The Price of Blood and Honor

by Elizabeth Willey

  “What a gloomy aspect,” the Emperor said. “If you cannot do better, we would prefer that you dine in your rooms.”

  “It’s the weather,” Josquin said. “Sir.”

  The Emperor snorted and addressed Prince Gaston, who was evidently leaving later in the evening.

  Nothing happened. Dewar ate mechanically and watched the others covertly. The Emperor was in an iffy temper. Freia did not appear; by the third course, her place was removed as it ever was, and neither the Emperor nor the Empress said anything.

  Did everyone know something he didn’t? Dewar wondered, and began paying more attention. Her name wasn’t mentioned; they were all talking about a new ship now, a cutter Prince Fulgens meant to take south.

  The meal ended, and Dewar rose to go without a word to Josquin. He was halted by Prospero, who laid a hand on his shoulder lightly as Dewar passed through the door.

  “A word.”

  Dewar nodded and let his father steer him aside, into a small anteroom.

  “Where’s Freia?”

  “I don’t know,” Dewar said, a pang of guilt curdling his meal.

  Prospero looked at him, and Dewar couldn’t look away. “Don’t know? Hast seen her today?”

  “I saw her. She—she wasn’t well, this morning. Upset. About the marriage plans.”

  Prospero looked at him still. “Her apartment’s empty,” he said finally, quietly. “I’ve sought her all afternoon. A brace of guards and a maid said they’d seen her leave the Palace in the forenoon, and thus I essayed a Summoning for her. ’Tis null.”

  “Null?” repeated Dewar, wondering what Prospero knew about that morning’s meeting. Was the Prince playing with him?

  “I’d have thee make the same attempt,” Prospero commanded him.

  Dewar, perplexed, nodded consent, and they left the anteroom. The Emperor, waiting with Prince Gaston, glanced a sharp question at them.

  “He knoweth naught of her,” Prospero said.

  “People don’t just drop off the face of the earth,” the Emperor said.

  “Nay,” Prospero agreed, “ ’tis unwonted. We’ll try again.”

  “We’ll wait for your word,” the Emperor said. “Damned nuisance, that girl.” He stalked away. Prince Gaston nodded to them both and left with him.

  “What’s up?” Dewar asked, nervous.

  “Surely thou’rt not untutored in what a null Summoning may be.”

  “Of course,” said Dewar. “Concealment.”

  “May be.”

  “She doesn’t know how to conceal herself; she hasn’t even passed the Fire.”

  “Exactly. Let us make haste.” Prospero went faster.

  Dewar, pacing him easily, said “Not—” and didn’t finish the thought, finding it too terrible to speak.

  “ ’Tis possible she’s not concealed, but dead,” Prospero said dispassionately, “but the power of seeking farther has been stripped from me. Thus I’d have thee try thy hand. ’Tis not beyond possible that I have erred.” He ground his teeth. “Erred,” he repeated in an undertone.

  “I—Father—” Glancing at Prospero, Dewar swam again with the oppressive giddiness he had felt on facing Freia after his scurrilous conversation with Josquin. He could not remember what he had meant to say, and so he left the words hanging. They arrived at Dewar’s door and he led the way in. Prospero picked up a candelabrum and waited as his son opened the closet where he had stored his tools.

  Prospero helped Dewar set up the apparatus, efficient and reticent. “Use this for the token,” the Prince said, and he put a wooden comb in Dewar’s hand, then stood back and watched Dewar, who had to pause a moment before beginning the spell to bring himself fully under control.

  The forces lay ready to hand, easily commanded, easily spun and sent whirling out from Dewar through his glass. The comb hung in the spell and colored it with something that was essentially Freia, bringing him the sound of her voice and the feel of her skin, the scent of her body and the color of her hair, and the single taste he had had of her mouth.

  The Mirror of Vision remained blank. The spell wound outward, inward; it found nothing to seize on and complete itself.

  Null. Dewar waited as long as he could maintain the suspended energies, and then closed the spell, aborting its search. He leaned on the table, looking at the Mirror.

  “Good work,” Prospero said, beside him.

