She wouldn’t second-guess him about the straightest road to Oakharn or which of Bayarn Wood’s berries were edible, Albric told himself. He had no business doubting the areas of her expertise. Even so her casual arrogance left a bad taste in his mouth.
Albric considered himself a skilled fighter, and knew that to be modestly put. His father, who had trained him since he was old enough to stand with a stick in his hands, had been the swordmaster of Ivollaine half his life. Albric himself had placed highly in the annual melees, both in Bulls’ March and Ivollaine, every year for the past twenty. Three times he had won.
And despite these proofs of his skill, Albric would have considered it sheerest folly to attack three armsmen of unknown quality alone, for no reason. He wouldn’t have hesitated if his lord’s life or the safety of the realm hung in the balance—but on a whim? With no profit in sight but a sun sign worth less than two solis?
It was hubris, plain and simple, and he wanted no part of it. Whatever happened with the pilgrims, the Thornlady was on her own.
They reached the pilgrims just as dusk stretched over the wood. The glow of firelight through the trees, warm as an ember fallen from the fast-fading sunset, marked their campsite; they had not bothered to hide their fire, or perhaps had not known how. Albric could hear their horses trampling dead leaves and browsing on whatever sparse greenery was still to be found. He slowed his approach and whispered to the Thornlady as they neared.
“Any closer and they’ll hear you. Friendly travelers don’t come sneaking through the woods. What’s your plan?”
“My plan?” she echoed. Her voice was soft as velvet, but there was no mistaking the mockery in it. The jewel of her eye twinkled like a lost star, distant and infinitely cold. “My plan is to meet a swordsman in Tarne Crossing. A very good swordsman. One who has something I want.”
Albric drew away from her, fighting the urge to make a sun sign over his chest. It wouldn’t help, he knew that, but still he wanted to invoke the goddess against her. The bitterness of bile was strong in his mouth. “Will you be needing my help?”
“No,” she said, and he had never been so glad to hear that word in his life.
“I’ll wait here, then,” he muttered. She half-smiled, slight and sardonic, and turned away, and went on alone.
Within a few steps she vanished from view. Albric saw the shadows of the night writhe and rise up around her, as if the darkness itself was her mantle, and then the Thornlady was gone. She had shown no skill at woodscraft before, but there was no sound at her passing. Only the movements of the horses and the faint drift of conversations by the fire, carried by the evening wind, reached Albric’s ears.
He huddled in the brush, pulling his cloak around him to conserve warmth while he stayed still. It was easier if he pretended that he was hunting, waiting for a deer or a fat black grouse to wander by. Not waiting for a Thornlady in the night; not lurking in the darkness while she worked some sadist’s magic on commonfolk undertaking the holiest journey of their lives. It was forbidden for any man to interfere with the vensolles, and while Albric had never considered himself an especially observant Celestian, he had been anointed to the sun and he tried to keep true to the Bright Lady’s laws as best a man in his position could. Betraying the faith in this manner brought a pang of superstitious fear to his soul. That surprised him. He thought he had outgrown that.
There was enough in this night to make any man superstitious, though. Clouds blotted out the moon and swallowed the stars, leaving the forest swathed in darkness. Ahead he saw a silvery glow rise through the trees, silhouetting them as gaunt black claws against its eerie light. The silvery luminescence was broad and diffuse, like a bank of gray fog rolling up from the sea, and it drowned the pilgrims’ fire in its depths.
He realized, after a while, that he could no longer hear the horses or the voices of men. The forest was quiet as death. Even the wind had gone still.
Stretching his legs to ease away the cold and stiffness, Albric gathered his courage and crept toward the camp. The haze of silver light faded as he stood, and vanished before he had taken two steps. Night closed around him again.
He stumbled over the first of the armsmen on his way there. It was so dark that Albric didn’t see the body until his boot hit the fallen man’s stomach. He scraped his hand against a tree trunk to keep from tripping. His breath caught in his lungs and for an instant his thoughts froze as if he were a child facing night terrors in an empty room, not a grown man who had lived near forty years under Celestia’s light and had already seen death in all its guises.
