He left, and Hadand followed him out.
Tau reached across the table and clapped Inda on the shoulder. “Keep a sharp eye. You sure you don’t want me riding with you?”
“Tau, Evred’s sending an entire wing of his toughest dragoons with me. If eighty-one dragoons can’t keep me alive, nothing can. Unless you’ve learned some tricks I don’t know.”
Inda looked around in what completely failed to be a covert manner, but since his sister and Evred were gone, it didn’t matter. He lowered his voice. “Besides, I think you are making them happy.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” Tau’s light gaze drifted Tdor’s way, then he raised a hand in salute and left.
Inda wondered what he had missed, then forgot that when Tdor leaned toward him. “I will miss you, Inda,” she said. Her voice had hurt in it.
He mumbled, “I’ll miss you, too.” He felt awkward. It felt so stupid to say things they both knew so well. Did other people feel better after saying obvious things? Damned Wafri and his torture—the days of his efforts to pry out Inda’s thoughts and memories were long gone. No one was doing that now—he was surrounded by people he trusted and loved—but sometimes he felt . . . pried. He couldn’t even say how.
Then Tdor bumped her forehead gently against his, and all his thoughts fled. She only did that when something was important, and she knew he might not like it.
“Inda,” she whispered. “Will you do something for me?”
“You know I will. If I can.”
“When you’re with the Idayagans, will you remember manners? Your mother taught us well. You didn’t have to remember when you were a pirate, and you don’t now. Because you are home. But all those people will be watching you. You are being all of us. You see?”
Inda flushed. “I—” There was nothing to say. It would be a lie to protest that he ate with manners when he didn’t remember how he ate. He never thought about how he ate, except what a waste of time it was when he was so busy. How often had he wished you had a door in your stomach so you could unlock it, shove the food in, and lock it up again, and go on your way. “I will.”
“Thanks. Let’s go.”
Hadand was waiting outside. Inda said, “Hadand, I’m taking that book with me, Cassadas Atanhas.”
“What? But I thought . . .” Hadand shrugged as they walked downstairs, Inda between his sister and his wife.
“I’ve been falling asleep over it for half a year. Don’t the guilds have a rule, no work after Daylast bells?” Inda joked. “Wish that extended to kings and their shield arms. I figure there’s no work waiting in a tent at night, so I’m going to try reading then.”
Noise filled the stable yard as Inda’s column formed up behind the banner bearers, horses flicking ears and switching tails and whickering at one another as men walked around and talked. The only one aware of this double layer of communication was Inda, who was still trying to catch up with learning horse ways after his long absence. How instinctively the men communicated with the animals while gabbling with the other men.
Then Evred was there, his fist held out, fingers curled down. Puzzled, Inda held out his hand, and looked down in surprise when Evred dropped something onto his palm. Oh. One of those magical locket things.
“Use that to communicate with me,” Evred said, and gave him the catch words.
There were five lockets all told: two had belonged to the former Harandviar, and the king had had three. Signi had changed the magical catches, so all five could communicate.
Evred had never used the bloodstained one Captain Sindan had worn until his death until now.
Inda flung the chain over his head, dropped the locket inside his shirt, and forgot it as he took hold of Tdor and kissed her, hard. She responded just as hard. Their noses bumped and they laughed unsteadily.
Tears made his form glimmer. She blinked them away as he mounted his horse. Inda looked back, grinning as he lifted his fist, then pointed.
As the horns blared and the thunder of hooves rumbled all around them, Hadand turned to Evred, lips parted.
But what she saw in his face as Inda rode out stopped the words, stopped light and sound and sense, cold.
Chapter Twenty-seven
LIGHTNING hissed overhead.
The violet glare branched across Signi’s vision in a reverse image of her eye’s veins.
She shivered, stretched out her arms, and when cold water trickled inside her sodden clothes, she shivered again, and forced herself into hel dancer breathing. Her hands must be steady . . .
The sun’s daily retreat to the north had begun to bring the bitterness of winter again, here in the southernmost reaches of Iasca Leror.
She had saved the south for last because of its relative proximity to Sartor. If she were to receive any word or sign from Brit Valda, Chief of the Sea Dags, she must carry on with her original quest.
But there had been no word. There had been no sign.
There had only been increasing evidence for the past couple of weeks that she was being followed. No, hunted.
She had learned how to travel silently, at night, to do her magics within doubled wards out of the sight of locals. She liked thinking of people waking to the surprise of renewed heat for their baths, the cleanliness of their water, of bridges strengthened. But she had to get food, so she limited her contacts and always told outright lies, claiming each time to be a trader, a weaver, a potter.
She had crossed the country in zigzags, creating no pattern, but now, as she reached the end, the pattern must be evident: there were few unrenewed places left.
And so, despite her crazy path and all her care, the trap had closed around her.
Signi pressed her hands over her eyes. But there was no escape from the images of the family she’d met just yesterday, their friendly faces, their generosity last night as they invited a lonely traveler to join them in their meal; the children’s anxious hope as she sampled the nut-cake they had made themselves—
Last image: the children lying dead inside that house, their parents beside them. All with their throats slit, killed with such speed they never knew the silent, shadowy Blood Hunt had entered their living space before they’d tumbled into death.
