by Vale Aida
Savonn was sitting on a gnarly root at the foot of a larch, examining the damaged lute he had brought out of Onaressi. The Empath’s lute. Without looking up, he said, “So turn back.”
Hiraen had never been patient. He was neither Rendell nor Emaris, and would not suffer to be led by the nose through Savonn’s vast mazes of circumlocution. “You’re going to meet him. What did he want?”
“I believe,” said Savonn, tracing a finger over the soundboard of the lute, “Marguerit wished to remove me from the board with bribes and promises before she opened the war. Dervain felt this was a bad idea.”
A chill was seeping through Hiraen’s insides, a chill that had nothing to do with the water he had just drunk. “Did you accept?”
Savonn continued to examine the lute. Louder, Hiraen said, “Did you accept?”
Once, there would have been no need to ask. Once, he and Savonn had known each other like the backs of their own hands. Before the Empath. Before Merrott. Before Kedris. But the blank-eyed stare that greeted him now was the face of a stranger, one of thousands of dispensable masks taken off as easily as they were put on. “Did I, indeed,” said Savonn. He wore his mockery like a shirt of mail, bright and cold and imperturbable. “Alas, your well-timed rescue deprived you of the chance to find out.”
The black rage returned. Savonn had turned traitor for him once before. And Hiraen had done the same for him, in his way. It made him sick. With effort, he kept his fists at his sides. “A few days ago, my patrol was massacred because of you. Yesterday, I risked my life to rescue you from a captivity you seem to have very much enjoyed. And quite soon, I am about to lose my temper and punch you in the jaw.”
Savonn put the lute aside and stood up. Beneath the violet bruises on his face, his dark olive skin had taken on a waxy undertone, the sort you saw in corpses on slabs. “Not being prone to martyrdom,” he said, enunciating every syllable with violent clarity, “I considered that if word got out about my past activities, I would be much safer in Marguerit’s hands than the Council’s. However, she is unlikely to sit back and let me kill her favourite spy. So I escaped. Is the logic sound? Do you still wish to punch me?”
Hiraen did. “Was that all you thought about?” he demanded. His voice had risen. A sparrow that had alighted on a branch by his head took fright and flurried away. “Only yourself, and this vendetta of yours? What about the rest of us?”
“I thought you were dead,” said Savonn. “What did it matter, then?”
Hiraen started to answer, then stopped. Savonn shrugged, a delicate, economical dip of his head towards one shoulder. Lately it had become fashionable among the younger boys to imitate the way their Captain moved: the acrobatic walk, the plumbline posture, the slant of his head to the side when he was concentrating. Even Emaris did it sometimes, when he thought no one was looking. Gods, Emaris. “I did all of it to protect you from my father,” said Savonn. “Betronett. Merrott. Dervain was the only part of it I kept for myself. If you were dead, then… it was over.”
He pushed a stray curl out of his face, a brief, impatient movement. When he spoke again his voice was dry and dispassionate, as if reading from a treatise. “Home is not a place. Not walls of stone or roofs of brick, nor a name on any map… No, you wouldn’t know the quote.”
Iyone might. Iyone always knew what Savonn was reading. Thick as twins, so close they used to answer to each other’s names when they were small. “Did you think,” said Hiraen, almost unable to speak, “did you think even for a moment that—Daine and Emaris and the rest—that they wouldn’t care if you disappeared?”
“You were dead,” said Savonn again. “My capacity for rational thought was a little circumscribed.”
His sinuses ached. He reached for Savonn, saw in time his habitual flinch, and lowered his hand without touching him. The lute was still lying at their feet, a silent witness. “But now I’m alive,” said Hiraen. “So if you want to go to Evenfall, you’ll have to take me along.”
Savonn turned away, businesslike again. “I am going there to kill my lover. I doubt you’ll enjoy the spectacle. Go and find Emaris and tell him I died at Onaressi. It would be kinder.”
Another lie. Another secret. Hiraen was up to his neck in them. Kedris. Merrott. Rendell. How did Savonn keep them all straight in his head? “I,” he said, with so much force his teeth clicked together, “am done lying for you. Tell him yourself.“
“It would be kinder from you,” said Savonn again. His face was still averted. “To him, and to me as well, if it makes a difference.”
