Daughter of Blood (19 page)

The Wall will fall, Malian thought, the certainty tight as a fist, clenching in her gut. Unless, even if I can't destroy the maelstrom outright, I somehow find a way to hold it back, buying time until I can search out a means to defeat it.

The same way, she countered silently—the fist tightening further around her doubt—that Yorindesarinen bought time when she stood alone against the Chaos Worm? And my starting position is so much weaker than hers was then.

Malian shivered, her breath misting against the night's deepening cold. The horses were standing close together for warmth, and she knew Raven's regular circuit about the hollow was as much about counteracting the cold as keeping watch. I need to sleep, she thought. But the cold clawed through blanket and cloak and coat, and her mind kept returning to Thanir and whether he would involve Nindorith in his hunt. In the end she gave in and extended her seeker's sense again, searching for any hint of pursuit.

Given Raven's ability to detect power use, she was not surprised when he looked her way. “For the moment,” he said, “I think we've gotten clear.”

For the moment, Malian repeated silently. She had not forgotten that Emuun, like his First Kinsman, was immune—or that she had not known Raven was present, watching her
encounter with the Ara-fyr. She stood up, stretching stiff limbs and flexing her gloved hands. “I eluded Nindorith in Caer Argent, but only just. Now the night fair incident seems certain to attract his attention.”

“Except Nindorith holds to Lightning, not Sun, so neither Thanir nor Emuun will solicit his aid, except as a last resort.” Raven paused. “So far, too, your measures to counteract Nindorith's seeking appear to be working.”

Malian nodded, before realizing that he would not see the gesture. Again, she reexamined her memory of Nindorith's power blasting through the midsummer dark. “Nhenir told me that if I looked in the earliest annals of the Derai Alliance, I would find the demon there.” She stopped, silently cursing her tiredness. “I'm sorry. I should say Ascendant.”

“It's probably best.” Raven's silhouette continued to face the hillside, and humor, rather than offense, colored his tone. “Otherwise, to be consistent, you'll have to refer to every Golden Fire in the same way.”

Malian's truthsaying, seeking, and seer's sense all quickened, telling her this apparently throwaway remark mattered. Perhaps she made a sound, because Raven's head turned as though she had spoken, and she sensed his scrutiny through the darkness.

“I assumed you knew,” he said slowly. She had never seen him taken aback, but thought he sounded close to it now. “It never occurred to me that the Derai could have allowed themselves to forget anything so fundamental.” They had both been keeping their voices low, aware of how far sound could carry in the isolated terrain, but now he spoke more quietly still: “Amaliannarath and Fire, Nindorith and Lightning, Salar and Sun—and one Ascendant, too, for each of the Derai's Nine Houses.”

The room at the heart of the Old Keep of Winds had twelve doors, and the table at its center was divided into twelve parts, not nine . . . Recalling that, Malian felt the same hollow sensation as when Nhenir had said she would need all three of Yorindesarinen's weapons to fully access their power. She was also remembering that although Nindorith
had subsequently taken the form of a unicorn, his initial manifestation in Caer Argent had been as fire. Later, she had guessed Nindorith must be the unicorn on Lightning's insignia, but her mind had not leapt to the winged horse device of Night as it did now. Yet surely the winged horse
was
just a device, because flame had always—
always
—been the only form taken by the Golden Fire: either as the individual entities that once infused the heart of the Derai's nine strongholds, or in its collective aspect.

I need to say something, Malian thought. “I didn't know,” she said. “I don't. Even the term Darksworn is almost forgotten among the Derai. I learned it from Kalan, and the old priest who told him the secret said the Alliance could shatter if we discovered that our own kind were also the Swarm's foremost adherents.” She did not add that she had not fully accepted that truth until midsummer, when she had seen her own face reflected in Nherenor's features.

Raven's silhouette studied the dark hillside again before turning back to her. “If I were being true to my Sworn heritage, I would say that I'm not surprised the Derai want to forget. But you are Heir to the House that leads the Derai. I believe you need to know.”

