The Other Lands (2 page)

What he doesn’t know is that Corinn has undergone considerable changes. Unlike her siblings, she has never experienced life among the people. She knows only the palace, the court, wealth, and the shrewd manipulation of power. She has finally given her heart to Hanish, but one evening she overhears her lover communicating with the Tunishnevre. She hears him swear that he will kill her to release them. This is the last of many disappointments, and it makes her believe she can rely only on herself.

Thaddeus shows her
The Song of Elenet
. Feeling its power, Corinn makes up her mind. Instead of fleeing with Thaddeus, she poisons him. She hides the book and quickly works behind the scenes to secure her own power. She makes a deal with the league, convincing them to sit out the coming war, and she forms an alliance with Hanish’s old allies, the Numrek, promising them the status Hanish never granted them. She brings in Rialus Neptos, a former Acacian governor with a duplicitous nature, to help her. She never exactly works against her siblings. Indeed, her actions aid them by taking the league and the Numrek away as threats, but neither is she working in concert with them. Her sights are set on Hanish, and she carefully arranges the pieces to strike him, even as he puts the finishing touches on his plan to resurrect the Tunishnevre.

Meanwhile, Aliver’s army meets the Meinish forces, led by Maeander, on the plains of northern Talay. The clash lasts for several days, the advantage veering back and forth. Maeander unleashes savage beasts called antoks that do great damage to the rebellious forces, but so does Aliver’s connection with the Santoth aid his cause and protect his people.

Then Maeander approaches the Acacians personally. He offers, invoking ancient customs, to fight Aliver in single combat. Aliver can’t resist this chance of ending the contest between them, instead of letting so many of the common people he’s grown to love die. Against Mena and Dariel’s protests, he agrees. For a time it seems he might prevail, but all too suddenly Maeander strikes a fatal blow. Aliver falls dead.

In a moment of rage, Dariel orders the troops to attack Maeander, thus breaking the oaths given prior to the duel. Fighting resumes between both armies in earnest, and the Meinish forces appear to be winning. Waking on the morning that looks to be the end for the Acacian forces, Mena and Dariel are both stunned to see enormous, shadowy shapes approaching from the south. The shapes shrink to human size as they grow near and reveal themselves to be the Santoth. They’ve come out of exile, troubled and angry because they sensed Aliver’s death. They know now that their banishment will not be lifted, and in rage they unleash their anger against the Meinish army. They rip apart the land and tear whole groups of soldiers to shreds with their songs and spells. Once the Santoth withdraw to the far south, it becomes clear the Acacians have won the battle.

Back on Acacia, Corinn has sprung her surprise attack on Hanish, using her new Numrek allies, whom she has smuggled into the palace via the same route Thaddeus used. They attack and kill the Mein, eventually capturing Hanish. Corinn orders his execution on the very altar on which he had planned to sacrifice her. Rialus performs the act.

As the book ends, a sort of peace has returned to the Known World. Corinn steps unchallenged into the role of queen, receiving her two living siblings with gracious but somewhat cold hospitality. It seems her vision of the future might be very different from the idealistic notions Aliver had espoused. Also, she is pregnant with Hanish’s child.

In Luana, during the ninth year of Hanish Mein’s rule

I
t should have been him. Just him. Ravi shouted this again and again. He jumped to be seen above the crowd. He pushed through the other children and grabbed at any of the red-cloaked soldiers he got near enough to reach. They ignored him or shoved him back into place or brought a crop down on his head and shoulders. Ravi would not stop shouting. They were making a mistake! He would go with them wherever they wished to take him. He would behave. He would do whatever they asked, but Mór should be no part of this! She was their parents’ only other child. They needed her. Their mother could not live without her. He had heard her say so more than once.

“Please,” he shouted, “let her go! Let her go home!”

A squat soldier rounded on him. He was shorter than most of the men, thick around the waist, with leathery skin and hair that bristled like a spiny rodent’s. His crimson shirt stretched tight across his belly. He grabbed Ravi by the chin and spoke close to his face, the man’s onion-scented words hot on his skin. “You’re both quota,” he said, his accent strange to Ravi’s ears. “You understand? You’ve both been given. Two peas from the same pod, two pups from the same litter. That’s just the way it is, lad. Accept it, and your life won’t be so bad.”

The man tried to push the boy away. When Ravi clung to his arm, the man growled that he had been patient enough. He balled his hand into a fist and smashed the boy on his nose. Ravi saw black for a moment. When his eyes cleared he stood sputtering, stunned, his lips and chin and chest splattered with blood.

“Ravi …” His sister’s voice finally reached him. Her voice was part of why he had been yelling. He feared to hear it. He began to move toward another red-cloaked man, but Mór threw her arms around him and would not be shaken off. “Please, Ravi, stop it! This helps nothing. You’ll make them angrier.”

Angrier? Ravi thought. Angrier? What did it matter if they were angry? He came near to whirling on her with harsh words, but her grip on him was tight and, in truth, he did not really want to break free from her. He knew that she was right. She was always calmer than he was. She never wasted actions, as he often did. On the farm, she worked each day steadily and slowly. She moved like an old woman, he used to think. But somehow she always finished her chores before him, no matter that he was faster and stronger than she. Even now, she was more self-assured than he was. Acknowledging this stilled him more than her grip on him and more than his fatigue and his battered face.

“Good, Ravi, come,” she whispered, starting to pull him back into the mass of children. “Better they don’t see you. They’re not going to let me go. You know that, and they might separate us if you keep drawing attention to yourself. I don’t want to be alone, Ravi.”

