“Perhaps she was sent to test us,” Arkoniel replied, trying to maintain a respectful tone with the elder wizard. He’d had ten years and thousands of miles to ponder the point. “King Pelis suffered one terrible plague. Since Erius took the throne, there have been dozens, if on a smaller scale. Perhaps these have been warnings. Perhaps the Lightbringer’s patience is running out. What Iya saw at Afra—”
“Have you heard of the Harriers, young man?” Ranai snapped. “Do you know that the king’s wizard serves by hunting down his own kind?”
“Yes, Ranai,” said Iya, intervening. “We’ve seen their work.”
“Have you seen them kill anyone you knew? No? Well, I have. I had to stand by helplessly while a dear friend of mine, a wizard who served four queens, was burned on a yew frame for merely speaking aloud of a dream very similar to my mine; and yours, too, I’ve no doubt. Burned alive for speaking of a dream! Imagine, if you can, what the power of the Harriers must be, to be able to kill so cruelly. And it’s not just us they persecute, either, but anyone who dares speak against the male succession. Illiorans in particular. By the Four, if he’d kill his own sister—”
The cup fell from Arkoniel’s hand, splattering wine across the table. “Ariani is dead?”
Nari’s letters had continued to arrive at the appointed places at regular intervals. How could she not have sent word?
“Last year, I think,” Ranai was saying. “Did you know her?”
“We did,” Iya replied, sounding calmer than Arkoniel would have believed possible.
“Then I’m sorry that you had to hear of it this way,” Ranai said.
“The king killed her?” Arkoniel rasped out, hardly able to get his breath.
Ranai shrugged. “I’m not certain of that, but by all reports he was there when she died. So you see, that’s the last of them, and Prince Korin will inherit the throne. Perhaps he will sire our Sad Queen.”
“Perhaps,” Iya murmured, and Arkoniel knew she would speak no more of her vision to this woman.
An uneasy silence fell over the room. Arkoniel fought back tears and avoided Iya’s watchful eye.
“I served Illior and Skala well,” Ranai said at last, sounding defeated and old. She touched a hand to her ruined face. “All I ever asked was a bit of peace.”
Iya nodded. “Forgive us for disturbing you. If the Harriers come here, what will you tell them?”
The elder wizard had the good grace to look ashamed. “I have nothing to say to them. You have my word on it.”
“Thank you.” Iya reached to cover Ranai’s damaged hand with her own. “Life is long, my friend, and shaped of smoke and water, not stone. Pray we meet again in better days.”
A terrible suspicion took root in Arkoniel’s heart as they left the wizard’s cottage and set off along the muddy track leading away from the village. He couldn’t speak of it yet; he didn’t know if he could bear the answer.
They made camp beneath a huge fir beside the sea. Iya sang a spell to keep out the damp, and Arkoniel coaxed his newly perfected spell, a sphere of black fire, into being and fixed it in the air at their feet.
“Ah, that’s nice.” Iya pulled off her sodden boots and warmed her feet. “Well done.”
They sat for a while listening to the rain and the rhythmic wash of the waves on the ledges. He tried to speak of Ariani, needing to hear from Iya’s lips that his dark suspicion was wrong, but he couldn’t seem to shape the words. Sorrow stuck in his throat like a stone.
“I knew,” Iya said at last, reducing his heart to ashes.
“For how long?”
“Since it happened. Nari sent word.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” Unable to look at Iya, he stared up through the branches overhead. All these years he’d been haunted by memories of that terrible night, of the strange child they’d created and the lovely woman they’d betrayed. They had not been back to Ero since—Iya still forbade it—yet he’d always imagined that one day they would go back to make things right again somehow.
Arkoniel felt her hand on his shoulder. “How could you not tell me?”
“Because there was nothing to be done. Not until the child is of age. Erius didn’t kill his sister, at least not directly. Ariani threw herself from a tower window. Apparently she tried to kill the child as well. There is nothing we can do there.”