All its honest guises, anyway. There were some things in this world that honest men had no business knowing. Tonight was forcing him to remember that.
The armsman had been sitting guard some twenty paces from their fire, his back to a tree. It was a good place for a watch, Albric recognized, once he could think again; the freeswords were indeed professionals. That hadn’t helped this man. His quiver was still hooded and his sword had toppled from his knees, the blade snug in its scabbard. Whatever had come upon him had done so without warning.
And hadn’t killed him. The man was still breathing—slowly, shallowly, but there was no question that he lived. Albric could find no wounds on him. His skin was cold and clammy as a drowned man’s, but his pulse was steady. A touch of warmth remained at his neck when Albric pressed his thumb to the life-vein there. The man moaned and his eyes darted under their lids, seeking escape from some terrible dream, but he did not wake.
Albric stepped over the man and continued toward the camp, making no effort to silence his steps as he came. The campfire burned low and dim, as if the flames feared to reach too far into the night. More bodies lay around it, solid shapes in the insubstantial dark. He couldn’t tell if they were breathing.
A flare of silver light erupted before him, brilliant as the sun, when Albric crossed into the camp. He staggered back, clawing his sword free of its scabbard. Black and white motes sleeted before his vision, blinding him. Slowly the light became more bearable and his eyes adjusted, still watering. Cursing, he wiped the tears away.
Thornlady Severine stood in the center of the camp, a sphere of misty light hovering over her maimed hand. Her hood was down, and her hair shone white in the pallid glow. Her good eye was sunk in shadow, as was her mouth and the hollow of her throat, but the cold crystal of her left eye was blue and bright as ever. Around her the pilgrims and their guards slumped in nightmare-ridden slumber, twitching feebly as they struggled to fight free of their unnatural dreams.
Albric did not sheathe his sword. He felt foolish with the steel bared in his hand and no enemies left standing, but he didn’t want to let go of his blade. It was the one thing he trusted in this spell-poisoned night. “Well?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t even glance in his direction. Instead she picked her way through the sleeping pilgrims, delicately, like a highborn lady stepping over curs on her way to a feast. When she came to the camp’s lone woman, a middle-aged matron with a careworn face under her starched white coif and a figure made dumpy by good food and a houseful of children, she knelt and cradled the woman’s head in her lap.
Then she smiled, and tilted the woman’s chin up gently, and drove the sharp bones of her maimed hand into her neck just below the ear. As her victim’s blood fountained dark across the dying fire, Severine drew a small mirror from the folds of her cloak and calmly began painting her own face with red runes. After every few strokes she wetted the small bones of her right hand in the woman’s lifeblood. By the time she finished, the flow had slowed to a weak trickle. The glistening sigils on her face and those scarred on her scalp were pieces of the same strange text, or so it seemed to Albric, who could make no sense of either.
Severine rose, shaking the woman’s head from her skirts as though the corpse were a doll with which she’d tired of playing. As she stood, the Thornlady’s svelte figure grew shorter and thicker, widening at waist and hip until she matched the proport
ions of the matron who lay limp at her feet. Her crest of silver hair dulled to the color of sand and spread to cover her bare, scarred scalp; the pale smoothness of her skin darkened and coarsened, gaining a fine network of lines to match the sun-carved wrinkles of the dead woman’s face. Even the glimmering jewel in her left eye was masked by her magic: between one blink and the next, Severine’s disconcerting stare was replaced by the friendly, honest brown gaze of the woman she had just killed.
“I am no longer so exotic,” the Thornlady said, and her stolen face creased in a smile.
Albric grimaced. He wiped the flat of his blade against his leg, trying to clean some unseen filth, then shoved it back into its scabbard. “Are we done here?”
“We are not.” Severine tucked away her mirror and took out a knife in a rune-marked sheath. Its blade was a faceted black crystal, flat and unrevealing under the starry light of her silver sphere. It measured the length of her hand from wrist to last fingertip. “This swordsman is a skilled one, you have told me. I do not intend to meet him unprepared.”
