Ash and Silver (54 page)

“Not yet,” snapped the man behind me, strengthening his hold as he threw a magical shield between me and the sword.

I roared and tore at his flesh, but his stern voice ground through madness and into my ear. “The time of your choice has come, paratus. There is no counterspell. The dust you preserved was gone. But the Archivist reminds you that Geraint's chains were forged with the detritus of a man executed eleven days ago. But in truth, that man ceased to exist two years past.”

“Axe!”
screamed the Marshal. “Execute these traitors! First of all this cur who dares restrain my instrument.”

But the one who held me would not yield. “You cling to sentiment instead of understanding, listen to echoes instead of voices; you yearn for what is ash, rather than shape what is silver.
Think
. The soul is not a name.
Nor is it incidents of other times, or emotions, no matter how cherished. The soul endures. The divine gift endures. Who
are
you? Choose.”

Fading reason searched for an answer . . . and found magic . . . my bents . . . my art. . . . I reached for line and color, shape and depth, and drew the portrait of a man of loving family who found life in a house of the dead, strength in a dark cellar, and purpose in works of justice. . . . And I wrapped this artwork in magic and linked it to the symbol of a knife.

I am not Axe.
I invoked the spell in silence.
Nor am I Lucian de Remeni, the artist whose past was stolen and whose future is enslaved.
Nor am I Greenshank, because that name was never anything but a placeholder for what Lucian was to become. The divine gift lives in me in generous measure. I am threaded with the power of the Knight Defender of Evanide, and I know truths that will help my people shake off the evils of the past. Even without a name, my soul lives. Unbound.

I turned inward, and as the Archivist had taught us, I used the knife to cut away the image I'd drawn. Not even memory pricks would be able to return a seed of Lucian de Remeni's life, because I removed the soil where it could root and display its truth. Three times I invoked the spell, reaching deeper to excise the lingering fragments: a sister who sparked the universe . . . the yearning for home and kinship . . . the connection with a great house near Pontia . . . the intimacy with a being of myth . . . the craving for beliefs, memory, and experiences that waited just beyond my reach . . . the threads that took fire when I touched a signature or artworks done in other times . . . and all attachment to a name.

As my knife cut deeper, belief and certainty grew, and lust for murder faded.

. . .
my soul lives. Unbound.
When at last I raised my head, the spasms and the killing fever had gone, as if swept away by a god's hand. Though I yet trembled from weariness and the pain in my leg, my captor had released his hold.

“You think this is over,
servant
?” The Marshal backed away from the sword-wielding Fallon, from Pons and her Registry servitors, from Canis-Ferenc and his crimson-and-silver-liveried guards. Both of Geraint's hands were filled with flame, ready to spew into ropes and chains of spellwork. “My leash has bound your soul, Remeni, and though the traitorous Archivist has allowed you to slip it this time, I will have it back.”

“No,” I rasped. “You won't.” But before I could raise a hand to defend myself, his magic flared. . . .

As if a shutter had blown open and admitted a gale wind, two dozen
men in black and gray swooped in and surrounded the Marshal, erecting wards and shields so that his cannonade of fire and lightning shattered without damage—a maneuver we had practiced repeatedly in the bloody days at Val Cleve.

“Cineré resurge!”
bellowed the Marshal. “Out of my way.”

The knights did not move. A fog descended from the ceiling and blanketed the noisy melee. A very familiar kind of fog—textured, shifting, though we were indoors and nowhere near the sea. A commanding figure walked out of it.

“Alas, the Knight Marshal's imperative has no weight when spoken by one who is no longer the Knight Marshal.” The lean, sinewy newcomer was armored and masked in the blue of storm seas and Order gray.

I grinned, though entirely confused. Even if Bastien had gone straight to Evanide after my capture in the alley, how could Fix have gotten here so quickly?

“Who in the name of all gods—?” Canis-Ferenc summoned a troop of his warriors, swords humming with power. Pons raced to his side, her single arm bearing a staff that spewed lightning.

“With all respect,
Domé
Canis-Ferenc, Curator Pons, and worthy purebloods of the Three Hundred, this arrest is not yours to make.” The Knight Defender waved a hand.

