Book One Prologue : Marshal Voight
THE MARK OF THE WOOD LANDS
38th DAY OF AUTUMN
No map ever tells the truth of the land. Summ Voight had not known this when he first fell in love with charts as a boy.
No matter how accurate the placement of towns and roads, shores and borders, once ink sets into paper those roads and borders shift, shores creep inexorably inland, towns slide into the sea or swell with refugees. Crumbling atlases unwittingly revealed their lies to him before he ever saw territory beyond the city of his boyhood, one map to the next as he studiously put them in order, different years carefully scribed in the corners, different coastlines traced thinly or double-lined in feeble confidence, humanfolk pressed further westward, further toward the dusk as ancient history washed into the present.
His father had sent him to study maps under the priests who served as stewards of the grand libraries of Strandel, a monumental port built by foreign exiles on the rotted planks of an unnamed Daumie town on an unmarked crossroads in the wild sunset plains of civilization’s western edge. It was now the proudest city of Daumiand, imposing in its architecture, celebrated for its schools, and not the seat of Daumie government only from fear that its expatriate sectors might corrupt the House of Elders with alien ways.
And from fear it might tumble into the sea as so many cities had before.
The cavernous stone chambers of those libraries felt torturously cramped as the boy read the truth of the land revised against the unrelenting advance of the waters, names of so many human towns, cities, and whole nations erased map by map, century by century, until the pens of cartographers were forced to sketch the contour of the waves against the border that had once separated Daumiand from the vast lands to the west.
The priests, encouraged by the boy’s devotion to the atlases, had told him that maps were drawn from God’s view of the world, looking down from the heavens. Summ was not so encouraged. God, who had lifted the plains from the depths as a gift to humankind, had watched as they slipped back under the tide, year after long year. His love of maps moldered with dread. He could hear the steady scrape of the surf through the library windows, like a great hungry cat clawing at the door of humankind.
After earning the birjan on his thirteenth birthday, Summ began traveling with his father to the other cities of Daumiand over the somber winter to buy cider, flour, and guns for his general store. The boy learned that the maps lied even about the present. He had seen maps painted so that forests were a happy green, seas blue and steady, fields yellow with grain. These were summer maps, telling quarter-truths. And a quarter-truth was mostly lie.
∇
Voight stood atop the Gristhod, a scarred ridge of low hills, long shorn of trees, now mottled by gray bushes and pale brown grass. The wind was cold on his stubbled face, and the tears it brought seemed to freeze on his cheeks. He knew this was a foolish thought; they were drying in the winter’s bitter air.
On the calendar, it was mid-autumn. Like the maps he knew as a boy, the calendar often lied. Summer had been weak, and winter had come early.
He set the butt of his long gun on the rock of the trail and wiped his eyes with a leather sleeve. His knuckles were ashen against the deep brown of his fingers. He studied the creases in his skin for a moment, the sallow cast of his nails, the single gray curl halfway down his trigger finger.
Down the dead slope, the Mayson farmhold was easily picked out against the buff fields, like a half-dozen pink and blue dice arranged in two neat rows inside a square, brown case. The dice were the houses, brightly painted like the great halls of most high-born Daumies, one house for each of the Mayson sons and two for the widower himself. The brown case surrounding them all was a log palisade. The farmhold was also a fortress.
This was the edge of civilization. Behind Voight, the plain of Daumiand reached back for two hundred miles, towns and farms and far cities and orchards all stripped and waiting out the winter, and at the far eastern edge of all that, the hungry seas.
In front of him to the west, beyond the Mayson farmhold, beyond many acres of flat and winter-barren fields, beyond crude summerhand shacks too small to be seen at this distance, stood the Mark of the Wood Lands, a dark wall of trees, unclothed of leaves and sleeping until Spring, as straight as a castle wall along the horizon. From atop the Gristhod, the distant forest was a thin seal of black mortar between white winter sky and gray winter fields, barely real.
But, Voight knew that this delicate line was but the near edge of a wilderness of hills and trees that could swallow Daumiand many times over, a haunt of the hostile alfanfolk who neither welcomed humans nor suffered them to live on their margins. They would raid the Markholds, steal children, down a summerhand with a single arrow loosed from the dark of the woods, or fix a sleeping overseer to his own straw bed with long stakes through his thighs and shoulders. The alfan were particularly fond of this last tactic. There was something of a ritual about it.
The alfan would send crows or yellowjays to unpen a Markhold’s chickens and pigs, or poke the eyes from cows and horses, or drape a cloth over the top of a chimney so the house below would fill with smoke as those who slept there dreamed themselves to death. They could rally the beasts of the forest, or even the forest itself, to run down and throttle any human who braved the wild. And, if a farmholder dared ride the circuit of his lands for inspection or crop review, a party of alfan scouts might simply rush from the woods to bash out his brains with oaken clubs.