“That’s what you always say!” He wiped angrily at the tears welling in his eyes. “I don’t question that what we’re doing is Illior’s will. I never have. But are you so certain this is how we’re meant to do it? It’s been nearly ten years, Iya, and not once have we been back to see if she’s well or fit, or to help with the mess Lhel left. The child’s own mother kills herself and still you say we have more-important work?”
Too upset to sit still, he scrambled from the shelter and strode down to the water’s edge. The tide was high, the water smooth beneath the shifting pattern of rain. In the distance, the glow of a ship’s lantern cast a thread of light across that glassy surface. Arkoniel imagined himself swimming out to the ship and begging a berth among the sailors. He’d heave cargo and pull sheets until his hands bled and never think of magic or spirits or women falling from towers again.
O Illior! he prayed silently, turning his face up to the moon’s pull beyond the clouds as he strode along the water’s edge. How can this be your will if my heart is breaking? How can I love and follow a teacher who can look unblinking upon such acts and keep such silence between us?
In his heart, he knew that he still loved and trusted Iya, yet some crucial balance was lacking between means and end that only he seemed to sense. And how could that be? He was only her student, a wizard of no account.
He stopped and sank down on his heels, cradling his face in his hands. Something is wrong. Something is missing, if not for Iya, then for me.
Since Afra.
It sometimes seemed that his life had begun anew that fateful summer day. Resting his forehead on his knees, he summoned the brightness of the sun, the taste of dust, the hot smoothness of the sun-warmed stele beneath his hand. He thought of the cool darkness of the Oracle’s cavern, where he’d knelt to receive the strange answer that had been no answer at all; a vision of himself holding a dark-haired boy in his arms….
A strange stillness stole over him as he remembered. The child. Which child?
Now it was the chill of the murdered child’s angry spirit that gripped him, stiffening his hands and making his bones ache. For an instant it seemed he was standing under that chestnut tree again, watching the tiny body sink down into the earth.
The witch’s magic had not been enough to hold the angry spirit down.
The vision grew brighter in his mind’s eye, taking on new shape and form. A child rose from the earth at his feet, fighting the grip of the roots and hard earth. Arkoniel grasped his hands and pulled, looking down into dark blue eyes, not black. But the roots still held the child, pulling at his arms and legs. One had pierced his back and came out of the wound in his chest where Lhel had sewn a strip of skin with stitches finer than eyelashes. The tree was drinking the child’s blood. Arkoniel could see him withering before his eyes….
The unnatural chill still gripped him, making Arkoniel shake and stagger like an old man as he slowly made his way back to the fir.
Wizards see well enough in the dark, but what Iya sensed as Arkoniel came lurching back made her strike a light.
His face was ashen beneath his thin beard, his eyes red-rimmed and staring.
“At Afra!” he gasped, falling to his knees beside her. “My vision. The one I didn’t—Tobin’s my path. That’s why—Oh, Iya, I must go! We have to go!”
“Arkoniel, you’re babbling! What is it?” Iya cradled his face in both hands and pressed her brow to his. He was shaking like a man with spring plague, but there was no hint of fever. His skin was icy. She reached out cautiously to his mind and was immediately presented with a vision: Arkoniel stood on a high cliff looking west over a dark blue s
ea. Just ahead of him, much too close to the edge, stood Ariani’s twins, grown tall and slender now. Strands of golden light connected the young wizard to the children.
“You see?” Pulling back, Arkoniel clasped her hands and told her of the darker vision he’d had at the shore. “I must go to the child. I must see Tobin.”
“Very well. Forgive me for not telling you. My vision—” She held out her empty hands, palm up. “It’s so clear and yet so dark before me. So long as the child lives, I have other things I must do. I forgot, I suppose, how much time has passed since Ariani died, how much faster it passes for you than for me. But you must believe me when I tell you that I have not forgotten the child. It was for Tobin’s sake that we’ve kept our distance all these years, and now it seems to me even more crucial to be careful not to draw Erius’ attention to that house, now that he distrusts all wizards but his own.”
