The Price of Blood and Honor Read online

  The Price of Blood and Honor

  Elizabeth Willey

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Website

  Also by Elizabeth Willey

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  IN THE CAREER OF EVERY SORCERER comes a time when he must assay the price that sorcery shall exact of him and choose, if it be not too late, whether the Art be worth the price. Sometimes this choice appears early, as in the case of a certain sorceress who dedicated herself to her Art at the age of fourteen years, renouncing the joys of liberally offered love, the diversions and dominion of society, and public paeans for her great beauty, in order to cloister herself under the frequently unpleasant tutelage of a succession of arid masters of sorcery. On concluding her apprenticeship with the then-customary duel, she mounted an ass, who had but an hour before been her most recent master, and rode to Noroison, where sat King Proteus, to claim her former master’s territory; and Proteus, impressed by her ability and affected by her beauty, granted her this boon, though the territory was one he desired himself, situated on a powerful Nexus and with several Nodes of the Stone’s power rising there. He offered her the honor of marriage as well, which she refused, displeasing him; but the boon was granted and he could not withdraw it without risking a challenge and a duel, which risks the King forbore to undertake, with a view to the ass who had once been this sorceress’s master. So the sorceress dwells there still, uncompanioned in her pastoral realm, served by her creatures, warding her secrets, feeding her knowledge, and waiting.

  And sometimes the choice appears late, as in the case of a certain mighty Prince, who commanded all the Elements and held a Source alone, as only Primas, Proteus, and Panurgus have done before in the history of the worlds, and who has lately discovered, in his prime of potency and pride, that there is something he values more, though the discovery shall gall and gnaw his heart and cause him much pain hereafter. He has ransomed his blood with his sorcery, and this seems a surpassingly high price; he thinks, as he rides through an untrodden wood, of precedents in which others have sacrificed blood for sorcery, and cannot but wonder if he has not been a fool; he bites his lip and grinds his teeth, self-doubting. But lurking in memory are the commentaries on those who have bought sorcery for blood: and the truth of the matter is that they have paid as high as he, or higher; for vengeance and Fortuna have already turned on most, and they are dead or worse. It is as if, he thinks, an un-expounded natural law acts to balance, somehow, blood and power; but there is no profit to him in philosophy now, and he turns his mind to matters of planning and defense.

  And sometimes the choice only seems to appear, as in the case of a certain prodigiously talented young sorcerer, who has thrown his lot in with his recently-found, dispossessed father, and who enters now his father’s demesnes in company with that gentleman; he congratulates himself, as he rides, on choosing well, and on having chosen both blood and power in one sweep, but he disregards the lady riding behind him and it has not occurred to him that the price he pays to perfect his Art may not be as simple as supporting his defeated sire. The young sorcerer has forgotten, in the momentary exhilaration of the filial bond, that his father had already renounced much of his power, in vows taken all too lightly, and given it to the lady, his daughter; and therefore she holds that power already, though she uses it not; and thus he has made only a down-payment on the Art he would claim, with high principal and interest yet to come due.

  And sometimes there is no choice. The lady who rides behind her brother has been heaped with power and wealth, none of her desiring; rather than choosing, she must accept, for, try as she may, she cannot refuse; and she must pay regardless of her own desires, and make the best of everything bestowed upon her.

  2

  BESIDE THE SCATTERED COALS OF A dying fire, two people sat on their heels and one stood. Above them in the night sky were few stars—so few they might be counted, were anyone so inclined. The place was neither here nor there, or perhaps as much there as here: it lay between two realms, no-man’s-land in the truest sense. The ground rolled, nowhere level, a rippling maze of low mounds, hard and dry, punctuated irregularly by tufts of dry grass. The air was as empty as the land: arid, waterless, windless, without warmth. The people, like the place, were between: they were resting in a moment between one movement and another, between to and from, between be and become.

  “We can’t go. They can barely walk,” said one, rubbing at her red-edged eyes. She was leading two horses, salt-flecked weary animals; a third, taller and fresher, followed them. “Papa? Dewar?”

  The two men were staring at each other, with none of their attention to spare for her. One nodded once and said, “ ’Tis a bold resolution, and I’ll not test its limits; for though blood’s strong-binding, ’tis bounded by the heart. Come then, and welcome.”

  “If you will have me there,” said Dewar, offering a last demurrer. “Sorcerers are not known for keeping company, as gentlemen do. Blood may carry weakness as well as strength, Prospero.”

  “In but little time I’ll be no more a sorcerer,” said Prospero, “so there’s an end to’t, and the tragedy’s a comedy, rounded with reunion. Hah!” He rose to his feet, slapped dust and ashes from his knees. “How go the horses, Freia?”

