The Hidden Stars Part 14

But Sinderian shook her head. "Better to bury it under the midden, and leave it there to rot," she said, thinking of the stench it would make when the fur began to scorch.

She reached for the homespun gown, slipped it over her head and shoulders. As the loose-fitting garment settled into place, Brielli gave her a worn leather belt to cinch it in. The dress had obviously been made for a woman who was shorter and a good deal heavier than Sinderian; the hem just skimmed her ankles, but the skirt was very full. Paired with the boots, it would make a suitable costume for riding and walking.

Brielli handed her a pair of long woolen stockings, and she sat down on a cot to pull them on, one after the other. Then she took up one of the knee-high leather boots and worked it on over the bulky stocking.

A dog barked somewhere outside; the geese set up a terrible clamor. Everyone in the room down below went suddenly silent. Sinderian stopped with one foot shod and the other boot still in her hand. She listened, over the hammering of her heart, as the door opened and closed when someone went out.

"It's nothing," the younger sister a.s.sured her. "Just someone going to the well for water, or to fetch in some firewood."

For all that, she tugged on the other boot as quickly as she could, jumped to her feet, and stood poised for flight-until the door finally creaked open again, and a voice down below was heard to announce that all was well.

Possessed by a sudden urge to be off, a nervous pounding in her blood, Sinderian plaited her hair, her hands grown suddenly clumsy with haste, and tied the end with a bit of ribbon provided by Brielli. Then she ran downstairs to rejoin her fellow travelers.

They were already preparing to leave, gathering up the things so generously provided: besides the food and the ale, there were blankets and fleeces to serve them as bedding, and a fine yew bow and a quiver of arrows with grey-goose fletchings, which Gilrain slung over his shoulder.

"You ought to be gone before the sun comes up," cautioned the redheaded man. "You will want to be well on your way, with Dreyde's men out searching the countryside."

"We will hear them long before they hear us," said Gilrain, with a thin smile. "Especially if they travel with such a noise as we heard before."

"I have it in mind," said the smith, rubbing his stubbled cheeks with thumb and forefinger, "that very few of the men of Saer have their hearts in this hunt. Only the men that Dreyde brought with him from Clowes. The rest obey him only because they fear him."

Gilrain nodded. "I think the same thing. So for their sake as much as our own we ought to be off."

When the others went out, Sinderian was impelled by a sudden impulse to enter the forge. A bucket of water stood by the cooling furnace. She stooped low, scooped up water from the bucket, and dribbled it in a circle on the flagstone floor. Then she traced a symbol in the center of the circle.

Drying her hands on her skirt, she turned toward the furnace. Drawing the runes hwela, chymis, and theroghal in the feathery grey ashes, she chanted a simple charm: that all things made and mended there might be well made and give faithful service. The signs she had drawn glowed with a pale green light, then faded. She felt the charm take hold.

It was a minor spell-any village witch or warlock might have contrived it, any hedge wizard or cunning-man-yet it cost Sinderian a considerable effort, left her breathless and weak in the knees, at a time when her hands were still inclined to tremble and her sight to blur.

But this much, at least, we owe them in grat.i.tude, she told herself. It was what Faolein would have done in her place; she knew that, too. Aside from simple grat.i.tude, simple decency, there was a danger, an imbalance, in leaving an obligation behind-particularly in what might soon become hostile territory. Wizards had been tripped up that way before, had trapped themselves in complex patterns of cause and effect that they could not escape.

But then-remembering the arrows at Gilaefri-she made a sign, unthought and reflexive, invoking the Light, and she sent up a sort of prayer: May the Fates forbid that any weapon forged here should be turned against my friends.

When she rejoined Prince Ruan and the others, they had already saddled and loaded up the horses, and were drawing lots to see who should ride first, who should walk. Learning, to her dismay, that one of the riding horses had been reserved for her use, Sinderian indignantly insisted on taking her chance with the rest. The lots fell to her and to Aell.

"But can you ride astride?" said the Prince, suddenly realizing that neither saddle was made for a lady. There was probably not such a thing as a sidesaddle in the entire village. "Or will you ride pillion behind one of us?"

