by Widowmaker
“Almost as good. You can’t buy anything with loyalty, no matter what the stories say. And I still owe you.”
“Land, then. I’ve a mind to settle in Alba for a while.”
Bayrd grinned, a brief, cold baring of teeth that was gone before any humour it might have carried could catch up with the expression. “To watch the Albans cut each other to ribbons in a war, then write about it for the sake of scholarship?”
“Perhaps,” Gemmel hesitated, then shrugged slightly, “not.”
“Your excuse; your choice. Land I have in plenty, at least. Clan Talvalin can make claim to hold everything from Redmer to the Blue Mountains. It ought to be enough for you to make another choice. Do you want a farm, a manor, a river valley, or what?”
“Some of my…studies might prove disturbing to any near neighbours. So. Somewhere desolate. Without any people living there at all. A piece of mountain slope would be more than adequate, I thank you.”
This time Bayrd laughed out loud, enough that both the children stirred in their sleep and Eskra gave him an angry look. “A mountain? Man, I’m offering you pasture, meadow, forest – and you want a mountain! What in the name of the Father of Fires would you produce there?”
Gemmel glanced at Eskra; his raised eyebrow was much more of a despairing shrug toward someone who might understand than any amount of lifted shoulders. He looked back at Bayrd, still amused at such foolishness, and shook his head.
“Something to outlast a war,” he said quietly, and watched the amusement fade. “Scholarship, perhaps…”
6. - Games
Marc ar’Dru’s shoulders were hunched under the weight of a silence that had grown more oppressive with every mile he travelled and every hour that passed.
It was not as if he had no one to talk to. Ten lord’s-men had ridden with Vanek ar’Kelayr to Dunrath, and now they accompanied his ashes home again. Those men were more than eager for any conversation that would ease the funereal atmosphere, even though everything they said was tinged with a slight confusion over why Marc had acted as he did. He had been a Bannerman, a clan-lord’s Companion, a kailin-eir of high rank, a position these retainers could only ever dream of, and he had thrown it all away on a point of principal.
But the one man whose voice he wanted to hear, needed to hear, for the approval it would carry and the absolution it would grant, remained obstinately silent. That man was Reth ar’Gyart, who had been Lord Vanek’s Bannerman. He rode now at the head of the column with the dead man’s longsword Katen slung across his back, and said not a word more than was absolutely necessary.
Despite his doubts, Marc was still convinced that he had done the right thing, and had maintained his own honour and respect, by defying the suspicious actions of his lord. He had seen both Bayrd and Eskra use sorcery and the Art too many times to be convinced that, just this once, they might have used it wrongly in the hope that they wouldn’t be found out. But at the same time, he could not shake a feeling of having been manipulated into that decision by some force, some persuasion beyond his control.
No matter what the reason – or was it just an excuse? – might be, the set of ar’Gyart’s back was radiating censure of all that he had done. That stung. The Bannerman had obviously approved of the stand that Marc had taken, otherwise he would have refused his company on the ride back to Hold ar’Kelayr. But he approved of nothing else.
Marc was still angry with Bayrd, an anger made deeper and more intense because it was mingled with regret. What Bayrd Talvalin had done was so pointless; he had been such an honourable man, and to have placed himself in such a dishonourable position that the only option open to his chief retainer was formal defiance seemed – to that retainer – an act very close to stupidity. The Talvalin Clan-Lord had never been stupid before, and Marc couldn’t understand why he had picked the present troubled times to start.
It was plain to everyone that Bayrd Talvalin stood to gain something from Vanek ar’Kelayr’s murder, if only a respite from the older lord’s accusations about his son. His protestations of outrage and innocence had been most persuasive, but for all that, Bayrd had failed to convince any right-thinking kailin that he had neither complied with nor approved of ar’Kelayr’s death. That was enough for him to forfeit all rights to fealty – even though Marc was the only one to actually leave his service. And yet, because of that same lack of proof one way or the other, Reth ar’Gyart’s old-fashioned mind plainly thought it far more honourable if Marc had set his reputation beside that of his lord and remained with Bayrd through thick and thin. Or at least, until the suspected wrongdoing had been proven beyond all doubt.
