Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

by Jonathan Strahan

  Anna did not know what to do. What if the Forlanger soldiers pushed past the lone guard and rushed into the house? She had to trust that the mark of the king’s sister being a swan and the general’s mention of her meant that the lady’s servants were also loyal to the man. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “News of General Olivar.”

  The chatelaine’s eyes opened wide. From the courtyard, shouting broke out.

  Anna reached into her bodice and pulled out the tin swan.

  The chatelaine gasped. “Hide it!” she said, then grasped Anna’s wrist and tugged her along up the stairs in such haste that Anna stumbled twice before they reached the top. There, a pair of bored young men wearing swan-embroidered tabards straightened up as if caught doing what they were not allowed.

  “Get down to the door and by no means allow any outsiders farther than the entry until I return,” the chatelaine snapped. “Send Captain Bellwin to me at once in the library.”

  The young men grinned, like hounds eager to the scent, and pounded down the stairs just as some manner of altercation erupted at another door. But Anna had scarcely time to think, for the dazzling corridor down which they hurried was like a palace of the gods, all studded with gold and silver and color. There were people walking and standing and hunting and dancing along the walls too, so like to people that she wanted to reach out and touch them, only she knew they were paintings like the one in the market hall that depicted the king being anointed and crowned.

  The chatelaine pulled her into a room so filled with books that it smelled different than any room Anna had ever been in. She did not know there were so many books. Even the priest at the temple, who bragged of his treasure-house of six books, would lose his ability to speak could he have seen the shelves and shelves of them. Who made so many books? What was their purpose?

  What was going to happen now?

  The chatelaine released her wrist and glowered at her until a neatly-clad servant girl peeped in. “Get me water to wash,” she ordered.

  They waited a bit longer. The girl returned with a bowl and pitcher and towel, and poured and rinsed the chatelaine’s hand where she had touched Anna, then took everything away. As the servant went out, a soldier dressed in a swan tabard strode in.

  “There is trouble at the gate. I did not know Roderd’s mother is a drunk beggar.” His gaze fell on Anna. A glint of humor in the slant of his lips gave her hope. “Is this the dame?”

  “I am not the lad’s mother,” she said. “It was a lie so that the Forlangers did not take me.”

  “She says she has news of General Olivar.” The chatelaine turned on Anna, and her fierce stare was the most frightening thing Anna had seen on her entire journey, for she could not tell if it promised or threatened.

  It was only now that she realized it might all be for naught. She might have walked into a trap, and her life forfeit. Yet then she would join Olef on the other side. Mari and Hansi had the wit and strength to take care of the little ones. So be it.

  She fished the tin swan out of her bodice and displayed it.

  The chatelaine and the captain exchanged a foreboding glance.

  “How come you by this token?” asked the captain. “What is your name, and where are you from?”

  “I am called Anna, my lord. I have taken this token from the general. If you wish to save his life, then you must rescue him from the place where he is hidden.”

  “Word came last night that he is dead,” said the captain in a flat voice.

  “He is not dead. He lives, but is wounded and hidden. I brought this to show the king’s sister, for he said that she would be able and willing to aid him. The Forlangers mean to kill him.”

  “They have already struck,” said the captain to the chatelaine. “I thought it must be Lord Hargrim’s doing, but we cannot establish he is the one behind the attack.”

  “General Olivar is proof,” Anna insisted. “But the Forlangers control the roads.”

  The two servants conferred in low voices, and then the chatelaine left. Anna knew perfectly well the captain remained as a guard to make sure she did not escape. What surprised her was that he did not attempt to take the tin swan out of her hand. Nor did he speak. He went over to the desk and, still standing, opened a book and looked at the scratchings just as a priest could. Anna watched him but he did not move his lips as the priest did when he read; only his eyes moved, tracing left to right and then skipping back to the left and so on, a pattern as steady as that of a woman knitting.

  The door opened to admit the chatelaine escorting two women. One was a magnificent noble beauty dressed in a gown of such splendor that she might as well have been dressed in threads spun of gold and silver. Her small, ordinary companion wore simpler garb sewn out of a midnight blue cloth so tightly woven it shone. They studied Anna, who did her best to stand respectfully, for she was not sure how to properly greet a king’s sister.

