“I knew it was too good to be true.” Lord Clarent chuckled. “I hoped to see him wed, but I fear I never will.”
At this, his brow crimpled, and his face went slack. Margret framed it, keeping his attention fixed on her.
“Papa,” she said, “Mama says you have been calling for me.”
Lord Clarent blinked. “Calling for you—” Slowly, he nodded. “Yes. I have something important to tell you, Margret.”
“I am here now.”
“Then you must take the secret. Loth is dead,” he said, tremulous, “so now you are heir. Only the heir to Goldenbirch may know.” The creases in his brow deepened. “Loth is dead.”
He must keep forgetting that Loth had returned. Margret glanced at Ead before she looked back at him, her thumbs circling his cheekbones.
They needed him to believe Loth was dead. It was the only way they would learn where the sword was hidden.
“He is . . . presumed dead, Papa,” Margret said quietly. “I am heir.”
His face crumpled between her hands. Ead knew how much it must be hurting Margret to tell him such a painful lie, but summoning Loth from Ascalon would take days they might not have.
“If Loth is dead, then— then you must take it, Margret,” Clarent said, eyes wet. “Hildistérron.”
The word caught Ead in the gut. “Hildistérron,” Margret murmured. “Ascalon.”
“When I became Earl of Goldenbirch, your lady grandmother told me.” Clarent kept hold of her hand. “It must be passed down to my children, and to yours. In case she should ever return for it.”
“She,” Ead cut in. “Lord Clarent, who?”
“She. The Lady of the Woods.”
Kalyba.
I searched for Ascalon for centuries, but Galian hid it well.
Clarent seemed agitated now. He looked at them both with fear.
“I don’t know you,” he whispered. “Who are you?”
“Papa,” Margret said at once, “it’s Margret.” When confusion washed into his eyes, her voice quaked: “Papa, I pray you, stay with me. If you do not tell me now, it will be lost to the fog in your mind.” She squeezed his hands. “Please. Tell me where Ascalon is hidden.”
He clung to her as if she were the embodiment of his memory. Margret held still as he leaned toward her, and his cracked lips came against her ear. Ead watched with a pounding heart as they moved.
At that moment, the door opened, and Lady Annes came into the room.
“Time for your sleepwater, Clarent,” she said. “Margret, he must rest now.”
Clarent cradled his head in his hands. “My son.” His shoulders heaved with sobs. “My son is dead.”
Lady Annes took a step forward, her brow furrowing. “No, Clarent, it is good news. Loth is back—”
“My son is dead.”
Sobs racked him. Margret pressed a hand to her mouth, eyes brimming. Ead took her by the elbow and ushered her out, leaving Lady Annes to tend to her companion.
“What a thing to tell him,” Margret said thickly.
“You had to.”
Margret nodded. Dabbing the wet from her eyes, she pulled Ead straight into her own bedchamber, where she fumbled for a quill and parchment and scratched out the message.
“Before I forget what Papa said,” she murmured.
You know me from song. My truth is unsung.
I lie where starlight cannot see.
I was forged in fire, and from comet wrung.
I am over leaf and under tree,
my worshippers furred, their offerings dung.
Quench fire, break stone, and set me free.
“Another wretched riddle.” Perhaps it was the strain of the last few weeks, but Ead felt so threadbare with frustration that the thought pinched at the fraying edge of her sanity. “Mother curse these ancients and their riddles. We have no time to—”
“I know exactly what it means.” Margret was already stuffing the parchment into her bodice. “And I know where Ascalon is. Follow me.”
Margret left word with the steward that they were going for an evening ride, and that Lady Annes should not wait up for them. She also asked for a spade apiece. The ostler brought these, along with the two swiftest horses in the stables and a saddle lantern each.
Garbed in their heavy cloaks, they galloped away from Serinhall. All Margret would tell Ead was that they were bound for Goldenbirch. To get there, one had to take the old corpse road. It was heaped in snow, but Margret knew her way.
