Daughter of Lir (48 page)

“I will take her,” Emry said. “I’m not afraid of her
spells.”

“You’re her slave,” Dias said.

“A woman owns nothing here. Yes? Everything that is hers
belongs to her through her husband or her husband’s heir. Am I not therefore
the property of the king? And is the king not—”

“The king is completely in her power,” said Aias.

“I am not,” Dias said.

“But you aren’t—”

“The old king lies dead in his tent,” said Emry. “No one yet
has found him. Shall we sit here talking the day away, or shall we seize the
woman before she expects any such thing?”

“Since when are you one of us?”

Emry grinned at Aias. “I’m a man and she’s a woman and a
witch besides, and you need to ask me that?”

It was not exactly true, but a man of this tribe would never
have understood the truth. Aias subsided, though he eyed Emry with the remnants
of suspicion.

“Go,” Dias said abruptly. “All four of you. Take her and
bring her here. Try to be quiet about it if you can.”

“You’ll need these,” Metos said. He unrolled a bundle of
leather, baring half a dozen bronze blades.

Emry recognized them. The traders had carried them, though
he had not known they would be traded or sold.

One was his own, his sword with the silver hilt. He had
reached for it before he thought, moving swifter than the others, lifting it,
sighing as it settled into his hand.

It was the best of the blades, as well it might be: it was
made for a prince in Lir. Belatedly he remembered what and where he was. But he
could not let the sword go.

The young men did not know enough to tell one blade from
another. Metos and his daughter clearly did. Metos seemed amused. Aera he could
not read behind veils and lowered eyelids. Neither moved to prevent him, or to
advise Dias that the slave had taken the blade fit for a king.

They were armed, all four of them. Dias would not go. He
wanted to, but Metos stopped him. “If they bring her safe here, you’ll have her
in your power. If they have to kill her, you won’t have that stain on your
spirit.”

Dias did not like that, but he had to yield to its wisdom.
He settled for seizing Emry by the shoulder as he prepared to go, and saying
harshly, “If anybody has to kill her, let it be you. Then you’d best run—because
I’ll be bound by my honor to avenge her.”

Emry bowed without mockery. “I understand,” he said.

He did not meet Aera’s gaze. She had tried to prevent this.
But this was fate; however great her wisdom, she could not stand against what
must be.

o0o

They went as casually as they could, four idle young men
passing through the camp, looking to occupy themselves late on a winter
morning. Their weapons were hidden in their mantles of fur and hide. They
sauntered with deceptive slowness, closing in on the king’s tent.

It was unguarded. No sound came from it but the usual murmur
of women’s voices and the laughter and cries of children. The king’s men were
elsewhere. They had passed some of them idling about the council fire, playing
at the bones. In a well-ruled tribe, Emry thought, the king would have been in
council, and his men would have been nearby to defend him.

Emry had taken the lead. None of the others, he would wager,
had been inside those walls. They seemed content to follow him.

He was following his heart, and the roiling in his gut. He
did not fear Etena’s magic; that was the truth. The Goddess protected him. But
he did not trust this quiet, not altogether.

He breathed a prayer to the Goddess as he entered the king’s
tent, most of it wordless, pure will and pure entreaty. He did not know if she
heard. He could only hope.

They found Etena where she often was. Only one of her women
was with her. She greeted Emry’s arrival with a glance that shook him: it was
briefly, unguardedly glad. Even when his companions come in past him and seized
her and her servant, she kept her eyes on him. Trying to lay a spell on him,
maybe. He felt nothing, not even a breath of wind.

Aias and Kletas bound and gagged her. Borias did the same
for her servant. Neither resisted. It was as if they could not conceive of such
a thing, and so could not respond to it.

They wrapped the women in cloaks and carried them out. It
was eerie, how nothing changed; no one saw them, no one cried a warning.

Emry could not bear it. Every drop of wisdom that he had
cried out to him to go with the others. But he had to do it—he had to find the
king’s body. If it was there. If his death was not a dream or a spell.

