Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (26 page)

“Miss Alvedo, you should be excited. Giroon the
Great is just as great as his name implies, a living legend of storytelling.”
If she was going to play the retainer and status symbol, she was going to get
under Alvedo’s skin a little bit more and have some fun with it. “I’m quite
jealous.”

Alvedo replied with a look that would have melted
all those golden chandeliers in the entrance.

Two guards flanked the door to their assigned
balcony box, dressed in identical polished steel chest plates over crimson
shirts with long, red sleeves and broad, frilled cuffs. Each wore thin blades
sheathed at the hip, the ornate hilts marking them as formal dress weapons. One
smoothly opened the door when Olivianna approached. His package delivered, the
usher vanished back to the entrance. Tyrissa took up a vigil opposite the door,
sharing nods with the other two guards. Their faces were as identical as their
uniforms, both clean-shaven with pointed chins and narrow noses, and Tyrissa’s
eyes went between each, trying to find a difference. They must be twins, a
sample of the excess of detail some of Khalanheim’s wealthy go through.

Within a few minutes a wave of applause sounded
from the theater, followed by a deep and powerful voice launching into a tale.
The show was on. Tyrissa strained to make out the words, but the walls muffled
the bard’s voice to a thrumming bass, any snatches of clarity elusive. An
accompaniment of stringed music followed the tales, silent or stirring as need
be. Time passed, Tyrissa giving cursory glances up and down the hallway while
listening to the rhythm of Giroon’s voice seeping through the walls. To be this
close, yet get nothing out of it pained her. Alvedo probably didn’t even
appreciate it, focused on worming her way into another advantageous friendship.

The shared sense of boredom must have gotten
through the twin guards’ armor.

“You hear they’re planning a falconry trip soon?”
said one to the other.

“I did. It should make Mistress van Braun less… acerbic
for a time.”

“Acerbic? You’ve been spending too much time with
that woman from the Concordium.”

“Not enough time, if you ask me.”

They continued on, chatting of shifting guard
rotations, and increased security details due to the burst of Thieves activity.

Applause erupted in the theater after an hour,
spiking in volume as the balcony door swung open and Irenea van Braun emerged
from the box seats. She was dressed in a radiant gown made to appear as pale
gold bands, each catching light at a different angle. It drew attention away
from a face where ‘plain’ would be overly kind, as if any scrap of beauty was
strip-mined away to be used in her dress. Tyrissa and the twins snapped to
attention in unison.

“Guardswoman, Olivianna requests your presence.”
She motioned for one of her twin guards to follow, and strode down the hall, as
quickly as her air of elegance would allow.

Tyrissa stepped through the door, closing it
quietly behind her. Below, the theater was an intimate venue, betraying its
roots as a converted banquet hall. There were no more than a hundred seats on
the main floor with a set of private balconies ringing the second floor. A
small orchestra sat in a pit before the stage, the players lowering their instruments.
An intermission, it would seem, though few among the audience had left their
seats.

Giroon the Great stood alone on stage at the
center of a broad pool of light. Dark-skinned and garbed in resplendent robes
of red and black, he stood in contrast to the bright emptiness around him. He
gave a slight bow as the applause died down, islets of perspiration crowning
his bald head with points of light.

“One of my many talents,” the bard said, “Is an
encyclopedic knowledge of heraldry. Men love little more than taking a symbol
for themselves, and they feature heavily in all stories, a common thread
regardless of origin. Thus, I ask the audience to challenge me. Name anything
from the North or West, and I shall identify it.”

“Three white flames on black field,” came the
first shout from the audience.

“That would be the sigil of Rizlin the
Flameweaver, in fiction. Adopted by the ill-fated Felarin house of Telosez, though
sadly it didn’t bestow Rizlin’s immunity to fire.” Scattered laughter sprinkled
through the audience.

“You wished to see me, Miss Alvedo?”