  The small, ordinary woman spoke to her, her speech so colored by odd pronunciations and words Anna did not recognize that she could make no sense of it. The king’s grandparents had come from a distant place to establish their court here; that no doubt accounted for their strange way of speaking.

  The chatelaine translated. “Her Serenity addresses you, Mistress. She wishes to see the token you hold.”

  Anna held out the swan. The tin badge was such a cheap thing, a trinket any girl could buy at a summer fair as a remembrance of her journeying there. Yet both ladies gasped, and the ordinary one stepped forward, took the swan out of Anna’s hand, and turned it over. Her cheeks flushed when she saw the scratchings. Her gaze fixed on Anna in a fearsome way that made Anna see that she had mistaken the beautiful woman for the king’s sister when it fact it was this unremarkable one who had the power and majesty.

  Her snapped question had no word in it Anna understood, but she comprehended what the lady wished to know.

  “The Forlangers attacked the village of West Hall, my lady. I went at night to give what aid to any wounded that I might, for I have some herbcraft. We found the general lying beneath the Dead Man’s Oak. I recognized him for he came once to our village to dedicate a market hall. Woodpasture, that is, but he called it Bayisal. Our people have always lent our support to the general. Our men fight when they are called. We have lost men in his service, killed by the Forlangers. My own husband...”

  She faltered, choked by grief as she rested a hand on her belly.

  The king’s sister passed the tin swan to the beautiful woman, who perused it and handed it back, nodding.

  The king’s sister spoke and the chatelaine repeated it.

  “How are we to know you did not find this token on a corpse and are come at the behest of the Forlangers to trick us into some rash action?”

  “One foot in the river are the words he told me with his own lips. At Elland Fort he saved the kingdom, not Toyant Bridge. So he told me. He was wounded, and he may yet not live, but I did what I could to ease his wound and if the rot does not take him, then I think it likely he will live. I know where he is, and I can take you to him.”

  Even the silent captain looked around at that, first startled and then, as his wrinkled brow cleared, brightened by hope. The king’s sister caught in a sob, grasped the beauty’s hand, and shut her eyes. When she opened her eyes, the four of them fell into an intense discussion filled with many exclamations and objections and finally a forceful declaration by the king’s sister that ended the argument.

  She and the beauty left. The captain and chatelaine remained, looking as impatient as if Anna was the last chore that had to be done before a girl could run off to the festival night and the promises of a lover. Brisk footfalls sounded in the hall and a soldier appeared.

  “The cursed Forlangers are still hammering on the front gate, Captain,” said the man. Like the laundress he was a little difficult to understand with his quick rhythm and city accent, but he spoke the language she knew. “They demand to be admitted to speak to Her Serenity.”

 
The captain nodded. “I will come in a moment and send them off with my boot in their ass.” The soldier left. “She must be guarded without making it obvious we are guarding her. Make all ready. You heard what Her Serenity commanded. We leave at dawn. Lord Hargrim and his faction must be given no reason for suspicion.”

  The chatelaine said, “I will hide her among the servants.”

  So she did, giving Anna the finest clothes she had ever worn and feeding her the finest meal she had ever eaten, so rich with thick gravy that it made her stomach queasy. The meal ended with a sweet flour cake that was indescribably delicious, like nothing she had ever before eaten. She was given a pallet to sleep on among the other kitchen women, a decent bed but this at least was not as comfortable as the marriage bed she had shared with Olef.

  She slept soundly but woke at once when the chatelaine rousted her. An impressive cavalcade of outriders, carriages, and wagons assembled outside. Anna was tucked in among the gaggle of women servants in one of the wagons, all wearing the same swan-marked midnight blue livery with their hair tucked away beneath cloth caps. With a great blaring of horns, the company rolled down the widest avenue in the city and out the main gate. The wagon with its padded seats was at first jarringly uncomfortable; Anna would rather have walked. But after a time she got the rhythm of it. The women around her gossiped and laughed for all the world as if this were a delightful excursion, and it did seem from their talk—those of them she could understand—they all believed their lady had suddenly taken a longing to visit the cloth markets of Ticantal, which name Anna eventually understood to be the same town she called Cloth Market.

