I examined our immediate surroundings for some way to slip the bonds of Saverian’s custody. The featureless gallery where we stood stretched the entire length of the hall. I could imagine bowmen poised at the iron rail. Or musicians with harps and vielles—if Evanori subscribed to any display of the gentler arts. About halfway along the outer wall, I noted a narrow gap.
Leaving Saverian in the vestibule, I ambled down the gallery. A sidewise glimpse confirmed the gap was a downward stair. I squatted just across from it and peered through the iron railing, as if trying to watch the events below without being noticed. Clutching the medicine bag, I considered what excuse I might devise for a venture down the stair.
One after the other, the warlords took the place in the center of the room, gripped a staff topped with a wolf’s head of wrought gold, and recited the incursions of Ardran or Moriangi raiders who scoured the countryside for food stores, or the vile deeds of Harrower burning parties who ravaged isolated villages and farmsteads on both sides of the border. I gathered this was the third night in a row they had recounted these same grievances, determined to implant them in one another’s memory as if the offenses had been dealt against them all. When Thane Stearc took the staff, he told of the dog-faced man who led the Harrower pursuit on our journey from Palinur and how the pursuit had been thwarted only when his pureblood guide had tricked the Harrowers into a bog and drowned them all.
As always, reminders of events in the bog left me nauseated and uneasy. Reflexively, I glanced over my shoulder. Saverian was staring at me, her nose flared in disgust. Perhaps she had never heard the story, or had only now connected it with me.
During each report, the rowdy onlookers shouted confirmations or approvals, curses or reprimands for the speaker’s tale. When a young thanea, sized like a brick hearth and clad in scarred mail, reported that she had dreamed of shadow legions overrunning Evanore, I expected derisive hoots and laughter, but the lords thumped fists on the tables and shouted that the time had come for Evanore’s legions to take the field.
Prince Osriel listened to all without comment. Once the staff had passed through every lord’s hand, the company fell silent. The elderly woman returned to the center of the room and began reciting. As her voice rose and fell in the fashion of talespinners, the torchlight dimmed.
The old woman spoke of Aurellian ships come to the river country in the north and Aurellian legions crossing the broad Yaronal from the east after discovering that the small magics they worked in their distant homeland took fire with power in the lands of Navronne. But they found this favored land ruled by a stubborn king…
It was Caedmon’s story she told, tracing his lineage into the deeps of history and telling of his rise and fall. Her tale recalled the great window in the Gillarine Abbey chapter house. In jeweled glass it had depicted the sad and honorable king who had first united the gravs of Morian and the warlords of Evanore with his own kingdom of Ardra. He had made the disparate realms into something greater than the sum of its parts, only to see his beloved Navronne brought to heel by the predatory Aurellians. The storyteller painted her portrait with words, not glass, depicting the king leading the tattered remnants of his legions to the great bridge he’d built to link Ardra and Evanore.
Deep shadows enveloped the gallery. Saverian could not have seen my hand rummaging in her medicine bag. I snatched out a few items and stuffed them in my pockets.
When the old woman’s tale was done, the lords began to sing. I stood up, fumbling the bag until I dropped it, spilling the loose contents on the gallery floor. That Saverian noticed. And came running.
“What have you done, fool?” she whispered, snatching up vials, packets, and tight-wrapped bundles of linen and wool. I held the bag open as she put the things away, sensing her itemizing each article, as I’d guessed she would. She patted the floor around us and hissed, “Three packets and two small jars are missing. Holy Mother…”
One of the lords took up another song—the Lay of Groshug, an interminable recounting of a bloody boar hunt that I enjoyed only when I was roaring drunk. They’d be bawling it for an hour at the least. Saverian would not dare risk a scene. And I gambled that she’d not dare leave her post. Her first duty was to Osriel’s health.
“I fear things dropped through the railing,” I whispered. “I’m sorry…I’ll fetch them.” And before she could protest, I shoved the bag into her hands and darted down the stair.
The stair dumped me into a dark vestibule, crowded with two big tables, piled with empty tankards and dirty serving platters. A wide door led back into the hall. A narrower door led outside, where an arcade fronted the long side of the building. Accompanied by the lords’ robust rendering of the chorus to the Lay of Groshug, I sped eastward through the arcade in search of the rock gate Elene had mentioned.
The geometries of such a fortress were fairly simple. A cross wall joined a long barracks building to the Great Hall. The arcade tunneled through the wall and ended abruptly in an alley at the far end of the hall. Follow the alley to the left, and you would end up in a paved yard surrounded by kitchens and bakehouses and storage buildings. Go right ten paces along the east end of the Great Hall, and you ran straight into the mountainside.
No gate was visible where the blocklike hall merged with the rocky buttress, but I guessed that the perilously steep set of steps cut into the mottled gray and red rock would lead me there. As I half climbed, half crawled up the interminable stair, I blessed Saverian for clearing my head. With only the diffuse light from the hall’s arrow slits to illuminate the rock, I needed all the acuity I could muster. My feet were bigger than the altogether too-slanted steps.
Elene awaited me atop the stair, like a warrior angel on a church spire. “I didn’t think you’d come, not a day out of your bed and bound by Saverian’s spellcraft.”
“To meet with you, lady, I would even climb this god-cursed stair again,” I said, gasping. “But by the Mother, do Evanori not approve of air?”
I bent over and propped my hands on my knees, coughing as the cold dry air rasped my heaving chest. I prayed I was not so sorely out of health as to be flattened by a hundred steps. But a squirrel could have toppled me.
“Renna is higher than Erasku. It’s even higher than Angor Nav—the duc’s official seat. Even I notice the sparse air here.” Her face was only a pale blur in the night, but her pinched voice hinted at high emotion reined tight. “Osriel told my father you were taking him to the Danae tomorrow. Is that true?”
“That’s what he wants,” I said. “We’ve less than a month until the solstice.”
“Come.”
By the time I accumulated enough breath to ask where, she had pivoted sharply and marched into the night. I followed carefully. The stair had brought us onto a steeply ascending apron of rock that skirted a bulge in the massive ridge. I hugged the rock wall on my left, for on my right, tiny, winking blots of torchlight and bonfires in a gaping darkness marked the heart-stopping drop to the fortress. The irregular path canted outward, and my boots hinted that ice lurked in its cracks and crevices.
“I had decided to send you back to your bed,” said Elene, little more than a formless darkness ahead of me. “To show you this betrays an oath I swore on my mother’s memory, a villainous oath that should condemn me to the netherworld for the making, not just for the breaking. He chose it. Not I—stupid, mooning cow that I am to be so led into godless folly.”
“What oath?” I caught up with her just as the path ended abruptly at an iron gate. The tall gate, anchored in the rock, blocked entry to a shallow breach in the ramparts of the ridge. “What folly?”