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Authors: Katya Reimann

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BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles

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She raised her head and looked into Tamsanne’s eyes. The old woman did not have the power to frighten her. Not anymore.

“Did Gaultry know what you intended for the Prince when you sent her westward?” she said sharply.

“She would not have agreed to go if I had told her,” Tamsanne admitted, her dark gaze unrepentant.

“Then we must go to her. All of us. Without us there to guide him, in desperation, I fear that Benet may try for the Kingship sacrifice as selflessly as you have described it—on a plain sword instead of the
Ein Raku.
We must prepare ourselves quickly. There is scarcely time to reach the border before Andion’s moon is upon us.”

“You want us to travel?” Dervla said angrily. “My place is here at court.”

“You have no place at court,” said Elisabeth coldly. “Injustice will not serve the Prince.” She looked at Tamsanne. “Whatever the price.”

“Benet must be made King,” Tamsanne said.

Elisabeth shook her head. “The blood price is too high, even if Benet is willing. We will find another way.”

“Twins in you, High Priestess, I believe you.” Through the glaze of fire, Dame Julie was staring, a new look of respect on her face. “Your eyes are open now. We will find a way.”

Elisabeth, closing her eyes, winced within, wondering at the certainty with which she had committed herself. “The Court Bards will travel with us,” she said curtly. “I so order it, in my first act as High Priestess.”

O Emiera,
Elisabeth quailed,
O Huntress.
Have I really just committed myself to two weeks in a horse cart, listening to Tyrannis witter?

Steadying herself, she opened her eyes. Yes, that is exactly what she had done.

Now, all she had to hope was that Gaultry and Tullier would be waiting safely at the battle-front for her arrival, and that she would get there before anything terrible happened.

For that, she would have to pray to the Great Twins. Long and hard.

chapter 21

It was the Ides of Andion, the center of the Sun-King’s month. The
sun had reached its apex in the sky. Gaultry and Tullier had not seen a human soul since morning, when they passed a tiny hamlet—six houses and their outbuildings. Those houses had been deserted save for a pair of young men who greeted them with unreserved hospitality, welcoming them to a massive, and greatly appreciated, farmer’s breakfast. The other members of the little farming enclave were away, celebrating the Feast Day at a slightly larger hamlet to the west, near where a priestess of the Goddess-Twins tended a sacral grove.

Gaultry intermittently regretted her decision not to co-opt mounts from the horse-children, but reflecting on their fragile innocence, she could not help but be glad she had left them unburdened by such an appropriation. Some great force had twisted their trail since they had turned south from the high road. She did not want to see those young innocents threatened by any connection to herself and Tullier, however obscure.

Her experience at the preceding day’s dawn had deeply shaken her. She did not understand the impulse that had moved in her as the dawn’s light had moved into the sky. The image of the dryad’s face flashed back to her repeatedly. The unreadable expression on the creature’s face. The beauty of his hands, reaching to touch her brow, just once, so gently. She had dared the border of the Changing Lands, and returned again.

The secret image of the creature’s beautiful yet alien face was to be
her punishment. Unless she crossed over, she would never see it again—and she would never live to forget it.

That dryad’s face … its likeness to her own was no coincidence.

Fiery like the sun.
That was how Tamsanne had described her lover, Gaultry and Mervion’s grandsire.
He never left the woods
. Gaultry had known who the dryad must be the instant she’d seen his face, and she had finally understood Sieur Jumery’s mistake. Tamsanne had not got her daughter on a dead man. She had got her daughter on a man whose soul had been taken from him by the trees.

Tamsanne must have loved him before he had crossed over, before he became a creature of moss and moonbeams.

But why had he chosen to show himself to her? Why now? Did his appearance explain the way their trail had shifted so inexplicably beneath their feet? Was it the magic of the Changing Lands that had called her this far south, finally revealing itself in that magic-charged moment of dawning, when time seemed almost to stand still, suspended between darkness and light?

He had come into the water to prevent the magic lands from taking her. Of that at least, she was certain. The instant when the dryad’s eyes had held hers made her quiver still, the beautiful smile on his face—mocking, inscrutable. He had touched her brow so lightly, and turned her away. The moment of their encounter had been so ephemeral, yet the image of him burned behind her eyes: every flower in his moss-tangled hair, every line of his body and face, as clear as though he stood before her. Why had he chosen this moment to reveal himself? Why had he called her to him, if only to send her away?

