The Four Forges

by Jenna Rhodes

  “Tolby! Tolby!”

  Her voice, pitched low but urgent, stopped his snoring, and then he shook his grizzled head. “What?”

  “Wake up! They’ve come back.”

  The tree trembled as he thrashed around in it before untangling himself from his own ties. “What are you doing way down there?”

  “Never mind that. What are we all going to do?”

  “Stay up in the trees, and hold our tongues. Get yourself back up here.”

  Lily began climbing again, slipping once or twice, and grateful when she got close enough that Tolby’s strong hand could reach her and pull her back up to the fork where he perched. He hugged her tightly. “Don’t go bolting away on me,” he said.

  “I wasn’t. Should we wake the others?”

  “Not till I get a better look. But they’ll need to be awake, to keep quiet.” Tolby gave her a last squeeze before edging away, and higher, to the willowy treetop which swayed under his weight. Rain had come in the faintest of patters, not putting the fires out, but making the stench even more foul, and the damp drops hissing where they touched the hottest spots. The sky had cleared then, and he peered across their ruined farmland. Tolby stayed for long moments as Lily held her breath. Finally, he called down, “I cannot tell what comes. Wake them, have them hold their silence.”

  Lily leaned across the fork of her tree, to the branch tethered there and tugged on it, lightly but insistently. The branch, bent over from the windbreak tree next to hers, shook about Nutmeg and Rivergrace, waking both of them. They, in turn, stirred Keldan and Garner. After hushed complaints, all were awake save Hosmer, who lay lashed to his tree with Keldan, and only moaned now and then in a deep dream, which Lily had lengthened with one of her “syrups.” Tolby muttered down again, “I cannot see! They’re moving slowly, searching. What fiends can see at night, even with torches?”

  “No hounds, though,” offered Keldan. He began to unstrap himself. “I’m going to run take a look.”

  “Stay here!”

  “If they’re as slow as you say, I’ll be there and back before they’ve noticed.” Keldan looked upward at them, waved, and dashed off before Tolby could stop him.

  “He had better be, or he’ll be dead,” Garner said quietly. Lily made a sharp sound, and all of them went quiet, waiting.

  Rivergrace watched the smoky orange torches draw closer, slowly, deliberately, bobbing in the night. Before she had been desperate to be outside, regardless of the enemy, now she wished for shelter again, and hugged the tree tightly, bark cutting into her clothes.

  Keldan appeared again, like a will-o’-the-wisp out of the night. “Da! You’ve got to come.”

  “What is it?”

  “It . . . you have to see it.” Keldan gulped. “It’s everyone,” he said, as Tolby slid down and landed with a thump beside him. “It’s everyone come to answer the beacon and help.”

  As the night shifted slowly away, the wagons and riders had filed into what was left of the Farbranch home and orchards, gathered in a circle, with the militia riding patrol, not too far away and not too near. Dawn came fitfully, and their time to leave grew close. Still and all, what do you say, Tolby reflected, to a man and good friend who’d lost two of his sons, even though he had a barnful of them still to his name? It made no difference he had more children. The loss of one always cut just as keenly. He pressed the bracelet that Hosmer had saved into Cavender Barrel’s hand, saying only, “From what Hos said, I wouldn’t send anyone looking that didn’t have a strong stomach and heart. There’s not much left after the Ravers to bury, Cavender. You have to be warned on that, ugly as it sounds.”

  His friend’s shoulders bowed, as he fixed his eyes on the item, and closed his hands about it tightly, until his scarred knuckles showed white. “Thank ye, Tolby, and give me thanks to that boy of yers. They did their best. Are ye sure ye’re not staying?”

  “No, my mind’s made up. I’ve had the life I wanted. Lily’s been hankering to go back to the city a bit. I reckon it’s time, while we’re still young enough to start again.”

  “We’ll be missing you. Good folks, and neighbors, and all.”

  “I know, Cav. We’ll be missing you. But I’ll be carting back and forth. If I buy the place I want, I’ll still be needing apples.” Tolby swung about, gesturing. “Anyone wants to salvage this, I’ll deed it to them. The trees are strong, good sap in ’em, deep roots. I grafted good stock onto good stock. They’ll come back.”