“Jorensen. Yes.” Her voice was a remote whisper,
quiet even for a theater. “I am failing.”

What a tragedy, her tale should be spun on stage.
“Welcome to the rest of humanity, miss.”

“I merely need someone else nearby. If I was
alone I may… lose my composure.” her words quivered in the air, like the final
holdouts of the autumn leaves against the first winds of winter. Below, Giroon
descended to the floor of the theater, fielding further challenges from the
crowd. Most were answered quickly, some before the questioner had finished.
Tyrissa knew half the answers as well, all familiar stories or noble lines from
Rhonia or Felarill. The crowd would have to try harder.

“This
woman
is like trying to befriend a
brick wall with half the personality.”

Tyrissa said nothing, preferring to watch the
bard’s game below and let Olivianna stew for a touch longer.

“House Korith,” said a woman’s voice during a
lull in questioning, as the audience racked their collective brains for a
tougher query.

“They would be among our Rhonian neighbors to the
east in Survantum. Their shield is two elephants, their trunks joined to evoke
the city’s famed and useless bridge.”

“But she gives me nothing, like she doesn’t want
to be here,” Alvedo continued. “You’d think she’d be grateful for the distraction,
at the very least.”

“You simply have to stay focused and keep
trying,” Tyrissa whispered, though she couldn’t explain why she would even try
to help. “Push everything out of your mind except the goal at hand. Don’t worry
about failure until you actually fail.”

“The simple advice of a northerner.”

“Sometimes simple is all you need. Do you want my
help or is this making up for your silence on the ride here?”

“I’m sorry.”

Sorry? Tyrissa blinked in surprise.
That
was new. She’d thought the word exiled from Olivianna’s vocabulary.

“I’m just a little overwhelmed.”

Tyrissa placed a hand on Olivianna’s shoulder.
She was faintly shaking, and Tyrissa then realized that Olivianna was in over
her head, tasked with something she thought beyond her abilities. Against all
odds, Tyrissa felt sympathetic. She thought back to the twin’s banter.

“What do you know about falconry?”

“Almost nothing,” Alvedo said, her voice lightly
seasoned with panic. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Her guards mentioned she has a fondness for it.
Their household is planning an excursion soon.”

“Well, it’s something to go on,” a pause. “How
the hell am I supposed to bring that up?”

“That’s your problem,” Tyrissa leaned in even
closer to Alvedo’s ear and gave her shoulder a less-than-comforting squeeze.
She whispered, “Remember, you’ve given me every reason to let you suffer and
fail. You’re welcome.”

“It will have to do.” It would seem ‘thank you’
would remain exiled for now.

Their attention returned to the show. Another
would-be challenger shouted out, “A woman slicing her tongue in two with a
knife.”

This one Giroon thought on for a few heartbeats.

“The sigil of Marie Boneshatter, the Doom of
Crestas, Harridan of Blood. An obscure tale in these parts. Well done sir, find
me on an off night at the tavern within the
Grand Inn
and we’ll hoist a
drink to her fortunate demise. I wish to know how you heard of the tale.”

A silver shield formed of quadrants
,
Tyrissa wanted to shout,
winged by five feathers on each side
.

A slash of light announced the Irenea’s return.
Tyrissa gave Olivianna a reassuring smile and returned to her position in the
hallway, closing door behind her. The remainder of the show passed easily as Tyrissa’s
mind raced through planning a surprise visit to the Great Bard.

The
Grand Inn
made a fine companion to the
Palace Theater, built with the same eye towards conspicuous opulence and
located on the same broad street where Khalanheim’s wealthy caroused between
theaters and private clubs. When Tyrissa tried the simplest route first and
asked the receptionist for Giroon’s room number, the woman gave it to her with
little more than a sigh and a dirty look. Tyrissa couldn’t help but feel
disappointed. Sneaking in would have been more fun.

