Only Anakerie knew it was the most artful of forgeries. The original she’d given to Thorn as a keepsake, a pledge of feelings neither of them dared admit, much less name.
About her throat was gold, a torque of Maizan workmanship that proclaimed both her rank and her relationship to their castellan. It was said that once donned, this collar could never be removed, symbolizing an eternal bond of fealty and devotion. At each end were set a pair of exquisitely carved fire chips, a rare form of ruby that used the warmth of living bodies to generate a radiance all its own. The effect wasn’t terribly apparent in a room with ambient light, but in shadow they gave the disconcerting impression of two sets of glaring predatory eyes.
Her gown was off the shoulders, a shallow scoop neck that hinted at the hollow of her breasts, long-sleeved and cut as much for comfort as for style. It was a gown that moved easily on her, but that left no confusion as to Anakerie’s status. Its color was a blue so rich it shimmered in the light as though its threads were actually spun crystal. Every so often a wayward beam struck one like a prism and found itself shattered into a myriad of component colors.
The entire assemblage was on their best behavior, true feelings locked away in the recesses behind tightly shuttered eyes or masked by ready smiles and glib exchanges. The laughter was genuine, because many of those present knew how to work a room, and which jokes were appropriate for the occasion. Among the direst of enemies there were always topics of common ground: the best way to train a horse, or hunt wild boar, or that most hoary and venerable of standbys, the weather. Here, the Maizan even found themselves the object of some expressions of genuine sympathy; for hard as the winter was proving in Sandeni, the general presumption was that it must be far more brutal on the open range.
Dinner was served, and eaten. Toasts were made, and returned. Light conversation, especially at the high table, marked the beginning of forthcoming negotiation as Anakerie and the Sandeni Chancellor tried for a better sense of the other. They weren’t talking positions, or terms, nothing of any substance pertaining to the conference to come. This was far more important. They had never met, they knew of each other solely by reputation, their goal tonight was to divine some insight into how the other thought. Was it an intuitive mind or a linear one, given to rational deduction or leaps of flash and fancy, calmly imperturbable or prone to excess? Did he play a deliberative game of chess, did she prefer a timed game? Did they prefer chess at all, or poker?
There were discreet questions about Mohdri. He had actively led the Maizan until the fall of Angwyn, in the forefront of every major battle as well as every negotiation. He’d been seen rarely since.
Anakerie smiled, a surface expression honed and perfected by long practice, that gave not the slightest hint of her true thoughts or feelings. Three years ago she had seen Mohdri fall, impaled on the horns of a stag, crushed beneath the body of his fallen, dying horse. The wounds were mortal, yet within the hour of that moment she saw him on his feet, directing his troops, apparently fully recovered. When she first met Thorn Drumheller in the dungeons below her father’s palace, he had told her of a deadly threat to the life of Elora Danan and the safety of her kingdom. She hadn’t believed him. Looking into Mohdri’s eyes after that final battle, when Thorn and Elora had made their escape, she realized that she was looking at a masquerade. The body was Mohdri’s, every gesture and word identical with the man she had once almost loved, but the soul was something else. She understood then why Thorn called his adversary the Deceiver.
Although he had a body and the temporal power it commanded, the Deceiver made little use of it. He gave the governance of the Maizan to Anakerie, but although she’d earned a place among them as a child, the only girl ever to do so, and distinguished herself in a score of campaigns, she had to prove herself to them all over again. She was glad to do so. Those duels proved the ideal outlet for the rage and grief over the loss of her city and her father that threatened even now to consume her.
This was none of her making but she swore to make sure as few would suffer from it as was humanly possible. In the past the Maizan had been excellent conquerors but poor rulers. They were forever losing through ignorance and plain stupidity what they had fought so valiantly to take. She set out to change that. She established a code of justice that was fair to all, and found the warriors to enforce it honestly. Again and again she pounded through the thick skulls of her generals that there was more honor and glory, and ultimately profit, in taking a city whole rather than in ruins. The farther they expanded, the harder it would become to control the land they already held. To succeed, to survive, the Maizan needed loyal allies at their back. It was a hard lesson for a people whose paramount precept had always been to trust no one outside their own.
Through all the work, the battles with those foes determined to fight, the deadlier struggles within her own ranks, one face comforted her. Not the one she would have expected to strike a flame in her heart, not in a million years. She could number the times they’d met on the fingers of a single hand, yet she knew his face, the gentle radiance of his soul, would be a comfort to her till she died. His was the face she searched for as she rode into Kinshire, as she had made her entrance past the guests. She knew he was in Sandeni, she had a volume of comprehensive reports from field agents as testament to that. At the same time she was glad he wasn’t here.
As Anakerie, she loved him. As Warlord of the Maizan, she was his sworn enemy. By direct order of the Castellan himself, he was to be slain on sight, he and all his companions. Only Elora Danan was to be taken alive and unharmed.
Despite the best efforts of her spies, however, and her cadre of Black Rose assassins, the Sacred Princess was apparently nowhere to be found.
Then the Household Chamberlain appeared and with the third rap of his seven-foot staff of office on the polished floor, conversation quickly faded, ushered away by a hurried flash of whispers as those who knew what was to come gleefully alerted those who did not.
