As light traveled across the visible surfaces of the building—those viewed through the towering boughs of Ellariannatte—she remembered: the Sleepers had been imprisoned; jailed in slumber and in physical space. This, then, was reclamation of sorts, and a hush descended upon the whole of the gathering as they watched what the Sleepers made of that prison, that place.
Meralonne had desired that she witness beauty as he perceived it, and she did, and she thought it a deadly gift but also a real one, because it both expended power and bought time.
But she understood, watching, that the cathedral itself was no longer a part of the city; where it spread, no Ellariannatte grew, and in the confines of that patch of land, the Sleepers had invoked the earth, and the earth had obeyed. She glanced, once, at the Ellariannatte, and thought: they will not hold.
* * *
• • •
Finch, with the aid of the House Council, moved among the refugees. Terafin had prepared for its own evacuation, and more besides; there was food. It could not feed the entire city for any length of time, but the water in the forest was clear and cool, and water would become an issue before food did, if they were careful.
The House Guard had the effect of the magisterial guard, and people huddled at a respectful distance. Finch had once been one of those people, and today, she remembered it clearly. But she understood that she was not one of the Mother’s Daughters, here. The comfort she could afford to offer was scant. She was, until and unless the Kings took to the forest, authority made manifest. Fear of that authority was only one tool, but she understood people well; for some, it was the only tool to which they would respond.
Thus, rulership.
She understood, better than Jay, why people sought power. She understood that power came in many forms, and today, she wore as many of them as she could bear. She, who had been part of the West Wing for her entire life in Terafin, had hated the social walls erected between the Household Staff and the den, but understood that it was her word that would carry the weight here, not the word of a servant, be they ATerafin or no.
She deputized, among the refugees; she counted, and counted again, breaking the new arrivals into manageable group sizes. She looked for Farmer Hanson and his forbidding, intimidating daughter, his “useless” sons; they were not here. Nor was Helen, and that gave her pause; Helen was older, and not very mobile.
But absent, as well, was Haval’s wife, Hannerle.
Helen and the farmer might not have arrived to open their stalls for the day’s business. But Hannerle lived in the Common. She froze for one long breath and then continued to move. Each person present, no matter how old or how young, was as valuable to someone as the three were to the den. The people present were alive; they were more real than fear. She could not let fear guide her actions, or she would have lost before she had started.
And she believed that, clung to it, reinforced it, until she returned to the House Council.
Jester was in the Common. Haval was in the Common. Arann was with the Chosen. These, she expected. Daine was present, and tucked into his side was Ariel, her eyes windows into a past that she never spoke about. Finch did not count her den. She knew that Jay and Angel were somewhere in the wilderness. They were beyond her, beyond them all.
Turning to Barston, she said, “Where is the right-kin?”
He met her gaze for a beat longer than necessary, and then said, “I do not know, Regent.”
Her voice sharpened; she managed to control its volume. “Where is Teller?”
* * *
• • •
Jester heard the question.
Surrounded by trees, his hand bleeding, the fox’s tiny teeth enlarging the wounds they had caused, he heard. He lifted head, opened eyes, and froze. Standing in the grove of Ellariannatte at its thickest were the people he thought of as trees, but they were not the trees Haval had trained. They were not adorned in the gold and silver of their leaves; they wore armor in plates that gleamed beneath what could be seen of amethyst sky. They carried swords, shields; they looked like suits of armor, like weapons come to life.
They stood around Birgide and Jester, facing outward; Jester was under no illusion as to who they protected, here.
Movement caught his eye; for a moment he thought of pitchforks and torches, but that was a mundane fancy that had no place in this changed universe. There was fire, yes, but it was not carried by men; it was not carried by anything. It approached, bobbing and weaving, and he saw the leaves of fire.
Only the leaves.
But those leaves moved on a current of air that Jester could neither feel nor see, fluttering toward the newly wakened soldiers of gold and silver, coming to land on their shoulders and helms as if they were butterflies. They did not melt the metal, but Jester noted that they did not seek purchase on any living bark. Nor did they land on the Warden.
The fox opened his mouth. Since manners in the wilderness were meant entirely for interacting with the powerful, he then turned and spit. Loudly.
“I hope,” he finally said when he had stopped, “that you appreciate this.” He glanced at the soldiers and nodded with approval. “They are not the trees that once grew in the wake of the gods. They are not, in any real sense, trees at all. The Warden understands this now.”
Jester looked down at his hand; it was still clenched tight around Birgide’s. Her fingers eased their death grip. Jester’s, however, did not.
She opened her eyes; opened her cracked lips. No words emerged, but they weren’t necessary. Jester grinned, and her eyes narrowed with customary annoyance.
“What? This is the safest place to stand, and I don’t intend to leave it.”
Birgide shook her head. Just that. But the butterflies of flame launched themselves off their armored perches, and the soldiers—he could not think of them as trees—began to march. He blinked and blinked again; he had not attempted to count them when he’d first set eyes on them, but he would have put their number at a dozen.
