Authors: Jude Fisher
Turning a corner, she could see that the end of the passageway was aglow with flickering light: a candleflame guttering in the draught from an open door. A large and lumpy knapsack sat propped up against the wall: a poor-looking item, all frayed hessian and patching. She walked toward it, intent and alert, frustrated recognition clawing at her scalp. At the door, she paused. This was Auda’s chamber: she had never set foot here before, but she knew as much at once from the heavy scent of lilies permeating the air. That much was no surprise to her; what made her catch her breath was the candle-cast shadow that leapt and danced on the wall opposite the door: it was tall and lean, impossibly so; but unmistakably that of a woman. Words came to her then:
seer, scryer, seither
. . .
As if called, the shadow’s head turned. The Rosa Eldi could see its profile clearly: a sharp nose, flat brow, well-defined jaw; long hair in a tail. More words now, as if spoken, though there was no sound to be heard:
You! It cannot be . . . Yet I knew: I felt you all the way here, beneath my feet, in the air
. . .
And then the figure came swiftly through the door and stared at her with its single eye.
The Rose of the World dropped like a stone.
‘Rajeesh, mina kuenna. Segthu mer. Mina dea, mina dea: rajeesh . . .’
The pale lids fluttered, revealing a flash of emerald green. The exquisite lips parted, framed a question, whispered into the air.
‘Hverju? Hvi segthu?’
The seither hesitated, as if suddenly unsure of her ground.
‘Jeh Festrin er, Kalas dottri, Brigs sun, Iels sun, Felins sun, Heniks sun
—’
‘Henik?’
Now the extraordinary eyes came full open and Festrin One-Eye stepped back, unnerved.
‘What? What are you saying?’ The Lady Auda pushed herself between the two of them, and pallor accentuated the normal angularity of her features. ‘What bizarre language is it you were speaking?’ She confronted the seither suspiciously. ‘It sounded . . . foreign. Certainly not Eyran, or no dialect of our tongue I ever heard.’
Festrin turned her one eye on the King’s mother and took some satisfaction in the way the old woman quailed away from her penetrating gaze. ‘That, my lady, is the most ancient tongue in this world. It existed a thousand years before either Eyra or Istria came into being; before humankind found its way over the Dragon’s Backbone and trailed out of the emptiness of the Bone Quarter like a colony of ants; aeons before the Eternal City was founded, or the earth was cultivated; while dragons patrolled the mountain fastnesses and great herds of undomesticated yeka roamed the plains. It has no name: it needed none, for when it first was spoken, there was no other language on Elda.’
Auda’s eyes narrowed. She did not believe a word of it, but to press the point risked being drawn into madness. ‘And who is she – do you know her?’ She stared down her long nose at her son’s wife, then up at the seither.
‘I – no,’ said Festrin, avoiding the old queen’s avid attention. She knelt beside the Rose of the World and made to touch her, then drew back as if afraid to do so. ‘We have never met. But, my lady—’ and she addressed this last to the woman on the ground, ‘—I think my great-great-great-grandfather may have known you.’
‘Six generations back?’ Auda scoffed. ‘The girl can be no more than two and twenty, and even your father has been dead these forty years and more. Are you completely out of your wits?’
Festrin blinked her one eye. ‘Even were it a single generation since this lady was known, I have not heard this language spoken in these isles since my father died: I had not thought any were left who knew it.’
‘
Sudrinni, alla ieldri segthir
,’ the Rosa Eldi said suddenly. Something in her demeanour had changed in the course of these few minutes: a light seemed to shine out of her, a new confidence, or something yet more crucial.
‘
Alla?
’
‘
I Istrianni.
’
The seither looked stunned. ‘I have not travelled as widely as I should have done. I have been very stupid. Had I only known—’
The King’s mother looked from one to the other as if they were both insane. ‘I haven’t got time for this nonsense in the middle of the night,’ she raged. She glared at the seither. ‘Quite what I can have been thinking of to summon your help, I cannot imagine. And as for you—’ she curled her lip at her son’s wife ‘—you need not think you have deceived me with this charade of bearing an heir for my boy. Anyone with half an eye can see you’re not pregnant. Well, your desperate ploy will soon be clear to all, and then we shall be rid of you, and I shall have no need for this freakish creature – no great seer, she; for her one great eye appears to see far less than my two rheumy orbs!’
