A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (33 page)

The last rider vaults from the saddle, not trusting his horse in
the sudden chaos. The Golden Girl meets him, darting in fast and low as the incantation
he utters marks him as the battle-caster of the group. His hands are twisting
through the precise pattern of his magic even as the Golden Girl drives the
rapier through one of those hands. The mage’s spell dies in a cry of pain as he
staggers back. He raises his good hand by instinct as if to ward her off, so
that the Golden Girl’s blade takes him through that hand just as cleanly,
crippling his spellcasting in twin jets of blood as she screams.

“En nom du haroya!”

An oath in the tongue of Gracia, echoing through long years.

In the name of the High King…

She tries to reach the sergeant before he rises, but the Norgyr
warrior twists serpent-fast. He rolls to his feet to parry her initial thrust,
pushes forward with three fast strikes. One tags her cloak, slashed out in a
feint as she slips past him. The second two crash off the guard of her blade. A
second feint to slip back, but another of Arsanc’s knights is there suddenly.
Then the third, leg bleeding as he screams in rage.

Caught between them, the Golden Girl turns one to the other,
dropping to a defensive posture. They fight in deadly rhythm by response, timing
their strikes as she turns.

Not even her speed saves her this time.

The sergeant cuts hard at her shoulder, but his blade shrieks as
it rakes steel, the armor she wears revealed as her tunic is slashed through.
Tightly woven chain gleams the pale grey of dwyrsilver, but though the strength
of that armor protects her, the force of the sergeant’s attack twists her off
balance. He shifts behind her to strike low, cutting deep into her leg.

The Golden Girl does not cry out as she falls.

The sergeant pins her rapier hand beneath his boot, his mouth a
wolf’s grin as she struggles in vain to escape. But then he spins on his heel
suddenly, a hand at his shoulder. A look of surprise as the pommel of a Norgyr
sword shatters his nose.

The White Pilgrim is there, torch in one hand, the blade that the
Golden Girl kicked free of the fray in the other. A moment of shock on the
faces of the Black Duke’s troops as their sergeant staggers back, collapses to
his knees even as they leap to the attack. Not fast enough.

Torch and sword move in tight arcs, locked together to block and
parry, then swung free, striking hard. Blades flash to left and right of him,
but the White Pilgrim twists away like wind-blown smoke, driving one guard back
with fire as he disarms the other with three furious strikes. The Norgyr’s
blade is sent to the shadows behind him, his sword hand cut to the bone.

The sergeant tries to rise, face a mask of dust and blood. His
shaking legs go out from under him as the Golden Girl drives her knee to his
stomach. She drops on him, his back cracking as she raises the rapier, gripped
tight in both hands.

The red-limned tip of the blade touches his neck. The White Pilgrim
sees. Stops. He limps back from the one guard still standing, who dares not
move.

The Golden Girl fights to slow her breathing. The wound at her
leg is a blossom of red-black. Shaking hands let the rapier slip, trace a razor-line
of jagged red along the sergeant’s skin. His eyes are tight on hers,
bruise-dark pits against the flickering firelight of the White Pilgrim’s torch.

“Why do you follow me?” she says. Pain threads her voice, teeth
set as a grim line against it.

“My Duke Arsanc’s orders.”

The White Pilgrim watches the sergeant spit blood as he speaks.
Gareyth, the young warrior’s name is. He does not remember why he knows it.
Uncertain suddenly as to why he stands there.

“Three years since my father and I first saw the black boar, in
Charath. Roaming Gracia in secret a full two years before your duke was even
thinking on moving against Reimari. Why?”

“My Duke Arsanc’s orders…”

The sergeant closes his eyes, will say nothing more. He waits to
die.

The Golden Girl stares for a long moment. Then she stands slowly,
keeps the blade at Gareyth’s throat until she steps quickly away, out of any
reach. He is on his feet in an instant, stumbling back. The White Pilgrim is
there, sword up in warning.

“Leave your weapons,” the Golden Girl says. “Ride.”

In the sergeant’s pack as he helps the wounded to their horses,
the Golden Girl finds glass vials packed in sheepskin. They gleam with a pale
blue light, the telltale sign of a healing draught. She takes two, leaves the
other two for the sergeant and his warriors to sort among themselves. The White
Pilgrim watches as she drinks, sees the blood at her leg staunched, the set of
her wounded shoulder slowly straighten itself.

