ardly fail to—Sif had it in his power to take his revenge on Senena in terms that could be just as gruesome as those that applied to Anghara herself. It was entirely possible that the little queen would only be kept alive long enough to deliver Sif’s heir.
And nothing had prepared Anghara for the fact that she and the girl who carried the living seal to Sif’s reign could be friends. Senena herself initially seemed oddly confused as far as her own motives were concerned—she was, after all, befriending a ghost whom the king had successfully “buried,” and whose resurrection could mean only disaster for her husband. But she seemed to put the more complex issues from her mind—perhaps her first impulse had simply been to see for herself, to check the truth of the wild story she had overheard from the minstrel’s gallery, but this rapidly passed into something like affection. She met with Anghara almost daily, knowing, as Anghara did, that their time together was running out fast.
It was from Senena that Anghara learned how much time had passed in the world outside; on finding out that Anghara’s birthday had been spent alone in the dungeon, Senena took an almost child-like pleasure in organizing a belated birthday feast, which they shared in the guardroom. Anghara could not bring herself to eat much—her spartan diet and something about the tamman seemed to have affected her appetite—but she tried not to wreck Senena’s festive spirit by appearing gloomy and ungrateful.
“What would you have liked for a birthday present?” Senena asked, sitting on the edge of the hearth like a hoyden, her brocade skirts almost dragging in the ashes.
There might have been a time when Anghara could have named a great many things, but her world had shrunk to the dungeons of Miranei, with no prospect but death waiting for her—death swiftly, or slowly by starvation, at Sif’s whim. The greatest, most burning wish of her heart was to once again touch that part of her which was power—to know the breath of Sight again. But that was beyond Senena. Anghara glanced upward, her eyes filling with unexpected tears, only to meet more unforgiving stone above her. And at that, it was easy—even Sight shrank from the weight of that stone.
“To see the sky,” Anghara whispered, “to feel the wind upon my face once again. It’s been so long since I have walked in the sunlight…”
“It’s a small enough thing to ask,” said Senena slowly.
Anghara looked down, her lips curving up into a ghost of a smile. “No, not even you, Senena. They might have turned a blind eye to all this, but only because I have not passed those doors…and nor will I. Someone might see me up there, and afterward…there will be no holding it in. Death waits for me up there.”
“No more so than in here,” said Senena stubbornly, and then bit her lip as she realized what she had said. She reached out to lay an apologetic hand on Anghara’s arm. “I’m sorry…not today of all days…I shouldn’t have said that…But there has to be a way—you’re not asking for a guide into the mountains, surely taking you up on the battlements for a few minutes could hurt nobody.”
Anghara’s eyes were sad. “Don’t get my hopes up, Senena. I have learned to hope for nothing, it is less painful.”
This, it seemed, had been entirely the wrong thing to say. Senena’s eyes glittered, and she lifted her chin with a grim sort of determination. “I will see it done,” she vowed.
Just as Senena had once sat listening to a conversation thought to be private between a king and his counsellor, this exchange in the guardroom in its turn was overheard by a pair of ears not meant to be privy to it. Even as Anghara was being escorted back to her cell and Senena left the guardroom to begin a determined attempt to accede to Anghara’s wish, a message was already making its way down the corridors of the keep, out across snow-piled courtyards, into the cold, empty white streets of the city, to a shabby hostelry just inside the city gates. The boy who carried it, a wiry waif of some eight years or so, looked around the inn’s common room with a swift glance, and crossed unerringly to where two young men sat in desultory silence by the fireside. He pulled at his forelock in an age-old gesture of respect, but what was in his eyes was closer to adoration as he lifted them to the face of the older of the two, a dark-haired youth with piercing blue eyes. The boy handed over a much-folded scrap of parchment, tugged his forelock again, and left without uttering a word. The youth opened the parchment, and sat staring at it in silence for a long while; then he rose to his feet, crumpling the message almost heedlessly as his hands closed into fists at his sides.
