by Matthew Ward
The other fell to her knees, hands shaking and eyes wide. Ice speckled her mantle and frosted her breath. “Get… Get away from me!”
Calenne stared at her hands, horrified. Bitter. Angry above all. At Erashel. At herself. At a fate that had left her thus, an inconstant figment with tenuous grasp on the world. An echo of the woman she knew herself to be.
Eyes closed, she screamed her throat raw and sought identity in the darkness.
Davenwood. Eskavord. Tarona. Nothing before, and everything since felt… Wrong.
Again, steel glinted in the darkness. She clung to the memory, stalked headlong into the gale of her fractured being. Pace by pace, it drove her back, into confusion. The slender moorings of her being shuddered and screamed.
And then she felt it. The strength that had filled her the night before. That had billowed to life on the road beneath Valna and taken the thrakker’s life. That had even brought her out of winter’s fever, wolves howling at the door. Thick. Rich. Dark. Blacker than night, and so swift that she shuddered with the joy of it. Muted sensation burst to vibrancy. The rich salt of the sea. The crash of wave on stone. The cold! Gods! But the cold! It was wonderful.
The recalcitrant memory crumbled beneath her hands, broken apart and forged anew amid the billowing black. The scent of smoke, hot and bitter. Flame licking red at leaded windows. And a dagger in her hand.
The world shuddered and shook. Calenne screamed and held fast to the memory, determined that it wouldn’t escape her again. When she looked up, she saw herself sat at a table, eyes unfocused as the other “her” drew close.
I couldn’t save you. I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry. The babble was Viktor’s and hers also, so thick with emotion as to be barely recognisable as either. I can at least spare you the fire. Forgive me.
She slid the dagger forward. The other Calenne didn’t flinch, didn’t scream. She tore free of the memory, of the pooling blood, of the rasping, heaving misery echoing about the cottage walls.
Viktor had killed her.
The realisation should have provoked sorrow. Anger. Something. There was only emptiness. And beneath it… not loss, but a peculiar sense of freedom.
Viktor had murdered her. He’d put a blade to her throat and run her red.
And yet, if he’d done that? If she’d died in Eskavord…?
How was she here?
Calenne’s eyes snapped open. Her reflection in the puddle stared back. Darker, bleaker, sharper. Her, but yet not, as if pieces of her being had peeled away with the illusion of self she’d borne so long. The illusions Viktor had woven about her. Of her. She hadn’t lost memories. She’d never possessed them. All she had was what Viktor knew. What Viktor had believed of his beloved Calenne, lost to the Dark.
She was the Dark.
Now she felt something. Laughter died as euphoria withered and cracked. Fury rode hard behind sorrow. She embraced it, let it soar. Her hands, ethereal no longer, raised Erashel to her feet.
The other woman’s eyes gaped. “Calenne?”
She smiled as the last of the illusion fell away. “No.”
It took no pressure at all in the end. Only the slightest shove. Then Lady Erashel Beral was gone, given to the rocks of Issamar, with nothing to mark her passing save a lingering scream.
Forty-Seven
Melanna stumbled into the ruined watchtower, glad to breathe air free of Otherworld’s melancholy. Even as she gathered herself, memory faded. Only the broadest strokes remained. Afterimages of jumbled streets, familiar and yet not. A viridian sky, blazing with light and shadow. And the lost souls of the dead in sombre procession. All fading into the past, where it belonged. Only the future mattered.
“Go,” said the Huntsman. “I will be waiting.”
She left him in the ruins, the mist-wreathed gate billowing at his back, and began the long descent to the Hadari encampment sprawled across the plain below.
There’d been no hiding the disaster at Sharnweald, not with corpse-barges lumbering downriver with ghastly cargo, or with columns of wounded wending into Tarvallion since noon the day before. They brought with them tales of skull-helmed spirits and mists that sucked the life clean out of shadowthorns – scant comfort to any true adherent of the Lumestran creed, nor to Zephan Tanor, who owed his life to the revenants’ intervention.
