Crown of Vengeance

Momioniarch Lightsister stepped into the vestibule and opened the inner door. The freezing wind of Snow Moon swept into the antechamber: Winter High Queen with her komentai of snow and sleet and ice. Suddenly the floor seemed colder and Vieliessar’s Green Robe thinner than they had moments before.

She’d miscalculated badly. Underestimated her opponent, underestimated the need for caution. And now there was nothing she could do but obey the “judgment” that was in truth a coward’s method of execution. Stay and kill him—she could—and she did not know what would happen next, only that she would have shattered the holiest custom of the Sanctuary.

Maeredhiel will see I am gone. No matter what tale Hamphuliadiel tells, she will see through it. I pray the Silver Hooves she does. Of all who were present on the night of my birth, she is the only one I dare trust.

“I will see you in Rain Moon, Lord Astromancer,” Vieliessar answered, her voice hard.

She turned her back and strode from the Sanctuary.

* * *

It had been cold inside the Sanctuary. Outside, it was freezing. The trees and hedges of Rosemoss Farm were bare and leafless in winter’s cold. Her breath was a white cloud, and her skin burned. Before she’d gone a dozen steps toward the outer gateposts, her leather-soled socks were wet through, for it had snowed last night and no one had yet swept the path this morning. Still, she did not stop or hesitate, for she was certain Hamphuliadiel or one of his lackeys watched to see what she would do.

As she passed through the outer gates of the Sanctuary of the Star, she could not keep from shuddering. Outside the Sanctuary. Outside its bounds. Prey for any hunter willing to defy ancient custom.

A Lightsister is no man’s prey. The Covenant did not say she could not defend herself—merely that she could not use the Light for the benefit of her House—or any other—in war. And I am Vieliessar of Lost Farcarinon—I have no House!

One step. Another. She called up her shields. They formed a barrier against the implacable wind, just as they would deflect arrow or swordblade, but they gave no heat. Arevethmonion was green, lush with eternal springtide … and more than half a mile away.

By the time she gained its shelter, her body ached with cold, though as she stepped beneath the trees, her skin tingled with the power all around her. It was not magic. Not precisely. It was that stuff of which Magery was woven, as thread was turned to cloth upon a loom. Light within called to Light without, and so the Flower Forests heeded the call of the Lightborn, feeding their spells, making them possible. She stepped from the road into the shelter of the trees. Only then, concealed from any who might watch, did she permit herself to slow, to stop, to hug herself against the cold and the fear. It was warmer here in the Flower Forest … but not as warm as it was in the Sanctuary.

Witless girl! You have sent Postulants to Arevethmonion year upon year to gather the ingredients for cordials, for incense, to gain vision and prophecy! You taught them that the Flower Forest holds food, shelter, and medicine, just as Hervilafimir taught you. Well, now you may see this storehouse and citadel and larder for yourself.

Warmth and shelter were her first needs. To Call an object from wherever it was to one’s hand was a simple skill, providing that one knew precisely what one wished to call and where it lay. But when she tried to Call one of the heavy winter cloaks from its hanging-peg beside the garden door, then her wooden sandals from her sleeping cell, she could summon neither.

The Wards around the Sanctuary were strong—but they had always been set to keep the untutored spells of the Postulants from getting out, not to keep one of the Lightborn from reaching in. Undoubtedly Hamphuliadiel had changed that. To break them was not beyond the power she might call if she wished—but to shatter the Wards might be to shatter the walls as well. And it would be an act of violence against the one place in all the Fortunate Lands where violence was forbidden. She would find another way.

She walked for candlemarks, moving deeper into the heart of the forest, warming herself with movement. Arevethmonion was hushed and watchful around her—she had gone deeper into the Flower Forest than anyone had in her knowledge or memory. Craftworkers might enter a Flower Forest to bring away felltimber, hunters might pursue game beneath its branches, but only Lightborn had ventured into Arevethmonion since the Sanctuary of the Star had been founded, and they stayed mostly at the forest’s edge.

At last she reached a clearing, a space opened up by the death of trees so ancient that the width of their fallen trunks towered above her head. Here, she thought. She must have shelter, a place to sleep. She would make them here. She could cause the forest earth to flow and re-form as a potter shaped clay. She formed the shape of her intention in her mind and raised a hand to begin.

And stopped.

She could feel Arevethmonion’s heartbeat, the Flower Forest’s soft breath. Unfair— wrong—to impose her will upon Lady Arevethmonion simply because she could. She waited, holding the shape of her intention, her need, bright upon the surface of her mind, reaching out with Lightborn senses for Arevethmonion’s response. Her years of training had taught her that the Light required patience: she was prepared to wait as long as she must before beginning. She closed her eyes.

Her mind wandered from this fancy to that, as it would when she spent too long in meditation. Vieliessar thought of the hare eluding the fox with speed and disguise, the vixen hiding from the hawk and the wolf in deep, warm burrows. She thought of mice and bears sleeping the winter away, of all the inhabitants of any forest who preserved their lives by guile and who survived the winter in safe shelter.

When she opened her eyes again, the clearing looked very different. She stepped away from the place she had meant to put her sleeping place. Not there. Here. She touched the trunk of the fallen tree. Time and animals had stripped away its bark; insects burrowed into its wood, seeking food, shelter, sanctuary. In a century or two it would be gone—rot and weather would have returned it to the forest, to feed its successors. Meanwhile it would give her not only heat and shelter but concealment.

When the earth had transformed beneath her Magecraft, there was a deep burrow beneath the trunk of one of the fallen trees, one that could barely be seen from outside. She had made a chimney within the tree itself—a small matter to visualize a channel through the dead heartwood, with its opening near the tree’s distant crown— and there was felltimber in plenty.

Almost she conjured a spring to appear where none had been, before she remembered to listen for Lady Arevethmonion’s voice. When she had, she walked a short distance to where a tiny stream flowed among the trees, its current brisk with winter snow. She drank her fill and returned to her burrow. She set a spellshield before the door before she kindled her fire, and soon smoke was drawing sweetly through her chimney.

She curled up against the back wall to think. Survival was her first need. The plan she must implement when she returned to the Sanctuary was the second.

The shelter she had built was vital to both, she realized. No matter his fine words, Hamphuliadiel meant her to die here. In a sennight, a fortnight, a moonturn he would send someone to Arevethmonion to find her body. It did not matter whether he sent friend or foe; he would undoubtedly look into the mind of whomever he sent to see what they had seen. Or—if he possessed more resources than she imagined—he would send a warrior who would slay her if she was found alive.

It might be nothing more than her panic and imagination which painted this future, but she must behave as if it were real. She had studied enough history of the Hundred Houses to know their tangled tales of alliance, betrayal, murder, and assassination. Even one of the Lightborn could be slain if someone wished it ardently enough. And anything that had happened once could happen again.

If anyone sought her, she must not be found.

* * *

Learning Lady Arevethmonion’s rhythms occupied her through Snow Moon and into Ice. The Flower Forests were timeless places, and it would be a simple matter to tarry here for a year, a decade, a century, without awareness of the passage of time. The eternal springtide of the Flower Forest gave her fruit, mushrooms, tender roots, even honey … a far more lavish table than in the Sanctuary’s Refectory. She wove blankets of grass, shaped sandals of felltimber, dug river clay to line her fire pit and conjured Fire to bake it hard.

She listened—always—to the voice of the Flower Forest.