Hidden Warrior (51 page)

On the night of the winter solstice Lhel brought Arkoniel into her hut. He had no thought of the Mother or Her rituals as they coupled, but he was hot and eager, and the sacrifice was well made. The Mother granted Lhel visions that night, and for the first time since she’d taken the young wizard to her bed, she was glad that his seed could not fill her belly with a child.

By the time dawn came, she was miles away, leaving not so much as a footprint in the snow for a farewell.

A
farmer driving his cart home after the day’s trading in Ero noticed the little girl crying beside the road. He asked after her people, but she was too shy or too scared to tell him. Judging by her muddy wooden clogs and drab, rough-spun dress, she wasn’t from the city. Perhaps she’d fallen off the back of another farm wagon. He stood up and scanned the road ahead, but it was empty.

He was a kind man and, with night coming on and no help in sight, there seemed nothing to do but carry her home to his wife. The child stopped crying when he lifted her onto the seat, but she was shivering. He wrapped his cloak around her and gave her a bit of the sugar candy he’d bought for his own little daughters.

“We’ll tuck you in between my girls tonight and you’ll be warm as a weevil in porridge,” he promised, and clucked to his horse to walk on.

The little girl sneezed, then happily went on sucking the sugar lump. Born mute, she couldn’t tell the man that she didn’t understand his words. She knew he was kind, though, from the sound of his voice and the way he handled her. He was nothing like the strangers who’d carried her away from her village in a boat full of sad people and abandoned her on the roadside in the night.

She couldn’t thank him for the sugar either, and that made her sad, for it eased the hot, swollen feeling in her throat.

T
he dreary winter dragged on in Ero. Mourning banners for Aliya hung wet and tattered on every house and shop. Inside the Palatine walls everyone from the king to the lowest kitchen scullion wore black or dun and would for a year and a day. And the rains continued to fall.

The palace servants grumbled and burned censers of acrid herbs in the hallways. In the new Companions’ mess, the cooks brewed bitter drysian teas to purify their blood.

“It’s this open winter,” Molay explained, when Tobin and Ki complained of it. “When the ground doesn’t freeze, the foul humors breed thick, especially in the cities. No good will come of it.”

He was soon proven right. The Red and Black Death erupted with renewed fury all along the eastern coast.

N
iyrn quietly moved Nalia, now nearly twenty, to Cirna. Thanks to their remote location and lack of shipping trade, the fortress and village had been untouched by disease. The girl and her nurse were dismayed by this grim, lonely new home, but Niryn vowed to visit more often.

B
y Dostin the deathbirds had burned more than twenty houses in Ero harbor, with their plague-ridden occupants nailed up inside.

But that did not stop the spread of it. A plague house was discovered near the corn dealer’s market, and the contagion spread through the surrounding neighborhood. Seven tenements and a temple of Sakor were burned there,
but not before some of the terrified inhabitants escaped to spread the pestilence.

In mid-Dostin the Companions’ favorite theater, the Golden Foot, was struck, and the whole company of actors, along with their dressers, wigmakers, and all the servants were condemned by quarantine.

Tobin and Ki wept at the news. These were the same players who’d entertained them at the keep during the name day hunt; they’d made friends among the actors.

The Foot lay just five streets down from the Palatine gate and the loss was compounded when the king canceled all audiences and sent word forbidding any Companion to leave the palace until further notice. With all entertainments forbidden for the first month of mourning, the boys found themselves trapped.

Master Porion urged them to continue with their training, but Korin was too despondent and often too drunk. Dressed in black, he moped alone in his rooms or walked in the rooftop gardens, hardly answering when anyone spoke to him. The only companionship he seemed able to tolerate was that of his father or Niryn.

T
he winds shifted at month’s end and the drysians predicted that the shift would cleanse the air. Instead, a new and more devastating sickness struck. By all reports it had started in the countryside, with outbreaks reported from Ylani to Greyhead. In Ero the first cases were seen around the lower markets, and before any ban could be imposed it had already swept up to the citadel.

