by Fiona Patton
Graize scowled at her. “That’s an ancient stream of possibility long since gone dry,” he scoffed, ignoring the pang his words invoked.
“And yet it continues to occur.”
“And yet it continues to be ignored.”
“And yet.” Panos gave him a penetrating look as she wrapped Hares’ cloak more tightly about her shoulders. “Denial tastes like ashes and melancholy music played in the shadows,” she observed with unusual gravity.
“What does wishful thinking taste like?” he retorted.
As the tip of the twig went dark, emitting a thin stream of smoke, Panos thrust it into the fire once again. “Much the same,” she answered, “Only the ashes have tiny, smoldering coals hidden in their midst. Such coals can always be used to rekindle a fire long since believed to be cold. Or they might ignite on their own, burning the whole world up in their misdirected passion.” Retrieving the twig, she waved the newly glowing tip at him.
“The dark-haired man is my enemy,” he replied. “Brax is my enemy, as bent on protecting this world that you speak of as I am on destroying it. We will not come together with any kind of passion. Not anymore.”
“He haunts your prophecy like a splinter in your eye. You will never be free of him until you find a mirror that shows you his true face. And yours. That’s why you’ve never been able to kill him.”
“I will kill him.”
“Unless you haunt his prophecy in equal measure, he’s more likely to kill you.”
Graize’s lip curled in disdain. “He has no prophecy.”
“His God speaks prophecy when Her people are in danger. And his kardos, Spar, the one you speak of when anger clouds your reason, also speaks prophecy.”
Graize turned his attention to the fire, unwilling to continue the argument, but her words had hit their mark. If he was going to be free of Brax, he had to be free of Spar as well. He stood.
“I always knew I would have to kill them both,” he replied, an inexplicable tightness in his chest leaching the anger from his tone. “Your vision has told me no more than that.”
“You will seek him out, then?”
Her tone was no more than curious, but Graize still regarded her suspiciously. “I always seek him out,” he answered. Heading up the rise, he glanced at the sky, once again expecting the golden shimmer of wings. Once again the sky remained still, and he shook off the feeling of disappointment with a violent shake of his head. “I will sleep in the open tonight,” he said shortly. “Clear dreams, Panos.”
“And clear dreams to you, too,” she answered. “May you actually pay attention to them if you have them.” She watched him go with an ironic expression, then began weaving the twig back and forth as he’d waved his Petchan bow, making lines of red prophecy in the air. Then turning, she stared into the darkness beyond the camp.
“Be patient, little one,” she whispered. “Learn from the erroneous ways of your elders and know what you truly desire before you reach for it. In the meantime, sing of life’s pleasures while you can.”
Allowing the melancholy to return, she smiled sadly. “Fly away now, there’s a good little God-child. Take a little golden bird’s form and fly away, singing.”
Nestled in the grass, surrounded by the spirits of the wild lands, Hisar rose, first with some hesitation, then with more confidence as she made no move toward it. They regarded each other for a long moment, then, taking the seeming of a small, golden sparrow hawk as she’d suggested, It headed south.
Panos lay back in the sweet-smelling grass with a pensive expression.
“So, you haven’t seen a future with him?”
“I have seen many futures. Some with him and some without him.”
But many more without him, she admitted silently; so many more that she’d stopped looking. But soon enough she would have to come face-to-face with it. War was indeed looming, and many things could happen in war, both bad and good. There was still a chance if he would take it.
Closing her eyes, she cast her mind north to touch the sleeping mind of Prince Illan Dmitriviz Volinsk.
“I miss you,” she whispered across the miles. “Brook no delays in coming to me. The future grows increasingly uncertain the longer we are apart, and I grow anxious without you.”
4
Distant Lands
ACROSS THE NORTHERN SEA, the dawn sun rose over Kitai, the capital of Volinsk, with a sullen, mist-enshrouded glower. An ancient, densely populated city of wood and stone, Kitai sat at the confluence of three shallow rivers, occupying the only solid ground before the land gave way to a vast marsh that separated the city from its harbor. In the centuries since its inception—as a simple, palisade outpost—thousands of workers had struggled each year to keep the river mouths from silting up altogether.
