The Witchwood Crown
“Of course we would rather have you here, Tiamak,” she said. “As you may guess, I am not pleased we should be doing this now.” She darted a look at her husband. “But if we can send your . . . League apprentice, I suppose we could call him, then I will not fight it.”
“Let it be so, then.” Simon nodded. “And I would like to talk to this Etan before he goes. Let him know the importance of this.”
“Of course, Majesty.” But Tiamak showed that odd flicker again, a hint of resistance.
Simon decided to ignore it. “And you will make sure he has all that he needs to search for Josua and Vorzheva and their children? To search for the truth?”
“I swear by my village, Majesties. I swear by my oath to the High Ward.”
After Tiamak was gone, Simon avoided meeting Miriamele’s eye. He knew she would have complaints, and he was not in the mood to defend himself. Instead he looked at the food and empty cups left behind on the grass.
“Shall we carry all this in? It will be just like my scullion days,” he said.
“We will send servants,” Miriamele said crisply, and gathered her skirts beneath her as she rose. “I was never a scullion, if you remember.”
Simon watched her go. She was angry at him again, but with so many possible reasons, he wasn’t entirely sure why. How can I lose arguments I don’t even know I’m having? he wondered.
Irritated, he kicked over a cup and watched the wine bleed out onto the grass, then followed his wife back into the residence.
When Tiamak reached his chambers, he discovered that Thelía was already there and looking rather annoyed, although what had upset her was not immediately clear.
“I give you good day, my dearest,” he said. “How is your patient?”
“The Sitha? No better, but God be thanked, no worse. Still, there is something that is eluding me—eluding all of us—and I cannot put my hand upon it.”
Tiamak sighed. “I feel much the same, both with her and several other matters. I have felt this way for weeks now. It is like watching the surface of a stream back home, in my younger days. There are ripples I do not understand. It might be only rocks beneath the water, or it might be something moving.”
“What troubles you?”
“Oh, everything and nothing. Too much to tell just now.”
“Then I will leave you to think in silence, if you will only do me one kindness.”
“And that is?”
“Pour me a cup of the yellow dock cordial, will you? I am so weary today, and my head is aching.”
“A whole cup?”
“Very well, a half a cup. I will drink it slowly.” She frowned at him, but it was meant to be playful. “You are too cautious with me, Timo. We drylander women are sturdy too, you know.”
“Oh, that I know.” He uncorked the small jug and poured a generous measure into one of their precious glass cups, then held it up to the afternoon sun spilling through the window. It was a large window, and the primary reason Tiamak had chosen these rooms, which were otherwise less than grand, but he missed the light of his previous existence more than anything else. He gave the cup a shake and watched the cloudy liquid swirl like an unsettled sky.
“Thank you, husband,” Thelía said as she took it.
He left her with her drink and went to the table. What he was about to do had been in his head since Etan had first shown him the forbidden book. Tiamak had realized immediately upon seeing the Aetheric Whispers that he would need advice from another scholar, but the League was nothing like what it had been—only three Scrollbearers left, and that was if Faiera lived! He had been considering Etan as a new Scrollbearer because of the young monk’s active mind and good heart, but he was someone to be trained into the League and groomed as a scholar, not someone who could immediately step in and help. And help was what Tiamak truly needed just now.
His wife was reading Sarchoun’s On The Movement of Blood And Pneuma as she sipped her cordial, which suggested she was still worrying over the dying Sitha. Thelía seemed to think of little else since his return from the royal progress, and came back to their rooms most days only to use one of their books of physick or to sleep. Tiamak was not the most demanding husband, but he was beginning to feel a bit jealous toward the poisoned woman who was getting all his wife’s attention.
No good brooding, he told himself. Instead, I should thank He Who Always Steps On Sand that Thelía is alive and well, and that we are both here together. And my energies could be better used, too.
He took a sheet of parchment out of the writing box, cut a quill for use, and began writing.
My dear friend Aengas, he began, then worried briefly that it was too informal. He decided he would leave it as it was.
I send you this letter because I have a need for your knowledge that outweighs the shame of distracting you from your life and work. A most unusual book has come into my possession, a book that neither you nor I have ever seen, but only heard of, a thing of great infamy.
That said, I would not trouble you even so, except that I fear its contents may have bearing on other important matters. The book is mostly written in old Nabbanai, which is straightforward enough, but as a kind of code, the author—I will not use his name here, but you will know it, as you will know of the book—uses Khandian words in place of most of the important names and processes. I know little of the language of Khandia. You do, however. I trust you can see the shape of my dilemma.
This book cannot be sent unless I were to carry it myself, which is impossible just now as my duties here in Erchester prevent it. I do not ask you to come—I know it is too much to ask anyone in your condition—but I have no other ideas. Do you know anyone else who could help me, old friend? Are there scholars outside the Aedonite church who know something of the Khand’s ancient tongue? If you have guessed the name of this book, you have also guessed why I cannot go to the Sancellan Aedonitis for help, and why I cannot say more in a letter which must be entrusted to a messenger, even a royal messenger.