It was a pox, and began with soreness in the throat, followed within a day by the spread of small black pustules over the torso. If it stopped at the neck, the patient survived, but more often than not the spots spread to the face, then into the eyes, mouth, and finally, the throat. It reached its crisis within five days, at the end of which the sufferer was either dead, or hideously scarred and often blind. The Aurënfaie had seen such illnesses before and
within days of the first outbreak there were few ’faie to be found in the city.

Niryn declared this the work of traitorous wizards turned necromancer. The Harriers redoubled their hunt despite more open dissent, especially against the burning of priests. Riots broke out around the Lightbearer’s temples. The king’s soldiers quelled such uprisings without mercy, but the burnings were once more held outside the city walls.

Illior’s crescent began to appear everywhere—scrawled on walls, painted on lintels, even crudely drawn in white trailor’s chalk on the mourning banners. People slipped into the Lightbearer’s temples under cover of dark to make offerings and seek guidance.

W
izards proved strangely immune to the pox, but Iya did not dare risk a visit to Tobin for fear of carrying the infection to him. Instead, she used Arkoniel’s translocation spell to send small ivory amulets inscribed with sigils of Illior to him, Ki, and Tharin.

As the outbreak worsened, piles of pox-ridden corpses mounted in the streets, abandoned by their frightened families at the first sign of illness, or perhaps simply dying where they’d fallen after blindly seeking help that never came. Anyone who even appeared infirm risked being stoned in the streets. The king gave orders for the sick to remain inside under pain of execution by the city guard.

Soon, however, there were few to enforce the order. Strong men—especially soldiers, seemed to be the most susceptible and the least likely to recover, while many who were old and infirm escaped with nothing worse than scars.

A
s the city sank into despair, Iya and her Wormhole compatriots grew bolder. It was they who drew the first crescents on city walls, and they who whispered to any who would listen: “ ‘So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’
line defends and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated.’ She is coming!”

Twenty-two wizards now lived in secret below the abandoned Aurënfaie shops. Arkoniel’s young shape changer, Eyoli, had joined them there when snow cut him off from Arkoniel’s camp in the mountains.

C
ut off from their customary entertainments, the Companions soon grew restless. Tobin went back to his sculpting and gave lessons to any who wanted to learn. Ki showed a knack for it, and Lutha, too. Lynx could draw and paint, and they began to collaborate on designs for breastplates and helmets. Nikides shyly revealed a talent for juggling.

Caliel attempted to organize a company of players from available talent among the nobles, but after a few weeks everyone was thoroughly bored with each other. Cut off from the ladies of the town, most of the older boys made do with serving girls again. Zusthra was betrothed to a young duchess, but no marriages could be celebrated during the first months of official mourning.

T
he female pains troubled Tobin more often now, no matter what the moon’s phase was. Usually it came on as a fleeting ache, but other times, especially when the moon was new or full, he could almost feel something moving in his belly, the way Aliya’s child had. It was a frightening feeling and worse for having no one to talk to about it. He began to have new dreams, too, or rather one dream, repeated night after night with variations.

It began in the tower at the keep. He was standing in the middle of his mother’s old room there, surrounded by broken furniture and piles of moldy cloth and wool. Brother stepped from the shadows and led him by the hand down the stairs. It was too dark to see; Tobin had to trust the ghost and the feel of the worn stone steps under his feet.

It was all very clear, just as he remembered it, but when they reached the bottom of the stairs the door swung open and suddenly they were standing at the edge of a high precipice above the sea. It seemed like the cliffs at Cirna at first, but when he looked behind him, he saw green rolling hills marching into the distance and jagged stone peaks beyond. An old man watched him from the top of one of the hills. He was too far away to make out his features, but he wore the robes of a wizard and waved to Tobin as if he knew him.

Brother was still with him, and drew him away to the very edge of the cliff until Tobin’s toes hung over the edge. Far below, a broad harbor shone like a mirror between two long arms of land. By some trick of the dream, he could see their faces reflected there but his was the face of a woman and Brother had turned into Ki. In the way of dreams, it surprised him every time.