The Norgyr move out at the slower speed of the wounded horse,
hoofbeats vanishing quickly into the utter dark that their single torch leaves
behind. The sergeant Gareyth is in the lead. He does not look back.

The Golden Girl hurls three shortswords to the forest, cracks the
stock of each crossbow with well-placed kicks. The White Pilgrim looks
wonderingly to the borrowed blade in his own hand, thinks to throw it after the
others. The fight is already fading in his mind. He slips the sword to his belt
instead.

The Golden Girl stands listening to the silence of the night,
ensuring that the Black Duke’s soldiers are truly gone. And only then, the
White Pilgrim sees her resolve crumble.

Her bravado breaks for the moment it takes to reveal the child
she is. She fights back tears, the weeping that wracks her slight frame, eyes
squeezed shut. The dirt of a long road hides her fear. Thirteen summers behind
her.

Then the moment is past and the steel-blue eyes are dry. She
passes the healing draught to the White Pilgrim, but he shakes his head. She
slips it within her cloak. Stands in silence, watching him.

“You fight well for a bastard brat,” he says finally. Dismissive.
The Golden Girl’s blue eyes are cold as the White Pilgrim turns, heads off with
torch held high. She follows a half-dozen steps behind.

THE WHITE PILGRIM WALKS until the torch begins to
sputter, breaking only then from the track of the road for the darker wood beyond.
The Golden Girl follows, stays close to see the faint trail he finds and walks
along. She glances behind her, as she does all the time since they set out. As
she has before, she sees only darkness there.

He moves with a slow certainty. Realizes that he passes this way
before, long ago. The trees shift to gnarled scrub pine, tight-set bough to
bough, a wall of shadow. And just as the torch threatens to gutter out, he
leads the Golden Girl to slip past that wall and into the sheltered grove
beyond.

The White Pilgrim stoops where he remembers the shallow firepit
scraped out from ancient soil. He finds charcoal fragments spread there,
covered now with a skin of winter-dry leaves. He sets them burning with the
last flickering of the torch, lets that kindling flame consume its stump. He
shuffles in the shadows, finds branches that he adds slowly. Faint tongues of
fire feed hungrily as they rise to a bright blaze.

In the light of that blaze, the Golden Girl stares to the wall of
forest where it marks the boundary of a great-stone circle that rises around
them in the darkness. Slabs of white granite, rough-struck and planed. They taper
faintly along their length as they rise to twice her height, set in a perfect
ring within which the ground is clear. The old magic of druidas. The
tree-priests marking the consecration of this place.

The White Pilgrim feels the power lurking within the whispering
pines, kneeling to face the tallest stone as he murmurs thanks to Menos, god of
travelers, for his grace and protection. When he turns back, the Golden Girl is
sitting close by the fire, holding deadfall with which to feed it. Her cloak is
a shroud of shadow where she crouches within it, stares to the darkness.

Justain, her name is. He remembers.

Her waterskin and pack are set out across from her, bread and
salt pork waiting to be eaten.

“Save the bread,” the White Pilgrim says as he paces. The
strength of the battle just fought is still in his limbs, pushing the pain away
for a time. The Golden Girl says nothing, flicks her gaze to meet his.

He feels something familiar in those eyes, so he turns away.

He sits finally, remembers that he still wears the Norgyr
warrior’s shortsword when its narrow guard catches him hard in the ribs. He
pulls it naked from his belt, stares at its edge against the firelight for a
moment before he sets it aside.

Justain eats a piece of the pork, chews slowly to soften it.
Thoughtful. “Bread ill-feeds the exertion of battle,” she says finally. “Wounds
need the nourishment of meat to heal. A warrior would know that.”

He answers by tearing a piece of bread, peeling mold from the
crust before he eats.

“You were a soldier once?” Her voice is flat, emotionless in a
way that draws his attention to it. Hiding something. “A general? Something
more?”

She calls him a name, before the fight. He tries to remember it
but cannot.

“I saw that limp you have,” she says. “I thought you might have
been a soldier.”