And with that, she stepped smartly back into her chamber and slammed shut the heavy wooden door.
The Rosa Eldi swayed upright. ‘It is true,’ she said to the seither in the northern tongue. ‘There is no child in me.’
‘Ah, my lady.’ Festrin bowed her head. ‘If you are who I think you are, then there is ample reason for that sad truth.’
The Queen looked stricken. ‘If I cannot conceive, then I fear for my life.’
‘I could help you leave this place—’
This only had the effect of making the Rose of the World even more despairing. ‘No! I cannot leave: do not think to make me.’ The thought of being separated from Ravn produced something akin to a physical pain in her chest.
Festrin threw her hands up in conciliation. ‘No one can make you do anything you do not wish to do, my lady.’
The Rose of the World regarded her curiously. ‘I do not understand what you can mean by that,’ she said, thinking of the way Rahe had kept her in the wooden box, removing her only for his pleasure; of how Virelai had sold her the length and breadth of the Istrian coast; how the whim of men had blown her this way and that, like a piece of chaff.
‘Perhaps I can help in some other way,’ Festrin offered, although she could not think of anything miraculous.
She hefted the knapsack she had left by the door and patted it solicitously, thanking all that was sacred that she had had the intuition to leave it outside the old woman’s room. The idea of her most precious crystal and the herb-knots made by her great-grandfather lying in the avaricious claws of such a bitter woman was not a comforting thought.
‘It is a ship!’ the Rosa Eldi cried.
She seemed, Festrin thought, as excited as any child seeing its first moving image in a crystal; and in many ways she was like a child, partly formed, learning new skills, new information every day. She had decided in the space of the last few minutes, and with a sureness she could not put into words, that to disrupt this delicate process by blasting it with what she believed she knew about the beautiful woman seated opposite her would be both dangerous and damaging. And so she held her tongue, and her thoughts, in check and gave herself up to the scrying instead.
‘Let me see.’ She placed a hand on either side of the rock – a small quartz orb with which she travelled, since she always left her great master crystal in the safety of her sea-bordered cave on the hidden island of Blackshore – and then recoiled. The rock was alive with weird energies. Tiny lights flickered in and out of the interior facets as if the orb contained a lightning storm. She waited a few moments for the charges to ground themselves, then replaced her hands and gazed into the crystal’s depths. The image was indistinct, as if she were seeing it through a fog, but this seemed to be caused by the aftershock of the last user, for when she bent all her concentration upon it, the mist burned away, layer by layer, until she could see not only the vessel, but every thing aboard it with preternatural clarity. The ship looked Eyran, at least in its design; but the crew which manned it appeared a ramshackle bunch indeed. Festrin had never travelled beyond the Northern Isles: to sail too far from her rocky home seemed to her tantamount to relinquishing the seat of her power: for it flowed to her through the very ground of Eyra; but she recognised the origins of many of these folk from descriptions in the knots and scrolls salvaged during her great-great grandfather’s flight from the South, and from her own experience of wandering the wharves and docks of Halbo and its surrounding ports, where Empire sailors and merchants brought their trade in years gone by: there was a dark man at the helm with the distinctive clan tattoos of the Farem hilltribes, which was fascinating in itself; and a number of ragtag sailors of indeterminate origin. A small, round man wearing a steel skullcap looked vaguely familiar to her; but the man at the steerboard she knew well. Joz Bearhand! She remembered him as a small child at the steading at Whaleness, fighting his brother with a stick, and clearly getting the best of him, even though the other lad was older by a number of years. Hadn’t he gone as a sell-sword? She frowned. Her memory was becoming hazy with the years. She had lost track of her age in any but the most general terms; but many seithers lived beyond a hundred and twenty years, and she knew she had not yet attained that longevity. If it were a mercenary ship, it would certainly explain the ill-assorted crew. But why had the crystal chosen to offer the Rose of the World this particular view? She scanned the other occupants of the vessel more closely, dwelling for a long time on a tall, broad-shouldered woman with her hair bound into a complex arrangement of braids and a mouthful of pointed teeth; then her eyes shifted to the figure with whom this fearsome woman was conversing. The latter was a pretty girl, with long dark hair flying wildly in the wind and soft brown eyes. She was dressed in an ill-fitting tunic and boots that were too big for her; but it was not the incongruity of her presence on this ship full of seasoned hands and motley adventurers that made Festrin catch her breath, but the swell of the woman’s belly – to all but the most observant eye camouflaged beneath the oversized folds of the gathered tunic.
