Sorrow's Peak (Serpent of Time Book 2) (11 page)

It was probably better in the end, but it made Vilnjar more than a little uneasy for reasons he didn’t quite understand.

Hodon was placing too much faith in the U’lfer need for freedom, when he should have been using Vilnjar’s willing presence there as leverage. They could do little else but try to appeal to their craving for freedom, but Vilnjar knew Cobin and the Council of the Nine too well to dismiss the unlikelihood the letter would even reach Galfon Wild-Heart. Its contents would never be conveyed to the people of Drekne.

Surely Hodon knew that.

His vision included an alliance with not just the U’lfer of the Edgelands, but with the free Alvarii hidden away in underground cities stretching below large portions of the continent of Leithe, if rumors were to be believed. Vilnjar didn’t know what was written in the letter Brendolowyn Raven-Storm carried to the King Under the City, but that wasn’t his business. Hodon only needed him to ensure his appeal to the U’lfer was well-worded and enticing enough to draw enough wolves south as possible.

War was coming.

And they were in desperate need of an army.

Though how Hodon knew for a fact they could expect such a war, Vilnjar did not know. A part of him fretted a return to the dark times that wiped out so many of his people. The U’lfer were an all-but endangered race, and another war could see the wolves to extinction.

Had Dunvarak’s seer whispered words of war into the overseer’s ear at some point before her passing, or was it a mere inevitability in the man’s mind?

Even without a seer’s confirmation, it seemed unavoidable.

Lorelei’s coming into the Edgelands was as a small stone trickling down the mountainside, warning of the avalanche to follow. She’d slighted a man meant to marry her for reasons Vilnjar was still not clear on. The king who’d raised her as his daughter was the same warmongering fool who’d put an end to so many of the U’lfer, including Vilnjar’s father. Lorelei’s mother, Queen Ygritte, brought fires of war when she escaped her arranged marriage and pledged herself to Rognar the Conqueror. The would-be Queen of Leithe married Rognar, and their union wrought a race-slaughtering war upon his people that nearly wiped them from the planet.

Such a slight would not be easily dismissed, and with Lorelei already gone from the Edgelands, who was left to pay the price if not the people who harbored her there for that short time before they exiled her?

Hodon didn’t have to say any of those things for Vilnjar to know war was as inevitable as the snow threatening to shower beyond the magical barrier keeping Dunvarak snug and protected in the tundra.

War was on its way south. King Aelfric would not turn the other cheek and ignore the fact that the U’lfer broke the terms of Edgelands Proclamation by welcoming Lorelei onto their land, though their treatment of her could hardly be considered a welcome. They sent her packing as soon as she was healed and back on her feet. Cobin even sent Hunters after them, in hopes of exterminating all three of them before they even reached Rimian, and Vilnjar found himself still wondering why Cobin hadn’t just shipped her back to her own people as an offering of good faith.

Aelfric would not ignore any of those facts as he marched his men on Drekne and ordered them to burn everything in their path. He would come looking for his daughter, even though the girl was not his daughter at all, and when she wasn’t found there was no telling what he’d do.

It gave him chills as he contemplated it and leaned further across the table to reach for the letter again.

“We should send this today,” he noted. “The sooner it is in Galfon’s hands, the sooner he can get the U’lfer out of the Edgelands to safety.”

“I concur,” Hodon nodded. “Do you agree everything is in order? That it will appeal to his sense of reason?”

“If it does manage to reach him.”

“It will reach him and only him.” Hodon sounded so sure of himself, gesturing over his shoulder for a withered, one-eyed old man in black mage’s robes to step forward. Vilnjar nearly forgot the archmage was there, he stood so still and silent through their meeting, like a statue simply absorbing every word with feigned indifference. “I will sign and seal this, and Archmage Auden will work his magic so none but Galfon Wild-Heart can read its contents.”

“You can do that?” he marveled.

Vilnjar had never been fascinated with magic, or the things it could do. Generally, he found it to be the trickery of charlatans with an agenda that usually involved lightening the coin purses of anyone willing to partake in their displays of power, rather than a legitimate and useful practice, but the city of Dunvarak itself was changing his mind in its favor.

