Changer of Days (28 page)

“I do not seek it,” Sif said darkly. “But I will have…what…I…came…for.” He spoke slowly, emphasizing each word. There was a flash of sun on metal as his sword began to leave its scabbard. At once there were a dozen loose all around him, leaving his captains’ scabbards in a concerted hiss of metal against leather. The woman’s eyes glowed even more gold than before.

“Al’ar’i’id akhar’a, rah’i’ma’arah na’i smail’len,”
she said, her voice soft but carrying. There was a texture to the foreign words, a feeling of the brooding power of an ancient land, and it was mixed with a dose of something much more down-to-earth—contempt. The phrase was not a curse, but to those who could not comprehend its meaning it might as well have been. It was an incantation, a thing of witchcraft born of a witch-country. Many made surreptitious signs against evil; and one, who had perhaps discerned the contempt and been enraged, unwittingly perpetuated the legend—with an outraged roar he threw his spear, only to see it pin no more than an empty black cloak to the hot sand. The woman seemed to have vanished into thin air.

The people of the desert country did, finally, meet Sif on the winding trail which led up to the Kharg’in’dun’an plateau. The terrain was of their choosing, and theirs were all the advantages of the encounter. That Sif did not lose this battle was a tribute to his abilities, and the spirit his presence still imparted to his suffering army. They held their ground. But it was hard to fight an enemy who had a knack of disappearing, vanishing into the land as though they had been water poured into the thirsty desert sand. The skirmish was brief, bloody and inconclusive. Ahead, it seemed, there was nothing but more empty country, sand and stone, and a powerful people who inhabited a twilight realm and were able to reach out in absolute mastery. Sif was nothing if not head-strong, but still lucid enough to know when to draw the line, to give up a prize in order to reclaim it another day. The sight of his suffering and dispirited army was enough to tell him he had reached the end of this particular road. Mere days after his first and last battle in Kheldrin, Sif announced they were returning to Roisinan.

“We will be back,” he had said grimly. The summer campaign had been a mistake, even if it had been undertaken in the fires of frustrated rage, and the light of the Kir Hama tradition of the invincible summer kings. But admitting failure came hard; harder still was the chilling certainty, deep in Sif’s heart, that she whom he sought had already left Kheldrin and was somewhere behind him, filling a place he had left empty. Upon his return to Roisinan, he had greeted the news of Anghara’s entry into Miranei with a weary resignation that stunned the hapless captain detailed to tell him. He did the only thing he could: gathered the remnants of his army and led them out to reconquer that which his anger, and his vulnerability to Anghara’s legitimate claims, had allowed him to lose.

Now, within the shadow of the keep that had been home to both Red Dynan’s children, Sif remembered the last time he had seen Anghara—locked safely away in the depths of Miranei’s dungeons. Thin, drawn, and, when she wasn’t curled up in a lethargy that was half sleep and half numbness, staring with empty eyes at the shadow-filled darkness, wild with the loss of something Sif could never comprehend. If someone had told him then that the creature in front of him would hold his fate in her hand not a year hence, he would have laughed. But the truth was, she had always held his fate. And only now, at the last, was he finding enough strength—or desperation—to end it. One way or another.

He remembered the damning record of her coronation, and blocked it out with the memory of his own—the night Red Dynan had died by the Ronval, and the face of Second General Fodrun as he had knelt at his feet, offering him a crown. And it had been sweet to accept, to come to his father’s castle no longer as an illegitimate son but as its lord, its crowned king. Against that bright memory was set a shadow Sif obstinately refused to face—a black premonition that time was running out, and the price of the bite he had taken from the apple of temptation was about to be demanded. He could feel the cold breath of something riding behind him, and, perhaps for the first time, he was afraid.

T
he siege of Miranei did not, in the end, last long, and for the very reason Anghara had foreseen. It was over the minute a band of Sif’s men gained entrance to the terrified town below the keep, and tried to cut a swathe through to the postern gates of the castle. The walls of Miranei were thick stones but Anghara didn’t have to hear the cries of those who found themselves in the way of Sif’s swordsmen in order to sense them. When Kieran and Charo came to her with the news, she lifted burning eyes and stopped them with a single look in the doorway of her chambers.

