A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (22 page)

She shifted closer to Raub as they walked, spoke low to his ear. “I
never took you as being one from such a place.”

Raub didn’t look over. “What did you take me for?”

“One of the city Ilvani,” she said. “You seemed at home in Yewnyr.
You must have been there a while.”

He said nothing in response, changing course through the crowd.
Rising ahead, wrapped tight around the bole of a massive yewn split and regrown
as two intertwining trunks, a wide staircase of grey wood was their destination.

But all at once, he slowed. Cass was beside him, catching as he
had a sudden ripple of anticipation spreading through the crowd, not sure where
it started. All around them, conversation suddenly flagged. Cass saw Raub’s
hands drift to the hilt of sword and dirk beneath his cloak, but she couldn’t
mark the threat he felt. Couldn’t catch his eye.

Down the grey staircase, a white-cloaked figure was descending. A
woman, older, Cass judged at first by the slowness of her step. But as the
figure stepped out of shadow, she saw a young Ilvani face, silver hair hanging
to frame eyes that blazed gold and violet in the light.

The woman was limping, a white-and-silver walking stick in her
hand as she made her way carefully across the market court. Like a wave, the
crowd pushed back from her. The Ilvani vendors nodded with familiarity, an
almost universal reverence in their gaze. The local buyers did the same, the
other folk of the market looking on with interest. Sensing a significance to
the woman’s appearance as they fell back to watch.

A wooden bench appeared from somewhere, set down carefully where
the silver-haired woman stopped near a wide cistern, spellcraft animating the
bubbling flow of its water this high above the ground. She nodded thanks as she
sat.

There was a voice at Cass’s ear suddenly, a hand tugging at the
shoulder of her cloak. The girl who had slipped up from behind as they walked
was young, slender as the Ilvani tended to be where she slipped close between
them to match their pace. Cass always found it hard to judge the age of the
graceful forest folk. She guessed at eight years in the girl’s height, though
the pale face seemed younger, set within a heart-shaped frame of golden hair.

Cass had to grab the sleeve of Raub’s cloak to stop him, watching
his dark gaze beneath the hood as the girl raised a well-laden wicker basket.
On the air came the sudden scent of spring berries and sweet spices Cass
couldn’t name. The buttery aroma of still-warm pies drifted up in faint traces
of steam caressed by the golden light. The girl peeled back the clean white
cloth that covered them.

“Cakes and pastry,” she called in a clear voice, overly loud as
the crowd stilled. “Fresh baked, my lady and sir. The best in Anthila.” A
jangle of coins came from her apron pocket as she bowed low, waiting for a nod
from them both before she rose again. The mark of one brought up in servitude,
Cass noted, most likely to the baker whose wares she carried now. But from all
around, she could feel the sense of anticipation.

Across from her, the silver-haired woman unslung a lyre from
beneath her cloak. Its strings gleamed in the golden light, its wood varnished
black and set with filigree in white.

The girl dipped deftly into the basket with one hand, which she
brought up holding a trio of stuffed pastries no larger than her thumb.
Distracted, Cass accepted one. She took a bite and felt a sudden rush of
summer. She tasted the sweet nectar of honey and wildflowers, felt a warmth
thread through her that pushed away the advancing chill of the night.

The silver-haired troubadour bowed low, grimacing subtly as she
shifted her injured leg. She began without speaking, made no introduction to a
crowd that obviously knew her. Her fingers plucked out a gentle melody on the
strings, a silver echo that rippled slowly through the silence.

“Try these,” Cass whispered to Raub as she took another pastry.
But her words were cut off by an expression on his face that chilled her. He
was staring at the bard, seemingly caught up in the song with a degree of rapt
attention that echoed that of the vendors and travelers around them. She
realized that his hands were shaking.

“The pastry is my master’s own creation, my lady.” The girl spoke
now in a bright whisper, glancing to the bard but ignoring the music. “From the
ancient forest lore of our folk, a recipe known to none but the Ilvani.”

Cass only nodded, watching Raub as he stepped erratically away
from her. He stared around him as if he was searching for something.

