A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  It was the same faint song that had woken him, drifting nearer where the wind twisted through the shimmering grove. A woman’s voice sounded out faintly, the lyre shifting within it as silver light through green leaves. But within that light, he sensed a shadow. He felt the voice seek his ear with words he didn’t understand, sharp-edged like the notes that carried from steel strings.

  Raub was drifting through the woods suddenly, couldn’t remember stepping away from the fire. He was in leather still, a well-scarred jerkin and leggings caked with the dust of the road. Through the screen of cypress and witchwillow saplings growing low, he padded barefoot, not sure what unknown summons he was following until he slowed to gauge the shifting of the wind through the leaves. From ahead came a gleam of light. The music was louder. Closer.

  He circled the bright clearing three times, made sure he was alone before he stepped out from the shadows. The Clearmoon rode at zenith, its near-full light catching the silver spread of wolf-foil and whitegrass above an uneven mat of lifeless carpet vine. Gnarled branches threw a haze of shadows across day-bright ground. But brighter even than the gleaming leaves was the pool that spread in the hollow beneath a rotting cypress stump. No more than a stride across, its surface was smooth silver, unnaturally calm beneath the trace of breeze that twisted past him.

  Only when his hands strayed absently to his waist did Raub realize that his weapons were back at the camp. The emerald-hilted longsword and the Ilvani dirk were still sitting where he had slung them off at the fireside. He still carried a third blade at his belt, as he always did. A leaf-edged shortsword, its distinctive shape marking it as the Ilvani style where it hung from a leather thong. But as always, scabbard and hilt alike were shrouded in black cloth and road dust. No way to draw it even if he wanted to.

  Raub felt a pinprick chill twist up his spine. Afraid not of what might lie beyond the forest wall, but wary of whatever power in the song could have inspired him to follow it weaponless, seeking blindly in the dark.

  In his mind, the voice he didn’t understand unfurled in a gentle arpeggio, stepped tones as vivid as the colors of a loom, impossibly perfect. It was a lament, slow and ethereal. The lyre slowed to an intermittent echo of single-string chimes, lifting the voice to greater heights of sorrow.

  Raub was on his knees at the pool’s edge, couldn’t remember stumbling the half-dozen steps across the silver glade. The scent of rot was heavy, filling his lungs so that he had to fight to breathe. Around him, the glade was shifting, the Clearmoon’s light spreading now like ripples on water. The cypress stump was a dark altar, shot through by the movement of finger-long black borer beetles that had reduced the wood to a shell. Silver leaves hissed past on the wind that somehow still raised no ripple on the pool itself. He felt himself pulled forward, tried to fight a desire he couldn’t explain.

  Despite every urge to look away, he stared deep into that silver water and saw the faces of the friends he had killed…

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  As if his head had suddenly torn free of some smothering gauze, Raub felt cool air fill his lungs. The light was bright around him as he rose slowly from the pool’s edge, not bothering to turn toward the familiar voice. He felt his mind clear, felt the breeze trace across his back, his tunic soaked in sweat.

  The music was gone, no hint that it had ever been there. Just the faint echo of despair still twisting in his memory. At his feet, the black water of the pool was streaked with scum and a chaotic cloud of ripples spreading at the touch of the wind.

  “Thought I heard something,” Raub said at last.

  He turned back to see Cassatra in the shadows, her crossbow nocked with a black quarrel, three more slung below the barrel and ready to be set. She had left her cloak at the camp, crouching barelegged in a knee-length shift of dark homespun that swallowed the moon’s-light. Her look of calm contemplation told Raub she was worried. On her belt, she carried the handaxe the loremasters of Myrnan had called the Reaper, swinging gently within its sheath.

  “You’re half a league from the camp,” she said. “What could you hear at that range? And if you could hear something at that range, why wouldn’t you be moving away from it?”

  “A voice,” Raubynar said quietly. He shook his head. “Just the wind.” Cass stood slowly, turned to take in the clearing, the tree line beyond. “I couldn’t sleep. Don’t worry about it.”

