Ash and Silver

by Carol Berg

  He had guided me through every step, and I respected, honored, and loathed him. I craved the hour I could be shed of his cold presence for the last time. Yet that event must surely be a small death I would carry with me always.

  As I moored the boat, Fix the boatmaster told me Inek was likely in the armory, as it was time to advance the enchantments on his current tyros’ blades. I dared not delay reporting. Fix had witnessed my return. Inek would know of it before I reached him.

  Thus I hurried smartly past the boathouse and up a short stair and winding ramp into the sleeping citadel, through the cavernous undervaults where we competed in games of strength or agility, and then upward into the Common Hall, where all at the fortress ate and where tyros, squires, and retainers slept on the floor like household dogs. Outdoors again and across the Inner Court. Shivering in my wet garments, I ascended the steep and exposed stair up the north face of Idolon Mount, Fortress Evanide’s foundation.

  In the vestibule at the top of the stair, I lowered my eyes, touching forehead and heart in respect for the two standing watch. “I am in-mission, sir knights, as yet unreported. I was told Commander Inek worked in the armory.”

  “Blessed return, Greenshank,” said a soft-spoken knight masked in gray and red. “The commander is where you say. Enter.”

  A maze of passages burrowed deep into the rock. They led to our three most secure rooms: the armory, the fortress treasury, and most precious of all, the dark, ever-misty cave of the spring—the source of fresh water that allowed any but birds to live on this rocky islet.

  A beam of magelight led me deep into the armory. Darkness obscured most of the vast cavern’s stores of spelled swords, knives, shields, and armor, the bundled staves, bows, arrows, and caskets of medallions, tokens, and jewels. A basket held tiny squares of silver called untraceables, used to ferret out those who might be alerted to enchantment without revealing the magic’s nature or origin. A lacquered box held silver splinters, which could be linked to transfer enchantments as did those embedded in memory-wipe tokens.

  A magelight globe hung over a long worktable illuminating a well-used sword. From his coarse tunic and slops, the lean man hunched over the sword might have been a smith’s assistant or the squire who catalogued the armory. Until he glanced up, that is, and the ice-blue eyes scraped one’s skin raw, and the sculpted lines of his face registered his judgment. His knuckle-length hair was entirely silver, but he could have been any age from thirty to seventy. And, in truth, if one heard him command the sun to rise in the west, one would believe entirely that the orb would reverse its habit.

  I bowed and touched my brow. “Knight Commander Inek, I report my mission complete.”

  “Blessed return, Greenshank. Unmask and speak.”

  I stripped off the mask and set my bundle on the end of the table. “The purveyor of rarities carried the proper token,” I said, pulling away the wrapping. “Once sure of that, I tested the substance as ordered. I judged it cereus iniga, yielded the payment, and excised Kitaro’s memory.”

  As I spoke, the commander’s attention returned to his work modifying the protections on his tyros’ swords. Enchanting weapons to minimize sepsis or loss of limbs, while maintaining the feel and proper risks of sword – or knifework, was a delicate business. Inek altered the protective spells frequently as his students advanced, sometimes tightening them if the moves to be practiced were particularly dangerous, sometimes loosening them to keep us wary. Sometimes it seemed he did exactly the reverse. It kept his students on edge, alert and focused, as we were always required to fight to our personal limits. We were never quite sure if we might die or wound a comrade on any particular day, but reading an opponent’s weapon was the first step to preventing either disaster.

  At Evanide, one either learned the necessary lessons or broke or died. Rumor told that only one in fifty tyros became a knight. No gossip ever tallied how many of those nine-and-forty failed, their memories of the Order and Evanide erased. Or how many withdrew from the journey with honor, the most trustworthy allowed to retain knowledge of their time here. Or how many died.

  I began again. “I practiced a veil as I was waiting.”

  He glanced up sharply. “You were masked?”

  “Yes. I arrived early. I donned my mask as soon as I heard Kitaro’s footsteps. But the veil enchantment failed, though I detected nothing wrong with it.”

