Changer of Days (23 page)

“Does that mean you accept?”

“To you, my enterprising lord, would go all the advantages of such a match. Should I agree, it would be no less than a complete surrender—and the battle hasn’t even been joined.”

“Not so,” Favrin said. Too quickly. Anghara braced herself, and looked up; there was an odd, fervid heat in his eyes. She hadn’t been afraid until this moment, but now the faintest touch of fear traced an icy path down her spine. “And must there be a battle after all, Anghara?” he added softly, almost as an afterthought.

“You forget what your women accept when they wed,” Anghara murmured. “The silken chains that lie behind the Silk Curtain.”

“Say rather that they rule their men with a rod of iron from the women’s quarters. It is not an ill life.”

“I was crowned in Miranei when I was nine years old,” said Anghara. “My kingdom is, has always been, my own—I hold what I hold in my own right. If I gain Roisinan and take back my throne, I will not rule my kingdom from behind the veils of the bedchamber, at some man’s whim or indulgence. If you are after an easier way to gain the throne of Roisinan, this is not it, my lord.”

“It could still be.”

“Would you break the traditions of your people and eschew the Silk Curtain? Would you have your barons call you unmanned because your woman would not keep to the confines of the
kaiss
?”

“Do you not think my barons might call me unmanned if they should ever discover what went on here tonight—if they find I stayed to listen to my enemy who is a woman, and then let her go free?” Favrin said.

“Do you measure manhood in this land by how much less worthy a woman is of your attention, except when she is bearing your children?” Anghara said.

“I told you, there is power of a sort in the
kaiss.
”

Anghara shook her head. “Not for me.”

“You would not be an average
kaissan,
that is true—but it could still be. It could still be,” Favrin said, and something leapt in his eyes at the words.

Anghara forced herself not to shrink from his gaze. “Your word,” she reminded him.

He recoiled, swallowed, fought to master his face. Then, again, he laughed. “I think that I find myself in sore need of another glass of wine,” he said, with the slow southern drawl she was beginning to recognize. “May I refill your own?”

Her own glass was still half full, but Favrin scooped it up in passing as he turned and made what was almost an escape into the main chamber.

Kieran had been thinking of late that all the trouble and pain of the last few months had been no more than a training ground to provide him with the endless reserves of patience he increasingly seemed to require. He had been sitting quietly by himself in one of Favrin’s carved chairs by the cold fireplace. Something on Favrin’s face made Kieran leap to his feet, instantly alert; he was not, however, given the chance to find out what it was that had stung him, because this was the moment when everything began to unravel around them.

A tap on the door made Favrin turn with coiled ferocity, betraying a prince’s fury at an order disobeyed. It was followed almost instantly by the fair-haired man who had conducted Kieran and Anghara here and had subsequently withdrawn—Kieran supposed he had gone no further than the guardroom. He had shed the coat and the velvet hat, and now showed himself to be an athletic young man. But the face he turned to his lord was drawn and gray, his eyes blazing with pride and pain. Whatever had happened to bring him here in defiance of Favrin’s instructions had to have been momentous—and, after a frozen moment, Kieran knew what it was, the only thing it could be. He was a breath ahead of Favrin himself, who suddenly reached blindly for the nearest support. He did it with the hand holding the two wineglasses; the delicate glass, the secret of whose making was something the south guarded as jealously as the honor of its women, shattered. A thin trail of red wine ran from what had been Anghara’s glass, like blood from a wound.

“The court doesn’t know yet,” Moran said breathlessly, ignoring the staring guest by the hearth. “The
kaissar
brought the message to me first, not a minute ago.”

“In the
kaiss
?” Favrin asked, his voice oddly hoarse.

“His chambers,” Moran said, shaking his head in swift denial. “Delvera. She will stay quiet.”

Favrin bowed his head, brought a hand up to cover his eyes. “Oh, my lord father!” he murmured; it was a private imprecation, words hardly meant to be heard by anyone else. The gesture was woven from pure pain, but the voice was Favrin’s usual sardonic tone, rich with irony. “You always knew how to live; small wonder you chose to take the God’s hand from the arms of a lover…”

Behind Favrin’s back, Kieran met Anghara’s level gray eyes. Alerted through esoteric senses of her own to impending doom, she had entered the chamber almost at the prince’s heels. She knew what had happened, as though Moran, opening the door, had let the news in before him and it had come at once to lay at her feet. This changed things. It changed everything. They had come to speak with an heir; they were now in the presence of a king.

