Patricia Briggs - Raven's Strike

When Tier was finished with that song, he glanced around at his audience—the one he could see. Then he began a soldier’s marching song Seraph had never heard before. It had a catchy chorus, and as he started into it for the second time, Tier said, “Join in if you’d like.”

Lehr and Jes both did, and Rinnie sang a soprano harmony. Seraph found herself humming along. At the top of the fourth verse, Tier said her name, instead of the word that should have been there, and she realized that he was fighting.

“Seraph,” said Tier again.

She pulled her gaze away from the dead and saw his Order had pulled almost entirely away from him, held only by a few lonely strands of his spirit and the last threads of her magic. She grasped the cord that ran between Tier and the gem and pulled hard toward Tier.

“Better,” said Tier, before throwing his voice into the chorus again.

She held on. She might be able to help Tier better if she knew how spirit and Order interacted on a healthy Order Bearer. She’d been too busy watching the dead before Tier called her to pay much attention to anyone else.

She looked up, intending to study Lehr—but her gaze stuck on the Memory first. She could see the Memory’s form, but with her seeing spell its form was deep purple rather than black. Crouched beneath the shelter of Order was a sharp-featured Traveler who gleamed a soft spirit-blue. He met her eyes, looked startled, then whispered in her head, “Have him tell The Fall of the Shadowed as he told it for me.”

“Tier,” she whispered so she didn’t interfere with his song. “The Memory told me to have you tell The Fall of the Shadowed the way you told it for him.”

Tier looked a little surprised, but he nodded. As he sang, she noticed Tier’s spirit had steadied and grown more solid where it attached to the tattered grey-green bits of his Order. Seraph wondered if, once the Shadowed’s spell was restrained, Tier’s music helped fight the drag of the spell.

Tier finished the song, then, striking a minor chord, began an ascending scale that built to a haunting arpeggio, the music forlorn and plaintive. His clever fingers flew over the gut frets of the lute, and the notes fell into a less disturbing tone as he began the story of Shadow’s Fall.

“It happened like this.”

Seraph had heard the story dozens of times before, so she paid little heed to the words. She surveyed the dead, but they seemed to be content with the lute-accompanied story, because they stayed where they were. The upper courses of Tier’s lute wove bits of heroic ballads and festival songs into a single melody over a subtle throbbing bass that gradually began to take on the rhythm of a heartbeat.

“This young man was a good king, which is to say that he promoted order and prosperity among his nobles and usually kept the rest from starvation.” Tier’s voice blended into his music.

When she was certain the dead were satisfied with Tier’s storytelling, she resumed her interrupted task of looking at Lehr to see how the Order was supposed to look in relation to spirit.

The smell didn’t startle her at first, though if she’d been paying attention, she’d have realized there was no reason for the library to start smelling like horses.

“I smell flowers,” whispered Lehr.

Once he said it, Seraph did, too. She looked up, but none of the dead had come closer.

Ah , she thought, returning to her examination of Lehr, no wonder the Path’s Masters had such a difficult time retrieving just the Order, no wonder it took months to separate spirit from Order—spirit is woven between the threads of Order like warp and weft.

She heard the sound of sword meeting sword, but when she looked up, she could see nothing that would account for the sound—or for the sudden smell of the sweat of combat.

“None of his guardsmen or nobles could stand against him with sword or staff,” said Tier.

Seraph looked at him incredulously, and she realized that even as she had restricted the magic she used for most of the two decades she and Tier had been married—so had he.

“He established libraries at every village,” said Tier, and the scent of dust and mildew overwhelmed that actual scent of the library they were in, which smelled only of leather, parchment, and preservation spells. “And in his capital he collected more books than had ever been assembled together then or since. Perhaps that was the reason for what happened to him.”

She was so in awe of what he was doing, it took her a moment to realize the cord of the Shadowed’s magic she’d been holding steady, the one binding Tier’s Order to the gem, was trying to pull away from her—and before she pulled it back, she realized it was pulling the wrong way. It was pulling back toward Tier. She released it.

“Time passed, and the king grew old and wizened as his sons became strong and wise. People waited without worry for the old king to die and his oldest son to take the crown.” Tier stilled his fingers for a moment, so that his silence waited like the people had waited for the old king to die.

Two beats of silence… three, then he began a run of minor chords, echoing the melody he’d used to begin the story. “One evening the king’s oldest son went to bed, complaining of a headache. By the next day he was blind and covered with boils; by that evening he was dead. Plague had struck the palace, and, before it left, the queen and every male of royal blood were dead.” The familiar melody twisted with a weight of sorrow. An occasional plucked harmonic rang like a widow’s wail.

Then, Lehr’s startled gasp made her look away from Tier, where she’d been caught by the magic of his words and music.

She saw Hinnum and the Memory, so different from the others who huddled at Tier’s feet. She saw the dead. She saw her children, Phoran, and his guardsmen. She saw Gura. She saw them all in glittering lights of spirit, Order, and the dark core that she had decided might be soul.

And before them all, untouched by Seraph’s magicked sense of sight, stood the Unnamed King’s daughter, Loriel. Seraph didn’t know how she knew who it was, just that the woman who discovered what her father had turned into stood before them all. Brought before them, real as life, by Tier’s power. Seraph watched in awe as Loriel fled the monsters who now filled her father’s castle.

The music became momentarily militant, sharp percussive taps of the lute’s face evoking drums and marching troops as Tier told of the army Loriel formed, one whose core would go on to fight to the end. Abrupt, discordant, wild strains starting and stopping suddenly followed by a cacophony of strident squeaks and slides, as Tier told of Loriel’s death. Always, throbbing steadily beneath the other sounds, was the rhythm of the Unnamed King’s heart.

It was hard to keep her attention on the reality of the Shadowed’s spell when Tier’s rich baritone called for her attention. Still, she watched him as the power of his music slowly forced the Shadowed’s spell to yield its prey. Seraph pulled the gem out of the belt pouch where she’d put it, and it was warm in her hand.

A man’s scream pulled her attention back to the battlefield the library had become. She couldn’t tell if the noise had been made by one of their boys, the dead, or by some quirk of Tier’s storytelling magic.

Seraph recognized the wide field they’d ridden across a few days ago, but this time there were bodies lying everywhere, and the stench of death made Seraph’s gorge rise.

The bass courses of the lute continued to measure the steady pulse of the Shadowed, but the melody faltered, quieted. She saw Red Ernave fighting the Shadowed King, who was even more frightening than she’d ever thought he could be. Tier’s fingers played a melody that stuttered and strained, falling a bit behind the beat, as if too exhausted to continue, the proud strains of military airs made aching and painful by their very slowness.