A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (24 page)

Cass was on her feet, shifting carefully to keep him in view as
she melted back into the deep shadows. From the topmost branch of the elm, Raub
jumped for empty air, snagged the lowest of the greater overhanging branches,
and was climbing fast. His cloak billowed around him like the wings of a hawk
in flight.

She saw him stop. She saw him seek her out beyond the edge of the
chaos, the crowd raging below. The woman’s voice was joined by a dozen others,
screaming the same name, unfamiliar to Cass.

“Talmaraub! You killed them! They followed you and your vain
dream and found only death in the end!”

From his high perch, Raub met Cass’s gaze for just a moment, then
he was gone into the trees. He vanished to the shadows ahead of a knife
flashing harmlessly past, a half-dozen figures attempting to follow his ascent.
They would never catch him, Cass knew. She had seen Raub climb before, a
sureness to his movement above ground that she didn’t share.

In the midst of the chaos, against the wailing of the woman’s
voice for six years’ grieving and a son lost, Cass realized that the distant music
was gone.

As suddenly as it began, it was done. The white-haired woman was
on her knees, her wailing voice reaching Cass with a knife-edge sting that told
her its pain was all too real. But in the movements of those who comforted the
woman, those who had moved against Raub, she saw a strange slowness.

All the rage of a moment before had been drained from them suddenly,
as if a tap was turned off. Cass saw anger flicker to uncertainty, then to
indifferent sorrow as the members of the erstwhile mob stared at each other,
uncertain as to what they should do, where they should go.

Their words were real enough, Cass piecing together a half-dozen
conversations within earshot. A half-dozen versions of the story of what had
happened six years before.

The bravos who thought to climb after Raub were already returning,
one of them dropping to the ground a dozen strides from where she stood.
Without hesitation, Cass stepped out from the shadows, walked calmly toward
him. He was a smith to judge by the black of his hands and the tight ropes of
muscle wrapping his arms. The hunting blade in his hand was one of the long
knives of the forest Ilvani, weighted for throwing and as deadly as a wyvern’s
sting.

He looked up, gazed at Cass with blank eyes. She nodded in greeting,
stepped past him and walked for the gate in plain sight of a dozen others.

No one tried to stop her as she went.

• • •

The descent back down to the market was quicker by far
than the long walk up, but Cass lingered at the edge of that first terrace for
a while. She found a seat at an open tavern, drank a half-goblet of bittersweet
berry wine slowly as her gaze traced across the crowd. Not for the figure she
was intent on speaking to, who she had spotted almost as soon as she sat down.
Instead, she watched the sellers, the local patrons, the drinkers laughing
where they lined a half-dozen carved trestle tables.

In all those faces now, she saw the same shadow. A thing she
would never have noticed before the events in the high garden, but which she
looked for now and recognized with disturbing ease. Not in the travelers,
though. No sign of that darkness in the scouts and merchants and wanderers who
would be part of life in Anthila for a day, or a week. But as with the
smith-turned-warrior, all the locals carried a kind of distance in their gaze.
A weight threaded every conversation, every market transaction, every gale of
laughter. A shadow passing across every set of eyes in the forest-home.

Every set, that is, save one.

Cass saw the golden hair through the crowd, dropping a handful of
copper to the table as she slipped easily toward the girl and her basket and
the sweet scent of butter and spice. She saw a smile of recognition as she
approached.

“I trust you enjoyed your pastries, my lady.” The young baker’s apprentice
beamed.

“They were beyond compare, child.”

“Then take more for your journey. My master’s recipes keep well
for the road.”

“Why do you presume I travel?”

“By your garb and accent only, my lady, and no offense to you.”
The girl cast her face down as if in apology. But Cass saw now that the green
eyes were upturned, the clear gaze never leaving her. She hadn’t noticed
before.

“Do you have a name?”

“I am Pheánei, my lady.”

Cass looked away for a moment, turning her face from the girl as
if she was scanning the crowd. “Then I will have a dozen more of your pastries,
if you please,
Pheánei.” She
spoke carefully, voice clear.

