A Dark Sacrifice Read online

Ristil took care to show nothing of what he was feeling, either to the refugees or to his men; he kept a well-schooled face throughout the recital. But he spoke privately with Prince Ruan afterward. “The road from the east is longer and more difficult than the way we go, yet with such a start I hardly see how they could have failed to arrive at the Old Fortress by now. Meanwhile, we have at least another three days’ ride ahead of us.”

  But with the mountains so near, the King instructed his falconers to send out a goshawk, one of Kivik’s own messenger birds, trained to return to the place it had last been released. If the Old Fortress was already under siege, he thought it might help to stiffen their resistance if they knew that help was on the way, and what numbers he was bringing with him.

  He watched the goshawk rise into the air, circle in the sky, take its bearings, and go winging off toward the peaks. Then he went back to the campfire and rejoined his captains. “An early night and an early rising,” he announced, as cheerfully as he could.

  Nevertheless, he had a sharp misgiving that sleep would elude him this night.

  8

  With savage glee, the barbarians tore the dead bird apart, strewing the ground with its feathers and blood.

  In the sudden silence up on the wall, Skerry materialized beside Kivik. “Let them gloat while they still can,” he said, raising one hand in a fierce gesture. “At least we know our own messages were received, or else why was the bird flying back to us? We know that help is coming.”

  “Yes, but how soon—and how many men?”

  At that moment, another wave of Eisenlonders came scrambling up the ladders and fought their way past the men at the parapet. Kivik and Skerry both waded in, shouldering a way through the press, hammering blows to right and left. A barbarian took a swipe at the Prince’s head; he flung up his shield just in time and received a jarring blow that he felt all the way up his arm to his shoulder.

  The battle raged on. The sun burned like an ember in the grey sky, and sleet continued to fall. It seemed to Kivik that he had been fighting for an eon, for an eternity, yet the sun had progressed only a little past noon. A sudden outcry brought him running back toward the gatehouse, forcing his way with shield and axe.

  The giants had created a battering ram out of a tree trunk and two wagons, and were using it against the great double-sided gate. Timbers groaned and iron hinges screeched, but the gate that had never failed in a thousand years held. Kivik arrived on the walkway above the gatehouse just as the ice giants rammed again. He felt the shock through his feet, heard the protest of wood and metal below.

  How much longer can it hold? he wondered. Forever, according to the legends, but his faith in the magical impregnability of the fortress was rapidly fading in the face of this determined attack.

  He rallied his men, shouting an order to pick up some of the larger stones from the trebuchets and drop them on the giants. As soon as the ram rumbled into action and those who operated it came within range, the stones rained down. Most of them bounced off the giants’ thick hides, doing little harm, but one rock larger than the rest landed directly on a giant’s head and sent him toppling. The men cheered. The Skørnhäär roared and positioned the ram for another rush.

  “More stones and bigger,” Kivik called out to those behind him. “And send me some of the archers from the west wall.”

  Even in the inner wards, there was no avoiding the tumult and uproar of battle. Some of the refugees made a show of indifference, trying to carry on as usual, observing the rhythms of their everyday lives. Young children shrieked and played noisy games while their mothers bustled about the kitchen, boiling up cauldrons of very thin porridge, brewing unnourishing soups out of snow, chicken bones, and the occasional beetle or spider for flavoring. The blind man in the pantry amused his grandchildren by deftly constructing slingshots and whittling out wooden tops.

  But in other parts of the fortress a sickness was spreading. Already weakened by the dwindling food supplies, many were sinking under the added burden of fear and uncertainty. Or perhaps, thought Winloki, they are finally succumbing to a subtle malignancy in the fortress itself.

  Like her fellow healers, she tried to be everywhere at once. By midafternoon, dozens were burning up with fever; others had simply collapsed. She had nothing to give any of them but wormwood and clavender, which she dared not dispense with too liberal a hand, reckoning most of them too frail for a violent purge. In the infirmary casualties came in so quickly that before long there was no place to put them. At Thyra’s suggestion half of the healers moved to an outer courtyard, where they set up tents and cots just inside the second gate. It was there that Winloki spent the next several hours, digging out arrowheads, slapping on poultices made of cobweb, and binding up shattered limbs.

