Daughter of Blood

by Helen Lowe

  Malian jolted fully awake and sat back as Raven sank onto his heels beside her, his expression quizzical. “That wasn’t quite what I envisaged when I said you had become part of Fire.”

  Surprised, Malian laughed, and saw heads turn in the periphery of her vision. Raven smiled, although that expression, too, was quizzical. “I believe we gave you a tent, if you want to sleep.”

  “You did. Initially, I wasn’t sleepy.” She paused as another of the escort brought Raven a stool as well. “I wanted to think,” she added, when the guard had withdrawn.

  “About last night? Or what was said in the tent?”

  “Both.” The recollection of Emuun’s hoarse, gasping voice intruded, filled with a mockery directed at both the Sworn and her. Silently, Malian repeated his words without the gaps and hesitations: Even Salar believed that a scion of the witch’s blood would be the stake we finally drove through the heart of the thrice-cursed Derai Alliance. And all the time it was you. Emuun had referred to a witch before that as well. The words had been mumbled, but with hindsight, Malian was sure that what he had said was Ilkerineth’s witch. Before he fell, Nherenor had told her that he was Ilkerineth’s son—while afterward, she had studied the Sworn youth’s dead face and realized how closely he resembled her.

  I guessed the truth then, Malian thought, but I wasn’t prepared to admit it, even to myself. “‘A scion of the witch’s blood,’” she repeated aloud, “‘and all the time it was you.’” Briefly, she outlined the gist of what Emuun had said, but kept the stake and his insinuations about Raven to herself. “If there’s any truth in what he said, then Ilkerineth’s witch has to be my mother: Nerion, daughter of Nerith,” she added formally, “of the Sea Keep. My father told me she might have gone over to the Sworn, and it explains why Nherenor and I looked so alike. He was my half-brother.”

  We fought, she told herself, but it was the lurker poison that killed him. His death was not fratricide.

  Raven’s expression was as close to gentle as she had ever seen it. “Emuun knew that information can be most effective as a weapon when it comes in the guise of truth.” He paused. “Ilkerineth lost his wife and children prior to the time of the Chaos Worm, when the maelstrom was quiescent and the Derai in the ascendant. So for him to have a son among the envoys in Emer, he had to have married again. The only question was who.”

  Especially since she bore him a child, Malian reflected, and began to comprehend the hope that might have led Amaliannarath to make her bargain with the sword. As for Nerion, in view of the circumstances surrounding her exile and suspected abuse in the Keep of Stone, Malian could see why she might have gone over to the Sworn. Yet Emuun’s claim that Nerion had worked with Aranraith to bring about her own death was far more difficult to accept.

  I’ve known it was a possibility since the attack on the Keep of Winds, Malian told herself now, but suspicion is one thing, confirmation entirely another . . . She thought she would have recognized the deceit if Emuun had lied outright, which made Raven’s suggestion more likely, since truth slanted to achieve contrary ends was far harder for a truthsayer to detect. Nerion might have been trying to capture her six years ago, rather than to kill, but reexamination of those events—from the assault on the New Keep and Malian’s escape into the Old, to the final flight into Jaransor—made her mother’s intentions look doubtful at best.

  Yet I liked Nherenor, Malian thought, and Kalan did, too. Her half-brother had been courageous and—remembering their encounter in the Caer Argent dawn—honorable as well. With hindsight, she realized it was probably significant that he had given his father’s name, but not his mother’s. “Although,” she reasoned aloud, “Nerion of the Derai may have taken another name among the Sworn. Like you,” she said to Raven. “You said in Stoneford that Aravenor was your true name, but Emuun called you Ravirien?”

  He nodded—imperturbable, she thought, as the weight of a thousand years. “The past was dead, we felt that strongly when we first woke. Fire names would have given us away, in any case. So those of us who took service as the Patrol adopted Haarth names instead. A binding ceremony,” he added, “in a sanctuary of Seruth.”

