by Glenda Larke
“One minute,” the gunsmith said. He was staring at his pocket watch.
She glanced at Saker’s body. He lay on his back with his eyes closed, unmoving, apparently composed. Only the rise and fall of his chest told her he was still alive.
“Two minutes.”
The bird was soon circling so high she could no longer see the grenade, let alone the glow of the slow match. She shuddered, remembering another time when someone had miscalculated and a ship had been blown to pieces…
“Three minutes.”
She watched the speck in the sky until it made a circuit at a lower level, and the next after that, lower and tighter. It had spotted its prey. Behind her, Saker did not move.
“Four minutes.”
After he left Sorrel, his rational thinking mind began to disintegrate, one tiny muddling piece at a time.
He was in the air again, looking down on the battlefield. There were fewer Grey Lancers still fighting on. He saw Sir Herelt and his horsemen, six of them all together, galloping down the steep slope, the mounts sliding on the loose soil, almost sitting on their rumps in that mad rush. One fell, toppling his rider. Grey Lancers pounced on the poor fellow and he went under, flailing, his sword wrenched from him, blood spurting, red and bold and salty.
Rot it, that was an eagle’s thought.
He could smell the burning wick he held in his claws. The bird’s claws. Fobbing grubbery, he was so confused. And he’d lost track of his count. Was it nearly five minutes since the eagle was swearing at him as it was lit, back in the camp? Well, swearing as only an eagle could, with a cold yellow look of pure hatred, as if he was the next meal.
Eagles knew nothing about time.
The bird was clutching the string and hating the smell of the slow match, and the hot red end burning towards the jar top. He – it – bent to look to see how far the match had burned. At a guess, three minutes.
Wings beating, steady, powerful.
Your last task, my beauty. After this, you fly free, I promise. Can you return to the warmth of the Summer Seas on your own? Do you know the way? Do you remember the splendour of the islands? Find a mate there, as magnificent as you are. Think of talons locked in courtship as you topple together through the air in your bonding…
There he was, the Fox sorcerer, a glint of gold at his throat, the red fox emblem he wore. Standing, surrounded by half a dozen of his guards, watching the wounded men he’d just sent back into the fray. Frowning, as the men he’d sent to die did just that.
It’s over, Master Fox. Your father is dead. He might have told you how to live past your prime. But in so doing, he doomed you to an early death. You are too dangerous to be allowed to live…
He took another look at the burning slow match. This would be difficult. How close to the sorcerer did it have to be? Would it roll? How long would it take to drop through the air? There was a wind blowing and it could affect the trajectory.
He urged the eagle lower.
Much lower.
Ruthgar looked up. Sensed the sakti he carried in the bambu pendant perhaps? Or alerted by the faded black smutch on his palm?
The sorcerer shouted something, but the words were snatched away on the wind, and Saker-eagle did not hear them.
Eagle eyes saw the archer who came out from under a canvas shelter in the camp with his crossbow in his hand. Human understanding acknowledged the danger.
Now, Saker told the eagle.
Curved talons dropped the string.
They banked, man and raptor, wings beating deep, tail ruddering them away. Neither man nor eagle saw the jar explode, but the eagle’s vision saw both the tumbling jar and an archer releasing his arrow.
Excruciating pain shafted into Saker. He looked down and saw the arrow’s fletching protruding from his breast. And that was when he fell out of the sky.
Sorrel did not notice the grenade jar drop. All she saw was an explosion on the ground and the eagle toppling through the air, over and over, like a dead thing.
She didn’t see the bird hit the ground either. All her attention was on Saker. Screaming his name into his ear, seized his body in her arms, shaking him hard. He shuddered, his whole body spasming, limbs jerking, as if the moment of the bird’s impact with the ground registered on his prone body.
His eyes flew open, and he uttered a cry of anguish. And then death. A blanking out of life as though his inner self had drawn a curtain across his gaze.
“NO!”
The word was wrenched from her on a wave of negation and violent rage. “Oh, no, Saker you won’t do that to me! Not to us.”