  “Aye, they will. We’ll ask about. Maybe a young couple or two might pitch in together to work it.”

  “That’s good talk.” Tolby smiled grimly. He pressed Cavender’s hands again, tightly. “We’re so sorry, Lily and I.”

  His friend pressed back. “We’ll have a good talk about it with the Gods themselves, we will, when it’s our time. What are they thinking, taking the young, eh?” Barrel sighed heavily. He stepped off. “Looks like they’re waiting on us.”

  Indeed, the small cart they’d put to rights, and a small wagon someone had lent them, were filled with their packs and supplies from the cellar, and the few things they could scrape out of the ruins and ashes. Bumblebee stood in the cart’s yoke and tossed his shaggy head impatiently, while Hosmer’s still tired tashya-blooded horse was tied behind. They’d been lent two mules for the wagon, and Hos lay in back, Garner sitting at his side, legs tucked under him. The girls rode on the front seat with Keldan driving, while Lily waited for him at the cart, still saying good-byes. They drove out to a dawn still hung with smoke on the air as the fires burned out in the new day, and their friends accompanied them to the road.

  Lily never looked back. Rivergrace put a hand out in farewell to her river, and a cloud of alna rose, circling over them twice, before winging their way back across the water to the forest deeps.

  Sevryn lay on the healer Frelar’s cot, feeling her tough hands knead the knots and soreness out of his body, testing the flexibility of his joints and muscles, and then, finally, rubbing ointment into his new scars. The bruises would heal and the scars fade out, she told him, but he knew that, and it hurt no less this time than the last. He slowly relaxed under her hands.

  “You have good Vaelinar blood in you,” grunted Frelar, as she rubbed the ointment in a second time, just for the sting of it he thought. “These are new but nearly healed as it is. The scarring will be minimal or fade altogether.”

  “That would be about the only good Vaelinar blood has done me.”

  She slapped his left buttock. “Listen to you. Think the queen would talk to you at all if you weren’t blooded? Queen Lariel is what and where she is because she knows the true worth of a person. She sees beyond blood and skin, as one of her station should.”

  “Vaelinars are born to such stations.”

  A strong hand found a knot just above his shoulder blade and knuckled into it sharply until it was all he could do to breathe. “Stations, even among the Vaelinars, are earned. Never forget that.”

  How could he ever? But he did not answer the healer, just let his breath go finally with a low moan, as she diligently searched out old and new tensions and plied her trade on them, muttering about pain and how some seemed to seek it out and others inflicted it. Her words receded into a dull roar in his ears as Sevryn gave himself to a kind of surrender.

  He found memory in pain, sometimes. Shadows of what had been years ago, buried beyond his knowing until a sudden pain might reveal the shadow to him, a flash of light sharpened by senses on the edge. Often he saw his mother’s face, the only time he could see her clearly anymore, her whip-thin body busily packing items for him, or doing laundry, or cooking, or talking to him about the way things in the world went. Often he sensed that her words had been Gilgarran’s or perhaps Gilgarran merely echoed his mother’s sentiment, but she had little regard for sentiment or Vaelinars in general, and in that way they had been similar. Neither had had any tolerance for Vaelinarran bonding or lack of it. As much as he’d loved her and missed her, he’d been cut
by her abrupt dismissal of him when she’d left to journey on, and it wasn’t her memory he sought.

  Four forges dire . . .

  Carved out of his pain, he knew those words only from the game of children and he heard them often now, whenever he traveled, accompanied by the slap of a skipping rope on packed dirt or street. He heard them endlessly, and had no more idea today what the rhyme meant than he had when he heard it that first time. Forges meant smithing, and smithing encompassed a world of possibilities, but from that time he could not remember, he had pieced together Gilgarran. They had encountered a forge which had brought about his mentor’s death, and that death he could remember, although not all of it. What had he hidden inside the meaning of the elements instead? Why not forges to the east, south, north, and west? If it meant so much to him to ensure not forgetting them, why did he not encode a direction into the rhyme? What had he been thinking of, and what was he losing by not remembering? Dire . . .

