Canticle

Chapter 25

Vlad Li Tam

Vlad Li Tam leaned on his shovel and tried not to look at the canvas-wrapped body. Still, eyes took him there against his will and then filled with tears-also against his will. The sun rose east of them, turning the distant Keeper’s Wall purple and pink.

They’d sailed with her in the Kinshark specifically for this, but he’d wanted to wait until sunrise. So he’d visited his new grandson and then slept, tossing and turning against the noise of his dreams. Then, he’d arisen to wake Baryk, and they’d carried her and their tools north of the camp to bury her away from all but the eye of Rudolfo’s magicked scouts.

Later, he would speak with the Gypsy King, though a part of him dreaded it after two weeks of avoiding Rudolfo’s watchful eye.

He cleared as much dirt as he could from the hole he’d started. Across from him, Baryk waited with the pickaxe ready. The others had offered to help, but he and Baryk had refused them. Instead, the bereaved husband and father worked together to carve out a grave for Rae Li Tam here among the dead of a city and a way of life that were no more.

It was the only proper choice that they work together, even as they had sat with her to watch her slowly die, still wrapped in the blood magicks that forced them to see her only in memory.

Even at the end, when the pain kept her weeping, she’d given herself completely to the work of finding a cure for her nephew and had died while Baryk napped beside her, an open book upon her invisible chest.

Vlad Li Tam felt the grief stabbing at him and looked up, nodding to Baryk. The gray-haired warpriest swung the pick down, breaking up the frozen ground for Vlad’s shovel.

Again, he tried not to look to her, stitched there in the canvas, and he failed. I remember your first steps, he told her in the deeper places he rarely visited. And your first words. He remembered her last words, too, though he’d not known at the time that they were such.

He’d sat beside her that last night before she died, and she offered no poetry, no celebration of her love. Instead, she squeezed his hand. “Grow your pain into an army,” she told him.

And he knew that he would. Later this morning, he would meet with Rudolfo and he would petition him to take their scarred children and care for them. He would show him the volume-a secret history of the Named Lands that even he had not known about. One in which House Li Tam cultivated an Y’Zirite resurgence in the Marshlands, quietly seeding it with the promised fall of Windwir until, by treachery and intrigue, they toppled that great city.

A resurgence that brought back blood magicks and had cast a great spell of power made from his anguish and from the blood of his children and grandchildren, such that it could heal the baby and raise Petronus from the dead-more miracles that pointed to a dark and rising gospel in their midst.

He would not have believed it if he had not read it coded in the book.

He’d believed at first, mistakenly, that perhaps they’d engineered the cult themselves simply to destroy Windwir. But deeper than that was the matter of faith. His father actually believed the so-called Y’Zirite Gospel. The volume was riddled with references to it. As much a study of scripture as a strategy for bringing out their present circumstances. But why?

To establish the throne of the Crimson Empress.

No, he thought, it could not be faith alone, some blind adherence in mysticism. He could not see his father in that light. There had to be a prime mover beyond him that he was in service to. And it had to be tangible and rational. Whatever the truth might be, the Crimson Empress was real.

Somewhere, someone played Queen’s War with the Named Lands, and his First Grandson and this kin-healing Machtvolk Queen were but pieces in a greater contest. And Vlad Li Tam would find his actual opponents and repay them.

It did not matter if the blood of his family saved his grandson or saved the very world. They who called for it and they who took it would pay for that taking.

So he would tell Rudolfo what he knew. And then he would ask him for money. And with that money, he would outfit what remained of his iron armada and go back to that island, though the thought of it broke his heart. Weeping, he would take it apart stone by stone and learn what he could from it.

He would grow his pain into an army, and while he did, he would learn his foe as well as he could. He would patrol the waters to the south, keeping an eye out for schooners of unfamiliar line and trim, made from a dark wood unfamiliar to the New World’s first family of shipbuilders. He would do all of this, and he would watch the water for ghosts while he did so.

Again, his eyes pulled him to Rae Li Tam, and he felt the sorrow moving through him like water.

She’d given her life to save him, taking in the blood magicks so that she would have the speed and strength to find him and pull him from the sea. He’d not anticipated that, and her sacrifice, at the end of so many other deaths, broke the old man’s heart.

I have changed, he realized.

He’d sent many of his children to their deaths to move this river or shift that mountain. He’d sent them to the beds of tyrants and into prisons with thieves and killers. He’d made them murderers and torturers and liars and whores.