She seized him by the shoulders and shook him, shouting at him to come back. She slapped his face, hard, but his body was unresponsive and limp. When she put a hand under the lacings of his tunic to rest on his breast, she could not feel a heartbeat.
Around her neck there was one more wisp of feather, and around Saker’s yet another. One for Piper, one for Prince-regal Karel. If she used either to save him, then how would her choice reverberate through the ages? And if she didn’t – then the ternion died. Saker died.
Oh, Va.
She couldn’t make the choice. She couldn’t.
Do nothing?
No—
Impossible. He had saved her life.
He had saved the ternion. And so must she—
Her hands fumbled with the bambu at her neck.
“Mistress—” the gunsmith began, shocked and hesitant.
“Stand aside,” a voice said in her ear, and there was a witchery healer kneeling on the other side of Saker’s body, and behind him, Perie. All her frenzy drained from her, leaving behind the coldness of desperation. She watched the healer make a fist of his hand and hit Saker hard on the breastbone, again and again, and all the while the glow of his witchery made whorls in the air around him.
She looked at Perie. “How did you know?” she whispered. She had never been so certain of anything in her life: Peregrine had brought the healer to where he was needed.
“The Way of the Oak,” he whispered, and nodded at the tree that shaded them. It was an oak, an ordinary oak, its leaves dappling the sunlight.
Saker jerked and gasped. His chest rose again as breathing started. When he opened his eyes, she slumped back on her heels, shivering, aware that her own heart was thumping so hard it hurt.
“Did – did we get the sorcerer?” Saker asked. He made no attempt to rise. Every muscle in his body ached. Every joint felt battered. Even his bones pained him.
“The grenade did explode,” the gunsmith said.
“He’s dead,” Perie said, his certainty reassuring. “So is the other one. We’ve done it. There are no more of them.”
He shuddered. “The eagle died. We fell, tumbling over and over. I can’t feel it anywhere.” He struggled to sit up, but Sorrel pushed him down again.
When his breathing steadied and he’d composed himself, he said quietly, “I promised him this was the last thing I would ask of him. That he could go home…” His voice trailed away.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It wasn’t right, what I asked him to do. It wasn’t right.”
“No, perhaps not. But if sorcerers ruled here, would the sea eagles of Chenderawasi be safe?”
He lay still for a long while, then raised her fingers to his lips. “Thank you, Sorrel. I needed to hear that.”
Gerelda staggered with fatigue as she trailed up the slope away from the battlefield. Every muscle ached. Every tendon complained. Her fingers cramped around her swordhilt. For some reason she had the weapon in her hand, rather than in its sheath, but she was no longer certain why.
When she topped the rise, someone offered her water, and she took the demijohn and drank the lot. As she handed it back, she caught a glimpse of the valley in the light of the late afternoon sun and she shuddered. It was a place of the dead, taken over now by the cut-throats and the scavengers and the corpse-pickers. Ravens and crows and rats. Human and animal. She want
ed no part of it. She stumbled on to the camp.
Her thoughts were sludge and stirred only weakly, but she didn’t care. She had no desire except rest. When she reached the tent she’d shared, she was barely conscious. Perie was there, and he levered the sword out of her hand and pushed her down on to her pallet. “They are dead, the sorcerers,” he said. She closed her eyes as he pulled off her boots and undid her sword belt.
Dimly in the distance she heard him speak. “Saker and Sorrel and Ardhi are fine.” Comforted, she tucked the words away for thinking about later; right now the information they contained melted into meaningless mush in her brain.
It was morning when she woke. Someone was shaking her and she told them to go hang themselves.
“Gerelda, no one has seen Perie since last night.” Sorrel’s voice.
She opened one eye and saw her sword belt lying next to her, with the sword in the scabbard. She pulled it out, glanced at the blade and shoved it back, all without getting up. “He cleaned my sword,” she said, and closed her eye again.
