Changer of Days

by Alma Alexander

  Left alone, Anghara leaned forward on the parapet and pillowed her chin in her folded hands, staring into the distance in the direction from which Sif was approaching.

  “Oh, Father,” she whispered, bringing up a ghostly image of Red Dynan in her mind’s eye. “What you have done here…I know you loved this land, but you planted an evil seed for its future. Only one of us can hold the Throne Under the Mountains; Sif will not give it up, and I—I cannot, not now, not in the face of the faith and sacrifice which have brought me here. So it has come to this—your blood warring against your blood. And all I have…all I have are the words of an oracle. I never sought his death. But what choice can I have, when he is forcing me to choose between his death or my life?”

  The oracle. The first words of Gul Khaima by the sea. It was something Anghara couldn’t forget, and much of the prophecy had already come true. It was almost done with Anghara, except for a few revelations still defying comprehension. A hunter shall be snared by the prey he baits. But which was the hunter and which the prey? And what of the last cryptic pair of unsolved lines? A broken spirit shall opened lie, a bitter secret to learn. Whose the broken spirit, and what the bitter secret? It was all coming to a head, and Sight was closed to her, the future murky.

  She sighed deeply, wondering whether Sif spent half as much time agonizing over this as she did, and turned away, back toward the keep where her friends waited.

  Had she but known it, Sif was resigned to yet another sleepless night when the army made camp that evening. There had been all too many, beginning long before the decision to fly against his instincts and chase into Kheldrin after the prey snatched from his own keep while he had been on a wild goose chase to punish those who attacked his mother’s manor. He had analyzed the events over and over again, and counted that foray as his first mistake—giving in to the hot thirst for revenge, to the burning urge to find the Rashin scion, and teach him a lesson he would never forget. Of course Favrin had long since vanished by the time he arrived, and Sif had to be content with raids into the hills. They had found one small group of men stupid enough to fall into his clutches—but it had been a singularly futile campaign, and the desire for revenge had lost its bite after he cooled sufficiently to think things through.

  So he had headed back for Miranei, only to be greeted with chaos on his return—his chancellor and his queen dead, his heir lost, and both his prisoner and the secret of her identity free of his dungeons. Again taken by white heat of fury, he had led his army out again after the fugitives. And he had almost got them, frustrated only at the last moment when they had gained the River Hal and somehow vanished into the country beyond. Sif paid a number of savage visits to the nearest villages, ransacking the places for his quarry; he found nothing, but left smoldering ruins filled with wild-eyed victims in his wake.

  Upon his return to Miranei, he immediately had the escaped prisoner declared an impostor, and went to pay very public respects to the vault which purported to hold the remains of Red Dynan and his family. And then his hand had been forced in no uncertain way—he would not soon forget the morning when they came to tell him Anghara’s tomb had been broken open, and anyone who cared to look could see the grave was empty.

  The state funerals he had organized for Fodrun and Senena turned into a grim shadowplay as Sif fought an elusive and yet persistent rumor that the real Anghara was very much alive. Whispers told of the deaths of Fodrun and Senena, and the loss of her child, being no more than punishment for Sif’s stealing the throne. Many recalled the way Sif had claimed his kingship, and the role Fodrun had played. There was even a murmur about a document bearing witness to Anghara’s crowning in the presence of her father’s Council before Sif had ever set foot in Miranei, making his claim even more tenuous. Sif thought he knew who had started that particular piece of gossip, but, although he had taken steps to try and find her, the woman named Deira, who had once been his means of extracting truth from a dying queen, seemed to have vanished completely.

  So had Anghara and her companions. As once before, when she had been a nine-year-old child, Sif sent out patrols to search for her, and met with as little success. He cursed himself for a soft fool, swore that this time, when he had Anghara once again in his hands, he’d finish the job properly and be done with her.

  In the meantime, back home in Miranei, he was beleaguered by sharp tongues which he knew could turn into knives soon enough. It was hard to keep denying what seemed more and more like an obvious truth, not when he was devoting such huge resources to hunting for the escaped prisoner—and not hunting her was inconceivable.

