by Jenna Rhodes
“He loved Nutmeg although he would not admit it to himself. As for Tressandre, the only thing she’s ever loved was her brother Alton, and that only because he mirrored her.” Cold waters, whispered to his ear in a chilled fog of a breath.
“She hates easily enough.”
“To the bone.”
“You’re muttering to yourself again,” Lara said, as she finished fussing with her laces and pulls, flexing her arms to make sure she had the room she needed and that all else stayed secure. “Talking to the ghost?”
“Ghost?”
“You must have one. You talk to yourself a lot.”
“Ah. Perhaps. Perhaps I’m just discussing what I fear to say to your face.”
“And that would be . . .”
“How beautiful I think you are. How you worry me.”
“Is that all? I would think your ghost would be nagging you for grandchildren.”
“All in good time,” Bistel whispered in his ear, before a cold wave washed over him that told him his father had left him yet again. But not, it seems, without a few words of hope that he and she might survive this entanglement with Tressandre. It did not seem enough to hold on to, but it was all he had.
“Not yet,” he answered Lara. “His first thoughts are on the duel.” He lifted his chin. “You look ready.”
She took three deep breaths. “Let us pray so.”
He did. He patted his thigh as he stepped back, a slim almost imperceptible dagger—a dart really—coated with the king’s rest secreted in an outside sheath. He would not lose her, even if it meant sending her to the depths of endless sleep and cold hell again. It saved her once from death and he dared hope it might save her again, but he could only use it if he himself survived Tressandre and Lara lived long enough for him to get to her.
The sun on high revealed the Returnists’ squat, buildings bleak and weathered and aromatic, crowd gathering. Tressandre waited at the fore, leaning on a sword, her wrists crossed, her expression one of open contempt. Lara dismounted, giving up the reins to Bistane who left his saddle and took both horses aside to stake them. As he took a watchful stance not far from her, two ild Fallyn in black and silver melted out of the crowd and flanked him. Lara’s glance flicked away from him and back to Tressandre.
“Well met, at last, Tressandre ild Fallyn.” Lara lifted her chin.
“Only now well met? We have known each other most of our lives. Fellows, I do believe the Warrior Queen has insulted me.” Tressandre half-turned and a few half-hearted laughs met her look.
Lara took out her daggers. “By virtue of that title, I not only insult you, I judge and sentence you. I convict you for your attempted treasons by assassination, for sedition among our people and the people of Kerith, for theft and plundering, for enforced slavery, and for the kidnapping of my heirs. This is a blood sentence and a debt I intend to collect. You’re guilty in my eyes, ild Fallyn and I don’t care if the Gods judge otherwise.”
Her words caused murmurs among the crowd but no shouted denials and Tressandre merely looked amused. “Kidnapping, you say? I’m sure those wayward children are floating around here somewhere.”
Floating? Caught by surprise, Lara looked toward the Andredia, expecting to see wretched bodies adrift on the river. Tressandre leaped.
Lara leaned precariously backward, feeling the swoop of air over her chest as Tressandre’s slash passed over her, the sword humming. She thought she could even smell the tang of kedant venom on its edge, but that might have been her imagination. Gaining her balance, she jabbed upward, not expecting to hit but forcing Tressandre to jump back a step and give ground. She twisted as she did, giving no target other than her flank, chain mail rippling across her torso. Her wrists sang out a tiny protest of pain and weakness which she ignored.
Her body worked on its own, muscles remembering drills pounded into her since she stood tall enough to hold a sword. She let it react the way it had been trained, and experience had honed it, while her mind leaped ahead and they circled each other a moment, judging each other’s reach. Tressandre carried sword and knife, she carried two daggers. A confident look crept over the other’s face as she calculated her reach.
They sparred, blades slicing the air to ribbons when they missed, her armor sparking when Tressandre did not, and she flinched back in alarm just as Bistane had predicted. Lara’s shirt fabric began to shred as Tressandre’s superior reach landed blows that Lara could not parry, and her sleeves hung about her arms, revealing the bracers and bands so carefully laced into place by Bistane. Tressandre’s lip curled, but she said nothing, pressing on the attack instead. The weapons howled as they played off one another, metallic shrieks accenting their breathing.
