1.4: The Furl

I walked and I walked and I didn’t stop walking even though I wished each step forward was really a step back and I could just retreat out the doors and back down the hall and into the storm again where I could get soaked and battered by the rains again for all I cared because this was hard, this was so fucking hard, and she was looking right at me with eyes as dark blue as her banners and just as embroidered with blood even if it didn’t show up on her pupils and no deep breaths could have prepared me for this moment because it was as raw as I’d feared if ‘raw’ was even the right word for the flensing stare she was giving me out of a face that was both hers and not hers at the same time and I felt like a ghost if ghosts could be skinned alive and made out of all these memories that refused to curl up and die but rotted instead when unearthed and festered and her eyes, her eyes, bright in laughter, bright in murder, bright as the winter sky is bright but too bright too look at for long, fever sharp, fever dream, and her mouth on mine and my fingers in her hair and her body scarred like a doll that’s been ripped and stitched and patched back together again and

               “Hello Corvalis,” she said, all smoke and glass and I stopped before her dais and inclined my head and said,

               “Furl.”

1.3: Familiar Wounds

When she built her seat of power in the newly named and conquered city of Gere, Grenja Furl had tried her hardest to bring something of the Southern Throne to the Keep. But both because it had been built on the ruins of Eyrie and because it had been constructed as a fortress to withstand Dellan rebellion the southern touches looked ridiculously out of place. We were escorted down a long hall, its thick white walls decorated with tapestries and banners that were too bright and too small for such a place. Their colorful hunting imagery of stags and boars being chased through autumn woods almost managed to cover the great scorch marks that scarred the walls. Almost.

               The last time I had been here, we had just put down Fethvevern’s Uprising- the bloodiest and most determined Dellan insurrection, it had swept through Kipana’s streets and broke upon us here at the Keep. The last time I had walked this hall bodies had lain in crumpled heaps on the floor and blood had decorated the stones in pools and puddles and arterial sprays. Ezra at my side, we walked past the place where I’d eaten a knife to the shoulder and a bright tapestry of geese in flight, indistinguishable from the rest, decorated the spot where Grenja had beheaded the last surviving Dellan even as he was raising his hands in surrender. Her matched hatchets had chopped his hands to bits and sent fingers flying before sinking into his neck.

               “You should see your face,” Ezra said quietly.

               I didn’t need to. I could imagine my own expression all too well. “I suggest getting used to it,” I murmured back, my eyes fixed on the great double doors at the end of the hallway ahead of us. Thirty paces.

               “What are you thinking about?”

               “How well this Keep cleans up,” I answered honestly.

               She raised an eyebrow at me bit I only shook my head. Twenty paces.

               Ezra glanced around us but our two escorting guardsmen were as far away as they could be without being rude and the single messenger we caught coming the other way hurried by with his eyes down. Satisfied that we wouldn’t be immediately overheard and with the distance to those great doors closing fast- fifteen paces- Ezra waited until the lone messenger was behind us before she pitched her voice low and asked me a question. But whatever it was she wanted to know, whatever she said, never reached me because with ten paces to go, Whisper stirred once again. He rolled over in my mind like something surfacing from the depth, my thoughts sheeting off his consciousness like fantails of water, and he sighed. A long, drawn-out breath that swept through my bones and raised the hair on my arms. It’s all dark, he murmured. It’s all so…dark. The amazement in his voice made me shudder before I could stop myself. Those were the exact words he had said before. At the beginning and the end.

               Keeper? He breathed and I could feel him press against my eyes like giant wings had been spread inside my skull and their feathers were pushing down on my tiny human thoughts. It was the strongest I had felt Whisper in months. He dotted my vision with black spots, brought a darkness to the edges of my sight, and completely blacked Ezra out of my immediate perception, and then he was gone again. Not even an echo remained. My vision cleared so suddenly that I stumbled and Ezra had to catch me by the arm. I was shaking, I realized, shaking hard with my heart pounding like I’d just run a race.

               “Is that a ‘no’ then?” Ezra asked, still supporting me as we walked.

               I tried not to look too blank as I stared back at her but it was hard. Whisper had shaken me to the core. Ezra brushed a bit of mud from the front of my shirt, covering my unsteadiness, then let me go.