She gave a humorless little laugh and tossed her braid back over her shoulder. "Let us not overburden the horses! I can ride like a man when the need arises." To prove her point, she gathered up her skirt, put a foot in the stirrup, and swung up into the saddle. The Prince, who would have a.s.sisted her had she permitted it, stepped back with a shrug and a faint curl of his lips.

They set out from Brill just as the moon was setting behind the hills. Gilrain, as their guide, naturally took the lead, and Sinderian urged the chestnut gelding forward to walk beside him.

"You told me," she said, bending low over the horse's neck in order to speak in his ear, "there was still a chance we might arrive in the north before Ouriana's messengers. But I don't see how."

"Because they are so far ahead of us, so much better mounted?" It was so dark that she could barely see him, though he walked quite near. Yet he seemed to navigate as surely by starlight as he had by moonlight. "There is something you may not know. There is a barrier in the Cadmin Aernan, a great wall of magic, ever since eireamhoine killed three Furiadhin there. Whether or not it was the wizard's intention, or something he created accidentally, no evil thing or servant of Dark powers can pa.s.s that ward.

"Ouriana's creatures will have to turn back and spend almost a month returning to the coast, or else go north through Hythe and Weye. But they can hardly ride openly through the coastal princ.i.p.alities as they've ridden through Mere. If they choose to ride north, it will have to be through the wilder country of the foothills and the backlands, where the roads are few and not very good. And even after they've pa.s.sed through Prince Bael's territory and Prince Gwynnek's, they will still have to face the dangers of the burning lands and the great northern woods.

"Whether or not these things will slow them enough I can't promise you, but there is a chance, a good chance, you may arrive where you're going first."

Sinderian sat up straighter in the saddle. She released a long, heartfelt sigh. "Even a small chance is more than I dared to hope. If you...if you can guide us swiftly and safely, Gilrain, there may be many who will thank you later."

His light, bell-like voice came to her out of the darkness. "I can lead you over the mountains as well or better than anyone. But what you will find on the other side, that I can't tell you. They say it has finally come to open war between Skyrra and Eisenlonde, that King Ristil and his men are hard-pressed. The entire north may be at war by the time you come there-or it may all be over, and the barbarians victorious."

Her stomach clenched; images of fire and sword leapt in her brain. It was true she had been halfway expecting this news all along, yet she had also foolishly continued to hope that war in the north might be miraculously averted. There were already too many battles being fought in the world, there was already too much death.

A shiver pa.s.sed over Sinderian's skin, a premonition of evil to come. She thought, If we come to Skyrra too late, if we find Winloki dead, a victim of the war-or even unwilling to leave her adopted people, when they have such need of healers-then everything we have done, everything we have lost or will lose along the way, will all be for nothing!

15.

And far away, far away to the north and east on the s.p.a.cious plains of Skyrra, it was as Gilrain described it: a state of open war. Horns were blowing; villages burned, sending up clouds of sparks into the night; armies of hors.e.m.e.n and foot soldiers met on the plains under the stars and clashed, staining the long gra.s.s with their blood. Behind a veil of smoke and flying ash, the face of the moon turned red.

Midmorning found King Ristil's capital at Luckenborg in an uproar. Shortly after sundown, young Prince Kivik and his kinsman Skerry had ridden through one of the gates with a war-weary troop, bearing messages from the marshals fighting in the east: they needed more men, more supplies, more healers-more of everything.

"We had thought to win this war in a matter of months, our numbers being so far superior, but there are more of them than we ever imagined," Kivik had said when he arrived at the Heldenhof, the King's great house, sweaty, dusty, and trembling with exhaustion, but in such a fever to deliver his news that he turned aside all offers of food and drink, and flung himself through doorways and up long wooden staircases, heedless of the guards who rushed forward to demand his business (then recognizing him, stepped back again), until he came at last, breathless and emphatic, into the King's very presence.

Ristil signed to the guards, to his companions of the hour-his Jarls and Thanes, his trusted counselors-and they all fell silent, so that the Prince might be heard.

