Sorcery Rising (37 page)

A voice terrifyingly close behind her shouted in the Old Tongue: ‘Halt!’

Another declared: ‘Move and we will kill you where you stand, Eyran scum.’

It took a moment to realise the significance of that last utterance. She whirled around. Three Allfair officials stood there, two of them training sturdy crossbows upon her. She recognised one of them. Her heart started to beat very fast. She gathered herself for action: if she were to dive and roll, then run back towards the tents, she might lose them again. If she could get to the Rock, she could shimmy up the crackline before they got anywhere near her. It was surely the last place they’d expect to look, and by now the line was firmly in her head: she could climb it blindfold—

She hurled herself down and heard the first bolt whistle over her back. She rolled and came to her feet running. Head down, she hurtled sideways towards the westward tents, and straight into an obstruction. She hit it so hard, she fell down, winded. When she looked up she found it was another guard, and he had the point of his sword at her throat.

‘Can you see her?’

Virelai, a head taller than most of those present, stared out across the crowd. This time he knew what he was looking for: that damned green shawl. Splashes of green kept drawing his eye – a headcloth there, a tunic here; a robe of deepest forest-green; a blocky-looking woman in an emerald dress, a man’s mossy cloak, a pale young woman in a virulent green and gold dress.

His eye strayed beyond her to a dark man seated on a dais, surrounded by a great tumble of coloured rugs and crocks, trinkets and flasks. A scribe sat beside him, quill poised over his parchment, staring and staring as if his eyes were no longer his own. Virelai knew well what that look meant, and he had learned to keep the Rosa Eldi well hidden from the public gaze as a result. He took a step to one side and peered around the group who had been blocking his view, and there she was, seemingly in deep conversation with the dark-haired man.

‘Ah, what are you about now?’ Virelai breathed, taking in this scene with some curiosity.

‘What? What did you say?’ Lord Tycho Issian grasped the map-seller’s shoulder with fingers of iron. ‘Did you say something?’

Virelai swivelled his head. He regarded the hand on his shoulder, then turned his pale, unblinking stare to the southern lord’s desperate face. As Tycho’s eyes narrowed in a prelude to fury, the map-seller quickly returned his gaze to the Rosa Eldi and began to plough a furrow through the crowd towards her. Nearer the dais, the throng grew more dense. Cleanshaven, dark-skinned men in rich clothing, attended by their respective retinues, had gathered on one side of the man on the dais, bearded men with their women on the other. Virelai cast a curious eye over them. They were all chattering away like jackdaws, he noticed, though they could not drag their eyes away from the scene that played itself out before them.

Behind him, there was a gasp. His lips quirked. So the southern lord had seen her at last. This should prove interesting.

Lord Tycho Issian shouldered past the map-seller with a curse. He barged through a group of Eyrans, who turned and regarded him with open hostility. One of them, young and red-headed, shouted something and tried to step in front of him, but nothing could stop Tycho now. He pushed roughly past Lord Prionan without a thought for the delicate political manoeuvrings he had been making towards the man for the past two years, and drove a shoulder between old Greving and Hesto Dystra likewise. Of the Swan of Jetra – rumoured to be the most beautiful woman Falla ever created – he took no more notice than the momentary irritation of finding her foot beneath his sole. Without a word of apology he forged on, until there were none left between him and his goal but the woman in the green dress.

The dark man had risen now and, taking the Rosa Eldi’s hands in his own, lifted her lightly up onto the dais beside him. Not once did his eyes leave her face.

Tycho felt the blood pumping about his body like surging flows of lava. Its incandescence flooded his limbs, his torso, his face, his groin. There she was – his prize – just three feet away, the Rose of the World, the heart of his life, the woman he would this very night wed—

Sound diminished all around as if he stood in a bubble of air. And then:

‘Wed her? My lord, you cannot!’ The voice was outraged, shrill with consternation. Tycho spun around to answer the speaker with his fist, then realised with a dawning horror that he was not the one addressed.

Confusion fell upon him, followed by an awareness that he had just missed something crucial in the exchange between the Rosa Eldi and the dark-haired man.

A tall, bearded man parted the crowd and came striding towards the dais. ‘Sire, I say again: you cannot take this woman to wife.’

