Elegy (The Magpie Ballads Book 1)

by Vale Aida

  “Don’t let it surprise you,” said Savonn. They had spread their saddle-blankets close to the fire. He was propped against one of the fallen columns, facing away from the flames. His left hand lay curled on the grass, slender and almost childlike; his right hand was concealed in the folds of his cloak, no doubt holding a knife. “He takes his poetry to extremes. My family—which he despises—is inextricably linked to Ederen. And then there is the temple they tried to build here, until the priests lost their minds and killed each other and they had to abandon it… You know the tale?”

  Beyond the trees, the moon lurked like a creature lying in wait. “I know. A temple to the god of death. The guardian of the Sanctuary.”

  In Cassarah they worshipped Mother Alakyne, who had sung the world into being, and her dread daughters Aebria and Casteia. But there were others. Flamboyant Charissos, lord of the stage, who might have been Savonn’s patron god if he had had a different upbringing. Amitei, love and beauty embodied. And the Father, Alakyne’s nameless consort, herald of death and the end of the world, who was sought only in desolate places like these—in the night and the fog and the deep cold of winter, when things perished and returned to the earth. There were no hymns for him. He was worshipped only in silence, as the Mother was with music.

  “It was two hundred years ago,” said Savonn. “The High Priest said he had received a vision from on high, that the world was coming to an end, and the only way to stop it was for his devout servants to deliver each other to the Father as sacrifices. Brother against sister, parent against child, lover against lover. So they did. An acolyte found them the next morning, forty grisly bodies strewn all around the altar.”

  He trailed off, as if imagining the scene. “My father used to say that the gods do nothing but addle people’s minds.”

  “Scepticism keeps your mind clear,” said Hiraen. His eyes were slipping shut. “But it also makes you terminally stupid about other things.”

  “I know,” said Savonn.

  * * *

  Hiraen dozed, and woke, and dozed again.

  Trumpets blared. Heavy feet tramped past their fire with the brisk, fevered regularity of a battle march. Low voices chanted a paean, now and then interrupted by a far-off shriek. Once he opened his eyes and saw banners, white and gold and red and silver, unfurling on the wind between the whispering cypresses. Moonlight glinted on helmeted heads. The obelisks moaned. The fire was burning low, and in the darkness he lay suspended in a nightmarish hellscape, the trees casting freakish shadows over the clearing, living pillars of a house of horrors. He tried to call to Savonn, but his voice choked in his throat as if he were underwater, and then the shades were gone.

  All but one. Kedris Andalle stood over him, an imposing figure in plate and mail, naked longsword shining in his right hand. Under his visor there was no face, only two brilliant eyes that blazed blue like starfire. “Get up,” he said. A spear blossomed out of his heart, blood spreading from the tip like crimson petals. “I am offering you an honour beyond anything you deserve. You need only do as I say, and one day you will be Captain of Betronett.”

  Hiraen still could not speak. Instead he heard in his own head, as if out of an unfathomable chasm, the answer he had given as a boy of seventeen. It is no honour. What you ask is murder.

  He stood in Merrott’s sickroom at Betronett, the air close and cloying with the reek of opiates. Another spear, another scarlet flower, blooming and putrefying in the old man’s chest. Across the deathbed Savonn would not meet his eye. “I would have put Betronett in your hands, but you would not kill for me,” said Kedris, every word solemn and hollow with avuncular grief. “I have loved you like a father, but it seems I have no luck with my sons…”

  I have killed, Hiraen tried to say. For Savonn, not for you. But even as he formed the thought, Kedris’s clear brown skin withered away like paper over an open flame, and he vanished in a cloud of ash. Then it began to rain, and Hiraen stood on the wet cobbles of the street in Cassarah he had seen a hundred times in his dreams, his hands red with sticky blood all the way to his wrists. I killed to keep his secrets, and he must never know.

  He awoke, drenched in sweat. It was still dark. The ground was dry and unmarked as ever, and the moon sailed on its last voyage through the sky, glimmering down at him like a satyr’s smile. Savonn was building up the fire. “I had a strange dream,” said Hiraen.

  The silence spread itself thin and untenable between them. Dimly, he wondered if he had cried out in his sleep.

