Daerwin rose from his knees and absently seated himself in the chair beside the duke, ignoring the duke’s veiled smile. “But is this wise, Father? Half of Kadak’s forces already occupy Brannford and Pyran, and the rest are wearing away Tremondy’s forces in the north. Mine as well, ere long.” It had to be said, though he dreaded to think where the information might lead the duke’s thoughts. “Father, the Resistance will surely fall without your leadership. Perhaps if this were to wait.”
“My leadership!” The sudden exclamation started a coughing fit that lasted a while, long enough that one of the duke’s Keepers melted from the wall in alarm. “Back! I yet live. Back, I say!” Vilmar Damerien looked up at his son, whose face had gone quite pale. “Leadership? Boy, look at me! I can barely walk to the privy without help.” That started another coughing fit. “Fie! Behold, Vilmar Damerien in his wretchedness! Bah. I am hardly the leader worth dying for these days! Besides, they will have all of my leadership, as you so flatteringly put it, but with Brada’s strength and youth to inspire them.”
He was right, though Daerwin hated to admit it. More and more of the Resistance fighters were too young to remember. To them, the lifting of the Durlindale Siege was lost in history as surely as the Bremo-Hadrian Wars or the Liberation itself, and Vilmar Damerien was just a feeble old man who commanded from his bed. If Kadak’s demon armies were to get past Brannagh to Damerien, these young fighters could not imagine Duke Vilmar holding the castle, and their morale was not what it should be, what it had to be, to resist the Usurper’s overwhelming forces. A younger, more powerful duke, especially one newly ascended, would rekindle their ardor.
As if he followed Daerwin’s train of thought, the duke nodded and wheezed softly. “Oh, they will love Brada— have no doubt of that. Handsome, powerful, heroic…he will be everything they need him to be. Above all else, Brada should be able to stand against Kadak, should the Resistance fall. So I pray, at any rate. Then, if necessary, we can begin to rebuild what was lost.”
In spite of the worry in Vilmar’s words, Daerwin’s heart jumped with hope. Surely this was his father’s intention, then, that between the remaining lords of Syon, they would find a way to defeat Kadak, finally, utterly, and barring that, for Brada to face Kadak himself. Hence the Succession now. Yes, with a newly ascended duke, they could win this war themselves, and if so…
“But enough of this.” Vilmar sighed heavily and stared through the walls for a time before he spoke again. “The succession will take care of itself. It always does. You know why I summoned you.”
The sheriff only stared into his father’s eyes, the vast reservoirs of dread he had just blocked safely away washing over him again.
No.
Not this.
They would not need it now. They had just been talking about the Succession, about Brada, about ending the war themselves. Themselves! If they could do that, if they could defeat Kadak themselves, then he could not be the Beast, and this could not be the Great War. This could not be the time of the prophecy, regardless of all the omens and portents, regardless of what the priests said. He shut his eyes in desperate prayer. Please, by the gods, let them be wrong. Let them all be wrong.
“Daerwin?”
In a single motion, the sheriff stood and whirled away, tearing himself free of his father’s gaze. He would not have this conversation again.
“Glynnis is well. She sends her love.” His voice was all of breath, but he could not help himself. “Roquandor starts at the academy this year. Such pride! You should see him strutting about at Brannagh, ordering the servants about.” He laughed nervously, desperately. “And Renda, dear little Renda...”
“Daerwin.”
His smile failed him, and his voice broke. “She will be seven in less than a tenday...”
“My son,” said the duke gently, “you’ve known since Roquandor was born that this day would come. No son has ever been born to the House of Brannagh, nor likely will be again.” As he spoke, he hunched his blankets up about his shoulders and from beneath the folds, produced a small, beautifully carved wooden sword.
Daerwin only stared at the toy weapon.
“Regardless of how you or I feel, the child must become a Knight of Brannagh and deliver this land from war, or all is lost.” Vilmar stood then and extended the sword toward Daerwin hilt first. “Renda of Brannagh will fulfill the prophecy, Daerwin.” The duke’s voice dropped. “She must. For the sake of Syon and all the world, she must.” He wheezed softly. “For my sake...”
