The Sacred Band Read online

  “Do you not?”

  Sabeer slid her leg over Rialus. Her skin was soft and hot, and he was glad he faced away from her, curved around the arousal in his groin.

  “No, I haven’t for many years. None of us do. I’m making a confession to you, Rialus. We know what’s written. We know things because we keep the knowledge alive. In records. In songs. We can only hold the memories of eighty years or so. The length of a long normal life. As we grew past that age our childhoods disappeared, and then our youth, and even the day we ate our first soul and gained lasting life. Rialus, I once lived in the interior, in a palace in the Westlands. I loved a man name Merwyn. We lived seventy-five years together but could have no children. The sadness of this became too much for him and he let free his lives and died a final death. At least, that’s what the written histories say of him. Myself, I remember none of it. We claim we abandoned the cities because of ancient wars and slaughter. Perhaps that’s true, but that’s not why we fear to return to them. I think what scares us is not remembering, not knowing our own lives, being strangers to ourselves.”

  “I—I understand,” Rialus said. “That must be like—like when the old in my land lose their minds and memories. Not just like it, of course, because they forget yesterday and remember fifty years ago, but the same sort of thing. Sabeer, you are like us. Your immortality hasn’t made you different at all. You’re just like—”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. She propped herself up on her elbow and pressed her finger to his lips to silence him. “Rialus Silver Tongue. That’s what we should call you. Always trying to save your people.” She smiled and leaned close enough to kiss him. “I like you, Rialus Silver Tongue, but when we reach your lands, I’ll take to the field of battle with my kinsmen just as we’ve planned. You can’t change that.”

  She pulled her finger away, but Rialus felt it still, as if it had left a brand on his lips, an old, bitter wound already scarred over. What was he doing in bed with this creature? Listening to her. Talking to her. Aroused by her and, for a moment, understanding her. Fool, Rialus! He tried to remember Gurta instead. She had wrapped around him like this also, but she had done it with true love for him. She had said so many times. Gurta, I won’t let them have you.

  “You know, Rialus, I can see the beauty in your race. I’ve had quota lovers, you know. There’s no shame in it.” She circled her finger on the soft skin of his inner elbow, smiling at some revelry this line of conversation brought back to her. “No shame at all. I even like you, Rialus, though that’s strange. You’re not … well, a specimen considered attractive by your race, are you? No one ever called you handsome, did they?”

  She was a vile, barbarian woman. He could have found a hundred ways to insult her. Instead, he heard himself say, “No, no one ever called me handsome.”

  “Rialus,” Sabeer said, “my poor leagueman. I don’t think you’re handsome either, but I like you. You’ll always have a place with me. After all this is over and your world is ours, you should come stay with me in some palace somewhere. You can bring your woman, too. Where do you think I should take a palace?”

  You never will, Rialus thought. You and all your kind will die first. I’ll make sure of it.

  “Tell me about the best of them,” she prompted, nudging him. “Tell me things you’ve not told Devoth.”

  And, despite the thoughts that played inside his mind, he began, “You should see Calfa Ven, in the Senival Mountains. It’s a hunting lodge.…”

  “Oh, hunting. That sounds good.”

  If we go there together, I’ll use you for target practice, he swore. Out loud he said, “Or the cliff palaces of Manil …”

  “Palaces on cliffs? Wonderful.”

  I’ll push you from them and watch you fall into the sea.

  Sabeer squirmed against him. “Tell me more.”

  And he did. He could not help himself. “Of course,” he said, “there’s the isle of Acacia itself.…”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Aliver Akaran reached out and touched the statue’s chin. He traced the Talayan’s jawline. He brushed his fingertips over the full lips and caressed the clean-shaven crown of its head. All so very lifelike down to the finest details—the texture of the skin and eyelashes, the expression of focused engagement, the collarbones and lean runner’s chest, and the muscled compartments of its legs. It stood frozen in a posture of motion, iron spear high in the fingers of one hand. The other arm was wrapped above the bicep by an arm ring. A tuvey band, Aliver recalled.

