Return of the Guardian-King by Karen Hancock
According to Rolland they’d escaped the amphitheater by following the underground passages all the way to the harbor, where they’d boarded the two galleys Katahn had brought and set off. The creative use of a fire ship set loose in the harbor produced a confusion of milling ships and dense smoke that effectively cut off any pursuit. Now they were heading up the coast toward where the Salmancan Sea met the Strait of Terreo at a place called the Neck. Rolland said Katahn thought it would take them a week or two, for they’d have to find places to go ashore periodically for water. And to rest the men.
“Why are we heading that way?” Abramm asked. “It’ll be a worse nest of Esurhite galleys than what we’ve left.”
“Katahn thinks they might’ve dumped the scepter there. He’s heard a rumor, anyway. And he says the thing can float.”
“At times. . . .” Abramm lay on his back, thinking through it all, feeling a profound regret that they’d not managed to bring Leyton out. There was more, too, something else that had gone wrong. Something in my side? “So our efforts have ended in failure all round, then,” he murmured.
“We got yer crown back, sir.” Rolland gestured again at the desk.
Now as Abramm again pressed up in the bed he saw the ring of plaited gold resting on a scarlet pillow beyond the kelistar lamp. And the moment he focused on it, a flood of memories overtook him—chief among them, Maddie in her wedding dress, wrapped in the Sorite lord’s embrace. That’s right— she’d married another man. Because he hadn’t gotten back in time.
The wound in his side began to throb.
“Sir, are ye all right?” Rolland leaned toward him, looking alarmed. “Ye’ve turned all white.”
Abramm supposed he should feel some terrible grief or pain or shock . . . something, anyway. In fact, he thought the first time those images had assailed him he had. Now he felt as if he were a shell of skin and nothing more. As if it couldn’t matter less that the love of his life had married someone else. . . .
Maybe I’ll just go back and kill him, he thought, rubbing absently at his side. The wound was tender to the touch, and it felt as if there was something in it. He looked round at Rolland. “Did the shaft break off? Is the arrowhead still inside me?”
Rolland gaped at him. “We saw no shaft, sir. It went right through you.”
“No. I saw it go in. . . .”
“Maybe the spore is back. I can check, if ye—”
“No.” Abramm lay back and stared at the planking overhead, still rubbing his side. “It’s my wife, Rollie. She married the Sorite.”
Rolland’s chair squeaked as he sat back. “Sir, ye’ve known of that rumor for weeks—”
“It’s no rumor. I’ve seen the truth for myself.” The images, he realized now, had come upon him right after he’d taken the crown from Leyton and placed it on his own head. Just as when he’d been crowned, it had enabled him to see things from afar.
“Let me take it all. . . .”
Something strange was happening in his chest, as if all his organs were breaking down, liquefying into a mass of gelatin. The air had grown so thick and hot, he could hardly force it into his lungs, and the light in the cabin was growing brighter and brighter. Rolland sat there staring at him, the sorrow far too plain upon his face.
Abramm looked away and wondered how his hands could shake as badly as they did while he felt nothing at all. He clenched them into fists and pressed them against the mattress to either side of him.
“Well,” he said in a voice that showed not the slightest tremor, “I guess we don’t need to go back to Chesedh, then. We’ll just pick up the scepter and head on to Kiriath.”
And to his everlasting mortification, he started to weep right there in front of his liegeman.
The next three days he spent in a cocoon of blithe indifference as they sailed northward along the coast, in tandem with their Chesedhan sister ship, disguised, as was Katahn’s, to look like an Esurhite vessel. It was as if Abramm had lost nothing. He ate, drank, talked, and joked with the men, listened to their story of how they’d gotten him out of the arena, and expressed his gratitude for their loyalty and that all had survived and were with him now. All except Oakes Trinley, that is. He, Galen admitted uncomfortably, had not fallen in battle but had simply walked away when the opportunity arose. For some reason, that thought angered Abramm more than seemed reasonable, especially since the rest of the men counted Trinley an implacable troublemaker they were glad to be rid of. Still it irked him, for it was foolish and ignorant. How could the man be so stubborn and blind? Every time the subject came up, it set him off again, and it frustrated him further that no one seemed to understand why it did.
Then Katahn came to him one afternoon as he leaned against the gunwale watching the sea and asked if he had any idea of useful landmarks that might aid their search for the scepter. Suddenly Abramm was unable to speak, beset with a pain so physically intense he thought he would die on the spot.
How could she have married someone else?!
Rationality supplied all the reasons: She had no reason to believe Abramm was still alive, she had children who needed a father, and a country that would not survive without outside help. She’d had no choice. He had taken too long.
But it still felt like the worst kind of betrayal, and not just one but two. For Eidon had kept him away long enough for it to happen—that hurt above all else. He was vaguely aware of Katahn leaving him to himself, his question unanswered, but Abramm didn’t care. All the days he’d spent blocking this matter from his mind and heart seemed to give it a particularly vicious intensity now that it had finally gained his attention.
After all he had done, all he had gone through, all the ways he’d trusted . . . It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Maybe Lema told the truth after all. . . .
