“Mora,” I said, and bowed again.
She smiled. “Would you come and sit with me? My companions of the chamber have prepared a spot for us, and it can’t be possible to play that thing standing up…”
I smiled in return. “Thank you,” I said, and followed her and her consort to sit on the blanket beneath the tree. The young Tan wrestled a bit with his scabbard as he settled, as if it were an unaccustomed encumbrance; I restrained a puzzled frown.
It is Tanaan custom for the women to rule; I understood this, strange as it was. The Tana arranging her skirts about her and tucking a pillow beneath her elbow just so would soon be the nearest thing the Tanaan nation of Finias—or Fíana—would have to a righ. This would make her consort the next thing to a riga: royal. I couldn’t fathom how a royal could avoid becoming a warrior, even did he also find time for scholarly or artistic pursuits, as this Tan evidently did.
The questions I wanted to ask were rude: I stored the information as a piece of the puzzle that didn’t match any I had discovered so far and opened my harp case.
“With your indulgence, Mora,” I said, glancing at her. If she was embarrassed by her consort’s discomfort with his scabbard, she hid it well. I pulled the harp free and set the case aside. “It hasn’t been tuned in days…”
She nodded, unsurprised; I pulled the harp key from my pocket. A Tana brought and served wine for the three of us. I settled the harp against knee and clavicle and began tuning while the serving-girl lingered, staring a bit. Finally the mora shooed her off again.
The familiar routine of tuning took the edge off all the strangeness around me; for half a second I wished I were back in the solitude of my studio in the Harpist Gorsedd Hall. But Ilnemedon was the last place I should be right now, and I was in the midst of an experience few humans are lucky enough to have. I made a deliberate effort to appreciate where I was, tuning with half my mind while I took in the scene with the other.
A collection of pretty, brightly-colored tents had sprung up across the meadow in which I sat; twoscore blond, exotic people in elegant silks moved among them. The sun’s last ruddy rays glanced from the strikingly-enamelled helms and breastplates of swordsmen as they bouted. Somewhere meat roasted over a campfire. Dragonflies performed an iridescent aerial dance above the river, which flowed almost soundlessly into sunset-tinged mist; to my left, beyond the meadow, trees laced golden with evening climbed northward out of sight. Shadows stretched away from me, deepening. There must certainly be songs no one had ever written in all this.
“I came to Fíana,” I said to the mora, “to speak with your mother about taking on a new gorsedd harpist. Our records show that she retained one, a very long time ago.”
“Really?” Again she was incredulous.
I nodded. “At first I thought her taste for our music might be unique among your people. But now that I see your interest in things Ilesian—” I nodded towards the book beside her, then glanced at her consort’s book and recognized the title with a small shock.
“And yours as well, sian,” I said to him. “Beannchar on siegecraft, isn’t it?” And why would a noncombatant read Beannchar? “An excellent volume; so much of it still holds true…”
He nodded slowly, analysis in his depthless blue eyes. Had he but grey eyes and black hair, he would have been Deaclan’s double; they had the same lean, muscular physique, the same high, graceful cheekbones and narrow jaw. Even the analytical look was familiar to me, though in Deaclan’s eyes it had shared the stage with the unmistakable light of magic. The realization made something strange and uncomfortable happen inside my chest; I pushed the thought aside.
“Well,” I said to the mora, keeping my sudden agitation out of my voice. “A harpist of the gorsedd would be a rich resource for you, and a nice change of pace from your own bardic works. Do you retain a bard?”
“I—No. My father does…”
“But you will be invested at Bealtan, I understand.”
She nodded; I reached for the grace stroke. “So this would be a good time to begin expanding your own staff.”
Her curious expression collapsed into a frown.
“I—I suppose it is,” she said, as if I were the first to suggest that her staff should meet her needs.
Clearly it would take until Bealtan at the very least to develop any sort of understanding of the Tanaan realms.
