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A plague of a different sort struck the eastern coast: Plenimaran raiders. Towns were looted and burned, the old women killed, the younger ones and the children carried off as slaves in the raider’s black ships. The men who survived the battle often met a crueller fate.
Iya and Arkoniel entered on such village just after an attack and found half a dozen young men nailed by the hands to the side of a byre; all had been disemboweled. One boy was still alive, begging for water with one breath and death with the next. Iya gently gave him both.
Iya continued Arkoniel’s education as they travelled, and was pleased to see how his powers flourished. He was the finest student she’d ever had, and the most curious; for Arkoniel there were always new vistas ahead, new spells to master. Iya practiced what she jokingly referred to as ‘portable magics’, those spells which relied more on wand and word than weighty components and instruments. Arkoniel had a natural talent for these, and was already beginning to create spells of his own, an unusual accomplishment for one so young. Driven by his concern for Rhius and Ariani, he experimented endlessly with seeking spells, trying to extend their short range, but with no success.
Iya explained repeatedly that even Orëska magic had its limits, but he would not be put off.
In the houses of the richer, more sedentary wizards, particularly those with noble patrons, she saw him linger longingly in well-equipped workrooms, examining the strange instruments and alchemists’ bowls he found there. Sometimes they guested long enough for him to learn something from these wizards and Iya was delighted to see him so willingly adding to what she could teach him.
Content as always to wander, Iya could almost at times forget the responsibility that hung over them.
Almost.
Living on the road, they heard a great deal of news but were little touched by most of it. When the first rumours of the King’s Harriers reached them, Iya dismissed them as wild tales. This became harder to do, however, when they met with a priest of Illior who claimed to have seen them with his own eyes.
‘The King has sanctioned them,’ he told Iya, nervously fingering the amulet on his breast, so similar to the ones they wore. ‘The Harriers are a special guard, soldiers and wizards both, charged with hunting down traitors to the throne. They’ve burned a wizard at Ero, and there are Illioran priests in the prison.’
‘Wizards and priests?’ Arkoniel scoffed. ‘No Skalan wizard has ever been executed, not since the necromantic purges of the Great War! And wizards hunting down their own kind?’
But Iya was shaken. ‘Remember who we are dealing with,’ she warned when they were safely alone in their rented chamber. ‘Mad Agnalain’s son has already killed his own kin to preserve his line. Perhaps there’s more of his mother in him than we feared.’
‘But it’s Niryn leading them,’ Arkoniel reminded her, thinking again of the way the wizard had watched him the night of Tobin’s birth. Had he been seeking out followers even then? And what had he found in his Harriers, that he hadn’t seen in Arkoniel?
PART TWO (#ulink_2511dd71-177c-5c1c-9d68-e682b399ca5a)
From the private journal of Queen Tamír II, recently discovered in the Palace Archives (Archivist’s note: passage undated)
My father moved us to that lonely keep in the mountains not long after my birth. He put it about that my mother’s health required it, but I’m sure by then all Ero knew she’d gone mad, just as her mother had. When I think of her at all now, I remember a pale wraith of a woman with nervous hands and a stranger’s eyes the same colour as my own.
My father’s ancestors built the keep in the days when hill folk still came through the passes to raid the lowlands. It had thick stone walls and narrow windows covered by splintery red and white painted shutters – I remember amusing myself by picking off the scaling flakes outside my bedchamber window as I stood there, watching for my father’s return.
A tall, square watchtower jutted from the back of the keep, next to the river. I used to believe the demon lurked there, and watched me from its windows whenever Nari or the men took me outside to play in the courtyards or the meadow below the barracks house. I was kept inside most of the time, though. I knew every dusty, shadowed room of the lower floors by the time I could walk. That crumbling old pile was all the world I knew, my first seven years – my nurse and a handful of servants my only companions when Father and his men were gone, which was all too often.
