One sank blade-first into a berzerker’s chest and sent him tumbling to the ground. The other tumbled in the air and struck with its back end against the other’s face, crushing his nose and cheek.
There’ll be time for them, Norbert thought, as he saw Symod pounding down the road atop an already lathered horse.
He seized the remaining throwing axe from the body and hurled it with all the force his newfound strength could muster.
It sailed past Symod and into a bush. He hurled another, plucking it from the dying berzerker, stepping on the man’s neck and crushing it for good measure.
It, too, sailed wide, and Norbert screamed raggedly in frustration.
He looked at the dead men around him, at the instrument of his torture lying broken in the road, and then up at the sunlight streaming across his face.
Norbert knew where his strength had come from, and he knelt on the road and wept.
* * *
Idgen Marte had fought tirelessly and endlessly for turns. She had never been more weary, more sick of a fight.
She had never wished more keenly for Allystaire to be by her side.
Teague, she reasoned, must have done a job on the Gravekmir, for but two of the giant Battle-Wights made it to the walls of Pinesward, which were defended now not only by Varshynners run off their feet and half-starved, but by Thornriders of Innadan and Harlachan axemen and knights from Telmawr, Delondeur, Damarind, and Machoryn.
And by the Order of the Arm. Or what was left of it.
None had sold themselves cheaply. While other men dug at the pile of wooden debris before the main gate of the keep, Mattar, Miklas, and Gaston, spears and axes in hand, had put down the two Gravekmir Wights that had made it so far.
But none of the three had survived the wounds. A Wight had taken Miklas’s head as he pushed a spear through its exposed knee joint and tried to lever it to the ground. He had destroyed the leg, and the thing crashed to the ground, but in its death throes it crushed Gaston.
That left Mattar and Idgen Marte to deal with the second, while the Barony men tried to get inside the walls. She tried to attract its attention, darting away from it, pestering it with her sword, while he tried to climb it and dash its glittering dark head to pieces with a rock he’d seized.
Finally it reached over its shoulder to pluck him free, throwing him to the ground with a contemptuous twist of one hand, the bones still dotted with rotting flesh, wired together with pieces of unraveled chain mail.
Then Torvul arrived, peppering the thing with crossbow bolts. Where they hit, it exploded in showers of bone and metal, and there it died again, and, she hoped, for good.
They dragged Mattar inside the walls, where his death had been hard to see, knowing that Allystaire could have saved him with a touch. Instead, they watched him wheeze and gasp for breath until his lungs finally filled with blood and it seeped from his mouth.
Now she and Torvul stood along a length of wall with the remaining knights, Harrys, Tibult, and Johonn. All of them carried weapons coated in the last of Torvul’s holy tincture.
That, Idgen Marte reasoned, had been the only thing that had kept all of them alive.
That and the calming presence of Arontis Innadan, who never flagged, never showed wear, never seemed to take a wound, whose sword was a marvel, a revelation, even to her. He was all over the wall, wherever the fighting was thickest.
In a word, she admitted to herself, he’s been regal.
“I have to admit,” she told Torvul, as they watched yet another group of Battle-Wights loping towards them, preparing to scramble up the wall, “I never thought I’d die in Barony Varshyne.”
“Yer not gonna die here.” Torvul said. The dwarf unhooked a flask and handed it to her. She drank, let the spirit burn her throat, handed it back. “Allystaire and Gideon’ll return. Faith.”
Inwardly, Idgen Marte knew that if she concentrated, she could reach out to Gideon and Allystaire, and even if she couldn’t find them, she’d know where in the world they were, or at least in what direction. Yet she didn’t, because she feared that she would find nothing.
She lifted her curved sword to the dwarf, who lightly reached out with the cudgel he’d improvised from a chair inside the keep and tapped it.
Battle-Wights swarmed up the wall, using their bladed hands, their axe-head hands, the points of spears imbedded on the end of what had once been arms, to find handholds and haul themselves up like awkward spiders.