  “I read a book about this,” said Savonn presently. His face was a dissimulation of light and shadow, deep vales and sharp peaks thrown into violent contrast. “It said that the ruins of Evenfall are surrounded by minute fissures in the ground, cracks that run deep into the earth and release gases from some underground chamber. The gases are odourless, but they bring visions and hallucinations that can turn a person mad.”

  After a moment, Hiraen identified this as an attempt to offer comfort. “Gases or ghouls, it makes no difference,” he said. “This place is haunted.”

  “Don’t be superstitious,” said Savonn. “Shut up and go back to sleep.”

  Hiraen meant to stay awake, to keep watch for the Empath’s arrival, but his eyelids grew heavy and drooped and then shut altogether. Isemain Dalissos faced him with a sword in his hand, narrow-set eyes alight with the joy of the fight. Parry. Twist. Duck. The sky was aflame, searing the ground to ivory beneath their feet, and at the back of his mind was the dull roar of a crowd. Emaris looked on, wide gazelle eyes filled with tears. Someone picked out a slow, mournful chord on a lute. He tried to open his eyes. The Empath was here. The fight was beginning. He had to—

  “But don’t you see?” asked Kedris, so earnest, so sincere, a voice to start wars and topple mountains. “Betronett is far too important to lie fallow in the hands of that old codger. Merrott is a lost cause. But a man like you, whose bow is guided by the very hands of Casteia—a commander like you on the frontier of the Farfallens—the fame, the glory, the songs that would be sung!”

  His younger self answered. I am not a killer. It had been true then. Neither is Savonn. Find someone else.

  A chiming laugh, or perhaps that was the lute. “Savonn is whatever he wishes to be on any given day. A useful child. If you cannot rise to the challenge, surely he will.”

  “Don’t touch him,” said Hiraen aloud, and lurched bolt upright.

  The moon was past its zenith, a long-horned fragment behind bulbous clouds. Savonn was playing his lute, watching him with catlike eyes across the fire. “Gases and ghouls,” he said, softly, as if in reminder.

  Hiraen staggered first to his knees, and then his feet. He felt weak all over, as if his tendons and sinews had been undone one by one by the god of the Sanctuary. There was cold sweat on his face and neck. “If I stay here a moment longer,” he said, “even a moment, I am going to lose my mind.”

  Savonn’s fingers went still on the lutestrings. “Then go away. I’m staying.”

  Hiraen flung up his hands. “What for? We’ve waited all night. He’s not going to show. He sent us here on a wild goose chase because that sort of joke appeals to people like him—people like you—”

  “There’s still some time before moonset,” said Savonn. “Take the lute and stay awake, if that helps. I shall take a nap.”

  He pushed the instrument into Hiraen’s hands and settled himself on his cloak, between the fire and his sword. Hiraen stared down at the lute, helpless. It had been a long time since he’d played. He had had lessons in his childhood, a few from his mother, a few from Josit, but mostly from an impatient schoolmaster who liked to tell him that his head was so full of earth, there was no room left over in it for music or philosophy. But that could not be true, because he was friends with Savonn. Anybody else, if they had even a smidge of sense, would have run for their lives.

  He fumbled through the three or four songs whose chords he still knew, too distracted to listen to himself, eyes and ears pricked
for movement in the thicket. If anyone approached, the music would betray their location at once. Minutes passed, or perhaps an hour. The moon was thin as a fingernail. The moon had drifted beneath the treetops. The moon was skimming the Morivant, silvering the water with faint luminescence. He drifted in a soporific haze, fingers still seguing from chord to aimless chord. Fingers that had held a bow, a sword, a dagger. Feet that had moved, soft with stealth and urgent with fear, down the cobbles of a back alley. Rendell’s voice asked, “What are you doing here?” and his own answered, “Keeping a secret.”

  The moon was drowning itself in the river. Across the fire, Savonn murmured something indistinct and rolled over.

  To fall asleep was madness. Hiraen saw that now. He edged over on stiff knees and clammy palms, keeping his face toward the fire. As a child he had often stayed up all night with Savonn and Iyone, swapping scary stories on the roof of the manor until none of them dared shut their eyes. But they were children no longer. “Savonn, “ he said.

  Savonn tensed like a coiled spring at the touch of his hand, and then relaxed again, still half asleep. “Etruska?”

  “No,” said Hiraen. “Just me.”

