The anger returned and I forced it down, knowing it to be a traitor. “My mistress is very beautiful.”
“I am. But you do not desire me, I feel it. And I know why.” She raised her gaze, searching my face. “You see it don’t you? You feel it?”
“Mistress?”
“The weariness. Who would have thought that I should grow so tired? So utterly weary. You would not believe how many have been drained to give me so many years, so much life wasted to keep a tired old woman on this earth, cursed to marry a murderous fool and witness his slaughters. That was the bargain we made, you see? Power for years, though only for those who wear the red of course, and even then only a select few. It made us the true power, the Council a convenient fiction. We, the endlessly young, and ever more weary, are the real power, for now they clamour for our favour. All those red-clad idiots, begging for a chance at the same bargain. We think we are slave owners, we are fools. We are the slaves. The great gift we bargained for was the greatest of chains.”
Her hand came up, swift and smooth, and I felt the chill of a steel blade against my neck. “You spurn me,” she said in a wounded tone. “Lusting after some book-loving corpse when you could have me. Do you know how many lovers I’ve had? How many men have begged just to plant a single kiss on my foot?”
“I will happily kiss my mistress’s foot,” I said, words softly spoken for the knife blade was pressed hard into my flesh and I felt a single drop of blood trickle down my neck.
“But you don’t want to. You want your Alpiran bitch back. Maybe I’ll send you to meet her. Would you like that?”
I never understood why, and I have tried very hard for many years to comprehend it, but at that moment all the fear fled and I felt what she felt, a great and terrible weariness. I do recall that I knew my death was now unavoidable. Her husband’s anger or the overseer’s whip would see me dead tomorrow or, if I was extremely fortunate, the day after.
I stepped back from her, opening my arms as the blood seeped from the shallow cut she had given me. “There was no poetess,” I said. “No woman. But I did love, and the man I loved died, killed by the man who I hope with all my heart comes here now to kill you and that vile wretch you call your husband. You offer me a gift, Mistress. I welcome it, for it means I will no longer have to stomach the thought of sharing the same air as you.”
She stared at me for a long moment as I marvelled at the steady beat of my heart. Is this courage? I wondered. Is this what the Hope Killer feels when he rides to battle? This strange calm.
“I often look for distraction amongst the slaves,” she said. “I find it dispels the weariness, for a time. And you are so very talented.” She tossed the knife away, sending it clattering across the floor. “Go and write some more flattering nonsense,” she said, slumping onto the cushions with a tired wave of her hand. “It’ll probably buy you a few more days.”
◆ ◆ ◆
I was summoned back to the upper deck barely two hours later, by which time my newly discovered calm had evaporated. Fornella sat next to her husband, apparently sober now, and dressed more appropriately in an elegant gown of red-and-black chiffon. She gave me the barest glance and turned back to the general. “The overseers are properly educated, I assume?”
The general seemed pensive, his time with the pleasure slave having done little to ease his temper. “Leave the practicalities to me, true-heart,” he muttered. “Your family will get its share of any we find, as it always does.” His gaze fixed on me and the scroll in my hand. “Your latest account, scribbling slave?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Well give it here, let’s see if you continue to earn my indulgence.” He was unrolling the scroll when a guard called out the approach of another messenger. “Finally.” He tossed the scroll onto the map table, standing with a studied air of stoic reflection, the dignified commander accepting news of his hard-won victory.
“Has the witch been captured?” he asked the messenger, looking off into the middle distance and speaking in an almost wistful tone. “Or did she die fighting? I expect she did. Strange that I should find room in my heart to admire such a creature . . .”
“Forgive me, Honoured General!” the messenger blurted. He wore the armour of an officer in the Free Cavalry, his face tense and slicked with sweat. “I come with graver tidings. A rider was found by one of our scout troops this morning, the only survivor of the Twelfth Free Sword Battalion. It seems he was captured and then set free. He brings word of an army marching towards us with great haste.”
The general stared at him. “An army? What army?”
“Their number is estimated at over fifty thousand.” The officer took a folded piece of parchment from his belt and held it out to the general. “The man was also given a message for you, Honoured General.”
The general flicked a hand at me. “Read it. I don’t speak their babble.”
I took the parchment from the officer and unfolded it. “The message is in Volarian, Master,” I said.
“Just read it.”
I briefly scanned the contents and felt my already speeding heart increase the pitch of its hammering. I cast a furtive glance at the scroll I had given him earlier, wondering if I could contrive to retrieve it in the confusion that would doubtless follow my reading of this message.
“To the commander of Volarian forces currently besieging the city of Alltor,” I began, hoping he hadn’t noticed the slight hesitation. “You are hereby ordered to disarm, surrender all captives and stand ready to receive justice for your many crimes. If you comply with this order, your men will be spared. You will not. Signed under the King’s Word, Tower Lord of the Northern Reaches, Vaelin Al Sorna.”
