Hunting Page 27

  Decsel Pelandis laughed, and Ash shivered all the way from shoulders to gut. She didn't know the voice, but that triumphant, gloating amusement? That was unmistakeable.

  "Rest assured, damnation holds no horrors for me! I'm no puling tot, too afraid to sample the pudding for fear of a hiding. I live on my own terms."

  "And died on them." Ash, though nearly a decade's worth of nightmares had risen to thicken her words, still managed to say: "This isn't Decsel Pelandis. It's Eward Carlyon."

  Lauren flinched, while the seated man stared at her with a kind of delighted surprise. "Who is that back there? Step forward."

  Never more inclined to turn tail and run, Ash palmed her knife and moved just enough that Thornaster no longer blocked her.

  "What will it take to kill you properly?"

  "If it isn't the stalwart defender! Another who got away. How obliging of you to present yourself, my dear."

  "Are you sure there's any point trying to question him?" Ash asked flatly.

  Again that laughter, grating every nerve. "Is that what you're doing? I thought it was a little light chatter before someone dies. Lauren, lad, you go downstairs now. I'll take care of business here, and then we can talk."

  "I..." Lauren sucked in breath like he was leaking.

  The depth of his distress helped Ash look at her own. She had not grown up idolising this man. He had intended harm to her – and had succeeded insofar as making absolutely clear how her parents valued her – but Ash had defeated him once already. Strange how she'd always looked at it as running, instead of winning.

  Discovering that did not make her hand shake any less.

  "You're outnumbered," Thornaster said. "Your plans exposed, your goals no longer possible. What remains is the house in the Rockways, and your death. The question is only with what level of dignity you face your end, and whether you are willing to undo some of the damage."

  This produced nothing but an incredulous stare. The man treated the half-dozen people before him as no threat at all.

  "You've clearly been keeping bad company, Lauren. Didn't I always tell you to question, not blindly follow idiots? Be assured this is no end. Now, listen to your father and go down."

  Lauren straightened, becoming every inch first seruilis once again, this time not as a mask, but a declaration. "I don't know if the father I loved ever existed. But if this has always been you, the truth of you, then I am not your son. I never was."

  "Go downstairs. You others, rid us of our Aremish guest."

  No change in tone, no visible effort, but Lauren sheathed his sword and turned.

  Thornaster knocked up the crossbow of the Guard on his right, and then barrelled into Farpatten. The third Guard released his bolt, which slashed across Farpatten's arm. Ash, uncontrolled and apparently not considered a threat, threw her knife. No hesitation, no qualms about taking this life.

  A man should not smile with a sliver of metal projecting from his throat. He certainly should not look elated. The only thing Ash had succeeded in doing was shutting him up. Perhaps not such a small thing, since she guessed that it was his voice, not his gaze, which allowed him to control others. It was surely something he couldn't do to many over an extended period, or he would not need the kismollen.

  With no time to be outraged at the failure of the enemy to die, Ash threw herself into the problem of three very competent Guards trying to kill her husband. Leaping on the back of the nearest, Ash locked her elbow around his neck. He turned into the hold, and jabbed fingers toward her eyes, so she tried to haul him off-balance instead, rapidly framing and abandoning half a dozen plans to take down the three Guards without seriously injuring them. The real problem was the frost beginning to decorate the many-paned windows.

  Since steel didn't work, she would see how the 'Cold Man' dealt with being thrown off a tower.

  More Guards were pounding up the stair, which wouldn't necessarily help the situation. Ash managed to knock hers down, and scrambled to her feet as Thornaster went down under the combined weight of his. It would need to be a straight-out run, no time for the Black Carlyon to react, and hope she had the strength to send him over without going herself.

  Everyone knew Estarrels could summon fire. Or heat things until they burst into flame, according to Thornaster, and perhaps he had been trying since Eward Carlyon had sent his son away, fighting the Cold Man's stolen strength. In any case, finally, fire overcame ice and the man in the chair became a torch.

