“Nicolas!” Maggie cried. Libuse had gone pale. Huss was sitting on the ground between them, his eyes closed and his face drawn.
Jerome leapt to Nicolas’s aid, swinging his sword powerfully at the hound’s side, He opened a long wound over the creature’s rib cage. Snarling, the hound dropped Nicolas and swung on Jerome, who sprang away from the animal’s snapping jaws.
Libuse jumped up and ran from their hiding place. She grabbed Nicolas and started to drag him away from the fight, when the hound caught sight of her. Its eyes flashed in anger at the sight of the princess of ancient days in whose hair the star fire dared to shine, and it turned from Jerome. He ran desperately after it, trying to draw it away from Libuse and Nicolas.
It seemed to Maggie that she beheld it all as in a dream, even as she left her place from behind the white rock and ran to her companions. She could hear herself shouting and yet did not know what words she used; she could feel the tears on her face but could not feel herself crying.
She saw Libuse throw her spear. She saw the hound shrug it away as though it had been a matchstick. She saw Libuse step over Nicolas and stand tall, the thread in her hair burning with light so pure and bright that it seemed to drive back the darkness where the princess stood. She saw the hound’s teeth glistening, she heard it roar, and she saw it leap forward…
And then she saw Jerome, though she did not know how he had come to be there, driving and twisting his sword deep into the hound’s neck while the creature was still in the air, and she saw the blood that evaporated into green steam and heard the sounds of the hound’s death throes.
As the hound’s writhing body fell to the ground, she saw its horrible claws bury themselves in Jerome’s chest, and she saw him falling under the hound’s weight, and she heard a sickening breaking sound.
She was at his side then, and he was reaching for her. The lower half of his body was under the massive bulk of the hound, but his hands were free and she took them and held them to her throat, crying. For a moment she felt his hands tighten around hers, and then they loosened. She bent down and kissed him, and he was gone.
Maggie felt Huss’s bony hand on her shoulder, and she felt Libuse slip her arm around her waist. But she stayed on her knees, holding Jerome’s hands, and cried soundlessly.
Then she lifted up her voice and sang a lament—an ancient lament, drawn from the depths of her heart where Mary’s song played, and in it was all the anguish and loss of five hundred years since the exile of the King, but for her it was all about one man.
* * *
Maggie ran. Around her and below her the city of Pravik was in flames. A battle raged the like of which had never been seen in five hundred years. She ran through the streets, not seeing the battle, not seeing the nightmare. She ran through the castle gates, up and up until she stood on the walls and looked over the boiling turmoil. The song was in her. The song ran through her veins. The song was wild and full of power.
The creatures of Blackness turned their heads to look at her. They began to move toward the castle, to beat their wings, and she saw it all in slow motion. They were coming for her. They were coming for the thing she carried.
“Can you hear me?” she cried. The wind took her words and bore them away to a hilltop where an evil blue light burned. “Your power is breaking,” she shouted, her voice strong because of the song. “It is drowned in the blood of those who die in honour!”
Still they were coming—scurrying up the walls, flying through the air. It would take them a million years to arrive, she thought. They moved so slowly.
She reached into her coat and pulled out the scroll. The shadow around her seemed to shiver. She unrolled the parchment—the scroll that had come so far, withstanding fire and water, the ancient testament to treachery. The song in her veins welled high, and with strength that did not come from herself she tore a piece from it and held it over the flaming city.
“For Mary,” she said. She released the torn paper and watched as it rose in the ash-filled air, drifting up with the smoke.
She tore another piece and let it go. “For John,” she said. The wind swirled and another piece rose on the air. “For Jerome.”
The last bit of parchment she held high before releasing it. “For the King!” she shouted. Her voice rushed along the walls of the city, danced up the eddies of the wind, and echoed through the hills and mountains of Sloczka.
When her voice died down, a hunting horn sounded long and clear through the sky. A flash of light like the birth of a star flooded the hills and tore through the darkness. The torn pieces of parchment burst into flames and burned, clear and white, until there was nothing left of them.
In that instant the creatures of darkness were knocked away from the castle. They fell to the streets, screaming in rage and fear. They turned on the soldiers, snarling, clawing. A goat-headed man bared razor teeth, raised its bloody black sword, and charged forward.
Its sword met the Ploughman’s. The rebel leader’s eyes blazed with fierce golden light. He pressed the goat-man back. He raised his sword to end the creature’s life. Around him his enemies closed in, yet it hardly seemed to matter. He was surrounded. The goat-man looked up at him with mocking red eyes, laughing. The Ploughman was outnumbered.
He would fail. He must fall.
His sword was still raised high, the goat-man still lay at his feet. He closed his eyes for a moment and looked up. He could see a single star shining.
He brought the sword down. In its wake a golden arc cut the fabric of the air.
In that instant the city was filled with pounding hooves and flowing manes; with golden armour and great white swords. The golden riders—horses and riders, from over the sea—drove into the forces of the Blackness.
The Ploughman fell to his knees, suddenly exhausted. He raised his eyes and tears flowed down his cheeks.
