A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (29 page)

That night, a renegade son was his weapon.

“Raub.”

He shook his head to clear it, turning to see Cass below him. A
circle of combatants around her stood in stunned silence. He felt a kind of subtle
panic in the Ilvani nobles, a disconnect between what they had just witnessed
and their ability to react to it. Against that uncertainty, Cass displayed the
same preternatural calm as always.

Raub kicked at Tajomynar’s body, gave it enough momentum that it
slid slowly down the sloping tiles. A wide swath of blood trailed out behind
it, marking the corpse’s path as it toppled off the edge beside Cass and fell
in a sodden heap to the floor below.

Six years ago on this very floor, the charm-song of the bright
blade in his father’s hand had worked Raub’s muscle and mind like a puppet, turning
the blood-fury intended for the seneschal against the others. Against the
friends who had followed him.

Tajomynar had been the first, too shocked to understand what was
happening as Raub gutted him from navel to neck.

Having witnessed Tajomynar’s fall, the others understood. Their
screams and Raub’s had shattered the dull silence and the pale glow of the
chamber’s white walls.

“Iastora,” Raub whispered. He remembered Tajomynar’s command as
he remembered his father’s from long ago. White flame danced along the blade of
the backsword, an unheard music flaring in a song that spoke of new beginnings.
Raub tried to find his voice, an unaccustomed fear in him as he felt the power
of Palas Eryvna filter through him. He sensed a connection to those around
them, felt his thought press out to touch them. He felt their minds waiting for
his commands, attuned to the blade over long decades of control.

He thought of the retribution he had waited years to deliver, but
the shadow that dogged him all that time still shrouded him now. Something else
needed to finally clear it.

To the stupefied nobles, he spoke the last command the sword
would give them.

“Know the truth,” he said, and across every face that watched him
blankly, there came a sudden rush of shock and fear.

A moment’s silence hung before chaos erupted. Two score voices
were shouting, screaming, as the elders of Anthila pressed in around the
shattered remains of the seneschal who had betrayed them. Cass could pick out
only fragments of the fast-spoken Ilvani, but she heard the awareness there,
felt the rage in those who circled closest to their fallen former master.

In the tumult, she slipped away. She turned back once to see the
black blade that was
Valaendar,
the symbol of the
Anthiliar and the badge of their leadership, driven down into the
blood-streaked wood of the crippled floor.

Though she tried to find him in the frenzied crowd, Raub was already
gone.

• • •

In the bright green of the vine walls outside the
necropolis gardens, Cass waited as the sun rose, the day dawning bright and
unseasonably warm. She had slept for a while as the Clearmoon set, her back to
the white arch. Each time she awoke, it was to the expectation that she would
see Raub sitting across from her. But as day broke, she began to make plans for
the road back to the forest’s edge. What might lay beyond there, she didn’t know.

She had made her way down to the market in the aftermath of the
events on the council terrace, moving quickly but still arriving behind the
news from above. Even against the clamor she had seen earlier, the market was
chaos, every shouting voice spreading the same shocked story of lies and
retribution. On the forest road below, she could hear horses in motion,
couriers heading out by the last light of the Clearmoon, she guessed. Taking
word of the night’s dark events into the forest and beyond.

She gathered up her cloak, picked two handfuls of early berries
from a vine-strewn lattice, and packed them carefully for the road. Idly, she
found herself wondering how long it would take for an entire clan of people,
for all its settlements forest-wide, to reclaim a collective memory denied them
for so long. She felt the twinge of an old sadness then, and a familiar ache
that she set aside as she always did.

All memory was precious, she thought. If Raub’s people hadn’t realized
that before, they would know it now.

“Ilvani tradition holds that the spirit lingers for a time in the
mortal world.”

Cass hadn’t heard Raub approach, his movement silent through the
trees as all Ilvani seemed able to do when they put their minds to it. He was
crouched a dozen strides away at the edge of the terrace, looking not at her
but at the white arch above, the great trunk twisting together as it rose into
green shadow.

“The life force exists outside the body it inhabits,” he said.
“The spirit takes time to have its life read to it by those who know it. The
final words of those who shaped our lives, imbued with all the emotion
engendered by our death, are the ghostsong.”

“That’s why you came back? To sing the truth?”

