Highborn men paraded about in fine apparel, competing in adornments with their fellowmen until the gaggle of royals was arrayed with an obscenity of bangles, bobbles, ringlets, and precious stones of outrageous cost and bad taste. Those who could tolerate the pain decorated their bodies with elaborate tattoos, puncturing the skin with needles dipped in lampblack and oil.
Irrational as it was, society demanded a man not be judged by his actions or who he manifested himself to be, but only by whose blood flowed in his veins and what honor, nobility, or notion of grandeur could be attached to it.
Rusthammer told Qhuin that the values held in high esteem at the time of First Landing that measured the true character of a person were lost as society was segregated by prejudice, pride, and power.
Many of the horsemen in the Blackthorn stables were like Jehu—freemen with a respectable lineage but without the nobility of a great house. They were employed by Blackthorn and paid a modest wage. They had families and, from time to time, left for a life away from the stables.
Qhuin often tried to imagine what it meant to be a “freeman,” but Jehu and the others kept it private, as if sharing any part of what went on in their small stone houses in the village might diminish the sanctity of it or risk its existence.
The rush of pride Qhuin felt in besting Jehu was expelled by the envy that tightened around his heart. Who am I to indulge in such vanity? I am A’quilum Ereon Qhuin. A man of unknown blood. Jehu is free, and I am not.
“No one in the reign of kings is truly free, not even Jehu,” Rusthammer’s voice said in his head. A person was so easily condemned by the company he kept that the risk of friendship was great. The suspicion over misplaced trust was inevitable and the danger of betrayal absolute.
“Free will and self-determination are illusions,” the blacksmith said. “Choices are made by the overlords in a perpetual feast for power. What little remains is spat out only by the good pleasure of the sovereign lords who rule from their great houses and grow fat on the labor of the poor.”
The roar of iron over broken ground and the pounding of hooves brought Qhuin back to the moment.
Sargon was shouting at him, but he heard no voice. Even the sounds of the horses and chariot were faint and far away.
Instead, his inner voice spoke louder than his thoughts. He had heard it before, and he knew he should not listen. It filled his head with ideas that pounded inside his skull like a prisoner trying to escape.
Qhuin knew the smallest thought of rebellion was perilous. Allowing the secret voice expression, even if only in the privacy of his mind, was dangerous. It spoke from the depths of his soul and came from a place that would never be silent.
The voice also filled his head with images. “Your mind’s eye,” Rusthammer called it. “The place of wondrous creation.” But the images in Qhuin’s mind were not wondrous. They were wretched. Emaciated men in stocks for alleged offenses against the king. Women stripped, shamed, and humiliated in the public square. Heads impaled on wooden spikes and black-winged creatures plucking out their eyes.
Why could he not rid himself of such horrors? Were they a warning? A foreshadowing of his fate?
Qhuin felt a rush of emotion that left him with a strange sense of hope. So he listened to that inner voice and allowed himself to imagine living a different kind of life.
The herd of wild tarpans galloped into the shallow end of a deep wash and disappeared in shadow. The vast plains of rolling grass shimmered in the last long shafts of golden sunlight.
Qhuin looked west at the barrier of mountains that divided the lands southward and protected the grasslands and forests from the sands and desolation that ran from the west slopes of the mountains to the sea.
The sun hovered at the rocky crest as if reluctant to send the shadows of night across the grasslands. Qhuin knew the Great Barriers by their ancient name, the Mountains of the Moon. Rusthammer had once told him the legend of a shrine in the mountains and of a hiding place of mysterious and sacred things. Qhuin remembered laughing at the story, but now he thought of the stone tucked into the secret pouch by his hip and wondered.
“We’ve only two hours before it is too dark!” Sargon shouted above the rushing wind with all the authority he could muster while clinging for life and limb to the railing of the hurdling chariot.
“We’ve an hour at best,” Qhuin said. “Speak when spoken to” was the rule, but the princeling was wrong. He intended no rudeness, but correcting a royal always ended badly. “The darkness will come even sooner down there,” he said and nodded toward the swale where the horses had disappeared; it was already in gray light.
“Use the whip!” Sargon yelled close to Qhuin’s ear.
“They’re not trained to the whip, m’lord.”
“I said use the whip!”
Qhuin nodded, but his jaw tightened and he made no move for the whip.
“Have you forgotten who I am?” the princeling shouted, jutting his chin forward and leaning even closer to Qhuin’s ear.
“You make it easy to remember . . . m’lord.” The pause held a caustic edge of contempt.
Sargon lifted the whip from its cradle and held it out. “Then do as I command and use the whip. I’ve a wager with my brother who’ll get the first catch.” The cords in the princeling’s neck bulged beneath the tight white skin. “Should I lose because of you, bondsman, I will take my losses from your hide, and you can be sure that I will—”
Qhuin turned his head so suddenly and his gaze was so intense that Sargon swallowed whatever else he intended to say. The stark blue of his eyes surrounded by the rich brown of his skin gave him a mystical quality. A soothsayer. A teller of fortunes. A diviner of men’s minds. His brow was pinched into a scowl.
