Victory of the Hawk

by Angela Highland

  Neither the guards who’d followed them nor the doctor at Margaine’s side were unwise enough to challenge the elf to her face. But Tamber Corrinides did murmur to the princess, “My lady, beware. This is going to be a diplomatic quagmire.”

  “I can hear you, human,” the fire-mage warned.

  Margaine lifted a hand to the doctor, and said to him without taking her gaze from the elf woman, “Doctor, as the royal physician, please confirm the healer’s verdict so that we may give testimony to the Church.” As Corrinides stepped forward to do as she asked, the princess added to Tembriel, “As you are acting in the capacity of ambassador for your people, so I shall speak for mine. We have much to discuss, above and beyond whether we will surrender the body of the Voice of the Gods into your keeping.”

  While she spoke, the doctor crouched down beside the body of the Anreulag—of Merawen, as Nemeides had called her—and touched his fingers to her throat. “This young lady has spoken truly, Your Highness,” he said. His hand moved carefully to the wounds at her head and breast, and at last he pulled back again to add, “The Anreulag is dead.”

  The words sent a chill through Margaine. For days now she’d been praying for just such a reprieve, yet the days of fire and panic that had swept across the land hadn’t been quite enough to outweigh a lifetime of reverence for the being every Adalonian had known as the Voice of the Gods. That she was in truth an elven mage her ancestors had enslaved couldn’t even dismiss that reverence, not entirely. It was tainted now with shame and sorrow, but in a way, Margaine found she could still revere the elf called Merawen—if nothing else, for having managed to survive as long as she had. If I’d been enslaved for hundreds of years, I’d want to set the country that did it on fire too.

  “And just for the record, Your Highness,” Julian Nemeides said, “you might let us know whether you intend to have us arrested or excommunicated because of that. Just so we know what to expect, you understand.”

  Margaine had no delusions that the sardonic bite in his tone was anything but intentional. Yet she chose to ignore that too, and instead replied with relief she didn’t have to feign, “On the contrary, I intend to offer you the hospitality of the palace, and if anyone in this city has objections, they can bring them to me. You three have just saved the realm, and I’m not about to see you punished for that while we discuss what must happen next.”

  “Thank you, akresha.” The healer Faanshi stood, pressed her hands palm to palm, and bowed her head to Margaine over them. “I for one accept, though I cannot speak for the rest of us.”

  The she-elf Tembriel scowled but offered a grudging nod, and the others who’d followed the princess out to the hedge maze lawn voiced their cautious acceptances as well. Only Kestar Vaarsen, still standing there with the gun dangling in his hand and a faraway look upon his face, said nothing. He met no one’s eyes, and only when the voices around him fell silent did he finally turn to face Margaine.

  He had a pale and stricken cast to his face, the look of a man who’d just been dealt a terrible blow—or perhaps had suffered a profound loss. Vaarsen was or at least had been a Hawk, the princess remembered. If she herself was badly shaken by what had just occurred, how much more so must a Knight of the Hawk be, especially a Hawk who’d just raised a weapon against his own patron avatar? His words were polite, but his tone was hoarse, and from the sound of him he might have been responding to being issued a death sentence.

  “Yes, Your Highness, we’ll accept your hospitality with gratitude.”

  The royal palace, Dareli, Jeuchar 28, AC 1876

  Three days passed while they waited for those they’d left behind in the Duchess Khamsin’s army to catch up with them in Dareli, three days in which Faanshi found herself in a position she could not have possibly imagined. Never mind that she was a guest of a princess. Never mind that the doctor Tamber Corrinides hesitantly accepted her assistance in treating the large number of wounded men, women and children who still suffered at the palace, at St. Merrodrie’s Cathedral, and at many other locations all over the city, though many reacted with fear at the sight of her elven features. Only when she began to heal the bravest and most desperate of the injured was she able to make true progress against the seemingly insurmountable cloud of agony that dogged her senses everywhere she went. None of that was as astonishing to her as the notion that, for the first time in her life, she was able to move about freely and without danger.

