Return of the Guardian-King by Karen Hancock
He pushed the thoughts firmly from his mind. Days ago he’d determined the only way to survive the separation was not to think of them. He prayed for them all—and for Trap and Carissa and her baby—every morning, but after that he refused to let himself consider them again. Thanks to the workload, that had been easier than he’d expected.
He saw the sympathy in Rolland’s eyes. “Young ones, then. That’s rough.”
“Why d’ ye never tell us?” Galen demanded.
Abramm swallowed the thickening out of his throat as he looked from one to the other of them, marveling that he had just revealed to them he had a wife and two sons who awaited him in the royal city of Fannath Rill, that they could look at his face and see his eyes and the scars that ran from brow to chin—and for all appearances make no connection whatsoever.
“I don’t think anyone asked,” he said finally.
The cawing of the crows returning up the valley drew his eye. They flew in an uneven flock along the edge of the mist-veiled forest on the far side. On the ground beneath them, snow plumed upward in the wake of the beast that ran with them. The moment he focused on it, though, the creature dodged into the trees.
“So what did ye do . . . before . . . all this?” Rolland asked, gesturing about.
The question dragged his attention back to his companions, and he stared at the big man blankly, the import of Rolland’s words dawning slowly. A second chance to reveal the truth of his identity lay before him, and he had even less idea what to do with it than before. It seemed wrong to blurt out, “I was king of Kiriath.” Shouldn’t they realize it without his having to tell them? And if they didn’t, then why should he bother with it? It wasn’t as if any of them were eager to put him back on the throne.
They were staring at him, waiting for an answer. Aware of his suddenly pounding heart and dry mouth, Abramm let himself watch the crows as they wheeled from the forest edge and headed now toward the monastery. Then, before he had consciously decided what to do, the words were falling out of him. “I did many things.”
“A soldier, I’m guessin’,” Rolland said, squinting at him speculatively. “In the king’s army, which is why ye’ve kept so quiet about it. And why Trinley gets under yer skin so much.”
“I rather thought it was me who was getting under his skin.”
Rolland shrugged good-naturedly as Galen exclaimed, “O’ course! That’s where ye got yer scars as well, wasn’t it? In battle.”
Abramm said nothing, reminded again that his scars had not gone unnoticed, and marveling how that could be and the truth still not be realized. . . .
“Hey, down there!” Trinley called from the dining hall roof looming above them. “You three gonna get any work done today, or are ye just waitin’ fer the sun t’ melt it all?”
The crows converged on a huge dark spruce not far from the kitchen, dislodging showers and heavy clumps of snow from its branches as they landed.
About that time Marta ascended through the stepped tunnel they’d dug up from the kitchen porch, shaded her eyes against the sun, and called up for Galen, whose pregnant wife was asking for him. Grumbling good-naturedly, he went down to see what she needed, and Rolland remarked afterward how glad he was not to be in the young man’s boots.
“It scared me t’ death thinkin’ poor little Jania might have to deliver up there in the pass somewhere.” He hefted the shovel and drove it under the next increment of snow. “Ye were right to send yers on ahead of ye,” he said, lifting it and tossing the snow over his shoulder. “I wish I’d done that now.”
“Aye, but then you’d have the worry of not knowing what’s become of them. If they’re all right, what they’re going through, the fact they’d not even know if you were alive.” And in his case, since the world had watched his execution and believed him dead, Maddie had particular justification not to know. From her perspective, all his plans would seem to have gone to ash. From her perspective, and that of everyone around her, he was gone and never coming back. With no way to contact her, he’d had only his hope in the mysterious link that bound their souls . . . praying she would know the truth and not give up on him until he returned.
But knowing a thing inside did not persuade others to agree with you.
“No. It doesn’t. . . .”
His breath hissed as he straightened to scan the forest’s edge across the snowfield, right where the crows had turned away. He felt the birds’ eyes on the back of his neck as movement stirred among the far trees and the great shaggy bulk of a tanniym stepped into the light. A small human form rode astride it, and he knew who it was the moment he saw her: Tapheina.
“You are a fool to think she will wait,” Tapheina’s mental voice taunted him. “A fool to expect a woman pregnant with her dead husband’s child—”
Pregnant?!
“You did not know?”
How could you know that?
“The birds told me. . . .” Tapheina’s rich laughter echoed in his mind.
The birds?
“In the spruce behind you. They also told me your sons are dead, killed at your brother’s hand.”
“Are ye all right, friend?” Rolland asked, his mellow voice breaking into Abramm’s thoughts. When Abramm looked at him blankly, he added, “Ye’ve gone right pale and stiff all of a sudden.”
I don’t believe you, he thought at the tanniym. If Gillard had killed them, he’d have shown them to me.
“What makes you think he didn’t find and kill them after you escaped him? She paused, no doubt sensing the dismay those words struck in him. “It’s time you left the past behind, my prince. Time you embraced a higher destiny.”
Get out of my mind!