Idgen Marte’s sword whipped through the glittering grey-black head of the first one to show itself over the wall.
“There any Stonesong t’be had in these walls, dwarf?” she asked as she kicked out at one that suddenly tried to throw itself over the wall.
“Too old, too long worked,” Torvul said sadly as he swung his cudgel like a smith swinging a hammer, breathing heavy with the labor of it. “And even those mountains could not have heard me without the boy’s aid.”
A knot of Wights gained the wall. Behind her she heard cries as more seemed to do the same.
The grey skies above were, at least, mercifully no longer dumping rain on them.
Mother, she silently prayed, as she whipped her sword from one Wight to another, trying to maximize each swing, going for joints, for limbs, for heads when she could. Mother, at least give me sunlight to die in. I beg you, she said, I have walked in your Shadows. Let me walk now in the light.
As if in answer to her prayer, shafts of light broke through the clouds above them, single fingers of gold.
They did not fall on her, though; they lighted on old Harrys, sneering and screaming defiance at the Wight he was locked in a deadly fight with; on Tibult, who seemed so gentle outside of a fight, who spent every moment worrying about his horse and everyone else’s; on Johonn, giant, cheerful, game Johonn, with his enormous axe and quiet laugh.
And each of the Wights those three were fighting died beneath their next strokes.
Around them the fighting paused as the three of them looked at one another, and then at Idgen Marte and Torvul.
The knights nodded to one another, and then went back into the fray, pushing along the wall, Johonn one way, Tibult and Harrys together in the other.
The strength they showed, Idgen Marte knew, could only have come from one place.
She did what she had so feared to do and reached out, looking with the inner senses the Mother had Gifted them all with and yet had never spoken of. Gideon, she knew, was far to the west.
Allystaire was not. He was nowhere.
He was gone.
She did not scream, or cry out, or weep. Instead, the Shadow of the Mother whipped her sword sizzling through the head of another Battle-Wight and went back to the fight with renewed vigor.
There would be a time for mourning and for grief. Idgen Marte emptied herself of those feelings and fought.
* * *
With the Mother’s Strength descending upon the remaining knights of the Order of the Arm, the tide quickly turned in favor of the Baronies. In perhaps a quarter of a turn, the field lay clear but for the enormous piles of broken and twisted bones.
And then a sickly green light suffused the battlefield. An amorphous figure, barely clinging to the shape of a man, appeared upon it.
His voice emanated not from the figure on the plain before the keep, but from everywhere, at once.
“Who here has the authority? Who is in command of this rabble?”
The words rolled around, echoing madly about the walls of the castle. Some of them repeated, the edges twisted and bent until the words sounded like other words, in tongues no one there understood.
Idgen Marte was already dashing from her side of the wall to where Arontis Innadan was stepping up atop the parapet and raising his hand. Torvul seized a potion from a pouch upon his chest and hurled it over the wall towards where the sorcerer stood
.
The Shadow of the Mother had never moved faster, crossing the courtyard, up atop the opposite wall, diving for Arontis as he called out.
“I am Arontis Innadan, Baron of Innadan and Keeper of the Vineyards, and I—”
Before he finished the thought, and moments before she reached him, a thin flat beam of green light shot from the sorcerer’s upraised hand, pierced Arontis in the chest, and blew a hole the size of a large gold link through his back.
His handsome face still open in shock, he pitched forward and fell, dead, over the wall of Pinesward Watch.
Then Idgen Marte let out a cry of rage, of frustration and anger.
She looked over the wall, intending to jump down and try the sorcerer herself, but he had turned away.
All over the field Battle-Wights were rising again, turning from smashed piles of bone into fresh enemies.
Instead of spending her life chasing after the sorcerer, Idgen Marte threw back her head and threw everything that was in her into her ruined voice and called, aloud and with her mind.
“GIDEON!”
