The winter carnival in Stephen’s time was the event of greatest goodwill in the year, when religious acrimony, land disputes, and other matters of contention were put aside for the sake of harmony, friendly competition, and good fun. On the day of First Snow, the year’s official contest was announced, revels of differing sorts—a treasure quest, an ice-sculpture challenge, a poetry competition, a footrace with a unique handicap—along with traditional sport and games of chance, awards for best singing, which Lord Stephen insisted upon judging himself, comedic recitation and performance dance, as well as folk reels, man-powered sleigh races, snow sculpting, and performances by magicians, capped finally by a great bonfire. It was an enormous undertaking, an expensive endeavor, a revel without peer, and a source of renewal for the spirits of the people of the central continent.
Until the year of the bloodshed.
Gwydion, standing now on the balcony of the library overlooking his ancestral lands, breathed in the air in which the tiny drops of frozen moisture were finally falling; First Snow had come late that year, only a day before the winter carnival was scheduled to begin, known as Gathering Day. He watched in relief as the snow began to blanket the ground, the large feathery flakes wafting down on a brisk wind. The carnival games and revels were generally better after a few weeks of accumulation, the drier the better, but Gwydion was not in the mood to be particular about the kind of snow.
Mostly because until the moment it started to fall, he was wondering if its absence was a sign, a portent that tragedy would strike again.
It had been three years since the last winter carnival, the first one that had been celebrated within the boundaries of the high wall his father had built around the lands nearest the keep, to protect his populace from the horrific and random violence that had been a scourge across the continent. The wall had been a saving grace when a cohort of mounted soldiers from Sorbold, under the demonic thrall of a F’dor spirit, had attacked the carnival and the merrymakers who had just finished witnessing the penultimate event of the festival, a sledge race that took place beyond the barrier in an open field. The mayhem that ensued had been ghastly; before Stephen and his cousin, Tristan Steward, the Lord Roland, had shepherded the terrified festivalgoers back inside the walls, more than five hundred of them were dead. Gwydion would never be able to expunge from his memory the look of controlled terror on his father’s face as he hoisted Gwydion and Melisande over the wall into the care of the defenders, and the relief he saw in Stephen’s eyes once they were out of harm’s way, as he turned and went into battle.
Why are we doing this again? Gwydion wondered; he had asked himself the question repeatedly since the day two months prior when Rhapsody and Ashe had declared their intent to resume the carnival. The magic of it all is broken now. How can there be a winter carnival without my father? His spirit was the winter carnival.
Ashe’s hand came to rest on his shoulder; Gwydion looked up at his godfather, now taller than himself by only a hand’s measure. The Lord Cymrian’s cerulean blue eyes, considered a sign of Cymrian royalty, were fixed on the fields of revel, where scores of workers now scrambled to erect stages, tents, bonfire pits, and reviewing stands. The vertical pupils in those eyes contracted in the brightness of the rising sun.
“Looks as if the weather is favoring us after all,” Ashe said. “I was afraid we might have to beseech Gavin the Invoker to summon the snow if the warm winter continued.”
Gwydion nodded but said nothing. Ashe’s father, Llauron, had been the previous Invoker, the leader of the Filidic order of nature priests that tended the holy forest of Gwynwood. In that last, terrible carnival, Llauron had broken the charge of the demonically compelled regiment by summoning winter wolves from the snow itself, spooking the horses of the Sorbold cavalry and buying the fleeing populace time to get inside the gates. Llauron had given up his human body for the elemental form of a dragon, the blood he inherited from his mother, Anwyn, daughter of the wyrm Elynsynos, and now was off communing with those elements, hovering near but never seen. Ashe rarely spoke of his father; Gwydion once told his godfather that he understood his loss, but the Lord Cymrian had looked away and merely said that the situations were very different.
“The guests began arriving yesterday,” Gwydion said as the falling snow began to thicken. “No problems thus far.”
Ashe turned to him and took him by the shoulders.
