by Jenna Rhodes
“Blessed rain,” murmured the tavern wench weaving her path through the crowd, a pitcher in each hand.
“Amen,” echoed the crowd.
Tolby waited for quiet. “As our rivers and lakes filled that following spring, the Raymy began to return. In spits and spurts, like big omens, falling from the clouds overhead. The ild Fallyn began to plot the death of Jeredon’s unborn child, the only heir to Larandaril, Queen Lara’s chosen successor. Abayan Diort’s army withdrew, but stayed on our borders, his intentions still murky. The Galdarkans were guardian servants of the old Mageborn peoples who warred each other into nothingness and chaos, and we did not know if Diort held the same chaotic mind.
“We lived in uncertainty. Then the inevitable began, and it became clear that Daravan’s magics failed and could no longer hold the Raymy at bay. They carried plague and war wherever they touched.
“What we did not know was that Daravan had not gathered up the Raymy to save us. It was his retreat. The armies belonged to him, given to Quendius to ravage our lands at will. He saw their defeat at Ashenbrook and Ravela that day and used all the power he could command to turn that defeat around, to retreat with his army still intact, and took it, sweeping them up with his magic and that of the Ferryman who could transport across water and time. We thought we’d won. The bitter notion came soon enough to us that we had only bought a little time. With the Raymy gone, we started eyeing each other again in suspicion.
“Queen Lariel saw her own assassination and named the killer as her own faithful Sevryn who took Rivergrace and fled her retribution. Sevryn, son of Daravan whose own traitorous conspiracies began to reveal themselves. Sevryn, named as the king of assassins.”
Tolby lowered his pipe and tapped it against the edge of the counter. He sighed. “My Rivergrace loved him, and because she did, I gave him the benefit of doubt. Though his father was a traitor, that man had also turned his back on his own son, and Sevryn did not even know of his paternal bond until those dire times. And Daravan had kept his traitorous nature hidden. Sevryn worried more than I did that he might follow unknown footsteps. I did not believe my daughter could treasure an unworthy man.”
He pointed his pipe at the ceiling. “Wonders dread and terrible were learned that winter and spring. We had rain again, a near miracle. And death had come to many of our families, a tremendous sorrow. But we did not know a dead man would rise from the battlefields, a bloodless man, a man who neither lived nor died, and a man who could hold the demon Cerat at bay and use him to create the Undead. That being was Narskap, still enslaved, bound forever to Quendius. Rivergrace was torn away from Sevryn and used by Quendius to force Narskap to build an army of Undead, while the weaponmaster waited for Daravan with the Raymy and his own dire soldiers to return.”
He looked out at the crowd, his brow knotted, his eyes fierce. “They plotted nothing less than the death of all of us. When Daravan came back, only a few would stand to face him. Ever devious, he struck at the heart of Larandaril when all expected the armies would return to where they had been swept up at Ashenbrook and Ravela. Queen Lariel was caught alone in her kingdom, with only a smattering of her troops. Rivergrace and her Sevryn against Quendius and the battalion of Undead he commanded. Young Bistane, Bistel’s son and heir, kept the bulk of his troops for some reason and came riding like a whirlwind in fury to Larandaril. And the Guardian King Abayan Diort, taking fresh troops to Ashenbrook turned instead to the sacred valley on a whim. The battle fell in the heart of Larandaril where only a few companies under the queen stood against the Raymy. The ild Fallyn came as well, but their soldiers came to make sure Queen Lariel fell and would not rise again there.
“Their battle shook the earth to its core. Th’ very fabric of our lives tore open. Daravan had sorcery as well as Talent, and it was he who tore the universes apart, linking the old world of the Vaelinar to fight this new world of ours where they had taken refuge.”
Hisses went around the room. “Aye,” agreed Tolby. “Our Vaelinar, chancy and devious as they can be—well, they’ve blessed us as well as chafed us. We learned it that day. The old world had cursed itself, filled itself with plague and hatred and wanted to spill into ours. We stopped it. We won that day. Bistane and Diort brought their troops thundering into Larandaril, the valley that had been pledged never to know war or drought or famine or pestilence. The Raymy were fought to the last one. Quendius saw Daravan cut down and he took his Undead Army through the hole in the universes in flight. Rivergrace and Sevryn went after, to heal the grievous wounds between two worlds, and stop Quendius.