"Again and again we're obliged to revise our ideas about their numbers. We won two great battles at the beginning of spring, and we thought it was practically over. Yet a fortnight later they met us with forces even greater than before. We somehow prevailed, and again we thought the war was effectively ended, until eight days ago when we learned to our cost that it wasn't so. We kill them, and there are always more of them.... How can this be? How can the rockywastes of Eisenlonde produce such an army?"

There was a confused muttering throughout the room. That the barbarians had even been able to produce an army worthy of the name-that had come as a shock at the very beginning, when Ristil's commanders were still expecting the usual rabble of horse thieves and raiders. But an army that grew and grew, and continued to grow beyond all reasonable bounds or expectations, that was even harder to grasp.

"Where do they come from?" asked Kivik. He shifted his shoulders, where the weight of mail and padding had become almost unendurable. Half a hundred candles burned in the room, reflected off a floor of polished dark wood, glanced off the gilding on elaborately carved beams overhead. In that clear light his dirt and dishevelment were the more obvious: a mud-spattered cloak and boots; light brown hair plastered to his forehead.

"The conclusion is inevitable: they're not all Eisenlonders!"

There was a collective gasp, followed by a feeble stir of protest among the King's aged counselors. They looked at Kivik askance, not even trying to conceal their dismay, their reluctance to credit a word that he said.

"Impossible," said one, the ancient Jarl Vetr. "Eisenlonde signs no treaties, maintains no alliances. They are so isolated there at the edge of the world, such a poor nation, what benefits could they possibly offer to potential allies?"

"It may be blackest magic," another greybeard rasped out. "The barbarians have sorcerers, shamans they call them. They create phantom armies out of the air to confuse you."

"It's entirely possible," answered young Skerry, who had arrived in Kivik's footsteps, "that there are illusions in with the rest. It seems very likely. But illusions don't set fire to the fields, they don't poison wells, or rape our women. You can't capture an illusion. We have taken prisoners who were strangely garbed, who bore strange weapons, men who could not understand our questions nor we their answers."

Vetr locked his gnarled hands around the stick that supported most of his weight when he walked. "There are so many different clans and tribes in Eisenlonde, there may be one living out at the very edge of the edge of the world, whose dialect is unknown to us."

"We think otherwise," said Kivik. "We think there are foreign mercenaries along with them-a great many mercenary soldiers perhaps."

And when the entire group a.s.sembled around the King began to protest, all the old men and h.o.a.ry-headed counselors, he cried out: "We don't know, we don't know how the Lords of Eisenlonde are able to pay them. But these men we are fighting, they aren't like the cattle thieves who make raids across the border after a bad year. These come to destroy rather than to steal. They've burned villages and crops throughout the Haestfilke, set fire to our forests. They slaughter our herds, then leave them to rot. The worst of it is, they can slaughter and burn far more than they ever carried off. But what do they gain by it? If they mean to expand their territories, claim herds and farmlands to feed their people, then why this wanton destruction?"

He turned toward the King, spoke with all the force and weary desperation that was in him. "Whatever we've been holding back, a.s.suming that victories would come easily, it is time to throw as many men and horses into the field as we possibly can."

King Ristil looked to Skerry. If that generally cool-headed and admirably reasonable young man came in all haste and added his voice to the vehement protestations of the more volatile Kivik, then Ristil was doubly willing to listen.

"It's as my cousin tells you. We need more men, at least another two thousand. Three thousand if you can find them. Meanwhile, we need to arm and fortify the Westvalle, Herzenmark, and Autland. The Eisenlonders may come that far. We may not be able to hold them. As for our people in the farms and villages to the south, they might be wise to come together and repopulate some of the old cities, which are at least defensible." Skerry threw a corner of his tattered green cloak over his shoulder, and took a step toward the King. Where Kivik was slender, he was stocky, with that raven-black hair uncommon in the northlands. It was ruffled now like the feathers of some storm-tossed bird of ill omen.

He lowered his voice-but not so much that the others could not hear him. "It might even be wise to consider the same thing yourself, to remove the court from Luckenborg to...Kuningskallin."