“This is it,” said Kieran, and his voice was flat and cold, a steel blade leaving its sheath. “Sif is coming back within days, and we will not get another chance. We go in tomorrow.”
Kieran’s men had caught up with the splinter group they had been chasing, but they hadn’t found Anghara; worse, the group contained none of the five men whom Sif had spoken about, the men who knew who Anghara was. Those whom he had caught could tell Kieran very little except to gloat over the fact he had run after the wrong bait and the prize he had been after was that much closer to the point of no return. Perhaps he could have taken a lucid decision if any of those men had had the barest inkling of what they had done. But instead they crowed over an achievement that was meaningless to them, except perhaps inasmuch as they had figured out who was chasing them and they had managed to comprehensively hoodwink someone with Kieran’s reputation. When one of Kieran’s men lost his patience and floored a grinning soldier with a violent blow, Kieran had not intervened, and neither had Rochen; after that, killing was but a step away. Kieran had long since gotten over his sensibilities where enemy lives were concerned, but these were revenge killings, done in cold blood. He was not proud of them, or of himself for standing back and abrogating the responsibility. The truth was, he had been furious, sick with anger and helplessness. That didn’t excuse what he had done, but at least it made it easier to cope with—it was as though naming his sin drew some of its sting.
“I’m not giving up,” he had said, driven into a dangerous, almost fey mood. If Anghara was really immured in Miranei, his actions would be as insignificant as a mosquito trying to bite a knight through armor. He knew it. The knowledge was a poisoned arrow in his heart.
By this time both Adamo and Charo were with him, and the brothers, who keenly remembered the Cascin to which a waif they’d known as Brynna Kelen had arrived so many years ago, seconded him fiercely in his hunger to free their royal cousin.
“Let us go into Miranei,” Charo had advised wildly, “there are ways of finding out the exact numbers of guards, and we can take twice our number, we have proved that many times already…”
“Yes,” Adamo had said, no less implacable but still a voice for calm reason in an ocean of turbulent emotion. “We have proved it…but always with a clear line of retreat, and the possibility of returning to fight another day. I have never seen the dungeons of Miranei, but I doubt we can take them without trouble—and even if we managed, the gates of the keep can be shut against us, and we can be hunted down and spitted like rabbits. No army has taken Miranei. Ever. And we…we aren’t even an army.”
“Are you suggesting we just go away?”
“No,” said Adamo, “but neither am I suggesting we throw our own lives away on something that is clearly impossible. We will go into Miranei—but we will wait. And I will try and make a friend or two amongst the guards.”
Kieran had shaken his lethargy off then, and taken charge. “Yes. We will wait. As long as we know she lives I will give up neither the hope nor the chance of saving her. But a large group will only attract attention.”
“A handful will not be able to do anything when the time comes,” Rochen had pointed out.
“We will stay in touch,” said Kieran. “I was not suggesting we sever all ties.” A round of ragged laughter went up at this; Kieran looked up at a circle of bright eyes. “Ten,” he decided. “No more than ten.”
“I,” said Charo flatly. Not asking, stating. Adamo did not even need to speak; his eyes spoke for him. Kieran nodded.
Rochen looked very young all of a sudden, his face slipping into a black, sullen scowl; but his brow cleared, and he lifted his head, looked straight at Kieran, nodded. And then, because it was still stronger than him, turned away.
The seven were waiting with their saddled horses when the three foster brothers emerged from the camp the next morning. Kieran, already mounted, reined in lightly, sweeping his company with hard blue eyes. “It’s the most bitter duty of all you have chosen,” he said softly. “The waiting may be long…and we may be waiting for disaster.”
“And maybe also for a miracle,” one of the men murmured.
“They pulled straws,” said Adamo, his voice deceptively gentle. “Every one of those men staying behind is wide awake, listening to us go, and cursing the long straws they pulled last night.”