Church bells had rung through the night to hold those spirits at bay. Had it stopped there, Zephan wouldn’t have minded. Bells brought the solace of simpler times. But it hadn’t. In the Merchant’s Quarter, a priest – refusing to believe that the Raven had intervened for any righteous purpose – had taken to his pulpit and blamed the day’s evils, both real and exaggerated, on heretics hiding within the city. As ever, Zephan’s fellow Lunastrans had borne the brunt of suspicions – the mob had razed a temple and lynched three of the congregation before the overstretched constabulary had petitioned Izack for support.
Zephan had been part of the punitive expedition. What flicker of shame he’d felt at drawing steel on civilians had faded upon sight of their terrified victims. His people, marked as different by the invisible line of divergent faith.
Essamere green had sent the rabble-rousers scurrying back to their houses, the call for martyrdom muted by Izack’s decision to hang the priest. And then, just before dawn, orders had come down from the reeve that Tarvallion was to be abandoned.
Thus Zephan, sore from battle and bone-weary from a broken night, found himself in command of Tarvallion’s Holdergate garrison. Two dozen men and women struggling to bring order to refugees blown in on a heather-scented wind. These newcomers brought rumours of their own. Not just of revenants and mist, but wood-demons that walked like men, and the war-slain dead disinterred from shallow graves. Zephan had taken to the wall as much to escape their stories as the stale press of bodies.
“I can’t believe we’re leaving without a fight,” said Shalan. “We could hold long enough for relief.”
“That’s what they thought at Ahrad, and at Tregga,” Zephan replied. “The city can be rebuilt.”
Even as he spoke, he wondered if it was true. Tarvallion was more than a city, it was the Republic’s opaline heart, where everything from the outer wall to the great cathedral of Tremora Gardens was fashioned with love and grace long-lost to Tressia itself. Tarvallion was a vision of the Republic at its best. What it was meant to be. Such things were not simply rebuilt.
“Not if it’s cursed,” Shalan replied. “Old Vannard rode out to Greyfields last night. Half those who went with him didn’t come back. The lychpath trees tore ’em apart.”
Zephan shot him a glare. “You know better than to spread rumours.”
“Yes, sir.” The squire’s expression soured in hurt. “With your permission, I’ll take a turn at the gate.”
Zephan nodded as Shalan walked stiffly from the wall. He’d spoken harsher than he’d intended, but times were dangerous enough without feeding disquiet. That the reeve had ridden out to the swollen burial ground of Greyfields – at dead of night, atop all else – was bad enough. Worse was that the dawnlit eaves of Starik Wood were closer than at dusk the day before.
Hallowsiders knew better than to ignore such things.
Chasing away a shiver, Zephan stared down at a grubby procession beneath the gate. Most were hooded and shawled against the cold. A few led pack horses or small carts, carrying anything too precious to be left to the Hadari advance.
Shalan moved among them, two guardsmen of the 16th at his back. The Essamere tabard calmed the crowd, voices raised in dismay falling subdued.
Taking a deep breath, Zephan strove for stillness, and found more than he’d sought. The subtle heather perfumes of the breeze easing fraught nerves. A piece of him resisted, distrusting the calm. The rest drifted away on gossamer clouds.
“Demon!”
Those clouds parted before Shalan’s shout, their sickly-sweet residue more alarming than the cry. Zephan ran to the rampart’s inner edge just as a refugee’s woollen cloak disintegr
ated in a storm of thrashing black fronds. The soldier to Shalan’s right was on her knees, expression agape with addled wonder. The one to his left collapsed, flesh and garb slashed to ribbons.
Shalan swung at the demon’s head. The wild blow tore away the tattered folds of the creature’s disguise, laying bare dark stems woven to a woman’s form, seething and twisting. A mask of white clay rested where the face should have been, the beatific features marred by a jagged crack running chin to brow. Behind sprouted a mane of vines abloom with black roses. Fronds lashed at shoulder and arm, dragging Shalan into a bloody embrace.
Zephan froze, reactions fogged by impossible recognition. Not a demon. A thornmaiden. A daughter of Fellhallow. He knew the tales by heart. The rhymes. The prayers. But to see one in the twisted, briared flesh…
Thorns burrowed beneath armour’s joins. Shalan’s whimpers faded. His body dropped. Screams filled the air as the crowd fled the carnage. But not all. Refugees and soldiers fell to their knees, senses adrift on the thornmaiden’s pollen. Their expressions didn’t even flicker as she tore them apart. Some even smiled as their killer’s dizzying, giggling laughter spiralled about them.