It was there. It was already rigid in death. Its face was
livid. There was no sign of the maid who had been with the king, nor of the
other whom Etena must have sent to fetch him. He was all alone, rigid and
still.

It was a terrible thing, this death of a king. Emry’s heart
yearned to bring him out into the sun, to give him honorable grief, but that
would be rankest folly. A slave found with the body of a king would have been
put to death in Lir. He doubted that the penalty would be any less here.

He slipped away as softly as he could. Dias’ young men were
already gone.

He could have escaped then, gathered his belongings and
taken a horse and run. But when he turned, it was toward the makers’ circle
again, and Metos’ tent, and the new-minted king.

The wailing began before Dias’ yearmates returned to
Metos’ tent. Aera, sitting in tense silence with Dias and her father, started
as if she had been struck. If the boys had failed—if they had been hurt, or
killed—

The flap lifted. She braced for attack.

It was Aias with a long limp bundle slung over his shoulder,
and Kletas behind him with a second. Borias followed, empty-handed. There was
no one behind.

They had Etena and one of her maids. The others, said Aias,
had been nowhere to be found. They laid their burdens on the floor of the tent.

“Go,” she said to them, and to Dias, too. “This is for us to
do. Your part is out there—where the keening is.”

“But—” said Dias.

“They’ve found your father,” Aera said, though none of them
could fail to know it. “Be sure to be astonished, and suitably horrified.”

“It is a horror,” Dias said. He turned to the others. “Come,
be quick.”

They went out at the run. Their absence felt like the
aftermath of a storm, still and unnaturally quiet.

Metos broke the silence with the hiss of bronze from leather
sheath. He had drawn the one sword that remained. Swiftly, coldly, without a
glance at her, he ran it through the burden that Kletas had carried.

The woman within died without a sound. The other, Aias’
captive, began to struggle, as if somehow, in all her wrappings, she understood
what Metos had done.

Even knowing what a fool she was, Aera interposed herself
between her father and the captive. That it was Etena, she did not doubt at
all. “Not this one,” she said. “Let the People judge her. Let them know what
she did, and how she did it. Then let them decide her sentence.”

“You may regret that,” Metos said.

“I’m sure I will,” she said. “But this is what must be.”

He sighed, but he shrugged. “On your head be it,” he said.

Wise boys: they had bound Etena tightly and gagged her before
they wrapped her in cloaks. She lay in the nest of them, glaring at the two who
stood over her.

“It’s ended,” Aera said to her. “The king is dead. Now there
will be justice.”

Etena’s eyes narrowed. Aera saw no fear there. There was
laughter—at herself, at the ease with which she had been captured, who knew?
She was perfectly defiant. If Aera cut her throat then and there, she would
never beg for mercy. She would embrace her death.

Aera loosed the gag, though she suspected she would be sorry
for it. Metos, watching, said nothing. He kept the bronze blade in his hand,
stained still with the servant’s blood.

Aera held a cup of snowmelt to Etena’s lips. She drank
gladly enough. When she had had her fill, she turned her head away.

The wailing outside had risen to a crescendo. Aera knew as
if she had a shaman’s sight, that Dias and his companions had brought the king
out into the light, so that the People might see the manner of his death.

Etena was impassive. “Did you do it?” she asked.

“He did it himself,” said Aera.

Etena’s lip curled. “Oh, surely. That is the gods’ truth as
you will swear it.”

“Would you know truth from black lie?”

Etena smiled thinly. “He won’t kill me, you know. You should
have let your father do it. My son is a weakling—he’ll never have the courage
to put to death his own mother.”

“There are worse things than death,” Aera said.

Etena only smiled.

o0o

The king lay dead in the council circle, laid on the hide
of a spotted bull, under a blue and empty sky. The People circled him in a wild
dance of grief. For this, even the women came out, rent their garments, tore
their hair that was shorn already for Minas the prince. The men slashed their
arms and faces and breasts, shed blood in the king’s name.

Emry had thought their grieving extravagant before, when
they mourned a prince. Now he saw how they mourned a king.