Marc felt like the bear in the story, with his paw in a cleft tree. Opening that paw would let him go free, but he would lose the honey he had found; but keeping the paw shut to keep the honey would also keep him trapped. It was one of those paradoxes tutors delighted in throwing at their students, where either decision could be seen as the wrong one, and neither was completely right.
Marc ar’Dru didn’t yet know for certain which decision he had made, much less which of them was the worst mistake…
He and ar’Gyart’s party had ridden together across the moors for almost three days now, and in all that time he and the Bannerman had exchanged no more than a few words; brief, necessary communications, far removed from the amiable gossip of travelling with Bayrd and Eskra Talvalin. They, though Clan-Lord and Lady in their own domain, always had a friendly word for anyone who rode with them, or indeed for anyone they met along the way. The encounter might be with high-clan or low, House or Family, farmer or peasant labourer, but there would always be a greeting or a salutation exchanged.
That was one of the many things that set them apart from the other Alban lords of the old high-clan bloodlines, one of the many petty reasons – apart from the great Causes of enmity and rivalry – that people like Vanek ar’Kelayr and others like him disliked them so. They had no sense of their own rank and position. While ar’Kelayr, on the other hand—
Marc stared for a moment at the wooden box strapped with such care behind the cantle of ar’Gyart’s saddle. That was his position now. But while he lived, he had been a man of set opinions, one whose view of the turning world and his own place in it had been as fixed as the stars against the vault of Heaven.
At least, as fixed as the stars had been until last night.
The banked campfire had been between them as always. Reth ar’Gyart saw it built it like that every night, just as he and his men slept on the far side of it every night, even when that might mean sleeping far out in the open instead of whatever shelter they had found. He always allowed Marc the shelter, with a scornful suggestion – never voiced – that the younger man was soft enough to need it. Marc had watched him lay the taiken Katen and the casket of ashes on the ground at his head before he rolled up in his blanket, so that even in death he slept at his lord’s feet. But on that first night out of Dunrath, ar’Gyart had also laid his own longsword at his side in readiness, and Marc had been more hurt and insulted by such a gesture of distrust than any insinuation of his weakness.
Company on the road ar’Gyart may have been, but that was all, and it would end when they reached Hold ar’Kelayr at Erdanor. Their relationship had never been between kailinin, not even the formal, distant association between men of equal rank. The fire and the steel said as much. Those were a wall, built to separate the true retainer from the faithless lord’s-man, the righteous from the opportunist – and always there was the memory of that other fire, the one which had created the box of ashes ar’Gyart guarded with such care.
Ar’Dru had been a Bannerman Companion to a high-clan lord, and had thrown that rank and title back as though it was a currency which had lost its value. But even though his own lord was dead, it was plain that Reth ar’Gyart saw himself as a Bannerman Companion still.
Marc had been lying awake in his bedroll as he had done on all the other nights since leaving Dunrath, smelling the scent of the heather and st
aring into the velvet glitter of the summer sky, wishing for a gloom to match the tenor of his thoughts. On this night, as on the others, Heaven failed to oblige. There had been a heavy overcast and a sullen rain on the day he denied his fealty to Clan Talvalin, and since then, as if in approval – or in mockery – of what he had done, the days had been bright and the nights clear.
This one was no different. It was cloudless, the moon more than halfway to full, its light silvery and cool after the heat of the day. All the rest was star-flecked dark, except for the soft, heavy skein that hung across the centre of the sky like a weft of smoke all strewn with diamond splinters, the great constellation called the Lady’s Scarf. But for all the darkness that lay to either side of the Scarf, it was still far too cheerful for Marc’s mood.
