The Sacred Hunt Duology (48 page)

The wild girl, so named, suddenly raised her head and barked. If she had had a tail, Stephen was sure it would be thumping away at the carpet.

Gilliam started to stand, which galvanized his huntbrother into action. That action, unfortunately, was to offer an arm as support, rather than to force an errant Hunter back to his seat. Gilliam would stand, and Stephen, knowing that this was not a point that he could win without a protracted and public argument, gave in gracefully.

“Evayne, mage, or whatever you are, we will go to the city. With Espere.”

At this, Evayne laughed, although the laugh was a gentle one. Then the laughter faded, and she turned to face them both, fully. “He chose Espere's protectors well, when he sent her to you. Listen, both of you. Listen well. What I speak here will not be repeated.” Her arms, she raised to either side; stiff and dark-robed, she became a mortal cross. Her eyes, violet, became darker still, irises spreading across the whites until nothing human remained.

When she spoke, her voice was a chorus.

Just as Teos' voice had been.

“The Covenant has been broken in spirit; the portals are open; the Gods are bound. Go forth to the Light of the World, and find the Darkness. Keep your oath; fulfill your promise. The road must be taken, or the Shining City will rise anew.”

“What oath?” Stephen shouted, for the voices were a storm; even when the words had finished, the air was heavy with their texture. Pain and peace, age and
youth, love and hatred called out through Evayne's lips, and then lingered a moment in her eyes.
“What oath?”
His words were heavy; sharp. The Shining City was a thing of legend—and a legend so fell and so dark that in the end, it claimed Morrel's life at the dawn of time.

Violet eyes cleared as Evayne lowered her arms; she had offered him no answer. “I thank you both,” she said softly, her voice once again her own. “But I must travel now.” Speaking had diminished her somehow.

“That was a God's voice,” Stephen said.

“Yes. I am your wyrd, Stephen. You know which God speaks through me. And if you do not, I cannot speak of it. I must leave.”

“What in the Hells did it mean? What oath are we supposed to keep? What is the darkness and what is the light?”

“I don't know.” Bitterness returned to her face. “I only know from my own experience that my advice to you is sound—you must go to Essalieyan.” When his eyes narrowed, she added, “I am no more god than you, Stephen of Elseth. Do you think that my God will grant me permission to enter his counsels, any more than yours does?” She turned, then, and began to walk away.

“Wait!” Stephen said, swiftly following her. He caught her shoulder in a tight grip, and she drew herself up to her full height. She did not pull away, but instead pivoted to face him.

“Yes?”

“Last night—last night you . . .” He didn't know what he wanted to say, and looked away from the pale violet of her steady glance. “Did you know, last night, what would happen to us? What we would choose?”

Her brows drew together into a peppered line; the wrinkles there deepened enough that it was clear what expression had formed them. “Yes,” she answered at last, as if the words had been dragged from her. “But I did not know that now you would ask me of it. I was bitter in my youth,” she added, and her lips turned up in a simile of a smile, and of wisdom. Neither reached her eyes. He saw her age clearly, but more clearly saw the weakness and the fear that he associated with only the very youthful.

“And not now?” He pressed her.

“I don't know. Am I?” Before he could answer, she reached up and touched his cheek, trailing its hollow with her fingers until they trembled off the line of his jaw. As he opened his mouth in shock, she withdrew her hand. There was an intimacy, a knowledge, a familiarity in her touch that Stephen was afraid of. She started to speak, and then shook her head and pulled away. He did not stop her.

But she turned again as she reached the door. “Time will start the moment I leave.”

Gilliam, Lord Elseth, Stephen of Elseth, and the newly named Espere, watched her with wide, unblinking eyes.

It was to Stephen that she spoke, and the next words were so odd they were almost incomprehensible, although they were simple and plain.

“Stephen—when I was young, you were kind to me. Will you—can you—” She looked away. Drew herself up. Smiled ruefully, and shook her head. “We will meet again, you and I. Be as merciful as you can.”

