SHE RODE OUT of Caithnard at dawn, stood a day and a half later in the vast oak forest bordering Hel, straining, as she had never done before, to unlock all the power and awareness in her mind. She had already sensed, as she came through the forest, the almost imperceptible movement of someone ahead of her, his need like a faint, indistinguishable scent, for swiftness, for secrecy. And at night, sleepless and aware, she had glimpsed for one terrifying moment, like the shape of some enormous beast rising against the moonlight, a relentless, powerful, enraged mind focussed to a single thought of destruction.
She wondered, as she stood looking over Hallard Blackdawn’s lands, what shape Morgon was taking through them. The pastures, sloping gently towards the river that ran beside the Lord’s house, looked quiet enough, but there was not an animal on them. She could hear hounds baying in the distance, wild, hoarse keening that never seemed to stop. There were no men working in the fields behind the house, and she was not surprised. That corner of Hel had been the last battlefield in the half-forgotten wars between Hel and An; it had held its own in an endless series of fierce, desperate battles until Oen of An, sweeping through Aum six centuries earlier, had almost contemptuously smashed the last stronghold of resistance and beheaded the last of the Kings of Hel, who had taken refuge there. The land had always been uneasy with legend; the turn of a plow could still unearth an ancient sword eaten to the core with age or the shaft of a broken spear banded with rings of gold. In so many centuries, King Farr of Hel, bereft of his head, had had much leisure to ponder his grievances, and, loosed at last from the earth, he would have wasted little time gathering himself out of Hallard’s fields. The chaos of voices Raederle had heard two nights earlier had faded into a frightening stillness: the dead were unbound, aware, and plotting.
She saw as she rode across Hallard’s upper pastures, a group of riders swing out of the woods into a meadow across her path. She reined, her heart pounding, then recognized the broad, black-haired figure of Hallard Blackdawn towering above his men. They were armed, but lightly; there was a suggestion of futility in their bare heads and the short swords at their sides. She sensed, unexpectedly, their exasperation and uncertainty. Hallard’s head turned as she sat watching; she could not see his eyes, but she felt the startled leap in his mind of her name.
She lifted the reins in her hands hesitantly as he galloped up to her. She had no desire to argue with him, but she needed news. So she did not move, and he pulled up in front of her, big-boned, dark, sweating in the hot, silent afternoon. He groped for words a moment, then said explosively, “Someone should flay that ship-master. After taking you to Isig and back, he let you ride unescorted from Caithnard into this? Have you had news of your father?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Is it bad?”
“Bad.” He closed his eyes. “Those hounds have been at it for two solid days. Half my livestock is missing; my wheat fields look as though they’ve been harrowed by millwheels, and the ancient barrows in the south fields have been flattened to the ground by nothing human.” He opened his eyes again; they were red-veined with lack of sleep. “I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of An. I sent a messenger to east Aum yesterday, to Cyn Croeg. He couldn’t even get across the border. He came back babbling of whispering trees. I sent another to Anuin; I don’t know if he’ll make it. And if he does, what can Duac do? What can you do against the dead?” He waited, pleading for an answer, then shook his head. “Curse your father,” he said bluntly. “He’ll have to fight Oen’s wars over again if he isn’t careful. I’d wrest kingship from the land myself, if I could think how.”
“Well,” she said, “maybe that’s what they want. The dead kings. Have you seen any of them?”
“No. But I know they’re out there. Thinking.” He brooded at the strip of woods along the pastures. “What in Hel’s name would they want with my cattle? The teeth of these kings are scattered all over my fields. King Farr’s skull has been grinning above the hearth in the great hall for centuries; what is he going to eat with?”
Her eyes slid from the unstirred woods back to his face. “His skull?” An idea flickered in the back of her mind. Hallard nodded tiredly.