Every so often there would be a scratch of brilliance to mark the passage of an golwan-sul, a sunspark struck from the Forge of the Father of Fires. It was common enough on clear nights, and more often in summer when the Forge burned hottest. Only the most ignorant and superstitious peasants ever called such things ‘falling stars’.
Stars didn’t fall.
Anyone could see that much, if they took the trouble and could count to a large enough total. No matter how many golwanin left their brief, bright tracks across the night, no matter how many must have fallen since the world was beaten out on that same Forge, there were never fewer stars at dawn than there had been at dusk. They changed their position, of course, as the Lady shifted the hang of her Scarf to match the changing seasons; but they moved together, in relation to each other, not one at a time.
Until last night, when he had seen one that did none of these things. Because he had seen a star appear where no star had been before. And then he had seen it slip from its place.
And fall.
It was as inconceivable as though a jewel had torn free from the Lady’s Scarf and tumbled down from Heaven to the floor of the world.
Had such an event been described to him, Marc knew he would have smiled tolerantly and nodded agreement, or laughed out loud and dismissed the incident as nonsense – his reaction depending entirely on the rank and status of the speaker. But he had seen it for himself, and Marc ar’Dru was old enough and cynical enough to have grown out of the common habit of disbelieving the evidence of his own eyes. Once a man started to doubt his own five senses, then whose senses was he expected to trust?
Even in the face of the patently impossible.
His folded arms had been behind his head, an uncomfortable pillow propping him up to stare out towards the eastern horizon at an area of the sky that lay between the constellations of the Two Hunters, the Hawk and the Hound. That part of the sky was star-dark, a blackness barely tinted with the suggestion of deep blue that came with moonlight. Marc would have sworn on any oath both then and later that there had been no star in it. That there had never been a star in it. Not even those faintest of glitters that could only be seen by the strongest eyes, and then only on the deepest, coldest, clearest nights of winter.
Then suddenly there was.
Anywhere else, any more spectacular, and it might have been lost amid the glory of the Lady’s Scarf. But in the darkness between the Two Hunters, in that one place of all the sky, it was unmistakable.
And acting as it did, it was unmissable.
The point of light winked into existence as though someone impossibly far away had unshuttered a lantern. In the moment of its birth, and for a time afterward that seemed no longer than the blinking of an eye yet was just long enough to be perceived, the new star surrounded itself with a corona of all the splendours of a rainbow. It was a momentary splendour, one that should have been heralded by a fanfare of trumpets, or greeted by a thunderclap of noble noise.
Instead there was nothing but the ringing silence of Heaven, and the small sounds made by birds and insects in the Alban summer night.
Marc had seen that same crystalline flash of colour only once before, when light from a low sun had struck through a perfect raindrop hanging like a jewel from a leaf. An instant later his horse’s shoulder had brushed against the branch, and the drop had fallen, and the moment had gone beyond recall.
But he had never seen it in the night sky. And he had never, ever seen the light that birthed it moving…
The tiny brilliance faded as it had done when the raindrop fell, leaving the new star behind. And that star was indeed moving, slowly, but not so slowly that it couldn’t be followed past the Hunters, up the vault of Heaven and through the Lady’s Scarf like the point of a bright needle.
Marc had known then that this was a dream, and soon or late, all dreams end in waking. It was certain that what he was watching was no golwan-sul struck from the great Forge, for it moved too slowly. Nor was it a star, or it would not have moved at all.
So it was something from his own mind, brought to life and light by his troubled thoughts, and once he awoke – or managed to reach a deeper and more comfortable sleep – the light would fade away. Contented by his own reasoning, of that swift clarity found so often in dreams and so seldom in the waking world, he continued to watch without fear or concern.
