Rythe Falls Read online

  Reih thought for a mere second longer. 'Perr, sheath your sword. She is an ally.'

  'I did not mean to startle you. I tried to be...considerate. I see much, but who can see which way a person will jump in the moment of violence? Gods, I think. Not I.'

  'Well, it was a shock,' said Reih, obviously speaking for herself. Perr, it seemed, was unmoved.

  'Please, I apologise. But will you listen?'

  Reih nodded. There was no guile, no harm in the child. Any fool could see that.

  'I am going to lift the veils from you. My...allies are many. My allies are yours, and we will speak, but first, you must see...you must...see as I do.'

  'Perr, the child says...'

  'I hear her well enough,' said Perr. 'She speaks in my head as yours.'

  The child nodded.

  'A friend of yours called me Sia. It will serve. I will show you what I see now, so that you understand, and then we will travel, for there is not time for more questions. Do not fear,' said the white-eyed girl child as the light flowed from her eyes and turned the night into day and they saw what she saw.

  They understood what she understood, and that she did not lie. There was no more time.

  *

  At first, the light was pristine. A perfect white that shone into the night and took away all the darkness.

  Reih gasped, like a child in awe at a sight of wonder.

  Then, her flesh turned cold and the light began to change.

  No...the light does not change.

  The night and the land were not white, or black. No more. Everything was bathed in red.

  She is showing me what truly is...

  'Do you understand, Reih? Do you?'

  'This...this blood-light...is this a sign?'

  Sia shook her head. So sad...terribly sad, for just a child, gifted or not.

  'This is not a vision, Reih. This is the truth, this is what is.'

  'What is it?'

  'This light? This bloody redness on the very air that none can see? It is no sign or portent. They are here. Already...they are here. They are in the light. The Sun Destroyers are not coming in a month, or a year...they are in the very air of this world already and all is as it should be, because this is now...this is the future even the great could not see. Red wizards and the wise men of the Order of the Sard, witches in their black castles and even the Protectorate. They think we can stop their return, but it is ordained. We cannot stop it. We cannot flee. They are nothing but light and for the last three nights now the light grows across the world.'

  'Then...we lost? Rythe is dead?'

  The seer shook her head.

  'I say it is as it is meant to be...I do not lie. We cannot fight light, Reih. We cannot fight fate herself. We cannot shape this moment. Millennia have brought us here, to this time, the turning of the world around the suns, the moons around the world, the people and their petty squabbles...for this. Not to flee, or die. To fight. To fight a last battle with the Elethyn as they are named in the light of the sun, and to send them into darkness forever.'

  'How? How!?'

  Sia nodded, rose from her seat in the dirt. She blinked and closed her eyes and when she opened them again, spread her arms wide.

  Now, in the light of the Sun Destroyers, in that awful bloody glow that made the eye ache, Reih and Perr could both see the Sia had not come alone.

  Beside her, hidden by some sly illusion, two golden-haired warriors stood, arms crossed on their shining breastplates. One, helmed, only his long beard showing. The other nodded, politely enough.

  Behind them? Thousands upon thousands of huge, haired beasts. Fierce eyed and gentle, large and small, claws, teeth bared, or grinning in what could pass for smiles. More than thousands. Across the swamp, huge beasts of every shape, spreading as far as the eye could see.

  'Rythe is not just home to the races of man, or the Elethyn's children,' said Sia.

  'No, it is not,' said a grizzled rahken, stepping forward. Her voice was like the rumbling of rock-fall. 'The Rahken Nations will fight, too.'

  *

  Chapter Seven

  Who would have thought there so many arselickers in the whole of Sturma?

  It seemed there were legions of them, and Renir had bad luck enough to have met every single one. He hadn't entertained the notion that a Sturman was even capable of such fawning, and yet if his arse got any cleaner he'd be sliding out of bed every night on his shiny backside.

  Little kids dream, he thought, of being King.

  Kids were idiots. It was a miracle they grew to any age at all.

  Disper Lohtrus cut Renir's words off before the would-be king could complain again. He did so quite effectively, by cinching the buckle about Renir's new breastplate too tight for him to breathe.

