The Sworn
( Fallen kings cycle - 1 )
Gail Z. Martin
Gail Z. Martin
The Sworn
Prologue
Nearly a year and a half has passed since King Martris Drayke of Margolan won back the throne from Jared the Usurper, and still Margolan is not at peace. Jared’s brief reign was long enough to drive the kingdom to famine and revolt, beggaring its farmers and stirring tensions between its mortal and undead residents, the vayash moru.
Jared seized the throne by killing his father, King Bricen, and the rest of the royal family, save for his half-brother, Martris, the only legitimate challenger. Martris (known as Tris) escaped with the help of three loyal friends: Ban Soterius, the captain of the guards; Harrtuck, one of the king’s guardsmen; and Master Bard Riordan Carroway. Tris and his friends fled to Principality to plan their counterstrike. Along the way, they gained a number of unlikely allies: Jonmarc Vahanian, an outlaw turned smuggler; Carina, a gifted healer; Carina’s brother Cam, a former mercenary; Gabriel, one of the lords of the vayash moru; and Kiara of Isencroft, who was fleeing an arranged marriage with Jared. When the group rescued a young girl, Berry, from the slavers who had captured her, they unexpectedly found King Staden of Principality in their debt.
During the journey, Tris discovered his ability as a powerful summoner, a mage able to intercede among the living, dead, and undead. Summoning magic is rare and dangerous, as its great power easily corrupts many who wield it, including Tris’s grandfather, a mage named Lemuel. Lemuel became possessed by the spirit of the Obsidian King, and Lemuel’s misuse of his summoning magic plunged the Winter Kingdoms into a cataclysmic war in a generation past.
That long-ago war splintered the Flow, one of the great currents of magical energy. Learning to control the Flow and his own wild magic before they could destroy him pushed Tris to the brink of sanity and survival.
The battle for the throne took a harsh toll on all of Margolan, and Tris Drayke paid the price in blood as he honed his skills as fighter and mage in order to go up against Jared and Jared’s dark mage, Foor Arontala. Ban Soterius played a vital role in the rebellion, assembling deserters and refugees into a strike-and-hide force to harry Jared’s troops and stop the massacre of civilians. Tris’s victory nearly cost him his life, and it won him a tattered kingdom with a bankrupt treasury. Although he gained the crown, it became painfully clear that the peace and prosperity of Bricen’s reign would be dangerously elusive.
Tris’s marriage to Princess Kiara of Isencroft is a love match, and Kiara is pregnant with their first child, a son they hope will inherit his father’s magic. Isencroft is a neighboring kingdom to Margolan, and the two kingdoms share a stormy history. The attempt to forestall war a generation ago unwittingly sowed the seeds for strife in a new generation. When Donelan of Isencroft eloped with Princess Viata of Eastmark more than twenty years earlier, Eastmark threatened war. Bricen of Margolan forced peace by creating a betrothal contract between his heir and Donelan’s heir. When Jared murdered Bricen, Kiara scandalized both courts by throwing her allegiance to Tris and helping him unseat Jared the Usurper.
Isencroft’s fortunes have suffered in recent years due to poor harvests and drought, and Kiara’s marriage means that Isencroft and Margolan share a joint crown until a suitable heir for each throne is born. The idea of a shared crown with a kingdom that in times past was an invader has fueled dissension in Isencroft, leading to riots and the rise of the Divisionists, a group that seeks to keep Isencroft free of foreign entanglements.
A Divisionist sympathizer infiltrated the Margolan palace staff and nearly succeeded in killing Kiara and her unborn child. The attack was stopped by Bard Riordan Carroway, a trusted friend and Margolan’s master musician. The wounds Carroway sustained protecting Kiara could cost him his livelihood. Kiara recovered from the attack, but the poisoned blade may have damaged the child she carries.
Jonmarc Vahanian, who was rewarded for his courage with the title of Lord of Dark Haven, returned from war to claim lands that were the traditional sanctuary of the undead vayash moru and shapeshifting vyrkin, immortals who were not pleased to see a mortal lord claim his due.
