The Sacred Band (26 page)

A morning several days into her efforts, Corinn found Elya waiting for her on the terrace that had become the avian nursery. Her young huddled close to her. For a second Corinn thought they looked like children gathered around a storytelling nurserymaid, but then she saw the dangerous slant of Elya’s head. She pushed through her children, jostling them behind her as she moved on Corinn. She lowered her head and dropped to all fours. She covered the short distance in a burst of speed, her shoulder joints pumping. Her head rose so close to Corinn that the air blown from her nostrils stirred the queen’s hair. Standing tall, she hissed down at Corinn, her neck feathers jutting out in an instant bristle.

Corinn breathed through her mouth. She moved only her fingers, which she flexed out of a need to move something, to steady herself somehow. Resolutely submissive, she just stood. Inside, however, she had a spell dancing, ready to be released should Elya strike. It would rip her apart and leave them all splattered in feathered gore. She would do it if she had to.

She didn’t. The mock attack was Elya’s version of a parting discourse, perhaps for her young’s benefit as much as a warning to Corinn. She curled away and returned to her agitated children. A few moments spent soothing them, touching them each with the soft spot below her jaw, and then Elya stood back from them. They tried to stay with her, but she huffed them back. Her wings unfurled from the knobby protrusions on her back. They snapped into place with a rapid clacking sound, the flowing motion of it almost liquid until it was complete. Then the finger-thin bone framework went rigid, only the silky membrane hung throughout rippling before the touch of the air. Elya leaped backward onto the terrace railing. She glanced from her young to Corinn once again, then twisted around and dropped out of sight.

Corinn raced the young dragons to the wall. They reached the railing together. Tij leaped up first. Kohl scaled it like a lizard. Thaïs scurried to a section with flowers carved in the stone. She stuck her head through a leaf. Po released his wings and flew up, almost overshooting the wall and having to flap back for a moment.

Elya’s wide-winged shape soared beneath them. She skimmed down toward the lower town wonderfully fast, then shot out low across the green waters of the harbor. Her shadow danced on the waves below her, like an aquatic companion. Then she turned to the north and beat her wings to rise higher. Her audience stayed transfixed until her shape faded into the northern horizon.

Only then did Corinn acknowledge the bubbling excitement inside her. Her abdomen tingled with it. She had her babies all to herself. She spoke to them softly at first. “You’ll be my greatest warriors.”

Kohl nipped the fabric of her sleeve in agreement.

“You’ll be the weapons your mother wasn’t cut out to be.”

Tij slammed the crown of his head against her left shoulder.

“You won’t be beautiful like her. You’ll be exquisite terrors instead.”

Thaïs brushed against her side.

“You want that, don’t you? To fight for me?”

Po chirruped, flapping his wings and lifting himself up off the stone.

Of course they did. Corinn read it in their eyes. “You were only waiting for it, weren’t you? Let’s begin.”

Corinn undid all the venom of the spell she had woven and held loaded against Elya. She lured her babies down from the railing and began a new song for them. She moved through them, touching them, lifting their chins and meeting their golden eyes. She whispered out the words and notes and sounds that lay behind the fabric of the world. She felt them slither in the air around her, and she let the young dragons hear them, too. No need to hide the serpentine scaly friction the ribbons of the song sliced through air.

Once the spell she wanted was strong, she began to release it into them. She stroked them as she sang, one after the other as they jostled and vied for her attention. Each of them vibrated with a sort of pleased purring. With each touch she felt the power of the song passing from her into them. Beneath her fingers and palms she felt the bulging pressure as they changed, as they truly became her babies, as they grew beneath her touch.

End of Book One

Mena awoke, knowing that something was in her room, standing at the foot of her bed. Her thoughts flew to ghosts, to angry spirits, to the Tunishnevre. She was lying on a floor bed that had once belonged to Meinish royalty, in a room that may have been Maeander Mein’s. She had gone to sleep, thinking of the last time she had seen him, as his prisoner on a ship bound for an Acacia ruled by Hanish Mein. The knotted irony of it all had slithered around her all day. That was why she was sure it was the anger of the Meins that stood breathing just beyond her feet. She sat up, faced it, and gasped at what she saw.