Here was his strength.
Here was his childhood delusion.
He heard shouts and whoops as his men renewed their strength and fought again, but he could not join them. He could only weep.
* * *
On the hilltop there was nothing but confusion. The feel of it woke Virginia from unconsciousness, even as she felt the fire underneath her grow with a vicious, cruel heat. She could hear Evelyn cursing and screaming with fury. In her mind’s eye she saw golden forces in Pravik and knew that the Blackness had lost.
Evelyn was fleeing the hilltop. Virginia saw the laird going with her, and she reached out to him, but he did not turn to look at her.
She saw Skraetock. He stood before the fire with his hands raised and his mouth twisted. He was staring into the flames. As he stared the flames grew hotter and higher, and she knew that he had used her enough and now meant to kill her.
She heard a shrieking as though there were yet spirits in the fire who had not taken form and flown to the city, and now they were dancing all around her. The sound and the searing heat nearly overwhelmed her, but with pain no longer controlling her, with Skraetock no longer binding her strength, she formed a word in her weakness through her cracked, blackened lips.
“Llycharath…” she whispered.
An instant later, a wind flung Lord Skraetock aside and cowed the shrieking flames. It tore the bars of the cage and carried Virginia away with it.
* * *
The battle ended with the coming of morning. The golden riders vanished with the first rays of the sun. Of the vanquished shadow creatures there were left only black stains on the cobblestones. Throughout the day the people of Pravik laboured to put out the last of the smoldering fires and salvage what they could of the ruins left in the battle’s wake.
Men and women from the surrounding countryside walked and rode into the city throughout the day. Mrs. Cook and Mrs. Korak arrived in the evening, bringing the stores of the farm’s cellar on a wagon behind them.
With the sunrise of the next morning, a long procession made its mournful way to the western mountain on which Pravik rested to lay
to rest all who had given their lives in the battle. They passed by the reaching hands of the Guardian Bridge and through the gates of the city to the hillside. Maggie walked with one hand on Jerome’s coffin, and Huss walked on the other side. The line of coffins stretched far ahead of them, each one carried on a small wagon pulled by farm horses and ponies. It stretched down the high hill to a valley where open graves waited.
At the head of the line the Ploughman walked. His cloak was torn and his face streaked with ashes as a sign of mourning. Libuse walked by his side, a broken spear cradled in her arms. Around the splintered handle was twisted the silver thread of the Huntsman.
Behind them came the widows and mothers and children of the men who had fallen. They wept loudly as they walked. Then came the men, rebel soldiers and villagers and farmers who had come to the new freedom of Pravik. They marched grimly and silently.
Pat was behind them on crutches, and Mrs. Cook walked beside her with one arm around Virginia’s waist. Virginia had been found in the road by villagers on their way to the city. Her skin was dark with soot and her lips cracked and bleeding, but there was a power about her that made even her friends a little afraid. She would not say where Lord Robert had gone, but all understood he was not coming back.
Nicolas was missing from the procession. He had left the city unnoticed in the commotion that followed the battle. He had come to Maggie first, while she kept vigilance beside Jerome’s open coffin.
“I’m sorry, Maggie,” he had said, faltering. “He was a brave man.”
Maggie had not answered.
“Anyway, I’ll be going,” Nicolas had said, his tone deliberately light.
Maggie had turned with tear-filled eyes, but Nicolas was already nearly out the door. At the last minute he had turned and looked at her, and she had heard anguish in his voice.
“He loved you very much,” Nicolas told her. “I heard the love in his heart. It was beautiful.”
And then he was gone. “He will be back,” Huss had said when she told him.
“You sound very sure.”
“The world is taking sides,” Huss had said. “Soon even the most determined wanderers will have to make a choice. And I am sure I know what side he will choose to take.”
The long procession reached the bottom of the hill. The men came and lifted the coffins, laying them on the ground beside the open graves. High on the hill behind them Pravik stood mournful watch, and the wind sighed up and down the sides of the valley.
Maggie stood near Jerome’s coffin as the Ploughman stood in the midst of his people and spoke of the battle and the courage of those who had fought. More, he spoke of the future, in which their toils would be rewarded. A future in which Athrom would hear them and they would be free.
Libuse spoke also, of days gone by, and of the faded glory of the Eastern Lands which once more was beginning to shine. “In the Hall of Kings there does not lay one man of more worth than we lay to rest here today,” she said. “This day we say farewell to the truest sons of the East.”
At the last Huss stood and spoke a blessing over the burial grounds, a blessing pronounced in the name of the King. Maggie stood and sang her lament once more.
Finally the last moment came. Maggie’s eyes clouded with tears as the men came and began to lower the coffins into the ground. She stayed near as they took up the body of Jerome, and her eyes widened. A large white seabird flew down and perched on top of the coffin. It smiled at her with knowing eyes and bobbed its head once. Then it spread its wide wings and soared away.
Maggie watched it go, and she called after it. The bird bore her last farewell along with it to the southern sea.
