Daughter of Blood (64 page)

“How does the Sea Keep get an envoy and his secretary, both weatherworkers, past the Blood Gate?” Khar was grim again, lines drawn deep about his mouth. “It could have been brought to the Red Keep in the confusion that followed the Night of Death. All the normal bonds of Derai society had been frayed by the civil war, so I wouldn't rule out looting, even between supposed allies.”

“Or the Swarm may have recovered it when they penetrated the Old Keep six years ago.” Malian was calm. “If what we've learned through Faro is correct, a Swarm agent infiltrated Lady Myrathis's household, so planting the mirror is perfectly feasible. Still, we may never know exactly how it came about. But now,” she said, steel tempering her calm, “we need to make an end.”

She was careful, lifting the tray clear, but the shield-mirror beneath appeared dormant, and remained that way once Raven picked it up. Even Faro felt compelled to look more closely, despite his reluctance, and saw no movement in the shadowed depths. “The mirror may have to be activated from the other side,” Raven said, propping it on a barrel set against the tent's main pole. “But whatever else went into its making, it stinks of Salar's handiwork.”

Salar, Faro thought, his stomach churning as he remembered the Ship's Prow House, where the name had clearly referred to some greater demon that Nirn and the others feared. Ilai might have mentioned the name, too . . . “Do it!” he said shrilly, but although Khar looked around, it was Malian who answered.

“Fear not, Pha'Rho-l-Ynor, I shall.” Faro was reassured by her certainty, but almost immediately disappointed by the so-called frost-fire sword's plainness, once drawn. And rather than raising the sword high and shearing through the shield-mirror, the Heir of Night simply sighted along its length. As though she's getting the mirror in perspective, Faro thought, puzzled.

“‘Free me,'” Malian murmured—which sounded like she was repeating someone else's words. Clasping the hilt with both hands, she extended the blade until its tip touched the mirror, but even then she did not thrust the sword deep. Faro had just decided that being Chosen of Mhaelanar couldn't be anything special—not like Khar defending the camp—when silver-white fire glittered along the blade and coruscated about its tip.

Electrified, he stared at the image of sword and flame reflected in the mirror's surface. Both remained frost-white, with lines spreading out from their reflection like fissures in ice, until the entire surface of the mirror was crackle glaze. “Free me,” Malian repeated softly, before her voice rang out, commanding as a note struck on the great gong in Seruth's Grayharbor temple: “
Be
free!” The sword belled on the same note, the top of its range piercingly high, the bottom so profound Faro could feel the reverberation inside himself. From the strain in Khar's face, he thought that the sound must be testing his shielding, and wondered if he should help—the same way he and the wyr hounds had loaned Khar their strength last night, when the assault of power was at its height.

“Wait; watch.”
The wyr hounds' caution was also a command. The belling note was building rather than dying away, the invocation
‘be free'
weaving through it like the entwined strands of Ise's staff. Both the actual and reflected swords blazed whiter until the mirror clanged, harsh with protest, and a sulfurous mist poured through the widening cracks in its surface. The sword belled again, insistent, and everyone except Malian—and Raven, Faro would remember afterward, wondering if that was what it meant to be immune—clapped their hands over their ears. Again the belling note swelled—and the mirror shattered into a cloud of steel fragments.

Faro expected the splinters to fall to the floor, but instead they revolved about the sword's white blade. Every revolution drew the filing cloud closer—like the moth and the lantern, he thought, riveted—until the first particle touched the sword's edge.
“Free . . .”
The whisper was a breath out
of the air as the entire cloud vanished. Nothing remained, not even specks of steel dust in the lantern's beam.

“Free,” Malian said, remote as the moon. By the time she lowered the blade, its appearance was that of any other plain, workmanlike weapon. Tirael made a gesture, partly salute to Malian, partly valediction.

“It had to be done,” Khar said somberly, as she sheathed the sword.

The others were silent, focused on the place where the mirror had been. Finally, Nimor shook his head as if to clear it. “There's still Lady Myrathis's vigil. We must keep that.”

“You should rest first,” Tirael told him. “We don't all have to keep the full vigil.” But someone must: Faro knew that, too, from his mam's teaching. He supposed that would end being Taly, since Khar had already been delayed and must still make his captain's rounds of the camp. Nonetheless, as if glad of the excuse to leave, within a very few minutes everyone had moved outside. The Blood exiles, who were keeping the first honor watch for Lady Myr, were still deployed about the garnet-and-gold tent, so Faro guessed it could not be as late as he had thought.

