“You were here last year, I remember, Duke Verrakai. So sad, that was, all those babes lost. I suppose you’ve come to see the twins.”
“Yes,” Dorrin said, grateful for an acceptable excuse. “They’re a handsome pair.”
“Falki is so like his father, spare the dark hair. Tilla’s a beauty but not much like Arian,” Sier Davonin went on. “But they’ll be trouble once they’re up on their legs, I’ve no doubt. Not to tell tales, Duke Verrakai, but our king, as a tiny lad, was too bold for his own good. If they have his bold ways, and two of them—!”
“We’ll keep close watch, my lady,” Kieri said. Sier Davonin raised her brows but said no more about it.
After dinner, the guests went back to the city. Kieri and Arian went upstairs with Dorrin. The twins were asleep, and they settled around the table in Kieri’s room to talk. A King’s Squire brought a pitcher and three fluted glasses, then left the room at Kieri’s gesture.
“I noticed High Marshal Seklis wasn’t at dinner—isn’t he staying here?”
“He went with the magelords on their tour to keep an eye on them, he said.”
“Tell me more about them—I know Seklis is suspicious of any mage-powers, but you and Arian seem uncertain as well. Why?”
“If you’ll excuse the diversion,” Kieri said, “I should start with something else—it explains some of the uncertainty.”
“Of course,” Dorrin said.
“You need to know about the elvenhome.” Kieri poured for all three of them. Dorrin took a sip of cool water with a hint of tart fruit juice. “I wrote you, but none of the details, and I think they may be important.” He began with his realization that he had come to the very place where his mother had been killed and he had been captured. After describing the relics that rose from the ground, he said, “I can only think that the taig itself took them … why not the sword, I can’t imagine.”
“Did you find out who had done it?”
“Yes. An elf who hated my mother—she said, for having married my father, but I suspect more than that.” He related the story in detail. “So after I killed her, I realized that the light was coming from me. There’d been that incident with Torfinn—but I thought that was something else. And on the way back, from the way the taig reacted, I knew it was the elvenhome growing around me.”
“You … it’s yours now?”
“In some way, though I think Arian is also involved. We’re both half-elven and both from royal lines. Her father had the gift from his father, though it was not known that it could be passed to a half-elven child.” What Kieri told her seemed impossible—if very few elves could form an elvenhome, how could a half-elf? The Elders had always held themselves apart; she had always assumed they were infinitely more powerful.
“Is this something new or something they did not know?”
He nodded. “That is the exact question I want answered. Amrothlin—my elven uncle—and Arian’s father both insist it’s never been heard of before in all the vanryn of elvenlore. But—bearing on your mission from your king and what little he’s told me about the regalia—I wonder the same thing. This resurgence of magery in Tsaia and Fintha—is it connected to the regalia or something else? Amrothlin wonders if the Singer is changing the song.”
Dorrin frowned. “I don’t understand what that has to do with your having—making?—an elvenhome.”
“What if it’s all connected somehow? Magery in Tsaia and Fintha, the regalia—clearly an ancient power of some kind—my ability to form an elvenhome, the iynisin, whom the elves here refused to admit existed for so long. And the dragon, too. What if it’s all one story, begun long before us and continuing to an end we cannot see?”
“I can’t see the pattern, Kieri. What do you think connects—oh.” Power, of course. Magery—human, elven, iynisin, and probably gnomish and dwarven as well.
“You have your powers from mageborn who came from Aare. I have some that way, though I never sought to use it, but my guess is that it’s entwined with what I did inherit from my mother. Then there’s the Old Human side.”
Dorrin shivered. “What you found in the ossuary?”
“And under the mound in the King’s Grove. I suspect it’s why magery’s recurring in Tsaia and Fintha … it’s a mix of mageries, not the pure form of either.”
“But why now?”
He cocked his head. “You really don’t know?”
“No.”
“Two things, I believe. Two old mageries were released when I became king of Lyonya and you became Duke Verrakai. And the same person wakened both—Paks. Everything’s changed since she became a paladin. I became a king, you became a duke, Arcolin took over the Company and is now a duke.”
Dorrin thought about that. “She’s Girdish … so it’s Gird behind it all?”
“More than that. Were you there when she said she wasn’t just Girdish? I think the high gods also move her, and when she moves, change follows.”
Dorrin nodded. “It certainly does. Paks told me I should take out what was in the vault and examine it. Then she told me I should take the crown to Mikeli to prove my loyalty.”
“She is the flame that lights the candle,” Kieri said, “and then the candle lights the oil. But her flame comes from the gods.”
Dorrin drank off the rest of her glass and set it down firmly. “But now we come to my decision—to leave now and make all speed where the crown wants to go or stay and help you find out what these magelords really are. And I still do not have your full assessment of them.”
“Pardon,” Kieri said. “They are so unlike people I know today—and their language so strange, though it is easier now—that I have found it difficult. They are not comfortable people. They use their powers openly, easily, with no sign of effort. Granted, I had seen only wizards until I met elves—not true mages. They seem to test, constantly, the strength of one another’s magery—and tried to test mine—by casting enchantments.”
