Changer of Days

by Alma Alexander

  I loved this land, he said directly into her mind, his words already distant, as if spoken from another world.

  I know, she said, her eyes brimming with tears even as the last vestige of the copper flame flickered and died.

  Sight, the word went sighing through the gathered men. He was Sighted. Sif too was Sighted…

  But that was not the least of the surprises.

  “You weep for him,” said one of Kieran’s captains standing close by, surprised into irreverence.

  Anghara closed her eyes for a moment, as though she were praying, and then gently laid Sif’s hand back on his chest. Kieran assisted her to her feet and she looked around almost blindly for a moment. The men nearby her respected her silence, until a bloodied and dishevelled warrior suddenly moved forward to kneel at her feet, offering her his sword hilt first.

  “My lady,” he said, his voice hoarse with battlefield dust and raw emotion, “we lay down our arms, and give ourselves into your hands.”

  Anghara reached for the proffered weapon and lifted it two-handed from the warrior’s palms. “It ends here,” she said, very softly, but her voice carried into the sudden hush that had fallen across the moors. She stabbed the sword she held into the churned ground at her feet. “It is over. The world is changed; tomorrow, we begin again.” She turned, gazing for a long moment into Sif’s face. Someone had closed his eyes, and the rain had slicked his hair back from his face; all of a sudden, he looked very young. “Bring him into the keep; tonight we will keep vigil for him, and light his passage to the Gate. Tomorrow we will lay him to rest in the royal vault.”

  “He was a tyrant,” someone said in barely more than a whisper.

  Anghara’s head came up at the words. She didn’t turn to see who had spoken them, but her words were cool with rebuke. “He was a son of kings, and he was King Under the Mountain in his turn,” she said. “He was Kir Hama, and royal. That, we will remember, of all the other things he was.” She glanced up at Kieran, standing mute and solid at her side, and what he saw in her eyes was suddenly for him alone, a complete reversal of the queenly poise and level voice which had just uttered these words. He felt her shudder beneath his hand. “Kieran,” she said, soft and low. “Take me home.”

  He knew what she was asking—take her back to the keep, without revealing how much of an illusion she was in this hour. From this battlefield which had split a nation, anointed with sudden tragedy, those who had fought must take a message of hope and strength. Anghara couldn’t afford to reveal how shattered she was by what had transpired. She needed his strength, a staff to lean upon, and, as always, he rose to her need.

  “Adamo,” he said quietly, without turning toward the foster brother who stood at his back. “My horse, and her dun. And get Rochen, with that standard. I’ll help her mount, and Rochen and I will ride in with her. You and Charo take over here. Has anyone seen Melsyr?”

  Anghara turned her head a fraction and Kieran instinctively followed her gaze—and found his question answered. His jaw clenched at sudden recognition of the blood-soaked, crumpled shape lying a few steps away from Sif’s body, a figure that had once been a man…and a friend.

  “Bring him, too,” Anghara said, softly. “There will be those who will keep a king’s vigil tonight. But Melsyr’s, we will keep ourselves.”

  Her dun was brought, its eyes still rolling at the memory of its wild ride. Kieran lifted her into the saddle, turned to vault into his own as his horse was led up, and nodded briefly to Rochen who had come up behind carrying the brave Kir Hama pennant he had taken into battle. It was somewhat the worse for wear, but still in one piece. The cold autumn wind had freshened again, driving the rain at an angle, and lifting the limp, soaked flag into a snap and flutter. Kieran dug his heels into the flanks of his horse. “Anghara,” he murmured, directing her to move.

  She obeyed, urging her own mount forward, a step ahead of her escort. With her hair wet and heavy on her shoulders and across her face in long clinging strands; her hands mired with Sif’s blood and the trampled earth of the field she had won; her cloak and gown torn and muddied, she slowly rode away from the battlefield. But there would be few later who would remember. Instead, the stories would tell of the glow of power that mantled the young queen, and the depth of the wholly unexpected mourning she had shown for one who had been her kin, and her enemy. Her right to Roisinan had been sealed. The gesture of a state funeral had not been looked for; it had been a surprise, and while it would form part of her legend, there were those who could not let it pass unremarked.

