A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (21 page)

“There’s an Ilvani settlement,” he said finally. “A frontier
forest-home inside the Yewnwood, south of Nesadale.” They had passed that
smaller Human city two days ago now, the Free City of Yewnyr four days beyond
that. All that time, he and Cass shadowed the trade road along the twisting
side tracks that wound their way through rolling farm country. Always ahead of
them, south and west beneath the high sun, the vast expanse of the Yewnwood
spread along the horizon as a green-black shroud.

They had taken a similar road from Highport to Yewnyr when they finally
left the great coastal city. The trade routes made it a little more than a
month’s journey for those in a hurry, but the memories of Myrnan needed a
slower road to clear them. Once in Yewnyr, Cass had been prepared for another
lengthy stay, and so she was surprised when Raub told her after a week that he
was heading south.

“We make time today,” he said, “we’ll be there by nightfall.”

“Something there you’re due to see? Or someone?” Cass gave him a
sidelong glance.

“I was born there,” Raub said evenly. “A place called Anthila.”

Cass was thoughtful as she adjusted her pack, half the size of
Raub’s and a quarter its weight. Her blanket and bedroll were the cloak she
wore, a change of clothes and her weapons the only real gear she ever carried.

“You talked about it once,” she said. “Anthila.”

Raub felt a sudden chill against the heat of the sun, near
mid-high now. The bird was done and he washed its grease from his fingers with
moss and a quick spurt from his waterskin, avoiding a response. A familiar
unease traced through his mind, not so much in reaction to what Cass said but
to the context. If she was speaking the truth, it was a conversation he didn’t
remember.

Like she could sense that unease, Cass answered the question Raub
couldn’t ask. “You said you couldn’t go back. I tried to ask you why, but you
weren’t overly amenable to questions that night.”

In the carefully pitched tone of her voice, in the echo against
the steady pace of their footsteps and the song of unseen birds in the tall
grass, Raub felt the lie. Not in what Cass repeated about him not going back,
but in her saying that he kept his silence afterward. Whatever he said to her
then, she must have felt the hurt it carried, which told him with cold
certainty that he had told her the truth.

Part of the truth, at least.

“My father,” he said quietly. Repeating what he was sure she already
knew. “He’s the reason I didn’t go back.”

“Old arguments?”

“I heard word in the Free City. He’s dead.”

Though she hadn’t been formally asked, Cass was ready to leave
the day Raub set out, falling in beside him without a word as they passed
through Yewnyr’s Thirty-League Gate. When he told her his plans, she sensed a
change in him but didn’t know what it meant. As she always did, she weighed her
options with an overly critical mind, every decision given an attention beyond
what most of them deserved. But as she often did, she found that attention
diverted by a need for company that she seldom admitted, even to herself.

She didn’t know how old she was. But already in a relatively
short life, Cassatra had walked enough roads alone.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. Raub said nothing, eyes on the
road ahead.

Two years ago now, and a month before he met Cass for the first
time, Raub had come into his first serious coin riding as a mercenary guard on
the caravan routes through the inhospitable Munychion Plains to the east. In
Nesadale, he spent that coin almost immediately, purchasing the confidence of a
Yewnwood trader who worked the Ilvani settlements of the eastern forest and the
adjacent Human frontier. Irasol was a scruff-bearded half-Ilvani who passed through
Anthila four times a year to appraise and buy the fleet grey horses of the
forest clans. For the equivalent of a year’s salary for any city worker, he
kept his eyes and ears open on Raub’s behalf.

It had been three seasons since Raub passed through Yewnyr. The
last time was with Cass, bound for Highport and Myrnan beyond. Irasol was the
one who introduced them to the broad-shouldered northerner named Connal, who
had first whispered to them of the eastern road, and of the treasures and
dangers lurking beneath the blasted hills at the heart of the Sorcerers’ Isle.

While they were away on that journey, the news came that Raub had
waited six years to hear.

Like Raub, like Cass, like the others who had made up their company
when they arrived at the isle, Connal came through the madness of Myrnan’s
ancient ruins unscathed. The dark barbarian hadn’t spoken in the aftermath,
though. He simply took his share of the wealth they pulled out of that
darkness, then fled for the docks at Claygate Keep and back to the Gracian
mainland. He had bested the dungeons of Eltolitinus, the dark foundations of
Myrnan’s ancient island-castle, as had all of them who survived. But as with so
many of those so lucky, Raub saw in the warrior’s cold eyes the shadow of
having left something behind in that darkness.

