“I awoke shivering despite the warm wash dripping from the hatch. For a moment I feared I’d overslept, but the slaves were still snoring, and there were too few boots battering the upper deck. Then I recognized it—the iron scent—a second baptism. I climbed from my hammock and up the rungs and pressed my ear against the hatch to hear, but I felt instead. A body lay atop the trap, heavy and bleeding through the wood and into my hair till the knots were damp and I was certain the stamping had moved safely away.
“It was a raid. We had drifted too far north into Messaii territory where our kind fell prey to Pareo’s privateers. I wish I’d known that back then—it was the first time I’d seen men with skin that pale, and I pissed myself believing they were wraiths come back for vengeance. A scream from the captain’s cabin cured me shortly after I arrived on deck. One raider was already dead, the other four howling at the head at Yin’s feet. His fat cheeks were grinning, his moustaches quivering in delight as the moon reflected bright on the length of his great sabre. And he wasn’t alone. There was the Vagabond—a sharp jawed man, all angles and long, unkept hair; the ornery Gold Jacket—aptly named; and the captain himself, missing his hat, his mane and beard a blaze of silver, standing naked save for his boots and greatcoat. I would have laughed if it wasn’t so amazing.
“The remaining Messaii died waving their little sabres like toys against the Gautamans’ greater steel. Two of them skewered, another hacked to pieces, and the last cleaved in half for turning his back on taskmaster Yin. ‘Kyoken,’ smiled the former slave driver, then he tossed me one of the dead men’s swords. I’d need it. More privateers were boarding, but so too were our men emerging from the hull.
“The fight went through the night until the light of dawn showed us head to foot in a ruddy brown. By then, all I wanted was to lie in my hammock, yet the day’s work had just begun. There was the deck that needed cleaning, and torn sails to mend, and a whole ship to loot and scuttle. Needless to say, the slaves didn’t get much oaring done. It was night again when we were finally finished, and I on my way to sleep when Yin called me to the cabin.
“Captain Fenghuang was seated upright on his feather mattress, dressed just the opposite as the previous night in a white linen shirt, bright orange trousers, and his gold trimmed hat half-hiding the stains in his hair. He had a sword in his lap and a look in his eye that terrified as he gestured for me to take a seat on the stool set across from him. I sat, and he said some words I couldn’t understand. Then he handed me this sword.”
I lifted my sabre to the fire so that the heathens could see the red lacquer scabbard, gilded disc guard and long braided hilt.
“From that day forward, I was a freed man—a member of the crew truly. I still drove the slaves, yet now my suppers were spent in the mess with the other men: Yin and the Vagabond, Gold Jacket, even the captain on occasion after a particularly successful raid. And there were many. During my few years on the sea, we seized two ships, more than doubled our crew, and halved the natives on the coasts of my homeland. But all good thing must come to an end. Slaves became harder and harder to find as Tsaazaari pirates followed our success, and at the same time, a flux of Messaii flooded the market.
“It was the end of summer when we docked in Gautama’s capital harbor for the final time with three empty vessels and a spent war chest. Captain Feng and his closest men met that evening, and we agreed over rum that our life together had reached its end. One ship went to Gold Jacket, as did several of the crew, though the other two were sold and the profit split among us. Most of us, anyway. The Vagabond refused his share, as did I, for fear of what gold might do to our souls. But there, we parted ways—he to the bamboo forests of the west and I to the northern mountain boarder. We never saw each other again.”
“Do you think he’s still out there?” the young Messah asked.
“I believe he is, to this day; though I’d hate to be the one to come across him now.”
“But weren’t you friends?”
And I replied, “That, and a worthy challenge. Had he gone north and I, west, I don’t doubt he’d have massacred most of Qi Shi Temple looking for a fight.”
“The abbot would have beat him,” Adnihilo spat with a smile.
