C. Dale Brittain Read online

  The rider had no back. He had a face, a front, but it was only a hollow shell.

  But Roric did not seem to notice. “Have you decided then that you need me?” he asked the rider evenly.

  “We want you, Roric No-man’s son,” said the rider, in a voice so deep it seemed to come from the earth. Valmar could see blue sky through the holes of his eye sockets.

  “I shall be with you in half an hour,” said Roric. He suddenly tossed back his hair and grinned. “There is one other person who wants me.”

  “Not half an hour,” replied the rider in the same deep, vibrating voice. As he spoke storm clouds moved across the sky, and the air temperature began to drop precipitously. “You will come now.”

  “Roric!” hissed Valmar. “You can’t— Don’t you see— He has no back!”

  “Don’t bother me with children’s tales,” Roric hissed in reply. “Two minutes!” he shouted to the rider.

  Then he whirled on Valmar and seized him by the shoulders. “Listen very carefully,” he said in a low voice. “Take this message to Karin for me. Tell her I have found at last a place for a man without a family—or that such a place has found me. Tell her I have gone with the Wanderers, but that I shall always love her.”

  “That’s not a Wanderer!” protested Valmar. As Roric shook his head, Valmar took in what else he had said. “You mean— You mean you love my big sister?”

  The corner of Roric’s mouth curved up slightly. “Yes. Tell her that. And take care of her if I do not come back—especially if you marry her yourself.”

  “I couldn’t marry her!” Valmar started to object, but Roric had already turned away and was mounting his stallion.

  Valmar looked after them in amazement as Roric and the being who could not be a Wanderer rode quickly away. Could this be not a nightmare but a dream, the dream he had sometimes had of all-powerful beings realizing they were not all-powerful but that they needed something, someone, him? But that he might marry Karin! One of his most vivid early memories was of her, only a few weeks after she had first arrived at the castle, coming to him and saying, “You’re my little brother now. And I’m going to teach you the games you have to play with me.”

  He glanced back over his shoulder. His father, really his father this time, was galloping toward him, a crowd of warriors and dogs and housecarls with him.

  Valmar suddenly jumped on his own horse. “Roric!” he screamed, his voice thin and high. The two figures were about to disappear into the forest. “Roric! Wait! I’m coming with you!”

  His gelding ran all out, but he was too late. When he reached the forest edge, they were already gone.

  # * # * # * # *

  Long, long ago, in your grandmother’s day or your great-grandmother’s day, lived a man and woman who loved each other with all their hearts. He fished in winter in the briny sea, and grew barley in summer in his fields on the hills, while she kept the cow and brewed the beer and made the cheese and bread. Their only sorrow was that they had no children.

  Their only sorrow, that is, until one stormy winter’s night his ship did not return from the briny sea.

  And in her despair she came home from drinking his funeral ale to a silent hall, and she called on the lords of voima to hear her. Her man was dead such a short time, she argued, he could not yet be in Hel, in the realm of the lords of death. Voima must still reach him. She demanded the lords of earth and sky to listen, demanded incessantly for three days. And on the third day, when she had almost lost hope and had returned to her duties on the farm and was once again brewing the beer, a Wanderer came to her.

  “So you want your man again,” he said, standing in the door of the brewing house and looking at her from under his broad-brimmed hat. “All it will take in return is that which is between you and the vat.”

  “Between me and the vat?” She looked down and saw the silver funeral buckle at her waist. “Of course,” she said. “I shall gladly meet your terms.” But even while she was loosening the buckle the Wanderer disappeared.

  She looked wildly for where he had gone, then forgot him, for she heard a voice in the yard and a step she had thought never to hear again. But as she turned to rush from the brewing house she suddenly gave a great cry and collapsed in agony.

  For the lord of voima had not meant her buckle. And she had not known until that moment that she had been with child.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  Across the meadow, into the forest, through the tangle of the alder thickets, Roric followed the rider. The other’s horse went effortlessly through the densest underbrush, and Goldmane followed.

  It disturbed him that he could not see the rider clearly. Maybe it was the sun’s glare, or the speed they were going, or the thin blue mist that rose from the boggy soil under their horses’ hooves, but when Roric looked at him directly all he could see was a shadowy outline.

  And yet he had seen his face, thin and yellow, dark eyes within enormous bony eye sockets burning like the last coals on the hearth on a winter’s dawn. If it was a Wanderer who had sat and talked with him outside the manor’s guesthouse, this could not be the same one.

  They came up from the boggy lowlands at last, their horses scrambling on the thin soil that overlay a steep rocky hill. Roric looked around, thinking they could not have come so far so fast. This hill marked the western boundary of King Hadros’s kingdom, and even by road and sea it should have taken a full day to reach here, yet it appeared that only an hour had passed since the rider appeared at the mares’ pen.

  “Where are we?” he called to his companion. “Where are we going?”

  The other did not answer or even acknowledge that he had heard. Roric looked ahead, toward the top of the hill, and saw two lichen-spotted standing stones that he could never before recall seeing, leaning together as though to form a gate.

