Kings of the North (57 page)

The glamour pushed doubt at him, but he pushed back, refusing. Finally it withdrew, but only a short distance. He thought he sensed his grandmother nearby, wrapped in the elvenhome kingdom, invisible but present.

“Sir King—?”

Garris. He didn’t want to talk to Garris, or anyone, but Garris had to know something, to understand Arian’s disappearance.

“Sit down,” Kieri said, waving to the bench he sat on.

“What … happened?”

“The Lady did not approve. Arian left.”

Garris stared. “You sent her—”

“No, not me.” Kieri sighed. “I argued with my grandmother; the taig was upset. Arian left, she said for the good of the realm. It is not good for the realm, if I do not marry. And I will marry Arian, or no one.”

“Oh.” Garris locked his thumbs one way, then the other. “You’re sure—”

“I’m sure that Arian has gone. I’m sure I will marry no one else. I’m sure my grandmother thinks I will change my mind. And I’m sure it’s a complication none of us needed.” He hoped the Lady was listening, but his sense of her presence had faded.

“Maybe she’ll change her mind—”

“Who? Arian or my grandmother?”

“Either. Both. Maybe even you.”

Kieri looked at him until Garris looked down and away. “Garris, you’ve known me how long?”

“Long enough to know you don’t change your mind easily. All right. But—happy as I was to think of you and Arian—she’s not the only—”

“She is for me.”

“There are other half-elf Squires. And rangers.”

“They aren’t Arian.” Kieri sighed again. “Garris, I’m not a youth. I’ve loved before; I’ve been married before. I know my own mind and heart. This is not some hasty infatuation, as my grandmother thinks. Nor some plot of Arian’s. And I see no reason why I should not have the wife I want—the wife I already love. Her reasons—the Lady’s reasons, I mean—amount to blaming Arian for her father’s behavior. He sired her; he didn’t infect her with whatever the Lady thinks is wrong with him.”

“Um. People do inherit—”

“Garris, I don’t want to be angry with you.”

“And I don’t want you angry with me. But as a friend, and as your subject, and as captain of your Squires: consider carefully. Maybe Arian has the right of it. If the Lady does not change her mind, and if your quarrel with the Lady imperils the taig, can you in good conscience continue that quarrel for the sake of a woman you have not yet married? As the king, healing and preserving the taig’s health are your primary responsibilities.”

Kieri shook his head. “If it were only convenience, or calculation,
or mere affection, Garris, I could leave it—with regret, but I could. This is not the same. I know it must be Arian because—besides my own feeling—the taig itself told me. I felt it.”

“You felt the taig more than the Lady did?”

“I don’t know what the Lady felt, but I felt the taig rejoicing when Arian and I knew—”

“You were—very emotional—”

“I could not mistake one for the other, Garris, any more than I could mistake redroots for clotted cream.”

“Well … what do you want me to do? Is there anything?”

“I would like to be alone for a while,” Kieri said. “I don’t—I can’t—meet the Council right now. I need time to calm myself down, and try to calm the taig, just that.”

“I will place Squires to guard your privacy, then,” Garris said.

Kieri listened to his footsteps on the garden paths, then the gentle thump of a door, and stared at the falling water. He tried techniques Orlith had taught him, slipping his mind into the water. Cold water, winter water, ice-edged wherever it slowed down; he shivered, thinking of Arian off somewhere in the winter woods, alone.

“She would be very angry if she knew I had done this,” a voice said. As beautiful as harp music, a gentle melancholy in it … Kieri looked aside and saw Arian’s father sitting on the next bench.

“What—how did you—?”

The elf made a gesture with his hands, and a pattern of light formed. “The Lady’s quarrel with me goes beyond my predilection for human women,” he said. “We elves have gifts in different measure, as do you humans, and in my case—my sensing of the taig is greater than hers.”

“How can that be?” Kieri asked. “She’s the queen, isn’t she?”

