The Eunuch's Heir (7 page)

While Dylan prepared his evening’s work, Fionvar gazed down upon his city. The tower stood just over the roof of the new temple, and Fionvar could see the circular hole in its center. Begun during the Usurper’s reign, the temple bulged out from the original wall of the city, the refugees’ tents spreading like a multicolored skirt around it. Turning toward the castle, Fionvar leaned on the wall. A few stories lower than the observatory stood the King’s Tower, where King Rhys had presented his new bride, Brianna, to the populace gathered in the square below, then taken a step from the rooftop and vanished. Fionvar smiled to himself; he was one of the few who knew all the secrets of that day. The same secrets that had driven away his son. He lost the smile and looked farther out, toward the haphazard arrangement of streets
built up around the castle. Market squares interrupted the rabble of rooftops with open patches and colorful pavilions. Sometimes he envied Bernholt its planned capital, laid out with streets purposefully crooked and not too chaotic. Of course, the castle at Lochdale was a good two hundred years older than the palace at Bernholt. This was a fortress first, whereas King Gerrod’s palace had been built during peace times, a bold and remarkable place meant to prove the glamour of the monarchs who lived there. Born a farmer and raised in the town of Gamel’s Grove, Fionvar had little use for such glamour, but the wider streets and frequent wells of Bernholt City would be a big help sometimes.

Dylan cleared his throat. “I’m set here, my lord, if you want to see.”

“Of course.” Fionvar crossed to his side and bent to peer through the short tube. To his surprise, it had neither lens nor mirror. “But what do you see?”

“My job is to measure the moon. When it rises, when it sets, and where.” He knelt near the wall and traced a slender metal staff attached to the instrument. “These markings give the height of the moon over that ridge. This scope is one of the oldest in the observatory. That means we’ve been watching the moon for several years, and we can predict where and when it will rise, or nearly so, anyway.”

Fionvar frowned. “But if you can predict it, then why do you need to watch?”

“I—We’re trying to confirm some things.” Dylan hurriedly scooped up his pages. “It’s only because we keep these records that we can make any predictions. We have people to watch the sun as well as the moon. These things can help us tell time a lot more accurately and anticipate seasonal changes, and we’re making a map of the stars, so when someone dies, we’ll be able to find that star again and again. Think about the implications for ships at sea! The charts we’re working on will mean they can sail farther and longer, and always find their way.”

Fionvar chuckled. “It’s good to see you’re so enthusiastic about your work.”

Dylan reddened and looked down. “You knew all that already.”

He clapped the young man’s shoulder. “I’ll leave you to it. Take care, Dylan.”

For a moment, Dylan’s eyes lingered on Fionvar’s face, then he said, “He’ll be back, my lord, I’m sure of it.”

With a slight smile, Fionvar agreed, “We’ll find him, somehow.” At the top of the ladder Fionvar stopped, looking back at Wolfram’s friend, perched before his instruments, already reviewing his records. Why had Dylan wanted to reassure him? Just an expression of concern, no doubt, an acknowledgment of the spot the Lord Protector was in. And if Dylan seemed a little more preoccupied than usual, he had cause to be between his injury and Wolfram’s absence. They’d find him. Of course they would. To lose his son now, before he’d even claimed him—it was unthinkable.

WOLFRAM RAN
a nervous hand through his hair. Five months had let it grow out to a decent length by his standards, but it would be years before it was long enough to braid properly—as the Woodfolk did. He frowned, and Morra patted his cheek gently.

“Do not worry,” she chided him in her own language. “The spirits have brought you, and surely they will let you stay.”

“I have not smoked before,” he replied, his speech hesitant as his tongue wrapped around the unnatural words. His facility with the language surprised him, but still he could understand much more than he spoke. When it would have been Finisnez—the high celebration of the Goddess in his home—he had composed a poem for Morra, as he might have done for a lady of the court. She said she liked it, but he thought the gift of a bone needle or pot of pine pitch would have been better received. Gorn and the extended family they traveled with made no pretense of liking poetry, nor understanding why he felt the need to give gifts in the dead of winter. They let him hunt with them, they cheered the tales of adventure he remembered from boyhood, they even gave blessings to the child which grew within Morra’s belly, but they did not greet him as one of them, and he knew by now they never would.

