The others who had come down with that single figure walked across on a line of blue Fire that spread itself across the water for them. While they did, up out of the East came a huge dark shape, its wings wide, and soared up to perch on one of the two towers that overlooked the great gates. The sky had been full of those wheeling shapes for some while now, and various others of them settled on the walls or the higher towers, looking down curiously at the people, who looked back as curiously. Many lights had been put out for fear of attracting Something’s attention, earlier that evening: now, encouraged possibly by the interested gaze of many huge eyes like lamps, the torches in the streets and the candles in the windows of the city began to be lighted again.The single figure who had walked across the water rejoined his friends on the far bank, and all together they walked down the Road to the gates. The others fell back as they all came to the gate itself, and the twelve guards there stood and looked at the young man who came up to them with Hergótha the Great in his hand. He paused for a moment, seemingly waiting for one of them to say something. None of them did. They knew what they saw, but what they felt was something that shone, something about thirty cubits long and ten high, Someone with solemn, amused eyes… and with claws.
“Well,” Freelorn said, “I’m back.”
They stepped aside to let him in. He nodded to them, and walked on through, swinging Hergótha up so that the blade rested over his shoulder. The great red mantichore sapphire in the pommel shone like an eye in the torchlight. Up the dark street he went, looking from side to side, taking note of a lampstandard broken here, a paving-stone loose there: a man coming home after a long trip, noticing things that need to be fixed. His friends came after him, and the guards watched them go, seeing all the Flame pass them by, murmuring at the sight of the Rods and the strange weapons. But what drew their eyes again, until he was out of sight, was the indistinct form carrying the glint of red with it, the hint of moonlight on a pale form, sauntering along the street that led up toward Kynall, home at last.
***
Kingship in Arlen passes without much ceremony, as a rule. Once there’s an Initiate, and the Stave comes to her or him, either simply as a gift from the ruling parent or by taking it from where they left it before they died, then Arlen has a ruler again. Herewiss had his suspicions as to where it might be found, and a little searching in Freelorn’s old room upstairs turned it up. The next morning, after Freelorn had gone down to the kitchens and confirmed all the cooks in their positions, and breakfast had been laid out, he took a while to sit in the Throne again. Segnbora brought the Lion banner, and put it in its old accustomed place behind the Throne: and Freelorn sat in the old white chair, looking down the length of the bright room, and smiled, just once, briefly. Then something caught his sleeve when he moved his arm. Freelorn looked down at the arm of the Throne and said to Herewiss, “What the Dark are these scratchmarks?”
Sunspark, back in one of its human-shapes again, that handsome red-haired young woman, abruptly became interested in something up the stairs, and headed that way. Herewiss chuckled.
“You’d better get up now and go somewhere else,” Herewiss said, “if you don’t want trouble.”
“What?” Freelorn stared at him. “What kind of trouble could I get into here? This is where I belong.”
Herewiss smiled, and Freelorn soon found out what he meant… as the old ministers of the Throne began arriving, all excuses and praise, to greet the new King and (they desperately hoped) to be reconfirmed in their offices. Herewiss turned and started to leave. “Don’t you go anywhere!” Freelorn said, rather sharply. Everyone in the room—ministers and their assistants, mostly—shivered slightly, as they heard the echo of a growl run down their nerves.
But Herewiss turned around, completely untroubled, though smiling wryly. “It was worth a try,” he said, and went up to lounge on the steps leading up to the Throne.
***
They spent the rest of the day there, and at the end of it Lorn heartily wished he had taken Herewiss’s advice. That’ll teach you to listen to your counsellors, said Herewiss’s amused thought to him privately. There had been a few good moments—especially when first Moris, then Dritt and Harald, turned up, having made their way to Kynall from their various postings. There were embraces then, and healths drunk, while ministers stood and looked nervously on people whose loyalties had been with Freelorn when no one else’s were. But the rest of the day was a long list of hirings and firings, shuffling people (with Herewiss’s advice) into positions better befitting their talents, or out of offices they had mishandled, or into ones where they could be politically useful but otherwise harmless. Mere loyalty to Cillmod was not a criterion for dismissal, as the ministers found to their relief and confusion. They were also surprised to find that Lorn would speak of him easily, when they were afraid to.
“Find him,” he said several times. “He has nothing to fear from me. If he’s dead, he’ll be honorably sent onward. If he’s alive, I want to see him.”
No one seemed able to do anything about this, and finally Segnbora went out to see what could be found. Freelorn sat back and went about his business, only once finding himself stymied: when Herewiss refused to be his chief minister. “You’re off your head,” Herewiss said. “You are not my master, nor are you going to be. But I do have a Mistress—and Her business to attend to. Find someone else.”
