Miriamele looked up, stricken. “Oh, Simon! But I don’t have anything to give you!”
“Just your being here is enough. To see you safe after all this time …” His voice broke, making an embarrassing squeak. To cover his chagrin, he cleared his throat. “But in any case, you have already given me a fine present—your scarf.” He pulled his collar wide so she could see it where it nestled about his long neck. “The finest gift that anyone ever gave me, I think.” He smiled and hid it again. “Now I have something to give to you.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a long slender something wrapped in a cloth.
“What is it?” The care seemed to slide from her face, leaving her childlike in her attention to the mysterious bundle.
“Open it.”
She did, unwinding the cloth to disclose the white Sithi arrow, a streak of ivory fire.
“I want you to have it.”
Miriamele looked from the arrow to Simon. Her face went pale. “Oh, no,” she breathed. “No, Simon, I can’t.”
“What do you mean? Of course you can. It’s my gift to you. Binabik said that it was made by the Sithi fletcher Vindaomeyo, longer ago than either of us can imagine. It’s the only thing I have to give that’s worthy of a princess, Miriamele—and like it or not, that’s what you are.”
“No, Simon, no.” She pushed the arrow and its cloth into his hands. “No, Simon. That’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me, but I can’t take it. It’s not just a thing, it’s a promise from Jiriki to you—a pledge. You told me so. It means too much. The Sithi do not give these things away for no reason.”
“Neither do I,” said Simon angrily. So even this was not good enough, he thought. Under a thin layer of fury he felt a great reserve of hurt. “I want you to have it.”
“Please, Simon. I thank you—you do not understand how kind I think you are—but it would hurt me too much to take it from you. I cannot.”
Baffled, pained, Simon closed his fingers on the arrow. His offering had been rejected. He felt wild and full of folly. “Then wait here,” he said, and rose. He was on the verge of shouting. “Promise me you won’t leave this spot until I come back.”
She looked up at him uncertainly, shielding her eyes from the sun. “If you want me to stay, Simon, I will stay. Will you be gone long?”
“No.” He turned toward the crumbling gateway of the great wall. Before he had gone ten steps, he quickened his pace to a run.
When he returned, Miriamele was still seated in the same place. She had found the pomegranate he had hidden as a last surprise.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I was restless. I got this open, but I haven’t eaten any yet.” She showed him the seeds lined up on the split fruit like rows of gems. “What have you got in your hand?”
Simon drew his sword out of the tangle of his cloak. As Miriamele watched, her apprehension far from gone, he kneeled before her.
“Miriamele … Princess … I will give you the only gift I have left to give.” He extended the hilt of his sword toward her, lowering his head and staring fixedly at the jungle of grass around his boots. “My service. I am a knight now. I swear that you are my mistress, and that I will serve you as your protector … if you will have me.”
Simon looked up out of the corner of his eye. Miriamele’s face was awash in emotions, none of which he could identify. “Oh, Simon,” she said.
“If you will not have me, or cannot for some reason I’m still too stupid to know, then just tell me. We can still be friends.”
There was a long pause. Simon looked down at the ground again and felt his head spinning.
“Of course,” she said at last. “Of course I will have you, dear Simon.” There was an odd catch in her voice. She laughed raggedly. “But I will never forgive you for this.”
He looked up, alarmed, to see if she was joking. Her mouth was curved in a trembling half-smile, but her eyes were closed again. There was a gleam like tears on her lashes. He could not tell if she was happy or sad.
“What do I do?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. Take the hilt and then touch my shoulders with the blade, I suppose, like Josua did to me. Say: ‘You will be my champion.’”
She took the hilt and held it for a moment against her cheek, then lifted the sword and touched his shoulders in turn, left and right.
“You will be my champion, Simon,” she whispered.
“I will.”
The torches in Leavetaking House had burned low. It was long past time for the evening meal, but no one had said a word about eating.
“This is the third day of the Raed,” Prince Josua said. “We are all tired. I beg your attention for just a few moments more.” He drew his hand across his eyes.
