The Spellsong War: The Second Book of the Spellsong Cycle (76 page)

Then she vaulted from Farinelli, half noting the scream and the column of flame that flared from the road ahead. She stumbled, but did not fall as she dropped to her knees beside Jecks, where Liende already worked with a cloth to stanch the blood. The javelin had vanished, the result of Anna’s spell. She only hoped that the spell hadn’t made the wound worse.

Jecks’ face was pale, whiter than his hair, and his breath was light and ragged.

Liende looked at Anna.

The sorceress bolted to her feet, fingers on the strings of the lutar. She had hoped never to use the song, but the words were burned in her mind, from another time, another battle, and she could only improvise quickly, hoping she would be quick enough, and sure enough.

“. . . always strong, as though young,

spells always cleanly sung,

back from danger, bring him life,

. . . through all strife . . .”

Again, she had to struggle to keep her voice open, free, against all the strains pressing in on her, ignoring the press of horses, and the clamor of voices—all pushed away as she finished the Darksong spell.

Strophic Darksong. . . .

Around her, strange chords were reverberating in a pattern of polyphony she couldn’t quite grasp.
But polyphony is a pattern . . . or is it a texture? You should know. . . .

“Too much . . .” That was what she thought someone said.

Above her, despite the scattered puffy white clouds, the sky shimmered silver and black, alternating like a strobe light, the black quickly predominating, the silver vanishing, as the sky turned the jet of night around her.

“The lutar . . .”

Her fingers were as numb as her mind as she tumbled forward into the darkness, the darkness of Darksong.

When Anna woke, lying on her cot, Liende was sitting beside her on a stool—rather, two images of Liende were, no matter how hard Anna squinted. The chief player’s white-streaked red hair was tangled, almost matted, and dark circles ringed Liende’s eyes, but the player smiled faintly.

“Jecks . . . ?” Anna rasped.

Liende extended a water bottle, and Anna fumbled for it, eyes unable to gauge the distance, before she drank gratefully.

“He will live. It will be seasons before he lifts a blade.”

Anna nodded. She tried to lift her head, but lay back when dissonant bass chords slammed through her skull, rippling the double images of tent silk overhead.

“You stopped breathing,” Liende said, her tone matter-of-fact. “I had to move your chest.”

“Thank you.” Anna blinked. Her eyes burned. “I’m sorry. It didn’t seem right. . . . Now, I’ve messed up everything.”

“That is not so.” Liende shook her head. “Your armsmen respect you for saving him—and for destroying the Sea-Priest. Your players are resting, and Ehara still remains behind the walls of Envaryl.”

Anna took another swallow of water. The dissonant chords assaulting her subsided, slightly, but the two images remained.

“Fhurgen?”

Liende glanced down, confirming what Anna had already felt.

Yet what else could she have done?

“He was dead . . . almost before you dismounted.”

Anna wanted to shake her head. Even before she had been regent, the big black-bearded guard had looked out for her. Then . . . Jecks had been looking out for her as well.

“Darksong is dangerous.” Liende paused. “Do you love Lord Jecks?”

“Sometimes I think so. Sometimes, I don’t know.”
There’s so much I don’t know . . . been so little time . . . so much to do. . . .

Liende smiled more broadly. “There is a saying about actions revealing the heart.”

Do you love Jecks? Because he has stood by you. Or for more? Or are you desperate? That desperate?

Before Anna could think more, her eyes closed.

S
truggling against the faint double images that still cloaked her sight after more than four days, Anna stood in the doorway and looked from the sleeping white-haired figure in the bed to the chief player, and then to the guard at the door.

“He sleeps more easily,” said Liende. “There is no fever. The wound is clean. Your elixir, it kept out the poisons.” Her lips pursed. “And your spells.”

Anna sometimes wondered if her greatest legacy might not be distilled alcohol, rather than anything else. She glanced back to Jecks. “I still worry about leaving him here in Hasjyl. The javelin ripped up his chest and shoulder badly.” Would she have had the courage to take enchanted javelins meant for someone else? She hoped she could have been so brave, but she doubted she had that kind of courage. She was a survivor, not a hero.

