by Melanie Rawn
“With respect, my lord, I disagree,” Betheyn murmured. “We’ve been speaking as if they want something in the Desert. Some physical thing. I don’t believe what they want is a High Prince, or dragons, and certainly not our castles and land. Which leaves only one thing. Vengeance.”
“But what did we do to them?” Chay demanded.
“Not ‘we’ as in everyone in the princedoms, or even the Desert,” Riyan blurted. “‘We’ as in Sunrunners. They shout ‘diarmadh’im’ in battle. They’re kindred to the Merida. Something must have happened so long ago that we don’t even remember it—but they do. And they’ve come to take their revenge for what the Sunrunners did to them.”
“There’s nothing in the histories,” Meath said, eyes wide with shock. “Not even in Lady Merisel’s scrolls.”
“Yes, there is!” Pol slapped his hand down on the table. “She brought the Sunrunners from Dorval to overthrow diarmadhi rule. She had hundreds of them killed, forced the rest into the mountains, and almost wiped out the Merida completely. So now their distant brothers have come to do the same to us. They attacked Goddess Keep, and failed to take it only because of the ros’salath and Tilal’s army. They—”
“But how does that connect to what they’ve done here?” Hollis interrupted. “And why did they wait so long? Everyone who was responsible for whatever happened—if it happened—has been dead hundreds of years. What’s the point?”
“My dear,” Chay said, “you’ll never understand because you’ve never had an evil thought in your life. Vengeance has nothing to do with time.”
“So we have Merisel to thank for all this? I don’t believe it. Not even from her. She and Gerik and Rosseyn were—” But she ran out of words, for other words from the scrolls she had helped Andry translate suddenly scrawled across her mind. Casual words, almost teasing, a minor reference overshadowed by other things—
“Hollis? What is it?”
Pol was staring at her. She met his eyes, seeing Fire in them. She had been at Goddess Keep during Andrade’s rule, she had known Rohan well—but no one’s eyes had ever compelled her the way his did at this moment. She felt like a lute string drawn tight enough to snap, trembling with unreleased sound.
“Gerik,” she heard herself say, and the inner shaking got worse. “She wrote it as if it was an old joke. . . .” Pol’s eyes caught unbearably at her mind. “He—he was born on the Desert side of the Veresch. Before he became a Sunrunner, he was called ‘Azhrei.’”
Chapter Thirteen
Lord Varek tilted his head back, lifting his face to the stars. They moved uneasily here, the Great Wheel spinning higher and wider across the sky. The moons came and went at unfamiliar times, like guests not quite sure of the household’s routine. He had heard all his life that this was an odd place. He could not but agree. It was a body crammed and cramped in upon its own flesh, girt by salt seas that had been squeezed from its heart, crowned in white snow. Only a few watery veins still flowed, still gave life. The rest was bony mountain, sickening marsh, or dead sand. He didn’t know how these people endured it, living ten and twenty days’ walk from the sea. He’d heard there were some who never saw more water than could be gathered in a rain bucket. He would never understand that, just as they would never understand his own people’s need for the sight of water, the sound of it, the feel of it on skin and tongue.
He turned his face from the midnight sky and turned his mind to the river. Of everything in the land, of all the differences in Earth and Air and Fire, Water was a comforting constant that he could not live without. He smiled as he listened to the river’s yearning hurry to the welcoming sea. It was the sound of a thousand wives rushing through tall grass to embrace returning warriors.
So many dead, he thought. So many who would father no more sons.
A bird cried out on the opposite shore. His gaze traced the flutter, gray as ashes in the starshine, blown through the darkness across the river to the deeper darkness of these woods. Leaves rustled as she settled, like the skirts of a single woman sinking to her knees, and her next cry was of mourning.
He descended the slope to the riverbank, where by torchlight his army was assembled. What remained of his army. Of all the warriors, only one hundred and seventy-nine; of all the clanmasters, only two. The rest were dead. The Vellant’im left no wounded.