“For your sake.” Daerwin drew a deep breath, biting back his bitterness.
“Yes,” he answered simply. “For the duke, for Syon and for B’radik. Is that not the oath you swore as a Knight of Brannagh?”
“It is not an oath she has sworn!”
“She will.”
“She’s but a seven years child!”
“Which is why you must train her now.”
“And if I refuse?”
The duke shook his head. “My son, you cannot simply ignore what is and hope it passes you by. The prophecy will not wait for your pleasure, and it will not be bargained with. It will visit itself upon her whether she is ready for it or not. Knowing this, it falls to you to prepare her for what will come.”
Daerwin sighed. “I will make of my daughter a Knight of Brannagh.” He shut his eyes in dread. “I will train her to be a weapon for you, a warrior for Syon. She will end this war, as your prophecy says she must. That much will safeguard your land and your throne.” He turned to his father with pleading eyes. “Can that be the end of it?” His voice cracked with the deep terror in his heart. “Please, I beg of you. Let that be the end of it.”
The duke’s eyes blinked in surprise and sorrow. “But Daerwin, you know better than that…”
One
Castle Brannagh
First day of Gathering, in the year of Syon, 3862
Renda of Brannagh stood at the library window and gazed out over the quiet fields and orchards of her father’s lands, stretching from the dry moat beyond the great stone curtain wall as far as the horizon. No armies gathered there, though of habit she still looked for the telltale smoke of their fires rising above the hills and the dust of their movement. No threat called for her attention, and still she stayed, still she watched. Still she hoped.
At daybreak, the Sheriff of Brannagh, her father, had stood with his knights and their farmers to crush the first grains under his boot heel and sprinkle the ceremonial milk and blood over the fields in the hopes that when the cold passed Didian would again bring His rains and Kanet the wholesomeness of the soil. And as she had, year upon year since she took her oath, she’d stood at his side, battle armor polished, swords gleaming, Brannagh mantle about her shoulders.
So little had changed, and yet...
In the slightest motion, her hand brushed over her hip and found no sword there. No swordbelt, no comfortable, familiar armor with its dented peplum…only the strange, perfect pleats of her skirts. Brocades, laces, silks, she sighed, the first bindings of a noblewoman. There were more. Three hours she had spent this morning, not moving, not breathing, not thinking, while her mother’s maids twisted and pinned her stubborn auburn hair—hair which had always obeyed the discipline of the helmet—into a fragile objet d’art.
Such things made no sense, not in the world she’d known. “Not tactical,” as Sir Saramore would say. Bound as she was in so many layers of silk and lace, she felt strangely naked and helpless, just as she had for the last two years.
For a moment, she felt a peculiar sense of vertigo: she was crude and out of place, a stranger in her own family castle, a knight in masque as a noblewoman.
In the silence of the great galleries and corridors, she could still hear the snap of the great almost liquid arc of power that had lashed out over the battlefield and cracked against the stone and mortar of Kadak’s stronghold, blasting through the last of the castle’s protections, the sudden implosion of the castle wall, and then the
thunderous cheers of her men as they ran for the glowing fiery breach over the bodies of the dead…
“Fades, it does.” Her squire’s Bremondine burr lilted quietly over the stones of the library floor. After six years, it was as familiar in Renda’s ear as her own voice, though the sudden sound made her draw a sharp breath. “Takes some time is all.”
Even without looking back, Renda could picture Gikka of Graymonde at the table behind her. As always, Gikka’s brown hair flowed in mannish style, uncoifed in scandalous loose waves that fell over her gray-green riding tunic, and she sat with her thin leather boots kicked up onto the table, irreverently close to the priceless scrolls and quartos. Her arms rested calm and strong across her chest, never more than inches from a weapon even within the castle walls. Renda smiled sadly. Even for Gikka, old habits died hard.
