by Jenna Rhodes
Quendius sat, elbows on a campaign table, playing at a game of pegs and falcons. He made his move, the chair opposite empty, and looked around.
“The Warrior Queen seeks to buy arms and armor,” Daravan announced.
“If you hope to earn a few golds by telling me that, you’re late.”
“Did your informant also tell you Abayan Diort has offered to meet her needs?”
Quendius dropped his peg. An anger ran through him that darkened his ash-gray skin to a soot color, and his eyes went entirely black. “You’ve proof of this?”
“Copies of letters. May I sit?” Daravan glanced at the empty chair.
Quendius waved at him. He jabbed a finger at the sentry. “Next time anyone comes in here without detainment, you’ll hang for it.”
Bowing and gasping apologies, the sentry made a hasty retreat. Quendius remained leaning on his elbows.
“What else have you for me?”
“That is not enough?” Daravan felt the chair creak under him as he took it, the leather sling giving to his frame.
“Should it be? I’m not where I am because I settle for the first crumbs offered me.”
“These aren’t crumbs.”
“Perhaps they are. Perhaps I know more of Diort than you do.”
Daravan picked up an eagle and moved it swiftly. “And perhaps Diort thinks you don’t look too closely at him, feeling that confidence. He has a war hammer that can take down a mountain.”
“He also has allies.”
“As long as they are useful. He’s Galdarkan back to the ages of the Magi. The queen is Vaelinar. You are Vaelinar. In part.”
Quendius bared his teeth in a smile. “What proof of this have you?”
“That he seeks to play one against the other? None but his actions. He’s like you, Quendius. He’s canny and shrewd and has the loyalty of his men to the teeth. He won’t be caught easily.”
“You offer to catch him?”
“Not I. That’s your business. I merely deliver news.” Daravan reached inside his cloak pocket and took out a packet of letters, throwing them over to Quendius.
“Tell Queen Lariel I will meet with her to sell her what she needs.”
“Tell her yourself, and I’ll deliver it.”
Quendius made a noise, then yelled for his scribe. The little man came in, hair fluffed about his head and bedroll wrapped about his waist, his satchel banging against his rib cage. He threw himself on the ground and began to write what Quendius dictated to him, dried it, handed it over for a seal, then tied it and left it on the table in front of the weaponsmith.
“That’s all.”
The scribe skittered out of the pavilion, reminding Daravan of a mouse scampering to stay just ahead of a fox.
The tied letter stayed on the table between the two men. Neither reached for it.
“Name your price for the delivery.”
“You have a sword—”
Quendius put his head back and roared with laughter. Daravan waited for the humor to ebb. “A sword for a letter? Perhaps I’ll put one through your ribs and deliver it myself,” he said when he’d caught his breath.
“You should know me better than that. I want a look at it.”
“Any sword?”
Daravan did not answer. Quendius stirred after a very long moment, then yelled, “Get Narskap.”
The spare man entered the pavilion. The lamplight played unkindly with him, making his face look even more skeletal than daylight did. He folded his arms over his chest and waited for Quendius to tell him why he’d been sent for.
“Show him the sword.”
“No.”
Quendius thumped a heavy hand on the tabletop. Game pieces jumped from the peg board. “Hand it over, then.”
Narskap did not make a move. A cord in his neck twitched a little, and Daravan thought he could hear a hum just out of the range of normal hearing, drawn across the edge of his nerves rather than heard.
Quendius said to Daravan, “The sword is never drawn without blooding.”
“A barbaric rite. Who made it for you? A Bolger?”
“A fine Vaelinar craftsman made that sword. Give him a look at it in the sheath.”
“Why?”
“Because he has brought me information, and this is the payment he wants. And because I told you to.”