Lara could feel herself growing tired. Dagger play was quick and fitful and nasty, not meant to be a long and drawn-out fight. Her ankles ached as she moved, back and forth, side to side, pivoting, turning, leaping, as her hands dueled almost without thought, meeting and tagging Tressandre wherever she could. She could feel her skin sting where Tressandre had sliced her, not deep but deep enough to draw blood, just as she could see where she’d drawn blood on the other. But there would be no end to this until life itself had been taken.
Lara shook her head slowly, denying Tressandre’s arrogant expression. “You’re not going anywhere this time.”
The whites of her eyes accented her smoky jade and greens as Tress stated, “You haven’t got what it takes.”
“To kill in cold blood? You’d know what that takes. But I can’t justify mercy anymore. You’ve gone too far.”
“Such pretty words. Cruelty. Treason.” Tressandre stepped forward and crisscrossed her sword and knife cutting across Lara who met them and shoved them off with a muffled grunt.
Tressandre gave a scoffing hiss. “Give yourself whatever reason you need for your failures.” Her booted feet crossed over each other nimbly as she circled about Lara. She would leap again, Lara told herself, when she threw her balance forward onto her toes. She had Tressandre’s tell, now.
“It was no failure to wait and see if you were a poison I needed to purge. You are, and I’m ready.” Lara baited her.
Lara threw herself aside, feeling the rush of air implode as Tressandre leaped. With all her preparation, with all her training, with all that Bistane had sacrificed to bring her this far, it would not be enough. She reached out her soul and caught at his, him standing nearby, his sword clenched in his hand, holding back the watching crowd and aching for her. Solid as a rock he stood, as solid as he’d been all through her life, even as a young girl and he just barely older, with a deceptive song on his lips. Songs that did not hide his soul as she’d often considered them, but now knew revealed a side of himself that he could not hide and did not want to. He loved life. He praised it in all its forms and nourished himself from the nurturing of it. He had a Vaelinar heritage as close to that of the Dwellers as he could get, and he chose not to hide it but celebrate it, for there were few Vaelinars who could understand. She understood, now, and in that split-second before Tressandre would descend upon her, she saw him anchored deep into Kerith with all his love and hope of life. He was exactly what she had always needed to love back. She’d sensed it and committed to it, but now she gave her all back. She threw her soul about that anchor and held on tightly.
She knew enough about her Talents that she could possess and look ahead, sometimes fractions of moments, sometimes years. She always feared never being able to return, so Lara had never let her Talent loose, had never unfurled it to its lengths even with Jeredon helping her. Now she had Bistane. She would never live past this moment in time if she did not reach for another. So she did. She seized not flesh or soul but Time itself.
Her senses darkened a moment. She knew a painful and disorienting jerk, like being at the end of the movement playing Crack the Whip. Then her eyes flew open and she stood on her feet, bringing her rig
ht dagger across and down. Her ears thrummed with the pressure of her movement, but she spun on her left heel after the slash without waiting to see its full effect—she knew she’d connected—and reached out, grabbed a moment, and whipped herself forward again.
She caught Tressandre stumbling on a jump, blade-filled hands flailing as she struck impotently at emptiness. She kicked one foot out at the back of Tress’ knee, bringing her down, and rolling, and lashed out, getting the inside of her thigh deeply. Crimson spurted in the wake of her strike.
“Tell me where the children are.”
Her lip curled. “Like curs, waiting to be sacked and sunk in the bottom of the pond, where good-for-nothing mongrels should go. You’ll never find them without me.” Tressandre bent over her leg, one forearm up to shield and the other frantically ripping apart the bottom edge of her shirt and trying to wrap the thigh wound. Lara hung back long enough to let her make the ineffectual gesture, trying to shrug off the cold dismay Tressandre’s answer stabbed through her.