• • •

“She's gone,” Stephen said quietly when Zareth Kahn pushed the door open and lightly stepped into the room. The scene that greeted his eyes was almost cozy; wood burned in the curtained fireplace in the room's northernmost wall, and around it, Gilliam and the wild girl sat, eyes drawn to the flame, attention absorbed by what they saw flickering in its heart.

It was late enough in the season to be chilly here, but the mages rarely burned wood at this time; they chose instead to don heavier robes and save the heat for more dire need. Zareth Kahn opened his mouth to mention this, then shut it again on the words.

Gilliam was quiet and pale, and the girl, not touching her Lord, but still by his side, even more so. Were it not for the windows, with their open view of birds and greenery, he might have thought it winter.

He cleared his throat, but before he could speak, the door at his back opened rather awkwardly. Navigating its wide, heavy swing, he stepped quickly out of the way as Lady Elseth entered the room.

She was severely dressed in heavy wool skirts and a rather stiff jacket; it was as if she, too, felt the cold here. “Well?” she said quietly, as all eyes turned to face her.

“Evayne is gone,” Stephen replied.

Lady Elseth nodded mildly, as if to say that she had expected as much. She walked over to her sitting son and inspected his ribs with all the nonchalance of a worried mother. “What did she have to say?” she asked in a casual tone of voice that fooled no one.

“We're to travel,” Gilliam replied, leaving off the preamble that would have been Stephen's opening, “to Essalieyan and the city of Averalaan. We leave within the week.”

Lady Elseth had twice undertaken that trek on matters of commerce and trade before Gilliam's father had passed away and the duties of the Elseth demesne demanded her attention and her presence. It took her less than a minute to pale. Her eyes grew round and her hands fell to her sides as her fingers began to curl into the heavy, thick wool of her skirts. But her voice didn't waver. “Why?”

“I don't know,” Gilliam said, and looked to Stephen's back.

“What did she say?” Zareth Kahn stepped between Lady Elseth and her adopted son. “What did Evayne say?”

“That Breodanir will fall if we fail to leave.” Stephen stared into the fire, seeing in the flames neither warmth nor comfort. “I believe her,” he added softly.

“Does she know what this may mean to Elseth?” Elsabet's eyes narrowed as she waited for the answer.

“She knows.”

“And you know it,” Lady Elseth said. “Very well.” She swallowed and then pulled her hands from their nervous dance. “A week is not long enough to see to all of your needs. But—”

“It has to be long enough,” Stephen said, and turned then to face her. His eyes were ringed, his face pale.

“This has to do with the . . . the demons, doesn't it?”

“What else can it possibly be?”

“Stephen.” Gilliam, hand on either wheel, rolled his chair forward until he could touch his huntbrother's hand. “We faced them last night, and we won.”

Stephen nodded, but it was clear that he took no strength from his Hunter's words. He was afraid. Time had begun, as Evayne had promised, the moment she left the room. Time turned; the birds touched branches and left the ground, the wind bobbed in leaves, teasing them away from their trees.

The shadows grew darker, although the sun was bright. The Hunter's Horn hung, heavy, at his side. He had the uncanny sense that if he left this city, this kingdom, he would never return to it again.

And everything that he loved was in Breodanir.

“Lady,” he said, and bowed to the woman who was his mother. “We will have two weeks in the city of the Twin Kings to see to our task.”

“What is your task?” the mage asked, crossing his heavily clad arms, daring to interrupt their discourse. Stephen had expected that Zareth Kahn would be irritated, but instead the mage seemed peculiarly intense and intent. His thin face, shadowed by lack of sleep, looked sharp—the edge of a personality, honed and pressed a little too close for comfort.

“Find the Light of the World. Find its darkness. Keep our oath.”

“In other words,” the mage replied, “you haven't the barest of notions.” He shook his long dark hair, and his eyes became very bright. “But I may have, at the end of this week. With your leave, Lord Elseth, Stephen, I will travel with you at the end of the week—at least as far as Corason.”

Stephen had never thought to be grateful for the company of a mage—especially not one who had attempted to force words from him by dint of a spell. He was grateful now. “She said—she said one other thing,” he told Zareth Kahn in the quiet of the library.

