“Nothing untoward!” Gikka hissed.
“Upon my word,” he said in tones of embarrassment and humility, “you will hear no more of this.” But his words rang false against the whitewashed walls of the manse, and now the knight and her squire advanced on him again. “Please! Have you no pity for an old man? In B’radik’s name, spare me!”
“In B’radik’s name?” Renda repeated incredulously. “You dare claim loyalty to the Houses of Damerien and Brannagh? To B’radik? In the very midst of your sin?” Renda moved toward him, sword still leveled at his heart. She looked at the table full of bowls and vessels and felt any pity she had for him drain from her. There, in the bowls, were Pegrine’s missing organs, darkened and reeking with the passage of time. Heart, kidneys, liver, a few others Renda did not look upon for long, mostly cut apart now with strangely shaped gouges and chunks cut from them. She turned her attention back to the priest. “Know you, Cilder, what child you have slain?”
But for the brief moment while her attention had left him, he had turned and gulped something from one bowl, something dark and bloody and thick. Now he cast both women a sinister grin and wiped the blood from his mouth with the sleeve of his cassock. “I do not, nor do I care. It is done!”
In desperation, Gikka lunged and jabbed at him with the dagger, and again she was thrown back, but this time, she left a deep cut on his throat.
“Verinara,” he said calmly, dabbing at the cut with his sleeve until it stopped bleeding. In only a moment, the wound closed. “That might have been unpleasant.” Finally he looked up into their shocked faces, and his expression was puzzled. “But why verinara?”
Gikka rose and moved toward him again, but as she came closer, his gesturing broadened: He was invoking the protection of his god against Gikka. Not B’radik’s protection—sure and inescapable proof of his betrayal—but that of some other, unknown to her. The one who had granted him the gods’ own knowledge.
With all speed, Renda shoved Gikka aside and threw the cleric to the ground just as he finished his invocation, steeling herself against the attack that somehow never came. She knelt over him to hold him down and, instead of her own swords, she drew Pegrine’s absurdly small wooden sword. She raised it above Cilder’s chest while he lay grinning at her in full anticipation of his god’s protection.
“Cilder!” A voice as smooth and sinuous as a viper’s skin uncoiled in the air around them, a hideously beautiful voice that could have been male or female. Or neither.
A swirl of cold, dark, something badly out of place, whirled around Renda’s sensibilities. She rose to her feet, drawing her own sword with her left hand while Gikka circled the room with her daggers raised, both looking for the one who spoke. The knight whispered a prayer to B’radik under her breath, and the squire cursed roundly under hers.
“Ha!” choked the bishop. He looked into the air and smiled like an obedient hound before its master. “I knew You would not fail me! I have fulfilled Your command!”
The voice growled, dark and terrifying, but not, as it seemed, toward the two women. When Renda ventured to look toward the bishop, she saw dark swirls of fury circling the bishop wildly under the raging howl of his god.
“How dare you profane My altar with the blood of Mine enemy!” the voice shrieked.
The whirls of black circled the bishop’s body faster and faster, and he was buffeted back and forth as he tried to rise. Cilder managed to get himself to his knees before the blood began burbling over his lips.
“No!” he wheezed, staring in horror first at the knight, then at her squire. She saw the realization in his eyes. “Enemy…the verinara. The child, oh mercy! Tell me it is not true! Tell me they did not take…!” He threw himself upon the ground, clawing at Renda’s boots, grasping at her tunic and begging for mercy in his wretchedness. “What have I done? I have sacrificed a child of Damerien! The prophecy! What have I done?”
Prophecy again. First Nara, now Cilder. Renda looked at Gikka. What prophecy? But the squire only shook her head in bafflement.
Then, at each joint of bone to bone, Cilder’s body began to unravel itself with dull sickening pops that counterpointed the angry slamming of the bolt against Gikka’s dagger. Aghast, wooden sword in hand, Renda watched the madness grow in his eyes as he watched his body be devoured by sulfurous flame, slowly, inevitably, bit by bit. The bishop shrieked with terror and pain, breaking his voice and bringing his servants to come pounding at the sealed door.
