Raven's Strike rd-2

by Patricia Briggs

  “When we found these maps—”

  “I found the maps—” said Rinnie, who was efficiently chopping up greens.

  “When Rinnie found the maps,” Seraph corrected herself, “I read them with my magic and found these maps are from the time of Colossae. Moreover, that around two centuries ago a wizard held the city map in his hands as he stood outside the gates of Colossae. That is not legend, or women’s stories. My own magic told me this.”

  “The city exists,” agreed Phoran, leaning his elbows on the table and bracing his chin on his folded hands.

  “Maybe it’s near here,” said Rinnie. “That could be the reason that the Path built its temple here.”

  “Volis told me that it was because of Shadow’s Fall,” Hennea said.

  “He told me that, too,” Seraph agreed.

  “Fine,” said Ielian, throwing up his hands. “The city exists. How is finding the city going to help the Emperor?”

  Seraph wondered if he realized that Jes had unobtrusively moved until he was leaning against the wall just behind Ielian.

  “I don’t know. But if Brewydd, Lark of the Clan of Rongier the Librarian, tells me if we don’t go to Colossae, Phoran will lose not only his throne, but his head as well—then I will go to Colossae. If something in Colossae can help us rid this world of the Shadowed, then I will go to Colossae.”

  “On the word of this bird woman?”

  “Lark,” said Seraph, biting off the ends of her words. “A healer who dedicated her life trying to save people in need. She died to save the people who killed her.”

  Hennea’s sharp “Control, Raven” and Tier’s “Easy, love” came one atop the other, followed by a thump as the heavy slab table lifted a handspan off the floor, then slammed down hard enough to vibrate the floorboards.

  Seraph took a deep breath and fought to calm herself.

  Ielian’s next question was considerably more respectful. “Finding the city is the easiest way to discover who this shadow-man is?”

  “He’s not a man, not anymore,” Hennea told him. “No wizard who drinks at the Stalker’s well stays human for long.”

  “Mother, did the wizard have to go to Colossae to become Shadowed?” said Jes suddenly, and Ielian jerked—answering Seraph’s questions about whether or not he’d noticed her son creeping up behind him.

  “I don’t know.” Seraph was grateful to him for asking the question, though. This wasn’t a subject likely to stretch her ability to control her temper. “I’ve learned a lot this summer from working with Hennea and Brewydd. They knew different things than I did—but some of the information we shared was contradictory. There are things we just don’t know and others we disagreed on. A lot of Travelers believe that the Unnamed King was the Stalker of our oldest stories.”

  “Only stupid Travelers,” murmured Hennea.

  Seraph continued blandly, “I can tell you my grandfather was certain that the Unnamed King had never walked the stones of Colossae—something supposedly passed down Isolde’s line, on my grandfather’s mother’s side, all the way from Kerine, who fought at Red Ernave’s side at Shadow’s Fall.”

  Ielian made a disbelieving sound.

  “Ielian.” Phoran’s command was quiet, but Ielian nodded and subsided.

  Seraph shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what you believe, Ielian. Phoran came to us for help, and we’ll do whatever we can for him. I believe finding Colossae is the best thing that we can do, both for Phoran and for my husband. I believe it because that’s what an old, dying woman told my son.” She looked at Phoran and softened. Ielian was doing his duty and trying to protect Phoran. She was glad that his men were that loyal.

  “What I can tell you, Ielian,” she said, “is that we will do our best to find the Shadowed and kill him or die trying.”

  Something, maybe the truth in her last statement, at last satisfied Ielian.

  “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  “Is Willon’s map still in the packs you boys took?” Tier asked Jes, breaking the small silence.

  Jes bestirred himself and went to his still-full pack and unearthed the map, set it on the table, and retreated to a wall nearer Rinnie than the people crowded around the table.

  “Can’t you go sleep, Jes?” Rinnie asked, not for the first time. “I can make dinner by myself.” She tactfully refrained from pointing out that he was getting in her way more than he was helping.

