The Witchwood Crown

  Jarnulf gave her a look. “Not likely,” he said, but again she thought she detected something more beneath the words. “I’ve never seen the ugly bastard before.” He looked around. “I don’t see anyone else coming. I think that was all of them.”

  She held her tongue as they reached Makho, who lay on his stomach, struggling to rise. The arrow that had struck him earlier was gone, although the wound was obvious and bloody. Nezeru had no doubt he had pulled it out with his own hands, eager to join the fighting.

  A short distance away, beside the big stone, they found Kemme and Saomeji in the middle of a circle of bearded corpses. Kemme was wounded in a dozen places but was already sitting up, tightening his belt around his arm to staunch the blood from the worst of his wounds. The Singer lay motionless a short distance away. He seemed unharmed as far as Nezeru could see, and even when she turned him over she could find no blood, but he was utterly insensible and limp as a rag, as though he had fallen asleep in the middle of the life and death struggle.

  “What happened here?” she wondered aloud. “What did these mortals want?”

  Jarnulf bent over one of the corpses and cut something free, then held it up—a wedge-shaped piece of iron dangling on a leather cord. “Do you see this?” He shook the heavy medallion. “Hovnir, the Ax of Udun Rimmer, the old god of my people. These are Skalijar, as I guessed.”

  “But why should they hunt us?”

  Jarnulf shrugged. “We are bound for Urmsheim. There is a place there called the Uduntree, sacred to the old gods of the Rimmersfolk. I told you, they think your people demons. They wanted to keep us off their sacred ground.”

  “A foolish reason to die.” She turned back to examining Saomeji.

  “Do you know any better ones?” Jarnulf asked, but before she could even wonder what such a strange thing meant, he let out a low whistle of surprise. When she turned to see what had startled him, she saw he had lifted up another corpse. It was really only half a corpse, though, since everything from the shoulders up was gone, leaving only a smoking tatter of burnt furs and blackened flesh pierced by jagged bits of bone. “By God, what happened to this one?” Jarnulf said, his eyes wide. For the first time since the fighting had begun, she saw real fear on his face.

  “The Singer did that,” said Kemme, getting unevenly to his feet. “A pretty trick of his I did not have much chance to watch. Something to do with stones. He killed several that way before he fell down like that.”

  “We must get him and Makho to shelter,” said Nezeru.

  Kemme stared at her, blood smeared across his hawklike face. “Until Makho can speak for himself, only I give orders, halfblood.” He pointed at Saomeji. “You two take the Singer, I will carry Makho.”

  Jarnulf was looking around. “Where is the giant? I don’t see him.”

  Kemme’s mouth began to curl into a sneer until he grasped the meaning of what Jarnulf had said. Then, with a snarl of frustration, he fell to his knees and plucked at Makho’s belt until he found the pouch that held the crystal rod. He stood up, holding it, and cupped one hand to his mouth.

  “Giant! Where are you? Come to me now, or I will choke you and roast your heart. Do you feel your collar?” He held the rod near his lips, whispered something—Nezeru thought she heard a low murmur of song. An instant later, a terrible bellow of pain and fury rose from the slope below.

  “Curse you!” came Goh Gam Gar’s booming voice. “I am trapped under stones down here! If you do that to me again, I will dig through the very mountain itself to rip your head off!”

  Kemme laughed harshly. He whispered to the rod again, and was rewarded with another ground-shaking bellow from the giant. “Well, I suppose we should dig him out,” he said at last. “Then he can carry the other two to shelter.”

  • • •

  It was strange to sit around a fire as mortals did, but when Saomeji had recovered enough to speak he had begged them to light one. Now he huddled beside it, as weak as if he had just survived a terrible fever. The smoke drifted up and out of the shallow cavern to be shredded by the mounting wind.

  “A trick, of sorts,” he said when Jarnulf asked him about the burned corpses. “It was a piece of luck we were surrounded by the right kind of stones. Most will not hold so much heat long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?”

  “Long enough to throw them before they burst.” He shook his head and inched a bit closer to the flames. “I sang fire into them until they grew hot, then threw them.” He lifted his right hand. The skin was terribly red and blistered. “But it is hard to bring so much force to bear so quickly. I am exhausted. I am sure I will sleep as if I were a child again.”

  • • •

  Later, while they were out gathering more wood, a task that Nezeru had never performed before, she found herself near Jarnulf while Kemme, the other member of the expedition, was a good distance away.

  “So those were Skalijar,” she said. “Will we meet more of them?”

  Jarnulf banged a log against a tree, knocking snow from it. “I doubt it. They waited until they felt it was the best time to attack, when the giant was not with us. That was more than two score men that we killed. If there had been more, they would have already made themselves known.”

  “But why? Why would they attack us? You said they believe us demons. Why would they take such a risk?”

  “You do not understand mortals, Sacrifice, even if you are half a mortal yourself. We do not always do what makes sense. Especially when we are driven by fear or rage.”

  “They were so afraid of us that they attacked us?”

  “They were afraid of us doing what we are going to do—climb Urmsheim, their sacred mountain. And they believed they could prevent us because their gods wanted it so—that with the gods’ help, they could defeat demons. That is their story. That is the tale that gives their lives sense.”

