“I do not argue with your vision, lady,” I called up to her, “but that you slaughter children and destroy all that is holy and good to create it. There must be another way. I’ll have no part of you.”
“So be it.” She shrugged and ran after her troops.
“Voushanti, you’ll see to Valen?” said the prince. His voice sounded hollow, as if he walked yet another plane, or as if he had fallen into the sinkhole after his blood. He knelt beside the dark shaft, the scarlet streams of enchantment giving his pale skin a ruddy cast to match the blood marks he’d drawn. Yet Sila’s words prodded me to move. Osriel was not at all like her.
“Lord Prince, don’t do this,” I said, limping across the drifted snow to his side. “Not before you tell me what you felt here this day. Not until you tell me why I sense no more hatred from these lost souls that even a few weeks ago twisted my bowels.”
Despair and grief stared out at me from my king’s bleak face. “Because I bled with them. Because I remembered them, as I promised when I took them captive. Because I knew their names.” He dropped his eyes to the roiling pit. “And now I must command them to go forth and live and die an eternal death for me.”
“Your very nature rebels at this crime,” I said softly. “Let them go.”
“I cannot.”
I knelt beside the bottomless hole that stank of death and corruption. “Think of the day we rode down from Renna, when you walked among your people who had been burnt out by the Harrowers. They had nothing before you arrived, and no more when you left save your care and your promise of hope. With but those few words from you, they stood straight and were able to do for themselves. You have given everything for love of these people and this land, and a lover does not torment his beloved. Use the power that has been given you. Let them go.”
“You have brought me no other answer, Valen.”
“Because it has lived inside you all this time, lord. Behind a mask. Hope is enough.”
He raked his fingers through his dark hair. “I would condemn us all.”
“Then we will die with love,” said a soft voice behind us. “And honor. And faithfulness. But I don’t believe we will die. I watched these Harrowers just now, and they are frightened, too, misled by a glamor—despair masquerading as hope. You are their king, Osriel of Evanore. Save them.”
When Elene knelt beside him, it was almost as if I heard the earth heave another great sigh. Or perhaps that was only me, watching surprise and weariness unmask his love at last.
Chapter 35
Osriel stood beside the sinkhole and called on those he had named to attend him. And so did every one of the gray phantoms in the cloud turn their empty eyes toward him. How he bore the cold weight of their attention, I could not imagine, for when I, by chance, met the gaze of only one, it placed a burden of lead and earth upon my shoulders.
The prince removed his gold armrings and held them in the scarlet light, and the phantoms’ eyes burned red and gold, so one could believe they listened. “Hear my commands and obey,” he cried. “I charge you, by the bond I hold, find all who bear arms on this field of woe—your brothers in war, whole or wounded—and speak to each soul what you know of death and life. And at the ending, give this message: A new reign of law and justice shall come to Navronne with this new year. Do this, and I count your service to me ended. Duty done, make your way through the world as you will and find those whom you would comfort at your parting from earthly life, and when the sun touches the sky, be gone to your proper fate. Perficiimus.”
The gray phantoms vanished from behind the cloud warriors, and an unsettling energy infused the air and land, like the building tensions of a thunderstorm. All the anger and confusion I had felt here was turned to eagerness. To hunting. Never had I been so glad I did not bear a blade. I did not want to hear what they would speak. I’d seen and heard enough of death and life.
Voushanti knelt at Osriel’s feet and spoke what none of us could hear. Osriel held out his hand. Voushanti kissed it, then handed over his sword and ax. And then the mardane turned to me, expressionless. I nodded, and he walked out of the pit and into the night. I did not think we would see him ever again.
Osriel knelt at the pit, his eyes closed as if he could hear his messengers. Elene kept vigil with him, her hand upon his shoulder. Philo formed up his three comrades at the foot of the cart track, weapons laid on the ground at their feet. The light of the votive vessels dimmed and faded. And so we awaited the end of the world.
Accounts differ about what happened on that winter solstice. Some say Iero’s angels visited the homes of the dead all over the kingdom and brought them heaven’s solace, while the Adversary himself visited wrath upon Sila Diaglou’s legions, showing them the paths of hell and sending them home repentant.
Some say the Danae brought forth Eodward’s Pretender, another young prince fostered in Danae realms. The guardians left him in the place of Osriel the Bastard, who had made one too many bargains with Magrog the Tormentor and was carried off to the netherworld. That this Pretender named himself Osriel was only to avoid the tricky business of Eodward’s will. Two copies of that document came to light with the new year, both proclaiming Eodward’s youngest son King of Navronne. All agreed that the first day of that winter dawned with a hope Navronne had not felt in living memory.
I know only what I saw.
When Osriel turned away from his enchantments, exhausted and at peace, Elene placed his hand upon her belly and whispered in his ear. It was the right time, when life displayed its truest mingling of joy and grief. For, of course, he had promised his firstborn to the Danae, and he could not break such fragile alliance as might come from this night’s work. They clung to each other for a while; then he donned his armor and became Navronne’s king, and Elene donned her fairest courage and became Navronne’s queen.
I saw no more than that. Saverian found me slumped in the corner of the grotto, trying to find my way back to Aeginea, and offered to sew up the great hole in me instead. Once assured that the blood soaking her garments was soldiers’ blood, not hers, I mumbled that my wound would surely heal of itself, and that her stitches would make my fine sea grass look like brambles, and that I had urgent matters to attend if I could just remember what they were. But indeed I came near collapsing on her boots from the great gouts of blood that would not stop oozing, though I felt shamed when I considered how Osriel had bled near a sun’s turning and was yet spinning out enchantments and traipsing off to meet with his brother Bayard.
Evidently the prince persuaded Bayard to round up the hardened elements of the Harrower legions and Perryn’s men, while Renna’s household garrison and the survivors of Boedec’s and Zurina’s legions gathered the Evanori dead for proper rites on the next day. After what Bayard’s men had seen happening in the sky over Dashon Ra that night, they were quite compliant. Many had been visited by the spirits of friends or brothers and had come to believe that Osriel had sent these spirits as a warning and a mercy to keep faith—as, indeed, he had. But I didn’t see any of that. Saverian had taken me in hand.
“I must go back,” I said thickly. It was very awkward after the physician had just spent most of an hour with her hands in my blood and flesh, and had given me some lovely potion to dull the wicked fire in my side.
“I suppose the ceilings are coming down on you again,” she said, emptying yet another basin of bloody water down her drainpipe.
“Not too awful as yet. No, it’s Kol.” As sense returned, the remembrance of Tuari’s impending judgment had me frantic.