Husband and wife looked at one another. “We have a daughter,” her mother said after a moment. She glanced around the field, but saw nothing. “Will you send her word—?”
Segnbora’s heart turned over and broke inside her. “Mother!” she said, choking, desperate, feeling more abandoned by that terrible placid regard that didn’t see her than by her mother’s death itself.
“Segnbora d’Welcaen tai-Enraesi is her name,” her father said, and even through the dullness the words came out proudly. “She was eastaway in Steldin last we heard. Something about some outlaws…but she’s had so much training: she can take care of herself. Send her word…”
“Father!”
Her tears made no difference; her father didn’t answer. “Come on, Hol,” her mother said, and reached up a little to touch her lips to his—then turned away toward Herewiss. “A man with the Fire,” she said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day.” And there on the threshold of true death, she smiled. “I didn’t, did I?…”
Herewiss shook his head silently, opened his arms. Welcaen moved into them, throwing a last glance at her husband on the threshold of true death. “I’ll wait for you,” she said.
Herewiss embraced her. She was gone.
Holmaern stepped slowly forward. “Father!” Segnbora cried as he moved into Herewiss’s arms.
Her father hesitated; his head turned toward her, and the Firelight caught in his hazel eyes. A flicker stirred there, like a vaguely recollected memory. Herewiss paused for a breath, two breaths.
“Tell her we love her,” Holmaern said. He gathered Herewiss close, passed through, and was gone.
Khávrinen’s Fire went out, and the circle faded to a blue smolder and died. Beside his now-dark sword Herewiss went slowly to his knees, and sobbed once, bitterly. Freelorn went to him, held him close with a helpless look: he was crying too.
Segnbora had no power to do anything but stand and look at now-empty air, and breathe in the fading scent of death.
Herewiss was gasping for control. “It’s not, that’s not something people are meant to be! Life—” He gasped again. “Lorn, it’s supposed to be life I give—”
Freelorn buried his eyes against Herewiss’s shoulder, then straightened. “And what kind of life would they have had, dead and on the wrong side of the Door, wandering ghosts? What do you think you gave them?”
Segnbora stood still, seeing behind her eyes, with the immediacy that came of Hasai’s presence, old lost times that were somehow also now: summer mornings in Asfahaeg, rich with sunlight and the smell of the Sea; winter nights by the old hearthside in Darthis; afternoons weaving with her father, riding with her mother; laughter, anger, argument, joy, the sounds of life. They were real, infinitely more real than what she’d just seen. She turned and walked away, back toward town.
The truth started to catch up with her at about the same time that Freelorn and Herewiss did, in the middle of the hayfield. They stopped her, looked at her as if expecting her to lapse into some new state of madness. “Well?” she said. “What’s the problem?”
“What are you going to do?” Freelorn said, sounding wary.
Segnbora felt Charriselm’s sweaty grip in her hand and thought of the innkeeper—hurried, merry sharp-faced, with eyes that wouldn’t meet hers. “I’m going to kill someone,” she said, turning toward town again.
“’Berend!” Freelorn said. She ignored him, hurrying off through the hay, which bit at her legs and hissed at her as she waded through it, faster and faster. It would have been us next, she thought. Someone doesn’t want southern news getting abroad—and we came from that direction, just as they did. I might well have been the next one. Wearing the same arms as the last two they killed, who knew whether I might have been looking for them, might have suspected something? Pprobably Lorn and the others would have been killed at the same time, or soon after. And Eftgan, if she stayed long enough and the innkeeper guessed who she was—
Behind her she could feel Fire stirring again. Herewiss had begun another wreaking, and she suspected what it was. Herewiss was a strategist. He would count it folly to kill a spy, and thus alert the spy’s superiors to the fact that that someone had discovered the game they played. He was building around the innkeeper and his wife a wreaking that would later cause them to dream the murders of those they’d agreed to kill, when in fact they would go on their way, unnoticed and unharmed. It was all perfectly sensible, and Segnbora despised the idea.
