She came in a plain shirt and breeches of bleached linen, and wearing boots, like any other countrywoman with a morning’s yardwork to do in hot weather. The shouting in the crowd quieted at the sight of her. Eftgan d’Arienn, like her husband, was short, though no one under any circumstances could have called her small: an oval-faced woman, with a sweet expression and short-cropped blond hair. Her close-set blue eyes and sharp nose sometimes made her look to Freelorn rather like a small, inquisitive bird, a chirper like the wren. But her voice always broke the illusion. It was the pure North Darthene drawl, like Herewiss’s, reflective and cool, and the mind behind the blue eyes was hard and deep and missed little. That was no surprise, since she was a Rodmistress as well as a Queen, trained in the Silent Precincts. Indeed she had been marked down to succeed one of the Wardresses, till the death of the heir, her brother, had brought her out of the Silent Places to Blackcastle. But Eftgan’s Power would do her little good here and now. She was without her Rod, the focus of her Power, and forbidden to use the Fire for her defense in any case. Eftgan carried nothing but a leather bag, which she dropped by the anvil with a clank and looked around her.
Here and there in the crowd a hat or bonnet came off; many bowed, those on high horse as well as those standing. Eftgan bowed her head briefly to them. “Lords and friends,” she said, the old words, “today I must know your will with me. Before the Goddess, I tell you I’ve done my best for you this year past. Here while I make my crown, you shall make plain to me whether my best has been yours as well. Our Lady defend my right, and yours; and see Her right done, for the land’s good and in the Shadow’s despite.”
“Be it so,” the crowd murmured; and the Queen nodded again, less formally, and turned around to sit down at the anvil, on the stool. She rummaged in the toolbag and came up with several small hammers, and a punch and hand riveter. Then from the other bag she produced the gold, a small fat ingot that she turned in her hands for a moment and gazed at, watching the way the sunlight fell through the moving leaves and caught on it, glancing bright.
The crowd fell quite silent. Eftgan picked up one of the larger hammers and began working on the ingot. The crown didn’t have to be ornate—just recognizably circular, something that would go on the forger’s head. Some kings had practiced in secret and had then astonished everyone with how little time they spent turning a block of gold into a band. But Eftgan looked unconcerned with speed. She sat there, a little hunched over, pounding the ingot flat, the ringing of the hammer muted as it hit the gold, brighter when it missed or bounced and hit the anvil. She didn’t look up at the people around her; not a glance for her husband, for her children peering between the people in the front rows, for Herewiss or Segnbora, and certainly no glance for Freelorn, right behind her.
He slowly began to gnaw on the inside of his cheek, an old nervous habit. Here they all were, in force, but what could they really do? Herewiss and Segnbora and Hasai were effectively helpless. Oh, perhaps anyone who moved against the Queen would have their mind wrung dry for information at a later date—but a lot of good that would do Eftgan if she fell. The heir to Darthen was presently twelve years old, busily eating an apple some feet away from Herewiss, and staring at Khávrinen… and it seemed unlikely that Wyn his father would be made regent if something untoward should happen. The Forty Houses were nervous about Arlen’s recent aggression, and would welcome an excuse to back away from the “dangerous” course of confrontation that Eftgan had been steering them. Some other regent would be chosen, someone more cautious, and in that caution Darthen and Arlen would founder together—
— and the shriek and motion across the courtyard brought his head up with a jerk, blood jumped in him, he flushed—
— and felt stupid, because it was the broad lady in the bright skirt, bending down to do something about her daughter, who had had the sausage stolen out of her hand by a small brown furry dog that had wriggled out from behind them. The young girl was crying and trying to hit the dog, and the people around them were beginning to chuckle as their shock passed. Eftgan glanced up sidewise from her work, grinned, looked down again.
— and too suddenly for shock Lorn found himself looking at that woman as well as at Eftgan—looking at the woman with two other sets of eyes, seeing her as it were from two different angles. And he saw, as those other eyes did, how the gesture that had begun as a straightening of the woman’s skirts, now ended with one of her hands bringing up from under the volume of them a small cocked crossbow—
From behind he felt someone push him aside, but it was not him, it was Segnbora feeling it. She wheeled, but he didn’t have time for her vision. The crossbow was up and aiming. At the same time, as if someone else was doing it, Súthan was out of the sheath, and Lorn took the sword two- handed. The crossbow quarrel flashed brassy gold with noonfire as it flew at the Queen. Súthan met it. Something sharp stung Lorn in the cheek; he flinched and blinked, eyes tearing with the pain.
