Who dares, he thought again, to attack the House itself? For of a certainty, the Kings would notice—could not help but notice—and where there was such a war, they could not turn a blind eye and leave the Houses to deal with their own. Oh, it would damage Terafin, there was no question of it.
But he didn’t give a damn about the House and its politics. It was the ravaged flesh of the individuals that worried him, and that would do more than that by the dawn.
• • •
Claris, bruised but otherwise whole, was shifting his weight from left to right foot so rapidly it seemed a sort of dance. His red hair was cropped short and all except a shock of curl was hidden by the helm that he clearly didn’t like. That helm topped Arann by a good six inches, and Arann had never been small.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” Claris whispered. “Why do you think all the guard’s been mobilized?”
Arann shrugged, wishing that Claris could shut up for five minutes in a row. Holloran, the sergeant on duty, glowered in their direction; he was not with them, but rather, with one of the Chosen. Receiving orders, no doubt.
“It’s got to be something big,” Claris continued, as Arann tried to shrink into the fancy boots that went with his armor and his uniform. Holloran was well-named, and Arann was afraid that they were both going to get the lash of Holloran’s careful scorn. Again.
He was almost right. Holloran crossed the tiled floors, his step firm and completely regular. He stopped five feet from Arann’s chest as both he and Claris attempted to look reasonably watchful. They weren’t very good at it, especially when compared to their eight companions, who fell into the attentive pose immediately, and awaited the word of their commanding officer.
“Cartan, Morris,” Holloran said, looking distinctly un-amused, “I’m this close to suspending you for the action. You are here to watch and listen—and if necessary, to fight—not to jabber like dress-servants off-duty. Is that understood?”
“Sir!”
“Good.” But the answer didn’t appear to entirely satisfy him; he stared for a long, uncomfortable moment at Arann before he spoke again. “Cartan.”
“Sir?”
“You didn’t come to Terafin on your own, did you?”
A brief hesitation.
“Just answer the question; when I want you to think, I’ll tell you.”
“No, sir.”
“I see. And the person or persons that you traveled with also remain within the grounds of Terafin?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What can you tell me about your . . . leader?”
He felt ten pairs of eyes on his face, burning a deep blush into the sides of either cheek. The silence stretched out, and this time Holloran didn’t deny him the time. “What—what do you want to know?”
But Holloran shook his head in mild disapproval. “You’ve told me most of what the guard needs to know,” he said, the words sounding very like a threat—although almost every word he spoke did. “Tell me this, then. Can we trust her?”
“Yes.”
“You have no doubt?”
“None, sir. If she—if she’s the one that says something’s happening, then that’s the way it is.”
“Good. Because it doesn’t appear that we have any choice.” He turned to his small troop. “Deploy,” he said softly. “Sound the alarm at the first sign of any unusual movement.” He stepped back, lowered his arm, and watched as his men—eight of them, at any rate—smoothly shifted position.
• • •
Battle was in the air, carried by the sea wind and the ghosts of old memories; a hint of Southern fires, a hint of the Western borders. The Terafin made her way down the staircase of the giants, leading her Chosen. She was diminutive in her armor, but the shield and the sword that she bore were unmistakable, and even the servants, rushing in haste and fear from one corridor to another, stopped to gape as she passed them, the very ire of a grand House made real.
She made her way through the ivory hall into the grand foyer, and there she stopped, waiting. She did not wait for long.
Alayra, wearing steel and sweat in what seemed equal quantities, brushed her chest plate with her fist and then lifted her chin. “Terafin.”
“Report.”
“There are men in the west garden, near the House shrine.”
“Ours?”
“No,” was the grave reply.
“And?”
“And down the road, perhaps half a mile, there’s a large procession moving toward us. It may be coincidence, but they carry torches and not lamps, and the light cast is glinting off steel.”
• • •
The great hall was on fire, had been on fire; unnatural flames had cracked the stone floors as if they were timber, leaving splinters for the unwary foot. He was bleeding; the flying shards had struck his forehead, his arms, his hands.
His hands.
He looked down, and he saw that beneath the sticky film of drying blood, they were wrong; they were a boy’s hands, a youth’s hands. The hands, he thought, of an oathsworn huntbrother untested by the King’s Forest. The Sacred Hunt.
He knew who he was.
Stephen of Elseth.
And tomorrow, tomorrow was the first of Veral.
Tomorrow, the drummers would beat their steady rhythm against the skins of previous years’ kills. Tomorrow, the King would take to the forest’s edge, divesting himself of all rank but the one that the Hunter knew: Master of the Game. Tomorrow, the Ladies would gather, in their brilliant dresses, their perfect sashes, paying obeisance to their Queen—and to the men who fulfilled their oaths.
The Hunter’s Death was waiting.
He heard the screaming; the splintering of wood—or stone—the cries cut short, and worse, the cries that lingered. They were coming. They always came.
Shadows flooded the great hall; the wall shattered. In the ragged hole that broken stone and mortar made, she stood. Hair of midnight, eyes darker, bruised lips. At her back were men, women—Priests of the God that no one gave name to.