“Then what?”
“Watch,” she said.
Cursing himself for a coward, he did.
She killed them. One by one, with a peculiar gentleness. She stooped by each man’s side and pressed a kiss to his brow and, whispering her unholy words, plunged the blade of black crystal into his heart. And, one by one, the corpses rose to follow her as she made them.
They were not men anymore, the creatures that she made. Albric did not know what to call them, if indeed they had any name known to human tongues. Their hair fell from their scalps like leaves from a frost-blighted tree; their skin became hard and white as deadwinter earth. Ivory mist swirled in their empty eyes, and their jaws gaped open with an unearthly hunger. Their nails twisted into jagged claws, and their teeth stretched into fangs, pushed out from their gums by curves of rough and bloodstained bone that made their mouths look like split rib cages. They moved with a loping swiftness that Albric knew he would see in his nightmares, if ever he was able to sleep again.
The solaros was the worst of the lot. Perhaps because he was a holy man, perhaps because the Thorns’ goddess visited a special vengeance on those who resisted her power. Albric wasn’t one to know. But the solaros died screaming, not peacefully like the others, and the creature he became was more horrible by far, for the ivory fog did not blind him. Something of the man he had once been stared out from those sunken eyes, half-veiled by a shimmer of mist the color of tarnished gold and clotted blood, and the torment in them was unbearable.
“Kill that one,” Albric said, when the solaros’ corpse staggered back to its feet.
“Why?”
Albric shook his head. There was no explanation he could give that she would understand. Mercy, pity, shame: these were not concepts for which the Thorns had any use, and no one who survived their Tower kept them.
He chose a different answer. “I don’t like that one. It goes, or I do.”
She shrugged, turned toward the offending creature, and issued a command in the same inhuman speech as the chant that had made it. The thing that had been a solaros rolled its terrible eyes upward and let out a keen that might have been gratitude or agony or both. It clawed its face and fell to its knees and was still. Tortured, disfigured, but once more a corpse.
“Are you satisfied?” Severine asked.
“Not yet.” Albric dragged the dead woman’s body to the solaros’—he could not bear to touch the other—and cleared the earth around them, using a hatchet taken from one of the dead mercenaries’ packs. He piled the bodies with deadwood and dry brush for kindling, scooped embers from the campfire, and set the heap afire.
It was, he knew, only the decent thing to do. Only the wise one. The rest of Oakharn might be blind to the return of bloodmagic on its soil, but he had seen its horror and he owed its victims this much.
So Albric told himself, staring into the flames as if they could burn away the memory of what he had seen and closing his nose to the smell of burning flesh under the woodsmoke. The solaros’ body smelled of something worse. But he was not in a temple, and he had no incense to sweeten the pyre, and so he simply shut his senses to what lay before him.
Only when the blaze had taken hold of both bodies did he look back to the Thornlady, who watched him impassively with her pale corpses behind her. He’d spent hours clearing the ground and gathering wood for the fire; dawn was nearly upon them, and already there was a tint of blue on the eastern horizon. But she did not seem tired, although Albric’s own eyes burned with smoke and weariness. She did not seem tired at all.
“We have a child to find,” she said, and returned to the road.
8
Lord Inguilar saw the Burnt Knight to the road with all honors. His cooks filled their saddlebags with hard cheeses, boiled eggs, and wax-sealed jars of honey; his quartermaster replenished their arrows and gave them oiled, hooded quivers to protect the shafts from foul weather as they rode. Lady Inguilar insisted on rewarding Bitharn with a purse of silver for her victory on the archery field, even though Bitharn tried to explain that as Celestia’s servants they were unable to accept such prizes.
“Take it,” Lady Isavela said, pressing the velvet bag into Bitharn’s hands, “or I shall be insulted. Buy yourself some jewelry. Every woman deserves one beautiful gem.”
