The War With The Mein (17 page)

With those words Hanish left his uncle to oversee the training. He pushed through the pinewood doors and climbed the stairs out of the Calathrock and up into the open air. A savage wind smacked him with enough force that he had to pause a moment, legs wide, one hand shielding his face from the tiny splinters of ice that peppered his cheeks and eyes. Though he had endured it all of his twenty-nine years, the harshness of the Mein winter never failed to amaze him, especially when stepping out of the massive shelter of the Calathrock or the warmth of the inner hold. It felt as if the winter night was a living, raging creature. The more they entrenched themselves and made life livable on the plateau, the more the snow tried to blanket them from existence; the more the wind sought to push them against the stones of the mountain, the more the cold found ways to enter their defenses. Hanish leaned forward and started the short walk across the frozen ground, the low-huddled mass of shadow that was Tahalian just visible through the storm.

An aide, Arsay, met him inside the hold. He held the tiny scroll out for him to take. “A message from Maeander,” he said. “Thasren has touched Leodan. He walked and slept and ate unnoticed by the enemy, and then came upon him at a banquet and pierced him with an Ilhach blade. The king’s time of idyll has ended.”

Hanish took the note in his fingers but did not read it. He had thought of his brother’s mission every day since Thasren had departed, and yet with the mention of his name he felt a tinge of shame that he had passed even a few hours not thinking of him. Thasren, weeks now alone in a foreign land, the vile treachery that was Acacia all around him, his life daily in a sort of danger very different from the Maseret. Hanish knew that Thasren had always felt himself the lesser sibling. The youngest, the least skilled in war, the farthest away from a claim to his father’s patriarchal lineage. To be a third son among the Mein was not easy. But such a thorn twisting in one’s side can be a boon if it drives one to action. That was what Meinish wisdom said.

“And my brother?”

Arsay averted his eyes at the question and answered in an ancient formula used to indicate an honorable death. “He asks to be praised.”

“He will be,” Hanish said swiftly. He instructed Arsay to call a council of generals in the morning. He said to send two messengers, one into the mountains alerting the army hidden there that the time had come, another to Maeander in Cathgergen, telling him to unleash the Numrek. And he was to rouse the mercenary naval officers so long guests in this ice-bound land. They had drunk enough grog, slept long enough wrapped in what pleasures the Mein could offer. It was time for them to earn their commissions. They were a thousand miles from the sea, but a fleet was ready, yet another secret project long years in construction. It would soon be afloat and pressing forward through a frozen ocean.

“I will meet with them all tomorrow,” Hanish said. “And alert my scribe that I will call on him tomorrow as well. Tonight I sit vigil with the ancestors. They will be anxious to understand Thasren’s fate. I should explain it to them. And I must cleanse myself of my opponent’s blood. It will be a long evening.”

Arsay had bowed his head at the mention of the elders and did not lift it again. As he walked away Hanish read the fear in the tension in the man’s neck and the cant of his head. Though he was critical of it—none should fear their ancestors, even if they were a ghostly embodiment of wrath—he had to acknowledge the tightness in his own throat, the tension high in his upper chest. None should fear the Tunishnevre, but all did. Inside their sacred chamber he felt the pulse of their undead energy as tangibly as he sensed heat or cold on his skin, joy or fear in his heart. They were the old ones of his people, preserved in timeless suspension. Such enmity as they contained within their ancient memory was a chilling thing to face.

He waited alone for some time, gathering strength, feeling the alignment of forces so long out of sync. The twenty-third generation since the Retribution…that’s what he was. If the Tunishnevre were right—and certainly they were—everything in the world was about to change.

Corinn would dream of the last embrace for many nights thereafter, so much so that the moment became something of a curse, a nightmare trap made of her siblings’ arms and her father’s dying body. It did not matter that she knew her father had not intended it that way. It did not matter that there was nothing else he could do, that it was a last tortured gesture made in love. She still wished it had never happened. Rather than see him as she did, she would have chosen not to see him that last time. Some things were better left incomplete, she thought, better left unfinished forever.

What transpired in the room between the king and his four children was simple. He awaited them on his bed, propped by pillows into a seated position. Corinn hung back behind the others as they ran toward him and fell to their knees beside his bed. Even at a distance she could see a man more ravaged than she could have imagined. She had thought of him all throughout the previous night, imagining him in pain, in different postures and conditions, and even still in death. But finally seeing him…It was as if a cloaked demon that had haunted her dreams all night had been un-hooded in the light of day; instead of allaying her fears the demon had been shown to be a more hideous thing than she had yet imagined. She wanted to turn and flee. She might have, except that the king’s eyes were pinned to her the moment she entered and seemed to stare at her alone.

Initially the others whispered their relief at seeing him, their horror at what had happened, their wishes that he gain his health again soon. But he could not listen to this for long. He motioned them to silence by lifting an arm and dragging his fingers through the air. The children waited, but it seemed there was nothing else he could offer them. She had realized before her siblings that he could not talk, that he was terribly weak and perhaps only hours from death. He could make no speeches to them. He could give them no last presents or words of wisdom. He could not, Corinn realized, keep the promises he had made to her.