Shouting broke out in the crowd. Across from him, Segnbora was standing quite still and glancing from the startled young man who had just bolted from behind her, trying to see better, to the woman with the crossbow, as the people in the crowd around her grabbed the bow out of the woman’s hands and seized her. The little girl was crying louder than ever, not understanding the sudden anger.
Light glanced off something silver, and again Lorn saw it with an extra pair of eyes as the knife flew. It flew wide, though, and clattered on the cobbles under the tree, and the well-dressed man who had thrown it from behind Herewiss turned and tried to shoulder away through the crowd. Lorn was in no mood for it, and in even less of one when he glanced down at the odd feel of Súthan in his hand and found the sword missing the pointward third of its blade. He dropped it, pulled the One Knife from under his sleeve, and was about to take it by the blade and throw it when someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Never turn toward the shoulder you’re tapped on,” his father had said long ago: “always turn the other way instead.” And Lorn did, and so was able to put the One Knife quite accurately into the upper right lung of the pretty young woman who had been about to stab him in the kidney.
She doubled over and went to her knees, and the people behind and around her, who had seen what she’d tried to do, looked at Freelorn in shock and made no particular attempt to catch her. He felt inclined to agree with them. Lorn turned around for a second, amid the angry shouting, to look at Eftgan. She glanced up, hammering away, and glanced down again—not looking particularly surprised, as if she had seen what had been happening with the same multiple vision Freelorn had briefly experienced.
And then there was a growl, and the furry brown dog stopped being a dog, and Eftgan looked up again, very surprised indeed.
Screaming began among the people closest. Shapechange could be decorous, or ugly, depending on the original mass of the sorcerer, the size of the shape one intended to take, and the amount of power and time one expended on controlling the change itself. This sorcerer was in a hurry. The dog literally exploded out of itself like a firework, skin and blood mingling horribly, and grew huge in a screaming, stretching tangle of sinew and naked muscle. A breath later, a tatty-pelted thing half like an ape, half like a wolf, and the size of a carthorse, was springing at Eftgan. She leapt up, horror plain on her face, and nothing but the hammer in her hand. She threw it full and hard in the monster’s face.
It staggered back, shook the blood from its dented brow out of its eyes, screeched horribly, and jumped at the Queen again, slavering, its claws unsheathed and ready.
The Sun fell into the courtyard. Terrified, the crowd pushed frantically back from the skin-scorching heat, from the wild swirl of fire knotting about the twisting, horribly howling shape halfway under the tree. The Blackstave’s lowest branches charred, their leaves writhing into flame. The thrown hammer, fallen to the cobbles, puddled into slag and ran like rainwater between the stones. Then the fire went out.
Where the shapechanger had been, a flat pile of ash was
starting to blow about on the red-glowing rocks. More ash, in tiny flakes, drifted up out of the courtyard on hot air that stank vilely of burnt bone and meat. Standing beside the pile of ash was a creature that looked like a horse, except that its mane and tail appeared to be made of flame, and its eyes glowed a hot amber, merry and wicked. It looked over at Herewiss.
He looked shocked, and chagrined. “Sunspark—”
“Just because I don’t take baths,” the fire elemental said, “is no reason to leave me out of things.”
It turned to Eftgan, and smiled at her, as far as a horse can smile. “You’re welcome,” it said.
“Thank you,” she said; “so are you.” And she sat back down at the anvil, and picked up another hammer, a smaller one, and went back to work on the gold.
Until she was finished, no one moved, and no one said anything, particularly not the woman with the crossbow or the man with the knife, who were being held, not lovingly, by the spectators. The girl who had tried to stab Freelorn lay groaning on the stones, not bleeding much; Lorn had been careful, knowing Herewiss would want to talk to her. Now Lorn simply stood there and breathed hard, holding the recovered hilt-shard of Súthan in his hands. When he was finally called, a tall wide man standing next to him in the crowd had to nudge him to get his attention.
