Kingmaker's Sword (Rune Blades of Celi)

by Ann Marston

  “Ye’ve seen me home,” he said quietly. “Ye’ve served me well and I thank you.”

  “It was an obligation I owed,” I said.

  “There are no debts between us, ti’rhonai,” he said. He glanced out beyond the standing stones where the darkness gathered thick as pitch. There was a strangeness to him I couldn’t place until I realized he wore no sword, no weapons of any kind. Then I remembered that Gwynna now held his sword. He had no need of it here. Not now.

  He looked back at me and smiled. “No, I need no sword,” he said. “But you will. There are enemies out there you will have to face.”

  “You’ve taught me well enough, ti’vati,” I replied.

  “Aye, and ye’ve learned well.”

  The texture of the darkness between the two westernmost stones changed subtly. A man stepped into the circle and Cullin turned to meet him, smiling. I had seen his portrait hanging in the Great Hall. It was my namesake, my great-grandfather, Kian dav Keylan. Another man followed him, then a woman. My father Leydon dav Medroch, and his mother, the lady Brynda. I knelt there, staring, as one after the other, they appeared out of the dark, a line of men and women, his people stretching back generations into the past, all come to guide him home.

  Cullin’s grandfather spoke, his voice soft and vibrant in the night. “It’s time to come home, Cullin dav Medroch, beloved grandson.”

  Cullin started to leave, then turned suddenly back to me. He held out both hands. I gave him mine and he raised me, then kissed both my cheeks. “We’ll meet again when it’s time,” he promised. “Your son will see you home, just as you saw me home.”

  The assembled company of men and women shimmered before my eyes. One by one, as they had come, they winked out. Cullin was the last to go. He did not look back.

  I didn’t realize I had been holding my breath until my chest began to ache. Slowly, I sank down to my knees and closed my eyes, then jerked stiffly erect again as a gentle touch of moving air brushed past my cheek.

  A woman stood before me, smiling. She had a beautiful smile. She seemed little more than a girl. Her hair was silver-gilt, curling around the perfect oval of her face. Eyes as golden-brown as shaded brook water looked into my own, and I knew her.

  “Mother?” I asked, wonderingly.

  She bent and brushed the fingers of her hand gently along my cheek, then stepped back. She held out her open hands without speaking. For a moment, I didn’t know what she wanted. She smiled again, and I picked up the sword and gave it to her. She held it before her, gripping the blade, then let it rest, point down, on the ground. One hand went to the hilt and gently caressed the rounded knob of the pommel. It began to glow softly, no longer a small globe of leather-bound metal, but a smooth cabochon gem, flashing colour in brilliant rays into the darkness. She stepped away, leaving the sword balanced in the earth. She glanced up, as if listening to a voice I could not hear, then nodded acquiescence.

  The scintillating light of the sword’s pommel illuminated her face. I took a step toward her, then another. She reached up and touched my face again, her fingers light and gentle as the brush of a moth’s wing. Love and pride glowed in her eyes and my throat constricted painfully.

  I reached out to take her in my arms, but even as I did so, she shimmered and faded. My arms closed on empty air, and she was gone.

  ***

  When the first light of dawn finally stained the sky behind the crags, I looked up. The box stood cracked and shattered on the plinth. Except for a faint, powdery residue of fine, grey ash, it was empty.

  XXIX

  I took the sword and climbed the path to the high crag overlooking the sea. Memories crashed and broke in my mind like breakers against the rocks of the shore. I let them ebb and flow aimlessly, making no attempt to render sense out of them. Time enough for that later.

  The sun was not high enough yet to reach into the small, sheltered enclave. I sat on one of the moss-cushioned rocks and stood the sword before me, holding it balanced with my left hand, my right hand resting on my thigh. Very slowly, I reached up and placed my right hand on the leather-bound orb of the pommel. It felt warm, as if it still retained the heat of my mother’s touch.

  She had given me a gift, but I was not sure I wanted to accept it. With the gift came an obligation and a responsibility I did not want. But it was the only gift I could remember my mother ever giving me. How could I refuse it?

