Lord of Snow and Shadows (4 page)

A bell began to clang from the harbor tower, an iron clamor shattering the icebound calm. Suddenly the shore was thronging with people. Gavril blinked. Where had they appeared from? There were women, thick shawls wrapped around their heads, rough-bearded sailors trudging through the snow, fur-cloaked clan warriors, and yet more clan warriors.

“They have come to welcome you,” Kostya said, nudging Gavril toward the quay. Their feet crunched on tightly packed snow as they walked to the end of the jetty.

The crowd stared at Gavril in silence. Expectant silence. Now all he could hear was the thin whisper of a wind that cut like wire . . . and the distant crackling of the ice.

Kostya turned to him. He had drawn a curved-edged knife from his belt. The white light glittered on the blade, which was keen and translucent as ice.

“Do I have to go through with this?” Gavril asked through gritted teeth. The utter stillness of the watching crowd disturbed him. He could feel their eyes boring into him. What did they expect to see?

“Right-hander, yes?” Kostya gripped hold of Gavril’s left hand, palm upward. Before Gavril could twist away, he had drawn the thin blade across his palm. The cut stung, keen as the whisper of the icy wind.

Gavril stared down at the open wound, too surprised to cry out.

Blood dripped from his palm, a slash of dark liquid welling from his scored skin. But . . . had Kostya smeared the blade with some chemical substance to alter it? Shouldn’t his blood run red? This was dark, too dark for human blood. Somewhere behind the pain and outrage, his artist’s mind tried to define the color accurately. It was more porphyry-purple than crimson. No, closer to indigo than purple . . .

With a grunt of satisfaction, Kostya lifted Gavril’s palm high in the air, showing it to the crowd. Blood dripped onto the snow. Where it touched the snow, there was a faint sizzling sound, as though the blood were burning its way down to the soil beneath, staining the white snow dark as ink.

And now, at last, the crowd broke its silence, the people hushedly, excitedly nudging each other, pointing, exclaiming.

“Say these words after me,” Kostya whispered in Gavril’s ear. “With my blood.”

“‘With my blood,’” Gavril repeated, almost speechless with anger.

“I, Gavril Nagarian, claim my birthright as Lord of Azhkendir.”

“‘I, Gavril Nagarian.’” The knife slash stung, cold as the icy breath of the wind on his cheeks. “‘Claim my birthright as Lord of Azhkendir.’”

He looked up, then, into the faces of the
druzhina
who stood silently watching him, and it seemed to him that there was a glint of hunger in their eyes, the hunger of a starving wolf pack encircling its prey, waiting for the kill.

Then the shouts of “Drakhaon!” began. People rushed forward, straining to touch Gavril. But the
druzhina
moved swiftly to hold them back, arms linked, forming an alley. Kostya took hold of Gavril’s arm and hastily led him between the two lines toward a cluster of horses, saddled and bridled, heads down against the wind. Ears ringing from the shouting, Gavril saw nothing but a blur of staring, eager faces and grabbing hands.

As Kostya helped him up into the saddle of a sturdy black gelding, he looked back to the quay. People were pushing and jostling each other to get to the place where he had been standing, scrabbling in the snow. Dully he realized they were fighting to collect the snow that had been stained with his blood. His blood! What primitive superstition made men and women place such faith in the blood of their chosen lord?

He looked down at his palm in disbelief. The blood was clotting already in the searingly dry cold air. In the ice-light it was difficult to tell what color it was oozing now.

“Let me bind that for you, my lord.” Kostya pressed a linen pad onto the gash and swiftly tied it in place.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” Gavril said, glaring at him.

“Gloves, Lord Gavril.” The old warrior passed him a pair of leather gloves, fur-lined, ignoring his question. “You’ll need these. We have a long ride ahead of us.” And he raised his hand in a gesture of command, impatiently signaling to the
druzhina,
beckoning them toward the waiting horses.