She’d been lucky to be able to cast a Darksong spell without being totally destroyed, as she had been at Stromwer. Then, the spell over Jecks had been limited to one person at close range, probably before there had been too much damage from the wound. Even so, it would be more
than a week before she was fully recovered, she suspected.

“You have spell-searched the town, and left twoscore of armsmen to guard him. He should not be moved until he is better, a few days, at least,” Liende pointed out. “Once you finish Lord Ehara, you can watch over Lord Jecks on the return to Dumaria.”

“I know, and I can’t let Ehara get away,” Anna said. “I don’t have to like it.” How many times over how many years had she thought those words?
You have to do it, but you don’t have to like it. . . .
Was that always the way it would be?

Jecks’ eyes fluttered, then opened. Anna stepped nearer the bed.

“You . . . are . . . here. . . .” The raspiness of Jecks’ voice tore at her.

Where was the strong leading man? The man who had taken a javelin meant for her?

He’s right there, you idiot. . . .

“I’m here,” she said quietly. “You’ll be fine, but you need to rest.”

“You . . . saved . . . me.”

“You saved me. You did a better job,” Anna said.

“The . . . Sea-Priest. . . .”

“Lady Anna turned him into flame with her anger,” interjected Liende.

“Fhurgen . . . ?”

Anna looked down at the stone floors she’d insisted be washed before moving Jecks into the house she’d borrowed—or commandeered.

“He was dead before Lady Anna could even begin a spell,” said Liende.

Anna wasn’t sure that was so, but she’d only had the chance to save one of them, and she’d made a choice.

“He . . . good . . . man.”

“Just rest,” Anna urged.

Jecks’ eyes closed slowly, almost unwillingly, and Anna stroked his forehead for a moment.

“Just rest,” she repeated softly before straightening,
carefully, hoping that the double images and semi-migraine headache would fade before she reached Envaryl, hoping, as always, that she did the right thing—and fearing she wouldn’t.

E
hara paces across the room, at ten yards long and half that in width, large for the trading town. He goes to the third-story window and peers out from between shutters bleached white by sun and lack of oil at the gently rolling hills, dotted with irregular shadows cast from the scattered summer clouds.

Beyond the low yellow-brick walls less than a hundred yards from the window, nothing moves in the meadows and empty fields. A handful of armsmen walk the walls. Several carry bows already strung.

Two lancers in the crimson of Dumar ride to the front of the building, the trader’s mansion the Lord of Dumar has commandeered. Ehara straightens his tunic, brushes back his dark hair and waits.

At the single
thrap
on the door, he coughs, then answers. “Come in.”

The stocky lancer officer enters and bows. “The scouts have just returned, sire.”

Ehara waits.

“The sorceress’s forces have passed through Hasjyl, Lord Ehara.” The lancer officer bows again. “They ride toward the walls of Envaryl.”

“Does she ride with them?”

“They bear the banner with the crossed spears. They would not ride westward, save she were directing them.”

Ehara nods reluctantly. “I had thought for a time, when
the sorceress stopped short of Hasjyl, that the Sea-Priest had succeeded.”

“None have seen him. A shepherd from Hasjyl said that harmony and dissonance clashed six morns ago, and that the ground shook.” The lancer adds apologetically, “That was all he could say, sire.”

“More like dissonance and dissonance,” mutters Ehara. He looks at the lancer. “Thank you. Would you have Captain Fional join me?”

“Yes, sire.”

Even before the door is fully closed, the dark-bearded Lord of Dumar returns to the window, gazing eastward. “Who would have thought it? One sorceress, and all of Liedwahr turned upside-down. A harmless ploy to gain territory in Defalk, and she invades Dumar. A mere attempt to kill her, and she pursues me like a harpy of dissonance. I have nowhere to turn, nowhere to go—nor does my son and heir. If I confront her directly, I will be turned to flames or spitted with arrows like a stag. If I die on the field against her, I honor her, and that I will not do . . . not now. For that, for that she must wait.” He shakes his head. “So little I have left. So little that I must content myself with making a sorceress wait. So little. . . . She does not understand Liedwahr, and we all will suffer.” Ehara laughs, a sound bitter and booming simultaneously, a roaring that fills the room for but a moment. “I will suffer most of all.”

