Shadow Over Kiriath (16 page)

Maddie frowned at her, suddenly exasperated. “Why are you doing this, Carissa? It can’t work between us. Even if Bree wasn’t part of the picture—I don’t want to be a queen. And even if I did, I’m not at all suited to it.”

“Nonsense.”

“You said it yourself yesterday.”

“Before I realized how truly brilliant it was for you to have readied Warbanner. Before the ceremony unfolded and the Light came on him and you fainted in the middle of it all. I remembered the day he faced the morwhol and how weird you were when we were fleeing down the Bright Falls canyon. All blank-faced and deaf, like you were somewhere else. And then after that boom, suddenly you were back and certain he was alive.” She paused, pulling a strand of windblown hair from across her face as she looked intently at Maddie. “I know you share his dreams. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You saw something yesterday during that ceremony. While he saw the Esurhites breaking into Graymeer’s, you were seeing something, too.”

Maddie fixed her gaze on the road again, now a sandy track through thick patches of wind-stirred beach grass. Her heart beat rapidly as the sudden desire to spill it all welled up in her. She was so sick of bearing this alone, having no one to share her heartache with, no one to seek for counsel. Carissa had become a good friend these last six months, and Maddie knew her to be a devoted student of Eidon and his Words. Why not tell her? She’d already guessed the worst and hadn’t laughed. If nothing else, just hearing herself tell it would give Maddie new perspective.

She glanced over her shoulder. The men followed at a respectful distance but were still too close to risk speaking.

Coming over the second rise, they found the beach stretched out beside white ranks of breakers. Wreckage strewed the shore, remnants still floating in from the ferocious storm two weeks ago—bits of wooden planking, scraps of canvas and rope, lanterns, flags, what looked to be part of the ship’s hull, and possibly even a piece of mast—lay scattered up the sand before them, festooned with mounds and ribbons of seaweed. Out beyond the surf line, the great cloud of gulls soared and dipped in a great writhing mass that was focused on one spot in the water—apparently the birds were feeding on a school of fish that had risen to the surface.

As they rode down the rocky bluff to the beach, Maddie suggested they go beachcombing. When Carissa frowned at her, she smiled and glanced meaningfully at the men now clustering around them. “I love walking the beach barefoot—feeling the sand beneath my feet, the surf on my legs.”

Carissa regarded her for a long moment, her expression as inscrutable as any of Abramm’s. Then she, too, glanced back at the men and finally agreed.

They dismounted, stripped off shoes and stockings, and left their horses in the care of one of the men as they set off together, skirts tied up at their waists. As one of the men rode along the bluff to keep a watch, Hogart and another followed out of earshot behind them.

They walked silently for a bit, stopping to examine the shard of hull that jutted up out of the sand, picking up a few shells and a small carved box. Then, as they left the ship’s hull and started toward the mast, Maddie spoke: “I saw Abramm’s wedding.”

Carissa drew closer, watching her intently.

“It was held on the wallwalk at Graymeer’s.” She swallowed. “Except his bride wasn’t Briellen.” She stopped again, and Carissa guessed the rest:

“It was you.”

Maddie flushed and fixed her gaze on the sand before them as she nodded. “The dream I had the night before the coronation wasn’t the same as yours. Or his, I think.” She flushed again at the memory.

Again Carissa picked up the part she hadn’t shared: “So
that’s
why you turned so red when I mentioned it.”

Maddie turned her face to the sea, the wind blowing her hair back out of her eyes. “I know the rhu’ema did it—pulled out feelings I’d been denying, made them so vivid and strong I couldn’t ignore them. Or help him when they attacked. I understood all that soon enough. So when I had the vision, or whatever it was, I thought it was more of the same.”

“The Light was on you, Mad. It couldn’t have been rhu’ema.”

“No. But it could’ve been my own desires laid over what he was seeing. Anyway, after that I knew I had to leave. I told him so last night in the tea garden.” She snorted bitterly. “He lamented the loss of his prized researcher.”

“You probably shocked him silly and it was the only thing he could think to say,” Carissa said dryly. “You really have no idea how much he relies on you, do you? And I don’t mean for research.”