  Three times a day, when Semai joined her to pray to Almighty Djashtet, she thanked the Dawnmaiden, Noonmother and Crone of Night for the Princess Margaine. Faanshi knew nothing of royalty or of the governing of a country, but she was thankful beyond measure that the woman had a compassionate heart. The akresha saw them all given rooms to stay, food to eat and finer clothes to wear than Faanshi had ever laid eyes on. She even had her servants provide clothing of Tantiu make for Faanshi and Semai, though Faanshi kept to a young man’s modest attire, with a korfi to hide her face when she needed to and to cover her hair. A woman’s choli and silwar and veil, even in rich hues and of noble quality, were the garments of her abandoned slavery. She would not return to them.

  And at any rate, the lessons she’d learned in the days of fleeing and hiding and fighting to win her freedom were still too strong for her to feel comfortable in a woman’s clothes. Run when I tell you. Hide when I tell you. The lessons still echoed through her thoughts, and at last, when she hadn’t seen him once in those three days, they sent her in search of the Rook.

  Nine-fingered Rab, outfitted in the finery that Princess Margaine had provided, spent his hours cutting a swath through the palace. Now that she had the luxury to do so, Faanshi could appreciate Rab’s considerable charm. His silver tongue, with its edge as keen as his knives, was far less intimidating when it wasn’t directed at her. And since he was safely occupied with socializing with noblemen and noblewomen struggling to regain a normal rhythm to their lives, he could not distract her from finding his partner. Julian, in contrast to the younger assassin, might as well have been a shadow for what little impact he made on the activity in the palace.

  But Faanshi knew him. Her magic still remembered the pulse of his living flesh, and with its guidance, she tracked him at last to the palace’s library.

  The room was a wonder, with shelves three times as tall as Faanshi herself, each by itself filled with more books than she’d ever comprehended existed. Several palace servants were tasked to attend to the vast chamber and the collection it held, men and women who handled the books with care, and one such young woman met Faanshi at the door. “Mr. Nemeides is here, yes, ma’am,” she promptly informed her. “Right this way, if you please.”

  Mr. Nemeides sounded as strange to Faanshi’s ears as ma’am, and she could only manage to nod to the other girl by way of thanks as she led her through the library to a chair in a far corner of the room. A lamp on the wall cast a warm golden glow down upon the chair and its occupant—Julian, with a book in his hands, scowling intently at the pages as if they’d offered him personal insult. “Excuse me, Mr. Nemeides,” the servant announced shyly, “but Miss Faanshi has come to speak with you.”

  His head snapped up, and for an instant Faanshi thought he might be angry at the intrusion. But he inclined his head once, slowly, with his gaze on her rather than the servant. “Thank you,” he answered gruffly. “Leave us, please.”

  The servant girl curtsied and withdrew on quiet feet, and Faanshi took in the sight of him.

  Julian in black was not an astonishing sight—but what he wore now was as far removed from what she was accustomed to seeing him wear as her own clothes were from the travel-worn ones she’d been able to set aside. His shirt was the familiar black, though along with it he wore a waistcoat of midnight blue and dark silver, and trousers of a shadowy gray. His hair had changed, too, and it took her a moment to realize that someone had trimmed and styled it. Most surprisingly there was no t
race of a beard on his jaw, and that, more than anything else, dumbfounded her. He looked elegant. He looked like a lord.

  “Good evening, Julian,” she ventured, tamping down the instinct to call him akreshi when he was dressed like this. “I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you, but I haven’t seen you in days and I was worried. Where have you been?”

  To speak forthrightly to this man was another lesson Faanshi had had to struggle to learn, for slaves did not freely converse with their masters. Later, once her magic had reshaped the very structure of his flesh, it had grown much easier to sense the ebb and flow of his moods. But now Julian’s face, unshielded by eye patch or korfi or even a beard, was as unreadable as she had ever seen it. He took several seconds to answer her. “I’ve been investigating what options may present themselves for Rab and me when this little idyll is over. Rab’s good behavior isn’t going to hold out long, and I’d rather he didn’t lose any more fingers when he gets a little too interested in helping himself to unattended baubles in this place.”