“So,” I said. “This is The Ballad of Carina.”
I raised the harp to my shoulder again, began a musical walk down a lane so familiar and well-worn I could have played through the whole thing while asleep. But this evening, sitting in a meadow with a Tana who probably hadn’t reached her third decade, the tired standard roared suddenly to life. This was Carina’s daughter, the living incarnation of all the outrageously worshipful imagery in the song; Carina herself couldn’t have been much older than Letitia was now when the events of the song took place.
Who had she been, that Carina? Usually when I played this song I thought about my old teacher Amien, who centuries later still seemed to carry an inextinguishable torch for the Tana. Surely there had been more to her than Tanaan beauty; the Prince of the Aballo Order has ample opportunity with women of great beauty in royal courts across the human realms. Carina was a Talent, the stories say. Was that why Amien lost himself in her?
I sang my way down the path the verses traced: Carina on a sojourn at the royal Tanaan court of Murias, completing the nuptial negotiations that would eventually make Rishan Murias her consort; word of the menace posed by the renegade wizard Nechton reaching all the way to that remote land; Carina traveling through lands rocked by war between Nechton’s forces and forces loyal to the true gods, finally reaching Nechton’s stronghold at Macol; Nechton’s defeat at the hands of her incomprehensible magic and the subsequent rout of his armies in the field; Carina’s return to the mystery of the Tanaan lands and the human realms left to remember and rebuild.
The more I learned of the history of that period, the more Carina had come to seem the next thing to a goddess to me. It was very strange to look at her daughter, who so matched the physical descriptions in the song, and consider the possibility that Carina might have been this young and delicate and yet somehow managed to defeat the greatest arcane talent ever to cross the threshold at Aballo. For the thousandth time I wondered how she had accomplished it. What power or technique she had mastered that Nechton was unable to counter. How many other secrets of Tanaan magic lay hidden on this side of the world.
How many of them Letitia knew.
Letitia stared at me in intense silence after I finished, wearing a look that suggested the entire eipiciúil might be an elaborate joke and the punchline had been lost in translation.
“Did you write that?” she asked finally.
I smiled. “It predates me by several hundred years.”
“But it’s true?”
Surprise overtook me before I could control my expression. Most historical ballads are composed of layers of fancy and winners’ self-justification, only leavened by a few nuggets of inescapable truth. I had already spent more years picking them apart than I’d spent on any other area of study, and this one fared better than most: there were no untruths I was aware of in its verses, only areas of history that are beyond the purview of historical balladeers.
Everyone agreed Nechton’s power had so far outstripped that of any member of the Aballo Order that no living wizard could have hoped to defeat him: even in the private chambers of Aballo, this fact was beyond debate. Arcane scholars—not least Amien himself, who had apparently spent considerable time with Carina—were still at a loss to explain her power and how she had defeated the renegade. And of course there was no accounting for the motivations of the Tanaan, who could easily have stayed on their side of the mountains and waited out the crisis. They have the lifespans for it, after all. But none of the ballad had proven untrue thus far: merely unexplained.
“As far as anyone knows,” I said. “With eipiciúilae this old,
it’s hard to find anyone still living who remembers the events.”
Among humans, that would have played as a humorous understatement; Letitia just gazed at me. And finally it occurred to me that Amien must know exactly what had happened; if I had correctly read between the lines of his stories, he and Carina had been together for much of the war. I wished I could learn what he knew about the backstory.
But not so passionately that I would talk to him, of course.
“Do you know of a reason why I should suspect it?” I asked Letitia.
She sat back with an exasperated sigh. “No. I just—Endeáril! Why was I never told any of this?”
Why, indeed. Human men drive their sons—and anyone else unable to escape—to distraction with the boredom of endless war stories. Shouldn’t Tanaan warriors do the same?
Unless the arcane battle had left Carina scarred in ways that only other members of the initiate might understand. Unless the duel had shown her things about herself that no man should have to carry inside him, things about which she was too ashamed to ever share the burden. Unless she had broken vows, destroyed her connection to her gods, caused the deaths of people she loved.
