She’d been standing there for too long; he wasn’t the only one looking. The party her people had sent for the ceremony wasn’t large: Zerill herself; Azra and Verik, just as Shona had asked; Grandfather Tarv to stand for the Heartspears. An escort of three dozen warriors followed behind in orderly lines, Lighteyes and Heartspears alike, led by Jeva, who seemed to have appointed herself Zerill’s protector. All of them were watching Zerill now, waiting. She was the one who had led them here, out of the Swamp and into the streets of a highlander city. Whatever came of this alliance, good or ill, it was her responsibility. She could feel the full weight of her people’s expectations resting on her shoulders, as heavy as the mountain rising overhead.
Just then, having Verik by her side was the only thing keeping her close to calm. Their friendship wouldn’t be allowed for long now that she was Grandmother, but she was breaking a great many traditions today—she didn’t think one more would make much difference.
All those times we climbed this mountain together, she signed, did you ever think we’d be standing here like this one day?
Without hesitation, Verik signed, Yes. Always.
She knew she should move on—the highlanders were watching, and they would imagine meanings of their own for her hesitation. Instead, she signed, Why? I don’t think I ever did.
Because I saw your face the first time you looked up at the sun. Verik smiled, and something in it made her feel more confident than she had. He’d always been good at that.
There are just… so many of them, Zerill signed. What if they won’t have us? What if it falls apart?
It was Azra who answered, stepping up from behind. It won’t. Few of these highlanders have given me any reason to love them—she scowled, and looked so like her mother that Zerill had to swallow against a sudden constriction in her throat—but the ones you chose are… better than most. You found a way to trust them, and I trust you. You’ve led us this far. Lead us a little bit farther.
And Zerill couldn’t refuse that. Not from Azlin’s daughter. Come, then, she signed. Let’s see how this ends. She looked a little bit higher, over the crest of the mountain to the sunlit sky high above. For just one more moment, she stood there in the light, savoring the warmth against her skin.
And then, holding her head high under highlander eyes, she started up the stairs and into the shadow of the Godspire.
The Orator’s Rise was a broad shelf of rock that emerged from the mountain halfway between the city below and the Aryllian Keep above, large enough to hold thousands. Like the road before, an aisle down the middle of the small plateau had been cordoned off, and guardsmen stood along either side to hold back the crowd. That crowd was denser still than the ones that had come before, though that hardly seemed possible to Zerill—thousands of highlander men and women and children filled the space on either side, packed so closely that they could hardly move.
At the far end of the plateau, a curved rock face had been carved out of the mountainside, like a bowl cut in half and laid on its side. Twin stairways curved up and around the stone bowl, and above they met and merged into one, continuing on toward the Aryllian Keep. Beneath the overhang of the curve, a collection of highlander nobles waited atop a stone dais.
Zerill swallowed and continued forward, keeping her eyes ahead and her back straight. However afraid she might be, she didn’t have to let the highlanders see it. The others followed her, and as they moved, the guards closed the cordon to let the crowd fill in the space behind. Very suddenly, she was surrounded in highlanders, thousands of feet above ground on a mountain in the open sky.
Everything in her screamed that it was a trap. Her fists clenched tighter; her heart beat hard against her chest, and her breath came fast and shallow. Jeva was beside her in an instant, and all around her, Heartspear and Lighteye warriors tightened their hands on their spears. But Zerill only raised her hand and signed, Peace.
She remembered what Shona had said: however they look at you, know that there are people here who understand what you did for us. The words had been encouraging at the time; less so now. But she clung to them all the same. It was all she could do. If this was a betrayal, there was nothing she could do to stop it now.
There was nothing she could do, so she kept walking. And when she did, the others followed.
As she drew near the dais, she searched the faces there for some sign of intent. She recognized most of them, from her meetings with Josen’s council: Ines and Alma Terene; Polt, the Chancellor; the strange young man called Yance Corvin whose duties she didn’t fully understand; the little chastor Renold Mulley. And at their center, ahead of all the rest, Josen stood waiting, with Shona and Eroh by his side.