  But abruptly the whole long procession lurched to a halt. When she craned her neck to see, she realized they had reached the bridge where the last of the general’s company had died. Soldiers blocked the bridge, and to her horror, Lord Hargrim himself could be seen in his sash and his brilliance speaking to the king’s sister. The lady was riding a horse; he was standing, at a disadvantage because of the horse’s bulk. The king’s sister waved a hand, indicating her procession. Anna’s hands tightened to fists as the lord walked down the length of the cavalcade, ordering his soldiers to peer into the closed carriage, to poke among the wagons carrying luggage. He ordered the wagon full of women servants to disembark, and Anna climbed down not ten strides from the man who had contemptuously tossed her a copper penny and called her an old shrew, but he looked right at her and did not recognize her. His soldiers looked under the benches and checked under the wagon, and yet when their rude inspection was over, even a lord as powerful as Lord Hargrim had to allow the king’s own sister to pass for she was powerful in her own right.

  Thus they came after two more days travel to the turning for West Hall and Woodpasture. Anna herself led the king’s sister and Captain Bellwin and a few stout soldiers past the outer pastures of West Hall and down the overgrown trail to Witch’s Hill and the Dead Man’s Oak. The clearing lay quiet in the midday sun.

  Now, after all this, the secret nest which she had cherished all these years would be betrayed, but it was in a good cause, surely. She hoped the old woman would forgive her the trespass.

  Off her horse the king’s sister strode along as well as any of the men as they pushed on into the forest. When they approached the rocky tumble and its dense watershed of thick rose-tree, Anna whistled the bird song she and Uwe had set for a signal.

  There Uwe came, one moment hidden and the next appearing as out of nowhere, startling the captain so badly that the man drew his sword.

  “He is a friend, the general’s guardian,” Anna said, anxious as Uwe shrank away, for the fear in his face might be fear of reprisal. Yet if the general were dead, why would Uwe still be here?

  “Lives he still?” she asked.

  “He lives,” said Uwe.

  She showed them the way in and allowed them their reunion in private, for it was what she would have wished, were it her own self.

  They gave her coin, as such folk did, and although she and her family had never had much coin before, she was glad of it, for her brother Joen could use it to expand his rope-making and Mari had long wished for a new loom, her being clever with her hands and mind in that way, and now they could pay the carpenter to make one.

  The general himself thanked her.

  “I have thought much about our conversation,” he said to her. “I cannot return your husband to you. Not even the gods can do that. But I have a thought that there is something else I can give you that may repay the debt I owe you.”

  Then they were gone.

  After this the people of Woodpasture came out of the caves where they had hidden and life went on with the late season slaughtering and all the many chores that needed doing to get ready for winter. Mari had her baby, a healthy little girl, and they made a feast for the mother and child.

  Over the next few weeks peddlers came through the village on their last pass through the area, selling needles, delicate thread much finer than what the village women spun for themselves, lamps, knives, and wool and linen cloth from Cloth Market, everything necessary for the kind of work women could do across the long closed-in days of winter. The traveling men had stories, too; stories made peddlers more friends than the goods they had to sell.

  General Olivar, the hero of the country, had been treacherously attacked by the northern traitor, Lord Hargrim. Although wounded, the general had escaped by swimming down the river and had been rescued by his loyal captain Bellwin. The king had exiled Lord Hargrim for disturbing the king’s peace and sent the Forlangers back home to the north.

  It was a good story. Everyone told it over and over again.

  One night a scratching on the door woke Anna out of a sound sleep. She checked to make sure the children still slumbered, then swung her feet to the floor and lit the fine oil lamp she had purchased. The shutter was closed against the cold but the lamp’s warm light lit her steps to the door.

  “Who is there?” she whispered.

  “It is me, Uwe,” said Uwe.