  From behind him came a hiss. A stand of witchwillow shifted, a dark shape rising to the air. Raub heard Cass’s crossbow sing as he wheeled, fast enough to see her shoot twice. The first shot was gone into shadow. The second took the brush grouse cleanly, shrieking as it fell clumsily from the air and back to the bracken below.

  Cass had a third bolt fitted and nocked as she turned to appraise the silence. Raub only shrugged.

  “Breakfast is served,” he said. Cass gave him a withering look.

  He found the grouse easily, was carefully pulling Cass’s bolt free when she called him. He heard a familiar hardness in her voice, approached to find her kneeling. He saw the flattened spread of whitegrass beneath a thicket of scrub that marked the bird’s roosting place. Cass was kneeling two strides away, however, the grass there bent and broken in a telltale pattern.

  “Something flushed the bird,” she said quietly.

  Raub stepped closer, carefully ran his fingers across the spread of flattened grass. Footprints, perhaps. Cass’s first shot hadn’t been aimed at the bird at all.

  “You thought you heard something?” she said.

  At the edge of his vision, he caught a sudden glimpse of white flame and bright steel. His father’s longblade. He had seen it.

  In a brief flicker of memory, from the instant before Cass’s voice called him away from it, Raub remembered the faces in the silver pool. He watched them shift to smoke, burn away to nothing in his mind.

  He felt his hand stray to the black-wrapped shortsword at his hip.

  “Raubynar?”

  He blinked. The sky was lighter now, dawn coming.

  “Just the wind,” he said.

  • • •

  The rebuilt fire was banked to coals by the time Raub cleaned and dressed the bird. He watched in silence as it cooked, Cass pointedly ignoring him as she ate nuts and dried fruit from a drawstring bag. The sun had risen, clouds copper-stained to the east.

  “You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” she said at one point.

  Raub pulled the grouse from its makeshift wooden spit, broke the charred body carefully, and began to eat. “We were moving south, last time I checked. The large yellow thing that hangs in the sky by day is the sun. You can tell direction by it, or so they say.”

  Cass smiled as she flicked an almond at him, sending it past his ear with a force he could feel. Though they sparred only rarely, the two of them were of a pair when it came to strength and speed. Raub was taller than Cass by only a hand’s breadth, his darkness matching hers. They had been taken as kin more than once by folk who failed to note the Ilvani set of his ears beneath the rough-cut hair, the pale gleam like starlight in his eyes.

  “We’ve been traveling south since we left the Free City,” Cass said, “down a succession of cart tracks and hunter’s trails that keep getting fewer and farther between. Yet somehow you manage to pick out a route from them like you know where they all lead.”

  She had the close, dark curls and the olive complexion common on the Gracian coast, but where she came from was something Cass had never spoken of. Barely two years since she and Raub met, that reserve was still the trait they most strongly shared. A kind of silent familiarity between them that made their time together seem longer.

  “Don’t confuse the ability to not get lost with having a destination,” he said.

  “All travel has a destination.”

  “All journeys have a destination. More aptly, a destination turns travel into a journey.”

  “And what’s this, then?”

  When they had first arrived back on t
he mainland from the Sorcerers’ Isle of Myrnan, Cass and Raub spent almost a month in the Highport. First, down on the docks that were the city’s lifeblood. Then moving higher from the water toward the white-terraced hills. In bars and brothels spanning the widest range of class and culture, Highport cost Raub what would once have been the fortune of a lifetime. Through an endless dance of drink and baser pleasures, he watched indifferently as it all slipped away.

  Cassatra had followed him at first. But though her tastes were more subtly refined, it was the more immediate loss of her patience that saw her abandon Raub in pursuit of her own business. On their initial journey to Myrnan, in each Gracian city and town they passed through, that business was the same. Quiet meetings with loremasters in the nobles’ districts. Quieter meetings with scouts and bounty hunters in roadhouses and dark taverns. Cass was searching for something she had never spoken of, and so Raub had never asked.

