Durand winced at the thought. Images roiled up: hunchbacked Radomor and his Rooks, Alwen in the tower stair, the girl and her snakes.
The last silhouettes at the fireside kicked out the embers and straggled off toward their tents. One walked toward Durand.
"I saw you with my prisoner." The voice was Coensar's. Durand imagined that he could see the captain's eyes like two new pennies in the shadow. "You had no sword." He jabbed a long blade into the turf. It swayed. "This one's yours. You'll need it before long."
Durand glanced back to the man's face, but the captain had already turned. Durand reached for the sword, gripping it hard before sliding it into his gear. He tried not to think of his own secret. He felt the unsteady gratitude of a castaway whose raft skids onto an alien shore.
Lying there in
the ruts, Durand dreamed: The darkness was heavy with the scent of water. Night breezes moved through willows. He stood on a riverbank.
The muck mashed between his toes. He wore only his linens: a long tunic and his breeches.
A river, like ink under the moon, curled off into wooded darkness a few hundred paces away. Something winked out there. A faint light was moving on the waves, drifting closer. In a few moments, he made out the profile of a skiff against the slippery glints of the water. Low above the gunnels, a single candle flickered.
The prow of the boat turned with the course of the river. Something about the scene probed the locks of his memory. The blond lines of the gunnels looked like something carved by a maker of mandoras or lyres.
Then he saw her—a flared cuff, a drape of white sleeve.
Without a thought, Durand stepped down into the river slime. She lay with the candle clasped in small hands. Her skin glowed as pale and soft as a dove's throat. He could feel the cold weight of the river, chest deep.
And the boat was passing him by. He reached, straining his fingertips into the path of the craft, but it was no use. Veils of weed caught his fingers. Dark curls tumbled over the square stern. He thought he knew t
he place now. This was the Maid
ensbier. A story. Her name was lost to him, but she was the maiden of the river's name. It was an old story. Standing in the water, watching the retreating skiff, he put his hands over his face.
Here, the story was real. This was the Lady of Gireth, wife to Gunderic, the founding duke, who had fallen in love with one of his lieutenants. Loving both and wishing harm to neither, she lived a precarious summer until the duke's shield-bearer stumbled on the lovers where they lay by the riverbank. The shield-bearer was a steadfast man bound by strong oaths to keep no secrets from his master, though compassion compelled him to wait for the morning. Durand watched as the skiff carried on, and knew that this was that long night.
They said that the girl drank foxglove, setting herself adrift upon the river, finally to pass below the walls of the duke's capital. Afterward, Duke Gunderic and his line abandoned that first capital and took his court to Acconel, far to the west. The skiff was almost out of sight. He could still just make out the fan of black curls—dark as sable.
The loyal shield-bearer, as Durand recalled, was made first Baron of Col: a spot as far from Acconel as could be found. His shield bore the three stags.
A
second time
he woke, like a drowning man breaking the skin of a lake.
He found a different darkness: one of ruts and chill drizzle. His sopping blanket lay over him like dead flesh. In his first blinking moments, the dream rain and mud and memories of women explained the dream away. He lifted his hand. A green veil of slimy weed trailed from his fingers.
Then voices reminded him that he was not alone.
Beyond the tents, a white shape drifted through the gloom.
As in the dream, he was in motion without thought, tripping through guy ropes.
Someone—a dark shape now—stood in his path.
Durand and the stranger staggered apart, and a sword whisked from its scabbard. Durand's new blade was rolled up in the blankets somewhere in the mud behind him.
"Hold there," Durand gasped.
"Oh, it's the new man, Durand, yes?" It was Lamoric's voice, rattled and breathless. "I don't—Watch yourself. The latrine trench isn't far off." He said nothing for a moment, hanging like a specter in the dark. "With the rain you don't smell it."
"I thought I saw—"
"She's dead."
"What?"
"My sister." The man was fumbling his sword into its scabbard. "You grew up at Acconel..."
"Alwen." He fought to keep the horror snaking through him from reaching his voice.
"I—I can hardly say it. They've found her. In the river. Drifting past the citadel at Acconel, then off for Silvermere. It is not possible. It has to be a mistake. My father. There was a priest writing for her every
week.
It will kill him."
Durand wondered about the white shape he had seen. Was there a messenger out here in the dark or someone else who shared the same midnight vision?
"You knew her?" Lamoric said.
"She was older than I," Durand stammered. "Married."
"Ten winters, aye. To Radomor of Yrlac. And now she's in the river. What in the Hells does it mean?"
Though Durand knew, he did not answer. The .Rooks had sent her home. "She is on her way to her dower lands in Gireth," they had said.
But this was not all. "Was there any sign of the baby?" he breathed.
"God, I
...
I never thought. She never mentioned. Just Alwen sprawled in a rowboat." Only the dark hid Durand's shudder.
By dawn, Coensar
had hired a merchantman to carry them across Silvermere to Acconel where Lamoric would see his sister buried. No one asked how he knew. But Durand remembered that pale figure in the dark; Lamoric had not been wearing white.
As they sailed, the night's drizzle swelled into a wild gale that beat Silvermere into a realm of surging mountains. Back and forth across the face of the wind, the ship's master set a reeling course with straining giants at the steering-oar. Through the screams of the horses below and the wind above, the men on decks watched Lost Hesperand and the Head of Merchion pitch into view and out again—places where no man would land. Men saw monsters pitched up from the depths by the waves. Even the creatures of the deep could do little in such a storm.