Dias was king now. No one disputed that, even the flock of
his brothers. But until this king was laid to rest, he would not rule with the
full force of the name. The elders and clan-chieftains performed much of the
office that he would hold; the rest was laid aside.

He had sent out riders, strong young men on the swiftest of
the horses, bearing word of the king’s death and bidding the scattered tribes
and clans to gather. That would be no simple thing in the dead of winter, nor a
swift or easy one. He summoned them for the moon of spring, the moon after the
next, and they would gather to the westward, near the fire’s edge. The hunting
would be better there, and grazing for the herds; and all the tribes in that
region were broken or dead.

But now, on this bitter-bright day, it was only the royal
clan. They raised the king up, sat him as if on a throne, clothed him in royal
finery and crowned him with gold. He stared sightlessly over the camp of his
people. In truth, Emry thought, he was more strongly present now than he had
been since Etena’s spell took his soul away.

Emry kept his head down. This was not a time for outlanders.
The slaves and captives, who usually were out and about, laboring in their
rags, were nowhere to be seen. He, who had kept his distance from them, could
hardly seek refuge with them now.

In the end he went where he might not be safe, but he might
be of use. He found Metos’ tent even more bare and silent than before. Etena
and her maid were not to be seen, nor did he see or hear Aera or her sisters.
For once even Metos and the makers had left their place. They would be mourning
the king, he supposed.

He should have expected that. He considered withdrawing to
the young men’s tent, which would likewise be deserted, but he seemed to have
lost the will to move. He settled in a corner, knees drawn up, cloak wrapped
about him, and did his best to find both warmth and peace of mind.

o0o

With the coming of night, the tumult of grief muted for a
while. Those who could sleep had fallen where they danced; the fires kept them
warm, or not. By morning some would be frozen dead. They were an offering to
the gods, an escort for the king.

Emry woke in that stillness. He was still alone in Metos’
tent. It was black dark. His bladder twinged; he rose stiffly, groaning,
shaking with cold. He hobbled out of the tent.

The stars were thick overhead, scattered like hoarfrost
across the blackness of the sky. The cold numbed his cheeks and the tip of his
nose; he was grateful for the beard that grew so thick. His breath ached when
he drew it in.

He relieved himself as quickly and discreetly as he could, a
stream so hot it seemed to burn. When he was done, he turned to go back into
the tent, which though cold was at least warmer than this. But something
stopped him. The stillness. The utter lack of wind. The glitter of starlight on
the bare and trampled earth.

At first he took it for the pulse of his own heart. But that
was nothing inside of him. It was a drumbeat, swelling slowly, and a skirling
of pipes, and a thin eerie singing.

They came from the east and the south and the north. They
came with drums and pipes, bone rattles and chiming of bells. They walked
upright like men, but their heads and shoulders were those of beasts: bear and
boar, bull and stag.

The shamans had come back, and the priests of the People.
They circled the camp sunwise, and then against the sun, three times three.
They bound it and warded it and sealed it with their magics. When that was
done, they raised tents in a quarter that had been empty.

Emry stood watch until dawn. His skin quivered as the wards
went up one by one. The air seemed warmer for their presence.

To his surprise, the tribe acted as if nothing untoward had
happened. Almost he thought them oblivious to the powers that had returned,
until at midday the rites of mourning paused. The priests came into the circle
and danced solemnly around the king. The people ceased their own dancing and
wailing, fell back and stood still.

The priests were priests of the Bull, in mantles of bull’s
hide and horned headdresses. They were naked under the hides, painted with ash
and red ocher, and warm in the bite of the cold. They pawed the ground and
snorted; they did battle, horn to horn; they played a long moaning song on the
horns of bulls.

When the last note died away, the priests linked arms,
facing outward, and knelt, a circle of guard around the corpse of the king.

They knelt as still as images carved in stone. As if that
had been a signal, the young king's warband advanced together. They led a
captive, bound and staggering. She was naked, her aging body pebble-skinned and
blue with cold. Her face and eyes were covered with a hood of tanned leather
that fell to her shoulders.