7
There wasn’t much left of the servant by the time they found her again. Crows had taken her eyes. A fox or a tree-cat had worried off an arm. It was too dark to see much of the flies’ work, which was a small mercy. Albric hated what maggots did to a body.
Someone should have burned her. It was only decent. It was only wise, where bloodmagic was concerned; the old traditions of oil and flame had developed during a time when dark things walked in the night and men knew what had to be done to stop them. But centuries had passed since the Pale Maiden’s faithful practiced their arts openly in Ithelas, and people in the west had forgotten that there was ever more to the burning of bodies than light and sweet incense to honor Celestia.
The servant’s corpse lay in the stables where Albric had left it the first time he’d ridden through Willowfield, his horse’s hooves wet with blood. He’d pulled the woman out to the late afternoon light, made sure she was dead, and moved on. There were so many corpses to count.
Now the body was rotted, stinking, most of the flesh on its face missing and the rest wrinkled like a soft brown apple, but it was still identifiable by the tatters of its dress and the arrow rattling in its ribs, and it was unchanged in any way that would put off the Thornlady kneeling in the straw beside it.
Albric stayed on his horse and stayed on the road. He saw no need to get any closer to Thornlady Severine’s work.
He disliked her intensely. He hadn’t particularly liked the mercenaries from Ang’arta, either, though they had done most of the killing in Willowfield and thus had been necessary to his lord’s plans. But that was a different kind of dislike. The Baozites were crude men, and cruel, but they were human. They diced and drank by the fire, they complained about cold nights on the road, and they suffered the shits after eating bad meals. He understood them.
He did not understand Thornlady Severine. He hoped he never would. There was something profoundly broken about a mind like hers, something both more and less than human. Whether that was a result of the training she had endured in the Tower of Thorns, or a trait of those who sought out such training, Albric did not know and did not want to know.
He hated that Leferic was relying on the woman. He would sooner have dangled over Spearbridge Chasm on a rotted rope than put his trust in a Thorn … but Leferic had decided otherwise, and it was Albric’s duty to obey.
Ordinarily that was no burden. Albric had neither brothers nor sons, and over the years had come to regard Leferic as a little of both; but the bond between them ran deeper than that. It was, in its purest form, the bond between a knight and his lord.
Albric knew war. He knew how to defend a line of foot against mounted attackers, how to lay sieges and withstand them, how to train a farmboy into a passable semblance of a soldier. In the past and present of the smoldering war along the banks of the Seivern River, these skills were common and necessary.
In the future, they might not be. That was Leferic’s dream, and although Albric could not grasp the full ramifications of what his lord hoped to do, he understood that he played a crucial role in bringing it to pass.
For while Albric knew war, Leferic knew rule. The scope and depth of his lord’s curiosity amazed him. It had since Leferic was a boy of five, reading the works of Inaglione and de Halle while Albric could barely piece together what the covers said. Lord Ossaric had ordered him to make a man of his younger son, as the Oakharne reckoned such things, and even though Albric had failed to make even a middling warrior of the boy, he’d learned that there might be other measures of manhood. Intellect, cunning, patience. Leferic had all those qualities. He would be a ruler such as Bulls’ March had never seen.
He should have been the elder son. Sir Galefrid was not an evil man, but he was a weak-headed one, shortsighted and undisciplined and easily led. He liked hunting and hawking better than the cold practicalities of rule. In that he was his father’s son, and perhaps his mother’s, too, to Lord Ossaric’s delight and the realm’s misfortune.
Albric had never met the Lady Nerissa, Galefrid’s mother and Lord Ossaric’s first wife. A winter chill carried her to the pyre long before Albric came to Bulls’ March. He knew, however, that Lord Ossaric had loved her and mourned her deeply. Although the lord had wed again for the sake of prudence and politics, he never found it in himself to love his second wife.
