Cheysuli 7 - Flight of the Raven

by Jennifer Roberson

  "Freely, or because you are constrained by blood and heritage?"

  "Freely, of course." Aidan spread his hands. "But the choice is hardly a true one… what other path is open to me?"

  "Many paths are open to you. Any number of them will seem easier than the true path awaiting you. Your life is very young, Aidan… do not judge what has gone before as the measure of what will come. You may despise the gods before your time on earth is done."

  Aidan disagreed politely. "I think not, kinsman."

  Donal arched black brows. "Innocence speaks hastily."

  Disgusted, Aidan scowled at him—this meeting with yet another dead kinsman was as obscure as all the others—then marveled that he dared. Donal had been dead for many years. "I have been properly raised, my lord Mujhar. You need have no fear your son has failed in his duty, nor his son… I will do whatever the gods ask of me."

  "And if they ask your life?"

  "They asked yours," Aidan retorted. "And you gave it."

  Sorrow altered Donal's face. He briefly touched a lir-band—wrought gold depicting wolf and falcon—then let the hand fall away. "I gave it. But my lir were dead… I wanted no empty life, no madness. Better to die whole, knowing, than die a lirless madman."

  Aidan shivered, though he was not cold. Out of habit he moved to pull the shroud to cover his nakedness, and as he did so he heard the chiming of links falling. He stopped himself from touching the chain.

  He looked squarely at Donal. "You are my great-grandsire."

  "Aye."

  "Then I ask a kinsman's boon." Aidan took a deep breath. "Tell me what I must do. Tell me what I must become."

  Donal, backlighted now by sunlight, though the barge had not turned, was only a silhouette. Aidan could no longer see his features. But he saw the pole shrink, swallowing itself, until it was a sword in the hand of its master. The point was set through one of the links; lifted, the chain dangled. Aidan stared, transfixed, as the chain was carried closer.

  Donal tipped the sword. The chain slid off steel and landed in Aidan's silk-swathed lap. "I cannot tell you what to do. The gods constrain me from that. But I can tell you what you must become."

  Aidan wrenched his gaze from the chain so close to his manhood to the shadowed face of his kinsman. "Tell me, then."

  Donal's eyes were oddly serene. "You must become Aidan," he said gently. "Not Aidan of Homana; Aidan the prince; Aidan, son of Brennan, grandson of Niall, great-grandson of Donal." He smiled. "You must simply become yourself."

  "But I am all those things! How can I not be?"

  "That is your choice."

  Aidan put out a shaking hand and touched the chain in his lap. "Is it?" he asked. "Is it my choice… or the gods?"

  But when he looked up, hoping for an answer, a word, anything, Donal—and the sword—was gone.

  He jerked awake with a gasp. His chest felt heavy, empty, as if it had been sat upon for a very long time. He shuddered once, gulping air spasmodically, then opened his eyes and saw Hart's haggard face.

  Breath flowed slowly back into his body, filling his chest until he thought he might burst. Then he swallowed forcibly, working his flaccid mouth, and managed to ask a question.

  At first, Hart only stared. And then he muttered several things, including a leijhana tu'sai Aidan understood was for the gods, rather than for him, which he found oddly amusing. Quietly, he waited.

  "Do you know," Hart said shakily, "I had composed it in my head? But the idea of putting it down on paper…"He shook his head, then abstractedly pushed silvering hair out of his eyes. "How could I tell Brennan? How could I make the words?"

  Aidan smiled faintly. "No need now." He swallowed. "How long, su'fali?"

  "Four days," Hart answered raggedly. "I thought we had lost you. I thought both of you—" He wiped his hand across his face, older now than before. "How could we have been so blind to him? To bring him into our home, into my daughter's bed—" He stood abruptly and turned rigidly away, as if he could not face Aidan. His voice was muffled. "Blythe swears she will kill herself."

  Shock and revulsion turned Aidan cold. Suicide was taboo.

  The dignity was stripped from Hart's voice, leaving behind a father's fear and anguish. "She swears the only way to undo her transgression is to destroy the body itself."

  Aidan sighed wearily. "Then she is a fool indeed, and not fit to be Cheysuli."

