“What must I do?” he asked.
“You must speak it,” the King said. “Whatever this fear, whatever this shame, you must speak it. If not, you will begin to hate whatever it is you hide. And in time that hatred will rise up and turn on you.”
The conviction in the King’s voice startled and frightened Iliff. He began to open his mouth, to confess his past, when he noticed a figure lingering in the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” came Skye’s voice. “I don’t mean to interrupt. I’ve only come to give father his medicine.”
“Yes, of course,” Iliff said, getting up quickly. “You’re not intruding.” He looked down at the King. “We will talk again, Sire?”
“Wait a moment,” the King said.
Iliff stopped and stiffened. He was terrified that the King was going to demand he speak his past right there, that he speak it before Skye. His eyes remained on the King, but he watched her soft incandescence in his periphery.
There is no darkness in her.
The King coughed into his handkerchief. “I will grant your request to build with stone,” he said at last, “provided it is temporary. When the threat passes, the stone will come down and be put to other uses. Are we agreed?”
“Yes, Sire,” Iliff said, exhaling his relief. “And thank you.”
* * *
Within a fortnight of Iliff’s meeting with the King, the first block for the new wall was cut and placed. Lucious had succeeded in conscripting large numbers of men and women for the project, and Iliff now directed their efforts. He led more than one hundred of them to a quarry in the north hills where he showed them how to measure, hammer, and pry stone blocks from the bedrock. Iliff had another group load the crude blocks onto ox-drawn carts, using ropes and levers, and carry them to the stone-cutting workshops below. At the workshops themselves, set up between quarry and town, Iliff trained yet another group how to cut and dress the blocks for placement in the walls.
The defensive walls required the largest number of workers and the highest level of organizing. Iliff assigned more than four hundred townspeople, employing excavators, stone-layers, and many drivers of oxen and mules. He had carpenters erect wooden ramps and high scaffolding, and charged others with operating the tall cranes for raising and lowering blocks of stone and baskets of gravel. He frequently joined engineers on the rising walls, measuring, directing this or that modification, then measuring again.
But the most abundant occupations Iliff assigned and trained were those most familiar to him: mortar-makers, mixers, porters, and trowelers. Iliff oversaw the composition of mortar in those first days, his long-handled spade pushing through the long troughs of sand, gravel, crushed limestone, clay, and water. The smell and feel of it carried him to another time and place—a safer place, it felt, where he did not know the same worries he knew now.
“I’ll grant, I never thought it could be done,” Gilpin remarked one day.
Iliff set his spade against the corner of the box and leaned against the handle. “Well, we’ve only begun,” he said. “I won’t consider it done until all of the walls and towers are gotten up. And that’s going to take a long while yet.” He looked around them and resumed mixing.
“You seem quite at home with this,” Gilpin said.
“I told you, I’ve worked with stone before.”
“Yes, but on such a scale?”
When Iliff looked at Gilpin, he found him regarding him with the same pleasant expression he always did, though there was a slight twisting of curiosity there as well. Even though Gilpin had become a dear friend, Iliff had never spoken to him of his past, except in generalities. This fact pained him now, just as his continued silence before the King pained him.
“I’ll tell you everything one day when the walls are finished,” Iliff said at last. “I promise.”
* * *
Construction on the walls was just entering its second month when the scouts returned. A missive sent from the King to the Garott weeks earlier had received no response, which made the scouts’ report before the Assembly that much more ominous. The Garott had indeed expanded their holdings. Their western-most boundary was now only ten days’ ride from the far shore of the lake. And just as the injured soldier’s thoughts had revealed, the yields from the Garotts’ lands verged on exhaustion.
“It appears certain they will continue to move in our direction,” the lead scout said. “And with swampland to the south and the Great Sea to the north, they’ll be funneled toward the lake.”
“When can we expect them?” Horatio asked. The captain was standing in for the King, who remained in his sick bed where Skye tended to him.
“At this rate, a year’s time,” the scout answered. “If not sooner.”
The Assembly members murmured.
“Will the walls be ready by then?” Horatio asked, turning to Iliff.
“I pray so,” he answered. “But I will need more workers. An additional hundred would be a good start.” Iliff could tell by the Assembly members’ shifting colors that the proposal was not well received.
When the representative for the farmers stood to speak, he could barely meet Iliff’s gaze. “I’m afraid we’ve given as many of our number as can be spared, Master.” Several others nodded in agreement. “And pardon me for saying, but the work sites appear crowded as it is.”
Lucious moved, as if preparing to speak, but Iliff motioned for him to stay seated. “My plan is to divide the labor into shifts,” Iliff explained to the farmer. “One group will continue to labor during the day, the other will work the hours of night. It will require the addition of lantern bearers, yes, but in this way, the walls will be finished in nearly half the time. The people will be able to return to their true occupations much sooner.”
Voices rose now, some of them in agreement with the plan, others opposing it. This time Iliff could not stop Lucious from jumping to his feet.
