“And I think I should come with you to the meeting after I’ve seen Orlith’s body. I should know what you know … and they should know that I know.”
“As long as you’re not too tired.”
Arian laughed. “Not now, Kieri. Later, I’m sure I shall tire more easily, but right now I feel wide awake and fit for anything.”
He had not meant to think of Tammarion again, but that was almost exactly what Tamar had said at the start of her first pregnancy. “Good,” he said to Arian. “I will expect you then.” As she turned to go, he added, “With this murder … take no chances, Arian. Wear mail always.”
“Indeed I will,” Arian said. “And listen to my Squires. Whatever has sought to harm this realm is still there and still active.”
With that she was gone with a wave; he watched her Squires follow.
The five members of his Council who were in the palace that night reacted to his news about Orlith’s murder with varying degrees of concern. Sier Davonin voiced the most obvious fear: “I hope they won’t find a way to blame us.” Others nodded, but Sier Tolmaric, whose steading had been burned by the Pargunese, glowered. He was still waiting to learn if the elves would grant him land to replace that ruined by scathefire.
“Blame us? It’s us should blame them for not being there when the Pargunese came, to help us.”
“They couldn’t,” Kieri said. “They were trapped under stone—an old quarrel with the rockfolk.”
“Elders have no business making quarrels,” Tolmaric said. “They’re supposed to show us better, aren’t they?”
Kieri secretly agreed with him but said, “We’re not the high gods to know what duties they gave the Elders. Ours is clear enough and hard enough for us.”
“You’d excuse them?” Tolmaric said. “Seems I remember you being annoyed with ’em back then—”
“And I was,” Kieri said. “I didn’t understand why they didn’t come, and I’m not sure I understand all of it now. But anyone can make mistakes, and any people can have some who aren’t what they should be. As king, it’s my responsibility to seek understanding before I leap to judgment.”
“And you find them blameless?”
“I find them fallible, as we are,” Kieri said. “Sier Tolmaric, I know your grief for your losses—but I do not think the Pargunese invaded because of the elves’ mistakes. My mistakes, perhaps, but perhaps also because they had been misled by the webspinner into evil.”
“But will you stand up for us humans if they try to lay Orlith’s death on us?” Tolmaric asked.
“We don’t know who killed him,” Kieri said. “I can’t ignore the possibility that he was killed by humans. Verrakai stragglers from over the border, maybe, or some of our own people who blamed elves for the invasion.”
Tolmaric flushed. “I didn’t—”
“I’m not accusing you or any of your people,” Kieri said. “But someone from Riverwash, say, who had been burned out and whose family died, might in grief and rage slay anyone he blamed. The wounds—more than needed to kill him—suggest a frenzy of some kind.”
“But it could have been another elf,” Tolmaric said.
“It could have been anyone with a bow and a sword,” Kieri said. “Or more than one. We do not know. We do not know why—was someone intent on killing Orlith specifically, or was it more that anyone where he was would have been killed?”
Sier Halveric leaned forward. “You and Orlith had become close—he was the only elf here for the first days of the invasion. Many knew that—so I would not expect even a grief-stricken refugee to kill him.”
“If they recognized him,” Sier Davonin said.
“True, but he was fairly well known,” Halveric said. “But did you not say, then, that he had consented to your trying to contact a Kuakgan?”
“Yes. Very reluctantly, but yes.”
“And we all know how elves feel about Kuakkgani in general. So maybe an elf who knew about that considered him a traitor.”
“But we didn’t call a Kuakgan,” Kieri said.
“But that might not be known. Or, as you say, it could be someone from over the border. We’ve had skulkers in there before, Verrakaien and others.”
“So we don’t know who did it or why … but we have to tell the elves something or they will blame us. Sir king, you have to realize that.”
“Have they blamed humans before when an elf was found dead?” Kieri asked.
Silence; the Council members glanced back and forth.
