Changer of Days (24 page)

“The others?”

“We gave a good account of ourselves. We fought as best we could. And in that hour we didn’t know if you had succeeded, or if you had already failed, and our stand was in vain.” His eyes strayed at last to where Anghara waited in silence, a hand rubbing her restive mare’s nose. To her he was still half shadow, but there was no mistaking the expression on his face—the pride and exultation as he glanced back at Kieran, the glow of joy as his eyes returned to her and then dropped as he went down on one knee. “It was not vain; those who died there would regret nothing in this hour. I give you welcome, my lady. I wish it could be in a place more fitting…”

Anghara took the few steps that divided them and raised him with her own hand. “I saw that campsite. I saw Sif’s Army. It would have been a brave band who dared to challenge that. I would have liked to have known them all.”

“They knew you,” said Rochen gravely. “They all knew you. So do those who now follow in their wake.”

“What news, then?” said Kieran briskly. “Where are the twins?”

“Adamo is in the woods below Cascin, where most of the men are gathered.”

“Charo?”

Rochen grinned wolfishly. “In Miranei.”

“What?” Kieran said sharply.

But Anghara, after the first moment of surprise, laughed quietly, and both men turned at the sound. “His words at our parting by the Hal were that he would be there to open the gates for me. I didn’t think he meant literally. What is he doing in Miranei?”

“He’s with Melsyr,” Kieran’s lieutenant said. “He…”

“Charo joined Sif’s
Guard
?” Kieran demanded incredulously, his eyes wide with disbelief.

“In a way,” Rochen said. “To hear him talk you’d swear he and Melsyr were a private army. Even so, they’ve been making converts for us inside the walls; plenty of the Guard lost stomach for all too many things after your stunt, Kieran, and were ripe for the taking.”

“Then we can take the keep?” Kieran said. “If we have men inside, and Adamo is waiting at Cascin with more…how many did you manage to gather? Melsyr could let us in through the western postern, and we could be in before anyone was any the wiser.”

“Not that easy,” Rochen said.

Kieran’s eyes clouded for a moment. “How many have we got?” he asked quietly.

Rochen shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. The numbers are not the problem. We have plenty. This time there are enough to present a formidable barrier even to Sif’s main army—for all that our men are lamentably untrained—let alone a handful of half-won keep guards.”

“What, then?”

“Charo swore he wouldn’t have it.”

Anghara smiled again. “Wouldn’t have me enter Miranei?”

“Not until he could throw open the main gates and invite you inside with acclamation,” Rochen said, managing to keep a straight face.

“Ever the grand gesture,” Kieran said, but without rancor. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe he and Adamo are brothers, let alone twins. Ansen was much more…”

There was a moment of brittle silence as Kieran abruptly bit off his words. Ansen’s ghost hadn’t been raised for a long time; the Ansen Kieran invoked had been his close companion at Cascin, not the youth who had grown up to envy, hatred, and betrayal. And yet it was the latter who would always overshadow the more innocent days. The young Ansen might be what triggered a pleasant memory—but it wouldn’t be long before it was swamped by the recollection of a long-past midsummer’s eve, and a sharp dagger in Ansen’s hand.

Rochen didn’t know the whole story, but was sensitive to the atmosphere Ansen’s name had conjured up. He backtracked, fast. It’s probably best to join Adamo at Cascin as soon as we can. I’ve been here for a while; maybe there’s fresh news.”

“Are the men all at Cascin?”

“Not at the house itself. There’s a camp hidden in the forest. But Adamo himself is at the manor, with a few lieutenants. Sif’s men give the place a wide berth; there are rumors at the han that the manor is haunted.”

“Somebody must have seen the new inhabitants prowling around, and it’s been deserted for such a long time…” Kieran began, but Anghara shook her head.

“It’s more than that. There’s the Stone.”

“What Stone?”

Anghara turned with a smile. “Gul Khaima wasn’t the only Standing Stone I raised. There’s a Standing Stone at Cascin…of a sort. And those things always haunt a place.”