Wiry arms flexed and untied the back sheath, swung it about, and laid the greatsword flat in front of him, across both forge-scarred hands, Narskap unmoving under its weight. Daravan stared at it. The hilt and guard gleamed in exquisite workmanship, no doubt of that, and from what he could see of the blade, it, too, was of incomparable caliber. He wanted to reach out for it, hold his hand near its aura, but feigned indifference instead. “A pretty, long knife.”
“There is nothing pretty about this blade.” Narskap swung it about and secured it.
He would learn nothing more, he knew, other than the accounting one or two frightened men from Bistel’s small army had survived to give him. Did it leap out for blood like a hound? Did it swallow souls like the very heart of hell? Likely not. But whatever it could do, Quendius stayed cautious of it, only one man was allowed to wield it, and Narskap looked as if the burden would be the death of him.
Standing, Daravan reached for the letter. “Consider it delivered. You will know if there is an answer.”
“Good.” Quendius steepled his hands as he watched him leave, and Daravan had the unnerving feeling that the back of his neck seemed very vulnerable as he did so. Between those knobs of bone, swords could strike for a swift beheading.
He melted into the night, relieved only when he’d retrieved his horse and put the camp out of range.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Dry Month—Summer’s End
“HOW CAN YOU ASK THIS OF ME?”
“Because it needs to be done. Lariel, one day you’re going to make her your avandara, and the next throw her away like an old rag? Explain it to me.”
Lariel put her hand on a stack of papers in front of her, her slender fingers curling about a writing instrument she’d just freshly sharpened for use. She wet her mouth to answer, looked away, and then looked back. “If she is what Azel believes, then she is not a person, Sevryn. She is a Way unto herself and likely an unstable one at that, her powers unknown, her makers unknown. Her effect could be one of total chaos. I need you with me, and Larandaril needs you. I can’t afford to let you go again on a chase to find a past that in all probability doesn’t exist for her.”
“Because you want to go to war.”
“Because we may have to go to war.”
“Have you an enemy? A front? An incursion which must be answered?”
“Not yet.”
“And you may never! What Abayan Diort is doing, he has a right to do. Galdarkans are his people, and if he wishes to unite them—”
She slapped her other hand down. “Don’t you ever dare tell me that one being has the right to subject a people to his will by bringing them to their knees in battle! No one has that right. If these people wanted him to rule them, they’d have gone to him long ago.”
“It’s a civil war, Lariel, and you’ve no right in it. They’ll unite just to turn on you, then. We’re the strangers here. You know that. There’s no winning a war when you step in between clans, tribes, who have lived for centuries fighting one another and the only thing they’ll fight even more fiercely is an outsider.”
“You speak of the Galdarkans as if they were Bolgers.”
“War is our most primitive state. It brings us all down to our lowest levels, even though you may see the greatest acts of courage and self-sacrifice within it. That can’t be reason enough to encourage it!”
Her fingers tapped. “Don’t lecture me on what runs in my very lifeblood.”
“Because it doesn’t run in mine? Or because my blood is thinner than yours, weakened, tainted?” Sevryn rocked back on his heels.
“I never said those words.”
�
�I’d like to see you deny that you’ve thought them.”
Her hands twitched from tapping to shuffling papers between them, trying to restore order to a pile already impeccably stacked, a never-ending resource of dialogues and recordings from the daily meetings. Somewhere in the Great Halls must reside a legion of scribes and copyists. She took a deep breath. “You yourself brought me confirmation that we may need to face the Ravers in swarms.”
“If we wait until they build an army as well, then we’ve already lost. It’s not a war we face there, but an infestation, and we need to root it out before they raise themselves up. There won’t be a front, uniforms, officers. They’ll raid and their groups will grow, but you won’t be able to fight them with rules of strategy and engagement.”
“Bistel wasn’t fighting Ravers. He speaks of inhuman weapons, of God-touched fighters who cannot be stopped without great sacrifice!” She shoved her paperwork aside. It went flying across the desk and into the air, drifting down like autumn leaves, covering the room in parchment.
He said quietly, “You brook criticism from me that you’d never accept from anyone else.”
