Ash and Silver
Page 1
PRAISE FOR CAROL BERG AND HER NOVELS
“Carol Berg is an absolutely gorgeous writer. . . . She does incredible, intricate world building that moves along like a deep, powerful river: It looks, on the surface, as though it’s carrying along at a reasonable rate, with occasional dips and swirls into eddies, but beneath that is an absolutely tremendous current pulling you along toward inexorable rapids, and you barely know it’s happened until you’re already over your head. And then, just in case that’s not enough, she does exactly the same thing with the character development, resulting in works of stunning scope that are also enormously internal journeys of discovery for not just the characters, but the reader.”
—C. E. Murphy, author of the Walker Papers series
“Among my favorite fantasies EVER! Carol Berg develops her characters, story, and world with a well-rounded brilliance seldom seen in fantasy, and a beauty that leaves a reader breathless.”
—Janny Wurts, author of Wars of Light and Shadow (on Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone)
“Carol Berg’s writing is some of the most lyrical and flowing I have run across. Her books all have some innate grace that serves as a marker against which I measure almost every other book I read. Berg’s books aren’t just books; they are art, and she’s a master of the wordsmithing craft. Her writing style gives all of her books a dreamlike quality that I love. Her stories are more real than real, and her characters are so vibrant, you live those moments as you read, and you learn so much about yourself as you do it.”
—Bookworm Blues
Dust and Light
“[A] captivating and satisfying fantasy epic. . . . With an impressive command of language, sure-handed plotting, and perceptive characterizations, Berg traces the arc of Lucian’s arduous quest to solve the murders of several illegitimate royals.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Carol Berg has spun a tale of magic and politics, of intrigue and betrayal. Set in a rich world, told through the eyes of a compelling and sympathetic hero, her story twists and turns, building to a conclusion that satisfies while hinting at more adventures to come. I eagerly await the next Sanctuary novel.”
—D. B. Jackson, author of the Thieftaker Chronicles
Breath and Bone
“The narrative crackles with intensity against a vivid backdrop of real depth and conviction, with characters to match. Altogether superior.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Berg’s lush, evocative storytelling and fully developed characters add up to a first-rate purchase for most fantasy collections.”
—Library Journal
“Replete with magic-powered machinations, secret societies, and doomsday divinations, the emotionally intense second volume of Berg’s intrigue-laden Lighthouse Duet concludes the story of Valen. . . . Fans of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon sequence and Sharon Shinn will be rewarded.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Berg combines druid and Christian influences against a backdrop of sorcerers, priestesses, priests, deep evil, and a dying land to create an engrossing tale to get lost in . . . enjoyable.”
—Monsters and Critics
“An excellent read . . . a satisfying sequel.”
—Fresh Fiction
Flesh and Spirit
“In Carol Berg’s engrossing Flesh and Spirit, an engaging rogue stumbles upon the dangerous crossroads of religion, politics, war, and destiny. Berg perfectly portrays the people who shape his increasingly more chaotic journey: cheerful monks, cruel siblings, ambitious warlords, and a whole cast of fanatics. But it’s the vividly rendered details that give this book such power. Berg brings to life every stone in a peaceful monastery and every nuance in a stratified society, describing the difficult dirty work of ordinary life as beautifully as she conveys the heart-stopping mysticism of holiness just beyond human perception.”
—Sharon Shinn, national bestselling author of Royal Airs
“Carol Berg has done a masterful job of creating characters, places, religions, and political trials that grab and hold your attention. . . . Don’t miss one of 2007’s best fantasy books!”
—Romance Reviews Today
“It’s challenging to create a main character who’s not exactly a good guy and yet still elicits reader sympathy. Carol Berg’s newest novel, Flesh and Spirit, features a man who has committed quite a few misdeeds and yet remains likable. . . . Berg also excels at creating worlds. . . . It’s like we’re exploring this world alongside its characters, and this technique works remarkably well. . . . I’m eagerly awaiting the duology’s concluding volume, Breath and Bone. This first installment is an engrossing and lively tale with enough action to keep you hungry for more.”
—The Davis Enterprise
The Daemon Prism
“[Berg’s] insight into the nature of human good and evil, the constantly ebbing and flowing relationships among lovers and friends . . . consistently raises this novel above sword-and-sorcery routine.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An amazingly complex and rewarding story. The Daemon Prism is certain to reward the devoted students of the Collegia Magica trilogy.”
