The Mirror Prince (52 page)

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Authors: Violette Malan

BOOK: The Mirror Prince
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Cassandra smiled, looking back at
Trere’if
again.
 
“The Shadowlands.”
 
Now available in trade paperback from
DAW Books, the first novel of
Violette Malan’s new fantasy series,
 
 
THE SLEEPING GOD
Read on for a sneak preview.
PARNO LIONSMANE RESTED his elbows on the ship’s rail and watched as his Partner, Dhu-lyn Wolfshead, led her mare Bloodbone from the deck of the
Catseye
down the ramp to the pier. The spotted mare was snorting just a bit, and putting her feet down delicately, but Dhulyn kept her moving with soft murmurings and a steady pressure on the bridle. The
Catseye
was a small coastal trading ship, wide and low in the water, and the horses had spent the four-day trip from the Isle of Cabrea secure in an enclosed horse-box on deck, but there were few horses who traveled happily by sea. Dhulyn had taken Warhammer, Parno’s big gray gelding, down the ramp first, claiming that Bloodbone would be ashamed to be more frightened than his gelding, and would come the more quietly for the bigger horse’s example. Parno believed her. He believed any and everything that Dhulyn told him about horses.
 
“Good trip then, mercenary?” Captain Huelra left off directing his sailors and joined Parno at the rail.
“Calm and quiet, thank you, captain, just how we like it.” Parno hunched his shoulders against the chill breeze that was blowing off the water. The harbor at Navra was sheltered—the salt flats which made the town important were off to the east—making it the best place to dock this early in the year, when most travelers were still waiting out the last of the winter storms.
“Don’t usually like horses onboard,” captain Huelra was saying, “but your Brother is a good hand with them. It is natural to her, eh? Being an Outlander and all?”
Parno looked to where Dhulyn stood with the horses, bloodred hair dull under the cloudy sky, rubbing their faces and caressing their ears while they became accustomed once again to the feel of land underneath their hooves.
“You could say that.”
Captain Huelra planted his elbows on the rail next to Parno and looked around. “You’re late getting started. Thought you’d changed your minds, eh? Decided to stay aboard after all. The season of the salt caravans is almost a moon away, and if it’s work you need . . .”
“We won’t be staying in Navra,” Parno said, straightening to face the captain. “As soon as Dhulyn Wolfshead finds us a decent packhorse we’ll be going on to Imrion.”
“Imrion? Work there aplenty, if what the gossips here in Navra tell me is true. But you could take ship from here, eh. Not mine, of course,” Huelra added, gesturing with obvious pride at the
Catseye
. A perfect craft for the inner sea, it was much too small to venture out into the open ocean.
Parno laughed and jerked his thumb at Dhulyn. “The Wolfshead didn’t win
that
much off your crew playing tiles,” he said. Not that his Partner would agree to an ocean journey in any case, even if they had the money, but Parno saw no reason to tell Huelra that.
The captain nodded again, looking at Parno slantwise, from the corner of his brilliant blue eye.
“Ah. Should have known. They’re saying Imrion’s on the brink of civil war, eh, and if the Mercenary Brotherhood is gathering, they must be right.”
Parno leaned forward again, hands lightly clasped, hoping the shock he’d felt at Huelra’s words hadn’t shown on his face. They’d been out of touch, for certain, but not so out of touch surely that he had to hear what rumor spoke of from outsiders. When he was sure his voice would be normal, he turned his head toward the man.
“The Wolfshead and I came almost without stopping from Destila,” he said, naming the city at the far end of the Midland Sea. “Changing ships only at Cabrea. Does rumor say what it’s about?”
“The Jaldeans are on the one side . . .”
“A bunch of harmless old priests?”
“You’ve been away to west, you say, Lionsmane, but you’re from Imrion yourself, eh?”
“You know better than that, captain. We’re Mercenary Brothers, Dhulyn Wolfshead and I, and
that’s
where we’re from.”
The captain nodded, tongue flicking out to the corner of his mouth. “Still. If it were anyone else . . . I don’t mind telling
you,
mercenary, I’m not from Imrion myself.” He shrugged.
“It’s not the old priests you remember, asking for alms for the shrines of the Sleeping God, it’s the New Believers, younger men trying to win the people away from the foreign gods that’ve been gaining a following here in the east.”
“And who on the other side?” It would be strange indeed, Parno thought, for civil war to break out because of a dispute over religion. Minor scuffles certainly, but while the Sleeping God was certainly the primary god here, the whole Letanian peninsula was known for its tolerance of all religious views. Even the Cloud People were open-minded on this point if on no other.
“They say the Tarkin himself,” Huelra answered, “but only a few of the Great Houses have declared themselves one way or the other. And all on account of the Marked,” the man continued, reading the question off Parno’s face. “The New Believers’re saying the Tarkin doesn’t see the danger—”
“
Danger?
From the
Marked?
How dangerous can they be? There’s not one in five hundred who are Marked.” Parno was almost smiling in his relief. This time rumor had to be wrong.
Captain Huelra opened his mouth to speak, and snapped it shut again with a frown. Parno turned to see what had drawn the man’s attention. A woman in an elaborately folded green headdress had stopped to say something to Dhulyn. His Partner listened, nodded, and jerked her head toward the ship, clearly indicating where Captain Huelra stood beside him. Parno glanced back at him when the man sucked at his teeth.
“There’s one now, from Imrion like so many others, and she’ll be asking for passage, eh, and I’ll have to turn her down.”
Parno raised his brows. “She looks like she has money.”
“That woman’s Marked, or her husband is. They’re to wear green headdresses now, and there’s a curfew for them and all.” He looked back at Parno, the muscles of his face gone hard. “And
