Changer of Days (10 page)

But Anghara had latched onto something else. “You sound as though you mean to leave me there.”

“I do,” he said, and then had to smile at the expression on her face. “Not to abandon you. But I do need to get us some horses, if we plan on getting any further. The way we are…This bedraggled crew, in this kind of craft, would cause a definite stir in Tanass Han—and you can be sure Sif will hear of that. Our paths now lie on the back roads.”

And so it proved. Miro and Ani, his wife, took in Anghara without demur; Ani had her tucked up in bed within an hour of her arrival, and Anghara, despite her protests, surprised herself by waking almost six hours later, rested and ravenous. There was no sign of Kieran.

He was gone for six days, returning on the seventh with three mismatched horses. Anghara fairly flew at him. “Where have you been? Don’t you know I’ve been out of my mind with worry?”

“Didn’t Miro tell you? Sif hasn’t been seen in this part of the world of late.” Kieran asked, dismounting from the tall bay gelding he rode.

His tone was lightly teasing, and she turned away with a growl of frustration. He was at her side in two long strides. “Hey,” he said, “I didn’t mean to distress you. It’s just that I didn’t want to be seen bargaining for all our horses at any one place…and besides, you look a lot better. The week has done you good.”

She’d glanced up at him, and then down again; there was once again a swirl of what was almost madness in her eyes. But he couldn’t be sure he’d seen it—it was gone when next she met his gaze.

He’d wanted to make her stay another few days, at least—Ani was something of a wise-woman, and her herbs and potions seemed to have done Anghara the world of good. Her face had lost that taut, stretched look, and she had a bit of color in her cheeks; she was still painfully thin, but that would take time to remedy. Still, all of this was only physical; there was a restlessness in her which no herb of Ani’s could heal. And that, in the end, could eventually undo all the good. Anghara was fretting to be on her way, and Kieran finally agreed.

The journey proved even more complicated than Kieran had originally thought. There were more patrols on the roads than ever before, and keeping clear of them was almost impossible; every now and again some path would be blocked and they would have to go around. They doglegged their way northeast, where the mountains which separated Shaymir from Roisinan faded into a broad saddle of low hills, tough to guard and easily accessible on horseback. But Sif kept pushing them further west, keeping them on track for the one place Kieran had hoped to avoid.

Bresse.

It was almost inevitable, in the end, that a last detour brought them within sight of the foothills where Castle Bresse used to stand. Anghara reined in and sat very still, her eyes on the remembered vistas. Kieran, a pace further, stopped his own horse.

“Anghara…”

She turned those luminous eyes on him—no madness there now, only a quiet, ineffable sorrow. “But I must,” she said. “Perhaps, if we’d passed a day’s ride away from here…but, now, I must. I cannot ride past this place without seeing what Sif has made of it.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he muttered, but she had already nudged her horse’s head around, and he could only follow.

The years had been kind. Not much was left of the White Tower; but the harshness of the ruin had been softened by ivy, and tiny white mountain flowers had woken to spring and peered shyly through the tall grass. White, like the robes the Sisters of Bresse had worn.

Anghara slipped off her horse and walked stiffly toward what had been the base of the tower. The earth had fallen in over what had to have been the stairway to the tunnel by which she had escaped. The whole layout was irreparably changed, but she went unerringly to stand at what had been the base of the tower’s stairwell and raised her eyes up imaginary stairs into the corridors where she had first learned to ride her wild gifts.

“Ah, Morgan…” she whispered. “Where are you now…”

Feor had said there’d been a message left at Bresse for those who had the senses to hear it. A message which spoke of what had been done here, and in whose name; and a final testament:
The young queen lives.
Anghara strained with every fiber, every nerve taut with effort, but she could hear nothing except the sighing of the breeze in the tall grass and the occasional thrush among the trees. Perhaps, after all these years, it had faded away…

But even while not hearing Morgan’s voice, Morgan’s words, something deeper in her knew they were still here, they haunted this place and would do so while the world endured. And the pain of being deaf to them tore at her until she sank to her knees amongst the ruins with a cry of utter anguish.

