“You know the penalty if I leave the Majesty’s service,” she said.
“Death will not find you,” Divad said. “The Majesty will not send soldiers into the mountains to track you down.”
The stone table beneath her palms felt warm. “And what will I tell the King when I find him?” she asked. “That I am a vow-breaker like our forefathers? A traitor, faithless? That one loved me like a daughter and I abandoned him?”
She pushed herself up and stood slowly. “I cannot do this thing, Divad, though with all my heart I desire to go. Faithlessness is the curse of the Darkworld.” Her eyes went to the door behind Divad, and she set her jaw. “No, I cannot go—not unless he gives me leave.”
“You’re not going to ask him?” Divad said. The alarm in his voice surprised her. It was not a common reaction for the high priest. “Rehtse, I know you love him—more than any of my priests, you care for the royal family. And at times he has loved you. But he is volatile, and angry. He might—”
“He will not make a martyr of me,” Rehtse said. “Not this time.” She held out her hand. “May I?”
Divad handed over Huss’s letter without a word. Rehtse rolled it up and tucked it into the fine red braided belt she wore. She left Divad’s presence with her heart pounding.
* * *
The first day’s ride brought the Ploughman’s entourage down to the foothills of the mountains, just above the thick forests of Galce. Maggie sat with Pat and Professor Huss by a new-lit fire in the camp, carefully hanging Mrs. Cook’s teakettle on a stick over the flames. Its copper sides, black and smudged along the bottom rim, glinted cheerfully in the evening light that fell through the new leaves and buds on the trees around the clearing.
Maggie worked her fingers over the holes on her bone flute. Hazrit, the elder of the Darkworld priestesses, had given it to her. She blew into it experimentally, enjoying its melancholy tones.
“Not a cheerful sound, is it?” Pat asked.
“The Darkworld is not a cheerful place,” Huss said.
Maggie smiled. “Not cheerful, but beautiful, I think.”
“I’d rather hear you sing,” the professor said.
Maggie laughed. “Professor, I love to sing. But I can’t escape the feeling that I’m meddling with powers too great for me when I do. Now and again I want to make music without any great significance.”
He chuckled in response, and Maggie blew a few notes, a melody that sounded strangely familiar though she wasn’t sure why. Pat watched her from across the fire with her chin in her hand. Maggie closed her eyes and let the song shape itself, drifting up with the tendrils of smoke, giving notes to the feel of the spring air. She stopped abruptly. She knew this song—Mary Grant had sung it. It was a lament for the old world and a prayer for the King’s return.
So much for making music without significance.
She opened her eyes, and the professor nodded. His expression was sympathetic. He understood what had just happened.
Soldiers passed the little campfire, carrying supplies and talking in low voices. One of them stopped. Maggie looked up and recognized Harutek.
“An instrument of home,” he said, gesturing to the flute. “Though I do not recognize the song.”
“It is one of ours,” Huss answered. “Will you have a seat, prince?”
Maggie expected Harutek to deny the request, but instead, he laid his cloak on the ground and sat cross-legged upon it. His fish-scale armour gleamed in the firelight, as did his shaven head. Harutek was muscular, handsome, and dignified, every inch a warrior and a prince.
“I hope you will play often,” Harutek said. “It will alleviate the hardship of riding. The Ploughman says it is four more days to Athrom.”
“Are you eager to get there?” Pat asked. Maggie shot her a look, but Pat didn’t acknowledge it.
“Of course,” Harutek said. His tone was quiet—humbler, perhaps, than Maggie had expected. She’d been angry with him for forcing Pravik’s hand. But it was hard to be angry with what she heard in his voice. Hope.
He looked her directly in the eyes as he spoke. “The Darkworld has been cut off from mankind for five hundred years,” he said. “Our people have lived and died without the sun. We have been decimated by sickness, weakened by lack of light. We should have come above ground long ago.”
“But you had a reason to stay hidden,” Huss said.
