Sword (17 page)

"Lady, we ’ave to keep going!" Marta knelt over her, face panicked in the flickering light of their only candle.

Taireasa fended off Marta's hands and huddled over the center of the feeling, which was somewhere just below her heart, vast and awful as though a piece of her had been torn away. Her parents were both dead this very moment. She pressed her hands to her face as her lungs locked on a scream. Tears spilled from her eyes, over her fingers.

"Gods, oh
gods,
please no," she moaned.

The whole castle opened itself to her mind’s eye. Men coursed through the rooms like rats, a deadly invasion killing wherever they found life not loyal to their cause. She saw it as though she were there.

Then something else intruded, something even worse. Her back arched. The agony was immediate, directionless, too great to think past. She was dimly aware of Marta fluttering over her as she curled up, trying to breathe, to move. The vision thundered over her, coming clear suddenly on a face, and then another face, and another—Cyrnic, Walderan, Brisham, Viam—

Her arms were tied. Her skin was bare. She could taste blood. There was rough stone against her back, and a pain that obliterated all else began. Kyali’s ragged gasps filled her ears, and all at once Taireasa understood what was happening. She tried to rise, frantic to stop this final horror, but her legs only jerked senselessly. She heard her own anguished cry echo off stone as Kyali’s consciousness swallowed her again, all of her torment and rage and terrible, resolute love completely overwhelming her.

Marta’s palm covered her mouth, smothering her cries. Her lips tore as they met her teeth. It was nothing against this new pain, this awareness of wounds, of burns and bones broken, of her skin slick with blood, and this... this unspeakable violation of the heart of her. There were voices, chanting together, pulling at her thoughts. There were men crowded close.

Then the world in her mind shifted again, and the dark was suddenly rent by light too bright to look on. There was a crack like thunder. A horse shied under her. The Lord General was dead, too, and Devin was riding with desperate haste, armed men on all sides of him.

Devin was coming for them.

Picking this urgent notion out of the rest, Taireasa fought to be free, and was suddenly back in herself. She lay there, trying to remember how to breathe, how to live. The candle did nothing against the darkness. Around her, the whole world trembled.

There was no time for grieving now.

She got her arms under her, and Marta cautiously removed her hand. She managed to get to her feet and stood panting, pressed against the wall, shaken to the core.

"Lady…" Marta ventured, little more than a shadow in the gloom. Taireasa held a hand up for silence. She wanted to weep, or scream, and swallowed the impulse. Her friends were still alive. She had lost her family; she could not lose Kyali and Devin too. She
would
not.

Her feet moved her before she even knew the choice had been made, taking her back. She felt that pulling begin again in her middle and was relieved this time, because it was a direction, and it meant Kyali was still alive.

Marta rushed up beside her, even took her arm to tug it in the other direction. Taireasa turned, glaring. Her handmaid fell back gasping; from what, she had no idea.

"Marta," she said, as the woman flinched away and leaned into the wall. When their eyes met, Taireasa reached out and took her maid’s hand, drawing her close. The air seemed to have a haze about it and her ears were ringing.

Is this magic? Gods, please, if there were ever a time to have it…

"The old passageways lead all over the keep," Taireasa said slowly, the thought taking shape as she spoke. "The hidden rooms. The servants don’t talk about them, do they?"

Marta frowned and shook her head. "No, lady."

"Then we must go back."

Around them, that strange haze grew thick and shimmery and almost solid, then vanished as she shook her head. Kyali’s presence was in the back of her mind. Voices hissed at her, urging her to speak, promising an end. The pain was rising and rising, unimaginable. A ghostly sheen of gold clung to everything.

I’m coming
, she tried to say, to reassure Kyali, but she had no sense that the message went anywhere. The horror of it all but swallowed her and she bent, trying to find the courage to keep going, to salvage
something
from this.

She couldn't come for Kyali yet, not and live. But she would not waste the unthinkable sacrifice Kyali made. Nor would she leave her friend to face it alone. Pain—oh
gods
, there was pain—that, she could bear, now that she had the means to keep hold of Kyali.