  The Black Carlyon plucked the knife from his – Pelandis' – throat, but did not seem able to properly scream and made a thin wailing noise as he staggered to his feet, took one faltering step, and then collapsed.

  The Guards came back to themselves at the same time, and Captain Farpatten immediately stopped trying to wrest Thornaster's sword away from him, looked around, then said:

  "Someone get some water."

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  "You'd never done that to a living person before, had you?"

  "No. Though 'living' may not be the right word." Thornaster opened a door at random and drew her into what proved to be an enormous linen cupboard so he could squeeze her breathless. "If Astenar is kind, I'll never need to again."

  "Is he...properly dead now? As dead as damned people usually are?"

  "I'm not certain. I suspect that when Eward Carlyon originally died, he had already gained a certain measure of strength through serving Karaelsur, and that allowed him to find and use Tranor Pelandis. There may even have been another cellar, with a life or two he could use for sustenance. The Godskeeps will advise on what to do here. Our problem is the Rockways."

  Because the Black Carlyon's second death had not ended anything, just as he'd said. One of the Watch had already delivered the news that the Rockways cellar had, if anything, become noticeably colder. The strange liquid had certainly shown no sign of dissipating, and so Ash and Thornaster would be gambling a great deal on their marriage bond.

  Leaving the linen cupboard behind, they found Lauren sitting beside the manor's drive, talking with Garet Pelandis. With Garet's father dead, and his entire family in a state of confusion compounded by kismollen poisoning, the boy was facing as mass of responsibility, not least of which would be standing before Astenar and Luin in hopes of being judged worthy of the Decselry.

  "Wouldn't Luin know that one of the Luinsel wasn't Luinsel?" Ash asked, considering the Garet's slumped shoulders.

  "Not if 'Pelandis' stayed out of the Decselry. Though the bond would have lapsed if he'd kept away for more than a year."

  Thornaster gave the pair a long look – two young men whose fathers he'd just killed – and despite all the circumstances around it, Ash could see that would weigh on him.

  Lauren looked up then, and nodded. A "thank you", and an "I'll take care of this", and so they passed on to make a detour to the palace, to report to the Rhoi and recover a little, and fortify themselves with food. Ash visited Kiri, and did not quite let herself sound like she was saying goodbye, while Thornaster wrote a letter that he handed over to Hawkmarten.

  Hawkmarten made no attempt to hide his opinion of "if we accidentally feed our souls to Karaelsur". The consequences of that weren't small, and Farpatten was already off arranging an evacuation of the houses nearest to the dismantled building.

  "Rapidly followed by the abandonment of the entire city, I presume, if you do fail," Hawkmarten said. "Thorn, write as many messages for your family as you like, but the only result I'm going to accept is you saving me the trouble of delivering them. After all, Astenar has provided."

  He formally embraced Thornaster and then Ash, and told them he would ride down with them. Ash thought about his words all during their return to the Rockways, distracted only briefly by the important step of saying goodbye to Cloud Cat and Arth.

  "If I followed the idea of 'Astenar has provided' to its logical conclusion, I'm not sure I could face the rest of the afternoon," Ash remarked, as she and Thornaster walked down a rapidly emptying st
reet.

  "Sun! What a thought!" Thornaster stared up at the sky, and then shook his head. "If Astenar could manipulate events so exactly, they would never arise in the first place, surely. Though my father's decision to send me in response to Rhoi Malaster's request becomes more explicable. I'd only been Luinsel for a year, and several cousins would have been a better combination of Estarrel senses and experience. I thought my father's choice simply due to the time I'd spent with Arun." He smiled. "I can't say I've previously been first in his thoughts when assigning serious tasks."

  "Too inclined to levity?" Ash asked.

  "Perhaps. I spent a great deal of my younger days trying to live up to my older brother. And never quite managing to surpass my sister at the sword, or my mother with horses. And demonstrating how little that mattered to me. It's only been the last couple of years that I've gained a better sense of perspective."

