by Jocelyn Fox
“All of us – myself, and the other Knights here, every one of us – we are here for you, lad,” said Balaron quietly.
“It’s not the same,” Ramel replied. He blinked and tried to remember his courtesy. “I apologize, sir. It’s not that…I just don’t…I appreciate the sentiment.”
“You appreciate the sentiment,” rumbled Balaron, “but you loved your master as fiercely as any squire has loved his Knight.” He nodded. “You will make a fine Knight.”
The rest of the day passed as though it were a dream. Guinna awoke and silently ate her meal and drank some water. Together, without speaking a word, they walked over to the paddock. Midnight flicked his tail and trotted over to them, shouldering aside a few of the other Knights’ mounts when they did not make way for him quickly enough. Guinna fed him an apple and he gently pressed his great head into her chest. She laid her white cheek along his nose, and the war charger held carefully still until she straightened and stepped back. He turned his attention to Ramel, nosing the squire’s chest and snuffling at his bandages, sneezing at the pungent scent of the healing herbs. Ramel smiled and ran his fingers through Midnight’s forelock, combing a few small tangles out of the silky mane.
Guinna touched his shoulder, disappeared for a few moments and reappeared with a kit of brushes and cloths. Together they groomed Midnight until he gleamed, combing out his mane and tail, wiping his smooth warm coat with an oil-dampened cloth and polishing his silvery hooves. The big faehal shuddered in pleasure and occasionally turned his head to lip at Guinna’s ear or Ramel’s collar, drawing a squeal from Guinna and a chuckle from Ramel.
The other Knights of the camp moved about in their daily tasks. Whenever one passed by the paddock, Ramel could feel them watching him and Guinna. Twice he caught a Knight’s gaze, and both times the Knight gave him a slight nod before turning their attention back to their task. He pressed his lips together as he oiled one of Midnight’s front hooves.
“They look at you as a Knight now,” said Guinna quietly.
“I don’t want them to look at me as a Knight,” replied Ramel. He carefully placed Midnight’s hoof back on the ground. “I’m Knight Finnead’s squire.”
“And I’m Rose’s sister,” said Guinna, gazing at him over Midnight’s back.
He felt as though she’d punched him, but he didn’t look away. He owed her at least that much. She swallowed hard and continued. Crystalline tears gathered in her eyes and trembled on her lashes but she refused to let them fall.
“I’m Rose’s sister,” she said again. “She’s dead, but that doesn’t change. She’ll always be my sister. You’ll always be Finnead’s squire.” She paused and took another breath. Midnight nosed her shoulder. She placed a hand on his neck. “I’m her sister and you’re his squire, but we will both be other things as we keep living.”
“I don’t want to be anything but Knight Finnead’s squire,” said Ramel. He sounded ridiculous, he knew, like a petulant child. But the words escaped him of their own volition and with them came a sort of release.
Guinna gently pushed Midnight’s head out of the way as she walked around the faehal and stood in front of Ramel. In the days of their flight, he’d never truly noticed how small she was, and now he could see the similarities between her and Lady Rose with painful clarity. Despite his height, he felt much younger than her as she placed her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him earnestly.
“Is that what Knight Finnead would want?” she asked quietly. “For you to be forever a squire, frozen in your grief for him like a relic encased in ice?”
“We are a people of the winter,” he reminded her with a wry smile. “If it’s my fate to be sealed in ice as a memorial to him and to the Princess, so be it.”
Guinna slapped his shoulder with enough force to startle him. She leveled a severe look at him, her eyes blazing in her pale face. “Our fate is our own. We survived, but we must do more than that. We must live.” Her lips twitched. “I wanted to slap you in the face.”
“I’ll count myself lucky you didn’t,” Ramel replied. He blinked and then nodded. “You’re right, of course.”