Looking up at them, she knew that she was safe.
They were still highlanders, and they would never truly understand her or her people, but these two had proven the strength of their word. They wouldn’t betray her, not after everything they’d been through together. She could see the truth of that in Josen’s welcoming grin, feel the strength of the promise they’d made behind Shona’s slight, conspiratorial smile.
And even without them, she would have trusted the miracle in Eroh’s golden eyes. Before she’d known him, she’d never much cared about highlander prophecies, but the way he was looking at her now, without a hint of fear or doubt, she could almost believe. He’d come out of nowhere to bring them together, an Abandoned boy with a Windwalker’s eyes—that had to mean something.
Perhaps even that a god who had been blind to her people for far too long could see them at last.
She stood tall, and thrust her arm toward the dais. Toward Josen. She let her clenched fist fall open, palm turned up toward the sky, and for the first time since she’d entered the city, her fingers hardly shook at all. Behind her, all as one, three dozen of the Abandoned mirrored the gesture.
The crowd fell quiet—or as quiet as highlanders could.
Josen stepped forward, surprisingly steady even without the cane he’d been using to walk for the past several days. It would have been a sign of weakness, she supposed. “You do me too great an honor,” he said into the silence. “It is we who owe you our thanks.” The strange bowl of stone seemed to catch his voice and amplify it, so that it rang clearly across the plateau.
Sweeping his gaze over his people, he asked, “Why so quiet? Surely you’ve heard the stories by now.” He put a hand on Eroh’s shoulder, opposite Goldeyes. “Surely you’ve heard how the last Windwalker summoned the birds of the sky to aid us against the Deeplings. How the people of the Swamp—Eroh’s people—came to our rescue when we had very little hope left. How we drove back Castar’s forces together, where neither of us could have alone. I can tell you that it is all true. I saw these things happen with my own eyes. The same way I saw this woman save my life, when she had every reason to let me die.” He extended his hand toward Zerill, and the crowd turned to her once more.
She could still see the fear in their eyes, still feel it in the air. Josen’s words were pretty, but they weren’t enough.
And then, unbidden, Eroh’s voice rose across the plateau. “You can trust Zerill! She’s never lied to me!”
If Shona had planned that, she hadn’t mentioned it to Zerill. Either way, it sounded genuine—a child’s trust, uncomplicated and freely given. And that made it powerful. The murmurs among the audience rose, and the timbre changed from simple fear to something less certain. It wasn’t acceptance, not yet, but to Zerill it felt like daybreak in the Swamp—the darkness hardly abated enough to notice, but it always reminded her that there was sunlight waiting somewhere beyond the mist.
“Well said, Eroh,” Josen said with an amused grin. “And in far fewer words than I mean to use.” Laughter from the crowd, there, though it was sparse. “I have often wondered whether this world can ever truly change. Today, because of Zerill, I know that it can. I have to believe that the Lord of Eagles sent Eroh to us for that very reason: to lead her to me, and me to her. To bring our two peoples t
ogether, and end a pattern we have been trapped in for far too long. We stand here together now because the Abandoned, who we have for too long known only as swamplings, put aside old fears and old hatreds to fight beside us when we needed them most. Now I ask you to show them that we can do the same. People of the Plateaus, give thanks to your saviors!”
They answered him hesitantly, at first, a few cries from across the vast crowd, scattered applause. And then a few more joined in, and more still, and all at once a wave of deafening sound was rolling across the plateau, more voices than Zerill had ever heard at once in all her life. She didn’t believe that every one of them meant it—most were cheering for Josen, or for Eroh, or just to be a part of the moment—but even so, there was a power in that sound as it crashed over her, a vibration against her skin that made her feel warm even in the shadow of the mountain.
After so much pain and fear and death, it felt as if something had truly changed.