It brightened even as he watched, like a blown fire; but this was a colder brightness than any ember. It was like a fragment of the moon, or a mirror carried from a distance, whose reflection might grow even while it showed only light, not heat. Even at its largest, it was still no bigger than the brightest of the true stars, and as it passed beyond the silvered half of the moon and out towards its darkened face, it began to fade. The light dimmed more slowly than it had grown, and that too was not the sign of a sunspark. Golwanin moved fast and died abruptly, true sparks from the Forge. This one’s death, though quick enough, had been gradual by comparison.
Marc’s eyes followed the thing’s track beyond where its light went out. If this was a dream, then it was the proper thing to do. If it was nodding wakefulness, then those eyes would roll back beneath the cover of their lids and he would sleep at last.
And anyway, he was an Alban kailin-eir, a trained warrior, and most especially an archer. Such eyes, trained for a lifetime to follow the flight of arrows from friend and foe alike, habitually followed any moving thing they watched for a little longer than was truly necessary. It was sometimes how that lifetime was prolonged.
That was why he saw the thing in the instant when it flared into new brilliance. No longer the chilly, remote glitter he had seen before, this time it was a glare of heat, blazing down from a point of intolerable yellow-white, through brilliant orange and the red of a dying cinder, visibly slowing as it descended towards the west. At last it dwindled to no more than a faint trail that ran as much across the inside of his eyes as across the sky, and the darkness of his dream returned again.
But the flash far off on the western horizon had been real enough, a flicker like summer lightning, the harbinger of a storm on the edge of the world. It was harsh enough to throw the Blue Mountains into stark silhouette, and bright enough that the afterimage was no faint, half-imagined track within Marc’s eyes, but a jagged blotch of glowing purple in the shape of the sky above the distant peaks.
And still there was no sound. Then he realized what he was truly hearing. No sound; no sound at all. The night noises were gone, as if every living thing in the world was holding its collective breath.
Marc ar’Dru remembered that silence with utter clarity, just as he remembered what came after. It had not been huge, not shocking him with great force – but in its implications it had been as terrifying as only a whisper can be. Under him, under his back where he lay in his bedroll on the unmoving earth…
It moved.
The movement was no violent shock, nothing more than a slight trembling. But it felt eerily familiar, a shudder as though he was not out here under the stars, landless and lordless, but in his own bed – and someone had lain down beside him.
That was when the men on the far side of the fire woke up at last. Marc heard Reth ar’Gyart come awake, he and
his sword together, all in a rush. He had slept through the lights and movement in the heavens, but that faint tremor in the earth jolted him awake as suddenly and surely as a kick in the ribs. There was a mutter of dubious voices from the lesser retainers, but Marc heard the rustle of a blanket kicked aside, and the crunch of a mattress made of heather and bracken, as ar’Gyart sat upright in his makeshift bed. With those sounds he heard a quick scrape of steel, and knew the man’s taiken had cleared its scabbard in the same instant. Ar’Gyart expected treachery, and expected it from him.
“What was that?”
Reth’s voice was always a low, carrying growl, and since his lord’s death in Dunrath it was edged with suspicion as a knife is with sharpness. Whether the man was as truly wary of him as all his other actions had suggested, or just distrustful of the world in general, Marc had neither known nor cared. He still didn’t care.
“Must have been thunder,” he had replied, pitching his voice in the drowsy tone of someone no more than vaguely awake. “I don’t care. So long as I don’t get wet…” Then he had rolled himself tighter into his blanket and pretended to go back to sleep with ar’Gyart’s derisive snort as a short-lived lullaby.
It had not been a good time for explanations of lights in the sky, golwanin or falling stars – and even less for why Marc had not been honestly asleep. He had doubted then, and felt quite certain now, that there would never be such a time. Ar’Gyart was not the man to hear about anything that could be associated, however improbably, with sorcery or the Art Magic. Not after how Lord Vanek ar’Kelayr had died.
Sleep came and went after that, and even when he slept, strange lights and sounds had continued to trouble his dreams until the morning. All in all, it had not been a restful night, and Marc was glad to see the morning.
