The Sacred Band (53 page)

“I don’t think anyone knew,” Hanish said, “not even my father. I left there wondering why I had been born first. Maeander was more a Meinish warrior than I ever was. Thasren knew it. That’s why he did what he did, to secure his name in another way.”

He paused a moment and they both listened as someone moved about one of the adjoining rooms, making noise enough, Corinn knew, to remind her that the living world went on outside her room. She did not need to be reminded.

“Do you know what I did? That night I stole into his room and woke him from sleep with a knife to his back. I made him swear to never betray me. I made him swear on pain of death. He did swear, and he never betrayed me. In the years we had together, he was my strongest ally. Part of me always expected a knife in the back from him, but he stayed true. I wish I had thanked him for that. I couldn’t say it to him, though. I could not say, ‘Brother, I know that you consider killing me every day and taking over in my place. Thank you for not doing it.’ I wish I could have. Now, in death, honesty like that seems such an obvious good. In life it’s not as clear, but that’s only because in life you always think you have more time. You always believe that things that don’t matter do matter.”

He stroked Corinn’s hair, drew it back from her face with his fingers. “Another thing I wish is that I hadn’t put that blade to his back that night. What if I didn’t need to? What if he would never have betrayed me of his own accord? I can’t know, not after I’d told him I would rather kill him than have him best me. There,” Hanish said, raising his voice a little, “you’ve had my confession. More than one. I could go on, but my tales are of the dead. It’s the living that matter. Are you ready to discuss the living?”

Corinn thought of Jason. She had killed Jason. The spell that ripped the flesh from his body began in her mouth. Jason, who had never been anything but loyal. Jason, who had taught her to read, to know the map of the world. Jason, who had made her recite the names of Acacia’s monarchs from Edifus onward. Jason, whom she had set on the fool’s errand of creating a horse lore for a people who had never truly had such a lore. Jason, who was going to write the mythology of her winged riders … He was dead, as were so many others. All from a spell that began at her lips.

No
, Corinn thought,
tell me more things about the dead
.

And so he did. He talked on.

The light had changed enough to foretell the coming dawn when Hanish said, “It’s time.”

Corinn sat at her dressing table again, staring at herself.

Hanish stood behind her, both his hands resting on her shoulders now. “I know it’s not enough time, but it’s all we have. There are people waiting for you. People you love.”

Aaden
, Corinn thought.

“Yes. He needs you to go to him.”

I can’t
.

“Of course you can. You must. He’s your son. Think of it as if you were he. Would you rather see your mother alive—no matter the curse set upon her—than be kept from her?”

The knock on the door was gentle, as it had been every hour of the long night. As she had done on each previous occasion, Corinn ignored it. She did not even turn her head. Hanish did, though. “They want you,” he whispered.

She shook her head.

Whoever it was moved away after a moment.

“Aaden wants you.”

Look at what he’ll see
. She drew her fingers across her not-mouth, elegant, gracefully for a few seconds, before she snapped her hand closed.
I’m repellent
.

“If this had happened to your mother, would you find her repellent? You saw your mother in death. You saw the bones of her dying hands and knew that they were yours. Remember that? Can you imagine not having that memory and not knowing that about yourself? What if she had forbidden you from sitting with her in her final days?”

That silenced her excuses. How did he know about that? Her mother’s hands; her hands. The same. The memory of that had always haunted her. No, she could not imagine having lived without that knowledge. As sad a memory as it was, nothing else had made it as clear to her who she was. Her mother’s daughter.

It’s not the same
, Corinn thought.
My mother fell ill. A sickness took her. She had no part in creating it. This, though … I brought on
.

She paused there, waiting. For what? For Hanish to refute that statement. For him to say it was not her fault, that she was blameless. A victim. She wanted all those things, but Hanish did not offer them. She knew he would not, and that if he had, he would be lying. The curse that was her face and the horror that was the Santoth free in the world were part of the song she had been singing. The moment she felt Nualo’s spell burrow into her flesh she knew it. The spell itself. She recognized it. It was a part of the music that swirled inside her head. It was as akin to her as her hand had been to her mother’s.