“Supposedly. Some dauntless rebel stole his head from Oen, the tale goes, after Oen crowned it and stuck it on a spearhead in his kitchen-midden. Years later it found its way back here, with the crown cut and melded again to fit bare bone. Mag Blackdawn, whose father had died in that war, was still angry enough to nail it like a battle emblem, crown and all, above his hearthfire. After so many centuries the gold was worn into the bone; you can’t keep one without the other. That’s what I don’t understand,” he added at a tangent. “Why they’re troubling my lands; they’re my ancestors.”
“There were lords of An killed here, too,” she suggested. “Maybe they were the ones in your wheat fields. Hallard, I want that skull.”
“You what?”
“Farr’s skull. I want it.”
He stared at her. She saw, gazing back at him, the faint struggle in him as he tried to shift her back to her place in his known world. “What for?”
“Just give it to me.”
“In Hel’s name, what for?” he shouted, then stopped and closed his eyes again. “I’m sorry. You’re starting to sound like your father; he has a gift for making me shout. Now. Let’s both try to be rational—”
“I was never less interested in being rational in my life. I want that skull. I want you to go into your great hall and take it off your wall without damaging it and wrap it in velvet and give it to me at your—”
“Velvet!” he exploded. “Are you mad?”
She thought about it for a split second and shouted back at him. “Maybe! But not so I would care! Yes, velvet! Would you want to look at your own skull on a piece of sacking?”
His horse jerked, as though he had pulled it involuntarily back from her. His lips parted; she heard his quick breathing as he struggled for words. Then he reached out slowly, put his hand on her forearm. “Raederle.” He spoke her name like a reminder to them both. “What are you going to do with it?”
She swallowed, her own mouth going dry as she contemplated her intentions. “Hallard, the Star-Bearer is crossing your land—”
His voice rose again incredulously. “Now?”
She nodded. “And behind him—behind me, following him, is something . . . maybe the Founder of Lungold. I can’t protect Morgon from him, but maybe I can keep the dead of An from betraying his presence—”
“With a skull?”
“Will you keep your voice down!”
He rubbed his face with his hands. “Madir’s bones. The Star-Bearer can take care of himself.”
“Even he might be a little pressed by the Founder and the unbound forces of An all at once.” Her voice steadied. “He is going to Anuin; I want to see that he gets there. If—”
“No.”
“If you don’t—”
“No.” His head was shaking slowly back and forth. “No.”
“Hallard.” She held his eyes. “If you don’t give me that skull now, I will lay a curse on your threshold that no friend will ever cross it, on the high gates and posterns and stable doors that they will never close again, on the torches in your house that they will never burn, on your hearth stones that no one standing under Farr’s hollow eyes will ever feel warm. This I swear by my name. If you don’t give me that skull I will rouse the dead of An, myself, on your land in the name of the King of An and ride with them into war on your fields against the ancient Kings of Hel. This I swear by my name. If you don’t—”
“All right!”
His cry echoed, furious and desperate, across his lands. His face was patched white under his tan; he stared at her, breathing hard, while blackbirds startled up from the trees behind them and his men shifted their mounts uneasily in the distance. “All right,” he whispered. “Why not? The whole of An is in chaos, why shouldn’t you ride around with a dead king’s skull in your hands? But, woman, I hope you know what you’re doing. Because if you are harmed, you will lay a curse of grief and guilt across my threshold, and until I die no fire in my hearth will ever be great enough to warm me.” He wheeled his horse without waiting for her to answer; she followed him down through his fields, across the river to his gates, feeling the frightened blood pounding in her ears like footsteps.
She waited, still mounted, while he went inside. She could see through the open gates the empty yard. Not even the forge fire was lit; there were no stray animals, no children shouting in the corners, only the incessant, invisible baying of hounds. Hallard reappeared shortly, a round object gathered in the folds of a length of rich, red velvet. He handed it to her wordlessly; she opened the velvet, caught a glimpse of white bone with gold melting into it and said, “There’s one more thing I want.”
“What if it’s not his head?” He watched her. “Legends are spun around so many lies—”
“It had better be,” she whispered. “I need a necklace of glass beads. Can you find one for me?”
