Child of the Sword, Book 1 of The Gods Within (60 page)

Morgin tried to picture himself as the
peasants might see him now: a distant blotch of red riding down
into the valley. He wondered if beneath their forced exuberance
they were laughing at him. Then again, the old woman had probably
declared a festival and day of feast for all, and with that kind of
bribe the peasants would cheer anyone, for any reason.

As the road leveled out onto the valley
floor he came upon a cluster of peasants waving red banners and
shouting. He wanted to speed past them, to avoid having to see the
derision in their eyes, but just then a young girl ran into the
road in front of him.

He yanked back viciously on Mortiss’ reins.
She screamed angrily, reared, and he just missed trampling the girl
as Mortiss brought her fore hooves down in the middle of the
road.

“ShadowLord,” the peasant girl called
joyously as she stuffed a bouquet of ripe wheat into his saddle
harness. It had been dipped in red dye, which was a custom among
the peasants since colorful flowers were rare thereabouts.

The girl was buxom and fair, with large,
jiggling breasts that threatened to burst from her dress. She had
full red lips and big round eyes, and her face was filled with
honest and sincere joy. She tugged on his sleeve, almost pulled him
from his saddle. To keep his balance he bent low toward her until
their faces touched. She whispered in his ear in a voice hot and
sensuous. “ShadowLord,” she said. “I am yours.” Then she kissed him
passionately, scandalously, with absolutely no regard for the
propriety of the situation.

Morgin broke free of her almost reluctantly,
realized he had been surrounded by a small clutch of peasants, all
stuffing colorfully dyed bouquets of wheat into his pockets and
harness. They touched him reverently and cheered him joyfully,
until he broke away from them and spurred Mortiss forward. “Long
live the ShadowLord,” they cried after him.

His next encounter with a cluster of
peasants was little different, and so too was the next, though he
took care to be certain the earlier incident was not repeated. He
slowed as he approached each group, but did not stop, and in
response to the joy he saw in their faces he found himself waving
at them triumphantly, exactly as the old witch would want him
to.

Well short of the village the spectators
were no longer grouped in clusters, but lined the road on both
sides all the way to the castle. The shouts of individuals blended
into a continuous indecipherable roar, and among the peasants
Morgin saw clansmen and women, merchants of high and low caste,
laborers, farmers. They all shouted and cheered, and while they did
not mob him as he feared, they were easily as jubilant as that
first cluster of peasants he had met far back on the road.

The village headman waited for him in the
center of the village, standing in the middle of the road leaning
heavily on an old staff. Morgin stopped, but did not dismount.

The headman raised his staff and slowly the
crowd quieted. “Yee have come home, ShadowLord,” the old man said
in a voice far stronger than Morgin had expected of him. “We owe
yee much, ShadowLord, for Illalla would have cost us grievesome
hurt. We owe yee our lives, and our fields, and our crops,
ShadowLord. But more than that, we owe yee our lands.”

A long silence followed the old man’s words.
On impulse Morgin dismounted, crossed the short distance between
them and stood before the old man as an equal, thinking of Rat who
could not have even claimed the stature of a peasant. He reached
out and took the old man’s hand, then bowed deeply and kissed
it.

A hushed gasp floated through the crowd, for
clansmen did not humble themselves to a peasant. “I am deeply
honored,” Morgin said, and the old man smiled.

Someone cheered, a single voice that drowned
the silence of the crowd. Then a second voice joined the first, and
suddenly they were all screaming and shouting. Now they did mob
him, reminding him painfully of his not fully healed wounds as they
pulled him toward the castle gates.

He’d been careful not to let go of Mortiss’
reins, so he fought his way through the mob to her side, managed to
get hold of the saddle horn, to find a stirrup. He struggled for a
moment, unable to mount in the moving, shifting throng. But then
someone in the mob gave him a rather rude helping hand and
catapulted him into the saddle. He spurred Mortiss lightly, and
caught only a momentary glimpse of France’s grinning, mustachioed
face as she trotted forward, clearing a path through the mob.

