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Authors: Elizabeth Haydon

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BOOK: Requiem for the Sun
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Have you learned nothing?
the demon chided angrily.
Do you not recall what happened the last time you let your lust get the better of us?
“Yes,” the seneschal said bitterly. “I recall it well, and would change nothing about it, given the chance. It gave both you and me a night of unmitigated joy in the glorious suffering of an Ancient Seren, and the boon of a bloodline in the child that was born of that night.”
A useless freak. A monster.
“Nonesuch!” The seneschal's voice, low and guttural to avoid calling attention to himself, ground against his throat as if against shards of glass. “Faron is a beautiful creation, unique, with powers only beginning to be realized. And should either of us ever be in need of a vessel in which to seek refuge, Faron is perfect.”
Thank you, no
.
I have higher expectations of a host than that
.
I have no desire to share my life's essence with what is essentially a human
fish,
blind in daylight, boneless
,
timid —
Violently the seneschal raked his nails down the sides of his head, gashing stripes of blood across his cheeks.
“Enough of this! If you wish to move to another host, do so now, or submit to my will! I will brook no more of this nonsense!” In his rage the seneschal closed his eyes, concentrating on the spiritual tethers that bound the demon to him, hooks in the core of his essence that he had untied the night before, to allow their combined spirits to inhabit Faron. All thought of self-preservation vanished; he quickly found one metaphysical tie and in his mind seized upon it, preparing to cast off from the demon as the ship soon would from the dock.
Stop
. The scathing voice quavered.
Silence returned to his mind. The clouds that had blanketed the sun as it rose thinned and broke open, causing the morning light to shimmer in dusty streams across the water. The seneschal held his breath, waiting for the demon's reply, longing for the cool darkness belowdecks where Faron waited. He wondered whether the monster he had carried voluntarily, its metaphysical talons embedded in his soul, would make good on its threats. There was nothing he could do but wait.
Finally, when the voice spoke again, it was subdued.
Tell me of this woman,
and why this is so important to you.
The seneschal inhaled, allowing the salty air to fill his lungs to their depths. He allowed his mind to wander back over ancient fields of summer grass, the
Wide Meadows of the Island of Serendair, now nothing more than seagrass in the sand beneath the boiling waves of the sea. He concentrated on the memories he had made there.
“Her name is Rhapsody,” he whispered, struggling to keep the word light on the air, reverent, like a psalm, a holy laud, though he knew it was far past impossible for his profane mouth to ever utter such a prayer. “I knew her in Serendair, before the cataclysm. She is beautiful; eyes green as the emerald forest, hair of gold like ripened sheaves of wheat. But that is not why.”
Then why?
The seneschal tried to form thoughts, words around the memory. “She is spirited, alive; passionate.” The thought of the disdain he had routinely seen in her eyes many centuries before rose up like bile in his throat, stung his pride all over again now as it had then. “Stubborn, surly, defiant, argumentative. Foolish.”
And she loved me
, he thought, allowing himself a fraction of a second to bask in the rumination, then driving it from his mind before the demon could seize upon it.
The knowledge that she had sworn her fealty to him had salved many a difficult moment, had kept him warm through a thousand dark nights in the time before the demon, when he was a mortal man in the vanguard of a coming war. He could still summon up the memory of the oath she swore to him before he had left her for the last time, a memory he had consigned to the dark vault of loss long before, too painful to think about without going mad.
I swear by the Star that my heart will love no other man until this world comes to an end
.
The fact that he had forced her into the pledge, had made her promise it, knowing that she was unable to lie, as he held the life of a young girl in his hands before her eyes, had dissipated in his recollection long ago. She had given her word, and Lirin had rules about such things inbred in their blood.
If she had said she loved him, it must have been the truth.