And the demon, of course. Only years later did I have any inkling that all households were not like my own – that it was unusual for invisible hands to pinch and push, or for furniture to move about the room by itself. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on Nari’s lap as she taught me to bend my little fingers into a warding sign …
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_9a86c65e-cf7d-5a39-8f19-f41682d0069e)
Tobin knelt on the floor in his toy room, idly pushing a little ship around the painted harbour of the toy city. It was the carrack with the crooked mast, the one the demon had broken.
Tobin wasn’t really playing, though. He was waiting, and watching the closed door of his father’s room just across the corridor. Nari had closed the door when they went in to talk, making it impossible to eavesdrop from here.
Tobin’s breath came out in a puff of white vapour as he sighed and bent to straighten the ship’s little sail. It was cold this morning; he could smell frost on the early morning breeze through the open window. He opened his mouth and blew several short breaths, making brief clouds over the citadel.
The toy city, a gift from his father on his last name day, was his most treasured possession. It stood almost as tall as Tobin and took up half of this disused bedchamber next to his own. And it wasn’t just a toy, either. It was a miniature version of Ero itself, which his father had made for him.
‘Since you’re too young to go to Ero, I’ve brought Ero to you!’ he’d said when he gave it to him. ‘You may one day live here, even defend it, so you must know the place.’
Since then, they’d spent many happy hours together, learning the streets and wards. Houses made from wooden blocks clustered thickly up the steep sides of the citadel, and there were open spaces painted green for the public gardens and pasturage. The great market square had a temple to the Four surrounded by trader’s booths made of twigs and bright scraps of cloth. Baked clay livestock of all sorts populated the little enclosures. The blue painted harbour that jutted from one side of the city’s base outside the many gated wall was filled with pretty little ships that could be pushed about with a pole.
The top of the hill was flat and ringed with another wall called the Palatine Circle, though it wasn’t exactly round. Inside lay a great clutter of houses, palaces, and temples, all with different names and stories. There were more gardens here, as well as a fish pool made from a silver mirror and an exercise field for the Royal Companions. This last interested Tobin very much; the Companions were boys who lived at the Old Palace with his cousin, Prince Korin, and trained to be warriors. His father and Tharin had been Companions to King Erius when they young, too. As soon as Tobin had learned this, he wanted to go at once but was told, as usual, that he must wait until he was older.
The biggest building on the Palatine was the Old Palace. This had a roof that came off and several rooms inside. There was a throne room with a tiny wooden throne, of course, and a tiny tablet of real gold beside it, set in a little wooden frame.
Tobin lifted this out and squinted at the fine words engraved on it. He couldn’t read them, but he knew them by heart: ‘So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’ line defends and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated.’ Tobin knew the legend of King Thelátimos and the Oracle by heart, too. It was one of his father’s favourite stories.
The city was populated by several score of little wooden stick people. He loved these the best of anything in the city and smuggled whole families of them back to his bed to hold and talk to under the covers at night while he waited for Nari to come up to bed. Tobin put the golden tablet back, then lined up half a dozen stick people on the practice ground, imagining himself among the Companions. Opening the flat, velvet lined box his father had brought home from another journey, he took out the special people and lined them up on the palace roof to watch the Companions at their exercises. These people – The Ones Who Came Before – were much fancier than the stick ones; all but one was made of silver. They had painted faces and clothes and each carried the same tiny sword at their side, the Sword of Queen Ghërilain. His father had taught him their names and stories, too. The silver man was King Thelátimos and next to him in the box was his daughter, Ghërilain the Founder – made queen of Skala because of the Oracle’s golden words. After Ghërilain came Queen Tamír, who was poisoned by her brother who’d wanted to be king, then an Agnalain and another Ghërilain, then six more whose names and order he still mixed up, and then Grandmama Agnalain the Second. The first and last queens were his favourites. The first Ghërilain had the finest crown; Grandmama Agnalain had the nicest painting on her cloak.
The last figure in the box was a man carved of wood. He had a black beard like Tobin’s father, a crown, and two names: Your Uncle Erius and The Present King.
Tobin turned the king over in his hands. The demon liked to break this one. The little wooden man would be standing on the Palace roof or lying in his place in the box when suddenly his head would fly off or he’d split right down the middle. After many mendings, Your Uncle was all misshapen.