Sargon inhaled sharply and pressed his body into the side of the chariot, a spoiled boy pretending to be a man. It took him a moment to recover, but then he lifted his chin with authority. Still, when he rubbed the back of his neck and fumbled with the collar of his jerkin, his fingers trembled. “I will have you flogged,” Sargon finished his threat with a voice that cracked. The final word came out in a pathetic squeak.
Qhuin took the whip from Sargon’s hand and shoved it back into its place.
“Just be ready with the lasso-pole,” Qhuin said.
The princeling’s eyes turned black.
CHAPTER 47
“Over here, m’lord!” The woman was waiting in the shadows when the Raven exited the tavern. He could only see half her face in the glow of the lantern.
“What is it you have for me, woman? Tell me quickly!”
“There is word about the village that you are a man willing to pay them that can help you.”
“Perhaps. If the help given warrants it.”
“You are the Raven to the King, are ye not?”
How could she know? He had moved with such care and stealth and secrecy. Before he could recover from his surprise, she continued.
“And the rumor in the village is that the king seeks to live forever, is that true?”
His mouth moved, but he didn’t speak.
She took his silence as affirmation. “And you are looking for the magic stones, ain’t that so?”
Magic stones? How could a tavern wench possibly know something the eyes and ears of the king did not? He was discomfited by his ignorance but felt a burst of hope in her words. This was what he had been hoping to find: Something more than a legend. Something real. Does the woman truly know of such things?
He regained his composure and scowled at her, fiddling with the laces of his cloak to buy time.
“Magic stones? And I suppose you are here to sell me your ‘magic stones’ for a heavy purse of coin. Do I appear to be such a fool?”
“No, m’lord, but I—”
“How can a tavern whore know of such things?” He cut her short.
Even in the low light, the Raven saw her neck turn red. She curled her arms around her middle. “I was not always what you see, gracious lord. I was abandoned by my husband and left in despair. He journeyed to the West River with two cousins and a fisherman, but they never returned. It’s been nine years since. The cousins returned but said they knew not what became of him. One later claimed that he drowned, but I don’t believe . . .” Her voice faded away. “Because I am of common blood, once he was gone, I was taken from what little privilege I’d been given.”
“Enough of your babbling,” the Raven said. “Your existence is of no interest to me. Tell me of these magic stones. I will reward you well enough if what you have to offer is of value.” He patted the money purse fitted snuggly under the broad leather belt around his waist.
She stared at the purse. The long silence was discomforting. A sound came from the darkness. A footfall? He glanced behind him. The distance between the inn and the dark shadows of the stable made it a fine place for thieves. He remembered the man with dark eyes inside the tavern, and he gripped the pommel of his sword.
“I’ve three children who stay with my mor while I’m working,” she said, blinking away an unwanted emotion. “I know little more than what I have told you, but there is such a thing, and the legend is true.”
He wanted her tale to be true, but it couldn’t be. It made him angry. “And how can you vouch for something about which you know so little? Or nothing at all, as it seems?”
“I have spoken with one who knows it from an ancient source—even where the magic stones are hidden.”
Hope gripped his throat, but only for an instant. “Who?”
“A holy man.”
“What to you mean ‘holy’? Where do I find him?”
“I pray, m’lord, but if you please . . .” She held out her hand.
“Do you not trust a man who wears the sigil of your king?” He held up his two-fingered ring.
“I’m sorry, m’lord.” She looked down, but her hand did not move. “I trust only what I’ve learned by being cheated.”
“You try my patience!” the Raven barked, but he lifted the purse and dropped two coins into her palm.
“Only two, m’lord? Is it not endless life your king seeks?”
“Greed will not serve you. How can I be certain you speak the truth about this holy man and his knowledge of these magic stones?”
“I had a fourth child. A boy. My oldest. My husband took him to the mountain and gave him to the priests of the temple. I pleaded with him to leave the child with me, but my husband was a cruel man. He resented me because I had loved someone else before. He never accepted the boy as his son, and he demanded I never tell the boy the truth.”
“What truth? Speak plainly.”
“My husband was not the father of my firstborn child.” She raised her face without shame. “The boy’s father was the son of a nobleman. He was the only man I ever loved. He intended to marry me and make me a fine lady, but—”
“A nobleman?” The Raven cut her off.
“Of House Edom. A minor house, m’lord, very old, almost gone now.” The flickering light of the lantern made the tear on her cheek glisten like a diamond. “It was not long after my husband took my boy away that he disappeared with the fisherman.”
The Raven expelled a gust of breath. “I don’t care about your sorry life. Tell me about the holy man,” he demanded.
“A year ago, an aged man who’d been beaten by bandits and left for dead was brought to my mother’s cottage. She’s a wisewoman of the old tradition and knows the secrets of the healing herbs. When the poor man could finally speak, he said he had come from the Mountain of God.”
The Raven wrinkled his brow. “Beyond Village Candella?”