  Malian nodded, because on the River, Seruth was held to preside over new beginnings as well as journeys. “Aravenor was taken from my personal emblem, which is the hawk.” Raven continued to study the flames. “The name means ‘lord of the hawk’ in the Old Empire’s northern dialect, just as Jaransor was once J’ara Ensor, the hills of the hawk. A Hill chieftain first called me Raven, which was both chance and irony, since it’s a shortening of Aravenor and resembled Ravirien.” His grin, directed at the fire, was wry. “I still answer to it most days.”

  They were the hedge knight’s words out of the Long Pass, which might have been why he used them, since Emuun had been right in calling him astute. Malian gazed into the blaze, thinking about her life’s journey to this point, which of course had begun with Nerion, even if she could not remember her mother at all. What would she look like, Malian wondered, if I glimpsed her in the flames? But instead she saw Raven, riding the length and breadth of the Southern Realms along both high roads and back trails, serving as sword-for-hire and household warrior from Emer to Ishnapur through the course of a millennium. “Is there anywhere in the Southern Realms that you have not served?” she asked softly. “Even”—remembering the blood magic and the fire elemental—“Ishnapur and Jhaine?”

  “I wanted to know this world: not just where we had come to, but why Amaliannarath might have foreseen that this was the place she needed to bring us.” Beneath the hedge knight’s imperturbability, Malian thought she detected the geas’s legacy of mystery. “Over time, I went everywhere there were people, even Jhaine. I served among the Shah’s auxiliaries, too, along Ishnapur’s desert border. I learned a great deal about Haarth and its people, but I still don’t fully understand the why.”

  And Amaliannarath, always deep minded, must have seen . . . Foreseen me, Malian thought: that’s the implication. Emuun had said it to unsettle her, not knowing that in order to return the sword, Amaliannarath would have had to foresee both Haarth and the new Chosen of Mhaelanar. Yet Malian’s truth sense told her that Raven was right, that was not all there was to the matter. As for Emuun, if she accepted his insinuations, she would also have to believe that the ghost Ascendant she had met in the Cave of Sleepers would have sacrificed herself and all of Fire’s Blood, bar one, for what the Darksworn had described as a long game.

  Returning Yorindesarinen’s sword was also an unlikely move, even for those playing for high stakes. And no one, Malian thought, has tried to understand this world more than Raven, let alone serving it as he has. Despite, she added wryly, our Derai claim to be protecting Haarth with our Wall and our fractious—if not fratricidal—Alliance. She shivered, fratricide bringing her back to Nherenor, and thence to Nerion. Who hates my father, Malian thought somberly. She ran her hands over the tinker’s patched knees, knowing that Nhairin and Kyr’s accounts of her mother’s exile, together with events six years ago, all pointed to that conclusion.

  Eastward above forest and camp, the sky was growing lighter. Malian rubbed at her knees again, recalling the horror Nerion’s possible defection had caused among the few Derai who suspected it. She knew that most in the Nine Houses would view her own alliance with Fire in the same light. On the other hand, the Blood Oath and Malian’s exile meant the Derai Alliance was unlikely to follow her without a show of strength. Short of restoring the Golden Fire, an army at her back might well be the only argument that many Houses—starting with Blood and Adamant—would find persuasive.

  Yet her fire vision suggested Kalan needed her on the Wall now, not long weeks or even months distant. “I have failed you . . .” Never, Malian thought, not in this realm or any other that lies beyond the Gate of Dreams. She spoke slowly. “I need to influence events on the Wall now, but the muster’s going to take time, and a march across the Wild Lands on the eve of winter longer still. If I could use portals .
. .” She paused, frowning. “But if other Sworn do investigate Emuun’s death and detect portal use, it’ll draw them like wasps to honey.”

  “And Thanir, in particular, may suspect Emuun of having pursued the Aeris sword-for-hire.” Raven was measured, but Malian recognized the tone that said he was calculating odds. “Even without gates, you could take my personal guard as escort and travel fast, especially if you follow the Telimbras route north.”

  That might work, Malian thought, reckoning odds in her turn, especially since Raven’s personal guard would be Fire’s elite. With a small, mobile escort, she could also operate covertly until the main force arrived. “And assess the current disposition of the Nine Houses before declaring my hand,” she said, thinking aloud, “as well as the level of Swarm threat. Although”—Malian hesitated before continuing—“with one of your cadres, perhaps some degree of portal use might be possible?” At least to get me as far as Jaransor, she added silently, since I still don’t like the idea of using a portal to bridge the Wall-Haarth divide.

