A Stranger to Command

by Sherwood Smith

  The only one who had actually seen Sartora—the young girl who’d released the world from the enchantment kingdom by kingdom—was King Galdran, and about her he’d said, She was a small, scrawny rat of a child. Didn’t stay long enough to exchange two words.

  To which Shevraeth’s father had said in private, If it’s true she is able to hear your thoughts as did our ancestors, what child, or adult for that matter, would linger in King Galdran’s presence?

  “Are you going to yap all day?”

  That was the senior rad in charge of archery, smacking his brass-topped stick against his palm.

  The boys scattered.

  When the noon bell rang and Shevraeth joined his own barracks, red-haired Marec said, “Did you hear Sartora is here?”

  Shevraeth asked, “Will we see her?”

  Baudan turned his thumb down. “She’s only come to the summer games once. Rest of the time she rides with the girls, or stays up in the castle.” Now the thumb hitched over his shoulder. “The people up there report she and the king blab about history, and all the other kings they know.”

  “Kings,” Shevraeth repeated.

  Stad poked him in the arm. “I’ll bet you didn’t even know our king got taken to the Norsunder base when Siamis first came. Escaped, too. It was after that he met Sartora.”

  “We didn’t hear any of that,” Shevraeth admitted.

  “Are you ignorant!” Marec declared with the satisfaction of superior knowledge.

  Vandaus snorted. “Truth is, Shevraeth, the king never talks about any of it. We only know as much as we do because some of us have relatives over in Vasande Leror. Next kingdom northeast of us. And the princess there has the world’s biggest mouth.”

  They all started chattering, and Shevraeth shook his head, laughing inwardly at himself. He’d arrived comfortable in his own superior knowledge. Remalna, so close to Sartor, influenced by Sles Adran and Colend, was sophisticated, rich with world literature, music, history, and these Marlovens were supposed to be ignorant barbarians, only good at war. The truth was, Remalna was a tiny kingdom lying at the edge of world events, and he stood now in a place where world events occurred.

  So maybe he had his answer for his lack of interview at last: what interest could a king involved in international affairs, whether his age or not, possibly have for a nobody from a small, unknown place like Remalna?

  He was still laughing inwardly at himself when they returned from supper.

  Janold came to him, saying in a quiet voice, “There’s a runner from the castle waiting for you outside the north gate.”

  “A runner?” Shevraeth repeated.

  Janold opened his hand toward the door. “King wants to talk to you.”

  TEN

  Janold watched Shevraeth look down at himself, his customary expression of polite detachment lengthening into dismay. Then he looked up, his confusion clear. “Like this?”

  Janold said, “What else? Only seniors get fitted uniforms. Everyone younger grows too fast.”

  “I have a formal suit of clothes meant for royal interviews,” Shevraeth said.

  The foreigner seemed to be uneasy, as if he’d made a mistake. So Janold didn’t tell him what he could do with his formal suit of clothes. Instead, he laughed. “If you can still fit it, more’n I know.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Runner’s waiting.”

  Shevraeth dashed through the cleaning frame, then hurried out, not even stopping to answer Stad’s “Where you going?”

  He found the runner waiting in the corridor outside the barracks courtyard. The tall young woman had a stooping eagle stitched over her heart. She was one of the king’s personal runners.

  “You Shevraeth?” she asked, and on his affirmative, “This way.”

  They walked along the walled corridor and into that low, dark almost-tunnel through the massive castle walls that he had seen on his arrival.

  Dream-like, that was it. Nothing seemed real. He didn’t fit here, as one never quite fit in a dreamscape. It wasn’t the flickering torchlight at the street corners and high on the castle walls. He was intensely self-conscious in this rough Marloven clothing, though he’d gotten used to it within the context of the academy. But surely one didn’t dress this way for a royal audience. He frowned down at the stones so carefully fitted together on the street, worn from centuries of horse, shoe, and wheel. Maybe he was mistaking the rules again, and this sudden summons was some sort of oblique royal insult.

  He remembered his father telling him once that personal interviews before the king of Colend required not only a nicety of formal apparel, but you had to be careful which colors you layered over which, and how your sleeves were draped, for all those things sent subtle signals. And then again, you had to enter certain gates, at certain times, for the gates and times all combined into layers of meaning before a word was even spoken. Even what kind of boat you used on the canals to approach the royal palace (for they apparently had few castles in Colend, and no walled cities) sent a message.

  All dangers, without a steel weapon in sight. His mother had once said, The western barbarians duel with steel, in the east with silken ribbons.

  He and Savona had scoffed. Who could be afraid of a ribbon? To which his mother had answered, When the weapon is a ribbon you discover your wounds in the scorn of the court. Humiliation can be far worse than mere steel.

