Saul and Ghurk hauled the warlock into the skiff. Still wet from his little death in the water, Garrett plucked her up and set her down as though she weighed nothing. She sat beside her father on the skiff’s bottom. The stench of his moldering shirt repulsed her. His white hair touched her shoulder, sticking to her like strands of spiders’ silk. “So this is the all-powerful warlock,” she heard Ghurk snort. “Very disappointing…”
“Well?” She sensed Saul hovering over her.
“Yes?”
“The book…you still have it. I trust you mean to throw it in the water once we’re out over the deeps?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Leave me be.”
“I will not. That thing is…”
“For a thousand reasons, not least of which I may someday need it to cast the Ur tower down, destroy the Undergrave, and bury Grimwain, the book will stay with me. I found it. I risked everything to have it. Rellen is dead because of it. The book…is mine.”
She supposed the way she said it terrified poor Saul. For the hour it took to cross the water and the two long days that passed during the slow, tortuous trek to the overworld, he never said another word to her.
And so, during a blustery, shivering night, when black clouds blurred the moon and the rain prevailed, she escaped the Undergrave. She was first to slink from the cavern mouth, her father right behind her, Garrett, Saul, and Ghurk standing like three daggers in the night. She heard wolves baying and the wind blasting. She held the Pages Black close to her breast and glared into the darkness, seeing everything.
“See, father,” she said. “The rain, the wind, the wolves. The world does not want us.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he creaked.
“The sky is sick. This is no natural storm. Will it stay this way forever?”
“It may.” He huddled beside her. She had grown accustomed to him, and had long forgotten how much she should have hated him. “It will follow your mood now, daughter, not mine.”
“Yes.” She knew it was true.
“Goodness!” Ghurk shivered behind her. “It’s winter again. We’re lucky to have found our new cloaks.”
She sighed against the wind. She felt impervious to the cold, immune to the rain. The Nightness is stronger than ever inside me. It will never stop, neither tonight nor any other.
“We will survive this.” She wrapped her arm around her father’s shoulders. “We will go to Aeth and present our prisoner to whatever lords have filled Orumna’s void.
“And after that, I do not know.”
Leaflets
Prisoner of Aeth.
Forgive my poor penmanship. I am no longer a free man. My bones have gone numb and my eyelids are thick with frost. A frozen seaborne draft works its way into my cell, cracking my skin and turning my blood to ice. My fingers seize in tiny arthritic fits. If my stylus should waver and ruin one word or twenty, the Thillrian winter is to blame. This is a dreadful season. For as warm as Thillria’s summers may be, its winters are cold enough to make one forget all the days before autumn died. I have no hearth to warm me. I see precious little sun. I do not expect to live much longer without catching my death.
I do not remember being this old. On this most frigid of mornings, I sit on the edge of my prison bed and glimpse my reflection in a barely-thawed puddle. I do not recall these hands, this hair, or this face. This is not me. It cannot be. How could it have been so long? This body, so grossly shriveled by time and ambition, seems not mine but someone else’s. Have my abuses wasted me so? I am not yet sixty seasons along, but when I rise from sleep my bones pop and my heart rattles as though unwilling to continue its work. My mind is crisp and clear, but my skin hangs from me like a rag, dirty and unwashed. I am an apple left under the sun for too long. I am dry and ugly, imprisoned within this cadaver. I am living death.
In Aeth’s dungeon, I have awoken the last twenty nights to nightmares. I dream I am a lad, fresh and ready to fly, but as swiftly as one hour passes I wither into a haunted old man. I walk in halls filled with mirrors, and I see only bones in my reflection. I wonder how long I have looked this way. A year? Ten? Have I forgotten my true age? I so seldom wore my own skin I cannot remember what the real me is supposed to look like. The Page of Masks hid my face from the world, and hid me from myself.
Alone, I dwell in Aeth’s lowest pit, shivering away the hours in a chamber meant to house some twenty lawless men. The stone walls are stained by rust and rainwater. The ceiling is too low, the floor is so numbingly cold I dare not cross it without donning my crusty old shoes, lest the skin peel from my feet. I hear the sea smashing against the shore, the frosted foam crawling up to the very bottom of the outer wall. This is not like Midnon. This is far, far worse. There are no imagined doors or mutable surfaces. Everything is as real as it seems. I have a wooden spoon, a porcelain bowl, and a dirty, leaky cup. My bed is bolted to the floor. My bucket sits in the corner, collecting melted snow from a hole in the mortar. This is my prison. It is deserved.
And I have one trouble worse than all the rest. My journal is gone. They took it from me after my first day out of the underworld. I can hardly blame them. I would very much like to have it back. I could amend it. I could blot out the many mistruths. But now I know I will never see it again.
This morn is my twenty-first in this cell. Only yestereve I was entrusted with this stylus and these ten leaflets of paper. I suppose I should be pleased. As long as they will allow me, I will happily hunch and shiver and scribble the hours away. My greatest hope is that if I should fill these ten pages, they might give me ten more, or a hundred, or a thousand. I have enough words to last until the end.
