The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy

by David Anthony Durham

  After a while, she wrote, Did you love her? She pointed her chin toward Benabe, who slept with her arm over Shen.

  “I might have. I was too young to know.” He thought a moment. “She was very beautiful. Still is, really.”

  If we had more time.

  “Yes, if we had more time.”

  Still later in the night Corinn sat at a table not far from the others, quills, paper, and ink at hand. She had a note to compose.

  Hanish stood with a hand on her shoulder. “You didn’t tell him about the hard part,” Hanish said. “About the fact that you’re planning to lure the Santoth into the worm’s mouth as well. That will not be ‘easy.’ ”

  She thought, No need to worry him. That’s for me to deal with. Now, be quiet. I have only a few hours to write everything I can for Aaden. You can watch over my shoulder but don’t say anything.

  When she had confirmation that he would not, she lifted the quill and considered what she wished most to say. She knew how she would begin and how she would end it. The same phrase. The truth. It was all the things in between that would take some sorting.

  She wrote his name, and then, I love you. In all the long life that you have before you, I hope that you find love in all its complicated variations. And each time it confounds you and surprises you, hurts you and heals you—remember me, for the love I mean includes all those things.

  Pausing, she wondered how much she should say, what she should withhold. It pained her to think of some of the lessons she had given the boy, things she did not believe now and doubted she ever had, not completely. Hopefully, some of that would fall away from him. Hopefully, he would be better than she had taught him, less afraid, more trusting. It was dangerous to be all those things, but it was even more dangerous to be as she had been. One cannot be whole unto themselves. She knew that now. She would tell him as much. She would tell him everything she could, so that this letter spoke to him in the years to come.

  She dipped the quill, and continued writing.

  The next morning she and Aliver met as the sun rose. They laid out the future as they agreed it should be, had it put in writing, sealed and official, and then locked away. The business of it took every moment up until the expiration of the single day.

  Corinn kept her parting brief. Private. It was not vanity that stopped her from addressing the populace. She would proudly enough have stood before them. She was still herself in Aaden’s eyes, so no one else could hurt or embarrass her. Nor did she mind asking Barad to be her voice to the world. He had a good voice. She had always liked it, and the fact that he gave it to her of his own free will did much to comfort her.

  The reason she said good-bye to her family in private was that she wanted no pomp on her departure. She did not wish to speak grandiose words, to instill either hope or worry. Aliver would stay after her to speak with the people in ways that brought the best out of them. What she needed to do, she had to do alone, so that’s how she set out.

  Or … almost alone.

  “You’re finally going to let me ride on your blessed mount?” Hanish asked. He stood beside her as she made last-minute checks to her straps, harness, and supply satchels.

  I never stopped you. You were just nervous. You don’t like it that he can see you.

  It was true. Po’s eyes did follow Hanish. He was not a particularly curious creature, but he seemed to recognize something unusual in Hanish’s presence. He squinted one eye and then the other when looking at him, as if testing something about his vision. There was no aggression in it, though. Corinn sensed that the dragon recognized that Hanish was somehow a part of her, that they were related to him through the magic that had shaped them.

  She hugged everyone. She held Shen’s face in her palms and stared at it a long time, and she had Hanish and Barad explain to her that there was absolutely no blame on her for bringing the Santoth to Acacia. That was Corinn’s responsibility. Shen should never feel another moment of guilt for it.

  In parting with Aaden, she slipped the folded and sealed note into his hands. She told him not to rush to open it. Read when he was ready. Wait as long as he wished.

  She pressed Aliver’s hand in hers and asked him to speak the truth of her to Mena when he reached her. Let her know that in the end, at least, she tried to be somebody Maeben on earth would be proud of. And then, before emotion could get the better of her, she mounted Po and they leaped into the air. She did not look back until she was some distance away.

  “So what do we do first?” Hanish asked.

  First, we find the Santoth. Who knows what they’ve gotten up to, or how cross they’ll be now that they know Calfa Ven does not contain what they seek.

