Read Shattered Shields - eARC Online
Authors: Jennifer Brozek,Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Shattered Shields - eARC (3 page)
He had his spear out, and did battle with two Toth at once.
“The boy is fearless!” the giant said in amazement.
More than that, he moved now as quick as a serpent. His foe was a smaller Toth, one with the shadows, and Avahn could barely see it in the darkness. It leapt and twisted away, teeth gaping. It hissed and shrieked, an alien sound, and bore a huge axe with three double heads.
It swung at the boy, but for some reason, as Dval pressed the attack, the creature kept fading back, the philia waving madly upon the frills of its head-plate, as if terrified and unbelieving of what it faced.
“Go save him!” Avahn shouted to Bandolan, for she feared that no mere human could face two Toth at once.
But the giant shook his head, wagged his great black beard. “My duty is to save
you!
”
Dval dodged beneath the smaller Toth’s swing, leapt back. No fighter of Mystarria could have evaded that blow in darkness, Avahn thought. None of her men could see so well in this infernal darkness.
But Dval leapt away, and for a moment, he disappeared in the shadows.
Suddenly his enemy gave a keening shriek and halfway collapsed to its left. The bigger Toth swung her flaming club overhead, and for an instant, Avahn saw the image of Dval, engaging the smaller monster.
He’d stabbed it beneath the arm, plunged his spear into its chest. Now he danced backward and disappeared into the shadows again.
The wounded Toth staggered a bit, fell back, and then swung its mighty axe. Dval was a white shadow in the starlight and moonlight, dancing away.
But he went flying, and Avahn shrieked as she realized that the Toth’s ax had found its mark. With a sickening crunch, Dval flew back a dozen feet.
The smaller Toth stopped and peered up toward the fortress, and for a moment it held its axe in both hands, then staggered forward and crashed to the earth.
Only one Toth was left. The big slow one.
“Get down!” Sir Bandolan grumbled, his voice issuing from his cavernous chest like rolling thunder. He shoved her to the ground.
* * *
Dval’s head spun. He felt as if he were caught in a tornado, his head spinning around. He clawed his way out of the darkness, and found himself on the ground.
Blood smeared his chest.
The Toth. The male had given him a mighty battle, and the end of the ax had nicked him, sent him flying.
A sense of urgency filled him, and Dval leapt to his feet. “
Ya, kanah
!” he shouted. To eternity!
He leapt up, thinking that while he was unconscious, the female must have charged the fortress, but to his surprise, she stood not more than a dozen feet from him.
She whirled and raised her flaming crystal staff overhead so that it whistled and hissed at the same time. The staff was at least fourteen feet long, and as thick as a large sapling.
His chest hurt, and Dval was in terrible pain. He staggered forward and realized that his feet would not move. He felt shocked, wounded.
He suddenly realized that he had dropped his spear, and he bore no weapon at all in his hand.
His ears were pounding, blood drumming in tune with his heart, and he stared for one moment into the maw of the Toth as it gnashed its teeth, huge eyes peering at him without moving, much as a spider’s eyes will.
His whole world was reflected in the Toth’s eyes. He could see himself there, blood streaming from his wound, his face pale as death. The monster’s fiery staff whirled toward him, and time seemed to stand still.
The Toth lurched forward, a lance piercing through its abdomen, and a charger came out of the night, a warhorse with a leather helm painted white like a skull, and leather barding.
The Toth fell on top of Dval, crushing him, so that for a moment he lay on the ground and struggled to breathe.
* * *
King Harrill rode out of the woods, only a few strides behind Sir Adelheim and Sir Pwyrthen, and watched the big Toth succumb to death, her armored body crashing to the ground with a sound like trees falling.
To his dismay, Avahn came leaping down from the fortress in the starlight, as if eager to finish killing the Toth herself, and Sir Bandolan the giant was too slow to stop her.
Avahn raced to the dying Toth and grabbed her giant staff, then struggled to use it as a lever.
Only then did he see the fallen Woguld lying beneath the monster.
The giant came trudging down, too. He grabbed the Toth, rolled her over, and pulled the boy out.
The Woguld lay in the moonlight, struggling to breathe, and King Harrill drew near, wondering if the boy would survive.
To his surprise, Dval climbed to his feet and staggered to the fallen Toth. Only then did he reach into the pocket of his tunic and pull something out.
He laid it upon the dead Toth’s thorax, then grunted and pointed at it meaningfully. By the light thrown from the fiery staff, King Harrill saw a cracked shell.
“By the powers,” King Harrill said, “the damned creatures have laid eggs!”
The pieces came together for him then—the reason the Toth had wiped out this city, and why so few had invaded. Now he understood why the Toth had refused to leave the ruins at Moss End.