  Well, here might be a world of steel and humiliation. Shevraeth laughed at himself inside his head, though he was careful to maintain the court mask. Pay attention, or humiliation is guaranteed, he thought.

  The royal castle was enormous. Shevraeth was about halfway through the history book Janold had brought him. In it he’d learned that during the royal city’s early days it hadn’t been called Choreid Dhelerei, but Choraed Hesea, as the kingdom had been Marloven Hesea (the “ea” not the AY-eh of the east, but a breathy yah that had been lopped off a couple centuries ago). And way before that the kingdom, or empire, had had a different name altogether.

  But from the very beginning, at least from the time the Marlovens had lived in castles, the armsmen of the various Jarls had been housed in this castle during what they had called Convocation, held every New Year’s Week, and again for the summer wargames. Apparently, at least at certain points in their extremely violent history, the Marloven royal families had required a substantial private guard as well as the city guard. This was why the royal castle was enormous, made up of conjoined stone buildings, each three stories, the towers considerably taller.

  Shevraeth had looked at the book’s diagrams of the castle and its changes over the centuries, and recognized enough of their route to realize that at least the interview would not take place in the vast throne room, with its ancient and bloodstained war banners hanging on high, and the huge black and gold screaming eagle war banner suspended behind the throne. That chamber lay south of them, behind doors so tall and wide one could drive a team of horses through the opening. In fact, one of this king’s ancestors had, during one of their many brutal internal conflicts.

  Shevraeth knew that the eagle standard had once been the House standard of the Montredaun-An family, who had held onto the crown longer than any other Marloven family, losing it to treachery and regaining it again.

  He knew that this king he was about to meet was the son of a man murdered by his own brother, when Senrid was barely out of babyhood, a fact Shevraeth had discovered by listening to vague references made by the boys in general chatter, and putting together the clues.

  He had looked at the back of the book in hopes of finding out more, but the pages having to do with Senrid’s father and whatever happened after had been ripped out.

  They climbed at last up the stairs into the Residence wing and traversed long halls lit by glowglobes. On the smooth plaster some Marloven artist had created friezes of large, stylized raptor shapes, done in subtle shades of pale gray.

  “Here we are,” the runner said, and paused outside a door otherwise unmarked, no diff
erent than all the others along the hall.

  She rapped twice, and a voice called, “Enter.”

  She opened the door, and waved Shevraeth inside a big room with a high ceiling, and a line of four tall windows on the opposite wall, overlooking the rooftops of the academy. Torchlight gold-washed the roofs along the castle walls right below eye-level.

  The same blond boy who’d appeared so suddenly at that very first sword fighting evaluation sat at a fine desk facing the windows.

  “Come in,” Senrid-Harvaldar said.

  Shevraeth’s first instinct was to perform the royal bow, his second to strike his palm over his heart, then he remembered someone saying that the proper salute for kings was a fist over the heart.

  Senrid stood, waving a hand. “Never mind protocol.”

  He was half a head shorter than Shevraeth, with gray-blue eyes set well apart in a face beginning to lose the roundness of boyhood. He looked much younger than fifteen, except around the eyes.

  “Would you rather speak Sartoran?” he asked, in that language. He spoke it with ease, nearly accent-free, except for the Marloven precision to consonants.

  “Whatever you wish, your majesty,” Shevraeth replied in Sartoran, using the courtesy title he was used to.

  Senrid laughed. “Forget the title stuff in here. Out there we play the game by the rules.” He jerked his thumb toward the windows. “Have a chair. Tell me what you think of your stay so far.”

  Shevraeth’s long training in court politeness prompted him to bow a little before he took a seat. “Everything is most satisfactory—” He almost added your majesty, for Galdran Merindar required the courtesies to be observed at all times, and Shevraeth was in royal mode, despite all the differences of the past couple of months. This boy in the ordinary shirt rolled to the elbows, the dusty trousers and scuffed riding boots, was still a king.

  Senrid’s brows lifted. “That tells me exactly nothing. You have no observations to make, after nearly a season among us?”

  Shevraeth’s face did not change. He said in the same polite, level voice, “I came to learn what you have to teach.”

  Senrid crossed his arms and leaned against his desk. “Do you always yap out platitudes?”

  Shevraeth asked, his voice still courtier-bland, “What do you wish to hear?”

  “What you have observed during your months among the evil Marlovens, of course.” Senrid’s smile showed the edges of his teeth.

  If a man had said that, Shevraeth would have kept silent, but this was another boy, even if he was a king. “If you wanted a spy, you should have made that clear to my father.”

  Senrid laughed. “A real retort, if not a real answer.” His laugh was sudden, there then gone. For that moment he seemed much younger than his age.

  It was that disarming laugh that prompted Shevraeth to say, “If you want some kind of evaluation of your training methods, I don’t know how. It is so different from home. But different is what my father wanted.” He looked down at his hands. “I’m still trying to understand things. Learn what’s considered basic here. Nearly all of it is unknown at home.”