  It jerked Hart around. "How can you say—?" But he understood at once. "Oh. Aye. Perhaps if she looked at it that way…" He resumed his seat once more. "I think—I hope—once the shock has passed she will be more rational After all, both Ian and Brennan survived—"

  "—and Keely." Aidan was oddly light-headed. "Su'fali—four days?" It felt like only an hour. It felt like four years.

  Hart nodded. "At first I thought the earth magic too weak to destroy the poison. But this morning the fever broke."

  Aidan reached for an itchy face and felt stubble. He grimaced in distaste; he detested his propensity for growing a beard. It felt oddly unclean. Or perhaps merely too foreign, evoking his other bloodlines.

  Hart's smile was strained. "The Homanan in you. Brennan and I are smooth as a baby—" He broke it off. Only the closed eyes gave away his grief, and then he opened them again. New lines etched his flesh.

  Aidan glanced around. He was in the guest chamber allotted to him. The room was empty save for Hart, who sat in a heavy chair beside the bed.

  Teel.

  Here. The raven briefly fluttered wings; he perched, as always, on the canopy. Rest yourself, lir… I am here.

  Awareness reasserted itself; Aidan looked sharply at Hart. "The Ihlini?"

  "Gone. Blythe's scream brought servants… Tevis—no, Lochiel—dared not remain. Too many Cheysuli." Hart's tone was grim. "He took his leave as so many of them do: in smoke and purple fire."

  Aidan was, abruptly, in the audience chamber, holding a tiny infant only barely named. He recalled the insignificant weight; the crumpled, sleeping face; the hope for continuity.

  He recalled also the look of pride and peace in Hart's face as he had named Tevis second-father.

  The pain was greater than expected, because it was twofold. The kivarna gave him that; he experienced his own grief while also echoing Hart's.

  Aidan drew in a deep breath. He could think of no words worth the saying. So he said the obvious ones. "I am sorry, su'fali."

  "I know." A slight gesture closed the topic. A right-handed gesture, since he had no left.

  And suddenly Aidan's fear and anguish was for himself. He thrust his left hand into the air, staring at it fixedly. It was swathed in bandages. He remembered, with unwanted clarity, the vision of steel piercing flesh, slicing too easily through skin and blood and muscle, dividing even bone.

  "Is it whole? Oh, gods, su'fali—is it whole?"

  Hart drew in a deep breath. "Whole," he said, "but damaged."

  "How damaged?" All he could see was the old pain in Hart's eyes whenever he spoke of a clan no longer his. Would he share it, now? "Will I have the use of it?"

  "I cannot say."

  Aidan struggled upright. "Cannot, or will not? Are you trying to save me grief? Trying to save me the realization—?"

  Hart's face hardened. "I told you the truth, Aidan. No one knows. The hand is whole, but damaged. You may or may not recover the use of it. I promise you nothing at all."

  "A maimed warrior has no place in the clans," Aidan quoted numbly.

  Pain and anguish flared afresh in Hart, with such virulence that it smashed through Aidan's awareness like a mangonel stone. "No," he agreed.

  Aidan slumped back against bolsters. Strength and fear and comprehension spilled out of him like a bag of grain emptied. He had not wanted to pass the pain to Hart yet again. Ihlini poison had left him weak. "But," he said quietly, "I am still a prince, as you are, with a place at the Lion's side, with a hand or without."

  When he could, Hart smiled. "Aye."

  "The gods will have to be conte
nt with me as I am—they gave me the burden." Aidan's eyes drifted closed. "Where are my links?"

  "Your links?"

  Eyes remained closed. "The links on my belt." He was naked beneath the coverlet, as he had been on the bier.

  "They were put away. Do you want them?"

  "No. Just to know they are safe." Because there will be a third to come. There must be; I met Donal.

  "Aidan."

  All he could do was grunt.

  "Shall I arrange to send you home once you are feeling stronger?"

  It made sense. He wanted to go. He had very nearly died—he would like to see home again, and all of his kinfolk—

  —but his great-grandsire Donal had come to set him back on the proper path.

  "No," he managed to whisper. "There is Erinn yet to see."

  So, Teel observed, you did not lose all of your wits.

  Sluggish irritation. Only the use of a hand.