Life is a risk, Malian thought, despite the hollowness at her core. And Asantir had always said she needed to know as much about her allies as her enemies, a philosophy that had tallied with Elite Cairon's Shadow Band tutelage. She stamped her feet, silent on the pine needles, and drew the blanket closer. “I'm listening,” she said.

T
hrough the link between them, Malian was aware that Nhenir was listening, too. How much of this do you know? she wondered. But Raven was already speaking, his voice acquiring a storyteller's rhythm.
“Sworn or Darksworn, demons or Ascendants, the distinction in names drives to the heart of the original conflict that sundered the Sworn from the Derai.”

She guessed that was how he had first heard the account, much as fireside tales had introduced a young Malian to the traditions of the Derai. It might also seem an easier way to recount a difficult history. Which, she reflected, I may be the first among the Alliance to have heard told—in how long, aeons?

“What the Sworn call Ascendants,”
Raven went on,
“took the form of rare beings, distinct in kind but close in friendship with what were once twelve allied peoples. When the maelstrom first rose, the friendship had endured for as long as anyone among the nations could remember, perhaps since the dawn of time.
The twelve became aware of the maelstrom shortly after it appeared in the space between worlds, but the expedition they dispatched to learn more was sucked into the maelstrom's maw and came close to perish
ing. All would have been lost if the Ascendants present had not joined with the strongest of the expedition's adepts and pulled the survivors out.

“Nonetheless, despite all that went wrong, some felt they had begun to communicate with an
intelligence at the maelstrom's heart. They argued for persevering with communication, while others, led by Salar, highlighted the potential to harness the maelstrom's power for the twelve's benefit. But the majority who returned were adamant that the maelstrom threatened all life and must be destroyed before it expanded beyond their ability to contain, if it had not already done so. Eventually those differences hardened into divisions between the twelve peoples.”

They would, Malian thought, reflecting dryly on what she knew of both Derai and Haarth history. She flexed her hands to warm them, while Raven checked their perimeter before resuming.
“As the maelstrom expanded with increasing rapidity, consuming everything around it, the divisions fractured further. Those who saw it as an opportunity dwindled, while the ranks of those who argued for destruction swelled. Increasingly, they sought a weapon strong enough to counteract the maelstrom's power and eventually focused on the twelve Ascendants. Only their strength, it was argued, could withstand the maelstrom. Absolute unity would be essential, too.
Individual Ascendants could not be permitted to withdraw unilaterally, while the whole must be able to compensate if a component part was wounded or destroyed. To increase the likelihood of success, the twelve's greatest adepts would act in concert with, and where necessary direct, the enhanced entity
—or weapon, as in fact it was.”

Malian's mind flew to the serpent of power, the conjoined force of the priestess-queens of Jhaine, that she had confronted when walking the path of earth and moon. She was also beginning to perceive how this must end. Waiting for Raven to confirm it was like watching the executioner's blade begin to fall—but Malian did not think she could have spoken, even if she wanted to.

“The plan's adherents argued that binding the Ascen
dants was the price of preserving life itself: a necessary evil, but of short duration. Those who opposed them called it enslavement, the betrayal of free beings that were also friends, and swore never to accede to such a deed.”
Raven paused.
“Then the first of the twelve's home worlds was consumed by the maelstrom.”

Now the blade was falling, and Malian wanted to hasten the end by whispering,
And?
But her lips refused to open.

“And,
”
Raven said, as if she
had
spoken,
“all those who had argued for the binding of the Ascendants decided that the time for discussion was over. They enacted a great working to achieve their end, and drew on the power of the Nine Gods themselves to create the binding. Those who had vowed to defend the Ascendants' independence—calling their faction the Sworn—became aware of the working in time to flee before it could take hold. But they were outcast, devastated
,
and betrayed, as well as vulnerable to the Derai Alliance and the newly forged power of the Golden Fire. So although the Sworn did not immediately join the maelstrom, it was inevitable that they would be drawn into the only alliance powerful enough to counter not just the Derai and the Golden Fire, but what they saw as abandonment by the gods themselves.”

