Crown of Vengeance

The Alliance Lightborn drew instantly upon the bounty of Janglanipaikharain and moved immediately to the attack—and Vieliessar’s Lightborn to the defense—but whatever their calls upon its Light, that Light still seemed inexhaustible. All along the line of march, storms quarreled and fought through the sky as the Alliance sent storms to harry them and the Warhunt sent them away again. Limitless Light had the same effect as none: the two armies fled and followed and little else was changed.

As Cold Moon gave way to Ice Moon, Vieliessar’s force reached the southern border of Janubaghir. The stars and the sun told them they were far to the south of lands any of them knew: Lord Gatriadde thought they might even be south of Mangiralas’s southern border, and Mangiralas extended furthest into the south of any of the domains of the West. In the far distance, the Bazrahil Range was visible, and before it, a plain that stretched on as far as the eye could see.

Someone named the southern plain Ifjalasairaet—wind and dust.

The land was flat as a tabletop. The Alliance army was a bare fortnight behind them when they reached the southern plain, and Magery swirled about both armies, its tides thick enough to choke any who could perceive the Light. The war had become a war of Lightborn, as each side attempted to discover a way to use Janglanipaikharain’s power to gain advantage over the other—and if they could not, to exhaust its Light so that this became a war of komen and destrier once more.

Never had anyone witnessed—or performed—such a profligacy of spellcraft. Vieliessar’s army had come to Ifjalasairaet a thing of rags and patches, privation and rationing. Now each suit of armor, every pavilion and rope, had been Restored until it might have come that instant from the hands of the craftworkers. Every injury, no matter how slight, was made whole. Wells were sunk into the earth each time the army stopped, striking deep until they overflowed with cold pure water, enough for all who thirsted to drink their fill. Transmutation turned water to cider, to beer, to milk, to wine. Spells of multiplication, taught against days of dire famine, turned a handful of grain to a wagonload, an apple to an orchard, a scrap of dried beef to a succulent feast for thousands. Faded colors of surcoat and pavilion grew bright, destriers and their riders grew fat. The night watches blazed, not with Silverlight, but with honest warming flame against a plain turned lush and green out of season.

And here, at last, the plan Vieliessar had set in motion in Oronviel’s Great Hall bore fruit. Her army was her future empire in miniature: Lightborn, Landbond, and Lord united as one in her name. It was an army of refugees, of renegades, runaways, outlaws, exiles, of all who had cast off the old ways to search for something … better. Of War Princes who yearned for peace. Of Lightborn who had embraced the field of battle.

In armies the size of the two which opposed each other here, even ten thousand Lightborn would not make much difference to the outcome of the battle yet to be fought.

But ten thousand Lightborn who were free …

The Alliance horded the Lightborn spellcraft among its lords, using their Magery to protect themselves from servants they had come to distrust. They expended Janglanipaikharain’s power and their Lightborn’s strength on attacks that experience had already shown them were futile. And day by day they closed the distance, as if the sight of Vieliessar’s army goaded her enemy into doing the impossible.

And still Vieliessar led them south.

They were but a sennight behind her when Vieliessar’s force at last reached a barrier it could not pass.

* * *

She and a few others rode far ahead of the vanguard, across a plain whose spring-lush grass, withering in the cold, was already dusted with fresh snow. Her army stretched out behind her, mile upon mile, marching within a shimmering haze of Shield: all the folk of every domain she had claimed, whether by force of arms or peaceful surrender, all who had fled to her for sanctuary. She knew what she must find to save them, yet in the clear merciless light of day, Ifjalasairaet’s Wall stretched unbroken as far as the eye could see. She reined Snapdragon to a halt and gazed at the cliff face in silence.

“Are you sure this is…?” Iardalaith said beside her, his voice pitched for her alone.

“I am,” she answered. “Amrethion’s city lies beyond this cliff.”

How will we reach it? She could hear Iardalaith’s question as if he had spoken it aloud, but she had no answer for him. Her spell had found the city. She had never wondered if there were an entrance to it. We can hold this ground until Janglanipaikharain is exhausted. Then we must fight. And starve. And die.

The only road to victory lay through solid rock. An army that could not retreat was helpless.

She bit her lip until the blood flowed bright and bitter in her mouth. She wanted to weep as if she were still a child, to cry out at the unfairness of it. Amrethion had promised her that she was his true heir—she had seen him, walked the halls of his great palace in visions.

Celephriandullias-Tildorangelor—White Jewel, Fire Forest … When shall I see you again? Lady Indinathiel thought. Our fellowship is broken, our ancient trust betrayed. All that is left to us is to keep faith. To destroy that which never should have been …

Half in memory, half in dream, Vieliessar looked out across Ifjalasairaet. But it had not been Ifjalasairaet to Lady Indinathiel. It had been Ch’rahwyr-thrawnzah, Border of the World—and she had wept behind her battle mask when she rode out onto it leading her army, for Kalalielahwyr, Heart of the World, was broken beyond mending, and she’d felt her hradan heavy upon her.…

Lady Indinathiel’s memories were a hundred times a hundred centuries old, and somewhere in that vast gulf of time the pass had closed.

“There is a pass,” Vieliessar said, her voice raw with cold and anger. “I shall find it. But for now, let us not make an encampment, but a fortress. Let the camp and the pasturage be set forth at the cliffs themselves—and let it be bounded with walls as high as those of a Great Keep.”

Iardalaith gazed at her for a long moment in silence, then turned away to give orders. A few moments later, the signal horns began to call to one another along the line of march: Halt. Make camp.

She had led them for so long, both hands filled with miracles, that few in all her meisne doubted she would bring forth more.

“If this is where we are to die, it is as good a place as any other,” Gunedwaen said. He had approached her alone, and in such silence that she had not heard him. “Yet if it is, I ask one last boon of you, High King of Jer-a- kalaliel.”

She knew she should chide him for speaking of defeat so glibly, but she could not. He, alone of her nobles, had not used Janglanipaikharain’s bounty to clothe himself in state. His rags were warm—but still rags. His mount, one of Thoromarth’s cherry-black darlings, was muddy and ungroomed. He masks his true self as a last weapon, Vieliessar realized.

“Name it,” she answered.

“Let Janglanipaikharain become an empty cistern before we fall. Let the army that vanquishes us starve and die beside us.”

Why not? she thought. It seemed to her, in that unguarded moment, that her whole life had been nothing but an endless series of questions, each “why” leading her farther along the path that brought her here, to a cliff that held her victory in an immovable grasp. It will not matter, she told herself. Should I fail here, Darkness will claim all, in the end. For the first time, the thought did not kindle defiance in her heart. What was darkness, but the end of day?

I am weary, she realized in surprise.

“Let it be so,” she said softly, bowing her head. “Now leave me, old friend. I wish to be alone.”

* * *

The Silver Swords of Penenjil arrived just as the gates were being raised.

Vieliessar stood at the far end of the encampment’s main road. Her pavilion stood at one end of it and the entrance to the camp stood at the other. The North Road was the broadest way in any camp, for it was good fortune to give the Starry Hunt a fair path to enter by, just as Arilcarion had decreed. After so long spent overturning the wisdom of centuries, it gave her a tiny thrill of shame to heed it now. But soon it would no longer matter.

It was dusk; it had taken the Lightborn the whole of the day to surround the camp with a rampart of earth and turn that earth to seamless stone. Her craftsmen took care to leave an opening in the wall, which they framed in oak; then they sculpted mud and water into two great doors that the Lightborn turned into solid silver. Upon each