“I do not know. Shall I have her trailed?”
“Never mind.”
“Very good, Your Majesty.”
“Is it?”
“If you say so, Your Majesty.”
“What would you say?”
“‘Will that be all, Your Majesty?’”
Sym snickered.
“Clever,” Mershayn said.
“Thank you, Your Majesty.”
Mershayn waved a hand. So far, it was impossible to verbally out-fence Vo’Dula, but he intended to keep trying. “What’s next?”
“Lady Bands scheduled a sweaty altercation for your afternoon.”
“A sweaty altercation?”
“With Captain Lo’gan, Your Majesty,” Vo’Dula finished.
“You mean sword practice?”
“Of course, Your Majesty. What else could I mean?”
Vo’Dula was baiting him. Mershayn pointed a finger at the seneschal. “Did Bands put you up to this snide repartee? Or does it just come naturally?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Your Majesty,” he said in his nasal voice. “Could you be more specific?”
“No. I don’t think I can.”
“As you say, Your Majesty.”
“So it’s on the north practice ground?”
“I believe they do have some sticks and clubs there, Your Majesty.”
“Thank you.”
“I live to serve, Your Majesty.”
Mershayn waved the man away and stood up. He hadn’t practiced his swordsmanship for a single day this past week. He had made mention of it to Bands in an offhand comment yesterday, telling her that if being king meant he gave up swordsmanship, then he’d hand the crown to someone else. He’d be damned if he was going to end up one of those kings whose bulging belly spilled over the arms of his throne.
After leaving Sym at the guardhouse, Mershayn headed for the northern practice yard. He had no wish for Sym to watch his fighting style. Sym had proved that he could take small bits of information and use them to great advantage, and Mershayn had to acknowledge that Sym was probably one of the better swordsmen in the castle. No need in giving him any advantages, just in case he ever did get a blade into that hand.
Mershayn wound through the halls that seemed so familiar now. He took the stairs to the third floor, went to the far northern side of the castle, and went through the double doors that opened onto the circular flat arena that had been carved out of the mountainside. Snow melted on the cobblestones, succumbing to the warm sunshine and creating delightful little puddles between miniature snow hills.
Lo’gan and Deni’tri were already there, early as usual. Deni’tri leaned against the stone rail, watching Lo’gan swing a practice wooden sword back and forth.
“This is a pleasant surprise,” Mershayn said. “I didn’t think they were going to let you swing swords at me anymore.” During Collus’s tenure as king, Mershayn had come here often, and tested his prowess against Lo’gan as often as he could. He was the best swordsman in the guard, and the only one who could challenge Mershayn. So far, Lo’gan had legitimately won one or two of every ten matches.
Lo’gan didn’t say anything, merely nodded politely. Mershayn liked to think that Lo’gan liked sparring against him, but he really couldn’t say. It was possible that Lo’gan didn’t like anything. He was driven by duty, so much so that it was possible he’d forgotten how to like anything, only how to follow the orders he’d been given and give the orders he knew needed giving, as duty dictated.
“Prepared to lose again?” Mershayn taunted him. Here, at least, he could pretend he wasn’t king.
“Prepared to do my best, Your Majesty,” Lo’gan replied.
“This could be your lucky day.” Mershayn picked up the first wooden sword on the rack. They were all constructed to be the same, but each was just a little different in weight and balance. He swung the blade back and forth, getting the feel of it.
“As you say.” Lo’gan paused. “Will you wear the pads today, Your Majesty?” He nodded at the sturdy shed against the castle wall.
“Not today or any other day.” Pads were unrealistic. They were good for beginners, but they could only dull the edge of a real swordsman. Master Debarc had scorned pads. Of course, Master Debarc was a bitter, reckless drunk, but...
Mershayn and Lo’gan walked onto the snowy practice yard, and the moment Mershayn crossed the arena line, marked by thin, white flagstones, he drew in a deep breath and relaxed. No troubles could find him when he did this. This was what he was born for.
“I’m not much for preliminaries today, Lo’gan.”
