Deathcaster

by Cinda Williams Chima

  He’d not seen or heard from Samara in that time.

  They met in council in Tarvos, where Evan intended to reestablish his capital. Evan divided responsibilities among his shiplords. Jasmina and Riggs took Deepwater Court, a reward for her loyalty and in recognition of her abilities. Blazon and Ursula went to Endru, with the added responsibility of patrolling up and down the coast. Evan and Breon would be in Tarvos, for now.

  They set some preliminary rules for the ports, and then moved on to a celebration. The only shadow over their good cheer was the knowledge that, sooner or later, Celestine would return, her armies swollen with wetland “recruits,” hungry for revenge.

  That’s the whole point—to lure her back here, Evan thought. But he knew better than to share that with his new allies, who would prefer that she stayed on the other side of the Indio.

  “Maybe that’s where Samara is,” Ursula said, having moved from the cheerful to the glum stage of drinking. “Maybe he heard what’s going on and sailed for the wetlands to tell Celestine.”

  “Maybe Celestine will turn right around and go back to the wetlands if she comes back to a free Desert Coast united against her,” Riggs said.

  “She will come back,” Breon said abruptly. “She will return to the Northern Islands by midsummer, if not before.”

  Evan and Jasmina stared at him.

  “Why?” Evan said. “Why do you think that?”

  “It was in her song,” Breon said.

  Jasmina eyed him suspiciously. “Celestine . . . was singing?”

  “Not out loud,” Breon said.

  “Can you sing it?” Evan said, quieting Jasmina with a look. His knowledge of Breon’s gift was sketchy at best. He was the first spellsinger Evan had ever met.

  Breon closed his eyes, as if searching out a memory.

  This is where it all begins.

  This is where it all ends.

  The shattering

  The rejoining

  Forged in the bleeding earth.

  As it has been, it shall be again.

  At midsummer,

  When the sun pauses in the sky.

  This was met with silence.

  “So.” Evan cleared his throat. “That tells you that Celestine is coming back at midsummer? Whether the wetlands have fallen or not?”

  Breon opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said with quiet confidence.

  “That’s just a month away,” Jasmina said. “How do you get that?”

  “It’s there,” Breon said, brow furrowed, like he was surprised that they didn’t hear it.

  “What do you think that means?” Evan said. “‘Forged in the bleeding earth’?”

  Breon shook his head, as if to say, I sang the song. My work is done.

  “Rivers?” Jasmina guessed. “Volcanos?”

  “There are volcanos in the wetlands as well as here,” Evan said. He didn’t want to call Breon’s prophecy into question, but it was making it harder to build a case. Fortunately, by now the shiplords were too deep in their cups to worry.

  “To the Stormcaster!” the shiplords said, raising their glasses.

  Evan raised his glass. “Ruthless,” he said.

  54

  KILLING SOUTHERNERS

  It was good to be fighting southerners again, Lyss thought, even if it was under somebody else’s flag, with somebody else’s army. Most nights she was so exhausted that she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. Other nights, she lay awake, worrying that she was helping Celestine to win control of the entire continent. Worrying that she was betraying her queendom for selfish reasons—her desire to keep her brother alive.

  She’d lost her father, her sister, her mother, and countless friends. Do I have to give up everything and everyone I love for this thrice-cursed line and star-crossed queendom?

  She would grip her brother’s serpent amulet between her hands for reassurance. When energy flowed into her fingers, she wondered who had put it there—Adrian or her father.

  Some nights, when she was falling into sleep, the amulet drew her attention, insistently, as if trying to pull her into a dream. Her father stood in the clothes he’d died in, but clean again, unblemished. He extended his hands, reaching for her, but there was too great a distance between them. She wanted to dive into the dream and leave the real world behind.

  You need to live, and succeed, in the real world, she told herself. The Line won’t end here.