He wondered if such magic would guarantee a letter into his sister’s care as well, but then thought better of asking. He didn’t have a letter to send to Rue, even though he’d thought endlessly about writing one. He’d thought to appeal to her senses, asking that she not only back Galfon if he chose to ally himself with the half-blooded U’lfer of the tundra, but follow him south with enough speed to get their people to safety before it was too late. What worried him was not that such a letter would never reach his sister, but she would ignore it when it came.

Ruwena was angry with him, and if he made such a gesture she might very well spit on it and stubbornly refuse to come south just to spite him.

His sister was an obstinate woman, and she’d never been angrier with him than she was the day he left her in Drekne so he could look after their younger brother once he was exiled. He stood by helplessly, watching as Cobin’s guards dragged her from the council chamber kicking, screaming, spitting and swearing vengeance so severe it cut deep into his soul. He could have done something, should have insisted they exile her with them, but he hadn’t. He’d just let them take her back to her prison, her spittle dripping down his face and the sounds of her raging screams echoing through him with the guilt.

She may very well never forgive him for leaving her behind to tend to their brother, who in truth was anything but helpless, but what else was he supposed to do? Finn hadn’t been named reckless without reason. He was impetuous, foolish and since he found Lorelei in the fields he’d been driven to protect her at any cost.

Finn hadn’t wanted him along on the journey, but Rhiorna confirmed Vilnjar was meant to be there, meant to follow the girl south, into battle, to the ends of the world if that was where Lorelei commanded him to go. Maybe he hadn’t believed it at the time, but part of him must have believed in it enough to follow. It couldn’t have been the simple need to protect and look after his brother that pushed him into exile with them.

He was meant to go with them, and it had very little to do with Lorelei at all. Maybe Rhiorna knew when she sent him, maybe she hadn’t, but Vilnjar’s mate was in Dunvarak, waiting for him to find her there.

And though the half-blooded beauty who carried a piece of his soul inside her probably had no idea the connection they shared, she liked him enough to ask him to work for her, spinning stories while she hammered steel into weapons and armor for the battle surely coming their way.

Glancing up, he watched Hodon’s quill bob and dip across the parchment in a series of brisk scratches as he signed his name. He leaned back to allow the ink to dry. One hand held the parchment down and kept it from rolling in upon itself as the other dropped the quill back into the ink pot.

“Before I commit this to Archmage Auden’s care, you are more than certain Galfon is the man?”

It was a little late to reaffirm that, as the letter was already written and addressed, but Vilnjar nodded confirmation. “Cobin would never allow such a missive to see the light of day, or its contents reach the peoples’ ears.”

Cobin seemed perfectly content to go on as they were, and why shouldn’t he be? He didn’t care about their people, about their future. He only cared about himself; once he was gone from the world what did it matter if his people weren’t far behind, winging toward annihilation?

Hodon nodded, “Very well then. I will send men north at once and hope against all hope we are not too late.”

“Is that a strong possibility, Father?” Logren spoke for the first time since they sat down at his father-in-law’s table, proving he hadn’t been dozing after all. Vilnjar wondered, having glanced several times in the other man’s direction only to find his cheek rested in the curve of his open palm, elbow planted firmly on the tabletop as he leaned into it with his eyes half-closed and an air of disinterest hovering around him.

The circles rimming both Logren’s eyes were so dark and deep, he looked as if he’d been in a brawl, not lost a night’s worth of sleep to drinking with his long lost sister before she departed on a dangerous journey. Vilnjar heard the two of them long into the hours of the night, waking several times to the sound of their laughter, their murmuring voices and Finn’s big elbow in his back. The only time the house was actually silent was when the siblings left and went to the temple, where they stayed until only about an hour before sunrise.

“A far stronger possibility than I’d like it to be,” Hodon answered, blowing one last time across the drying ink, then removing his hand and the weights from the corners so the parchment could roll in upon itself. “We need to get as many people out of the Edgelands as possible if we’re to make this work to all of our advantage, and we need to do it quickly.”