  Yes, he knew something dreadful, and it lay just beyond his grasp despite Gilgarran’s training, and even though Vaelinars plotted in decades, he doubted time remained on his side.

  Despite his thoughts, and the sharp knots Frelar kept finding throughout his body, he moved toward a warming sleep and nothingness. The only edge he found in his dream was that held in the hands and in the remarkable eyes of a young woman standing over the body of a Raver, pulling her Dweller sister to her, her eyes filled with a silvery defiant light that kept him at arm’s length no matter how he wanted to hold her. Sevryn had not seen her since, and yet seen her nearly every night in his dreams. From that vision, he drifted unknowing.

  Until the healer pinched his ear bruisingly and hissed, “Wake up. Think I’ve nothing better to do than listen to you snore? Lariel asks you to meet her, a candlemark or so after dinner.”

  “Then I will do so.” Sevryn stretched. His skin, which had felt tight and drawn, now felt oiled and comfortable, the puckering of scars fading already. “Mistress Frelar, you work miracles, as always.”

  She snorted. He pressed a gem into her hand anyway, ducking out of reach before she could smack him for it, grabbing his clothes and making his way through the bathing area, tugging them on as he ran, laughing. He knew well that Lariel had paid for his tending, but surely Frelar would find value in the prettiness of the gem anyway, although she was not the type given to vanity. At the entrance to the baths, he sat down on a low boulder, its surface smoothed into a bench not by hands but by centuries of people so sitting upon it, and tugged his boots on. There was no backlash to Tressandre’s challenge other than the refusal he was to carry to her, and he wondered at his summons. Had she changed her mind about sending him? Lariel kept her own counsel on many a thought that passed through her mind. Her brother had retreated into frowning silence, the matter chafing at Jeredon though he no more wanted her crown and responsibilities than he wanted his head turned backward on his body. Or so he’d often said to Sevryn.

  Sevryn wandered about the light and airy keep of Larandaril, enjoying the mild spring day, checking on his gear and horses, the gardens, the gossip, the farms edging the castle. He enjoyed the day despite the notion always in mind that Lariel wished to send him back to the ild Fallyn Stronghold. A deep, dark fortress at the edge of cliffs and mountains, forboding and formidable, as far from here as could be imagined, that stronghold looked more like the birthing place of a Warrior Queen than did Larandaril. Biting words to that effect had sprung from the ild Fallyn Stronghold before.

  “What infant springs from a soft and cushioning lap to the hardness of war? None. She smiles and the infantry falls to their knees in praise of her, but what battle, let alone war, has she ever won for us?”

  Unseen, certainly unheard by most of the Vaelinars when he first joined Lariel’s entourage, he had not argued the point although Lariel’s exploits in battle were storied, little more than a girl-child at the time, a standard-bearer for her grandfather.

  When his hostess had given him the challenge to carry, he had demurred. Tress’ full mouth had curved in a snarl. “Oh, yes, I know the stories, and yes, I will duel her. Tales have her running the invaders off while barely able to stand in the stirrups herself and swing a sword. If one believes that.”

  “You bring armies trembling to their knees.”

  “Deservedly.” Tressandre’s eyes flashed whenever he told her that, and she pushed her wild honey-colored hair from her face where it had tumbled forward, and lifted it from her shoulders with a disdainful gesture. “She is the queen while I am the whip, the sting, the solace after. My Talent is named while hers goes unnamed. Did you know that, Sevryn? The head of a mighty House and yet they have never declared her Talent. Why, she might be as dry of it as any of you eyeless half-breeds.”

  If she ever read anything in his gaze, Tress did not show it. It pleased her to treat him as if he were blind, and all he could say in his defense was that he had eyes enough to see her terrible beauty. That pleased her even more, though she dismissed him as little more than a servant of her hated rival.

