The Dark Ferryman (52 page)

Lara waited a moment or two before saying, “The two main accusers are not present, but I have their sworn statements before me. The charges are high treason against the Vaelinars and the first accusation comes from Azel d’Stanthe of Ferstanthe. Following a visitation from Rivergrace to the library, he let it be known that the
Books of All Truth
have been corrupted with an unknown and deadly mold that has begun to destroy the works at an unprecedented rate. He and his apprentices are fighting the corruption with all at their disposal and have, as of this morning, finally attained some small degree of success. The damage done, however, to the Books diseased is incalculable.”

“Although Lord Bistel was also a visitor to the library at this time, he left before Rivergrace. Azel has made a determination, according to the extent and speed of the corrupting agent, that Bistel could not have spread the mold. Upon seizing Rivergrace at the borders, guards removed from her wrist a bracelet which contains a key to the cabinets of the
Books of All Truth
, and the accusation falls upon her shoulders.” Lara looked to the scribe to see if her words had been taken down. After a moment, the scribe nodded to her.

“The second accusation comes from Lord Daravan. He has reported to me that the Galdarkan warlord Abayan Diort was approached by an ambassador offering to negotiate terms of peace with an alliance by marriage. This negotiation was done in secret, the offer sent by Lady Rivergrace with herself as the bride price. Other terms of the contract remain unknown. The ambassador posed as Daravan himself, which was how he discovered the proposition. We can only surmise that this alliance would have included the overthrow of all that we know as Vaelinar.” Lara paused as a ripple of sound ran around the room, but Rivergrace’s gaze fixed on Sevryn and stayed there, as if she could read from his eyes what his thoughts might be. Chills ran down Grace’s back as she heard the charges, things she had no idea had happened nor how they could have happened, yet she was supposed to have been the perpetrator of the deeds. How dare she hope to defend herself against that of which she was totally ignorant?

Nutmeg swayed against her briefly, their riding skirts brushing against each other.

Lara tilted her head slightly, her eyes dark and unreadable. “How do you plead, Rivergrace of the Farbranches?”

She took a deep breath. Feeling as if the River Goddess had grabbed her yet again to drag her down into chilly and unbreathable depths, she answered, “Guilty to the charge of having a key. It was given to me, and I used it, and if that is a crime, then I’m guilty of it. I had a need to search for information and the friend that passed me the key knew so and did it out of our friendship. I wouldn’t harm the books if I could, but no, I did nothing to them, nor had Lord Bistel.”

Bistane commented dryly, “Lord Bistel is not on trial here.”

Her hand fluttered at her side for an instant. “No. I . . . I understand that.” She tried to recapture her thoughts. “The second charge. I have but one man I wish to spend my life with, and that is Sevryn Dardanon. There is nothing I can add to that.” Her mouth had grown dry and she had to lick her lips to say what she was going to say next.

Lara interrupted. “What proof do you offer?”

“Proof? None except all that I have said and done in my life. All of which you knew before those charges were brought to you, and you decided you believed them.” Rivergrace’s hand moved again, helplessly. “You move in centuries. I live in moments, moments given to me by my Dweller family and their teaching. They taught me that life is to be lived now, and suffered and triumphed now. I’ve been accused of not being wholly Vaelinar, and there is truth in that. I won’t wait decade upon decade to live. As to the rest, I am not guilty with one exception. I went to the library in search of who I might really be. Part of the answer was given to me, and this may well be the treason you so dearly wish to hang upon me.” She faltered a moment.

“I am the daughter of the man once known as Fyrvae, smith to Quendius, and who now exists as his hound, Narskap. He is a broken being, but I believe what he told me at Ferstanthe. He may be the one who poisoned the books, but I’ve no proof, and I won’t accuse him of it. If I am guilty of my bloodline, then so be it.” Her words fell into a deadly quiet.

A Drebukan, a son or nephew of the murdered Osten, cried out. “Murderer!” Steel filled his hand, and he lunged. Both Bistane and Sevryn reacted, and the open floor of the ballroom filled with surging bodies. Nutmeg took her arm and swirled her away from the fray, dragging her toward the open doors, but crossed swords blocked them. Lariel held one of them. Their eyes met across the gleaming steel.