“Jeredon, perhaps.” She leaned back in her chair to survey the mess. “Tell me again why you must leave me for Rivergrace, in the face of all I’m worrying about.”
He bent over, picking up the sheets as he spoke. “I don’t think I’ve ever lied to the two of you . . .”
“Omitting the truth isn’t lying.”
“No.” He put some on the table and continued to gather. “I lost those years in slavery.”
“Tell me what Jeredon and I don’t know.”
“I never faked not having the recall, but I ran across something I kept from you. I left a message for myself. When I escaped, I had a mind or enough of a mind to know I had to do that, that I had to lay clues to what I’d learned, what Gilgarran had gone to learn, so that it could never be forgotten in case I was caught again and perhaps to be understood by another if I didn’t survive.”
She sat forward intently. “And you’ve found it?”
“It’s not that easy, m’lady queen. I wish it were. I’ve been years trying to decipher it, and I still don’t have the answer.” On one knee, still gathering the fallen paperwork, he recited:
“Four forges dire Earth, Wind, Water, and Fire, You skip low And I’ll jump higher. One for thunder By lands torn asunder Two for blood By mountains over flood. Three for soul With no place to go. You skip low And I’ll skip higher Four on air With war to bear.”
She frowned at him. “Where have you heard that?”
He could feel his face warm as he feared her mocking the verses. “I know it’s a child’s rope game, commonly played in the streets. It resounded in me, and I pulled the players aside when I first heard it, thinking I’d found the key, the answer to my lost years.”
“And?”
“And they told me I taught it to them. In rags, a wastrel on the streets, but a man who stopped to play with them, and taught it to them by rote. They stared at me as if I were a madman for not knowing what I’d done.” He gestured helplessly. “Outsmarted myself, it seems. I devised such a cleverness that I can’t unknot it. I’ve nothing beyond that, nothing I can tell you, and it haunts me. I learned something when Gilgarran died, that I dared never forget, and it’s lost to me.”
She shook her head. “Not entirely a child’s game. Four forges dire of earth, wind, water, and fire comes from our very first days here, a warning. It’s an old prophecy, Sevryn, very old. Like Trevilara, it’s ingrained in us so deeply that it wasn’t quite forgotten, although the sense of it, the need to remember it, has been. It’s also not widely known. It’s been passed from leader to leader, and kept, quietly. I don’t know how you heard it, unless Gilgarran passed it to you without your knowing it.”
“Yet you would equip an army from such a forge.”
“I can’t very well send men out facing death without equipment, without armor, without weapons. I won’t go to battle without a plan and without hope of winning. Prophecies are always couched in riddles, Sevryn, and they seldom say what they actually mean. It’s often been interpreted that a forge is meant as an event or one of our own Houses, since the elements are strongly entwined in the wording. We likely won’t know till all is said and done, and what Bistel deigns to tell me only reinforces that.”
He rose to his feet. “And so there is no answer?”
“Not known by me. Perhaps Azel or one of the apprentices he keeps hidden away behind his dusty shelves might keep interpretations you’ll find useful. He’s very weakened after yesterday, though, and he has never been able to remember what it was he wanted me to know. He remembers last year and ten years from yesterday as sharp as a nail, but the day the Kobrir hit him, he can’t recall anything. The good news was that he was able to see you and Rivergrace. The bad news is that he’s not what he was, and he may never be.”
The hope he’d felt springing forth grew cold. She took the last of the gathered papers from his numbing hand with a murmured word he did not catch. “I can’t afford to lose your counsel or your guardianship. Your request is refused.”
“M’lady queen.”
“No. No further appeal.” She turned her face away from him, as she picked up her quill and prepared to make notes on the stack of papers, now crumpled and in disorder, on the desk.
Sevryn swallowed back a final retort and bowed instead, returning to a silent watch on her door, and window, and rooms, his face lined with thoughts he could no longer share with his queen.
