Finnikin of the Rock

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  him. And when the awkwardness and silence became too much, Trevanion climbed on his horse and rode away.

  When Finnikin returned home to the Rock Village, his great-aunt Celestina wept for what seemed an eternity. Although he now felt like a stranger among his mother's people, he allowed them to fuss over him, though they did so with a certain shyness and hesitation. At first he thought it was because he was one of the few exiles from the Rock, but one night when his great-aunt kissed his forehead, he saw the sparkle in her eyes. "Is it true, Finnikin, that the queen has chosen you to be her king?"

  "Do not speak of such things, Aunt Celestina," he said quietly. "When there's so much sadness in our kingdom."

  Although Sir Topher had sent messengers requesting his presence, Finnikin could not bring himself to walk the road to the palace. Instead he focused on the task the queen's First Man had assigned him, to account for every one of their citizens based on the last census. It was with a heavy heart that Finnikin began his new role, yet what started as a task of asking heartbreaking questions turned into something that marked the end of years of silence for their people.

  "Talk," he would suggest gently wherever he went. It had been what the novice Evanjalin had allowed him to do on the rock in Sorel. What the queen feared had happened to her people: nobody had talked these past ten years. They had whispered words to survive. Muttered curses beneath their breath. Murmured plans in the deep of the night. Even exchanged words of love. But nobody had told their stories, until Finnikin asked them to.

  In the days that followed, he listened, sitting at their tables, if they were fortunate enough to have a roof over their heads, or working alongside them harnessed to a plow, baling hay, thatching

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  roofs. He heard tales of anguish from people as fractured as the land they were rebuilding. He saw more tears in that time than he had seen in his lifetime, but he wrote with a steady hand so the lives of these Lumaterans would not be forgotten. Perhaps, he thought, these chronicles would be read in centuries to come. Perhaps they would act as a deterrent. He could not believe anyone who heard such stories of wickedness would allow it to happen again. Never had he loved his fellow Lumaterans more than in those moments when they told their stories of terror.

  "If we challenged or resisted," Jorge of the Flatlands told him, "the bastard king's men would return the next day and say, 'Pick one.'" The man fought back a sob. " 'Pick one you love to die. If not, you sacrifice your whole family. Your whole village.'"

  "Men were on their knees begging, 'Take me. Take me instead,'" Roison of the River explained.

  "We would sit and discuss our plan, Finnikin," Egbert of the Rock whispered. "We would work out, as a family, who we would choose to die alongside us if we were forced to decide. Better to make the choice as a family, rather than in moments where there would be no time for good-byes."

  "So men would choose their sons?" Finnikin asked, sickened by the idea of Trevanion having to make such a decision.

  The man looked at him with tears running down his face. "No," he said, shaking his head. "No father would leave his daughter behind to be raped and abused. We chose our daughters. Always our daughters."

  As Finnikin and Sir Topher had expected, the royal treasury was almost intact; the curse meant that the impostor king and his men had not had opportunity to squander the gold. Horses and oxen purchased from Osteria and Belegonia provided much needed assistance to those plowing the Flatlands, and the construction

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  of cottages became a priority. Both Osteria and Belegonia had volunteered to send workers to help with the rebuilding, but Trevanion refused to allow any foreigners into Lumatere and kept the borders heavily guarded. In the first week, the Guard brought back fruit and vegetables from Osteria and hunted the woods for game and rabbits. By the end of the second week, activity on the river had begun and the first of the barges came upstream from Belegonia. Finnikin stood with Sefton and the lads, watching his father as he supervised the goods being unloaded. Trevanion's hair and beard had been clipped in the same fashion as the rest of his Guard, which made him seem more like the Trevanion of old. Yet there was still a haunted look in his eyes, and Finnikin knew it would be a long while before songs were sung on the riverbank and laughter rang through the air once more.

  That afternoon Finnikin traveled with Sir Topher to see Lady Beatriss. He had caught a glimpse of her earlier that week in the palace village but was reluctant to approach for fear of not knowing what to say. But when he stood before her in the parlor of the manor house, he realized no words were required. She took his face in her hands and kissed him gently on the forehead, then gestured for them to sit, and began to prepare the tea.