Tonight, with the full moon gleaming down on the remaining patches of snow, the Woodfolk would finally admit him to the men’s lodge, to smoke and drum, and call upon the spirits. Shivers came and went along his spine. If the
spirits would not speak to him, he’d either be tossed out into the wilderness, or killed. Morra would not tell him honestly, but he gathered that opinions were mixed on that point. The elders weren’t sure if mere banishment would be enough to appease the spirits for the heresy of adopting him. They did not like to kill him, since he was a good hand with a spear during boar hunts and had shown promise as a tracker, but they would kill him if the spirits asked it.

In his hide clothes, his skin weathered and hands cracked from the long winter, Wolfram might easily have been mistaken for one of his adopted people. He had been, in fact, one time when a hunting party from Bernholt had stumbled upon their encampment. Holding his tongue, he let them believe it, but inside he was burning with questions. What was made of his disappearance? Had they given up searching for him, or were these men not the hapless hunters they seemed to be? So even as he drank the Woodfolk’s hearty ale and dined on the meat of animals he helped slay, Wolfram knew in his heart that he did not belong. The spirits might well know, too, looking into him through the ritual smoke.

Suddenly, the flap of the lodge was thrown open, his cue to enter. Wolfram cleared his throat and turned back to Morra, his refuge from fear and anger.

She swiftly threw her arms around him and kissed him lightly. She had learned well in these few months together. Ducking her head, she slipped off the great bear claw she wore about her neck. Placing it over her lover’s head, Morra said,
“Na tu Lusawe.” Gifts of the spirits
.

“Na tu Lusawe,”
Wolfram agreed, stroking his thumb along the sharp claw. The phrase came from one of their stories, a strange and rambling tale in which the hero found his joy, and lost, and found it again. After several such cycles, depending on the mood of the storyteller, he might end with the treasure found, or the treasure lost. Either way, the moral was the same: the gifts of the spirits are precious and swift.
Na tu Lusawe shasinhe goron.
They used it as a greeting and a farewell, and for just about any purpose they deemed
appropriate. Morra was telling him that he was precious to her, that her faith held true, but he had given her the child she needed, and somewhere inside, where Wolfram’s long-quiet demon still lurked, he was hearing farewell.

Quickly, before he lost his nerve, Wolfram released her and strode to the lodge, ducking inside. Too quickly, it seemed, for he missed the step down inside, and stumbled in, starting a rumble of amusement among the men already gathered there. Dusting himself off, Wolfram held up his palm in greeting and crossed toward Gorn and the brothers he had traveled with. The oval lodge had a roof formed of thin, bent trees, bound in a grid and draped with deer hides. From the gridwork, various bundles of offerings hung: dried meat and fish, pouches of herbs or rare crystals, and bits of jewelry or other trade goods from the cities. Did the fur merchants know that the gold and jewels they exchanged for beaver and mink were hung as offerings to heathen spirits? From his belt, Wolfram lifted the little bundle he had assembled. Inside the carefully prepared skin of a pheasant nestled the tusk of the first boar he had slain—the one that would have slain him—and a cluster of garnets he had found by the stream. Around the pheasant’s neck, he bound the chain that had once adorned his own. In this place of their spirits, he gave his formal thanks that Morra had saved his life. Reaching up, he tied the offering to an empty crossing of branches.

Gorn, gazing up at the dangling bundle, moved over to make room for him on the ledge of earth encompassing the space.

On the dirt floor before them, a few men sat, bringing out round drums and small, stringed instruments. With the flap replaced over the doorway, the only light came from a fire at the northern end. One of the elders rose up, clattering with bits of metal and the beaks of birds. He bent over the fire, mumbling in a harsh voice. He revealed a branch with bits of herbs tied to its twigs. Lighting this, he straightened and began to make a circuit of the room, waving the smoke over their heads and down along the floor. When he had at last
returned to his place, leaving Wolfram blurry-eyed from the fumes, the musicians began to play, wild, rambling music that only now and again found a rhythm.

