Summerblood (13 page)

And still Avall had said nothing. But when he'd marched out to the Court of Rites at the head of the mourning file, he'd carried the new helm with him, as Merryn had carried the shield and Lykkon the Lightning Sword. And when the time had come for him to speak as King—which was his prerogative, though he had none within his clan—they'd simply raised those three wondrous things on high and he'd shouted for all to hear, “Without him who lies there, none of these would exist, and most of you who sit witness to this rite would be dead.”

They'd then relinquished those items to trusted kinsmen, and he'd taken the torch the Death Priest offered. He'd considered using the Lightning Sword, but that would both irritate Priest-Clan and remind Common Clan—and others—of issues still far from resolution.

Besides which, Eellon despised such display, and were it not for massive arguments to the contrary from everyone Avall respected, he'd have followed custom and made this a private affair in Argen-Hall's own small court of rites, with only the clan and a few close friends to witness.

Yet somehow Eellon had become a national hero. And in that, the clans and the common folk alike must be mollified.

So it was, that with a strange separation from himself that was almost like being drunk or high on imphor wood, Avall slowly stepped forward, gaze focused intently on the torch in lieu of the bier that rose ever higher before him. And then someone—it truly did not feel like him—was lowering that torch to the basin of volatile oil at the bier's base, which would feed the flame where needed to ensure rapid and complete combustion.

The world went yellow-red, then white. Thunder boomed that was not of Avall's summoning. Heat washed his face, and
he felt the skin stretch taut across his cheekbones as necessity forced him back. Yet even then, he could only stare fixedly as the Death Priest pried the torch from his still-locked fingers, while Rann and Merryn gently led him back to where Strynn and Lykkon—and others of his clan he'd asked to join the royal party—waited, and there watched with tear-stained faces as the most powerful man in Eron not to wear a crown surrendered his mortal shape to ashes.

Only when the smoke of that burning was a thin spiral damascening the heavens did Avall finally turn away. And only then came the rain, dripping from his crown to wash his tears away.

It was still raining when Avall found Tyrill. The old Craft-Chief was sitting, as she often did these days, in the water court behind Smith-Hold-Main. A high-arched dome stood there, sheltering a life-size bronze statue of Eddyn that stared down at a slab of rustless metal that had been mingled, when molten, with a portion of his ashes, which was all he would ever have for a tomb. Even so, she'd had to fight most of the clan to have that edifice erected. Oddly enough, however, she hadn't had to fight Avall. “He was flawed, but still a hero,” Avall had told her. “Without him, Ixti would have had the victory.”

Avall came upon her quietly, where she sat unmoving, a cup of brandied cider cooling between hands still gloved in the thin black sylk of mourning. Save a sash of Argen maroon twined with Smithcraft gold, she wore only black these days— for Eddyn had been of her immediate line, and it was for him, as much as Eellon, that she mourned.

Why Avall sought her out, he had no idea. Perhaps it was simply that she was one of the few ties remaining to the life that had vanished like the smoke of Eellon's burning all in a season. A time when the old Chiefs' rivalry—and the surrogate continuation they propagated among their two-sons—was one of the fixed points in the universe, along with winter snow.

Silently, he mounted the marble steps that put him beneath the dome. A stroke of his hand wiped water from his face and swept his hood back with it, as he took a seat close enough beside Tyrill to be heard without raising his voice. She acknowledged him with a murmured “Avall” and filled a cup for him without asking. It was High Summer, but the rain had brought a chill that reminded him far too much of the colder seasons to come.

“You've lost a lot,” Avall whispered finally, wincing at the inanity of the words, though he knew there
were
no words that could comfort Tyrill now.