Isgrimnur thought that of all those assembled in the room, it was the prince himself who most showed the strain of the long days and the acrimonious arguments. In attempting to let everyone have his or her fair say, Josua had been dragged along through many a side issue—and the onetime master of Elvritshalla did not approve at all. Prince Josua would never survive the rigors of a campaign against his brother if he did not harden himself. He had improved some since Isgrimnur had seen him last—the journey to this strange place seemed to have changed everyone who made it—but the duke still did not think Josua had grasped the trick of listening without being led. Without that, he thought sourly, no ruler could long survive.
The disagreements were many. The Thrithings-men did not trust the hardiness of the New Gadrinsett folk and feared that they would become a burden on the wagon-clans when Josua moved his camp down onto the grasslands. In turn, the settlers were not certain that they wanted to leave their new lives to go somewhere else since they would not even have new lands to settle until Josua took some territory from his brother or Benigaris.
Freosel and Sludig, who had become Josua’s war commanders after the death of Deornoth, also disagreed bitterly over where the prince should go. Sludig sided with his liege-lord Isgrimnur in urging an attack on Nabban. Freosel, like many others, felt an excursion into the south missed the true point. He was an Erkynlander, and Erkynland was not only Josua’s own country, but also the place that had been most blighted by Elias’ misrule. Freosel had made it clear that he felt they should move westward to the outer fiefdoms of Erkynland, gathering strength from the High King’s disaffected subjects before marching on the Hayholt itself.
Isgrimnur sighed and scratched his chin, indulging for a moment in the pleasure of his regrown beard. He longed to stand up and simply tell everyone what they should do and how to do it. He even sensed that Josua would secretly welcome having the burden of leadership lifted from his shoulders—but such a thing could not be allowed. The duke knew that as soon as the prince lost his preeminence, the factions would dissolve and any chance of an organized resistance to Elias would collapse.
“Sir Camaris,” Josua said abruptly, turning to the old knight. “You have been mostly silent. Yet if we are to ride on Nabban, as Isgrimnur and others urge us, you will be our banner. I need to hear your thoughts.”
The old man had indeed remained aloof, although Isgrimnur doubted it was from disapproval or disagreement. Rather, Camaris had listened to the arguments like a holy man on a bench in the midst of a tavern brawl, present and yet separate, his attention fixed on something that others could not see.
“I cannot tell you what is the right thing to do, Prince Josua.” The old knight spoke, as he had since regaining his wits, with a sort of effortless dignity. His old-fashioned, courtly speech was so careful as to seem almost a parody; he might have been the Good Peasant from the proverbs of the Book of the Aedon. “That is beyond me, nor would I presume to interpose myself between you and God, who is the final answerer of all questions. I can only tell you what I think.” He leaned forward, staring down at his long-fingered hands, which were twined on the table before him as if he prayed. “Much of what has been said is still incomprehensible to me—your brother’s bargain with this Storm King
, who was only a dim legend in my day; the part you say the swords are to play, my black blade Thorn among them—it is all most strange, most strange.
“But I do know that I loved well my brother, Leobardis, and from what you said, he served Nabban honorably in the years I was insensible—better than I ever could have, I think. He was a man who was made to govern other men; I am not.
“His son Benigaris I knew only as a bawling infant. It gnaws at my soul to think that someone of my father’s house could be a patricide, but I cannot doubt the evidence I have heard.” He shook his head slowly, a tired war-horse. “I cannot tell you to go to Nabban, or to Erkynland, or anywhere else upon the Lord’s green earth. But if you decide to march on Nabban, Josua … then, yes, I will ride before the armies. If the people will use my name, I will not stop them, although I do not find it knightly: only our Ransomer should be exalted by the voices of men. But I cannot let such shame to the Benidrivine House go unheeded.
