Changer of Days (20 page)

“Ah, no, child,” ai’Jihaar murmured. “It is not the same thing, not at all…”

“He gave us a month,” ai’Farra said. “But there are men in Shaymir waiting for his command. If you try going back that way, you will be going straight into his arms.” She smiled, and the smile was savage. “And I would not have it said that Kheldrin broke its faith.”

It could have been an easy way out for her, a way to destroy the viper in Kheldrin’s heart without bringing any guilt onto her own head. But ai’Farra knew the Changer was already named, the Change already begun, and such a gesture would have been worse than pointless—it would have been a futile waste.

Kieran, however, was looking beyond the immediate problems and found something almost unbelievable. “He named you,” he said slowly. “That means he has finally had to acknowledge you are alive. I told my men to proclaim it on every village green when I left to try and snatch you from Miranei. We left quite a trail when we took you; Sif would have had to come up with something solid to explain Fodrun and Senena’s deaths.” Something else occurred to him, and he frowned in fierce concentration. “If he comes…he brings everything he’s got. He has to. He’s coming to destroy you. And he leaves it all wide open behind him—Roisinan, Miranei. For Favrin, if he is sharp enough to grab his chance…For you. To claim it.”

Anghara turned to him, and her eyes were almost accusing. “And this land?” she questioned quietly. “Is Kheldrin to be hostage to my freedom and the price of my crown?”

At this, ai’Jihaar squeezed Anghara’s hand lightly in support, and then let go, stepping away. But it was al’Tamar who spoke first, his eyes blazing.

“No hostage,” he said proudly, his head high. “Sif Kir Hama will find out the hard way. This prize is beyond him.”

“He has an army…an army willing to die for him,” Anghara whispered.

“They may well be called upon to do that,” ai’Jihaar said. “We have been invaded before…and none have stayed long enough to leave more than a few lines in the Records. Sif knows nothing about Kheldrin. He may not yet realize he has a foe in this land which could well prove too large a bite even for him to swallow.”

“What foe?” said Anghara, her voice still soft—but her eyes had kindled quietly, and now glowed almost silver in the firelight.

“The desert,” ai’Jihaar said, then laughed unexpectedly, laughter which fell into the expectant silence like shards of glass. “The desert fights for us.”

T
here was little in the lush shore the small Kheldrini sailboat had been hugging for the past week that reminded Kieran of the desert country—but every time he looked across the narrow stretch of water between the boat and the shore Kheldrin rose up to haunt him. The parting words with which Kheldrin’s
an’sen’en’thari
had seen them off on Sa’alah’s quays, the words which had put an idea in Anghara’s mind—an idea which had never occurred to her before.

“I have a message for you from Gul Khaima,” ai’Farra had said, “I have been carrying it for months. I knew you were coming back.”

“Another long set of incomprehensible triads?” Anghara had asked, rather flippantly. “I’ve still to find the meaning of parts of the first prophecy.”

“No, nothing like that. Something ai’Raisa told me when I was last at the Stone. A single sentence.”

“Well, what is it?” Anghara had said after a moment of expectant silence.

“Just this:
Let the lost queen take care in the Crystal City.
”

Kieran had been watching Anghara’s face, and it had been completely blank as ai’Farra uttered her words—but it hadn’t stayed that way for long. Anghara’s eyes became curiously speculative.

“Does it mean anything?” ai’Farra had asked; her tone had been diffident, but Kieran wasn’t fooled.

“It might,” Anghara had said, keeping her own counsel.

If ai’Farra had hoped Anghara would reveal any meaning before she left Kheldrin’s shores, the
an’sen’thar
was disappointed—even Kieran, who should really have guessed right away, had been taken by surprise, yet again and in spite of all his vows. Upon leaving the port of Sa’alah, Anghara had turned the small sailboat’s prow more south than east.

The Crystal City. Algira. Tath.

“You’re not thinking of walking straight into Duerin Rashin’s parlor?” Kieran had demanded incredulously.

“No,” said Anghara sweetly. “Not Duerin. For a long time Duerin has reigned in Tath while someone else rules.”

“Favrin? You plan to beard
Favrin
?”

“Don’t you remember what Feor said in Cascin?” Tears sparkled for a moment in her eyes. “Favrin, he said, was the dangerous one—clever, and strong. When Favrin comes into his own, Roisinan will have to choose: war to the hilt or some sort of treaty.” She smiled. “I’m going to offer him a treaty,” she said. “Before he realizes what Sif is planning and chooses the war. A war he can win.”

“It’s madness,” Kieran said. “Alone?”

“I have you, don’t I?” she said. The words somehow managed to be both a wry barb and a clean avowal of trust and confidence; Kieran could find no response quickly enough for it to be effective. “Besides,” Anghara added, “it’s not as though this was my own idea. The oracle told me to be careful in the Crystal City long before I thought of going there.”

“You don’t know anything about the place,” Kieran said mutinously.

