Crown of Vengeance

terror. The weight of the Rider’s pronouncement, the Rider’s grief, was a palpable thing, making her body tremble with a burden too great for mortal flesh to bear. Who am I that the power which shapes our lives and our destiny should regard me thus?

“You are Farcarinon,” the Rider said. “Death in life. Life in death.” In the Rider’s words Vieliessar heard more than simple recognition. There was judgment—and sorrow. “You will be known when We are forgotten,” He added, and raised His hand. Salute, benediction, warning … she did not know.

In the next moment her sight became uncertain, as if she gazed not into shadow, but into the brightness of the sun itself. Her eyes were filled with light and her ears with a sound as if a whole army roared out its battle cry, and she could not say in that moment if she stood upon the ground or rode through the heavens on a destrier made of moonlight and shod with stars. Someone shouted in a language she did not know and for an instant it seemed she gazed down from a great height at a landscape of darkness, of ice and shadow. Before her hung a balefire, burning star-pale with magic. A komen knelt beside it, and with him stood a creature neither Trueborn nor Beastling, with blood welling in the palm of her hand.

“The Land calls you. The People call you. I call you. He Who Is would return to the world, and so we summon you.”

“And will you spill your own blood to save the land?”

The creature—woman, but nub-eared and red-skinned as no Trueborn could ever be—held out her wounded palm to the Rider, as if her blood held a compulsion even He must obey. Even her blood was strange, for it was red as flowers.…

* * *

Vieliessar came to herself with the stiff and aching limbs of one who has spent too long motionless in too cold a place. As she raised her head, she could see the sky above was grey with dawn. She clambered to her feet, clutching at one of the standing stones to steady herself before she remembered what she touched.

Dream? Vision? In this moment she could not say whether what she had seen was truth or the expression of her own buried desires. Does the Hunt always come? Do the Silver Hooves bow down to each of the Lightborn? Is this how all who come to this place are tested and tried? Had she given the proper answers? Or was she dead even now, a homeless ghost, doomed to vanish like morning frost the moment she stepped from the Shrine?

Vieliessar looked toward the doors of the Shrine and spied a bundle of green cloth, placed there by some Lightborn candlemarks before the beginning of her vigil. She turned back to the Shrine and saw the print of a hand deep-sunk into the ancient altar stone. Slowly she reached out and set her hand into its shape. It fit as if the eternal stone had been as malleable as bread dough and shifted at her touch. She felt the weight of an unimaginable fate bearing her down. For an instant a thousand evasions crowded her mind: to leave the Sanctuary of the Star this very candlemark, to keep moving until she left the bounds of the Fortunate Lands completely; to offer up her name, her House, her life, as a sacrifice to unmake this destiny.

She could. But …

Serenthon knew his fate. Celelioniel foretold it when he came here.

In that moment of realization it seemed to her she could see him: Serenthon Farcarinon, War Prince, First among the Hundred Houses, bold and beautiful and arrogant. He had known before he began he would fail. He had known his Bondmate would die, that Farcarinon would be unmade, that all who had trusted him would die …

That someday his daughter would stand here, to be Sealed to the Light.

If Serenthon-my-father could embrace such a fate for himself and all he loved, then I shall not disgrace him.

She lifted her hand from the imprint in the stone and walked steadily to the doors of the Shrine, tying the knotted flaxen cord about her waist as she went. Custom said she must now return to the domain of her birth and there present herself to the Chief Lightborn of the War Prince’s court. But she was Farcarinon, and the officers of her father’s court were slain or fled. So she picked up the green robes that lay upon the stone and carried them, still naked, back to her sleeping cell. She took up a knife and cropped her long black hair close to her head, then donned the Green Robe, tightening the silver cord about her waist. Then she sat upon her bed and waited for someone to come and tell her who she must become now.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE VEILED PATH

Then spoke Berendriel, Notariel’s Heir: I do not set my foot upon Your stirrup, I do not set my hand upon Your horse. I shall not ride the night wind, nor leave my House, my

komen,

or my kin.

And the Star-Crowned, Hunt-Lord, Master of the Silver-Shod answered: As you say, so it will be. Your name shall be no longer Berendriel but Mazhnune. You shall battle forever, a hungry ghost, and never will you die and never will you live.

—Berendriel’s Song

“Fall back! Fall back!”

“Stand!”

Thurion Lightbrother waited at the edge of the battlefield. His mare’s thoughts were a background hum in his mind. Sariar was wise in the ways of battle, and knew there was no danger here for her, even though the din of battle made Thurion wish to cover both his ears and hers. It wouldn’t help. True Speech brought him the thoughts of the komen bell-clear above the screams of the wounded, the battle cries, the thunder of drums, and the clash of metal upon metal.

The wind was sharp with the first stirrings of autumn. On Menenel Farmholder’s land the sky would have been bright and clear, for the Lightborn worked their weather magic over the Farmholds to provide fair weather for the last sennights before harvest, keeping the rain from the fields until the year’s crop was safely housed in barn and mill. They worked no such Magery over the battlefields. The sky was grey with low clouds, the wind harsh with the promise of rain before sunset. If it did rain, the fighting would not stop. Injuries would increase as warriors attacked blindly and destriers slipped on the uncertain ground.

Would it be any different if I and my brethren were not here? If the komentai’a—if the War Princes—knew injury could bring a lingering death or a lifetime of agony? In the Sanctuary they say we are the essence of the peace of the Fortunate Lands. I sometimes think we bring war, not peace.

He remembered his first battle, so many years ago now. His teachers at the Sanctuary had told him over and over of the necessity to shield himself, to refuse to hear the minds around him. He hadn’t truly understood why until the moment when Caerthalien and Oronviel took the field against Aramenthiali and Ivrithir, he had thought he would go mad—from the noise of sword against shield, from the clamor of mind-voices, from the agony of the wounded and the dying.

He had heard it all, on that first of many battlefields.

He had never learned to deafen himself to the sounds.

Today Caerthalien fought against Ullilion. The combat would have been uneven save for the fact that Ullilion—somehow—had gained wealth enough to summon the best of the Free Companies to its banner: between them, Foxhaven and Glasswall had brought four thousand swords to the field, and Blue Deer had come with another twelve hundred. Now Prince Domcariel of Caerthalien was calling for the Caerthalien komentai’a to retreat, while Prince Runacarendalur was demanding they stand. With each engagement they fought, the rift between the brothers widened: Runacarendalur, brilliant and imaginative, leading his komentai’a to battle as if to a festival dance; his brother Domcariel, cautious and traditional, slow to adapt to an enemy’s change in tactics. Days of fighting the enemy on the battlefield became nights of fighting each other in pavilion and castel. Thurion had seen too much of it. The Lightborn were invisible, like the servants.

He’d imagined his life would be different when the Light was Called in him. Everyone knew the Lightborn were