by Melanie Rawn
“Have you spoken with him?”
“Not yet. Sioneva was essential; Rohannon can wait. He knows what he’s doing and he’s doing it very well. Goddess Keep is what’s important right now.”
“The home farms are emptying. We can hold our people plus a hundred or so from the villages. But that’s all.”
“Our gates are open to all, Torien. No one will be turned away from Goddess Keep. They’re welcome as long as they don’t interfere with the devr’im.” His smile thinned. “Besides, I want as many witnesses as possible. But you wanted to know how I figured it out about Sioneva.”
Andry took the bulky genealogy scrolls from their case on a shelf and unrolled them onto the carpet. Real parentage and lists of illegitimate children were included here, unlike the official records downstairs in the library and at Castle Crag. But the essential lie, the one about Pol, was missing. Andry kept that one to himself.
Andrade had in her time kept charts as complete as she could make them of various bloodlines. Of course, the princes and athr’im knew their forebears back hundreds of years, but the common folk rarely bothered. Yet it was from these commoners that the overwhelming majority of Sunrunners came—because marriage between trained faradh’im and highborns had been, if not exactly forbidden, then strongly discouraged.
“It’s fact,” Andry told Torien as they settled onto the rug, “that those with diarmadhi gifts pass them on to all offspring without exception. With faradh’im, the skills are guaranteed only if both parents are Sunrunners. Sometimes parents who are ungifted themselves produced faradhi children—”
“—which invariably shocks them speechless,” Torien chuckled.
“It certainly did my father,” Andry agreed, “when he found out about Maarken and then about me.” For lack of a better term, Andry called people such as his father “halflings.” Their gift in combination with a full Sunrunner could make for faradhi children.
The puzzle of Alasen made sense only if Andry accepted this halfling idea. Neither of her parents were gifted, and none of her siblings—but Alasen was. Ostvel, too, must be a halfling; their eldest daughter, Jeni, was faradhi.
So was Sionell’s daughter Antalya. Sailing with her father off the Tiglathi coast one day five years ago, not a dragon-length from shore Antalya turned green and fainted. There had been a repeat scene on the lake at Skybowl later that summer. Speechless? Tallain, Sionell, and her grandparents had practically joined her in her faint.
“It’s something like eye color,” he mused. “Two blue-eyed people can’t have a brown-eyed child—”
“Unless the father isn’t really the father.”
“Yes—which is a dead certainty if the baby turns up with dark eyes. That was Barig of Gilad’s problem—his mother is definitely Cabar’s aunt, but the only thing certain about his father is that it wasn’t the man she married. But the analogy is fairly apt for Sunrunners. Two of us can’t have ungifted children. But people with brown eyes can have a blue-eyed child.”
“Halflings,” Torien said, tracing Tilal’s and Gemma’s lines with one finger across the complicated parchment.
Andry nodded. “And the mirror can tell me who’s what. It breaks down when we start talking about sorcery, of course.”
“Can I have a look at it?” Torien asked. “I’d like to see it at work again.”
Formerly the property of an old sorcerer woman who lived—and died—in the Veresch, the mirror reacted differently to the names of faradhi, halflings, sorcerers, and those with both gifts. The first appeared with their colors clearly defined around them; the second with a faint aura called an aleva, or “fire circle.” Full-blooded diarmadh’im were defined by blackness in the mirror—which Andry considered appropriate enough. Those such as Pol, both Sunrunner and sorcerer, appeared with their colors limned in eerie silver. Everyone thought that Riyan was both as well, but the mirror had told Andry long ago that the man was all diarmadhi. His queasiness when crossing water was not due to Sunrunner blood, but to a normal physical reaction.
He went to the closet where the mirror was kept, shrouded and seemingly unimportant, and carried it near the hearth. Whisking the blanket from the glass, Andry conjured a fingerflame.
“Sioneva,” he said, and the girl’s image appeared—with the glow of full Sunrunner gifts around her head. “You see?” he remarked to Torien. “Halfling parents, faradhi child.”
“What about the others?”
“Rihani,” Andry told the mirror. The boy’s face was very like his sister’s—they shared the same brown hair and blue eyes, the same resemblance to Tilal about the eyes and Gemma around the brow and jawline. But what was brilliant surrounding the girl was barely visible in the boy: halfling.
