Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (52 page)

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BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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As she spoke, she slipped the blade from the scabbard. It was a simple design, silver-colored with runes carved on the flat. Yet somehow, there could be no mistaking it for was it was.
“You have an
Ein
Raku
blade?” Gaultry whispered. “There are two Kingmakers? How is that possible?” But Richielle had spoken of power like unto that which was no longer given to the world, so Gaultry knew. “Lukas Soul-breaker,” she said, louder. “He gave you—he made you—the
Ein Raku,
in return for you raising him to the power of the triple-souled. That’s why you helped him steal his sister’s Blood-Imperial.”
Richielle stepped forward and pressed the blade against Gaultry’s throat, just shy of breaking her skin. “You will never understand the price I paid for it—and I, only I, Richielle goat-herder, had the power and foresight to see this weapon made and forged. Fifty years planning, and
all has come to pass as I envisioned it. Perhaps my vengeance on your grandmother will never come about; but I will live at least to see Tielmark free, Clarin’s heirs King, and Bissanty shattered.” Turning on her heel, she made her way out through the herd of sheep, leaving Gaultry alone.
G
aultry stopped throwing herself against the line when her hands began to bleed. She had succeeded in moving the tether along the beam a little distance—far enough to chivy herself closer to one of the pen’s slatted walls—but a vertical strut from beam to roof prevented her from getting close enough to the wall for her to try to scramble atop it. Maddeningly, the angled tension of the line was just enough to prevent her from balancing and clambering up.
She had attempted to use her magic to embrittle either the line or the beam, but to no effect. With each pulse of power she sought to send outward, the sheep bleated and milled in confusion—absorbing her power, muting her effectiveness.
Richielle would not be long about her business with Tullier. A moment to gloat, surely, a moment to enjoy her triumph, but she would not waste breath in explanations or arguing. She would cut out his heart, as she had promised—unless Tullier found some way to save himself, or unless Gaultry found some way to help him.
In sheer frustration, Gaultry kicked out the slats at the side of the pen closest to her. That weakened the low wall of the pen but did nothing to improve her situation, though it did make her feel less than completely useless for something like the space of four heartbeats.
The sheep outside were frightened by the noise, but Richielle had packed them into the barn so tightly that they soon came crowding back. There was hay in the pen under Gaultry’s feet. An obese ram rolled a speculative eye up at Gaultry, gauging her degree of threat, then greed overcame the animal’s caution and it forced its way through the broken slats to grab the fresh fodder. A pair of ewes, encouraged when Gaultry did not react offensively, soon followed. One brushed against Gaultry’s legs, investigating the fallen bucket. Near enough for Gaultry to spirit-take from it, she realized with a jolting gleam of hope. She did not need her Glamour to do that.
But what would that accomplish? What could a sheep do, that she could not do better, even with her own miserable human strength? Bleat? Grow woolly? Panic like a fool?
Panic. Gaultry looked down at the heaving backs. The obese ram gazed up at her foolishly, hay straws at the corners of its mouth. If she took one of these sheep and panicked, perhaps she could spread that to the rest of the flock. Suitable for creating a diversion—though of course, with the sheep-spirit still in her, she would be no good for thinking, and that would be of little help to Tullier.
And of course, she would be no help to Tullier, even spreading panic, if she remained appended to this stupid beam. She drew a deep breath, and tried to think.
The barn was constructed with wide gated doors at each end. Late golden light filtered in via the western door frame. Twilight could not be far away. Andion’s Ides would soon be over. Just as Tamsanne had used the power of dawn to heighten the spell that she had cast on Dervla’s fetish-crown, Gaultry guessed Richielle intended to use the power of the sunset.
Where was Benet now? What would he experience when Richielle’s blade entered Tullier’s body? Would the gods greet him in a vision, announcing his new rank as King? Would the strength of the earth, of Tielmark, come coursing through him? What would the Lanai feel? Would they sense the change, the realignment of the Gods’ loyalties, and know it was time to retreat? Victor Haute-Tielmark at least would be pleased by that.
A small side door shot open, and Richielle stuck her head inside. She glanced at the destruction Gaultry had wrought at the side of the pen, and then at the sheep, who had flooded the pen by now and were butting up against Gaultry’s legs. Seeing Gaultry’s situation effectively stable, she flashed her teeth in her gruesome smile, shut the door, and retreated. She could not have made a clearer statement of her confidence.
“Hag!” Gaultry spat angrily, shamed as well as frightened. There was nothing she could do but go down the path on which Richielle had set her. There was nothing she could do—nothing but make herself more like a sheep.