“She is the Lady of the Ladysforest,” the elf said gravely. “She has great power—greater than mine, in many ways, but not in all. I honor her, but she resents that the taig tells me more than it tells her.”

“If you know the taig so well, you know it rejoiced when Arian and I came together.”

The elf said nothing.

“I do not know your name,” Kieri said. “She did not introduce us.”

“She did not intend us to know each other,” the elf said. “My name is long and difficult in human speech, but Dameroth will do.”

“Well, Dameroth, why have you come to me? And against the Lady’s wishes?” Kieri had not known any elf to cross the Lady before.

“I want you to understand my daughter. Of all my children—and all are half-elven, as I sired no full elves—one of the Lady’s complaints—Arian inherited most my sensitivity to the taig. It was her taig-sense, that and her mother—”

“Her mother?”

“Her mother had a strong sense of duty, and brought her up to the same. Put those together—” Dameroth placed his long-fingered hands palm to palm, then interlaced his fingers. “—the taig-sense and the duty, and she could do no other than leave.”

“She could have trusted me—” The pain and humiliation he’d felt when Arian turned and ran down the hill stabbed him again.

“It was not lack of trust in
you
, Sir King,” Dameroth said. “I know her well; I knew her as a child—and a stubborn little fireball she was, too. She befriended the taig early, and as a ranger bent her whole attention on the taig. She cannot ignore its distress any more than she could ignore a splinter in her eye. The taig and this realm have been her whole life. Her love for you has grown out of that, root and leaf and flower, and to live and flourish must remain so. She cannot sever that connection; the flower would wither and fade.”

Kieri frowned. Of all the reasons he’d thought of, in his furious pursuit, this had not occurred to him.

“I have more experience of humans than the Lady,” Dameroth said. “And in this matter, though I am partial, I am not blinded by anger. I saw true love in you, when you stood with her.”

“Yes,” Kieri said. “And I swear to you we felt the taig rejoice when we spoke together.”

“Trust her,” Dameroth said. “Her love for you is genuine; her sense of the taig is unerring; her loyalty to the realm is unbending. If she comes to feel that the taig truly rejoices in your marriage, she will come back. But for her, a half-elf, to place her taig-sense above that of the Lady whom we all revere and serve, to risk injury where she has been sworn to healing—that she could not do in an instant.” Dameroth paused, but Kieri could think of nothing to say. Dameroth
went on. “The Lady would tell you that I have no sense of duty, and I do not pretend that Arian inherited that from me—that is all her mother and her mother’s teaching. But you should know that Arian will expect the king to do
his
duty, whether she is there or not.”

“She is testing me?”

“No … not you. She is testing herself, her sense of the taig’s need. But she will expect you to show the same diligence, the same loyalty, that she herself values and shows.”

“You are not … putting a glamour on me …”

“No. I could, of course, but you are the king, and it would be discourteous.” He paused, hummed, and then went on speaking. “That was to reset the boundary that let me come here without the Lady’s knowledge. I hope. I want your kingship to succeed, and not only for Arian’s sake. There are those who do not, even now. You are like a harrow that stirs the soil, bringing stones up … long-buried secrets will rise from the depths, and some will break on their hardness, elf and human, Earthfolk and folk of the air.”

“Secrets?”

“Not mine to speak of. But you’ve already made changes in the relationship of elves and humans.”

“They need to work together—”

“Of course. Most understand that, though they may not know how, or wish it were not necessary.” He turned to look Kieri directly in the face. “I have said I want your kingship to succeed, and I do. I hope, as others hope, that it does not require too much of me. Can you understand that?”

“In a way,” Kieri said.

“Your paladin—that yellow-haired girl—”

“Not
my
paladin,” Kieri said firmly. “She’s Gird’s, or the High Lord’s. And her name is Paksenarrion.”

