On the night of the winter solstice Lhel brought Arkoniel into her hut. He had no thought of the Mother or Her rituals as they coupled, but he was hot and eager, and the sacrifice was well made. The Mother granted Lhel visions that night, and for the first time since she’d taken the young wizard to her bed, she was glad that his seed could not fill her belly with a child.
By the time dawn came, she was miles away, leaving not so much as a footprint in the snow for a farewell.
Part IV
The Plenimarans’ first attack was not launched with armies or ships, or with the necromancers and their demons, but with a scattering of children abandoned along the Skalan coast.
48
A farmer driving his cart home after the day’s trading in Ero noticed the little girl crying beside the road. He asked after her people, but she was too shy or too scared to tell him. Judging by her muddy wooden clogs and drab, rough-spun dress, she wasn’t from the city. Perhaps she’d fallen off the back of another farm wagon. He stood up and scanned the road ahead, but it was empty.
He was a kind man and, with night coming on and no help in sight, there seemed nothing to do but carry her home to his wife. The child stopped crying when he lifted her onto the seat, but she was shivering. He wrapped his cloak around her and gave her a bit of the sugar candy he’d bought for his own little daughters.
“We’ll tuck you in between my girls tonight and you’ll be warm as a weevil in porridge,” he promised, and clucked to his horse to walk on.
The little girl sneezed, then happily went on sucking the sugar lump. Born mute, she couldn’t tell the man that she didn’t understand his words. She knew he was kind, though, from the sound of his voice and the way he handled her. He was nothing like the strangers who’d carried her away from her village in a boat full of sad people and abandoned her on the roadside in the night.
She couldn’t thank him for the sugar either, and that made her sad, for it eased the hot, swollen feeling in her throat.
49
The dreary winter dragged on in Ero. Mourning banners for Aliya hung wet and tattered on every house and shop. Inside the Palatine walls everyone from the king to the lowest kitchen scullion wore black or dun and would for a year and a day. And the rains continued to fall.
The palace servants grumbled and burned censers of acrid herbs in the hallways. In the new Companions’ mess, the cooks brewed bitter drysian teas to purify their blood.
“It’s this open winter,” Molay explained, when Tobin and Ki complained of it. “When the ground doesn’t freeze, the foul humors breed thick, especially in the cities. No good will come of it.”
He was soon proven right. The Red and Black Death erupted with renewed fury all along the eastern coast.
Niyrn quietly moved Nalia, now nearly twenty, to Cirna. Thanks to their remote location and lack of shipping trade, the fortress and village had been untouched by disease. The girl and her nurse were dismayed by this grim, lonely new home, but Niryn vowed to visit more often.
By Dostin the deathbirds had burned more than twenty houses in Ero harbor, with their plague-ridden occupants nailed up inside.
But that did not stop the spread of it. A plague house was discovered near the corn dealer’s market, and the contagion spread through the surrounding neighborhood. Seven tenements and a temple of Sakor were burned there, but not before some of the terrified inhabitants escaped to spread the pestilence.
In mid-Dostin the Companions’ favorite theater, the Golden Foot, was struck, and the whole company of actors, along with their dressers, wigmakers, and all the servants were condemned by quarantine.
Tobin and Ki wept at the news. These were the same players who’d entertained them at the keep during the name day hunt; they’d made friends among the actors.
The Foot lay just five streets down from the Palatine gate and the loss was compounded when the king canceled all audiences and sent word forbidding any Companion to leave the palace until further notice. With all entertainments forbidden for the first month of mourning, the boys found themselves trapped.
Master Porion urged them to continue with their training, but Korin was too despondent and often too drunk. Dressed in black, he moped alone in his rooms or walked in the rooftop gardens, hardly answering when anyone spoke to him. The only companionship he seemed able to tolerate was that of his father or Niryn.
The winds shifted at month’s end and the drysians predicted that the shift would cleanse the air. Instead, a new and more devastating sickness struck. By all reports it had started in the countryside, with outbreaks reported from Ylani to Greyhead. In Ero the first cases were seen around the lower markets, and before any ban could be imposed it had already swept up to the citadel.
It was a pox, and began with soreness in the throat, followed within a day by the spread of small black pustules over the torso. If it stopped at the neck, the patient survived, but more often than not the spots spread to the face, then into the eyes, mouth, and finally, the throat. It reached its crisis within five days, at the end of which the sufferer was either dead, or hideously scarred and often blind. The Aurënfaie had seen such illnesses before and within days of the first outbreak there were few ’faie to be found in the city.
Niryn declared this the work of traitorous wizards turned necromancer. The Harriers redoubled their hunt despite more open dissent, especially against the burning of priests. Riots broke out around the Lightbearer’s temples. The king’s soldiers quelled such uprisings without mercy, but the burnings were once more held outside the city walls.
Illior’s crescent began to appear everywhere—scrawled on walls, painted on lintels, even crudely drawn in white trailor’s chalk on the mourning banners. People slipped into the Lightbearer’s temples under cover of dark to make offerings and seek guidance.
Wizards proved strangely immune to the pox, but Iya did not dare risk a visit to Tobin for fear of carrying the infection to him. Instead, she used Arkoniel’s translocation spell to send small ivory amulets inscribed with sigils of Illior to him, Ki, and Tharin.
As the outbreak worsened, piles of pox-ridden corpses mounted in the streets, abandoned by their frightened families at the first sign of illness, or perhaps simply dying where they’d fallen after blindly seeking help that never came. Anyone who even appeared infirm risked being stoned in the streets. The king gave orders for the sick to remain inside under pain of execution by the city guard.
Soon, however, there were few to enforce the order. Strong men—especially soldiers, seemed to be the most susceptible and the least likely to recover, while many who were old and infirm escaped with nothing worse than scars.
As the city sank into despair, Iya and her Wormhole compatriots grew bolder. It was they who drew the first crescents on city walls, and they who whispered to any who would listen: “ ‘So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’ line defends and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated.’ She is coming!”
Twenty-two wizards now lived in secret below the abandoned Aurënfaie shops. Arkoniel’s young shape changer, Eyoli, had joined them there when snow cut him off from Arkoniel’s camp in the mountains.
Cut off from their customary entertainments, the Companions soon grew restless. Tobin went back to his sculpting and gave lessons to any who wanted to learn. Ki showed a knack for it, and Lutha, too. Lynx could draw and paint, and they began to collaborate on designs for breastplates and helmets. Nikides shyly revealed a talent for juggling.