by Ken Scholes
She read wonder in his voice, and her eyes narrowed. “What do you know, Seamus?”
He drew in his breath. “I know that it can’t be so,” he said again. “She couldn’t be.. I helped your father bury her. The fever took her in the first month.” He looked to her. “Unless. ”
Yes, she thought. It was possible. She’d watched the drop from the phial bring Petronus back. She’d seen the second drop heal Jakob. The dead could be raised.
Or, she thought, a death could be faked. Petronus again came to mind.
“And her name was Winteria?”
Seamus nodded. “Yes.”
She sat with this and tried to take it in. Why wasn’t this in the Book? She’d seen not a hint of it through all her father’s writings. and his closest friend, Hanric, had said nothing of it to her. “Why was her death kept secret?”
Seamus’s eyes were hard now. “Her birth was kept secret as well. Only a handful of us knew, and your father swore us to silence. Your mother was kept in isolation from the time she first conceived.”
“But why?” she asked again.
He shook his head. “I do not know.”
“Do not know or will not tell?” She raised her voice and heard the bitterness in it. “Seamus, I abjure you to tell me what you know.”
He shook his head. “I know nothing, my queen.”
Winters stood, and she felt a wave of nausea roll over her as the truth settled in. “If you speak truth, then I am not your queen.”
And without another word, she slipped out of the tent and into the frozen night.
Turning north, she slipped past the Gypsy guards and wandered toward the treeline at the edge of the ruined plain.
This was familiar ground. Not so long ago, she’d walked this plain with Neb as he patrolled the gravedigger’s defenses. Where was he, she wondered? Her dreams were empty without him. Violence and blood and dark birds filled them, and there was no comforting word in it for her. Still, she clung to her memory of him and longed to walk with him again. Longed for him to tell her that everything would be fine, that home still arose though she was no longer certain that it did.
And she missed the dreams. Not the ones of late that unfolded now behind her eyes.
In that future, the light swallowed her Book of Dreaming Kings. And a song-mad Tertius playing it upon the harp-led her love away from her and deeper into desolation. Her secret sister-back from the dead, it seemed, and sharing her name-built shrines to Wizard Kings long dead and cut their mark into her people and their children, openly pledging themselves in service to the Crimson Empress whose soon-coming they preached.
The Marshfolk were gone. The Machtvolk had returned in their place. And now she was gone, as well, and another Winteria would climb the spire and announce herself Machtvolk Queen and Bond-Servant of House Y’Zir.
Until this day, she’d never felt an orphan, because she’d always had her people. And even when their sudden fall to the Y’Zirite heresy had shaken her, until she saw her sister, until she recognized her own eyes, her own mouth, her own nose upon the older Winteria, she’d not truly believed she’d lost them.
But she had. And beyond the loss of her name, her people, her dream and her love, Winters had also lost her faith, she realized. She felt the hole where it had been and wondered how it had vanished so fast. And she wondered how or if she would ever get it back. She doubted it.
But just as when she’d lost Hanric and before him, her father and her mother, she would take this loss into herself and would drink the pain of it.
As the sun rose, she turned to the east to watch it and knew what she would do. She returned quietly to camp and left again with a small bundle beneath her arm.
She walked upriver until she was out of eyeshot of the camp and she stripped carefully, feeling the cold winter air move over her, causing her to shudder.
Teeth chattering, she waded out into that river and quickly scrubbed the mud and ash from her body. She pulled the braids from her hair and sent the bits of stick and leaf floating downriver. Then she scrubbed with the bar of strong soap until the numbness of the cold water drove her back to shore. She dried off with a rough cotton towel from the Ninefold Forest supply wagon and dressed herself in a calico dress and boots.
Buttoning her fur coat against the cold, Winters turned her back to the north and returned to camp.
Tomorrow, she would ride with Lynnae and Jin Li Tam and Jakob. She would take up her work in the Ninefold Forest, helping to integrate the refugees into the city that grew there. Jin Li Tam had suggested that it would be meaningful work while she determined her next steps.
