The Assassin King

by Elizabeth Haydon

  Over and over as he walked in circles he silently repeated what he had seen in the harbors and outposts of Sorbold, the great nation of threatening mountains and windswept deserts to the south of Roland, struggling to keep the facts and figures straight in his mind.

  Seventy-five three-masted cutters, he thought to himself, running down his list again in anticipation of the discussion that would sooner or later come about. Sixty three-masted schooners, at least four score heavy barges, all in the southwestern port of Ghant, all in the course of one day’s time.

  All carrying slaves, thousands of them, perhaps the contents of ten or more entire villages, probably bound for the salt mines of Nicosi or the sweltering ironworks of Keltar.

  Gwydion had been unable to fully quell the racing of his heart since the moment he had witnessed the unloading of the human cargo a few weeks before. Compassion and outrage at the sight had quickly been joined by fear; a little sleepy harbor town teeming with soldiers and longshoremen, mountain guards and human chattel, had been enough to convince his companion that the war for which Sorbold was preparing would be greater in scope than anything the Known World had ever seen.

  Given that his companion at that moment had been Anborn ap Gwylliam, the Lord Marshal of the first Cymrian empire and perhaps the greatest military mind that had ever existed on the Middle Continent, Gwydion had been quickly and nauseatingly convinced, especially since Anborn had engineered the previous war to be described as such.

  The heavy carpet beneath his feet bulged up into a ridge from where he had unconsciously worn a groove. Gwydion smoothed it down with his feet, pushing the bump to the edges, arriving at the fringe at the same moment that the doors to the Great Hall banged open with urgency.

  Standing in the door frame was his father’s long-trusted chamberlain, Gerald Owen, an elderly Cymrian who had served Gwydion’s father and grandfather, and perhaps a few ancestors before him. The old man stepped back in surprise, then opened the door wider for the young duke.

  “Finally,” Gwydion muttered as he entered the Hall. “I’ve been waiting a week to talk to him.”

  “He’s aware of that, sir,” Gerald Owen said smoothly, closing the door behind him. “The Lord Cymrian needed to see that the Lady Cymrian and the baby were attended to before the meeting. She was in a grave state when she returned.”

  Gwydion stopped and turned back quickly. “And is she better now?” he asked anxiously. Rhapsody had adopted him and his sister Melisande four years before as honorary grandchildren, though in many ways she had been more like a second mother. “Will she be missing the council?”

  “Yes, and no,” came a warm baritone voice from behind him. Gwydion looked over his shoulder to see his godfather standing in the center of the feeder hallway leading into the central meeting place of the keep. Ashe, as the Lord Cymrian was called by his intimates, was a man in possession of the blue eye color most often associated with Cymrian royal lineage, but whose face and body bore the lines of the mixed races of human and Lirin, with draconic vertical pupils scoring his eyes and copper-colored hair that appeared almost metallic in its sheen, signs of the wyrm blood that ran in his veins as well. “She has been tended to, and will be sitting in on the council meeting. We would be sorely lacking in wisdom were she not to attend.”

  “Agreed,” said Gwydion, looking askance at the empty room. “But where is she? To that end, where is everyone? I saw Anborn come in earlier, and Achmed and Grunthor both a moment ago—where did they go?” His eyes fell upon the metal walking machine, abandoned in the corner of the room, a marvel of engineering provided by Anborn’s brother, the Sea Mage Edwyn Griffyth, to help the lame Lord Marshal regain the ability to walk upright. “What is going on here, Ashe?”

  Outside the enormous windows of the Great Hall an icy wind howled, drowning the silence, buffeting the glass until it rattled.

  The Lord Cymrian eyed him seriously, then turned and walked over to a heavy wall tapestry depicting the voyage of the Cymrian fleets from the lost island of Serendair. He drew the drape aside and pressed his hand into the stone of the wall; darkness appeared as a hidden passageway opened.

  “Do you remember this place?” he asked.

  Gwydion’s throat felt suddenly dry. “Yes,” he said. “Gerald Owen hid Melly and me there during the slaughter at the Winter Carnival four years ago.”