With infinite cruelty, the god had somehow kept him alive during this last of his dissolution, when his body was reduced to no more than a wretched trunk and head, and now she could see his eyes bulging and his tongue swelling within his mouth, yet somehow, cruelly, he was still conscious. The horrible mouth continued to scream until the tongue choked off the sound and the bishop lay flopping absurdly and gasping on the floor.
“For Pegrine and B’radik!” Renda leaped forward and plunged the wooden sword into his heart with all her strength and pulled it free. What remained of the bishop, a bloodied piece of his cassock over his absurd, limbless trunk, quivered weakly for a moment before it relaxed at Renda’s feet, silent and still.
In the sudden silence of the room, Renda stared at the dead bishop’s body, numb, cold. Then she knelt to offer a prayer to B’radik for the soul of the man she had known all her life, her father’s gentle priest who had come so far from B’radik’s light. But then she stood and raised Pegrine’s bloody wooden sword above the body of the evil creature who had murdered her niece. “Praise to Rjeinar, vengeance is done,” she muttered, and dropped the verinara leaf on his body. Then she stripped off a piece of the bishop’s cassock to wrap around the gory sword.
Behind them the servants and some priests from the temple stood at the door where it had suddenly come open, staring in shock and horror at the scene before them. The beautiful white walls of the bishop’s chamber ran black with burned and spattered blood, the largest part of Cilder’s body lying just beneath the table with its grisly bowls. The smell of burned flesh and blood tang filled the room. The knight and squire faced the pale and menacing faces of the household, wondering whether anyone would leave the manse alive.
“It is over,” spoke a quiet voice from behind the crowd. “Get back to your duties.”
Renda’s hand went to her sword.
The servants nodded quickly, not looking at each other nor seeking the source of the voice but dispersing immediately to their work, leaving only a single priest standing in the doorway. He wore the robes of a high priest of B’radik, and the faint glow about his form was unmistakable, pure and white. He had a gentle face and looked to be about the sheriff’s age with bands of steel gray and white through his hair. Renda supposed that, having spent so many years in B’radik’s service, he could call upon considerable power, if anyone still could.
“I greet you in the name of B’radik and sow your hearts with truth and light,” he said, bowing quickly. “I am called Arnard.” He looked up the hallway for a moment, then gestured for the women to follow him out. Once they stood outside the bishop’s chambers, he waved his hand quickly over the doorway, and a white wall closed over it before he led them down the hallway. “I trust you have horses waiting?”
Renda nodded, looking back to see bewilderment in Gikka’s eyes. “Yes, of course, but why—”
He led them toward the servants’ stairway. “We have no time. Know this, Lady Renda, in case you had any doubt. You and your household are in danger.”
Renda drew breath to speak, but he hushed her with a wave.
“Hear me. The temple is split, and we who serve B’radik lose more to …their god every day. B’radik has grown weak, so weak that She answers only my simplest prayers; that She sealed yon door for me is a most welcome sign. But the rest count themselves lucky to heal their own sprains and bruises by daylight. By evenfall, most of the priests find themselves utterly impotent. They watch with jealous and frustrated eyes while those who have gone to the other
have unlimited power. And so, one by one, our priests are seduced away. Now that the bishop is defeated...”
“What other?” asked Gikka.
But Arnard shook his head, and she could see his frustration in the gesture. “They never use a name.” He stood at the top of the stairs and motioned for them to climb down. “But I have seen their works. They would destroy everything you hold dear.”
Renda frowned. “But the bishop killed the sheriff’s granddaughter, and his god killed him for it. Surely they will return now that justice—”
“No,” said the priest worriedly, looking back toward the bishop’s sealed chamber. “Their god,” he said heavily, “smote the bishop for his clumsiness, for drawing the attention of B’radik’s guardian houses prematurely. For warning you, as it were.” Arnard’s gaze dropped reluctantly to the bloody bundle she carried, Pegrine’s toy sword. “And do not forget, you saved Cilder from that death, Lady. After a fashion.”
Renda shut her eyes for a moment, then nodded. “I see.”