The Golden Fire: Malian's truth sense was raw edged, jangling that this was
true, true, true . . .
She felt as though she had just stepped off a precipice into deep water, with the cold and the dark closing over her head. She was falling, drowning, lost—while all that she had held as certain, and believed the Derai to be, was flotsam, whirling away. The need to be alone seized her, to get away from whatever judgment or condemnation, or careful lack of both, might follow Raven's tale, and
think . . .
But every Shadow Band instinct warned against showing weakness, so she spoke calmly as she laid the blanket aside. “You were right, I did need to know that.” Rising, she moved to the opposite side of the hollow. “I'll cast a wider circuit before standing watch, double-check we're really alone out here.”

Raven said something that Malian did not catch because
she was already gone, slipping between the pines and her own trip wires. Beneath the surface calm, her heart was racing. If possible she would have folded the blackness around her like a second cloak, shutting out every word of Raven's story. This
truth
, she thought, curled like a worm at the heart of the Derai Alliance.

Survival breeds necessity; necessity drives hard decisions:
Malian repeated the Shadow Band adage to herself. But this—If the Golden Fire really had been forged out of a compulsion wrought from the power of the gods themselves, then that act went against every tenet the Derai held sacred. The sanctity of friendship, she thought, doggedly combating the sensation of falling—and keeping faith with comrades, as well as Earl, Heir, and House. Not least, the taboo against slavery.

Yet the binding Raven had described
was
a form of enslavement, in fact if not name.

“That is how the Sworn tell the story, at any rate.”
Nhenir was calm as moonlight.

Malian frowned, her eyes fixed on the starry horizon and the mass of shadowed ridges below it, rolling into a distance that would eventually become the River.
“Have you heard it told differently?”

Uncharacteristically, the helm conveyed hesitation.
“I know Yorindesarinen held that truths may not always be as they first appear.
”

“Did she know of this?”

“She found out. And vowed to set it right, except death intervened.”

Is that when the Derai buried knowledge of the Sundering? Malian asked herself. Is it possible that's
why
we buried it? This time, she looked south rather than north, as though she could see across time and physical distance to the Aralorn tower where she had refused to compel the Ara-fyr back into the Derai Alliance. Yorindesarinen's influence had shaped that choice, since the dead hero did not seem to believe that sacrificing anyone or anything to the Derai cause was what it meant to be the Chosen of Mhaelanar, champion of a god.

Yet if the gods themselves had loaned their power to the compulsion that transformed nine Ascendants into the Golden Fire, bound to the Derai keeps and the Blood of the Nine Houses . . . Malian shook her head, deciding that the world, already far from straightforward, had just grown considerably murkier.

“It was largely because of your decision not to compel the Ara-fyr,”
Nhenir reminded her,
“that Raven revealed himself and returned the sword. Do not forget that you are also part of what the Derai are.”

And the moon turned both dark and light faces to the world: Tarathan had told her that on Imuln's blessed isle.
“I suppose you're right.”

Jehane Mor, too, had spoken words of reassurance when telling Malian and Kalan of the cataclysm that the Derai's arrival had wreaked on Haarth.
“It was a long time ago, and it was not the two of you, or any of the Derai who live now, who destroyed Jaransor.”
Malian repeated the herald's words, her mindtone thoughtful.
“If Jehane were here now, she would say the same about the Sundering.”

“She is wise.”
Nhenir paused. “
They both are.”

Malian suspected the hesitation arose from the need to include Tarathan in that wisdom, since the helm had been swift to tell her, after Imuln's Isle, that he was not for her. Briefly, she felt the fire from the path of earth and moon reignite along her veins . . . But her heart tugged toward her seer's memory of the Gate of Winds, breaching mist and darkness with the vast body of the Derai world concealed behind it. Until the civil war, that world had included the Golden Fire, the core of the Derai's Alliance and their bulwark against the Swarm—a lost legacy she had been raised to honor. Setting Raven's account against it was painful, a blade that struck to the heart.

The moon has two faces.
Malian repeated the adage to herself, but knew she could no longer assign the light face to the Derai while naming the other as Darksworn. Yet when Hylcarian had aided her, six years before, he had said that he and his fellows were the Derai's long allies and their friends
in the age-old war against the Swarm. When she left the Keep of Winds, he had also said that he would be waiting on her return.
“Perhaps Yorindesarinen was right. The truth, like the moon, may wear more than one face.”

