Winter of Ice and Iron

by Rachel Neumeier

  It was nearly two months yet before the Iron Hinge of midwinter, and Kehera doubted that even Hallieth Suriytaiän was mad enough to let the Great Power of Suriytè seek apotheosis. But the Mad King was certainly ambitious enough. Thus Gimin in the far north had recently become an Emmeran town, when until five years ago it had belonged to Kosir; and similarly, last year, another Kosiran town, Diàth, a prosperous town surrounded by good farmlands, which mountainous Kosir could ill afford to lose.

  This year, the summer had been hot and dry in Harivir—yet another hot, dry summer, the fifth in a row. The drought had lain heavy on the land from the Month of Flowers right through the Harvest Month, with little rain falling anywhere north of Coär. So now Hallieth Suriytaiän looked to press Emmer’s borders south of the broad Imhar River and take Cemerè for his own. And then, no doubt, he would look east toward Leiör or west toward Timir, smaller towns that also lay along the Harivin border with Emmer.

  All this summer, every day, it seemed to Kehera Raëhema, her father had become a little quieter, a little older. She worried about him—she had worried about him even before this trouble with Emmer. Raëhemaiëth, the Immanent Power of Raëh, drew on her father’s own strength so that its lands flourished. The ruling Immanent of all Harivir, it drew on his human strength so that it could support all the lesser Immanences of the drought-stricken provinces of Harivir. Raëhemaiëth was important. It prevented each Immanent from encroaching on the lands of its neighbors; it encouraged generosity and liberality from land and human folk alike. During the lingering summer months it supported the peace and calm and burgeoning life brought by the Fortunate Gods. Thus even in a difficult year, when little rain fell and day after day the cloudless skies stretched out above the lands, the grain ripened in the fields, and the acorns ripened on the trees, and the deer and foxes and saplings flourished. And thus the harvests did not falter. But the golden grain ripening in the fields and the swelling apples in the orchards and the fattening of the land all wore at Kehera’s father. It was the price of being king; or at least, it was the price of being a good king, a king who loved his Immanent and his people and set the well-being of his lands above his own span of years.

  And so now, of course, Hallieth Suriytaiän had decided that Harivir’s misfortune presented a fine chance to press the border. And so there was this war. This little war. This attempt to take Cemerè away from Harivir, to carve its Immanent Power away from Raëhemaiëth, the Great Power of Raëh. To bring all the southern bank of the river into Emmer, binding those provinces into Suriytè instead, forcing Harivir farther south and expanding Emmer’s grasp.

  Of course Hallieth Theraön Suriytaiän would not succeed. Kehera was certain he couldn’t succeed. She’d told herself so firmly every day for the past month. But throwing back the Emmeran offensive cost her father too—in the lives of men and in his own strength. It cost him a little more with every passing day, and would, until the Mad King of Emmer turned his attention to some weaker target. No doubt another Kosiran border city would prove an easier—

  Kehera lifted her head and held up her hand for quiet. Only after the startled women had fallen silent did she realize what had changed. It was the distant sound of battle. The clamor had stilled, or at least quieted so far as to become inaudible from Liyè Cemeraiän’s house. The stillness should have been welcome, and yet dread ran through her, though she did not know why. Turning her head, she met Soë Cemeraiän’s wide, stunned gaze.

  That was when she realized that another kind of silence had fallen as well.

  She rose to her feet, blue cloth and golden thread falling unheeded to the fine gravel. She looked around the garden, not quite seeing the yellows and oranges of the maples, nor the russets and golds of the chrysanthemums, nor the mute horror of the ladies. What she saw instead, with her inner eye, was a great blank emptiness that a moment before had been filled with the vast living Immanent of Cemerè.

  Then Raëhemaiëth swelled up beneath the emptiness, and Kehera let out a slow breath of profound relief and looked around the garden once more, meeting each woman’s eyes. Even, at last, though it was difficult, Soë Cemeraiän’s.

