Those ships bore our families to safety,Hector reminded himself as they passed the desolate forest ruin.To safety.
On the other side of Earthwood the ramparts of the castle walls could be seen, atop the three hundred steps that led up to them. Hector reined his horse to a halt, then looked to the others, observing the silent dismay on the face of the exhausted old fisherman.
“You needn’t despair, Brann,” he said reassuringly. “It’s too much of a climb for most, now that the wagon-ramps are gone. Stay here, Jarmon, Anais. Cantha and I will return forthwith.”
The two soldiers, one old, one young, inhaled deeply but said nothing.
For all the years he had spent in the palace, the design and construction of the place had been a constant source of fascination to Hector. As he and his father’s oldest friend hurriedly climbed the stone steps hewn from the rock, passing through the empty gardens and loggias that had long beautified the terraces leading to Elysian, they both unconsciously glanced back at the ramparts hidden beneath them. In its time, more than ten thousand soldiers were routinely garrisoned within the palisaded battlements that scored, in ascending rings, the crags on which the palace stood. That they had been hidden so decoratively was tribute to Vandemere, the king who had designed and built the place as a shining monument to a new era of peace, knowing all the while that war loomed, ever watchful, in the distance.
The king riding the hippogriff whose broken statue was now rubble in the dry fountain bed of Kingston’s square.
Hector’s grandfather.
“Did you know him, Cantha?” Hector asked as they hurried over the granite walkways past beds of dried flora and dying topiary. “Vandemere?”
“Aye.” The Kith woman kept her eyes focused directly on the great doors that marked the side entrance of the palace, now unguarded. One stood slightly open, a testament to the completeness of the evacuation. In its time, never fewer than a score of soldiers held watch over those doors.
Through the towering hallways they ran, keeping their eyes fixed on the corridors ahead of them, rather than see the emptiness of the once beautiful stronghold. Their footsteps echoed through the cavernous rooms, bare and dull in the dark.
Hector knew this place blind; it was only the urgency he had heard in the fisherman’s voice and the stirrings of a long-denied hope that prevented him from taking the time to stop and gaze one last time at the rooms, alcoves, and nooks he had loved from childhood. Most of the tapestries still lined the walls; much of the art remained in place, unmolested by the looters and thieves who had picked the rest of the countryside clean. There was something sacred about Elysian that kept it sacrosanct; a power that protected it, even with no king on the throne.
Entering the corridor that led to the Great Hall, Hector realized what it was.
In a way, there was a king on the throne still. Gwylliam had named Hector the king’s shadow, born of the same bloodline, and therefore, in a way, the king had not left, not completely.
“This was a remarkable place to spend time as a child,” Hector said, passing the doors to the nursery where his mother and her siblings had played while their parents held court. “There were so many alcoves to explore, so many places to hide. The palace guards were more than once called out to find me. I had made a nest beneath the drape of a pedestal in the Hall of History, and had fallen asleep in there. It was great fun—until I had a child of my own and Aidan started doing it.” He drew deeper breath. “I still don’t know where that boy and his mother could have been secreted that allowed us to miss them.”
“In the City’s necropolis,” Cantha said, her eyes fixed on the enormous mahogany doors of the Great Hall before them. “In one of the crypts.”
“Why do you think so?”
“They had the smell of death about them.” The Kith woman grasped the massive brass handle. “They still do, but it be different now.”
The dark, cavernous room revealed the throne from which the unmarried last king had held court, a wide marble chair with blue and gold giltwork channels running up the arms to the back. Hector walked the long carpet to the foot of the dais, mounted the steps quickly, and sat down unabashedly in the king’s seat. He took a moment to look up at Vandemere’s motto, inscribed for the ages on the wall directly before his eyes, where each subsequent king was bound to see it at every moment while enthroned:
HE WHOM ALL MEN SERVE BEARS THE GREATEST DUTY TO SERVE ALL MEN.
Then he stretched his hand out over the right arm of the throne.
“Traan der, singa ever monokran fri,” he commanded softly, speaking in the tongue of the Ancient Seren, the mystical race of Firstborn beings born of the element of Ether, the first people of the Island. Come forth, in the name of the king.
The marble arm of the chair cracked open along a hidden fault, and split away. From beneath the dais a mechanical arm rose to an even height with the chair, the royal scepter of Serendair in its metallic grasp.
The symbol of state was simple in its design, a curved piece of dark wood the length of a man’s thigh, gilt and inscribed with intricate runes. Beneath the golden overlay the thin striations of purple and green, gold and vermilion could still be vaguely made out, the colors of the stone trees in Earthwood, from which it had probably been harvested. Atop its splayed pinnacle a diamond the size of a child’s fist was set; it gleamed dully in the darkness of the hall.
Hector stared at the scepter for a moment, encased within the mechanism of the king’s design. Then he seized it, plucking it from the metal arm, pulling it free.
Cantha’s dark eyes were watching with a gleam he had not seen before. He looked at her questioningly, inviting her to speak, and was surprised when she did. Cantha guarded her thoughts jealously.
“Had the crown passed to the first of Vandemere’s children, rather than the last, this might have been a sight seen long ago; thee, Hector, on the throne as king.”
