She saw herself abruptly in his brain; he showed her herself as he saw her: pale as pure light, her hair as white as his, yet blown by the wind into a tinsel of ice.
“Anici—” she said. “But there is another—”
“No longer,” he said. “Amrek, the Black King, has caused both their deaths.”
“You must hate him a great deal,” she whispered.
“I pity him.”
She heard the terrible power behind his voice, the thing so invincible that it could pity the enemy it would destroy.
“Did you call the wind?” she asked him.
“No. I am not a magician of Shansar.”
“But the wind came.”
“Yes, Sulvian. It came.”
“Jarred . . .” she said. “By the laws of the cities, you’ve challenged his rule as King.”
He said nothing.
Beyond the windows, the wind fell suddenly quiet. The horn of a gold moon pierced the tangled clouds.
In Tarabann of the Rock the wind came funneling from the southwest. Priests, as they stood on the high prayer-towers of Ashkar—raised up and built to resemble striking serpents—saw the wind coming like a long-tailed cloud, itself a python made of dust and storm.
It smote on Tarabann for two days and a night between. That night’s moon was dark blue as sapphire, the days’ sun the color of old blood. The waves reared up and flooded the salty flats that stretched out two miles from the Rock to the sea. Ships were wrecked and roofs blown off. The priests had different prayers to attend to. They smoked their incense and laid bare their minds, and became troubled. On the day after the wind dropped, the High Priest of Ashkar of the Rock came to Klar.
“It seems, lord, there is a new King in Vathcri.”
Klar, who was the King of Tarabann, who had fought at his father’s side in the last battle with Vathcri five years before, put down his gilded book.
“A new King, you say? What’s become of the young pup, Jarred?”
“He lives, King. You must understand that thought and things of the mind are as mist—we comprehend as best we may—”
“So you fumble at your tasks. I understand very well.”
“Indeed, King, you do not. There is a—power—in Vathcri. I have no other means to explain what I have felt. A vast power. Greater than the King’s. Not, I would judge, the power of a man. It has to do with the wind, yet is dissociated from the wind.”
“Riddles,” Klar snapped, snapping, too, the clasps of his book.
“Once gods walked on earth, King. So our fables tell us. Once She talked with men, like a kind sister.”
“You’re trying to say there’s a god walking about in Vathcri?”
“I would not pledge myself so far, lord, as to say such a thing.”
Klar was wary of the magic of the priests. He was two things: one was mostly merchant, the other all soldier, and neither had time for mysticism. The inner tongue had been dead in him since his brother—the only man with whom he could so speak—fell in the siege of a Vathcrian town. Nevertheless, he respected the priests, though he did not like their business to overlap into his own forthright and uncomplex world.
“Very well, sir,” he said, “I’ll send people to Vathcri. We’ll see what’s up, eh, old priest? Don’t fret. You did well to tell me.”
But Klar’s men were only away two days. On the third day they returned, and with them the six Vathcrians they had met on the road. They had a curious look about them, these Vathcrians. Klar could not gauge it. They brought a message not from the king, Jarred, though it bore his seal. Klar read it and looked up amazed.
“There is a man here, commits himself to paper, calls me brother in the manner of a king and bids me come inland to assembly in the Place of Kings at Pellea.”
“King,” the chief Vathcrian said, “that is the old place of assembly, used by our ancestors.”
“So it is, precisely,” Klar said, “but our ancestors, and not since. The last meeting there was a hundred, a hundred and fifty years past. By Ashkar! And is the rest of this correct: I must decide, along with the other Kings, whether or not to go to the aid of this Lowland country, never before heard of or seen?”
“Yes, King. Lord Jarred has sent men also to Vardath, and up into Shansar.”
“By Ashkar. I thought it was this Raldnor sent you, not Jarred.”
“They’re bound as brothers,” the Vathcrian said. “Raldnor also is royal, son of a High King and a priestess.” He did not look abashed, but rather, proud.
“Well, well,” Klar said. “Well, well.”
To blue-walled Vardath the wind came only for a night, stirring up the fishing boats on her broad river. A tree fell in the King’s garden. It had been planted at the hour of his birth, and the omen alarmed him. His wife, Ezlian, High Priestess of the Vardish Ashkar, went herself to the goddess, and returned to him in the dawn, pale, but smiling in a certain way she had.
“Rest easy, Sorm my husband. The omen was not your death.”
“What then, for Ashkar’s sake?”
“There’s change coming. The wind brought it. We must neither resist nor sorrow; both are superfluous and quite futile.”
“Change for the worse?”
“Simply change,” she said and kissed his face.
Sorm loved his wife and trusted her. He was neither weak nor unmasculine, yet in things spiritual, he leaned on her. From a child she had possessed aptitude and could speak within to most who were willing. In adolescence she had gone to live a year with the forest people, since when she had eaten no meat and shown particular cleverness in healing, both physical and of the mind. He himself had seen her somehow communing with a lion in the yellow hills above Vardath, while drawn knife in hand he trembled in every limb with terror for her. The snakes in the temple pit she called her children, and they wound like bracelets round her wrists and throat, and snuggled in her hair.
The Vathcrian riders came ten days after the tree fell.
Sorm asked, as others had similarly been moved to ask: “Who is this man?”
Ezlian seemed puzzled, searching inside herself. Presently she said: “There is a Vardish fable of a man born of a serpent, a hero. His name was Raldanash. He had dark skin, pale hair. The legend says his eyes were like Her eyes.”
“Yes, priestess,” the Vathcrian said, using the title generally considered to be more important than queen, “this man is dark, and very fair. His eyes burn.”
“Is he then some sort of god?” Sorm said, his mouth dry as ash.
“We must go to Pellea and find out,” said Ezlian. Then smiling in her way, she added: “But naturally, it’s as my lord wishes.”
In Shansar no wind came.
Mountains divided it from the fertile plains and forests of the south, and mountains thrust up inside it. There was a great deal of water in Shansar; it was a land of rivers and lakes and marsh, with the great rock stacks and steeples jutting in marching lines across it, like jagged stepping stones discarded by giants. It had a hundred or more outlets to the sea. Jorahan, the Vathcrian scholar, who had lived out his old age in a little-known town of the south, had left maps to show these mostly unused ways. There were many kings in Shansar and many tribes. They built ships of necessity. Sometimes they sailed around the coasts to pirate in the south. They worshiped magic, but with them also only their holy men spoke within—or lovers, or families. They had a goddess. Her name was Ashara. She had a fish’s tail, and her arms were eight white cilia such as they occasionally discovered on lake creatures.
Three Vathcrians, one of whom was a guide, rode into the mountains, crossed an ancient pass, came down into Shansar and bartered for a long narrow boat. There was a fourth man with them, not a Vathcrian, a tall man with white hair. They deferred to him as to a king, but he had come to be his own messenger in these lands that answered to no call from the south. There was a hosting place here, too; Jorahan had marked it on his maps. It also had been unused for centuries; only tradition and superstition had seen to its upkeep.