Avahn demanded of Sir Pwyrthen, who had some skill as a surgeon, “Sew up the Woguld’s wounds. I think his ribs are broken.”
Indeed, Dval now squatted beside the dead Toth, admiring his handiwork, as if there were nothing special about it.
* * *
By dawn, King Harrill’s men found the Toth’s nest, hidden on a sunny sandbar near the river, high on the bank. Two thousand eggs they shattered that day, and then combed the riverbank looking for more, just in case. Only a few eggs were kept whole, for King Harrill insisted that he learn how long a Toth took to hatch.
So Avahn found herself that afternoon, riding across fields of barren ash toward the Courts of Tide, its magnificent towers rising up from islands in the distant sea. The setting sun shone golden-red upon them, making them look like beaten copper, while ash swirled at their feet.
So much destruction,
she realized,
and from so few Toth. They never even bothered to land their ships.
Her father had sent men ahead to warn his knights, to warn the kingdom, to search everywhere for the monsters’ eggs. Fortunately, they were huge and easy to track, and she dared believe that they’d find them all.
As she rode, she glanced over at Dval, slumped in his saddle, his green robe pulled over his face. He clutched at his mount blindly, as if in pain.
“So, Father,” she said at last. “Can I keep him?”
King Harrill glanced at the boy. “There are some honors that cannot be given,” he said wearily. “They must be won.” Then, as his weary scowl transformed into a thin-lipped smile, she realized that she had won. “He saved you twice, I suspect, and he may well have saved our kingdom. I’ll let him train as a guard, and be glad of it.”
Avahn’s heart seemed to soar, and she smiled up at her father, but his face became haggard and drawn, and he warned, “Don’t become too attached. His training must be hard, if it is to be of any worth. He cannot be coddled. You will be forbidden to show him any favor. You will not be allowed to speak to him, or speak
of
him. Do not even think of him. He is a soldier, a shield. In times like those that are to come, such shields will be easily shattered.”
Avahn could only hope.
The Fixed Stars
An October Daye Story
Seanan McGuire
The bay trees in our country are all wither’d
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven.
—William Shakespeare,
King Richard II
The Castle Brocéliande, Albion, 572
The ravens that dipped and wove their arcane patterns in the sky above the castle walls were out in full force, their black wings painting prophecy across the dusky purple sky. I wanted to look away, leaving those transitory etchings unread, but I could not force my eyes to close. Too much death and too much dying were scrawled there, spelling themselves out one scavenger bird at a time.
A footstep on the battlement behind me told me that I was no longer alone. I started to turn, and stopped as Michael’s voice rumbled, “No, sister. Stay as you are; I need your eyes to guide me.”
“Guide you to what, a hard fall to the rocks below?” But I smiled and did not turn. Michael was the youngest of my brothers in those days, still feeling out his place in the hierarchy of our strange family. His antlers were only as broad as two hands splayed wide, and his parchment-pale eyes could almost seem to track motion across a room, even though they had not seen a single thing in the eighty years he had lived thus far in Faerie. All his sight was borrowed from the eyes of others.
“To your side, fair sister,” he said and stepped up next to me, almost towering in his nearness. He had grown quickly to a man’s stature and had been the taller of us since he was scarce ten years old. Not that I was possessed of any great height; my nature had always been protean, inclined to twist and change as need demanded, but when I allowed myself to sink into my natural shape, I was a small, slender woman, easily lost in the crush of a crowd. I could be overlooked, if I so willed it, and I willed it often.
But the time for silence and solitude was past. I kept my eyes fixed on the fields outside the castle walls, letting Michael see what he would never be able to behold on his own: men, camped close enough that the shit and feathers dropped by the flocking ravens landed on their heads. So many men, and all of them touched by our manipulations. They must have numbered in the hundreds, and before that day, I would not have thought that so many merlins lived in all of Albion.
Michael was quiet for a time before he asked, “Has Father come?”
“No.” The word was small, and simple, like a key being slipped into a lock. “No,” I repeated, and this time jagged laughter followed the word, impossible to catch or to contain. “The great Oberon come here, for us? The least of his children, guarding the least of his frontiers? Eira will come to fight beside us, and feed you sweets and braid my hair before our father comes to us. There is no cause to count on him. His mercies have never been ours to claim.”
“Antigone.” Michael’s voice was almost chiding now, like he had somehow become the elder, and I the stripling child in need of soothing. “Father loves us. He has always loved us, and he always will.”
“I wish I shared your certainty, Michael.” I turned my eyes away from the battlefield-to-be as I leaned up and pressed a kiss against his cheek. His flesh was cool from the evening air. “Do not stay outside too long. You’ll catch your death of chill.”
