Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (62 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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The ground shuddered as she spoke, and the lance of fire streaming through the sky and over her head drew back into itself, sharpening, expectant. Gaultry knew she must have guessed aright. Their Glamour-souls were not enough to move this change. But Tullier and his Blood-Imperial—
The boy was at her side, the pale green of his eyes unreadable. Gaultry made an attempt to drop the Brood’s hands, but the circuit was so strong, she could not let go.
“Tullier,” she breathed helplessly.
Glancing by her, he met Martin’s eye with a grimace. Then he reached out to her, and gently touched her cheek. The power surging in her was so strong that the touch seared him, but Tullier, true to his training, did not flinch from her.
“There needs to be a sacrifice,” he said. His narrow face was pale but resolute. “Willing, but still a sacrifice. Benet has too much to live for. So be it. You have taught me at least that.”
He slipped under her arm and darted up onto the dueling dais. Gaultry screamed, frightened for him. “Tullier!” she cried. “Not that! You must not offer yourself! We don’t want to pay a price in blood!”
Elisabeth’s face, beyond, went paper-white, seeing her circle disrupted. She did not understand what was happening, and imagined some new Bissanty treachery. “Quickly!” she shrieked to Benet, her poise and confidence falling away, her girlishness re-emerging. “Strike again, before he can reach you!”
Benet drove downward. This time, Lily, fearful as ever of Bissanty interference, actively raised her blade to meet him. There was a slash of white fire, and the edges of the blades merged.
But Tullier was too quick. He seized the Kingmakers at their nexus. Their white flare shot out along his arms, and his body jerked, taking into itself the full force of the god’s power as it finally surged down into those blades and broke them. “Andion!” he called. “Andion Sun-King! Take this! Take me. Break forever the chain! Tielmark free of Bissanty! Through me! Break that chain through me!”
As he spoke, the deep-purple of his Blood-Imperial flowed from between his fingers, sheeting the
Ein Raku
blades.
—BISSANTY’S ORPHAN PRINCE—Again, the words shook the sky.—LLARA’S SCION, BLOOD OF MY QUEEN, I ACCEPT YOUR OFFER—
The lance of light pulsed, enveloping the boy in fire, throwing Benet and Lily back. Tullier, clutching the melded Kingmakers, screamed, his clothes bursting into flame, the God-fire searing his skin. The flame was thickest at his hands, where it sparked and leapt, consuming the substance of his Blood-Imperial. Tullier screamed again. The entire Brood circle jerked outward. Some among them would perhaps have run or fallen, save that they could not release each other’s hands. The skein of their magic tangled and rose, just barely restraining the destructive stream of God-fire contained within. Benet, throwing Lily off the dueling dais to protect her, ripped off his cloak.
Instead of retreating, he stepped toward the God-fire and threw his garment over Tullier, attempting to shield him. The fire incinerated the cloth in a fearful flashing instant, then started on Benet’s sleeves. “Great Twelve above!” Benet shouted, refusing to draw back. “I will not claim my crown through this boy’s blood! Tielmark will not make a King through Bissanty’s claims!” He would have spoken more, but his words trailed away in a distressed cry.
Then—louder than Benet, there was a scream, a scream more shattering than anything Gaultry could have imagined possible. If the air had trembled before, now it seemed to shatter.
—NEVER NEVER NEVER! HE IS NOT FOR YOU! NEVER NEVER NEVER!—
A thousand dazzling bolts of lightning lit the sky, spearing down all around the earthen dais.
—NEVER NEVER NEVER! HE IS MINE! HE IS MINE!—The Grey Thundermother, Llara, had come to claim her own.
The light over the dueling dais, silver and red, was so intense Gaultry could no longer see—nor could anyone else. She had a dim perception of Tullier, screaming still, fenced round with silver light. Then all she could see was sheer white light. There was a terrible clash of power: Andion’s fire, Llara’s lightning bolts. Gaultry’s magic, with the rest of the Brood’s, was sucked into the maelstrom. For a moment it seemed it would be swept away, that her magic, already attenuated, would be torn from her completely.
