King's Shield

by Sherwood Smith

  “You left me with many mysteries,” Signi said.

  “I hardly know where to begin.” Valda scrubbed her hand over her frowzled gray hair. She had not combed it in days. Her insides ached from too many transfers: the human body was not made to be wrenched in and out of physical space like that.

  But needs must be met. And needs had never been greater. She leaned forward, forearms on her thighs, which eased her cramping stomach. “Erkric is searching for me again. I had almost had him convinced I was dead. He believes you are dead. You were very clever to avoid the major magics while you were gone. Anyway, he’s put up formidable wards and tracers all over Ala Larkadhe and the pass, most of which I’ve spent the night removing or compromising. He’s had a very easy time with his tracers, as these people have almost no access to magic. Ulaffa says days ago Erkric was scorning your Marlovan king for using old-fashioned courting lockets for military communications. Is that true?”

  “It is,” Signi said. And I know how to restore that magic—the work of a few moments. But I dare not do magic, unless . . . “Go on.”

  “There is nothing I can do when our king is determined to send our people against these Marlovans, and they are equally determined to resist.” Valda touched her fingertips together. “But I am busy extirpating in any way I can magical interference in their battle.”

  “Ah,” Signi said.

  “Erkric has forced Ulaffa and the dags into it by getting Prince Rajnir to issue the orders.” Valda’s smile was thin. “I have not heard these orders. As our first oath is to the greater good of Ydrasal, my conviction that the intent of such orders owes more to Venn aspirations of power than to Ydrasal’s harmony gives me leave, in good conscience, to act as if I never heard of them.” She glanced down at her token. “I do not know how long I have, so to specifics. But first. Before I go on, why are you here? With these Marlovans? Are you helping them against us?”

  “No. I am doing nothing. I am asked to do nothing.” Signi flattened her hand and extended her fingers in neutral intent. “The war I cannot stop, not when our people and theirs are so determined upon it. You do not stand in the way of the river’s flood, even when you know it will sweep away the seedlings.” A pause, as Valda’s steady gaze did not waver. “Valda, the truth is, the enchantment I labor under is that of the heart, and yes, I examine my reasons every moment, not just waking but in dreams. Aside from my connection to this young man, I know that somehow I yet see the Golden Tree, the greater cause. After all, you yourself removed me from this war to devote myself to that greater cause.”

  Valda leaned back, exhaling slowly. “It’s good you did not make it to Sartor. I think they know about Erkric and Norsunder, for they have adamantly refused to treat with us. And Erkric has his trusted followers watching as many of our movements as they can.”

  “Then our plan is abandoned?”

  “No, postponed only.” Valda’s arms tensed slightly, cuing Signi to brace for the technique of emotional provocation. Valda loathed using emotional provocation, Signi knew, but it was often the only way to surprise the truth out of their formidably masked colleagues. “Why did you permit yourself to form a tenderness for Indevan Algara-Vayir? You know that, apart from Durasnir, whose opinions are necessarily shaped by someone’s fitness for war, everyone believes he is the epitome of evil. He betrayed young Wafri and destroyed his home, causing terrible turmoil in Ymar. That’s aside from all his bloody ship battles, burning people to death, and so on.”

  “He was Wafri’s prisoner. Wafri was torturing him, did you know that?” Signi said.

  “No.” Valda’s brows rose. “I did not. There were odd rumors. But that incident was so far removed from our concerns, I did not investigate further. Did Indevan tell you that?”

  “No. He’s never talked about it at all. But he wakes up in dreams shouting Wafri’s name, or arguing with him and his—his—” She tried to find a term outside of the specifics of Hel dancing, which was so acutely observant of muscle expression. “His body,” she said finally. “The scars of torture are evident not just in the pain he feels in his joints, but in the way he moves, sometimes in his voice. That is not what forced me from the old path onto a new. He shines, so.” She flickered her fingers upward, miming the swirling rise of sparks.