A young man with the blood-streaked brow of a new warrior stood up then, his hands trembling and eyes intent on the pipe he held. He offered it to the spirits of earth and sky and took the first puff, breaking down in a coughing fit immediately.

The other men stamped their feet and cheered him, welcoming him into their midst. As the pipe began its circle of the room, the young man began to dance, slapping his thighs and chanting. Others joined him, their voices raised in shouts and laughter. Even before the pipe had reached the third man, someone had passed a skin full of ale. Wolfram drank deeply and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, his feet stamping the newfound rhythm. Head adrift in the scent of the herbs and the smoke of the fire, he wondered if he might suddenly find himself compelled to dance. Removed from the pressures of his father’s legacy and his own curse, Wolfram felt lighter, stronger, taller even than he had been before. Laughing, he slapped Gorn on the shoulder.

The Great Hunter slapped him back, passing on another bottle.

When the pipe reached him, Wolfram took a long draw on it, taking the foreign smoke swirling into his nose and lungs. It tingled through him like inhaling starlight, and a presence touched him as surely as if a spirit stood before him. Someone took the pipe from his limp grasp, and he swayed to his feet, still stamping. Whirling in the pattern of an old-fashioned jig, Wolfram danced from his place. He whooped and hollered, leaping in the air, and many of the others fell back around him. Suddenly, he found himself face-to-face with a shaggy elder, the man’s gray braids lashing Wolfram as they stopped.

“Wolfram!” The ragged man shouted on a blast of ale and smoke.

Befuddled, Wolfram cocked his head to try to make sense of the stranger.

“I knew him!” The old man thumped his own chest. “Not you!” he roared, looming closer.

“I was named for him,” Wolfram shouted back, speaking his own tongue as the old man had. He searched his memory, and found the name in Fionvar’s stories. “Quinan?”

Bursting with laughter, the other grabbed him in a hearty embrace and dropped him to the floor again. “Dance!” he cried. “Smoke!”

Alone on the floor, the two men danced, their arms flailing in the air, feet beating against the earth. Quinan shared his own small pipe, clenching it back between his crooked, stained teeth. Spinning like a madman, Wolfram called out the words of the song his mother had always hummed to him, and jubilantly flicked the elder’s braids.

“Speak!” cried Quinan suddenly, whirling to a halt.

Caught up in the rhythm, Wolfram kept moving, but let his arms fall to his sides. The picture reached him clearly—the spirits had heard him! “I am alone in my bed.” Wolfram began, speaking his own death.

From the shadows in the vision, a woman drew herself forward, he could not see her face, but knew her to be someone that he loved. “A woman I love is coming,” he called out to his audience, and they murmured their approval. Buoyed up by their attention, Wolfram focused on the scene revealed to him, then he froze.

One foot hovered until his toes found the floor, but he stood poised. In his mind’s eye, the woman carried a goblet. From her clothing, she drew a vial and shook it over the drink, then bent to offer it to him, to the figure in the bed he would one day be. She had poisoned him, this woman—Lyssa?—whom he loved. Even as he watched, he felt a cold dread within him. He had been murdered, yet, in his heart, he knew it was not wrong. Had he deserved this death? Was he so terrible, now and always?

Trembling, sickened, he opened his eyes and closed his mouth. He thought he could escape his place, and he was wrong.

The face of Quinan hovered in the smoke near him. “Speak.”

Wolfram shook his head, trying to clear it of the vision.

Quinan frowned, drawing nearer, suddenly corporeal in the atmosphere of smoke. “Speak,” he commanded.

“I saw nothing more,” Wolfram blurted.

“Lie not to me, little Wolf,” Quinan growled, his eyes narrow, yet gleaming.

Around them, the other men grew restless; the rhythm of their stamping faltered, then grew louder.

