The Born Queen tkotab-4

by Greg Keyes

  "It must have been awful," Cotsmur said.

  Anne thought back. "It was," she said. "And I was a pretty terrible maid, at least at first."

  But part of her suddenly longed for those days in z'Espino. She knew that was absurd. She had been in fear of her life, working like a dog at menial tasks, often missing meals. But still, compared to the times that came later, compared to now, those days seemed simple. And she had had her friends, and they had been working together to survive, which had rewards she'd never imagined while growing up in privilege. She would almost want to have those days back.

  But it didn't matter what she wanted, did it?

  The girls began chattering among themselves, silly prattle about who was handsome and who was sneaking off to see whom. It made her sad, not least because she had been sillier than most of them not so very long ago.

  It was a relief when John came to tell her that the Virgenyan delegation had arrived. Taking Lize and Audry with her, she went to change her dress and receive them.

  She chose a black and gold Safnite gown, a light breastplate, and greaves. She had Lize trim her hair back up to her ears and chose a simple circlet for her crown. Then she went to the Red Hall.

  As far as Anne knew, the Red Hall never had been used to receive ambassadors. Her father hadn't used it for anything; it was in the oldest part of the castle and not very large. The king had preferred the more imposing chambers to overawe those who came before him.

  But that lack of use had made it the perfect place for children to play. Her sister Fastia had held pretend-court there, throwing lavish banquets of cakes and wine or whatever they could pilfer or beg from the kitchens. In those days, more often than not, Anne had pretended to be a knight, since being a princess was-well, what she was. Austra had been her man-at-arms, and they had defended their queen from countless invasions and depredations.

  Anne felt comfortable there. It also suited the image of the warrior-queen she had adopted to meet in less formal places, more face to face.

  Today the hall seemed a bit large, however, because the number in the Virgenyan delegation was exactly three. The leader she recognized as a frequent visitor to her father's court, the baron of Ifwitch, Ambrose Hynde. The black hair she remembered was grayer now, and his squarish face more lined. She reckoned he was about fifty. He had a vaguely apologetic look in his eyes that worried her. Behind him stood two other men. One was her cousin Edward Dare, the prince of Tremor, a man of some sixty years. His silver hair had been cropped till he was nearly bald, and he had a severe, hawklike look about his face.

  The third man, by contrast, was unknown to her and younger, probably no more than thirty. She noticed his eyes first, because something seemed odd about them. After a moment she understood that it was that one was green and the other brown. His face was friendly and intelligent, boyish, really. He had auburn hair and a small mustache and goatee that were redder.

  He smiled, and she realized her gaze must have lingered on him while she sorted out his eyes. She frowned and looked away. They were announced by her herald, each in turn kissing her outstretched hand. The phay-eyed man turned out to be the Thames Dorrel, the earl of Cape Chavel.

  "Such a large delegation," she said when the immediate formalities were done. "It's good to know our cousin Charles takes our troubles seriously."

  "She goes right for it, doesn't she?" Cape Chavel said.

  "I haven't spoken to you," Anne snapped. "I'm speaking to the baron."

  "Majesty," the baron said, "I understand how this looks, but it wasn't meant as an insult."

  "Well, I can't imagine what an intended insult must be like, then. But that's not really the point, Baron. The point is that Virgenya and her monarch are subject to the will of their empress. I requested knights and men in arms, not a delegation, and so I can only imagine you've been sent to tell me that Virgenya is in open revolution."

  "That we are not, Majesty," the baron replied.

  "Then you've brought the men with you?"

  "They will come, madame," he said.

  "I rather need them now, not after the ravens are picking our bones."

  "It is a long march from Virgenya," Baron Ifwitch said. "And there was difficulty in the levy. Monsters have been swarming out of the Mountains of the Hare, terrorizing the countryside. And since your actions against the Church-"

  "What of the Church's actions toward me? Or the good people of Virgenya?"

  "Loyalty to z'Irbina has lately become a fashion in Virgenya, Majesty, especially among the nobility. No one actually refused to send men, but they have found ways to…delay."