Lo’gan saluted in response. Mershayn returned the salute, then ran at Lo’gan. He slid to a stop in the slush, then lunged with the last bit of his momentum. Lo’gan parried the bold strike and came back with a speed that belied his age. Mershayn spun, batting the hardwood away. He backed up, feigning that he had lost his balance, then locked his step and thrust again. Lo’gan was waiting for it, though. He blocked the light strike and riposted. He’d long ago discovered that Mershayn liked to be tricky. The wood whistled by Mershayn’s ear, but that had been the real set-up. Mershayn tapped Lo’gan on the side.
Lo’gan nodded, backed up a pace.
“Point,” Deni’tri said.
“Where is your fire, Lo’gan?” Mershayn swung his blade negligently back and forth.
Lo’gan saluted again, walking toward him.
“Ah, the direct approach. I like your style.” Mershayn watched Lo’gan’s approach keenly. He liked to give his opponents the feel that he didn’t care, that he was sloppy and reckless. It wasn’t going to fool Lo’gan, of course. He knew Mershayn was meticulous when it came to swordsmanship. Still, Mershayn had gotten used to keeping up a bit of banter while he hammered at his opponents. It relaxed him, and that made it a hard habit to break.
Lo’gan attacked quickly, swinging low to Mershayn’s left. Mershayn blocked. Lo’gan’s sword bounced off the block, and he used the momentum to bring it around low right. Mershayn blocked, backed up a step. Like clockwork, Lo’gan used the momentum again to come back around at the left.
Too predictable, my friend.
Mershayn blocked. It was almost pleasant. This was the kind of workout he needed. Bands seemed exceptionally good at identifying that sort of thing.
As expected, Lo’gan, let the bounce take his sword around to the right—
He locked his stance, let out a grunt and came straight down for Mershayn’s left shoulder.
Mershayn barely had time to get his sword up. The strength of the blow shocked his arm, knocked the sword down, and whacked his right forearm solidly.
“Point,” Deni’tri said.
Wincing, Mershayn shifted the wooden sword from right to left and shook out his hand. “Ouch.”
“You could use the pads, Your Majesty,” Lo’gan said, and Mershayn wasn’t sure if that had been a jab, or a serious statement. Probably serious, knowing Lo’gan, but maybe not....
“Going for my fighting arm. I see. I see,” Mershayn said, making a fist and rotating it. He was going to have a bruise.
“I was going for your left shoulder, Your Majesty. Your block deflected it to the right.”
“Thanks for the play-by-play,” Mershayn said.
“You’re welcome, Your Majesty.”
See? That sounded like a joke.
Mershayn saluted, and they moved toward each other again. They exchanged a few token test strikes, swords clacking together, then Mershayn went all-out. Like Lo’gan had come after him, Mershayn returned the favor, thrusting left, then right, then straight at Lo’gan’s face. With an intent wrinkle in his brow, Lo’gan blocked each. When there was the barest window of opportunity, he thrust at Mershayn’s face. It was a long stretch, and it left Lo’gan over-extended. Mershayn swung sideways at Lo’gan’s head—
But Lo’gan had planned it from the beginning. He ducked. Mershayn’s wooden blade swung over Lo’gan’s head, and the captain’
s sword swung into Mershayn’s exposed belly with all the momentum of his spin.
The air whooshed from Mershayn’s lungs, and he doubled over. His knees hit the slushy stones.
“Point,” Deni’tri said, her voice worried.
Lo’gan dropped his sword in the snow and knelt Mershayn’s side. “Your Majesty? Are you all right?”
Mershayn gaped like a fish on a riverbank, but his lungs wouldn’t work. Finally, they started, and he sucked in a gulp of air.
“I apologize, Your Majesty,” Lo’gan said.
Mershayn took another two deep breaths. “For what?” he wheezed. “For me taking a nap? That was a clever move.” He took another few deep breaths and managed to recover himself. “I’m going to have to remember that. It was damned risky, though. If I’d decided to thrust at your chest, I could have had your eye. Even a stick can poke out an eye.”
