The Sacred Band

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Having so little time to live, with so much to do, Aliver worked without resting. He did not think about all the weeks he had lounged about the palace in Acacia. Bemoaning the past would do him no good. He had told Corinn not to. He wouldn’t either.

Later that very day, he cut away from the other riders and swept down on Kidnaban. He caught Paddel, the head vintner, trying to make his escape on a pleasure yacht loaded to the brim with the riches of his estate. Landing Kohl on the boat’s elaborate prow, Aliver shouted over her shoulders and the black flare of her wings, “Paddel, I am Aliver Akaran! I come to you with questions. I will have answers; you will give them now. If not, you will be food for my mount.”

Paddel-sweating and faint as he was, constantly touching his bald head and the tattooing meant to replicate hair on it-proved very forthcoming.

That evening in Alecia, Aliver spoke before a late session of the Senate. The things he said were easy for him, the words there on his tongue without hesitation. They were truths as he knew them. He would himself lead the army of Acacia north, up over the Methalian Rim. Hopefully, they would meet Princess Mena quickly, but in any event they would face the Auldek on the Mein Plateau. “While I live, they will not come down from there,” he said. “I pledge you that.”

He declared that the league had shown themselves to be traitorous scoundrels, enemies to everyone in the empire. “They’ve bled us all these years and sipped our blood as if it were wine. You see their abandoned palaces, their warehouses in ashes, and their ships all gone, fled to the Outer Isles? This is all proof that they’ve been found out. They’ve run from us, and they are now our enemy just as much as the Auldek are.”

He announced to them what he had learned about the vintage. The nation was addicted to the mist once again. They did not even know it, for it came to them in the bottles of wine on every table in the empire and it affected them so mildly that they did not know how much they depended on it. They drank of it every night, an enemy right there in their homes. “It is vile and subtle,” he said, “but we cannot save our nation without our full and true minds.” He ordered all wine poured out, casks smashed, not one more drop of it consumed. “Friends, let us drink water until this war is concluded. I will do the same. You may find it hard, at first, but I will be with each and every one of you, helping you forward.”

He told them that the Santoth had finally revealed their true nature. “They are an evil none of us here can stand against, and if they triumph, all the world will be enslaved to them.” He said that only one person could defeat them. Queen Corinn. “Only my sister has sorcery to match theirs. So pray for her. Put behind you now your hatred of her, your jealousy. Put behind you the schemes you have had for grasping power when this war ends. Put it all behind you, and pray to the Giver that she succeeds. If she does not, you have no future anyway.”

He admitted that he had a daughter but said she was not to be a pawn in the war or after it. “The queen and I have agreed to the order of succession. Should anything happen to us, we want these instructions followed.” He produced the box, a small metal container that he had carried with him on Kohl. “I have them here, in a locked box that I will leave in the care of the Senate. In this box are my wishes. Corinn’s wishes. You need not fear them, for they are just. This box is not to be opened until instructions on succession are needed. The key will be kept in safety. You need not seek it. It will appear when it’s needed. Before I leave this in your care I must have something from you: your word that you will abide by our wishes. All of you. Each and every one of you must swear to abide by our wishes. I want your oath on the Senate records.” Aliver had smiled then, looking around the chamber at the rapt faces staring at him. “I understand that I am not giving you a say in this. But I am your king.”

After saying all this, and after getting each senator’s oath to abide by the instructions in the locked box, Aliver left the senators in the chamber speechless. Yes, he spoke the truth, but he did not speak all of it. He had not mentioned that the league, in their treachery, had put numbers on his days of life. If he failed on the Mein Plateau, he would be dead before he had to see the Auldek coming down from it. He did not say that as the people came off the vintage they would lose the will to live, and die because of it. Though he told them Corinn fought on their behalf, he did not say that she had only as many days to succeed as he did, or that she no longer could use The Song to aid her, or that she did not intend to return from the mission at all. He knew that the senators who swore to obey the succession plan would not have done so readily if they did not fear him and Corinn and the coming war. And while he told them he would repel the Auldek, he did not say that to him success was no longer the same as what it was for them. Victory could be something else, he believed. No easier to attain-perhaps harder, in truth-but a new way. A better way.

Kohl lifted Aliver away from the city that night. The silence and the sound that is wind in motion, the flapping of massive wings, the creak of Kohl’s harness and armor. Far out to his left Thais carried Dram. To the east Ilabo rode Tij. The dragons called to one another every now and then. Their sounds were like chirrups stretched out with bass notes, each call ending with an almost flutelike sweetness of tone. Aliver had never heard anything like it.

Dragonsong, he thought. I would never have imagined such a thing.

As he listened to it, the night passed in beauty. The world below them slept beneath a starry sky, farms and villages, rivers and roads and dense patches of woodland. Love it for what it is, Aliver told himself. Love it for being my daughter’s world, my nephew’s future. Love it for what it is and because it will go on after me.

Many campfires glowed beneath them, often in clusters. His army. A great migration of soldiers heading north. Love them for who they are. For them, I cannot fail.

This thought became the frame inside which he ordered the rest of his life. Inside which he planned and dreamed and worked through the things to come and how he would face every hurdle he could imagine. He had already begun reaching out to people, urging them off the vintage, speaking to them to keep their minds clear, to fill them with his love of life, with purpose. He would not let them die, or waver. Not while he lived. He had done this before, with the Santoth’s help, and he believed he could do it again without them. He had only to open his mind, to offer himself to all the people of the Known World, to touch their minds and let them touch his.

As part of his consciousness took root in people’s minds, the sense of connection with them built. Thousands upon thousands of different connections. It was wonderful. Through it, he knew every reason he had to succeed, to end this war, and save all the lives he could. It was not the same as when the Santoth aided him. It was better, the connection his and the peoples’ alone. It was a communion shared, even as it was intimate with each individual. It was not even a strain on him. Rather, it felt as if once the connection was established, each person hosted his voice inside himself or herself, keeping alive Aliver’s words and praise and hopes for them.

He was still at this at sunrise, when the three dragons left the Eilavan Woodlands and rose over the Methalian Rim. The zigzag path up its heights thronged with his army, climbing. Aliver flew up to the Mein Plateau, skimming low over the great mass of troops already gathered there. He let the army see him and the dragons, and he rejoiced to hear the shouts that rose to greet them. Then he and the other dragon riders pressed on as the climbing sun crept across the land, bringing color to it. And it was later that day, under the brief blaze of the arctic day, that he saw Mena and Elya.

They were under attack.