  “Go use our bed, son,” said Tier, an invitation that held the force of an order. “There’s room next to Lehr. If you can’t sleep, you can at least lie down for a while.”

  Jes stiffened. “There are too many people here. I can’t sleep with everyone awake.”

  That was probably true as well; Seraph looked thoughtfully at her son. “Would it be easier outside?” she asked. “Or does the sun bother you?”

  Jes shook his head. She could tell he was feeling bad because his gaze carefully avoided touching anyone in the room.

  “He’s too tired,” Hennea said suddenly. “If he goes to sleep, he’ll sleep too deeply. He can’t protect himself in the forest, and the Guardian won’t allow him to try.” She pushed aside the map she’d been looking at and continued briskly. “But he’ll allow me to stand guard.”

  “Yes,” said Jes, very softly.

  “Get a blanket or two then, Jes.” Hennea stood up and cast a sharp look at Tier, then Seraph—perhaps waiting for them to object.

  Seraph thought a walk in the woods might do Hennea as much good as it had earlier done for Seraph. She’d noticed that the collected expression on Hennea’s face was beginning to fail her. She needed someplace private to grieve for Benroln’s clan—and Jes needed rest.

  “I’m not doing any good here,” Hennea told Seraph, almost angrily. “Whoever drew these maps knew less about mapmaking than I do. They don’t even agree with each other.”

  “We’ll keep working on it while you’re gone,” said Seraph steadily. In the Traveler tongue, she added. “I entrust my son to your keeping, Raven.”

  A wild spectrum of emotion flashed over Hennea’s face. “You trust too much,” she said in the same tongue.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Tier opened the door for them. “Jes?”

  Their son turned, so obviously operating on the last of his reserves of strength that Seraph had to fight the need to go to him. Her touch would only hurt him, though, so she stayed where she was.

  “Thank you for going with Lehr to Colbern, son,” Tier said. “If you had not been there, he would have died.”

  Jes clutched his blankets a little tighter and nodded.

  Hennea let Jes choose his own path, and walked far enough behind him there was no chance of accidentally touching him. He was too tired to deal with her lack of control.

  Time was such an odd thing. One moment you could talk to someone, then, suddenly, they were gone. Somehow it always seemed to her that there ought to be a way to turn back time and change the events. An hour, a minute, they were so simple in passing… reversing them should not be impossible. But she’d never found a way to do it.

  Another clan was dead. More people that she had known and would never see again. She felt… empty.

  Jes was silent as he walked. With his shambling gait, he should have been stumbling all over, but somehow his foot always seemed to land on the other side of fallen debris, rocks, or holes.

  Hennea kept quiet as well. She didn’t know if she could have spoken to him if she’d tried.

  She understood what Seraph had just done, though she rather suspected neither Jes nor Tier knew Seraph had chosen the last words of a Traveler marriage ceremony. The ceremony where parents turned the care of their son to his spouse.

  Hennea didn’t want to think about it, or about death, or the Shadowed.

  She tilted her face into the sun and let her mind go blank, as if there were nothing more than this moment: the sun in her face, the smell of trees and grasses, the sound of birds and insects, and the sense
that told her where Jes was that had nothing more to do with magic than the power of the ties between a woman and her man.

  He stopped on a gentle slope covered in yellowing grasses that looked no different to her eyes than several other places he’d passed without a pause. He shook one blanket out, handed her the other, then lay down on his face, leaving his back to absorb the late-afternoon, summer sun.

  Rather than shaking her blanket out, she folded it and set it on an unoccupied corner of his. Sitting on its soft folds, she pulled her legs up to her chest and settled her chin on her knees, prepared to watch over him while he slept.

  “I remember when Papa used to have nightmares almost every night.”

  Jes’s voice was so soft it could almost have been the breeze that rustled the leaves on the trees.

  Hennea didn’t say anything.

  “He still has them, from his time as a soldier, I think. Though maybe some of them now are from being a prisoner of the Path.”

