Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

by Jonathan Strahan

  Dimly he realizes someone new is shouting over the din, and that shouting is not words of encouragement either. He raises his head, sees through the grit a pair of dirty, perfectly formed feet.

  “STOP!!!” screams the Princess. The rest of her words, foreign, are lost to him.

  The feathered creature stops. The Hero struggles to his feet, wipes sweat from his eyes, finds his fighting stance, watches the other for his next move—and is utterly astonished by the fact that the creature has begun to dance. It’s a lively pace, a sprightly jig that seems to be designed to keep his feet from touching the earth—or, no, to get a bright red fox to let go of his legs.

  The Hero is touched beyond measure; Reynard has never fought for him before—and he is horrified to realize that means he must need him to.

  The creature stamps and shouts, still trying to shake Reynard off his lower legs. The Hero realizes he must try to attack the top half, the feathered cape, flaring into wings, the beaked head. Because of the fox dance, it’s hard to say where the feathered man will be from moment to moment.

  The creature is ignoring the Hero, now, concentrating on getting rid of Reynard. Which is good, because he’s afraid to come in too close, lest he hurt the fox by mistake. And besides, his sword has gotten awfully heavy. Must be the heat. The fox is a flurry of motion. The Hero is mesmerized by the dancing colors: foxfur rust, tailtip black, rainbow obsidian blade, ruby eye, feather black, rainbow blade, foxblood red—

  “No!” the Princess is shouting. Is she defending the Monster, or Reynard? He should give her his impossibly heavy sword after all, see how much luck she has with it. She’s lifting something dark and bright: the club they’d given him. She holds it high above her head, and flings it over both their heads, right at the feathered creature.

  It hits with a huge thud. The creature’s arms fly upward. Is it going to take off from the hillside? No; the obsidian blade goes sailing out instead. Empty-handed, the creature seems to shrink. It—he—falls forward, face-plants in the dust, head askew as the beak turns to one side, reaching for but never nailing the fox lying utterly still beside it.

  The Hero stands panting, gasping for water, no longer sure of his status. His sword feels right in his hand. The Monster is dead. Why is no one cheering and bringing him a drink?

  At his feet, a girl sits in the dust of the hillside, cradling a ragged bundle of red fur in her lap. She is crooning to it, and stroking its bloody pelt.

  IN THE END, he decides to return to Asteria.

  The King of Illyria is dead, slain on a dusty hillside by a mysterious stranger while out hunting for his missing daughter, to bring her back to her duty. The Princess will become Queen of the land, now—its first female ruler from this line of invaders. She is assured the throne by virtue of the support of the Shifters, whose rights she has vowed to sustain at the price of their sworn loyalty, and a tribute of seventy-seven jars of pumpkin jam each year.

  And she will be marrying an Outlander, a clever red-haired man with a beautiful voice, a nice line in verse, and a pronounced limp from a healing wound. Their time together in the storeroom had been short, but intensely romantic. The last of the Princess’s antipathy for Shifters had vanished away, and Reynard had realized two feet, when they were so well formed, were just as good as four.

  They asked him to stay, of course. He’d make a wonderful ornament to their court, and a godfather to their children. He could help train the new queen in fighting, and later her children, as well.

  But he is suddenly homesick for a place he never thought was home. He’d like to swim in the Asteria River again, and to fish in it, too. He’d like to sit in the orchards of Asteria, and pick apples from their trees. He’d like to taste the fine pastries of the Asterian court, and the sweet red wine.

  He’d like to see the Elector again.

  He takes two of the three hundred dromos from his purse, plus his winnings from last night’s game of something enough like euchre for him to have been successful with the younger set, and a gold hairpin from the grateful princess, and goes off to the Bazaar to see if he can find the Elector a really nice ruby ring.

  There will be a Bazaar. There always is.

  THE HIGH KING DREAMING

  DANIEL ABRAHAM

  THE HIGH KING is not dead but dreaming, and his dreams are of his death.

