C. Brittain - Voima

“You feel even worse about killing Gizor than you have said?”

He tried not to meet her eyes. “No. I told you all about that.”

She put her hands on the sides of his face so he had to look at her. “Is it this land, then? You do not feel right lying in my arms in the Wanderers’ realm?”

He pulled away and stretched out on the grass. “Nothing like that!” he said, trying to laugh. “If that was a problem, would I be asking you to stay here with me? Maybe I am just a little tired after the last few days.”

“And maybe,” she said quietly, with an undertone to her voice that he could not tell was teasing or dead seriousness, “there is a woman in this land, a member of the Hearthkeepers, whom you are waiting to see again and love more than me.”

“Karin!” he cried in protest, sitting up and clasping her to him. She kept her head turned away so he could not find her lips.

“Tell me truthfully and tell me now,” she said in a low voice, angry but with a note that sounded as though she might burst into tears.

He held her against his chest; she leaned limply, waiting. “Karin, I wanted to keep this from you.”

“I thought so,” she muttered.

“Yesterday or whatever you would call it, I began thinking again about what the witch had said-and what the Weaver told me this spring. Karin, I think I may be your brother.”

She went absolutely rigid. After a moment he could feel the front of his tunic growing wet and realized she was crying. He rocked her gently back and forth, his own eyes stinging.

“Why else would the Weaver have told me knowledge of my father would destroy me?” he said after a moment. “I know, I know what the witch said,” he went on when she tried incoherently to protest. “The witch tried to explain the Weaver’s words by saying that sure knowledge would leave me with no goal to strive for, not even an imagined father to try to emulate. But I think the meaning is far more direct. The Weaver knew what it would do to me if I could never be your lover.”

“The Weaver could have meant all sorts of things,” she mumbled.

“Such as that I was a warrior’s or housecarl’s son? That is what I always assumed when growing up. I wanted to know which warrior or housecarl, but the knowledge could not have hurt me. For a while I thought I might be King Hadros’s son, but Queen Arane told me she was quite certain I was not. That leaves your father.”

“It can’t be true,” she said, lifting her head sharply and rubbing her wet cheeks with her fists. “You could have been fathered by a hundred different men. Hadros and my father were always enemies! My father would never have sent him a child of his own, even a child born to a serving-maid.”

“Your father sent him you,” he said, stroking her hair. He had already thought of these objections and had, he feared, also thought of all the answers. “And they cannot always have been enemies. We do not know what relations were like between them before we were born. They have both long been numbered among the Fifty Kings. They had plans and wars-and alliances-for many years before we appeared and started thinking of them only as they affected us. Might I not have been a hostage left over from an earlier conflict? Or might not the war we remember have begun because your father-or, I should say, our father-objected to some aspect of how I was being raised?”

“My father would have told me,” she said against his shoulder.

“He may have intended to tell you, but remember, you were only home a short time, and he did not know I was your lover. Might this not be why Hadros refused to let us wed?”

“The witch would have told us!” Karin gasped.

“The witch wants to unite everyone, mortals and immortals alike. That is why I can never know my father.”

She was sobbing in good earnest now. She threw herself on him, giving him tear-soaked kisses. “I don’t care! I don’t care if you are my brother! I love you and don’t want anyone else! It’s too late anyway. We’ll stay here, Roric, and no one will ever know!”

He held her gently until her wild sobs subsided. “This goes beyond blood-guilt,” he said quietly then. “We are both cursed already, and the curse would be made far, far worse if we committed incest in full knowledge.”

“Then we might as well die,” she said, a little more calmly but in tones of black despair. “In the old stories, the brother and sister who did not recognize each other and became lovers threw themselves over a cliff. We’ll find Valmar and send him home, then you and I can go down to Hel together.”

“No, remember? The witch did not think that would work.”

“I wasn’t thinking of seeking death for the Wanderers,” she said in a voice lacking all expression. “I would seek it for us.”

The iron gates of the fortress resounded with the blows of the battering ram, but no one looked out from the narrow windows above or shouted defiance at them.

“Are you all dead in there?” King Kardan yelled up at the empty windows.

“Just cautious,” said Hadros, sharpening his knife. “They know we want Roric and the princess back again and are hoping we will pay well for them, so they hope to frighten us with this silence.”

The night before, after the terrible day in which they had not found Karin, lost Roric, lost one man to the dragon, and for a while thought they had lost a great many more of their warriors until the final one staggered into camp by moonlight, they had at last buried the dead. They had raised a great mound of earth, sand, and stones above the tide line and sung the funeral songs; the best songs were for Gizor One-hand.

“I should never have told Gizor I wished I was rid of Roric,” Hadros had said regretfully as the two kings rolled up in their blankets on the pebbled beach by the salt river. “I am getting too old to do things like that without thinking through the consequences.”

Kardan had not been sure whether to be more horrified at hearing Hadros say he had intended to kill his foster-son or at the black-bearded king expressing regret over anything.

Today they had started systematically hunting for the raiders, keeping careful watch for the dragon though it had not reemerged from its lair. “The old tales say dragons only have to eat once a week,” commented Hadros. Now, after a long day’s searching of the stony lower slopes of the mountains they had found the raiders’ fortress, but if anyone was home they were not answering the pounding on their front door.

“Nothing here to build ladders,” said Hadros, “but the stone is rough enough that some men should be able to climb up to those windows if no one’s defending them. Want to send a few of your lads, Kardan?”

But defenders appeared at last as two of Kardan’s men scaled the sides of the gate. They shot at the men from the narrow windows above, missing but sending them scrambling hastily down again, and bringing a flurry of answering arrows from the attackers.

“I could threaten to fire their fields,” said Hadros with a sudden grin. “That brought you out quick enough, Kardan, as I recall! But I haven’t seen any fields except those scorched ones across the river. They must live by raiding ever since their castle burned. A good life for a young man, but no life for someone who used to be one of the Fifty Kings.”

Kardan was not interested in how this renegade king might live. Karin must be inside the castle, and he would set her free if he had to rip it down with his bare hands. “Again!” he shouted at the men with the battering ram, and again the ram smacked into the wood and iron of the gate.

The defenders had disappeared from the windows again. Late afternoon shadows lay across the fortress before them. “They should be shooting at us,” said Hadros with a frown.