The Given Sacrifice

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

County of Napa, Crown Province of Westria

(Formerly California)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

April 29th, Change Year 46/2044 AD

The High King’s force slid south. Time seemed to pass with shocking speed for Órlaith though she was achingly conscious of every second; she made herself let her shield drop a little so the guige-strap could take its fifteen-pound weight and keep that arm limber for when she needed to move it swiftly. She could see a plume of smoke now from ahead and to the left, dirty-brown wisps rising and blowing towards them; that must be the burning ship the scout had mentioned.

“I wonder why it is that folk always set things on fire during a fight?” her father mused calmly. “Because they do, so. Whether there’s a reason or not. I’ve seen horizons afire from one edge to the other, rick and cot and tree, when armies passed through.”

Then they were past the last roll of land-even what looked like flat terrain could be deceptive that way-and the clamor of voices and a hard banging clatter came on the wind. She could see the strangers as they turned west, a cluster of tiny figures at the end of a long alley of trampled tall grass no more than a bowshot across. A chant was building amid a rhythmic clash of wood and metal, probably the attackers nerving themselves for another rush. . though she couldn’t be sure.

It’s confusing, she thought. Well, thank the Crone and the Keeper-of-Laws I’m not in charge. Twenty minutes ago all I was looking forward to was a Beltane feast at Dun Barstow and findin’ out what roast ostrich tastes like!

Órlaith thrust her right hand out.

“Lance!”

The squire who’d armed her father pushed the lance into her palm. She closed her hand around the ashwood of the grip below the dish-shaped guard, the hide binding rough even through the leather palm of her steel gauntlet, resting the butt on her thigh with a click of metal on metal. The sound and the feel of the tapering twelve-foot shaft were familiar, but everything was strange, as if she were seeing the world clear yet distant through a sheet of salvaged glass.

“Noisy bastards,” Heuradys said quietly to her side, as Toad tossed his head and champed at his bit until foam drooled from his jaws. “But this is good ground for a knight’s battle. Very good. Auntie Tiph always said picking the right ground was half way to winning.”

Her father made another gesture with his left hand and called: “Now, Hellman.”

The horse-archers all dropped their knotted reins on their horses’ necks, reached over their shoulder for a shaft and leaned forward. Their mounts rocked up to a canter and then a gallop, abruptly shrinking away forward. Another shout of Artos and Montival! went up from them, and then a chorus of yelping, yipping cries, like mad coyotes or files on metal or both.

The High King hadn’t taken his lance yet, and used that hand to raise binoculars to his eyes. He barked a laugh.

“Da?” she said, startled.

“They’re just now noticing us. There’s a Haida chief in a sealskin jacket sewn with iron rings running up and down shouting at them to look to their rear. . yes, and kicking their backsides too, by way of getting their attention.”

Even Sir Aleaume, who was a bit stiff, chuckled at that.

“So sorry, are we interrupting something private and intimate?” Heuradys added, and there were more harsh barks of amusement.

They were closer now, close enough to see the enemy formation writhe and shake as the first flight of arrows from the horse-archers slashed into them, just as they tried to turn their attention to the rear. The light horsemen rose in their stirrups and went into a fast nock-draw-loose rhythm as they charged.

The war cries from the strangers were suddenly interspersed with shrieks of raw pain as arrows driven by the springy horn-and-sinew bows slammed down out of the sky; and the beleaguered group in the ruins rose and started shooting at their foemen again too. The horse-archers broke to the right at fifty yards from the enemy front-you could only aim ahead, behind and to the left from horseback-and raced down their ranks, loosing with flat aimed shots at close range in a ripple that emptied their quivers. Arrows came back at them, but few and hasty; then they were turning away, twisting in the saddle to shoot a last shaft or two behind them. They thundered by the rest of the Montivallan party to the right, whooping triumph and waving their bows in the air, looping around to refill from the packhorses led by the varlets.

