Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (46 page)

She felt the rays of the sun cross over the stone and touch
the top of her head, and she wondered if he’d raised his knife to catch the
first ray or if today was the day the sun would sneak up on him.

A
t
B’radik’s command, Nara had not stirred from her bed in the nursery since
Valmerous arrived at Brannagh.  She’d eaten nothing, drunk nothing, moved not
at all lest he know she was there.  Her body was asleep to the point of death,
cold and quiet, sipping only tiny amounts of her goddess’s strength to keep her
alive, while her spirit kept silent vigil in Pegrine’s sacred place of life.

She had allowed herself only one departure from B’radik’s
orders.  Last night, she had sent her spirit to Renda in the chapel to ask the
blessings of B’radik and to set protections over her.  It had been quite a
risk—Valmerous could have come to the chapel a moment earlier, or he might have
decided to try attacking the nursery again before entering the crypt.  Either
way, Pegrine would have been in danger.  But without Renda, Damerien would not
survive.  Nara had failed the duke once; she would not fail him again.

Her hands flexed irritably under the bedclothes at the
strange spreading warmth that began in her palms and poured through her veins
like warm cognac.  Suddenly, her sips of power became frantic gulps as the
thirsting woman nearly drowned in the sudden burst of B’radik’s power.  Her
bedclothes began to smoke and smolder until she regained herself enough to damp
the tremendous glow of power emanating from her body.  Her spirit soared.  She
had not felt this luxurious rush of the goddess’s power since the war’s end: 
B’radik was free.

“Nara!”  Lady Glynnis was pounding at her door.  “Nara, open
at once!  Please!  The castle is in danger!”

Minutes later, wrapped in a dark gray mantle to conceal even
the controlled glow of her habit, she shuffled up the battlement stairs alone
and looked down over the churning mass of bodies below.  Would that she could have
taken Arnard and his priests away from their patients to help her, but they
were trying to save as many of the knights as possible now that B’radik’s
strength had returned to them, too.  Arnard had even ventured aloud that they
might have the strength to stop the plague, but Nara had hushed his optimism. 
First, they would have to survive.

So, alone at the top of the castle wall, Nara took a deep
breath and raised her hands over the enemy army massing below.

“Nara.”

She paused, lowered her hands.  “Praise B’radik,” she
murmured.  “I greet You.”

“And I, you.”

“It is as I’d hoped, then.  You are free.”  Nara bowed her
head.  “Lord Daerwin and Lady Renda were victorious?”

“It was a near thing, but Valmerous is dead, and Damerien is
safe.  The sheriff and his daughter live.”

The old woman nodded, her eyes focused in the far distance
as she watched the battle in her mind’s eye.  “Lord Daerwin,” she gasped.  “He
is injured.  Badly.”

“He lives.”

“And Pegrine?”  But even as she asked, she watched the final
moments of the battle, watched Renda cradle the dying girl in her arms, watched
the child’s body flash away to dust in the sunlight.  She looked down, letting
her tears spill down her cheeks.  “I see.”

“It was she who destroyed Valmerous.  Now she is at peace among
the stars.  You should be proud, Nara.”

“Proud and grateful,” she replied automatically,
tonelessly.  “I could have wished no more for Peg but to serve You so.  Her
victory is a victory for all Syon and all the world.”

“Not victory, Nara, not quite yet.”

Nara’s head tilted almost imperceptibly.

“Xorden keeps one place on Syon sacred to Him still.”

The nun stared through the battlement’s stone floor.  “The
east chapel.”

“Cilder consecrated it.”

“Aye, Madam, he did.”

“But not to Me.”

Nara nodded.  “Since his death, we’ve not trusted it, and no
one’s been to use it since.  I’ve meant to see to it, but with the plague and
the cardinal and all…”

“Consecrate it now.  In My name.”

“Now?”  The word escaped before the old nun remembered to
Whom she spoke.  But she did not take it back.  She looked down worriedly over
the army and over the huge battering ram they carried toward the castle gate. 
The gates would not stand against it long, certainly not long enough, and with
no hale knights inside to hold them back, once the villagers breached the
gates, the castle would be theirs.