(Don’t waste your time,) she said, silent and bitter. (He won’t know what’s happened to him until a second after I hit him, when he tries to move and falls over in two pieces. And as for his wife—)
She went quietly through the postern, expecting an empty street. Instead, Moris and Dritt were there. So was Harald, standing silently with their horses. Lang was just joining them, along with Eftgan, who had her cloak about her shoulders and her unsheathed white Rod in her hand.
Segnbora would have brushed past the Queen to take care of unfinished business in the inn, but Eftgan’s hand on her arm, together with her look of concern at the sudden taste of Segnbora’s mind, stopped Segnbora as if she had walked into a wall. “‘Berend? What happened?”
Segnbora looked down at Eftgan’s brown eyes, so like her mother’s, and flinched away, unable to bear it.
“Oh, my Goddess,” Eftgan said. “Herewiss?”
In a breath’s worth of silence Herewiss showed Eftgan what Segnbora had found, what he had done for her parents, and the dream-wreaking he had woven and implanted in the innkeeper, and afterward in his wife. “Can we get out of here now?” he said, sounding deadly tired. Sunspark paced to him in its stallion shape, and Herewiss leaned on it, sagging like a man near exhaustion while Sunspark gazed at him in uncomprehending concern.
“Done,” said the Queen, and gestured with her Rod at the ground where she stood. The wreaking she had been maintaining until they arrived leaped upward from the stone and wove itself on the air, a warp and weft of blue Fire that outlined a tall squarish doorway. The doorway flashed completely blue for a moment and then blacked out—but the black was that of a different night, a long way off. The Door sucked in air. On the other side they could see smooth paving, a better road than the damp cobbles of Chavi.
“Hurry up,” Eftgan said. “The Kings’ Door is unpredictable, and it’s a strain to hold it for this many.”
One by one they went through, each leading a horse. Eftgan stood to one side of the Door, Flame running down her Rod and keeping the lintels alight. Lang stepped through before Segnbora, his eyes on her, looking worried. Numb, she followed him. The one step took her from the wet lowland air of Chavi, air stinking of death, into air colder, purer, but not entirely clean of the taste. Her ears popped painfully.
The night was perhaps an hour further along here; the stars had shifted. In one part of the sky they were missing entirely. Segnbora looked around the paved courtyard where Freelorn’s people stood grouped among milling horses and men and women in the midnight blue of Darthen. Over the low northward wall she could see faintly, in the starshine, the valley where she had sometimes lived as a child, with the braided river Chaelonde running through it. Many a time she had stood down there looking up at the place where she stood now—Sai khas-Barachael, Barachael Fortress, the black sentinel perched on an outthrust root of one of the Highpeaks.
Dully, Segnbora looked southward to where the stars were blocked from the sky. Looming over khas-Barachael, shadowy dark below and pale with starlight above, the snows of Mount Adínë brooded, impassive and cruel.
“It’s late,” Freelorn was saying. “We’ll meet in the morning, all of us. Meanwhile, does the Queen’s hospitality extend to a drink?”
Segnbora saw to Steelsheen’s stabling and made sure her corncrib was full, then followed Lang (who seemed to be beside her every time she turned around) to a warmly lit room faced in black stone. There was hot wine, and she drank a great deal of it. The explanations went on and on around her, but
she was never as dead to them as she wanted to be.
Snatches of conversation and random thoughts faded in and out of hearing, as they had when she had first come down from the Morrowfane. She would have welcomed Hasai’s darkness to flee to again, but she couldn’t find it. He and the mdeihei were, for once, too remote. They wanted nothing to do with her, the mdeihei; had seen was all too familiar with the kind of death to which they couldn’t admit, and to them she was now carrier of a contagion of terror and impossibility. The more she tried to approach, the more they fled her, afraid of any death in which one could so lose oneself.
After a while she somehow found her way to the tower room they had given her, and to bed. Lang was there too. He held her, and she clutched him, but she found no comfort in his presence. Her thoughts were full of graves, bare dirt, eyes that looked right through her. Her mind talked constantly, again and again making the most terrible admission a sensitive could make: I never felt you die. I never felt it. How could I not have felt it?!
