Changer of Days (26 page)

“Lady Catlin, with your permission, I will take you in,” he said courteously, taking his cue and leaning down from his horse.

With a last lingering glance at her mistress, Catlin turned away only long enough to accept the proffered hand, and Adamo hoisted her into the saddle before him amidst envious looks from the crowd. Catlin sat shaking as though with ague, unable to tear her gaze from Anghara’s face.

The incident had cracked the crowd, and the murmurs were louder, with people turning and nodding sagely at one another. This was confirmation indeed. But still there was a deep stillness at the root of the whispers, a holding back—almost unwilling, ashamed of its own existence, but there, impossible to bypass.

Until Kieran’s sword sang free of its scabbard and swung in an arc that made the closest in the crowd shy away with a gasp of fear. He reached with the sword over their heads to lift one of the topmost garlands from a shrine to Bran which stood in an alcove a few paces to the side of the street. As it slid down the blade he caught it, sheathed the sword in one smooth movement, and lifted the purloined garland above his head with both hands.

“Today,” he said, his voice intense enough to be heard by the gasping throng, changing the war cry of the young queen’s army. “Today, in Miranei—Roisinan’s own queen!”

With the polished grace of the accomplished horseman, he stood in his stirrups and held the garland for a breathless moment over Anghara’s bare head before lowering it gently like a crown.

It might have cut both ways; there could have been devout worshippers of the new God in the crowd who might have taken this gesture amiss. But as Kieran had gambled, Anghara completed the moment of power by responding in a manner beyond conscious control—the flame of her soul fire blazed forth, and even those without sight saw the garland shine like a crown of true gold. Those with the Sight—there weren’t many left in Miranei, but enough with eyes to See—gasped and stared at the golden glow. Perhaps it was such a one, unable to hold in her wonder, who cried out Anghara’s name in a passionate avowal of fidelity and belief. It was taken up, slowly at first but gathering momentum until it rolled in the crowd like a wave and shook the old walls of Miranei. The cry followed them into the keep, and Charo, riding beside his brother, wore a smile of smug triumph, as if he had arranged the whole thing himself. This was the way he had wanted it to happen, for Anghara to ride into her city on the wings of her people’s love and acclamation. Adamo forbore to comment that it had been Catlin’s spontaneous affirmation and Kieran’s potent crowning of his queen with a garland of flowers that had precipitated the cheers. Charo was still reliving the glory as they retreated into the royal chambers of the King’s Tower. There they collapsed gratefully into chairs beside the fire burning brightly in the great hearth, each claiming a glass of wine to replenish all they had spent on this day.

Despite the core of exhilaration which burned quietly in them all, they felt too exhausted and wearied to contemplate any further celebration. Only Charo was unquenchable, bubbling with excitement, filled with it like a glass of sparkling wine, blazing with a great light.

“We did it,” he said, lifting his goblet in a salute. “We really did it!”

Kieran looked up, met the eyes first of Melsyr, then of Anghara. He glanced back at Charo and his expression was curious, but he kept his counsel. It was left to Anghara to answer her youngest foster brother as she cradled her own goblet in her hands.

“There is still one thing left to do,” she said, “the hardest.”

“What?” Charo said with his usual swift impatience. “What is there left that we haven’t already accomplished?”

Anghara had looked away, into the flames, and her voice was slow and distant, like the resonant echo of a great bell. Her reply shaped an eternity into a single word.

“Wait,” she said simply.

T
he days remained balmy, but a distinct nip was beginning to be felt in the evening air, and the morning mists flowing down from the mountains began to curl with the promise of winter chill. The leaves in the enclosed garden beyond the Royal Tower had turned, and some branches were already bare; inside the keep, the fires had been lit. The old stone stored up the cold, and breathed it out—and nowhere was it colder, to one as sensitive to atmosphere as Anghara, than the royal apartments in the tower. This was the room where Anghara had been conceived, where Rima had died, where the tragic Senena had carried Sif’s unborn heir. Sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a robe of gray wolf-fur, Anghara shivered. There were too many ghosts sharing the room.