At this, there was an even louder protest than before. The town of Luckenborg, which is built up around the venerable old timber fortress known as the Heldenhof, is the ancient seat of the Lords of Skyrra, but thirty miles to the south lies the vast stone city of Kuningskallin, where Kings of Skyrra reigned in great splendor for nearly two hundred years. Half of that city lies in ruins, devastated by one of the immense destructive shocks that pa.s.sed through the earth when the moon changed course in the sky. The King then reigning fled from Kuningskallin along with the surviving members of his court, and neither he nor any of the heirs who followed after him had ever returned.

For that city-and others like it-was raised in part by wizardry, in the days when men of the north pledged friendship with the Empire of Alluinn. Since Alluinn's fall, the great cities of stone, and the arts which had built them, had come to be regarded as presumptuous and unchancy by the men of these northern realms-Skyrra, Arkenfell, and Mistlewald. Let those in the former Empire lands do as they would, let them try to rebuild their mighty fortified houses, let them attempt to reclaim all that had been lost or broken by the catastrophe-the Northmen returned to older ways, to ancient traditions, which suited them better. They had never, perhaps, been entirely comfortable in the cities, anyway.

"Your Majesty," said Vetr, with a hooded glance under wrinkled eyelids, "let us decide nothing in haste. These young princes, n.o.ble and valiant as they are, have ridden far on short rest and short rations, as it is readily apparent. In a state of exhaustion, a man is inclined to paint things much blacker than they actually are. In the morning, they may offer more reasonable advice, or at least give a less incredible account of events to the east."

Kivik flushed to the roots of his hair. He glared at them, all the old men with their long grey beards and spindle shanks, their weak eyes and withered hearts.

Men grown coward with age, he thought, grown complacent and foolish, sitting at home by their own hearths. He opened his mouth to say so, but Skerry restrained him with a look and a touch on the arm, reminding him that these were also old men who had spent too many days and weeks in the saddle when they were younger, too many long cold nights patrolling the border. Scars shone white on many of their faces; others had wounds that still ached in damp weather. Peace they wanted now, and the world as they knew it-but peace was exactly what they could not have, and the world was changing.

"If you had been where we have been, Jarl Vetr, and seen what we have seen," Skerry said evenly, "you would not doubt the truth of anything we tell you. You would hardly think any tale we brought you too incredible."

He bowed to the a.s.sembly, deeply, ironically. It might have meant many things, respecting their relative ranks and ages; it might have been youth bowing to experience; it might have been deepest insult. No one mistook the gesture; bloodless faces went even whiter, thin lips grew even thinner.

"We don't doubt you. I don't doubt you," said Ristil peaceably. "Why should I question messages from my own marshals, carried to me by my own son? That would be incredible." His fingers curled around the arms of his chair, and he sat for a long time with his golden head bowed, profoundly in thought.

At last he looked up. "In this matter of removing to Kuningskallin, I must consider a while longer. But if Prince Kivik tells me that more men are needed to fight in the east, then more men he must and will have. Everything he asks for will be provided. Let it be done at once."

By an hour after sunrise, the muster had already begun, for the King's messengers had been busy all during the night.

Men and horses from the manors and farmhouses surrounding Luckenborg came in through both gates, followed by wagons and sledges. Pigs squealed in their pens; ducks and geese pecked at each other and flapped their wings. Every forge in the town had been fired up since midnight, the swordsmiths and armorers hard at work. Elsewhere, fletchers, bowyers, coopers, chandlers, and bootmakers plied their separate crafts; sergeants and quartermasters reckoned men and materials on tally sticks; and in the mews at the Heldenhof, the King's falconers debated which of the remaining hawks were best suited to see immediate service as messenger birds. Young men were hunting up and polishing their fathers' and grandfathers' swords, as well as odd bits and pieces of antique armor that had been in the family so many generations people had stopped counting; meanwhile, their wives and sisters and mothers were shaking the dust out of banners and surcoats rich with devices lovingly embroidered over the years. It took the efforts of many to get an army on the move, well armed and well victualed.

"Three hundred men will be ready to leave with you tomorrow," King Ristil told Kivik, when he met him walking with Sigvith the Queen in her garden, among the neat rows of pansies, marigolds, and rampion, between the beds of new vegetables.