  “I know you,” the prince said. “We once ran together.”

  He said this and knew it to be true. It warmed him, but he also understood that this figure was only a work of wood and iron and fabric. The others spaced out along the lamplit hallway were as well. The Senivalian wore scaled armor and hefted a curved sword with a brawny arm. The Vumu warrior’s eagle feathers flared from a band around his head. The various Acacians in different military garb, their faces like Aliver’s—light brown, even featured, with a haughty lift to their chins and sagely dark eyes. There was even a Meinish soldier, blond and gray eyed, his nose and cheekbones sharp. A tuft of gold bristled on his chin.

  “I know you,” Aliver said. “We once fought each other.” Again it was true and not true. So many things were true and not true.

  Looking back down the corridor that led to his boyhood room, Aliver saw not just the scene before him, dimly lit and quiet with the dead of night, but also a thousand other views of this same place. He saw it in the morning light and by the afternoon glare from the skylights, muted by gray skies and crimson when the setting sun shone through the western windows. He saw it with the eyes of the child who ran down the corridor, light on his feet and full of play. He saw it as the youth he was on the day his father died, striding straight-backed and very foolish in his pride. He saw it filled with the people who had once moved through life with him.

  “I know you all.”

  The same sensation surrounded him as he sat in his old room. He ran his hand over his silken bedspread. He picked up the statue of Telamathon—he who had defeated the god Reelos and his five disciples—and felt the man’s face with fingers. He studied the tapestries on the wall and the busts of the early kings, facing east to greet the morning sun. His room had remained furnished as he remembered, almost as if it had been preserved for his return. He knew it had not been. Nobody had expected his return, least of all him. But he was here, body and mind; and with each passing hour he became more and more himself. Less and less whatever he had been.

  It felt almost like his flesh and skin were shrinking to fit his form, just now growing snug around him. Whatever Corinn had done to bring him back to life should not have been attempted. He knew that as surely as he had ever known anything. But it was done, and he could only live with it. Just how to live he was not sure. Wandering about the palace seemed to be helping, though. He rose and continued.

  He could not have explained how he knew where to find the boy. He simply rose and looked. And looking, he knew. He entered the room as a servant came out of it. Surprised by his presence, she slammed herself against the doorjamb and stood straight as a board as he approached. Much the same reaction the other servants gave him when he encountered them. He studied her soft-featured face a moment, not recognizing it but finding it pleasant, and then he nodded as he passed by her into the bedroom.

  Aaden, a child of eight, lay on his bedspread. Dressed in silken green bedclothes, he curled to one side, his knees pulled up and his hands clasped together. Something about the posture looked choreographed, too precise to be natural. Perhaps the servant had just repositioned him. Yes, that was it. They were caring for him as he slept.

  Aliver sat beside him. He felt as if he already knew the boy, as if he could sit without fear that the boy would think it a trespass, as if he had spent time with him already. He had not. Corinn had always delayed their meeting, but she was gone for the time being. A good thing, too. He was coming to
know himself and the present world faster without the tightly wound energy swirling about her to contend with.

  “When will you wake?” he asked. “I should like us to talk, just us for a time. I was a boy like you once. A prince promised the world. No doubt you’ve been lied to … for your own good, they’ll believe. But nothing good comes from lies, not even well-intentioned ones. One thing they don’t tell you is that the world is not truly yours. You are but a part of it. You have been born not to be served by it but to serve it. At least, that’s how it felt with me. Perhaps your birth into this family is no accident. You may be the greatest of us all.”

  Greatest of them all? Was that his idea? Strange to feel it anchored in him, though he knew nothing of this boy beyond his parentage. Corinn had said something about Aaden’s greatness. She had said many things; and she had not said many things. Aliver was aware of both. Their conversations had created an unease that itched at the edge of his awareness. He could not find a way to draw it nearer or to pull it over himself and inhabit it as some part of him wanted to. Even when she had said things he did not agree with, he was powerless to truly object.