“Think what you like.”

“I think you know who I am. So why do you pretend?”

With a twisted length of pine branch, the White Pilgrim banks the
fire, sending sparks to spiral up past the standing stones. Dark shapes against
the star-streaked sky. His hand shakes, a hint of anger in his gaze. She sees
it.

“People have too many things to remember,” she says. “Too many regrets.
Do you have regret?”

“A man who dies with no regrets dies without having lived.” His
voice tells him he is angry. He knows not why.

On the closest stone, the White Pilgrim sees weathered runes in a
script he cannot read. Not Gracian but older. Their meaning hidden now, lost
over the endless years of Empire that shaped language and thought to one
unbreakable whole. Likely no one left in any land who can still read all the
stories that only the past now speaks.

Then at the High Winter did Prince Sestian of Marthai and
Veneranda declare for Telos, and so did war press finally to the borders of
Magandis. And King Astran did send forth Guderna who was Gilvaleus, in lead of
two hundred Knights of his realm, and in those battles he did acquit himself in
great heroic form.

“My father died a year ago. Before he did, he told me he had only
one regret,” the Golden Girl says.

And standing singly against full scores of Sestian’s best
swords, the young Captain Guderna took no wound, and showed his foes great
quarter and did turn countless of them against their Lords and to King Astran’s
side. And Telos fighting in the South heard word of this new Captain but had no
knowledge then that his Son had been bound to the Daughter of his enemy’s ally,
and neither could know the other across the gulf of war in the North.

The White Pilgrim waves his head to show his disinterest, drinks
from her waterskin. He realizes how parched he is only when he hears himself
speak, throat tight, voice raw with the fear he cannot place.

“And what was that?”

“That he never saw his high king again…”

With the words comes a weight of loss and apprehension. She looks
up to the sharp light of the stars, then back. The White Pilgrim does not meet
her gaze.

“You are Gilvaleus,” she says.

“No…”

A single name. So small a word in response, but he fights to
force it out. He feels a pain that stabs at his chest like a rusted blade
plunged in, then again, again.

“He followed you from the field at Marthai. When you turned away
from him. He followed you like he’d followed his whole life.”

“No.”

Then it happened that Nàlwyr heard of this brash young Captain
of Magandis who had defeated all his Prince’s best, but who tempered victory
with mercy and had claimed full hundreds of Marthai and Veneranda’s force to
the armies of Magandis. And he marveled ‘This is a Knight of great heart, and
woe to the times that make us enemies, and the fates that will force me to face
him.’

“But he lost you when he fell sick outside Odradale,” the Golden
Girl says. “It was winter.”

“You don’t…”

And at the High Spring, they did face each other at the head
of two great forces along the banks of the River Konides that flowed with the
full rage of Winter, and could not be crossed save at three narrow fords whose
claim and hold would be paid in blood.

He feels the anger like a black flame suddenly, burning at his
heart and in his hands where fists squeeze blunted nails into his palms. Pain
there like the pain at his throat, where the words he means to say are caught
tight.

The Golden Girl stands slowly, cloak wrapped around herself.
Small in the shadows. Justain.

“My father. Nàlwyr.”

From within her tunic, she brings forth the thong of leather at
her neck. The talisman hangs there, an oval of pale gold to catch the light. At
its center, a dragon rampant in blood-red, claws of black. Eyes of silver gleam
where it coils its tail around itself, ready to strike.

The White Pilgrim is on his feet, does not remember standing. The
fire is before him but he circles, the Golden Girl across from him, risen to
pace away from him, angry. Justain.

“They all say you died. That Astyra the king’s-bastard had slain
you before he fell. Priests and fools announcing that your body was carried on
a chariot of fire up to Orosan, taken to the lap of the gods, but you walked
away!”

“You do not know!” he shouts at last. He tastes blood at his
tongue where he must have bitten it. He does not remember. “No one knows these
things! Memories and lies! All of it, lies!”

“This is no lie. This is what my father said to me before he
died. Captain to the high king, first of the companions of Mitrost…”

“You do not know!”

The White Pilgrim turns from her, cannot bear to look at her anymore.
The bottomless blue of her eyes, her face blurred with tears to match his own.
Footsteps around him mark where she follows as he tries to rub his eyes, feels
the burning of the blood still clinging to his fingers from the fight.

