The Witchwood Crown

  Nezeru found her voice. “I fear only failure.”

  “An enemy you know well, I think. Sit.”

  Nezeru hesitated. She knew that the giant could not disobey the crystal goad that Makho held, and he would not let the giant harm her while he believed she carried a child. In any case, I am still a Talon of the Queen, she told herself. Even my failure has not robbed me of that. Not yet.

  She found a fallen tree she judged to be just out of reach of the long arms, at least as long as the giant remained seated. The Hikeda’ya were camped beside the forest they had been skirting for several days, and trees were plentiful, but although he had permitted a cookfire, Makho had ordered her to build it small and to use only dry wood. She thought it was odd the chieftain showed so much caution here, in a place so empty of other living things.

  The giant fixed her with a stare. His eyes were black, and should have been impossible to see beneath his bony brow-shelf, but a spark of pale green seemed to burn at the center of each. “You are female,” the giant said abruptly. “You look like all the others, but I can smell your womb.” He pinched one of the hares between thumb and forefingers as thick as Nezeru’s arms, then sucked it in half, fur and all, before popping the rest into its mouth. She could hear the bones crunching as it chewed. “I hear you are going to whelp, but I do not smell that. Gar wonders why.”

  Nezeru felt a moment of trapped panic, but the creature had spoken almost conversationally; she decided to pretend she had not heard his last words. “Yes, I am female,” she said at last. “How is it that you speak our tongue?”

  “What tongue should I speak?” Goh Gam Gar smiled—at least she thought it was a sort of smile—showing a mouth full of broad yellow fangs. For a moment the giant looked almost like a person. Almost. “My kind do not speak among ourselves. We live far apart, and when two males meet they do not talk like your kind, they fight for the hunting territory. Much we must eat. We need a wide land to keep us fed.” He bit the head off the second hare and sucked on it until the furry bag of skin had emptied, then rolled up the bloody hide and delicately consumed it.

  “So how did you learn?”

  “Many of us do, if we live long enough. Many of us have fought for your Queen Utuk’ku. We learn the words of command, of attack. But no one needs to teach us to kill.” The toothy yellow grin appeared again. “But I speak best because I am the oldest. I am the greatest. Three hundred turns of the world or more Goh Gam Gar has been alive, and I have been the queen’s captive for much of it. I fought for her in the southern lands, when the tower fell, and I alone of my people who went there came back to the mountains.” The eyes narrowed. “Oh, yes, Gar has learned many of your words. Whips. Chains. Fire.”

  “Your loss in the south must have been great,” she said carefully. “I know many giants died there.”

  “My mate. My whelps, some of them not full-grown.” He gave her a shrewd look that made her drop her gaze.

  “I am sorry to hear it.” Nezeru was telling the truth, at least at that moment. Her own people had suffered so many losses over the years that no victory they might ever win would offset them all. Nezeru’s people understood loss.

  The giant was still staring at her. At first she almost hoped, fearful as it would be, that he was looking at her merely as a potential meal. But the longer she sat across from the monster, the more she believed something else was at work, perhaps even that he had worked out her secret.

  Watching her did not stop Goh Gam Gar from throwing the last two hares in his mouth and swallowing them without chewing. It came to her that he would not have much more trouble doing the same to her.

  “Come here, Blackbird,” Makho called from the far side of the camp. The nickname came from the ancient story of a blackbird who had failed to deliver an important message because of cowardice. It was an old insult among the Hikeda’ya, and every time Makho used it, she felt it.

  “Blackbird, is it?” A deep rumble came up through her feet and legs. The giant was laughing. “We have something in common, you and I. Your master Makho is also my master. He holds the queen’s little gift. Did I refuse him or do something he did not like, he could make me lie on the ground howling in pain until my heart burst in my breast.”

  She got up and returned to the cookfire, which had been doused and was now only a thin trickle of smoke. The sun was vanishing behind the mountains to the west, and the whole valley was sunk in shadow. Soon night would come and they would be traveling again.