Through it all, Durand watched Lamoric clinging like some bleak figurehead in the merchantman's forecastle, though the bow swung and crashed down like Creation's end. Durand hung on with the sailors in the ship's waist, tethered like a dog to the rail. He fought with the others to keep the horses upright and alive. Lamoric haunted him, and, from time to time, he would catch Guthred watching.
Finally, as light failed them on the second day, the great port of Acconel hove into view. The rain had returned to its steady drizzle, like some guard dog curling back into its kennel. Every man aboard was left soaked and pale.
When pinpoints had swelled to arrow loops in the dark face of the city's walls, the captain's mate hallooed until they sparked some action on the quay. Men came running along the wharf, leaping into boats to meet the ship and haul her in. The boatmen shouted their astonishment to the sailors who threw them lines and bragged about their passage.
Among these men, Lamoric appeared like a specter. As each man noticed the lord among them, they shut their mouths, some snatching hats and skullcaps from their heads. Lamoric bent over the rail. His voice, when he spoke, was quiet.
"Were you here when they found my sister?"
Most of the longshoremen scratched their necks or turned to tie off lines; one bow-legged man, braver than the rest or in charge, answered.
"Lordship. They brought her here. They say little Alraora spotted her."
"Almora?" She was his youngest sister, a dark-haired child.
'They say the girl rose from a sound sleep, Lordship, went off through the passages of the castle and fetched up at a window high in Gunderic's Tower." Durand flinched at the likeness: Alwen in her tower. "Could see her clear. All in white, she was, sliding over the water. Laid out like she was sleeping, a candle in her hands."
Lamoric hardly breathed the next words.
"You saw this?"
His hands shook.
"My grandmother. My sister, Lordship. The wise women of the fourteen duchies knew before morning. Your brother sent fishermen scrambling out to catch the boat before it was lost on the mere. The lads and I, we helped getting her in."
Lamoric was nodding. He was fighting with tears.
"I've come to bury my sister," he said, finally.
Now, the longshoreman closed his mouth, and Durand had a premonition of what was to come. None of the men in the boat wanted to look Lamoric in the face. Every hand was still.
"It is done, Lordship. Your father's buried her this afternoon," the longshoreman said.
Lamoric blinked. He pushed himself upright. The men had taken a half-step back, as though the group were inhaling.
'The high sanctuary then."
Lamoric stalked off
between upturned dories and drying cordage, a few of his men in tow. Most of the others remained behind, keeping an eye on horses and supplies. Durand could not be one of those—he had to say something. He was glad when Guthred joined Sir Agryn and Coensar to follow their master.
Lamoric stalked under the cavernous Fey Gates as the curfew bells tolled, Durand and the others hurrying after. Shopkeepers hauled great shutters over their windows; alehouse signs hung swollen in the drizzle. They passed one called The Waterclock on Fishmarket Street where Durand had passed long evenings. The city smelled of privies, dung, and the rain: everything the same, nothing familiar.
They wound their way through the stone warrens of the citadel. Walls crowded overhead till the streets seemed little more than damp passageways. Pigeons stormed and swirled between the eaves.
At more than one corner, Durand was ready to turn for Gunderic's Tower and the Painted Hall of Lamoric's people, but the young lord's twisted course led only to the high sanctuary. White spires rose from the midst of shops and guildhalls: a relic from the days of the High Kingdom when the kings of Errest ruled all the Atthias.
There was a double door: oak enough for a warship carved with all the writhing vines of a forest. Low in one door, Lamoric found the hidden outline of a smaller portal. The young lord took hold of an iron knocker half-concealed among the carvings.
They stood for twenty heartbeats, waiting. Lamoric never turned or said a word. A hundred yards of empty street stretched at Durand's back. Suddenly, the carvings split as the wicket door creaked wide. A crabbed hand beckoned them inside.
Beeswax candles filled the vast nave, glowing-over ancient columns and throwing shadows
over interlaced branches and ru
nning beasts. An entire forest of tapers glittered thirty paces down the aisle. Durand could se
e the long shape of a plain sar
cophagus. He thought of the long white form in his dream.
The acolyte who opened the door pointed to Oredgar, the Patriarch of Acconel himself. In samite and gold, the tall priest might have stepped from the mists of the lost High Kingdom a thousand years before. There were private rites and vigils long after the public ceremonies were finished.
Durand and the others let Lamoric proceed alone, and waited, dripping on the entrance tiles, under the undulating sheet of a dark window. Durand rolled his eyes at himself. What was he if he held his tongue?
The silver-bearded Patriarch set his hand on Lamoric's shoulder, then stepped back as Lamoric crouched low among the candles. Durand found he didn't know what to do with his hands.
Guthred was watching him, his face sour. It was as though the man could look into his soul. Finally, he relented.
"God," he said, peevishly. "Long time since I been in a place like this." He peered up where the slender pillars crisscrossed among the vaults and arches, high at the limits of candlelight. In the dark, the thousand thousand panes of the windows were black and glinting.
Agryn snorted. It was more a sigh.
"You can feel Him," the old shield-bearer said. "Watching you. Watching, but not saying nothing. My dad was a great one for that. Had a way of looking at you till you knew you must be up to something."
"The King of Heaven watches always," said Agryn.
Guthred grunted, and Durand winced hard.
In the high sanctuary, you could feel the Lord of Dooms, like some vast thing rising from the sea.