When rogue vayash moru led by Malesh of Tremont broke the Truce and slaughtered mortals, Jonmarc retaliated, and he bargained his soul for vengeance. Carina, newly betrothed to Jonmarc, became a pawn in the war. The magical energy of the Flow, damaged in the Mage War of a generation past, became too dangerously unstable for mages to use, and Carina risked her life to “heal” the energy. Jonmarc and Gabriel defeated Malesh’s forces, but the Truce remained damaged, and retaliatory killings between mortals and the vayash moru still threaten the fragile peace.
Carina’s brother Cam returned to the service as Champion of King Donelan of Isencroft. Cam was captured by the Divisionists, and while a prisoner, he uncovered a plot to kill the king and put the Divisionists’ man on the throne. Alvior of Brunnfen, the traitors’ challenger, is Cam’s elder brother. When Cam managed to blow up the Divisionists’ stronghold to warn the king, he nearly lost a leg in the explosion, but he gained the unlikely assistance of Rhistiart, a silversmith-turned-squire. After the king’s personal healer did all he could for Cam, Donelan sent Cam to Carina in Dark Haven, hoping that she could complete the healing.
In the first year of his reign, Tris went to war to put down a rebellion by the traitorous Lord Curane and his blood mages. Tris waged a bitterly fought siege that unleashed a virulent plague. His triumph over the traitor lord took a great toll on Margolan’s army and came at a high personal cost. When Tris returned to his palace, he found his queen badly injured by an assassin’s blade and his best friend wrongfully accused of high treason. Summoning the spirits of the dead to find the traitor and clear his friend’s name, Tris was sorely tempted to use his powerful magic for vengeance, but the memory of the penalty Lemuel paid for his twisted magic stayed Tris’s hand.
Six months have passed since the Margolan army returned from battle and since Jonmarc Vahanian put down the vayash moru uprising. Jonmarc and Carina wed, and Carina is pregnant with twins. Tris and Kiara nervously await the birth of their son, uncertain how the poison has affected this child on whom the future of two kingdoms depends. In Isencroft, the Divisionists have scattered, but Cam fears that the threat has merely gone into hiding and that Alvior may have found foreign allies to challenge Donelan for the throne.
Peace in the Winter Kingdoms has always been elusive. With the kingdoms weakened by war, insurrection, and poor harvest, the threat of invasion and revolution looms large and all the magic in the world may not be enough to hold back the bloodshed.
Chapter One
Every time you go, I can’t believe six months have passed already.”
Prince Jair Rothlandorn of Dhasson looked up as his father, King Harrol, stood in the doorway. Jair smiled and sighed as he closed his saddlebag and secured the cinch. “And every time I get ready to leave, I can’t believe I’ve survived six months away from the Ride.” Carefully, Jair folded his palace clothing into neat piles and placed them in a drawer to await his return. For the Ride, the only clue that would mark him as the heir to the throne of Dhasson was the gold signet ring on his right hand.
Jair walked to his window and looked out over the city. Valiquet was the name of both the Dhassonian palace and its capital city. The sun gleamed from the white marble and crystalline sculptures that had earned Valiquet its reputation as “The Glittering Place.” Long a crossroads for commerce and ideas, Dhasson was perhaps the most cosmopolitan of the Winter Kingdoms. Its long tradition of tolerance for all but the Cult of the Crone had spared it the conflicts that often tore at the other kingdoms and had made it a magnet for scholars and artists. Beautiful as it was, f
or the six months Jair was home, the city felt like a glittering prison. Jair sighed and returned to packing.
Harrol watched as Jair gathered the last of his things. For the last eleven years, ever since Jair’s fourteenth birthday, he had made the Ride. Although this trip would take Jair away from the palace, Valiquet, and Dhasson for six months, Jair’s belongings fit neatly into two large saddlebags. “You miss her still.”
Jair turned back to look at his father. “I miss her always.” He was dressed for the road, in the dark tunic and trews that were the custom in the group with which he would ride sentry for the rest of the year. Jair slid up the long sleeve of his shirt, revealing a black tattoo around his left wrist, an intricate and complicated design that had only one match: around the wrist of his life-partner, Talwyn. On his left palm was an intricate tattoo that marked him as one of the trinnen, a warrior proven in battle. He stared at the design on his wrist for a moment in silence. “I wish-”
“-that the Court would accept her,” Harrol finished gently. “And you know it’s not to be. Even if it did, Talwyn is the daughter of the Sworn’s chieftain and she’s their shaman. She can no more leave her people than you can renounce your claim to the throne.”
