The Assassin King

by Elizabeth Haydon

  Anborn looked up in annoyance.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

  The Lord Marshal took off his spectacles and laid them down on the map.

  “No,” he said shortly. “That will not do. I’m busy—go away.”

  “But I’ m leaving in a few moments,” Rhapsody said, nonplussed. They had often had such exchanges; she had long been accustomed to Anborn’s gruff manner, and knew that it masked something deeper, most likely a fear for her safety, and very possibly that of the continent. “The very least you can do is pause long enough to say goodbye as well.”

  “Are you deaf? No. I will not.”

  Rhapsody turned to Gwydion Navarne, who looked uncomfortable.

  “Excuse us for a moment, Gwydion,” she said. “I think Ashe might need your assistance in the preparations anyway—we depart as soon as the horses are provisioned and ready.”

  The young duke nodded and left the room.

  Rhapsody came over to Anborn’s chair and stared down at him. His hair was still black as night save for the streaks of silver that had grown slightly wider in the four years since she had met him; his upper body was still muscular and strong, but he had the air of an aged man, much more than the time would warrant. He has grown old before my eyes, Rhapsody thought. “All right,” she said briskly, “we’re alone now. What is this nonsense?”

  Anborn exhaled wearily. “Aside from the few cherished opportunities I had to actually kiss you goodbye when we were pledged to marry, do you ever recall me saying that word to you?”

  Color flooded into the Lady Cymrian’s face. Anborn’s reference was to a time she still regarded with awkward memory, confusing days during which she had asked him to be a loveless consort to her as Lirin queen. The Lord Marshal had been good-natured about it, as well as in releasing her from her pledge when he discovered that she and his nephew were in love, but this was the first time he had teased her about their near-miss at matrimony.

  “No,” she said haltingly.

  “And I don’t intend to do so now. We both have work to do which will take us from this place; you are merely leaving first. So do it; be done with it. Go. I have no desire to mark this parting with such a word. Unless, of course, you wish to kiss me first—that does tend to take some of the sting out of it.” He winced as her eyes began to glisten, then shook his head. “Forgive me, m’lady, I’m being coarse and unpleasant, and you don’t deserve it. It is not you from whom I should have withheld a goodbye, but rather someone else much like you, very long ago.” He watched her press her lips together to forestall the question that had risen to them, and almost chuckled. “Thank you for not asking. I will tell you the story some day, when we are sitting at ease, playing with my great-nephew.”

  Rhapsody smiled slightly, putting her hand to her cheek, now pale again. “Agreed,” she said, “but only if you wish.”

  Anborn sighed. “There is little that I wish anymore, Rhapsody. I’ve lived too long, seen too much, to bother wishing for anything. This cursed lengthy life span, bequeathed to me either by whatever my father did to cheat time, or my mother’s dragon blood, has given me a sour outlook. This is the way of stupid longevity. It insures cynicism, because it guarantees that unlike the rest of oblivious humanity, the all-but-immortal realize that they will never really know peace. You, being similarly cursed, just haven’t figured it out yet. When one lives long enough, he learns that there is no such thing as peace, just longer and shorter intervals between wars. Life becomes an endless and often arduous series of goodbyes, laced with dread, unless you can learn to expect never to see anyone you care for again. I have learned this lesson in the ugliest ways imaginable, Rhapsody. So I will bid you farewell, wish you safe journey and Godspeed, express my hope, and expectation, that you and your child will be safe among the Firbolg, and that your undertakings will prove fruitful to the war effort. But I will not say goodbye to you.”

  The Lady Cymrian smiled, her wan face taking on more color for a moment. “Very well, then.” She reached into the leather bag and pulled out a large conch shell, turning it over in her small hands; Anborn watched her absently caress the homed crown with the calloused tips of long slender fingers that had hardened in uncounted years of playing stringed instruments, not unlike the hard pads on his own digits, ossified from centuries of plucking bowstrings. Odd, he mused as she took his hand in her own and turned it upright, then placed the shell in the scarred palm and gently bent his broken-knuckled fingers around it I suppose we each make music in our own way, she for the purpose of lifting hearts, me for the purpose of piercing them with arrows.