“It’s rare,” Sier Galvary said. “You know—they keep themselves secure in the Lady’s realm. But your mother—the elves said humans killed her. And you, since we didn’t know you’d been stolen away. Brigands, they said, or some Sier’s armed men. And it was clear they suspected one of us had given the attackers the information. They questioned all who lived on the borders of the elvenhome—and not gently.”
“I did not know this,” Kieri said.
“No, sir king. How could you? And you so eager to bring understanding between the peoples, which I agree is important … I was not going to tell you.”
“Sier Tolmaric, do you think they blamed you?”
“Me? I was a child then. My grandfather, yes; they blamed him. He and my father were both taken away for a tenday; my mother was terrified. And I swear, they had done nothing. They came back pale and shaking, not the same, ever after.”
“It’s no wonder you have some resentment of elvenkind,” Kieri said. “That, and now the damage to your steading.”
“My father, too,” Sier Belvarin said. “And my uncle. And Sier Galvary’s.” He glanced at Sier Galvary, who nodded.
“It wasn’t fair,” Sier Galvary said. “We were as shocked and horrified by the queen’s death—and yours, as we thought—as elves could be. No one wanted to kill either of you; she was beloved among humans from the moment your father introduced her as his betrothed.”
“Nobody’s equally loved by everybody,” Kieri said. “And someone did kill her.”
“None of us,” Sier Belvarin said. “Nor our families. Brigands—well, they’ll kill anyone and sell any likely child into slavery. But not us.”
“I understand,” Kieri said. His sister’s warnings echoed in his mind. Someone had wanted his mother dead; someone had wanted him gone, ruined; someone had wanted the joint realm to fail. He must find out who, and why, or he and Arian and their child were like to suffer the same fate. And he must reassure his human subjects that he would not let them be punished for someone else’s crimes.
The next morning, the storm still raged. Elves had not come; no one had ventured back out into the city. The palace steward reported that guide ropes had been strung between all the buildings of the palace complex. Orlith’s body, wrapped in clean cloths, had been moved to the outer chamber of the ossuary.
The day passed without word or sign of any elves, and it was not until the next day, when the storm finally died down, that one of the King’s Squires could look for elves in the city. He came back within a turn of the glass, trailed by four elves. Kieri met them in the forecourt. He did not recognize any of them.
“A courier found one of yours dead in the forest,” he said to them. “Orlith, who was my tutor. He was murdered.”
They looked at him and then at one another. “Where is he now?”
“In the outer chamber of the ossuary,” Kieri said.
The elves exchanged glances again. “The Lady must come,” one said. “She will not be pleased.”
“I have no doubt,” Kieri said. “I am not pleased at any murder. But she has not come, though I tried to call.”
Again those glances back and forth. Kieri felt his patience fraying away.
“She has many concerns,” another of the elves said. “It is not carelessness, sir king.” He bowed. The others bowed then, though less deeply.
Within a glass, the Lady appeared with an escort: the same four elves who had come before. She moved over the drifted snow without leaving footp
rints.
“Who did this?” the Lady asked when Kieri came out to greet her.
“I don’t know,” Kieri said. “He was found a few days before the half-Evener, and the man who found him brought his body here.”
“It should not have been moved,” the Lady said.
“You would have it lie unprotected, at the mercy of wind and wild animals?” Kieri said.
“I would have had it reported sooner,” she said.
“How? Were you on call so I might let you know? I had seen no elves about for hands of days.”
The Lady moved restlessly, her robes swirling around her. “I was not hiding from you, Grandson,” she said. “We have much to do to repair damage to the taig and to make a better peace with the rockfolk, who are still angry about the elfane under stone.”
“I am glad you were not hiding,” Kieri said. “Will you now look at Orlith’s body?”
She shivered. “When we die, we die. I will take it into the elvenhome, and there it will be laid to rest.”
“You need to see,” Kieri said. “We must know who did this—man or elf or something else—”
“It is done, it is over. Have it brought out here; I cannot go into that place.” She shivered again, looking at the ossuary entrance.
“Lady—Grandmother—”
Her eyes seemed to blaze for a moment. “Sir king, I tell you I cannot. And so long after the spirit flies, what can the husk tell?”