  “So you are saying that they were foolish, like children.”

  Jarnulf added a new log to his pile, then stepped back and looked at her squarely. “I am saying that all living things that think have a story, something that makes sense out of the howling chaos into which they are born. You should know, Nezeru of the Order of Sacrifice. Your people would have curled up and died long ago if you did not cling to the story of the Garden and of your undying queen. You believe that she will lead you back to happiness again, just as in those long-ago days, and so you endure terrible hardships, dreadful wars. You do not even protest the fact that you will likely not be alive to see that happiness if it ever comes.”

  For a moment, Nezeru could not understand him. “But you know that is not a mere story. The Garden, the queen—it is all true!”

  Jarnulf’s face was again carefully emotionless. “If you say so.”

  “But she is your queen, too! Are you not her huntsman—her slave-taker? Do you not labor in her service?” Frightened that they had reached such strange territory of thought, she looked around for Kemme, but he was still high up the slope.

  “I have my own story. Being a servant of the Queen of the Hikeda’ya does not command my thoughts as well. Even you could think differently if you chose.”

  “That is treason!”

  “If you say so.”

  “How do you know I will not go to Kemme or Makho and tell them what you say?”

  “I don’t. Is that part of your story? That when somebody’s words make you frightened, you must see that one destroyed?”

  Nezeru had never experienced anything like this and did not know how to think about it. His ideas were worse than treasonous, they were terrifying. They turned the world upside down. But at the same time, as though she had been pushed from a great height, she also felt a moment of wild freedom simply contemplating such things. It frightened her, but she was not ready to flee from it. “You are a very strange, very dangerous man.”

  “You could n
ot even guess.”

  She watched him as he continued his search for wood, as calm as if he had not just called the Mother of All a liar and the Garden a foolish dream. “How can you live without a story, mortal? How could anyone live that way?”

  “You’d be surprised. And I never said I didn’t have a story of my own. When you meet someone who has lost his story, then you will see someone who is truly dangerous.” He surveyed his stack of logs and broken branches. “Perhaps it is time for us to go back. I cannot carry more than this.”

  But now Nezeru wanted to talk. She knew so many things that proved him wrong, but why should she even argue with him? Surely it would be better to denounce him and have done with it. She knew that any feeling of confusion as strong as this must be a sort of dark magic. But all she could think of were more questions.

  “You know a lot about the Skalijar,” she said. “Why is that?”

  He gave her an irritated look. “I told you all. I have moved through this part of the world for years. I have also been farther to the south than you can even imagine—well into the lands of mortals. I have been in their cities.”

  “You have? How?”

  The edge of his mouth curled—was he fighting a smile? “Well, do not forget, Sacrifice Nezeru, I am a mortal. Nobody was likely to be very surprised to see another Rimmersman.”

  More questions fought for release, but even she was surprised at the first one that escaped. “What are they like? The mortal cities?”

  He shrugged. “Loud. Dirty—in fact, you would think them filthy. People build higgledy-piggledy, wherever they choose. People do what they want, and when they get in each others’ way, they argue.”

  Nezeru could not imagine this. “How can such a thing be? It must be dreadful! Why would their rulers let them behave so?”

  “Two possibilities, Sacrifice. One is that their rulers are not as strong and clever as ours. Another is that they do not fear freedom as much as ours do.”

  “You make a joke. That is not freedom, to fight with other people, to do what you wish! That is chaos.”

  “Well, perhaps that is the difference, then. Mortals feel more comfortable with the freedom of chaos than the freedom of obedience.”

  Now she felt certain that he was inventing things that could not be true, and it made her angry. “You knew that man,” she said suddenly. “He knew you.”

  Jarnulf showed her a blank face. “What man are you talking about?”

  “The one-eyed man of the Skalijar who tried to kill Makho. He saw you, and he recognized you.”

  “I doubt that. But if he did, it is no mystery. I have been traveling the borderlands for years. I have had encounters with such people before. I have killed some of them, but others no doubt lived to remember me.”

  Nezeru shook her head. “I do not believe you, mortal. That was not the look he gave you. That was not what was in his face—the sight of an old enemy. He was surprised to see you, but he recognized you.”

  “None of that disproves what I have said.”

  From high up the slope, Kemme turned and began to make his way back toward them, a huge pile of logs cradled in an improvised sling over his back.

  “Just tell me the truth,” Nezeru said, and was aware of a kind of desperation in her need to know, although she could not say why. “Did you know that one-eyed man?”

  He turned to look at her as he shouldered his burden of wood, and to her astonishment, he smiled broadly, like a man who had just been given high praise or rich reward. “I never saw him before this day.”

  He was lying, of course, and not only that, he knew that she knew he was lying—he had as much as told her so with that easy, self-satisfied grin. It should have sent her running to Makho, but it did not. Instead, it filled her with a curious agitation she had never known, so unexpected and so unusual that for long moments she could not even make sense of what it was. Only as she followed his lean form back toward the cave where Makho and Saomeji waited, did she begin to understand it.