Tobin sighed again and put them all carefully back in the box. Not even the city could hold his attention today. He turned and stared at the door, willing it to open. Nari had gone in there ages ago! At last, unable to stand the suspense any longer, he crept across the corridor to listen.
The rushes covering the floor were old and crunched beneath his slippers no matter how carefully he tiptoed. He looked quickly up and down the short passage. To his left lay the stairs to the great hall. He could hear Captain Tharin and old Mynir laughing about something there. To his right, the door beside his father’s was tightly shut and he hoped this one stayed that way; his mama was having another one of her bad spells.
Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he pressed his ear to the carved oak panel and listened.
‘What harm can there be, my lord?’ That was Nari. Tobin wiggled with delight. He’d nagged for weeks to get her to do battle on his behalf.
His father rumbled something, then he heard Nari again, gently cajoling the way she did sometimes. ‘I know what she said, my lord, but with all respect, he’s growing up strange kept apart like this. I can’t think she wants that!’
Who’s strange? Tobin wondered. And who was this mysterious ‘she’ who might object to him going to the town with Father? It was his name day, after all. He was seven today; surely old enough at last to make the journey. And it wasn’t so far to Alestun; when he picnicked on the roof with Nari, they could look east over the valley and see the cluster of roofs beyond the forest’s edge. On a cold day he could even make out smoke rising from the hearth fires there. It seemed a small thing to ask for a present, just to go, and it was all he wanted.
The voices went on, too soft now to make out.
Please! he mouthed, making a luck sign to the Four.
The brush of cold fingers against Tobin’s cheek made him jump. Turning, he was dismayed to find his mother standing right there behind him. She was almost like a ghost herself, a ghost Tobin could see. She was thin and pale, with nervous hands that fluttered about like dying birds when she wasn’t sewing the pretty rag dolls, or clutching the ugly old one she was never without. It was tucked under her arm just now and seemed to be staring at him, even though it had no face.
He was as surprised to find her here as he was to see her free. When Tobin’s father was home she always kept to herself and avoided him. Tobin liked it better when she did.
It was second nature for him now to steal a quick look into his mama’s eyes; Tobin had learned young to gauge the moods of those around him, especially his mother’s. Usually she simply looked at him like a stranger, cold and distant. When the demon threw things or pinched him, she would just hug her ugly old doll and look away. She almost never hugged Tobin, though on the very bad days, she spoke to him as if he were still a baby, or as if he were a girl. On those days Father would shut her up in her chamber and Nari would make the special teas for her to drink.
But her eyes were clear now, he saw. She was almost smiling as she held out a hand to him. ‘Come, little love.’
She’d never spoken to him like that before. Tobin glanced nervously at his father’s door, but she bent and captured his hand in hers. Her grip was just a little too tight as she drew him to the locked door at the end of the corridor, the one that led upstairs.
‘I’m not allowed up there,’ Tobin told her, his voice hardly more than a squeak. Nari said the floors were unsound up there, and that there were rats and spiders as big as his fist.
‘You may come up with me,’ she said, producing a large key from her skirts and opening the forbidden door.
Stairs led up to a corridor that looked very much like the one below, with two doors on either side, but this one was dusty and dank smelling, and the small, high-set windows were tightly shuttered.
Tobin glanced through an open door as they passed and saw a sagging bed with tattered hangings, but no rats. At the end of the corridor his mother opened a smaller door and led him up a very steep, narrow stairway lit by a few arrow slits in the walls. There was hardly enough light to make out the worn steps, but Tobin knew where they were.
They were in the watchtower.
He pressed one hand to the wall for balance, but pulled it away again when his fingers found patches of something rough that scaled away at his touch. He was scared now, and wanted to run back down to the bright, safe part of the house, but his mother still held his hand.
As they climbed higher, something suddenly flittered in the shadows overhead – the demon, no doubt, or some worse terror. Tobin tried to pull free but she held him fast and smiled at him over her shoulder as she led him up to a narrow door at the top.