He would have been wrong. They marched out of the copse of trees, and also simultaneously remained. Jester closed his eyes and listened to the fall of their feet across a path made of roots.
They walked in all directions; Jester caught Birgide as she sagged.
“Remain here,” the fox told him. He seemed to be smiling. “It is, indeed, the safest place for one such as you to stand.”
“You’re leaving?”
“I am considering my many options,” the fox replied, a hint of buoyant excitement in his voice. “But perhaps you cannot hear what I hear.”
Jester waited.
“It appears that one of the firstborn has taken to the skies around the citadel.”
“The Sleepers?”
The fox threw a very familiar look of disgust over his golden shoulder. “They are of the White Lady. But she is not. Can you guess who I speak of?”
Jester said, “Calliastra.”
“She will not be able to take them all, but they will find her a challenge.”
“You’re going to join her?”
“I think I might,” the fox replied. “I found their courtesy . . . lacking.” He hopped lightly across the roots, maintaining the form that he usually wore.
* * *
• • •
Haval saw the soldiers of gold and silver as they joined the ranks of the Ellariannatte. They did not require arms; nor did they require armor. He suspected they might require more firm ground than the roots of trees, given the density of at least one of the base metals. But this gold and this silver were not mortal and inert.
Haval gave instructions to the spirits of the Ellariannatte. “Take those who will follow you into Jewel’s lands. Return when they are safe.”
They spread out in packs—half a dozen trees accompanied, where numbers permitted, by at least one Terafin House Guard. He added metallic warriors to
those numbers; their instructions were different. They were to intervene—and destroy—anything that attacked either the Ellariannatte or the civilians they shepherded. Anything. They accepted his orders in silence. Haval did not ask them if they knew how to use the weapons they carried.
He followed the tree line, taking care to remain beneath the boughs of the trees that had once grown only in the Common, and he moved toward the heart of the Common. Toward his home.
There was, however, a problem, if one did not include the ground-based forces that appeared, from the sound of horns, to be converging toward the newly risen building.
A dragon.
* * *
• • •
Haval noted the break in the line of the trees; he could see the remnants of trunks, some taller than Arann.
The den, individually, understood the importance of the den as a whole; they failed to understand their significance as disparate parts. He closed his eyes briefly. If Jewel did not return soon, the safety of the den might be irrelevant.
“Sleeping on the job?”
“I am attempting to think without the distraction of visual noise,” Haval replied, without opening his eyes. “Can the dragon be injured by regular weapons?”
“If the last five minutes are any indication, no. I think it likely that ballistae might have a salutary effect, but they were not considered wise within the city.”
Haval turned to his troops, gazing across the sheen of their armor, their weapons. He had watched the Chosen in utter silence, part of the shadows cast by trees; he had seen enough.
The shield that had been taken from Jewel’s armory was proof against the breath of the frostwyrm; it was not, however, adequate to damage the creature, and the man who wielded it was wearing armor that was not proof against incidental damage.
The breath of the creature appeared to freeze anything it touched, even the walls of the buildings themselves; when it lashed out with tail or lunged with sizable jaws, debris flew in all directions. Brick, stone, and timber did not seem to even attract the dragon’s notice. All three caused the Chosen difficulty. One man was downed by it—Haval thought a bone had snapped though he could not be certain.
The Chosen had attempted to flank the creature, but the dragon’s wings were problematic. Where they could, the Chosen pressed close to the bulk of its body to avoid the dragon’s breath and tail; they could not avoid the wings. Those wings had also sheared through the sides of buildings; the Common was crowded.
It would be less crowded soon.
“Councillor.”
Haval nodded his permission to speak but did not take his eyes off the combat.
“They are ready.”
He turned then. Drifting with care among the spirits of living trees were moths of flame, sparks of a fire that, uncontained, would do what the dragon had not yet managed.
“Interesting.”
“If you are not inclined to aid us,” Haval said, “Your silence would be appreciated.”
Jarven chuckled.
“Go to the Kings.”
“It has been many years since either of us have undertaken such service.”
“You have stated that you feel younger than you have in decades.” Haval lifted a hand, and the moths came to it. He had, twice, lifted a hand to touch the low-hanging branches of Jewel’s tree of fire. In neither case had the obvious occurred; he had not been burned.
But these small flames were no longer attached to that tree, and he felt their heat as a warning. He was aware, as they circled his open palm, that he was not lord here, not commander, not Warden. The Lord, however, was absent, and the Warden appeared to be inclined to give weight to his commands.
He did not know what effect the fire would have against the frost; there was only one way to determine that. He sent the fire to where the dragon rampaged.
* * *
• • •
Arann flattened as the dragon’s wings passed over his head. Kauran was not as lucky; the wing’s arc clipped him. The clatter of steel against steel was the sound of blade against armor; Kauran staggered back at the force of the blow. He toppled, managing to crawl out of reach of the wing as it returned to a heightened position above the dragon’s back.