Gaultry paused to drink from her waterskin. The sun blazed overhead, sending up shimmers of heat from the fields of unkempt wild oats that surrounded them. A few hours before, they had refilled their water supply from a marshy brook. Gaultry, washing her mouth from the skin, wished that they had not gone through the supply they’d taken from the breakfast farmers, but with neither horses nor an adequate stock of skins, they could not carry a good supply. As she swallowed, the faintly briny taste made her wonder if it might not have been fouled. That would not have surprised her. She did not like the heat or the smells of this place.

The track was marked with the hooves of herding beasts, spread out in places among broken oat-shoots, as though their herders had moved them quickly and without a care for the ground. This land was still too far east for these to be signs of Lanai raiders, and no one at the village
they had passed in the early morning had reported any such thing. That
should
have been reassuring.

She glanced at Tullier. He was walking head down, cheeks flushed with twin roses of fever color, his skin beneath its sheen of sweat a little pale.

“Where do you think we are?” he asked, noticing her attention.

“I’ve no idea,” Gaultry said. “I don’t understand the ground here. We’ve been heading northwest all day. From what those farmingmen said this morning, we should have reached the road between Pontoeil and the north. But I’m not seeing anything like that, and this ground,” she gestured at the low wooded hills that surrounded them, “it doesn’t give any clues as to what lies ahead. We’ve reached Haute-Tielmark, I’m sure of that. But that’s all I know, until we can find another farmer to set us to rights.” Much of Haute-Tielmark’s land was thinly populated. Not simply because of the Lanai raiders who threatened every summer, but because the soil was thin, discouraging a settled style of farming. Although the land had been herded successfully since ancient times, using the land more intensively would spoil it.

“We’ll just have to keep going,” Gaultry said. She smiled wanly. “At least we’ll get plenty of warning before we reach the border. They say the mountains are tall enough there to keep their snow, even in high summer. That will be a signpost we won’t be able to mistake.”

“Snow.” Tullier wiped the sweat from his eyes. “That’s hard to believe with a sun like this beating down.”

Gaultry took another swig from her waterskin, wondering again at its mossy taste. The waves of heat off the ripening oats made her feel headachy and weak. Or perhaps it was the image of her grandfather, so younglooking, so alien—

“It’s Andion’s Ides,” Tullier said abruptly. “Do you suppose the Sun-King truly looks down on us today?”

“I do. It’s his feast day. He has to be watching.” Gaultry left unspoken her fervent prayer that if this were true, the Great God would have the will to keep them safe until the day had passed.

T
he hills around them deepened and began to open out, gradually taking on a grander, untamed aspect. Low ridges of grainy rock began to appear, splitting the land into a giant’s playground. This was the Haute-Tielmark Gaultry remembered from her visit to Prince Clarin’s tomb, in those confused
days before Benet had renewed his God-pledge. It gave her hope that they might soon rejoin a road.

It was deep afternoon, the height of the day’s heat, when they came to the lip of a lovely valley. Its bottom was lush grass. Natural terraces of the grainy rock formed its sides. Their track descended sinuously to the valley floor and wound off into the distance. Halfway along the valley, over several humps of land, was evidence of an extensive manor. Pens, low outbuildings, and a patchwork of irregular pastures. Perhaps the holding of one of Haute-Tielmark’s knights. There was no obvious stronghold or manor-building, but the folds of the land could easily have concealed a small fortress or keep.

“Have we lost our way again?” Tullier asked. “Those men this morning didn’t mention anything like this.”

Gaultry stared down, frustrated. The buildings were clearly occupied. She could see the smoke of at least one fire. The empty paddocks were not so surprising. To escape the worst heat of the day, the stock would have been driven up the valley sides to cooler pasture. “I have no idea. I don’t understand any of this. Elianté in me, I don’t think I’ve understood anything since we came away from the High Road.”

“It’s like someone is leading us,” Tullier said tentatively. He sounded embarrassed to be speaking such a thing aloud. “Maybe it is just too odd to me, to be traveling in a land where everyone we’ve met has been so pleasant and hospitable. The serfs I knew on Bissanty farms—back at Fructibus Arbis—they all seemed like they were keeping darker secrets.”

“Fructibus Arbis was a special case.” The estate where Tullier had summered away from the Sha Muira was secretly owned by Tullier’s father, a part of the old Prince’s festering schemes of vengeance.

“I know,” Tullier said. “But in a way it was a comfort, the certainty that any of the serfs would have risen against you, had their slave-bond not been holding them back. Here, it’s so much less clear what keeps the people we meet from knocking travelers on the head and stripping their bodies of their valuables.”