Kieran, who had left her alone with her ghosts, came up at this and knelt beside her. “This was exactly why I didn’t want to pass this way,” he said, his voice filled with compassion, as he readied to lay a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Anghara turned and buried her face in his shoulder, sobbing; she had so much to say she could say nothing at all. Kieran respected the silence, holding her, offering the solace of his presence because he didn’t know how to give her anything else.

“Do you think I’ll ever be able to hear them again?” she asked plaintively after a while, rubbing at her tear-spiked eyelashes.

“I don’t see why not,” Kieran said sturdily, although he had no clue what she was talking about. But it seemed to do the trick. Anghara scrambled to her feet, flicking clinging bits of brush off her knees.

“Come on,” she said, suddenly anxious to leave. “I can’t…I can’t bear this place. There is too much here…that I remember…too much I cannot reach…”

“I agree,” said Kieran, with some alacrity. He didn’t like the look of her. The madness had swirled back into her eyes, gray-blue, as she stared at the ruin of the White Tower, and he hated it when she started sounding fey. It separated them, an almost physical barrier he had no hope of ever scaling or even understanding. He wouldn’t be sorry if the Khelsies told her the damage was permanent and she had to learn to live without the dangerous, fiery gift of her Sight…and then he caught himself with a gasp. These were Sif’s thoughts, Sif’s rationalization for the destruction he had let loose amongst his people—the destruction Kieran had spent the last four or five years fighting against.
What am I thinking?
he asked himself, aghast.
Would I really throw away something that someone I love treasures simply because I cannot understand it?

In one thing, at least, Anghara was right. They would do well to leave this place as soon as they might. It was doing neither of them any good.

There were also patrols in the foothills, but it was too broad a frontier to guard with a soldier on every knoll. They slipped through unobserved, and crossed into Shaymir on Kieran’s birthday, a fact he found oddly symbolic.

Beyond the foothills, the land sloped away into moors not so much different from the one they had left behind in Roisinan.

“I thought this was a desert country,” commented Anghara, who had never been to Shaymir.

“You’ll see plenty of desert soon enough,” Kieran said. The words were vaguely familiar; Anghara groped for them through a fog of confused memories, then recalled ai’Jihaar—ai’Jihaar on the ship. The same words had been said at the beginning of her last exile.

“There’s no need to try and tangle ourselves into the real desert country before we have to,” Kieran said. “You’ve no idea how difficult…” He caught her looking at him with a wry smile. “All right,” he said, with a self-deprecating grin of his own, “so you do have an idea. Still…Let’s stick to the plain while we can; and then I’d like to get us fresh horses for the next stretch, or perhaps even camels…but that depends on how rough the mountain passes might be—”

“
Ki’thar’en
are very adaptable,” Anghara said.

“What are?”

“I mean…camels. We took them from the coastal plain into the Arad…and then into Khar’i’id…”

She got a blank stare in reply, and decided to leave it. Time enough for geography lessons, if they got through into Kheldrin. And, please the Gods, Kieran would never have to learn what Khar’i’id was…

The Shaymir plains soon petered out into what was only technically not desert—they became dry and dusty, the only grass intermittent hummocks of tall, dry, whispering blades. Squat, spiny cactus-like plants began appearing, and after them it wasn’t long before the harbinger of the real desert, the spicy, sweet fragrance of the tiny desert sage, reached out for them.

Kieran had become increasingly uneasy about Anghara. She wrapped herself in long, brooding silences which would last for hours, riding in a cocoon of solitude which was almost frightening. Once he caught her almost sleepwalking, wandering away from a campfire while his back was turned and stepping into a desert night without any idea as to where she was. That night they’d heard the distant baying of the colhots, desert predators who lived on carrion when they could find it, nevertheless fearless and inventive hunters who never avoided easy prey when it crossed their path. Another time she had sat beside a different campfire—and silent tears ran unheeded down her cheeks as her hand closed on a fistful of dusty sand, letting it trickle out between her fingers.