She squeezed his shoulder lightly. “And remember, we have each other. I understand what you saw, because I saw it too.” The tears that Guinna had successfully held back suddenly spilled down her cheeks. With more grace than he’d thought he possessed, Ramel gathered her into his arms, ignoring the sting of the wounds on his chest. She cried softly for a few moments, shuddered and then quieted. They stood silently for a long moment, feeling the beating of each other’s hearts and thinking of the life that lay ahead of them without those they loved so dearly.
Chapter 34
Finn didn’t know anymore how long the hooded sorcerer had held them in their painful captivity. Rye still doggedly marked the days with her system of rocks, but Finn wasn’t sure that she counted every day, or that some days weren’t counted twice. The hours stretched and contracted, the days lingered and then sped by fast as a sigh. Time meant nothing to him anymore. He found it harder and harder to remember how it had felt before he’d been captured. His life outside the cave seemed like a dream. Sometimes the sorcerer told him such things during their sessions, crooning into Finn’s ear that nothing else existed outside this cave, this pain, this miserable existence.
Rye kept him sane. She anchored him to their memories. When they curled together on the floor of the cave, she spoke of Darkhill and the Queen, the rides they had taken with the Princess and the festivities of the Solstice. She dipped into the details of her life at Court, telling him of her beloved twin Tyr the bard and her black hound Mira, sired by one of the Northerners’ wolves those years ago. Her voice rallied him to answer with his own tales of training as a page and as a squire, his all too brief time with Shaleh and his favorite memories of Kieran. They even laughed sometimes when they walked through these memories.
Every so often, Rye reassured him that she was still working on her plan. “Do not trouble yourself, Finn,” she said. “Focus on keeping your strength and stoking your anger against this sorcerer.”
But Finn began to fear that they would fail at this plan of escape. The specter of his failure in the clearing rose again and again in hot shame to haunt him when the cave was dark and silent save for the slow breath of a sleeping Rye. He tried to think of a way to save Rye and the Princess. He tried to think of a way to escape, but it was like trying to claw his way through the solid stone of the cave wall. He exhausted himself by throwing his mind against the problem again and again until he slid into oblivion.
As time stretched and flexed through what Rye said was their sixth month in the cave, Finn felt any hope of rescue seeping from him like a slowly bleeding wound. Their earliest wounds were now scars. The sorcerer fed them enough to keep them alive, but Rye grew pale and thin, and Finn knew he couldn’t look much better.
“They can’t find us,” she said one afternoon. She’d spent the morning singing songs in the Northern tongue. Finn found her voice beautiful and even with their foreign words the songs lifted his spirit.
“Who can’t find us?” he asked.
“Mab’s patrols,” Rye said, frowning. “That’s why. They can’t find us, and they can’t rescue us if they can’t find us.”
“Perhaps they aren’t looking. He’s held us in the same place,” said Finn, looking at the same cave wall that they’d been staring at for days unending.
“Has he?” murmured Rye. She fell silent and said no more.
Finn sighed and returned to performing basic stretches and calisthenics. Sometimes Rye joined him, but though she fiercely urged him to keep up his strength and remember, he thought she was starting to drift away from him. The thought of enduring this grim place without her filled him with a despair and sadness even deeper than what he’d felt when they’d been captured. He kept discovering deeper levels of the dark mire within him.
Days passed in blurs of shadow and light, none of them free from pain but separated only b
y the times when the hooded sorcerer directed his slaves in a soft voice, inflicting the white-hot agony that stole away all conscious thought, and those times when they tried to heal in the cave, washing each other’s wounds and using their meager healing supplies. Finn could not be completely sure, but when he saw the Princess, it looked as though their captivity was finally beginning to weigh upon her. Andraste grew thinner, hollows in her cheeks catching shadows, her dark hair not as lustrous as he remembered. But perhaps she had never been quite as beautiful as his memories. Perhaps she had never really existed as he thought of her now.
The weather began to change. After they awoke one morning able to see their breath, ice crystals crawling up the walls of the cave, Rye performed her peculiar skill of yelling at the sorcerer’s slaves, reminding them that they had no enchantment or fire to keep them warm. A few days later, one of the slaves dumped a pile of clothes and blankets at the end of the passageway. Rye sorted through them and secreted away one vest that Finn never saw again. He didn’t ask her about it.