Never again, he vowed.

Baryk rested on the pickaxe now, and Vlad Li Tam worked his shovel. They went back and forth like that until the hole was just so. Then, they put down their tools and took up their beloved.

The tears flowed freely now, and he did not despise them. I will grow my pain into an army.

He looked across and saw that Baryk also wept. He builds his army, too. We all do.

It would be a mighty army, he realized, that each of them grew. It would be a terrible reckoning for whatever hand had moved those pieces against Vlad Li Tam’s family.

Gently, and in silence, they laid Rae Li Tam into the ground and readied their hearts for war.

Winters

Winters knelt before Seamus, holding his hands in her own. He blinked at the mention of the woman who shared her name, his face showing his surprise.

She’d finally come and awakened him in the middle of the night when her questions and nightmares would not let her sleep.

“She claims to be my sister,” she told him. “She said to ask you about her.”

“It can’t be so,” he said, his voice quiet and low.

She read wonder in his voice, and her eyes narrowed. “What do you know, Seamus?”

He drew in his breath. “I know that it can’t be so,” he said again. “She couldn’t be.. I helped your father bury her. The fever took her in the first month.” He looked to her. “Unless. ”

Yes, she thought. It was possible. She’d watched the drop from the phial bring Petronus back. She’d seen the second drop heal Jakob. The dead could be raised.

Or, she thought, a death could be faked. Petronus again came to mind.

“And her name was Winteria?”

Seamus nodded. “Yes.”

She sat with this and tried to take it in. Why wasn’t this in the Book? She’d seen not a hint of it through all her father’s writings. and his closest friend, Hanric, had said nothing of it to her. “Why was her death kept secret?”

Seamus’s eyes were hard now. “Her birth was kept secret as well. Only a handful of us knew, and your father swore us to silence. Your mother was kept in isolation from the time she first conceived.”

“But why?” she asked again.

He shook his head. “I do not know.”

“Do not know or will not tell?” She raised her voice and heard the bitterness in it. “Seamus, I abjure you to tell me what you know.”

He shook his head. “I know nothing, my queen.”

Winters stood, and she felt a wave of nausea roll over her as the truth settled in. “If you speak truth, then I am not your queen.”

And without another word, she slipped out of the tent and into the frozen night.

Turning north, she slipped past the Gypsy guards and wandered toward the treeline at the edge of the ruined plain.

This was familiar ground. Not so long ago, she’d walked this plain with Neb as he patrolled the gravedigger’s defenses. Where was he, she wondered? Her dreams were empty without him. Violence and blood and dark birds filled them, and there was no comforting word in it for her. Still, she clung to her memory of him and longed to walk with him again. Longed for him to tell her that everything would be fine, that home still arose though she was no longer certain that it did.

And she missed the dreams. Not the ones of late that unfolded now behind her eyes.

In that future, the light swallowed her Book of Dreaming Kings. And a song-mad Tertius playing it upon the harp-led her love away from her and deeper into desolation. Her secret sister-back from the dead, it seemed, and sharing her name-built shrines to Wizard Kings long dead and cut their mark into her people and their children, openly pledging themselves in service to the Crimson Empress whose soon-coming they preached.

The Marshfolk were gone. The Machtvolk had returned in their place. And now she was gone, as well, and another Winteria would climb the spire and announce herself Machtvolk Queen and Bond-Servant of House Y’Zir.

Until this day, she’d never felt an orphan, because she’d always had her people. And even when their sudden fall to the Y’Zirite heresy had shaken her, until she saw her sister, until she recognized her own eyes, her own mouth, her own nose upon the older Winteria, she’d not truly believed she’d lost them.

But she had. And beyond the loss of her name, her people, her dream and her love, Winters had also lost her faith, she realized. She felt the hole where it had been and wondered how it had vanished so fast. And she wondered how or if she would ever get it back. She doubted it.

But just as when she’d lost Hanric and before him, her father and her mother, she would take this loss into herself and would drink the pain of it.

As the sun rose, she turned to the east to watch it and knew what she would do. She returned quietly to camp and left again with a small bundle beneath her arm.

She walked upriver until she was out of eyeshot of the camp and she stripped carefully, feeling the cold winter air move over her, causing her to shudder.