In the days of kings, bodies had been taken from Goldenbirch and other villages on this path to the now-destroyed city of Arondine for burial. During the spring, pilgrims would walk here by candlelight, barefoot and singing. At its end, they would lay offerings at the site where Berethnet Hearth had once stood.
They rode beneath crooked oaks, across grassland, past a standing circle from the dawn of Inys.
“Margret,” Ead called, “what does the riddle mean?”
Margret slowed her horse to a canter.
“It came to me as soon as Papa whispered the words. I was only six, but I remember.”
Ead dipped her head under a snow-heavy branch. “Pray enlighten me.”
“Loth and I grew up apart, as you know—he lived at court with Mama from a young age, and I lived here with Papa—but Loth would come home in the spring for pilgrimage. I hated it when he had to go back. One year, I was so cross with him for leaving me that I swore not to speak to him ever again. To appease me, he promised we would spend the whole last day of his stay together, and I made him promise we would do anything I wanted. Then,” she said, “I declared that we would pay a visit to the haithwood.”
“Brave indeed for a child of the north.”
Margret snorted. “Daft, more like. Still, Loth had made the vow, and even at twelve, he was too gallant to break it. At dawn, we slipped out of our beds and followed this very road to Goldenbirch. Then, for the first time in our lives, we kept walking, until we reached the haithwood, home of the Lady of the Woods.
“We stopped at the very edge of the trees. They were like faceless giants to a little girl, but I found it all thrilling. I held Loth by the hand, and we stood trembling in the shadow of the haithwood, wondering if the witch would come to steal us and skin us and chew on our bones the moment we set foot in it. Finally, I lost patience and gave Loth a rather firm push.”
Ead bit down a smile.
“Such a scream he let out,” Margret recalled. “Still, when he failed to be hauled away to a bloody end, the pair of us grew bold as peacocks, and soon we were picking berries and otherwise larking about. Finally, as dusk fell, we decided to go home. That was when Loth spotted a little hollow. He said it was naught but a coney-hole. I reckoned it must be a wyrm-hole, and that I could kill whatever wyverling was hid in it.
“Well, Loth had a hearty laugh at that, and it stung me into crawling in. It was very small,” Margret said. “I had to dig with my hands. Headfirst, I crawled inside it with a candle … and at first, it was just soil. But as I tried to turn around, I slipped and tumbled, and found myself in a tunnel large enough to stand in.
“Somehow my candle had stayed lit, so I dared venture a little farther. It was clear the tunnel had not been made by conies. I don’t remember how far I went. Only that my terror was growing by the moment. Finally, when I thought I would fairly wet myself, I ran back and scrambled out and told Loth there was nothing there.” Snow caught in her lashes. “I thought I had stumbled on the abode of the Lady of the Woods, and that if I ever told a soul, she would come to steal me back. For years, I had nightmares about that tunnel. Nightmares of being drained of my blood, or buried alive.”
It was rare that Margret looked afraid. Even now, eighteen years later, it touched her.
“I suppose I forgot about it, in the end,” she said, “but when Papa spoke to me . . . I remembered. I am over leaf and under tree, my worshippers furred, their offerings dung.”
“Conies,” Ead murmured. “Kalyba tol
d me she seldom went to the haithwood, but Galian might have. Or perhaps it was your ancestors who told him about the tunnel.”
Margret nodded, her jaw tight.
They rode on.
Dark had fallen by the time the ruins of Goldenbirch came into view.
In this hallowed place, the cradle of Virtudom, the silence was absolute. Snow wafted like cinders. As their horses trotted past ruins that had lain untouched for centuries, Ead almost believed the world had ended, and she and Margret were the last people alive. They had gone back in time, to an age when Inys had been known as the Isles of Inysca.
Margret stopped her horse and dismounted.
“This is where Galian Berethnet was born.” She hunkered down to brush away some of the snow. “Where a young seamstress gave birth to a son, and his brow was marked with hawthorn ash.”
Her gloved hands revealed a slab of marble, set deep into the earth.
HERE STOOD BERETHNET HEARTH
BIRTHPLACE OF KING GALIAN OF INYS
HE WHO IS SAINT OVER ALL VIRTUDOM
“I heard tell that Galian had no earthly remains,” Ead recalled. “Is that unusual?”