She paused as a new thought struck her. Twice she’d had a glimpse of the Lightbearer’s hand on Arkoniel and, while he appeared in her visions, she did not appear in his. The realization brought sadness and a twinge of fear.
“Well, it seems you must go,” she told him.
He kissed both her hands. “Thank you, Iya. I won’t be away long, I promise. I only want to make certain the child is safe and try to discover what it is that Illior is trying to say to me. If I can find a ship tomorrow, I’ll be back in a week. Where should I meet with you?”
“There’s no need for such haste. I’ll go on to Ylani as we planned. Send word to me there when you’ve seen the child….” There it was, that sadness again. “Then we shall see.”
Chapter 16
Arkoniel looked back over his shoulder as he set off the next day. Iya stood by the fir, looking very small and ordinary. She waved and he waved back, then turned his face for the village, trying to ignore the sudden lump in his throat. It felt strange, walking alone after all these years.
The wizardly accouterments he carried were stowed safely out of sight in the bedroll slung over his shoulder. Hopefully anyone looking at him would see nothing more than a traveler in muddy boots and a dusty, broken-brimmed hat. All the same, he planned to heed Iya’s warning to avoid priests and other wizards, and to keep the usual cautious eye out for men wearing the hawk badge of the Harriers.
He found a fisherman willing to take him up the coast as far as Ylani, where he boarded a larger vessel bound north for Volchi. Leaving the ship there two days later, he bought a sturdy sorrel gelding and set off for Alestun and whatever tasks the Lightbearer had set for him there.
He knew from Rhius and Nari’s letters that the duke had moved his family from Ero to the keep the spring following Tobin’s birth; by then tales of the “demon” had already spread around the city. The spirit, it was said, threw things at visitors, hit them, and spirited away jewels and hats. And beautiful Ariani with her stained dress and strange doll, wandering the corridors in search of her child—that was still remembered, too.
The king had apparently been content to let Rhius go. The same had not been so for the “demon,” which had somehow followed them to the keep.
A chill ran up Arkoniel’s spine as he tried to imagine it. Unquiet spirits were fearsome, shameful things, and any dealings with them were normally left to the priests and drysians. He and Iya had learned what they could from such folk, knowing that sooner or later they would have to face the ghost they’d helped create. He’d never expected to have to face it alone.
Arkoniel reached Alestun on the third day of Shemin. It was a pleasant, prosperous little market town nestled in the foothills of the Skalan Range. A few miles further west, a line of jagged peaks loomed against the cloudless afternoon sky. It was cooler here than it had been on the coast, and the fields showed no sign of drought.
He stopped in the square to ask directions of a woman selling fresh cheeses from a cart.
“Duke Rhius? You’ll find him up at the old keep on the pass,” she told him. “He’s been back the better part of a month now, though I hear he’s not to stay long. He’ll be at the shrine tomorrow to hear petitions, if that’s what you need.”
“No, I’m looking for his home.”
“Just keep on the main road through the woods. If you’re peddling, though, I’ll save you the trip. They’ll set the watch on you, ’less they know you. They do no business with strangers up there.”
“I’m not a stranger,” Arkoniel told her. He bought some of her cheese and walked away smiling, pleased to have been taken for a vagrant.
Riding on, he passed golden barley fields and meadows filled with shorn sheep and fat pigs, and on into the dark forest beyond. The road she’d sent him on showed less travel than the one leading into town. Sere grass stood thick between the wheel ruts, and he picked out more tracks of deer and pigs in the mud than of horses. The shadows were lengthening quickly now and he pushed his sweating mount into a gallop, wishing he’d thought to ask how far it was to the keep.
He came out into the open again at last beside a river at the bottom of a steep meadow. At the top of the rise stood a tall grey keep backed by a single square watchtower.
Threw herself from a tower window—
Arkoniel shuddered. As he turned his horse to continue up the road, he saw a little peasant boy hunkered down in the weeds by the road, not twenty feet from where he sat.