“Glass beads.” He covered his eyes with his fingers and groaned like the hounds. Then he flung up his hands and turned again. He was gone longer this time; the expression on his face when he came back was, if possible, more harassed. He dangled a small, sparkling circle of round, clear beads in front of her; a simple necklace that a trader might have given away to a young girl or a hard-worked farmer’s wife. “They’ll look fine rattling among Farr’s bones.” Then, as she reached down to take it, he grasped her wrist again. “Please,” he whispered. “I gave you the skull. Now come into my house, out of danger. I can’t let you ride through Hel. It’s quiet now, but when night falls, there’s not a man who will stir beyond his barred doors; you’ll be alone out there in the darkness with the name you bear and all the twisted hatred of the old lords of Hel. All the small powers you have inherited will not be enough to help you. Please—”
She pulled loose of him, backed her horse. “Then I’ll have to test the powers of another heritage. If I don’t come back, it will not matter.”
She felt the sound of her own name spin out over his lands, echo in the deep woods and places of secret gatherings. She rode swiftly away from his house before he could follow her. She went downriver to his southern fields, where the young wheat lay whipped and churned and the ancient graves of Hallard’s ancestors, once smooth green swellings whose doors had sunk waist-deep in the earth, were smashed like eggs. She reined in front of them. Through the dark crumbled soil and the broken foundation stones she could see the pale glint of rich arms no living man dared touch. She lifted her head. The woods were motionless; the summer sky stretched endlessly over An, cloudless and peaceful, except toward the west where the blue gathered to a dark, intense line above the oak. She turned her horse again, looked out over the empty, whispering fields. She said softly into the wind, “Farr, I have your head. If you want it, to lie with your bones under the earth of Hel, then come and get it.”
She spent the rest of the afternoon gathering wood on the edge of the trees above the barrows. As the sun went down she lit a fire and unwrapped the skull from its velvet coverings. It was discolored with age and soot; the gold banding its wide brow was riveted to the bone. The teeth, she noted, were intact in the tightly clenched jaws; the deep eyepits and wide, jutting cheekbone gave her a hint of the king whose head had stared, furious and unsubmissive, over Oen’s midden. The firelight rippled the shadows in the eye sockets, and her mouth dried. She spread the bright cloth, laid the skull on top of it. Then she drew the necklace of glass beads out of her pocket, bound an image in her mind to them with her name. She dropped them into the fire. All around her, enclosing the skull, the firewood and her uneasy mount, rose a luminous circle of huge, fiery moons.
At moonrise, she heard the cattle in Hallard’s barn begin to bawl. Dogs in the small farms beyond the trees set up a constant chorus of shrill, startled barking. Something that was not the wind sighed through the oak, and Raederle’s shoulders hunched as it passed over her head. Her horse, lying beside her, scrambled to its feet, trembling. She tried to speak to it soothingly, but the words stuck in her throat. There was a great crashing in the distant trees; animals lying quiet until then, began to stir and flee before it. A stag running blind, reared and belled as it came suddenly upon the strange, fiery circle, wrenched itself around and shot towards the open fields. Small deer, foxes, weasels roused in the night, bounded silently, desperately past her, pursued by the rending of branches and underbrush, and a weird, unearthly bellow that shattered again and again through the trees. Raederle, shuddering, her hands icy, her thoughts scattering like blown chaff, added branch after branch to the fire until the beads swam red with flame. She stopped herself from burning all the wood at once by sheer will, and stood, her hands over her mouth to keep her heart from leaping free, waiting for the nightmare to emerge from the dark.
It came in the shape of the great White Bull of Aum. The enormous animal, whom Cyn Croeg loved as Raith of Hel loved his pig herds, loomed out of the night towards her flames, pricked and driven by riders whose mounts, yellow, rust, black, were lean, rangey, evil-eyed. Their heads snaking sideways, they nipped at the bull as they ran. The bull, flecked with blood and sweat, his flat, burly face maddened and terrified, swung past Raederle’s circle so closely she could see his rimmed eyes and smell the musk of his fear. The riders swarmed about him as he turned, ignoring her, except the last who, turning a grinning face her direction, showed her the seam of the scar across his face that ended in a white, withered eye.