  He dozed after the evening meal, lazing in the sanctuary of Larandaril, knowing that these days could be few when he did not have to worry about having his back to an enemy, knowing that when he awoke, he would have to think about meeting the wishes of his queen. It was a dreamless sleep, for which he thanked the Gods as he rose and stretched, moving effortlessly into the exercises of a swordsman. The inky cloak of night cooled off as he washed and dried and dressed lightly. Outside his rooms the night watch walked halls silently and every other sconce had been put out, so the hour had turned late while he slept. He judged that it was time for his appointment with Lariel.

  The watch outside her doors eyed him, then moved aside at his nod. A tall Vaelinar with brown-and-gold-sparked eyes and thick brown hair braided back watched Sevryn step through the doors carved with runes and words he ought to be able to read, but could not yet. The archaic Vaelinar language still escaped him, and the detailing of this fine work made it that much more difficult. He traced the edge of it as he passed through, his touch a kind of tribute to a world still just out of his reach.

  Soft perfume rose to greet his senses as he moved into the room. Lamplight mingled with muted candlelight, casting shadows within shadows. She turned her face upward, her skin as fair as a newly harvested pearl, and he paused. She would be beautiful to anyone but him, he who longed to see only one face, only one set of remarkable eyes. He stopped and bowed, his mouth twisted by the irony. She tapped a piece of paper. “Tressandre ild Fallyn sent word this evening.”

  “Then I don’t need to return?”

  “This isn’t about me, and the messenger bird did not come for me. I thought it had, and I beg your forgiveness for opening and reading what wasn’t mine to read.” Lariel’s gaze stayed on him evenly, a certain coldness to it.

  “I hold no secret from you.” He spread his hands.

  “Don’t mistake my anger, it’s not directed at you, but at the House that thinks to drive a wedge between myself and those I trust.” Lariel paused, and took a deep breath. She handed him the note.

  Darling Sevryn, it read. He winced at the elaborate handwriting.

  “Remember,” murmured Lariel, “it’s couched to be deceiving if intercepted.”

  His hand curled about the paper. “She lies.”

  “We both know that.”

  I have come upon intriguing information about the man who is undoubtedly your father. Come to me when you are free of demands put upon you, and learn the truth.

  He felt the blood leave his face. “I swear, she does not buy me!” The paper crumpled in his fist.

  Lariel waved off his words. “I know that.”

  “Then, why?”

  “Wouldn’t you want to know of your father? Your mother?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Sevryn.”

  “She calls my service to you a demand put upon me?” He looked from his hand to her face.

  Lariel stood. “She
hints that she wants you to put aside your post, and go to her.”

  “I won’t.”

  “What if I order you to?”

  He stood, rocked in place.

  Lariel’s expression stayed open, yet unrevealing. “She has a spy in my house. Perhaps I need a spy in hers.”

  “Don’t ask me to do that.”

  “I could never ask you to bathe yourself in the deception that an ild Fallyn does. You’ve done far too much for me, already. However, she expects you back, one way or the other.”

  “And if she knows who my father is, what then?”

  “It matters, and it does not matter. It doesn’t change who you are, or the loyalty you’ve earned from me.”

  “You’d trust me in her folds?”

  Her mouth quirked a little. “I trust you, although I’d rather you weren’t in her folds.”

  “Then I’ll simply be your messenger, your envoy. I won’t stay.”

  “Fair enough.” Lariel smiled faintly. “If she has even the slightest crumb of information, of truth for you, know that Jeredon and I will hunt down the rest of it for you, with you. We won’t let her leave you twisting in the wind, Sevryn.”

  He let his breath out, and nodded.

  “Just remember that, whatever you say face-to-face to Tressandre ild Fallyn, take care of the knife at your back.”

  “Always.” He bowed, retreating from her apartment. He heard something crackle and spit into flame as it was tossed into the small, banked fire against the still damp spring air.

  As he hurried down the stairs, brushing past Tiiva, whom he scarcely noticed except for the rustle of her gown as she moved aside to watch him, he wondered how Tressandre had known to bait him. He had indeed reached for something he should not have, for something that would never lie within his grasp, for a life that would never be that of a half-breed. His lineage might make a difference, and it might not. As for the ild Fallyn, they had little use for him, but he knew where he stood with them.