  “And then?”

  And then we destroy them. If it’s possible, we destroy them. We make things right again.

  Hanish, with his arms around her waist and lips close to her ear, said, “All right. Let’s do that.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY

  Rialus worried to no end about the frostbite that damaged the tip of his nose and the skin of his cheeks. It did not go deep, but he feared that Devoth or Sabeer or Allek—annoying Allek—would notice it and question him. To him, the dead flesh, which went red and painful and peeling as it warmed in his room, wrote his whole escapade right there on his face. He would cave at the first query. Where had he been that first day of battle? Why had somebody seen him trekking across the snow? Was that where he got that frost damage to his skin? Had he really thought he could desert them, and that his people would want him back?

  It all felt like such a great folly. Shuffling away from the enormous torches that were the burning towers; stumbling into the dark; fearful every moment of discovery; and then, eventually, alone in the howling arctic night. How foolish. And then he had been found, bundled into the Acacian camp, surrounded, interrogated. As cold and as miserable as he had been, joy had sputtered to life, a single candle flame of heat and light within him. How foolish. He had spoken to Princess Mena in the flesh, offering his pathetic bits of information, thinking he was saved. He was with Acacians again. He was with his people! How foolish. Scarcely an hour of hope, and then back to the ice again, sent away by people who loved him not, back into the jaws of his enemy.

  He would have liked to believe it was a nightmare, except that the proof of its reality was right there in the bits of flesh that Fingel trimmed away from his face, right there in the wounds she treated with an alcohol ointment that kicked his eyes back into his head with the scorching pain of touch. He could not tell if she enjoyed hurting him. She worked, actually, as if the pain did not occur to her at all.

  “Fool Rialus!” he said. “Why even have your face tended? Let it fester and go green and kill you. Death, you know, is your only way out of this misery.”

  Fingel said nothing. She hardly ever said anything. Finished with her work, she turned away with the warm water, bloody towels, and shears. She put them down and then checked the small pot of broth she had brewing over a shallow pitch fire.

  “They wouldn’t have me, Fingel,” Rialus said. He could not tell if she listened to him at all, so unresponsive was she to his words. He spoke anyway, a habit he took some comfort in, which soothed his occasional stutter right out of his voice. “I tried, but they wouldn’t have me. They sent me back. Told me to bring them more. To them I’m nothing but a traitor.” He watched the shape of her back as she worked. Even bundled under several layers of clothing, he could still make out her figure. He had studied it often enough, and thought of it many a time in erotic fantasies. Why had he never forced her? Because I’m afraid of what that would mean about me. It would mark the end of anything worthwhile in me.

  “I wonder if you would kill me if I asked you to. It would be your last act as my slave. I could write a note explaining that I had ordered you to do it, so that you wouldn’t get punished. I wonder if you would.”

  And yet he did not make the simple changes to his phrasing that would have made the question the you
ng woman had to answer. Instead he looked at his damaged face in his hand mirror. He slurped the meat broth Fingel had made for him. He waited for the summons he dreaded and anticipated.

  It did not come. Not that day, at least. Not during the following evening, nor in the dark of that night. His station remained immobile, steaming away like a behemoth at rest. He heard movement outside, all the normal sounds. Men shouting, laborers at work. Beasts bellowing. A few times he heard the distinctive chattering of fréketes in flight. They seemed louder than usual, more agitated. And yet hour after hour passed without the expected knock on his door or the shout that would call him to explain himself.

  On the morning of the second day since the battle, Rialus could not help asking Fingel what was happening outside. She had just returned from some errand. Stripping off layers, she said, “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Where’s Devoth? Why haven’t they called for me?”

  He knew she would not answer these questions. He followed them with others that she did not answer either. Eventually, he could not take her silence anymore. He pulled on his furs, yanked tight his hood, and shoved his hands into his mittens. He went out to find the people he most feared finding.

