The River King's Road

by Merciel, Liane

  Finding the right words was a struggle. Albric had never prided himself on any skill with language: he was a man of the sword, not a courtier or poet. He could write simple facts well enough, and field reports seldom demanded more. But this, he felt, should be more than a mere recitation of what happened when. This should have something of beauty.

  He expected it to be his eulogy. Bitharn had honored him with her offer, but he did not believe, in his heart of hearts, that he would be able to accept. He had seen and done too much that was evil. Redemption required more courage than he had left.

  And while Albric did not expect to be remembered with praise, he hoped at least that others would understand that he had committed his sins in the name of duty. Not for himself: for the hope of achieving some greater good for his lord and his domain. So he sat there, by his weak glassed-in flame, and struggled to find the words that could catch truth in a net of lies.

  It felt clumsy as trying to carve ivory with an axe, but in the end he found something close enough to suffice. The writing hurt; he hadn’t expected that, but it felt right. By the end his chest ached as much as his eyes did, and his fingers felt frozen through.

  Laboriously Albric folded the letter and sealed it with the nub of a candle heated over the lantern. He tucked it back into the prayerbook and lay down to rest.

  In the morning he would send the letter. Soon after he expected to die.

  16

  “Be careful of the Vis Sestani,” Brys said before they left Tarne Crossing.

  “Why?” Odosse had asked. She knew the stories of the Starfolk: that they were thieves of goods and children, that they couldn’t touch iron and so carried no weapons, instead consorting with fell magics to keep them safe on the road. And that they wandered endlessly, from the Sunfallen Seas to the Silent Water, because of some ancient curse laid on their tribe. She had heard all these stories, as had every child in her village, but she had never laid eyes on a living Vis Sestan. To her they were figments of fairy tales, same as the Ragface Knight who flayed stray children to patch up his rotting hide.

  “Because there’s a good deal of truth to the tales. They steal things if they can. Babies, too, if they think the babes are rightly theirs.”

  “Aubry?”

  Brys grunted when she asked him that. She thought he was trying not to laugh. “Your whelp should be safe, unless you slept with a Sestani singer to get him. They only steal the ones they’ve fathered … and sometimes ones with red hair. But keep an eye on him anyway, just to be safe.”

  “Why are we going with them if they’re thieves?”

  “We need numbers to mask our departure, and there’s a little truth to the stories about Vis Sestani magic. They have a few tricks of their own. It might help keep the Thorn away. We’re safer with them than without. They’re not fools enough to try robbing me”—he touched the hilt of his sword pointedly—“and you don’t have anything they want.”

  And so, in the company of the Vis Sestani, they returned to the River Kings’ Road.

  Odosse hadn’t known what to expect of the Starfolk. The stories painted them as creatures of song and shadow, hardly human, with dancing flames for hair and faces inked like Festelle masks.

  They were human, as it turned out, but it was not hard to see how the stories began. Most of the Vis Sestani were red-haired, in shades ranging from amber-gold to copper to deep mahogany, and all moved with the light quickness of deer. They spoke a strange tongue among themselves, fluid and alien to Odosse’s ears as the babbling of a stream over stones. Their faces were tattooed with colorful stars, sometimes a single small mark at the corner of an eye or over a cheekbone, sometimes a full constellation that covered the entire face in gold and green.

  The stories about their lack of weapons were rooted in truth as well. Odosse saw not a single sword among them. They used iron in their pots and their horses’ trappings, so it was no curse that kept them from bearing steel, but the Vis Sestani had no blades bigger than a knife.

  Tall red oxen with shaggy fur on their shoulders drew the Vis Sestani’s wagons. Their long, black-tipped horns curved out and in and out again, tracing the shape of a lyre. Their small, quick-footed horses wore sweet-smelling dried flowers braided into their manes and harnesses with silver stars over their chests. When they first left Tarne Crossing the animals wore bells, but after they had been a day on the road, the Vis Sestani put the bells away.

