The Born Queen (23 page)

Emfrith’s group was slowing its charge because the second manticore had stopped advancing and stood just out of catapult range.

In moments, the two remaining utins tore away from their tormentors and ran back across the bridge.

“I don’t believe it,” Aspar said.

It looked like Sir Evan had lost around fifteen horsemen and probably about that many archers. A few more probably would die of contact with the greffyns. But of his monsters, their enemy had lost all but two utins and a manticore. Suddenly, beating them didn’t seem that much trouble at all.

They seemed to know it, too. The wagons were turning.

Sir Evan was forming his men back up, and Emfrith was galloping back up the hill.

“Well,” he said as he drew up, “maybe not such a bad idea, after all.”

“Maybe not,” Aspar agreed. “I never would have believed it, but maybe not.”

“We’ll dog them for a while, find a good place to attack them, and—”

“Sceat,” Aspar said. “I think Sir Evan has other ideas.”

Emfrith turned just as the Celly Guest horsemen—what remained of them—went thundering over the bridge, along with about twenty of Emfrith’s men. The manticore wasn’t there anymore but had moved back up the hill.

“Get back here,” Emfrith howled. No one looked back. They probably couldn’t even hear him.

The men and Sefry across the river had turned but didn’t seem to be readying a countercharge. He couldn’t make out their faces from that far away, but something seemed odd about them.

“I don’t like this,” Leshya said.

Aspar just shook his head, trying to figure it out.

And then, as if struck by a thousand invisible arrows, Sir Evan and all the men with him, along with their horses, fell and did not move again.

Far across the river, Aspar saw something glinting in the back of one of the wagons.

“Turn around!” Leshya screamed. “Close your eyes!”

Aspar felt his own eyes starting to warm and followed her advice. After an instant, so did everyone else.

“What is it?”

“Basil-nix,” she said. “If you meet its gaze, you die. I think it’s too far away right now, but…”

“Get them out of here, Emfrith,” Aspar growled. “Get what’s left of your men out of here.”

“I don’t understand,” the young man wailed. He sounded as if he’d just been wakened from a deep sleep.

“Sound retreat,” Aspar told the man with the horn.

“Sir—”

Aspar took Emfrith’s shoulder.

“He’ll move up now. We can’t fight with our backs turned. We didn’t know about this.”

“Raiht,” the boy said, his face wet with tears. “Sound the retreat.”

A black shadow passed over them, and another, and there was a sound of many wings.

CHAPTER TWELVE

K
AURON

S
TEPHEN PAUSED,
trembling, staring at his feet, staring at a thousand pairs of feet in shoes, buskins, boots, bare, missing toes, huge, tiny.

It was like what the Vhelny had done to him, except the other memories weren’t
his.

But that distinction wouldn’t matter for long. He closed his eyes and stepped, feeling as he did a myriad of other steps, a thousand different swayings of his body.

His stomach couldn’t take that, and he doubled over, vomiting, observing with an odd detachment that in that act he somehow felt more solid, more himself.

But he wasn’t. That was the greatest lie in the world, the most fundamental illusion. That thing called Stephen was a culling, a mere snip of what really existed. The rest of him was trying to get back in.

Would that end it? Would he be complete if he gave up the fantasy that this tiny Stephen thing was real?

Maybe.

No.

The voice barged through the rest, pushed them back to whispers. It was gentle, strong, confident, and Stephen felt some of the strength from the first fane come back to him.

No,
the voice repeated.
That is death. The voices you hear, the visions you experience—those are the dead, those who let go of themselves, who allowed the river to take what was in them. You are stronger because you still have a self. Do you understand? You are still tied together. You are real, Stephen Darige. It’s totality that is the illusion. Only the finite can be real.

“Kauron?”

Yes. I’m more powerful here. You’ve passed the fourth fane. There is only one more
.
Listen to me. What you feel is your mind trying to accept everything in the river. You can’t do that without dying, without ceasing to become who you are. Can you understand me?

“I think so.”

Then let me help you fight it.

“Aren’t you dead, too? Why are you different?”

Because I walked this faneway, too. Because when my body died, I would not permit the river to have me.

“I—” But the voices were coming back, and he couldn’t think. “Help me find the last fane,” he gasped.

Be strong, Stephen. Hold on to yourself. Hold on to me. It isn’t far.

It seemed far, however. He realized at some point that the light and wind weren’t illusions, that somewhere along the way he had left the innards of the mountain and was winding up its slopes. Kauron stayed with him, talking to him and not to the other voices, reminding him that he was the real one. It felt as if the ancient monk were walking right beside him, although when he looked, he could not see him.

