Kings of the North (53 page)

“They can kill each other if they want, but not on my land,” Kieri said. “Dammit—I paid too much for a chance at peace to lose it for a brawl in a tavern!” The Pargunese king had the upper hand now and was throttling Hafdan; Kieri strode forward, putting a hand in the king’s collar. “STOP THIS!” he roared, louder than the two men together. His voice startled even him; he had not expected that, or the light that now blazed from him.

The two combatants stared at him; the king’s grip on Hafdan’s
throat loosened slightly, but he was not cowed. “It is an affair of honor! Let me alone—he is a traitor; I must prove it on his body—”

“Prove it somewhere else, then,” Kieri said. “It is ill done to break guest-truce, and this landlord does not deserve to have a welter of blood on his floor. It is a Pargunese quarrel and none of mine. Get you across the river, and if you want to fight bare naked with teeth and nails, that is your business. You agreed to this parley, in hopes of a peace between our kingdoms. Bind this man, if you will, but let us not waste the time we have.”

F
or a moment, the room was silent, everyone motionless, Kieri’s light paling the firelight and lamps. Hafdan squinted against it. “He’s still a traitor,” the king said. He jerked his head at the other lords. “Bind him like a thief.” They came forward, one pulling a leather thong from his pocket. The king loosened his grip of Hafdan’s throat, but still straddled him.

Hafdan’s throat worked. “I thought—Einar was—right. You had—gone soft.”

“Do you try to save your life?” the king asked.

“I only say—you are not soft.”

“I am not, and Einar will find that soon enough.” The king started to rise as the Pargunese lords leaned over Hafdan to grab his arms and bind them.

In that instant, Hafdan twisted, jerked out his dagger, and stabbed the king in the side, saying, “Not soft—but steel is harder.” Before Kieri could do anything, one of the Pargunese had run a blade into Hafdan’s throat.

The king put a hand to his side. “It will kill me,” he said calmly. “But the traitor is dead.” Then, with a groan, he slid off Hafdan’s body and lay unmoving on the floor. “Tell Elis and Iolin …” But his voice trailed away.

Kieri had been stabbed so, by a poisoned blade … and Paks had
healed him. But there was no paladin here, and he did not yet have the full royal magery … but what other chance was there? And the light had come, no longer flickering and uncertain, but still filling the room. Maybe …

He stepped over the traitor. “Knight-Commander,” he said. “Come and help me.”

“What you do?” asked one of the Pargunese lords in Common.

“Try to save him,” Kieri said. The king’s eyes were almost closed, but focusing on Kieri. “Breathe,” Kieri said, as he would have to one of his soldiers. “Don’t stop.” He slit the king’s doublet, the winter shirt, the undershirt, and cursed himself for not insisting the king wear mail. The wound in his side was clearly poisoned, already discolored; dark blood flowed out.

“Cannot. Is death wound,” the Pargunese lord said.

“Be quiet and breathe,” Kieri said, to the king. The Knight-Commander knelt at the king’s head; he and Kieri locked eyes. “Knight-Commander, I ask Falk’s aid for this brave man, a king, who has fought for honor—”

“Yes. I will pray—do whatever you plan—”

“I hope the gods will give me healing for him.”

Kieri put his hand on the wound, as Paks had done for him. He had no idea what she had done or how; they had never talked about it. He had thought it beyond anything he would ever do or need to understand. He felt nothing at first but the hot blood, and the heart beating somewhere inside. Then, slowly, something nudged, pushed, urged him to—to what? He tried to understand, but it was not words or thoughts he could follow, just a feeling that this hand had to move, had to—He stared at the elven dagger he now held, his grandmother’s coronation gift.

“No!” One of the Pargunese lords lunged at him, but two King’s Squires stopped the man.

