The Nightborn by Isabel Cooper (howl and other poems TXT) 📗

hallway and footmen brought their cloaks. It was not the most elegant moment Zelen had experienced.

Branwyn’s cloak was thick black wool, lined and trimmed with gray and brown fur, and an inch or two shorter than her gown: practical, again. She started to reach for it before the footman put it on her, bumped his hand in the process, and grinned awkwardly. “Apologies.”

“Sickeningly helpless, aren’t we?” Zelen said when another man in livery had helped him into his red brocade cloak. “I promise I do know how to dress myself, rarely as I may call on the skill.”

Laughing, Branwyn took his offered arm again, though with a carefulness in her movements that made Zelen sure she spent little time in such a position. He would have wagered as much even before: her skin was smooth for a warrior’s, but the marks of sword and bow were still there. She smelled mostly of the mint-scented soap common to the better sort of inn, but slightly of leather and metal as well. “I admit, I’m not used to servants.”

“And that,” Zelen said, “is probably the other reason Rognozi left you. He expected that your retainers would get directions. His man probably spent a few minutes trying to find them.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” said Branwyn. “I hope it wasn’t inconvenient for him.”

“No, he’d give up quickly enough. Rognozi was born and raised when nobody would travel alone, that’s all. Not even a soldier.”

A glint in her eyes and a slight tilt of her lips showed that Zelen had guessed right.

The gilded magnificence of the Star Palace gave way to the gardens. Trees blazing crimson and gold in autumn colors lined the pathway toward the gates. Beyond them were bare flower beds and rosebushes where the last petals of the season spread blood-red on the ground, casualties of the rain that had slackened to an unpleasantly damp mist.

“I hadn’t heard the name Thyran since I grew too old for tutors,” Zelen said.

“Mostly, neither had I,” said Branwyn, and sighed. “That’s part of what I’m up against, of course. Even the worst—or best, in a way—of necromancers couldn’t raise a man a hundred years dead, and the council knows it.”

“Then what happened?”

She gave Zelen a look that felt as though she mapped every inch of his face, then said: “He never died.”

They came to the garden gates, where the trees parted and fanciful wrought-iron and silver bars allowed a view of Heliodar’s shining many-colored roofs. A few still stood half-fallen-in, and there were gaps that didn’t appear in paintings from a hundred years before. Zelen had gone all his life without really calling that to mind, and now his attention was drawn to the absences, the scars that still lingered.

“The general who faced him set off a spell and took them both out of time,” Branwyn went on once they’d passed through the gate. “Then, one of Thyran’s more historically minded surviving minions discovered his whereabouts and how to break the enchantment. He didn’t get a wonderful reward for his pains, but he succeeded.”

“A hundred years of sleep didn’t improve Thyran’s temper, I take it?”

“No.”

They took the road down, though not very far. Rognozi’s mansion sat just below the palace on Ravens’ Hill. Zelen searched vainly for a comment with wit to it, abject fear not being quite the thing to show to a woman one admired, short-foundationed though that admiration might be.

Thyran. At eight, Zelen had dressed up as the man—well, in principle, though it had mostly been a matter of black cloth and injudiciously applied raspberry jam—to try to frighten his sisters. He’d gotten a slap from Alize that had made his ears ring, and another from his nurse. After his father had heard the news, Zelen had slept on his stomach for a week.

A son of Verengir did not use that name lightly.

“I can understand why,” Branwyn said into the silence, bringing Zelen back to the present. “Not only does it sound unlikely, but nobody would want to believe it. I didn’t.”

“You mentioned other signs.”

“Ah. Yes. It gets a bit complicated,” she said. “Too much so, I thought, to explain at the end of the council session, with all of you eager to go about your business. It seems that Amris var Faina didn’t precisely die either.”

“General Faina?” Military history had never been one of Zelen’s strong points, but he’d read enough. The man had stopped Thyran at the end and supposedly died in the process.

“I can swear to that too.”

She spoke with a patience that embarrassed Zelen. “I trust your account,” he said hastily, though he hadn’t been sure he did before. “But you have to allow a man a bit of shock. Has Letar gotten tired of visitors?”

Branwyn laughed. It was a quiet, smooth sound and incongruous with the sharp, dark humor in her face. “I wouldn’t blame Her for it, but no. Faina’s lover became a soulsword after he died. The soulsword and his Sentinel found Faina and brought him back to the present day. Faina was the one to recognize Thyran.”

“And the, er, soulsword recognized Faina?”

“Just so. It’s a strange story, I’ll grant.”

“Certainly not what I was expecting to hear today.”

“Nor any of your fellows, I noticed.” She gazed ahead of them, to where green-painted roofs sprouted over another set of gardens: the first signs of the high lord’s mansion. “I don’t blame them for not believing, or not wanting to. Nobody did at Oakford either.”

“You may find it worse here,” said Zelen gently. “This is where Thyran came from, after all, and where he learned to dedicate himself, and we’ve never been able to find out how. Bit of an old wound, you understand.”

“And nobody did? Find anything out?” Branwyn kept surveying the landscape.

“I’m sure the priests tried to learn more when it happened, but the city’s largely spent the last hundred years trying to forget he ever existed. Particularly the nobility.”

“You seem to be one of the exceptions,” she said, directing that sharp scrutiny at