Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  The King studied her. He had lines on his face and gray streaked in his hair. Sadness. His entire bearing had an edge of sadness.

  “You seem amazingly fearless for one who could die in an instant,” the King said.

  She stood straighter and shook herself free of the Prince’s grasp. “I am a soldier,” she said. “I have been trained to die all my life.”

  The King’s face remained impassive, but Stephen’s mouth opened slightly, as did the Black Robe’s. A thrill ran down her back. They truly did know nothing of her people. She could speak to them of her own free will—lie to them—and help the Fey by placing the wrong kinds of fear in them. She would have to think on the proper way of doing it. She only hoped she would have enough time.

  The King stared at her for a long moment; then he stood as if he couldn’t contain his energy. He paced around the large room, passing the other men as if they weren’t there, and then stopping in front of her.

  He was shorter than his son by an inch or two. She found that she had to look down to meet his eyes. And in them, she saw the restlessness he had just displayed reflected, and then she understood why her taunt had reached him: he hated being trapped in this room while his people were dying below.

  “What are you doing here?” His words were low and full of anger. He didn’t mean her, but all of them, the Fey her father had brought.

  She saw nothing wrong in telling him the truth. “The Fey own half the world,” she said. “Blue Isle happens to be one of its richest corners, and we want it for ourselves.”

  “We have done no harm to anyone. We trade freely with those who would trade with us. You had no reason to take us by force.” He spit a bit as he spoke the sibilants. She felt the spray on her chin and neck but did not turn away.

  “We do not trade with anyone,” she said.

  “But we would not have refused you!”

  She stuck out her chin, made her posture firm so that he would understand she was speaking with authority as she restated, “We do not trade with anyone.”

  He tilted his head back and looked up at her. There were shadows beneath his eyes that could not have come from the day’s battle. “All that death,” he said slowly, “for something we would have given you.”

  “You would not have given it all to us.”

  The Prince let go of her. She felt the loss of his warmth. She relied on him, even though she didn’t know him. He took a step to the side, closer to his father, where he could watch her face. Silence remained behind her, looking to them, perhaps, as if he were protecting the exit, when in fact he was guarding her back.

  “Is there any way we can stop this bloodshed? Can we negotiate with you?”

  “The Fey do not negotiate,” she said, but she did not know if that was true. The Fey had never been in a situation like this one before.

  “You are asking the wrong person,” the Prince said, “if she is only an Infantry leader, as she claims.”

  “Who leads your force?” the King asked.

  “Rugar,” she said.

  “Rugar? He is—”

  “The leader.” She was not willing to explain how military hierarchies were related to political hierarchies. It was clearly different here—something the Islanders would have to figure out on their own.

  “How do I find him?” The King stayed close to her, as if his presence would force her into speaking the truth.

  “For all I know,” she said, keeping her tone level, “he could be dead. Our leaders fight.”

  Again, the insult. The King’s face flushed, and the Black Robe took a step closer. The King held out his hand, stopping the progression.

  “It seems an odd battle plan,” Stephen said from behind her. “How would there be direction if a leader died?”

  He wanted to trap her into revealing the very thing she had decided to keep to herself. “We have our ways of knowing what needs to be done,” she said. Let them take that implication as they would.

  The Black Robe burst out in a torrent of words. The King replied with a firm tone, then added a comment to Stephen, who nodded.

  “I thought you were going to cooperate with us,” the King said.

  “I am answering your questions.”

  “You are not saying anything of import.”

  “Then ask better questions.”

  The Prince said softly, as if he was trying to help her, “Have a caution. He is our King.”

  “He is not my King.”

  “Your insolence doesn’t make things easier,” Stephen said.

  She shrugged. The movement was painful. Her arms had fallen asleep. “Then you will learn nothing at all.”

  The Black Robe took a step toward her, flinging water from the vial. Time slowed. Even though she backed out of the way, she didn’t seem to be moving fast enough. The Prince pushed her, and she stumbled. She looked up to see that he had stopped the water with his own body.

  Her heart was pounding furiously. Silence still held her arms as if he were trying to save her, when, in fact, she had become his shield.

  “What was that?” she said to the Black Robe. “Are you so anxious to use your magick that you can’t wait for orders from your King?”

  The Prince peeled off his shirt, revealing a slender, muscular chest. He wiped the water from his face and flung the shirt into the corner. “I wouldn’t provoke him any further.”

  “This man behind me said that man is a religious being. Is it your religious people that specialize in murder?” Jewel’s terror made it impossible for her to be quiet. Silence’s grip tightened on her shoulders. The Black Robe held up the vial of poison as if brandishing a sword.

  “Get out,” the Prince said to him.

  The Black Robe looked at the King. The King spoke sharply in his native tongue. Black Robe responded, gesturing at Jewel. The King repeated a phrase twice before the Black Robe bowed once and left.

