Until the year of the bloodshed.
Gwydion, standing now on the balcony of the library overlooking his ancestral lands, breathed in the air in which the tiny drops of frozen moisture were finally falling; First Snow had come late that year, only a day before the winter carnival was scheduled to begin, known as Gathering Day. He watched in relief as the snow began to blanket the ground, the large feathery flakes wafting down on a brisk wind. The carnival games and revels were generally better after a few weeks of accumulation, the drier the better, but Gwydion was not in the mood to be particular about the kind of snow.
Mostly because until the moment it started to fall, he was wondering if its absence was a sign, a portent that tragedy would strike again.
It had been three years since the last winter carnival, the first one that had been celebrated within the boundaries of the high wall his father had built around the lands nearest the keep, to protect his populace from the horrific and random violence that had been a scourge across the continent. The wall had been a saving grace when a cohort of mounted soldiers from Sorbold, under the demonic thrall of a F’dor spirit, had attacked the carnival and the merrymakers who had just finished witnessing the penultimate event of the festival, a sledge race that took place beyond the barrier in an open field. The mayhem that ensued had been ghastly; before Stephen and his cousin, Tristan Steward, the Lord Roland, had shepherded the terrified festivalgoers back inside the walls, more than five hundred of them were dead. Gwydion would never be able to expunge from his memory the look of controlled terror on his father’s face as he hoisted Gwydion and Melisande over the wall into the care of the defenders, and the relief he saw in Stephen’s eyes once they were out of harm’s way, as he turned and went into battle.
Why are we doing this again? Gwydion wondered; he had asked himself the question repeatedly since the day two months prior when Rhapsody and Ashe had declared their intent to resume the carnival. The magic of it all is broken now. How can there be a winter carnival without my father? His spirit was the winter carnival.
Ashe’s hand came to rest on his shoulder; Gwydion looked up at his godfather, now taller than himself by only a hand’s measure. The Lord Cymrian’s cerulean blue eyes, considered a sign of Cymrian royalty, were fixed on the fields of revel, where scores of workers now scrambled to erect stages, tents, bonfire pits, and reviewing stands. The vertical pupils in those eyes contracted in the brightness of the rising sun.
“Looks as if the weather is favoring us after all,” Ashe said. “I was afraid we might have to beseech Gavin the Invoker to summon the snow if the warm winter continued.”
Gwydion nodded but said nothing. Ashe’s father, Llauron, had been the previous Invoker, the leader of the Filidic order of nature priests that tended the holy forest of Gwynwood. In that last, terrible carnival, Llauron had broken the charge of the demonically compelled regiment by summoning winter wolves from the snow itself, spooking the horses of the Sorbold cavalry and buying the fleeing populace time to get inside the gates. Llauron had given up his human body for the elemental form of a dragon, the blood he inherited from his mother, Anwyn, daughter of the wyrm Elynsynos, and now was off communing with those elements, hovering near but never seen. Ashe rarely spoke of his father; Gwydion once told his godfather that he understood his loss, but the Lord Cymrian had looked away and merely said that the situations were very different.
“The guests began arriving yesterday,” Gwydion said as the falling snow began to thicken. “No problems thus far.”
Ashe turned to him and took him by the shoulders.
“There will be no problems, Gwydion. I’ve taken every possible measure to prevent them.” He gave the young man’s arm a comforting squeeze. “I know you are worried, but try not to let it overshadow the import of these days. This is a special moment for you, and for Navarne. There is good reason for revelry and merrymaking; the future is being well assured with your ascension.” He smiled reassuringly, the corners of his draconic eyes crinkling with fondness. “Besides, rather than worrying, you should be saving your strength for the tug-of-war. My team intends to drag yours mercilessly through the mud, and there is a considerable amount of it this year. You best pray that the ground freezes quickly.”
A smile finally came to the corners of the young man’s mouth.
Ashe saw the change, and patted his ward’s shoulder. “That’s better. Now, I understand that Gerald Owen has taken it upon himself to convince the cooks to make an early batch of Sugar Snow, just for you, Melly, and me, as soon as there is enough accumulation to cool the boiling syrup.” He shielded his eyes and glanced at the back of the buttery, where the falling snow had covered the bricks with a thick layer of pocketed white, coating the graceful limbs of the silver-trunked trees with frosting. “I think it may almost be ready.”
Gwydion laughed halfheartedly and turned to leave the balcony. Just before he reached the door, he heard his godfather call his name quietly again.
“Gwydion?”
“Yes?”
Ashe did not turn, but continued to stare off over the now-white fields of Navarne as the carnival came to life below him.
“I miss him, too.”
Faron did not understand what had happened to him.
Initially after he had awoken on the plate of the Scales he thought, in his limited capacity to reason and understand, that he had died. The blinding light and the intense heat had scorched his withered flesh in agonizing purity; Faron was no stranger to pain, but this suffering was so overwhelming that he imagined it could only be the death he longed for. So when the light vanished, and the sky above him cleared, he was despondent.
The father he had been waiting to reunite with was not there.
He did not remember breaking away, did not have any concept of the obstacles that had attempted futilely to rein him in, to thwart his escape. He had merely run as fast as he could, once the concept of running had come to him, away from the pain and into the warmth of the desert he could feel beyond the Place of Weight.
Now he wandered that desert alone, passing over, and sometimes through, the sand and dry scrub as naturally as if it had been air. The Living Stone body that encased his spirit was born of the earth, and it had no weight to him while he was touching the ground. If anything, every step he took, every moment he felt the sunbaked ground beneath his feet, brought him new strength.
He no longer unconsciously thought of himself as neuter; something nascent in the stone warrior’s spirit had instilled in him a gender, though it was not something he realized other than innately. It had imbued him with memories as well, fragments of images that flashed through his primitive mind which were beyond his understanding. There were scenes of battle, of endless marches, that came and went with the speed of a half-formed thought, leaving him confused. There were other images that came to his mind as well, human memories and scenes that were decidedly not from the mind of a man, but from the Earth itself; instinctive thoughts that whispered to him on the most elemental of levels.
Winter comes, it said. The fallow time. The sleeping time.
But for now the sun was high. The earth was warm beneath his stone feet.
Giving him strength.
In the distance he could feel the scales as surely as he had felt them in his glowing pool of green water. Each called to him with a vibration unique in all the world, vibrations that had been an integral part of his makeup before the awakening. He could not see them yet, but he could sense the directions from which they called. Thinking about them both soothed his tortured mind and agitated him as the missing vibrations nagged at his consciousness.