“She, too, was wise.”

And kind, Malian thought—although neither attribute saved her. That thought, too, was a blade, companion to the realization that despite a history that seemed little more than one long unraveling of betrayal and death, she still yearned to return to the Derai.
“Are you still there?”
She cast the mindwhisper toward her last memory of Hylcarian, a slender bridge across the leagues of darkness between Aeris and the Derai Wall. Yet the only answer was the night breeze, speaking of emptiness and distance as it had throughout her exile.

Time to focus on the present, Malian thought, and my immediate responsibilities. The pines, stark against the stars, made retracing her path easy; when she reached the hollow, Raven was still on its far side. She saw his head turn her way, but spoke first, deliberately adopting Crow's sword-for-hire manner. “All's clear out there. And now it's my watch.” Picking up her blanket, she held it out. “I doubt it'll make much difference, but one of us might as well try and be warm.”

“I should have thought of that myself.” Raven's voice matched hers for matter-of-factness as he took the blanket.

Malian repressed a sigh of relief. “If I'd thought of it sooner, I would have asked for yours.” She kept her tone light as she settled into a vantage point on the lip of the hollow and studied the pattern of slope and shadow beyond. Soon, her attention was absorbed by the need to both stay awake and keep warm. She had heard the Aeris winter was hard and could imagine how bitter it must be once snow lay low on the hills. It would be difficult then, if not impossible, to survive a night in the open without a fire. Now, Malian used activity to combat cold as the night crawled by, changing position as Raven had and rechecking her trip wires and Band wards—although at one point she thought the first gray light might never come. When it did, she moved to a tree that looked south rather than east, so the rising sun would
not dazzle her. But the lightening of the world was slow, the cold still iron.

Her seer's vision came with the first line of gold on the far side of the Aeris basin. The color split the grayness above from the darkness of the world below, as an answering fire arced across Malian's inner sight. Part of her remained aware of the pine hollow and surrounding hillside, while the seer within stood on a pebbled plain. In the vision, sheer mountains rose on either side, and a high massif loomed ahead. A thin wind shrilled, and the entire scene filled Malian with foreboding.

“Dread Pass,”
Kalan's voice whispered, as though he were standing beside her. Somewhere in Haarth, she knew his dream must be overlapping her vision.

Dread Pass
, Malian repeated. The wind whipped the grit into clouds, blinding her, and when she shaded her eyes and looked again, the plain was covered in low-lying cloud. Armies fought through it, first one side and then the other reeling forward and then back, all within an utter silence that belonged to the seer's vision. Is this a battle yet to come, she wondered, whether in my or the Derai's future—or the glimpse of some long ago past, a clash during the civil war or on some distant world? Horses charged, a thunder across the plain that she felt as a reverberation through her body, and she forced her seer's sight to focus on the combatants. Gonfalons hung heavy in the fog, but she recognized Swarm fighters: fell lizards hurtled forward as a were-hunt brought down riders. A warrior rose in his stirrups, rallying those about him, and she saw the blazon on his shield as he led a counterattack that drove the Swarm assault back.

More cloud rolled in and the grayness thickened until clinging damp displaced the Aeris cold. For a long time the brume remained dense—then swiftly lifted to reveal low, rounded hills and outcrops of jagged rock. A double column of warriors traversed a narrow defile beneath discolored sky, and Malian felt a shock of recognition, knowing she had seen this once before, when she looked into Yorindesarinen's fire in the glade between worlds.

The seer's vision might be an uncertain art, but she waited with a sense of inevitability until the attackers rose, seemingly out of the ground, to hack and slay. Swords rose and fell, only this time Malian could hear the wounded crying out and horses screaming as they fell. The riders sought to rally about their leader, holding a path for his escape, but there were too many attackers. One by one the defenders fell, until the leader alone was left and his assailants closed in. At the last moment, exactly as in her first vision, the leader vanished, winking out from beneath his assailants' blades while they howled rage and frustration to the bruised sky.