The Fall of Neskaya (51 page)

“It was Margarida who insisted we stay and fight,” Petro said, his eyes flickering in her direction. “Me, I would have kept running from here to Shainsa.”

Look at her now,
his thought echoed in Coryn’s mind.
What has she done? What has she
become?

Coryn shifted uneasily. He turned to Eddard and asked for his story.

“Deslucido’s estimation of my weakness was somewhat exaggerated,” Eddard said with a flicker of a smile. “At first, perhaps, I could do little. The lungrot left me blind and barely alive. I was told he took my family as hostages. Orders went out under my name. From time to time, men came, dressed me up, sat me in that big chair Father hated so much, and made speeches in my name. When I realized what they were saying, I spoke up. Oh, that was a mighty scene. I’d scrambled to my feet, screaming to whoever could hear that I did not countenance the things they said, that all true Verdanta men must resist the Ambervale rule. They beat me senseless and when I recovered, they told me they had killed my eldest son.”

Coryn could think of nothing to say. Petro laid down his knife and listened, eyes dark and mouth set. They waited while Eddard regained his composure.

“They had not,” Eddard went on. “Although he had died of some childhood fever. I did not learn that until later when they allowed my wife and second son to join me here. By then, they believed me broken . . . and I suppose for a time that was true. They brought her, she said, because they feared I was willing myself to die and they still needed me as a figurehead. . . .”

Eddard’s voice trailed off; his sightless eyes reflected nothing. His wife, who had been rocking their young son, fast asleep in her arms, reached out to gently touch his hand. He came immediately to himself.

“I lay there with darkness filling my heart,” he said in a voice resonant with passion, “and all I could see was fire. I thought of that big one—you know, Coryn, the one when
Dom
Rumail arrived and summoned the fliers from Tramontana. The one which began all these troubles. I told myself I wouldn’t let that fire win, so many years afterward. Over and over I told myself that.”

Coryn nodded. He could well see Eddard’s anger simmering over the months, keeping him alive.

“After that,” Eddard said with a wry twist to his mouth, “I recovered somewhat more quickly than I allowed them to see. Somehow, I knew the time would come when I might have another chance to act.” He fumbled for Petro’s hand, clasped it. “I never dreamed my baby brothers would come riding to the rescue!” His head swung in Coryn’s direction. “You will stay and help us rebuild, won’t you, Coryn? Verdanta needs all her sons now.”

“I cannot stay, Eddard,” Coryn said quietly. “My greater duty is to the Tower I serve and the King who commands us.”

“You would leave your own family to go fight Rafael’s war?” Eddard said, gray-white brows drawing together.

Petro tightened his grasp on Eddard’s hand, drawing his attention. “It is Rafael’s war that brought us this victory, my brother. Until now, my men and I could do no more than harass and delay. We had not the means or the skill to strike directly until Coryn and these men arrived.”

Eddard’s stormy expression softened. “Then I suppose you must go where duty commands. Remember the old proverb,
Bare is the brotherless back.
We will always be here if you need us.”

As much as he loved his country, Neskaya was his home now. His father had been right, so many years ago, when he said that Coryn might not want to return after seeing the wide world. It was not a matter of wishes, but where he truly belonged, what he had become, who he was now. For today, it would be enough to see Verdanta free and his family safe.

“We may defeat Deslucido, but that will hardly put an end to men’s lust for power or their abuse of it,” Petro said with a spark of his old cynicism. “As long as we are small and weak, there will be others to prey upon us. Verdanta has never been able to support much of an army, not compared to what Ambervale can raise, or the lowland kingdoms. We stayed free for a long time simply because we had nothing they wanted.” His dark eyes met Coryn’s defiantly.

“We cannot rely on our continued insignificance,” Eddard said. “Sooner or later, someone else will come along who wants what we have, even if we’re just a step to some place else.” He shifted his head in Coryn’s direction, as if to say,
You are a Tower-trained
laranzu.
Can’t you protect your own family
?

What?
Coryn thought with a flare of heat,
by arming you with
clingfire?

And yet that was exactly what Liane had urged when her own homeland was under attack by their shared enemy.

If we had
clingfire
, someone like Deslucido would only use it in greater quantities against us, or worse, and then turn our own stockpiles against us as well.
But what if the mountain kingdoms had stood together against him—Verdanta and Storn and Hawksflight—even Taniquel’s Acosta?

Verdanta allied with Storn
. . . Coryn could imagine Petro’s response to that idea, but so much had changed in all their lives. Coryn and Liane had forged a bond deeper than friendship.

Only a heartbeat of conversation had passed. Petro was still staring at Coryn, as if challenging him for answers.

“You are right, my brother,” Coryn said in his most temperate voice, “as long as we are small and isolated, we are vulnerable to ambitious, unscrupulous men like Deslucido. I think Father had the right idea in seeking formal connections, but he looked in the wrong place.”

“Where should we look for allies, then?” Eddard asked, genuinely interested. “You have been among the powerful kings beyond these mountains. Which of the great Domains would consider us, except as vassals for their own purposes?”

“Not a great one,” Coryn replied, “but an equal. There is power in numbers, just as a single reed becomes unbreakable when joined to its fellows.”

“You’re thinking of
Storn?
” Petro asked incredulously. Eddard’s features darkened. “I’d as soon trust a fox to guard a coop of chicks!”

“And yet,” Coryn went on, “Liane Storn, who loves her homeland as much as we love ours, has held my life in her hands when we worked in a
laran
circle together and never once failed me. She had been taught to hate me, that I came from a line of despicable villains, just as I learned to think the same of her. As we came to understand each other, we saw that what we had in common far outweighed old quarrels and petty differences.”

