Eowi’s soft voice carried only into the chamber, from his post just inside the doorway. She nodded: They were coming. She had made sure to be early, with Eowi and Girayal, her seconds—a day early for the meet, to wander the Holding and gauge the changes against the rumors she had heard, and so early to this chamber that their wretched bells had barely tailed off when she’d finished inspecting it for hiding places and weaponry. Forgoing breakfast always put her in a sour frame of mind, but Girayal had the foresight to save some supper, and since these folk ate the same swill three times a day, it made no difference. Nor did the swill, when you came down to it. Her fighters were doing no better, living on seaweed at their coastal posts, clothed and sheltered by the generosity of local villages. How long could Eiden Myr go on, when their protectors and healers were reduced to wearing castoffs and eating swill? She flicked a crumb of dry cheese off the polished table.
The blond man who strode in, with the air of a ship’s master coming on deck, was midway through his seventh nineyear, lean and deeply tanned, ruggedly handsome under hair and beard so sun-bleached that there was no telling how much gray was in them. He was flanked by two swarthy Khinish sailors. They carried the scent of the sea on them, as if they’d only just arrived.
“Cutting it a bit close, aren’t you, Evrael?”
“Verlein.” He gave her a slight nod and the barest glance, as his sailors, a man and a woman, stationed themselves by the open door, one inside, one out. Both wore cudgels and longstaffs; the outline of dagger sheaths showed through the soft material of their high boots. He did not bother to introduce them to her, but Eowi and Girayal welcomed them. Her shield and the Khinish seafolk had become well acquainted over the years.
She seated herself with a view of the entry, seeing no reason to wait on the others, and after a moment he did the same. He sat as if unaccustomed to straight-backed chairs set on carpeted floors that didn’t move. Verlein, herself used mainly to camp stools, rubbed her mouth to hide a grin. “The place has changed,” she said, an opening to benign chatter. She and he had come to an understanding six years ago, standing at the portal to that chamber of codices. He was a known quantity.
“This place changed a generation ago,” he said. “No, more than that.” His mouth was set and grim. His restless eyes, the pale green of an angry sea, roved the walls as if threats might lurk behind the [119] tapestries. After that first acknowledgment, his gaze had never returned to her. That, too, they had in common, the continual scanning wariness of those who held guard against attack.
“I hear you’ve stepped up production of ships,” she said. “Good thing your quinces and apricots came in, or I don’t know how you’d get the timber.”
Watching his man at the door as if awaiting some particular signal, Evrael replied, “It was Streln who commissioned the shipbuilding; it’s only mastwood that we don’t grow on Khine; and we had other goods to trade besides fruit. White pines don’t grow only in the Gerlocs. But we had fruit, and needed mastwood. They had mastwood and they had scurvy and the High Arm is easily accessible by sea. This holding made the match.”
This time Verlein let the grin blossom. In one elegant deflection, he had told her that her information was flawed, that he still deferred to headman Strelniriol te Khine, that his adopted island was quite healthy, thank you, and that thus far they were allied to this holding. Nicely done, she thought. Could that understanding we forged need stropping and oiling after all?
Bootsteps sounded in the passageway. Evrael’s man gave a shake of the head so slight that anyone else would have missed it, and through the door came not the Khinish headman, as Verlein had expected, but two men and a woman dressed in black tunics and hose. Verlein rose to her feet at the unlikely sight. When she’d heard the Khinish were coming, she’d assumed that this would be a gathering of leaders. Those who still wore reckoner’s black were merely message runners. She could have been no more surprised if three children had walked into the chamber.
“Good morning,” said the oldest of them—a Norther, judging from the blunt accent and pale complexion. He did not bear himself like someone who’d stumbled into the wrong place; he believed he was expected here. As tall and lean as Evrael, with eyes and hair the color of aged silver, he was old indeed, by the standards of the day. Few saw their ninth nineyear anymore, fewer still of them former mages, and none of those were scribing messages with their arthritic hands, let alone running them hither and yon. He gave a fluid bow, as did his unarmed aides, and beside her Evrael stiffened before returning it—with awkward grace, as if remembering a gesture long forgotten.