  A family emerged from a house to their right, assisted by a Watchmen with two children held against his chest. Ash turned to survey other, similar scenes, and shook her head. "So if we fail, and it gets stronger, the best thing to do is deny it food?"

  "That's the idea. Though if I thought this wasn't the solution, I wouldn't try it. It makes no sense to give Karaelsur my strength."

  "Will the old Sun be actively fighting us?"

  "I don't think so. This is a tool, a device. Which is not to say it won't react. I would still rather be anywhere else right now. The fact that Astenar should be able to use us as a conduit doesn't give us any immunity to ill-effects."

  Ash blinked, then diverted to a clump of Guards escorting another family, and made several requests. This produced in short order a collection of sturdy coats, gloves, caps and scarfs.

  She shared the pile of garments with Thornaster and they fumbled them on as they found their way through the maze of debris into the upturned rear garden. Not wanting to look at the churned earth, or the plants yet to be dug up, she said:

  "Not proof against soul-stealing, I know. But a little protection against the cold can't hurt. And...you seriously have to wear that another time."

  Thornaster, tugging on a sheepskin cap complete with earflaps, tweaked her nose, and then pulled her against his chest.

  "I can't be sorry I married you, stripling, but I could wish it hadn't brought you to such a place."

  "I'm here for Genevieve." She said the words tersely, but leaned into his embrace, squeezing tightly. "And Frog, blast him. If I can't be sure why he did it, then I'll choose to believe he was the person I thought him, and had just mislaid himself."

  She stood away and finished buttoning her coat, her breath pluming into mist. While she definitely didn't want to be in this place either, she saw it as at least a course of action, and in a way less difficult than the weeks where they'd flailed about failing to make any progress.

  "Will the souls of the people who have been fed to it be...are they damned?"

  "I don't know. I'm not certain there's anything left of them."

  "Let's go find out, then."

  The Guard had destroyed most of the building, leaving intact only the area supporting the stair down, and even that creaked ominously as they set their weight on it. The stair itself was lost in a growing mist lifting from the now exposed roil covering the cellar floor.

  Ice crunched beneath their boots as they eased their way onto the first step, and they paused to wrap the scarves more firmly across their faces.

  "We're going to have to touch it," Thornaster said.

  "The way this stair feels, we might end up falling into it."

  "If that happens, lead with your fist." Thornaster tightened his grip and raised the joined hands they'd left free of gloves. Silver lines glowed beneath, but her fingers were already numb.

  In all her nightmares Ash had never thought to walk into a breathing pit, a spider work of rime reaching out from the stairwell walls, and ice crystal quickly crusting her eyelashes and the knitted wool protecting her face. The air became daggers in her throat.

  Drawing his rapier, Thornaster knocked down icicles hanging from the stairwell's partially demolished ceiling, and they used their grip on each other to keep their balance on the cracking layer of ice.

  Ash, wobbling, inadvertently put her hand down on the stair's railing and had it stick fast. Immediately she tore free of the glove and left it – and what felt like a large amount of flesh – behind.

  "All right?"

  "Yes. It's so much colder than before."

  "When we reach the bottom, position your feet as best you can, and we'll crouch and touch our hands to it. And..." He laughed briefly, coughed, and slipped a fraction before regaining his balance. "And then Astenar will provide, or I will be a fool, but in either case there is no-one I would rather be doing this with."

  Ash didn't reply immediately, because they had reached that unnaturally raised floor, and it was so cold that the already-difficult task of crouching without slipping was made doubly hard by uncontrollable shaking. It did not help that the silvery lines beneath their skin were barely visible through the mist.

  Ash had spent long years believing that Astenar had failed her. And even longer trusting those around her only up to a point, and the question of how much she trusted Thornaster-who-was-Morrion was paramount since the lines of her marriage bond were not changing or increasing their glow or doing anything at all to encourage her into thinking this plan was going to work.