Arann was one of a handful of Chosen who had taken a sword from the war room’s wall. He had discovered that the weapons arrayed there shifted; although they appeared to be solid and almost mundane, not all of the Chosen could see all of the weapons. Some of the Chosen had said they felt compelled to choose specific weapons—or, in Gordon’s case, the shield—but Arann had not; nothing had, in subtle or unsubtle fashion, called his name or attracted his attention.
Left to his own devices, he had taken a sword, one of a pair. It was the least ostentatious of the weapons arrayed there; there was one gem in its hilt, but it was a small gem. It had seemed, to his eye, to be the most used, the least pristine; only the blade was perfect. Use had not chipped its edge, and there were no obvious pits or hints of rust.
He had not been raised to arms; had not been raised, in fact, to violence. Given his size and his strength, violence had come to him anyway. He had been given rudimentary training in the handling of a sword; old Rath had been disappointed in his general competence. Compared to Angel or Carver, the sword did not come easily to Arann, although he handled its weight with ease.
But when he had chosen to join the House Guard, he had forced himself to set aside his dislike of, distrust of, physical violence. He had learned. He was not the best, though not the worst, of the House Guard. He was, he was certain, the least competent of the Chosen. And he was certain that he could not become proficient in any other weapon with any speed.
He had therefore looked only for swords; he had touched nothing else.
The sword he now carried was a hand and a half sword; too large for a smaller man to wield comfortably, it fit Arann’s hand like a glove. He had drawn it before they chose to engage the dragon. Nothing special had happened; it was a sword, its blade flat and perfect and heavy.
But when he drove it into the dragon’s exposed wing, its edge separated flaps of glittering ice. Blood ran down the blade and that blood caught fire—a golden glow of warmth that did not blind the eye. He felt the warmth of hearth fire, the warmth of spring; the winter chill that had permeated the Common with the fall of Moorelas evaporated.
The dragon roared and turned toward Arann; it roared again as someone on the opposite side of its bulk struck. Gordon’s shield was somewhere nearest where the head of the beast had been before they had grouped to attack. Arann raised his sword as the dragon’s massive jaws opened two yards from where he stood, poised to throw himself to the right or left of the conic breath.
He saw wings snap up and out; could not tell from the sound that followed whether they had struck man, building, or both. He bent into his knees, shifting his hold on the sword; it was hard to dodge and roll while carrying a weapon. Hard to do it while wearing armor.
Screams joined dragon roar, and Arann stiffened. They were not familiar voices. They were too high, too hysterical, too fragile. One stopped, banked suddenly—by dragon tail or claw or falling wall—and the others redoubled in volume. Once, half a lifetime ago, he would have told the hysterical, terrified people that screaming was the worst possible choice: it made position and location completely obvious; it alerted predators who might not otherwise be alert.
He had never been loud, and he had taught the peculiar silence of heightened caution to anyone in reach who would listen. He could not teach these unseen strangers that lesson, now.
High above the dragon’s chosen ground, flew what Arann thought of as vultures, waiting, waiting; they circled lower at the sound of terror. Fear made people stupid if they couldn’t control it. And he understood why they couldn’t.
This was the Common.
Dragons did not exist. That lesson was dr
ummed into children, had been drummed into them for centuries, each passing out of that childhood belief and into the solidity of adulthood. Dragons could not exist. No more could swords that shed warmth and light, or knights that wielded those swords in pursuit of justice. Stories, all.
But the dragon was here. The winged vultures circled. And Arann stood in a broken street, newly made ruins gaping where walls and windows had shattered, listening to the terrified screams of people he could not see, and understanding, as he did, that this sword existed. He was not a hero. Not a knight. Not the final charge of the Kings’ Swords. But he remembered his stories, now: remembered the tales of the Blood Barons, and the first of the Twin Kings, Cormalyn and Reymalyn, and he remembered that the final battle had taken place in the city itself, where cavalry was almost useless.
Then, there had been demons and magi; now, there was dragon and vulture and the horns of a distant, new foe.
Stories, he thought. Stories were what history became. History was reality; it was blood and death and loss; the grief and rage of the moment made real because people were living it, breathing it. Glory, gallantry, heroism, all existed after the fact as bards spread the tales, made newer and prettier, to those who were safe enough they could pause to listen, to daydream, to become, for a moment, one of the valiant warriors who fought on the side of right.
He understood, now, as the screams tilted into a silence of exhaustion and terror, that those soldiers had not thought of themselves as heroes; they might not have thought of themselves as right, either. What they’d desired, on that long-ago day, was survival. Of themselves. Of their comrades. Of the way of life they had chosen, and the Kings to whom they had committed the whole of their service, even if that service ended their lives.
But, he thought, even struggling for survival, it was the way of life they’d chosen, and they would live or die for it. The stories might be fodder for the young, the hopeful, the painfully naive—but the kernel at the heart of those stories was truth. Was he afraid?
War Page 55