  “We have lost Cemerè,” she said quietly, because someone had to say it. “I am so sorry, Soë. Liyè was a strong lord and Cemerè prospered in his hands. But Raëhemaiëth holds. I promise you, Raëhemaiëth holds and will not fall. I am sure my father will withdraw toward Raëh. You and your family must come with us. You must all come.”

  “We’ve lost Cemerè . . . ?” faltered Soë. “You are certain . . . ?”

  “I am sorry,” Kehera said gently. “I must ask now for haste. I am sure we must withdraw at once to the south. If you will all—”

  The sound of a man’s heavy, hurried tread on gravel interrupted her, and Kehera turned—they all turned—steeling themselves as women must for the news of the disaster they already knew had fallen upon them.

  Liyè Cemeraiän burst into the garden, swung around the gatepost, cast down the helm he had been carrying as though only at that moment realizing he held it, came forward with long strides, and folded his lady in a fierce embrace. Though many of the women cried out and exclaimed, Soë herself did not make a sound, but gripped her husband’s surcoat with both her small hands and pressed her face against his chest.

  But after the first moment, the Lord of Cemerè raised his head and met Kehera’s gaze over his wife’s head. He said, his voice cracking a little, “Your father—your father must speak with you, Your Highness. If you will . . . if you will go to him at once. He is—he—my men will show you—”

  Kehera saw that half a dozen men had come with Liyè. They waited now by the gate. She wanted to demand Liyè tell her what had happened by the river; she wanted to cry, But what happened? How could my father let the Mad King of Emmer take Cemerè? How is this possible? But she smothered all this and said only, “Of course. I’m grateful—I’m glad to see you well, Lord Liyè. I’m grateful it was not worse.”

  “It could not have been worse,” Liyè said bitterly, and bent his head over his lady’s.

  “We could hardly have seen a worse outcome,” Torrolay Elin Raëhema told Kehera when she found him.

  Her father had proved to still be in the encampment by the river, in his pavilion, which occupied a slight rise toward the rear of the Harivin force. The king’s pavilion was set a little apart from the soldiers’ tents and the larger physickers’ tent. It was made of bleached canvas put up on gilded rods, with sheer curtains at front and back to let in the breeze, and Kehera had always thought it rather pleasant. But at the moment the pavilion was also surrounded by the aftermath of battle: men weary and wounded, physickers and women hurrying to attend them. Too many wounded; Kehera had seen that already. Too many young men laid out in the rows of the dead. That contributed to her anxiety, because she could see that the Hallieth Suriytaiän must have done more to Cemerè’s Immanent Power than just take the deep tie from Liyè. That would have been bad enough, but he must also have disrupted all the thin, barely perceptible ties that bound ordinary people to the Power of their land. Otherwise the Power would have healed many of the wounded and taken up more of the dead.

  So she was not surprised by her father’s grim manner, though clearly he did not expect another attack—not, at least, a physical attack with blade and bow and weight of arms. If he had, he would hardly have sent for her to come here. Indeed, from what little she had glimpsed as she hurried through the encampment, the Emmeran force had already retreated through the drought-shallow river back to their own camp on the opposite bank. Kehera was surprised by that; she knew she did not have any great grasp of battlefield tactics, but she would have expected whatever general was in command of that force to claim the town of Cemerè now that Hallieth Suriytaiän had forced the Power of Cemerè to yield to his own. But the Emmeran soldiers had withdrawn to their neat rows of canvas tents. Even from this distance, if she glanced out the door of her father’s pavilion, she could see their long standards wh
ipping in the rising breeze, the White Stallion of Suriytè before the others. Kehera could not keep from giving that banner a mistrustful glance even as she nodded attentively to her father.

  He had been seeing to whatever details attended the loss of an important Power—she was sure there must be a thousand grim minutiae that needed arranging. Her younger brother, Tirovay, was with him, which relieved Kehera’s mind and heart of at least one great worry. Another man Kehera did not know was also present. The stranger was a mystery. She’d thought she knew all her father’s captains and advisers. But she didn’t ask. She assumed her father would tell her who this man was if it were important for her to know.