All of this violence was hidden in that deceptively slim, black line against the horizon.
The man Summ Voight was familiar with this savage truth because he was a marshal of Daumiand, and the marshals were charged with encroaching upon the wilderness, finding trails through the Wood Lands and, when they could, murdering the alfan as they slept through the winter. “Culling” as it was called by the marshals, scouts, and knights who patrolled the Mark. The brutal work of attrition in the Long War, which had now seen over a thousand gray winters as the seas rose, erasing one human land after another and pressing humankind against the fringe of the Wood Lands.
The maps Voight had studied as a boy simply read: “Here Are Elves.”
∇
The trail down the foothills of the Gristhod was gentle enough, ice coating the rocks in nooks where the sun rarely fell. Here and there along the trail, the redoubts of the farmhold sat like giant stone cubes, refuges where the family could hide during a raid, although the Maysons had not had to do that for decades. The redoubts were also homes for the overseers who captained the summerhands, and for the Maysons’ cauleiros, knights who patrolled the Mark, held the farmhold, and defended the family.
Voight was looking for a particular caul, a knight he’d known when he was a boy, one who had watched as his devotion to maps turned to nightmares and then to oaths. First an oath before God to recover the sacred Cornerstone that had once kept the plains above the waters, and then the oath before the elders of Daumiand that made him a marshal.
He knew her redoubt. He stopped to see her whenever he went into the Wood Lands. Hers was the third keep along the trail from the ridge.
First was the redoubt of the dreaded chief overseer Kurtafel, a distant cousin of the marshal who had lost an eye to an alfan spear. He was housed at the edge of the Maysons’ land to discourage summerhands from fleeing to the east. The stone of the keep, painted ghost white, was rudely carved, jagged at the top like a row of shark’s teeth. It lurked in the shadow of a steep gully on the south side of the trail, its walls mottled with frost. The pink carcasses of three dried and gutted antelopes hung from iron rings near the gate of the redoubt. To one side was a row of crude wooden kennels, where the one-eyed captain kept his pack of hunting dogs.
The kennels were empty as Voight walked past. The chimney was dead. It was winter, and Kurtafel’s summerhands would have completed their contracts and gone home for the winter, south to Verqia or east into Daumiand. Kurtafel was likely at the farmhold itself, enjoying the old man’s hospitality.
Second was the keep of Caul Pitt, a Hyrsian knight whose father had also served the Maysons as a landsrider. From what Voight had heard, Pitt was a frail echo of the warrior his father had been, and the elder Mayson kept him on only because he felt a debt to his father. The yellow, gritty stone of the Hyrseman’s redoubt was rounded and worn, melted by rain and wind. It looked like a child’s sandcastle. It had been painted red once, but it did not keep paint well.
A recent pile of dung just outside the stable told Voight the man was not at home. Likely also at the farmhold. A thin wisp of smoke swept back and forth from the flue like a kitten’s paw under a closed door. He hadn’t bothered fully putting out the fire before he had left.
Voight could see the keep of Caul Gÿrien down the trail before the smell of horse dung cleared his nostrils. The redoubt was distinctively unpainted, bare black stone with red blocks alternating along the upper edge of the walls. There was no stable; the keep was large enough that the knight’s steed could stay inside. It was the largest redoubt on the trail, fit for a giant.
As he was about to shout her name, he noticed fresh hoof prints leading from the gate. She did not abuse the old man’s company, and would not be at the farmhold except to issue a report. She was out on patrol. Voight shrugged, adjusted the strap of his long gun on his shoulder. A rock squirrel peeked out from behind a dead bush, then scurried up the rocky slope.
He followed the tracks of the knight’s steed, a large horse so heavy its hooves dug deep even into the frozen ground. Past a half-dozen more redoubts and two ancient stone gates, as the trail settled into the broad valley of the farmhold, the air was still cold, but growing warmer.
He set his teeth. The ground’s going to melt soon and be a mess.
∇
The palisade was a long striped wall: pale, fresh logs among the old, darkened wood marked where rotted beams had been replaced in the spring. Marshal Voight was always impressed with the vigilance of the Maysons. Or, at least, with the prudence of the elder of the farmhold, Pareinga Mayson, who could remember the rough summers under the last House of Elders, when four mild winters had strengthened the alfan and emboldened their brigadiers. The raids had been brutal.