“Perrin?” She knew his tall physique even in the partial light. She stretched for the lantern in a stand beside the bed and opened the vent to increase the flame. Yes, it was Perrin. Clothed only in his underlayers. His hair, as ever, kicked about in a small chaos atop his head. “What are you doing?”

Something was wrong with him. His eyes were open. He was awake, standing, but his face wore the limp flaccidity of sleep. He swayed. His arms hung straight down at his sides. He was asleep on his feet.

“Do you think me here to warm your bed, Mena?” Perrin’s mouth said. The voice was his but not only his. “What would Melio think?”

“Are you mad?” Mena asked. “Perrin, I am true to Melio. We are—”

“I won’t tell him, of course. Who you bed is your business, Sister.”

Then she knew the second voice, the one that created the words that Perrin’s mouth spoke. “Corinn?”

“You cannot avoid me, Mena. You should not try.”

“I haven’t,” Mena said. She put a hand to her chest, a gesture that looked like modesty, but that she made to quiet her heart and rate of breathing. “I never would. You have … taken Perrin’s body?”

“You are closed to me, Sister. Don’t you find that strange? Of all the people in the world to whom I can dream-travel, the two closest to me will not answer my call. When I search, I can never find you or Dariel. I could find fine-looking Perrin, though. He has brought me to you. A pleasing form, is he?”

Mena could think of no response. His was a pleasing form, but not like this. He might as well have been a reanimated corpse.

“Why did you abandon my orders? Mena, stop gaping like that! It’s me, Corinn, talking through this man’s mouth. Now, answer me. Why did you abandon our plan?”

“Our plan did not include sacrificing the entire army before ever seeing an enemy,” Mena said. “That’s what would have happened.”

“You exaggerate.”

“No, I don’t. If you had been there, you would have seen. To wait up there would have been a slow death. We would have been weakened by cold and in no shape for when the Auldek come. I had to make a decision in the field. I did. Military matters are my area, Corinn. If you don’t trust me, take away my command.”

“I trust you, but … Tahalian? Do you do that to taunt me?”

Suddenly feeling uncomfortable sitting up in the bed, Mena yanked her covers off and folded her legs under her, back straight. “Tahalian is the perfect place to settle,” she said. “We can train in frigid conditions, hike the Black Mountains, work on navigation and communication in the worst of conditions. But we can also return to a warm base. We can run maneuvers in the Calathrock. We can learn from men like Haleeven, who know war in the north better than anyone. Instead of huddling in frozen hovels, struggling to survive, we’ll be fit and prepared. I was sure that you would agree if you knew all the facts, so I acted on that.”

Perrin’s eyes stared at her a moment before answering. “You have done well,” Corinn said. “I myself could not have made that choice. I could not have set foot in that place. It’s good that you could.” Despite the strangeness of hearing this from Perrin’s lips, it warmed Mena to hear the vulnerability in her sister’s voice. “You should know something else. Our brother has returned.”

“Dariel? Did the league—”

“No, not Dariel. He is still unaccounted for. I mean Aliver. I sang him back to life. He is here in the palace even now. He played this afternoon with Aaden. Mena, you should have seen them!”

Mena asked for Corinn to say again what she meant. Corinn did so. Mena asked her to speak it one more time. Perrin’s lips curved into a smile. “I am not insane, Sister. I worked a spell and brought him back. I can do such things. You have the blade; I have the song.”

“I don’t understand. How can …”

“How can something dead and spread as ashes on the wind live again? I can’t answer that, but it’s true. You’ll see him yourself.” Perrin’s eyes closed for a long moment, and then opened with a start. “Call Elya. Call her to you and fly back on her for the coronation. I have already sent her toward you, but call her to make sure she comes to you.”

“The coronation?”

“Aliver will be king. I will be queen. We will rule together. Come, Mena, be here to share the moment with us. Summon Elya. Summon …”

Corinn’s words faded. Perrin sighed, his body loosening, swaying. Corinn was gone. Just like that the force that had animated him vanished. Mena began to ask if he was all right, but stopped as he climbed onto her bed and fell, facefirst, onto her sheets. “Perrin, you can’t.…” He grasped her sheets and curled into them, coming to rest on his side, facing her. Fast asleep.

