Alti, Chapter 1

[lostsheep_inprogress]

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

 

"Come down from there, my lord Prince." The bodyguard's voice drifted up the considerable distance from the ground to the top of the supply wagon, almost lost in the sound of Alti's own breath and drumming heart. "Please, my lord Prince."

Alti executed one last turn-and-flip so as to land at the very edge of the wagon, and grinned down at his guard. "Shield, I am in no more danger here than on stage."

"It's a moving wagon. Indulge me, my lord Prince."

Alti wiped sweat from his forehead and began drawing one foot up as far behind him as it would reach. "You know I would, old friend, but it's far too warm a day to practice inside a wagon, and if I do it on the ground, the wagons will leave me behind!"

"Perhaps practice can wait, then." Shield's stout figure jostled inside its armor as he trotted alongside the wagon, sweat giving an extra sheen to his silvery skin.

"I suppose I could practice this part of the act instead," Alti said, pulling three throwing knives free of his waistband and doing a butterfly kick as he juggled them.

Shield made a choked noise. "Lad, do you know what your parents would do to me if any harm came to you on this foolhardy jaunt—"

"My parents have plenty more sons where I came from." Still, Alti sighed and flipped the knives back into their sheaths. It was unfair to tease Shield too much; as a magically-created vassal, his core purpose of guarding Alti's safety could never be relaxed or ignored. All the same, Alti did need to practice—they'd be arriving at the front in a day or two, and he wasn't quite happy with his performance at the last camp, for all that it seemed to go over well enough.

"Maybe the supply train could stop for a rest," Alti wheedled. "Then I could practice on the ground and everyone, I'm sure, would be much happier for a rest!"

Shield hissed between his teeth. "There'll be no stopping along this stretch, my lord Prince. We shouldn't have come this way at all."

"Don't get so worked up about it, Shield," Alti said, and really, it must be awful to be a vassal, always so anxious about everything. "We hadn't any choice about it, for one thing, with the road washed out, so it's no use worrying. But anyway this area's been under Sedilan control for weeks!"

"Aye, and Drohaini control for weeks before that, and then us again before that, and then them again—it's the way the land lays, it's impossible to keep good hold of it. I won't draw an easy breath until we're out of these hills entirely."

Alti sighed, dropping down to swing one foot off the edge of the wagon, and magicked an apple out of nothing to peel with one of his knives. It wouldn't do anything for hunger, but he wasn't really hungry anyway, he just wanted to taste it.

"I still say it's improper, anyway," Shield grumbled, "for a Prince of Sedila to be running about dressed like a temple dancer."

"I could only wish to be as beautiful and talented a dancer as those Called by the goddess of love—unless you are impugning Mahana's chosen?"

Shield rolled his eyes. "They have their honored place, my lord Prince, and you have yours, which ought never to have included performing for the eyes of the masses, much less risking your neck to do so—"

That was when they first heard the screaming.

Alti had put little stock in tales of the inhuman battle cry of the Drohaini, but it was everything he'd been told and more—an eerie, echoing wail, almost beautiful, that froze his breath and lifted every hair on his skin.

The wagon jolted to a stop, knocking Alti half-off the edge, as everyone in the supply train spent a precious second listening in dawning terror.

Then the Drohaini came into view, dark horses and white armor spilling over the crest of the hill, with a wave of arrows flying before them like a cloud.

Hanging half-off the wagon, some panicked instinct drove Alti back up onto the roof—a mad chance that likely saved his life, as arrows studded the ground where a leap down would have placed him. Shield fell with a choked cry, an arrow jutting from the unarmored joint at his throat.

People were screaming, shouting, running, drawing weapons and dragging wounded friends, and for long incomprehensible seconds all Alti could do was stare down at the body of what had been his guard and protector all his life.

The commander of the supply train was shouting orders, trying to direct the noncombatant performers into and under the wagons, while the soldiers gathered to meet the enemy.

I should do something, Alti thought. I'm the prince, I should do something—at the very least I should hide so I don't get killed—but his body refused to move, plastered flat against the roof of the wagon even as another volley of arrows landed around him.