Amidst the clashing, the violence, Dame Julie began singing. Her
voice should have been drowned—by everything—yet it rose clear and high, its sound self-contained, beautiful, sealing out the awesome clash. After an uncertain moment, it established a rhythm, created an anchor. A sweet note joined it—Julie’s granddaughter, across the circle, harmonizing. An excruciating interval passed, the white blindness still burgeoning, threatening to overwhelm everything. Then Tamsanne too began to sing, joining the anchor, broadening it, the old woman’s crackling voice a not unpleasant counter to the beauty and purity of the others’ sound.
After that, like a rush of streaming water, the Brood’s magic reformed the skein, each of them cautiously retrieving their own thread, unraveling it, returning it to the skein in a new and stronger shape. Gaultry, along with Mervion the most extended of the Brood, took the longest to come to herself, but slowly, she too opened her cracked lips and joined her voice to the chorus. Her blindness endured, but the whiteness was no longer the terror of ancient gods descended. It was the blindness of eyes that had seen more than they should see, recovering. She sang earnestly, and loud, and was hardly even aware of the change when waves of comfort rolled back toward her, along with coils of her own magic. It was not until her Glamour returned to her that she realized how scared she had been to lose it, how frightened.
A greater fear, of course, had momentarily overwhelmed it. Tullier! Tears streamed down from her blinded eyes, dampening her chest.
Whatever stake Andion God-King had intended to take for raising Tielmark to a Kingship, it was quite clear that his Thunderer-consort Llara had intervened to argue the price.
Julie led the song to a tranquil close, and slipped her hand free of Gaultry’s.
Around them, all was silence.
Gaultry’s fears that everything around them had been annihilated were alleviated as the first sounds she heard came from the soldiers who had followed the Brood onto the dueling ground. Reassuring, normal sounds, of folk blinded like herself, and querulous and a little frightened as their neighbors moved and stepped on their toes, or bumped them.
“Can anyone else see anything?” Dame Julie’s voice asked plaintively. “I’ve got spots, but nothing else yet.”
On Gaultry’s other side, Richielle, the old goat-herder, would not let go of her hand. Her fingers enclosed Gaultry’s, viselike, her ragged nails cutting Gaultry’s skin.
“Martin?” Gaultry asked tremulously, trying unsuccessfully to free herself.
“She’s dead.” Martin answered grimly. For an unpleasant moment, the two of them struggled blindly with the old woman’s dead weight, then successfully managed to free themselves. Replacing the dead vise of Richielle’s fingers with the warmth of Martin’s hand was a terrific comfort, even as the white blindness began to break into black spots, followed by the sluggish return of her vision. Gaultry, blinking, turned toward the dais, relieved as she did so to see others rubbing their eyes and shaking their heads. At least she was not the last one to recover her sight.
At the center of the dueling dais, Benet was on his knees, protectively hunched, his arms clasped around Tullier’s fallen body. The Prince’s clothes were charred, his hair was dark with ash, and his skin was soot-covered and darkened, as if by the passage of flame. He raised his head just as her gaze touched him, his blue eyes strangely pale in the darkness of his skin. Those eyes searched the emptiness of the blue sky overhead—whether for god, goddess, or new omens, it was impossible to tell.
Atop Benet’s head was a jagged, silver-colored circlet, the transformed remains of the Kingmaker knives.
A crown for the new King.
Benet, dropping his gaze, met Gaultry’s eyes. She quailed before what she saw in them—a nakedness, a wildness, like nothing she had ever seen. Then, still holding the young huntress’s gaze, he opened his arms, a gesture curiously like a benediction.
From within, Tullier feebly raised his head. Like Benet, he was braised by flame—but more fiercely. His clothes were completely burnt away, and his green eyes bore a stunned, bewildered look.
“Behold,” Benet said. “Through my passage of flame, Tielmark sees its new King. But here in my arms lies something that one Goddess rules more precious still.”
Gaultry felt she should say something, anything, to acknowledge the new King’s words, but overwhelmed emotion choked her. It was Martin, touching her hand, who jogged her to movement. Together they stumbled forward, Martin shrugging out of his military cloak, then helping her to cover Tullier’s burnt nakedness. The boy seemed numb as they first touched him, then started to shake and quiver as Gaultry put her arms around him. She and Martin half-carried him down from the earthen dais.
