by Sean Stewart
The Ghost King’s mail clinked and muttered. “Son.”
The Old Man seemed now so frail, so empty, as if his father’s presence struck the life from him and left but a shell behind. But when he looked up at his father, his eyes glittered with fear and hate.
Hedrod’s left hand reached to touch his own chest, above his heart, then fell away. “Tha!” he whispered. “It was tha. I should have known that even so base a deed was not beneath tha.”
A great shudder rocked the Old Man’s body. “I would have died and gladly, to prove my true son’s love, but tha never graunted me the chance. Tha penned me with tutors, that tha need not speak with me thyself; tha graunted me this castle so my shade would never cross thy own. Tha shewed me no trust, and gave me no teaching.”
Hedrod shook his head impatiently. “A son must take some weight on his own shoulders. He cannot seek for plaints in every err his father makes. Tha wert always weak; tha could not be trusted. Time hath shown me right, for with black art tha murthered me.”
“He murdered you,” Mark said. The bitterness between them took his breath away. “Hedrod, look upon your son. Blow by blow you made your son an enemy, hard as hate and sharp as grief.”
“Thruff the heart,” the Old Man murmured, fingering the black dagger. “I slid it thruff the heart of an orphan-boy, swaddled in thy old cloak; I watched thy blood stream from him, felt him twitching root and boughs with thy death-throes.”
Through the heart of an orphan boy, Mark thought. The frail body hung between the two terrible old men, unheeded. Through the heart of an orphan boy.
He heard Val stagger into the room behind him, panting and gasping. Steady, Mark. Got to hold on. Poor Val shaking like a willow wand but here beside me, and his eyes are steady because he can face the darkness. Mark forced himself to look upon Hedrod’s Ghost and said, “Bless him, ancient King.”
“He hath no bless to give,” Hedrod’s Son said bitterly.
“Oh, I can bless,” the old King murmured. “I can give you your death.” Dread pooled around him, thick as midnight, cold as the grave. The Old Ghost’s eyes were black and hard as iron. Lissa said she had seen her death in the Ghost’s eyes. Now, horrified, Mark saw himself there, lying on a black-draped bed. The smell of sickness came foully to him. Valerian, his soft beard almost white, dipped a cloth in a bowl of rosewater and washed his brow. The wire in his chest clenched, cutting into his heart, and
Stop!
Don’t think. O God. Move fast. “You may not take my life, awd King.”
Hedrod’s heavy shadow grew to lap against Mark’s feet. “Nobody commands me.”
Mark laughed unsteadily. “As it happens, I’m Nobody’s Son,” he said. “And what I tell you, you must do.”
Where’s Gail? Why isn’t she there if I’m sick? Val’s there but Gail, Gail…
Don’t think.
Keep your steel about you just a little longer, Shielder’s Mark. You’ve got to shift the ground on this Ghost somehow. That’s what you’ve always done, lad. When you answered awd Husk’s riddle, when you stole the dagger from Hedrod’s Son, when you claimed King Astin’s daughter: each time the trick was shifting the ground from their strength to yours.
Well what was the Ghost’s strength? Fear, of course. Fear and dread. But what does a ghost fear?
And then, with a start, he knew.
From his side the Ghost King drew a rune-carved sword, grey as dead men’s flesh. “Tha be but a fool in a leather hat and muddy breeches. Tha’rt nought. Tha hast no power.”
Quick as thought Mark whirled with Ashes. Hedrod’s sword leaped to block a cut—
But Mark did not swing at him. Instead he laid his long black blade against the Old Man’s throat. “An you so much as blink an eye I’ll kill your son,” Mark said, sick with dread.
No matter how hard he tried, he could not tear his eyes away from the Ghost King’s deadly gaze. His body shook with fever; the smell of stale sheets and rosewater clogged his throat. He was dizzy, no longer sure if he stood, or lay upon a feather bed. He heard women crying.
Hedrod’s iron eyes narrowed. “Feel the turn?” Mark gasped, moving one step closer to the terrible Ghost. “Feel the floor start to slip beneath your feet? Here stands your son. Your killer. If you be ghost, and I kill him, you are avenged. And what then holds you to this second life?”
What must a ghost fear?