  Dewar shook his head, catching his breath. He took his handkerchief out and wiped his face. “I’ll try Seeking her location.”

  “Location? A failed Summoning—”

  “It shows the last detectable location of the subject,” Dewar said, his mouth twitching, trying not to smile proudly. It was one of his own innovations. “As long as too much time has not passed.”

  Prospero’s eyes flashed with interest and optimism. “Indeed. By all means then, carry on, sir.”

  Dewar nodded, straightened again, and relit the fire.

  The Seeking worked at once, as the Summoning should have. The spell jumbled images in the Mirror, an irrational, undecipherable kaleidoscope that spun and halted. The glass showed darkness, moving.

  “Where in the world,” muttered Prospero.

  Something white plunged into the scene; they both jumped. It was a bird, folding its wings and floating on the water. “Ocean,” Prospero whispered. “ ’Tis a calmewe.”

  The water moved in the darkness of the early winter night. Other things moved in the scene, flying flakes of snow.

  “Ah, black damnation,” Prospero whispered, and turned away, biting his knuckles. “Enough.”

  Dewar closed the spell. Again he mopped his face.

  “ ’Tis well-worked, well-made,” Prospero said softly, his back to Dewar. “Oriana herself could do no more.”

  His son looked at the Mirror, empty now.

  “This Seeking told us little useful,” Prospero said to his raw knuckles. “Canst discover more of the location?”

  “Yes. It’s just a question of control.”

  Dewar repeated his spell, his emotions locked away where they could not disrupt the sorcery, not considering the implications of what he saw.

  “There,” he said through his teeth as the images whirled. Prospero turned and stood behind him, looking over his shoulder.

  A boat, a small dinghy, drifted on the waters, its oars laid neatly lengthwise inside, no one in it or nearby. The scene blurred into movement and became snowy water again.

  “Lost it, sorry,” Dewar said.

  “Enough; ’twill serve,” said Prospero emotionlessly.

  Dewar closed the spell and leaned on the table again, taking a deep breath. “What does it mean?” he asked the Mirror and the firepan.

  “Its meaning is: I erred,” said Prospero, arms folded, turning away and walking to the door.

  “What means you erred?” Dewar shook himself and chased his father, catching his arm. “Where is she? That meant nothing to me.”

  “She went to the sea, via the boat,” Prospero said.

  They stared at one another.

  “Dead, I fear,” Prospero said gently, putting his hands on Dewar’s shoulders.

  The color drained from Dewar’s face. He had done this, he thought. He had belittled her until there was nothing left, and she had become nothing.

  Prospero dropped his hands, turned away, started out. “Wait for me,” he said, pausing, looking back at Dewar. “Wait.”

  Dewar blinked, still shocked.

  Prospero left.

  The sound of the door closing seemed to reach Dewar as from the top of a cliff. He felt his knees buckle; he let them fold and knelt on the floor.

  He had done it, he thought. He’d killed her.

  Freia’s face, shocked and naked, would not fade from his mind’s eye. He put his hands over his ears and shook his head hard; he bent forward until his eyes pressed into his knees.

  I trust you, she had said not long ago.

  Thank you, he had replied, a careless courtesy. Th
e feeling of her body, clasped against him, strong and warm, flooded his nerves again, so that despite his position it overwhelmed him with its remembered brief contact. Alive. She had been alive, and now she was not, would never be, and the blood-guilt was on him. She had put herself in his hands. He had torn her to pieces. In the first hour he had known her, he had cursed her, and all the evil that had fallen on her after was his doing.

  Dewar moaned, a low, frightened sound.

  The oppression of her death suffocated him. There was no outlet for it here, in this room; it constricted his thoughts until he thought he would collapse inward and vanish, vanish as she had vanished. He moaned again. Freia stared at him across the room, as helpless before his cruelty as a straw against a lightning bolt. Dewar whispered, “I’m sorry. Please. I’m sorry,” to the blanket of horror enclosing him. He thought of cold wind and cold water, of the tug and pull of the waves and the sour salt in her throat, of her eyes closing, of her body yielding to the hostile element and subsumed by it. “Freia, Freia, no,” Dewar wailed to his belly, and shuddered. He had killed her; he had ground her under his heel in dung, and his burning urge to bed Josquin had made him a cur. She had only been kind to him, only offered him friendship, only had herself but had been generous with all she had.