She laughed again, but when he turned to Eidon and the Light flared through him, the intrusive presence withdrew, leaving him sick and shaken.
Rolland was looking worriedly between him and the view across the valley. “Is it them again? The tanniym?”
Abramm’s glance whipped around. “Do you see something?”
“Something, maybe. It’s too dark in the shadows to be sure. I thought ye could tell better.” He hesitated, watching Abramm keenly. “The professor told me she’d come and try to speak t’ ye.”
Abramm grimaced at him. “She’s not going to get me to open the gate, Rollie. There. See?” He jogged his chin toward the pair of tanniym, rider and beast, now bounding away through the trees, intermittent sprays of the snow tracking their path. “She’s leaving.”
Rolland stared across the valley as Abramm got back to work.
Not long after that, Abramm’s shovel collided with something hard under the covering of snow. It turned out to be a mound of ice that had built up— apparently melting and refreezing repeatedly—over a hole where the chimney met the roof.
“Hey,” he said to Rolland, who was just finishing up on the other side of the chimney. “I think I might have found that leak they’ve been complaining about in the kitchen. . . .” He chipped away at the ice with downward chops of the shovel, and suddenly the ice wall exploded outward in a whirlwind of black flapping wings. How did the crows get into the chimney? he wondered as they bumped around him, battering him with their wings and beaks.
The realization that they were not crows but feyna came on him all at once, and momentarily paralyzed him. They were moving too fast for him to actually see them, but he sensed the cold fire of their spore as it burned in the tiny cuts they had made in his hands and face. The smell of roasting almonds filled his head, and he sensed his inner Shadow awaken, then the deeper violet tones of the spore that Tapheina had deposited. In fact, he sensed her watching him from down the valley back in the trees, as other beings, much closer, looked on as well, somehow holding the feyna in a cloud around him, waiting, waiting for the spore to grow bright enough, the Shadow strong enough to seize him—
Aversion exploded in him, and he staggered back with a shout, swinging the shovel as the Light flared out of him, blasting the dark forms away in all directions.
The perspectives of the rhu’ema and tanniym left Abramm abruptly, and he tumbled briefly through space. Then he felt the canted shingles beneath his feet, the shovel handle hard against his mittened palms. The dark, newly cleared roof and the massive mountains whirled briefly around him, and settled. He swallowed and stared at bearded Rolland, who stared back, blue eyes wide. Then the man’s gaze dropped to his feet and frowned.
“What the plague did ye do here, Alaric?”
Abramm blinked back at him, struggling to recall what he had been doing. . . . “I was just trying to get the ice off. . . .”
“No—I mean here.” Rolland gestured at the roof, and now Abramm saw the multitude of small feyna bodies littering the shingles around him.
“There’s gotta be a score of ’em at least,” Rolland said. “Yet ye killed ’em in a single flash.”
“They’re small,” Abramm noted. “Young ones.”
“Aye . . .” Rolland was looking at him oddly. “But how did ye kill ’em all so fast?”
“It was the Light, Rollie. I did nothing.”
“I’ve never seen anyone do that before.”
Abramm had no answer for him. He had shoveled up the first few bodies of the baby feyna when behind him the crows burst out of the spruce in a thunderous flapping of wings, cawing as they went. They flew an almost perfect circle around him and Rolland, then sped off to the east, following the stream again until they disappeared in the V between the foothills. “Almost as if they were watchin’,” Rolland said.
A chill crawled up Abramm’s spine. They were watching—no question of it. They were the source of the other minds he’d sensed, and now he knew just what they were—rhu’ema who had buried themselves in the birds’ bodies so they could travel about in daylight. Not rhu’ema from around here, but creatures from somewhere afar. Like Fannath Rill. Or even Kiriath.
“The birds told me,” Tapheina had said. They could well have brought information from wherever they had come, spies who would return to those who sent them and report that Abramm was alive. That their compatriots in Kiriath had failed to kill him, as had those in the pass. That he was alive, in Caerna’tha . . . and they would have all winter to plan how they would deal with him.
A ghost of fear rattled through him before he reminded himself whom he served. Let them plan. They’d tried with everything they had to kill him and had failed.
But they did succeed in taking away my crown, he thought uneasily. And his way of life. And his loved ones—all of whom were out there somewhere at his enemies’ mercy. . . .
He frowned and pushed the thought from his mind, turning back toward the ice blob he’d been struggling to remove. It was gone, and in its place a brick-sized hole gaped in the chimney where it met the roof. “Might as well get this sealed up right now,” he said.
After they’d repaired the hole, they went down to the dining hall for the midday meal. The central topic of conversation, not surprisingly, was the startling revelation that the loner Alaric had a wife and sons. Abramm was peppered with eager questions, the answers to which were discussed at length among the others, many of them voicing the very worries Tapheina’s vicious lies had ignited in Abramm himself.
“A woman with two young sons in her care and who has every reason to believe her husband is dead?” Kitrenna Trinley asked as they sat at the long center table eating. “Of course she’d be looking to remarry.”