               “I didn’t think you’d be that shocked,” she muttered. “From what I’ve heard they had eyes on you before.”

               My mind made the connection at last and with one stride to go before the doors, as the guards in Grenja’s blue on either side of them pulled them open, I looked blatantly all around us. Even knowing he was there it took me a moment to find him. He was positioned well, half hidden by the pillars that upheld the Keep’s roof, not quite invisible but by no means easy to find. I couldn’t see his face but I didn’t need to, this one wore the Judge’s sigil openly enough once you spotted him. The long white cloak of his office was pinned to one shoulder with a silver brooch in the shape of a long, sharp, nail. When he caught me looking at him, he inclined his head in open recognition. We’re watching you, he said in that gesture, and we don’t care if you know it.

               I conjured up a grim smile from somewhere dark and plastered it onto my face. Watch away, I told him with mine. But by then the double doors were open and some loud-mouthed announcer was actually calling our names like this was the King’s Court, and I couldn’t stall any longer. I took a deep breath, Ezra stood up a little straighter, and then we walked in together, dripping rainwater and mud in our wake.

               The Judge stood motionlessly at his post and watched us go and the weight of his regard came to rest like an old familiar wound across my back.

1.2: The Keep

The Furl’s Keep, like so many of the other great structures of the city, was an addition, and had been built after the war had ended. It stood at the end of the great ivory plaza we simply called the ‘Ring’, its front doors meeting the white stones as if Ring and Keep had been built at the same time like interlocking puzzle pieces.

That wasn’t the case of course. The Ring was much older and of Herald-make. Its stones were subtly decorated and etched with tiny lines and miniscule spirals but otherwise they were perfectly smooth, white as bone, and hard as glass. Our horses’ hooves rang metallically against them almost as if we rode over the flat of a giant sword blade and inscriptions aside, these stones were also perfectly reflective so that on a clear day it was like walking across the surface of massive mirror, your image beneath your boots. I remembered how brightly it shone when the sun was out and how painful it was on the eyes.

               Behind it the Furl’s Keep squatted in the rain. Eight years ago a second Eyrie had stood here and the Furl had been forced to hold court inside it, even as it was dismantled piece by piece to make way for her new seat of power. Supposedly, sometime after I had left, they had tried to tear up the Ring too to put in some war monument only to have the stones resist all attempts at removal. But because the location was directly at the city’s heart and probably more so because Grenja wanted to make a point, the Eyrie was torn down, the Keep stuck in its place, and the Ring left to sit in front and reflect everyone that came and went.

               At the massive pine doors in the front, more men in the Furl’s dark blue came forward to take our horses. Ezra swung blithely down, handing her gelding’s reins over to the waiting guardsman, only to realize that neither Seerhus nor I had dismounted.

               “The Furl is expecting you,” Seerhus said.

               “Let her wait a few.”

               He raised an eyebrow again.

               “Marcus inside?” I hated to ask but I’d be damned if I walked in blind.
               “No. He’s at Blackwater, scouting. The rumors have made everyone jumpy.” He shrugged noncommittally, no easy feat in full armor. “Now every village and every farmers’s post from here to Asherton swears they see Heralds in every shadow and rogue Dell’an behind every tree.” He met my eyes. “You know how it is.”

               I swung myself out of my saddle and dropped to the wet, hard ground of the Ring, my boots ringing against the stone. I handed my reins over to the helmeted soldier at my elbow, met Ezra’s eyes and jerked my head in the direction of the Keep, and was turning to go when Seerhus stopped me.

               “Valis.”

               I glanced back.

               “There’s a tavern not far from here called Otter’s. Right by the-” He started to say something, caught sight of Ezra watching us with a curious expression, and thought better of it. “We should talk,” was all he said instead.

               I looked at him, sitting straight as the damn banner in his saddle, unflinchingly meeting my eyes, trying as he had once to always do the bigger, better thing. Even if the bigger, better thing was intensely painful. For everyone involved.

               “We’ll see,” I said. It was the best I could do right then.

                Seerhus nodded. He gestured for his small escort group to move again and wheeled his horse around, probably heading back to collect the scattered remnants of my caravan. I didn’t watch him go, was already moving to the doors. I knew what it had cost him to offer but I also know what it would cost me to accept. 

