The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  Dante sent Lira and Mourn ahead to announce their presence, then cleaned up in the ice-cold creek as much as he could stand. He dried himself with a blanket and gathered up his things. Horse droppings littered the path through the pines.

  The forest ended on the ridge of a low hill, Beckonridge spread in the valley below. For administrative purposes, the place was a single household, yet in practical purposes it resembled a small village. The manor itself was a giant stone structure, L-shaped, with four floors of windows and several towers rising another three stories above that. At a tasteful distance, smoke poured from a smithy, the rhythm of clanging metal trickling through the damp air. A barn and stable sat close together. A number of other simple wooden structures were arranged here and there, housing for servants and resident employees. The dirt road continued past all this, widening as it climbed the ridge on the valley's opposite side.

  Gala walked with them, scanning the open fields as if she expected the old tree stumps to rip themselves from the ground and tear Dante and Blays limb from limb. Dante saw no hint of Mourn and Lira, which was either a good sign or a very bad one. At the manor, a servant waited before iron-banded double doors that could have resisted most armies. The woman led them to a warm receiving room, thick with carpets, a full shelf of books, and the scent of woodsmoke, where she explained that Cassinder was currently at the mines but would return shortly. Lira and Mourn were brought to the room a few minutes later, taking up properly studied positions along the wall.

  "See anything interesting?" Dante asked.

  Mourn nodded enthusiastically. "A rather nice rendition of the confluence of the Cricket and Rommen."

  "He said interesting," Blays said.

  "If you're referring to things you can eat, the answer is no."

  "There's always something to eat. It just depends on how much you want to chew."

  They spent the next hour leafing through picaroon novels and poking at the reluctant fire. At last, the door opened. In it stood a shortish man in a quilted pine green undercoat and the blotchy complexion of one who's been riding in the cold. His blond hair was cut severely short, a glowing fuzz above the sharp angles of his face. To Dante's surprise, he introduced himself as Cassinder; Dante had expected your typical middle-aged and doughy-middled lord, not a thin man nearly as young as himself.

  Cassinder blinked at the books spread on the low table. "There is no tea."

  "In all the world?" Blays said. "Have you checked under the bed?"

  "Excuse me. I will return with tea."

  Cassinder did just that, personally bearing a bronze tray carrying five green-glazed mugs and a steaming clay pot. He set them on the table and poured each full, offering one not just to Blays and Dante, but to Lira, Gala, and Mourn as well.

  "I'd heard this was a strange land," Dante said in his best blustery, jovial, bring-me-a-beer-and-the-nanny voice. "But not so strange that you serve the servants."

  "Everyone gets cold." Cassinder took a step from the table and gazed between his guests in the ritualistic Old Gaskan acknowledgment of presence that might well have been lost on Dante if he really were a traveling Mallish lord and not in fact a Mallish transplant who'd spent years attending dozens of versions of this same traditional tea-greeting. Considering his station, Cassinder's version of the ritual was extremely stripped-down yet respectful, a return to its historical origins. In other households, Dante had seen lords nod briefly at their guests while ignoring the servants pouring tea from emerald-crusted pots into delicate silver cups.

  Dante slurped tea. "Some excellent weed-juice you got here."

  "We grow it ourselves."

  "Funny, that's exactly why we're here. But I'm getting ahead of myself."

  "I will not be insulted if you want to cut straight to the point."

  The lord had a soft way of speaking that made you focus on every word. Dante suspected this was deliberate. Dante grinned and made another bonhomie-heavy insight about how nice it was to cut the crap, then launched into their cover story about needing to put the best possible laborers in front of their skeptical investors—specifically, the figures of the fabled Clan of the Green Lake.

  "They are, unfortunately for you, not for sale." Cassinder said. "Have you seen any of the Clan of the Green Lake?"

  "Not personally."

  Blays grinned. "Although we've heard so much about them I could believe there are no other norren."

  Cassinder gazed at the cooling teapot. "To southern eyes, they look no different from any other norren."

  "What's the difference to northern eyes?" Dante said.

  "Their beards are slightly reddish."

  "That's it?"

  "That is what I said."