—Booklist
“One of the best fantasies I have encountered in years. . . . Berg takes chances with her characters . . . that leave them imprinted indelibly in your memory and heart . . . wonderful.”
—Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys
“Enthralling and not to be missed.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Filled with action and feeling as if it occurs in a Berg version of the Age of Reason; fans will appreciate this stupendous story.”
—Alternative Worlds
BOOKS BY CAROL BERG
THE SANCTUARY SERIES
Dust and Light
Ash and Silver
THE COLLEGIA MAGICA SERIES
The Spirt Lens
The Soul Mirror
The Daemon Prism
THE LIGHTHOUSE SERIES
Flesh and Spirit
Breath and Bone
THE BRIDGE OF D’ARNATH SERIES
Son of Avonar
Guardians of the Keep
The Soul Weaver
Daughter of Ancients
Song of the Beast
THE RAI-KIRAH SERIES
Transformation
Revelation
Restoration
Published by New American Library,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
This book is an original publication of New American Library.
Copyright © Carol Berg, 2015
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Berg, Carol.
Ash and silver: a sanctuary novel / Carol Berg.
pages cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-60311-6
I. Title.
PS3602.E7523A9 2015
813’.6—dc23 2015019866
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Praise
Books by Carol Berg
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
PART I
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
PART II
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
PART III
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
PART IV
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
About the Author
FOR PETE, THE EXCEPTIONAL SPOUSE, MY TRUE HEART AND MY BEST FRIEND, EVER AND ALWAYS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my extra eyes—Susan, Curt, Courtney, Brian, and Saytchyn. And to Brenda, ever-inspiring and ever-generous with home and heart. To the Writers of the Hand for companionship on the journey and for energy, fun, food, wine, and focus, focus, focus. To Mike, Stella, Richard, Twila, and all the crew at the Hand for providing a refuge when life got too hectic at low altitude. To Marcus the Fighter Guy for combat advice. To my editor, Anne Sowards, for her gifts of commentary, trust, and understanding of life’s knotty seasons. To my faithful readers for support and unending encouragement. And most especially to Linda the Muse for twenty-seven years of friendship, mentoring, incisive questioning, plot-twisting, and lunch. Looking forward to many, many more.
The teeth of spring bite sea and stone. Storm and mist shadow the cove. The glade starves. Where is the fire? Where is the heart? Where is the gladness of the season, when danger lurks amid trees yet barren, and in the sea yet cold and dark? Dance, my brother. Spin, my sister. For root and sap, for wave and worm. Call glory to banish grief too long lingered.
—Canticle of the Spring
PART I
SEA AND STONE
CHAPTER 1
YEAR 1293 OF THE ARDRAN PRINCIPALITY
YEAR 216 FROM THE UNIFICATION OF ARDRA, MORIAN, AND EVANORE AS THE KINGDOM OF NAVRONNE
YEAR 3 INTERREGNUM, MOURNING THE DEATH OF GOOD KING EODWARD
LATE SPRING
You are not a murderer. The curious fact had been served to me that morning like cold fish on a platter, to be digested as I took my daily run.
My bare feet slapped on the mudflats, instinct bound with magic leading me inerrant between pools and mud and the sucking sands left behind by the tides. Cold damp slicked my bare arms. Fine soft particles of sand and clay coated my feet.
That I had ever taken life unsanctioned by law or duty would never have occurred to me. It was true, the story of my years before coming to Fortress Evanide remained a gaping void inside my skin. And some of my comrades here had almost certainly escaped from rough entanglements with Crown law. But my habits and inclinations, so carefully examined and strictly groomed in my training, suggested nothing like in my own nature. Yet if I had not been similarly entangled, why would my guide choose that fragment of my past to return to me—infused by way of enchantment so that I recognized its indisputable truth?
My destination had not yet emerged from the thick fog, though its chill stone bulk loomed scarce half a quellé ahead of me. Formidable. Hidden. Fortress Evanide—its name derived from the Aurellian word for disappeared, like those who worked, studied, and trained here. Supposedly the few hardy travelers who ventured this tide-scoured coast believed the place a stronghold of the gods . . . or demon gatzi . . . or even more elemental creatures of air and sea who sent the rampaging waters to drown any who ventured close.
My arm blotted the salt sweat stinging my eyes.
