The Path of Flames (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 1) (6 page)

She’d never managed to convey to Elon why she wanted to dress in armor and wield a sword. Elon was a practical man; he understood the world in terms of what he could shape and handle with his powerful hands. To him weaponry meant blood and injuries and dirt and campaigning and death. Which was all true. Kethe knew that being a warrior was not a glamorous business, not like they sang about in the epics. She knew that all too well. But simply being a woman was just as dangerous and brutal in its own way.

Three years later, it was still too easy to summon the terror, the bitter, galling sense of helplessness. To remember his face as he came at her with his sword, his eyes blank with his determination to kill her. It had been three years, but she could still vividly recall the tearing pain in her throat as she’d screamed. Screamed, because she’d been unable to defend herself. Screamed, because she was weak and had to summon others to save her.

Kethe pursed her lips and stared down at the wire. Having a sword at her hip would mean never feeling that way again, never letting an animal like that knight terrorize her to the point of having nightmares for a year afterwards. She would be like her father, feared and respected for his strength. Nobody intimidated him. Nobody took advantage of him. He was the strongest, most capable man she knew. Kethe bit her lip as she wove the wire around and around the rod. Elon’s hammer began to ring out anew. Methodical, rhythmic.

But becoming a knight had become more than simple self-defense. Over the past few years the blade had come to symbolize the ability to forge her own destiny. Choose her own path. Cut through the layers and layers of strangling expectations, and stand tall and proud and free. A foolish dream, no doubt. There had been many times when she’d felt desolate and alone, and had nearly thrown her coat of mail into Elon’s forge. Moments when she’d felt foolish and pathetic, a child indulging in fantasies. But she hadn’t given up. Coming to the smith—escaping the stifling confines of the keep whenever she could—was the only true pleasure that was hers and hers alone. Even riding Lady was stilted, accompanied as she always was by Hessa and two guards.

Shouts disturbed her thoughts. She turned to Elon, who stopped, hammer raised above his head. Both then turned to the smithy door. The cries weren’t of fear or panic, but rather excitement tinged with alarm.

“A visitor?” Elon set his hammer down and wiped his hands with a dirty cloth.

“News from Father?” Kethe stood and threw a cloth sack over her mail.

Lord Kyferin had been gone two months, along with every Black Wolf and all the squires. Two months was a long time to campaign, but not unusually so; word had reached them intermittently that the Agerastian force had been avoiding pitched battle for weeks now, burning its way across the countryside as it avoided the Ascendant’s forces.

More shouts. Kethe hurried through the door into the chapel just as Father Simeon came walking down the aisle with his chaplain at his heels. He was a tall, stern man, with a high forehead, severe cheekbones, and the rich bronzed skin of a Noussian born. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Kethe said, and stepped outside into the bailey.

Everybody was emerging from their respective buildings to crowd around the gatehouse. Kethe stepped forth, people parting for her with the usual respectful nods. A young man was riding over the castle drawbridge. His white hair and skin as pale as milk marked him for a Bythian, though why he was mounted she couldn’t fathom… Wait. Asho? He looked like he’d been dragged backwards by his horse through a field filled with thorns. Half his face was discolored with bruising, and his long hair was spiky with dried sweat and dirt. His horse looked blown, with its head hanging low and its hooves almost dragging across the boards.

The young man’s expression was haunted, and Kethe felt the crowd harden around her. Almost every castle servant here was an Ennoian, and none of them appreciated the sight of the upstart Bythian squire.

Asho rode through the gatehouse, the sound of his horse’s hooves echoing loudly in the silence until he emerged once more into the weak afternoon sunlight.

“It’s Lord Kyferin’s squire,” muttered somebody to her left.

Asho gazed about the quiet crowd with his pale silver-green eyes, unabashed and disconcertingly direct for a Bythian. As always she felt that prick of annoyance that was just shy of anger at his insolence. He’d not the wit to realize how a little natural deference would ameliorate the anger his arrogance provoked. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a pang. His delicate, almost elfin features were terribly aged. The last she’d seen of him he’d appeared but fourteen years old, a fresh-faced youth with large silver eyes and a quiet manner. Now he looked almost a man, harrowed by some experience she couldn’t guess at.

Asho slid from the saddle. He was so exhausted his knees buckled as he landed, and were it not for his grip on pommel he might have fallen. Nobody moved forward to assist him, though murmurs of alarm flickered through the crowd. Raising her chin and pushing back her shoulders, Kethe stepped forth, fearing his news but knowing in her core that there was no hiding from the bleakness in his eyes.

“My Lady,” said Asho, his voice barely more than a whisper. He straightened with a wince, and she realized he was not only exhausted but wounded too; his hauberk was torn along his ribs, and dirt was deeply ingrained in the links over his shoulder as if he’d fallen hard to the ground.

“Squire Asho.” Her nerves made her speak more coldly than she’d meant to.

“I bring grave news, my Lady.” He spoke as if they were standing alone, a terrible kindness in his eyes that she wanted to dash away with a slap. He hesitated, the moment come. The moment, Kethe realized, that he must have been dreading even as he fought to get here with all his might. “We were defeated in battle. Lord Kyferin and all his Black Wolves are dead.”

The crowd erupted into exclamations of horror, and Kethe closed her eyes and rocked back on her heels, feeling her whole body grow numb. With those words her world had suddenly and irrevocably changed. People were calling out angrily, shouting questions, but when she managed to open her eyes again she saw that Asho was standing silently, ignoring everyone but her.

She had to do something. Control the crowd. Give commands. But all she could do was hold Asho’s gaze. No words came to her lips. No thoughts beyond the one terrible and impossible fact: her father was dead. What would she tell Roddick?