1.1: Sinking

We arrived in Kipana the same morning that the storm did. It had been following us north for three days now: a dark, brooding wall of thunder clouds that crept closer each hour with the grim kind of inescapability normally reserved for things like death. That looming front had been a weight at my back as we rode, a solid presence that pushed against my awareness like a smothering hand. And now, the last morning of the long trek, it poured, and it poured, and it poured some more.

               If any of the merchants in our little party had hoped to ride in with some sort of dignity, the rain extinguished that idea right away. The gates of Kipana opened not to welcome a distinguished merchant convoy, but to swallow a thankful group of drenched travelers riding horses splattered up to their stomachs with mud. 
              No one was happy about the weather but, in a way, it was strangely fitting for the storm to finally break as we reached the city. It had been raining the day I'd left as well, I remembered sourly as I sat my horse in the torrential downpour waiting for the Furl's men to open the gates. The same, cold, winter rain. I had even been riding the same horse. Only back then I had left with half the bones in my right hand broken, Marcus' blood fresh on my knuckles, and a stone cold certainty that I was never, ever coming back.

               At my side, Ezra shifted in her wet saddle and shot me a sidelong look like she could guess what I was thinking. "Are you alright?" she asked quietly as we waited. They seemed to be taking an awfully long time with the gates. The last time I had been here the mechanisms that had operated the Gates and Doors and Lights of the city had still been functional. But those delicate clockwork contraptions and intricate systems of switches and pulleys had slowly died without the Heralds to tend to them. Even the stone of the city, once a pure solid white, was gradually rotting to gray. Ensconced in the skeleton of the once great city, teams of soldiers and laborers struggled to hold it together, manning structures that had once manned themselves. South Gate was once such edifice. I remembered the way the gates had raised for me last time, the slow rumble of hidden gears at work, the smooth rising of a solid section of the wall. Now the Furl's men strained and curse and struggled to lever the Gate open and, despite their best efforts, could only raise it about halfway. There they held it, with barely a foot of clearance between a mounted man's head and the bottom of the gate and their Captain stared irritably at me, urging us to get a move on as if he was unsure or unwilling about keeping it open this long.

I nodded to the man and nudged my horse into motion. He wasn't anyone I recognized but that didn't mean much and it sure as hell didn't stop him from greeting me with a scowl. I wasn't paranoid enough to take it personally, but it wasn't the greeting the rest of my group expected and they muttered behind me as we rode through. I made it under without having to duck but Shibel, mounted on the biggest palfrey I had ever seen, grumbled as she bowed her head to avoid the dripping bottom of the Gate. Ezra, following close behind me, had forgotten her question and was all open amazement, craning her head back to study the underside of the Gate, heedless of the mud that fell from its edges. I could feel her growing excitement replacing her earlier concern and the sheer energy radiating off her- the pure eagerness- was at odds with my own darker mood. Eight years earlier, her delight would've been totally justified but now? Why get excited over ruins? Why get enthused about ghosts?

We passed through the wall and the city sprang up around us, the Low Markets right there where I'd left them, all laid out in the Herald's precise geometry. Before, not even a storm of this magnitude could have shut down business in those markets, but now only a thin crowd moved through the trader's buildings and wooden stalls. The wide streets ran with watery mud and the downpour couldn't quite wash away the heavy and pervasive stench of burning twitch. If the weather had been better, the alleyways here would have been choked with clouds of the smoky stuff hanging so thickly it would've almost been a haze. Like the rain did now, it would've muted the once bright colors of Low Market- the reds and blues of Dell'an dyes, the soft pinks of the giant Cadavari fish dredged up from the bottom of the river Ice. But now everything was gray and dark and half-hidden to avoid getting wet and the people that navigated their way through the mud didn't look up from the shadows of their hoods.