He tries to get away. He must get away. He tries to not think of
these things anymore, the memories almost gone.

“He came to you at Marthai!” Her words are a blade, cutting open
the oldest scars. “He came back for you, out of exile, out of the wilderness
for you. He fought by your side, offered you his life. He watched you crawl out
from a field of shattered bodies, and he followed you, he begged you!”

‘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?’

He hears her father’s words in the Golden Girl’s voice, sharp
with the edge that betrayal makes. Hears the rage there handed down to him like
a dark judgement for all his deceit, all his weakness.

“He begged you and you walked away. He told me…”

He twists from her grasp as he strikes her arm away with a
shaking hand. The darkness of his look stuns her to sudden silence where she
stands.

No. Not the look. The shortsword in his hand that he cannot remember
picking up. It thrusts out to touch the paleness of her throat, so fast that
she has no time to avoid it. A point of blood rises there, spreading black in
the firelight.

“And how good are you?” the White Pilgrim whispers.

The Golden Girl stares. Does not understand.

Her hand strays to her belt, the scabbard hanging there. Slowly,
slowly in the hope that he does not see. A stripling’s trick, where a veteran
would draw at speed to distract the foe.

“Bastard brat. You steal a man’s memory. Try to steal his name.
You don’t know…”

And with blinding speed, the White Pilgrim thrusts through the
pale throat, all the force of leg and shoulder punching through flesh and bone,
blood and spine. The blackened steel of the Norgyr sword is a deadly shadow in
the blaze of firelight.

Except the Golden Girl is gone.

There and not there, forcing herself back as she falls beneath
the killing stroke. She rolls two paces away, dropping her cloak as she rises
again. The White Pilgrim is on her, going low for the right side, opposite her
scabbard. A savage strike, no way to block it, but his blade hits steel. A
flash as her rapier comes up, slashes out and down, too fast to even see.

“How good would you have to be?” he screams, a dark rage in his
voice that is stilled for long years. “How good to prove that Nàlwyr’s blood
flows in your veins?”

Her silence answers as she wheels, tears the torn sleeve of her
tunic free to take no chance on it hindering her movement. The tight-woven
links of the chain shirt twist like silvered snakeskin as she lurches back from
the White Pilgrim but he presses, relentless. Slashes down and across with a
series of killing strokes, speed driven by the lightness of the Norgyr blade.

The Golden Girl retreats again, gets no quarter as she parries,
no room to take advantage of the longer rapier as she sends strike after strike
wide by a hand’s width. She parries his next blow with the same cross-hand
movement as the last three. The White Pilgrim feels himself set for the
follow-on. Then he watches her blade suddenly flash down and across, slipping beneath
his. The repetition of her defense lulling him into a pattern of counterattack
he cannot see.

She takes the advantage, lunges in with a thrust that catches his
tunic but misses his arm as he twists wide. The White Pilgrim drops his sword
to deflect her next attack, a low thrust from the opposite side, impossibly
fast. And then she has the offensive, the razor tip of the rapier weaving a
bright pattern in the firelight as she strikes, strikes again, swords meeting
in a clash of steel that rings out against the silence of the stones and the
night beyond.

He finds a respite when she stumbles in a patch of thistle,
winter-grey and invisible in the dark. He unleashes a savage windmill strike,
fast as an uncoiling thicket-serpent, but she slides past it as if he was
standing still.

The best blade in his Father’s court at twelve summers. Memories
and lies.

The White Pilgrim fights like a man half his age, strength and
speed a reminder of the skill he once has. The Golden Girl fights like a veteran
twice hers. Her prowess is a reminder of something else.

He is as fast as he ever is. As fast as he can be, but she is
faster. Her blade weaves a mandala in the firelight as she strikes, furious
now.

The darkness in her gaze is a thing the White Pilgrim recognizes.
A thing he cannot face.

She forces him left, left again, pushing him back as she tags his
sword arm twice. The fire is behind him now, blocking further retreat. A fool’s
error. She comes in low, a blurred stain of red and black, fire and shadow, and
through it the flash of steel as the rapier bites deep at his shoulder.