  Blays cocked his head. "Then why are they so important to you?"

  Cassinder refilled Blays' tea. "They and their nomad cousin-clans are open supporters of norren independence. The message they send from down my mine is worth more than anything you can offer for them."

  "Don't be too sure about that," Blays said. "In Mallon, our gold grows as thickly as wheat. Our bread weighs eighty pounds a loaf."

  "Then I am surprised you have come all this way for norren when your own farmers must have the musculature of elephants."

  "Are the norren so likely to rebel they need reminders of their place?" Dante said. "From what I hear they're so busy exchanging treatises and crafting cups they can hardly run a village."

  Cassinder laced his fingers together, gazing at his paralleled thumbs. "The norren are restless. If they push much more obviously, several clans will soon be headless."

  "Sounds like you've got them under control either way."

  "I will not sell my stock. I will consider pressing the matter any further rude."

  Dante drew back, palms raised, eyes downcast. "Not our intention at all, sir. But I hope you won't consider it rude if I ask to see them, so that when I look for stock elsewhere, I'll know for myself how close my purchase comes to the finest clan-warriors in Gask."

  "It is not rude, merely pointless. But you are guests. We will go to the mine tomorrow morning."

  Neither his expression nor posture changed, but there was a sudden absence to Cassinder that made it perfectly clear their discussion was done for the day. Dante made a show of stretching, remarking how long the day had been. Cassinder nodded and excused himself. He was replaced by a pair of servants moments later, one of whom led Lira and the two norren to the servants' wing while the other showed Dante and Blays up a stairwell so plushly carpeted they couldn't hear their feet at all. The walls were empty of paintings, cloth hangings, statues, any of the usual trappings of status and wealth. Their two guest rooms were similarly spartan: a bed, a reading-chair, an end table, then nothing but carpet and blank walls, interrupted only by a fireplace. Dante visited the water closet, then returned to Blays' room.

  "What do you think of our host?" he said in Mallish, as if Cassinder might have his pale ear pressed to the door.

  "That he was born three months premature."

  "The fact his fellow bluebloods haven't killed him and claimed they mistook him for a fox makes me think he's close enough to the throne to smell King Moddegan's sweat."

  "He's a second cousin or something. Are you telling me you didn't know that?" Blays turned to the waning sunset beyond the window. "Good work down there, by the way. You almost convinced me you can hold a normal conversation."

  "What? I can talk to people."

  "The same way a fish can wriggle out of a boat. Lots of flapping around, and someone's going to wind up all slimy."

  "If I had a club, it would be on its way to your skull right now." Dante glanced up at the plain ceiling. "Where do you suppose the Nine Pines' bow is?"

  "The armory?" Blays jerked his chin at the bare walls. "Judging from the other furnishings, it'll be the only thing there."

  "Josun Joh said it would be found in a high place. If the Green Lakes are at the bottom of a mine—the low place—where would that put the bo
w?"

  "At the top of a mine?"

  "That is definitely not the answer."

  "At the top of an anti-mine."

  "Of course!" Dante said. "By coincidence, it's rumored your brain is hidden there, too."

  "The attic, if this place has one. Or one of the towers. What do I look like, a Pennish bow-hound? We'll ask for a tour and see what there isn't to see."

  Which was actually a decent plan, given that it was low-risk, unsuspicious, and might even involve a helpful friend or servant stopping to specifically point it out—with the implication that "Here is the Quivering Bow, a norren artifact of unsurpassed power, so what does it say that it's now in the hands of our esteemed lord?" Alternately, their tour leader might go the opposite route, conspicuously leaving a part of the manor unshown to avoid revealing their secret weapon to Mallish eyes. Either way, the search would be narrowed.