Their eyes met briefly, slid apart. Neither said it—that Cascin was also haunted by Ansen’s brooding spirit. Cascin’s heir had inherited the manor in his own strange, dark way; it would never be free of him. Kieran found a moment to wonder how Adamo was dealing with the shade of his dead brother.

“Well,” said Anghara quietly into the moment of silence. “This has proved a true homecoming. The path from Miranei to Kheldrin led through Cascin…and it is just as well that Adamo has chosen it for his headquarters. Cascin would have had to lie on my road back; there are things I left there I need to bring with me to Miranei.”

“We could stay here tonight, rest your horses…” Rochen began.

Anghara shook her head. “There will be time for rest. We rode them hard yet there is life and spirit left in them. We can rest soon enough, in the woods.”

“She’s right,” Kieran said. “Too many things are riding at our back. We need every hour we can snatch.”

Rochen wasted no more time, turning to reach for his riding gear. “On our way, then.”

Anghara withdrew into solitude during their ride, leaving her two companions to reestablish severed bonds and catch up with one another’s doings. Rochen plied his friend with questions and, while there were some he was reluctant to answer, Kieran still found himself doing most of the talking. Later, when they made camp, Anghara sat a little apart beside the fire. Kieran, although keeping a constant and wary eye on her, was content to respect her mood, choosing instead to turn questioner himself and get the full story of what had transpired on the moors before Miranei. Anghara didn’t seem to be listening. She sat with her legs drawn into the circle of her arms and her chin resting on her knees, staring into the flames. When she suddenly laughed quietly into the night Rochen physically jumped as if the laughter had ambushed him.

“What is it?” Kieran, more used to Anghara’s ways, asked almost casually.

Anghara lifted her eyes and there was a glow in them that wasn’t firelight. “He’ll be coming home soon,” she said slowly. “Many will be back before him; he will be following his army, not leading it. And still he will find enough power to make a stand at Miranei.” She laughed again, more sharply, with an edge. “A winter campaign,” she said. “That’s what it might come to in the end. And by tradition, the one who loses a winter campaign is branded as being of the true Kir Hama line.”

“You lost,” Kieran pointed out, “last year.”

“Not a campaign,” Anghara said, tossing her head. “Just my freedom. On that, there is no season.”

“Sif is coming?” said Rochen hesitatingly, looking from the one to the other. “How in the God’s name does she know his hour?”

“Which God?” Anghara asked sharply, before Kieran had a chance to reply. There had been something, a strange inflexion in his voice…

Rochen’s reply was intriguing. “Well, it hasn’t exactly been forbidden, although it isn’t liked by Kerun’s lot,” he said, a shade defensively. “It’s Bran that many swear by now.”

“Bran?” Kieran said, mystified. “Who is Bran? Where did all this come from? We haven’t been away that long…”

“I don’t know,” Rochen said. “Someone had a revelation. The word went out, and it took. There are no temples, but there are already men who are holy to him, men who serve the new God, and they raise shrines in Bran’s name, in their own fashion. It is said that Bran of the Dawning is the new guardian of the bridge into Glas Coil.”

New shrines. Kieran suddenly remembered the flower-wreathed pole on the plain. A new God would inherit the name of Gheat Freicadan; a new guardian for an ancient gate. “Where does that leave Kerun?” asked Kieran, curiously bereft at this obliteration of something immortal which had formed a cornerstone to his entire life. And only then did he make a connection. Bran. In Kheldrin it had been a winged goddess called ai’Bre’hinnah. And the prototype for both had been a name he had released into the night, a name which had once disguised an exiled princess.

His eyes sought Anghara’s, and in them he read equal comprehension. He remembered ai’Jihaar’s voice in the desert night:
You might well become a Changer for your own land.

Glas Coil had survived; but a new God had come to guard its gates. Bran of the Dawning, Rochen had called him. And a new Goddess stood in the portals of the Land of Twilight across the sea. Brother and sister; husband and wife—a making whole of two separate halves.