And tonight, here on the edge of the desert, he’d started awake to a breath of sudden wind which rushed through the still night like a sigh, and what had sounded like a strangled cry. The fire had died to glowing embers and the occasional faint flicker of flame; it was too dark initially to see anything, and Kieran narrowed his eyes to sharpen his night vision. Anghara’s nest of blankets on the other side of the fire was empty.

He scrambled to his feet, groping for his sword. “Anghara! Anghara, where are you?”

Again, a sound; a sob, it sounded like. A sob of pain.

“Anghara!”

He took a few steps away from the fire and all but tripped over Anghara who lay prone on the sand. She clutched a narrow-bladed, black-hafted stiletto in her right hand—for a moment it was unfamiliar, but then memory returned and Kieran recalled seeing it in the package Adamo had rescued from the Calabra inn. A Khelsie dagger.

A long gash on her left forearm oozed blood into the desert sand. Kieran’s heart sank. “What in the name of all the Gods are you doing?” he whispered. “What heathen magic is this?”

She’d opened her eyes and they were twin gleams in the darkness. “It was in the name of the Gods that I did it,” she whispered despondently. “There was a time…but now…look…there’s blood on my sleeve…”

“Of course there’s blood on your sleeve,” he said uncomprehendingly, sheathing his sword and bending down to drape her good arm around his shoulders. “You’ve just laid your arm open. Come on, we’d better clean that up, its full of sand, and I wouldn’t know what to do if it gets inflamed or infected.”

“There was a time,” she said, suddenly and strangely calm, “when there would have been no blood at all. But they didn’t come…
al’Zaan, Sa’id-ma’sihai, qa’rum mali hariah?”

And she’d fainted, gone slack in his arms, still clutching the black dagger in a death-grip he couldn’t loosen. He’d left it, then, turning his attention to the wound it had inflicted. It wasn’t deep, but it was long, running from the inside of her elbow to the wrist. She didn’t seem to have sliced any major blood vessels, but there was a significant amount of bleeding nonetheless and much of it had clotted already, forming a crust around which blood still oozed. Kieran cleaned it up as best he could—twice he restarted the bleeding he’d staunched, and eventually had to resort to the emergency pressure points he’d learned from Madec, the healer who rode with his own band. Battle-spawned knowledge he had never thought he might have to use with Anghara Kir Hama, Queen of the Royal Line of Roisinan. He’d used a clean piece of linen to bandage the gash securely. During his ministrations Anghara had not stirred, nor let go of the black dagger. She seemed to be lost in some unpleasant dream of her own, tossing her head from side to side in the uneasy swoon she had fallen into—or was it sleep? Her brow was filmed with a thin sheen of sweat.

They were still far from Kheldrin.

Seated by the fire, staring at Anghara’s restless slumber, Kieran found a small sprig of desert sage beneath his hand and pulled it out of the ground, almost unthinking, rolling the leaves between fingers and palm, releasing the scent into the clean desert night, remembering…and deeply afraid.

Anghara had been wrong. The Gods had come, the old Gods whom Kieran did not know. He had felt their breath on his face when he’d started from sleep. She had called them, and they had come, wild, loose, dangerous—Gods who had not walked on the eastern side of the Kheldrini mountains for more generations than anyone could remember. But they were here now, and she who had summoned them had no strength left to control them. Kieran’s soul was cold as he sensed eager, inhuman eyes on the girl who writhed in the grip of violent nightmare in the pitifully small, safe circle of a dying campfire.

K
ieran had been dreading the morning, but Anghara woke to lucidity—not that she could fail to wake to full knowledge of the events of the previous night, with a black dagger dark with dried blood clutched in one hand and a tight bandage on her other arm. Having inspected these, in silence, she raised her eyes to meet Kieran’s rather wary blue gaze and, somewhat unexpectedly, laughed.

“It’s all right, I’m not dangerous,” Anghara said with a wry smile still playing around her mouth. She’d run an experimental hand over the ground at her heels, but it was too hard to scour her dagger clean desert-fashion, by simply plunging it into the sand. “Can I have something to clean this with?”