  “See that the horses are saddled,” said Makho before she even reached him. “Kemme has returned from scouting the way ahead. We will leave when the stars kindle.”

  • • •

  The rocky valley narrowed into a defile. By the time the familiar stars had mounted into the sky above her head, Nezeru and the others were walking single file up a steep ridge, only the sureness of her footsteps preventing a tumble onto the jagged, snow-capped rocks below. Directly above the horizon the star called Mantis was following a dimmer light named Storm’s Eye, which meant they had turned farther south than she would have guessed. Nezeru wondered why Makho had brought them so far into the lands of men when their destination lay so far to the east.

  A ghost owl slid past just above her head, so close she could have touched it, a flash of silent white that appeared and disappeared in the space between heartbeats. A moment later Nezeru heard its barking call in the treetops below the ridge and a sudden, almost overwhelming desire for freedom struck her. It was such an unusual sensation that she could barely give it a name—to go where she wanted, to live as she chose . . . But of course that would only come with a betrayal of everyone and everything she knew. Nezeru could no more be free of her ordinal vow than she could put on wings and feathers like a Tinukeda’ya shape-shifter out of old legend and become a real blackbird. And without that vow, what was she, anyway? A halfblood. A coward and a liar. Only the success of their mission might change that, might give her a chance to make good again.

  “The Mantis is bright tonight,” said a voice just behind her. With the calm learned at the cost of countless beatings in her order-house days, Nezeru let the surprise wash over her without affecting her steps. White-robed Saomeji the Singer had come upon her, silent and unnoticed as an ermine, while she had been lost in thought. “That bodes well for our mission.”

  “Our lives are the queen’s.” It was the blandest of responses she could make.

  He followed behind her in silence for a score of paces before saying quietly, “I would not have punished you as Makho did.”

  She thought that a very unusual remark. Makho and Kemme were far ahead of them both, and she could just see the top of Ibi-Khai’s head past the next bend of the ridge-trail, so it was relatively safe to speak; but the why of it made no sense. Did he hope to catch her speaking some treason against the queen’s chosen hand chieftain?

  “I failed,” she said. “I was punished as I deserved.”

  “Failure is usually as much a fault of the leader as of the follower who fails.”

  Nezeru could not make out what Saomeji wanted from her, and that worried her badly. The Singer had avoided her the last several days, but in that he was no different from any of the others—the stink of her crimes was on her like the rotted meat between the giant’s teeth. Did he merely want to couple with her? That, at least, made some sense, but even if he had not been told about her being with child, she did not think the Singer would risk provoking their hand chieftain.

  She took a breath. “Do you call Makho a failure, then?”

  He laughed. She envied him the lightness she heard. “No, never. The queen and my master did well when they chose him. He is like a knife of finest blackstone, so sharp that he can cut the air itself and make it bleed.”

  “When you say your master, you mean Akhenabi.” The Lord of Song’s bottomless black eyes and wrinkled mask now lurked at the edges of many of her
dreams. “Are you saying that he chose this Queen’s Hand?”

  He ignored her question. “The Lord of Song is more than my master. He will be the savior of our people.” Saomeji spoke so flatly it almost sounded as though he didn’t believe it, that he was speaking by rote, but there was a gleam in his alien golden eyes that she didn’t recognize. “You interested him, hand-sister. I could tell.”

  His words touched something that had been disturbing her since Bitter Moon Castle. Emboldened by the distance between themselves and the rest of their comrades, she turned and asked him, “Why did your master let me go?”

  The Singer’s look was carefully blank. “This hand of Talons was ordered by the queen, and sworn to her and her alone. How could my master have interfered?”

  This was ground far more dangerous than the slope they climbed, but now that she had started Nezeru felt a sort of heedless freedom, as though this night and this high place were both outside the bounds of what was ordinary. Another part of her was horrified by such risky behavior, but nothing had seemed quite the same since Makho had used the hebi-kei on her. “You surely know better than that, Singer Saomeji. Chieftain Makho was the queen’s choice to lead this hand. Makho wished me sent back to Nakkiga for punishment. Why would Akhenabi thwart him of his will?”

