“Who are you?” the king finally stammered.
“I am Kimbralin Amaristoth,” she said. “I believe you know—knew my brother, who is lately deceased. Now, where is the merchant?”
When Master Gelvan was helped into the room, painfully thin and filthy, with a straggling beard, Rianna ran to him with a cry. His eyes were narrowed to slits, as if adjusting to light. But his hands were strong on her shoulders nonetheless. “My love, what has happened to you?” He could barely speak.
Rianna forced a laugh as she hugged him to her. “That you would ask me that. Oh, Avan.” She felt a catch in her voice. “So much has happened.”
* * *
THAT night as he worked, he sang. His song was the work. His eyes were intent on the body on the bed, so near to death. For years Valanir Ocune had studied the enchantments of healing, hoping that one day they might be put to use. They worked only with enchanted wounds, which this was.
Marlen’s hair was spread on the pillow; his lips were cold. In the moonlight that streamed from the window, his skin showed a purple cast. They were in Marilla’s apartments. Valanir had stripped Marlen of his shirt; now he pressed his fingertips to crucial pressure points in the course of his song. As he worked, he felt a perilous falling sensation in his chest, as if the words drained something vital from him. The most urgent of the healing enchantments were, in their own way, dark. Cheating death, Valanir thought, meant you had to play its game.
He wondered if Kiara watched over him here, as she had all his life. Guiding, whispering, and ultimately bestowing upon him the gift of deepest insight into his own soul when through Lin Amaristoth, he had reached the Path.
If it was a gift.
When he and Marilla had first mounted the stairs with Marlen’s long, graceful form sprawled in their arms, she had asked, in an even tone, “Can you save him?”
“There is a chance, lady.” He had come to know Marilla as a shadow figure at Marlen’s side. For someone whose reputation was so savage, she seemed strangely shy. “But you know that even if I can save him, this life, this wealth”—he gestured around the apartments—“they’re finished for him.”
“I know, Erisen.” Moonlight reflected from her pale eyes. She adjusted Marlen’s feet at the edge of the bed; he was almost too tall for it. “I have lately been thinking of the lands near the border of Kahishi, where my family once had a home. I am thinking of farming again.”
* * *
THE wedding took place after the snows melted, when the first of the spring crocuses were peering from the new grass of Master Gelvan’s garden. Still, a chill stood in the air, stirring color to the cheeks of the bride as she waited beneath the Galician wedding canopy that Lin had embroidered with her own hands. The bride’s dress was green and gold brocade—her mother’s wedding dress, saved by Master Gelvan for this occasion. A gold veil fell around her face and trailed in the grass.
For a wedding so vital to the social fabric of Tamryllin—one of its wealthiest daughters, wed to one of the most important families—it was shockingly small: other than Lin Amaristoth and Valanir Ocune, the only other guests were Ned’s family. Such had been the request of the couple, and so relieved were their parents simply to see their children alive, they could not refuse.
Master Gelvan’s hair had frosted utterly grey while he was imprisoned; he would not speak of what had befallen him there. At times Rianna regretted that the former Court Poet was beyond her revenge. She would have liked to have killed him more slowly, if possible. She knew her father had nightmares. And now she understood him in ways that she never had before.
The day before the wedding, Rianna had suddenly turned to him and said, “She was loyal to you.”
Master Gelvan had been in the midst of looking over accounts in his study while she read on a bench beside the window. She was in here a great deal now, when she wasn’t with Ned; she had a need to be near her father, as if to assure herself that he was indeed unharmed.
But she had not told him of the Path, fearing to hurt him more than he had already been hurt. She could still feel, jangling in her bones, the moment Nickon Gerrard’s knife had punctured Ned’s throat; she could only imagine how it would feel to have that moment go on and on for weeks, months, years. She wanted to protect her father now from anything else that might come after.
But a realization came to her: that a secret, held forever by death, was its own source of pain. And it could be her gift to him, perhaps, to dispel it.