  I could not have said when I had decided to withhold the tale of the woman. If this was a test and Inek already knew of her, punishment was certain; at Evanide, omission and dissembling were equivalent to deliberate untruth. But if she was what she claimed—a friend from the past—and I reported her, Inek would certainly strip away my memory of the incident, while our Knight Marshal decided if her presence compromised the purposes of the Order. I had to know more before I could allow that.

  “I thought to work another veil tomorrow and ask one of the senior parati to inspect it.”

  “Ask Cormorant. He’s expert at veils.” Inek’s forefinger drew a scarlet flame along the sword’s cutting edge. Very, very carefully. “What of your navigation? Night fell on your return. . . .” As he had known it would when he set me the mission in the last hour of a rising tide and said it must be done that day.

  “I made good speed, though I depended too heavily on the Seal Rock beacon. If it had been submerged, I might yet be trying to extricate myself from the Spinner or Hercal’s Downspout. I’ll need to practice the same route when the full moon grows the tide.” Deception grew like a fungus. But I needed to get back to the estuary.

  “Full moon’s six days hence. Highest tide seven.” He lifted his finger from the blade and pinched off the light at the sword’s point. “I’ll note a practice crossing in your training schedule.”

  “As you say, rectoré.”

  Scarlet, vermillion, blood . . . the sword pulsed every hue of red for a few moments. Inek watched it intently, and I took the anxious moment to order my thoughts.

  When the color faded, Inek set the blade aside and laid a second one on the table. His fingers flexed, ready to work. “Is there anything more?”

  A thousand things more, threatening to burst my chest. “Questions plague me, rectoré, as you warned. Not doubts. I am entirely committed. I cannot believe the past holds anything to compare to the gifts of power and good service offered me here. But surely to know myself would make the final relinquishing all the more significant.”

  As ever, his glance of assessment scraped my spirit raw. “You’ve a great deal more to learn before we speak of commitment or the final relinquishing. You’ve held paratus rank for what . . . forty days? You’ve not even begun to feel the plague of questioning you’ll suffer. And inevitably, doubts will follow. Don’t tell me of your resolve, Greenshank; prove it.”

  “Yes, rectoré.”

  “You did well today. Three of our brother knights will use the cereus iniga to save a great city from a terrible foe. Think of the price they will pay, once it’s done—the price you will pay to do such service if and when your time comes. Then see how long you can stave off doubts.”

  As always, he was right. “They’ll not remember what they’ve done,” I said.

  To preserve our ability to serve those who needed our skills, and to ensure that those who joined us did so for the right reasons, knights sacrificed not only their past, but also their glory.

  “Nor will those whose future they save remember who it was defended them,” he said.

  A knight retained everything of his training and experiences inside Evanide. But once he submitted a mission report to the Archivist so that all could study it, the knowledge of his own part in that venture was stripped from him. His body’s understanding of the lessons learned would remain, but if he happened to review that mission in the archives, he wouldn’t recognize it as his own. A harsh, rigorous life, but one that made sense to me. It felt honorable and clea
n, unlike my wavering conscience.

  “Rectoré, I need—”

  “Enough, Greenshank. You’ve an early call tomorrow, as do I. And if I’m to prevent our lackwit tyros from slaughtering one another, I need to finish this. Go to bed.”

  I touched my forehead. “Dalle cineré, Knight Commander.”

  “Dalle cineré.”

  From the ashes. The emblem of the Equites Cineré ought to be a phoenix, as we were each of us built anew from the ashes of the past.

  • • •

  Sleep eluded me. For seven nights I flinched at every sound, afraid Inek had come to throw me in the bay or sentence me to the Disciplinarian’s lash for my lies. Days were filled with training in magic and combat, with running, with practicing veils that even Cormorant, the parati-exter—the next to be knighted—could find no fault with. But through the long nights, my mind revisited the woman’s words, analyzing, questioning until they felt graven in my skin.

  The full moon brought the highest tides to the bay. No matter my frenzy to be gone, I spent a pre-dawn hour in the chart room studying, and presented myself to old Fix at the docks as if this were no more than the navigation practice Inek had scheduled.