Duguay led the way, gloriously colored, a rainbow walking, so bedecked in bows and tassels and ribbons that one clueless wag likened him to a drapery shop. He took large steps, confident of his feet’s ability to take him anywhere he wanted to go, and the broad smile he gave the audience along with a languorous bow of greeting made women swoon and even the pulses of a few gentlemen beat a hair faster. Then, a reverse of position and a second bow, to the patrons of the night’s entertainment at the high table. The Chancellor and the Factor acknowledged with nods of the head, but Anakerie had eyes only for the cloaked and silent figure that seemed to glide in behind Duguay.
At the sight of her, Anakerie went very silent, very still, so small and subtle a change in her demeanor that only one other figure in the hall noticed.
As if on cue, or in answer to a call that only she could hear, Anakerie’s eyes lifted from Elora and fixed on that other.
In that gaze was a message meant for him alone. It was a smile, and from where he stood well hidden against the farthest wall, Thorn Drumheller replied in kind and in full measure.
Duguay and Elora had been working with the household musicians since receiving the invitation. From their station in the corner the fast-paced beat of a dumbbell mallet on the stretched leather head of a tiompan burst forth, calling on Elora to dance the reel. For the next few seconds, while the beat of the drum established itself, she remained still as a piece of carved stone, every aspect of her hidden beneath her hooded cloak.
With the closing of that introductory measure, the drum was joined by uilleann pipes and a bagpipe as well, to cheers and applause from various Cascani scattered through the assemblage who recognized the tune. From stance and manner it seemed to Anakerie, as to everyone else, that Duguay would lead off the performance, but that sudden crescendo of music ignited a like explosion of movement from Elora. In a single, sweeping motion that sent her into a leaping full circle, she cast the cloak from her shoulders into Duguay’s
arms and claimed the dance for herself.
Her gown was the same shade as her leathers, the night-washed scarlet of the Black Rose, the color of blood spilled in passion. It was in two parts, hung low on her hips with a bandeau top to cover her breasts. It had body and weight, draping itself artfully along the line of her body when she moved against it, and flowing outward as well in graceful circles. As with Anakerie’s gown, Elora’s was stitched with crystalline thread, giving it the same capacity to refract the light that struck it, the difference being that in Anakerie’s case the effect made her appear all the more regal. For Elora, she appeared to be shot through with either blood or flame.
The patterns on the cloth had been replicated on her body paint. To those who’d seen her before, she had never looked more elemental. For the others, they beheld the vision of some otherworldly being, no doubt from far beyond the Veil, who had joined them for the evening. If appearance alone wasn’t enough to convince them, the dazzling athleticism, the terrifying audacity of her dance more than did the trick. To watch Elora Danan that fateful night was to behold music made flesh. Each separate note struck its resonance in her body and called forth an equivalent response. There was no lag between inspiration and execution. She and the musicians were more in sync than the figures on an automaton, and shot through with a passion as fiercely beautiful as life itself.
But she was merely the prelude. Seemingly without warning, where the dance had been a solo, suddenly it was a duet. If anything, the movements became more daring, more intense, more passionate, the two figures playing off each other as well as the music. Gasps were heard, some cheers, rounds of spontaneous applause. Many a breath was held and not an eye left the two partners.
Except for Anakerie’s, which found Thorn again and shared with him the unspoken realization that what they were witnessing was more than mere dance. The Maizan Warlord had known her destiny since she could walk. She’d learned long ago to recognize a duel when she saw one.
Duguay led, then Elora, then he again, then with a playful whoop of laughter that found an enthusiastic echo in the audience, she seized the role back. When next he claimed ascendancy, however, it was plain that it would not be easily relinquished. This time there was no contest between them. He cast her in the subservient role and she accepted, and when he spun her to the side so that he might finish the dance as she’d begun it, solo, she let him.
If there was any tension, no hint of it showed when they stepped forward to take their bows. The moment the music struck its final chord most of the house was on its feet, raising hands and cheers to the rafters and clamoring for more, a request the performers were only too happy to oblige.
Duguay held center stage and had the audience entranced. His jests made them laugh, his music was a delight, he’d never been better. All the while Elora remained off to the side, sitting on her ankles in the eastern fashion with her feet folded under her, her guitar held upright at her side in a manner that reminded Anakerie of a warrior sitting sentry with a blade.
At Duguay’s conclusion, the applause was generous, meriting a brace of encores.
Elora didn’t move from her place.
Then, in her husky, broken voice, she began to sing. A cappella, unaccompanied, about two lovers. Two lives, rich with promise, that would ever remain unfulfilled because of one woman’s twisted ambition. Her voice alone provided the frame and foundation of the ballad, she wanted nothing to distract from the images she was crafting. With the opening refrain, somehow all unnoticed, she slipped the guitar into her lap, plucking single strings, then chords, then striking an impatient percussive beat on the body of the instrument with her fingers.