The boy’s ragged tunic left his skinny arms and legs bare. His skin was streaked with mud and his dark hair was matted with burrs and leaves.
Arkoniel was about to call out to him when he remembered that there was only one child in this house—a child with black hair. Shocked at the prince’s condition, he urged his horse forward at a walk to greet him.
Tobin had his back to the road, staring intently at something in the long grass above the riverbank. He didn’t look up as Arkoniel approached. The wizard started to dismount, then remained in the saddle. Something in Tobin’s stillness warned him to keep his distance.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked at last.
“You’re Arkoniel,” the boy replied, still looking down at whatever had engaged his attention.
“Your father won’t like you being so far from the house all by yourself. Where’s your nurse?”
The child ignored the question. “Will it bite, do you think?”
“Will what bite?”
Tobin thrust a hand into the grass and plucked out a shrew, holding it up by one hind leg. He watched it struggle for a moment, then snapped its neck, neat as a poacher. A drop of blood welled at the tip of the creature’s tiny snout.
“My mama is dead.” He turned to Arkoniel at last, and the wizard found himself staring down into eyes as black and deep as night.
Arkoniel’s voice died in his throat as he realized what he’d been conversing with.
“I know the taste of your tears,” the demon said.
Before he could make any warding sign against it, it leaped up and flung the dead shrew in his horse’s face. The gelding reared, throwing Arkoniel into the tall grass. He came down awkwardly on his left hand and felt a sickening snap just above his wrist. Pain and the fall knocked the wind out of him, and he lay in a tight ball, fighting back nausea and fear.
The demon. He’d never heard of one appearing so clearly or speaking. Arkoniel managed to lift his head, expecting to find it squatting beside him, watching him with its dead black eyes. Instead, he saw his gelding tossing its head and kicking in the meadow across the river.
He sat up slowly, cradling his injured arm. His left hand hung at a bad angle and felt cold to the touch. Another wave of nausea burned his throat and he eased himself back down in the grass. The sun beat down on his upturned cheek, and insects investigated his ears. He watched the green rye and timothy dancing against the sky and tried to imagine himself walking the rest of the way up the steep road to the keep.
Failing that, he returned to the demon. Only now did its words really register.
My mama is dead.
I know the ta
ste of your tears.
This was not the racketing poltergeist he’d expected. It had matured like a living child and come to some sort of awareness. He’d never heard of such a thing.
“Lhel, you damned necromancer, what did you do?” he groaned.
What did we do?
He must have drifted off for a time, because when he opened his eyes again he found a man’s head and shoulders blocking the sun.
“I’m not a peddler,” he mumbled.
“Arkoniel?” Strong hands reached under his shoulders and helped him to his feet. “What are you doing here all by yourself?”
He knew that voice, and the weathered, bearded face that went with it, although it had been more than a decade since he’d last laid eyes on the man. “Tharin? By the Four, I’m glad to see you.”
Arkoniel swayed and the captain got an arm around his waist, holding him upright.
Blinking, he tried to focus on the too-close face. Tharin’s fair hair and beard had faded with age, and the lines around his eyes and mouth were deeper, but the man’s quiet, easy manner was just the same and Arkoniel was grateful for it. “Is Rhius here? I must—”
“Yes, he’s here, though you’re lucky to catch us. We’re leaving for Ero tomorrow. Why didn’t you send word?”
Arkoniel’s legs buckled and he staggered.
Tharin hoisted him upright again. “Never mind, then. Let’s get you up to the house.”
Helping him over to a tall grey, Tharin got him up into the saddle. “What happened? I saw you sitting down here looking at the river, then your horse just threw you off. Looked like it went crazy. Sefus is having a hell of a time over there trying to catch him for you.”
Out in the meadow, Arkoniel could see a man trying to calm his runaway gelding, but it shied and kicked every time he reached for the bridle. He shook his head, not yet ready to speak of what he’d seen. Clearly Tharin hadn’t seen the demon. “Skittish beast.”
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