  Fix was one of those servitors who must have been at Evanide since its founding. His weather-scored face was not masked, so he was no knight. And no one addressed him as adjutant—one of the skilled trainees who had failed to reach knighthood, but chose to stay on and serve the Order. He was just Fix, who knew everyone who resided at Evanide and everything that went on. I tried always to take a moment to exchange a word with the old man. His knowledge of the sea and boats dwarfed even Inek’s. This day it required patience to heed the boatmaster’s gloomy predictions that storms inevitably accompanied the demon tide.

  As I crossed the bay to the estuary where I’d met Kitaro and the woman, I could afford thought only for rampaging sea, spell-wrought beacons, and faint lines of magic that stretched between submerged rocks. But as I entered the river Gouvron’s mouth, dismay slapped me in the face like a dead fish. The demon tide had spread its waters deep and wide. There were no more muddy banks. The half-drowned reeds were arm-high, not man-high, and all looked the same.

  Cursing, I trolled up and down the lower estuary but the sea had washed away all remnants of Kitaro, donkey, cereus iniga, and magic. No one lurked but birds, insects, and sea creatures. How could I imagine the woman would be waiting? This was surely Inek’s test. So simple a mission. And so abject a failure.

  Mind numb, stomach in knots, I tied the skiff to a random clump of reeds. My shoulders were afire, and surely a giant had battered my back and legs with the trunk of an oak. Like a raw tyro, I’d eaten nothing that morning and drained my water flask early on. To find any water fresh enough to drink on the day of the demon tide would mean rowing upriver past the salt boundary, another five quellae at least. But I’d need every scrap of my strength to get back to Evanide alive. How many names were there for fool?

  I would rest for a quarter of an hour, then head back. . . .

  • • •

  A hard edge rapped my skull. I jerked instantly awake, sprawled in the bottom of the skiff. The restless river had tumbled me from my seat, cracking my forehead on the sternsheet. Great gods, how long had I slept?

  The painter angled sharply upward. Either the reeds had grown dramatically or the ebb was well begun. At least Fix had called the weather wrong. Blue sky teased behind thin, high mist, and the reed shadows had begun to stretch across a golden world of water and marshland. Past time to go. Time to survive the passage, confess my sin, and take my punishment. Inek would likely be waiting at the dock, coolly disappointed that his test had snared me.

  As I stretched out cramps and reclaimed my seat, a black cylinder rolled along the bottom of the bobbing skiff. A spare water flask, I thought at first, as pleased as one could be when facing such an ordeal. But the shape was wrong; it was straight sided and tied at both ends. The leather covering was not stiffened and hardened, but wrapped about something else and sealed with resin. Proof of our friendship . . .

  Cold fingers fumbled with the damp leather ties and pulled a rolled parchment from the casing. Magic assured me there were no enchantments to harm or trick, no poisons or pricking needles. But certainly a deeper enchantment suffused the fine parchment, heating a knot just behind my breastbone. My body named the spellwork benign, though reason could not explain why. I spread the page.

  The world paused. Surely the squalling gulls were halted mid-flight, their rapid hearts stilled . . . as mine was. An ink drawing depicted a naked woman reclining on a grassy hillock bathed in afternoon light. The lines of her hip and thigh were long and elegant, her legs firm and powerful, her thick hair a cascade of curls over her shoulder. The drawing itself was masterful, assured and balanced and so real . . . so true . . . that I could smell the meadowsweet and sun-warmed grass her body crushed. The very woman I had met here.

  But unlike the previous day, her bare skin was marked with fine and elegant drawings. Luminous images of honeysuckle vines entwined her arms and legs. Simple threads wrapped her fingers. A butterfly graced one hip. A lynx curled amid a stand of aspens on her back, and a nightingale on her cheek spread its wings across her brow and down her neck. Danae . . .

  Gods’ witness, the image was truth, and tales of the world’s creation—knowledge the Order had not taken from me—spoke of only one sort of creature whose body gleamed with nature’s own artworks. Danae—the earth’s mythical guardians. Tales said the exquisite lines would gleam every shade of blue—lapis and azure, cerulean, sapphire, and indigo. Legend explained how she could be here and then not, for Danae could travel at will through the world and dissolve into earth or sea. Gods and myth held no sway at Evanide, but this . . .