Morning shimmered off the small, rounded foothills that looked like weather-eroded barrows of the dead . . . and well they might have been, as Narskap trailed Quendius across the warlands of the east. They had been riding for day upon day, and this new day promised no better, his eyes and mouth dried by a mild yet persistent wind. Quendius pulled his horse up and waited for Narskap to draw even. “Get me a direction.”
His skin crawled with loathing, but he kicked a leg over his mount’s rump and jumped to the ground, dirt and dried grasses scattering as he did. His horse stomped as he looped the reins loosely. He did not wish to do this, but it had been his idea, and he had little choice in the matter. Abayan Diort kept his army hidden and quartered in this Gods-forsaken land. He alone had a chance of finding Diort without escort, and Quendius had made his wishes plain.
He drew his sword. It quivered in his hold, as if surprised by being pulled and awakened when it sensed no death, and gave a howl meant for his ears alone, of joy, of blooding, of souls being rendered unto it. He dropped the blade on the ground and walked away. Walked until he could no longer hear its keening fury as the only storm against his hearing. Then he turned, and listened, felt, for another bond, faint yet present. Forger of the war hammer, although it had partnered with Diort, he still had a tentative hold on the weapon. It murmured to him, its voice a low, rumbling growl, nothing like the screaming howl of the sword, but he heard it still. Hearing it now, he turned slowly, face to the warlands and barrowlike hills, until he knew where it lay and rested, murmuring invectives against earth and stone moved by man’s hand.
“There,” Narskap spoke, and pointed. He strode briskly, no, ran, back to his sword and swept it up, sheathing it before its noise could drive him mad or deaf. Quendius turned his horse in the indicated direction with a kick and moved on. Narskap leaned against his mount a moment, beads of sweat dotting his face and evaporating almost before they formed, his hands shaking. To draw the sword without blooding it was insanity, pressing on him, driving him into the ground. But what would he have struck out here? The mounts? Quendius? He would have doomed himself further. He would wait and hope that a swift velvethorn might be flushed by their passing, bounding away in front of them, prey that he could cut down and perhaps they could spit and roast later, over the campfire.
The sword scolded him from its back sheath, its voice an angry hornets’ nest in his ears as he swung up onto his horse and rode after Quendius.
&
nbsp; Much later, with the sun low on the horizon and at their backs, melting into the end of day, he could smell the camp-fires and the acrid vapor of the middens before they crested a butte and looked down upon the plains where Abayan had settled his army. Tents encircled blackened fire rings, and outlying pastures by the river were pole-fenced for horses. Spread far, as the land here seemed meager and burned by the summer sun, the army did not seem as large, but he knew looks could be deceiving. Quendius stood in the stirrups, stretching his legs a bit, before saying, “They’ll have seen us as well, but won’t attack until they’ve seen who we are. Two of us won’t be thought a threat.” He reined down off the butte.
Narskap let his mount pick his own way down, loose stone and grass shivering from its hooves as they did, and before they reached the more level plains, two horsemen flanked them. No questions were asked or answers offered as they were escorted to the main tent where Abayan Diort stood, awaiting them.
They dismounted but did not hand off the horses’ reins to his men. Abayan considered their faces a moment, then signaled his men to leave them.
“You’ve come a long way.”
“You do not,” remarked Quendius, “seem pleased to see me.”
“I’m not displeased, but it occurs to me that I shall have to kill the man who betrayed my position. Or . . .” Diort’s voice trailed off.
“Or woman? Fear not, it wasn’t the lovely Tiiva who gave you away. She was too busy trying to have the queen poisoned.”
“Unsuccessfully, I presume, or I would have heard.”
Quendius inclined his head. “You don’t seem distressed that it didn’t succeed.”
“Dissension was the primary goal. Lariel’s death would only have been an unexpected bonus.” Diort waved a hand toward his tent. “Come in, cool down, have a drink. It seems you know a good many of my secrets.”