A
nna reined up on the low hillside to the southeast of the yellow-brick walls of Envaryl, walls that still lay more than a dek westward. In the seven days it had taken her to recover from the aftereffects of the Darksong used
to save Jecks and to move her forces to within ten deks of Envaryl, Ehara had kept all his troops inside those yellow-brick walls.

As Farinelli tossed his head gently, Anna’s hand dropped to the open-topped shield carrier and the respelled round shield that had saved her life twice so far—and had failed to save Fhurgen or to protect Jecks. She couldn’t even make a gesture for Fhurgen, not even with cold gold. The black-bearded guard had never told anyone where he had come from, not even the most seasoned veterans from the volunteers who had followed Hanfor from the Prophet’s service to Anna’s. What had he fled from? And from where? She shook her head.

Alvar reined up on her right, Hanfor on her left. Rickel and Lejun eased their mounts forward of Anna, the protective shields up and ready. To her right, south of the rise, the river road wound along the Envar River for close to half a dek before turning more northward toward the main gates—those on the south wall. The heavy wooden gates were closed, and the crimson banner of Ehara flew from the right-hand gate tower.

From what Anna had found from her previous work with the scrying glass, Envaryl was enclosed by a pentagon of yellow-brick walls, each side roughly a dek in length. The town was one of the few walled ones in Dumar, possibly because it was an old town, and the western entrance to Dumar from both Mansuur and Neserea.

To the north, Anna could barely make out a dark line just above the horizon, the nearest mountains, those where the Mittfels and the Westfels joined to separate Dumar from Neserea.

In the early-morning light, the sorceress could see the length of both the south and the eastern walls, and the watchtowers on three of the five corners, but not any individual figures in the towers or along the walls.

“Quiet for now,” observed Alvar. “It was not so yesterday. Watch for a moment.”

Anna watched. So did Hanfor, and so, Anna presumed, did the twoscore armsmen behind them.

Shadows from the summer clouds cast slow-moving shadows across the hills, across the empty fields, and the summer grasses that barely bent in the light breeze. Although the air remained damp, Anna appreciated the warm breeze, a relief after so many days of hot and sticky travel.

A movement caught her eye, and she glanced north where two figures sprinted from somewhere behind the corner watchtower away from Envaryl and in the general direction of the distant Mittfels.

“Yesterday was worse,” Alvar said from her right. “Jirsit’s scouts counted scores of them running away. The armsmen just watched, those that hadn’t thrown rags over their uniforms and joined them.”

“Ehara’s armsmen shoot deserters,” Hanfor pointed out. “Jirsit’s scouts saw that as well.”

“When they see them, ser,” answered Alvar. “Or when they are forced to use their bows . . . or crossbows.”

Anna gained the definite impression that Alvar disliked crossbows. She wondered what he would have thought of machine guns. “We could wait a day or two, or a week,” she suggested, “until Ehara had no armsmen left. Or fewer armsmen.”

“Lady Anna,” Hanfor said slowly from her left, “I seldom question your thoughts . . .”

“But you do this time,” Anna said. “What have I missed?”

Hanfor shifted uneasily in his saddle, turning to face the regent. “Ehara knows he cannot best your sorceries, or even your forces, now. He will wait, because that will make you seem weak and because he knows that you do not wish to use your power against the innocent. So he huddles among the poor folk of Envaryl. If you wish to end this war quickly, you must destroy Envaryl, or you needs must visit and spell-seek each and every hamlet and town in all of Dumar.”

Anna refrained from swallowing, Hanfor had always agreed with her strategies to minimize death, carnage, and general mayhem. Now, he was suggesting obliterating a town whose major crime was harboring the former Lord of Dumar.

“Every war must have a battle, preferably a great battle, to mark its end. We cannot hazard a battle, and so we must have great destruction, destruction so great that all in Dumar will understand the folly of crossing the sorceress of Defalk. There must be a single . . . destruction . . . a monument . . . so vast that none can deny your power.” Hanfor swallowed. “This I like little, but I have watched and I have listened. Men are not as we would like; they respect but force, and you must supply that force if you are to gain the respect you will need to enforce peace.”