Snenneq wrapped his beloved in a cloak and took her off to change into dry clothes. When Binabik and Sisqi returned to tending the feverish Sitha, Morgan got up and walked across the camp to take a seat by the fire where Porto sat.
The old man looked at the prince, still shivering and wet nearly to the waist, and asked, “What happened, Highness? Did you fall into the river?”
“Not quite.” He leaned closer to the flames. It was summer, and even with evening coming on quickly the air was warm, but Morgan could not remember feeling so cold in a long time, even in snowy Rimmersgard. “I almost became a meal for River Man.”
“Who is that?”
“The trolls call it a ‘Kallypook’ or something. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He described the monster to Porto, who reacted with appropriate awe at the prince’s close escape.
“That is why I never go far without my sword,” Porto said, patting the hilt fondly. “The forest, all these wild lands—they are full of terrible things. Did I tell you of some of the things I saw at the Nakkiga Gate?”
Morgan was about to answer wearily—when his teeth had temporarily stopped chattering—that he had heard about Nakkiga Gate from the old knight a hundred times, but he realized that he had never heard Sir Porto talk of anything quite like this. “Were there such things at Nakkiga?” he asked. “Kallypooks?”
“I did not see your water-monster, so I cannot say. But I can promise you that we fought many kinds of demon-spawn. The Norns themselves were bad enough, with their corpse-skin and dead eyes. And silent! Like fighting ghosts. There was one I had to fight by myself in a cave on the mountainside. He was already wounded, thank merciful God. And when I cut the arm off him, he never said a word, made no cry of pain—just kept crawling toward me, blood pouring out of him like a river. I had to slice his head away, nearly, before he gave up. But it was not the Norns I feared most. No, that would have been the giants.”
In his present mood, Morgan was not certain he wanted to hear any more, but he was also too cold to move away from the fire. “I have heard many stories about the northern giants,” he said to the old knight. “And not just yours. My grandfather had to fight one, he told me.”
“We fought more than one of them on our way to Nakkiga. Praise the Aedon there weren’t more. That was the Norns’ great weapon, those cursed, murdering beasts. Big as houses, strong as bulls.”
Morgan remembered the tales he had heard more recently from the men who had survived the fighting on the Frostmarch Road, about the biggest giant anyone had ever seen. His guts felt like water to think of it. “How can anyone kill such a thing?”
“One man can’t. Perhaps Camaris the Great could, but no other man I’ve met could survive long enough to make a killing blow. Great clubs those creatures had, studded with spikes, and every time they swung, men flew apart into bloody bits. I saw one giant pick a man up and squeeze him until he burst like a ripe plum crushed in your fist.”
Morgan was becoming even more certain he didn’t want to hear any more of Porto’s tales, but he did not know how to stop him without seeming cowardly. The old man had a look on his face that Morgan had never seen, as if he was not just telling a story but seeing it happen again before him.
“One moment the poor devil was alive and screaming,” the knight said, still staring at something that Morgan couldn’t see and didn’t want to see. “The next he was nothing but drippings and ragged skin.”
It was impossible not to flinch. “God preserve us! How did you not go mad?”
Porto gave him a flat look. “Oh, Highness, I saw worse, much worse. At Nakkiga, I saw our own dead climb up out of their graves and come against us.”
“Good God.”
“God could not have been there that day—at least that is what I thought, many times, may the Redeemer forgive me.” He made the sign of the Tree. “And even that was not the worst that came to me.” Porto shook his head. As he tried to find new words, he made a sound that Morgan recognized as someone fighting tears. “But I cannot talk about that, about what they did to me—no, what they did to my friend who died at Nakkiga. They . . . he . . .” The old man shook his head again, harder, as if trying to dislodge some stinging, biting vexation. “No, I still cannot speak of it. I am sorry, Highness. But those damned, white-skinned things are not God’s creatures, they are something else. Demons. Remember that if you ever face them.”