The girl seemed not to notice the warrior’s mood. She looked to
Cass expectantly, silver brows arched above eyes the green of rain-washed
spring leaves. A nod signaled the girl to scoop up another dozen of the
delicacies, which were quickly wrapped in smooth white paper and slipped into
Cass’s hands.

“One silver, if it please you, lady.”

As if the girl’s voice had broken some spell that held him rapt,
Raub suddenly tore himself from the view before him. He met Cass’s gaze for a
moment, but in response to the question there, he turned quickly away, tossing
the girl a coin as he went. But he saw Cass stretch her hand out, catch it in
midair. She passed the girl a silver from her other hand, and it wasn’t until
she tossed Raub back his payment that he noticed its weight as he should have
the first time.

If the back-and-forth confused the girl, she didn’t show it,
nodding thanks to both of them as she slipped away into the crowd. The coin
Raub had pulled absently from his purse wasn’t silver, but the cold platinum
whose worth gave it no value anywhere outside the largest Human cities. But
even as he turned away from the girl, he stopped short, staring wide-eyed. The
coin slipped from his hand.

The shimmer of the Clearmoon’s light flared in a rush of wind
that scoured the trees overhead, sent a sudden gust of golden leaves to the
air.

Raub saw the ghost.

His gaze flitted past the troubadour again, heart tripping heavy
in his chest. In her face, shining through for just a moment, he saw a flash of
the one who was gone. The silver hair, the gold and violet eyes were common
enough among his people. But where he watched those eyes, he saw in them the
gaze of a friend dead for six years. A shaking reflection, blurred as if caught
by poorly polished steel.

The name came unbidden to his mind, forced itself out through all
the will that kept it hidden.
Tajomynar.

Raub stared in disbelief. If the ghost had a sister, the bard
might have been her. However, Tajomynar was the older of two sons, both of whom
followed Raub that night long ago. Pride of father and family, one of the
oldest lines of Anthila and the northeast wood.

It was a mistake coming back, he thought, and a sudden fear
rooted deep inside him that he couldn’t name. Nothing for him here. A useless
errand clouded by the anger of six years and his need for revenge against a
dead man. Revenge in the name of all the other dead. The faces in the silver
water.

Revenge on the dead, for the dead. A fool’s game.

“Are you all right?” Cass asked at his shoulder, and Raub felt himself
pulled back. He met her gaze for a moment, turned quickly away, pacing toward
the grey stairs and trusting her to follow.

Cass scooped the platinum from the ground where it had fallen.
She tossed it to the cart of a bookseller who seemed not to notice her as she
passed, listening like all the rest. Behind them, the silver tones of the lyre
fell away to silence as they climbed.

Cass had turned her back on the wealth of platinum in the dark
aftermath of their escape from Eltolitinus. But even then, she found herself in
possession of more riches than she had ever imagined. It was a thing she would
never get used to. A thing she never wanted. Watching Raub drink himself into
an ever-deeper state of darkness over the past months, she came to understand
that she wasn’t alone in that.

With the other survivors, they spent a week in Mooncastle, Myrnan’s
central keep, whose ruling mages were the custodians of the hidden entrance
that was the ruins’ Black Stair. They had healed, and they had given their
thanks to fate or their gods, and they had divided the spoils of those four
weeks beneath the earth. Cass took two handfuls each of gold and silver, then
packed up the rest of her one-eleventh share of coin and gems whose luster was
a haze of blood to her weary eyes.

She had to strain to lift the bag when she was done, but she
handed it over to the mercenary boss who called himself Lárow. He knew most of
those who died, or so it seemed by the darkness in his manner each time they
interred what remained of them. Cairns of cold stone marked where they fell,
deep in those ancient catacombs that no blessing of sunlight would ever touch.

Quietly, Cass asked him if he could arrange for the families of
the dead to share out what she didn’t need. Lárow had simply nodded, adding
Cass’s bag to a laden leather pack. Before she and Raub left that night, she
saw him pass the pack on to a trio of boys, fourteen summers on the oldest. One
of them was crying, but in his eyes, she thought she sensed the grim
determination of the sword fighter cut down by an arcane nightmare none of them
had seen, a flurry of spectral blades hacking him to ribbons as he screamed.

