Vision began to strobe, the firelit night interspersed with somewhere else, somewhere that was black in a way that negated the possibility of anything else.
He twisted against the strength that pulled him away from what he must do. Flashes, a man’s square face, a blond woman’s locked in a rictus of effort.
“Fáfnir’s bones he’s strong!” a soprano voice gasped.
Hands and arms gripped him, half a dozen strong warriors just enough to contain the quivering violence that locked them all into a dynamic stasis. It took two to get the knife out of his hand.
“I . . . see . . . you,” rasped through his throat.
“And I you,” the High King said grimly.
To the others: “Hold him fast, now.”
His right hand stripped the Sword out of the sheath at that hip, leaving it pommel-upright in his grasp. The world froze in a blaze that was light and darkness, a smile that was and wasn’t his mother, a feeling of completion. Nothing more was necessary, but something that was/wasn’t him shrieked. In the same movement Rudi pressed the antler-cradled crystal to Cole’s forehead.
Click.
There was something like steel wire around his brain, straining and then snapping.
He didn’t black out, but everything became irrelevant. The sudden rag-doll limpness of his body almost tore it out of the hands gripping it, where the previous instant’s unnatural strength had been checkmated. They carried him back and plunked him down sitting on top of a barrel full of something heavy and solid, a posture that kept his feet off the ground and made it impossible for him to move even if he felt like it, which he didn’t.
When his eyes fluttered open again he felt almost normal, except that he had no desire to do anything whatsoever except sit and there was a film of something like flexible glass between him and the world. Hands rested heavy on his shoulders and a Mackenzie short sword was close enough to his throat to make the little hairs crinkle a bit, but that was nothing he could care about.
“No.”
The High King’s voice, facing off against Bow-Captain Luag’s anger and meeting it with a slight smile.
“He’s foresworn!”
“That he is not, Luag. He had no more choice in the matter than a man hit on the head with a sledgehammer can choose not to fall.”
A hand fell almost caressingly on the hilt of the Sword. “I’ve met the like before. They must have foreseen that the line of his fate would be tangled with mine, so. And I can tell you with a great and certain certainty that it won’t happen again. Not with this one. He’s guarded against such now, for all his life to come.”
“It would be just as certain if he were dead, but you’re the High King,” Luag said, but it was a grumble now and not hot rage.
“Indeed I am.”
The bow-captain sheathed his own weapon and stepped back.
Cole felt enough life return to smile slightly at the shocked, uncertain faces of Alyssa and Talyn and Caillech. Rudi held out his hand.
“A bit of a pick-me-up, Edain.”
The square-faced young man Cole remembered stepped forward, a flat silver flask in one hand. The other held an unstrung bowstave of impressive thickness.
That part of Cole’s brain that handled logic was starting to work again, as were his nerves, and he suspected that was the thing that had whacked him across the backs of his knees in a way that was going to make him limp for days. All things considered, he didn’t mind much.
“Waste of good brandy, sure and it’s a crime, Chief,” the archer said, but handed it over.
“Drink.”
Cole did as the flask was held to his lips. The sweet fire coursed down his throat; he gasped, and things stuttered to life within him. For a moment he had a crazy sensation of being a grape, and feeling utter completion as he was picked and fermented and distilled, then it spun away and the world began to break through the film around his being.
“What—” his voice began to rise.
The High King stooped a little, one hand braced on his knee, which put their eyes on a level.
“Look at me, man.” Cole did. “Now, you’ve met a High Seeker of the Church Universal and Triumphant at some time, have you not, the misfortune of the world?”
“I . . . yeah, of course, I—”
A gust of panic suddenly squeezed his throat shut. He knew he had, a red-robe priest of the weird cult that ruled beyond the Rockies. One had shown up to be chaplain, and . . . but he couldn’t remember it.
“I . . . I can remember remembering that I did, but—”
“Easy, easy. Drink again. My guard-captain can refill his flask later.”
Cole did, gulping and coughing. The light changeable eyes were steady on his in the firelight, but their presence was like a burning limelight, like looking into the sun for a moment.
“How can I remember remembering but not remember?”
“The Sword of the Lady healed your mind,” Rudi—Artos—said. “A compulsion was laid upon you, like a seed . . . or a spring trap set for game. The Sword removed it, but that means a scar upon your memory. Count yourself lucky; the compulsion was subtle, and meant to be hidden. If it hadn’t been, more of you would have been lost when the tainted part was burned away.”
The flask was empty. Cole looked down at it—there was a wolf’s face on it, thin black lines set into the silver—and wondered whether he should ask for more or just upchuck. A gust of wild laughter threatened to break free. Probably puking all over the High King would be blasphemy or lèse-majesté or something like that.
“Cole Salander, is it?”
“Yes,” he said. Familiar ritual straightened him a little, as he rattled off his rank and serial number.
“And you’ve two brothers, Jack and Tanner?”
That startled him enough that his stomach subsided. “Yeah. They went missing—”
“At the Horse Heaven Hills last year, yes,” the High King said. “There was more than a little chaos, just then.”