And she knew before the others the meaning of his upraised arms. He lifted them, trembling, a wide gesture, an opening. Aliver moved back a step, apparently thinking that the king was using his arms to open a discussion on some topic that required the acknowledgment of the largeness of things. But that was not it. He simply held them out to either side until his children saw the invitation for what it was. Then they crowded awkwardly together into the embrace he offered, Corinn the last to accept. It seemed that only she understood how ghastly it was to lie piled upon a dying man, saying nothing at all but only clinging to one another, tearful.

That was how the Akaran children spent their last minutes with their father. Corinn, on exiting the room, ran before her peers, ignoring Mena’s entreaties that she stay with them. She could not. Instead of feeling the bonds between them stronger, the touch of those stung like tentacles. She fled as soon as she could. She hid herself away in her private quarters and ordered her guards to let no one disturb her.

So it was from behind a closed door that she heard word of her father’s death later that day. It came to her first in a whisper. Then, a few moments later, the enormous bell housed in one of the higher towers began to toll, slow and deep and mournful. She had known it was there but had never heard it before. It was used for a single purpose: to announce the death of an Akaran king. Between its beats she heard the gathering chorus of the servants’ wailing, an audible manifestation of misery that crept across the palace and down into the lower town and to the port, to be carried out to the world from there. Corinn clamped her hands over her ears, but she could not block out the sounds.

The following week passed in a dreary blur. Had she the choice, she would have locked herself up in her room immediately and rejected the world. But she did not have that choice. Her presence was required daily, at every hour, it seemed, although she did little more than occupy space, a vacant shell of herself that person after person embraced or bowed before or shed tears in front of. She stood beside her siblings as the masses sang with them the lament of her father’s passing. She stood trembling as the drummers beat out the slow, martial dirge performed only for deceased monarchs. She sat without listening through the endless string of funereal speeches, nobles sailing in from near and far, each of them pronouncing their grief in words that layered over and over one another and lost individual meaning. She knew that behind the somber façade an electric buzz of anxiety crackled and popped. She knew that people whispered about the horrible possibilities on the horizon, but her personal grief was more than enough to occupy her. She cared nothing for what happened in the larger world.

At the end of the week the priestesses of Vada and their acolytes prepared and incinerated the king’s body. It was one of the only state roles remaining for them and they carried it out with solemnity. When they emerged with the king’s urn of ashes, it marked a reprieve from the rites. His ashes would not be released, Corinn knew, until a day in late autumn. She did not look forward to that ceremony, but it was some time away.

As soon as she could, she invoked the old rites of mourning. She kept her windows closed and forbade even her servants from looking at her. Food and drink she had left outside her bedroom door, though she barely touched it. Days passed, one fading into the next without change. Mena came to her twice, Aliver once, and even Dariel sent a messenger to beg her to come forth, but she turned them all away. She drifted into and out of sleep, through dreams and memories, visions of the past that seemed so very distant. Occasionally she was struck by the realization of just how treacherous the illusion of time was. Things that were once could not be again. Things that she had clung to—her mother, her father—were no more substantial than the images conjured in her mind. And what good were those? They could not be touched. Could not be weighed in the palm or seen with true eyes or heard in the air. Her life was going to be just as she imagined in her dark moments: she was on the path to losing one beloved thing and then another. That was what life would be for her until she herself was swallowed by the maw of the same hungry oblivion. She could not face it. So she did not. Not, at least, until the world came to her in a form she did not wish to turn from.

She heard the muffled sounds of shouts from her waiting room, the bang as some large object fell over, and the fast click of heels across the stones. She did not think enough of it to raise herself from where she lay spread across the expanse of her soft bed. At the first impact against the door she only lifted her head and looked sleepily toward it. But when it sprung open, it finally registered to her that somebody really was intent on getting in to see her.

Igguldan tumbled in behind the opening door, nearly sprawling flat on the floor. He scrabbled forward on his knees, spun and twirled to an upright position, and dashed a few steps farther into the chamber. Behind him several guards shouldered through the doorway. They were so anxious to get at him that they stuck fast for a moment, swatting and cursing one another, their swords held awkwardly so as not to do themselves damage. Igguldan’s eyes darted around the chamber. He found Corinn standing at the foot of her bed with one hand poised across her heart. He took a small step closer and then stopped. The guards, free of the door and rushing toward him, pulled up. They stood looking at the two young people, at a loss for how to proceed.

“Princess Corinn,” Igguldan said. “Forgive me for intruding. It is horrible of me, I know, but I had to see you. I had to see that you were all right and to…”

One of the guards broke in. He, too, began to ask her forgiveness, to explain that the prince had dashed past them unheeding of their demands that he stop. Corinn cut him off with a gesture of her hand. “Leave us,” she said.

