The King of Forever (Scarlet and the White Wolf, #4) (3 page)

“But how—” Scarlet frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to be rude, but I wondered. I know how your people feel about
lenilyn.”

“So how did Romaksha find a husband, and a noble one at that?” Liall touched Scarlet’s cheek softly. “I wish you would not use that word.
Lenilyn.
You know what it means.”

He did, but he refused to hide from a
word.
“If it bothers you, I won’t say it again.”

“Rshani men have a weakness for beauty, as you know,” Liall said, overlooking the barb. “It was scandalous, of course, but Romaksha married into a noble family of Tebet, and her son was Baron Ressanda’s father. Ressanda, however, did not come to rule Tebet by right of blood. He married my cousin Winotheri, and
her
father was the rightful lord of Tebet.”

“So why didn’t she rule instead of him? Your mother ruled and she was a wondrous fine queen.”

“Yes, but she was a
queen
, love. There are rules and there are rules, if you understand me.”

Scarlet did not.

“What I mean is, there are rules for the people and there are rules for the Camira-Druz. We are...” Liall seemed to be searching for the right word. “I don’t know if there’s a way to explain it. You don’t have a term for it in Bizye.”

Scarlet’s horse pricked his ears forward and shuffled his hooves restlessly, and Scarlet patted his mane to gentle him. “There’s a first; you not having twenty words when one would do.”

Liall smiled. “It’s difficult to put the concept together succinctly, but in a sense, the Camira-Druz are to the Rshani what the Flower Prince is to Byzantur.”

Scarlet looked at him quickly. “They believe the gods speak to you?”

“Hardly. Rather, they think we can intercede with something they revere, and in some ways, we can. An Ancient must come when a Camira-Druz calls.”

Scarlet gave Liall a sour look. “I don’t much care for your Ancients.”

“Neither would I, if I’d gone through what you did. I don’t say I forgive them, but just like men, not all Ancients are cut from the same cloth. I don’t pretend to understand them, either, like I would never understand a Shining One.”

Scarlet was curious all over again. He was always curious about the Shining Ones, who were honored among the Rshani but were demigods to the Hilurin, as well as demons. “Did the Shining Ones really come from this place?” He looked around him at the barren but strangely alive landscape. The vast expanse of ice and snow never seemed to stop changing. Perhaps it really was alive and restless, like the stories Liall mentioned. The wind had died down and he could hear the deep, healthy breathing of the horses and the faint clinks of armor and the weapons of the guards.

“All the stories tell us is that they emerged from Ged Fanorl, which is a mountain to the north,” Liall said. “Though we have never seen them, we sense them. The Ancients are our link to them, to our origins. There could have been no Rshani as a people without the Ancients.”

There were large gaps in Scarlet’s knowledge about Liall’s people, but he was beginning to realize there was much
they
did not know, either. It seemed there were mysteries that not even the Setna were able or willing to reveal, and all Rshani hated to admit ignorance. He’d never met a people more proud of themselves.

A shadow drifted through the valley, moving rapidly.

“Liall!”
Scarlet called in alarm. His muscles tensed and he sawed on the horse’s reins. The horse shied and balked in fear.

Liall quickly seized the reins and stopped the horse from bolting. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “It’s fine.”

“I saw something.” Scarlet jerked the fur collar from his face and pointed. “There on the ice. It was...” He shook his head and his breath quickened to a fog before his eyes. “It had
arms,
I think. Or something. I don’t know what it was. It moved so fast.”

“We’re safe,” Liall said. He touched Scarlet’s shoulder. “Pay it no mind. It is not aware of us. We matter nothing to it.”

“It?”
Scarlet felt his hands shaking. “Is it a monster?” He recalled their voyage across the oceans and the huge, fanged fish that Liall and the mariners had hunted before they reached the ice. He had thought those were monsters, too, but Liall had laughed and said they were only fish.

Liall looked over Scarlet’s head into the distance, narrowing his eyes. “No,” he said, though he did not sound all that sure. “But it is not something we should disturb. It will not harm us.”

“What is it?”

“Call it a wind rider. That’s the closest I can get to the term in Bizye.”

“It flies?”

“Not really. Glides, more like. Stop looking over your shoulder. It won’t come all the way up here. I told you: we do not matter to it. It can’t eat us and we’re not interesting enough to get its attention.”