“So if that is the answer you seek from me, Josua, then you have it now.” He raised his hand in a gesture of fealty. “Yes, I will ride to Nabban. But I wish I had not been brought back to see my friend John’s kingdom in ruins and my own beloved Nabban ground beneath the heel of my murderous nephew. It is cruel.” He dropped his gaze to the table once more. “This is one of the sternest tests God has given me, and I have failed Him already more times than I can count.”
When he had finished speaking, the old man’s words seemed to linger in the air like incense, a fog of complicated regret that filled the room. No one dared to break the stillness until Josua spoke.
“Thank you, Sir Camaris. I think I know what it will cost you to ride against your own countrymen. I am heartsick that we may have to force it upon you.” He looked around the torchlit hall. “Is there anyone else who would speak before we are finished?”
Beside him, Vorzheva moved on the bench as though she might say something, but instead she stared angrily at Josua, who slipped her gaze as though he found it uncomfortable. Isgrimnur guessed what had passed between them—Josua had told him of her desire to stay until the child was born—and frowned; the prince did not need any further doubts clouding his decision.
Many cubits down the long table, Geloë stood. “I think there is one last thing, Josua. It is something that Father Strangyeard and I discovered only last night.” She turned to the priest, who was sitting beside her. “Strangyeard?”
The archivist stood up, fingering a stack of parchments. He lifted a hand to straighten his eyepatch, then looked worriedly at some of the nearby faces, as though he had suddenly found himself called before a tribunal and charged with heresy.
“Yes,” he said. “Oh, yes. Yes, there is something important—your pardon, something that may be important …” He riffled through the pages before him.
“Come, Strangyeard,” the prince said kindly. “We are anxious to have you share your discovery with us.”
“Ah, yes. We found something in Morgenes’ manuscript. In his life of King John Presbyter.” He held up some of the parchment sheets for the benefit of those who had not already seen Doctor Morgenes’ book. “Also, from speaking to Tiamak of the Wran,” he gestured with the sheaf toward the marsh man, “we found that it was something that much concerned Morgenes even after he began to see the outlines of Elias’ bargain with the Storm King. It worried him, you see. Morgenes, that is.”
“See what?” Isgrimnur’s rear end was beginning to hurt from the hard chair, and his back had been griping him for hours. “What worried him?”
“Oh!” Strangyeard was startled. “Apologies, many apologies. The bearded star, of course. The comet.”
“There was such a star in the skies during my brother’s regnal year,” Josua mused. “As a matter of fact, it was the night of his coronation we first saw it. The night my father was buried.”
“That’s the one!” Strangyeard said excitedly. “The Asdridan Condiquilles—the Conqueror Star. Here, I’ll read what Morgenes wrote about it.” He pawed at the parchment.
“… Strangely enough,”
he began,
“the Conqueror Star, instead of shining above the birth or triumph of conquerors as its name might suggest, seems instead to appear as a herald of the death of empires. It trumpeted the downfall of Khand, of the old Sea Kingdoms, and even the ending of what may have been the greatest empire of all—the Sithi mastery of Osten Ard, which came to an end when their great stronghold Asu’a fell. The first records collected by scholars of the League of the Scroll tell that the Conqueror Star was bright in the night sky above Asu’a when Ineluki, Iyu’unigato’s son, pondered the spell that would soon destroy the Sithi castle and a large part of Fingil’s Rimmersgard army.
“It is said that the only event of pure conquest that ever saw the Conqueror Star’s light was the triumph of the Ransomer, Usires Aedon, since it shone in the skies above Nabban when Usires hung on the Execution Tree. However, the argument could be made that there, too, it heralded decline and collapse, since Aedon’s death was the beginning of the ultimate collapse of the mighty Nabbanai Imperium. …”
Strangyeard took a breath. His eyes were shining now: Morgenes’ words had driven out his discomfort at speaking to a crowd. “So you see, there is some significance to this, we think.”
“But why, exactly?” Josua asked. “It already appeared at the beginning of my brother’s regnal year. If the destruction of an empire has been forecast, what of it? No doubt it is my brother’s empire that will fall.” He showed a weak smile. There was a small rustle of laughter from the assembly.