“I should tell you some things,” Rye said dreamily one day, staring up at the ceiling as Finn cleaned her latest set of wounds. It seemed that lately they were focusing on Rye. She rarely gave them the satisfaction of acknowledging her pain, but the past two sessions her screams had echoed back into the cave. Finn had exhausted himself with calisthenics until he shivered from the sweat cooling on his skin.
“Still saving some secrets?” he asked with gentle humor.
“A woman always has some secrets,” she replied, smiling with that strange vague look that marked the hours after a long while spent with the sorcerer and his minions. Her words plucked a chord within him, and he waited patiently for his mind to recover the memory of the beautiful tree nymph with skin the rich brown of an acorn, her leaf-green eyes sparkling as she whispered, A woman has her secrets, even if that woman is the spirit of a tree.
“A friend told me much the same once,” Finn replied.
“I mean I should tell you some things,” Rye began again, “which may have happened or will happen soon. Especially when I am dead.”
“Don’t speak like that,” Finn admonished her, though he couldn’t say that his own thoughts didn’t tend to the macabre often as well.
“I will greet Death as an old friend,” Rye murmured. She slipped into the Northern tongue and spoke for a moment. It sounded like an incantation or a prayer. Then she raised her head, her pale eyes finding his and shocking him with their clarity. “You must tell Mab when you return to her of all you have seen here. She will listen to you. You are a Knight.”
Finn stared at her for a long moment, suddenly aware that she was very lucid and very serious. Then he nodded slowly. “I will.”
Rye held out her hand to him, and he grasped it, pulling her upright. She shifted her weight, grimaced and then turned back to him. “Ever since my return from the North, I have been speaking of freedom. I grew to love Andraste, and it was much for her sake and that of my brother that I did not speak out in a louder voice when I could.” She shook her head. “I know that you have experienced the Queen’s ruthlessness in your own way. I have been afraid that she would use me against my brother Tyr. We let that fear become our chains.” She coughed and couldn’t stop, doubled over and gasping. Finn fetched her a ladle of water from the bucket and she drank it gratefully, spilling some of it as she shuddered. After a few breaths, she continued. “When I’m dead, my brother will be unleashed.” She swallowed. “He is not violent, not unless there is absolute necessity. But he learned much in our time in the North from their volta. He knows runes and spells that have been lost to even our most skilled mages. And his voice…” She smiled. “His voice is his greatest power.”
“What will your brother do?” Finn asked, suspicion crawling up his spine.
“I think he will rebel,” whispered Rye. “Ironic that my death will give him freedom, but it is a price I gladly pay.”
“You speak of your death as though it’s already done.” Finn shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”
She smiled slightly. “I have always admired you, Finn. Always so stoic and driven. You were an enigma. You still are, in a way.” She took a breath. “But your stubbornness won’t prevail here. I know I will die here.” Her eyes hardened. “The only question is how meaningful my death will be, and I am determined to make it count.”
Finn sat silently for a moment. His mind circled back to Rye’s words about her brother. “You think your brother will lead a rebellion against the Queen?”
Rye nodded. “It is a possibility.”
“Why tell me this?”
She smiled. “Because the Queen will test your loyalty, and by the time she is done with that, I think it will be done, one way or another.”
“And why are you speaking of all this now?” Finn asked quietly.
“You already know that answer.” Rye leaned forward and placed a hand on his chest. “You are the one who will return to the Queen to tell her of this darkness. It has to be you.”
“With the Princess,” Finn said, fighting down the sadness rising in his chest. Their time here had been the worst days of his life, but he had come to view Rye as an equal, a partner in the struggle against the darkness surrounding them.
Rye was silent for a long moment. “Something is going to happen soon. Perhaps even today. And when it does, we must be ready.”
She stood slowly, wincing, and walked over to a smooth portion of the cave wall. Licking one thumb, she pressed her skin to the rock and a rune glowed briefly.