She wanted to feel excitement, but curiosity was the best she could muster. Her mind was elsewhere, working her crisis of faith like a tongue upon a missing tooth. Finding meaning and sorting facts out from the knotted mess of it all. The dreams had been real. The glossolalia had been real. And everything had changed now. She wanted to know why, and she wanted to know what she was meant to believe now. She could not even find the passion to be angry or bereaved over it.
Somehow, Winters knew, she would sustain this loss and find treasure in it. Perhaps something better than the faith she had lost would grow up in its place.
Perhaps I’m meant to be a Gypsy wife after all; perhaps home was never any farther away than that. Would that be so bad? And would it be wrong to hope for it? And to hope that someday, she would have a child who laughed and blew bubbles in his sleep?
A child with eyes as piercing and blue as a summer sky above the Dragon’s Spine.
Like Neb’s eyes.
Sighing, Winters slipped back into her tent and fell into a light sleep, her nose twitching at the clean smell of soap on her skin and hair. As her sleep deepened, she dreamed about her white-haired boy, even though it wasn’t him but a memory of him. He held her by the campfire and told her that everything would be fine and well again in its proper season.
And above them, the blue-green moon sang both of them to sleep.
Petronus
Petronus left in the early hours while the sky was dark and the stars and moon were veiled lightly by wisps of clouds. The sun was red and low over the Keeper’s Wall when he paused and looked down the hill to the snow-blanketed ruins of Windwir. He traveled lightly with a horse and pack, both marked with the crest of the Ninefold Forest.
He’d met with Rudolfo briefly that afternoon, but the brooding Gypsy King had obviously been scattered and spread thin by the challenges before him. They’d talked briefly in private, and when Rudolfo had suggested secreting him away in the forest, Petronus had shaken his head and pressed for the Gypsy King to give him what he needed to quietly slip out of the Named Lands. Reluctantly, he’d called for his hostler and for a supply captain who could write out letters of credit and introduction for him.
Rudolfo had made a great effort, Petronus thought, not to look at the ragged scar. But in the end he had stared, and wonder had touched his eyes. Petronus frowned at the memory of it.
A realization struck him as he sat atop his horse looking down at Windwir and the camps around it. I may never see this place again. It grieved a part of him, but there was another part that felt relief. This was his first time back since the grave-digging. Walking that plain, seeing the rubble buried in snow and the raised ground of the trenches they’d filled with Windwir’s blackened bones was a cold blade that cut him deeply.
Below, he saw a figure by the side of the river just north of camp. From his vantage point, he could not tell who it was, but it looked to be a woman. She removed her clothing and waded out into the cold waters, dunking herself beneath them and scrubbing hurriedly.
His hand moved absently to his heart, feeling the raised skin of scar tissue there. I wish I could cleanse this from me.
But he couldn’t. Now, he carried a mark. A token, with the scar upon his throat, to remind him that his life had been taken and given back to him in a greater reckoning than he could have ever known. An autograph upon someone’
s dark handiwork. A living miracle bearing witness to the power of the Wizard Kings.
He left now with only those marks and a few items of clothing. And it hearkened him back to another day he had slipped away alone. On the day he’d killed Sethbert and had then seen Vlad Li Tam’s evidence of the threat against Windwir, he’d ridden out from the Seventh Forest Manor to return to his shack on Caldus Bay and begin his work gathering up what data he could.
But now, he left with no work to drive him forward, and perhaps that was a good thing. Until Windwir’s pyre, he’d lived quietly for thirty years, marking his time by the fullness of his nets and the companionship of the kind-hearted people who kept his secret and welcomed home their prodigal Pope.
Maybe quiet would come to him again. He hoped so. But already, his mind spun. Why had he been brought back? What was the significance of Rudolfo’s heir? Who was this Crimson Empress, and could she be the external threat he’d been convinced they faced? He thought it likely that she was.