When she turned back, the girl was still smiling, oblivious to
what had been said out of her sight.

“Will you have more, lady?”

Cass mouthed the words without speaking aloud.
You cannot
hear, can you?

A flicker of shame passed through the girl’s gaze like storm
clouds across the sun. Cass saw the fear in the green eyes as Pheánei stumbled
back, but she stopped her with a hand to the shoulder. As she had forced
herself to so often in her youth, she smiled.

“In the place were I grew up, there were many like you. Born without
the senses of other children, and no gold for the healers who value coin more
than the life they claim to protect. This is no cause for shame. On the contrary,
you are very brave.”

The girl nodded, uncertain. The green eyes were impossibly bright
against the pale skin, making her look even younger than Cass might have
originally taken her for. She knew enough of Pheánei’s culture to know the kind
of hardship under which she lived. Physical perfection was an ideal the Ilvani
lived by more so than most folk.

“I was not born this way,” the girl said dutifully. “But when I
was small, we lived in a village away from the forest-home. A fever came of
some dark magic. It stole away sound and song from me. My parents died. My
brother, too.”

Cass felt something twist in her gut.

“My family, too, was lost to me.” The words tumbled out without
warning, past the stark silence within which they were normally held. Cass saw
Pheánei’s expression change, a glimmer of sudden light in the green eyes.

“I miss them very much,” the girl said. “But even more, I miss
the song of the wind and the birds. My mother sang with the wind and birds, and
I dream sometimes that if I could but hear them again, I would hear her voice
once more.”

The green gaze was fixed on some vision far beyond the golden
light and the shifting crowd. Cass’s hand was shaking. She squeezed it to stillness
as she nodded, thoughtful.

“I do not remember my mother sing. I do not remember her face,
but I dream of her all the same.”

The girl shrugged, the weight of a sudden sadness settling in
her. “It is only a dream,” she said. “It is not the world. A dream cannot fix
what is broken in me.”

“We carry more than one world inside us, Pheánei. And we are all
broken in our own way, and the only healing that counts is that which we make
for ourselves.” The words sounded strange in Cass’s ears. Words she had often
thought but never said, she realized. Things she knew but was afraid to hear.

The girl nodded. And then she let the moment pass as if she was
conscious suddenly of the unheard market around her. Remembering the task that
was set for her by whatever merchant had taken her in, most likely for the
debts her parents left her. She proffered the basket again. “Will you have
more, lady?”

“I will, child. And what is more, I will gladly pay extra for the
answers to certain questions.” She patted the purse at her belt, the comfortable
jingle of coin there.

Cass could read in Pheánei’s expression that she didn’t
understand, but the girl nodded with the eagerness of one for whom every extra
copper made a difference.

“On the high stair,” Cassatra said, “there is a fine terrace
house that stands dark tonight, and for many nights past by the look of it. Its
gate is marked with a burning sword. Who lived there?”

“That is Garania Hall, my lady.” Pheánei’s voice carried a sudden
echo of sadness. “It was the place of our forest-home master Thrasus Talmaraub
Garania. He was master of Anthila for many years, until he died a half-year
past.”

“I am sorry to hear that. I have another question, though you
might well be too young to know. Did this Master Thrasus have a son?”

The wind picked up again, a cloud of golden leaves sweeping past
them, cold. “I am young, lady, but all the forest-home knows the story of our
late master Thrasus, seneschal of Anthila. His was a life of hardship, from
which he drew the wisdom by which he ruled our realm justly and fairly from
long before I was born.”

The girl turned full somber suddenly. She spoke with the easy
familiarity of one repeating a story often told. “Our late Seneschal Thrasus
had but one son who was his only family when his wife passed. He was named
Talmaraub for his father. But this son was the dark shadow of his father in
every way, unjust and scornful. The Hooded Hawk, he called himself. A masked
outlaw in his youth and a stain on the name of his family. A rogue and knave,
he brought near-ruin on Anthila when he tried to seize his father’s power by force.
Those who followed him were killed, and the son was driven into exile and never
seen again.”