She could do nothing to strengthen the metal of the gates. 
Such a thing would take the powers of a mage, or at the very least a priest of
Glaiben, the Hadrian god of metalsmithing and gemmary.  But perhaps she could
still do something about the army.

She imagined the iron in their weapons, their armor and
their blood, fired to a red glow.  Even if she managed to stop but a few of
them, the horror of it might be enough to hold the rest off for a time,
certainly long enough to consecrate the chapel.  The tight, dry skin of her
ancient face wrinkled with a hard smile, and she lifted her hands toward them,
anticipating for the first time in a season the full strength and glory of
B’radik’s power flowing through her.

“Nara.”

The power dropped away cruelly, leaving her cold.  With a
little cry of anguish, she turned pleading eyes toward the heavens.  “It’ll
take but a moment.”

“Nara.”

She stood transfixed, watching the crisp phalanx of
knights—Wirthing knights—form up around the battering ram the way the condemned
man watches the axeman hone his blade.  Presently, her hands dropped to her
sides, and she bowed her tonsured head in submission.

“Praise B’radik.  I will obey.”  Then she turned away and
made her way quickly down the battlement steps.

A new thought entered her mind, a plan at once simple and
certainly possible.  If she would obey her goddess without abandoning her duty
to the sheriff, to the household, to all Syon, every moment mattered.

Willem, Barlow and Matow were gone, presumed dead with honor
in the service to B’radik; Renda’s mind gave a eulogy for them as she rode,
burying them, setting her honored dead at rest between battles as she had
during the war, the better to clear her mind for what lay ahead.

She had freed their horses from silence and sent to graze,
not wanting to be burdened with bringing them back to a beseiged castle.  By
sunset, when their knights did not return, the three horses would make their
own ways back to Brannagh or, if that was not possible, to Damerien.  By
sunset…but sunset seemed so far away.

I only wish it could be over for you, too.

Renda lifted her chin and rode on, trying to shut out the
terrible visions of Pegrine locked in her fiery battle with Valmerous.  Pegrine
had lived long enough to see the goddess’s enemy die first; hers was death in
the service of B’radik, death with a kind of glory that filled a Brannagh
Knight’s dreams and a bard’s belly.  How insipid, indeed, to survive such a
thing and make it mundane.  This, Renda, Knight Commander of Brannagh,
understood through every cell of her being.  She only hoped her own death would
one day prove as glorious.

But Pegrine had not been a Knight of Brannagh.  She had not
been forged into a weapon of war.  She’d worn no armor and carried only a toy
sword, the same sword which had been placed into Renda’s hand so long ago.

No armor.

She'd been so keen to return to battle, but not for want of
excitement or glory.  The armored knight, the military commander…this life came
easily to her.  But she had seen another part of herself, if only for a moment:
the part she’d called Renda the Maid.  And it terrified her.

Like Pegrine, this side of her hid nothing.  It thought of
simple, soft things like love and loss.  Regret.  This side of her wore no
armor, and because of this, it could be hurt in ways she had never dreamed
possible.

She’d hated that side of herself, and she would have happily
destroyed it only months ago.  But now, knowing that she was again at war and
knowing this was not a side of her that could live in battle, she found herself
missing it.  After the farmers went back to their farms, after Maddock’s head
was mounted on a pike, after they were sure of Xorden’s defeat…then she would
sit in the gallery darkness and dwell on the horrors of this season and perhaps
allow that side of herself to breathe.

For now, she had no time to dwell on what should have
happened, what could have happened.  They had won, and they were alive, which
meant they—she—had to turn all thoughts back to Maddock and to the army that
waited between them and the castle.  The tunnel entrance was well hidden, and
even if it weren’t, the army was most likely clustered near the castle gates. 
A careful approach and they should be able to get back inside.  Then judicious
use of the catapults should force the army back.  After that, they had only to
wait for cold and starvation to put Maddock in mind to negotiate.

Lord Daerwin’s arm was bound tightly to his body armor from
the pauldron to his linen-wrapped hand, but still, each jolt of the ride showed
in his face.  Only his good hand peeked from beneath his heavy mantle to hold
the reins, and he rode bonelessly in his saddle, occasionally slumping over
Revien’s neck or leaning dangerously to one side or the other.  Chul had used
the last of the salve on the sheriff’s arm before they bound it to his side,
only a tiny amount, so part of the injury burned on, gaining momentum against
Lord Daerwin’s ability to stand the pain.  Nevertheless, injured and unlikely
to survive even the briefest battle, she watched him drive on by sheer force of
will toward Brannagh.

