The Fall of the Dagger (The Forsaken Lands) (25 page)

Juster studied his nails thoughtfully. “A love of perilous adventure? An absurd hankering to cross swords with a sorcerer? Believe me, even the handmaiden doesn’t seem averse to tackling doomed ventures—”

They never heard the remainder of what he was going to say, because just then the world around them began to change.

The untidy tangle of vegetation shivered, as if in a breeze, then dissipated, like a painted scene melting in the rain. The eagle rose up into the sky, calling in alarm, circling higher and higher until it was just a dot in the sky.

And there, where the furze and holly and brambles had been, the oak tree shrine began to appear, first just as an indeterminate vagueness, and then in living detail. A solid oak, hundreds of years old, clad in the young leaves of late spring when they should surely have begun to turn, surrounded by outbuildings, vegetable gardens, people and livestock – a whole complex that had more in common with a monastery than a shrine. People with witcheries had been living here in hiding, just as they had in Hornbeam.

Waiting at the entrance to the shrine was Fritillary Reedling.

She looks so much older
, Saker thought in shock. Her hair was completely white.

“Well,” said Juster, sounding pleased, “it seems your note must have said exactly the right things, Saker.”

A
fterwards, when he had to describe the scene to Sorrel, Saker remembered the confusion of that moment. They all had questions to ask, and answers to give, and explanations to make. There were also secrets to keep.

Saker’s greatest confusion, though, came from the Pontifect’s appearance. She had aged badly. Apart from the change in her hair, her face was lined and her once beautiful hands were covered in liver spots and wrinkles.

Gall ’n’ acorns, it’s what – only three years since I saw her last, and she looks at least fifteen years older!

For her benefit, he sketched a bare outline of what had happened since he’d last seen her, but serious conversation was postponed until the shrine keeper, an elderly, dark-skinned man proud of the Pashali blood mixed in with his Shenat ancestry, led them into his private section of the shrine. Living roots had been twisted in their growth to form seats, but there were only four, which meant that someone had to sit on the beaten soil. Ryce, Fritillary and Juster all took a seat as their right. Saker and Ardhi grinned at one another and said nothing. Saker, knowing that Chenderawasi folk regarded chairs as something designed for discomfort and used for formal occasions when brevity was to be encouraged, let Ardhi sit on the ground.

The shrine keeper served elderberry wine in wooden cups. As he was withdrawing to leave them alone for their discussion, he caught Saker’s eye, deeply distressed.

Change
, Saker thought. Everything was changing, and even those keepers who had dealt with several hundred years of history found the present challenges unprecedented. Oak shrines, supposed to be
places of peace and comfort, had been caught up in violence and war. Some had even been destroyed.

After the shrine keeper had left, Lord Juster took a sip of the wine and spluttered. For a moment Saker thought he was going to spit it out, but his good manners prevailed and he swallowed it with a pained expression, muttering something that sounded like “Hog’s piddle.”

Ryce looked at him quizzically.“Really?”

“Some other time, gentlemen!” Fritillary snapped. “We have much to do. Keep your stories relevant and as succinct as possible. Details can wait.”

When no one volunteered to go first, she began, detailing what Gerelda Brantheld had been doing with Peregrine Clary – whom Saker had never heard of – to kill some of the sorcerer sons of Valerian Fox. Saker didn’t know whether to be appalled or impressed. The idea that Gerelda had been embroiled in so many murders, however justified, grieved him for her sake. Sweet Va, how life had changed in the Va-cherished Hemisphere! Va-cherished? That had become a laughable epithet for their land.

Fritillary then moved on to tell the full story of Sir Herelt Deremer and the Dire Sweepers, and how Deremer had discovered the truth about the Horned Death – thanks to Saker’s preliminary discoveries. “The Sweepers, aided by Lowmian guards, have eliminated Fox sorcerers from Lowmeer. Deremer believes the only ones left are those in Ardrone, East Denva, Valance and Vavala, which is excellent news.”

Saker kept silent on the question which bothered him most about Deremer: why had the man tried so hard to kill him at that small village in the south of Lowmeer?

Of everything that was said that morning, it was the story she had to tell about how the shrines had been hidden, and why, that interested him most.

“We had no way of fighting Valerian Fox in the beginning,” she explained. “His sorcerer sons were everywhere.”

“Fobbing grubbery, he must have been jumping in the bed of every Fox female on every Fox estate for years, from the Principalities down to our southern shores, to have had so many sons,” Juster
muttered with a tinge of reluctant admiration. “Surely half of his offspring were girls?”

