The Sacred Band (16 page)

Perrin arrived at Mena’s side a few moments later. “Anything accomplished?”

Mena called loudly, “Haleeven Mein! You want to remember your former glory? You can do more than that. You can rebuild it! This can belong to the Meinish race again.”

The figure, deep in shadow now, paused.

“I would not ask things of you without offering things in return.” She grabbed the torch that one of the guards held and walked into the shadows.

“Your sister destroyed the Meinish race,” the shadow said. He had turned to face the princess, and his voice came clearer now. “We are no more.”

As Mena approached, his features flickered into existence again. “My sister punished the Mein. She was harsh, yes, but don’t ask me to forget what you did to us. Don’t ask me to forget the Tunishnevre! What would they have done to my people? No, don’t ask me to forget either. Let’s forget the word
forget
. It’s a useless word!”

The other smiled with a corner of his thin lips.

“Haleeven, I’ve known your name since I was a child, and you must have known mine from the day that I was born. We’ve spent all that time being enemies without even knowing each other. Our fight is over, though. Now we will both be destroyed if we don’t find a way to prevail.”

“I’m not sure that would be so bad,” Haleeven said.

“I doubt very much that the Auldek deserve our world more than we do, or that they’ll rule it more benignly. And you’re wrong about one thing. Completely wrong. Corinn was in power when your people were defeated, but she did the exact opposite of destroying the race. She gave birth to Hanish’s child. You know this. Your bloodline goes on.”

The old man crossed his arms, a difficult act with all those layers on. He gave no sign of how being reminded of Hanish’s child affected him, but Mena had his full attention now. “What do you want of me?”

“I want you, who know this place the best, to help us open it. I want you to train my army here in this chamber. I want it to ring with singing swords and battle cries. I want your help in preparing to face the Numrek. Who better than you?”

“What will you give me in return for making me your soldier?”

“Your life back. Tahalian. Acknowledgment of your race and your name.”

“You can promise me that?”

“I promise you that.”

Haleeven’s eyes bored into hers. “I would have to call all Meins to me. From all around the empire, whether enslaved or in hiding or imprisoned. I would want them all here in Tahalian. I will not be the only one.”

Perrin cleared his throat skeptically, but Mena said, “That will be done. Write a summons yourself so that your people will believe it. I will pen a sealed note to accompany it. We can send it tonight. There are birds fed, rested, and ready to fly.”

“I have your word on it?” the man asked. “Truly?”

Mena met Perrin’s eyes a moment, then slipped a hand down her collar. She fished out a chain, on it a silver pendant. Pinching it in her fingers, she held it up for Haleeven to see. “I found this at the base of a great tree. It is the reason I fought and killed the eagle goddess Maeben. It was not a present or a gift or payment, even. It’s a burden. It was sent so that I would remember the children sacrificed in the name of the goddess I served, then abhorred, and then killed. I made a mistake. When I realized that, I did the best I could to correct it. That’s the way I am, Haleeven.” She pulled the chain taut, letting the curves of the serpentine figure on the pendant catch the light. “I swear on this, on the children I carry with me, on the wrongs I will yet see righted. Fight with us, Haleeven Mein, and if we live, your people will live as well. I swear it.”

Haleeven drew his head back and then let his eyes drift up and around the great arched roof. Finally, he said, “I am not without ideas.”

Mena nodded, curt. “I thought as much.”

“The air is not flowing properly. It should not smell of sulfur. Someone has opened a ventilation tube improperly. Send me a few capable men. We’ll survey the heat ducts. Before anything else, we must see to that.”

“As you advise,” Mena said, not quite smiling but close enough that he responded with a not quite smile of his own.

On the night he arrived at Calfa Ven, Delivegu Lemardine lingered a while over the scene rolling out beneath his private balcony. The King’s Preserve, a vast stretch of woodland deep in the mountains of Senival. Unending crowns of trees crowded the entire view, broken here and there by granite protrusions. Plumes of orange and brown, some bursts of yellow: the leaves still displayed their late autumn brilliance.