All sounds around her seemed to dwindle to one point inside her head; she wondered, dimly, if she was going to faint. The groan of the bull in the distance made her open her eyes again. She saw it, gigantic and ash-colored under the moonlight, blundering with its horns lowered across Hallard’s fields. The riders, their arms flickering a bluish-silver like lightning, seemed mercilessly intent upon driving it into Hallard’s closed gates. There they would leave it, she knew in a sudden, terrible flash of insight, like a gift at Hallard’s doorway, a dead weight of bull for him to explain somehow to the Lord of Aum. She wondered, in that split second, how Raith’s pigs were faring. Then her horse screamed behind her and she whirled, gasping, to face the wraith of King Farr of Hel.
He was, as she imagined him, a big, powerful man with a wide slab of a face hard as a slammed gate. His beard and long hair were copper; he wore rings of hard metal at every knuckle, and his sword, rising above one of the glass moons, was broad at the base as the length of his hand. He wasted no time with words; the sword, cutting down into the thin air of illusion, nearly wrenched him off his horse. He straightened, tried to ride his horse through it, but the animal balked with a squeal of pain and cast a furious eye at him. He reined it back to try to leap; Raederle, reaching for the skull, held it above the flames.
“I’ll drop it,” she warned breathlessly. “And then I will take it, black with ash, to Anuin and throw it back in the midden.”
“You will not live,” he said. The voice was in her mind; she saw then the ragged, scarlet weal at his throat. He cursed her in his hoarse, hollow voice, thoroughly and methodically, from head to foot, in language she had never heard any man use.
Her face was burning when he finished; she dangled the skull by one finger in an eye socket over the flames and said tersely, “Do you want this or not? Shall I use it for kindling?”
“You’ll burn up your wood by dawn,” the implacable voice said. “I’ll take it then.”
“You’ll never take it.” Her own voice, colored with anger, sounded with a dead certainty that she almost felt. “Believe that. Your bones lie rotting in the fields of a man whose allegiance is sworn to An, and only you remember what shinbones and snapped neckbone belong to you. If you had this crown, it might give you the dignity of remembrance, but you’ll never take it from me. If I choose, I’ll give it to you. For a price.”
“I bargain with no man. I submit to no man. Least of all to a woman spawned out of the Kings of An.”
“I am spawned out of worse than that. I will give you your skull for one price only. If you refuse me once, I will destroy it. I want an escort of Kings through Hel and into Anuin for one man—”
“Anuin!” The word reverberated painfully in her own skull and she winced. “I will never—”
“I will ask only once. The man is a stranger to An, a shape-changer. He is moving in fear of his life through An, and I want him hidden and protected. Following him is the greatest wizard of the realm; he’ll try to stop you, but you will not submit. If the man is harmed on the way to Anuin by this wizard, your crowned skull is forfeit.” She paused, added temperately, “Whatever else you do on your journey through An will be your own business, as long as he is protected. I’ll give you the skull in the house of the Kings of An.”
He was silent. She realized suddenly that the night had grown very quiet; even Haggard Blackdawn’s hounds were still. She wondered if they were all dead. Then she wondered, almost idly, what Duac would say when he found the wraiths of the Kings of Hel in his house. Farr’s voice seeped into her thoughts.
“And after?”
“After?”
“After we reach Anuin? What demands, what restrictions will you place on us in your own house?”
She drew a breath, and found no more courage left in her for demands. “If the man is safe, none. If you have kept him safe. But I want an escort of Kings of Hel only, not a gathering of the army of the dead.”
There was another long silence. She dragged a branch onto the fire, saw the flick of calculation in his eyes. Then he said unexpectedly, “Who is this man?”
“If you don’t know his name, no one can take it from you. You know the shapes of Hel: trees, animals, the earth; you are of them, rooted with them. Find the stranger whose outward shape is of An, whose core is of nothing of An.”