“But—
Storn!
”

“Think on it,” Eddard said, rubbing his face with one hand. “They have been under the Oathbreaker’s boot even as we have been. It would not be the first time that a common enemy made strange comrades.”

“You speak from the past,” Coryn added, thinking of Petro’s mission to High Kinnally during the great fire. “But we are none of us who we were then. Look at Eddard, at Tessa, Margarida—me.”
Yourself.
“Don’t you think the Storns might have changed, too—especially with a daughter held hostage at Linn.”

“My—my wife was held there at first,” Eddard said. “She spoke of a Liane, a
leronis
, though she did not know the girl’s family. She—she said Liane nursed the baby through a fever, as tenderly as if he were her own.”

“I see you are in league against me,” Petro said, “and I still say no good will come of this. I suppose next you’ll be wanting to send me as ambassador to High Kinnally.”

They all laughed while Eddard said, “It
is
a thought.”

“Seriously,” Eddard went on, “there could be no better way to open discussion than to help the Storns win back their freedom. I cannot send fighting men, not and honor our debt to Rafael Hastur. A small group of your foresters, Petro, those skilled in stealth and hiding, might bring news of our victory here and give them the heart to rise up on their own.”

“That I will do.” Petro’s smile held more than a trace of ferocity, and Coryn saw that nothing would please him more than to strike back at Deslucido, even if it meant aiding their old enemies.

King Rafael’s men stayed to organize as many men as wished to go with them, and most of the good horses. Petro had already melted into the forests on his way to High Kinnally, but he left two of his best trackers to guide the Hastur men through Verdanta lands.

Coryn stood watching the
coridom
count heads and horses in the courtyard, knowing that he, too, ought to be going. The war would not wait for him, and Aldones alone knew what new strategy Deslucido might be hatching.

Margarida came up to him, so silent that he barely heard her approach. She still wore her forest garb, her hair short as a boy’s, with the long knife strapped in a sheath to one thigh.

“Last night, I spoke with the men who came with you,” she said without inflection.

“Yes,” Coryn answered, since a comment seemed to be called for. “I wondered what they were saying of such interest.”

She shook her head and went down the steps, heading for the stables and inviting him by her posture to join her. “Not so much what they said as how they said it. The silences between the words, the things they didn’t say.

“I know what people are saying about me,” she said, “that now no husband will take me to wife, dowry or no. Husband! Well, where was he when Father and Kristlin sickened with lungrot? Where was he when the Oathbreaker’s hounds came pouring through the gap? Where was he when Lotrell and his men caught me in the forest and left me for dead?”

Her pain seeped through her tightly woven barriers. Coryn ached to reach out, soothe it away. He brushed the back of her wrist with his fingertips, Tower-style, but she shrugged off the touch.

“I survived those things, me alone. I don’t know—” she lifted one hand, palm callused and fingernails ragged, “—I don’t know how all this would have turned out differently if Deslucido had not come.”

He did not need
laran
to read the rest of her thought,
How I would have been different.

“I had no husband to take care of me, and after this, I do not want one. Nor can I live on here like Great-aunt Ysabet, weaving tapestries until I’m ninety. King Rafael’s men have told me of the Sisterhood of the Sword. I mean to join them.”

Coryn had heard of such, women who trained in weapons and hired themselves out as soldiers, fiercely loyal where they had pledged themselves but knowing no law but their own. He had even seen a few, moving through the streets of Thendara in pairs or threes, grim and aloof in their blood-colored vests. Gold earrings gleamed in their ears, visible below short-cropped hair. He began to say something about how improper they were, and then realized how well his sister fit their description. But for the earring, token of whatever oath they gave one another, and their distinctive garb, she might already be one of them.

“I believe there is a house of such women in Thendara,” he said. “I can ask Rafael’s men to escort you there, if that is truly what you wish.”

She laughed, an unexpectedly merry sound. “Dear brother, I do not need an escort, any more than I need a husband. I have asked these men if I may travel as one of them. It may be a long while before they return to Thendara, but meanwhile I will be learning the skills I will need to earn my bread.”

“You can fight that well?” True, she’d taken Lotrell by surprise, but how could she match a man’s strength?

“I can
shoot
that well. As for swordskill, I have years to make up for, when I was playing at flower decorations and sewing, while these boys were hacking at each other with wooden swords. I don’t expect I will ever be as powerful as a man, but stealth and speed can do much to even the odds.”

Coryn could not help grinning at her. “I can see you have much to teach me. When you have pierced your ear and become a fearsome warrior, will you still allow me to call you
little sister?
”

“You blockhead, of course! And you will always be my bossy brother.” She threw her arms around his neck and, for an instant, her barriers went transparent and he saw the sister he loved, tempered by a fire he could not imagine, but still a sweet and gentle spirit. He wished for all the world he could undo what had been done to her, but he realized that to even speak of it would take away from what she had achieved.

They spoke no more of these matters, but parted amicably, he toward Neskaya and she with a contingent of armed men for Hastur.

C
oryn’s second arrival at Neskaya was as unlike his first as night to day. His horse was as footsore and his own body as weary, for he had pressed both of them hard over the miles. Those miles had been uneventful except for the growing impatience within him. As his horse clattered down the last slope, the spires of pale translucent blue stone rose before him with their faintly luminescent glow. As before, his breath caught in his throat at the beauty of each pure line, the arched entrance, the windows ablaze with reflected sunset. Now his heart warmed to the familiar sight.