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  TORCHLIGHT

  Book 1 of the Ninth Circle

  by Theresa Dahlheim

  Copyright 2012 by Theresa Dahlheim.

  All rights reserved.

  The Ninth Circle

  Book 1: Torchlight

  Book 2: Icestorm

  Book 3: Firedance*

  Book 4: Daystar*

  Book 5: Sundogs*

  Book 6: Candlehouse*

  Book 7: Amberglow*

  Book 8: Blacksight*

  Book 9: Rivendark*

  *Forthcoming

  Also by Theresa Dahlheim

  Forbidden

  Dedicated to

  the Raging Battle-Moose,

  Dingle,

  the Lady of the Morning,

  and my Nana.

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Appendix: People

  Appendix: Places

  Map

  Prologue

  The island appeared from the center of the sea as the black of night slipped to grey. Carlodon let his hood blow back from his head as he braced himself in the caravel’s rigging. Due east the veiled coastline sharpened as the cloudy sky brightened, and he could see a long, broad beach, trees beyond the beach, and hills beyond the trees. Despite the cold of autumn on the open water, warmth filled his chest and flushed his face. He was right. He was right!

  “Your Majesty!” a voice bellowed up to him. “What are your orders?”

  He looked down at the sailors and soldiers crowding the deck and found the grim face of the ship’s master. “South!” he shouted. “There’s a cove to the south!”

  “Your Majesty, I must again protest! We cannot make landing here!”

  Carlodon leapt from the rigging and landed easily on the deck fifteen feet below, scattering men like mice. He turned a slow circle to look at the crewmen at the sails and the rudder. No one would look back. They were frightened. All their lives, they had heard the priests and the healers say that this island was poison.

  He looked at his soldiers. Bor was at the rail, looking at the island, pretending to ignore the incipient mutiny. Bor feared nothing. His twenty men were sneering contempt at the superstitious sailors; if they were frightened, they weren’t going to let their king know it.

  He looked at his wife. Haliena stood near the mainmast with her servant, her dark cloak whipping behind her as she stared back the way they had come. Her furrowed brow and the thin line of her mouth had not changed. Like everyone else except Bor, she had only last night learned about this divergence from their voyage through the archipelago; but, unlike everyone else except Bor, it didn’t frighten her.

  Queen Haliena had the gifts of mind-speaking and weather-sense, and she did not frighten easily. These were virtues, of sorts.

  Finally he turned his gaze to the ship’s master, a squat man who had been the captain before Carlodon had taken the title back in Chrenste. “You will turn south to the cove,” he told him. “You will drop anchor. You will stay there until I return.”

  The ship’s master hesitated. Carlodon lifted one eyebrow. The ship’s master nodded vigorously. “Yes, your Majesty.” He raised his voice to his crew: “Fall off! Two points to starboard!”

  The boom swung across the deck, and Carlodon ducked under it as he crossed to join Bor. The warm rush he had felt upon first sighting the island had not abated—was now in fact prickling his skin—and he didn’t think it was just because his expert navigation had taken them straight to the target. He felt like a child watching maple candy cool in the snow; the anticipation was agonizing. But Bor just leaned on the rail, his eyes half-lidded, and shifted his weight from time to time to keep balanced as the ship rode the waves.

  “Calm down,” Carlodon told him after a while. “All these hysterics won’t do you any good.”

  Bor rubbed his nose. “Keeps me warm, Sire,” he drawled.

  “Except for your cold, black heart.”

  “No help for that.” A pause. “Are you sure about this?” It was the closest Bor would ever come to arguing with him.

  “Trust me.”

  Bor nodded. Carlodon had had his trust for twenty years, ever since they’d been recruits in their first warband and barely knew which way to point the spear.

  The ship’s master gave the island wide room, but Carlodon could still pick out individual cliffs and beaches, even trees and rocks. He had consulted the obelisks in Chrenste and the bound records kept by the priests, and the two sources agreed that the forested island was about thirty miles from north to south. The hunting and fishing were plentiful, so plentiful that the island would have been settled long ago, except for the fact that anyone who landed on it sickened and died within days.

  More than once, Carlodon had asked the priests how the people who had surveyed the island had lived long enough to report on it. The priests had doggedly repeated, as priests had for five centuries, that anyone who landed there died there.

  It didn’t discourage him. If anyone could land here and live, it was King Carlodon of Telgardia.

  It baffled the priests, the healers, and those with the gift of mind-speaking, all of whom agreed that he did not have their talents, but none of whom could explain his charmed life. In the sixty-one battles he had fought to carve out his kingdom and fuse it together, he had never taken a serious wound. He had never caught any contagious illness. He was thirty-six, but looked twenty. His skin was rough but unscarred. His hair was dark brown without any of the grey that streaked Bor’s black hair and beard. He wasn’t big or wiry, but he was stronger and faster than almost all his men. He had spent weeks on almost no sleep, other weeks on almost no food. He had walked fifty miles in a single day and ridden three hundred in a single night. He had survived a dozen accidents that should have killed him and at least half a dozen assassins’ last, best efforts. And he had survived marriage to Haliena for almost a year now.