“Peace,” breathed Gikka, “I hear steps.”
The priest hurried them down the stairs. “Protect yourselves well,” he told them from the top of the stairway. “I will speak with you again soon.”
* * *
The old chapel occupied only one rounded tower in the oldest and best protected part of the castle, on the north side where the windows were no more than slits between the thick stones. The household rarely used this chapel now, although occasionally a visiting knight might find his way here to be alone or to make his own peace with B’radik. The mortar in the walls was crumbling in places, and the frescoes depicting B’radik’s victory in the Gods’ Rebellion had faded into the plaster, leaving only the gold of the Dragon’s eyes still visible on the north wall.
Centuries of voices raised in song and prayer, the wept prayers of Brannagh women for B’radik to protect their men in battle, the blind joy of the newly married, the pain and sorrow of those who, like themselves, had come to bury a child—all these were here at once, seeping back from the stones that had so greedily drunk them up for so long, swirling and eddying over the pews and floors. As Renda approached the pew where her family and Gikka sat before the little veiled bier, she moved through these currents of pain and guilt, not sure how much of what she felt was her own. More than enough, well more than enough.
Beneath the veil, amid tiny fragrant bouquets of rosebuds, sprays of brilliant doucetels and snowberries all in white, Renda saw the little girl’s body looking more peaceful than she could have hoped, and beneath the tearing pain in her heart, she was grateful to the maids for their efforts. Somehow, they had bound Pegrine’s trunk to give her body a more lifelike form beneath the white lace of her gown. Her arms and legs had been put straight, with her hands crossed peacefully over her chest to hide their missing fingertips. Even her face had been smoothed out of its agony, and with the soft glow of a blush on her cheeks, Renda could almost believe that the child lay asleep. The illusion was not perfect, but it was enough.
The family stayed a while in the chapel, offering their own poor prayers for Pegrine’s soul to speed its way through the stars and leave this place, a Brannagh daughter, a fitting gift from B’radik to Verilion, but they all knew the truth. B’radik had no bishop at the temple now; just as no one stood before them to direct their prayers, so no one stood to consecrate the child’s grave. Especially given the manner of her death, she could not be sealed within her niche, nor even her bier set directly upon any stone of the vault, until a proper bishop could come, and none was within a tenday’s ride of the castle. Until then, she would lie on her funeral bier within the vault over a thick black cloth to keep her unsanctified flesh from desecrating the whole of the crypt. Pegrine would go to an unhallowed grave, unprotected and alone against its dangers, until a new bishop could come to Brannagh.
When at last the family followed the little girl’s body into the vault, Renda and Gikka carried the bier. Lady Glynnis chose the child’s temporary resting place herself and set the black cloth over the sarcophagus of Lexius, the first Sheriff of Brannagh, in the hopes that his formidable spirit might protect little Pegrine. Then they settled the funeral bed atop it.
So dark, the crypt, thought Renda. So bleak and chill. But Pegrine had never been afraid of the dark, not the way Renda had as a child; Renda supposed she would not mind it so much. What nonsense, to think that she still inhabited the flesh they set here to rest. She was surely gone, sped through the stars upon their prayers and wrapped in Verilion’s own cloak against the cold. Pegrine, at least, was at peace.
Even so, the mausoleum seemed overflowing with sorrow, as if the many dead sheriffs and their kin mourned with the family at Pegrine’s death.
Renda prayed over Pegrine’s bier for a time before she lifted the veil and placed the bloodied wooden sword into the little girl’s hands. For a moment, only a moment, she fancied that the child’s hands opened to receive her gift, grateful that her Auntie Renda could do her this last service. But when Renda looked again, the sword lay flat beneath Pegrine’s mutilated hands, sinking sickeningly against the bandages that filled out her body and bloodying the gown that the maids had worked so hard to keep white.
At last, tears spilled over Renda’s gown of mourning, not the tears of honest grief but of futility. Her revenge had meant nothing, changed nothing. Pegrine was still dead.