Bitterness simmered and frothed in his belly, and he began to think he understood just how Trinley felt: It wasn’t Abramm he’d hated so much; it was Eidon. . . .
I trusted you! Gave up everything for you! And this is how you repay me? You know how much she meant to me! If you wanted to take her into eternity, you know I’d never have begrudged that. But to let him have her?! How could you do that to me?
His hands gripped the gunwale as anger burned up in him, the pain sharp and throbbing in his side. Suddenly something snapped and he decided he couldn’t bear it any longer. Who was he fooling? All those dreams of the kingdom restored to him? They were naught but empty promises. He’d no doubt been hallucinating in the dragon city, and nothing more.
He was done, taken all he was going to take.
Shoving himself off the gunwale, he strode back to his cabin, flinging the door open so hard it rebounded off the wall and shut itself in his wake. Snatching the crown from its scarlet pillow, he stood clenching it with fingers gone white from the force of his hold. Finally he turned, jerked open the door again, and strode out onto the deck.
Rolland—never far away—saw him at once and started toward him.
Abramm flashed him a grin and held up the crown. “Might as well put it with the scepter, don’t you think?”
The big man’s jaw dropped. “What?!”
Before Abramm could get to the railing, Rolland sprang to stop him. “My lord, no!”
But Abramm swung the crown up hard, catching him on the chin with it and knocking him back into the gunwale, even as he loosed his fingers from the plaited metal on the follow-through. The circlet sailed out over the gray swells, plopped onto one, and sank, disappearing into the depths of the sea.
Rolland stared after it, stunned to immobility.
Abramm left him there and returned to the cabin, where he stayed for the remainder of the day, brooding and sulking.
He stayed in the cabin the next day, as well, eating nothing, saying nothing. After that, he came on deck to spend hours at the prow staring across the heaving gray seas beneath their cover of mist. Sometimes he would note a galley in the distance, a dark blot against the gray humps of the land, but never s
Maybe he’d have Katahn put in at Mareis and let the men off so they could all go home, and then he could take Abramm off to the Narrows. Or Thilos. Or the Western Isles.
Or maybe Abramm would get off at Mareis, too, and go kill Maddie’s new husband. . . .
No, that was wild thinking. And it wouldn’t do any good, anyway, because the damage was already done. By that simple decision she was lost to him. Forever. He didn’t care about her, anyway.
But he still hurt an awful lot for someone who didn’t care.
Sometimes he amused himself with the notion of finding someone else, maybe Marta. She’d been interested. But after a few moments the amusement left him and disgust took its place.
He suspected from time to time that not all these thoughts were his own. Despite several attempts at purging it, the thing in his side was growing. Not obviously, but he could feel it in some strange way, and often he was fevered and nauseated for no good reason. And the dark thoughts held a strange power to release him from his pain, even though they didn’t really. It was just easier to be angry and bitter and nasty than it was to hurt. Easier to find fault and criticize. . . .
Rolland had the speaking stone and once tried to get him to listen to a Terstmeet message, but he refused and went to stand alone at the vessel’s prow, where the waves blocked out the sound, until the message was done. After that, Rolland didn’t ask him anymore.
As they approached the Neck between the Strait of Terreo and the Salmancan Sea, the number of Esurhite galleys around them increased dramatically. Soon it became apparent some major operation was under way. Clearly they continued to be regarded by the vessels around them as just one more in the great armada heading north. It wasn’t until they turned into the western end of the Neck toward Mareis that they realized a good number of the Esurhites were heading that way, too.
It didn’t take Abramm long to figure out that if they intended to launch a double-pronged attack upon Peregris—or Fannath Rill, for that matter— Mareis would be the appropriate point of debarkation. He took a sort of bitter pleasure in wondering where all the great Sorite galleys were that were supposed to be protecting the realm . . . but never got beyond his bitterness to explore possible reasons for their absence. And when his suspicions were borne out about Mareis being a point of debarkation for their enemies, he decided not to go there, after all.
“In fact,” he told his men, assembled before him one day on the deck, “I’ve decided to go down through the Narrows and on to the Western Isles.”
The three men who stood with him on the quarterdeck exchanged startled glances. Then Katahn said, “You’re just going to abandon these poor people?”
“How can I abandon them? I’m dead. Besides, they have their Sorites to help them. As for Kiriath, they can stew in what they’ve wrought for themselves. I’ve never been to the Western Isles.”
Rolland stared at him as if he’d acquired three heads. “You can’t just throw your destiny to the winds like this, sir!”
“And what is my destiny, Rolland? More than that, can a dead man even have a destiny? I just want to live my life somewhere where I’m no one. Where the biggest decisions I have to make are when to move the sheep to a new pasture or what crops to plant in the fields.” And I never have to think of her again. . . .
“And you think you’ll find that at the Western Isles?” asked Katahn.
“Maybe.”
They fell silent.
Then Rolland said, “What is wrong with you, sir? You are not at all yourself these days.”
“Well, you might not be yourself, either, Rollie, if you return home to find that Daesi has married someone else.”
