“Maker keep us, it’s in the house!”
Cheers and applause burst out below. She could hear the king proclaiming a blessing for Tobin’s health. With trembling fingers, Nari wiped at the mark with the edge of her skirt until the handprint smeared to a pinkish smudge. She pushed the rushes up to cover it, then slipped into Ariani’s chamber, fearful of what she might find.
The princess sat by the fire, sewing away as madly as ever. For the first time since the birth, she had changed her nightdress for a loose gown and put on her rings again. The hem was wet and streaked with mud. Ariani’s hair hung in damp strands around her face. The window was shut tight as always, but Nari could smell the night air on her, and the hint of something else besides. Nari wrinkled her nose, trying to place the raw, unpleasant odor.
“You’ve been outside, Your Highness?”
Ariani smiled down at her needlework. “Just for a bit, Nurse. Aren’t you pleased?”
“Yes, my lady, but you should have waited and I’d have gone with you. You’re not strong enough to be out on your own. What would the duke say?”
Ariani sewed on, still smiling over her work.
“Did you see anything … unusual out there, Your Highness?” Nari hazarded at last.
Ariani pulled a tuft of wool from a bag beside her and tucked it into the muslin arm she’d sewn. “Nothing at all. Off with you now, and fetch me something to eat. I’m famished!”
Nari mistrusted this sudden brightness. As she left, she could hear Ariani humming softly to herself, and recognized the tune as a lullaby.
She was halfway to the kitchens when she placed the smell at last and let out a snort of relief. Tomorrow she must tell the servants to bring in one of the hounds to root out the dead mouse spoiling somewhere along the upper corridor.
Chapter 5
Arkoniel left Ero not knowing when he would see Ariani or her child again. He met up with Iya at an inn in Sylara and together they set off to begin the next long stage of their mission.
Despite Arkoniel’s strong misgivings, Iya decided that it would be safest for everyone if they kept their distance from the child. When Arkoniel told her of his strange conversation with Niryn, it only strengthened her resolve. Nari and the duke could get word to them by sending messages to several inns that Iya frequented in her travels. For emergencies, she’d left Nari with a few small tokens; painted rods that released a simple seeking spell when broken. No matter how far away Iya might be, she would feel the magic and return as quickly as she could.
“But what if we’re too far away to reach them in time?” Arkoniel fretted, unhappy with the situation. “And how can we leave them like that? It all went wrong in the end, Iya. You didn’t see the demon in the dead child’s eyes. What if the tree can’t hold it down?”
But she remained adamant. “They are safest with us away.”
And so they began their long wandering quest, seeking out anyone who had a spark of magic in them, sounding out loyalties, listening to fears, and—with a select few—cautiously sharing a glimpse of Iya’s vision: a new confederation of Orëska wizards. She was patient, and careful in her choices, winnowing out the mad and the greedy and those too loyal to the king. Even with those she deemed trustworthy she did not reveal her true purpose, but left them a small token—a pebble picked up on the road—and the promise that she would call on them again.
Over the next few years Niryn’s words would come back to haunt them, for it seemed that they were not the only ones spreading the idea of unity. They learned from others they met on the road that the king’s wizard was gathering a following of his own at court. Arkoniel often wondered what answer these wizards had given to Niryn’s oblique question, and what their dreams had been.
The drought that had heralded Tobin’s birth broke, only to be followed by another the following summer. The further south they went, the more often they saw empty granaries and sickly livestock. Disease walked the land in hunger’s wake, striking down the weak like a wolf culling a flock. The worst was a fever brought in by traders. The first sign was bloody sweat, often followed by black swellings in the armpits and groin. Few who showed both symptoms survived. The Red and Black Death, as it came to be called, struck whole villages overnight, leaving too few living to burn the dead.
A plague of a different sort struck the eastern coast: Plenimaran raiders. Towns were looted and burned, the old women killed, the younger ones and the children carried off as slaves in the raiders’ black ships. The men who survived the battle often met a crueler fate.
Iya and Arkoniel entered one such village just after an attack and found half a dozen young men nailed by the hands to the side of a byre; all had been disemboweled. One boy was still alive, begging for water with one breath and death with the next. Iya gently gave him both.
Iya continued Arkoniel’s education as they traveled, and was pleased to see how his powers continued to flourish. He was the finest student she’d ever had, and the most curious; for Arkoniel there were always new vistas ahead, new spells to master. Iya practiced what she jokingly referred to as “portable magics,” those spells which relied more on wand and word than weighty components and instruments. Arkoniel had a natural talent for these, and was already beginning to create spells of his own, an unusual accomplishment for so one so young. Driven by his concern for Rhius and Ariani, he experimented endlessly with seeking spells, trying to expand their limited powers, but with no success.
Iya explained repeatedly that even Orëska magic had its limits, but he would not be put off.
In the houses of the richer, more sedentary wizards, particularly those with noble patrons, she saw him linger longingly in well-equipped workrooms, examining the strange instruments and alchemists’ vessels he found there. Sometimes they guested long enough for him to learn something from these wizards, and Iya was delighted to see him so willingly adding to what she could teach him.