The angle of the sun moved ever lower in the doorway. Gaultry began to shake all over, imagining Tullier’s fate. She had promised him her protection. In the beginning, she had even forced it on him.
Richielle would be concentrating her power now on preparing him for the sacrifice. Gaultry forced herself to think. Tullier would not be unconscious at the moment the knife descended. Richielle would want to look in his eyes as she killed him. But Tullier was not a helpless boy.
He was a trained Sha Muira. If she could distract Richielle even for a moment, maybe it would be enough.
There was only one thing to try, so she would try it. She would take from a sheep, become one with the flock, and see what happened next.
She looked down, dubious, at the milling animals.
Never before in her life had she spirit-taken from a sheep. What would have been the point? She tried at first to straddle the obese ram, but he skittered to one side, suspicious. She had to settle for a scrawny ewe that another sheep bumped against her. It was a feeble thing with a scraggly coat, not dexterous enough to escape. Gaultry clutched it gracelessly between her legs. It bleated hopelessly, and then subsided and lowered its head to pull at a wisp of straw.
Her infuriation at its stupidity almost ruined it. Her first attempt, using her Glamour, soaked into it like water through a sieve, to no effect other than riling it. It crunched one of its hard little hooves down on her instep, and kicked her leg. In the fresh shock of pain, she almost let it escape.
She had grown so accustomed to calling on her Glamour to power these small spirit-taking magics. Now she had to remember humility, and call for strength from the gods. “Huntress Elianté,” she intoned. “Fair Lady Emiera. This is a little thing I ask of you. The spirit of this sheep. I call it to me. I need the strength of it—”
The scrawny ewe grunted a protest. Its spirit struggled weakly, sensing the unfamiliar corridor open before it, but only for a moment. Its shadowy spirit-substance made its way tremulously forward into her body, reluctant at the strangeness but not yet scared. Between her legs the animal’s light body slumped, its skinny legs folding. Gaultry glanced down uneasily, and positioned her feet to protect it. Any injuries its body took while she possessed it would manifest as pain in her own flesh. Where it had fallen, it could easily be trampled. That might add to the panic Gaultry was feeling, and in turn transmit to the rest of the sheep, but Gaultry felt almost queasy, imagining that sympathetic pain.
With the befuddled ewe’s spirit dumb and puzzled inside of her, it was time to start.
She cautiously gave the ewe’s spirit the power to control her limbs, feeling its puzzlement as she did so. Then she made it aware of her bonds. The little sheep did not like how it had been tied—the upright position of Gaultry’s body alone was enough to spook it. The animals crowded around Gaultry’s legs drew away as she began to flail about, less purposefully
than she had done earlier because the ewe-spirit in control of her body did not understand the use or the shape of her limbs.
It was not enough to spook the flock. Trying to turn back a rising tide would have been easier.
Gaultry, maddened, began to tease the stupid thing. The asinine creature kicked, but refused to panic. This was no good, she thought. She would have to be more brutal. She poked at it, prodded—the animal was so stupid that nothing had any effect.
Eventually she tried hitting it with a slap of her Glamour-power. The golden strength cracked down, hard as a whip. This time, the creature reacted, but not as Gaultry expected. It absorbed the power into itself—and then it projected it outward. Gaultry had tapped inadvertently into the part of it that dissipated her power throughout the flock.
But this time that power was suffused with her angry frustration. The flock moved uneasily. A few of the rams snapped at their fellows.
All
right,
Gaultry told them.
If I need to be a sheep to get this going, I will be a sheep.
She began to struggle in earnest. She threw more lashes of Glamour at the sheep-spirit, then began to twist violently against her bonds. Gallingly, the little sheep remained disengaged, throwing the worst of the emotion out onto the others, and dumbly refusing to respond itself.
It was not until one of the other sheep in the pen stepped onto the ewe’s body with a razor hoof that Gaultry at last managed to engage it.
Seething with that cut of reflected pain, Gaultry opened herself to let the sheep-spirit share. And that—rage and anger the sheep did not understand, but pain—that was the beginning of a panic in the ewe that was strong enough to reflect back even on Gaultry. She lashed out with a wave of Glamour—this time to protect herself. It manifested itself as fear, driving the animals inside the pen against the slatted walls, protecting for a brief moment her downed ewe. She lashed out again as they came surging back, and then again. Soon blood was slick on her body, evidence that she had pushed to her Glamour’s limit. She was reaching the edge of her power, had put it all into the damned flock, and still the panic stayed below the level where she needed it.