The old man had lost his wife in those raids, and Caul Pitt had lost his mother and father. Voight had been a boy then, but he heard the rumors in his father’s store in Strandel. During those warm years, the sylvages nearly drove the Markholders back over the Gristhod. Gÿrien had been there, fighting alongside a much younger Pareinga, defending the Mayson farmhold, laying her sword into the green flesh of the foe. It had been the fight that earned her the caul.
Voight felt the ground giving under his boots, the crunch of ice giving way to a wet squish. The palisade was glistening with the meltwater of the night’s frost. As he passed the corner of the fortification, he saw the familiar stone namüs of the farmhold, a round stone platform in the dwarven style, outside the palisade. The white dogs leashed to its base, clearly Kurtafel’s pack, turned and began to bark at him. Their tails were wagging to the right. It was theater, a show of aggression that disguised their recognition of the marshal.
Standing on the namüs were several rough-looking Daumie guards with plain black birjans tight against their heads. Kurtafel was tallest among them, his ruined eye a white blot on his deep brown face, black curls like a wild verge around the edge of his birjan. Pitt stood beside him, a pink-faced Hyrsian in leather armor, his blond hair held back by the purple caul of his knighthood. An absurdly long musket leaned against his shoulder.
Three of the old widow’s sons stood near the edge of the namüs, conspicuously clean with hair neatly covered by bright birjans, dressed in thigh-length topshirts and loose trousers, looking better suited for the polite cities in the east than the frontier. The sight of them tightened Voight’s stomach. Something soft was getting into humankind. A despair, surrender to the rising sea, resignation to being pressed against the narrow shelf of land they had won from the elves?
With a stomp of his iron-hobbed boot, the chief overseer shouted his dogs into silence: “Be quiet, you beasts!”
As Voight stepped around to the far side of the namüs, he could finally see the elder Pareinga Mayson, sitting like a king in a wicker throne, staring toward the far forest and smoking an elaborate hookah. The old man’s yellow-brown skin, wrinkled but not sagging, reminded Voight of his father, who had also lived for years as a widower. Also on the edge of a wilderness, not the wild of the elves but the slow creeping wilderness of the sea.
Voight stepped up to the namüs, the mossy edge of the ancient stone coming up to his chest. Kurtafel stared into the distance with his one good eye, while his underlings kept their eyes on the elder. The younger Maysons shuffled in their flimsy street shoes. Their feet have to be frozen by now.
Caul Pitt smirked at him.
He felt an urge to reach toward his throat, to touch his marshal’s gorget, to feel the curve of cool iron under his fingertips. He tightened his grip on the flintlock’s strap instead, and stopped with a polite nod to the elder of the Markhold. Pareinga eyed him with suspicion, but nodded his response.
Caul Pitt grinned sidelong at Kurtafel, but the overseer did not return his look. The tall Hyrsian repositioned the musket against his other shoulder and gestured toward Voight with a pink hand.
“It’s the Summer Marshal!” Pitt chuckled toward the younger Maysons, who smiled blandly back. “That’s what they call you, isn’t it? Yet, I’ve never seen you go into the woods except in the dead of winter like anyone else.”
“Anyone else,” Voight said flatly. They were the first words he had spoken aloud in days.
“Anyone else?” Pitt said, his brow knit. Pareinga glanced up at his blond knight and took a draw from the hookah.
“In summer,” Kurtafel said to the Hyrsian, “you’re too busy shoving your little pink cock in my field hands’ wives to know who’s coming and going.”
Pareinga slapped his hand against the arm of the wicker chair. “You will maintain the dignity of this house!”
The overseer glared at the caul, but answered his master: “Aw, sir.”
The pipe’s mouthpiece settled on the widow’s lip. “Marshal Voight.” He drew deeply, the water bottle rattling against the stone of the namüs.
“No time to talk, Elder. I wanted to announce my presence while passing, out of respect for your name.”
“Not required under your commission,” the old man said around a mouthful of smoke. “The House of Elders says you have right-of-way into the Mark. But I appreciate it.”
The Mayson sons adopted a common look of indifference. Caul Pitt and the Daumie guards stared at Voight with practiced menace. Kurtafel tapped an iron-hobbed boot twice on the stone surface of the namüs.
Pareinga scratched his rough cheek with a thumb. He floated the hint of a grin, seeming to acknowledge the posturing of his entourage without looking at them. “You’re following Caul Gÿrien’s tracks.”
Voight nodded. The elder vanished for a moment behind the broad leather brim of the marshal’s hat.
“She’s gone culling in the woods.” He cocked his jaw with a musing look and raised his eyebrows at Voight. “Working.”