  "You're saying that the trouble isn't that my dear cousin is insubordinate but that he cannot command his own nobles?"

  "There is some truth in that, yes."

  "I see."

  "I'm not sure you do, Majesty. The political situation in Virgenya is very complicated at the moment."

  "Too complicated for me to sort out, you mean?"

  "Nothing of the kind, Majesty. I will be happy to explain it to you."

  Anne sat back in her chair. "You will, but not now. Do you have any other bad news for me?"

  "No, madame."

  "Very well. Have a rest. I would be pleased if you would meet me at my table tonight."

  "We would be honored, Majesty."

  "Good."

  The two older men turned to go, but the younger stood his ground.

  "What?" she asked.

  "Is that leave to speak, Majesty?"

  Despite herself, she smiled a bit. "I suppose it is. Go ahead."

  "You asked if we had more bad news. I do not. But I hope you will think I have brought a little good news."

  "Delightful if true," Anne said. "Please say on."

  Ifwitch took a step toward the earl. "Tam, you shouldn't-"

  "Really, Ifwitch, I would like to hear this rumored good news."

  He bowed and didn't say anything else.

  "It's true, some nobles don't know where their duties lie. I am not one of them. Majesty, I've brought my bodyguard with me, five hundred and fifty of the best horsemen you will ever see. They-and I-are yours."

  "King Charles has released you to me?" She asked.

  None of them spoke, although Ifwitch reddened.

  "I see," she replied. "He hasn't."

  "Charles needs the nobles he trusts in Virgenya," the earl said. "It's really that simple. He knows I would never ride against him. But as I am loyal to him, so I am to the empress he serves, so I have come directly to petition you."

  "I didn't think I would hear much pleasing today," Anne said. "I was wrong. I accept your loyalty."

  She shot her gaze back at the other two men. "It is a thing in short supply these days."

  CHAPTER TWO

  ALONG THE DEEP RIVER

  WITCHLIGHTS LED the way as Stephen, Zemle, Adhrekh, and twenty Aitivar descended into the roots of the mountain. The ethereal globes of iridescence flitted about, casting the otherwise bleak gray walls in shades of gold, silver, ruby, emerald, and sapphire. Stephen had never seen witchlights before entering the Witchhorn, but Aspar had spoken of them as a fixture of Sefry rewns.

  Oddly enough, the Aitivar didn't seem to know anything about them other than what anyone could observe. Were they alive? Creations of shinecraft or some natural product of the tenebres?

  No one knew, and no book Stephen could find answered the question. But they were useful, and they were pretty, which was more than could be said about most things.

  They were particularly useful just now, as the path they walked was barely a kingsyard wide, bounded on the right hand by the stone of the great central subterrain of the caverns and on the left by the crevasse through which the underground river Nemeneth sought its way through stone and earth to feed deeper streams and eventually, perhaps, the Welph, which flowed in turn to the Warlock and thence to the Lier Sea at Eslen. He could hear the rushing of the Nemeneth, but it was too far below him for the witchlights to reveal.<
br />
  "Are you sure you're ready?" Zemle asked him.

  "I'm sure I'm not," he replied. "I wasn't ready to walk the first faneway I walked. Then I nearly died-maybe did die-just setting foot on another sedos. But Virgenya Dare wasn't ready, either. She just did it. And I'm not going to wait until the Vhelny or whatever it is that's stalking me has its chance."

  "Then the journal talks about the faneway?"

  "Yes. I was reading an early part, when she was a girl, and the Skasloi took her into the mountains. This mountain. She felt the faneway below her. Years later she came back and walked it."

  "So she tells where it is."

  "Yes. I know where I'm going, if that's what you're asking."

  "Is it much farther?"

  He smiled. "That's what we used to ask my father on long trips. Have you aged backward to five?"

  "No. I don't care how far it is. I'm just curious."

  "I reckon it at about half a league. It's in another part of the mountain. Adhrekh, have you ever been this way before?"

  "The cavern ends ahead, pathikh."

