Guy Kay - The Last Light of the Sun

If you didn't count a prince, gone into the godwood.

Riding up the main street from the gates, a screaming, colourful crowd on either side, her father had waved, smiled gravely, let the people see a king calmly aware of achievement, and as calmly set on repeating it as often as necessary. Let his subjects know this, and let all who were here from abroad carry word back to their homes.

Kendra, with her mother and sister and brother (the one brother here), in front of the great hall, had looked at her father as he'd dismounted, and she'd known—right then—that he was dissembling.

Athelbert outweighed sixty Erlings killed, by so much.

There had been sea-raids for a hundred years, and they would not stop with this one. But the king of the Anglcyn had only two sons who'd survived infancy, and the older was gone now into a deadly place, and the younger (they all knew) had never wanted to be a king.

Truth be told, it was Judit, thought Kendra, beside her red-haired sister on the steps, who ought to have been a boy at birth, and now a man. Judit could have sat a throne, incisive and confident in the fierce brightness of her spirit. She could have wielded a sword (she did wield swords!), commanded the fyrd, drunk ale and wine and mead all night and walked steadily away from a trestle table at dawn when all those who had been with her lay snoring amid cups. Judit knew this, too, Kendra thought; she knew she could have done these things.

Instead, she was going off this winter, escorted by most of the court, to marry a thirteen-year-old boy and live among the people of Rheden to bind them close: for that is what young women in royal families were born to do.

Things went awry sometimes, Kendra thought, and there was no one to give her a good answer why Jad had made the world that way.

They'd feasted that night, heard music, watched jugglers and tumblers perform. The rituals of victory. Theirs were lives on display, to be seen.

More of the same at sunrise. At chapel to pray, then she and Judit (dutiful just now, more shaken than she'd want to admit by what Athelbert had done) had made a point of walking through the thronged, roped-off marketplace three separate times (to be seen), fingering fabrics and brooches. They'd made Gareth come with them the third time. He'd been quiet, extremely so. Judit bought a jewelled knife and a gelding from Al-Rassan.

Kendra bought some fabrics. She made her way through the duties of the day with difficulty, then after the evening rites she went looking for someone. She had questions that needed answering.

Ceinion of Llywerth had not been at the royal chapel for the sundown services. There were a small number of Cyngael merchants here for the fair (they'd come along the same coastal path he had, or been granted passage through the Rheden Wall). She found the cleric with his own people at a chapel on the eastern side of Esferth, leading the rites there.

He had just finished when Aeldred's younger daughter arrived, with one of her women in attendance. They waited until the cleric was done talking with some of the merchants, and then Kendra had her woman withdraw and she sat down with the grey-haired cleric towards the front of the old chapel, near the disk. It needed polishing, she noticed. She'd tell someone tomorrow.

Ceinion's eyes, she thought, were curiously like her father's. Alert, and just as unsettling when you had something you wanted to hide. She wasn't here to hide. She wouldn't be here if she were hiding.

"Princess?" he said calmly, and waited.

"I am afraid," she said.

He nodded. His face was kind, smooth-shaven, less lined than was usual for a man his age. He was small and trimly formed, not a laden-table, wine-cup cleric like the other one here, from Ferrieres. Her father had told them some time ago, before the first visit, that this man was one of the most learned scholars in the world, that the Patriarch in Rhodias sought his views on clashes of doctrine. In some ways it was hard to credit—the Cyngael lived so cut off from the world.

"Many of my people are greatly afraid just now," he said. "You are generous to share it with us. Your father has been very good, sending a ship to Arberth, messengers to the Rheden Wall. We can only hope—"

"No," she said. "That isn't it." She looked at him. "I knew when Alun ab Owyn entered the wood with my brother and the Erling."

A silence. She had shaken him, she saw. He made the sign of the disk. That was all right; she'd have done the same. "You… you see spirits?"

He was very direct. She shook her head. "Well, once I did. One of them. A few nights ago. That isn't what I… from the time you came across the river, the other morning? When we were lying on the grass?" She heard herself sounding like a child. This was so difficult.

He nodded.

"Well, from that time, I… I can't explain this well, but I knew… ab Owyn. The prince. I could… read things in him? Know where he was."

"Dear Jad," whispered the high cleric of the Cyngael. "What is it that is coming among us?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

He was looking at her, but not with eyes that spoke denunciation or disbelief. "Strange things are happening," he said.

"Not just… to me?" She was extremely determined not to cry. "Not just to you, child. To him. And… others."

"Others?"

He nodded. Hesitated, then moved a hand sideways, back and forth. He wasn't going to say. Clerics, she thought, were good at not telling what they didn't want to tell. But he'd already said something, and she'd needed to know it, so much. She wasn't alone, or going mad.

He swallowed, and now she did see a hint of fear, which frightened her, in turn. She knew what he was going to ask, before he spoke.

"Do you… see him now? Where they are?"

She shook her head. "Not since they went in. I've been having dreams, though. I thought maybe you could help me."

"Oh, child, I have so little help to give in this. I am… enmeshed in fears."

"You're the only person I can think of."

Her father's eyes, very nearly. "Ask me, then," he said.

It was quiet here. Everyone had gone, except the aged cleric of the chapel, straightening candles at a side-altar near the door, and her own woman in a far row, waiting. This chapel was one of the oldest in Esferth, the wood of the benches and flooring worn smooth with years. It was dark where the lamps didn't reach, softly lit where they did. A feeling of calm. Or there ought to have been, Kendra thought.

"What can you tell me," she asked, "about the Volgan's sword?"

+

The ambit of a woman's life could not be said to be very wide. But how wide might it be for the majority of men alive on the god's earth, struggling to feed themselves and their families, to be warm in winter (or sheltered from the sandstorms in the south), safe from war and disease, sea-raiders and creatures in the night?

The Book of the Sons of Jad, more and more widely used in chapels now, even here in the Cyngael lands, taught that the world belonged to the mortal children of the god, saying so in words that were incantation: eloquent and triumphant.

It was difficult for Meirion mer Ryce to believe this to be true.

If they were all the glorious children of a generous god, why did some of them end up blood-eagled, soaked in blood, ripped apart, though they had only been a girl walking back from pasture with brimming pails after milking the two cows on a morning at the end of spring?

It was wrong, thought Meirion, defiantly, remembering her sister, as she did every single time coming back from the milking in the mist before dawn. Elyn was not a person who ought to have died that way. It wasn't what life should have held for someone like her. Meiri knew she wasn't wise enough to understand such things, and she knew what the cleric in the village had been telling them over and again since summer began, but Cyngael women were not particularly submissive or deferential, and if Meirion had been asked by someone she trusted to describe what she really felt, she would have said she was enraged.