The crowd surged forward as Gavril’s bodyguard vaulted onto the backs of their mounts with whoops and wild shouts of exultation. Kostya grabbed hold of Gavril’s reins. Hooves rattled on the compacted snow, a muted thunder that shook the timbers of the wooden houses.

Gavril looked at the eager sea of faces as they swept through the crowd. One alone caught his attention. A glint of burnished gold hair; dark eyes staring at him from a pale face with a singularly intense, unreadable expression. For one moment all the shouts and the dinning of hooves receded into a blur of sound.

A young man’s face, eyes dark with pain and horror . . .

Gavril swung around in the saddle, scanning the following crowd. But the face had vanished and the townspeople were dropping behind, only a few energetic ones still pursuing them, waving and shouting his name.

They had been riding north across the moors for two days since they had disembarked at the port of Arkhelskoye. Inland from the bleak icebound coastline, the snows had not yet settled on the bracken-brown moorlands.

At first, Gavril had been sunk too deep in despair to notice anything but the bitter cold and the desolation. Hunched in his thick fur cloak, he rode along the moorland trails in a drugged daze, shoulders braced against the gusts of icy wind that buffeted them.

But as the last effects of the sedation gradually lifted from his mind, he found himself going over and over what had happened in Arkhelskoye. Again he felt the blade bite into his palm, saw the blood sizzle into the snow, staining it with drops as dark as midnight. The knife cut, tightly bound, still stung beneath his leather riding gloves every time he adjusted the reins.

It was a clever trick to impress the crowd, he allowed, now that he could be more rational about what had happened. Kostya must have used some secret dye on the knifeblade to change the color of his blood. Maybe it was even a side effect of the sedative. As for the other talk of dragons and flying . . . he was certain it must be metaphorical. Much as past warrior princes had been named “the Bear” or “the Hawk,” so the lords of Azhkendir must have gained the title of “Drakhaon” for their ruthless skills in battle.

Gavril glanced uneasily at the
druzhina
riding on either side of him. Their dour silence was less a trial than a relief. He was in no mood for conversation. They might call themselves his bodyguard, but he knew himself their prisoner. Besides, he had not forgotten the look in their eyes when Kostya held aloft his bleeding hand to the crowd in Arkhelskoye. That strange look, hunger and terror intermingled. What was in his blood that they both desired and feared?

A sudden gust of wind swept across the purpled moorlands, and Gavril began to shiver. Days away from the sun-gilded shores of Smarna . . . would he ever feel warm again?

In the far distance lay a range of jagged mountains he heard Kostya call the Kharzhgylls. Kostya told him—in one of his rare communicative moments—that they were making for his father’s kastel, which lay on the borders of the vast forest of Kerjhenezh. On the open moorlands the only trees they passed were single and sparsely branched, but now the wind-bent clumps increased to small groves, and from small groves to bristling woods.

That night they camped in a sandy clearing, and the
druzhina
built a small fire of cones and pine twigs. They had nearly used up their store of provisions; all that remained were hunks of stale black bread, strips of dried fish, and the water in their flasks. And when Gavril suggested calling at a farmhouse or village to buy food, Kostya turned such a strange look on him from beneath his bushy, iron-gray brows that he did not dare repeat his question.

While Gavril helped water the horses at a nearby stream, Kostya sent the younger men of the
druzhina
in search of wild mushrooms, herbs, and pungent berries in the wood. Soon he was brewing a savory, salty fish broth in which to soften the stale bread.

Gavril sat gazing into the flames of Kostya’s fire. He was too exhausted to find the energy to be angry with his abductors anymore. His whole body ached from the long hours in the saddle. He reckoned he could feel every muscle in his thighs and calves. Now all he could think of was a bath: a long soak in a hot, steamy tub.

Kostya spooned some of the broth into a bowl and handed it to him. Gavril cupped the hot bowl in his hands, breathing in the savor of wild herbs in the steam. He had not realized till then how ravenous he was.

The
druzhina
ate in silence, draining the bowls to the dregs with satisfied grunts, then wiping the clinging drops of broth from their moustaches with the backs of their hands.