The Erama Krona adhered precisely to ritual when on a Blood Hunt. These deaths had been a warning. From now on they would kill everyone who aided her, whether the victims knew they were aiding a fugitive or not.
Signi had fled straight into the storm, running most of the night. She sensed that dawn was not far off. She must find somewhere to hole up for another long day.
Her days of mage renewal were done. She had her greater duty before her surely, but if so, why had she not been warned that there had been a Blood Hunt called out against her?
There had been no message from Dag Valda since that day on the tower at Ala Larkadhe, when Signi had declared she would take a stand against Dag Erkric.
I will not be able to ward you, Dag Valda had warned, but Signi raised the water anyway, in a desperate attempt to prevent slaughter. Had Valda abandoned her, then? But she must not assume.
She flexed her cold hands, envisioning a bubble around herself, the protective ward advancing outward a fingersbreadth at a time. So—
Ah! She held the spell, one hand gripped to aid her mind in two simultaneous tasks as she laid another spell over the ward. And another. On the last, as she whispered the spell, she moved outside the ward. She had to feel her way for her eyes were dazzled by magic.
One more, and there! The ward lay like a bubble, invisible to the outer senses but discernable to a mage. Let them all assume she was inside it. She’d laid several different protections inside of it. That ought to take some time to dismantle, in case rigid tradition had been broken, and the Yaga Krona had been sent on the Blood Hunt as well. Erkric had become adept at breaking tradition while seeming to uphold it.
Signi felt her way into the young stand of green ash at the river’s edge. Lightning flared again, mirrored harshly in
the river water, the back-flash firing the slanting raindrops to crystal.
She left the ward at the river’s edge and crept over the tangled ground under an old willow, then toward the cottonwoods and silver maple, all interlacing sturdy brown fingers overhead.
She eased around the ice-rimed puddles of low ground, stepping on the netted roots of water arum, four different types of water lily, and pungent sting grass as she made her way toward the gently rising slope—
Pain whipped into nerves, bones, muscle, flinging her to hands and knees. Lightning? No—
Hard hands yanked her to her feet. Someone twisted her arms behind her with such viciousness her shoulders shot red agony through her, weakening her knees. Someone else caught her up by the neck of her robe, and when her head dropped back, a young voice, guttural with hatred, uttered, “Traitor.”
A warm splurp in her eye: he’d spat in her face.
Her hands were chained tightly. Someone else pulled cloth around her head, gagging her mercilessly so the sides of her mouth stretched wide, her tongue pressed back almost into her throat. Then a hard blow rocked her head on her neck.
“Enough.”
Instant release of the remorseless hands sent her staggering, and she fell face-first into the swamp.
At least it cleans the spit off. Her mental voice chattered like the clatter of bones inside her head as she was yanked to her feet, her legs chained.
Erama Krona clad in the black of the rare and terrible Blood Hunt pressed in close. One by one they activated transfer stones, the last pulling her away and through space to drop her, staggering, on a Destination platform.
Someone released the grip on her chains. The Erama Krona flowed around her and away, two slightly apart, she saw with a heart beat of pity. The Erama Krona were forbidden, under threat of terrible penalty, from speaking or making personal contact outside of orders while on the hunt. The depth of moral outrage that would cause them to pay the cost was a message of warning far more dire than the actual violence they’d done to her.
The loosened chain thunked, rude and abrupt, against the knobs of her spine. Hands yanked her up, set her on her feet. When she began to fall, they held her up, fingers prising into her muscles and tendons.
Her throat spasmed, her tongue stirred horribly against the gag. A knife was thrust up behind her ear, shearing locks of hair. She jumped, then stilled as the knife sawed twice. The gag fell away.
Her lips had cracked from the extreme tightness of the gag. Blood leaked into her mouth as she struggled to get her tongue to partner with her lips again in the shaping of words. She coughed, hard, terrified her own silence would condemn her. “I—” There was her voice, like the squeak of a bat flying around one of the southern mountains. She had shared a cave once with bats. They were shy creatures, so beautiful in flight.
She was force-marched through Anborc’s Trallagat, the Gate of Thralls, where the born thralls, or those indentured to service as retribution for misdeed, came and went. The Erama Krona forced her feet into heavy wooden clogs so that she would not defile the marble floors on the long walk to the Hall of Judgment, with its lofty ceilings of serene blue, painted with stars that their ancestors had remembered from the night sky of a world long gone.
To the dais, raised three upon three layers of marble, blue, gold, and white, where the throne sat, void of kingship.
Signi jolted into the now. Her eyes stung with dribbles of mud, blurring the surrounding Erama Krona: not those of the Blood Hunt, whose oath had been fulfilled. These were dressed in gray, which meant there was yet no king.
There was yet no king.
She felt the impact of the hall full of gazes as the Erama Krona positioned her in the middle of the first step below the dais, her chains clanking unmusically.
She was forced around to face the Losveg Skalt, face obscured by the mask of Law. Though Signi’s eyes blurred and stung, she had been trained to observe muscle and movement, the flow of color in faces, the way people breathed. The woman’s malignity was as palpable as a blow.