They had built a pile of stones for him to stand on. While he had labored all day to construct the shell-skiff, they had made this so that he might stand above them all as he spoke. The rocks were as solid and silent as if mortared. Varek set his feet firmly upon them, and lifted the bronze horn on its silver chain around his neck. He wished it could have been the horn stolen from his people long ago—from his own clan, in fact—but at least the failure to recover it from the accursed faradh’im had not been his.
Swalekeep was. Supposedly, he understood war. Prince Tilal had shown him otherwise. And for his arrogance in believing himself superior, the Father of Rains and Winds had punished him with defeat.
But that his warriors had suffered too, had died in their hundreds—it was more than he could bear. And this, he knew now, was the thing he did not understand about war: how a commander could live with such loss.
The horn Varek blew was a small replica of the one that had been stolen. Its note was high, piercing the night like the wail of a newborn child. He heard his sons in it, their first grief at leaving the safe dark sea of the womb, and knew how great would be their shame at his failure. He hoped a little love would survive in secret; he cringed from the thought of his sons cursing his name in their hearts as well as aloud to the clan-kin.
He blew again, the silver mouthpiece warm against his lips this time, and now the sound was the cry of an old man’s longing for return to the sea. When his lungs were drained of breath, he took the horn from his lips and listened to the thin soaring echo. When it faded into the starshine, he listened to the music of the river. Now was the time for him to speak.
It ought to have been a priest, but he had none with him to say the words. He had as little use for the breed as the High Warlord. But unlike his master, he had the excuse of a hard campaign with no plans for seizing castles to house a luxury-loving parasite in proper style. Now he regretted it—not the lack of comforts, but the lack of an eloquent voice. Perhaps his master would have the ritual repeated, so that priestly voices could honor the dead of the Battle of Swalekeep.
“Warriors of many Clans,” he said, regretting too that he did not have the High Warlord’s deep, ringing voice. “You of the Nine-Spoked Wheel, of the Spear Tree, of the Chain, of the Scarred Island—” He named them all, the sixteen different clans of which only a handful of kin survived. The two clanmasters he saved for the last but one, leaving his own as the final name. And as he said, “. . . of the Great Horn,” his eyes stung with memory. Rejecting the softness as shameful to a warrior—even one who had failed—he fixed his gaze on the hard faces around him. But the golden beads glinting by torchlight reminded him of starflowers in a sea of dark grass, and he had to pause.
“Hear me,” he said at length, hoping they had taken his brief silence as respect for the ancient, honored Names. “When the High Warlord commanded us, we became brothers of the heart to achieve our great purpose. I say to you now, this is no longer so.”
They shifted slightly, silently.
“Brothers we remain, but now of blood—as truly as if we were all born of the same mother and the same father both. All rivalries, all debts of honor, all oaths of any kind are as if they had never been.” He put his right fist on his heart, and held out his left hand. “Naresch of the Black Hoof, ninth of that Name, I call you my brother in blood.”
There was a whispering at this, as he had expected. He had just called on a man whose kind had fought his own for seventeen generations.
Varek went on, “We were born of the same blood. My sword is yours, my hearth, and my daughters. Will you say the same to me?”
Naresch came forward, stunned and
awkward. His sword hand fisted on his chest. He couldn’t quite bring himself to extend his left hand yet; he could accept Varek as his commander in battle because the High Warlord had decreed it, but this was personal.
Again Varek wished for a priest. Useless as they were in fighting—proudly useless, with their soft scholarly hands—their authority at such times was absolute. It was the dearest wish of their scheming hearts to see all the Clans truly united, fighting when, where, whom, and as their holy guidance directed. The High Warlord was to them an unfortunate necessity; he had been able to weld the Clans together as they had not. Varek knew that after this was over and the faradh’im defeated, there would be another war, of the kind fought without swords. Priests with unlimited power did not bear thinking about.
