Daughter of Lir (68 page)

It was like a slow crumbling of earth on a mountainside,
seeing how it all fell apart, every plan and scheme. Rhian strode up to the
gate with the young messenger still standing in it, about to draw his sword,
and smiled into the eyes of the guards. “Let us in,” she said. “We have
messages for the one who rules you.”

She had gambled well. They recognized her. She drew the
startled tribesman with her, past the motionless guards, across the court and
into the king’s hall.

The feast was still going on, but not only Dias’ men were
uneasy. The sounds of fighting were audible even here. Only Etena seemed in
comfort. She had not touched the food set in front of her. All her hunger was
satisfied by the sight of her son sitting before her, subject to her will.

Rhian and the tribesman entered just as the truce broke. An
uproar erupted through the inner door. Priestesses, armed, driven back by
servants with no weapons but the weight of their numbers. Behind them came a
cluster of bearers, and a litter, with Minas on it.

He was sitting upright. His mother was with him, and Eresh
the foreigner.

Dias surged to his feet. So did the rest of his men,
oversetting tables, flinging benches aside. The sound that came out of them was
even more terrible than the sound of chariots rolling to battle.

The priestesses were not fools, not when it came to saving
their skins. They saw the look in the tribesmen’s eyes and bolted. Even Etena
in her arrogance was borne along with them. She had a fair turn of speed for so
small and so heavily swathed a person.

Rhian sprang after them. A wall of guards rose up before
her. She recoiled from it. Her mind was clear, and running swift.

She whirled. Minas’ litter was laid in the middle of the
hall, and his people crowded around it, with Dias innermost. But Aera stood
apart.

Rhian’s heart knew where it wanted to be, and that was not
here, beyond the circle, face to face with Aera. “She’s headed for the temple,”
Rhian said. “I’m going after her. There’s fighting on the walls. The tribe is
moving. They’ll be thinking it’s an attack on their king. If he can go out
there, stop it before it reaches the city—”

“I doubt that he will want to,” Aera said.

Rhian met those cool green eyes. There was no help in them,
no mercy for Lir. And did Rhian want any?

Maybe a little. “The city guard is fighting priestesses,”
she said. “Your people might be made aware of this. Priestesses are hers. They
broke your prince. The others are simply defending what is theirs.”

“You had better go,” said Aera, “if you would catch her.”

That was manifestly true, and Rhian would gain nothing else
from her—not in this. Rhian turned and ran.

She knew all the ways of this house, better, she was sure,
than Etena’s women did. But they were well ahead of her, and there were many of
them. No servants barred their way. Emry had got them out, then, if there had
been any left.

Rhian knew as she ran that she was perfectly foolhardy,
running alone against a hundred armed warriors.

Feet pounded behind her. She glanced back. Tribesmen, armed.
And—Emry?

Not only tribesmen. Men of Lir, too, running together, as if
they were allies. The huge red-headed man beside Emry was the chieftain Aias.
He had been in the hall but a moment ago.

They all owed Etena a debt that she would be forced to pay.
With half of Dias’ warband at her back, and a company of the city guard, Rhian
tracked the priestesses through the king’s house and out into the glare of the
day.

The rest of the warband was waiting for them, a line of
feral grins and bristling weapons. On its edges stood the chariots of Lir:
teams a little raw, a little new to this face of battle, but willing and strong
of heart.

The priestesses were not cowards. They measured the forces
against them, before and behind. With Etena and the elder priestesses protected
in their midst, they drew together, lowered spears, and charged toward the
temple.

The warriors who had followed Rhian streamed past her,
yelling war-cries. The mounted fighters stood their ground, but the chariots
rolled inward, falling on the priestesses from either side.

More were coming down the streets from the city: armored
women, and some of those were mounted. It was full-fledged battle, growing
fiercer the longer it went on.

Rhian, outside of it, knew a thing that had to be impossible.
It could not have happened, not in her full sight. And yet her bones were sure
of it.

She turned back into the king’s house. The passage the
priestesses had taken was straight, but others opened off it, winding away to
the servants’ quarters, the kitchens, the storehouses.

