She took them from his arms and did not even notice their weight, although she buckled beneath it. She brought her knees the ground, as if in obeisance, and touched the dull white of the broken orb, the black and gold of the sword’s scabbard. Her lips opened and closed, and Gilafas knew a moment of pride, for he could hear her voice, and he was certain the others could not. After a moment, she raised her head, and she looked at Meralonne APhaniel, all joy in the lesser creation gone.
She said, “You should not have brought these here.”
“We had no choice, Lady.”
She rose, staggering; she would not allow him to touch their plain surface. “But the demons will come, now.”
“Yes.”
* * *
She woke in the dark of the night, in her bed, alone. She had gone to sleep there, her hands absorbed with the beads she had asked for, the strings upon which to place them almost full. Her fingers were stiff with the damp and the cold; she knew that she had worked them while she slept. Master Gilafas would worry. She knew it.
It was why she had forced herself to walk the halls, to come to this room, to let sleep take her while he watched. He only left her when she slept, and only when she was here.
But she had work to do; she knew it. The days. The days had gone; the nights had slowly devoured them. They waited above her head and beneath her feet, gathering the shadows and the darkness. All the voices were strong.
And steel’s voice strongest of all.
She slid her feet out of bed; the floors were cold but she dare not wear shoes. She wanted no light, nothing to see by, and without it, her feet were her eyes; they knew the halls at least as well as her eyes did.
Beneath her bed, she found the Sword; found the Rod. Her hands knew them by more than their weight, but it was their weight that troubled her, for the Sword was so long it would drag on the floor, the metal of its sheath creating sparks and noise.
She struggled alone.
She understood, dimly, that she was not a simple child, but the child in her was often the only element that could survive the arduous task of making. The understanding clung to her as she struggled: she was not a child. She had come to Fabril’s reach because she was not a child, and she had remained because no one—not even her beloved Master Gilafas—could hear the voices of the wild as well as she.
But she was grateful; had she been at home, had she been in Durant, she was certain the Town would have perished this eve. It was Scarran, the longest night.
She was not dour by nature; not grim. Master Gilafas, haunted and tired, was both of these things, but she understood that he had come to love her, and because of it, she knew she must leave him. She understood the whole of Fabril’s intent, and had, from the moment she had found the room Master Gilafas so hated.
The Rod and the Sword were vessels; they were vessels, and those vessels had long lain empty. She had listened to the ocean in Master Gilafas’ words. She understood vessels, and what they contained, or could contain, because of that distant voice.
She was not so old that she had forgotten fear. In the dark of her room, she armed herself: she fastened the clasp of the pendant she had made, cold sapphire resting against the hollow between her collar bones. She drew cloak from an armoire that was otherwise empty, and ring from the box at her desk. She took no gloves, and paused a moment before the silver sheen of dark mirror.
In the dark, she drew the blade. She was not a swordsman; it was an awkward action. But she must do it; she must leave the sheath here. The blade, the rod, they must go where she travelled.
The moon was high. Fabril had loved light, and if gold was the color of day, silver shone now, radiant and cool. Enough light to see by, but she did not need it; she could see in the shadows.
She hesitated for just a moment, on the edge of the Master’s workroom. And there she laid down her burden, and ran lightly across the darkened threshold. Moonlight came through glass in all its muted color; she passed it by, again and again, until she reached the delicate globe of blown glass Gilafas had given her.
Inside, floating and fluttering, was her butterfly.
She pursed her lips, touched the cool glass, and with a simple word, set the butterfly free. It broke the meniscus of glass surface as if it were liquid and passed above her, circling her head three times.
She let it go and turned again to her task.
The Rod and the Sword had been forged and quenched in the whole of a single day. She knew it, by touch; understood what not even the cold man understood: that Fabril had made these in the light of the longest day, a measure of, and containment for, the Summer. It was, as her simple jewelry box had been, an act of affection, a desire to help those he had loved and respected. And in Summer’s season, the Rod had served the son of Wisdom, and the Sword the son of Justice: the Twin Kings who had, for centuries, given their lives to the Empire of Essalieyan.
But all things living know time and its passage, and all things living know the shifting of seasons. Summer had passed, the season so long for these crafted items that Winter had been forgotten.
Aiee, she hated the shadows, the sibilance of their terrible whisper.
But what was forged in the grim stillness of Winter, what lived in its ice and its blankets of pure, cold snow, was strong in a way that the Summer itself was not strong, and that strength, cold and terrible, existed beyond the shadows.
Terrible power, scouring and lonely.
She had heard of men who had died steps from their homes when the blizzards had come; they could not see their way to safety, and what love and hope they carried as they struggled ended there.
Kalliaris, she thought, for the first time since she had come to Fabril’s reach. Kalliaris, smile.
She walked the long hall, seeing the frozen stone about her, fitting company, and silent, for this last journey. She was afraid of only one thing: That she would finish what she had been born to finish, that she would remake the Rod and the Sword that would be so necessary to the Twin Kings upon whom the Empire depended, and that there would be no one to bring them home.