Then the wave of Drohaini slammed into the haphazard wall that was the supply train's defenders, and what was already chaos became nightmare.

From almost the first moment, some Drohaini cut right through the Sedilan line, and thundered into the midst of the wagons. One kicked in the door of the one nearest Alti, where some of the other dancers were hiding, and Alti found himself on his feet before he knew it, a throwing knife already flying from his hand. It lodged in the soldier's back, toppling him from his horse with a cry.

More soldiers, hot on their comrade's heels, looked round in alarm, and pointed up at Alti. One flicked a hand, sending a magicked ball of nothing-good speeding his way.

Alti flattened against the roof again, and rolled, dropping off the opposite edge—straight onto another soldier.

"Hey!"

Alti still had a knife in his hand. He twisted in the startled soldier's grasp, leaving a line of scarlet across arms and chest until the man released him with a howl of pain. By then the others had rounded the wagon—he ducked one, kicked another, and blinded them all (perhaps permanently) with a blast of white light that gave him time to scramble back up to the roof of the wagon. From there he leapt to the next roof, and the next, and up the flagpole that waved Sedila's colors from the top of the tallest wagon, where he clung tightly, unsure if the tremor throughout his body was his own terror or the imminent collapse of the thin pole.

Spread out below him was a massacre.

The Sedilan soldiers were reduced to a pocket here and there, surrounded and fighting back to back, while Drohaini pulled dancers, cooks and pageboys out of their hiding places and gathered them at swords' point against the wagons. A muledriver who tried to fight back was slashed viciously across the face and left bleeding on the ground. Alti caught sight of the train commander, just as his pocket of soldiers collapsed, disappearing under flashing swords.

I can stop this. The thought held its own deep and particular terror, yet it stilled the fluttering panic in his gut. I am a prince of Sedila and I can stop this.

"We surrender!" he shouted, as loud as his lungs would shout. He tore at the flimsy turquoise bolero that was almost all he wore at present, aside from beads and ribbons—it made for a lousy flag of surrender, but it would have to do—and waved it above his head. "Put up your arms! We surrender!"

Every heartbeat that it took for word to spread was like a stab to his chest. The Drohaini who heard him stopped, reached to stay their comrade's hands, spread the word—and the Sedilans collapsed in relief and despair, screams dying down into ragged weeping.

A rider, in the same blood-spattered white armor as the others but declared commander by a helm with a gleaming white horsehair tail, approached the flagpole and called up to him.

"And who are you, boy, to declare surrender?"

The pole was creaking and splintering under his hands; rather than fall, Alti dropped, landing hard but in a controlled crouch before the commander's horse. Neither commander nor horse shied from the movement, he noticed, though several surrounding soldiers tensed and readied their steel. The commander put out a hand to keep them back.

Alti drew himself up to his full, unimpressive height. "I am Alti Reizanda of Sedila," he said. "Fourth son of the Royal House."

"Well." The commander pulled off his—no, her—helmet, exposing mussed and frazzled red-gold braids, and a face no older than Alti's own. "Isn't that interesting."

 

****

If Princess Tassara was going to fight a pointless, horrifying and unnecessary war, she was at least going to do it right.

That meant leading troops herself, not staying safe at home while her people fought and died. It meant not even trying to retake the Ashland hills again, because enough blood had been spilled for a strategically unimportant region that the Sedilans could easily take back from them. And it meant capturing a Sedilan supply train, when it fell into their laps, because it would be an easy, morale-lifting victory and her men had been on thin rations long enough.

Capture, that had been the goal, not slaughter. She hadn't expected the supply train to put up such a fight—had hoped, in fact, that there might not be any fight at all. A small, surprised force, outnumbered and largely civilian—what did they have to gain by fighting? They ought to have surrendered at once, and called it victory for all.

The presence of the Prince, though, explained much. No commander wanted to be the one who handed a member of the royal family over to the enemy.

So the Prince had done it himself. She wasn't sure whether to be impressed with his pragmatism or repulsed by his cowardice.

