The High King's Vengeance

by Steven Poore

  “Are you hurt?” Havinal asked without preamble. With that tone of voice, he might as easily have asked if she had brought his coat.

  Cassia shook her head. It took her a moment to realise that this could be one more reason for Tarves’s sour anger. Not only had he lost a brother, but the girl who killed him had barely a scratch upon her.

  “Then you had best tell us how you came to slit the throat of an Imperial half-captain,” Havinal said, in the same flat tone.

  Was this a trial? She looked around for reassurance, but Arca had gone, vanished into the crowd that had gathered behind her. A large crowd – she had not noticed it forming as she walked through the camp. Men jostled quietly for position, some angry, others just outright inquisitive. Cassia turned back again and tried to put them from her mind. She felt herself tensing, ready for the first blow to land. Surely it would not be long in coming. This was the North: justice came quick, retribution even swifter.

  Her grandfather watched her, but there was no sign of support or comfort in his features. There couldn’t be, Cassia realised. Not while Vescar’s family and his supporters looked on.

  She recited the events of the previous evening as best she could remember them. Even so soon after the fight it was difficult to recall precisely what had happened. But the most important parts – the spearhead ploughing into the earth; the weight of the steel in her hand; the words he had spat at her – they were still clear.

  You die, the sorcery stops. Simple.

  Cassia saw Tarves’s eyes tighten when she quoted those words. He did not blink once as she described the final moments of the fight. When her account was finished, he said nothing at all.

  “And the facts?” Havinal asked.

  One of the legion’s junior officers rose to speak. The wounds upon Vescar’s body were beyond dispute, he said. A spear had been found a short distance from his corpse, the tip buried deep in the ground exactly as it would be if the girl’s tale was the truth. Scouts had surveyed the ground, but all other signs of the incident had been disturbed by the hurried arrival of guards from the perimeter.

  Cassia listened with only half an ear, distracted by fatigue. Attis’s horrible cordial had not worn off completely, and the drums still beat relentlessly at her temples. There was no time for this stupidity. She had to keep moving towards Caenthell. Every moment wasted was a moment in which the twisted things from behind the curse wards leeched more life from the land.

  She realised her head had dipped, and it was an effort to straighten her spine once more, to lift her chin so she could stare back at the commanders. Advisors and other officers milled behind them, and for a moment she thought she caught sight of another familiar face, but her mind was still too fogged to be certain.

  Craw? Watching over her? Or manipulating events from the shadows, as dragons had done in the stories ever since the Age of Talons? Or was it just a man who, in this uncertain light, bore a passing resemblance to the dragon’s human form?

  When she blinked she lost track of the man. Perhaps, given the strength of that cordial and the way Caenthell’s sorcery had already played with her thoughts, he had never been there at all.

  There were raised voices in the circle of commanders. Cassia shook loose her thoughts.

  “You would call my brother a coward? An Almoul?” Tarves still held Vescar’s sword, but now his hands had tightened around both hilt and blade.

  “I would call him a damned fool,” another man said. “I doubt many would disagree.”

  As Tarves came to his feet in a rage, the sword raised, Cassia realised that the situation had moved beyond farce. The integrity of the entire legion, of her mission to defeat Caenthell, stood threatened at this trial, and she did not think any of the commanders would be able to save it. It was up to her. Whether she had willed it or not, this was her mess to pick apart.

  “Stop!” she shouted, pouring as much of Caenthell’s insidious sorcery as she dared into her voice. The fire blazed upwards, consuming wood like a starving dog in the midden, and several commanders drew back from the flames, flinging up their arms to protect themselves.

  “Stop this stupidity now, damn you all!”

  Cassia strode between the two men and batted their weapons aside with her own. Until this moment she had not even realised she had drawn her blade. Tarves backed away from her, but he did not raise his sword.

  “Think on where you are. And on what waits for us up there.” Cassia pointed to the darkened skies that hid the mountains. “And on how many hundreds – how many thousands – have died already. And think on how stupid this must all seem to the High King now. How he must laugh at our squabbles and childish finger-pointing.”

  Tarves’s face was still dark, but now his anger was directed entirely at her. He was a big, broad man and his size had always intimidated her in the past. The memory of that nightmarish evening at Rann Almoul’s house, where her father and Rann himself negotiated her sale as though trading cattle, was still vivid in her mind. Tarves had been present then too, alternately laughing and scowling as the evening wore on.

  “Vescar was no coward, girl,” Tarves said.

  “He was scared,” Cassia told him. “And so are you. And Hetch. And Havinal and Attis too. We’re all scared half to death, you idiot. But together, we have half a chance of defeating this evil. I’m sick and tired of saying this to you all. If you turn and run, we will all die.”

  “And we will all die there in the mountains, if we follow your word!”

  Cassia was beyond intimidation. She stared straight into his eyes. “Do you think I want this? Do you think I want to go to my death? I know men will die up there, and if you believe for one moment that makes me happy then you’re even more stupid than you look! We’re all going to die in the end, Tarves. Even Baum died, and he had lived since before the fall of Caenthell. But if we can fight this evil together, and defeat it before it floods the whole land, then only some of us will die today.”

