Changer of Days (5 page)

“Hold,” one of them said, his voice low and somehow fittingly sepulchral in this place. “Who comes?”

Senena had counted on surprise, and was amply rewarded by the sight of their faces as she pushed back the cowl of her cloak. “The queen,” she said. Her voice rang with confidence and authority she had never had, never even felt, as Sif’s wife; but these men weren’t to know. “Let me pass.”

“Lady,” began one, dropping creakily on one knee, “it is not meet for a woman that you go down there…”

“It is for a woman that I go,” said Senena. “I will not need to descend to her if you have her brought here to me. I wish to speak with her. Is there a place where I could do so in private?”

The two had exchanged glances. “A woman, my lady?”

“Lady, we cannot…your husband the lord king…”

“The king is not here,” Senena said. “I sit beside him on the Throne Under the Mountain. Do as I say.”

Still they hesitated, and something kindled in Senena’s pale eyes that was steely and implacable. A part of this came from imitating Sif’s own regal attitude, but another part was entirely her own. She may have been young, she may have been timid and sensitive, but she had a core of strength and nobility which would have set her apart even without a crown on her head. Sif had chosen his queen all too well.

“Do as I say,” she repeated to the two guards, and in that moment the swift and imminent retribution they read in her face overruled the nebulous possibilities of what Sif might do when he returned to Miranei.

“This way, my lady,” one of the two said, handing her through the grim gate and into a guardroom where a fire burned brightly on the smoke-blackened hearth. Two more men had been lounging there, but they leapt to their feet when Senena entered. Her escort barked at them to get out, sending one of them down to the lower levels to get the prisoner.

They ran into unexpected trouble when the gaoler Sif had placed to watch over Anghara refused to hand her over without specific orders from Sif. But when the messenger they sent came panting back with this refusal, Senena calmly slipped off the wedding ring Sif had given her, with its miniature Roisinani crest worked in jewels.

“Give him that for a token,” she said, “and ask if he will rather face his lord’s wrath when he learns I have had to climb down into the vaults myself?”

It wasn’t Sif’s own ring, but even the jailer had to bow to the fact it was a royal token, and, not without grumbling, hunted out the key for Anghara’s cell from the bunch hanging at his waist.

Anghara had long ceased to believe the door of her cell ever opened—even she must have been introduced through the trapdoor at the bottom, which yielded everything from food and water to fresh straw every now and again. She sat curled up on her pile of straw, staring owlishly at the widening crack of light which entered through the opening door.

“Come on,” said her jailer gruffly, “ye’re wanted.”

Another first; nobody had spoken to her directly for months. She sat frozen; she had to be manhandled to her feet when she showed no signs of moving.

It was a long journey to the top; there were steep stairs, and Anghara hadn’t walked more than five steps for a long time. Whatever Senena had expected, it was not the pale, wide-eyed wraith of a girl, wearing a filthy dress which was only a memory of its former self, with whom she was confronted in the guardroom. The dress hung off the frail prisoner—the delicate bones in her narrow hands and fragile wrists were almost visible through the skin.

The two girls’ eyes met, held.

“Senena…” whispered Anghara through cracked lips, not seeming aware she had spoken.

“Put her down in that chair,” Senena commanded, “and then leave us.” Somehow it did not seem strange that this girl, whom she had never set eyes on before in her life, should know her on sight.

The soldiers obeyed, and Senena knelt at the foot of Anghara’s chair, taking the thin, cold hands into her own and trying to rub warmth into them. Her eyes were wide and haunted. “Oh, Gods…” she murmured, staring into the hollow-eyed face beneath the matted red-gold hair. “Sif, what have you done?”

A
nghara didn’t know whether to bless Senena or curse her.