Cowardice, she decided reluctantly, looking him up and down and trying not to let her face heat. The boy was dressed like a drinking-hole floozy, his bottom half clad only in some gauzy, fluttering thing that barely touched his thighs, his top half a bare expanse of lean-muscled Sedilan bronze, but for a few strings of beads. A distractingly pretty picture, to be frank, but definitely not the picture of a military leader.

He may not even be the prince at all, she thought. They would have to verify that somehow. "Tie his hands," she ordered the nearest lieutenant. "Keep him guarded. I'll be back for him when we're settled."

"Surely that's not necessary," the pretty princeling said, the words tilted and musical in the Sedilan accent. He drew subtly away from the approaching lieutenant and his rope. "I've surrendered to you. You can have my parole."

"Parole?" Tassara repeated. "That would require trusting the word of a Sedilan. Experience has taught me the error of that."

The princeling stiffened, outraged, and drew breath to say something hot and offended, she was sure—but Tassara didn't hear it, already walking away to get this fiasco of a battle properly locked down.

She circled the supply train, barking orders and verifying what her lieutenants had already reported, getting the wounded seen to (her own men first, then the Sedilans) and the dead gathered for burial (none of her own there, thank the lost gods).

Absently she took down her hair, which was itching with sweat and pulling uncomfortably against its pins, shook it out with her fingers and pulled it back with a band. Her horse, Zephyr, followed loyally behind her, occasionally bumping her shoulder with his nose to request a pat. Battles always left him on edge—excellent quality in a warhorse, but oh well. She'd get one of the horseboys to look after him as soon as they were done calming the supply train's mules.

She had mules now, and wagons, and prisoners both military and civilian—and a prince, oh, what was she going to do with a Sedilan prince? Killing him was always an option, but a distasteful one after he had surrendered (and offered his parole—was he that naïve a fool, or did he think she was?). No, she couldn't kill him unless he did something to really provoke it. She would have to take him home for her mother to deal with.

A plaintive male voice drifted across the slowly-calming mess of the supply train, distinctively royal and Sedilan.

"Must we continue standing about in the sun? You can't possibly be any more comfortable than I am. And how about some water, come to that? Couldn't one of you lovely lads fetch me some water?"

This was going to be a long journey.

 

            Tassara managed to avoid Prince Alti until nightfall, when she took dinner in an emptied wagon repurposed as something of a command tent. If she was going to accept his surrender and transport him back to Drohain, some measure of royal-hostage protocol had to be observed. That meant giving the captive prince the best seat at the table, even if that was camp stools around a broken desk.

She got her first truly clear look at him as he stepped into the wagon; it was dimly lit but she had her spectacles on now, which of course she had not worn into battle. Even if it had been safe to wear glass on her face when people were swinging swords at her, they wouldn't fit inside her helmet. Now she could make out every detail of his thick, tousled black hair, slim muscular figure and bronze skin—very little of it hidden by his ridiculous outfit of underdrawers and beads.

"Why are you still wearing that?" She hadn't meant to be so blunt, but something about the sight had made her brain skip in place.

"You haven't given me an opportunity to change," Alti said—snapped, really. "It's getting rather chilly, too."

Ah. Er. Yes, she could see that. Tassara crossed the wagon to the cloak she'd left piled on a chair and tossed it to Alti, who hurriedly wrapped himself in it. A relief to them both.

"Why are you dressed like that to begin with?" Tassara said, returning to her seat and scooping roasted potatoes onto her plate. "Were you hoping to hide amongst the dancers?" She'd been startled to discover that the supply train traveled with an entertainment troupe; apparently they put on shows at the camps and outposts, wherever they stopped for supply delivery.

Alti looked slightly confused. "I am one of the dancers."

"You said you were a prince!" Exasperated, she set down her fork with excessive force. She'd been right to suspect him, this was all just a ploy engineered for the sake of the surrender—

"I am a prince! I'm also a dancer! Is this hard to understand?" Glancing warily up at her through his lashes, he began helping his own plate.

"You mean to tell me," Tassara said slowly, "that you, a member of the royal family, a person in the direct line of succession, put on dancing performances? For audiences?"

"Audiences of my choosing," he said with an offended snort. "It's not like any old peasant could give a penny at the door and take a gander."

