The Amber Legacy (45 page)

‘My lady?’ Meg acknowledged the Elite Guards Leader, Hilt Redsword, and prodded her horse into a trot through the gate and into the city.

The King’s Way was busy with early morning traffic. As the troop rode the winding street out of the northern quarter, farmers with their market produce, wagoners hauling goods and craftspeople moved aside to let the Elite Guards pass unhindered, and children stared. The buildings steadily diminished in size and quality, and Meg was surprised at how quickly they were leaving the
city for the countryside. She hadn’t realised that the palace was so close to the city’s northern limits, but she was glad to be out of the walled grounds after her extended confinement within the claustrophobic world. Neither the dull grey clouds that spread across the sky, nor even the purpose of her journey, could dampen her joyful sense of freedom. She wished that she’d been able to explore the city in the past year, but the intrigue, her abandonment and the Queen’s insistence on her safety interfered with every opportunity, so it remained a tantalising mystery.

The troop travelled north-west until the road turned true north and shadowed the cliffs above the ocean. Meg spent much of the morning staring west at the endless expanse of dark grey water, wondering at the courage of sailors who chose to point their little wooden craft west and sail over the horizon. What strange faith drove them to go blindly in the hope that there might be more land beyond their vision? She was grateful for their curiosity. The books that they had brought back to Western Shess were reason enough for their daring voyages.

It rained spasmodically and lightly throughout their journey as they passed through towns and fishing villages, stopping to eat lunch and camping each night at the edge of a town. Leader Redsword was vigilant to the extreme, making certain Meg was under his personal constant surveillance and protection, but he was also distant in his interaction with her, limiting conversations to instructions. She couldn’t engage him in chatter, and he avoided revealing details concerning his family or himself by keeping busy. His distance made her suspicious, and she wondered if, yet again, she had placed herself unwittingly in the hands of a Rebel as had happened with Follower Servant. But how would she know?

Whisper charmed the soldiers with her antics whenever she emerged from sleeping in Meg’s cloak. The rat, well known as Lady Amber’s companion over the past year, seemed to enjoy sharing her favours among the soldiers, accepting tidbits at mealtimes and letting individuals pick her up and stroke her sleek black fur. Meg was at first embarrassed by the rat’s casual manner amongst the men, but by the third morning she was amused, especially watching how the soldiers competed for Whisper’s attention.

On the fourth day, midmorning, Leader Redsword reined in beside her and pointed to a rocky outcrop that rose above the landscape and jutted over the sea. ‘Whiterocks Bluff,’ he informed her.

The Queen had sent a messenger to Seer Truth confirming that Meg would meet him there. She stared at the white limestone rocks on the bluff. Seagulls drifted in the air currents.
Is he waiting?
she wondered.
And is Jon there with him?

‘I’m sending scouts to see if the rebels are waiting,’ Redsword said. ‘I don’t want us to be led into any traps.’

Unless you are setting the trap
, she thought. She let the Leader organise and disperse four men, and she patiently watched them ride to the outcrop and disappear into the jumble of rocks.

A short time later they emerged, trotting back to the troop, and reported to Redsword, and he passed on their findings to Meg. ‘They’re not here yet. We’ll set up camp and wait for them to arrive. I’ll have men secure the position so that we aren’t surprised, and so there’s no advantage for them when they come.’ And he went about his duties with military precision.

Meg stroked the lump sleeping under her cloak, saying quietly, ‘I guess this is when we find out what is really going on.’

Late in the afternoon, as a light shower drizzled out of the dull grey sky, a scout encountered a large force, at least the equivalent of five Groups, approaching along the northern road. Shortly after, a lookout perched on the rocks confirmed the scout’s information, and Leader Redsword prepared his men. Though he only told Meg that the rebel force was near, by his mood and actions she knew that he wasn’t happy that his Elite Group was outnumbered five to one. He asked her to wait on the far side of a small rise near the rocks, out of the enemy’s sight, ignoring her protests that this was strictly a meeting between herself and the rebel Seer as he returned to begin the protocol process.

Meg was annoyed and frustrated. She hadn’t seen her son for almost a year. How much had he grown? Would he know her? Was he being properly cared for? She toyed with the pendant that Sunset had given to her—a symbol of her family link with her son, Jon. Waiting, when she was so close to him, was making her more anxious than she had imagined possible.
What if this
, as Diamond warned,
is only a cruel ruse by Truth to get hold of the Conduit, and Jon isn’t here at all? What can I do if the meeting is a trap?
She had spells. If Truth pushed too hard, she would use her power. How? She went through her mental file, considering the possibilities. Just in case. And then Redsword appeared over the rise on horseback and dismounted before her. ‘Lady Meg, I’ve cleared everything. Seer Truth is ready to meet.’

