Dark Mist Rising

by Anna Kendall

  ‘Another queen. Her slave Mar-gar-ait—' he stumbled over the name, ‘—says that this other queen is also a young girl, crowned in the manner of your people, and she tells my bride, “Die, die, die.” And Staif-ain-ee wakes screaming.' He frowned. ‘She is too old for such fear. And she is a queen. Queens do not scream.'

  But I had stopped listening to him.

  ‘ Die, my baby die die, my little one, die die ...' And Roger the child listened to the monstrous song and nestled closer, a smile on his small face and the pretty tune in his ears.‘Die, my baby, die die, my little one, die die ... ...'

  Tarek said, ‘Is this a witch attacking Stef-ain-ee in her dream?'

  Yes. ‘No.'

  ‘Then the children of your people are badly trained.'

  I said nothing. Let him think the little princess was badly brought up rather than have him suspect the truth. My mad sister had invaded Stephanie's dreams. Stephanie must have, after all, inherited the talent for the soul arts that her mother and grandmother had lacked, but that Mother Chilton said was possessed by Stephanie's great-grandmother. But Stephanie's was a talent untaught and uncontrolled. A wild card. And the talent must lie strong in her, since my sister had sensed it in that other realm.

  All at once I was afraid for the little girl, more afraid than even before.

  Tarek gazed at the white stone. ‘Then I must dream of this stone?' he said, gazing at it. The subject of Stephanie had been dismissed; she was merely a spoiled, badly raised child with fears unbecoming to a queen.

  ‘Yes, you must dream of this stone.'

  ‘You will show me how to cause such dreams?'

  ‘I will show you what you must learn to cause such dreams.' Lurching onward, I put together a jumble of instructions, scarcely knowing myself what I said. Tarek listened to all my nonsense, organized it in his practical mind and said he would practise this before he slept, in order to dream of the white stone.

  ‘ Klef,' he said finally, and I was taken back to my fire.

  ‘Peter,' Tom said, in a state of high excitement. ‘Great news! I have met a girl!'

  39

  I did not want to hear about Tom's girl, some poor kitchen maid or apprentice laundress dragged away from The Queendom to serve the princess. But when Tom wished to tell me something, there was no escaping him. While Jee, huddled in Tom's fur cloak against the cold, watched us across the fire, Tom burbled on.

  ‘That savage bastard – the guard who watches me when you're gone – allows me much more freedom now. Well, I'm tied, ain't I? And he probably thinks The Queendom is too far now to go back to all alone, and he might be right at that if ... Anyway, he was casting dice with two other soldiers – I wish they would let me play! Ten to six odds I could beat them all. But I watched yesterday for an hour and the rules—'

  ‘Tom, I'm very tired.'

  ‘Well, all right, I'll make my tale short. I took a walk in the woods by that creek and she was there and I bedded her. Oh, I feel so much better now. A man needs a woman.' He winked.

  ‘Fine,' I said. ‘Goodnight.'

  ‘Her name is Alysse.'

  ‘Very pretty.'

  ‘I will meet her again tomorrow.'

  ‘Good.'

  ‘She has red-gold curls and breasts like—'

  ‘ Goodnight, Tom.'

  ‘You need to have a woman, Peter. Truly. I say this as a friend. I know you're married but after all, hang it, Maggie is far away. Lying with a woman would cure your melancholy.'

  My ‘melancholy'. I had a great ruler to whom I must teach an art I did not possess. I had a mad sister being used to divert the power of death to create those who would never die. I had a child growing in the womb of a woman I had abandoned. I had a princess haunted by phantoms from beyond the grave. I had a promised rescue that did not come. Bedding a woman was not going to cure my melancholy, which this night felt like the deepest despair.

  And then it grew deeper.

  She came in my dream, and I saw her emerge from the fog. Her crown glinted gold in a light I could not see, a light bright and terrible somewhere beyond the horizon. She wore a lavender gown like my mother – our mother – and her hair was my mother's rich brown. Her eyes glittered with madness. She said, ‘Roger. Brother.'

  I said, ‘How can you—' but she interrupted me.