Andry identified the third sibling aloud. Named for his own dead twin. Goddess, how much it still hurt to think of his brother. The mirror showed him Tilal’s son; it stayed blank on hearing the names of the dead.
Young Sorin looked like neither parent, and where he’d gotten those gray eyes was problematical, but by the usual odd trick of kinship he was unmistakably the brother of Sioneva and Rihani. He was half a Sunrunner, and therefore useless to Andry.
“Well,” sighed Torien, “that’s two fewer faradhi princes we have to worry about. No problems with Ossetia in the future.”
“No? Your vision doesn’t extend far. What if Sioneva marries a halfling lord, and their children are Sunrunners? What if Rihani Chooses Antalya of Tiglath, say, or my niece Chayla, and his children turn out the same? It’s generations we’re speaking of, Torien. The trouble is, I don’t know whether to encourage it or stop it.”
The steward was barely listening. As each name was spoken, the face in the mirror changed. Torien blinked into his own eyes and Andry grinned at his discomfiture. It was a bizarre thing indeed to be standing at the wrong angle for a direct reflection, and yet to see one’s own face in this mirror.
Torien felt his sidelong amusement and shrugged irritably. “Perhaps just this once you could ask Brenlis to look into the future and—”
“No—oh, Goddess, no!”
Andry put both hands to the mirror’s cold surface. He called Brenlis’ name, frantic with fear, clawing the glass.
Empty; blank nothingness; the mirror’s response to the names of the dead.
Chapter Fifteen
As Tilal heaved his saddle onto Rondeg’s back, Chaltyn gripped the bridle in one hand and rubbed his balding pate with the other. “I don’t like it, my lord,” he stated frankly. “That bunch of—mind your teeth or I’ll hood you like a hawk, you misbegotten brute!—those song-singing Sunrunners can’t fight. It will be just us against Goddess alone knows how many of those savages.”
Tilal kneed Rondeg in the belly; air whooshed from the horse’s lungs and tufted ears were laid back. He quickly tightened the girth. “Nice try, old son,” he told the stallion. “But I know your tricks by now. I know Sunrunner tricks, too,” he added to Chaltyn. “You don’t believe in rumors, do you?”
“I believe in nothing I can’t grab with my fists,” the old man growled. “I know the rumors, my lord. That a magical wall goes up at their bidding, turning warriors and horses to stone.” He snorted. “You’ll never convince me I’ll soon sit a granite gelding.”
“Don’t fancy yourself as an equestrian statue? No more do I. But it’s fear woven into the wall that makes enemies wish they’d turned to stone.” Sioned had told him the story of the battle at Dragon’s Rest nine years ago—a battle that had ended before it even began. Just where the gorge widened into the valley, Andry had constructed a spell from the Star Scroll. Those contacting that invisible wall slammed into their own worst nightmares.
“Wall or not, they’ll need us to do their fighting for them.”
“Agreed.” The ros’salath would keep the Vellant’im out of Goddess Keep, but it would not kill. That was Tilal’s job.
He inspected Rondeg’s leather battle harness, the equine equivalent of his own, covering breast, upper limb
s, and back. Kolya had insisted he take the armor along with the stallion; a commander unhorsed was a very bad idea. Tilal’s gear was a gift from Kolya as well, the leather hastily redyed in Ossetian dark green. Matiya had fashioned a plume for his helm that resembled the wheat-sheaf symbol of his princedom. He also wore the belt of Desert blue and the gold buckle of his knighthood, given twenty-five years ago and brought out for the Rialla this year. It had been Pol’s notion that older men should wear the symbol of their status to honor new-made knights. Tilal was glad he would be carrying Rohan’s color into battle with him. He only wished he had the High Prince’s banner as well to fly beside his own.