So she told her father of what she had seen. And she saw that it hurt him, but she saw also a peacefulness came over him. “You are right,” he said at last, when she was done. “I didn’t want to think ill of her, but there was no way to know for certain. Rianna … thank you for this.”
“Do you think you’ll ever remarry, Avan?” she asked. “I want you to be happy.”
He laughed, but turned serious after a moment. “For years, I was intent on revenge, and my grief … it would have been impossible,” said her father. “And now … well, I’m old, Rianna.”
“You aren’t,” she said stubbornly. “Besides, you know what this city is like. You’d need to fight women off. To find the one with gold in her heart, and not her eyes.”
Her father had laughed at this, too. He did not say anything about metaphors or poets, and for that she was grateful.
* * *
LIN had heard countless jests growing up—mostly from servants in the kitchen—about the nervousness of grooms at weddings, but she had never seen Ned as relaxed as he looked now, standing tall between the bent figures of Master Gelvan and Lord Alterra as they escorted him to the marriage canopy.
They performed the ceremony without clergy; instead, Rianna had asked Lin to officiate. Sprinkling water from a blessed spring on the couple and reciting the Ellenican prayer—blessing their union in the light of Thalion, Kiara, and Estarre—Lin had been able to forget for a moment all the responsibilities that awaited her beyond the walls of this garden. At Master Gelvan’s request, she also murmured a marriage sacrament in the forbidden tongue of the Galicians, in undertone, so that none should hear—a secret from all but Rianna and Ned. Sunset cast a copper glow over everything, itself a benediction.
Ned’s father had been unnerved by the idea of a woman performing the ceremony, but Ned had convinced him that a woman of rank was different. Lin felt self-conscious as she raised her arms above the couple, as it caused her six-colored cloak to flare in the breeze. It was not the cloak that had belonged to Nickon Gerrard—to wear anything that the blood-soaked poet had touched would have been unacceptable. But Valanir Ocune had advised that, as Court Poet, it was vital that she make her authority absolutely clear. “No one else will, if you do not,” he had said, and she had known it was true.
It was uncertain if Marlen Humbreleigh and Marilla would have been invited to the wedding—Lin knew Rianna was ambivalent about both of them. But they had departed the city in exile months before, heading south to the village where Marilla’s family had lived.
“There is good farming in the south, and Marilla wants to see if any of her family survived,” Marlen had explained with a tired smile. Since the injury, he had seemed tired a great deal of the time. Valanir had told him it would take months for the effects of Nickon Gerrard’s rite to dissipate. Marilla thought the southern lands would warm his languid blood.
In the time following Nickon Gerrard’s death, Lin and Valanir had met with the king, their army of poets at their backs. Most of the poets had stayed within the palace walls the first night, almost as if they truly were a conquering force. In that night, the balance could have shifted with disastrous results if the guards had decided to reassert themselves. But Lin had counted on the gruesome crimes of Nickon Gerrard to turn the guards in the poets’ favor, and so they did: when she and Valanir arrived at the gates the next morning, they were escorted to the king’s chambers. The king was under siege from more than just the poets, and he knew it.
“These are our con
ditions,” said Lin that day, as they stood before Harald in a secret meeting that was no secret at all, not with hundreds of guards and poets standing outside in the corridor. Lin and Valanir had agreed that she would be the one to state them, because she did not have a history of rebellion against the Crown—and because Amaristoth blood ran in her veins. “The laws controlling the content of poets’ songs will be revoked. The Crown’s direct authority over Academy procedures—revoked. In exchange, all graduating Academy students will swear an oath of fealty to the Crown. And every year, the Academy will pay a tithe to the Eldest Sanctuary in recognition of its ultimate authority.”
The king had leaned forward, clearly attempting to assert some dominance in the conversation. “There must be more,” he said. “I must have a Court Poet at my side who will stand as assurance that these conditions will be met and that the Academy will stay loyal to the Crown.”