“You must tell me more of this new God,” Anghara said very quietly. Her eyes strayed for a moment into the fire, passed over the flames, and then flicked back as though riveted there by something. “There’s a ship coming in,” she said quietly, her voice making even Kieran’s hackles rise. “Men will step ashore in Calabra tonight, and find their native land stranger by far than the strange country their king led them forth to suffer in.”

Even though it was no longer possible for him to see it with his physical eyes, Kieran’s mind could easily supply the gleam of golden soul fire which must have wreathed Anghara in this moment—and yet another thing fell into place. The straw halo on the carved pole raised to Bran was a crude attempt to depict that golden glow. They had been wrong when they tried to analyze the shrine in terms of Roisinan’s ancient Triad. There was nothing there of Nual, Kerun or Avanna. It was all Anghara’s. Brynna’s. Bran’s.

Rochen stared at Anghara, his feelings plainly written on his face—something between horror-struck awe and adoration. This would be a thing that would follow her wherever she walked amongst her people. Kieran had to admit defeat on one point and agree with his queen that in this, at the very least, she had been right when she said she was no longer human. She was already beyond herself. She was becoming the incarnation of a legend before his very eyes.

As if being queen was not enough.

He stood quietly and went to rummage in their packs for the last remnants of the lais. In the aftermath of vision, Anghara would need rest; tonight, at least, he could provide it. After that, she was on her own.

They crossed into the straggling edges of Bodmer Forest by the sunset of the next day, and were deep into its secret paths by the following day. Anghara watched with interest as Rochen and Kieran navigated by signals invisible to anyone else—they’d ride a narrow path through the underbrush and emerge into campground clearings, or veer from a broad and well-defined way into what appeared to be no more than a wilderness of fern and scrub, only to find a hidden path. They moved surprisingly quickly for all that they were hindered by the terrain, and it was with a start that Anghara reined in her mare at Kieran’s signal. She saw a man wearing a forest-green cloak and carrying a long woodsman’s bow step into their path from amongst the trees.

“Ho, Mical,” said Rochen calmly, as though he had parted with the forest guard a matter of hours before. “I bring guests.”

Mical, eyes shining, glanced from Rochen to his companions. “Guests?” he all but whooped, protocol forgotten as his eyes met Kieran’s. “Friends, rather, unlooked for! Welcome back, Kieran!” And then, recollecting himself, he dropped onto one knee and lifted his face to Anghara. “Welcome, my lady!”

“Yes,” said another, more familiar voice; Adamo, wrapped in a cloak the mate of Mical’s, stepped from behind his man. “Welcome home.”

R
ochen rode in the van, leading the small procession into the camp in the woods beyond Cascin. Kieran followed just behind, his head bare, smiling gently to himself. Mical had remained at his guard post, and thus it was that Anghara and Adamo brought up the rear in the deep, companionable silence she had always associated with her cousin and foster brother. Some instinct made her keep her hood pulled well forward, and she rode shadowed, a slight, anonymous figure who was by this small ruse given an instant where she could be the observer and not the observed. Word had gone ahead in some mysterious manner, but had obviously not included all the details. It was Kieran’s name that greeted them as they rode into the camp. It was the first time Anghara had seen him with a larger body of his men, and she was both touched and strangely shaken to see the affection and deep respect that brought them pouring out of their tents and cabins to welcome him. His horse was ringed ten-deep with grinning, whooping men; Kieran had a name and word for most, and a warm smile for those he had yet to meet.

“They love him,” Anghara murmured.

“If you were the candle he held out to them, his was the hand that bore the light,” said Adamo, oddly eloquent for once. “Yes, they love him.”

