What is it? she whispered in her sleep, as she had into his ear then.
The Lord Marshal, almost as real to her in her dream as he had been in the grassy field, shook his head.
I don’t know. But I thought I heard the Kinsman call the other night. On the Skeleton Coast.
What neither of them could have known was that what she was feeling was the eyes of Michael, the Wind of Death, her hated adversary and pursuer in the old world, gazing at her through the scrying scale that his child could read.
The Faorina Michael had called Faron.
The demon host that was, in fact, coming for her.
From the west.
The dream shifted again, and Rhapsody sighed painfully.
She was now atop a rocky promontory that lunged out into the sea, a large jagged structure beside other such structures that rose from the sand like fingers, as if a giant hand had landed from the sky, palm down, at the ocean’s edge. The sea crashed violently to the shore below her.
Around her was violence and devastation too grisly for her mind to comprehend, a purge for sheer sport with soldiers ravaging young mothers as well as their children, the brutal sodomizing of an elderly woman in the vestments of a member of the clergy.
And, worst of all, a line of soldiers carrying screaming infants to a catapult positioned at the end of the promontory, which they used to fling the babies, still screaming, into the sea.
All the while a young soldier with dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard, whose face was hidden in the night shadows, laughed uproariously as he directed the mayhem.
With a scream of her own, Rhapsody bolted upright in her bedroll, trembling.
The next several minutes were spent apologizing to the various soldiers who had come rushing to her aid, bringing her hot cider and sympathetic glances, but who were clearly confused by whatever it was that bedeviled her.
How can they possibly understand this sensitivity? she asked the bottom of her mug of cider as the shaking of her hand subsided. Even I don’t understand it.
Eventually she was able to calm herself again and climbed back into her bedroll, brushing the rocks out from under her head first.
Trying to remember, as sleep came for her, what she had first seen in her vision before it had turned to a nightmare.
And failing.
* * *
The next morning, when a message had come from Navarne that their attack had been repelled and that Gwydion and Constantin were making their way to Sepulvarta, she packed her meager possessions, requested and received a mount, and left quietly before most of the city had awakened.
On her way to meet the two men that, long ago, she had adopted as grandsons, one still young, one now very old, one to heal his broken young heart.
And one to save his soul.
33
NAVARNE
In the smoldering aftermath of the attack launched against the citadel that carried his father’s name, and his own, Gwydion Navarne left the walled capital city that had been successfully defended, but at a horrific cost in human lives and structural damage, and made his way north to the keep that had been his family’s home.
Once the walled city had been declared safe after the onslaught, a rout that had left the streets behind its wall running red with blood, Gwydion had quietly sought the Patriarch’s blessing to return to Haguefort, where some of the most wonderful and hideous memories of his young life had been made.
When at first he had approached and spoken to Constantin, the Patriarch had been attending to the wounded, applying the power of the Ring of Wisdom that he had been given upon his investiture and his own deep knowledge of healing he had gained, it was said, beyond the Veil of Hoen, the place between life and death. His back had been to Gwydion as the young duke had quietly put forth the request that the Patriarch assume responsibility for the citadel in his stead for a few days while he went to check on Haguefort.
At first the Patriarch had turned, fury in his blue eyes, in angry astonishment to confront Gwydion, vituperative words struggling to break out of his mouth. The casualties of the battle had been enormous, and the work of rebuilding and sustaining the citadel was a heavy burden, expected to be borne by all present.
But upon beholding the young man, his rage had tempered, and the former gladiatorial arena slave had reverted to being the compassionate man of faith he had been since his return from the Veil of Hoen.
He had nodded his assent.
“Do what you must do, young Navarne,” he had said simply. “You have well earned the leave; I will pray that, whatever you find, the All-God will give you the strength to accept it with the gratitude that your province has been largely spared.”
He cast a glance around the streets of the city, broken and blackened, with bodies being stacked in neat rows, and shook his head.
“Perhaps not largely.”
“My thanks,” the duke had said, turning away.
“Remember, m’lord,” said the Patriarch as Gwydion began to take his leave, “that you owe me your time in return for mine. I will await your return three days hence, whereupon I will go and finish the reconnection of the Chain of Prayer. And then I will come and collect you to ride to Sepulvarta, where you have agreed to help me retake my citadel.”
Gwydion had merely nodded.
He had ridden the forest road alone. It was more difficult a passage than he had imagined it would be; the road was the same thoroughfare his mother and aunt had traveled ten years before on their way to purchase a pair of shoes for his baby sister Melisande. It was on this road she had met a grisly death, one of the many acts of random violence perpetrated by the thralls of a demon that had held the continent in terror and disarray.
He had not realized, until he had ridden her final path, how much more had ended that day than he had ever realized.
Perhaps that was because, by traveling from the city to which she had been heading when her carriage was assaulted, to the place from which she had departed, he was quite literally traveling back in Time.
His father, Stephen Navarne, had been a man of almost unquenchable optimism, in Gwydion’s recollection from that hazy time in childhood. He had done his grieving in private at the death of his wife, choosing to focus instead on helping his young children recover from it.