Rhian followed the aching in her bones. The city was
breaking apart beyond these walls, three sides of battle, and confusion
wherever her heart turned. But here, in the dimness of the king’s house, it was
all very simple. Etena had slipped away from her guards and her allies. By
sleight or sorcery, she had hidden herself.

Rhian was sworn to hunt and take her. The kitchens were in
disarray, with signs of hasty departure everywhere: an ox still on the spit,
half-baked loaves spilling from a basket by the oven, a scatter of spices and
sweetness across a table. Rhian took up a lamp, saw that it was filled, lit it
at the hearth. With its flickering light to guide her, she ventured into the
storerooms.

Etena had hidden herself well. Rhian would never have found
her but for that niggle in her bones, which might be the Goddess’ voice, and
might only be the purity of her hate. Deep amid the jars of grain and oil and
wine, behind a barrel of last year’s apples, was a space as large as a small
room. Whether it had always been a bolthole or whether Etena had prepared it
for herself, it was a remarkably comfortable lair for a serpent. Food and drink
were to hand, and a soft bed, and lamps, and even a chest for belongings.

At first Rhian thought Etena was alone. She had been lying
on the bed; at Rhian’s coming she sat up, blinking at the light, hand lifted to
shield her eyes. Then from the shadows beyond her crept a small figure, staring
at Rhian with great round eyes.

Rhian could feel the weakening of her will, the spell
sapping her strength. Pity, she thought. Compunction. Separated from her loyal
guards, shut in this cupboard of a place, surely Etena posed no danger. She was
defeated, hunted and hated. She would not rule again in this world. And
see—here was her child, Emry’s child, Rhian’s own brother’s daughter,
stretching out small trusting hands to the one who had come to kill her mother.

Fiercely Rhian shook off the spell. As long as this creature
drew breath, she was deadly. She fixed Rhian with melting eyes and pitiable
expression. “Please,” she said in a soft trembling voice. “Don’t let me die
here. Let me die in the light. And my child—my poor child—”

That too was a spell. Rhian snatched knife from sheath and
sprang.

She stopped cold, a hair short of sinking the keen bronze
blade in the child’s heart.

The creature was simple, or else she was drugged. She stared
at Rhian without fear. Her mother’s face beyond her was a mask of triumphant
hate—briefly, before she concealed it again behind the semblance of
helplessness.

“Take me out,” said Etena. “Let me see the sun again. Then
you may do with me as you will.”

Rhian measured the distance between them, and the woman’s
grip on her daughter. It must be painful: her fingers were sunk like claws in
the thin arms. But the child showed no sign that she felt anything.

Drugged, for a certainty.

Rhian darted round her, striking at her mother. The blade
met flesh, bone; caught, slid.

Etena screeched like a cat, dropped her shield and went
straight for the eyes, stabbing with long nails, snapping at the throat.

Rhian stabbed blindly, fending off teeth and nails. White
pain raked her arm again and again. A vise clamped about her throat,
sharp-needled with claws. The world began to go dark.

She slashed with the blade. Hot wetness sprayed her face.
Through the scarlet haze she saw her target, the twisting dark-clothed body;
heard a heartbeat like thunder in her ears. She struck at that sound with all
the strength that was left in her. To pierce it deep. To make it stop.

Etena wrenched away. The dagger’s hilt tore from Rhian’s
fingers. Etena clawed at it. Rhian, unarmed, cast her eyes about wildly for a
weapon.

A soft sound brought her wheeling about. Etena smiled at
her. The child lay limp in her lap. The blood on her was not wholly her
mother’s. Her eyes were open, hardly less empty than they had been before, but
there could be no doubt that she was dead.

“She was mine,” Etena said. “You will never have her. Never
corrupt her. Never—” She coughed. Whatever else she might have said was lost,
drowning in blood.

She died upright, eyes fixed on Rhian. The hate lingered in
them even after the breath left her body, as if after all it was stronger than
death.

Rhian straightened slowly. Her arms, her face stung. Her throat
was red agony.

What she had to do, she could not ponder too deeply, or her
spirit would revolt. Gently she lifted the child’s body and laid it in the bed.