  She couldn’t argue with the wisdom of that; Julian and Rab were, after all, assassins and thieves. Yet she felt a pang in her chest nonetheless at the words Rab and me. “So you’ll be leaving?”

  Her words came out smaller than she liked, and Julian’s gaze offered no insights in its twilight blue. “We don’t exactly belong here. Princess Margaine is going to be Bhandreid, by default if nothing else, but she’s going to have a fight on her hands to keep the throne. And even if she’s willing to look the other way on Rab’s and my prior activities—” he smirked, just a little, “—the Assembly of Lords may not be so magnanimous. Or what’s left of the Hawks. I’d just as soon be gone from here before someone decides to press charges.”

  “I thought…” Faanshi heard her voice roughen, drew in a breath, and sternly ordered herself keep speaking nonetheless. “I thought perhaps now that things are quieter, you and I…that we could talk again about what we talked about before. In Dolmerrath, before the Anreulag came. When we…”

  Lady of Time! She was blushing, and each word seemed more difficult to utter than the last. On the final few she managed, Faanshi couldn’t quite keep her gaze on Julian’s no matter how much she wanted to. Yet his hand lifted to her cheek, a touch that drew her attention back to him. Only then, finally, did she see subtle tension in the lines of his face, hinting at turmoil beneath his calm control.

  “When I kissed you,” he said simply.

  It took all of Faanshi’s resolve to answer him steadily and without nervousness, and that left her nothing to keep from quivering slightly at his touch. Like a bowstring, she thought wildly, or the strings of the fine violins she’d seen palace musicians playing at the princess’s command the past two nights. “Julian, I don’t want you to go. I don’t want to be apart from you.”

  With that, the façade of his control cracked further—and his arms reached out to draw her near and hold her close to him. “Damn it, dove, I’ve been hiding from those words for the last three days,” he said against the korfi that covered her hair, in a voice as raw as her own churning thoughts.

  Dove. That he was willing to embrace her made her heart leap, but that single word was a blessing and a gift of Djashtet. “The ridah of truth is one of the most holy,” she murmured, “and I am not that scary.”

  “Like hells you’re not.” Laughter he wasn’t quite letting free resounded through Julian’s chest. “You’re the most fearsome thing in this entire country—countries, if the army of Nirrivy gets its way. You’re an eagle, girl.” Then he reached for her chin once more so that he could look down into her face. “I can’t ask you to stay on the ground with me. You deserve a better man, if a man is what you want to help you fly. Vaarsen, or somebody like him.”

  Understanding began to blossom, as many things she’d not comprehended even as she’d gleaned them from his healing meshed together into a coherent whole. How many times had she insisted in Julian’s hearing that Kestar Vaarsen was a good man? How often had she spoken of the connection that had formed between her and Kestar, fueled by her magic and their shared elven blood? Often enough that Faanshi knew now that her words had stung the Rook’s pride—and she knew him well enough to know that his pride was not quite as unshakable as it often appeared.

  She knew him well enough, furthermore, to understand what she had to say next.

  “I know Kestar very well now because of what happened between us—that too is truth. Because of what I saw in him when I healed him, I know what it’s like to love someone as a brother, because he is so very like me that he might as well have been born to the same mother. That’s how I feel about him, and it is not how I feel about you.” Faanshi lifted her hands to Julian’s face, and the last small distance before her fingertips brushed each of his temples felt like the widest, most dangerous distance she had ever crossed—yet she could not think of any distance she’d ever traversed with such joy. “Julian. Hìorollè. You are a far better man than you let yourself believe, and I love you.”

  His expression began to change at the Elvish word, the one she’d been delighted to learn from Alarrah as meaning beloved. At the words that came after, a light kindled in his eyes. The smile that came with it, the largest she’d ever seen on his face, was a sunburst breaking through the clouds.

  “Hìorollè,” he echoed, testing the word. His accent wasn’t perfect. But a peace she’d never seen before entered his face as he said it, and that alone made the gruffly murmured word the sweetest of music. “May I?”