Varek looked down into Naresch’s eyes, seeing seventeen generations struggle for his heart against this offer of belonging. He’d chosen the man not only for their traditional enmity, but because of the Black Hoof, only Naresch survived. Until he rejoined the other divisions of his clan-kin at Stronghold, he was utterly alone. And no warrior wanted to do battle with no one to protect his back.
Naresch’s solitude won. All his forefathers were dead; he was here, and alone. He reached up with his left hand and said, “We were born of the same blood. My sword is yours, my hearth, and my daughters.”
Varek clasped the callused fingers, reflecting with untimely humor that Naresch’s daughters were perfectly safe; their own looks were better protection than any sworn sword. He hoped Naresch lived to go home and see to them himself. Varek’s four wives would, in descending order of age, shriek, curse, rage, and faint at the prospect of housing those six remarkably ugly girls.
He smiled, but his impulse to amusement had fled and the curve of his lips was wistful. He had reminded himself of his family again. That wouldn’t do.
Straightening up, he called out, “Will the rest of you do less than this?”
A moment passed. Then the oath was repeated once, twice, then too often to count. Some were spoken in grudging mutters, some with relief as men who had lost almost all their clan-kin claimed new brothers, and were no longer so alone.
Varek repressed a sigh. Once these men had joined the High Warlord’s own army in the Desert, the others of their blood kin might quietly kill them so that this oath died with them. But if they were to arrive in the Desert at all, they must weave themselves into a smooth rope, not tie impossible knots along it. Well, he had done what he could.
Naresch, as the first of them to swear, asked the inevitable question. “We are oathbound, my lord. What would you Name us now?”
“I call you by the Name of the High Warlord’s own Clan.”
There were cries of wonder at the honor and protest at the insult, depending on whose ancestors had fought whose. Varek held up a hand.
“But you must earn it with the Tears of the Dragon.”
This shocked them into silence. He very nearly smiled again.
“Yes, there is a dragon who lives at Faolain Lowland. Yes, it will be a hard thing to do. But you will fight in the name of the High Warlord and under his banner, for you will be his blood kin more surely than those who took Radzyn Keep and Remagev and Stronghold itself, where the old Azhrei died. You will be the right hand of the High Warlord when he defeats the new Azhrei, for in his right hand he will hold the Tears of the Dragon.”
Now they cheered and chanted. Varek listened for a time, his own right hand slowly closing around the dagger at his belt. None of them knew it for what it really was: the knife he’d used to mark each of his wives as his. Beside the small scar left by each girl’s father three days after her birth, he had gently traced his own claim. He was always careful not to cut the veins on the backs of their hands, careful not to nick the bones, the way some men did to make certain the scarring was deep.
But they knew what the dagger meant as he held it aloft. They fell silent again, waiting to see who would be chosen.
The enemy, for all their barbarian ways, burned the dead as was proper. Even Vellanti dead. There was at least that small grace given. But so far from the sea, so far from the sweet rage of storms—it made his soul ache every time he thought about it. Tonight, three nights after the battle, one man would die and burn in the shell-skiff as it swept down the Faolain River. One man would burn for all the others, and be given to the sea.
It was an honor and a glory, and everyone held his breath so as not to miss a syllable of the name chosen as worthy. The dagger waited for one of them, and the fire, and the shell-skiff. It would not burn, being lined with the salvaged banners of the clans whose masters had fallen, material prepared by the same priestly magic as the sails of the dragon-headed ships. Varek had made the little boat himself—not because he did not trust his men to do it properly, but because a man ought to prepare his own final bed.
For it was Varek who unslung the horn from around his neck and handed it to Naresch, and stepped off the solid pile of stones into the little craft. He turned his face south, where the sea was, and dug his marriage dagger into his heart. Not because he was worthy, but because only he could explain to the Storm God his own shame and the blameless bravery of those who had died at Swalekeep.
He sank to his knees, blood slippery on his hands. The shell-skiff slid deeper into the water, rocking, rocking, mimicking the waves so far downriver. He could feel the dagger throb with his final few heartbeats. There was great pain, and great joy. From the corner of his eye he saw Naresch stride forward with a torch, and the last thing he knew was the first touch of the fire.