  As she’d expected, her bloodsworn army was much more effective in the relatively flat borderlands than it had been in the mountains. They made rapid progress to the west, following the river valley from Spiritgate toward Delphi. Lyss told herself that it was a good thing that Delphi was back in Ardenine hands. This way, when they took the city, they would be killing southerners instead of her countrymen.

  Lyss’s success pleased Celestine. She praised Lyss’s skills on a daily basis, though much of her time was spent reflecting on her own good judgment in putting Lyss in command of the army.

  Lyss was glad to share credit with the empress, even though she knew the blame would be all hers when things went wrong. “The first job of a general is to choose a battle she can win,” Lyss said. “Then, when it comes to the actual fighting, she looks like a genius.”

  Her Highlander officers were relieved that they weren’t fighting the Highlanders, but they found the behavior of their bloodsworn soldiers disquieting.

  “They scarcely eat anything,” Lieutenant Farrow said. “They don’t seem to feel the cold. It’s like they don’t notice when they’re wounded. They don’t even go out to taverns or pleasure houses when we reach a town.”

  “So they’re ideal soldiers, right?” Lyss said drily. “What commander doesn’t dream of soldiers like this?”

  “Me,” Farrow said bluntly. “It’s hard to care about them as much as I should, because they don’t quite seem human.”

  “Just remember—most are unwilling recruits. And you never know what’s going on inside them. Maybe more than you think.”

  Jada Long Foot sauntered up and saluted in that lackadaisical way she had. “Some of the advance scouts just rode in. They say the road is fairly clear between here and Delphi. We should be there in two days.”

  Lyss had learned not to trust good fortune. “Where is everyone? It’s like the entire countryside has been emptied out.”

  “The few civilians we can find say that one army after another has marched through,” Long Foot said. “Many have hidden their food and their valuables and left the area.”

  Lyss groaned. They were moving too fast, in her opinion. The more quickly they reached Delphi, the more quickly she might be faced with marching north, through Marisa Pines Pass, and into the belly of the queendom.

  At least Samara wasn’t here, looking over her shoulder. Celestine had left him in Carthis, to keep an eye on things. She wished she could send Celestine east to join him. That would give her a bit more flexibility. Or a lot. She still wished she knew more about the blood bond, and if there was any way to break it.

  And then, like a dream come true, Celestine was called away to the northeast. Since taking Chalk Cliffs, her armies had struggled to make any headway in the mountains. Clan warriors were decimating the bloodsworn in the mountain passes, and she’d lost several of her best commanders.

  Lyss had worried that Celestine might pull her from the southern campaign and send her north to address the problems there, but she didn’t. “This is one part of the war that is going well,” the empress said. “Why would I interfere with that?”

  Instead, she took Munroe Graves, one of Lyss’s best Fellsian artillerymen, who’d been captured at Chalk Cliffs. “If we cannot get at these soldiers in the mountains,” Celestine said, “we’ll blast away their hiding places.”

  Good luck with that, Lyss thought, but didn’t say it aloud, because she was glad not to be going herself.

  When Graves asked for advice, Lyss said, “Say yes to everything she asks, but if you can get clean away, make a run
for it. If you get away, find your way to General Dunedain and tell her what’s going on. Tell them that my brother is probably being held captive in the Northern Islands.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Graves said.

  “Be careful,” Lyss said, swallowing hard, aware that tears were rolling down her cheeks. “Stay alive, and I’ll buy you a drink when I see you again.”

  Impulsively, she embraced him.

  She and Celestine had a parting conversation as well. “Just remember, Your Highness, that no one is irreplaceable,” the empress said. “Serve me well, and you will be richly rewarded. But know that I deal with betrayal with a hard hand. I will find you, I will take you back to Celesgarde, and I will kill both you and your brother.”

  “I understand, Empress,” Lyss said. “After I take Delphi, which way should I go?”

  Celestine laughed. “As long as you keep winning, you can go whichever way you want.”

  How many times am I going to have to take this city? Lyss thought. She looked across the expanse of open land that surrounded Delphi. She knew for a fact that it was much better protected than it had been when she’d won it from Arden. She had taken advantage of its weaknesses, and then fortified the city so that it wouldn’t be as easy for the next would-be invader.