Behind her, Benet reached for Lily’s hand, pulling her back up onto
the dais next to him. The Princess looked frazzled but otherwise well—the shove Benet had given her before turning to protect Tullier had evidently preserved her from the worst of the God-fire. The new King placed his hand gently against Lily’s midsection, still to the outward eye girlish and slim—but, as the gods knew, planted with fresh potential.
“By the great love that brought you and those who served you here in time to save me from myself,” he said solemnly. “I pledge myself here to you once again. This crown is for the child that we have made together.”
Tears overflowed from Lily’s eyes. She bowed her head. “May all the gods grant our child a love of country equal to our own.”
Gaultry was not sure why she ended up being assigned to oversee
Richielle’s burial, but she did know that standing over this grave-hole as the four soldiers dug was far down on the list of places where she wanted to be.
The news of Tielmark’s triumph had passed from the dueling grounds like flame spreading in grass, lighting the ducal armies with a fresh fever to fight, to prove themselves before their new King. Benet, flush with energy from the transformation sent down by the gods, acceded to their cries to carry him away on their shoulders, to rally his armies into what would be perhaps the season’s final battle against the Lanai. With a new flag raised before them, Tielmark’s Princely blue-and-white hastily embellished with the brazen image of the sun, he had every hope of leading his warriors to victory.
Other members of the Brood, even the wretched Dervla and Palamar, were likewise seized and carried in his train. It seemed that only Gaultry and her four digging-men were going to be left out.
With the display of godly pyrotechnics that had lit the sky over the dueling ground, there was little doubt that the Lanai would have seen the omens against their winning victory today. Surely Tielmark, in its new flush of Kingship, would have a triumph today—and just as surely, she had earned a chance to see it.
Instead, Elisabeth High Priestess had insisted that Gaultry stay and oversee the old witch’s burial beneath the dueling dais. “It cannot be trusted to anyone else,” she had said. “It is an important completion, and
must be carried through quickly.” Gaultry could not find any arguments to raise against her. She had been obliged to entrust Tullier into her family’s hands; and to kiss good-bye to Martin (who would ride alongside the new King into battle). Even as the crowd was dispersing, the soldiers cut up the sod and started to dig.
She had not overseen the work with the best of tempers.
At grave depth, they discovered signs that another burial had been made here, centuries gone by. Gaultry sent a runner to get Elisabeth and kept the men grimly working.
The foursome of soldiers assigned to her were little more happy than she. “Not a way to spend the last day of battle,” the oldest complained, as he and his dig-partner climbed out of the deepening hole to give the other pair a turn.
“It’s honorable service,” Gaultry said dauntingly, in an insufficient effort to hide her fervent agreement. From the dueling ground, they could hear the clarion calls of battle, the distant shouts of men organizing for the charge. “Be happy you’ve drawn safe service.”
The man grunted, and leaned to rest on the handle of his spade. “Elianté’s Spear! That one needs to be in the ground all right. I just don’t want to be the one to do it.” He cast the goddesses’ sign, and spat.
A movement by the earthwork wall caught her eye. Elisabeth, coming to inspect. Gaultry turned to the pair of men who had replaced the complainer in the hole. “It’s the new High Priestess! Get a move on.”
They applied themselves with an enthusiasm hitherto conspicuously absent.
“Lady Gaultry. How goes it?”
“Your Veneracy.” The formal address came clumsily to Gaultry’s lips. To Gaultry, Elisabeth was still the court-bewildered girl who had taken such an impulsive shine to the tamarin. “What do you think? Deep enough to lay the old hag to rest? With the mound atop it will be deeper still. Haven’t these men done good work?”
Elisabeth looked tiredly at the heaps of loose earth around the grave hole. “The histories don’t record it,” she said. “But my belief is that this is the site where Algeorn of Far Mountain married Tielmark’s Princess Briessine. I don’t believe it’s a grave that you’ve found—1 think it’s the markers of their pledge.”
The diggers looked unconvinced. For some time now, they had been turning human bones out of the earth, along with coins gone black with age. It seemed unlikely these could signify anything other than a grave—
although Algeorn had been a barbarian war-leader, and the possibility that he might have lain the bodies of those he’d slain within a commemorative cairn, long since beaten flat by time, was not entirely improbable.
