Petronus
Petronus left in the early hours while the sky was dark and the stars and moon were veiled lightly by wisps of clouds. The sun was red and low over the Keeper’s Wall when he paused and looked down the hill to the snow-blanketed ruins of Windwir. He traveled lightly with a horse and pack, both marked with the crest of the Ninefold Forest.
He’d met with Rudolfo briefly that afternoon, but the brooding Gypsy King had obviously been scattered and spread thin by the challenges before him. They’d talked briefly in private, and when Rudolfo had suggested secreting him away in the forest, Petronus had shaken his head and pressed for the Gypsy King to give him what he needed to quietly slip out of the Named Lands. Reluctantly, he’d called for his hostler and for a supply captain who could write out letters of credit and introduction for him.
Rudolfo had made a great effort, Petronus thought, not to look at the ragged scar. But in the end he had stared, and wonder had touched his eyes. Petronus frowned at the memory of it.
A realization struck him as he sat atop his horse looking down at Windwir and the camps around it. I may never see this place again. It grieved a part of him, but there was another part that felt relief. This was his first time back since the grave-digging. Walking that plain, seeing the rubble buried in snow and the raised ground of the trenches they’d filled with Windwir’s blackened bones was a cold blade that cut him deeply.
Below, he saw a figure by the side of the river just north of camp. From his vantage point, he could not tell who it was, but it looked to be a woman. She removed her clothing and waded out into the cold waters, dunking herself beneath them and scrubbing hurriedly.
His hand moved absently to his heart, feeling the raised skin of scar tissue there. I wish I could cleanse this from me.
But he couldn’t. Now, he carried a mark. A token, with the scar upon his throat, to remind him that his life had been taken and given back to him in a greater reckoning than he could have ever known. An autograph upon someone’s dark handiwork. A living miracle bearing witness to the power of the Wizard Kings.
He left now with only those marks and a few items of clothing. And it hearkened him back to another day he had slipped away alone. On the day he’d killed Sethbert and had then seen Vlad Li Tam’s evidence of the threat against Windwir, he’d ridden out from the Seventh Forest Manor to return to his shack on Caldus Bay and begin his work gathering up what data he could.
But now, he left with no work to drive him forward, and perhaps that was a good thing. Until Windwir’s pyre, he’d lived quietly for thirty years, marking his time by the fullness of his nets and the companionship of the kind-hearted people who kept his secret and welcomed home their prodigal Pope.
Maybe quiet would come to him again. He hoped so. But already, his mind spun. Why had he been brought back? What was the significance of Rudolfo’s heir? Who was this Crimson Empress, and could she be the external threat he’d been convinced they faced? He thought it likely that she was.
In the moments before administering her blood magick upon him, the Machtvolk Queen had added his own blood to the phial, according to Rudolfo. He’d certainly studied what little of the alchemy of blood magick they understood, but there were reasons why those magicks and spells, bargained for in the Beneath Places with the ghosts of long-dead gods, were forbidden. They were songs crafted out of the blood of others.
And over the years, he’d seen the parchments-fragments of this spell or that-but he had never seen a blood magick that could reverse death.
Petronus shook his head and saw now that the girl below was dressing hastily upon the shore. He turned his horse east and left her to her privacy.
He would take his time riding for the Keeper’s Gate, and when he arrived he would show the Gypsy Scouts stationed there the letter that authorized him entry. Then, he would go alone into that place and make what home for himself he could.
But as he rode east, a handful of horses separated from a copse of evergreens, and he recognized a gray standard he’d not expected to see.
When the riders approached, Grymlis rode at the head of them. Behind him, resplendent in the uniform of the Gray Guard of P’Andro Whym, rode five men he recognized and three he did not. The silver buttons upon their jackets cast back the red light of the rising sun, and a sudden rising breeze caught the edges of their standard and unfurled the crest of Windwir onto the morning air.
“Father,” Grymlis said, saluting when they were within earshot.
Petronus sighed. “I thought I ordered you back to the Ninefold Forest, into Rudolfo’s service?”
Grymlis smiled. “You did, Father.”
Petronus looked over the men. The new ones were younger and had the look of the Delta upon them. “You’ve no doubt heard about my present situation.”
Grymlis nodded. “I have,” he said. “And welcome back.”
Yes. He’d paid for his crimes with his life and then had his life handed back to him. He’d been made a spectacle, part of a story that would be told from town to town, city to city, in hushed tones and wonder, lending credence to the Y’Zirite Gospel. More than that, he also suspected he’d been brought back to force Jin Li Tam into a corner, and that frightened him more deeply than even his own return from the dead. Seeing the power of the Y’Zirites’ blood magicks manifested by Petronus’s resurrection, she had begged an ancient foe for the life of her child and it had been granted.
It was the beginning, he feared, of greater darkness in the land of his birth and first life.
Still, circumstances demanded that he leave and do quietly what could be done offstage and away from the eyes of the north. He realized then that Grymlis was speaking, and he forced his attention back to the old Gray Guard captain.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “My mind wandered.”
“Understandable,” Grymlis said. “I was telling you that there are others, as well, who will meet us at the Keeper’s Gate.”
Petronus felt his eyebrows furrow. “Others?”
“Androfrancines are no longer welcome here,” Grymlis said. “They killed the few that remained in the Summer Papal Palace. Caravans en route to Rudolfo’s forests have been attacked-again, Androfrancines massacred and left unburied for the crows. The only place untouched has been the Ninefold Forest, but some of us believe it’s only a matter of time before that changes. And now, the Gypsies owe a debt to these Marsher heretics.” He shifted in the saddle. “I’ve word out of our exodus; we’ll wait a week at the Keeper’s Gate for any others who would join us.”
At one time in his life, Petronus would have been angry at the disobedience of his orders, at the assumptions and actions being taken by the man before him. But the events of recent weeks had shown him that life was a nonmetrical song at times, one that went where it needed to for the melody without respect for the rhythm of history and tradition. Truly a canticle that one danced to as best one could. He would trust Grymlis to dance it, and he would not isolate himself from those who chose exile with their fallen father over a hidden life in a land that had turned on them so utterly in such a short time. Rudolfo’s kindness notwithstanding, he saw a day coming when no Androfrancine would be suffered to live in the Named Lands. And more than continuing, he feared the pieces had been set to this board in such a way that the Y’Zirite resurgence would not just survive but thrive in the rich soil of desolation prepared for it.
Finally, he nodded to Grymlis. “Then we will wait there for them.” He looked to the other men. “We will carve a home in the Churning Wastes, and we will offer ourselves to Rudolfo as his eyes and ears in that place.”
And we will find a way to undermine those tangled and bloody roots that threaten to choke our light.