  'Uh...' Renir managed.

  'Too tight?' said Disper, frowning.

  'Uh.'

  The Sard swordsman shook his head and loosed the buckle a notch. With his gold hair and gold moustaches, Disper looked more foreign to Renir than a thousand Draymen. No wonder people whispered their distrust of the Sard along the halls of the Castle of Naeth. Common folk distrusted anything too shiny, and the Sard fair glowed under suns and stars both.

  Renir knew well enough what common folk trusted and mistrusted. He was common folk. He'd grown up in a fishing village, damn it. He knew common, and it was him. So what, they said he had King's blood? So what he had his own wife's ghost in his head?

  So what?

  Disper was busying himself pulling on Renir's new pauldrons and didn't see the look on Renir's face. If he had, the swordsman might have been a little more gentle.

  Probably not, though.

  The Sard were not Renir's people. He didn't understand them, the Sturmen and women within and without the castle didn't understand the golden warriors, either. They were in awe, yes. But accepted? Not at all.

  Nor did the men of the Order help themselves. So pretty in their shining steel, they could not help but seem aloof and alien. Sturma was a country of dirt and mud and cold. A country of soft colours and dull, unimaginative people. The only time people saw red was in autumn and battle. Gold? Gold was for coins, not for hair. People didn't understand, and Renir didn't, either, for all the time he'd spent in the castle with the Sard.

  His castle, he supposed.

  But he wore no crown, had no coronation, had no court.

  Plenty of arselickers, though, he mused, but not happily.

  'Disper, I can't breathe. It's too damn tight. I can't lift my shoulders, either.'

  'Another hole in the strap, then.'

  'I was comfortable in my armour.'

  'Didn't befit a king.'

  'But it did fit, Disper. It was comfortable, and I trusted it.'

  Renir sighed as best he could with his chest under such strain and rapped his knuckles on the new breastplate. It was ornate and he could see Disper's face in the sheen when he looked down.

  'This? This is fit for looking pretty. Someone hits me in this I'll shit myself over the cost of repair.'

  'A king does not trouble about such things.'

  'What? The waste of coin on a pretty plate of steel? This thing cost more than most families see in a year.'

  Disper looked like he was about to pull on his moustaches, but instead he shook his head. 'I understand, Renir. I do. You want to look like your countrymen. You want to be like Shorn, or Bourninund. Grizzled and...barbaric. Like your people. But a king is different. A king is set above.'

  Renir, in turn, shook his head. Disper might think he understood...but he did not.

  Yet there was no point in arguing with the paladins of the Sard. Their ways were not his ways, and his people were not theirs. He understood them no more now than he ever had.

  He would speak to Drun. Maybe Drun would understand, or at least pretend to...though of late the priest had been distracted with his own concerns.

  Shorn?

  No. He couldn't talk to Shorn. His mercenary friend would laugh hi
s head clean off. Shorn, Bourninund and Wen Gossar wouldn't even stay in the castle. Renir wished they would. What fun, sleeping sober in a soft bed?

  He'd had more fun drunk in the dirt.

  Is that true?

  He wondered for a moment. The fear, the discomfort, the pain...seemed distant now. He'd been sleeping comfortable a long damn time. Too long. Did he actually miss the terror of battle? The sore head from ale in the mornings? The tired legs from riding or walking or running?

  He smiled, while Disper fussed about his nethers, straightening the mail coat he wore beneath his armour, no doubt intended to save his manhood from a wayward strike.

  It was true, he realised. He might not remember the terror, the pain...but he remembered the road fondly. He'd happily give up this cold, windy castle, all the arselicking and fancy armour, just to be on the road again with friends. He wished he was wearing his own damn armour and could breathe without his skin pinching at his sides and his ribs cracking.

  'Done,' said Disper, but Renir was deep in reminiscences and barely acknowledged the man's endeavours.

  No sense in speaking to the Sard, Drun, his friends...and definitely no sense in trying to sway Caeus.