  Rochen muttered something under his breath, riding at her side, his face faintly rebellious as his fingers curled with latent ferocity around the slick shaft of the noble banner he carried.

  Anghara turned at the murmur. “What was that?”

  “I said,” Rochen repeated, “that it was more than he would have done for you.”

  “You forget that he had already done it for me, when I was much younger,” she said, with a grim humor. “He buried me in the family vault with all possible royal honors years ago.”

  “Then he was trying to bury his mistakes,” Rochen said obstinately.

  Anghara lifted a hand that trembled only slightly to push a strand of wet hair back from her eyes, and offered him a sad smile that never quite managed to reach her eyes. “So am I,” she said softly.

  18

  The day after the battle dawned suitably somber. The rain held off but the sky was a mourning shade of dark purple, heavy on the white-crowned mountains above Miranei as Roisinan’s dead king was laid to rest in his family’s vault, interred with savage irony next to a broken and empty tomb which bore his successor’s name.

  Anghara, garbed in purple, stood throughout the ceremony, silent, bareheaded except for a token circlet of beaten gold around her brow. They had taken the sword from Sif’s heart, and, with his hands clasped around its hilt and his wounds concealed by his robes, he looked asleep. His hair had been combed back, bare of any sign of kingly glory; this had been the priests’ decision, that he should be buried thus humbled. They had even wanted to do away with the sword, but Anghara had been quietly adamant—it might be her father’s sword as well as Sif’s, but it was a significant part of what Sif had tried to be. By laying claim to it he had effectively severed its links to Dynan, and its symbolism for the crown. For all the memory of his tyranny, there was an odd nobility about him this day, marked by the hush that followed him to his tomb. Watching from a respectable distance enforced by the occasional poker-faced palace guard, the crowd could just as easily have jeered as they sent their oppressor on his way to meet Gheat Freicadan, at the shadowy gates of Glas Coil.

  And even this was a mystery, for there seemed to be ambivalence as to which God Sif would encounter there. Two sets of priests were at hand, Kerun’s trio glowering at the simply dressed pair who served Bran. Anghara had allowed it; it seemed like a royal sanction to the new God, and Kerun’s priesthood was seriously alarmed. They struggled to maintain the appearance of dignity and decorum as they went through the ancient rites of burial sacred to their God; as for the other two, they seemed serene, and unconcerned. Their rites were few, and, compared to those that had gone before, startlingly plain; a few whispered words, a strange sign over the body by the long, white-fingered hand of the younger, and then they had laid one of Bran’s ubiquitous yellow-marked garlands on Sif’s chest, before offering one last bow as they backed away from the bier.

  The four knights whose duty it was to lift the bier into the niche of the tomb now stepped up to perform their task, but a sudden gesture from the young queen stopped them. “Wait,” said Anghara. “It isn’t right.”

  “My lady…” One of the priests of Kerun, standing a few paces to Anghara’s left, turned sharply. “All the necessary rites have been performed, as the God directed; is there something…”

  “Anghara,” said Kieran, much closer to her, softly enough for only her to hear. “Don’t give him too much glory. It will ma
ke for an unquiet ghost.”

  “As mine was,” Anghara said, with a sharp-edged smile. But the few extra seconds gave her time to think, and to abandon her original plan, arguably reckless—she had been ready to lay her own golden circlet into the tomb with Sif, a token of his royalty. Perhaps, on reflection, that had not been such a good idea. But Bran’s priests as well as Kerun’s were watching her now, and she owed them something.

  The nearest knights around Sif’s bier stepped away as she approached and stood for a moment looking down on Sif with a strange and inscrutable expression. Then she sighed, and glanced at the mountains of Miranei as if for inspiration before she laid her hand gently on Sif’s brow. “Sleep a king,” she said softly, yet all heard her words.