“Go,” she said, without their having to say a word. “It is in the God’s hand now. Go, for what is fated will be, and that which awaits us will find us, in the keep or without these walls. Go out to him.”

After a moment of silence Charo had simply nodded, and turned to stride away. Kieran lingered for an instant longer, exchanging an eloquent look with the woman who was all queen in that hour, and then turned away without a word. There was too much to be said, and not enough; it was a simple choice—take refuge in silence, or stay a lifetime, talking of everything left unspoken for so long.

They had gone, then, all of Anghara’s knights; even Rochen, who had bound up his shoulder and ridden out with the shaft of a Kir Hama banner tucked into the space between his body and the sling supporting his left arm. The army they rode out to face would fight under the same banner.

Anghara cleared her chambers of attendants, huddling alone by the fire, hoping that this time, her Sight would clear and allow her a glimpse of what was shaping at the foot of Miranei’s walls. The flames were bright this day—bright with a burnished coppery glow. So bright it hurt her eyes—she kept having to turn away and blink back tears. Within, she could see nothing but billowing mist and smoke. In the end, Anghara fled the suffocating atmosphere of her chambers and made her way to the heights of the battlements, to see for herself that which her recalcitrant Sight refused to reveal. The copper blaze from her hearth seemed to follow, a bright pain beating behind her temples. The views with which she was presented were confused; at least one building in the city was aflame, and out on the moors a deadly dance was shaping, although it was difficult to make out its form. The crisp cool air brought Anghara remote, almost mocking, snatches of sound—a ringing clash of swords, an inarticulate shout, the distant thunder of horses. She couldn’t make out individual figures, but tried to harness her Sight at the very least to seek out Kieran amongst the tangled ranks below. She found him, at last, his mind tightly focused on the burly soldier swinging a heavy two-handed sword toward him with an ease that made the weapon look as though it had been made of willow-withies and not tempered steel. One blow, and it would all be over; Anghara remembered with extraordinary clarity a vision she had seen once before of a naked sword descending upon Kieran. Then…was it in Bresse…it seemed a thousand years ago…the vision had resolved into his knighting on a distant battlefield. Now there would be no such reprieve, Anghara heard a voice cry out, and knew it only a moment later as her own. But Kieran seemed to hear something too, for the barest instant. He hesitated, perhaps for too long. The great sword came down; Kieran’s flashed up to meet it. There was hardly enough power in Kieran’s counterblow to deflect the deadly blade, flung out defensively an instant too late; iron rang against iron, and sparks flew as the two blades slid against one another with a metallic scream. But the strength which should have carried through the blow never seemed to materialize. A moment later it became clear why as the soldier’s hands fumbled and dropped his great sword from a suddenly nerveless grip. He toppled sideways from his horse with the barest handspan of a short, hand-hewn ash spear protruding from his back. Kieran glanced up in the direction from which this had flown, and Charo waved jauntily before turning his horse with his knees and plunging the screaming beast into the thick of another fray. Up on the battlements Anghara made a queer sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and leaned heavily against the battlements as her legs began to give way. She sensed rather than heard an attendant hurry toward her, and made a swift warding gesture with her hand without turning around. “I have no need of assistance.”

“My lady…”

“Clear this area,” Anghara said, softly but emphatically. “I will be alone.”

“Yes, my lady,” the attendant said, after a moment of eloquently grim silence. She might not have been ceremonially crowned yet, but the young queen’s instructions were obeyed. Anghara found herself alone on the battlements, as she had commanded; but in that instant of distraction she had lost her focus, and the battle was once again a churning chaos. And, obstinate and enduring, the copper blaze she had taken from her hearth still danced and shimmered in her mind, an ache that wouldn’t go away. Anghara caught herself rubbing her temples, seeking the knot of a headache, but this was no physical pain, just a persistent hot glow which gave everything an odd cast, as if she were seeing things simultaneously through…

Through a different pair of eyes.