Something twisted hard in Hiraen’s heart. They could never stay angry with each other for long. “Savonn,” he said, helplessly, hopelessly. How long had it been since they last curled around each other behind a closed door and listened to the adults rowing below? “Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t go to Evenfall. I’ll fight him for you.”
“No.” With Savonn’s head in profile, Hiraen could only guess at his expression. “He is mine to kill.”
“But could you?” asked Hiraen, before he could think better of it. “Could you do it? Could you take a blade to his throat with your own hand and watch the light in his eyes go out?”
Savonn had bent to pick up the lute. He stopped. Then he straightened, empty-handed, and turned to meet Hiraen’s gaze full on. His smile stung like a brand, but whether it was directed at himself or Hiraen, no one could have known.
“I suppose,” he said softly, “we are going to find out.”
25
By the time Emaris reached Onaressi with the rest of Daine’s force, the battle was over.
It had left its mark on the mountain. The trail at the bottom of Forech’s Pass was littered with souvenirs: dead men and dead horses and their trappings, a dinted helm here, a broken spear there. Most of the outbuildings had burned to the ground, leaving only charred, smoking skeletons where walls and roofs had once been. But the main keep still stood, and from the soot-blackened ringwall flew the proud standard of House Safin, its conqueror, the orange sunburst bright beneath an unimpressed grey sky.
Emaris burst into the front hall, half expecting to be greeted by Hiraen himself, with Savonn in tow. Instead, it was a man with a bandaged face who met him at the foot of the main stair, voice muffled by the swaths of fresh linen that criss-crossed their way across his cheeks and nose and jaw. “Anyas?” asked Emaris, alarmed. “Is it you?”
“It’s actually quite funny,” said Anyas’s familiar voice, “having to reintroduce myself to everyone I meet. I don’t even know what I look like under these bandages anymore.” He took Emaris’s elbow. “The Saraians are gone. They saw you lot coming and clattered back up to Astorre to hide behind Celisse’s skirts. We won.”
“And the Empath?”
Anyas grimaced, or at least Emaris thought he did. It was hard to tell. “Disappeared. Evaporated like dew, so far as anyone can tell. The Marshal at least was worth his salt. Wrangled an orderly retreat, so we didn’t get to kill many of them, but…”
Emaris shouldered past him, starting up the stairs. “I have to go see Hiraen. There’s something he promised me.”
Anyas pulled him back. “You don’t want to go in there,” he said. “Lord Safin’s quarreling with his lieutenants in the parlour. One of them is an Efren.”
“Lord Safin?” asked Emaris, disoriented. Then his heart sank. “Oh. You mean Lucien. Where’s Hiraen?”
“That’s what they’re fighting about,” said Anyas. “They haven’t found Hiraen or Savonn. Not in the dungeon, not in the keep—” He saw Emaris’s expression change. “Not among the corpses, either. They checked. There aren’t many, and they’re mostly Saraians. Look, Emaris, I saw him. Hiraen, that is. He killed the dungeon guards and set us loose and said he was going to find Savonn. I told him exactly where they were keeping him. I can’t understand it.”
It was a lot to take in. Emaris rubbed at the back of his head, which had begun to ache again. “Maybe they went down into the Pass? To Medrai?”
>
“Or,” said Anyas, “the Saraians took them when they fled.” His voice was raspier than usual, but it could have been the bandages. He sat down on the lowest step. “Lord Lucien’s just about ready to ride into Astorre after them. Efren and Sydell are talking him down. Him over there—” He pointed to a lean brown fellow sitting on the window-sill on the far side of the hall, whom Emaris had not noticed before. The man caught his eye and nodded. “That’s Zarin, Lady Josit’s man. He got bored of the bickering and left.”
Emaris took in perhaps one word out of every three. He said, stupidly, “But Hiraen said he would find Savonn. He said he would try. He said…”
He stopped short. All that was between him and Hiraen. “Nikas,” he said, changing the subject. “He sold us out. He was the Empath’s spy all this time. I tried to kill him at Kimmet, but he ran off.”