“She wouldn’t have every reason,” Rolland argued. “She doesn’t know for sure he is dead.”
“Aye, but these are difficult times. And she has her children to think of.”
Or maybe not, Abramm’s treacherous memory supplied. If her children are dead.
Galen and Jania jumped into the discussion, but Abramm no longer heard them, consumed with the sudden restless desire to try following the river down out of the mountains after all. How could he spend six months not knowing? And if Maddie was pregnant—
Oh, but you don’t know that. So stop thinking about it. . . .
So distracted was he by his own thoughts and fears, he forgot to worry about the others finding out who he was, and so answered many of their questions without any regard for what those answers might reveal. Such as the fact that he had been married for six years, same as King Abramm; that he had lived and worked in Springerlan all that time; that he’d sent his wife out of Kiriath by sea—a very expensive proposition even if one could find a ship’s captain willing to take her; that Gadrielites had indeed tortured him; and that after being rescued by the Terstan Underground, he had spent several months recovering from his injuries in a north country hunting lodge. And few commoners, indeed, had access to hunting lodges of any stripe.
Yet for all of that no one seemed to assemble the pieces sufficiently to guess the truth. Except perhaps Professor Laud, who listened to the conversation without comment as he ate and afterward sat back, puffing on his pipe and watching Abramm closely.
When the meal was over, Abramm half expected the man to take him aside and question him privately, but the kohal returned to his study without comment, leaving Abramm to go about his business as usual. They had a couple more roofs to clear, and then he spent a good hour and a half filling the kitchen and Great Room woodboxes.
The work lent itself to contemplation, and as the day wore on he found himself returning again and again to Tapheina’s words, each time considering them for a longer period of time than before. And with his contemplation, the pressure to leave mounted.
Yes, he knew that was most likely her intent. And if the crows really had given her the information, it was likely for the same reason: to draw Abramm out of the fortress’s protective walls and put him at her mercy. He wondered if they were still around, waiting to see if he’d take the bait. Waiting to see if she could overcome him. He didn’t understand the feyna, though. How could they have known he would be on that roof? Did they have that much manipulative control?
He kept to himself at the evening meal and found his concentration sorely compromised during Terstmeet that night, though at one point it seemed to him that Laud was directly addressing his situation. It did, indeed, seem that he was being tempted.
On the other hand, if what the tanniym had told him was true, how could he stay here for the whole winter? Now at least he had the hope of a few days of good weather, maybe even a week or two of a dragon’s summer. Laud had speculated he could be to Deveren Dol at the heart of Chesedh within a month. Should he not be willing to take the risk and trust Eidon to get him through it?
Afterward he sat in the Great Room with the others, listening to their banter and to Marta’s reading—she’d avoided him scrupulously all afternoon—as Trinley and Rolland played a game of uurka. Eventually the children were put down, then the others took up their customary positions, and soon—from the sounds of the snores and gurgles and deep, regular breathing—everyone was asleep but Abramm.
And still he sat before the fire, watching the flames dance, reluctant to go up to his cell. Being alone would only make the temptation worse. He ached for Maddie’s mischievous smile and bright eyes, for her wit and counsel, for the warmth of her embrace, the sweet scented silk of her hair, and right now especially for the way she could look at him and make everything bad disappear. He loosed a long sigh and rubbed his eyes, seeking Eidon in his thoughts.
“Crows are not at all normal for this time of year.” Laud’s low voice coming close at his shoulder made him jump. “In fact, they’re not normal for any time of year this high up the mountain.”
He looked around as the professor settled into the chair beside him. “Aye. They came from the south,” Abramm said.
“So you kn
Abramm nodded.
“I’m told they gathered round to watch you open the feyna’s nest. As if they knew what was going to happen.” From his coat pocket, Laud pulled out his pipe and a wooden holder someone had made for him, setting both on the small table between their chairs.
Abramm nodded. “It did seem so. Though I can’t figure out how. The nest was there long before they came. And how did they get me on that side of the roof? They weren’t even here when Trinley assigned me my place.”
“Perhaps not, but there are others. Permanent residents, you might say.”
And Abramm recalled the ells he’d seen taking shelter in the trees the evening they’d arrived.
“Never think they are gone simply because you cannot see them,” Laud said. “Never think they are not close and real and watching. . . . Just like she is.” He inspected the empty bowl of his pipe, blew a bit of ash away, and said, “I suspect she can sense you now from quite some distance away.”
No need to say whom he meant. Rolland must have told him about Tapheina’s second visit. Abramm shifted uncomfortably and turned his face to the fire. “I thought you’d gone off to study, Professor.”
“I got stuck and thought I’d take a break.” He set the pipe in the holder and fished a small leather pouch from his pocket. “So what did she say to you?”
Abramm watched the flames leaping and dancing from the last of the logs that had been put on earlier. Answering Laud’s question would admit the power the tanniym had over him, something he wasn’t eager to do. And yet he also felt the need for counsel. Or at least to have someone to talk about it to.