  "You really believe that, or is this just something else you neglected to tell me? Another test to see if I'm really Kauron's heir?"

  "It's not a test, pathikh. We've never known where the faneway is."

  Stephen stopped. "It's going to stay that way, then. Give me a pack of food and water and return to your rewn."

  "Pathikh-"

  "Do it. If I even suspect you're following me, I won't go anywhere near the faneway. Do you understand?"

  "Pathikh, this place you are going-it is old, very old, and it has been abandoned for a long time. There's no knowing what might lurk there in the dark."

  "Stephen, he's right," Zemle said. "Going alone would be foolish."

  "They've just admitted they need me to find the faneway. Maybe that's all they ever needed from me. Maybe once I find it, I'm of no use to them."

  "Stephen, Sefry can't walk faneways. Any faneways. Why would they want to know where this one is?"

  That drew him to a stop. "What? I've never heard that."

  "It's true," Adhrekh said.

  Stephen frowned and leafed quickly through his saint-blessed memory. No Sefry had ever joined the Church and walked a faneway; that much was true. But there was something…

  "As soon have a Sefry walk a faneway as give shiveroot for the gout," he cited.

  "What?" Zemle asked.

  "From the Herbal of Phelam Haert. It's the only thing I can think of that supports your claim. Anyway, maybe they have someone in mind to walk it other than me."

  "Who? Not Fend, obviously. Hespero? Then why did they fight him?"

  You can trust the Aitivar.

  Stephen blinked. Everyone was looking at him strangely.

  "What did you say?" Zemle asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You were just babbling in some other tongue."

  Stephen sighed and massaged his forehead. "Nothing," he said. "Never mind. All right, Adhrekh. You can come."

  Adhrekh acknowledged that by bowing, and they continued the descent. As the Sefry had predicted, the roof of the cave came sloping down to meet them even as the angle of the trail sharpened and finally became stairs. The churning of the river grew louder, and eventually the stairs ended on a bed of gravel and sand at its banks.

  Stephen had been trying not to think about this part, but now he was there, and he felt his breath shorten. It wasn't how he had imagined it; it was much worse.

  Upstream, where the Aitivar dwelt, the Nemeneth was a relatively placid stream. Here, she came crashing down from a series of shoals and waterfalls to form a great vortex. The cave roof was only two kingsyards above that, and across the river was only stone.

  "No," Zemle said. "Oh, saints, no."

  "I'm afraid so," Stephen said. He was trying to sound brave and nonchalant, but his voice quavered. He hoped they couldn't hear that over the steady thrumming of the river-size drain.

  "This can't be right," she said, and turned to Adhrekh. "Haven't any of you ever tried this?"

  Adhrekh actually coughed out a little laugh, something Stephen had never heard the man do before.

  "Why?" he said. "Why would anyone do that? I could live seven hundred years if I'm careful."

  Stephen sat on the shingle and tried to take deep, slow breaths. The witchlights seemed slower now, calmer.

  "Stephen?"

  "I have to," he said. He took a few more breaths, levered himself up, and walked toward the rushing whirlpool. He knew he couldn't pause, and so he leapt in, aiming his feet toward the center of it.

  It took him with incredible violence. The power of the water was absolute, and nothing his limbs could do had any effect. All he could do was try to hold on to his air, not scream and let it all out, and he suddenly knew with absolute certainty that he somehow had been tricked. He was a dead man, and knowing that, he lost the power of thought entirely.

  When it came back, he remembered being ground against sand and stone and then expulsion and the grip of the flood easing. Now he lay on gravel in utter darkness, coughing out the water that had forced its way into his lungs.

  A golden glow rose up in front of him, and then a deep red one. A few heartbeats later the witchlights were all around him again.

  He lay on a strand not very different from the one he had just left, but here there was no high-vaulted chamber, only a tunnel two kingsyards higher than the river flowing through it. Water crashed through the roof in a great column on his right, and on his left the passage went on much farther than his luminescent companions could reveal.