  Cassinder was gone again in the morning. Something about overseeing the latest extraction, said to be especially rich. Dante asked for and was reluctantly granted a tour of the household by its majordomo, a man near fifty with thinning gray hair and the tight, clipped gestures of a former soldier. He led Blays and Dante through the manor's numerous wings, floors, and cellars, pointing out ancestral heirlooms (an engraved chalice, a sapphire ring, a broken arrow, which excited Dante until the majordomo explained it had been retrieved from Cassinder's great-great grandfather after the battle of somewhere-or-other); the home's notable additions (along with which estate-owner commissioned them and which architect designed them); and an endless procession of guest rooms, which were of interest not for what was in them (nothing, for the most part, though a handful were appropriately if archaically furnished), but for who had once slept in them, a list of historical so-and-so's whose names Dante forgot as quickly as the balding man recited them.

  "Is there an armory?" Blays said as the majordomo returned them to the carpeted but otherwise blank hallway that opened to their rooms. "Any legendary weapons of yore? Nothing restores your sense of wonder like looking at a sword that's killed a king."

  "Unfortunately, there is nothing like that in the house itself," the man said. "With Lord Cassinder's permission, perhaps you might see the collection in the tower." He glanced down and to the corner. "Yet as with the house, the contents are...austere. Our lord is ever a minimalist."

  Blays took an expression of mock affront. "Except in his hospitality!"

  "Of course."

  The man left them to the quiet house. Cassinder returned by noon, flushed from the chilly ride. After convening downstairs along with the various servants and attendants of both parties, he offered Dante and Blays a carriage for the ride to the mine.

  "Horses or our own feet," Blays said, continuing the bravado. "Carriages separate a man from the world. You know what you get when you're separated from the world? Soft. And white enough to read by."

  Dante expected one of the man's chilly rebuffs, but Cassinder responded with a fragile smile. "It will be done."

  His people scattered for the stables, bringing back two fine-looking horses (for all the riding Dante had done between Narashtovik and the Norren Territories, he still couldn't tell any equine differences more specific than mare or stallion) and an adequate if less nobly statured mount for Lira. Gala and Mourn were left to accompany on foot. Cassinder's troop consisted of three mounted men and two unmounted norren of his own, who carried large packs on their broad backs.

  The trail curled up the hill. To both sides of the dark dirt, grass and ferns glistened in the sun, still damp. Vapor trailed from the horses' nostrils. Cassinder ranged ahead. From most nobles, Dante would take this as a sign of arrogance—the light, ongoing cruelty of constantly reminding everyone around him of their place—but Cassinder's long gazes over the green fields and his nature in general suggested he was simply the type to wander ahead because he was lost in his own thoughts. He was an odd duck, a strange bird among the social beasts that made up the aristocracy, and if Dante didn't have more pressing matters on his hands, he would have tried to get to know the young lord.

  "Do you do any fencing?" Dante said instead, trying to steer their host into martial matters. "Boxing? Archery?"

  "I train with the besette," Cassinder said, referring to a reed-thin blade that hadn't been popular in Gask for at least three generations. "It is a weapon of finesse."

  "Just that?"

  "It only takes one weapon to kill a man."

  Blays pushed out his lower lip. "If you don't care about having fun, sure."

  "Killing is a tool, not a sport." Cassinder blinked, then offered that same fragile smile. "I am sorry. My mother once told me I'd have to learn a blade to protect myself from my tongue."

  "Smart woman."

  Dante pried further, but Cassinder's responses turned monosyllabic until the lord shifted the discourse to chummy small talk—their trip, their families, etc. The hill apexed and began a shallow downslope into a valley cleared of trees. Trying to clear the lush landscape of all growth would have been futile, however, and the ground remained fuzzy with bushes, weeds, ferns, stump-mosses, and fungus. A few miles further along the road, the land swelled again. Atop its high crown, a narrow tower jutted into the sky.

  "Is that where you keep your armory?" Dante said without thinking.

  Cassinder looked at him from the corner of his eyes. "My armory?"

  "Your man gave us a tour of the household. We wanted to see the family arms, but he said they were kept in a tower."

  "The original site of the house." The blond man swayed with the roll of his horse. "But it is not a good time."

  "Are you that busy? Surely one of your people could show us up."

  "The steps to the top are in disrepair. Reaching the armory is currently impossible."

  "Damn," Blays said. "When are they going to invent ropes already?"

  Cassinder gazed at the finger of stone on the hilltop. "You would only be disappointed. There is only one item of note, acquired so recently it has not yet been given a proper display."