Bitharn took the money, but she didn’t buy jewels. She bought a new whetstone: the quarries of northern Langmyr gave up good ones, rough white on one side and soft blue on the other, so that a blade could be quickly polished free of nicks and brought to a fine edge with a single stone. She also bought an oiled horn of extra bowstrings for herself and a warmer winter cloak for Kelland. Lastly, as her one indulgence, she bought a double-stringed ardvele from a tavern singer who had gambled himself penniless and needed the coin.
It was a beautiful instrument, fashioned from ivory-hued wood and inked with twining black vines. The ink was made from the burnt and crushed leaves of the ladyspear tree, said to grow only on heroes’ graves along the cold beaches of the Thousand Rivers. An ardvele painted with such inks, the northmen claimed, would always carry the voice of its homeland in its song. To Bitharn, who had no homeland of her own, the story was irresistably romantic.
“You don’t play the ardvele,” Kelland said when he saw it.
“I’ll learn,” she assured him airily.
They rode through drifts of falling leaves, their horses’ hooves striking broken music from the white stones of the River Kings’ Road. Bitharn never had time to try her ardvele, for they were scarcely a day’s ride from Thistlestone when she saw the first black birds circling in the distance. Carrion birds.
“Willowfield,” Bitharn said.
Kelland nodded, his mouth set in a grim line. He squared his shoulders and nudged his reluctant horse along the road. Bitharn followed him, full of trepidation.
He had trained for this, she reminded herself. Ten years he’d spent practicing swordplay and learning the prayers that called Celestia’s magic forth in battle. This was the purpose of his life, the end toward which he was Blessed: to confront the enemies that other men could not, and cleanse their evil from the world so that others might live safely.
She knew, too, that Kelland wanted—needed—to prove that he was worthy of the respect people gave him based on the white tabard he wore and the color of his skin. The mystique of the Burnt Knight was purely an illusion, and not one he wanted. Kelland hated that peasants treated him with awe and lords with fear because they attributed some imaginary magic to his blood. Nothing, he’d confided to her once, frightened him more than the possibility that he might be tested and fail before the eyes of a world that expected more from him than any mortal man could give.
Bitharn didn’t believe he could fail. Her faith in him, and in their goddess, was absolute. Nevertheless she felt a twinge of fear as they rode toward Willowfield.
Neither of them had ever faced a Thorn; she didn’t really know what to expect
. The Spider was newly come to Ang’arta, her students newer still, and little was known of what they could do. Both Kelland and Bitharn had been in Calantyr when the Battle of Thelyand Ford was fought, and that was the only major conflict in which Thorns had taken the field alongside the ironlords. They’d heard the stories—everyone had heard the stories—but stories had a way of getting distorted between one teller and the next, and Bitharn had no idea how much truth was left in what they’d heard. She wasn’t especially eager to find out.
She said none of this to Kelland. He didn’t need her worry. The birds overhead were ominous enough. Black and stark against the autumn sky, the circling crows could be seen from leagues away. The size of their flocks told the number of the dead.
The wind turned as they came through the wood, and on it was a foulness worse than carrion, worse than the stink of putrefying wounds. It put Bitharn in mind of their first ride out from Cailan, right after Kelland won his spurs and swore his oaths to the sun. They’d gone to the tiny forest town of Silverpool, near Balnamoine, where a summer plague had stopped the flow of lumber across the high roads to the city. The lack of trade worried Cailan’s lords, so they’d sent for a Blessed to heal the sick.
Kelland and Bitharn had arrived to find the town already dead. Its people lay in the streets and their homes and the tiny chapel, where the last of them had gone to pray for salvation between vomited mouthfuls of blood. The plague had killed them too quickly to spread. A small mercy, perhaps, but to this day Bitharn thought there was nothing natural about it.
There had been crows in the sky then, too, and the same stench in the air when they piled up the bodies to burn. The work had gone on for days, and the stink with it, and when they finally left Silverpool Bitharn had burned her clothes and shorn her hair, because the smell would never come out.
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