Gavril watched them with a kind of fascinated disgust. Was this what his father had been like? Rough-mannered, taciturn, and battle-scarred? What had Elysia seen in him to make her leave her home and family in Smarna for this wild, desolate place?

He mopped the last of the broth from the sides of the bowl with the bread.

Thinking of Smarna only brought Astasia back into his mind. For a moment the firelit glade blurred as tears filled Gavril’s eyes. He had not even been given the chance to send word from Arkhelskoye as Kostya had promised. Was he to be trapped here until the ice melted in the spring? By then she would be married, beyond his reach forever. Furiously, he blinked the tears away. Tears were no use. He must start to plan his escape.

Kostya hunkered down in front of the fire beside him, stretching his scarred, knotted hands out over the flames to warm them.

“Tomorrow we reach your father’s kastel,” he said, “and you come into your inheritance, Lord Gavril.”

Gavril’s wits were sharper now that he had eaten.

“This initiation I must undergo,” he said drily. “What does that entail? More bloodletting? More conjuring tricks?”

Kostya gave him a long, appraising look. Gavril suddenly felt like a young, raw recruit whose pretense of bravado has been exposed as a sham.

“It is a ceremony or a contract,” Kostya said at length, “between the Drakhaon and his
druzhina
. Do you think that hardened warriors like these would be impressed by conjuring tricks?”

“If I agree to go through with this ceremony,” Gavril said wearily, “then I want my freedom. I want to be free to come and go as I please. To go back to Smarna.”

“That would be unwise in these circumstances, my lord.”

“Unwise! Didn’t my father meet my mother when he was traveling abroad?”

“Your father had no blood feud to settle when he met your mother.”

“Blood feud?” This time it was Gavril who looked searchingly at the old warrior. “What blood feud?”

“Whenever a Clan Lord dies dishonored in Azhkendir, murdered in bed or in his own hall—” Kostya threw a handful of pinecones on the glowing embers of the fire. “His clan are blood-bound to find the murderer and exact their revenge.”

“Revenge?” Gavril echoed, dreading what must come next.

“If the murder is not avenged, the spirit of the Clan Lord cannot rest in peace. The land begins to die. Crops fail. Winters never end.”

The cones crackled and spat, drops of crystallized resin flaring up into little flames, giving off the bittersweetness of burning incense into the black night.

“And the honor of vengeance falls, by right of blood, to the Clan Lord’s eldest son.”

“You mean me? I must kill my father’s murderer?” Anger flared again, impotent, cold anger. “Is that what this is about? You’ve kidnapped me to perpetuate your barbaric bloodfeud?”

Smoke billows across his sight, blue smoke, spangled with iridescent firesparks. A young man’s face, blood-smeared, turns toward his, eyes dark with pain and horror
. . . .

Gavril felt the old man’s hand on his shoulder, gripping hard, steadying him.

“Are you all right, Lord Gavril?”

Gavril shook his head, trying to clear his sight. The only smoke he could see now was the twisting woodsmoke from their fire, gray and dull.

“But—no one knows who the murderer is. You told me so yourself.”

Dark eyes staring at him from the crowd at Arkhelskoye with a singularly intense, unreadable expression.

“We’ll twist a few more tongues.” Kostya turned his head aside and spat. “People talk . . . sooner or later.”

That acrid stink of chymicals, the phial of liquid, his father’s shuddering cry, “Who let you in?”

“No assassins will come near you, my lord. You will be well protected in Kastel Drakhaon.”

Well protected?

The sliding secret panel, the low voice whispering, “Come this
way . . .”

Gavril sat, hugging his knees to his chest. However faithful the
druzhina
professed to be to their Lord Drakhaon, someone within the kastel had betrayed his father. Someone who hated all of the Nagarian blood with an unrelenting, unassuageable hate. Someone who was waiting for him.