It was over twenty years ago that Lady Indoiya had come to Bulls’ March. Albric was a young knight then, fuzzy-cheeked and more than half in love with his tiny, fragile lady. She had the pale coloring of the north, with eyelashes so light and long that she seemed to watch the world from behind a veil of snow. High-voiced, fine-boned, Lady Indoiya was delicate as a creature made of glass. Albric had adored her.
Lord Ossaric had not. He was never cruel to her, but neither was he kind; he did his duty by her and otherwise ignored her. When Lady Indoiya died trying to give him a daughter, Lord Ossaric grieved publicly at her pyre and was done. He had two sons; it was enough. He did not marry again, and he paid little heed to the son given him by his second wife.
Albric, who had never stopped loving his pale lady or forgiven Lord Ossaric’s neglect, took the boy under his own wing.
He had never presumed to treat Leferic as a son. Never. It would have overstepped his station. But over the years, as he saw the man that Lady Indoiya’s child grew into, he could not help but feel some glimmer of pride.
No, Leferic would never be a warrior. But he could be a lord. So when Leferic had come to Albric with a plan for Galefrid’s removal, the knight had swallowed his misgivings and agreed to help. Loyalty and love dictated that he do no less.
Albric had swallowed his misgivings about the Thornlady, too, though he had nearly choked on those. But duty, in the end, won out. A knight’s first duty was to his lord, and Albric’s true loyalty had always been to Lady Indoiya and her son, never to Lord Ossaric. His second was to ensure the peace and safety of his realm. Removing Galefrid had been part of that duty. Thornlady Severine, however little he liked her, was merely another.
Still, being alone in a dead village with her set Albric’s teeth on edge. He wanted this assignment done. Were it for anyone other than Leferic, he would never have agreed to it at all.
She was chanting over the body. Against his will Albric found himself listening. The syllables blended and blurred together, slipping past his understanding, but the sound of the words stirred a deep fear in his soul. It was older than human speech, that fear; it was the fear of darkness and silence stretching beyond the small safety of a fire, of terrible hungers that lurked in the night. Her chant spoke of blood and binding, and spell-crafted chains that could give shape to shades and hold them past death.
The Thornlady raised her whole hand and pricked her forefinger on the bones of the maimed one. Two crimson droplets welled up from the wounds, and she smeared them over the leathery lips and bare teeth of the servant’s skull.
A hiss escaped through the dead teeth, so softly Albric could scarcely hear the sound. It went on longer than any mortal lungs could sustain, and the Thornlady wove her chant around it, alternately coaxing and commanding. Chill white mist gathered over the half-fleshed skull, luminous and eerie as the ghost-fogs that rose from the Greymire’s marshes at dawn. The mist coalesced into a shadowy likeness of the woman whose corpse lay under the Thornlady’s hands, and Severine’s chant ended, for her spell was complete.
Albric knew, without looking, that the Thornlady’s eyes were filled with the same white mist that limned the spirit she had called. He had seen her work this magic before; he had no desire to watch it again. Flicking the reins lightly against his mare’s neck, he guided his horse back down the road.
Behind him, he heard the shade scream.
The Thornlady returned to the road some time later. Straw and windblown leaves clung to the soft black cloth of her robes; there might have been scraps of dry dead skin as well. He tried not to look too closely. Thornlady Severine was unsettling enough in herself.
She might have been a beautiful woman once. The hint of it was still there, in the slim lines of her figure and the grace with which she moved. But everything else about her was as if she had taken a knife and set to work eradicating even the memory of beauty from her form.
Her silver hair was shaved on both sides of her scalp, leaving a long, flowing crest that ran down the center of her head like a horse’s mane. Arcane runes were scarred white on the shaved skin, covering her bare scalp in strange patterns. Some said the Thornlady had cut those markings with her own hand. Albric believed it.
Severine’s left eye was gone. A sparkling ice-blue crystal, framed by a spiderweb of pale scars, glimmered in its puckered hole. The last two fingers of her right hand were gone as well—or, at least, the flesh of them was gone. The bones had been cleaned and sharpened and fixed back into place, the joints sealed together with bright silver.
