Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (2 page)

The old man drew up his blanket in spite of the stifling
heat, with only his face and his signet hand showing.  His hawk nose seemed
larger against his thin face than Daerwin remembered, and his pale brown eyes
were mired in a web of wrinkles and hollows.  His lips looked cracked and dry,
and when Daerwin came near, they curled into a grimace of pain.

The sheriff approached and knelt before him.  “Your Grace,”
he said stiffly.

“Oh ho, my Grace, is it?”  The duke huffed impatiently,
clearly disappointed in the direction the conversation was already taking. 
“Come, enough of this.  Rise, Daerwin, sit beside me as you once did, and tell
me, how fares my…younger son?”

Younger son.  Daerwin looked up sharply from where he knelt
and met his father’s gaze, but he did not stand.

His father’s hand reached from beneath the blankets and
patted the chair beside him, all the while studying his reaction.  “Your lovely
bride, Glynnis, is well?  My grandchildren, Roquandor and dear little Renda,”
he coughed thickly, “both are well?”

Ah, Father, that you could make your body old and infirm at
your will, that you could let Castle Damerien and those within fall to ash, and
still not take the fire from your eye… 

“When?” Daerwin asked quietly.

The duke sighed, letting his smile fall away.  “Soon
enough.  In battle, I should think.  A battle we will win, of course,” he
added, “lest the bards forget Vilmar Damerien too soon.  Otherwise, I should
die abed and be done with it.”  His gnarled, ringed hand gestured insistently
to Daerwin to take his seat.  “Of course it will fall to you to send for your
brother.”  He glanced up evenly.  “I’ve decided his name will be Brada.”

“Brada,” the young nobleman repeated carefully.  “I see.”

“Yes, yes,” the duke continued, patting the arm of the
chair. “Write something appropriately sentimental to your dear brother—it is
widely known that you were close as children—and be seen to send it off with
Nestor at the funeral.  He will know what to do.  Nestor has been through the
Succession many, many times.  Should you have any worries or questions, you
have but to ask him.”

“Brada, did you say?”  His cocked brow bordered on derision.

Vilmar shifted in his seat and dropped his hand to his lap
in exasperation. “I realize it sounds almost womanish, Brada, but Brado or
Bradon, Bradicon...”  He shook his head.  “In any case, I wanted the
association with B’radik for obvious reasons.  We need every advantage just
now.”  When he saw Daerwin’s frown, he shook his finger at him.  “Peace, boy, I
nearly charged your mother to name you thus!”

Daerwin rose from his knees and absently seated himself in
the chair beside the duke, ignoring the duke’s veiled smile.  “But is this
wise, Father?  Half of Kadak’s forces already occupy Brannford and Pyran, and
the rest are wearing away Tremondy’s forces in the north.  Mine as well, ere
long.”  It had to be said, though he dreaded to think where the information
might lead the duke’s thoughts.  “Father, the Resistance will surely fall
without your leadership.  Perhaps if this were to wait.”

“My leadership!”  The sudden exclamation started a coughing
fit that lasted a while, long enough that one of the duke’s Keepers melted from
the wall in alarm.  “Back!  I yet live.  Back, I say!”  Vilmar Damerien looked
up at his son, whose face had gone quite pale.  “Leadership?  Boy, look at me! 
I can barely walk to the privy without help.”  That started another coughing
fit.  “Fie!  Behold, Vilmar Damerien in his wretchedness!  Bah.  I am hardly
the leader worth dying for these days!  Besides, they will have all of my
leadership, as you so flatteringly put it, but with Brada’s strength and youth
to inspire them.”

He was right, though Daerwin hated to admit it.  More and
more of the Resistance fighters were too young to remember.  To them, the
lifting of the Durlindale Siege was lost in history as surely as the
Bremo-Hadrian Wars or the Liberation itself, and Vilmar Damerien was just a
feeble old man who commanded from his bed.  If Kadak’s demon armies were to get
past Brannagh to Damerien, these young fighters could not imagine Duke Vilmar
holding the castle, and their morale was not what it should be, what it had to
be, to resist the Usurper’s overwhelming forces.  A younger, more powerful
duke, especially one newly ascended, would rekindle their ardor.