“I know.” They’d had this conversation before. Although every heir to the Dhasson throne made the six-month Ride, only two before Jair had married into the secretive group of warrior-shamans. Eljen, Jair’s great-great-granduncle, had renounced the throne, throwing Dhasson into chaos. Anginon, two generations removed, had worked out an “accommodation,” accepting an arranged political marriage in Dhasson to sire an heir while honoring his bond to his partner among the Sworn by making it clear the Dhasson marriage was in name only. Neither option was to Jair’s liking, and it was at times like these that the crown seemed to fit most tightly.
“You may find that this year’s Ride leaves little time for home and hearth,” Harrol said. “Bad enough that plague’s begun to spread into Dhasson. What I’ve heard from Margolan sounds bad. I know the Sworn stay to the barren places, where the barrows lie. Please, avoid the cities and villages. And be careful. Nothing is as it should be this year. I fear the Ride will be more dangerous than it’s been in quite some time. I have no desire to lose my son, to plague or to battle.” Harrol embraced Jair, slapping him hard on the back. But there was a moment’s hesitation and the embrace was just a bit tighter than usual, letting Jair know that his father was sincerely worried.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be home before Candles Night. And perhaps this time, I’ll bring Kenver with me. The Court can’t argue that he’s my son, whether or not they recognize my marriage. Whether he can take the crown one day or not, they can get used to the fact that I won’t deny him.”
Harrol chuckled. “If the boy can be spared from his training, by all means, bring him. If he’s half the handful you were as a lad, it should keep you busy fetching him out of the shrubbery!”
Neither Jair nor his father said more as they descended the stairs to Valiquet’s large marble entranceway. There was no mistaking the two Sworn guardsmen who awaited Jair. They were dressed as he was, in the dark clothing and studded leather armor of the Sworn, wearing the lightweight, summer great cloaks that would help to keep down the dust and discourage the flies. Jair shouldered into his own cloak.
“Good to see you once more, Commander.”
Jair recognized the speaker as Emil, one of the guardsmen he had known since he’d first begun making the Ride. Emil’s greeting was in Dhassonian, but his heavy accent made it clear that that language was not his native tongue. His companion, Mihei, a warrior land mage, echoed the greeting. No one would mistake either of the men as residents of Dhasson. Both wore their dark, black hair straight and long, accentuating the tawny golden cast of their skin. Their eyes, amber like the Sacred Lady’s, marked their bloodline as servants of the goddess. A variety of amulets in silver and carved stone hung from leather straps around their necks. The leather baldrics that each wore held a variety of lethal and beautiful damashqi daggers, and the weapon that hung by each man’s side was neither broadsword nor scimitar but a stelian, a deadly, jagged, flat blade that was as dangerous as it looked, the traditional weapon of the Sworn.
Jair was dressed in the same manner, but it was obvious to any who looked that he did not share the same blood. Tan from a season outdoors, he was still much lighter than his Sworn companions, and his dark, wavy, brown hair and blue eyes made his resemblance to Harrol obvious.
“It’s been too long,” Jair responded in the clipped, consonant-heavy language of the nomads. “I’ve been ready to leave again since I returned.”
Jair knew his father watched them descend the sweeping front steps to the horses that waited for them. Even the horses looked out of place. They bore little resemblance to the high-strung, overbred carriage horses of the nobility. These were horses from the Margolan steppe, bred for thousands of years by the Sworn for their steadiness in battle, their intelligence, and their stamina. Jair fastened his saddlebags, shaking his head to dissuade the groomsman who ran to help him. Then the three men swung up to their saddles and rode out of the palace gates.
They did not speak until the walled city was behind them and they were on the open road. Mihei was the first to break the silence. “When we stop for the night, I have gifts for you in my bag.”
“Oh?” Jair asked, curious. “From whom?”
Mihei smiled. “Kenver-and his mother. Kenver chased me down the road to make sure I’d packed the gifts he made for you. Cheira Talwyn didn’t chase us, but I wouldn’t care to face her displeasure if I were remiss in making sure you received your welcoming gift.”
Jair smiled broadly, knowing that he had packed several such gifts for his wife and son in his bags as well. “Are they well?”