“So why are you going back?” Cass’s voice pulled him from his distraction.
The western wind of the night before was gone, a colder breeze from the north
carrying gathering clouds.

“My father is dead,” Raub said, as if she might not have heard
him the first time.

“If you only just got word in the city, he’s been dead for weeks.
Longer, maybe. If you wouldn’t go back while was he alive, why do it now?”

Raub had seen that same shadow in the others who emerged with him
into sunlight at the end of their ordeal. Full-blown in the sullen Vanyr
warlord who had appointed himself leader of their expedition. More guarded in
the dragon-marked mage who walked at that warrior’s side. He saw it in the grey
eyes of the Gracian sellsword he knew only as Dilaon, a companion of Connal’s
who carried himself with a nobility that spoke to a story Raub never heard. He
saw it in the mercenary boss who was the only one of them to have previously
taken the great staircase down into the dark depths.

Eleven of them altogether walked out alive in the end. In
Claygate and Highport and a half-dozen cities beyond, Raub had drunk himself to
the point where he couldn’t remember the faces of the dead anymore.

“Old business,” he said at last.

He had done the same when he left Anthila the winter of his sixteenth
year, losing himself in the taverns and roadhouses of the towns and smaller
cities of the north. Drinking to forget the faces that came back to him the
previous night for the first time in six years, ghostly in that silver pool.
Bright like the sun and hazy as a waking dream.

• • •

As the sun rode past zenith, a wall of trees loomed
before them, marking the sudden and eternal boundary of the Yewnwood. From the
moment they hit the trade road, the forest beckoned them. The ever-present
green of the horizon rose slowly, cresting like a great wave ready to wash
across the open plain. However, not even that gradual sighting could prepare
one for the experience of stepping beneath that wave, Cass realized as they approached.

The yewn was a thick tree of twisted trunk and straight branches,
its broad leaves ever growing throughout all seasons. Green at birth, they
faded gold as they were caught on the wind and cast away. Its only natural home
was the great forest, running one hundred and twenty leagues east to west and
twice as far between north and south where it split the Elder Kingdoms like a
wedge. As they approached, Cass tried to judge the height of the closest trees,
each estimation upgraded as they drew ever closer.

Where the wide track plunged into that green sea, the golden
trunks of two great yewn rose and twisted past each other to form an arch five
times her height. Beyond them, even greater trees loomed, as tall as any keep
or tower she had ever seen. The wind shimmered their sweeping branches as she
and Raub walked beneath them, passing suddenly from the open skies of the
sunlit world into the dusk of the forest road.

The yewn for which the endless wood was named stood as gnarled
shadow-shapes to all sides. Their smooth trunks were the color of goldenrod,
bare where thin bark peeled off and sloughed away of its own accord to cover
the forest floor. Though she felt the weight of the dark at first beneath the
gently rustling canopy of leaves, it didn’t take long for Cass to grow used to
the wind-twisted shadows. All around them was green and gold and silence. A
feeling of closeness, of shelter that she found more peaceful than she ever
would have expected.

They met wagons a dozen times as they walked, Ilvani and Human
traders greeting them with a wary nod as they and their horses clopped past.
Even before they heard the first approach, Raub had pulled the hood of his
cloak up to shroud his face, Cass noting it but not bothering to ask why.

She tried to imagine this moment for him, a half-decade’s homecoming
to a dead father, but she couldn’t. This was a blind spot in her. A place of
darkness in her memory that made her more than happy to share his silence.

The road wound its way over long leagues, crossing the flanks of
narrow streams where they tumbled down from distant hills. But though Cass was
wary of walking through the darkness that would swallow the trees once the sun
was down, the gloom of real dusk had barely fallen when they saw the first
lights of Anthila ahead.

There was no sense of entrance into the settlement. No wall to
mark a defensive perimeter, no outlying farmlands to announce the slow transition
to tightly packed shops and houses. Only a sudden flare of gold that filled the
green twilight with the glow of first dawn.