His hand was on the Sword again, eyes slitted in thought for a moment before he went on:
“They’re alive. Tanner I grieve to say lost his left foot at the ankle, a matter of a six-pounder round shot, but he’s recovering and will be able to get about well enough to do a man’s work yet. Jack has taken service with Frederick Thurston, the one of your first President’s sons who yet lives, and the one who didn’t betray and kill him and sell his country to the enemy of humankind. With which enemies you have just now had, I’d be thinking, a closer acquaintance than is comfortable. Not so?”
“I, uh. Yeah.”
Rudi straightened and clapped a hand on his shoulder. When he spoke he raised his voice to carry among the onlookers; faces stretched back into darkness.
“This man did no wrong of his own will. He’s now free of all taint, and I swear by the Sword of the Lady and She who chose me to bear it that he means to abide by his oath. He strove his utmost to resist the bane laid in his soul, and that may well have slowed the stroke just enough to spare me. And he’s now under my protection and that of the Goddess through me, so heed the word of the Mother-of-All.”
A babble broke out, as the late-comers were filled in. The square-faced man took his flask back and tucked it into his sporran.
“You’d think they’d have learned by now it wouldn’t work, and they so full of eldritch knowledge,” he said cheerfully.
Cole thought he was a little white around the gills, though.
“It didn’t work this time,” Rudi said grimly. “If we do well, we’ll keep dodging and weaving long enough for me to accomplish what I must. There’s a reason I was given the Sword. The Lady’s protection does not sleep, but neither does the hatred of the Malevolent.”
He turned his attention back to Cole. “You can see your brother Jack soon,” he said. “And perhaps he can acquaint you better with the rights and wrongs of this miserable war.”
The beautifully modulated voice rose again. “Are there those who’ll care
for this man?”
Three stepped forward. “Ah, cousin Alyssa. And Talyn and Caillech of Dun Tàirneanach. See that he sleeps, and that he’s bundled warmly; shock’s a possibility.”
They helped him back, and got out his bedroll to wrap around him while they built up the fire a little and set rocks to heating; he did feel core-chilled.
After he stopped shaking Cole looked into the darkness where Rudi Mackenzie had vanished.
“He’s . . . quite something, isn’t he?” he said slowly. “He’s got . . . impact. Whatever it is about a man that . . . the old General had a lot, and my CO has some . . . but that guy, he’s got all there is to get.”
“Baraka,” Talyn said soberly. “The Mother marked him for Her own when he was yet a boy, in the nemed, the sacred wood above Dun Juniper. My own father saw it, the great Raven flying out of the setting sun . . . the mark of Her beak is between his brows, you saw it? That was put there by no human hand. Some say he’s Lugh come again, the Sun Lord’s self returned in His joy and wrath and splendor.”
Cole nodded. It was weird, but somehow it made sense. Then he yawned enormously, and the world faded away. He scarcely felt hands moving him into the tent and laying him on the pine boughs, hot stones at his feet and back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Castle Todenangst, Crown demesne
Portland Protective Association
Willamette Valley near Newburg
High Kingdom of Montival
(formerly western Oregon)
June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
“Órlaith!”
Mathilda ran. Vision came in jerky flickers, fast and at the same time unbearably slow. Sandra scooped her granddaughter up and rolled into the swept outdoor hearth, curling her body around the infant’s, and the wet-nurse stood in front of them with a poker in her hands like a baseball bat. Signe spun out of her chair, the Bearkiller backsword snapping into her hand, a bright glint of steel in the flickering green gloom. The two Countesses swept up the skirts of their cotte-hardies in their left hands and each drew the dagger that marked them as Associates with their right; the weapons were ceremonial, but quite functional as well.
Delia de Stafford and Virginia Thurston started throwing things—teapots, for starters. One smashed right into the face of the Cutter assassin, boiling-hot water flying with shards of Sevres porcelain that had come down two centuries to meet its end here. The de Stafford nanny took Heuradys in one arm and Yolande in the other, retreating behind her mistress.
Buy time, Mathilda knew. The guards will be here in seconds.
Then a clash of steel came from the inner rooms as she raised her sword. One of the magus-assassins turned to meet her.
• • •
Lioncel struggled to keep his breathing even; it wasn’t the effort of the brief run, but the tension, and that ratcheted upward when they came out into the central space of the Queen Mother’s level. There was a dead man lying on the stairs that led up to the Guard barracks, blood leaking out of his armor, and the clash of steel on steel and the dull beat of blades on shields from farther up. Two dozen men-at-arms in the black harness of the Protector’s Guard waited in the great groin-vaulted chamber that lay outside the Queen Mother’s private rooms, their visors down except for the man in front. The leader of the living was a young knight.
Lioncel recognized him, but vaguely, Sir Evroyn-something, from somewhere north of the Columbia, one of the valleys on the eastern slopes of the Cascades. His face was white and sweating—though to be fair, if Lioncel’s liege was standing in front of him looking like that Lioncel would have sweated too. Some of the men-at-arms behind him were stirring slightly, not much, but not the statue-still immobility you expected from the Protector’s Guard. Not all of them were in on this; the rest must have been fed some story.
“There’s a conspiracy against the Crown. Stand aside,” she said, not halting her forward stride and pitching her voice to carry to all the guardsmen.