Elisabeth climbed, a little clumsily, over the piles of turf mounded around the hole, and then unexpectedly jumped down in, giving the two diggers in the hole a nervous moment. They cast Gaultry a beseeching look—she signaled to them simply to stay out of the young woman’s way as best they could, and let Elisabeth get on with her business.
Tielmark’s new High Priestess bent and kneeled, with a certainty owed to magic, and dug briefly in the soil with her soft fingers. When the dense soil defeated her, she had one of the diggers move in to help her with his spade. It obviously took more effort than Elisabeth had expected, but when she stood again, she was holding a fist-sized earthen clump.
“Help me out,” she told the diggers. Abashed by such a casual address from one so distant to them in power, the men put aside their spades, wiped guiltily at their dirt-soiled hands, then, reluctantly, hefted her out, fair cringing as their hands made obvious marks on her skirts. Elisabeth took no notice. Bringing the clump of compacted earth over to Gaultry, she halted a few steps away, as if suddenly uncertain.
“I did not expect to need your powers this morning,” she admitted shyly, speaking softly so the diggers would not hear her. “Great Twins together, after what I did to stop Dervla and become High Priestess, I thought all the answers would come so easily—in a rush, with each answer pulling along the answer to the next question in its wake! My blindness shames me—how could I have not included the Brood-members who lacked in magical powers? My own have been open to me for such a short time. How could I have not seen it? The price Benet might have paid for my slowness of mind!”
“You had most of the answers,” Gaultry said uncomfortably. “And I can’t claim I expected exactly what happened either. There were signs that Llara was protecting Tullier—I suppose beginning with the fact that Mervion and I were able to save him from the Sha Muira. But that was before the Bissanties made him Prince of Tielmark and gave him a throne, however empty its powers. I never imagined that Llara would interfere so directly.”
Elisabeth nodded. “The Goddess-Queen is breaking her own rules. There is precedent for that in Bissanty—but in the past the Empire has always suffered grave upset for it.”
As she spoke, she crumpled the clump of earth she’d retrieved from the grave-hole. Within was revealed a brooch of twisted gold, twined in a lover’s knot. Pure gold, uncorroded by time or the earth. One of the diggers made a noise of astonishment. At the center of the knot a sun was boldly emblazoned: Andion God-King’s sign.
“How did you know?” Gaultry asked.
Elisabeth, brightening the brooch with the edge of her sleeve, made a self-conscious half-shrug. “The land talks to me a little of its secrets. Nothing like Benet feels, or will come to feel, but it sufficed for this.” She glanced over to where Richielle lay, her stiffening body stretched out on a winding cloth brought over from camp. “We will rebury it with her body, and rebuild the dueling dais. And so the Brood of Old Princess Lousielle ends.”
Gaultry glanced nervously to the mountain skyline, toward the unseen battle lines. “I thought the Brood ended when Benet took the red of Kingship. I wouldn’t want Martin to be fighting at Benet’s side today unless the blood-bond is done.”
“Martin is safe,” Elisabeth said reassuringly. “Or as safe as any soldier can be this day. Richielle’s blood and soul paid the final debt. That pledge is done.”
They walked over to look at the corpse.
Richielle in life had been a terror. In death her body seemed a pitiable bundle of sticks. Her yellow-white hair had fallen free from its proud crown in her last struggle to evade the Brood-circle. Its long strands spread over her fallen body like stray weavings from a giant spiderweb. “Her last moments were bad,” Gaultry said. It had not been pleasant to hold the woman’s hand in the moment that life had left her. “She knew death was coming.”
Elisabeth frowned. “Don’t waste your pity. She was dead from the moment she vested her soul in the
Ein Raku.
She would have died if the blade had buried itself in Benet’s heart. Or your boy Tullier’s. She knew that. She knew that from the moment she made her soul into a weapon.”
“Did all her hatred make the fuel that called the gods to listen?”
Elisabeth shook her head. “It was not Richielle. The gods were already listening. Ultimately even the Great Twelve must acknowledge the new configurations that arise within the lands they rule. Even an old god, like Llara, who has stubbornly given the Bissanty Emperor five princes for millennia, even as lands like Tielmark have slipped away from their grasp.” She bent over Richielle’s wizened body, straightening her limbs.
The golden marriage brooch, she clasped in the old woman’s already skeletal hands. Then, methodically, she tied the winding sheet closed, all except the area over Richielle’s stern face. “Would you like to say good-bye?”
