The Heart of What Was Lost Read online

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  The Finest in Imaginative Fiction by

  TAD WILLIAMS

  MEMORY, SORROW AND THORN

  THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

  STONE OF FAREWELL

  TO GREEN ANGEL TOWER

  THE LAST KING OF OSTEN ARD

  THE WITCHWOOD CROWN*

  THE HEART OF WHAT WAS LOST

  * * *

  THE BOBBY DOLLAR NOVELS

  THE DIRTY STREETS OF HEAVEN

  HAPPY HOUR IN HELL

  SLEEPING LATE ON JUDGEMENT DAY

  SHADOWMARCH

  SHADOWMARCH

  SHADOWPLAY

  SHADOWRISE

  SHADOWHEART

  OTHERLAND

  CITY OF GOLDEN SHADOW

  RIVER OF BLUE FIRE

  MOUNTAIN OF BLACK GLASS

  SEA OF SILVER LIGHT

  TAILCHASER’S SONG

  THE WAR OF THE FLOWERS

  *Coming soon from DAW

  Copyright © 2017 Beale Williams Enterprise.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket illustration by Michael Whelan.

  Jacket design by G-Force Design.

  Maps by Isaac Stewart.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1744.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

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  Ebook ISBN: 9780756412494

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  Contents

  DAW Books by Tad Williams

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Maps

  Part One The Ruined Fortress

  Part Two Three Ravens Tower

  Part Three The Nakkiga Gate

  Part Four The Fatal Mountain

  Part Five The Long Way Back

  Appendices An Explanation . . .

  Glossary of Terms

  Dedication

  The Osten Ard books have been incredibly important to me and also to lots of readers, so writing a sequel to the original story after so many years away has been a daunting and even occasionally terrifying project; but it has also been a joy.

  This book, The Heart of What Was Lost, starts the journey back to Osten Ard by filling in an important piece of history left out of the last volume of “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn”—namely, the tale of the Norns after the Storm King’s War ended in their defeat.

  I honestly never planned to return to Osten Ard, at least not in any major way, and it wouldn’t have happened had it not been for all the kind people who asked me over the years, “But are you ever going to go back to Osten Ard?” and “What about those twins and their birth prophecy? Come on, you can’t tell me that wasn’t setting up a sequel!”

  After enough readers asked, I started to think about it. A story finally came to me that I wanted to tell; so now, with this small volume and much more to come, I return to those lands I thought I’d left behind. Thus:

  This book is dedicated to the readers who always wanted to know more about Osten Ard, about Simon and Miriamele and Binabik and the Sithi and the Norns, who wanted to know more of the history of Osten Ard before the first books began and also the history that followed the More-or-Less-Happily-Ever-After of the first story’s ending. Your love for the characters and the place was something I never expected. I finally gave in, and I’m glad I did. Thank you all for your support and kindness. I’m doing my best to make you glad you encouraged me.

  Welcome back! And for those of you who are new to Osten Ard, I paraphrase one of our heroes, Simon Snowlock, as he greeted an ally at the end of the first story: Come and join us. You have a world full of friends—some of them you don’t even know yet!

  Acknowledgments

  Getting back to the land of Osten Ard after all these years and exploring old and new parts of it has been a huge and sometimes daunting task. I couldn’t have managed without the help of many people.

  My wife and partner, Deborah Beale, worked hard to make all the good things happen. Thanks, Deb!

  My publishers, Sheila Gilbert and Betsy Wollheim, who are also my award-winning editors, also worked diligently to make this the best book possible, as they have with the whole of my return to Osten Ard. Josh Starr of DAW has also done a great deal to make this book possible. Thanks, Betsy and Sheila! Thanks, Josh!

  Copyeditor Marylou Capes-Platt always brings the smarts and has improved every book of mine she’s worked with. This book is no different. Thanks, Marylou!

  My excellent agent Matt Bialer worked his own magic over the project as well, for which I am always grateful. Thanks, Matt!

  Lisa Tveit has been a rock of support for a long time now with her work on the TW webpage and in many other ways. Thanks, Lisa!

  I owe special debt of gratitude for this book to Ron Hyde and Ylva von Löhneysen, who have been titans of fact-checking and priceless sources of Osten-Ard-iana, not to mention being such enthusiastic fans of the original books that it makes me feel like I have done something useful with my working life. That alone is a gift beyond thanks, but they’ve given me much more. Thanks, Ron and Ylva!

  And of course, I want to acknowledge the support I’ve had from so many of the people associated with the tadwilliams.com website, including Eva Maderbacher, who offered some very useful opinions on the first draft of Heart. The other early readers of the series will be thanked properly and personally in the opening volume of the new trilogy, The Witchwood Crown, which many of them read in manuscript. But for now, I just wanted to say: Thanks, friends! Because no author has ever had nicer or more supportive readers.

