Legacy of Ash

by Matthew Ward

  Makrov locked gazes with Katya Trelan’s dead stare. “I want it taken down and burned. Her body is ash. Let her spirit join it. I can think of no stronger message of unity.”

  “I won’t do it,” Josiri said through gritted teeth.

  “Yes, you will.” Makrov sighed. “Your grace. Josiri. I entertained hopes that you’d lead your people out of the past. But the Council’s patience is not infinite. They may decide upon another exodus if there’s anything less than full cooperation.”

  Exodus. The word sounded harmless. The reality was punishment meted out for a rebellion fifteen years in the past; families divided, stolen children shipped north to toil as little more than slaves. Makrov sought to douse a fire with tinder.

  “Your mother’s memory poisons you. As it poisons your people.” Makrov set his hands on Josiri’s shoulders. “Let her go. I have.”

  But he hadn’t. That was why Makrov remained the Council’s chief emissary to the Southshires, despite his advancing years and expanding waistline. His broken heart had never healed, but Katya Trelan lay fifteen years beyond his vengeance. And so he set his bitterness against her people, and against a son who he believed should have been his.

  Makrov offered an avuncular smile. “You’ll thank me one day.”

  Josiri held his tongue, not trusting himself to reply. Makrov strode away, Sark falling into step behind. Yanda hesitated a moment before following.

  “Tomorrow at noon, your grace. I look forward to it.” Makrov spoke without turning, the words echoing along the rafters. Then he was gone.

  Josiri glanced up at his mother’s portrait. Completed a year before her death, it captured to perfection the gleam of her eyes and the inscrutable perhaps-mocking, maybe-sympathetic smile. At least, Josiri thought it did. Fifteen years was a long time. He saw little of himself in his mother’s likeness, but then he’d always been more akin to his father. The same unruly blond hair and lantern jaw. The same lingering resentment at forces beyond his control.

  He perched on the edge of High Table and swallowed his irritation. He couldn’t afford anger. Dignity was the cornerstone of leadership, or so his mother had preached.

  “When I was a boy,” he said, “my father told me that people are scared and stupid more than they are cruel. I thought he’d handed me the key to some great mystery. Now? The longer I spend in Makrov’s company, the more I suspect my father told me what he wished were true.”

  Anastacia drew closer. Her outline blurred like vapour, as it always did when her attention wandered. Like her loose tangle of snow-white curls and impish features, the robes of a Trelan seneschal were for show. A concession. Josiri wasn’t sure what Anastacia’s true form actually was. Only black, glossy eyes – long considered the eyes of a witch, or a demon, bereft of iris and sclera – offered any hint.

  The Council’s proctors had captured her a year or so after the Battle of Zanya. Branghall, already a prison in all but name, had become her new home shortly after. Anastacia spoke often of what she’d done to deserve Tressian ire. The problem was, no two tales matched.

  In one, she’d seduced and murdered a prominent councillor. In another, she’d instead seduced and murdered that same councillor’s husband. A third story involved ransacking a church. And then there was the tale about a choir of serenes, and indecency that left the holy women’s vows of chastity in tatters. After a dozen such stories, ranging from ribald to horrific, Josiri had stopped asking.

  But somewhere along the line, they’d become friends. More than friends. If Makrov ever learned how close they were, it wouldn’t be the gallows that awaited Josiri, but the pyre.

  Pallid wisps of light curled from Anastacia’s arched eyebrow. “The archimandrite is foolish in the way only clever men are. As for afraid? If he wasn’t, you’d not be his prisoner.”

  Josiri snorted. “My mother casts a long shadow. But I’m not her.”

  “No. Your mother lost her war. You’ll win yours.”

  “Flatterer.”

  The eyebrow twitched a fraction higher. “Isn’t that a courtier’s function?”

  Genuine confusion, or another of Anastacia’s little jokes? It was always hard to be sure. “In the rest of the Republic, perhaps. In the Southshires, truth is all we can afford.”

  “If you’re going to start moping, I’d like to be excused.”

  A smile tugged at the corner of Josiri’s mouth. “If you don’t show your duke a little more respect, he might have you thrown from the manor.”