She painted a vivid picture of a land and a time where life had become warped and twisted: under the rule of the Demon Queen, pleasure came no more from joy in the wonders of the world but in the delight of another’s pain. Power abjured responsibility, became an end unto itself, the purpose of achieving it was to achieve more. The goal was to triumph, to become the absolute zenith of all things, and any hindrance to that end was to be destroyed. So fell the father, so fell the mother, so would have fallen their only gift to the world, their daughter, had a midwife not spirited her away.
The Demon Queen was not so easily deterred, and the song began to increase its tempo ever so slightly. The gentle midwife, too, made the supreme sacrifice. But the child found another rescuer, the unlikeliest of heroes, whose heart and courage bore no relation to his stature. Through his efforts, with the help of dearest friends, the shape of their part of the world, mayhap the world entire, was changed for the better.
As for the Demon Queen, she met the end she’d planned for the baby, ultimate obliteration.
Someone began to clap, only to belatedly realize that the song wasn’t done. The tiompan drummer was beating out a complementary rhythm, taking his cue from the pattern of Elora’s own handslaps on the guitar face.
She continued her theme, singing of another time and of two sets of lovers where before there’d been but one. Here again, Anakerie sought out Thorn, because when he had been her prisoner she had bonded briefly with his mind and soul, and she knew from that brief union that one of the pairs of lovers was Thorn and his Nelwyn beloved. They had won the good fight and looked forward to the joys such victories bring. So full of dreams, so rich with promise.
A jangling chord, a moment of stillness, a harshly spoken sentence from Elora.
“The world split asunder, and they died.”
She forged ahead with a driving, relentless pace, painting the picture of that lost and lonely child, once more cast adrift, pursued by a foe even more implacably ruthless than Bavmorda, centerpiece of a struggle that appeared just as hopeless.
Only there was a difference. The child was not a child, and her champions no longer had to fight alone. If destiny, through whim or cruel design, had chosen to set its mark on her, she would seize destiny by its throat and teach it she was not to be trifled with. Too many had suffered, too many had died. She might be defeated but their sacrifice had stripped from her forever the right of giving up.
This was not a war about placing any Sacred Princess on a throne. It was about the freedom to choose your own path, and take responsibility for all that followed.
She stopped again, in mid-phrase, but no one dared utter a sound. She hadn’t left her knees, yet it seemed as though she could fix her gaze on every other eye in the room and take their full measure.
She sung once more of lovers, and then the refrain, “We will be free.”
She sung of dreams, and then the refrain, “We will be free.”
She sung of dragons, and then the refrain, “We will be free.”
She sung of hope, and then the refrain, “We will be free.”
With each repetition, the tempo increased, the passion and the intensity. When she sang the fourth refrain, another voice from deep within the crowd joined her. With the fifth, she had a chorus. By the sixth, every voice in the room that wasn’t Maizani.
The one she heard best was the one she’d hoped for all along, even though she knew that given the opportunity in battle, Anakerie would try her level best to kill her. The Warlord’s lips barely moved and she sang so quietly that neither figure flanking her heard a word, but Elora heard it all.
“We will be free.”
She built to a last crescendo and with the final refrain rose with effortless grace to her feet, holding her guitar high as though brandishing it like a standard before an army, letting those four words pound at walls and windows like thunderstones before a final crashing chord brought her song to its end.
“We will be free,” she sang with full voice and with all her heart, even as the force of that singing tore at her throat like claws, “and we shall!”
The cheers before were nothing. People were on their feet, applauding, whistling, stomping, hollering, the front rank of Cascani surging forward to engu
lf both Elora and Duguay, chanting the refrain to her song like a chant as they hoisted them up on communal shoulders, the better for the rest of the crowd to see. Among the Maizan were a couple of glum faces, not because they were displeased by the song but, contrary folk as they often were, because they, too, had found themselves caught up in it, bellowing that fateful refrain as heartily as the citizens of Sandeni they’d come to conquer.
At the high table the Cascani Factor was on his feet, slamming his big hands together. The Chancellor stood more deliberately, to offend his guest. Anakerie sat a long moment, then allowed herself a regal smile that acknowledged the singer’s skill and her incredible audacity. Then, the last in all the room, she, too, rose from her chair and offered up a proper and polite round of applause.
“My lords,” the Chancellor cried, using the voice he turned to whenever debate in parliament got a bit too rambunctious, “ladies and gentlemen, I crave your indulgence a small while longer. There is something”—and this he directed more to Anakerie—“I should like you to see before we end this night’s festivities. I hope it will put our forthcoming discussions in their proper context.”
“There’s no need to show me the Wall,” she said with relaxed charm as he led her among the crowd to the eastward-facing bank of windows. “It’s been in my face for far too long.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
The Chancellor beckoned to an aide, who proceeded to summon Duguay and Elora over. “A magnificent performance,” he told them. “I especially liked your final song.”
“The Chancellor is too kind,” Elora said with a shallow curtsy.
Anakerie took a slow measure of the girl. Her eyes were on a level with Elora’s nose, which wasn’t so terribly bothersome unless the girl wasn’t done growing.
“Allow me to present Anakerie, Warlord of the Maizan.”
Another curtsy, deeper and more formal, a gesture of authentic respect.
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