“Yes,” Harutek said, and here his voice took on a note of bitterness. “The priests told us it was our duty to stay loyal to the King. Loyalty—that’s what they call our hiding like rats in the darkness, giving ourselves over to die.”
“And how does loyalty figure into what you’re doing now?” Huss asked.
“My loyalty is to our people,” Harutek said. He sat a little straighter, and this time looked Huss straight in the eye. “To our future. Not to a being who, if he exists, has shown little love or care for us in centuries.”
Maggie blew into the flute once more. The note was mournful.
By late evening, darkness rolled over the camp, felt more than seen. The horses twitched their ears and looked nervously around them, and the soldiers hushed them and stroked their necks, watching the trees just as keenly.
Still sitting by the fire, Maggie let her eyes rove the treetops. In her hands, she clutched a tin cup, tea warming her palms and calming her increasingly edgy spirit. The trees were rustling, but no wind could be felt. The camp was hemmed in on one side by sheer rock, a last remnant of the mountains before the foothills would give way to flatlands, and on the other by the woods—and the aura coming from the woods was unfriendly. Maggie cleared her throat and strained to hear music, a song in the air to give her strength, but she could hear little.
The camp was silent.
Nearby, Rivan stalked from the horses to the Ploughman, who was standing in the midst of the camp. His rough voice echoed off the rock face. “Something is wrong, my lord. Horses don’t like it, and neither do we.”
“I feel it too,” the Ploughman answered. “What would you have us do?”
Rivan opened his mouth to answer, but Cratus, seated at a fire a few feet away, cut him off. “There is nothing to do. I would not have thought you Easterners would be so easily spooked by your own forests.”
“There is something here,” the Ploughman said quietly, “that is not a part of our forests.”
“Nonsense,” Cratus said, but his voice faltered as a heavy rotting stench filled the air, and from the shadows of the trees two pale blue lights suddenly shone.
Cratus drew his sword. The Ploughman did likewise. The blue lights—eyes, they could now see, pale and pupiless—rose in a wolf-like head from a pool of darkness.
“Great stars,” Rivan said. “’Tis a serpent.”
What had seemed simply a deep place in the ground, merely a mass of shadows, could be seen now to be the coiled body of an enormous snake. Maggie stood slowly and backed away from the fire as it raised its head, rising until its eyes were level with the horses and then even higher, looking down on the frozen band from a towering height. A snake it undoubtedly was, but not like any serpent they had ever seen. Its was a blind wolf’s head, with a wolf’s great ears and teeth. And from its mouth came the smell of rot, of death and decay.
Maggie dropped her tin cup and reached for the knife she wore at her side. She had seen such creatures before.
It was Blackness.
The serpent’s tongue, forked and blue, flicked. Cratus was the first to act. He shouted a battle cry, running straight at the snake with his sword raised. The serpent’s head shot forward. It caught Cratus by the leg and slammed him against the rock face. Maggie heard a crunch and tried not to be sick. Knife in hand, she moved backwards, away from the snake, giving the warriors room. The Ploughman bellowed a cry of his own, and Harutek’s warriors let fly their two-pronged spears. The points bounced off the creature’s scales. The Ploughman ducked a lash of the creature’s long body. Maggie lost sight of him as the horses broke in
a panic, pulling their stakes from the ground and shrieking with fear as men tried to get control and fight.
Shadows seemed to attend the creature. The clearing grew darker by the moment. The farmers grabbed at the horses, trying to calm them and get them out of the way. The professor’s hands took Maggie’s shoulders. He was trembling, though only a little. She turned to look at him. “It will be all right,” she said.
Another battle cry sounded, and Maggie turned her head back to the rock face to see Pat leaping onto the serpent’s back and trying to drive her sword into it. Pat began to slip as soon she touched its slimy skin, her blade glancing off, momentum making it impossible to finish her attack. She hit the ground, palms first, and the serpent’s side undulated toward her as though it would crush her. She rolled out of the way, toward Maggie. Pat’s eyes widened as the slime began to eat into the sword, hissing as it did. The metal corroded so fast she was forced to throw her sword aside.