Once they were alone Igguldan began to apologize again. The princess told him not to. He asked after her health and began to express his sympathies, but again Corinn asked him to stop. He stood a moment as if deciding what he had to say. Then he did so directly. “I have been recalled to Aushenia,” he said. “My father fears for my life, I think. Also, he seems on edge about other things, movements in the north. I received only the briefest command sent by pigeon. But I have to go, Corinn.” After a moment of hesitation, he added, “I do not want to leave you like this.”

Corinn wrung her hands, nervous, unsure why she had received him at all. She knew she was unkempt, in a rumpled gown, hair tangled and unwashed. She looked down and motioned at something outside the room, hoping he might look away from her. “It feels as if the world is in turmoil.”

“It is, more than you can imagine. The whole island is in turmoil. Vessels sail back and forth hourly to the Mainland. The governors in Alecia have been in nonstop session. The treaty between our nations is not official, but it sounds like the governors want us as allies. There is a rumor that an army has laid siege to Cathgergen. Your brother is handling it all manfully. You should be proud of him, although he is in a strange position—no longer just a prince but not really a king either.”

Corinn asked when he was to depart. He answered that he would sail for Alecia with the next rising of the sun. There they would pick up representatives his father wished to meet with and sail directly for Aushenia. He gave no more details than this, but as the two considered his journey in silence Corinn could not help but feel every sad mile of distance that it would put between them. She recalled the chill waters the prince had described swimming in, the rolling landscape thick with forest. How wonderful it must feel to ride among those massive trees on horseback. She imagined Igguldan doing just that. She saw him galloping through a wind-lashed wilderness totally different from the manicured jewel in the sea that was Acacia. Aushenia was so very far away, and not just in terms of distance. It was a wild place in which one could be lost or reinvented in a different form.

“Do you think I could go with you?” she asked. “I would not burden you. It is just that I want to escape this place. I want to be with you, just with you.” She had not given this the slightest thought since her father’s death, but as she said the words she felt convinced they were true. That is exactly what she wanted now, more than anything.

Igguldan slipped his hands around hers, clasping them firmly. Together, they lowered themselves to the edge of the bed and sat side by side. “I so wish the world were not so mad and that I had met you at a different time. Your father was a special man. After I watched him struck, I was sick. Just sick! But even so I kept thinking about you. Everything I heard or saw or felt reminded me of you. The world is falling apart, but all I can think of is you. I said to myself, ‘This is not right. Get control of yourself.’ But I could not. And then I thought, Perhaps this is love. That’s what it is. You are in love with Princess Corinn. I know it is inappropriate of me to say it like this. But time is so short. I just had to see you once more before we both fly off in different directions. I needed you to know that you are loved. Wherever you are to go in the world, you take my love with you.”

Once again, the prince had managed to say the perfect thing. She was loved. He—brave and handsome and faithful—loved her. She squeezed his hand and inched forward slightly. “I am not going anywhere,” Corinn said, thinking he had misspoken. “I wish I were. I would go with you if you asked me.”

The prince’s grip lessened slightly. “They have not told you yet? Corinn, you are to leave tomorrow, too. I only know because your brother told me in confidence. He was angry about it and could not hold it in. All the Akaran children are to leave the island for refuge. The chancellor thinks you will be safer somewhere other than Acacia, someplace secret.”

“Someplace secret?” the princess whispered.

The prince, thinking she was prompting him for more information, admitted that he knew no more, but Corinn had not actually expected him to answer. She was just considering the possibility of this secret place. Where might it be? She had dreamed so often of travel to distant places, wondering how she would be received there, whether or not she would be thought beautiful. Would they journey to Talay? The Candovian coast? Would they sail to the Outer Isles or some other place far from the heart of the empire? Or would it just be Alecia? Hardly a secret place, but maybe she was thinking too grandly. Maybe she would spend the next few weeks locked in a room in the capital. Though this news surprised her, she did not feel the sense of urgency she might have. At least it meant movement, change, getting away from the palace. These could not be bad things, could they?

She asked Igguldan where he would go if he could go into hiding somewhere. He was slightly taken aback by the question, but he settled in to think about it. After a pause, he said that he would rather seclude himself away in the far north of his own country than anyplace else. There was a corner of Aushenia where the forest runs right up to the slabs at the base of the Gradthic Range. It was a cold country, but the air is so full of goodness that breathing it fills one with health and vigor. The mountains themselves are a northern wilderness most of the year, home of great brown bears and of a type of wolf different from the kind that frequented the forest. He had only been there once a few years ago, but he had never forgotten the feeling of standing on those rocks at sunset, with the mountains at his back and the ancient forestland stretching south right over the horizon, the whole scene alight with a play of colors, the darkening woods touched with brilliance by the fire of the sun, eagles above it, flying their high patrol. He had never been so aware of solitude as during that moment, but also he had felt an ancestral pride. Out of that land his people had emerged. It was feral and harsh, but it was also of his very flesh and blood. They had walked from the woods to the southern shore to found Aushenia. They had left behind the wolves and bears and took up their rightful place as caretakers of the land. It was something he had in common with all Aushenians.