Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) Read Free

Because of the presence of the priest, the lieutenant accused the family of treason and hanged Commiseth’s sons in front of him, and raped his wife, and killed Commiseth.
     
    The wife and remaining children were marched off to the south, along with the priest, where later the Queen’s courts declared them traitors and had them sold into slavery. Sergil never finished the journey, dying on the march. I passed their house sometimes when I was grazing the flock in neighboring pastures. Vines overran the sod walls in a season, and every window lay open to wind and rain. Grass grew waist deep in the door-yard; the whole aspect was sad and broken, and we told tales that it was haunted.
     
    The Queen prospered from the best year of tax collections in history. She commissioned Charnos shipwrights to build a royal yacht for sailing across the bay to Aerfax in the summer. After tax season the soldiers withdrew from the vicinity of Arthen, shutting themselves up in the forts. While we no longer had Blue Cloaks as guests in our houses, their presence was evident everywhere. Each day patrols swept across Athryn’s girdle round the Forest, the patrols maintaining vigilance lest anyone enter Arthen against the Queen’s wishes.
     
    In spite of the turmoil in the world and Grandmother’s death, in spite of tragedies among our neighbors, our life on Papa’s farm proceeded in something like a familiar order. I grew into my work, from feeding chickens to hoeing weeds to forking hay. I learned to ride and track, with Sim to teach me, a more patient master than my father would have been. Even the presence of soldiers at our table had little effect on our secure family. Now and then, however, a shadow crossed my vision — the look on Mama’s face at tax time, the dread Papa evinced when blue-cloaked soldiers rode across our farmland. Tales Grandmother told me ran through my head, cities in the forest and a high white tower, shrines in ancient fields, tribes of silent, invisible folk slipping beneath tree shadow. Even then, from the earliest moments I can remember, my schooling led me to consciousness of a world of many powers.
     
    My mother herself gained a strength with the years, a keenness of vision, along with the beauty that emerges beyond youth. She paid no mind to the names people called her, laid no charms on anybody, soured no milk nor ruined anyone’s crops. Not even when she had good reason. At times I could see her restless with some thought she could not say. Once I saw her in her room holding a box, but when I came in she put it away, and the look she gave me reminded me of Grandmother telling the story of the Jisraegen priests when they were making the song that frightened God.
     
    I turned out to be a fair shepherd, better than my full-sister Mikif who had the job till I showed a talent for it. The sheep would come to me whether I called them or not, and the dogs knew what I wanted them to do without my having to tell them. I never considered this a praiseworthy accomplishment since it came so easily, but my father remarked on it more than once, and after my ninth year the flock of some two dozen was entirely entrusted to me.
     
    I wandered throughout the countryside, spending summer nights away from home under the starry sky, learning to make my own campfire and to hunt for small game. We would stay off grazing for days, me and the sheep and the hound Axfel, a huge, hulking ribcage of a dog, three years old when I was ten, with tongue enough to trail the ground and a snout that would have done justice to a wolf. We wandered in the farthest pastures of my father’s farm and beyond to the hillsides that approached Arthen herself. At night one could count the watchfires along the girdle, the Blue Cloaks never ceasing their vigilance. It was said that the soldiers hated duty on the Arthen patrols worse than any other post in the Queen’s service. The Woodland swelled vast and dark beyond their puny fires, shadows of