  The rider went straight through. Goldmane made to follow, but Roric held him back for a moment, looking off toward the distant sandstone escarpment that rose over Hadros’s castle. Whoever this person was, he seemed able to move space and time.

  But then the stallion jerked his head against the bit and followed through the gateway of the standing stones.

  And emerged into a world Roric had never seen.

  2

  The sea wind blew in Karin’s face, stinging her eyes and whipping her hair. She took a deep breath of clean salty air and abruptly felt awake for the first time in ten days.

  It had been like a dream during a bad fever, events rushing at her too fast, incomprehensible. She must have slept during that time, but she could only picture herself working, or else lying fully awake in bed, longing achingly for Roric. She had prepared for the trip to the All-Gemot with no conscious memory of having done so, packing her clothes, making sure that Hadros and Valmar had their own finery, choosing what herbs to include in her medicine chest, preparing food to take, instructing the maids on what would need to be done in her absence.

  When Valmar had tried to talk to her about a person he said could not possibly have been a Wanderer, when the king raged so that the men went to their loft immediately after dinner without drinking with him, she went about her chores with her face placid and her eyes devoid of any expression.

  Now she seemed suddenly aware of herself again, the skin on her cheeks, the way her cloak tugged at her shoulders, the feel of the smooth railing under her hands. For ten days she had been constantly busy, constantly moving, but all at once there was nothing to do except watch the sailors and the sea. She ran a finger along the broad links of her gold necklace; it had been much too heavy for a child, but her father had given it to her to wear when she went to Hadros’s castle, and she would wear it coming back.

  The king joined her at the railing. The ship ran with its red sail taut, rising up on the long swell that had come across hundreds of miles of empty ocean to the channel, then sliding into a trough rimmed by waves that seemed they must surely sink the ship in the next second. But the ship always rose ag
ain, the foam white under its bow, and the lines creaking overhead.

  She looked at Hadros thoughtfully. He too looked almost himself again. While she emerged from a fevered dream, he was waking up from a furious nightmare.

  “Be glad I did not let you marry him, little princess,” he said with a visible effort at good humor. “You would not want to be coming home to your father to tell him you had married a man who ran at the first challenge.”

  “He did not run,” she said, then wondered if she had already said this. If so, the king had apparently not heard it.

  “He ran from me, to save his skin if not his honor,” said Hadros, looking grimly out across the waves, “and he had best not come back with a wheedling tale in search of forgiveness.”

  Karin wondered if this was an admission by the king that he had indeed intended to have Roric killed—even if he had regretted his intent. If he did run, Hadros, she thought, it was so he would not have to kill you. “The Wanderers want him,” she said, “and no one can refuse a summons from the lords of voima.”

  “Do you actually believe the boy’s story?” he asked with a frown. “Valmar should try to be more consistent with the stories he concocts.”

  “Of course I believe him,” she shot back. Valmar was up in the prow. She had a vague memory of him looking miserable, but now he eagerly strained to see the distant line of land ahead. “All the housecarls—your younger sons—support his story.”

  “Crazy stories,” growled the king. “Glad he’s gone.”

  Karin thought without saying that Hadros did not seem glad he had driven Roric away. Instead she said, “Do not think of Roric as someone who ran. Think of him as someone who has gone to use his strength and his courage to win renown for himself.”

  And who went without saying farewell.

  “The lords of voima do not appear to mortals except in the old tales,” said the king, “and then only to great heroes.” He was no longer frowning but instead looked uneasy, as though he had been using his fury to avoid thinking about something disturbing. “A person with no back,” he muttered. “There are plenty of creatures of voima walking this earth . . .”

  “Did you ask the Weaver?”

  Hadros did not answer for a moment. Waves slapped against the side of the ship, and white spray danced in the air. “I went to his cave to burn an offering before our voyage, of course,” he said at last. After another long pause he added, “Weavers have never been known for answering questions they did not want to answer.”

  The Fifty Kings were encamped in the broad meadow before her father’s castle. Tents of linen, of elk hide, or of silk stood side by side, their lines tied to the same posts. Rough men like Gizor One-hand and graceful warriors with curled hair and delicate stilettos hanging from slender hips met and talked while their masters waited in their tents for the Gemot to begin, or else went with hoods pulled up for quiet conversations with other kings.

  Next to the royal tents was another encampment, this one of merchants. “There have always been peddlers,” King Hadros commented, “but this is the first time I have seen an entire fair next to the All-Gemot. Perhaps it is because recently the Fifty Kings have met north of the channel, where fewer merchants trade.”

  Late in the afternoon, he took Karin through the tents to meet a woman who was one of the Fifty Kings.

  “So this is the heiress who has been gone so long,” said Queen Arane, beckoning her into the tent. Hers was one of the silk ones. Her bodyguard she told to wait outside.

  King Hadros greeted her as though they were very old friends, though Karin had never heard him mention her—but then he had already given familiar slaps on the back to kings of several kingdoms she had not even realized existed.

  At first Karin thought the queen young, for her unbound hair was a deep chestnut, and her figure as she rose slim and lithe. But then she saw the little lines on her forehead, the veins blue on her hands, and the eyes—not quite cynical, because they still looked ready to be amused, but as though they had already seen everything someone could expect to see and then much more.