As if he followed Daerwin’s train of thought, the duke
nodded and wheezed softly.  “Oh, they will love Brada— have no doubt of that. 
Handsome, powerful, heroic…he will be everything they need him to be.  Above
all else, Brada should be able to stand against Kadak, should the Resistance
fall.  So I pray, at any rate.  Then, if necessary, we can begin to rebuild
what was lost.”

In spite of the worry in Vilmar’s words, Daerwin’s heart
jumped with hope. Surely this was his father’s intention, then, that between
the remaining lords of Syon, they would find a way to defeat Kadak, finally,
utterly, and barring that, for Brada to face Kadak himself.  Hence the
Succession now.  Yes, with a newly ascended duke, they could win this war
themselves, and if so…

“But enough of this.”  Vilmar sighed heavily and stared
through the walls for a time before he spoke again.  “The succession will take
care of itself.  It always does.  You know why I summoned you.”

The sheriff only stared into his father’s eyes, the vast
reservoirs of dread he had just blocked safely away washing over him again.

No.

Not this.

They would not need it now. They had just been talking about
the Succession, about Brada, about ending the war themselves.  Themselves!  If
they could do that, if they could defeat Kadak themselves, then he could not be
the Beast, and this could not be the Great War.  This could not be the time of
the prophecy, regardless of all the omens and portents, regardless of what the
priests said.  He shut his eyes in desperate prayer.  Please, by the gods, let
them be wrong.  Let them all be wrong.

“Daerwin?”

In a single motion, the sheriff stood and whirled away,
tearing himself free of his father’s gaze.  He would not have this conversation
again. 

“Glynnis is well.  She sends her love.”  His voice was all
of breath, but he could not help himself.  “Roquandor starts at the academy
this year.  Such pride!  You should see him strutting about at Brannagh,
ordering the servants about.”  He laughed nervously, desperately.  “And Renda,
dear little Renda...”

“Daerwin.”

His smile failed him, and his voice broke.  “She will be
seven in less than a tenday...”

“My son,” said the duke gently, “you’ve known since
Roquandor was born that this day would come.  No son has ever been born to the
House of Brannagh, nor likely will be again.”  As he spoke, he hunched his
blankets up about his shoulders and from beneath the folds, produced a small,
beautifully carved wooden sword.

Daerwin only stared at the toy weapon.

“Regardless of how you or I feel, the child must become a
Knight of Brannagh and deliver this land from war, or all is lost.”  Vilmar
stood then and extended the sword toward Daerwin hilt first.  “Renda of
Brannagh will fulfill the prophecy, Daerwin.”  The duke’s voice dropped.  “She
must.  For the sake of Syon and all the world, she must.”  He wheezed softly. 
“For my sake...”

“For your sake.”  Daerwin drew a deep breath, biting back
his bitterness. 

“Yes,” he answered simply.  “For the duke, for Syon and for
B’radik.  Is that not the oath you swore as a Knight of Brannagh?”

“It is not an oath she has sworn!”

“She will.”

“She’s but a seven years child!”

“Which is why you must train her now.”

“And if I refuse?”

The duke shook his head.  “My son, you cannot simply ignore
what is and hope it passes you by.  The prophecy will not wait for your
pleasure, and it will not be bargained with.  It will visit itself upon her
whether she is ready for it or not.  Knowing this, it falls to you to prepare
her for what will come.”

Daerwin sighed.  “I will make of my daughter a Knight of
Brannagh.”  He shut his eyes in dread.  “I will train her to be a weapon for
you, a warrior for Syon.  She will end this war, as your prophecy says she
must. That much will safeguard your land and your throne.”  He turned to his
father with pleading eyes.  “Can that be the end of it?”  His voice cracked
with the deep terror in his heart.  “Please, I beg of you.  Let that be the end
of it.”

The duke’s eyes blinked in surprise and sorrow.  “But
Daerwin, you know better than that…”

Castle Brannagh
First day of Gathering, in the year of Syon, 3862

R
enda
of Brannagh stood at the library window and gazed out over the quiet fields and
orchards of her father’s lands, stretching from the dry moat beyond the great
stone curtain wall as far as the horizon.  No armies gathered there, though of
habit she still looked for the telltale smoke of their fires rising above the
hills and the dust of their movement.  No threat called for her attention, and
still she stayed, still she watched.  Still she hoped.