Neither did he. He let her pull him into the group, sliding between the others until they were two among many. Now that he had ceased his commotion, he and his sister were little different from the rest. He saw a few faces from the neighboring village. The rest were strangers, but judging by their clothing, demeanor, and fear-filled eyes they were much the same as he and Mór. They were farm children, too, from the fertile but isolated territory north of the Lakelands. They had been gathered together near a town he had never been to. They were like so many sheep brought into one corral and kept in place by wolves in red garments.

How many of them were there? Hundreds, Ravi thought. Children as young as seven or eight, some as old as he and his twin sister at thirteen. They all had frightened eyes and often whispered to those nearby, trying to gain some understanding of what was happening. Many had tear-streaked faces, smudged and dirty. Their hair was mostly silver blond, their complexions smooth and pale, eyes narrow and deep set in a way that foreigners sometimes laughed at, thinking them a dim, passive people. They weren’t dim, though, or passive. They were far enough north that they had often gone unnoticed by those of the Known World. That had changed suddenly, Ravi realized, and the change already felt irrevocable.

The siblings sat down knee to knee among the others. Mór wiped Ravi’s face with her sleeve, instructing him to raise his head. He did so sullenly, accepting her attentions but not able to look her in the eyes, as he knew she wished him to do. He had not cried once yet. He feared that looking into her face might change that: her face was too clear a reminder of things lost.

A
few days ago the world Ravi knew had been measured by the rolling miles of farmland and moor around his village north of Luana. His family’s cottage sat on a hill surrounded by fields of the sweet red potatoes that were one of the area’s main crops. The houses of their nearest neighbors rimmed the horizon, spaced out by a half mile or so. A lonely landscape, damp each morning and cool throughout most days, no matter the season. It was a simple life he had led, daily toil at the tasks that modestly sustained their family of four.

His father was a quiet man with big hands; he limped from some injury of his youth. His mother had absurdly crooked teeth, which she showed often as laughter peppered all the words that came from her mouth. He knew that his mother had lost two children in childbirth before having him and Mór. This was not unusual. Perhaps she was sad beneath all those smiles, but she made sure that Ravi never saw signs of it.

He had dreamed of escaping to something more exciting: sailing on a trading vessel, joining the guards that occasionally patrolled the provinces, or stealing a neighbor’s horse and riding out into the world. He had found excitement, but not in the way he had imagined.

The red-cloaked men had arrived in the dark hours far from either dusk or sun return. Ravi heard the knock on the door. He heard his father grumbling a moment later, and he listened to the creak of the door and to the mumbled exchange that followed. Probably one of the neighboring farmers, Ravi thought, come to ask help for some midnight mishap. The farm over by the marshes had been having a problem with sheep thieves. Perhaps they were organizing a chase.

“Ravi,” Mór had whispered from her cot on the other side of the room, “who is it?”

He shushed her. He had started to pull off his sheet, planning to tiptoe across the floor and listen through the crack in the door, but he got no farther than plucking the cloth between his fingertips.

A shout came from the main room, the sound of something—a chair, he thought—knocked over, the scrabble of feet on the packed-earth floor. He froze. Another shout and whispered curses and then sounds he couldn’t place for a moment and then he could: the dull thuds of fists against flesh. He swung his legs free from the bed and set them on the floor. The light shining around the door frame shifted and danced and grew brighter. He watched it, hearing Mór’s sharp inhalation of breath.

The door to their room flew open, kicked by a booted foot. Torches lit the room, cruel in their intensity. Through the torchlight the bodies of men emerged, burly, garbed in crimson. The first strode across the room and slammed a hand down on Ravi’s neck. He leaned in close, studying the boy, the torch so close to his head that his features were a motley of distorted highlight and shadow. A second figure went to Mór. He was gentler. He placed a finger under Mór’s chin and turned her so that the first man could see her face.

“Yes,” he said, glancing between them, “you’re two sides of the same coin. You two are one, together in the womb, together in your fate. Your councilmen told us true. Come on. On your feet, both of you. We’ll not harm you if you come quiet.”

He was so matter-of-fact, so casually intimidating that before he knew what he was doing Ravi was standing. He and Mór were pushed through the doorway into the main room. What Ravi saw there stayed in his memory only in fragments, disjointed images captured between the jolting motion of being shoved, stumbling. He saw his mother’s face, openmouthed, her teeth looking like the fangs of a wolf or bear. His eyes shot around to find his father. He couldn’t find him. He saw a commotion of men near the cook-stove, their arms and legs moving like those of some monster. He never did see him or pick out his body from among the motion, but Ravi knew that his father was at the center of it.

Ravi was roughly conveyed through it toward the door. His foot caught the side of the doorjamb, and he sprawled out into the night. He hit the ground hard on his forearms and elbows, rolled, and had a clear moment of thought as he watched the figures striding out after him. Red cloaks. They wore red cloaks! And that meant he and Mór were to be taken by the eaters! Older boys had told stories about such things, saying that from time to time the king to the south sent hunters through Candovia in search of the children his god loved to devour. Ravi had never believed it. It had never happened in his lifetime, and he knew older boys were cruel and liars. But now a man was reaching down for him; his father was pinned beneath a seething mass of limbs; his mother wore a wolf’s face; his sister was crying out at some roughness.

The anger was in him complete and instant, like oil on a fire. He kicked at the man reaching for him, a glancing blow off his shin. This made him angrier and he kicked again and again, his legs churning as he squirmed on the hard-packed ground. The man cursed and jumped back, then came in again, his entire bulk trailing behind the point of his boot toe. Ravi tried to wrap himself around it and pull the man off balance, but the boot tore free and came on again. In a moment others joined it.