Last Song Before Night

by Ilana C. Myer

  For that was the price that was expected of him, the only path to the summit of which he had dreamed for so long.

  “You will command a modest detachment of the castle guard,” Lord Gerrard had told a bewildered Marlen the night before. “The king wishes that the future Court Poet prove his loyalty thus. It is known that Darien was your friend. A friend now turned renegade.”

  “I already betrayed him,” Marlen said with a forced smile. “Surely that proves that we are no longer friends.”

  “You betrayed him, if you will forgive me, in a rather petty way,” said Nickon Gerrard. “You ruined his career for your own advantage. You must now prove you are willing to take measures to punish him for his offense against the Crown.” He leaned forward then, and his eyes bore into Marlen’s. “There is more, of course. With the position of Court Poet comes a great deal of power. I wish to see if you are capable of exercising power.”

  Marlen’s mind had been thrown into chaos by this. Now in the more coherent state of a day later, he felt a measure of fury. What of my art? he thought. What has this to do with it? He resisted a suddenly powerful urge to tear the book in his hands to shreds.

  The Court Poet had had more to say before he allowed Marlen to take his leave. “It is quite dangerous for the sentiments expressed by Valanir Ocune, and now by Darien Aldemoor, to become widespread. It could mean a reopening of certain doors that must remain closed, for the safety of the realm.”

  Reopening of doors. What did Nickon Gerrard mean? All the legends, all the lore of enchantments that Marlen had dutifully swallowed in his history lessons at the Academy … that was all myth, and no more. So what did the Court Poet intend to convey, if he did not mean that there was some truth to them after all?

  It was not his prerogative to question, of course. He had only to find Darien, and his future position as Court Poet would be guaranteed. Already a message was making its way to the estates of Humbreleigh, notifying his family of his victory. It was no small thing for a youngest son to win the Silver Branch, certainly no small thing to be given command of a detachment of the king’s guard. Even Lord Humbreleigh must acknowledge the truth of that.

  And to hell with him if he doesn’t, Marlen thought. That old gargoyle had determined Marlen’s course for too long. The search for Darien would be the last unscrupulous act he would permit himself. Afterward, he would start over. Perhaps even manage to manipulate events in such a way as to save Darien’s life, if nothing else. He had not seen Marilla since the day of the contest, and he did not intend to. She and his father clustered together in Marlen’s mind, a concentrated patch of blackness that signified the shadow in his own heart. He could still avoid that shadow, once he had finished doing what he must do. There was still time.

  CHAPTER

  14

  NEARLY one month into their journey, the flames of summer were at a low ebb. There was bite in the air; a new urgency drove the winds in the hillside grasses where Darien Aldemoor and Hassen Styr made camp at night. Cutting through fields to stay off the main road, their rings and harps concealed, they had made their way past Tamryllin and into the outlying farmlands. Various homesteads took them on for days at a time to work the fields in exchange for a hot meal and shelter in the barn at night. It was a long journey traveling in this roundabout manner, the only way to thwart pursuers.

  Ruddy and golden apples were coming into season. Darien recalled harvest celebrations in Aldemoor. Every year they made a feast, cooked with the harvest offerings. He would be sorry to miss it this year. He wondered if they would be thinking of him—if news had traveled to them yet from the capital.

  It was likely that the king’s guards had already paid them a visit, though surely Nickon Gerrard must have known that Darien was not such a fool as to flee to the arms of his mother.

  If Hassen thought of his own family as the days went by, he gave no sign.

  Their mission was to reach the mountains in one piece. What would happen when they got there was not something Darien liked to dwell on, knowing that he did not—as yet—have anything that could be said to resemble a plan. Edrien Letrell had intimated that the Path lay somewhere in the mountains to the northeast, but scores of his contemporaries had sought it there and failed.

  But Darien had dreamed of a Kahishian with tidings of Valanir Ocune, if it had been a dream.