Standing in a small, wooden pagoda on the shoreline, Prince Illan Dmitriviz Volinsk watched the double line of laborers hauling bucket loads of mud, weeds, and ice chunks from the frigid waters. Volinsk’s navy had always been compromised by its shallow harbors and harsh winters. The rivers had only just opened up in the last few days and one late freeze could undo all their efforts in a single night. And late freezes were common.
Illan turned his attention to the dozen elderly weather sorcerers crouched at the marsh edge. Surrounded by a host of attendants and apprentices, they knelt on the cold, mossy ground, ears pressed to a series of sacred holes dug to release the whispering of the earth; listening for the promise of spring. Most of the Volinski sorcerers sought prophecy in the old ways, attending to the natural world around them and observing the controlled behavior of birds and beasts—doves and horses for the most part—to predict the future.
Illan resisted the urge to raise his upper lip in a sneer. It wasn’t all that long ago that the court sorcerers had sought their predictions in the animals’ entrails instead of their behavior. Illan preferred a more scientific method and had left his teachers and the crowded, bustling capital at age fourteen to pursue his own solitary studies at Cvet Tower where the quiet lapping of the waves and the whistling of the wind were his only natural distractions.
Pressing two slender fingers against the bridge of his nose, he banished each individual component of the capital’s sensory bombardment: the odors of fish and dung and smoke, the shouting and singing of drovers, tradespeople, and merchants, the swirling ever-constant flow of swine, poultry, horses, and dogs. And people everywhere, their individual destinies pressing against his vision; each one identifiable for a split second before plunging back into the whole like a vast school of fish. One by one, he regarded them, then discarded them, until he’d fashioned a kind of peace behind the wall of his control for the hundredth time since coming to the capital.
Illan had spent the entire winter at Kitai at his brother, the Duc Bryv’s, request, trapped in the palace with a host of courtiers, soldiers, relatives, and sorcerers of two separate nations. Volinsk and their ancient enemy, neighboring Rostov, had forged a peace treaty after the Rostovian duc had died suddenly during a night of drunken revelry. His heir, Tonja Ivaniviz, had surprised everyone by sending an offer of marriage to Bryv rather than the traditional declaration of war. Now with their own child, Prince Mikal Bryviz, safely past his first month’s birthday, it looked as if the peace treaty might actually hold for a while.
The perfect time to turn their attention to the invasion of Anavatan.
Across the marsh, the fine, high notes of a sailor’s pipe came to him on the breeze and he turned his attention to the distant harbor. Half the combined fleet of Volinsk and Rostov lay at anchor, tucked into the limited space that offered both depth and shelter in the narrow inlet. Illan’s sister, Prince Dagn Vanyiviz, would be escorting the rest from Korov and Tunoysev—Volinsk’s two major shipbuilding cities upriver—within the week. Outfitting each would take no more than another week after that, so if everything went smoothly at court, the fleet should be ready to set sail within a fortnight.
If everything went smoothly.
&nb
sp; He cast his mind back to the night before. Standing in the window of his overly ornate palace suite, Illan had sent his thoughts reaching out toward Panos of Amatus. Although their minds touched nearly every night, he missed the calming influence of her physical presence, her soft singsong conversation, the sleepy-eyed seduction of her smile, and the fiery warmth of her lovemaking.
Closing his eyes, he’d envisioned their bedchamber at Cvet Tower, seeing her reclined across the coverlet or seated by the fire, her golden hair framing her face in a halo of prophetic light.
“I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Brook no delays in coming to me.”
“I’m on my way.”
The future grows increasingly uncertain the longer we’re apart, and I grow anxious without you.”
Unwillingly, his thoughts had traveled back to when Anavatan’s God, Incasa, had sent an unexpected storm to smash the atlas table with which he spoke prophecy. Illan had not wanted to admit the concern that action had caused him, but in the ruins, he had seen a single hidden element, still unformed that had put his doubts to rest. A strength to be wielded or a weakness to be exploited: water sparkling in a cavernous darkness. The future was in flux, not uncertain. Incasa did not hold all the cards, and so He would not win through. Not this time.