  A few days ago, before she left for Teh, she had told him that she believed the Santoth had reached out to her. She claimed that they had spoken to her through people in her dreams. “Once I wouldn’t have thought that possible,” she had said. She sat sharing the late evening with him. The fire had burned to glowing coals and grown warmer for it. He watched her fingers as they kneaded a lacy shawl, squeezing and letting go, squeezing and letting go. “But now anything is possible. Anything at all.”

  “What do they say?” Aliver asked.

  “Promises. Entreaties.” She did not look at Aliver. She seemed almost to be carrying on both sides of their conversation herself. “They ask and ask and promise. It’s all quite jumbled really.”

  “What do they ask?”

  “They ask me to rescind their banishment, bring them back to Acacia, and give them The Song of Elenet. They act like it’s theirs! And what do they promise? They’re vague on that. To be my army of sorcerers. To protect me from forces I don’t understand. As if I need them for that.”

  “Perhaps you do. They cared for me. Corinn, I went in search—”

  “Of them. A foolish thing to do. They helped us win the war, so I don’t fault you too much for it, but it was the song itself we needed, not other singers of it.”

  Perhaps she knew best. His thoughts were still cloudy on his past life. And yet … “In the end I didn’t find them; they found me.” That was exactly right. He had thought they were stones. He would have died just a few feet from them, had they not risen and saved him. “They wanted only to be released from banishment and to study the Giver’s tongue again.”

  “I know that much,” Corinn said. “They’re desperate for my book. Too desperate.”

  “Wouldn’t you be desperate, too?” This brought her gaze up. “Imagine if—” He could get no further. With Corinn’s eyes on him, intense and flashing warning, his words clipped off as if his throat had been squeezed shut. For a moment he did not breathe. Then he gasped and knew that he had breath. It was only words that could not pass his lips.

  Corinn looked back to the shawl in her lap. “They’ve left me alone recently. I’m glad of it. My dreams are cluttered enough without them. We don’t need them. Tinhadin didn’t; I don’t.”

  “But what if—”

  “No, I am right,” she said. “Leave it at that.” Before the reverberation of her words had completely faded he believed she was right. It was a relief in a way. So much confused doubt replaced by her certainty. He was not even sure what he had been about to say.

  “Oh, look at this!” Corinn plucked at something on the shawl. “A slipped stitch.” She tugged on the yarn pinched between her fingers. It slipped free easily. She clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth, a reprimand for whoever had knitted it. Then, after a studied pause, she continued ripping the stitches out.

  Sitting beside Aaden now, Aliver sighed. Thinking of his sister fatigued him and exhilarated him at the same time. He could make no sense of it yet. He reached out and stroked strands of wavy hair back from the child’s forehead. He was handsome. How could a child of Corinn’s not be?

  “I do wish you would wake and speak to me, but you can’t. I should speak to you. How about a story? Would you like a story?” Aliver stretched out next to him. “Let’s see.…”

  And tell stories he did. Not just one. Several. He told of the girl Kira, who had one magical gift. She could fold bits of paper into winged shapes and toss them into the air, turning them into living birds. It was a simple talent that she thought largely useless until she learned better. He told of an adventure Bashar had while hunting his brother in Talay, how he fell into a deep pit and could escape only with the aid of a legless man who climbed on his back and described the way out for him. He told bits and pieces as he recalled them from his own childhood, and he told half the tale of Aliss, the Aushenian woman who killed the Madman of Caraven. Only half, though, for he realized at some point that the ending was a bloodier thing than he wished to describe to a sleeping boy.

  He talked long enough that his voice grew hoarse and he fell into a long, ruminative silence, staring at the ceiling and listening to the boy’s quiet breathing. Eventually, when the pipers played the passing of a third hour, Aliver swung his legs to the floor and rose. “Sleep peacefully, my nephew. Wake soon.”