Raub threw his hood back but didn’t answer, seemingly lost in
thought. Cass approached, dropped to sit three strides away. Dried blood still
marked his face, hair streaked red-black. But in the light, she could see that
the wounds of the deadly fight were gone.

His bow and quiver were still missing, as was the emerald-hilted
longsword that had been the greatest treasure Raub carried out from the
darkness under Myrnan. Instead, Palas Eryvna, the black-runed bright blade that
had been his father’s, hung at his belt.

“What did I tell you?” Raub said.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Cass said truthfully. Even with the
snatches of sleep, she was exhausted, her thoughts slow. Caught up in the old
sadness that she couldn’t shake.

“That night that you said I spoke of my father. I don’t remember
it. What did I tell you?”

Cass was silent a while. The wind was warm again, coming from
what felt like the west, but she had little sense of direction within the
silent expanse of trees. “I was in the market this morning,” she said by way of
not answering. “To a person, all Anthila is talking about the Hooded Hawk.”

“Let them,” Raub said, and only in saying it did he realize how
little it mattered to him now. “How did you find it?” he added. “This place?”

“I asked a deaf girl where your father was interred.”

Raub weighed the answer, didn’t bother asking the obvious questions
in return. “And how did you know I’d be here?”

“I didn’t.”

Above them, the wind dislodged a cloud of golden leaves. And even
as they fell, their slow drift was suddenly disrupted by a half-dozen dark
shapes shooting out from the shadow of the trees. A phalanx of fist-sized hawks
shrieked and soared on fast wings, flashing black and gold in the light for a
moment, then gone.

“What did I tell you?” Cass heard the edge in his voice that told
her he wasn’t going to ask again.

“All of it,” she said.

Raub stared out toward the edge of the tier, a screen of branches
there framing blue sky beyond.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you told me all of it. What he was, what you did. You
standing against him, fighting for your people. What he made you do in the end.
What you tried to do after.”

“Remember this.
”

Those who had followed him were dead, and their blood drenched
his shaking hands.

“Remember this,”
his father had said, and then he turned
away, and Raub felt the power of the bright blade Palas Eryvna in his mind
break beneath an aching rage he had never known before.

That night six years ago, he stumbled forward, seizing the shortsword
where it hung at his father’s belt. His father was old even then, too slow to
stop him. He died quickly, the sword
Valaendar
that was the symbol
of his rule and the corruption he had visited on his people buried deep in his
back. The flaming backsword was still in his grasp as he fell, the black blade
wrenched free and in Raub’s hand as he fled.

In the resultant chaos, he stole a horse and rode for the Free
City, far from the reach of Anthiliar law. With
the sword of his people
in
his possession, he lived on the coin the horse brought as he waited for long
days, then for weeks. He expected to hear the news of his father’s death made
public, word of his corruption exposed. Expected to return to Anthila with
Valaendar
in hand, the black shortsword ready to be presented to the new leader of the
forest-home.

It was well into winter, raining cold when he heard from a group
of Gracian traders that his father was alive and well. The one called the
Hooded Hawk had disappeared, they said. The fools who followed the traitor had
been slain by his own hand.

For six years, Raub felt his father’s corruption lurking in the
shortsword that had slain him. For six years, he fought and failed to shed the
dark spirit that dwelled beneath that tight-wrapped black cloth.

When he left the Free City, he fled by horse across the plains of
Munychion with the thought of abandoning
Valaendar
in the dragon
deeps of the south. More than once, he almost left it behind in the depths of
Eltolitinus, dreaming of the black blade lost in that place of death and
madness until the end of time.

On the ship back to Highport, his spirit broken by a darkness
that eclipsed even the night of his exile, Raub decided to cast the sword
overboard, watch it sink deep into the blue-black depths of the sea. He unwrapped
it that night for the first time since he fled, trying to find the strength to
follow through. In the end, though, he felt the hold the blade of the Anthiliar
had on him. A feeling finally laid to rest now.

At his belt, the black-runed backsword hung, imbued with the
ghostsong of countless older generations whose presence would wash away his
father’s darkness in time. A deeper history, waiting for him to set aside who
his father was. To become who his father might have been.

For long years, he wondered why fate had spared his father that
night. Tajomynar was right. His father never told him of the sword’s powers,
save for the strength over other’s minds that Raub had discovered on his own.
His father had rejected him from the start. His legacy and the blade that was
the symbol of it, both denied to Raub. He had never even known the sword’s
name.