“The Vhelny,” Stephen managed to ask. “What does it want?”

“Vhelny?”

“The thing you warned me against, the thing in the mountain.”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t think it would be someone else seeking the power of the faneway, not if he already knew where it was. One would think he would have slain you and walked it himself.”

“That’s what I thought,” Stephen said, pausing to make certain that the hand he was using to steady himself was his own.

“So it’s someone who
wants
you to have the power.”

“But the prophecy says he’s my enemy. I’m your heir, and he’s my enemy.”

“If I had an enemy like that, I don’t remember. It’s possible, I suppose. Ghosts, even ghosts like me, aren’t aware of the things they’ve forgotten. Anyway, I don’t think I would know much about prophecies concerning Kauron’s heir, would I? They were all made after my death.”

Stephen felt a deep shock of dizziness.

Stephen!
The voice was back in his head, fainter, alarmed.

Listen to me, Stephen. Focus on my voice.

The vertigo eased back. “What happened to you, Kauron?” he asked. “How did you die?”

“I died on this very mountain,” the ghost replied.

“Did the faneway kill you?”

“No. It’s a long story. I actually returned here to die.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. I just thought I ought to. It appears I was right.”

“But—”

“The fane is just ahead. The path is narrower than in my time.”

“I wish—it’s hard to think, to ask what I want to ask.”

“I know. I remember. Think about who you are.
Tell
me about who you are.”

“I—I love languages. You’re a thousand years old! There’s so much I could learn…” He shook his head, trying to focus. Was he still moving?

Yes, inching along. He saw something up ahead, something like a standing stone.

“I, ah—when I’m angry, or frustrated, I make up a little treatise, as if it’s going to go into a book.”

“Of course you do,” Kauron said. “I used to do much the same, especially when I was a novice. I wrote mine down, though, and one of the other brothers—Brother Parsons—found it and showed the others.”

“What happened?”

“They made fun of me, of course, and I had to clean the stables for a year.”

Stephen had a sudden vivid image of standing ankle-deep in horse muck.

“It’s hard to imagine the great Kauron cleaning stables,” he said.

“What’s so great about me? What did I do?”

“You brought Virgenya Dare’s journal here for safekeeping. You must have been important among the Revesturi.”

“Like you are, you mean?”

“What are you saying?”

“I was no one. Hardly anyone. I lived in the scriftorium, I found the journal; I found the location of the mountain. My fratrex sent me to bring it here because he reckoned that no one would suspect I was up to anything important, that no one would follow me.”

“There are prophecies about you.”

“No, it sounds like there are prophecies about
you,
Stephen. I’m just in them, doing what I’m supposed to do: helping you.”

The voices were fading now, and his sense of where he was returning. He was on a spit of stone sticking out from the mountain, a triangle four kingsyards at the base and seven long. It slanted up as it narrowed toward its apex, where stood a little spike. The Virgenyan symbol for “five” was barely visible scratched on it.

“It’s funny,” Stephen said. “You asked me to talk about myself, but it was talking about you that helped.”

“I’m your guide.”

“I think we must be very much alike,” Stephen said.

“It sounds like it. At least in youth.”

“When I touch the stone, it’s over?”

“Yes. The knowledge and power are in you, but without the blessing of this fane you can’t control it.”

“What happens to you?”

“It’s my sacrifice to make, Stephen.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry. All is as it should be. I’ve guided you this far. Trust me a step farther.”

Stephen nodded, walking carefully forward. Sighing, he placed his hand on the upthrust of stone.

The last of the voices faded, replaced by a feeling of vastness. It was as if a great wave had passed over him, spun him in its waters, and set him back on his feet. Everything seemed new and different, as if he were seeing the world with completely novel eyes.

As if he had been reborn.

This is the Alq,
he realized. It’s not really a place, it’s a state of being.

He sank down to his knees, utterly exhausted. He gazed at the beautiful march of mountains before him and felt a sudden, savage joy at the magnificence of it all, at the thunder and lightning that was the world. His body was tired, but inside he felt alive as never before.

But he knew he’d just begun: There was still plenty he had to do. The faneway wasn’t the last step. He still had to find the throne, and he had to find it soon.

Stephen stood up, and although his knees were still a bit wobbly, he felt he could walk. He was sure he remembered the way back to the Aitivar city, but it meant going halfway around the mountain, and it wouldn’t do to starve to death. Not now, when it was all there before him, when he finally knew what to do.

Something was rushing toward him on the wind, something hot and acrid.

He turned to face the Vhelny.

He still couldn’t see it either with his eyes or with the sense that dug beneath the surface of the world. Or maybe it really was nothing more than shadow.

But no, he felt the slow and terrible potency burning in it.