              Directly in front of us, Blood's Eyrie rose up out of the rain. Even in ruin, the great, twisting structure was large enough to defy the storm and I could easily make out its shape through the downpour, the hundreds of large windows dotting its serrated surfaces gaping like dark wounds. I tried not to look too closely at it. I still dreamed of that massive building sometimes. I still dreamed of Blood too sometimes. I gave my horse the spurs and rode through Low Market, the others falling further and further behind with each passing stride. If I looked back I knew I would see them in a confused knot of horses and wagons and mules, pointing and whispering like the city had ears and would take offense to what they were saying. Predictably, they were caught up on the Eyrie, captivated by the harsh, alien curves of the tower and the way it almost seemed to sway if you didn't keep an eye on it at all times. Who knew how long it would take them to tear their gazes away let alone to get through the twisting maze of the Market itself where anything of Herald-make, any Dell'an war artifact, would inevitably draw their attention. I began to leave them behind in ones and twos, like beads slipping off a string and didn't look back.

               I turned my horse down a barely remembered side street but I hadn't gotten more than a few feet before movement caught the corner of my eye. "You don't have to stay with me, you know," I told her. "I'm not exactly taking the scenic route."

               "Now, what kind of assistant would I be if I abandoned you?" Ezra asked as she rode up. I turned to look at her and was met with small smile that was only half kidding.

               "Ezra," I said, rising to the bait nonetheless, "You're not my assistant."

               It was an argument we'd had half a dozen times by now and one she always won thanks to a slip of paper with the King's royal seal impressed on the top. I honestly didn't know why I bothered anymore. She obviously found my staunch denial amusing, if I had to judge by the smile in her blue eyes, but I couldn't share her good humor. I hadn't been the most popular person when I left Kipana eight years ago and I doubt time had done much to smooth out my memory. But try telling Ezra that and she just nodded like we were discussing what to eat for lunch.

               I thought she was going to reply but then her gaze went past me and locked on to something up ahead. "Well they look awfully official, don't they?" she asked. With a sinking premonition in my gut, I followed the direction of her stare and saw them right away. A small group of horsemen were riding towards us under a soaking banner that dripped rain. It was too dark and there was too much rain to see the face of the man leading them but I would bet my horse's weight in gold that it was who I thought. The banner, a white feather with a red tip on a blue backdrop, was tasteless clue enough. "That's the Furl's personal sigil," I told Ezra. "Get used to seeing it plastered on everything that can't move."

               "Is that the Furl then?" Ezra asked.

               I fought back a dark laugh. "No. That's her Champion."

               She offered the name with ease. "Seerhus?"

               "Mhmm," I confirmed. "The Sword of the North." I reined in and Ezra followed suit and we sat our horses in the rain and waited for the riders to come and meet us, and I tried my hardest not to think about how I'd last parted company with the Furl's Champion. Predictably, it was then all I could think about.

               Ten paces away and the lead rider held up a gauntleted hand but whether it was a greeting or a command for the rest of his small group to halt, it was impossible to tell. His men did stop at a discrete distance and he rode up us alone, with the impeccable mounted form I remembered too well.

               Graveside. Winter rain. Whisper reached into my memories and dredged up the imagery with a distinct lack of care for how his voice and those words gutted me. I had to make a conscious effort to not reel in my saddle, his intrusion into my mind was so unexpected. And so raw.

               Luckily, Seerhus didn't seem to notice. He reined in a few feet away and for several seconds we sat there and openly looked at each other while I scrambled to get my composure back. Unlike me he had a new horse, a heavy dappled gray that towered over my own smaller mare so that I had to raise my head to meet Seerhus' eyes even though I was the older and taller of us. New horse, same man. Seerhus hadn't changed one bit in my absence. Same dark regard, same closed face full of gravity, same quiet, self-assured grace. It took people by surprise to see such darkness out of such light eyes. For being Northern born, pale-skinned, white-blonde, and just shy of thirty, the Furl's Champion had this intensity about him, this solemnity, that gravely mismatched his appearance. He wore his armor like a second skin, sat his horse like other men sit on stools in their favorite dives, and looked into you rather than at you until you got the impression that nothing you say could surprise him.

               Not many could match his stare when he really cranked it up and looked at you. But I'd had practice.

               After a moment he conceded this fact and switched his attention to Ezra. "Lady Ezrana Ril?" he asked and she shifted at my side, suddenly uncomfortable.

               "Ezra is just fine," she said.

               He inclined his head, correct to a fault. "Welcome to Gere, Lady Ezra-"

               "Just Ezra. Please."

