Niryn pressed both hands to his brow and heart, then bowed low to the king. “King Erius, what is your will?”
Erius dismounted and climbed up to join him. Facing the crowd, he drew Ghërilain’s sword and planted the tip between his feet, hands folded over the hilt. “Cleanse the land, loyal wizards of Skala,” he cried. “Protect my people!”
No soldier stepped forward. Instead, Harrier wizards dragged the condemned to the upright frames. Three stood a little apart, chanting steadily as the prisoners were loosed from their shackles and quickly bound spread-eagle to the frames with silver ropes.
One of them seemed drugged or ill. His legs would not support him and he had to be held upright as he was lashed into place. The other one was not so passive. Just as the wizards reached to tie his hands, he suddenly twisted loose and staggered forward. Raising his hands to his face, he let out a muffled scream and the iron mask shattered in a cloud of smoke and sparks. Blood spattered the robes of the closest wizards. Tobin watched in horrified fascination, unable to look away. The man’s bloody face was horribly torn, and twisted with agony. Shattered teeth showed in a defiant snarl as he raised his fists at the crowd, screaming, “Fools! Blind cattle!”
The wizards grappled with him, but the man fought wildly, throwing them off. “Your reckoning will come!” he shouted, pointing at the king. “The True Queen is at hand. She is among us already—”
He jerked away as another wizard seized him and suddenly he was staring straight down at Tobin.
Tobin thought he saw a spark of sudden recognition in those crazed eyes. A strange tingling sensation spread over him as they stared at each other, locked eye to eye, for what felt like a long time.
He sees me! He sees my real face! Tobin thought numbly as something like joy came into the man’s eyes. Then the others were on him again, dragging him back.
Freed from that gaze, Tobin looked around in panic, wondering if the crowd would let him flee if Niryn denounced him. From the corner of his eye he saw the wizard and king standing apart from the scuffle, but didn’t dare look directly at them. Were they staring at him? Had they understood? When he finally chanced a look, however, both were watching the execution proceed.
The Harrier wizards hauled the struggling man back by his arms and hair, yanking his head down so that another could gag him.
“Lightbearer will not be mocked!” he managed as they forced a loop of the silver rope between his teeth. Even then he kept fighting. Transfixed, Tobin didn’t notice the king move until he’d plunged the Sword of Ghërilain into the man’s belly.
“No!” Tobin whispered, horrified to see that honorable blade stained with a prisoner’s blood. The captive thrashed once, then crumpled forward as Erius withdrew the blade.
The wizards held the man upright and Niryn pressed his hand to the man’s brow. Still alive, the prisoner spat at him, leaving another red stain on his white robes. Niryn ignored this insult and began to chant softly.
The prisoner’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and his legs gave way. After that it was a simple matter to bind him into place on the frame.
“Proceed,” Erius ordered, calmly wiping his blade clean.
With order restored, the wizards formed a circle around the frames and began a new chant. It grew louder and louder until white flames, brighter than anything Tobin had ever seen blossomed over the condemned men’s bodies. There was no smoke, and none of the stench that sometimes wafted into the city from the burning grounds outside the walls. The doomed wizards struggled for a few seconds, then were consumed as quickly and completely as a moth’s wing in a candle flame. Within a few seconds nothing remained of them but their charred hands and feet, still hanging in the silver bonds at the corners of the scorched wooden frame.
The searing brightness left dark spots before Tobin’s eyes. He tried in vain to blink them away as he stared at the frame on the left, remembering that look of recognition he’d glimpsed in the man’s pain-wracked face. Then the world was tilting crazily around him. The square, the jeering crowd, the pathetic, shriveled scraps on the frames, it all disappeared and Tobin was staring instead at a gleaming golden city set on a high cliff above the sea.
Only Ki was close enough to hear Tobin’s faint cry as he slumped slowly over Gosi’s neck, and he didn’t understood the single word Tobin gasped out, nor would Tobin remember it for a long time.
“Rhiminee!”
No one, not even Niryn, noticed a tiny charred pebble lying among the ashes of the wizards.
Twenty miles away, under that same yellow moon, Iya rested her head on a tavern tabletop, gasping as white fire filled her vision as it had that day in Ero. In it she made out another doomed face, twisted in agony. It was Kiriar. Kiriar of Meadford. She’d given him a talisman that night in the Wormhole.
The pain passed quickly, but left her badly shaken. “O Illior, not him!” she moaned. Had they tortured him, learned of the little band of wizards hidden away under their feet?
Slowly she became aware of the tavern noise around her.
“You’ve hurt yourself.” It was a drysian. Iya had noticed her earlier, healing village children outside the shrine. “Let me tend to you, old mother.”
Iya looked down. The clay wine cup she’d been drinking from had shattered in her hand. The shards had cut her palm, crosshatching the faded scar Brother had given her the night she’d brought Ki to the keep. A sliver still jutted from the swell of flesh just below her thumb. Too weak to reply, she let the drysian wash and dress her wounds.
When she’d finished, the woman laid her hand on Iya’s head, sending a cool soothing energy through her. Iya smelled fresh green shoots and new leaves. The sweet tang of springwater filled her dry mouth.
“You’re welcome to sleep under my roof tonight, Mistress.”
“Thank you, Mistress.” Better to sleep on Dalna’s hearth tonight, than here where too many curious idlers were still watching the crazy old woman to see what foolishness she’d do next. Better, too, to be with a healer if the awful pain returned. Who knew how many wizards Niryn might burn tonight?
The drysian helped her down the muddy street to a small cottage at the edge of the village and settled her on a soft bed by the fire. Names were neither asked for nor given.
Lying there, Iya was glad of the thick bands of protective symbols carved in the beams and the hanging bags of charms. Sakor might be at war with the Lightbearer in Skala, but the Maker still watched over all equally.
Despite that, Iya found little comfort that night. Every time sleep claimed her she dreamed of the sybil in Afra. The girl looked up at her with shining white eyes and spoke with the Lightbearer’s voice.
This must stop.
In the vision, Iya fell on her face before her, weeping.
25
Arkoniel had watched the Alestun road hopefully in the months since Iya’s visit. Spring had passed with no visitors. Summer burned the meadow brown, and still no one but tradesmen and Tobin’s messengers raised any dust above the trees.
It had been another blisteringly hot summer; even the valley around Alestun, spared the worst of the ongoing droughts for years, was struck. Crops withered in the fields and new calves and lambs died in the meadows. The river shrank to a gurgling stream between cracked, stinking expanses of mud and dead water plants. Arkoniel stripped to a linen kilt again and the women went about in their shifts.
Be was working in the kitchen garden late one afternoon in Lenthin, helping Cook dig the last of the yellowed leeks, when Nari shouted down to them from a second floor window. A man and a boy were coming up the road.
Arkoniel stood and brushed the dirt from his hands. “Do you know them?”
“No, it’s strangers. I’ll go.”
Watching from the gate, however, Arkoniel recognized the broad-set, grey-bearded man walking beside Nari, but not the little boy perched among the baggage on the sway-back horse the man led.