“I've lost nothing,” the old woman retorted without rancor. “Everything has lost me. It's all gone—
all
of it. My husband, my children, my one-children, and most of my two-. My friends, my lovers, my foes, and my rivals. People tell you they want to live to old age. Some are even so stupid as to crave immortality, but I tell you, it's not worth it. I've watched the world grow and seen civilization advance. I've seen the plague come and go and take half the people I cared about with it. And then I watched people grow to adulthood to whom the plague is only words in books, images in paintings, and lines in plays. You're seeing that now, but you don't know it. History starts out as a thing remote from you, and then, all at once, it surrounds you. You're the center of the world—for a while. Take that book Lykkon's writing—the chronicle of the war and the documentation of the power of the gems. Have you ever stopped to think what that book will represent a thousand years from now? It'll be like Allegri's
Treatise on Falconry
or Calayn's book on honing edges. It'll be something that's as much a part of those future lives as breathing. Yet it will have no connection with us at all. We'll be names, but not flesh, blood, and bone, love, hate, and jealousy. We'll—”

Avall silenced her by edging closer and easing his arm around her. “Eddyn's the past, and Eellon's the past, and—”

“I'm soon to be the past,” she broke in. “I don't know when, but soon. But the funny thing is that history will mention you
and me on the same page, if it mentions us at all. I'll get a line, and you'll get a paragraph, but no one will get
any
sense of how we're from different generations. I was born when adherence to rite was uncontested. Then came the plague, and necessity forced flexibility, and with that came questioning and dissent. You're from a more liberal age, though it doesn't seem that way to you—it never does. But those who read about us a thousand years from now won't know the gulf between us, or the bond. They won't be aware of the distance between our ages, because history books don't emphasize such things. I'll simply be your mentor's rival; you'll be the man who wielded the sword that won the war with Ixti. And
maybe
they'll mention Eddyn and Strynn, and how you were all barely more than children, and you were the youngest King Raised in tenscore years. If you learn nothing from this, Avall, learn that nobody is ever apart from history, but always a part of it.”

Avall could think of no good reply, and so kept his peace, as did Tyrill, for a long yet comfortable time. “History,” he murmured eventually. “It all spins on such small things: a discussion I had with Lykkon that made me angry, that made me place-jump to Eddyn's cell, where he got the gem and jumped away himself, into—eventually—a worse kind of captivity. But if Lyk hadn't asked that one question—”

“Eddyn would've finished the shield sooner and saved some lives. Or he might've refused to work and cost us everything.”

“Which do you think?”

A shrug. “I don't want to think, because I'll have to recall a bad thing about someone I loved. But I do know that if he hadn't had that final forging in the south—if he hadn't fallen in love, then been captured, tortured, and raped—he'd never have valued what he saved enough to make the sacrifice he did.”

Avall shrugged in turn, patted her hand, then drained his cider. “Well,” he said “this has done me some good, whether you know it or not. But now I have to return to being King.”

“And I,” Tyrill echoed, likewise rising, “have to return to something as well.”

“Being chief ?” Avall inquired.

“No,” she sighed. “Being old.”

Merryn wasn't surprised by the summons that Bingg delivered to her suite in the Citadel, only that it hadn't arrived sooner. Bingg's footsteps were still echoing down the corridor, and she caught the flash of the Royal Herald's tabard he wore so proudly just before he disappeared around the corner to the right.

It was an official summons: That much was clear from the paper, the seal, and the fact that Bingg had delivered it. She also knew what it contained before she tore it open. It showed only a place and time—Avall's suite in the Citadel for dinner, at sunset. Its existence implied the rest. Her brother had finally been pushed to the limit on one of the crises that had been simmering all summer. This scrap of paper meant that he'd decided to act, but needed—or thought he did—the input of his counselors. So, she supposed—as a glance out the window showed soggy workmen already removing the soot-stained marble dais that had held Eellon's bier—she had best be there.

Avall surveyed the faces of those arrayed around the table at which they'd just dined on the most sumptuous repast he'd yet had set before them. They'd needed it, too, to put paid to the stresses of the day, but also in payment for what he was about to inflict on them. Problems were presenting themselves faster than he could resolve them, and he had to get some of them off his plate. Not the most important or most troublesome, perhaps, but removing any of them was progress.

Still black-clad from the morning's rite, they were gazing at him expectantly, across that expanse of damascened velvet, expensive gold dinnerware, and the remnants of roast venison, fresh lobster, fried shrimp, wild mushrooms, tame rice, and fruit grown under open sky. Wines had been consumed and
cordials sipped and savored. But that was the salve; now came the punishment.