“I said good-bye when I held her quiescent for death,” Gaultry said grimly.
Elisabeth shrugged, and tied the last windings closed. In a final blessing, she traced the goddesses’ spiral over the old woman’s chest. “Then everything here is done. Commit her to the earth,” she told the diggers.
“Wait,” Gaultry said. She turned to Elisabeth. “There is a favor I must ask you.”
“Tell me.” The girl’s pragmatic carefulness would not let her give an answer until she knew the question.
Gaultry showed her instead, taking her to the place in the grass where the mysterious diamond-linked chain with which Benet had threatened Tullier had fallen. “I want this to go in the earth with the goat-herder.”
Elisabeth did not, of course, recognize it, so Gaultry had to tell her the story. The young High Priestess considered the matter very seriously, then agreed. They used one of the diggers’ shovels to pick up the chain and drop it into the grave, where it would lie, Gaultry hoped for all time, beneath the goat-herder’s corpse.
“What did you mean, the gods were already listening?” Gaultry asked, as they watched the men fill in the hole.
Elisabeth shrugged. “Bissanty has grown decadent and weak, and Tielmark—we have earned our freedom many, many times over, even without the gods’ intervention. It has come to such a point: Even if we had broken our God-pledge and lost the protection of the Twins, the Empire would not have found it easy to retake our lands. To turn this tide of history would have taken godly intervention beyond anything that has been seen for centuries. The gods knew it was time for Tielmark to have a King.”
“You make it sound too simple,” Gaultry said. “For all I’ve suffered these past months—”
Elisabeth shook her head. “It’s simple only in the sense of how clear the view seems when one has reached a mountain’s summit. We’ve struggled for three hundred years to reach this height. When people—not just a Prince or King—have worked so hard and long to change the state of a nation, all the gods need is a point of power, and they find the excuse they need to acknowledge the change.”
“Andion wanted more than an excuse,” Gaultry said shortly.
“His inclination was to be greedy, and take the highest sacrifice on offer,” Elisabeth agreed. “But his consort made him settle for rather less than that, didn’t she?”
Gaultry smiled wanly at the memory of Llara’s spears. “She applied more than a little pressure to that end.”
“Of course,” said Elisabeth, “the gods are not politicians, like my mother. They are eager to see a pattern set, and once settled, they are disinclined to vary it. Your grandmother was right. A tyrant king will always bear tyrants. A martyr, martyrs.” She shuddered. “I am glad we arrived in time to prevent Benet from condemning Tielmark to that.”
“How did you even discover that the sacrifice was unnecessary?” Gaultry asked. “How did you know?”
Elisabeth looked toward the morning sun, shading her eyes with her hand. “I was almost wrong. Andion would surely have taken your boy’s life-sacrifice if Llara had let him.” Then her face brightened, taking on the enthusiastic expression that Gaultry recognized from their meetings at court. “How did I know? Much of it I discovered as we traveled. We had packed up old Delcora’s manuscripts, and the Prince’s bards traveled with us, like troubadours of old. You should have heard those old sticks complaining! But after two days of traveling, we began to find the old rhythms of movement. The turning point came in one of Tyrannis’s older songs. It described the powers of Tielmark’s High Priestess. About how she had the power to hold time still—as I did this morning, when I stopped the blow that might have killed the Princess. But this power was something Dervla had never managed, despite having inherited all old Delcora’s strength. Once I heard that, I recognized what Delcora had done, and I began to destroy Delcora’s manuscripts as I read them.”
“Tyrannis?” Gaultry was not familiar with the name.
“One of the Prince’s older bards. He trained back under the Princess Lousielle.”
“He told you to destroy the manuscripts?”
Elisabeth shook her head. “No, but something he said reminded me about the creating powers of the original Brood-members. Each had their specialty. My grandmother,” there was pride in her eyes as she spoke, “was Marie Laconte, one of Tielmark’s greatest warriors. Old Melaudiere was a sculptor. Dame Julie has her music. Delcora’s power was to trap magic in words on paper. She did that even with the powers of the High Priestess. That robbed so much from her daughter—and would have kept so
much from me, had I allowed it. So as I read Delcora’s papers, I took that magic back.”

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