“You carried that knowledge all this time and never spoke of it,”
he said to Cass at last. “Why?”

“Because if you’d remembered that you told me your story, I would
have had to tell you mine.”

They sat in silence a while longer. Then, as if they were in
touch with each other’s thoughts, both rose.

They slipped out of Anthila easily enough, Raub taking them down
little-used paths and ladderways that descended in time to the forest floor. By
side trails, they made their way to the road, and though they passed couriers
riding at speed in both directions for the better part of the day, they walked
unrecognized and, finally, alone.

The sun was down and the Darkmoon up when they passed beyond the
forest wall, the shadowed scrub plain and the southern mountains seeming larger
somehow after the close confines of the great forest. They made camp in a pine
bower atop a rise whose crest was a shattered stone dyke, the last vestige of a
frontier outpost tumbled and fallen in one of Gracia’s endless ancient wars.

They walked the day in a silence both welcomed, neither speaking
more than was necessary until they had eaten by the fireside. Cass felt the
ache of the night before and the long road in every joint, even as the last of
Pheánei’s pies filled her with the warmth of a forgotten spring and the urge to
do nothing but sleep. But as she watched Raub throw scattered deadfall to the
flames, she suddenly spoke.

“I don’t know who I am.”

She hadn’t realized she was going to say it. Hadn’t felt the
words slip out from the place where they had been held tight inside her for
long years.

Raub looked up, dark eyes catching the firelight where Cass
watched him.

“I have a past,” she said, “but it’s closed off to me. I have a
family I don’t remember. My father, my mother. A brother. I can see them
sometimes. Only their faces, not even names.”

In the refuge where she was raised, they were taught to look
within. But in looking inside herself, Cass had only ever seen the emptiness
that her memory made.

“I remember… a castle. Where I was born, I think. A man in armor,
wearing a crown. I seek out the rangers, the loremasters, the bounty hunters
for word of old stories. A girl, lost. To see if anyone’s looking. There’s been
too much war, though. Too many lost…”

It was the emptiness that had forced her in the end to look
outside herself. To look back on the past that was lost and leave all else
behind.

“You can’t blame yourself for being the one who survives,” Cass
said. “The one left behind.” And in saying it, she realized how long she had
waited to speak those words.

She laid down then, curled close to the fire. Raub watched her
for a while, feeding wood to the flames as the Clearmoon rose and the distant
call of wild dogs sounded out against the silence of the night.

“Where are we bound for tomorrow?” he said at last, but she was
already sleeping.

THE CHAR-BLACK DRIFT OF CROWS writhes like smoke above distant
fields. Rising wind flows cold from the east, carrying the echo of a woman’s
laughter. A ringing like a clear bell, faint shimmering of silver on the air.
The dawn-sweet scent of spring’s thaw. The foul air of the unburned dead.

And when Gilvaleus first saw the Lady Aelathar among the ranks
of the Healers, he swore his love for her upon the Sword of Kings, saying ‘Thou
art most fair of all the courts of Gracia, and the Forest Kingdoms of the
Ilvanrand, and all the isles and far lands of these Elder Kingdoms, and when
this war is done, with my love will I honor thee.’

He sees the thorp from the little-used forest road. A league
distant in the light of dawn, but he recognizes at once the stillness of death
that feels far closer. This place has a name, once. No more. A cluster of a
dozen farmhouses, sod walls and ridgepoles. Canvas and plaster and thatch are
shimmered by the gusting wind as he approaches. Broken doors are burned by a
mark he does not recognize.

He walks through a score of bodies lying unmoving, blood anointing
frost-kissed ground in a dark benediction. He is an old man, feet bare. Back
bent as he drags each corpse in turn to lie in rows beside the mound he builds
from fence posts and deadwood, lamp oil and the last hay of winter, unneeded by
the horses found slaughtered in the grange.

In the smithy, he finds flint and steel with which to light the
pyre. He finds three boys there, throats cut. Left to slip slowly to the darkness
that comes for all the others in the end.

He hefts the bodies as if they weigh nothing. The muscles of arms
and back twist like double-knotted leather beneath his tattered rags. With an
old strength, he lays the fallen to their makeshift bier one by one, but the
limp that carries with him speaks of wounds even older.

He burns the boys first.

“Take this offering to the mountains’ winds,” he whispers, only
to himself. “Ash of the body, heal the spirit now set free.”