Nimor stopped, intent on the solitary star that could be seen through the Gray Lands' cloud. “The pilot's star,” he said softly, and even the wyr hounds turned their silver eyes skyward, following his gaze. No one spoke, but Faro knew they all understood that Nimor had not expected to see it again. “You know,” the envoy continued, “there's still one thing I don't understand in all this.”

“Only one,” Tirael murmured.

Nimor ignored him, his eyes on the star. “I suppose Faro may know. But what quest was so pressing it sent an Heir of Blood into Jaransor, then led him to appropriate a Sea House ship?”

Faro shook his head, because if Mam knew, she had never said. In the brief silence that followed, Murn came out of the infirmary to join them. “Rook's awake and urgent to speak with you,” he told Khar. “He won't settle until you come.”

Khar nodded and started to turn away, but checked when
Malian spoke. “What drove your stealing in those same times?” she said to Nimor. “Our Alliance had not only lost its bulwark against the Swarm, but the privation that followed the loss of the Golden Fire nearly destroyed us. As if that were not enough, the Blood Oath was taking hold, turning us more deeply against ourselves. We were like an animal in a trap, which sees gnawing off its own leg as the only way out.” She paused. “What else
could
Ammaran have been doing, except seeking to restore the Golden Fire?”

One wyr hound moved sharply, but the rest stood motionless. “It seems obvious, once you frame it that way,” Tirael said finally. “But even if Ammaran thought restoring the Fire possible, why voyage into the Southern Realms? What was he seeking there?”

“Power.” Malian dropped the word into their midst like a pebble down a well. Faro could have sworn he heard the echo. “A source of power to draw on, since we had decimated our own.” Her coolness was tempered again as she met their eyes one by one. “And now that we know the Wall has been breached at least once, while Yorindesarinen's shield is lost, we had better find a way to complete Ammaran's quest.”

F
or the first time since the siege began, Kalan heard a rat-fox bark, farther out on the plain. The wind carried the coughing cry to him where he stood in the shadow of the breached earthworks, with part of his mind monitoring the muted sounds of both the camp and the wider night. The remainder of his attention was absorbed by the words Rook had spoken, risen onto one elbow in his urgency. At one level, the Adamant youth's account was a confusion of a crow woman come alive, who was also Emeriath out of legend, and how the hind in the tapestry must run. The rest was all too familiar: the Hunt striving to break free, precipitated by the finding and claiming of the spear.

My fault, Kalan thought, his jaw ground together. Not Faro's, for having crossed Thanir's path, or Tirael's for acknowledging Myr as kin: mine and this cursed ring's. He was tempted to drag it off and hurl it away, as his first instinct had been to cast The Lovers onto the nearest fire and watch it burn to ash—except he did not know what either action might mean for Myr's spirit, caught in the eternal cycle of hind and Hunt. Also, according to all Rook had witnessed with his power joined to Myr, and through her to Emeriath, the sacrifice must be willing. And Myr
had
been willing, not least for Kalan's sake.

“She said you were hers. Her champion and Honor Captain, I suppose. That's when she agreed.” Kalan heard Rook's words again, each one a reproach, although he knew that was not why the youth had told him of events in the tent. Yet so long as Myr was bound to the hind, her spirit would never come to the Hurulth's Hall. Rook, raised in Adamant, which served the Silent God first among the Nine, had not said that, but Kalan had spent seven years in Night's Temple quarter so he had not needed to be told.

I was supposed to champion and defend her, he thought, frowning at the ragged hole blasted through the dike, only to fail at the last. While she—the shy, the gentle, the one Blood considered unfit to be its Daughter—not only stepped between Faro and Thanir's knife, but into Mayanne's web to save us all. From what Malian had gleaned from Faro's memories, Myr had been naturally resistant to the mirror's influence as well. Otherwise, Kalan thought bitterly, she would doubtless have been permitted to live and take her place as Countess of Night. But then—less bitterly—she would not have been Myr . . .

Reason might assert that both the shield and The Lovers had been in place long before his arrival. Nonetheless, he had not paid either of them the attention they merited.
Because,
the voice of reason pointed out,
you had your mind on other imperatives, like a camp on the verge of annihilation.
Still, Kalan now knew how Lannorth must have felt, with Rowan Birchmoon dead on his watch. The situation was not the same since guards under his command had not slain Myr. Yet Faro's involvement, however unwitting, meant the parallel ran close enough.

The crow had warned him that the spear came at a price. I just assumed I would be the one to pay, Kalan thought. It
should
have been me. He could have wept, except the wind from the plain gusted, a grit-laden susurration to the futility of blame and might-have-beens. Dry-eyed, he stared into it, but felt as bleak as Taly had looked, keeping her vigil for the young woman she had called Lady Mouse. The ensign had insisted on honoring Myr with the rites of Hurulth, dismiss
ing the New Blood's ritual of Kharalth—and Kalan could not bring himself to tell her both would be equally vain so long as Myr's spirit was bound into the Web of Mayanne.