  Saomeji did not speak for a while, and they climbed in almost complete silence. For a Singer, he was well trained in stealth.

  “Do you know anything of my master, hand-sister?” Saomeji said at last. “Beyond the stories children tell each other?”

  “I know he is one of the very oldest,” she said carefully. “One of the first Landborn, after our ships found their way here. I know that he has the queen’s ear, and her trust. I know that he is feared in every land, by people who have never looked on his face or heard his voice.” And by me, too, she thought. How I wish I had never seen him so closely!

  Saomeji shook his head. “You know very little, then, young Nezeru. We are of an age, you and I, but I know more than you—much more.” He looked straight ahead, as though describing a picture only he could see. “I have walked the deep places below Nakkiga, the ancient depths where our people no longer go, and I have seen things there that would send you into madness . . . but still I am as a child to Akhenabi and his closest kin. We all are. The old ones, the masked ones, are subtle beyond our understanding. What are we, who have lived but a few hundred turns of the seasons, to those who have passed a thousand winters—or ten thousand?” He opened his eyes, fixing her with his honey-yellow stare. “My master saw something in you. What that was I cannot say, nor even guess. As well might a snail try to understand the reasons of the foot that crushes him or spares him. Because we are small, Nezeru. We are small, you and I and even Makho, and our span is scarcely longer than that of the mortals who swarm the land and destroy our peace—a few centuries, then we are dust. The Queen does not die, and her chosen ones do not die either, although eventually all the rest of our kind find their ending. How can you and I judge the thoughts of those who have seen the very form of the world shift—seen mountains rise, seas dry?”

  You like the sound of your own voice, Nezeru thought. That is a failing most of your secretive order does not share. But she only said, “So I cannot hope to understand the reason your master spared me because I have never seen a mountain grow?”

  “If you like.” Saomeji was amused again, and for some reason that frightened her. He could be no more privileged in his birth than she was—another halfblood, but with the added defect of the golden eyes of their traitorous Zida’ya cousins—so what gave this mongrel Singer such confidence? “It is not a failure of your youth but a failure of knowledge and imagination,” he went on. “There are great matters in train, greater than you or I can know—or perhaps even guess at. But if Makho’s anger has brought you despair, I bring you something that should melt that unhappiness like sun on shallow snow. And it is this—the most powerful of our folk see some purpose in you, Sacrifice Nezeru. Lord Akhenabi does not make mistakes.” He walked a few more paces in silence, then said, “Look up.”

  The wind had risen as they neared the top of the ridge, and for a moment she thought she had misheard him above its noise. “Look up?”

  “There. You see the stars hung in the sky like the lanterns above Black Water Field? My lord Akhenabi sees the very paths they travel, where they have been and where they will be. In my scant time in the Order of Song I have learned the way their movement pulls on those of us below, the way their light brings life to darkness, but my master even sees the darkness between them. Not the absence of their light, understand, but the darkness itself—he reads it like a book.”

  She looked up at the teeming stars. “I do not understand you.”

  She could hear the amusement in his voice. “I do not always understand myself, hand-sister. When I studied the Great Songs and the Lesser Songs in the order-house, it was as though a fire was lit in my thoughts. That fire still burns. Sometimes it warms me. Sometimes I feel it will consume me, blazing until I am only ash, floating up into those dark places where the stars do not hold sway.”

  Nezeru was beginning to think that this halfblood Singer was not merely subtle but actually mad, as damaged in his own way as she was by her own cowardice and failure. Was it true, then? Were all halfbloods corrupted by their birth?

  Before either of them could speak again, Ibi-Khai appeared on the path ahead of them. “Dawn will be here soon,” he announced. The Echo had pulled back his hood; his long black hair swirled around his narrow face. “Makho and Kemme have found a way down to the plain below.” Ibi-Khai was clearly waiting for them to catch up, which meant no more unsettling private conversation with Saomeji. Nezeru felt relieved. “Make haste!” Ibi-Khai urged them. “We will stop there until the daystar is gone.”

