The Barrow (48 page)

“The
Fae
Courts?” asked Malia, making a quick sign against the Evil Eye.

“Aye, for what transpires in the Known World has effect in the Otherworld, as well,” said Stjepan. “When the old wood was broken up into pieces, and dismembered, so too were the
Fae
Courts; so where there was once a single great Court of the
Fae
, now there are Seven, and many of my people feel we owe them a great debt, having lost the battle to preserve the Wold and the Golden Realm.”

“I suppose each of us bears the history of our blood in different ways,” Annwyn said. She frowned. “Why not just remove the cursed stones, then?”

“It's been tried, but the stone's effect seems permanent unless the magic of each rune itself can be undone, and no one has ever been able to identify the rune that is carved in the stones. The mark was taught to the Aurian magicians by a mysterious man that most believe to have been either the Horned Man or the Corn King in disguise; a manifestation of the Devil, in other words,” Stjepan said quietly. He leaned forward, and drew a mark into the earth. It looked like a complicated version of the letter
R
in the Middle Tongue, but with crossed lines that formed jagged forks. “Most think it is a corruption of the Mark of Binding of Bragea, the old smith-god. But it has never been encountered before, or since.”

Annwyn and Malia both shuddered, looking at the mark in the earth; it was just a scribble in the dirt, but there still seemed to be some malevolent and malignant spirit that was attached to it. Stjepan wiped it away with his boot.

“Almost every Athairi magician for a millennia has tried to undo those runes, and failed,” said Stjepan. “Most believe that until the Green Temple is restored, and the Spring Queens return, that any effort to undo this curse magic will be fruitless. And so my people travel the old paths, and sing songs to the trees, and ask them to be patient.”

Annwyn felt a great sadness like a weight, as though one of those cursed stones was pressing down upon her body, crushing it to the earth.

“Ah, the great haunted Erid Wold of An-Athair . . .” she murmured at last, her eyes far away. “Was it really so large, once upon a time, that it reached to our home at Araswell? I would like to visit the Wold one day; I have passed it by, but never entered it.” Her eyes came to rest on Stjepan. “Though I gather that for you it would not be a happy homecoming.”

Stjepan froze, and then looked into her eyes. He didn't speak for a long moment, measuring her with his hard gaze; but she didn't look away. “My mother's ashes coat its leaves,” he finally said in a flat, quiet voice. “My father wandered mad into its thickets, cursed with her dying breath; my sister ran away to hide in its boughs, and has not been seen since. What son of An-Athair would not yearn to see its depths again? I still have family there. But we will not pass through it on our way to the wizard's barrow.” He looked at her carefully. “Perhaps when this journey is over your brother will let you find refuge there.”

Annwyn broke his gaze, shyly smiling with sympathy, and with sadness.

“My brother . . . will not let me find refuge anywhere,” she said quietly. She seemed to withdraw into herself a bit.

Stjepan started to say something when he sensed someone at his side. He looked up to find the Athairi woman Leda looking down at him with raised eyebrows. “Time for that dance, scion of Morfane,” the Athairi woman said with a smile, and she grabbed him by the hand, pulling him up and away. He glanced over his shoulder apologetically back at Annwyn, and then he was being dragged into the dancing circle where Lestra awaited them. Each sister took an arm, and they started to move with Stjepan in tandem, taking several stutter steps to one side and then a kick, and then several stutter steps in the other direction.

Annwyn thought the three dancers looked like they were in a playful tug-of-war. And then the trio was spinning out in a circle, joining in with about thirty other revelers who were dancing in two circles around two campfires, occasionally switching from one circle to the other. The dancers were mostly their Athairi hosts, but she could see Stjepan's young squire Erim dancing, and Master Gilgwyr as well, along with a couple of Arduin's knights—Sir Holgar, and Sir Theodore, and there was the squire Brayden, looking very scared but excited as a pretty young Athairi showed him the basic sideways stutter steps of the dance.

She watched Stjepan dancing with the two Athairi sisters, and felt an ache of longing and jealousy that surprised her. Not about Stjepan, or at least she didn't think so; it was the Athairi women that she watched with startled, envious eyes. They had a freedom and surety of movement that she had never seen in a woman dancing before, a confidence about their bodies, their sexuality, their identity that she found dizzying and discomforting. The shake of their bare hips and bellies, the way they used their bracelets and anklets and shimmering belts as instruments to accompany the drummers, the sheer joy on their faces, the perspiration that made their sun-kissed copper skin glisten in the firelight, the way they improvised their dancing to the music. She'd been considered an excellent dancer when she was younger, but that was in the mannered, measured style of the courtly dancing of the High King's Court, all rigid steps and control. She had never danced like these women; she'd never had the chance to. But she could remember when she had wanted to dance like that, a long time ago, when she was young, when she . . . She stifled a sudden sob, caught it in her throat, and willed it to die.