  “You can leave us, Hadros,” said Queen Arane and motioned Karin to a cushioned seat. Her straight eyebrows gave her a look of determination and firmness that everything else about her seemed intended to belie. She said, “I am very sorry your brother was drowned. He would have made a good king.”

  “You may have known him better than I,” said Karin, “for I knew him only as a boy.”

  Arane’s eyes glittered as she turned. “I did indeed know him well. He was excellent friends with my nephew, my most probable heir—who was also on the ship when it went down.”

  Karin murmured, “I too am sorry then,” and sat in silence for a moment. She had no sense, she realized, of how old her own father was, how soon she might have to become sovereign queen herself, but she would have to learn the affairs of the Fifty Kingdoms—or sixty-three, or however many there were.

  “It is not all bad,” said the queen with a wave of her hand. Rings were thick on the fingers. “It will keep my cousins busy for at least several years again plotting against each other.” She took a handful of the rich cloth of Karin’s sleeve. “Fine clothing for a princess living in one of the northern kingdoms,” she said approvingly. “Growing up in King Hadros’s court has not made you want to be a warrior, I hope?”

  “Hadros has taught me to use a knife to defend myself,” said Karin uneasily. “I had not expected to be a sovereign queen, so I never thought about leading an army . . .”

  “And do not begin to think of it now,” said Arane, tapping her on the knee. “Women can use their wits, their smiles, their tongues to maneuver most men, most of the time—have you not already noted this yourself?”

  “At least if they have not sat overlong drinking,” said Karin with an answering smile.

  “But the lords of voima did not give us the strength of arm they gave to men—the strength which men foolishly but predictably think gives them power over women. That belief itself, of course, can be very useful . . . But I warn you, Karin, not to challenge men on what they consider their own ground, as a warrior. There was one young queen who had won a kingdom for herself, up north of Hadros’s lands, but she was not content to plan the strategy and map the battles. She had to ride out with a sword in her hand herself, and when she disagreed furiously with one of her lieutenants, he challenged her to single combat. It was regrettable—she had ten times the wit and the spirit he did, yet she answered his challenge, with the result you could predict.” Arane shook her head. “I do not believe he lasted long as king either; that land has sent no representative to the All-Gemot for three years now.”

  Karin saw a hundred issues and problems and possibilities opening up all around her, when she had thought her only concern was to face the man who had sent her off as a hostage but was still her father. She was not sure she agreed with the wise eyes facing her, but she was unable to shape a response while she still felt as though she had been dropped into deep waters without knowing how to do more than splash.

  “And you have not yet made any plans to marry, I trust?” Arane asked suddenly.

  “I do not believe I shall marry soon,” Karin answered quietly.

  The queen nodded briskly. “Good. I knew you had wit in you when I saw you—even aside from being your brother’s own sister. It is your greatest weapon, the threat that you may at any time marry. I am sure that you have already considered the possibilities, the ease with which you can rid yourself of an enemy by letting a quiet word slip to his rivals that he may soon become the man of your heart.”

  Karin wiped her forehead. It was suddenly very hot in the silk tent. Was that what she had done to Roric by agreeing that he, rather than she, should talk to King Hadros—treated him as an enemy she would dispose of through his rival? But Hadros was not, she hoped, a rival for her hand.

  But what did that make Valmar? She still called him her little brother, and had often felt him the only person in the castl
e she could count on unreservedly, without having to plan or maneuver, but what would he do when he realized he and Roric were in competition?

  “There is a young warrior who lives in Hadros’s castle, I believe,” the queen said casually, “Roric No-man’s son. I used to know him. How is he?”

  Karin gulped, wondering wildly if the queen could read her thoughts. She forced herself to answer calmly. “He’s fine. He left recently on a trip.” She smiled as well as she could. “I am very glad to have met you, Arane, and I shall ponder all the things you have told me. Now I think I should return to Hadros’s tent, to make sure the evening meal is prepared properly. Since I am not yet a queen, I must use the means I have to keep the men happy.”

  Leaving Valmar and Gizor behind, Hadros and Karin went at twilight up to the castle.

  It took King Kardan a minute to recognize his daughter. They were announced by a page, and for a moment he did not look directly at her but instead behind her, as though in search of the little girl he had sent away.

  But then he focused on her, tall and russet-haired, looking at him from sober eyes rimmed dark with weariness.

  She had imagined coming home many times in ten years. At first she had pictured her father picking her up and tossing her over his head in joy, laughing and teasing and telling her it was all a horrible mistake and he was so glad to see her safe. Later, she had imagined herself telling him scornfully what she thought of a man who would let his own daughter go to the court of the enemy, perhaps to be cherished but more likely to be made into the lowest kitchen slut. But she had not expected the hall to be more familiar to her than her father.

  The very stones of the wall seemed to rush at her like the faeys, laughing with delight to see her again. When she turned to the man who was too short and too old truly to be her father, she had to force herself from beginning her greeting by saying, “You’ve moved the high throne to the other side of the hall.”