CHAPTER 4

The youngest and most insignificant housemaid of Kastel Drakhaon came hurtling along the painted corridor, not looking where she was going. Coming toward her was Sosia the housekeeper, weighed down by a pile of clean linen. Kiukiu skidded to a halt—but too late to avoid a collision. Sheets, pillowcases, and towels cascaded to the floor.

“Clumsy child!”

A sharp slap to the face; Kiukiu ducked—but not quite fast enough. Her cheek stung.

“Sorry, Auntie Sosia.” Kiukiu dropped to her knees, trying to help Sosia pick up the spilled sheets.

“You’ll have to mind your manners, my girl, when our new master arrives. Best stay in the kitchen, out of the way. He won’t want—”

A bell began to tinkle. Sosia looked up.

“What does
she
want now?”

The bell went on tinkling, a high, insistent, irritating sound. Lilias’ bell; Kiukiu pulled a face. Beautiful Lilias, indolent and heavy with child. Refusing to leave her rooms. Demanding attention at all hours of the day and night. Sosia’s slaps might sting, but her anger was soon forgotten. Lilias never forgot a transgression, no matter how small.

Sosia shoved the sheets into Kiukiu’s arms.

“Well, I can’t send you to see to
her
wants, can I, not after last time? Where’s that good-for-nothing maid of hers?”

The bell continued its insistent, petulant tinkle.

“You’ll have to make up the bed for Lord Gavril.” Sosia pushed herself up again, shaking the creases from her gray skirts. “I’ll go see to my lady Lilias. Oh—and don’t you dare touch anything. Just make the bed. And go.”

Since the time she was old enough to take up service, Kiukiu had been sent to clean the grates and lay the fires in the kastel bedchambers. She had lugged the heavy buckets of sea-coal and logs up from the outhouses; she had swept and scraped the ashes from the grate, rubbing the iron firedogs clean, day after day. But it was an honor to be allowed into the Drakhaon’s chamber, to perform even the most menial task—a fact that Sosia never let her forget, reinforced with many cuffs, slaps, and beatings. But Kiukiu never minded being accorded this particular honor, because it meant she could sneak a look at the portrait.

She wandered around, drifting a duster over the dark, carved wood of the brocade-curtained bed, the tall chest of ivory-inlaid ebony, the lower chest encrusted with carved dragons, all sharp spines and curved wings until . . .

Until she reached the portrait. It was set in a simple frame, so unostentatious that you could have passed it by were it not for the vivid quality of the painting. Whomever the artist was, they had captured a moment in time so intensely that whenever Kiukiu looked at it, she felt as if she were gazing through a window into another world.

The portrait showed a boy of nine or ten years, head slightly turned as if someone had just called his name. His wind-ruffled hair was dark brown, lit with little tips of golden bronze. Behind him, Kiukiu could see a white balcony—and beyond that the blue of the sea. The boy’s sunburned features were regular, strong-boned. His expression was serious—though there was something in the way the artist had painted his eyes, and the little quirk at the corner of his mouth, that suggested the seriousness was assumed for the solemn occasion of the portrait and that an infectious grin was about to break through. And those eyes—they seemed to follow her when she moved away. Blue as the misty sea behind him, shaded by curling dark lashes and strong, dark brows, there was a luminous gleam to those blue eyes that was so lifelike it made her catch her breath.

When no one was around, she used to speak to the boy. Who else was there to confide in? Sosia was too busy with the affairs of the household to trouble herself with the feelings of the youngest, lowliest servant girl. Lilias had taken an instant dislike to her. Lilias’ maid, Dysis, ignored her. Ninusha and Ilsi, the other housemaids, were always flirting with Lord Volkh’s bodyguards, giggling over secrets together. . . .

So Kiukiu spoke to the lord Drakhaon’s son. She knew that the boy in the portrait was Lord Volkh’s son Gavril and that he had been sent away before the Clan Wars, a few months before she was born. Which would make him about twenty years old, she reckoned on her fingers, as she was so nearly eighteen.