Behind her, patient stacks of parchments sprawled over the tables, Renda’s strange new weapons for this strange new world. Some were carefully powdered and rolled into carved bone cases, others leafed flat and bound between thick wooden covers. In these writings were laws and judgments, records of harvests, settlements of disputes, declarations of war, peace treaties…every dreary point of Syonese law for the last thousand years, many in strange languages and centuries-old scripts. Above these, in shelves and cases lining the walls, were another scant three millennia of bickerings and squabblings going right back to the Liberation.
“The farmers,” Renda murmured. “They whine like spoiled children, Gikka.”
“The farmers.” The squire cocked her brow. “The farmers have you staring out the window, do they?”
“These are men who spilled blood together, men who buried the dead together, and now they've all gone mad with their selfishness.” She rubbed her forehead in frustration. “They come to blows over who owns a newborn goat or the lay of a fence, one foot this way or that. I’ve no head for this, to speak softly beneath their bickering. Were it my decision, I should give them all swords, and let them decide it themselves.”
“Sounds sensible to me,” Gikka studied her hands, squinting at the edges of the unusually long nails of her smallest fingers. “Such answer certainly befits our lady of the battlefield and might knock some sense into them besides. Yet here we find ourselves…in the library.”
“Even so. His Lordship, my father,” Renda said, arching her brow, “has charged me with finding a peaceful answer for these fools. ‘This is a time of peace. We must show them peaceful solutions if we would keep it so.’ If, indeed.” She looked out the window again. “I’m sure he knows his answer already and even his justification for it. He’s set me this task to fill my time.”
Gikka smiled gently. “He worries after you, what with the screams in your sleep.”
“So he fills my days with emptiness?” Renda shook her head.
“Regardless,” breathed Gikka, “we’ve the whole library twixt us and your famous answer, and only an hour of light.” She picked up the nearest of the scrollcases and shook her head over the elaborate curls of the High Hadric inscription. “Bloody Hadrians,” she muttered. “Turncoats, renegades...” She uncased the scroll and blew the powder from it. When Renda made no answer, she looked up. “Best tell me what we seek…”
The knight looked back toward the heap of parchments. “Ah, Gikka, how is it I find this peace so much more wearisome than war?” She hugged herself, vaguely irritated at her gown again, that its bodice should bind at the shoulders and its skirts drag about her feet so. “I have no breath in me, no appetite. Gods, but I feel so...”
Gikka set aside the scroll and swung her boots down from the table top. “Fades, as I say, an you don’t pick at it by the hour.” She stood and leaned against the wall beside Renda to look out over the quiet fields. “I’ve the same cravings in my own heart, and right well you know it.”
“Then you understand,” answered Renda quietly. “I see no more battles ahead, no more victories. Just dull gray days of peace.”
Gikka jumped easily to sit on the thick window ledge. “Renda, you miss the war like an old love, and in the missing, you forget the bad of it. The dead, the maimed.” She nodded toward the rich fields of amaranth and wheat. “The farmers, they earned this new life of theirs, Renda, paid for it with their dearest blood. Sure you’d not take it all back.”
“Would I not?”
Gikka frowned. “That’s an ungrateful turn of thought.”
“Ungrateful?” She sighed. “Do you know what is in my dreams, Gikka? Every night, filled with nothing but the mindlessness of the day, my dreams return to the war. I relive the battles, the victories and the losses, worry at the choices I made, the lives I sacrificed and those I saved. I carouse with those long dead…” She closed her eyes against the pain and loss. “Falling asleep, I dread the morning. I dread waking to the emptiness, waking to another day of pretending to care about things that do not matter. Should I be grateful for this?”
“Renda, this emptiness you feel, it’s unfair. The war’s end…well, now, that was a day, indeed, one in five hundred years, not just for you but for all Syon! You can’t expect every day to rise to that same glory. You breached Kadak’s stronghold, destroyed Kadak, rescued Duke Brada, gods rest him—”
“You were the one to rescue my uncle, not I.”
“We rescued Brada. You, me, Dith, your father…the lot of us.” Gikka sat back in the chair. “Still in all, what day can ever compare to that, Renda?”
