Winter 973
Winter was always my favorite time to visit Naal. I loved to sit on a high tower balcony, or on the covered porch of a friend’s estate, and watch the mighty storms roll in from the south. It was the only place in the mortal world where I ever saw lightning as fierce as what I saw growing up in Starview.
I liked it less out in the sandy hills and valleys of the Sacred Desert. The wind was relentless and unforgiving. The smell of petrichor, elsewhere soothing or even inviting, was somehow threatening, here. Tal Thannu’s lightning cracked overhead: bright bolts leaping cloud to cloud, just minutes ahead of the heavy rains. I offered up yet another prayer to the storm god, that he not let my quarry escape me in the drama of the storm.
I had wronged Veralar Tann on our quest for the sword. My options in that moment had been few, if any, but the curse I had laid had been a profound injustice, all the same. I had robbed her not just the glory to be had on the quest, and the chance to fight for and beside her friends, but of her very self. Orland Borgon might have lived, had she been with us. Our time in the Holy Empire would have been … profoundly stranger.
For the thousandth time, I regretted not using the Rorgoth Throne to find and aid her in the hour that had I wielded it. By the time, long after Elana’s coronation ceremony and festivities, I had finally been at liberty to turn my time and attention to searching her out, that trail had long grown cold. Shadow and Crescent – contemptuous of, furious at, and disgusted with me by the time I found them – had lost her in the Namoran lowlands. She had been their constant, if forgetful, companion one morning; the next morning, she had been gone, her trail mysteriously imperceivable. Worse for me, she had either traveled a profoundly great distance, since she’d left them, or she had retained some benefit of her Shan Khul disciplines that let her hide herself from me. No matter how I had searched my crystal ball, I could not find her.
Then, after months and months of searching, word had come to me by way of Kendel Twinblade, an adventurer for whom I had made two most excellent swords, that friends of his had met a strange woman in the desert: enormously tall and strong, wielding a black staff that was sometimes a katana and sometimes a greatsword, but no one knew her name.
And so I had made arrangements to go south, accompanied by Khanaarre and Rennin. Khanaarre came as my friend and Veralar’s, to aid me and to speak for me, and because she was still my custodian under Vencari law. Rennin came on behalf of the emperor, to be certain Khanaarre and I acted in Elana’s interests, and because we needed an armsman. I was glad to have both of them, even if they were not both always glad to be there.
In the south, we found crisscrossing trails of rumor. A noble warrior who aided all she came across. A fine companion who did not know her own name or where she’d come from, and who disappeared into the night. A nameless champion of the arenas in Namora and Naal. A lone woman who fought off a dozen bandits using only their own swords. She wielded a black staff, or black sword. Some said it was a relic of lost Illustria, a shadowy thing that could be whatever weapon she needed. But everywhere we went, she had already gone.
The Nameless Swordsman had kept a step ahead of us for months, now, flitting across Naal and the Sacred Desert, from city to ruin to nomad camp like a fly across a battlefield map. I had never imagined to see so much of the desert; she seemed to have made it her home.
Finally, in the foothills of the Mountain of God, we caught up to her in the company of a band of Sh’vry nomads. I had known little of the Sh’vry, save their famous violet eyes and that they counted themselves the true heirs of fallen a’Rasyr. On this quest I had also learned that they rode horses, and sometimes stranger desert beasts, and that they kept as many secrets from their Naalar allies and any other northerners as they could, a game not unlike the uurnigath had played me on the matter of their wolf-friends or wolf-forms, whichever that truth would someday prove to be.
The nomad encampment was already well-secured against the coming storm: low, squat tents that reminded me of the Jor yurts we had used crossing the Lightning Plains, secured by nets of guy lines and corkscrew stakes twisted deep into the ground. Their cook-fires had already been extinguished and their tent-flaps secured from within. We saw no-one, in fact, except for my contact, who pointed us to a lone tent at the far edge of the camp.
Khanaarre and Rennin followed close on my heels, silent and a little sullen. They were both mad at me. Rennin had never really forgiven me for … any of it, which I supposed was fair. Khanaarre was mad because we were days overdue to turn back toward home. We had gone so much deeper into the deserts than we had ever intended. If we pressed on much further, did not catch our quarry or turn back soon, or if we got caught in the wrong storm, I would be making us late to her wedding.
Rennin had come for Veralar’s sake. I suspected he hoped she would kill me, or that it would be him who got to speak her name and save her, not me. Whatever else happened, he had come to offer her a guide home and a place in Elana’s court.
Khanaarre, I know, had hopes to talk Veralar down from lethal vengeance. I will admit that I rather hoped she succeeded. But if Veralar wasn’t here, I knew that they would force me to turn back and resume the hunt in the spring.
We found the Nameless Swordsman’s tent at the edge of the encampment. Twice before, we had found such a tent, abandoned before we could arrive. We feared to find this one abandoned, as well. This time, though, we could see as we approached that it was lit from within.
Circling the tent, we found the door flap tied open, facing the oncoming storm. Sitting at the back of the tent but looking out through the doorway into that storm, was a tall and powerfully built woman, dressed in the layered robes of the Sh’vry, complete with a veil about her shoulders, waiting to be pulled up over her face, and the silver bells tied to the tassels of her fringes, the sound of whose chimes drove off evil winds. Her hair, once bleached gold and teased to stick straight up, was gone, shaved off like many desert peoples, but I still knew her. Even if I had not recognized her face, I would have known her by the black staff that lay at her feet: the magical weapon I had made for her from her swords and fighting sticks and the ward I had carved to hide her from the searching spells of Aemillian.
She did not respond when she saw me, though, except perhaps for a flicker of a flinch behind her eyes. So I shook the bells at the edge of the tent’s curtain door, as we had learned was the custom.
“Come in.” I didn’t recognize the voice, but it came from inside the tent.
There was plenty of room for us inside, but I waited, as did Khanaarre and Rennin close behind me, for the Nameless Swordsman to nod. Only then did we enter, settling ourselves on the floor before her while her companion – a middle-aged Sh’vry woman in modest robes – closed the tent up against the storm rolling in behind us.
“Derrek Rowan,” the Nameless Swordsman said, just as the winds rose. She pronounced my name like a curse. “I see that you’ve come for me at last.”
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And so ends The Prince’s Fighters, my second full-length novel.
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