There was a moment of sudden stillness. Even the wind died down in that instant, as though the world itself grew hushed in the split second of comprehension, a moment in which the words of the oracle of Gul Khaima abruptly took shape and form.

Through a different pair of eyes. Through a different Sight.

A broken spirit shall opened lie, a bitter secret to learn.
Yes, Rima had been Sighted, and Sif had hated her for it. But Feor, at the last, had been vindicated, for he had been right when he had surmised that Anghara’s own precocious gifts had not been the legacy of her mother alone. Dynan, too, had carried the gift of Sight. And Dynan had sired another child besides Rima’s daughter.

Sif, Sight’s implacable enemy, had a soul fire that burned with the glow of burnished copper in the darkness of the battle frenzy below. A soul fire every bit as bright as the gold of his half-sister who watched from the castle they both called home. A soul fire of pure and powerful Sight.

Anghara, suddenly aware she’d held her breath in the instant of revelation, drew in a ragged gasp. There were so many images in her head she experienced a brief sensation of vertigo, and had to clutch once again at Miranei’s solid and comforting stone.

It all made sense. Sif’s uncanny power as a leader of men had more in it than charisma; his vicious campaign against the Sighted of Roisinan had roots in an unconscious wish to exorcise something he sensed deep within himself but had been unable to pinpoint. Anghara had probably owed her life more than once to his ignorance and inability to channel his gifts, and his consequent reliance on others to seek for her. If only he had known how to use it. With the power he had, rooted at least partly in the same foundation from which her own had sprung, he would have found it all too easy to have accomplished himself what his minions had spent fruitless years trying to do. It would have been over for Anghara before it had truly begun. Instead Sif had renounced and denied his heritage, and that repudiation had brought him, at the last, to his final battle. Even now he fought in the shadow of the castle which had seen the kindling of his own soul’s fire, the place which had seen his early humiliations, and the triumph of wearing the crown which was the only legacy of his father he had chosen to acknowledge.

Anghara’s first instinct had been to call for her horse and ride into the melee below, seeking her brother. But he would be in the thick of things, and if she charged in bearing these tidings he would likely sheathe his sword in her body. She checked the suicidal impulse, a quizzical half-smile playing around her mouth. Going to Sif in the flesh would not, in the end, prove necessary—not when she had his mind before her, bright and strong. She would have liked to have been beside him when she touched him in the higher senses he had striven so hard to cleanse from his people’s soul, to see his face in that instant of realization. There was something entirely too calculating and cold for Anghara’s liking in hailing him thus, from a distance, pinning him down with savage shock and opening him up to the God alone knew what, while she waited here, safely away from the consequences. But there were other voices in her mind, voices that would cry out in mortal pain and then be silenced with an abrupt finality which froze her marrow. There was too much death. It was time to stop it, stop it now, and it lay within her hands to do so.

Now that she recognized it for what it was, the fiery copper glow of Sif’s soul fire marked him amongst the combatants as clearly as though he had been branded. Anghara found the source of the copper flame and arrowed in toward it, her own soul fire flaring in a bright gold aura around her head and shoulders in a manner any worshipper of Bran of the Dawning would have instantly recognized.

Sif had deliberately forced this battle. Time was against him, and he couldn’t afford a slow or leisurely resolution. He knew Miranei too well; many of the improvements of its defenses had been his own work, and he knew them to be impregnable. He realized his only chance lay in luring the defenders out into the open where he could deal with them swiftly without Miranei’s formidable battlements between them.

