The King of Forever (Scarlet and the White Wolf, #4) (17 page)

“That part is true,” Liall said carefully. He was not fond of recalling that fateful hunt last winter, when Scarlet had been injured and nearly crushed by the charging snow bear, and Vladei had been revealed for the traitor he was.

“The bear perished by your t’aishka’s hand.
Sun hinir,
the great hunter of the ice, slain by so small a hand.” Ulan looked at his own palm and moved his fingers reflexively. “We hear that our Rshani scions name him Keriss, meaning the flame flower. We are very curious to hear more of
Scarlet
of Lysia.”

Liall felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. “Is my t’aishka welcome in the eyes of the Ancients?”

Ulan nodded his great head. “More than welcome. Ten thousand welcomes. Our races have been sundered too long. It is the old way.”

Melev had said the same, and Melev had also claimed that Scarlet was welcome. The truth was that Melev had considered Scarlet an object, a thing to be used to achieve a goal, as evidenced by the way he had kidnapped Scarlet and aided in the murder of Cestimir.

Liall sat down, never taking his eyes off the Ancient. Ulan stared back at him without blinking. It was difficult not to be cowed by such eyes. Like Melev, Ulan was intensely interested in all things Hilurin, or
Anlyribeth
as they had been known in Rshan more than an age ago. Deliberately, Liall had kept the details of Melev’s treachery under wraps.

“The old way,” Liall mused. “Very few know how far Melev went, either to satisfy his interest in Scarlet’s magic or his own personal quest for power.”

“I know.”

Liall nodded. “And I am afraid your curiosity runs along similar lines, and carries with it the same quest for the lost knowledge of the Shining Ones.”

Ulan was silent. His eyes were steady, giving Liall nothing.

Liall tried a new tack. “That the Ancients have kept the Rshani people ignorant of the true nature of the relationship between the Anlyribeth and the Shining Ones is deeply disturbing to me.”

After a moment, Ulan nodded again. “You know of these matters?”

“I’ve put it together, more or less. Most wouldn’t, but I’ve been surrounded by Setna since I was a child, and I dwelled in Kalaslyn for many years. The Hilurin haven’t changed much, have they?”

“They had no need,” Ulan rumbled. “They were complete. Perfect. It was our ancestors who were lacking. We needed the magic of the Anlyribeth to survive. We were their channels, they were the source. Or, no...” Ulan swung his head from side to side in negation. “No, not the source.”

Liall could not recall ever witnessing an Ancient correct himself. He leaned forward. “Then who...
what
is this source?”

Ulan made a sound in his throat like a wave pounding a shore. Liall frowned. Ulan made the noise again, and Liall realized it was a word.

He had no hope of reproducing that sound. “What does it mean?”

“Deva.”

Liall snorted. “You want me to believe in the legends of the Flower Prince? That the goddess favors the Hilurin, speaks to them, protects them and gives them magic?”

“Their magic is of
Her.
She deeded it to them before She dispersed.”

Deeded. It seemed an odd choice of phrase, as did
dispersed.
“It was a gift?”

Ulan nodded. “The Gift. The Anlyribeth speak the truth.”

“I’ve found they rarely lie.”

Magic. Liall did not trust it, and he was deeply suspicious whenever the topic was mentioned. Because Scarlet was new to the jaded court and such a novelty to them, the topic came up quite often within Liall’s hearing, especially since Scarlet had chosen a very public way to reveal his magic. Now everyone knew, and everyone was curious about what more there was to know, how far the mysteries went. It was a danger.

Liall decided to maneuver from a new direction. “You know of the revolt in the north, of Magur and what happened there.”

Ulan nodded slowly, as if he expected this change of topic. He turned his gaze to the casement and looked at the land spreading out beyond. “Many deaths. Vladei brother-prince sought to use the Ava Thule in his bid for the throne. Melev helped him.”

“And so they’re all dead, as it should be,” Liall said. “The last great incursion between the Rshani and the Ava Thule was the Tribeland campaigns. Before Magur, decades had passed without a whisper of them. My people hoped they had all perished, swallowed up by the winds beyond the Greatrift. The freeriders knew they were still sheltering in the foothills of Magur, but that information never seemed to reach the south.” He watched Ulan, but could read nothing from him. “Until the revolt. Then there was no more pretending.”