How did he manage that, I wonder? Gwydion thought as he cantered past the bodies on the roadside, or beneath the trees of the forest, riding a bloodstained pathway back into the past on his way to a home he was not certain was still standing.
But it was.
As he rode past the guardian towers that had long welcomed visitors to Haguefort, he was relieved to find them still standing, but he had only gone a few hundred paces before the edifice of the rosy brown stone keep had come into sight.
Blackened with soot, its windows broken, great sparkling piles of glass glittering across the grounds.
For as much as he had expected it to be the case, the sight still made Gwydion want to vomit.
He tied his horse to the blackened trunk of what had once been the tree he and his mother had planted in the gardens of the courtyard when Melly was born. His throat tightened as he thought of his sister, hidden away with Rhapsody and Ashe’s son in the shelter of the Deep Kingdom of the Nain, or at least as he thought they were.
And then he realized there was literally nothing about which he was certain anymore, no one he loved that he actually knew was safe.
Walking what had once been the hallways of his childhood home was both bitter and strangely reassuring; everything of any value was gone, as he expected, but many things that had mattered greatly to his father, suits of armor and family crests, relics and antiques from bygone eras and renderings of historic buildings that no longer existed, had been wantonly destroyed and left as garbage in the rooms he had been born in, had played and been schooled in.
It matters little, he told himself as he walked through thousands of shredded books and manuscripts that his historian father had co
llected so meticulously. I had never realized victory could be so painful.
The sight of his family’s historical treasures in ruins within the keep made him think in horror of what must have happened to the Cymrian museum, the squat, plain two-story stone building not far from the keep in which his father had lovingly kept and restored artifacts of the Cymrian Age. That repository had even more valuable treasures than the family home; unlike the libraries of the keep, which stored scholarly works, the museum was the depository of historic swords and other weapons that doubtless had made their way into enemy hands and had been used, in sickening irony, against the innocents of the continent yet again, much as they had in the Great War.
He made his way out of the gutted keep, heartsick, and across the courtyard to the museum, only to find it unmolested. The single window of thick glass above the doorway was still intact; hurriedly Gwydion located the key and went inside, only to find it exactly as he had left it when he had moved himself, Melly, their household servants, and their late beloved chamberlain Gerald Owen to Highmeadow almost a year before.
He quickly climbed the stairs to the second floor, which, like the first, had been left untouched. Gratefully he ran his hands over the items in the collection; it was almost as if the items his father had guarded and treasured had been of no interest whatsoever to the invading armies.
Much as his father had once told him they were to even the descendants of those whose memories were enshrined there.
For a man of seventeen summers, I am far too old and weary of the world, he thought as he closed up the place and locked it carefully again.
He felt a sudden chill on his cheek and looked up.
A fine, light snow was falling, a dusting merely, but unmistakable. Utterly unseasonable, but meaningful to Gwydion beyond measure.
Snow had often been the harbinger of his birthday, the last day of autumn, an upcoming anniversary that he had utterly forgotten. That day was frequently the Gathering Day for the Winter Carnival that his father had so loved and had made an unbreakable tradition while he had been alive.
That tradition had been sullied four years before when a cohort of soldiers from Sorbold, demonic thralls, had assaulted the celebration, leaving it in ruins and smoldering ash. Gwydion winced at the memory of his father’s face as he boosted him, then only thirteen years old, over the keep wall and handed a wailing six-year-old Melly up to him.
The expression in his eyes had long haunted Gwydion’s dreams; it was an extraordinary mixture of terror and relief, the realization of danger at the same moment he was sending his children out of the fray.
Just as his godfather and namesake, Gwydion of Manosse, had done with his wife and child.
It was at just such a carnival a year before that he had been invested as duke, had inherited all his father’s lands and titles, had become a man, really. Ashe and Rhapsody had proposed the idea of reinstituting the tradition three years after the bloodbath, telling him that it was time to go back to living.
Looking around Haguefort and remembering the sights he had seen on the way to it, Gwydion was not ready for that yet.
But the soft falling snow, as it dusted his eyelashes, felt gentle and almost warm on his face, like a reminder from afar that life would go on.
Like an early birthday greeting.
Gwydion raised his face to the sky and allowed the snow to fall on it.
“I’m doing the best I can, Father,” he whispered. “Thank you for guiding me, as always. Kiss Mother for me.”
Then, when remaining thus began to feel self-indulgent, he retrieved his mount and made his way back to the capital seat, Navarne City, where a nightmare of destruction required his attention.
34
YARIM
In spite of the fact that his journey with his troops to the far eastern province of Yarim had been the longest that any of the divisions of Icemen had traveled on their way to attack one of Roland’s northern provinces, it didn’t take long for Hjorst, the Diviner of the Hintervold, to come to the conclusion that something was very wrong.
In the many late-night strategy sessions that he, Beliac, and Talquist had undertaken after the new emperor’s coronation, the necessity for the Hintervold to strike in a preemptive manner had been clearly reinforced time and again as intelligence came in indicating that the Alliance forces were leaving the northern citadels to mass along the Threshold of Death, as the pompous leaders of that alliance had chosen to call it.