               I stifled a humorless smile at the silence that followed her interruption, staring out into the rain as Seerhus finally gave in.

               "Ezra," he conceded, somehow managing to pronounce the word like its own unique title. "His Majesty sent word ahead that you would be visiting with the trade delegation. The Furl has sent me to welcome you and to escort you and the rest of your caravan to the Keep."

               Ezra's confusion was almost palpable but when I continued to sit idly, still staring off into the distance, she straightened in the saddle and spoke. "I don't know what the King told you, but I'm here as the personal assistant to Captain Winters. Nothing more."

               Seerhus looked back at me and I slowly turned my head to meet his eyes again. "Hello, Seer."

               "It's been a while Corvalis," he said quietly.

               "Not long enough," I replied and meant it. Fresh dirt on the grave, Whisper agreed. I twitched like I'd been stung by the world's largest horsefly and knew he'd seen it. Knew he knew what it meant.

               Still he played along. "Eight years?" he asked.

               "Not long enough." We looked at each other for a while.

               Seerhus's already closed expression closed a little further but there was something of understanding in his nod. "Can I take you to the Furl?" he asked.

               I could've said 'no' but what would've been the point? Eventually everyone's got to pull the knife from the wound. So I just nodded. "Sure."

               Seerhus' eyes went past us like I was hiding the rest of my caravan somewhere in the shallow alley and the rain. "Where are the merchants?"

               "Don't know."

               He raised an eyebrow at me.

               "They're somewhere in Low Market," I amended. "They got sidetracked."

               "I see." The Champion twisted in his saddle and beckoned his men closer. The banner flapped wetly above out heads and I looked up at it as he gave two of his men new order. A white feather on a dark background, its tip and the leading edge stained red with blood. A dark little smile cooked my mouth. Inside my mind Whisper stirred and sighed and faded before the hurt could find him.

               "Ready?"

               I blinked. Seerhus and Ezra were both looking at me so I nodded. "Let's go."

If the Furl was hoping her escort would make some grand welcome impression the rain had more or less ruined everything. The banner was a soaked piece of cloth by the time we started riding again, too wet to do anything other than cling to its pole even though the bannerman gave it a few discrete shakes when he thought no one was looking. The soldiers got drenched, the horses got drenched, and the streets ran with mud and were overrun with puddles. In some places the entire road was filling with rain water. As Seerhus' men guided their horses to the side of the street, yelling at the remaining vendors to clear a path, I paused for a moment in the middle of the cobblestone road and looked to either side. My horse was fetlock deep in a massive puddle and the ramshackle buildings around me seemed oddly elevated, almost as if the street was on a lower level than they were, almost as if the road had sunk ever so slightly. Like the city wasn't just crumbling above ground but also slowly dropping onto the earth as well.

               I caught up to Seerhus and Ezra. "Kipana is sinking," I remarked. It wasn't a question.

               Seerhus shot me a sidelong look. "No one calls it that anymore," he said. "It's Gere now."

               "I know what they've named it. Kipana's sinking."

               This time Seerhus didn't answer but Ezra was all ears. "Sinking how?"

               "In the same way everything else sinks. Down." I leaned close to her and pointed. "Look at the buildings, at the roads. The Furl's hard a try at shoring up the infrastructure with things like these cobblestone streets and granite bulwarks against the walls but no one really knows what Kipana was originally made of- the Herald's white stone, no one really knows if it's even really stone at all. Stone doesn't rot like this stuff does...” I looked around at me, at the shadow of Blood's Eyrie now on my left, listing in the rain. "It's all crumbling away. Slowly, yes, but in another decade or two this place will fall down around whoever's left."

               Ezra eyed me like I was pulling a fast one on her but I just nodded at the scenery around us, at the deep puddles we splashed through, and left her to draw her own conclusions. The evidence was there if you looked. Or wanted to see.

               We rode the rest of the way in silence. Seerhus had urged his charger a few feet ahead of us, just behind his bannerman, and I watched the rain stream down his polished back plate through hooded eyes. My face ran with water. The smell of wet horse clung to all of us and now thunder was coming in, rolling up from the south with a long, low growl to announce its arrival.

               It had been raining that day too.
              The storm tumbled in and drowned the sky.