Aliya sprawled like a broken doll in the middle of the blood-soaked bed, white as the linen nightgown rucked up around her hips. A midwife still knelt between her splayed legs, weeping over a swaddled bundle.
“The child,” Korin demanded, holding out his arms for it.
“Oh my prince!” the woman sobbed. “It was no child!”
“Show it, woman!” Erius ordered.
Keeping her face averted, the midwife turned back the wrappings. It had no arms, and the face—or what should have been the face—was featureless below the bulging, misshapen brow except for slitted eyes and nostrils.
“Cursed,” Korin whispered. “I am cursed!”
“No,” rasped Erius. “Never say that!”
“Father, look at it—!”
Erius whirled and struck Korin across the face, knocking the prince off his feet. Tobin tried to catch him, but ended up sprawled under him instead.
Grasping Korin by the front of his tunic, Erius shook him violently, shouting, “Never say that! Never! Never, do you hear me?” He let go of Korin and rounded on the others. “Anyone who carries this tale will be burned alive, do you hear me?” He slammed out of the room, shouting for the room to be put under guard.
Korin staggered back to the bed. His nose was bleeding; it trickled down over his mouth and into his beard as he clasped her limp hand. “Aliya? Can you hear me? Wake up, damn you, and see what we’ve done!”
Tobin scrambled away, desperate to escape. As he turned for the door, however, he caught sight of Niryn calmly examining the dead child. He’d turned away from the others; Tobin could see only the side of his face, but a lifetime of reading faces made him catch his breath. The wizard looked pleased—triumphant, even. Shocked, Tobin did not have time to retreat before the wizard looked up and caught him staring.
And Tobin felt it; that nauseating feeling of cold fingers tickling through his bowels. He couldn’t move or even look away. For a moment he was certain his heart had stopped in his chest.
Then he was released and Niryn was speaking to Korin as if the last few moments had not happened. The midwife had the little bundle now, though Tobin had not seen him pass it to her.
“It is undoubtedly necromancy,” Niryn was saying. He stood close to Korin, a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “Rest assured, my prince, I will find the traitors and burn them.” He glanced at Tobin again, eyes cold and soulless as a snake’s.
Korin was weeping, but his fists were clenched and the muscles in his jaw worked furiously as he cried out, “Burn them. Burn them all!”
Standing outside with the others, Ki heard Erius shouting, and ducked out of the way when the king stormed out.
“Summon my Guard!” Erius roared, then rounded on the boys. “Go on, get out of here, all of you! Not a word, any of you. Swear it!”
They did, and scattered, all but Ki. Keeping watch from a doorway down the corridor, he waited until Tobin came out. One look at his friend’s white, dazed face was enough to make him glad he’d stayed. He hurried Tobin back to their rooms, bundled him into an armchair by the fire with blankets and a mazer of strong wine, and sent Baldus to find Nik and Lutha.
Tobin downed a full mazer before he could speak, then told them only what they already knew; that the baby was stillborn. Ki saw how his hand shook and knew there was more to the tale than that, but Tobin wouldn’t say. He just pulled his knees up under his chin and sat silent and shivering until Tanil arrived with news that Aliya was dead. Then Tobin put his head down and wept.
“Korin won’t leave her,” Mylirin told them as Ki tried to comfort Tobin. “Tanil and Caliel tried everything short of carrying him, until he ordered us out. He wouldn’t even let Caliel stay. Niryn is still there with him, talking of nothing but burning wizards! I’m going back now and staying outside that door until they come out. Can I send for you, Prince Tobin, if Korin wants you?”
“Of course,” Tobin whispered dully, wiping his cheeks with his sleeve.
Mylirin gave him a grateful look and went out.
Nikides shook his head. “What wizard could hurt an unborn child? If you ask me, it’s Illior’s—”
“No!” Tobin lurched up in his chair. “Don’t say that. No one is to say that. Not ever.”
That was no stillbirth, thought Ki.
Nikides was sharp and caught it, too. “You heard the prince,” he told the others. “We never speak of it again.”