“I don’t need to,” said Anghara. “I’m being led; that means I will be shown what I need to know.”

There was a sharp brilliance about her, ever since winged ai’Bre’hinnah had restored her power in the red desert of Kheldrin—the fearless and thoughtless arrogance of an adamant crafted to adorn a royal crown. She had felt reborn; and because she believed nothing foul could touch her again, nothing could. Never had Kieran felt less necessary—she looked as though she would be quite happy to undertake this wild quest by herself. Another moment such as the one they had wasted in the Kadun cavern had not presented itself. Now that all she had lost had been restored to her, it seemed to Kieran as if she was somehow further removed from him. It was as if the closest image he had of her had been snatched away; even the childhood name of Brynna now belonged more to a winged goddess than to the small girl Kieran had found it so easy to love.

He was back to his own self, with senses no more alert than might have been expected of those forged in the fires that had made Kieran what he was. Despite his close acquaintance with Kheldrin’s vanished Gods, he was no more capable of understanding what it was that Anghara was doing to help them on their way than any earth-bound man. Somehow she had woven a concealing sea mist around their boat. They could see out, but none could see them within—and it seemed to work. Once, at night, they sat quietly in their little craft and watched the passage of two large Roisinani galleys, part of Sif’s force, travelling toward Kheldrin. Anghara’s face had been eloquent, and once the ships were past and there was no danger of his being overheard Kieran hastened to chase away the brooding shadows in her eyes.

“As ai’Jihaar said, the desert itself will be Sif’s enemy.”

“But Sa’alah,” Anghara replied with quiet pain, “Sa’alah is not in the desert. And Sa’ila is so easily denied…”

That was the hour in which Kieran chose to throw his support behind the Algira venture—it was something that needed Anghara’s active participation, leaving her no time to torment herself with dark visions. He pushed her into thinking about what she meant to do, reaching for some sort of plan, despite her expectation of a path waiting to unroll itself at her feet. With that, and the necessities of guiding their small craft on its way, the days drifted by. They passed close enough to Vallen Fen to smell its sweet, rotten corruption in the early morning mists; on their right, a dark smudge on a bright ocean, lay the largest and closest island of the Mabin Archipelago. There was a time when Anghara sat motionless in the midst of the small craft, only her eyes moving, darting from the shore to the island.

“We’re too close to two Dances,” she told Kieran when he asked if she was all right. “There is something in me that wants to answer the call of both, and is being torn apart…”

“I thought the old Gods were gone.”

“They hadn’t been in Roisinan for a long time,” Anghara said. “But the Dances…they belong to something else. There will always be power there. I can’t help it; the presence of a Standing Stone is like a knife to me. It’s like a breath of incense. They…remind me of everything.”

“Like desert sage,” Kieran had murmured.

She didn’t ask what he meant, and he didn’t elaborate. But soon the island was left behind, and the Dances released Anghara from their thrall. The marshes of Vallen Fen gave way to grasslands, then dark, lush forest sweeping down to the shore. Sometimes they saw small animals swimming in and out of the shadows in the shallows. The raucous noise of a tribe of small monkeys followed them, and once, when they saw a freshwater rill pouring into the sea and stopped to replenish their water supplies, the monkeys came close enough to pelt them with hard-shelled fruit. Anghara sported a blue-green bruise on her arm and Kieran had a walnutsized lump on his temple, where a larger than average missile had narrowly missed his eye.

“We’ll make quite an entry into the palaces of Algira,” Kieran grumbled. “When they ask us how we came by these bruises, I just wish we didn’t have to say we were beaten up by a troop of monkeys.”

Anghara had known the land around Algira was heavily cultivated, but the vineyards and the olive groves took her by surprise—the little Kheldrini boat had made good time. They first saw the silver-leafed vineyards by moonlight, and Anghara leapt up to tack the sail.

“Back,” she said. “It was lucky we came here at night. I don’t want to sail straight into Algira Harbor. We’ll hide the boat in the forest; from here we walk.”

They sailed back to a small inlet they had seen earlier, pulling the light craft up onto the sand beneath concealing fronds of lush undergrowth. That night they slept on the beach, in the lee of their craft, and it didn’t take them long the following morning to hack their way through the forest and find a road.

The
an’sen’en’thari
had provided them with neutral travelling cloaks, but these were little protection against the curious glances of vineyard and orchard workers, who straightened from their tasks to glance at the two passers-by. Anghara used Sight to blur them both, leaving behind an impression of two nondescript travellers, who merited little attention. They were forgotten as soon as the workers turned back to their labor. Later, as their country road swung north to join a broader artery which eventually led all the way to the banks of the Ronval River and Roisinan, they mingled with other travellers making their way south to Algira. They found anonymity amongst women with large baskets and small unruly children and the occasional cart laden with produce heaving its way into the city. Impatient riders wove through the pedestrians with muttered curses, and old men plodding patiently beside equally ancient donkeys, gray around the muzzles, bearing sacks of olives or sloshing skins of wine.

