The Seventh World Trilogy omnibus

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  She turned to go, and paused. “I came to tell you,” she said. “Because I hoped that in the last age of this earth—however long it may continue—you would finally acknowledge the truth and honour him. That is all.”

  She passed out of the corridor, away from the prisoners. Their judgment was coming—the Ploughman could hardly leave them in the dungeon forever. They and the people of the Majesty, their leaders imprisoned on a level below this one, would have to answer for their crimes before the world ended.

  Tears pricked at her eyes.

  * * *

  The throne room, still decked with bunks and shelves and the remnants of children’s games, was now a house of the dead. Rehtse had embalmed the body, weeping all the while, and at last had pronounced the work finished and her life over. Virginia, in a panic, had gone after her to make sure she did not intend to kill herself.

  “I am not sure what I intend,” Rehtse reassured her, “but not that. I will exist. But I cannot live.”

  Now the Gifted haunted the room where the King’s body lay, drawn to it and to each other. The people of the city, joined by others who had come since the battle to acknowledge the Ploughman as the only ruling power left in the Seventh World, came in processions three times a day to see the body, some to weep, some to marvel, and left when the Ploughman shut the doors on all but the inner circle.

  Four days had passed. In that time it had become clear that, as Virginia had told Lord Robert, everything had changed. And yet nothing had—nothing visible. The world was a dying patient not yet showing its symptoms.

  A cluster of city folk had arrived from Athrom that morning, bowing and scraping and promising allegiance and restitution to the Ploughman. They brought news: Lucien Morel, the mad emperor, had drowned himself. The High Police had not come back to the city; rumour said Cratus had been killed by his own men. There was no one to take charge, no one to rule. Pravik was all there was left, and the people of the Seventh World, without anyone to reign over them, brought themselves to the Ploughman’s feet.

  “You know what they say,” Pat said, seated on a bit of scaffolding in a corner of the throne room with her knees drawn up to her chin. The Ploughman looked up at her and waited.

  “They say we should keep the body here, in this very room,” Pat said. “Stories will grow around it. The people will come in yearly pilgrimages to see it. You can unite the Seventh World around the memory of what happened here and the bones of the King.”

  The Ploughman stared. After a moment he dropped his eyes. “And what will they remember?” he asked. “Power. They won’t remember the light. They won’t remember that he loved us. They will be afraid. Yes, they will unite, as they did under the Empire. For the same reasons.” He shook his head. “I will do all I can to help stitch this world back together,” he said. “And we will teach the people the truth about who they are, and about who he was. We will undo the Empire’s lies as much as we can. But I cannot dishonour him by making a showpiece of his body.”

  “That will happen no matter where he is buried,” Nicolas said. “Keep him here or bury him in the Hall of Kings, it will make little difference.”

  “Then we will not bury him in Pravik,” the Ploughman said, standing. The answer he had been puzzling over for days was clear to him now. “We will take him away at night and give him to the sea.”

  They looked at each other. Miracle nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “That he may belong to us all.”

  Virginia stared forward and said nothing. They could all see the gathering darkness in her face. The loss of her Gift was doing something to her, plunging her into greater blindness than she had ever known. She was growing distant from the others, and they a little afraid of her.

  * * *

  That night, Virginia dreamed.

  It was not a dream as she’d known before her Gift vanished. It lacked clarity, lacked power, lacked light. It was hazy and confusing and full of grief and a strangled feeling like trying to break free from fear. But in it she saw the King opening doors. Letting prisoners out.

  She awoke. The air was hot. It was still night, and the streets were silent.

  She rose and wandered up the streets toward the castle, wishing that a breeze would come and cool her face and her tortured mind. Wishing with all her heart that she could hear the wind whispering or feel some presence in it. But no wind stirred. The muggy air was silent and dead.

  She didn’t know why her feet led her where they did. Perhaps because she had believed so hard in visions and dreams, had acted on them so many times before, that she could not help going to a place like one she had imagined in sleep. She descended to the deepest level of the dungeon, where she could hear the prisoners sleeping, snoring and stirring, the Majesty and all who had led the Darkworld in siding with Evelyn.

  She was using the wall to feel her way, and her fingers fell on a ring of keys. They closed around it.

  She felt oddly detached from herself as she wandered down the corridor and unlocked the doors one by one, pulling the first few open, listening to them squeal on rusted hinges. She heard the gasps and questions but did not answer them. Her feet took her up a flight of steps, and she stood in the same corridor she had visited before, but this time no torch flickered on the wall. She was alone.

  Realization of what she was doing hit her, jolting her awake. She swallowed. She remembered the dream, hazy though it was. The King opening doors. Letting the prisoners go free. And suddenly she wondered why it mattered that they be locked up; what more harm they could possibly do. She thought of the King letting the High Police flee into the woods. The way he had unleashed his army to take vengeance on the Blackness but had driven the High Police away. He had spared men—all of them. He had been giving them all a second chance.

  She set her jaw, shoved the key into the lock of the nearest cell, and yanked the door open. Silence answered her.