Favrin seemed to remember this, and the two of them, at about the same moment. He lifted his head, straightening his back. “Send the
kaissar
back; make sure Delvera says nothing, not before I’ve had a chance to speak with her. Then come, and wait.” Moran, who had dropped to one knee before his new king, bowed his head briefly in acquiescence and departed. Favrin turned, very slowly, to Anghara, and she was astonished at the change a few charged moments had wrought in him.

“I can offer you sympathy, if not condolences,” Anghara said, taking the initiative, after a pause which both seemed reluctant to break. “I too lost a father. But you are hardly likely to share my fate—when this old lion died, the lion cub was grown and ready. Whither Tath now, King Favrin?”

The eager fever that had been in his eyes a moment ago had vanished, replaced by something cool, calculating. “It almost seems as though everything about this was planned,” he murmured.

Anghara raised an eyebrow. “If you think I had anything to do with this death, you grievously misjudge me—and the last place I would have been found when the deed was discovered would be my victim’s son’s own chamber.”

Favrin found strength somewhere to laugh. “My father would have enjoyed this. Intrigue was his love,” he said laconically. “And it seems to be something of a legacy; a plot was not what I was thinking of, but it isn’t entirely beyond the bounds of possibility. I should investigate Delvera’s links to Roisinan.”

“Your father always did have a penchant for the women of the north.”

Favrin’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Be careful, young queen, for you may yet step on quicksand.”

“I came here on a safe-conduct that was the given word of a prince, and trusted in a knight’s honor,” Anghara said pointedly.

“But you found a king,” Favrin said. He seemed to find the concept strange, as if he couldn’t imagine holding all that had been his father’s—a
kaiss
full of exotic women, a city, one crown held firm in one hand and free, finally, to reach for a far older and nobler royal circlet.

If it hadn’t been for the bright-haired girl before him, who now gathered herself with a royal poise he had yet to discover in himself.

“And shall a king’s honor be less than the prince’s, and both mean less than the sworn word of a true knight?” his strange guest now inquired from the glittering heights of court protocol.

“No, damn you,” Favrin said at last, blood rushing to his cheeks. He lifted his hand, only now seeming to realize the glass had cut him as it shattered and bright blood was welling out from a gash across his palm. He stared at this for a long moment, then closed his hand into a fist around the wound and lifted his eyes to Anghara, stepping aside to clear her path. “My word protects you. Leave this place with honor, as you found it. But go, Anghara Kir Hama. Go now, before it is too late. Remember, though, that ere you can become a true queen in Roisinan two men need to step out of your way; and neither your brother nor I will do so lightly.” He raised his good hand, palm open toward her, in a gesture of farewell. “We may yet meet again,” he said, in a softer voice, “in some green court in Miranei. Very soon.”

Anghara gazed at him for a long moment, and then her eyelashes swept down, veiling her eyes. Kieran was already waiting with her cloak, and she allowed him to drape it over her shoulders.

“Moran,” she heard the King of Tath say behind her to the chamberlain who had reappeared in the doorway, “make sure they are conducted from the palace in safety. Thereafter,” Favrin said, and he was speaking directly to Kieran now, “my writ does not run. I gave you safe-conduct to enter the White Palace, but my obligation ends at the pierhead; I offer you no promises at all if, tomorrow, I find you still in the city.”

“You won’t,” Kieran said.

The expression on the other’s face shaded into something oddly like relief; Kieran, who couldn’t begin to understand this subtle prince, found nonetheless that it was all too easy to like the man. Once he had seemed larger than life, the subject of his schoolroom lessons, against whose forces he had first bloodied his sword. He offered, at the last, a smile.

“Tend to that hand,” Kieran said softly, turning back from the doorway, meeting Favrin’s eyes, blue on blue. “Make sure they get any stray slivers out, else it could stiffen.”

“We wouldn’t want that to happen,” Favrin said, unable to resist meeting this unexpected solicitude with a barb.

Kieran parried the jab with relentless honesty. “It would be a pity…and a waste.”