“Do not be anxious, my love. We’ll be together soon.”
He’d turned back to his chambers and the new atlas table he’d commissioned that winter. The ornate wooden pieces stood ready in both offensive and defensive formations with a single uncarved piece representing the hidden element, sitting off to one side.
“Soon, my love,” he’d repeated, sending a kiss out on the wind. “Very, very soon.”
A cough interrupted his reverie, and he turned to regard his sergeant-at-arms, Vyns Ysav, standing at a respectful distance behind him. The older man gestured toward the city gate.
“A palace servant approaches, my lord,” he noted.
Illan nodded. “A summons from Bryv.”
Together they waited for the green-liveried woman to make her way through the mud and traffic to the pagoda steps, then Illan swept past her without bothering to hear her message, Vyns at his heel. Used to the ways of court sorcerers, the servant dutifully fell into step behind them.
Despite his royal birth, Illan was not well known by sight in this city of two hundred thousand people, but the rich cut of his fur-trimmed and embroidered kaftan, leather gloves and thick, fleece-topped boots marked him as a rich and powerful man, and his inward, arrogant expression marked him as a sorcerer of note. The reed cutters, sheep skinners, launderers, and laborers who inhabited Kitai’s crowded Fourth Demesne and the merchants, artisans, and street sorcerers who lived in the Third, made way at once and the guards on the gates saluted briskly.
Illan took the log-paved roads of the more affluent Second Demesne at a swift pace, past a dozen naked bodies sprinting from a line of steaming bathhouses that smelled of herbs and the equal number of bucket-laden bodies sprinting toward the smoldering ruins of a nearby manor house. Fires were such a common occurrence in this city of tightly packed wooden structures that the wood merchants—peddling precut logs and roof shingles—were often on site before the flames had been brought completely under control. Illan ignored them all, passing through the First Gate without pause.
The central Imperial Demesne was, by contrast to the rest of the city, constructed almost entirely of white sandstone, from the encircling twenty-foot-high fortifications to the labyrinthine palace, which long ago had engulfed the orchards and gardens within its walls. Seeing-stone obelisk towers and wooden-and-stone-clad scrying chapels and shrines from tiny, altar-sized affairs to room-sized temples, dotted the riverbanks and clustered about Kitai’s city walls like mushrooms, but in the Imperial Demesne, they were particularly ornate.
This morning, court sorcerers of every ability clustered about a tall, fountainlike obelisk, paying close attention as a black horse, draped in tiny silver-and-golden bells, navigated a series of iron spears laid in an intricate pattern before the palace entrance. Illan paused a moment to note its progress, more out of simple curiosity than belief, then headed up the wide, stone steps that led to the Anise Bell Tower, the main hall of the Imperial Palace.
A hushed peace fell over him at once as he passed into the vaulted antechamber, and he relaxed slightly as the servant ushered him into the throne room and the presence of the Duc Bryv Dmitriviz of Volinsk.
Illan’s older brother was a large man of thirty-two years, tall and heavyset with muscular arms and shoulders and a thick mane of light brown hair that often fell into his eyes, mingling with long, dark lashes that were said to be the envy of the court. Beardless, as was the fashion for men in Kitai, he often forgot to shave, sporting a rakish shadow of whiskers across his cheeks that sparkled with a faint bronze glow in the sunlight. A great beauty herself, it was said that Tonja of Rostov had fallen in love with him after a single glance at his portrait. Together, by the sheer force of their charm and beauty, they ruled two fractious nations that had been at each other’s throats for centuries.
In private, his sister, Dagn had raised the cynical question of what happened when old age stole these fleeting attributes away, but Illan had shrugged philosophically. Anything that kept Volinsk and Rostov allied, even in the short term, would suit his own ambitions. After that, it wouldn’t matter; they had a son, it would be his problem.