  It was unfair, unfair. If he could unsay it— If he could catch her, just long enough to apologize, when she ran away, repelled by the shabbiness of Princes and the perfidy of brothers—

  Her death was his doing, as surely as if he had slashed her throat on the fireless hearth in her rooms. As surely as if he had held her under the near-frozen waves.

  He jerked upright. The workroom seemed airless. He could barely breathe here; he had to get out. Dewar staggered to the door of his workroom and closed it behind him; he said a word as he did, melding door to wall. He leaned against it, eyes shut, for a moment. The room was dark save for the light of the pale snow falling outside the windows.

  It was still too close. Dewar felt hemmed in, surrounded. He had to get out. He lurched unevenly to the cloak-rack and took one. He crossed the room and threw open a tall window, stepped out onto the balcony, and dropped over the edge to the ground.

  13

  DEWAR WALKED AIMLESSLY AWAY FROM THE Palace. Somehow he got into the Gardens—later he was never sure where he had been that evening—and from the Gardens to Herne’s Riding, into which they faded in growing wilderness. In the Riding he happened on a road and followed it indifferently. It could not matter where he went now, he thought. When he returned to the Palace he would confess his guilt in the matter to Prospero, and Prospero would take out her blood in his own. Prospero had killed Golias, and Golias had not murdered Freia, only made her life a torment.

  The snow blew around so that he could hardly see the road. It mattered little; Dewar was not attending his steps, and so he bobbed from the edge of the road to the middle and back to the curb again, muttering apologies to Freia, whose accusing, mute face hung before him still.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, tears freezing on his cheeks. “I’m sorry, Freia. Please listen. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I was an ass. I’m sorry. I lied. I’m sorry.”

  Dewar stumbled against something as tall as he was and caught at it: a tall black stone. In the snowlight, the strange illumination that came with the chill pure whiteness of the snow, he saw the stone and it echoed, remotely, against another stone in memory. He laid his hand against a curving carving in its face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, bowing his head. “Freia. Oh, Freia. Hear me. I’m sorry.” A memory of Freia, smiling shyly at him when he had been doing his utmost to win her over, to coax such a smile, came to him, and with it a wave of grief and regret crashed down. He had won her, indeed, and then what? Dewar leaned on the cold stone; he knelt before it, hugging his cloak around him and sobbing. “Come back, come back, Freia. Don’t be dead. I’m sorry, Freia. It wasn’t meant so. I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”

  The snow whirled around widdershins, an opaque white curtain, and hung on the wind without falling. It thickened and circled Dewar and the stone. He closed his eyes and bent his forehead against it, feeling the throb of the Oldest power that still persisted weakly here. Far away, the heart of its realm; yet it comforted him to know that it was here in this stone as it was in the great Stone on Morven.

  “Ancient One, pity a fool,” he whispered.

  The wind whooshed in with a thunderclap of force that drove Dewar against the stone. He fell forward, and the stone was no longer there to support him. On his face he sprawled on a surface without sensation.

  “You. Invoke.”

  The voice, genderless, gravelled in Dewar’s inner ear, ideas from outside rolling through his mind and clashing together, leaving meaning. He recognized it. Well save him, he had Summoned the Stone. The sorcerer thrashed up to kneel, hunched, but kept his face covered.

  “I—Ancient One,” he said, shaking, “I am half out of my wits with grief. I addressed you, but I did not mean to—”

  “Invoke. You. Me. Past. Present. Reason.”

  Now that it had him, it wasn’t letting him get away without paying. He swallowed. Long years ago, pursued by his mother’s hatred, he had been desperate for his life; now he cared more for another’s. “Last time I was imperilled, and now—my sister, my sibling, my father’s daughter has died, Ancient One, and it is my fault for I wronged her. I hurt her and she killed herself. I grieve, Ancient One, for the loss.”

  “Waste.”

  “She was a good person,” Dewar protested, and began to weep.

  “Sister. Life. Desire.” More ideas bouncing off one another, echoing with sharp cracks.