  “Ah.” Valda looked skeptical. “A blood-handed battle leader shines with the light of the Golden Tree? I had not known the tree bloomed crimson for you as well as for Erkric.”

  Signi lifted her expressive hands, as if taking a precious gift. “I know I deserve this rebuke.” Her fingers opened, like petals. “Yet that is not how I perceive him.”

  Valda sat back. Jazsha Signi Sofar was a woman of complexity, one who had trained at all the levels but one of one of the highest disciplines known to the Venn, the Hel dancing. And then she had become a mage, mastering in years what most took a couple of decades to even perceive. She was no child to mistake the sentiments of desire for anything but that.

  “I think, desperate as I am for time I don’t have, I must ask. Ydrasal has brought us here, you and me. Flows the crimson river of Rainorec between us? Or is it possible we perceive different branches of the Great Tree? You must know that what I see is a lover of the very enemy about to lead his people against us, because I have seen your Inda riding next to the Marlovan king.” Valda rocked again, forearms against her middle, the token winking on her knee. “He is so young,” she said in a casual voice. “As I have grown older I find myself enchanted by the way the young have only to catch one’s eye, to smile, to offer smooth limbs with the unconscious beauty of youth, and they are instantly ready for the happiness of love, however tired, or worried, or stressed.” She smiled. “It is most precious of all forms of wealth, youth.”

  Signi was far better trained in observation even than Valda. She could hear Valda’s physical effort just to speak, much less to sound casual, as if she were merely testing the depth of Signi’s infatuation.

  You have been watching me, she thought, as from below the open window rose the faint but distinct stamp and clash of drilling warriors. What do you hold back? She would not know until this part of the conversation was finished. “Life is the most precious gift,” she said, a reminder of the inner circle’s vows that transcended Venn, Marlovan, Ymaran, or any mere political or cultural polity. “Youth is—youth. If I had met Inda at sixteen, I would have scorned him for his scars. Had I met him at his own age, I would have scorned him for the lack of grace that we Hel dancers believed, in our arrogant simplemindedness, divided artists from mere barbarians. He would have been ugly to me, compared to the male dancers.”

  “So define your enchantment,” Valda commanded. “Are you telling me this is a life love, root and branch?”

  Signi knew the answer to that, but hesitated before saying it. To some it was not given to find that kind of love, that lasted from acorn to the last bloom, through all the seasons and storms of life. But there were other loves, and age taught one to appreciate each kind.

  “No,” Signi said, reluctant because she knew that her love for Inda had rooted, while his (though he did not seem to know it) was still the green shoot of the young. “He’s like the golden fish in the river,” she said at last. “I can watch all day with pleasure, but he darts here and there, his movements as much a mystery to me as the currents of his river’s waters.”

  Valda made the gesture of peace, as the rumble, zing, and clack rang up the stones from below, followed by full-throated roars in cadence.

  “Then here’s what you must know now. The king lies in a strange sleep, somewhere between dream and death. He has not wakened for days.”

  Signi pressed her fingers to her lips.

  “The last command he made about us in the south was to bring the Marlovans back to the homeland. Those were his words, Bring back the Marolo—he used the old word—into the embrace of the homeland.”

  “Which Erkric comprehends as spells to take their wills away, if we win?”

  “The wit
and will of their leaders. Yes.” Valda bowed her head. “His present ruse is to further delay the Marlovans from marching up the pass so that the Hilda may gain an advantageous position. I know little about such details, but Signi, here is also what you need to know: he is forcing the Yaga Krona to use magic in aid of this invasion.”

  Signi’s breath hissed. “Dags—”

  “Do not belong in battle lines. Everyone knows it. But the prince commanded it, calling them ‘aid,’ not ‘warriors.’ So they must obey.” She tipped her hand toward the castle. “Prince Rajnir is eager, no, desperate to win the coming battle. The Breseng is nigh, and he must return with a triumph for the Venn.”

  Signi had felt the problems of the Venn homeland as a looming storm beyond the horizon. Always there, but far away. Now once again she was in the midst of the thunder.