  Those first few days, they said little to either Brys or Odosse. The apparent leader of the Vis Sestani was an old woman named Razhi, whose tattooed stars were so faded and wrinkled that they looked like patches of mold on her cheeks. She spoke briefly to Brys as they left town. Odosse was too far away to hear the conversation, but afterward the Vis Sestani let them follow along, seeming to ignore the stragglers’ presence as completely as they ignored the knights and armsmen that streamed past them on the road.

  Odosse hadn’t thought that there would be so many knights on the road in winter, but they seemed to be as numerous as the black-necked geese flying south. When she asked Brys about it, the mercenary just shook his head.

  “It isn’t usual,” he said. “Raharic’s calling his swords. I’d bet a fistful of silver that Theodemar’s doing the same on the other side of the Seivern.”

  “Why?”

  “Galefrid, I’d imagine, and Willowfield.”

  In that order, she knew. One knight’s life counted for more, on the world’s scales, than did those of everyone else in her village. She watched the riders go, thundering by on steel-shod horses whose charge shook the earth, and was glad to stay beneath their notice. Their faces were so grim.

  The Vis Sestani weren’t nearly as grim, but neither were they kindly. “They aren’t very friendly,” Odosse said as they made camp one evening. She gazed longingly at the communal fire burning between the Vis Sestani wagons. The smell of roasting meat and savory stew drifted toward them. She could hear merry voices raised in song, accompanied by the quick patter of chalice drums and the piping of cane flutes. Aubry raised his head to listen, his chubby fingers waving clumsily to the music. Their own small fire, and dinner of boiled barley and dried sausage, seemed pitiful by comparison.

  “They have their reasons,” Brys said.

  “We’ve done nothing to them.”

  “Plenty of others have.” He spooned the sausage-flecked mush into a bowl with no sign of envying their distant companions’ meal, handing it to her before taking the rest of the pot as his own. “The Vis Sestani don’t travel weaponless because they love peace. They do it because every one of the Sunfallen Kingdoms forbids them to carry swords, and local lords are liable to take the excuse to massacre the lot of them if they’re caught breaking the law. They don’t mark their faces with stars for love of tattoos, either. They do that because they were once branded by outsiders, by force. Rather than let other people disfigure them with hot irons, they made the tradition their own. They do it their way now, and might be they’re happier for it, but it wasn’t much of a choice. So they’ve a right to be suspicious of outsiders, and I don’t fault them for that.”

  “Why?” Odosse asked, dropping her spoon in horror. “Why would anyone brand their faces?”

  “To mark them as what they are. As I told you: they have a little magic of their own. Enough to make people afraid of what they might do, not enough to keep themselves safe. They don’t have the support of a great faith like the Sun Knights, and they don’t have the shelter of an army like the Thorns. Their magic’s not near as powerful as either of those, anyway. A love potion that might last a few hours, a charm to help a barren wife conceive … that’s about the most they can muster. The only safety they have is in being able to pack up and leave when things get bad for them, and that’s why they keep to the roads.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “That’s life. They have it better than some.”

  Odosse propped Aubry’s head up in the crook of her elbow and fed him a little of the barley mush, spo
oning it patiently back to the baby’s mouth when he dribbled it out. “Why do they let us travel with them at all, then?”

  “How would they make us leave? Anyway, one sword is better than none. The Vis Sestani don’t like mercenaries in force—too many memories of their own hired blades turning against them, I expect—but they’re happy enough to have a freesword or two riding along on the road.”

  “How do you know so much about them?”

  “I’ve traveled with them before.” Brys scraped the last of the mush from the pot and rose to scour it with snow. “And once I was hired by a man who didn’t think they should have taken his daughter. So I’ve killed them, too.”

  ON THE FOURTH DAY ODOSSE WENT to the Vis Sestani.

  Her milk was all but gone, and Wistan was failing slowly on a diet of salt broth and porridge. The winter was still new and relatively mild, but it was another strain on the child, and he had no strength to spare. As self-sufficient as the Starfolk seemed to be, Odosse thought they must have a healer of their own. They had gone to Tarne Crossing to find a Blessed, and had failed there; perhaps she’d have better luck here. If the Vis Sestani could give children to a barren woman, surely they could save one already born.