  For every man a different road, the song went. For every poet, a road eternal. A past Seer, nameless now, had made this observation many turns of the sun before Darien was born; yet Darien had always instinctively felt the truth of it. In practical terms, it was the fate of every poet to wander, whether on the king’s highway, rutted wagon paths, or forest trails bestrewn with leaves and stones. It was true that once a poet attained the rank of Seer, he might be installed in the home of a noble family to instruct its scions in branches of knowledge common and esoteric, as well as provide entertainment. But so few poets achieved that rank that most could only hope to wander or, failing that, relinquish their art and become scriveners or clerks, marry and have children. That was, in the end, the life most of them chose. Contentment and a memory of dreams beside the winter fire.

  Never for Darien that road. He and Marlen were different from the other Academy students, and they had been drawn to one another as if by a whispering of blood to blood. Marlen had chosen to befriend Darien when lads from more prestigious houses had sought out the young lordling of Humbreleigh. Darien always knew better than to feel gratified: they were of a kind, and Darien proudly cherished the name of Aldemoor, minor as it was. With his fame, he would instill it in the common tongue beside the names of Ocune and Letrell.

  The road he and Hassen traversed resembled the one he and Marlen had known in a different time. The road was the road, regardless of its form. They had cut through forest and onto dirt paths where only the occasional farmhouse could be seen, and they had stopped for supplies and hot baths in hamlets so small they had no name. They dared not sing for coin, for that would mark them; their harps they had swathed in muslin and stored away in packs they carried, their Academy rings on leather thongs around their necks.

  When they labored shirtless in the fields, their rings were carefully secreted in the packs. The sun beat on their necks, and Darien was not built for manual labor as Hassen was, but the food at the end of the day was always hearty, and in his mind Darien was composing a song about the rigors of such work. The blue eyes of a farmer’s daughter shyly blinking up and then away from him was a verse; the ripple of wind in the wheat fields another. When he swung the farmer’s young boy in circles and sang a silly song—a boy like he had once been, lithe and laughing—Darien sensed that there was a pattern to everything, even this; an unrelenting cycle larger than himself, larger even than the endeavor that had led him to abandon his former life. Whether or not they succeeded, a farmhouse would most likely remain here, and the boy would grow into a man and out of the memory of two strangers who had once worked his father’s field for a handful of days. All these moments danced briefly around them on the summer winds and then away.

  Hassen Styr made a quiet companion. Darien found it difficult to get used to this at first, being accustomed to the exchanges he had shared for so many years with Marlen Humbreleigh; the dagger wit they had tossed back and forth, spinning and dancing for the sheer pleasure of it, never flinching from its sharp edge.

  He asked me to kill him. That haunted Darien. All the years that I knew him, and then this.

  On one of the nights that they were forced to bed down in the forest, they had stayed up talking for some time.

  “I can’t say that I saw it coming,” said Hassen. “But he was never quite with us, Darien. You never saw it.” He clenched a large fist. “I’d have killed him for you. Pity I wasn’t there.”

  Darien found himself regretting that he had told Hassen about that. Marlen’s eyes so full of self-loathing … and so weak. His friend, who had always been strong, proud, and a match for him. “You wouldn’t want that
on your conscience,” he said. He had never told Hassen of his dream and didn’t think it would be well received if he did: the man was ruthlessly rational.

  But he was more than a rational man; Hassen was also a formidable talent who would most likely have won second place at the contest had he not chosen to follow Darien. Like a bolt of poison, Darien recalled Marlen’s contempt for Hassen’s fiery temper and apparent lack of subtlety, and then it angered him that the thought had even crossed his mind.

  Perhaps it was guilt that spurred Darien to ask Hassen now, after weeks on the road and in the dark of night, “Are you sorry you decided to come with me?”

  A short silence. Then Hassen said, his voice even and calm, “I was sorry the moment I dropped my grey cloak and ran from the stage. I was sorry when I found you and knew what I meant to do. This isn’t how I planned things, but at the same time … it’s the right thing, I think. It doesn’t matter if I’m sorry or not.”