CHAPTER ONE
Vaelin
The beauty of the forest was revealed in daylight, the sun painting an ever-changing canvas of dappled clearings and great old trees, gently flowing streams tracking to shallow waterfalls and pools of clear water. Vaelin felt the army’s fears abate somewhat as they marched, won over by the unspoiled majesty of the forest, even giving voice to a few marching songs, though the often profane content seemed out of place amongst the trees, like a curse whispered in an Alpiran temple. The blood-song had never lifted from the moment he entered the trees, soft and melodious but also carrying a graver note, not in warning but respect. So old, he wondered. Far older than the people who worship it.
Four days in and Hera Drakil advised they were about halfway through, this being the narrowest stretch of forest between the Realm and the Reaches. Vaelin had given up trying to judge just how many Seordah travelled with them, and asking their guide proved pointless as the Seordah saw little meaning in numbers. “Many,” the hawk-faced man had said with a shrug. “Many and many.”
Although his soldiers may have been growing accustomed to the forest, his other recruits proved less than enamoured. “How much longer?” demanded Lorkan, forgetting his usual effusive courtesies. There was a deep line in the centre of his youthful brow and his eyes had the sunken look brought on by constant pain. Marken and Cara seemed only marginally less discomfited, both fidgeting and restless as they sat eating their cold breakfast. Weaver alone seemed unconcerned, hands busy with the hemp the Seordah had provided. For some reason he had abandoned baskets for a tightly bound length of strong rope, already ten feet long and growing every day.
“Four days only,” Vaelin assured Lorkan.
“Faith, I don’t know if I can stand it.” He rubbed his fingers against his temples. “Can’t you feel it, my lord?”
“Feel what?”
“The weight,” Cara said, breaking her usual silence. “The weight of such a great gift.”
“Whose gift?” Vaelin asked.
The look on her face told him she wondered if any awe she may have felt might have been misplaced. “The forest, Lord Vaelin. The forest has a gift all its own, covering every tree, branch and leaf.
” She clasped her hands together, forcing a faint smile. “I daresay we’ll get used to it. The Seordah seem to cope well enough.”
Why them and not me? he thought later. Why do I feel nothing but welcome?
“Because it welcomes you,” Dahrena told him that night after their reading lesson. “It knows you, sees your soul.”
“You talk as if it’s alive.”
The look she gave him was a harsher echo of Cara’s. “Of course it’s alive. Ancient life surrounds us on all sides, for hundreds of miles, nothing but life, breathing, feeling and seeing. It sees you and likes what it sees.”
“Did it see you? When you first came here.”
“I was a child then, when father found me. I thought it was a dream, the wolf, the forest’s welcome.” She fell silent, returning to binding a fletching to one of her arrows. Like the Seordah, she made her own, hands moving with unconscious skill and precision. Drakil had given her a bow some days before, much the same as his own but with pictograms etched into the stave, at first glance crude representations of the beasts of the forest but possessing an elegant clarity on closer inspection. From her reverent expression as she accepted the weapon he deduced it held some great significance for them both.
“Do you remember a time before?” he asked. “Your childhood amongst your people?”
“The Lonak are not my people. I can remember no more than a few words of their language. I recall a village, somewhere in the mountains. A number of women, harsh and quick with the back of their hands, but also kind sometimes. I recall a night of flames and screams and blood, I think they died that night. There was a man with a knife, walking slowly towards me, black against the flames . . . then there was the wolf. I think he killed the man with the knife, though I have no memory of it. He came and crouched down before me and I felt an urging to climb onto his back.
“We ran for such a long time, me clinging to his fur, the air cold on my face. I wasn’t afraid, I was joyful, and sad when it ended somewhere dark and surrounded by trees. I got down from his back and he blessed me, his tongue covering my face, banishing fear. Then he was gone. Father found me in the morning, the first time the Seordah had ever allowed a Marelim Sil to walk the forest, and I was almost the first thing he saw.”
From her tone he deduced she had long reconciled herself to the conclusion he had just drawn. This was no accident. We are both children of the wolf.
“How many times have you seen it?” he asked.
“Just twice, including the day we came here. And you?”
“Four.” Though there may have been one other time, when it was living in a statue . . . “Every time it has saved me, as it saved you.”
Her fingers became still and he saw her fear, the same tension he had seen when they first confronted Wise Bear. “For what?”
“I don’t know. For this perhaps, a war that needed us to fight it.”
“I was so young when he blessed me it’s only now I come to realise how it felt, the sense of a being so old I could never truly comprehend it. He must have seen countless petty feuds between the strange two-legged furless things that run around the earth, countless wars. Why is this one different?”
He recalled Aspect Arlyn’s words on the fate of the Realm when he had questioned the wisdom of supporting Janus’s mad war: It will certainly fall. Not to warring fiefs once more but to utter ruin, the earth scorched, the forests burned to cinder and all the people, Realm Folk, Seordah and Lonak dead. What else would you have us do?
“Because this one will claim his world as well as ours,” he said. “I think we both know we face other enemies than the Volarians.”
“Hence the good brother’s continued presence.” She glanced over at Brother Harlick, engaged in an animated conversation with Alornis. His sister seemed to find the scholar’s inexhaustible knowledge fascinating and could spend hours assailing him with questions in the as-yet-vain hope she could stump him.
“He knows far more than he shares,” Dahrena said.
