Rules of Ascension: Book One of Winds of the Forelands (30 page)

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Authors: David B. Coe

BOOK: Rules of Ascension: Book One of Winds of the Forelands
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Tavis would never have thought that a man of Aindreas’s size could move so swiftly. But in a blur of light and steel and swirling cloth that he could barely follow, the duke drew his sword and slashed him across the shoulder.
The boy screamed in pain as blood began to soak into the tatters that were once his banquet clothes.
The duke held out his blade to that its point hovered like a bee just before Tavis’s eyes.
“Every denial will draw blood,” he said. “Every lie will bring pain.”
“But it’s the truth!”
Again the blade flashed, this time along his cheek. Tavis gasped. It felt as though his face were burning, as if the blood running down his jaw and neck were molten earth flowing from a fire crevice.
“Lie again and you’ll lose an eye.”
“When my father sees me—”
“Ah yes, your father.” The duke shook his head. “I think it will be some time before your father or his companions will be allowed down here again. They probably won’t see you until the day of your hanging.”
Tavis closed his eyes, feeling the tears start to flow again.
“You thought that the blood they found today would win your release, didn’t you?”
He said nothing, fearing that any response would bring the blade again.
But even his silence could not save him.
“Answer me!” the duke raged, pressing the point of his sword against the corner of Tavis’s eye.
“Yes,” he breathed. “That’s what I thought.”
Aindreas removed the blade, at least for the moment. “I thought as much. That seems to be what your father expected as well.” He smiled thinly, shaking his head once more. “That blood means nothing to me, not compared to the blood on your dagger and on your hands.” He stepped forward again, grabbing Tavis’s shirt in his fist. “Look at this!” he said, his voice echoing off the walls. “Look at it! Her blood is still here on your clothes! And you want me to believe you’re innocent, just because your friends found a drop of blood on a window shutter?”
Tavis was trembling. He looked to the side, then down at the floor. Anything to avoid what he saw in the duke’s eyes.
“Do you?”
He nodded, and it probably saved his eye. The sword sliced into him again, but from the corner of his eye to the top of his ear. Even with the blood flowing into his eye, he could still see. His tears stung like a surgeon’s spirits, but Tavis dared not make a sound. He merely clenched his teeth, waiting for the next cut and wondering what he had done to offend the gods that they should put him through this.
“You think me cruel,” Aindreas said. He offered it as a statement, Tavis noted with relief. No question to answer. “You think that I’m inhuman because I take pleasure in causing you pain. If you had lived long enough to be a father, perhaps you would have understood.”
I’m not dead,
he wanted to say.
Don’t speak of me as if I am.
Instead he held his tongue.
The duke raised his sword again, but then frowned and lowered it. “If I’m not careful,” he said, “you’ll bleed to death. Best to find another method of persuasion. Unless you care to confess now.”
Still Tavis said nothing. Aindreas came forward, grabbing his left hand and bending back his little finger.
“Answer! Will you confess?”
“No,” Tavis said, as bravely as he could. “There is nothing to—” He broke off, hollering in agony as the duke snapped the bone.
Aindreas took hold of the next finger. “There are nine more. How many must I break before you’ll tell me what I want to hear?”
“Would you have me lie?”
Pain like white fire flared in his mind. Whimpering like a babe, he sunk to the floor, though the duke still held his hand. He sensed Aindreas staring down at him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look up. After a moment, the man dropped his hand and squatted down before him.
“Why do you deny it?” he asked, sounding almost kind. “You must know by now that it won’t save your life, that it will only bring you more pain.”
At that, Tavis did look at him, summoning courage he didn’t know he possessed. “Yes, I do know it. And yet I persist. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
Aindreas slapped him again, this time catching him in the temple where he had hit his head on the stone wall. Tavis held his breath, waiting for this new pain to recede.
That’s my reward for courage.
“It tells me only that you are your father’s son. Like him, you’re stubborn and foolhardy.” The duke looked at him for a few seconds more before standing and shaking his head. “I’ll return tomorrow. We’ll start with the thumbs, I think. I’ve been told that can be quite painful.”
He started to walk away.
“Can I ask you something?” Tavis called to him.
“Of course.”
“Without fear of being struck or maimed?”
Aindreas’s face reddened again, and just for an instant Tavis thought the duke would kick him. After a brief hesitation, however, he nodded.
The boy closed his eyes for an instant. His hand was throbbing, as were his cuts and the bruises on his face. Perhaps it would have been easier to make up a confession. But he could not bring himself to surrender. In that respect he was his father’s son.
“Well?” the duke said, sounding impatient.