Other fears would come later, to keep her company and ease her loneliness, but this fear was the wisest and the strongest.
She could not make anything while she walked, and she felt the gnawing hunger take her hands, felt this scrap of reasoned fear, this almost adult comprehension, fray about the edges, pulled like the loose thread in a weaving from her loom. So she cradled the blade with care against the cloak that protected her from the sight of men, and she ran her fingers, over and over, across the surface of what was writ in its runnels.
She began to descend the stairs, and it was hard: the floor was cold, and the steps steep. The lights that existed against the walls were dim; they no longer spoke a language that her eyes understood. But she did not need them; she knew where she walked, and when she reached the halfway mark, she set her hand against the wall and waited.
The door opened.
The door opened into the Scarran night, and the Winter road wound from its step into the hollows of the ancient, wild way.
* * *
Gilafas could not say what woke him, not at first.
He sat up in bed as if struck, the full face of the moon framed in the windows of his chambers. The night was silent; he listened a moment and heard the distant thrum of ocean voice. It was not insistent.
He rose, clenching fists, and cried out in shock and pain; his left hand burned.
He spoke a word and mage-light flooded his vision, forcing his lids down; when they rose again, he stared at the open mound of his hand, his left hand.
In it, in the light, were shards of delicate glass, the broken form of butterfly wings above crescent pools of blood.
He listened, and he heard the ocean, and only the ocean, and then he understood.
* * *
He dressed like a madman, taking the time to don jacket over his sleeping robes. He grabbed dagger, although it was futile; tore light from the wall and cl
utched it in his bleeding fist.
He took no care to be silent; silence was not his friend, and the noise was a distraction, a welcome one. He ran to his workroom, commanded light, banished moon. There, on the furthest reach of his personal bench, he saw what he had dreaded: the globe in which he had encased Cessaly’s butterfly. This was their only common work, and it was empty now; what she built, he had in the carelessness of sleep destroyed.
What night? What night, he thought, frenzied. Was this the longest night? Or was it past him, was it gone?
But no: for once the darkness was blessed, for it lingered, deep and forbidding.
He began to search for Cessaly.
The first place he looked was her room, but it was empty; there was no trace of her presence in it at all, although the sheets were turned back. Her cupboard door swung open as he approached.
The halls were long. He knew all of her rooms, for once she had opened the ways, they could not be closed. And he knew his own: the room in which her death was carved in stone, the obscenity of it stronger every time he chanced upon it.
He visited them all. All of them, and he found her in none, although his own horror waited around every doorway and ever corner.
He had left her. In his exhaustion, he had chosen to leave her. If he found her, he promised whatever capricious god might be listening he would never leave her again.
No, Gilafas, fool. No. Think.
But thought eluded him, deluded him, sent him in circles that ended, always, with the workroom.
But the last time, the last circuit, had finished him; in agony, he retreated into the moonlight, his hands shaking.
The lights were dim; he could not remember dimming them. He started to speak, and lost the words as he turned to the great windows that formed a casement for the moon. No; not the moon, but some light that was much like it: radiant and cool.
In its heart, standing in robes the color of night, stood a ghost, a demon. He had brought the wind with him, and it was a foreign wind, devoid of the taste of salt. He turned, and the light turned with him, and when at last this intruder faced Gilafas he saw two things that he recognized.
The first, the least, Meralonne APhaniel, shorn of the emblem of the Magi, the decorations of mageborn rank. His hair was white and long, his eyes the color of new steel; he wore no sword, no shield, no armour, but he was dressed for war.
The second, the source of the room’s light: the mosaic he had made in the likeness of Cessaly. Golden hair, honey eyes now shaded to the green that was either trick of light or whisper of power, blue dress, and red, red blood, these burned in his vision. The lead that held the glass was grown insubstantial and weightless, or perhaps it was fluid; he could not see it clearly. Did not try.
“You asked,” Meralonne APhaniel said softly, “what purpose this Work served, and I believe I have divined it. It is of glass for a reason, Guildmaster.
“It is a window.”
A window. Gilafas stepped toward it, and faltered in the glow of its light. “Why did you come?”
“I told you. I am not Duvari.”
“You are not truthful.”
“Not entirely, no. This is Fabril’s reach. Fabril was not seerborn; that was not his gift. But it is myth that he created the whole of this wing; he made it his own, but he chose it for a reason.
“For the Summer, Guildmaster, and for the Winter.” He eyes were unblinking. “You do not hear the Summer voice; you do not hear the Winter. That is both your gift and your curse. What Fabril wrought does not speak to you. But it speaks to her, to your apprentice, and this is the longest night, the Scarran night.
“And I believe that she speaks to you.”
Truth, Gilafas thought, but not enough of the truth.
“Why did you come here, mage?”
Meralonne was silent a moment, and then he said, “I believe that she will be drawn to the Winter road, and if she enters into a great work upon it, she may never return.
“But her work must return. Do you understand?”
Gilafas said nothing.
“Guildmaster.”
Silence.
