by David B. Coe
Aindreas raked a hand through his red hair, his pale eyes fixed on the ground before him, as if he were deep in thought.
Watching him, Gershon began to feel uneasy. He glanced about the ward, as if expecting to see Kentigern’s soldiers closing on them, but he saw only a few men lingering near the gates to the inner keep. “Lord Kent—”
“I have something to tell you.”
“By all means.”
“A large contingent of the Aneiran force that had been laying siege to my castle marched northward this morning.”
“The farmhouses,” Gershon whispered.
Aindreas looked up at that, meeting the swordmaster’s gaze. “Yes. They burned the farmhouses and fields as they went.”
“How many men?”
“Well over a thousand, most of them from Solkara. I believe they were headed toward Galdasten.”
Gershon nodded. Of course they were. A thousand men wasn’t many, but with enough bowmen, they could inflict heavy losses on Kearney’s army from the south as the king battled the men from Braedon to the north.
“There was nothing I could do to stop them,” the duke said, seeming to misinterpret Gershon’s silence. “They sought to draw me out of the castle with the fires they set, but I couldn’t risk compromising the safety of the tor. You understand.”
“I do, my lord. But we need to go after them. They’re already nearly a full day’s march ahead of us.” He turned to Lathrop and Caius. “My lords, please ready your men, and inform my captains of what’s happened. We march within the hour.”
Both men nodded. “Of course, swordmaster,” Lathrop said.
Facing Aindreas once more, Gershon said, “Thank you, Lord Kentigern. I’m sorry that we can’t do more for you, but my first duty is to the king.”
“I want to go with you.”
Gershon stared at the man. Lathrop and Caius, who were nearly to the gate, had stopped and were eyeing him as well.
“But after all the damage that your castle sustained—”
“Mertesse is in retreat. He’s lost too many men, and he no longer has the Solkarans by his side. I’ll leave a few hundred men here to guard the tor, but he won’t attack again, at least not soon.”
“My lord—”
“Kearney thinks me a traitor.” He faltered, looking to the side for just an instant, almost as if he had spotted something out of the corner of his eye. “I want to win back his trust,” he said at last. “You can’t tell me that several hundred more men wouldn’t help your cause.”
“Of course they would, my lord.” He took a breath, then pressed on, knowing that he was about to put his life and that of his companions at risk. “But I don’t know if I trust you to ride with us. You’ve made no secret of your hatred for the king, and you’ve done nothing in the turns leading up to this war to indicate that you care a whit for the welfare of this realm. I fear that if you march with us, you may betray us.”
Aindreas’s face shaded to scarlet, but rather than flying into a rage, he merely shook his head. “I won’t. Everything you say about me is true. But this siege has . . . has opened my eyes. And so has your arrival here. I’m in debt to the king, and to you, even more than you know. I’d be grateful for the opportunity to repay that debt.” His eyes darted to the side, once more, and he licked his lips. “I swear to you on the memory of my daughter, Brienne, that I will not betray you or defy the king again.”
Unsure of what to do, Gershon looked over at Lathrop and Caius. Labruinn held himself still, but after a moment the duke of Tremain gave a single nod.
“Very well, Lord Kentigern. Ready your men. They’ll be marching under the king’s banner, and so will be under my command. Are you prepared to follow my orders?”
“I am, swordmaster.”
Gershon nodded. He still wasn’t certain that he was doing the right thing; he dearly wished that the king were here. But something in Kentigern’s manner convinced him that the man wouldn’t betray them. After a moment he turned and followed Caius and Lathrop out of the castle and back down the road toward the king’s army.
“I don’t trust him,” Caius said quietly.
Gershon glanced back at Aindreas, who was watching them walk away. “Neither do I, Lord Labruinn. But he swore on the memory of his daughter. He wouldn’t have done so lightly.”
“So we’re placing our faith in a ghost?”
“No,” Lathrop said. “We’re placing our faith in a father’s love. And I, for one, feel quite confident that our trust will be rewarded.”