Freelorn put his eyebrows up at this, but knew the sound of Herewiss’s mind being made up, and turned his attention to other matters, such as the army. The forces that had been defending the fords at Daharba and Anish had not themselves seen the Lion, but word had spread to them from other groups of regulars who had survived the last awful hour in Laeran’s Ridings. Their commanders had come in to offer their surrender. Freelorn had burst out laughing. “You can’t surrender to me,” he said. “You’re on my side! Aren’t you?… ”
The commanders hastily agreed. After a while, reassured by Freelorn that the troops’ pay would not be affected by the last week’s work, they went away, relieved both to still have their jobs, and to get out of Kynall. The sense of something large, amused and white, watching them, was much with them all.
It was getting on toward evening when Freelorn stood up and said, “No more of it. Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen. Till then, good night.”There were mutters from people who had unfinished business, but Lorn merely looked at them, and they left hurriedly, feeling other eyes than his resting on them, with less amusement than previously. Freelorn sat back in the Throne, rubbing his eyes wearily, and said to Herewiss, “Is it always going to be like this, do you think?”
“You mean the work? You watched your father—you should know that better than me.”
“No, I mean—this.” Freelorn gestured over his shoulder with his thumb at the presence that hung about him, and which he suspected Herewiss could see perfectly clearly, Fire-gifted as he was. “Not that I object, mind you,” he said hurriedly: for him, the Lion was Héalhra, as much a father figure as his own blood-father. “It’s just—”
“Oh. No, Lorn, I doubt it. I think you’re in something like breakthrough—since this power that lives in you has to do with the Fire, though it’s not the same in discipline or manifestation: as you said, She doesn’t care to repeat Herself. I think it’ll get less… noticeable after a while, even for you: certainly for other people. But He’ll always be there when you need Him.” And Herewiss chuckled. “We won’t be three in a bed, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I was meaning to talk to you about that—” Freelorn said.
Lorn, Segnbora said in their minds. Lionhall, quickly. I’ve found him.
***
It was only a few minutes’ walk away, through the quietening streets. The city had come back to life today, at least partly. There had been a sense of holiday, people standing in doors talking about what they had seen the night before, a buzz of excitement, relief, and sorrow for those who had fallen. It was quieting again now, but t
here were still a lot of people standing around in the streets as if waiting for something: and they watched Freelorn pass by, and greeted him the way he remembered people in the old days having greeted his father: “Good evening, King.” The offhand sound of it was meat and drink to him.
Lionhall was less a massive pile of rubble than it had been, for the simple reason that Hasai and several other Dragons, one scaled in amethyst and another in ruby, had been carefully picking up the biggest pieces and setting them out in order in what remained of the square, as delicately as children playing jackstones. The great crevasse down the middle had already been filled in with melted stone carefully smoothed over, and some paving-blocks were stacked off to one side, ready to be laid again.
Freelorn and Herewiss made their way to the shattered portico, where Segnbora was kneeling over a supine form with Blanis, and two other Rodmistresses from the army. Hasai looked down curiously over her shoulder.
On the ground, on a piece of board someone had brought, Cillmod lay. His legs were a welter of blood, but he was awake and alert, and not in pain, due to Segnbora’s ministrations. He gazed up at Freelorn with an expression that looked strangely like relief, though there was unease in it too.
“Plainly this man was being saved for something,” Segnbora said. “Half a wall came down on him, but a fragment of the dome that had come down first kept the wall from falling flat, and it spared his chest and head. These are bad—” She looked dispassionately at his legs. “But he’ll walk again, though it may take us a while.”
Freelorn nodded.Cillmod looked at him a moment. Then he said, “Well, King, I would give you your Stave back, but it seems to be gone.”
“I have it,” Freelorn said. He returned the uneasy glance, and said the thing he had been thinking about for a while now. “I am going to need a chief minister. A bit of a move downwards for you, it has to be admitted. But you kept this country running, however you could, when the rightful ruler was off acting the idiot. And you clearly have the talent, and you know the Four Hundred much better than I do. Will you help me now?”
“It will not be comfortable for you, I would think,” Cillmod said.
“I’m not here to be comfortable,” Freelorn said, and was tempted to rub his back, which was bothering him after a day in the Throne. “I have work to do, that’s all. Will you help me?”
Cillmod looked at him for a while. “Yes,” he said at last.
Freelorn nodded. “Go in Her care, then,” he said, “and get better. If there’s anything you need, let me know.”
Cillmod turned his head away. “I’ll see you at dinner,” Segnbora said. “Come on, ladies.”
They vanished, taking Cillmod with them.
“Dinner,” Herewiss said. “Not a bad idea. You haven’t had anything all day. Not even at breakfast this morning.”
“Nothing for me yet,” Freelorn said. “There’s something I have to do fasting. I’ll take care of it now.” He hugged Herewiss for a moment, one-armed, and then turned and headed down the street, toward the city gates.
***
It was the oldest law, and almost the first one his father had taught him, when he was old enough to understand such things. “When Arlen goes to battle,” Ferrant said, “it does so for safety, not for glory. It is for the people out on the fields, and in the little towns, that we go to war—because that battle will make them secure—not for our own aggrandizement. Now remember how Héalhra’s son, when he could find nothing of his father to send to the fire, took up one of the people from the battlefield instead, one of Héalhra’s townsmen who had come out to fight, honoring him as if he had been his father? So we do now. When a battle is over in which Arlene blood is shed, the ruler must find some one of the people who fell, and send that person onward with his or her own hands, to remind them that we know their grief, and it’s ours, not just theirs. Not food nor drink may pass your lips until this is done. Remember it.”
