The Door into Sunset (54 page)

Lionhall was less a massive pile of rubble than it had been, for the simple reason that Hasai and several other Dragons, one scaled in amethyst and another in ruby, had been carefully picking up the biggest pieces and setting them out in order in what remained of the square, as delicately as children playing jackstones. The great crevasse down the middle had already been filled in with melted stone carefully smoothed over, and some paving-blocks were stacked off to one side, ready to be laid again.

Freelorn and Herewiss made their way to the shattered portico, where Segnbora was kneeling over a supine form with Blanis, and two other Rodmistresses from the army. Hasai looked down curiously over her shoulder.

On the ground, on a piece of board someone had brought, Cillmod lay. His legs were a welter of blood, but he was awake and alert, and not in pain, due to Segnbora’s ministrations. He gazed up at Freelorn with an expression that looked strangely like relief, though there was unease in it too.

“Plainly this man was being saved for something,” Segnbora said. “Half a wall came down on him, but a fragment of the dome that had come down first kept the wall from falling flat, and it spared his chest and head. These are bad—” She looked dispassionately at his legs. “But he’ll walk again, though it may take us a while.”

Freelorn nodded.Cillmod looked at him a moment. Then he said, “Well, King, I would give you your Stave back, but it seems to be gone.”

“I have it,” Freelorn said. He returned the uneasy glance, and said the thing he had been thinking about for a while now. “I am going to need a chief minister. A bit of a move downwards for you, it has to be admitted. But you kept this country running, however you could, when the rightful ruler was off acting the idiot. And you clearly have the talent, and you know the Four Hundred much better than I do. Will you help me now?”

“It will not be comfortable for you, I would think,” Cillmod said.

“I’m not here to be comfortable,” Freelorn said, and was tempted to rub his back, which was bothering him after a day in the Throne. “I have work to do, that’s all. Will you help me?”

Cillmod looked at him for a while. “Yes,” he said at last.

Freelorn nodded. “Go in Her care, then,” he said, “and get better. If there’s anything you need, let me know.”

Cillmod turned his head away. “I’ll see you at dinner,” Segnbora said. “Come on, ladies.”

They vanished, taking Cillmod with them.

“Dinner,” Herewiss said. “Not a bad idea. You haven’t had anything all day. Not even at breakfast this morning.”

“Nothing for me yet,” Freelorn said. “There’s something I have to do fasting. I’ll take care of it now.” He hugged Herewiss for a moment, one-armed, and then turned and headed down the street, toward the city gates.

*

It was the oldest law, and almost the first one his father had taught him, when he was old enough to understand such things. “When Arlen goes to battle,” Ferrant said, “it does so for safety, not for glory. It is for the people out on the fields, and in the little towns, that we go to war—because that battle will make them secure—not for our own aggrandizement. Now remember how Héalhra’s son, when he could find nothing of his father to send to the fire, took up one of the people from the battlefield instead, one of Héalhra’s townsmen who had come out to fight, honoring him as if he had been his father? So we do now. When a battle is over in which Arlene blood is shed, the ruler must find some one of the people who fell, and send that person onward with his or her own hands, to remind them that we know their grief, and it’s ours, not just theirs. Not food nor drink may pass your lips until this is done. Remember it.”

Lorn made his way down to the battlefield, hearing the words. He had dreaded this for a long time, again because he was uncertain what to do. There was no criterion for choice that he knew of: he had never dared ask his father, the times he came back from war, how he chose. Now Lorn walked through the cold trampled-up ground and mud, under the early evening sky—just one more figure moving among the bodies, with head bent, looking for someone. The difference was that the others looking, silent, or moaning at the sight of all the death, knew who they were looking for.

No one lying down moved. The wounded had been taken away by now: all that were left were already healed of their wounds more thoroughly and finally than any leech or Rodmistress could do it. Lorn moved among them, numb, too numb even to weep any more. The ground was all trodden and poached up with horses’ hooves into ridges of torn grass, and mud, now, since it had rained for a while earlier in the day. The bodies sprawled out on the ground in terrible relaxation, some blank-eyed, staring upward, some curled up as if in sleep, but instead of quiet breath, their blood spread out around them, black and cold. Arms were stretched out to dropped weapons, to other dead; hands lay open and empty as if asking for something, ready to receive. But all their receiving was over.