“How strong are they?”
Kieri shrugged. “I cannot tell. Not as strong as I am, and I have no tame mages with which to compare them.”
“Except me,” Dorrin said. She grinned at him. “As you tested me when we were young.”
He grinned back. “So I did, young fool that I was myself. And I may be a fool now to ask you to risk yourself—”
“Oh, I would gladly risk myself. It is that other I must not risk. How sure are you that the ossuary is enough protection?”
“Very sure,” Kieri said. “And certain that I can shield you, at least temporarily, when you take it away.”
“We should ask Falk,” Arian said. “Three Knights of Falk and we’re talking about something that may affect the whole world—we should at least ask guidance.”
Dorrin nodded. “We should indeed.”
Silence followed in which Dorrin had a curious vision: she was surrounded by a curtain of falling water yet was dry. She reached out a hand to the water, and it avoided her hand. Through the opening she could see a vast barren plain of red sands and black rock, but out from the curtain of falling water flowed a stream of grass, the blades bending under the movement of the water. That vision changed, and instead she saw herself as she had been, ardent and young, receiving her ruby when she became a Knight of Falk.
She opened her eyes. “Well?” she said, as Kieri and Arian said nothing.
“It is up to you,” he said. “That’s all the answer I received.”
“I will see your magelords,” she said. “And I will be very wary.”
Chaya, Lyonya
The magelords arrived back in Chaya two days later. Dorrin spent the intervening time making arrangements for her travel east. Kieri sent two Squires ahead of her with supplies and spare horses so that she could ride out in an ordinary way.
High Marshal Seklis came to the palace first; the magelords had returned to their lodgings in the city.
“Duke Verrakai!” he said. “I thought you would be … somewhere else by now.”
“King Kieri thinks I might be useful in learning whether these magelords are like my father was.”
“That’s true,” Seklis said. “But what about the regalia?”
“Safe,” Kieri said.
“I’ll be leaving soon,” Dorrin said. “I stayed only to help, if I can, discern which of these magelords might be harboring another spirit.”
Seklis took Dorrin to see the magelords at their lodgings. The first she met, though glad to see another magelord, one familiar with the present-day world, seemed more ordinary than she had expected. They had put off the clothes in which they’d arrived, trading them for local styles. “Even the mail,” one said. “I hope no fighting here, ever.”
“And I as well,” Dorrin said. “Peace prospers lands and peoples.”
At the next inn where magelords lodged, she felt something even as they entered, but when they asked the landlord which rooms the magelords had, he shook his head.
“They went out a glass ago at least. I don’t know where—the market, maybe?”
Outside, Seklis said, “Those are the ones I most wanted you to see, Duke Verrakai. Something about them—it’s as if they’re laughing at us from behind a screen.”
They found no magelords in the main market square, nor had anyone seen them.
“We should go back,” Dorrin said. “If they’re at the palace and I’m not—”
“Yes,” Seklis said, the set of his mouth grim. “They will be snooping about again.”
“Again?”
“Well, they say they only want to learn about this time so they will fit in. I don’t believe it.”
A small group of magelords were at the palace when Dorrin and Seklis arrived. Dorrin knew at once that several of them had changed bodies. Kieri was with them, looking annoyed.
“They came in search of you, Duke Verrakai,” he said formally. “And somehow they did not find you on the way.”
“Nor did we see them,” Dorrin said. “But now we are met. Will you introduce us?”
Kieri nodded. “This is Duke Verrakai, of whom you have heard. She is an old friend and came here to visit the queen and our children.” He paused, and one woman stepped forward. “This is Flannath, Duke Verrakai, who has been most anxious to make your acquaintance.”
Flannath looked to be some years Dorrin’s junior, dark hair braided in a coil on top of her head. She bowed politely to Dorrin. “My lady Duke … or is it my lord?”
“As you will,” Dorrin said easily. The person within that younger body was older, and thus Flannath was someone to distrust. One after another the others came up, all polite, even cordial. Dualian, another woman. Matharin, a man in older middle age, and his son, Lethrin. Caldor and Norin, brothers. Fifteen in all, and every one of them in a body other than that of their birth.
Kieri, standing behind them now, raised his brows. Dorrin smiled and ran her hand through her hair, down to the ruby of her knighthood: a signal Kieri knew. He excused himself to the group and left the room with a hand signal to Dorrin that meant he was going for reinforcements.
Matharin spoke up. “There was a crown and other jewels in our day, sent to Verrakai for safekeeping, after Greenfields.”
“A crown?” said Dorrin. “There is no crown there now.”
“But you Verrakai, is?”
“Yes,” Dorrin said.
“You know old words … power words?”
“Some,” Dorrin said.
He uttered a string of words that Dorrin half understood, among them “speak” and “true” and “yield.” The hairs rose on her neck as she felt power wrap around her. Without hesitation she responded with the command words Verrakai knew. Matharin stared, and his son’s eyes widened.
“You great mage,” he said. “You ruler! Why here? Why not you rule?”
“Tsaia has a king,” Dorrin said. “I obey my king.”
“He more mage?”