Yaella was by the river when the siege failed. She had heard shouting and screams, and had watched as the blazing pots of oil flew from the hurling arms, but she had merely assumed that the duke of Kentigern had sent out another raiding party. Only when the cries of Aneira’s men turned desperate did she begin to understand that another army had come to break the siege.
Soon men were streaming down the road toward the Tarbin, many of them falling as arrows and bolts pelted down upon them. She heard her duke shouting orders, urging his men to stand and fight, but the soldiers would not listen, and soon Rowan gave up. She saw him at the rear of his army, fleeing as well.
And she knew that the time had come.
All around her was bedlam—panicked men, horses straining against their reins, healers and their wounded desperate to cross the river before the men of Eibithar descended upon them. It was perfect.
A small part of her grieved at the thought of leaving Mertesse. She had served in Rouel’s court for nine years, and had been with Rowan for another. A decade. Not much to an Eandi, but nearly a third of her life. She had possessions in her chamber in Castle Mertesse that she would never see again. Gold she had earned in the Weaver’s service, clothes and baubles she had accumulated over the years, gifts Shurik had given to her. She regretted having to give these up, particularly the gifts from her beloved. She knew as well that she would have some need of gold in the coming days.
But if she returned to Mertesse she would never find another opportunity to slip away. On the other hand, if she left now, amid the tumult of the retreat, no one would miss her for hours, not even the duke. Eventually they would conclude that she had been killed in the Eibitharian assault, or had drowned as she tried to cross the river. Certainly they wouldn’t bother searching for her, at least not for long. She would become a walking wraith.
Those had been the Weaver’s words. A walking wraith. “No one will know you,” he had said, the night he entered her dreams and spoke to her of his movement, and of her special place in his plans. “No one will think to stop you. You’ll be able to go anywhere you choose, anywhere I tell you.”
“Yes, Weaver,” she had said.
He had told her to go east. There lay glory and revenge and peace; all that she sought.
“Yes, Weaver.”
And so, as the Eandi soldiers ran toward the river, followed by their duke, pursued by the enemy, Yaella ja Banvel, first minister to House Mertesse, slipped into the brush by the north bank of the Tarbin and crept slowly away. At one point she thought she heard Rowan calling for her, but by then she had put some distance between herself and the army’s camp. She knew that he would never find her. Still, she stayed low, keeping herself hidden, always in motion, always putting more distance between herself and the life she had known for so long.
Only when night fell, bringing darkness and safety, did she stand and begin to walk. She would have preferred to ride, but her mount had been taken from her by one of Kentigern’s bowmen. She was truly alone. There was nothing for her here anymore.
She kept her eyes fixed on the eastern sky, where the moons were climbing into the night. White Panya and red Ilias, guiding her. Eastward, toward glory.
Chapter
Twenty-six
dolkara, Aneira
he sun shone bright in a hazy sky of pale blue, warming the grasses of Castle Solkara’s vast courtyard and making the garden blooms of borage and gilly flower, columbine and sweetbriar, woodb
ine, iris, and lavender glow like Qirsi fire in the hands of festival sorcerers. A gentle wind blew off the Kett and across the castle walls, carrying the smell of fish from the river piers, and rustling the leaves of poplars and willows growing along its banks.
All her life, Chofya had loved the slow, hot days of the growing turns. While others complained of the heat, she basked in it, thinking back to her youth in the hills south of Noltierre, where the sun baked the clay and the brush and the skin of small children to a fine golden brown. Here in Aneira’s royal city, where the waters of the river and the shadows of the Great Forest cooled the air, it never grew warm enough to suit her taste. But still, she welcomed these mornings in the garden. Later she would take Kalyi to the marketplace—there were always so many peddlers in Solkara this time of year.
