The Path of Flames (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 1) (16 page)

“I approve, Ser Wyland. Lord Laur will take at least a week to arrive. Let’s spread the word.” Lady Kyferin looked to the doorway, where a page was standing. “Please summon Marshal Thiemo and Master Bertchold.” The boy nodded and took off.

Ser Wyland hesitated. “My Lady? There is another option open to us. I would not have suggested it were your Lord alive, but with him gone and us in dire straits…”

“Yes, Ser Wyland?”

“There is a man being held beneath the Wolf Tower. He’s been there three years now.”

Lady Kyferin stiffened. “You’re speaking of Ser Tiron.”

Ser Wyland nodded uneasily. “I know his case is not a simple one.” He hesitated. “But before your Lord husband gave him… cause to go mad, he was as loyal and dangerous a man as could be found amongst the Black Wolves. If you could convince him to put the past behind him and serve you in exchange for his freedom, he would make a mighty addition to your forces.”

“He is in that dungeon for a reason, Ser Wyland.” Lady Kyferin’s voice was cold. “I don’t think he’s forgotten his grievances. Nor have I mine.”

“Well I know it.” Ser Wyland shrugged. “But the past is past. I merely make the suggestion. Regardless of how successful our tourney is, we will still have only greenhorn knights on hand. Ser Tiron is a brutal, seasoned, and ferocious warrior. I know he’s no longer the man we once knew—how could he be? But whatever is left of him in that dungeon cell is still worth ten untried sons.”

In the silence that followed, Audsley looked for something to hide behind. The look on Lady Kyferin’s face was one he wished never to have directed at him. Her cheekbones seemed to have become more prominent, her eyes as hard as water under a winter sky.

Finally, she nodded. “I will think on it. Thank you, ser knights.”

Both men nodded, stepped back, then turned to quit the Lord’s Hall. Audsley nodded as he watched them leave, then realized that Lady Kyferin was looking at him expectantly.

“Is there anything else, Master Audsley?”

“What? I mean, my pardon, my Lady? Oh! No, nothing. Not yet. Soon? A stonecloud floats our way. I’ll just go take the measurements, and then I’ll return, that is, if the measurements urge me to do so?”

A flicker of amusement passed across Lady Kyferin’s face, but it didn’t linger. “Very well. Please keep me apprised.”

“Yes, I will. Right now, in fact. If you’ll excuse me?” Blushing ever more fiercely, Audsley turned and hurried out of the room, turned up the steps and paused once he was out of sight. He leaned against the wall. One day he’d have the poise and grace of Ser Wyland, and would be effortlessly courteous and controlled. But not yet.

In the meantime, however, the Nethys Stonecloud awaited him. Buoyed up by this prospect, he smiled in the darkness, tugged down on his tunic, and hurried back up to the keep’s roof.

CHAPTER NINE

Asho followed Ser Wyland down the dark keep stairs and out into the sunlight. The sight of the large man’s back filled him with troubled doubts. This was a real knight, a true Black Wolf, a man trusted by Lord Kyferin and proven in dozens of battles. Where Asho barely stood over five feet tall, Ser Wyland towered over six. Each of the knight’s steps was a powerful thud that was accompanied by the ring of his heavy armor. Asho ghosted down behind him, feeling insubstantial and inconsequential. Ser Wyland had greeted him politely enough in the Lord’s Hall, but made no move to speak to him now that they had left it. He opened his mouth several times to address the man, but each time closed it with a sense of futility. What would he say?
Here I am
?
Acknowledge me a knight
?

They stepped out onto the bailey. While life continued apace, there was a tension to the air that betrayed everyone’s fear. Nobody laughed, and even the children were subdued. Asho hesitated. With nobody to guide him, he’d taken Ser Eckel’s room in the Stag Tower, though the experience had been unpleasant. He’d lain awake each night in the bannerman’s large bed, unable to sleep, feeling like an imposter, expecting at any moment to be rousted from under the covers and thrown out on his ear. Just before dawn on that first night he’d risen, irresolute. He couldn’t return to his old spot beside the fireplace in the great hall, but he could not sleep in the Stag Tower. Instead, he’d stolen down to the stables and up into the hayloft past the sleeping grooms, and bedded down at the very back. Each night since then he’d snuck back, but he knew it couldn’t last.

Should he march brazenly back into the Stag Tower as if he belonged there?

Ser Wyland took a half dozen paces and then stopped, turned and stared at Asho. “Come on, then.” He nodded to the tower and resumed striding toward it.

Asho swallowed. An invitation? A threat? He hurried after.

People smiled at the newly arrived knight. Trutwin the gardener called out a greeting, and then looked past Ser Wyland to Asho. His smile flattened and he turned away. Asho kept his expression blank, and was glad when the darkness of the tower claimed him.

Ser Wyland climbed to the very top, up four flights, and then out onto the roof. There was no guard. Asho stepped out after him. A cinder of three firecats glared at them for intruding, then spread their feathered wings and dove through the crenellations to glide down into the bailey. The wind plucked at Asho’s hair, pulled a lock free and blew it across his face. Asho ignored it and instead watched the other man. Ser Wyland moved to a merlon, placed his hands on its top and studied the land, then turned to regard Asho.

“Tell me of the battle. Leave nothing out.”

Asho nodded and stepped up beside him. They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring out over the land while Asho told the knight everything. It felt good to tell him the tale. He left nothing out, and Ser Wyland proved a good listener, asking only clarifying questions and nodding. Asho spoke for half an hour, recounting everything from the procession through the city of Ennoia at the start of the campaign right up to their doomed charge up the hill. The only things he left out were how he’d survived the Sin Caster’s attack, and the wounding and healing of the Grace. When he had finished, Ser Wyland looked down at him, eyes narrowed.

