Changer of Days (3 page)

They whooped and followed him, Rochen at his elbow, an incongruous grin splitting the young lieutenant’s broad face. But their enthusiasm was checked abruptly with a simple and effective ruse not much further on. No other group had passed the fords of the Hal since the previous day; the swathe that had been left by the skirmish was still clearly visible, as were the tracks on the other side of the ford. What brought the pursuers up short was the sudden division of the main body of the tracks into several different trails. The group had fragmented into at least four or five smaller companies. At least one of these seemed to have taken off ahead of the others at a faster gallop; another had veered off toward the nearest foothills to the left of the plain, the first harbingers of the great mountain range that had given the throne in Miranei its ancient name. A third group had ridden eastward, back toward the forest. Kieran reined in, dismayed.

Rochen had also stopped, and leaned forward to study the place where the tracks diverged. “They seem to have had their own wounded,” he said. “Look, over there—traces of blood. They may have stopped to take care of their men. Helm and Merric did not sell their lives cheaply.”

“But which group has the queen?” asked Cair, slipping off his horse and squatting down for a closer look.

“The fastest, probably,” Rochen said, straightening. “They’d make straight for home.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what they want us to think,” said Kieran. “Perhaps they just sent two people on ahead to warn someone what is on its way, and the others took her…”

“We split up?” Cair suggested, getting up.

“We can’t,” said Rochen soberly, glancing at Kieran.

“We split up, we run the same risk Javor and the others fell foul of,” said Kieran. “There is a strong possibility, for example, that those of us chasing the group headed into the hills might well find more than we bargained for.”

“Ambush?” queried Cair. “For whom? They don’t know they’re being chased!”

“Don’t they?” said Kieran, rubbing a weary hand over his temple. “Whose did they think the three men at the ford were?”

“They shouldn’t have shown their hand,” murmured Rochen regretfully.

“Adamo as good as told them not to. But that would have meant simply standing by and letting them take her through at their leisure.”

“Which just isn’t in any of us,” said Rochen, with a sudden, surprising smile. “The Gods rest Helm and Merric, but they were brave, foolhardy men. Kieran…”

“Forget the rest,” said Kieran, after a moment’s thought. “Let’s ride after the van. There is a good chance she is with them. If not, then they will bring her in through some postern gate…and I haven’t the men or the knowledge to besiege every gate in Miranei. Let’s try and get this lot. If Anghara isn’t with them, they will know where she is, and we won’t waste time chasing shadows. Let’s move!”

But in the thunder of galloping hooves Kieran was still hearing only one word.
Yesterday.
Sif’s men passed here yesterday. Anghara was here yesterday. Yesterday had been the window of opportunity to halt Anghara’s captors in their wild ride to Miranei. Kieran had a despairing, sinking feeling that today was already too late.

F
or Anghara, the hours and days which followed her abduction in Calabra ran together into a bland, homogeneous grayness—her captors had the dosage of the drug nicely gauged, and another dose would materialize just as she was beginning to recover from the one before. Her head ached, and if left to herself she would have wanted nothing else but to be left in peace, to curl up in a small dark place and sleep. But sleep would not come to her, and left in peace she definitely was not. Instead, she registered dimly the commotion around her—milling, man-like shadowy forms; large, looming quadruped shapes. She was hoisted up into the arms of a mounted rider, and the horse was flying through the blur that was Calabra’s street, out through the city’s gate, and onto the open road.
This is not the horse I bought,
she thought blearily, still clinging to enough conscious awareness to realize the heavy, military gray horse she was on bore no resemblance to her newly acquired bay mare. But there was no strength in her to wonder at this. She drifted in and out of consciousness, staying in the saddle only through the strong arm of the rider holding her there. Once or twice she tried reaching for the power of Sight, but the experience was so unpleasant, her head splitting with a fiery stab of agony every time she tried, that she abandoned her attempts. It was easier to simply lie back against the soldier who carried her, and empty her mind of everything.

Her escort rode as though furies were after them; rests were few, and short. Fatigue exacerbated Anghara’s symptoms even further. Lashed securely to the rider who carried her, she spent most of the journey in a kind of grayed-out doze, far enough from true sleep to deny her its rest yet close enough to ensure an almost complete divorce from awareness and reality. Occasional exchanges, when the old drug was just wearing off and the new dose had not yet been administered, caught at her mind; some were curiously triumphant, others merely flat and grumbling. The odd thing was that the triumph was muted, usually spoken in softer voices, apart from the main body of men; the complaints were loud and vociferous.

“…the king will surely reward us…”

“…until I tell Leil at the barracks, he’ll kick himself…”

“…Gods’ sake, isn’t it someone else’s turn? My horse is nearly…”

“…stupid; if she were in a litter, we’d still be three days back on the trail…”

“…just who is the chit anyway? We’re breaking our necks for someone we don’t even know…”

“…you don’t think someone will try to spring her…”

“…she’s coming round. Who’s got the
tamman
?”

And then the drug…
tamman?
…would be forced down her throat again, and she would slip away into her gray haze.