  He came awake at once, a knife glinting bright in his closed palm. The back of his shirt was soaked through. Distantly, Hiraen wondered what he had been dreaming about. “Look,” he said. “Your crescent moon. It’s set. He’s not coming.”

  Venus had risen in the east, blinking in and out behind a wisp of cloud. Otherwise their solitude was complete. Tomorrow night was the new moon. “He may have been delayed,” said Hiraen. “Or captured, or wounded. He might not even have survived the battle.”

  He thought perhaps he sounded too hopeful. Then he realised Savonn was not listening at all. His cheeks were flushed, the twin upsweeps of his lashes heavy with beaded moisture, the bright pinprick of Venus reflected twice in his glassy eyes. Hiraen had seen him like this before, unmasked at the masquerade, and again in the House of Charissos after the play. Sudden apprehension thrummed at the back of his mind, a misplaced chord in a minor key.

  As if to himself, Savonn said, “He never meant to come.”

  Hiraen rubbed his eyes. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “No,” said Savonn. His voice was muted, deadly. “On the edge of the crescent moon, in the unholy light of evenfall… He was stalling us. It’s been nine days.”

  “What?”

  “Nine days since he said that to me. Nine days between the battle and the last night of the crescent moon. Nine days,” said Savonn, louder now, every consonant sharpened with suppressed hysteria, “is just enough time to get from Onaressi to Cassarah.”

  Hiraen drew a sharp breath. “With his army? No, that’s insane. Alone.”

  “Alone,” Savonn echoed. He looked like a candle burning at both ends, though with what fuel, Hiraen could not tell. Hatred and wonder and anger and love were all mirror images in that bizarre magpie mind. “With the most powerful weapon he has. Secrets. It’s our game. Just like old times…”

  “Stop it,” said Hiraen. Without thinking, his hands found Savonn’s shoulders. “Stop talking in riddles. What did he mean? What’s he going to do?”

  He knew the answer even as he heard himself speak. “Expose me to the Council, of course,” said Savonn. His eyes were unnaturally bright, and his lips were straining into a smile, gruesome and hideous. “So all the world will know me for what I’ve done. I can hear him even now. Spy. Traitor. Murderer… No, sit down,” he said, as Hiraen reared to his feet. “He’ll have arrived by now. It’s too late. There is nothing we can do except watch the curtain rise, and marvel at the genius of it all.”

  His fingers closed tight around Hiraen’s wrist, his grip brutal, his face glimmering wet. “They have him.” There was a strange new note in his voice, brittle and aching. It was grief. “Hiraen, they have him.”

  27

  “I won’t believe it,” said Iyone, “until I see their bodies.”

  She had called on Josit at the Street of Canaries, half expecting to be turned away at the door, but desperate for a reprieve from the well-meaning friends who kept foisting their condolences on her. Her brothers were not dead. Savonn was merely hard to find, that was all, and Hiraen was with him. If this was as much an exercise in denial as in logic, then so be it. Gods help her, she had enough to worry about as it was.

  “We should prepare for the worst,” said Josit. There was no sign that she remembered Iyone’s threats about the child, or had marked Shandei’s abrupt disappearance. She was paler than Iyone had ever seen her, the skin of her face blanched and fragile as eggshells, her fingers taut around the stem of her goblet. “Zarin is on his way back. His last letter told of a traitor in the Betronett camp, one who sold them out to the Marshal. It seems likely that Savonn and Hiraen were killed, or at least taken alive to Sarei.”

  In spite of herself, Iyone pictured her brothers as prisoners, hauled before Marguerit in chains. Savonn would make the best of it, of course. Given a week, he would be chorusing dirty songs with the fiercest of his gaolers; in another, he would be an honoured guest at Marguerit’s court, clothed in silks and jewels and spewing absinthe-fuelled poetry. He loved life a little too much for death before dishonour. Hiraen, though, was another matter. She imagined him on the rack, spitting curses at his tormentors, refusing to forswear his allegiance even as his bones popped and his sinews tore—

  She pulled herself out of it. Savonn and Hiraen were only one of her problems. Josit still sat across the table from her, bold as day, new schemes probably taking shape in every dark recess of her mind as they spoke. And there was the letter from Terinea, distracting and infuriating. There was no stillborn child, Iyone, Shandei had written. The convent’s records show that there was only one infant delivered there in July 1512: your gnatlike best friend Savonn. Either someone is misleading you, or there has been some mistake. I don’t know what to make of it, but I’m sure you do.

