* * *
Marloven Hess
Senrid’s foot tapped in counterpoint to the enthusiastic thundering of hand drums played by Retren Forthan’s old academy friends, gathered from all corners of Marloven Hess for Forthan’s wedding to Fenis Senelac.
Fenis was a young bride now, a tall figure in her wedding robe of crimson, edged with shiny black cord and embroidered along hem and cuffs with blue and gold and green figures. It had been made by a many-greats-grandmother and worn by every Senelac bride since.
Senrid watched as she led the singing. Anyone seeing them would take her for Senrid’s elder, though they had been born around the same time.
Senrid had survived. The army was back, the garrison as well. On the surface, everything looked normal—he had received a note from Liere, saying that she was now a student at Bereth Ferian’s mage school.
Everything looked normal, and yet he knew it wasn’t. He forced an attitude of good cheer as he watched Retren Forthan get to his feet, flushed with wine and with the genial, bawdy jokes of his friends. Forthan held his sword high over his head, hilt in one hand, tip balanced on his left fingers, as he began the wedding sword dance.
One by one the other young men joined as Fenis’s friends took over the drumming. Men dancing, women watching, and soon they would turn about, making ribald comments—Senrid understood the words, but as yet the meaning was beyond him.
That was fine. He had enough to do, and to think about. Like that last salute of Siamis’s. Gift. He kept coming back to that. He and Liere were the only ones with Dena Yeresbeth, which was more of a burden than anything else. Siamis’s threat about gifts, his salute with the sword, had been aimed specifically at the two of them. Surely being singled out for oblique threat had to do with Dena Yeresbeth. So maybe, once Liere was used to her new school, they should try to seek out some kind of training—
His notecase ticked in his tunic pocket.
He’d gotten pretty good at remembering to check it. Satisfied that nobody was interested in the short figure sitting midway between the old folks and the children trying to gobble all the wedding tarts, he palmed the case from his pocket and unrolled the piece of paper.
Chwahirsland
Senrid:
You were correct in what you said about laws that people can point at, that my granting things will look like favoritism and whim if some get what they want and others don’t.
But we also know that Wan-Edhe could be sent back at any time. I had my first meeting with the army leaders. Uncle Shiam and his third cousins were there with me, as we talked about the future of our kingdom.
We are agreed that Wan-Edhe will come when he or Norsunder wants, not when we are ready. But until then we shall live as if he will not.
Tsauderei knows about the book, and Mondros wrote to ask where it is. I told him it’s stored beyond reach. Now that the secret is no longer a secret, there’s no use in trying to discover who blabbed, because after all, it will be the first thing Wan-Edhe demands when he returns.
It reports that Siamis and Detlev are back at Norsunder Base. None of my tracers have alerted me to the presence of Kessler Sonscarna, but the book says he’s been here. Twice. I wish I knew what that means.
Jilo
Prelude
North of Sartor
AND so the young allies survived their first action. I have endeavored in this, the first record of their alliance, to introduce them before I must introduce their adversaries, as yet unmet.
* * *
—
The last summer storm had washed the sky clear overhead, and left the newly turning leaves bright as jewels. Rel was descending the last of the mountain trail north of Sartor’s border when he heard voices echoing through the trees, and a rising shout, “Help!”
Rel slung his pack onto a boulder and unloosed his sword as he splashed through the undergrowth to a clearing. The thud of retreating steps reached him, and a faint, floating laugh on the wind—the laugh of a teenage boy, from the sound—as he stumbled to a stop. There in the middle of the rain-soggy glade lay a boy, bright blotches of color marring the snow all around him.
Rel’s gaze snapped to the crimson first, but as that was surrounded by bright splashes of blue and yellow, the fear that the boy’s blood had been spilled vanished. It was paint. The boy struggled to rise, and Rel hastened to help him up. He was thin and gangling, in age anywhere from thirteen to eighteen. A pair of wide-set, mild brown eyes gazed out of a thin face half covered by a cloud of curly brown hair, now matted with mud.
“Thank you,” the boy said breathlessly. “I don’t know what they would have done if you hadn’t come along.” He looked around, blinking mud off his eyelashes before he wiped a grimy sleeve over his face. “At the very least, they would have smashed all my paints.”
Rel looked around. Besides the paints, brushes and other artistic items lay scattered in the snow. “I’ll help you.” He sheathed his sword and began collecting scattered bits.
“Oh, look at that,” the boy mourned. “Demolished my primaries, and it takes so very long to make the blue . . .” He wiped his face again, smearing the mud even worse, then stared in dismay at the splintered remains of little ceramic pots, the colors already soaking into the ground, impossible to retrieve.
Rel said, “There are a few unspilled. See? Three right here.”
“Maybe a few more,” the boy said with a hopeful air. “They flung them at the trees.” He indicated a venerable oak, whose bark had been liberally lightened with a splash of yellow.
In a short time they’d gathered everything they could, and restored it to the boy’s travel knapsack, which was full of papers.
“At least they didn’t get to your work,” Rel said when he discovered the knapsack on the far side of a mossy boulder, where it had obviously been thrown.
“That was probably next.” The boy sounded resigned as he dropped the last of the salvaged art materials into the knapsack, then looked up at Rel.
Faint smears of paint streaked his face under the mud. Or maybe those were bruises. “Thank you again. Who are you?”