“Certainly not today.” Renda smiled bitterly. “It’s over, don’t you see? Everything I knew, everything I had, everything I was. This is all that’s left to me.” She looked back over the library tables in disgust. “And not just this weary nonsense, no.” She paced away from the window. “I have social functions and state dinners, politics, maneuverings...” She laughed bitterly. “And what’s more, I have before me a marriage of alliance, ere I grow too old and unappealing, that I might become some fat old lord’s brood mare while he dallies with the beauties of the realm!”
“Fat old lord, is it?” Her squire laughed. “Which fat old lord might this be, what with all the young gallants come to break with your father after you?”
“One and all, they would conquer Renda the War Hero, Renda the Duke’s Cousin, Renda the Sheriff’s Daughter and brag to their comrades. No, not conquer. Purchase at auction by the highest bidder of title, land and gold, my virtue a trophy for the ancestral manse.” She felt a bit sick, hearing her thoughts take on a certain truth now that she’d spoken them aloud. “So what difference, fat or thin, old or young, hideous or handsome, if I’ve no say…”
“Ho, mistress, but you’ve a thing or more to learn. A bloody big difference, it is, and no mistake.” Gikka chuckled. “Oh now, I know your father well enough; you’ll have a say. Mark my words.”
“My say is that I’ll none. There’s no time to waste on love and such rot in war.”
“Aye,” answered Gikka softly. “But Renda, we’re no longer at war.”
Renda laughed bitterly and gestured toward the parchments. “It seems I shan’t have time to waste on it without the war, either.”
Gikka shook her head, obviously frustrated.
Renda smiled. This was a side of her that Gikka simply did not understand and likely never would. In some ways, Renda did not understand it entirely herself. She had seen it time and again. Nothing made soldiers lust for every bit of life they could get more than having just come from battle. But somehow Renda had always held aloof.
“Besides, what point do you see in my pursuing love or romance?” Love, romance. The words tasted strange and bitter on the knight’s tongue.
“A warm smile of a cold morning and a warm hand to hold.” Gikka laughed. “Barring that, a warm bed…”
“…only to suffer the loss when called to heel.”
Her squire snorted. “Who calls Renda of Brannagh to heel? Sure not even your father would be so bold.”
She slammed her hand down on the table. “I would bring myself to heel out o
f duty!”
“What duty?” Gikka met her hard gaze. “The war ended for you, too, and this peace gives you leave to take off the armor and live as something more than just a knight!”
“Gikka, I never wanted to take off the armor! I never wanted to be other than what I am, and I am a knight!”
“Aye, but then, as a knight, have you no whims or fancies? There’s a blue-cape or two I’d have thought worth a tumble even for your illustrious self. And Aidan…” Gikka’s eyes flashed. “How you denied yourself that is beyond my ken.”
Renda smiled grimly. “I learned long ago to subdue whims and fancies and arm against disappointment.”
“So you did,” Gikka said gently. “But now you’ve leave to let them breathe and see where they lead. Who’s to stop you but yourself? What was once a choice now comes from habit. Ah, you make excuse of your station, but even Roquandor loved and married, Renda—even your very brother, a knight like yourself and a child of Brannagh.”
“I am not my brother.”
“Are you not a knight as he was?”
“I am not a man as he was!” she snapped.
Gikka scowled. “When it’s war, you’re the knight, man or woman be damned, but comes the peace, and you’re so quick to accept the simpering life laid out for you, even as you rail against it.”
“Of course I rail against it! But rail against it or no, in the end it makes no difference. There’s no need of me to be a knight now.” She hugged herself and walked toward the window. “So I will do what the daughters of Brannagh have done before me. I will marry appropriately, bear an heir or two, and then amuse myself with pettiness to cover my shame of becoming an aging baggage.” She listened to the finality of her words as they hung in the library air like an epitaph and wished she could take them back, wished she could make them false. But she could not. Defeated, she sank into her chair. “This I’ve wrought for myself, Gikka. Peace, security, and the exquisite boredom of a life at court. And would that it were not so.”
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 2