The loss he felt when the word had come to him as he was embroiled in the early battles of the Seren War that she had vanished, when he was within a hairsbreadth of reclaiming her, had almost killed him. She had been stolen by the Brother, the Dhracian assassin known as the most proficient killer the Island had ever seen, even more proficient than he himself had been. There was no trace of her to be found, and so he had assumed that the Brother had killed her and tossed her body into the sea, as the Dhracian's disinterest in temptations of the flesh was renowned. He had wept, for the first time in his memory, tears that rained like acid and had driven him into even greater fits of destruction, sacking villages and torching the Wide Meadows in the vain
hope that the wildfires he ignited would help purge his soul of the despair he felt at her loss.
And now he had come to find that she was alive, had survived the destruction of the Island just as he had, had undoubtedly sailed away before the cataclysm with the other Cymrian refugees who had made their way across the world to the Wyrmlands and had taken shelter there. She, like he, had cheated Time, had robbed Death of a conquest, had obtained the same immortality that the other Cymrians and their descendants had obtained.
And she had married. Word had come via the shipping lanes of a royal marriage in Roland, but he had paid it no mind, until the name
Rhapsody
had come to his ears again, after sixteen centuries of silence.
It was then that the jealousy had begun to brew. He took to walking the docks at night, passing by dock wenches and drunken sailors that otherwise would have been easy prey, wondering if the Rhapsody he had known and this new queen that he had heard tell of could possibly be one and the same. When the curiosity turned to obsession he had summoned Quinn, one of the sailors who was his unwitting thrall, and sent him on a mission to discover if by the smallest stroke of Fate it might be the woman who had pledged herself to him. Until last night, it had seemed almost impossible to believe that it might be true.
And then Quinn returned, confirming his greatest hope, and his greatest dread.
She was alive.
After all these centuries, the death of the Island in volcanic fire, a journey that had taken the lives of many of the refugees, and the war that followed, she was still alive, half a world away. Still wearing the locket she had worn when he knew her. She was alive.
And married.
And happy.
His thoughts blackened as the rage returned.
She had lied to him.
She had broken her oath.
She needed to be taught the consequences of such actions.
“Why?” he said aloud, his voice beginning to shake in the effort to suppress his fury. “Because she is the single best knob I have ever experienced; a bedwench of limitless charms. A talented slut, a rutting whore who broke an oath to me. I seek to reclaim what I lost when that happened.”
The voice of the demon was weak, like the graying ash of a long-burning fire that had expended much of its fuel.
Not again. Let us not do this again. Remember the consequences: remember how
weak we were left the last time you gave in to the desire to knob a woman. Each child you father breaks open my essence, our essence, leaving us diminished. Sate your lust in blood and fire, not between a woman's legs. What you leave behind there —
“I will leave no seed behind this time,” the seneschal retorted, gripping the railing as the light from the rising sun flattened over the sea. “When Faron was conceived I was still human, my blood only slightly tainted by your essence, because you were still so weak from the transfer of hosts. Now I am F'dor, having carried you for sixteen hundred years. There is very little, if any, human blood left in me. And F'dor, like all other Firstborn races, choose whether or not to break open their souls in the act of procreation. Believe me, I have no intention of doing that again; I want nothing between Rhapsody's legs but me. I plan to spend a goodly amount of time there, making up for all the time she owes me. So rest easy; your power is safe.”
There was another long silence while the demon considered, peppered now by the increasing noise from the docks, the cacophony of activity as the harbor swelled with life and traffic. Finally the voice within his mind spoke; it was soft, as though tired, resigned, but still bore a resolute tone.
Very well. Let us be off, but with the intent on returning as soon as you have retrieved that which is owed to you. I wish to get back to the terror, the burnings, the mad beauty of the destruction we have wrought here
.
The seneschal absently fingered the hilt of Tysterisk as he thought back for one last moment to the image of Rhapsody's face as she swore her pledge to him; she had called him by a name he had long forgotten until now.
There; is that enough for you now, Michael?
Michael
, he had been called in that other life. He had all but lost the memory of it.
