by Vale Aida
ELEGY
VALE AIDA
BOOK ONE OF THE MAGPIE BALLADS
Copyright © 2016 Vale Aida
All rights reserved.
ISBN-10: 1535299606
ISBN-13: 978-1535299602
For everyone who’s helped,
one way or another,
to unleash this book on the world:
Caitlin, Geraldine, Harold, Mochi, and Zelda.
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
The Council of Cassarah & their households:
KEDRIS ANDALLE, Lord Governor and High Commander of Cassarah
His late wife DANEI CAYN of Terinea
His son SAVONN SILVERTONGUE, Captain of Betronett
WILLON EFREN
His sons BONNER and VESMER
His captain of guards, CAHAL
YANNICK EFREN, Willon’s cousin, the Council’s scribe and steward
ORIANE SYDELL
Her nephew DARON
LUCIEN SAFIN
His wife ARETEL DONNE
His son HIRAEN
His daughter IYONE
JOSIT ANSA, Kedris’s mistress, a freed Saraian slave
Her captain of guards, ZARIN
The soldiers of Betronett & their families:
SAVONN SILVERTONGUE, Captain of Betronett
RENDELL, the Second Captain
His daughter SHANDEI
His son EMARIS, Savonn’s squire
HIRAEN SAFIN, a patrol leader
DAINE, a patrol leader
His wife LINN
NIKAS, Saraian defector and former assassin of the Sanctuary
ANYAS, a patrol leader
LOMAS, VION, ROUGEN, & KLEMENE, new recruits
Cassarah’s sometime allies:
CELISSE, Lady of Astorre
JEHAN CAYN, Lord of Terinea
ROZANE CASSUS, niece to the Lord of Medrai
The Saraians:
MARGUERIT the Magnificent, Queen of Sarei, ruling from Daliss
ISEMAIN DALISSOS, Marshal of Sarei
“The Empath”
ACT ONE
THE FIREBRAND
OVERTURE
My little songbird, my favourite game, my chiefest vice:
Is it strange to kill for an enemy? For you, I did it without question. At our final meeting three years ago you said, “There is something I must do,” in that unsentimental way of yours. Joyless, fearless; just the razor-blade quality of your gaze, clean and cutting, and that cryptic twist of your mouth. You said, “After that we might not meet again.”
I said, “Let me do it for you.”
(It is true. I have killed for you and will again.)
I had no illusions about the battle lines between us. What I had was the scintillating mirth in your eyes, the softness of your curls, the steady companionship of your music. I knew that the name you gave me was as false as the one I gave you. You said, “Love is so terribly adolescent,” and we laughed at the young couples kissing by the bonfires. What did I not tell you? Many things, and this: that I sacrificed often to Mother Alakyne, beseeching her to grant that we would never have to face each other across our swords.
If I had any premonition, I would have begged never to find out who you were. I would have prayed for you to be anyone else in the world, but it is too late. Now—sweetest of secrets, dirtiest of lies, son and henchman of that stumbling block on which my life was broken—now, I have your real name.
It is not strange to kill an enemy.
First I will find him. Then I will find you. (And here is another truth. I will kill you just as I killed for you.)
1
“The Governor is dead.”
Shandei clawed her way up the stairs, the refrain rustling like a mantra through the mourners around her. “Kedris Andalle is dead. Murdered.” With their own eyes they had seen the bier sweep into Cassarah through the Gate of Gold, trundling between the staid ranks of the honour guard on their caparisoned horses. Still their disbelief was palpable, and sharpened by fear. “Kedris Andalle, killed by bandits!”
On an ordinary day, Shandei—soldier’s daughter, informed citizen, consummate loafer who for lack of more respectable occupation was all eyes and ears as far as gossip was concerned—would have had no shortage of opinions to air. But today she was wholly preoccupied with a more pressing issue. Her father and brother were both in the honour guard, and would have a superb view of the funeral. She was not, and would not.