“But that is not the whole story, Prince Josua,” Geloë said. “Dinivan and others—Doctor Morgenes, too, before his death—studied this matter. The Conqueror Star, you see, is not yet gone. It will be coming back.”
“What do you mean?”
Binabik rose. “Every five hundreds of years, Dinivan was discovering,” he explained, “the star is in the sky not once, but three times. It is appearing for three years, bright the first, then almost too dim for seeing the second, then most bright of all for the last.”
“So it is coming back this year, at the end of the winter,” Geloë said. “For the third time. The last time it did that was the year Asu’a fell.”
“I still don’t understand,” Josua said. “I believe that what you say may be important, but we already have many mysteries to think about. What does the star mean to us?”
Geloë shook her head. “Perhaps nothing. Perhaps, as in the past, it heralds the passing of a great kingdom—but whether that would be the High King’s, the Storm King’s, or your father’s if we are defeated, none of us can say. It seems unlikely that an occurrence with such a fateful history would mean nothing, however.”
“I am in agreement,” Binabik said. “This is not the season for the dismissing of such things as coincidence.”
Josua looked around in frustration, as though hoping someone else at the long table could provide an answer. “But what does it mean? And what are we supposed to do about it?”
“First, it could be that only when the star is in the sky will the swords be of use to us,” Geloë offered. “Their value seems to be in their otherworldliness. Perhaps the heavens are showing us when they will be most useful.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Or perhaps that will be a time when Ineluki will be strongest, and most able to help Elias against us, since it was five centuries ago he spoke the spell that made him what he is now. In that case, we will need to reach the Hayholt before that times comes ’round again.”
Silence descended on the vast chamber, broken only by the quiet murmuring of the fireplace flames. Josua shuffled absently through a few pages of Morgenes’ manuscript.
“And you have learned nothing further about the swords on which we have staked so much—nothing which would be of use to us?” he demanded.
Binabik shook his head. “We have been speaking now many times with Sir Camaris.” The little man gave the old knight a respectful nod. “He has
been telling us what he knows of the sword Thorn and its properties, but we have not yet learned of anything that tells us what we may do with it and the others.”
“Then we can’t afford to bet our lives on them,” Sludig said. “Magic and fairy-tricks will turn traitor every time.”
“You speak about things you do not know …” Geloë began grimly.
Josua sat up. “Stop. It is too late in the day to abandon the three swords. If it was my brother alone we fought, then perhaps we might chance it. But the Storm King’s hand has apparently been behind him at every step of his progress, and the swords are our only thin hope against that dark, dark scourge.”
Miriamele now stood. “Then let me ask again, Uncle Josua … Prince Josua, that we go directly to Erkynland. If the swords are valuable, then we need to take Sorrow back from my father and recover Bright-Nail from my grandfather’s grave. From what Geloë and Binabik are saying, we seem to have little time.”
Her face was solemn, but Duke Isgrimnur thought he sensed desperation behind her words. That surprised him. Important, all-important as these decisions were, why should little Miriamele sound like her own life was so absolutely dependent on going straight to Erkynland and confronting her father?
Josua’s look was cool. “Thank you, Miriamele. I have listened to what you say. I value your counsel.” He turned to face the rest of the assembly. “Now I must tell you my decision.” The desire to be finished with all this was audible in his every word.
“Here are my choices. To remain here—to build up this place, New Gadrinsett, and hold out against my brother until his misrule turns the tide in our favor. That is one possibility.” Josua ran his hand through his short hair, then held up two fingers. “The second is to go to Nabban, where with Camaris to march at the head of our army, we may quickly gain adherents, and thus eventually field an army capable of bringing down the High King.” The prince raised a third finger. “The third, as Miriamele and Freosel and others have suggested, is to move directly into Erkynland, gambling that we can find enough supporters to overcome Elias’ defenses. There is also a possibility that Isorn and Count Eolair of Nad Mullach may be able to join us with men recruited in the Frostmarch and Hernystir.”