Congratulations,
the shadow told him, and opened vast, obfuscate wings. Stephen felt the tickle of command begin.
I can use one like you.

Stephen didn’t hesitate, and that fact in itself was a beautiful thing, almost erotic in its intensity. He flung his will at the Vhelny, drawing from the infinite flood beneath the world.

What met him was raw force of a kind he had never sensed before, and he suddenly felt as if he were wrestling with something of constantly changing form, like the alv-queen’s lover in the old tale.

But this was terribly real. He felt suddenly pushed back, surrounded, and it was more and more difficult to keep his focus on the demon, to match his power against it. This was not the power of the sedos; this was ancient night come to life, something that had existed long before the world itself or any of its petty powers.

No. I don’t know what it is, but it can be beaten. Take—

A surge of fresh energy filled Stephen’s limbs, and he suddenly understood.

Whatever this was sat the Xhes throne. There had been another, years before, who had sat that, a Sefry warlock, and he had been bound, and now he knew how to do it.

He stopped fighting the Vhelny’s energies, let them enter him, take hold of his heart and will. And when the demon had committed itself, was in him, he grabbed those energies like the leash of a dog and twisted them, made them his, laid stricture after stricture until the chaos in the monster was hemmed by order and his command.

No,
the Vhelny whispered.

“Yes. And thank you for your congratulations, and to paraphrase, I’m sure you will be of use to me.”

I will be free. I will grind everything in you.

“I don’t think so. Now, what say you fly me back into the mountain and we find my companions.”

You will pay.

But something wrapped around him, and in a moment they were soaring though the air, and he laughed in sheer delight.

He couldn’t wait to see Zemlé. And Winna. And Aspar. And Queen Anne, especially Queen Anne. The best part was how surprised they would be. He loved it when people were surprised, when they finally got the joke.

Of course he did. That was why they called him the Black Jester.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

R
ETREAT

A
NNE COULDN’T FEEL
the reins anymore. The breeze seemed to spin her around, and then the ground reached for her.

She still could see, but nothing she saw made much sense. Horses’ legs were everywhere, and men were reaching for her, and then it was all just noise and color, and finally she was elsewhere, lying in a meadow by a mere. She lifted her hand and saw that there was no shadow. Her side hurt, and when she reached to feel it, there was a stick there. She pushed at it, and agony erupted along her ribs. Her hand felt wet and sticky, and when she looked at it, it was red.

“Shot,” she managed. There had been a lot of arrows; she remembered that. And then the horses coming together, a shock like a giant ocean wave that threw everyone around her down until she
drew,
drew down from the sickle moon hanging pale as a cloud in the sky, and struck through them. She remembered seeing their eyes explode in gouts of steam, and the screams…

I did that?

“You did it,” her arilac confirmed, rising up from the earth. “Even Genya Dare would have been impressed by that.”

“Did we win?”

“You broke their charge and killed half of them before you got shot. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

“I
am
shot.”

“Yes.”

“Am I dying?”

“I don’t know, but you shouldn’t stay here in this condition. If
he
should come, you won’t be able to fight him.”

“I don’t—” Black spots were dancing before her eyes.

“I’ll help you,” the arilac said, and smoothed her forehead with one burning hand.

A hoof thudded in the earth next to her head, and someone shouted her name. She tried to sit up and gasped.

“She’s here!” a man shouted. “Saints know how. We were looking there—”

“She’s shot.” A face appeared above her.

“Hello, Cape Chavel,” she said.

“You can hear me?”

“Yes.”

“I have to get you up. Do you understand? I can’t leave you here; we’re in retreat. Unless you can—” He grimaced.

“I’m too weak,” she replied.

“You’ll ride with me. Your Craftsmen and the heavy horse have formed a rear guard. My horses are faster. We’ll get you back to camp and to a leic.”

Anne searched for a response, but she felt too tired.

It did hurt when he got her up in the saddle with him, and it hurt more every single time his horse took a stride. Although she tried not to, she cried, wanting nothing more than for the pain to end.

She woke flat on her back in a small, rumbling room that she eventually recognized as a wain. She remembered that Nerenai had given her something bitter to drink, and she had fallen asleep.

She felt at her side and found the arrow gone. So was her clothing. She was wrapped loosely in a blanket.

“There, mistress,” she heard Nerenai say. “Lie still.”

“What’s happening?”

Before Nerenai could reply, Emily broke in. “It’s very exciting. They say you made their eyes explode. Is it true?”

“I’d rather not talk about that,” Anne murmured. “Can you find Artwair for me?”

“No, Majesty,” the girl said. “He’s out forming up the lines. You killed a lot of them, but there’s plenty left. Like they knew we were coming.”