  Ashe nodded. “It’s not a perfect place to meet in secret, but being underground and away from the wind, and any ears that might be listening, it’s the best we can do for now.” The vertical pupils of his cerulean blue eyes caught the light from the windows and contracted visibly; Gwydion wondered if the change was from more than the light “Make haste, Gwydion; we are about to convene the most dire discussion undertaken in the history of the continent.”

  The young duke nodded and stepped into the dark passageway, followed a moment later by the Lord Cymrian, who closed the doorway as he entered, plunging them both into empty blackness.

  A moment later he felt a crackle in the air around him, and the earthen walls of the dark passageway began to glow with a warmth that held no real light, but rather the radiance of heat. The dim illumination gave Gwydion enough vision to make out the rough-hewn stairs that twisted down into the blackness below, where he knew a small room was concealed, little more than a root cellar, behind a rock wall. The Lord Cymrian chuckled.

  “Thank you, Aria,” he called into the darkness below.

  “My pleasure, Sam,” came Rhapsody’s voice in return. “Mind your step, Gwydion.”

  “Well, it’s good to know that at least she is well enough to make use of her fire lore and to still order me around like a child,” Gwydion murmured to his godfather as they slowly descended the stairs into the gloom. “‘Sam’—I’ve never asked you this—why does she call you that, anyway?”

  The Lord Cymrian smiled but said nothing, following the turning staircase down into the subterranean repository. Gwydion shuddered involuntarily at the memory of being thirteen in this place, left in charge of his five-year-old sister and a handful of sobbing children he did not know, waiting to hear if any of their parents survived the assault of the soldiers of Sorbold on the winter carnival where they had all been celebrating a few moments before. His father had lived; Gwydion tried to blot out the memory of the sounds that had risen from those whose parents had not been so fortunate.

  At the bottom of the stairs in the darkness Rhapsody was waiting for them; Gwydion thought perhaps heat had caught in her golden hair, making it shine even in the lightless gloom, but a moment later recalled that her title as the bearer of Daystar Clarion, the ancient sword of elemental ether and fire, was Iliachenva’ar, translated from the old tongue as meaning one who brought light into a dark place, or from one. His “grandmother” certainly had that ability; seeing her now, even in the gloom after all her months of absence, somehow gave the dank air a sudden freshness of hope.

  Or perhaps, rather than Rhapsody herself, it was the presence of the tiny sleeping infant that she cradled in her arms.

  Ashe rested his hand on her waist and brushed a kiss on her cheek. “You didn’t wish to remain within?” he asked.

  “I didn’t like the way Achmed and Grunthor were looking at Meridion,” she replied mildly, drawing the baby closer. “They kept dropping broad hints about missing breakfast.”

  Ashe smiled slightly and opened the stone door hidden within the rough granite wall.

  An almost blinding light spilled into the dark stairway from the room beyond. Crouched within it around a small wooden table on which a large parchment scroll was lying were the two Firbolg, Achmed and Grunthor; Anborn, looking testy as he usually did; and a Lirin man Gwydion recognized after a moment as Rial, Rhapsody’s viceroy in the forest of Tyrian where she reigned as their titular queen. Rial’s presence made Gwydion’s hands tremble unconsciously; if the Lirin elder statesman had traveled all the way from the sacred forest to the southwest of Roland, the scent of blood in the air must be unmistakab
le.

  “Hurry up and get inside, all of you,” Anborn growled.

  Ashe stepped aside to allow Rhapsody to enter first; Rial rose and bowed respectfully as she entered, but the other three men remained seated, Anborn because he had no other choice, and the Firbolg because they had no intention of doing otherwise. As she passed into the small hidden room Gwydion leaned discreetly toward Ashe and murmured in his ear.

  “How did Anborn get down here without the walking machine or a litter?”

  Ashe cleared his throat to cover his reply. “He allowed the only other Kinsman who was able to carry him,” he replied under his breath. Gwydion nodded and bowed to Grunthor, knowing that it was to him Ashe referred. The order of the Kinsmen was sacred to soldiers, a brotherhood deeper than that of blood, achieved over a lifetime of soldiering or a great deed of self-sacrifice, chosen by the wind itself. Rhapsody, Grunthor, and Anborn were the only Kinsmen Gwydion knew of in the world, though his “grandmother” had assured him there were others.