Lorn stopped suddenly and knew he had found the one. She lay there in a mudpuddle, whatever livery she had worn gone plain brown now, the common color of the mud. She lay on her face, one arm twisted up under her, her fair hair all in wet strings like retting flax, and the arrow that had killed her buried almost to the fletching in her back. The sword beside her was streaked amber and red-black with blood separating out, the remnant of her last kill.

He did not want to touch her, but slowly he crouched down and put a hand under one of her shoulders. She was stiff. It made him shudder, how like a heavy doll or a half-filled sack a human body felt, with the life new gone out of it: as if it had never been alive at all, had never ridden proud in the saddle or walked or laughed. She turned over too easily, the broken arm falling stiffly over her face as she did, like a sleeper’s arm thrown over the eyes to shut the light away. And Lorn found himself looking at the face of the girl who had brought him Blackmane, the one who was rude to him, and willing to take his orders anyway: the one who rode off laughing him to scorn.

Now he wept indeed: his eyes blurred so they were hardly any use to him, he could not breathe, and the rage in him mixed with grief and the two of them strangling him. She would not be grinding any corn this time next year, or coming to him to complain about the lack of it. Freelorn swung her up in his arms. A long leggy bundle she was, not the light lithe creature who had laughed at him and thundered off fierce and furious, like the Maiden gone mad: dead weight in truth, sodden clay like the ground all around, clothes and mud and blood. He staggered as he tried to carry her away. Finally Freelorn had to throw her over his shoulder, like a sack, and that made him cry worst of all, so that he stumbled and fell, and swore at any hand that touched him to try to help. Finally he found his way back to the place where they were preparing to burn the dead, and laid her out on one of the pyres there, ordering her body as best he could, and saying the words of farewell. He waited until the pyre was ready, and put the torch himself, while the people around him watched and grieved. Then he made his way back toward the city. An hour, perhaps, the business had taken him. But in that hour he knew at last what all kings know sometimes—that any death of theirs that might prevent a war is worth it. But also that the great Death is loose in the world, and like the Goddess, sometimes one must live and wish to be dead, and go on regardless—with all the others’ deaths slung over one’s shoulder, the weight that is never wholly there, but never wholly gone, until the World end and be made again, and made aright...

*

He came to dinner in somber mood, but it couldn’t last long in the face of the others’ merriment. All his own people were there, and Sunspark, in its young-woman shape: Eftgan had come in from putting her own army to rights, bringing Hearn with her. They all sat down to the meal together in one of the downstairs dining rooms, not the huge echoing state banqueting hall, but a cozy room with windows looking out westward. The evening was cool and still, the sunset clear and cloudless: the candles burned up straight, as if in a closed room. Outside the window, Hasai’s head rested on a nearby wall, one eye looking in. Herewiss handed Freelorn a cup of wine when he came in, and Freelorn drank it straight off, and then stared into the cup, and at Herewiss, surprised. “That’s Brightwood white!”

“You’re welcome,” Hearn said, dry as always, and gestured at a small firkin in the corner.

The cooks were evidently grateful for having been retained. Dinner was restrained, but splendid—the first roast goose of autumn, crisp and fragrant with peppercorns and red wine, and salt salmon, and beans baked in garlic cheese. Freelorn dove into it all with great enthusiasm.

“A leonine appetite,” Eftgan said, helping herself to a second helping of goose. “As regards work, too, I hear. You were at it already today. What will you do next?”

“Besides being King? Well, there was something else....” He blushed, then got embarrassed at his own embarrassment, and looked at Herewiss. “Since we don’t have to be running all over the place any more, I had thought we might get married.”

Herewiss chuckled, and then glanced over at Hearn, a sidewise look. “You’ve been trying to get me to settle down for long enough!” he said. “Would this make you happy?”

“Don’t marry for
me
. And you settle down? Hopeless,” said Hearn, with the air of a man bidding farewell to a lost cause.

Herewiss rolled his eyes at his father, and turned back to Freelorn. “But you know I won’t be at home all the time, loved.”