Voight nodded again. To avoid looking at Kurtafel and Pitt, he glanced west toward the Wood Lands, then back to the elder whose land he was crossing. “I feel obliged to say that I have a few words for her before I breach the wild.”
The old man leaned his head back to steal a look at his knight and his chief overseer. He drew on the mouthpiece and studied the marshal again. His eyes were suspicious again.
“A few words,” he said.
“By your leave,” Voight said.
For a long moment, the two men looked at each other. Voight could see the gray of the widow’s stubble, the weathered yellow around his brown eyes, the even more weathered yellow of the birjan cloth wrapped tightly to his skull. There was a rude scar on the elder’s cheek. This was a man who had seen trouble. Voight felt an ache of guilt to add to the elder’s worries.
“You’re a bold man, Marshal Voight. The House doesn’t require you to tell me anything at all.”
Voight looked at the dogs. They were panting puffs of mist and looking friendly. He turned back to Pareinga.
“Only by your leave, Elder Mayson.”
The old man drew on the water pipe, which rumbled obligingly in the cold winter air. He shrugged and blew out a cloud of white smoke.
“She’s gone culling,” he said. “In the woods.”
∇
Voight followed Caul Gÿrien’s tracks to where they led into the sleeping forest, miles from the Mayson farmhold, across the desolate winter fields and past several summerhand shacks.
He stopped at the bulwark, a low mound of earth that marked the western edge of the worked fields. Beyond the bulwark was a stretch of open, barren land, nearly an arrow shot from the edge of the forest. The Markholders maintained it as a defense against alfan raiders. They called it the Verge.
The Verge was a wasteland. He tried to calculate how many squandered acres this boundary constituted along the three-hundred-mile stretch of the Markholds. After a few moments, he gave up on the arithmetic. Too many acres. Yet, planting the Verge would simply necessitate another step into the Wood Lands, another felling of trees, another Verge. And the whole calculation all over again, further revising the truth of the land.
And even then, it would do nothing to change the fact that, two hundred miles to the east, the sea was drowning acres of farmland every year.
The breeze from the Wood Lands changed as he stood with one boot on the bulwark. Winter touched his cheeks and a light snow began to fall onto the silence of the frozen earth. There was a light rustling all around, the “snowbreath” as the Hyrsians called it. The trees of the Mark stood like a palisade, more openly spaced than the fortress of the Mayson farmhold but darker and sharp with warning, bare and spiny limbs arrayed like thorns against the open air of the fields.
The human are creatures of open ground. The shadows of the forest are for the alfan, the rocky barrens for the jotan, the dark underworld for the dvergan. Something deep in Voight’s soul threatened mutiny against his resolve to breach the Wood Lands. It was against God’s plan. But, so was the loss of the Cornerstone.
For a long time, the forest was a blank mural behind the gentle curtain of snow. Then, from the shadow between two trees that were no different from any other pair of trees along the Mark, she rode out atop her tall Hyrsian steed, black hair pouring from under her silvery caul like a cataract. She held a pole arm against her shoulder, the long curved blade almost a scythe, steel gleaming a moist amber sheen. As she crossed the Verge, he noted three ropes tied to the saddle, dragging a heavy burden from the woods.
She lifted her free hand when she saw him and gently nudged the horse in his direction with her heels. He touched the brim of his leather hat and nodded.
The far ends of the ropes cleared the forest, knotted to rude iron hooks. Speared by the hooks were three clumps of dried vines and leaves, each the size and shape of a large sack and mottled with the dark amber of dried blood. She had cut them from the trunks of trees, he knew, with the pole arm. He could hear the weight of them grinding and scraping against the frozen ground. They were alfan cocoons, the sylvages inside slain as they were dreaming through the winter.
“Summ,” the knight said. Her horse came to a halt without a cue.
It was the same round face he had known as a boy, smooth skin like slate, clear sapphire eyes calm with the poise of decades at war. Her hair had remained dark while his had become sprinkled with gray. As the humans around her dimmed in their mortality, Gÿrien had abided in her jotan youth. He was one of the few who knew her as the Huldre Caul.
In Strandel, she had passed herself off as one of the remnants of the sunken lands, of which there were plenty in that city, a descendant of human refugees from the ancient east. Her complexion was explained as a trace of mongrel blood from some distant jotan ancestor. But, one Daumie boy had seen the heavier truth in the blue cast of her skin. In her stance as tall as any Hyrseman. In her full, lavender lips. Adolescent infatuation drove his curiosity until he guessed her true origins. She was pure giantkind, an alien among humanfolk.
Why she had chosen to join the human’s struggle he had never guessed. It was her people who had stolen the Cornerstone and allied with the elves. But she had taken on the caul as he took on the gorget, exiling herself on the frontier where the force of her sword mattered more than her race.