“He’s nowhere to be found,” Sorrel said. “He didn’t sleep here. And he left his spiker behind, on his pallet.”
She sat up, both eyes snapping open. Perie never went anywhere without his spiker. He even slept wearing it. A wave of cold swept over her skin from her head to her bare feet. “No,” she said, but she wasn’t even sure what she was denying. “He told me last night when I came back to camp late yesterday that the last sorcerers were dead and you were all right.”
She pulled her blade fully out of the sheath. It was not just clean; it had been oiled as well, although he knew better than to sharpen it. That was something she always did herself. “He knows he doesn’t need the spiker any more if all the sorcerers are dead. He’ll be all right. He will have gone to that oak of his to pray.” She scrambled to her feet. “Um, I’ve got to piss.”
She washed at the camp troughs on her way back to her tent, grimacing at the blood caked on to her filthy clothes. Sorrel poured her a drink and Saker handed her a plate of food. She took both gratefully and sat on the log outside to eat, not caring what she was consuming. Her last meal was already a day in the past. “We did win, didn’t we?” she asked, her mouth full.
“Yes,” Saker said. “Perie told us he couldn’t feel a sorcerer anywhere. The Grey Lancers laid down their weapons, those who were still alive. It didn’t help them. Deremer’s Dire Sweepers killed them all anyway.”
“I saw. That’s when I left the battlefield. I couldn’t stomach any more.”
“No,” he agreed.
She frowned, wondering at the pain in him. “We won. So what’s wrong, then?”
“The eagle died,” he said.
“Oh.” She stared at him. “I’m so sorry, Saker. I – I can’t imagine what that must be like for you.”
He gave a short bark of humourless laughter. “No one can. I’m not sure I understand it myself. Anyway, right now I think we have to worry about Perie. We all know he hasn’t been himself lately.”
“He’ll be at that oak tree. I’ll look for him.”
He nodded and glanced at Sorrel. “We want to leave for Vavala as soon as possible so that we can take a ship for Ardrone from there. We’re anxious to get back to Piper.”
“Right. I’ll be with you soon. Let me see about Perie first.”
She gulped down the last of the food, buckled on her sword and headed out into the woods. A ten-minute walk brought her to the oak, but there was no one there. She stood for a moment, frowning, as she glanced around. The forest was still, the oak leaves shining in the sun, leaves yellowing, some drifting lazily to the ground like golden boats floating on an invisible sea. As she walked up to the trunk, she saw clothes piled up at its foot.
His clothing.
Cold shafted her with the expectation of grief. Kneeling, she fingered the discarded tunic, so neatly folded. And there, on top of the pile, the red-tongued shoes that had belonged to his father. She laid a hand on them, tears blurring her vision.
Thoughts came to be considered and discarded, the lawyer in her assessing, rejecting, finally accepting that she would never fully understand, and that understanding didn’t matter. She stood and laid her palms flat to the oak, then dipped her forehead to lean it against the bark. Overwhelmed, she stood there for a long, long while.
“Gerelda?”
She took a deep breath, released her hold on the tree, and turned to face Saker where he stood at the edge of the canopy. “I was worried…” he said.
The tears came in earnest as she walked towards him. “He’s gone, Saker.”
“There are birds in the tree,” he said. “They are… contented. In the way birds are in a shrine-oak.”
She nodded. “Yes. I think – I think it has just gained an unseen guardian.”
His eyes widened. Surprise first, then shock as his gaze fell on the clothes, and finally wonderment. “By all the acorns in the oak…” The words were hardly more than an awed whisper. “It’s become a shrine-oak?”
She reached out and took his hand. “He truly has gone where we cannot follow.”
He lifted his gaze to the canopy of the oak. The leaves whispered in the breeze, soft, gentle sounds, as if to say all was well with the world.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
She wasn’t sure where home was, except that she knew now it had to be where Saker was too.
40
Truths from the Past
Saker, Gerelda, Ardhi and Sorrel paid their respects to the Pontifect immediately on their return to Vavala by barge from the north. Fritillary was back in her workroom, as busy as ever, making use of a three-wheeled bath chair and an assistant cleric.