“And the Sithi?” It had suddenly occurred to Morgan that the very same people they were seeking all along the edges of this dark forest were the cousins of Porto’s Norns. If the Norns were demons, what did that make their relatives?
It took the old knight a moment to reply. When he did, his voice was still shaky, but more controlled than it had been. “The Sithi? What do you ask, my prince?” Porto slapped at his cloak, then looked around. “By all that is holy, why is there nothing to drink anywhere?”
Morgan was surprised to realize he hadn’t had a drink himself all day. “I’ll find something.” He fetched his saddlebags, which he had left hanging over a branch near his grazing horse, and carried them back to the fire, nodding to the men who gave him “Good day, Highness,” or “God speed you, Prince Morgan,” on the way. By the time he returned to the fire he felt a little better. He enjoyed traveling with battle-hardened men who treated him as one of their own—albeit a bit more exalted—instead of as an excuse to run to his grandfather and grandmother and complain about him.
He handed Porto a silver flask that carried his princely arms in gemstones and fine enamels. “The Cuthmanite Brothers’ best apple brandy. I brought it in case we became lost in the forest, or were attacked by Norns.”
Porto reached out for the flask, staring at it like a child given a colorful whirligig. “What good would this do if we were attacked by Norns, Highness?”
“It would make sure we didn’t care.” He dropped down on the log beside the old knight.
Porto took out the stopper and sniffed the neck of the flask, eyes shut. His smile unrolled across his bearded face like a hedgehog waking from a happy dream. “Ah,” he said, then offered it to the prince.
“Your health, Porto.” Morgan took a warming draught. It rolled down his throat with the clean bite of the finest stuff, honeyed fire.
Porto accepted the brandy back from him reverently. He took a mouthful and savored it, puffing his cheeks as he sluiced it from side to side, so comical that Morgan laughed out loud. “It is worth some care,” the old knight told him with more than a hint of pained sensibilities. “You may drink such stuff every day, my prince. It comes to a man like myself perhaps once in a lifetime. Your very good health, Highness.” He took a proper swallow.
Morgan was still grinning, but he waited a respectful time for Porto to savor his brandy before asking him what he had been about to say of the Sithi.
“Ah, yes. So.” He hesitated, then held up the flask. “Another sip, Highness?”
“For me or you? No, go on, have as much as you like.” He looked up at the sky, which was beginning to darken in the east. “Well, as much as you can drink before I have to blow the Horn of Failure so the Sithi can ignore it again. I’m not such a fool as to leave the brandy with you while I’m gone.”
Porto again made the sign of the Tree. “Careful how you talk, Morgan. Prince Morgan, I mean.” He leaned, his breath fuming with the Cuthmanite monk’s finest. “They might hear you.”
“If you mean the fairies, if they can’t hear that great bellowing horn we’ve blown every night for a fortnight or more, they’re hardly going to hear me talking to you. But what were you going to say about them?”
Porto fortified himself again before beginning. “I saw the fighting at the Hayholt, Prince Morgan, as you know. Back in the Storm King’s War. I saw the fairy folk, the white and the golden, the Norns and the Sithi—even saw them fighting each other, although that was . . .” He frowned. “Hard to expl
ain it properly. Like hearing a song in someone else’s tongue, Highness. Trying to make it out, do you see, without understanding the words.”
“I don’t think I do see, Porto. What do you mean?”
“It was so fast. And some of it didn’t make sense. I can’t find the words, and I swear it isn’t this little bit of grog that’s fuddled me, beautiful and welcome as it is. Watching the Fair Ones and the White Foxes fight each other was like watching someone singing a song and playing at some contest, both at the same time, and I couldn’t understand either song or game. Can you compass that, Highness?”
Morgan waved his hand. “Go on.”
“And they were as bold and lovely as any fairies I ever heard about when I was young, my prince. But deadly. Deadly like a hawk is deadly, which is to say no more deadly than a sword’s blade, which only does what it is made to do.