“The truce of the traveler’s sign is not lightly violated,” Gaultry snapped, annoyed for the umpteenth time by Tullier’s paranoid world view.

In her efforts to curb her temper, Tullier’s suggestion that they were being led went by her without further comment.

A
s they neared the cluster of buildings, Gaultry became more puzzled by its layout. For a farming spread of this size, she would have expected to see an extravagant manor-house. Tullier, she could tell, was similarly nonplussed. If they had not passed the empty hamlet of the morning, the buildings’ deserted air would have felt threatening—evidence of a plague, or a Lanai raid. But everything was neat and orderly: tools put away, windows tightly shuttered. Clearly, the folk who would be necessary to tend the beasts of these well-kept paddocks, pens, and low-eaved barns had traveled away to spend the Feast Day at some nearby village. All they could see was a skinny old rail of a woman, standing by the well on the bare square of ground that was the nexus of three of the larger buildings, watching their approach. Their path would take them right past her, in a matter of a few more minutes.

Afterward, Gaultry would wonder why she didn’t see it. But really, there was nothing in the scene to give her warning.

“G
ood day to you!” Gaultry called, when they were near enough for hailing. “Best wishes of the Feast Day!” A rail fence enclosed the yard where the well and the old woman stood: a rail fence with broad gaps left open at both ends of the yard, accommodating the path. As Gaultry stepped inside this pale, she made the traveler’s sign.

The woman nodded curtly. Her hands were busy hauling up the bucket, and she could not offer the countersign. “Well met,” she said loudly, half over her narrow shoulder. Her hands as she hauled on the rope were surprisingly quick and strong. From the woman’s leathery, sun-darkened face and grimy yellow-white hair, tied in a long braid that straggled down past her hips, Gaultry would have taken her for a far older woman than that strong voice and her nimble strength with the bucket implied.

“Almost with you.” Huffing from her effort, the old woman heaved the brimming bucket into view over the edge of the well. It was a large bucket. More than Gaultry would have liked to see her own grandmother lift.

“Can we help?” Gaultry asked, drawing nearer.

“Help? Oh yes.” The woman swung the bucket onto the well’s edge, and steadied it there with her hand. Her face was set like chiseled stone, her eyes fierce and dark, malevolent. “Great Twelve above. You’ve done all that, and more.”

Almost the last thing Gaultry knew, the old witch upturned the bucket toward her. She understood fleetingly that the woman’s failure to acknowledge the traveler’s sign had been intentional, and she did not need her sudden glimpse of the ram’s-head amulet at the woman’s throat to know who she was. In the long, spindly lines of the woman’s body, her grey robes, Gaultry saw suddenly the figure that had intruded into her dream back at Princeport palace. Not the unseen presence who had driven her deep within the palace labyrinth or the green-black enemy who had sheathed her with the vines, but the grey figure, the grim figure, who had spoken to her from the distant hill.

But realization, and with it her fear, arrived too late. The black circle of lead that bound the bucket’s upper rim expanded toward her, encompassing her in darkness. Something that was not water drenched her skin. “Run, Tullier!” were her last conscious words.

Then there was only darkness.

G
aultry came to with water burning in her sinuses. Gasping with pain, she groggily comprehended that a bucket of water had been flung in her face to rouse her. Not the bespelled bucket from the well. Another, simpler bucket, full of older, dirtier water.

After the pain, the first thing to strike her senses was the thick musk of animal, pressed in on her from all sides.

With an effort of will, she overcame the pain, the startlement. From the rough rafters and beams overhead, the partial darkness, it was obvious that she had been taken into one of the larger barns and lashed by her hands to an overhead beam. Already, her raised arms and shoulders felt on fire. Only by straining up onto the balls of her feet could she somewhat relieve the pain.

Around her were the low slatted walls of a lambing pen. Beyond, the rest of the barn’s floor had been emptied of similar separators. Crowded into that space was a milling, tightly packed flock of sheep.

All this she took in during the brief moment before she became aware of the figure who stood before her, blocking the lambing pen’s gate.

The old woman leered at her with something like pleasure, a second bucket brimful at her feet, ready to douse her again if the first hadn’t taken effect. Tullier, to her deep dismay, was nowhere in sight.

“What have you done with my friend?” Her voice came out weak and cracked.

“What have I done with you?” the woman cackled. “Better to ask that, Glamour-witch. You are powerful and bold, but I have hold of your measure.”

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles

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