Maddie watched her fingers toy with the white shell she still held. Then she sighed. “I only know it seems like a death sentence never to be able to see him again. The only thing worse would be seeing him with my sister. . . .”

She fell silent, and they walked on, a particularly high wave washing around their calves, eating away the sand beneath their feet. Sea gulls flapped and squawked around them as they came even with the great feeding column out beyond the surf.

“I don’t think leaving’s the answer,” Carissa said presently.

Maddie sighed her frustration. “Maybe not. I was so sure it was the right thing to do when I told him, but then Leyton cornered me in my suite.” She paused, glanced aside at her friend. “You have to promise you’ll tell no one what I’m going to say next.”

Carissa promised.

Maddie turned her gaze forward again, toward the piece of topmast lying on the sand in a curl of canvas ahead of them. Three sea gulls stood perched upon it, pecking at seaweed. “He said things are much worse back home than he’s let on, and he thinks the regalia have special powers Abramm could use to defeat the Armies of the Black Moon. He wants me to stay and help figure out what they are and how to use them. And Abramm’s had me searching for information on the fortresses and the guardstars, and I’m just now starting to have some success, and . . . I don’t know what to do. On the one hand I want to leave, but on the other I think if I could help defeat the southlanders I should put my personal feelings aside and stay.”

“I agree.”

“But if I stay, I’m afraid he’ll find out how I feel . . . and I can see no good coming of such a thing. Worse, I don’t know if I can bear to watch him marry my sister.”

“You don’t know it will happen that way.”

“How could it not?” Maddie looked at her soberly. “The only way to break the treaty now is if Bree were to die, and that would be hideous. Besides, your claims to the contrary, I don’t think Abramm has the slightest interest in me—at least, not like that. So the whole thing is ridiculous. Ridiculous I should feel like this and ridiculous that I should have to think of leaving at all. And yet . . .” She wrapped her hands about her chest. “I prayed all night . . . but nothing seems any clearer.”

A sea gull landed on the glistening beach ahead of them, a small red shell in its beak. It walked along before them, back and forth, studying them with its bright yellow eyes.

After a time Carissa sighed. “Well, if it’s not clear, it seems to me you must wait until it is. The only thing you know for sure is that there’s much of value to be discovered and you’ve been asked to help do so. That’s something you know you can do. So do it. One day at a time. Bury yourself in your books, and avoid him entirely if you have to.”

“Avoid him? How? I have to report whatever I find.”

“You write out your reports anyway. Just hire an assistant and let him deliver them.”

Ahead of them, the sea gull dropped its shell on the sand, bent its head to peck at it again, then ran on ahead of them, leaving its treasure behind. Maddie shook her head. “I’m not sure I can trust myself to stay away. Last night I nearly spilled it all to him. With no intent of doing so . . . yet there I was.” She stopped and closed her eyes. “I really think it would be better if I just left.”

“But if it’s Eidon’s intent that you stay . . .”

“How could it be? I’m in love with a man who’s essentially married.”

Another big wave flooded around them. Ribbons of seaweed tickled Maddie’s legs, then wrapped around them as the wave receded. She stepped free of them and walked on, noting that the gull’s bright red shell lay before her on the dark and shining sand. And now that she was closer, it did not look like a shell at all.

She was only a stride away from it when the next wave flowed around her feet, picking up the object and floating it toward shore, then bringing it back on the outflow. Scooping it up as it went by, Maddie straightened to examine it more closely, Carissa peering over her shoulder. As she realized what it was, a chill spread from spine to back and shoulders, neck and arms. For on her flattened palm stood a tiny dragon, carved of red stone, its wings outstretched, tail hooking out behind, pinhead crystalline eyes glittering in the sun.

The world shifted about her and she felt as if she’d been kicked in the chest. A red dragon. Flying.

“Oh,” Carissa said. “That’s an Esurhite fetish. Soldiers carry them for protection.”

Maddie looked at her blankly.

“And it couldn’t have floated all the way from Esurh because the currents are wrong.” She plucked it off Maddie’s palm and turned it over in her fingers. “In fact, it might not have floated at all—that bird could have brought it straight here on the wing.”

“You’re saying Abramm’s fears are correct and there are Esurhites on the Gull Islands?”