  Darien glanced away as if to hide his thoughts, even though it was dark. He was tempted to tell Hassen about the khave house, the corpse of Master Beylint, the vision of Sarmanca. He knew he would sound like a madman if he did.

  Hassen followed him, and that was a responsibility. Heeding the call of a more-than-dream, Darien followed Valanir Ocune, who in turn seemed to be following Edrien Letrell.

  Yet Edrien Letrell had followed no one.

  The stars were clear tonight, a sea of gems in which Darien could easily lose himself before sleep. But a chill that was too much at the core of him to be from the autumnal winds was teasing his bones. It was too late, he thought, to have it wrong. He let sleep take him away, and would awaken in the morning renewed, washed clean of doubts.

  * * *

  THE house was too quiet. That was the sense Rianna had every day since Lin had gone. Darien was gone, and Ned, and now Lin; and making everything worse was that Rianna’s father was distant, lost in a world of his own. Strange people came to the house in a hurry under cover of darkness and departed just as swiftly; and Rianna was strongly discouraged from meeting the visitors, even from catching a glimpse of them.

  Only once during the interminable last month of summer did her father speak to her about anything of substance, when he said, “I am thinking of our leaving early for the south this year. Would you like that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said listlessly. “Avan, what is happening? I don’t understand.”

  “Nothing is happening, love,” he said, and forced a smile. If she had needed any indication that something was wrong, it was this; yet when she tried to draw him out, he smiled with greater cheer and told her to practice her embroidery. Furious, Rianna stalked out and sought the one outlet she had. It was her dagger, and the rocks that she lifted every day in the garden, watching with surprise and interest as the muscles in her arms became taut and grew.

  Her blade darted in weary repetitions, an echo of her thought patterns. She felt fury with her father, with Darien, with Lin, even with Ned. The stabbing thrust Lin had taught her matched Rianna’s mood; she practiced it, over and over again. Her wrist ached at the end of the day, and she bathed it in warm water and vinegar. She read books of poetry, though they had lately begun to stoke her fury. It was all very well for these poets, who wandered off to have adventures and then could string them to words, to music. Anything she might write would be formless, a creature of rage and stormcloud. No music there.

  Do I have your leave to keep on clinging to a dream of you?

  A note the tall, kindly poet named Hassen had delivered to Rianna in the hours following the contest. The last words Darien had written her before he vanished from her life, perhaps forever. Dreams are no use to me, she wanted to tell him. When she lay in bed at night, sleepless, she would speak to him in her mind. I am tired of dreaming.

  * * *

  THE act of buying a drink was not as simple as it had once been. If anyone had thought to ask Marlen Humbreleigh how his life had changed since his victory, it was this development that he would likely have cited, with accustomed dryness. When he entered the Ring and Flagon, all conversation died. He felt himself watched by a roomful of suspicious eyes.

  They would no doubt have been talking of the recent arrest of a young poet who had written a song praising Darien Aldemoor as an example for all poets. Naturally, the song had not received official approvals, yet for weeks it was a furtive staple at parties where poets were in attendance.

  Within a week of his arrest, the offending poet had publicly recanted in the Court Plaza, looking small and shamefaced in the company of a detachment of king’s guards. Everyone knew why he had recanted: it was that, or be given the choice between flaying or the galloping horses that had greeted such offenders in the past. The only reason he’d even had such a choice, Marlen thought, was that Nickon Gerrard was wary of allowing the young poet to become a symbol for an uprising. He was subsequently released, his fingernails pared to the quick so that he could no longer strum the harp at his side. No one was surprised when he vanished soon after.

  The song of a certain Piet Abarda became famous following this incident: a clever satire that mocked the rash contrivances of young upstarts and then subtly questioned, at the end, whether true conviction was what was needed here. No one had ever thought of Piet as an idealist, and this reinvention of his character increased his popularity. And inevitably, in the depths of night at tavern tables across the city, over drinks and through tabak fumes, the contrast was drawn between this idealism and the crass ambition of Marlen Humbreleigh, who had sold both his friend and his soul in pursuit of power.