  So he felt pretty good about his chances.

  They found the cove exactly where the map in the bound records had shown it to be. The ship’s master would have stood off a mile or more if Carlodon had let him, but in due course they anchored about two hundred yards from the sandy beach. Carlodon checked the rowboat, which was packed with food, a bow and a rod so he could get more food, a tinderbox, a tent, and other gear from his campaigning days. “I will return in one week,” he told the ship at large as two sailors cranked the winches to lower the rowboat. “If I don’t, wait one more week. Then go home.”

  Nods and honorifics and shuffled feet answered this. Haliena gave him one piercing look, then turned deliberately away. Bor saluted. Carlodon climbed down the rope ladder to the boat, settled himself, and took up the oars.

  A deep thrumming pulsed everywhere around and through Carlodon, stronger and stronger, and his fierce heaves on the oars soon had the boat tearing through the water. His back was to the beach, but the sea and the receding ship he faced were less real than the island in his mind’s eye. He could see the sand, the driftwood, the brush, the trees, the hills beyond, all in shades of green and shadows of grey in the drizzling rain. He was almost there. Almost there ...

  When he at last scraped bottom, Carlodon stood up on the rowing bench, turned and leapt onto the prow. There was a broad boulder next to the boat, and he jumped and landed on top of it just as the rising tide crashed over it.

  Then everything was gone, vanished in a hot white light that transfixed him from the soles of his boots to the ends of his fingers to the top of his head. There was no boulder, no beach, no island, no sea—no ai
r. His breath stopped. His heart stopped. Ten thousand burning needles pierced every inch of his skin. Pressure filled the silence in his ears near to bursting. His bulging eyes were scorched dry. He could not close them. He could not move, he could not speak, he could not think—he could only feel, and all he felt was fire, and he was blind and deaf and mute in its grip of unimaginable pain. His blood boiled in his veins, seared his muscles into charred meat and scalded his very bones.

  The flames devoured him and he could not scream.

  After a long, long time, white became black, and there was nothing.

  After a long, long time, black became grey, and there was a tree.

  Carlodon’s eyes blinked convulsively as he stared up at a pine bough, lifting and dipping in a salt-scented breeze. Each green needle was distinct, each cluster of woody pine cones a sharp contrast to the splayed tufts branching out from the bough’s upcurving line. He could hear the surf, could hear each drop striking each pebble and rock and shell and grain of sand.

  He was lying on his back, and he lifted his hands. His gloves were gone, but his hands were whole, if a little stiff as he stretched his fingers. So were his knees as he bent them, and his ankles as he flexed them, still inside his heavy boots. He had felt this way before, once, when he had slept for thirty hours straight after the week they had taken the riverforts.

  How long had he been asleep this time? What on earth had happened?

  Slowly, he sat up. His back and butt and neck all ached. His left shoulder popped as he rotated his arm. His leather jerkin and trousers and boots were covered with sand and soot. He was sitting on damp sand and sea grass, and when he pushed the pine bough aside, he could see down the beach. It wasn’t raining, but the heavy clouds made it impossible to tell the time.

  Cursing, he bent the pine bough back and snapped it in half—then wondered why he had done that. He wasn’t angry—or, he was angry—he wasn’t, but he was feeling it and he didn’t know why. His mind was filling up with it, but he couldn’t connect it to anything. Slowly he turned, craning his neck to look down the beach, then twisting to look back over his shoulder to the thick line of trees only twenty yards beyond him. He was feeling someone’s anger as clearly as he could hear a voice or see a face.

  Was this the gift of mind-speak? What had happened to him?

  He still couldn’t see anyone, and he turned his head back to the beach, and beyond it to the sea, and realized that the ship was gone. Suddenly the anger became his own. How dare they—

  A gasp, a spear of disbelief through his thoughts, made him turn back toward the trees, and he in his turn caught his breath in shock. It was Haliena.

  She did not have her cloak or her jewels. Her black hair was still tied back, but stray wisps hung around her face. She was carrying one of the packs from the rowboat, which had been pulled up beyond the tideline, high and dry near the trees, on its side to provide a rude shelter. Had she done that? Was there anyone else here?

  “How ...” She came no closer, and she spoke in a whisper, but he could hear her clearly, and he could feel her fear now raging through his head, so raw and strong he instinctively pulled back—

  And just like that it was gone. It was as if he had held up a shield against a rain of arrows—nothing touched him anymore, he could still see her, but he could not ... could not sense her anymore.

  “You were dead,” she murmured.

  “Thank you for not burying me.”

  She jumped, as if she hadn’t really believed he was alive until he spoke. As he studied her, he kept the idea of a shield, and lowering the shield, letting her thoughts through again, and it was as before—he was feeling things that he wasn’t really feeling.

  Slowly, he rose to his feet. He dusted sand and soot off his clothes. Haliena watched him. He took a step toward her, and she took two steps back.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “They threw me over the side,” she said tonelessly.

  “Why?”

  “You were dead and they said—”

  “Dead?—Do I look dead?”