  She paused for breath. To her surprise Tarves was silent, though the insult she had thrown at him had darkened his features even further. The only sound she could hear now was the ever-constant drumming inside her head. Calling her back to Caenthell. To the castle. To the raised mockery of a throne room that surely stood there. To her father.

  Tarves was listening, she thought. He might not agree with her, but at least he listened.

  Give the man a reason to survive.

  The thought arrived fully formed in her mind; Cassia knew it was not her own.

  Malessar?

  There was no reply. Only the war drums.

  “I’ll call no man a coward for wanting to live,” she said aloud. “I would much prefer to call every man in this legion – every man who has defended his land against this foul invasion and every man who lives or dies under this command – I name every man a soldier.”

  Tarves stared down at her. “Every man.”

  Cassia nodded. “Every man,” she repeated.

  Despite her coat, and despite the small fire, it was cold out here. She fought back the shivering that threatened to show her weakness to the entire legion.

  “And if you should die?”

  “Then call me what you will,” she said. “For as long as you are able.”

  Tarves nodded once. “Acceptable.”

  He shifted his grip on the sword and offered it to her, hilt first. Cassia hesitated – she neither wanted nor needed another weapon; to her mind two swords were already at least one too many – but she recognised the gesture Tarves was making. She would undo all her own efforts if she was to refuse it. She took the hilt and lifted Vescar’s sword from his brother’s hands.

  The tension in the camp lessened at the same time as the weight on her shoulders increased, Cassia noted. Tarves Almoul had turned away, leaving her alone in the middle of this council. Or trial. Or whatever they had decided to call it.

  “Tarves,” she said quietly. The large man halted and looked back.

  “I m
eant every word.” She reversed her own grip on Vescar’s sword and offered it back to Tarves. “This belongs with him.”

  He took it without a word and left the circle, and Cassia breathed a sigh of relief. She hoped that had been the right thing to do. Surely Pelicos would have done the same. She looked around at Havinal, at Attis and the other commanders, and blinked in surprise to find that not only did they approve, but some openly smiled and nodded. The crisis had passed. All that remained now was to defeat Caenthell.

  Cassia almost laughed aloud at the absurdity of that thought. She rolled her head back to ease the tension in her neck, and stared up into the sky. The clouds above were unnaturally thick and grey, and it seemed the stain of Caenthell was spreading through them like the rot from an open wound. Soon – perhaps within the next day – the legion would be overtaken by the darkness. And the mists would follow close behind, tendrils coiling out to leech the life and soul from anything they touched.

  She let her gaze wander across the sky towards the eastern horizon, where the clouds were still visibly thinner. East, and then south – back into the untouched lands of Hellea. After hundreds of years, there was so much there for Caenthell to feed upon . . .

  Movement, there upon the ridge. Cassia squinted. At such distance it was difficult to be certain, but . . . a rider. It had to be. And another, further along, silhouetted against the light that filtered from the east. She did not think they were Havinal’s men.

  “Oh Ceresel, sweet luck,” she breathed. Now that thought did not seem quite so absurd.

  19

  Their arrival lifted the spirits of the whole legion. First came the mounted scouts, flying makeshift coloured pennants from their spear tips as they rode past the camp. Cassia thought she recognised one or two of the riders as Rais’s half-captains, the brash young men from the towns outside Hellea. They showed off as they came close, balancing precariously on the backs of their mounts and weaving in and out of formation, encouraging by the answering shouts from the camp’s perimeter. A few descended back into the valley to rejoin the March, cantering out of sight to report back to Rais himself.

  And then, at last, the first column of infantry appeared on the road. Cassia could tell immediately that these were her shieldmen. Their march was inhumanly disciplined compared to the columns that came behind them.

  She wanted to ride down to meet them, but Attis would not let her go anywhere near a horse. In fact he and Arca ganged up on her, refusing to leave her side until she promised she would stay within the bounds of the camp. Hobbled and frustrated, she had to wait as the column divided neatly in two. One half formed up in units further along the road, while the other half began the slow climb up the side of the valley towards the watching legion.

  “I had no idea there were so many of the blessed things,” Havinal observed as he passed by. The legion was in uproar as it shifted to accommodate so many reinforcements all at once, and the former quartermaster was plainly in his element. This was a battle he could control effortlessly, and win decisively. “How in all the hells did your sorcerer make them all?”

  It was something she had wondered herself more than once, and still she had no clear answer. Perhaps Malessar would tell her, if she lived to see him again. Or perhaps the truth would be lost in these mountains, along with the shieldmen themselves.

  “It is an incredible sight,” Attis said from her other flank. He sounded worried by what he saw.

  Arca merely spat onto the ground. He looked as exhausted as Cassia felt, yet he refused to retire to his tent. It had not taken Cassia long to realise he was waiting until he could see Ultess, or to have him pointed out on the road below. “Seen one walking statue, seen ’em all.”