Freelorn nodded. “As if that matters particularly any more.” And it was true, for since last night, neither of them had been able to lose the sense of the other’s presence within him, nearby, ready, committed.
How long has that feeling been there,
Freelorn wondered,
drowned out by our fears?
But it didn’t matter now. “You have your work to do,” he said, “as I have mine. We’ll make it work out somehow.”

“And certainly there’ll be no lack of royal heirs,” Herewiss said, “which will make the Four Hundred happy, if anything can.”

Freelorn made a wry face. After today’s work, he was beginning to have his doubts. “But that’s another point,” he said. “The princesses. —’Berend,” he said, “how about it? Will you marry us, and make an honest man of me?”

Segnbora smiled, dimpling. “Possibly this is a task beyond even the Goddess,” she said, “but one must attempt the impossible, as She does. All right. But don’t forget, I have a lifemate.”

“I wouldn’t think of leaving Hasai out of it,” Freelorn said. “Assuming he consents. What do Dragons do to get married?”

“Get pregnant,” Hasai sang, amused. “And then, a bath in the valleys of the Sun, to celebrate.”

“Oh, well then
that’s
handled. Segnbora, take care of it.”

She burst out laughing, and Hasai went off into a bout of hissing like a lidded pot boiling over. Freelorn suspected he had just made some sort of dirty joke in Dracon, and let it lie. “The more the merrier,” he said. “But the Royal House of Arlen is going to be a very confused place. Sunspark, what about you? Will you marry in?”

She looked bemused for the moment. “Why not?” she said finally. “Maybe I’ll understand this ‘progeny’ thing eventually.”

Herewiss sat back grinning. “In this family, I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Segnbora laughed again. “This is going to be one of those weddings where the participants outnumber the guests,” she said. “But who cares? Is there anyone else we should have in the family? That’s only five so far, not counting the children. What children there are so far, anyway.”

“I had thought about Eftgan,” Freelorn said. Herewiss and Segnbora looked at him with some surprise: but the Queen merely smiled. “Well,” Lorn said, “it’s not as if she doesn’t come of a good family. And there would seem to be certain—relationships—that might be more deeply explored.”

Eftgan laughed out loud. “Don’t ask me for help in being a demigod, lazybones! I’m having my own problems. But as for the business of uniting the two lines again, well, why not? It’s good for a young King to marry an experienced Queen, they say.” Freelorn leered at her hopefully. “I don’t mean that, you lecher! —It also much reduces the chance of something like this interregnum happening to either of our lines again. I’m willing enough, if you all are. But don’t ask me to be here much: I have my own row to hoe. And I’ll have to ask Wyn, of course. But he always did like crowds....”

“Let it be so then.”

*

A tenday later, so it was. Who was to officiate was a problem, since normally for a royal wedding, the king or queen of the other country came to do the honors in his or her capacity as the Goddess’s high priest. Finally Eftgan suggested that Kerim, the Chief Rodmistress, do the honors, and she agreed.

“Who are you going to invite?” Herewiss had said to Freelorn. Freelorn had looked at him in astonishment. “Everyone,” he said. And so that came to pass as well. Most particularly he sent word south to Lalen and Nia. Five days before the wedding they arrived, Lalen quite astonished, but cheerful in an ironic way, and Nia overwhelmed. She was made much of, stuffed with treats, sat in the Throne, and took to hanging about the rebuilding of Lionhall. Herewiss and the Dragons were managing this, and Nia shortly made common cause with with Herewiss’s sons, newly arrived from the Brightwood, who were also “assisting”—that is to say, ordering the bemused Dragons around, and driving Herewiss half mad. Meanwhile, Lorn was busy with wedding arrangements. All the people of Prydon would not fit into Kynall at once, of course, so much of the wedding feast was staged outside in the squares and the main marketplace. So was the ceremony, since at least one of the participants, in common with his relatives, could not fit more than his head into Kynall.

They came out into the marketplace, two hours past noon, in a blaze of color: Herewiss and Hearn in the white of the Phoenix livery, Segnbora blinding in the black glitter of dragonmail, Dritt and Harald and Moris in their best silks: and a somber spot in the middle, the black of Arlen on Freelorn’s surcoat, and the midnight blue of Darthen, both shadowed every now and then by Hasai, who was sitting on the fourth wall.