To Green Angel Tower (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn #3)

by Tad Williams

Your brother chases us with soldiers. People die, women die, children die, all for grazing land and names and flags. We are beasts, Josua. Have you not seen that?”

Long the Peaceful Ones had hidden from the eyes of the world, nursing their sadnesses, living only in the memories of other days. Today they rode in armor as brilliant as the plumage of birds, their spears shining like frozen lightning. They sang, for the Sithi had always sung. They rode, and the old ways unfolded before them, forest glades echoing to their horses’ hoofbeats for the first time since the tallest trees had been seedlings. After a sleep of centuries, a giant had awakened. The Sithi were riding.

It’s hard to live with fear all the time.”

“Each one of has our own sorrows, Princess,” he said. “It’s no shame to take them to heart. The only sin is to forget that other folk have theirs, too—or to let pity for yourself slow your hand when someone needs help.”

When she awoke to the uncertain light of a slate-gray dawn, Simon’s cloak was still covering her. He was sleeping nearby, a few wisps of damp hay his only covering.

Ineluki’s servitor was glowing, red light leaking through the black robes, but it made no move to pursue Simon and Miriamele, as though reluctant to leave the circle of blood-drenched ground.

The old knight abruptly pulled away and took a few staggering steps backward out into the snow. Thorn’s long scabbard bumped against his leg. “They are calling, each to each. They need. The blade will go where it will go. It is time.”

In Nabban, where the upstart Imperators had once ruled, snow piled high in the streets; in the great harbor high waves flung the anchored ships against each other, or drove them into the shore where their splintered timbers lay like the bones of giants. The kilpa, frenzied, struck at everything that moved across the water, and even began to make sluggish forays into the coastal towns. And deep within the heart of the Sancellan Aedonitis, the Clavean Bell hung silent, immobilized by ice just as the mortals’ Mother Church was frozen by fear.