“Name’s Rel. You?”
“Adam.” His Sartoran was so good that Rel couldn’t quite tell the origin of his accent, except that Adam didn’t sound like the Sartorans. Nobody outside of those born in Sartor did, their accent being separated from the rest of the world’s use of the language by a hundred years. “Are you going north toward the port city, by any chance?”
“Going through there, yes,” Rel said. And, as was considered polite on the Wander, “Want company?”
Adam’s relief was unmistakable.
Rel glanced behind them, then said, “Weren’t you heading south toward Sartor?”
“I was,” Adam admitted. “Someone warned me about brigands, but I didn’t believe it. Someone else warned me that the Sartorans probably won’t want itinerant art students. Maybe that warning is as good as the first. I can always go back some other time,” he said. “That is, if the brigands don’t do me in first.”
“Have a weapon?” Rel asked as he started back along the path to retrieve his pack. “Any training?”
Adam held his muddy hands away from his sides, his grin rueful.
“I’ll walk with you to the next town. You can report what happened.”
Adam shrugged into his knapsack, then fell in step beside Rel. “Will it do any good?” he asked.
“Probably not, if you mean, will they go searching. I’ve been in this area before when brigands attacked, and they didn’t do anything then. But there’s always hope that the next report will convince someone they’ve had enough.”
“If that’s so, I guess I’ve a duty to be the next.”
Adam talked cheerfully as they proceeded up the road, readily answering Rel’s questions, not that he asked many. The etiquette of the Wander, Puddle
nose had told Rel when they met on Rel’s first journey, was not to delve into people’s backgrounds unless they offered the information. But a few questions were considered permissible—What’s your name? Where do you come from? Have any skills? If the answers were vague, then you dropped the questions, but if detail was offered, you could ask more.
Adam didn’t seem interested in origins or whereabouts, anyway. He was far more enthusiastic about his artwork, something he clearly loved talking about.
By the time they glimpsed a market town beyond the last hill, Rel had learned that there were thirty basic sketch techniques, the benefits and drawbacks of dry watercolor versus wet on wet, and the difficulties of making color. “I shall have to start again,” Adam finished ruefully. “Remaking my primaries.” Then he ran off to a rocky bluff to catch sight of some winter bird, whose plumage he compared to the same sort of bird, but with slightly different plumage, as found farther north.
They stopped once when Adam spotted what he thought an artistically twisted tree, sat on a rock, and pulled out a rumpled sheet of sketch paper.
Rel watched him sketch, impressed. Adam had the shape of the entire tree suggested with no more than three quick, assured lines, then used the pencil to demonstrate a great many of those thirty techniques as he roughed in a bit of the corrugated bark, the gnarled shape, the shadows, the piny spines, the cones, and how the shadow lay on the piled-up leaves left from the recent storm.
Adam had an astonishing eye for detail, so when they reached the town and found the local magistrate, Rel expected such an exact description of the brigands that the miscreants could easily be identified.
What the magistrate got was a confused blur of contradictory facts, all of those hazy. Her exasperation manifested itself in gusty sighs as Adam dithered. “No . . . the leader was not as tall as Rel. Or maybe he was, but he was bent, some. And I was on the ground, so my perspective was distorted. How many? Well, that I’m not certain of. It felt like a gang, but there couldn’t have been more than four or five. Three, at the very least.”
The magistrate put down her pen. “That will do.”
Adam said anxiously, “Is that enough? I am so sorry I don’t seem to remember more. But I was so frightened, and then my face was in the mud . . .”
“No, no. It happens. The most assured witness can’t always recollect the details, especially when you are taken by surprise,” she said, and as Adam walked out, the woman caught Rel by the arm. “Look, you. I don’t want to cast aspersions on our duchas, but as Sartor has not kept the old treaty, he’s saying if he has to mount and pay for patrollers, then he ought to have a king’s treasury, if you catch my meaning.”
“I do,” Rel said.
The magistrate nicked her chin in Adam’s direction. “Your friend there clearly couldn’t defend himself against a kitten. You had better see him to wherever he’s going.”
“I will,” Rel said, and had a happy thought. Atan and Hibern were both determined to keep the alliance communicating, which meant a visit to Thad and Karhin Keperi in Colend. Hibern seemed to think that putting someone besides a bunch of busy young rulers in charge of communication was better than leaving everything haphazard.
Rel had agreed; any excuse to visit the Keperis was fine by him. He could see Adam fitting right in with Thad and Karhin. And everybody agreed, the alliance needed more members, if they really wanted it to be effective against Norsunder.
“Would you like to see some of Colend?” Rel asked. “I’ve friends there.”
Adam hefted his knapsack. “I would like to meet them,” he said.
About the Author
Sherwood Smith started making books out of paper towels at age six. In between stories, she studied and traveled in Europe, got a Masters degree in history, and now lives in Southern California with her spouse, two kids, and two dogs. She’s worked in jobs ranging from counter work in a smoky harbor bar to the film industry. Writing books is what she loves best. She’s the author of the high fantasy History of Sartorias-deles series as well as the modern-day fantasy adventures of Kim Murray in Coronets and Steel. Learn more at www.sherwoodsmith.net.
* All month names and festival days in headers given in Sartoran
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A Sword Named Truth Page 79