  Devoth and the other clan leaders sat at council in the large station outfitted for the purpose. The human guards at the entrance barely noticed as Rialus walked past them. They seemed preoccupied. They talked among themselves. Argued actually. Rialus slipped inside.

  The council was in full swing, crowded and contentious. Several Auldek were talking at once, each of them vying to be the center of discussion and none of them managing it.

  “I told you we were too many,” Calrach said. When nobody listened, he slammed his palm on the table. “You forget that we Numrek did this journey before, fought these Acacians before. I told you it was foolish to display the whole army in front of them. Now you see why. We can do nothing with so many against so few! We should be more selective.”

  To this, Skahill offered the slight that the Numrek had made this crossing before, but they did so like thieves in the night, with no one to oppose them until they were welcomed as guests, given a fortress and a steaming chamber to feast in. Considering that, what did Calrach know about how to fight the war they were fighting, up here, on the ice? “You want to be more selective. Perhaps we should send the Numrek to do battle by yourselves, all eleven of you. Will that shut your mouth?”

  “I would do it with joy,” Calrach ground through his teeth, no sign in his visage of the joy he spoke of. “Not everyone is so afraid to die as you.”

  “Afraid! Anets were in the front lines. We pleaded for the cowards to fight us.”

  “So you say. Perhaps you pleaded them to bend you over and—”

  Skahill shot to his feet, slamming a fist on the table as he did so and roaring in wordless rage. Calrach shoved the man next to him as he began coming around the table. Skahill did the same, upsetting chairs and the people in them, clawing with one hand for his dagger.

  Faster than Rialus could follow with his eyes, Sabeer went from sitting to crouching on top of the table, with an arm thrust toward either man. Each fist clenched a curved crescent of steel. She stayed that way a moment, lean and gorgeous. Utterly terrifying. “Stop it! Keep bickering and I’ll take you to death myself. Say another word in anger. Either of you. Just one more word …”

  Neither man took her up on that. They continued to glare at each other, but they held their tongues and crashed back into their seats. If they had not been warriors they could have been chastened, angry children.

  What in Hadin’s name is going on here? Rialus wondered. He had never seen the Auldek so ill-tempered. Herith glared at Sabeer’s back as she climbed down from the table. Or so melancholy. Millwa leaned forward on the table, his head cradled in his hands. Or so distressed. Jàfith … Well, if Rialus had not found the idea impossible, he would have said that Jàfith had been crying recently. And Devoth wore a look of profound perplexity written on the lines of his forehead and with the vague, unfocused way his gaze floated without fixing on anything.

  What in Hadin’s name? Rialus avoided the empty seat at Devoth’s side. His seat. He slunk around the edge of the chamber and found a stool that hid him behind the bulky shoulders of several of the chieftain’s assistants. There he listened. As the chieftains paid those behind them no mind, he even scooted up beside the assistants and whispered questions to them. In the hours that followed, he pieced together a mental mosaic of what had transpired.

  The battle had not gone well for the Auldek at all. Instead of a day of glorious slaughter, they had experienced one of confusion, frustration, humiliation, and even an Auldek death. This latter thing it took him some time to understand. He could not picture how it came about, but somehow Mena had cut through most of Howlk’s neck in midair, both of them riding on Nawth’s back. The impact from his fall finished the job, sending his head twirling across the ice, through the feet of the high-stepping, horrified Auldek. His body spasmed through death after death, all his lives tearing themselves out of him in one long agony. The Auldek who saw this from up close—including Jàfith—were shaken to their cores.

  Nawth did not die from the fall, but he was so crippled that the clan chieftains had decided he would have to be abandoned. Fréketes could not be killed for some sacred reason that Rialus could not fathom, but neither could injured ones be kept alive. Their bones do not heal, apparently. Nawth would never be anything more than broken. Better he be dead, then, by Auldek logic.

  Incredible. And there was more.