Kieri concentrated … lay the dagger so … let his desire flow down his arm into it … 
Let him live. Let him live
. A shaft of white light shot up from the dagger’s jeweled hilt, then reversed, glowing for an instant in the wound itself. The king cried out, jerked, and something dark flew out of the wound and landed clinking on the floor: the blade’s tip. Bright blood flowed around the elven dagger, then stopped … and Kieri had a sickening view of the wound closing,
the gaping flesh pulling together, layer by layer, the blood flow slowing … stopping … and the skin closing over it.

Kieri felt a great exhaustion settle on him, almost like that he had felt at Aliam’s, and yet different. His vision darkened; he did not realize at first that his light had failed at last.

He looked around, blinking. The Pargunese lords huddled together; the one who had stabbed the traitor dropped his sword. It clattered on the inn’s wooden floor. Elis still held her brother’s arm. The Pargunese guards and Halverics still faced one another, tense and worried.

“You … saved me.” The king lifted his arm and looked at his blood-streaked side. “How—?”

“Better gods than yours saved you,” Kieri said. His head hurt; he felt dizzy. “And my grandmother’s dagger.”

“Elf-made?” The king looked scared.

“Yes.” Kieri’s head swam; he tried to push himself up and instead nearly fell over. Strong arms clasped him from behind.

“Sir King! Are you—”

“It’s just … the healing,” Kieri said. The stench of blood and death in the room sickened him. “Fresh air,” he managed to say. Someone ran to the door and flung it open. In blew a gust of cold wet wind and a few snowflakes; he shivered, but the fresher air steadied him. Someone brought a chair and helped him into it. His vision cleared slowly. What a mess they had made of his carefully prepared meeting place. He took another breath, and another.

“You have it all,” the Knight-Commander said to him, across the traitor’s body and the blood.

“All?” Kieri said. His vision was clear now, but he still felt a strong desire to fall into a bed and sleep for a night and a day.

“Do you even know what you did?”

“Healed a wound, with the gods’ aid.” He bit down on a yawn. “I tried to do for him what Paksenarrion did for me.”

“Did she tell you how?”

“No. We never spoke of it; I thought it paladins’ mystery. It was a poisoned weapon, the same as this—the same poison, for all I know.”

“Did she use a symbol of Gird?”

“I don’t know … I was not in condition to notice.”

“Light?”

“That, yes. She was the only light in the room for a time.”

“As were you.” The Knight-Commander sighed. “My lord king, what you have shown this night goes beyond our expectations. I heard about the daskdraudigs, but this—not for generations have we had a king with such powers. When did Orlith instruct you in healing magery?”

“He hasn’t,” Kieri said. “He said I still needed more training in other arts … I did manage to sprout a seed, though.”

“It is more than a seed I witnessed,” the Knight-Commander said. “It is a blackwood tree, grown to full height and flowering.”

Kieri looked at the dead traitor; while he had rested, the Pargunese lords were stripping his body. One had a knife. He reached out, and Kieri understood. “No!” he said. They looked up, startled. The Knight-Commander glanced down and stared.

“No,” he said, too. “You must not.”

“But he needs,” one of them said in halting Common, nodding at their king. “Einar said, he come back with man-pizzle, maybe prove honor. No pizzle, nobody listen.”

Kieri switched to Pargunese. “I don’t care what Einar said. You are not going to mutilate the body here, in Lyonya. This is my kingdom, and I forbid it.” He glanced at his Squires. “Get a blanket from our gear and wrap him up well; take the body outside—the stableyard, maybe—and mount a guard over it. They can take it back to Pargun tomorrow. What they do there is their concern, not mine.”

“You show honor to the traitor who would have killed me?” the king asked.

“It is not his honor that concerns me, but mine,” Kieri said. “I have killed many men, but it is against my beliefs to treat their bodies as no more than that of a wolf or an ox, and take pieces. They were once men like me.” He remembered having that argument with Aliam, the first time he went to Aarenis, and saw—with mingled horror and fascination—a belt decorated with human ears.
They’re already dead
, he had said to Aliam, and Aliam had clouted him to the ground.
So will you be someday
, Aliam had said.
Should someone take your ears or scalp as a trophy, as if you were a wild animal?