Michael, the Wind of Death.
“Believe me,” he said again, “where we are bound, there will be more than ample opportunity for terror, for burnings. I promise you, the mad beauty of the destruction we have wrought here will pale beside what is to come when we make landfall on her shores.”
Violet
The New Beginning
Grei-ti
7
HAGUEFORT, NAVARNE
T
he master of the range flashed the signs from one hundred fifty yards — twelve centers, two inner ring, nine outer ring, one perfect alignment.
Gwydion Navarne sighed, then signaled for the targets to be moved back. While the rangekeepers dragged the haybutts about in the distance he gave his longbow a shake, then gently ran his fingers up the grip. He had spent more than a year in its making, had carefully blended wood, horn, and sinew, cured it lovingly. It was a weapon of which he was greatly proud, even if it was still not a masterpiece; it, like he, was in training, learning, stretching to its potential.
This afternoon he was not proving worthy of it.
He was so focused on trying to sort out the problem with his angle of flight that he did not hear the approach of the hoofbeats until Anborn was already upon him.
“You disappoint me, lad.”
The snort of the black stallion shook Gwydion from his concentration, and he looked up into the face of the Lord Marshal, the ancient general of the Cymrian army, who was staring down at him from his high-backed saddle, watching him as intently as a bird of prey watches a mouse. Gwydion shook the bow again.
“My apologies, Lord Marshal. I'm working on my free-flights, albeit dismally this afternoon.” He nodded to Anborn's man-at-arms, an older First Generation Cymrian with gray hair and a deeply lined face, weathered from the sun, who always traveled on horseback with a pair of crossbows drawn. “Well met, Shrike.” The soldier nodded in return, dismounting.
The general snorted in the same timbre as his war horse, then reached behind him and unstrapped his crutches from their saddle bindings.
“I'm not disappointed in your accuracy, boy, but in your choice of projectiles. I see you have a fondness for those flimsy Lirin sticks.” Anborn sighed dramatically. “I should have had a long talk with you before your adopted grandmother moved in here and destroyed your sense of arrow flight with her Lirin preferences.”
Gwydion laughed, then took the reins as the Lord Marshal dismounted slowly, Shrike standing ready, as always, to support him should he lose his
balance. In the three years since Anborn's crippling, Gwydion had never seen it happen.
“Actually Rhapsody has little preference for arrows, and not too much interest in archery anymore,” he said. “She brings me back the long whitewoods whenever she goes to Tyrian if she can.”
Anborn steadied himself on the two specially made canes and stared at Gwydion, in mock disgust. “So you came to this tendency on your own? Appalling.”
“I am still studying the crossbow as well, Lord Marshal.”
“Well, then at least you shouldn't be taken out and fed to the weasels yet.”
Gwydion Navarne laughed. “Perhaps someday you can enlighten me as to why your family is so fascinated with the feeding of incompetents to weasels,” he said, glancing at the squire who was approaching with the general's chair. “If I recall correctly, your brother, Edwyn Griffyth, declared the same fate should befall Tristan Steward at the Cymrian Council.”
“Being devoured by weasels is far too good a fate for Tristan Steward,” Anborn said contemptuously. “In addition, it would be cruel to the weasels.” He observed the gesture of the rangekeeper. “They are ready for you, lad.”
“So what have you been occupying yourself with, Lord Marshal?” Gwydion Navarne asked as he nocked his arrow. “Rhapsody said you had gone south to the Skeleton Coast of Sorbold.”
“Indeed.” The Lord Marshal allowed Shrike to assist him into the wheeled chair, then laid the crutches across his now-useless legs.
Gwydion Navarne watched the general thoughtfully as he settled himself. He had met the legendary soldier as a child of seven at his mother's funeral, and had been terrified by the experience. He was too young to have yet heard of the general's cantankerous reputation, so Anborn's very appearance was intimidating to him; the broad, menacing musculature of back and shoulders, gleaming azure eyes set within a face dark with terrible memories, black hair streaked with white flowing angrily to his shoulders — everything about the general was sufficient to make him want to hide behind his father, who had understood his fear innately and did not require him to come out and shake hands until the general was ready to leave.