“Without risk, there is no victory. Especially against a superior opponent.”
“For a practice session?”
“Isn’t that why you wear no pads, Your Majesty? Because if we are to improve, we must dare some risk?”
Mershayn gave a coughing laugh. “Well said.”
The small door that led from the practice arena to the castle burst open. Vo’Dula’s page, Bimeera, burst through. She stumbled on the snow, gained her feet, and sprinted across the courtyard. Deni’tri, ever alert, stepped in front of the child. Bimeera slipped in the snow, and Deni’tri deftly caught her arm, held her upright.
“Hail, little one,” Mershayn said, but he felt the tension that came with the breathless child. Something was wrong.
“Your Majesty!” She gasped, spent from her long run. “Lord Baerst has returned. They’re burned. His soldiers. All of them. Dragons, Your Majesty.”
“What?” Lo’gan asked sternly.
“Dragons. They’ve destroyed Corialis Port!”
16
Bands
Bands led Mirolah down the hall, down the stairs, around the common room reserved for visiting nobles, and out into the royal gardens where she had entertained Zilok Morth only hours ago. Mirolah followed, and the giant skin dog trailed last, always a few paces behind her.
Bands moved quickly, because the woman behind her was more dangerous than anything in the kingdom at the moment.
In the garden, the melting snow still lay across everything like a white blanket. Bands navigated through the hedges and snowy, manicured trees, but her heart was racing.
It had taken Bands many years to learn how to threadweave like a human, using GodSpill to alter the saturated threads of Amarion rather than pulling it from what dragons considered to be the source of all power: Avakketh. In that time, she had developed a threadweaver’s sight. She could see the great tapestry of the world. She could see how those threads made up all things.
What she saw in Mirolah was frightening.
A normal human was comprised of more threads than Bands could count. An arm, for example, had thousands of threads twisting into the shape of bones, muscle and skin. Those threads were comprised of even tinier threads, and those tinier threads were saturated with GodSpill, the substance of creation from which the gods were made. That loose GodSpill, spilled from the Godgate millennia ago, was what threadweavers used to alter the world.
In addition, humans were connected to everything around them: to the air, to the ground, to the plants and animals around them. It was called the great tapestry because everything was interwoven. Humans were attached to everything, and yet they stood out as they moved. Threads shifted as they slid across the great tapestry of life, like the raised bump of a mouse under a sheet.
Everyone had a mixture of different colors.
Rocks, water, and other inanimate elements had muted colors. In Bands’s vision, they were mostly shades of gray, with some earthy tones. But humans and animals were woven in bright, moving colors. Once-living creatures—corpses, bones, and the like—looked similar to the elements; they were gray once life left them.
All humans were predominantly one color or another. Medophae was almost pure gold. Zilok Morth was predominantly blue. Ethiel had been predominantly red, hence her nickname “The Red Weaver”.
Mirolah’s body was a corpse being flooded with pure GodSpill. One moment, it faded to a dead gray, the next it was full of colors. A rush of rainbow colors invigorated the threads, then leaked away, the color draining until another wave rushed in, filling her again. The colors cycled through her like the crashing tide of an ocean.
And the connecting threads, the ones that bound Mirolah to everything around her, were huge and grotesque. They converged on her in a nightmarish parody. Bands had never seen anything like it. The stones of the castle, the gravel of the garden path, grass and hedges to the sides, the trees looming over them, the very air around her, all bent toward Mirolah like gnarled, flexed muscles.
Mirolah was not the bump of a mouse under a sheet like normal people; she was a porcupine who had speared the fabric of reality, balled it up, and pulled it with her as she moved.
I don’t think she’s actually alive.... Bands suddenly realized. She died, and somehow she’s holding herself together by her own will and...power. By the gods...the sheer power it takes to do that!
It staggered Bands’s imagination. Mirolah was forcing the GodSpill to suspend the natural order for her. Bands had seen powerful threadweavers, like Zilok Morth, live beyond their mortal years by lashing their spirits to an anchor, which was typically a significant object or person, but even Zilok couldn’t keep his physical body alive once it had died.