  Valda said, “The Yaga Krona is not just divided, we are fractured. Erkric knows how to shape his words to reach the deepest roots of ambition, so that each of the most untenable of these orders is given to the dag who would most find a way to see them as reasonable. There are two of his spies in this city right now.” And she named them. “There was also Mekki, up on the heights. She was not just watching for Erkric, she was killing messengers. There were two bodies directly below, one of them a Runner sent by the Jarl’s heir, and the other a girl hardly over sixteen, sent through the tunnel under the northern castle, which is hard-pressed now by our invasion force. Mekki killed messengers, not warriors, probably dispatched to apprise the Marlovans of the our invaders landing along the Idayagan coast, and attacking the castles.”

  “Killed? With magic?” Signi cried softly, rocking back in horror.

  “Yes.” The soft folds of Valda’s face trembled with the intensity of her emotions.

  “How is it even possible? No, I don’t wish to know—”

  “This atrocity will revisit your dreams, as it has mine. I want that to happen,” Valda said, low and intense. “I want every one of us to see that young man and the girl in dreams, the transfer of a stone directly into their hearts. And don’t remind me that our transfer spells make that impossible, because Dag Erkric has been given by Norsunder some spell to remove those protective wards.”

  Signi hissed as if a stone had erupted into her own heart.

  Valda breathed deeply in equal pain. “That was an act of war, not of magical necessity. Just as it was when our dags ruined the hinges of the castle gates. Though everyone called it aid, because no weapons were involved. Mekki did not deny it when I confronted her. And so she has been given the time these young messengers might have lived, twice eighty years, in which to meditate upon her actions in betrayal of our oaths,” Valda added in the mode of it-shall-be.

  Signi understood by these words that Brit Valda, Chief of the Sea Dags, had placed Mekki under a stone spell. To all evidence the body is so frozen that it takes in physical time half a year to move a finger. But the mind is free. One hundred sixty years as stone—a merciful sentence only because Mekki had been ordered to do what she had done.

  Signi’s temples panged. She knew she might not be granted that much mercy if Erkric caught up with her.

  “What do you see as my duty, Valda?” Signi asked, as the sounds shifted to drums and chanted ballads from a balcony somewhat closer to the tower’s prominence.

  Valda sat up, fingers clasping around her token. “I will remove the last of Erkric’s wards, freeing your magic. You can do nothing, I can do nothing, Falk Ulaffa can do nothing, to stop the war. With our own path so fouled by the dust of ambition, I must leave your actions to your conscience. Afterward, your purpose is still to find a way to get to Sartor.”

  Noise outside: the brave, syncopated rolling rhythm of drums broke of a sudden into patter, and laughter.

  Valda whispered, and vanished.

  Halfway through the night, the heat broke over embattled Castle Andahi. The mountain-reinforced echo of thunder, the crack of bluish-violet lightning did not diminish the occasional screams from inside.

  Hilda Commander Talkar, in charge of the land portion of the invasion, knew those screams mostly came from the throats of his own men.

  Talkar had set up a command post directly inside the outer curtain wall, his advance force one command from march-readiness around him.

  He wrote in his scroll-case twice, asking for a report of the Drenga captain inside. To his surprise, and increasing displeasure, there was no response. Did they shirk duty? No, he must not cloud his mind with distrust of the Oneli, with anger. The noise, the sudden, red-glowing gouts of fire in windows, the intermittent cries, indicated strenuous effort of some kind inside.

  Once again he suppressed the instinct to send in his own men. A fight in an unknown space, especially in the dark, could easily end up with his force and the Drenga already inside thinking one another targets. A signal for reinforcements would be different. But no signal came.

  At dawn the Drenga captain himself emerged from the inner castle wall to report, covered by two men, shields high. Arrows rained down, rattling on the shields. Talkar peered up at the walls, making out vague shapes that appeared just long enough to shoot, then vanished.

  Talkar waited at his camp table, having signed for an orderly to bring steamed milk with honey, which Captain Henga downed gratefully at a sign. His eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion.