The ghosts of the dead—and of the living. Days ago the fire had given her the vision of Sif stepping off his swan-prowed ship in Calabra, grim-faced and set. The flames were showing her he was on his way to Miranei even now. The news of her claiming of Miranei would have met him on the wharf, although it would have been a brave man who dared to tell it. Sif had wasted no time in gathering his men—he still had enough to form the core of a formidable army—and leading them north. And the men he led would see him as a rightful king seeking to restore his reign. After an initial guarded wariness, the land had risen wholeheartedly for the young queen it had once mourned as dead, but Sif still saw himself as the only true King Under the Mountain. And because he did, his men could do no other. A human king, over a human people, who had tried to scour the gift of vision from his people’s soul—and who, if he could not reclaim his throne and restore his edicts, was even now faced with the utter confusion and failure of all his schemes. Not only had the “witch-queen,” whom he had thought safely buried, returned to Miranei, she had become part of a new faith—and a new God that was partially of her making had greeted his return to Roisinan.

Sif had always been a powerful distraction. Anghara was so absorbed that Kieran had to knock twice before she called on him to enter. She looked up with a whimsical grin; they held the keep ready for action at any time, and Kieran was never parted from his sword, not even when entering his queen’s chambers. The sight of the white ki’thar skin girding his waist had drawn her smile—for a man of Shaymir, his sword belt was the ultimate irony. “Khelsie!” any Shaymiri worth his salt would spit at the sight of it. But like Anghara, Kieran had been touched and changed by Kheldrin’s potent power. He hadn’t uttered the word Khelsie in months. He no longer thought of them in those terms.

“Have you eaten?” Kieran said, slipping easily into his old protective mode as he saw her alone, curled in her armchair by the fireside. “Sitting out here and pulling Sight out of the fire won’t make Sif come any faster. And at this rate you’ll be a wraith by the time he arrives. A fine queen you’ll make to greet him.”

“I’ll greet him, and he’ll know who I am,” Anghara said, her smile full of subtly barbed innocence. There had been times of soul-searching when she was far from sure she could be the queen Roisinan needed—but she had come to terms with that. “And he will be here sooner than we think.”

“Well, all the posterns are guarded by loyal men,” Kieran said equably. “He won’t find it as easy to take Miranei a second time.” He hesitated—there was an edge between the two of them these days, which both were dancing around gingerly—and then subsided gracefully at Anghara’s feet. She gazed at the shadows the dancing flames cast on his features.

“You look tired,” she said unexpectedly. “Are you doing it all yourself, as usual?”

Kieran looked up, reaching to rake his fingers through his dark hair. “No,” he said. “There are plenty of good men to help. Adamo and Charo make a great team; with twins on your side you can literally have a man in two places at once, and I learned to appreciate that gift a long time ago. Rochen isn’t always in the sweetest of tempers—it’s the frustration of his wound, and the knowledge that the begetting of it was his own fault. By the Gods, for breaking cover so impetuously, I’d have almost taken him for Charo! But when he has been himself, he has been a rock. And Melsyr…Melsyr has his eye on becoming First General.”

“I thought that was you.”

“Am I?” Kieran said, with genuine surprise. The question of formal titles had never arisen.

“You’ve been one in all but name for years,” Anghara said. “Are you telling me you don’t want the job?”

“I don’t know,” Kieran said. He was something…different. He had been both friend and guardian. He had been the one to guard the path to her throne; he had been the one to crown her in the sight of the people, even if it had only been with a wreath of flowers. He was less than a general—and so much more. Most of the men under his command had been his companions during his outlaw years, and were his through friendship rather than set command structures. Kieran found himself curiously reluctant to formalize that relationship now. But he looked up with a lopsided grin. “Are you appointing me?”

“I might need to appoint someone,” Anghara said. “Sooner than I know.”

Kieran glanced into the fire. “It’s better any day to have one Sighted guardian by the fire than a hundred spies in the field,” he said, with just the faintest touch of irony. “I don’t doubt you will tell me the exact hour in which Sif Kir Hama will appear below Miranei. Do your visions also show what happens then?”

