The Hollow Queen (8 page)

“What about the green? Constantin made use o' that when the Duchess, the king, an' Oi were ambushed by assassins in the meadow at Kraldurge. They was 'idden in ways we neva' would o' seen 'em, except that the green light appeared and 'Is Majesty took 'em out as if they was standin' right in front o' us.”

Omet exhaled.

“I'm not sure how to scry in grass, which is the negative aspect, the flat of the green note, through the Lightcatcher,” he said, somewhat nervously. “I did, however, see the Patriarch apply the positive, the sharp, which is translated as Grass Hider. He used it to shield Rhapsody and the women she traveled with to the Deep Kingdom of the Nain, as much as possible. That I might be able to do; it's not an exact application. I could set it to green sharp,
Kurh-fa
, and put it on a continuous cycle. I'm not sure if that will help confuse or misdirect any attack that's coming, but it's the only other thing I can think to do.”

“Unnerstood. If Oi'm not mistaken, that was 'ow Gwylliam kept Anwyn out—and if that's the case, Oi see no reason not to give it a try. We're gonna need every bit of 'elp we can muster.”

“So, now that I've answered, where do you plan to deploy?” Omet asked nervously.

The Sergeant-Major looked at him seriously, his large amber eyes solemn beneath the grassy brown hair on his head.

“Every single soldier will be on full guard across the kingdom, and we're gonna need every bloody one o' them,” he said, his face a mask. “If, as we think, Talquist is sendin' the titan you saw in the forest of Navarne, Rath, to find the Earthchild, he can strike anywhere—'e's not bringin' the army for that. It's a distraction, to keep us engaged, while 'e finds a way in.”

The Dhracian nodded.

“But 'ere,” the Sergeant said cheerfully, digging something out of his pocket. “Maybe this'll 'elp.”

Rath looked at the object in Grunthor's hand.

It was a pick hammer in the same configuration as the one the Sergeant had been forging earlier, only a tiny fraction of the size.

“What is this for?”

“It's a weapon,” Grunthor said indignantly.

“Hardly. I don't need this.”

“Whaddaya mean, ‘'ardly'? It's a perfeckly nice pick 'ammer, an' Oi imagine you know 'ow to to use it—well,
anyone
know's 'ow, ya smack whatever ya can. Aim for 'is rocks, if you can forgive the play on words.”

“Actually, that was fairly unforgivable.” The words were spokenly flatly, without humor.

Grunthor looked solemnly at the Dhracian.

“Ya got a dagger. You may as well 'ave a weapon o' last resort. You an' me, Rath—we are gonna be right in the doorway to 'er chambers, right in the eye o' the storm, shall we say—'cause we don't got no other choice. You an' me—
we
are the last resort, the final fallback. Which means it's all up ta us in the end. Half a million Bolg may 'old the line—but we will be in the teeth of it, whenever it comes. An' if we fail, that's all she wrote. The game's over, and there won't be nothin' left. Nothin' in this world, and the next.”

The Dhracian nodded again. He had already known that as well.

 

10

ON THE MVEKGURN FJORD, SOUTHERN BORDER, THE HINTERVOLD

The moon had risen at last. Wrapped in fog and brittle clouds that raced across the cold sky, breaking apart in their passage, it floated at the horizon, hovering over a night that seemed to grow bright as day within moments of its rising.

The Icemen of the Hintervold had gathered at the edge of the fjord in response to the call of the gyldenhorn, a long and deep-bowled instrument known for its deep, resounding voice and capability of piercing even the thickest night wind. When the horn sounded, it took less than the time it had taken for the sun to descend one hand of sky for them to assemble, clad in the heavy furs and leather armor that provided warmth as well as dark cladding, shielding them from ordinary sight.

The Icemen were quiet warriors. In their realm of endless winter nights and unnaturally long summer days that left outsiders feeling itchy and unnerved, they remained year-round, living silently off what the land could provide them in winter, harvesting the bounty of the forests and towering mountains in summer.

The residents of the Hintervold that inhabited cities were cousins to these men. They shared the same ancestors, the same empty history, the same love of the cold. The sparse city dwellers, unlike their self-sufficient cousins, had come to rely on other parts of the Known World to provide them with food to span the short growing seasons, bad weather, and years when the animal herds were elusive. Their reliance had proved to be their undoing now.

A leader in a nation south of the Riverlands had violated his trust, had interrupted their shipments of grain and foodstuffs, poisoned them with rat droppings, mold, and toxic substances that caused many of the women of the Hintervold to lose their babies in the womb, children to starve, and men to grow sick and die. The righteous wrath of the survivors had built into a growing storm that was completely natural.

It was just aimed at the wrong leader.

The gyldenhorn sounded again. In answer, glaciers calved in the distance, raining hillsides of snow and ice down into the dark valleys below.

As if of one mind, the Icemen turned in the direction of its call.

Standing at the rise of the tallest swale on the fjord stood a man clad in a robe of heavy polar-bear fur, a leather hat with a carved matching representation of the ursine beast crowning his head. His magnificent beard, gray and curling at the ends, hung down almost to his waist, and his black eyes were crowned with equally dark brows. In his hand was a staff with a horizontal crossbeam of blackthorn sharpened to points at the ends.

Hjorst. The Diviner of the Hintervold.

Although one side of the Diviner's line was descended from the same Cymrian refugees from which their hated foe had come, he was also a descendant of an even more ancient indigenous people, ice dwellers who had lived in the cold mountains and frozen seas of the Hintervold for a thousand years before the Cymrians even thought to leave their doomed island homeland.