I shook off the bleak imaginings. That was my story, not hers. There must be a much simpler explanation.
“Mora,” I said quietly, “I couldn’t begin to guess. But sometimes… Sometimes it’s impossible to talk about engagements like that… afterward.”
Once again her gaze locked on me, and I was sinking into the emerald sea of her eyes. Some quality about her gaze felt like innocence; was this the transcendent, ageless wisdom of the Tanaan one hears so much about? And what was the source of the grief in her depths?
Was this a mysterious, ageless creature out of a legend, or a woman barely out of girlhood missing her mama? Both possible truths wavered in my head; I couldn’t decide.
“When did it happen?” Letitia asked. “This war?”
“A little less than four hundred years ago.”
“So she was young.”
“Very young. Possibly no older than you are now.”
The mora bristled. “Why, how many winters have you?”
Suddenly I felt as if I had sailed into a mined harbor. How was I supposed to know where the mines lay?
“Twenty-eight,” I said mildly, presenting her with a calm, even gaze. The belligerence in her eyes softened; I should have smiled, but magic walked red and black up my spine, sparkling in dark seductive hues around the edges of mundane vision, and my head was shifting to accommodate it.
It was an unimaginable stroke of good luck: I’d stumbled into an arcane engagement between two of the legendary Tanaan mages. The fact that I was likely to be caught in the crossfire troubled me far less than it should. I was about to see something no human had witnessed in centuries.
But no: there was no answering flare of power anywhere in the meadow, no court wizard on Letitia’s little staff. What was going on here?
It was an error in judgment, one I’d probably regret within minutes, but I cast a tendril of awareness towards the arcane onslaught approaching the meadow’s northern border. I encountered no answering mental presence here, either: the black energy racing towards me stemmed from a remote working. Its vehicles included a group of dead souls tethered to undead bodies.
Cold horror gripped me, and I discovered myself on my feet, fingers curled around the hilt of my sword. Such workings are violations of the code every Aballo wizard vows to uphold; but apparently the Tanaan weren’t bound by any sort of moral convention. And no one in this meadow seemed to have even a glimmer of what was bearing down on them.
“Get to the barges,” I said to the mora, hardly aware of the words leaving my mouth. Iminor stood beside me, seemingly following my gaze. But I couldn’t focus on him: a contingent of horsemen rode out of the trees, and though dead they were unmistakably human.
This wasn’t Tanaan magic at all. Whoever had set an assassin on my trail had decided to escalate beyond all the bounds of warfare, arcane or otherwise, and I had just put dozens of innocent people in mortal danger. The best I could do now was draw the attack away.
“Mora, now!” I barked, all pretense of courtly manners lost, and sprinted to my horse. He stared wild-eyed, ears pinned: predictably miles ahead of his dim human rider at recognizing battlefield magic. I vaulted into the saddle and spurred him towards the onslaught; he snorted and dug in, muscles rippling as if he might turn and bolt in the opposite direction instead. I swore and slapped his hip with the flat of my sword, and he leapt forward, racing diagonally across the meadow. Iminor and Letitia shouted words the wind swept away before I could hear them; people ran in a dozen different directions; the riders thundered straight across the meadow as if unaware my faster mount would have me in the woods before they reached the place where our paths intersected.
I stole little glances at the riders as I raced away: pale and still-faced, they were resplendent in scarlet coats and meticulously-articulated spidersilk mail. Their huge black destriers, full of mane and fetlock, rumbled across the meadow like an approaching storm. I could feel myself beginning to stare even while I urged my horse faster: eyes snared by the grace and precise coordination of the contingent, the aura of power shimmering around them, the seductive hint of almost-visible tethers to a crystalline will trailing in their wake: the elusive connections tantamount to an invitation, for a wizard with the fortitude to look into the truth of the black power that fueled them. Surely learning the source of that energy was not a violation of my vow, merely a necessary gathering of intelligence about an unknown enemy. Surely no one in this meadow would be surprised when the riders took to the air like the Wild Hunt of Hy-Breasaíl, and no one would blame me when I followed.