“That the wounds were not made by crossbow bolts,” Kieri said. “Not by the arrows our rangers use or the Royal Archers. My people fear that you will blame them, as you blamed them before when my mother was killed. Did you then turn away from her body, as you are refusing to see Orlith’s? She was your daughter; he was your servant and becoming my friend—”
“We do not look at ugliness,” the Lady said. “It weakens … it infects us as disease infects you.”
“No one likes looking at ugliness, but it must be done to find out why and prevent more,” Kieri said.
“Humans can see and live,” she said. She seemed to shrink a little, as she had when she knelt to him on the scathefire track. He distrusted that, as he had distrusted her seeming humility then. She went on. “We have been healing the forest’s wounds, but—but such ugliness is a blow to the heart of Sinyi.”
Was this an excuse or an insight into her nature, the nature of all elves? Were they really so fragile—and how could an immortal be fragile and still immortal? He was still struggling with these thoughts when she waved her escort forward.
“We will convey it,” one of them said. “Have it brought forth, sir king.”
The Lady started to turn away.
“Wait,” Kieri said. “Lady, tell me, do you believe me that this was not of human doing?”
She turned back, and he saw tears like crystal sliding down her perfect face. “Grandson … I grieve. I cannot see, but I grieve. And I offer no blame. Let me go …” And she was gone into a silver mist that faded in an instant.
After that, Kieri could do nothing but have his Squires bring out Orlith’s body on the low bed where it had lain. The elves did not touch it, but from their fingers light wove a net between the body and the bed. Then they lifted the net, and, turning their faces away from the body, they too moved into a mist and vanished.
Beclan Mahieran, isolated in a cottage at the far end of the family estates, paced the length of the largest room again and again. Outside, on every side of the cottage, Royal Guard soldiers stood watch a half-bowshot away with orders to kill anyone who crossed the line of flags stuck in the snow. A single servant, an elderly female, prepared his meals in the cottage kitchen and pushed them through a hatch in the door; she would not come closer or speak to him. He had a fireplace for warmth and a room upstairs with a bed. Every third day a squad dragged in more wood, during which he was required to stand at the upstairs window, where he could be seen—and shot—if anything went wrong downstairs.
And it was all completely unfair and unnecessary because he knew he had not been invaded by any evil Verrakaien. True, he and his escort had been caught in a Verrakai trap. True, his escort had died, leaving no proof that he was still just Beclan Mahieran: a sobered Beclan Mahieran, who had seen his first violent death, faced his own folly and its consequences, and made his own first kill. He was not the boy Beclan anymore, but a man, a man who knew he had far to go to be the man he wanted to be. The last moments of Sergeant Vossik, when that grizzled old veteran had killed himself on Beclan’s sword to give him a chance to escape … Beclan had seen then, in the raw, what it meant to be courageous and honorable, traits he’d seen in his father and the other dukes in more cultured form.
He understood now why Dorrin Duke Verrakai had not been impressed with his royal lineage, his evident—or so he’d thought—superiority to the other squires. Night after night he lived it again, woke crying or screaming, soaked in sweat. Hadrin’s horse rolling down the slope; Hadrin’s death … the Kuakkgani trap closing in on them … Vossik trying to warn him … Vossik’s face as he pulled Beclan’s sword into his body … the stiff, awkward movements of those men in his escort he’d had to kill … their terrified expressions … that horrible, tempting, insinuating voice in his head. All his own arrogance, all his mistakes and failures, repeated over and over and over.
And no one, no one at all, to talk to, to ask if his increasing misery and fear meant he was going crazy or had been invaded, after all. They were all afraid of him; they all thought he’d become a monster. Who could possibly understand what he felt? Did anyone care? Would he ever have the chance to talk to anyone ever again, to hear his name spoken without fear, without loathing? He still had his Girdish medallion; he held it hour after hour, begging Gird for help. But none had come.
He had pens and paper; he could write—had written—his father, giving his account of what happened and taking blame for what he knew was his fault. Every hand of days, a royal courier came to deliver and collect messages, and at that time he had to stay upstairs, by the window, from the horn call announcing the courier’s arrival to the one announcing him safely back outside the Royal Guard perimeter.