The cry was almost unintelligible, rattled and echoed around the keep, and seemed to do nothing but disturb a crow or two that were roosting atop the towers, awaiting the end of the battle.
* * *
GIDEON!
The Will felt the cry in his mind, felt the fear in the Shadow’s voice, and sat bolt upright.
He was upon a cot, soft and warm, blankets piled on him. A window was open. The smell of the sea and of a pleasant spring breeze wafted in.
A fire burned merrily in a nearby fireplace, before which sat a woman in a chair, drinking tea from a heavy mug. She stood and came to his bedside.
“Awake, lad? Terrible things that happened, terrible,” she muttered, shaking her head. “Don’t know where it came from, or what it was sent it back.”
“When did it happen? How long ago?” Gideon’s questions tumbled out of him as he threw back the blankets and came to his feet. His boots and stockings were gone, and he did not waste time searching for them.
“Only a few turns. What’s your name, boy? There’s no rush. Stay until you’re well.”
“I am sorry, good woman. In answer to your questions, it was the Sea Dragon, an avatar of Braech itself. And what killed it was the paladin. Allystaire Stillbright.” He swallowed hard past a lump in his throat, but shoved the grief away. “My father. And now I have to go. You have my thanks.”
Yolande dropped her mug to the ground when the boy simply disappeared.
“Allystaire,” she muttered. “That’s familiar,” she said to her now empty room. And she remembered a vision of a man standing at a quay wearing glittering silver armor, with an arm that flared like a thunderbolt.
“No,” she corrected herself, “like the sun.”
* * *
Idgen Marte finally did weep, openly and joyfully, when a column of golden light broke through the clouds over Pinesward Watch and descended to the ground with the force of a blow.
All over the field where they had been rising, Battle-Wights fell to pieces.
Bathed in a nimbus of golden light, the Will of the Mother—a slim boy, barefoot and bald—confronted the Eldest.
“The Negation!” the sorcerer’s voice babbled when Gideon appeared. The word repeated itself over and over, echoing and invading every ear.
Negation. Negation. Negation.
It was whispered and screamed and giggled and hurled like a curse.
The sickly-green form of the sorcerer hurled power at the Will. There appeared to be no thought, no plan, just an assault.
Gideon bore it all with an air of curious detachment, raising his hand and simply deflecting the energy the sorcerer threw at him into the ground.
“Why do you struggle?” Gideon said, shaking his head sadly. “You are already dead. You are a husk of nothingness, of empty ambition.”
“You are the Negation,” the Eldest shrieked, “you will NOT have my power.”
The sorcerer raised another hand. Wights started to rise, pulling themselves together, metal shrieking as it bent and twisted to draw bones together. Clumps of shattered skulls and broken steel or iron flowed together into the glittering grey-black skulls that sat atop the animated corpses.
Gideon shook his head and they collapsed back to the mud.
“I don’t want it,” Gideon said. “I don’t need it. You only reveal how little you understand, Eldest. All that I have negated is your stranglehold on power. There is nothing that you can do now, Eldest. Or should I call you Yrining, as you were called by the parents you have long since forgotten? There is nothing you can do that the meanest, poorest farm child might not some day be able to match. And they will do so without sacrificing themselves. Without forgetting their names. Without forgetting love, or music, or each other, or the names of their fathers and mothers.”
“You would raise up hundreds of me,” the Eldest replied in a dry and rotten laughter. “None can wield power without succumbing to it.”
It was Gideon’s turn to laugh. “Perhaps I will give the world monsters. But I will also give the world the means to destroy them. I will go and find my children, and I will teach them to love the world, not their power. I will teach them to love life itself, and others, and not the thrill of domination, of plots and conspiracy. And wherever a conniving Yrining tries to make himself an Eldest,” Gideon smiled, “we will teach him how wrong he is.”
Gideon seemed to grow taller as he advanced on the sorcerer, who shrank away from him. “Your plotting is done. Your grand design has failed. The Sea Dragon lies dead at the bottom of Londray Bay. If it rises again, it will not be within the span of your years. Realize what you should have many hundreds of years ago, Yrining. Know that you are dead. Accept it.”