  Quickly, before I could think too much about it and change my mind, I took the small black knife from my boot and slashed the leather bindings on the pommel. The leather peeled away in two neat pieces, the rind coming off an orange.

  The cabochon gem beneath, big as a plover’s egg, clear as still water, glittered brightly as a single ray of sunlight spilled over the edge of the rock around the enclave and touched it. As I watched, the light filled the gem until it overflowed and washed down across my hands like warm honey. I looked down into the gem, down into a vast depth, a globe of crystal light and dancing shadows. In the centre, a point of light glowed brighter than the splinters of colour the gem scattered around me.

  I closed my eyes for a moment against the glare and rubbed them. When I looked again, the brilliant point of light was still there, flickering like a fire seen at night on a distant hillside. Then I realized it was a fire—a huge fire flashing and flaming in a clearing amid a grove of tall oaks. I saw the figures of men and women, all dressed alike in simple white tunics, dancing and leaping around the flames.

  The fires of Beltane Night. The night—the only night—when the Duality split to become god and goddess to join the celebration and couple as man and woman to assure the fertility of field and forest, river and sea. The night when every woman represented the goddess and every man the god. On this night, a princess might offer mead to a shepherd, or a chambermaid to a prince. No class distinction existed between gods and goddesses. Children born of Beltane Night were lucky and blessed, able to claim a god as a father, and a goddess as mother.

  Men and women danced joyously to the haunting melody skirled out by the pipes. The women carried goblets of golden mead, dancing carefully so as not to spill the liquid. Blessed and lucky for the coming year was the woman who spilled no mead on this night.

  Gradually I became aware that I could see only two dancers clearly, a man and a woman. All the others faded into the background and became mere shadows around the fire.

  The woman, little more than a girl, really, was in the first bloom of womanhood. Silver and gilt hair like moonbeams and sunlight plaited together, tumbled down her back, rippling to the swaying movements of her dancing. She was not tall, nor was she pretty, but she possessed a lithe grace and an animation in her face that made her powerfully attractive. Her smile lit her face and eyes from within the way the Beltane fire lit them from without.

  The man was also very young, not more than eighteen or nineteen, his eyes grey as the smoke rising from the fire. He moved with the supple symmetry of a natural dancer, or a born swordsman, the muscles set neat and tight against his frame beneath the taut skin. His hair, glinting copper-gold in the firelight, was bound back from his forehead with a plain leather thong. The single braid falling from his left temple blended in with the rest of his hair beneath the thong.

  They danced on opposite sides of the fire, but each was searching for the other amid the throng of dancers. The man adroitly turned away when it appeared that any other woman was about to offer her goblet, and he moved swiftly partway around the fire.

  The woman paused momentarily in her search to offer a sip of mead to a man, who accepted, laughing and gave her the expected kiss in return for the gift. The woman smiled at him, and danced away, goblet held carefully in both hands.

  They both saw each other at the same instant. The man’s face, which had been gravely serious, broke into a smile as he whirled through the throng of dancers toward her. She remained where she was, waiting for him, dancing alone amid the surging crowd.

  He reached her, and for
a moment, they simply danced facing each other, each looking deep into the eyes of the other. Finally, the woman held up her goblet.

  “Mead, my lord?” she asked breathlessly.

  He smiled and took the goblet. “Your gift brings me great pleasure, my lady,” he said. He drained the mead from the goblet and flung the empty cup into the fire-lit darkness, heedless of where it landed. Wordlessly, she held out her hands to him. He took them and spoke a word quietly.

  “What was that you called me?” she asked.

  “Twyla,” he said, smiling. “In my country, the twylitha is the breeze that comes off the mountains in the heat of summer. Clean and cool and refreshing. Something wonderful. Almost miraculous.”

  “Then I shall allow you to call me Twyla.”

  As they began to sway together to the lilt of the pipes, he bent forward to place his lips near her ear. “Ytwydda—Twyla, my soul lies cupped in the palm of your hand,” he murmured.