  And then word had come from Shaymir. Sif had long had a network of spies in Kieran’s native land—the land to which the outlaw might well return. It was this net which now caught a bigger fish. Hearsay, a rumor, a mere breath, but it had to do with Anghara, and Sif had sent orders to trace it. It didn’t take his men long—a small village on the edge of the desert was located, and a camel trader found who remembered bartering three camels to a lad and a bright-haired girl in exchange for three tired horses out of Roisinan. The proprietor of the only inn in the village remembered having these two young travellers under his roof, together with a couple of singers who had really been too good for his establishment. The musicians acquired names—Shev and Keda. The thing was clinched for Sif when he discovered Keda came from the same village which had been Kieran’s birthplace, and that before her marriage she had borne the outlaw’s own name. Word was sent out for their capture.

  Whether through timely warning or her husband’s selfless sacrifice, Keda escaped. But Shev was taken, and perhaps his own guilt accounted for the ease of his capture—for it had been his tongue which had loosed the secret of Anghara’s passage. There had been true power in Anghara’s departure into Kheldrin; Shev had been a part of that, and was enough of a singer not to be able to resist the lure of the song he’d seen taking shape that day. In Sif’s hands, Shev had initially tried to deny any knowledge of Anghara, but Sif needed to find her whereabouts, and fast; his men had orders not to be overly nice about extracting that information. The musician cracked when they systematically broke every finger on his left hand, and threatened to start on his right. Sif learned of the trip into the Shaymir desert, of the singing rock, and of the semi-mythical passage through the mountains. He learned, at last, of Kheldrin, solving more than one mystery—for Anghara must have been there before to head for it again. Kheldrin, by repute a land where witches reigned and magic was loose, even if they didn’t call it Sight; it made sense for Anghara to seek sanctuary there. Thwarted yet again by that which he had sworn to destroy, Sif made his third mistake—he sent a message into Kheldrin demanding they surrender Anghara, or face war.

  In doing so, he sent more than one message, to more than one place. There could be only one reason he would go to such lengths to destroy the girl—she could hardly be the impostor he claimed. It was only the inescapable fact that he too was descended from the Kir Hama kings that kept a rising from flaming there and then. But Miranei was a city steeped in royal intrigue and politics, and knew that without Anghara there to take the throne if they overthrew Sif, true queen or not, they would surely face an invasion from Tath. That was unthinkable; what saved Sif was the simple fact that Miranei preferred a descendant of the ancient Kir Hama line, whatever his credentials, over a Rashin pretender. Besides, the army was still Sif’s, and it would have taken a rash leader to risk a rising then, with the army itching to turn on someone to protect their besieged leader. When Sif proposed invasion, the men jumped at the chance to channel their frustrations against an identifiable enemy—and instantly forgot everything they had ever been told about Kheldrin.

  They had taken Sa’alah easily enough—it was a trade city, enjoying all the privileges of that status, and had never been fortified against massive assault. It had also been surprisingly empty, almost as if it had been sacrificed, bait to draw the Roisinan king deeper. If that had been the plan, it succeeded magnificentl
y, for Sif roared through and took the road to the mountain pass whose name, had he taken the trouble to discover it, should have given him pause. By the time he emerged into the yellow sands on the far side of the Ar’i’id Sam’mara it was too late for second thoughts, the press of men behind him forcing him forward.

  There had been no attack while they were threading their way through the mountain, although there had been ample opportunity—a single orchestrated rock fall would have decimated the winding line of men packed tightly into the narrow pass. But there had been no need. There was nothing to meet the invader on the other side of the pass except desert, and Sif’s inexperience soon proved more than enough to begin, slowly and pitilessly, to destroy him.

  There were men in his army who came from the desert country in northern Shaymir; with presence of mind Sif moved these into positions of command, and some semblance of order returned. Their horses were useless as a means of transport; men were sent back to Sa’alah to procure camels to support the baggage and supply train, as well as mounts for the army leaders. But that in itself necessitated learning new riding techniques; in the meantime, the men who were to cross the desert on foot had still not found an enemy to vent their anger and frustration on, and were rapidly running out of water.