  Anastacia sniffed. “He’s welcome to try. But these stones are old, and the Council’s proctors made a thorough job of binding me to them. You’ll fail before they do.”

  “You forget, I’m a Trelan. I’m stubborn.”

  “And where did stubbornness get your mother? Or your uncle, for that matter?”

  Josiri’s gaze drifted back to his mother’s portrait. “What would she do?”

  “I doubt she’d put a mere thing, no matter how beautiful, before the lives of her people.” She shrugged. “But she was a Trelan, and someone once told me – though I can’t remember who – that Trelans are stubborn.”

  “And none more than she,” said Josiri. “I don’t want to give up the last of her.”

  Anastacia scratched at the back of her scalp – a mannerism she’d picked up off one of the servants in her frequent forays to the kitchens. Her appetites were voracious – especially where the manor’s wine cellar was concerned.

  “Might I offer some advice, as one prisoner to another?”

  “Of course.”

  “Burn the painting. Your mother’s legacy is not in canvas and oils, but in blood.”

  The words provoked a fresh spark of irritation. “Calenne doesn’t seem to think so.”

  Anastacia offered no reply. Josiri couldn’t blame her for that. This particular field was well-furrowed. And besides, good advice was good advice. Katya Trelan had died to save her family. That was her true legacy.

  “I should tell her how things went,” he said. “Do you know where she is?”

  “Where do you think?” Anastacia’s tone grew whimsical to match her expression. “For myself, I might rearrange the window shutters on the upper floor. Just in case some helpful soul’s watching? One who might be agreeable to expressing your annoyance at the archimandrite where you cannot?”

  Josiri swallowed a snort of laughter. Regardless of what his mother would have done about the painting, this she would approve of. Humiliation repaid in kind.

  “That’s a grand idea.”

  Anastacia sniffed again. “Of course it is. Shall we say nightfall?”

  That ran things close, but the timing should work. Makrov was due to hold celebration in Eskavord’s tiny church at dusk. Afterwards, he’d make the long ride back to the fortress at Cragwatch. It all depended on whether Crovan’s people were keeping watch on the shutters.

  Still, inaction gained nothing.

  Josiri nodded. “Nightfall it is.”

  Each creak of the stairs elicited a fearful wince, and a palm pressed harder against rough stone. Josiri told himself that the tower hadn’t endured generations of enthusiastic winds just to crumble beneath his own meagre weight. He might even have believed it, if not for that almost imperceptible rocking motion. In his great-grandfather’s time, the tower had been an observatory. Now the roof was a nest of fallen beams, and the walls stone teeth in a shattered jaw.

  At least the skies were clear. The vistas almost held the terror at bay, fear paling before beauty. The town of Eskavord sprawled across the eastern valley, smoke dancing as the Ash Wind – so named for the cinders it gusted from the distant Thrakkian border to the south – brushed the slopes of Drannan Tor. Beyond the outermost farms sprawled the eaves of Davenwood. Beyond that, further east, the high town walls of Kreska nestled in the foothills of the Greyridge Mountains. All of it within a day’s idle ride. Close at hand, and yet out of reach.

  But it paid not to look too close. You might see the tabarded soldi
ers patrolling Eskavord’s streets, or the boarded-up houses. The foreboding gibbets on Gallows Hill. Where Josiri’s Uncle Taymor had danced a final jig – where his mother had burned, her ashes scattered so Lumestra could not easily resurrect her come the light of Third Dawn. It was worse in the month of Reaptithe. Endless supply wagons crept along the sunken roadways like columns of ants, bearing the Southshires’ bounty north.

  Duke Kevor Trelan had never been more popular with his people than when he called for secession. The Council had been quick to respond. Josiri still recalled the bleak Tzadas-morning the summons had arrived at Branghall, backed by swords enough to make refusal impossible. It was the last memory he had of his father. But the Council had erred. Duke Kevor’s execution made rebellion inevitable.

  Another gust assailed the tower. His panicked step clipped a fragment of stone. It ricocheted off the sun-bleached remnant of a wooden beam and clattered out over the edge.

  “I suppose your demon told you where I was?”