“For Anghara,” said Charo, “and for you. You kept the dream alive. If anyone can snatch her from the dreaded dungeons of Miranei, it’s you.”
“And I need to be unlucky only once,” said Kieran. “Then it will all have been for nothing. Perhaps Sif has already given the word…”
“Sif is not at Miranei,” said Adamo. “And many things can happen before he returns.”
He had been both right, and wrong. Sif had been in Shaymir; but nothing happened where Anghara herself was concerned, not while Sif was away, not when he came back. Chanoch, Anghara’s birthday, Winter Court came and went. Kieran’s handful mingled with the guard, and they knew that Anghara still lived. And then winter was almost over—and came the morning Sif rode away from Miranei like a whirlwind to wreak his revenge for his wounded mother. And then, on the heels of that…Senena.
Unknown to Sif, one of the guards who had stayed behind on duty in Miranei was far more than a simple soldier. It was he who had sought out Kieran in his hostelry, a gray-eyed man with ash-brown hair with the build and cast of the man who had once been Red Dynan’s First General.
“I know who you are,” he had said simply, coming to stand beside the bench in the inn’s common room where Kieran had been sitting with Charo. Kieran heard the double hiss beside him—Charo’s quick indrawn breath and the loosening of the blade in his scabbard—and raised a swift hand to forestall murder.
“Sit,” Kieran had invited. His eyes were hooded; his voice guarded.
The young man slid into the seat opposite Kieran’s, avoiding Charos eyes. “You need have no fear,” he said, his voice low. “I have known for some time. I will not betray you. I…know why you are here.”
Outside it was snowing; perhaps it had just been a quick gust of cold air that swirled inside as someone opened the inn door that made Kieran shiver where he sat—but there was something deeper. A touch of prescience, perhaps. “Who are you?” Kieran asked.
“Melsyr, son of Kalas, who was King Dynan’s general.”
“I thought he died, in the same battle that claimed the king,” muttered Charo, dimly recalling a few remembered phrases heard from Feor in happier times.
“Almost,” said Melsyr. “He survived long enough to curse Fodrun, whom he had himself picked and brought to the king to be made Second General. He never believed Anghara was really dead. To him, Sif was a usurper who seized the throne when he saw the chance, and Fodrun nothing more than a traitor.”
“Yet you serve in the usurper’s guard,” Kieran said blandly.
“I was in the guard when Dynan was king,” said Melsyr hotly. “To leave when Sif came…it would have signed my father’s death sentence.”
“But he died,” said Charo.
“Yes. Bitter, angry…yet unmolested. And on his death…yes, I stayed. I have a young wife, a small son. And I know naught but soldiering.”
“And now?” Kieran said. “What changed, that you should come to me?”
“My father’s queen, and my own, is in Sif’s dungeons,” Melsyr said tersely.
“I am listening,” said Kieran, and his voice had changed, very subtly. Melsyr had dropped his gaze to the scrubbed deal table between them, but he lifted his head at this, and met eyes that were no longer chips of blue steel.
They were still too few, but Melsyr was a source of information that had eluded them until now. Kieran learned details of Anghara’s captivity; Charo, who had rapidly changed tack and taken Melsyr as a messenger of the Gods, had more than a few illusions shattered as he proposed one or two wild plans, now that they had a man on the inside.
“Suicide,” Melsyr had said flatly. “There might be one or two guards who could be turned—especially now that Sif himself is not here. When he is…I do not know what it is in him, but men follow him unto death. If he were here…I do not know if even I would have found it in myself to go against him…even now…knowing that time is against us, and that you are her only chance.”
“But we could overpower the guards at the gate, and then we could…” Charo persisted stubbornly.