“Ploughman!” Pat shouted. “Aim for its head!”
“Pat!” Maggie screamed. The snake’s head was lunging straight for her. As Maggie watched, Harutek appeared seemingly out of nowhere, grabbing Pat and bearing her out of range of the snake’s strike. The prince turned and slashed at the creature’s head, bellowing as the long fangs hooked into his arm. The serpent jerked him into the air and threw him aside.
“Here!” a loud voice cried. “Creature of darkness, look to me!”
With the words, golden light exploded from the ground beneath the snake’s head. The creature recoiled from the force of the light.
The Ploughman’s Gift.
The Ploughman stood before the serpent, sword in one hand and staff in the other, his eyes ablaze with golden light and the air whirling with power around him. With a cry, he plunged his sword into the serpent’s underbelly. It wailed and shuddered, pulling back, but somehow the Ploughman got his footing on the creature’s back and leaped to its head, driving his sword in. The long body shuddered and began to shrink, its wet sides shriveling before their eyes. In minutes all that was left was a long, stinking carcass, and the Ploughman was watching his sword dissolve, steaming and hissing. He dropped it, but the serpent would move no more.
Its black body was streaked with gold dust, as though light had taken form and settled over it.
Cratus still lay groaning on the ground. “Come, Maggie,” Professor Huss said. She followed him without question, and he knelt by the Southern commander. The man’s leg was soaked with blood where the serpent’s fangs had pierced and shaken him, and he clutched a dislocated shoulder.
“Sing, Maggie,” Huss said tersely.
Cratus glared at them, but he submitted as Huss tore aside the ripped clothing to examine the wound. The sight and smell made Maggie’s stomach lurch. Harutek appeared at her side and knelt by the wounded man as well. His own arm appeared to have been protected by his armour and the cloth of his sleeve, which was torn by the serpent’s fangs. “I have some training,” he told Huss.
Huss nodded. He looked back at Maggie. “Sing,” he said.
She closed her eyes and sought for a song. Strains were rising from the forest, and she took them and wove them into a melody. She wasn’t sure what words she was singing or where the melody was coming from, but she sang with one shaking hand on Huss’s shoulder. At first she could hear Cratus swearing and protesting, but in a few minutes, he had fallen silent. Everything had.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she stopped singing and opened her eyes again. Cratus was sitting up, leaning against the rock face. Huss had finished dressing his leg with Harutek’s help. The shoulder was no longer dislocated.
Maggie frowned. She cleared her throat.
“It healed itself,” Harutek said quietly. He patted her on the shoulder. “Well done, Maggie.”
The old man stood and wiped his hands clean on a rag one of the farmers offered him. The Ploughman was watching the proceedings with his arms folded.
Cratus looked up at him.
“What was all that?” Cratus demanded.
“A serpent,” the Ploughman answered. “A creature of the Blackness.”
“Not that,” Cratus said. “The song. And you. The light. The way the air moved around you—the way you moved, like a warrior not of earth. What was all that?”
The Ploughman looked down at Cratus, his expression inscrutable. “Some call them Gifts,” he said.
Harutek remained by Cratus as the others moved away.
* * *
Chapter 4: People of the King
It was three hours after midnight when three cloaked and hooded figures proceeded on foot through the streets of Pravik toward the gates and the mountains beyond. They walked slowly, deliberately. None saw them, as was their intent.
They passed through the gates together and followed the road into the mountain forests until they had passed beyond sight of the walls. There they halted.
The tallest of them removed his hood, revealing long, dark hair tied back with a leather strap. The others followed suit, and Divad, Hazrit, and Rehtse regarded each other in silence.
“Kneel, Rehtse,” Divad said.
She obeyed. Hazrit and Divad each laid a hand on the young woman’s head.
“We speak the words of denouncing,” Divad said slowly. “We proclaim you traitor and heretic by the word of the Majesty and release you from his service.”