  Teel, to do him credit, did not respond to that. He merely tucked his head under a wing.

  Blythe came, as he expected. She came as he put the last of his possessions into his saddle-packs, and stood just inside the door. Even in her bleakness, he thought her beautiful.

  Right-handed, he closed the flap on the saddle-pack and looped the thong loosely through the buckle. Then he looked at Blythe.

  Her hands, in skirts, were rigid. He wished he could do the same. "They said—" She stopped. "They said it does not move."

  "The hand moves," he corrected. "Even the thumb, a little. But the fingers are mostly useless." Aidan forbore to look. He knew what it was, under the bandages. He had examined it most carefully when it was clear the healing was done.

  She lifted her head a little. "Will it make you kin-wrecked?"

  It took everything he had to answer casually, so as not to display the fear. "Probably."

  Color flared in her face. "How can you sound like that—as if it makes no difference? As if you hardly care? You have only to look at my father to know what it means… the pain he has to live with—all because of a gods-cursed ancient custom in a race too blind to see that a man can be a man even if he lacks a hand—"

  "I know," he said tightly.

  "Then how can you stand there and shrug so elegantly, wearing all your gold, when you know what they might do—and to the man who will be Mujhar!"

  "I know," he said again.

  Tears glittered. "Know what?"

  "How badly it hurts."

  Blythe had cut her hair. She clawed at it now; it barely touched her shoulders. "He told me what you said. That I was not fit to be a Cheysuli. Not worthy of the taboo."

  "No. Only a lirless man can accept the death-ritual, or there is no honor in the death."

  "Honor!" she snapped. "What honor is left to me? I have been defiled—"

  Aidan shook his head. "All you were, was tricked."

  "I lay with an Ihlini!"

  "Do you know who he is?"

  Blythe blinked. "What?"

  "Do you know who he is? The man you believed was Tevis?"

  Clearly, she did not have the slightest idea what he meant. "Of course I know who he is. He told us: Lochiel."

  "Strahan's son," Aidan said, "who is nephew to Rhiannon, who is our great-uncle's daughter."

  "What?" Blythe snapped. "What has this to do with anything?"

  Aidan shrugged. "I thought I spoke clearly enough."

  "But none of this makes sense—"

  "Does it not?" He shrugged again. "I thought I had just named off a generation or two of our birthlines."

  "Aidan—"

  Sympathy dissipated. "By the gods, Blythe, you are not the first Cheysuli—or the first of our line—to lay with an Ihlini! Ian did it first. Then Brennan, my father… then Keely, my aunt. And all of them tricked, Blythe. D'ye hear what I'm telling you?"

  She shouted back at him. "Do you expect me to like it? Do you expect me to be proud? Do you expect me not to care?"

  "No," he said softly. "I expect you to survive."

  She swallowed painfully. "He wanted me for the throne."

  "And for a son," he told her. "I know, Blythe—I know it hurts to realize you have been tricked, been used… but it could have been much worse."

  "Worse?" She was aghast. "He killed a three-day-old baby!"

  "But not you. Not Dulcie, or the twins. Not your mother or father. Think again, Blythe… it could have been much worse."

  "He would have killed us all. You were there. He wanted my father first—"

  "Because he was discovered." Aidan sighed; he still tired easily. "Had I not uncovered who he was, Owain's death would have been remarked as a sad, tragic thing—no true-born heir for Solinde. But Hart made it clear there was an alternative—your child, Blythe… your son by Tevis of High Crags. Lochiel did not come here planning to murder everyone for the throne, but to marry for the throne."

  Her lips were pressed flat. "Is that supposed to please me?"

  Aidan picked up the saddle-pack. "Perhaps not, just now. Perhaps all you can see is the humiliation you feel because you bedded an Ihlini."

  Anger flared forth. "Save your compassion, Aidan. You do not know what it was like."

  "What it was like?" He threw down the saddle-pack. "I'll tell you, then, so we'll both be knowing about it: you bedded him willingly. It was probably your idea, so you could be putting an end to the unwanted suit of an unwanted kinsman come from Homana to find a bride. And that, my highborn Solindish, is why you're so angry now!"

  Color peeled away. White-faced, Blythe stared as the tears ran down her face. Her chin trembled minutely. "I am ashamed," she whispered. "Oh, gods—so ashamed!"