Forgive me. I shall complain no more. I shall write instead of my mind, for today at last it is unclouded. Perhaps it is the winter air, but I feel a new sense of clarity. I am the sunlight shining after the storm has passed. I am the soil tickled by every insect scuttling across my skin. I am aware again. I am alive.
And so I begin. I lied to you, my beloved journal. I stroked your pages with treacherous ink. Just as I deceived Thillria, my daughters, and so many others, I deceived myself. I believed my own words, but only because they were easier to stomach than the truth. I called myself the king-to-be, yet nothing could have been further from the truth. I am not King. I was never bound for anything grand. I was a slave, nothing more. Grimwain is and always was my master. The unspeakable truth, I must face. For as vile as I may be, Grim is viler. He would slay us all. He would deal out draconian death to every man and woman in the world, and he would smile at the sight of cities choking beneath a blanket of smoke and fire. He is not at all whom I said he was. He is darkness. He is pain. He is death.
Here I sit, and my freedom from Grim grants me a fresh sense of honesty. I know everything now. I am a fool and a traitor to have knelt before him, for I never had more than the most fleeting hope that he might let me live. He never meant to spare my daughters. His heart knows no mercy, no beauty, and no love. I have always been a part of his plan, the catalyst he required, but nothing more. I went to his place of exile not to beg for his help, but because he demanded it. He is the master. He is the king.
I should have known it from the beginning. The signs are too many. Grimwain does not sleep. He never tires. His mind never dulls. Perhaps he once was human, but now he is a monster in a man’s body, a knower of too many things. It makes sense to me now. I come to believe it more and more every day. He is one of Them. He is a child of the Ur. It is the only explanation. They put him here. They disguised him as one of us. They sent him for me, and with me as their willing servant they hoped to return. His promises to me were of a cleaner world, a place where I would have dominion, but this was never true. I knew it always in the back of my mind. He is their Sleeper, their foundling, their agent sent to flood the world with darkness. My daughter believes his work has only just begun. I can only hope she is wrong.
I can make no meaningful apology. I can weep and grovel and scratch out my e
yes, but it will not undo what I have done. The toll upon Thillria is mild, but the human cost is much higher. Ona. Sweet, innocent Ona. What I would not give to drop you back into your life. You were so like your mother, so mysterious and pure. I do not blame you for stealing your lover from Midnon, nor do I blame him. I cannot even blame Grimwain, who so eagerly murdered you. The fault is solely mine. I never knew the richness of your life until I sold you into the poverty of the grave.
Andelusia. My eldest. The harms I inflicted upon her cannot be overstated. She pays me visits here in my cell, but each time I lift my miserable gaze to hers I feel my insides turn. The happy curls in her hair are gone. Her mane is black as oil, her eyes are a cold and restless sea. She exudes sorrow. Her small smiles are haunted. She is the most beautiful creature in the world, and the most ruined. I thought I understood her, but I cannot hope to know what passes through her mind. She speaks of no future for herself. She asks plenty of me, digging this way and that, but she greets my questions with rigid silence. This is the woman I have created. Her experiences in Furyon might have healed in good time, no cure exists for what the Pages Black has done. Love and happiness will forever elude her. Men will try to woo her, but they will fail, and their offerings fall upon an empty threshold. I pray some miracle might reverse the shadow that has befallen her. But it will not. I know that now. As does she.
How much longer? How much until I die. The cold invades me. My magic is gone. My rings are vises around my fingers, my manacled arm numb and grey. I hurt. I want to weep. I am ready to die. I am grateful only that my irons keep the whispers out.
And now I will rest. My fingers are blue, oppressed by the cold. I will complete these leaflets tomorrow, after my daughter pays me a final visit. My last words must be careful, for I am told that in two days time my judgment is due. The Thillrians have convened. I do not expect their mercy. Order in the realm is restored, but the wounds of those who lost fathers, brothers, and sons to the Undergrave will be slow to heal. The people require a villain, and he shall be me.
Somewhere Grim is laughing.
Judgment
The wind whipped through her hair. The ocean rolled up the beach and sloshed around her ankles. Grey clouds, roiling in the sky, curtained off the sun.
Perfection, thought Andelusia.
On a lonely shore in Aeth’s shadow, she wandered. She left only the faintest footprints as she walked, the sea devouring each impression she made in the sand. Her feet were bare, her leggings pulled up to her knees. Her white seafarer’s shirt, flimsy as a butterfly’s wings, fluttered in the bitterly cold wind. If anyone had seen her in such a state, they would have thought her mad.
But today, no one will find me.
None but she walked the barren shore beneath Aeth, least of all in the dead of winter. A grey-eyed ghost, she drifted across the beach, and the only voices she heard were those of the waves crashing around her. All of Thillria might have looked for her, but none, not even Garrett, would have known to seek her below the castle. For one eve, the realm of rocks, sand, and water was her dominion.