  Whatever Cassinder's claims, the tower looked intact and unblemished, an impression Dante confirmed when they crested the hill and rode under its noon-shortened shadow. It was a simple construction, smooth walls of white stone flecked with brown and yellow, its curves broken by narrow arrow-slits. The single door was average in size, but its ring handle was bulky enough to brain a bull. Cassinder stared past it as they advanced. Dante caught Blays' eye and raised his brows at the silent tower.

  They reached the mine within the hour. It sat halfway up a hill, a dirty sprawl of scaffolds surrounding a cavelike tunnel into the stone. Norren emerged with buckets, shoulders bent, dust sifting from their hair. Others turned the wheel of a listless windmill, siphoning water from the depths. Smoke poured from the chimneys of a smelter. A single long barracks stood a few hundred feet away. Men with swords and bows laughed, arms folded over their chests, sparing glances at the lean norren hauling rubble and ore up from the torchlit tunnels.

  Cassinder turned his horse sideways to watch the proceedings. Near the barracks, a one-armed norren tended pots above a firepit. A woman limped up to set a water bucket beside him. Others emerged from the smelter, trudged to a clearing by the mine's entrance, and hefted buckets, arms and backs straining, before returning to the smoking building. They showed no expression but the occasional wince. Over Dante's shoulder, the faces of Mourn and Gala were coldly blank.

  "It is a pinnacle of the intersection of purpose and meaning," Cassinder said softly, as if to himself. "The labor of would-be traitors is instead turned to extracting the silver of one of the nation's wealthiest new mines. In this way, their treasonous spirit is converted into strength for the very country they would sabotage."

  "Pretty fit punishment," Dante said.

  "It's not a punishment."

  "I didn't mean to imply they're not treated well."

  Cassinder shook his head, features contracted into something sharp and eager. "You misun
derstand. It is a sign."

  "Looks like hauling rocks to me," Blays said. "I don't know what that's a sign of. Other than a lifetime of shit-work."

  "How do we know the things we do are right?" Cassinder said. "Praise from others? But they are just men, their vision and wisdom limited by a mortal span and the circumscribed perspective that comes with it."

  "Well obviously."

  "Others look to inner praise. The righteous pride one feels when one has done well. There is nothing purer than one's own spirit."

  "But we're just men ourselves," Dante said.

  Cassinder's head snapped down in a nod. "Exactly. Exactly. The praise of mortals—weak, flawed, rotting—cannot be trusted. Whose can? That of the gods. The heavens. But they do not speak to us. Not in words like these. They operate by signs." He gestured to a dust-blackened norren as the worker staggered to a stop, dropped two buckets with a hollow thump, and gasped for air. "The heavens are symmetry. Perfection reflected and reproduced. The dirt in those buckets becomes pure silver. So the dirt in that man's rebellious soul becomes the power of Gask. Between this symmetry, we glimpse the approval of Arawn."

  Dante had to literally bite his tongue to prevent himself from launching into an extensive, Cycle-quoting counterargument that Arawn doesn't in fact care about the acts of men at all—that we are all derived from and return to the same stuff, the nether, the grist of Arawn's mill, and so our time spent as men doesn't seem that significant to him at all. Instead he said nothing. He was all but certain the Quivering Bow was locked in that tower with its "broken" steps. If he did nothing to impinge on his host's goodwill for two more nights, the bow would be his.

  "You did not come here to see me speak," Cassinder smiled into the silence Dante had inadvertently let grow awkward. "Careful inside. There are rocks."

  Dante laughed, but Cassinder's quickly-hidden look of puzzlement suggested that hadn't been a joke. He provided them covered lanterns and warned them to let him know if the flame changed color, particularly green or blue. That much sounded exciting, but otherwise the mine looked exactly the way Dante would have guessed: stone tunnels, boards planking the walls and ceilings to lock in loose rocks, grit and dust and sweating men bunching their arms to assault the walls with heavy picks. Other norren gathered the rubble into buckets and lugged it up to the light. No surprises except the silver ore itself, gnarled rocks shot through with shades of rust and blue.