“They did know we were coming.”

“How?” the girl asked.

“I was outmagicked,” Anne replied.
Pray saints Alis and Neil find this Hellrune and know what to do about him. He’s stronger than I.

A sudden thought occurred to her. “If we’re fighting, why is the wain moving?”

“We’re retreating,” Emily replied. “But orderly, so we don’t get slaughtered. Artwair’s a smart general.”

I led him into a trap,
Anne thought.
That will be hard to mend.
Yes, she was queen, but she needed her generals to believe in her, especially Artwair.

“How many have we lost?”

“I don’t know. They think around two thousand. They attacked our infantry where we were camped, too.”

Two thousand?
The number seemed unreal. Had she ever even met two thousand people in her life?

For three more days they fell back toward Poelscild. Losses on both sides were minimal. And then, a day’s march from the northernmost dike, the Hansan army stopped following them.

The next day Anne wasn’t sleeping in a wagon anymore but in a fine bed in Poelscild’s keep.

The count had almost three thousand of her soldiers sleeping in the ground.

“They haven’t gone far, Majesty,” Artwair told her the next day.

“You look tired, Cousin.”

He did. His face looked lined and ten years older than it had a month earlier.

“I’m well, Your Majesty.”

“So where have they gone, then?”

“About a league north, in Andemuer. They’re building a redoubt there. I expect they’ll reinforce it and then come here.”

Anne nodded. She’d made Nerenai and Emily sit her up. She couldn’t stand, but she didn’t want to face Artwair on her back. “And the fleet? Any word?”

“They anticipated us there, too,” Artwair said. “Met Liery in open sea. Five ships were lost, and about that on the Hansan side. Sir Fail brought them back to Ter-na-Fath.”

“So we’re in retreat everywhere,” Anne said.

“Everywhere we’ve ventured.”

“Everywhere I’ve sent us, you mean,” Anne said.

“There’s no blame to Your Majesty. It seemed like a good plan to me, too. But it wasn’t the surprise they thought it would be. And things could have been worse. This Hellrune of theirs isn’t perfect, either. He may have managed to trick you, but you fought out of his trap.”

“Barely. But I agree that things could have gone worse. I may know little about war, but I know that armies in retreat often fall apart and are destroyed. This could have been a rout. Your leadership prevented that, Duke Artwair.”

“I’m not the only one to credit. Lord Kenwulf kept our left flank, and young Cape Chavel our right. If we had ever been encircled, that would have been the end of it.”

“I will commend them, too,” she said. “What happens now?”

“I’ve sent for reinforcements, of course. Many of the landwaerden levies are already either here or reinforcing other forts along the edge of Newland.”

“Then we’re giving them Andemuer and the Maog Voast plain?” Anne asked.

“We’re not giving it; they have it. Northwatch fell two days ago, so reinforcements can come along the Vitellian Way without resistance. Copenwis is open to their ports. No, Newland is better fortified than the northern border and always has been. Andemuer has gone back and forth between Hansa and Crotheny for exactly that reason. But they’ll have a harder time breaking us here. And if they do, we’ll retreat to the next canal and flood these poelen behind us, so they’ll have to swim at us.”

“You mention the danger of them coming down the Dew. Have you any reports from the east?”

“No report of attack yet, no, but I expect it.”

“And the south?”

He nodded. “We’ve heard that at least three Church legifs are camped along the Teremené River. That news is a few days old, of course. They may have started fighting already.”

Anne remembered Teremené.

“The river is in a gorge there,” she said. “They’ll have to cross at Teremené town or go north into Hornladh…” She trailed off.

“Majesty?”

She closed her eyes.
Nothing; just another stupid thing I’ve done. Cazio, be as smart as I think you are.

“The Hellrune can’t help those in the south. I’ll see what my visions can tell me about what the Church is up to. Is there anything else?”

“Not that I know of, Majesty.”

“Thank you, Duke. I’d better rest now.”

She met her arilac on a heather-covered down overlooking an azure sea. The air was warm and wet and a little dirty-feeling.

The arilac seemed more human each time they met, although she still shone unnaturally at times.

“You were outmaneuvered,” the woman said. “With the law of death broken, the Hellrune is stronger than even I suspected.”

“You should have warned me,” Anne replied.

The arilac raised a fiery eyebrow. “That would have been an insult to your intelligence. If you could see the results of what
he
saw, how could you not imagine it wasn’t possible for him to do the same?”

“But when does it end?” Anne asked. “If I had seen the trap, couldn’t he have seen me seeing it? And so on, into utter madness?”