Ulan splayed a large hand against the glass, as if seeking the cold outside.

“How could you do it? How could
you
permit those savages inside the temple mountain?”

Ulan was unmoved. “Wars are things of men. They do not last. Only the sky lasts, and the suns that wheel in the heavens, and the language of stars. It is not our business to deal death and swing swords.”

“Then it’s not your business to take sides, either.”

“We have taken no side. The generations of mortals rise and fall like wheat. Fissures open in the land. Mountains collapse. Ice melts. Only we endure.”

“You’ve sheltered our enemies,” Liall accused. “Given them food and a safe haven to gather and breed more rebellion.”

“When brothers fight and a father comforts one of his injured sons, is that taking sides as well?”

“They’re not children,” Liall said in disgust. “You know what they’re capable of. You know what they’ve
done.
We’ve shown them mercy before. We always harbored hope that the Tribelands would eventually bow to the rule of the crown, as they should have from the beginning. It’s been too long now and their nature has changed beyond recognition. Since the days of Ramung, they’ve ravaged the northern lands, preying on outlying settlements, murdering travelers, stealing from the very cradles of the village folk to swell their numbers. They’re animals, answering to no law, respecting no boundaries, living like wild beasts of the glacier and cave. Their numbers have grown great and the Ancients have not only kept their secret, but now you aid them against us.”

“How have we aided them?”

“You allowed them to enter Ged Fanorl.”

Ulan shook his head in his slow and plodding way. “They found the entrance to the temple mountain and unlocked her secrets. We did not help them. We simply did not prevent.” The Ancient’s lassitude was deceptive. Liall knew that Ulan was capable of moving faster than sight if he chose to. The fey ancestor-race of the Rshani were unknowable. It would be perilous to mistake either their motives or their capabilities. A misstep either way could prove disastrous.

Liall decided honesty was best. He doubted that he could hide anything from Ulan anyway. “We will make war against the Ava Thule. It’s already begun. You knew that might happen one day, if your secret got out.”

Ulan’s voice turned deeper with displeasure. “It was
you
who opened that door, king.”

Liall’s jaw clenched. He had kept the secret nearly all his life, but now silence was a hazard at best, and treason if his subjects choose to see it that way. “I had to. The temple mountain is sacred to all Rshani, and your friends grew bold, attacking deeper inside our lands. It was only a matter of time before the truth broke. If I had not done this, the monarchy would have been destroyed. It might still be, no matter what I choose.”

Ulan dropped his hand from the glass. “If the Ava Thule are not Rshani, then what are they? Where do you imagine they sprang from, if not the Shining Ones?” He made a discontented noise like a chair sliding on wood.

“Could it be that you wanted them to open the mountain
for
you?” Liall pressed. Ulan was not required to answer him at all. An Ancient could arrive in Nau Karmun clad in a ragged tunic and demand an audience with the king at once, and not only be tolerated, but venerated. He had nothing to pressure Ulan with.

To his surprise, Ulan’s chin rose and his eyes seemed to burn like sunlight glinting off a shard of ice. “Many years ago, they found the way inside. Now the Ava Thule have learned of the return of the Anlyribeth. Many have journeyed to the temple mountain,” he rumbled. “
Many
. A pilgrimage. They said they would open the temple and unlock the secrets of the hidden power, the lost magic. We have let the mountain rest these thousands of years. Now, one of
them
has returned of his own will. Not a captive, not a slave or subject, but one driven by love. The Ava Thule say it is but the beginning. More will follow. It is time to wake the magic.”

Liall’s heart clenched. Scarlet had spoken with him before about the Creatrix, said that his deadly encounter with Melev had shown him the location of the ancient magic of the Shining Ones.

“I won’t allow you to harm Scarlet. I won’t allow
them
to. My mother refrained from annihilating the Ava Thule
on your word.
She let the fleas live for your sake, for the Ancients and for the blood we share with them, but no more.”

“You would kill them all?”

“They killed themselves when they entered Ged Fanorl,” Liall answered. “I fought in the Tribelands campaigns when I was young. We hunted and burned them out of our lands. We drove them beyond the borders of Uzna and into the ice before the Ancients asked us to stop. You had never asked anything of us before.”