That sound spurred Zephan to his wits. As the thornmaiden passed beneath, he plunged from the rampart and landed atop her. Laughter turned shrill as his sword sank into briared flesh, the weight of impact driving steel deep. She staggered. Thorns lashed about Zephan’s limbs and hurled him away. His head chimed on cobblestone, the dizziness of impact wedded to that of the thornmaiden’s intoxicating scent.
She bore down, knocking the slack-jawed masses aside. Treacly sap pulsed from the broken fronds at her shoulder, the sword still deep in her knotted flesh. Black petals fell like rain.
{{You hurt me.}} There was more wonder in the tone than anger. {{Oh, we will have so much fun.}}
Zephan’s urge to rise – to fight – floated away on sweet clouds.
{{Come. Lie with me in the green.}}
She crouched, the cracked perfection of her face level with his. Zephan felt no pain as thorned fingertips split the skin of his cheek, only a sense of loss as they withdrew.
The thornmaiden started to her feet, tendrils thrashing in alarm. Then she was gone, snatched from sight. Laughter gave way to a screech of pain, and a chorus of cracking twigs. Golden light drove the clouds from Zephan’s thoughts.
“Rise up, son.” A rough hand dragged Zephan to his feet. “Lumestra abhors idleness.”
Zephan blinked and bowed his head as a face snapped into focus. “High Proctor, I…”
Tapping his sun-staff on the ground, High Proctor Ilnarov stared above Zephan’s head, where the thornmaiden thrashed and railed, helpless in a kraikon’s bear hug. Mouldered bone showed through torn fronds, scarlet blood mingling with sap. “Disgusting.”
{{Insolent meat!}} she screamed. {{Release me!}}
Ilnarov’s hand went to the lionhead amulet at his neck. “A touch tighter, if you please, Henrik.”
Light sparked behind the kraikon’s eyes. Metal groaned. The chorus of breaking twigs renewed. The thornmaiden howled and went silent. Kraikons might fall motionless in the mist, or if cowed by Ashana’s servants, but the demons of Fellhallow had no grip upon them. Not all that was divine was equal, nor entirely holy.
“Thank you.”
“It used to be a woman,” Zephan said softly. “The Hallowsiders, we… they… give their criminals to the forest. Their dead. Sometimes their children. Tribute for Lord Jack and a good harvest. This is what comes back…”
All around, men and women shook to their senses, their eyes awash with emptiness.
Ilnarov’s gaze didn’t waver from the captive thornmaiden. A scholar’s examination, curious and contemplative. “Fascinating. We walk with dream and nightmare. I don’t know if I should rejoice or scream. I might find time for both later.”
He hoisted his sun-stave to the thornmaiden’s chest. Golden light blazed. She writhed, her crackling scream fading as fronds blackened to ash. Zephan shuddered, visions of old banishings rising to the fore. The ribbons on the village well. The garlands at the forest border. The sound of pipes and fiddle as spears goaded the condemned over the border.
Had he known the woman she’d been?
At the end, the thornmaiden sounded almost human. When the screams stopped, char tumbled from the kraikon’s outspread hands. Zephan’s sword clanged on the cobbles.
“Well,” said Ilnarov. “That’s done with. Keep this lot moving, would you? She won’t be the last.”
Melanna encountered no challenge as she made her way through the encampment, and the bright braziers of ghostfire set to hold at bay the creatures of the mists. Surrendering her sword to the Immortals standing guard, she parted the flaps of her father’s tent and passed inside. Like coming home, and yet not. The fabric, the adornments. The smells and sounds of campaign. All as familiar as the rhymes she’d sung as a girl, and yet different. She was different. Her home, but she was a stranger, separated from the past by her father’s lies.
Swallowing a sudden sense of loss, she brushed aside the inner flap.
Her father stood at a table, the map spread wide and decked with clusters of coins. Devren, as ever, was at his shoulder, sweltering beneath his bear pelt in the tent’s musty air. Elspeth stood behind, arms folded.