Anghara glanced at her companion, and wasn’t surprised to see his expression bearing no less pride and fierce affection than the men around them. To Adamo and Charo their brother Ansen had often been condescending and overbearing. Kieran hadn’t always been a perfect older brother, but for all his occasional impatience he had been closer to them than Ansen ever managed. The two younger Cascin sons had hero-worshipped Kieran since earliest childhood, shadowing him since they had been old enough to walk. The Taurin twins had been amongst the first of his band; they were still the youngest holding positions of authority—although Kieran sometimes entertained doubts, despite his indisputable flashes of brilliance and courage, as to Charo’s suitability as a leader and a role model.

But Anghara was out of time to muse and ponder. There were those in the crowd who, if they didn’t know precisely where Kieran had been, knew well with whom he had left. Curious eyes turned to the slight, shrouded rider. And then Kieran turned, catching Adamo’s eye, and Adamo slipped from his horse and came to Anghara’s mount to help her down. His action focused hundreds of pairs of eyes on her. She allowed herself a small sigh as Adamo helped her alight, throwing back her hood with a toss of her head; this was how it would always be, from now on. This was the reason Sif craved the crown. It must have been a heady feeling for the youth whose semi-royal status as the king’s bastard meant he had never been a true prince in his own right, to see men bending their knee before him. Perhaps he would have known what to say in this moment, some powerful, exhorting speech, girding his men’s hearts with that insane courage with which they seemed to follow him. But Anghara had no such speeches. The moment held her spellbound; she struggled to find words, completely unaware of how eloquently the expression on her face and in her eyes spoke to the men gathered in her name. In the end, she didn’t need to say anything, because they said it for her. One man in the front ranks had risen, and stepped forward to bow over her hand. She recognized him: Bron, who had been with her foster brothers and herself on that wild ride from Miranei, with Sif’s army treading on their heels.

“Tomorrow, my lady,” he said, “in Miranei.”

They might have rehearsed it, so flawlessly did the rest follow. There was a beat of silence as men looked at one another, met each other’s eyes in recognition of a war cry. And then it was raised, in perfect unison, as they lifted clenched fists into the air—hundreds of voices, a vow of thunder.
“Tomorrow, in Miranei!”

Anghara found the words she needed, only two. She had clung to Bron’s hand, her vision swimming in sudden tears, and now she freed her hand gently, bringing it up to clasp it with the other on her breast, a gesture of gratitude as old as time. Her voice was a whisper in the wind, but every man heard her. “Thank you.”

It was Adamo who allowed this scene to run precisely long enough to maximize its impact, before leading up Anghara’s horse and advising the young queen to continue on to the manor and rest from her journey. Anghara, who had spent more than she knew on this instant of rapport, suddenly felt drained of every ounce of strength and energy she had ever possessed, and was all too happy to take his advice.

But Kieran was the camp’s for the moment, until all his men could have the chance to talk, to ask, to welcome him back. It was an oddly wrenching experience for them to take different paths—it was as hard for Kieran not to watch until Anghara’s horse passed out of sight as it was for Anghara not to ride with her head turned back toward the camp. She felt strangely cold and exposed, as though a shield had been torn away; she had grown used to having him around every moment of every day, waking and sleeping, hers, a different Kieran to the one who had just vanished into the throng of excited men.

“He’ll be back,” Adamo said unexpectedly, showing a startling ability to read the situation. “I’ll be surprised if he stays away an hour before he rides into Cascin to find out if we’ve tucked you in properly.”

Anghara swung round to glare at him, but he looked so serenely complacent it was difficult to do anything but admit a direct hit with a smile. “He has taken good care of me,” she said.

“Feor made you his Responsibility,” Adamo said, and Anghara could hear the capital. “Kieran has never been aught but responsible.”

You are the hawk I will send to seek for her
…Yes, there was that; Feor had begun Kieran’s quest. But there was something in Anghara that flinched at the logic. She sought refuge in memory—it had begun long before the responsibility was passed. Anghara recalled a rainy day in Cascin, and a cloak a young boy had flung over her shoulders. And then, on a midsummer’s eve some years after, a night when she had been the one to have taken Responsibility—and precipitated so many tragedies…

Anghara felt her breath catch painfully as she saw the manor appear through the trees. Other memories crowded in—of cold exile, bewildered hurt and incomprehension at what was happening to her, and then of what she had found in this place.