  She set down the bar and opened the door. A full moon spilled its light over the porch. Uwe had on his familiar and well-worn wool cloak and a new sheepskin hat pulled down over his ears. The frosty chill made his beardless cheeks gleam.

  “Can you come?” he asked, his forehead knit in a frown and his lips paled by cold.

  It was such an odd request that she merely nodded and dressed in silence, waking no one. They walked the forest path, their path lit by the splendid lamp of the moon. An early snow had come and gone, leaving the northern lee of trees spotted with patches of white. Branches glittered, as beautiful as any painting on a wall. Dry leaves crackled under their feet, and in the distance an owl hooted.

  She soon knew where they were going. When they came to the clearing, she saw that a man was hanging from the tree, naked, cold, and dead. It was Lord Hargrim. No sign of battle marred his skin, no wounds, no bruising, no broken bones. He was just dead, except for the crude mark of a swan carved on his back.

  Uwe stamped his feet against the chill. Shadows tangled across the grass. Anna rested her hand on her round belly.

  “Well, then, there comes an end to him,” she said. “They’ll make a good story of it. Now we have hope of peace.”

  She turned and, less cold than she had been before, set back for home.

  SPIRITS OF SALT:

  A TALE OF THE CORAL HEART

  JEFFREY FORD

  THE SAGA OF Ismet Toler can only be told in pieces. Like a victim of his battle craft transformed to red coral by a nick from his infamous blade only to be shattered with a well-placed kick and strewn in a thousand shards, the swordsman’s own life story is scattered across the valley of the known world and so buried in half-truth and legend that a scholar of the Coral Heart, such as myself, must possess the patience and devotion of a saint. It’s a wonder I’ve not yet succumbed to the hot air of the yarn spinners of inns and royal courts. Oh, they have wonderful tales to tell—fanciful, heroic, daunting adventur
es—but their meager imaginations could never match the truth of what actually transpired.

  Many of them will recount for you, as if they were there, the Coral Heart’s battle on the island of Saevisha, against the cyclopean ogre, Rotnak, tall as a watchtower and ever ravenous for human flesh. They’ll supply the details, no doubt—the whistling wind from the swing of the giant’s club, the tremble of the earth in the wake of his monstrous stride, Toler’s thrust to that single eye and the whole massive body crackling into a weight of red coral the size of a merchant ship. I hate to disabuse you, but the incident never happened. Please, an ogre? Remember we live in the world, dear reader, not a children’s bedtime story.

  One of the aspects of Toler’s life most abused by these fabrications is the story of his upbringing in the Sussuro Mountains. Yes, they manage to capture well enough the location and the fact that he lived out his childhood in a cave in the side of a cliff—common knowledge—but that’s about the extent of any accuracy. All of these tale tellers have him raised by a hermit, who taught him the art of swordsmanship. The old man was a master of the blade, a fallen knight who had fled the world for a life of contemplation. And even some of this is truth, because Toler was raised by a hermit. The difference between legend and truth, though, is that the hermit was a woman—an assassin who had spent half her life killing for the Alliance of the Back of the Hand, a clandestine society of the very wealthiest of aristocrats who pulled the strings of commerce and manipulated the fate of the powerless.

  She was known, or more her work was known, under the alias, -I-. Even those in the secret council of the Alliance, those who sent her on her missions, had never seen her face. What they knew was her black cloak, her silk boots, the speed and grace of her sword. And they knew her mask, a blank white shell with two small circular eye holes and a small circle for a mouth. She killed swiftly, simply and accurately and moved like an eel through a sunken pasture in the escape. Most of her victims practiced sorcery. The Alliance had secretly declared war on all magic, fearing its promise of hope to the powerless. In -I-’s years of killing, her prey had thrown spells at her, frightening illusions, distracting dreams, creatures of the imagination. She trusted in her sword, her darts, her leather club, and dagger. Once she parried with an enchanted hog, wielding a sword. Once she wrestled with an angel in the heat of the afternoon. She kept her focus as sharp as the blade, able to cut through illusion, sharper than magic.