  “It’s not this day, though that’s gone badly enough,” her father told her now. He ran a hand through his sweat-dampened hair. He repeated, grim and weary, “It’s not this day. It’s the threat of tomorrow.”

  Kehera nodded again earnestly, and continued to wait, with a patience she was far from truly feeling, for him to explain.

  Though Torrolay Elin Raëhema was not old, he had been King of Harivir for years and years, since long before Kehera was born. His own mother had died young, and so he had mastered the Harivin Power and ascended the throne when he was only a little older than she was now. Ever since, he had dealt with the Fortunate and Unfortunate Gods, with generous and recalcitrant Immanent Powers, with aggressive Emmer to the north of Harivir and untrustworthy Pohorir to the east, with quarrelsome nobles at home and with every possible crisis with the imperturbable composure and patience that every Raëhema stamped more firmly into the character of the Harivin Power and received back redoubled.

  But he did not look entirely calm now. He said, “You felt it, of course—the death of Cemerè’s Immanent.” This wasn’t a question, and he went on before she could do more than blink in surprise at the word “death.” “Hallieth Suriytaiän didn’t rip Cemerè away from Raëh and force an Unfortunate bond between Cemerè and his own Great Power. That would have been bad enough, but hardly unprecedented. I thought I could stop him doing that—and I thought that was as bad as it could get.”

  Of course they had all believed the Mad King’s intention was just as her father described. That was why her father had come here to Cemerè himself, bringing several companies of his men, but more importantly bringing his deep tie to Raëhemaiëth. That was why he had brought her and Tiro; because Kehera was his heir and had to be ready to take the tie if the worst should happen and the king fall to mischance on the field or to the foreign Emmeran Power. And, of course, if that should happen, Tiro had to be ready to step into the heir’s place in his turn. He was old enough, at least. If there was no direct descendant old enough to establish the necessary resonance with the Immanent, no heir’s tie would be possible. That was never safe. If any lord or duke or king—or queen—died without a proper heir, the tie might go anywhere, to an unknown distant cousin, wherever it could find that resonance. In the case of a Great Power like Raëhemaiëth, that sort of succession could ruin the good order of a kingdom for generations—disaster in time of war.

  Tirovay was seventeen; he was rather a young seventeen, Kehera thought, with his baby-fine brown hair cut a little long and his wide mouth that smiled readily. Ordinarily he was quick and cheerful and ready to believe the best of everything and everyone. He had always had a child’s confidence that nothing so very terrible could happen. Kehera believed it wasn’t the few years between them that made the difference, but her memory of their mother’s death. Tiro did not remember their mother at all. Kehera, on the other hand, though she had been only three, had learned then that terrible things could indeed happen, and that nothing you did could make the world go back to the way it was supposed to be.

  Today she thought her brother had learned that too, and she was sorry for it, but she still did not know what exactly had happened. She asked plainly, “But what did the Mad King do, if not take Cemerè’s Immanent away from Raëhemaiëth and force it to submit to his own Power? What do you mean, its death? Immanents can only deepen in the earth or become Gods. They can’t die.”

  Tiro cleared his throat, and Kehera looked at him, appalled. “You mean they can?” Her brother, always fascinated by the oldest stories, knew more than she did about the creation of the Four Kingdoms. Diffident in the presence of their father and the stranger, Tiro nevertheless ducked his head and said, “It kind of happened in Sierè, people think.”

  Kehera didn’t like that idea much at all. The greatest calamity the world had ever faced was thought to have been caused by the Great Immanent of Sierè, a land that had once lain far to the south.

  Tiro glanced at their father, who gestured briefly that he should go on. So he explained. “The southern king used the Immanent of Sierè to force the lesser Immanences of neighboring provinces out of their lands. It’s thought . . . Scholars think he meant to make those lands his own, creating new Immanences in them so he could rule them utterly. But midwinter overtook him, and the Unfortunate Gods tilted all his ambitions to serve their own ends. All those dispossessed Immanences entered apotheosis all at once. Or maybe one after another; no one knows.”