“If I had killed her,” Tavis said, looking up at him, “why would I have stayed there in the room with her. Why wouldn’t I have fled from Kentigern?”
Aindreas shrugged. “You were drunk. You fell asleep. I don’t think you planned to kill her. I think it was an act of blind passion, like your attack on Hagan’s boy.”
Tavis’s eyes widened and he felt his face grow hot.
“Yes,” the duke said. “I know about that. It seems drink has been your undoing.”
“What happened with Xaver was different!” he said quickly. “I had just come from a bad Fating! I was distraught!”
“Of course,” Aindreas said, sounding unconvinced. “And just what did this bad Fating show?”
Tavis faltered and looked away. How could he answer? “It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” the duke said. “I don’t suppose it does.”
He turned again and climbed the stairs, followed closely by the two guards who remained. Tavis heard the door open and then he heard the duke say, “He’s not to have any more visitors. Not even his father. If they protest, send them to me.”
The door closed again and the voices began to recede. Tavis took a long breath and started to sob as he hadn’t since he was a young boy. The pain in his hand seemed to hammer at him with every beat
of his heart. He felt blood from his face and shoulder drying on his skin, the sword cuts burning like brands. The bruises on his face felt swollen and tender.
Yet it was not the pain that made him cry, at least not entirely.
He had been thoughtless on occasion. Certainly he had been foolish, perhaps even cruel. And he would never forgive himself for what he had done to Xaver. But in this instance he was innocent. He was almost certain of it. The spot of blood discovered by his father and Xaver had to mean something. What a harsh irony it was, that he should suffer so for the one dark act he had not committed.
He heard bells ringing in the city. Probably the prior’s bells, though again he had lost all sense of time. But in the silence that followed the distant toll, he remembered the other prisoner, whose screams had tormented him for days. He strained his ears, listening for any sound, any sign of life. He knew, though, that he would hear none. The man was gone, dead in the forgetting chamber. Tavis had never felt so alone.
Southwestern fringe of Kentigern Wood, Eibithar
A
s a young man growing up in Aneira, Jedrek had spent much of his time hunting in the southern portion of the Great Forest, near where the Black Sand River meets the Rassor. His father, the most successful smith in Crieste, the second-largest city in the dukedom of Dantrielle, had considered hunting beneath Jedrek’s station and had tried his best to convince the boy to learn smithing.
“Hunting is for idle princes and unskilled brutes,” he often said. “Young men looking to make their way in the world need a craft.”
Even as a youth, however, Jedrek knew where his talents lay, and he knew as well that his father was wrong. Hunting was a craft for those who treated it as such. Any fool, prince or brute, could travel the forest long enough to blunder across a bear or a wildcat and slaughter it. But to track and kill a single prey took forethought, cunning, and, above all, knowledge of the beast’s habits and needs. By the time Jedrek was old enough for his Fating, he could track wolves over stone and wood elk through a streambed.
Not long after his Fating he learned that people could be hunted as well, and that the rewards were far greater. The skills required, though, were the same: patience, guile, and an understanding of one’s prey.
In this case, Jedrek’s prey was Qirsi, which made him dangerous in ways even the most accomplished Eandi swordsmen were not. But the fact that this man, Grinsa jal Arriet, was a white-hair also told Jedrek much of what he needed to know in order to track him
across Eibithar. Jedrek knew which inns he would seek out along the way and to whom he would turn for help. Other Qirsi were not likely to be very helpful if Jedrek went to them asking questions, but by the same token, those Eandi with whom Grinsa had dealings were far more likely to remember him. Lone Qirsi travelers were something of a rarity throughout the Forelands, particularly in the north.
It helped as well that Jedrek knew where the gleaner was going, just as it was easier to hunt a wildcat once he found its den. He had waited four days before going after him, just as the Qirsi woman had instructed. The trail was already cold between Galdasten and Curgh. He knew it, so he didn’t even bother looking. He merely rode southward across the Moorlands, pushing himself and his mount as hard as he dared. Whatever the limits of the gleaner’s magic, he was no match for Jedrek in strength or stamina. None of the Qirsi were. If Jedrek rode fast enough for long enough, he’d catch him.
When he neared Heneagh, as the sun set on his third day of pursuit, he began stopping in towns and asking questions. He was bone-weary, his legs and back aching. It had been some time since he had ridden a mount so hard. But when the Eandi smith in a farm village just north of Heneagh told him that he’d shod a horse for a tall Qirsi traveler two evenings before, all of Jedrek’s pain seemed to vanish. The grey-haired man believed that the stranger had stayed in the village overnight—there was a tavern that catered to his kind on the far side of town, the smith said.