  As the door opened, the guards outside peered in. The Black Robe pushed past them. Then the door slammed shut.

  “Your customs are very strange,” she said in Nye. Silence’s grip on her was still tight. “Is such disobedience common?”

  “This entire day has been uncommon,” the King said. “And I would not be seeing you now if the Danite hadn’t come to let me know that over most of the city your people are dying. Your invasion is failing.”

  Silence’s fingers dug into her shoulders. She wanted to pull away but couldn’t. She couldn’t take their word for it, but since the arrival nothing had gone as planned. Still, they didn’t know about Silence.

  “If we are failing,” she said, “then why do you need me?”

  “Because,” the King said, “I do not believe defeating the Fey could be so easy.” He ran a hand through his thick hair. “Milord, take her to the dungeons and put a guard on her that you can trust. I don’t want to come down there to discover another zealot has been there before me.”

  “I will go with her,” the Prince said.

  “No,” the King said. “You will stay with me.”

  Jewel swallowed hard, unable to believe her luck. Would she and Silence get a chance to be alone? It would be almost too easy.

  “Lord Powell doesn’t know the guards,” Stephen said. “I will accompany them and return within a few minutes. Besides, I want to see this defeat for myself.”

  “I can handle her,” Silence said.

  Stephen smiled. “You would probably abandon her at the first sign of trouble. Do I have your permission, Sire?”

  The King nodded. He spoke to them briefly in their own language. Jewel wished her arms had not gone dead. Silence could knock the old man unconscious and free her; then she could rejoin the others. It would be simple.

  She hoped.

  THIRTY

  The sun was setting. The sky over the Cardidas was blood-red. Long shadows hid the Rocaan on his balcony. He felt empty, hollow. Below, bodies littered the courtyard like discarded waste. The stench was so thick, he could almost touch it. Rot an
d burned flesh. From forever forward he would recognize it as the smell of anguish.

  Matthias was inside, supervising the last of the holy water they would make that day. Vials and vials of the water went out the doors on trays, as if every person on Blue Isle had come to Midnight Sacrament and needed a Blessing at the same time.

  As far as the Rocaan could see, the fighting had stilled. Lights flickered in the harbor, but the ships were gone. He had been staring into the twilight so long, he thought he saw an occasional Fey disappear over the waters of the Cardidas. Perhaps he was watching souls take flight.

  Ah, Holy One. The Rocaan leaned his head back. He could not believe that God would sanction such destruction.

  The stench touched him, seeped into his own body. He would never wash it clean. If only the confusion hadn’t been so great, if only he had been able to consult with Elders other than Matthias. Matthias had never believed. Matthias used his brain to justify everything.

  Matthias was terrified of the Fey.

  The Rocaan’s entire being ached—the joints in his hands and wrists and elbows, his shoulders and his back—all from the work he had engaged in during the afternoon.

  He couldn’t blame Matthias for all the destruction. Matthias, even though he had helped with the holy water, had not made the decision. The Rocaan had.

  He had no idea how many were dead. He had counted almost a hundred bodies on the ground below him.

  The lights flickered again over the harbor. Five Fey stood on the pier and then disappeared. The sounds of fighting were gone. Now the city was filled with the moans of the survivors. Oh, if he could only go back to the day before, when his greatest concerns had been his aging body and the unceasing rain. He had never believed that an entire world could disappear within the space of a day, but it had, and it had taken his life with it.

  What crime would it be to take his body as well?

  A man must live with his own actions. For it is on how he learns from his mistakes that he will be judged.

  A man should not be allowed to make such dire mistakes in the twilight of his existence. Nothing in the Rocaan’s life had prepared him for this. Nothing. It was a choice no sane God would allow: choose between killing hundreds of Fey and hundreds of Islanders. Of course the Rocaan would choose his own people.

  But what if this was a test, a test like the one the Roca had faced just before his death? The story was as familiar as the pain the Rocaan felt when he woke every morning. The Roca, when asked to choose between leading his people into a battle they could not win, or slaughtering the Soldiers of the Enemy, decided instead to offer himself as a sacrifice.

  The Words Written and Unwritten were clear on the sacrifice itself, on how the Roca died and was Absorbed into the Hand of God. But the Words were silent on the fate of the Roca’s people, and on what became of the Soldiers of the Enemy.

  Until this moment the Rocaan had always been caught in the ritual and ceremony surrounding the miracle. He had never thought of the human consequences. The canonical law did not say if the Roca was successful in finding a third alternative to the crisis facing his people. Instead, it focused on the fact that the Roca, holy being, had found a place before the Eternal Flame, cupped in God’s hand, able to do God’s bidding from that moment forward.

  But what was God’s bidding? And how was a Rocaan, the Roca’s emissary to the world, able to know?