They said that Thornlady Severine had done exceptionally well in her training, and that she stood high in the Spider’s favor. Albric wondered what was left of those who did poorly.
None of these thoughts showed on his face. A lifetime of castle service had made him very good at keeping his opinions to himself.
“Well?” he asked as she remounted her thin gray mare.
“She gave the baby to a man named Brys Tarnell. A knight in Sir Galefrid’s service.”
“He isn’t a knight.” Albric snorted. “He’s a jumped-up mercenary who happened to win my lord’s melee last year. I know the man. He might have been given spurs and a medallion, but he’s no knight.”
Severine shrugged, lifting her hood over her head so that the black cloth shrouded much of her strangeness. The blue crystal of her left eye still shone in the shadow of that hood. “Be that as it may. He took the child and left her to die.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“Is he a loyal man? Where would he take the child?”
“He’s loyal to himself and whoever’s paying him—and the second man’s dead. He’d go wherever he thought he could get the most profit.”
“Where would that be?”
Albric pondered the question. “Bulls’ March, I’d think. Baby’s only worth as much as his rank, so pick a place where that matters. No reason to stay in Langmyr. Far as he knows, they’re the killers. Why bring them the baby to finish the slaughter? Likely to get paid with profuse thanks and a knife in the ribs. Could go to Seawatch, to his mother’s kin … but that’s a long way to take a baby, and winter’s near upon us. Bulls’ March is closer and safer. I’d head there.”
“Unless you suspected treachery,” Severine said softly.
“Aye. Unless that. But there’s no reason he should.”
“A man who wins a lord’s melee is likely to be a careful one,” she murmured. “But it is as good a guess as we have. What road would you take to get there?”
“The one we’re on. Straight to Tarne Crossing and south to Bulls’ March. But he didn’t go straight, or he’d have gotten there before we left.”
“Do you believe he would have gone anywhere else?”
“No.”
“Then we will begin there, and perhaps find where he diverged.” She touched the mare’s ribs with her heels, and the gray started down the road.
Albric followed, a little ways behind. “You’re a little exotic for Tarne Crossing, m’lady.”
The hooded head turned. He caught the flash of a smile over her shoulder, and the hint of laughter in her voice. It chilled his blood.
“Not for long,” Severine said.
AS AUTUMN FADED INTO WINTER, TRAVELERS became as scarce as green leaves along the River Kings’ Road. Few dared to walk the glimmering paths, and those that did traveled in groups. Too many rumors had spread about what happened in Willowfield; even the most isolated villagers knew there was something darker and deadlier than the usual bandits in the woods. No one ventured near the blood-soaked site if they could avoid it, and if they could not, they went with wary eyes and ready bows.
It took a full two days for Albric to find a party suitable to the Thornlady’s needs. She had been very specific about what she wanted, and did not seem to mind the delay. Albric, on the other hand, resented every hour that was not spent pursuing the infant who threatened his lord’s rule. But he couldn’t hope to find Wistan without the Thornlady’s help—not without losing more time than he was wasting on this whim—so he did as she asked.
Finally he managed to track down a small company of pilgrims going north. They had the look of devout but ordinary commonfolk, probably making their one great vensolles to the Sun Garden in Craghail or the Tomb of the Redeemer in Mirhain. Even their solaros wore simple brown clothes while traveling; the man was identifiable only by the bands of yellow on his sleeves and a sun sign that, although it appeared to be made of true gold as custom required, was by far the smallest Albric had seen on a priest.
The pilgrims were not completely blind to the realities of the road. They carried sturdy sticks and knives, and three competent-looking armsmen rode with them. Albric spent the better part of an afternoon shadowing the party in the hopes of assessing the armsmen’s skill, but nothing happened to give him that opportunity. The men carried their weapons comfortably, kept one of their number ahead of the pilgrims and another at the rear, and bore no lord’s emblem on their plain leather armor. Albric guessed that they were freeswords, good enough to impress travelers in need of protection but not good enough to have earned a place with a bigger company or a lord’s keep for the winter.
