Stronghold Read online

  The youth flung himself down the stairs. Segelin shouted to the guards, telling them to throw him out the main gate. Then he went to soothe his wife and son.

  Nobody saw the juggler tidy his clothes, make a face at the dampness of his trousers, drink off the rest of the water from a small pocket flask, and start off at an easy, graceful lope into the deepening night, chuckling as he ran.

  • • •

  The moons rose early, bright enough to light her way. Not that Brenlis needed to see where she was going; the paths were familiar to her from childhood. She stepped softly through the pale grass, wilted but making a lovely sibilant sound against her skirts, until she reached the rocky cliffs. The smell of the sea filled her and she crouched down, picking up small rocks to throw down at the waves.

  Her parents understood nothing. Nothing. She was the mother of a child by the Lord of Goddess Keep, and they asserted that as the baby’s grandparents they ought to enjoy honors, land, wealth. Her influence with Andry should gain them favors from Prince Kostas—instead of being only lowly farmers, they could be important vassals, rich, powerful, intimates of their prince. They had been after her about it since her arrival, through the days it had taken to assure herself that her brother would recover from his illness.

  Brenlis was nauseated by their greed, and had not scrupled to say so. But tonight they had used her brother against her.

  We don’t ask for ourselves. We ask for him, for his future. Why shouldn’t he have the best? Why shouldn’t he become a great lord with a fine castle and the chance for a rich wife? The Lord of Goddess Keep loves you. He’d do anything for you. You’ve given him one child—give him another, and this time make him marry you!

  She hadn’t cried until she had run through half a measure of drooping grass in the new moonlight. After wiping her eyes, she continued on to the cliffs, where she sat back on her heels to watch the glow of bonfires across the water at Faolain Riverport.

  It was the harvest celebration tonight, she reminded herself. She was tempted to go, to lose herself in the crowds of laughing townfolk. She could pretend to be someone else, as she had done when she was little—as she had not had to do since going to live at Goddess Keep.

  High Princess Sioned had understood. Brenlis had been brought to her attention by Lord Baisath, who had heard strange tales of a girl who sometimes saw the future. She had been invited to Stronghold and for the first time in her life Brenlis found someone who understood her. Sioned, too, had been looked on askance as a child, called fey and strange, something of an embarrassment to her family. Brenlis had warm memories of her sympathetic kindness. To hear some at Goddess Keep tell it, the High Princess drank dragon blood instead of wine and had taught her son the blackest sorcery. Brenlis felt guilty sometimes that she did not defend them, but who was she to contradict anyone there? Her two pitiful rings had been earned at great effort. She would never have any more, never achieve a rank that would enable her to speak of the gentle treatment she’d known at Stronghold, the understanding woman who had sent her to Goddess Keep where she need no longer be afraid. Brenlis knew why people told stories about Sioned. They were afraid of her power.

  But Andry was afraid of nothing. She wished she could talk with him now, bathe her wounded spirit in his love. But she didn’t know how to reach out to him. The sun was difficult enough for her to use. Moonlight was completely beyond her. A part of her said that even were he with her now, within reach, she still would not know how to touch him.

  He had worries of his own. She could not trouble him with her petty problems, not when he was frantic with concern for his mother. Brenlis had met Princess Tobin once during her brief time at Stronghold, and still could not quite believe that her own daughter was Tobin’s grandchild.

  Bitterness curled her mouth at the thought of the other grandmother. Merisel, Named for the long-dead faradhi Andry revered, had one grandmother who was a princess and one who was a grasping peasant. Brenlis would not ask Andry for anything, not even for her brother. She couldn’t. He would do everything in his power—and she would have to give something in return.

  Marriage. Though he had never asked outright, she knew he wished it. Lords or Ladies of Goddess Keep did not marry. But he would break that tradition as he had broken so many others. The power this gave her was frightening. She stared hard at the red-orange glow of the Riverport festival fires, and determinedly put him and her parents and everything else from her mind.