"But camps full of soldiers can?"

Again with the wary glancing, as if he weren't sure she was quite right in the head. "Men and women fighting for Sedila? I can think of no worthier audience."

Tassara refused to like him for that comment. "And the King and Queen approve of this?"

Alti laughed. "Not much. But I assured them…" The smile drained from his face. "I assured them I would be safe."

She felt a peculiar and pointless desire to reassure him, to reverse the loss of the radiant smile. "Well, you are safe, and shall be. My mother will consider your comfort a high priority, for honor's sake."

"Your mother?" He cocked his head, like a puzzled little dog, and she realized with a start that he had no idea who she was. Well, fair enough; she didn't recognize him either. In fact she still wasn't one hundred percent convinced he was Prince Alti at all.

"I suppose we skipped the proper introductions," she said. "I'm Princess Tassara Highspear. Heir to the throne of Drohain." She held out a hand, angled for a shake, not a kiss, as that seemed more appropriate in a stolen wagon wearing battle-blacks and no crown. Alti just stared at her.

"You rag on me for dancing," he said, "when you're going into battle? The heir to the throne? You're mad—and your mother must be mad to let you!"

"It was my mother's idea. I'm to be the head of state, I have to know how to be a leader, have to know what war really means." She frowned. "Are you refusing to shake my hand, princeling?"

"What—no, of course not." He threaded a hand out of the cloak and gripped hers with it, warm and unexpectedly strong. "But it's madness! What if you were killed?"

"Then my sister would be in for a rude rearrangement of her life's priorities." She sighed, pulling her hand belatedly away from Alti's. "I'm kept away from the hottest spots, of course. But my parents both served right at the front, and so did my grandparents before them. You keep your people's morale up by shaking your ass in a frilly skirt? I do it by leading them, by going through the same hardships they do and showing them they can trust me—what are you doing?"

"Leaving," Alti said, disentangling the cloak from his chair. "I find that childish insults impair my appetite."

"Oh, by the lost gods. Sit down, you haven't eaten."

"Apologize first." He crossed his arms over his chest, the movement dislodging her cloak to let candlelight play over brown muscle and glittering beads.

It was funny, really, that the populations of Drohain and Sedila had such different colorations, when they'd been one people once upon a time, at least according to legend. The Sedilans had combined their forces, and eventually their families, with the darker-skinned tribes on their side of the Sea, while Drohain remained pale and alone. Sedila was much warmer and sunnier than Drohain, too, and thus Alti would doubtless have been tan regardless, but even the most sun-kissed Drohaini would never have his night-black hair and eyes—

"Well?" Alti said. "Or do you not know how to apologize? I can walk you through it."

Tassara cleared her throat and tried to gather her strangely distracted thoughts. "Oh, very well, I apologize for my remark." She should have known a Sedilan would consider half-naked dancing a perfectly honorable pursuit.

Alti continued to glare, but returned to his seat and began eating voraciously.

"Leave a bit for the rest of us," Tassara said drily.

"Leave a bit," Alti repeated, around a mouthful of food, how elegant, "of our food for our troops that you killed half of us in order to steal? I'll eat as much as I want, thanks."

"You can stop with the hyperbole, we both know there was only half a dozen dead and only that—" Inexplicably she bit back the words, only that because you were there. The poor idiot probably didn't realize that, and it would be an unnecessary cruelty to point it out. "—only that because you're such terrible fighters."

"Seven." He swallowed, and set down the bread he'd been about to bite, looking suddenly nauseated. "Seven dead."

Tassara frowned, looking back through her memory—no, there'd been only six bodies to bury, she was perfectly sure.

"One was a vassal," Alti said. "They don't really leave a body, especially after a violent death. The magic holding them together just… dissolves in a flash of light. Mostly burns up their clothes, even. Nothing left."

"Oh. We have very few vassals in Drohain," Tassara said, cursing herself for inane chitchat, but not wanting to deal with the haunted grief in Alti's eyes. "It's a very complicated magic, and few of us have the trick of it. Or an interest in developing the trick of it, I suppose."