“You are summoned before the Frasadeng.” The voice was strong and precise, meant to sound neutral, above human concerns. But Signi, sensitive to the subtleties of human expression in body and voice, recognized Dag Nanni Balandir, aunt to the new young Hyarl Balandir. She’d been one of the House Dags, possibly even the king’s House Dag during the years Signi had been sailing in the south. She had been one of Erkric’s protégés when they were all young.
“State your identity before the Frasadeng.”
Not for Signi the simple “My name is” that seemingly all had a right to, a dignity she had claimed before the Marlovans. Here in the homeland she must stay with the strict truth, though it shamed her. But then shame was her shroud this day.
“I was born Jazsha Signi Sofar.”
“What is now your name?”
“My name is Signi. I am a Sea Dag.”
“Explain to the Frasadeng why your name at birth and your present name differ?”
“My mother declared me family outcast when I failed to achieve the last level of the hel dance, as had she and her mothers before her. Since I shared her personal name, I deemed it better to relinquish that as well. I earned my place in the world as Dag Signi.”
“You, Dag Signi, outcast from the family Sofar, are accused of betraying your people by acts of magic, causing death and destruction to our warriors, and bringing about the failure to carry out the king’s will.”
Signi trembled inside, though she forced her muscles to a semblance of calm. There is a quality to every silence: this was the skull-ringing density of high emotion, of emotions as well as voices pent up. It was the silence of hundreds of people in close proximity.
“When did you decide to commit treason against your homeland?”
“I never committed treason.”
“Did you raise a water spout by magic to drive out our force from taking the city of Ala Larkadhe?”
“I raised a water spout to prevent anymore deaths.”
“Did you remove protective magical wards and tracers from the tower at the city of Ala Larkadhe that were placed on order of Prince Rajnir?”
“I removed wards that would throw a stone spell around any who inadvertently crossed certain places, as stone spells against innocent people directly contravene our vows.” Her voice shook with her effort to be heard.
“Did you break protective wards placed at the castle located at the north end of the Andahi Pass?”
“No.”
“Did you break protective wards on the heights of Andahi Pass?”
She did not even try to hide how startled she was. “I did not.”
“Did you remove tracer wards from any of these locations?”
“I did not.”
The Losveg Skalt looked down at her papers, and then up. “Who did? You are permitted to speak if you can prove your innocence.”
“I witnessed no such actions,” Signi stated, and despite the cold, and ache of the heavy chains and the iron gall chafing her throat, she was angry at the absurdity of these accusations.
On they went. Signi locked her knees to keep from falling, and her voice sank lower and lower. Disbelief at the falsity of these accusations caused her just once to lift her head. The council sat like stone effigies, revealing little. Prince Rajnir was not even there. But she sensed a hidden intensity in Dag Erkric; she was too bewildered, in too much pain to understand much beside the fact that she was being accused of things that she had not done, she could not have done. Had anyone done them?
A flicker of memory, barely more than instinct. Then the Losveg Skalt said, “Did you place tracer wards on the communications scroll case belonging to Dag Erkric?”
“No.” But Signi knew who had.
The shock of memory made her dizzy and she swayed.
White-haired, beak-nosed Dag Agel of the House Dags lifted her voice. “Losveg Skalt. We have increasing difficulty hearing the answers of the accused.”
Signi shut her eyes, struggling to remain upright. Brit Valda bespelled Erkric’s scroll case; she told me herself. And . . . did she not say that she had tampered with some spells on some gates? I don’t remember . . .
Signi swayed and forced herself to hel dancer balance breathing. The rushing sound in her head resolved into whispers and shuffles.
The Losveg Skalt stated, “It has been deemed appropriate to break at this point.”
Mercy, from Dag Erkric?
No, there was no mercy in that hateful gaze. The angle of his chin, the corners of his mouth: that was triumph. Instinct coiled, cold and terrible, inside Signi.
The Losveg Skalt went on. “The accused denies all accusations, and we cannot administer kinthus to a dag. Therefore we must call forward all who witnessed the actions taken by the accused. We shall reassemble three days hence at dawn. Take the accused to Sinnaborc.”
The Tower of Transgressors. The name, the words, whispered through the Hall.
Signi did not see half the council stir in protest, for she was accused, not condemned, and half sit back in satisfaction. She had closed her eyes as a pair of Erama Krona, dressed in gray, took up a stance on either side of her.
If she did not walk on her own, she would be dragged.
The guards led her back to the Trallagat. She trembled from the hurt of familiar smells—stone and the sea and the spices of home—and the familiar slant of the sunlight.
These sensations hurt more than the bindings, for the pain was deep inside. But she braced her spine. Something far worse than the poignancy of homecoming was nigh.
More Erama Krona fell in behind her, the reverse of an honor guard.
Traitor’s Gate opened only for one purpose: to display criminals accused of crimes against the Venn. There was the cart to conduct her along the King’s Road, with a single low rail meant to keep her within while giving full access to her from all sides. One of the Erama Krona clapped an iron circle round her neck, the torc of the thrall. It was connected to a heavy chain, which was fastened to the cart rail.
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