  An advance guard found and “captured” a hai’r, although no resistance had been encountered. This solved the immediate problems. But no map had ever been made of Kheldrin. None of them had any idea in which direction to turn, and mistakes could prove costly in this inhospitable country. Sif tried to clear his head and think logically—he knew of dun’en, the desert horses, and knew they had to be reared somewhere relatively accessible to Sa’alah Harbor, from which they could be shipped out of Kheldrin. Only Sa’alah itself lay beyond the mountains at his back; the horizon stretched away for a great distance to the south and west before it met the blazing desert sky. There seemed to be a suspicion of high ground to the north, though, and Sif turned his army that way.

  There were no paths in this desert wilderness, and it was hardly Sif’s fault that he missed the caravan trail to Kharg’in’dun’an. The first he knew of his blunder was when he felt the air change into something oppressive with an almost living heat which offered no respite, and the yellow sand gradually gave way to black rock. Ten men died on that first day, six from heat and exhaustion and four from deadly encounters with diamondskin lizards, before Sif could extricate himself from the Khar’i’id—and this was long before any enemy had been sighted. Another twenty crossed to Glas Coil the next day; and after that, not even Sif’s charisma was quite enough. Every day that followed saw fewer men stumbling at Sif’s heels, even though the army, on retracing its steps, sometimes came across mortal remains, proving that those who fled Sif’s ranks stood little chance of making it out on their own. But perhaps they found the odds acceptable, for the desert proved to be an eminently worthy adversary. As Anghara had before him, Sif saw the deadly beauty that drew and enchanted, and then reached out to kill with the careless ease of true power. By the time the right path out of the Arad had been found the fight had been knocked out of his men. It was doubtful if they would have managed a successful sortie had a phalanx of enemy soldiers suddenly risen to bar their way. In any case, when they did encounter their first Kheldrini it had not been an army—but, rather, a veiled woman whose golden eyes were twin embers of cool fire over the blue burnouse concealing the lower half of her face.

  “There is nothing that belongs to you in this realm, King of Sheriha’drin, and nothing here to which you belong,” the apparition informed the stunned army leaders in flawless if accented Roisinani. “Leave now, and the spirit of this land will be merciful.”

  Sif had urged his mount forward, a few steps ahead of his captains, his eyes narrowed at the desert vision. “You do hold something…someone…that I seek,” he said, refusing to allow himself to be intimidated. “I will have what I came for.”

  “You will have a waterless summer in the desert of Arad Khajir’i’id,” said the woman, her voice lilting with the evocative syllables of her own tongue. “You have already looked into one face of death—and here, in Kheldrin, death has a thousand faces.”

  Sif loosened his sword in its scabbard. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Do you speak for your king?”

  “We have none,” the woman said. She thrust aside her black cloak, shrugging it back over her shoulders, revealing golden robes and several ropes of amber and silver say’yin’en. Her slender arms, full of silver bracelets, lifted toward the sky. “We are the People of the Desert, following the Way. Our lords do not reign by right of birth alone, they are chosen to lead the caravans of their folks’ lives. And we of the an’sen’en’thari stand between the People and the Gods to whom all in this land is sacred. Leave us, Sif Kir Hama. Kheldrin is not a prize for you.”

  “I do not seek it,” Sif said darkly. “But I will have…what…I…came…for.” He spoke slowly, emphasizing each word. There was a flash of sun on metal as his sword began to leave its scabbard. At once there were a dozen loose all around him, leaving his captains’ scabbards in a concerted hiss of metal against leather. The woman’s eyes glowed even more gold than before.