  Especially as it was because of Caeus and his mad orders that Renir was little better than a prisoner in this, his castle. King of nothing, wearing shiny, uncomfortable armour.

  'At least my arse is good and clean,' he muttered to himself as Disper lead the way from his room, and as he did so, Renir felt more wretched than he ever remembered feeling before.

  *

  There was one thing that Renir refused to give up; his weapon.

  Once, he'd been nothing more than a fisherman, and a lazy one at that. A fisherman wouldn't go fishing without net or rod. A warrior wouldn't go to battle without his blade.

  The Sard tried to persuade him to give up his axe.

  A sword, your highness...a far better weapon...

  Might be he was uncomfortable, here in the courtyard, in his ridiculous armour. Might be that his feet hurt in the steel-shod boots he wore.

  But Haertjuge felt right in his hands. It was the only damn thing that did.

  'Begin!'

  Quintal, as the rest of his brothers of the Order of Sard, wore full armour and a pure white cloak that never muddied.

  Renir's booted feet kicked up mud as he twisted to the side of Quintal's lightning fast blade, which already turned back toward Renir, almost as though Quintal was merely being dragged by the will of the sword.

  Renir's axe met the blade, steel against steel, and he drove the Sard back, weapons locked. Renir had power now. Not the speed or finesse of the Order's paladins, but he was strengthening.

  Beneath his armour Renir felt the plates on his shoulders pinch as he pushed up and over, driving Quintal back across the mud.

  Man was still spotless, grinning, and didn't seem like he'd exerted himself at all.

  But then, Renir wasn't the man he once was.

  With a roar, he leapt into the air and brought the axe down for Quintal's head. A lesser man, Renir knew, would have split in two beneath the blow.

  But Renir knew Quintal wouldn't be there when the blade came down, just as he knew that the Sard's sword would pierce him through his breastplate, had it been a real battle.

  But it was not. Renir had fought for real, as had Quintal. But training is not the same as a battle. Blows are held back, speed checked - especially with real weapons.

  But did you have to follow the rules?

  No.

  Renir let go Haertjuge at the top of the arc. Quintal already moved aside. The golden paladin's sword already plunged toward Renir's chest.

  But Renir wasn't playing today.

  One boot kicked aside Quintal's blade. The other, with Renir's momentum behind it, drove the Sard onto his back and into the mud.

  For a moment Renir stood panting, shocked he'd knocked the master down. His shock must have showed, and thankfully covered the fact that he'd struck in anger and frustration.

  Quintal pushed himself to his feet, grinning.

  'Good work,' said the man, and clapped Renir on the shoulder. 'You learn well, my friend.'

  'Thought you'd be sore. Threw my weapon away.'

  'Not at all, Renir. Your weapon is important, yes. But a man should be able to fight without his weapon, no?'

  Renir nodded.

  'Take the day. Tomorrow, again.'

  Renir took his axe from the mud and said his thanks. But his heart was still sore, and he was still a prisoner in his own castle.

  As he left the courtyard he happened to look up. The lady that came with the Sard, who lost her rahken friend to the Revenant - Tirielle A'm Dralorn. A lady, without doubt, her. She watched him from a window, but when he raised his hand to wave she ducked inside.

  He shook his head. No matter how often or well he tried to speak with her, on the rare occasions she left her rooms, she was distant. Polite. Unerringly polite. But of the few people he could share his thoughts with, Shorn, the lady, Drun...he hardly ever saw them.

  And they could come and go as they pleased. You'd think Shorn, even, would have come to share an ale, or even punch him in the face. But no.

  Renir stood for a second longer, staring up at the now empty window, and had never felt so alone in all his life. Angrily, he strode along dark halls barely acknowledging the bows and the congratulations as he headed back to his rooms. To more boredom. To more tuition. To learn the business of being a king. To learn all the things he did not wish to.

  'I'd rather fight the bloody Draymen than this,' he said to himself when he reached his room. And to his surprise, he found that he spoke true.