At daybreak, the Sheriff of Brannagh, her father, had stood
with his knights and their farmers to crush the first grains under his boot
heel and sprinkle the ceremonial milk and blood over the fields in the hopes
that when the cold passed Didian would again bring His rains and Kanet the
wholesomeness of the soil.  And as she had, year upon year since she took her
oath, she’d stood at his side, battle armor polished, swords gleaming, Brannagh
mantle about her shoulders.

So little had changed, and yet...

In the slightest motion, her hand brushed over her hip and
found no sword there.  No swordbelt, no comfortable, familiar armor with its
dented peplum…only the strange, perfect pleats of her skirts.  Brocades, laces,
silks, she sighed, the first bindings of a noblewoman.  There were more.  Three
hours she had spent this morning, not moving, not breathing, not thinking,
while her mother’s maids twisted and pinned her stubborn auburn hair—hair which
had always obeyed the discipline of the helmet—into a fragile objet d’art.

Such things made no sense, not in the world she’d known. 
“Not tactical,” as Sir Saramore would say.  Bound as she was in so many layers
of silk and lace, she felt strangely naked and helpless, just as she had for
the last two years.

For a moment, she felt a peculiar sense of vertigo: she was
crude and out of place, a stranger in her own family castle, a knight in masque
as a noblewoman.

In the silence of the great galleries and corridors, she
could still hear the snap of the great almost liquid arc of power that had
lashed out over the battlefield and cracked against the stone and mortar of
Kadak’s stronghold, blasting through the last of the castle’s protections, the
sudden implosion of the castle wall, and then the thunderous cheers of her men
as they ran for the glowing fiery breach over the bodies of the dead…

“Fades, it does.”  Her squire’s Bremondine burr lilted
quietly over the stones of the library floor.  After six years, it was as
familiar in Renda’s ear as her own voice, though the sudden sound made her draw
a sharp breath.  “Takes some time is all.”

Even without looking back, Renda could picture Gikka of
Graymonde at the table behind her.  As always, Gikka’s brown hair flowed in
mannish style, uncoifed in scandalous loose waves that fell over her gray-green
riding tunic, and she sat with her thin leather boots kicked up onto the table,
irreverently close to the priceless scrolls and quartos.  Her arms rested calm
and strong across her chest, never more than inches from a weapon even within
the castle walls.  Renda smiled sadly.  Even for Gikka, old habits died hard.

Behind her, patient stacks of parchments sprawled over the
tables, Renda’s strange new weapons for this strange new world.  Some were
carefully powdered and rolled into carved bone cases, others leafed flat and
bound between thick wooden covers.  In these writings were laws and judgments,
records of harvests, settlements of disputes, declarations of war, peace
treaties…every dreary point of Syonese law for the last thousand years, many in
strange languages and centuries-old scripts.  Above these, in shelves and cases
lining the walls, were another scant three millennia of bickerings and
squabblings going right back to the Liberation.

“The farmers,” Renda murmured.  “They whine like spoiled
children, Gikka.”

“The farmers.”  The squire cocked her brow.  “The farmers
have you staring out the window, do they?”

“These are men who spilled blood together, men who buried
the dead together, and now they've all gone mad with their selfishness.”  She
rubbed her forehead in frustration.  “They come to blows over who owns a
newborn goat or the lay of a fence, one foot this way or that.  I’ve no head
for this, to speak softly beneath their bickering.  Were it my decision, I should
give them all swords, and let them decide it themselves.”

“Sounds sensible to me,” Gikka studied her hands, squinting
at the edges of the unusually long nails of her smallest fingers.  “Such answer
certainly befits our lady of the battlefield and might knock some sense into
them besides.  Yet here we find ourselves…in the library.”

“Even so.  His Lordship, my father,” Renda said, arching her
brow, “has charged me with finding a peaceful answer for these fools.  ‘This is
a time of peace. We must show them peaceful solutions if we would keep it so.’ 
If, indeed.”  She looked out the window again.  “I’m sure he knows his answer
already and even his justification for it.  He’s set me this task to fill my
time.”

