StarCrossed. Part 6

Hopping on the icy inn room floor, I climbed into my borrowed dress and hiked my skirts into my belt. We'd leave the main road today; if I wanted to light out for Yeris Volbann on my own, the moment was close. If I could slip away from the ever-watchful Nemair and their equally attentive retinue. So far I'd not had even a moment's privacy among these people, let alone a full hour when n.o.body was paying attention to me.

Seeing me dressed, Meri dutifully held out her arms to receive her own traveling costume, mimicking the arrangement of my skirts. She had started off full of excitement, delighted by the grand adventure, but the farther we moved from the familiar safety of Favom, the more anxious she seemed. I couldn't blame her: She was leaving the Decath, the only family she'd known for the last five years, and I knew she wasn't sure exactly what to make of the ones who'd come to take their place.

I'd be grateful if you'd be a friend to her. Pox. I slipped beside her and put a tentative hand on her shoulder, steeling myself to keep it there as a swirl of magic flared up around my fingers. I had discovered that even wearing Meri's silver bracelet, I could still see the magic on her whenever we touched. The silver didn't seem to inhibit how magic reacted to me, or my ability to detect it. She turned her gaze from the window and tried to smile, but a quivering lip betrayed her.

"All right!" I backed off. "Let's fetch some breakfast."

"I'm not very hungry," she said.

Meri could afford to skip a meal or two, but some of us woke up starving as a routine and knew that you ate when you had the chance. "I'm getting food for us. Don't eat if you don't want, but who knows what they have planned for lunch."

The inn's common room was surprisingly crowded. This place was remote, and the season for travel was waning, but apparently the colorful wagons and the knot of retainers camped outside with our cargo had drawn out the neighborhood curious. Mostly forest folk, in for a nip before heading to do whatever it was forest folk did. Not the richest pickings, unfortunately. A couple of the liveried Nemair guards sat together at a table near the door. I recognized the big young one from yesterday. Phandre had spent almost the whole day trying to get him to help her forget Raffin.

The mood in the room was strange; most people kept to them selves or smiled at their neighbors, but a current of tension swirled through the diners. I climbed up onto a tall stool at the bar as I waited for our food.

"I'm just telling you what I heard," a wiry man in a much-patched jerkin was saying. "They've increased patrols on the roads, and they're checking everyone's pa.s.sage licenses. Seems they're on the hunt for somebody special."

I tensed. If they were checking pa.s.sports, that meant I was stuck with the Nemair. The patrols we'd pa.s.sed on the road so far had been happy to wave a n.o.ble party along with a nod and a bow. But a girl all alone would draw suspicion.

Think ahead, Digger. I had to draft myself some doc.u.ments, just as soon as I could lay my hands on some paper. And a magistrate's seal. Pox and h.e.l.ls.

"I've heard it's Prince Wierolf, trying to sneak back into the country."

"Why sneak?" put in a heavyset laborer coming to join the conversation, a mug of ale in each hand. "Don't he own the whole d.a.m.n place?"

"Not yet - not till Bardolph says he does."

"Which he won't. Old mule. G.o.ddess save him, and all that, of course."

"I heard he off and married some Talancan girl." Somebody gave a chuckle. "I'd be sneaking too."

His neighbor popped him in the head and scoffed. "That's twaddle, and you know it. Milord's met the man and says if it don't involve books or horses, Wierolf's not interested."

Did that include politics, religion, and ruling Llyvraneth? I wondered.

"It's not the prince the patrols are after," said a small, bald man dressed a little better than his friends. The local bailiff, maybe. He withdrew a notice from his coat and smoothed it on the table. "They're looking for a.s.sa.s.sins. Rumor has it somebody's finally offed Prince Wierolf."

I swung my gaze his way - and I was not alone. The Nemair guards were watching. One of them said something to his partner, who rose and headed straight outside.

Two Ales said, "That's been all over the road to Yeris. They say the city's papered with these notices. Whoever done it's calling themselves the Huntsmen."

"Is that one huntsman, or a pack of 'em?" asked the bailiff.

He shrugged. "It takes a pair, don't it? Kill a royal and claim Zet's favor for it?" Zet wasn't just the G.o.ddess of hunting and war, she was the patroness of royalty. Murdering a prince in her name? That even sounded bad to me.

"Well, I'll believe it when I see a corpse," said a dark-featured man across the room. "We've heard this rumor before. Just people trying to stir up trouble."

"Or stir up dissenters," the bailiff said quietly. "Toss down a meaty story like that and see who comes out to bite."

"See if they can't stir up a nest of Sarists, you mean." The dark fellow's voice was low, but it carried.