Kieran passed a rag. “I don’t really want to ask this,” he said carefully, “but what were you trying to do last night?”

She answered without looking at him, bent industriously over her blade. “Trying to prove something,” she said, very quietly. He couldn’t see her grimace but he could hear it in her voice as she said, “Although why I picked last night to try, I can’t tell you. All I did was prove…that it still makes me ill…”

“What does?” He was on his feet. “Are you all right?”

She looked up at that, with another smile. “No, Kieran.” There was pain in her eyes; her voice, infinitely gentle, was raw with it. “I wonder,” she said, her eyes wide, focused somewhere beyond the horizon, “if he knew how deeply he wounded me…”

He.
Sif. The specter who had ridden into Shaymir with them. Kieran’s eyes darkened. “But you did…”

She focused her gaze back on him, after a beat of silence. “Did what?”

But Kieran had already thought better of it. Now was probably not the time to tell her about what he had felt last night. “No, it’s not important. Do you feel like some breakfast?”

“I couldn’t eat a thing,” she said wanly.

“We’ve a long day ahead,” he said, sounding like a mother scolding a recalcitrant child. “You need to keep your strength up.”

“Very well,” she said, after a small hesitation. “I’ll try.”

She didn’t eat much, but Kieran didn’t press the point. Anghara always seemed at her weakest in the morning, oddly enough—just after she had supposedly spent a good few hours resting during the night; it was as though she drew whatever strength was hers to muster from the effort of the day. This morning, more than ever, she seemed edgy and restless and frail—as though she smelled something in the wind.

“I feel…as though we’re not alone,” she said at length, pausing to look around as she was about to mount her horse.

Kieran felt an icy shiver down his spine. “What do you mean?” Could she sense them after all, those whom she had called here?

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s as though…Ah, but I’m dreaming. Oh, my head! I’m dizzy with headache. Kieran, what happened last night?”

“I only…woke when I heard you cry out,” he said carefully, avoiding her eye.

She’d mounted by now, and seemed absorbed by the dried blood on her sleeve. But she roused after a moment and gave him a brave smile. “All right, I’m ready. Where to from here?”

“I think it’s safe to start edging a little to the north now,” said Kieran. “We should be past the Dance…”

“The Dance?” Her horse shifted nervously under sudden conflicting commands from heel and bit. “The Shaymir Dance…Perhaps that was what triggered…Is it close by? Can we…”

She had been luminous, transformed; a sudden light had flashed in the wide gray eyes. But then she reached for Sight—out of instinct, from the plinth of power—and Kieran could see the instant of breaking. She crumpled in pain, the light fading; there had been something in her face at that moment that had been almost old.

A weird gust of wind chose that moment to explode out of nowhere, blowing dust and sand into a small twister at the horses’feet; it faded almost as soon as it came, leaving the debris it had picked up to fall where it would. In its wake the air grew solid, still, as though Kieran was breathing honey. But as he drew his first shallow, ragged breath of it, even that was gone, leaving nothing but a sense of a vast and brooding power. Still struggling to get his breath back, Kieran became aware that Anghara was speaking.

“…sorry. I swear, I felt it less keenly when I was shut up in Sif’s dungeons—now that my body is free it’s harder for the soul to accept it’s still in chains…Are you all right, Kieran? You look as though you’ve seen…a ghost…”

That too he saw breaking on her face—the realization of who his ghosts were. There was a blank look in her eyes which frightened him, a white shadow around her mouth. “They did come,” she whispered, her voice hoarse with emotion. “I called them, and they did come…and I can’t even sense their presence…”

This time there was no conflict; the horse reacted to a sharp stab of its rider’s heels and set its ears back, breaking into an explosive gallop. But not before Kieran, in the instant she turned away, saw the flash of tears in Anghara’s eyes.

Kieran swore softly. He was hampered by the packhorse tied to the back of his own saddle, and Anghara was rapidly opening up a distance between them. “Anghara! Wait!” he yelled, urging his own mount into a gallop in her wake. “Wait!”
I didn’t ask your damned Gods to come to me!