As she told all the neighbours (loudly), “Damned if I’ll be left out!”
The presenting problem: the graveyard was full of important people. The councillors alone took up half the lawn with their entourages. There was no room on ground level for the likes of Shandei. But she had gone to reconnoitre the terrain as soon as the news arrived, and found that the high sandstone wall around the yard made a decent alternative vantage point, if she could only find a spot there.
The further quandary: early as she had set out, the wallwalk was already crowded with other resourceful people three ranks deep all round its perimeter. The only possible solution: gleeful, unfettered violence.
The funeral oration had begun by the time she summited the stairs and reached the parapet, her black gown and mourning veil thoroughly crumpled. The crowd on the balustrade shifted and murmured. “Kedris is gone.” Their incredulity was not without reason. Kedris Andalle was only forty-eight, after all: the force of nature that had united the fissile Council and kept their old enemy the Queen of Sarei in check, unbeaten in battle, with a fiendish charm that could talk the very swords out of his adversaries’ hands. Short of a volcanic cataclysm, he should have been invincible.
Shandei’s view was occluded by a solid palisade of heads. She considered the merits of fetching something—or someone—to stand on, abandoned the idea, and began, teeth gritted, to push her way to the front.
Applying her elbows liberally, she poured through a gaggle of plump matrons, rearranged one by one the limbs of a toothless old man so that he found himself behind rather than before her, and confronted by an auburn head and its accompanying pair of shoulders, she propelled their owner aside and wormed into the few inches of room this afforded her at the balustrade. Then at last, she could see below.
It was festival weather: summer had arrived at last, tardy that year, but the northeast wind still brought sudden currents of crisp highland air that stole her breath away. Viewed from above, the graveyard was a sea of black hoods and veils. The bier stood near the front, white petals clinging to its wheels. The Betronett cavalry, who had brought Kedris home from his last battle in the Farfallens, flanked it in two neat lines, sitting their horses with flawless parade posture. Shandei picked out her father immediately, with her little brother Emaris next to him, their golden hair showing bright at the edges of their hoods. Under the rustle of half-shushed conversations, she caught snatches of the councillor Lucien Safin’s voice, dignified and correct, reading the funeral oration from the rostrum. Our High Commander… fearless in battle… adroit in strategy…
The rostrum was an elaborate one, shaped like a giant falcon cast in bronze, with baleful eyes that stared across the graveyard and shining wings that rose ten feet into the sky. The thing was disturbing. Shandei turned to study the rest of the crowd instead. Reformed our laws… freed the slaves, and made them our brothers and sisters in dignity… On her father’s other side was Hiraen, Lord Safin’s handsome son, whose eye everyone was trying to catch. Beyond the honour guard stood the great families of Cassarah: the other Safins, the Sydells and the Efrens, whose representatives made up most of the Council, and who would soon be fighting among themselves for the governorship.
His compassion for the needy, his alms… sold
his own house to provide…
“They make him sound half a god,” murmured a voice in Shandei’s ear. “Can a man be so many things and still remain mortal?”
It was the redhead she had pushed out of the way. She gazed up at him with interest, eyeing the well-shaped cheekbones under the young gold-brown skin, and the half-healed sword cut running down the left side of his jaw. A soldier, then. His hair was long and tousled; he had not even troubled to veil it for the funeral. “One would think,” she whispered, offended, “the body was sufficient proof of that. Would you like them to open the coffin?”
The man wrinkled up his nose, childlike. “Please, no. It is, what, two weeks since he died? No wonder they are strewing flowers everywhere.”
His speech, though fluent, was peppered with odd stresses and inflections that were distinctly foreign. If he was a stranger to these parts, that explained the lack of consideration for his hair. She allowed her expression to soften. “They can’t help that. My father said so, when he wrote me from Medrai. He said it took them days just to get the bier out of the hills after the—the bandits attacked.”
She had nearly said too much. His fine brows made a quizzical arch. “Bandits,” he said. “Yes, that is what they say. But Father doesn’t think so?”