“Nicely done, almost like a drill,” her father said judiciously. “Hellman knows his business.” A little louder: “When you think the range is right, Bow-Captain.”

Another dozen paces, and Edain’s voice cracked out: “Draw!”

His command halted and the yew staves bent, the Archers sinking into the wide-braced, whole-body, arse-down style that the Clan’s longbowmen practiced from the age of six, what they called drawing in the bow. The points of the bodkins glittered as they rose to a forty-five-degree angle, and the drawing-hands went back until they were behind the angle of the jaw. Behind the Archers their piper cut loose with the keening menace of the “Ravens Pibroch”; bringing along a battery of Lambeg drums would have been excessive with less than a tenth of the guard-regiment here, but you wouldn’t find forty Mackenzies without at least one set of bagpipes.

Edain’s voice punched through the savage wail of the píob mhór:

“Let the gray geese fly! Wholly together-shoot!”

There were twice twenty and one of the High King’s Archers here, counting their commander. That wasn’t enough longbows to generate the sort of sky-darkening arrowstorm that had smashed armies on the battlefields of the Prophet’s War. Though the target was a lot smaller too, if nicely packed, and these were picked experts who could loose a shaft every three or four seconds and put it exactly where they wished. Forty scythed down into the foreigners in the first volley, then a flickering stream as each bowman walked four paces, shot, walked, shot. .

Órlaith swallowed; she was close enough now to see men screaming and staggering with an arrow through the face or writhing on the ground trying to pull out one that had punched through armor into chest or belly or groin, or just lying still with their eyes open wide. With the wind in her face she thought she could smell that tang of salt and iron too, like being in a garth in the autumn at pig-slaughtering time. . except that there was no one standing by with a bucket of oatmeal to catch the blood for sausages.

When her father spoke his voice had the flat judiciousness of a landsman looking at a yellow field of grain he’d plowed and sown and tended, rubbing a handful of ripe ears between his hands before tasting the kernels and nodding satisfaction that it was time to send in the reapers.

“We surprised them right enough. Now they’re dung for our pitchforks, the careless bastards. Let’s not let them get their balance back.”

Even with her nerves thrumming-taut Órlaith shivered a little. Her father was a gentle and forbearing man, slow to anger and quick to laugh and endlessly patient in composing the quarrels of which Montival’s wildly varied peoples had an abundance.

One of her earliest memories was clinging to his back with a tiny fallen bird in her free hand as they climbed a tree to put it back in the nest. He would make a three weeks’ ride in the dead of winter to be sure of the facts in an appeal to the Crown’s justice, when a death sentence was at stake. This was a side of him she hadn’t seen much of before, and suddenly the tales of the man who’d broken the Prophet’s hordes and forged a kingdom took on a new light.

It had been a sword that the Lady had given him on the magic isle, after all.

“Sir Aleaume!” he said crisply, as he extended his hand for his lance and a squire leaned forward to fill it. “Advance to contact!”

The baron’s son nodded to his signaler. That young man raised the long Portlander trumpet slung across his body and put the mouthpiece to his lips.

The men-at-arms knocked down their visors with the edge of their shields as he raised the oliphant. Órlaith did the same; darkness fell with a click as the metal snapped into its catch, and the world shrank to a long narrow slit of brightness, like a painting or a tapestry. Her father’s visor and hers were both drawn down to points at chin level, suggesting a beak: his was scored and inlaid with black niello like his helm, echoing the feathers of the Raven that was his sept totem. The markings on hers were threads of pure burnished gold, for the great hunting eagle that had come to her on her spirit-quest. Something of that raptor’s intensity seemed to fill her, as if she were a vessel of movement and focus stooping from a great height.

“Chevaliers, haro!” Aleaume shouted. “For Artos and Montival. . à l’outrance, charge!”