Mena watched his sleeping face for a time. She lay down next to him, close enough to take warmth from his body as she tried to sort through what she had just heard.

The mock battle the next day was Haleeven’s idea. After three days of steady snowfall—a strangely windless storm that allowed the snow to blanket the world around Mein Tahalian evenly—he proposed, “Let’s stage a battle along the slope of the mountains. We did so in the old days. Even with Hanish we trained that way on occasion.”

When Mena protested the heavy snow, Haleeven said that was the point.

“This is the Mein, Princess.”

The old warrior’s face was a creviced mask. He had trimmed his wild beard, but it was still bushy and longer than anything seen in the empire’s warmer climes. Leather cords wove color into several braids of his thinning gray-blond hair. Mena was not yet used to looking at him. At times she marveled that the world could be so varied as to produce these hairy, blond, fair-skinned northerners in one case and the richly dark, smooth-skinned people of the south on the other. With her kind in between, like a blending of the world’s extremes.

“This is the Mein,” Haleeven repeated, “and north of here it’s been known to snow as well.”

Not sure what to make of his statement—ill-tempered humor or more kindly jest—she nonetheless agreed. Haleeven was a hard man to read. Since their first conversation, he had shown little emotion. He had revealed nothing more of himself and seemed to regret having ever shown himself a victim of the world’s turning. Instead, he threw himself into work. He, more than any single person, brought Mein Tahalian back to life again. That he did it for her benefit Mena doubted, but she was grateful for it.

As they marched out to do mock battle, the sun shone blindingly bright. The clouds that had pressed down upon them for weeks had vanished, revealing a dome of sky impossible to look at. They all squinted as they gave and received commands, trying to form up on opposing sides of the slope. The snow was fluffy and soft. A few soldiers scooped it up in their naked fingers and ate it.

“You’d do well to keep those fingers covered,” Perrin said. He walked at Mena’s elbow. It relieved her that he occupied the role as he had before. The morning after Corinn had used his body to speak through, it had taken Mena some time to explain how he came to wake in her bed. He had no memory of it, and Mena convinced him that he had simply walked in his sleep. She had found him in a daze in the corridor, she explained. She directed him to the first spot to lie down that she could find—her bed. She had not been discomforted. She just slept on the couch in the adjacent room. Nothing inappropriate happened. Nothing they needed to discuss with others. Such things occurred during the stress of approaching war. Better he believe that than know the truth, including that she lay, taking heat from his body, for some time before crawling away. Some things were better kept to oneself.

Gentling as it was on the contours of the land, the snow was a misery to walk through. The soldiers kicked curses into it, struggled to keep their balance. They paused after only a few steps, breathing hard. Several lost their boots in the stuff and had to dig around in it with their hands, one socked foot exposed to the cold.

They spent several hours tugging and shoving several catapults and ballistae into place. By the time they were ready and the two sides faced each other across a stretch of trodden and slashed snow, they were exhausted, panting plumes of vapor into the air.

Though they would not have wanted to know she heard them, more than one soldier on her side grumbled at the incongruity that his face could be plastered with sweat while vapor froze into ice nuggets in his beard, or that his torso could be drenched while his toes had gone beyond cold to numb, or that his mouth was parched for liquid while his bladder made him stop to pee every few moments.

When a soldier noticed her within hearing of such a complaint, his face flushed red with embarrassment. She let him see the sternness of her face. In truth she felt all the same things herself, the problem of wanting to pee being chief among them. She also noted his Candovian accent. He did not belong in the frozen north any more than she did.

Not a good start, she thought.

It got no better when the battle began. The two sides roused themselves sluggishly at the horns’ call. They slogged forward. They tripped and had trouble rising. Their wooden swords and axes encumbered them as they toppled over one another, cursing. The two sides did not so much hit each other as collide, stumble, and fall back, swinging their weapons either as an afterthought or in search of balance. Archers lofted blunted arrows into this mêlée. A pathetic effort. The catapults’ gears got stuffed with snow, frozen in place. Only one managed to lob a weighted ball. It flew over the opposing side. The ballistae did not shoot at all; the padded bolts had been lost somewhere.