  She’d cleared the land surrounding the city fortifications. This way, any approaching army would be under fire from the walls for what would seem like an eternity.

  “There’s one odd thing,” Long Foot said, pointing. “There’s a new banner flying from the city walls. They’ve taken down the queen’s banner and raised another, but it’s not the Ardenine banner, either. I don’t know whose it is.”

  Lyss shaded her eyes. “The emblem looks like a tree.”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Could it be a city banner?” Delphi had once been an independent city-state.

  Long Foot shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe one of Jarat’s thanes is leading the invasion and claimed the city for himself.”

  Not for the first time, Lyss wished that Celestine gave the same attention to maintaining a network of eyes and ears as she did to her ships and her marble palace. Good intelligence saved soldiers’ lives.

  By now, everyone in Delphi must be aware that a massive army was camped just outside bowshot from the city walls.

  She could just march around Delphi and head south for Ardenscourt. She didn’t need yet another walled fortress, and, like any wolf, she preferred to go for the throat. Plus, a Delphi in Ardenine hands was one more obstacle on the road north, one more excuse not to go that way.

  But Delphi sat astride the road from Spiritgate, blocking supply lines from the coast. Celestine would—and should—question a decision not to take it.

  In the end, she sent Demeter Farrow under a flag of truce to arrange a meeting.

  They met under a canopy midway between the city walls and Lyss’s army. For the empress, Lyss, Farrow, and Jada Long Foot. Two came from the city. Lyss scanned their faces.

  “Fletcher!” Lyss recognized Brit Fletcher, one of the Patriots she’d partnered with when they drove Arden out of the city. The other was Yorrie Cooper, another Delphian freedom fighter.

  “Captain Gray!” Fletcher said.

  It was hard to say who was more surprised. It was hard to imagine the Ardenine empire choosing Fletcher as an emissary. As they quickly pointed out, it was hard to imagine the empress choosing Lyss.

  “Since when do you fight for Carthis?” Fletcher demanded.

  “Since when do you represent Arden?” Lyss shot back.

  “Since never,” he said, offended. “I represent the free state of Delphi.”

  Lyss looked from Fletcher to Cooper. “I’m confused.”

  “A lot has happened,” Cooper said. “The king is on his way. He’s running a little late.”

  “The king?”

  “Aye,” Fletcher said, like a cat with a bird in his mouth. “The king of Arden is here, in the free city of Delphi.”

  “What the hell is he doing here?” And why would he risk coming out here to negotiate?

  “The king arrived in Delphi a week ago,” Cooper said. “He’s getting ready to march north to Fellsmarch.”

  “He is, is he?” With what army? she wanted to add, in an echo of the childhood taunt.

  Cooper nodded. “A few days later and you’d of missed him.”

  Then again, if the Highlanders and clans were concentrated in the eastern mountains, the road to the capital might be an easy one.

  That will never, ever happen, Lyss thought, the wolf rising in her. Maybe her family was dead, maybe she wouldn’t save her brother, maybe Celestine would win. But if Jarat Montaigne was trapped in Delphi with thousands of bloodsworn all around him. Lyss would make sure that he never left the city alive. That, at least, she could do.

  She heard a challenge and response outside the tent, and the flap was pulled aside to admit a gray-haired man wearing a wizard’s collar, followed by a person in an Ardenine military uniform—the person who must be the king.

  Before she even focused in, she realized that the silhouette was familiar. Tall, broad-shouldered, erect. Somehow reassuring. Older than she’d understood Jarat to be.

  She took in the gray-green eyes with their startling fringe of black lashes. The raven-wing hair flopping down over his forehead. The circlet of gold on his head, as simple and straightforward as the man who wore it. The grim expression on his face that said he knew he was hip-deep in scummer but would find a way to climb out of it or fight his way through it.

  Lyss’s heart flailed like a wounded bird, yet still the blood wasn’t getting to her head, because she was totally stupefied.