The silver scream of the oliphant echoed the command, like a white flash in the mind. Their coursers were as well trained as the men, and scarcely needed rein or spur or even the riders’ shift of balance. The dozen armored men-at-arms spread out into a close-spaced line and their horses moved up the pace. Walk. . trot. . a long rocking canter. . and the pennants began to snap and flutter in the speed of their hoof-drumming rush.

They passed where the archers had halted in easy range of the enemy, a score on either side; the arrows were still going by overhead, focused now on the spot where the lanceheads would go home. Apparently the foemen knew something about receiving a cavalry charge, for they were trying to pack together and present a hedge of points to the horses; trying and failing, falling or throwing up shields to stop the rain of gray-feathered cloth-yard shafts.

Closer, a hundred yards, and then the trumpet shrieked again for the gallop-a close-held controlled hand-gallop, not the wild dash that would scatter them like hailstones on a roof. Her instructors had hammered home that the shock of a charge depended on all the lances striking at the same moment. Her father’s lance came down, and she couched her own; the rest followed in a ripple, the black-gold-silver of Heuradys’ pennant rattling and cracking a yard to the right and twelve inches behind her own.

The foot-long blades of the heads pointed down at breast-height on a standing man, wavering only a little as the hooves pounded and the horses’ heads pumped up and down. She raised her left fist to just below her chin, and that put the curved upper rim of her shield right below the level of her eyes.

It didn’t feel heavy now, just comfortingly solid. Arrows shot by the men facing them went by with a nasty whpppt sound, one glanced with a tick against the side of her helmet like a quick rap with a hammer, and then three smashed into the shield crack-crack-crack, punching through the thin sheet-steel facing and into the bullhide and plywood beneath.

Someone is trying to kill me! went through her mind.

She knew it was absurd even as she thought it, but that didn’t remove the sense of indignation, and it carried the faint memory of a scolding and swat on the bottom she’d gotten when she was six and pointed a half-drawn bow at someone.

The impact of the arrows hammered against her, but the grip of the high-cantled war saddle kept her firm and she braced her legs in the long stirrups. What was about to happen would be much worse. Hitting things at speed with a lance she knew about.

Pick your man, a harsh remembered voice spoke at the back of her mind. Pick him the moment you couch the lance and your horse goes up to the gallop.

It had been an old knight from County Molalla, with a wrinkled brown face like a scar-map of campaigns and lumpy with ancient badly healed bone-breaks. He lectured the young squires in his charge with the combination of vehemence and boredom used for vital truths told a thousand times, and he’d spared none of them an iota for birth or rank or sex:

You can’t change your mind once you’re committed and you get only one chance with a lance. Don’t waste it.

A mailed figure ahead of her with a spike atop a conical helmet that spread in a lobster-tail fan over his neck was waving his square-tipped blade and screaming a war cry that sounded something like jew-che as he tried to rally his men. She let the point dip towards him; a touch of the rein to neck and the alignment of the lance itself brought the last ounce of effort from Dancer. The man snarled with his eyes wide and swept the sword back, suddenly close enough to see a mole beside his mouth-

Thud!

Impact, massive and somehow soft and heavy at the same time, wrenching savagely at her arm and shoulder and slamming her lower torso against the curved cantle of the saddle. Near two thousand pounds of horse and armored rider moving fast, all packed behind the hard steel point. You could knock yourself head over heels off the horse if you did it wrong, but she came back upright as the lance broke across and she made her hand unclench and toss away the stub. The man in the pointed helm was down, with the lancehead driven right through his body and three feet of the shaft standing out of his chest.

He’s dead, she thought suddenly. I killed him. Then her father’s voice: Don’t hesitate.

Her hand pulled the war hammer loose from the straps at her saddlebow, a yard of steel shaft with a serrated head on one side and a thick curved spike on the other. A Haida warrior with an orca painted on his round shield tried to come in stooping low and hack at the horse’s legs. Dancer came up in a perfect running levade and lashed out with both forehooves. Her body flexed again, and her teeth went click as the horse stamped on over the prostrate body.