  The Lord Cymrian pulled the stone door shut behind him. In the light of the lanterns Gwydion caught a better look at his face, and those around him. In spite of the appearance of calm, there was a tightness about Rhapsody’s lips, a floridity to Anborn’s face, a tenseness in Ashe’s shoulders which belied that calm. Gwydion shuddered; he had believed his own news would be the most painful to share with the council. Clearly he was not alone in bringing bad tidings.

  A humming beneath the table caught his attention, and Gwydion looked down. There on the floor was a partial hexagonal ring of swords, laid tip to tip, hilt to hilt. He recognized three of them immediately.

  The first was Daystar Clarion. Flames licked up its blade, and after a few seconds Gwydion realized it was the weapon that was providing the light in the room rather than the lanterns. It was crossed with a battered, nameless blade he had seen many times before in the hand of Anborn, a weapon Gwydion had received numerous sparring blows from in the course of his training with the Lord Marshal. Seeing it now, its tip against the historic blade, made him wince from the memory.

  Daystar Clarion’s hilt abutted that of a Lirin longsword with a redwood handle; Gwydion knew this must be the weapon of Rial, the Lirin viceroy, whose duty was the protection of the forest of Tyrian. Gwydion had seen up close some of the Lirin defenses, and knew that however humble the blade appeared, when wielded in union with the tens of thousands identical to it, this sword was part of one of the greatest and most secret military machines on the continent.

  The hilt of Anborn’s sword abutted that of another legendary blade, Kirsdarke, the weapon of elemental water that his godfather carried, a bastard sword that was inscribed with gleaming blue runes on the blade and hilt. The sword appeared to be fashioned of silver steel as it lay on the floor, but in the hand of its bearer, known in the ancient tongue as the Kirsdarkenvar, the blade took on the appearance of living water and froth that ran in waves from the tang to the tip. It was crossed with a strange weapon, something Grunthor had once shown him called a triatine, which Gwydion knew from his history lessons had only been used more than a millennium before on the lost island of Serendair and nowhere else in the Known World.

  Between Grunthor’s weapon and Rial’s was an empty space.

  Gwydion could feel the eyes of the others in the room on his back.

  Unconsciously his hand went to the hilt of the sword in the scabbard at his own side. The import of the space that had been left for his weapon was not lost on him. He had attended many of Ashe’s councils before as the heir to the duchy of Navarne, but now he was being included for another reason, as the bearer of an elemental sword. Only five such weapons had ever been forged, and as far as anyone knew, only three now existed.

  All of which were present in the room.

  Gwydion Navarne glanced nervously over at Achmed, who was watching him, his mismatched eyes intent, his all but lipless mouth twisted in the hint of a smile. Gwydion thought back to the day, not that long ago, when the Bolg king had presented him with the sword.

  This is an ancient weapon, the elemental sword of air known as Tysterisk. Though you cannot see its tang or shaft, be well advised that the blade is there, comprised of pure and unforgiving wind. It is as sharp as any forged of metal, and far more deadly. Its strength flows through its bearer; until a short time ago it was in the hands of the creatures that took Rhapsody hostage, part man, part demon, now dead, or so it seems at least. In that time it was tainted with the dark fire of the F’dor, but now it has been cleansed in the wind at the top of Grivven Peak, the tallest of the western Teeth. I claimed it after the battle that ended the life of its former bearer, but that was only because I wanted to give it to you myself. Both Ashe and I agree that you should have it—probably the only thing we have ever agreed on, come to think of it.

  Anborn coughed impatiently.

  Quickly Gwydion drew forth the air sword from its scabbard. Tysterisk, when not being used in combat, appeared as little more than a hilt carved with swirling symbols that seemed to move and dance when in his hand. In the humming presence of the other two elemental weapons the slightest outline of a blade could now be seen. The young duke hastily placed it on the floor, its hilt abutting Grunthor’s triatine, its ephemeral blade crossed with Rial’s solid one, completing the circle.

  Anborn gestured to the chair beside him, and Gwydion took a seat, noting that the swords beneath the table had been arranged with common weapons interposed between each of the elemental ones. He recognized the wisdom of keeping the immense power of those swords separated, but also recalled something else Achmed had told him when the king had presented him with Tysterisk.

