“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 li
ttle 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 sword 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.
There on Potboilers’ Street, just outside the old second wall, stood the little stone house with its doors and windows shuttered blind, and the tai-Enraesi lioncelle carved over the passage to the horseyard. But Segnbora’s mother wouldn’t be singing in the armory any more; her father wouldn’t be rehanging the bedroom shutter that was always falling down. There was only one person left to carry the family’s lioncelle; and how long even that one would survive she couldn’t tell. Ice and darkness. . .
(Are you sure,) Hasai said diffidently, (are you sure that they’re not in here somewhere, those that sired you? Since last night there’s been a—I don’t know what you would call it—an opening in the depths—)
She blinked back sudden tears, and her mouth was grim. (Mdaha, forget it. What you almost did, they’ve done; they’re rdahaih, they’re gone forever, and I’ll never see them again, not till I pass the last Door. Maybe not even then.)
She felt him turn his head away, a gesture of shock and sorrow at her hard words and her pain. (Their souls live yet, don’t they?)
(They do. It might have been otherwise if we hadn’t found them in time.) Her rage at the murdering pair at the inn, which had been gnawing at her like an ulcer all the night before, flared up hot again. She turned her back to the wall, to the wind.
After a long time Hasai said, (We didn’t understand this terrible thing—or believe it.) In his voice there was distress. Far back in her inner darkness, the mdeihei were singing a mournful bass cadence, both dirge and apology. (You humans throw yourselves so willingly into strifes and dangers that we thought surely you must go mdahaih somehow. Otherwise it seemed a madness—)
(We don’t get the same life twice. Or know the same people twice. So in this life we fight for what matters. Herewiss fights for Lorn, and Lorn for his kingship. All of us fight for our own happiness, as best we can. Once past the Door, it’s done forever.)
Hasai fell silent again. The same fear, of not-being, and not-remembering, was at the heart of the terror of going rdahaih, and nothing could frighten a Dragon more. Segnbora heard Hasai wondering what would become of him and the mdeihei when her time came to change bodies. Perhaps this human death would be more final and terrible, in its way, than going rdahaih…
Segnbora’s pain briefly turned to regret for the fear she had planted in him. (Mdaha,) she said, (I’m sorry. But you and I, we’re an experiment, it seems. If it’ll make you feel better, I intend to put off my death as long as possible.)
His low rumbling sigh of agreement mingled with the sound of steps on stone. Segnbora looked southward along the wall. Eftgan was coming, not in country clothes, this morning, but dressed for battle: boots and britches, jerkin and mailshirt, and the Darthene midnight blue surcoat blazoned with the undifferenced royal arms—the White Eagle in trian aspect, wings spread, striking. Eftgan’s sheathed Rod still bumped at her side, but she was carrying another weapon over her shoulder. It was Fórlennh BrokenBlade, Earn’s sword, without which no Darthene ruler went to war.
Eftgan was a fair sight, and even a little funny, bumping down the parapet toward Segnbora with a sword over her shoulder that was almost as long as she was. Segnbora remembered the days when Eftgan had been her wreaking-partner in the Precincts. Back then she had refused to wear any gear more complicated than a belt for her tunic, or maybe a ribbon in her hair. Evidently queenship had brought some changes. Segnbora smiled, and wiped her nose as Eftgan came up and leaned on the parapet beside her.
“Fair morn, your grace.”
“Oh, don’t be formal,” Eftgan said, making a sour face. “I have enough problems today. Your friends are looking for you, ‘Berend.”
“I dare say. I needed to get away from their watchful eyes for a while.”
br /> Eftgan looked somber. “I didn’t say it last night—you were getting drunk and I didn’t want to interfere—but I share your grief, dear.”
“May our pain soon be healed,” Segnbora said They were words she had thought she wouldn’t have to say for years yet. She sighed and gazed down at Barachael town with its moat and ditches and star fortifications. “Where are you off to?”
“Orsvier, as soon as I’m finished here. A force of Reavers and mercenaries is forming there to raid the granaries. There’ll be a thousand or more gathered by nightfall. They’ll attack tonight, or tomorrow morning perhaps.”
“Goddess,” said Segnbora, disturbed. “More mercenaries. Where is Cillmod getting them all?”
“Steldin, mostly. Some are even Steldene regulars; evidently King Dariw sold their services to Cillmod at a discount, to make up for letting Freelorn get away.”
Once more Segnbora went cold at the thought of what might have happened had she not stepped into a certain alley in Madeil one night. She shook her head. “How do you stand?”
“A thousand foot, five hundred horse, thirty sorcerers, and the right is on our side. Whether that’ll be enough, I don’t know.” Eftgan let out a tired breath and fell silent.
Segnbora thought of Herewiss standing on the Morrowfane, an open challenge to the Shadow. Obviously It had taken up the challenge. These latest incursions by the Reavers were too well timed, and too well organized, to be coincidence.
“Have any suggestions for me?” Eftgan said.
Segnbora put an eyebrow up. “The Queen’s grace hardly needs to discuss battle tactics with an outlaw.”
“With an outlaw, no. But with the head of one of the Forty Houses—”
Segnbora winced.
“‘Berend, I’m sorry,” Eftgan said, “but you had better face up to it. You’re now the tai-Enraesi, and I have the right to require your advice as such.”