Still teetering precariously on the brink, the woman she’d become turned to kiss Ki. She could hear the stranger on the hill shouting to her, but the wind carried his words away. Just as her lips met Ki’s the wind pushed her over the edge and she fell—

It always ended that way and Tobin would wake to find himself sitting bolt upright in bed, heart pounding and an erection throbbing between his legs. He had no illusions about that anymore. On those nights when Ki stirred in his sleep and reached out to him, Tobin fled and spent the rest of the night wandering the palace corridors. Yearning for things he dared not hope for, he pressed his fingers to his lips, trying to recall the feel of that kiss.

The dream always left him low-spirited and a little scatterbrained the next day. More than once he caught himself staring at Ki, wondering what it would feel like actually to kiss him. He was quick to squelch such thoughts and Ki remained oblivious, distracted by the more tangible affections of several welcoming servant girls.

Ki slipped away with them more often now and sometimes
didn’t come back until dawn. By unspoken agreement, Tobin did not complain of these sorties and Ki did not brag of them, at least not to him.

O
ne windy night in Klesin, Tobin was alone once again, pondering designs for a set of jeweled brooches for Korin’s mourning cloak. It was a stormy night and the wind made lonely sounds in the eaves outside. Nik and Lutha had come by looking for him earlier, but Tobin was in no mood for company. Ki was off with Ranar, the girl in charge of the linens.

The work allowed him to escape his racing thoughts for a while. He was good at sculpting, even famous for it. During the previous year’s royal progress, pieces he’d made for his friends had caught the fancies of their hosts. Many had since sent gifts, along with precious metals and jewels, requesting a bit of jewelry to remember him by. The exchange of gifts was not only acceptable, Nikides had observed, but held the possibility of connections of other sorts being made later on. Who wouldn’t want to be thought well of by the future king’s beloved cousin? Tobin had read enough history to appreciate the wisdom of this advice and accepted most commissions.

Nonetheless, it was the work itself he really cared for. To bring an image in his head to reality in his hands pleased him in a way nothing else did.

He was nearly finished with the first wax carving when Baldus brought word of a visitor.

“I’m busy. Who is it?” Tobin grumbled.

“It’s me, Tobin,” Tharin said, looking in over the page’s head. His cloak was rain spattered and his long, pale hair windblown. “Thought you might like a game of bakshi.”

“Come in!” Tobin exclaimed, his dark mood falling away. It had been weeks since the two of them had had a quiet moment alone. “Baldus, take Sir Tharin’s cloak and fetch us wine. And send for something to eat—a dark loaf
and some cold beef and cheese. And a pot of mustard, too! Never mind the wine. Bring us ale.”

Tharin chuckled as the boy ran off. “That’s barracks fare, my prince.”

“And I still prefer it and the company that goes with it.”

Tharin joined him at the workbench and examined the sketches and half-finished carvings. “Your mother would be proud. I remember when she gave you that first lump of wax.”

Tobin glanced up in surprise; Tharin seldom spoke of her.

“Your father, too,” he added. “But she was the artist of the pair. You should have seen him working on that toy city of yours. You’d have thought he was rebuilding Ero full scale, the way he labored over it.”

“I wish I could have shown him these.” Tobin pointed at three miniature wood-and-clay structures on a shelf over the bench. “Remember the Old Palace he made?”

Tharin grinned. “Oh, yes. Out of a fish-salting box, as I recall.”

“I never noticed! Well, these aren’t much better. As soon as the plague bans are lifted, I’m going to talk to real builders and ask to learn their craft. I see houses in my head, and temples with white columns and domes even, bigger than anything in Ero.”

“You’ll do it, too. You’ve a maker’s soul, as much a warrior’s.”

Tobin looked up in surprise. “Someone else told me that.”

“Who was that?”

“An Aurënfaie goldsmith named Tyral. He said Illior and Dalna put the skill in my hands, and that I’d be happier making things than fighting.”