She blocked a spearhead with the point of her shield and lashed down with the war hammer on the top of the man’s helmet: metal dented and bone cracked beneath, the feeling vibrating up the shaft and into her hand.

“Morrigú!” her father’s voice shouted.

“Scathatch!” her own replied in a keening shriek as she hacked down to the right with the spike.

And that was most strange, some distant part of her mind noted. He had named the Crow Goddess, the aspect of Her that watched over warriors; for She was all things, the gentle Mother-of-All who gave life and the Red Hag who reaped men on a bloody field as well.

Órlaith had called instead on the Dark Mother in Her most terrible form: Scathatch.

The Devouring Shadow Beneath.

She Who Brings Fear.

For a moment there was nothing but chaos, the knights ramping through the mass like steel-clad tigers, sword and hammer and lashing hooves, the Archers running up and firing point-blank before throwing down their bows and wading in with buckler and short sword. A man leveled a crossbow at her, but an already-bloodied lancepoint tore into his throat with savage force and a deadly precision.

“Alale alala!” Heuradys screamed, tossing the lance aside and drawing her sword. “Alale alala!”

Then the beleaguered foreigners who’d been facing certain death before the Montivallans arrived rose from among the ruins and charged into the disordered mass. There were only thirty on their feet, many wounded, but they came in a disciplined armored mass of points and swords, a red-and-white banner fluttering in their midst and a harsh baying throat-tearing chorus sounding in time to the pounding of their boots:

“Tennoheika banzai! Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

The newcomers fell upon their foemen with terrifying intensity and skilled fury, like a blizzard of dancing butcher knives. The enemy broke then, south and west, screaming in terror and throwing away their weapons to run the faster. Hellman’s light cavalry looped effortlessly around them and deployed, though there seemed to be two less of them. The ten drawn up in a semicircle with their stiff bows pulled to the ear were enough, though. The foemen stopped and milled about; one or two drove daggers into their own throats, or each other’s. Those were the surviving Haida-they seldom let themselves be taken alive, which saved the Montivallans the trouble of hanging them for piracy.

Órlaith turned Dancer and followed her father without conscious thought. For an instant her attention went to what clotted and dripped on the head of her war hammer; she gulped a little and dragged it through a bush as she passed.

“Odd,” her father said. “That war cry the enemy were using-it meant self-reliance, more or less. An admirable quality, but not what you’d expect on a battlefield.”

“What were the. . well, the other lot of foreigners saying?”

“Mmmm. . more or less literally. . To the Heavenly Sovereign Majesty, ten thousand years! Or Long Live the Emperor for short; it’s a polished and compact phrase.”

He halted and spoke to the captives, in a language Órlaith didn’t even recognize. That was another gift of the Sword of the Lady; the bearer could speak the tongues that were needful to the High King’s work. The foreigners cast their weapons and helms away and knelt, their hands on their heads.

The Montivallan party were around them now, and she could see the first of Dun Barstow’s levy coming up, jumping off their bicycles and trotting forward with arrows on the string. One fresh-faced Archer of the guard younger than she spoke sotto voce to a veteran who had a scar like a thin white mustache crumpling the dark skin of his upper lip:

“Is it always that easy, so?” the youngster said, trying to be nonchalant and not quite suppressing a quaver; the freckles stood out against a face gone pale.

“It’s easy enough when you catch them with their kilts up and Little Jack in hand, laddie,” the older man said, a little indistinctly and making an illustrative pumping motion with his right. “And when the Morrigú doesn’t get up to any of Her little tricks. When they’re waiting for you, and things do go wrong. . then it gets very hard. Enjoy this while you can, for you’ll not see the like often. The Ard Rí and our Old Wolf did a nice neat job o’ work, I’ll say that for any to hear.”