  The sun is bright in the blue expanse of sky, the meadow more beautiful than it had ever been in life because he sees it from above. The banners of the kingdoms he unified shift in the gentle breeze: Stonewell, Harnell, Redwater, Leftbridge, Holt. The kings who bent their knees before him do so again, and again with tears in their eyes. The Silver Throne is there, but empty. The scepter and whip lie crossed on its seat. His daughter, once the princess and now the queen, sits at its foot, her body wrapped in mourning grey. The pyre on which his body rests has no fuel beneath it. No acrid stench of pitch competes with the wildflowers’ perfume. His beard is white, bright in the sun, and as full as frost. His shoulders are thick, as are his arms and his thighs. His eyes are closed, but his lips hold the memory of a smile. The blade Justice rests on his chest, weighing him down in death as it had in life. His cold fingers hold it easily. He is like a statue of himself, and the legend still unwritten below him should be Grace and Power.

  He does not recall what brought him low, nor does it matter. He rose in an age of war when all nations stood against each other, and he forged peace. The Eighteen Peaks, snowcapped and bright in the spring sun, have not looked down on bloodshed in a decade. The keeps at Narrowford and Cassin store grain now. Any child may walk the Bloody Bridge at Hawthor and return across it at nightfall. Some lands he took at the point of a sword, some with a wise word, some by sharing grief with enemies who had expected their pain to draw forth only laughter, but with Justice in his hand and God in his heart, he remade the world into a better place than he had found it.

  All the events of adventures of his life have strung together like individual steps in a long march that they might bring him here. But that march is not done.

  In his dream, he sees the court’s cunning man, withered by years and buoyed up by an endless and sometimes vicious humor. He is wearing a robe of gold, as one might at a baby’s naming ceremony, and so he stands out among the mourners like a candle in darkness.

  “Do not weep!” he cries, waving a staff wrapped with sage at the crowd. “Do you wail and beat your breasts when your father naps? Then do not weep! Stand tall and quiet! Be quiet, or take yourselves to the yard and play your games there. There is no call for sorrow here!”

  King Abend of Holt rises, his hand on the hilt of his sword. “The High King lies dead, and you say there is no call to weep? What madness has taken you, old man?”

  “The madness of knowing too much,” the cunning man says. “The High King is not dead, but dreaming. He waits now in places beyond our sight, but he is not gone. All of history remains before us, and we have lost him now only because he must rest. When he is needed, the High King shall rise and Justice shall again protect the land.”

  His daughter looks up, and the devastation on her face falters. There is something like hope in her eyes. She looks to her father’s body, sobs again, and the cunning man’s staff raps her smartly on the shoulder. Smartly, but not hard.

  “Would you wake him already?” he asks, and his eyes are gentle. The girl who was once the princess and is now the queen smiles as she has not in days. Perhaps that has been the cunning man’s aim all along. She holds out her hand, and the cunning man kneels. She stands, her mourning robes made glorious by the sun and the sky, by her beauty and her gravity. She climbs to the Silver Throne, lifts scepter and whip in her hands, and takes the throne for the first time.

  One by one, they come before her. They bend their knees. They swear again the oaths they once swore to him. And to each of them, she says “When he is needed, he shall rise.” For some it is a comfort. For some it is a threat.

  The High King dreams, and his dreams m
ove on. Time is a different thing for him now, and he moves through it to places where the threads of fancy and prophecy are indistinguishable. He is aware of the meadow under a blanket of snow, and then he is not. He is aware of the sepulcher around him, dark and silent. Of his body, as cold and heavy as stone, and as immune to corruption. And then he is aware of nothing, not even of being unaware.

  The war boils around him suddenly. Men are dying in the fields where the crops should grow. He sees the obscene, dancing light from the fires that consume Harraw and Gant. The rich land outside the Keep of Stormcoast is barren, its woods chopped down for fires, its grain eaten by the besieging army. From the battlements of the keep, the banner of Leftbridge flies defiant. From the besieging forces, Holt. His bannermen stand one against the other, and the land is churned into a lifeless muck.