Her father did not, but that was none of this fellow’s business. It was evident that the oration did not interest her interlocutor at all: he kept looking at her, and his brows continued to be eloquent. “He wasn’t there,” said Shandei. She danced around the question, giving him only what was common knowledge. “They were supposed to escort the Governor and Lord Safin from Medrai to Astorre, the mountain city. But they were held up and Kedris didn’t wait. A pity.”
His brilliant victory at the River Morivant… smashed the Saraians… took back territory lost for five generations… By now, the news would have reached Queen Marguerit in Daliss. Her people would be feasting in celebration, and sacrificing to their strange gods. Shandei, who had been brought up with a wholesome distaste for all things Saraian, hoped they choked on their meat.
“Which one is he?” asked the man. “Your father?”
With relish, she leaned over the balustrade to point him out. He cut a splendid figure in his sombre black doublet, tall and broad-shouldered, his horse perfectly in hand. “Rendell, Second Captain of Betronett.” Unnecessarily, she added, “Savonn Silvertongue’s deputy.”
The movement must have been visible from below. Emaris, a presentable if somewhat undersized lump on a pretty white mare, glanced up and spotted her on the wall. Predictably, he broke into an unguarded smile, then remembered himself and reorganised his face into stern solemnity. The man laughed. “Your brother. A fine little lion cub.”
“Don’t laugh,” said Shandei, mortified. “We’re at a funeral.” Then, unable to resist: “He is Lord Silvertongue’s squire.”
The stranger’s reaction was not what this normally elicited. “Savonn Andalle,” he said, pronouncing the name with exaggerated care. “The dead man’s son, yes? He has been held up by bandits again? I see no kinsfolk in attendance.”
“I never said they were held up by bandits,” said Shandei, annoyed. The Betronett cavalry could have dealt with highway robbers in their sleep. “Their horses were hamstrung in the night. Nobody knows how or why. They had to go on foot to Medrai and—”
She shut her mouth so hard that her teeth clicked together. She had never met this man in her life, and already she had told him almost everything in her father’s letter. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Now I have succeeded at angering you, and henceforth it will be like standing next to a furnace. Come, gossip with me of harmless matters, daughter of Rendell. Where is Savonn Silvertongue? They say he will make a grand entrance.”
The thought of Kedris’s only son, the infamous actor-soldier whom everyone always seemed to be talking about for one reason or another, brought a reluctant smile to her lips. Last Midwinter the Safin manor had nearly burned down when, newly arrived on home leave, Savonn set off a firework in Lord Lucien’s parlour over supper. The year before that, he had dressed up as a maidservant, seduced a smuggler and unearthed the hapless fellow’s illicit cargo: a barrel of wild monkeys, which he promptly loosed on the streets, shrieking and chattering. “He might,” she said. “He quit the theatre a long time ago, when he went to Betronett. But that’s never stopped him.”
She peered over the balustrade again. She was fond of her father’s soldiers, and knew almost every face in the honour guard. It was simple, after all, to befriend a fighting man: you knocked him down with a good uppercut, and if he got back up and wasn’t too proud to admit defeat to a woman, then you were friends for life. Savonn Andalle, who was impossible to miss, was not in the ranks. Nor was she the only one looking for him. The councillors had drawn together to mutter, and some were craning up at the parapet as if expecting to find him there. Keeping his head still and his countenance dignified, Emaris was watching them avidly.
“The great men and women are disturbed,” her stranger observed. “Is Lord Silvertongue’s absence a cause for concern?”
“Lord Silvertongue is always a cause for concern,” said Shandei. “Now be quiet. We’ve missed half the oration.”
We gather to send our lord on his last journey… never again another one like he…
“We’ve missed all of it,” said the man. He propped his elbows on the balustrade. “Look, the pall-bearers are coming forward. In my country, the Priestesses of Strife and Sorrow will sing a hymn to sanctify the dead, which will be long and boring, and then the kinsfolk bring up the grave-gifts, and the pyre is lit.”