  D
ewar, released from scrutiny, the hanging tension of the moment resolved, let his heels roll from under him and sat back with a slow exhalation, closing his eyes. At his boot-toes, scattered coals from the fire with which he’d Summoned Prospero brightened with his breath and subsided, dimmer than before.

  “They’re too tired to go, Papa.”

  “They can walk, and so should we. They’ve had fodder and water?”

  “We didn’t have much left, and they’ve eaten it all.”

  “The more reason to begone: but let us consider ourselves as well as the beasts; this is mortal weary country to cross, and some refreshment will shorten the distance. Dewar’s near-dazed with working.”

  The truth was that they were all tired. Dewar was tired and hungry from the exertion of Summoning Prospero, and Prospero was tired and straining to keep a smooth surface over his agitation, and Freia was tired and unsure where she stood in the world. Before they went anywhere, it seemed wise that they should eat. So they stirred up the embers of the fire, which Prospero had nearly extinguished in his precipitous involuntary arrival, and wordlessly shared a meal from Prospero’s saddlebags; the horses were given a portion of Hurricane’s ration of grain. Then, at Prospero’s urging, they walked slowly away from the site of their late reunion.

  “I’ve never felt fearful in these hinterlands, nor had reason to, yet I’m apprehensive,” said the Prince. “There’s a safer place for us all to rest. Dewar, I know thy sorcery’s drained thee; an thou canst sleep a-horseback, Hurricane will bear thee.”

  Dewar stretched, his joints creaking and snapping. “I can walk a ways,” he said.

  Prospero nodded, and so they went.

  The resting-place was four hours’ plod distant, in grey-skied darkness, through the hillocked desert and the dry grassland that fringed it. No visible blaze marked the route, but Prospero guided them confidently through the waste, leading Hurricane. Dewar stumbled from time to time, and Freia walked by him and lent him her shoulder to steady him. The horses Epona and Torrent trailed behind, lag-footed, but willing to follow Hurricane from habit.

  There were no clear-cut roads to or from Argylle; tracks, paths, streambeds, and sometimes no marks at all on the landscape showed their direction. The grassland was a thin band where Prospero led them across; it sloped up steeply, broken by black, glossy lines of outcropping rock, to scrubby trees and thin-leaved, resilient bushes. The slope came to a peak, and the other side, less steep and wetter-smelling, held fewer bushes, larger trees, lusher grass, and none of the linear outcrops. There Prospero stopped to make a light at the top of his staff. Color returned to the world, the trees’ long dark-olive needles and red-veined black bark startling the monochrome-lulled eye. Long, black, columnar shadows swayed and fell back drunkenly as he guided them onward.

  Freia paced along steadily, nearly light-footed, and Prospero’s staff swung in time to his longer steps. Dewar concentrated on getting there, pushing through bushes and slogging up hills. He felt himself to be dangerously overtired; he reached, with his sorcerer’s senses, for the Fire of Landuc’s Well to sustain him, and could not fasten on it, yet he would not demand respite of Prospero. When at last, at a mud-daubed log hut, Prospero said, “Here ’tis,” Dewar went in and lay down without speaking. A single long sigh, and his body slumped on the hard-packed dirt floor.

  “Asleep already,” Freia said, and adjusted his cloak around him. He had slept in the instant.

  “Aye,” her father said. He touched her head, stroked it. “Puss, make up a fire. I’ll see to the horses. Thou’rt showing wear thyself.”

  “You sleep too, Papa. You don’t look well.”

  “ ’Tis worry wears me. Let it not weary thee. Sleep.” He kissed her and went out.

  Freia built and lit the fire on the rough stone hearth and waited for Prospero to come back, gnawing her grimy fingernails, dozing and starting herself awake. She trembled from time to time, exhaustion’s grip, but refused to rest until she knew he was indeed still with them. She had not seen him for so long—three years in Argylle and then the uncounted captivity in Landuc—that she had forgotten parts of him, how angry he could become, and how suddenly calm. Her head clamored with things she had to say, though she was too tired to tell her father anything now. It would be enough that he was there. Anyway, Dewar, even sleeping, was an intruder, and she wanted to talk to Prospero alone, at home in the evening firelight after supper, so Freia held her words in and looked forward to the time when she could let them out.

  Returning, Prospero was unsurprised to find her waking and forbore to chide her. He smoothed her tangled hair again. “Time to rest,” he told her softly.

  She nodded, another tired shiver running through her.

  They shook out their cloaks without speaking again and lay down, and Prospero put her between him and dreamless Dewar, thinking to keep her warmer so.