"Well, he's their favorite, isn't he? And they were active around here."

"Come now," said the barman. "Surely His Majesty has better things to do with his time than pick at old wounds and bother the fine, upstanding folk of the Carskadon Mountains. And surely those fine, upstanding folk have better things to do than speculate about their betters. I know for a fact that you, Merc Kessl, have a fence that needs mending. If your wife comes looking for you here, I will tell her all I know."

The wiry fellow stood up from the table. "Aye, you would too. I'll see you, lads." He raised his drink. "G.o.ddess keep Prince Wierolf!"

n.o.body matched the toast.

Two Ales spoke quietly. "Careful, Merc - that's treason. If it ain't heresy."

Merc shrugged. "And do you see any Greenmen here, then? When the prince comes through here - and he will - we'll be free to worship as we always have in these mountains. We don't need a king from the city to teach us how to pray."

"Still, what if it is true?" a small man in a brown coat was saying. "The prince could be dead for months before anybody even noticed he was missing. We should do something."

I didn't hear the rest, since the serving girl appeared with my tray. I followed her to Meri's room, helping myself to a coin or two on my way. I wasn't sure if this lady-in-waiting job paid anything beyond room and board.

Upstairs, Meri was standing in her open doorway, looking down over the rail into the common room. She was quiet and thoughtful as I arranged our plates, not even noticing I took the n.o.b's share of the eggs.

"Do you think it's true?" she finally asked. "About Prince Wierolf? Do you really think they've - a.s.sa.s.sinated him?"

Startled, I looked up from my food. "There are always rumors like that. I wouldn't worry about it."

"But it might be true?" Her voice was soft and urgent, eyes begging me for answers.

Sure, it might be true. But for some reason I didn't want to say that to Meri. "It's just a rumor, some bored n.o.bs - people trying to make a name for themselves, playing on everyone's fears."

"Why would they do that?"

"To scare people, stir them up, sow unrest -" I broke off with a shrug. "You shouldn't think about that."

She turned to me. "But it's our duty to think about it, as the n.o.bility. It's our sacred responsibility to protect our people and our land. I have to understand these things, Celyn." G.o.ds help me, she really believed it. "My parents are heroes, you know. They fought in the last war. I must aspire to be like them, mustn't I?"

She was watching me anxiously, waiting for my answer. But I just bowed my head, saying, "Yes, milady," and thinking that we were all in a lot more trouble than we'd bargained for, if we were counting on Merista Nemair to protect us.

Breakfast was interrupted a few moments later by a knock on Meri's door. "Milady!" a sharp voice barked through the wood. "Your father bids you make haste to depart."

Meri swung the door open. "Now?"

The big guard - Berdal, I thought his name was - nodded. "Aye, lady. He's in a fair rush."

Meri frowned. "Because - because of what they said down there?"

The guard's cool expression never faltered. "Ach, no, lady. They've spotted snow in the mountains above us, and there's a risk of avalanche if we don't get through the pa.s.s tonight. Tell your girl to pack your things, and get right down to the horses."

Back on the road, taller and taller trees sailed by the coach windows, black-green things with fierce, triangular bodies that marched like a ma.s.sive army across the foothills. The closest I'd ever come to trees like this was the great ash that grew at the heart of the Celystra. The Hanging Ash, we called it. It was supposed to be sacred to Celys, but I couldn't imagine what she'd think of it now, its roots watered with the blood of heretics. With Meri chattering away in my ear, I watched the road to Yeris Volbann roll past about noon, and with it my last hope of escape.

The party bound for Bryn Shaer was small. In addition to the five of us who made up Meri's strange family a.s.sembly, a handful of servants and some dozen guards rode alongside, all clad in the silver-and-black Nemair livery. Supply wagons brought up the rear. I used the endless hours to try to learn as much as I could about my new company, which was difficult from my position trapped inside the coach, the only member of our party who couldn't ride. Occasionally I could coax Phandre into riding with me and sharing some tidbit of information, but it was never long before she remembered I was beneath her notice, leav ing me with little to do but watch the unwelcoming landscape close around me, and wonder what in Tiboran's name I had gotten myself into. She had been included out of sympathy as well; I'd discovered that she was what we called a "loose" n.o.b - orphaned and unattached to any other family. She was as lucky as I the Nemair had taken her in for the winter, though she spared no opportunity to remind me of her superiority.

I thought back over my first meeting with Lord Antoch and Lady Lyllace. Anyone in Gerse would have tied me up and beaten me b.l.o.o.d.y, demanding I produce proof of my claimed a.s.sociations before they strangled me and threw my body into the Oss. But with these people, if I said I was a jeweler's daughter, I was a jeweler's daughter. It baffled.