He wasn’t sure where to start. “You’ve been out culling,” he said.
“It was a weak summer.” She glanced over her shoulder at the elf-nests in tow. “They’re sleeping hard this winter. And low.”
They’re sleeping harder and lower now. These were three elves who would never again loose an arrow into the Maysons’ fields, never again murder an overseer in his bed. He looked long at the silhouette of her pole axe against the winter’s cloud. He took courage from her mettle. It was the one constant he knew from his boyhood.
“What I am about to say must be kept in confidence.”
She nodded. “News from Burrin?”
“I’m meeting new allies. Others who want to end the Long War.”
She nodded again and let the long handle of the weapon slide through her hand until its butt crunched against the frosted earth. She cast a dark figure against the white sky, the arc of the blade like a black halo over her head. Snowflakes sprinkled the caul and her mount, and the wall of the forest had become a blur behind her.
He went on: “First at a hillock deep in the forest, and then we’re moving ahead to the Pentacle.”
She lifted her brows at that. The Pentacle was a gully on the far side of the Wood Lands, in the distant barrens where the Cornerstone itself was rumored to be hidden. Breaching the forests of the elves beyond the wildest strategies of the timid generals of Verqia, Hyrsia, and Daumiand. They stood still for a long cold moment, lost in their common cause, lost in their long affection, in his iron gorget and her silver-laced caul, in his oath before God and her mysterious jotan devotion to humankind’s Long War.
“Of all the times you’ve visited me here at the Maysons’,” she smiled her violet smile, “I think I may remember this meeting most fondly.”
He grinned for the first time in weeks. His lips cracked in the winter air, but he did not care. It was good to muster with a friendly soul. He let the long gun slip from his shoulder to rest its butt against the bulwark. “You’re just happy for an occasion to slay the sylvage.”
She chuckled, a peculiarly cheery noise in the grave plot all around them. The dead alfan in their lifeless cocoons, dead ground in a dying land, in a dying war.
“Will you join us at the Pentacle?”
She sniffed, brushed a snowflake from her nose with a gloved thumb. Her horse shook its head. “Do you remember when we last saw each other in Strandel?”
Voight was thrown from the moment, deep into his past. When he was a youth, nearly sixteen, nearly free of his father’s rein and free to choose his path, merchant or marshal. His last winter journey, south along the coast to the Daumie port of Siambic, where his father could trade cider and smoked beef for goods imported from Verqia. There had been a sandy lowland near the coast, a basin where sea grasses topped the low dunes and three streams fed a small freshwater lake. There was a town, a day’s walk from the sea. He had kissed a girl in that town. Her lips had been plump, her hair as dark as a moonless night and gorgeously kinked like chain armor. He had played ball with the boys there. He had lost. He had sworn to beat them on his way back, on his birthday.
While Summ and his father were in the port city of Siambic, trading for rice and wine and handsomely carved Verqeño jewelry boxes, the low ridge separating the basin from the vast seas had slumped and the tide stormed the valley they had left days before. The whole area flooded at once, the lake and the town smothered in salt water. On their return, their path was blocked by a broad and reeking bay rimmed with the drowned residents of that town, gulls and terns squabbling over the carrion. As they followed the new shore, his father had not spoken a word until they passed the bloated corpses of the boys his son had played ball with. “Look away, son.” But, he couldn’t look away. Those boys traced a line in the surf that would soon be scratched onto a new map.
Summ never saw her, but he knew the kissing girl was there somewhere, bobbing along the new shoreline. Everyone was dead.
When they arrived in Strandel, he had rushed to confront Gÿrien about her kinship with the jotan who had stolen the Cornerstone, who had set the slow deluge in motion centuries before. She confessed her ruse pretending to be human, but also that she had been spending her summers fighting in the defense of the Mark and was returning to take the caul offered her by Pareinga Mayson. They swore their friendship in blood, and she went with him to the Marshal House. As a non-Daumie, she could not stand as a legal witness to his oath, but her witness was what mattered to him.
“I don’t remember the name of that town,” Voight said.
“Soon enough,” Caul Gÿrien said, “no one will.” Her face was steel.
Voight lifted the flintlock back to his shoulder. He cursed his friend for summoning this memory. Salt water rose and dried again on his cheeks. He brushed his face with a leather sleeve and thanked God for his friend.
Gÿrien lifted the pole axe to her shoulder. “Will you give me time to think about it?”
Voight nodded, the broad brim of his hat obscuring the caul.
“When this is over, I will go back to the libraries of Strandel and make sure that name is remembered.”
“I know you will,” Caul Gÿrien said.