Welcome home.

Anghara had never thought of it as such until Adamo had said it, back in the woods with Mical. That word had always conjured up Miranei—the Miranei whose perfect image she had carried in her heart ever since she had left it at the age of nine, running from the whirlwind. But now she discovered it was all too easy to think of Cascin of the Wells as home. For all the upheavals and the searing memories tied to this place, it had also been the setting for so many gentler things. Anghara’s parents had always been distant—her father doted on her, but had little time to share with a young girl-child; her mother, capable of fighting like a tigress for her child’s life and inheritance, loved her dearly—but was, nevertheless, queen first and mother second. Anghara had forfeited a world when she fled to Cascin—but she had gained a family.

And lost them all, she realized in the next moment—all but the child Drya who had been too young for anything enduring to have grown between them, and the youth who rode beside her and his brittle, brilliant twin. There were other things in Cascin besides intangible memories and dreams. There were graves.

She turned to Adamo. “I’ll come to the house a little later,” she said quietly. “I would go first to the vaults.”

“The dead will stay for you,” Adamo said, his eyes soft. “It would be better…”

“I wouldn’t rest,” she said. “Not until I have gone to them.”

“All right,” Adamo said after a pause. “I’ll take you.”

“Adamo…I’d like to go alone.”

He was silent for a moment, and then smiled, reaching to touch her cheek. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll wait for you by the Well.”

“I know the way home,” said Anghara, dimpling at him. “You don’t have to ride guard on me; I’m sure these woods are crawling with your men.”

“If you were our Brynna,” Adamo said, “I’d leave you your solitude. But you are no longer Brynna; you are Anghara Kir Hama, and you will never be alone again.”

Hama dan ar’i’id.
The saying flashed briefly across her mind, bringing a breath of hot desert wind into this misty land of moss, bracken and laughing streams.
You are never alone in the desert…you will never be alone again.

Anghara bowed her head, acknowledging the inevitable. Adamo shifted in his saddle. “No one will intrude. Go, give them greeting. I’ll be waiting for you.”

She didn’t stay long; for her the place was haunted in more ways than if she’d been an ordinary mourner. She had the Sight, and knew how Chella had died; and Chella’s was a restless and pervasive ghost, for all that she would never hold the manner of her death against her niece, whose turbulent life had inevitably shaped her own. Lyme was in the crypt beside his lady, but the other restless ghost haunting this burial ground was one whose power lay in the very absence of his bones. Ansen lay buried far from his family—yet his angry, brooding spirit was as much a part of this place as any whose moldering remains lay beneath the gray stone slabs. It was an unquiet burial ground, and its unease was mirrored in Anghara’s eyes as she rode back to where Adamo had dismounted and now sat on a storm-felled tree trunk. On the face of it he was totally relaxed and at ease, his eyes closed, leaning against another tree trunk growing close behind him. But his head turned fractionally at the sound of her approach, and when his eyes opened a moment later they were full of understanding.

“I should have warned you.”

Anghara laughed dryly. “Rochen said the place was haunted.”

“Not the house,” Adamo said firmly, getting to his feet. “But here…I always feel him, and he’s stronger than any buried here, for all that he lies far away in an unmarked grave.”

She could cry for Ansen—for the anger, the resentment, the waste. Adamo saw her gray eyes film with tears, and looked away, busying himself with his horse. Charo, more alike to Ansen than he ever knew, had recoiled from their brother when he had learned the full truth of what Ansen had done, disowning even his memory. Charo had never wept for him. With the same capacity for deep passion Ansen had possessed, albeit tempered in his case with a lightness of spirit, Charo was aware at some deep level just how close he was to the chasms that had swallowed his brother. He had chosen to turn away, clinging instead to his loyalty to Kieran and Anghara with the same fervor that Ansen had devoted to the pursuit of his own darker goals. But Adamo had wept quietly for his older brother—not for his death, but for his life. He had Ansen’s intensity, but not his arrogance; he had a measure of real understanding for what had led to Ansen’s fall. And, unlike Charo, he had embraced the knowledge, not buried it. Ansen couldn’t touch Charo, for whom he had ceased to exist. But Cascin’s flawed heir could reach and shake his other brother through the very bridge of his empathy—and now, Adamo saw Ansen had the same power over the cousin and foster sister he had once done his utmost to destroy.