  “I’ll watch over your dreams.” Hennea almost touched his shoulder, which was so close she could feel the warmth of his body. “I’ll wake you before they get too bad.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and slept.

  Sitting in the sun, trying to think of nothing, Hennea instead thought about what Seraph had said about all the strange coincidences that had shaped her family’s life.

  It had angered Seraph, the thought of someone meddling in her life, someone she had no control over. But Hennea found it to be a curiously uplifting thought. If there was such evil in the world, was it possible that there was good, too?

  The gods are dead, she reminded herself fiercely. But she couldn’t, quite, kill the hope that Seraph had given her.

  After an hour or so, Jes began to stir restlessly. She’d been avoiding watching him sleep, because some people could feel when they were watched—and, given Jes’s abilities, she assumed that he belonged to that group. But a soft sound drew her eyes, and she watched the subtle motions of muscle in his face, searching for a clue to his dreams. Slowly his face hardened into that otherness that told her the Guardian had come. She’d never seen that happen to an Eagle while he slept before.

  “Jes,” she said softly. “Guardian, wake up. You’re dreaming.”

  He rolled so fast she almost hit him by reflex. Two arms, strong and hard wrapped around her hips so tightly she knew she’d have bruises tomorrow. His head burrowed against her midriff, and the rest of him curled around her.

  “Shh.” She touched his hair lightly, but then decided if her touch were bothering him, he wouldn’t have wrapped himself as close as he could get, and she let fingers sink through the dark strands in a caress. “Can you talk about it?”

  He shook his head firmly.

  She leaned over him and put her arms around him as best she could, given the awkwardness of moving while he was still wrapped around her middle.

  “Shh,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  “He remembers,” said Jes hesitantly after a while. He’d relaxed somewhat, and she’d thought he was sleeping again.

  “What does he remember?” she whispered.

  Jes shook his head. “I don’t know, but it frightens him.”

  Phoran watched Jes and Hennea leave the house. He knew that something had happened, but, not speaking the Traveler tongue himself, he wasn’t certain what. Later he could ask Toarsen, who like quite a few of the former Passerines could speak a little Traveler.

  For some reason, he thought, as he turned back to the map in front of him, he’d expected Tier to solve his problem overnight. Instead, he’d spent the better part of a week working on the farm. He suspected many of the tasks Tier had given him were merely to keep him busy—but not all of them. Survival, he’d discovered this week, took time and effort even when you weren’t the Emperor. A farmer didn’t have to worry about assassinations and political maneuvers, but Phoran found cutting wood, gardening, and washing required as much time and effort.

  Toarsen hadn’t been best pleased when Seraph sent them all to weed the kitchen garden—Phoran savored the memory of the expression on his captain’s face—but since Phoran had gone out without a murmur, Toarsen had to do the same.

  Now, he thought wryly, when Rinnie had had to show them all what to do—her eyes wide at the thought of someone who couldn’t tell the difference between dill and reaverslace—that had stung Phoran’s pride. But she hadn’t laughed at them—at least not openly—and the memory of Toarsen’s face had kept Phoran’s sense of humor stronger than his sense of pride. Kissel hadn’t needed supervision: he said his family’s cook had taught him how to garden when he was a boy.

  He’d learned a lot; but when Lehr and Jes returned, somewhere in his heart of hearts, Phoran had expected his trials to be over.

  Lehr should have come back with the old healer in tow. She’d take one look at Phoran and give him a mysterious potion or tell him to turn around three times while wailing some unpronounceable word—like half the doctors in Taela. The Memory would leave him, and he could race home to rule in peace. He smiled to himself. At least until someone decided on a more effective method of assassination sometime when he wasn’t guarded by his men. His men.

  He cast a quick glance at Ielian. The man had surprised him with his passionate attack on Seraph as Phoran’s advocate.

  It seemed that the Emperor’s total number of loyal followers was growing. At this rate, in ten years they might number over—say—twenty. Phoran was amused at himself for the pleasure he found in knowing that Ielian, at least, served him out of something more than desire for gainful employment.

