The two soldiers exchanged a glance, and Anborn’s smile broadened.
“Perhaps you should ask your ‘grandmother’ the answer to that question,” he said.
“Rhapsody?” Gwydion Navarne’s brows drew together above an incredulous expression. “Rhapsody is a Kinsman?
“Perhaps I neglected to mention that Kinsmen come in all shapes and sizes, lad,” he said, echoing the words she had once used on him in the same incredulous state. “They come in all walks of life—some of them even are Singers, Namers.”
“Women can be Kinsmen?”
“Both the Kinsmen I have just mentioned were women. You think only men are willing to sacrifice for a greater cause?”
“I’d like to have one sacrifice a few hours, a few scrapes on her knees, and a sour taste tomorrow morning for the greater cause of my satisfaction,” muttered Shrike. “Are you finished here, Anborn?”
Gwydion Navarne ran a hand through his mahogany-colored hair. “This has been a curious day,” he murmured. He looked up at Anborn’s man-at-arms. “Are you a Kinsman, Shrike?”
The elderly Cymrian snorted. “When you are one yourself, then you may ask me that,” he snapped. “Not until.”
“Sorry,” Gwydion said, but already Anborn was nodding in the direction of the black stallion. Shrike, obviously relieved to be quitting the conversation, wheeled the chair quickly over to the horse and took Anborn’s canes, strapping them quickly to the saddle again.
“You really should reconsider the longbow, lad,” Anborn said as Shrike prepared him to mount. “A crossbow or stonebow penetrates better and is more flexible in war.”
“Yes, but we are at peace, and have been since the lord and lady ascended the throne,” Gwydion replied, looking at the ground as the man-at-arms lifted the ancient general with his shoulder from the wheeled chair and boosted him like a child into the saddle. “I don’t expect to see war anytime soon, Lord Marshal. For now as an archer I only need to be proficient enough to penetrate a haybutt.”
The general paused in his ascent and stared down at him. “Only a fool thinks so, lad,” he said shortly. “Peacetime is good for but one thing: practicing skills to be ready for the next war. Your father knew this; you can tell by that wall he built. Woe unto your province if you don’t know it as well.”
When the Lord Marshal had been hoisted back onto his mount, he gestured for Gwydion Navarne to bring him the longbow. The youth complied, fascinated, as the Cymrian general closed his eyes, drew the bow easily back to an anchor point well behind his ear, a draw length Gwydion had never seen on the bow before, and fired.
The arrow whistled past him; the wind on which it sailed tousled the young man’s hair, blowing it into his eyes, but not before he saw the arrow slam into the direct center of the hay target, vibrating rigidly in waves he could feel in his teeth from one hundred sixty yards away.
Anborn opened his eyes.
“Did you hear it?” he demanded.
“The wind? Yes. It whistled like a teakettle.”
The general tossed him the bow impatiently.
“That was the arrow.,” he said curtly. “Did you hear the wind*?”
Gwydion Navarne considered, then shook his head.
“No.”
Anborn exhaled sharply. “Pity,” he said as he lifted the reins and Shrike mounted his own horse. “Perhaps you are not meant to, then.”
“Why did you tell me this?” Gwydion Navarne called as they turned to leave.
Anborn came alongside the young duke and leaned down as far as his fused vertebrae would allow him, steadying himself against his high-backed saddle.
“Because soon there will be no more Kinsmen,” he said quietly. “The brotherhood all but perished when the Island was swallowed by the sea. MacQuieth, probably the greatest of all Kinsmen, died soon after that; he led the Second Fleet to safety in Manosse, then waded into the sea, standing vigil for the death of the Island. When the cataclysm came, he walked into waves and drowned. What few remained in this place—Oelendra, Talumnan—all have passed from this life now. One day the legendary Kinsmen will be nothing more than that; a legend. I thought you might want to hear the lore while there was still someone qualified to tell you, lad.” He took up the reins. “I am sorry if I was mistaken. And if I was mistaken, then you, too, are sorry.”
“I am honored that you chose to tell me, Lord Marshal,” Gwydion said hastily as Anborn nodded to Shrike, preparing to depart. “But what about Rhapsody? She is a First Generation Cymrian, and therefore should be unaffected by the passage of time. As long as she lives, won’t there always be Kinsmen?”
Anborn sighed. “Apparently you don’t understand the meaning of the word,” he said, a touch of melancholy in his voice. “One cannot be a Kinsman alone.”
He clicked to his stallion, and cantered off over the glossy fields of highgrass bending in supplication before the late-afternoon sun.
Dressing the Loom
8
Rhapsody raised her hand to her face to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun. The wind was gusting hot, even now, at dawn, the portent of scorching day ahead.
The green fields of Navarne were silent beneath the sun, the dawn win rippling the highgrass in waves beyond the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare, the ancient roadway that spanned the length of Roland from Avonderre to the Manteids. The quiet hills looked in all their vast motion like a green-golden sea, ebbing and flowing with the gusts of the wind. They put her in mind the earlier days, other meadows, another world now long gone, and in the mid of the excitement brought on by the upcoming journey a pang of melancholy struck, resonating for a moment in her soul.
Peace reigned across the Cymrian Alliance, and had for three years now; was both a fragile and a resilient accord, with the occasional flare of temper and disputes, but by and large harmonious. She could see it in the faces of the people of the continent, from the Lirin of the western forest to the delegate from Bethe Corbair, the last Orlandan province before the Bolglands, a relation of a long-held guard. Even Ashe seemed to be relishing the end of hostilities that had gripped the land for decades. This formerly hunted man, who had spent twenty years hiding and alone, now walked the world openly, happily, his face to the sun. That a wyrmkin’s dragon blood, notorious for paranoia, was allowing him the optimism he was experiencing must surely be a sign that all was right with the world.
But there was something in the wind.
She could not really put her finger on what she felt; it was transiton ephemeral as the wandering breeze itself. But a change was coming; she coul feel it. And it made her skin prickle in cold, even beneath the growing heat of the summer sun.
The noise of preparation dimmed; she looked away for a moment from the soldiers making ready the horses, wagons, and supplies that would accompany them on their trek to Yarim and turned from the ocean of billowing gra; westward toward the real sea, one hundred leagues away.
Is that where it’s coming from? she wondered, trying in vain to find the threat in the wind, the change in the air, whatever alteration in scent or heat or density that was causing her melancholy. Attuned as she was to the vibration in the world around her, in the tone of the music that life made, as a Lirin Singer, a Namer, she could seek such changes. But she found nothing.
There had been no dreams, no nightmares that foretold of anything looming, warnings like the ones that had once nightly plagued her sleep. When she was wrapped in Ashe’s arms, the bad dreams stayed at bay; a dragon guarding one’s dreams was the most peaceful means to a night’s rest. But even more, when she was away from him, in Tyrian or journeying back again, there had been no visions, no premonitions, no omen to give credence to this sudden change in the wind.