It had been a largely rhetorical question, but Anghara’s monosyllabic reply brought Kieran’s head up sharply, his eyes wide with shock.

“No,” she said.

A dozen thoughts exploded in Kieran’s mind at once like a flock of startled pigeons. Not least was a sudden appalling fear that Kheldrin had not, after all, completed its work and that parts of Anghara remained permanently lost. He could find no words at all, and then Anghara smiled into the silence, softening the blow.

“No. Everything is closed and misty. I’ve been trying to move past that for hours, but it seems there are some things it isn’t good for a mortal to know ahead of time.”

“You once said you weren’t,” Kieran blurted, forgetting he had taken her to task at the time.

“That is still true, up to a point,” Anghara said. “But much of that part of me has become a winged spirit of Kheldrin.”

“And Kerun’s successor here in Roisinan,” Kieran said thoughtfully. “That’s a lot of yourself to lose.”

“I threw down an ancient oracle, and raised a new one,” said Anghara, more thinking out loud than making conversation. “I spoke with the old Gods, only to see them vanish at my touch; and yet…all of that is gone, past, and all I have left is Sight—the homely vision of the humblest Roisinan village hut where the spaewife reads the fire. And, somehow, it is enough.” She raised luminous eyes to Kieran. “I’m not sure I want to know what happens next.”

Kieran knew these moods. She was getting fey again, less dangerously so than she had been when madness had taken her on the Shaymir plains all that time ago, but it was the same frame of mind. It needed the same selfless faith to serve as the antidote.

He reached out for her hand where it lay upon the fur coverlet. “I don’t need the Sight. I know what’s coming. The stars are turning your way; you are where you are meant to be, and nothing can stand in your way.”

“Not even Sif and his army?”

“We’ll deal with Sif and his army,” he said confidently.

“Well, then, you’d better make ready,” Anghara said. “You should be able to see the dust of his army before the moon turns full in three days’ time.”

“We’ll be ready,” he said, not missing a beat.

“And are you ready to deal with Favrin Rashin as well?”

Kieran stared at her in blank incomprehension. “
Favrin?
What has he got to do with this?”

“I have seen him at Miranei,” Anghara said with a calmness which was almost terrifying. “The flames show me very little now, but I have seen Favrin in the Great Hall of Miranei, and I have no idea of how he came or what he seeks. And I suspect that he is coming hard at Sif’s heels.”

“Kerun and Avanna!” Kieran breathed, taking refuge in the old familiar Gods although he knew full well they were too far away to heed his prayers. “I suppose we could always hope the two of them tear each other apart.”

“That would make Favrin my ally,” Anghara said, “and I am far from sure he is that.”

“I’m not sure it isn’t beyond him to aid Sif, and then turn on him when they’ve dealt with us,” Kieran said helplessly. And then, after a moment of thought, shook his head. “No. That would be Duerin’s ploy. Whatever else one can say about Favrin, he doesn’t stab in the back. He’s direct to a fault.”

“Perhaps a deeper immersion in his father’s plot-soaked court has whetted his appetite for intrigue,” said Anghara. “That might not have been too difficult to achieve. He is his father’s son.” She shivered involuntarily as she recalled the last intrigue Favrin had proposed. Had she accepted, she could have been incarcerated in his
kaiss
these long weeks she had spent gaining Miranei and then waiting within for Sif to reclaim it in blood and thunder. It could have been so much more pleasant, waiting instead in silk-draped dalliance with a husband who would have taken over the plotting and planning and who would have raised his own strong arm on her behalf.

And his own.