Death, of course.
Slowly Hedrod lowered his sword. “Tha wouldst not. Tha hast not the belly for it, to slay a weak old man with thy blood as cold as snow.”
Mark tried to spit but his mouth was dry. “Try me,” he said.
He felt sick and fevered and half in dream, as if he lay already on that black-draped bed while his life burned away. But cutting through the fever Mark felt Ashes in his hand, cold and heavy with darkness.
He had seen faces in the fire, and heard their song. But he had learned another lesson in the Red Keep; mastered it before his forge.
He too was a thing of darkness. He knew the taste of ashes.
If Hedrod stirred, Mark would slay his son. Not with joy and not with pleasure: but he would kill the Old Man, quickly and forever.
The Old Man laughed his laugh of breaking stone. “So tha didst learn, after all.” Turning to his father he said, “He will do as he says.”
And o god life was sweet, was sweet.
Gail?
But you will die, whether Hedrod’s vision were truth or but illusion. You will die of fever or some other thing.
Working at the Red Keep’s forge, he had let the taste of ashes fill his mouth: once he had let the fear of death and failure rob his life of sweetness.
Never again. I swear it.
“Will it be enow?” Mark said steadily. “To send you back to your grave? I don’t know. But I don’t think you can take the risk.”
Hedrod looked at him through narrow eyes. “And if I were to slay tha now, with but a glance?”
“Your son would fall before Mark hit the floor,” Gail said, voice shaking but clear.
Gail?
In the pale morning light just creeping into the Tower, Mark whirled to see her dimly in the doorway, wrapped in her beloved brown travelling cloak. She was wearing the shooting glove Lissa had given her; she had an arrow nocked and drawn back to her ear, aimed at the middle of the Old Man’s back. “If I want my husband killed,” she said, “I’ll do it myself.”
“Shite, Gail, what the—” Mark looked at Val, at Gail and Lissa coming up behind her. The sight of them, his closest friends, miraculously here with him in the midst of darkness, filled him with joy, and awe. He remembered how he had felt that day in the Spring Room, meeting Gail for the first time, with his life strong within him, brave and fresh as rainbows. He stepped forward another pace, to stand directly before the Ghost King as once he stood before Astin the Munificent. “We are stretches of the same river, you and I, awd King. I am fated to destroy you. I knocked the Red Keep down, and I hold Borders now. It was I who last saw your wife Queen Lerelil alive. Though I did not mean to, I killed her when I broke the Ghostwood’s spell.” Reaching around his neck, Mark lifted up the Queen’s talisman, let it dangle for a moment in the weak red light, then dropped it clattering to the floor. “Everything you are is in my power, and you can’t beat me ever, because deep down you’re held here by only hate and fear. You’re a great man with a great line. But I’m just Nobody’s Son, wi’ nowt to lose, and you can go spit.”
An endless silence spun out then, while he and Hedrod looked deeply into one another; he felt steel shiver as their looks crossed, and knew that the ancient King saw his death too, deep within Mark’s eyes.
At last Hedrod sighed and looked away, and with that breath he seemed to dwindle. “Thy father was lucky not to know tha, Nobody’s Son. Of all things i’ th’ world, be there nought so troublesome as a child.” He looked from Mark to Gail with something almost like amusement. “I hope tha’s cursed with a pack of them. For myself,
King of Kings, I found one to be too many.” He stared at his son; in his eyes Mark saw rage and bafflement, deep frustration, and wonder, and something, far behind, almost like hurt. “Murthered me, eh?” Hedrod shook his head, and sheathed his long grey sword. “Do not kill my boy, Nobody’s Son.”
And Mark started to relax, and the fear began to drain from him, for it seemed that father and son might after all be reconciled.
But the Old Man, eyes glittering with hatred, said, “Too long have I been stirring all my ashes. Let the fire blaze, or go out!” And raising up the iron dagger he lunged with all his strength toward his father.
Mark dropped Ashes and dove, but he missed the Old Man’s wrist, and his hand closed on the dagger’s blade instead, a hair’s breadth from Hedrod’s heart. But though the white scar on his right palm screamed with agony, the blade did not lay him open to the bone. Only a few drops of blood squeezed out between his fingers, drying instantly upon the blade to patches like red rust.