I brought
The Song
back, and with it came evil
.

Hanish leaned down, his gray eyes meeting her reflection’s gaze. “Tell him that. It is a bitter lesson, but it’s the one you have to tell. He will need to hear it, and only you can explain it. There is a way to speak to him. Corinn, there is. And not just to him. You have to speak to everyone, to Aliver and Mena, to the world.”

I can’t
.

“You can. Listen, believe me on this. You have to be stronger now than you ever were before. And you were strong before, love. You were. I know that better than anyone.” He tried a smile, but it slipped away almost before it had started. “I would not have loved you so much if you hadn’t been. Nor would I have died as I did. Remember who you became when I betrayed you. You didn’t fold in on yourself. You fought. You struck. You outmaneuvered a world of ambitious men who wanted things from you. You can do that again. And even more. In the days that we have left, you must become the queen you were destined to be. Not the queen you envisioned, but the queen you are fated to become. The two things are never the same. Trust me on that as well. You won’t get another chance. That’s all there is to it.”

Her eyes brimmed with moisture. She twisted away and rose. Hanish moved with her toward the center of the room, where she stopped, unsure where she meant to go.
I thought … I thought that I would meet the Auldek. Before my gathered army I would fly out to face them. My people would watch as I flew on Po, singing, hurling down spells that would destroy them all. I was going to save Acacia. It was to be legend. It would have been … magnificent
.

“Yes, it would’ve been that,” Hanish said.

Now I’ve failed them
.

“You’ll have to find some other way to be magnificent. You have a choice to make. You can take this curse that you’ve received and you can give it life. You can let it eat at you until it destroys you, and all you love and hate with you at the same time. That outcome is within your power. I hope you turn from it. There is another way, the way that acknowledges that you have a boy to be a mother to. You have siblings to be a sister to. You have a nation that needs leadership, and you have a band of sorcerers to deal with.”

Why are you doing this?

This time the smile formed and held. “I told you already,” Hanish said. “It’s the same as I said on the day you had me killed. I love you too much to ever leave you. I am a ghost, but I don’t haunt a place. I haunt a person. You, Corinn. You see, I also have a different destiny than I imagined. It wasn’t an accident that I came back. I didn’t just slip in randomly on the spell you brought Aliver back with. I had never left you, Corinn. I’d been haunting you, watching you, loving you. You didn’t know it, but from the day I died I’ve been with you.”

It’s finally come to it, Rialus thought. He stood atop an Auldek station in a buffeting wind, taking in the view south toward Mena’s army. In the dwindling light the Acacians were visible as a stain, a dark slash across the pale expanse of snow. War. Another war. For the second time in my life I’m helping an enemy invade my own country.

He hated the words but could not shake them out of his head. He believed more fervently than ever that he was not a traitor. None of it was as it seemed. He loved the Known World and all its people! In his dreams he replayed his recent exchange with Princess Mena again and again. In his dreaming version he leaped across the few strides that had separated them. He joined her and rebelled against the Auldek. He flew up into the heavens on her dragon’s back, snug behind the princess, so elated that he crashed into consciousness on the swell of it.

If he could dream that, there had to be the possibility of truth in it. His dream self did not know it was only a dream self. Was not the point of such imaginings to prove that he was, somewhere inside himself, the man who could act like that? He could feel the pride and euphoria of decisive, righteous action for once in his life. Of course he could. It was not too late. He still believed that the Giver rewarded his worthies. The fact that his waking hours contradicted that truth frustrated him more than he could bear. It was not a new feeling, but he was getting very, very tired of it.

He climbed down from the station after only a few minutes, already feeling his fingers and toes stiffening. As ever, he was absurdly bundled in layers of fur. No warmer for it, though. Howlk had joked that furs only kept a living body warm because of the heat within it. “Perhaps you are dead already,” he had said, poking him, “just a shell of a man who doesn’t know it yet.”