Lin had thought of this, already knew what she would say. Yet before she could speak, Valanir did. “I recommend Lady Kimbralin Amaristoth for the position,” he said, sending a cold shock to Lin’s spine. “She is sole heir to the lands of Amaristoth and their wealth. It would be to your advantage to have her close.”
“But a woman,” the king had protested, with a furrowed brow. “There are no female poets.”
“Your majesty, until this winter, there were no enchantments,” said Valanir Ocune. “The game has changed forever.”
* * *
LATER that evening, at the inn, she confronted him. “I thought it would be you,” she said. “I don’t even know if I want this. In truth … I do know. I don’t.”
“It has to be you,” said Valanir. His voice was gentle, but there was steel in it, too. Laughter and song echoed through the floorboards from below, where—incredibly, to Lin—life in Tamryllin was proceeding as usual. The old enchantments had been brought back through Darien’s life, the Court Poet was dead, and the new one would be a woman. And yet the same drunken songs, the same laughter, rocked the walls of the inn as on the previous night.
Such was the reality of a city that had perched like a white gem above the harbor for hundreds of years. Lin realized, suddenly, what it would mean to be Court Poet in that palace, where Eldgest had once dismembered Academy poets, cutting out their tongues. No longer was history just words on a page. It was a song ringing out on a midsummer night; it was, just now, like the planks of a ship jarring beneath her feet in a storm.
Valanir’s voice called her back from her thoughts. “What happened today can all still come to nothing. It was a coup, and the success of a coup depends on what comes after, when the storms are done. There will be grave difficulties ahead, negotiating the balance between the Academy and the Crown. The Court Poet in the coming years will be pivotal to that negotiation. And only you possess both the skills and the background with which to do it.”
“Only me?” Lin said. “I can’t imagine that is true.”
“You are a poet, and an Amaristoth,” said Valanir.
Feeling as if the breath had been pummeled out of her, Lin sat on the bed. She thought of Darien and the promise she had made to him. Does this keep it, or break it? Aloud, she said, “So it is the palace for me, then. And you? Where will you go, Valanir Ocune?”
“Not far,” he said. “I will be at the Academy. We will need to open new classes for all poets, even the graduates. Everyone must learn how to control these techniques and not abuse them.”
“We’ve seen what can happen,” Lin said softly, her eyes dropping to the backs of her wrists and the half bracelets there. She knew they would scar, unlike the marks Rayen had cut in her face, which had faded. “Will you visit me here?”
Valanir took her hand. “I will come often,” he said. “I must help mediate between the Academy and the Crown. In truth, Lin, it’s not what I want, either. I was born to wander, as Edrien was.”
“Yet it was your song that was the beginning to … all of this,” said Lin.
“I helped set events in motion,” said Valanir. “As did you.”
Lin met his eyes. It was becoming easier to do that. Her voice was pitched so low he would have had to strain to hear as she said, “So it is to be walls, then, for both of us. Walls and rooms. You know I used to dream of taking to the road with you.”
She allowed her words to hang there in the silence. Below, the singing and the laughter continued. The life of Tamryllin on a winter evening, as outside it began softly to rain.
* * *
THAT winter, the Academy held a funeral for Darien Aldemoor, Hassen Styr, and the five poets who had fallen in the attack on the palace, interring them with much ceremony in a shrine on Academy Isle.
Buried, too, were the remains of Lord Gerrard’s altar to blood divination, after Valanir Ocune and other Seers performed the rite of its destruction in the Court Plaza before all the people. A detail Lin Amaristoth had suggested: that the people would know that the threat of the Red Death would now be lifted from Eivar—and what had caused it.
In that same spot before the palace gates, for thirty nights and a day, the harp and ring of Darien Aldemoor were displayed on a platform watched by palace guards. Candles lined the platform, a prayer to speed Darien’s soul to the gods’ embrace. At all times of night, poets kept silent vigil by the flames.
As for Marlen Humbreleigh, he had vanished south with his strange lady; none had heard from him since.