  Yet it was neither divine revelation nor sheerest wonder that made my hands tremble. As my fingers traced the curves of her shoulder, her neck, and the perfect wing scribed on her brow, I knew what ink had been used, the width of the pen, the technique used to shadow the cheek to reveal the slender bone beneath or to reveal the brilliance in her eyes. Magic swelled in my breast, where the fiery knot burned. With a touch I should be able to quirk her lips as I’d seen them the previous day, for that, too, would be truth, or extend her finger as she had done to touch my mask . . .

  My bellow could have roused every bird that nested in the Gouvron Estuary or the coastal marshes. This drawing was a fragment of my soul as much as that chip of stone hidden in Fortress Evanide. And yet I could not remember her name, nor what we had done together, nor how I could possibly know a being of myth. If this was a test, then it demonstrated a measure of cruelty that could change my every perception of the Equites Cineré.

  The discipline that embodied my present life quickly tamed inner chaos. Yet as I rolled the page to store it away, one more detail of the drawing leapt out at me. In the lower right corner, the artist had scrawled his name. I touched that, too, and it felt as familiar as the ink and parchment.

  Lucian de Remeni-Masson. His name. My name.

  Evidently I drew portraits and my magic instilled them with truth. Yet I could not remember doing so, nor when or where I’d learned the skills. Save for the burning in my chest, all of it was gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  According to Fix the boatmaster, Knight Commander Inek could be found in the sparring arena with Dunlin and Heron, the third paratus of my cadre. But when I reached the arena, Inek was nowhere in sight. Dunlin knelt beside our grimacing third, tightening a bandage about his bleeding thigh. Patchy enchantment mottled the air about the two, so I didn’t interrupt. Healing enchantments were a critical portion of a knight’s training, though mostly futile for anyone who wasn’t born with the bent for it.

  Like Lucian de Remeni, who instead carried a bent for portraiture. I crushed that thought. No more thinking until I spoke to Inek.

  “A rugged session?” I said when D
unlin sat back on his heels and tossed the roll of linen into the wooden box.

  Dunlin crooked his head in distinct mockery of our swordmaster. “Is it possible we forgot our nether limbs again, Paratus Heron?”

  Heron, a scrappy, spindle-limbed fellow with sinews like drawn steel, hopped up from the blood-spattered stone muttering a curse upon Dunlin’s unknown heritage. He wiped down his sword and sheathed it, and waved off my outstretched hand as he hobbled away. “I’ll be in the infirmary. This hamfist’s bandaging will likely have this cursed leg rotted by morning.”

  “Now you, Greenshank, a bit of extra work?” asked Dunlin, making a great show of wiping the blood from his blade. “You seem a bit soggy.”

  I shook my head. “I’m yet in-mission, hunting Inek.”

  His face sobered immediately. “Blessed return. Inek was summoned to the Marshal not a half hour since.”

  “I’ll be ready for a match later,” I said on my way out. “Any weapon.” My swordwork was ever in need of extra practice, but it was the fight I needed more. The hard row back had kept inner turmoil at bay, but since I’d left the boat, guilt, desire, and confusion raged inside me in a whirlpool worthy of Evanide’s storm tides. I had to tell Inek the truth. Perhaps having the unsanctioned knowledge ripped out would keep my skull from cracking. Yet I wasn’t sure I could allow him to do that. Danae. Holy Deunor . . .

  • • •

  The Knight Marshal of Evanide had no name. At the Rite of Breaking, when the knight-in-waiting smashed the fragment of stone that held his past, he announced the name he would carry for the rest of his life. Unless he was eventually named Knight Marshal. When the knights chose a replacement for a deceased or retired Marshal, only the Knight Archivist, the caretaker of our memories and the Order’s history, knew the identity of the one selected. If the man chosen accepted the office, his former name was marked as knight-deceased throughout the archives and excised from the memory of every member of the Order—including his own. Anonymity meant freedom to make hard decisions for a man who must send his knights into the most dangerous places in a dangerous world.