Why he stood so long watching the night creep over the landscape he could not say. Perhaps it was nostalgia for some aspect of his forgotten childhood. It was not that he remembered a view like this, or had any particular fondness for the notion of roaming the wilderness beneath that canopy, but he was Senivalian by birth. He had spent his first years in some village or another near here. Perhaps the memory was in his blood. Perhaps he should spend more time here. Not this trip, though. This trip had a particular purpose and would be brief.

That evening’s banquet had a rustic charm. Delivegu went to it dressed in a manner he felt fit the occasion. He wore a shirt of thick Senivalian cloth, its collar a tall ring around his neck. He squeezed his private parts into tight black trousers. He was particularly fond of his crimson leather boots, strapped snug all the way up to the knee. One should always take care with one’s appearance, Delivegu believed, even when far from court.

The lodge’s guests gathered in the winter dining room, a crowded space centered around a single oval table. Wall lamps lit the place, but something about the dark wood walls, the pelts pinned there, and the heads of several stags and a boar jutting from them gave the room a somber air. Two fires roared in large fireplaces at either side of the room. That was another thing Delivegu had noticed about the lodge. Many corridors opened to the outside air. Windows often sat crooked with age in their frames, rattling in the wind and spilling warm air and letting in cold. Instead of correcting these things, the servants set blazing fires in every room. Inefficient. Wasteful, really, but there was a certain style in this rugged excess. Delivegu approved.

He did not, on the other hand, much approve of his dinner company. Nothing wrong with them per se, but not one seducible maiden among them: Gurta, so fat with Rialus Neptos’s pup she would have been better off rolling than waddling around as she was; a senator from Aos, his middle-aged wife and several other relations; along with an old merchant and his two teenage sons, the latter flushed from the day’s adventures. Adventures that featured Wren, Dariel’s mistress. She was pregnant with the prince’s child, though from the story the two sons told she was not much hindered by her condition.

“Mistress Wren warned us it would be a long ride in any event,” one of the sons said. The guests stood in a loose circle, sipping the mint liqueur that was customary for early winter evenings at Calfa Ven. “We rode north through the valley and then up along a ridgeline she called Storneven. Wren knew the route well.”

“Or the horses did,” the other son, slightly younger, said.

“No, she knew it. She’s ridden it several times during the weeks she’s been caretaker here.”

Caretaker? That was a clever way to describe her situation. Better than she who is banished until the queen decides what to do with her. “She rides so often?” Delivegu asked.

“Every day,” Gurta said. “Keeps her from going insane with boredom.”

“There was no chance of that today,” the younger son piped. “We had a run-in with a wolverbear!”

“An old wolverbear,” the other corrected. “Peter, the warden, said so. It picked up our trail about halfway around Storneven, spooked the horses. It followed us for a good hour, sometimes right out in the open. It loped along as if it were just biding its time until one of us fell off our horse or something.”

“Peter said that’s what it was doing. Said if any of the horses had gotten lamed—or if one of us had fallen—the thing would have been on us like a flash. He got it off us by tossing down two of the squirrels he had shot. When the wolverbear couldn’t resist them, we took off as fast as Wren could ride.”

“Dreadful,” the senator’s wife said. “Those creatures are beastly. They should hunt every last one of them.”

“Oh, you don’t mean that,” Delivegu said, finding himself drawn to flirt. Force of habit. “There need to be wild things in the world. Things to give you chills at night thinking about them.”

“My wife has far too many chills already,” the senator said. “Goes to sleep wrapped in three layers of undergarments.”

“That’s a pity,” Delivegu said. “A crime, I’d say. No woman should go to sleep so encumbered.” He flashed her a smile and sipped his liqueur. Then he wondered why he had bothered. He had no interest in her. And then he realized that without knowing it his senses had picked up on a person of interest. The sudden rush of vigor he felt was not for the senator’s wife at all. It was for one of the girls setting the table for dinner. Oh, yes, that was it. He watched her bend over the table, arranging cutlery. What is it about youth? he wondered. Even though her body was half hidden beneath her simple frock, unadorned and meant to go unnoticed, Delivegu saw the contours beneath the fabric. No Acacian beauty, this one. She was of Senivalian stock, clear enough in her short stature, with hips that would go wide in a few years, breasts that stood at attention for the time being, and dark hair she wore clipped at the back. He decided he would see those locks flow free. Reconnecting with his ancestral roots. That’s what it would be.

