Chương 170: Chapter 166. Ithrenaar

From the high terrace, Oberys watched the ship grow small. It was a good vessel, fast and quiet, and it carried the young magus and his companions out past the harbour mouth into the long southern swell — bound, though only a handful of souls alive knew it, for Ithrenaar, and the woman who waited at the heart of its veiled waters. Oberys stood with his hands folded behind him and watched it go, the morning light pale on the water, and for a while said nothing at all. Caelen came to stand at his side.

"What did you make of him, Father?" Oberys considered the question, and the dwindling shape of the ship that had prompted it.

"A formidable young man," he said at last.

"Everything the broadsheets claim, and a fair amount they haven't the wit to. Capable. Quick. Kind, I think — which is rarer and more useful than most give it credit for." He allowed for a small pause.

"And largely unpredictable, which I confess I like a good deal less. I do not enjoy being unable to forecast a man." The smile returned to his mouth.

"Though when one can't predict a man, it is some comfort that he isn't one's enemy." Caelen said nothing to that, while Oberys let the quiet run a moment, then glanced sideways at his son.

"You seem unhappy."

"I'm not…" Caelen began, and stopped, because his father was giving him a look that said he didn't believe a word of it. So he sighed instead and faced the sea, where the ship had thinned to a splinter against the brightening horizon.

"... I just think," he said carefully, "that letting yourself be taken — letting Kazimir's men put you in a cell — only to see how the magus would handle it, was a bit much. You were in a cell, Father."

"Perhaps." Oberys did not sound especially troubled. He laughed, in fact.

"Though I'll admit I rather enjoyed the drama of it. It's been some years since anyone went to such lengths on my account." He watched the splinter sink toward the edge of the world.

"And it wasn't idle, and you know it. I tried to measure him the ordinary way first, but my people came back with nothing but the wall he'd built around himself. The broadsheets shout prodigy, Magus at nineteen, but shouting is cheap, and I'd no way to know if the man was as large as the legend. So I set a problem only a large man could solve in his path, and watched."

"And?"

"And he solved it." Oberys turned from the railing.

"Better than I'd let myself hope. Most men would have just bought me out of that cell, or broken me out. He crowned a new king instead, and freed me with the same stroke. That tells me more than a hundred dossiers could." He laid a hand on his son's shoulder and steered him gently back toward the house.

"Here is a thing worth keeping, for the day you do this without me. In our trade you will be forever tempted to move simply because you can. You'll hold the coin for a thing, or the leverage, or the reach, and the holding of it will feel like reason enough on its own, but my son, it never is." Caelen seemed to understand.

"I could have made Veyslav a king months ago; the means were lying right there in my hands. I didn't, because I wasn't yet certain enough of the odds, nor of the people I'd be staking everything on. A king crowned on an uncertain bet is a debt that comes due at the worst possible hour. Be sure of your allies first. Their strength, yes — but their character far more. Strength without character is only a sharper knife, pointed in a direction you can't see." They walked.

"And weigh what we hold now," Oberys went on, "against what I'd have had if I'd merely spent my resources and crowned the boy myself. That way, I'd have a grateful king, and nothing besides. Veyslav, alone. Instead—" he gestured back toward the empty horizon "—the magus has stepped into the dance of his own will, with all that he is and all that he commands, and Veyslav is bound to him now, not only to me. So I helped knit a bloc.

A rising Magus of Sundar, a new king beneath a fae crown, and — if that ship arrives where I believe it's going — the next heir to the Sundarian throne. Every thread of it passing, at one point or another, through this house." He smiled, wholly content.

"A king would have been a fine thing to own, but an alliance of that shape is worth a great deal more, and I needn't even be the one holding it together. I had only to be the man willing to sit a day in a locked room." Caelen was quiet a long moment.

"... You're insufferable when you're right," he said.

"I'm aware," said Oberys pleasantly, and went in out of the wind.

Five days out of Oriscael, the world ran out. There was nothing in any direction worth the name. Grey water, grey sky, the line between them gone soft and uncertain, and the ship sitting in the middle of all that emptiness like the last solid thing left in creation. They'd left the shipping lanes days ago. Even the seabirds had given up on them. Captain Lowe stood at the rail beside Adom, frowning at the compass in his hand, then at the blank horizon, plainly hoping one of them would change its mind.