  “The Queen watches over us,” replied Saomeji.

  “Our lives are hers,” said Ibi-Khai, making the sign of fealty. “No praise of her is too great.”

  Jarnulf had rested as long as he dared. His injuries were minor—a few deep cuts, a long but shallow weal across his scalp, some scratches and scrapes. He had no idea if the three dead Norns had been a wide patrol out of Bitter Moon Castle or a scouting party for a larger force, but although this southern end of Moon’s Reach Valley had been a good place for an improvised ambush, it was a bad spot for evading a determined hunting party of Sacrifices. Large troops of Hikeda’ya often brought the terrible white hounds from Nakkiga’s kennels to guard the camp during the day, when the Cloud Children did not like to travel. With luck he might elude upright pursuers in the forested hills above the valley, but Jarnulf knew he had no such chance against a pack of Nakkiga hounds.

  He also knew he could not make his way straight over the highest hills from where he stood now because of the icy, windscraped rocks of the steep crest. He would have more choices at the far end of the valley, including a pass low enough that he could climb it without suffering too badly, and if necessary could actually escape through into Hikeda’ya lands where it would be easier to hide, at least long enough to allow a wide troop to pass him on their way south. Normally Jarnulf would not have ventured so near to one of the border fortresses, but he could not rid his thoughts of the corpse-giant’s dire words. If the creature had been truthful and the masked queen really was alive, then had it also spoken the truth about the Hikeda’ya planning to attack the lands of men once again? What would his solitary quest mean then—a dead Sacrifice here, a dead Sacrifice there—when thousands more of them marched south to kill mortal men and women?

  • • •

  It was the strangest war party that Jarnulf had ever seen. As he watched from a high, hidden place at the southern mouth of the pass, it was easy enough to see that the five human-sized shapes were all Hikeda’ya. Five of them traveling in the wild lands meant a “hand”—an assassination party or something like, since scouts tended to move in even smaller numbers. L
ike all their kind, this hand of hated Hikeda’ya traveled mostly by night and used fire sparingly. Nothing about them seemed exceptional. But instead of five, he was looking down on six travelers, and the sixth member of their party was monstrously huge. From where Jarnulf lurked, that one looked and moved like one of the Hunën, but if so, it was by far the biggest he had ever seen, and he had encountered more than a few. Also, the creature did not appear to be restrained in any way, which made no sense at all. The Hikeda’ya often used giants in battle, but each one required a small force of Sacrifices just to make sure the monsters attacked the Hikeda’ya’s enemies and not the Hikeda’ya themselves. This giant actually appeared to be walking free—a companion instead of a slave, if such a thing could even be imagined.

  Jarnulf needed to make a decision, and soon. Within half a day or less they would reach the spot where he had left the dead Norn scouts and signed the bloody work with his customary White Hand, so it was only good sense to keep as far away from these newcomers and their pet giant as possible. Still, there was something here he didn’t understand, something that tugged at him and made him want to know more. Was this the sign he had asked God for? Or merely another strange event in this strangest of seasons?

  And that is my weakness, he told himself. At least some would say so. Father used to tell me, “Make curiosity your strength.” But Master Xoka always said, “Wisdom seeks for nothing, because in time Death finds all, and then all lessons are learned.” And still, all these years later, I swing back and forth like a weathercock between those two voices.

  At last, Father’s way won out: Jarnulf began to move closer, but not too close, his movements parallel with the route of the strange traveling party. A Hunë could pick up a scent when even the sharp nose of a Hikeda’ya could not, and the last thing Jarnulf wanted was to become the quarry of a hunting giant.

  The Talons found a place to rest that would be sheltered from the rising sun by a stone outcrop, but although Nezeru’s legs were weary from the climb through the pass and the long descent, and an hour or two of sleep would be a useful thing, sleep would not come. The strange conversation with Saomeji had set her mind awhirl.