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“Compel you? But you’re a prince!” The Sitha shook his head. “That word is not the same in our speech as in yours, Seoman. I am of the reigning house, but I order no one and rule no one. Neither am I ruled, fortunately—except in certain things and at certain times. My parents have declared that this is such a time.”
the Sitha had calmly deflected all of Simon’s questions as to what magic might run like blood through Camaris’ strange sword. Simon’s chilled fingers crept up his jaw to the still-painful scar running down his face. How had a mere scullion like himself ever dared to lift such a potent thing?
“I was carried here,” Simon said, and heard an unexpected coldness creeping into his voice, “but that doesn’t mean I’ll have to be carried always.”
There were times when Simon found it very hard to converse with veiled and roundabout Prince Jiriki. How might it be for a straightforward soldier like Haestan, who had not been trained, as Simon had, on the maddening circularities of Doctor Morgenes?
“She is Nunuuika and he is Uammannaq,” Jiriki said quietly, “—they are the masters of the
“Kind hearts must never overthrow just law, Prince Jiriki, or all Sedda’s spawn—Sithi as well as mortals—will return naked to the snows. Binabik shall have his judgment.”
Miriamele smiled bitterly. So many impostures. She was free now of her father’s court, but she was still
Where was God, the younger Miriamele had wondered; where was He when love was slowly hardening into indifference and care becoming duty? Where was God when her father Elias begged Heaven for answers, his daughter listening breathlessly in the shadows outside his chamber?
“It is the way of the Perdruinese not to know such things. That is how they remain so cheerfully uninvolved in most conflicts, managing to arm and supply both the eventual victor and the eventual vanquished—and turn a neat profit.”
‘If a king wants apples,’ as the Nabbanai say, ‘Perdruin plants orchards.’ Any other nation would be foolish to attack such a compliant friend and helpful ally.”
“Not everyone can stand up and be a hero, Princess,” he said quietly. “Some prefer to surrender to the inevitable and salve their consciences with the gift of survival.”
Igjarjuk, grander and deadlier by far than any ordinary animal?
But for this silent fellow beside me, they are all hell-wights.”
No one can help if you don’t help yourself!
Always regretting, always too late! Would he be a mooncalf forever? He was tired of the position. Let someone else take it on.
“There is nothing I could do, in any circumstance,” Jiriki said quietly. “The Qanuc have a right to their justice. I cannot honorably interfere.”
“Things are not so easily ended, Seoman,” Jiriki said slowly, “even by my leaving. It is a very unmagical wisdom that tells me we shall meet again. The debts of the Zida’ya run deep and dark.
“Whatever happened on Urmsheim was between you and ancient Hidohebhi’s child, Seoman. There was no magic.”
Even the bravest mortals grow sick with too much truth.”
I’m in a sort of story, just like Jiriki said. A story like Shem used to tell—or is it History, like Doctor Morgenes used to teach me . . . ? But no one ever explained how terrible it is to be in the middle of a tale and not to know the
“This, as I said, is a strangeness,” Binabik rasped. “I am condemned for dishonor, yet for honor’s sake I must translate my wrongs for outsiders, since they are honored guests.”
You must go to the Stone of Farewell. That is the only place of safety from the growing storm—safety for a little while, anyway. Go to the Stone of Farewell.”
Pryrates might be the only one left who could control the king—unless, as the Earl of Utanyeat sometimes felt sure, it was the meddling priest himself who was leading Elias down the road to perdition.
“Fight and live, fight and die, God waits for all.”
‘He who is not bringing in his flock at night gives away free mutton’—that is what we Qanuc say.
“. . . That I have seen the coming of a great cold darkness, the like of which my people have never seen. It is a dreadful winter that will come from the shadow of Vihyuyaq, the mountain of the immortal Cloud Children. It will blast the lands of Yiqanuc like a black wind from the Lands of the Dead, cracking the very stone of our mountains in cruel fingers . . .”