“Why have you never come home, Lord Gavril,” she whispered, lovingly dusting the frame, “till now?”

The painted sea shimmered blue, an achingly deep, beautiful blue. Kiukiu had never seen the sea, but if it was anything as blue as in the portrait, she thought she would never want to be anywhere else. If you stared for long enough, it seemed as if the painted water began to ripple, to move. . . .

Kiukiu forced her eyes away, focusing on the boy’s face.

“They say your mother wouldn’t let you come back.”

The boy gazed silently back with his clear, sea-blue eyes.

“Because of what Lord Volkh did to her.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Even though the lord Drakhaon was dead, she still feared him. And dead in such a horrible fashion, burned by an alchymical poison, slashed and stabbed till his blood soaked through the floorboards of the hall. . . .

She shuddered. Best not to think of it.

“Is that bed made up yet, Kiukiu?”

Kiukiu started, startled by Sosia’s sharp voice from the corridor outside.

“Nearly finished,” she lied, shaking open the crisp folds of fine, bleached linen. The chill, somber air of the bedchamber filled with the fragrance of summer-dried lemon balm as she spread the sheet on the mattress and carefully tucked in the corners. Then she plumped up the soft goose-feather quilt and arranged the pillows.

A little door behind the brocade-canopied bed led to the Drakhaon’s dressing room and garderobe.

Better leave some clean towels . . .

Kiukiu slipped inside the little room. Here stood a vast armoire of dark-stained wood containing the Drakhaon’s clothes, dwarfing the washbowl and jug on its stand. What would become of all those fine linen shirts, those fur-lined winter jackets of black leather stitched with metallic thread, those rich brocade coats, trimmed with the softest velvet?

Dead men’s clothes . . .

Lord Gavril would never want to wear them, no matter how expensive the cloth. . . .

Kiukiu carefully placed the towels by the washbowl and straightened up, catching sight of a fragment of her reflection in the full-length, gilt-framed glass mirror that stood behind the armoire, still draped in a dark cloth, a funeral custom of Azhkendir.

She knew well enough the old stories told around the kitchen fire at night, superstitions about the souls of the departed. Stories that said the restless dead could use the shadows of their reflections in mirrors and glass to clothe themselves, could return to haunt the living.

But Lord Volkh had been laid to rest in the Nagarian mausoleum with all the funerary rites due to a Drakhaon of Azhkendir. And Lord Gavril would be here by evening.

Kiukiu whisked off the mourning cloth and folded it into fourths. She sneaked a glance at herself, and in case Sosia came in and caught her preening, gave the glass a perfunctory polish with the cloth.

Did she really resemble her mother, long-dead Afimia? Whenever she asked Sosia, Sosia would nod and then let slip ambiguous little snippets such as, “Of course poor Fimia’s hair was so much lighter than yours . . .”

But all Kiukiu could see in the mirror was a homely kind of face. Strong cheekbones, a broad brow, long, straight hair that was more wheaten gold than pale barley, plaited and tucked away beneath a bleached linen kerchief, and freckles. Try as she might to rub them away with herbal concoctions, they stubbornly remained, dusting her sun-browned skin like specks of golden pollen. No lady of quality had freckles. Lilias’ skin was pale as early almond blossom, unblemished, translucent. Even now that Lilias was so heavily pregnant, her complexion had retained its becoming pallor. Her rich chestnut hair was sleek and glossy—or so it should be, Kiukiu thought scornfully, after the hundred brush strokes Dysis had to administer every day.

Now the dressing room looked a little less dour, but it was hardly a suitable apartment for a young man. Even Lord Volkh had spent little time here, working late in the night in his study in the Kalika Tower. Kostya said that the Drakhaon liked to study the stars from the roof of the tower, that he and Doctor Kazimir were often to be found together, charting the constellations with the doctor’s telescopes.

But all that had been before. Before their quarrel, before the terrible events that followed . . .

Kiukiu felt a strange, sudden chill in the little room. She shivered involuntarily, rubbing her arms, feeling the skin rough with goose bumps.