Gikka smiled gently.  “He worries after you, what with the
screams in your sleep.”

“So he fills my days with emptiness?”  Renda shook her head.

“Regardless,” breathed Gikka, “we’ve the whole library twixt
us and your famous answer, and only an hour of light.”  She picked up the
nearest of the scrollcases and shook her head over the elaborate curls of the
High Hadric inscription.  “Bloody Hadrians,” she muttered.  “Turncoats,
renegades...”  She uncased the scroll and blew the powder from it.  When Renda
made no answer, she looked up.  “Best tell me what we seek…”

The knight looked back toward the heap of parchments.  “Ah,
Gikka, how is it I find this peace so much more wearisome than war?”  She
hugged herself, vaguely irritated at her gown again, that its bodice should
bind at the shoulders and its skirts drag about her feet so.  “I have no breath
in me, no appetite.  Gods, but I feel so...”

Gikka set aside the scroll and swung her boots down from the
table top.  “Fades, as I say, an you don’t pick at it by the hour.” She stood
and leaned against the wall beside Renda to look out over the quiet fields. 
“I’ve the same cravings in my own heart, and right well you know it.”

“Then you understand,” answered Renda quietly.  “I see no
more battles ahead, no more victories.  Just dull gray days of peace.”

Gikka jumped easily to sit on the thick window ledge. 
“Renda, you miss the war like an old love, and in the missing, you forget the
bad of it.  The dead, the maimed.”  She nodded toward the rich fields of
amaranth and wheat.  “The farmers, they earned this new life of theirs, Renda,
paid for it with their dearest blood.  Sure you’d not take it all back.”

“Would I not?”

Gikka frowned.  “That’s an ungrateful turn of thought.”

“Ungrateful?”  She sighed.  “Do you know what is in my
dreams, Gikka?  Every night, filled with nothing but the mindlessness of the
day, my dreams return to the war.  I relive the battles, the victories and the
losses, worry at the choices I made, the lives I sacrificed and those I saved. 
I carouse with those long dead…”  She closed her eyes against the pain and
loss.  “Falling asleep, I dread the morning.  I dread waking to the emptiness,
waking to another day of pretending to care about things that do not matter. 
Should I be grateful for this?”

“Renda, this emptiness you feel, it’s unfair.  The war’s
end…well, now, that was a day, indeed, one in five hundred years, not just for
you but for all Syon!  You can’t expect every day to rise to that same glory. 
You breached Kadak’s stronghold, destroyed Kadak, rescued Duke Brada, gods rest
him—”

“You were the one to rescue my uncle, not I.”

“
We
rescued Brada.  You, me, Dith, your father…the
lot of us.” Gikka sat back in the chair.  “Still in all, what day can ever
compare to that, Renda?”

“Certainly not today.”  Renda smiled bitterly.  “It’s over,
don’t you see?  Everything I knew, everything I had, everything I was.  This is
all that’s left to me.”  She looked back over the library tables in disgust. 
“And not just this weary nonsense, no.”  She paced away from the window.  “I
have social functions and state dinners, politics, maneuverings...”  She
laughed bitterly.  “And what’s more, I have before me a marriage of alliance,
ere I grow too old and unappealing, that I might become some fat old lord’s
brood mare while he dallies with the beauties of the realm!”

“Fat old lord, is it?”  Her squire laughed. “Which fat old
lord might this be, what with all the young gallants come to break with your
father after you?”

“One and all, they would conquer Renda the War Hero, Renda
the Duke’s Cousin, Renda the Sheriff’s Daughter and brag to their comrades. 
No, not conquer.  Purchase at auction by the highest bidder of title, land and
gold, my virtue a trophy for the ancestral manse.”  She felt a bit sick,
hearing her thoughts take on a certain truth now that she’d spoken them aloud. 
“So what difference, fat or thin, old or young, hideous or handsome, if I’ve no
say…”

“Ho, mistress, but you’ve a thing or more to learn.  A
bloody big difference, it is, and no mistake.”  Gikka chuckled.  “Oh now, I
know your father well enough; you’ll have a say.  Mark my words.”