“Evrael n’Vonche,” the old man said. “It has been many years.”
“A lifetime,” Evrael replied. There was a strange light in his sea-distant eyes. “And it was n’Daivor, as it turns out, though I am wholly Evrael te Khine.”
[120] The old man’s brows arched. “Was it now?” he said softly.
“If my brother’s message can be believed.”
“Evonder your brother was a sound man, Evrael. I wish you could have known him.”
Verlein had stood over the body of this Evonder—n’Vonche, n’Daivor, it made no difference to her—in this very chamber. He had been one of the Ennead, felled in the mage war as the Nine’s final casting against the Lightbreaker failed. If Evrael was his brother, Evrael himself had been Ennead spawn. That he was of Head stock was evident in his coloring, his name, his diluted Khine drawl, and she’d always known he’d forsaken the light when he was young. She had not known that it was Ennead light. This old man was more than he seemed, and Evrael ...
“Yes,” he said without turning, sensing her evaluation. “I was born in this Holding and groomed for the Ennead. I told you the changes began more than a generation ago. I was here. I saw it. I denied it, and went to Khine.” Something passed between him and the old man then, something deeper than Verlein could follow.
She felt old forces rising, arraying against her. There was a forest of history here. She must tread carefully. Breaking the magelight had not broken the bonds between these people, or the ambitions this mountain had fostered.
“You recall some of the old courtesies, but not all,” the old man chastised gently—another statement more significant than it sounded. Verlein became aware that she was fingering the guard of her longblade. They are divesting me of arms, she thought, as the weapons become words and the field of battle the past. “I am Pelkin n’Rolf, of Drey, in the Neck,” he said to her with exaggerated gallantry, “and I was once the Ennead’s head reckoner. Now my folk make their way carrying messages. And information.”
Ah, Verlein thought. And thus your importance to this holding. Were they spies for Dabrena, as well? Eiden’s bloody balls, what had she walked into here?
“Verlein Blademaster,” she said, “and I never did understand why you folk persist in wearing black.”
Ignoring the gibe, he continued, “I present to you Jimor n’Loflin of the Strong Leg, and Chaldrinda n’Poskana of the Haunch. Jimor, Chaldrinda, I present to you Evrael te Khine, master of the Khinish fleet, and Verlein n’Tekla, first of Eiden’s shield.” He waited for the introduction of Evrael’s seafolk and Verlein’s seconds. When neither came, he returned his attention to her, as if there had been no breach of his outdated protocol. “What better way to identify ourselves as runners when we travel? Times are hard. One commission is hardly [121] enough to cover the cost of bearing a message by hand. We depend upon customers waylaying us as we pass.”
“You are a black reminder of the Ennead that brought a darkness on this world.”
His eyes narrowed. Good, she thought. Let’s get a rise out of you, see what you’re made of, old man. But his expression remained courteous. “Black was considered a color of grieving, in another world. We grieve the light we have lost.” He manufactured a genial smile, but his eyes cautioned her to accept what he offered next: “Would you have us wear pigeon feathers on our heads?” Respond in kind, those eyes said, or I will take your goading personall
y.
She was meant to come back with a joke—take him up on the opportunity to abandon her aggressive position. She understood the maneuver. She could work with it—say something like Perhaps only the dovekeepers among you, which in the code of this conversation would convey her understanding that he was more than a message boy while reminding him that she wore a longblade. But she was not yet prepared to acknowledge any authority on this man’s part. Reckoners had failed her folk in desperate times.
Better feathers on your heads than silver rings on your fingers, she started to say, but pulled her thrust when she caught a nod from Evrael’s man. The arrival, at last, of the Khinish headman. The nod was relayed to Evrael by his woman inside the chamber. The step he took to the side cleared his line of sight to the door, which the runners had blocked, and also distanced him from physical alliance with Verlein.
So much could be conveyed and confirmed by so little. Evrael straightened, but did not quite come to attention as his folk did. His sweeping gaze fixed on the doorway. As Streln entered, their eyes locked, and for a long moment it was apparent that for the two of them no one else existed.