Chapter 47
Lhel stayed with Arkoniel and the others at the mountain camp, but slept alone in her own hut. Her abrupt withdrawal hurt Arkoniel, she knew, but it was as it must be. The other wizards would not follow him if they saw him as her fancy man. As for Lhel, the Mother was not done with her.
As she’d foreseen, little Totmus died within a few weeks of their arrival. She joined the others in mourning him, but knew that the winter would be hard enough without a sickly one to tend. The others were strong.
With Cymeus to guide them, they strove to build a larger shelter before the storms hit. The children spent every spare minute gathering wood, and Lhel showed them how to forage for the year’s last roots and mushrooms, and how to smoke the meat Noril and Kaulin brought in. Wythnir and the girls added to their stores hunting rabbits and grouse with their slings. Malkanus made himself unexpectedly useful one day by spell-slaying a fat sow bear that wandered into the camp.
Lhel showed the town dwellers how to make use of every bone, tooth, and shred of sinew, and how to suck the rich marrow from the long bones. She taught them how to tan every hide, stretching the raw skins on cedar branch racks and rubbing them with a mash of ashes and brains to cure them. Despite all this, the older wizards still did not trust her or she them, and she was careful to keep her spellcraft hidden. Let Arkoniel teach them what he would. That was the thread the Mother had spun.
The provisions they’d brought and what little they could forage would not be enough and they all knew it. With a long winter staring them in the face, food, hay, clothing, and livestock would have to be carted in. Vornus and Lyan took the cart and set off along the north road to trade in the mining towns.
Snow found them soon after, sifting down from the grey sky in huge feathery flakes. Gentle but steady, it silently built up in mounds on the boughs and capped every stone and stump. By the time the wind was cold enough to make small, sharp flakes the Skalans had managed to construct a lean- to byre and one long, low-roofed cabin. It was crude, but large enough for them all to crowd into at night. They didn’t have enough rope or mud to chink the walls, but Cerana wove a spell against drafts and Arkoniel set another on the bough-thatched roof, knitting the green branches tight against the weather.
On the night of the winter solstice Lhel brought Arkoniel into her hut. He had no thought of the Mother or Her rituals as they coupled, but he was hot and eager, and the sacrifice was well made. The Mother granted Lhel visions that night, and for the first time since she’d taken the young wizard to her bed, she was glad that his seed could not fill her belly with a child.
By the time dawn came, she was miles away, leaving not so much as a footprint in the snow for a farewell.
PART IV
The Plenimarans’ first attack was not launched with armies or ships, or with the necromancers and their demons, but with a scattering of children abandoned along the Skalan coast.
—Ylania ë Sydani, Royal Historian
Chapter 48
A farmer driving his cart home after the day’s trading in Ero noticed the little girl crying beside the road. He asked after her people, but she was too shy or too scared to tell him. Judging by her muddy wooden clogs and drab, rough-spun dress, she wasn’t from the city. Perhaps she’d fallen off the back of another farm wagon. He stood up and scanned the road ahead, but it was empty.
He was a kind man and, with night coming on and no help in sight, there seemed nothing to do but carry her home to his wife. The child stopped crying when he lifted her onto the seat, but she was shivering. He wrapped his cloak ar
ound her and gave her a bit of the sugar candy he’d bought for his own little daughters.
“We’ll tuck you in between my girls tonight and you’ll be warm as a weevil in porridge,” he promised, and clucked to his horse to walk on.
The little girl sneezed, then happily went on sucking the sugar lump. Born mute, she couldn’t tell the man that she didn’t understand his words. She knew he was kind, though, from the sound of his voice and the way he handled her. He was nothing like the strangers who’d carried her away from her village in a boat full of sad people and abandoned her on the roadside in the night.
She couldn’t thank him for the sugar either, and that made her sad, for it eased the hot, swollen feeling in her throat.
Chapter 49
The dreary winter dragged on in Ero. Mourning banners for Aliya hung wet and tattered on every house and shop. Inside the Palatine walls everyone from the king to the lowest kitchen scullion wore black or dun and would for a year and a day. And the rains continued to fall.