  This man—this mortal man, she thought wonderingly. No, this traitor. Why does he fascinate me so?

  37

  Two Bedroom Conversations

  It was a warm night. The upper floors of the Hayholt’s royal residence were full of hot damp air that had the sparking feel of imminent thunder. The servants had been dismissed to the outer room and now the queen sat naked at her mirror, brushing her hair.

  “God reminds us that these bodies are only loaned to us, to clothe our spirits while we walk the sinful earth,” she said suddenly.

  Simon was huddled in the bed already, wearing a night shirt despite the heat. He had been thinking about Urmsheim again (perhaps because these days it no longer came to him in dreams), thinking on those long ago days when he and Jiriki and Binabik and the others had climbed to the Uduntree. Beneath it all lay the deeper memory of the dragon’s icy blue stare, the agonizing splash of its hot, black blood. Thinking of it again, he shivered. “I’m sorry. What are you talking about, wife?”

  “This,” she said, cupping her breasts with her hands. “This fading, falling body.”

  “I think you are beautiful,” he said.

  “You are kind to say so.”

  “What do you mean, kind? Do you call me a liar, woman?” He laughed. “I loved you from the first moment I saw you. Do you think me that shallow, now that I am old too? Come to bed.”

  “Not yet.” She continued brushing. Miriamele kept her hair long now, but a part of Simon missed the days when she had been less careful, less formal, when she had cut her hair short to hide her identity, like someone out of a story.

  God’s Blood, have we truly become old? he wondered. I do not feel old. I feel the same, but . . . weathered. Like a ship that has plowed the same waves for many years. The rigging is slack, the sails have holes, but the bottom is still seaworthy. He laughed again.

  “What is funny?” Her voice had the brittle sound he knew too well.

  “Just . . . I just thought that I am glad our bottoms are still seaworthy.”

  Miriamele gave him a sharp look over her shoulder, then glanced down at her own pale, vulnerable body. “Do you mock me, husband?”

  “Never. Oh, dear one, not in a thousand, thousand years. Come to bed.”

  “I will. But do not think you will paw me tonight and paddle my cheek and make me forgive you. I am angry, Simon.”

  He sighed. “Still?”

  “What do you mean, still? You act as if this were a lark, a game. We are sending our only heir—our only grandson!—away into the wild woods. Into danger.”

  “We are all sent into danger,” he said, and was quite pleased with himself for the idea. “And we will all fail in the end. That is God’s will. It does no good to struggle against it.”

  “You are punishing your grandson because I will not let you go marching off to look for the Sithi.” She stared directly at her own reflection. She would not meet his eye. “I thought we were equals, husband. I have learned the truth.”

  “What? What nonsense is this? You know as well as I do that the boy needs seasoning. He has lived only for himself.”

  “And getting him killed will improve that?”

  Simon slapped his hands on the bedclothes in frustration. “I do not wish to see him harmed, may God preserve us, I wish to see him grown. What will happen when we die if he does not change? The whole of the High Ward in the hands of a selfish boy—a boy who does not want to be a man, except when it comes to drinking and wenching. For the love of the Aedon, Miriamele, he climbed Hjeldin’s Tower on a drunken wager! What if he had fallen and dashed out his brains on the cobblestones? Would you still say he was better off here than going out into the world?”

  “Do not invent things to try to shame me, Simon. You have never been kind to him.”

  Simon closed his eyes, fighting against the weary ang
er that he had thought was behind them tonight. “Come to bed. You will take ill, sitting uncovered like that.”

  “Perhaps you had better send me off on some dangerous task. That would be a more certain way of silencing me.”

  “Damn me, do you think I want him to go because I want him harmed, Miri? Are you mad? It is you who wants to keep him home because . . . because you cannot forgive yourself for John Josua.” Even as he said it, Simon knew he had opened a door that was better left closed. Her silence seemed to confirm it.

  When that silence had stretched a while, he said, “Miri? Dear wife? That was wrong of me. That is a pain that should be left out of our disagreements.”

  “No,” she said. “No, there is some truth in what you say. But how can you not feel that, too? After losing our only son, how can you so blithely send your grandson out into the perils of the wild world?”

  “Because he is to be a king, Miri. A king cannot be shielded from consequences, or he will become a king who does not understand what ruling means.”

  “Is this about my father, then? His madness?”

  “No, no, no.” He took a deep breath, trying to think of words that would carry his meaning when he did not entirely understand it himself. “This is a far bigger matter than you make it. I said to you once, let me go to the Sithi. They are our allies, but they have fallen away from us. But you would not let me go. If we ever needed their counsel, we need it now. So someone must go to them.”

  “Then Eolair is the right choice. We do not need to send our heir as well.”

  “But it is not about what we need, it is about what Morgan needs.” He lifted the coverlet. “Come here. I promise not to paw you. Come here and talk to me. It makes my bones ache just watching you sitting there in the cold.”

  “It is not cold, it is summer-warm though spring has barely ended. Are you having the dreams again?” Something changed in her voice, just a little. “Is it the mountain?”

  “No dreams still. But I remember the mountain, of course. That is not all that is in my mind, though. Come here. Come to bed.”