  ‘We have your father, did you know that? At Galtryf. He is our captive. As you will someday be.' Her laugh rang through the fog, and all at once I felt myself dissolve, the flesh melting grotesquely off my bones and the bones themselves crumbling to powder as Cecilia's had, as Fia's had—

  ‘Peter!' Jee crouched over me, a small brown shape in the dawn. The camp already stirred, and savages swivelled their heads to look at the screaming antek. My guard loomed by the fire, gun pointed at nothing, his blue eyes glazed with fear.

  ‘You be dreaming,' Jee said. ‘Wake up, Peter!'

  ‘I'm awake.' Groggily I sat up.

  The guard lowered his gun and the fright left his eyes. No usual enemy could ever bring fear to a savage soldier's expression, but I was a witch. Even in the confused state between sleep and waking, even in the backwash of my terrible dream, I realized that such knowledge might prove useful. My guard feared witchcraft.

  Jee, however, did not. He said with disgust, ‘Get up, Peter. It be late.'

  ‘Wake Tom.' Tom snored on, oblivious of all noise. Jee shook him to life.

  ‘Oh, piss pots,' Tom mumbled. ‘Morning already? By damn, but that was a short night! I was dreaming of ... someone.' He winked at me and mouthed, ‘Alysse.' Jee snorted.

  The horror of my dream was still upon me. My own body dissolving for all eternity ... No. It had been but a dream. I was here, alive, solid. But no rescue was coming for me; my father was captive in some place called Galtryf. I had never heard of Galtryf. But I could think of nothing else as we did the day's march. Now the land was descending; we were over the highest of the mountains; my father was captive in Galtryf. Strange plants began to appear, large red bushes with leaves sharp as swords. The air turned even colder. Where was Galtryf? No rescue was coming ...

  But my sister might so easily have been lying. And she was mad.

  Two more days passed. The savages became louder and more jovial as they approached home. The Young Chieftain tried to make himself dream of a white stone. His gaze began to turn on me with – what? Suspicion? Another guard was added to my original captor, and both of them hovered beside me constantly. Tom, less closely guarded each day even as I was watched all the more, met Alysse somewhere in the woods every afternoon. Cold apparently did not interfere with their amorous activity, nor did the length of rope between Tom's ankles. Jee, sensing my despair, clung to me like a shadow.

  ‘Look!' Tom said one morning. ‘That's her! That's Alysse!'

  We had been walking for several hours, warmed by both the exercise and the sun in a welcome cloudless sky.

  It was nearly time to stop for the noon meal. My legs ached. I did not want to talk yet again about Alysse, but I glanced dutifully at her.

  And I stopped walking, so abruptly that Jee stumbled into my legs.

  This was no wanton kitchen girl. She stood twenty feet from me, holding a bucket of water, and she stared directly into my eyes. It was a gaze of complete concentration, as if she knew what I was. Hisaf. She did know. I was certain of it, although I could not have said how. Then, as I stared back, her face shifted. Only for a moment, but the plump girlish cheeks and rosy little mouth became the sparer, tauter lines of a mature woman, neither young nor old – as Mother Chilton had once been, before she changed herself into the crone Tom had talked to on the cliff above the sea. The next moment the maturity had vanished. Tom had noticed nothing; Alysse's transformation had been only for me.

  She was one of that shadowy web of women who practised the soul arts. Why was she here, lying with Tom Jenkins?

  My guard, not touching me, urged, ‘ Klef! Klef! ' His co-captor, quicker to see where I gazed, shouted at Alysse to m
ove on. She did, with one backward gaze over her shoulder at Tom, who grinned delightedly.

  ‘She wants me again, Peter,' he bragged.

  ‘She's ... she's very pretty.'

  ‘A shame that you're married, yes?' Then, with a self-consciously sober expression, ‘Although of course your Maggie is tearing fine, too.'

  I had to speak with the web woman, but I could see no manner of getting to her. I was watched every moment, and Tom would be of no use.

  But perhaps Jee would.

  ‘Only you're a long way from Maggie, after all,' Tom said. ‘By damn, nobody could expect you not to have normal urges. And there's nothing like a woman to affect a man's spirits.'

  ‘Yes,' I said. ‘I know.'

  ‘Jee,' I said when we made camp for the night, ‘I have a task for you.'

  ‘What,' he said flatly.