The headman of Khine made up in breadth and muscle what he lacked in height. His complexion was darker than Verlein’s, shading to bronze rather than olive and further deepened by the sun; his eyes, which might have been brown in natural light, looked so dark that their whites startled. He had the stance of a fighter, but not the easy grace of the fighters Verlein trained. Every movement spoke discipline and control. A Khinish blade curved to his flank as if molded there, and one gloved hand rested with care on its belt rather than its pommel. A cloak was folded, not flung, across the opposite forearm. Two men stood braced and square-shouldered precisely one pace behind him and to either side.
The scent that wafted to her was of horseflesh. The silent confrontation of headman and fleetmaster clearly followed some time [122] apart. Streln had not sailed here on one of Evrael’s ships. He might have made the crossing from Khine on one, but he had ridden from the Boot all the way to the Head. Four nonned leagues or more, by horseback.
No wonder there were whispers that the Khinish were waking.
“Headman,” Evrael said at last, on a rising tone, and laid his fist on his heart.
“Fleetmaster,” the headman replied, a flat statement, and laid his fist on his.
It was a customary Khinish greeting. Verlein had seen it a nonned times. But in the rarefied atmosphere of this chamber the gesture took on strange layers of significance. She scowled.
“You must have had an arduous journey, and no host as yet to give you welcome,” said Pelkin n’Rolf. “Why don’t we sit while names are exchanged—there’s no telling how long our wait will be.”
“Evrael and his fleetmates are known to me,” said Streln, “and he has spoken my title. That is Eiden’s self-proclaimed first shield and those are two of her seconds. You were a reckoner once, are now a bearer of tidings and possibly more, and those are your aides. These are my men. That is all any of us needs to know.”
“As you say, Headman.” With that neutral deferral, Pelkin gestured his folk into seats that gave their backs to the door, and engaged them in ordinary conversation. Verlein took her own seat again, with a glance to Eowi and Girayal to confirm that they should stay in place, and stretched out at an angle to the chairback, crossing her legs at the boot and her arms at her chest. Streln posted his men with the lift of a finger, then moved aside to await their hosts. After the briefest hesitation, Evrael went to him, and they exchanged even briefer words, too low for Verlein to make out. Then Evrael returned to the table and sat, one chair away from hers, still facing the door, still on the same side. His hands lay lightly on the stone surface, perhaps an unconscious display: he held no weapon, but his longstaff was propped in easy reach. His gaze still swept the chamber and lit on his guards at intervals, but slowly now; what absorbed him was visible only to his mind’s eye.
Verlein produced a toothpick and worked at a nutshell lodged in her teeth.
Did you learn what you sought? he had asked. Streln had answered, Yes. And she was right.
Five words, whose message he had already read in Streln’s reserve, in the refusal to take the chair beside his. Five words, rising [123] like unmarked shoals in a sea-way he had not wanted to enter. This mountain holding was a rocky point he had sailed ever to windward of. Now, in the next few breaths, he would find out whether it would be the wreck of him at last.
Evrael had never thought to return here—not even once, let alone this second time. He had left at two nineyears of age, the day after taking his triskele. Ordinary mages went journeying for a year after receiving the pewter symbols of their craft. He went to sea, which was the journeying of a lifetime. Mages were always needed on shipboard, particularly bindsmen with journey trusses. Somehow he never triaded, as if the spirits knew that magecraft was not his true calling. After a year he landed on Khine, forged friendships, became the bonded son of a prominent family. Streln, of an age with him, became his bonded brother, then far more. They had labored side by side in the vineyards and groves of that rich, sun-drenched island, where all families were landholders and all leaders were chosen by consensus. The rigor of the lifestyle had suited his Holding upbringing just as its warmth had neutralised it. On Khine, hard work and discipline were rewarded with honest, open acclamation. His speech slowed, his pallor darkened, his sandy hair bleached blond in the sun. He woke to life and love and honor. He never looked back.
Yet he could not resist the sea’s call. Though it kept him from Streln at times, he made a place for himself as shipwright, later as shipmaster. It gave him standing apart from Streln’s family, put them on equal footing: the seafolk chose their own leaders, answering only to the headman of all Khine. He himself became their fleetmaster, just as Streln, his rise unrelated to Evrael’s, came one step away from headman—and just as rumors of dissension on the mainland began to reach them.