Ahead of him the crowd waited obediently
along the sides of the road, but as he passed they spilled into it
behind him, forming a pleasantly unruly mob of which Olivia would
never approve. He could leave them behind, he knew, by applying his
spurs a bit harder, but perversely he chose not to.

The castle gates were open, and beyond them
he saw the old woman waiting amidst several clansmen of high caste,
among which were representatives of the other Lesser Clans. Morgin
pulled Mortiss to an abrupt halt just outside of the castle wall,
and the crowd behind him crested like a wave on a rocky shore. But
where they had mobbed him before, they now held back, reluctant to
stand between him and the old witch. An uncomfortable silence
descended upon them all.

Olivia’s patience had not improved with
time, and she barked some whispered command at Brandon, who
obediently trotted across the yard and through the castle gates.
“Cousin,” Brandon asked. “What are you waiting for?”

Morgin dismounted, stood squarely before his
cousin, and suddenly both he and Brandon had the same impulse. They
abandoned propriety and wrapped their arms about one another in a
heartfelt hug while the crowd cheered them.

“It is good to see you,” Brandon whispered
in his ear. “But don’t spoil the old woman’s show. You know how she
is when she doesn’t get her way.”

“Come now, grandson,” Olivia interrupted
them impatiently. “We are waiting.”

Morgin pulled free of Brandon’s embrace.
Olivia too had crossed the courtyard and stood just within the
threshold of Elhiyne, while Morgin stood just without. He did not
move to enter.

Olivia’s brows slowly narrowed. “Well?” she
demanded.

Morgin shrugged. “When last we met,” he
said, speaking softly and with care, though his voice rang loudly
through the silence about them, “you accused me of cowardice. You
condemned me to a death that would not be fit for the worst of
criminals, and swore by the
gods
that should I ever return,
you yourself would order my death.”

Olivia’s eyes went stark with anger.

“Now I know you to be a woman of your word,”
he continued, “so I stand here now, at the threshold of my home,
and rightly I wonder: Have you changed your mind, or will I fall to
treachery?”

This was the moment he had waited for. In
many ways it was the moment he had lived for: to see the old witch
eat her words, to see her for once humbled as she chose to humble
others. But just as her anger seemed ready to explode and shower
down upon them all, she smiled warmly; she stepped forward and
embraced him, though it was a gesture for public viewing, grand and
cold and lacking the love that had been in Brandon’s tightly
clenched welcome.

“All is forgiven,” she announced loudly,
somehow turning the tables so that it was she who forgave him for
her own sins. “Let it not be said that Elhiyne does not welcome the
return of its wayward son. We rejoice that you have come home to
us, oh ShadowLord.”

She released him, turned to the crowd,
lifted her hands high to demand the attention that she already
commanded. “The grandson of Elhiyne is home; AethonLaw et Elhiyne;
ShadowLord; hero of Csairne Glen; and now, by my command, Warmaster
of the Council of Elhiyne. From this day hence the ShadowLord will
attend all council of Tribe and Clan and House Elhiyne. The
ShadowLord has come home.”

The crowd cheered and shouted, but Olivia
silenced them with a wave of her hands. “Come,” she said to them.
“Let us adjourn to the Hall of Wills. It is time for the ShadowLord
to meet his enemies, for by his own hand they are now his prisoners
in defeat.”

She spun about then and strode purposefully
across the castle yard, leaving Morgin and the crowd behind. But
the crowd was now hers, and would have trampled Morgin had he not
followed. As it was they allowed him only the barest instant to
move out ahead of them, and then stayed close on his heels, forcing
him to match Olivia’s pace. They drove him through the gates,
across the castle yard, up the steps and into the main entrance of
the castle proper. And only when he entered the Hall of Wills did
they slow, for even peasants could sense the power that waited
there.

Clansmen of middle and high caste filled the
hall, and Olivia was nowhere to be seen. For an instant Morgin saw
nothing but another milling throng blocking his way, though the one
before him was dressed somewhat better than the one behind him. And
then, as if the entire thing had been rehearsed to perfection, the
crowd before him parted slowly like calm, still water cut by the
bow of a ship. They withdrew to the edges of the Hall and left
Morgin at one end, facing Olivia at the other where she sat upon
her throne; and between them, in the center of the Hall, two lone
figures, on their knees, facing him, their hands bound behind their
backs. Illalla and Valso looked at him carefully, Illalla with
uncertainty, and Valso with no expression at all.