Perhaps because he was still ridden by the demons of his dark premonitions, he fought like a man possessed when Anghara’s men came pouring out to meet his army. His sword seemed to have a life of its own as it danced and weaved, sowing death where it fell. It was soon red to the hilt with other men’s blood. Sif, although he seemed to court self-destruction, remained untouched. It was as though death rode at his back, lending strength to his arm, keeping others from closing with him. He’d sought the leaders, the best in the army that faced him; but circumstances had sent Kieran and the twins in the other direction. Sif never wore distinguishing insignia into battle, wearing the same scarred armor as most of his men, and it was hard to pick the king from the press of his army. He’d had to be content with lesser lights.

Until Kerun sent a familiar face his way.

The other had lost his helmet, and already bore a long gash seeping red across his right temple. But his loss, and the wound, didn’t seem to have hampered him; his weapon was fully as gory as Sif’s own as the tides of battle swept them to face each other. Sif, who had the disconcerting ability to remember the face and name of any of his men, found both swimming out of his memory to name the man who stood against him.

“Melsyr.”

The other’s eyes narrowed at the voice, and his grip tightened on the hilt of his sword, itself slippery with blood beneath his gauntlet. Impulsively, Sif reached up to unfasten the straps that held his own helmet in place and threw it aside, releasing bright hair so much like Anghara’s own.

“You turned your coat, I see,” Sif said softly. In the noise of battle, his words should have been inaudible to anyone but himself, but Melsyr heard, and his cheeks flushed beneath the bloody streaks running across his face.

“I was never unfaithful to my true allegiance.”

Sif laughed, a harsh sound with little mirth. “Kalas’ son. I should have known. I remember Kalas all too well. I should have recognized that rigid backbone of idealism the moment I laid eyes on you, I suppose you engineered the escape which killed my queen?”

Melsyr flinched, but didn’t look away. “I would never wish harm upon a woman, especially not one in Queen Senena’s condition—not in payment for things I could hold against her husband. She wasn’t responsible for your doings. But no, you are wrong. I didn’t plan the escape. I merely lent my aid when they came to take the young queen from your dungeons.”

“You knew where she was all along, didn’t you?” Sif said savagely. “Afterward, while I sought the breadth of the country for her—you knew all along…”

Melsyr smiled, his teeth unexpectedly white underneath the grime and blood on his face. “For what it is worth, King Under the Mountain, I did not. My part ended when he took her from Miranei. Where he was taking her, I didn’t ask. The last thing I wanted to do was risk betrayal of her secret. But even had I known…I would have died before you had it of me.”

“So you would,” Sif said. “You are one of the fanatics, and your honor is Kalas’ high twisted version, damn his hide. I’d expect no less from his son.” He paused for a moment, and then met the other smile for smile. “And you can stop shielding Kieran Cullen. I know full well only he would have had the nerve to try.”

“Twisted?” Melsyr asked, passing over the late admonition and returning to the slur upon his father. The grim smile was still painted upon his face. “Better that, than some of the paths along which your honor has led you.”

Sif hefted his sword. “We all do what we must,” he said levelly, and swung, without further warning.

Melsyr’s smile vanished in an instant as he raised his blade to parry, and then parry again, and again. Sif channeled all his fury, and the grief—for, unexpectedly and surprisingly, there had been bitter grief when he had learned of the death of the little queen he had taken for granted—and his sword sang as he beat Melsyr back. Melsyr found himself hopelessly outclassed, fighting for his life against a master. He got a blow or two in, managed to blood his adversary, which seemed to be more than anyone else had achieved before him—but even as he stole a moment to revel in that accomplishment he knew this was all he would be able to do. His Gods had thrown him into a fight he couldn’t hope to win; he would meet the new Guardian of the Gate, and walk with his father in Glas Coil, before this day was over.

Even as the thought came to him Sif broke through his guard. The edge of Sif’s sword bit into the side of his neck, and blood fountained out, spraying Sif’s face and armor. Melsyr swayed in the saddle, his own blade slipping from his grasp, slicing at his horse’s shoulder as it fell. Maddened already by the smell of blood and the clamor of battle, it screamed and reared, throwing its rider, and bolted across the battlefield with trailing reins and an empty saddle bright with blood. Melsyr was dead before he hit the ground.