Twenty one days in Denawir, she thought. Two more, and I will have no purpose in the world. I might haunt these shores forever after father is condemned. When everyone else leaves, perhaps I will remain.
Dusk conquered the western horizon. The greys collapsed into deep blues, and the deep blues into black. Tonight would be no easy night, she knew. She would be forced to have conversations until now evaded. She would stand before the lords of Thillria and speak truths she knew they would never believe. After a last longing glimpse at the sea, she began her trek away from the shore. She climbed the steep stair hewn into the rocks below Aeth’s northernmost parapets. Graceful and silent, she sneaked up the cliff wall and crawled through a gap in the stone.
Even as darkness drowned the last of the light, she arrived in the castle’s rearmost courtyard. The gardens were dry and dead, the lawn a carpet of frozen, needlelike glass. Frost silvered all surfaces. Snowflakes soared with the wind, wetting her eyelashes. She felt none of the cold, for the winter was nothing to her. She could have wandered naked from Denawir to Shivershore, and never feel a thing.
The guardians at Aeth’s main gate knew her well. They opened the door and slammed it shut behind her, daring not a word as she entered the castle. Anymore, she was treated with all the fear and respect of a Thillrian queen. All folk knew of her deed of defeating the warlock. With no Orumna or any heirs to claim his throne, Aeth might have belonged to her. She was Thillria’s hero, its savior. ‘Cleanser of the Uylen,’ they named her whenever she went by, ‘Conqueror of the Shadow.’ She hated her new titles. If they only knew the truth, they would call me something else entirely.
She pattered through Aeth’s outer corridors. Lanterns hung from the walls, their light throwing shadows before her. At the end of the longest passage lay the King’s Hall, from which many men’s voices echoed, some low and murmuring, others agitated and loud. She knew what awaited her therein. Within the hall now convened the assembly of judgment, a gathering of Thillrians from cities far and wide come to discuss her father’s fate. In no hurry to join them, she lingered at the door, keeping in the darkness where no one could see her.
They will not listen to me. I am a woman in a man’s world. They give me titles and call me a queen when I walk by, but they all pity me in their minds.
She mustered a moment’s courage. She peeled the sodden hair from her cheeks, straightened her shirt, and pushed the doors open. The King’s Hall, dim and quiet under Orumna’s rule, was now very much alive. Dozens of burning braziers lit the room, their collective light illuminating everything far brighter than she liked. Orumna’s table was gone, replaced by six huge slabs of Thillrian oak, each of them stacked with bottles of wine and platters of piping hot food. Some twenty Thillrian men occupied each table. Some were young, some old, and all of them aware of me.
She entered to a raucous scene, a room of many talkers but few listeners, and yet the crowd grew quieter as she entered. She disliked the attention. She wished she had stayed at the sea.
“Hail to our savior!” shouted a venerable politician from County Dray.
“Defeater of the warlock!” crowed another, a knight from the stronghold of Muthemnal.
Mocking or sincere, she wondered of their compliments. The Thillrians knew nothing of her powers or her relation to the warlock, but their shouts made her no less uncomfortable. Even after recognizing several men she had freed from the Undergrave, she felt anxious. She feared they would discover her secret, and that she might become as much the subject of their judgment as my father.
At one table in the center of it all, she found Garrett and Saul with an empty seat between them. Garrett had trimmed his beard and cropped his hair, just like Rellen, and his black raiment stood out against the sea of Thillria blues and greys. Saul looked weary as ever, his bushy beard laced with white hairs she did not remember seeing before. Ghurk sat at the table’s head, smiling sympathetically, looking much more a noble in his azure tunic and fur mantle than ever he had in the Undergrave.
“Hello.” She nestled into her waiting chair, sipped at Saul’s chalice of wine, and closed her mind to all the murmuring about her.
“Nervous?” pried Saul.
“A little.” She cupped his goblet beneath her chin. “Strange to be the only woman here.”
“No need to worry. This will all be over soon.”
Of course it will. Because they have already decided. Her secret fear was that the Thillrians, so hungry for vengeance, would order her father slain this very night. She swallowed several sips of wine in the vain hope of becoming too tipsy to care.
The assembly quieted. The rattling of plates and the ringing of silverware died down. With her arrival, the gathering was complete, and the final act of Thillria’s restoration began.
The master of the assembly stood at the head of his table. Between two pillars of stone he rose in the very place Orumna had so many times sat to
supper. “Lord Tycus of Dray,” she heard Ghurk whisper. “Wants to be king, he does.”
Tycus, tall and narrow as a Shivershore birch, looked so very Thillrian with his high cheekbones, pale skin, and slick ebon hair. His black collar encircled his neck like a highwayman’s cloak, and his gaze penetrated everyone beneath him. Everything about him suggested sternness, strictness, and a quick end to these proceedings.
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