Hector rose from the throne and started back out of the palace.
“I suppose that means I am foreordained to meet my end in this way, then,” he said as they retraced their steps. “For if I had been king, I would not have left. You, however, Cantha, you and Jarmon, Anais, and Sevirym, would have been sent off with the others, to guard them in the new world, and live on. For that reason, and only that one, I am sorry that the line of succession did not fall to me.”
The Kith woman said nothing.
They hurried from the palace in silence. At the brink of the battlements, Hector touched her arm.
“Tell me one thing, Cantha, now that the time for niceties is past, and there is nothing left to be gained in politeness,” he said. “When you announced that the king of the Kith had decided you would stay behind as a representative of your race, I believe it was because you had volunteered to do so. You are my father’s dearest friend. It was for him that you stayed with me, wasn’t it?”
The Kith woman’s eyes narrowed in displeasure. “MacQuieth would never have asked such a thing of me. Of anyone.”
Hector smiled. “I know. But he didn’t have to ask.”
Cantha exhaled, frowning at him. Finally she assented.
“Nay,” she said. “He did not have to ask. Aye, ’twas for him that I stayed, to stand with his son when he could not.” She looked over the grassy fields, falling into shadows of gold as the sun began to set. “ ’Twas as good a choice of end as any.”
“Thank you,” Hector said. “For staying, and for telling me.”
The Kith woman merely nodded.
“I have one more boon to ask of you,” Hector said as they descended the stone steps. “We will part company now. To take the woman and child north with us would only slow us down, and end any chance they have to survive. Elysian is the highest point on the southern half of the Island. If any ground is to be spared by the sea, it would be here. Stay with them, Cantha, in these last days; keep them safe, especially the boy. We will leave you supplies, and you can scavenge the orchards for fruit. If we succeed in con
taining the sea, and you run short of stores, you can go back to the inn.” Cantha nodded, and Hector took her elbow, drawing her to a halt for a moment. “If the wave comes, though, get to the highest ground you can. I’d advise you stay near the vizier’s tower.” He nodded behind them to the tallest of the palace’s spires, where Graal, the king’s adviser and seer, had once dwelt. Cantha nodded again.
Jarmon had prepared the horses to leave as soon as Hector returned. As the men mounted, Hector heard a screech from below him.
“No,” the child was screaming, struggling in Cantha’s firm grasp. “No!” He turned to Hector, his eyes pleading. “No! Stay w’chyou! Stay w’chyou!”
The words echoed in Hector’s mind; they were the same as the ones uttered by Aidan on the docks the day he bound his family over to his father for sailing.
Stay w’chyou! Da! Stay w’chyou!
His throat tightened, remembering Talthea, so strong and brave, dissolving into tears at the pain in their son’s voice. He reached down and gently caressed the head of the writhing child, then nodded to Cantha. His last sight of the boy was seeing him struggling violently in her arms as she restrained him. He continued to kick and fight with a willfulness that finally collapsed into a visibly broken spirit once the horses were out of sight.
Just as Aidan had.
They rode north along the river now, following the mule road where barges had long traveled, laden with goods from the northern isles and distant ports that were traded at every crossing and village until the flat-bottomed boats finally reached Southport, the enormous city at the river’s delta.
The rocks at the mule road’s edge trembled as they passed; tremors in the north had intensified in strength and frequency, and viewing the sky above was now almost impossible through the mist. Patches of blue became fewer and farther between.
The men rode in silence. Each day that passed brought the mist down even more heavily, making first joking, then speaking, too weighty to bother with.
Finally they arrived in Hope’s Landing, the largest mill town on the Great River, where the east–west thoroughfare had crossed. In its time Hope’s Landing had been the heart of the river, a bustling city where the westlands met the east, with wagons lining up as far as the eye could see to unload grain for the mills, foodstuffs bound for markets in the south, and then were reloaded again with every kind of good imaginable from the barges. Now the city stood empty, the wheels of the great mills lodged in the mud or jammed by rocks where the water had once flowed freely.
Pratt’s Mill had been the largest of all, spanning the river at its deepest and swiftest place. Bridges at one time had connected the east and west banks, with the mill between, an esplanade over which travelers could pass, observing the river’s currents beneath them. The western span was gone, but the eastern bridge was still there, they noted, then rode past as the heat of the sun beat down from overhead, the only sign that it was now midday.
Just past the silent mill, where the roadway led off to the east, Hector signaled to the party to stop and let the horses graze. He scooped up a handful of smooth river stones, then beckoned to Anais, and together they walked to the banks of the Great River, dry now except for a thin stream that pooled and trickled in the wide riverbed.
“Remember when this river seemed a mile wide?” he mused, watching the water wend its way around the rocks and broken barrels that now lined its bed.
“Aye,” Anais agreed. “ ’Twas death to fall in up here. That millstone ground day and night; if you took a tumble north of it, you’d be bread the next day.”