“If he is nothing of An, then what is he to you?”
“What do you think?” she asked wearily. “When I’m sitting here alone for his sake in the roused night of Hel bargaining with a dead king over his skull?”
“You’re a fool.”
“Maybe. But you’re bargaining, too.”
“I do not bargain. An deprived me of my crown, and An will give it back to me. One way or another. I’ll give you my answer at dawn. If your fire goes out before then, beware. I will show you no more mercy than Oen of An showed to me.”
He settled himself to wait, his face, baleful and unblinking, rising out of the darkness above the fiery beads. She wanted to scream at him suddenly that she had nothing to do with his feuds or his death, that he had been dead for centuries and his vengeance was a matter insignificant in the turmoil of events beyond An. But his brain was alive only in the past, and the long centuries must have seemed to him the passing of a single night over Hel. She sat down in front of the fire, her mouth papery. She wondered if, when dawn came, he intended to kill her or to barter with Duac over her as she had bartered over his skull. Hallard Blackdawn’s house, with all its windows lit at that hour, across two fields and the river, seemed as far away as a dream. As she gazed at it helplessly, the din began again in the fields, a new sound this time: the chilling clash of weapons in a night battle in Hallard’s cow pasture. The hounds bayed the danger hoarsely, imperatively, like battle horns. The eyes of the King met hers over the illusion of the fire, relentless, assured. She looked down from him to the fire and saw the small, blazing circle, the core of the illusion, the glass beads cracking slowly in the tempering of the fire.
The cries faded to a corner of her mind. She heard the snap of wood, the sibilant language of the flames. She opened her hand, touched an angle of flame and watched the reflection of it in her mind. It groped for her shape as she held it in her mind and her hand; she kept her own thoughts mute, tapped a silence deeply within her mind which it slowly moved and gathered. She let it gather for a long time, sitting motionless as the ancient trees around her, her hand uplifted, open to the flame that traced constantly the twelve-sided figure on her palm. Then a shadow flowed over her mind, quenching the fire in it: another mind spanning the night, drawing into its vortex a comprehension of the living and dead of An. It passed like great, dark wings blocking the moon and brought her back, shivering and defenseless, into the night. She closed her hand quickly over the small flame and looked up to see the first hint of expression in Farr’s eyes.
“What was that?” His voice rasped jarringly in her head.
She felt his mind unexpectedly and knew that she was beginning to startle him, too. She said, “That is what you will protect the Star—the stranger from.”
“That?”
“That.” She added after a moment, “He’ll blot out your wraith like a candle if he realizes what you are doing and nothing will be left of you but your bones and a memory. Do you want your skull so badly now?”
“I want it,” he said grimly. “Either here or at Anuin, Witch. Take your choice.”
“What are you, then, with your eyes full of fire?”
She thought about it. Then she said simply, “I am nameless,” while something too bitter for sorrow touched the back of her mouth. She turned again to the fire, added more wood to it, followed the wild flight of each spark to its vanishing point. She cupped the fire again, this time in both hands, and began slowly to shape it.
She was interrupted many times during the endless night: by the run of Hallard Blackdawn’s stolen cattle, bawling in terror across his wheat fields; by the gathering of armed men around Farr as he waited, and his bellow of fury in her mind when they laughed at him; by the flurry of sword play that followed. She lifted her head once and saw only his bare bones on his horse, blurred with fire; another time, she saw his head like a helm in the crook of his arm, his expression changeless while her eyes groped for shape above the stump of his neck. Near dawn, when the moon set, she had forgotten him, forgotten everything. She had drawn the flames into a hundred varied shapes, flowers that opened then melted away, fiery birds that took wing from her hand. She had forgotten even her own shape; her hands, weaving in and out of the fire, seemed one more shape of it. Something undefined, unexpected, was happening in her mind. Glimpses of power, knowledge, elusive as the fire, passed before her mind’s eye, as though she had wakened within her memories of her heritage. Faces, shadows stretching beyond her knowledge formed and vanished under her probing; strange plants, sea languages whispered just beyond her hearing. A void in the depth of the sea, or at the heart of the world, cut a hollow through her mind; she gazed into it fearlessly, curiously, too lost within her work to wonder whose black thought it was. She kindled a distant star of fire even in that barren waste. She felt then, as it stirred, that it was no void, but a tangle of memory and power on the verge of definition.