"Begging your pardon, Magus," he said at last.

"But is this really it?" Adom checked the figures one more time himself, the ones Oberys had written out for him. Seventeen degrees south of the Vorentine Meridian. Forty-one east of the old reckoning. A place that sat on no chart Lowe owned, because two centuries ago it had been struck from all of them on purpose, and the civilised world had agreed ever since to treat it as a story told to children.

"This is it," Adom said.

"To the league, if Lord Baelys is to be believed." Behind him the others had come up onto the deck, drawn like the rest of the crew by the particular quiet that had settled over the ship as the last of the sea-roads ran dry.

"There's nothing here," Karion observed, looking directly at a great deal of nothing.

"There's nothing here yet," Adom corrected, as he drew a crystal out from inside his coat. Oberys had pressed it into his hands the night before he sailed, wrapped in dark cloth, with instructions given exactly once and the clear expectation that once would do. It was about the size of a closed fist, clouded and irregular, shot through with veins of deep violet that pulsed like a heartbeat. The nearest crewmen took an instinctive step back from it, but Adom didn't blame them.

"What is that?" Sam asked, already wincing a little.

"A key," Adom said. He raised it before him in both hands, the way he'd been shown, and felt the thing wake against his palms: the violet light deepening, gathering, leaning toward the empty horizon, then he spoke the words Oberys had given him, the only ones that opened this particular door.

"Clear the way for us." The crystal's pulse quickened. The light within it bloomed, swelled, and burst outward in a single silent wave that rolled across the surface of the sea like the ripple from a stone dropped into still water. The mist ahead did not part so much as unravel. And behind it the grey, featureless horizon began to crack, and splinter, and peel back, until an entirely different sky showed through the wound torn in the old one: brilliant, and blue, and incredibly vast.

And there, where a heartbeat before there had been nothing at all, lay the archipelago. It sprawled across the whole of the horizon in a great sweeping crescent, dozens upon dozens of islands rising from a sea that turned, in the space of a single breath, from iron grey to a luminous and near-impossible turquoise.

The nearest climbed in sheer dark cliffs crowned with forests so green they seemed to burn against the sky; and beyond them, further out, greater landmasses rose toward distant mountain ranges whose peaks trailed banners of cloud so white they might have been carved from marble. Sam let out a slow breath.

"... Okay," he said quietly.

"That's new."

"That's Ithrenaar," Adom said.

"The Veiled Throne of the Western Waters." Beside him Karion had forgotten entirely to be dry about it, and only stared, mouth a little open, at the green country that had unfolded itself out of an empty ocean.

"Right," he managed, after a moment.

"I take it back. There's definitely something here." The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Adom wrapped the crystal back in its cloth and tucked it away, looking out at the islands.

"Take us in, Captain," he said. The ship came about and made for the islands, and for a long while there was nothing to do but watch them grow. They grew slowly, and then all at once. What had been a green smudge on the horizon resolved, mile by mile, into something with detail and intent: terraced hillsides, pale towers rising off the cliffs, the glint of harbour water tucked into a deep bay ahead. And the nearer they came, the plainer it grew that whatever this place had once been, it was no sleeping myth now.

There were watchtowers on the headlands, and walls. Then a horn sounded, carrying clear across the water, and every man on deck flinched.

"Well," said Damus.

"Looks like they've seen us."

"They've seen us," Adom agreed, watching the nearest tower.

"One horn means enemy. Two means allies. Three…" he paused.

"Three means stand by to be fired on." A short silence followed this.

"... I only heard the one," Sam said.

"Yes," Adom said.

"I noticed that too." It was an unpleasant little worry that crept over him then. Because they could see the towers properly now. And said towers had cannon: long dark rows of them, set into the stone and angled down at exactly the bright stretch of water the ship was sailing into. Then the second horn came. It rolled out across the bay to join the first, and the whole deck let go of its breath at once, Lowe loudest of all." Two," Sam said weakly.

"Two is good. Two is my new favourite number." He looked out at the cannon, the walls, the towers, and shook his head slowly.

"Whoa. She's come a long way. I mean, look at this."

"She did," Adom said, equally impressed.