“A small price to pay,” she said, dismissing the subject of her inability to walk. Saker thought he saw frustration in the pinched lines around her mouth, but he knew better than to offer her sympathy.
She already had the main news of the battle, as Deremer had sent a messenger a day earlier, but they filled her in on some of the details before adjourning to Proctor House to eat, bathe and sleep.
The next day, after lunch, a messenger came for Saker to tell him the Pontifect wanted to see him again.
“She’s going to ask you to work for her,” Gerelda said.
“Probably.”
“Will you?”
He shook his head. “I’ll keep my promise to Ryce. I’ll be his Prime.”
“Have you told Ardhi and Sorrel yet?”
“I told them I might take the post. I won’t tell Sorrel why I have to, though. It would just be another burden she’d be happier not knowing.” He shrugged. “I’d better go.”
He found Fritillary in the Pontifect’s workroom. Somehow she’d managed to resurrect the room as it’d been before Fox had taken over the palace. He could find no trace of Valerian anywhere. Still, there was something missing: Barden’s touch. Fritillary’s desk was a mess of papers that her secretary would never have tolerated.
“Barden knew where everything was and which should be dealt with first,” she said, waving a fistful of documents in exasperation. “I still don’t know what I’ll do without him!”
“I’m sure there are clerics with the same intelligence and orderly mind he had. Think of it this way: there must have been a time when he was young and new to the job.”
“Before my day, that was,” she said, irritably. “He was already ancient when I was elected Pontifect.” Her expression softened. “I loved that old man. Anyway, that’s not why I wanted you to come in today. I wanted to ask you again about Peregrine. Gerelda appears to think he’s become an unseen guardian for a new shrine-oak. Do you have any opinion on that?”
“Well, the oak is definitely a shrine-oak, but it has no shrine keeper as yet.”
“The unseen guardian will choose its own. But Peregrine – tell me what you know.”
“He was deeply troubled, driven by his need to rid the world of evil men. He became the instrument of Va-faith, or of th
e Shenat Ways. It made him a killer. He was used, in fact. That never sat well with me, or with Gerelda. Necessary perhaps, but neither of us liked the idea of what was… I don’t know. Judicial execution?”
“Are you saying becoming an unseen guardian was his reward for being an instrument of our faith?”
“A reward?” He thought about that. “Perhaps. Or an absolution. Gerelda thinks Peregrine felt he was living on borrowed time. He ought to have died when his father did, but an unseen guardian saved him, for a purpose. That purpose has been fulfilled.”
“Traditional thinking says the unseen guardians of new shrine-oaks are from ancient oaks that died. That there will never be more guardians than we already have.”
“I know.” He smiled slightly. “What is certain is that oak now has an unseen guardian and Gerelda said she heard the rustle of its leaves whisper words to her: ‘I’ll miss you, Gerelda’ – and she’s the least imaginative person I know.”
“There has never been any indication that unseen guardians were once human.”
“One manifested to me as a woman. And Perie told Gerelda that the unseen guardian who gave him his witchery was a young man.” He tilted his head at her in enquiry. “What was your experience?”
“I – I turned to a shrine in a time of great despair. I had done something wrong and there were… consequences. I had been thinking of not continuing with my Va-faith studies. I was praying, my hand on the oak, when I suddenly knew what I had to do in order to live with the guilt. I had to take my final vows and serve others as a cleric. That was the moment I received my witchery. I didn’t know what it was for a few days.” She shrugged. “Some things are not ours to understand. Let’s get to one of the other reasons I wanted to see you today. It’s about the twins.”
“We still have two pieces of feather. Piper is wearing her necklet. What about the prince-regal?”
“Regala Mathilda wrote and has assured me he will wear it. You’ve told me your feathers are the fallback in case the necklets fail. I think you’re wrong. You have one on you, in that pendant you wear?”
“Yes.”
“I want to hold it, to check my theory.”