With that, he turned and was gone, following Moran into the guardroom to claim his sword. The door snicked gently shut behind him, leaving Favrin to sink into the carved chair Kieran had just vacated and stare at the closed portal. The expression on his face was curiously similar to the one with which he greeted Anghara Kir Hama’s entrance an hour and a lifetime ago—astonishment, and reluctant respect.

K
ieran didn’t volunteer where he got the two horses before the young sun cleared the horizon the next morning, and Anghara didn’t ask. In fact, they were doing very little talking. She had balked at leaving Algira.
I nearly had him,
were her despondent words;
another hour, and I would have had him.
But Kieran had seen something he could still not completely define on Favrin’s face as he came in from the balcony the night before. No—the chance had been and gone. Favrin would have no time and no room for them, not now—certainly not with every baron at court closely monitoring his smallest move. Favrin was a great soldier—but, for all that his had been the unseen hand on Tath’s helm for a long time, he was an untried king. There was too much at stake for him to risk a highly visible intrigue with what was, after all, as yet only another pretender to the throne he himself coveted.

But Anghara had been adamant, a stubbornness owing as much to royal self-confidence as to an almost childish frustration at the denial of a cherished wish. In the end Kieran lost his temper and did something he thought he had almost forgotten how to do—he spoke to her from the only height the yawning chasm between their ranks allowed him, that of older foster brother. Perhaps out of sheer astonishment Anghara had stopped arguing and obeyed. That didn’t mean she did it willingly. She had taken up the mantle of royalty, with all its prerogatives, and one of those had been a certain incontestable authority it had been all too easy to become used to. Now she found herself resenting the control Kieran had so easily invoked; relations were strained in the early hours of their ride north.

This persisted through a pause for a lunch so stilted and polite they could have been strangers—or, worse, deadly enemies unable to avoid being seated together at a court banquet. They were both relieved when the meal was over and they could divert their frustrations into the physical exertion of hard riding. Eventually monotony began to restore their good humor; when they stopped for the night, Anghara could ask calmly whether Kieran thought Favrin would have them followed.

“Favrin undoubtedly has other things on his mind,” said Kieran. “But I think the respite won’t last. The man is nothing if not a ferociously good organizer. Sooner or later he will remember you. He may or may not think you pose a serious threat—but, whatever he decides, it would be in his interest if you never reached Roisinan. And he knows you’re still in his land, and in his power, should he choose to stretch it forth. This time he gave you no promises.”

“You think he’ll come after us?”

“Maybe not just yet,” Kieran said, feeling absurdly young and innocent; he almost expected the lanky ghost of Feor to emerge at any moment and rap him over the knuckles for an ill-considered analysis. “Right now he’s in the same situation Sif was when he swept into Miranei. For all that Favrin inherited lawfully and Sif simply took what had been offered—both are forced to pay attention to home base first, before they can think about striking further afield. Then again, Favrin will never get this chance again—Sif away from Roisinan, and you in no position to offer him serious opposition. What is it?” he said, with a smile, as he saw her watching him with her head tilted thoughtfully on one side, the corners of her lips turned up, but her eyes glittering with what looked suspiciously like tears.

She held out her hands and he stepped closer and took them, searching her eyes.

“I missed you,” she said unexpectedly.

It woke an echo in him, a painful one. The words were innocuous enough in themselves but she had said them to him once before—in a bloody dawn on the battlements of Miranei, a day which seemed a lifetime away. They were different people now, their earlier selves so far removed as to almost be creatures of myth. But Kieran shied away from the memory, shutting it away, his smile widening a fraction as he raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Are hostilities over, then?”

She laughed out loud, squeezing his fingers; her mouth opened to say something when, suddenly, the small tin kettle they hung above the fire boiled over with an angry hiss of steam and they both whirled to rescue it. Anghara was more tired than she would admit, and began nodding off over the mug of lais tea, made from supplies eked out all the way from Kheldrin. She was asleep almost before Kieran gently removed the mug from her hand and wrapped her into a blanket beside the dying fire. This, Kieran reflected wryly as he went to check the horses before he too turned in, was getting to be a habit—sabotaged yet again at what might have easily been a critical juncture. Another wasted moment. Kieran was beginning to assemble a library; he would flip through his collection before going to sleep, sparing a moment of regret for all the might-have-beens he held so gently in his memory.