She sensed that there was someone else behind her, and yet there had been no sound of footsteps or a door opening.

“Who’s there?” The question came out sharp-spiked and tense.

“Kiukirilya.”

“Ilsi? Ninusha? If this is a joke—”

The room suddenly darkened as if winter fogs had drifted in from the moors. The damply cold air tasted of the lightless dark of winter and despair.

“Turn around, Kiukirilya.”
The words resonated in her mind like the somber din of the funeral bells in Saint Sergius’ monastery, tolling out across Azhkendir for their dead lord.

“No,” she said in a small voice, resisting.

“Help me, Kiukirilya.”

Slowly, unwillingly, she turned around. The mirror had become a yawning portal of rushing darkness from which wisps of fog escaped, colder than winter’s chill. And framed in the center of the portal stood a tall figure of a man, a warrior, his hands reaching out to her through the swirling mists. The terrible burns of the alchymical poison still disfigured his face, and stains of dried blood marked the gaping wounds through which his life had leaked away. . . .

“Lord Volkh?” she whispered. Her tongue was frozen with fear. She was talking with the dead.

“My son Gavril; I must speak with my son.”
The words shivered into her mind, bitter as hoarfrost. How could she hear him so clearly against the chaotic roar of the darkness?

“Bring me through, Kiukirilya.”

“M-me?” Her heart seemed to have stopped beating. “Why me?”

“Because you have the gift.”
Blue the spirit’s eyes were, intensely blue as starfire on a winter’s night.
“You have the gift to bring me through.”

“I—I can’t bring you through, Lord Drakhaon.” She wanted to back away, but his gaze held her frozen to the spot. What gift did he mean? She had no special gifts; she was only a serving maid. She fought to close her mind to the relentlessly tolling voice, to turn away from the lifeless stare of those compelling blue eyes. “I d-don’t know how.”

“For my son’s sake. I must warn him. Before it’s too late.”

“Warn Lord Gavril? Is he in danger?” Those ghost stories told around the kitchen fire on winter nights still niggled at the back of her memory. Something you were not supposed to say, to do, in the presence of a revenant . . . But the chill fog seemed to have seeped into her memory, and there was nothing in her mind but smoke and shifting shadows.

“Kiukiu. Use your gift.”
A spectral hand reached out toward her, frail as a skeletal leaf blackened with glittering frost.
“Help me.”

She reached out to touch the revenant’s hand. What was she doing! Something at the back of her mind cried out to her to stop before it was too late—

She stood on a bare, scorched plain, dark stormclouds scudding fast overhead, distant bleak foothills, gullies of gray scree, all empty, desolate, lifeless. . . .

“Where have you brought me?” she cried, but her voice was drowned by the howl of the wind. Stinging grit gusted into her face, a hailshower of burning dust. “What is this terrible place?”

“Look.”

Through her dust-stung eyes she began to make out a slow stir of movement in the plain. As she stared, she saw they were human forms, some crawling laboriously, mindlessly onward across the barren plain, others so exhausted they had collapsed, lying half-buried in dust, gray statues of petrified lava.

Pity and horror wrung her heart. But at the same time she knew she must escape before she found herself drowning in the stinging dust. She forced herself to turn away, straining back toward the distant glimmer of light.

“Don’t condemn me to eternity here.”
The revenant still held fast to her hand, gripped it with a desperate strength, and would not let go.
“Bring me through, Kiukirilya!”

“I can’t, I daren’t—”

Then they were falling, tumbling back down through a turbulence of boiling thundercloud and whirling, serecold wind—

Her whole being fought the pull of the darkness. She wanted to let go, to shake herself free of the revenant, but still it clung on.

The mirror frame glimmered ahead, a portal limned in stardust.

She strove toward the daylight, the shadow clinging fast to her hand. It was like swimming up through the cold, heavy waters of Silver Lake in the forest, kicking free of the treacherous pull of the hidden currents. One more effort and she would reach the surface—