  She froze for an instant, drawing back so she could look up into his face, her eyes wide and startled, lips parted. Then she smiled and the sun rose in her eyes. “Leydon, your soul is sheltered safe within my hands and my heart,” she replied clearly.

  He laughed in sheer delight and swept her up into his arms. She clung to him, laughing, too, as he ran through the dancers, carrying her toward the soft spring grass waiting for them in the shelter of the oak trees.

  ***

  The light in the gem fractured into a thousand shards, scattering like drops of water in a cataract. I drew back, blinking in the strong sunlight, my eyes still adjusted for the flickering darkness around the Beltane Fire. My head ached as if the fragments splintered from the gem had embedded themselves like slivers of glass into my skull. I sat shivering in the hot sun, my arms wrapped around my chest, trying to warm myself. The sword stood balanced before me, the gem still gathering the light.

  “Please. No more,” I whispered, but I reached out to cup the gem between the palms of my hands, and bent forward to look into it again.

  ***

  There were four of them this time. Leydon dav Medroch, Twyla al Kyffen, a very young Cullin who strongly resembled his elder brother, and a small boy of six or seven. The men stood back to back, the woman and the boy between them, their swords flashing in the late afternoon sun, as they fought a hoard of bandits. Cullin fell, his sword dropping from his hand. The boy tried to pick it up, but it was too heavy, and he himself was cut down moments later by a savage blow to the side of the head. Twyla reached down to snatch up the fallen sword, standing over the boy’s body, and turned to swing it at the man who had felled the boy.

  A man dressed in black sat a horse on the periphery of the fight. He smiled as the sheer press of numbers overwhelmed Leydon and Twyla. He gestured to the man standing on the ground beside him and bent down to speak with him.

  “Make sure they’re all dead,” he said. “The boy especially. Your men may do what they will with the woman, but she must be dead when they finish. Do you understand?”

  “Of course, General,” the other man said. “Leave it to me.”

  The General nodded in acknowledgment, then turned his horse and left, still smiling.

  ***

  A shadow fell across me as I sat, both hands gripping the hilt of the sword, forehead pressed to my wrists. I looked up, my vision blurred and watery.

  Medroch stood before me, gentle gravity marking the lines of his face. I saw him for a moment through the eyes of a young child looking at the grandfather he adored, tall and straight and strong, the grey gone from his hair and beard, the lines less deeply etched into the skin around his eyes. For a long moment, I simply stared up at him until, finally, he became again the grandfather I was familiar with. The amethyst in his ear flashed violet sparks against the silvered copper of his braid.

  “They came for him,” he said at last.

  “Aye, they did.”

  “As they came for your father the night I stood vigil for him.” His hands clenched into fists at his side and he looked away for a moment. “Two sons,” he said softly. “Two sons, I’ve lost.” His grey eyes turned again to me. “And you’ve lost two fathers, lad.”

  “Where was my mother buried?” I asked.

  “In the crypts. Cullin brought her home, too, when he saw your father home.”

  “And they came for her, too?”

  “Brynda stood vigil with her,” he said. “They came for her.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s not an easy thing,” he said. “To stand vigil.”

  “No.” I looked up at him again. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew who my mother was.” There was a simple sense of inevitability about it that was inescapable.

  For a moment, I thought he might not answer. Then he nodded. “Aye,” he said. “I knew. Kyffen is my friend. I sent Leydon to him as an emissary to warn him of Tebor’s treachery.”

  “Sion’s spies?” I asked.

  “Aye. A good man, Sion dav Turboch. He suggested sending Leydon. He showed a certain talent for the work. I told Leydon to deliver the message anonymously, if possible.” He smiled briefly. “I didna tell him to run off with Kyffen’s daughter, though. Nor did I tell him to go bounding around the continent with her for three years before he brought her home.”

  I glanced up at him. He had unwittingly answered a question that had puzzled me. A simple explanation of why I was three years younger than Kerri thought her prince to be. “You said nothing. You never said anything to me.”

