The Hollow Queen (32 page)

Rhapsody nodded, took another sip, and returned the flask. “Again, agreed, and thank you.”

“How many did we lose?”

“Eleven hundred seventy-four. All but one hundred eighteen women.”

“Remarkable. And on their side?”

“We have roughly eleven thousand prisoners. Tallies disagree, but it is upward of forty-five thousand dead.” She wiped her hands off onto her apron. “Bethany is a large and well-appointed city with many places to hide. It will take a while to ferret out all the deserters. But Luisa is charged with that, and she is relentless.”

“Indeed. So what are your plans now? Do you intend to remain here and await a second assault?”

Rhapsody shook her head. “If that prisoner we met on the road is to believed, they just lost over a third, close to a half, of that one commander's forces—what was his name? Titactyk? I am absolutely certain that our new forces, men and women, have the citadel secured. I have been awaiting word from Gwydion Navarne and from the leadership in Yarim, Bethe Corbair, and Canderre, but so far no bird has arrived. Once I know how they are faring I will make a decision as to where to deploy next. But unless there is a serious need of more arms, I suspect Ashe's new trainees have things well in hand.”

Knapp nodded agreeably.

“So if that be the case, I believe I will head off to join Anborn and the First Wave.” She chuckled as the ancient scout's left eyebrow arched, but he said nothing. “Just in case there are any more iacxsis out there, Knapp; I do have a decent weapon for use against them.” She patted the dragon's tongue whip she had used to pull Skraw from his mount, curled at her side.

“I know.”

“Thank you again for the cover. Well, unless there's something else you need of me, I think I will go bed down. My tent is looking very comfortable in my mind's eye.”

“Get some sleep—you well deserve it.”

“As do we all. Good night, Knapp.”

“Good night, m'lady.” The scout looked away, suddenly tired.

Rhapsody stepped closer and looked up into his face. “Are you all right?”

Knapp exhaled. “Yes—I'm just struggling with old demons, having witnessed what I did this day.”

“I can imagine,” Rhapsody said simply. “Good night.”

*   *   *

Later that night, in the depths of her small regulation tent, Rhapsody was beset by old demons herself.

She had long been blessed, or cursed, with the gift of prescience, the ability to see the Past and often the Future, and even occasionally the Present, in dreams and visions that occasionally left her exhausted, drained, and terrified. Though she did not remember, those dreams had been held at bay for years by the men in her life, her husband and son, neither of whom she currently thought of, as a family member, in Ashe's case, or at all, as it regarded her son. The dragon blood in their veins allowed them to wrap the protection of their lore around the images in her mind and guard her from them.

This night she had a glimpse of a tiny child, with enormous blue eyes, the irises scored by vertical pupils, as Ashe's were. In her mind she saw him quite distinctly for a moment, lying on a pillow beside her, waving his tiny arms in the air.

Then the vision vanished.

Rhapsody groaned and rolled over onto her other side.

After a few moments' respite from the visions, her dream changed.

She was back in the Past, on a summer's day nearly two years before, back when Anborn had still been lame.

She had come to bid him goodbye before she and Ashe had set off to the province of Yarim to meet up with Achmed and the Bolg artisans who would undertake, successfully as it turned out, to rejuvenate the dead, ancient relic of Entudenin, a rock obelisk that had once been a fountain of life-giving water in the middle of the arid red clay desert city that was the capital of the province.

She had found the Lord Marshal staring out over the fields of waving golden highgrass, a contemplative look in his azure eyes.

She could see him, could hear him speak the words again he had spoken to her in that field what seemed like a lifetime ago.

It's coming from the west, I believe.

In the depths of her dream, Rhapsody felt the same queasy feeling in her stomach that she had experienced then.

Anborn, a Kinsman like she was, though far more familiar with the brotherhood of soldiers sworn to the wind, was referring to the Kinsman call, the summons spoken into the wind by those who had been welcomed into the fraternity for a lifetime of selfless service bearing arms, or for a heroic gesture, risking one's life for an innocent.

He had been granted his Kinsman status long ago, she recently, he for the first reason, she for the second.

And, like him, she had been hearing, or rather feeling, something strange on the wind.

What is it?
she whispered in her sleep, as she had into his ear then.

The Lord Marshal, almost as real to her in her dream as he had been in the grassy field, shook his head.

I don't know. But I thought I heard the Kinsman call the other night. On the Skeleton Coast
.

What neither of them could have known was that what she was feeling was the eyes of Michael, the Wind of Death, her hated adversary and pursuer in the old world, gazing at her through the scrying scale that his child could read.

The Faorina Michael had called Faron.

The demon host that was, in fact, coming for her.

From the west.

The dream shifted again, and Rhapsody sighed painfully.

She was now atop a rocky promontory that lunged out into the sea, a large jagged structure beside other such structures that rose from the sand like fingers, as if a giant hand had landed from the sky, palm down, at the ocean's edge. The sea crashed violently to the shore below her.

Around her was violence and devastation too grisly for her mind to comprehend, a purge for sheer sport with soldiers ravaging young mothers as well as their children, the brutal sodomizing of an elderly woman in the vestments of a member of the clergy.

And, worst of all, a line of soldiers carrying screaming infants to a catapult positioned at the end of the promontory, which they used to fling the babies, still screaming, into the sea.

