Alisaar, won by Shansar in the Lowland War, had been credited an ally to this Storm Lord, son of the man who had first led Shansar into Vis. Now Alisaar had proclaimed herself. Neutral. The formal message had not yet come, but it would come. The Dortharians who brought the story in advance gave it in their own words.
“It seems Kesarh made secret overtures on first gaining the Karmian throne. He’s half Shansar himself though he shows it little enough. Shansarian Alisaar is a provisional ally with Shansarian Karmiss. Now Kesarh seems to favor Free Zakoris. Alisaar can’t move. She has Vardish Zakoris next door, the Middle Lands over the Inner Sea, Free Zakoris able to get at her on the other side, and Kesarh sending presents and swearing undying love—and most of that from Lan which he’s annexed.”
“Alisaar will fight, my lord, but only for herself. Whoever moves up on her will be shown violence. That means Vardish Zakoris and Free Zakoris alike. Or Dorthar.”
The news, though bitter, was not quite astounding. Already the majority of Shansarian officers had resigned their commands throughout all Vis.
Warden Vencrek, speaking to the mixed council of Anackyra, exposed the threat that underlay Alisaar’s dilemma and resolve.
“We,” said Vencrek, using the Vis tongue, but laced by many now-popular phrases from his birthplace of Vathcri, “have sent our messengers to the Sister Continent. It appears we shall be blushing before the snow is done. I’m sure you’re aware, gentlemen, that if Kesarh had the sense to keep fresh an alliance with Shansarian Alisaar, he will have done the same by Shansar itself.” And the council muttered, although it had known to a man what was coming. “If Karmiss, who still sends us words of friendship—that we discredit—” said Vencrek relentlessly, “if Karmiss, I say, has retained a treaty with Shansar-over-the-water, and we can assume she has, then Shansar must take Kesarh’s part. Kesarh leans to Free Zakoris, the Black Leopard, the sworn enemy of Dorthar. In that case, the second continent now stands thus: Shansar becomes the foe of the Storm Lord’s people of Vathcri, and of Vardath who holds the kingdom of Old Zakoris in Vis. At the least, Shansar will refuse to aid her original ally, Dorthar. At worst, Shansar must declare war on Dorthar, and on Vardish Zakoris. And so in turn on Vathcri and Vardath themselves. And Tarabann, into the bargain. With the crisis as it exists, Vardians or Vathcrians would themselves be imbeciles to send troops here and leave their own ground unprotected. We can therefore expect no support from the second continent, gentlemen. All we can expect is a possible escalation of the war, once it begins, and the decimation of the southern Homeland, even as Vis herself is ravaged.
“Kesarh, by his fiendish maneuvers and his lack of integrity, has set the whole world on its ear.”
In the aftermath of this speech, the cries of outrage died and left them empty.
Here was chaos to rival and surpass that of any former conflict. And now, there would be nowhere for any of them to run. Rich and poor, serf and master, they would all be caught in it.
The foundations were giving way. Rarmon had betrayed them to Free Zakoris. Raldanash sat before them like a cool white stone.
Where were the heroes now?
Into the small room the dusk came crowding, full of shadows and unheard sounds. Beyond the high window the sweep of the uplands showed above the city, and on the deepening sky the mountains built of the sky.
You are not ours, the mountains called faintly to him, no son of our mornings; conceived in other shade. We will not conceal you, nor keep you safe.
Raldanash, sensitive to the alien contour and expression of this land, had long ago ridden its hills, sought out Koramvis, stared. Now he stared inwards, away from Dorthar, and away from Vis.
He was remembering Vathcri-over-the-ocean, her lenient winter season of winds but rarely if ever of snow, her hot months when the valleys flamed golden with grain. He saw the red-walled city, a tiara of towers almost ninety feet above the plain, and the red-walled palace. And there at the center of the cameo of walls and valleys and dark trees, his white mother, whose name had been Sulvian, while she lived.
Sulvian was beautiful. She and he were alike in that, and, in that continent of snowlessness, alike in the snow-color of their hair. As he grew, he believed that they had only each other. She had had a brother she loved, an uncle who could have served as a father to him, but Uncle Jarred had gone with Raldnor to the War, and perished in a burning sea, leaving no trace, nothing to mourn save recollection. And his actual father, Raldnor, Elect of the Goddess, he had not come back, nor been looked for. Sulvian had always comprehended it a vain thought, that she might behold her husband once more. She had promised Raldanash that he would see Raldnor, in her place.
When it began to filter to Vathcri after the War, the word of Raldnor’s disappearance, metamorphosis, transcension, Sulvian had set it aside. He would return to Dorthar. He had been at such pains to have Dorthar—of course he would return. Raldanash had been about five or six when he noticed her trust in this supposition had undergone a change. She commenced, very slowly, to wean her son from the wish she had herself implanted in him, and which they had shared, that one day, when he must leave his home and all he knew and sail to the foreign kingdom to be its heir, then Raldnor his father would await him, and welcome him. She had been used to say, judging his apprehension though he did not voice it, “You won’t be alone, with your father beside you.” But his father would not be beside him after all.
Raldanash, though a child, perceived she was more wounded by this than he himself. She had always understood she had been used—the alliance, the seal of the male child. She had loved Raldnor but without requital. She had turned to love her child instead. But, of course, the child also was a temporary solace. In early adolescence he would be sent for.
He thought of his mother now, as he saw her on the very evening he had gone away.
His heart had been wrung with trepidation and the first-blood of severance. He was just a boy. She, her luster already hollowing, her pale hair wound with gems, stood framed by the gems of stars standing in the sky beyond the colonnade.
“I shall send for you,” he said, trying, for he was so young, to be older.
She smiled.
“I’m always with you,” she said, “there or here, or anywhere.”
It was not until days later on the ship, the land sucked away like an indrawn sable breath, that he felt the hidden omen of her words, and knew she would soon die. He would have wrenched the ship about if he could. But already the discipline of his position, and those other elemental disciplines inherent in him, had taught him how to resist and how to endure. So, he bore it, all the way to Vis. He bore it through the arrival alone, the pomp, the earth tremor that rendered him its terrible homage. Through the ceaseless labor to achieve what was asked for, everything novel and to be learned and no harbor anywhere and no rest, for even asleep he dreamed the worries of his state, how he was to rule, the man he must become. He bore it, too, when they brought him the fact of Sulvian’s death, and laid it softly as a flower at his fourteen-year-old feet, before upward of fifty bystanders.
His court judged him cold, aloof and soulless. His dignity and dry eyes insulted the tenets of Vis. Women keened for their dead. Funeral processions were frantic. This youthful outlander, he should at least have put his hand to his brow, fumbled his sentence of acknowledgment. But Raldanash had no outward theater save his looks. He was stabbed in the mind, and bleeding, but none of them were allowed to observe it.
Cold King. Lowlander. Amanackire.
In his way, he had loved the idea of his father, too, Raldnor, the waking sunrise, the messiah. And to this hour he could still vividly recapture Sulvian’s face and voice, her whole demeanor, as she spoke of Raldnor to their son. To lose such a father totally, and to watch Sulvian’s loss over and over in reverie, these things did their work upon Raldanash, even if never seen to do it.