“The Guild of Makers has been waiting for longer than you can imagine, guardians against this age. It has waited so long, there have been those among you who have come, over time, to believe the wait has been in vain, a thing of child’s story. But you know, now. And I, and the Kings. Open the window. Open it, Guildmaster, for I cannot.”
* * *
He cursed his gift for the first time in his adult life. Cursed himself for a fool for making this window so small, although it was the gift itself that had guided the making. His hands shook as he approached her, trapped in glass, circled by lead. Her eyes were now closed.
They had not been closed when he had made her, for the width of her eyes were, among the many things about her, the one that he had come to love best.
He cried out in fear and reached for the glass, and his hands passed through it as if it were mist, or smoke, or veil.
The winds tore past him, then, and in their folds, they carried the screams of the dying, thin high ululations, the keening of the damned.
His eyes teared at once, and his cheeks froze; the wind was dry and cold, and it allowed for no liquid. Ocean voice denied him, then, and just as well. He saw darkness, felt it across the length of his arms. Frost formed in the folds of his jacket; flakes gathered against cloth and found purchase there.
Bodies lay aground, some writhing, most still. He saw an arm, a jerking hand, a fallen blade; saw a broken bow, its curve shattered, saw the spill of hair across snow, white upon white, with the thinning pink of spreading blood beneath it.
He could not count them all; he did not try. Once, in the whirl of the angry wind, he saw the pale skin of an upturned face, its eyes wide, lashes made of snowflakes. Too beautiful, he thought, although clearly the man was dead. To beautiful to be a demon.
He moved, although he could not say how; he knew that the window itself was too small a passage for a man of his size. Could not regret it, either.
Until he saw her.
He knew her at once, although he could not see her face, for her hair was short and golden; not even the snow that clung there could obscure its color. He knew the bent shape of her shoulders, the moving jerk of elbows at play; he knew the shape of her back, even seen now, beneath heavy folds of cloth that obscured it. He knew the soles of her feet, for in the vastness of Fabril’s reach, she never wore shoes.
Had not, he saw, worn them now. She would freeze to death, she would freeze in the wailing storm, and he thought her unaware of it, for the madness was upon her.
He could hear it so clearly he almost forgot himself.
But she was not alone in that clearing; the trees themselves, like wrought iron fences, surrounded her, and in their shadows a shadow rose, tall and slender and perfect.
It made a poverty of any beauty he had ever seen, and in the guildhall, he had seen much of it. He was humbled, instantly, by the presence of this stranger, this Winter Queen.
She looked up, then, and she smiled, and although she was beautiful, and the smile a gift, he was chilled by it in a way that not even the slaughter had chilled him.
“Yes,” she said softly, “I am the Winter Queen, and you are bold, to come here on this night.”
He could not speak; his legs would not hold his weight and he felt himself begin to bend so that he might place his life where it properly belonged: at her feet. Or beneath them.
But something held him up, something sharp and sudden.
“I do not walk the Winter Road,” he told her, the words flowing through him as if they belonged to another. “I have placed no foot upon it, and I have taken nothing, touched nothing, that belongs to the Queen who rules it.”
Her smile deepened, and it was chilling; there was no pleasure in it. “You are wise, who appear to be a simple, mortal fool.”
“I am not wise, Lady, or I would not be here, witness to Winter; the mortal
seasons are not your seasons.”
“No, indeed they are not, and mortals themselves are so fleeting.” And her gaze, the gaze he coveted and feared, slid from his face to the shuddering back of Cessaly. “But not all that is mortal is beneath my interest. You have come for the girl.”
“I have.”
“Ah. But she has not your wisdom; she has set foot, unencumbered foot, upon my path, and she has taken the lives of those who serve me.” She stepped toward Cessaly, and Gilafas followed. Somehow, he followed.
He wanted to shout, to give warning, to raise alarm; he was mute. The words that were not his words failed him.
The Winter Queen laughed in the wake of his silence, and her laughter was almost genuine.
She turned to him, then. “Has it come to pass, little mortal? Have the gates been opened, and the covenant shattered? Does the darkness stride the face of the mortal world once more?”
He was mute. Mute, still.
“Leave,” she said. “Leave while I am amused and may know mercy.”
“It is not for your mercy that I have come.”
“Oh?”
“What the child carries belongs in the hands of the godborn; no other might wield or claim them.”
“The hands of the godborn do not trouble them now,” she replied, but amusement had left her face, and her lips were thinner. “And they have been made, remade, in my realm.”
“They have been made and remade in the wild realm, Lady.”
“And the wild realm knows no law but power.”
“The wild realm knows no law but yours, it is true. But your vow is law in the realm, be your oath ancient, so ancient that it is forgotten upon this plane. You cannot lay claim to the Rod or the Sword until those vows are fulfilled, and Lady—if you seek to retain even one, they will never be fulfilled, and your power diminished by the binding.”
Her hair swept past her face; the gale had returned in the clearing.
“Perhaps,” she said, one hand falling to the hilt of the sword she carried, and the other to the horn. “But so, too, will yours, and the mortal kingdom will surely fail. The Sword and the Rod came to me.”
Memory of Stone Page 6