He chuckled. “Yes, sister.” My eyes were useless to him now; he would be borrowing vision from the ravens, using them to gain a hundred views of the men who camped below us. By the time he came back into the castle, he would know everything there was to know about their defenses, the weapons they had brought with them, and the items they were scavenging from our land. His information would be invaluable, as it always was during times of war.
A pity that we were going to lose this fight, as we had lost so many others since the merlins took up arms and rose against the many cruelties of their fae progenitors.
I turned my back on him, glad that he did not have eyes of his own, and that he could not see the marks of my betrayal on my face. Shoulders bowed with the weight of a burden that should never have been mine to carry, I descended the rough stone steps toward the waiting castle door.
* * *
There are those who yearn to know the future. You can see them at every fair and gathering, skirting around the edges of the crowd and looking for someone who claims to have the Sight. Will I live long, will the crops be good, will I have many children, they ask, and the fortunetellers tell them what they want to hear—those who have the ability to lie, that is. I have never been able to force my lips to form falsehoods, and so I have never found favor in the courts of kings or queens, whether they be mortal or fae. Too many dark truths have fallen from my mouth like poison berries, and no one wants a fortune teller who will not pretend that tomorrow will always be better than today.
The upper halls of the castle were deserted. The household staff would be below, shoring up our defenses, while the nobility prowled like chained beasts, eager to wet their swords on merlin blood. The fact that the men outside our walls were our distant descendants didn’t matter to them. My brothers and sisters had raised their children to believe that nothing outside of Faerie had value, and merlins were outside of Faerie from the moment of their births.
Brocéliande had been one of Titania’s places to begin with, intended for the pleasure of her children and designed as a beautiful poem of a building, rather than a properly defensible fort. Fortunately for the fools who gathered in the halls below me, the construction of the castle had been given over to Trolls and Gremlins, Coblynau and Hobs—people who understood that a wall needed to do more than simply decorate the landscape. It needed to keep the people inside safe and dry, and it needed to keep the people outside at bay until they were invited to enter. They were not difficult tasks, and the castle performed them well.
But there are other tasks to set before a castle: tasks involving secret passages and hidden ways through the walls, tasks best performed at noon, when the uncaring sun sends most children of Faerie to their beds to sleep the daylight hours away, and such private assignations as must not be seen by the ever-judgmental moon may be carried out. These, too, were performed by the palace at Brocéliande, and performed well enough that even though I made my way from the top level of the castle all the way down to the lowest in the wakeful twilight, not a soul saw me, nor marked upon my passage.
I stepped out into the courtyard, shivering from a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air. What I was doing…it was unforgiveable, and yet I had been given no choice in the matter by the people who claimed to love me best. They would not listen to reason. They wanted blood.
The castle gates were latched, but it was a simple matter to murmur my desires to the sturdy oak, which remembered me well and warped itself enough to allow me to slip out of the stronghold and onto the smooth cobblestone of the castle bawn. Here, too, could you see Titania’s arrogance at work: the moat was deep and wide, yes, and home to strange beasts that would rend and tear any flesh that came too close to their terrible jaws. And at the same time there was the bawn, wide and smooth as a village square, and there was the bridge, which could easily hold a palanquin drawn by two Dragons walking side by side. There was no safety here. Even if the battle went in Faerie’s favor, blood would flow like wine.
Full dark had fallen, blinding Michael’s ravens. My cloak was the color of the sky, blue-black edged with runnels of red. I pulled it close as I hurried across the bridge and toward the camp on the other side of the field. The smell of smoke and unwashed human skin assaulted my nostrils as I drew near, reminding me that I ran toward a different world than that which I left behind me. This was a rawer place, harder, because it had been given no other choice.
The first watchmen were stationed near the boundary fires, where the light was bright enough to dazzle sensitive fae eyes and buy a few precious seconds to sound the alarm. I heard them rustle in the brush as I drew near, doubtless reaching for their weapons. I did not stop or slow, but continued walking forward with my chin held high and my eyes fixed on the distant tents. If they killed me here—if a spear crafted of rosewood and tipped with blessed silver found my heart, and iron nails were driven through my flesh—then the tides of war would turn. Mankind would lose, and my family would maintain their position over all. It was not the right outcome, I knew that much, but if things should go that way, it would be outside of my control and none of my fault. I would betray no one. And so I walked, and waited for the spears to fly.
No one raised a hand against me. I was, in my own way, as well-known here as any of their own forces. So I continued on across the moor until I came to the second ring of fires, this one set around the main encampment, as if keeping the dark at bay could do anything to dissuade the creatures that called it their home.