  • • •

  The last moonlight dappled patterns onto the intricate tiles of the oratory at Graypearl. Meath had never lost his amazement at this masterwork of the faradh’im who had lived on Dorval long ago. The floor and domed roof were a calendar, pure in function but not at all simple; it had taken Princess Audrite years of complicated calculations to replace missing or broken tiles accurately. The bulk of the oratory had been excavated from the ruins of an ancient keep on the other side of the island and transported here. It was during an idle dig through nearby remains that Meath had found the Star Scroll.

  “First of Summer, First of Winter, moons don’t rise at all,” sang a little boy as he leaped from one tile to the next, his brown curls bouncing. His voice was sure and surprisingly rich for his nine winters as he recited the lesson Meath had brought him here tonight to learn. “Fortieth Spring, Fortieth Autumn, it’s early the moons fall!” He stopped on the Autumn tiles. “Meath?”

  “Yes, O torment of my declining years?”

  “The moons don’t really fall down, do they? Wouldn’t they break?”

  “Audran, my pest, if they fell out of the sky we’d none of us be here to ask foolish questions.”

  “Then the song is foolish, too,” Audran replied. “It says the moons fall, and they don’t. Where do they go?”

  “The other side of the world. There’s more to the song—keep going. And don’t land too hard on the midwinter tiles—they’re very old.”

  “Older than Granna and Grandsir? Older than you?”

  “Even older than I, and I am exceedingly old.” He grinned and gestured for the child to continue.

  “Moons are full and white and clear,” Audran sang, doing a complicated cross-step over to another set of tiles.

  “Wait a moment. Where did you learn that? Not the song, the maneuver.”

  “From the squires. They’ve been teaching me how to fight with a knife.” Suddenly Audran crouched and, wielding an imaginary blade, stalked Meath with exaggerated care. “I come in low and slow, and distract you with a feint—like this—then jump in and slash and slash until you’re ribbons!”

  “Gaahh!” Meath staggered back and clutched his belly. “I’m wounded! Great prince, don’t finish me off!”

  “Of course not,” Audran scoffed, pretending to wipe a blade on his shirt. “You haven’t taught me the rest of the song.”

  All at once Meath toppled to the tiles—careful of his sixty-four-year-old bones—and gave a whimper. Audran darted to him. In an instant the boy was prone and captive and Meath held a thin knife in front of his startled eyes.

  “My prince,” he said softly, “never leave an enemy merely bleeding. He may not be as badly hurt as he seems. And he may have other knives.” Meath replaced the blade in his boot. “And if the matter is serious enough to use your knife, it’s serious enough either to kill him or scar him forever.”

  Audran barely breathed as the Sunrunner helped him up. “You scared me,” he whispered.

  “I intended to. If you’re old enough to learn how to fight, you’re old enough to learn the rules—the real rules, not the ones that apply when you’re practicing with the other squires.” Meath smiled and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Forgiven?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Audran hesitated, then said, “Meath? You never called me that before.”

  “Called you what?”

  “‘My prince.’ You call Papa and Grandsir that, but not me.”

  Meath thought of the other little boys he’d had a hand in turning into
men: Audran’s father Ludhil and uncle Laric; Maarken, Pol. “You’re growing up.”

  “I wish somebody’d tell that to my mother!” Audran grumped.

  “Princess Iliena is a sweet and loving lady, and you’re lucky to have her for a mother. But I understand.” He glanced at the domed ceiling. “Now look what’s happened. The moons have set and it’s too late to go on with the lesson. Is that what you had in mind?”

  “Meath! I did not!”

  Laughing, they left the oratory and paused on the little footbridge over the stream that circled it like a miniature moat. This part of the garden was dark, for it was impossible to use the calendar accurately if torchlight interfered with the moons. Meath gestured, and a row of flames blossomed from wrought iron sconces set at intervals along the path back to the palace.

  “Meath? Do the ones around the water, too, please?”

  Obliging and indulgent, the Sunrunner concentrated. Audran clapped his hands as light flickered from the hundred small lamps that followed the course of the stream. Meath lit them in sequence, as if Fire sped from treetop to treetop in a miniscule forest. Audran leaned over the railing of the bridge and laughed to see the water ripple gold and red and orange.