They bore directly southward across the meadow. They weren’t going to intercept me; they weren’t even going to try. I wasn’t their target.
I sucked in a lungful of suddenly-cloying air and wheeled my horse towards the campsite. The undead horsemen rode without slowing through a hailstorm of Tanaan arrows, undeterred and unbloodied by the hits they took. They reached the fringes of the camp before I did, swords busy among the Tanaan. Power flashed against my skin like sparks from a campfire; the Tanaan were dying instantly, on contact: not of their wounds, but of the sudden draw of their life energies into their attackers. Whoever had crafted those dire ghouls was using a depletion spell to power them: it was simultaneously terrible and elegant, and the accidental splashes of energy arcing against me made my throat knot with horror even while the pleasure of the power sprinkled itself up the length of my spine. The riders had slowed, but they weren’t stopping; and the part of my mind that had trained to manage battlefield deployments drew all their separate trajectories into a single pattern and saw their target: Letitia.
Moments like this were why I always found myself choosing overbred Dáirine lighthorses: the horse followed my cues as if he’d been waiting a twelvenight for them. He cut and wove through the chaos to the place in which Letitia raced among the tents, shouting and harrying her panicked staff towards the barges. I leaned down and plucked her from the ground as we galloped past, swinging her up and around behind me. She grabbed two fistfuls of my jacket and jammed a shoulder into my spine.
“No!” she shouted. “What are you doing?”
And I’d thought her push against the ground as I lifted her had been a helpful, intelligent choice, possibly the result of extraction drills. Well, we’d argue later; I just wheeled us back towards the woods and spurred the horse faster.
“Those are my people dying back there!” Letitia shouted in my ear.
Or we could argue now. “You are the target of the attack!”
We jumped and cleared a little stream trailing across the meadow. Letitia gasped and bounced against me, then clutched more tightly at my jacket. I glanced back: most of the warriors of her contingent still stood, but they were not organized. Her attackers would take them apart that way, and a lighthorse carrying two can�
��t outrun a destrier for long. We would have to make a stand; I needed reinforcements and a spot in which to deploy them.
“Fíana!” I shouted, which served to catch the attention of most of the warriors. “Fíana! To me!”
We raced to the treeline, and I glanced back, satisfied that the warriors finally understood where their lady was and were following me, then scanned our surroundings for a spot I could use. There was nothing: just darkening meadow and shadowed trees and a horse who was tiring under the extra weight. At the edge of the woods, I reined. There was no better choice than the trees.
“Well, then, that’s it!” I said. One should address noncombatants as gently as possible during combat, but it was perfectly obvious that not only the remains of Letitia’s contingent but all her attackers were following me, and the attackers would reach me first. My voice was not as gentle as it should have been. “Please tell me you know how to climb a tree!”
“What?” Letitia shrilled.
“Fouzh!” I said. We were well and truly buggered, then. Maybe I should try to dodge among the trees a while, counting on my greater maneuverability to peel off a few of them and perhaps buy her contingent some time. My horse’s sides were heaving.
“Of course I know how to climb a tree!” Letitia snapped. Her voice sounded strong, but her otherworldly eyes were edged with tears. “But this hardly—”
“Up you go, then,” I said, schooling my voice to a semblance of calm, and maneuvered the horse so we stood beside a hefty oak. “Don’t come down until I say!”
She didn’t move. The riders were closing in, and some treacherous voice in the back of my head suggested that it would be far more expedient to manage this situation magically; that it might be the only way anyone survived to embellish the tale. It would be all too easy to allow the shift in consciousness that was trying to overtake me. My throat clenched with the need.
The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods) Page 5