Rehtse closed her eyes and let the words sink in. She had never imagined this ceremony would be used against her—much less that she would ever deliberately provoke the Majesty into denouncing her.
Of course, had they been following protocol properly, one of the Majesty’s more muscular sons would finish the ceremony by raising an axe and taking Rehtse’s head to seal the denunciation. They were not. Hazrit moved her hand so her palm rested against Rehtse’s cheek. Rehtse leaned into the motherly gesture.
“So it has been decreed,” Divad said. “So it is done.” His voice leveled out a little. “Stay kneeling, Rehtse.”
Rehtse heard the smile in Hazrit’s voice as she spoke the words of another, very different, ceremony, one that had first been enacted in her life when she was only a small child. “By the will of the King we accept you into the service of the priesthood of the Darkworld,” she said. “From this day forth you are his servant. Yours it is to pray and worship, to carry the knowledge of the past forward that our people may be found faithful, to heal and tend their needs. And to serve the Majesty as a daughter serves her father. Will you swear to all these things in the King’s name?”
“I will,” Rehtse said.
She stood, and Hazrit embraced her. Rehtse clung tightly to the woman who had been the closest thing to a mother to her. Divad waited his turn, and when Hazrit reluctantly let go, he also embraced Rehtse. He laid one hand on her head and said, “Bless you, child. The King be in all your ways.”
Rehtse blinked back more tears. Excitement was leaping in her for the journey ahead, but the somberness of denunciation threatened to pull it back down.
“There,” Divad said as he stepped away. “You are the first priest in the history of our people to take that vow twice.”
“I am the first to survive denunciation,” Rehtse said. Her smile faltered a little. Only two priests in all the last five hundred years had ever been denounced—one for plotting to murder the Majesty and one for teaching the people to go aside after Morning Star. She was not especially happy to be in their company. But she turned her face to the shadowed mountains and pulled the letter out of her belt. She had memorized the directions to the cabin where Virginia was waiting.
The cabin where they would begin their journey to find the King.
* * *
Virginia lay in an abandoned shack in the mountains outside Pravik, listening to the sounds of the night. She fingered a pouch full of seeds lying next to her on the musty old cot.
It was her second night in the cabin. She was still waiting for Huss’s promised gift of eyes. As she waited
, she let the last two and a half years play themselves out in her mind as though she was watching them from some close vantage point. One memory, made all the stronger by the pouch of seeds, was that of awakening the Earth Brethren. Tyrentyllith, the Forest Lord, had given her the seeds. They were life. New life, not yet realized.
She’d fallen asleep in her memories and awakened to a song.
Its notes were sweet, its melody peaceful. A song of healing and triumph. A song of hope. As Virginia listened to it, she saw light battling darkness, a serpent and a golden man. Images and music died away together.
She smiled in the darkness.
An instant later, she was startled by the sound of cloth rustling against the door frame. She sat bolt upright, snatching up the bag of seeds and tucking it inside her cloak. “Who’s there?” she asked.
The voice was familiar, but she hadn’t placed it before the newcomer answered the question. “Peace,” she said. “Professor Huss sent me. I am Rehtse of the Darkworld.” Virginia could hear a smile in her voice. “I have come to be your eyes.”
* * *
When morning came, Virginia awoke to the smell of something cooking outside the cabin—fish? She stood carefully, feeling her way to the door. The air outside was perfumed with the scent of flowers blooming. Virginia breathed it in as she crossed the damp earth to the fire where Rehtse was cooking breakfast. Her head swam. She was hungrier than she wanted to admit.
Rehtse helped her find a seat on a fallen log and then got busy serving breakfast. Virginia sorted out questions in her mind, wondering where to start. But before she could ask, Rehtse was praying aloud. She chanted softly in a sing-song blessing Virginia couldn’t understand. The words were in a lost tongue, one of the languages of the world before the Empire. Then she repeated it in the common tongue.
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