The king glared, then shrugged. “You saved my life,” he said. “If that is your decree, in your own land, I will obey.” He and the Pargunese lords moved away from the body. In Pargunese, the king spoke
to the four Pargunese guards. “It is over—no more fun tonight. But if that king bids you do something, do it for me.”

“We need to clean this room, and let the landlord finish clearing the table,” Kieri said. “There is yet work to do; what we came for is not accomplished. I would see swords put aside and the floor cleaned.”

By the time the body was gone, and the mess on the floor had been cleaned away, Kieri’s headache had eased. With the door closed once more, the room warmed. Outside the storm beat at the town; wind shook the door and shutters in great gusts, and the chimney whistled and moaned. The landlord’s servants having cleared the table—for a wonder, nothing had broken—the group settled around it once more. Kieri let the Pargunese king do most of the talking, speaking only when the king turned to him for confirmation.

The night dragged on. Twice the landlord came to ask if they needed anything, and finally Kieri told him to go on to bed. It was a full glass after that when the king finally got the Pargunese lords to agree that Elis was the only possible—and the best—envoy they could have to Lyonya, and the best chance of peace.

“Not that we fear war,” one of them said, eyeing Kieri. “For the Lady promised us undying fire that would surely burn the forest to the roots and open the land for grain, if we had the courage to defend the king’s honor.”

“Undying fire?” Kieri suppressed another yawn and leaned forward.

“Yes,” the lord said, turning to him. “The Lady, the Weaver, told us we would have with us scathefire that could not be quenched by anything, not even by the sea. Kindled from the bones of ancient dragons, she said.”

“You know what the Earthfolk said about that, Knof,” the other lord said. “We would be cursed forever if we set spade to that hill. They would withdraw their gift that they had long regretted.”

“Yes, but
She—
”

“Einar told us what She said. He says She talks to him more than to the king.”

“And Einar’s a traitor, if the king’s right. I understand that, Harn. But still—” The man looked at Kieri. “If we do want peace, it is not because we fear you, or fear war. You have hideous powers, that is
clear, but so did those who drove us from our homelands.” He spat, but politely, away from Kieri, toward the fire. “If you healed our king to impress us, know that I will not bend the knee to you without my king’s orders.”

They were prickly and proud as young boys in training, and yet, Kieri knew, they could not be treated as boys, not these men of the Pargunese king’s Council. “I do not doubt your courage or your will,” he said to them. Their wisdom, yes, but not their courage. “I do not want your submission; I do not want Pargun. But I do want my own land and people to flourish.”

“Well.” Suspicion in the tone, but agreement, too. “Well, I am not so fond of fighting I must pick quarrels out of the air. It will be as our king wishes.”

As long as he was king. Kieri sent a prayer into the snow-blown night that this might be, and they sit someday eating and drinking again with no death at the end of it.

“To bed, then,” the king said, slapping his knees. “We have far to go tomorrow, if we can even get across the river.” Then he looked at Kieri and raised his brows.

“Upstairs or down, as it suits you,” Kieri said. “I am going up.” Despite the abundance of rooms, the Pargunese crowded into one on the ground floor; Kieri’s Squires had brought his own bedding along, so he slid into familiar rose-scented sheets and was asleep at once. Outside his door, a King’s Squire stood, and another at the head of the stairs.

In the morning, clouds and snow had blown past, and a pale blue sky scoured by wind opened over them. Kieri heard a noise in the stableyard below and pushed open a shutter, peering out to see the Pargunese king, stark naked, washing himself from a bucket of steaming water; two Pargunese lords, just as bare, were doing the same. Did they never stop proving how hardy they were? When the king had finished, he gave a shout and ran, bare as he was, around the yard, and the other two ran after him, all laughing like boys. Kieri eased the shutter closed, and shook his head.

He dressed and came down to breakfast to find the king and his lords dressed again, in clothes he had not seen, the king wearing mail and a different sword, this one with a richly jeweled hilt. On the table was a helm of the kind Kieri associated with Pargun.