“Arlen?”
Eftgan was standing with the Gold in her hands, hammered out and riveted, a rough-looking circlet perhaps an inch wide. Freelorn went to her. They exchanged a rueful glance as he sheathed his broken sword. Then she held Dekorsir out to him. “If you would do me the honor, brother.”
He took the circlet from her. She looked out and around, at the crowd, who stirred and murmured. “The Gold is forged,” she said, “and by this token I am your Queen indeed, and I will be your good lady and defend you from those who would do you harm, as you today have defended me.”
The silence grew around them again. Freelorn lifted up the circlet, and carefully set it on Eftgan’s head… then tried to straighten it, and found this hopeless. It was quite crooked, and a poor fit.
“You’ll never make a jeweler,” he whispered to her. “Stick to queening.” She smiled at him like sunrise.
And more loudly, for the crowd to hear, he said: “Take your crown, Eftgan datheln Arienn ie kyr’Bort tai-Earnésti, and wear it well, and bear it well; for like the Goddess our Mother, you have wrought your own burden.”
The cheering started, and built. Freelorn looked around the crowd with satisfaction…. until his glance lit again on the shapes on horseback, and the shapes that stood, the shapes that held their peace and watched the common people shout. It occurred to him that a crown might make a Queen, but it would not make her secure.
“Of your courtesy,” the Queen said to the people closest in the crowd, “give over those folk you’re holding to our guards, and let them be held to wait our pleasure. That one may need the surgeon as well as the household’s Rodmistress: have them called. Does anyone here know that woman with the child? Good. Sir, I’d be glad if you would go with the little one and see her lodged in Blackcastle and properly treated. I wouldn’t have her frightened by this confusion, it’s no fault of hers. Arlen,” the Queen said, to be heard, “did that knife mark you at all?”
“No, Darthen,” Freelorn said. “Yet I confess to you that I’m getting tired of being hunted like a hound, even in this your own town. I weary of having the battle carried to me by Arlen’s usurpers. That was why I came out in the open at last, and came to you. If nothing’s going to change—”
“No fear of that. Enough of skirmishes,” said the Queen, and reached up to adjust Dekorsir, which was sliding sideways on her bright hair. “Let us have a war.”
TWO
There is little to choose between the pen and the sword.
Too often, both write in blood.
Gnomics, 1216
Early sunlight lay in a long warm parallelogram on the polished basalt tabletop. The soft scratching noises of a quill underwrote the airy silence of the room whenever the several voices there fell quiet.
“And you found nothing at all?”
“Of course not. That poor woman has no memory of anything from the time the dog took her daughter’s sausage to the time she found herself being held by the people around her. It was the sorcerer, the shapechanger, who was controlling her. Probably he passed the crossbow to her in town, on the way to the Hammering.”
“So this man was controlling not just her, but the other two with the knives as well? Isn’t that terribly difficult?”
“It’s not difficult at all. It’s just that the backlash from a direct-control sorcery is horrible—a human mind isn’t meant to run more than one of itself. Also, the undischarged energy of the controlled mind snaps back at you like a misdrawn bowstring when the spell finally breaks. If the poor fool could have survived such a violent shapechange, he’d have the Shadow’s own headache right now—if the backlash hadn’t actually killed him outright. I have to wonder what kind of hold that creature’s master had over him.”
Eftgan took a long drink out of a cup of barley-water and lemon. “I am dry as last year’s bones,” she said, putting it down. “That’s so good.” Lorn watched her push back from the great table, put her hands up behind her head and stretch. The room was one of the informal dining rooms attached to the royal suite, a high-ceilinged tower room. On the table a collation had been laid out for the Queen to break her fast. She had help; Freelorn’s people Dritt and Moris and Harald were there, as were Wyn, and Torve s’Keruer, the Chastellain of Bluepeak. The Queen was sitting happily in front of the wreckage of half a cold roast of beef, picking at the remains of it as the mood took her. Herewiss was sitting at the far end of the table, writing busily, while Segnbora looked over his shoulder.