A second northerner followed, grizzled as an old bear, his beard a bush of grey. ‘Ravn, what can you be thinking of? This is madness.’

Ravn. King Ravn Asharson. Stallion of the North. Heathen lord of the Eyran isles, here to choose his wife. Tycho felt the madness roil over him.

For her part, the Rosa Eldi let drop her shawl, revealing her silver-blonde hair, as straight as a waterfall; the perfect white skin and sea-green eyes. A hush overtook the room, washing out across the crowd like the ripples made by a thrown stone in water, or the destructive spiral of a typhoon. In the silent eye of the storm, the Rosa Eldi took the northern king’s hand. She parted his fingers, placed the index finger of his right hand inside her pink mouth, then withdrew it and blew softly upon it. Then she leaned towards him.

‘Say it again,’ she urged in that low, uninflected voice. ‘For them.’

Ravn Asharson drew himself up. He roared something in the guttural language of Eyra. Then: ‘I have chosen my Queen!’ he cried out in the Old Tongue.

And the Rosa Eldi smiled.

Virelai stared. He had never seen her change expression before. He had not thought she knew how.

Aran Aranson watched all this play out with some bewilderment, but his mind was not entirely on the royal choice. He appeared to have lost his daughter. And some while back he’d realised that Erno Hamson was nowhere to be seen, either, which two facts taken together gave him genuine concern. He’d known young Erno was sweet on Katla, as Gramma Rolfsen would say, for the last couple of years at the least, but he’d paid it no mind, for Katla would never choose for herself a man as good-natured and taciturn as poor, shy Erno: he knew his noisy, wayward daughter too well. Or he thought he did. Most likely Erno was playing the maiden-aunt, he told himself, calming her nerves, walking her about outside. He had been trying to put a polite face on his growing anxiety for the past twenty minutes or more since he had first noticed her gone, and determined also, that Finn Larson should not know it. For his part, the master shipmaker had been bent on Aran witnessing Jenna’s triumph with the King and kept clutching at his arm, which meant that Aran had not been able to slip quietly away. ‘See what a fine family you are marrying your girl into,’ Finn kept saying. ‘And soon with a royal connection, too.’ He winked. ‘Who else can Ravn choose but my beautiful daughter? Istrians may offer tawdry temptations to gild their offers, but Ravn’s a proper man: he’ll choose a red-blooded northern girl. I am eternally grateful to you, Aran, my friend, for putting your good son to one side to make this match possible.’

And now here they were with Jenna weeping over her embarrassment, and no doubt over the King picking some unknown beggar-girl like the complete fool that he was; and Katla – on whom his trade with Finn, and hence all his dreams and plans were founded – had vanished with Erno Hamson. Aran Aranson was not by nature an anxious man, but his skin was crawling now. There was something not right here, not right at all. His superstitious mother, who claimed to be able to see the future, and had on occasion been unnervingly prescient, would have said he was feeling the skeins of the web-makers brushing his skin, as the strands of his fate were woven. His fingers found the nugget of gold in his pouch, caressing its cold brilliance. The tingling sensation it transmitted travelled through his palm up his arm and into his chest, where it suffused him in a wash of warm comfort. It was his talisman: all would be well.

Relaxed now, his head light with relief, he gazed around, his eyes coming to rest at last on a tall man, towering pale as a lily over the crowd to the right of him. It was, he realised with a certain surprise, the map-seller, the man who had entrusted him with the quest that so enthralled him, and with the ingot in his pocket. As if recognising its erstwhile master, the rock buzzed in his hand, so unexpectedly that his fingers came off it as if burned. As they did so, a connection struck him. He focused for the first time on the woman with the King. Something about her. Something . . . magnetic . . . He watched her pale hand move rhythmically on the King’s arm and remembered that same hand, that same gesture, upon the black-furred cat on the steps of the map-seller’s wagon. Puzzled now, he stared back and forth between the two. Was this some sort of trick, some mummer’s play? He looked about more widely; saw how a big woman in a hideous green dress moved towards the dais with great strides that kicked out the front of the fabric as a woman more used to such fashions never would; he saw a small man bobbing in her wake; more oddly, he watched a small group of Istrian matrons in their voluminous sabatkas detach themselves from the anonymous group by the musicians’ stage and begin pushing through the crowd in a most unladylike manner.