It hadn’t been easy for everyone; two of Hellman’s troopers were laying out a third. It was the one who’d brought the message, Noemi Hierro, lying still with an arrow sunk fletching-deep under her right armpit and an expression of surprise on her face beneath the blood and her twenty-first year never to be completed. Órlaith felt a little winded at the sight; that had been someone she knew, fairly well after weeks of travel together, and liked.

So sudden, she thought, a little dazed; the young man who’d closed her eyes looked even more stunned-not in an anguish of grief yet, just. . disbelieving.

The healers were busy with several others, including some from both lots of foreigners-that was part of their oath to Brigit, to care for all Her children first and put everything else second when they saw the need. Though sometimes all that could be done was a massive dose of morphine.

The hale prisoners were all men, mostly youngish and stocky-muscular though not large. With their helmets off she could see that they were all of very much the same physical type, which itself was slightly odd to Montivallan eyes. Their skins were of a pale umber a little darker than hers when she had a summer tan, and they had sharply slanted dark eyes-shaped like Sir Aleaume’s, but more so-and short snub noses and close-cropped raven hair, faces high-cheeked and rather flat and sparse of beard where they had any. That combination of features was known in Montival though not common in pure form these days, and she knew that they stemmed originally from the other side of the Pacific.

Her father spoke again, then dropped back into English for her: “I’ve promised them their lives if they behave,” he said, pitching his voice to carry to his followers. “We’ll need to question them, of course.”

To her, more quietly: “But now let’s see to our friends. . or at least, the enemies of our enemies.”

Heuradys wiped and sheathed her sword and passed a canteen to Órlaith; she sucked greedily at it, suddenly conscious of how her mouth was dusty-dry and gummy at once. The water was cut one-fifth with harsh red wine, and it tasted better than anything she’d ever drunk. The High King took two long swallows when she offered to him, and sighed.

“You forget what thirsty work this is, you do.”

The other group of strangers had halted when the Montivallans indicated they should-though there weren’t any living foemen behind them. She recognized the armor they wore now that they were close. It was more complex than that of the men they’d been fighting, built up from many enameled steel plates held together with silk cord, and helmets with broad flares and sometimes contorted masks over the face like visors. Several had banners flying from small poles fixed in holders on their backs.

“Nihon style,” Órlaith murmured, and one of them close enough to hear gave her a sharp look, plainly recognizing the word. “And we thought nobody survived there!”

“They speak Nihongo as well as wearing the gear; they’re Nihonjin, right enough. Japanese, the ancients would have said,” her father said.

The phalanx of. . Japanese. . murmured a little among themselves, evidently remarking on the fact that they’d been recognized. She and her father dismounted, removing their helmets; at his gesture the squires unfastened the King’s bevoir, the piece that protected throat and chin but made conversation with anyone unaccustomed to them a little difficult.

The strangers-could they really be from the fabled land of Japan? — removed their helms as well and bowed, a uniform formal-looking gesture held for a second before they came erect again; they were of the same race as the other party of strangers but looked very different, with their hair shaven in a broad strip up the center of the pate and then curled into a tight topknot behind. Some wore white headbands with a single red dot flanked by spiky script as well. Their faces were set, without any of the grins or whooping she’d have expected from a like number of Mackenzies. There were others in Montival who cultivated a similar stoic manner, of course; Bearkillers, for example.

Órlaith’s brows went up. The last of the Nihonjin had taken off his helmet. .

No, her helmet. A woman, and about my own age. . somewhere between my age and Herry’s, maybe. The features were strong but delicate. Not wearing that strange hairdo, either, though she does have the headband.

She wore the same armor as the others, and she carried a naginata, a long curved blade on the end of an eight-foot bamboo shaft. There was blood on the tip, too. She began to speak slowly in what Órlaith recognized as an attempt at English. . probably grammatically correct English, but with the sounds so badly rendered that it was incomprehensible except for the odd word.

“. . senkkyu Beddi Mach,” she finished.