She would remember later—much later—that there had been a skirmish along the way somewhere; would recall yells, and screams, and blood, and hearing one man call her name in the melee. It would be a dim and fuzzy memory, but she thought she had lifted her head at the sound of her name—and been pushed, none too gently, into the folds of her escort’s cloak, down into the dust and the grime and the sweat-smell of hard riding. She had not had the strength to try and lift it again; and had blacked out for a while. When she came back to some sort of lucidity, it was to the sensation of lying on the ground upon the same cloak, or a similar one, impregnated with the same smells and textures. She sensed movement around her: moving shadows, an occasional groan of what might have been pain.

“…I tell you, definitely being followed…”

“…split up, and leave them chasing ghosts…”

“…with the fastest one? They would expect that she…”

“…really think that there’s only three of them…”

“…a back door. They cannot guard every postern gate at Miranei…”

“…time we were moving. Look to her, someone. Where’s the
tamman?
”

Hills…steep slopes full of sweet mountain grass…hooves on rock…once, a meadow sprinkled with bright flowers which nodded at Anghara as she tried to focus her bleary vision on them. Another day, and then yet another…another night…a golden sunset…and then, abruptly, high walls where there had been wide-open spaces; flickering torches instead of daylight; the still, stale fug of a place which had not seen the sun since the day it had been wrought, instead of crisp, cool mountain air.

This time there was nothing fuzzy about the memory when it came—this was the place she had seen when al’Jezraal had invoked dungeons in the Catacombs of Al’haria. This was the real thing; the knowledge cut at her, sharper than any thought since she had left the stables in Calabra. Her escort left her, alone at last, and somewhere above in the quiet darkness of the dungeons of Miranei, Anghara distinctly heard, as she had in her vision, the dull, ominous thud of a distant door closing with a finality that was absolute. They were gone, and she was in darkness, alone.

The
tamman
had brought Anghara to the point where this realization meant nothing more than that they were leaving her in the blessed dark, to curl up without being bounced on the back of a galloping horse, to finally try to sleep. It didn’t matter that her bed would be a hank of filthy straw on the flagged stone floor, or that the air in her tiny cell entered through an open grille in the stout oak door—a grille that looked as though it could easily be shut. She craved sleep—a long, wholesome sleep lacking the pain, the numbness, the gray fuzziness and the constant nausea that had been her companions for long days and nights on the road. And, without
tamman,
she did finally sleep—the last innocent sleep she would have for a long time, had she but known it, untainted with the horror of knowing what she would wake to in the morning.

When she did wake, it was to a weakness which made it next to impossible to perform the simple act of sitting up, and unabated nausea which was, if anything, worse than before. But queasy and shaken as she was, she was lucid, for the first time in days, perhaps weeks—she suddenly realized she had no idea how much time had passed since she had paid for the bay mare in the Calabra stable. She moaned, pressing her fingers to her temples; her head felt like a wayside smithy where a battalion’s horses were being shod. She tried to get up and take the few steps toward the hole in the floor that served as a latrine. Her legs wouldn’t hold her; eventually she crawled there on hands and knees, and was violently sick.

She seemed to feel better, as though she had thrown up some poison which had been slowly killing her. There was a half-full pottery jug of water on the floor by her bed; she reached for it, rinsed her mouth, and then swallowed a few gulps. It was stale, with an odd taste, as though things she would be better off not knowing about had leached into it during its long standing—but it was clean. Anghara wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and only now turned to make a closer inspection of her surroundings.

She was in a solitary cell, only just long enough for her to stretch out on the straw that was her bed and no wider than perhaps five short paces from wall to wall. There was an old, rusted fitting on the wall just above the straw. Anghara had to stare at it for a while before it occurred to her that it was a flange for fastening a chain. There had been a mate—once she knew what to look for, Anghara could see the hole in the wall where it should have been attached, but it had either been removed a long time ago or simply rotted away. They were just the right distance apart to spreadeagle a prisoner against the wall.

“I should be grateful,” Anghara murmured to herself, shuddering, “that they didn’t see fit to put me up in those.”

Aside from these grisly furnishings, the straw pallet, the jug of water and the latrine hole, the place was empty, the walls blank, the ceiling low and louring. The cell wasn’t quite dark—faint light from a torch outside in the corridor filtered through the open grille, and it was this that had allowed Anghara her scrutiny. Her mouth curled into a tight, bitter little smile.

“But the Gods always give what you ask for,” she whispered softly, remembering her wishes on the journey to this place—a small, dark place to sleep, and to be left alone. She had been given it all. “How long, I wonder? How long before you forget all about me, Sif…or before you send a loyal sword to end everything?”

It wasn’t clean. She would never have done it like this. The drugs…the dungeons…it wasn’t clean. It stained the name of Kir Hama, the proud lineage of ancient royal blood.

