Wolf's Blood (61 page)

“Finally, since the curse did not strike each and all at once—beginning instead with the strongest, and moving to the less powerful—there was ample opportunity for the true nature of querinalo to be understood. That the sorcerers chose to persist in their adherence to magic—and to the pattern of domination and abuse that had come with it—sealed their fate. Those with less power might have survived, without magic, true, but alive.”

Firekeeper, considering the general collapse of human society in both the Old World and the New, thought that Virim and his followers had been rather idealistic if they had believed that the sorcerers would relinquish what little hope they had of turning back chaos.

She said nothing, though. Bruck’s feet had been treated, and Elation had brought a brace of wood fowl for the pot. As the wolf-woman began kindling a fire, she asked Bruck, “So is this blood magic and is this dream magic. What other magic is there?”

Bruck had reached that point of overtiredness where words came more easily than sleep. He spoke in great detail about various magical rites and traditions, of magic that could be used to commune with spirits that lived within the elements, of magic that was focused on potions or charms, of magic intimately tied to elaborate rituals or paintings.

However, no matter the type, each still required a spark of magical talent within the one who would learn it, else the rituals would not work.

“Effort is not enough,” Bruck said. “Just as a deaf man cannot hear for wishing to do so or a blind man see even if he props his eyelids open with fingertips, so no matter how great the desire, one who is born without the gift for magic cannot simply follow the forms and expect them to work.”

Another thing Firekeeper gathered was that all of these forms could be duplicated, often with greater ease and speed, by being hybridized with blood magic.

“That is why in the end blood magic came to dominate,” Bruck explained.

He was yawning now, food and rest and a flood of talk having brought him around to true exhaustion.

Firekeeper felt that pressing him further would yield no good results. Instead, she asked her questions less frequently, watching the man fade into drowsiness and then into deep sleep.

She piled some timbers over the entry to the cave, and Elation perched nearby, eager as the human for some rest.

When Bruck was locked firmly away, Blind Seer came and nudged Firekeeper.

“Run with me, dear heart?”

“Gladly,” she replied.

Together they let the night take them and give them for a few hours more the illusion that they were just wolves, and all the world a simple hunt.

“LET ME TRY it on, Daddy! Let me!”

Four-year-old Neysa bounced from foot to foot, her hands raised toward the helmet Bryessidan had just lifted from his own head.

Indulgently, the king lowered the helmet over the little girl’s head. Even with the new padding inside, it was so capacious that it covered her eyes. Nonetheless, the girl was ecstatic. Maybe she had imbibed something of the warrior spirit of her mother’s people along with Gidji’s milk.

“Do I look mean?” Neysa asked, tilting her head back so she could peer out through the eye slits. “Do I look fierce?”

Her voice came out muffled. but her enthusiasm was undimmed.

“I think she looks stupid,” five-year-old Stave said sulkily.

“Don’t let Neysa hear you say that,” Gidji said. “She’s quite likely to kick you. In any case, why quarrel when your father must leave us so soon?”

Stave looked unhappy, but nodded. The young prince had lost all his enthusiasm for the upcoming campaign when he had learned that his wartime duties included attending a series of formal events his father and mother were both too busy to attend.

His sister, Junal, the firstborn and presumed by most to be the heir apparent to the throne, had taken her similar duties much more seriously, but then she’d been serious ever since Gidji and Bryessidan had explained to her a moonspan before something of the risks Bryessidan would be taking, and what it might mean to her own future.

Neysa was struggling to remove the heavy helmet and Bryessidan assisted her.

“Did I look like a terrifying warrior?” Neysa asked.

“You looked terrifying,” Bryessidan said tactfully. “But then making the wearer look terrifying is one of the functions this armor was created to serve.”

“Me next! Me next!” chirruped two-year-old Vahon.

Bryessidan shook his head. “It’s a bit heavy for you, Vah.”

Vahon began to scream in the manner of toddlers no matter how royal when thwarted and Gidji looked at him sternly.