Every day at Evanide I raced this course. Some days it stormed. Some days the sea never entirely relinquished the flats. Still I ran—or swam if it was impossible to stay afoot. At first, two hovering guards had watched amused as I floundered in sinkholes and tide pools and retched from unfocused terror and unaccustomed exertion. Later I ran with a companion of my cadre, a paratus, a man lacking only his final months of training before taking on the arms of the Equites Cineré, the Order of the Knights of the Ashes. Now that I was myself a paratus, I was required to run alone, just as I now slept alone for the first time in all my days here—two years, more or less, by my reckoning of the seasons.
Commander Inek, my guide, had told me that the solitude prevented more men from taking the last step from paratus to knight than any other aspect of our training. I’d been skeptical until I, too, experienced these solitary hours when questions and fears, so long suppressed, rattled around in the emptiness inside my skull. Where is my home? Who are my people? How have I come to be here?
No one came to Evanide unwilling. Magic powerful enough to remove memory could not be effected without some measure of consent on the part of the subject. Why would I have agreed to such a thing? What had I been?
Not a murderer. That, I supposed, was a comfort. I was a sorcerer of more than average skill, although my deepest talent—the inborn bent that was the keystone of every sorcerer’s work—had been deliberately hidden in the same moment my past was ripped away. Instead, my masters at Evanide had taken the retching, wretched tyro, who’d had to crawl the last quellé across the mud those first days, and made a warrior of him.
Screeching gulls mocked my passing.
Warrior. That was an ill-fitting skin as yet. My initial weakness, physical ineptitude, and ignorance of defensive and strategic magical practices testified that my life had been a comfortable one, focused on more sedentary pursuits. But once convinced I was not going to be purposely drowned or driven entirely mad, I had grown to relish Evanide’s rigor, living and breathing the lessons of magical warfare, preparing to combat the evils of a world I could recall only in the abstract. Every day I reveled in the satisfaction of growing strength and agility. And the magic seared my soul with wonder and glory—defenses and attacks, obscurés and veils, encryption, exposures, strategies of wit and illusion to support an ally or confuse an opponent, weapons crafted from light, heat, and cold as well as steel and wood. The Order’s training stretched body and talent in ways I could never have imagined, no matter what my previous life.
Our masters had made us empty so we could learn without boundaries, Commander Inek had told me in the days when the ache in my head and the vacancy inside kept me constantly breathless and nauseated. Only now that I was left alone to consider it all had the questions returned a thousandfold, less fraught with emotion, but plaguing nonetheless. Who was I? Who am I?
A deep and resonant horn call split the muffled silence of the fog—the tide call, its rising note soun
ding as much in my gut as in my ears. A second blast followed. The sea was ever our first enemy. A single long blast meant the turn—the ebb was done. The double warned of the deluge.
My feet sped up on their own. The tidal onrush in Evanide’s bay bore the strength of an avalanche, spawning deadly whirlpools and vicious currents as it raced across the mudflats and up the rivers and swamps of the level coast. Though an hour yet remained until the onslaught, my body had learned its lessons well.
Every tyro of Evanide was dragged from sleep at least once during his months of initiation and sent onto the mudflats at low tide, forbidden to return to the fortress until the rising water had reached the octaré mark on the tide pillar—the height of eight men standing on one another’s shoulders. Two of my cadre’s five had drowned in their test, unable to muster wit, strength, and magic enough to survive the maelstrom. For the rest of us, the experience lived on in our nightmares, ground into our bones and sinews, as our commanders knew it would be. We never began a day unaware of the tide charts. And when the hour warning sounded, our feet ran.
“Get a move on, Greenshank!” Dunlin, the scarred, cocky second paratus of my cadre, was perched on the rocks beside the water gate like his namesake bird. He didn’t unlatch the gate for me. The spells for all entries and defense works changed randomly throughout the day and night, and it was each man’s responsibility to unravel them for himself. Agility was not just for feet and hands. “Inek has a change of work detail for you this morning.”
“Gods be thanked,” I said, as my fingers investigated the tendrils of spellwork that entwined the bronze latch and my inner senses responded with the counters. “Totting up bundles of reeds and quivres of salt and calculating factors’ commissions have me ready to leap from the seaward wall.”
All were required to train in the business of the Order as well as its martial purposes.
“You must have been well behaved of late.” Dusky-skinned Dunlin picked his sound teeth with a sliver of reed, a show of nonchalance. “Fix is readying a boat for you.”