The girl’s eyes were dark, an anger there suddenly. A thing born
not of her own heart, Cass knew, but of this story she retold that would have
been instilled in her since she was old enough to understand it. The Ilvani
fascination with lore, turning the legends of clan and race-kin into the fire
of the heart and a passion strong as steel.

“When the traitor-son fled, he carried with him not only the mark
of his own crimes and his family’s shame, but the past of the Anthiliar. We who
range and shepherd these great woods from the bright lights of our forest-home.
The blade
Valaendar
is the Kin-Sword in the high tongue of the
Ilvani. A weapon of ancient craft and older magic, predating the arrival of the
Empire in the east and carried from hand to hand along the line of the rulers
of these woods. From his father’s own hand, the Hooded Hawk stole away the
blade that was the symbol of the Anthiliar, and it is lost to us still.”

“A black shortsword,” Cass said. “Leaf-edged and marked with ancient
glyphs of power. Ever-sharp and glowing with a pale light.”

The girl nodded, surprised. “You know the story, lady?”

On Myrnan, not long before they took the Black Stair down into
shadow and madness, the Gracian warrior Dilaon asked Raub in a quiet moment why
he had never regaled them with tales of his own family. All the clan legends
that every other Ilvani the mercenary had ever met seemed to carry with them
like necessary baggage.

“Not all stories are worth telling,” Raub had said then.

Not long after, in a night built on fear and the strength of dark
ale, he had told Cass alone the only story she ever heard from him. The story
that stuck with her still.

“Another question,” Cass said to the girl. “Did you learn that
story from the bard who plays in the market? The woman with silver hair?” She
spoke with a degree of casualness that she realized she didn’t need, the girl
reading only the impassive inflection of her lips.

“She is no mere bard, my lady,” the girl said brightly. “She is
Halessi
,
our new seneschal of Anthila. She is our lord and protector, and she is
very beautiful.”

“Indeed she is, and her songs as well.”

The girl was suddenly wistful. “I read our lady’s speech when she
sings,” she said, “so that I know the stories though I cannot know the song.
For many years, she played for the pleasure of our late seneschal Thrasus, and
when she plays, she holds all the crowd rapt, as you saw. We get many bards in
Anthila, traveling the forest road, but my lady
Halessi
’s songs
are special.”

“Indeed they are. I would tell her so myself, would that I knew
where to find her.”

“I can show you, lady,” the girl said happily, caught up so much
in the feeling of her own importance to Cass’s questions that she had seemingly
forgotten the market, forgotten her life for just a moment. But as she turned
to lead, Cass stopped her with a hand to the shoulder.

“Only directions, if you please. It is best if Halessi and I
speak alone.”

Despite her not hearing them, the girl seemed to feel the
dangerous undertone in the words this time. She nodded, uncertain, but she told
Cass what she needed to know.

When it was done, Cass went not for her purse but for the leather
bag Raub had dropped, slung now from her belt. She slipped it into the girl’s
hands, watched her react to its unexpected weight.

“Find a healer, Pheánei,” she said. “Hear your mother sing.” Then
she kissed the golden brow and slipped away.

The girl watched her go, curiosity overcoming confusion quickly
enough as she tugged at the drawstrings of the pouch. Within was the gleam of
cold platinum coin of a lost age, catching and reflecting the golden light of
the market in green and wide-open eyes.

• • •

The necropolis was bright in the moon’s-light, the
ancient vines that marked its edges each as thick around as Raub’s waist. The
wood of the open cemetery’s half-dozen wide terraces was worn smooth with age,
bleached to silver-grey by long years of rain and sun. The main gate was a rare
ghost yewn, rising on a split trunk. A great white arch of living wood, its
appearance suggested that it had somehow been grown from the sky down where
Raub slipped beneath it.

Beyond the hedge of yewn into which the gate was set, a garden
spread. The path that led into it was overgrown with muskflower and sun
creeper, whose tight-clustered pods shimmered like fireflies in the night.
Within the maze of overhanging branches that swallowed the Clearmoon’s glow,
evenlamps shone pale green through the screen of broad leaves around them.