‘And Jon?’ she asked, desperation adding an edge to her voice. ‘What about my son?’

‘Truth has your son with him,’ Redsword explained. ‘I knew you would insist on that. Truth will meet with you on the bluff.’

‘Alone?’

‘No. He will have two of Prince Future’s men with him, your son, and a woman who cares for your son.’

‘Jewel?’

‘I don’t know her name, my lady,’ Redsword replied apologetically. ‘Truth is happy for you to bring two men for security. He understands that you wouldn’t trust him. He asked me to tell you that he knows how you feel. He doesn’t trust you, either.’

Meg wished that she had Blade with her—the one man in the Queen’s army that she knew she could trust with her life. She cursed herself for not insisting on him. But the opportunity would have been missed, even if the Queen had approved, because Blade was still serving somewhere to the south of Port of Joy and he would have taken days to return. ‘I want you to come with me,’ she said to Redsword. ‘And you can choose a second man.’

Redsword bowed, saying, ‘I would be honoured, Lady Meg.’ He lifted his dark eyes to meet her gaze. ‘Chance normally serves as my second,’ and he nodded to a man still mounted on a roan horse. Chance bowed his head.

‘Then let’s meet with Truth,’ Meg said, smiling inwardly at the irony in her statement. ‘And be on your guard.’

S
eer Truth waited on the bluff, his blue robe and black hair wrenched by the strong sea breeze. Beside him, silhouetted against the dark metal ocean and apricot sunset clouds, two soldiers stood either side of a young woman who was clutching a large yellow bundle to her chest. Images of a fragmented dream took focus. Meg felt an instant pull towards the bundle, a powerful confusing emotional surge, but she gathered her resolve and approached the Seer. When she was ten paces short of him, he held up a hand. ‘Close enough, Lady Amber,’ he said, his resonant voice unimpeded by the breeze. A smile graced his mouth. ‘You look as beautiful as always.’

‘My name is Meg,’ she told him, and glanced at Jewel whose anxious expression unsettled her.

‘Meg it is, then,’ Truth replied, ‘although the foreign name doesn’t have the same beauty. Or aptness.’ His gaze shifted to her accompanying men, and down at her feet. ‘I see you’ve brought your Guards.’ He stared contemptuously at the black bush rat beside Meg’s feet.

‘I want my son,’ she said bluntly.

Truth grinned and nodded. ‘And I want the Conduit. It’s that easy.’

‘Let Jewel and my son go to safety now, and I’ll give you the Conduit.’ She noticed that one of Truth’s soldiers curiously had a white hunting horn slung across his shoulder.

Truth’s grin widened. ‘How about you give me the Conduit and then I’ll set them free.’

Thunder rumbled across the ocean and echoed against the cliffs. A spot of rain hit Meg’s face and she blinked. ‘I will give you what you ask for, but it’s not as simple as you think it is.’

Truth’s grin faded as his eyebrows knitted into annoyance. ‘I’m not here to play a game with you, woman. I want the Conduit.’

‘I am the Conduit.’

Suspicion darkened his face. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I am the Conduit,’ she repeated. She began to loosen her cloak and Truth watched with cold fascination as she opened her tunic to reveal the amber discolouration on her chest.

Stunned by the strange vision, he looked as if he was struggling to understand, before his face twisted into brutal anger. ‘Do you
know
what you’ve done?’ he snarled. ‘Do you
really
understand what you’ve done?’ He stepped forward, hands reaching for her, but she stepped back, covering herself, and the soldiers whipped their swords from their scabbards. Whisper scampered away.

‘No!’ Meg screamed, glaring at the men.

Truth’s hands remained raised and open, as if he was desperate to hold the amber crystal. His eyes met her frightened stare and a cruel smile spread across his face—the smile of someone realising that the twist in events has ironically played into his hands. ‘Then I don’t need all this charade,’ he said calmly, measuring his words, and snorted. ‘I only need you.’ Over his shoulder, to his men, he snapped, ‘Get rid of them!’
and he lunged. He tore open Meg’s cloak, and grappled with her tunic, breaking the chain with the horse pendant. Meg slipped from his grip and pushed him back, just as a Rebel soldier stabbed Jewel in the side. The handmaiden stumbled sideways and the bundle tumbled from her arms. With a vicious kick, the soldier sent her floundering backwards, over the cliff, clothes flapping, arms and legs flailing. Meg’s instinct was to rescue her son, but the Seer grabbed her again and dragged her to the ground. She punched and kicked wildly, screaming until a knee dug into her stomach. There was a flash of black, and Truth’s weight vanished. Rolling onto her side, she found Truth swatting wildly at his face as Whisper bit and scratched. The Seer slapped the rat aside and went to step on her, but Redsword grappled with him, and Whisper ran to safety.