“He is the king,” Dorrin said. She was not going to reveal what this man would think Mikeli’s weakness. “A good king.”
He shrugged. “Strong is good.”
“He is not weak,” Dorrin said.
“We go Tsaia, meet him.”
“He says no,” Dorrin said. “None of you will go to Tsaia.”
“He afraid of trial of strength?” Without giving her time to answer he went on. “I go; I challenge him. King is strongest. Grahlin made mistake, follow weak king. I no make.”
“You were at Greenfields?”
“No … that king weak. No follow weak king.”
“You did not challenge him?”
“Grahlin said no. Grahlin stronger than me.”
“Legends say he had great water magery,” Dorrin said.
The man nodded. “He did. Nearly kill Gird once, did kill many. Water magery greatest of mageries. He last to have. He father-father make water shape. You know?”
YES.
She heard the regalia as clearly as ever and hoped the magelord did not. He narrowed his eyes at her but not, she thought, with that knowledge.
“Water shape?” she said.
“Solid. Like glass. Like … jewel.”
The truth burst upon her. Jewels. Water. Regalia. Not magical jewels that might repel the sand and call water but water itself, the element. No wonder the rockfolk disclaimed knowledge of their origin.
“That’s … impossible,” she said. “Water can’t be solid except as ice or snow. Magery can’t change something’s nature.”
He grinned, more relaxed than he’d been before. “So much lost. You strong mage but not know. You have some water magery, yes?”
“Yes,” Dorrin said. “I healed a cursed well, brought water.”
“You broke mage curse? Very strong, you. Verrakaisti always strong. Cannot believe they lost crown.”
Dorrin shrugged. “Maybe they took it somewhere else. It has been a long time.”
“If you alive back in our time, your family teach more water magery. Make jewels, maybe.” His look was challenging. “Would give much for such jewels. Have only this.” He dipped into a pocket in his tunic and brought out a jewel the size of her little fingertip, red as blood and reeking with evil power. “Know what this is?”
“It looks like blood,” Dorrin said. “Do you say it is made with blood as you say the others are with water?”
He nodded. “Yes. Much blood it takes. A hundred and a hundred died for this.” He wrapped his hand around it quickly as if afraid she might take it from him. “You do magery with blood?”
“Never,” Dorrin said. She could not keep the anger out of her voice. “Blood magery is evil.”
He lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “So that peasant said. I not agree. What your king say? And this one?”
“Use blood magery here or in Tsaia and you will die.” His brows went up: disbelief. “You know I am stronger than you; so is Lyonya’s king. I will kill you if you use blood magery here.”
“You would kill your own kind?”
“I have killed mages,” Dorrin said. She did not elaborate.
His hands moved in a gesture she hoped meant submission. “It is good to know. No blood magery here. Over the sea is same?”
“Over the sea?”
“Esa-aare, sun-land, Esea Sunlord’s home. Do you not know it?”
“I do not,” Dorrin said. “The Seafolk trade there, I think. Pargunese and Kostandanyans.”
“Seafolk … good fighters after they learned ships; we taught them that after taking land. What that red jewel you wear, if not blood jewel?”
“Falk’s honor, a ruby,” Dorrin said. “You know of Falk and the Knights of Falk?”
He sniffed. “King Cunias’s youngest son, yes. Before our time, but heard story. He never amount to anything. When he came back that time, he crippled and scarred and no one marry him, so Cunias offered him a woodsman’s house and a servant, but he went away. The Company of Falk just band of younger sons, not inheriting. Wander around with Falk, wear rags until tired of it. Wen
t back to real clothes after Falk die. You are one?”
“Yes. I trained here in Lyonya, at Falk’s Hall.”
“All students mages?”
“No. Only some. But all well born. Girdish now have knightly orders, you know.”
He laughed. “The peasants? Did they finally learn to ride horses and wear fancy clothes?”
“Indeed yes,” Dorrin said.
His eyes narrowed. “It is hard to believe a Verrakai would not know about the crown even if it had been moved.”
“I left home early,” Dorrin said. “My father did not like me. He was angry that I wanted to be in the Company of Falk.”
“Ah. Suspected you a bastard and did not wait to see that you had the water magery. Sorry later, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” Dorrin said. “But I came to the title and the estate. To my knowledge there is no crown as you describe anywhere in the house or on the estate.”
“It may have been suspected and they moved it. Too bad you do not know.”
Dorrin blessed the years of military service that gave her the control she needed now.
Finally he bowed and left her. The others followed, with polite excuses. Dorrin went immediately to Kieri’s office, where a group of King’s Squires, both western and local elves, and Aliam Halveric waited.
“What have you learned?” Kieri asked.
“Much to distress us,” Dorrin said. “All in that group are indeed in others’ bodies. Matharin, the oldest man, not only has shifted bodies at least once, he admits to having used blood magery. I warned him that use of blood magery here would mean his death. He confirms the story King Torfinn told you of how the Pargunese came here: the magelords invaded and stole their land across the ocean. I now know their name for that land; they think it’s where Esea Sunlord came from. Matharin thinks Falk was a fool and his father reasonable to send him away.”
Crown of Renewal Page 31