  “You ought to take care, Princess,” Syvi admonished her as they worked side by side trying to keep the most desperate cases alive. The more experienced healer was herself pasty-faced and hollow-eyed, yet she knew her limits and had never been known to exceed them. “You don’t eat, you don’t rest—you ought to know the danger in draining too much of your strength. If you collapse or die, what good will you be to any of these men?”

  Winloki answered absently, agreeing to eat a bite and take a nap eventually, a promise she had no intention of keeping—or of breaking either, it passed so quickly out of her mind—and went on applying tourniquets, cauterizing wounds, and working spells to stop the flow of blood.

  Most of the day had already slipped away before she realized that one man or the other seemed always to be following her, that some familiar faces were turning up again and again as she moved between the tents.

  “My cousin has ordered you to guard me!” she accused the boy Haakon as he helped her to lift an unconscious man onto a cot. By this time she was dripping with sweat and bloody to her elbows—she who used to pride herself on the neatness and dispatch of all her healings. “Did you suppose that I wouldn’t notice? I may be distracted, but I’m not yet blind!”

  Over by one of the tent poles she spotted a man with a hard, sober face trying to look inconspicuous. If Haakon and Arvi were there, she had little doubt there were other guards lurking in the vicinity. “Truly,” she said under her breath, but loudly enough that they both might hear her, “it seems there are better things you might be doing!”

  The youth blushed and ducked his head. “We do as Prince Kivik bids us, my lady. Your danger may not be immediate, but when and if it is—”

  “Danger?” Winloki gave him an incredulous look, though all the time her hands were busy cleaning, bandaging, rubbing on salve from an iron pot. “Why should I be in more danger than anyone else? It ought to be less. Surely even Eisenlonders respect the sanctity of healer’s grey!”

  Arvi abandoned the imperfect concealment of the tent pole and came over to stand beside her. Not so long as ten days ago he had been carried into the fortress as cold and stiff as a frozen corpse, after one of the sorties. It had taken all of Winloki’s skill, all the power of the runes on her ring, to bring him back again. “I suppose there must have been healers in some of those settlements we saw, the ones that were levelled and burned,” he said. “Where are they now? It’s certain we never met any among the refugees.”

  The din, which had receeded while she worked, broke out afresh. Men swore or vomited in pain; some of the more serious cases babbled and begged for relief. Winloki pressed the heels of her hands to her temples, willing the pounding to cease. Yet she had never been one to give way or to ask for protection, and she was not about to do so now.

  “If the barbarians have been slaughtering healers, you ought to be guarding Syvi, Thyra, and all of the rest of them—I can look after myself.”

  As if in answer, she heard the crash of a ram, followed by wild horns blowing. A volley of rocks overshot the walls and landed not far from the tents, striking sparks off the marble pavement.

  All this time, the gates had continued to hold, though one side hung slightly askew on twisted hinges
. A party led by one of Kivik’s captains began to build a barrier of carts and wagons just inside, an added precaution should the gates finally fail. It must have been a powerful magic the witches had woven into the fabric, or the timbers would have split long ago.

  For Kivik up on the wall-walk, exhausted after hours of fighting, it seemed that his movements had slowed, that every movement he made required an infinite effort. The only thing keeping him alive was a similar lethargy on the part of his opponents.

  He had discarded his shield as much too heavy, had been forced to abandon the axe when it lodged in an enemy’s skull and refused to come loose. He was fighting two-handed, using a sword that somebody tossed him when he lost the axe. There was a hard ache in his chest, and pain stabbed at him with every breath; he thought that some of his ribs must be broken.