Thick carpet woven with diamond patterns of gold
and azure softened her footfalls and rich cherry wood panels lined the generous
space between rooms. Sparse clean-burning elchemical lamps laid a second
pattern of alternating light and shadow upon the carpet. Room 310 stood at the
end of the hall, next to a window of checkered panes of colored glass that
obscured the view and deadened the noise from the bustling entertainment
district outside. An upholstered bench sat below the window, useless given the
lack of a view at this dead-end of the hallway. She knocked on the door and
received no answer. She must have beaten him here despite crossing the center
of the city three times in her whirlwind rush of returning Alvedo, hurrying home
to trade in her staff and new guild coat for a less official, mundane coat, and
returning to a spot only a few hundred yards from where she began. This was the
first time she’d been still in over an hour.

Tyrissa sat down and took up a watch on the
night-darkened hall. Soon she had Tsellien’s cloak clasp in hand and rolled it
between her fingers like a gambler’s lucky coin, a recent habit she’d adopted
in idle moments. She glanced down at the simple yet vexing crest etched into
the metal disc. Tyrissa had searched through two thick books on heraldry during
one visit to the library, traveling through all the realms, cities, and noble
houses of the North via their emblems and crests. Though there were numerous shields
and wings, nothing matched the clasp. She patted Karine’s dagger sheathed under
her coat. Finding another example of the symbol in the Pact Witch’s ransacked
home only made this whole quest more frustrating, a taste of success that led precisely
nowhere.

With no other avenues of investigation remaining
it was time to consult an expert. The posters advertising his show claimed
Giroon the Great knew every legend, every tale, and every song, true or
fanciful. Heraldry like this should be simple. Of course, he would have no
reason to help her, but Tyrissa knew how to approach him thanks to the one part
of the show she had seen.

A hummed tune from down the hall brought
Tyrissa’s attention back to her vigil as Giroon the Great rounded the corner
from the stairwell. He looked shorter without the dramatic framing of the stage,
but was dressed no less grand fashion in a long coat of dark red fabric
intricately embroidered in silver thread that shimmered when he passed through
the hallway’s lamplight. Tyrissa stood as he reached his room and Giroon gave a
slight start, just now noticing her.

“Hmm? Ah. Tell Madam Allimon that there must be
some error. My next scheduled visit isn’t for another two nights.” He unlocked
his door without a second glance in her direction. His voice was true to the
stage, a deep, projecting timbre infused with the rhythms of a poet with a
verve that you felt as well as heard. He wasn’t old, but his face already bore
a handful of deep lines from a life of smiles, laughs, and scowls, feigned or
otherwise.

“What—”

“Please deliver her my thanks for attempting to
give me more variety,” his eyes gave Tyrissa a quick assessment, lingering on
her face, “However, you’re much too tall, young, and pale for my tastes. No
offense meant. I’m sure the large, exotic northerner angle will work out well
after another year or two of filling out. I like the hair.”

“Wait—”

Giroon pushed the door open just wide enough to
slip through and spun in place on the other side of the threshold.

“I bid you a good evening, miss,” he said through
the narrowing gap.

Tyrissa shot out a hand, stopping the door with a
thud that reverberated in the air between them.

“I’m not a whore.”

The slice of Giroon’s face between frame and door
looked halfway apologetic and said, “No? Well then we’ve truly naught to
discuss. My apologies for the misunderstanding. Good. Eve.” He punctuated with
pushes on the door. Tyrissa inwardly smiled at being stronger than him and
leaned a little more into the polished wood. She began her pitch.

“During your show tonight you took challenges on
heraldry and titles from the audience.”

Giroon seemed to give up getting the door closed,
but held his position all the same, mouth turned in a stymied half-frown.

“Yes, there’s a schedule posted outside the
theater if you didn’t get your chance. I’m here through the winter.”

Tyrissa stood firm against another push from the
other side and held up the cloak clasp. “Have you ever seen or heard of this
symbol?”