Jeray was the fallen fighter’s name, or so she thought. She
hadn’t had time to remember it. But it was then that she realized the mercenary
boss had already given up his own share of the ruins’ blood money for the same
purpose. He looked up then to see her watching, but Cass didn’t speak to him,
didn’t ask his reasons. She didn’t give him a chance to ask her own.

She was reminded of that in Hypriot, when that first week of taverns
told her that Raub had no idea why he kept his full share of the spoils. That
realization cast a dark shadow in her, as it forced her to dwell unwilling for
a time within her own mind. Forced her to think on her own reasons for taking
the road to Myrnan, for following Raub and the barbarian from the Free City as
she had.

At the time, she told herself that if anyone ever asked, she
would simply echo Raub’s reasons for the month-long trek east and across the
water and beneath the dark earth. But in the aftermath, as she watched him
collapse in on himself from an ever-increasing distance, Cass had come to
understand that Raub’s reasons for venturing into the shadow beneath the
Sorcerers’ Isle were something she might never know.

She took only one trophy from the ruins. The handaxe she now
carried, which had turned the Myrnan loremasters pale when they inspected it.
As with all such forays into the ruins named for the mage whose hubris and
power had built the island-castle, then reduced it to rubble and ash, their
group’s exploration of the dungeons of Eltolitinus was sanctioned by the
Myrlins, the master arcanists of Mooncastle. Some of the relics of those lost
depths were claimed even before they were found, she knew. More than a few
would-be fortune-seekers were distressed to see their most valuable finds
stripped away in the end. Declared too dangerous to be set loose in the wider
world.

Raub had lost a ring to the Myrlins, a band of linked platinum facets
with a blue-red gem inset with strange symbols. It seemed no more than an
arcane trifle, some dweomer of protection within it, but the masters had seized
it at a glance. They wrapped it with thick layers of wool and lead foil, none
of them touching it. They handed him a purse of platinum coin in exchange, Raub
adding it to the fortune that was his now.

Whatever power was in the axe they called the Reaper, it had
scared the loremasters, even as their unknown code gave them no claim on it.
Walking past the silent warning of their eyes, Cassatra followed Raub out of
Mooncastle and south for Claygate. That day was bright, she remembered, the
fields to the south shining green. In Raub, she thought she felt a sense that
the experience of passing through peril and winning its riches should change
things.

In her own heart, she felt a conviction that nothing ever could
change.

She thought about her own reasons, the real reasons she wouldn’t
speak of. A thing she had never shared with Raub, never shared with anyone. The
reason that was the absence of any reason in the end.

When a person has little enough to live for, she thought darkly,
the decisions become easy.

• • •

The terraces of the forest-home showed no sign of ending.
As they climbed the grey stairs, Cass began to make out ever more distant
lights. Faint where they flashed through sudden breaks in the tree-canopy, then
gone again. She ate as they walked, guessing by the sureness of his step that
Raub knew where he was going. However, it took a serious effort to commit to
memory the twisting route of terrace paths and smaller stairways that saw the
noise and light of the market fall away behind them. All around, the Ilvani of
Anthila were making their way along the same stairs and terraced paths,
drifting slowly,
voices
quiet where they paid no mind to the
visitors in their midst.

Between the terraces, rope bridges radiated out like the
anchoring arms of a spider’s web. These were little more than lattices of thin
cord, set with wooden tiles and flanked by braided stays that served as railing
and guy-line to either side. Raub crossed each bridge with practiced ease, Cass
a little more cautious as she followed. In the empty space between terraces,
she saw the wood spread above and below them. Not just the branches of the
great trees rising from the forest floor below, but trees grafted to those
branches as living pillars.

By their look, the lower tiers they passed through were laborers’
domiciles, possessed of the Ilvani grace in their architecture but consistent
in their simplicity. The dwellings of the Ilvani had an almost ephemeral quality,
with walls of tightly woven wicker set on frames of loomed branches and bark.
Behind those wicker screens, lights glowed to cast ghostly shadows through the
haze of leaves, the bright green of new buds showing through darker green and
shed gold. A yellow-shadowed carpet crunched beneath their feet as they passed
through the high branches, sudden flurries of leaves falling like slow rain whenever
the wind picked up.