“Of course there is.”
“While I’m not endorsing anything Lord Wall said about the crown, it is true that some of the essential nature of the Kinslayer is bound to it. His essential nature, in this case, meaning his selfishness. He was not a creature that could ever have countenanced doing something for someone else while his own needs remained unfulfilled. Ergo, you cannot use his crown for another’s benefit unless you yourself have no wish for it yourself. I must, therefore, recuse myself from further assisting you, because, well, I’m only human. However, you of course are a hero, my dear, and so I would assume…”
“No,” said Celestaine.
“Hm?”
“I can’t use it selflessly. This whole venture was a sop to my conscience. I want this godsdamned thing to make me feel better about myself, doctor. So, no, not me.”
“Ah, well,” Catt said, not in the least disheartened. “Then, while I had assumed you’d want the honour, I can think of a very acceptable substitute candidate in the person of the bard sitting by the door there.”
Ralas eyed him suspiciously. “Was that what all the death-talk was about? Seeing if I wanted something from the Kinslayer’s magic hat?”
“Mere serendipity,” Catt assured him. “But am I wrong? Take the magic hat, why don’t you? Do you feel the need to work a change in yourself, or perhaps conquer the world?”
Ralas snagged the misshapen crown and stared down at it balefully. “It’s nothing to me,” he said. “Ugly-looking thing anyway.”
Chapter Thirty-One
FROM THERE, IT was back to Forinth, just off the border with Cherivell, near enough that another day would have seen them at Bladno. This was where the Aethani colony was, that Amkulyah had left to seek her help. That was where the Kinslayer’s crown would work its last broken miracle.
Entertainment on the journey was mostly provided by Nedlam complaining that she didn’t need the cart and could have walked the whole way. She made sure not to make too much fuss, though, in case anyone made her do it, and she slept a lot. Yorughan mended fast. By the time they arrived she would be up and about and pushing the boundaries of what her injured arm could do.
Although their roads led in the same direction, they bade goodbye to Catt and Fisher soon after. Fisher took Celestaine aside and suggested to her that she should avoid Cinquetann hereafter.
“I understand,” she said. Ralas had explained how things were left between the two doctors. It was hard to look on Fisher, knowing what beast lurked beneath his skin. She remembered the pair’s home town, still recovering from its occupation. If she asked, would she hear tales of a monster that had torn up the Kinslayer’s soldiers and never been caught? Quite possibly. Or would she just hear of an old antiques dealer? Either way, she didn’t think Fury had been idle during the war.
They passed Bleakmairn, of course. Thukrah had already moved on from it, and Celestaine could only hope that Kait Hegumen’s messengers had reached him, and that some measure of peace might result. She found herself looking at Heno and wondering how travelling with him in a year’s time might be. Would Yorughan faces meet with acceptance; would the wounds of the war heal over enough? Or would there be those, like Silvermort or Wall, whose livelihood was in stirring up hatred and profiting from misery?
Or will the Yorughan bring the war, because it’s what they were trained for, and it’s easier than dealing with us? Equally possible. There were plenty of the Kinslayer’s minions left alive, after all, above and below ground. And perhaps the Yorughan would make better generals than a mad, vengeance-driven demigod. We might not win that war.
The place Kul guided them to was called Grovesendry, part of the fiefdom of the Stipe clan, who had never got on with the Fiddleheads of Fernreame. Celestaine, turning up with her clan cloak hung about her, almost got them thrown out on the spot by a very belligerent patrol of young Stipe bravos. In retrospect, she’d got into Bleakmairn, Ilkand and even the Unredeemed Lands with less trouble. The two Yorughan got less harassment than she did.