  Author’s Note

  You can find a cast of characters and an index of other names at the end of this book. You will also find a short essay (by one of the characters) titled An Explanation of the Fairy People Known as Sithi and their Cousins the Norns, which those new to the land of Osten Ard might find helpful and might want to read before starting the book.

  Tad Williams

  October, 2016

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  Visit bit.ly/2fQ7FgI for a larger version of this map.

  Part

  One

  The Ruined Fortress

  At first, in the flurrying snow, he thought the soldier stumbling in front of him, through the icy mud of the Frostmarch Road, had been wounded, that the man’s neck and shoulders were spattered with blood. As he steered his horse around the hobbling figure he saw that the blobs of red had a regular shape and pattern, like waves. He reined up until the soldier was limping beside him.

  “Where did you get that?” Porto asked. “That scarf?”

  The soldier, thin and several years younger than Porto, only stared up at him and shook his head.

  “I asked you a question. Where did you get it?”

  “My mother wove it for me. Piss off.”

  Por
to settled back in his saddle, amused. “Are you really a Harborsider, or is your mother a bit blind?”

  The younger soldier looked up at him with a blend of confusion and irritation: he thought he was being insulted but wasn’t sure. “What do you know about it?”

  “More than you do, as it turns out, because I’m from the Rocks and we’ve been drubbing you lot at town-ball for centuries.”

  “You’re a Shoro—a Geyser?”

  “And you’re a Dogfish, dim as can be. What’s your name?”

  The young foot soldier looked him over carefully. The two waterfront neighborhoods—setros, as they were called in Ansis Pelippé, the largest city on Perdruin—were ancient rivals, and even here, hundreds of leagues north of that island’s shores, it was obvious that his first impulse was to brace for a beating. “Tell me yours.”

  The man on the horse laughed. “Porto of Shoro Bay. Owner of one horse and most of a suit of armor. And you?”

  “Endri. Baker’s son.”

  At last, and as if he had been holding it back, the youth smiled. He still had most of his teeth and it made him seem even younger, like one of the boys who had run beside Porto’s horse waving and shouting as he made his way through Nabban, all those months ago.

  “By the love of Usires, you’re a tall one, aren’t you!” Endri looked him up and down. “What are you doing so far away from home, my lord?”

  “No lord, me, just a man lucky enough to have a horse. And you’re freezing to death because you can’t walk fast enough. What happened to your foot?”

  The younger soldier shrugged. “Horse stepped on it. Not your horse. I don’t think it was, anyway.”

  “It wasn’t. I’d have remembered you, with your Harborside scarf.”

  “I wish I had another. I’d even wear one in damned Shoro blue. It’s so bloody cold here I’m dying. Are we in Rimmersgard yet?”

  “Crossed the border two days back. But they all live like mountain trolls up here. Houses built of snow and nothing to eat but pine needles. Climb up.”

  “What?”

  “Climb up. First time I ever helped a Dogfish, but you won’t even make it to the border fort like that. Here, take my hand and I’ll pull you up to the saddle.”

  When Endri had settled behind him, Porto gave him a sip from his drinking horn. “It was terrible, by the way.”

  “What was terrible?”

  “The beating we gave you lot this year on St. Tunato’s Day. Your Dogfish were weeping in the streets like women.”

  “Liar. Nobody wept.”

  “Only because they were too busy begging for mercy.”

  “You know what my father always says? ‘Go to the palace for justice, go to the church for mercy, but go to the Rocks for liars and thieves.’”

  Porto laughed. “For a sniveling Harborsider, your father is a wise man.”

  “This is a true story, if words can be true. If not, then these are only words.

  “Once upon the past, during the preserve of the queen’s sixteenth High Celebrant, in the era of the Wars of Return, our people, the Cloud Children, were defeated by a coalition of mortals and the Zida’ya, our own treacherous kin, at the Battle for Asu’a. The Storm King Ineluki returned to death, his plans in ruins. Our great Queen Utuk’ku survived, but fell into the keta-yi’indra, a healing sleep nearly as profound as death. It seemed to some of our people that the end of all stories had arrived, that the Great Song itself was coming to an end so that the universe could take its next age-long breath.

  “Many, many of our folk who had fought for their queen in a losing cause now departed from the southern lands with thought only of returning to their home in the north ahead of the vengeance of the mortals, who would not be content with their victory, but would strive to overthrow our mountain home and extinguish the last of the Cloud Children.

  “This was the moment when the People were nearly destroyed. But it was also a moment of extraordinary grace, of courage beyond the proudest demands we make upon ourselves. And as things have always been in the song of the People, in this, too, even the moments of greatest beauty were perfumed with destruction and loss.

  Thus it was for many warriors of the Order of Sacrifice when the Storm King fell, as well as those of other orders who had accompanied them to the enemy’s lands. The war was ended. Home was far. And the mortals were close behind, vermin from the filthiest streets of their cities, mercenaries and madmen who killed, not as we do, regretfully, but for the sheer, savage joy of killing.”