All the while a young soldier with dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard, whose face was hidden in the night shadows, laughed uproariously as he directed the mayhem.

With a scream of her own, Rhapsody bolted upright in her bedroll, trembling.

The next several minutes were spent apologizing to the various soldiers who had come rushing to her aid, bringing her hot cider and sympathetic glances, but who were clearly confused by whatever it was that bedeviled her.

How can they possibly understand this sensitivity?
she asked the bottom of her mug of cider as the shaking of her hand subsided.
Even
I
don't understand it.

Eventually she was able to calm herself again and climbed back into her bedroll, brushing the rocks out from under her head first.

Trying to remember, as sleep came for her, what she had first seen in her vision before it had turned to a nightmare.

And failing.

*   *   *

The next morning, when a message had come from Navarne that their attack had been repelled and that Gwydion and Constantin were making their way to Sepulvarta, she packed her meager possessions, requested and received a mount, and left quietly before most of the city had awakened.

On her way to meet the two men that, long ago, she had adopted as grandsons, one still young, one now very old, one to heal his broken young heart.

And one to save his soul.

 

33

NAVARNE

In the smoldering aftermath of the attack launched against the citadel that carried his father's name, and his own, Gwydion Navarne left the walled capital city that had been successfully defended, but at a horrific cost in human lives and structural damage, and made his way north to the keep that had been his family's home.

Once the walled city had been declared safe after the onslaught, a rout that had left the streets behind its wall running red with blood, Gwydion had quietly sought the Patriarch's blessing to return to Haguefort, where some of the most wonderful and hideous memories of his young life had been made.

When at first he had approached and spoken to Constantin, the Patriarch had been attending to the wounded, applying the power of the Ring of Wisdom that he had been given upon his investiture and his own deep knowledge of healing he had gained, it was said, beyond the Veil of Hoen, the place between life and death. His back had been to Gwydion as the young duke had quietly put forth the request that the Patriarch assume responsibility for the citadel in his stead for a few days while he went to check on Haguefort.

At first the Patriarch had turned, fury in his blue eyes, in angry astonishment to confront Gwydion, vituperative words struggling to break out of his mouth. The casualties of the battle had been enormous, and the work of rebuilding and sustaining the citadel was a heavy burden, expected to be borne by all present.

But upon beholding the young man, his rage had tempered, and the former gladiatorial arena slave had reverted to being the compassionate man of faith he had been since his return from the Veil of Hoen.

He had nodded his assent.

“Do what you must do, young Navarne,” he had said simply. “You have well earned the leave; I will pray that, whatever you find, the All-God will give you the strength to accept it with the gratitude that your province has been largely spared.”

He cast a glance around the streets of the city, broken and blackened, with bodies being stacked in neat rows, and shook his head.

“Perhaps not largely.”

“My thanks,” the duke had said, turning away.

“Remember, m'lord,” said the Patriarch as Gwydion began to take his leave, “that you owe me your time in return for mine. I will await your return three days hence, whereupon I will go and finish the reconnection of the Chain of Prayer. And then I will come and collect you to ride to Sepulvarta, where you have agreed to help me retake
my
citadel.”

Gwydion had merely nodded.

He had ridden the forest road alone. It was more difficult a passage than he had imagined it would be; the road was the same thoroughfare his mother and aunt had traveled ten years before on their way to purchase a pair of shoes for his baby sister Melisande. It was on this road she had met a grisly death, one of the many acts of random violence perpetrated by the thralls of a demon that had held the continent in terror and disarray.

He had not realized, until he had ridden her final path, how much more had ended that day than he had ever realized.

Perhaps that was because, by traveling from the city to which she had been heading when her carriage was assaulted, to the place from which she had departed, he was quite literally traveling back in Time.

His father, Stephen Navarne, had been a man of almost unquenchable optimism, in Gwydion's recollection from that hazy time in childhood. He had done his grieving in private at the death of his wife, choosing to focus instead on helping his young children recover from it.

How did he manage that, I wonder?
Gwydion thought as he cantered past the bodies on the roadside, or beneath the trees of the forest, riding a bloodstained pathway back into the past on his way to a home he was not certain was still standing.

But it was.

As he rode past the guardian towers that had long welcomed visitors to Haguefort, he was relieved to find them still standing, but he had only gone a few hundred paces before the edifice of the rosy brown stone keep had come into sight.

Blackened with soot, its windows broken, great sparkling piles of glass glittering across the grounds.

For as much as he had expected it to be the case, the sight still made Gwydion want to vomit.

He tied his horse to the blackened trunk of what had once been the tree he and his mother had planted in the gardens of the courtyard when Melly was born. His throat tightened as he thought of his sister, hidden away with Rhapsody and Ashe's son in the shelter of the Deep Kingdom of the Nain, or at least as he thought they were.

And then he realized there was literally nothing about which he was certain anymore, no one he loved that he actually knew was safe.

Walking what had once been the hallways of his childhood home was both bitter and strangely reassuring; everything of any value was gone, as he expected, but many things that had mattered greatly to his father, suits of armor and family crests, relics and antiques from bygone eras and renderings of historic buildings that no longer existed, had been wantonly destroyed and left as garbage in the rooms he had been born in, had played and been schooled in.

It matters little,
he told himself as he walked through thousands of shredded books and manuscripts that his historian father had collected so meticulously.
I had never realized victory could be so painful
.