“We don’t burn our dead, but the rest is the same,” said Shandei. Lord Safin had left the rostrum, but as yet, the temple singers were nowhere to be seen. She looked at the stranger’s hands, the long fingers scarred and callused. “Where are you from? Astorre? Pieros? Bayarre?”
As a child she had visited Bayarre, the city at the mouth of the Morivant. The others were only names on maps to her. He shrugged. “I have lived in all those places. Came here to see an old friend, as it were.”
Somewhere out of sight, a drum boomed.
Shandei fell silent, her question dying on her tongue. The man looked this way and that, and his gaze fell on the bronze falcon. “Hush,” he said, sounding pleased. “Something is happening.”
“The priestesses haven’t arrived,” said Shandei. “What—”
What she meant to say, she immediately forgot. The falcon was speaking.
The voice was rich and deep and monstrous, like something excavated from an abyss and brought thrashing into daylight. It sank into her bones, rattling in the marrow. “Behold!” the falcon cried. Its jasper eyes glinted, malevolent. “Behold! The Lord Governor of Cassarah goes to his long sleep. Weep! Wail! Tear your clothes!”
Cymbals clashed. Shandei jumped, and felt foolish. Someone screamed. An infant began to cry. “The underworld opens,” said the falcon with pulpiteering gusto. “His death is marked, and will be avenged.”
A stream of guards issued through the graveyard with an urgency that drew the eye. Then they slowed, and began to vacillate in confusion several feet from the rostrum. “It’s him,” said Shandei to no one in particular, since the foreigner was no longer paying attention to her. “It’s the Silvertongue. He’s speaking through the falcon’s beak.”
The drum continued to pound. Several others joined in. Then a flurry of bright figures emerged from behind the falcon’s outspread wings, lithe and quick-footed in tunics that shimmered grey and black in the morning light. Their faces were beastly, noses protruding like snouts, cheeks blanched white as bone, ears unfurling upward like miniature trumpets. Several rabbit-gaited heartbeats later, Shandei realised they were human. Costumed humans in masks.
“The Ceriyes,” said the stranger. Inexplicably, he was smiling. “The demons of the mythic underworld, attendants of a wrongful death.”
Swanlike in grace, the flock of Ceriyes arrayed themselves around
the open grave. “Behold!” cried the disembodied voice once more. The drumbeats quickened. A lute began to tinkle. Then, as one, the Ceriyes joined their voices to the music.
It was no song she had heard before. It began low and rhythmic, like a spellbinder’s chant, forceful against the expert accompaniment of the lute. Then the sopranos came in, and the verse swelled strong and buoyant into the chorus.
The prince marshals his armies,
their thunder fills the sky;
The soldiers rush unto the breach,
blades gleaming in the dawn.
But now the flags are furled to sleep,
the battle-hymn forgone;
The lilies fall to kiss the ground,
the hoofbeats pass them by.
The pall-bearers, stiff with amazement, had to be prodded into shovelling the ceremonial handfuls of dirt over the grave. Emaris’s mouth was hanging open in a soundless ‘O’. But astride his sleek horse, Hiraen Safin was grinning.
The pall-bearers retreated. In well-timed harmony, the voices of the choir soared towards a fiery crescendo. The cymbals crashed. The drums boomed. The lute twanged. The singers gave a final shout, as if in triumph. Then, without warning, a profound silence fell.
Shandei cried, “Look!”
The man they had waited to see had come out from behind the rostrum, lute in hand. Savonn Silvertongue did not glitter like his chorus singers. Instead he was dressed in a sober, high-collared doublet, with a black hood drawn over his dark curls. Some way into his twenties, built light and whippet-small like the bull-leapers of old, he bore little resemblance to his magnificent father except in the smooth olive skin and the delicate, angular features of his face. Under the hood, a pair of bright acquisitive eyes flicked to appraise the crowd, impersonal and calculating.