Their first meeting had not been scintillating—after uttering Senena’s name Anghara couldn’t seem to gather her wits about her to say any more, simply staring at the young queen’s flushed face. Senena did not stay for long on that first visit, but she left specific orders—and in her wake the grumbling soldiers provided a lukewarm bath, the first Anghara had had since she had left the Kheldrini ship in Calabra, and a change of clothing. It was nothing grand, but anything would have been better than the rags to which her dress had been reduced over the long months of her captivity. She had clean hair, clean clothes—even her food had climbed a notch or two in quality, and, best of all, since Senena had begun showing an interest, there had been precious little
tamman
in it. In their second meeting, and those that followed, Anghara began to remember how to relate to another human being. At first it was no more than a few words, but then, as Senena persisted, Anghara slowly started to cross a wide and trackless ocean back to the shores she once knew.

The upside of all this was that she was beginning to regain a sense of her own humanity; the downside was, of course, that she felt her captivity all the more keenly every time one of her meetings with Senena came to an end. And she knew with bitter certainty that it would all cease, one way or another, as soon as Sif returned to Miranei. When he found out what Senena had been up to in his absence—and he could h

ardly fail to—Sif had it in his power to take his revenge on Senena in terms that could be just as gruesome as those that applied to Anghara herself. It was entirely possible that the little queen would only be kept alive long enough to deliver Sif’s heir.

And nothing had prepared Anghara for the fact that she and the girl who carried the living seal to Sif’s reign could be friends. Senena herself initially seemed oddly confused as far as her own motives were concerned—she was, after all, befriending a ghost whom the king had successfully “buried,” and whose resurrection could mean only disaster for her husband. But she seemed to put the more complex issues from her mind—perhaps her first impulse had simply been to see for herself, to check the truth of the wild story she had overheard from the minstrel’s gallery, but this rapidly passed into something like affection. She met with Anghara almost daily, knowing, as Anghara did, that their time together was running out fast.

It was from Senena that Anghara learned how much time had passed in the world outside; on finding out that Anghara’s birthday had been spent alone in the dungeon, Senena took an almost child-like pleasure in organizing a belated birthday feast, which they shared in the guardroom. Anghara could not bring herself to eat much—her spartan diet and something about the
tamman
seemed to have affected her appetite—but she tried not to wreck Senena’s festive spirit by appearing gloomy and ungrateful.

“What would you have liked for a birthday present?” Senena asked, sitting on the edge of the hearth like a hoyden, her brocade skirts almost dragging in the ashes.

There might have been a time when Anghara could have named a great many things, but her world had shrunk to the dungeons of Miranei, with no prospect but death waiting for her—death swiftly, or slowly by starvation, at Sif’s whim. The greatest, most burning wish of her heart was to once again touch that part of her which was power—to know the breath of Sight again. But that was beyond Senena. Anghara glanced upward, her eyes filling with unexpected tears, only to meet more unforgiving stone above her. And at that, it was easy—even Sight shrank from the weight of that stone.

“To see the sky,” Anghara whispered, “to feel the wind upon my face once again. It’s been so long since I have walked in the sunlight…”

“It’s a small enough thing to ask,” said Senena slowly.

Anghara looked down, her lips curving up into a ghost of a smile. “No, not even you, Senena. They might have turned a blind eye to all this, but only because I have not passed those doors…and nor will I. Someone might see me up there, and afterward…there will be no holding it in. Death waits for me up there.”

“No more so than in here,” said Senena stubbornly, and then bit her lip as she realized what she had said. She reached out to lay an apologetic hand on Anghara’s arm. “I’m sorry…not today of all days…I shouldn’t have said that…But there has to be a way—you’re not asking for a guide into the mountains, surely taking you up on the battlements for a few minutes could hurt nobody.”

Anghara’s eyes were sad. “Don’t get my hopes up, Senena. I have learned to hope for nothing, it is less painful.”

This, it seemed, had been entirely the wrong thing to say. Senena’s eyes glittered, and she lifted her chin with a grim sort of determination. “I will see it done,” she vowed.