  The things he heard stoked the fires of rebellion inside him. The Auldek could make no sense of the tactics Mena had employed, but he could. He saw the results of the things he had told Mena in all of it. She had cut the amulet off Nawth’s neck because he had told her she should. Right? Of course. Yes. She had avoided fighting the Auldek because he had told her about their impenetrable body armor. And she had sent volleys of arrows into the slave flanks because he had said they would be vulnerable. It all seemed so obvious to him. His culpability swam in his head, making him dizzy.

  I did this, he thought. I helped this …

  “Rialus leagueman!” Devoth’s voice snatched him up from his paroxysms of self-congratulation. He had quite forgotten himself, and was stunned to find all the chieftains gazing at him. “Come to my side,” Devoth said.

  When Rialus managed to reach him, after stumbling over stools and having to squeeze among bodies that stubbornly did not move to let him pass, Devoth said, “Where have you been?”

  Exactly the question Rialus had feared. His short-lived euphoria evaporated, replaced by the dread he had become so used to. “I—I’ve been trying to understand.”

  “You and all of us. Why do they not fight us, Rialus?”

  Feeling his pulse quicken, Rialus picked up the stylus on the table before him as if he had just remembered something he needed to make a note of.

  “Tell me. You know them. Why will they not fight us as they should? Are they cowards? Have we come across the roof of the world to fight cowards?”

  No, you’ve come across to die, Rialus thought. He said, “Yes, they are cowards. Look no f-f-further than that. They’re cowards.”

  Devoth did not seem to have heard. “It’s like they are wolves and we the prey. They attack our weak points, the lame, the young. They avoid the strong. I did not expect this.”

  “Don’t compare them to wolves,” Herith said. “The Wrathic are not cowards.”

  “Perhaps the Acacians are not either,” Sabeer said. She spoke to Herith, but her eyes were on Rialus.

  He looked down and stayed that way as the conversation circled around the idea of Acacian cowardice.

  Some time later, Sabeer remained the only one who saw something other than cowardice in the events of the day. “The princess did not avoid Howlk and Nawth,” she said. “You cannot say she is a coward.”

  “Exactly,” Rialus said. He regretted it the moment the word was ou
t of his mouth. She had just said something so obviously true the affirmation slipped out of him.

  The other chieftains fell silent. Devoth turned and looked directly at Rialus. “No, she showed bravery in that, at least. How did she know to cut loose the amulet?”

  “She knew more than that,” Sabeer said. “She knew our strengths and avoided them. She did not strike at us—at the Auldek—or engage the mounted warriors. Arrows may be cowardly, but they felled thousands of divine children. She hurt us more than we hurt her. Clever, in a way.”

  Having not taken his eyes off Rialus, Devoth pressed, “Rialus, how did she know these things?”

  Rialus kept his head bent, his attention on the page. He did not want to speak. Words bubbled in him too ferociously. He did not want to let them out, and yet he did not even shrug. He did not motion with his fingers or purse his lips or give any answer to Devoth at all. He knew he should, but he did not. He wrote, How did she know? How did she know?

  “Stop scribbling.”

  How did she …

  “Stop scribbling and answer me!”

  “I have no answer to give!” Rialus snapped. He slashed the stylus across the words he had written and tossed it down. He looked around at the Auldek faces staring at him. “What do you want me to say? That I snuck out of camp in the night, ran across the ice to them, told them all your secrets, ran back across the ice, and crept into my quarters unseen? Would you believe that? Even know I’m a spy? If you were wise, you would kill me, kill me now before I bring your entire race to ruin!”

  Rialus finished shouting. His face flushed red and his hands trembled. The Auldek around the table stared at him with mild revulsion, as if he had just demonstrated his insanity in some depraved manner. Devoth asked quietly, “Is that true?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I did,” Rialus said. His voice dropped to match Devoth’s and lost its edge, but he looked at the chieftain as he said it. “I met a lioness on the way and I broke her neck.”