Content as always to wander, Iya could almost at times forget the responsibility that hung over them.
Almost.
Living on the road, they heard a great deal of news but were little touched by most of it. When the first rumors of the King’s Harriers reached them, Iya dismissed them as wild tales. This became harder to do, however, when they met with a priest of Illior who claimed to have seen them with his own eyes.
“The king has sanctioned them,” he told Iya, nervously fingering the amulet on his breast, so similar to the ones they wore. “The Harriers are a special guard, soldiers and wizards both, charged with hunting down traitors to the throne. They’ve burned a wizard at Ero, and there are Illioran priests in the prison.”
“Wizards and priests?” Arkoniel scoffed. “No Skalan wizard has ever been executed, not since the necromantic purges of the Great War! And wizards hunting down their own kind?”
But Iya was shaken. “Remember who we are dealing with,” she warned when they were safely alone in their rented chamber. “Mad Agnalain’s son has already killed his own kin to preserve his line. Perhaps there’s more of his mother in him than we feared.”
“It’s Niryn leading them,” Arkoniel said, thinking again of the way the wizard had watched him the night of Tobin’s birth. Had he been seeking out followers even then? And what had he found in his Harriers that he hadn’t seen in Arkoniel?
Part Two
From the private journal of Queen
Tamír II, recently discovered in
the Palace Archives
[Archivist’s note: passage undated]
My father moved us to that lonely keep in the mountains not long after my birth. He put it about that my mother’s health required it, but I’m sure by then all Ero knew she’d gone mad, just as her mother had. When I think of her at all now, I remember a pale wraith of a woman with nervous hands and a stranger’s eyes the same color as my own.
My father’s ancestors built the keep in the days when hill folk still came through the passes to raid the lowlands. It had thick stone walls and narrow wi
ndows covered by splintery red-and-white painted shutters—I remember amusing myself by picking off the scaling flakes outside my bedchamber window as I stood there, watching for my father’s return.
A tall, square watchtower jutted from the back of the keep, next to the river. I used to believe the demon lurked there, and watched me from the windows whenever Nari or the men took me outside to play in the courtyards or the meadow below the barracks house. I was kept inside most of the time, though. I knew every dusty, shadowed room of the lower floors by the time I could walk. That crumbling old pile was all the world I knew, my first seven years—my nurse and a handful of servants my only companions when Father and his men were gone, which was all too often.
And the demon, of course. Only years later did I have any inkling that all households were not like my own—that it was unusual for invisible hands to pinch and push, or for furniture to move about the room by itself. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on Nari’s lap as she taught me to bend my little fingers into a warding sign—
Chapter 6
Tobin knelt on the floor in his toy room, idly pushing a little ship around the painted harbor of the toy city. It was the carrack with the crooked mast, the one the demon had broken.
Tobin wasn’t really playing, though. He was waiting and watching the closed door of his father’s room across the corridor. Nari had closed the door when they went in to talk, making it impossible to eavesdrop from here.
Tobin’s breath came out in a puff of white vapor as he sighed and bent to straighten the ship’s little sail. It was cold this morning; he could smell frost on the early morning breeze through the open window. He opened his mouth and blew several short breaths, making brief clouds over the citadel.
The toy city, a gift from his father on his last name day, was his most treasured possession. It stood almost as tall as Tobin and took up half of this disused bedchamber next to his own. And it wasn’t just a toy, either. It was a miniature version of Ero itself, which his father had made for him.
“Since you’re too young to go to Ero, I’ve brought Ero to you!” he’d said when he gave it to him. “You may one day live here, even defend it, so you must know the place.”
Since then, they’d spent many happy hours together, learning the streets and wards. Houses made from wooden blocks clustered thickly up the steep sides of the citadel, and there were open spaces painted green for the public gardens and pasturage. The great market square had a temple to the Four surrounded by traders’ booths made of twigs and bright scraps of cloth. Baked clay livestock of all sorts populated the little enclosures. The blue-painted harbor that jutted from one side of the city’s base outside the many-gated wall was filled with pretty little ships that could be pushed about with a pole.
The top of the hill was flat and ringed with another wall called the Palatine Circle, though it wasn’t exactly round. Inside lay a great clutter of houses, palaces, and temples, all with different names and stories. There were more gardens here, as well as a fish pool made from a silver mirror and an exercise field for the Royal Companions. This last interested Tobin very much; the Companions were boys who lived at the Old Palace with his cousin, Prince Korin, and trained to be warriors. His father and Tharin had been Companions to King Erius when they were young, too. As soon as Tobin had learned this, he wanted to go at once but was told, as usual, that he must wait until he was older.
The biggest building on the Palatine was the Old Palace. This had a roof that came off, and several rooms inside. There was a throne room with a tiny wooden throne, of course, and a tiny tablet of real gold beside it, set in a little wooden frame.
Tobin lifted this out and squinted at the fine words engraved on it. He couldn’t read them, but he knew them by heart: “So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’ line defends and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated.” Tobin knew the legend of King Thelátimos and the Oracle by heart, too. It was one of his father’s favorite stories.