  Rhapsody saw the look of wry amusement pass over his face and smiled.

  “Long ago, back on the Island, when I was first learning to be a Storysinger, I knew a barkeep named Barney.” She chuckled. “Did you know all barkeeps in Serendair were named Barney? Every one?”

  Anborn studied the shell. “No. Why?”

  “The legend had it that a barkeep named Barney had witnessed something he should not have in the course of his rum-serving duties, and the dangerous man whose name was mentioned in what he had heard sent an assassin from a faraway town to find and kill the barkeep. So this Barney left his little town in the dead of night, made his way to Easton, the largest port city in Serendair, and found a job in another tavern, along with putative safety. A year or more went by, but the assassin was patient, and eventually discovered that Barney was now living in Easton, so he made his way to that city, intent on completing his contract.

  “Word of the killer’s approach arrived quickly—bartenders hear everything first—news that an assassin was coming, looking for a man he had never seen, who was working in a place with a great many taverns, inns, and pubs. Upon his arrival, the assassin went to the first pub he found, a place with two men working the bar. He asked if Barney was about. ‘Indeed,’ came the reply, according to legend. ‘Which one ya lookin’ fer?’ Not only were both men in that establishment named Barney, but in each such place the city over, every man serving ale or spirits from behind a tableboard was invariably called by the same name. Bartenders take care of their own; they work in a business that requires them to hear much and say very little. So when they heard the plight of one of their fellows, they underwent Renaming as a group, to a man, so that henceforth they would be even more anonymous, even more safe from the retribution of nefarious men and assassins. Unless the hired killer was willing to take the life of each man serving spirits in the entirety of the city, he would never find the one his employer sought to have killed. So he gave up and never returned, because even an assassin has standards—and a need for ale once in a while.”

  Anborn, who had chuckled at the tale, allowed the humor to leave his eyes as they met hers.

  “Was that assassin Achmed?” he asked quietly.

  Rhapsody’s face went slack. She released the shell and the Lord Marshal’s hand, and turned away toward the window of the room.

  “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, her back to Anborn. Silhouetted against the setting sun, she seemed even more thin and wraithlike than he had noted upon seeing her after her ordeal. “I didn’t know him in those days. I would doubt it, however. My understanding is that Achmed rarely, if ever, missed a shot or lost the trail of prey.” The last words fell awkwardly from her mouth; she shut it abruptly and pulled at the drape, letting more of the fading light enter the room. And he would have had no compunction about killing every Barney in the town if he had to. Achmed can pour his own ale.

  “Do you ever stop to think your loyalty to him is misplaced?” Anborn asked, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Don’t get me wrong, my dear; I am in no position to condemn any man for the sins of his past. It just appears to me that you are risking much of what you love for someone whose entire view of the world is anathema to everything you profess to believe.”

  The Lady Cymrian remained silent for the span of seventy heartbeats.

 
“I always thought you liked him,” she said after a moment.

  Anborn drew himself up taller, then sighed dispiritedly.

  “I do—but that doesn’t change the validity of my concern for you. You’ll notice I have asked you the same about my nephew and, in fact, myself. You are a woman that treasures things none of us truly care for—and to that end, in trying to see good in us which does not exist, you may undo yourself. And your child.”

  Rhapsody returned to him and sat by his side. “I was telling you the story of Barney,” she went on as if she had not heard him. “My Barney—the one I knew in Easton. He was a little old proprietor of an inn called the Hat and Feathers. Had a wife named Dee and a generous heart. He was also the first person I ever spoke the True Name of—or, more precisely, I wrote it down when I was learning to graph musical script. I told him to have a troubadour play it for him one day, if one should come along. And apparently one did; he played Barney the song of his own name, though neither of them knew what it was. Barney found it to be a catchy tune, and so he hummed it to himself every day, while washing glasses and serving ale.” Her eyes grew brighter. “He still does, as far as I know.” She averted her eyes as Anborn’s gaze grew suddenly sharp.