Grovesendry was your standard Forinthi town, dug into a valley with a fort on the high ground to keep watch for raiders, now partially rebuilt. The Aethani quarter was… a reminder of all they’ve lost, was all Celestaine could think. The locals hadn’t exactly extended a broad welcome to the refugees, and the shacks and shanties the Aethani had managed to raise looked as though the next rains would wash them away. They were busy, though. They had been in the mines, almost all of them; a sullen strength had been beaten into them. She watched them scratch away at the worst farmland the valley had to offer, work away at wood, cut stone, haul in loads of charcoal or peat. Aside from the woodworkers, whose craft the locals would at least appreciate, they were doing the jobs the Forinthi hated, repaying their reluctant hosts as best they could. Plenty of young Forinthi warriors had never come home, after all. An influx of strong backs wasn’t to be turned away. For their part, perhaps the Aethani saw no option but to work, just as the Kinslayer had made them work. Be useful or be thrown out? Celestaine hoped her kin wouldn’t do any such thing, and likewise hoped that the value Forinthi would normally place on hard labour was being extended to these guests. Times were hard for everyone after the war, though. Hospitality might still be a rationed commodity.
She remembered the glories of Aethan before the war: its high houses, the decorated beauty and pride of its people. Now all that was left were ghettos like these. The Kinslayer had taken more than their wings. Their land was gone, unreclaimed still, and even if they got it back, everything they ever built or made had burned.
What we bring them is pitiful, she knew.
Then Amkulyah had jumped down from the cart, his arms spread wide. They knew him, but there was little excitement, even when he started going among them, touching foreheads, telling them what he’d brought.
Celestaine glanced at Heno, beside her on the driver’s board. He had been very quiet ever since the fight with Wall, hardly a word to share all journey. Now he all but glared at the Aethani, as though he’d only now understood what all this was in aid of, and didn’t approve.
“What is it?” she asked him, not for the first time.
Heno just shook his head.
“You’ll have to tell me some time.”
“Probably. Let the prince have his moment,” he growled, which at least was progress.
It look Amkulyah some time to gather a crowd of his people, and the scepticism in the air was palpable. Perhaps elsewhere there were energetic, bustling communities of displaced Aethani, but Amkulyah’s kin here seemed still weighed down by all they had gone through.
Ralas had the crown, his arm thrust through it for safekeeping. He had found proper Forinthi attire along the way, a bard’s white cloak signifying he was of no clan and held no blood or oath debts. He still looked rake-thin, his face covered with bruises, but the clothes lent a touch of the man she remembered to him. She wondered if he had kin and a home somewhere, a past he had never spoken of that he could yet return to. The life of a travelling bard was a hard one.
“We are ready.” Amkulyah broke in on her thoughts, and Ralas hopped down from the cart with a wince. There were four Aethani lined up ahead of the others, all of them older than Kul, but not so old as to be parents, by Celestaine’s guess.
“I dearly hope this works,” Ralas breathed. “We’re going to get stoned to death if it doesn’t.”
“I have said not to hope,” Kul told him.
“Good luck with that one,” the bard said, shuffling towards the line. “Stoned to death,” he said again. “You first, then?”
Amkulyah took a hurried step back as though Ralas had offered him a snake. “No.”
“But… you’re the prince, surely you get…?” Ralas waved the crown at him vaguely and Kul backed off still further.
Celestaine went over to him, hand out but finding him beyond reach. “Surely…”
“How old do you think I am, Celest?” he asked her flatly.
“You’re
… young. Nineteen? Eighteen? Is this an Aethani thing, giving way to elders…?” She didn’t think the prospective candidates looked like elders, though—plenty in the crowd had decades on them.
“Aethan fell at the start of the war,” Amkulyah reminded her. “How long ago was that, tell me?”
“Ten years, of course, but I… Oh.”
He nodded jerkily. “I never flew. My wings were barely grown when they were taken from me. Give them back to me now, what would I even do with them? And who could teach me to take back the air?”
“But you did all this…” Celestaine’s voice tailed off. “I thought you missed it so much…”
His face was unreadable. “I missed seeing my people as they were. I remembered that.” He flinched away from Ralas once again, as the bard offered the crown to him.