Just as Senena had once sat listening to a conversation thought to be private between a king and his counsellor, this exchange in the guardroom in its turn was overheard by a pair of ears not meant to be privy to it. Even as Anghara was being escorted back to her cell and Senena left the guardroom to begin a determined attempt to accede to Anghara’s wish, a message was already making its way down the corridors of the keep, out across snow-piled courtyards, into the cold, empty white streets of the city, to a shabby hostelry just inside the city gates. The boy who carried it, a wiry waif of some eight years or so, looked around the inn’s common room with a swift glance, and crossed unerringly to where two young men sat in desultory silence by the fireside. He pulled at his forelock in an age-old gesture of respect, but what was in his eyes was closer to adoration as he lifted them to the face of the older of the two, a dark-haired youth with piercing blue eyes. The boy handed over a much-folded scrap of parchment, tugged his forelock again, and left without uttering a word. The youth opened the parchment, and sat staring at it in silence for a long while; then he rose to his feet, crumpling the message almost heedlessly as his hands closed into fists at his sides.

“This is it,” said Kieran, and his voice was flat and cold, a steel blade leaving its sheath. “Sif is coming back within days, and we will not get another chance. We go in tomorrow.”

Kieran’s men had caught up with the splinter group they had been chasing, but they hadn’t found Anghara; worse, the group contained none of the five men whom Sif had spoken about, the men who knew who Anghara was. Those whom he had caught could tell Kieran very little except to gloat over the fact he had run after the wrong bait and the prize he had been after was that much closer to the point of no return. Perhaps he could have taken a lucid decision if any of those men had had the barest inkling of what they had done. But instead they crowed over an achievement that was meaningless to them, except perhaps inasmuch as they had figured out who was chasing them and they had managed to comprehensively hoodwink someone with Kieran’s reputation. When one of Kieran’s men lost his patience and floored a grinning soldier with a violent blow, Kieran had not intervened, and neither had Rochen; after that, killing was but a step away. Kieran had long since gotten over his sensibilities where enemy lives were concerned, but these were revenge killings, done in cold blood. He was not proud of them, or of himself for standing back and abrogating the responsibility. The truth was, he had been furious, sick with anger and helplessness. That didn’t excuse what he had done, but at least it made it easier to cope with—it was as though naming his sin drew some of its sting.

“I’m not giving up,” he had said, driven into a dangerous, almost fey mood. If Anghara was really immured in Miranei, his actions would be as insignificant as a mosquito trying to bite a knight through armor. He knew it. The knowledge was a poisoned arrow in his heart.

By this time both Adamo and Charo were with him, and the brothers, who keenly remembered the Cascin to which a waif they’d known as Brynna Kelen had arrived so many years ago, seconded him fiercely in his hunger to free their royal cousin.

“Let us go into Miranei,” Charo had advised wildly, “there are ways of finding out the exact numbers of guards, and we can take twice our number, we have proved that many times already…”

“Yes,” Adamo had said, no less implacable but still a voice for calm reason in an ocean of turbulent emotion. “We have proved it…but always with a clear line of retreat, and the possibility of returning to fight another day. I have never seen the dungeons of Miranei, but I doubt we can take them without trouble—and even if we managed, the gates of the keep can be shut against us, and we can be hunted down and spitted like rabbits. No army has taken Miranei. Ever. And we…we aren’t even an army.”

“Are you suggesting we just go away?”

“No,” said Adamo, “but neither am I suggesting we throw our own lives away on something that is clearly impossible. We will go into Miranei—but we will wait. And I will try and make a friend or two amongst the guards.”

Kieran had shaken his lethargy off then, and taken charge. “Yes. We will wait. As long as we know she lives I will give up neither the hope nor the chance of saving her. But a large group will only attract attention.”

“A handful will not be able to do anything when the time comes,” Rochen had pointed out.

“We will stay in touch,” said Kieran. “I was not suggesting we sever all ties.” A round of ragged laughter went up at this; Kieran looked up at a circle of bright eyes. “Ten,” he decided. “No more than ten.”

“I,” said Charo flatly. Not asking, stating. Adamo did not even need to speak; his eyes spoke for him. Kieran nodded.

“Adamo, Charo, myself…seven others. I will not choose. We leave camp tomorrow at dawn—I will take the seven who wait for me.” He caught another eye, bright, determined, and shook his head imperceptibly.
Not you, Rochen. I need someone to lead those who stay outside.