  “Say what you mean,” the Lord Marshal commanded.

  “I mean that all those centuries ago in the Third Age of history, a man learned to sing his True Name to himself, day into night, for each of the days of his life forward. His beloved wife grew old and died; war came to the Island, and went, taking a generation with it. Centuries of rebuilding passed, until Gwylliam’s vision of the Cataclysm was revealed, and when the Cymrians made an exodus to this place, Barney went with them. He lived through the whole thing, Anborn—the exodus, the journey, the building and undoing of the Cymrian empire, the war, the years of silent misery—and to this day, he quietly tends bar in a small fishing village on the western coast, looking exactly like the same man who I kissed on the cheek and walked away from two thousand years ago. The song of his name has seemed to have sustained him; each time he hums the melody, it remakes him, in a sense, to what he was on the day he learned it.”

  She tapped the shell in his hand.

  “Grunthor gave me this a few years ago, when we first came to this place. A thoughtful gift; he believed it might help with the nightmares that had been plaguing me since girlhood, thought I might be comforted by the sound of the sea. And he was right, though I think perhaps it was more the kindness that consoled me than the roaring of the waves.” Her smile brightened even as the look in her eyes grew serious. “In that time I have kept it carefully as a reminder of what it was that allowed me to survive all that had befallen me—not my wits, if I have any, or my strength, minimal as it is, but the love of those dear to me. I give it to you now, and in it I have sung the song of your True Name, Anborn ap Gwylliam, son of Anwyn.” She squeezed his hand.

  The Lord Marshal sighed. “I am not in need of your comfort, m’lady,” he said as pleasantly as he could. “I am in need of focus and concentration—war is looming. The last thing I wish to be distracted by is foolish consolation.”

  “I know,” Rhapsody said. “It is not for consolation that I am giving it to you, but for healing.” Her voice became softer, as if the words caused her pain. “It was I that caused you to be lame, when you caught me from the sky as I fell from Anwyn’s grasp at the battle after the Cymrian Council.” She waved him into silence as he attempted to speak. “It is because of me that you have lost the freedom you once had, the freedom you told me you valued above all other things. I have tried many times to heal those injuries, to make you whole again, but my knowledge, my abilities, are not strong enough.”

  The Lord Marshal squeezed her hand. “Your abilities were sufficient to keep me from death, to return me to health, if not vitality—”

  “It is not enough,” Rhapsody interrupted. “If you are to lead the forces of the Middle Continent again in a war that is perhaps directed by malicious greed and a desire for conquest, or perhaps something darker, something demonic, you will need to be as hale and able as it is possible for you to be. And what I have come to understand since Meridion’s birth, since my time in Elynsynos’s Lair, is that I have been going about this in the wrong way. I could heal you, Anborn, save you from death, but I cannot remake you to what you were, because only you can do that. Only you know the man you were, and are, what you have seen and done. Only you own the memories of everything that has happened to you in the course of a very long lifetime. Good and bad, those memories are what make you whole—and I believe only you can embrace them enough to allow them to restore what you were.”

  The large hands that encircled her small ones trembled slightly. Anborn looked down at where their hands were joined.

  “I don’t know that I want that man back,” he said tonelessly. “I’ve done many terrible things in my life, Rhapsody, things you may know of, many more that you don’t. Perhaps, in the course of prosecuting the war that is to come, I will do them again, or worse. If the cost of purging those things from my soul was the loss of my legs, then so be it.”

  Rhapsody inhaled. “It was not,” she said, her voice ringing with a Namer’s truth. “You cannot purge anything that has happened to you, as if it were an impurity of steel to be smelted away in a forge fire. All that has gone before has made you what you are, like notes in a symphony. Whole or lame, you are who you are. Ryle hira, as the Lirin say. Life is what it is. Forgive yourself.” She released his hands and pushed the shell against his chest. “At least try to be as whole as you can, if not for yourself, then for the men you lead. And for me.”