“Take it. You don’t want it, so you should have it.” Ralas cracked a bitter smile. “Best lesson of life, that. Only give power to those who don’t want it. Would solve a lot of problems in the world. So take it, take the power in it, remake a few of your people. You don’t need some human doing the honours. Give them a bit of pride back.”
“You killed Wall, after all,” Celestaine pointed out. “Not Fury, not me.”
Gingerly, Amkulyah accepted the battered crown from Ralas, turning it over in his long-fingered hands. His eyes strayed to where his people waited.
LATER ON, AS dusk fell, she found Heno sitting above the Aethani village, looking up into the darkening sky. Night came on swiftly in the Forinthi valleys, the sun clipping the edge of the hills and then vanishing like a drowning man, leaving only the stars. The last streaks of gold were just dying as she walked up the slope to him, a dark shape on a dark hillside enlivened only by the silvery flash of his hair and beard.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” she asked him, but he just kept on looking. The last rays of the sun touched the handful of shadows wheeling and dancing over the village like huge bats, clumsy in the air after so long without practice, but remembering fast. Celestaine counted them, because it moved her heart at least from a failure to all the world to better than nothing. Eight. They had restored eight of the Aethani before the power of the crown had dwindled to nothing. Doctor Catt had done well.
“Tell me,” she said, and when he didn’t reply she prodded him under the ribs, where she knew he couldn’t abide it. He rounded on her, and for a moment she was still, staring into what could have been a stranger’s face, all tusks and flinty eyes. Then his reserve cracked and he pressed his fingers to his forehead as though trying to drive out evil thoughts.
“You don’t want to hear it,” was all he said.
“Tell me,” she repeated firmly. “Look, it’s me. If you can’t tell me, then who?”
“What makes you think I’d tell anyone?” he snapped, but she kept looking him pointedly until his shoulders sagged and he let out a long, harsh breath.
“When we came out from the earth, you can’t know what it was like,” he said at last. “We’d been told of this land above that was full of our enemies. We’d been told that everyone there had conspired to lock us beneath the earth, to deny us the sky and the sun—not that most of us even knew what those things were. They were just things we couldn’t have.”
She nodded carefully, knowing that he would say it in his own time or not at all, now. Further prodding would yield no more.
“The Kinslayer never told us how beautiful the world was,” Heno told her. “He didn’t know how much we would love the sunlight and the trees. And of course, wherever he laid his hand the sun dimmed and the trees died. We came to this land, this… everywhere, that you took for granted. And it was everything we could desire, and we knew we’d never have it, and we hated you, because you had it all and wouldn’t even fight for it. You just died or ran away. We hated ourselves for what we were made to do, but we couldn’t live with that hate, so we made it a hate of you for being too weak to defend all that beauty.”
He was silent for a long while and she put her arm around his shoulders, hugging him close.
“And we enjoyed it, of course. Like the Kinslayer knew we would, like he’d primed us to. Because if you hate yourself enough, and hate others enough, then doing terrible things to them becomes your only pastime, your only pleasure. Because in the moment when you rack them with fire, or slip your blade behind their eyeball, you have control, and that means something. It means something when the Kinslayer’s your master and that’s the only control you’ll ever have.”
Another long, strained pause.
“And then we came to Aethan, which was most beautiful of all, where the people were so free and graceful that even the sky was theirs. And we looked on them, Celest, and we wondered. We stared, open mouthed, at how they rode the air, the whole world spread beneath them.” He clenched his fists before him suddenly, magic flaring from between his fingers and lighting up his tormented face. “And we hated them so much, for what they had. We, who had lived in the dirt all our lives, we couldn’t stand it that they had all that freedom, that the world was theirs. But we had our armies, that had never lost a battle, and they didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to lose all that beauty they had, and so they gave themselves into our hands. And we knew we didn’t have to stand it. If we couldn’t bear to be in a world with the flying men, we didn’t have to be.”
“Heno…”
“It wasn’t the Kinslayer, Celest,” he told her hollowly. “We destroyed Aethan. We clipped the wings of its people, every damn one of them. Generals and Heart Takers and soldiers, all of us, we made that choice. We just couldn’t stand them having all that, and us having lived with nothing for so long. It was too hard, and we were too strong, and there was too little to stop us.”