The symbols and the substance were ready. He mounted and made a brief tour of his troops. Those gathered from around Kadar Water had been augmented by levies from elsewhere in Ossetia, until he commanded a respectable army of cavalry, bows, swords, spears, and scythes. Something Rohan had said years ago came to mind—that people fight for their own land with a fervor not born of mere loyalty to a prince. Tilal had no illusions that his four hundred and sixty-three followed him for himself alone. He was a just and able prince, generous, faithful to the law. His work in the war against Roelstra at so young an age was a source of pride to his people; he had a handsome wife and a charming daughter and two strong sons. The Ossetians loved him well—but for all that, he was a foreigner, a Syrene-born second son of River Run’s athri. It was just as well he had no territorial ambitions and did not make war to amuse himself; through duty his people would have followed him, but they would not have fought as they were about to do.
And, ultimately, fight for whom? Andry. Goddess Keep was on Ossetian land; it was only good tactics to stop the Vellant’im there. But that Andry would be the primary beneficiary of spilled Ossetian blood did not sit well with Tilal.
The Lord of Goddess Keep annoyed him on several counts. Tilal had philosophical differences with Andry over the direction faradh’im had taken in the last eighteen years. He looked askance on rituals and mysteries. His nature inclined him toward easygoing, friendly, unsuperstitious relations with the Goddess. But even if he had agreed with Andry, there was a deeper problem that was at once—paradoxically—intensely personal and overwhelmingly political. Neither the man nor the prince in Tilal appreciated Andry’s self-chosen position as rival to Pol’s power. He was on Pol’s side, simply and irrevocably. Family feeling was part of it. He also genuinely liked his cousin as a man. As a prince, he deplored the inevitable clash of two strong wills. And he had the uneasy feeling that this war would see a headlong collision between them.
But that was not his immediate problem. He nodded to Chaltyn his approval of the disposition of troops, beckoned to his banner-carrier—a place that would have been Malyander’s, now held by a woman archer from the southern coast—and began the march. They would reach Goddess Keep by noon, set up camp, and wait for the Vellant’im to land on the beach below the wrinkled cliffs. Tilal had several ideas about using those cliffs to his advantage, and as he led his army across the autumn-rich meadows of their princedom, he was smiling.
• • •
The alarm was called just after dawn. The Sunrunner on watch had no need of sunlight to see the dragon-headed ships; they were less than twenty measures off the coast and sailing fast.
Torien was informed first. He nudged his wife awake, threw on some clothes, and sent warnings to the home farm and the villages. Then he went to have a look for himself.
Jolan was already up on the battlements, gazing out to sea. She didn’t spare him a single glance as he stood beside her in the crisp morning air.
“By the Father of Storms—magnificent,” she breathed. Daughter of pearl-fishers along the Dorvali coast, she appreciated a fine spread of sail. Torien, born near Snowcoves in Firon, could not help but agree with her. Admiration for the ships momentarily banished all other thoughts.
Oclel appeared at Torien’s shoulder. “They’ll hit Trenchwater soon,” he said. “That gives us some extra time.”
Wrenched back to practicalities, Torien nodded. The deep ocean floor gorge, hinted at by a swath of midnight-blue water, had a current as strong as the Faolain in spring flood. The captains of regular cargo ships knew how to negotiate Trenchwater. It would slow the enemy’s progress—or so he hoped.
“I’ll wake Andry—if he’s not already up. Oclel, you start the drill. Everyone knows what to do.”
“They’d better,” Oclel replied in a voice that boded ill for slackers or those of poor memory. “As for the farmers and their noise—they’d best behave and not get in anyone’s way.”
“Kind but firm,” Jolan reminded him, smiling a little. “Don’t bite their heads off. War is new to them.”
“And the rest of us have been doing it all our lives?” Oclel asked. “I won’t have their pigs squealing underfoot while we work. They’ll do as they’re told and stay where they’re put or they can go take their chances outside.” He squinted at the dragon ships. “No one’s thought to find Tilal yet, I suppose?”
Jolan shrugged. “We can keep them busy until he arrives.”
“I don’t like being beholden to him,” Oclel muttered. “He’s Rohan’s, down to his last breath.”
“He’s prince enough not to gloat to our faces—unlike his brother.”
Torien elbowed his old friend in the ribs. “Be glad it’s not Kostas marching to our defense. We’d never hear the end of it.”
They went about their tasks, Jolan keeping pace with Torien to Andry’s door. “Having seen those ships, I don’t wonder Chadric fled,” she murmured.