Lorn made his way down to the battlefield, hearing the words. He had dreaded this for a long time, again because he was uncertain what to do. There was no criterion for choice that he knew of: he had never dared ask his father, the times he came back from war, how he chose. Now Lorn walked through the cold trampled-up ground and mud, under the early evening sky—just one more figure moving among the bodies, with head bent, looking for someone. The difference was that the others looking, silent, or moaning at the sight of all the death, knew who they were looking for.
No one lying down moved. The wounded had been taken away by now: all that were left were already healed of their wounds more thoroughly and finally than any leech or Rodmistress could do it. Lorn moved among them, numb, too numb even to weep any more. The ground was all trodden and poached up with horses’ hooves into ridges of torn grass, and mud, now, since it had rained for a while earlier in the day. The bodies sprawled out on the ground in terrible relaxation, some blank-eyed, staring upward, some curled up as if in sleep, but instead of quiet breath, their blood spread out around them, black and cold. Arms were stretched out to dropped weapons, to other dead; hands lay open and empty as if asking for something, ready to receive. But all their receiving was over.
Lorn stopped suddenly and knew he had found the one. She lay there in a mudpuddle, whatever livery she had worn gone plain brown now, the common color of the mud. She lay on her face, one arm twisted up under her, her fair hair all in wet strings like retting flax, and the arrow that had killed her buried almost to the fletching in her back. The sword beside her was streaked amber and red-black with blood separating out, the remnant of her last kill.
He did not want to touch her, but slowly he crouched down and put a hand under one of her shoulders. She was stiff. It made him shudder, how like a heavy doll or a half-filled sack a human body felt, with the life new gone out of it: as if it had never been alive at all, had never ridden proud in the saddle or walked or laughed. She turned over too easily, the broken arm falling stiffly over her face as she did, like a sleeper’s arm thrown over the eyes to shut the light away. And Lorn found himself looking at the face of the girl who had brought him Blackmane, the one who was rude to him, and willing to take his orders anyway: the one who rode off laughing him to scorn.
Now he wept indeed: his eyes blurred so they were hardly any use to him, he could not breathe, and the rage in him mixed with grief and the two of them strangling him. She would not be grinding any corn this time next year, or coming to him to complain about the lack of it. Freelorn swung her up in his arms. A long leggy bundle she was, not the light lithe creature who had laughed at him and thundered off fierce and furious, like the Maiden gone mad: dead weight in truth, sodden clay like the ground all around, clothes and mud and blood. He staggered as he tried to carry her away. Finally Freelorn had to throw her over his shoulder, like a sack, and that made him cry worst of all, so that he stumbled and fell, and swore at any hand that touched him to try to help. Finally he found his way back to the place where they were preparing to burn the dead, and laid her out on one of the pyres there, ordering her body as best he could, and saying the words of farewell. He waited until the pyre was ready, and put the torch himself, while the people around him watched and grieved. Then he made his way back toward the city. An hour, perhaps, the business had taken him. But in that hour he knew at last what all kings know sometimes—that any death of theirs that might prevent a war is worth it. But also that the great Death is loose in the world, and like the Goddess, sometimes one must live and wish to be dead, and go on regardless—with all the others’ deaths slung over one’s shoulder, the weight that is never wholly there, but never wholly gone, until the World end and be made again, and made aright…
***
He came to dinner in somber mood, but it couldn’t last long in the face of the others’ merriment. All his own people were there, and Sunspark, in its young-woman shape: Eftgan had come in from putting her own army to rights, bringing Hearn with her. They all sat down to the meal together in one of the downstairs d
ining rooms, not the huge echoing state banqueting hall, but a cozy room with windows looking out westward. The evening was cool and still, the sunset clear and cloudless: the candles burned up straight, as if in a closed room. Outside the window, Hasai’s head rested on a nearby wall, one eye looking in. Herewiss handed Freelorn a cup of wine when he came in, and Freelorn drank it straight off, and then stared into the cup, and at Herewiss, surprised. “That’s Brightwood white!”
“You’re welcome,” Hearn said, dry as always, and gestured at a small firkin in the corner.
The cooks were evidently grateful for having been retained. Dinner was restrained, but splendid—the first roast goose of autumn, crisp and fragrant with peppercorns and red wine, and salt salmon, and beans baked in garlic cheese. Freelorn dove into it all with great enthusiasm.
“A leonine appetite,” Eftgan said, helping herself to a second helping of goose. “As regards work, too, I hear. You were at it already today. What will you do next?”
“Besides being King? Well, there was something else…. ” He blushed, then got embarrassed at his own embarrassment, and looked at Herewiss. “Since we don’t have to be running all over the place any more, I had thought we might get married.”