  “Not now!” And that really scared her. “Before! You jumped on that rock and you lit up like a torch! Then you fell and the water came over you and Lord Bor wanted to go see but everyone else said that you were dead! And that’s when they said I would be too dangerous since I had a claim to your crown as your queen so they took my sapphires and they threw me over the side of the ship!”

  Of course Bor wouldn’t have believed he was dead. Of course Bor would have wanted to see for himself—but the man wasn’t stupid, he had no reason to think that lightning wouldn’t strike him if he dared to set foot on this island—or maybe it was just that boulder ... Carlodon turned back toward the beach, but couldn’t immediately pick out the flat black rock.

  “Listen to me!” Haliena shouted, and he looked back at her. “I swam here and I found you, and your face and your hands were black, your Majesty, black, and you were not breathing! You were dead!”

  “Was my heart beating?”

  “I don’t know! I didn’t dare touch you!”

  He couldn’t blame her for that, just like he couldn’t blame the men for leaving them here. He wondered why he wasn’t more afraid at what had happened.

  Suddenly wolfishly hungry, he turned and trudged over to the boat. The packs and tools and gear were neatly organized under the tent canvas, which Haliena had stretched from the side of the boat and staked into the sandy soil between the roots of a tree. He found bread and dried meat and apples, and as he sat and ate he offered some to Haliena, who shook her head and kept her distance, watching him.

  She was not beautiful, but she was regal; she was not kind, but she was conscientious; and she was not brilliant, but she knew everything that went on around her. She would have made a good queen, if she had decided to become his friend and ally instead of the thorn in his side.

  But maybe it wasn’t too late. “You don’t need to be afraid,” he told her.

  The tension in her body was that of a wounded animal. “Don’t I?”

  “I won’t hurt you. When have I ever hurt you?”

  “You made me come out here.”

  “I told you why. No one in Chrenste trusts you. It was as much to keep you safe as to keep you out of trouble.” She frowned deeply at this, and Carlodon heaved a sigh. “It didn’t have to be this way. I made an effort when you first came. I asked your servants what rooms you would prefer, what jewels you liked to wear, what food my cook should make for you ...”

  He waited, and eventually she gave a single, short nod. “You did.” But she said it so flatly that it conceded nothing.

  Disgusted, and thirsty, he turned away and leaned across the packs for the water canteen, but it was just beyond his reach. He stretched further, because he didn’t want to get up for it. “Come here,” he muttered, and with a jerk, the canteen leapt up and smacked into his hand.

  He stared at it. Then, before he could think too much, he dropped the canteen and stretched his hand toward the hunting knife that rested on the ground a man’s height away. At first nothing happened, but he concentrated, thought about reaching, stretching, thought about the knife coming to him—and within seconds it, too, trembled, jerked, leapt up and shot through the air. It was a good thing it was sheathed because otherwise it would have sliced his hand open ... or, knowing him, it wouldn’t have.

  He looked at Haliena. Her eyes were so wide, her cheeks so ashen, it was as if someone had stabbed her. She backed away, stumbled, and fell over.

  Carlodon dropped the knife and got up to help her, but she kicked at him when he tried to give her his arm. “Get away!” she screamed, her black dress tangling her legs as she scrambled backward. He tried to catch hold of her hands, just to get her to sit still and calm down, but she was thrashing like a caught fish and sobbing like the world had ended. Finally he actually sat on her, pinned her wrists to the ground and just held her down until she expended her strength trying to push him off. T
hen she lay limp, her eyes shut tight, her breaths shallow and shuddering.

  “Please,” he said quietly. “Relax. Your head will stop hurting, and you ...”

  Her eyes opened. “How did you know my head hurts?” she whispered in horror.

  How did he know? “I ...”

  “You’re reading my mind. You’re taking it out of my mind!”

  Was he? Mind-speaking could only be between two mind-speakers—but maybe his gift was not quite mind-speaking ...

  He lowered the shield and let all her emotions hit his thoughts. It was easier now to separate what was her and what was himself. He thought about her thoughts, thought about pushing back at her, pushing into her mind. A part of him noted with amoral detachment that she was screaming, but this was too fascinating to stop.

  Fascinating, and confusing, because thoughts rarely march along in order, and the best he could find were moments of clarity in murky memory ... Bor shouting at the soldiers as they pushed Haliena toward the ship’s rail, then Bor’s wedding last year, and the disgust Haliena had felt at how fawningly happy Bor’s young bride was—then Carlodon himself ... odd, so odd to see himself through her eyes—his body, because she thought he was dead—God, his face was burned black, and his hands and cloak too, as he floated in the water close to where Haliena emerged from her enforced swim. He wanted to know more, and he held onto the sight of his own ravaged face, forcing connections with other sights and sounds, and eventually he sewed the unsequenced impressions and images together like pieces of a jerkin.

  During that first day, the tide had dropped him onto the beach. Haliena had been exhausted by exertion and despair, but as night approached, she’d summoned the strength to pull the boat up to the trees for shelter. And in the morning, just moments ago, she’d found him lying under that pine tree, without a mark on him, alive.

  Rage pounded him like sword blows, and pain erupted in his head, and his mental shield slammed like a door in his face. Haliena threw him off, and he landed sitting in the sand, cursing, holding his head.