Severine did not seem terribly concerned about either the pilgrims’ staves or their escort. Once she heard that he had found a party that numbered more than five and included a woman, she lost interest in the details. All she wanted was for Albric to show her to them. He took her through the forest, fighting down his misgivings as autumn’s golden hour passed and sunset stained the sky red through the trees’ rattling branches.
She wouldn’t second-guess him about the straightest road to Oakharn or which of Bayarn Wood’s berries were edible, Albric told himself. He had no business doubting the areas of her expertise. Even so her casual arrogance left a bad taste in his mouth.
Albric considered himself a skilled fighter, and knew that to be modestly put. His father, who had trained him since he was old enough to stand with a stick in his hands, had been the swordmaster of Ivollaine half his life. Albric himself had placed highly in the annual melees, both in Bulls’ March and Ivollaine, every year for the past twenty. Three times he had won.
And despite these proofs of his skill, Albric would have considered it sheerest folly to attack three armsmen of unknown quality alone, for no reason. He wouldn’t have hesitated if his lord’s life or the safety of the realm hung in the balance—but on a whim? With no profit in sight but a sun sign worth less than two solis?
It was hubris, plain and simple, and he wanted no part of it. Whatever happened with the pilgrims, the Thornlady was on her own.
They reached the pilgrims just as dusk stretched over the wood. The glow of firelight through the trees, warm as an ember fallen from the fast-fading sunset, marked their campsite; they had not bothered to hide their fire, or perhaps had not known how. Albric could hear their horses trampling dead leaves and browsing on whatever sparse greenery was still to be found. He slowed his approach and whispered to the Thornlady as they neared.
“Any closer and they’ll hear you. Friendly travelers don’t come sneaking through the woods. What’s your plan?”
“My plan?” she echoed. Her voice was soft as velvet, but there was no mistaking the mockery in it. The jewel of her eye twinkled like a lost star, distant and infinitely cold. “My plan is to meet a swordsman in Tarne Crossing. A very good swordsman. One who has something I want.”
Albric drew away from her, fighting the urge to make a sun sign over his chest. It wouldn’t help, he knew that, but still he wanted to invoke the goddess against her. The bitterness of bile was strong in his mouth. “Will you be needing my help?”
“No,” she said, and he had never been so glad to hear that word in his life.
“I’ll wait here, then,” he muttered. She half-smiled, slight and sardonic, and turned away, and went on alone.
Within a few steps she vanished from view. Albric saw the shadows of the night writhe and rise up around her, as if the darkness itself was her mantle, and then the Thornlady was gone. She had shown no skill at woodscraft before, but there was no sound at her passing. Only the movements of the horses and the faint drift of conversations by the fire, carried by the evening wind, reached Albric’s ears.
He huddled in the brush, pulling his cloak around him to conserve warmth while he stayed still. It was easier if he pretended that he was hunting, waiting for a deer or a fat black grouse to wander by. Not waiting for a Thornlady in the night; not lurking in the darkness while she worked some sadist’s magic on commonfolk undertaking the holiest journey of their lives. It was forbidden for any man to interfere with the vensolles, and while Albric had never considered himself an especially observant Celestian, he had been anointed to the sun and he tried to keep true to the Bright Lady’s laws as best a man in his position could. Betraying the faith in this manner brought a pang of superstitious fear to his soul. That surprised him. He thought he had outgrown that.
There was enough in this night to make any man superstitious, though. Clouds blotted out the moon and swallowed the stars, leaving the forest swathed in darkness. Ahead he saw a silvery glow rise through the trees, silhouetting them as gaunt black claws against its eerie light. The silvery luminescence was broad and diffuse, like a bank of gray fog rolling up from the sea, and it drowned the pilgrims’ fire in its depths.