‘Those are just my birds. They have their nests here and I have mine, but they can fly in and out whenever they wish.’
She opened the narrow door and sunlight flooded out. It made him blink as he stumbled over the threshold.
He’d always thought the tower was empty, abandoned, except perhaps for the demon, but here was a pretty little sitting room furnished more nicely than any of the rooms downstairs. He gazed around in amazement; he’d never imagined his mother had such a delightful secret place.
Faded tapestries covered the windows on three sides, but the west wall was bare and the heavy shutters open. Tobin could see sunlight shining on the snow-covered peaks in the distance, and hear the rush of the river below.
‘Come, Tobin,’ she urged, going to table by the window. ‘Sit with me a while on your name day.’
A little spark of hope flared up in Tobin’s heart and he edged further into the room. She’d never remembered his birthday before.
The room was very cozy and comfortable. A long worktable stood against the far wall, piled with doll making goods. On another table finished dolls, dark-haired and mouthless as always, but dressed in tunics of velvet and silk fancier than any Tobin owned, sat propped in a double rank against the wall.
Perhaps she brought me here to give me one for my name day, he thought. Even without mouths, they were very pretty. He turned hopefully to his mother. For an instant he could almost see how she’d smile, telling him to pick whichever one he liked best, a special present just from her. But his mama just stood by the window, plucking restlessly at the front of her skirt with the fingers of her free hand as she stared down at the bare table in front of her. ‘I should have cakes, shouldn’t I? Honey cakes and wine.’
‘We always have them in the hall,’ Tobin reminded her, casting another longing glance at the dolls. ‘You were there last year, remember? Until the demon knocked the cake on the floor and …’
He faltered to a stop as other memories of that day came back. His mother had burst into tears when the demon came, then started screaming. His father and Nari had carried her away and Tobin had eaten his broken bits of cake in the kitchen with Cook and Tharin.
‘The demon?’ A tear rolled down his mother’s pale cheek and she hugged the doll tighter. ‘How can they call him that?’
Tobin looked to the open doorway, gauging an escape. If she started screaming now he could run away down the stairs, back to people who loved him and could be counted on to do what he expected. He wondered if Nari would be angry with him for going upstairs.
But his mother didn’t scream. She just sank into a chair and wept, clutching the ugly doll to her heart.
He started to edge his way towards the door, but his mama looked so terribly sad that instead of running away, he went to her and rested his head on her shoulder, the way he did with Nari when she was sad and homesick.
Ariani put an arm around him and pulled him close, stroking his unruly black hair. As usual, she hugged too hard, stroked too roughly, but he stayed, grateful for even this much affection. For once, the demon let him be.
‘My poor little babies,’ she whispered, rocking Tobin. ‘What are we to do?’ Reaching into her bodice, she took out a tiny pouch. ‘Hold out your hand.’
Tobin obeyed and she shook out two small objects: a silver moon charm, and a little piece of wood capped on both ends with the red metal he’d seen on the backs of shields.
She picked up one, then the other, and pressed them to Tobin’s forehead as if she expected something to happen. When nothing did, she tucked them away again with a sigh.
Still holding Tobin close, she rose and drew him to the window. Lifting him up with surprising strength, she stood him on the wide stone sill. Tobin looked down between the toes of his slippers and saw the river rushing in white curls around the rocks below. Frightened again, he gripped the window casing with one hand, his mother’s thin shoulder with the other.
‘Lhel!’ she shouted at the mountains. ‘What are we to do? Why don’t you come? You promised you’d come!’
She gripped the back of Tobin’s tunic, pushing him slightly forward, threatening his balance.
‘Mama, I want to get down!’ Tobin whispered, clutching her harder:
He turned his head and looked into eyes that were cold and hard again. For an instant she looked as if she didn’t know who he was or what they were doing here at this window so high above the ground. Then she yanked him back and they both tumbled to the floor. Tobin bumped his elbow and let out a yelp of pain.
‘Poor baby! Mama’s sorry,’ his mama sobbed, but it was the doll she rocked in her arms as she crouched there on the floor, not him.