that’s
your New Believers as well, eh? It started in Imrion, but it’s spread here, as you can see, maybe in the last moon or so. I don’t know what it is they hold against the Marked—not my business, Truchara’s a good enough god for any sailor—” Huelra spit over the side, giving water to his goddess as he spoke her name.
“When did this start?” Parno said, frowning in his turn. If there could be dress codes and curfews even in a Freeport like Navra, the status of the Marked was changing indeed. “The Wolfshead and I haven’t been in Imrion since they took the field against the Dureans at the battle of Arcosa.”
“Arcosa? That would have been in Nyl-aLyn’s time, the old Tarkin.”
Parno nodded. The Marked woman had left Dhulyn and was making her way toward the gangplank, and the section of deck on which he and the captain stood. “This business with the Marked, would that be the new man’s idea?”
“Not from what I hear, eh? But it’s all he can do to prevent an open breach between those as support the New Believers and those who would just as soon let be. I’ll tell you straight, since it’s you I speak to Lionsmane, and I leave here on the next tide, no good will come of any persecution of the Marked, it’s madness, pure and simple.”
Huelra turned, fixing his eyes on Parno’s. “I tell you plain, it goes against my heart to let you off here. Money or no money, I’d rather you stayed aboard. The whole of the west country was flooded last spring, an earthquake leveled Petchera in the summer—and there’s rumors the Cloud People are looking to break their treaty. Imrion’s luck has turned bad, you mark my words.”
Parno laughed to cover the chill that had come over him, raising the hairs on his arms. “Why, captain, we’re Mercenary Brothers looking for work. What better place for us to go than a country with trouble coming?”
Anything else the captain might have said was cut off as he turned to greet the Marked woman, who, having made her way up the gangplank was hovering at the captain’s elbow. Parno nodded to them both and stepped aside, knowing he’d learn nothing more just now, and thinking it was high time he joined Dhulyn with the horses.
Bloodbone and Warhammer showed every sign of putting their sea voyage behind them. As Parno walked up, Bloodbone was snuffling Dhulyn’s shoulder, but both horses were alert, flicking their ears, bobbing their heads and generally taking an interest in what was going on around them, as battle-trained mounts tended to do.
Dhulyn was doing the same, though in her own peculiar way. Still holding fast to the horses’ bridles, she was watching a group of children play a skipping game farther along the pier, not far from where she stood with the horses. Having had no real childhood herself, it had always seemed to Parno natural that Dhulyn showed a great curiosity in the childhoods of others. She smiled as he neared her, her eyes still watching the children’s game.
“It’s the same rhyme,” she said. “That sweeping rhyme the children were singing in the street in Destila.”
“You sure? Those kids were playing a game with blindfolds.”
“Nevertheless, it’s the same rhyme, same cadence, same consonance. I’m curious, how do these rhymes and games get transplanted from one place to another?”
Parno shrugged. Dhulyn had spent a year in a Scholar’s Library before taking her final vows to the Mercenary Brotherhood, and she’d never lost the habit of making these scholarly observations. “Adults like you see them, I would suppose, and carry them home for their children, like new toys.”
“It would be interesting to trace the songs and the games back, try to find the point of origin from which they spread.”
“You think such a point could be found?” Parno said, smiling. His years with Dhulyn had taught him that many the countries of the eastern continent told folk-tales and stories of amazing similarity. Why, it didn’t take a Scholar to see that the God Dreamer of the Western Horde was the same deity known as the Sleeping God here in the Letanian Peninsula.
“Unless it goes back to the time of the Caids, then it will appear to have sprung up everywhere at once.” Dhulyn shrugged one shoulder. “Ah well, a dissertation subject for some Scholar no doubt. And meanwhile, here we are back in the land of the Sleeping God.”
“The Sleeping God’s worshiped everywhere,” Parno said, taking Warhammer’s rein from her.
“But here, on the Letanian Peninsula, he is the first god, is he not?”
“The Brotherhood recognizes all gods,” he reminded her.
“And all gods recognize the Brotherhood.” She turned fully to look at him. “I told Huelra where to send our packs. Has the place changed very much? Do you remember the way to the inn you’ve been telling me about?”
“What do you think?” he said, grinning as he took Warhammer’s bridle from her.
“I think you got lost in our cabin last night.”
Parno swung, Dhulyn ducked, and the children looked over from their game, excitement plain in their faces—as was the disappointment when no fight broke out. Dhulyn, grinning for the benefit of the children, tilted her chin toward the
Catseye
.
“What’s that about? The woman in green?”
“When we get to the inn,” he answered, turning away.
They led the horses away from the
Catseye,
dodging seamen and dockworkers loading and unloading from the ships and fishing boats tied up along the pier. It really was too crowded, Parno told himself, to tell Dhulyn what he’d learned from Captain Huelra. That could wait until they could find some private corner at the Hoofbeat Inn. And besides, he needed to think a bit, find a way to tell her what they were heading into so she wouldn’t just turn around and get back onto the ship. Dhulyn had been uneasy with the idea of returning to Imrion ever since he’d suggested it, looking for a reason not to come. And he couldn’t be sure where a civil war might weigh on the scale of come or go.
The horses were spoiling for exercise, but the streets close to the docks proved to be so uneven that Dhulyn suggested they continue afoot. Parno was just leading the way down a narrow lane when his Partner froze.

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