  It hardly mattered by now, because he knew he was going to die. The battle had continued too long; no skirmish in the field had ever lasted for so many hours. His men were dropping from sheer exhaustion, but the numbers of the enemy were constantly refreshed. He fought by instinct rather than conscious thought. When two men tried to engage him at once, he sidestepped to avoid a blow, raised his sword, and struck and struck again. Blood fountained, turning to ice in the freezing air, landing with a faint rattle on the stonework.

  Then, unexpectedly, lightning leaped across the sky; thunder crashed and roared. The snow stopped falling—not gradually, but suddenly, unnaturally. Kivik watched in a daze as all of the snow that was in the air rose up with a whoooosh in a great turning cloud and went whirling away into the sky. A hush fell over the fortress and the enemy camp below.

  In that moment of dreamlike clarity, he forced his way to the parapet and gazed out across the valley, watching the approach of three gaunt figures in scarlet cloaks who rode at a headlong pace through the ranks of the Eisenlonders.

  The air still crackled with the promise of lightning. On they rode, these phantoms in red, their white hair lifted by the speed of their passage, and the dark mass of the barbarian host gave way before them. So pale they were, their faces frozen to a heartless immobility, that Kivik nearly mistook them for the ghosts of dead witch-lords come back to claim their own.

  One of the specters lifted a withered hand, and a spiderweb of purple lightning flashed across the sky. The concussion that followed shook the wall under Kivik’s feet, knocking him over; others, not so lucky, were thrown from the ramparts. He could hear them screaming all the way down.

  Then a section of the fortifications close to the gate began to sway. Those who could flung themselves to safety where the ramparts stood firm; those who could not sent up a wail. Bits of mortar and fragments of flying stone went racketing and tumbling as the wall that had never been breached in a thousand years crashed down, taking more than a hundred men with it.

  9

  They were a day and a half riding through the foothills, a shapeless landscape of dry grasses and rough stones. By noon of the second day King Ristil’s army began their ascent of the mountains. At first the way was easy, the road leading through grassy uplands where the slope was gentle. Later, they came into a forested region of birch, alder, and hawthen, where it was necessary to slow the pace. There the ground was steep and rocky, and the trees came right down to the edge of the road, causing the way to narrow until no more than six or seven men could ride abreast. In the disciplined confusion of re-forming the line, those to the rear had a long wait before they were able to fall in and follow after the leaders.

  Riding along beside the King, Sindérian finally found an opportunity to ask him the question she had been longing to ask since their first meeting. “You told us,” she said, “that Éireamhóine was separated from the Princess’s nurse in the Cadmin Aernan. Yet I’m certain I recognized her at the Heldenhof—and more than that, she knew me, too!”

  All along King Ristil had maintained an appearance of unruffled serenity, but Sindérian was healer enough to sense the taut nerves, knotted muscles, and clenched jaw beneath his outward display of calm. She knew that he had been thinking of his son and adopted niece, that behind that unclouded blue-eyed gaze a thousand fears were gnawing at his mind. But now he smiled at some pleasant memory, and his whole aspect brightened.

  “The answer to that is such a remarkable story, I wonder if you would even believe it.” He laughed and shook his head. “And yet—why not? No doubt you’ve heard more incredible things at your school for wizards on Leal.

  “My tale begins more than two years after the wizard brought Winloki to Lückenbörg. It was that time at the end of winter when it first becomes possible to cross the Cadmin Aernan, and a large party of merchants was travelling from Hythe to sell their goods in Arkenfell and Skyrra. Strange things are often seen and experienced in those mountains, as perhaps you know, but none more amazing, I think, than the sight that met these travellers as they neared the summit: a beautiful young woman encased in a block of ice. One of them said that she looked like an enchanted princess sleeping in a crystal coffin; another said no, she resembled a mermaid or a water nymph, floating just under the surface of the water. He almost believed he could see her long brown hair moving in an invisible current.”