“You showed mercy.”

“We showed weakness. Why were you so merciful? Do you know what the Ava Thule really are?” Liall was angry now, remembering those battles, the atrocities he had witnessed. He stood up and paced the room. “If you had seen for yourself what they did, you would not call them your sons. They kill to win their mates. They cast their dead into pits with no burial, and they expose their female infants on the hillsides. Why waste food on raising a female when they can simply steal one of breeding age? The boy-children are tied arm-to-arm and made to fight over food and shelter, or for girls barely old enough to bleed. And they do worse. Much worse. Nothing grows in the North but mushrooms and lichen. The Ava Thule’s knowledge of growing is gone, and they don’t hunt the village-lands only to steal carrots and sheep and women. They have hunted men as
food.”

Ulan was eerily still. “The wolf pack is not very different from what you describe. It is primal necessity, what they have become. They live according to the dictates of their environment.”

“Even wolves don’t cannibalize their own. I’m done trying to harry them back into the wastes, or trying to reason with you.” Liall took a deep breath. “I won’t wait until these animals are howling at our door before I act. I’m taking the army north to wipe them out.”

Ulan made a burbling sound. It took Liall several seconds to recognize it as laughter.

“You do not make this war only to protect your people, scion of the Camira-Druz. Your crown
needs
a war.”

“Fair enough,” Liall grated out. “But it changes nothing. All I have said of them is true, and they are no less a threat for the happy convenience of timing. Warn them or not as you will, but we are coming, and Ged Fanorl will be cleansed.”

He looked at Ulan, trying to gauge his reaction. It was difficult to measure even the strongest emotions when dealing with an Ancient. Their dark, broad faces at times seemed to be carved from solid wood. Scarlet, being a Hilurin with an open nature that concealed almost nothing, complained that Liall was secretive. If only Scarlet knew. Liall feared that Ulan could read him as easily as he read Scarlet’s moods.

Ulan appeared to be looking
through
him. Liall wanted to shiver. He had the same feeling as when Scarlet used his magic; a sense of unreality jarring his perception of the world. Did Ulan have a similar magic that allowed him to read minds?

Ulan put one flat foot forward and advanced a step. “There is much you must see, much for you to learn before you reach Ged Fanorl, and there is little time. The channel must have a doorway, the link must be completed.”

“I don’t understand what that means.”
Riddles, always riddles!

“You will.”

“And I don’t appreciate your gods-cursed inscrutability!”

Ulan’s wide mouth stretched further in a rare smile. “Even gentle creatures turn predator when they hunger, and into scavengers when starving. You call it abomination, but you have never starved as the Ava Thule have starved. Your fingers and toes have not turned black. The cold has not frozen your mate as she slept, or your babes in their cradles. In the elder times, when the long cold came and night lay on the land like a sickness, I saw worse than the deeds of the Ava Thule, King Nazheradei.”

“You shall not see it again,” Liall vowed.

“And what if I said that the thing you desire above all else will be given to you freely by your enemies, the Ava Thule, from what they have discovered inside Ged Fanorl?” Ulan paused and looked down on him. “Your t’aishka is fragile.”

Liall stiffened. “If you dare threaten him...”

“I would not waste breath threatening you.” Ulan loomed and his voice seemed to shudder the walls. “What need have I to threaten? If I meant the Anlyribeth harm I could root him from the stone of this castle and crush him with my own hands, and neither you nor all your spears could prevent me. This you know.”

Liall held his tongue, though his vision had begun to narrow in a long tunnel focusing on Ulan.
Berserker rage
, he thought, and willed it back so hard that spots swam before his eyes. He forced himself to wait before speaking, to breathe, to grip the edge of a chair to steady himself. “You will not do that.”

“Not I, no. Death will take a different form for your t’aishka. Forty summers, is it? Less, if their lives are hard. Even if you coddled him in a golden cage until he sickened of it, you will still live centuries beyond his span.”

Liall felt like the floor was sinking beneath him. It was true.
Surely I’ve not lived all my adult life without love, only to find it and lose it in a handful of years? I cannot have come this far only to watch my love die before his time and leave me with only old age to endure alone. Fate is not that cruel.