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Ivis shook his head. ‘There was war, with the Forulkan. We were forced to create an army. When the war was done, witch, only then did that army turn upon us. Honour was well served in the instant, but its flavour quickly fades, and now the taste is bitter.’
‘What drove the Forulkan into our lands? For them, too, the old ways were dead.’
‘Is this all you wanted to say? Why bother? We could argue causes until the last sunset; it avails us nothing.’
‘The Shake will leave their fortresses,’ the woman said. ‘They will come to us, in the forests. You will try to find us, but we will not be found. Not by you, not by Father Light. We are no longer in your war.’
Ivis snorted. ‘You think to usurp Higher Grace Skelenal?’
The witch was silent for a long moment, and then she said, ‘The goddess you saw chose the manner in which she manifested. When we found her … we fled. If others set upon her, they belonged to the forest. Spirits of wood. Spirits of old bones and blood-hungry earth and roots. For us, there was no need to hear her words. We well knew what she would say to us.’ The witch raised both hands, out from under the skins she was wearing, and Ivis recoiled upon seeing the stakes driven through both. ‘It is our fate to slay the old ways of living. We take too much joy in the slaughter, in the proof of our skills with spear and arrow. Longing gave power to our summoning. We must now suffer the proof of our regret.’
‘Then … send her back.’
‘Seen or unseen, flesh or ghost, she suffers still. You and I, we have murdered the old ways, and all that we will come to, it is of our own making.’ She hesitated, and then cocked her head. ‘You can always blame your neighbour.’
She bowed before him, and turned away.
Ivis watched her re-join the others, and the three shamans slipped back into the forest. In moments they vanished from sight.
Blame the neighbours. Yes, we’ll do that. When we can, if only to make living easier.
He resumed walking, his scowl deepening as he looked upon the wall before him. The Deniers would do as they must. If indeed they chose to disappear, rejecting the vengeance they had every right to seek, well, regrets had a way of breeding, and the swarming spawn could drown a soul in an instant.
Passing through the gate, his steps slowed as he studied the keep before him. Ah, milord. Your daughters? Well now, there was a fire in the house … we saw naught the telltale flickers of light, and all too late felt its murderous heat.
Come the spring, milord, I see a sky made grey with smoke.
* * *
Sandalath Drukorlat sat near the fire in the common room, away from the others. The new surgeon, Prok, was singing a ballad, words slurring and the brightness of his gaze an alcoholic sheen through which he blinked regretfully at the world. Whatever sorrow existed in the song lost its truths in the maudlin self-pity of the man’s voice.
Seated near the surgeon, in poses of faint attention or outright uninterest, were arranged the other newcomers to the household, as well as Armourer Setyl and Horse Master Venth Direll. The new keeper of records, a woman named Sorca, hid her face behind the bowl of a pipe. Her complexion, oddly smooth and unlined, was the same hue as the smoke she sent out in long, tumbling streams from her somewhat overly generous mouth. Her hair was cut short as if to undermine her femininity, but her broad features were soft and peculiarly welcoming. For all that, the woman rarely spoke, and when she did, it was in a low mutter, as if all conversation was in truth a private one, she with herself. Sandalath had yet to see her smile.
Sitting close to the new keeper was the woman who had replaced Hilith as head of the house-servants. Bidishan was wiry, nervous, carrying herself with an air of impatience, as if some vital task yet awaited her for which she needed all her energy, but, Sandalath had come to realize, there was no such task, and each day and evening was consumed by the same headlong rush. Perhaps it was sleep that Bidishan hurried towards, as if oblivion was the only island to take her exhausted self, flung insensate upon the strand at day’s end, and in the realm of dreams the woman unleashed all that was in her soul.
Musing on the notion, Sandalath felt a pang of sympathy for Bidishan. Within the mind, after all, was a world of unchecked dramas, where loves were unveiled and made so bright, so fierce, as to sting the eyes, and every gesture could make the earth groan, and every glance could awaken unfettered flames of passion.
In that world, Bidishan was beautiful, young, filled with vivacity. And others who came upon her, why, they saw her truly, and in the face of such encounters they avowed their hearts, and made every labour bent to her service an act of worship.
Sandalath knew her own such world, also clothed in sleep. And often, she found herself longing for its embrace, for in this cold, wintry place, with its stone walls hiding secret passageways, her waking moments were filled with anxiety, fear and longing. In her thoughts and in her body, she lived with nervous fires flickering without end. When she could, she fled them all, huddling beneath furs in her bed, and, as sleep took her, slipping back to the life that existed before House Dracons, before the murderous spawn of Draconus and the blood splashing floor and walls, before the bodies carried out into the bleak light of the courtyard and the small white bones in the bread oven. Before the terrible battle that had been fought outside the keep’s walls.
A secret lover, the pleasure of his touch, his weight upon her in the high grasses far beyond the sight of her mother. A son, free to play out his games of war amidst the scorched embers of the old stables. Children were visible shouts of life, a crowing delight in possibility and promise.
He was taken from me, taken from my sight. Where he once lived, in my life, there is nothing. An emptiness, empty of life and love. Empty, I fear, of hope.
Was that child not the mother’s gift? Children were where things could start over, be made different, where wounds could be avoided, evaded. Where dreams could live again, passed on in the clasp of her hand to his. Youth sent echoes into the world, echoes that could rush over a mother and sweep her back into her own past, and the swirling sorrow of such moments, so bittersweet, could become a kind of strength, a protectiveness both savage and undying. As if, in protecting the child, the mother was also protecting what remained of the child she had once been.
Bridges such as these should never be dismantled.
And yet, when Sandalath thought of her own mother, she felt nothing. No bridge there. She sold off the stones, one by one, until she had us all perched upon a single block, a tottering foundation stone, the height of which she held to be more vital than anything else, even love.
Nerys Drukorlat, was it Father who stole everything from you? His war? His wounding? His death? But Orfantal wasn’t your child with which to begin again, to make right.
He was mine.
Prok’s song stuttered and then fell away as the surgeon lost his memory of the words. From near the kitchen door, Yalad – now the gate sergeant – rose to collect wood for the fire. She watched him approach and answered his weary smile with one of her own.
Houseblades were stationed in every common room now, and at the doors to the private ones. It was, in some ways, absurd. The girls hid in their hidden places. Ivis himself had said they could root them out at any time. Instead, such a moment would have to await the return of Lord Draconus. And in the meantime, we live in terror of two wretched children.