The wagon jostled to an uneven stop, and I heard Merista's voice. "Celyn, come have a look!"

Hopping on one foot to shake a cramp out of my leg, I stumbled out of the coach and joined the party on the road. They cl.u.s.tered at the mouth of a precipice, gazing into the distance below. Meri saw me and pulled me closer.

Impossibly far below us, in a dizzying swoop of trees spotted with crisp gray juts of rock, nestled a miniature model of a castle. Ringed with a double row of heavy stone walls studded with three squat towers, it sat hunched against the black stone of the mountain. At the base of the wall, the cliff dropped straight away to nothing.

"Celyn, get back - you'll fall."

"I never fall," I said, shaking off Meri's arm.

Antoch leaned in beside me. "That's home now. Bryn Shaer, gem of the Carskadons. Another two days' ride, if the weather holds."

In the distance, a few hills and dips past the castle, I spotted a gap in the mountains, a glimpse of open sky. "What's that there?"

"The Breijarda Velde," Antoch said. "The Wide Pa.s.s through the mountains between Briddja Nul and Kellespau. Bryn Shaer was built to defend it."

"It looks like it's out in the middle of nowhere. How can it defend anything?"

Antoch gave his rumbling chuckle. "It doesn't defend anything now, girl. But back in its day - you can't see it from here, but there's a road leading to and from the castle, and the pa.s.s is a straight shot from the guard towers. Anything coming east or west through the mountains, Bryn Shaer has a clear view of it. Critically important in the winter, when the Gerse road is closed by snow."

"The pa.s.s is the only way in or out, all winter?" I said.

"And the tunnels," Meri put in. "There's a network of tunnels under the castle, leading all the way to Breijardarl."

"There used to be a network of tunnels." Lady Nemair had stepped forward. "They've been closed off as long as we've held the property, and we haven't restored them. So don't any of you girls get the idea to go exploring. Those tunnels are dangerous."

Dangerous tunnels? Bryn Shaer was looking brighter by the moment.

Carskadon means "black mountain," and already I was feeling the pressure from that gloomy dark stone. Gerse isn't a pretty city, but there's something about its dull gray buildings that feels . . . normal. Safe. This wild landscape of jutting escarpments and sheer drops into endless nothingness looked like the G.o.ds had ripped open the earth in some fit of hunger for what lay below, and left the rent pieces scattered and twisted behind them.

Berdal, the young guard a.s.signed to watch over Meri and her attendants, was apparently native to these mountains and enjoyed pointing out their fascinating hazards to the foreigners of the party. Between bandits lurking among the trees, starving bears ravaging campsites, and avalanches - crushing falls of snow and rock that struck without warning to bury the unsuspecting under a frozen white death - I was starting to wonder why I'd been so worried about Greenmen.

As we climbed, it grew colder; we woke to the landscape frosted silver and a bite to the air, and Antoch pointed out clouds he said were dropping snow on distant peaks. Through breaks in the rock, I glimpsed a night sky with moons that were cold and watching, the stars flickering so close you could almost touch them.

"The scholars at Breijardarl used to study the stars, did you know?" Lady Nemair said as we sat up one night after dinner. We knelt at the fire, the shadows leaping just outside the ring of light. "They named the brightest of them, charted their course in the night. They even speculated that our own sun is a star not unlike its neighbors."

How could that be? "They all look so tiny," I said.

"The moons look small too," Lady Nemair said, "but it would take many thousands of them to equal even the brightness of one sun."

I stared at her until she laughed. Laughed! "I know, you're going to tell me that's heresy. It's not heresy, Celyn, it's astronomy. A science."

"A science they bleed people for."

She grew sober. "That's true enough. But it won't always be that way. Have faith." She said that last bit cheerfully, then told me more stories of the wonders of the college that had once stood at Breijardarl, before King Bardolph declared that knowledge heretical and illegal, and scattered Llyvraneth's scholars to every corner of the known world.

"They taught magic there too, didn't they?" I asked. A dangerous question, but one that seemed tantalizing and mysterious in this remote starlit night.

She nodded. "Not for hundreds of years, of course - there's nothing to teach anymore. But back when this land had magic, certainly they did."

Nothing to teach anymore. I glanced across the fire, where I could barely see Meri sitting with her father and the guardsmen. I spun the silver bracelet on my wrist, and said something guaranteed to earn a Celystra girl the cane. "I heard - people say that magic is coming back." I raised my eyes to see her reaction, but her face was still and calm as the face of a moon.