“A wind rider,” Scarlet murmured. He felt colder. “What does it eat?”

“Ice, if the tales are true. Look!” Liall pointed to the east, a note of excitement in his voice. “There it is. I told you, redbird.”

Scarlet’s breath caught in his throat. After so long, it had seemed he would never look upon such a sight again. A razor-edge of orange, vivid as fire against the monochrome landscape, hovered on the rim of the horizon. It shimmered and flared like a live thing, and as he watched, the band of fire grew larger and a shaft of light burst through the surrounding trees, arrowing down between the circle of black stones.

“Gentle Deva,” Scarlet breathed. He could see the sun.

Liall chuckled. “So your Byzan legends are only partially true. This
is
the land of night, but it’s also the land of the sun. Get used to looking at that, t’aishka. You’ll be seeing it in Kalas Nauhin until fall.” He called out in Sinha to their guards, his voice loud and merry, and the guards answered with happy shouts and a rhyming cheer in Sinha that Scarlet caught two words of:
shining
and
green
.

“What did you tell them?”

“Just that the sun had returned. It’s officially spring, or Greentide as we call it.” Liall sighed in satisfaction and turned his horse’s head toward the waiting guards and the road back to the Nauhinir. “Now the ice will melt in the straights and the eastern barons will be free to come to the palace and make their pledges to the crown.”

“Will they come?” Scarlet asked.

“Oh yes,” Liall said, very confident.

“When?”

“Soon.” He winked. “After all, if the king can call the sun, he ought to be able to manage a pack of mortal barons.”

S
carlet raised his arm and pointed to a spot in the sky, low on the horizon. “What’s that?” he asked Jochi lazily. A yellow blur hovered just above the trees, barely visible through heavy snow clouds.

“That is the sun, ser,” Jochi answered, polite as ever. He sent a hard look to the armored Nauhinir guards who had accompanied the hunting party to the gate of the grove, as if daring them to laugh.

They were on the hunting lands that Liall had gifted to Scarlet. For six months, the sky had been either a dome of indigo dotted with stars or a heavy cover of solid clouds which could barely be seen against the dark. Occasionally, the
ostre sul,
the lights in the darkness, had illuminated the sky with brilliant bands of blue and green, and sometimes orange, purple, yellow, or even red. Jochi claimed these lights could be predicted, but whatever method the Setna used was unknown to Scarlet. He only knew they were wondrous, and he was a little sad when he was told that they would be very difficult to see until Greentide—the Rshani spring and summer—was over.

Scarlet only questioned Jochi to be difficult. For days, he had been expecting the season to turn into the bright, blazing summers he had known in Byzantur, and he was bitterly disappointed that the sun stubbornly refused to spill more than this milky half-light upon the land. For sure, this summer sun never set, but how could anything grow under it?

“Is it the same sun we have back home?” he wondered. It seemed impossible that the little blob of light that skated around the horizon but never seemed to rise in the sky was the great bronze sun that had warmed his back as a child.

“The very same.” Jochi slipped off his mount and held the reins of Scarlet’s pony for him while he dismounted. “It is as much daylight as we can expect this month, ser. It may snow again later.”

It had snowed yesterday. Or last night. Scarlet was finding it every bit as hard to keep track of hours when the sun never set as he did when it never rose. He patted his gray pony on the nose. “The tracks will be fresh. Easier to hunt.”

“Yes, ser.”

“I don’t like easy.”

Scarlet unslung Whisper from his back and looked down. There were rabbit tracks leading off into the grove.

The hunting lands Liall had given him were a few hundred acres of rambling, forested hills. Scarlet’s favorite part of it was the grove, a wide meadow dotted with apple trees and bordered by low stone walls that ran for many acres and circled it all around except for one gate.

Hunting the grove was like spearing fish in a barrel. Scarlet preferred simply to walk there and admire the trees, but he was restless and eager for any sport, no matter how tame.

He strung one end of his bow and slipped it between his knees while standing, then he bent one limb far back to loop the string to the other bow nock.

Jochi watched him. “There is nothing
easy
about pinning a running rabbit with an arrow, ser.”

The Nauhinir guards in their hunting party exchanged looks. Tesk, the handsome artist and courtier, cleared his throat.