Mark rose slowly to his feet to stand between the two of them, father and son. The Old Man snarled at him in fury, but his frail struggles were like a child’s against Mark’s strength. Emptiness filled Mark’s heart. Too much had gone through him today. Too much grief, too much pain. He knew a kind of darkness would be a part of him forever.
Suddenly he hungered for sunlight. He wanted to feel the wind on his cheek, the kiss of rain on his brow. He looked upon the Old Man, and sighed, and said, “There’s other things than ashes.”
And then, with his aching right hand, brown and veined and hard, he crushed the black blade like a withered leaf within his fist, and let the fragments clatter to the ground.
The Tower shook, and the Old Man shrieked, and Hedrod his father roared like a peal of thunder that explodes overhead and then goes howling, rumbling, fading, dwindling into silence, and darkness; and his hands withered, and his chain shirt slid clinking to the floor, falling from a shadow that held its shape for a single heartbeat and then was gone, like mist blown away by the wind.
The Ghost King was gone.
Where his son had stood, a black robe settled gently to the floor, and was still.
12
Goodbye
Mark and Val and Gail and Lissa sat on blocks of red granite fallen from the Red Keep’s walls, glad of the pale October sun. The black limbs of the cherry trees were bare, and the path that led from the Ghostwood was carpeted in dull red leaves.
Gail stripped off her shooting glove. “Valerian. How good to see you,” she said, in a tone of low menace. “And of course hello to you, Husband.”
Lissa winced. Hat in hand, Valerian glanced at Mark and bit his lip in silent sympathy.
Mark had gone down into darkness and come out again. He had faced down the Old Man; there was new heaviness in his hands, a weight of iron in his belly.
All this iron seemed to melt before the flame in Gail’s eyes. That’s happily ever after for you.
Gail stalked over to Mark, grabbed his collar and yanked his face down to hers. Fiercely, she kissed him. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”
Mark blinked. “Me too.”
“But if you ever walk out on me again I’ll hunt you down and murder you myself,” Gail finished.
Oh boy.
Jerk. “Do you believe me?” Shake.
“You bet,” Mark squeaked. Gail’s eyes carried absolute conviction. “I swear I didn’t mean—”
“How could you do this?” Gail yelled, rage and hurt pouring through her shaking hands. “How could you leave me alone with ghosts everywhere and that horrible man in the house? How could you desert me? What kind of man are you, you, you idiot!”
“A stupid one.” Mark took Gail in his arms and held her. Her body was stiff with fear and anger. “But getting smarter, I hope. I’ll not leave you again.”
“Better not,” Gail swore. Her arms softened, and one great sob wrenched her body. “Here I am, taking care of you again,” she muttered fiercely. “Can’t be trusted to tie your own damn bootlaces.” Pushing herself away she took a deep breath, and bent to unstring her bow.
Mark winced. “It’s good to see you all.”
“It’s good to see anyone,” Valerian muttered, gazing nervously around at the ruins of the Red Keep. “That must have been the Ghost that came to High Holt. Richard’s servants say he declared himself King again, and demanded tribute from the living.”
Gail laughed. “I don’t think we’ll have to pay up now.”
Val nodded. “The dagger—and the hate between them—was all that held those two to life, I think. Perhaps that was all that remained of Duke Aron’s spell.”
Lissa studied Mark without enthusiasm. “I never thought I’d see you looking wilder than you did that first day you strode into Swangard, but that sooty face! That beard! That shaggy hair! How did you grow it all in three days?”
“Three days! But it seemed like months. Years!”
Valerian looked at him curiously. At last he shook his head. “Well, there’s magic in the world again, I guess.” He turned back to the women, baffled. “What I want to know is how you came to be here. I meant to slip out unobserved.”
Offended, Lissa’s immaculate eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch: you think rain is dry? you think ice is hot? “You thought you could commandeer a brace of carpenters without me finding out?”
Mark blinked. “Carpenters?”