Of the three nations affected by the aggression of the Alliance, Hjorst felt that his had by far the most to lose. While Golgarn had discovered an encampment of Bolg a mere three leagues away from its capital in the mountains to the north, and Talquist had expressed concern about manipulation of crops and other trade goods, the Diviner was facing the prospect that his lands would be beggared and starved.
Given that his people were by far the most threatened, Hjorst had invested as much as he could fairly put on the table. The Hintervold, though it comprised an enormous landmass that lay across almost the entirety of the northern border of the lands of the Alliance, had managed, by fate and the hands of ancient gods that resided in the land and water, according to the belief system of the Diviner, to inherit a terribly hostile climate. The weather regularly ran the gamut from brutal winters to scorching summers with a heavy canopy of clouds in either season, leaving little growing season to provide food for the people who were intrepid or foolish enough to brave its elements and live there.
And since starvation seemed to trump Talquist’s loss of income and Beliac’s fear of monsters who had not yet attacked his cities, Hjorst felt that he had the obligation to hold the line, as he had been requested to do, by providing support troops to an invasion force that would conquer and occupy the northern citadels that Talquist had assured him were all but empty with a sincerity that all his instruments of divination had confirmed was genuine.
So it was with great surprise that when his forces, in league with a commander named Rasnike from Sorbold, consistently seemed to come upon walled garrisons and highly reinforced barricaded encampments where the once-pleasant capital cities of Canderre and Yarim, Bethe Corbair, Bethany, and Navarne had stood, there was no word from Jierna Tal as to how the army of Sorbold, massive as it was, could not spare more troops to counter the buildup that had apparently gone unnoticed.
Still, he had committed but thirty thousand troops, while Talquist’s forces numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It didn’t seem to matter that his contingent represented a larger portion of his overall forces; the requests for donations of valuable supplies and troops seemed to have no end.
Hjorst tried not to think about what the men he had left behind along the way from Navarne to Bethe Corbair had encountered.
But if it was anything like what he had found in Yarim, he ran the possibility of being recorded by history as the worst leader the Iceworld had ever known.
Given his family history and lineage, that was an enormous accomplishment of the worst possible kind.
So when he was summarily captured and imprisoned at the battle of Yarim, he knew that something had gone terribly wrong with the world, or with his decision making.
But by then the losses were so grievous that it didn’t really matter.
As he trudged along, silent and stunned, in chains like the other prisoners of the Alliance, behind wagons drawn by horses that seemed to have eaten their weights in prunes each morning, Hjorst was trying to make sense of it all.
Has any nation on this side of the Wide Central Sea ever had a sovereign taken prisoner before? he wondered dully as he marked time and the pathway to wherever it was that he and the other troops were being herded.
He was trying not to think of Elivan, his second-youngest son, who had been reported killed in the battle for Bethany. Word had spread almost silently that the rout in the citadel had been led by the Lady Cymrian; Hjorst did not know what to believe; the battle tales about her behavior were so outlandish that he had be
gun to think it possible that perhaps he had been misled.
Each new step on the road seemed to uncover a new level to which that may have happened.
Your quest for immortality may have undone us all, Talquist, he thought ruefully. Who could have known that your seeking to cheat death would bring so much of it on all of us?
But he couldn’t brood about it for too long.
Because after a few moments’ rest, a whip was cracked.
And he, with the other prisoners of war, were on the road back to Bethany again.
35
SOMEWHERE ON THE SOUTHERN EDGE OF THE KREVENSFIELD PLAIN
Hrarfa could barely contain her excitement.
It had been more than a thousand years since she had last visited the place that had been known at the time as Canrif, the Cymrian word for century. It had been so named because a First Generationer named Hague, Gwylliam the Visionary’s best friend and confidant, had famously told the first Lord Cymrian that within a century the citadel in the mountains he was designing would be the greatest civilization the world had ever seen.
Fool, she thought now as she had then. What did you know of what the world has seen? I, and those like me, who were around at the beginning of this world, know of secrets and civilizations that you could never even imagine.
Her excitement was diminished somewhat by the memory of what had driven her out of the place long ago. She had been in male form at that time, occupying the body of a low-level soldier in Gwylliam’s standing army; she had still been weak, even after the millennia that had passed since her escape from the Vault when it was ruptured by the impact of Melita, the Sleeping Child, a piece of a dead star that had fallen out of the sky and into the depths of the sea.
Her host body had been owned by a young man of human blood who had traveled on one of the ships of the Third Fleet, the Cymrian faction loyal to Gwylliam, long before it was discovered that the First Fleet had survived the storm at sea as well, and had elected Anwyn as their leader. The soldier whose soul she had eaten was of insignificant rank and standing in the world, so it had not been too difficult to take him as a host. His greatest flaw had been his inability to control his red, easily excitable tarse, and he had made copious use of it whenever possible as if it had enslaved him.