Though Rialus climbed down with all the slow caution he could, his feet slipped off the rungs several times. On the lower landing he fell flat on his backside. At least the station was not moving. It had stopped the evening before at the first sighting of the Acacian force. Rialus knew that the Auldek had wanted to reach solid ground before meeting the Acacians, but they did not seem too troubled to be out in frozen arctic sea. The ice was so thick and constant it might as well have been stone. It did not creak beneath the weight of the stations.

The Acacian force had pushed their camp forward early the next day, staking out ground a couple miles from the jumbled shoreline. The battle would commence the next day. Because of it, Rialus scurried across the frozen ground between the steaming stations and spent several hours sitting beside Devoth during his war council with the other chieftains. Rialus was there to answer any last-minute questions about Acacian tactics. He had long since given up explaining that he did not really know anything about military matters. When pressed on details, he sat dumbly. He refused to answer, despite the chuffs about the ears and the threats directed at him.

It did not matter anymore. The chieftains were more intent on figuring out their positions in the line of battle than anything else. The Lvin took the center front, of course—the honor of the spearpoint, which Menteus Nemré had won for them in such bloody fashion back in Avina. The Kulish Kra got the left flank for some ancestral reason that Rialus could not fathom. The Antok, it seemed, won the right flank based on the toss of a handful of colorful bone dice. Millwa, the Antok chieftain, grinned his pleasure. The rest squabbled for positions behind them.

Rialus sat through it all, miserable, his head pounding. He might as well have been surrounded by a mob of jostling children. Did none of them understand that they were arguing over which of them was lucky enough to get them and their slaves killed first? It was almost like they did not know what the morrow really held for them. Yes, they would overrun Mena’s forces. How could they not, when each of the Auldek had lives to spare imbedded in him or her? But it would still be a horror of pain and slaughter, and the divine children had only their one life to risk.

Just when Rialus thought the meeting might be drawing to a close, Skahill, the head of the Anet clan, offered to trade positions with the Antoks, arguing that the dice toss was not strong enough to override their seniority. He made some argument about their performance in a footrace they had held on a stony beach earlier in the invasion. Rialus wanted to smack him. Instead, Rialus took off his inner gloves and pinched a mist pellet in his fingers. Nobody took any notice. He stuffed it up his nostril with his thumb and inhaled. The first time he had seen Howlk do this he had been horrified. Now he was quite used to it. The ball disintegrated almost immediately, and the euphoria of the mist came fast afterward. Rialus closed his eyes and tried to relax.

Remembering what Sabeer had confessed to him, he realized that the Auldek did not personally remember the wars they had fought in more than a hundred years ago. They may have done battle themselves, but their knowledge of the events would be no more real to them than things they read in books. The actions they attributed to themselves would be like those of characters in the old tales.

How do they even know their own records are accurate? he wondered. Acacian histories were full of rubbish. He opened one eye and scanned the faces gathered around the table. You sad people. You don’t even know who you are anymore.

When the meeting ended, Howlk steered Rialus into the frigid dark with an arm clamped over his shoulder, following Sabeer. Rialus did not protest. Within a few minutes he was stripping off again inside the station that the Lvin used for martial exercises. It was as hot as a steam room. Despite the cold outside, Rialus was sweaty from the moment he entered. He tried to cling to the mist’s sedative effects, but doing so just pushed him further away from the mild bliss he had managed during the meeting.

“Rialus, I’m going to show you our secrets,” Sabeer said. “Let me hear your opinion. Come.”

She stood in the center of a sparring ring marked out on the floor, a small gathering of Auldek and sublime motion around her. She held one of the curving Auldek swords and stepped deliberately through a choreographed routine of strikes, parries, and footwork. At first Rialus thought she was wearing a black training suit of some sort. It clung as snug as leather shrunk to fit her contours, with a patterning to it something like fish scales. As ever, Sabeer wore it with a deadly sensual grace.