The mental picture of Favrin Rashin on her father’s throne with herself as the veiled and modest consort at his side was enough to shatter that particular reverie. But she had thrown Favrin into the melting pot, and now he was Kieran’s problem. And Kieran was by now far away in his thoughts, organizing and reorganizing his plans in the light of two armies, not one. It wasn’t long before he withdrew to meet with his lieutenants. Anghara had once told Favrin that being a woman had its advantages in a war—she could leave the fighting to her generals. Now, in the hour when that remark was taking physical shape around her, she recognized its truth with bitter clarity. When a queen’s generals were also her friends, wars were a lonely time for the woman who stayed behind on the throne. Feor had done his job all too well—he had made no distinctions between his pupils, and she was just as well versed in strategy as Kieran and the twins. Hers had been an important contribution back in Cascin, when they planned the taking of Miranei. But there was little for her to do in the present situation except wait. Things were being handled as well as they could be by those she had entrusted with the keep’s defense; part of knowing how to rule wisely was knowing when to leave a job to those best equipped to deal with it. There was nothing for her but the fire, and the obstinate veil hiding the future from her Sight.

She had been out by a day in her estimate of Sif’s time of arrival; it was on the fourth day after her conversation with Kieran that his approaching army was sighted. Adamo had come to tell her, and she climbed onto the battlements with him and Kieran. It was a gray and overcast day, promising autumn rain, cold and constant, and Anghara shivered as she hugged a fur-lined cloak against the wind. Perhaps it was the wind that stung tears into her eyes as she watched the approach of her father’s firstborn son—her brother, her enemy.

“It looks a sizeable army,” said Adamo quietly.

“We’ve already spotted a few outriders,” Kieran said, turning to Anghara. “Some rode almost to within arrow range before turning back. I’m not entirely sure what Sif had in mind. It’s not as if he were riding to conquer an unknown place that needed scouting.”

“He’s just letting you know he’s coming,” Anghara said.

“As if I needed reminding,” Kieran muttered.

“We can withstand an indefinite siege,” Adamo said, also turning to face Anghara. “All we need do is sit it out.”

“If it weren’t for Favrin,” Kieran said darkly.

“And if it weren’t for those who aren’t within the keep,” Anghara said. “I could not sit safe in Miranei if I knew Sif was taking his frustrations out on those less able to defend themselves.”

“What do you mean?”

“The city below us is much more vulnerable than the keep; and then there are the villages beyond. We must have a way out of here, if we need to go out to him.”

Kieran exchanged a swift glance with Adamo over Anghara’s head. “Somehow I knew you’d say that,” he said. “We’ve already thought of it. There are men posted in the woods beyond the western postern. Sif won’t get into the mountains behind us, and we have an exit. But our strength is this keep. If we give Sif a chance to orchestrate a battle in the open, I’m far from sure we could get the better of him. Especially if…” He bit off the sentence with a savage sharpness as he turned away to gaze at Sif’s approaching army again. Anghara raised her eyes to the profile he presented to her.

“Especially if Favrin plays a wild card,” she finished his thought softly. “I’m sorry, Kieran. I have no comforting promises for you. What will be on this field, will be. It is beyond me to know.”

She reached out to lay a gentle hand on his arm, and after a moment he turned, covering it with his own. “Well,” he said philosophically, “we’ve beaten the odds before. Nothing much has changed, after all.”

Something in his voice made Adamo glance at him keenly but he kept his counsel. He thought it better not to interrupt the moment; had he been his brother, he would probably have made a quip, and then quite possibly instantly regretted breaking into the way his royal cousin and his foster brother and friend were looking at one another. It could have easily been another addition to Kieran’s book of Lost Opportunities. Instead, Anghara simply smiled, looking into the blue eyes which held her own.

“If anyone can, you can,” she said. “I always believed in you.”

Kieran’s mouth quirked at this. “I thought that was my line.”

Adamo chose his moment. “Charo should be back from the city, and Rochen and Melsyr will be waiting. Will you come, Anghara? Sight or no Sight, you are still the one who best knows this place from the inside…and the only one who has ever been close enough to Sif to know his mind.”

“You might as well ask Kieran, who spent years skirmishing with him,” Anghara said. “I only know he is angry, and frustrated. Anyone could have told you that much. But I will come.” She hesitated. “Can you give me a moment?”