  This particular detail may have chafed at Marlen more than anything—that the little weasel had managed to convince the masses that he was somehow noble. Marlen knew better, of course, but no one would ask his opinion.

  In fact no one would ask Marlen anything, or talk to him at all. The only people he conversed with, it seemed, were the useless guards he had been assigned to command and Nickon Gerrard, who lately had begun to express his disappointment with Marlen for failing at so simple a task as finding two men on the run.

  The idiot guards had already made a false arrest, dragging a terrified blond man into Marlen’s presence after two days of mistreatment on the road. The event had caused Marlen to be satirized by poets throughout the city as a cruel authoritarian who was overfond of arresting innocent men—or pig farmers, as this particular man turned out to be. An unfortunate detail.

  Maintaining his usual air, Marlen strode to the counter to order a whisky. He noticed that Piet Abarda and his new hangers-on congregated in the corner, watching him with sneers on their faces. There was strength in numbers, Marlen thought; any of these paltry men on his own would never have dared to look at Marlen with such an expression, or even to look him in the eye. They were all cowards, he thought, and felt his accustomed weariness harden into anger. Though in truth, the anger was always there; he felt it bubbling beneath the surface of everything he said and did.

  In his last meeting with Nickon Gerrard, in particular, it had been difficult to control. The old man had accused him of not working hard enough to find Darien Aldemoor and had even begun to complain about Valanir Ocune as well. As if Marlen was responsible for every poet who had ever committed a crime in this damnable city.

  The threat had been blunt: if Marlen failed to provide Lord Gerrard with new tidings within the week, he would be turned out of the new apartments and replaced with someone more capable.

  Marlen’s mood was no better after overhearing—no one had told him, of course—that the latest popular song was a fable about a minstrel fox heroically outwitting an evil, greedy snake. It did not take much imagination to guess who the fox and the snake were. Worst of all, the song had passed the official approval process because the censors had not detected the symbolism, and now it was too late to ban it from the books; it had spread too far.

  Marlen thought that was probably only the officially stated reason: Nickon Gerrard, that knife-boned
sadist, probably enjoyed the joke at Marlen’s expense.

  It did occur to Marlen that alone as he was in the echoing rooms of his luxurious apartments, ostracized by those who had once been friends, he might be losing his capacity to judge between a sane thought and a delusion.

  By day, he inspected maps and gave orders to the guards. By night, he scoured the books and papers at his disposal, searching for clues to the location of the Path. He had already posted guards in the main mountain pass, though he doubted Darien would go there. The Path was somewhere in the mountains, but to say that was somewhat akin to saying that the needle was in the haystack. So how could Darien have dared tear off in that direction, unless he knew more?

  Unless it is a red herring, Marlen thought feverishly, downing his whisky in an instant. Unless this is all just to make a fool of me.

  One thing was certain, whether Darien was pursuing the Path or not: the other poets believed he was. Some had even begun forming bands claiming that they, too, would seek the Path as Darien had. Marlen wanted to dismiss them all as madmen, but he knew Lord Gerrard was watching—and was displeased.

  He had one week.

  He became aware of another man beside him, a familiar voice ordering from the bartender. Marlen looked up and saw Leander Keyen. The other man’s eyes met his, then quickly darted away, but it was too late.

  “You are going to decide you don’t want a drink after all,” Marlen said conversationally. “You are going to leave now, and I will follow to make sure you do as I say.”

  Leander’s face was grey. He turned to face the door, like a condemned man facing the gallows. “What do you want?”

  “I think you know,” said Marlen, feeling very much like a snake in that instant, hearing the silken quality of his own voice. “You are going to tell me everything.”

  * * *

  THE next evening, Darien and Hassen made camp on a hilltop overlooking the midland town of Eirne. They were only a short distance now from the forest that ran for miles north; an ocean of great trees that broke against the gleaming walls of the mountains and fell back.