Rochen looked very young all of a sudden, his face slipping into a black, sullen scowl; but his brow cleared, and he lifted his head, looked straight at Kieran, nodded. And then, because it was still stronger than him, turned away.

The seven were waiting with their saddled horses when the three foster brothers emerged from the camp the next morning. Kieran, already mounted, reined in lightly, sweeping his company with hard blue eyes. “It’s the most bitter duty of all you have chosen,” he said softly. “The waiting may be long…and we may be waiting for disaster.”

“And maybe also for a miracle,” one of the men murmured.

“They pulled straws,” said Adamo, his voice deceptively gentle. “Every one of those men staying behind is wide awake, listening to us go, and cursing the long straws they pulled last night.”

“For Anghara,” said Charo, “and for you. You kept the dream alive. If anyone can snatch her from the dreaded dungeons of Miranei, it’s you.”

“And I need to be unlucky only once,” said Kieran. “Then it will all have been for nothing. Perhaps Sif has already given the word…”

“Sif is not at Miranei,” said Adamo. “And many things can happen before he returns.”

He had been both right, and wrong. Sif had been in Shaymir; but nothing happened where Anghara herself was concerned, not while Sif was away, not when he came back. Chanoch, Anghara’s birthday, Winter Court came and went. Kieran’s handful mingled with the guard, and they knew that Anghara still lived. And then winter was almost over—and came the morning Sif rode away from Miranei like a whirlwind to wreak his revenge for his wounded mother. And then, on the heels of that…Senena.

Unknown to Sif, one of the guards who had stayed behind on duty in Miranei was far more than a simple soldier. It was he who had sought out Kieran in his hostelry, a gray-eyed man with ash-brown hair with the build and cast of the man who had once been Red Dynan’s First General.

“I know who you are,” he had said simply, coming to stand beside the bench in the inn’s common room where Kieran had been sitting with Charo. Kieran heard the double hiss beside him—Charo’s quick indrawn breath and the loosening of the blade in his scabbard—and raised a swift hand to forestall murder.

“Sit,” Kieran had invited. His eyes were hooded; his voice guarded.

The young man slid into the seat opposite Kieran’s, avoiding Charos eyes. “You need have no fear,” he said, his voice low. “I have known for some time. I will not betray you. I…know why you are here.”

Outside it was snowing; perhaps it had just been a quick gust of cold air that swirled inside as someone opened the inn door that made Kieran shiver where he sat—but there was something deeper. A touch of prescience, perhaps. “Who are you?” Kieran asked.

“Melsyr, son of Kalas, who was King Dynan’s general.”

“I thought he died, in the same battle that claimed the king,” muttered Charo, dimly recalling a few remembered phrases heard from Feor in happier times.

“Almost,” said Melsyr. “He survived long enough to curse Fodrun, whom he had himself picked and brought to the king to be made Second General. He never believed Anghara was really dead. To him, Sif was a usurper who seized the throne when he saw the chance, and Fodrun nothing more than a traitor.”

“Yet you serve in the usurper’s guard,” Kieran said blandly.

“I was in the guard when Dynan was king,” said Melsyr hotly. “To leave when Sif came…it would have signed my father’s death sentence.”

“But he died,” said Charo.

“Yes. Bitter, angry…yet unmolested. And on his death…yes, I stayed. I have a young wife, a small son. And I know naught but soldiering.”

“And now?” Kieran said. “What changed, that you should come to me?”

“My father’s queen, and my own, is in Sif’s dungeons,” Melsyr said tersely.

“I am listening,” said Kieran, and his voice had changed, very subtly. Melsyr had dropped his gaze to the scrubbed deal table between them, but he lifted his head at this, and met eyes that were no longer chips of blue steel.

They were still too few, but Melsyr was a source of information that had eluded them until now. Kieran learned details of Anghara’s captivity; Charo, who had rapidly changed tack and taken Melsyr as a messenger of the Gods, had more than a few illusions shattered as he proposed one or two wild plans, now that they had a man on the inside.