  A golden glow kindled beneath her palm, seeping out between her fingers as it intensified; slowly she withdrew her hand and stepped away, to a gasp that was torn out of a thousand throats as the crowds saw what she had wrought. It was illusion, and would last only as long as it took to raise the stone that would seal Sif in his tomb—but now, still in the sight of his people, he wore a living crown of golden flame.

  Kieran’s expression was almost comically at war with itself. “I’m not sure if it wouldn’t have been better to leave him with a crown more of this world,” he whispered as Anghara returned to her place. “This kind of thing lives on for a long time in people’s minds; you’ve just branded the tyrant a saint. Look at those two priests of Bran!”

  Anghara took in the priests’ beatific smiles, and then glanced back to where Sif’s bier was being raised into the niche of his tomb. “They will remember he was buried with it, but they are unlikely to forget who gave it to him.”

  Kieran decided to ignore the Kir Hama arrogance, for it was, in this instance, no more than a dressing on the truth. She was right—the crowd would remember. He sighed as he looked again at the priestly contingent and saw the black frowns that, for all their efforts to hide them, still wreathed the faces of Kerun’s anointed—many more would flock to Bran of the Dawning after this demonstration. Kieran spared a brief moment to wonder if even Glas Coil the eternal could be the same after grim Kerun had given way to this bright new God, and then shook it off. These were morbid thoughts, borne by the somber atmosphere of the funeral; he, Kieran, was a long way from Glas Coil.

  The gravestone was raised into position; as the last of the golden glow was cut off, the crowd, who seemed to have been holding their collective breath, let it out in a massive sigh—and then someone raised a solitary cheer for the queen. In an almost eerie replay of her entry into Miranei the cry was quickly caught up, until the multitude was calling out Anghara’s name. As she turned to leave, Kerun’s priests made her the silent obeisance her rank required, but the young priest of Bran held his palm over Anghara’s brow and looked up, ignoring all the rules, straight into the young queen’s eyes. There was a hiss of indrawn breath from her entourage—priesthood gave one some prerogatives, but hardly this—but the expression on his face was so serious and rapt that it stayed the consequences.

  “You are Bran’s,” the young priest said, in a voice of awe. “You are Bran’s own blessed one. The gold that is his…it is yours, it flows through your hands…Bran’s blessing on your days, royal lady, now and always. Bran’s blessing.”

  He fell to his knees then, but it was not obeisance—it was as if he had been poleaxed, and he would have sprawled had his friend not anticipated him and gone down on one knee beside him, supporting him. He too now lifted his face. “He has always had vision, my lady…the Sight. He doesn’t mean any impropriety, but when Sight comes to him he never knows what he does. I ask your pardon for his transgressions.”

  “No offense was taken,” Anghara said softly, looking down at the stricken priest with something like compassion. “He but blessed me, after all…and I have walked in his shoes. You are far from your brethren; if there is any assistance I or mine can render in their stead, call on us.”

  “My lady,” stammered the other priest in confusion, bowing his head. These new priests had taken to tonsuring their hair, and his meticulously shaven pate gleamed as she stood for an instant longer looking down at the kneeling pair. Then she passed on.

  Not far away, a cloaked figure seemed to smile at the scene, and, as she moved away, followed at a decorous distance, flanked by a closely following shadow of its own. It slipped into the gates of the keep at the heels of the royal procession without being challenged, and then, glancing down an arched opening to its right, stepped through this into a quiet courtyard shadowed by a gnarled old pine. Its companion, after receiving something wrapped in white silk, left the courtyard to hurry toward the Royal Tower.

  This time, the way was barred—the guards at the gate lowered crossed spears to cut the messenger off. “Your business within?”

  “I bear a message,” the man said. He shed the cowl of his cloak, and threw back the cloak itself to show he wore no sword belt—indeed, bore no weapon except for a small dagger tucked into his boot which he now bent to retrieve and offer hilt first to the nearest guard. The man took it, balancing it in his left hand. “And your message?”