  The two old men bickered away, and Cassia had to smile. It was typical of a soldier’s humour, but she already knew he was wrong. Even at this distance she could see differences between the shieldmen she had raised along the March and those she had gathered on her way through Lyriss. The latter were more square-cut and angular, their features defined by hard lines that sunlight or lanterns picked out in relief. The shadows that were thus cast looked somehow darker. Cassia had thought at first that they were sculpted by a man who only followed direction and who had no talent of his own, but she had only to encounter one of these shieldmen in the dark to see otherwise.

  The Hellean figures – she sometimes caught herself thinking of them as the originals – were more rounded, as though greater care had been taken to give them a form of humanity. Just as Meredith had been given. Their movements were more fluid and the details of their stone weapons more varied. In certain lights Cassia could almost swear she could see them smile or frown. Perhaps it was no surprise that the shieldmen who had given themselves the task of protecting her came from this half of the force.

  “He’s here, y’know,” Arca muttered at her shoulder. “The lord of silk an’ smiles.”

  “I know,” Cassia admitted with a sigh. That was why she had been thinking on the shieldmen – so that she would not have to think on Rais himself. “I suppose I should meet him before Havinal decides to boot him back down the hill.”

  “Pheh.” Arca spat again. “Don’t go too quick then, girl. That’s something I wouldn’t mind seeing.”

  The first thing she noticed was that Rais’s smile was still fixed – irrepressable and irritating – to his face, as though he had just returned from a merry chase through the taverns of Galliarca. It took her another moment to recognise the smile was forced and the prince’s eyes were darkened with exhaustion. While he still wore silks, they were frayed and dirty, and he had evidently bought or borrowed warmer clothes as well. In fact he wore so many contrasting styles and colours together that he could even pass as a storyteller.

  But his stride was no longer the swagger of a self-confident prince. Despite the fact that Rais’s position as head of the guard in Galliarca must have been handed to him on a silver plate, he had apparently taken his duties seriously. Those duties, however, were as nothing next to commanding an entire army as it marched to war – and an army of such varied composition, at that. Cassia had seen how the commanders of her makeshift legion were weighed down by their responsibilities, and she was glad she could trust the likes of Havinal and Attis to keep that weight from her own back. But Rais had shouldered the full burden in his efforts to win the respect of his Hellean officers. Even before Cassia had left the column to travel into Lyriss she had seen how the pressures mounted up on him. And Rais had known it too.

  The light veneer of confidence was gone, replaced by a kind of hardened determination. Rais had the look of a man who had marched each and every step alongside his men.

  The third thing Cassia noticed – even though the unnaturally clouded skies leeched all warmth from the air – was the heat of his embrace.

  She could have stood like this all day, wrapped within his arms, her own hands pressing him as close as possible while his breath warmed the top of her head. But the camp was in upheaval all around them, and the North would not wait forever.

  She gulped cold air into her lungs and wiped her eyes clear with the sleeve of her coat. Attis and Havinal stood at a discreet distance, along with some of the other commanders and the remaining Almouls. Cassia pushed aside a faint flush of embarrassment and glanced back at Rais. For once he had abandoned his roguish smile for a more concerned look.

  “A week ago you would have just kicked my shins. Things are plainly worse than I thought.” He reached out and plucked at the bloodstained sleeve of her borrowed coat. “Much worse?”

  “They could be better,” Cassia admitted.

  Rais sighed. “I pushed them as hard as I could up this damned road. Even now the train is probably a day behind us. If I could have been here any earlier . . .”

  He sounded angry, Cassia thought. That was . . . new. He stared around the legion’s camp as though searching for anyone who might dare to attack her, but aside from his frown there was no outward sign of that anger.

/>   “You look exhausted,” she said. “I don’t think you could have got here any sooner without half killing yourself, and every other man down there. There’s no fault, Rais. I’m just . . . glad to see you.”

  He sniffed. “Glad! I rode through the night for glad! Did you hear that, Teon? The Heir to the North is glad to see us! Well, to see me, anyway. I’m not certain how she feels about you.”

  He turned back with a sudden smile and laughed aloud. “Oh, if you could see your own face right now.”

  As much as the return of his flippant side irritated her, Cassia smiled back as she shook her head in mute resignation. Rais had already admitted to her that his bravado was a shield to deflect the close attention of others from his own failings, and though she envied him the ease with which he hid behind it, she could not begrudge him his maintenance of it. He was here, after all, when she had begun to fear he might fail to keep the disparate elements of his army together.

  “You got what you required in Lyriss, then.” Rais accompanied her across the field to where the officers of both forces were beginning to congregate. He gestured to the lines of shieldmen that had marched with her over the Antiachas.

  “That and more,” Cassia said. She wasn’t certain how much she should tell him. “At least there should be a way to retreat back into Lyriss if needed.”

  “Hmm.” Rais was silent for a moment. “So there is an army that can stand against this evil?”

  “Not an army, no. Rais, I told you before it was old magic.”