"I think they've always said that. If it were true, I think it would be a very good thing for a lot of people, and not just in this country."

"Just not Bardolph."

Lady Nemair barked out a short, sharp laugh, then covered her mouth with her white hand. Smiling, she rose and smoothed down her skirts. "That bracelet suits you, Celyn. Good night."

I watched her leave, wishing she'd stayed for me to ask more questions. Every child in Llyvraneth knew we lived in a world of dying magic, no matter what the king and the priests tried to tell us. The Celystra's official position was that magic did not - could not - exist, that Sar had never knelt upon the earth and breathed her power into our world, that those who claimed otherwise were lying or delusional. Dangerous heretics spreading their blasphemy like a plague. Centuries ago Llyvraneth had overflowed with Sar's power, until her temples and priestesses rivaled Celys's own. But now only faint traces remained in the odd charmed antique, the odd n.o.bbish girl, the odd thief - rare, but enough to send the church and the king into fits, until Sar's few remaining faithful had been driven from the island, forced into hiding, or bled on the gallows.

A generation ago, a few powerful families decided Bardolph had gone too far, and had staged a rebellion under Sar's banner. It was hard to say whether any of those rebel Sarists had much to do with magic themselves - and it hadn't mattered anyway, since their strike against the Crown had failed, and they were all soundly crushed by the king's Green Army.

After that, whatever magic there was in Llyvraneth retreated even farther underground, until it was impossible to learn anything about it; that knowledge had crumbled to dust in the abandoned mages' college at Breijardarl, burned in bonfires in city circles, and been locked tight away in convent libraries. I'd never understood this odd skill of mine - there was never anyone I could ask about it, of course. Or show it to. Or trust with it.

Kind as Lady Lyllace Nemair seemed, she was not that person.

Finally one evening, under the faint light of Mend-kaal and a waxing Sar, we crossed one last hump of crumbling rock and rumbled into Nemair lands. I was on the wrong side of the coach and could see nothing, but I felt the caravan stop suddenly, as if we'd all sucked in our breath at once. I leaned my head out the wagon and tried to see something, but there was only gray-dark sky above and gray-dark stone all around.

"Are we here?" I pulled my head back in and looked at Phandre.

"Looks like it." Phandre climbed out of her seat and pushed past me to the door.

Close to, that tiny miniature castle we'd seen across the valleys was huge. Not as big as Gerse's royal palace, of course, but nearly the size of the Celystra. Mismatched buildings of stone and brick piled in on one another, watchtowers crowding into walls, all crisscrossed by narrow stone walkways and bridges, until the castle seemed even more a part of the ruined landscape than the mountains themselves. A tight, rocky path twined up the steep slope, the only approach from the treacherously narrow ridge below.

We'd come to a stop on a level plain that spread out around the castle, surrounding it with a great ring of lands and grounds. Still, everyone dismounted and milled about in a tight cl.u.s.ter, as if afraid to stray too far from the safety of the crowd. The night and the cliffs and the utter impossible size of the place made it seem risky to take even one step in any direction but toward the castle.

But I saw that tall white tower, with its sharp narrow fretwork, and suddenly wanted to see what Bryn Shaer looked like from up there, wondered what was behind all those tiny starlit windows and iron- barred doors. I pushed through the crowd, leaving Phandre and Meri behind. Lord Nemair fell in step beside me, his dark mare whickering uncertainly.

"Celyn." He nodded to me. "Long journey. How are you bearing up, then?"

"Very well, milord. Thank you."

Even in the darkness I could see his broad cheeks part in a smile. "Celyn, my dear, you are a very good liar." He gave me a clap on the shoulder that sent me stumbling, and led the way to the castle gates.

The high wall, maybe three times the height of a man and begging to be climbed, parted in a wide double wooden-and-iron gate, large enough to drive the wagons through, three abreast. Liveried guards in Nemair black and silver ushered us through to an open courtyard where torches flickered over a mix of cobbles and lawn. I saw a paddock marked out at one end of the courtyard, while in the shadow of the white tower stood a great half-timbered lodge, still hugged by scaffolding, built around a curved center court.

"Planning an attack?"

Meri's mother's voice in my ear made me jump. "What?"

Lady Nemair laughed. "You looked like you were scrutinizing the Lodge pretty severely, there, Celyn."

I bit back my reply - because that was exactly what I'd been doing: measuring up the walls of the new building for handholds and toeholds and counting windows, just as if cracking this building were one of Tegen's jobs.

"How far is the pa.s.s - the Breijarda Velde?"

"Three miles," Lady Nemair said cheerfully. "You can see it from the wall, just there."