“You will never go to Abayan Diort. Never. Not as long as I stand.”

“This is madness,” Sevryn yelled to her. He held the Drebukan at bay, swords crossed with daggers between them. “This is no trial but a vendetta, Lara. We have other enemies, close at hand, we should be striking at!”

“And she would bind them together, Narskap to Diort.” Lara’s hand knuckled whitely on her sword’s hilt. The guard standing with her kept his hand steady, the sinews on his forearm standing out with the strain. His blade crossed hers, but it not only blocked the door—it blocked the blow she might have struck—and held her constrained. The two swords murmured together, steel singing briefly. “I will not be questioned.”

“You must be,” Bistane said, not unkindly. “Or else you would be the very tyrant you would oppose. Even your grandfather bent himself to be questioned.”

“I know what I know, and what I have seen.”

Loud words began to buffet them, and Rivergrace shrank back a little against Nutmeg, her ears ringing with the anger and strife of the many voices talking at once.

“Proof,” grated out Tranta as the voices began to die down. “What proof? Upon my dead brother’s soul, you’ve not shown us enough to convict Rivergrace.”

“Proof?” Lara pulled her sword back and sheathed it, her movements slow and deliberate. Her mouth twisted to one side. “If I said I was Anderieon, would you doubt me?”

“Of course not. You are the heir of the Anderieons as certain as the sun rises in the sky.”

“And if I tell you that I know who my enemies are, and why, would you doubt me?”

No one in the ballroom seemed to wish to answer her, although several shifted their weight uneasily, and the wood of the flooring creaked with their movement as if giving voice to their hesitation.

“In the interest of justice, we would all have to doubt you until evidence proved you right. How dare you forget that?” Bistane answered her with sorrow.

She ran her hand through her hair, brushing it back from her face. “I don’t forget it. I weigh what I know with what I am given to see, every day. I put aside alliances, friendship, even love, to make that accounting.” She looked over Rivergrace quickly, before turning away.

“Prophecy,” said Sevryn quietly. Yet his voice carried over all the murmurs, all the conferrings, and Lara faced him.

“It is not reliable.” One of the Drebukar spoke up, his face a whole and thin image of his kinsman Osten, his brow knotted in disapproval.

“It is reliable. When it occurs. When it can be deciphered. It’s not a way to rule a people from day to day. Still, I know what I have seen.” The cords in Lara’s throat stood out as if her very throat tightened about her words, trying to stifle them, yet still she spoke.

Tranta made a gesture of disdain, turning away from her, his blue hair falling across his shoulders like a barrier. He faltered as if the life within his body were too heavy for him to carry.

“Do you want to know what I see, then? Do you?” Lara cried. She put her hands up and they shook. “I see a Way opening. I see our home beyond it, lost Trevilara, in all its splendor and beauty and wildness, calling for us, and it is he—he who stands between us and the Way home, Abayan Diort, with his war hammer in hand and there is no way on this or any other God-given earth that we can go home without going through him, and
he will not let us pass
! I know it is our home because it calls for me, for you, for all of us, and its beauty is like a cutting edge and like nothing that can be seen anywhere on Kerith. Its need for us is as sharp as our need for it, and the Way has opened. How can any of you wonder, then, why I am telling you to make war against Abayan Diort?”

“Trevilara!” cried Bistane.

“No longer the Suldarran.”

Rivergrace could hear the longing.
No longer lost
. The need to be home, to have a home, was almost palpable in the room, but not in her. Nutmeg’s fingers laced through hers as if instinctively knowing what Rivergrace felt.

A riot of questions broke out, probing, challenging, pleading, burying the queen.

Lara’s shout cut across the commotion. “Silence!”

Instead of silence, the room fell into absolute darkness.

AVICIOUS YANK out of the abyss of darkness grabbed up Rivergrace. It tore her away from Nutmeg and propelled her, slamming her into a doorway and then into openness. The entire manor appeared to have been plunged into deepest night. No lamps had been lit for it was morning, and so nothing could be seen beyond the end of her nose. It was as though she were still locked up, awaiting trial, and she might awaken from the nightmare. But the rough hand on her arm bruised into her flesh, and she knew she would not. And she could tell that it was Lara who had her, for the hand only had three long digits and a thumb, not four.