“We haven’t seen him either,” said Anyas. “Dead or fled, then. Good riddance, if you ask me.“
The freedman called Zarin stepped forward. He was in his forties, Emaris guessed, with grey eyes so pale they were almost lilac. “Did you say the traitor is called Nikas?”
“Yes,” said Emaris. “Have you heard of him?”
“The name is known to us,” said Zarin. “He is a source of some amusement to Josit her ladyship. They have been in touch from time to time. Suffice it to say that this man Nikas fancies himself a lost scion of the royal house of Sarei, and wishes for his status to be… acknowledged.”
“What?” said Anyas.
Zarin shrugged. “We keep tabs on him, not altogether successfully. So, we are told, does Marguerit.”
Emaris could not have cared less about Josit and Marguerit and Nikas. He said, “Savonn disappears all the time. He always turns up sooner or later, with Hiraen and—and a choir and fireworks and a goddamned tame dragon if he feels like it. They’re not dead.”
“No one is saying they’re dead,” said Anyas, with unbearable gentleness. He squeezed Emaris’s elbow. “Emaris. Are you listening? Lord Lucien won’t give up the search. The men are so drunk on victory, they’ll march on Daliss tonight if that’s what it takes to get them back.”
“Yes,” said Emaris automatically. It seemed like too much effort to detach himself, so he only stared at his arm until Anyas let go. “Of course. I hear you.”
He believed Anyas. He believed Lucien. Most of all, he believed Hiraen, who had never once let him down. Hiraen was a man of his word. If he was alive, he would find his way back somehow. But Savonn—
Emaris might never get to ask his questions now, and he had no answers but the equivocal ones Nikas had given him. Already they were percolating into his mind, seeping into the cracks and fissures left by past hurts. Savonn’s voice, drifting out through a succession of closed doors. Savonn’s face that first evening in Astorre, the mountain glowing scarlet behind him. Savonn dancing with the Empath, the magpie and the nightingale. Emaris stood again in the hallway in Daine’s house, light spilling out of the back room to puddle at his feet; but this time, when he looked to Savonn, seeking comfort, he found he could barely picture his face.
26
Lissein was a little backwater village on the east bank of the Morivant, notable only in one aspect: it lay just two miles south of the Singing Ford, where Kedris Andalle had routed the Saraians eighteen years ago. The villagers never forgot this, especially now that Marguerit had suffered another blow. It was all anyone could talk about. Lucien Safin had driven the Marshal of Sarei and his pet sorcerer out of the mountains, and his lordship’s son Hiraen had pulled off a heroic rescue of the Marshal’s prisoners in the same night. Surely a cause for celebration, even if Hiraen had vanished from the battlefield right afterwards, along with that rascal Savonn Silvertongue. Probably dead; such a pity, and so young, too, but could there be any better way to go?
The deceased, listening discreetly from the back of a tavern, had to be physically restrained from launching himself to his feet. It was their last stop before they reached Evenfall, brooding on its isle in the Morivant not far north of the Ford. At Savonn’s insistence, they had lived off the land all the way from Onaressi, shunning even the shepherds’ lonely cottages to sleep under the stars, and concealing themselves by the wayside on the few occasions they heard another traveller on the road. Hiraen did not learn of his purported death until days after the fact, by which time it was too late to prevent the news from reaching Cassarah.
“But we can’t let them grieve,” he hissed. He was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, which Savonn had forbidden him to remove under pain of death. “My mother—she isn’t young anymore, and Iyone—don’t you care?”
Savonn yawned, stretching his arms out above his head. He had made no attempt to alter his appearance. It did not matter. When the Silvertongue wished to disappear, he was unrecognisable. “Iyone,” he said, “would survive the apocalypse and complain it was boring.”
His arms, still outstretched, socked a passing merchant in the stomach. The man squawked, and Savonn, wearing the lazy smile he had decided to put on for the day, allowed himself to be smacked in the head. To Hiraen, he said, “You can turn back if you like. I, on the other hand, must be in Evenfall tomorrow night.”