"Find us one of the old rooms," she ordered, still curled over herself. "Deep underneath. We'll gather those that we can. The guard first, all we can reach."

"Lady," Marta whispered, and the fear in her handmaid's tone straightened her spine. Taireasa wiped tears from her face, hissing a curse.

Voices hissed back in her head:
Say it, stupid girl! Where is the princess?

Taireasa swayed and caught herself on the wall again, tears smoldering on her skin and guilt and fury burning in her. Kyali would not say. And they would not kill her, not without that.

That anyone should endure such a thing for her… it was beyond bearing.

"The guards," she said, "then my bedroom. We are not leaving her behind."

"Yes," Marta said with toneless enthusiasm, never needing to ask who that was. She snatched the candle up, slipping past Taireasa to lead the way.

* * *

They couldn't keep this pace up for much longer. Savvys's bone-jarring gallop had dwindled to an exhausted, head-down trot and sweat foamed on his coat. Two horses had been left at the roadside already, blown and trembling. And yet they rode on, some three hundred worn-out men without home or hearth: these were the men of the Third with him, who had spent most of their lives at the Corwynall estates. Tonight, they were as orphaned as he.

Devin knew it, and knew too that right now they would follow him unquestioning into death if he asked, but he had never felt more alone in his life.

Something was happening to Kyali—he had no idea how he could know that, but he was increasingly certain it was true. He'd felt her presence for the briefest of moments, as he had felt both hers and Taireasa's in the great hall today—a sense of bewildering newness and utter familiarity, like opening a strange door in his own home. That first time, anyway. This second glimpse had been a nightmare of confusion and terror, there and gone so fast he wasn't even certain it had truly been Kyali behind the experience. He got nothing from Taireasa, which filled him with both relief and fear.

They were still more than an hour away from Faestan even if the horses kept this speed. Which they wouldn't.

He was going to be too late. He was going to lose Kyali too. And there wasn't anything he could do to stop it; the distance was too great, and whatever Gift he had, it couldn't take him to Faestan in time.

The whole world had come unraveled so fast.

Grief choked him. Devin swallowed it back, determined to be strong for the night, fairly certain he wouldn't have to worry about such things after that. Here was Song riding east to the end of a kingdom: whatever plans prophecy might have had, they were nothing now. In bitter acknowledgment of all fate had laid on him, he drew out the bone flute, arbiter of all the useless magic he owned. He put it to his lips, meaning to play some marching tune—he had to earn his place in this company somehow, and it certainly wouldn't be with his fighting skills—but instead he chose, at the first faint peal of sound, to play his father's favorite song.

This was all the eulogy it was likely he would be able to give.

It was a mistake: the notes weren’t made for anger. They broke the night open like an egg, let in all the awful truth the dark had hidden from him. He squeezed his eyes shut and played past the feeling that something in him was tearing apart, coming undone like everything else already had. All around him he could hear the stifled misery of men grieving. But he didn't stop playing; he was a Bard, after all, worthless in the kingdom as it had become tonight, and this simple noise was all he had to offer the world now. He forced his eyes open and stared at the unforgiving stars, swaying to Savvys's tired pace, and played until a hazy shimmer of effort was blurring his vision, till he was lightheaded and the grief he wouldn’t give voice any other way sat in his guts like a stone.

Dizziness shuddered through him, a sickening lurch that hurt his bones. There was a dreadful pulling making it hard to draw the next breath. The air went away, returned in a rush. Then Savvys stumbled hard, making his last note jump an octave, and Devin looked up.

He felt the blood leave his face.

Where there had been fields stretched out on either side of them, there were thick trees now. Where the Sainey river had kept a quiet, distant counterpoint to his playing, there was now the hum and whisper of a sleeping forest. The ground under his mount’s hooves had a marked tilt. It felt like something was pulling him down in one direction. Devin turned in the saddle, more disoriented than he had ever been in his life, and cried out when he saw the sharp slope of land outlined in moonlight, falling away from him in the starry dark.

They were in the mountains.
High
in them.