I hope this finds you as well as can be, and that your work goes well. Whatever your answer to this query, I will look forward to your writings on Warinsten and the ruins of Kementari.
Your brother in spirit,
Tiamak of the Village Grove, now of Erchester
He read it over, then blotted it and folded it before applying his seal. He would put it in the next southbound post himself, to make certain it stayed secret. It would likely come to nothing—Aengas was notoriously uninterested in other people’s work—but Tiamak felt the need to do something, anything. Since the day that fearful premonition had swept over as they journeyed across the Frostmarch, he had been haunted by an inexplicable feeling that his time was now short, that something was about to disrupt everything that had been ordinary in his and Thelía’s lives, like a large rock dropped into a small pond.
May the Elders grant that I am as poor at seeing the future as I am at reading Khandian, he prayed. But it provoked a sudden, worrying thought. What am I sending Brother Etan into? Should I go myself instead?
Such questions had no simple answers, of course—none that any but the gods could know.
Tiamak kissed his wife on the top of her head as he headed toward the door, then saw that the cordial glass was almost dropping from her fingers; she had fallen asleep with Sarchoun still open on her lap. He removed the book and then took the glass, which fortunately was all but empty, and set both on the table before he left.
“Sleep well, dearest wife,” he whispered as he closed the door. “Sleep safe.”
30
The Slow Game
They rode northeast over the wide plain the Rimmersmen called Osterdyr, forest to the north and the lake, wide as the sea, stretching for miles beside them on the south, making their way out of the southern springtime and into snows that would not melt until much later in the year. Makho was pleased by
their escape from what he called “the mortals’ trap,” but when Kemme said, for the second time in as many hours, “Four Talons and a Giant, but we killed dozens of their best!” the chieftain stared at him in displeasure.
“The queen would expect no less, Sacrifice,” was all he said, but Kemme did not speak of it again afterward.
Still, Makho was pleased by what had happened, and during those long days of riding he did not go out of his way to make Nezeru’s life any more miserable than he had before, though he still treated her with contempt.
Storm after storm blew through the gap, but bad weather was never much of a discouragement to the Hikeda’ya, and because this bleak part of the northern world was almost uninhabited, the queen’s hand could ride toward the distant peak called Jinyaha-yu’a in daylight as well as darkness. But Makho had not lost all caution: the mortal Jarnulf knew the territory better than did any of the Hikeda’ya, and was consulted frequently, but he was never allowed to lead the hand or even ride at the front. Makho took that place himself, behind only the giant Goh Gam Gar, whose task it was to clear the way when the snow lay piled too deep for their horses to pass. Kemme and Saomeji rode with the chieftain and were close in his counsels as well. Thus it was that Nezeru and the mortal became the endmost riders of the small company.
Jarnulf slowed his horse in a way that Nezeru knew she was not supposed to notice. She guessed that he sought to speak with her because she was in disgrace, and would try to draw her out with the idea of making her an ally. The other Hikeda’ya all suspected the mortal’s motives, and in this at least Nezeru agreed with them. Queen’s Huntsmen were known to be solitary and cruel, as well as murderously proud of their freedom when the rest of their brethren were collared slaves. It seemed hard to believe one of the huntsmen would so lightly join his fortune with a party of Talons.
“So, Sacrifice Nezeru,” Jarnulf said abruptly. “How do you come here?”
It still seemed strange that someone who looked so alien could speak her mother tongue so flawlessly. He even made the secondary “k” sound as well as the Hikeda’ya themselves, on the inward breath instead of the outward. And his grasp of the subtleties was good too, asking her “how” she had come instead of “why,” which had the sound of interrogation.
“The queen sent me. How do you come here, Freedman Jarnulf?” she asked.
He smiled, recognizing, as she had, that it was to be a long, slow game, one that could last for days. In this land of endless, snowy plains, of gray-white skies and stunted forests of dark, gnarled trees, nobody was in a hurry.
“I come out of the slave pens of Nakkiga, of course,” he said. “Nakkiga-That-Was to be more precise, the old city outside the mountain. I was born in White Snail Castle at the foot of Stormspike, and I was taught from the time I could draw breath to fear the queen. So in that way, no different from you.”
“Except I wore no slave collar. And I was taught not to fear her but to love her.”
“It comes to much the same.” His look was mocking. “And I knew you were not born in the slave pens, Sacrifice. That is obvious in your every movement.”
“What do you mean?”
“The hue of your skin and the shape of your face tell me you are a halfblood, but you move like one raised among Nakkiga’s nobility. Am I right?”
“You are,” she said, nettled by the accuracy of his guess. “Is there more that you can see of my past merely by looking, Queen’s Huntsman?”
He showed the hint of another self-satisfied smile. Mortals, even this one, were so over-generous with their thoughts, Nezeru thought: their faces were like books, with everything written there. “It is not only your proud posture that tells me you were raised in a noble house before you joined your order,” he said. “You clearly learned the Hao sa-Rashi—the Way of the Exiles that is taught to children of the higher clans. And the stiffness with which you still perform some of the gestures tell me it is not long since you left the house of your childhood.”
“How so?”