“Who comes to rescue you?”

“A rescue? I thought we were being attacked again.”

“Answer me!” Lara shook her lightly.

“No one that I know of, I swear.”

Lara pushed and pulled her stumbling down the corridor. Raised in this manor, the Warrior Queen no doubt knew where she guided them, but Grace had no such memory and she tripped and staggered to the other’s impatient tugs. Her knuckles skinned as they rapped against one rough wall, drawing her breath in with a hiss, but Lariel did not slow. They rattled down a back stair which Grace knew had to have been the servants’ stair because of its narrow familiarity, and then into another hallway and light flared as Lara thrust a hand out to bring a wall lamp into flickering life.

“Grace, by my life, how could you do this to us?”

“I don’t know. How would I know?” Rivergrace stammered in answer.

Lara stared into her face.

“You don’t believe me.”

She did not answer.

“How can you think this of me?”

“I think you could be misled. I’ve seen you with a sword in your hand—a sword that only one or two others could hold—so I know what you are capable of, when you need to be. With Narskap as a father . . .” Lara’s words trailed off.

“He’s not my father. Narskap is a broken thing that remembers only now and then what he was, what he did, what he might have been meant to do. My father is all but dead, and the only thing he holds for me is proof that I am Vaelinar. Not more and not less as many of you reckon me.”

“Blood runs deeper than any river. You may find that you can’t dismiss him as easily as that.”

“Easy? It’s not easy. He’s all I have left of myself, and yet he is nothing of myself! How can that be easy?” Temper ate through her fear, and she shook off Lara’s hand.

Lara moved as if to slap her, and Rivergrace moved as quickly, catching the other by the wrist and holding her. Surprise raced across Lariel’s face. “You have strength you don’t even know you have. I can’t let you go as you are. I was blind not to have seen it, you for Sevryn and he for you. He has been very guarded this past season. Gods, how could I have missed it? You are both possessed. I fought the Demon-Gods of Kerith in the Secret Wars, I thought never to see the like again. I can’t leave you like this, to be used as a weapon against yourself and us. I will let you live, if I can.” She twisted in Grace’s hold, turning about, slamming Rivergrace against the wall and knocking the breath out of her. “Forgive me,” she whispered as she leaned close and thrust her mind into Grace’s.

In a dizzying moment, Rivergrace lost the sense of herself captive in a rough-hewn corridor, hemmed in by inky darkness with only a small lamp illuminating the two of them. She felt the rush of the wind against her face, under her wings, and saw the treetops as they dropped below her flight and she was free, but she was not. She was Lara and a war falcon, she was a wisp of cloud holding the merest promise of rain, and she was winter with the sun trying to chisel away at her icy back, and she was an abyss of memory which Lara began to stir. She could feel herself falling through Lara’s fingers, slipping away, as the other made a noise of determination low in her throat.

She had been violated like this before when the Goddess had unwoven her life and soul down to nothingness before reweaving her threads, but that had been done with a ruthless gentleness and this . . . this was like being chopped at. Uprooted. Having her heart pulled out of her by a hand thrust down her throat. She struggled and fought, gagged and spit. Then she felt the thread at which Lara pulled.

It was that which made her Vaelinar, which gave her eyes like seas and lakes, which gave her the power to know water and fire and summon them, it was that which was etched into every bit of her, and Lara’s touch was like a firebrand which sought to cauterize every morsel of her that held that power. She fought back as only she could. Fire here, then she brought water to quench it. Burning embers there, then she brought up a cooling mist. Lara entwined their powers, seeking to yank Rivergrace’s out, and she became as insubstantial as the dew, slipping out of Lara’s hold.

“No!”

Did that cry erupt from her throat or Lara’s? She could not tell. She could feel her body again, forehead to the wall, arm bent behind her, Lara’s breath hot against her cheek. She would not give up herself. Not any part of her, not even that which she feared and hated. She could feel Lara draw in a deep breath and steel her body and knew that the next attack would either succeed . . . or kill her.