“But Aelfric is an old man,” Logren interjected. “He was an old man when he fought against my father. Surely he will not move with the same speed and vigor he once did.”

“There are always young soldiers in the king’s army, and besides, it is not just Aelfric I am worried about.”

It was the first time anyone mentioned Lorelei’s betrothed, a young prince from Hofft whose name escaped him until Hodon spoke it.

“Trystay of Hofft,” he said, as if the name should mean something.

It did sound familiar, and as he rolled back through his memory for it, he found only loose references from Lorelei that made little to no sense at all. Logren did sit up a little straighter, a ferocity knitting his brow together and wrinkling his forehead as Hodon went on.

“Trystay’s father, the king of Hofft, has been on the brink of war with Aelfric for decades, an old family feud that means next to nothing to me. I know only that it was some power struggle your sister was finally meant to bring an end to with the brokering of her marriage, and she botched it when she ran into the Edgelands.”

“So like her mother, she ran?” Vilnjar mused.

“Not exactly,” Hodon shook his head. “I don’t know all the details, and I wasn’t given time with her before she departed to discuss them, but Yovenna made mention before her coming. She said Lorelei’s life was threatened the night she ran onto your lands.”

“By the man she was meant to marry?”

It made sense once he could put it all into perspective. Finn said she’d been running the night he found her, and though his brother seemed to know what chased her, he’d never shared his insight, claiming it was up to her to decide who knew her secrets.

No secrets were safe in the eye of a seer, though, he supposed. He doubted there was much of anything about Lorelei, or her life, Yovenna hadn’t been privy to long before the day she stepped up to meet her at the gates of Dunvarak.

“I’ll kill the bloody bastard with my bare hands if he so much as even thinks about crossing that mountain,” Logren declared.

“He won’t cross it alone when he comes, and he will come. Men such as him rarely overlook having their agenda thwarted, and make no mistake, he had an agenda.”

“Did Yovenna say how many men he would bring with him?”

“Yovenna told me nothing beyond the words: war is coming. Be prepared. We spoke briefly on the details of Lorelei’s involvement with Trystay, but that was all. Mark my words, if even half of what I’ve learned from the traders in Port Felar about this Trystay of Hofft can be believed, he will work her slight to his advantage with Aelfric and bring every man in the king’s army with him. He’s as manipulative as an old Ninvarii, that one, and I hear he has Ninvarii on his side to make matters that much worse.”

Vilnjar resisted the urge to remark on how useless seers were if they couldn’t actually tell anyone what they saw and shifted the subject back to the letter at hand. “How long will it take your riders to reach Drekne?”

“Three days if the weather on our side of the mountain isn’t dreadful. Four or five if we see storms.”

Four to five days suddenly seemed an incredibly long time. Would it be enough?

Logren’s thoughts were in the same vein. “If this Trystay has already marched…” he started, lowering his arm to the table. He was still scowling, a sibling’s instinct to protect Vilnjar himself was all too familiar with. He stretched both shoulders across the back of his chair with a groan and shook his head. “If we are too late…”

“Then we are too late,” Hodon resigned. “There is not much more we can do than what we have already planned.”

True as it was, they could have sent word earlier, couldn’t they? Announced their presence in the south to the people of the Edgelands and extended an invitation after they’d established themselves in the tundra. It wouldn’t have made much difference, Vilnjar realized. Such an invitation would have been ignored by the council, never even revealed to the people they ruled over.

Sometimes he felt like such a fool for devoting so much of himself to the Council of the Nine.

“Lorelei is on her way, so for the time being there is hope she’ll be safe. We are doing what we can. That’s all that can be done.”

The discussion was settled, and for a few moments no one said anything at all. It was so quiet Vilnjar could almost hear the sounds of the city beyond the walls, people calling out to one another in the streets, horse hooves clomping along the stone, a blacksmith’s hammer clanking metal on the forge across the way.

“Logren, I want you to take the day,” Hodon finally went on. “Go home and sleep off the grief and drink. You can return to your duties tomorrow.”

“I’m fine,” he insisted, “really.”