Daughter of Blood

by Helen Lowe

  Faro shook his head violently, but Khar checked him. “You were warned, when I took you as my page, that you had become mine to do with as I will, subject to the laws of the Derai. Including disposing of you as I wish—without question,” he added, when the boy’s mouth opened. Faro subsided, although his expression remained a mix of desperation and denial as Khar turned back to Myr. “I also have two letters. The first is for Lord Nimor and includes my will. In the event of my death, my arms and the bay warhorse, Tercel, are to go to Faro, as well as any money remaining after his and the horses’ care.”

  Faro, Myr saw, was rigid. She could only imagine how frightening it must be for him, not only being placed in the custody of a stranger while in the heart of a hostile keep, but forced to face that the master he hero-worshipped might soon be dead. Yet Khar is right, she thought, to make provision for the boy now.

  “The second letter,” Khar said, “is for the navigator of the ship that brought me back to the Wall. Both Faro and the roan, Madder, are to be conveyed into her charge.”

  Her, Myr thought, taking the folds of sealed paper and repeating the inscriptions to herself: Lord Nimor—and Che’Ryl-g-Raham. She wondered what Khar had been to the unknown Sea House navigator, that she would be willing to take custody of his warhorse and a House of Blood page. But it was not a question she could ask, so Myr put the letters in her pocket and turned to Faro. “We should go,” she told him, because she had not missed the unspoken “now” in Khar’s request. And she, too, was keen to circumvent any hidden listeners who might take steps to acquire Faro as leverage.

  The page’s gaze was fixed on Khar, his eyes imploring, but the Storm Spear shook his head. “Go with Lady Myrathis and do as she and Lord Nimor tell you, exactly as if I were the one commanding it. Do not speak,” he added, swift and stern. “It will do you no good.”

  That must mean he can speak, after all, Myr thought. Her heart went out to Faro’s look of desolation, because she also knew what it meant to face being sent away, her fate given over to strangers. “Faro.” Myr spoke quietly, and after a grudging pause the page turned her way. She doubted he was really listening, but tried to reach him anyway. “When I was growing up in these rooms, my governess told me that service and duty must govern all that I am, and do. They are hard lessons, but lie at the heart of what it means to be Derai.” She paused, hearing the echo of Ise’s voice weave through her own. “It is the same for a governess as for a warrior, a page as a Daughter of Blood.”

  Faro had stiffened, and Myr wondered if he was going to flare into defiance, but she continued to meet his mutinous gaze as steadily as Ise had always held hers—and finally the page frowned and jerked a nod. The mutiny and the frown made Myr think he had probably heard the stricture before, even if he did not fully accept it. Khar’s hand still rested on his page’s shoulder, and now Faro seized it between his own. Turning, he knelt and pressed his lips to the Storm Spear’s black-pearl ring.

  “Faro—” Khar began, but the boy shook his braided head and stood up, crossing to Myr’s side without raising his eyes. She resisted the temptation to lay her hand on his shoulder as Khar had done, suspecting it would only be thrown off—or worse, suffered because of who she was. He did not look at Khar again, and Myr found that she, too, had to withstand the urge to look back as the nearest honor guard opened the door.

  Nalin, who was waiting outside, turned to instruct Myr’s escort while Faro stared straight ahead with a stoniness that would have done Earl Sardon credit. Yet at least we both get to walk away, Myr thought, acutely aware of Khar’s presence through the still-open door. For all Banath and Nalin’s Honor Guard correctness, in every practical sense he was a prisoner, one who would be given no opportunity to escape the duel to the death.

  To the death, Myr repeated silently—and the ghost howl rose again, a scrape along already raw nerves. “Nalin,” she said, checking the sergeant’s move to close the door, “has the Earl ordered that my champion be confined?”

  Nalin paused, her headshake as cautious as her expression. “No, Daughter of Blood. ‘Kept safe’ is the order.”

  Myr nodded. “Then unless the Earl instructs otherwise, please ensure that he is suitably escorted at all times, but not prevented from coming and going.”

  Nalin saluted. “As you command, Daughter of Blood.”

  I do command it, Myr thought, and felt a little less like a coward, abandoning her champion to his fate, as she turned toward Liy and her escort. The hound howled again, a bereft, drawn-out cry, and she stopped. “I wish someone would find out what’s wrong with that hound. Nalin, is that something you could see to?”