  “Al’ar’i’id akhar’a, rah’i’ma’arah na’i smail’len,” she said, her voice soft but carrying. There was a texture to the foreign words, a feeling of the brooding power of an ancient land, and it was mixed with a dose of something much more down-to-earth—contempt. The phrase was not a curse, but to those who could not comprehend its meaning it might as well have been. It was an incantation, a thing of witchcraft born of a witch-country. Many made surreptitious signs against evil; and one, who had perhaps discerned the contempt and been enraged, unwittingly perpetuated the legend—with an outraged roar he threw his spear, only to see it pin no more than an empty black cloak to the hot sand. The woman seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  The people of the desert country did, finally, meet Sif on the winding trail which led up to the Kharg’in’dun’an plateau. The terrain was of their choosing, and theirs were all the advantages of the encounter. That Sif did not lose this battle was a tribute to his abilities, and the spirit his presence still imparted to his suffering army. They held their ground. But it was hard to fight an enemy who had a knack of disappearing, vanishing into the land as though they had been water poured into the thirsty desert sand. The skirmish was brief, bloody and inconclusive. Ahead, it seemed, there was nothing but more empty country, sand and stone, and a powerful people who inhabited a twilight realm and were able to reach out in absolute mastery. Sif was nothing if not head-strong, but still lucid enough to know when to draw the line, to give up a prize in order to reclaim it another day. The sight of his suffering and dispirited army was enough to tell him he had reached the end of this particular road. Mere days after his first and last battle in Kheldrin, Sif announced they were returning to Roisinan.

  “We will be back,” he had said grimly. The summer campaign had been a mistake, even if it had been undertaken in the fires of frustrated rage, and the light of the Kir Hama tradition of the invincible summer kings. But admitting failure came hard; harder still was the chilling certainty, deep in Sif’s heart, that she whom he sought had already left Kheldrin and was somewhere behind him, filling a place he had left empty. Upon his return to Roisinan, he had greeted the news of Anghara’s entry into Miranei with a weary resignation that stunned the hapless captain detailed to tell him. He did the only thing he could: gathered the remnants of his army and led them out to reconquer that which his anger, and his vulnerability to Anghara’s legitimate claims, had allowed him to lose.

  Now, within the shadow of the keep that had been home to both Red Dynan’s children, Sif remembered the last time he had seen Anghara—locked safely away in the depths of Miranei’s dungeons. Thin, drawn, and, when she wasn’t curled up in a lethargy that was half sleep and half numbness, staring with empty eyes at the shadow-filled darkness, wild with the loss of something Sif could never
comprehend. If someone had told him then that the creature in front of him would hold his fate in her hand not a year hence, he would have laughed. But the truth was, she had always held his fate. And only now, at the last, was he finding enough strength—or desperation—to end it. One way or another.

  He remembered the damning record of her coronation, and blocked it out with the memory of his own—the night Red Dynan had died by the Ronval, and the face of Second General Fodrun as he had knelt at his feet, offering him a crown. And it had been sweet to accept, to come to his father’s castle no longer as an illegitimate son but as its lord, its crowned king. Against that bright memory was set a shadow Sif obstinately refused to face—a black premonition that time was running out, and the price of the bite he had taken from the apple of temptation was about to be demanded. He could feel the cold breath of something riding behind him, and, perhaps for the first time, he was afraid.

  17

  The siege of Miranei did not, in the end, last long, and for the very reason Anghara had foreseen. It was over the minute a band of Sif’s men gained entrance to the terrified town below the keep, and tried to cut a swathe through to the postern gates of the castle. The walls of Miranei were thick stones but Anghara didn’t have to hear the cries of those who found themselves in the way of Sif’s swordsmen in order to sense them. When Kieran and Charo came to her with the news, she lifted burning eyes and stopped them with a single look in the doorway of her chambers.

  “Go,” she said, without their having to say a word. “It is in the God’s hand now. Go, for what is fated will be, and that which awaits us will find us, in the keep or without these walls. Go out to him.”

  After a moment of silence Charo had simply nodded, and turned to stride away. Kieran lingered for an instant longer, exchanging an eloquent look with the woman who was all queen in that hour, and then turned away without a word. There was too much to be said, and not enough; it was a simple choice—take refuge in silence, or stay a lifetime, talking of everything left unspoken for so long.