Today, Bryv was alone in the throne room, watching the antics of a dozen small dogs who, obedient to a complex series of whistles from their handlers, were doing tricks on the brightly woven carpet before him, leaping and tumbling in the air, then falling down as if exhausted only to leap even higher moments later. Bryv’s expression was strained, but he nodded his head with polite appreciation as the handlers bowed at the end of the performance. Catching sight of his younger brother, he tossed the chief handler a small purse before dismissing them, then rose to embrace Illan warmly.
“You look pale; have a drink,” he ordered, gesturing at a servant who moved forward at once with a glass of thick red wine. “The winds off the marsh are dangerous this time of year, and you’ve been away from the capital too long to go without fortification.”
Illan accepted the glass absently, one eyebrow raised at the sight of the empty chair next to Bryv’s.
Throwing himself back into his own chair, his brother grimaced at him. “You’re the mighty sorcerer, you tell me,” he grated, attempting to mask the concern in his voice with a snarl.
Illan gave an elegant shrug. “Her Grace, your royal wife, the Duc of Rostov, is closeted with the heir,” he said simply. “Who’s had the entire palace in an uproar, dancing attendance on the distracted and unpredictable moods of his parents all week, because of a minor cough.”
Bryv showed his teeth at him. “Yes, that’s what his physicians keep saying—aside from the unpredictable mood comment—but Tonja thinks the spring air off the marsh has affected his chest.”
“What does his nurse say?”
Bryv snorted. “Croup.”
“Then it’s croup. Gleb nursed all three of us in our time, you, Dagn, and me. Gleb is always right.”
“That’s what I told Tonja. Still . . .” Bryv chewed at his thumbnail, staring into space. “Yes,” he said finally. “Croup. Nothing to worry about.”
“I’m glad we have that settled. Now, you sent for me, Your Grace,” Illan said, putting a mild emphasis on the title. “Was there something else you wanted?”
“What? Oh, yes.” Bryv straightened. “The Court Weather Sorcerers say the inlet’s finally free of ice.”
Illan snorted. “Strangely enough, the sailors aboard your scout ship, the Anaviz, which Your Grace sent out only this morning to check on conditions in the inlet, reported the same thing. And they didn’t have to rely on the musical pattern caused by a dozen white doves splattering on a dozen silver tea pots to discover it.”
Bryv chuckled. “Be kind,” he
chided. “We can’t all suffer from an excess of raw talent like you do.
“The point I’m making,” he continued before Illan could offer up another comment, “is that, if the weather continues mild, I could be prepared to order the fleet to depart within a fortnight, maybe sooner.”
Illan kept his expression carefully neutral. “And?” he asked politely.
Ignoring the tone of condescension that his brother was unable to mask completely, Bryv leaned forward. “And seven centuries ago,” he replied, the expression in his pale gray eyes intense, “the Duc Leold of Volinsk made war against Anavatan and the Warriors of the Battle-God Estavia sent his fleet to the bottom of the sea. Anise of Rostov used that defeat to take his life and take his throne. Since that time, no ruler has ever attempted such a move against Anavatan again.”
“Yes,” Illan acknowledged. “As we’ve been discussing all winter, Your Grace, the Anavatanon were a people to be reckoned with. Seven centuries ago.”
“But not now.”
“No. Now they’re distracted and divided and we’re allied with raiders and pirates of both ability and power.” Illan frowned at his brother. “I thought you’d closed the debate around the Anavatanon offensive. I’ve seen a spring of long-lasting storms and heavy fog to the south; so have your Weather Sorcerers. This will be to our advantage and to Anavatan’s disadvantage. Has some court sorcerer’s dancing bear or prancing pony foretold you otherwise?”
Bryv growled at him. “No,” he admitted. “As it happens, all of my people, from my Privy Council on down, agree that Anavatan is ripe for invasion. Although, I suspect it’s more because Rostov is now off limits, and they’re all bored after a long winter of inactivity, than because of any well-timed storms and foggy conditions.”
“We are a militant people,” Illan agreed with a mocking smile.
“Yes. The royal family particularly so. Speaking of which, you are to attend me at Council this afternoon.”