“There will be no problems, Gwydion. I’ve taken every possible measure to prevent them.” He gave the young man’s arm a comforting squeeze. “I know you are worried, but try not to let it overshadow the import of these days. This is a special moment for you, and for Navarne. There is good reason for revelry and merrymaking; the future is being well assured with your ascension.” He smiled reassuringly, the corners of his draconic eyes crinkling with fondness. “Besides, rather than worrying, you should be saving your strength for the tug-of-war. My team intends to drag yours mercilessly through the mud, and there is a considerable amount of it this year. You best pray that the ground freezes quickly.”
A smile finally came to the corners of the young man’s mouth.
Ashe saw the change, and patted his ward’s shoulder. “That’s better. Now, I understand that Gerald Owen has taken it upon himself to convince the cooks to make an early batch of Sugar Snow, just for you, Melly, and me, as soon as there is enough accumulation to cool the boiling syrup.” He shielded his eyes and glanced at the back of the buttery, where the falling snow had covered the bricks with a thick layer of pocketed white, coating the graceful limbs of the silver-trunked trees with frosting. “I think it may almost be ready.”
Gwydion laughed halfheartedly and turned to leave the balcony. Just before he reached the door, he heard his godfather call his name quietly again.
“Gwydion?”
“Yes?”
Ashe did not turn, but continued to stare off over the now-white fields of Navarne as the carnival came to life below him.
“I miss him, too.”
THE REALM OF SUN, THE WESTERN SORBOLD DESERT
Faron did not understand what had happened to him.
Initially after he had awoken on the plate of the Scales he thought, in his limited capacity to reason and understand, that he had died. The blinding light and the intense heat had scorched his withered flesh in agonizing purity; Faron was no stranger to pain, but this suffering was so overwhelming that he imagined it could only be the death he longed for. So when the light vanished, and the sky above him cleared, he was despondent.
The father he had been waiting to reunite with was not there.
He did not remember breaking away, did not have any concept of the obstacles that had attempted futilely to rein him in, to thwart his escape. He had merely run as fast as he could, once the concept of running had come to him, away from the pain and into the warmth of the desert he could feel beyond the Place of Weight.
Now he wandered that desert alone, passing over, and sometimes through, the sand and dry scrub as naturally as if it had been air. The Living Stone body that encased his spirit was born of the earth, and it had no weight to him while he was touching the ground. If anything, every step he took, every moment he felt the sunbaked ground beneath his feet, brought him new strength.
He no longer unconsciously thought of himself as neuter; something nascent in the stone warrior’s spirit had instilled in him a gender, though it was not something he realized other than innately. It had imbued him with memories as well, fragments of images that flashed through his primitive mind which were beyond his understanding. There were scenes of battle, of endless marches, that came and went with the speed of a half-formed thought, leaving him confused. There were other images that came to his mind as well, human memories and scenes that were decidedly not from the mind of a man, but from the Earth itself; instinctive thoughts that whispered to him on the most elemental of levels.
Winter comes, it said. The fallow time. The sleeping time.
But for now the sun wa
s high. The earth was warm beneath his stone feet.
Giving him strength.
In the distance he could feel the scales as surely as he had felt them in his glowing pool of green water. Each called to him with a vibration unique in all the world, vibrations that had been an integral part of his makeup before the awakening. He could not see them yet, but he could sense the directions from which they called. Thinking about them both soothed his tortured mind and agitated him as the missing vibrations nagged at his consciousness.
And there was something more, something even more distant. In the back recesses of his conscious mind, fragmentary and shrouded in the darkness of ambiguity, was the memory of fire.
Dark fire.
20
GATHERING DAY, HAGUEFORT, NAVARNE
“This is mortifying,” Rhapsody said.