‘Mama?’ Tobin crept to her side, but she ignored him.
Heartbroken and confused, he ran from the room, wanting nothing more than to escape the sound of her sobs. He was almost to the bottom of the tower when something pushed him hard in the back and he fell the last few steps, banging his shins and scuffing his palms.
The demon was with him, a dark shape flitting just at the edge of his vision. Tobin couldn’t recall just when he’d begun to see it, but he knew he hadn’t always been able to. It darted close and yanked at a stray lock of his hair.
Tobin struck out wildly. ‘I hate you! I hate you I hate you I hate you!’
Hate you! echoed back from the shadows overhead.
Tobin limped back downstairs to the toy room, but even here the daylight seemed tarnished. The savour of his earlier excitement had been leeched away, and his shins and hands hurt. All he wanted was to burrow under his bedcovers with the current family of friendly little wooden people waiting there. As he turned to go, his father came in.
‘There you are!’ Rhius exclaimed, hoisting Tobin up in his strong arms and giving him a kiss. His beard tickled and suddenly the day seemed a little brighter. ‘I’ve looked high and low for you. Where have you been? And how did you manage to get so dusty?’
Shame welled up in Tobin’s chest as he thought of the disastrous visit. ‘I was just playing,’ he said, staring down at the heavy silver broach on his father’s shoulder.
Rhius slipped a rough, callused finger under Tobin’s chin and examined a smudge on his cheek. Tobin knew his father was thinking of the demon; this at least they both understood without the need for words.
‘Well now, never mind that,’ he said, carrying Tobin next door to his room where they found Nari laying out a new set of clothes on the bed. ‘Nari tells me you’re old enough to ride down to Alestun with me and look for a name day present. What do you think of that?’
‘I can go?’ Tobin cried, all dark thoughts swept away for the moment.
‘Not looking like that, you can’t!’ his nurse exclaimed, sloshing water into the basin on his washstand. ‘How did you manage to get so dirty this early in the day?’
His father winked at him and went to the door. ‘I’ll meet you in the front court when you’re presentable.’
Tobin forgot all about his scraped shins and sore elbow as he dutifully scrubbed his face and hands, then stood as still as he could while Nari combed the tangles she called rats’ nests from his hair.
Dressed at last in a fine new tunic of soft green wool and fresh leggings, he hurried down to the courtyard. His father was waiting, as promised, and all the rest of the household with him.
‘Blessings of the day, little prince!’ everyone cried, laughing and hugging him.
Tobin was so excited that at first he didn’t even notice Tharin standing off to one side, holding the bridle of a bay gelding Tobin had never seen before.
The horse was a few spans shorter than his father’s black palfrey and fitted out with a child-sized saddle. His rough winter coat and mane had been curried until they shone.
‘Blessings, my son,’ Rhius said, lifting Tobin up into the saddle. ‘A lad old enough to ride to town needs his own horse to go on. He’s yours to care for, and to name.’
Grinning, Tobin twitched the reins and guided the bay into a walk around the courtyard. ‘I’ll call him Chestnut. That’s the colour he is, just like a chestnut shell.’
‘Then you could also call him Gosi,’ his father told him with a twinkle in his eye.
‘Why is that?’
‘Because this isn’t just any horse. He’s come all the way from Aurënen, just as my black did. There are no finer mounts than that. All the nobles of Skala ride Aurënfaie horses now.’
Aurënfaie. A flicker of memory stirred. Aurënfaie traders had come to their gate one stormy night – wonderful, strange looking folk with long red scarves wrapped around their heads and tattoos on their cheeks. Nari had sent him upstairs too early that night, but he’d hidden at the top of the stairs and watched as they did colourful magics and played music on strange instruments. The demon had scared them away and Tobin had seen his mother laughing with her doll in the shadows of the disused minstrel’s gallery. It was the first time he’d ever realized he might hate her.
Tobin pushed the dark thoughts away; that had been a long time ago, nearly two years. Aurënen meant magic and strange folk who bred horses fit for Skalan nobles. Nothing more.