  The fire collapsed and a log rolled out, but Raven seized it, tossing the branch back a second before it exploded in embers and sparks. “From what I saw on our journey here,” he said, his eyes on the subsequent display, “you may be capable of sustaining a portal that would accommodate yourself and an escort. But it would take most, if not all, of Fire’s cadres to have a hope of concealing it from the likes of Thanir, and we’ll need them to screen the muster.” He looked around at Malian as the branch gave a last, desultory snap. “We both know you’d travel fastest alone, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t.”

  Because unlike the Shadow Band adept, Malian thought, an Heir of the Derai who makes alliances with princes should not place herself at risk. A bird called from the forest, a single note across the still-dark world; very soon now, it would be day. Raven ground out an errant spark beneath his boot. “We used to have squadrons dedicated to opening gates, and more to concealing them. Recruits with either ability didn’t get to choose where they served. But those like you who could open a gate independently, let alone convey others, they were rare.”

  “Were they all of Fire’s Blood?” Malian asked.

  “The few with any substantial ability were. The minor talents died shoring up Amaliannarath at the last.” He paused. “Even then we nearly didn’t make it.”

  I’m sorry, Malian wanted to say, but knew the words were inadequate. A bird called again, a quicksilver bubble of sound, and this time another answered it. Her voice felt crow harsh by contrast. “I promise I won’t slip away without your guards.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” he replied, with the hedge knight’s glint.

  “I’m sure you will,” she murmured, rising before exhaustion overtook her. She nodded, Crow’s gesture from weeks on the road, before turning way. “Although perhaps,” she added to Nhenir, yawning as she entered her tent, “I should have been more formal with his people watching.”

  “Better,” Nhenir observed, “if Fire sees that the Heir of the Derai and their prince are easy with each other.”

  “You’re probably right.” Malian discarded jacket and sword, lying down just as the full dawn chorus erupted. Perhaps because of the birds’ tumult, her initial sleep was fitful, and fragments culled from recent events jerked her back into wakefulness several times. “Dread Pass,” Kalan whispered as mist poured into a narrow gap beneath high crags—only this time, shadowy figures climbed beneath its cover. A boot scraped, displacing a pebble, as warriors deployed about the gap.

  “Dread Pass,” another voice said. This time it was the High Steward Nhairin’s voice out of childhood memory, inculcating geography. “Morning guard it with their High Towers, or did . . .”

  Nhairin, Malian thought, rousing again, whom I loved and trusted, but who turned out to be a traitor. The dawn wind stirred outside, cool as doubt, and she followed it with her farseeing: past the tramp of feet and ring of arms as the watch changed, out beyond the mingled scents of woodsmoke and breakfasts cooking, to reach the nearby Telimbras, pouring out of the north to join the Ijir. The River of No Return, she thought, her lids gritting together: it’s as much a boundary between the Derai realm and Haarth as the Border Mark . . .

  Gradually, events, visions, and memory all faded into a drum of hooves that could have come from any of her many journeys. A deeper sleep followed, banishing the last of the hoofbeats, and no dream penetrated its layers. What did, finally, reach Malian was a single pure note that rose out of darkness like the first bird’s call. The Song of Haarth, she thought, still mired in sleep. The note was achingly familiar, and Malian’s seeking, stirring to pursue it, identified north. Yet she knew this was not the previous day’s song of the Wild Lands, or part of Jaransor’s grinding rumble—although when she roused sufficiently to hone her seeking, she discerned both wildness and an echo of Jaransor’s power.

  A line seared across Malian’s inner sight and she smelled snow, mingled with the scent of birchwood fires as the fiery line became the hawk’s flight, solitary above a winter plain. Her seeking quickened, and although her eyes remained closed she pushed her power hard. Now the curl of song was also a spring, bubbling up beneath another plain of wind and dust. Her seeking became the windhover, gliding this way and that on the currents of the air and all the time looking, searching—until Malian saw it, a Winter Country cairn in the midst of the Gray Lands, with the Song of Haarth rising beneath it. The spark of life force before the cairn would be the hound, Falath. She had seen him in her vision outside Tenneward Lodge, keeping his lonely vigil by Rowan Birchmoon’s grave.