“Yes and no. As you’ve learned, the future isn’t a fixed thing if you can see it. But it has a path and momentum. When the Hellrune saw that your army would march the way it did, and you saw that he had seen that, you might have done a number of things. You might have decided not to go that way, or not march at all, or bring thousands more with you—or what you did: try to turn the trap against itself. The Hellrune would have been shown all these paths, but dimly, and one would have seemed infinitesimally brighter. In turn, his possible reactions—abandon the plan, send more men, and so forth—would be even more contingent, first because your choice was one of dozens, then because his was. That’s why you didn’t see the reversal of the trap: It was a wispy thing, unnoticeable. For him to see the outcome of his reversal I would call impossible, which is why you managed to escape. So to answer your question, your duel with the Hellrune went as many strokes as it could, and he won. When you are in full mastery of the power, you might see one step farther. Might.”

“Then I must guess, you are saying, where Hansa is concerned.”

“No, no,” the arilac said. “He can’t know you’ve seen something unless you react to it.”

“Then what use to see it?”

“It can inform your strategy.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “Yes, poorly. Suppose I predict an army coming down the Dew River, and Artwair diverts troops to stop them, and instead the army never marches east but comes here instead?”

“You will find you can rarely see more than a nineday or so when specifics are involved. Visions of the far future are usually vague as to when and how they will happen. The Hellrune’s is limited in the same way, and he is not here, Anne. His shadow is still in Hansa. It takes a rider to bring information from him, a rider that may or may not arrive and will always be late. You’re closer to where the war is being fought now. And now you know to be cautious.”

Anne nodded. “Very well. But first I must see what the Church is up to on our southern border and what danger I’ve put Cazio and Austra in.” She straightened her spine.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she told the arilac.

“I never said you were.”

“Oh, I was,” she admitted. “But no longer. From now on I expect you to tell me everything I need to know. Do you understand? I don’t want to be hit from behind again.”

“Very well, Anne.”

“Call me ‘Majesty.’”

“When you are
my
queen, I shall. But that time is not come. And I’m not afraid of you, either.”

She watched the titanic stones of the citadel crack and felt herself like fingers wedged there, tearing at it. The doors were like burning brands, but she pulled, and everything in her seemed next to snapping. In an instant she brimmed with the most profound happiness she had ever known as everything slowed to almost stopping, and the magicked metal rang as it tore, and the power of chaos collapsed before her. She felt the slow burning fire of ten thousand lives bent against her—creatures so much of the master’s that even now, when their liberation was at hand, they still fought to remain slaves.

But now they cringed as the citadel lay open and the powers that kept her at bay disintegrated.

She had known the power before, but never like this. Gone were her reservations, gone her fears. She was pure and simple, an arrow already loosed from its string, a storm striking a port, unstoppable, not in need of stopping.

Every weakness purged.

She laughed, and they died, either quenched by her will or gutted by her warriors, her beautiful, lovely warriors. And everything they were and might have been flowed from them and came back, and she knew she finally sat the sedos throne…

“It was worse this time, wasn’t it?” Emily asked.

Anne held back from throttling the girl over the inanity of the question, but only barely. Instead she took deep breaths and more of the Sefry tea.

“Is there anything I can do, Majesty?”

Yes, jump out the window,
Anne thought.

“Hush, Emily,” she said instead. “I’m not myself.”

But maybe she was exactly herself. They had wanted her to take on the responsibility? Fine, she had. Now that she was queen, she would be queen, the queen they all deserved.

Emily backed away and didn’t say anything.

A bell later Anne no longer felt as if a bed of ants had invaded her head.

“It’s getting so easy,” she told Nerenai. “I think of what I want to see, and I see it, or something to do with it. But then, the dreams. The clearer my visions come, the worse my Black Marys are. Is that the way it’s supposed to be?”

“I think it must just be the price,” the Sefry said. “You’ve separated the visions from the dreams, but they flow from the same source.”

“I have to be able to tell them apart.”

“True, for now. But when you are strong enough, you won’t have to keep them apart. It will all be one.”

Anne remembered standing before the gates as they shattered, the liberation of it, the joy.

“I hope so,” she sighed. “Send Emily back in, will you? I want to apologize to her.”

“She’s just outside,” Nerenai said. “With her brother. He’s come to see you.”

“All right,” Anne said. “I’ll see him.”

The earl stepped through a moment later, Emily tugging at his hand. He was in a new-looking deep red doublet and black hose.

“Good of you to come, Cape Chavel,” she said.

“Majesty,” he said, bowing.

“Emily, my apologies for earlier. “

“It’s nothing, Majesty,” Emily said. “It’s your dreams, I know. I’m just here to serve you.”