In the moments before administering her blood magick upon him, the Machtvolk Queen had added his own blood to the phial, according to Rudolfo. He’d certainly studied what little of the alchemy of blood magick they understood, but there were reasons why those magicks and spells, bargained for in the Beneath Places with the ghosts of long-dead gods, were forbidden. They were songs crafted out of the blood of others.
And over the years, he’d seen the parchments-fragments of this spell or that-but he had never seen a blood magick that could reverse death.
Petronus shook his head and saw now that the girl below was dressing hastily upon the shore. He turned his horse east and left her to her privacy.
He would take his time riding for the Keeper’s Gate, and when he arrived he would show the Gypsy Scouts stationed there the letter that authorized him entry. Then, he would go alone into that place and make what home for himself he could.
But as he rode east, a handful of horses separated from a copse of evergreens, and he recognized a gray standard he’d not expected to see.
When the riders approached, Grymlis rode at the head of them. Behind him, resplendent in the uniform of the Gray Guard of P’Andro Whym, rode five men he recognized and three he did not. The silver buttons upon their jackets cast back the red light of the rising sun, and a sudden rising breeze caught the edges of their standard and unfurled the crest of Windwir onto the morning air.
“Father,” Grymlis said, saluting when they were within earshot.
Petronus sighed. “I thought I ordered you back to the Ninefold Forest, into Rudolfo’s service?”
Grymlis smiled. “You did, Father.”
Petronus looked over the men. The new ones were younger and had the look of the Delta upon them. “You’ve no doubt heard about my present situation.”
Grymlis nodded. “I have,” he said. “And welcome back.”
Yes. He’d paid for his crimes with his life and then had his life handed back to him. He’d been made a spectacle, part of a story that would be told from town to town, city to city, in hushed tones and wonder, lending credence to the Y’Zirite Gospel. More than that, he also suspected he’d been brought back to force Jin Li Tam into a corner, and that frightened him more deeply than even his own return from the dead. Seeing the power of the Y’Zirites’ blood magicks manifested by Petronus’s resurrection, she had begged an ancient foe for the life of her child and it had been granted.
It was the beginning, he feared, of greater darkness in the land of his birth and first life.
Still, circumstances demanded that he leave and do quietly what could be done offstage and away from the eyes of the north. He realized then that Grymlis was speaking, and he forced his attention back to the old Gray Guard captain.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “My mind wandered.”
“Understandable,” Grymlis said. “I was telling you that there are others, as well, who will meet us at the Keeper’s Gate.”
Petronus felt his eyebrows furrow. “Others?”
“Androfrancines are no longer welcome here,” Grymlis said. “They killed the few that remained in the Summer Papal Palace. Caravans en route to Rudolfo’s forests have been attacked-again, Androfrancines massacred and left unburied for the crows. The only place untouched has been the Ninefold Forest, but some of us believe it’s only a matter of time before that changes. And now, the Gypsies owe a debt to these Marsher heretics.” He shifted in the saddle. “I’ve word out of our exodus; we’ll wait a week at the Keeper’s Gate for any others who would join us.”
At one time in his life, Petronus would have been angry at the disobedience of his orders, at the assumptions and actions being taken by the man before him. But the events of recent weeks had shown him that life was a nonmetrical song at times, one that went where it needed to for the melody without respect for the rhythm of history and tradition. Truly a canticle that one danced to as best one could. He would trust Grymlis to dance it, and he would not isolate himself from those who chose exile with their fallen father over a hidden life in a land that had turned on them so utterly in such a short time. Rudolfo’s kindness notwithstanding, he saw a day coming when no Androfrancine would be suffered to live in the Named Lands. And more than continuing, he feared the pieces had been set to this board in such a way that the Y’Zirite resurgence would not just survive but thrive in the rich soil of desolation prepared for it.