On the far side of the camp someone was playing a flute. The sound was mournful, suiting his mood and the silence of those crouched around the fires. So many lost, Kalan thought: Palla and Dain, together with Jaras and Nhal from his exiled company; Reith and Yelme among so many other marines; and Sarr and Nai from the caravan. Baris, too, had fallen sometime before the end, and Orth was dead.

Kalan had seen the Sword warrior's body as he turned Madder to answer Murn's summons, cast up a few yards past the high-tide line of the final assault with a storm wrack of enemies about him. All Kalan's focus had been on Myr, so he had not fully assimilated the details absorbed at that time, including Orth's death, until much later. He might not mourn the Sword warrior as he did others, but could and would acknowledge that Orth had fought ferociously to the end—and cut down the support for Arcolin's offer to the camp as effectively as he had swung his poleaxe. Not from any change of heart toward Faro, but from his understanding of Arcolin's game and a hatred of the Swarm that outweighed other animosities.

The rat-fox barked again, and Kalan frowned, studying the shadow of Malian and Raven's warriors, keeping guard in the darkness beyond the camp. The main force of around six hundred horse, commanded by someone called Valadan, was still pursuing the besiegers. Almost inevitably, Kalan knew, their superior numbers would whittle the Darksworn cavalry away until the infantry were at their mercy. In the meantime, Malian's escort had been reinforced from the original vanguard, so now several hundred warriors guarded the camp.

All drawn from Raven's personal guard, apparently—yet try though he might, Kalan could not recall any Southern Realms' mercenary company of comparable size to the force that had rescued the camp. The warrior he had observed in the tent was subtly altered, too, from the hedge knight he had known in Emer. The old Ser Raven had also kept in the
background until need demanded, but this man was . . . Less rough-edged, Kalan decided finally, and more assured. If that's possible, he added wryly, remembering the hill fort and Caer Argent.

He felt confident Malian would explain more fully as soon as circumstances allowed. Meanwhile, the strengthened guard meant he need not fear either a surprise assault or harassment from the lower-level 'spawn infestation that had accompanied the legion. With Malian and her force present, he could even say that his job was done and walk away from the camp, losing himself and his grief in the vastness of the night . . .

The respite, Kalan decided after a few moments, lay in contemplating such a course, but without any serious intention of pursuing it. Especially since he was still the Honor Captain Myr had appointed, and would retain responsibility for the camp until alternate provision could be made. Still frowning, he turned back to the camp, and recognized Aiv, crouched by one of the fires with the remnant of Palla's company. Together with Rigan, who was still in the infirmary, she was the last of those who had helped Sarr secure the camp after Kolthis abandoned it.

Instead of passing unseen in the dark between the fires, Kalan turned aside and sank onto his heels beside her. Checking Aiv's move to rise, he held out his hands to the flames. “Where's Darrar?” he asked.

Aiv cleared her throat. “All the companies chose one of their number to keep the second honor watch for Lady Myrathis, and Darrar stands for us. The Sea company will keep the third watch, and Lord Tirael's knights will see the vigil out. The camp agreed while you were with the other captains.” She hesitated. “We're all glad to see you unscathed, Captain Khar.”

“And I you,” Kalan replied as a series of murmurs endorsed Aiv's comment.

The groom glanced away, clearly uncomfortable in her role as spokesperson, but one of the others gestured her to continue. “I mean, we all know that none of us would be here if it weren't for you. Sir.”

“Ay,” an older man agreed. “Even this Heir of Night, the one they say is the new Chosen of Mhaelanar, only came to our rescue because of her friendship with you.”

Nods greeted this, and Kalan saw the association with Malian had enhanced, not diminished, him in their eyes. No question, though, how quickly word got about. As if to confirm it, Aiv spoke again, very low. “Is it true what they say, that your page is a long-lost Heir of Blood?”

“He has ties to the old line of Blood,” Kalan temporized. “That much is true.” If that implied anything more was not the case, he would have to live with the stain on his honor—but Aiv's query had stirred fear to life, highlighting the danger of Faro's heritage. Tirael had implied it, with his remark about loosing a wyr pack in Blood's halls, while Nimor's response had anticipated the way current alignments within the Alliance would shift as Earls and their advisors scented advantage. Kalan had known the revelation of Pha'Rho-l-Ynor would cause a furor, but now realized that grief and other preoccupations had blinded him to what Tirael had seen at once: that the ruling kin's most likely response would be to seek Faro's death.