“Yes,” Margret admitted. “Very. The Inyscans should have preserved the remains of a king. Unless—”
“Unless?”
“Unless he died in a way his retainers wanted to conceal.” Margret climbed back into her saddle. “No one knows how the Saint perished. The books say only that he joined Queen Cleolind in the heavens and built Halgalant there, as he had built Ascalon here.”
She made the sign of the sword over the slab before they spurred their horses on.
The haithwood was dread itself in the north. As it came into sight, Ead understood why. Before the Nameless One had taught the Inyscans to fear the light of fire, this forest had taught them to fear the dark. The bulk of its trees were ancient giantswoods, pressed close enough to form a black curtain wall. To look at it was suffocating.
They rode up to it at a trot and tethered their horses. “Can you find the coney-hole?” Ead kept her voice low. She knew they were alone, but this place unsettled her.
“I imagine so.” Margret detached the lantern and tools from her saddle. “Just stay close to me.”
The woods beyond consumed all light. Ead retrieved one of the saddle lanterns before she interlocked their fingers and, together, they took their first step into the haithwood.
Snow crunched beneath their riding boots. The canopy was dense—giantswoods never shed their fur of needles—but the snowfall had been heavy enough to leave a deep covering.
As they walked, Ead found herself filled with a profound sense of desolation. It might have been the cold as well as the all-consuming dark, but the fireplace at Serinhall now seemed as far away as the Burlah. She set her chin deep into the fur collar of her cloak. Margret stilled now and then, as if to listen. When a twig snapped, even Ead tensed. Beneath her shirt, the jewel was growing colder.
“There used to be wolves here,” Margret said, “but they were hunted to extinction.”
If only to keep Margret occupied, Ead asked, “Why is it called the haithwood?”
“We think haith was the word the Inyscans used for the old ways. The worship of nature. Hawthorns, especially.”
They trudged through the snow for an age without speaking. Loth and Margret had been brave children.
“This is it.” Margret approached a snowdrift at the foot of a knotted oak. “Lend me a hand, Ead.”
Ead crouched beside her with one of the spades, and they dug. For a time, it seemed Margret had misremembered—but suddenly, their spades broke through the snow, into a hollow.
Ead dislodged the snow from its edges. The coney-hole was by now too small even for a child. They scooped with the spades and their hands until it was big enough to admit them. Margret was eyeing the opening nervously. “I will go first,” Ead offered. She kicked loose soil from the hole and slid in, leaving the lantern at the entrance.
It was barely wide enough inside for a well-fed coney, let alone a woman. Ead lit her magefire and pushed herself forward on her belly. She crawled until the tunnel, just as Margret had promised, simply dropped away, into a well of darkness. Unable to turn around, Ead had no choice but to go into it headfirst.
The drop was short and bruising. As she straightened, her magefire flared, unveiling a tunnel with sandstone walls and an arched ceiling, just high enough to stand in.
Margret joined her. She held up her lantern in one hand and a tiny knife in the other.
The walls of the tunnel had alcoves chiseled into them, though only the stumps of candles remained. There was a chill in this secret burrow, but nothing close to the ice on the surface. Margret was still shivering in the swathes of her cloak.
Before long they reached a chamber with a low ceiling, where two iron vats flanked another slab, cut from blackstone. Margret bent to sniff one.
“Eachy oil. A vat this large would burn for a season,” she said. “Someone has been tending to this place.”
“Remind me how long ago your father took his fall,” Ead said.
“Three years.”
“Before that, did he ever go to the haithwood?”
“Aye, often. Since the haithwood is in our province, he would sometimes walk with his servants through it, to make sure all was well. Sometimes he would even go alone. I thought it made him the bravest man alive.”
By the light of her magefire, Ead read the inscription on the slab.
I AM THE LIGHT OF FIRE AND STAR
WHAT I DRINK WILL DROWN
“Meg,” she said, “Loth explained my magic to you, did he not?”