“Halt!” called a voice. “Who goes there?”
“I have many names, and I cannot tell you which of them is true,” I replied with utter honesty. “But your leader calls me ‘Nimue,’ and so that is my name, to you.”
“How do we know you are who you claim to be?”
I rolled my eyes, glad for once that the fire hid the face of my challenger. It would have been difficult to keep the claws from my fingers, and thence from his throat, if he had looked me in the eye and challenged my honesty. “You don’t,” I said flatly. “But here is a riddle for you: Nimue, it is said, never lies, although her truths can be ribbons that a man may use to tie himself in knots. If I am Nimue, then I am not lying to you, and will be direly offended by your question. If I am not Nimue, then what’s to stop me from reading the future in your entrails before any man could come here to your aid?”
There was a chuckle from the darkness, rich and slow and beautifully familiar. “You never have learned to suffer fools gladly, have you, Auntie?”
“No,” I said. “I have never seen the need. Come out of the firelight, Emrys. I wish to see you, and I am tired of standing here alone.”
“The firelight is my friend, Auntie; it keeps Faerie’s wolves from my door,” said Emrys, even as he walked forward and out of the flickering distortion. He was a tall, strong man, with black hair and a bushy beard that he had allowed to grow since the siege began. His eyes were very green. If any had questioned his heritage, they need only have looked at those Roane-bright eyes and known him as a member of my line. “I wasn’t expecting you tonight.”
“Give me your arm and lead me to your tent,” I said.
He frowned. “My men will talk.”
“A pox upon your men,” I spat. “They will have more than enough to talk about soon, if you and I do not have this conversation now. Will you take me, or have I come all this way for nothing?”
Emrys’s frown deepened as he moved to stand beside me, linking his arm firmly through mine. I put my hand against the hard muscle of his forearm, matching his pace as I allowed him to lead me into the encampment.
“I do not like this,” he murmured.
“You were not meant to,” I replied, and we walked on. “You put too much faith in fire, Emrys. There are people fighting on the side of Faerie who are born in fire, who can juggle flame like a human man juggles a ball. It would be a small thing for a child of the Fire Kingdoms to turn your wall against you.”
“And are there any children of the Fire Kingdoms come to fight for Brocéliande?”
“No,” I said, with absolute honesty and no small satisfaction. The binding that keeps my tongue true was set upon me by Eira, looking to win the favor of her mother, the fair Titania. It was intended as a punishment, and it has been, in its way. But it also allowed me to betray my people without hesitation. How could I be blamed for telling the truth when Eira saw fit to steal away my choice in the matter?
Emrys nodded, satisfied by my answer. “That is good to know. Has the Undersea come?”
“Not yet,” I said. There were men in the shadows, creeping forward as they watched me walk through the camp on the arm of their leader. I kept my eyes on the path ahead, not acknowledging their presence. I was the intruder here.
It should never have been like this.
“Good,” said Emrys, and together we walked on.
* * *
His tent was as plain as any of the others on the outside: plainer, even, with visible patches on its side and no banner flying overhead. His personal coat of arms flew above an empty tent on the other side of the camp, a decoy against attacks from above. I smiled a little when I saw that. He had listened to my advice after the last battle and was adjusting to the tactics of the fae.
Inside was another matter. Inside, the tent seemed to go on for the length of a great feasting hall, with an oaken table suitable for gatherings of men, and a bedchamber almost as large as the one which I enjoyed at Brocéliande. The air smelled faintly of heather, the single-note signature of his magic. Unlike their pureblood and changeling forebears, merlins were too thin-blooded for complexity. It was a small price to pay, given all that they had gained.
Emrys walked me to the table and guided me to a seat on the long bench like the gentleman that he was. I unclasped my cloak and slipped it from my shoulders before folding my hands demurely in my lap. In the fire-lit tent, my white samite gown glimmered like a star.
“Why are you here, Nimue?” he asked. “It can’t be to tell me not to march against Brocéliande. You know that I will not call off this attack.”
“No,” I said with a small shake of my head. “You will not, and more, you
cannot
. If you stand down now, the war is over, and you will head the losing side. That cannot be allowed to happen.” If Faerie won, everything would change, and not for the better.
Emrys frowned as he sat down beside me. “You say that every time we speak. Why won’t you tell me your reasons?”
“Is it not enough that I will side with you against my own kind?” I unclasped my hands, reaching up to touch his cheek with the back of my fingers. He was a handsome man, in his way, more like his father than his mother, who had shown her Roane blood more clearly in the curve of her neck and her longing for the sea. She had been my granddaughter, and Emrys was my great-grandson, and when I looked at him, I was still looking, in some small way, at her.