Bands led Mirolah deep into the garden, as far away from anyone who might get hurt as possible, to a secluded circle of paving stones with two benches, backed by tall hedges. Bands hadn’t survived thousands of years of death-defying adventures by being hasty, and she thought carefully about what she would say. Her first question had to be the right question. To a non-threadweaver’s eye, Mirolah might seem strange with those rainbow eyes and her stilted manner, but they didn’t see that Mirolah was a catastrophe about to happen.
As Bands’s swirling mind tried to put together all the pieces—at least the pieces she could understand—she came to three realizations in quick succession.
First, as she had surmised earlier when she was posing as Elekkena, the GodSpill spoke to Mirolah in a way it didn’t speak to other threadweavers. The GodSpill was...sentient for her. It talked to her. For other threadweavers, the GodSpill was a resource like water, or stone, or wood. But not only did the GodSpill seem sentient for Mirolah, it related to her like a tempestuous lover. All-giving. All-demanding. Irrevocably bound to her.
Second, Mirolah was unbelievably powerful, easily the most powerful threadweaver alive. She could even be at the mystifying level of Daylan Morth, who was akin to a god.
Lastly, if Mirolah was like a god, she might be indispensable in the battle against Avakketh. If she didn’t explode first and take everyone in this castle with her.
The girl was a holy mess. Bands didn’t understand what was happening to her, but she could see that much.
A fourth realization struck her. Oedandus kept Medophae alive; he couldn’t kill himself if he tried. The nearly destroyed god rejuvenated Medophae to look exactly as he had been when Oedandus found him. Medophae didn’t need to shave because he had shaved just before Oedandus infused him. He couldn’t have short hair for more than a day or two because it would regenerate to the length it had been that day. Was it really Mirolah keeping herself alive with the GodSpill? Or was her tempestuous lover forcing her body to stay alive because it wouldn’t let her go? If Mirolah had wanted to die...could she?
You poor girl.... What happened to you?
Bands gestured, pulling threads and whispering, “Scatter.” The snow on both benches blew off. She wanted to show Mirolah that she, too, was a threadweaver. “Will you sit?” Bands asked.
Mirolah’s rainbow eyes regarded Bands. She didn’t look at the bench.
“
Why would I sit?”
In a petulant noble, Bands would have seen the comment as verbal fencing. But Mirolah’s voice had no inflection. She spoke like a child. She didn’t know why she would want to sit. She did not have the normal responses of a mortal woman.
She has lost her memory.
“It is a human convention when conversing,” Bands said calmly. “If you prefer to stand, I am happy to stand.”
Mirolah glanced at the bench, then walked to it and sat down. She was barefoot, but of course the snow didn’t bother her. Her body was dead.
Sniff whined, padding over and lying down in the snow at her feet. Even lying down, the giant dog’s back rose higher than Mirolah’s waist. He shivered, and suddenly the snow melted away underneath him. The water raced away and, in a moment, the entire space around the dog was dry.
Mirolah watched Bands with interest. Bands approached and knelt. “Will you take my hand?”
Mirolah hesitated, then took Band’s hand. Her flesh was odd, cooling and warming in the pulse of a heartbeat.
“I am here to help you,” Bands said softly. “What you need...I want to make sure you get it.”
“Who am I?”
“You’re a threadweaver from the small town of Rith. You came here with Medophae, Stavark the quicksilver, and Sniff the dog.”
“And Elekkena, the false quicksilver,” Mirolah said.
Bands nodded. “Yes.”
“I did not know who you really were when I first met you,” Mirolah said.
“No.”
“Are you in your normal body now?”
Bands hesitated. “No.”
“So you’re giving me another false face. You’re lying to me.” Mirolah withdrew her hand. “I don’t like lies.”
This wasn’t getting off to the best start. Bands stood, retreated to the other bench and sat down. “It is necessary,” Bands said.
“Lying to me is necessary?” Mirolah’s lip curled.
“I did not want to hurt you,” she said simply.
“How would truth hurt me?”
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