His primitive bearing and warlike demeanor belied the fact that he had been educated in the modern capital of Marincaer half a world away, a place where he had grown fond of elegant potables, whiskeys, brandies, and rums from the finest distilleries in the world, as well as flaky pastries, fresh fruit, and dainty finger sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

But even if he had been modernized in his education and experiences, the Diviner's heart belonged to the primeval earth. He not only loved this glistening land of almost year-round snow and ice, where elk, mountain goats, and tirabouri wandered the permafrost in thunderingly gentle herds, but he believed unwaveringly in the animist beliefs and sacred rituals of the earth that were practiced by these people.

Bloody, uncultured, and violent as some of them might be.

As he stood atop the rise, the Diviner looked down for a long moment at the troops gathering at his feet. The cold of winter had abated; Second Thaw was here now, the earliest days of spring which the more southerly parts of the continent had been enjoying for several months. With the spring came the melting of the barriers that the Icemen carried around inside them. They were stoic in the winter, a time when anger or distress cost more energy than it was worth, but in spring the blood ran close to the surface, spinning rivers of rage and the lust for vengeance in their hearts and bodies.

As it was running now.

Quiet as they were, the Diviner could feel the black anger building on the fjord in front of him.

An anger he shared.

Hjorst had not undertaken a specific divination to confirm the circumstances over which he was about to launch bloodshed. Divinations were only safely performed at Yule, in the depths of a frozen winter, when the sacred teachings were proscribed, for divination in any other time was considered risky at best, and at worst, offensive to the animist spirits.

It was a gift to be able to access knowledge that one's own senses were not entitled to by the spilling of blood; to expect to be able to do it on a whim was arrogant and insulting to nature. The Diviner had already bent the rules by performing divination at the turn of spring for a friend, the recently crowned emperor of Sorbold. He did not wish to anger nature and the upcoming war by spilling blood intentionally for other reasons, even if they were sacred ones.

In the back of his mind he recalled the divination of Yule at the beginning of this past year. It had warned direly of treachery, but the specifics were uncertain. The only hint that the holy augury had offered was that the traitor to his nation was one who presented himself in the guise of a friend. Hjorst had immediately guessed who the only person was to which the augury could apply.

Gwydion of Manosse.

The Lord Cymrian, the leader of the Alliance to which the Hintervold was a friendly confederate, though not a member, spanning the vast bulk of the Middle Continent.

And who, by circumstance, was therefore the holder of the majority of the grainfields and vineyards, orchards and foodstuffs of most of the continent.

The Lord Cymrian himself had traveled to the Hintervold to offer the friendship of the Alliance upon his investiture, bringing with him his new wife, a woman of surpassing beauty and wisdom. She was herself trained and experienced in agriculture, having been responsible for the rehabilitation and expansion of the vineyards, rice bogs, and vegetable fields of the realm of Ylorc, where the first-era Cymrians had built their great civilization, Canrif, a thousand or more years before.

In addition to making suggestions that had been implemented with great success in the sparse farms and hatcheries of the Hintervold, the Lady Cymrian had offered songs of growing and harvesting which had helped the Riverlands, the only part of the Hintervold with reliably tillable soil, produce crops with almost double the yield. The Lord Cymrian had offered a tariffless delivery of grain and other foodstuffs as a sign of friendship to help the Hintervold recover from some of its worst droughts that had occurred over the previous three years.

Hjorst was a man who took such offers reverently and seriously. The Hintervold valued its independence enough to be judicious in accepting contracts or partnerships. The violation of a promise of peace and friendship with the Hintervold was an offense of deep insult and threat, one that could not be overlooked the way the provinces of the Middle Continent and the nations of Ylorc, the Bolglands, and Undervale, the mountainous realm of the Nain far to the east, had forgiven the ancestors of these new leaders, put old enmities aside, and reunited.

But there was such sincerity in the visage of the two handsome leaders of the Cymrian Alliance that he could not overcome the way his heart rose in hope at their offer of peace and friendship. Hjorst, by nature a skeptic almost from birth, put his nagging doubts aside and signed on as a friend of the new Alliance.

So when the shipments of grain did not arrive on time, or did not arrive at all, the Diviner was enraged. When the ones that did arrive were laden with poison or rat feces, or showed signs of widespread mold, and his communiqu
é
s to the Lord Cymrian demanding explanation were met with silence, the Diviner could not stand by in similar silence.

Not when his people were being starved.

And not when he had learned that the Alliance was secretly planning to attack and annex the Riverlands at the end of spring. It sickened Hjorst to realize that the tour he had given the Lord and Lady had merely been a scouting trip for them, which he had supplied and hosted.

He had clandestinely thrown in his lot with the leaders of two other nations who had each been similarly injured by the deceitful leaders—Beliac, the king of Golgarn, whose southern coastlands shared a northern border with the Bolglands, who had discovered his lands were about to be invaded by the Firbolg, also signatories to the Alliance. Beliac had an almost obsessive fear of being devoured by the Firbolg who had been his distant neighbors for five hundred years, and had been relieved to find friends among the enemies of the Bolg.

And Talquist, the regent of Sorbold, about to be crowned emperor, who himself had been betrayed by the Lord and Lady, though in the back of his mind, Hjorst had still not completely put the pieces of that betrayal together.

Talquist's taking of the holy city-state of Sepulvarta, an independent nation between the borders of Sorbold to the south and Roland in the Cymrian Alliance to the north, had been confusing to the Diviner, even after he and Beliac had been given a carefully guided tour by the emperor himself.

But it didn't matter.

If revenge was not struck soon, if action was not taken, within the short growing season the Riverlands would belong to the Alliance, and all foodstuffs to his mysterious and ancient land would be gone.