Ashe sighed. “So you’ve indicated three times already in the last hour,” he said indulgently, watching his wife wriggle uncomfortably in her thick cape beneath an even thicker blanket. She was ensconced on a large padded chair with a high back in the center of the reviewing stand, her feet propped on a tufted ottoman, her distended belly elevated to a point that she could barely see over it. Ashe leaned over and kissed her cheek, rosy from the wind, and brushed a strand of golden hair out of her eyes.
“I can stand,” she insisted.
“Well, that makes one of us,” Anborn chimed in humorously. He was seated to her left, watching the parade of festivalgoers from the reviewing platform as well. “Now you know how I feel.”
“She can’t stand, either,” Ashe retorted. “When she stands she vomits or gets light-headed.”
“I vomit and get light-headed when I sit as well,” Rhapsody said crankily. “At least if I’m going to be sick, it would be nice to be able to see who I am going to be sick on.”
“Oh, m’lady, by all means, don’t aim at the peasantry,” said Anborn, nudging her playfully. “Turn your lovely head clockwise toward your husband. He is, after all, responsible for your woes—or at least he thinks he is.”
Rhapsody glared at Anborn, then settled back down beneath the blanket, attempting to maintain a pleasant official expression. The crowd of merrymakers was a blur to her, a sea of jumbled faces and clothing passing beneath the flapping banners of colored silk that hung from Haguefort’s towers and guardposts and the reviewing stand on which they were seated.
Melisande hovered nearby, her face shining with excitement, rimmed in a fur hat that matched the muff that encased her hands. Her black eyes were sparkling in the wind, her nose and cheeks red with the bite of it.
“Look at the puppets!” she said gleefully to Rhapsody as a line of giant articulated harlequins paraded past the reviewing stand, their limbs controlled by the large sticks of their puppetmasters, who walked behind them, dwarfed by their size.
Rhapsody smiled at her in return. “Are you going to compete in the Snow Snakes competition this year?” she asked the young girl.
“Yes, definitely,” said Melisande with a knowing glance at Gwydion. “I have to defend the family honor; last time Gwydion lost in the final round.”
“That’s right,” Gwydion murmured to himself. He had forgotten that aspect of the carnival; the thought opened a floodgate in his mind and the memories poured back in, the good-spirited competition, the comic races where Melisande and the other little children had to race with a sled tied to their waists on which a fat sheep had been placed, the excitement of the sledge races, the humorous dunking of the winning teams by the losing ones. Such good memories that had been overshadowed by what came later. Over it all he could hear the pealing of Stephen’s merry laughter. I have to hold on to these, he thought. That was my father’s last carnival. I need to remember him that way.
He turned to Anborn, beside whom he was sitting, and motioned into the crowd.
“Isn’t that Trevalt, the swordmaster?” he asked, indicating a black-mustached man, tall and rapier-thin, accompanied by a small retinue, making his way from the line of carriages outside Haguefort’s wall to the central festival grounds.
Anborn’s lip curled in disdain. “I would never call him by such a lofty title, but yes, that’s Trevalt.”
Gwydion leaned forward in his seat and addressed his godfather.
“Third-generation Cymrian?”
“Fourth,” Ashe corrected.
“But a First Generation damfool,” said Anborn scornfully. “A simpleton dressed in the robes of a scholar, a thespian who wraps himself in the titles of soldiers because he lived through a war in which even children and blind beggars fought.”
Gwydion blinked at the acid in his mentor’s voice, and looked questioningly at Ashe. His godfather motioned to Gwydion, who rose and walked over to him. Ashe leaned closer so as not to be overheard.
“Anborn loathes Trevalt because he once claimed, for personal gain, to have been invested as a Kinsman,” he said quietly. He needed to say nothing more; the look of horror on Gwydion’s face indicated clearly that he understood the severity of the offense. Kinsmen like Anborn were members of a secret brotherhood of warriors, masters of the craft of fighting, sworn to the service of soldiering for life. They were accepted into the brotherhood for two things: incredible skill forged over a lifetime of soldiering, or a selfless act of service to others, protecting an innocent at the threat of one’s own life. It was a sacred trust to be one, the ultimate honor coupled with the ultimate selflessness, and with the membership came the unspoken understanding of its secrecy, and its honor. Anyone who was boasting about being one was clearly lying. And that was considered an affront almost too egregious to be borne.