Anghara was quiet at breakfast, almost as if their reconciliation had never taken place. But it was soon apparent to Kieran that this was a new kind of quiet. What had gone before had been a silence of pique, born of brooding frustration. This was different, deeper, with a pain Kieran couldn’t initially understand. He sensed a deep foreboding, and recognized the silence of anticipation. And then, mapping out their journey in his mind, he suddenly understood. The Ronval River lay squarely across their path; not so very long ago, its banks had been soaked with the blood of two armies. On this battlefield Anghara’s father had been slain, surrendering his crown into the waiting hands of his firstborn son.

Anghara’s wanderings had never taken her so close to this spot. Perhaps she would have reacted differently had she not come here from the heart of Algira, from the palace where the Rashin clan’s desire for the crown of Roisinan had wrought her father’s death in its defense. It was new again in Anghara’s breast, and the pain was sharp, the sharper for being an old pain whose true magnitude was being felt only now.

Kieran tried to work out another path, in the first flash of comprehension, but there were no real alternatives but to cross into Roisinan over the haunted ground of the old battlefield. Everything else would take too long. They needed time to escape across the border, time to reach Roisinan and lead Anghara’s army to Miranei before Sif returned from Kheldrin with his own. And while Kieran never doubted there would be an army waiting, he was far from sanguine about its size or its abilities compared to the one it would have to face. The stars had turned in this circle, had offered Anghara this chance. If it was wasted, it might never come again.

“I will be with you,” Kieran said into Anghara’s silence, without touching her, without looking at her. He only turned his head when he felt the almost electric power of her gaze, to meet a pair of gray eyes brimful of memory. For, once again, the words were an echo, the shadow of a Standing Stone upon the moors before Miranei lay across them, across an hour long gone which had been fraught with another hard choice. The memory was no less potent for Anghara than those clinging to the Ronval battlefield.

“Are you sure,” Anghara asked gently, “that you don’t have the Sight?”

“Quite sure,” Kieran said brightly, breaking the mood. “It’s time we were moving; the day will not stay for us.”

Anghara knew this, and yet she couldn’t suppress a sigh that tore itself from her deepest soul. She made no reply in words. She didn’t need to.

The Ronval looked deceptively drab and gray. Kieran had steered them west of the fatal fords where Red Dynan’s last battle had been fought—the Ronval, after all, was a border between two kingdoms and the fords were constantly patrolled. There had been a ferry, but that had long since been stopped. They would have to swim the river downstream, at a deeper spot. More dangerous, perhaps, on the physical level, but Kieran had learned enough in the past few years to prefer physical peril to exposing himself and his companion to the unpredictable danger of edgy border guards.

“It looks so innocent,” Anghara said, putting some of his own thoughts into words.

“I’d prefer it at our backs,” Kieran said. He sniffed at the air, already tainted with the fetid odors of Vallen Fen. “As long as we don’t cross into Roisinan branded with the same perfume that led our army to the Rashin men when they tried to cross the Ronval.”

Anghara smiled, remembering the story. She allowed herself one regretful backward glance for all the opportunities lost in Algira, and then dug her heels into her horse’s flanks.

Kieran took a moment to watch her lead the way into the kingdom she meant to win back, and found himself wrestling with a moment of bittersweet ambivalence. In Roisinan she would be royal again. It was what he wanted her to be, what he had fought and planned for, risked other men’s lives, and his own, for; and yet—by the very act of becoming what he had dreamed, she was removing herself from his ambit, a queen to his knight. With every step she took toward the borders of her own land Anghara was taking away choices. In the end there could be only one, and Kieran felt the blade of it against his heart.

His own choices were few. There was little he could do other than urge his horse forward in Anghara’s wake.