  The Lord Marshal’s rigid face relaxed a little.

  “You are very infused with admiration for yourself, and your place in my esteem,” he said jokingly. “All right—what must I do?”

  “Hold the shell to your ear, perhaps before you lie down to sleep, perhaps when you wake. Listen to the music within it; it may take you a while to even hear the song in the crashing of the waves. Hum it, or sing it if you can hear the words, though that is not an easy thing to do unless you are trained as a Singer. Just try, please—try to remember who you were and blend that in with who you are. I don’t know if it will make any difference, but we are about to be parted, one from the other, for what we both know will be a long time, if not forever. I beg you, Anborn, do this one last thing for me. If not for me, do it to add one more healthy body to the fight for the survival of the Middle Continent, and perhaps the world.”

  Their eyes met sharply, and for an instant they both recalled another discussion years before, the meeting in which she had asked him to consider being her consort.

  Let us not mince words, General. We both know that war is coming; it draws closer with every passing moment. And while you have seen war firsthand, I have seen the adversary—or at least one of them. We will need everything we have, everything, to merely survive its awakening, let alone defeat it. I will waste neither the blood nor the time of the Lirin fending off a martial challenge over something so stupid as my betrothal. A marriage of convenience is an insignificant price to pay to keep Tyrian safe and at peace for as long as possible. We will need every living soul when the time comes.

  “I will,” the Lord Marshal promised finally. “Even as I split the ears of the men encamped near me with the horror of my singing voice, for you I will make the attempt, Rhapsody. I will try to imagine you as I do, singing to my great-nephew, and perhaps that will ease my sense of ridiculousness. But, in return, you must promise to let go the silly burden you have carried of the responsibility for my laming. My rescue of you was foretold in prophecy centuries before I ever laid eyes on you, and if I learned nothing else from my cursed mother, may maggots eat her eyes, it was that you cannot fight Fate.” His blue eyes twinkled in the growing darkness. “Of course, if I see Fate coming, I intend to make a good tussle of it anyway.”

  A knock sounded as the door opened, and Ashe’s shadow appeared in the doorway.

 
; “The preparations are under way, and should be completed shortly, Aria,” he said. “The quartermaster intends to have the horses tacked and ready to leave in a quarter hour.” He eyed Anborn for a moment, then extended his hand to his wife.

  Rhapsody rose and came to him, taking his hand. “Who has the baby?”

  “Grunthor.”

  “Do you think that was wise? Did you feed him first?”

  “The baby?”

  “That wasn’t who I meant.” Rhapsody turned one last time and smiled at the Lord Marshal. “Good fortune in all that you will be undertaking,” she said. “And remember your promise.”

  Anborn swiped an impatient hand at her.

  “Go,” he said curtly.

  Rhapsody watched him for a moment longer, then let go of Ashe’s hand, came back to where the Lord Marshal sat, and stood before him. She bent down slightly and pressed her lips to his, allowing her hands to rest on his wide shoulders, taking her time, breathing in his breath. Then she returned to her astonished husband and left the room without looking back.

  Anborn waited until the heavy door had closed solidly behind them, their footsteps fading away in the hallway beyond. When at last he could no longer hear any trace of sound, he picked up his spectacles and returned to his work.

  “Goodbye,” he said softly to the map on the desk in front of him.

  13

  “I’m not even going to ask what just happened,” Ashe muttered as they walked down the hallway with the same sense of controlled urgency that had been in place since the meeting. “That was not a sight I had hoped to keep in my eyes as we are about to be parted in the advent of war. Please be certain that you do not do that to Achmed where I can see—I’ll be unable to take nourishment for weeks.”

  Rhapsody was lost in thought and didn’t hear him.