Allasakar.
He ran.
Three times he had made this trek. This fourth time, he thought it should somehow be different. But the narrow, perfect halls became shadow forms at his back; fire brushed his ankles as he turned corners; lamps doused themselves in the wake of his passing. Pain became his only companion; his side cramped, and he clutched it, knowing there would be no relief. How could he stop?
She laughed. Her voice was velvet, desire, death. He thought, a moment, that he might stop and just accept the death that she offered—the fear was that strong, and the weariness. But his oaths were his oaths. His feet beat a path across the cold stone while his mind numbed.
He knew the way, although the building itself was less than a memory to the Breodani. Had there been no torchlight, no blue light, had there been shadows and darkness not just at his back, but all around, he would still have known how to reach it.
The Hunter’s Haven.
There, the door; light gleaming beneath it. He reached for the curved handle, but before he could touch it, the hinges creaked. The door swung open.
There, spear in hand, dog at his side, was Gilliam. But not Gilliam the page; it was Gilliam the Hunter.
“Stephen!” he said, his face folding into familiar lines of both danger and relief. “You made it! Get behind me. We’ll take care of her.”
He was so exhausted. So relieved. The giddiness made his last steps light as he crossed the threshold and stood behind the man that he had followed for almost all his life. He felt liquid coursing down his cheeks; he thought, in confusion, that the wound across his brow had opened up again. But no. Tears fell, the first of the tears he had yet cried in this history, this dream, this place.
He stepped back as the darkness reached the mouth of the Hunter’s
Haven. His back hit something; he turned, and saw the Hunter’s relics laid out as they had always been laid out; but they were all gray and lifeless. Save one. The Hunter’s Horn was a soft, warm ivory, with a simple mouthpiece. Carved in a continuous turning line, the symbol of a vow that not even death could end.
No. He would not take it. He would not take it here.
He looked at the reassuring sight of his Hunter’s back. Felt, for the first time in this terrible, Wyrd-ridden place, the bond between them. Looked down at his hands, and saw that they were the hands of his adulthood, and not the hands of his youth.
And then he looked at the dog, wondering; it wasn’t Ashfel, but it was familiar somehow. The proud alaunt turned, swiveling its black-masked face toward him. He lost breath then, and heart.
Corwel.
• • •
“Stephen.”
The voice carried darkness, was part of the darkness; there were no lights in the room that he could see by. No, not no light; there was a silver glow, fainter than distant starlight, that took form and shape as his eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom—a glow around the form of a young woman.
Evayne.
The cry died in his throat as he glanced wildly about the room’s darkened walls. The dream was gone. But she was here. She was here.
Stephen sat up in bed, tossing aside both sleep and blankets that were there more for comfort than warmth. He had guttered the lamp’s flame, and there was no fire in the hearth; still he squinted into shadows, trying to discern her age. Her breath was rough and heavy, as if some physical exertion had only just ended. Running, perhaps.
“Stephen?” That she called a second time told him she was younger.
“Evayne,” he said softly.
He heard her sigh of relief; it was loud. “You’ve got to get up,” she said, the words beginning a headlong rush out of her mouth. “You’ve got to wake Gilliam.”
“What? Why?”
“Because they’re coming for you.”
He stood, and after a moment, there was light in the room, harsh compared to shadow, but weak compared to day. Stephen lifted the lamp aloft to better see Evayne’s expression. Midnight blue framed her face; her cheeks were flushed, her eyes wider than they’d ever been. And there was no line or wrinkle at all across the smoothness of her skin; she was fair and pale, and her hair was perfect darkness. Only her eyes themselves—not the lids of the skin around them—were unchanged by her youth.
The door opened; Espere crossed the threshold. She saw Evayne, and came up short. The younger woman smiled, but fleetingly. “Wild one,” she said softly. “I think it time to rouse your master. We must flee.”
Stephen touched her shoulder gently, where he might have grabbed the arm of any other speaker. “Evayne, who is coming for us?” He asked because he did not want to know, to acknowledge the fact that he did know.
“I—I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know who they are. But they’re coming to Terafin; I heard them speak. They’re looking for you here.” She turned fully to face him. “Stephen, please. Trust me.”
She was young, was Evayne. Her lip trembled as she made her plea. The older woman would never descend to such behavior—because the older woman had lost all sense of vulnerability in her isolation. “We’ll trust you,” he heard himself saying as he left his room to rouse the Hunter who was already waking. “You haven’t led us poorly yet.”
• • •
She watched him leave, taking light and warmth with him as he sought to rouse his Hunter Lord. Lord Elseth was already awake—she had looked into the night that contained the sleeping city, and found them both. She drew the crystal, rounded and yet imperfect as any life was, and ran her fingers across the stability of its cool surface.
Images flickered in the silver mists, silent and distant, yet also distinct. There were tales in the ball’s depth; whispers of other times and other places imposed one on top of each other like layers of ghosts—or perhaps, more practically, onion. What lay at the heart? Was it the final step on this thrice-cursed path?