“What is it you want?” he cried, staring at the head farmer. “For your tillers to go out into the fields and be hacked apart?” He turned to the man beside him. “For your lumbermen to climb their trees and be filled with arrows?” He looked around the Assembly room. “Iliff is proposing a small sacrifice for your enduring security, and this is your response? Saying that you have no one to spare? That the work site is too crowded? Well, you won’t have such problems when the Garott come and find you defenseless.”
“That’s enough,” Horatio said.
It felt odd to have Lucious defending him for a change, but as Iliff observed the sudden silence and abashed faces, he experienced a small stirring of satisfaction.
Horatio turned back to the lead scout. “Are there any signs of spying?”
“We encountered no Garott nearby, but we did find this.” The scout reached inside his leather pack and pulled out something solid and round.
“What is it?” Horatio asked.
“A cup of some sort.” When the scout lifted it, Iliff’s heart hammered.
“Where did you find it?”
“In a clearing on the far side of the lake, not far from the bridge.”
Where I made my camp that first night, thought Iliff.
“May I see it?” he asked, trying not to seem anxious.
He walked over and took the gold cup from the scout’s hands. He looked inside of it, then held it up and turned it, eyeing its curve. It was tarnished now and intense heat had altered its pitch somewhat. Iliff could feel Lucious watching him as he turned the cup once more.
“Do you know what it is?” Horatio asked.
“No,” Iliff said. “No, I don’t.”
But of course he did. He knew this cup well. Indeed, it had belonged to him once.
It was his gold chalice from the mines.
Chapter 13
The King died late the following winter. The funeral was held on the shore of the great lake on a bitter, wind-swept dawn. The townspeople, who had begun gathering hours earlier, stood silently over a crusting of gray ice, their dim mas
s forming a wreath around their King, whose body rested in a wooden skiff.
As Horatio spoke the eulogy, Iliff looked over the sovereign’s clean royal dress, the gold crown that had whitened with time, the coarse silver hair, the tired lines of his face. Though Iliff had always thought the King’s colors subdued, he could see now that, in spite of the King’s hardships, in spite of his illness, there had been a constant, if subtle, light radiating from inside him all those years. A light that announced itself only in its absence.
The death of the King surprised no one, least of all Iliff. The King had become more infirm over the past months, more aged. Iliff visited him often to give him whatever comfort he could. He continued to update the King on the progress of the stone defenses, even when their sovereign could no longer open his eyes or speak or even recognize that words were being spoken to him. Iliff did so out of his love and reverence for the King but also so that Skye, who tended to her father day and night in those final months, might remain informed.
He had never told the King of his past. He had often planned to, often wanted to, but the thought of confessing such shameful things before Skye was too much. In the end he said nothing.
Iliff watched Skye now as she stood beside her brother. Her colors were dim like the others, her hair faded beneath her staid headdress. And yet, as she cinched her dark cloak around her, her blue eyes shone. Most would later agree that they had shone with the intensity of her sorrow, but to Iliff, they shone with her intention to honor her father, to rule as he had, with love and dignity.
At the conclusion of the ceremony, Stype, Lucious, Horatio, and Iliff pushed the skiff into the gray waters. They all watched as the weak current of the lake took the skiff in and carried it beyond the bluff and out of sight to where the waters would eventually join the sea.
The rest of the day was for mourning. All labor, even that on the town’s defenses, ceased. It was the first time in nearly a year that the quarries, stonecutting workshops, and town walls were silent. Most of the townspeople gathered in one another’s cottages on that solemn day, honoring their late King with stories and sweet songs. Though Gilpin urged Iliff to join them, he found that his grief did not desire company, but rather space and solitude.
The late morning thus found him on the town wall, meandering its barren length. Closing his eyes, Iliff imagined the King beside him, his easy footfalls, his grave, yet reassuring voice. He tried to feel the warmth of his nearness, but it was too cold and the wind unrelenting.
Iliff wiped his eyes and resumed walking. The stone walls and towers were mostly completed. Up on the bluff, there remained only the turrets and tooth-like crenellations of the inner wall to finish. The timber of the original palisades, dwarfed now by the high stone walls, was being disassembled and put to other uses.
As Iliff stepped over tools and under scaffolding, he considered the last months. They had been harrowing months to be sure, ones where he retired to bed each night certain that the town would be attacked, then rose each morning too tired and troubled to be thankful that it had not been. Iliff rested little during this period, for every time he closed his eyes, hoards of Garott would appear to him, their shadowy faces leering up as if from below the ground.
And then there were his former treasures.
Though Iliff had denied knowledge of the chalice before the Assembly, he asked to be able to inspect it further. When Iliff returned to his cottage with it, he sat at his kitchen table and looked on the chalice for a very long time. There was no doubt that it was the first treasure that Euclid had given him, the same one that had sat on his shelf for four years, that he had packed and carried into the world. The same one he had left behind in the fire.
How had it ended up in the clearing?