  For the first time since he had arrived, Aidan touched Blythe. And the kivarna remained silent.

  "I know," he said as softly, as she moved into his arms. "Shansu, meijhana—I know."

  "I want to die," she whispered. "Oh, gods—I want to die—"

  He stroked her ragged hair. "Your parents have lost three children. Are you wanting to steal another?"

  A shudder wracked her body. "I want it back the way it was. The way it was before he came."

  "The Wheel of Life has turned."

  With a quiet, deadly vehemence, "Then the gods are very cruel."

  Aidan looked over her shoulder at the hand that would not work. "Sometimes," he agreed sadly.

  Thinking of the Weaver, who let so many die so the Wheel could turn again.

  PART III

  Chapter One

  « ^ »

  He rode westward, bound for Andemir on the wild coast of Solinde battered by the Idrian Ocean. There he would take ship to Kilore, where the Aerie of Eagles perched upon the white chalk cliffs of Erinn, overlooking the Dragon's Tail. He had heard much about Kilore from his mother and from Deirdre; he wondered if it would fit.

  Teel flew overhead. Will you not marry the girl?

  Aidan frowned skyward, but thick trees screened the raven. The plains were far behind; all he could see was forest and the track stretching before him, sheltered by foliage. Blythe? No. At least, not just now. There is the possibility of a child… all of us agreed it would be best to wait. He paused, thinking of Blythe as she had been, alive with love for Tevis, and the Blythe he had seen at the last, devastated by Lochiel. She needs time. The worst thing for her would be to enter into a marriage just now. She associates me with Lochiel. Once I am back from Erinn, and if there is no child, then we might think of marriage.

  Are children not desired?

  Aidan wondered how he might explain things to a raven, whose understanding of human things was not always perfect. The lir were very wise, but not omniscient.

  Finally he gave him an answer. Preferably my own.

  There is the prophecy, Teel said lightly. Two magic races united…

  Ruddy eyebrows ran up under hair. Are you saying I should marry Blythe, even if she bears an Ihlini halfling? It was the last thing he expected a lir to advocate.

  Should, or should not, Teel
said, is your choice to make.

  As always. Aidan scowled in the raven's general direction. Why should that change now?

  Teel made no answer to his lir's irritation, though smugness thrummed through the link.

  Aidan thought about it. Two magic races, indeed. How else to merge the bloodlines than by bedding an Ihlini?

  Inwardly, he quailed. For Ml he had offered solace to a frightened, angry cousin, he did not wish what had happened to her to be a thing he faced.

  "That gods-cursed ring," he said suddenly. "I should have gotten it from him. Somehow. Some way. That gods-cursed ring of my jehan's has been the bane of us all."

  He looked down at his left hand. He wore no rings on it, because he saw no sense in ornamenting a useless finger. No longer bandaged, the hand was obviously a hindrance rather than a helpmeet. The fingers had begun to curl as severed tendons died, but not all equally. The Tooth had sliced through vertically, so that the cut ran across his palm from fingers to heel. He had partial use of his thumb, and a bit in the smallest finger, but the other three were too damaged. Each day they twisted more tightly. Eventually what had been a hand would become an awkward claw.

  Aidan tucked the hand into one thigh, trying to ignore it. But his belly squirmed unpleasantly. The fear he had fought back since learning of his injury rapped yet again at tightly sealed shields.

  I am not so brave, he thought hollowly. All my studied nonchalance when Blythe shouted at me was nothing but affectation. I do care, almost too much—I do not want to be kin-wrecked. I do not want to be Hart, left outside the clans. I lack his kind of courage—

  Almost against his will, he tried to fist the hand. All it did was spasm and send pain the length of his arm.

  "I cannot go home," he said aloud. "If I do, they will know—everyone will know… and then they will take my name off the birthlines in Clankeep. A kin-wrecked man, I'd be—what kind of Mujhar is that?"

  Lir, Teel asked, do you ever plan to stop? Or will you ride through the night?

  "Through the night!" Aidan snapped, then cursed himself for a fool. What good would it do to rail at his lir? Teel knew as well as he how helpless he felt, how frightened he was of being kin-wrecked.