As she got to her feet, Meg saw that Chance was fighting the Rebel soldiers. Her attention snapped back to the bundle at the edge of the cliff. It was rocking. A solitary pink hand emerged, little fingers grasping at the air. Heart racing, she dashed to the bundle and swept it up in her arms, and pressed her son to her chest. Chance staggered and collapsed, clutching his stomach. The Rebel soldiers turned on her. ‘Give up the kid, lady,’ one snarled, through bleeding lips.

His companion unhooked his hunting horn and blew three sharp blasts. ‘That should make for some fun back there,’ he said, lowering the horn and winking. Behind them, Redsword knocked Truth to the ground, but when the soldier with the horn saw Redsword advancing, he turned to confront him.

‘Makes no difference to me if I slash through the kid, lady,’ the soldier facing Meg sneered. Fighting her instinct to hold her son as she glanced down at the tiny dark eyes looking back at her, tears staining his pink
cheeks, she lowered the bundle, watching the soldier for treachery. ‘Smart choice, lady,’ the soldier said, lifting his sword to strike.

He didn’t expect Meg to attack first. He didn’t expect to have a rat leap up his leg. Distracted by Whisper’s sharp bite, he couldn’t stop Meg as she barrelled him to the ground, and rolled aside. When they got to their feet the sword was lying on a flat slab of rock between them. The soldier glared at her, and warily eyed the rat circling to his left. ‘Lucky first time, lady, eh,’ he scowled and grinned fiercely, welcoming the unexpected challenge. ‘Now I know.’ He took a tentative step towards the sword, his eyes daring her to try for it. ‘Come on, now. Don’t be shy. You wanted to have a go. Have a go now.’ Whisper charged again, leaping up a rock to launch at the soldier’s shoulder—but he saw her coming. He swung and caught the rat in midair with the back of his armoured forearm, and Whisper spun away, hit the ground and was still. Meg felt sick. ‘Your filthy bloody piece of vermin is dead, lady, and now it’s your turn,’ the man taunted. He picked up his sword, grinning with anticipation.

Over his shoulder, Meg saw Redsword wrestling with the other soldier close to where Jon was lying. The Leader pushed the soldier away and stood over Jon protectively, ready to meet the enemy’s next attack, but blood was gushing from a massive gash in his side. How long could he last? She had to act. She pointed at the taunting soldier and an arrow of fiery energy tore through his chain armour and threw him backwards. She pointed at the soldier pressing Redsword and loosed another magical arrow that ripped through the man’s chest. Redsword’s expression showed his astonishment. He looked from the dead soldier to Meg and back again, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d witnessed.

Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Gathering his senses, Redsword scooped up the bundle and checked that the child was uninjured. As Meg reached them, she scrutinised the limestone rocks for danger. And froze. Blood matting his dark hair, flowing down his face and onto his blue robe, Seer Truth stood, rocking unsteadily, staring at her. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ he said. ‘The power of the Conduit, and all you can do is call up a pair of puny flame arrows?’

‘It’s over,’ Redsword warned.

‘Over?’ Truth scoffed.
‘Over?’
He laughed, and coughed and spat a gob of blood. ‘Out there my troops are tearing your pathetic party apart, Leader whoever you are. Oh, it’s over all right. It’s over for you.’ Truth wrenched his hands up, bellowed an Aelendyell word that Meg recognised from the texts,
‘Haerani!’
and Redsword erupted in a ball of flame.

Thrown sideways by the explosion, Meg scrambled to her feet in time to see Redsword and a fiery bundle tumble over the cliff. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘NO!’ and threw herself to the edge, peering down as the roiling surf extinguished the flames and swallowed the tiny bundle. ‘Jon!’ she screamed desperately. ‘Jon!’ The pain crushed her chest. Truth had wrenched out her heart and hurled it from the bluff. She clutched the limestone, crumbling it in her agonised grip. On the horizon, the tiny rim of the sun melted into the ocean, plunging the world into grey.

‘Sometimes,’ a deep voice said, through her sorrow, ‘you have to sacrifice everything to get what you want.’ Meg rolled onto her back, glaring up at the shadowy figure looming over her, tears blurring her vision. ‘Jarudha works through us,’ the voice said. ‘If we are to pave the way for His kingdom, we have to cleanse it of heresy.’ The words meant nothing to her. The words meant nothing. ‘And now He has chosen you to do His
work. The ways of the Righteous Path are always mysterious. So let it be.’ Noise. Nothing but empty noise above her. ‘This should have ended when I killed that old village fool who was guarding the Conduit. It would have been mine and Jarudha’s Will would already be done. But somehow he gave it to you.’

You killed Samuel. You killed my son!
Then came the surge of white anger, like a raging river—and she rose, closing her hands around the noise, crushing it relentlessly. Lightning flashed, searing the world white, and the rain thundered down, drowning everything in darkness. The solidity between her hands cracked and melted to warm pulp between her fingers, and as the warmth seeped down her wrists and arms she dropped to her knees and laughed hysterically.

