Canticle

And he knew that he would. Later this morning, he would meet with Rudolfo and he would petition him to take their scarred children and care for them. He would show him the volume-a secret history of the Named Lands that even he had not known about. One in which House Li Tam cultivated an Y’Zirite resurgence in the Marshlands, quietly seeding it with the promised fall of Windwir until, by treachery and intrigue, they toppled that great city.

A resurgence that brought back blood magicks and had cast a great spell of power made from his anguish and from the blood of his children and grandchildren, such that it could heal the baby and raise Petronus from the dead-more miracles that pointed to a dark and rising gospel in their midst.

He would not have believed it if he had not read it coded in the book.

He’d believed at first, mistakenly, that perhaps they’d engineered the cult themselves simply to destroy Windwir. But deeper than that was the matter of faith. His father actually believed the so-called Y’Zirite Gospel. The volume was riddled with references to it. As much a study of scripture as a strategy for bringing out their present circumstances. But why?

To establish the throne of the Crimson Empress.

No, he thought, it could not be faith alone, some blind adherence in mysticism. He could not see his father in that light. There had to be a prime mover beyond him that he was in service to. And it had to be tangible and rational. Whatever the truth might be, the Crimson Empress was real.

Somewhere, someone played Queen’s War with the Named Lands, and his First Grandson and this kin-healing Machtvolk Queen were but pieces in a greater contest. And Vlad Li Tam would find his actual opponents and repay them.

It did not matter if the blood of his family saved his grandson or saved the very world. They who called for it and they who took it would pay for that taking.

So he would tell Rudolfo what he knew. And then he would ask him for money. And with that money, he would outfit what remained of his iron armada and go back to that island, though the thought of it broke his heart. Weeping, he would take it apart stone by stone and learn what he could from it.

He would grow his pain into an army, and while he did, he would learn his foe as well as he could. He would patrol the waters to the south, keeping an eye out for schooners of unfamiliar line and trim, made from a dark wood unfamiliar to the New World’s first family of shipbuilders. He would do all of this, and he would watch the water for ghosts while he did so.

Again, his eyes pulled him to Rae Li Tam, and he felt the sorrow moving through him like water.

She’d given her life to save him, taking in the blood magicks so that she would have the speed and strength to find him and pull him from the sea. He’d not anticipated that, and her sacrifice, at the end of so many other deaths, broke the old man’s heart.

I have changed, he realized.

He’d sent many of his children to their deaths to move this river or shift that mountain. He’d sent them to the beds of tyrants and into prisons with thieves and killers. He’d made them murderers and torturers and liars and whores.

Never again, he vowed.

Baryk rested on the pickaxe now, and Vlad Li Tam worked his shovel. They went back and forth like that until the hole was just so. Then, they put down their tools and took up their beloved.

The tears flowed freely now, and he did not despise them. I will grow my pain into an army.

He looked across and saw that Baryk also wept. He builds his army, too. We all do.

It would be a mighty army, he realized, that each of them grew. It would be a terrible reckoning for whatever hand had moved those pieces against Vlad Li Tam’s family.

Gently, and in silence, they laid Rae Li Tam into the ground and readied their hearts for war.

Winters

Winters knelt before Seamus, holding his hands in her own. He blinked at the mention of the woman who shared her name, his face showing his surprise.

She’d finally come and awakened him in the middle of the night when her questions and nightmares would not let her sleep.

“She claims to be my sister,” she told him. “She said to ask you about her.”

“It can’t be so,” he said, his voice quiet and low.

She read wonder in his voice, and her eyes narrowed. “What do you know, Seamus?”

He drew in his breath. “I know that it can’t be so,” he said again. “She couldn’t be.. I helped your father bury her. The fever took her in the first month.” He looked to her. “Unless. ”

Yes, she thought. It was possible. She’d watched the drop from the phial bring Petronus back. She’d seen the second drop heal Jakob. The dead could be raised.

Or, she thought, a death could be faked. Petronus again came to mind.

“And her name was Winteria?”

Seamus nodded. “Yes.”

She sat with this and tried to take it in. Why wasn’t this in the Book? She’d seen not a hint of it through all her father’s writings. and his closest friend, Hanric, had said nothing of it to her. “Why was her death kept secret?”

Seamus’s eyes were hard now. “Her birth was kept secret as well. Only a handful of us knew, and your father swore us to silence. Your mother was kept in isolation from the time she first conceived.”

“But why?” she asked again.

He shook his head. “I do not know.”

“Do not know or will not tell?” She raised her voice and heard the bitterness in it. “Seamus, I abjure you to tell me what you know.”

He shook his head. “I know nothing, my queen.”

Winters stood, and she felt a wave of nausea roll over her as the truth settled in. “If you speak truth, then I am not your queen.”

And without another word, she slipped out of the tent and into the frozen night.

Turning north, she slipped past the Gypsy guards and wandered toward the treeline at the edge of the ruined plain.

This was familiar ground. Not so long ago, she’d walked this plain with Neb as he patrolled the gravedigger’s defenses. Where was he, she wondered? Her dreams were empty without him. Violence and blood and dark birds filled them, and there was no comforting word in it for her. Still, she clung to her memory of him and longed to walk with him again. Longed for him to tell her that everything would be fine, that home still arose though she was no longer certain that it did.

And she missed the dreams. Not the ones of late that unfolded now behind her eyes.

In that future, the light swallowed her Book of Dreaming Kings. And a song-mad Tertius playing it upon the harp-led her love away from her and deeper into desolation. Her secret sister-back from the dead, it seemed, and sharing her name-built shrines to Wizard Kings long dead and cut their mark into her people and their children, openly pledging themselves in service to the Crimson Empress whose soon-coming they preached.

The Marshfolk were gone. The Machtvolk had returned in their place. And now she was gone, as well, and another Winteria would climb the spire and announce herself Machtvolk Queen and Bond-Servant of House Y’Zir.

Until this day, she’d never felt an orphan, because she’d always had her people. And even when their sudden fall to the Y’Zirite heresy had shaken her, until she saw her sister, until she recognized her own eyes, her own mouth, her own nose upon the older Winteria, she’d not truly believed she’d lost them.

But she had. And beyond the loss of her name, her people, her dream and her love, Winters had also lost her faith, she realized. She felt the hole where it had been and wondered how it had vanished so fast. And she wondered how or if she would ever get it back. She doubted it.

But just as when she’d lost Hanric and before him, her father and her mother, she would take this loss into herself and would drink the pain of it.