“I am a sheep!” she screamed. “I am a sheep! I am a sheep!” Waves of power reverberated out from her; concurrently, a stabbing pain cut at her hands. Looking up, what she saw made her let out a shriek of true bloodcurdling terror.
Her hands—they were shrinking. Already her fingers were vestigial
stubs, the nails thickened, broadening. A horrid, scouring feeling itched across her skin, as if a woolen jersey were creeping over her flesh.
Whatever emotion it was she felt next, it went directly to the flock, bypassing conscious intent. They were a mirror of her feelings, milling now in real terror. The gate across the east door of the barn had not been made very fast. The mass of terrified sheep surged against it, once, and then again, and it crashed open like a barrier breaking beneath a heavy tide. The panicked creatures began to stream away from the irrational screaming that was Gaultry, no clear direction to them, just wanting escape.
And Gaultry, as the last rays of sunlight slipped away from the barn door on the building’s far side, slipped free of her bonds, and tumbled down onto the floor.
“Not!” she whimpered. “I am not an animal.” Her heart was drumming in her chest. She was barely conscious—except for one thing. Her hands were soft and supple. Her fingers—they were as they should be. She jerked herself up to her feet, relief mingling with renewed determination.
She freed the little ewe’s spirit, then, kicking sheep out of her path without compunction, strode for the western door.
Perhaps Richielle’s magic had forced her to waste the strength of her Glamour-power, but that wasn’t going to prevent her for one moment from trying to help Tullier.
The sun showed scarcely a finger’s width above the steep ridgeline
of the valley. Sunset would come early in Richielle’s domain, followed by a lingering twilight.
Gaultry emerged from the barn borne on a wave of panicked sheep. Breaking free of that wave, she made for a clear space by the barn’s wall, needing to collect her wits.
Save for bleating animals, the yard around the well was deserted. This was no reassurance. The sheep were making such an awful ruckus, she had to believe that Richielle would know something was up.
The goat-herder’s farm rambled in all directions along the valley floor. Some of the barns were ancient, with thick rubble walls, heavily mossed, and low pole roofs, piled high with slate. The sheep barn where Richielle had tied her was one of the more recent constructs. The roof was rough-hewn wooden shakes. The work she could see was more than one woman could handle by herself, even swollen with power and magic. What poor souls had helped Richielle cut those shingles?
Her eye fell on a miserable shed. For all its paucity, there was a fire hole at one end of the roof’s ridgepole. Not a place to keep animals. A place to prepare magic? Gaultry ran to it, kicking sheep out of her way, and threw open the door.
Five frightened, emaciated faces turned toward her. Gaultry, smeared all over with her own blood from the Glamour she had expended, did nothing to assure them with her startling entrance. There were three thin men, one little more than Tullier’s age, and a pair of tired-looking women.
All five were tall, sturdily built people, but their clothes were worn rags, and all were clearly near exhaustion from overwork. The women had been preparing a meal of grain and milk mashed together to make a sort of cold porridge.
“Who are you?” Gaultry demanded. Halting but obedient, they began to give their names. She cut them short. “No. I mean what are you doing here? Have you come here of your own free will?”
One of the men snorted. “The herder comes by our farms for new hands every spring. She is fair, in her own mind. She never takes those who can’t be spared.”
“She leaves restitution,” a woman protested. “We’ll all take stock home at the summer’s end.” Her weary face lighted with hope. “The herder’s cattle are a special gift. They breed true, and never throw their get. It’s worth the labor, to win that.”
The others frowned but did not contradict her claim.
“Where has she taken my boy?” The silence that greeted this question was fearful. It would have been kinder to be polite, but she was in no mood to care. “You must know who I am. Your own Prince’s Glamour-witch. Richielle expected me. Her preparations to hold me while she took care of the boy were extensive. As you can see, I defeated those preparations. Imagine what I will do to you, if you won’t help me now.”
The aggrieved man who had spoken first started to answer. The others overrode him with concerned noises.
“Tell me,” Gaultry insisted. She pushed into the room, thrusting aside the first person who opposed her. She could not tell if the feeling that possessed her was anger or fear. “On your honor for Benet and Tielmark, tell me.”
“She’s taken him to the riverbed.” The man who had answered before kept his gaze focused her face, avoiding the worried eyes of his fellow laborers, their hushed whispers, urging him back to silence. “There’s an old stone there where she makes sacrifice. Two stones. One upright, one fallen. Follow the old path to the river and you will find it easily. The water rises and cleans the flat stone, come spring flood. That’s where she’ll do it.”