“Well, I doubt this will convince Admiral Hamilton and his cronies, but that’s as reasonable an explanation for this thing being here as any.”

If Carissa was right, the danger was here, too, not just in Chesedh. Time was every bit as short as Abramm feared. Could it possibly be Eidon’s intent for her to leave now, when she might be able to help unlock the secrets of both the regalia and the fortresses? Secrets that, as Leyton suggested, might mean the difference between life and death for them all?

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence you were the one to find it, either,” the princess said, holding the tiny dragon out for Maddie to take back. She smiled thinly. “Looks like you’ve got your answer, my dear: you’re supposed to stay.”

Carissa dropped the figurine into Maddie’s outstretched palm, and Maddie stared at it, feeling destiny swirl around her, yet unable still to see it clearly. Then, before she could wrestle her thoughts into any kind of coherent order, one of the men cried out behind them, “That’s no school of fish. That’s a body!”

She turned with Carissa to see all three men racing out through the incoming breakers toward the pale mound that floated beneath the column of gulls—a mound she saw now was very obviously not a mass of fish but something far more gruesome.

————

Madeleine had still been sitting by her fire studying the Words of Revelation when Abramm and his party, dressed in the gray tunics and woolen mantles of rank and file armsmen, joined the corps of soldiers awaiting them west of the King’s Bridge. Notified beforehand that a group would be meeting up with him that morning, the commanding officer accepted them without comment and without apparent recognition.

The trip was made without incident, and by the time they were climbing the fortress switchbacks, the sun was up and Abramm nursed a rising tension. Philip and his commanding officer had finished their interrogation of the Esurhite captives not too long before Abramm left the palace. As hoped, they had come away with more than the southlanders intended to give them, concluding that the Esurhites had indeed intended to take the fortress, though not alone and not immediately. They also suspected there might be some who’d not been caught and were hiding in Graymeer’s tunnels. And almost certainly they would seek to set up an etherworld corridor to connect the place with their homeland so they could funnel through enough men to eventually take and hold the fortress. This was particularly troublesome news coming on the heels of Trap’s report that Carissa claimed to have seen Rennalf yesterday. Not once, but three times.

Reaching the top of the switchbacks, they rode through the sequence of newly installed gates in the repaired barbican and main outer wall. After six months of work, Graymeer’s was no longer a collection of crumbling, roofless, griiswurm-infested structures. The interior buildings now included a new barracks, stables, and granary in the inner ward, while the officers’ quarters on the third terrace had been reroofed and fully refitted, becoming habitable almost three months ago. And the work continued apace. Scaffoldings stood everywhere, along with pieces of construction equipment and diminishing piles of rubble.

The maze of tunnels beneath them, unfortunately, was another story. Though the upper levels had been scoured of spawn by the blast of Light Abramm had released when he destroyed the first corridor six months ago, those below remained infested. It was a constant battle to hold ground gained, and no one knew how far the tunnels descended. Still, they had been holding it, and given Graymeer’s history, things were going well.

Once the officers’ quarters had been completed, Abramm had stayed overnight once a week, as much to supervise the work as to reassure the men that it was safe. Only in the last fortnight, when coronation preparations had kept him way, had the rumors sprung up again—tales of ghostly voices, of malevolent pools of darkness, and most recently, of a barbarian warrior who walked the deep dark passages with the green eye of the ancient hill god, Hasmal, glaring from his forehead.

Now, as the returning soldiers disembarked from their wagons near the gate, Channon led the king’s group up to the inner ward, where Graymeer’s second in command, Lieutenant Brookes, awaited them at the stables. After they had dismounted, Brookes saluted Channon, bowed to Duke Eltrap and Lord Ethan, and in keeping with Abramm’s instructions, entirely ignored the rest of them as he introduced the three armsmen who had been first to surprise the Esurhites in the tunnels yesterday.

Then he led them around the back of the stables to a doorway in the middle west tower and down a narrow winding stair with Abramm safely sandwiched in the middle of the entourage. Kelistars tucked into niches along the outer wall lit the spiraling stairwell and the corridor it emptied into. Lasting about twelve hours from the time of creation, kelistars made a welcome substitute for candles and torches and, some believed, helped to keep the corridors free of spawn.