The Hollow Queen (33 page)

The sight of his family's historical treasures in ruins within the keep made him think in horror of what must have happened to the Cymrian museum, the squat, plain two-story stone building not far from the keep in which his father had lovingly kept and restored artifacts of the Cymrian Age. That repository had even more valuable treasures than the family home; unlike the libraries of the keep, which stored scholarly works, the museum was the depository of historic swords and other weapons that doubtless had made their way into enemy hands and had been used, in sickening irony, against the innocents of the continent yet again, much as they had in the Great War.

He made his way out of the gutted keep, heartsick, and across the courtyard to the museum, only to find it unmolested. The single window of thick glass above the doorway was still intact; hurriedly Gwydion located the key and went inside, only to find it exactly as he had left it when he had moved himself, Melly, their household servants, and their late beloved chamberlain Gerald Owen to Highmeadow almost a year before.

He quickly climbed the stairs to the second floor, which, like the first, had been left untouched. Gratefully he ran his hands over the items in the collection; it was almost as if the items his father had guarded and treasured had been of no interest whatsoever to the invading armies.

Much as his father had once told him they were to even the descendants of those whose memories were enshrined there.

For a man of seventeen summers, I am far too old and weary of the world,
he thought as he closed up the place and locked it carefully again.

He felt a sudden chill on his cheek and looked up.

A fine, light snow was falling, a dusting merely, but unmistakable. Utterly unseasonable, but meaningful to Gwydion beyond measure.

Snow had often been the harbinger of his birthday, the last day of autumn, an upcoming anniversary that he had utterly forgotten. That day was frequently the Gathering Day for the Winter Carnival that his father had so loved and had made an unbreakable tradition while he had been alive.

That tradition had been sullied four years before when a cohort of soldiers from Sorbold, demonic thralls, had assaulted the celebration, leaving it in ruins and smoldering ash. Gwydion winced at the memory of his father's face as he boosted him, then only thirteen years old, over the keep wall and handed a wailing six-year-old Melly up to him.

The expression in his eyes had long haunted Gwydion's dreams; it was an extraordinary mixture of terror and relief, the realization of danger at the same moment he was sending his children out of the fray.

Just as his godfather and namesake, Gwydion of Manosse, had done with his wife and child.

It was at just such a carnival a year before that he had been invested as duke, had inherited all his father's lands and titles, had become a man, really. Ashe and Rhapsody had proposed the idea of reinstituting the tradition three years after the bloodbath, telling him that it was time to go back to living.

Looking around Haguefort and remembering the sights he had seen on the way to it, Gwydion was not ready for that yet.

But the soft falling snow, as it dusted his eyelashes, felt gentle and almost warm on his face, like a reminder from afar that life would go on.

Like an early birthday greeting.

Gwydion raised his face to the sky and allowed the snow to fall on it.

“I'm doing the best I can, Father,” he whispered. “Thank you for guiding me, as always. Kiss Mother for me.”

Then, when remaining thus began to feel self-indulgent, he retrieved his mount and made his way back to the capital seat, Navarne City, where a nightmare of destruction required his attention.

 

34

YARIM

In spite of the fact that his journey with his troops to the far eastern province of Yarim had been the longest that any of the divisions of Icemen had traveled on their way to attack one of Roland's northern provinces, it didn't take long for Hjorst, the Diviner of the Hintervold, to come to the conclusion that something was very wrong.

In the many late-night strategy sessions that he, Beliac, and Talquist had undertaken after the new emperor's coronation, the necessity for the Hintervold to strike in a preemptive manner had been clearly reinforced time and again as intelligence came in indicating that the Alliance forces were leaving the northern citadels to mass along the Threshold of Death, as the pompous leaders of that alliance had chosen to call it.

Of the three nations affected by the aggression of the Alliance, Hjorst felt that his had by far the most to lose. While Golgarn had discovered an encampment of Bolg a mere three leagues away from its capital in the mountains to the north, and Talquist had expressed concern about manipulation of crops and other trade goods, the Diviner was facing the prospect that his lands would be beggared and starved.

Given that his people were by far the most threatened, Hjorst had invested as much as he could fairly put on the table. The Hintervold, though it comprised an enormous landmass that lay across almost the entirety of the northern border of the lands of the Alliance, had managed, by fate and the hands of ancient gods that resided in the land and water, according to the belief system of the Diviner, to inherit a terribly hostile climate. The weather regularly ran the gamut from brutal winters to scorching summers with a heavy canopy of clouds in either season, leaving little growing season to provide food for the people who were intrepid or foolish enough to brave its elements and live there.

And since starvation seemed to trump Talquist's loss of income and Beliac's fear of monsters who had not yet attacked his cities, Hjorst felt that he had the obligation to hold the line, as he had been requested to do, by providing support troops to an invasion force that would conquer and occupy the northern citadels that Talquist had assured him were all but empty with a sincerity that all his instruments of divination had confirmed was genuine.