‘There are indeed mysterious forces at work in the world,’ the seither whispered. She took her hands off the crystal and gazed in awe at the Rosa Eldi, a most bizarre stratagem already beginning to take shape in her mind.
‘Who are you, and why do you come to my door at such an hour?’
Rui Finco had just emerged from a lingering bath in water scented with rose petals, assisted by two veiled girls who had insisted on spending an hour and more rubbing aromatic oils into his back, which he fervently hoped was a prelude to rather more interesting and energetic pursuits. Jetran ways were not to his usual taste, which tended towards the pragmatic: a bath was for removing the day’s grime, and required hot water with no additives other than a loofah and a willing, and preferably naked, companion, and the time thus saved in bathing to be spent rather more productively between the sheets; but the slavegirls in Jetra were more exotically-minded than those in Forent, where they had got used to their lord’s rough and ready attitude to bathing as a preliminary to sex; and he was getting a little impatient. He wrapped his silk robe tighter around his muscular frame, which merely served to emphasise his impatience, and surveyed the man who had interrupted his evening with undisguised hostility.
The man – dark-skinned, tousle-haired and broken-nosed – looked like a hard bastard. Rui judged him to be around eight and thirty years, or possibly a little older: judging by the network of scars on his arms and face, he had seen a fair bit of action, though none of them looked fresh, which meant that he was either a veteran of the last war, or a mercenary so good with a blade that none had got close enough to mark him in recent times. Maybe both were true. Which could make him useful; unless he was here as an assassin, and one with sufficient gall to march up to his chambers and murder him where he stood. Rui’s eyes slid to the sword he kept propped by the door-jamb, wondering whether his reflexes would be fast enough to save his skin if this were the case, and knew that if the assassin was good he wouldn’t stand a chance. When he looked up again, he caught the man’s own gaze returning from the same spot. Rui stared him out, watching for a signal, but the visitor held his hands up. He was weaponless.
‘My apologies for disturbing you at this late hour, my lord. My name is Galo Bastido,’ he said gruffly, in the heavily-accented Istrian that marked him as a native of the northern coast.
The Lord of Forent waited.
‘Until recently I was the captain of the Altean militia.’
That was a surprise, given the accent. Rui thought quickly. Altea: capital of the Vingo lands in the far south of the country; the elder son of the family a cripple; the younger now posted, along with the men his family owned, to Tycho Issian’s command. Leaving this Galo Bastido positionless and mostly likely penniless, for he did not look like a man who would swallow his pride and accept a lesser rank under the auspices of some callow youth.
‘And you come seeking my favour?’
‘I have a proposition for you, my lord.’
The slavegirls were waiting. Their warm mouths and lithe bodies beckoned, demanded his attention. He pushed the thought aside. Another few minutes’ delay after all that damned massage would signify little. ‘Come in,’ the Lord of Forent said after barely a pause, and ushered Bastido into the anteroom. The girls, well-trained as they were, took one look at the newcomer, read the situation as one which did not require their immediate presence, slipped quickly into the bedchamber and took up their stations there, their veiled forms still visible through the gauzy drapes which separated the two rooms.
Rui Finco cast himself down on one of the long couches and waited.
‘Well?’ he said.
Galo Bastido dragged his eyes away from the doorway to the bedchamber. What it was to be a lord in the Eternal City. Was it just the money, he wondered; or did an inherited title make such a difference? If it was the latter, then he was cursed; if the former, perhaps there was still the possibility of him taking his destiny squarely into his own hands.
‘You will need ships, my lord, if you are to storm the North.’
‘Evidently. Our wrights have set to acquiring the necessary materials to construct a fleet. We are working on the plans.’