It was easy to forget that there was war, that less than forty leagues to the south, Aneirans were killing Aneirans for no reason that Chofya could see. Oh, she understood well enough Numar’s pretense for marching south; she simply saw no sense in it. Never mind that Dantrielle’s defiance in the face of this foolish war to the north was entirely justified. Even had she not agreed with Tebeo and his allies, she would have seen Numar’s siege as a wasteful, spiteful gesture, one that served only to weaken the throne as well as the realm. Chofya wasn’t vain enough to believe that the years she spent as Carden’s queen were enough to teach her all the finer points of statecraft. Carden himself hadn’t mastered them; how was she to do so? But in her capacity as lady of the castle and hostess to all sorts of feasts, ceremonies, and councils, she had observed a great deal. Presiding over the realm, she had decided long ago, was not that different from running a castle. In both endeavors, one needed authority enough to maintain order, but also a modicum of flexibility, a willingness and capacity to cope with the unexpected. In the same way, she had come to believe that dealing with a wayward duke was not all that different from teaching discipline to a contrary child. Anger and violence served only to stiffen the resolve of the one who needed to be mollified; only patience and reason would produce the desired result. She had raised a daughter nearly to womanhood. She knew she was right.
But in all her years as queen she had also learned that men knew little of patience and even less of reason. And they had no interest in taking counsel from a woman, unless she happened to be Qirsi. Before leaving for Dantrielle, Numar had refused to grant her an audience, no doubt knowing that she would speak against his alliance with the empire and the siege he was planning. Chofya then went to her daughter, knowing that the regent could not refuse to hear his queen, only to discover that Numar had already convinced Kalyi of the wisdom of both the alliance and the siege.
Realizing that there was nothing she could do to save Aneira from the folly and vanity of its regent, Chofya stopped trying. The realm had survived for nearly nine centuries, weathering civil wars, rebellions, ill-advised wars with its neighbors, and countless other tragedies. It would survive Numar.
Still, she did not ignore the war entirely. Nearly every day Henthas received messages from Numar describing the progress of the siege, and though the duke was under no obligation to share any of what the regent told him with Chofya, he had no choice but to share the messages with Kalyi. And since the queen remained terrified of her uncle the duke—with good reason—she always had Chofya accompany her to Henthas’s chamber. Naturally there was some delay between Numar’s writing of the messages and their arrival in Solkara—usually three or four days—but there was an immediacy to Numar’s account of events on the battlefield that was quite compelling. Though Chofya wished to maintain her indifference to the course of the siege, she soon realized that she looked forward to the daily audiences with Henthas. It didn’t matter that she hated the duke, or that, with his dark blue eyes, fine features, and muscular frame, he bore a disturbing resemblance to her late husband. She found the descriptions of the siege exciting, almost as if she were hearing of some ancient battle from Aneira’s glorious past, rather than of Numar’s foolish war. On those few occasions when no message arrived, she was deeply disappointed, even more so than was Kalyi.
Still, fascinated as she was by the regent’s reports, and versed as she was in the subtleties of Aneiran statecraft, it took a conversation with Kalyi, still two years shy of her Determining, to make Chofya understand fully how dangerous this siege was for her and her child.
They had returned to their chambers from yet another audience with the duke. The prior’s bells had just tolled in the city and they had an hour or so to wait before the evening meal. Kalyi seemed to have sensed long ago that Chofya did not approve of the siege or much else that Numar had done in her name. Outside of Henthas’s chamber, the two of them had not spoken of the conflict in some time. But on this day, the news from Dantrielle had not been good, at least not for House Solkara. Chofya liked Tebeo and Brall and still remembered how they had stood with her when Grigor, Carden’s ruthless brother, had tried to wrest the crown from her daughter. Listening to Henthas read Numar’s accounts, she often found herself silently cheering Dantrielle’s successes and the regent’s failures.
According to the message that arrived that day, the last of the waxing, Numar’s scouts had seen men approaching Castle Dantrielle from the north, south, and east—no doubt the armies of Orvinti, Tounstrel, and Kelt. Tebeo’s defenses were beginning to fail, Numar wrote, but there was no way of knowing if the castle would fall before Dantrielle’s allies arrived.