“Yet you survived.” Her voice came from a far distance. She could barely hear herself over the rushing in her ears. She wanted to hurt him. How dare he look at her with pity? “Did you flee the battle?”

“No,” Asho said. He was holding on to the saddle as if it were a branch that was keeping him from drowning. “I only left after the Ascendant’s Grace and his Virtues quit the field.”

“Then come,” she said. “The Lady Kyferin will want to hear your news at once.”

The curtain walls seemed impossibly high, the barbican receding into the distance. She felt a moment of vertigo as she turned away, and tears pricked her eyes. She’d show him no weakness. She was Lord Enderl Kyferin’s daughter. She would show him only strength. Almost blind with tears she refused to wipe away, she wheeled and strode toward the barbican, sending people scattering as they stumbled out of her way. She didn’t care. Memory guided her footsteps. She strode up the stone ramp to the drawbridge, passed quickly over it, and only once she had stepped into the darkness of the barbican did she shudder, a deep soul quake that almost undid her knees. She pressed her hand to the wall and paused, another pang causing her lungs and heart to spasm. She gasped for breath, the sound loud in the corridor. It felt like somebody had punched her right in the solar plexus.

Father was dead. The strongest man she had ever known was gone. It was like learning that a mountain had suddenly disappeared. And all his Black Wolves with him? Thirty-three knights. Brutal, cruel men who had at once scared her and ensured her safety. Each with his own manse or fort in the countryside about the castle, each a minor lord of his own staff and servants. Dead. All of them. She stared blindly at a wall torch as names tumbled through her mind. Her mind reeled, and then she pushed away from the wall. She took a deep breath. Held it. If she was to be a knight, that she had to accustom herself to pain and loss. She had to be strong. Roddick would be looking to her for comfort. And yet the floor felt like it was slipping out from beneath her. Before more tears could come, she strode forth down the hall and turned right at the elbow. Out the gate and onto the second drawbridge, moving swiftly, head lowered.

She passed through the drum towers and out onto the keep stairs. Lifting her dress, she ran up the steps, not caring for decorum, not caring who saw. She flitted up to the keep door and hauled it open. She turned quickly away from the large kitchen, ignoring the puzzled looks of the servants, and ran up the intramural staircase to the third floor.

While the Great Hall down in the bailey could seat over a hundred and often did, the Lord’s Hall here on the third floor of the keep was more intimate, and her father tended to use it as an audience chamber in which to receive distinguished guests. A dais was set against the back wall, with her mother’s pale oaken seat set next to her father’s massive and beautifully carved cherry wood throne. Two long trestle tables ran down the length of the circular room, whose walls were hung with tapestries depicting her father’s favorite pastimes: war and the hunt. Wall candles complemented the light that filtered through the arrow slit windows.

Their bard, Menczel, was sitting to one side, idly plucking a quiet melody from his lute and singing of the legendary trials of the Virtue Theletos. Her mother was seated on her pale chair, with the steward and his assistant standing before her.

Kethe rushed into the hall and then caught herself and stopped, took a breath and pushed her shoulders back. Her mother had been leaning back in her chair, chin resting delicately on an extended finger, listening to Bertchold as he recounted some issue regarding their stocks. At Kethe’s entrance, however, her mother sat up, and both Menczel and Bertchold fell silent, turning to regard her.

“Kethe?”

Her mother was the most intelligent person she knew, and the most perceptive by far. Kethe’s whole life had been one long struggle to find privacy, to shield her thoughts, to not give everything away to her mother without realizing it. She had no hopes of doing so now.

Lady Kyferin rose gracefully to her feet. In her mid-thirties, she was still a strikingly beautiful woman, her eyes the blue of stark winter midday skies, her skin as pale as fresh milk and her mien effortlessly noble. It was from her that Kethe had inherited her own auburn hair, a dark brown that the right angle of sunlight could set to smoldering like fireplace coals; but while Kethe tended to wear her hair in a rough braid thrown over one shoulder, her mother’s mane was luxurious and intricately braided. Born and raised in the august mountain peak cities of Sige, Lady Iskra Kyferin’s descent to Ennoia and her presence in the castle and by his side had been a source of great pride to Kethe’s father. Dressed today in white accented with gold, Lady Iskra stared at her daughter, and her eyes grew wide.

Kethe fought back her tears anew. As realization dawned on her mother’s face, she stepped forward, unsure what to do with her hands, what to say, where to stand.

“Father is dead,” she managed at last, and at this the tears finally spilled.

CHAPTER FOUR

Asho had yearned for and dreaded this moment in equal measure since quitting the battlefield a week ago. His weary mind had played out a thousand scenarios as he’d ridden south amongst the flood of demoralized soldiers and peasants, hunched over Crook’s back but refusing to rest. At times he’d imagined the blowing of trumpets as he rode up to Kyferin Castle’s gatehouse, the sunlight golden, the castle folk and Lady Kyferin turning out to grant him a hero’s reception. Other times he despaired and could only imagine being received as a traitor and coward, castigated by the Lady for not having died by her husband’s side, his weapons and arms taken from him before he was hurled out the postern gate if not dropped into the Wolf Tower dungeon itself.

Despite his despair, he’d ridden for the great city of Ennoia, which gave its name to all those born on this plane of existence, the roads growing more choked with every passing mile. How different this journey was. It had been only a month since he had ridden along this same road as part of Lord Kyferin’s proud retinue, head held defiantly high and convinced that he would return, if not covered in glory, then at least part of a victorious band.