And Aelathar’s power was the old magic of the Druidas, so a
garden Gilvaleus vowed to make for her at the King’s Seat at Mitrost, to which she
would call the splendor of Summer in all seasons. And they walked together in
the empty ruins where that wonder would be raised, and he told her they would
pledge their love beneath bowers white and green.

Blue sky flares, breaking through cloud only to be scarred by the
reek of black ash. Thick columns of smoke rise and are torn away on the wind.
One by one, the dead receive the rites of Danassa, goddess of the harvest who
watches over them while they live. The rites of Herias, god of the long night of
death where they walk now. Folk of the fields, living lives unchanged for ten
centuries of Empire.

Then her laughter rang on the white stones that glimmered by
the stars that were fair Aelathar’s name, and whose light was in her silver
hair and pale eyes. And Gilvaleus the High King kissed her for the first time
beneath those stars, that watched them both with all of fate and history’s
unseeing eyes.

Stone walls twist across fields, rubble-strewn. Thin grass breaks
the dead-brown stubble of winter, the green left gleaming where frost turns to
dew, then mist.

And in the end, the Companions of Gilvaleus the High King rode
to the Plain of Marthai and met the Warriors of Astyra the King’s-Bastard, who
had called to him swords from the Duchies of the Northlands, and uncounted
blades of the Norgyr besides, who sought revenge against Gilvaleus for Thoradun
the Usurper, their long-dead Lord.

He thinks of the boys. Tries to remember their faces through the
black shroud of burning. He tries to think on how many winters it might be
since they last sleep in their mothers’ arms, before the gods’ call and mortal
steel makes men of them.

He feels a wetness at his eyes that he does not understand.

Then the skies were shrouded black with cloud and crow-wings
so thick as to block the sun, and a dark rain fell that covered all the field
with a clinging mist to thwart the eye of Archer and War-Mage alike. And the
High King was wrathful, and fought with the strength of ten, killing the best
Knights of the Northlands. And all the while in the fray was heard his voice,
calling for his Son to come to him, and to embrace the dark destiny of his
betrayal.

He tries to not think on these things anymore.

The day waxes, wanes as he keeps the fire burning and throws each
body to it in turn. Dawn sun rising weakly, pale gold in the east, grazing
clouds born of the distant sea. High sun passing warm, touching his robes that
are the pilgrims’ white once, long ago. Stained by countless leagues of travel
but still recognizable by their shapeless cut, by the cord belt, unknotted.

A weathered scar rises chest to neck to cheek, half-hidden by a
ragged growth of beard the same grey as the White Pilgrim’s hair. He is shorn,
but badly. A rough knife-cut that he administers only when weather and blood-mites
remind him to. His knife is a slip of rusted steel, barely a blade at all. He
uses it to cut the ropes that bind the three boys, keep them from struggling in
the end.

And ere the battle was done, the Field of Marthai ran red and
black with blood from steel and spell-fire that rained dark as night, bright as
noon. And all around them were the dead that lie and the dead that walk,
returned to the fight by the dark Animys of the Necromancers of Astyra’s ranks,
and denied the gods’ blessing and the long rest of earth and sky. Then the
mottled light of the Darkmoon shone down upon the plain to stain the mud of the
field blood-black and glistening, like the blood that stained Ankathira the
Whitethorn, Sword of Kings, that cut fearless through the ranks of the
Kings’-Bastard’s unholy force in Gilvaleus the High King’s hands.

He lets image and memory-scent flit past his mind’s eye, a
constant shadow play of blood and memory. By day, he sacrifices himself at the
altar of madness remembered. By night, he sleeps the sleep of no dreams.

“This is the bargain the gods have struck,” he whispers, only to
himself. This is who he is, is why he lives. A new lifetime of atonement for
the life, for the future, that ends so long ago.

Then Gilvaleus looked about him, and saw that all the
Kings’-Bastard
Astyra’s
force was broken but circled. And with
weeping eye, he beheld that of his Companions, yet lived only Nàlwyr, who had
returned to his High King, and
Baethala
the brave, and Fossa who
was his Brother, but all were near death and fighting far from the High King’s
side. And Gilvaleus cried out, saying ‘Woe to all that this day should come,
and an end to all we fought for.’ And from the dark smokes around came the
voice of the King’s-Bastard, who cried ‘Father, thou hast won the field but
lost all thy cause, and thou must face me now!’ So did Gilvaleus the High King
spy through shadow the adamantine spear of he whose treachery so much death had
sown, and drawing strength from the Whitethorn did he advance against his Son,
crying ‘Traitor, the death thou seekest is here!’