  His daughter sits the Silver Throne, looking half a child to him in the unkind morning light. Her skin is ashen, her eyes hold a weariness that speaks of her fright and her uncertainty. It is also night, and she is also with the cunning man, sitting on a low stool in his private study among the great webwork of his experiments. The High King wills his eyes to open, the dream to break. Even as he sees her rise from the throne, he tries to grip the pommel of Justice, as if the sword would pull him back to the world. He dreams that his fingers move and take their grip.

  “Stop,” his daughter says, and he imagines that she means him. Another voice answers her. The captain of his guard. Of hers.

  “Majesty?”

  “Bring her to me instead.”

  The captain is older than he was when the High King lived. His dark eyes are webbed by the marks of age and he has fewer teeth. His black hair is white. He nods, but does not turn away. “She has already been called to the gallows, Majesty.”

  “Then you should hurry,” his daughter says. Her voice carries a joyless mirth that he recognizes as once he recognized her other imitations of him. The captain hurries, his footsteps echoing. The night before, she looks up at the cunning man and says, “He isn’t here. I need him.”

  “If you needed him,” the cunning man says, “he would rise. If he is not risen, then this is not the need.”

  “I don’t know anything about war. I don’t know what he would do.”

  “Neither did he,” the cunning man says. “Not at the first.”

  The captain reaches the gallows and leads the prisoner away. The crows look down in disappointment not to have fresh eyes to peck or the taste of a woman’s tongue.

  “What would he have done?” the cunning man says, sucking at his teeth. He shrugs. “Ridden with blade in hand to the battle and enforced his will over any who stood in his way.”

  “I can’t do that,” she says. It is the whine of a child and also the sober assessment of a woman grown.

  “Then the question is not what he would do, but what you shall.”

  The prisoner kneels before the throne. Her hair is the same auburn as Abend of Holt’s. The line of her jaw is as his. The daughter of the rebel and the daughter of the unifier face each other, and the air between them holds its breath.

  “You are hostage to King Holt’s good behavior,” the queen says. “Unfortunately your father’s behavior leaves a great deal to be desired.” The night before, in the cunning man’s dark room, she scowls, her mind searching for something. If he is not risen, it is because this is not the need. The High King’s hand relaxes from around Justice’s hilt.

  “Yes, Majesty,” the hostage says.

  “He has sentenced you to death by his actions. Your life is mine.”

  “I understand,” she breathes.

  “Then take your life to Stonewell in my name. You will write a single letter to your father asking his surrender in return for what amnesty I see fit to grant. And inform him that if he refuses, you will become Queen of Stonewell, and all lands of Holt shall devolve to you and your husband upon his death. I will inform King Merrian of Stonewell likewise. Then we shall see if he can’t find the men to break this siege.”

  No, the High King thinks. Stonewell’s recalcitrance cannot be rewarded. If he has not come out in force to put down the rebellion, he must be punished. Justice demands loyalty, but the hostage bows her head.

  “Thank you, my queen.”

  “I’m sorry,” his daughter says. Her voice is petulant, reluctant, and still she puts her hand on the hostage girl’s shoulder. The girl begins to weep again.

  It is a mistake, and the echoes of it will haunt her. He is certain of it, but he can dream that he is wrong. And so he imagines that the war fades, and that the deaths of the soldiers and the wounding of the land become something else. Where the bloodshed was worst, the bodies of the fallen feed the brightest grass. The High King feels the growth as if it were rising from within him, a great, warm exhalation that does not stop. For a time, he is the land, and he is rich and fruitful. His own body, sealed in stone, does not fade. A mouse comes and makes its home in the crook of his arm. It lives its full span, giving birth to its young who scatter through the field and dying beside him, its thin bones against his still pale but eternal flesh.