In among those rumors he received a message from the youngest member of the Ennead. In all his long lifetime away, no one else had contacted him—not parent, not the brother she claimed was born nine moons after his departure. Then this young woman sent to him, the master of the Khinish fleet, seeking to forge an alliance.
As binder, never mind seaman, he should not have been able to read it, but the last two Enneads had trained their successors in all three triadic disciplines, so he did not require a wordsmith to translate for him or scribe a reply. He’d thought she was her father at first, not knowing Rigael was dead, seeing his mark, the rune riol, at the foot of her messages, but in context her identity came clear. He rebuffed her, and failed to acknowledge several subsequent advances. Her pleas kept coming. When he could no longer deny the thickening rumors [124] of darkcraft, he constructed replies that led her to believe he would bring his fleet to her aid.
He had no intention of doing so. She was party to this darkcraft, if not in practice then in complicity. He meant only to sabotage her schemes by promising help he would fail to provide—a small way in which he was willing to help those fighting that faraway Ennead. But then, thoroughly duped by his lies, she revealed the plan for a great casting to be worked by the leading triad of her Ennead. It was to happen on the balance day of the following sowmid equinox. The casting would satisfy an ancient vengeance against the outer realms, and sacrifice the leading triad, clearing the way for rulers to arise. She would have him, and the Khinish, by her side when that time came.
He had to go. He had to stop it.
Trusting in the love they bore each other, he told Streln everything—and that, he knew now, was the trunk from which all subsequent errors branched. “I must return to the place of my birth and set things to rights,” he’d said. “I would take six ships.”
“And so you shall,” Streln had said. “We have slept too long here on our sunny island, I fear, while darkness has crept across the mainland. We have remembered our beginnings only in dreams. We must awaken from tho
se dreams now, and assert our heritage.”
Evrael was not born to Khine, not of Streln’s blood. He was pressed for time, could not stop to ponder awakenings; he left immediately for the Holding, and even then, battered by the front of what he later learned was a Great Storm, cored of his magelight in what he later learned was a loss suffered realm-wide, he arrived past noon on the balance day of Ve Galandra. Verlein’s rebel horde had burrowed through the mountain and joined a stewards’ uprising, while warders reduced to little more than stewards themselves had pulled together to divert the Storm. All was changed, irrevocably, the home of his youth soiled, castrated, freed. There was little left for him to do but stay Verlein’s murderous fury, save the warders, the materials, the codices.
But he’d captured the last surviving member of that doomed Ennead: Lerissa n’Lessa l’Rigael, who called herself Lerissa n’Rigael in negation of her lightless, banished mother, who signed her messages with riol, her father’s mark, the frost hawthorn. The youngest member of the Nine. The scheming girl who had sent him messages and expected his fleet to save her.
He had thought her a devious, naive child, not worth bloodying a blade on, perhaps redeemable, and no longer his concern.
He had brought her home with him, and delivered her to Streln.
Now he sat in the new holding that had risen from those ashes, [125] at the very table where his brother had died. He hadn’t believed the girl’s claims that he had a brother. But the resemblance had been inarguable. His parents had lain not two threfts away, poisoned. The remains of a triskele had strewn the table, and in death Evonder clutched the tools that had shattered it. When Evrael returned home, a message from his brother awaited him, having wended its slow way to Khine through the proxies who now made a trade of bearing such messages. I am your brother Evonder, it had said, the son of Naeve and nominally Vonche. I will probably be dead when you read this, and there is a thing you must know. The shade of Daivor, the binder who trained you, the binder who trained me, the man who was traded with our parents, was bound into his own triskele by those who murdered him, more than two nineyears after you left. I have touched that triskele and felt his spirit as though casting passage, and I tell you true, brother I have never known: He was my father, and believed, hoped, that he was yours as well. I have lived in your shadow all my life, golden Evrael, but gravely wronged you by failing to reach out. Understand that silence was necessary, given the circumstances here. I could never take the risk. It has grieved me always. Spirits willing, I will live to look on your face one day. Strive well, and die with honor.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 15