And a conspiracy against my mother and sisters! Lioncel thought.
“My lady, I have orders that absolutely nobody should pass—” the knight began, clearing his throat.
“I am Baroness Tiphaine d’Ath, and I am Grand Constable of the Association,” Lady Death said. “By my office I have right of immediate access to Her Majesty. Get out of my way. Last warning.”
It was also the first, but this was Lady Death speaking. Not for the first time, he knew a deep comfort in the fact that Delia de Stafford was also Tiphaine d’Ath’s Châtelaine. Then his ears twitched. Was that a scream from within? His mouth went dry.
“I have orders—” the knight began again.
Lioncel had been around his liege all his life, and seen her in battle. He had never seen her move so quickly; one instant she was walking, then next extended in a perfect long-lunge with the flat of her blade horizontal to the ground, right foot forward and arm and sword extending the line, shield reserved and tucked against her torso for balance.
Sir Evroyn reeled backward, and she recovered with the smooth precision of water running downhill, like an exercise in the salle rather than the desperate scramble that real fighting usually was. Red blossomed where his right eye had been, and on the last few inches of her longsword. He fell with a clatter of armor as if all the strings that held his body together had been severed at once . . . which was more or less what happened. The point had punched through the thin layer of bone at the back of the eye socket and into his brain, just far enough and no more lest the steel be trapped by the edges cutting into his skull.
What part of last warning didn’t he understand? Lioncel thought, a little dazed. Did he think Tiphaine d’Ath was just bluffing?
“Throw down!” she barked, as the menie of Ath locked shields behind her and knocked down their visors. “Now!”
A few did, dropping their swords with a clatter and dropping to their knees with their hands on their heads. The rest started to close ranks, their big kite-shaped shields coming up to make a wall, but the kneeling men hindered the precision of the movement.
“Shoot!” the Grand Constable snapped.
Six crossbows fired, a dull multiple tung of vibrating steel and cord and right on top of it the hard ringing tank sound of the pile-shaped heads hitting steel, like a ripple of blows from a hydraulic punch in a mill. At point-blank range even the best armor didn’t always stop a bolt from a military crossbow. Lioncel felt as if something in front of him was pulling his hands up, snuggling the butt into his shoulder, squeezing the trigger—
A man stumbled backward with the bolt sunk deep in his bevoir, the jointed piece that shielded throat and chin. Blood leaked around the short thick arrow, and sprayed from under the visor and even through the vision-slit. Steel gauntlets scrabbled at it for an instant and then the armored figure fell and lay twitching and gurgling. Tiphaine d’Ath went through the gap like a falcon stooping, with Rodard and his brother Armand behind to either side. A man in the black harness of the Guard tried to overrun the Grand Constable—tucking his shield into his left shoulder and charging, to ram her off her feet by sheer weight and impetus. The shields banged together with a lightning crack, but she was already pivoting as if they were dancing a volta. She ignored him as he staggered where she’d put him, into the stroke of Sir Armand’s serrated mace. It smashed his visor with a sound like a boot heel stamping on a metal cup.
The sword flicked out again, its narrow point punching through the mail grommet covering an armpit and the edges breaking the links. . . .
Using the sword against opponents in armor requires absolute precision because of the limited number of targets. The armpit is a weak spot. Don’t throw your arm back so it’s exposed.
The voice in his mind was Tiphaine’s in some salle d’armes sometime in his life, running like an inhumanly detached commentary.
I will now demonstrate why . . .
A minuscule sway, and a sword went past her. She reversed her own and thrust backward into the spot behind anothe
r man’s knee without looking behind her, blocking a thrust with her shield while she did, moving with the leisurely certainty of someone who had all the time in the world to line things up. . . .
The knee is another vulnerable area, but rarely easy to reach. . . .
He’d been reloading the crossbow as he followed, dodging through the shouting clanging mass of armored forms, with the two household knights to either side. The initial lines of combatants had broken up into knots of steel-clad forms who shoved and hit and shouted and screamed. And increasingly threw themselves flat and called for quarter.
“Follow me who can!” his liege called, in a voice like a contralto war-trumpet.
Four of the Guard men-at-arms who weren’t giving up retreated through the door into the Queen Mother’s chambers, a boom and clatter and crash of metal utterly incongruous in the pale splendors. For a moment they stood in the door, and then one of the Ath spearmen—he was actually carrying a glaive—thrust his polearm past the edge of a shield and used the hook just below the blade to drag the shield forward with a double-handed heave. The man attached to the shield by the arm he had through its loop staggered, then screamed as the war hammer came down on his shoulder, denting the metal in and breaking the collarbone beneath. The Grand Constable and her two knights burst through into the great chamber, and there was a blurring flurry of motion and the surviving man in black armor was running away . . .
. . . not running away. That’s out towards the balcony. He’s running towards Mom and the girls and Her Majesty.
His liege and Rodard and Armand were after the man, but he dodged behind an old tattered-looking statue on a plinth. Lioncel brought the crossbow up with a steady concentration, as if he were watching someone else aim—someone perfectly calm, as if this were a shooting range.
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