Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (6 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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The Sharif could share the voice of her mind—a voice that was deeper than language—only with those she trusted. Sometimes it amazed Gaultry that the woman could still communicate with her so, after all they had endured, after all her bad choices as the little party’s nominal leader.
Tell Aneitha she must find a place to cross the river. The bridge is too crowded.
The Sharif sat up in her saddle and straightened her shoulders, the desert yellow of her eyes focusing inward. For a moment, she looked strong and handsome, in command of her body and her mount. Then a deep shudder wracked her chest, as even what should have been for her the
simple effort of reaching out exhausted her.
It’s done
. The proud shoulders slumped and she rolled tiredly in her saddle.
Even so, when Gaultry shot the woman an anxious glance, she answered with a good-humored smile.
Far better Aneitha to make such a crossing than me.
The desert-woman could not swim, and her adventures with Gaultry had not made her love water any better.
At least this time I get a bridge.
Never fear!
Gaultry said, hoping to be cheering.
There’s a bridge for every crossing from here all the way to Princeport. We’re a civilized people, in Tielmark.
I believe what I see with my own eyes, Gautri
. The Sharif smiled, and rubbed the base of her neck. The thick black hair she had lost to the lice of the slaver’s hold grew longest there, and she had gotten into a habit of tugging at those short strands.
We’ll show you we’re civiLized,
Gaultry assured her.
I believe what I see
, the Sharif answered, a little more seriously.
More now than ever.
The crossing bridged the narrowest point between hard granite
banks. As they neared, the reason for the gathered crowd became obvious. The bridge was narrow and much-repaired, so overgrown with vines that it was difficult even to see the age-whitened boards from which it had been constructed. The center of its three short spans sagged dangerously. The bridgekeeper, a stout, dark-haired man with an enormous belly, collected two-penny tolls and directed the marketgoers into ragged lines on both the banks, ensuring that the bridge never bore the weight of more than a handful of travelers and their livestock, or the mass of a single cart or wagon.
From a distance, Gaultry conceived a fanciful impression that the entire structure was held together only by the unusual wealth of ivy that swarmed up over its sides and supports. Coming closer, she was appalled to discover imagined whimsy was actual fact. A spindly, vine-covered arch had been erected on the bridge where it went onto the first piling. As she approached, she saw that it was marked with the hex-signature of an Emiera Priestess who had grafted the vines to the bridge to keep it from collapsing. From the hex-signature, she read that the work was dated for new attention—as of three years prior.
“This is Tielmark’s High Road!” Gaultry said, shocked. “Who would allow this bridge to get to this state?”
Martin loosed his reins and rubbed his neck. “Who do you think? The late Chancellor of Tielmark was also the Master of its High Road and bridges.”
The late Chancellor of Tielmark had been a Bissanty loyalist. Gaultry, who had been personally responsible for his death, paled with shock as her poor understanding of the far-reaching consequences of a disloyal chancellor came freshly home to her. “How could Tielmark trust something so important to a man up to his elbows in paper and court protocol? Even if he wasn’t a Bissanty snake? And why send a Priestess instead of a builder to fix it?”
“Benet has been a long time coming into his power.” Martin sounded tired. He slid out of his saddle, pulling his reins over his horse’s head so he could better control the animal in the crowd. “Years of regency after his father died, then a traitor chancellor. He’s actually held the throne of Tielmark for almost eight years now—yet with the regency and the ill-counsel of his chancellor considered, his marriage this spring can be counted his first entirely self-ruled act as Tielmark’s ruler. Do you wonder that his bridges are rotten?”
Gaultry stared, first at the bridge, then at the marketgoers who waited, patient but increasingly surly, on both riverbanks. “This bridge has been collapsing for more than eight years,” she observed. “Was Benet’s father ineffective too?” Martin was old enough to remember, even if Gaultry was not.
Martin shrugged. “Ginvers was a soldier, like his brother Roualt before him. You’d have to go back to Corinne for a ruler who took the time to care about her roads. Besides, the lands that border the High Road are a patchwork of small estates, each owing allegiance to different power-holders. There must be some local dispute.”
Following Martin’s example, Gaultry and the others dismounted, leading their horses to the back of the queue that twined round on their side of the bank.
Gaultry was dismayed at the numbers—and the volume of the produce—that lay ahead of them. “We’ll be here hours. Maybe it would have been faster to find a place to wade.”
Tullier smirked.
“Not necessarily.” Martin, catching Tullier’s expression, eyed him with a look of serious displeasure. “I’ll not argue with every pig farmer, but this—obviously we can’t waste the rest of the day standing here.” He slapped his reins into Gaultry’s hand and pushed through the crowd to speak with the bridgekeeper.