On the cusp of the white rock, momentarily lit by the jagged lightning, her hair was slicked to her skull by the rain streaming down her body, rain that turned pink and stained the limestone as it washed blood from her hands and arms. She lifted her arms and spread them wide as if she was embracing the entire dark landscape. Lightning flashed again, revealing the tragedy unfolding on the slopes leading to the rocks. Redsword’s surviving Elite Guards were banded in a tiny group, back to back, surrounded by a circle of northern soldiers who were closing in through the drumming rain for the kill. Only darkness and the torrential downpour impeded the inevitable. The anger seethed unabated through her veins like cold fire. The images of Jewel’s fall, Redsword’s fiery death repeated over and over—and her son, Jon. Little Jon, who couldn’t have understood why his life had been so brutally cut short, the tiny flaming bundle extinguished in the seething foam. The images flashed like the lightning. The anger roared. And she said the words,
words she’d sworn never to learn, never to utter, never to use. She screamed them at the sky.

A soft blue light appeared in the storm clouds, bathing the entire battlefield. Stunned by the unearthly transformation, the soldiers lifted their heads, shielding their eyes from the driving rain, and gaped in awe. And their faces melted in horror. Out of the blue haze rode two armoured horsemen, their steeds’ nostrils filled with dark blue flame, their hooves thundering, as they descended. They swept over the battlefield, galloping on the air as bolts of white lightning arced across the boiling clouds, and rose again in the south, wheeling for a second pass. The soldiers panicked. They dropped their weapons and fled.

Perched on the white rock, the soldiers’ screams reached Meg as one long anguished sigh, before it was drowned by the rolling thunder. The Demon Horsemen swept over the battlefield in a storm of blue fire, and she drove them. Her anger drove them. Her pain drove them. They passed over the battlefield three times, a burning blue vengeful wildfire, consuming everything they touched in their path—foe, friend—their vengeance spreading outwards as they passed, until the entire battlefield was a raging blue firestorm. Then she drove them back into the blue light, willing them to recede. She made the light vanish. And they were gone.

She stood in the sluicing rain for a long time, the darkness broken by sporadic flashes of lightning and thunder, the wind ripping at her, letting her anger subside. She knew it was cold, but she was numb. She was numb without and within. And the storm was closing in again.

Everything was about waking, she thought, as she slowly opened her eyes. She was lying on wet earth at
the foot of a limestone rock. A numb grey fog blanketed the world, settling like a listless kangaroo. As she sat up, a drop of moisture slithered down her neck and she shivered. She was cold. Goosebumps covered her arms. She got to her feet and peered into the fog. The battlefield was somewhere in there. What was left? She shivered again, not from the cold this time, but from the memory of what she’d done. What had she done? What
had
she done?

She shuffled back along the narrow path between the rocks towards the bluff and stopped when she entered the space where she’d fought Truth. The fog masked the edge of the cliff. The ocean softly lapped at the rocks far below like a distant whisper. Directly ahead, four corpses were strewn across the ground, like discarded rags. She walked past Chance’s body and the soldiers with the fatal holes burned by her magic—but she veered from Seer Truth’s body, afraid of what she would see. She stopped at the edge of the cliff, her toes touching the air. There was no wind to soothe her face or touch her tears. ‘Jon,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’ The urge to step into the air welled and she stretched a foot tentatively into space, wondering what it would feel like to fall. There would be no more need to fear or worry or suffer. But there would be the moment of dying. She pulled her foot back, stepped away from the edge, and sank to her knees, overwhelmed by her sorrow.

The fog slowly cleared as her tears ran dry and her numbness returned. She rose unsteadily, and walked from the bluff, back through the rocks onto the slope. She didn’t see the ash grey dust crushed by her passing feet. She didn’t see the bodies of men and horses scattered through the grey dust across the open field, or the clusters of corpses frozen in the rictus of violent death, empty eye sockets staring skyward, hands clutching for lost hope, legs bent in the act of escaping.
She walked like a ghost across the battlefield, bearing east-north-east, into the wilderness. She didn’t even see the tiny black shape limping through the dust in her wake.

‘Men, horses, everything. Like a fire burned through, only worse,’ Seer Diamond said, unblinking. ‘No survivors. Not a single one.’

Queen Sunset stared at the rain pattering against the War Room windows, her back to the men in the room to hide her tears. ‘And Lady Meg? Any news at all?’

‘I found this, Your Majesty.’

The Queen carefully wiped her cheeks and turned to look at the object that Diamond was holding towards her. ‘Where did you find this?’

‘A soldier found it on the bluff, among the bodies, near Truth’s body,’ Diamond explained.