“That’s no way for a prince to behave when a king expresses his will. Behave yourself, Vahon!”

Vahon was so surprised at hearing himself spoken of as a prince by his mother—for usually Gidji felt that such reminders only gave children airs—that he stopped in midscreech.

“May I hold it?” asked Junal. “I want to look at it.”

“Hold it where the others can see,” Bryessidan said, extending it to her.

He imagined the armsman who had spent a good deal of time polishing the helmet after Bryessidan had worn it to practice wincing at the fingerprints on the gleaming brass and silver. Never mind, in a very short time they would be fortunate if fingerprints were all that marred the surface.

Junal reached one hand to take the helmet and Bryessidan frowned.

“Use two hands. I wasn’t joking when I said it was heavy. When I wear it, my shoulders take part of the weight, but still it’s not a light hat.”

Junal accepted the helmet and studied it gravely.

“It looks different from the other soldiers’ helmets,” she said. “Is that because it’s a king’s helmet?”

“In part,” Bryessidan said. “In part it’s because it was a gift from the Alkya immigrants to the governor of the Mires in the days before the Plague.”

Stave sought to redeem himself for his earlier sulk by displaying that he knew his lessons.

“The Alkya were the people who came here from halfway across the world to study our herbs and plants. A lot of them came because they were going to try a whole new type of farming there. Then when the Plague came, they were stranded. That’s why people of the Mires—and maybe a few in Azure Towers—look different from the other Pellanders.”

“Very good,” Bryessidan said. “More than one of our ancestors came from that blending. Many of the Alkya had been in the Mires long enough to marry and start families, even before the Plague. That’s why they blended so easily into our culture.”

“The Mires,” Gidji said, “has always been very accepting of different peoples and different gifts. I hadn’t really considered that before. No wonder your father was prepared to welcome the Once Dead and Twice Dead into his service.”

“The Mires,” Bryessidan said, “have much to offer other nations. My father’s enthusiasm for what we had to share led him astray, but while I see his means were flawed, I do not necessarily disagree with his goals.”

Junal was still absorbed in the helmet, and now she glanced between it and the armor. The latter waited on its stand, every bit of trim polished. More importantly, the screws, hinges, straps, and suchlike had all been replaced, so the armor was as good as new.

“Why didn’t they make the armor look like a person? Why did they make it look like a monster? Did they want to frighten people?”

“That was part of the reason,” Bryessidan said. “But that isn’t just any monster now, is it?”

Stave interrupted before his more methodical sister could reply. “It’s not! It’s a dragon, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Today, dragons only exist in stories, but in the old days they were real. Kings rode on their backs when they went to war.”

Bryessidan stared at the armor, wondering if that long-ago governor had ever ridden a dragon while wearing the armor.

“So they didn’t just want to look frightening,” Junal said thoughtfully. “I think they wanted to make sure that people were scared of them, not just of their animals. Could that be right?”

“Very right,” Bryessidan said. “You’ve been thinking a lot, haven’t you?”

She nodded, her lips tight, her eyes suddenly overflowing with tears.

“Don’t go to war, Daddy! People don’t need to be afraid of you. You can just stay here and be king like before. You didn’t need people to be afraid of you then.”

Bryessidan gathered Junal onto his lap, wondering just when she had started losing baby fat and instead become this coltish creature, all arms and legs and knees. Neysa had stopped bouncing, and even Vahon was suddenly solemn, arrested by the sight of their big sister in tears.

Bryessidan started to look to Gidji for help, but realized that in this his wife could be no help. This was a matter for the king of the Mires and those who would be his heirs, those who would reign over the empire he dreamed of establishing.

“Junal,” he said. keeping his words simple, but talking to her as he would to another adult, “the reality is, I need people to fear me. Kings can’t be kings if people don’t fear them.”

“The Mires’ folks don’t fear you,” Junal said. “I don’t believe it. They love you.”

“I’d like to think that I have earned that love,” Bryessidan said, “but their love isn’t enough. Even if that love would make every one of them fight and die to preserve me and to preserve the Mires over which I rule, that love wouldn’t make other rulers love me. It might even make them hate me or fear me.