“I know. She meddled in forbidden things. Places. Unwitting, at the time, but she did. And it is in those things the great change began, both the change to this age and the change to come.”

Kieri scowled. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“No. And I do not know what, if anything, to tell you. If the gods are moving in this, it is not my place to interfere—something the Lady would agree with. But if they are asking me to speak, then I must. I dislike this uncertainty.”

“I would prefer to know.”

“I am sure you would, and yet knowledge given out of time can bring disaster.”

“As can knowledge withheld,” Kieri said. “In war, it is most commonly withholding knowledge that kills.” Dameroth looked thoughtful but said nothing. Kieri went on. “Does Arian share your certainty about this change?”

“No. And I am not certain—it is the uncertainty that drives me to speak, but only partially. I will tell you this: what that paladin touched—in two places far apart—has begun the next great change. And I hear from elves in Tsaia that someone else you knew, your former Verrakai captain, has touched another, and the paladin with her.”

“You can’t leave it there,” Kieri said. But Arian’s father was already turning away; he vanished in a pulse of light. Another damned elf evading conflict, refusing to help … Kieri sat on the bench and stared at the water, thinking of everything Arian’s father had said. Despite himself, he found his mind drifting to what hadn’t been said. What had Paks done—or been involved in—that could bring about a great change—whatever that was? What places had she been? Kolobia? What else? It was easier, in a way, than thinking about Arian and why she had run away like that. Every time he thought of Arian, his anger rose again, and grief, and he could feel the taig react.

Where was Arian? Did even her father know? Was her father right about why she had left … and that she would return? What would the Lady do if she did?

He left the garden a little later, hardly noticing as the Squires on duty fell in behind him without speaking. He did not want to speak to anyone … he went down, and down again until he was in the chamber outside the ossuary. Sitting on the bench, taking off his boots and socks, he felt more numb and empty than he had before. Why had he come here? What could the dead tell him, that the living could not?

And yet … he went in and stood once more by his father, his father who had loved an elf and suffered her loss … suffered his son’s loss.

“We both lost a loved wife,” Kieri said, as if to that man. “We both lost a son, and I a daughter as well. I do not want to lose Arian. I don’t
know how—what to do—” He turned to his sister’s bones and laid a hand on her skull. “As you were woman, sister, you may understand Arian better than I do. Help me understand, help me know what to do …”

Peace sifted down on him, flake by flake, it seemed. In the silence, in the freshness of the air, he felt calmer. Under his bare feet, the stone grew a little warmer; he felt moved to lie down, there in the aisle, having been invited. Under his back, the stone felt firm, warm through his clothes, almost as if shaped for him.

Rest
. No outward voice, but an inward command. Why here? Why now? He closed his eyes, in spite of uncertainty. His thoughts wandered to the past, as far back as his arrival at Aliam’s … as recent as the confrontation with the Lady … as distant as the coast of Aarenis and the king of Pargun …

And once again, his sister’s presence, this time more clear than ever before.
They lie. She lies. She did not send the sword
.

Kieri tried to hold the same stillness, to listen only.

She called mother. She called you. She did not protect
. The image he’d seen before: the Lady’s face. Then another image: two elves talking behind the Lady.
They lie. They tell her lies. I saw. She bade me come. I refused. She hated me. A bad place. Evil
.

No image for the “bad place.” Kieri struggled with himself, not to press for answers, to listen only, but he had to know, and the question burst from him.
Did she kill our mother?

Silence. A sense of overwhelming grief, the grief of a child who does not understand the finality of death. Then:
Betrayal. Danger. Judgment
. And then, from more than one, unnamed and unnumbered:
Peace. Rest now
. He sank into that peace despite himself.

“S
ir King?” The Seneschal’s soft voice woke him.

Kieri opened his eyes. “I’m fine,” he said. “They wanted to talk to me.”

“Ah.” The Seneschal’s expression showed he understood who “they” were. “I can tell the others, if you like—if you need more time.”