Was that “thank you very much”? Órlaith wondered.

Her father responded with a bow of his own and spoke Nihongo in a barking staccato manner, to the evident vast relief of the newcomers. They seemed astonished, too. They bowed again when he indicated himself and said something that ended with:

“. . koutei Dai-Montival.”

Then the whole party turned with a clatter and a united gasp. Two more of the Nipponese were approaching, carrying the body of a third between them.

“Ouch,” Heuradys said softly just behind her ear. “No way he’s going to live with that just there.”

She nodded agreement. An arrow stood in his torso; her training calculated the position and put it down as far too near the big clutch of blood vessels above the heart.

You had only to nick something there and the body cavity would fill with blood in a minute or less. . The woman gave a small shocked cry as they laid the dead man down and called out what might be a name.

“That was their ruler, their Tenno,” her father murmured to her. “Heavenly Sovereign, their Emperor. And the father of that young woman.”

Órlaith made a small shocked sound of her own, throttled down out of consideration, not to intrude on grief.

Mother-of-All, be merciful to her! she thought. The poor lass, to come so close to safety and then lose her Da so! Hard, hard, very hard indeed.

“That’s not one of our arrows, praise and thanks to Lugh of the Long Hand,” her father said quietly. “Accidents of that sort can happen more often than is comfortable, in a scramblin’ fight like this.”

“No, it’s fletched with gull feathers and shafted with some sort of reed,” she agreed, wincing at the thought.

All the rest of the Nihonjin sank to their knees and then bowed forward towards the dead man, forehead to ground with their hands flat on the earth and fingertips touching. When they sat back on their heels their impassive countenances were like tragic masks. One of them nearest the young woman had a square scarred face that underneath the differences might have been Edain Aylward’s to the life, and a single tear trickled down his cheek. He slowly reached for the short curved sword at his right hip, twin to the longer blade tucked edge-up through the sash he wore, touching the clasps of his armor at with the other hand.

The young woman unfroze and made a sharp chopping gesture, and spoke in a commanding tone without a break in it, though her own eyes were glistening. The man said something in a pleading tone, and she repeated the order.

Her father leaned close to Órlaith and murmured. “She just denied him permission to kill himself in apology for failure. No, she said. I forbid it. I forbid you all. I will need your living swords, and you may not desert me or our people. Our need is too great.”

Órlaith nodded respectfully. The middle-aged Nihonjin looked at his ruler’s daughter for a long moment. He made the same gesture of obeisance to her that he had to the dead man; the others followed him. Then with hands upflung he barked out a short phrase; she thought it had a word something like jotei in it, used several times with another from the war cry as well. The others repeated it and took it up, chanting for a moment, ignoring the eyes of the Montivallans. Her father translated in the same low murmur:

“Hail to the Heavenly Sovereign Empress! Daughter of the Sun Goddess! To the Empress, Ten Thousand Years!”

He shook his head, and continued almost as softly: “And here I thought we’d achieved a nice, boring, uneventful life!”

The High King and his daughter waited courteously until the ritual ran its course, then stepped forward. Artos spoke again when the. .

“Well, I suppose she’s an empress now, though of what we don’t know,” Órlaith murmured.

“Maybe a country, maybe of one village and a pet ox,” Heuradys replied almost inaudibly sotto voce.

News travelled across the great ocean, but slowly and fitfully and mostly from the southern parts of Asia whence came a trickle of trade. Everyone had just assumed Japan was a total wreck, like most of Europe or the coastal parts of China. Too many big cities too close together.

. . the empress rose and faced him.

Movement, and a shout. Órlaith spun on one heel and froze for an instant. One of the kneeling prisoners was grinning at her, and his eyes. . were solid black, emptiness with only a rim of white around the outside. She’d heard of the like, but never thought to see it herself.

“I. . see. . you. .” he said, in a voice from the surface of a dead star.