  Caught up in his own story, the King had relaxed. His jaw unclenched; some of the rigidity was gone from the muscles in his neck and shoulders. “They thought it would be a fine thing to take the frozen maiden with them, as a kind of curio. So they loaded the block onto a sledge, covering her up with their furs and woven blankets to keep the ice from melting, and made their way down from the Cadmin Aernan, through Arkenfell, and across the waters of the Necke to Skyrra. Spring is slow to arrive in the north, but by the time they came to the channel the ice was already slowly melting.

  “I first saw her at a village not far from the coast, where I used to keep a hunting lodge. By then, very little of the ice remained. The crystal coffin had become a crystal shroud, a thin skin of ice clinging to her own skin. Still, she was a wonder! She looked so fair and so perfectly lifelike, I knelt down beside her to take a closer look. You will be thinking,” he added, with a faint reminiscent smile, “that I woke the lady with a kiss.”

  Sindérian nodded. That was exactly what she had been thinking.

  “I believe I had some such notion, but there was no need. Hardly had my knees touched the ground when the last of the ice melted away. Then all of her lovely color came back, she opened her eyes and sat up on her couch of furs, with the water pouring off of her and all her clothes and hair streaming wet.

  “All memory of her life until that moment was gone,” he continued. “She could not remember her name, or where she had been before the mountains, or even what it was that brought her into the high reaches of the Cadmin Aernan. I insisted that she travel with me back to the Heldenhof, and there—because she was in a sense newborn—she was taken to the nursery and cared for along with the children, until she grew stronger.”

  “And you never guessed who she might be?” Sindérian said, with a skeptical quirk of her dark brows.

  Ristil’s chestnut stallion shied at something in the road, but he controlled it with a sure hand on the reins. “I suspected she was the girl that Éireamhóine lost between Hythe and Arkenfell. The wizard told me he cast a spell of protection in the last moments before the avalanche hit them. A spell wrought in haste, he said, and he hardly dared to imagine it had been successful, but still there was a chance, a small chance…”

  The King shrugged. “I could hardly proclaim the truth to the world without telling the tale of the wizard and Winloki. And as for the young woman herself, it seemed to me that she had chosen not to remember. Éireamhóine had told me enough of her unhappy story; I hadn’t the heart to revive those bitter memories.”

  “And you fell in love with her and married her.”

  A cold wind came down the mouth of the pass and lifted his bright golden hair. “My sons loved her long before I did. The death of her child—from which I believe she suffered deeply, even
without remembering the cause of her pain—the fact that they were still mourning their own mother, these things seemed to strike a chord of sympathy between them. It was my eldest who gave her the name of Sigvith, while she was still with them in the nursery. But I was not far behind Arinn and Kivik in learning to love her. She was so beautiful and good, what did it matter to me who or what she had been before? If I hadn’t already two sons, perhaps my jarls and thanes would have protested more vigorously when I announced I would marry her. But in the end, they were more than reconciled, for as you have seen she is as kind and gracious as she is beautiful.”

  Sindérian nodded thoughtfully, remembering Luenil as she had been at seventeen: bitter, sorrowful, defiant—reckless of her own safety. It was pleasant to have seen her as she was now, in comely, prosperous, graceful middle age. This one time the Fates had been kind.

  Leaving the mixed forest of the lower slopes for the cliffs and gorges, the woods of pine, spruce, and fir farther up the mountain, was like riding from summer through winter’s door.

  It began with wisps and rags of vapor, and the sun making rainbows through shimmering veils of mist and cloud. Then the mist thickened into a fog so dense it muffled all sound. As the fog grew colder and colder, moisture froze on Sindérian’s eyelashes and hair; her face began to feel like a mask of ice. At the first intimation of sunlight up ahead, she drew a deep sigh of relief.

  But when she finally emerged from the fog it was into a cold flurry of snowflakes. And the deeper the army rode into the mountains, the heavier and heavier fell the snow, until soon they were forced to plough a way through high drifts blocking their road.

  “No, never before at this time of year, not within memory,” the King said in response to Prince Ruan’s question. “But there may be ice giants somewhere about, and it’s said that they make their own weather.”