"His name was Shield. He'd been my bodyguard my entire life. And now he's just… gone."

Tassara knew that look, the empty horror of knowing someone you cared about was dead, and you were responsible. At least she didn't have to wonder anymore if this silly boy was really what he claimed; in spite of everything, that was the look of a prince.

"If he was your bodyguard," she said quietly, "then I'm sure falling in your service was an honor to him."

"Screw honor! He's napping on the job, is what! Who's going to look after me now?" Alti turned away, visibly struggling for control.

Startled by the outburst, Tassara decided it was best to politely ignore the boy until he had recovered himself. She forced down a few bites of her dinner.

"What is going to happen to me now?" Alti asked after a long silence, his voice very quiet now, subdued.

"Probably you'll be held for ransom, prisoner exchange or the like."

"It won't end well for you. My people will do whatever it takes to get me back, but probably not via negotations."

He was right. It would be very like the Sedilans to refuse ransom and instead mount a full-scale attack, however ill-advised, on wherever they suspected Alti to be. Tassara took a sip of her wine, trying to settle her stomach.

"You could just let me go," Alti said, persuasive now, almost playful. He tilted his head, dark curls falling in his eyes. "Give me back for free as a gesture of goodwill."

"Goodwill?" Tassara shook her head. "Where do you get these ideas? Our countries are at war, do you even understand what that means?"

"Maybe such a gesture could end the war."

Tassara couldn't help it; she laughed. "End twenty years of fighting with one gesture."

"It took only one incident to start it. One incident could stop it."

"I suppose I should expect a Sedilan to have such a simplistic view on the matter, but you're immensely wrong. There were hostilities between Sedila and Drohain, off and on, for generations before the sinking of the Swan—"

"So you think it would take a bigger gesture?"

"Much bigger."

"Like what?"

"I—how should I know?" Tassara wanted to inch away from the mocking sort of expectancy in his expression.

He was leaning over the table at her now. "You are going to be the head of state, as you said. Don't you think you should have some kind of plan for ending the war? Or at least knowing what it might take to do so? But perhaps you are content to keep fighting until we kill each other off."

"No, I am not," she snapped. He waited, but when she said nothing further, he eventually leaned back, shaking his head. He picked up his half-eaten plate and left the wagon with both it and her cloak; she could hear him peevishly shrugging off the hands of his guards as they escorted him away.

"Silly, stupid princeling," Tassara muttered under her breath, but only because she knew he was right. The war wasn't going to end by itself. She might be the only person with both the power and the desire to make it happen.

A gesture of goodwill, she thought, her mind racing in a direction it had never considered before.

 

****

 

Alti was accustomed to sleeping through all manner of noise and movement when necessary; his brothers' rowdiness, royal feasts and celebrations, evenings out with fellow performers. But he was not accustomed to sleeping on the hard ground with armed guards watching his every move.

"Explain to me again why I can't sleep in a wagon?" he called, trying to wrap himself more securely in the single blanket he'd been given. "Seeing as how they're my wagons? With my things in them? And everyone else gets to sleep in the wagons? I've a perfectly good bed and it's not as if you lads are using it!"

"We're to keep you under watch," one of the guards said, words slow and lazy and bored in his flat Drohaini accent. "Can't do that inside a wagon. Tight quarters. Not safe."

"Your biceps are bigger around than my head, do you really think I'm such a threat?"

A second guard spoke up. "My best mate's not been able to see anything but golden sparkles since he ran into you, so yeah, we're making sure we can conveniently get a sword into you if need be."

Alti resisted a brief urge to apologize. These men had been attacking him—these men had killed Shield and six other soldiers Alti had known, and he wasn't a bit sorry for making them bleed for it.

But that was exactly the kind of thinking that had kept the war going, wasn't it. Everyone had lost somebody they loved, and wanted the other side to pay for taking them away. And so they kept right on killing each other's loved ones as if eventually they'd run out of revenges to take, when they were only making more. From the very beginning, that's what the war had been about—two nations in mourning, each blaming the other for the loss of their prince or princess aboard the Trumpeter Swan.