Emil laughed. “Kenver is a hand’s breadth taller than when you left, and begging for a pony to ride with the guards. Talwyn’s driven us all mad these past few weeks with her wishing for time to pass more quickly.”
“Tell me, where do we join the tribe?”
Mihei’s smile faded. “The Ride’s taken longer this year than in any season for many years.”
“Why?”
“Many times, we’ve found the barrows desecrated. Cheira Talwyn says the spirits are unhappy. We’ll join the others just across the river, below the Ruune Vidaya forest,” Mihei replied.
Jair didn’t say anything as he thought about Mihei’s news. The Sworn were a nomadic people, consecrated thousands of years ago to the service of the Lady. They were the guardians of the barrows, the large mounds that dotted the landscape from the Northern Sea down through Margolan into Dhasson and to the border of Nargi. Legend said that long ago, the barrows had continued, down into Nargi and beyond, to the Southern Plains. But when the Nargi took up the worship of the Crone Aspect of the Lady, they destroyed the barrows and fought any of the Sworn who dared cross into their lands. The Sworn had left them to their folly, and the legends said that the Nargi had paid dearly for destroying the barrows.
Within the barrows were the Dread. What, exactly, the Dread were, Jair did not know. No one had seen the Dread in over a thousand years. Only the shamans of the Sworn, the cheira, ever communicated with their spirits, and then only through ritual and visions. But it was said that as the Sworn were the guardians of the barrows of the Dread, so the Dread were guardians of the deep places, and it was their burden to make sure that a powerful evil remained buried.
The three men rode single file, and Jair noted that both Emil and Mihei seemed unusually alert for danger on this leg of the trip. Normally, the two-day journey from Valiquet to meet up with the Sworn was uneventful. Now, Jair realized that the others’ heightened vigilance had affected him, and he found himself scanning the horizon.
“Look there,” Jair said as a small hamlet came into view late in the afternoon. Any other year, the fields would have been full of men, women, and children working. Instead, even from a distance, Jair could see that the fields
lay untended, although it was only weeks until harvest. As they drew nearer, an overpowering stench filled the air, and Jair saw shifting gray clouds hovering over the village and the pastures.
“Dark Lady take my soul, what’s happened?” Jair breathed as they drew nearer. The air stank of decay, and it was clear that the gray clouds were swarms of flies. The sunken, half-rotted corpses of cows, sheep, and horses lay in the pasture. There was no noise, except for the buzzing of flies, so many that it sounded like the hum of a distant waterfall.
“It’s the plague,” Mihei said, as they passed the turn to the lane that led into the village. The smell was overpowering in the late-summer heat. He began to chant quietly to himself, and Jair recognized it as the passing-over ritual the Sworn said for the bodies of the dead. Jair made the sign of the Lady, adding his own fervent prayer for safe travel.
“What have you seen of plague?”
Emil shook his head. “Rarely have I been so glad to avoid cities as this season. Most of what we hear comes from the news of the travelers and tinkers we pass on the road. But it’s bad enough in some of the larger towns that the dead lie stacked like cordwood because there isn’t time to bury them, and the living have abandoned their sick and fled.”
“Sweet Chenne,” Jair murmured. “What of the other kingdoms? Have you heard?”
“There’s a rumor that Principality has closed its border to Margolan refugees. It’s said that Nargi is patrolling the river more frequently, as if anyone would think about sneaking into that rats’ nest. Has your father closed Dhasson’s borders?”
“Not yet. But it may come to that.”
“Watch out!” Mihei’s shouted warning came as figures crashed through the underbrush toward the road. Jair’s eyes widened as he drew his stelian. Four creatures burst from the forest, dressed in rags, moving in a frenzy of rage. They had been men once, but there was no reasoning in their eyes, nor sanity. They stank of waste and sweat and were covered in filth and dried blood. Three of the madmen swung tree limbs that looked to have been ripped from their trunks. One of the men wielded a large branch with finger-length thorns, heedless of the blood that flowed from his hands as the thorns tore at his discolored flesh. Their faces and arms were covered with large, red pustules and bleeding open sores. The sight of three well-armed men on horseback should have deterred even the most determined thieves. Instead, the four howled with rage and ran at them, swinging their makeshift weapons.
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