  *

  Chapter Eight

  Tirielle A'm Dralorn was far from aloof. If anything, though she did not know Renir's loneliness, she was the sadder of the two. She tried to stay alone simply for fear that her crushing despair would engulf any who came near her. To be next to her would be akin to standing beneath a landslide.

  While the barbarian king was, perhaps, a glorified captive, Tirielle was her own prisoner. She kept her council, kept to her room. A room no more lavish than Renir's own, and one in which she rarely invited visitors. Her meals and drinks she had brought to her. What else could she need? Light? Air? Company?

  She'd had her fill of them all.

  Quintal came daily, as did Cenphalph, or Disper, or Typraille...each paladin had their own salve for her ails, but none were right. They thought her broken for the loss of j'ark. It hurt, true. She had fallen for the man, and he had died...but it was not what caused her so much pain. She was no stranger to loss, was she?

  She'd lost her friend, Roth, to a great beast known as the Revenant...but was she heartbroken? No. She'd lost friends and family, father to an assassin, her mother dead, her servants and lands gone. Her once vaunted position and all her power; lost to the Protectorate.

  Tirielle hugged herself, staring at the map of Rythe she'd made on her bed. Hangings on the wall kept the cold at bay - the castle servants were murmuring about winter, about this being a mild autumn. Felt cold enough for winter already, to Tirielle, but she wasn't aching with chills.

  Was she afraid? Not of death, certainly. No more did that hold any terror for her. She'd been captive, once, of the very Protectorate that took everything from her. Afraid for her life, then, and Roth, who wore chains beside her. But she lived...Roth was dead.

  Bonds broken, bonds made. Once, she'd taken sanctuary with Roth's kind, the Rahken, and received their great gifts, twofold. The daggers she wore inside her long sleeves, and their friendship and promise of alliance.

  Friends she'd lost, friends she'd gained. The Rahken, The Sard, Sia, these barbarian who would fight their own war in this land Sturma. All were staunch and solid and dependable. The barbarian king himself...Renir...he'd fight. His friends, the mercenaries and the black-skinned man whose deep, dull eyes frightened her - the one they called Wen.

  Loss and gain...but then, i
t was war, was it not? Men died. Children were caught up in the widening circle of destruction, women slain in battle or grieving for their loves...

  Tirielle was no soft maiden, no mother. She had no husband nor child to lose to war. Her family were dead, her friends gone. The man who'd taken her heart for but a short time was dead.

  There was almost nothing left for her to part with.

  But to lose your mind?

  That, she could not bear.

  *

  She did not sleep on the bed any longer. Truthfully, she barely slept at all.

  Spread over the thick quilt on her bed were pieces of hard cheese, some grapes, a few hunks of bread, a piece of fat from some meat she didn't remember eating. A salt pot, two knives, a fork.

  From the foot of the bed, the left was Sturma. The edge of the bed, unknown, was the Drayman lands, the pillows at the top Teryithyr. The middle was the ocean, with a small hump in the middle the rumoured new land of the seafaring nations. To the right, Lianthre. Above Lianthre, nothing, below, a land she'd come to know of as Ascalain, the warrior Wen's distant homeland.

  The salt pot was placed where she imagined Naeth was, somewhere in this foreign land she found herself in. Knives and forks were Sybremreyen, the Kuh'taenium, and Arram.

  Grapes people, fat the Protectorate, cheese Rahken, and bread seafarers.

  She'd worried, for a time, that the bread would be too absorbent, for the sea. Obsessed, even, while she built this great map to chart the coming war. But it was just a bed, not the world. Rythe was more complex than a mere collection of rotten food.

  'Wake up, my love...wake up...'

  Tirielle sniffed, ignored the voice and shifted a grape from the Lianthran side of the bed to the hump in the middle.

  The wizard's ship, moving. Hope and aid from Lianthre, the wizards trained by the rahken, coming fast as the sea would move beneath their boat, fast as the winds in their sails.

  'Time has caught us...'

  It was a woman's voice she heard. She imagined, if she were to go mad, that she might hear the echoes of her murdered father, or her friend Roth, or j'ark, the lover she was perhaps never meant to have.