“You worry for the future,” he said.
“The world is in chaos,” she replied. “Worry seems appropriate.”
“Were I still a man of the Faith, I might quote a pertinent catechism about the virtues of hope.”
“You believe the queen’s invasion will succeed?”
“I believe in her. She is . . . more than she was.”
“And if we do succeed, what then?”
“We return to the Reaches, where I suspect we’ll spend much of our time protecting them from gold-hungry idiots.”
“That is your ambition? Just the tower and the Reaches?”
“The tower, the Reaches”—he reached out to take her hand—“and you. Also, the peace to enjoy them.”
She smiled, but he saw it was forced. “Father wanted peace too, and hoped to find it in the Reaches.”
“Caenis told me he had been exiled for questioning the King’s Word. I always assumed it was because he had refused to do what my father did in the Meldenean Isles.”
“A climax to a long argument. Father began his career as a guardsman in the Al Nieren House Guard, when the Asraelin noble families feuded endlessly over the Lord’s Chair. He told me once Janus had promised him peace, in the days when the Red Hand had finally faded. They were both little more than boys then, facing an onslaught of a dozen houses allied against them, the Al Nieren line having been weakened by the plague and seemingly ripe for plucking. ‘We’ll kill all these fools together, Vanos,’ Janus had said. ‘Then we’ll make a Realm.’
“And they did, year after year of war, the other houses shattered and brought low, the fiefs hammered into submission, all on the promise of peace. A peace that failed to appear with the birth of the Realm as Janus turned his gaze to foreign lands. So, unable to face another war, Father begged for release, imagining he might find an untroubled retirement in the Reaches, far away from the Realm’s troubles and Janus’s ambition. But war still found him when the Ice Horde came.”
Vaelin squeezed her hand tighter. “With this war won there will be no one left to fight.”
“I see the queen, as you do. I met her once before, all those years ago when Father took me to the Realm. And you are right, she is greatly changed. But I still see in her what Father did, that day as she took us on a tour of the palace gardens, all laughter and charm. Father smiled at her witticisms, accepted her flattery, and made a gracious farewell. As we rode away his smile faded, however, and I heard him say, ‘And I imagined Janus to be ambitious.’ It may have changed but it hasn’t gone, Vaelin. When she’s done with this war, what then? What will sate her when she’s conquered an empire? What more will she ask of you?”
You’ll kill for your faith, for your king, and for the Queen of Fire when she arises . . . Words from a long-remembered dream. Perhaps not all prophecy is false. “I think she is wise enough not to ask for what I won’t give.”
? ? ?
Astorek came to fetch them to council in the morning, tracing a path into the forest until they arrived at a tree so large Vaelin at first wondered if it wasn’t some shaman-conjured illusion. The trunk was covered in reddish brown bark and stood near thirty paces wide at the base, ascending to well over two hundred feet in height, the top lost somewhere above the forest canopy.
“The name loses much in your tongue,” Astorek said. “Wolf Lance is the closest translation. The oldest great tree known to us. Even the grandfathers of our grandfathers couldn’t remember it a sapling.”
The base of the trunk featured a large, cave-like hollow where a number of Wolf People waited, standing in silent regard as Astorek led Vaelin inside. He made no introduction, simply standing to one side as they stared at his face, recognition and disquiet evident in every gaze. The silence stretched as he stood there, wondering if there was some ritual observance he had failed to make, until Wise Bear came to his side, speaking softly, “They want your words.”
“Words?”
Wise Bear gave the assembled Wolf People a tight smile, resembling a parent apologising for an ill-mannered child. “Words of war. They expect you to lead them.”
His gaze roamed the assembled council, finding Whale Killer among them, the others also marked as elders from their various accoutrements: necklaces of bone or beads, a knife with an ornately carved handle. Only those ice folk of sufficient age and influence had the time or opportunity to accumulate trinkets. “There are no shaman here,” he observed to Astorek.
“Shaman are forbidden leadership,” he said. “Too much power sickens the soul. A lesson the Cat People never learned.”
Vaelin nodded. “How many warriors do they command?”