Existence itself wavered. She looked into those eyes, and through them into a universe where matter itself perished with a whimpering squeal, absolute cold, utter black forever and everywhere, where nothing happened and nothing ever would. She could not move, for nothing did. .

The prisoner’s hands went down from his bristle-shaven head to the back of his collar. A bodkin-headed arrow plowed into his forehead and sank inches deep with a wet splintering crack of bone, and Edain was cursing as he reached for another with blurring speed and half a dozen of the Archers shot too and men-at-arms were charging with their swords raised, but the dead man’s hands flashed forward. Two streaks of silver went through the air.

Time slowed, like a spoon through honey. The thickset man beside the foreign empress flung a hand out in a desperate reach like a baseball outfielder. It went between his charge and the weapon, and suddenly a small slim blade was standing out of his palm. Her father grabbed at Órlaith, throwing her backward with huge and desperate strength as he dove between her and the threat and Heuradys’ shield came around before her.

And she knew he’d started to move an instant before the attacker.

As he did he jerked his own right arm up, the shield-bearing arm that reflex would put in the way of a threat. The flash of silver went over it by the merest fraction, and then he was falling backward beside her, his hand clasped to his throat and the dimpled bone hilt of the throwing-knife standing between the fingers. Blood welled out over the hand and from his mouth. Time unfroze, and she checked her lunge forward. The angle meant that anything she did would make things worse.

A few seconds ticked by like years. Faces gathered about where she knelt by her father, but they were more distant than the Moon. He reached with his other hand, fumbling, and she saw what he was doing and helped, bringing the Sword up until it lay on his breast, with her hand over his on the hilt. Light flared in the crystal pommel. For a moment she hoped wildly and then-

• • •

“Hello, my darling girl, my heart, my treasure,” he said gently.

They were standing in the trampled meadow, but the grass nodded undisturbed instead of lying flat, and there were neither men nor weapons nor blood. Her father was in a simple kilt and shirt, smiling at her as the wind ruffled his bright hair.

That expression turned rueful as he looked down at his right hand, flexing the arm and opening and closing the long shapely fingers.

“I was told at the time that Cutter arrow in my right shoulder would be the death of me. And so it was, with a twenty-year stay of execution. Just a fraction of a second too slow for me to make old bones. Well, I had it on the best of authorities I’d not see my beard go gray. . and I noticed the first gray hair six months ago.”

“Da!”

His arms went about her, comforting and strong as she wept. “Ah, lass, it’s sorry I am to leave you. So, so. Grieve, but not too long; it’s the way of nature for a child to bury her parents.”

A thought penetrated even her sorrow. “Oh, Goddess, I’ll have to tell Mother!”

She could feel his head shake. “No. She is High Queen. We were linked to the land, and to each other. She’ll have known.

“Tell your mother that I will wait for her, in the world beyond the world.”

He held her at arm’s length with his hands on her shoulders. “You and I will meet once more, my heart, in this cycle of the world; long ago for me, not too long in the future for you. By Lost Lake.”

A thread of eeriness penetrated her misery. That was where the Kingmaking took place. Nobody went there but a new made High King. . or High Queen.

• • •

Then the world crashed in on her once more. Her father lay with his eyes closed, comely even with the blood bright on this throat and lips, years vanished from his face. She stood, slowly, the Sword of the Lady in her hand. Always before it had seemed a little heavy, a little large, as a blade sized for her father would.

Now it was perfect, alive in her grip at the exact weight her wrist and arm could wield, and her fingers closed around it as if it had been fashioned for her at the place where the world began. Somehow that made the moment real, as even her father’s face relaxed in death could not.

Slowly she raised the Sword on high. Heuradys fell to her knees, head bowed, and the others did in a ripple outward like the fall of petals from flowers.

“I am my father’s heir,” she called, her voice strange and harsh in her ears. “And for him and for Montival, for the land that he has watered with his blood. . I swear vengeance on those who did this deed!”