Finally, he nodded to Grymlis. “Then we will wait there for them.” He looked to the other men. “We will carve a home in the Churning Wastes, and we will offer ourselves to Rudolfo as his eyes and ears in that place.”
And we will find a way to undermine those tangled and bloody roots that threaten to choke our light.
Petronus touched the scar at his throat briefly, then touched his breast. Then, without looking back, he whistled his horse forward and rode east beneath the red fist of the rising sun.
Chapter 26
Neb
Neb let the winds of the Churning Wastes move over him where he lay and turned himself again so that his other ear pressed to the cold iron cap.
Renard snored gently at the edge of the clearing, weary from the jostling ride he’d made. But Neb had not been tired. The canticle would not let him sleep. He’d lain awake here in this place for a night and a day, listening to the song and working through the ciphers in his mind.
It was nonmetrical, and the hands that plucked at the harp strings moved with a precision that he could hear clearly. It played and it played, with no beginning and no ending that he could discern, though he knew it had to have both.
And when the moon had risen that first night and the song’s strength increased, he’d found that the nuances of note and measure concealed numbers and those numbers coincided with the notches and dials and levers of the Rufello locks upon that great iron cap.
Still, he had not known how it was that he could hear them. During the daylight hours Renard had joined him but heard nothing, not even the faintest note of the song, when he stretched himself out upon the ground alongside Neb.
So Neb kept at his work and left the Waste Guide to his rest. Soon enough, the Gypsy Scouts would reach this stopping point along their way to Sanctorum Lux, and Neb did not want to be here when they did. He wanted, by that time, to have the source of the dream within his hands. They would go north to Renard’s people so that the Waste Guide could heal. And while he healed, Neb would find this dream the metal man spoke of.
He sighed and pressed his ear even closer to the iron. The numbers were hard to find, but they were there. Already, he’d puzzled out four of six lock ciphers. And now, his fingers found the fifth and worked it, too. Deep inside the iron lid, he heard the clacking and ticking of gears that moved a bolt aside.
He paused there and remembered the metal man’s words. The last cipher is the first day of the Homeseeker’s Advent.
He knew that one without listening to the song, but he’d still saved it for last. Sometimes Rufello’s locks had to be worked in
sequence.
Biting his lower lip, he calculated the numerical date of his birth based on the Whymer calendar and twisted it into that last dial. When he finished, he heard nothing below him-no gears, no raspy sliding of the bolt. Furrowing his brow, he rolled onto his back.
He’d lost track of all time here. It had been daylight the last time he’d paid any attention to his surroundings. It was nightfall now and the sky was clear. Stars throbbed above him, their cold light casting an eerie glow upon the mountains that surrounded him.
It hadn’t worked. But why?
He tried again, but with the same result.
And then the moon rose and the song reached its crescendo with the rising. He stared at it, heavy on the horizon, and wondered at the size of it. He could see the lines where land ended and sea began and, squinting, he could even see the man-made line of the Moon Wizard’s tower, desolate and abandoned upon that poisoned and empty world that rose above them to remind them of that long-ago war that had killed the last of the Younger Gods who huddled afraid upon that blue-green rock.
Neb started. Of course.
He knew now, and he recalculated the number, not by the Whymer calendar but by an older one that had gone out of use. A calendar measured by different landmarks in time than those of P’Andro Whym and the disciples who gathered and shepherded the light along with the orphans of a broken world.
When he converted the date of his birth into the ancient numerology of the moon calendar of the Wizard Kings, he heard the movement of grinding gears as the last bolt slid free.
Neb rolled aside and squatted, regarding the unlocked hatch in the ground. He gripped the edge of it with his fingers and put his strength into lifting the iron cap. It groaned slightly but swung open upon oiled hinges. Glancing to Renard, he decided against waking the man.
This place was made for me to find it. He knew this was true. Even as he knew that his father had had a hand in it. Soon enough, Neb knew that he would understand to just what depth his father had known and prepared against this day.