* * *
That night Maggie ate for the first time since the battle had ended. She sat on a cushioned seat near the fire in the house of Libuse and let her eyes trace the outlines of the faces that sat at the table with her. The Ploughman and Libuse; Mrs. Cook and Pat; Huss and Virginia. They were a strange little company, Maggie thought, but a smile came to her as she reflected that they were no stranger than another council that had met, forty years ago, to dream dreams that would lead to this day.
Pravik was taken, but the battle was not over. Athrom would not hear them yet. Even now High Police were marching from Athrom. The Emperor roared in his den, eager to avenge the death of his Overlord and teach the rebels a lesson. In the city, the people were moving underground. The tunnels through which Maggie had run from the guards what seemed like an eternity ago were only one level of a great web of tunnels and caverns that led deep down into the rocky foundations of the city. The High Police would find nothing but mystery when they arrived.
Soon they would go, too, but the little company wished to eat one last meal above the ground. In a way it seemed that they were still sitting in the old Pravik: the Pravik where Libuse had longed for the days of her ancestors; where the Ploughman had lost his brother in a riot sparked by hopelessness; where Huss had battled the Empire by teaching secret truths to all who would listen. It was the Pravik where the old Maggie still lived, the Maggie who had ridden over the Guardian Bridge with Nicolas and shivered at the sight of the pleading statues, before love and truth and song had changed her forever.
But it was not the old Pravik any longer, no matter what illusions and memories the night whispered to them. When Maggie took Huss’s arm that night and left the house of Libuse, she stepped into a new world.
THE END
Burning Light
Book 2 of the Seventh World Trilogy
by Rachel Starr Thomson
* * *
Prologue
It was cold in the shadow of the pine trees. The moon was shining, but only a few brave slivers of light found their way through the woven canopy of long green needles to the bank of the stream where Nicolas Fisher sat. The air smelled of heavy snow, the first of the year in Galce—a thick, swirling snow that blew down from Fjordland in the far north and swallowed the world in white.
Nicolas was watching the water.
He had not been watching it long. For hours he had listened to it running over rock while he thought of other things, other places; of a black river in the City of Bridges, of a girl he loved, who was still there.
He thought of these things, and breathed the air that had lately drifted over the northern mountains, and he was not sure when he noticed that the water was running uphill. Yet noticed it he had, and now he could not take his eyes from the sight of it, black and silver in the moonlight, calmly doing what it could not do.
He reached down, touched it, and jerked his hand back. The water was warm. Its warmth ran up through his fingers, into his hands and arms, and his skin tingled.
It was then that he heard the voice.
He heard it first as a barely perceptible change in the water’s flow. A deepening—then a shimmering echo as though something had cried out far away, and the stream had carried the musical cry up into the forests of Galce.
As Nicolas listened, the echo became a whisper, and then a call.
Come for me, the voice said. I am the prisoner River-Daughter, yearning to be free. Come for me. Set me free.
He closed his eyes while the words swirled through his mind. Another voice mixed with the first—a young man’s voice. His own. It repeated the words urgently before the running of water drowned it out. Come for me. Set me free.
“Where?” Nicolas asked, the sound barely escaping his lips.
Follow the stream, the shimmering whisper answered.
A moment later the deepening became shallow again. The whisper was gone, and with it the echo. The stream was running downhill, as though it were a normal stream without any voice beyond that of rapids rushing over mossy stone.
Nicolas stayed by the stream for a little longer. The form of a great black bear melted out of the pines and stood by him, snuffling. Nicolas stood and stretched his legs. He buried one hand in the fur of Bear’s neck.
He said nothing, but together they started to walk. Downstream
.
And the snow began to fall.
* * *
Chapter 1
Trouble Afoot
Nicolas turned fitfully in his sleep. His small fire had nearly burned itself out in the night, and only a few small embers still glowed. The cold of the ground was seeping up through the thick green woolen blanket Nicolas was wrapped in. It was making its way through the bundle of rags he used as a pillow, up into his ears and his head until all his dreams were white and grey, snow and fog and endless skies.
Something nudged his booted foot, once, twice, and harder. He opened his eyes and blinked away the frost from his lashes. With a grunt, he pushed himself up, pulling his foot away from Bear.
“And where were you all night?” Nicolas asked. Bear moved closer, and Nicolas leaned on the animal’s bulk as he rose and stamped his feet on the hard earth. “Eh?” Nicolas prodded. Bear grunted once.
“That’s no excuse for leaving me out in the cold,” Nicolas said. “I could have used that fur coat of yours.”
He rubbed his hands together and blew into them. His breath formed small clouds in the air, and he grimaced. “I swear it’s getting colder every night. At least we’re headed south. This stream seems determined to take us all the way to Italya.”
Something in Nicolas’s eyes glinted. He added, with a hard smile, “They say Athrom is never cold. Too many dragons there to keep the city hot. Too many snakes to coil around you and keep you warm. Isn’t that right?”
Bear snuffed and looked away. Nicolas put a sympathetic hand on Bear’s shoulder. “I know,” he said. “I never wanted to go to Italya, either.”
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