  “I want to be able to do that someday! Can I be a Sunrunner, Meath?”

  “I’m afraid not, my prince,” he replied gently. “There’s no trace of it in your family. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh.” Crestfallen, Audran turned from the display and sighed. Then, with the unquenchable spirits of the very young, he danced down the pathway singing the song about the moons again.

  Meath chuckled and shook his head. He followed the boy, hoping Audran would not choose to make him play seek-and-find in the gardens tonight; his bones were aching from a long ride this afternoon, and he didn’t relish the thought of trying to match pace with a nine-year-old.

  He kept Audran in sight and as they neared the palace was astonished to see a guard hurry out, scoop the young prince unceremoniously up under one arm, and rush back inside. Other guards emerged, calling for Princess Alleyn.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  “His grace said to find the children and get everyone inside at once.”

  A maidservant caught sight of Meath and cried out, “Do you know where she is? What’s happened to Alleyn?”

  “Try the lily pond, or the shed where she keeps her animals,” he suggested. “Where is his grace?”

  “Up top the walls, my lord.”

  He took the stairs three at a time, then two, and finally had to heed the screaming muscles of his thighs and the pounding of his heart. At last he reached the palace roof and stopped to catch breath enough to call out.

  “Meath! Over here!” Chadric shouted.

  Ludhil and Audrite were with him, as well as several guards and their commander. Judging by the way they breathed, all had only just arrived. They stared north out to sea, where the channel between Dorval and the continent widened into the Sunrise Water.

  “Ships by the last moonlight,” Ludhil said tensely, scraping the lank brown hair from his forehead. “The watch saw them clearly for only a moment.”

  “They’re not ours?” Meath asked.

  “We’ve none coming down from Tiglath, and none unaccounted for,” Chadric said. “I received the yearly tally from the portmaster only yesterday morning.”

  “Port Adni?” Audrite guessed. “Einar? Waes?”

  Her husband shook his head. “All in port for the winter. There won’t be any early storms coming down from the Veresch, or so Donato tells us from Castle Crag, and things are calm to the south as well over the sea. But by this time of year everyone with any sense has furled his sails.”

  Ludhil cleared his throat. “Father—the watch says he’s never seen sails like these on any ship. Great squares, three of them, looking as if they’re fixed in place. We use triangular, movable sails, and never more than two.”

  “New design?” Meath guessed.

  “Not that I’ve heard of. And no one builds so much as a flatboat that I don’t hear about.” Chadric tapped an arrhythmic beat on the top of the low balustrade with fingers almost as weathered as the stone. “We must assume these ships are something less than friendly,” he said with grim understatement.

  “But who could they belong to?” Audrite exclaimed.

  “I don’t think that matters. Mother.” Ludhil exchanged a glance with his father. “I think we’d better prepare ourselves.”

  “For what?” Then she gasped. “Oh, Goddess!”

  Chadric turned to the commander of the guard. “Give the alarm at once.”

  Meath looked up at the sky and swore bitterly. “The moons are gone—and I can’t use starlight!”

  “On purpose,” Audrite whispered. “This has been planned—timed.”

  Chadric frowned in the dimness. “I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right. Ludhil, see to the defenses of the palace. Audrite, we’ll need people to ride down to the port and reinforce the alarm. See to it, please. And Meath—”

  “The useless Sunrunner,” he muttered.

  “Stop that!” Audrite exclaimed. “We need your wits and your experience!”

  “And your Fire,” Chadric said.

  Meath had never kept count of how many times he’d told someone to sound the storm drum at Graypearl, warning of an approaching tempest. Now the drum began to thunder a different warning to the palace and the town below, and the beacon was lit atop Graypearl’s soaring slender watchtower. Meath searched Chadric’s eyes, the blue washed away in the dimness, and understood that he was about to break a Sunrunner’s most solemn oath. He was about to use his gifts to kill.