"I still can't believe," Karion put in, "that she started out as your cat."

"Briefly," Adom allowed. Damus turned to look at him.

"... How did the two of you actually meet? I don't think I've ever heard the whole of it."

"Much the same way I met Veyslav, as it happens." Adom kept his eyes on the harbour.

"She was in a cage. I let her out. It went from there." Karion stared at him a moment.

"You realise you've now done this twice," he said.

"That there is a pattern. You go somewhere, there is royalty in a cage, and you simply open it?"

"Hah!" Adom laughed, only now realizing it did happen twice.

"When you put it that way, it does sound like rather a lot."

"Land ho!" one of Lowe's men suddenly called from the bow.

"Harbour ahead, sir, and there's folk waiting on the quay!" Adom moved to the rail and looked. There they were, small with the distance but unmistakable: a cluster of figures gathered at the very edge of the water, where the stone met the bright turquoise of the bay. Watching the ship come in. He couldn't make out faces yet. But he found, all the same, that his pulse had picked up again.

"Well," he said.

"Let's go." The ship came in to a stone quay worn smooth by long use, they made fast, and the gangway went down, and Adom stepped off the deck onto the soil. There, a delegation was waiting for them, drawn up in good order on the quay: a double rank of guards in clean, well-kept harness, spears grounded, watching the newcomers. Off to one side stood two younger men a little apart from the rest; one lean and sharp-eyed and watchful, the other younger still, both of them looking close enough to be brothers.

But it was the man at the front his eye kept coming back to. He was old, and he was enormous. Even bent a little by age he stood a clear head over the guards behind him, broad through the shoulders in a way no amount of years had managed to whittle down. A wall of a man in his prime, plainly, and even now a fairly serious fence. He stood at the head of his soldiers with both hands resting on the pommel of a grounded sword, and watched Adom come down the gangway. Adom crossed to him and put out a hand.

"Hello there. My name is Adom Sylla." The old man took it. His grip could have cracked a walnut and didn't, which Adom appreciated as a courtesy.

"Bedivere." Then, looking Adom over from boots to white-streaked hair, he made a low sound in his chest, somewhere between a grunt and a laugh.

"Hah. You look a great deal like your father."

"Oh, you… know my father?"

"Do I know him?" Bedivere's face split into a grin that took twenty years off it.

"Boy, I had the schooling of him. Arthur Sylla came to me a raw recruit, green as spring grass and twice as pleased with himself. Served under General Soren, same as I did, back when the world was a different shape." He shook his head, looking fond and exasperated at once.

"Finest natural blade I'd seen in years, and not a scrap of sense in his skull to go with it. The number of times I put that boy flat on his back for charging something he'd no business charging…" He held up a broad hand, fingers spread, as though the count were too high to settle on.

"I beat the recklessness out of him the only way it ever takes. Slowly, and with great repetition." Adom was grinning back before he'd decided to. It was a strange and warming thing, to meet a man on the far side of the world who'd known his father as a boy.

"That tracks," he said.

"He never did lose the charging-things part."

"No. Men like that don't." Bedivere's eyes were bright.

"And how is the old terror, then? Still in harness?"

"Retired, actually. Couple of years back. Hung up the command for good."" Retired?" Bedivere repeated it grave and disbelieving, as though Adom had reported a death.

"Arthur Sylla. Sitting still?" He snorted.

"I'll credit that when I see it, lad. Men like your father don't retire. They just go out looking for the trouble that used to come find them on its own."

"... That's more or less accurate," Adom admitted.

"He's taken to clearing dungeons. For the exercise, he says." Bedivere threw his head back and laughed loudly." For the exercise. Of course he has. God, that's the man exactly." He wiped at one eye.

"Old enough to know better, and out monster-hunting to keep limber. I'm almost sorry I've missed it." Still chuckling, Bedivere looked past Adom to the others coming down the gangway behind him, and his eye brightened with a new kind of interest.

"And these'll be the rest of you," he said, and stepped to meet them. He came to Sam first. Looked him over once, and nodded to himself.

"Let's see. Red hair. Spectacles." A slow grin.

"You'll be Sam." Sam's brows went up.

"Y-you know who I am?"