When he caught the flow of conversation again, the senator’s wife was saying, “If you ask me, it’s just reckless. Why put the child in danger like that? I enjoy a good brisk ride myself, but there’s a time for all things.”

Delivegu tried to imagine her enjoying a brisk ride. It was not a pleasant imagining, too full of jiggling flesh for his liking. He glanced at the serving girl again and caught her watching him. Oh, good. She’s noticed.

“Mistress Wren!”

She walked in with a careless air, as if she had happened on the place by accident and was not entirely sure she would stay. She was pretty enough. Small and lithe, she had the body of an acrobat. “Ready to eat?” she asked. “I could eat an entire wolverbear.”

Delivegu managed to secure a place across the table from her. Despite her reckless riding and adventures with wolverbears, she did seem fully aware of the child growing inside her. It was a small bump yet. She rubbed it often, making him wonder what it felt like. It was sensual in a way he had not considered before. As was the way she ate, heartily, without any courtly reticence. He was not sure why Dariel would invest so much in her, but such things were often hard to explain.

“To what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Delivegu?” the merchant asked.

“Yes,” Wren asked, slicing through her roasted boar, “why are you here?”

“I conducted business for her majesty in Pelos,” Delivegu said. “She asked that before I return I stop in and check on the preparations for winter. She’ll not be able to make a last visit herself this season. I know very well that the staff here has everything in hand, so it’s an easy assignment for me. A pleasing one. She asked me to look in on you as well”—he nodded at Wren—“to see how you were settling in here.”

“I’m so disappointed,” the senator’s wife said, “that the queen couldn’t make it! When we received the invitation, oh, months ago, I so hoped the queen would be here enjoying Calfa Ven as well. I love her so, you know? She’s just magnificent. I’d devour her if she were here.”

Somehow I think not, Delivegu thought, wondering if Corinn arranged to schedule certain visitors to the lodge when she planned not to be there. This woman might qualify. No doubt she complained mightily to her husband when they were alone. Hoping for a retreat with the queen, getting one with two pregnant discards instead.

“This horrid invasion!” she said. “I’m sick of hearing of it already. I hope the whole business is over by the spring.”

Surely she was old enough to remember the last two wars that had ravished the empire. Some forget so quickly. Delivegu said, “That’s my hope as well. By the queen’s grace, so it shall be.”

The attractive servant appeared at Wren’s side. “Mistress?” She offered an orange glass bottle, half filled with a clear liquid. Judging by its consistency, it was not water. Wren nodded, and the girl set the glass down, along with a tiny snifter of the same glass.

“What’s this?” Delivegu asked, once he had made eye contact with the servant and held it long enough to establish an intimacy.

“Wren’s little poison,” Gurta said.

“Palm wine,” the younger teen said. “It’s so tasty she won’t let us have any. See if she’ll let you have some, Delivegu.”

He played along, tilting his head questioningly. Wren pushed the bottle toward him, the glass just after it. The liquid smelled of palm nut flesh and more strongly of straight alcohol. Compared to the liqueur from earlier, there was little tempting about this. The eyes of the group were on him, though. He smiled, saluted the room, and then tossed back the glass.

Instant regret. Searing heat. A gag reaction so torso convulsing that he shot away from the table. His chair slammed into the wall behind him and for a few horrible moments he was sure he was going to spill his dinner onto the floor. A string of curses, muttered all the louder because the room had erupted in laughter. It wasn’t just the raw alcohol content. It was that—that … “Agh! That’s foul!”

“It is. It is,” they all agreed.

“Only Wren drinks it,” the senator said. “She says it reminds her of what they used to brew on the Outer Isles. Reminds her of her brigand days, apparently.”

Wren did not deny it. Grinning, she reached over and hooked the bottle back. She poured and, with a nod in imitation of Delivegu’s salute, she drained the tiny glass. She did not so much as blink. In fact, she licked her lips with the tip of her tongue and looked as if she had drunk nothing stronger than sweet tea.