Swords and shields clattered to the floor. Soldiers dropped to their knees. Pons and Canis-Ferenc halted, not of their own accord.

“We mean you no harm.” Fix held out his hand to the curator and the lord. “Take one of these tokens and it will tell you, all who serve you, and all who are guesting under your protection, everything you need to know about who we are.” Memory-wipe tokens, certainly, to ensure the Order's anonymity.

The Knight Defender opened his hand in Fallon's direction. I shook my head. Fallon deserved to understand what he'd done for me and Navronne.

After dispensing a few more tokens, the Knight Defender came to me. “I'll see
you
before you leave here. You've some things to learn about metallurgy. Silver tarnish is as annoying as a bastard cousin. And no matter what you decide about the future, you
will
do some work with me before embarking on it. You're something like a sword without guards or hilt—all points and sharp edges.”

I dipped my head and laid a fist on my breast. He laughed, nodded to someone behind me, and plunged into the fog.

By the time the fog dissipated, Fix, the Marshal, and the Order knights had vanished with it. Arcs of magic had spit through the air of the Great Hall, leaving those remaining in that chamber, and likely hundreds of others, scratching their heads in confusion.

Though he'd released me when my resistance ceased, my captor of the stern and powerful voice had shielded my back until the Marshal was gone. I turned around and knelt up on one knee, fist on my breast. As with Fix, I most improperly raised my eyes and affirmed that he was indeed the only man who could have bested me in such a fight or reached me in the midst of raging frenzy. There was no measure for my gratitude . . . or my pleasure.

“Knight Commander Inek,” I said hoarsely, “I report my mission complete.”

In stern solemnity that helped soothe my lingering tremors, he shook his head. “I disagree with your assessment, paratus. You seem to have set forces in motion that will not be denied. You cannot abandon a mission in progress.”

His strong hand pulled me to my feet. From a tumbled chair, he picked up my hooded mantle and threw it over me. “You'll want this. The weather's turning and there are three hundred purebloods in this castle ready either to kill you as an imposter, hang you as a traitor, or anoint you king of Navronne.”

Inek strode toward the doors and I limped along beside him. I could scarce think beyond putting one foot in front of the other. Every part of me seemed stretched thin.

A clamor of voices rose from the rotunda. Now the ground had stopped shaking, a sea of bodies flowed through multiple doors from the outer courts and gardens. However unlikely, townspeople milled about the castle. Like the Gouvron Estuary where salt water and fresh mingled with the surge of the tides, so did streams of men and women in worn, patched garb surge through the flood of jeweled brocades and frothing lace. Yet from everywhere in that mingled tide, spears and nets of magic flew out to support pillars before they toppled, to strengthen walls and settle dust.

A disgusted Pons stood at the great doors, hands on her hips. She was dispatching Registry guards to search for Geraint de Serre, who had disappeared out from under her nose. I started toward her, anxious to learn of Juli.

Inek held me back. “Not yet,” he said. “What you have to show the girl
will not be easy for her to see, and what you have to tell her will not be easy for you to say or for her to hear.”

“True,” I said. Juli believed her brother dead. As he was. Only now they were gone did I understand the ghostly threads that had bound the girl and me. My spirit was a desert.

Inek and I moved unremarked through the throng. Only when I stumbled into a woman and she looked straight through me, puzzled, did I realize Inek had drawn a veil over the two of us.

“I recall distinctly. There were two of them, master and servant,” said a young woman, swathed in black fur. “The servant had no face.”

“His face was a mask,” said another. “So he was the true Pretender. The Pretender promised the judges that he would wear a mask every hour of every day. . . .”

“It was the medallion in his flesh tells me the bodyguard was the true Pretender,” said a man with a pointed white beard poking out from under his half mask. “That's how you would hide who you are, while making sure you and your evidence can't be separated. And the magic . . . Great Deunor did you feel his power?”

“Where did they go? I don't see either one of them. A king of our own kind . . . what a fine way to clean up the mess. Patronne has named the curators greedy gatzi for years.”