  Now she recalled where she’d seen that spreading tree signia before—the one now flying over a city that was not known for trees. It was on one of the occasions that she’d been confronted with a shirtless Hal Matelon. She’d noticed a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, where it wouldn’t be too noticeable.

  “What’s that?” she’d said, resisting the temptation to grasp his wrist and turn his arm over to get a better view.

  “This?” Matelon had traced the ink with his forefinger. “That’s the spreading oak, the signia of my house. My sister, Harper, was afraid that I’d be killed in battle and my body would never be identified and they’d never know if I was alive or dead. She said that if I was dead, she was not going to spend the rest of her life waiting for me to come through the door. So she made me get this tattoo.” He’d looked up at Lyss, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “You’d have to know her,” he’d said.

  And Lyss had felt guilty, knowing that, as his gaoler, she was the one keeping Hal apart from his sister, and recalling all those years she had waited for her brother to come back to her.

  A voice broke through the haze of memory and confusion. “General? Ma’am? Are you all right?”

  It was Farrow. The officer was peering into her face anxiously.

  Lyss gave him a sharp nod, then turned to the king.

  “Matelon,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, as if puzzled at being addressed in such a familiar fashion by a Carthian field commander. He looked her up and down, taking in the long, loose-fitting breeches, embroidered vest, curved blade, her head wrap draped around her neck. Then fastened on her face.

  His eyes widened and he took a step toward her. “Gray?” he said, swallowing hard. He took a quick look around, as if to see whether she might be some kind of trick or apparition. Or whether Celestine was behind her, pulling her strings. They stood and gaped at each other, as voiceless as two big fish in a too-small jar.

  “Do you two know each other?” Cooper said, pretending surprise. “Oh, right. You two met the last time you was in Delphi.”

  “This is our third go-round,” Lyss said. “It seems that Matelon never gets tired of losing.”

  55

  MILITARY MANEUVERS

  For months, Hal had been rehearsing what to say if he ever saw Lyssa Gray again. T
here were several different scenarios, but none of them turned out quite right. The truth was, his upbringing provided no framework for a story that centered on the two of them—at least, none with a happy ending.

  In one, he dropped to one knee like a knight in a story, offering up his sword. You have my sword, Your Majesty, he would say.

  She would roll her eyes. Get up, Matelon. Nobody does that.

  Or she would growl, I want more than your sword, Matelon. And she would leap on him, somehow avoiding being cut in half.

  In another, he lay mortally wounded on a battlefield, having driven Empress Celestine into the sea. Gray would drop to her knees in the muck and gore and cradle him in her arms. You have saved the Seven Realms, she would whisper. From now on, it will be known as Matelonia. And then he would die.

  As it turned out, none of those scenarios remotely resembled what happened in real life. He could have daydreamed for the rest of his life and never conjured a scenario in which Gray showed up in desert horselord garb, leading an army of the empress’s bloodsworn.

  Ever since he’d watched the empress’s ship sail away with her, he’d spent nearly every waking hour trying to help this queendom that he’d grown to admire, these queens that he respected.

  And even though Gray had been totally unaware of all these efforts on her behalf, his gut reaction was betrayal. After all I’ve done for you . . . you’re fighting for the empress?

  Maybe it was just his bruised ego speaking, since this was the third time they’d met on a battlefield, and this was the third time she’d gotten the better of him.

  She looked tired, a little beaten down, but he knew from experience that her battered surface hid a core of forged steel. Though he would have said it was impossible, she looked stronger, harder, more honed than before.

  What had happened to her in Carthis? What could the empress have done to convince her to fight against her homeland? Against her own blood? Did she tell herself that since it was Arden she was fighting, it didn’t really count?

  Hal had limited experience with the bloodsworn, but one look at Lyss convinced him that she hadn’t been bound. She was still a wolf to the bone. In a way, that made it harder. It would have been easier to accept if it weren’t Alyssa Gray looking out through those brown eyes.