She scowled as her gaze rose to meet Melanna’s. “Oh, it’s you.”
Melanna’s father glanced up from the map, his expression holding all the welcome Elspeth’s had lacked. “Daughter. You’ve returned.”
His smile eroded a measure of the distance haunting Melanna’s thoughts. “My Emperor.”
“You’re very formal.”
“I should be,” she replied bitterly. “The mountains east of Vrasdavora are ours, but the bulk of the garrison escaped. A day, maybe two, and they’ll join with the others.”
“I see.” The warmth faded from his expression. “How did this happen?”
She’d dwelled on what answer to give, worried over her twin failures of resolve and temper. But in the end, there was only one possible reply. “They proved themselves our better. We brought death, and they showed us courage.”
Devren snorted. “Because we sent a woman.”
She rounded on him, the shackles slipping from her tongue. “I had men enough in my ranks who couldn’t prevail against the women on the walls. I wish you had been there, Devren. So you could have seen what I saw.”
“And what, pray, is that?”
“That those who fight for survival will ever have the advantage over those who fight for lies.”
“We fight for the Goddess,” snapped her father. “To excise the Dark.”
“There is no Dark in Tressia, Father. You’ve always known, and you kept it from me. As you’ve kept so much from me.”
For the first time in the wan light of the tent, Melanna realised how grey he’d become since their last parting. A mountain still, but worn by wind and rain. Then he gathered himself in anger, no longer her father, but the Emperor she’d failed.
“I will speak with my daughter alone.”
Devren’s eyes flitted from Melanna to her father. Then he bowed and retreated from the tent. Elspeth followed, disdain never leaving her features. The Emperor’s silence lingered. The unspoken disapproval that had haunted so much of Melanna’s childhood. The sign of a line in the sand that could not easily be re-crossed. Her fault, for losing her temper.
Her father eased the moonsilver crown from his brow and laid it atop the map. “You forget your place. Devren has shared my battlefields since long before you were born. He deserves your respect.”
“And I deserve his.” She sighed. “Can we begin again?”
A muscle twitched in his cheek. “I am pleased to see you well, daughter. Scars and all.”
Melanna traced the ridged, crusted scabs upon her cheek. Small harms, barely noticed in the taking. The worst ached beneath armour and robes – those earned brawling with Orova or duelling with Naradna.
&
nbsp; “They’ll heal.”
“How do you know about the Dark?”
“I had suspicions. Haldrane confirmed them.” Melanna hesitated. “So did Ashana.”
His breathing quickened. “She lives?”
“She endures. She knows her mistake – the error your lies encouraged – and wants the war ended. She believes you’ll refuse. I promised her otherwise.”
“You accuse me of lying to the Goddess? You think I’d dare?”
“What is a lie but an omission of truth? I never realised how good you were at that.”
“Truth is complicated. I don’t expect you to understand.”
Melanna laughed bitterly. “I understand well enough. Women do not bear swords. How many times have I heard those words? And now I find that our ranks are thick with women who do precisely that. Our tradition was always a lie. Can you imagine what it would have meant to know that? To know that I wasn’t alone?”
“Those deceivers shame their families,” he growled.
“They fight for their families,” Melanna replied. “As for honour, are you better? This war began with a lie. Let it end with truth. Parley with the Tressians.”
“Why? Because I lied to you about the Dark? Are you so vain?” His fist slammed down on the table, setting coins dancing. “This is what you wanted! A chance to prove yourself! And now you come to me in failure and demand? Did I raise so spoilt a child?”
Melanna’s cheeks warmed. “I’ve nothing more to prove to you, or to the Golden Court. I realised that when I came to blows with a woman forced to a lie so she could embrace her truth. This is not about my pride!”
“Then what is it about?”
“Survival! The Raven stands with the Tressians, and I know you’ve bargained with Jack.” A scowl banished the horrors of Vrasdavora back to memory. “What began as an ephemeral war is turning divine. It will consume us all. We started this, you and I. We can end it.”
“This is what Ashana believes?”
“It is.”
“That explains why her daughters have deserted me.” He scowled. “Only Elspeth remains loyal. More loyal than my own blood, it would seem. Why doesn’t the Goddess tell me herself?”