  Calenne, as usual, perched on the remnants of the old balcony – little more than a spur of timber jutting at right angles to a battered wall. Her back to a pile of rubble, she had one foot hooked across her knee. The other dangled out over the courtyard, three storeys and forty feet below. A leather-bound book lay open across her lap, pages fluttering.

  “Her name is Anastacia.”

  “That’s not her name.” The wind plucked a spill of black hair from behind Calenne’s ear. She tucked it back into place. “That’s what you call her.”

  Calenne had disliked Anastacia from the first, though Josiri had never been clear why, and the passage of time had done little to heal the one-sided divide. Anastacia seldom reciprocated the antipathy, though whether that was because she considered herself above such things, or did so simply to irritate Calenne, Josiri wasn’t sure.

  “Because that’s her wish. I don’t call you Enna any longer, do I?”

  Blue eyes met his then returned to the book. “What do you want?”

  Josiri shook his head. So very much like their mother. No admission of wrong, just a new topic.

  “I thought you’d be with me to greet Makrov.”

  She licked a fingertip and turned the page. “I changed my mind.”

  “We were discussing the arrangements for your wedding. Or do you no longer intend to marry at Ascension?”

  “That’s why I changed my mind.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  A rare moment of hesitation. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I see.” Steeling himself, Josiri edged closer. “What are you reading?”

  “This?” Calenne stared down at the book. “A gift from Kasamor. The Turn of Winter, by Iugo Maliev. I’m told it’s all the rage in Tressia.”

  “Any good?”

  “If you admire a heroine who lets herself be blown from place to place like a leaf on the wind. It’s horrendously fascinating. Or fascinatingly horrendous. I haven’t decided yet.” She closed the book and set it on her knee. “How did the meeting go?”

  “I’m to make a speech tomorrow, on the topic of unity.”

  She scowled. “It went that badly?”

  “I didn’t have my sister there to charm him,” Josiri replied. “And . . . he reacted poorly to mother’s portrait.” No sense saying the rest. Calenne wouldn’t understand.

  She sighed. “And now you know why I stayed away. If Makrov reacts like that to Katya’s image . . . I didn’t want complications. I can’t afford them. And I do want this marriage.”

  Josiri didn’t have to ask what she meant. Katya in oils was bad enough. Her likeness in flesh and blood? Even with Calenne at her most demure and charming – a rarity – there was risk. With every passing year, his sister more resembled the mother she refused to acknowledge. Perhaps she’d been right to stay away.

  “You think Makrov has the power to have it annulled?”

  She shrugged. “Not alone. But Kasamor’s mother isn’t at all pleased at the match. I’m sure she’s allies enough to make trouble.”

  “Kasamor would truly let her interfere?”

  On his brief visits to Branghall, Kasamor had seemed smitten. As indeed had Calenne herself. On the other hand, Josiri had heard enough of Ebigail Kiradin, Kasamor’s mother, to suspect she possessed both the reach and influence to thwart even the course of true love, if she so chose.

  “On his last visit, he told me that I was the other half of his soul. So no, I don’t believe he would. He’d sooner die, I think. And I . . .” Calenne shook her head and stared down at the book. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Josiri frowned. “What? What doesn’t matter?”

  Calenne offered a small, resigned smile. “I’ve had bad dreams of late. The Black Knight. Waking up screaming doesn’t do wonders for my mood.”

  The Black Knight. Viktor Akadra. The Phoenix-Slayer. The man who’d murdered their mother. He’d taken root in the dreams of a terrified six-year-old girl, and never let go. Josiri had lost track of how often in that first year he’d cradled Calenne as she’d slipped off to broken sleep.

  “Is that why you’re back to hiding up here? He’ll not harm you, I promise.”

  “I know he won’t.” Her shoulders drooped, and her tone softened. “But thanks, all the same.”

  She set the book aside and joined him inside the tower proper. Josiri drew her into an embrace, reflecting, as he so often did, what a curious mix of close and distant they were. The decade between them drove them apart. He doubted he’d ever understand her. Fierce in aspect, but brittle beneath.

  “The world’s against us, little sister. We Trelans have to stick together.”