Anghara had seen paintings of fabled Algira in her childhood. Kieran had not; all he had were elaborate tales, and many of those had been suspect. But the truth was so much beyond even these stories that Kieran stared with something like disbelief. The Crystal City was one of many names with which the chroniclers of history and legend had wreathed Algira. It had other guises; it was also known as the Water City, the Canal City or the Garden City. And all of those were true.

The sun was bright and high when Anghara and Kieran topped a shallow rise and stood looking into the valley sloping down to the blue bay. The ocean sparkled in the sunlight, but was put to shame by the flash and fire of Algira’s towers as they broke the southern light like a shattered adamant. The place seemed made of glass, and shimmered before Kieran’s eyes; he could see twisting trails of water, sometimes bridged with arching spans of white stone or black obsidian, which wound their way between the glittering buildings. Scattered amongst these, great palms spread enormous emerald fronds, and glimpses of bright creepers upon sheer walls caught Kieran’s eye. Above it all, upon a small hill ringed by a broad stretch of water, rose the most magnificent building of all—a delicate edifice which looked as though it had been made from spun sugar. Its gardens were a riot of green and scarlet, well-tended lawns giving way unexpectedly to tangled green masses which reminded Kieran of the forests they had recently passed.

“That’s where we’re going,” said Anghara quietly, having caught him staring. “The White Palace. The home of Favrin Rashin, and his father, the king.”

Beauty tempted Kieran into disloyalty. “What in the name of the great God Kerun do they want with our harsh winters and snow-bound crags when they have this?”

“There was a time when the kings of Roisinan had both. The Rashin would have it so again.”

“So would you,” Kieran said. “Else why would you be here?”

“They would kill for it. I would leave them their world; they would be less kind to me.” Anghara allowed her eyes to rest for a long moment upon the White Palace, for so long the summer place of the Kir Hama kings, now home to a pretender to their ancient throne. “Come on.”

Kieran, unaware he had stopped, obediently began moving again. His eyes, however, stayed on the White Palace, and once the initial thrill had passed he saw it with a soldier’s eye. And he didn’t like what it revealed.

“Even assuming you could get into that place—it looks as if it could go hard on you if you tried to leave without your host’s consent,” he said in a low voice.

Anghara glanced at him, then down to where the white walls caught the sun and flamed with brilliant splendor. “That is not entirely unexpected,” she said. “But explain.”

Kieran frowned. It was so beautiful and such a deadly trap. “Look at it,” he said. “An island, surrounded by water—you, an easy target for an archer upon the walls. And not a scrap of concealment near the waterline—the place might look like it’s going wild, but there’s a careful plan in the midst of that madness. There isn’t anywhere to hide. And, discovered, there isn’t anywhere to run.”

“I don’t plan on running,” said Anghara with a curious smile.

She would do it, Kieran thought despairingly. She would walk into this without any thought for the aftermath—trusting to the Gods. Still. But there were no Gods, not any more; there was only Anghara’s own bright flame, and the dogged loyalty of a single man. Who would follow her into anything, even this, because for him no other choice existed.

By now they were already in the city, walking beside the first canals coruscating in the southern sunshine. It was more crowded here, people starting to jostle for space on the narrow walkways flanking the canals. One large elbow nearly spun Anghara off into the water; Kieran would have turned to remonstrate, but Anghara’s hand on his arm forestalled him. “No, I don’t want attention. Follow the greatest crowds; I need a marketplace.”

“What for?”

“That’s where we’ll find a scribe.”

Kieran knew this cryptic tone. She had cooked up a plan, but nobody would know a detail of it until she was ready to speak. But Kieran already had an inkling of this plan, and he didn’t have to like what he was thinking.

“What would you commit to paper here?” he said. “There is danger enough being courted today without going out of your way to draw it upon you. Don’t tell me you mean to challenge Favrin Rashin in his own city?”

“Not challenge,” Anghara said demurely. “Merely invite.”

“To do what?”

“To issue an invitation in return,” Anghara said. “I plan to enter the White Palace as an invited guest-friend.”

“Why on the Gods’ green earth would he invite you into his palace, and guarantee safety to that which stands between him and his desire?” Kieran asked blankly.

“Out of curiosity. Out of piqued interest in what his sworn enemy might find to talk about while drinking his wine.”

“How do you know he’s even here, and not chasing Sif’s tail in Roisinan?”

Anghara, wise in the way of courts, merely smiled. “You ought to know Favrin’s colors by now,” she said. “There’s a blue and white pennant amongst the banners on the towers. Favrin’s. It only flies when he is within.” She laughed, then, at Kieran’s face. “Duerin might accept the gauntlet, only to try and have me poisoned quietly at his table,” she said, her voice light, almost lilting; Kieran’s skin crawled at her easy, almost fey, banter on the subject of her own death. “Not Favrin; he’s too forthright for poison. Feor was right about that. But he
will
accept my invitation—and he will guarantee my safety, his soldier’s honor will see to it.”