  "Please do not serve me, Lady Beatriss. It humbles me to have you do so," Finnikin said.

  "It should humble you to have anyone serve you, Finnikin," she said without reprimand.

  On the table before them, Sir Topher laid out the pages of their records. "We have already recorded the names of all the exiles. If there is a cross marked next to the name, it means we know they died outside the kingdom," Sir Topher said. "If there are two strokes, we know they live."

  She looked at him for a moment. "Exiles? We called you

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  'our lost ones.'" She looked at the records in front of her, her fingers brushing gently over the names. A small sound escaped her lips and she covered her mouth with her hand. "Lord Selric and his family?"

  Sir Topher nodded soberly. "There was a plague in Charyn. Three years ago."

  "All of them?" she asked in a hushed tone. "All those beautiful children?"

  Sir Topher cleared his throat and nodded again.

  She went back to the list on the table. "The family of Sym the potter?"

  "Sarnak," Finnikin said flatly.

  Her face paled. "Sarnak," she whispered. "The queen spoke to us about it just yesterday, when I visited the cloister of Sagrami with Lady Abian. I could tell the queen exactly when the massacre had taken place. When my Vestie was three years old, she screamed for days until she had no voice left. I could only sit by and watch over her. Tesadora gave her a tonic that would make her sleep. We had no idea what had happened, only that it must have been catastrophic for our people."

  "The queen walked your sleep that night and said it was the reason for her journey to the cloister in Sendecane," Sir Topher said gently.

  "I was never aware of her walking my sleep. It was a shock when the queen spoke of it. For a long time we could not question Vestie, for she began to speak late, and even then it was only a few words. But I always sensed there was something different about my child each month during those days of walking."

  "Good or bad?" Finnikin asked.

  "Unlike the queen's or Tesadora's experience, it was usually peaceful for Vestie. Tesadora was somehow able to keep the darkness away from her. But during the time of Vestie's unrest, which

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  we now understand to be the time of the massacre in Sarnak, I remember praying to the goddess Lagrami to protect the queen. And so our goddess sent her to Sendecane, where she was safe and at peace for a time."

  "So you knew it was the queen all along?" Finnikin asked.

  She nodded. "Vestie's only word for a long time was 'Isaboe.' But you had best ask Tesadora about the connection between Vestie and the queen. There are things about the curse and magic that I will never understand." She looked up, sensing Finnikin's gaze on her.

  "So you spoke to the queen?" he said quietly. "Just yesterday?" He had not seen Isaboe since he placed her on Tesadora's cart. "Yet the Guard has not been allowed inside the cloister."

  "Tesadora will not allow men near the girls."

  "We would never hurt them, Lady Beatriss," Sir Topher said.

  "The damage is already done, Sir Topher. Boredom made monsters out of the bastard king and his men. They went for the cloister of Lagrami first. It was close to the palace, and the novices had no protection. On the night the impost
or's men attacked, not one of them was left inviolate, not even the priestess. One night, they all disappeared, and although I suspected that Tesadora and the novices of Sagrami had taken them into their protection, it was many months before I knew for certain."

  "Wouldn't the impostor king have known where the novices had disappeared to and attacked the Sagrami cloister?" Finnikin asked.

  "Oh, he knew," she said bitterly. "But if there was one person in this kingdom the bastard king feared, it was Tesadora. Her mother had cursed the kingdom and there were stories that the daughter was even more powerful."

  As he had many times in the past week, Finnikin wanted to tear someone apart with his bare hands. He wanted to be like

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  Trevanion and Perri and forget protocol. Yesterday his father and some of the senior guards had entered the palace dungeon to question the impostor king and his surviving men. Finnikin knew that few words had been exchanged and that the howls from the prisoners could be heard all over the palace. He remembered the look on Sir Topher's face when they later saw the blood-splattered dungeon walls. Horror, certainly. But mostly satisfaction.