  The sergeant looked blank, and Liy troubled. “It’s only the wind, Lady Myrathis.”

  “Probably whining through a storm shutter that’s looser than it should be,” Nalin agreed. “I don’t hear anything, but we’re used to all sorts of wind noise from battlement duty. The only howling today’s been the wyr pack just after dawn. You might not have heard them, Lady Myrathis,” she added, “because of being in your father’s war room.”

  Because of all the shouting, you mean, Myr thought, admiring her tact.

  “Or maybe you did catch something, but just didn’t realize it,” the sergeant continued. “It does stick in your head when the wyr pack gives voice like that.”

  “Why—” Myr began, then stopped at the look on Liy’s face. “What happened?”

  Liy shifted feet. “The contestant whose leg broke yesterday—” She stopped, looking to Nalin.

  “He was in a fever, Daughter of Blood, but came out of it this morning, long enough to take in what had happened to his leg. He killed himself. That’s why the wyr pack howled. They always do when it’s a suicide.”

  I didn’t know that, Myr thought numbly. I didn’t know. Even Faro was watching her now, drawn out of his introspection as one of her escort spoke, his voice heartening. “That’ll be it, Lady Myrathis. Just the wind and recollection of the wyr pack, like Sergeant Nalin says.”

  Could I be that mistaken? Myr wondered. Instinct made her look toward Khar, who was standing just inside the doorway, although he made no attempt to step through. He wiped his expression clear at once, but she felt certain that whatever hound she was hearing, the Storm Spear could hear it, too.

  27

  The Turnings of Fate

  A snarl of shadows writhed through Kalan’s dream, twisting over and around each other like a pit full of snakes. He heard panicked sobs, then Faro gasping out something about lightning, black magic, and secrets, before the shadows smothered the boy’s voice with a murmurous whispering. When Kalan pursued the sound, he found himself hemmed in by his own wards while the greater part of the Gate of Dreams flowed around him: partially visible and audible, but impossible to touch. Until the wards were lifted he would have to follow the Oakward’s path and wait for what the Gate showed him, rather than imposing his will on it as Nhenir had advised in Emer.

  The whispering slipped away and Kalan turned back toward sleep—but the dream transformed into a heaving mass of water. Overhead, lightning tore the heavens apart, while thunder, wind, and ocean battered at each other. Have I crossed into one of Yelusin’s memories? he wondered, recalling the Sea mariners’ accounts of deep ocean storms. The vision rolled, hurling him onto the back of a mountainous wave. For a moment he rode above the abyss, lightning spearing around him, before the crest collapsed. An avalanche of water crashed into his side, and he veered wildly off true. Voices screamed as a snapped mast thudded down, and he was running blind, every fiber stretched to breaking point as he strained to climb the next towering wave.

  Lightning exploded again and the black clouds boiled as a behemoth plunged through them, trailing streamers of fire. Kalan felt as though he might splinter apart at any moment but clung to the dream, striving to understand what the Gate—or the fragment of Yelusin contained within his mind—was showing him. “Too soon.” The whisper burned in his mind like one of the streamers of fire. “Too soon . .
. But I burn. I cannot hold—”

  “We’re tearing apart!” The man’s shout was raw with urgency, although Kalan could see nothing but black rushing water and the lurid glow overhead. “She’ll never hold unless—”

  Unless what? Kalan wondered, as the clouds overhead snapped closed and the behemoth disappeared. The tempest continued to batter at him, but the wind’s fury was dying. The next time cloud and water swirled, the funnel around him was gray, not black. Finally, the storm dissipated altogether, transforming into clear dawn above a long gray firth.

  Grayharbor—but Kalan’s dream funneled again and hounds bayed beneath a shadowed moon. His feet crunched on frosted ground, climbing a slope that rose almost as steeply as the storm’s waves. Just below the crest, he lowered himself prone and snaked through thorn brush, the spines tearing at his clothes. The terrain below was spectral as the moon, and narrow pennants hung motionless above an encampment of circled wagons. A ghost caravan, Kalan thought, seeing no people, or animals, or fires: no movement at all within the camp or on the surrounding plain. The only sound was the hounds, baying out their paean of blood and death.