“But when we went north after the Storm King failed, chasing the Norns back to Nakkiga, the Sithi did not come with us. Old Duke Isgrimnur, bless him, he was most set that the Norns should not get back to the shelter of their mountains, and he talked the king and queen into letting him take a great troop and pursue them, but the Norns moved too fast—like smoke on a brisk wind—and they made it all the way past their great walls and into their mountain. That was Nakkiga Gate, and the Sithi were not with us there. If they had been, there would be no White Foxes left.”
“But if they fought their kin at the Hayholt, why didn’t the Sithi fight with you that time?”
“A better man than I would have to answer that, Highness. I was only a soldier, and more concerned about having to ride all the way to the end of the world than I was about what the fairy-folk were doing. It was never certain that the Sithi weren’t coming, at least among us men. Many of us thought they would show up for the fighting, you see, riding in a great company as they rode to Hernystir, and as many were fearful of that as were happy to think so. You’d understand if you’d been there, my prince. They were so terribly different than men.”
“But the Sithi never did come to Nakkiga.”
“No, they didn’t. I heard from another fellow, who heard it from someone, that the Sithi still had some family feeling for the Norns—that they would defeat them but not destroy them. But Duke Isgrimnur, he was so set on it that he drove on regardless. Perhaps he too thought the Sithi would show up at the last. He was a great man, the duke, but even great men make mistakes.”
Morgan noticed a member of the Erkynguard lurking nearby, clearly waiting to say something. “A moment, Porto.”
The soldier made a half-bow. “Beg your pardon, Highness, but Count Eolair says it’s time for us to go into the forest.”
“Us?” said Morgan.
“Myself and some of the other men. Count said we should come along this time, Your Highness.”
Morgan excused himself to Porto, made sure to retrieve his flask, then followed the guardsman.
• • •
As they led half a dozen mounted Erkynguards toward the darkening line of the forest, Morgan asked Count Eolair about the armed escort. He had grown rather fond of his rides into and out of the forest edge with the old count, who never said exactly what you expected him to say—a rare trait in old people, Morgan thought.
“It is because we have now ridden beyond the easy reach, and perhaps even the repute, of the High Ward,” the count said. “Out here the Hayholt is more legend than fact, and the high king and high queen even less known. You will see it clearly if we reach New Gadrinsett. The citizens are loyal to the High Throne in theory, but the town that has built up around it is more Thrithings camp than Erkynlandish city. And the farther we go, the less anything we carry or wear will mean. Except our weapons, of course.”
“Do you mean bandits?”
“All manner of things. I hear you met one of the locals earlier this afternoon.”
“The River Man?” Morgan barely repressed a shudder. “Yes, and I would not like to meet him again.”
They were in among the trees now. Eolair led them deeper, until the last orange and pink smears of sunset gleamed only in spots through the high trees. They stopped at last in a forest clearing, beside a stream that was on its way to join the marsh down the shallow slope behind them, but they did not dismount. Eolair handed the wooden chest containing Ti-tuno to Morgan.
“Make music, my prince,” said Eolair.
Morgan took out the horn and weighed it in his hand. “Why can I blow it now, but I couldn’t when I first tried?”
“Who can say?” Eolair gave the ghost of a shrug. “The things the Sithi have made are always strange to mere mortals. Or perhaps it is simply that you found the trick.”
“If I found the trick, why don’t I know what it is?”
Eolair smiled. “Another question I cannot answer, Your Highness. But the light is fleeing us swiftly now. May I suggest you perform that trick you don’t know one more time?”
Morgan lifted the horn and sounded it, giving it all his breath, so that the mournful wail of it flew out into the deepening evening and rang and rang until the echoes died at last among the trees. The silences after the horn blew always seemed different than ordinary silences, although he could not have said why. Some quality of heightened stillness, perhaps, as though something listened and heard its call, even if the listeners were not the same ones he and Eolair sought.
Long moments passed, then Morgan winded the horn again. He had only a moment to savor the great silence after the echoes, then it was broken.