  He had just started away when the boy’s eyes fluttered open. He looked at Aliver. His irises were Meinish gray, a startling contrast with the fullness of their Acacian shape. He worked his mouth a moment, licked his lips. “I—I had dreams.”

  It did not occur to Aliver to be surprised by his awakening. He chose delight instead. Settling back on the edge of the bed, he asked, “Of what?”

  “That I walked outside and the clouds were stones. Big stones floating.”

  “Really? I don’t think stones can float.”

  “These ones could. And I dreamed that the water floated out of the pools on the terraces and all the fish started swimming in the air. And I could swim, too, so long as I was touching drops of floating water. It was fun until I remembered about the hookfish. When I remembered them, I knew they were coming and fell down to the ground.”

  “Your dreams have a lot of floating in them.”

  “Not always. Once I was very thin.” Aaden lifted his arms and shook them slightly, demonstrating some aspect of his temporary thinness. “And one time I could eat anything. I mean anything. I could just bite the wall and chew it, and the bedspread, and the lamp oil. Anything. Nothing tasted like much, but I could still eat it.”

  “That would be convenient in many ways.”

  “Yes, it would. When you’re fighting a war. It would make it easier to supply the troops if they could just eat anything. Stones. Grass and stuff.”

  Aliver grinned. “That would be an advantage, but only if the enemy could not do the same.”

  “No, they couldn’t,” Aaden said, as if he had thought that through already. He looked up at the ceiling, clearly considering something else and weighing whether or not to voice it. “I dreamed that my friend Devlyn got killed.”

  “Oh.” Aliver squeezed the boy’s wrist gently. “That was not a dream. Or … it was not only a dream.”

  “I know. I hoped you would say it was, though. I wish you had. I would have believed it if you said it. Who are you?”

  Aliver leaned closer. “I am your uncle.”

  “You’re not Dariel,” Aaden said. “He’s gone across the Gray Slopes.”

  “I don’t claim to be Dariel. I’m Aliver.”

  Aaden let out an audible breath of affirmation. “Of course you are! Did Mother bring you back?”

  Aliver nodded.

  “Are you going to get them?”

  “Who?”

  “My guards. The ones who stabbed Devlyn. I saw them do it for no reason. They wanted to kill me, too. Is he rea
lly dead?”

  “I believe so,” Aliver said. “I … know that he is, yes. I’m not sure how I know, but I do. I know a lot of things, Aaden, but they’re new to me. It’s like … I just discovered a new library of books. I have them. They’re mine, but I haven’t read all the books yet. It may take me some time.”

  A gasp drew their attention. The maid stood inside the door, her mouth an oval around a question she could not manage to speak. She tried several times, then turned and darted out of the room.

  “She’ll be back soon, I think,” Aliver said.

  Aaden sighed. “Will she get Mother?”

  “No, your mother has gone to Teh. She was angry at all the Numrek, not just the guards who hurt you and Devlyn. I believe she went to punish them.”

  “Good. There’s no excuse for such behavior. What is she going to do to them?”

  Aliver ran his hand over the boy’s hair. “What would you have her do to them?”

  “I don’t know,” Aaden said. “They killed Devlyn. He was my friend.”

  “That was wrong of them.”

  Aaden pressed his lips together, nodded. “Why did they do that? He didn’t do anything except be my friend.” All of sudden, as if the grief of it had just exploded in him, Aaden crumpled forward, falling against Aliver. “He was my only friend.”

  Aliver held the boy to his chest as he cried, stroking his hair. So Aaden had not inherited his great-grandfather’s gift of being loved by all his peers. Gridulan was the last Acacian monarch to have a band of brothers with him always, loyal and adoring if the stories of them were to be believed. Leodan had only his traitorous chancellor Thaddeus Clegg. Aliver himself might have had Melio as a close companion, but he had been too foolish to accept the youth’s overtures with the sincerity with which they were offered. At least Aaden knew to call a friend a friend.