“They did not save Lara who was cut down and lies today in a sleep like death, yet she does not die. Bistane stays at her side. Her wounds heal, but she does not awaken. The ild Fallyn lost their son, Alton, but their daughter Tressandre remains as ambitious as always. Some circles say it was her blade, or her brother’s, which cut Queen Lariel down. No one has proved—or disproved—it yet. It was said she, too, carried a child sired by Jeredon Eladar who would claim the Anderieon throne, but rumor came to us that she lost that child after the fight in Larandaril. Does she plot bitter revenge? Likely.”
Tolby clamped his lips tightly about his pipe stem for a long moment. “The Raymy plague is still about, but never unleashed upon us as it might have been. For that we may be thankful. We drive it out with fire wherever it erupts, and so far, we’ve not lost many lives of Kerith to it.
“And my daughter Nutmeg has given birth to the rightful heir of the Anderieon Warrior Queen.” His gaze fell upon the two sleepy children under the nearby table, and he smiled.
“Rivergrace, Goddess of fire and river waters, has not returned to us. Nor has her love Sevryn, king of the assassins. It’s been two years and a bit more. The rip between our world and theirs remains, often very slight but sometimes great, and the world shakes whenever it opens. It is an eye that watches us as closely as we watch it.”
Tolby rocked back on his perch and drained the last of his mug of cider, thumping it down empty beside him. “Yet that is only part of the story, for any tale involving the Vaelinars mean wheels spinning within wheels and the knowledge that much is still hidden.”
He cleared his throat, preparing to tell them what Bistane had asked him to share. Outside, where some of the listeners had been crouched on the roadway or leaning in the windows, bodies began to straighten and shuffle off, leaving their mugs in a congenial pile by the thrown-open doors. Dust spouts followed their footsteps, swirled about by a beginning afternoon wind. The breeze grew stiffer and gained a voice, a howl.
Then someone screamed.
Chapter
Thirteen
“THERE ARE GODS HERE!” Bregan spun around in the barren wasteland, flinging his arms out as if he could catch one to embrace.
Abayan Diort, known to his people as the Guardian King, sat in his leather chair as the briefest of travel canopies fluttered in the breeze overhead. Despite his kingly presence, the man he watched dance seemed oblivious of him. His gold-hued skin, a marking of the Galdarkan people, glowed in the morning light, and the woman who kneeled next to him smiled softly as she basked in the warmth of his presence. She put her hand on the arm of his chair. “There are Gods everywhere,” she called back to Bregan. A tangle of hair escaped her scarf, exposing her curved and exquisitely pointed ear, her own marking of her Vaelinar blood. “Especially to Bregan.”
His eyebrow went up at the naming of the half-mad Kernan in Diort’s guardianship. Self-proclaimed, for no one heard the Gods as loudly or as often as Bregan did, the madman styled himself a Mageborn in a land which had not seen Mageborn for over a millennium—nor did they wish to. Mageborn held magic like the Vaelinars did, but unlike the Vaelinars, they quarreled themselves to death with it and left reservoirs of corrupt, unpredictable magic behind them that still soiled Kerith to this day. If Mageborn had indeed returned to the face of the earth, one could question: why? To what purpose? What good wo
uld it serve? And no one would have a good answer. Certainly not Bregan, once a handsome young Master Trader with all the wealth and education that conferred, whose current level of mind skill ranged between deliriously incoherent to raving maniac. Galdarkans had been bred centuries ago to rein in the Mageborn, to serve as their bodyguards and protectors and, in some cases, even their conscience. Diort could not deny he had found a deep, instinctive maternal response within him to Bregan’s plight. One which he often wished he could ignore.