Hiraen eyed, suspiciously, the space between Savonn and the retreating merchant. “Why?”
“It’s the last day of the crescent moon,” said Savonn. It was just one of the many incomprehensible things he had said over the course of their long and hair-raising friendship. He placed his cupped palms on the table and opened them, like a conjurer revealing a secret. Inside was a pouch Hiraen had never seen in his life, full to the brim with gold drochii. “This should be enough for everything we need, shouldn’t it? Oh, at least pretend to be impressed. You’re a terrible audience.”
He disappeared soon after to buy, of all things, lutestrings. The merchant remained none the wiser about the theft of his pouch. Hiraen took advantage of Savonn’s absence to write two brief, carefully worded letters, one addressed to Emaris, the other to Iyone. Then he realised there was no one to whom he could entrust the letters, and threw them in the fireplace.
They set out the next day on fresh horses, their saddlebags laden with food. They passed the Singing Ford at a judicious distance—it was guarded more heavily than usual, with a phalanx of pikemen and a catapult—and made their way north to Evenfall, keeping close to the riverbank. It was not far to where the Morivant parted to flow around the little island rising in midstream. They saw the cypresses of Evenfall first, bristling red and gold above the water like a contingent of watchful guardians. Then the isle itself came into view.
Hiraen knew all the stories. Evenfall had lain desolate for a thousand years, passing like a counterfeit coin from owner to owner. No trace of Ederen Andalle’s palace now remained save a few sinister standing stones, and anyone who tried to live there went mad sooner or later. Even Kedris, with his penchant for making everything his own, had not cared to go near the isle. “We are in time,” said Savonn.
Hiraen followed his gaze to the dusky sky. The moon had been waning all through their journey from Onaressi. It was in its death throes now, a sliver of a crescent snared between the distant mountain peaks. Tomorrow it would be gone.
He decided not to ask. Above the rumble of the rushing torrent, he called, “Has it occurred to you that this might be a trap?”
“Many times,” said Savonn.
Riding up and down the bank, he had found a shallow place where the channel could be forded. With a brief backwards glance at Hiraen, he urged his horse down the gentle bank and began to splash across. Hiraen followed. The water was cold and the current inexorable, and it took every ounce of his considerable horsemanship to guide his mare across, nose-deep in the river. “He won’t come alone,” he said.
“No,” Savonn agreed. “He will bring a witness, like I did. It will probably be Nikas, unless you have killed him.”
They reached the sandy shore of the isle without event. The thicket was already dark, the wind
sighing in the eaves like a human voice, and at the treeline Hiraen’s mare balked. He dismounted to lead her on foot, keeping a hand on his bow. There was no sign of the Empath, nor of any other living creature, human or animal—no birdsong, not even the flutter of wings or scurry of rodent feet. The soil was as pristine as if no one had trodden here since Ederen’s day. “No tracks,” Hiraen remarked.
Even against the thunder of the Morivant, every word and movement seemed sacrilegiously loud in the stillness of the wood. Savonn slid out of the saddle. He had found himself a sword in Lissein, and wore it openly on his hip, as he so seldom did. “Then we have beaten him here. He should turn up in a few hours.”
“Will he?”
Savonn did not answer. They walked on in silence, until the trees began to thin and the thicket gave way to a grassy clearing, about as big as the stage in the House of Charissos. One side gave onto a sheltered shell-shaped cove, which fed in turn into the river. Scattered through the clearing were the remains of what had once been a colonnade: here a chipped stone column, taller than Hiraen; there the base of a collapsed obelisk, its strange markings worn almost smooth by the centuries. Farther inland, he could see the indistinct hulks of more crumbling walls and pillars. There was nothing else. Anything of worth had long been looted by intrepid explorers.
Without speaking, they gathered brushwood and lit a fire by the cove. Striking inland after dark was out of the question. “I’ll take first watch,” said Savonn. “Unless, of course, you don’t trust me.”
From long experience, Hiraen ignored the goad. “It’s an odd place for a rendezvous, is all.”