Jedrek couldn’t have asked for more. He had made up two days on the gleaner already, and he could cover the rest of the distance in Kentigern Wood, where the Qirsi was less likely to notice his approach. He briefly considered going to the inn to check on the smith’s story, but quickly thought better of it. It was a small town; chances were that the old man was right. Better to make an informed guess than to raise suspicions with too many questions. Thanking the smith with a five-qinde piece, he left the village and continued southward, crossing the Heneagh River by the light of the moons and riding to the northern boundary of the wood before stopping for the night.
Jedrek resumed his pursuit with the first light of dawn, feeling like an army commander who had guided his soldiers to the high ground for a coming battle. In the wood, he could track anything or
anyone, and having grown up in Aneira’s Great Forest, he could ride among the trees at a good pace. Even after nearly two days, the Qirsi’s path was obvious. Hoof marks on the forest path, broken twigs and trampled leaves where the man’s horse had rested and fed, and, late in the day, freshly blackened ground where the gleaner had cooked a meal and warmed himself as he slept. He even found a few white hairs in the dirt beside the remains of the fire. They were long and fine, obviously from a Qirsi. It seemed that the gleaner did not fear being tracked, or was merely too careless to know any better. Whatever the reason, his marks on the forest were unmistakable. By the time evening fell, they had begun to look very fresh as well.
The Qirsi was half a day ahead of him, no more. Jedrek could close the distance that remained tomorrow. By the time the moons were up tomorrow night, the gleaner would be dead.
The thought of it made his stomach tighten. He tried to convince himself that he always felt this way before a kill, but he knew better. Tossing the rest of the smoked meat he had been eating into the shadows cast by his small fire, Jedrek leaned back against the trunk of a large oak and pulled out his dagger, the one he had gotten in Thorald nearly two years before. He had used it quite often since then, but the Sanbiri steel glimmered like a mirror in the firelight, showing no sign of wear.
It was true that he had never killed a Qirsi, though he still was not certain why he had confided such a thing to the woman who had sent him after Grinsa. Even Cadel didn’t know. Cadel always handled the jobs involving Qirsi because he was better with a blade than Jedrek, and because he kept all the difficult jobs for himself. It was part of their arrangement, and Jedrek had never challenged it. But Cadel would have been surprised to learn the truth. On the other hand, he might have understood. Tracking a Qirsi was one thing. Killing one of the white-haired sorcerers was something else again.
Jedrek didn’t like to take a man in the back, without showing himself. That was a coward’s way. But in this case, he thought, carefully testing the dagger’s edge with his thumb, he’d have little choice.
“He’s just a gleaner,” she had said. “He shouldn’t be any different from others you’ve killed.”
Right. Except what if he knew Jedrek was coming for him? What if he had seen it, or dreamed it, or whatever they did? What then?
“He’s still just a man,” Jedrek said aloud. “Maybe he’ll have a
blade of his own, or even a sword. But he’s still just a man, and a weak one at that.”
Still, his doubts remained. Despite the woman’s assurances, and those he offered to himself in the flickering light of the fire, he couldn’t help but think that a Qirsi, no matter how limited his powers, presented unfathomable dangers.
Take him quickly, in the back. Better a coward than a corpse.
It was as good a thought as any to carry with him to sleep. He returned his blade to its sheath and laid it on the ground beside him before closing his eyes. But sleep didn’t come easily, and when finally he drifted off, his dreams were haunted by strange images of the Qirsi and their magic.
He awoke before dawn, forced from sleep by his last dream. Daylight was just beginning to seep into the wood. A fine grey mist hung among the trees and a single jay called from far away, its cries echoing eerily through the still branches above him. Most of the images that had come to him in his slumber had left only vague, unsettling impressions. But this last one remained disturbingly clear. He had been here in the wood, the trees shrouded in darkness. The Qirsi woman had been with him, holding a flame in the palm of her hand as she had the night she came to his room. As he watched her, unable to move or even utter a sound, held, he realized, by magic, she came forward, smiling, the fire she held shining in her pale eyes. She raised her hand over her head, and in that moment, the shape of the flame changed, becoming a fiery dagger, which she plunged into his chest.
He stood, stretching out stiff limbs, and then stamped his feet. His clothes and hair were damp and the air felt too cold for Elined’s Turn. He knew he should eat something, but the knot in his stomach remained and there was a sour taste in his mouth. Instead, he stooped to retrieve his dagger, tucked it into his belt, and climbed onto his mount.
For an instant he considered abandoning his pursuit. He was no gleaner, and his dreams could not foretell the future. But he feared there was an omen in the vision that had awakened him. It no longer mattered that he was in the wood, or that he had gained so quickly on the Qirsi. His passion for the hunt was gone. Just a day before he had compared himself to a battle commander on the verge of a great victory. Now he felt like a foot soldier marching toward his doom.