  She girded up her cloak, straightened her back, and marched across the short distance that separated them from the caravan ahead. Brys watched her go with little more than a sideways quirk of his lips: a smirk, she was sure, and one she did not care to entertain. Odosse left him with the horse and went on alone, the babies nestled side by side on her back.

  The Vis Sestani gave her odd looks as she passed among them, drab as a goose among peacocks in her plain brown cloak. Even on the road, the Starfolk preferred bright scarves and gems set in tinkling necklaces of silver, although their clothes were practical in cut if not color. Odosse was even more conscious of her mud-brown hair amid a sea of fiery reds, and of her clomp-footed clumsiness among so many who moved like swans. The oxen had more grace than she did.

  It didn’t matter, she told herself resolutely. A few blows to her vanity couldn’t deter her from finding a healer for Wistan.

  “Pardon me,” she said to the first Vis Sestan to catch her eye, a long-limbed youth with a blue star at the center of his brow. “My baby needs a healer. Do you have one among you?”

  The youth stared at her for a long moment, while the horses snorted and the oxen ambled on around them. Odosse wondered if he understood her. Perhaps he didn’t speak Rhaellan. As she was about to step away and ask someone else, he pointed mutely to a wagon near the front. Unlike the others, it had no bronze bells or sun-faded scarves hanging from its sides. It was painted with whirling stars, like all the other Vis Sestani wagons, but where the others showed the marks tattooed on the faces of the families who owned them, this one bore every star worn by every member of its caravan. Each one was rendered in black and white, stark and skeletal. Odosse had the uncomfortable premonition that the stars were those worn by dead Vis Sestani, not the ones who rode and sang around her.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, not sure if she meant it, and hurried to catch up with that wagon.

  A girl sat in front, driving. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, but she was possessed of a spectral beauty that transcended age. Her hair was long and a lustrous black that made the night sky look dull; her skin was nearly as white as the snow that crusted the drifts of dead leaves around them, and her eyes were so wide and dark that they hardly seemed human. Those eyes seemed at once blind and piercing, as if they could read souls but not see faces.

  The girl lifted her head as Odosse walked up to the wagon, and her blind black gaze was so disconcerting that Odosse forgot what she’d planned to say.

  “I—I’m looking for a healer,” she stammered. “I was told I could find one here.”

  The child-woman gave her a long, unblinking stare. Odosse felt that she was being weighed, and wondered whether she met the girl’s satisfaction. She shifted the carrier on her back, taking reassurance and resolve from the babies’ presence. They needed her.

  “Perhaps,” the girl said at last, her words liquid with the melodic accents of the Vis Sestani. “If you are willing to pay her price.”

  “What price?”

  “That is for Ghaziel to say. Do you wish to know?”

  “Yes,” Odosse decided after a pause. Knowing the price didn’t mean agreeing to it. She could always refuse once she knew what it was. And how high could it be, truly? She had precious little to give them, and what she did have she would happily trade for Wistan’s health.

  “Then come,” said the girl. Nimble as a squirrel she climbed from the driver’s bench to open the wagon’s door, never setting foot on the ground. She left the reins lying on the seat where she’d been, and Odosse opened her mouth to voice a caution—but the oxen ambled on, stolidly indifferent, and something about the girl’s manner told her that she had done this many times before.

  Swallowing her protests, Odosse hoisted her skirts and climbed into the wagon. The girl followed her.

  Inside the wagon was warm and close. It smelled of pungent spices that Odosse couldn’t name. The windows were shuttered: it was so dark she couldn’t see her own hands. She stumbled as the wagon hit a bump, falling onto a bundle of clothes from which the scent of cloves billowed in a cloud. Aubry and Wistan began to cry, jarred awake by her fall.