“And I’m going to be really honest with you, because someday you or one of the others is going to be king or queen after me. Lots of those who show a king or queen or prince or princess a smiling face don’t do so from love. They do it from fear or greed or even from pleasure that they are in the presence of someone important.

“Even those who really do love me as their king love other people for some more personal reason. They would fight for me but if their mother or father or children were threatened, then they might decide to go and light to protect them instead. That’s one of the reasons they need to fear me. They need to be just a little afraid of what I might do if they disobeyed. Do you understand?”

Four heads nodded, and even little Vahon, a beat behind the rest, seemed to understand.

“It’s worse with the kingdoms near to us. Kingdoms are like greedy children. always wanting what someone else has. The Mires has a lot, once you get to know her. She has intelligent, well-trained people, the plants in our wetlands, even good ports.”

“And a gate,” Junal said.

“And a gate,” Bryessidan agreed, “and Once Dead who can make the gate work. Those Once Dead are another resource in which we have an advantage over other lands. Because my father welcomed them here, even when the Reprieve came, many remained with us rather than returning to their homelands or emigrating to the Nexus Islands.”

“Do our Once Dead make people hate us?” Stave asked. “I know that lots of people are afraid of them. I was, when I was little.”

“Fear us, certainly. Some probably hate us, because hate and fear can be close, just like love and fear.”

“Or love and hate,” Gidji said softly. “Bry, isn’t this too much?”

“I’m going off to war in not very many more days,” Bryessidan said, looking to where waning Lion Moon showed through the window. “If I am going to speak of these matters, perhaps now is the only time I’ll have.”

“Don’t start thinking that way!” Gidji snapped. “You will win, and you will come home, and honors will be heaped upon your head in this land and in many others.”

“I will do my best to earn those honors,” Bryessidan said, “but I think the children also need to understand that even if I did not desire those honors, even if I decided that we of the Mires could do without a gate, even if I wanted to turn the days back to before those first emissaries arrived, I cannot. Choices have been made, choices that have shown the Kingdom of the Mires is strong and willing to fight. If I backed down now, they would decide I was weak, that I was afraid, and as soon as they finished with the Nexus Islands—as they will certainly finish—then they would come for us.

“The people of the Mires are brave—none braver—but we could not survive invasion. We only survived the last war intact as a kingdom because the Once Dead made that a provision of their treaty. Whatever exactly has happened in the Nexus Islands we do not know, but whatever caused the Nexans to break their treaty with us, the result for the Mires is the same. Once again, perhaps as never before, we are vulnerable. I cannot turn back, because if I did within a few years there would be no Kingdom of the Mires any longer, just a gathering of low, wet lands whose people can claim an interesting and colorful heritage.”

He concluded with a defiant glance at Gidji, but she no longer seemed angry that he was speaking so seriously. Instead, she was nodding agreement, rocking Vahon back and forth on her lap.

Junal pressed her head against Bryessidan’s breastbone. He could feel her shudder as he stroked her hair. He wished he could reassure her that he would win, that he would always come back, that she would be queen only when she was ready, but he knew if he said those words he would be speaking lies.

Veztressidan had never weakened his son with the myth that his father was invincible. As much as Bryessidan might have wished for that reassurance during those long nights when he stared out into the darkness, wondering if the clattering hoofbeats he could hear in the courtyard below brought some routine bulletin or news that would change him from prince to king, he also knew that when the time had come, the lack of lies had made him ready to be a king.

“So,” he said, setting Junal on her feet and carrying the helmet to join the armor on the stand, “you see why I will wear armor that inspires fear—not because I want to be feared for myself, but because fear of the King of the Mires will protect the Mires, will protect those I love …”

“I am sure the armor will protect you, too, Daddy,” Junal said. She looked up at the polished silver and brass thoughtfully. “It’s really very frightening armor. Certainly, it will protect you. I wonder if someday I will need to wear it to protect me, too.”