  ‘It is not dangerous.' A stupid thing to say; everything here was dangerous. ‘I be not afraid of danger,' he said stoutly, and my heart cracked. Ten years old, and already forced to behave like a man, with a man's pretended bravery.

  ‘Everyone is afraid sometimes, Jee. My guards are afraid of you. You know that, do you not?'

  He nodded. All around us people shouted and built fires and set up tents and cooked and fed donkeys and carried water and formed into off-duty cadres, singing. It was the best time for Jee to slip through camp. He had grown bolder about moving around now that he knew the savages would not touch him. They would not even touch me, the antek, and Jee the magic illusion they actively feared. Everything he did was observed, and nothing was interfered with. I suspected that he could even have walked through the outlying guard ring and so escaped, except that there was nothing to escape to.

  Jee said, ‘I be afraid of that girl.'

  ‘Of Alysse?'

  ‘She be not ... her.' His small face creased with annoyance at not being able to articulate what he meant. Words failed him, but perceptions did not. Jee had sensed something about Alysse that had completely slipped by Tom. Although that was not surprising. Tom was blinded by desire. I knew well how that felt.

  Jee repeated, ‘I be afraid of that girl.'

  ‘I know. But ... but, Jee, I have no one else to help me.'

  He looked at me keenly. ‘Ye have the Dead.'

  ‘No. I do not. I cannot cross over ... not any more.'

  ‘Why not?'

  I couldn't bring myself to explain to him. Mother Chilton had made me promise I would not cross over again, but against that, my father had said it could do no harm. But the truth was that I was too afraid. My sister and her hisaf henchmen – or controllers, or whatever they were – terrified me. In my last dream my sister had spoken directly to me, had sent that horrific image of myself dissolving for ever, lost even to eternity.

  ‘It doesn't matter why not,' I snapped at Jee. ‘Will you help me or not?'

  ‘Maggie said I maun.' He sighed heavily, and I hated that I was bullying a small boy. But then I had an inspiration.

  ‘It's not just to help me, Jee. It's to help Princess Stephanie.'

  ‘The princess?' he breathed. His face changed. He had seen her once, peeping from her pole-chair. Once that I knew about, anyway. As Jee slipped around the camp at will, he might, for all I knew, have glimpsed Stephanie scores of times. His eyes widened. ‘What maun I do?'

  ‘Just find Alysse. She must know who you are. See what she says or does. Perhaps she will send me a message. Find her when no one else sees. Can you do that?'

  ‘I can do that.'

  ‘Thank you, Jee.'

  ‘I want to be home with Maggie.'

  ‘We'll get there, Jee.' I hoped it was true. I wanted to see Maggie, to talk with her, to feel enveloped in her competent and acerbic caring. To lay a hand on her belly, where my child grew. I had no right to any of these things, but I wanted them.

  My guards watched me whisper with Jee, but they did not interfere, still working diligently at pretending that Jee did not exist. I rose, ostentatiously stretched and asked to be taken into the woods to piss. When I returned, Jee was gone.

  Tom and I ate what was served us, setting aside a portion for Jee. Then one of my guards conducted me to the Young Chieftain's tent for our nightly instruction.

  And everything began to unravel.

  40

  ‘I dreamed of the white stone,' Tarek said to me. His face was as calm as ever, but triumph shone in his eyes. ‘I did all that you said, and last night the image of the stone appeared in my dream, surrounded by a ring of knives.'

  ‘Yes,' I said and tried to smile. Of course he had. Think about anything long and hard enough and one may eventually dream of it: red boars, dancing cottages, mad sisters, pink-veined white stones. ‘You are making pro-gress, my lord.'

  ‘But very slowly, antek. Your task is to teach me to bring an army from Witchland to my kingdom. That is a long way from dreaming of a white stone.'

  ‘It is indeed. But how long did you need to become a great warrior?' Discipline.

  ‘War is not witchcraft. How long did you need to learn to bring the army that killed my father?'

  I ignored the glittering of his brilliant blue eyes, but my heart began a slow, hard thud. ‘It took years, my lord.

  I told you that.'

  ‘You do not look that old.'

  ‘I began very young.'

  ‘When you were a queen's fool?'