Kalyi had said nothing as they walked through the corridors back to their chamber. She looked pale, her lips pressed tight. With her dark hair and eyes, she favored Chofya, but like her father, she carried her worries where all could see them.
“What if the siege fails?” she asked abruptly, once they were back in their quarters. “What if Uncle Numar can’t take Castle Dantrielle after all?”
Chofya sat on their bed and beckoned Kalyi to her side. “If the siege fails, your uncle will have to fight his war against Eibithar without the soldiers of Dantrielle, Orvinti, and the rest. He’ll still have his alliance with the emperor of Braedon, but he won’t bring quite so strong an army to it.”
Actually, this was essentially what Chofya had expected from the start would happen. She thought the siege was destined to fail; Castle Dantrielle was as strong as it was beautiful, and Numar had already sent part of his army north. Though Rassor had joined him, the regent’s force remained too small to defeat Tebeo and his allies. Their only hope had been a quick and decisive victory. Clearly that hadn’t happened. None of this surprised her, which might have been why she never considered the possibility raised by Kalyi’s next question.
“What if Uncle Numar is killed?”
She didn’t care for the man at all. When it came to choosing a regent for Kalyi, she had preferred him to either Grigor or Henthas, but she knew better than to think him kind or to believe that he had taken on the responsibilities of being regent out of concern for his niece. He was clever and ambitious and nearly as dangerous as the other two. So why did she tremble so at the mere thought of his death?
“He won’t be,” she said, knowing how foolish she sounded.
“What if he’s struck by an arrow or killed by one of Dantrielle’s swordsmen? What if Pronjed kills him?”
“What? Why would Pronjed kill Numar?”
“He killed Father. At least that’s what Uncle Numar thinks.”
“Damn him!” Chofya muttered, drawing a shocked stare from Kalyi. Why would Numar tell the girl such a thing? She had thought that they were past this nonsense. For several turns Kalyi had been trying to learn what she could about her father’s death, as if there had been any doubt but that he had taken his own life, as if such an endeavor were appropriate for a ten-year-old girl. Numar should have kept his crazed theories to himself.
“Your father took his own life, Kalyi,” she said wearily, bracing herself for the all-too-familiar argument. “I’ve told you that before.”
Kalyi shook her head, the go
lden circlet she wore as a crown flying from her hair, but at least she wasn’t crying. “That’s just how Pronjed made it seem. He used magic to make father kill himself. Uncle Numar said it’s called mind . . . turning, or something like that.”
It seemed to Chofya that someone was kneeling on her chest, making it difficult for her to draw breath. She had heard tales of Qirsi who could control the thoughts of others, though she had placed little stock in such stories. Certainly she had never thought that she would know such a man. “Mind-bending?” she whispered.
“Yes! That’s it! That’s how he killed Father!”
“Mind-bending magic is very rare. We don’t know that Pronjed—”
“Yes, we do. I . . .” She lowered her eyes. “I overheard a conversation, a long time ago. Pronjed used that magic on the master of arms.”
“Kalyi!” she said, trying to sound stern. “You listened?”
The girl nodded, her eyes still fixed on the floor. “Yes.”
Chofya should have been cross with her; it was unseemly for any young girl to listen in on a conversation between adults, but it was particularly so when that girl was queen. Still, Chofya’s eagerness to know what her daughter had heard was a match for any anger she might have felt. Perhaps more than a match.
“Tell me what you heard,” she said, as if admitting defeat.
Kalyi looked up, smiling. The conversation she described made little sense in terms of military matters; clearly the girl had not understood much of what she heard. But when Kalyi told her how Pronjed had instructed the master of arms to give certain advice to the regent, when she said that the archminister told Tradden what he was to remember of their conversation, she had little choice but to believe that Pronjed possessed mind-bending power.