“I do not doubt your courage,” said Melsyr. “But the guards at the gate are the least of your problems. They are changed every hour; you would need a guide down into the fourth level of the maze of catacombs that are the dungeons of Miranei. All he would have to do is delay you…just a little. The next detachment of guards would come, and find the bodies you will have left at the gates. Then even if you freed the young queen you would find the gates barred and held against you on your return. They would have you precisely where they wanted you—in the dungeons. And you would all die, one way or another.”
Charo had been convinced, eventually, but such was the pitch to which he had worked himself, he had to get up and stamp out into the snow to cool his frustrations. Adamo had come to take his place, and the cooler heads arranged with Melsyr that he would be their eyes and ears in the keep, and send a message as soon as anything changed…if it did.
And now it had. Senena had sworn to it. Impossibly, incredibly, they would have a chance. Kieran stood rapt in the common room of the inn where he had waited for so long, with tears in his eyes. He was remembering a rainy day now many years in the past, shaking off the wet in Cascin’s hall with Feor while other arms bore Anghara away into some women’s fastness to be dosed against catching a chill.
She will need a friend.
“So be it,” he breathed, as he had done then, repeating the vow. I will take you from here, or I will perish in the attempt. Without you…nothing I have done during these long empty years has any meaning.
Kieran’s men slipped into the keep in inconspicuous ones and twos, himself following with Charo at his heels. They came together unobtrusively at the back of a barrack stables, mostly empty now that its inhabitants were away bearing their owners to Sif’s war, and settled down to wait for Melsyr’s signal.
“Who’s to guarantee she’ll be able to do it?” murmured one of the men, wrapped in his cloak and sprawled over a pile of loose straw. “Fodrun is hardly likely to give his approval. And keeping this from him…I wonder if the little queen’s got it in her.”
“She’ll do it,” said Kieran. He spoke as though he had knowledge of it, as though it had never been in any doubt.
“Do you have the Sight?” mumbled a skeptic from the dark.
Melsyr’s son turned up in the morning, moving like a shadow, with a basket of victuals and a message that nothing was known yet. None of them could eat much, but Kieran insisted—this was the worst waiting yet, with the imminence of something immense hanging over them, and used as these men were to being in tight spots together, stretched nerves made for uneasy companionship. Eating would give them something to do. Besides, they had learned the hard way never to scorn offered food—they never knew what lay around the next corner.
Melsyr himself, still in uniform, came at dusk, but even in the dim cobwebs of twilight shad
ows hanging from the rafters his face seemed to glow. Kieran’s hackles rose. “She’s done it,” Melsyr whispered. “Tomorrow. It will only be for half an hour, up on the northern battlements—up where the mountains crowd up to the keep, it’s the most isolated place. There will be ten guards with her, four more at the foot of the stair, and Fodrun himself will be in charge.”
For a moment none of them could speak over the violent thudding of their hearts. And then Kieran did, his voice low and steady although his eyes were twin blue flames. “And you?”
“I am to be with the four guarding the rear,” said Melsyr. His teeth flashed white in the gloom, a promise of intent. Kieran recognized it for what it was, and reached to lay a hand on the other man’s shoulder.
“The Gods alone know if or when we might need you again,” he said, and it was a warning. “Do not let yourself be suspected. Above all, do not help us. It would be best if you could manage not to be there.”
They could barely distinguish one another’s features in the dimness, but that which passed between them needed no light. It was gratitude, and pride; it was a fierce joy, and a love born of what could become a great friendship. It was Melsyr who broke away first, briefly covering Kieran’s hand with his own and then stepping away into a bow.
“As you will, lord,” he said. “I will switch duty with someone tomorrow…much as it galls me not to be there to see you take the Princess from this place, perhaps it would be more useful if I were on guard at a back door.” He grinned again. “But have no fear; if we do meet at some gate, I’ll ease your passage as much as I am able, and you have my full permission to deal with me as best you deem suitable at the time. Something tells me you will return; I will be here for you when you do. There will be,” he added, unconsciously echoing Sif’s words, “time enough.”
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