"Your mate's sight might come back," Alti said, feeling oddly shy. "I can take a look at him tomorrow. Maybe figure out a way to reverse it."

All the guards' heads turned toward him, speechless for a long moment.

"No, I don't think I'll give you another shot at finishing him off," said the second guard eventually, sounding gruff and flustered. "Our healers can handle it."

Well, he'd tried, Alti thought. At least they considered him dangerous; that was a kind of compliment. He still grumbled under his breath as he curled down tighter inside his blanket.

At least he still had Princess Tassara's cloak; despite her prattle about sharing her men's hardships, the cloak was soft and thick. It smelled nice, too, like frycakes with cream and honey, like sun-warmed grass and rich earth, like—

Like Princess Tassara, most likely, he realized with an embarrassed jolt. Well. Too bad nothing else about her was so nice. Except her hair, maybe. He had to admit her hair was pretty, despite the lack of care she took with it.

Running into the Crown Princess of Drohain out here—that had been a surprise beyond reckoning. She was everything he could have expected a Drohaini Princess to be—cold, stubborn, insulting, and obviously determined to keep the family legacy of bloodshed alive. A right shame, when this mad chance could have meant something, could have been the first step down an important path.

In fact, the more he thought about it, the more insane it seemed, that a Prince of Sedila and Princess of Drohain could meet by chance like this, and have it come to nothing.

"Habri, Lord of Luck, is that your hand I sense in this mess?" he whispered. "Or Rachak War-master, what of you?" Neither god answered, of course, and he wasn't mad enough to bemoan that—clamoring for the gods' attention rarely ended well.

Still, there were ways to look into the matter. He had no cards to read, and the stars would not be helpful on so small a scale, but his own blood could hardly fail him. He wouldn't even have to cut himself; his body bore plenty of marks from earlier in the day, though he didn't really remember getting them.

One of the guards turned to watch, frowning, as Alti shuffled his arms out of the blanket and cloak and began picking at a scab on his elbow.

"Don't do that," the guard muttered, "you'll get it infected."

"It's sweet of you to care," Alti said, "but I'm afraid this is—well, it might be important, anyway. And if it does get infected, that's a sign all on its own, I suppose." He winced as the cut came open, and waited until he had a nice, large bead of blood there before murmuring a spell and touching it to one of the many unwelcome rocks littering the ground around him. A snap of his finger gave him a spark of light to see the result.

"Here now!" The guards were all drawing away, reaching for their swords. "No funny business, you!"

"Nothing funny about it, lads," Alti muttered absently. "Just a bit of fortune-telling. Nothing a good Drohaini puts any stock in, I'm sure."

Two blotches of blood on the stone, not his intention but clearly part of his results. He peered at them closely, trying to listen to his magic as much as his eyes, interpreting the shapes.

That one, it was very similar to the linked circles associated with Mahana, goddess of love. And the other…

The other was the clearest impression of Kinver's four-armed spiral symbol that he'd ever seen in his life.

Don't overthink it, he told himself, feeling cold down to the cores of his bones. She's also goddess of the sea. You'll be crossing the sea to Drohain, that's all.

Just as the Trumpeter Swan had once planned to do. Kinver, Queen of the Depths, had claimed the Swan for her own, as she did whenever she pleased. As she did to all, sooner or later, for Kinver was the Queen all bowed before in the end. Most gods were content with one realm to rule—fire, or harvest, or war, or love—but Kinver had two that were one. Death and the sea.

*

 

Alti did sleep eventually, but only when the night-richness of the sky had faded to gray, the weary stars winking out one by one. When he did, he dreamed of sun-warmed grass, rich earth, and the goddess Mahana condensing from the colors of the sunrise. Which was nonsense, as it was Marith who ruled the dawn, and while easygoing for a goddess, she still wasn't known for sharing her territory.

All of which had his head in quite a muddle when he was nudged awake by the unforgiving toe of a boot. Muttering curses, he squinted up at the most unwelcome form of Princess Tassara, leaning over him with the dawn sunlight blazing in her hair.

"Ugh, what?" he demanded.

Tassara put her hands on her hips. "I think we should get married."