  She came back to find him in the end, dragging him out of the drunken haze of a month’s debauchery to a monastery perched among the green vineyards north of the city. These hills were still called Hypriot, the city’s original name in Gracian long before “Highport” had been culled off by the rougher Imperial tongue.

  The next morning, awaking with his senses more or less functioning, Raub found that the fortune he had lost made barely a dent in the fortune that plagued him still. The cold weight of platinum coin struck and minted a thousand years before. The glint of Dwarf-cut gems that were the legacy of that month the two of them spent beneath distant Myrnan.

  The ruins of that dread Sorcerers’ Isle left those who survived them wealthy.

  Raub and Cass had survived.

  “Where are we going?” she asked again as they walked. She wore leggings now beneath the shift but still walked barefoot, a kind of quiet ease in her pace. Beneath that ease, however, Raub heard the edge in her voice that told him she wasn’t going to ask again.

  He had worked his way slowly through the fragile bones of the grouse, cracking the last of them now to suck the marrow before he tossed them to the grass. The day was golden, sun climbing bright across the open scrubland that spread between the cypress groves and the mountains beyond. The trail he took them on met a wider cart road not far beyond their camp, heading straight for the great forest and with tracks along it fresh the day before in both directions.

  “There’s an Ilvani settlement,” he said finally. “A frontier forest-home inside the Yewnwood, south of Nesadale.” They had passed that smaller Human city two days ago now, the Free City of Yewnyr four days beyond that. All that time, he and Cass shadowed the trade road along the twisting side tracks that wound their way through rolling farm country. Always ahead of them, south and west beneath the high sun, the vast expanse of the Yewnwood spread along the horizon as a green-black shroud.

  They had taken a similar road from Highport to Yewnyr when they finally left the great coastal city. The trade routes made it a little more than a month’s journey for those in a hurry, but the memories of Myrnan needed a slower road to clear them. Once in Yewnyr, Cass had been prepared for another lengthy stay, and so she was surprised when Raub told her after a week that he was heading south.

  “We make time today,” he said, “we’ll be there by nightfall.”

  “Something there you’re due to see? Or someone?” Cass gave him a sidelong glance.

  “I was born there,” Raub said evenly. “A place called Anthila.”

  Cass was thoughtful as she adjusted her pack, half the size of Raub’s and a quarter its weight. Her blanket and bedroll were the cloak she wore, a change of clothes and her weapons the only real gear she ever carried.

  “You talked about it once,” she said. “Anthila.”

  Raub felt a sudden chill against the heat of the sun, near mid-high now. The bird was done and he washed its grease from his fingers with moss and a quick spurt from his waterskin, avoiding a response. A familiar unease traced through his mind, not so much in reaction to what Cass said but to the context. If she was speaking the truth, it was a conversation he didn’t remember.

  Like she could sense that unease, Cass answered the question Raub couldn’t ask. “You said you couldn’t go back. I tried to ask you why, but you weren’t overly amenable to questions that night.”

  In the carefully pitched tone of her voice, in the echo against the steady pace of their footsteps and the song of unseen birds in the tall grass, Raub felt the lie. Not in what Cass repeated about him not going back, but in her saying that he kept his silence afterward. Whatever he said to her then, she must have felt the hurt it carried, which told him with cold certainty that he had told her the truth.

  Part of the truth, at least.

  “My father,” he said quietly. Repeating what he was sure she already knew. “He’s the reason I didn’t go back.”

  “Old arguments?”

  “I heard word in the Free City. He’s dead.”

  Though she hadn’t been formally asked, Cass was ready to leave the day Raub set out, falling in beside him without a word as they passed through Yewnyr’s Thirty-League Gate. When he told her his plans, she sensed a change in him but didn’t know what it meant. As she always did, she weighed her options with an overly critical mind, every decision given an attention beyond what most of them deserved. But as she often did, she found that attention diverted by a need for company that she seldom admitted, even to herself.