“Out!” a voice cried, and another took up the cry, then another until it grew into a terrible chant. “Out, out, out, out!”

The drums beat ominously beneath a hiss of voices, and Wolfram turned from the fearsome slits of Quinan’s eyes. Around him in the smoke, those eyes shone from every face, wild, angry eyes. Pushing his way through the smoke, coughing, Wolfram fled.

He stumbled up the stairs and out into the brilliant clarity of the night air, and ran on, the focused glare of the Woodmen joined by the vengeful spirit of the man he had killed, howling him out into the black.

An arm shot out and caught him. Wolfram screamed, then stopped, whirled to face Morra’s anxious cry. He said quickly, “I can’t stay. I’m sorry.”

She wailed, a crude, inhuman sound of grief. “I did not think they’d take you, not now.” She pressed one hand to her belly, where their child grew.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and, touching her forehead to smooth away her coarse hair, he realized he spoke the truth. She had been kind, and asked him no questions.

She raised to her lips the bear claw she had given him, and kissed it, then kissed his lips with all the tenderness he had taught her. “Be careful,” she said. She untied her belt in the darkness, and tied it about him, with its bundles of medicine, flint, and tinder.

“I will, don’t worry.”

“The road of your people,” she said, turning him gently away and pointing through the forest.

His people. Wolfram shook his head.
“Na tu Lusawe,”
he whispered.

“Na tu Lusawe,”
she replied, and she stood to watch him go.

The road was quickly found, once his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Wolfram stood a moment, hesitating. Night birds called around him, and he listened to be sure it was not the Woodmen. To his left lay the mountains, and Lochalyn. To his right, Bernholt, where he had not been in years. Sighing, he realized he had no choice to make, not really. He turned right, down out of the mountains. If he struck out for the city, at least he could hear the news of Lochalyn and find out what they made of his disappearance.

Ten days’ hard walking brought him there, wearing the ill-fitting clothes of a farmer who’d taken a liking to his Hurim leathers. He kept the bear claw necklace, though, hanging beneath the shirt, token of the one person who would wish him well. Trudging beneath the arch into Bernholt City, Wolfram ran a hand through his hair to comb it. Scruffy whiskers darkened his cheeks, and weariness darkened his thoughts. Still, he’d no place to stay, so he’d best find work until he decided what to do.

“Move it, boy!” a gruff voice called, and he turned to find a groaning wagon loaded with stone.

Stepping aside, Wolfram watched the blocks of marble creak past, escorted by a few apprentices. He fell in beside them to follow the stone to a mason who might give him work. Above the city, he saw the towers of the palace. He swallowed. Perhaps this idea wasn’t so clever after all. Someone there might recognize him. But with this hair, these clothes? He shook off the concern. Besides, it was the best place to eavesdrop on the doings of the kingdom, this one, and his own. He moved as one of them, straight over the main bridge and down the arched tunnel until they emerged again into the sun in the royal gardens. Newly paved walkways crossed among young trees and flower beds not yet planted. He remembered a walk in the garden when he last
visited the palace, some four years ago. Princess Melisande had gone on about how grand the place would be, once they had finished rebuilding. It looked nearly done, to his eyes, but he stuck with the wagon and found himself led to the back corner, where the foundations of a new chapel rose from the surrounding dirt.

The wagon creaked to a halt, and sweaty men came to unload it. Wolfram spotted the master mason standing to one side with a parchment drawing. Wolfram picked his way among the stones and stood before him.

“What?” the man barked, glowering at him.

“I, ah, was wondering if you needed an extra pair of hands, sir.” He remembered to throw on the “sir” at the last moment, and the man frowned.

The master was a thick, stubby man, with huge arms. He wore a thin shirt that stuck to his broad chest, and showed the sun-baked arms and neck. His wispy gray hair did little to protect his scalp, and he winced a little when he reached up to scratch his head. “Plenty of laborers,” he replied, “and you don’t look near strong enough. Try the stables.” He offered a crack-toothed grin.