Valerian shivered. “When we found you gone, I guessed that you were headed for the Keep. I asked the carpenters to slap me up a boat: not a fancy craft, just good enough to cross the Border once and back. I launched below the rapids and pulled across. The boat is knotted to a cedar bough upon this side. Great heroes may ford icy rivers in October in the dark, but even by the light of day I could not swim the Border, thank you. I am very glad to let you use the boat returning, unless a mighty hero scoffs at such conveniences, and you would rather swim across again.”
“Actually, I didn’t ford the river,” Mark said blandly, with a sly glance at his friend. “I walked ower the bridge.”
“You walked over the…bridge?” Val sighed. “I foresee a rare few weeks of weaseling to ferret all your stories out.” Valerian blinked and slid down off his stone to stand, studying Mark as if examining him through a scrying glass. “You are different, Shielder’s Mark. Heavier. I can hear the paving stones crack beneath your feet. I see cold iron in your eyes.” Slowly Val unbuckled his belt and drew his sword. Tossing it on the ground, he held the belt and scabbard out to Mark. “I wonder at that coal-black blade you carry in your hand.”
Gravely, Mark took the scabbard Valerian offered him, buckled it around his waist, and sheathed Ashes in it. “A scabbard’s the best place for this blade of mine. And nowt could keep it better than a gift from you.”
Val blinked, and, charmingly, blushed a little.
Gail laughed. “I think at last you’ve got a sword you will not lose. But tell me, you bastard, why did you run off into the Ghostwood anyway?”
“I was looking for God.”
Gail blinked, nonplussed. Val said, “What did you find?”
“Ashes.” Startled, Valerian cast an anxious glance at Mark. “Ashes first, anyway. Only at t’end did I remember my wise friend’s words and think to look for joy.” They looked at one another, a flash of understanding. Two souls shaking hands. “Thanks,” Mark said. And then he told his story, from the time he had left Borders until Gail and Lissa had found him with Val atop the Scarlet Tower.
When he was done Val frowned and rubbed his glasses on his tunic hem, mulling over the tale. “So royal patricide then was the crime so great that Nobody’s name was forgotten and his shield blanked.”
Lissa nodded. “And High Holt was once the capital. This explains much.”
But Mark was feeling the wind against his cheek, and the stone cool and real beneath him, thinking about other things. “And you know, my father’s probably in a bar somewhere, and drinking. Getting awd to be a soldier now, bitched knees
, maybe, and a sore back all the time. Thinks about me sometimes: Ma always said I had his hands, his eyes. Still guilty after all this time for running out on me.”
“He knows he failed,” Val said softly. “He knows he is a coward, and wonders why his father did not make him a better man.”
And even if he came to you right now and held out his hand, what would it help, Shielder’s Mark? It wouldn’t change the loneliness that cankered in you at four and ten and sixteen. It could never heal that four-year-old boy who still sits inside you, abandoned and betrayed. Your father and that four-year-old: those two ghosts made you what you are, and for better or for worser, that’s what you’ll stay.
“All those years I worked and waited for my dad to come back. And he didn’t. So I looked for someone else to do his job, looked for awd men like a schoolboy lusting after girls. Damn near anything wi’ beard would do: Sir William, Duke Richard. No matter what you or Lissa told me about Richard I just ached for him to shake my hand and say ‘Good work, lad: I’m proud of you,’ and so I swallowed down every shovelful of shite he tossed my way.”
“Richard can give you a pretty steady diet of that stuff,” Gail observed.
Mark laughed. And as a sharp stroke upon an old black bell will ring off the rust, so that laughter, deep and real and rooted in his belly, shook the last self-pity from his soul. He felt his black iron sword heavy in his hand; felt too the weight of the earth underneath his feet, the jolly kiss of sunshine, the breeze bearing up his heart like the wind under a hawk’s wing. He was strong, strong as he had never been before.
Mark spat for the sheer pleasure of it, a long carpenter’s spit. “But come, let’s start for home: I want to see what Orrin’s done while I’ve been gone.” They slid from their stones and began the long trek, and it was good to Mark, to be walking away from the Red Keep with his dearest friends, treading a forest path in fall, kicking through drifts of oak and cherry leaves, the sky overhead that certain clear blue that foretells a frosty morrow. “And I still want to know how came my wife to be here. Aren’t you supposed to be back at Borders, minding the place like a good Duchess should?”