* * *
IN early autumn of that year, Lin visited the Gelvan home to see the girl child Rianna Alterra had brought into the world. Lank brown hair like Ned, blue eyes like Rianna. Of course, these things changed all the time until children were of a certain age, but even so … Lin thought of a golden-haired little girl skimming through fields of lavender, rosemary, and sage and closed her eyes a moment as she pressed her lips to the infant’s cheek.
This girl would learn knives and poetry from an early age. Rianna was jesting from her bed, where her father threatened that she had better stay if she knew what was good for her. “You can’t punish me anymore, Avan,” she said sweetly to Master Gelvan’s departing back. “That’s Ned’s duty now.”
The father of their newborn flushed red as a poppy and practically fled the room, mumbling something about a hot water bottle. Rianna flashed a mischievous grin at Lin, and Lin was again reminded of Darien.
Drawing herself up amid the pillows, Rianna took the baby back from Lin and held it to her breast. “We’re calling her Dariana,” she said. “I hope she will be strong. And that a certain Court Poet will teach her what she needs to know, when the time is right. As once she taught me.”
Lin took Rianna’s hand. She saw the girl was paler than the sheets she lay upon and that new lines strained around her lips. Lin said, “I swear to you that any child of yours shall have my protection and love, for as long as I live.”
* * *
IT was in a somber mood that she returned to her rooms at the palace. The day had been blessedly uneventful, which was a rarity. Usually she was running from meeting to meeting—between Academy Masters with requests and court nobility with grievances—baffled as to how anything in government could ever be accomplished with so many meetings to attend.
And through it all, there was Edrien Letrell to contend with, his memories and music threading with hers. It was a burden she would have to bear all her life, Valanir had told her. There was no known enchantment that could disengage Edrien from within her, and as time went on, they would grow ever more intertwined.
That was something she preferred not to think about as she went about her numerous daily tasks.
“Who let you in without my permission?” she said when she saw the figure by the window, gazing out at the waves below. Lin’s tower room boasted a view of the harbor, where she could pretend—sometimes, when she was happier—that she was a student at the Academy, with the waves crashing in a slow music to the words she composed by candlelight.
Most treasured of all to her was the golden harp on a t
able beside the window. Some nights, when the ghosts of memory—hers or otherwise—threatened to overwhelm her, Lin sought refuge in precise and passionate melody. Sometimes, when she thought she could bear it, she played to the dark the song that Darien Aldemoor had begun to shape in their time at the Academy. Never shall we see such times again.
Valanir Ocune shrugged without turning from the window. “I suppose your attendants thought you wouldn’t mind. I told them it was urgent that I see you.”
“You do charm your way into whatever you want—and whomever you want,” said Lin acidly, throwing herself onto her couch with a sigh. It was a relief to sit here in her chambers, to not have all eyes on her, just for a moment.
“Except you,” said Valanir, now turning to her. “It must be that chilly northern blood.”
“What did you want to see me about?” She tipped her head back and closed her eyes, hoping she could stay awake long enough to hear him out. He’d be wanting something for the Academy, no doubt; these days, with the immense changes that were happening, they always wanted something. But in exchange, she was demanding they start accepting women as students, even if the numbers would be small at first.
This particular subject had been debated at several of the innumerable meetings. Lin was surprised sometimes by how enraged she felt when she confronted the Academy Masters on this, as if any experience in her life could have led her to hope for anything else. Any experience but one: that a woman now sat as Court Poet in the palace of the king. Yet to the Academy Masters, entrenched in centuries of immovable tradition, Lin’s existence was no more than a fleeting anomaly. In such meetings, Lin sometimes felt her fingers stealing toward the hilt of her knife.
“I never told you—or anyone, for that matter—what it was that I saw on the Path,” said Valanir Ocune. She heard him take a seat across from her. It was a sparsely furnished room; Lin thought that here, in her own chambers, she could adhere to her northern roots. “And in truth, I still cannot tell you.”
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