Stephen did not understand all of Evayne’s life, yet he knew the cause she pursued was a just one, at this age or any other. What he did not know—and what she, at this age, would not tell him—was that the path took her places without direction or directive; that she had to guess, from her time and her surroundings, what her purpose was to be.
Sometimes the purpose was hard to know, harder still to fathom; sometimes, times like tonight, it was simple and clear.
Evayne, called a’Nolan in the free towns of her birth, had the fear and the confidence of youth. But she was not known—not yet—for infallibility.
Chapter Twenty
THE MOMENT THE FIRST of their enemies set foot on the grounds of Terafin proper, Jewel knew. Her skin felt as if it were the surface of a large bell tingling at the stroke of the clapper. Behind her, Carver pulled up short; he took one look at her face as she glanced over her shoulder, and closed his lips firmly on the question he’d been about to ask. It was dark in the halls, but not dark enough.
Not dark enough.
She shivered; the chill grew piercing.
Then, swearing none too softly, she lifted a hand in a pitched signal and began to run.
• • •
The halls were grand and smooth and glorious; taller than any but the cathedrals of Averalaan could boast. The ceilings were simple, although the height of the columns folded into a fanned pattern directly above them; the windows were full and long.
Yet as he stepped into those very halls, every hair on the back of his neck rose. Something struck him from within—a thing almost too forceful to be what it was: memory, however warped and twisted.
“Stephen!” Gilliam was at his side in a second, all irritation at the young Evayne—at Stephen, at The Terafin, and at the Empire—forgotten in the urgency of his huntbrother’s fear. Ashfel joined him, growling uneasily, ears flattened against his broad skull.
Evayne glanced sharply up at them both, Stephen’s white face and Gilliam’s slightly flushed one. “What is it?” she asked, perhaps a bit too quickly. “What’s wrong?”
Stephen raised an arm. It shook; there was a weight across it too heavy to carry for long. But he managed to point, his single finger tracing a downward curve until it met the floor in the distance of the fountain alcove.
They all looked, then. The dogs were silent, staring at something their master felt to be an enemy. Only Espere tossed her wild, tangled mane and snarled in angry defiance; her eyes, dark, still seemed to carry a spark within them that left no space for fear.
Evayne drew a breath so sharp it cut the silence.
• • •
“What? What are you all looking at?” Gilliam said, his frustration held in check by his concern.
“Look through her eyes,” Stephen said, speaking for the first time. Only Gilliam was surprised to hear his voice—even weak and shaky though it was—because only Gilliam knew how paralyzing his huntbrother’s fear was. He did not quibble or even hesitate. Instead, he did what came so naturally it was easier than making a verbal reply: he slid into Espere’s eyes, seeing for a moment as she saw. No more, and no less.
The hall was as his own eyes made it to be: pretentious, grand, foreign. But the floor, tiled and etched and rugged—the floor was different. Shadow crept like living mist gone mad across every nook and cranny—a shadow cast by no light that he had ever seen. As Gilliam watched its slow progress, he wondered if anything that it obscured would emerge whole and unchanged. And if it did not, what change would the Darkness decree? For there was Darkness here.
Like Espere, his response was immediate; as Espere with her growl and her teeth, he drew his bright, long blade with a cry that was wordless and defiant. There was no room in his heart for fear—excepting only the space that Stephen claimed and crossed.
>
He stopped a moment, and then looked at Evayne, saw her as Espere saw her. Friend. Pup. There was nothing of a rival in her fine, porcelain chin, her high cheekbones, her fragile expression. Nothing of Cynthia, nothing of Maubreche. He owed her a debt for the saving of Stephen’s life. He owed it, and if possible, tonight would be the night that she was repaid in full.
He closed his eyes a moment, denying the darkness as he slid back into his self, his full self. The dogs were there, at the edge of his awareness, and Espere, like them to the very core. Only Stephen was closer, and Stephen knew better than to interfere with a full Hunter who chose, in haste and need, to call the Hunter’s trance.
Time changed, slowing; he could hear and identify the timbre of Evayne’s unfamiliar breath, the shuffling of his wild girl from foot to foot as she stared intently into the shadows, the growling of his pack. He could smell their sweat, each scent resolving into something distinct.
His hand found his horn, trembling with a type of excitement, but although he could not have said why, he stopped himself from winding it. There was a hunt, yes—but who the hunter and who the hunted had not yet been defined enough.
“Come,” he said, his the voice of command. The stillness shattered as the dogs pulled into a loose formation in front of Evayne and Stephen. Ashfel at their head looked a fifth again his size as his fur rose along neck and back. There was no thought that was not obedient. They were at war, they were in danger, they were hunted—and Gilliam was their unquestioned leader.
And he ordered them quickly away from the alcove in which shadow pooled—but not so quickly that they did not hear the shattering of stone that was older than the city itself; nor so quickly that they did not see the outer wall fall, crushing the fountain’s delicate structure, and making of its tinkling water’s fall a final gurgle.
The Sacred Hunt Duology Page 91