  Her vision outside Tenneward Lodge . . . Kalan had said it that night, she realized: that what they were seeing was an opening from Emer into the Gray Lands. But then events had overtaken them when the Darksworn came . . . All the same, Malian thought, shocked fully awake, I should have remembered after Stoneford—especially as my visions since then have centered on Yorindesarinen’s death and the fate of the shield. I’m also hearing and seeing Kalan still, although he has to be on the Wall by now.

  “Which means,” Malian told Nhenir, “that I have been accessing the Derai side of the Gate of Dreams. But when I thought about it at all, I assumed it was an aftereffect of your Stoneford song.” Glimmerings and gaps, she added, when what I’ve needed—what I need—is a reliable bridge. Six years before, Nhenir had told her that she had the raw power to force a way through the psychic barrier, but warned that not only would brute force risk detection, a failed attempt might also widen the existing rift. “But now . . .”

  Malian sat up to find bright daylight outlining the tent flap, although the angle and length of the shadows suggested she had not slept long. “But now,” she whispered, “I know a bridge exists.” Because of you, she added silently to Rowan Birchmoon’s memory. Somehow, in dying, you made your power into a conduit for the Song of Haarth—a wellspring emerging beneath the Gray Lands’ cairn, but with its source deep in your own Winter Country. Deep in Haarth, Malian amended. That’s why the visions of the cairn could reach me, first outside Tenneward Lodge and again in Stoneford. I saw it. I just didn’t understand what it meant, although I should have.

  In retrospect, it seemed obvious, a vision from the Wall side of the divide that was not just memory. Yet Malian also remembered how Tarathan, in bringing news of the Winter Woman’s passing, had shared his belief that Rowan Birchmoon foresaw her own death. So why stay? Malian asked silently. Did you knowingly sacrifice yourself? Or was your love for my father, and the uncertainty of foreseeing, also part of the mix?

  She knew from her own experience that motivation was rarely simple, but this—“Even your death,” she said aloud, “you made into a gift.” She rested her forehead against drawn-up knees, trying to assimilate the magnitude of the offering, until Nhenir cut through her absorption.

  “Riders are coming.”

  The drum of hoofbeats, Malian realized, straightening, was no longer confined to uneasy sleep. The riders were approach
ing fast, but she was fully armed and at the tent entrance before she distinguished Rhaikir’s voice. “Fetch the prince!” he commanded, sounding both terse and exhausted.

  The guards outside the tent sprang to attention as Malian stepped through. A return, she noted automatically, to the formality she had once taken for granted as Heir of Night. The newly arrived horses had been ridden hard, and their riders looked haggard, but Rhaikir and his second-in-command strode into the command tent without looking around. When Malian followed, the guards on duty there also stood to attention.

  Raven and Valadan were already inside. Possibly, Malian thought, joining them, because they had never left. Rhaikir barely glanced her way before he resumed speaking. “We built the pyre and fired the chapel as ordered, but just before it really took hold—” He broke off, his gaze fixed on Raven. “The body vanished ahead of the flames reaching it. We felt no incursion of power, but one moment the body was there, the next gone. Just like that.”

  Another elemental? Malian wondered. Except from what she understood of the cadre’s abilities, if they had not detected power use then it had to have been something far more covert. A rune triggered by his death, perhaps, since Raven had said Emuun was skilled in their use, or some form of desert magic that Fire had never encountered? Other possibilities intruded, including Kalan’s tale of a siren worm’s spirit, trying to return to the Swarm by way of the Gate of Dreams. To tell what it knew, Malian thought. When her eyes met Raven’s, she knew they were both thinking the same thing: that before he died, Emuun had learned entirely too much.

  “We’ll have to delay the muster,” Valadan said. “Best if there’s nothing to find, should Sun start sniffing around. We can use one of the other forts to complete what we’ve begun here, then filter north by diverse routes.”