“And now we could cross easily, with feet barely wet. It’s as if the river never divided the Island at all.” Hector examined the stones in his hand. “My father once said something to me that is finally taking hold in my mind.” He fell silent for a moment, trying to remember the words correctly. “He was a Kinsman, one of a brotherhood of soldiers whose patron was the wind, and thus had learned to pass through doors in the wind that would take him great distances in a short time. When I asked him by what magic this could happen, he said that it was not magic, but merely understanding that distance was an illusion.
“There are ties between us, Anais, all of us, friend and foe, that transcend what is normally seen as the space in the world. That distance, that space, is merely the threshold between one realm and another, one soul and another; a doorway, a bridge if you will. The stronger the connection between the two places, the smaller the threshold; the more easily crossed, anyway. The physical distance between the two becomes secondary. It was in making use of this that MacQuieth was able to win his greatest battle, his destruction of the fire demon, the F’dor Tsoltan. His hatred of that demon, and that primordial race, was a tie that could not be outrun. There was not enough space in the world to keep them apart.” He sighed deeply. “I believe it is also the reason that my family is only as far away as my next breath, that I can see them in my dreams, see them as they are now, not as a memory. Why you dream of the World Tree, and the place where you were born.”
Anais nodded, and they stood in companionable silence for a while, watching the trickling stream.
“How does the weather appear to be taking shape for the next few days?” Hector asked finally, tossing a stone into what was left of the water.
“Aside from the likelihood of catastrophic destruction, it looks to be a fine week,” Anais answered jokingly. “Why do you ask?”
Hector lobbed another pebble into the stream. “I just wanted to know how you would fare on your journey, if you would be dry or sodden with rain.”
Anais’s face lost its smile. “Journey?”
Hector exhaled and nodded. “I’m sending you home now, Anais. There is no need for you to go on with us from here. Either we will prevail in this undertaking or we will fail, but your being with us will not make that difference. The dreams you are having of Yliessan is Sagia calling to you to come home. If the World Tree is beckoning to you, it would be wrong to keep you from her.”
His friend’s silver eyes reflected sadness and understanding in the same gleam.
“I have come to accept many things I could not have fathomed would be possible a year ago, Hector, many tragic and horrific things, but until this moment, it had never occurred to me that I might not meet my end at your side.”
Hector tossed the rest of the stones into the riverbed and wiped the grit from his hand on his shirt.
“We have lived in each other’s company all our lives, Anais, and lived well,” he said, his voice steady. “There is no need to die in each other’s company, as long as we die well.”
Anais turned away.
“Perhaps if Sevirym was right, or you prevail, we will not die at all,” he said.
“Perhaps,” Hector said. “But go home anyway.”
Beneath their feet the ground rumbled, stronger than before, as if in confirmation.
On the way back to camp, Hector stopped his friend one last time.
“Know that wherever we are when the end comes, you will be with me, Anais,” he said simply.
The Liringlas knight smiled. “Beyond the end, Hector. Not even death can separate you from me.” He clapped his friend’s shoulder. “You still owe me a night of very expensive drinking.”
Once Anais had gone, the days and nights ran together.
In the distance, the sky had begun to glow yellow through the mist above the northern isles. The rumblings had increased in sound and frequency, making the men nervous and edgy without respite. Sleep seemed a luxury that they could ill afford, and yet exhaustion threatened to drive them off course, bleary-eyed in the dense fog.
When at last the sea could be heard in the distance and splashing fire could be seen far away above the horizon, they determined they were near enough to Dry Cove and made camp for what they decided was the last time. Hector stirred the remains of their stores in a pot above their fire while the old fisherman and Jarmon tended to the horses before sitting down to a last meal at rest.
“Brann,” Hector said, trying to break the awkward silence with conversation, “have you lived in Dry Cove all your life?”
The old man shook his head. “No. I was born there, but I had not been back until recently.”
“Oh?” Jarmon asked, setting down his tankard. “That’s odd for a fishing village, isn’t it? It seems that most families in such places remain there for generations.”
Brann nodded. “True. But long ago, I had the chance to leave, and I took it. I traveled the wide world, doing a variety of things, but my birthplace has never been far from my mind. When it became apparent that the Child was awakening, I wanted nothing more than to return home, to help in any way that I could.”
“You do know the chances that we can do anything at all, let alone save your village, are very small?” Jarmon said seriously. “This is a fool’s errand.”
“No, it’s not,” Hector said quickly, seeing the light in the fisherman’s eyes dim slightly. “It is a slim chance. But it is a chance, nonetheless. Trying is never foolish.”
“That is all I ask, so that my people might live.” Brann mumbled, drawing his rough burlap blanket over his shoulders and settling down to sleep.
When the old man’s breathing signaled he had fallen into the deepest part of slumber, Jarmon took a well-used wallet of smoking blend from his pack and tamped nearly the last of it into his pipe.
Beneath them the earth trembled. It seemed to Hector that the quakes were lasting longer, and it was undeniable that they were coming more frequently. Anais had observed, just before he rode east, that even Sevirym would have been hard pressed to ignore it.
Hector looked up into the dark sky, missing the stars. “You and me, Jarmon; we are the last ones left,” he mused, watching the clouds of thickening haze race along in the dark sky on the twisting wind.