  They lowered their hands toward dark liquid and still the soul bond showed no sign of reacting, but proximity to the floor was starting to make Ash feel dizzy.

  "Right now," she said, looking away from the moment of contact to the misty outline of her husband. "Right now, I'm giving you a starry-eyed look of approval."

  Choked laughter accompanied sucking dizziness, while a deep, agonising cold consumed her hand and shot up her arm. She cried out, and fell forward into...gold.

  Wings. Hundreds, thousands: a blizzard, a fountain. Sprawled on slick flagstones, Ash let go of Thornaster's hand and rolled on her back, damp and shuddering, too spent to do more than stare up at glimpses of blue sky through the mass of tiny golden butterflies carrying away the souls of the sacrificed.

  Astenar had provided.

  Trailing the mass, a spiral of grey moths. Luin, taking to be washed those whose sins weighed too heavily. Ash watched them rise until there was more blue than gold above, then turned on her side and looked at her husband as he pulled the scarf away from his face.

  "Can – can you tell if they took everyone?"

  "There's nothing here but you and I, for what it's worth." He tugged her scarf down around her throat. "We're still here, stripling."

  Ash tested her limbs to make sure all of them were present, and then took time to kiss Thornaster properly. He still tasted like mead.

  "What now?" she asked, because even kissing Thornaster did not mean she wanted to lie in a puddle indefinitely.

  He laughed. "We hope that our second day of marriage is less eventful than the first. And assist your Kiri in being a seruilis, though I suspect she will require very little help. We ensure that the laws regarding smallholdings are passed. Think up a reward for a laundry maid. And perhaps go see the glacier that is the source of the Milk, which Arun tells me shouldn't be approached outside of summer – though I must admit that right now glaciers hold little attraction for me. And I will continue to try to teach you sword-fighting, and we will ride a great deal, and see a thousand new places, and..."

  "And just be us," Ash finished, pleased. No matter what names they went by, whatever challenges they faced, or the consequences of the bond that joined them. These things altered the frame, but she always had, and would, remain herself.

  Epilogue

  A sun-browned girl sat far above the River Milk. Early morning light combined with the setting moons to pick out gleams in the turbulent water as it split around Luin's Island, and she was able to look down the length of the enormous statue from her perch on its shoulder
.

  Moving slowly, she unwound a vividly pink ribbon from around her waist, and knotted it into an elaborate bow in Luin's stone hair. As a message it was redundant, since almost all the people who meant anything to her were on the bank below, watching.

  She waved to them. Kiri, proudly wearing a tabard of red and gold, magnificent and assured. Veirhoi Heran, now in Thornaster's colours, trying hard to pretend he was not excited to be sent to Aremal. The Huntsmen, and the Rogadneys, come to see off not only Ash Lenthard, but also Melar, Lark and Bitty, who would travel to Hawkmarten's Tye's Haven, before splitting off to head south, volunteering their support for Telat's attempt to regain her lost birthright. And Lauren Carlyon. It had been inspired of Bitty to suggest he come along – or, as she'd put it – "bring money, keep us out of hedgerows". Lauren was at his best looking after others, and could escape his father's shadow without feeling he was running from his name.

  There was even a sizeable contingent of the Guard and the Watch, along with the Rhoi himself, despite it being strictly illegal to climb Luin's statue. He was now a Rhoi she approved of, not for this indulgence, but for a sincere apology made to a good friend. One step among many he was taking toward becoming the sort of Rhoi Montmoth needed.

  A crowd of early morning travellers was also gathering to stare and point, so the girl waved at them too, and then climbed down. Directly below, minding the ferry they'd used to reach the island, Morrion Estarrel watched her descent and smiled.

  "Ready now?"

  "As I'll ever be."

  They rode south, but the girl looked back often, and could see it long after they'd left the Commons. A ribbon for Genevieve, in Luin's hair. From Daere.

  ooOoo

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  Hunting

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  Andrea K Höst