She was not so gentle with the mother. She laid the dead
woman on the packed earth of the floor, taking no such care as she had with the
child. Then with her dagger she cut the head from the neck, severed the spine,
and pierced the heart with a wooden spit from the kitchens. She spoke words
that she had learned in the service of the mare, words of binding and of
cleansing. Her voice was a rasp, and each word was pain, but she spoke as best
she could.

She wrapped the head in a sack, and again in another lest it
drip blood on the floor, and hung it from her belt. She took up the child,
still careful, gentle as if she had been alive, and walked out of that place,
into the roar of battle.

The world had gone mad. Emry fought side by side with
warriors of the People as he had so often before—against the priestesses of the
Goddess, in his own city of Lir. The city guard, and what had once been the
king’s own guard, fought with him. There was fighting all over the city, on the
walls, in the streets. Beyond the walls, the massed horde of the People came on
with chariots.

He did not know when he was sure that the woman the
priestesses were protecting was not Etena. Certainly it was after he saw a
wounded charioteer carried off to the healers, and took the chariot for
himself.

A chariot was not the best weapon for hand-to-hand fighting,
but for breaking away from the skirmish and hurtling through the gate into the
hall, it had no match.

They were fighting in there, too, Dias and his dozen
defending Minas against a mass of women in armor. Minas had a short horseman’s
bow—Goddess knew where he had found it, or the filled quivers, either—and was
shooting when he could, with excellent aim.

He nigh shot Emry in the heart, but in the last instant his
eyes flickered with recognition. The arrow flew wide.

The horses were young and fractious. Emry could not both
drive them and fight. But he could send them full into the crowd of attackers
and scatter them.

The most fortunate fled. One or two fell and rolled sickeningly
under the wheels, like his dream of battle years ago. But in that dream, he had
not been the charioteer; he had been among the slain.

This was not the world, or the war, that he had expected. He
brought the horses to a clattering halt in front of Dias’ defenders. They
stared at him as if they could not decide whether he was friend or enemy.

One appeared to have no doubts as to which he was. She was
dressed as a man. Her spear had seen use. She regarded him with a flat inimical
stare, mantling like a falcon over the body of her son.

Emry turned his eyes from her to Dias, nor need she ever
know how great an effort that was. “The priestesses have attacked the city
guard on the walls,” he said, “and my people are fighting side by side with
yours inside the city—but your army doesn’t know that. It’s riding to the
attack. Will you send a messenger to call it off, or shall I?”

“Should I wish to stop it?” Dias asked.

“Yes,” said a raw shadow of a voice. “You should.”

Rhian was standing in the doorway to the kitchens. She had
been in a fight, and not a clean one: her face and throat were torn, her arms
and hands bleeding. She held a black-wrapped bundle in her arms. She laid it
down, uncovering it carefully, with visible grief. Then beside it she laid the
thing that had hung in a sack at her belt.

Emry gagged on bile. The child—the dead child—had the face
of his kin; was his kin, his daughter whom he had never known. Her mother’s
head stared lifelessly from beside her. Blood pooled on the tiles beneath the
severed neck.

“It is done,” Rhian said, “as I swore to do. Now keep your
own oath, lord of chariots.”

Dias was staring as if he could not stop. “But she was out—I
saw her—”

“A ruse,” said Rhian. “Her last one. And her last murder:
the murder of her own child.”

Emry unclenched his fists, if not his heart. What he had
been thinking was unworthy of his sister and himself. With an effort that
grated in his bones, he turned his gaze on Dias. “It’s over, lord king. She’s
dead. Your army is still riding against the city. Will you come?”

Perhaps it was the title, perhaps Emry’s voice, but Dias
closed his eyes; he shuddered. When he opened them, he was the Dias whom Emry
knew. He too, Emry noticed, was no longer looking at what lay at Rhian’s feet.
“King of Lir,” he said. “Whose victory is it, then?”

“One would think hers,” Emry said.

“I will stop my army,” Dias said, “but there is a price.”

Emry tensed.

“We can fight the war to a standstill and burn this country
to the ground. Or we can end it now.”