“My say is that I’ll none.   There’s no time to waste on
love and such rot in war.”

“Aye,” answered Gikka softly.  “But Renda, we’re no longer
at war.”

Renda laughed bitterly and gestured toward the parchments. 
“It seems I shan’t have time to waste on it without the war, either.”

Gikka shook her head, obviously frustrated.

Renda smiled.  This was a side of her that Gikka simply did
not understand and likely never would.  In some ways, Renda did not understand it
entirely herself.  She had seen it time and again.  Nothing made soldiers lust
for every bit of life they could get more than having just come from battle. 
But somehow Renda had always held aloof.

“Besides, what point do you see in my pursuing love or romance?” 
Love, romance.  The words tasted strange and bitter on the knight’s tongue.

“A warm smile of a cold morning and a warm hand to hold.” 
Gikka laughed.  “Barring that, a warm bed…”

“…only to suffer the loss when called to heel.”

Her squire snorted.  “Who calls Renda of Brannagh to heel? 
Sure not even your father would be so bold.”

She slammed her hand down on the table.  “I would bring
myself to heel out of duty!”

“What duty?”  Gikka met her hard gaze.  “The war ended for
you, too, and this peace gives you leave to take off the armor and live as
something more than just a knight!”

“Gikka, I never wanted to take off the armor!  I never
wanted to be other than what I am, and I am a knight!”

“Aye, but then, as a knight, have you no whims or fancies?  There’s
a blue-cape or two I’d have thought worth a tumble even for your illustrious
self.  And Aidan…”  Gikka’s eyes flashed.  “How you denied yourself that is
beyond my ken.” 

Renda smiled grimly.  “I learned long ago to subdue whims
and fancies and arm against disappointment.”

“So you did,” Gikka said gently.  “But now you’ve leave to
let them breathe and see where they lead.  Who’s to stop you but yourself? 
What was once a choice now comes from habit.  Ah, you make excuse of your
station, but even Roquandor loved and married, Renda—even your very brother, a
knight like yourself and a child of Brannagh.”

“I am not my brother.”

“Are you not a knight as he was?” 

“I am not a man as he was!” she snapped.

Gikka scowled.  “When it’s war, you’re the knight, man or
woman be damned, but comes the peace, and you’re so quick to accept the
simpering life laid out for you, even as you rail against it.”

“Of course I rail against it!  But rail against it or no, in
the end it makes no difference.  There’s no need of me to be a knight now.” 
She hugged herself and walked toward the window.  “So I will do what the
daughters of Brannagh have done before me.  I will marry appropriately, bear an
heir or two, and then amuse myself with pettiness to cover my shame of becoming
an aging baggage.”  She listened to the finality of her words as they hung in
the library air like an epitaph and wished she could take them back, wished she
could make them false.  But she could not.  Defeated, she sank into her chair. 
“This I’ve wrought for myself, Gikka.  Peace, security, and the exquisite
boredom of a life at court.  And would that it were not so.”

Gikka drew breath to answer, but then she turned away, her
whole body taut against the silence.  A second later, she was on her feet, signaling
caution, and Renda understood why:  behind her, the library door was creeping
open.  Doors either opened or they did not in honest company.

Renda’s hand reached reflexively for her sword and found
nothing there.   Helpless, she watched as Gikka moved soundlessly toward the
door.  Through the gap, Renda saw a gnarled white hand curl into a painful fist
to knock.

“My lady Renda,” called a chilling voice as the door opened
further, “Are you within?”

“Yes, Nara,” said the knight, rubbing fatigue and perhaps a
certain disappointment from her eyes.  She motioned Gikka back to sit beside
her at the table.  “You may enter.”

An ancient B’radikite nun pushed open the door to the
chamber.  Her starched habit glowed an eerie white in the late afternoon
shadows, the white of the goddess of truth.  A thin white veil of her hair grew
from a narrow band across the crown of her head and billowed out behind her as
she moved, the only hair not ceremonially removed as the signature tonsure of
her order.  The woman’s skin looked as it had since Renda’s earliest memories,
thin and dry like the parchments on the table, stretched tight across the sharp
bones of her face and distorted joints of her hands.