The palace servants grumbled and burned censers of acrid herbs in the hallways. In the new Companions’ mess, the cooks brewed bitter drysian teas to purify their blood.
“It’s this open winter,” Molay explained, when Tobin and Ki complained of it. “When the ground doesn’t freeze, the foul humors breed thick, especially in the cities. No good will come of it.”
He was soon proven right. The Red and Black Death erupted with renewed fury all along the eastern coast.
Niyrn quietly moved Nalia, now nearly twenty, to Cirna. Thanks to their remote location and lack of shipping trade, the fortress and village had been untouched by disease. The girl and her nurse were dismayed by this grim, lonely new home, but Niryn vowed to visit more often.
By Dostin the deathbirds had burned more than twenty houses in Ero harbor, with their plague-ridden occupants nailed up inside.
But that did not stop the spread of it. A plague house was discovered near the corn dealer’s market, and the contagion spread through the surrounding neighborhood. Seven tenements and a temple of Sakor were burned there, but not before some of the terrified inhabitants escaped to spread the pestilence.
In mid-Dostin the Companions’ favorite theater, the Golden Foot, was struck, and the whole company of actors, along with their dressers, wigmakers, and all the servants were condemned by quarantine.
Tobin and Ki wept at the news. These were the same players who’d entertained them at the keep during the name day hunt; they’d made friends among the actors.
The Foot lay just five streets down from the Palatine gate and the loss was compounded when the king canceled all audiences and sent word forbidding any Companion to leave the palace until further notice. With all entertainments forbidden for the first month of mourning, the boys found themselves trapped.
Master Porion urged them to continue with their training, but Korin was too despondent and often too drunk. Dressed in black, he moped alone in his rooms or walked in the rooftop gardens, hardly answering when anyone spoke to him. The only companionship he seemed able to tolerate was that of his father or Niryn.
The winds shifted at month’s end and the drysians predicted that the shift would cleanse the air. Instead, a new and more devastating sickness struck. By all reports it had started in the countryside, with outbreaks reported from Ylani to Greyhead. In Ero the first cases were seen around the lower markets, and before any ban could be imposed it had already swept up to the citadel.
It was a pox, and began with soreness in the throat, followed within a day by the spread of small black pustules over the torso. If it stopped at the neck, the patient survived, but more often than not the spots spread to the face, then into the eyes, mouth, and finally, the throat. It reached its crisis within five days, at the end of which the sufferer was either dead, or hideously scarred and often blind. The Aurënfaie had seen such illnesses before and within days of the first outbreak there were few ’faie to be found in the city.
Niryn declared this the work of traitorous wizards turned necromancer. The Harriers redoubled their hunt despite more open dissent, especially against the burning of priests. Riots broke out around the Lightbearer’s temples. The king’s soldiers quelled such uprisings without mercy, but the burnings were once more held outside the city walls.
Illior’s crescent began to appear everywhere—scrawled on walls, painted on lintels, even crudely drawn in white trailor’s chalk on the mourning banners. People slipped into the Lightbearer’s temples under cover of dark to make offerings and seek guidance.
Wizards proved strangely immune to the pox, but Iya did not dare risk a visit to Tobin for fear of carrying the infection to him. Instead, she used Arkoniel’s translocation spell to send small ivory amulets inscribed with sigils of Illior to him, Ki, and Tharin.
As the outbreak worsened, piles of pox-ridden corpses mounted in the streets, abandoned by their frightened families at the first sign of illness, or perhaps simply dying where they’d fallen after blindly seeking help that never came. Anyone who even appeared infirm risked being stoned in the streets. The king gave orders for the sick to remain inside under pain of execution by the city guard.
Soon, however, there were few to enforce the order. Strong men—especially soldiers, seemed to be the most susceptible and the least likely to recover, while many who were old and infirm escaped with nothing worse than scars.
As the city sank into despair, Iya and her Wormhole compatriots grew bolder. It was they who drew the first crescents on city walls, and they who whispered to any who would listen: “ ‘So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’ line defends and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated.’ She is coming!”