If they lived, she still had a chance to find them, but she would not take that chance from Tressandre. She sucked in her resolve. “What I learned from Sinok was that it isn’t enough to be right or powerful. You have to be ruthless. Today I embrace that.”
Tressandre began to levitate, her arms flung out and her hair spread upon the winds of her movement, readying to flee.
Lara lashed out with the back of her hand and the butt of her dagger’s hilt, smashing the side of Tressandre’s temple and laying her out flat on the ground. Winded, she took a deep breath so she could raise her voice. “For every traitorous act you and your brother Alton have committed on the peoples of Kerith, I condemn you. I judge you. I execute you.”
“You can’t kill me.”
“You think I won’t? Again, you’ve been wrong about me, ild Fallyn.”
Tressandre flung her hand out, digging her fingers into the grasses, new grass grown over old blood and ashes, her nails digging down deep. “This is mine! It should belong to me. By blood and spirit we shed here, I claim what is rightfully mi—”
She brought her dagger across Tressandre’s throat even as the woman’s face curled in spite, and she shouted out a single, indistinguishable word.
Warm blood splattered Lara’s own face; she dropped her daggers in the grass, straightening and wiping her face on the back of her sleeve. She noticed then that her own shirt and jerkin hung in tatters about her, exposing the mail bracers Bistane had so lovingly secured in place. Tressandre had gone for every weak and vulnerable spot she could reach, and met the mail with every slash. If he had not prepared her, and if she had not reached out to Time itself, it would be Lara lying in the pool of blood on the trampled meadow. Her eyes blurred a moment and she had that sense, she had that fleeting moment of knowing that Time seized her back, and she looked on another field of death, and heard the voice of a God in her ear.
Then she returned, with a shiver, and Bistane held her up by one elbow. “Are you hurt?”
He held her away from him and checked, limb by limb.
“A few cuts,” she answered. “Nothing deep. You had me covered where she intended to strike. We can’t stand here. She had orders in place.”
He swept his gaze over the retreating crowd, the pale of face and disbelieving, the Returnists and squatters and her men, all of whom had lost all they’d hoped to gain. “To do what, you think?”
“Kill the children at the very least. Set the world on fire if she could have managed it. Or—” Lara lifted her head and looked at the Eye, pulsing as it hung in the sky, and a chill fell over her. “Open that.”
Chapter
Fifty-Six
BREGAN’S MOUTH tasted of dirt and ashes when the whirlwind deposited him at the hills above Larandaril. He staggered as it dissipated around him, his skin chapped from the dry heat of the elemental as well as the grit and debris that had been caught up with him. He had not been able to summon the God for days as he wandered across the wilderness, and when it had finally found him and taken him up, it hadn’t crossed the land directly “as the silverwings fly, the Dwellers might say.” It had meandered where it would, reminding him that the Gods of Kerith were both capricious and distinctly not mortal. He spat as he could, but he had little enough in his mouth that he could not clear the taste of his journey from his throat.
He wobbled down the small slope, listening for the rush of the river, heading for the water which was the only thing on his mind. His burning thoughts had quieted for the moment, leaving him only with the need to drink and perhaps find food wherever he might. But water, sweet water, stayed foremost on his mind. He could see its vibrant blue ribbon winding its way across the valley. He did not even notice the war hammer he had stuck through his belt, great thing though it was, covering two-thirds of his body and bouncing against his one good leg as he made his way downhill. Drying grasses tore at his ragged clothes, and stones pushed at his toes however they could be found, until he stumbled onto the last muddy bank and half slid into the river awaiting him and nearly drowned himself.