  He had been discovering more about me. From whom?

  Tarek continued, ‘It would seem to me that an antek who can command such powerful witchery would not allow himself to be a woman's toy, or to sleep in the ashes of a hearth.'

  ‘I did not sleep in the ashes of a hearth.'

  ‘On at least one occasion you were seen there. Come, Roger Kilbourne, I will not cross knives with you. Teach me more quickly.'

  It was an unmistakable command. Before I could respond, he added, ‘Or at least show me that you can do what was said of you.'

  ‘My lord? I don't—'

  ‘I think you do. Enough of white stones and chants of “george”. Show me, here and now, that you are indeed an antek. Go to Witchland and bring something back.'

  ‘I have already done so.'

  ‘You refer to the witch child, the servant of your servant. You brought the child back from Witchland.'

  ‘Yes.' Let him think so, if it enhanced his estimate of my value.

  ‘But I did not see you do so. Go to Witchland now, while I can watch you, and bring something back.'

  We stared at each other. My thoughts raced. I was so far away from Soulvine Moor that surely my sister would not appear to me if I crossed over. And if I did encounter anything harmful, I could return immediately. However, my father had warned me so strongly not to bring anything back over with me. And Mother Chilton ...

  Anger suddenly flooded me. Do this, do that, I was told, but how could I obey such contradictory orders? I was a hisaf. I would decide for myself. My father's decisions, after all, had brought him only a dead wife and captivity in the mysterious Galtryf. Surely anything I chose could not be worse?

  But there was still my fear. I was afraid to cross again into the Country of the Dead.

  ‘My lord,' I said, and even to my own ears my bluster sounded weak and thin, ‘the arts of an antek cannot be rushed. In good time I will—'

  ‘You will do it now. Or I will believe that you cannot do it.'

  ‘ My lord—'

  ‘Tarek, I would interrupt.'

  It was one of the Young Chieftain's captains, an older warrior with a short feathered cape thrown over his fur tunic and urgency in his face. Our lessons were never interrupted. The Tarekish word for ‘interrupt' was, in fact, the same as ‘attack'.

  ‘ Klef,' Tarek said.

  ‘Mar-gar-ait is dead.'

  Lady Margaret. Dead.

  Tarek said, ‘Murdered?'

  ‘I cannot tell.'

  Tarek said, ‘My queen?'

  ‘Not harmed.'

  The two looked at each o
ther. Their impassive faces nonetheless communicated much that I knew I could not discern; I was not one of them. But I did realize that Tarek would not have been interrupted for the death of a ‘slave' unless something else had occurred. He said, ‘I will come.' Then he looked at me. ‘And you will come too, antek.'

  Tarek and his captain strode from his tent. His guard formed around him, falling into perfect step. I followed, immediately accompanied by my own startled guard. As the Young Chieftain paced through the camp, soldiers fell silent and sprang to attention, left fists raised in the air. The very cook fires seemed to not snap. Thus Stephanie's high hysterical screams rang clearly through the night air.

  Outside her tent Tarek gave an order and his guard fell back, as did mine. The captain remained in the doorway, his knife drawn. Only Tarek and I could enter the tent of his child bride.

  She sat on the carpeted ground, shrieking, trying to get her thin arms around the corpse of Lady Margaret. The nurse crouched beside both, ineffectively saying, ‘Your Grace, please now. Your Grace ... Lambie ...' There was no blood on Lady Margaret's gown, no injury that I could see to her head or limbs. But her face was contorted into a look of horror.

  How long had she been dead? If I crossed over right now, before she lapsed into the mindless serenity of the Dead ...

  I did not cross over.

  Tarek said sharply, ‘Staif-ain-ee! Ka!'

  The little girl looked up at him, shrieked louder than ever, then buried her head in the nurse's shoulder. Her thin body shook uncontrollably. She did not cease screaming.

  Tarek said to me over the noise, ‘Translate. Ask the slave what occurred here.'

  I stepped forward and put a hand on the nurse's shoulder. She looked up angrily, saw who I was and fell into confusion. She breathed, ‘The witch fool ...'

  There was no time to argue with her name-calling. I said, raising my voice to be heard, ‘His lordship wants to know what— Your Grace, please stop that shrieking!'