He looked back at Anborn, whose face was still flushed with purple rage, sitting impotently on his litter, his useless legs motionless beneath the massive barrel of his chest. Gwydion’s heart went out to him, but a moment later he saw Anborn glance at Rhapsody, a Kinsman herself, and the anger drained out of his face as she smiled at him. They both sighed, then returned to watching the assemblage of the crowd and the festivities.
“Become accustomed to this torture, Gwydion,” Anborn said as the line of dignitaries passed the reviewing stand. “Alas, this is the sort of useless nonsense that takes up one’s days when one is saddled with a title.”
Rhapsody slapped the Lord Marshal playfully. “Stop that. Your title never stopped you from distancing yourself from court obligations.”
“Ah, but you forget, m’lady, my titles have only been military,” said Anborn. “I was the youngest of three. No one ever had any illusions about me being to the manor born, I am relieved to say.”
“Well, except for the Third Fleet, who nominated you for my title, I remind you,” joked Ashe. “Had you not refused it, you might have a lot more ‘useless nonsense’ to attend to today.”
Anborn snorted and returned to his mug of hot spiced mead. Trevalt and his retinue stopped before the reviewing stand, per custom, and bowed deeply with flourishes to the Lord and Lady Cymrian. Rhapsody’s hand shot out and covered Anborn’s mouth in time to prevent him from spitting his libation at the swordmaster. She smiled pleasantly at Trevalt; he blinked, confused, smiled wanly in return, and moved on.
“Now, now, Uncle, this is Gwydion’s last day before his investiture tomorrow,” Ashe said, trying to contain his amusement. “Let us not christen his ascension to duke with a brawl, shall we?”
“You will be lucky if that’s all that comes to pass,” muttered Anborn into his mug.
Rhapsody, Ashe, and Gwydion exchanged a somber glance and returned their attention to the opening of the festival.
“I believe I see Tristan Steward arriving,” said Gwydion.
“Oh joy,” said Rhapsody and Anborn in unison under their breath.
Gwydion sighed and returned to his seat. It appeared it was going to be a long day.
Later, after the Gathering Day’s festivities had come to an end, and the First Night feast had begun, he had to admit to himself that he was enjoying the carnival in spite o
f it all.
Ashe had wisely limited the attendance to the citizens of Navarne and a few invited dignitaries from across the Cymrian Alliance, rather than holding it open to the entire population of the western continent, as Stephen always had. Since the tents required to accommodate a very much smaller attendance were able to be spread out and more carefully managed, the settling in took only a few hours, rather than the whole of Gathering Day; Ashe had anticipated this as well, and had arranged for the afternoon to hold several highly favored events, as well as a remarkable performance by the Orlandan orchestra that Rhapsody had patronized. The result was a jolly populace, fresh with the excitement of the sporting events and music, ready to sup heartily at the First Night feast. The wine and ale were flowing freely, courtesy of Cedric Canderre, duke of the province that bore his name. Gwydion was quietly amazed that the elderly man had even been willing to attend, let alone provide such a generous donation of his highly valued potables; his beloved only son, Andrew, had died a hero’s death at the battle of the last winter carnival.
As Gwydion stood talking to Ashe while the roasted oxen were being carved and the ale being passed, Tristan Steward, the Lord Roland and his cousin once removed, sidled up to them both and greeted them pleasantly, his auburn hair gleaming in the light of the open fire.
“A splendid beginning, young Navarne,” Tristan said, saluting Gwydion with his glass. “I confess at first when I heard of your godfather’s intention to hold the carnival again, I thought it in poor taste at best, and foolhardy at worst. But it seems to have worked out well, so far at least.”