Teeth chattering, she waded out into that river and quickly scrubbed the mud and ash from her body. She pulled the braids from her hair and sent the bits of stick and leaf floating downriver. Then she scrubbed with the bar of strong soap until the numbness of the cold water drove her back to shore. She dried off with a rough cotton towel from the Ninefold Forest supply wagon and dressed herself in a calico dress and boots.

Buttoning her fur coat against the cold, Winters turned her back to the north and returned to camp.

Tomorrow, she would ride with Lynnae and Jin Li Tam and Jakob. She would take up her work in the Ninefold Forest, helping to integrate the refugees into the city that grew there. Jin Li Tam had suggested that it would be meaningful work while she determined her next steps.

She wanted to feel excitement, but curiosity was the best she could muster. Her mind was elsewhere, working her crisis of faith like a tongue upon a missing tooth. Finding meaning and sorting facts out from the knotted mess of it all. The dreams had been real. The glossolalia had been real. And everything had changed now. She wanted to know why, and she wanted to know what she was meant to believe now. She could not even find the passion to be angry or bereaved over it.

Somehow, Winters knew, she would sustain this loss and find treasure in it. Perhaps something better than the faith she had lost would grow up in its place.

Perhaps I’m meant to be a Gypsy wife after all; perhaps home was never any farther away than that. Would that be so bad? And would it be wrong to hope for it? And to hope that someday, she would have a child who laughed and blew bubbles in his sleep?

A child with eyes as piercing and blue as a summer sky above the Dragon’s Spine.

Like Neb’s eyes.

Sighing, Winters slipped back into her tent and fell into a light sleep, her nose twitching at the clean smell of soap on her skin and hair. As her sleep deepened, she dreamed about her white-haired boy, even though it wasn’t him but a memory of him. He held her by the campfire and told her that everything would be fine and well again in its proper season.

And above them, the blue-green moon sang both of them to sleep.

Petronus

Petronus left in the early hours while the sky was dark and the stars and moon were veiled lightly by wisps of clouds. The sun was red and low over the Keeper’s Wall when he paused and looked down the hill to the snow-blanketed ruins of Windwir. He traveled lightly with a horse and pack, both marked with the crest of the Ninefold Forest.

He’d met with Rudolfo briefly that afternoon, but the brooding Gypsy King had obviously been scattered and spread thin by the challenges before him. They’d talked briefly in private, and when Rudolfo had suggested secreting him away in the forest, Petronus had shaken his head and pressed for the Gypsy King to give him what he needed to quietly slip out of the Named Lands. Reluctantly, he’d called for his hostler and for a supply captain who could write out letters of credit and introduction for him.

Rudolfo had made a great effort, Petronus thought, not to look at the ragged scar. But in the end he had stared, and wonder had touched his eyes. Petronus frowned at the memory of it.

A realization struck him as he sat atop his horse looking down at Windwir and the camps around it. I may never see this place again. It grieved a part of him, but there was another part that felt relief. This was his first time back since the grave-digging. Walking that plain, seeing the rubble buried in snow and the raised ground of the trenches they’d filled with Windwir’s blackened bones was a cold blade that cut him deeply.

Below, he saw a figure by the side of the river just north of camp. From his vantage point, he could not tell who it was, but it looked to be a woman. She removed her clothing and waded out into the cold waters, dunking herself beneath them and scrubbing hurriedly.

His hand moved absently to his heart, feeling the raised skin of scar tissue there. I wish I could cleanse this from me.

But he couldn’t. Now, he carried a mark. A token, with the scar upon his throat, to remind him that his life had been taken and given back to him in a greater reckoning than he could have ever known. An autograph upon someone’s dark handiwork. A living miracle bearing witness to the power of the Wizard Kings.

He left now with only those marks and a few items of clothing. And it hearkened him back to another day he had slipped away alone. On the day he’d killed Sethbert and had then seen Vlad Li Tam’s evidence of the threat against Windwir, he’d ridden out from the Seventh Forest Manor to return to his shack on Caldus Bay and begin his work gathering up what data he could.

But now, he left with no work to drive him forward, and perhaps that was a good thing. Until Windwir’s pyre, he’d lived quietly for thirty years, marking his time by the fullness of his nets and the companionship of the kind-hearted people who kept his secret and welcomed home their prodigal Pope.