And I can't rule out Liankhara and others still having viable agents in the camp, he thought grimly. “The defense would not have held without each and every one of you,” he told Aiv and her companions, deliberately returning to the previous subject. “Your stand here honors Blood.”

Kalan noted the lift in their expressions as they murmured acknowledgment, and all those about the fire rose to their feet as he left. On reaching the inner camp, he saw the lamp inside Myr's tent had been relit—and since Malian and Raven's escort still waited, was unsurprised to find the two of them inside. Malian was seated on a folding stool, studying an ornate scroll with Ise's walking stick propped beside her, while Faro lay close by, fast asleep amid the wyr hounds.

“He wanted to keep the vigil,” Malian said, following his gaze, “but fell asleep almost at once. I thought it best to bring him with us when we left.”

“At least one of us is thinking clearly,” Kalan said, re
lieved, then glanced from the walking stick to the scroll, his raised brows a question.

“It's the marriage contract,” Malian told him.

Kalan's brows rose higher—until he reminded himself that as Heir of Night she had every right to look at it, now that Myr was gone. To cover his flash of disapproval, and subsequent surge of grief, he studied The Lovers again. “I hate the cursed thing,” he said finally, turning back to Malian and Raven, “but I intend to keep it very safe.” Settling into a camp chair, he told them all he knew or suspected of the tapestry's part in events.

“A complex weaving,” Malian observed, then paused. “Honor and duty may count for a great deal, but I can see Lady Myrathis meant more to you.”

Raven remained by the entrance, but Kalan could feel the shimmer of Nhenir's power as well, warding the tent and their conversation. “More than I realized. And it was my job to keep her alive.” His voice roughened. “I failed in that.”

Gentleness was not a quality he primarily associated with Malian, but Kalan heard it in her voice now. “I doubt she would see it that way.”

He met her eyes. “But I do. And I'm still her champion, so I have to find a way to free her spirit, if I can. But you needn't fear,” he added quietly, “that I'll fail you by turning away from immediate events to pursue a personal quest.”

Malian shook her head. “From the beginning, we've been friends, not Heir and retainer. And friends come and go as they wish, choosing their own paths as need and wisdom dictate. So, the question of failing me does not arise.”

Which is both freedom and a burden, Kalan thought wryly, since it leaves me with no one else to blame if my decisions go awry. His gaze returned to The Lovers and the young woman who stood alone, weeping—although he rather thought the symbolism might depict Faro's fate as much as Myr's. He met Malian's gaze again. “In terms of where I go from here, my dreams keep showing me Dread Pass, above the Towers of Morning.”

She nodded. “I've detected that, through my visions. I also
met Garan of Night and his eight-guard by Rowan Birchmoon's tomb. From what he told me, Morning and the pass are both dangerously vulnerable.”

Garan had said the same thing to Asantir in the Red Keep, Kalan reflected. “In light of what's happened here, the pass must be secured.”

“I agree.” Malian was thoughtful, though. “But how sure are you of your dreams' truth? We know Nindorith manipulates both dreams and foreseeing, and the Darksworn might well try misdirection regarding their plans.”

“So far, the other dreams around it have proven true.” Kalan glanced toward Raven, watchful by the tent entrance, then back to Faro. “Including one that may be his great storm.
‘Do it,'
” he quoted. “
‘Live.'
I believe I dreamed Ammaran saying those words, presumably telling Taierin to use the Luck's binding. And there
was
another power loose in that storm.” Kalan described the behemoth and the sky riven by more than lightning. “But how
Pha'Rho-l-Ynor's
wreckage washed up four hundred years later, I still don't understand.”

“I may, from what you describe.” Raven spoke quietly from his place by the entrance. “Do you recall,” he said to Malian, “my telling you how Amaliannarath brought us here, and that our few remaining adepts with any sort of talent for gates all died, shoring up her power at the last? And that even then we almost didn't make it?”

Amaliannarath, Kalan thought, cudgeling his tired brain to recall . . . But Malian was nodding. “She never intended bringing us back into time at all,” Raven continued. “She had foreseen that we must sleep outside it and waken only when the circumstances were right. But she had expended too much of herself at the end and was already dying. She came out of the Gate of Dreams inadvertently, tearing a gap between it and Haarth, which is when our adepts died, joining their power to hers to rectify the error. That breach,” he told Kalan, “is what you saw in your dream.”

“
‘I move between worlds and time,'
” Malian said softly. “Amaliannarath really did have that ability—but she came out of the gate
after
the time when she foresaw Fire waking.
Before that could be corrected and the tear closed again,
Pha'Rho-l-Ynor
must have sailed through the anomaly and into our current time.”