“If I have it right, yours is a magic of fire,” Margret said, “and is attracted, in some way, to the magic of starlight—but not as much as the magic of starlight attracts itself. Do I have it right?”
“Just so. Galian must have known the sword would be drawn to sterren, and that Kalyba had a supply of it. He did not want her to hear that call. Whoever buried Ascalon surrounded it with fire. I imagine that for the first few centuries, whoever was the Keeper of the Leas was charged with keeping the entrance open and the braziers lit.”
“You think Papa was doing that.” Margret nodded slowly. “But when he took his fall—”
“—the secret was almost lost.”
The two of them looked down at the slab. Too heavy to pry up with their hands.
“I’ll ride back to Serinhall and fetch a greathammer,” Margret said.
“Wait.”
Ead took the waning jewel from around her neck. It was cold as hoarfrost in her hand.
“It senses Ascalon,” she said, “but the pull is not enough to drag it from the stone.” She thought. “Ascalon is of starlight, but it was shaped with fire. A union of both.”
She held up her magefire.
“And it responds to what is most like itself,” Margret said, catching on.
The tongue of flame licked at the jewel. Ead feared her instinct was misplaced until a light glowed in it—white light, the kiss of the moon on water. It sang like a plucked string.
The slab of stone cracked down the middle with a sound like a thunderclap. Ead threw herself back and shielded her face as the blackstone ruptured into pieces. The jewel flew from her hand, and the broken slab vomited a streak of light across the chamber. Something clanged against the wall, loud enough to make her ears ring, and came to rest, steaming, beside the jewel, which quivered in response. Both were glowing silver-white.
When the light dimmed, Margret sank to her knees.
A magnificent sword lay before them. Every inch of it—hilt, crossguard, blade—was a clean, bright silver, with a mirror shine.
I was forged in fire, and from comet wrung.
Ascalon. Made of no earthly metal. Created by Kalyba, wielded by Cleolind Onjenyu, blooded on the Nameless One. A double-edged longsword. From pommel to tip, it was as tall as Loth.
“Ascalon,” Margret said hoarsely, her eyes wick w
ith reverence. “The True Sword.”
Ead closed a hand around the hilt. Power thrummed within its blade. It shivered at her touch, silver drawn to her golden blood. As she stood, she lifted it with her, speechless with wonder. It was light as air, chill to the touch. A sliver of the Long-Haired Star.
Mother, make me worthy. She pressed her lips to the cold blade. I will finish all that you began.
They climbed out of the coney-hole and retraced their steps through the haithwood. By now, the sky was dredged with stars. Ascalon, scabbardless, seemed to drink their light. In the chamber, it had looked almost like steel, but now there was no mistaking its celestial origins.
No ships left during the night. They would have to rest at Serinhall and make for Caliburn-on-Sea at dawn. The thought of another journey weighed on Ead. Even with the sword in hand, the haithwood wound its creepers about her heart and squeezed the warmth from it.
“Hail, who goes there?”
Ead looked up. Margret had stopped beside her, and was holding up her lantern.
“I am Lady Margret Beck, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Goldenbirch, and these are Beck lands. I shall brook no mischief in the haithwood.” Margret sounded firm, but Ead knew her voice well enough to hear the fear in it. “Come forth and show yourself.”
Now Ead saw it. A figure stood between the trees, its features obscured by the oppressive darkness of the haithwood. A drumbeat later, it had melted into the shadow, as if it had never been there.
“Did you see that?”
“I saw it,” Ead said.
A whisper of wind unsettled the trees.
They returned to their horses, moving quickly now. Ead buckled Ascalon on to the saddle.
The wolf moon was high over Goldenbirch. Its light glistered on the snow as they rode back to the corpse road. They had just passed one of the coffin stones that marked it when Ead heard a sharp cry from Margret. She yanked the reins, turning her horse around.
“Meg!”
Her breath snared in her throat. The other horse was nowhere to be seen.
And Margret was standing, a blade at her throat, in the arms of the Witch of Inysca.
The Priory of the Orange Tree Page 59