The bard opened his mouth to fire off a quick
dismissal but remained silent, his brow furrowing in concentration. Tyrissa
could almost see the pages of ancient tomes turning behind his eyes, the trance
of an expert racking his brain. After many moments of dredging though his
memory, Giroon loosened his hold on the door, said, “My dear, why don’t you
come in?” and retreated into the room. Tyrissa took a second to savor the
little victory, then followed.

The bard’s room was one of the inn’s suites, a
grand room suitable for their temporarily residing Great Bard. It had the same
soft carpets and the paneled walls were hung with paintings of distant
landscapes of pointed mountains and sun-scorched deserts. Two gold-rimmed
travel trunks sat in one corner, one gaping open and empty, the other closed
and locked. Through a wide doorway in the rear was another room where a four
post bed stood in the shadows. Giroon made a quick circuit around the darkened suite,
sparking to life a handful of lamps that bathed the room in warm yellow light
and filled the air with the faint odor of oil. An empty fireplace stood along
the outer wall, flanked by tall, curtained windows. Tyrissa settled into a one
of a pair of thickly upholstered chairs placed in front of the fireplace. The
chair was so deep and comfortable that it threatened to send her right to sleep
as the weight of the long day crashed onto her.

“May I hold the emblem,” asked the bard, standing
above her with palm outstretched. Tyrissa obliged.

Giroon shed his extravagant coat over the back of
the other chair and began to pace a circle around the room. His arms were bare
to the shoulder and Tyrissa saw that he had matching tattoos of delicate script
shaped into chains etched around his upper arms. The ink was a fiery red
against dusky skin and its brilliance made the common tattoos she’d seen among
the men of the Cadre seem dull and ancient. Giroon held Tsellien’s emblem in
his palm, his hand slightly extended in front of him, as if he chased the
emblem as he paced about. He would look down at it every so often, as if to
make certain it was still there and still a mystery to him.

“The rune is old Hithian for thirty-two,” he said
after three circuits. “That much is trivial. But the arrangement of the
feathered wings is unusual and shields are rarely so plain…” he deliberated
quietly to himself for a few more circuits about the room, his speech slipping
between the common language of the North and a far more exotic, rhythmic tongue.

“How did you come across this?” he finally asked.

“I found it in the ruins of a temple in Morgale.
It was on the previous owner’s corpse, lying in the dust of defeated daemons.”

“Daemons,” Giroon mused, “The fodder of fiction
and
reality, for some.”

Tyrissa shivered despite the warmth of the room
and could feel the cuts on her skin, fresh and hateful phantoms. She pushed the
memories back down.

“Right,” she said through clenched teeth,
“Fodder.”

“You’re a little young to be crossing continents
for the sake of a strange symbol,” he motioned at the emblem in his upturned
palm with a flourish. “What is your concern with this number thirty-two, if I
may ask?”

“She was Hithian, a Pactbound of some kind I’ve
never heard of. And I am number thirty-three.” The admission still had such
weight. While she had internalized the idea weeks ago, speaking it aloud to
someone new made all the more real.

Giroon smiled with some secret satisfaction. “Ah.
The chosen successor lost in the world with only the barest hints at her true
nature. I love it when life mimics fantasy.”

“It’s not as great as the tales make it seem.”

“No, but by being true your story will be made
that much better,” Giroon extended his hand to return Tsellien’s clasp. Tyrissa
took it back and closed her hand around it, slightly more comfortable now that
it was back in her possession.

Giroon settled into the opposite chair and tented
his fingers into some semblance of an image of wisdom.

“Perhaps you should tell me the story so far,
hmm?”

“Sure,” Tyrissa whispered, steeling herself and
sorting out her thoughts. She couldn’t keep this entire thing bottled up any
longer. She needed more help.