  “No.” He sat on the stone beside me, resting his back against the sun-warmed rock of the cliff, and closed his eyes.

  “Did Kyffen know? Did he know where his daughter went?”

  Medroch shook his head. “No. Twyla made us swear we would never tell anyone. She feared for your safety.”

  “But after?” I asked. “After she and my father were dead. You didn’t tell him then, either.”

  “A vow of never means never, Kian.”

  “Aye.” I glanced at the strong profile, saw the pain there. “I suppose it does.”

  “We thought you were dead, too. Then when Cullin brought you home, it wasna my place to speak with Kyffen. You made no vows, but you remembered nothing. You had to discover the truth for yourself, and take it to him.”

  I nodded. “A hard thing,” I said, “discovering the truth.”

  “The truth sometimes is, lad. A hard thing, indeed.” He glanced at me, a hint of a smile suddenly playing at the corners of his mouth. “Perhaps ye’d best tell the lass her quest is over.”

  I made a wry face. “That willna be easy, either.”

  He made an eloquent gesture and I got reluctantly to my feet. My head ached, and I felt drained and empty as a licked pot. I picked up the sword and sheathed it carefully, then bent to pick up the husk of leather that had enshrouded the gem. I walked to the edge of the cliff and hurled it as far as I could toward the sea below. I lost sight of it long before it hit the water.

  “Aye, well,” I said. “If it must be done, soonest is best.”

  Medroch got to his feet and came to the edge of the cliff. He put his hand to my shoulder. “I’ll walk back wi’ you, lad,” he said. “Ye can tell the lass after you’ve eaten and taken some rest.”

  ***

  Kerri was in the courtyard with Keylan when Medroch and I walked through the open gates. I stopped to watch them. My son held a wooden practice sword, his sturdy young body faithfully copying Kerri’s posture as she demonstrated a high block moving to a backhand sweep. He would not be four for another season, but already, he showed promise of the same mastery his foster grandfather had.

  “A fine son, Kian,” Medroch said quietly, watching them, too. “Ye can be proud of the lad.”

  “Aye,” I said, smiling. “Verra proud.”

  Medroch watched Kerri critically for a moment. “The lass moves well, too,” he said. “For all that gown is hardly the garb for swordwork.”

  “Dinna let her hear you say that. She’ll te
ar strips from your hide. She’s a tongue like a rusty razor when she wants it.” Kerri showed Keylan another move, and then crouched to hold his arms to guide him through it. “You go ahead,” I told Medroch. “I’ll be along in a moment.”

  “Ye dinna have to tell her now, ye ken,” he said.

  “I know. This is something different.”

  Keylan saw me then, and a delighted grin wreathed his small face. “Look, vati,” he called, waving the wooden sword. “Look. Look at my sword.” He came running across the courtyard, short, sunburned legs churning, and flung himself into my arms, sword and all, as I stooped to catch him and pick him up. The sword fetched me a good clout on the side of the head as he swung it around to show me.

  Kerri turned, smoothing her skirts with the back of her hands, and met my gaze above Keylan’s bright head. She smiled briefly as I gently pushed the wooden blade to a safe distance beyond my ear. The child babbled on about the sword for a moment, then wriggled with impatience to be set down again.

  “Show Vati-mhor,” he said.

  “It’s truly a wondrous sword,” I said gravely, crouching down in front of him and running a finger along the wooden blade. “And you will be truly a fine swordsman when you grow up. Run along now and show Medroch.”

  Kerri hadn’t moved. She waited as I crossed the courtyard. “You look tired,” she said.

  “Aye, well, it was a long night. I need to speak with you, sheyala.”

  “Right now? Shouldn’t you rest first?”

  “This won’t wait.” I took her arm and led her to a stone bench beneath an apple tree. The small, hard green fruit clustered thickly on the branches, nearly hidden by the leaves. Somewhere in the highest branches, a thrush poured out its ardent little heart in sweet song to the morning.

  Kerri sat on the bench and looked up at me. “What is it you need to speak with me about?”