And now, since the council held in the wake of the great battle three years ago, he had come to know and admire the man, to love him much the way his godfather, Gwydion of Manosse, did — respectfully and from a safe distance.
There was something in the general's eyes that Gwydion Navarne didn't grasp. He recognized, in the incomplete wisdom of youth, that there were thoughts, emotions, and insights in the head of someone who had lived for as
many centuries as Anborn had, seen as many horrors as Anborn had, and contemplated life in ways that Anborn had that he himself could not comprehend now, if ever.
Gwydion Navarne drew back and let fly; the arrow's arc was slighted a hint to the lee; it struck the hay target at one hundred sixty yards and glanced off.
“Drat!”
The Lord Marshal stared at him as if thunderstruck.
“Drat?” he said disdainfully. “
Drat?
Dear All-God, what has my useless nephew been teaching you? Is that the best oath you can muster, lad? After you finish here we will go directly into Navarne City and find a suitable tavern, where we will tend immediately to your proper education in the essential things — drinking, wenching, and swearing properly.”
“Oh, I do know how to swear fairly well, Lord Marshal,” Gwydion Navarne said pleasantly. “I just didn't want to offend your ears, knowing you to be the frail and discreet gentleman that you are.”
Anborn chuckled as Gwydion Navarne drew back again. “Well, I would certainly hope so. My nephew, your namesake, has been schooled by the best — that would be
me
— in the finest curses ever wrought of the dragon tongue, which is the preeminent language in which to swear. You don't have the physiology for that, alas — without the serpentine aperture of the throat you could never manage the double glottal stop — but certainly you should have acquired an impressively vulgar vocabulary after living with him for a few years. And your ‘grandmother'—well, a Namer of her power should have access to some utterly splendid oaths.”
“Oh, she does.” Gwydion Navarne let fly, piercing the inner edge of the outer ring, then kicked the ground in annoyance.
“Hrekin
!”
“Ah, a Bolgish profanity, if an uninspired one. Not bad.” The general's face twisted in amusement. “Can't imagine who you caught that one from.”
“Well, when you and I served with Sergeant-Major Grunthor as honor guard at Rhapsody's coronation in Tyrian, he taught me many useful things, such as nit removal from private skin folds and how to clear the nasal passages of blockage while rendering an assailant momentarily sightless at the same time.”
“Ah.” Anborn cleared his throat as Shrike looked askance at the young duke-to-be. “Well, one can never have too many weapons in one's arsenal, though that one was unknown to me until just now.”
Gwydion Navarne unstrung the weapon, allowing the bowstring to relax. “So are you going to share with me where you have been? Or am I committing a social misstep inquiring?”
“Both.” The ancient warrior looked him up and down, but with a different
expression in his eyes than before; there was a sharper intensity in his glance that was tempered with another, deeper emotion, one that the boy did not see this time as he turned back to his bow. “I was looking for a Kinsman on the Skeleton Coast.”
Gwydion Navarne did not look up as he strung the bow again. “Oh?” He gave the bowstring a perfunctory pluck and, satisfied with the draw, glanced up finally. The serious expressions on both men's faces made him blink. “Was this a kinsmen on your father Gwylliam's line, or from your mother Anwyn's family?”
Anborn exhaled deeply and looked out over the meadow, his eyes unfocused, as if seeing into another time.
“Neither. I don't mean a kinsman who is merely a blood relation. I am speaking rather of an ancient society of men, a fraternity forged in the old world, from another time; brothers. Warriors. Dedicated soldiers who mastered the craft of fighting over a lifetime's devotion to it, at the expense of self. Kinsmen were sworn to the wind and Seren, the star which shone over the Island of Serendair, resting now below the waves on the other side of the world. And to each other. Always to each other.”