Tears were a long time coming, but they found her at last; and Lang, more hero than she had ever been, held her and bore the brunt of her blows and cries and impotent rage. Bitterness and a shameful desire for vengeance, they were still all tangled around her soup at the end, but she knew at least she would be able to sleep. At least for tonight….
Over the bed and the room and the fortress, like a great weight, loomed the thought of Adínë, and the last lines from the old family rede, which now might have a chance to come true. There will come an hour of ice and darkness, and then the last of the tai-Enraesi will die. Flee the fate as you may, you shall know no peace until the blade finds your own heart, and lets the darkness in.
Darkness. That was the key. One Whose sign and chosen hiding place was darkness was coming after Herewiss and Freelorn. She had chosen to ride with them, and to defy It. And It hated defiance, and never failed to reward it with pain of one kind or another.
She could leave Lorn now, and her troubles would cease; or she could stay with him, and they would almost certainly get worse. The Dark One obviously had it in for her. But what could be worse than a head full of Dragons, and to suddenly find oneself orphaned, she couldn’t imagine.
Yet there was the small matter of words spoken under a cold hillside in the starlight, to a man she’d come to love. My sword will be between you and the Shadow, until you pass the Door—
Beside her, Lang turned over and started to snore.
She lay there for a long time with the tears running down the sides of her face into her ears, and finally made her choice.
Shadow, she thought at last, it’s war between us from now on. I’ll die soon enough. But it’s as I said before. You won’t get Lorn – or anybody else, if I can help it.
The darkness about her teemed with silent, derisive laughter. She turned her back on it and went to sleep.
EIGHT
Kings build the bridges from earth to heaven. But it is their subjects’ decision whether or not to cross – and if they do, no mere king can guarantee the result.
On the Royal Priesthood, Arien d’Lhared
People who live in the Highpeaks find it easy to believe the old story that the Maiden creates the World anew, every day, for the sheer joy of it. Astonishing dawns come there, and the face of a mountain will change completely as the shadows swing across it, revealing a new countenance every quarter hour. Sunsets come that run blood down cornices of snow, or light a whole range as if from within, until it all seems one great burning opal. Then twilight dissolves everything, leaving only shadows where peaks have been; cut-out places in the sky, from which the mischievous Maiden has removed the mountains so She can rework them for the next day.
Huddled in her cloak, Segnbora leaned on her elbows on a battlement of Sai khas-Barachael at dawn, watching the mountains come back. The Sun was up, though not yet visible past the eastern peaks. Beneath her Barachael valley was still hidden in shadow and morning mist. That valley was nearly circular. The walls broke only at the far northern end, where a quarter-arc of the circle was missing and the land sloped down northward toward the rest of Darthen. Khas-Barachael fortress stood on the northernmost spur of high ground, on the western side of the break, commanding a view of both the distant Darthene plains and the valley.
Segnbora gazed across the gap, though which the little braided Chaelonde River ran down from its glacier, toward the mountains that reached out long spurs to each other and made the rest of the ring. First came Aulys, right across the gap, like an eagle with bowed head and drooping wings. South and west of it Houndstooth reared, smooth and polished-looking, and armed with avalanches. West of Houndstooth, between it and the next mountain, was a shadowy spot—the north end of the Eisargir Pass, through which Reavers had been raiding for food and metal since time immemorial. Then came Eisargir himself, like a great stone rose unfolding with his down-spiraling spurs. Westward again lay a low col or saddle between mountains, over which looked red Tamien. Finally came the rising ground that grew into the long northeast-pointing Adínë massif.
Segnbora looked over her shoulder, scanning the long crest line. It was scarred on both sides with old glacial cirques, scraped-out bowls of stone. One such bowl was still full: the South Face cirque beneath the lesser, southern peak of Adínë. Ice spilled over from it to feed the glacial lake which in turn fed the Chaelonde. Every now and then the morning stillness would be broken by a remote groan or a huge crashing snap, made tiny by distance, as the glacier calved off an iceberg into the lake.