That knowledge sent her groping urgently for the simpler chaos of An. She came to rest like a weary traveller within herself. The dawn mists lay over Hallard’s fields; the ash-colored morning hung amid the trees without a sound to welcome it. All that remained of her night fire was the charred stubble of branches. She stirred stiffly, sleepily, then saw the hand out of the corner of her eye, reaching for the skull.
She set it blazing with an illusion of fire from her mind; Farr flinched back. She picked up the skull and rose, stood facing him. He whispered, “You are made of fire . . .”
She felt it in her fingers, running beneath the skin, in the roots of her hair. She said, her voice cracking with tiredness, “Have you made up your mind? You’ll never find Oen here; his bones lie in the Field of Kings outside of Anuin. If you can survive the journey, you can take your revenge there.”
“Do you betray your own family?”
“Will you give me an answer?” she cried, stung; and he was silent, struggling. She felt his yielding before he spoke, and she whispered, “Swear by your name. Swear by the crown of the Kings of Hel. That neither you nor anyone else will touch me or this skull until you have crossed the threshold at Anuin.”
“I swear it.”
“That you will gather the kings as you journey across Hel, to find and protect the shape of the stranger travelling to Anuin, against all living, against all dead.”
“I swear it.”
“That you will tell no one but the Kings of Hel what you are sworn to do.”
“I swear it. By my name, in the name of the Kings of Hel and by this crown.”
He looked, dismounted in the dawn light with the taste of submission in his mouth, almost alive. She drew a soundless breath and loosed it. “All right. I swear in my father’s name and in the name of the man you will escort, that when I see him in the King’s house at Anuin, I will give you your skull and ask nothing further from you. All binding between us will end. The only other thing I ask is that you let me know when you find him.”
He gave a brief nod. His eyes met the black, hollow, mocking gaze of the skull. Then he turned and mounted. He looked down at her a moment before he left, and she saw the disbelief in his eyes. Then he rode away, noiseless as a drift of leaves beneath the trees.
She met, as she herself rode out of the woods, Hallard Blackdawn and his men venturing out to count the dead cattle in the lower fields. He stared at her; his voice, when he found it finally, was strengthless.
“Oen’s right hand. Is it you or a ghost?”
“I don’t know. Is Cyn Croeg’s bull dead?”
“They ran the life out of it . . . Come to the house.” His eyes, the shock wearing away from them, held a strange expression: half-solicitous, half-awed. His hand rose hesitantly, touched her. “Come in. You look—you look—”
“I know. But I can’t. I’m going to Anuin.”
“Now? Wait, I’ll give you an escort.”
“I have one.” She watched his eyes fall to the skull riding the pommel of her saddle; he swallowed.
“Did he come for it?”
She smiled slightly. “He came. We did some bargaining—”
“Oen’s right—” He shuddered unashamedly. “No one ever bargained with Farr. For what? The safety of Anuin?”
She drew a breath. “Well, no. Not exactly.” She took the necklace out of her pocket and gave it to him. “Thank you. I couldn’t have survived without it.”
Glancing back once, as she reached down to open a field gate, she saw him standing motionlessly beside a dead bullock, still staring at the worthless handful of cracked, fired beads.