  Two

  The kraikon loomed through the trees, as implacable as the colossal bronze statue it resembled. Burgeoning moonlight revealed an angular, stylised form more than twice Josiri’s height. Golden magic hissed through lesions in an antiquated frame, crackling across the king’s blue tabard and segmented steel plate. Empty, expressionless eyes swept the undergrowth from beneath an open helm.

  Josiri held his breath. He pressed against the black oak and willed the kraikon to continue its patrol of Branghall’s overgrown gardens. There wasn’t a curfew as such. As ever, the bars of the cage were carefully hidden to ease cooperation. But to be caught beneath the estate wall at so late an hour? That would provoke questions he didn’t wish to answer.

  The kraikon stomped away through the night, the tip of its horsehair plume scraping against overhanging branches. Josiri allowed himself a sigh of relief.

  “Evening, your grace.”

  The whisper was so close that the breath of it fell warm on Josiri’s ear. He jumped, the involuntary yelp forming on his lips. A gloved hand stifled the cry, then slipped away.

  “Careful.” The whisper returned, leavened with amusement. “Don’t want to upset the lummox.”

  Cheeks warming with embarrassment, Josiri pulled away. Revekah Halvor offered a toothy grin and sat carefully on an exposed root.

  Anastacia’s teeth gleamed white. She cut a ghostly figure so far from Branghall’s foundations. The bark of the great black oak was clearly visible through a faded dress and translucent skin. Her fingers danced, shadow coiling in their wake. The oak sank silently into the soil, collapsing the arboreous tunnel that was Josiri’s only connection to the outside world.

  The tree’s roots had always run deep, and far further than the estate wall. Under Anastacia’s influence, they ran farther still, weaving the passage by which Revekah had broached Branghall’s imprisoning wards. As notorious a soul as she had no hope of gaining official entrance through the main gate – the ward-brooches that allowed visitors to breach the enchantment were carefully and rarely doled out.

  But there were other magics in the world than those pressed to the Council’s service, by whose grace Anastacia had woven the hallowgate from the oak’s gnarled flesh. Old magics, learned from forbidden gods. Or at least forbidden in Tressia, where Lumestra held sway. Remnants o
f temples to her heavenly sister, Ashana – or Lunastra, as she was named in the oldest scriptures – remained out in rural areas; shrines to Jack, the King of Thorns, in places wilder still.

  Not for the first time, Josiri wondered where Anastacia had learned her magics. And where the Council had found her. “Demon”, Calenne had named her – pejoratives aside, it suited her well.

  “Where’s Crovan?” he asked.

  “Where’s Crovan?” Revekah snorted. “That’s how you greet an old woman who’s travelled hard to be here? No respect, Josiri. None at all.”

  The twinkle in her eye belied both words and tone. Revekah’s sixtieth year lay long behind her. Nonetheless, she’d not softened an inch since the chaos at Zanya, where she’d heaved Josiri onto her horse and ordered him to flee. She still wore the phoenix tabard over her leather jerkin. Like her, it had faded and worn thin with the passage of time.

  “Crovan’s away to the south. Might even be across the Thrakkian border by now.”

  Josiri frowned. “What went wrong?”

  “A raid went sour.” She shrugged. “It happens. He’ll be back. But not tonight. I saw the shutters, and feared you’d be lonely.”

  They’d settled on the shutter-code years before as a way for Josiri to communicate with those southwealders who’d not yet given up the fight. Some, like Revekah, were survivors of his mother’s doomed rebellion. Crovan belonged to a younger generation. Together, they named themselves the Vagabond Council, a bitter jest aimed at the “noble” men and women who ruled the Southshires’ fortunes from Tressia. The law named them Wolf’s-heads – creatures of the wild, not the civilised world – and like wolves they were hunted.

  The Tressian army, honed to the bloody craft of massed battle and border skirmish, was too blunt an instrument for rural insurrection. Wolf’s-heads harried the occupying soldiery; ambushed grain convoys and prison wagons. They took shelter in abandoned villages, and in the Forbidden Places, where the magic of the Council’s simarka and kraikons guttered like candle-flame in a storm.

  “How are things out there?” he asked.