  “Captain Henga. You do not have the castle yet?” Talkar asked.

  “No. But we believe we have one more section to go, and that most of them are dead.” Henga’s voice was a husky croak. “Unless there are more waiting for a last stand. Everything is dark in there . . . sabotaged,” he finally said, because he couldn’t think of a word strong enough to encompass such thorough, single-minded ferocity. “Every passage, stair, room was blocked or diverted. Most with traps. All the stairwells have brought down rains of burning matter, oil, even furniture flung on us in the dark.” He waved a gauntleted hand vaguely. “Diverted over to the side where the mountain came down. Into traps. Burying my men alive.” He threw back his head, staring blindly through the opening of the tent to the massive castle looming against the sky. “In pairs,” he added in a low, tired voice.

  Talkar said, “Then it’s not a matter of doors to batter down?”

  “If there is a direct way through to gain access to the road beyond, we have not found it.” He hesitated, reviewing the nightmare since the dags had broken down the last door: all the glowglobes had been smashed. Their reserve torches extinguished with tipped barrels of dirty water, leaving them floundering in the dark, to serve as targets for yet more arrows, knives, boiling liquids poured down onto their heads. Fire traps. Arrows shot from openings impossible to descry. Ugly traps, like sharpened spikes in walls and floors.

  The worst, though, the worst had been entire floors sawn through in the two western towers. In both cases young girls had darted past his men, each of them carrying pieces of paper. Of course the men gave chase, one party under Henga’s direction.

  He’d just reached the door himself when the girl stopped in the middle of one of the round tower rooms, with its bare wooden floor. She looking back over her shoulder at them, and time seemed to halt for one rush and thump of his heart: this girl was just the age of his daughter, about fifteen, freckles across her nose, her hair light, her braids tousled. Her pulse beating in her skinny neck above the rumpled tunic much like Venn children wear during their brief summer.

  Thump. His men moved in slowly, surrounding her, she stuck out her tongue. Then she tensed, glanced down—an abrupt, instinctive reaction.

  And the floor dropped.

  The entire floor, taking them all three floors down to death.

  The second one he heard, not a hundred heartbeats afterward, across the length of the castle. That is, he heard the same crack! of sawn wood giving way, the smashing long fall, the screams and shouts of terror, and then that awful silence.

  He swallowed, knowing that if he survived this battle, he would always remember th
at girl, how she stood poised, not letting herself look down at that sabotaged floor until it was too late for them all.

  He blinked, forcing his attention back to Talkar, and reported how many they’d lost—dead, burned, punctured, wounded with shattered limbs who would no more march through the pass than they could fly.

  It was absurd in the face of the thousands waiting, a desperately absurd defense. In another circumstance one could say a gallant one.

  Now? Right now they could not afford the time.

  “Get control of that castle. We know there is a tunnel, leading up around the headland onto the pass. They have to have bricked it up, or buried it. Do whatever you have to do to find it.”

  The man swallowed again, summoned his men, and the three ran heavily back inside, armor jingling, arrows clattering on the shields.

  Chapter Seven

  Jeje: My current domicile is a pantry closet between the kitchen and what was once the main banqueting hall or whatever they called those vast rooms. Now a barracks full of straw sleeping mats, smelling of wet wool and old socks. I was sitting in here sewing Inda’s battle tunic when a message came that Inda was seeking me. He dashed in looking like he hasn’t slept in a week, and it was just like the bad old days. With no warning, he blurts, “I might have to divide ’em, Tau. But I don’t know who to send where. As commanders, I mean.”

  “You are not having this conversation with Evred why?”

  He was ramming back and forth as if in front of a field of a thousand men and not in a room about four paces by five. “He knows ’em all too well. They don’t—I don’t—oh, I just want to know what you see. When Evred and I aren’t there, or talking.”

  “You mean from your Sier Danas?”

  “It has to be them.” Then he stopped and glared at me. “Have you seen anyone else who could command?”