She crossed the length of Hel as far as Raith’s lands with a growing, invisible escort of Kings. She felt them around her, groped for their minds until they gave her their names: Acor, third King of Hel, who had brought through force and persuasion the last of the bickering lords under his control; Ohroe the Cursed, who had seen seven of his nine sons fall one after another in seven consecutive battles between Hel and An; Nemir of the Pigs, who had spoken the language of both men and pigs, who had bred the boar Hegdis-Noon and had as his pigherder the witch Madir; Evern the Falconer, who trained hawks for battle against men; and others, all Kings, as Farr had sworn, who joined him, the last of the Kings, in his journey to the stronghold of the Kings of An. She rarely saw them; she felt them range before and behind her, their minds joining in a network of thought, legend, plots, remembrances of Hel during their lives, after their deaths. They were still bound to the earth of An, more than even they realized; their minds slid easily in and out of different shapes that their bones had become entwined with: roots, leaves, insects, the small bodies of animals. It was through this deep, wordless knowledge of An, Raederle knew, that they recognized the Star-Bearer, the man whose shape would hold none of the essence of An.
They had found him swiftly. Farr broke his silence to tell her that; she did not ask what shape he had taken. The Kings surrounded him loosely as he moved: the hart, perhaps, that bounded in terror across a moonlit field at their presence; the bird startled into flight; the fieldmouse scuttling through broken shafts of hay. She guessed that he dared not keep one shape long, but she was surprised that the Kings never once lost track of him. They were a decoy to the powerful mind she glimpsed occasionally as it groped over the land. No man of An, and certainly no stranger, could have passed among them unnoticed; the wizard, she guessed, must search every man they did meet. She was surprised also that he did not threaten her as she rode alone through the troubled land; perhaps he thought, seeing the skull on her saddle, watching her sleep at night in the woods impervious to the tumult around her, that she was mad.
She avoided people, so she had no news of the extent of the trouble, but she saw, again and again, empty fields at midday, barns and stables locked and guarded, lords travelling with armed retinues towards Anuin. Their tempers, she knew, must be worn thin by the constant harassment; they would, in time, turn their houses into small, armed fortresses, draw into themselves and soon trust no man, living or dead. The mistrust and the anger against the absent King of An would fester into open war, a great battleground of living and dead, that not even Mathom would be able to control. And she, bringing the Kings of Hel into Anuin, might precipitate it.
She thought much about that, lying sleepless at night with the skull beside her. She tried to prepare for it, exploring her powers, but she had little experience to guide her. She was dimly aware of what she might be able to do, of powers intangible as shadows in her mind, powers she could not yet quite grasp and control. She would do what she could at Anuin; Morgon, if he could risk it, would help. Perhaps Mathom would return; perhaps the Kings would retreat from Anuin without an army behind them. Perhaps she could find something else to barter with. She hoped Duac, in some small measure, would understand. But she doubted it.
She reached Anuin nine days after she had left Hallard’s land. The Kings had begun to appear before they entered the gates, riding in a grim, amazing escort about the man they guarded. The streets of the city seemed fairly untroubled; there were quite a few people out staring, uneasy and astonished, at the group of riders with their nervous, wicked mounts, their crowned heads, armbands and brooches of gold, their arms and rich clothes spanning nearly the entire history of the land. Among them, cloaked and hooded in the warm day, rode the man they had been guarding. He seemed resigned to his unearthly escort; he rode without a glance at it, slowly and steadily through the streets of Anuin, up the gentle slope to the house of the King. The gates were open; they rode unchallenged into the yard. They dismounted, to the confusion of the grooms, who had no intention, even under the weight of Farr’s hot gaze, of taking their horses. Raederle, riding alone into the gates behind them, saw them follow the cloaked figure up the steps to the hall. The expression in the grooms’ faces as they hesitated around her made her realize that they thought she, too, might be a wraith. Then one came forward uncertainly to hold her reins and stirrup as she dismounted. She took the skull from the pommel, carried it with her into the hall.
She found Duac alone in the hall, staring, speechless, at the collection of Kings. His mouth was open; as she entered, his eyes flicked to her and she heard it click closed. The blood ran out of his face, leaving it the color of Farr’s skull. She wondered, as she went towards the hooded man, why he did not turn and speak to her. He turned then, as though he had felt her thoughts, and she found her own mouth dropped open. The man the Kings had followed and guarded through Hel had not been Morgon but Deth.