  The girl behind her spoke a soft word in her own tongue. A light blossomed in the wagon. Cradled in the girl’s hand was a bubble of clear glass. A spark of blue light drifted inside the globe, floating from side to side until it struck the interior walls and bounced off to strike them again. As the sphere’s radiance fell across the babies’ faces, Aubry’s strong cries and Wistan’s halting sobs both dwindled into silence.

  The eldritch light enabled Odosse to see that the wagon’s interior was a single large space, parts of it hidden behind curtains fastened to hooks in the wooden ceiling. Bundles of rolled cloth and carpets filled most of what she could see. The colors were impossible to distinguish in the eerie blue light, but metallic embroidery sparkled everywhere, and crystals and bells gleamed in the glow. Other things glinted amid the cloth: carved bone rods, sculptures twisted from rope and hair, bowls of crystal and rippled agate polished to a satin sheen.

  A very old woman sat on a bale of clothes, cushioned on all sides by more, so that she looked over the wagon from a throne of pillows. Her face was wizened as a midwinter apple; wrinkles seamed her cheekbones and sank in around the pucker of a toothless mouth. Odosse could not tell whether her eyes were open or closed, or whether she still had eyes at all, so deep were the shadows pooled in those wrinkled old sockets.

  There was no one else in the wagon. Only the babies, the girl, and the crone.

  “Sit,” said the girl. She gestured slightly with the bauble in her hand, and the shadows danced to her movement.

  The wagon held no chairs. Odosse fumbled behind herself until her fingers latched onto a bundled quilt and sat heavily, pulling both babies into her lap. To her side, the black-eyed girl sank gracefully onto a rolled carpet, shadows rising as she descended.

  “Tell us … what is it you seek?”

  Odosse cleared her throat and laced her fingers nervously together, keeping her eyes on the old woman though the crone had neither stirred nor spoken. “My baby’s unwell. He—he hurt his head some weeks ago, and he’s not been right since. I was told you were a healer. Can you help him?”

  The crone did not answer. The girl did.

  “She is not Ghaziel,” the dark-haired girl murmured. “I am.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The girl—Ghaziel—gave her a small, weary smile. The uncertain light made her expression difficult to read, but Odosse thought she saw pain there—a great deal more pain than belonged in such a young face. “You are an outsider among us. We always present one of our grandmothers as tehazra to outsiders; should you then seize her or stone her, the harm to the People is less. A true
tehazra is precious to our survival; a grandmother is precious only to our hearts. You see? But the soul-star burns blue in your aura, so I will speak with an open face here.”

  “Thank you,” Odosse replied, unsure what else to say.

  “You want a healer for the child in your arms who is no child of your flesh.”

  “How did you—I mean—yes. Yes, I do.”

  “How did I know? Your faces are open.” Ghaziel touched her own face, marked by two hollow green stars whose linked points framed her right eye. “The future is not read in the lines of hands, as you outsiders would believe. The future is not read at all, except by an abhorrence of blood. But the truth of the person is in the lines of the face, and you do not guard yours with others.”

  Odosse shook her head, unable to follow and too confused to try. What mattered was whether these people could help Wistan. She returned to that thought as an anchor of reality in a conversation that seemed to drift further from it with every word. “Can you heal him?”

  “Yes. The price of one child will be another.”

  “No.” She clutched Aubry fiercely, tightening the arm that held him even before the words passed her lips. “I won’t give you my son.”

  Ghaziel shook her head, a quick fluid motion that seemed somehow inhuman in the light of her soul-star. The glass chips of her earrings tinkled under her hair and scattered blue sparks from its glow. “We do not want him. Not that one.”

  “He’s the only one I have.”

  “Accept our bargain, and you will bear another. We will mark him before birth as ours, and we will come for him when he is weaned. That is the price for our aid.”

  Odosse swallowed. “Do I have to choose now? Can I think on it?”

  “Of course.” Ghaziel rose smoothly, despite the wagon’s roll, and unlatched its door. Wintry light poured in. “Ours is a trueprice. It will not change until you accept or we can no longer help him. Return when you are ready.”