  I haven’t done anything to be worthy of such a weapon, Gwydion had said haltingly.

  The Bolg king had snorted with contempt.

  That’s a fallacy long perpetuated by self-important fools. You cannot be “worthy” of a weapon before you begin to use it. It’s in the use of it that your worthiness is assessed. It is an elemental sword—no one is worthy of it. In truth weapons of this kind of ancient power do choose their bearers, and make them, in a way.

  Gwydion watched as Rhapsody bent down, still cradling her infant son, and brought her hand to rest over the circle of swords. She was a good example of what the Bolg king had said, Gwydion knew. While he had been told little of Rhapsody’s life, one detail she had shared with him was that she was of humble birth, the youngest child of a farming family. Her transformation into the Lady Cymrian, and Lirin queen, might have been attributable to many things, but certainly she would not have become the warrior that she was known to be without the aid of Daystar Clarion.

  Perhaps he would have a chance to prove himself more than just a boy duke as well.

  His musings were shattered as she began to sing, a soft note from the back of her throat that resonated at the same pitch as the hum of the elemental weapons. Gwydion listened, enchanted, as she began to weave the swords’ names, along with words he didn’t understand, into her song. Though he knew little of music, and nothing of the Lirin science of Naming, he thought he recognized a change in the musical vibration of each sword, until the three of them, along with Rhapsody’s voice, were making a perfect chord.

  When the music seemed to be holding steady, Rhapsody took Daystar Clarion by the hilt. As her hand made contact, the fiery blade leapt to life, its flames roaring in brilliant colors that stung Gwydion’s eyes. Maintaining her song, she passed the sword over the ring of weapons, as if picking up invisible threads.

  A circle of sparkling light appeared, hovering below the table, then expanded as she waved it away to the earthen ceiling of the hidden room, where it remained, pulsating and still ringing with the chord, as she put her weapon back in the hexagonal ring. It continued to hum, softer, back to its original monotonal pitch, as she ceased her wordless song and fell silent. She listened for a moment, then nodded to herself, smiled at her husband, and prepared to be seated.

  Ashe held Rhapsody’s chair for her
as she settled in with the baby, then took his seat at the table. He unrolled the large scroll, revealing a map of the continent that highlighted in green the lands of the Cymrian Alliance, comprised of Tyrian, the southwestern coastal Lirin realm, the six central provinces of Roland, as well as the Firbolg mountains known as the Teeth at the easternmost border. The northwestern forest of Gwynwood and the small city-state of Sepulvarta, both religious strongholds of the continent’s two major sects, were depicted in white but dotted in green, indicating their allegiance to the Alliance as well as their independence.

  Sepulvarta, sometimes called the City of Reason, was the seat of the Patriarch, the head of the church known generally as the Patrician faith, while Gwynwood was the holy forest of the Filids, nature priests who tended to the Great White Tree of earth. As Lord Cymrian, Ashe was the titular head of both sects, but only ceremonially; he had continued to recognize the independence of both orders upon the formation of the Cymrian Alliance, sponsoring discussions between the two sects that had been adversaries during most of the fourteen centuries since the Cymrian refugees first came to the Wyrmlands.

  “Thank you for your forbearance,” Ashe said. “I know that each of you brings terrible news, as do I. I have asked you to retain it in silence before sharing it, so that the impact of your words will be as pure and accurate as possible.”

  His voice resonated inside the hovering circle of light, the sound remaining trapped within it. The Lord Cymrian reached into his pocket, removed a coin minted with his own aspect, and tossed it on the earthen floor outside the protective spinning light. It landed without sound; satisfied, he continued his address.

  “We know we are facing war—what is at question is the scale of it, and who is allied against us. Each of us holds a piece of that answer, and it is critical that we have as much of the puzzle as we can know before we put our defenses in place. We must ascertain whether what is coming is a war of conquest, driven by the greed of men, or if it is something far darker, more ancient, which has always loomed in the distance. Rhapsody, Namer that she is, has the power to not only record the words for posterity, but to help derive additional meaning from them once they are laid out for her. She has canted a circle of protection to keep our words secret from any ear that could hear them, hiding us all from any eye that could see within our council chamber. She will now remain silent, concentrating on each of our stories. I will speak first.” He turned slightly toward Anborn.