Morgin felt ill and numb. Everyone there
waited to see what he would do, what he would say, but he could
find no grand speeches within him, nor could he think of an
appropriate action, or gesture, or command. He wanted merely to
disappear into a shadow, perhaps go hunting in the mountains, or
fishing by the river. And suddenly he decided that he would do
exactly that.
To netherhell with all of them
! he thought.
Olivia could play her games without him, and damn the crowd’s need
for a show.

Oddly enough, it was Valso who stopped him.
Valso must have sensed his hesitation, for at that moment Valso’s
lips curled slowly into a triumphant grin, a smile that reminded
Morgin of Salula’s evil pleasure with the lash.

Morgin had crossed half the distance to
Valso before he realized what he was doing. He could not remember
drawing his sword, but it was in his hand now, alive with such
power that the clansmen about him stepped back. It was a mistake to
bring that weapon to life with no power of his own to control it,
but with the memory of Valso’s grin etched on his mind he no longer
cared.

Olivia cried, “No. I forbid you,” and the
sword flared even more powerfully in his hands until even she
cringed back from him. And in that instant, as he stood over Valso
and Illalla about to take their lives, he saw fear in Valso’s eyes,
stark and naked terror, and it pleased him.

But the air between them suddenly shimmered,
and Erithnae appeared, in every way a goddess that did not belong
among mortals, and Morgin understood that she was there only for
his eyes. She held up her hands to stop him. “No, Lord Mortal.
Please. You must not.”

“Out of my way, Erithnae,” he screamed. “Go
back to your king and your world of dreams.”

“Please, Lord Mortal,” she begged.

Morgin advanced another step. “What care you
for this offal that calls himself a man?”

She shook her head. “I care not for them,
but for you, Lord Mortal. You must not harm yourself so by killing
them.”

“Be gone,” he screamed, and at his anger she
reluctantly disappeared.

Something tugged at his sleeve. He looked
down and found young Aethon standing next to him. “Please, Lord
Mortal,” the boy begged with tears in his eyes. “Please don’t harm
them. For you will harm yourself far more than you will harm
them.”

Aethon held Morgin’s sleeve in one hand,
buried his face in the other, and his shoulders shook with sobs as
he cried openly. And while he cried he slowly faded from sight,
until only his memory remained.

No more phantoms appeared to replace Aethon.
The power had left the sword in Morgin’s hand and it now lay
quiescent and peaceful. He looked at it, then sheathed the blade
carefully.

The crowd cheered him. Olivia stood from her
throne and crossed the room to where Morgin stood over the two
Decouix lords. She raised her hands to silence the crowd. “The
ShadowLord has chosen to consult the
gods
, and from them he
has learned the wisdom of mercy for his enemies.”

“ShadowLord,” the throng chanted.
“ShadowLord . . . ShadowLord . . .
ShadowLord . . .”

In the midst of all the noise Olivia looked
at Morgin and smiled menacingly. She measured him, weighed his
worth in her sight, and as always when she was near he felt the
ghostly fingers of her power probing at him. Suddenly her eyes
flashed and she laughed evilly. She crowed with mirth, and the
crowd screamed louder.

She leaned toward Morgin carefully until
their faces almost touched. “Play your games, oh ShadowLord without
power,” she mocked him. “Play them well. Let these fools about you
believe that you speak to nonexistent
gods
. But remember
that I now know the secret of that weapon of yours, and of your
nonexistent power, and while I will not reveal it, for that would
cost you your life, you will do my bidding, oh great ShadowLord.
That you will.”

A sword point sliced past Morgin’s nose and
he back-stepped desperately, then foolishly he lost sight of the
blade for just an instant. He found it again only by the glint of
the sun on the steel point as it cut straight for his heart. He
dodged to one side barely fast enough to elude it, brought his own
sword down against it in a clanging shower of sparks.