Adamo urged his horse forward, brushing Anghara’s arm in a comforting caress. “Come,” he said. “There
is
peace to be had here. Come to the manor.”

They returned to the great house, and Anghara was shown into her old room. All the memories of this particular sanctuary were good ones, and they gave her rest, and healing. She slept for hours, the sleep of the exhausted and the innocent; when she woke, rested and alert, it was to realize she had slept away the afternoon and right through the night; the light filtering through her window was the pearly light of morning. Somewhere in the trees beyond the house she could hear a weave of birdsong, and smiled as she recognized the same sound she had woken to for years in this room. The memory of her morning routine washed back, so strong it was almost more than she could do not to braid her hair and run for Feor’s schoolroom before she was late for the morning lesson.

The pull of the schoolroom proved entirely too much to resist when she finally got up and made herself presentable. She could have been forgiven for the sharp intake of breath when she pushed the door ajar and was greeted by a familiar scene. It looked as though the same fire burned in the grate, with the chairs arranged around the hearth just as they had been when Anghara had sat here with Ansen and Kieran, analyzing her father’s battles and nursing her secret identity. The chairs were occupied, and Anghara jumped when one creaked, and Kieran’s face popped around to look at the door.

“About time,” he remarked equably. “We were about to start without you.”

There was no need to ask what they had been about to start—the room was piled with maps and letters, and in one corner, incongruous in this place of learning, rested a stack of naked swords, with three long spears leaning against the wall. The men in this room were a war council, beginning to plan for tomorrow—that tomorrow they had sworn to see in Miranei.

This interlude in Cascin, time to rest and plan, was the last step in a long journey. The three children who had grown up in this house began to appreciate Feor’s true legacy, as the qualities and abilities he had fostered in them quietly came into their own in the planning of the taking of Miranei. It was here, as much as anywhere, that Kieran had become a leader of men, that Anghara had unobtrusively changed into a young queen. The small select circle—Kieran, Anghara, Adamo, Rochen, and two more of Kieran’s lieutenants—sat and planned, aware that every hour slipping past was one hour less they had to put those plans into action before Sif returned. They had to work fast, and they knew it—and yet they had to resist the temptation to work too fast. A sloppy plan could fail—and there would be no second chance.

It took them several days to hammer out the beginnings of a plot, and at the end of that time Anghara paid another visit to the family graves, this time accompanied by an unexpected ghost. Beside the stone-sealed niche which held the remains of Rima’s mother, Anghara’s grandmother whom she had never met, Anghara vividly recalled her first visit to this place. It was only days after her arrival at Cascin as a bewildered nine-year-old. March had accompanied her then, guiding her hand toward a specific carving on the frieze adorning the stone covering her Grandmother’s grave. He showed how a piece of the stone could slide out and reveal a long, narrow, dusty hiding place. They’d pulled out a handful of childhood treasures—relics of Rima’s childhood, and for a moment Anghara had been distracted by the sudden insight into her mother’s past. But soon the niche was empty, waiting for the next treasure it would to be called upon to guard—the document weighed with the Council Lords’ seals. Anghara held it in both hands as if it were too heavy to support with just one. In some ways, it was—this was the proof and bond of her inheritance, bearing witness to her crowning. March had taken it and laid it with gentle reverence into the narrow space; they had replaced the stone, sealing the document into its secret chamber. Nobody would have thought anything was amiss; the graves would need to be taken apart stone by stone for the document to be discovered by anyone who didn’t know precisely where and how to look.