The next silence was hers, as she thought through the implications, thinking back for any clue he might have dropped back when she proposed the plan to restore them. He had been like stone, though. He had given nothing away.
“But Ned and Kul, they… they’re friends.”
“Oh, Ned probably wasn’t there. Probably she doesn’t even know,” Heno said, his arch superiority back just for a moment. “But I was. I cheered it on. It felt good, Celest. It felt good to make a whole people more wretched than we were.”
“And now?”
He met her gaze at last. “If I were surrounded by Yorughan officers, perhaps? If we’d won the war? If I hadn’t met you and done this. It would feel good still, Celest. We’d be clapping each other on the back and saying, Remember the Aethani?”
“And now?” she asked again.
“And now I’ve met you, and I understand that I’m a monster. Not because I’m Yorughan, but because I made those choices. I chose to be cruel. Just because I turned on the Kinslayer, don’t think I’m like you. Don’t think I’m good.” He stood suddenly. “I’ll go, Celest. I’ll go find Thukrah, maybe. I’ll… do something to help, somehow.”
She grabbed his wrist and yanked him back down, hard enough to knockthe breath out of him.
“Heno, I know you’re no holy man. I know you turned on your master for your own reasons. You were a torturer, for death’s sake! You think I was sitting here blissfully believing that you spent the war rescuing puppies and smuggling children back to their parents?”
He stared at her, but he didn’t take his hand back.
“Look up there,” she demanded, watching a winged Aethani pass before the yellow face of the rising moon. “You’ve done a little to put things right, just a little. And it’s because of you the Kinslayer’s dead; that’s another little. We’ve all made wrong choices, and yes, you’ve made a hell of a lot more than most, but you’ve changed and you can keep changing. The Kinslayer isn’t there to order you, and you don’t have to live in a cave any more. So be better, that’s all. Better tomorrow than yesterday, like Thukrah, like Kait. Not worse, like Wall and Silvermort. And stay with me.”
He said nothing for a long time, but after a while he leant into her, and she rested her head
on his shoulder, drawing her cloak about her as the night chill stole in.
THEY STAYED ON at Grovesendry for a few days, in which time the handful of winged Aethani had already started to make a difference. Their wingless kin walked differently and the locals looked on them with new eyes. An echo of what they had once been had re-entered the world. There was hope in the air, like the first fragrance of spring.
Nedlam didn’t want to leave, and in the end she was quite tearful to part from Amkulyah. She was a good friend, Celestaine knew, and she didn’t discriminate between her own kind and any other: fight alongside her—or on her shoulders—and you were her comrade, and she’d die for you if she had to.
What came next was that Celestaine went home and introduced her kin to her new friends, and that was a whole new barrel of trouble brought up from the cellar. Only her bringing a renowned bard along, and her insistence that she had no intention of staying on to run the place, went even halfway to smoothing that over. Still, she had been travelling a long time, and Fernreame was just coming into its true spring beauty. “A month,” she told her cousins of the Fiddlehead clan, knowing that she’d be long gone by then, driven out not by angry relatives but by discontent and boredom.
But for now, she told herself, try to be content, just for a few days. Is that so much to ask?
And try to be discreet about Heno. Because there were limits to her clan’s hospitality, and taking a Yorughan lover was probably beyond those limits by some several miles.
Ralas said he’d leave before then, but somehow never did, relaxing into the role of a bard, telling the old stories and singing new songs, fingers darting about the strings of a borrowed harp. Only Celestaine saw the pain crease his eyes when he sat down.
And then, days later, when the Fiddlehead had even grown used to big Nedlam shambling about the place, or sparring with their new crop of young warriors, there was a visitor.
They sent for Celestaine at dawn and she came yawning and scratching and dragging her cloak into place, clutching at her waist for a sword she would never hold again, and for which she would never truly find a substitute.
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