“So. You saw the Virtues in combat. I’ve had the honor but once. Believe me when I say there is no greater privilege than to witness their powers in action.” Wyland paused, gaze distant for a moment, then shook his head as if to clear old memories away. “And knighted by the Grace himself. An honor usually reserved for heroes.”

Did he imagine that tone of reproof? Asho nodded and looked away. “I didn’t ask for it.”

“Lord Kyferin had no intention of knighting you.” Ser Wyland’s words were flat. “He intended to drive you so hard that you would ask to return to Bythos and release him from his vow.”

“I know.” Asho looked down at his pale hands. “I figured that out two years ago.”

“Then why did you stay?”

He thought of that night. The rain slicing down from the black sky. The flash of lightning. Shaya turning to him, huddled on her pony. Her wounded, irrevocably broken smile. The guard waiting to ride out and take her to Ennoia to leave him. Abandon him forever. Pain rose within him, that pain that he could sometimes now forget, but which never truly went away. He hoped it never would.

He took a deep breath. “To defy him.”

He saw Wyland nod out of the corner of his eye. “I can understand that. But why?”

Asho gripped the rough merlon tight. A thousand memories assailed him. Slights and injuries, mockery and insults. Beatings that had only stopped when he’d forced Kyferin to raise him from page to squire by defeating the older squires and winning the Ebon Cup. The haunting isolation ever since Shaya had abandoned him. The loneliness. The knowledge that it would never get any better, not so long as Lord Kyferin lived.

“Why?” Perhaps it was Ser Wyland’s calm words. His directness. Perhaps it was the fact that Kyferin was now dead. Whatever it was, something in his breast snapped, and he turned to glare up at the larger knight. “Because I loathed him. I loathed him with every ounce of my soul. And if he wanted me to give up so as to get rid of me, then I would never give up, never give him the satisfaction. I’d rather have died than grant him his wish.”

Ser Wyland studied him. He showed no reaction to Asho’s words. “You’re a Bythian. By all rights you should be a slave, cleaning out the latrines or worse. Lord Kyferin granted you and your sister an unheard-of honor by raising you to his staff, an unnatural promotion that could only harm everybody involved.” There was no rancor to his words; he spoke with measured calm. “Erland’s mistake was to raise you up from the pit. I can understand hating him for that initial act of misguided kindness. But to hate him for the life that followed? That seems ungrateful.”

Asho laughed, a bitter bark that he cut short. “Ungrateful? Yes, perhaps I am. You’re right. My sister and I didn’t ask for his charity. My father didn’t expect it when he saved Kyferin’s life during his Black Year in Bythos. But, no, that’s not why I hated him.”

“Enderl was a hard man. Cruel, even. I don’t condone much of what he did, but he was an Ennoian warlord. The Ascendant has judged him and he is now living his penance or celebrating his Ascension.” Ser Wyland shook his head. “I know your life has not been easy. But you could have returned to Bythos at any point and removed yourself from this situation. Don’t you think your stubbornness is partly to blame for the hardship you’ve endured?”

A black and terrible anger began to throb deep in Asho’s soul, the anger he never let himself feel. It was fed each and every day, but he repressed it with all his might lest it ever break free and destroy him. But Wyland’s calm certitude, his ignorance, his Ennoian superiority and false rationality were driving Asho past the point of control. He should look away, back down, remove himself from this situation. Do as he had always done, and bow his head.

But he was a knight now. If that title was ever to mean something, then he had to stop running, had to stand up for himself, or else he might as well turn over his blade and return to Bythos tonight.

“Lord Kyferin’s cruelty broke my sister. It drove her back to Bythos, to a life of slavery and abuse.” He was trembling with fury. “Do you know what it takes to prefer a lifetime of slavery and an early death in the mines over an existence in this castle? He gave us the sky, this life, only to change his mind and force us back underground. She vowed to resist him no matter what, and then he broke her. He promised to keep breaking her until she fled and—”

Asho stopped and took a deep, trembling breath. Wyland paled in shock. He hadn’t known. Of course he hadn’t. “I almost killed him afterwards. I dreamt about it for months and months: slipping into his chamber with a knife and opening his neck while he slept. He had me watched, but that wouldn’t have stopped me.”

It felt terrible to speak these words, to reveal this truth at long last. It was terrible and liberating at the same time, even as Asho knew it would damn him. But he was past caring. Wyland listened intently as Asho went on. “But I didn’t. You know why? Because killing him would have achieved nothing. It would just set him free. No.” Asho’s voice was thick with hatred. “I wanted to force him to knight me. I wanted to shove his charity down his throat till he choked on it, humiliate him and show him that I wouldn’t break, that he couldn’t break me. And when he finally did so? I would challenge him to a duel, and only then cut his throat in front of everybody.”

Asho felt sick. Bringing forth this poison that had lain deep in his soul was almost more than he could bear. He stood there with his whole frame shaking, not caring for once in his life what somebody might think. He felt naked, brazen, bold, past redemption. Let Wyland tell the world. He was a knight now. He’d challenge anybody who came for him, and die at their blade if need be. He didn’t care.

Wyland frowned but did not look away. “I didn’t know. We were told your sister came to her senses and chose freely to return to her native element. We believed it. It made sense to us.”

Again Asho felt that bitter urge to laugh. He bit it down. “That was true. She couldn’t adjust to the life Kyferin gave her.”

Wyland exhaled. “I admire you for not trying to kill him.”

Asho’s eyes stung with tears, and he turned away to look out over the countryside. “I regret it now. I never got to avenge Shaya. Kyferin got the glorious death he wanted.” He closed his eyes tight and grimaced as pain lanced through his heart. “I should have killed him.”