  “This,” the man said, producing the silk parcel from a pouch at his waist.

  “What of it?”

  “To be taken to the queen.”

  One of the guards raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Indeed. And then?”

  “Then, safe conduct for my master, who would meet with her.”

  “And who might your master be?”

  “I am not at liberty to say,” the messenger said with cool dignity.

  The guard measured him through narrowed eyes. “Southerner, by your accent,” he said. “And your coloring. What is your business this far north?”

  “My master’s business is his own,” said the other. “Please. The message.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said one of the guards, glancing at the other. “I’m not sure I hold with some cloak-and-dagger fellow who won’t even give his name strolling into the Tower.”

  “It’s not your call,” snapped the other, still hefting the dagger. “Inside, you; into the guardroom,” he told the messenger, indicating the way with a toss of his head, and then turned back to his companion. “Who’s on duty upstairs today?”

  “Adamo Taurin, I think.”

  “Get this to him, see what he says. With your permission, m’lord?” This with gentle sarcasm as he reached for the silk, and its bearer, for the barest instant, showed every intention of being ready to lay down his life to hang on to it. But it was surrendered, with a graceful bow, and the guard inclined his head in return, with a grin. “I’ll keep an eye on our guest.”

  The guard bearing the package vanished into the shadows. The messenger walked inside in the man’s wake as the spears were lifted, and sat quietly, hands on knees, on one of the chairs beside the arrow-slit window in the small guardroom. The guard who had stayed behind hovered for a moment at the guardroom door, and then offered a grudging smile.

  “Damned if I don’t like your style,” he said. “I don’t know who your master is but it can’t be someone we’ll like very much, else he wouldn’t have had to resort to you and yon secret package to gain entry. And there you are, sitting pretty, with not a blunt food knife between you and the palace guard.”

  “As to that,” said the other, smiling with the grave arrogance born of generations of aristocratic ancestry, “I have no need of knives; where I come from, we make weapons of our hands and feet.”

  The guard’s smile slipped, as his eyes went to the slim brown hands resting relaxed and innocent on the man’s lap; the other’s widened a fraction. “But you don’t need to worry,” the visitor said, his obsidian eyes gleaming with amusement. “My master sent me here under instruction not to use my art.” He paused, just long enough to be sure of his impact. “Unless,” he qualified gravely, “in defense of my freedom—or my life.”

  The guard had an instant to regain his aplomb—and took refuge in bluste
r, in stark contrast with the calm and poised bearing of his guest. Uncomfortably aware of this, the guard became all the more incensed, and in the end could only trust himself to return to his post by the door. He had managed a bluff, “What kind of talk is that…” before his eloquence deserted him. His companion’s face hadn’t changed, but that only made it worse—the guard hadn’t needed to observe his calm amusement in order to be aware of it, and be mortified. He was a Royal Tower guard, and it galled him to realize he had been drawn onto thin ice with consummate ease and allowed to fall through and flounder. He should have taken it all in his stride. Out at the gate, fuming, he found himself wishing Adamo would come down and throw the cocky foreigner out on his ear—feeling even more ashamed that he should have been brought to this pass.

  When the second guard returned, he brought a companion. The messanger received back the square of white silk and its contents with a formal bow, and then straightened to meet a pair of piercing blue eyes. “And if you got your safe passage?” the blue-eyed man asked softly.

  “My master waits, my lord, to be conducted within. At the queen’s word of protection.”

  “As once he gave his own,” said Kieran with a strange smile.

  The emissary, eyes hooded, bowed again in acquiescence. “That is so,” he said.

  “He has that word,” Kieran said briskly, after a small hesitation. “If you will take me to him, or conduct him here, I will escort him to the queen myself.”

  “I will bear your message,” said the other. “If you will wait, he will not be long.”

  Kieran’s features lit up with a swift, appreciative smile. “He’s here, in the keep? Well, I guess I’d expect no less. My compliments to your master; I will be expecting him.”