"Of course I know who you are." Bedivere clasped his hand and gave it a shake that travelled visibly up Sam's arm.

"The princess talks of you and Adom near enough every day. Has done for years. I'd know the pair of you in the dark by now." He clapped Sam on the back, a blow that staggered him half a step.

"She'll be glad to see you both. Glad doesn't half cover it. She speaks of you the way a body speaks of family — little brothers, the both of you, whether you signed up for the post or not." Sam softened, openly pleased.

"I've… yeah. I've been looking forward to this. A lot, actually."

"Aye, I'll wager you have." Bedivere moved on. He stopped before Damus, took him in, and gave a small grunt.

"And this one's a Lightbringer if ever I saw one. That hair gives you up, lad. Three hundred years and the line still breeds true."

"Sir Bedivere." Damus inclined his head with a gravity none of the others had managed, and took the old knight's hand almost carefully.

"It's an honour. I was raised on the stories, the Crimson Pass, all of it." He let a second pass.

"Every account I ever read had you dead and gone years ago. I'm glad to find them wrong." For a moment a shadow crossed Bedivere's bluff good humour, quieter than the rest of him. Then he covered it with a smile and gripped Damus by the shoulder.

"So am I, lad," he said.

"Most days. My thanks." And then he came to Karion, and his eyes narrowed with the pleasure of a puzzle.

"Now you," he said, "you I'll guess. Hold still." He studied him.

"That bearing. That coat. House Aurelian? No, too much chin for an Aurelian. Valebrook, then? Or one of the Caspians?"

"None of those, actually," Karion said, a little stiffly. He'd been rather enjoying the attention right up until it started going wrong.

"No?"

"Dimitri."" Hah." Bedivere's face lit.

"Dimitri. I knew there was iron in you somewhere." It wasn't quite enough. Karion managed a small, polite nod, but the pleasure had gone flat in him. Bedivere caught it at once.

"Ah, come now, don't pull that face. I was having you on." He waved the wrong houses off like smoke.

"I'd never miss a Dimitri. I knew your grandfather." Karion went still.

"... You knew my grandfather?"

"Of course. I stood beside the man." Bedivere provided.

"Caspar Dimitri. We held the line together at Hadrek's Ford — long before your time — and there was no better man to have on your flank when it all came apart. Calm as a millpond with everything on fire around him. Carried two wounded lads out under the worst of it, one over each shoulder, and grumbled the whole way that they were bleeding on his good coat." He had a short, fond laugh.

"Vain as a peacock and brave as a lion, your grandfather. The two go together more often than people let on." Karion was staring now, the polished dryness dropped clean off his face.

"I never met him," he said.

"He died before I was born. My father doesn't… we don't talk about him." Bedivere's face gentled.

"No," he said.

"I don't imagine you would. It was an ugly way to lose him." He took Karion's hand, and there was nothing of the game left in the grip now.

"But he was a fine man and a finer soldier, and the blood's plainly still good. Ask me about him some evening, when there's time. I've stories enough to bore you senseless." Karion nodded, not quite trusting his voice, and stood straighter. Glad, this time, all the way through. Then Bedivere stepped back and looked the four of them over together, and shook his head slowly, plainly pleased with what he saw.

"Good heads, the lot of you," he said.

"Good heads on good shoulders, and not too proud to put them to use. You know, a man gets to my age and he starts to fret over what he's leaving behind him." He smiled.

"Then a boatload of you turns up out of an empty sea, and I find I'm not fretting half so much. The future's looking better than it has in a long while." Then they heard quick footsteps on the stone, coming round the head of the quay, and figures with them, still small with distance but closing fast. Bedivere looked, and a slow grin spread over his face.

"Ah," he said.

"There she is." He laughed under his breath, shaking his head.

"She wanted us to bring you up to the guest hall first, you understand. Have it all just so before you ever clapped eyes on her; the welcome arranged, the table laid, every petal in its place." He folded his arms.

"Only it seems she ran out of patience somewhere between giving the order and us carrying it out. She does that, when it's people she's been waiting on a long time." The footsteps came on. Adom turned toward the sound, and caught himself grinning before he'd quite decided to. It had been a long time. Years, an ocean, and a great deal of water under both, but he hadn't realised until just now how much he'd been looking forward to this.