  “Come out, laird,” she said, her voice jarring in her own ears. “Come out and avail yourself of whatever second chance you can find.”

  She turned and opened Evelyn’s cell as violently, and then crossed the corridor to the door that barred Undred from freedom, and unlocked it, and pulled it open.

  “There are no sides left!” she said. “Go and wander in this world, and when sides form, take one. Change your story, Undred; it’s a new world, however long it may last.”

  She turned, angry tears running down her face now, and knew that Evelyn and Lord Robert were watching her. She held her head high. “I was one of the King’s,” she said. “Consider this his last gift to you. Now get yourselves gone. If the Ploughman finds you in the city I do not think he will show you mercy a moment longer.”

  * * *

  “You did what?” the Ploughman’s voice was shocked, angry. Virginia stood still before his seat on the throne, expressionless, with only her clenched fists to hint at emotion.

  “I did as the dream bade me,” she said.

  “Your dream!” the Ploughman said. “Not a vision, not your Gift!”

  “Grant me this one last pretending,” Virginia said. “I don’t know how not to respond to dreams.”

  Huss’s voice was beseeching. “Has any real harm been done?” he asked. “They have fled the city. And the world is already gathering to your banner. Evelyn was hated wherever she went, and she is stripped of power now, nor is there any power left for her to tap into. She is as powerless as…”

  “… as we are,” the Ploughman finished. He sighed. “No, no real harm has been done, except that some may see this as dissension among the rulers of Pravik.”

  “Then don’t dissent,” Huss said. “Declare it as an act of mercy from you. You have set them free just as you are allowing the old High Police to go home unmolested.”

  The Ploughman nodded. “It is best.”

  “We should not wait much longer,” Maggie said. Her voice sounded ragged from grief. “To take the King’s body from here. We need—we need to say good-bye. We all need to.”


  Virginia imagined that the Ploughman nodded. “I have a few details to take care of, and deputies to place in command. No word has gotten out of our intent. I think it is best that way. We can leave tomorrow night, under cover of darkness.”

  Virginia almost smiled at the irony. All was darkness to her now.

  All would always be darkness.

  * * *

  When the throne room closed up for the evening on the next day, Nicolas and Michael brought a casket in through a back door, and Miracle and Marja helped to maneuver the body into it. Rehtse’s embalming had worked to good effect, preserving him well, but the face that had shone with light and life seemed made of wax. It was still a young face, still looking much like the child Roland had called Stray.

  The four stood for a long time, looking down on him, before they closed the casket. Michael and Miracle left at last.

  “Leave me here?” Marja asked. “Go and see the children; they’ve been wanting you.”

  Nicolas kissed her and nodded, shutting her into the throne room with the casket. She drew a knife from her skirt and studied its smooth surface.

  The night deepened, hours passing quickly by. A key turned in the lock, and the Ploughman entered, followed by Michael, Roland, and Nicolas. They stopped short and looked down at Marja and her work of art.

  She had carved every inch of the casket with scenes of the battle. The style was an ancient one, unique to the Gypsies; the story was vivid and beautiful, from the star bursts and rainbows in the clouds, the Huntsmen and the Earth Brethren, to the shining warriors on the ground. And in the center of it all was a carving of the King, enveloped in light.

  She smiled wearily up at them. “I know we are giving him to the sea,” she said. “But not without ceremony.”

  As the men took up the casket, Marja sheathed her carving knife and went down to the courtyard to join the others. They had kept their plans a secret, and it was only the old inner circle that gathered now.

  Professor Huss, Maggie, Pat, Mrs. Cook.

  Virginia, Roland, Rehtse.

  Michael O’Roarke and Miracle with Kieran, his flesh pale and withering.

  Nicolas and Marja, and Peter the Pipe-Smoker with them.

  The Ploughman and Libuse.

  Fifteen, silent in mourning as they met together, remembering others who had once belonged to them. Jerome, the professor’s apprentice. The farmers and soldiers of Pravik who had been slain by Evelyn. The Darkworld priests, and Caasi. The Major, Nicolas’s uncle. Michael thought of Kris of the Mountains, his old friend from the far north of whose death he’d had word before all this happened, and of Shannon and Jack and Lilac and Stocky and all the others. His clann. His family.

  The old members of the Council for Exploration Into Worlds Unseen, so significant still though they had been gone so long: Old Dan, John and Mary Davies, Lucas Barrington.

  The Earth Brethren, absent since the moment the King had fallen.

  The Shearim, whose voices only Nicolas remembered.

  Their ghosts seemed to flicker beyond the edge of seeing, to accompany them silently as the men lifted the casket onto a two-wheeled cart pulled by Roland and Michael and began their procession—the long walk to bury the one who had united them all even before they knew it. Who still united them, the living and the dead, in some way they did not understand.

  In the door of the courtyard, a tall shadow stood in their way. They halted. Virginia’s heart stopped when he spoke, and she recognized the voice.

  “I have no right,” Lord Robert Sinclair said. “But tell me I may come with you, and I will be grateful.”

  “Come,” Professor Huss said, not waiting for any of the leaders to speak. “Come. You have as much right to mourn as any of us.”