"Five or six hundred by next week, perhaps a thousand more by the end of the month. After that, it becomes difficult, if we don't wish to leave the south and the west undefended. But I am sending an emba.s.sy to Arkenfell and another to Mistlewald, asking that they lend us what help they can. They have troubles of their own, as I know well, but we must make them understand: if we fall, can invasion of their lands be far behind?"

"But will they believe you, will they understand the need? When we could hardly convince those of our own jarls and thanes who offered their counsel?"

Ristil clapped his son on the shoulder, a rough touch but affectionate. "It is the nature of counselors to be cautious, to temporize, just as it falls on kings and princes to be decisive, most particularly during perilous times. Halfdan and Saerid are not fools; neither do I imagine they mistake me for one. They will send us as many men as they can-let us hope that will be as many as we are going to need." He turned and strode out of the garden, with his head high and the weight of a kingdom on his shoulders.

Kivik and the Queen exchanged a rueful, affectionate glance.

They were much alike, brown-haired and hazel-eyed, with the same fine fair skin, alike in mind, too, though she had learned to moderate her impulses, to think before she spoke, which was a hard lesson. They looked enough alike to be brother and elder sister, not mother and son. She was not, in fact, his mother, and Kivik had been a boy of seven when Sigvith married his father. But she had haunted the royal nurseries for six months before that, a mournful young creature with a tragedy in her past she could neither remember nor entirely escape, quick to apply healing poultices and kisses to bruised shins and skinned knees, or to rock a little boy in her arms when he woke in the night weeping for his dead mother. Even when Ristil made her his queen and she began to bear children of her own, the bond she had formed with her three stepsons remained strong. Yet always there remained that elusive sorrow behind her eyes.

Now she brushed her fingertips across Kivik's face. "Dear heart," she said, "you must make up your mind to come back, whatever happens. We have lost too much already, how could your father and I bear it if we lost you, too?"

He took her soft hand and raised it briefly to his lips, then turned on his heel and followed the King out of the garden.

When the Prince left the Heldenhof, crossing one of the wooden bridges over the stream that divided the fortress from the town, he headed for the market at the center of Luckenborg. On a patch of open ground between the market square and the guildhall, an area generally set aside for cattle and horse trading, someone had raised a banner, the golden oak of Skyrra on a green field, and they were recruiting men there. It was Kivik's intention to handpick a dozen riders to add to his own troop.

The houses he pa.s.sed along the way-of timber, or stone, or undressed logs-were of no great size, but they gave that illusion with roofs steeply pitched to shed snow during the winter. They all had brightly painted wooden shutters, decorated with an entire menagerie of fantastical beasts, lions and camel-leopards, winged stags and unicorns, along with objects both mundane and mysterious: hearts and hawkbells, leaves and acorns, the moon and the stars, the sun in glory-clan badges and family emblems many of them, but the symbolism of others was harder to trace. The householders repainted them every third or fourth year in the exact same patterns and colors they had used before. At this season, with the paint on many of them still fresh, the figures shone out brightly: red, yellow, blue, and green.

As Kivik neared the marketplace, following a narrow, unpaved lane scarred with wagon tracks, his cousin Winloki appeared out of a side street, and fell into step beside him.

"You leave at dawn?" She sounded breathless trying to keep up with him, though she was a tall girl, with a stride nearly as long as his own. Her grey silk gown, belted with a chain of bronze links shaped like crescent moons, showed dirt about the hem; her thick red-gold hair seemed to be working loose from a long, careless braid; and it was evident to Kivik she was in a pa.s.sion about something.

He nodded, one short, preoccupied jerk of his head.

A stain of crimson flooded into her cheeks; her chin came up defiantly. "I want to go with you-why not?" she asked, forestalling a protest she obviously expected. "You asked for more healers."

Kivik stopped at the edge of the square and spun to face her. At nineteen, she was inclined to be headstrong and impervious to argument, but even he (who thought her a little spoiled) was not immune to the charm and high spirits that sooner or later won all hearts to her. He ran a hand through his hair, rifled through a hundred disorganized thoughts, searching for the right words to say.

