From the battlements sounded the low, heavy tones of a sonnivar, the hooked horn that stretched taller than me when stood on end and that rang so deep and so true its call could be heard for vast distances through the mountains and vales, guiding Evanore’s warriors home. Evanori claimed the timbre of each warlord’s sonnivar unique, so that a fog-blind warrior could identify which fortress he approached from the sonnivar greeting alone.
A party of horsemen rode over the steep crest of the valley road and cantered up the gentler slope to the gates. Gruff voices carried across the dark hillside, shouting challenges and orders until the portcullis clanked and rumbled open and the party rode through.
“Pull up your hood,” said Saverian softly, as if fearing that we, too, might be heard from afar. “And carry this.” She shoved her leather bag into my hands. I hefted the heavy little bag onto my back, as our path joined the trampled roadway to the gates.
“The password, Saverian,” said a slab-sided warrior standing to one side of the sizable detachment manning the gate tower and portcullis. “Even for you this night. And identify your friend.”
“Pustules,” said the physician. She stepped up close to him, as the sonnivar boomed again from above our heads. “Is your wife pleased with your renewed affections, Dreogan? Perhaps I need to reexamine your little—”
“Pass!” bellowed the guard. A snickering youth waited behind an iron wicket set into the tower wall. At the guard’s signal, the youth unlocked the little gate, let us through, and locked it again behind us.
“You’re on report, Dreogan!” Saverian called over her shoulder. “This is no night to be slack.”
“Deunor’s fire,” I said, “has every man in the universe got crossways with you?”
“You’ve not seen me crossways, sirrah. Dreogan would kiss my feet did I but ask. More fool he.”
More fool the man who imagined my companion a feeling woman.
The burly warrior’s curses followed us as we hurried through a passage so low I had to duck and so narrow we could not walk abreast. The close quarters set my teeth on edge. Once through, we passed without challenge across the barren outer bailey and through the inner gates into the bustling main courtyard. Thick smoke rose from torches and warming fires, as squires and men-at-arms groomed horses, honed weapons, greeted friends, and shared out provisions. A burst of cheers and oaths pinpointed a dice game on our left, and whoops rose from the milling crowd when servants rolled three carts loaded with ale casks into the yard. We kept to the quiet perimeter, dodging several sighing fellows who’d come to the shadowed wall to piss or satisfy a lonely soldier’s fleshly urges.
Naught fazed Saverian. She headed briskly for the northwest corner of the yard, where a tight stair spiraled up one of the fortress’s barrel-like towers. The thick tower walls damped the noise of the courtyard until we emerged on a parapet walk. On one side we overlooked the noisy throng of waiting warriors, on the other a close, dark well yard. Two heavily armed guards, their heads wreathed in steaming breath, halted Saverian at a thick door of banded oak that led into the blocklike heart of the fortress. She complained of a sore elbow from riding and named me her servant, brought along to carry her medicine bag.
“I’m sure I needn’t remind you to stay quiet and out of sight,” said the woman under her breath once the guards passed us through the low doorway. “A warmoot is a sacred meeting between the warlords, their heirs, and their sovereign. It is closed to other Evanori no matter how favored, even wives or husbands, and most certainly closed to outsiders.”
“But a half-Evanori physician is admitted?”
“Only if I remain out of sight and hearing. It is an ongoing argument between His Grace and me. He wishes no public reminders of his difficult health, yet he knows saccheria can flare without warning, so he tolerates my presence. Few know the truth of his condition: you, your fellow madmen in this monkish conspiracy, and those few who have served in Renna Syne—the ‘window palace’ where you’re housed—since he was small. Even his royal brothers have it wrong. The cretins think he shapeshifts to disguise a crippled back.”
“Does he?”
Her glance could have withered heaven’s lilies.
Of a sudden the fine, graceful house set apart from the fortress made sense. Osriel had grown up here. Eodward had housed his pureblood mistress in Evanore, away from the Registry’s interference, and he had named their child the province’s duc, so that Lirene would own the bound loyalty of the Evanori, if not their love. The house protections used to damp my magic would be those of any pureblood home where the children had not yet learned to control their sorcerers’ bent.
More anxious than ever to make sense of Osriel, I leaned in close and touched the physician’s hand, hoping to soften her in the way I’d had most success throughout the years. “I’ll confess, mistress, Prince Osriel leaves me not knowing which ear to listen with. If you could but tell—”
“I am not your mistress, Cartamandua,” she said, with long-suffering patience. “I am a servant, as are you, and Renna’s servants do not gossip about Prince Osriel. Best learn that.” She removed my hand from her arm with a grip worthy of her warlord ancestors. Foolish to imagine my…natural skills…could lure her into anything she had no mind to.
Beyond a short vestibule, we came onto a gallery that overlooked a smoky feasting hall. Below us an elderly woman decried the depredations of a Harrower raid. Prince Osriel and a hundred or more warriors sat listening.
Saverian frowned speculatively when a grin broke over my face. The hall’s arrangement reminded me of nothing so much as the refectory at Gillarine, with the monks seated according to seniority at long tables along the side walls, the abbot and prior at their head, listening to the day’s reading of the holy writs.
Of course, rather than a splendid window overlooking the cloisters and the abbey church, a solid wall of war banners rose behind Osriel’s great wood chair. And rather than the tall glass windows of the refectory, only arrow slits penetrated the thick side and entry walls. Every other quat of wall space from floor to wood-beamed roof was given to a vast collection of war trophies: shields, weapons, bits of armor, several long oars and a carved wooden figurehead with snaky hair and peeling paint—evidence of Hansker longboats. A few dried, hairy lumps looked disconcertingly like long-dead squirrels…or scalps.
“No question where Evanori hearts find pleasure,” I murmured.
Saverian folded her arms and gazed down on the panoply. “Indeed, the most welcomed entertainment at this gathering would be a Harrower raiding party storming the doors. What a collection of idiots. And the women are as bad as the men.”
At least we agreed on one matter.
Despite the smoky heat, both men and women wore heavy fur cloaks over thick leathers, mail, and weapons. The only concession to ornament were the fine-wrought clasps, earrings, chains, rings, and bracelets—all gold—that adorned every head, neck, and limb. A gold band set with garnets circled Osriel’s brow atop a soft hood that obscured his face.
Evidently Osriel had allowed Stearc to venture from Gillarine for this gathering. Elene sat just behind him on a bench against the wall, along with the other warlords-in-waiting, some young and blooming as she was, some older and as battle-worn as their sires and dams.