  * * *

  They traveled east through the night, down the mountains toward the sea, into wild country where few villages were settled and where no eyes would see. They traveled all the next day, and on the seventh day after the King’s death, they reached the coast and an abandoned fishing settlement the Ploughman had known as a boy. They found there what they were looking for: a longboat. It needed some patching, but they had come prepared. Michael and Lord Robert did the repairs while the others looked on. At last they pushed it out onto the sands where the water lapped at it.

  Roland and the Ploughman carried the ornate coffin from the cart and laid it in the bottom of the boat. They had agreed to give the King to the sea and to the open sky, so they took off the lid of the coffin and sent it into the waves on its own. Roland nearly sobbed with surprise and grief—for an instant, the body in the coffin seemed to be that of the child he had known.

  Ankle-deep in the water, Roland covered the body of the King in a cloak that was blood-red against the white planking of the ship and the pale interior of the coffin. The sea beyond was wild and tumultuous and shining with brilliant light.

  Michael and Nicolas put their shoulders to the boat to push it out into the waves.

  “Wait,” Virginia said. The men held, and they all watched as she stumbled forward, into the surf, and found the boat with her hands. She followed its lines until she reached the place where the King lay, and pulling herself over the side, she leaned forward and kissed his forehead.

  When she dropped back to the surf, they pushed the ship the rest of the way out until the waves took it and carried it out to sea.

  Over the boat, white seabirds circled, calling a mournful cry.

  * * *

  Chapter 21: In Him

  Three days had passed. In a little tangle of trees up the beach, smoke blew across the ground from the remains of their campfire, driven by the breeze from off the sea. Fifteen of the mourners sat together, Lord Robert a ways from the others. Only Virginia was missing.

  They knew they had to return to Pravik, but none had the heart.

  Roland sat closest to the flames with an enormous leather-bound book in his lap. Professor Huss had insisted on bringing the books. Now he insisted that Roland read aloud from them. None protested. The books told old stories of the King, and in a way seemed to bring him back to them. They listened in silence, in tears, and in deep pondering.

  “And this is the way Death came into the world,” Roland read. “For Death is a stranger, and was not always among us. In the beginning every man was in the King, and in the King is life that does not end. But in the days before the Great War, when Morning Star had begun to lift himself up, he came to men and taught them that a world existed outside the King that was richer and fuller and would reward them with great power and wisdom. And fools that men are, they believed him.”

  Lord Robert looked away, through the twisting trees at the glistening blue sea beyond.

  “And so they gathered together and enacted a rite to cut themselves away from the King,” Roland read. “And in the same day two of them came to blows over who would lead them, and one fell and struck his head. On that same day he died, for he had not the King’s life to preserve him, having cut himself away from it. So Death came into the Seventh World.”

  Miracle tightened her grip on Michael’s hand. Both looked down at Kieran, who was leaning against Michael’s shoulder. His dark hair was sticking to his pale face. His crippled leg had grown so bad that Michael had carried him much of the way from Pravik to the coast. They were not now sure he would ever return to the city. Miracle spent every night bowed over him, silently begging her old power to return. But it did not.

  Roland read on. “When the King knew of the rite, he wept. But he swore that one day he would reverse what they had done. One day…”

  His voice trailed away.

  The King had come. But Death had taken him too, and “one day” would never come.

  * * *

  Virginia walked the shore alone. Waves washed up around her feet. She followed her instincts, not caring much whether she walked too long or too far, or whether she walked the wrong way and found herself in the depths of the sea.

  Just ahead, she heard so
mething scraping against the sand—wooden planking?

  A hull?

  Streaks of light crossed her vision. Grey planks. A single mast without a sail.

  The longboat.

  Her heart caught in her throat, and her vision grew stronger as she approached it. Something in her urged her to turn, to go back, not to look. Decay could only have set in. The sight could only be more heartrending now.

  But something else urged her forward, and she nearly lost her footing in the slipping sand as she picked up her speed, picked up her skirts, ran to the ship. Breathless, she lifted herself above the side. The folds of a cloak lay draped over the side of the coffin.

  Empty.

  “Virginia.”

  She gasped and turned her head. Someone was standing on the shore, holding out his hand. For an instant she thought it was Roland—but the hair was golden, not dark; the eyes that smiled into hers were sea-green.

  Slowly, she let herself down from the ship. Afraid to believe, Virginia waded out of the surf and walked up the shore.

  He was still holding out his hand. Trembling, she reached forward and took it. His fingers tightened around hers. She felt spring in the air.

  She dropped to one knee and closed her eyes. “My King,” she said.

  “Go tell the others,” he said, and joy danced in his voice as it had so long ago, when first he had visited her on a hillside in the Highlands of Bryllan, before she had fled with Lord Robert from the High Police and entered a conflict with the Blackness that had lasted until ten days before. “Go tell them I am here; I am alive.”

  She hesitated, hating to pull herself away. He smiled. “Never fear; you haven’t seen the last of me. Go now—they need to know. But be careful. You may have a little trouble finding the way.”