  "If I could make a request, Finnikin, on their behalf. Could you ask your father to remove some of the guards from around the cloister?"

  Finnikin shook his head. "Not as long as the queen is within those walls," he said firmly. "Tesadora will have to let them in soon. The queen's yata and the Mont people will want her with them for a short while before she returns home."

  "Her yata is with her now."

  "Lady Beatriss," Finnikin said, trying not to let his frustration show, "can you not see a problem with the fact that the queen's First Man and the captain of her Guard have to obtain information about her well-being from you?"

  She gave him a piercing look. "I do believe, Finnikin, that the queen would be happy to speak to you if you were to visit."

  "Has she made such a request?" he asked quietly

  "Does she need to?" This time there was reprimand in her tone.

  "Finnikin will speak to the queen soon," Sir Topher said. "After he follows his father's example and has his hair clipped and looks ... presentable."

  Finnikin stared at his mentor in disbelief, a stare that Sir Topher studiously ignored.

  "It's what the people of Lumatere expect from the one they believe will bond with their queen," Sir Topher continued.

  "What?"

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  Sir Topher sighed. "Finnikin, I know I can speak of such things in front of Lady Beatriss. The people of Lumatere will want the queen to choose a--"

  The snarl that came from Finnikin stopped Sir Topher in his tracks. "The people of Lumatere are trying to rebuild their lives, Sir Topher. The last thing they're thinking about is who the queen chooses to bond with." Yet Finnikin knew it was a lie, for he had been asked a number of times during the past two weeks if the rumors were true.

  "How wrong you are, Finnikin," Lady Beatriss chided. "The queen is everything to our people. She's the leader of our land. As a single woman she is vulnerable. When Lumatere celebrates our reunification, our people will expect her to be settled so she can carry on with running the kingdom. Ever since the word on Vestie's arm hinted a return, the talk has been of you."

  "And was I ever to have a choice in the matter?" He was furious, but Beatriss did not seem fazed.

  Sir Topher looked exasperated. "Finnikin, you have loved her from the moment you climbed that rock in Sendecane."

  "When she was a novice, not a queen."

  "Oh, I see." There was disappointment in Lady Beatriss's eyes.

  "I don't think you do, Lady Beatriss."

  "If you were king and she were a mere novice, would you have chosen her to be your queen?" she asked.

  This time he could not lie. Not to Beatriss. "Yes," he said quietly.

  "Yet the queen cannot choose you?"

  Suddenly he felt as if he were eight years old and Beatriss was reprimanding him for tying Isaboe to the flagpole by her hair.

  "If this is about power, then perhaps you are not the right person for our queen after all, Finnikin."

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  "The prince of Osteria has expressed interest," Sir Topher announced.

  "I've heard he's a strapping boy," Lady Beatriss responded pleasantly as she disappeared into the other room. Finnikin kept his hooded stare on Sir Topher, who yet again chose to ignore it and turned instead to Lady Beatriss as she returned with a large book in her hands. She placed it on the table before them.

  "Here are the dead," she said, opening to a page. "Marked next to each name is how they died." She turned to another page. "Here are the arrests. Here are the attacks on our property, although we stopped recording them after the first two years."

  Finnikin pointed to the names marked in red ink.

  She stared at him. "Informants."

  "Traitors?"

  She shrugged. "Whatever it is they did or said kept them free from any type of punishment. I'm ashamed to say that the nobility were the worst. We could have done with Lord Augie and Lady Abian. And I would have imagined the same noble behavior from Lord Selric."

  "Your actions were beyond reproach, Lady Beatriss," Finnikin said. "Your name has often been praised these past weeks in my travels. You went beyond the duty of a citizen."

  "Circumstances present themselves, and at times we have no choice. I had no choice but to work for the good of the people. Perhaps if I had been presented with different circumstances, I would have taken the path of my fellow nobles."

  "How is it that you survived, Lady Beatriss, when all exiles believed you to be dead?" he asked gently.