“Talk about choosing one’s battles unwisely!” Gaultry said between her teeth. “Just watch. This will prove worse than me with the pig-woman.
Tielmaran farmers won’t stand for queue-jumping.”
Sure enough, as Martin finished speaking to the bridgekeeper and beckoned them to the front, calls of complaint rose from both banks. The monkey and the tamarin particularly drew the crowd’s ire—as if the creatures were proof that the travelers were performers or players, greedy for a chance to set up a stall early.
“Get back in line!” one man behind them shrieked. To judge by his dress, he and his companions actually were actors or minstrels. “We’ll all reach Soiscroix in good time, if no one pushes forward unfairly!”
“Quiet! Quiet! They’re on the Prince’s business,” the bridgekeeper protested, his breathy, soft-toned voice scarcely audible above the tumult. “Their business gives them right of passage—”
No one listened. Martin, ignoring the catcalls, stepped onto the bridge and beckoned. Gaultry tossed her reins to the Sharif and hurried up to him. “Martin—this isn’t a good idea.”
“Hurry up. There’s going to be a surge if we don’t make this quick.” He manhandled Gaultry past him. “Come along you two!” he called to the Sharif and Tullier. “Prince’s business!”
Gaultry, reluctant, took two paces along the bridge. A man at the bridge’s far end stared back across the heads of the people who would be the last to cross before them, a furious expression on his face. “Who are you to push ahead?” he yelled. “Elianté’s Spear! Wait your turn!”
Gaultry set her face and stepped forward. Whether Martin was wise to have leapt the queue or not, he wasn’t in the wrong to have done it. Ahead of her, the angry man’s eyes bulged with affront.
Then she realized the reaction was more than simple offense. Something was happening in the crowd behind him: There was a sharp spike in the crowd’s movement, and the man fell, or was dragged, out of sight.
A short, slope-shouldered man took his place. At his back, another; then a third man and a fourth. At first Gaultry did not recognize what she was seeing.
Tullier grabbed at her sleeve. “Bissanty-men! What are they doing in Tielmark?”
The man in front swung his sword clear from his belt. “For Llara!” he called. “For Llara’s Heart-on-Earth!” Sword upheld, he loped forward to close with them. Marketgoers scattered to either side, clearing a path.
“Stop them!” Gaultry shouted. “They’ll kill us!”
But the crowd thought the men were only giving them a fright for their audacity—they seemed deaf to the invocation of the Bissanty goddess,
the imperial title. Some even cheered the swordsmen forward. For a crucial moment, Gaultry, half taking her cue from the crowd’s reaction, could not decide whether she should press forward or turn back, unable believe the attack was really happening. She darted a quick look at the bridgekeeper, and saw him standing to one side, obviously wanting to be out of it. Martin was still behind her.
“I am Gaultry Blas!” she shouted, as the swordsmen almost came up on her. “Glamour-witch, and protector of this realm!” But of course the men must already know who she was, if they were Bissanty and attacking! Still—she could bluff—“Don’t test me, if you choose to live!” As the men kept coming, she remembered at last that she did not have to bluff. Touching the vine that encircled the rail at her side, she opened a channel toward the signature of the priestess who had bound it to the bridge, calling on the strength left dormant there. As she touched it, her own power surged up. “Know my power!” For a moment, her heart leapt with hope: She would turn the spell, and use the magicked vine to trap the attackers before they reached her. All it needed was a little extra call of power—
An unfamiliar countersurge slapped against her as she reached the signature board. The first sweet shock of her own power staggered, lurched and dropped, with an angry recoil that was as painful as it was unexpected. Some other witch, unnamed, had left her mark on the boarded archway, along with a fresh, aggressive spell. Gaultry jerked her hand back from the vine, swearing, not sure what had gone wrong, and turned with angry fear to face the descending sword.
But as she turned, the vines all along the bridge made a violent, flexing motion. Beneath her feet, the bridge ties shifted and shrieked in protest, and awareness pierced her of the nasty drop from the bridge to the swift-running, rock-strewn waters that ran beneath it. The panicked marketgoers still remaining on the bridge, ignoring even the men with the swords, scrambled for the safety of solid ground. The sallow-skinned face of the first of the Bissanty attackers paled. “Llara on me—” he cried, lurching as the bridge shifted beneath him.
The vine unfurled from the spot where Gaultry had touched it and reared back away from the bridge, twisting like a serpent, made all from leaves. And not just in that place. All along the bridge, fronds of ivy writhed like a many-armed creature waking from sleep, breaking up parts of the bridge as it tore itself free.