  “I didn’t want her to die! I didn’t mean to—to—hurt her—” Dewar looked up, but saw only darkness.

  “Sister. Life. Balance. Alter.”

  Hope jolted through Dewar. He stared at the darkness. “To restore her? To—bring her back?”

  “Sister. Life. Return. Balance. Alter.”

  Dewar had an image of things swinging back and forth across abysses, a glimpse of fourfold symmetry that fleeted before he comprehended it. “From life to death. I can move her back?”

  “Yes.”

  Dewar, who had dealt with sorcerers all his life, knew such a blessing could not be without cost. “What must be done for that to happen, Ancient One?”

  “Time. Task. Exchange. Life. You. Balance. Life. Sister.”

  Dewar closed his eyes. An inverted pyramid. He and Freia, touching hands, swinging around, changing places. “How much time?”

  “Time.”

  Sand running through a glass flashed in his mind. Dewar swallowed. Little time.

  For once and all, he could do something good, something right, something that would change the world and better it. Freia could live. He would be dead, but it was his fault she had gone to the sea and thrown herself in.

  “I will make the exchange,” he said.

  The darkness did not reply.

  “Ancient One?” he whispered after many heartbeats had thudded in his breast.

  “Sister,” came the voice, and a heptagon of meaning arrayed itself. “Plateau. Balance. Seek. Consent. Exchange. Life.”

  “Thank you—” Dewar breathed, and then a brilliant white light flashed and he had to duck his head and cover his eyes again.

  A perfect silence surrounded him. He peeked through his slitted lids and fingers to see darkness, but a lighter darkness. Cautiously, Dewar lowered his hands and raised his head. “Beware,” came the voice in his innermost hearing.

  Dewar nodded, waiting.

  “Tarry. Long. Plateau. Remain.” Four cold flat square facts.

  He’d be dead, inferred Dewar, and for nothing. How could he find her? How long was too long?

  He knelt now on a broad plain beneath a lightless sky. Vaguely seen figures were around him, standing, kneeling; there were stones also, and a feeling of movement.

  The kneeling figures were rising slowly to their feet. Tho
se who stood were walking away from the place, all in one direction.

  These, he understood, were the dead.

  He rose. The world was painted in a palette of greys, all dark. The dead were indefinite; their faces and heads were clear, but they blurred gradually through their bodies to the ends of their indistinct limbs. Their expressions were calm, neutrally preoccupied. No one looked at him.

  Dewar looked at himself. His body was solid, his clothing vestigially colored in the grey light. An elderly man passed by with thoughtful paces, his eyes on the horizon.

  They all looked at the horizon, Dewar realized. He turned and gazed awhile that way himself, but saw nothing there. However, the longer he looked, the better he understood the vastness of the plateau. It was covered utterly with people, all walking toward the horizon.

  In the opposite direction lay darkness. It ebbed and flowed around the stones—

  They weren’t stones. They were people, huddled on the ground in foetal positions, tightly balled, not moving, not rising.

  Dewar bent his head again and covered his face a moment. How could he find her? There were so many dead. It was a hopeless task, as hopeless as sorting a hill of beans. It could not be done. Yet there was no escape here. He must seek her, or perish forever and with him Freia; indeed, if he must die, then he would die searching.

  With faint faith, he walked among the dead travellers, looking into their faces. He opened his mouth to shout, to call “Freia!,” and no sound came from his throat. He observed he was not breathing; that his heart was not beating.

  He attempted to methodically walk back and forth among the dead. The plain was boundless in all directions, or at least unfathomably wide. But Freia must be somewhere near the border, mustn’t she? It appeared that the dead at first crouched curled womb-shaped on the ground and then slowly uncurled, stood, and began to walk. As they walked, they lost definition: their features faded into a blur, and he dared not press far from the border to see what came next. Yet some, those within the darkness and at the fringe of it, never rose, never changed: remaining as they began, stonelike lumps self-enclosed.

  He swallowed and went back toward where he thought he had arrived. The foetal dead were well-defined. They faded as they moved away from the border—as they left life behind, he surmised. He looked, and looked, and looked again. None of them were Freia.