“So you and I know.” He pointed his chin toward the still spinning Kernan. “I am not so sure what our madman perceives.” He watched as the personage who had once been the prince of the most powerful Trading Guild on Kernan began to topple, dizzied, from his activity. He wore a brace of elven make on one leg, his right, weakened by a magical attack from the being known as the Ferryman, but Diort had his doubts about the kind of magic. He’d seen similar injuries among the fortunate few to have survived a lightning strike. The striations on the skin, the muscle weakness, the nerve damage. It was not for him to say, of course. He hadn’t been there decades ago when the young scion had taken umbrage with the Ferryman about the trade caravan’s passage across a treacherous river and taken a sword to him. Diort would not have done such a rash act. The Ferryman had been a Way, a knot put into the natural fabric of their world by the Vaelinar, a knot which should never have existed but did because they’d taken up a few of the threads which made the natural world and changed them.
Those knots existed throughout this coast where Vaelinar Houses were more populous and powerful, and their unnatural magics remained potent for the most part, although every now and then a knot simply frayed apart and the threads sprang back into place. When that happened, energies would be released, and a backlash occur, but nothing disastrous. Nothing at all like the lands blasted by their own past wars of the Mageborn. Nothing at all like the cataclysmic pools of corrupt power sunk into the Kernan soil, cesspools of disaster waiting to flare at the slightest touch.
The man he watched eddy to the side and sink slowly to the ground was Mageborn, or so the Gods told him. The only one after centuries of extinction by the will of vengeance of angry Gods. Kernan Gods were distant. They had once talked to their people and now they were mostly silent, either discouraged or complacent with the civilizations they had stirred into being. Galdarkans had been born to be guardians of the willful Mageborn, to protect the magic wielders from each other and themselves. They had ultimately failed at their task as the wars erupted. Diort wondered vaguely if he would fail at this new, resurrected task.
“Bregan. How do you fare?”
Bregan lay on his back now, spread-eagled. “Marvelously dizzy.”
Diort had no answer to that. He looked down at the woman flanking his chair. “Ceyla.”
She smiled wider. “He is childlike, is he not?”
“Indeed. I’d like to know why he ran away and I’ve spent the last two weeks tracking him this far.”
Ceyla spread her hands, palms up, and eyed the faintly pink skin. “It didn’t take him two weeks to get this far.”
“No. With or without the Mageborn tunnels, he is still on foot.”
“I surmise,” she told him softly, “that a God carried him this far.”
His attention snapped to her. “Why would you think that?”
“He’s not journey-worn. Not tired or hungry or thirty. He doesn’t show any of the strains of having been running for days, even though he escaped from your care.”
“And does he show how he escaped?”
“Not that. If he felt compelled enough, he would have escaped however he could. Perhaps he hung underneath one of your supply carts as it went through the gate.”
Diort made a scornful noise. “When he was young, perhaps, but he’s not in that kind of condition now.”
“Yet he’s here, brace and all, and he’s even euphoric.”
“So that means to you one of the Gods carried him this far, but you cannot prove it.”
“Of course I can’t.” She shook her head, dislodging her scarf further and finally reached up to remove it, loosening the glorious bounty of her hair over her shoulders and down her back. “Nor do I think he could give an account of it.”
Diort sighed. “I do not wish to be in charge of a madman.”
“It’s what your people were created to do.”
“Not I. I didn’t conquer the earth-shaker Rakka so that I could be a nursemaid. I brought broken cities together. I was born to heal what the Mageborn tore apart!” He clenched his fists.
Ceyla’s face smoothed into a curious, neutral expression. “Following him will lead you to your destiny.”
He looked sharply at her, noting the expression and the position of her hands. He said not a word until she shivered and suddenly dropped her hands to her knees.
“Would you repeat that?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “I said I doubt Bregan could tell you himself how he got here.”
He paused for a long time, gaze searching her face before looking away and getting to his feet. “I suppose we need to ask him where he intends to go from here.” He bent to give his hand to her. “Or should I wait until you divine his road?”
Ceyla slipped her slender hand into his great one, standing easily. “I may be your oracle, Abayan Diort, but those words don’t fall easily from me.”