  "Perhaps Lady Beatriss would prefer not to speak of such a time, Finnikin," Sir Topher said.

  Finnikin held her gaze. "My father mourned your loss for ten years."

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  "Finnikin," Sir Topher warned.

  "The births," she said quietly, leaving Finnikin's question hanging in the air. "There are one thousand, nine hundred, and twenty-three of us, last count. It is hard to determine with the Forest Dwellers. There were some who survived, perhaps hidden by our people during those days. I have never seen them, but Tesadora has hinted of their existence in the woods beyond the cloister."

  "Yet Tesadora allowed you to be part of her world with the novices," Finnikin observed.

  Beatriss nodded. "But she was secretive all the same. There were so few of them in the end that they trusted no one." She leaned forward to whisper. "We were very lucky to have her hide the novices of Lagrami, and later the young girls."

  Finnikin took her hand gently. "The impostor king and his men are no longer in power. You have no need to fear. So we must learn to speak with loud voices rather than in soft whispers. That, I know, is what the queen wants."

  She nodded. "The crops." She turned another page. "The days of darkness." She pointed. "The days of light."

  "Did that happen often?" Sir Topher asked.

  She nodded. "The first five years were the worst. Some weeks there was day after day of darkness and we feared the crops would fail and we would starve. Even the surviving Sagrami worshippers had no idea how to control it or what it all meant. The answers seemed to have died with Seranonna."

  She pushed the book across to Finnikin and stood to refill their cups. Sir Topher walked to the window and peered outside. "Is that Gilbere of the Flatlands, Lady Beatriss?"

  "My cousin, yes."

  "We studied together as children. Will you both excuse me?"

  "Of course."

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  Sir Topher left, and Finnikin began to copy the recordings from Beatriss's book into his own.

  "It's because she returned to fulfill her mother's request to save me," Lady Beatriss said after a while.

  Finnikin put down his quill. "Tesadora?"

  Lady Beatriss nodded. "She's very frightening when you first see her, isn't she?"

  He smiled, abashed. "She's half my size, so it might be slightly humbling for me to admit t
hat."

  "Well, I will admit it for you," Beatriss responded with a laugh. Then her face grew serious. "Seranonna and I were locked in the same dungeon cell. The day before the curse, she was permitted a visitor. A novice from the cloister of Lagrami. The novice was there to give a blessing to the Sagrami worshippers so they could repent before death. I remember feeling ashamed to hear such piety coming from a novice of my order. But it was a deception. The novice was Tesadora, her hair shorn, dressed in the stolen robes of a Lagrami novice. She gave Seranonna a blessing in the language of the ancients and pressed into her mother's hand a potion concealed in a tiny vial. It was a substance that would render her mother unconscious; she would be dead to all who saw her. But Tesadora knew enough to be able to revive her."

  Finnikin paled. "Seranonna gave the potion to you instead?"

  Beatriss nodded. "We have never spoken of it, but I cannot imagine how Tesadora felt that day, watching the guards drag her mother into the square to be executed. When Seranonna screamed out that I was dead, Tesadora knew the words were meant for her. A message to retrieve my body and bring it back to life. I drank the potion after I gave birth, praying that I would not regain consciousness. I have no memory of what took place during the curse. All I know is that Tesadora took advantage of the confusion and came to find me. She said I was still holding your sister, Finnikin."

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  Tears sprang to his eyes before he could stop them.

  "She lived for only a few moments, and in those moments, I said her name out loud so she would one day be able to shout it through the heavens. I knew she could not possibly survive, because she was too tiny. I had carried her for less than six months. But she knew the important things before she died. That her father's name was Trevanion, her mother's name was Beatriss, and her brother's name was Finnikin. I called her Evanjalin after Trevanion's beloved mother, and when my precious Vestie was born five years later, I swear I heard her cry out that name when she first entered this world. As if somehow the spirit of Evanjalin lived within her. You may think I sound like a mad woman for believing such a thing, but there are moments when I see qualities of your father in Vestie, Finnikin."