Tyrissa spun out a story for the storyteller. She
started with what she knew of Tsellien and, by extension, Karine. She told him
what she could remember of the receiving her Pact, but glossed over the fact
that she
died
in the process
.
The more time passed, the more that
part felt too unreal to voice. Then it was onto the odd interactions with
elemental magicks, of turning one element into its opposite, and the reaction
of other Pactbound to her mere presence. She finished with the icy vision of
the other woman with the same mark upon her shield and briefly drew out
Karine’s dagger to show off another example of the mark. Once she finished, the
relief from telling someone else everything she knew was palpable.

“Above all there’s this sense of interaction with
the elements themselves. It’s somehow part of the Pact. What I can do… it
doesn’t match any of the stories. It’s like I’m outside of the Elemental Wheel.
The version with eight elements, at least.”

“So then you are part of the ten-segment wheel,”
Giroon said, his first words in a while. “The wings do have something of an angelic
appearance. Given what you said about where you found your predecessor’s
corpse, we can likely rule out the Infernal segment of the wheel, correct?”

Tyrissa nodded. “So it would be the Divine by elimination.
That is what receiving the Pact felt like. Divine.”

“The Divine and the transmutation of elemental
magicks,” Giroon murmured while drumming his fingers against the arm of the
chair. “With those two points we have a place to truly begin.”

“But there’s never been a Divine Pactbound.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“No.” She thought of the Cleanse, of the tales of
men corrupted and empowered by the touch of daemons. By infernal magicks. Where
was the counterbalance to the touch of the Infernal? Fire and Water, Wind and
Earth. The Infernal and the Divine. She found it difficult to think of herself
as some piece of
Divinity.
Tyrissa was hardly pious but such a thought went
beyond presumptuous. Beyond arrogance.

“For a divine source of magick, the nearest tales
that comes to mind are a handful that end with the protagonist being taken away
to the afterlife by some variety of an angel or messenger. Normally it’s played
as a ‘Your time has come’ situation, after they’ve accomplished all they’re
destined to do. The heroes go willingly, but the villains and anti-heroes fight
it to no avail, finding all of their powers useless against divine judgment.”
He gazed over toward the closed travel trunk across the room. “I must dig up
some examples.”

“Calad Stoneshield,” Tyrissa said, “He was
brought before the Ten Gods by an escort of Valkyries after completing his
quest.” Tyrissa had the misfortune of reading that part of his saga early,
though it made little sense until she found other books with Calad’s earlier tales.

Giroon waved a hand, dismissive. “Or vanished
into the conflagration of Vordeum, consumed by the uncontrollable fires like so
many others. Like many stories it all depends on which ending suits your
purposes.”

“Yeah, that’s true.” Tyrissa preferred her
version, but endings were so mutable. She said as much when she told the Zeris
story to Alvedo and Jesca before the autumn gala.

They spent the better part of an hour comparing
stories, dredging for anything similar to the emblem or Tyrissa’s tenuous grasp
on her and Tsellien’s shared abilities. Giroon’s knowledge was encyclopedic and
bordered on unnatural. Despite not even being from this side of the world, he
knew every story Tyrissa mentioned, often including alternate versions. Once
reminded of a single aspect of a tale he could rattle off a summary. It was
like speaking with a living library.

After some time Giroon drew out a pocket watch.

“The hour grows late, Tyrissa,” he said. “I have
another show tomorrow and you should return home. I will have to think on all
of this and do a little research in my spare time.”

“Does that mean you’re going to help me?”

”Indeed.”

“Does that mean I’ve stumped the
great
bard with a story he doesn’t know?”

Giroon held out his hands as if to stop her. “Let’s
not jump to conclusions. I will admit that it holds considerable fascination to
me.”

“Everyone wants payment in this town. What is
your price for this Giroon?”

“True enough,” the Bard said, pausing to consider
his price. “The challenge will be enough for now, but I will think of some form
of favor in exchange. Return to me if you discover anything more about yourself
or this symbol.” He grinned and gave her a knowing look. “You clearly know
where to find me.”