Kieran’s voice suddenly came to her, from years ago—that day on the banks of a Cascin well, on which he had first found out who she was.
Sif is your brother
…

And then her mother’s, from before even that, from the mists of memory that clung to the mind of a child, perhaps only three or four years old:
He looks like you,
Rima had said, standing at a window and watching the young Sif in a courtyard below. Behind her, the shadowy figure of her husband had smiled. He had chosen never to hear the bitterness that edged Rima’s voice every time the subject of his son came up between them.

Her brother. Her own father’s son.

None of it mattered. He was king in a land he had wrested from the hand of a little girl. That she had been born to the crown, that she had worn it before him—all this was irrelevant. Dynan was dead, Sif was king, and there was space on the Throne Under the Mountain for only one monarch to reign over Roisinan. And it was his land as well as her own.

She could have witched the door of that dungeon open quite easily with what ai’Jihaar had taught her over the years—if only she could have touched the power without seeming to tear at her mind with poisoned talons. Maybe it was the drug—perhaps, Anghara thought hopefully, now they had her safely in here they would forget about the
tamman,
giving her a chance to recover. Perhaps. There was nothing for it but to wait—for what, she was not quite sure, but wait she must.

They hadn’t quite forgotten about her yet, at any rate, because she was shaken from a light doze by the rattle of a small trapdoor she hadn’t noticed before. It opened near the bottom of the cell door, only just wide enough to admit a battered tin plate.

“Supper,” a gruff voice announced, “and if you want fresh water pass the jug out with the plate when you’re done.”

Anghara had surged from her place on the pallet—but her head still swam when she moved too fast, and the few precious moments it took her to gasp herself back into a semblance of steadiness were all it took for her efforts to be in vain. She stood on tiptoe next to the door, trying to peer out into the corridor.

“Wait!” she called. “Come back!” But her only reply was silence.

Defeated, she sank down on her knees beside the plate of food. It looked greasily congealed, and, worse, cold; but she was starving. Her mind recoiled but her stomach accepted—it was food, and after the first instant, when she had to taste the foul mush, it didn’t matter what her mind thought of the meal. She finished, and banged on the door with the empty container, hoping to attract the guard back again. Nobody came. Anghara pushed the empty plate and the water jug against the little trapdoor, and stood waiting by the door in expectation, determined not to be caught napping again.

When she woke, she was cold and stiff from the position she had collapsed into, on the cold stone floor at the foot of the cell door. The headache was back, and the nausea. They must have slipped more
tamman
into the food. The plate was gone, and the re-filled water jug stood by the trapdoor; Anghara was alone once more.

They’ll never let me talk to anyone again,
she thought bitterly, leaning her forehead against the cold stone wall, fighting the urge to start beating her head against it. She tried once more to reach for Sight, and paid for it by being sick all over again, only just making the latrine hole in time; she leaned over the edge of the noisome pit, continuing to retch even when there was nothing left to bring up. Now that she thought about it, there had been a ghost of a taste of the drug in the food, but she had thought it only a lingering memory of what had gone before—and even if she had known beyond a doubt, what could she do? The only options open to her were to suffer the
tamman
and stay alive as long as she could, or stop eating and save Sif the trouble of killing her by starving herself to death.

“I will live,” she muttered, but her voice was wretched even as she uttered the brave words. It was not life she was choosing—not this, not in here. For one whose every waking moment for years had been spent in the company of a powerful gift, the lack of it was an exquisite torture she was only just beginning to comprehend. She wasn’t even sure if it was a deliberate cruelty, or something careless and inadvertent, a simple side-effect of keeping her from using Sight to escape. And how did they even know she was Sighted?

The answer came easily enough. Bresse, where they searched for her and where she would not have been if not for Sight. And Ansen, who had, almost inadvertently, led her there—who had, perhaps, brought Sif there, too, and paid a high price.

She soon lost count of the days, and ceased to speculate about why it was taking Sif so long to get round to killing her. She didn’t know autumn had flowed into winter and the first light snow fallen already on the mountain, or that blizzards piled it man-deep around Miranei. Neither did she know that, on the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Sif himself stood and watched as she slept, her bright hair tangled and matted, the bones of her delicate wrist standing out like a fledgling bird’s.

“What are your orders, my lord?” the guard had asked deferentially.

“I will decide, in due course,” Sif had said, taking a last look and turning away. He knew he should have had her killed weeks ago, but he was finding it curiously difficult to sublimate that knowledge into action. Nothing had changed in his feelings for Anghara Kir Hama—she still stood in his way, and would for as long as she breathed, but her ghost seemed easier to bear if it was still housed in a living body he could keep under observation. Killing her would set that spirit free. The dictum would be the same as at Bresse—
I did what had to be done
—but Bresse had not vanished from his mind just because he had managed to rationalize its destruction, and he knew Anghara would be a far tougher ghost to lay. Even watching her now—thin, grubby, unkempt—there was still something in her that was royal, and the line of her jaw, while undoubtedly more feminine and delicate, reminded Sif forcefully of the man who had fathered them both.
I could have loved her,
Sif thought, surprising even himself with the idea.
A younger sister…but no, she is not my sister. She could still snatch the throne from me
…