“Likely their war,” the fox-faced woman whispered to the mustached man, confident that her words wouldn’t carry.
Normally, she would have been right, but Branwyn had gotten her minor blessing from Tinival, god of justice and truth, when she’d been reforged as a Sentinel. The whisper and what came after reached her ears clearly, as on an unfelt wind.
Their war. She stifled her response.
“Good to have real word instead of rumors,” the lord with the mustache muttered in response.
“Official word, at any rate,” said the woman.
The ostentatiously plain one was eyeing Branwyn as though she were a dog that might bite—or had just not been house-trained. The one in spectacles was blinking, frowning either in nervousness or perplexity. The youngest was simply watching, his pale, narrow face alert. He wore a bronze circlet on his shoulder-length dark hair, unlike Rognozi’s gold or the others’ silver: Branwyn wasn’t sure what that meant.
Criwath and the Order had been able to tell her very little. Heliodar, being the least affected by the winters that ravaged the world, needed few Sentinels, and those who went there didn’t have much to do with the nobility. The High Council and King Olwin carried on sparse correspondence, as became countries that were neither allies nor enemies, and what few traders went between the two didn’t often meet with the city’s rulers either.
Finally, Rognozi folded both letters and handed them back to the footmen, who put them on a small table to the side of the dais. “I’m convinced of your identity, Madam Alanive,” he said, which should have made Branwyn wince, had she been a more honest person, “and the message you bear is dire. Say it now, please, so that we can all hear at once.”
The moment was upon her.
“Thank you, my lord,” she said, and drew a deep breath. “I come to beg the aid of Heliodar, in an hour when Criwath’s need might become that of the world.”
“The war?” It was the youngest lord, who leaned forward in his chair as he spoke. “The Skinless Ones?”
That sounded like another name for the twistedmen, the ordinary—if one could call them that—forces arrayed against humanity. Certainly it described them well enough.
“Just so, my lord, and worse. Thyran the Traitor, Thyran Bloody-Handed, has returned.” Before any of the seven could reply, before the startled gasps from around the court could turn into murmurs of speculation and disbelief, Branwyn continued. “I saw him myself, in the siege of Oakford, and I’ll swear as much before any knight of Tinival. The man who broke the world walks it again.”
* * *
She was the most interesting thing to happen all day—all bloody year, if Zelen was being honest.
The pageantry of council sessions always appealed to him: the rolling words of the ceremony, the smell of incense, and the rich colors of tapestries and stained glass and clothing. He came away feeling as though good had been done, and despite his tenuous position, he’d helped accomplish it often enough that he didn’t entirely dread the meetings or reporting on them to his father. The family very rarely issued instructions to him, and mostly it didn’t offend Zelen to carry them out when they did. Some meetings were actually exciting.
Until Madam Alanive’s entrance, this had not been one of them. The year was winding down, and the business at hand involved reports of winter supplies—necessary but dull—preparations for the Festival of Irinyev—much as they’d been every year—and toad-like Marton rambling about the Problem of Vice in Our Fair City for the fifty-third time.
Then, this woman. New. Terrifying in the news she’d brought: Thyran, servant of Gizath the Traitor God, had almost conquered the world a hundred-odd years back. Hehadstarted years of storms, blizzards that had damaged even Heliodar badly and had reduced the more northern landlocked kingdoms to famine and cannibalism. He, his storms, or his armies had also unleashed a fascinating assortment of monsters on the world. Just before the storms had reached their peak, he’d vanished. “Died,” all of Zelen’s tutors had said, but they’d never mentioned how. When Zelen had gotten old enough to read for himself, he’d discovered that nobody knew.
If he was back, with an army… Zelen saw the blood drain from his fellow councillors’ faces and felt it leave his own. Nearsighted Starovna raised their joined hands above their head, parted them in a circle, and rejoined them at their heart, the sign that invoked the Four Gods for protection. Kolovat smoothed his mustache.
Marton was the first to speak. “What proof, madam, do you have of this?”
The woman didn’t seem surprised by the question, nor as irritated as Zelen would’ve been—though, granted, she didn’t have ten years of dealing with Marton to get her back up in advance. She faced the assembled council with her shoulders straight and her chin high: serenity, thought Zelen, but no trace of arrogance.
He also thought that bad news had never come in such a lovely form.
Madam Alanive was as tall as most of the council, as tall as Zelen himself or taller, with broad shoulders, round hips, and hard muscle showing beneath the sleeves of her tightly laced gown of blue wool. Her eyes were a slightly darker blue than the gown’s summer-sky color, her hair rich gold and pulled back into a simple knot, her features square and strong boned.
Along the hem of her gown and the cuffs of the sleeves ran gold embroidery in patterns of knotwork diamonds, and opals shone from the ends of a bronze torc at her neck. The woman wore no rings, and the torc was too broad, and too open at the front, to be used against her. Her skirt was neither very full nor very long, and the boots she wore under it were polished to a sheen, but still boots.
That might have been normal dress in Criwath, but Zelen suspected it was more significant, and he wasn’t surprised by the woman’s reply.
“I was present at Oakford when he attacked, my lord,” she said. Her voice was low-pitched and precise, every syllable clear. “I witnessed his magic at work. The man himself, if he is a man, was recognized by the soulsword of a Sentinel there, among other signs.”
The soulsword made sense. The Sentinels, odd creatures that they were, each carried a dead person’s spirit in their sword, usually one with some expertise in battle or magic.
“Sentinels,” Starovna said, more to their fellow councillors than to Branwyn, “generally know their business where such things are concerned.”
“After a hundred years,” said vulpine Yansyak, “even a spirit could be in error.”
“And the Sentinels have their own…agendas, you know. I know little about them or their training,” Marton said, proud of his ignorance, “but they’re not precisely human by the time they take the field, and even assuming good intent”—which his tone implied would be foolish to do—“gods know what sort of faults in perception or judgment that leaves them open to.”