Gwydion Navarne brought his hands to rest atop the bow respectfully, waiting to hear the rest of what the Lord Marshal, usually a man of few words, was saying.
He felt Shrike's eyes on him, but he didn't turn to meet the glance of Anborn's man-at-arms. The intensity he felt in their stare told him that what the general was sharing was something he was imparting carefully, with great import. He resolved to be worthy of the telling.
Anborn looked out over the rolling hills to the high wall that surrounded the fields beyond Haguefort; atop the rampart guardsmen walked, patrolling the battlement, their shadows long and spindly in the afternoon sun.
“To some extent, all soldiers are brothers of a kind, relying on one another for their very lives. This kind of life forges bonds that can't be formed any other way, not by birth, nor by the mere desire to do so — it is a commitment of the soul that transcends any other; the willingness to die to save a comrade, the participation in a cause greater than oneself.
“After a lifetime of such soldiering, two kinds of men remain — those that are grateful to have survived the experience, and those that are grateful that the experience survives.
“The first kind gathers his belongings and whatever pieces are left of himself at the end of his service and goes home to farm and family, knowing that no matter what befalls him thereafter in life, he was part of something that will
never leave him, tying him to others he may never see again, but who remain a part of him until death takes him.”
He cleared his throat and looked back at Gwydion Navarne, studying him for a moment. “The latter kind never goes home, because to him, home is the wind. The wind is never in the same place for more than a moment, but is always there, around him, wherever he is; it is both ephemeral and stalwart; he learns to be the same way. And the more like the wind one becomes, the more one loses a sense of self. Of course, any soldier who serves, any man-at-arms who puts his life at risk daily for not only his comrades and his leader but for those he never sees, has little sense of self anyway.
“Kinsmen were the elite of men who lived this way. They were accepted into the brotherhood for two things: incredible skill forged over a lifetime of soldiering, or a selfless act of service to others, protecting an innocent at threat of one's own life.”
He took the bow from the young man's hand and turned it over, making adjustments to the grip and examining the string. “Your nocking point is too high,” he said. He made a motion with his hand toward Shrike, who wordlessly plucked a white longflight from Gwydion Navarne's standing quiver and handed it to him. The general flexed the wood of the shaft, then raised his eyebrows.
“Good spine,” he said with grudging admiration. He nocked the arrow, then handed the bow back to the young man.
Gwydion nodded silently.
“When one has achieved the right to become a Kinsman, it is the wind itself that selects him,” Anborn continued, watching him closely. “Air, like fire, earth, water, and ether, is a primordial element, one of the five that make up the world, but it is often overlooked. Its strength is always underestimated, rarely seen, but formidable. In its purest form, air has
life
, and it knows its own: Kinsmen, who were also called Brothers of the Wind. Serendair was a highly magical place; the wind blew freely there, and strong. Alas, the birthplace of the element, Northland, is on the other side of the world from here, so wind is not as strong in this land as it was there.
“When a man becomes a Kinsman, whether he has earned the title through a lifetime of service or a moment of selfless sacrifice, he hears the wind in his ear, whispering to his heart, telling him its secrets. He can use those secrets to hide within it, to travel by means of it, to call for help on it. The Kinsman call is the most compelling summoning a man can ever hear; it ensnares the soul, reaches deeply into the heart, demanding to be answered. It is used only in the direst of circumstance, when the Kinsman uttering it feels he is on the
threshold of death, when his death will have impact beyond itself. And any Kinsman hearing it would never think of ignoring such a summons; to do so would leave him haunted unto insanity for the rest of his days.”
“And you heard the Kinsman call from the Skeleton Coast.” Gwydion Navarne tried to keep his voice low and respectful, but the excitement in it boiled over, breaking the solemn mood in the meadow.
BOOK: Requiem for the Sun
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