Above the glacier, and above the eminence of Sai khas-Barachael two thousand feet above the valley floor, Mount Adínë loomed like a crooked, ruined tower. Its greater peak stood two miles higher than khas-Barachael, and a sheer league above the little town in the valley’s depths. Segnbora shuddered, though whether more from the morning’s cold or a feeling of threat, she wasn’t sure. A breath later, the Sun rose through the gap between Aulys and Houndstooth and touched on the lesser Adínë summit. There, tiny and sharp, a line of something silvery glittered: the Skybridge, bright even against the blinding white of the peak on which stood.
Segnbora shuddered again, this time knowing why. Unconcerned, Hasai said from inside her, (We thought about living there, once…)
(Under that? I thought Dragons didn’t care to live where the shadowed powers are.)
(We don’t. When we saw what happened at certain times of year, we abandoned plans to make a Marchward there. But those issues aside, there are weaknesses in the valley. We were afraid we would disrupt the land if we worked as deep into that main massif as we normally would.)
(This was how long ago?)
She felt Hasai look at his memories, then count the passing suns backward in his mind. (Fifteen hundred years or so.)
(That long…)
Segnbora moved away from the wall and walked along it, southward, to a corner where she could better see the Eisargir Pass. The increasing light was already revealing the reddish tinge to the rocks where they were bare of snow. There under Eisargir lay the oldest mines in Darthen. From them came the best iron in the Kingdoms, the raw material from which the people of Barachael made the matchless Masterforge steel. Goddess only knew how many times Barachael had been raided, burned, and razed by the Reavers, who came down the Eisargir Pass again and again on their forays into the Kingdoms.
Those forays had for a long time been one of the deadlier aspects of life in the South. No one knew much about the Reavers; their language was utterly different from any spoken in the Kingdoms, and prisoners fasted themselves to death rather than live captive. In their first sporadic appearances they had always been small and thin, making it seem likely that in the high cold South beyond the Southpeak ranges, few crops grew and little game could flourish. And it was a fair guess that the countries overmountain were short of metal in general and had no iron, for the Reaver bodies found on any given battlefield were in the early times armed only with flint-tipped spears and arrows; if a bronze knife or s
word appeared, it was on the body of some fallen leader. So matters had stood until twelve or thirteen hundred years before, when some desperately hungry Reaver tribe had followed a game migration northward instead of southward…and had discovered the Eisargir Pass, and Darthen, and iron.
Those first Reavers were no fools. They saw that the richness of the farmland below them was not all because of the warmer climate. They discovered the plow and the sword. They stole as many of each as possible, and fled back overmountain with them to change their world. Their children, growing swiftly in power and becoming more successful as both hunters and warriors, had conquered or merged with other tribes, growing more numerous and extending their hunting grounds.
Already a nomadic people during their short summer, the Reavers had taken wholeheartedly to the raiding lifestyle in order to better survive in their unbalanced world. For centuries now, when the weather broke in the spring and the passes opened, the Reavers would come flooding northward, spending the spring and summer raiding for loot and cattle, but most of all for iron and steel to use in their tribal strife. Time and again Barachael was attacked, looted, and burned.
And time and again the town was rebuilt, for neither the stubborn smith-sorcerers who lived there nor the Darthene crown that ruled them would give up the Eisargir mines. Sai khas-Barachael was built on the northernmost Adínë spur to keep an eye on the Eisargir incursion route, but even its formidable presence did not deter the Reavers. They kept on raiding, though more circumspectly and in greater numbers, so that the battle for the Chaelonde valley was never over. Only Bluepeak had ever seen more blood shed on its behalf.
The thought of blood was not a welcome one that morning. Segnbora turned her back on the southern prospect and walked north along the wall. But that view held no comfort for her either. Northward the highlands fell away to the green and golden plains. On the plains, far out of sight but clear in her mind, was the city of Darthis—her family’s formal home, and the only one remaining, now that Asfahaeg was sold.