  Under the spreading, clogged canopy of the forest, as they rode on together, toward and away in every step, Freia’s mood lightened; Prospero’s darkened. Dewar rode between them on the invisible track that Prospero followed, watching his father’s straight back. Prospero had his sword again, the blood-stained one he’d surrendered to Gaston on the battlefield; Dewar wondered briefly how he’d gotten it, and concluded that either it had been returned to the Prince in Landuc or Prospero had purloined it somehow. The sorcerer shrugged and looked around him.

  These were old trees; the forest ground was free of undergrowth beneath them, with a scattering of delicate greenery over many years’ accumulation of dead needles. The smallest trunks might be circled by three men’s arms; the largest were four times as large, or larger, silently alive and thriving on their own litter. There were no branches protruding from the trunks for most of their height, or so it appeared; only a few bright green tufts dotted the rough black bark far below the radiating boughs that interwove between the trees. Prospero was leading them along a slope, swerving up or down around the trees, trying to neither climb nor descend. From time to time their steps coincided with deer-trails, but there was nothing else: no cuttings, no gradings, no human mark on the wood.

  Prospero rode half-attentively, choosing their way by instinct and habit, the greater part of his thoughts fixed resolutely on the future. Despite his defeat in war, he had thus far been able to conceal Argylle’s location and its nature from the Emperor Avril, but on his return to Landuc he might no longer be able to do so: the bargain he had made to free his daughter demanded he yield all. Therefore Argylle’s defensibility must be assured. He did not mean to allow Landuc to have the Spring; in all honesty he could make a case for it being impossible, leading inevitably to the mutual destruction of the realms, of vast Pheyarcet and the Spring’s small environs. But Avril, who understood nothing more of sorcery than a trained organ-grinding monkey understood of harmony, could not be relied upon to see this distinction. Prospero considered the grim possibilities of this and planned.

  Dewar rode preoccupied by the problem of the Well. He could sense its hot pulse here, weak and distant, ebbing exponentially as they travelled away from it: a disturbing, dizzy sensation, now that he attended to it. It had been stronger in the desert area, strong enough to support his Summoning Prospero; here, it was only a trace of itself, a memory of what it might have been at one time. This Spring of Prospero’s, he surmised, banished the Well. The antithetical Sources, Water and Fire, could not meet or mix. Could it be, Dewar posited to himself, that only the Well’s present unnaturally quiet state (which had prevailed since King Panurgus’s death) permitted the Spring to arise and flourish? They were undoubtedly now in an area that had once been only the Well’s, though the Well had been but a small presence here, its power withdrawn inward by Panurgus to sustain the inner realm and leaving a vacuum-like waste at this outer edge of Pheyarcet, not unlike the artificial Limen dividing the Well’s Pheyarcet from the Stone of Morven’s Phesaotois. Dewar could not perceive the Spring, but he began reckoning, recasting old formulae and equations in his mind,
and soon he saw nothing of the wood around him, wholly self-absorbed.

  Freia rode or walked, collecting new spring greens to eat, some distance back from the other two, in such a turmoil of emotion that she could not be sure what she thought or felt. She was happy to be going home, truly home to stay, with her father, at last. The enormous joy she had felt when Prospero appeared still reverberated in her heart. Yet her joy was dulled by manifold griefs: by her anguish at having caused him such trouble, by the terror and misery his wrath had struck into her, and by her own private burden of woe. His storming frightened her. She had not expected it, had never imagined he might be angry with her for escaping Landuc, for returning home, for finding him. She ought to have stayed in Landuc and waited for him, the Emperor’s prisoner, but she had been half-maddened by captivity and desperation, and the few words she had had then of Prospero had been inconclusive. She ought to have stayed, she chided herself, she ought to have stayed, and Prospero would have fetched her home soon and she could have found the poisonous fungus she’d craved. She had failed him by mistrusting in his return. How could she have thought he would not return for her? Now she could not remember what he had said, what she had said, when he had seen her in the Palace; she remembered only that he had been curt, and that she had wanted to go home with him so much that her heart might have burst. Prospero had gone, and had not come again; Dewar had come, and she had gone with Dewar.

  Now Dewar rode before her, at times beside Prospero, at times behind him. Prospero wanted him to come home with them to Argylle. This too bewildered Freia—despite the help he’d given her, Dewar was a foreigner, one of the Landuc people of whom Prospero had always spoken so harshly. What would he do there? When would he leave her father’s side, so that she could talk to Prospero alone and tell him of her journey with her gryphon, tell him what violent Golias had done, and be comforted? She tried to imagine Dewar in the cave with them and failed; it was their place, not his. There were two chairs, two beds, two goblets. She and Prospero, she decided, would go there and have supper, and after supper it would be cool enough for a fire (for spring season was still young), so they would sit together at the hearth.… Freia gazed at Prospero’s blue-cloaked back and dreamt of what they would say.