Maybe quiet would come to him again. He hoped so. But already, his mind spun. Why had he been brought back? What was the significance of Rudolfo’s heir? Who was this Crimson Empress, and could she be the external threat he’d been convinced they faced? He thought it likely that she was.

In the moments before administering her blood magick upon him, the Machtvolk Queen had added his own blood to the phial, according to Rudolfo. He’d certainly studied what little of the alchemy of blood magick they understood, but there were reasons why those magicks and spells, bargained for in the Beneath Places with the ghosts of long-dead gods, were forbidden. They were songs crafted out of the blood of others.

And over the years, he’d seen the parchments-fragments of this spell or that-but he had never seen a blood magick that could reverse death.

Petronus shook his head and saw now that the girl below was dressing hastily upon the shore. He turned his horse east and left her to her privacy.

He would take his time riding for the Keeper’s Gate, and when he arrived he would show the Gypsy Scouts stationed there the letter that authorized him entry. Then, he would go alone into that place and make what home for himself he could.

But as he rode east, a handful of horses separated from a copse of evergreens, and he recognized a gray standard he’d not expected to see.

When the riders approached, Grymlis rode at the head of them. Behind him, resplendent in the uniform of the Gray Guard of P’Andro Whym, rode five men he recognized and three he did not. The silver buttons upon their jackets cast back the red light of the rising sun, and a sudden rising breeze caught the edges of their standard and unfurled the crest of Windwir onto the morning air.

“Father,” Grymlis said, saluting when they were within earshot.

Petronus sighed. “I thought I ordered you back to the Ninefold Forest, into Rudolfo’s service?”

Grymlis smiled. “You did, Father.”

Petronus looked over the men. The new ones were younger and had the look of the Delta upon them. “You’ve no doubt heard about my present situation.”

Grymlis nodded. “I have,” he said. “And welcome back.”

Yes. He’d paid for his crimes with his life and then had his life handed back to him. He’d been made a spectacle, part of a story that would be told from town to town, city to city, in hushed tones and wonder, lending credence to the Y’Zirite Gospel. More than that, he also suspected he’d been brought back to force Jin Li Tam into a corner, and that frightened him more deeply than even his own return from the dead. Seeing the power of the Y’Zirites’ blood magicks manifested by Petronus’s resurrection, she had begged an ancient foe for the life of her child and it had been granted.

It was the beginning, he feared, of greater darkness in the land of his birth and first life.

Still, circumstances demanded that he leave and do quietly what could be done offstage and away from the eyes of the north. He realized then that Grymlis was speaking, and he forced his attention back to the old Gray Guard captain.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “My mind wandered.”

“Understandable,” Grymlis said. “I was telling you that there are others, as well, who will meet us at the Keeper’s Gate.”

Petronus felt his eyebrows furrow. “Others?”

“Androfrancines are no longer welcome here,” Grymlis said. “They killed the few that remained in the Summer Papal Palace. Caravans en route to Rudolfo’s forests have been attacked-again, Androfrancines massacred and left unburied for the crows. The only place untouched has been the Ninefold Forest, but some of us believe it’s only a matter of time before that changes. And now, the Gypsies owe a debt to these Marsher heretics.” He shifted in the saddle. “I’ve word out of our exodus; we’ll wait a week at the Keeper’s Gate for any others who would join us.”

At one time in his life, Petronus would have been angry at the disobedience of his orders, at the assumptions and actions being taken by the man before him. But the events of recent weeks had shown him that life was a nonmetrical song at times, one that went where it needed to for the melody without respect for the rhythm of history and tradition. Truly a canticle that one danced to as best one could. He would trust Grymlis to dance it, and he would not isolate himself from those who chose exile with their fallen father over a hidden life in a land that had turned on them so utterly in such a short time. Rudolfo’s kindness notwithstanding, he saw a day coming when no Androfrancine would be suffered to live in the Named Lands. And more than continuing, he feared the pieces had been set to this board in such a way that the Y’Zirite resurgence would not just survive but thrive in the rich soil of desolation prepared for it.

Finally, he nodded to Grymlis. “Then we will wait there for them.” He looked to the other men. “We will carve a home in the Churning Wastes, and we will offer ourselves to Rudolfo as his eyes and ears in that place.”

And we will find a way to undermine those tangled and bloody roots that threaten to choke our light.

Petronus touched the scar at his throat briefly, then touched his breast. Then, without looking back, he whistled his horse forward and rode east beneath the red fist of the rising sun.