It was debatable if Anghara was still in control of her plunging animal by this time. She seemed to have given the beast its head, merely hanging onto the reins as best she could. When the horse stumbled over some small hollow in the ground, the lurch was enough to throw her clear; she landed well, but hard enough to make Kieran wince. Her horse came to an uncertain stop a few paces later, snorting, aware of a sudden lifting of weight and peering back to see what had become of its rider, before turning its attention to what sparse grazing grew in that place. Short of a desultory flick of its ears, it paid no attention to the approaching thunder of the other horses. Kieran rode up, sliding off his own mount almost before it had come to a full stop, and raced to where Anghara lay.

She was dusty, and the fall seemed to have wrenched open the cut on her arm, where the linen bandage was seeping red. But it didn’t look as though there were any bones broken, although she would probably be black and blue for days.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, even as he dropped to one knee beside her and reached out a hand to her face. A tear squeezed its way past her closed eyelashes and left a wet trail down her dusty cheek. “Kieran…what if I’m never myself again?”

The gray eyes had opened at that last question and there was such unbearable pain in them that all Kieran could do, in the grip of a wave of inexpressible tenderness, was to reach out and take her into his arms. She clung to him, driftwood to a rock.

“Can you get up?” he asked, after a moment of silence. She sniffed loudly and nodded, letting go of him and grimacing as the pain from her wounded arm finally made itself known. Kieran also glanced at it. “We’d better sort that out before we go any further.”

She sat quiescent while he was bent over that task, but as he straightened she said, very calmly, “Tell me, Kieran. What did you see?”

He met her eyes candidly. “Nothing, and that’s the truth. But I felt…the night you cut your…you called them, I woke and felt the wind on my face like a breath—and afterward, while you slept, there were eyes in the night. And now, now there was a whirlwind at my feet, and then the air became…like no air I have ever breathed.”

The God-presence. She knew that well. Her eyes were wide, as though with shock. “I can’t sense them…I can’t feel anything…”

Kieran reached out and shook her shoulder. “Don’t,” he said, aware she had been about to try and channel Sight again, seeking for that which eluded her. “Don’t torment yourself. They came when you called them. Isn’t that enough?”

She laughed, a bitter little laugh which broke on a sob. “Never. It will never be enough.” She recalled with a sudden clarity the touch of unearthly wings, the immortal eyes set into the great vulture head; the creature who had spoken with her, who had given her the gift of resurrection—al’Khur. Was he beside her now, waiting to take it back? “It will never be enough.” She got up, dusting herself down as best she could with her good hand. “Can we go?” she asked, and her voice was plaintive, nothing left in it of command.

“I’ll get your horse,” said Kieran after a pause, squeezing her shoulder in encouragement.

The horse was lame, which was not entirely surprising; Kieran transferred the packhorse’s load onto Anghara’s beast and her own saddle onto the erstwhile beast of burden. They would be slowed down, but they wouldn’t have kept the horses for much longer anyway; Kieran planned to trade them for camels as soon as they came upon some decent specimens.

They rode off again, north by northeast. And all the time Kieran had the uneasy feeling of someone’s eyes on his back; had he known any Kheldrini, he would have smiled at their adage that one is never alone in the desert. In this moment, he would have known exactly what they meant. But Anghara showed no awareness, and Kieran didn’t bring the matter up. They passed too far from the Shaymir Dance to see it.

That night, deep in the shadow of Kheldrin, Anghara spoke, somewhat unexpectedly, of Roisinan.

“An army,” she said, her knees drawn up into the circle of her arms, staring into the small campfire. “I told Charo to raise me an army. Where is he to get an army to match Sif’s, the army which was my father’s? And if he does, and if I by some miracle hold Sif at bay, what is to stop the Rashin clan from taking advantage and taking Roisinan from both of us? It is my land, my inheritance—but am I throwing it to the wolves just so I can call it my own?”