But the Andredia had suffered a fair amount of fools in her time and eased away from him, enough that he might turn his head to breathe while he sprawled half-conscious at her mercy. When the coolness of the water lapped at his face and neck, bathing away the grime and sunburn, and when he’d drunk all he could consume, he got to his knees. His brace creaked a bit. Bregan looked down in surprise. The smoothly geared contraption rarely made a noise or stuck or hampered him in any way since he’d been fitted with it more years ago than he would like to admit. He could see that he’d battered the elven machinery over the years; tiny scratches nearly invisible to the eye could be seen and also bits of wood and stone caught in the cogs and wheels. He stepped into the river and cleaned it as best he could, for without it, he stood and walked little better than a one-legged man, and that one without a crutch as well. His brace caught the light as he emerged, gold-bronze and brilliant, and when he stepped, it moved as smoothly as it ever had. Bregan smiled. He began to move down the Andredia toward his next goal where it hung, barely imperceptible from his vantage, the golden eye low in the sky over the forest, the portal that began to hold a crimson hue as though that eye bled.
As he gained ground, memories of the man he used to be flooded him. Wastrel, gambler, a man women flocked to, a Master Trader, a master swordsman, even after being crippled when he had to switch sword hands and relearned his skills. He wasn’t sure why the Gods let his mind come back together again, although he supposed it was for some reason of theirs. He wanted to say that he would have come to them, even if they hadn’t split his mind apart, but he wasn’t sure of that at all. He knew he hadn’t much choice when he had turned to the Gods of Kerith, because they were the only ones he could perceive in the days after his mind crumbled. Even Abayan Diort and Sevryn Dardanon, with their bold presences and sharp weapons, had barely existed to his senses in the first days of his new self. Even now Diort looked upon his charge with a somewhat beset upon, if benign, expression. The Guardian King had never seemed certain of his guardianship. He could not fault him or Ceyla his oracle; both had cared for him as they could within the range of their experience. Bregan knew he was difficult. He could not change that. The demands of the Gods were excruciatingly difficult. They were angry with their people and with their own complacency, choosing to sleep for centuries as if all had been well.
That would change. That and everything would change. Bregan caught the edge of that fleeting thought as it sliced through his awareness, that edge as sharp as razors. He had been given this task and would do it as they asked of him, but at the same time, he wouldn’t absolve those Gods of their forgetfulness. Of their sleep, of the deaf ears they’d turned to their people. They’d been called upon and chose to ignore those pleas. He, Bregan, newly discovered Mageborn, would exact a penalty on both the errant people and their Gods. Only he could do it. He would suffer w
hatever punishment they lowered upon him gladly, and as for the future . . . there would be other Mageborn coming along, sooner or later. He had but to blaze the trail for them.
He knew they would take far better steps than his own shuffling, struggling ones. They had to be better than he—he rested with the dregs at the bottom of the barrel. But, then, perhaps that is how he and his line escaped the purge that took the Mageborns out of Kerith for all these centuries. It was not the best and wisest who came surging back, but the least of the unwanted.
Good camouflage, he told himself as he rounded yet another lazy bend in the great river and then heard the singing in the sky of the portal which had never been closed. His neck stretched as he threw his head back to look at it, great slit in the clouds, with auras shifting behind it, hinting of untoward things happening in faraway elsewhere.
His brace glided smoothly the faster he walked and the closer he got to his goal. It more than held his weight; it seemed to be upholding the other leg as well, lending strength and speed to both. He hated the weakness that ruled the right side of his body. He’d seen old men and women cursed with it, a stroke of the brain, folding them up and spitting them out without unwrinkling them, leaving them tottering upon the face of the world. It was his own fault, though, he admitted that to himself. He had charged at the Dark Ferryman, a phantasm who was no more mortal than a . . . a . . . stump of a tree, and he’d been hit with the full force of whatever magic it was that ran it. The jolt knocked him across the river, blazing pain into every fiber and bone of his being, and he thought he’d died except for the agony that coursed through him with every laborious beat of his heart. He should have died. He’d attacked a Way, accusing it of deception and dishonor as you would a mortal, but it had never been mortal, that Vaelinar Ferryman. Well, Bregan told himself, that was not the story entire. He had been mortal, once, brother to the Vaelinar traitor Daravan before caught in a web of magics and transformed into the Dark Ferryman who could ford any river, no matter the flood or wind or ice, who could and did escort any barge or ferry brought to him. And whom it was said, could also transport a wanderer across any water if his name was invoked.