  He heard violent coughing and saw the silhouette of a head and shoulders rise from the pool: Adhrekh.

  "Zemle!" he gasped. Had she tried to follow him, too?

  More Aitivar appeared, but he didn't see her.

  "Zemle!" he repeated, this time at the top of his lungs.

  "I have her," someone said. In the stir he couldn't tell where the voice was coming from exactly.

  "Who is that?"

  Then he made out one of the Aitivar cradling a limp figure. He waded up onto the beach.

  "Saints curse me," Stephen snarled. "Is she-"

  The fellow shrugged and lay her down. Her head was smeared with black, which Stephen realized was blood rendered dark by the colored lights. For a moment he felt paralyzed, but then she coughed, and water bubbled out of her mouth.

  "Bandages," he told Adhrekh. "Get me bandages and whatever unction you might have."

  Adhrekh nodded.

  "Zemle," Stephen said, stroking her cheek. "Can you hear me?"

  He took the sleeve of his shirt and pressed it to her wound, trying to see how deep it was. Her eyes opened, and she shrieked.

  "Sorry," Stephen said. "Can you hear me?"

  "I can hear you," she said. "Can you hear me?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. Because I hate you." She felt toward her brow. "Am I bleeding to death?"

  "I think it's a shallow cut," he replied. "There's a lot of blood, but I don't think your skull broke."

  Adhrekh returned with linen cloths and some sort of paste with a sul-fury smell and set about bandaging Zemle's head. He seemed to know what he was doing, so Stephen didn't interfere. His pulse finally began slowing down, and he felt unexpected exhilaration flood through him.

  Who was he to brave such things? Not the Stephen Darige who had left Ralegh for the monastery d'Ef, what, not even two years ago?

  Even Aspar might be proud of him.

  "Did we lose anyone?" Stephen asked Adhrekh.

  "No, pathikh," the Sefry replied. "All accounted for."

  "It's colder down here," Stephen noticed. "You brought the change of clothes I asked for?"

  "Yes. And now I understand why you asked for them. But if you had told me more concerning what we were to do, I might have made more effort to keep them dry. I can better serve you, pathikh, if you talk to me more."

  "The extra clothes are wet? What about
the coats?"

  "Drier than what we're wearing, pathikh."

  "It'll have to do. When Zemle can walk, we'll move on. Moving will warm us."

  "Stephen," Zemle said. "A small question. Tiny, really."

  "Yes?"

  "There is another way back, yes?"

  Stephen glanced at the waterfall. "Right. I guess we can't swim back up that."

  "Stephen-"

  "Virgenya Dare made it out."

  "But you don't know how?"

  "She neglected to write about that, I'm afraid. But there must be a way out."

  "And we only need find it before we run out of food or freeze to death."

  "Don't be a pessimist," Stephen said, his elation starting to fade. "We'll be fine."

  "How much farther to the start of the faneway?"

  "I'm not sure. Virgenya wasn't sure; it's hard to measure time and distance underground. She reckoned it at several bells but admitted it could have been days."

  "What if we get lost?"

  "Not much chance of that right now," he said. "We've only one direction to go. Anyway, I can feel the faneway. It's close." He gripped her shoulder. "How are you feeling?"

  "A little dizzy, but I can walk."

  Adhrekh had dug out the coats from their packs, sturdy elkhide paiden with fur lining. They were hardly wet at all, and once clothed in one, Stephen felt a great deal better even though he was still wet.

  Once everything was gathered again, they started out.

  The passage bent and turned like the bed of any river and its roof went higher and lower, but it stayed simple in terms of choices. More streams joined it, but they came from above, from fissures too small to accommodate a person. The floor dropped roughly down in places, forcing them to use rope to descend, but was never as dramatic or dangerous as what they already had been through. Not, that is, until they reached the place Virgenya Dare called simply "the valley." Stephen knew they were approaching it because the close echoes of the tunnel began opening up, becoming vastly more hollow, along with the sound of rushing water.

  They came to the lip where the river churned and fell far from sight, and a vast black space yawned before them.