• • •
Ostvel, granted a spare moment from his morning of making Swalekeep function smoothly again, rose from the desk to stand before the roaring fire across the room. He felt a hundred winters old. Maybe two hundred.
He’d slept badly these last four nights. It wasn’t the work that kept him awake with worry. He had been Second Steward of Goddess Keep in his youth, run Stronghold for Rohan, then Skybowl, and finally Castle Crag, so even creating order out of the chaotic aftermath of battle held few challenges. He didn’t sleep because he kept dreaming about death. Not Kerluthan’s, clean and quick, nor even Aurar’s—brutal, but in the end deserved. He didn’t imagine Halian’s murder at the hand of his own son, nor the sudden horror of Rialt’s and Mevita’s dying. What he saw, time after time, was the guard who had killed them, and Princess Naydra standing nearby as Fire made of him a living torch.
In his dream, Naydra wore her sister Ianthe’s face. Ianthe, Pol’s birth mother, whom Ostvel had killed.
Shivering, he turned his back to the fire. He hadn’t yet wanned again after seeing Tilal off at the east gate. Early this morning the prince had declared himself ready to start south after the Vellant’im, despite the warnings of Swalekeep’s physician that he ought to rest another two days. Keeping Tilal pent this long had been difficult enough; actually, Ostvel had expected him to leave yesterday. Sore muscles and a minor though painful wound had argued otherwise. But hot soaks, poultices, and the skill of the physician had made him well enough to leave—or so he said.
Ostvel closed his eyes, wishing the same treatment could work as well on a man of sixty-four as it had on one barely forty-six. The fog this morning seemed to have grown dragon claws that dug into his shoulders for purchase and not even the heat of the fire could shake them off. In some ways it was worse than the misting rain of the day Swalekeep had fallen. This enshrouding fog grayed the windows as if Meadowlord wore mourning for its prince. Few had been honestly fond of Halian; no one Ostvel knew had respected him. How did one like or hold in esteem a man who married someone like Chiana? But no one deserved to die that way, his skull bashed open by his own son.
They had burned Halian two nights ago. Building separate pyres had taken a full day: one for the prince, one for Rialt and Mevita together, one for Kerluthan, and five large ones with all the dead of Waes, Castle Crag, River Ussh, Grand Veresch, and Swalekeep itself. Aurar they took out to the battlefield,
to burn with her allies the Vellant’im. Andrev had done his Sunrunner duty that night, calling Fire. But the next morning an honest breeze had blown the ashes north, for the boy had no idea how to summon Air for the purpose. This lack of knowledge, added to the tongue-lashing given him by Tilal for riding into danger, had dimmed whatever of Andrev’s brightness had remained after seeing Halian’s corpse.
Ostvel tried not to think about the dead prince, though it was difficult here in the man’s own audience chamber. He sat at Halian’s desk, received Halian’s people, organized Halian’s castle and city, used Halian’s wax to set his own seal on written orders. The joke he’d made to Tilal about being given the princedom as punishment for his service to Rohan was no joke anymore. To all intents and purposes, he was the new Prince of Meadowlord.
And if Pol dared make it official, he’d take the boy over his knee, High Prince or no High Prince.
He heard the doors open, and before he could look up, a voice he hadn’t heard since autumn said, “You’re about to singe your backside, my lord. Move over and share a little of that fire with your frozen wife.”
“Alasen?”
He gaped at her as she crossed the room to him, taking off her gloves. She smiled as casually as if she’d just come into their own chambers at Castle Crag after a morning’s ride.
“What are you doing here?”
“I just told you—freezing. And ready to hear your apology for not waiting to take Swalekeep until we arrived to help. Don’t put all the blame on Tilal, either, when he’s not here to defend—”
She never finished the teasing. Ostvel caught her in his arms and kissed her, lifting her right off her feet. Setting her down again, he scowled down at her smiling green eyes.
“You should be at Castle Crag.”