He realized, after a while, that he could no longer hear the horses or the voices of men. The forest was quiet as death. Even the wind had gone still.
Stretching his legs to ease away the cold and stiffness, Albric gathered his courage and crept toward the camp. The haze of silver light faded as he stood, and vanished before he had taken two steps. Night closed around him again.
He stumbled over the first of the armsmen on his way there. It was so dark that Albric didn’t see the body until his boot hit the fallen man’s stomach. He scraped his hand against a tree trunk to keep from tripping. His breath caught in his lungs and for an instant his thoughts froze as if he were a child facing night terrors in an empty room, not a grown man who had lived near forty years under Celestia’s light and had already seen death in all its guises.
All its honest guises, anyway. There were some things in this world that honest men had no business knowing. Tonight was forcing him to remember that.
The armsman had been sitting guard some twenty paces from their fire, his back to a tree. It was a good place for a watch, Albric recognized, once he could think again; the freeswords were indeed professionals. That hadn’t helped this man. His quiver was still hooded and his sword had toppled from his knees, the blade snug in its scabbard. Whatever had come upon him had done so without warning.
And hadn’t killed him. The man was still breathing—slowly, shallowly, but there was no question that he lived. Albric could find no wounds on him. His skin was cold and clammy as a drowned man’s, but his pulse was steady. A touch of warmth remained at his neck when Albric pressed his thumb to the life-vein there. The man moaned and his eyes darted under their lids, seeking escape from some terrible dream, but he did not wake.
Albric stepped over the man and continued toward the camp, making no effort to silence his steps as he came. The campfire burned low and dim, as if the flames feared to reach too far into the night. More bodies lay around it, solid shapes in the insubstantial dark. He couldn’t tell if they were breathing.
A flare of silver light erupted before him, brilliant as the sun, when Albric crossed into the camp. He staggered back, clawing his sword free of its scabbard. Black and white motes sleeted before his vision, blinding him. Slowly the light became more bearable and his eyes adjusted, still watering. Cursing, he wiped the tears away.
Thornlady Severine stood in the center of the camp, a sphere of misty light hovering over her maimed hand. Her hood was down, and her hair shone white in the pallid glow. Her good eye was sunk in shadow, as was her mouth and the hollow of her throat, but the cold crystal of her left eye was blue and bright as ever. Around her the pilgrims and their guards slumped in nightmare-ridden slumber, twitching feebly as they struggled to fight free of their unnatural dreams.
Albric did not sheathe his sword. He felt foolish with the steel bared in his hand and no enemies left standing, but he didn’t want to let go of his blade. It was the one thing he trusted in this spell-poisoned night. “Well?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t even glance in his direction. Instead she picked her way through the sleeping pilgrims, delicately, like a highborn lady stepping over curs on her way to a feast. When she came to the camp’s lone woman, a middle-aged matron with a careworn face under her starched white coif and a figure made dumpy by good food and a houseful of children, she knelt and cradled the woman’s head in her lap.
Then she smiled, and tilted the woman’s chin up gently, and drove the sharp bones of her maimed hand into her neck just below the ear. As her victim’s blood fountained dark across the dying fire, Severine drew a small mirror from the folds of her cloak and calmly began painting her own face with red runes. After every few strokes she wetted the small bones of her right hand in the woman’s lifeblood. By the time she finished, the flow had slowed to a weak trickle. The glistening sigils on her face and those scarred on her scalp were pieces of the same strange text, or so it seemed to Albric, who could make no sense of either.
Severine rose, shaking the woman’s head from her skirts as though the corpse were a doll with which she’d tired of playing. As she stood, the Thornlady’s svelte figure grew shorter and thicker, widening at waist and hip until she matched the proportions of the matron who lay limp at her feet. Her crest of silver hair dulled to the color of sand and spread to cover her bare, scarred scalp; the pale smoothness of her skin darkened and coarsened, gaining a fine network of lines to match the sun-carved wrinkles of the dead woman’s face. Even the glimmering jewel in her left eye was masked by her magic: between one blink and the next, Severine’s disconcerting stare was replaced by the friendly, honest brown gaze of the woman she had just killed.