“You’ve been doing rune-magic all this time,” said Finn in amazement. He couldn’t imagine how she’d found the strength to sustain her spells.
Rye didn’t reply. She slid her hands into the rock and pulled a vest free. Finn pushed himself to his feet and walked over to her.
“Put this on,” she said quietly. “When they come for us this last time, you must be wearing this.”
Finn took the vest from her grasp. She had carved runes into the leather, and the material was stained in several places with what Finn knew was blood. But he didn’t argue. There was a force in her voice that he couldn’t contradict. He slid the vest over his head, accepting the sting of the wounds on his back at the extra weight. Rye slid her thumb into her mouth and bit down hard. Blood lined her teeth when she withdrew her thumb and pressed it to a rune carved into the vest directly over Finn’s heart. He held carefully still as the air in the cave tightened with power. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, acknowledging the strength of Rye’s sorcery.
Rye pressed her bloody thumb onto the vest and murmured an incantation in the Northern tongue. A silvery light flowed from her touch, filling the lines of the runes carved into the vest. Finn drew in his breath as the vest rippled, the stiff leather warming and becoming supple as the runes heated and came to life, filled with Rye’s taebramh. A sudden stabbing pain shot into him – it felt as though a thousand small needles had plunged into his skin from the vest. He grunted and stumbled backward. Rye pressed him against the wall of the cave with inhuman strength, her pale eyes overtaken by molten silver, her incantation unbroken. He couldn’t breathe as the vest shrank and squeezed his torso, heedless of the wounds on his back and the bruises on his ribs. The runes flared and slid through the vest and he felt each line of them on his skin, burning into him like a brand.
But the heat and the pain of the runes were different from the cruelty of their captors. This was a hot fire burning away his weakness. This was a forge in which he would be struck anew, a blade sharper than before, a blade stronger than before. Finn gritted his teeth and leaned into the pain, plunging himself into it willingly, inviting it into every fiber of his being. The runes rushed into the cracks deep within him, filling the seams of doubt and self-hatred and despair until he saw himself as a shining silver weapon, smooth and perfect and deadly. Rye’s voice rang in his ears, louder in his mind than in the cave, her words now cooling the fire, coaxing the taeb
ramh to harden and solidify and make him strong. He staggered but she held him up with an unfaltering grip. Her incantation became urgent. He felt the runes weaving together through his body, strengthening his wasted limbs and restoring his strength. Rye pressed her bloody thumb to his forehead and said a final, definitive word that severed the connection between her and him and the runes and the vest.
The silence sounded deafening. Rye’s knees gave out and she fainted. Finn caught her easily, moving more quickly than he’d ever remembered, holding her weight easily. He stood in awe for a moment, Rye in his arms, feeling the strength and power surging through his body. He hadn’t imagined his life outside of this cave. The Court was not a dream, and his years as a Knight weren’t over. He gently laid Rye on the blankets in their little hollow on the cave floor, brushing a strand of her dark hair away from her face. For a long moment, he sat silently, overwhelmed by the selfless gift that she’d just bestowed upon him with no warning and no discussion.
Sooner than he’d anticipated, she stirred and opened her eyes. She blinked and shook her head. Finn took her hand, pressing it between his own.
“That might have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, talking about your own death,” he said quietly, “since you just poured an immense amount of your life-force into these runes.”
She smiled tiredly and then closed her eyes for a moment, holding her breath as though waiting for a spasm of pain to pass. “You have to make it back to the Queen, and I would be remiss if I did not give you every advantage I can.”
Finn swallowed hard. “It’s happening soon, isn’t it?”
They could hear the beating of drums outside the cave, accompanied by a low and insistent buzzing that reminded Finn of a hornet’s nest.
Rye nodded. “Yes. Help me up.”
Finn lifted her to her feet without any effort. She felt as light as a child but she steadied herself and then walked back over to the cave wall, sliding her hand back into the rock. She withdrew a long, slender piece of rock that gleamed blackly in the scant light. Finn saw that she had crafted it into a crude dagger.