  • • •

  A faint pungent scent of smoke awakened Brenlis. Stiff and chilly, she shifted in the little hollow—much smaller now than when she hid here as a child—and raised her head. It was not yet dawn; the east was soft and milky-skied, but stars still pocked the night that lingered in the west. She sat up and grimaced at the unpleasant dampness of her clothes. Residual anger nipped at her, resentment at being forced to spend the night this way. But for her brother, she felt unwelcome in her own home. The smell tickling her nostrils annoyed her further. Only the leftover fumes from the celebrations at Riverport, she decided; a little strong, but perhaps someone had grown careless and a house had caught. Standing, stretching, grateful for the clean salt spray as she faced the sea, she scrubbed her hands over her face and yawned.

  It was then that she saw the dragons.

  At least twenty of them, huge and gleaming dark and gold and silver, heads rearing proud and fierce from long necks half-submerged in the waves, white wings unfurled.

  Brenlis cried out, thinking this another vision. But there was no queasiness, no lightness of spirit, no sense of being in two places and two times at once. This was real.

  They were not dragons, those immense creatures floating toward the river’s mouth. They were ships, lavished with bright paint that captured even this dim light. They picked up speed as the morning wind blew strong in the shoulders of their sails, these ships with the heads of snarling dragons.

  She whirled around. Smoke billowed from the palely glowing Riverport, staining the eastern sky. Treachery there, faceless enemies mixed in with unwary townfolk, using the cover of festival bonfires to set the whole port ablaze. She sobbed with the horror of it, the deaths, the destruction. And she finally knew that she was living one of her own visions. She was standing on the cliffs near her home, just as she had done in the seeing—but the Goddess had not shown her enough.

  “Andry!” she screamed, and fell to her knees on the stony ground. “Oh, Goddess, help me! Andry!”

  But there was no light to use, no sun visible over the horizon. She covered her face with her hands and trembled, the cool wind fingering her dress as if to judge its worth as spoils of war. She begged the sun to rise, the Goddess to speed its passage into the morning.

  Her need went unanswered. She looked up, tea
rs streaking her face, and saw the last few stars winking mockery at her lack of skill. “I’ll do it!” she shouted at them. “You’re Fire, and I’m a Sunrunner! I can use your light, too!”

  Now that she dared, now that she must, it seemed easy. Pale and silvery in a dark blue sky, the stars were made of cooler fire even than the moons. She felt chilled to the bone as she wove the delicate strands and cast them toward Goddess Keep.

  Strangely, she forgot her terror and no longer smelled the thickening smoke. She flew along the starlight, enchanted. How beautiful the land was, mysteriously shadowed in the half-night. Here was the rich farmland she had passed through days ago, and there the dark ribbons of the Catha and Pyrme rivers, the gentle hills of Ossetia, the smooth expanse of Lake Kadar and its pretty manor and keep and pastures filled with horses. And then, finally, blessedly, the gray bulk of Goddess Keep.

  But how would she find him? Surely he slept. Did the stars shine on him? They must. Otherwise she was lost. She searched frantically for his windows, looked within. The bed she had so often shared with him, richly hung with tapestries and covered in a white velvet quilt—his bed was empty, unslept-in.

  She sobbed again and the sound jerked her painfully back to the coast of Syr. Where was he, how could she possibly find him? There was no hope for it—and the stars were almost gone. Her heart thudded sickly as she realized how close she had come to being shadow-lost. Shrinking into herself, she cursed her failure and her weakness, and whimpered Andry’s name.

  There was other noise now besides the whisper of windswept grasses and the pounding of the sea. She heard horses and the crash of windows, shouts and shrieks and the terrible clamor of swords. Fists pushed against her eyes so she could not see, breath held so the scent of burning and blood could not reach her, she rocked back and forth in mute agony, trying to deny what the Goddess pressed upon her. But with the sound came the scene, and the stench. This was no seeing of the future, removed from her, having no connection to her life and mind but the Goddess’ power. This was real. She was seeing Faolain Riverport die. Worse, she was there, drifting along the blazing streets as if she, too, were only smoke.