“I wonder if he used sorcery to ensure otherwise. Not important now. Coercion made it easy for him to raise an army; Fox money armed them. His problem was more how to take men who’d never held a sword or a bow in their lives and turn them into soldiers.”

“Which is why he’s relied mostly on lances, pikes, crossbows, staves,” Prince Ryce said. “Easier to train them to use those things than to make a longbow archer or a swordsman.”

“Surely Fox could buy pistols and cannon and arquebuses from Pashalin?” Saker asked. “He’s rich enough. Not much training needed. Pashalin is where black powder is made, too.”

“Oh, he did,” she said. “But their rulers started to worry whether the arms could be one day turned against them, so they stopped their open export. But we shouldn’t be complacent. Fox is destroying Va-faith from within.”

“So you decided to hide the shrines and hide the shine keepers, and save the folk with witcheries,” Juster said. “But what’s the point in that if ordinary people don’t have access to shrines?”

“It was a terrible thing to do,” she said. “I know that. But we needed time to prepare in safety.” She glanced at Saker. “I supposed you guessed what we were doing.”

“You’ve been training people how to use their witcheries to defend themselves and others, or as an act of war.”

Prince Ryce protested. “Can you do that? Use a witchery to harm or kill, and you lose it, that’s what we were taught!”

“True,” Fritillary agreed. “However, I was indirectly given a lesson from the unseen guardian of the Great Oak. She – or he – gave a witchery of sorts to my secretary, Barden, who has no Shenat roots, and that witchery is aggressive in its defence of him and me.” She heaved a heartfelt sigh. “There’s a time when you have to fight to preserve what is good and true. Oak shrines were attacked and burned. Water shrines had their springs poisoned. Keepers were murdered. We had to stop that.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Prince Ryce said.

“I still don’t see how witcheries can be used to fight and kill,” Juster said.

“Of course they can,” Saker said. “Take, um, a man with a woodworking witchery. He can bend staves for a cask, curve planks for a hull—”

“We know what a woodworker does,” Prince Ryce interrupted. “So what?”

“Think of all the things made of wood. Bridges, crossbows, wagon wheels, gun carriages, trees, boats, buildings. A woodworker could break any of…”

“Woodworkers never break the wood they work with!”

“Only because no one employs them to do so because it’s cheaper to use an axe or a saw! But that doesn’t mean they
couldn’t
do it.”

Fritillary nodded. “They have in fact been perfecting their abilities to do so.”

“There’s one problem,” Saker said. “There must be many more Grey Lancers than folk with witcheries.”

“Yes. But a coerced army tends to lose their focus with time. Whenever a Fox son goes off to coerce more farmers’ sons, the lancers he leaves behind start to fall apart.”

Ryce nodded. “We noticed that. They became increasingly slovenly. So what now? Are we ready to do battle?”

“We can’t keep the shrines and witchery folk in hiding any longer,” she said.

“I don’t understand how you did it in the first place,” Ryce said.

She stirred uneasily. “Let’s just say that the unseen guardians are entities with very strange abilities. They can travel time, carrying a place with them.”

“What the blazes does that mean?” Prince Ryce asked.

“They can take their shrine and keep it stationary in that moment, while everywhere else time advances as usual. They become islands stuck in our past.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Juster said.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to us. The point is that unseen guardians can do it.”

Saker had an uncomfortable thought. “How did you get here?”

“There have always been paths and streams that link one shrine-oak with another – the spiritual, natural connections between the physical parts of Shenat faith. Unseen to us and unused except by the
unseen guardians. If the shrine-oaks stay in another time, so do their links. Unseen guardians have made them visible to a select few of us, so that they can be walked. Or sailed if they are water shrines. I’ve done enough walking over the past year or two to a last a lifetime! Be grateful to Va that it is possible.”

“I agree,” Ardhi said suddenly. “You don’t want or need to know any more than that. And you don’t want to know what price was paid, either.”

Saker looked at Fritillary’s wrinkled hands and felt queasy.

There was an uncomfortable silence, which Prince Ryce broke, saying, “All I care about is rescuing Bealina and Garred. I must return to Throssel as soon as possible.”

“Bealina is not there,” Fritillary said. “They were taken to Fox in Vavala.”

Aghast, the colour draining from his face, Ryce said, “They are in
Fox’s
hands? Saker was right?”

“I had word,” she said.

“What about Horntail? He was with them—”

“Ah, that bearded fellow was yours? He lives, but was ensorcelled and remembers nothing. Gerelda Brantheld told me he is with her and Peregrine, hiding in Vavala. They’ve been trying to find a way to free your family.”