Our eyes locked over the fire. “He certainly beat me. Now, where was I?….That’s right—the mountain. I didn’t know about Qi Shi Temple at the time, but it’s the only place to provision before the descent, and I was well out of food and water by then. Of course, they didn’t want to let me in at first. I don’t blame them. I was filthy as my linens stained black with old blood, and my hair and beard were no better in matted knots. I wouldn’t have opened the gates either, but I pounded anyway.
“First day got me nowhere, so the next morning I waited instead. I figured someone would poke his head over the wall to check if I’d left, and I was right. They sent Brother William, who the initiates called Gwei Lo. He was the one to peer over the gates, and when we saw each other, we just gaped for a while wondering how two foreign devils arrived at such a place.
“Gwei Lo made me clean up before granting me entry. I had to cut my hair and wear their robes and listen to their ascetic babbling. It would have been worth it if just for the food, but then they started teaching me their Gautaman boxing. You see, I thought I was good because I’d killed a couple men in the chaos of a melee. The monks taught me something else. They put me through Hell before I’d even discovered God, but I remembered the man that Yin flogged to death. I remembered and worked and prayed until I made it in front of the abbot in his billowing orange pants and his smirking bald head. Bastard hit me so hard that for days I thought I was a dead man. I might have been if not for their medicine. The initiates taught me how to apply it to myself, then once I was healed, the abbot showed me his trick.” The half-blood winced at that, as I grinned and finished, “And that’s about it—down the mountain and into the desert, the same way you did.”
“That’s it?” begged Adam. “You didn’t even tell us where you got that giant sword?
“What? That wasn’t enough? You heathens are as bad as Mephistine hedons.”
“Why do you keep calling us that?” It was Adnihilo who spoke, and the bishop who answered.
“Cause they’re all a bunch of heretics. We get this shit in Pareo all the time, some raving lunatic thinking he’s the manifestation of God. These fools are no different.”
“Not at all,” whispered Jordan, hardly louder than the crackling flame. “Kashim and I serve separate Lords. We’re heathens in his eyes as well, just of a different sort.” He turned to me. “Kashim, why don’t you explain?”
“They’ll never believe me anyway.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Adnihilo, glancing toward the priestess then the bishop.
“So, you truly want to know?” I said, staring at each of them in turn, ending with the witch. “May I,” I asked, “Oh Mother of old Iisah?” She said nothing, and I did not wait for her permission. “So here it is, the final line in the song of Kashim the Dreamer—The Death of the Mad Dog—resurrected in the red Tsaazaari sands by a true God apart from that nefarious demiurge.
“I first heard his voice in the tides of Umlomo and again in the pale moon on the night of the solstice. The third time, his words came from inside, and it was only then that he revealed himself. The horror. It’s a terrible thing to look upon the face of God—that endless maw of the Blind Leviathan—jaws open, eyes focused, unfathomable insights spilling into mind. My tongue unraveled in speech I’d never learned: the ancient words of Babylon and the eternal Messaii. And I saw the fate of greater beings—serpents slain for the sake of prophecy: Light Bringer and Dark Seeker and Deep Sea; he showed me their fates and gave me the sword of King Luthor to safeguard the seven seals withheld from man for millennia.”
“We found him the next morning,” Jordan finished, “shivering, sweating, and mad from thirst.”
The bishop rolled his amber eyes. “You expect us to believe that?”
“It matters not,” I replied, “what another believes when your witness is God. But enough stories from me. It’s late, and you’ve still a long journey ahead of you. Perhaps the truth will reveal itself in your dreams.” A howl sounded from the darkness. “Or perhaps not. I’ll take the first watch.”
Twenty-Second Verse
Few things in Jael’s life had compared to the horrors at the Hibernis Fair, of the deep western woods, those beneath the frozen earth of pale Quiet Tower; yet there, in the great hall of Castle Aestas, amidst the chatter of a hundred nobles, at the high table of Duke and Duchess Stoltz, terror gripped her like it hadn’t since she was a girl.