Before she could stop them, she felt tears rolling down her cheeks. Her work was far from over, she knew that. There were still too many on both sides who opposed this alliance. Castar was still free, and he had a Delver with power like nothing the Makers had ever known. But just then, all that mattered was that she was standing under the light of the sun with her face bare before thousands of highlanders, and they were cheering.
We did it, Azlin. It was all worth something. I hope you can be proud of that.
Her eyes met Josen’s then, as the roar of voices faded. He smiled, and tipped his head toward the crowd as if they were a gift from him to her. To her surprise, she found herself smiling back.
And then he spread his arms wide, and spoke the words she had longed to hear all her life.
“Men and women of the Abandoned, be welcome in the Nine Peaks!”
Epilogue
Carissa Theo sat in her chair by the fire in the quarters she and Rudol had once shared, listening to the sound of cheers drifting through her closed shutters.
And seethed.
As the noise swelled, her fingers tightened around the arms of the chair. It wasn’t the sound she hated, it was the reason for it: Josen Aryllia. He could sell every duchy in the Peaks to the King in the Deep and still they’d cheer for him.
This was all his fault.
She was supposed to be queen. She’d earned it, done things to reach the throne that no one could ever know about. And then Josen had taken it away. Again. If he hadn’t been so delicate, so above doing anything a son of the king was supposed to do, they would have been married years ago, and she would never have had to do the things she’d done. Instead, she’d been given the younger brother as consolation, the silent, sullen giant. Hardly the prince any girl dreamed about.
And the worst part was that after she’d been refused and shamed, after she’d been forced into a marriage she’d never wanted, she’d started to care for the big oaf. Even before he’d been named his father’s heir, she’d started to care. And then Josen had taken him away too. That self-righteous bitch Shona Falloway had played her role, but it was Josen’s fault. He was the one who’d come back from the dead. He was the one who’d planted the doubts in Rudol’s mind. It was his fault that she felt this way.
Alone.
She missed the warmth of Rudol’s body beside her at night, the adoration in his eyes when he’d looked at her, the gentle way he’d held her waist in those huge hands. He’d been as big a fool as she’d ever known, stubborn and easily wounded and desperate for affection, lacking any useful vision or ambition, but she missed him. She missed him even though she knew she shouldn’t, even though it made no difference, even though he was gone, nothing but a meal for some monster from beneath the mist. No body had been found after the battle—Josen had come to tell her that himself, rubbing her face in it while he pretended at regret—but if he’d still been alive, Rudol would have come back to her by now.
Even after what I said to him before he left? She wasn’t supposed to feel so guilty about that. Spirit of All, what is wrong with me? It had always been a marriage of convenience, hadn’t it? A tool to advance the Theo name. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the hurt in Rudol’s eyes when he’d turned away.
And that was Josen’s fault too.
She was still staring into the fire, imagining all the ways she wanted to make him suffer, when she noticed something strange about the wall to the left side of the fireplace.
The stone seemed to be shifting.
She stood and approached to look closer, and as she did, the wall suddenly bulged outward. Stone parted like clay. A tall slit formed, the height of a man. Her heart pounding, Carissa snatched up the iron from beside the fire, and stumbled several steps back.
A man walked out of her wall. He wore a brown robe, like a chastor’s. A few locks of grey hair protruded from the edges of his hood.
“Deepwalker’s ghost!” Carissa yelped, and swung the fire-iron at the figure’s head.
The iron rod bent back on itself and passed harmlessly through the air an inch short of his nose.
Carissa dropped the iron as if it had caught fire, stumbled back, and yanked her chair into the gap between her and the robed man.
The hole in the wall flowed together and sealed closed behind him, exactly as it had been; no hint of a seam was left behind. It’s one of those passages I’ve heard about. It… it has to be. The Keep has dozens. And the fire-iron… She glanced down at the bent rod at her feet; she didn’t have a good answer for that.
“How… What…” she stammered, before settling on, “Who are you?”