“He’ll share it,” Vaelin assured her. “If I have to, I’ll wring every ounce of knowledge from him until he has no more breath to speak it.”
◆ ◆ ◆
He spent the next morning travelling with the Eorhil, the horse-people leading their mounts through the trees and displaying almost as much discomfort as the gifted. “Horses can’t see the sky,” Sanesh Poltar said, smoothing a hand over his stallion’s head, the animal’s ears constantly twitching and his eyes wide. “Don’t like it. Neither do I.”
“The Eorhil are not welcome in the forest?” Vaelin asked.
Wisdom gave a soft laugh as she walked alongside the war chief. “We never have reason to come here. Eorhil and Seordah speak much the same tongue and trade for skins and weapons, but we are not the same people. They are of the forest, we are of the plains.”
“Do the Eorhil have stories,” Vaelin asked, “of the time before the plains, before the Marelim Sil came?”
Sanesh and Wisdom exchanged an amused glance. “Never a time before the plains,” Sanesh explained. “Eorhil always ride the plains. Always will. There was a time the Seordah were not so many in the forest, so it’s said by the grandfathers who speak of their grandfathers. But we had no knowledge of the Marelim Sil until they came to dig for stones in the hills.”
“But you do know of the blind woman?” Vaelin said to Wisdom.
Both Eorhil instantly became subdued, Sanesh striding on a ways and tugging his horse along.
Wisdom walked in silence for several moments, face set and closed. When she spoke again her tone was heavy with reluctance. “There’s a city, a ruin on the fringes of the Lonak Dominion. The Eorhil do not like the place and stay away, the grandfathers tell of troubled dreams and madness for any who venture there. But as a girl I was ever curious, for curiosity breeds wisdom, although I was yet to earn my name. So I journeyed there, alone, finding just the remnants of something that may have been wondrous in its time. I made my camp amongst the ruins and a woman came to my fire, a Seordah woman with empty eyes, although they could see me. I was not overly afraid for the Seordah are known to birth more gifted than the Eorhil. She said she also had journeyed far to view these ruins and we spent the night exchanging what little knowledge we had about the place. She pointed me to a certain stone amongst the rubble, very small, small enough to carry in both hands in fact, but also perfectly square, the surface smooth and undamaged. I asked her if she wanted it but she just shook her head, ‘This is for you,’ she said. So I picked it up.”
“It took you somewhere,” Vaelin prompted when the old woman fell silent once again.
Wisdom shook her head. “No. It gave me . . . knowledge. So much knowledge, all at once. Your language, the Lonak tongue, even the words spoken by the people we go to fight, and many more besides. I can recite every catechism of your Faith and every word in the Ten Books of the World Father, name all the Alpiran gods and relate every legend told by the Lonak. There was no insight to it, no context, just knowledge. It . . . hurt. So much that I fainted. When I woke the blind woman had gone, but the knowledge hadn’t.”
“So you are gifted?”
She shook her head with a small sigh. “Cursed, some might say. More puzzled than anything. That stone, that small perfect stone, filled with knowledge about the people of this world, but it was so old, crafted long before any of those languages were spoken as they are now. Who made it? And why?”
“Do you still have it?”
She raised her head, eyes searching for a gap in the canopy, no doubt hoping for a glimpse of sky. “No,” she said, smiling a little as a small patch of blue appeared above. “I found a heavier stone and smashed it to dust.”
◆ ◆ ◆
The forest began to thin the next day, there was a noticeable widening of ground between the trees and clearings grew more numerous, although it remained dense in comparison to t
he Urlish. The mood of the men lightened further, the availability of open ground enabling more regiments to camp together, bringing a welcome sense of security. The forest’s charms may have won many hearts, but the basic fear of it remained, the ever-present knowledge that they didn’t belong here. The comparatively open ground also enabled Vaelin to gain a better appreciation for the Seordah’s numbers as he moved from clearing to clearing.
“Has to be well over eight thousand of them,” Nortah opined that evening at the council of captains.
“Ten thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two,” Brother Hollun reported. “Those that have remained within sight long enough to count that is. Bringing the total strength of the army to just over thirty thousand men.”
“I was wondering if we shouldn’t give the army a name,” Nortah said. “The Army of the North or something.”
Vaelin glanced at Captain Adal, who gave a nod. “Binding the men under a single name couldn’t hurt morale, my lord.”
“Very well,” Vaelin said. “I’ll ask my sister to design a banner, something suitably fierce.” His eyes tracked over the map. “The Seordah advise we are but one day’s march from Nilsael. Captain Orven, take your men and scout east. Captain Adal, send a company of North Guard west and take another south yourself. Any Volarian forces of appreciable size within thirty miles are to be reported to me as soon as possible.” He looked at Dahrena. “We will, of course, require deeper reconnaissance.”
“You’ll have it tonight, my lord.”
“My thanks, my lady.” He moved back from the table, addressing them all. “In the morning a full inspection of kit and weapons will be conducted and we will march into the Realm in battle order. Make sure every man under your command understands that we are now marching to war and like to find it in short order. If any were thinking of desertion, this is their last chance, though I wouldn’t advise making the return journey through the forest.”