“Relax, Leonhardt,” Trey whispered with a side-ways smile, talking out each side of his mouth, one moment to his aunt Ariel, then to Jael, then across the trencher to Troy and Brandon, and Harpe’s father Sir Brandr, then back again to his cousin pouring out of her chair over his every word. He was born for this, to mingle amidst the rich and noble—in his element: crystal and gold. But Jael, she was mud among the roses, flung up where she did not belong—an ox in a ball gown. No amount of preparation could change that now. Though they tried.
They’d arrived six days prior after as many on the road by the creaking wheels of coaches. Trey had been loath to return to Aestas that way; he’d complained to Leonhardt at least a dozen times of his desire to arrive horsed and armoured before cheers and adoration. Jael did not think he knew how guilty that made her feel. Her injuries were what kept them from riding, injuries which would have had time to heal had she seen through Ogdon’s farce. Instead, she was lured into yet another scandal: a priest was arrested, and Gildmane decided to leave prematurely. I should have let him die at the bottom of the bog, she thought whenever she saw Sylvertre. She thanked God their encounters were sparse since departing Quiet Harbor. She thanked the captain, too. His orders were what kept she and Ogdon apart, were what barred him from attending the welcoming ball for the Saint’s Cross—though she wished it were her who had been barred.
Trey had warned her no sooner than the evening of their arrival, and even then, she’d believed it a jest till breakfast the following morning when Lady Sofiya asked after what manner of gown she’d be wearing. Jael looked on the marred reflection gazing back from her silver plate and thought, What does it matter? A horse is a horse no matter its barding.
Six days later, the only thing to change was her plate from silver to gold. She knifed a duck leg and wild boar sausage from the trencher to obscure her reflection, then drained a glass of its golden apple cider—nearly jumped from the bench, startled by the sudden materialization of a servant to fill her cup.
“Still adjusting to luxury?” quipped Duke Johan Stoltz, leaning entirely off of his throne, beaming at Leonhardt, though they’d only seen each other sparingly the entire length of her stay. A happy thing, that; for every time she saw the man was more jarring than the last. He looked nothing like she’d imagined of a dignified Summerlander: tall and blonde like Trey or Brandon. Instead, the duke seemed an artificial man, small at the joints as his beautiful, young daughter, yet weirdly muscular in his shoulders, back, and neck. And worse was his face, his complexion in particular was that of blanched canvas and painted like a whore’s its color and contour. No doubt he was a blue blooded northerner—the true north: the mountains of Kayin, the cold eastern reaches, the Hibernis Enclave.
Looming dangerously over the trencher—a moat of grease; the roast duck, a brackdragon—Stoltz tucked his hair into the collar of his doublet, like it was a pendant, something separate from his body. That’s when Jael recognized the inky strands for what they were. A horse-hair wig, fake, just like his smile as he said to her, “It’s a crime, what my nephew deprives you. He’s behind the times, I say! It’s been a decade since Lucius’s war, yet on he goes with swords and soldiery. What for? The future has already come, and I dare say the next saint will be even more progressive than Paul. What good will all this battle draught be then? No one enjoys a melee anymore. You should be learning the subtleties of the lance, and the horse, and etiquette: how to speak and dress and, by god, how to use a fork!”
Jael felt her face flush and checked that each of her hands had the correct utensil. Knife in the right, fork in the left, just as they’d been arranged at the outset. She might have sighed her relief, that she’d done at least this one thing right, but Leonhardt knew better. The heat in her cheeks meant her scars were turning dark, apparent for the whole hall to see. Her head and body slouched, heavy with humiliation as she tried distracting herself with cutting sausage on her plate. To her chagrin, her right hand moved like a foreign appendage, mistranslating dexterity for clumsiness.