  Yes welled through her mind in Adalonic, Tantiu and Elisiyannè, a bright chiming chord of assent—but she didn’t need to speak it. Not when her own brilliant smile and a single gentle nod was enough to prompt his kiss, and to fill her blood, breath and soul with sunlight.

  The royal palace, Dareli, Annesdal 6, AC 1876

  If he’d had a choice in the matter, Kestar would have gone straight home from Dareli the instant it was all over, stopping just long enough at the camp of the Army of Nirrivy to fetch his mother and to return her to their estate where she belonged, safe and sound.

  It was inevitable, he supposed, that he had no real choice in the matter. The Voice of the Gods was dead, and every survivor in the city, noble or commoner, rich or poor, seemed to need to lay eyes on the man who’d done it—particularly once Princess Margaine, confirmed as Bhandreid Regent until her daughter Padraiga was of age, issued a royal proclamation ordering the immediate liberation of every slave of elven blood in Adalonia and its protectorates, and the pardon of elven rebels still at large. He, along with Tembriel and Faanshi, stood in as symbolic recipients of that pardon, in St. Merrodrie’s Cathedral. Days after the fact, Kestar could remember little of the entire ceremony, save that Tembriel had looked as if she’d wanted to set the entire place on fire with the power of her gaze, and Faanshi, despite the brave lift of her chin, kept wringing her hands in nervous restlessness whenever she thought no one was looking.

  Only Julian—himself pardoned along with Rab, their past illicit deeds pointedly dismissed and kept quiet by Margaine’s orders—had kept Faanshi from bolting right out of the place, Kestar was sure. Something had changed between them, something that needed no explanation when it had them looking at each other with radiance in their faces, and Kes surreptitiously made a bet with Celoren as to how long it’d be before Julian Nemeides, long-lost scion of House Nemea, reemerged into society with a half-Tantiu, half-elven bride.

  “Two weeks, tops,” Celoren proclaimed. Kestar wasn’t so sure. He’d glimpsed Faanshi’s innermost heart. She was too much an elf to feel at home in a human city, no matter how much she loved her Rook. And through her, he’d gleaned a reasonable suspicion that Julian wasn’t the sort to play at being a respectable nobleman for long. They wouldn’t stay in Dareli. Whether they’d return to Dolmerrath to help the elves rebuild their stronghold, or whether they’d go to Tantiulo so that Faanshi could explore that
side of her heritage, he didn’t know.

  Whatever they’d decide, he envied them both sorely, for he had no such escape. Not when the princess entered several straight days of stern negotiations with the Assembly of Lords as to the fate of the western provinces—for along with the emancipation of the elves, the topic of Nirrivan independence promised to ignite tempers already frayed by Merawen’s rampage through the realm. Until some accord was reached, and until the duchess and her representatives arrived in the capital to participate in the diplomatic talks, Kestar wasn’t at all sure he’d have a home to return to. No matter how much he wished to make his retreat.

  And so he haunted the less heavily frequented parts of the palace estate, where it was far less likely that he’d run into gossipmongers of any station. He even avoided Celoren, though it pained him to do so when Cel was perhaps the only person who had a chance of understanding his current frame of mind. Semai was a seasoned soldier, and Julian and Rab doubtless knew far more than he wanted to consider about what it felt like to kill anyone for the first time. But only Celoren, who’d grown up with him in the Order of the Hawk, could begin to grasp what this death meant.

  One afternoon he went back to the stretch of lawn where he and Merawen had fought, though he couldn’t make himself linger in the spot for long. Instead he took to prowling the nearby hedge maze. It got him out into the open air, and for all that his own elven blood wasn’t nearly so strong as Faanshi’s, something in him craved the breath of the wind through green leaves, and the melody of a stream’s running water.

  When he finally reached the heart of the maze, Kestar found a secluded garden flanked on all sides by lush rosebushes, with a gurgling fountain in its center. Not a stream, and the statues of the Daughter and Son in the fountain’s heart, despite their playful stances and the peaceful trickle of the water from the urns they bore in hands of uplifted stone, were not exactly a welcome to elven eyes or elven ears.