  Songs are sung of him, and then songs are sung of the songs, changing every time until the words are like words written in dreams. The High King who brought the land together, who is the land, whose blood still flows in the veins of the queen and the water of the rivers. There is awe in the songs and reverence. And some smut as well. And some anger. He hears them all, seeing the events they recount as if they were true. He sees himself battling with Lord Souther, blade to blade, and remembers finding Souther’s body after the battle, crushed under his fallen horse. The truth and the exaggeration and the lies pour together, becoming something larger, richer, and true in ways that know nothing of fact.

  He is not dead but dreaming, they sing, and when the need comes, he shall rise.

  The captain of his guard dies from an autumn fever. King Erald of Leftbridge dies, and his son Cormin takes his throne. The cunning man does not die but passes into a twilight that leads him out of the world. The High King hears him laughing as he goes, and knows that the old man will never be seen again by mortal eyes. There is cruelty in the sound as much as sorrow. The High King dreams soft, pleasant dreams, until they turn to nightmares.

  A ray of warm sunlight heats the rich-smelling earth. Green wheat nods in the soft breeze. The distant buzz of an insect’s wing, and the High King feels shrill horror run through him. He tries to scream. The insect is no larger than the head of a pin. Its black carapace is split, its wings beating so quickly they cannot be seen. Its mouth is a sharpness. He hears it land on a stalk of wheat with a boom like great stones hurled against a castle wall. The inhuman mouth touches the soft, green flesh. In the fields, the farmers toil. In the cities, the merchants and traders make their negotiations. Only the dreaming king knows that it is too late, and his cry cannot be heard.

  The blight spreads like ink spilled upon a map. The sun sets upon rich fields, and rises to find them blackened and stinking. Throughout the land, the harvest fails. It has happened before. Starving springs have come and passed, but the next year is the same. Mothers make nettle tea for their babies because there is nothing else to drink. Boney cattle are slaughtered in their fields rather than let them suffer as their keepers do. Desperation smells like an empty pot left too long over the fire. He feels it in his breast, profound and sorrowful. Another blighted year, and the kingdoms will be peopled by bones. War is the only hope. A war not of justice, but necessity. A single dusty tear tracks from his closed eye. It is terrible, but it is needed. If it were only him, he might starve and die proud, but it is his daughter and the land she inherited from him. The time of need has come upon them, and he dreams with a bleak certainty that this is his waking hour.

  His dreams are of his daughter, her face gaunt, standing before her lords. Their condition fills him with dread. The great kings are shades of themselves, withered by hunger and by years. Only King Cormin of Leftbridge and Queen Sarya
of Stonewall and Holt who have never seen battle are hale enough to lead an army. His peace has lasted too long. There are no war leaders left but him. The irony is bitter.

  The banner of the enemy waves in the winter sun. Crimson and gold with a black star in its center. He does not know it. He sees the enemy, tall men—if they are men—with massive black eyes and ink worked into their skins. Their cheeks are too wide, their lips too thin. Their mouths are purple-black. And their teeth as sharp as a hound’s. They stand in the throne room, proud and stern. Cruel horns rise from the temples of their leader, and he wears armor of silk layered upon silk layered upon silk, strong enough to stop an arrow or a sword. His voice is human, his inflections strange, musical, and unsettling. With the logic of dreams, the High King knows these are hraki, but he does not know what the word means.

  Their leader shakes his horned head, as if in bewilderment at the High Queen’s words. Her kings stand arrayed about the Silver Throne, starving but stern.

  “Two more years, according to the cunning men,” his daughter says. Her face is thicker than it was, no longer a girl’s but a woman’s. Handsome and strong. She holds the scepter and whip with a forgetfulness born of long company. They are as much extensions of her body as a swordsman’s blade. “After that, our fields will be as rich as they were before. Our strength will return. But first we must weather those years. It will mean fodder for our horses and cattle. Grain for our people. Seed for our fields when the blight has run its course.”

  “And in return?” the hraki says, though he knows the answer.