“You don’t recognize me? Lady Carissa, I’m wounded.”
She knew that voice.
The man pulled back his hood, revealing dark skin and long grey hair. An old man, like any other.
Except that he was blind. It was hard to forget a man who wore a cloth wrapped around his eyes.
“It’s you.” And for a moment, her fear was forgotten, replaced by anger. “You lied to me!”
“I don’t believe I did.”
“You told me my father sent you!”
“I said no such thing. You asked me if he had, and I simply didn’t deny it.”
“No, I…” Carissa fell silent. Had he claimed to be one of her father’s spies? She’d assumed as much when the old blind man in chastor’s robes had approached her and pressed the small vial of powder into her hand, but she couldn’t remember if he’d ever confirmed it. And she’d never asked her father about it directly—she’d thought she was being discreet, the way he’d taught her.
The old man smiled. “You see? You were so eager to believe, I hardly had to say anything at all. My dear, if I’d left the poison by your bedside without a word, I think you might have slipped it into Gerod’s drink all on your own.”
That wasn’t far from the truth. She had been eager. With Josen gone, Rudol had been next in line for the throne, and it had seemed entirely reasonable that her father would want to take advantage of that chance. Felbard Theo was not squeamish when it came to his ambition, and he hadn’t raised his daughter to be. And if she was being honest with herself, part of her had been thinking about her husband—about all the pain that Gerod had visited upon him. She’d been glad to sprinkle that powder in the king’s wine.
“It… it was supposed to kill him.” It was only after Gerod had refused to die, after he’d lingered for turns, that she’d realized that something was wrong. Any poison her father had sent would have worked much faster. But by then it was too late, and the constant vigil of Renold Mulley and Master Jovert’s apprentices at the king’s bedside had made it impossible to finish what she’d started. “Rudol was supposed to be king, and I…”
“I know. Such a shame for you that it didn’t turn out that way.”
Spirit of All, how can I have been so stupid? This old man had moved her like a game piece, and she’d made it easy for him.
But who is he? Her eyes strayed to the bent fire-iron laying on the floor, and then to the wall h
e’d walked out of. A slow dread crept over her. Spirit of All, it can’t be. There was no secret passage there, she knew there wasn’t—that was just a lie she’d told herself.
“You’re him, aren’t you? Castar’s swampling. The one who called the Deeplings and broke the wall.”
“Call me Auren, if you like.”
Carissa’s mouth was suddenly very dry. “Are you here to… to kill me?”
He laughed. “Of course not. Why would I kill someone so useful?”
“What do you mean?” She was still afraid, but his condescension was beginning to annoy her. “What do you want? If you’re on Castar’s side, why let Gerod linger like that? That just made things harder for everyone.”
“My motives are not yours to know.”
“Then at least tell me what use you have in mind for me.”
“You have the freedom of this Keep, do you not?”
“If you can call it freedom,” she said with a scowl. “I’m a prisoner in every way that matters. They need a hostage to assure my father’s continued loyalty.”
“It doesn’t matter to me if you can leave,” Auren said. “I only care that you can listen. I have other agents, of course, but you can go places and hear things that they cannot. It would be very useful to me to know King Josen’s plans.”
Other agents. That was interesting, and frightening. A man who could walk through walls might have ears in a great many places. Is that why Benedern was acting so strangely? Does this man have some hold over him? The high chastor was still under guard in the Keep, but otherwise he could be a useful tool, with the right leverage—leverage that would not have been easy to come by over so influential a figure. It was a guess, but if she was right, anyone could be under the old man’s power.
“Why should I help Lenoden Castar win this war?” Carissa stuck out her chin, and hoped he couldn’t see her hands trembling. This man had power she didn’t understand, and she had little doubt that he could kill her if he wanted to, but there was always a bargain to be made. Her father had taught her that. “What do I get?”
The Swampling King (The Windwalker Legacy Book 1) Page 94