“Where are my weapons?” Her bow, her hunting knife. Tullier’s short sword and daggers.
The man shook his head. Either he did not know or he was unwilling to risk himself so far as to tell her. Seeing he had nothing further, Gaultry snatched up a farm tool that had been laid against the near wall—a long
pole with a curved metal blade, intended for cutting high branches. “Point me the way,” she said. “And may the gods give the rest of you just reward, for valuing nothing beyond your own skins.”
From the door, the man showed her the path. It led out past the barns, between some paddocks with woven branch fences, and down across a meadow to a line of low trees and scrub, obviously marking a river’s banks.
The man put his hand on her arm. His pale grey eyes were intense. “Do not think of us so poorly. We are bound here by spells. Think on it. To die in the Herder’s service—that is a sorry fate.”
“The gods will judge, not I,” Gaultry answered tiredly. But she let his hand slip into hers, and she briefly shook it.
The great ball of the sun had almost dropped to the ridgeline now. Was it sinking unnaturally fast, or was that her imagination?
The man nodded, understanding that her thoughts had already gone past him, that she would, perhaps, have spoken less harshly, had circumstances been less dire. “If you get a chance to flee, follow the river. The water is low, and the flats will afford an escape path. Ignore the trails you see. They twist—you will find yourselves back here before you know it.”
“The Great Twins give you thanks,” Gaultry said. She turned toward the river and started running.
F
rom a distance the tall stone gave the appearance of a giant standing figure, its head bowed in contemplation. Gaultry, who had run like a madwoman across the fields to find this place, sank back into the scrub and tried to catch her breath.
Richielle was standing on the recumbent stone, within the upright stone’s long shadow. She had just dispatched a goat—numerous goats, judging by the pile of fresh carcasses to the stone’s side—and she was pulling another up onto the stone to kill it too.
The riverbed was flat and wide. Around the sacrifice stones, it had the appearance of an ancient fording place, with the stones erected to propitiate the Gods and allow safe passage over the floods. But whatever the place’s history, as the man had promised, in this season the river ran only in a small channel at the center, leaving scoured sand and pebbled flats to either side. Come winter, both the recumbent stone and the upright stone would be surrounded by water, if not, in the case of the former, completely submerged.
The goat, a fat black-and-white nanny, struggled in the old witch’s hands, diverting Richielle’s attention. Around the stone, a large herd of the animals waded clumsily in the shallow water. They were nervous and angry, as goats can be, and clearly aware of the fate of their kindred upon the stone. Richielle apparently maintained some loose magical control, preventing them from bolting. Even from where she stood, Gaultry could smell the creatures’ manure as they defecated their protest at being held.
Richielle finished with the black-and-white nanny and heaved it onto the pile of dead animals. She bent for a moment. When she rose, a flame had started. Gaultry could not make it out from her distance, but it appeared that the carcasses had been interlaced with wood and kindling. Whatever the case, it did not take long for the heap to catch, sending up greasy dark smoke.
The goat herd did not like it. The animals—there were more than a hundred of them, maybe more than two hundred—balked and skittered. Richielle, still up on the flat stone, did a slow pirouette, deepening the holding spell. The revolt subsided. Then she bent into the shadow of the upright stone and pulled Tullier into sight.
He was hog-tied, hands and feet bound together, his body bent in a bow. Richielle dragged him forward and pushed his head down against the flat stone. For a moment, it appeared that she had pushed it right into the stone, as the boy’s head disappeared from sight. When it reemerged, his features were streaming with gore, and the boy himself spluttered, half drowned. There was a basin cut into the flat stone. Richielle had filled it with goat blood before ritually dunking him.
Laying the boy next to the heap of burning goat flesh, the old witch busied herself with erecting a simple pole tripod, wedging each of its legs in crevices in the stone. When she was done, she heaved Tullier up and lashed him to the main support, suspending him with his head hanging downward, his pale throat exposed.
Her hand fanned open against his chest, just over his heart, the goat-herder faced the ridgeline, waiting. Her timing was unnervingly precise. The great round of the sun lowered, its bottom edge touching the purple-blue of the evening ridge. As she stood there, poised, it began to slip out of view.
On this cue, Richielle knelt, her manner reverent, and reached into the basin where she had doused Tullier’s head. Her arm went in past her elbow. After a short pause, she stood, flourishing a short, narrow blade.
Gaultry caught her breath. The
Ein Raku.