  Kehera shook her head, doubting it had mattered. The apotheosis of some gentle Immanent into a Fortunate God was destructive enough to the lands from which it tore itself free. Far worse was the apotheosis of a cruel, ambitious Great Power into an Unfortunate God. That was the part of the tale she knew: the part where the Immanent of Sierè had ascended to Godhead in a storm of shattering chaos. By tempting it into their company, the Unfortunate Gods had nearly succeeded in destroying the world they hated and despised.

  Nothing was left of the southlands now, as far as anyone could tell. Actually, no one knew, since directly after the disaster, a servant of the Fortunate Gods had somehow raised the impassable Wall of Storms between the northlands and the southlands, to stop the spread of ruin.

  Servants of the Gods were something like extremely powerful sorcerers, but they drew their strange capabilities not from a forced tie to an Immanent, but directly from the Gods. Tiro could probably list all the differences and advantages and disadvantages attendant on being such a servant compared to an ordinary sorcerer, but Kehera knew only a little about such things. Potent, unpredictable, no longer precisely human, a servant of the Fortunate Gods appeared when circumstances were most dire, but such sorcerers solved problems—if they solved them—in ways that weren’t always kind to the world. The Wall of Storms was the most dreadful thing Kehera knew of; the dragons it spawned at midwinter were the most terrible sign of the enmity the Unfortunate Gods held for the world.

  Tiro, plainly thinking along the same lines as Kehera, said in a hopeful tone, “If the King of Emmer is trying anything too much like what the King of Sierè tried, maybe a servant of the Fortunate Gods will move to stop him.”

  “It’s never wise to depend on the intervention of the Fortunate Gods,” the stranger commented, his tone absent, as though he weren’t very interested in the topic. “Generally, even if such a servant is made at an opportune moment, his ability to intervene—or hers—depends primarily on dedicated human action.”

  Tiro turned to the man in surprised interest, plainly wanting to go on with this topic, but their father waved the whole abstract matter aside. “Whatever the Mad King has in mind isn’t quite as dangerous as whatever happened in Sierè, probably. Hallieth Suriytaiän tore the Immanent away from Cemerè and away from the earth. But it’s definitely not going to ascend, because it’s gone.” He gestured sharply, frustrated with the limitations of words. “He gave it entirely to his Power. The Immanent of Suriytè . . . devoured it. We are nearly certain. Poor Liyè,” he added. “I hardly knew what to say to him. He thought at worst he might be forced to kneel to Hallieth Suriytaiän, and now . . . this.”

  “The Mad King . . . left Cemerè empty?” Kehera tried to imagine the unmooring of an Immanent Power from the land and people from which it had arisen. She hardly knew what to think. Except it was horrifying.

&
nbsp; But if Cemerè’s Power had actually been destroyed . . . no wonder . . . no wonder there were so many dead left lying on the now-soulless earth; no wonder the wounded had no help but ordinary physickers. She said, hearing the blankness in her own voice, “But . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Yes,” said the stranger, his tone dry. “Hallieth Suriytaiän is mad.”

  Torrolay Raëhema let out his breath and shook his head, but obviously not in disagreement. He said to Kehera, “I was warned the Mad King would destroy Cemerè if he couldn’t take it. I was warned he’d leave Cemerè hollow. I didn’t quite understand that warning. Or believe it.” From her father’s glance, Kehera surmised that this stranger must have been the source of the warning.

  This was a dark man, not tall, with an ambiguous cast of feature and a cool manner. He was clearly not a soldier. So far as she knew, she had never seen him before.

  “This is a man of mine who has been in Emmer for some time,” her father told her. “Quòn is his name; or at least, it is what he is called. He had been keeping an eye on . . . things, for me. You understand.”

  Kehera understood perfectly. He meant the man was an agent of his who had been spying on the Mad King. “Yes?” she said, wishing that one or the other of them would start at the beginning and just explain everything. If the Mad King had destroyed the Immanent Power of Cemerè, that was terrible, but though that seemed more than enough, there was something else to all this. She knew there was.