But Cadel needed him, though he knew nothing of the gleaner’s approach. If the Qirsi managed to save Curgh’s son, all would be ruined and their gold lost. This was why Jedrek had remained with the Revel: to make sure that Cadel wasn’t followed. This was what Cadel expected of him, always: to protect his back, to guard against the unforeseen. With any luck at all, Cadel was already in Aneira, expecting Jedrek to join him at some point. The path to Aneira, it seemed, wound through Kentigern. Thrusting away his doubts, he kicked his horse into motion and resumed the hunt.
He picked up the Qirsi’s trail almost immediately. Just before midday—earlier than he had expected—he came upon the blackened ground on which the man had made his fire the previous night. For the rest of the day, Jedrek had to force himself to slow down, not wishing to overtake the gleaner before he was ready. Still, the marks Grinsa left on the trail grew fresher, until Jedrek half expected the Qirsi to jump out in front of him at every turn. Late in the day, when he suddenly flushed a covey of quail from a thicket, he nearly cried out.
He halted then, swinging down off his mount to catch his breath and calm his pounding heart. He had a feeling that the gleaner was close, though he was not certain how much faith he could place in his instincts at that moment. In the end, he decided to trust himself. Better to be wrong in this, than to give himself away by stumbling into the Qirsi too soon.
When twilight began to darken the wood, Jedrek started forward again. He left the horse tied to a tree, choosing to follow the Qirsi’s trail on foot. Thus far, Grinsa had stuck to the path except to rest and make camp, and Jedrek guessed that he would continue to do the same. Night fell, making the signs harder to read, but he followed the path, trusting that it would lead him to the Qirsi. After a time, Jedrek realized that his blade was in his hand, though he didn’t remember taking it out. Cadel would have laughed at him, arming himself to fight wraiths in the wood, but the feel of the smooth wooden hilt in his palm comforted him, and he held it ready as he advanced through the darkness.
At last, as Panya rose above the trees, softly lighting the leaves overhead, Jedrek spotted the orange glow of the gleaner’s fire. He froze in midstride for just a moment, his heart abruptly pounding in his chest until the sound of rushing blood filled his ears.
He hasn’t seen you. Be calm and be silent, and he’s yours.
It was Cadel’s voice he heard, and like the dagger in his hand, it eased his fears.
He crept forward, sticking to the path as long as he could before easing himself into the shadows of the wood. The Qirsi was on the far side of the fire and Jedrek had to move in a wide circle to get behind him without being heard. A light wind was blowing, stirring the trees and helping to mask the sound of his approach, but still he took his time, taking slow, deliberate steps, and doing all he could to avoid dried leaves and twigs.
By the time he was close enough to ready himself for the attack, the gleaner was settling down beside the fire. Jedrek paused in the shadows lurking just beyond the light of Grinsa’s fire. The act of stalking the man had calmed him, but his right hand was sweating, and he had to shift his blade to the left for a moment to dry his fingers. This was no time for an uncertain grip.
Taking the dagger in his right hand again, he breathed in slowly and lowered himself into a crouch.
Do it quickly.
This time it was the woman’s voice, and it reached him as more of a plea than a warning. He nodded, as if she could see him, and then lunged at the man, intending to plunge the blade into the gleaner’s back as he landed on him.
It was not until his feet left the ground that he realized how badly he had miscalculated, and by then, of course, it was too late.
The Qirsi, lying on the ground beside the fire, rolled. Not away from him—that would have taken him into the flames—but toward him, so that Jedrek sailed over him, landing awkwardly on the hard ground and just missing the fire himself. It was as if the man had been expecting Jedrek’s attack, as if he had known all along that Jedrek was stalking him.
Jedrek scrambled to his feet and spun toward the gleaner, his dagger ready again, but now the Qirsi was on his feet, holding a blade of his own.
The woman had described him as tall and broader than most Qirsi, but still Jedrek had pictured a typical white-hair-tall perhaps, but frail and narrow in the shoulders. Certainly he had not expected the formidable, powerfully built man who faced him, his yellow eyes flashing with firelight, his long white hair stirring in the wind.
“Who in Bian’s name are you?” the gleaner demanded.
Jedrek said nothing, but dove at the man again, slashing at him with his dagger.
The Qirsi jumped back, dodging the attack. He waved his blade at Jedrek as he did, but without much effect. Jedrek grinned. The man might have been built like a fighter, but he had no skill with a weapon. Grinsa seemed to recognize this as well, for he began to back away slowly, circling the fire as Jedrek advanced on him.

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