His first thought was that someone—a Seeker, perhaps—had found it in the ashen ruins of the forest. Perhaps this person had carried it through the swamp, rested with it in the clearing, then forgotten to take it upon moving on. But Iliff was uncomfortable with the coincidences—his chalice, the clearing he had slept in—and it felt like wishful thinking, besides. When he questioned the scout further, he was told that the chalice had been sitting before the most prominent tree in the clearing, as if someone had intended for it to be found.
Was it possible?
The mere idea of his former companion shook Iliff to his core. He had long believed Troll dead or, at least, returned to the mines. And though both thoughts had recalled his guilt over the years, they had also relieved him. For either one meant that Troll could not reach him here, could not threaten the good and gentle people with whom he had settled. But if the sudden reappearance of the chalice had been Troll’s doing, it meant that he was still out there, still lurking.
In the months subsequent to the discovery of the chalice, the threat of the Garott and the nearness of Troll had co-mingled in Iliff’s mind—and before long, in reality as well. More than six months into the construction of the stone walls, the scouts returned again, but this time they were two men lighter.
“Ambushed,” the lead scout reported. “Not a week’s ride from the far shore. The Garott are patrolling their western boundary in greater numbers, just as we are patrolling our eastern. The lands beyond the lake are more dangerous than ever.”
He turned to Iliff. “And there were these,” he said, pulling from his leather pack a gold chest, then a gold helmet and shield. “The chest we found in our going and the others on our return. All of them in the same place as the cup.”
There could no longer be any doubt.
Iliff asked to examine these three treasures as well, but when he returned with them to his cottage, he promptly wrapped them in sacking and concealed them in the same wooden trunk that held the chalice. He pushed the trunk deep beneath his bed.
From his lonely perch on the wall now, Iliff looked beyond the fallow fields to the wooded horizon where rain blew from slate-colored clouds. Although the stone defenses were nearly complete, the King’s death coupled with the enormity of the lands around him made him feel more responsible for the Fythe than ever. He shivered and drew his cloak around him.
“Where are you?” he whispered into the wind. “Where do you hide?”
And whether he was addressing the Garott or his former companion, he could no longer tell.
Chapter 14
One week following the funeral, Skye summoned a meeting of the Assembly. The same space in which they had been meeting for years suddenly felt strange and cold to Iliff, like a room without its familiar hearth. Not knowing where to place their attention, most of the members looked at their laps. With the fullness of his own grief threatening to rise up, Iliff looked down as well.
Soon Skye entered the meeting room. She went without regal adornment, which surprised Iliff. But though her gown and chemise were plain, her eyes and bearing held command over the Assembly. There was the essence of her father in her, yes, but also a quality that was uniquely hers: a warmth that penetrated rather than pervaded, that from the moment she entered the room, drove the sorrows from the Assembly members’ hearts and compelled them to raise their heads.
“Honorable members of the Assembly,” she said, standing before the King’s place at the bench. “I have not called you here to grieve. You loved my father in life, just as he loved all of you. I ask you to love him still and leave him rest. Let not your sorrows pursue him over that sleeping sea.”
As Skye spoke, Iliff felt a lightness return to their space. And though he tried to hold onto his own grief, to gather it back around him, it had become like a drifting mist, without weight or substance.
“As with all passing,” she continued, “there is renewal. And with new life, there is often change.” As she looked around, her face appeared to darken, to become almost stern. “I am your queen by right of birth,” she said. “And as your queen, my word is law. Does anyone here challenge this?”
Though Lucious grumbled, he did not raise his voice. Skye looked toward him before continuing.
“As there is no challenge, I will announce my first law as queen. Effective midnight, the role of sovereign as we have all known it will cease to be.” Her voice was plain and powerful. “All decisions will be made by this Assembly. The sovereign will take her seat among you. Her role will be supportive. Her voice as yours—not less, not more.”
There were many protests among the members. “But we want you as our ruler,” the head weaver stood and said.
“There must be a sovereign,” called the head fisherman. “It is the way it has always been.”
Iliff too was disturbed by her announcement. Amid the pleas, he sought out Lucious. He was surprised to find him sitting quietly, the corners of his pinched lips slanting upward.
This is good.
The presence of Lucious in his mind startled Iliff.
This is good, indeed. Even if she opposes our solution for the enemy, the Assembly can still be influenced. They honor you in matters of defense. And though they do not care for me, they trust me in questions of battle. Do you see? She has all but ceded to us authority over the war.
Skye, who had remained standing, waited for the protests to diminish before speaking again. “Our people are multiplying. Our holdings are expanding. Though it is true we are being threatened from without, there might soon come dissent from within. That too is the way it has always been.” As she looked around the Assembly, Iliff could not help but feel that her blue eyes lingered on his longer than the others.
“Sovereign rule was appropriate in the beginning. But the Kingdom is established. It needs space now lest it become strangled and its people restless. My father was considering just such a transfer of power before his passing. Indeed, we spoke long on it.”
Lights and Shadows (The Prisoner and the Sun #2) Page 8
