David Coe - Shapers of Darkness

But if she returned to Mertesse she would never find another opportunity to slip away. On the other hand, if she left now, amid the tumult of the retreat, no one would miss her for hours, not even the duke. Eventually they would conclude that she had been killed in the Eibitharian assault, or had drowned as she tried to cross the river. Certainly they wouldn’t bother searching for her, at least not for long. She would become a walking wraith.

Those had been the Weaver’s words. A walking wraith. “No one will know you,” he had said, the night he entered her dreams and spoke to her of his movement, and of her special place in his plans. “No one will think to stop you. You’ll be able to go anywhere you choose, anywhere I tell you.”

“Yes, Weaver,” she had said.

He had told her to go east. There lay glory and revenge and peace; all that she sought.

“Yes, Weaver.”

And so, as the Eandi soldiers ran toward the river, followed by their duke, pursued by the enemy, Yaella ja Banvel, first minister to House Mertesse, slipped into the brush by the north bank of the Tarbin and crept slowly away. At one point she thought she heard Rowan calling for her, but by then she had put some distance between herself and the army’s camp. She knew that he would never find her. Still, she stayed low, keeping herself hidden, always in motion, always putting more distance between herself and the life she had known for so long.

Only when night fell, bringing darkness and safety, did she stand and begin to walk. She would have preferred to ride, but her mount had been taken from her by one of Kentigern’s bowmen. She was truly alone. There was nothing for her here anymore.

She kept her eyes fixed on the eastern sky, where the moons were climbing into the night. White Panya and red Ilias, guiding her. Eastward, toward glory.

dolkara, Aneira

The sun shone bright in a hazy sky of pale blue, warming the grasses of Castle Solkara’s vast courtyard and making the garden blooms of borage and gilly flower, columbine and sweetbriar, woodbine, iris, and lavender glow like Qirsi fire in the hands of festival sorcerers. A gentle wind blew off the Kett and across the castle walls, carrying the smell of fish from the river piers, and rustling the leaves of poplars and willows growing along its banks.

All her life, Chofya had loved the slow, hot days of the growing turns. While others complained of the heat, she basked in it, thinking back to her youth in the hills south of Noltierre, where the sun baked the clay and the brush and the skin of small children to a fine golden brown. Here in Aneira’s royal city, where the waters of the river and the shadows of the Great Forest cooled the air, it never grew warm enough to suit her taste. But still, she welcomed these mornings in the garden. Later she would take Kalyi to the marketplace-there were always so many peddlers in Solkara this time of year.

It was easy to forget that there was war, that less than forty leagues to the south, Aneirans were killing Aneirans for no reason that Chofya could see. Oh, she understood well enough Numar’s pretense for marching south; she simply saw no sense in it. Never mind that Dantrielle’s defiance in the face of this foolish war to the north was entirely justified. Even had she not agreed with Tebeo and his allies, she would have seen Numar’s siege as a wasteful, spiteful gesture, one that served only to weaken the throne as well as the realm. Chofya wasn’t vain enough to believe that the years she spent as Carden’s queen were enough to teach her all the finer points of statecraft. Carden himself hadn’t mastered them; how was she to do so? But in her capacity as lady of the castle and hostess to all sorts of feasts, ceremonies, and councils, she had observed a great deal. Presiding over the realm, she had decided long ago, was not that different from running a castle. In both endeavors, one needed authority enough to maintain order, but also a modicum of flexibility, a willingness and capacity to cope with the unexpected. In the same way, she had come to believe that dealing with a wayward duke was not all that different from teaching discipline to a contrary child. Anger and violence served only to stiffen the resolve of the one who needed to be mollified; only patience and reason would produce the desired result. She had raised a daughter nearly to womanhood. She knew she was right.

But in all her years as queen she had also learned that men knew little of patience and even less of reason. And they had no interest in taking counsel from a woman, unless she happened to be Qirsi. Before leaving for Dantrielle, Numar had refused to grant her an audience, no doubt knowing that she would speak against his alliance with the empire and the siege he was planning. Chofya then went to her daughter, knowing that the regent could not refuse to hear his queen, only to discover that Numar had already convinced Kalyi of the wisdom of both the alliance and the siege.

Realizing that there was nothing she could do to save Aneira from the folly and vanity of its regent, Chofya stopped trying. The realm had survived for nearly nine centuries, weathering civil wars, rebellions, ill-advised wars with its neighbors, and countless other tragedies. It would survive Numar.

Still, she did not ignore the war entirely. Nearly every day Henthas received messages from Numar describing the progress of the siege, and though the duke was under no obligation to share any of what the regent told him with Chofya, he had no choice but to share the messages with Kalyi. And since the queen remained terrified of her uncle the duke-with good reason-she always had Chofya accompany her to Henthas’s chamber. Naturally there was some delay between Numar’s writing of the messages and their arrival in Solkara-usually three or four days-but there was an immediacy to Numar’s account of events on the battlefield that was quite compelling. Though Chofya wished to maintain her indifference to the course of the siege, she soon realized that she looked forward to the daily audiences with Henthas. It didn’t matter that she hated the duke, or that, with his dark blue eyes, fine features, and muscular frame, he bore a disturbing resemblance to her late husband. She found the descriptions of the siege exciting, almost as if she were hearing of some ancient battle from Aneira’s glorious past, rather than of Numar’s foolish war. On those few occasions when no message arrived, she was deeply disappointed, even more so than was Kalyi.

Still, fascinated as she was by the regent’s reports, and versed as she was in the subtleties of Aneiran statecraft, it took a conversation with Kalyi, still two years shy of her Determining, to make Chofya understand fully how dangerous this siege was for her and her child.

They had returned to their chambers from yet another audience with the duke. The prior’s bells had just tolled in the city and they had an hour or so to wait before the evening meal. Kalyi seemed to have sensed long ago that Chofya did not approve of the siege or much else that Numar had done in her name. Outside of Henthas’s chamber, the two of them had not spoken of the conflict in some time. But on this day, the news from Dantrielle had not been good, at least not for House Solkara. Chofya liked Tebeo and Brall and still remembered how they had stood with her when Grigor, Carden’s ruthless brother, had tried to wrest the crown from her daughter. Listening to Henthas read Numar’s accounts, she often found herself silently cheering Dantrielle’s successes and the regent’s failures.

According to the message that arrived that day, the last of the waxing, Numar’s scouts had seen men approaching Castle Dantrielle from the north, south, and east-no doubt the armies of Orvinti, Tounstrel, and Kelt. Tebeo’s defenses were beginning to fail, Numar wrote, but there was no way of knowing if the castle would fall before Dantrielle’s allies arrived.