The conversation continued, Trey leaping to defend his decisions, Lady Ariel embarrassed, commenting on her husband’s liberal speech. Jael seized the opportunity. Intent on escaping one exchange for another, she glanced across the table, saw Brandon’s attention rapt in whatever Troy and Brandr were discussing—something about heavy lancers disappearing over the next century. They were a vestige, Brandr argued, from an ancient civil war when armoured men killed armoured men—would have vanished long before if not kept alive for tourney and tradition. Troy disagreed; as for why, Jael didn’t care to listen. It was better, she decided, to stare out frosted windows and occupy her mind with stories from childhood winters. Saint Constance who slew the dragon in the north….The ashen snow at Crusader’s Canyon….The great purge at the city of Babylon….She thought of the seven heroes; of Camilla, her icon; of all the soldiers there and what it would have been like to be one of them. Then she remembered the woods and the pagan den and realized at once her question had been answered. Is this truly what I wanted? She wondered why almost no one had told her the truth about war and knighthood. Not her father, not Rillion—then she thought again, something the old knight had said to her on their way to Pareo. It lingered for a while at the threshold of memory, then it emerged, “Our campaign in Babylon.”
Thoughts of scars and murders gave way to the working of Leonhardt’s pondering. He was there—they were both there, Rillion and Father. They saw the seven and the demon and never mentioned anything! Another revelation struck her, cold as the ice outside the windows: opaque, white, reaching high above her head. Why doesn’t the story ever mention them? And why were members of the Temple Guard so far from the Saint? Where was the Cross? Surely they would have been sent. Out of instinct, she turned to Trey for answers. He’d been the only one to warn her what life would be like as the saint’s sworn sword. She could trust no one else. So she sat shivering next to him, waiting for the chance to snatch his attention from his aunt when she felt a finger swipe the nape of her neck.
“Ooh, Gooseflesh. Still not used to the cold, are you? So it must be true. They really do suck out your northern blood in the capital.”
Jael twisted on the bench and spoke over her shoulder, her body facing Trey, smiling for the sake of politeness. “It’s warmer here than home was in Herbstfield, with all these fires going. I’m just used to more clothes.”
Sofiya Stoltz looked her up and down. “Wool and linen, yes I know. You’ve been telling me all evening. What I want to know is if you feel any differently about your gown?”
This again, thought Leonhardt. The duchess’s daughter would not leave it alone. The dress had been of Sofiya’s design, after all, a variation of the matching black and gold gowns that adorned she and her mother. Theirs were gold satin slashed with layers of black underneath, at the breast and bottom center gold-thread lions embroidered rearing there and on the inside of shoulderless sleeves where they flared, forearm to wrist. They fit beautifully the blonde, fair, emerald eyed Ladies Stoltz, identical but for age their heart-shaped faces, rosy cheeks, lips, and noses. Of course, Jael’s was just as gorgeous—where gold was crimson and black was gold; and her own rearing lions bore the cross in their mouths—a courteous touch. Wasted, she thought, and said as much to Sofiya. “The gown is wonderful, but no matter the barding, a horse is
still a horse.”
“Come again, sirrah?” cut a lady’s voice. Leonhardt’s neck uncoiled, as did every head at the high table turn toward the duchess—everyone, save for her husband and nephew who smiled politely into their laps. Lady Ariel didn’t seem to notice them, nor did she seem to notice anyone as she spoke, peering down her upturned nose. The force was enough to unhorse a knight from his charger. “I could have sworn I heard you disparaging our mounts.”
“Mounts?” Jael echoed.
Sofiya hid behind her hands. “Not in front of everyone. Mother, please.”
“Horses,” the duchess continued, “and don’t you dare try playing the fool. A northern lady should know better. To suggest a Blundanburgh destrier or an East Aestas courser could be anything but beautiful is a sin against your own blood.”
“But I only meant that—that even in this dress, I’m not—” Leonhardt started.
The duchess cut her off, “So it’s the gown that’s the problem? The best couturier north of the capital isn’t good enough for Little Red Cloak, I see. Forget my husband’s liberal whinging. My nephew has spoiled you.”
Jael stared agape like a statue of clay: her inner-self hollowed, embodied in Sofiya shrinking pink-faced behind her; her voice a reverberation of the strange epithet, “Red Cloak?”
“Little Red Cloak,” Trey explained, “The original is meant to be your father. I’d forgotten that old grudge. Would have thought it had died with Lord Gildmane and his sons, but it seems it’s haunts these halls like a ghost.”
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