He brushed a bit of dirt from her hip. “Perhaps, like Bregan, they do, but you cannot give an accounting of it.”
“Bitterness doesn’t ride you well.”
“My people were born to it evidently, but that doesn’t mean we like to embrace it. At least I didn’t have to bring an army after this fool.”
“This time,” Ceyla murmured softly behind him, as she dropped into place to follow him.
His voice drifted back to her. “You are more accurate than my last oracle, but she was not tempted to talk behind my back.”
Ceyla shut her mouth firmly, but couldn’t help smiling as she followed the man, whom she considered great, to the man all knew was a fool.
Bregan sat up as they neared and looked as if he had, for the first time since they’d made camp that morning, just noticed them. His childlike expression brightened. “Oh, good! You’ve brought horses.” He ran toward them, his brace working as smoothly as if a living limb in itself and he swung up on horseback, snapping the bridle loose from the horse line and setting his heels into the animal’s flank. It bolted with a shrill whinny, and the madman galloped out of their encampment.
Diort sprang forward with a curse and commands, and the camp came apart in a flurry of men, tents, and equipment, in pursuit. Like a hill of ants broken apart and swarming up in furious activity, his army flew apart to form up again. Another army might have taken a day to pack and prepare to follow, but his came from nomad stock, and he watched in pride as they were ready in less than a candlemark, outfitted and eager, awaiting him.
Ceyla sat on her mare, toying with the tasseled mane, waiting for Diort. Their eyes met, and she smiled at him. “I await.”
“As always, since the day fate gifted you to me.” His gaze lifted from her face, and his answering smile warped into a scowl. “What in cold hell—”
The horse Bregan had stolen ran scampering back to them, its eyes white with wild fright and its tack entangled and dirtied as if it had been caught in a massive dust storm, tail and mane knotted and thrust about with brambles and even stones.
Ceyla began to shake. She put a hand out as soldiers spread out to catch the frightened horse and bring it to a halt, its flanks heaving and lathered. It put its nose to the ground and made terrible noises. She swayed at the sight of the poor beast and let out a cry herself.
The dream struck her down as cleanly as if she’d been cleaved in two by a sword. Ceyla felt herself go limp and then drop at the feet of her liege, his shout ringing in h
er ears just before everything went dark.
• • •
Her mind did not stay dark, as the dream welled up inside her, until she thought she might explode from it. The sights, sounds, and smells of her prophecy swelled until her head could hardly hold it all and she reached out with both hands, grasping, crying, “I can’t remember all this!” in terror. The scene ripped in front of her and swirled away into gray mists, leaving her ears ringing from it all, and her lungs gasping for air. She awoke panting, her fingers clawing in front of her.
Abayan Diort took her hands in his to still her fighting. His large hands enveloped her in strong but gentle warmth, and Ceyla felt his strength wash through her, a comforting feeling as he helped her sit.
“I have known for some time that dreaming is not easy for you, but this looked like a deadly struggle. Yet, I knew I should not awaken you.”
Her heart had been beating like that of a racing horse but now began to quiet in her chest. She took three deep breaths before saying, “So much. So much I don’t know if I can tell you all.”
“Try, if you wish. If you wish not, that is your will. Your dreams aren’t mine to command,” Diort told her. His bulk stayed between her and the sun, shading her in gold, like the hues of his skin, not yet deepened to bronze as it did in the summer, but golden enough. Thick skull ridges shaded his eyes deep in his face, and the tattoos of office and manhood offset distinct cheekbones, his face both barbaric and handsome at the same time. To a Vaelinar, she thought as she freed her hands from his. To one of Kerith, he looked perfectly acceptable. Galdarkans were nomads of the great eastern part of the continent, although this man had united most of the tribes and forgotten cities. They were not in the east, though. He lingered in the First Home lands, on the western coast, and Ceyla knew he wondered if he should take a bride from this region or if it would be seen as a grab for even greater power. She knew her lord had power enough and that he found himself lonely. A Guardian King did not marry for his feelings; however, he married for his people. Would taking one of the Vaelinar cement or help his kingdom?