“I would be upset, yes, but not like this. This is something else. And you haven’t been eating, either. . . . How is that arrow wound in your side? Is it healing?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes, it’s healing.” A blatant lie. How easy it had been to tell it, too. That was not like him, either, but he didn’t need Rolland nosing around in all that. And what could Rolland do about it, anyway? Abramm had tried to purge it many times, without success.
“We’ll go through the Narrows,” he said. “Unless, of course, you want to rush back to Chesedh and see if you can all kill yourselves there.”
“We have sworn our lives to you, sir. We will go with you.”
Abramm stared at them all, wanting to lash out at them so that he could make them all go away. Except he knew it wouldn’t work. Which made him angrier than ever. So he went back to his cabin and sat there alone for most of the night, rubbing at the pain in his side.
————
Two months after she was supposed to have married Tiris ul Sadek, Queen Madeleine and her retainers arrived late one night at the palace in Fannath Rill, having fled the royal residence in Peregris just as Esurhite battering rams were crashing through its front gates. Now, after twenty-four hours straight in the saddle, they were safe, but exhausted—and still in a communal state of shock. No one spoke as the guards escorted the queen and her ladies to the royal apartments, where she dismissed them and sent Marta off to her own quarters, as well. She let Jeyanne take her smoke-impregnated travel cloak and gloves but waved aside any further ministrations and strolled to the great, multi-paneled window in her receiving chamber.
The eastern sectors of Fannath Rill sprawled before her, the dark lines of roofs and walls and trees limned by the twinkle of the kelistar streetlamps. Most of its citizens were asleep at this hour, and it was quiet, peaceful, and safe. But for how long?
Tired as she was, she was too agitated to even consider sleeping. And too sore. Her back, legs, and seat ached from having spent nearly all that time in the saddle—no comfortable coach for her. Even if they could have found one there at the end, it wouldn’t have been fast enough.
Peregris has fallen! It seemed impossible to believe. And yet the images of the city’s burning docks and houses had been seared upon her memory, the flames leaping out the windows of the royal residence, smoke billowing skyward. It still clung to her clothes and hair, reminding her with every breath she took of the price she’d paid for refusing to marry Tiris ul Sadek.
The only thing that kept her sane was the absolute certainty it would have been worse had she not, and last week’s betrayal had shown her that beyond all doubt.
The very night before the wedding, she’d called him to her quarters and told him she wouldn’t marry him, despite her promise, despite the humiliation he would endure, despite the shock and anger she knew her decision would provoke amongst her own people. She’d trembled as she’d told him, fearing his reaction, but he’d received her decision with his customary poise.
He’d nodded, smiled ruefully, and confessed he’d suspected she might back out on him. Then he’d given her a gentle warning: “You’ve thrown your lot with Abramm, then. I hope for your sake he really is out there and will return in time to save you. . . .” With that he had taken his leave. In the morning, he was gone, his villa abandoned. But in the harbor at Peregris, twenty galley ships had remained to help defend the realm from the coming Esurhite plague—a gift of parting and affection, he’d claimed.
It was a gift that had filled her with terrible anguish and second thoughts at the time, making her doubt her own sanity more than ever.
Not long after that, the Esurhites had sent in their emissaries, and when she’d refused to receive them, they had launched their first attack on Peregris. For two months the Chesedhan navy had resisted them, helped immeasurably by Tiris’s galley ships. The skill, bravery, and tactical experience of their crews had made them the foundation of the Chesedhan commanders’ defensive strategy. But then, just when they were most needed, as the Esurhites prepared to launch their biggest assault yet, the galleys disappeared in the night without a word. Their former allies were left
Six days later the enemy’s battering ram had stove in gates at the royal residence in Peregris, even as Maddie and her company were fleeing north.
Having foreseen the inevitable, her generals had sent many of the troops northward, to establish defensive positions up the river and at other points along the southern edge of the Fairiron Plain, most notably at the locks on the Silver Cascades. They might have as much as a month before the enemy broke through there. But she didn’t want to think that far ahead. What point in that if it never happened? Surely Abramm will have returned by then.
The whisper of footsteps behind her alerted her to Lord Garival’s arrival. She’d been expecting him and turned from the window to face him.
Seeing her, he stopped. “So,” he said. “Peregris has fallen.”
“Yes.”
“And Tiris’s ships abandoned you.”
“At the worst possible time. I believe it was deliberate.”
Garival snorted and came farther into the room. “Could you expect any differently after what you did to him?”
“For a man who professed to love me? Yes. He knew my struggles.”
“Abramm is not coming back, madam,” Garival said flatly.
She stared at him, refusing to engage, a flush of anger rising in her breast.
He shook his head. “I can only give thanks you told him the night before the ceremony rather than leaving him to stand alone at the altar in front of everyone.”
His expression still bore traces of the hurt and confusion he and all the other courtiers had felt when the news had come out that day. The Kirikhal swathed in its ribbons and flowers, the people who had camped in the streets overnight for a good spot all standing there as the most minor members of the wedding party proceeded up the route . . . and that was all. Guards had ridden behind them to announce there would be no wedding after all and everyone should go home.