“I just wish we had him alive,” Eftgan said. “No shame to you, Sunspark, you did what was necessary.” She glanced at the fireplace, which though it had no wood in it, still had a fire.
The fire looked back at her, ironic. “I try.”
Lorn dunked a bit of roast beef in a bowl of horseradish sauce. “It would have been nice to have proof from his mind that Cillmod sent him. Or more correctly, Rian. That would have been cause to declare war right there.”
“Oh, I have reason enough. And we know that sorcerer was a tool of Rian’s, and Rian knows we know. No problem there. But the question now becomes, what the best courses of action are for us.” Eftgan took another drink. “If we’re going to have a war, we have to condiser our own force in arms, and whether we have enough people to beat all the mercenaries Cillmod has on his payroll. There’s also the problem of the loyalties of the Four Hundred… but with the crops as bad as they are now, those are wavering. And finally,” Eftgan said, beginning to play with a pen-knife that lay near her, “there’s the question of Cillmod’s master-sorcerer. Rian is definitely not just a man acting from political expediency. He’s a disguise of the Shadow’s, or rather, he’s become one.”
“If that’s a question at all,” said Moris from down the table, “it should be answered with a horse, a rope and a tree- branch. No one becomes a tool of that one without agreeing to it.”
“Bloodthirsty creature.” Eftgan looked at him affectionately. “Mori, the agreement to evil isn’t always so clear-cut and conscious as the old stories would have us think. But that’s not our problem right now. What we have to do somehow is tempt the Shadow in him out of cover—and then strike It down. My job, most likely…. ”
There were uneasy looks around the table. One might speak lightly of disposing of the Shadow—especially if one came of Eftgan’s line—but the execution was likely to be more difficult. Even Segnbora, related to that line and using a life’s worth of repressed Fire, had managed only a temporary solution at Bluepeak.
There was a faint click as a quill was tossed to the tabletop. “Well,” Herewiss said, from the table’s end, “let’s see how this sounds.” Parchment rustled. “‘Eftgan datheln Arienn ie kyr’Bort tai
-Earnésti, by the Goddess’s good gift, by descent from the Eagle, by gift of her people, and by the might of her hand Queen of Darthen, Princess of the Harichel Isles, Lady paramount of the Brightwood, and Maintenant of the Old Kings’ Road: to Cillmod stareiln Kavannel, styling himself sharing-son to Ferrant stareiln Fréol stai-Héalhrästi, and sitting in the Throne and place of the Rulers of Arlen: greeting and defiance—’“
Freelorn sat up straight in his chair. “Wait a moment! ‘Styling’? I thought we had proof that he was one of my father’s children. No one not of the Lion’ blood can go into Lionhall and come out alive… and he did that.”
Eftgan smiled narrowly. “So he did, but Lorn, that’s not proof! Or, mean-minded creature that I am, I can refuse to accept it as such. If I don’t explicitly contest Cillmod’s use of that style and dignity—with which he’s been making free—he could use the omission to argue that I should be supporting him, on the grounds of prior and present possession of the Throne. It is Our official position that you are the only Lion’s Child available.”
“Suits me. Go on, Dusty.”
“‘—sitting in the Throne and place of the Rulers of Arlen: greeting and defiance.
“‘Having seen by many sure signs that your lordship means no good either to Darthen your neighbor, nor to Arlen over which you now hold sway; as by the looting and burning of Our granaries near Egen, and by the many returns of Our messengers from your domains with neither yea nor nay to Our frequent suings for calm on Our borders; and as by the most recent and lamentable bloodshed in the fields of Bluepeak, where We did adventure Our royal person for the maintenance of the Great Bindings whereto should be your chief concern, and for Our pains were set upon by mercenaries in your hire, and in the same treachery and ambush were rudely advertised of your dangerous alliance with the Reaver folk from overmountain; and chiefly moved by the late cowardly and treacherly attempt on Our life, made by your tool and instrument, which attempt was by the Goddess’s good humour brought to nothing; We are minded to make an end once for all of these troublings of both your folk and Ours, which have since the time of Lion and Eagle been bound as one land and lordship in heart, though two in name.