He knew nothing of what was going on outside. When the Kuakgan opened the spiral trap, the commander of the Royal Guard troop, Sir Flanits, answered no questions. Beclan had argued, tried to explain … but he had been forced to drink some potion that put him to sleep, and when he woke, he’d been in bed here, upstairs, alone. A letter from his father, in one of the royal courier’s bags, had laid out the conditions of his life “until we know for certain what occurred.”
No one now would tell him anything, because no one was allowed to be in the same room with him or converse with him. He imagined Duke Verrakai leading troops into battle, Gwenno Marrakai and Daryan Serrostin with her, winning glory or falling nobly … and here he was, trapped. His father answered no questions about them, about the war, about anything. Only, over and over, warnings to obey the rules, to wait. He felt so helpless. So miserable. This sort of thing happened to people in bards’ songs: to the misunderstood, misidentified young hero brought up in poverty and hardship but destined for greatness, not to young men of good family.
Midwinter was the worst. His entire life, every Midwinter had been the same: the family gathered with all their house servants, huddled together in the dark and cold, singing and telling stories. Mahierans preserved some of the oldest customs; he had been coached into the role of “youngest boy” when he was just able to lisp the words; he had given up that role two years later to the cook’s youngest. He enjoyed the circle dance in the dark, when bumping into the others was not only allowed but intended. He loved to shout the Sunreturn greeting with the men at dawn and throw on the new fire the symbols of the new year he hoped for. And the food. Always the food. And the laughter and songs and family close around him.
Here … it had been nothing. He’d been ordered upstairs, and when he came down the hearth was bare, all candles removed, and his Midwinter din
ner barely visible in the dim light coming through the window. A lump of honeycomb stood for all the delicacies; the rest of the food already chilling to sodden lumps, like the one he felt in his stomach. After a long, cold, dark night … a night in which everything and everyone he had loved in his childhood tormented him in visions … the horn blew again at daybreak, and once more he had to stand by the window while the soldiers dragged in wood and replaced candles. No one so much as called a Sunreturn greeting up the stairs.
The rules of his captivity allowed him to take exercise outside in daylight, walking a track around the cottage, but knowing that archers were focused on his every step made that less attractive, especially on a day like this, when a cold fog lay over the little valley and the archers moved in closer. And inside, he fretted … pacing back and forth, over and over, up the stairs, the length of the upper room, back down.
The rules did not permit him weapons, not even a knife to cut his own food. For eating he had a fork and spoon; the cook cut his food into what she thought of as bite-sized pieces, and they probably were, for a small child. He felt naked without a sword, reduced to the status of a child in every way. He would gladly have traded his warm bed, his clean dry clothes, the predictable meals, for the cold, filthy floor of the old sheepfold that had so disgusted him in the snowstorm. To have the men alive once more whom his willfulness had killed would be better than the comfort he now enjoyed in royal solitude.
Tomorrow, if he’d counted aright, another courier would come. With that thought, he sat down at the desk, put a few drops of water in the bowl, and rubbed the ink stick in it. What could he say that he had not said before? That would persuade his father to mitigate the conditions of his imprisonment?
He picked up his pen.
Father, greetings. I understand that I must stay immured here until you are sure I have no taint of ancient Verrakai magery, and that you cannot trust my sworn word. I understand why you do not grant me weapons or tools of any kind. But consider, sir, that I have nothing to do day after day. I have no tasks taking more than a turn of the glass—to keep my rooms neat is no effort, since I can do nothing to disarrange them. I have read what little is here to read—a few pages someone stuffed in a hollow of the bedroom fireplace is all—and I am like to go mad with no one to talk to and nothing to do. Please send me something—old accounts of grain harvests even—or any other thing you think I should study. If I were inhabited by an evil Verrakai, I would know such things already, so you would risk nothing in that way. I do not ask for those things which formerly interested me, but for anything at all to occupy my mind and time in some way that will profit me later.