“I have brought for you a bowl of tea and some tidings. It appears I am no longer bound for an unfortunate plunging,” the troll grinned. “No longer are Sludig and myself to be thrown into Ogohak Chasm.”
her
A flock of white figures came forth, beautiful as ice in the sun, terrible as winter. They had watched him come. They had witnessed his every failing step across the white wilderness. Now, their unfathomable curiosity somehow satisfied, they brought him at last into the fastness of the mountain.
She could, perhaps, have gained the knowledge she sought from him without inflicting terrible torture. If such mercy was possible, she chose not to exercise it.
“I give you back your name, Ingen Jegger,” Utuk’ku said. “You are still the Queen’s Hunter.”
“for you have crossed farther into the realms of death than mortals may usually go and yet return.
“Kill me, then—swiftly or slowly,” the prisoner taunted. “I will say no more. Your time—the time of all mortals, shifty and annoying as insects—is nearly over. Kill me. The Lightless Ones will sing of me in the lowest halls of Nakkiga. My children will remember my name with pride.”
“Perhaps that is one of the virtues of Thorn and Minneyar—that they are invisible to the Norns’ magic.” He slapped at his thigh. “Of course! They must be, or the Storm King would have found them and destroyed them! How else could weapons deadly to him still exist!?”
“Cadrach is a name I never heard until you mentioned it,” he replied. “I knew him as Padreic, long years ago.”
We were members of the same . . . order, I suppose you would say. But something happened to Padreic. He fell away from us, and when I later heard tell of him the stories were not good. It seemed that he had descended into very bad ways.”
There are crimes beyond forgiveness, and a special place prepared for their perpetrators.”
Doctor Morgenes wrote of his fears that “. . . the time of the Conqueror Star” was surely upon them—whatever that might
“. . . if certain dreadful things which—it is said—are hinted at in the infamous lost book of the priest Nisses . . .” were to be avoided. But what things? “The infamous lost book . . .”—that was Nisses’ Du Svardenvyrd,
When Blayde, Call, and Man Come to Prince’s right Hande Then the Prisoned shall once more go
“You call me by one that belongs to a dead man. The princess, well now, she’s given me a new one—‘traitor’—and baptized me with it in Emettin Bay to seal the bargain. So you see, don’t you, it would be all too confusing, this—one might say—multiplicity of names.”
Simon realized that he felt and saw things differently than he had before Urmsheim. People and events seemed more clearly connected, each part of a much larger puzzle—just as Binabik and Sisqi were.
That was what the dragon’s blood had taught him, in some way. He was not great; he was, in fact, very small. At the same moment, though, he was important, just as any point of light in a dark sky might be the star that led a mariner to safety, or the star watched by a lonely child during a sleepless
“The whole time you were in that hole, a prisoner, I was thinking and dreaming.” “And what did you think?” Binabik asked. “It’s hard to say. About the world and how old it is. About how small I am. Even the Storm King is small, in a way.”
“It was language—the difference between tongues. You said: Stone of Farewell.” “That’s what Geloë told me,” he answered defensively. “Of course. But Ookequk’s scrolls are not in the language you and I are now speaking.
I was looking for ‘Stone of Farewell,’ but in Sithi language, it would be named ‘Leavetaking Stone’—a small difference, but one that makes much differentness in the finding of it.
Binabik smiled as one of his folk approached. “Simple answers to life’s questioning. That would be a magic beyond any I have ever been seeing.”
“Never make your home in a place,” the old man had told him that day. “Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it—memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you
Doctor Morgenes, Grimmric and Ethelbearn, An’nai, now Haestan—all dead, all struck down because they tried to do what was right. Where were those powers that should protect such innocents?
It is the hate and the hating of our enemy that has been bringing this upon us, but if our peoples can stand together for the battle that is coming—a greatest, but perhaps also last, battle—the deaths of all our friends will be even better given than they now are.”