The tempo of the drumming increased a notch, and the tenor of the dance changed; it became wilder, more barbaric, and suddenly long curved swords with watered steel blades were being passed about. She could sense Arduin and the other knights shift in confusion and nervousness. The swords were being handed to the Athairi women, and they lifted them over their heads and gave a great cry and a
whoop
, and suddenly they started weaving the curved swords in and out of the spaces between and around them and their dancing partners. She marveled at their skill, watching the bared blades flashing in the firelight, the bodies jumping and dancing through the whirling danger.
Athairi sword-dancing
, she thought suddenly.
I've read about this
. The two Athairi sisters effectively had Stjepan trapped as they danced, their swords flashing about on each side of him as the three of them spun about the fires.

And then the Athairi women started to sing as they sword-danced, and she felt like her heart had been pierced through and through.

Arduin frowned disapprovingly, one eye on his transfixed sister, and the other on the dancers circling the campfires. He almost opened his mouth to order Malia to take his sister back to her tent; but he stopped himself, and said nothing, and just let himself fume.

That night, Annwyn dreamt of a beautiful golden-haired youth with strong shoulders and arms, a gentle soul, piercing blue eyes, and a smile that could make any maiden's heart beat faster but was meant only for her. She had not dared dream of him in years; the pain and heartache it brought had simply become too much, and he had been banished away. And yet that night she dreamt of him, and in her dream they danced, and she danced with him as an Athairi woman might dance with a man. She danced with a freedom and a joy she'd never been able to feel before, letting her body move wildly and with abandon, a long curved sword in her hand. And then suddenly in her dream she wasn't dancing with him anymore, but instead with a tall dark Athairi man with a gaze of danger and death.

When she awoke she was surprised to find that she was breathing heavily, her pulse racing, a sheen of sweat on her forehead, her hands clawing into the bedroll, her nipples filled to bursting, her knees opened wide, and that a part of her that had long been dry was surprisingly very wet.

Gilgwyr awoke with a splitting headache that he could only partially attribute to the prodigious amount of wine he had consumed the night before. No weak sauce, that wine, like the watered-down bottles that they had picked up in Vesslos, but some serious red Erid vintages from the wineries near Orliac. Great report and celebration had been made in Therapoli that the vineyards had been thankfully untouched by the fighting during the Earl's rebellion the year before, and he had strongly suspected that the safety of the region's vines and casks and bottles had been more important to most of the city's citizens than the fact that one of Erid Dania's most powerful Earls was at full-fledged war with his King and High King.
Vines and grapes are hardy things, and man makes himself to be more important than he is in their life and death; but the royal edifice of power and allegiance, that's an illusion all too easily brought down and almost always solely at the behest of men and their actions
, he had thought to himself that tense summer.
What glorious fucking fun!

Not so fun now, with his head feeling like a spike had been pounded through it.

But the pain in his head was not merely wine-driven; he'd drunk enough wine in his time to know that. The dreams he'd had during the night had been like his dreams of the past weeks: filled with beauty and promise, of stars aligning and the hint of great things to come. But underneath them he'd felt tremors of ache and panic and fear, an undercurrent to his dreams that seemed to have neither cause nor root, but built and built until culminating in stabbing, searing pain—first in his chest, then in his belly, and in his back, then in his loins, again and again and again in his loins, and then in between his eyes. He awoke choking on a scream, unaware of where he was for a few moments, lost in the pain and panic, already losing the details of his dreams but left with the unnerving conviction that someone was trying to tell him something, something of grave importance.

He disentangled himself from the sleeping bodies in the tent without bothering to discover who they were, and struggled to his feet and then out into the brisk morning wind. The Dawn Maiden had risen in the east to announce the beginning of the 21st day of Emperium, and the Plain of Stones stretched out blue and gray beyond their camp. He groggily shook his head, trying to clear it of cobwebs and rust and wool and all the other detritus of too much alcohol so that he could focus on his dreams and try to remember why he'd felt that nagging fear and sudden pain, but all he could think about was how terrible his mouth tasted and how thirsty he was. He stumbled over to a doused campfire and found a canteen and lifted it to his lips, taking large gulps of cold water until his thirst was parched. That cleared his head a bit, but by then the dreams had faded into their usual place in hazy half-memory. His eyes came to focus on a small sparrow perched on a flat stone, watching him with its head tilted quizzically. He cursed and threw the canteen at it, and it flew off with a mocking chirp.

Erim squatted one campfire over, cooking several eggs in olive oil in a skillet, eyeing him with a raised eyebrow. Gilgwyr finally looked over and saw her.

“Where's Stjepan?” he asked, voice scratchy and hoarse. He coughed. “I must needs get to a city!”