She had no wish to linger on the other shore, waiting only long enough for Kieran’s horse to struggle up the uneven muddy bank before she urged her mare into motion. She kept her face resolutely turned to the north, with only her eyes, wide and bright, betraying her by occasionally straying toward the east and her father’s last battlefield. Kieran caught up with her in silence, and they rode for a while without speaking. The plain that spilled out flat and meadow-green from the riverbank was empty of movement; it was easy to imagine themselves alone in the world. But for all that none were in sight, it wasn’t as though the people of the place hadn’t left traces. Near an isolated copse Anghara drew rein and contemplated with interest what seemed to be a small shrine—but it was a shrine to no God she’d ever known. A broad, carved wooden pole had been set into the ground; its crown was rounded, buffed and polished into a semicircular sphere, and a crest, or a halo, of plaited golden straw had been fixed onto this. Below, at the foot of the pole, lay a number of wreaths. A few had fruit twisted into them, sweet-smelling apples or a wilting peach, but most were of flowers—some dry and already crumbling, others fresh, as though they had only just been left there. The one thing they all had in common was that every one had a trace of yellow—a yellow flower, or a weaving of golden straw, and in at least one Anghara saw a thread of what looked like a thin strand of gold.

“Curious,” she said. “What do you make of it?”

“From the flowers, I’d say it was Nual’s,” said Kieran, leaning forward from his saddle to get a closer look. “But the nearest water is the Ronval, and that’s too far away to build a shrine to Nual. Besides, there’s gold. That’s Kerun’s.”

“And the fruit of the harvest is Avanna’s,” murmured Anghara thoughtfully.

“Too many questions,” said Kieran after another moment, kneeing his mount into a turn. “We won’t learn the answers here.”

After another long look, Anghara turned to follow. “Where to now?”

“The Tanassa Hills. If Adamo or Charo aren’t there, they’ll have left a message. They had no way of knowing which way we might come back; they will have left a message in every stronghold.”

“We’ve been away a long time,” Anghara said, her voice oddly flat.

Kieran snatched a look; she was very white, her teeth worrying at her lower lip. “Faith has been bred into them,” he said quietly. “The last time you disappeared, they believed for years.”

Anghara glanced at him from beneath lowered eyelashes, betrayed into a smile; and then her expression changed, into something more subtle, more sad. “After Sif destroyed Bresse…this is where it all began, in the Tanassa Dance,” she said. “It’s where I first met ai’Jihaar.”

Kieran had pieced the tale together from scraps that had come his way, but only now did the story begin to assume its true shape. He tried to imagine the Kheldrini woman, old and blind and yet wrapped in a cocoon of power, away from her desert home, and almost failed. Almost, because in the final reckoning he would have found it hard to believe anything was impossible for ai’Jihaar ma’Hariff. It would not be entirely beyond the bounds of possibility, Kieran thought wryly, if they were to find the old
an’sen’thar
waiting for them in the Tanassa Hills.

It was not, however, ai’Jihaar who met them when they finally slid off their mounts. They stood before the same cavern from which Kieran’s men had issued forth to ride after a captured princess on her way to the dungeons of Miranei. They entered carefully, Kieran in the lead, one hand lightly on his horse’s bridle. The horse snorted as it stepped inside, alarmingly loud in the dark, echoing silence of the empty cave.

What they thought was an empty cave.

Another horse suddenly answered from the shadows, and Kieran froze, peering into the gloom, halfway through the swift motion toward his horse’s muzzle. “Who’s there?”

“You took your time,” said a familiar voice.

Kieran closed his eyes for a moment, his fingers knotting in the horse’s mane. The silently eloquent relief of his gesture was transmuted into radiant joy as his eyes opened and sought eagerly for a man-shaped shadow. “I thought you were lost,” Kieran said, very softly.

“You left me with the honor of dealing with Sif Kir Hama’s entire army, with the victorious king-general himself at its head. Why in the world should you think me lost?”

“Stop crowing in the dark, young cock-a-hoop, come out and let me see you!” Kieran said, laughing.

A piece of darkness peeled off a cavern wall and flung back a concealing cloak the color of winter twilight, to reveal itself as a stocky young man with an enormous grin splitting his broad face.

“Rochen!” Kieran said, stepping forward to clasp the other’s arm. “You’ve no idea how glad it makes me to see you in one piece! I thought Sif had done for you. We found the camping place, it looked to tell a grim tale.”

“Grim indeed,” Rochen’s voice changed in the space of a heartbeat, from teasing banter to harsh pain. “I had lookouts posted, so at least Sif didn’t take us totally by surprise. But there was surprise enough, in the end. Only a handful lived, and most have souvenirs of the encounter. Mine was a sword across the back of my legs from a man I thought dead. I was lucky he didn’t hamstring me.”