The city was populated by scores of little wooden stick people. He loved these the best of anything in the city, and smuggled whole families of them back to his bed to hold and talk to under the covers at night while he waited for Nari to come up to bed. Tobin put the golden tablet back, then lined up half a dozen stick people on the practice ground, imagining himself among the Companions. Opening the flat, velvet-lined box his father had brought home from another journey, he took out the special people and lined them up on the palace roof to watch the Companions at their exercises. These people—The Ones Who Came Before—were much fancier than the stick ones; all but one was made of silver. They had painted faces and clothes and each carried the same tiny sword at their side, the Sword of Queen Ghërilain. His father had taught him their names and stories, too. The silver man was King Thelátimos and next to him in the box was his daughter, Ghërilain the Founder—made queen of Skala because of Oracle’s golden words. After Ghërilain came Queen Tamír, who was poisoned by her brother who’d wanted to be king, then an Agnalain and another Ghërilain, then six more whose names and order he still mixed up, and then Grandmama Agnalain the Second. The first and last queens were his favorites. The first Ghërilain had the finest crown; Grandmama Agnalain had the nicest painting on her cloak.
The last figure in the box was a man carved of wood. He had a black beard like Tobin’s father, a crown, and two names: Your Uncle Erius and The Present King.
Tobin turned the king over in his hands. The demon liked to break this one. The little wooden man would be standing on the Palace roof or lying in his place in the box when suddenly his head would fly off or he’d split right down the middle. After many mendings, Your Uncle was all misshapen.
Tobin sighed again and put them all carefully back in the box. Not even the city could hold his attention today. He turned and stared at the door, willing it to open. Nari had gone in there ages ago! At last, unable to stand the suspense any longer, he crept across the corridor to listen.
The rushes covering the floor were old and crunched beneath his slippers no matter how carefully he tiptoed. He looked quickly up and down the short passage. To his left lay the stairs to the great hall. He could hear Captain Tharin and old Mynir laughing about something there. To his right, the door beside his father’s was tightly shut and he hoped this one stayed that way; his mama was having another one of her bad spells.
Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he pressed his ear to the carved oak panel and listened.
“What harm can there be, my lord?” That was Nari. Tobin wiggled with delight. He’d nagged for weeks to get her to do battle on his behalf.
His father rumbled something, then he heard Nari again, gently cajoling the way she did sometimes. “I know what she said, my lord, but with all respect, he’s growing up strange kept apart like this. I can’t think she wants that!”
Who’s strange? Tobin wondered. And who was this mysterious “she” who might object to him going to town with Father? It was his name day, after all. He was seven today; surely old enough at last to make the journey. And it wasn’t so far to Alestun; when he picnicked on the roof with Nari, they could look east over the valley and see the cluster of roofs beyond the forest’s edge. On a cold day he could even make out smoke rising from the hearth fires there. It seemed a small thing to ask for a present, just to go, and it was all he wanted.
The voices went on, too soft now to make out.
Please! he mouthed, making a luck sign to the Four.
The brush of cold fingers against Tobin’s cheek made him jump. Turning, he was dismayed to find his mother standing right there behind him. She was almost like a ghost herself, a ghost Tobin could see. She was thin and pale, with nervous hands that fluttered about like dying birds when she wasn’t sewing the pretty rag dolls, or clutching the ugly old one she was never without. It was tucked under her arm just now and seemed to be staring at him, even though it had no face.
He was as surprised to find her here as he was to see her free. When Tobin’s father wa
s home, she always kept to herself and avoided him. Tobin liked it better when she did.
It was second nature for him now to steal a quick look into his mama’s eyes; Tobin had learned young to gauge the moods of those around him, especially his mother’s. Usually she simply looked at him like a stranger, cold and distant. When the demon threw things or pinched him, she would just hug her ugly old doll and look away. She almost never hugged Tobin, though on the very bad days, she spoke to him as if he were still a baby, or as if he were a girl. On those days Father would shut her up in her chamber and Nari would make the special teas for her to drink.
But her eyes were clear now, he saw. She was almost smiling as she held out a hand to him. “Come, little love.”
She’d never spoken to him like that before. Tobin glanced nervously at his father’s door, but she bent and captured his hand in hers. Her grip was just a little too tight as she drew him to the locked door at the end of the corridor, the one that led upstairs.
“I’m not allowed up there,” Tobin told her, his voice hardly more than a squeak. Nari said the floors were unsound up there, and that there were rats and spiders big as his fist.
“You may come up with me,” she said, producing a large key from her skirts and opening the forbidden door.
Stairs led up to a corridor that looked very much like the one below, with doors on either side, but this one was dusty and dank-smelling, and the small, high-set windows were tightly shuttered.
Tobin glanced through an open door as they passed and saw a sagging bed with tattered hangings, but no rats. At the end of the corridor his mother opened a smaller door and led him up a very steep, narrow stairway lit by a few arrow slits in the walls. There was hardly enough light to make out the worn steps, but Tobin knew where they were.