The hairs on the back of his neck began to rise.

He was still watching this strange convergence of paths when there was a great hubbub at the entrance to the pavilion and a band of uniformed men came rushing in, shouting something about murder and abduction.

In the midst of them was his daughter, Katla, bound and blood-stained.

Fifteen

Prisoner

‘
K
atla!’

He heard his own cry emerge as an anguished, keening howl, high and tortured, like nothing he would expect to issue from his own throat. And then he was pushing forward, careless of the folk between him and his daughter. Behind him, he could hear, as if from afar, Fent screaming obscenities at the Istrian guards; Halli, his voice lower, as ever more temperate, apologising gruffly to the families they trampled in their passage.

A clamour rose from the Eyran families close enough to see the guard troop and the figure they held as the perpetrator.

‘Who did you say it was?’

‘Katla Aransen.’

‘Aran Aranson’s pretty daughter? Never – it’s surely a lad.’

‘Would it be Fent Aranson?’

‘No, stupid, look, he’s right there behind his father, threatening bloodshed.’

A laugh. ‘That’ll be young Fent all right: little firebrand he always was.’

‘It’s Katla Aransen, I tell you: I heard her father call her name.’

‘But I saw her earlier: she wore a red robe – very grand.’

‘It is Katla Aransen, I swear.’

‘By Sur, so it is. But why?’

‘They’ve got one of our girls—’

‘Take your hands off her, Istrian bastards!’

Word burned like wildfire around the Eyran clans. Everyone started to push towards the front of the Gathering, where the guard troop were marching their captive. Distinctive and official in their crested helms and blue cloaks, by now they had their swords out and looked ready to use them.

Ravn tore his eyes away from his chosen bride, distracted by the noise. Released from that piercing green gaze, he felt his head clear, as if he had just come up from a deep-water dive. Down on the floor of the Gathering he saw a chaos of movement: an Allfair guard troop hustling a prisoner along, the crowd behind them parted by a group of furious Eyrans, shouting and waving their fists in the air. Of a sudden, the mood had turned dangerous and he had not even noticed the transition. Chill touched his heart. He was a king and this his Gathering, these people his subjects; yet somehow he had been unaware of the drama. He felt confused, disorientated. He had drunk a lot of wine; but this sensation of detachment was not the warm familiar haze incurred by too much drink; rather it was like emerging from a dream, a dream not entirely his own. He shook his head, stared out into the crowd. The silver of the guard troop’s swords glinted in the candlelight. Swords: that was something he did understand.

‘Hold fast!’ he bellowed into the din. ‘Put away those swords: this is a peaceful Gathering, I’ll have no weaponry here.’

The guard captain was staring at him, uncomprehending.

Ravn glared back, infuriated by the man’s insolence; then realised he had spoken unthinkingly in Eyran. He repeated himself in the Old Tongue.

The guard captain drew himself up, affronted. He gave no order for his men to disarm, and instead of presenting himself to Ravn Asharson, bypassed the northern king and pressed on towards a knot of Istrian nobles. They were, he reasoned, the men who paid his annual stipend, now that Rui Finco, Lord of Forent, headed the Allfair forum that ruled on such matters.

‘Falla’s greeting to my lords this night,’ he intoned, in formal Istrian. ‘I bring before you a prisoner whom we took by force running from the scene of a crime.’

The Lord of Forent – a handsome, wiry-looking man with a plain silver band set upon his burnished temples, and the nose of a predator – had at first looked flustered by this turn of events, but he rose to the occasion admirably. Raising an elegant eyebrow, he regarded the guard captain with interest. He turned to Lord Prionan beside him. ‘A theatrical presentation to enliven the evening, my lord?’ he enquired smoothly.

Prionan shrugged. ‘I know nothing about it, if so.’

Rui Finco addressed himself to the guard captain in Istrian. ‘I fear we have not been rehearsed in our lines, sir,’ he smiled. ‘But carry on, for I’m sure we’re up to the task of improvisation.’

The guard captain looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s no mummery, my lord,’ he said. ‘It’s a grave matter. There’s been a death—’

A hush fell over those who understood the sibilant southern words.

‘
Grave
and
death
– a clever wordplay: bravo!’ Hesto Dystra clapped his hands. Nearing seventy now, his wits were not always as sharp as they’d been.