Torien stroked her cheek, his fingers brown as taze against the white-rose paleness of her skin. “But you haven’t forgiven him.”
“Would you? My parents, my sisters and cousins—Goddess only knows what’s become of them. All I saw on sunlight was their village. Burned to cinders.”
“We’ll look for them again soon, love,” he promised. “Perhaps they’re with Prince Ludhil.”
“And perhaps they’re all dead.” Jolan straightened and continued more briskly, “I’ll go prepare the wine.”
“Make it fairly strong. We may be at this a while.”
This was Andry’s opinion as well. He was awake and dressing when Torien entered his chambers. The steward barely had time to report what had been seen and thus far done before the outer door burst open and Andrev ran into the room. The boy skidded to a stop at his father’s side.
“Valeda says I have to stay with the children! I’m thirteen, Father, old enough to be your squire! Please let me!”
Torien saw amusement war with consternation in Andry’s blue eyes. The son was the image of the father in that feature as well as the lines of mouth and jaw and the sweep of thick hair back from the temples. But Andrev was blond like his mother Othanel, who had died ten years ago attempting a Star Scroll spell. Since spring, Andrev’s height had started to go up and his voice had started to go down—but as he repeated his plea, the latter cracked back into a childish treble.
“I can hold the banner and I’ve been practicing with sword and knife and Oclel himself says I’m pretty good—please, Father!”
After a moment, Andry said softly, “No.”
“But why?”
“Because—” Andry hesitated, and Torien saw the reasons in his eyes. Andrev was his eldest son, soon to begin the training that would make him Lord of Goddess Keep after Andry. Since his eleventh year he had been wild to be fostered at some court—preferably in the Desert, like his half-sister Tobren—and become a real squire like other boys of his age and high birth. His father had forbidden it.
Torien said, “Because the battle we’ll fight won’t be with swords or knives. Your skills will better serve to protect your brother and sisters.” He had little inclination for and less experience with children, despite the dozens at Goddess Keep—and Andrev was no fool. But for a disgusted glance, the boy ignored him.
“I could stand guard. I won’t get in your way, Father, if you�
��re worried about that.”
Andry shook his head. “I wasn’t. But I’d have to worry about your safety, and that would distract me from what I must do.”
The boy’s cheeks flushed. “I’m not like Joscev, that you have to rescue me from the roof or keep me away from the unbroken horses!”
“I know. But I’d worry about you all the same.”
“But, Father, I—”
“Enough, Andrev. I have things to do, and you’re keeping me from them.” Even Torien recognized that this was the wrong thing to say. Hastily—but too late—Andry added, “We’ll talk about your fostering once this war is over. Would you like to go to Kadar Water, or perhaps Kierst-Isel like your cousin Rohannon? Think about your choice.”
“Once the war’s over, I won’t be any use to you,” Andrev said, stiff pride trying to conceal angry disappointment. “I’ll get out of your way now, Father.”
“Andrev—” He extended a hand, but the boy was already out the door. Andry sighed. “He won’t soon forgive me for this.”
“Andry, he worships you.”
“When he was little, yes. But he’s growing up. At his age, all I wanted was to prove myself—but in Sunrunner arts, not those of war. I suppose it’s my father and grandfather in him.” Shrugging, he donned a white wool tunic and belted it around his waist. “Let’s get started. I want an estimate of when Tilal will arrive. And Trenchwater won’t slow these people down long, you know—they’ve come from Goddess knows where through Goddess knows what kind of seas. We’re not dealing with casual sailors here.”
That became obvious when Jolan checked on the ships’ progress. “Faster than I thought,” she admitted as the devr’im assembled in the gate tower. Indicating the wine cups on a low table, she said, “Drink up. We’ve got work to do.”
Torien watched the others find their individual goblets. Commissioned from a Fironese crystaller, each of the nine had been designed by Andry in the primary colors of each faradhi’s gifts. Jolan’s was a scene of underwater pearl-beds, amber and emerald seaweed bending delicately in the current; for Oclel, born in the Veresch, a black wolf paced among ruby flowers near a sapphire river. Rusina paused to admire her cup before drinking; the glass showed a gray-white cat stalking blue birds through a grassy field. Everyone knew who Andry cast as the cat.