“As your people grow older, their performance of the ancient gestures grows smoother and less careful. Among the eldest—in the queen’s Landborn advisers, for instance—it is impossible to tell that they have ever expressed themselves or moved in any other way.”
Nezeru was a bit taken aback: whatever else he might be, this mortal was no fool. But she was also beginning to enjoy the game. “Let me tell you something about yourself, then,” she said. “You had a teacher, the sort that slaves do not usually have. You learned the fighting arts and even horsemanship before you left the slave life. And you have tried to unlearn the same sort of rote gestures you mock in me, at least enough to pass for an ordinary Rimmersman among your own kind.” She was gratified by a slight shift at the edge of his mouth—a strike! “Now why would you do such a thing, try to disguise how you were raised?”
“I give you honor, Sacrifice Nezeru. Your eye is keen, although I had spoken of my teacher Xoka before. But the reason I had to unlearn the gestures taught me as a child slave should be obvious. As one of the queen’s huntsmen, I range the whole of these lands from the border of her domain down into Rimmsersgard—and occasionally, as this time, all the way into the northern reaches of Erkynland. I must deal with other mortals that I meet in my travels, and I often trade in their villages. What do you think I would receive instead of jerked meat and grain if they knew I was one of Queen Utuk’ku’s slave-catchers?”
“A noose, perhaps. And an iron cage for your bones.” Now she smiled, with the conscious desire to show him how pleasant it would be to see him thus. “I hear that the bodies of traitors are often hung along the borders of the mortal lands, to show what the rest of your kind think of those who take the Norn queen’s silver, as they say.”
“Exactly.”
They rode in silence for a while. Far ahead, Nezeru could see the humped silhouette of the giant, like a moving snowdrift. Behind him, Makho spoke with Saomeji, with Kemme following a little way behind. More and more in these last days the chieftain and the Singer seemed to be in deep conversation, often arguing, and Nezeru wished she knew why. She also wondered why Saomeji’s master Akhenabi had allowed her to remain with this hand when Makho had wanted her sent back to Nakkiga for punishment. Their mission was important, of course, but surely the Lord of Song could have picked any one of dozens to replace her from his own entourage of Singers and Sacrifice-trained guards. And Akhenabi, in the plundering of her thoughts, could not have failed to learn that she had lied about being with child. Why had that also been ignored? Certainly the arch-Singer had not informed Makho, who clearly still believed her lie.
“If I am right, as I think I am, that you are young for your kind,” Jarnulf said abruptly, as if he had been listening to her thoughts, “how have you come to join this grave undertaking—whatever it may be?”
“I was top of my file in the Order of Sacrifice.” She could hear the tightness in her own voice, and was unhappy with herself. Was it so obvious that she, too, had wondered at the same thing? “I killed six armed slaves with my bare hands. I crippled two rival Sacrifices in the Games. I can fight as well as any male and better than most.”
“Oh, I am certain,” he said. “But still, files pass through the Order of Sacrifice every few years, don’t they? There must have been dozens of other warriors who reached equally high rank in their own time, and who have been blooded since in actual battle.
“Because you have not been in real battle before our fight with the Erkynlanders, have you?”
She was surprised by how that stung her. “A bad guess, mortal. I have been in many fights, many struggles,” she said almost too quickly, thinking of the islanders she had slaughtered, but also of the one she had let escape.
“Ah.” Irritatingly, he acted as though she had agreed with him. “So who are your parents, Sacrifice? They must be powerful indeed to secure such an important posting for their daught
er while she is still so young.”
“My youth means nothing.”
“Really? It certainly means something to me. Your people live to be a hundred times as old as mine—and yet I would wager that despite your high position and honors, I have lived longer than you have in this world, beneath these stars.” He spread his fingers toward the night sky. “I have seen twenty-eight summers. How many have you seen?”
“Meaningless.” She kept her face immobile, but now she wanted to kill him and silence his mockery. “You jab at me so you do not have to answer any questions of your own.”
The pale blue eyes surveyed her. “Then I apologize. I suppose, in a way, I am a guest, and should be better behaved. Question away, Sacrifice. Is there something about me that warrants your interest?”
“Interest? Perhaps.” Nezeru knew she had lost her calm. She silently repeated the Prayer of Loyal Servants until she could think with her customary clarity. “Your arrows are different than ours,” she said at last.
He raised his eyebrows in feigned surprise. “Well, that is certainly cause for concern.”
“Not in and of itself, no. But yours are fletched with hawk or eagle feathers. We Sacrifices use feathers from the black goose.”
“Do you want a contest, then, to see whose arrows fly most truly? I may not be Hikeda’ya, but nobody yet has complained of my skill with a bow.”
“I do not seek a contest—although it might be interesting to have such a thing one day, you and I.” Now she allowed herself to smile, just a little. It felt like power, like lifting her cloak to display a sharp blade. “But I followed you down the hill that night we escaped the mortal army and I saw many arrows with that fletching. They were all sticking into trees.”
For a moment he rode in silence. “I’m afraid I don’t understand you, Sacrifice.”
“Oh, I think you do, Freedman. For someone who professes to be a skilled archer, you seem to have hit very few mortal targets.”