  He turned his attention back to the map, but it looked the same as it had earlier. Sighing, he gave up. “If you have a sheet of paper, I’ll start making lists of places this might be. There’s nothing unusual about the placement of the roads. Maybe Master Willon will have more maps we can use for comparison.”

  “I’ll do it, Mother,” said Rinnie as she wiped her hands clean on a rough cloth.

  She rummaged around, then set a sheet of paper, an ink pot and a well-trimmed pen beside him with a smile—she’d been shy of him at first. That day in the garden, though, had robbed her of any awe she might once have felt.

  “Good idea,” agreed Tier. “We might see if Willon will take a look at these maps, himself, if we don’t come up with anything. He’s had more than half a century running all over the Empire. Maybe he’ll see something that we’ve missed.”

  “Dinner will be done soon,” Rinnie announced.

  “As long as you used dill instead of reaverslace, we’ll not flog the cook.” Phoran started scratching out place names. He wished that at least one of the maps had some kind of scale so he knew whether he was looking at ten-leagues mapped in great detail or a hundred leagues.

  “If it’s reaverslace, it’s because someone weeded out the dill,” returned Rinnie complacently. “You can try it first. If you don’t go into convulsions, the rest of us will eat.”

  “Threatening your emperor is treason.” Phoran scratched out a place he’d written because it was too near the coast. If Colossae had been that near the sea, certainly one of the maps would have shown it. “Kissel, should we string this girl up?”

  “Not until she finishes our dinner,” rumbled Kissel. “I’ll even eat reaperslace if it tastes as good as that fish smells.”

  Tier stood up and stretched. “I’ll bring some water for washing to the porch,” he said. He took a step away from the table, glanced back at his map—the one covered in fine lines that seemed to be meaningless—and he froze.

  “Seraph, can you hold that map up?” he said.

  Phoran looked at Tier’s map as Seraph pulled it from the table, but it hadn’t changed. It still looked as though someone had, very carefully, drawn hundreds of meaningless lines all over the parchment.

  It was big and had been in a roll for a long time and kept trying to curl up. Phoran got up and helped Seraph hold it flat while Tier took slow steps away from it with
out taking his eyes off whatever had caught his attention.

  “Lehr?” he said. “Son, I need you to get up and help me a minute.”

  Lehr groaned and muttered something that sounded rude to Phoran, but he rolled out of the bed in the loft and dropped to the main floor without bothering with the ladder. Staggering across the room, he stood next to his father and rubbed his eyes.

  “Look at that map,” Tier said. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Lines,” said Lehr grumpily. “What am I suppose to…” He frowned, coming to alertness just as Tier had.

  “It’s the distance that helped me see what it was,” Tier explained.

  He walked over to the map and put his finger on the lower left-hand corner. “The lines are elevations,” he said. “I bet they used to be different colors, but age turned them all dark.”

  “What do you see?” asked Phoran. “Can you tell where it is?”

  “It’s here,” said Tier simply. “Not Colossae,” he brushed his hand over the star that marked the wizards’ city. He dropped his hand until he pointed to the lower left-hand corner again. “Right here, this is Redern Mountain and the Silver River. Here’s our valley.” He ran his hand up to a section about the size of his palm that had a single thick line running through the middle of it, but none of the thinner lines. “This must be…”

  “Shadow’s Fall,” said Lehr. “If the distances are right for Redern and this valley, then that’s right where Shadow’s Fall would be.”

  Tier let his finger follow the line that bisected the flat plain of the battlefield. It connected to a second road, then took an abrupt turn north. About a finger length from Shadow’s Fall, Tier’s finger stopped and rested on the strange symbols that Hennea told them represented the ancient wizards’ city of Colossae.

  “I can take us there,” he said.

  CHAPTER 11

  “You want journey bread?” Alinath came out of the baking room, her face tight with dismay after overhearing Tier’s request to her husband, Bandor.

  Seraph took a step back and let Tier deal with his sister.