“I am no longer so exotic,” the Thornlady said, and her stolen face creased in a smile.
Albric grimaced. He wiped the flat of his blade against his leg, trying to clean some unseen filth, then shoved it back into its scabbard. “Are we done here?”
“We are not.” Severine tucked away her mirror and took out a knife in a rune-marked sheath. Its blade was a faceted black crystal, flat and unrevealing under the starry light of her silver sphere. It measured the length of her hand from wrist to last fingertip. “This swordsman is a skilled one, you have told me. I do not intend to meet him unprepared.”
“Then what?”
“Watch,” she said.
Cursing himself for a coward, he did.
She killed them. One by one, with a peculiar gentleness. She stooped by each man’s side and pressed a kiss to his brow and, whispering her unholy words, plunged the blade of black crystal into his heart. And, one by one, the corpses rose to follow her as she made them.
They were not men anymore, the creatures that she made. Albric did not know what to call them, if indeed they had any name known to human tongues. Their hair fell from their scalps like leaves from a frost-blighted tree; their skin became hard and white as deadwinter earth. Ivory mist swirled in their empty eyes, and their jaws gaped open with an unearthly hunger. Their nails twisted into jagged claws, and their teeth stretched into fangs, pushed out from their gums by curves of rough and bloodstained bone that made their mouths look like split rib cages. They moved with a loping swiftness that Albric knew he would see in his nightmares, if ever he was able to sleep again.
The solaros was the worst of the lot. Perhaps because he was a holy man, perhaps because the Thorns’ goddess visited a special vengeance on those who resisted her power. Albric wasn’t one to know. But the solaros died screaming, not peacefully like the others, and the creature he became was more horrible by far, for the ivory fog did not blind him. Something of the man he had once been stared out from those sunken eyes, half-veiled by a shimmer of mist the color of tarnished gold and clotted blood, and the torment in them was unbearable.
“Kill that one,” Albric said, when the solaros’ corpse staggered back to its feet.
“Why?”
Albric shook his head. There was no explanation he could give that she would understand. Mercy, pity, shame: these were not concepts for which the Thorns had any use, and no one who survived their Tower kept them.
He chose a different answer. “I don’t like that one. It goes, or I do.”
She shrugged, turned toward the offending creature, and issued a command in the same inhuman speech as the chant that had made it. The thing that had been a solaros rolled its terrible eyes upward and let out a keen that might have been gratitude or agony or both. It clawed its face and fell to its knees and was still. Tortured, disfigured, but once more a corpse.
“Are you satisfied?” Severine asked.
“Not yet.” Albric dragged the dead woman’s body to the solaros’—he could not bear to touch the other—and cleared the earth around them, using a hatchet taken from one of the dead mercenaries’ packs. He piled the bodies with deadwood and dry brush for kindling, scooped embers from the campfire, and set the heap afire.
It was, he knew, only the decent thing to do. Only the wise one. The rest of Oakharn might be blind to the return of bloodmagic on its soil, but he had seen its horror and he owed its victims this much.
So Albric told himself, staring into the flames as if they could burn away the memory of what he had seen and closing his nose to the smell of burning flesh under the woodsmoke. The solaros’ body smelled of something worse. But he was not in a temple, and he had no incense to sweeten the pyre, and so he simply shut his senses to what lay before him.
Only when the blaze had taken hold of both bodies did he look back to the Thornlady, who watched him impassively with her pale corpses behind her. He’d spent hours clearing the ground and gathering wood for the fire; dawn was nearly upon them, and already there was a tint of blue on the eastern horizon. But she did not seem tired, although Albric’s own eyes burned with smoke and weariness. She did not seem tired at all.
“We have a child to find,” she said, and returned to the road.