  She didn’t know how old she was. But already in a relatively short life, Cassatra had walked enough roads alone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally. Raub said nothing, eyes on the road ahead.

  Two years ago now, and a month before he met Cass for the first time, Raub had come into his first serious coin riding as a mercenary guard on the caravan routes through the inhospitable Munychion Plains to the east. In Nesadale, he spent that coin almost immediately, purchasing the confidence of a Yewnwood trader who worked the Ilvani settlements of the eastern forest and the adjacent Human frontier. Irasol was a scruff-bearded half-Ilvani who passed through Anthila four times a year to appraise and buy the fleet grey horses of the forest clans. For the equivalent of a year’s salary for any city worker, he kept his eyes and ears open on Raub’s behalf.

  It had been three seasons since Raub passed through Yewnyr. The last time was with Cass, bound for Highport and Myrnan beyond. Irasol was the one who introduced them to the broad-shouldered northerner named Connal, who had first whispered to them of the eastern road, and of the treasures and dangers lurking beneath the blasted hills at the heart of the Sorcerers’ Isle.

  While they were away on that journey, the news came that Raub had waited six years to hear.

  Like Raub, like Cass, like the others who had made up their company when they arrived at the isle, Connal came through the madness of Myrnan’s ancient ruins unscathed. The dark barbarian hadn’t spoken in the aftermath, though. He simply took his share of the wealth they pulled out of that darkness, then fled for the docks at Claygate Keep and back to the Gracian mainland. He had bested the dungeons of Eltolitinus, the dark foundations of Myrnan’s ancient island-castle, as had all of them who survived. But as with so many of those so lucky, Raub saw in the warrior’s cold eyes the shadow of having left something behind in that darkness.

  “So why are you going back?” Cass’s voice pulled him from his distraction. The western wind of the night before was gone, a colder breeze from the north carrying gathering clouds.

  “My father is dead,” Raub said, as if she might not have heard him the first time.

  “If you only just got word in the city, he’s been dead for weeks. Longer, maybe. If you wouldn’t go back while was he alive, why do it now?”

  Raub had seen that same shadow in the others who emerged with him into sunlight at the end of their ordeal. Full-blown in the sullen Vanyr warlord who had appointed himself leader of their expedition. More guarded in the dragon-marked mage who walked at that warrior’s side. He saw it in the grey eyes of the Gra
cian sellsword he knew only as Dilaon, a companion of Connal’s who carried himself with a nobility that spoke to a story Raub never heard. He saw it in the mercenary boss who was the only one of them to have previously taken the great staircase down into the dark depths.

  Eleven of them altogether walked out alive in the end. In Claygate and Highport and a half-dozen cities beyond, Raub had drunk himself to the point where he couldn’t remember the faces of the dead anymore.

  “Old business,” he said at last.

  He had done the same when he left Anthila the winter of his sixteenth year, losing himself in the taverns and roadhouses of the towns and smaller cities of the north. Drinking to forget the faces that came back to him the previous night for the first time in six years, ghostly in that silver pool. Bright like the sun and hazy as a waking dream.

  • • •

  As the sun rode past zenith, a wall of trees loomed before them, marking the sudden and eternal boundary of the Yewnwood. From the moment they hit the trade road, the forest beckoned them. The ever-present green of the horizon rose slowly, cresting like a great wave ready to wash across the open plain. However, not even that gradual sighting could prepare one for the experience of stepping beneath that wave, Cass realized as they approached.

  The yewn was a thick tree of twisted trunk and straight branches, its broad leaves ever growing throughout all seasons. Green at birth, they faded gold as they were caught on the wind and cast away. Its only natural home was the great forest, running one hundred and twenty leagues east to west and twice as far between north and south where it split the Elder Kingdoms like a wedge. As they approached, Cass tried to judge the height of the closest trees, each estimation upgraded as they drew ever closer.