The Eldest raised a hand once more, summoning a ball of green fire.
Gideon stepped close enough to wave his hand contemptuously through it, and the sorcerer collapsed into the mud in a puff of dust.
Cheers rose up from the walls of Pinesward Watch.
Gideon fell to his knees, put his face in his hands, and wept.
Men rushed to throw open the gates and crank up the portcullis.
Idgen Marte threw herself over the wall and ran to Gideon’s side, wrapping her arms around him. She knew, she sensed, that Torvul was running as fast as he could manage for the gate. She picked up the boy and carried him with her in Shadow to where Torvul could join them.
Against the side of the wall of Pinesward Watch, the Wit, the Will, and the Shadow gathered each other together in an embrace. Slowly, others would gather around them; Andus Carek, Rede, Keegan, the Barons. But for a few moments, heedless of who was watching or what they might think, they mourned together for the man who had brought them together, who had been brother, father, mentor, captain, friend. They wept and they held each other, a strange family that would not have been, if not for Allystaire Stilbright.
* * *
Far away in Thornhust, the Voice of the Mother leaned against the Pillar of the Arm in an otherwise empty Temple. Her hands lay against her folded legs, holding in them the carefully preserved blanketflower that Allystaire had tucked behind her ear when last he had set foot in Thornhurst.
She had known, one way or another, every moment of that short visit, that it would be the last time she would see him alive. She had wanted to fling herself into his arms, to warn him, to tell him not to go, but had known that she could not. Such was her burden.
She reached up to run the fingers of one hand over the sigil of the Arm.
It pulsed with sudden warmth beneath her hand, and Mol smiled through the tears that streaked her face.
* * *
The last person the Marynth Evolyn had ever expected to meet upon a bridge that spanned the Ash from Delondeur into fallen Vyndamere was the Choiron Symod.<
br />
He was unhorsed, walking in broken boots, coated in dust. His once regal face had a haunted and ragged look. The great grey mane of his beard and hair had grown wild and tangled and his face was streaked with dirt.
Even so, he tried to assume a regal air with her, even if were tinged with a touch of mania.
“Evolyn! Evolyn, in the Sea Dragon’s name. What happened? Does the Dragon still rage? Did it quiet after it killed the paladin?”
The Marynth looked upon her escort of Dragon Scales, who regarded Symod with evident disgust. The Choiron pressed past them, clutched at her boot in the stirrup.
“Tell me,” he shouted, “what news of Londray? I was pursued by a madman. It was catastrophe. The Eldest, he ruined all our plans. You will have to make amends for having brought him, but he can be managed.”
“He is probably dead, you idiot,” Evolyn said, coldly, kicking him away from her boot. “As is the Dragon, as anyone in any village for miles seems to know already. I cannot credit how fast it spread, but I can credit how it felt when it happened. Did you feel nothing?”
Symod’s face cracked, his eyes widened till the whites bulged. “Dead? The Dragon? But the paladin—”
“Killed it,” Evolyn spat. “Destroyed it over the bay. Folk say they were preparing to dive to go looking for remains when the boy showed up. The Will, the one the Eldest called the Negation? They say he brought the paladin’s arms and armor—such as was left of it—up from the depths, and told them never to disturb the bones of the Dragon, that he had placed a curse upon them.”
“Bones? Bones? But, but surely we can raise it again. We need only the right sacrifice, the right key.”
“You are a coward and a fool, Symod. I cannot believe that ever I followed you, that I idolized you. You have ruined our Church. If ever a priest of Braech can raise their head again in the Baronies without it being struck off, it’ll be after my death. You have destroyed us.” She shook her head, her lip curled in disgust, and she said, rolling the words slowly off her tongue, “Kill him.”
Then she rode on, without looking back. Not even when she heard his wet, gurgling screams.
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