In the end he decided he might just as well be blunt, for he had nothing to tell her that she wanted to hear. "I asked for more healers, but my father has said you're not to be one of them. Winloki, I have a thousand things to attend to today-"

"It's folly that the King has forbidden me to go," she flashed back at him, not to be deterred by his other concerns, his other preoccupations. "Other women will be going-others have gone before-girls much younger than I, and less powerful for healing. Why should I alone stay behind, like some bauble made of gla.s.s wrapped up in wool for safekeeping?"

"That," he answered, as patiently as he was able-though not without a sidelong glance at the men congregating in the field across the square, "is for the King to decide, and not for me. If it were my decision, you would certainly come. I would gladly take you, we have such need of healers."

But as soon as the words were out, Kivik knew he had spoken amiss. He saw her lovely face radiant, the leap of hope behind her grey eyes. And much as he hated to dash that hope, it had to be done. "If you might go with the King's blessing, not otherwise," he said sternly. "Not otherwise, Winloki!"

An hour later, she was pleading her case to the King, in the great audience chamber with its beautiful embroidered banners and tapestries, where he listened to pet.i.tions twice every fortnight. Knowing what she meant to ask him, what was likely to follow, Ristil sent his attendants away with a motion of his hand and a nod.

"I know why you keep me here," said Winloki, as soon as the others filed out. "You do so against the day when some unknown kinsman arrives to claim me. But Uncle, Uncle, that day may never come. There may not be anyone living who knows my real name or to whom I belong."

She dropped to her knees on the steps below the dais, urgent, vehement, trembling with the force of her desire. "And in the meantime, what must people think of me, when their own sons and daughters go to war, while I stay here in ease and comfort?"

"They will think what they have always thought: that you are a brave heart and an ardent spirit," he answered-not unkindly, not unmoved by her plea. "They will understand that it is your duty to me that keeps you here."

Winloki covered her face with her hands. "And would they understand the same thing if Kivik stayed behind...or Aesa, or Sigfrid, or Arinn?" she asked, envying her cousins and her brother their masculine privilege, their uncontested right to risk all in defense of their people.

She lowered her hands, looked up at him pleadingly. "Why won't you allow me to do the work I was born to do? Why deny me, as you would never deny your own sons, my fair share of the danger?"

"My dear child," said the King, reaching out to touch her bright head. "My beloved niece in all but blood, there may be peril in your future, and great deeds, too. But not in Skyrra. Your Wyrd-your fate for good or ill-is in the south."

She sat back on her heels. "You know who I am," she said softly, wonderingly. "You know more about me than you ever told me!"

And she remembered, suddenly, the southern wizard, Aethon, who had come during the winter, asked so many questions, then, abruptly, departed. "You have reason to believe that someone is on their way to claim me even now!"

Ristil shook his head; yet he looked troubled, uncertain. "I have no way of knowing when the summons will arrive, or how it will come, only that when it does come you must be here. I have promises to keep, and you have a duty far beyond Skyrra."

But by then she was well and truly frightened. The King might not know anything about this Aethon, his reasons for coming to Skyrra; but that part of her which sometimes gave warning of things, the mysterious intuitive gift that was somehow tied up with the secret of her birth, did know.

Winloki rose slowly to her feet, her brain awhirl with wild surmises. They were coming for her, those unknown kinsmen who haunted her dreams, they would take her away from everyone and everything she loved, claim her at a time when the need for healers grew daily more desperate.

A cold stab of fear went through her; Winloki struggled for control. She had to think and to think clearly; she would not sit and wait with folded hands for events to sweep her away. She wondered, If I'm not here, how far would they go to seek me out? Into battle? Into danger-when they were content to forget me for so many years?

She made up her mind that they could wait a little longer.

If they come to Luckenborg looking for me, she resolved, they can stay at Luckenborg, while I go to war.

Visits to the Jarl Marshal, to several of the elder healers, and to the Queen were no more satisfactory.

"I don't understand what you expect me to do," said Sigvith, looking up from the fine needlework with which she beguiled her afternoons. "Do you think the King could possibly be made to accept my judgment in place of his own?"

Winloki sighed. It was only a variation on what she had been hearing all day. Still, there was that nervous beating in her blood, that pressure around her heart urging her so insistently to be gone.