Scarlet looked at the royal painter. “Have I said something wrong?”

Tesk wore a brilliant green virca embroidered with bright birds giving chase to butterflies. The green leather bracer on his left arm bore a hawk emblem. Liall had granted Tesk an additional appointment as royal Falconer; an undemanding job that would not interfere with his art, but allowed him to accompany Scarlet on the hunt without gossip from the court. Privately, Scarlet thought Jochi would have made a better falconer, but Liall said that Jochi had asked to remain a simple courtier and tutor, so his position remained the same: companion to the king’s household.

And making Tesk the falconer is as good as saying he’s my new wet nurse,
Scarlet thought.
I don’t mind. He’s pleasant company, and like Jochi, he never grows weary of questions.

“There are few in the Nauhinir graced with your skill, ser Keriss,” Tesk said. His page sat astride a gelding and held a large, hooded gyrfalcon on his gauntlet, though they were not hunting with birds today. “The bow is a weapon of war, yes, but one requiring a delicate touch. You’ll not find a great deal of delicacy in the men of the Nauhinir. Theor, for instance, whom I often mistake for a rampaging bear. Warriors employ either the crossbow or something... bigger.” Tesk smiled charmingly. He was always charming.

“You mean a bow big enough to punch through a giant. I’d like to see one of those.” Scarlet liked Tesk. Most of what he said was gossip or nonsense, but he never took on airs or tried to make anyone feel lesser.

Scarlet selected an arrow from the quiver strapped to his back. He didn’t need to look. He could tell from touch which were the slender bodkin arrows for small game and which were the notched broadheads for larger targets. The largest game he had encountered in the grove was a snow fox with eyes of startling blue, so beautiful that he’d let it go, but Liall had mentioned that deer had been seen in the grove over the winter.

“I can’t stretch one of your crossbows,” he said. “I’d be fighting it all day and in the end, the bow would win. I’d be snarled like a ball of yarn.”

Tesk unslung his weapon—an ash longbow twice the length of Scarlet’s recurve—and dismounted. “I can’t hit a fleeing rabbit, so we are even, ser.” He slipped an arrow from his quiver and nodded to the field. “Shall we?”

Scarlet glanced to Jochi. There were many complicated rules about who could keep company with a king’s consort, but he hadn’t learned them all. Liall had handily side-stepped those rules by making Tesk his falconer. While Scarlet enjoyed the artist’s easy mood and frequent smiles, he was curious to see if Tesk could stalk game silently. He doubted it.

Jochi handed the reins to a guard. “I’ll come with you, ser.”

“No, stay here and mind my horse,” Scarlet answered. “He likes you.”

Jochi looked at Tesk and then back to Scarlet. “Ser, I should come. And the guards, as well. It is my duty—”

“Aren’t you a little young to be such an old hen?” Scarlet winked at Jochi. “We won’t wander very far, and besides, you’d scare the game. I don’t think you’ve tracked anything smaller than a snow bear in your life.”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“‘Course it does. A bear doesn’t run when it hears the hunter. This kind of hunt calls for stealth. Stay here.”

Jochi’s frown was formidable on such a noble face. “As you command, ser.” He shot a warning look at Tesk, who returned his regard unruffled. “Please be careful.”

“I will, never fear,” Scarlet promised airily, knowing Jochi would fret himself into a lather whether he was careful or not. It was a miracle they didn’t wrap him in wool and stuff him in a closet, like his mum tried to do with a doll once. A rich merchant with a broken wagon wheel had made a present of the doll to Annaya. His little sister adored it, lavishing kisses on the porcelain mouth, the expensive satin gown and garnet buttons. While Scaja had repaired the wheel, Linhona had carefully tucked the doll away for safekeeping until Annaya was older and less careless. Annaya found it, of course.

All in ashes, now.
He frowned and shook his head, willing the darkness away.

“Are you well, ser?” Tesk asked.

Scarlet turned a sunny smile on the painter. “Never better.”

He turned for the grove, but his pony whickered anxiously and pulled against the reins. Scarlet chuckled and scratched the pony’s soft, gray ears.

“Enough of you, silly beast. You’re getting plump and spoiled. Be good for Jochi and there’s an apple in it for you.” He glanced at Jochi. “I’ll have to give him a name soon. What do you fancy I should call him?”