Caolle checked each one anyway to ascertain no body still breathed.
Above the soft scrape of his bootsoles, Halliron said, ‘You won’t find what you think.’
‘So we’ll see.’ Nettled as a wolf over a disturbed cache, Caolle adhered to his wariness.
Cautioned by the angle of the captain’s shoulders, Halliron let ballads and conversation both lapse. The ravine they trod held an unsettled feel. Where deer should have bounded from their watering, the song of the crickets rang unpartnered. Here only bats flitted and swooped erratic circles between the scarred walls of the rimrocks.
And then between steps the mosses that cushioned the trailbed were seared to papery dryness. Trees became fire-stripped skeletons, while ahead the grotto lay ravaged and razed to split stone filmed over with carbon.
The air hung poisoned with taint.
Inside the ruin where the tents had stood, limned like a ghost in soft starlight, knelt a man.
Breath hissed through Caolle’s clenched teeth. His knife hand lifted, caught back from a throw by Halliron.
His urgency queerly muffled, the bard said, ‘Don’t. That’s no enemy.’
‘His Grace of Rathain. I can see.’ Tension did not leave Caolle’s arm. ‘By Ath, I could thrash him! Why in Sithaer should he bother with corpses while our wounded lie unfound and suffering!’
‘You misunderstand him, you always have.’ The Masterbard released his restraint, and jumped back at the speed with which the clan captain turned on him.
‘And you don’t?’ Caolle enforced incredulity with a whistling gesture of his knife.
Recovered, Halliron stood his ground. The night breeze stirred his white hair, and his face, deeply shadowed, stayed serene. ‘This moment, no. I think it best you don’t disturb your liege.’ Then, his tone changed to awe, he added, ‘It is like Falmuir. “
‘I’d be hardly likely to, should I?’ Caolle presented his shoulder, his profile like a hatchet cut against the soot- stained dark of the grotto. ‘Killing’s my trade, not fey tricks with poisons and shadows.’
And behind the captain’s harshness, in a knifeblade demarked by a trembling thread of reflection, Halliron perceived the grief of crushing losses: a clanlord gone, and Dania and four daughters cherished as if they had been Caolle’s own. The present was robbed and the future stretched friendlessly bleak. A difficult task must for love be repeated all over again; another young boy to be raised for the burden of leading the northland clans: first Steiven and now, when a man was ageing and weary of adversity, Steiven’s orphaned son.
That Caolle’s sullen nature would greet such desertion in anger Halliron well understood. What could not for tragedy be permitted was that blame for Deshir’s ills stay fastened on the Teir’s’Ffalenn. Time had come for the bard to ply the service he was trained for. There and then in the darkness, amid the charred ground where the dead lay, he unwrapped the cover from his instrument.
Caolle snapped, ‘Ath, we’ll have ballads again?’ He made to surge forward and stopped, caught aback by the bard’s grip on his wrist. Court manners or not, Halliron could move nimbly when need warranted.
‘You’ll not touch him,’ the bard said in reference to the man, still kneeling, who had neither looked up nor shown other sign he had heard them. The schooled timbre of a masterbard’s voice could fashion an outright command. ‘Sit, Caolle. Hear the tale of Falmuir. After that, do exactly as you please.’
Disarmed as much by exhaustion, Caolle gave way. If he chose not to sit, he had little choice but to listen, as any man must when a singer of Halliron’s stature plied his craft. For a masterbard, the edges of mage-sight and music lay twined to a single wrapped thread. The lyranthe had been fashioned by Paravian spellcraft and under supremely skilled fingers she evoked an allure not to be denied.
From the opening chords, Caolle looked aside. By the close of the first verse his stiffness was all pride and pretence. As his knife hand relinquished its tension, and his face eased from antipathy, he heard of the siege of Falmuir, where a princess had walked out alone on a battlefield where defenders and abductors lay slain. Lent refined vision by the spelled weave of words and bright notes, Caolle was shown in humility the legend of the ballad re-enacted here, in the grotto of Deshir’s slain.
His gaze at some point drifted back to Arithon. Even as a princess had once done in grief and total loss, the Shadow Master poised amid the burned remains of clan kindred. His fine-boned hands were filmed with black ash for each of the corpses he had settled. His hollowed cheeks glittered with the tracings left scoured by tears. He was speaking. Each syllable rang with compassion, and each word he spun formed a name. He summoned in love, and they came to him, the shades of tiny babes and silent women, of girls and grandmothers and daughters and wives, sundered from life in such violence that their spirits were homeless and dazed. They formed around him a webwork of subliminal light, not burned, but whole; no more aggrieved, but joyous, as he added words in lyric Paravian that distanced the violence that had claimed them.
Arithon gave back their deaths, redeemed from the horror of murder. One by one he cherished their memories. In an unconditional mercy that disallowed grief, they were fully and finally freed to the peace of Ath’s deepest mystery.
In time, no more forms shone in soft light; but only a man alone, who rose unsteadily to his feet; while the sad cadence of Halliron’s voice delivered the Princess of Falmuir’s final lines: ‘
But in this cleft of sere earth and split rock, there were neither bodies to bury nor blossoms to seed over gravesites. Caolle blotted his cheeks with the knuckles still clenched to his skinning knife. His gesture encompassed his prince, as gruffly he said, ‘The man was sent to bed once. If he faints on his feet, he’s like to whack his head on a rock.’
‘Let him be.’ Halliron stroked the ring of fading strings into silence. ‘What he does brings solace we cannot.’
‘It’s healing he needs,’ Caolle groused. ‘Though by Daelion, I don’t like the post of royal nursemaid.’
Attuned to the change in the captain’s railing, the masterbard tied up his instrument. Too grave to be accused of amusement, he waited while a shamefaced Caolle noticed and then sheathed his knife. Then, unspeaking, they trailed Arithon’s progress up the grotto; they sorted out and administered to the living, Rathain’s prince to his uncounted dead.