  Kalan was aware, with one part of his dreaming mind, that he was turning over in the same bed that Dab had lain on the night before. A fire burned in the grate and he reexperienced the previous night’s shock of recognition as Lady Myrathis turned toward him, the firelight playing across her shy, fragile face. “Who are you?” she asked now, as she had then, so that he finally recognized her from his Grayharbor dream. She could hear the Hunt of Mayanne, too, which should not even be possible.

  So who is she? Kalan thought, prowling the perimeter of dream and wards like a wolf: Earl Sardon’s ninth and youngest child, who was also the daughter of Lady Mayaraní of the Rose, and now the Bride of Blood, but who had grown up with a depiction of the Hunt on her wall. In his dream, Kalan stared at the circle of milk-white hounds. Is that why she can hear you? he mused. Has your presence here caused the veil between the Red Keep and the Gate of Dreams to grow thin? Or perhaps it was his presence—with the ring on his hand and in such close proximity to the web—that allowed the Hunt to draw near.

  The hind’s head was tilted to gaze up at him, while the crow above the lovers’ heads gazed down with a searching, corvid’s eye that also seemed to ask the Daughter of Blood’s question: Who are you? Strange, Kalan thought, that Lady Myrathis questions your presence, when for me you will always belong with both Huntmaster and Hunt. “But you,” he said to the hind, “I do not know. Where do you fit?”

  “What is his lineage?” A new voice, somber and disturbed, whispered beneath the baying of the Hunt. “Who are his clan and kin?” Kelyr’s words from the Che’Ryl-g-Raham, Kalan thought, but not his voice.

  “We know who he is.” This was the Luck’s answer, but Yelusin’s voice, sunlight reflecting on the surface of the sea.

  Slowly, the baying died away, and a man spoke in its place. “Cap’n wants to see you.”

  Another man groaned. “What about a meal? Or better still, a bath.” Kalan knew he had heard that weary voice with the underlying humor in another dream. Dust prickled his nostrils, as though gauntlets had been swatted against a tunic stiff with dirt. “We’ve been shuttling the length of the Wall for an entire season now, on top of the journey to the River.”

  “Nursemaiding priest-kind,” a woman added. She, too, had spoken in the earlier dream. “Have a heart, Sarus, we’ve only just ridden in.”

  “Not you, Innor,” Sarus said. “Just Garan and Nerys. Straightaway, the Captain said—and given the way you lot stink, another hour without washing’s hardly going to matter.”

  “You know what it’s like out there.” A third man spoke without rancor. “You wouldn’t linger over ablutions either, not with darkspawn every other place you look.”

  Kalan sensed Sarus’s shrug. “It doesn’t change the fact that you lot stink. Or that Garan and Nerys’s first stop is the Captain’s rooms.”

  The third man lowered his voice. “Why can’t Blood just appoint an Honor Guard for their Bride, like a House of sense? Why does our Commander have to waste time over their cursed selections, when everyone knows it’s the Battlemaster who’ll make the final cut?”

  “You know why, Ter.” Garan’s voice was half a sigh. “It’s so Night bears some culpability if anything goes wrong, all under the guise of elite selection and open opportunity.”

  “‘A Battlemaster’s star in every Blood warrior’s kit.’” Ter quoted the Blood saying softly. Quiet chuckles answered his subsequent snort.

  “Eyes-and-ears,” Sarus warned. “Remember where we are.”

  “Let’s get this done.” Garan ended the brief silence that followed. “You ready, Nerys?”

  Silent Nerys. Even in his dream, Kalan remembered her, just as he could still dredge Garan and Sarus, Innor and Ter, out of his six-year-old memories of the Old Keep of Winds. Gauntlets slapped again, only this time the scent in his nostrils was woodsmoke, leather, windchill—and the face he saw was Malian’s, gazing into a campfire. But when she leaned forward he recoiled, because the eyes that met his were Ser Raven’s: a stare so darkly blue that it was almost black.

  “A child of my blood,” the knight’s voice said, speaking out of Malian’s mouth, “driven like a deathstake into the heart of the Derai Alliance.” Ser Raven’s tone was as hard as any Kalan had heard him use in Emer, but he wondered why his dream would juxtapose the Haarth hedge knight with Malian and the Derai Alliance. Yet when the firelight wavered, then steadied again, the cool, measuring gaze was Malian’s own.