This life is given back to him, then given in turn to the gods
whose gift life is. A new lifetime of dark dreams to pay for the old lifetime
that spawned those dreams.

Then did the power of the Whitethorn cut down Astyra the
traitor, but the King’s-Bastard drew breath through foul Animys even after
blood and spirit had left him. And with his spear, he slashed at his Father’s
face to scar him cheek and neck, and Gilvaleus fell back with rage in his heart
and bloodied gaze. So did Astyra rise to thrust his spear through the heart and
spine of the High King, who fell at last. Then with his final breath, Astyra
witnessed this curse upon Gilvaleus his Father, saying ‘I die at dismal peace
with knowing that thy last sight will be the Son thou slayest, sired in the
darkness of thy heart, and the price of all thy sins. Father, remember me…’

Dusk and sunset are blood-red across darkling sky to the west,
and the burning is complete. The last of the dead are set to the cleansing
flame that their fate denies them. The village is scoured two days past, to
judge by the state of the bodies. Eyes gone to the birds, maggots not yet unweaving
pale flesh.

The White Pilgrim sees death too many times before. He knows what
these things mean.

He works with no scarf or scent to mask the rankness. For him,
the air carries no stench to note because the taint of death is always with
him. Carried from the Plains of Marthai a lifetime ago. Blood on his hands
slick like oil, burning like spell-fire as he plunges them through the mud
crust of a filthy trough to wash them by the failing light.

And as Gilvaleus the High King lay dying, he was cradled in
the arms of Nàlwyr, who spoke his grief and rage to the empty field.

He tries to not think on these things anymore. The memories all
but gone now. Gone for good, soon. Taken by the darkness that is all he has
left.

‘I ayra la mea Gilvaleus Haroya? Quèla sort es déicen a
mai, ayra que vou apartes de mi, resta seol amba tos els meus nemicas a la mà?’

Benediction in the tongue of Gracia, echoing through long years.

‘And now my High King Gilvaleus? What fates are left to me,
now that you turn from me, left alone with all my enemies at hand?’

A man might turn away from the friend he betrays. Might walk away
from the warrior’s death that the gods deny.

The warrior’s death is good enough for some. Not for him.

A man might walk away from a killing field. A man might turn his
back on the past and disappear into history.

He tries to not think on these things anymore.

And the High King spoke, and said ‘Thou must take comfort in
thyself alone, and look to the hope of these days to carry thee. For I am taken
into Orosan to heal the wounds that are my heart and memory. But in that time
when name and heart are cleansed by the memory that takes me, then all Gracia
that I saved shall embrace that memory, and I will return for all who speak
this Prayer for Dead Kings.’

He is walking along the farm track that twists between the wan
mud of spring fields, bare feet not feeling the cold. The pyre’s last bodies
spill fat-black smoke to the shrouded sky, and that sky is split suddenly by a
shrieking cry and the storm of wings above him.

A howling rattle on the wind is the passage of a phalanx of
hassas overhead. He counts six of the great winged horses, circling back with a
speed that belies their sheer size. Soaring low enough that even through the
falling dark, he sees bright eyes watching him, sees the darker masks of helmed
riders tracking as they pass. Their tightly reined movement on the air, the
faint glow of their dweomered barding marks them as beasts of war. They circle
to drop around him one by one, touching down at speed to stop in a storm of
dust and shredded turf.

Light springs from hand and sword. The White Pilgrim is caught in
a shimmering circle of white, against which the dusk beyond can no longer be
seen. The riders are warriors by their look. Dark leather, weather-stained. A
red band at the shoulder of each cloak is set with the sign of the black boar.
The White Pilgrim recognizes it. Cannot remember. Bright tokens are pinned
there, blades in white that mark some manner of rank.

The closest hassas rear up, cry out a challenge. They expect him
to run through the spreading shadow and the mud of track and field, but no
thought of running enters his mind. The great beasts shake foam from their
flanks as their wings are furled. They trample dead-grey earth as they circle,
upthrust stands of winter grass shading newer green beneath.