“It was always yours. As for the army…yes, Sif’s is trained, and it has been devoted to him, but if they learned you were alive and…”

“They knew I was alive when they helped him take Miranei after my father’s death. The knowledge didn’t stop them.”

“I wonder if Fodrun ever regretted his decision?” Kieran said thoughtfully.

Anghara turned to look at him, her eyes twin mirrors reflecting leaping flames. “What do you mean?”

“They won the second battle at Ronval, and won it well. But part of the reason Fodrun supported Sif was that he believed Sif could deal with Tath. But in the years since—well, with half-competent generals, you could have done as well as Sif.”

“He couldn’t be king until he knew no other could claim his throne.”

“And yet—when he had you, he held you…why didn’t he kill you the minute he heard you were in his hands?”

A memory surfaced, old, faded—a little girl crossing a cobbled courtyard, one hand firmly held in the hand of a nurse, the other clutching a small doll. An uneven cobble, a trip, a stumble; the doll went flying. By the time the little girl had straightened herself up and looked around it was already back—in the slim brown hand of a boy with pale blue eyes and hair very like her own. She had politely offered a thank-you, as she had been taught; he smiled—a little tightly, but he smiled. Had that been their first meeting? Anghara couldn’t remember; but she could clearly recall her feelings. It had been only a stirring, but it had been there—a dim potential for affection which had never flowered.

Perhaps Gul Khaima had known all along. A line of its odd prophecy came floating back now:
love given to him who hates.
Could Anghara have loved her brother? What was it that had stayed his hand?

But Gul Khaima was part of Sight; already she could sense clouds gathering in the back of her mind even as she skated on the edges, with ominous rumblings of thunder warning her of what would follow if she went too far along that path.

She rubbed her temples with her fingers, closing her eyes. “Kieran…if they can’t heal me…if they can’t help me in Kheldrin…I don’t know if I can come back. I can’t claim Roisinan when I am not mistress of my own soul.”

“They will,” said Kieran, with more confidence than he felt—or wanted to feel, given his own glimpses of knowledge of Kheldrini methods, reinforced now by Anghara’s own actions, which he had witnessed firsthand. “But even if they can’t…don’t throw Roisinan away lightly. Sif has reigned for years without Sight. It can be done. And there are many who would give much to see you sit once again on the Throne Under the Mountain. It is yours.”

“For years,” Anghara said, “I lived with that. It is mine. I just wonder, should that time ever come, if I love it enough to renounce it.”

“But if not Sif, and not you…who else is there? Tath? Would you allow your father’s slayer to sit on his throne?”

“That isn’t fair,” she said, wincing.

“I rescued you from Sif’s dungeons. Now it seems I must try to lead you out of another of your own forging.”

They were nearing the outcrop of low, copper-bearing hills lying behind Kieran’s native Coba and many small settlements just like it. The hills divided the settled and fertile basin of Lake Shay from the vast sandy desert stretching away to the north—a spur of the great mountain range which swept south to embrace Miranei and give it its ancient name. As the sun was setting behind the hills on the second day, Kieran shaded his eyes against the low golden rays and pointed to the shallow slopes of the foothills.

“There’s a village,” he said. “We can make it there before it’s completely dark; rest for a day or so. Perhaps they’ll have camels for sale.”

But there had been a strange hesitation in his voice, and Anghara had noticed him cast an uneasy glance behind them. “Are you afraid they’ll follow you in?” she asked steadily enough; obviously the Kheldrini Gods were still Kieran’s companions, if not her own. “Don’t worry, al’Zaan will not enter a place where there are walls; ai’Lan is never strong without sunlight. You’re left with only ai’Dhya, and al’Khur.”

“The Lord of Death?” Kieran said, shivering slightly. Anghara had spoken a little of her Kheldrini sojourn on their journey; Kieran knew, at the very least, the identities of the Old Gods in their Kheldrini incarnations. “That’s quite enough for me.”

But he spurred his horse on with his heel, and before long they had reached the first houses in the village. Most were dark; one or two showed soft yellow lights through small, slit-like windows. One, a large, low building, poured a whole ribbon of light through an open doorway.