“Who are you, mortal men? And why do you carry a gift that is not yours to carry?”
The voice was not loud, but it seemed to fly straight into Morgan’s ear like a bee, startling him so that he nearly dropped the horn. The soldiers who had accompanied them grasped at their swords when they heard it, but Eolair held up his hand. “Do not draw your weapons,” the count said. “It would be pointless.” He looked slowly around the clearing, but saw nothing, heard nothing now that the voice had fallen silent, only the trees and the plashing of the little stream.
“I am Count Eolair of Nad Mullach,” the old man called, his voice only a little louder than when he had been talking to Morgan: he clearly thought that whoever had spoken was close by. “We mean no harm. I know your Prince Jiriki of old and would have words with him.”
“And I am a prince, too,” Morgan said, rather more loudly than he’d meant to. “I am Morgan of Erchester. King Simon and Queen Miriamele are my grandparents, and I’d like to talk to Prince Jiriki, too.” His heart, he realized, was beating madly, almost as swiftly as when he’d seen the river monster leap up to take the heron. “Show yourself!”
“Do not make demands,” Eolair said quietly.
A figure appeared at the edge of the clearing, so suddenly that it almost seemed to form out of the half-darkness. “Tell your men not to move,” the newcomer said. “They are surrounded by my hunters.”
“Nobody will move,” said Eolair.
The figure came toward Morgan, who was feeling a strong impulse to ride away as fast as he could. It was not that the stranger was frightening to look at—he was slender, and the angled bones of his face and his huge, golden eyes marked him clearly as one of the Sithi—but that Morgan felt a coldness beating out from him, a disdain. He felt certain that this odd creature in rough-spun garments, with red hair that seemed unnaturally bright, even in the darkening twilight, would happily have him feathered with arrows if the need arose, regardless of his princely status.
The stranger put out a thin, long-fingered hand. It took Morgan a moment to realize he wanted Ti-tuno. He looked to Eolair, who nodded.
The stranger took the horn and handled it with obvious reverence, turning it over in his hands, his lips moving as if in prayer. “It truly is Ti-tuno,” he said at last, his use of the Common Tongue almost faultless, but shaped and accented in liquid ways Morgan had never heard
before. “It is a strange thing to hear its note in these dark days. We had thought it lost. Who are you?”
“I am Count Eolair, Hand of the Throne. We come from the High King and High Queen in the Hayholt—in old Asu’a. We have been sent to find Prince Jiriki and his sister Aditu, and to speak to them.”
“Prince Jiriki,” said the stranger, but his smile was close to a smirk. “So. And why should we take you to trouble them?”
“For old friendship’s sake, if nothing else, I hope,” said Eolair. “But there is another, more urgent matter—”
“Why is he asking us all these questions,” Morgan demanded. “Doesn’t he understand that it’s the king and queen of this entire land we’re talking about? That I’m the heir? Listen, you, we want to speak to this Jeekee.”
“The name is Jiriki, Highness.” Eolair gave him a significant look. “This is why your grandparents sent me, my prince. Please, let me . . .” The lord steward turned back to the Sitha. “We have one of your people with us, very ill and in need of care, back at our camp. You sent her to us, but she was attacked and shot with arrows—poisoned arrows.”
“What?” The Sitha’s catlike face sharpened into a mask of anger. “You have shot another of our people?”
Morgan was about to tell this puffed-up idiot that he didn’t understand anything, but Eolair was making the face at him again, so he remained resentfully silent.
“No, we who serve the king and queen in the Hayholt did not shoot her. We do not know who did. She was found, injured and senseless, near the castle. We have nursed her as well as we can, but she has passed beyond our healers’ craft.”
For a moment the Sitha only stared at Eolair, his face a mask made even harder to read by the fading light. Then he let out a whistle, although Morgan did not see him purse his lips. A moment later a dozen shapes stepped from the shadows on all sides—Sithi, male and female, all dressed in similar rough clothing, all with arrows nocked on the strings of their bows.