COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2004, 2013 by Robert Reginald
Part of this book was previously published in different form under the title The Dark-Haired Man.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For the members of the English Department at Gonzaga University between 1965-1969, to whom I’ll always be grateful for their very kind advice and consent, especially:
Fran J. Polek
William P. Safranek
Franz K. Schneider
John P. Sisk
(with thanks to Dean Patricia Terry for her help)
—And for Katherine Kurtz,
for giving me permission
L’ENVOI
But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and notwithstanding go out to meet it.
—Thucydides
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For those of you who care about such things, this novel is an alternate history set in a Europe whose geographic features are similar or even identical to our own, with the major (but not sole) divergence from our timeline having occurred in the year 363 ad, when Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, Constantine I’s cousin, was not killed in battle against the Persians (as he was in our world), but lived on for another forty years.
For the geographic and personal names herein, I used mostly Slavic, Hungarian, German, and Greek models; there are no silent letters in such constructs. Forward accents are intended to provide guides to stress in Slavic words, such emphasis often appearing in locations unfamiliar to westerners; in Hungarian names, however, the accents merely indicate differences in vowel sounds. I’ve employed circumflexes in Greek words to distinguish between the letters epsilon and êta, and omicron and ômega. Umlauts can denote gutteral vowel sounds—or dress up otherwise pedestrian names. The letter “ß” stands for “ss.”
In the end, of course, I have my own ideas about pronunciation, and each reader will undoubtedly have hers or his. Mangle them as ye will, folks, and no one will be the wiser, unless you actually hear me read a passage someday, and then you can tell me, with as haughty an air as possible, that I’ve got it all wrong! I do try to have fun when creating these things; some of the names here have been invented from the flimsiest of constructs, bearing no discernible relationship to anything that anyone but I will ever be able to determine. Oh, well!
PROLOGUE
“I ENDLESSLY REPEAT THE STORY OF THOSE DAYS”
Anno Domini 1241
Anno Juliani 881
Always, the marriage!
Her couselors were ever at her heels, nipping away like a pack of curs worrying a fox, and barking and snarling all the while. Gad, if she could just get them to SHUT UP and leave her alone for half a day!
But of course, they never would.
Maybe, she thought, just maybe she should make a virtue of necessity, as the old saying went. Perhaps she should find someone who could easily be controlled, and, uh, wouldn’t be capable of siring an heir—at least while she was still technically able of producing one. One of the womanish sirs who huddled so closely ’round the throne, as if to keep warm from the heat that she generated as the center of the state—someone like Count Maltesia or Lord Baniszow. Now, they wouldn’t be any trouble!
After all, it wasn’t as if there were any lack of heirs. Au contraire: they proliferated in each and every corner of Kórynthia, and even outside the realm—first, second, third, or greater cousins, all wanting to sit high—so high—on that Obsidian Throne. Oh, if only they understood how hard and uncaring that seat really was!
She would pick one of them, in the end. She would have to, or risk civil war when she was gone.
She walked over to the floor-length metal mirror mounted on the wall of her bedroom. It was an ancient artifact, passed down, so the story went, from old Tighris himself, primus of their line of monarchs and mages, whose origins were fogged amidst ungraspable wisps of legend and fable. This great shining speculum, this self-reflecting slab of albaurum, was a major seat of power—this much she knew, this much she could ken through her own magely senses. It was no ordinary transit device.
“What are you?” she murmured out loud. Her own image, the reversed portrait of Queen Grigorÿna herself, mouthed the words back at her.
Then: “Who are you?” said the picture in the mirror, and the unexpected retort caused her to step back.
She slowly and carefully reached out to touch the surface of the white-gold instrument, and almost had the sense, that if she had only known how, she could have roamed the universe itself. But she didn’t have the knowledge, and there was no one left to teach her. No one but...but...well, she couldn’t go there, didn’t dare to go there.
She sighed, long and loud, and finally turned away. She walked over to the open exit to the balcony, stepped outside, and placed her two hands on the stone railing. A bronze gargoyle grinned wickedly back at her from the left-hand wall, and a cuprous dragon’s head snarled back a warning from the right. “Keep your distance,” it said.
Where was she? What was she doing?
Ah, yes. She breathed in the cool night air, savoring the attar of the aridian blossoms that only unveiled their large pale faces to the dark.
Her history. Her history of the Great War in Nova Europa that had been waged when she was a little girl. The conflict that had destroyed so many of her family and so much of the heritage of two nations.
She’d now completed her chronology of the events leading up to the turning point of the war—of how the Court of Paltyrrha had been seemingly subverted from within, how her grandfather, King Kipriyán III, had been plagued on all sides with the deterioration of the body politic, how a series of attacks and outright murders had pushed the old monarch towards conflict with Pommerelia, and how the strange albino mage known as Melanthrix had somehow been ever at the center of events—and, many believed, the cause of them.
The problem was this: she could find dozens of sources giving accounts of the climactic battle itself—of Killingford—but none that told her what had happened at the very end. They were all...muddled—yes, that was the right word. Even the participants did not understand the events.
Those whom she would question were either dead...or worse. And she dare not step beyond the boundaries imposed upon her by...well, by those who could not be named.
But Killingford had happened in the year 845 of the Era of the Emperor Julian—and that was thirty-six years ago. None of the major commanders who’d participated in the war between Kórynthia and Pommerelia still lived. Only some of the junior officers.
What about one of them? But who?
As a breeze from the Hanging Garden ruffled her dark hair, the Queen thought and thought and thought. Who was left?
And then it hit her: Lord Maurin! The Count of Kosnick! Somewhere she’d read a history of the war by...—who was it, Duodène d’Écosse?—that had cited the Count’s memoir of Killingford as one of his primary sources for the great battle. And Maurin, she well knew, was still active, a man of perhaps five-and-sixty years. She would send a note to Kosnicksberg in the morning. Maybe he could tell her what she needed to know.
* * * *
Several days later, on the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, also known as Michaelmas, the Count Maurin III was ushered into her private conference room.
“Leave us!” she ordered Master Svyet, when Maurin had settled on the