  “You need a lamp.”

  Matthias’s voice made the Rocaan start.

  “I prefer the darkness,” the Rocaan said. “It hides the truth of the day.”

  Matthias stepped onto the balcony, the open door leaving a triangle of light on the floor. His blond hair was mussed, his face drawn. “At least we survived,” he said.

  “But at what cost?” the Rocaan asked. He stretched out his legs in front of him, feeling the strain of the overworked muscles.

  Matthias sank into the chair beside the Rocaan. For a moment the odor of Matthias’s nervous sweat overpowered the stench of death. “We had no choice, Holy Sir.”

  “We did not think of other choices,” the Rocaan said. “We followed blindly the path laid before us. Perhaps I should have given myself to them, as the Roca did so many generations ago.”

  “And then what?” Matthias said. “They would have slaughtered you, and no one would have been able to save us.”

  “I am not a savior,” the Rocaan said. “I am a purveyor of destruction.” He stood, ignoring the shooting pains in his back and feet, walked to the edge of the balcony, and leaned on the railing. The lights continued to flicker in the harbor.

  “The Roca knew he was Beloved of God,” Matthias said.

  “The Rocaan is also supposed to be Beloved,” the Rocaan said. The wood was still damp beneath his arms. “And you forget that there were people involved in that story, too, and Soldiers of the Enemy. You are a great scholar, Matthias. What became of the people the Roca swore to defend? What became of the enemy?”

  “‘The enemy is always with us, within ourselves.’ ”

  “I can quote the Words Written and Unwritten. They say nothing on these points. What of the history?”

  “The history?” Matthias sounded confused.

  The lights continued, nearly a dozen of them, circling the same point. “Yes. We study the Roca. We believe he was a man. We use the Words as a guide, but we know nothing of the human truth.” The Rocaan gripped the wet wood. “It did not matter until now. I had never even thought of it until this moment.”

  “There is historical precedent for what we did today,” Matthias said. “The Forty-fifth Rocaan, the Twenty-third—”

  “May all have missed what the Holy One was trying to tell them. Perhaps it is the duty of a Rocaan to sacrifice himself for his people every few generations. Perhaps it is a test of faith, of the religion itself. Perhaps, in failing to do our duty, we have destroyed the very foundation of our belief.”

  The chair creaked behind him as Matthias stood. He came to the railing and stood beside the Rocaan. Matthias’s height prevented him from leaning on the railing. He put his hands behind his back and stared over the carnage to the river. “You speak of things we cannot know,” he said softly. “The Fey would have killed you. That much is certain.”

  “And perhaps I was to be Absorbed into the Hand of God. Perhaps that is the duty of the Rocaan. Not leadership in this world, but in the next.”

  “There is nothing about that in the Words Written and Unwritten.”

  “The Words are full of such admonitions,” the Rocaan said, “about the Roca himself. Tell me, Matthias. Who are the Soldiers of the Enemy? We do not know. Such a general name. Perhaps they were Cemeni and the other leaders of the Peasant Uprising. Perhaps the Forty-fifth Rocaan failed to follow the model set by the Roca. Perhaps we have new Soldiers of the Enemy here now, and perhaps I have failed.”

  “I think God never makes easy choices,” Matthias said.

  “And I think that is an easy answer for a complex problem.” The Rocaan let exhaustion fill him. “I cannot stand more of this day. I am going to my chambers.”

  “Wait.” Matthias put a hand on the Rocaan’s shoulder. “What are those lights?”

  “They have been flickering all evening.”

  “I thought I just saw someone disappear into them.”

  The Rocaan patted Matthias’s hand. “I think they are Fey souls meeting their own version of God.”

  “Or a new style of Fey magick that we are unfamiliar with. What happened to the ships, Holy Sir? Ships like that do not disappear from our harbors, and yet our people couldn’t trace them.”

  The Rocaan felt an odd chill mixed with an even odder hope. If the Fey weren’t dead, then he had another chance to serve his own God. He looked at the dark courtyard below, as if he could see the bodies rising whole and strong. “What do you think it is?” he whispered.

  Matthias shook his head. “I do not know,” he said. “But I promise you an answer by morning.”

  THIRTY
-ONE

  The Shadowlands leached the ships of color. Rugar stood on the deck of the Feire, watching as more and more of his people staggered into the Shadowlands, bloody, beaten, and terrified. In all of their history the Fey had never encountered someone with more power than they had.

  His clothes smelled of mud and the odd rot that had set in on the bodies near the port. Since he’d entered, he had made the entrance circle near the dock wider and ringed it with newly made Fey Lamps. He had one Foot Soldier outside, changing the lamps as their powers faded. Already a hundred Fey had entered the Shadowlands. He wanted to make sure all the other survivors did too.