  —Lady Miga seyt-Jinnata of the Order of Chroniclers

  “I had hoped you might be exaggerating,” said Duke Isgrimnur. “But it is worse than I could have guessed.”

  “An entire village,” said Sludig. “No sense to it.” He scowled and made the sign of the Holy Tree. Like the duke himself, the young warrior had seen terrible things during the war just ended, things neither of them would forget. Now another dozen bodies lay sprawled before the tithing-barn in a chaos of mud and bloody snow, mostly old men and a few woman, along with the hacked carcasses of several sheep. “Women and children,” lamented Sludig. “Even animals.”

  At Isgrimnur’s feet the body of a child had been half-buried by snow, the blue-gray fingers still reaching for something, the arm stretched like a trampled flower. How terrible it must have been for these villagers to wake in the night and find themselves surrounded by the deathly white faces and soulless eyes of the Norns, creatures out of old and terrifying tales. Duke Isgrimnur could only shake his head, but his hands were trembling. It was one thing to see the mortal ruin of a battle, to see his men dead and dying, but at least his soldiers had swords and axes; at least they could fight back. This . . . this was something else. It made his gut ache.

  He turned to look at Ayaminu. The Sitha-woman had been standing a little apart from the duke’s men, gazing at the muddle of footprints and hoofprints beginning now to disappear beneath a fresh sifting of white. The steep, golden planes of her face and her long, narrow eyes were alien and unreadable as she examined the ugly work of her people’s Norn kindred, different from her only in the color of their skin. “Well?” he demanded. “What do you see? I see only murder. Your fairy cousins are monsters.”

  Ayaminu’s inspection continued for a long moment. She seemed to make little distinction between disturbed snow and tumbled bodies. “The Hikeda’ya were stealing food,” she said. “I doubt they would have bothered to harm anyone, but they were discovered.”

  “What of it?” Sludig was barely containing his anger. “Do you make an excuse for them because they are your kin? I don’t care what you call them—Norns, White Foxes, or Hiki . . . what you said. Name them as you like, they are monsters! Look at these poor people! The war is over, but your immortal fairy cousins are still killing.”

  Ayaminu shook her head. “My kind are not immortal, only long-lived. And as recent battles have shown, both my folk and our Hikeda’ya cousins can die. Thousands of them have done so in the past year, many at the hands of mortals like you.” She turned to stare at Sludig, but her face was all but expressionless. “Do I excuse this murder? No. But if the Hikeda’ya were hungry enough to steal from a mortal settlement, they must have been very hungry indeed—to the point of madness. Like my own folk, they can survive on very little. But the north has suffered from the Storm King’s frosts a long time.”

  “We Rimmersmen have suffered from this endless winter too, without needing to destroy entire villages!”

  Ayaminu gave the young warrior a bemused look. “You Rimmersmen who came out of the west a mere few centuries ago and killed thousands of my people? And just this year brought death to so many of your Hernystiri neighbors?”

  “Damn it, that was not us!” Sludig was trembling. “That was other Rimmersmen under Skali of Kaldskryke—Duke Isgrimnur’s sworn enemy!”

  The duke put his hand on Sludig’s arm. “
Quiet, man. That argument has no ending.” But at this moment, with his insides knotted by the sight of the dead villagers—his dead villagers, the people God had given him to protect—Isgrimnur could not look on the Sitha-woman with any kindness. But for the golden hue of her skin, the fairy-woman could have been one of the Norns, the corpse-white creatures whose murderous work lay all around him. “Remember that our memories are not as long as yours, Lady Ayaminu,” he said as evenly as he could manage, “and neither are our lives. I gave you leave to come along with us at the request of your Lord Jiriki, friend of our king and queen—but not to pick fights with my men.” In fact, it had only been the strong urgings of the newly crowned Simon and Miriamele that had convinced Isgrimnur to let the Sitha-woman accompany them at all, and he was still not certain he had made the right decision.

  He looked down the hill, where his men waited in disordered ranks stretching half a league back down the Frostmarch Road. They were Rimmersmen for the greatest part, along with a few hundred soldiers from other nations who had missed most of the fighting in Erchester but had been hired to reopen the empty forts along the northernmost borders between the lands of the royal High Ward and the defeated Norns. If any of them had expected the White Foxes simply to slip harmlessly back across the border, they were now learning otherwise.

  “This village was Finnbogi’s.” Bulky, shaggy-bearded Brindur, brother of the thane of Skoggey and an important thane in his own right, had survived the final battle at the Hayholt but had left a great deal of blood and most of one of his ears behind. His helmet sat oddly over the bandages. “I saw him die just outside the castle gate, Your Grace. Had his head torn off by a giant who threw it over the Hayholt wall.”

  “Enough. And enough of this place, too.” Isgrimnur waved his hand in angry disgust. “God preserve me, I can still smell the foul creatures even through all this blood—as though they were here only a moment ago.”