  The letter had not ended there. Iyone had been surprised to discover that, given pen and paper, Shandei could be dramatically verbose. Thus far I have scandalised three acolytes with bedroom tales, and showed another how to kill a man with a sewing-needle. (Have I mentioned I am doing a lot of sewing? Heavens help me.) The blessed Governess Persis is about to fling me out of her convent. No, that is unlikely—she is too pious for that, but I am bored out of my mind, and desperately tempted to test her patience. How, I wonder, can any hot-blooded woman take a priestess’s vows?

  I have thought about following your father’s army to Medrai and beyond, to look for my brother and join him in arms against the Saraians. But then I remember the thing I have to do in Cassarah… and I remember you, Iyone. I know you would prefer I stayed in Terinea until you finished pruning the Thorn, but every day I am away from home is a little death I die. It is my city as well as yours, and there is so much talk of war. Soon, you may be glad of a warrior.

  What I mean to say is that I have packed my bags and am on my way to you. You will probably be angry. You will just have to put up with me. I look forward to seeing you again.

  It was all terribly exasperating. After all her work to put Shandei out of harm’s way, the girl was simply coming back. She might finally kill Willon Efren, or he might arrest her, or—a non-negligible possibility—Josit might do both.

  For now, Iyone preferred to neglect it.

  “Let’s not worry about things we can’t help,” she said bracingly, as much for her own benefit as for Josit’s. “The mountains will soon be impassable. When Marguerit attacks, she will have to come by the west, over the Morivant. The blow will fall on Cassarah. Let us drink another cup, and then convene the Council.” She leaned across the table to ring the handbell at Josit’s elbow. “More mulled wine for the Lady and I, please.”

  Josit frowned. She seemed to have aged several years in the span of hours: her cheeks had thinned, and a green webbing of veins showed through the fine, translucent skin at her temple. One could se
e the marks of a difficult life led with pride and honour and no small success. “I prefer to be sober when dealing with you.”

  “That,” said Iyone, “is the highest compliment I have ever received. Let us speak of sober things, then. Why do you think Savonn was taken?”

  “I can guess,” said Josit. “He has a knack of making himself intolerable. Not just to his friends, but also his enemies. Marguerit may have grown alarmed.”

  The solar door slid open to admit a servant with a fresh jug of wine. Smoothly, Josit changed the subject to a safer one. “Did you mention the Council?” she asked. “You should have heard Willon today. I suggested twelve different ways in which the city could be fortified, and he barely listened. He’s gotten worse since Lucien left.”

  Perhaps it was time they removed him. But that was a matter for when they were alone. “He dislikes being proven wrong,” said Iyone, reaching for her refilled cup. The wine smelled of cloves and cinnamon. “A common failing of old men. We must win over Oriane, or nothing can be done.”

  The servant had retreated to the back of the room with his hands clasped behind his back. Iyone raised an eyebrow at him. “We don’t need anything else. You can leave.”

  “Wait,” said Josit. “I don’t know your name.”

  Iyone wondered where Josit’s usual maid had gone. The man must be new—she was sure she would have remembered the long red hair, falling in a fat braid across one shoulder. His eyes were demure and downcast. “Why, ladyship? I am nothing.”

  “I know the names of all my servants,” said Josit. “It’s a habit of mine.”

  Something in the tenor of her voice arrested Iyone in mid-sip. She put the cup down without drinking. The servant looked politely surprised. “A name is only a word, ladyship. You may call me what you please.”

  Josit said, “You are not one of my household.”

  Iyone began to rise. But before she could call out, the man straightened his shoulders and stepped away from the wall. It was a simple movement, but one that seemed to set off a complex sequence of chain reactions, so that he looked disproportionately different from before. The servility fell away from him like a doffed hat. He stood taller, his chin firmer, and all trace of reverence fled his eyes. It was a transformation of a familiar sort, one she had witnessed before. “No, I suppose not,” he said. “But I am your countryman, after all. They say in Daliss that you are shrewder than Marguerit. I thought such a thing was impossible.”