Cass’s first time in the Free City, she sought out the enclaves
of the Ilvani rangers who patrolled the Yewnwood frontier, asking them the questions
she always asked. As she walked the city, she had gazed in wonder at the Ilvani
wards of the great island-university of Allias, and at the gardens of Gwaleldan
and Lomandra Wood along the southern wall. The terraces of those wards rose as
waves of white stone, supported on the smooth arches of thousand-year-old yewn.
Those great trees had marked the edge of the forest long ago, when rough huts
along the great river were the first signs of the city to come.

The Ilvani of the Yewnwood called their largest settlements
muirilna
.
The forest-homes, great cities set within the trees. In the forest-home of
Anthila, the boles of the broadest yewn stood as wide as any city block. Around
those gently twisting trunks, great wooden terraces rose. Like the slopes of a
sunlit hillside, they climbed on both sides of the road and into a bright haze
of sculpted globes hung from low-sweeping branches. The golden light of magical
evenlamps blazed here, as it lit the streets of the Free City and the houses of
its richest residents. The terraces were connected by wide bridges, and by
intricate wooden catwalks and ladderways hanging suspended from webs of delicate
white rope, ivy-twined. A loom of light and shadow climbed up into the trees
through which Anthila spread.

“It’s beautiful.” It was all Cass could think to say. She saw a
darkness in Raub’s shadowed eyes where he glanced over to her.

“Wait,” he said.

As they walked beneath the supports of the great terraces, Cass
could see that these were living limbs, curving out from the trunks with the
precise arc of a wheel’s rim. Screens of tightly woven branches were their ceilings,
and from every platform and ladder came a buzz of motion and voices. Along the
ground, the forest was all but silent. Stables were the only buildings she
could see, but these were plentiful. Between the trunks of the ancient yewns,
smaller sapling groves were clustered and coppiced to create wide-ranging
corrals. Here and there, glowing ladders reached down to brush the ground, and
where the road opened up to a circle of grey paving stones, two wide stairways
of white-trimmed wood rose through the screen of leaves, circling past each
other as they climbed.

Raub led her up the stairs without a word, and as they climbed,
Cass looked down to see the sleek horses the Ilvani rangers of the wood rode.
Grey and graceful as a morning mist even as they grazed thick grass and
milkweed. She heard laughter and voices from within the stables, merchant
ponies tethered there, and the carts they drew lined up alongside the fence.
These were watched over by a pair of Ilvani boys who danced around each other with
long switches of yewn. These were swords in their hands, the two striking,
parrying, striking again in a focused skirmish that seemed more dance than combat.

At the head of the stairs, the haze of light and sound became a
storm of activity, and they found themselves at the center of a vast market
court, what would have been the central square of any Human city of the Gracian
plain. The floor they walked on was smooth-worn wooden tile, dusted with golden
leaves and set over a frame of woven branches. This was visible through
intermittent gaps that Cass guessed were meant to sluice away rain. The throng
was thick even against the rising of the night, and the voices of merchants and
shoppers alike rang out like song beneath the sweeping canopy of the leaf-ceiling
and the rising ranks of higher tiers overhead.

To all sides, market stalls and peddlers selling from packs and
handcarts created a maze of narrow paths between them. The vendors were Ilvani,
and locals by their look. Their customers were a mix of the forest folk and
travelers on the long road that ran between the eastern forest and the great
Ilvani cities at the Yewnwood’s heart. A good number of rangers walked easy
among them, armed with bow and blade. The soldiers of the Ilvani realms, aloof
and deadly.

Cass caught the nods of greeting as they passed, the careful
respect of a trade-city’s folk, accustomed to strangers. She returned each pleasantry,
saw Raub ignore them. From across the market, voices called out the virtues of
silks and leatherwork, stonework and jewelry, harvest fruit and fresh
nut-bread. The scent of this filled the air around them, and reminded Cass that
it was a week since she had eaten anything but dried rations on the road.
Successive flights of narrow stairs led to higher platforms and terraces above
them, their balconies spilling over with laughter and song, and the scent of
honey mead and roast meat. Beyond those were shaded terraces with what looked
to be walls of wicker and woven bark. Apartments, Cass guessed, rising high into
the cool Yewnwood night.