“What have you done?” Tullier shouted. He was the closest of her companions.
“It’s not me!” Gaultry shouted back. “I swear by Elianté, Huntress-god, it wasn’t me! Jump clear!”
Instead he snatched at her hand.
The flailing, many-armed mass of ivy arched over the bridge behind them, blocking retreat.
A frighteningly strong frond grabbed at her arm, then ripped Tullier’s hand away. A plank shifted and fell away from beneath her. When she tried to make a dash for stable ground, a mantle of green swept over her head, a living robe of leaf and vine that blocked her sight as it engulfed her. As she drew her knife a vine-tendril looped three times around her arm, then contracted, hard enough to tear her skin. She screeched with pain, but clung to the knife, knowing she would never be able to retrieve it if it dropped.
She heard Tullier call out again, his voice pitched high with anger, but she could not distinguish his words. The vines extended and coiled like leafed snakes, lashing her knife arm against her chest. She threw herself against the bridge’s rail, trying to break free. “Martin!” she called. “Anyone! Help!”
The bridge rocked sharply. With a harsh chorus of cracking and splintering, it began to come apart. A board dropped out right beneath her feet, and then, as she struggled to hold the rail, another still was wrenched away. Gaultry fell, clutched at a broken piece of rail to brake herself, and knocked her chin against something hard. She fell again, a terrible slipping fall, twice and more again the height of a standing man, punctuated with a bruising crash against what remained of one of the bridge supports.
Then she was in the water, forced by the current against the edge of a half-submerged rock.
The vine loosened as she dropped, deprived either of its purchase or of the magic that grounded it. Gaultry got a confused partial view, through whipping snakes of vine, of the remnants of the bridge above her. Martin was still aloft, facing at least one Bissanty man. Tullier—she could not see Tullier. He had to be down with her in the water. And the Sharif—the Sharif had been holding the horses—
The Sharif was in the water not far from her, pressed against one of the bridge’s pilings, strung between two of their mounts. The chestnut that Martin had been riding lunged furiously, striking with all its strength
against a closing noose of vine. Gaultry’s horse had broken bones in the fall. Shrieking in pain, it plunged wildly, trying to right itself. The Sharif was strung between the two panicked animals, bound in a tangled snarl of bridle straps and vine.
Let them go!
Gaultry called, not understanding at first how seriously the woman was entangled.
Oh yes. And then the river takes me and I drown
, the woman shot back.
The exchange between the women roused the vine. It moved sluggishly in the water, fronds extending, slow to regroup. Snaky masses of leaf noosed once more around Gaultry’s chest, tentative at first, then gaining strength enough to constrict her breathing. Somehow she had managed to keep hold of the knife. She was torn between trying to make use of it and continuing to paddle and keep her head above water.
At last the vine had power and purchase enough to make the decision for her. It wrenched her away from the protection of the half-submerged rock and dashed her into the current. A rush of white foam blinded Gaultry briefly, disorienting her as she twirled into the main stream. Water forced its way up her nose and into her foolishly open mouth. It was only when the vine whipped her against another ridge of stone that she was able—just for a moment—to orient herself. She thrashed out, trying to reach a stone that jutted up from the water a bare yard from her head, and cracked her foot against a hidden ledge of stone in the water beneath her.
Gaining a precarious life-hold on that unexpected rock, she tried to take a normal breath and gather for a counterattack. Touching a cluster of leaves, she probed outward with her magic, this time covertly, trying to determine what had set the plant in action against her. Her Bissanty-attacker had appeared shocked when the vine had come to life—but Gaultry had been running from enemies for too long to believe that simultaneous attacks could be coincidental.
The source, when she found it, was a palpable, angry thing. It hated with a vitriolic personal strength that Gaultry could feel like a physical force, even just thrusting a thread of power toward it. Rather than risk testing it further, she settled back into the water. If that magic sensed she had found her feet, it would sweep her back into the depths.
She forced herself to concentrate, to push her fear aside. She stared at the vine, trying to understand its violent animation. It was not the old priestess’s spell that had bound the vine to the bridge in the first place. She could sense that woman’s touch, still in the vine, gently binding the
vines to the worn-out boards. This was something new. Something opportunistic. Dimly, she became aware of a green nimbus where the new magic had bound itself over the old. As she focused, the nimbus deepened in color to a green so dark as to be almost black. Angry green, hate-spawned and curdling black. Recognition of a sort tore her: Goddess Elianté wore that color, when she tore through the forest in her aspect as Huntress-avenger.

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