“And that?”

“We must stop the Shining City from coming again.”

“The Shining—”

Silence.

• • •

Elsabet watched as her two sons left the King's City. She knew that they would stop in the Elseth demesne; Gilliam would not be parted for months on end from all of his dogs, and had elected—against the quiet, restrained objections of Zareth Kahn—to take six of his dogs on the road with them.

The girl—Espere, he had called her; she wondered if he knew what it meant—still walked, pranced really, by the side of Gilliam's horse. She could not be forced to mount, but Gilliam insisted that this would not slow their progress. She did not believe him. Still, she had no choice but to believe Stephen when he solemnly backed his Hunter's word.

Time
, she had told the more serious and studious of her sons,
is everything now. You have two and a half months, Stephen
—
don't tarry.

If the Hunter's Death was a loss that every mother feared, Hunter's Disgrace was a life that they feared more. The Sacred Hunt would be called, and if her sons failed in their oaths . . . She clutched the locket at her throat as tightly as she dared and exhaled. There was no greater crime in all of Breodanir.

Then, squaring her shoulders and drawing her long, woolen overshawl tightly about her body, Lady Elseth began her short trek back to her rooms in the Order of Knowledge. She would have liked to travel with her sons; she was not certain when she would see them again, or in what circumstances.

But she had much to do; letters to write to Ladies Morganson and Faergif, a Queen to make a plea before, and a number of different Priests to see. She could not travel with her sons, but she could help them best without ever leaving the King's City.

• • •

Smoke was in the air; there was fire, dust, and the smell of rotting flesh. The sun had come and gone, but there had been too many casualties for the victorious troops to deal with all at once. In the morning, the rest of the bodies would be gathered and buried. Or burned.

Evayne began her quiet search in the darkness. She did not know yet when she was; nor did she know where. She did not know what battle this was, between what armies, over what disagreement. In the shadows and the muted hub of campfires in the distance, the banners hung like slack shadows against their poles, withholding all information. She had hoped, just for a moment, that this would be the end; the point at which, briefly, her path and the path of the rest of the world would finally coincide in a solid way, a meaningful way.

But that was the end of it; she knew it. And this was not the time. There was too much left to do. Who?

She traveled by mage-light and masked her coming, hid the sounds of her retching when the smell or the sight of the not-quite-dead overpowered her. Drawing the folds of her robes well above her knees, she continued to search. Who?

And then she saw the dirty thatch of long blond hair; curls crushed into shoulders
and dirt and a tangle of arms. Her breath was sharp; she was never certain—never—that this time would not be the one in which she would find him dead. He alone, of all of her servants—her victims, as she had once called them in her youth—she had no ending for; no death, no finish. She did not understand Time, or his working, and he didn't understand her motions; they existed, uneasy, as allies of the unnamed God that they both served.

She knelt; felt someone's chest give beneath her left knee. Shuddering, she brushed the heavy, wet hair away from a face. His face. She looked at the lines of it, thinking,
we are almost in the same time.
Then, carefully, she dabbed the dried blood at the corners of his mouth.

He stirred. “Is it you?”

“Yes,” she replied, cradling his head against her chest as she summoned her power. “Where are we?”

He shook his head, and struggled to sit up; grimaced in pain, but did not leave off his attempt.

“Kallandras,” she said, more urgently. “Where are we?”

“I will not tell you,” he replied, his breath a wheeze. “It hurts me; it will hurt you, no matter when you come from.” He coughed; she lifted a hand and danced his noise away with her fingers and a little spark of blue-light. “Come, help me away.”

She nodded in the darkness, brushed the top of his head with the tip of her chin. He froze, and she blushed and pulled away. She blushed—at her age, with so much death and darkness behind her.

But he was gentle, at this age, where he had been cruel in his youth; his anger was softened, although his lined eyes spoke of loss and a yearning which nothing could ever fulfill. No, not nothing. She grimaced as she thought of the Kovaschaii. Stiffened.