  “I am to fight a duel to the death,” he told her through the medium of fire and dream. “Regardless of the outcome, I have failed you in terms of my purpose in coming here.”

  Flames danced across Malian’s eyes, but she made no reply. Kalan stirred, close to the surface of both dream and sleep, and heard the somber uneasy murmur again: “Kalan-hamar.”

  “Yelusin?” he queried, but the spark of her Fire remained quiet within his mind.

  “Kalan-hamar,” the voice said again, on a deeper note—before, like the dream, it disintegrated into a fist pounding on timber.

  “Khar! Storm Spear!” Time to wake, Kalan thought, and opened his eyes to evening shadows in every corner and a dying fire in the grate.

  “Khar!” The fist pounded again, and Kalan recognized the voice as Jad, the eight-guard leader who had relieved Nalin when the watch changed.

  “Coming!” he shouted, but took a moment to orient himself before standing up. He had not needed his dream of a snakepit, or Sarus’s caution regarding eyes-and-ears, to warn him how perilous his situation was, and so had lain down in his clothes, with his weapons close to hand. Buckling on his sword, he went to the main door and listened intently, but the sounds from the corridor conveyed no hint of danger.

  Jad saluted as soon as the door opened. The Earl’s honor guards were being nothing if not correct. Another honor guard in Night armor, with the winged horse device on his breast, bowed as Jad saluted. Kalan recognized the youthful warrior as one of the pair who had been in the training hall with Asantir. “I am Morin,” the Night guard said. “The Battlemaster has approached Commander Asantir, as the one whose honor you primarily defend, to formalize arrangements for the duel. She is leaving tonight’s banquet early and requests that you meet with her.”

  Kalan’s thoughts raced, wondering how great a risk it would be for him to meet Asantir in person. He had still been a boy when they met briefly in the Keep of Winds, and now he was a grown man who looked his part of a Blood warrior, complete to the Storm Spear insignia engraved onto his armor by the Che’Ryl-g-Raham’s armorer. Yet the Asantir he remembered had been astute, and he would have preferred to conduct their business at a distance. His best hope of that was Jad objecting, since a refusal on his own part would raise unwelcome questions, but the eight-guard leader only said that Blood guards would have to accompany him. “No disrespect intended,” he added to Morin.

&nbs
p; “None taken,” Morin murmured, so there was nothing for Kalan to do but arm himself formally, then fall into step beside the Night guard. Jad and another three of his eight-unit went with them—taking no chances, Kalan thought. He rotated his shoulders, easing the ache from the previous two days of both receiving and dealing body-jarring blows. At least, having slept away last night’s tiredness, he felt better prepared to face what lay ahead,

  I might well die, Kalan told himself, evaluating that prospect as coolly as he could. The part of him that had been raised in the Keep of Winds’ Temple quarter understood that no one ever truly expected that outcome for themselves: it was always another’s blood that would stain the arena sand. Yet he also knew that death was part of the warrior life and could come at any time, not least from the sort of misadventure that had caused the warrior with the broken leg to take his own life.

  “‘Life and death, death and life.’” The saying belonged to the Winter People, but Kalan had found its echo among the fractious wards, marks, and marches of Emer. His only real regret was that regardless of whether he won or lost, he had failed Malian, since he was meant to have won a place in the Bride’s Honor Guard and so gain unremarked entry into Night. He would fail Yelusin, as well, if he did not carry the spark of her former Fire to rejoin with Hylcarian in the Keep of Winds. Seen from that perspective, perhaps he should have let the business between Lord Parannis, Asantir, and Lady Myrathis play out. Especially, he reflected, since the Daughter of Blood was right: many of his fellow competitors would not have felt their contest vow obliged them to defend her pledge of guest friendship.

  Her courageous pledge, Kalan amended. Lord Parannis had called his half-sister a mouse, intending insult, but Kalan saw a more favorable analogy in Lady Myr’s liking for back stairs and staying out of sight. She had seemed very like a mouse in the training hall, too: outmatched but still defying the predator that was her brother. And although born Derai, Kalan had also been raised on Emer’s dangerous Northern March, where courage and resolution were among the qualities that kept barbarism at bay. No matter the scope of the Honor Contest vow, he could not have let Lady Myr stand alone against her half brother and still called himself a knight of Emer and Falk of Normarch’s foster son.