"Gods bless," Devin murmured, forgetting fury and even grief for one moment in favor of sheer terror. "What—?"

He looked at his old bone flute, friend of many years, still sitting in his hand, and blinked.

No. Surely not.

He stuck the flute in his pocket, hoping there was a better answer.

Around him, the men of the Third were riding in circles, moving their horses into the trees. He knew a scout pattern when he saw it and opened his mouth to call them back. He wanted to lose no one else tonight.

Peydan rode to his side. "We ought to scout out, m'lord."

"I—" Gods, he could barely find his voice. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Not just yet, Lieutenant. I don't want to spring any traps."

There, that almost sounded reasonable, didn't it? Devin passed a hand through his hair, looking at trees, trees, trees, and the faint outline of a game trail. How had they gotten here?

How would they get back?

Oh, gods, Kyali, Taireasa. He would never get to them now.

"An’ where are we then, m'lord?" Peydan asked, breaking into his thoughts before the despair and panic that welled up in him could send him riding off a cliff in an attempt to get to Faestan.

It was a good question.

"I don't know," Devin muttered, too loudly. The sudden silence that fell around him felt like an accusation. "In the mountains, obviously, but gods,
how
—"

"Magic, Lord Corwynall, what else? Magic and
geas
."

Swords leapt out of sheaths all around him.

The voice seemed to be coming from the woods ahead on the right. Devin urged Savvys carefully forward. Peydan followed close as a shadow, his sword naked and gleaming in the faint moonlight trickling through the leaves.

"Who are you?" Devin said to the darkness between the trees. "And don't call me that."

"It's what you are tonight."

Damn it, his hands had begun to shake again. He swallowed a hard lump of sorrow and hissed through clenched teeth: "Show yourself. Show yourself and
explain
yourself. How do you know that my father is dead?"

"Magic there too, Devin Corwynall. There are many things we know tonight that we wish we didn't."

There was a rustling. Devin gripped the reins, wondering if he were about to regret not having drawn his sword. Ahead, five men melted out of the treeshadow like ghosts to stand on the trail. A soldier shouted. There was a general jostling as men rode forward. But Devin, squinting in the dimness, raised a hand and Peydan immediately shouted over the din, ordering them to stand down.

He knew that style of dress, just as he knew the long shape over each man's right shoulder was a sword in a baldric. If it were daylight, he would see daggers belted on hips.

The Fraonir.

One of the shadows separated from the group and came to his foot, looking up. In the dark, the lines of the man's face were deep and grim.

"I am Arlen Ulin's-son. Get down, Devin Corwynall. We have much to speak of.”

C
HAPTER
10

"
Y
ou know you are always welcome here."

Arlen’s face wore an odd expression, both gentle and dreadfully sad. He brushed a strand of hair from her face, calluses rasping against her cheek. Something knotted tightly in her chest loosened.

It wasn’t real. She was somewhere else, somewhere terrible and pain-filled and dark. She thought she might be dying.

Saraid knelt at her side and set one thin-skinned hand on hers, which rested on the leather-bound cover of a book she'd never read, one that might—no. She wasn’t thinking of that. She drew her knees up, feeling like a child. She wanted only to forget: forget the book, forget the words it held, forget the rhyme that had changed the world, forget it all, even the feel of her father's hands on her shoulders, if it meant she could forget what had come after.

What was happening now.

But Taireasa's face intruded on her retreat, Taireasa's iron will and brilliant, passionate mind, like a hand clinging to hers. It made no sense, it wasn't real, but she was held by it nonetheless.

Taireasa wasn't safe yet.

Nothing
was more important than that.

Flame touched the edges of the dream, searing first the blanket and then her skin. The pages of the book curled and blackened under her hand. Arlen’s face vanished as she disappeared under the heat, became it, and cruel shadows pushed at the edges of her vision, man-shaped, blood-dark. Her limbs twisted as wounds blossomed on and inside her body. The pain was deep, all over, rising endlessly, too huge to breathe around. She couldn't even scream. Saraid’s hand tightened on hers. Streaks of gold began to crawl over everything.