She nodded and continued. “He said he was given to the high priests of the temple as a child, and, in time, became an enlightened master and Blessed Sage. He came down from the mountain to proclaim his God of gods and Creator of All Things ‘to all mankind,’ he said. We cared for him. In spite of our disbelief.” She smiled and shook her head. “In spite of our impoverishment, we shared all we had with the prophet.”
“You call him a prophet?”
“He was called such by the villagers who found him and brought him to my mor.”
“And this ‘prophet’ has these magic stones of endless life?”
The woman continued as if she had not heard the Raven’s question. “I asked him what became of the children given to the temple. Whether all of them lived to be old men filled with great wisdom, like him. He said not all, but when I told him of my son, he said he remembered a boy I feel certain was my child. ‘If he is your boy,’ he told me, ‘he is gifted in spiritual things.’” She paused a long time before returning from where her heart had taken her. “It was many years ago. If my boy is yet alive, he would be a young man now. Quite handsome now, I’m sure, and so very, very bright.” She tapped her head.
“Yes, yes, but the magic stones—what did the prophet say?”
“He never told us about them, exactly, not in a way that—”
“By the gods, woman! If he did not tell you, how can you presume to—” The Raven gripped her arm. The lantern swung, and the light of it wavered across her face. “If you do not tell me something of value, and quickly, I will take back my coins and your lying hand with it!”
The woman dug her sharp nails into the back of his fist and twisted away. “You don’t think me foolish enough to meet you here alone?” she said and glanced at a stack of timbers no more than a dozen paces away.
The man looming in the shadow would have remained invisible had he not shifted his stance and adjusted his grip on the club in his hand. When he moved, the light from the window fell across his face. It was the man Raven had seen in the common room of the tavern.
“My apologies,” the Raven said while looking at the large man. He raised a hand in a gesture of calm, then turned again to the woman. “I am eager to know all you can tell me.”
“The prophet was beset by a fever for many days, his mind muddled.”
“So what you heard of magic stones came from a man in delirium and madness?” He chuffed loudly.
“He spoke of the stones and their mystical power only in his worst of times, as if caught in a nightmare by day.”
“An illusion, then?”
“No, m’lord. They were secrets that could never otherwise be spoken. No words are truer than those spoken by an unguarded tongue.”
The Raven pinched his face to ponder the wisdom of that. “And what did he say of their magic?”
“Magic was not a word he used, m’lord, but from his uttering, I found out that whoever possesses the stones will live forever with no fear of death. And there was something else. About light that caused them to shine. He said that . . .” She pursed her lips as if she dared not speak another word.
“And what? Pray continue, woman!”
“He said the stones were touched by the finger of God.”
The Raven to the King and the woman of the tavern stood in the island of lantern light in a black sea of silence.
“He said they were the sacred stones of light of ancient days,” she whispered.
“And he had them?”
She shook her head.
“They were taken by the thieves who attacked him on the King’s Road?”
“No, I think not, m’lord. He never said such a thing.”
“Did you ever learn his name? Where is he now?”
“I long to tell you where he is, gracious lord, but I am a despairing woman. I have lost a husband and a son, and I have naught to feed my mor and little daughters.” She reached out her hand. “Forgive my shameful begging, but . . .” She bowed her head, but her hand remained steady.
“You are a foul woman,” the Raven scowled, but he opened his purse and droppe
d half a dozen coins into her hand. “Where do I find your so-called prophet? What is his name?”
She looked at the coins in her palm, then brought her other hand forward, cupping them together. “I swore to him I would never reveal his name. If I must dishonor what little is left of me, it must be for coin enough to cover my shame and feed my children until they can care for themselves.”
The Raven’s jaw muscles twitched. He resisted the urge to strike the woman down. But what if it was true? What if there was a holy prophet who knew of magical stones of light with the power of endless life and where they could be found?
He emptied the contents of his purse into the bowl of her two hands. “Very well, but I tell you now, if your prophet is not where you send me, or if he is unable to give me what I require, or unwilling, you will find me in your tavern again, and what ‘little of you is left’ will be cut into pieces and fed to the pigs.” He stuffed the empty purse into its place. “Now, by the gods, tell me where he is!”
“The prison at Stókenhold Fortress.”
The Raven’s eyes caught the flame and blazed bright. “He’s a prisoner? What are his crimes?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “He was taken from us in the night.” She shivered against the cold damp creeping in from Leviathan Deeps.
“How do you know where he was taken, then?” The Raven narrowed his eyes.
“I heard the soldiers talking. One of them said they were taking him to the prison of the old fortress. The only place called such is the dungeons of Stókenhold Fortress.”
The Raven’s guarded smile broadened to soft chortling. “Indeed.” He turned from the stable but stopped at the entrance and looked back. “I fear I have been too harsh. I apologize for my rudeness.”
She smiled and lifted her hands, heavy with gold coins. “No need, m’lord. You have saved my precious ones.”
“Your boy,” he asked her. “The one taken to the temple. What was his name?”
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