When Richielle held it up
to the fading sun, a single bright ray flashed down, connected it briefly to that bright ball on the horizon, linking sky to earth.
For that flashing moment, Gaultry stood riveted. Belief swept through her that Andion, the gods’ High King, would honor the goat-herder’s sacrifice; belief that there was nothing she could—or should—do to interfere. For that brief instant, as the fire of the sky was reflected in the goat-herder’s blade, all Tielmark’s proud history crowded before her. She saw Clarin, the first free Prince, and Briern-bold, laughing and wild. Benet, at the end of this glittering chain, flashed by, riding the Tielmaran lines in victory.
In that swirl of sunlight, Grey Llara Thunderbringer, Bissanty’s cruel mother, relented, freeing Tielmark and Bissanty together as she ceded her god-claim to Tielmark’s soil. Generations of Emperors breathed relief, Bissanty’s three-hundred-year-old wound at long last mended, their empire reformed to hold the thrones of four princes only, complete. In that visionary moment as the sun touched the
Ein Raku,
the world, the lands, lay reformed and peaceful.
Then the wind shifted and the charred scent of burnt goat-hair hit her. Death, it struck Gaultry then, was also a kind of peace. But it was not a peace she would sacrifice Tullier to sustain.
Richielle’s back was to her and the goats were making a worse ruckus than the earlier terrified sheep. Still, the open space of the pebble beach that led across to the stone seemed impossibly broad. Gaultry wanted to pass it at a run, but she did not quite dare. That quick movement would surely catch the old witch’s attention.
Slowly, steadily, she walked forward. One step, and then another. The river-washed rubble shifted treacherously underfoot, stone-ground stone moving against stone, but she kept coming, silent, every stalking skill she had learned as a hunter strained to its limit. The goats sensed her, then saw her, and waded suspiciously out of reach. She was two-thirds through the watery shallows, almost at the recumbent stone, when Richielle turned finally and spied her.
“It is not time!” The old witch cast a flickering look at the horizon, dismay flashing on her leathery face. “It is not time!”
Gaultry closed on her at a run, swinging the bladed pole. The old woman ducked under it, nimble and quick as a cat, then slipped on the blood underfoot. Gaultry, screaming, scrambled up onto the stone and jabbed down. She nicked the old woman’s side. Then Richielle got a
hand on the pole, twisted, and it was Gaultry’s turn to lose her footing. For one crazy moment, she was underneath, struggling, forced to release her grip on the wooden shaft as Richielle stabbed for her with the Kingmaker blade. Beyond the old witch’s arm, she glimpsed the half round of the sun blazing down from the glowing backlit skyline of the ridge. In descent, it had the appearance of a great fiery eye, half-lidded.
“You cannot use your power!” Richielle hissed. “My flock at least has robbed you of that!”
“I can still fight and pray, you godless bitch!” Gaultry shot back. “Whose prayers do you think the gods would rather answer?”
Grunting, Richielle pushed her away and disengaged. Both women scrambled unsteadily to their feet, the farm tool clattering against the rock, unheeded. The flat of the rock beneath them was fluid with goat gore. Below them, in the shadow of the rocks, the herd bleated protestingly, riled up. Gaultry should have been the stronger of the pair, but the old woman possessed fearful strength, and undepleted magical power—and she was armed with the
Ein Raku.
Gaultry risked a closer look. It was a narrow blade, inscribed with runes, shiny clean, as though its metal had repelled the blood in which Richielle had bathed it. Indeed, Richielle was all over blood from the fall she’d taken, except for the hand holding the knife. That hand, her sleeve, the fold of robe that fell on that arm—all those were gore-clear, in a pattern that suggested this was the action of the knife.
Richielle closed again, biting downward with the
Ein Raku.
Gaultry ducked away, barely in time to save herself. The old woman screamed and bore down on her like a fury, hurling some sort of spell. The frission of magic knocked the younger woman off her balance, and Gaultry felt the kiss of the knife. If Richielle hadn’t accidentally planted her foot in the pothole where she’d doused Tullier’s head, spell and knife together would have found their mark. As it was, the goat-herder’s strike transformed awkwardly into a close grapple. Gaultry, desperately afraid of that shining blade, planted her hands against Richielle’s chest, trying to push her back.
Her hands touched something hard within the old witch’s robes. Richielle, too late aware of her groping hands, loosed an angry cry. Gaultry, losing her balance once more, found herself clutching at the old woman’s clothes to save herself, tearing away a sizeable swath of the ancient material—and with it something else.

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