Five
She missed the sting of sweat and blood in her eyes that cut streaks through the grime on her face. She could feel it now, when she closed her eyes, that and the close, sweaty heat of her armor that seemed to weigh nothing when she fought. In her dream, she saw herself look down at the unmarred peplum on her armor and she smiled. The battle was yet to come. She had not missed it.
She did not flinch as a great arc of magical power lashed out over the demons against the stone and mortar of the ancient keep. The wall punched inward abruptly, crushing the demons massed behind it and scattering those outside into terrified chaos.
At last, she saw what she had waited her entire life to see: ahead lay the glowing, fiery breach, their way into Kadak’s stronghold. Triumphant, she braced her foot against the creature’s chest and wrenched her sword free.
But Pegrine wasn’t there.
Of course not, she told herself in the logic of dreams. She was only five at the time. But there was another reason why Pegrine wasn’t there. Wasn’t there? Something terrible. Something cold, dark, badly out of…
“No,” she murmured in her sleep, fighting away the present. “Please, let me just… remember…”
“Bloody Hadrians. Whole turncoat army of ‘em.” Gikka threw aside the stick she’d used to sketch her map in the dust and settled back on her haunches in disgust. Her face glowed gritty orange in the torch-light, painted as it was in sandy sludge, and her dark hair was slicked back with mud and sweat. “Sets me to wonder who minds our east flank.”
Renda watched her knights and soldiers streaming in through the broken wall behind her, bloody, dirty, exhausted. Awestricken. Proud.
She had kept her promise to them: they were inside Kadak’s fortress, and after half a millennium of fighting, Syon would win at last or die fighting. These few and her father’s forces along with the last remnants of Tremondy, Windale and Wirthing who protected their south flank were the last of the Resistance. These and the Hadrians to the east had pooled their strength for one final push to defeat Kadak. But if the Hadrians had joined Kadak…
“It does not matter,” she told them. “Tonight, the Five Hundred Years’ War ends one way or another.”
The men cheered, and she smiled over them. They only knew that they had put Renda of Brannagh within striking distance of Kadak. They could end the war. What they could not know, what they could never know, was how precarious their position actually was.
Renda crouched beside her squire and lowered her voice. “Whatever happens, Gikka, you must get Duke Brada away from this place. If Kadak destroys him, our vict
ory means nothing. To say nothing of what will happen without him if we fall.” She looked between Gikka and Dith, the one called the Merciless, who sat cross-legged beside her, apparently lost in his own thoughts. “You can still reach him?”
“Getting to him’s not the problem,” answered Gikka, “it’s getting him out alive. I seen him, Renda.” She lowered her voice. “He’ll not see the dawn—”
“But he yet lives. Can you get him out?”
“That I don’t know!” She scowled and scraped the unusually long nails of her little fingers against the stone wall behind her. “With him like he is, I need a clear run, or we’re caught, sure.” She laughed, and the sound struck Renda with its bitterness. “I need rid of them traitor Hadrians is what I need, and then it’s a near thing.”
Renda looked over her exhausted forces. Her losses would be devastating if she sent them against the Hadrians.
“I’ll see to the Hadrians,” murmured Dith.
“You yourself?” Gikka looked up at him. “Sure I don’t see how. The whole place is acrawl.”
But something—was it amusement?—flashed in his blue eyes. He had a plan. Dith was unconventional, young and brash, but he had never failed her before. After all, he had been the one to breach the wall. Whatever he had in mind might be their only chance to save the duke.
“You’ll know when.” He squeezed Gikka’s shoulder affectionately. Then he stood and picked up his rucksack, shaking smooth his seamless gold robes. “Just be ready.”
Just be ready…By the gods, they were ready, weren’t they? They would win. They had won. They were winning. Weren’t they? Hadn’t they? But something told her she had missed something.
Her sleeping mind tried to make sense of it but could not. This would be her moment of glory. She had seen how it would end somehow, perhaps in a dream. Perhaps they had already won. Perhaps they were home, and Pegrine was…
Pegrine was…
No. They were winning the war, and Peg was safe at Brannagh. Safe. Nothing could hurt her. Nothing.
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 8