Twenty-two wizards now lived in secret below the abandoned Aurënfaie shops. Arkoniel’s young shape changer, Eyoli, had joined them there when snow cut him off from Arkoniel’s camp in the mountains.
Cut off from their customary entertainments, the Companions soon grew restless. Tobin went back to his sculpting and gave lessons to any who wanted to learn. Ki showed a knack for it, and Lutha, too. Lynx could draw and paint, and they began to collaborate on designs for breastplates and helmets. Nikides shyly revealed a talent for juggling.
Caliel attempted to organize a company of players from available talent among the nobles, but after a few weeks everyone was thoroughly bored with each other. Cut off from the ladies of the town, most of the older boys made do with serving girls again. Zusthra was betrothed to a young duchess, but no marriages could be celebrated during the first months of official mourning.
The female pains troubled Tobin more often now, no matter what the moon’s phase was. Usually it came on as a fleeting ache, but other times, especially when the moon was new or full, he could almost feel something moving in his belly, the way Aliya’s child had. It was a frightening feeling and worse for having no one to talk to about it. He began to have new dreams, too, or rather one dream, repeated night after night with variations.
It began in the tower at the keep. He was standing in the middle of his mother’s old room there, surrounded by broken furniture and piles of moldy cloth and wool. Brother stepped from the shadows and led him by the hand down the stairs. It was too dark to see; Tobin had to trust the ghost and the feel of the worn stone steps under his feet.
It was all very clear, just as he remembered it, but when they reached the bottom of the stairs the door swung open and suddenly they were standing at the edge of a high precipice above the sea. It seemed like the cliffs at Cirna at first, but when he looked behind him, he saw green rolling hills marching into the distance and jagged stone peaks beyond. An old man watched him from the top of one of the hills. He was too far away to make out his features, but he wore the robes of a wizard and waved to Tobin as if he knew him.
Brother was still with him, and drew him away to the very edge of the cliff until Tobin’s toes hung over the edge. Far below, a broad harbor shone like a mirror between two long arms of land. By some trick of the dream, he could see the
ir faces reflected there but his was the face of a woman and Brother had turned into Ki. In the way of dreams, it surprised him every time.
Still teetering precariously on the brink, the woman she’d become turned to kiss Ki. She could hear the stranger on the hill shouting to her, but the wind carried his words away. Just as her lips met Ki’s the wind pushed her over the edge and she fell—
It always ended that way and Tobin would wake to find himself sitting bolt upright in bed, heart pounding and an erection throbbing between his legs. He had no illusions about that anymore. On those nights when Ki stirred in his sleep and reached out to him, Tobin fled and spent the rest of the night wandering the palace corridors. Yearning for things he dared not hope for, he pressed his fingers to his lips, trying to recall the feel of that kiss.
The dream always left him low-spirited and a little scatterbrained the next day. More than once he caught himself staring at Ki, wondering what it would feel like actually to kiss him. He was quick to squelch such thoughts and Ki remained oblivious, distracted by the more tangible affections of several welcoming servant girls.
Ki slipped away with them more often now and sometimes didn’t come back until dawn. By unspoken agreement, Tobin did not complain of these sorties and Ki did not brag of them, at least not to him.
One windy night in Klesin, Tobin was alone once again, pondering designs for a set of jeweled brooches for Korin’s mourning cloak. It was a stormy night and the wind made lonely sounds in the eaves outside. Nik and Lutha had come by looking for him earlier, but Tobin was in no mood for company. Ki was off with Ranar, the girl in charge of the linens.
The work allowed him to escape his racing thoughts for a while. He was good at sculpting, even famous for it. During the previous year’s royal progress, pieces he’d made for his friends had caught the fancies of their hosts. Many had since sent gifts, along with precious metals and jewels, requesting a bit of jewelry to remember him by. The exchange of gifts was not only acceptable, Nikides had observed, but held the possibility of connections of other sorts being made later on. Who wouldn’t want to be thought well of by the future king’s beloved cousin? Tobin had read enough history to appreciate the wisdom of this advice and accepted most commissions.