One last time he surveyed them, from left to right around the table: Rann, Merryn, Tryffon, Vorinn, Veen, Lykkon— and Strynn, at his right hand. Those he trusted most, with five of them born outside his clan, and thus, in theory, more objective. Bingg was there as well, but only to make notes. His two favorite guards, Myx and Riff, stood outside. Avall would've liked to have Kylin and Div on hand as well, but that was impossible. He missed both of them most keenly.

A deep breath, a sip of walnut liquor, another breath, and he spoke. “If you were me,” he began, “ruler of a kingdom— any kingdom—and you had in your control weapons so deadly they assured your victory in any battle, but also assured your defeat if they fell into other hands, what would you do with them?”

Merryn gnawed her lip for a moment: she who, as Avall's twin sister, had known him longest and knew him best. “For the sake of clarity, I suppose you should specify
exactly
what you're talking about, brother.”

“The new regalia,” he retorted through a weary glare. “The sword Strynn made, Eddyn's shield, and my helm.”

“Only one of which is actually a weapon,” Lykkon noted. “For accuracy's sake, I mean.”

“And none of which is dangerous without the gems,” Strynn added quickly. “I'm not even sure you should consider them as one thing—the regalia—or as two—the regalia and the gems.”

Avall exhaled heavily. “I'd like to think they were separate, but the more I use them—and let me stress that I
have
used them more than anyone else, and am the only person alive
and conscious
to have used the whole ensemble—the more I think you can't have one without the other.”

“Meaning what?” Veen inquired.

“Meaning that, to state what we're already dancing around, the gems and their receptacles really are, in essence, one thing.”

Veen shook her head, and Avall wondered about the wisdom of including her. Still, she'd been involved in this affair virtually from the beginning and was older than all but Tryffon by a half score years. She was also from Ferr, which was loyal anyway, but was one of those rare people who split generations, being old enough to value tradition and young enough to acknowledge its abuse. Vorinn—who was holding his peace for the nonce—was another.

Tryffon, however, was scowling mightily. “That might make sense if you were a Smith,” he rumbled. “Or if you made these things or saw them made. I didn't. Veen and Vorinn didn't. Lykkon and Rann saw only a little, and Merryn was prisoner most of the time. Only you and Strynn actually worked on the things—of those to hand, I mean.”

Avall steepled his fingers before him, mirroring Merryn's favorite council pose. “That's true,” he acknowledged. “All of you know—or should—that the gems have many powers, among which is the ability to modify the perception of time so that one can do better work than is possible otherwise. I'm the only person here who's actually applied that skewed perception to crafting, but trust me, it's a fact. In any case, you also know that the gems, in a sense, bond with their owners and protect them. They like some people and dislike others— apparently based almost entirely on how those people relate to me, I assume because I found the original gem.”

Everyone was nodding now, which Avall hoped meant they understood what he'd said so far. “So,” he continued, “I have some reason to assume that these gems are themselves sentient beings, working for their own good by ensuring mine. And since my good was—and still is for a while, I'm afraid—bound up with the good of Eron, they seem also to have influenced events in that direction.”

Veen frowned above folded arms. “I'm not following you.”

Avall managed a wry grin. “And I can't really explain, since much of this involves concepts for which we have no words— especially as Gynn implanted a fair bit of it in my mind
without speaking at all. But what I'm trying to say is that all the regalia—the helm especially, and the sword—was created under the influence of the gems—”

Merryn shook her head vehemently. “Not the shield. Eddyn had completed most of it before he ever heard of the gems, and Tyrill rebuilt the frame from scratch.”

“But I showed Eddyn how to make the connections between the gems and the shield,” Avall shot back. “And that information came, in part,
from
the gems.”

“Which isn't getting us anywhere,” Lykkon muttered.

“Briefly, then,” Avall retorted, “the regalia is what it is because of the gems. Assuming we could remove them easily— which I doubt, though they were easy enough to install—and tried to set them in another sword, helm, or shield, I don't think they'd work as well. It would be like wearing clothes made for someone else. Parts might fit, but the whole would bind in odd places and be loose in others.”