She slowed Alandro at the crest of the foothills above the
glade.  From there they could see a thick, dark haze filling the valley below
them, too much to be the dust of a dry season kicked up by the farmers’ boots,
too dark to be anything but smoke.  They could see neither the castle nor those
who surrounded it through the haze, but suddenly the full magnitude of the
battle became apparent to her.  From the sound of it, the force arrayed against
the castle was made up of thousands, far more than just the farmers of her
father’s lands.   But that made no sense.

She saw glints of light winking through the smoke and
realization dawned on her.  Those glints of flickering orange light were
reflected by armor.

“Wirthing…” her father gasped.  “The bastard.”

Low rumbles and roars of battle echoed up the foothills and
filled the whole Brannagh valley below them, rumbles of battle, of resistance
and of hope.  Time was all they needed, time to gather Lord Kerrick and the
handful of knights who had gone to Windale, time to find Gikka and Dith.  Then
they could stop this army and retake Brannagh.  All they needed was for those
walls to hold for a few days, a tenday at most.  They’d done so before, during
the war, against demon armies, against the Anatayans.  Surely they had one more
war left in them.

Suddenly a great flare of unnaturally white light erupted
over the plateau, thick, black smoke billowing out in all directions, and
Chul’s horse reared in terror.  A few seconds later, barrages of flame and ice
and otherworldly energies lit the smoke below.  A great rumbling shook the
ground and made the horses skitter to keep their footing.

Mages.  An army of them, no less.  How Maddock had managed
to convince so many mages to join his cause against Brannagh, she could not
imagine, but he had.  Clearly she had underestimated him.  With the last sounds
of battle dying away, no doubt the last resistance giving way under the
firestorm and smoke, Renda closed her eyes in defeat.

“Renda!”  The sheriff’s face was twisted in a grimace of
pain and rage.  “To the tunnels!  We cannot let them win!”

“It’s not up to us!”  Renda shouted back at him.  “Look!” 
As if at her command, another white-hot flare burst out over the land.  “This
is more than just Maddock and a few Wirthing knights.  They’ve mages with
them!  We’ll never make it to the tunnels alive!  Would you have us add three
more bodies to the field?”

“Aye, to defend Brannagh!”

“No!  If we die here today, it will mean the end of Brannagh
for all time!”  She looked back at the smoke filled valley.  “Then who will
guard Damerien?  Who will guard Syon?  Surely Maddock’s bargain with Wirthing
and these mages goes beyond taking Brannagh!”

The sheriff sank over his horse’s neck, and his ragged voice
scraped itself raw with anguish.  “Glynnis…”

Renda’s mouth went dry, and she shut her eyes against the
flood of pain.  Her mother.  Nara.  Sedrik.  Greta.  All the priests, the
remaining knights, even the villagers in the hospice.  So many.

But her voice was clear and strong, the unconquerable war
hero subdued for so long.  “I’m sorry.  For Damerien’s sake, we cannot.”  She
turned her attention north, toward the Bremondine forests.  “For the sake of
all Syon, we cannot.”

The sheriff watched fiery burst after fiery burst fill the
valley below with thick, black smoke.  “The gods are merciful,” he murmured
bitterly, gritting his teeth against his grief and pain.  “And because the gods
are merciful, my Glynnis and the others are already dead.”  He looked down,
shaking.  With one last sob of grief, he nodded to Renda.

They rode together to the northern cliffs.  Slowly over the
early morning hours as they rode, the shocked silence slowly melted away, and
they began to formulate the beginning, just the bare beginning of a plan.  
Then, with a few reassuring words and a clap at the boy’s shoulder, the two
knights rode down the steep cliff trail to the north and disappeared into the
southern edge of the Bremondine forest.  Lord Daerwin’s arm would need
attention, and Renda had an idea where to seek it.

Chul watched them go.  He looked out over the thick trees
that covered their escape and raised his hand after them.  Then he turned west
and galloped away over the foothills toward Graymonde.