Ryce groaned and jumped to his feet. He slammed his palm flat to the bough of the oak, over and over, with the full force of his arm behind the blows.

Fritillary stood and went to lay a hand over his to force an end to his pounding. “Princess Bealina is probably safer there than she would be with your father,” she said, “King Edwayn is unpredictable and violent. At least Fox is rational in his behaviour, and at the moment it is in his interest to protect your son.”

“We’ll go to Vavala, then,” Ryce said, addressing Juster.

“For
Golden Petrel
to get there from here would take a month or even more, depending on winds.”

“We’ll go overland.”

“Not advisable,” Fritillary said. “A whole company of armed men couldn’t approach Vavala unheralded. Besides, it’s more important that—” She stopped, face flushed.

What, Saker wondered, was so embarrassing that she hesitated to say it?
Ah of course.
“You want King Edwayn to abdicate first.”

“It is better to do this with a semblance of legality, as well as unity. I’ve already primed the northern princes to follow your lead when you are king, Your Highness. Mathilda will support you, too, of course.”

“But my son and my wife!” Ryce cried. “They are in the hands of that monster!”

Lord Juster stood up to take Ryce’s arm and ease him back on to his seat. “So what do you advocate, Your Reverence?”

“You sail back to Throssel.” Fritillary was addressing Prince Ryce, but they knew she was speaking to them all. “You take the city and the castle. You
could
force the king to abdicate on the grounds of insanity.”

Juster and Ryce glanced at one another, faces without expression.

Saker sucked in a sharp breath. Blister it, with that slight emphasis on “could”, had she just given Ryce free rein to do what he liked with his father?

“With the city and Throssel Palace secured,” she continued, her tone as calm and measured as always, “you get the Arbiter of Throssel to crown you king. Then you travel overland to the port of Betany. That way you save several weeks at sea. Once there, you seize the navy in the king’s name and sail to Vavala.”

“The navy is in Betany?” Juster asked.

“Edwayn has been trying to blockade Lowmian ships, part of his daft plan to control the spice trade,” she said. She gave Lord Juster a sidelong look before adding, “He had reports from Karradar. Something about the Lowmians attacking
Golden Petrel
on your outward voyage. He was not only furious, he was bent on revenge. Fortunately the news of that didn’t arrive until after Regal Vilmar had died, or the troubles with Lowmeer could have been worse. At my request, Regala Mathilda showed restraint.”

Juster burst out laughing. “Now that’s one outcome of our skirmish in Karradar I would never have predicted!”

Fritillary ploughed on. “When you arrive in Vavala, you will be joined by the Dire Sweepers and Lowmian troops, as well as forces from the Principalities. Before then, Gerelda and Peregrine will have rescued Bealina and Prince Garred so that neither your wife nor your son will be hostages to your behaviour.”

For another hour, the conversation continued, thrashing out details of what could or could not be done. Most of the discussion was between Lord Juster, Prince Ryce and Pontifect Fritillary Reedling.

Commerce, royalty and religion
.

Saker was bemused by his own attitude, halfway between uneasiness at the thought of deposing a king and facing a sorcerer, and rejoicing at the idea of battle. Ah, how much he wanted his revenge on Fox.

But how strong were the Prime’s powers now? If he could suck the life out of others to extend his own, did that mean he could – barring accidents or murder – live indefinitely? If he was injured, even mortally, perhaps he could cure himself by dragging the life out of those around him. He looked down at his palm. The black smudge was there again, now that he was under a shrine tree. Time, or perhaps the counter effect of his contact with
sakti
, had faded it a little.

Lord Juster broke up the discussion, announcing he had to arrange for supplies for
Golden Petrel
, after which they would sail back to Throssel. He and Ardhi and Prince Ryce then headed off on foot to Twite, leaving Saker and Fritillary Reedling standing side by side in the shrine.

“Sorrel will be glad to reach Throssel,” Saker remarked. “She’s been fretting because it’s been so long since she saw Piper.”

“I will be interested to meet her. She sounds like a remarkable woman.”

He chuckled. “She is.”

“She’s the only person in the Va-cherished Hemisphere at the present time who has a glamour. She must have been special from the beginning. An unseen guardian saw something in her that few people have. Are you in love with her?”

“What business is that of yours?”

“Well, you still work for me.”

“I haven’t been paid for the past three years!”

“Even so, I don’t recall ever receiving your resignation.”

“My heart is still not your concern.”

She levelled a stare at him, without speaking.