“Over here, carpenter! We need you to hold these arches until we strengthen the supports, else the dome will fall in.” Juli directed several of the townsmen into an area of fallen masonry. Pale dust smudged her half mask and mourning gown of black velvet. An elegance of power flowed from her hand as she helped clear a passage. So her art manifested with masonry and buttresses, not pens and ink. A smile teased at my lips. Such a small thing she was to build so large.

Inek tugged at my arm. “Your mission awaits.”

“Where?” I said, swallowing regret. “Much farther and you'll have to drag me. Never would have thought you could best me just out of your sickbed. Though I suppose the Archivist—” He must have moved Inek from the infirmary when he found the proper counter to the trap spell. Even then he didn't trust the Marshal.

“He is retired to Evanide and will never leave. His successor is already in place.”

“And what of the Marshal?”

“De Serre will die. A new Marshal is already named, but Fix will command for a time as we go through our own cleansing.”

The gray evening was frigid as we emerged onto Castle Cavillor's deserted ramparts to a view that thrilled the eye. A lake of magelight lanterns pooled in the bailey just below us, rivers of them flowed through the town, and a sea lapped the town walls. “Is this Damon's legion?” I said. “The Marshal said he had long-laid strategies in place . . .”

“Not Damon's. Look there.”

In the courtyard below, Canis-Ferenc and a troop of his soldiers were surrounded by ragged men and women bearing every manner of weapon, all bristling with dire magics. Horror snatched my gut. Harrowers, armed with magic?

But three horsemen headed the ragtag legion—a tall man with hair the color of old honey, a woman almost his twin but with a scar blighting half her face, and a cadaverous man whose black hair was threaded with gray. Benedik, Signé, and Siever. Above them flew a black ensign, its blazon a white tree.

“Deunor's light,” I whispered, joy, relief, and wonder mingled in equal parts. “However can they be here?” Yes, I'd been kept asleep for ten days, but that was hardly enough time to bring them from Xancheira . . . and Siever from Evanide . . . and Fix and Inek, unless . . .

My gaze roamed the darkening world beyond the torchlit bailey and the streams of lanterns. Had I not known what I was looking for, I would have thought I glimpsed a phantasm or a trick of the light. Atop a round tower outside the light stood a naked man alone, his muscular body sculpted in cerulean light, his long hair bound into a braid that fell over his shoulder and almost to his waist. Kyr Archon. Pale blue gards . . . not silver.

Was it joy at his redemption or the certainty that Safia would have stood there instead if she yet lived that made my chest ache so fiercely? Or perhaps it was the release of despair held close since my abrupt leaving. They lived, the Xancheirans and the once-silver Danae. The Severing was undone.

Voices rose from the confrontation in the bailey.

“. . . but I don't know who you mean,” said Ferenc with stern dignity. “And I don't know who you are or how your people got inside my gates, but you will withdraw them immediately. If you are servants of the imposter de Serre, know that his plot has failed. If you are Curator Damon's allies, know that the curator is dead and his noble plan left in splinters. Give me
the
name of the one you want, and I'll see him brought down. Lay down your arms, and I'll hear your grievance and his.”

“We call him the Deliverer,” said Signé. “But he goes by many names, some of which he says are not safe to use.”

“We'll not leave without him,” said Benedik. “He has brought us back from beyond time, and we hear he is prisoner in this place. We
will
have him, and then will I, the Duc de Xancheiros, have speech with the Southern Registry about the ordering of magic in the world.”

“Xancheiros! You're mad. . . . Leave this house and take your rabble with you, else the power of Navronne's sorcery will be brought to bear.”

“Dismiss my lord and his
rabble
at thy peril,” said Siever, spreading his arms wide. As he slowly raised his hands from shoulder height, a pillar of whirling white light rose between the Xancheirans and the outer wall of the castle. The display was not illusion, but a palpable construction. Eye and mind told me that my hand could wrap my arms about the pillar and feel an impossible solidity.

But when Siever's hands met above his head, the white light reversed to unlight—that's all I could think to call it. Not simple blackness. The portion of the castle wall his pillar crossed—wall, parapet, tower—was not masked, but empty.