So it was with great surprise that when his forces, in league with a commander named Rasnike from Sorbold, consistently seemed to come upon walled garrisons and highly reinforced barricaded encampments where the once-pleasant capital cities of Canderre and Yarim, Bethe Corbair, Bethany, and Navarne had stood, there was no word from Jierna Tal as to how the army of Sorbold, massive as it was, could not spare more troops to counter the buildup that had apparently gone unnoticed.

Still, he had committed but thirty thousand troops, while Talquist's forces numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It didn't seem to matter that his contingent represented a larger portion of his overall forces; the requests for donations of valuable supplies and troops seemed to have no end.

Hjorst tried not to think about what the men he had left behind along the way from Navarne to Bethe Corbair had encountered.

But if it was anything like what he had found in Yarim, he ran the possibility of being recorded by history as the worst leader the Iceworld had ever known.

Given his family history and lineage, that was an enormous accomplishment of the worst possible kind.

So when he was summarily captured and imprisoned at the battle of Yarim, he knew that something had gone terribly wrong with the world, or with his decision making.

But by then the losses were so grievous that it didn't really matter.

As he trudged along, silent and stunned, in chains like the other prisoners of the Alliance, behind wagons drawn by horses that seemed to have eaten their weights in prunes each morning, Hjorst was trying to make sense of it all.

Has any nation on this side of the Wide Central Sea ever had a sovereign taken prisoner before?
he wondered dully as he marked time and the pathway to wherever it was that he and the other troops were being herded.

He was trying not to think of Elivan, his second-youngest son, who had been reported killed in the battle for Bethany. Word had spread almost silently that the rout in the citadel had been led by the Lady Cymrian; Hjorst did not know what to believe; the battle tales about her behavior were so outlandish that he had begun to think it possible that perhaps he had been misled.

Each new step on the road seemed to uncover a new level to which that may have happened.

Your quest for immortality may have undone us all, Talquist,
he thought ruefully.
Who could have known that your seeking to cheat death would bring so much of it on all of us?

But he couldn't brood about it for too long.

Because after a few moments' rest, a whip was cracked.

And he, with the other prisoners of war, were on the road back to Bethany again.

 

35

SOMEWHERE ON THE SOUTHERN EDGE OF THE KREVENSFIELD PLAIN

Hrarfa could barely contain her excitement.

It had been more than a thousand years since she had last visited the place that had been known at the time as Canrif, the Cymrian word for
century
. It had been so named because a First Generationer named Hague, Gwylliam the Visionary's best friend and confidant, had famously told the first Lord Cymrian that within a century the citadel in the mountains he was designing would be the greatest civilization the world had ever seen.

Fool,
she thought now as she had then.
What did you know of what the world has seen? I, and those like me, who were around at the
beginning
of this world, know of secrets and civilizations that you could never even imagine
.

Her excitement was diminished somewhat by the memory of what had driven her out of the place long ago. She had been in male form at that time, occupying the body of a low-level soldier in Gwylliam's standing army; she had still been weak, even after the millennia that had passed since her escape from the Vault when it was ruptured by the impact of Melita, the Sleeping Child, a piece of a dead star that had fallen out of the sky and into the depths of the sea.

Her host body had been owned by a young man of human blood who had traveled on one of the ships of the Third Fleet, the Cymrian faction loyal to Gwylliam, long before it was discovered that the First Fleet had survived the storm at sea as well, and had elected Anwyn as their leader. The soldier whose soul she had eaten was of insignificant rank and standing in the world, so it had not been too difficult to take him as a host. His greatest flaw had been his inability to control his red, easily excitable tarse, and he had made copious use of it whenever possible as if it had enslaved him.

He had been enthusiastically knobbing a less-than-enthusiastic camp-following whore when another soldier, drunk on spirits and the misconception that his own tarse was the only one that should ever reside up her skirts, had come upon them and had beaten her soldier-host body to death on the spot, not even having the grace to allow him to disengage from what he was doing first. As a result, the only option to spare Hrarfa's true spirit form from an ugly death and disappearance from the world was to take on the prostitute as her new host, fleeing Canrif.

And thus a new means of rising to power had come into her awareness.

So the demon's memories of Canrif were both reminiscent and horrifying.

It seemed to her that it had taken a great deal more time to come to the place than it should have, however.

The journey from the mountain edge of Sorbold into the no-man's-land that was the southern edge of the Krevensfield Plain should have taken less than a sennight. Yet almost three weeks had passed since the army had moved away from the southern Teeth toward where she remembered Canrif being, and still they seemed to be wandering aimlessly, with no view in sight of the eastern mountains that were home to the Firbolg.

Faron,
she whispered cautiously.
I think we are lost.

As usual, there was no immediate reply.

The stone titan came to a halt in the middle of the endless plain, the horizon visible from every side. It turned slowly, its enormous head making a careful sweep of the vista around it.