  “Fair enough. They speak well of you. Have you any observation to make on the method of teaching, from your perspective as newcomer?”

  Method of teaching. How much did that compass? Shevraeth suspected Senrid-Harvaldar knew all about Sindan, but he wouldn’t bring it up unless the king did.

  “I found it strange that so much teaching is done by other boys. They’re good at what they do, at least as far as I can tell. But we seldom see masters, except at the various types of fight training, and even then they mostly oversee. It’s the senior boys who do most of the demonstrations.”

  “We have a long tradition of the older boys teaching the young, and girls teaching younger girls as well. There have been... changes,” Senrid said, after a hesitation. “Some like them, some don’t. As is common with any change most anywhere. Marlovens,” he added with some irony, “tend to be less than courtly when they don’t like change.”

  Shevraeth remembered the stories he’d heard, and the urge to smile doused in a heartbeat. So he shifted the subject enough to regain neutral ground. “The only thing I can offer is a question more than an observation, but why so much time spent on those games? The overnights are fun, and I can see they are practicing some of the things they experiment with on the shorter games, but playing around like that—no weapons, not even toy ones—doesn’t seem much to the purpose of learning the skills of war.”

  “It is very much to the purpose of learning the skills of command.”

  Shevraeth said, “How?”

  “Next game, try not to pay so much attention to your own riding, and what you yourself are doing. Get captured early, if you need to. Watch the bigger patterns. It won’t make sense at once. At least it didn’t to me. But—if you watch—you will start seeing the whole. That’s the first part of command, seeing what’s there. Making sense out of what appears to be confusion. The rest is deciding what to do and then doing it.”

  ‘Part of command.’ Shevraeth felt a shift in perspective that was almost like a moment of dizziness. It was followed by the heat of embarrassment. “Nothing was said. I take it everyone understands that purpose from the beginning.”

  Senrid flicked a hand open. “They grow up knowing it, knowing it so well, most of them, they don’t really think about it. But then most of them will be middle-rank commanders. Masters. Captains at outposts.”

  Shevraeth began, “My father said—”

  Senrid’s mouth tightened. “So why are you using a territorial title rather than your name?”

  Shevraeth stared, surprised both by the interruption and by the question.

  Senrid’s expression turned wry. “Do I look stupid?” Then that quick, disarming grin again. “Don’t answer that. My uncle thought I did, and he saw me every day. Or I would not be alive now. Here.”

  He moved quickly, reaching inside a beautiful cabinet carved over with patterns of running horses. Inside were vertical rolls of paper, all with notations at one end. Senrid ran his finger quickly along them, then pulled one out and snapped it open, spreading it wide on the desktop with his hands. Shevraeth was distracted by faint white scars across both of Senrid’s wrists. Wide scars. Strange. What would make such a scar?

  “Here’s the eastern end of the continent,” Senrid said, setting an ink pot at one end to keep the paper from curling, and holding the other end down.

  Shevraeth studied the skillfully drawn map, rivers and forests detailed with stylized clarity and then colored. Neatly lettered were all kingdoms, capitals, major cities. Sometimes trade cities.

  He found Remalna, tucked away among the other small kingdoms surrounding it, there above Sartor. He saw his father’s principality and all the counties named correctly, including his own marquisate. On the east, along the mountains forming the inland border, someone had printed Goldenwoods—guarded by tree people. He touched the lettering. “We call them the Hill Folk.”

  “Up north they’re called the Hervithe.” Senrid brushed his fingers over the mountains of Tlanth in the corner of Remalna. “What are they like?”

  “My father says they aren’t even remotely human, that the ones people occasionally catch sight of probably aren’t even in their true form.”

  Senrid’s face had gone wry again. He snapped the map closed. “People want to send boys here for one thing, to learn the Marloven war skills. Despite all the flattery and compliments they mouth out. Or write out, in your father’s case.” He glanced over his shoulder before he put the map away. “So I did some delving. Made sure the oh-so-polite and oh-so-flattering Prince of Renselaeus wasn’t planning to do some throne grabbing after his son spent his time among the barbarians. Your—”

  The door opened, and Senrid’s head whipped round, then he relaxed. Shevraeth had only time to feel one pang of alarm at Senrid’s instant tension, before Senrid smiled at the newcomer who was carefully carrying a tray—and who did n
ot need to knock at a king’s closed door.

  She was short, slight, probably eleven or twelve years old, wearing a shapeless old tunic of blue-dyed cotton and loose trousers of a dull green that only came to the knees. Below the hem of these peculiar-looking trousers her skinny legs and feet were bare.

  Shevraeth’s gaze traveled up again to her face, which was unremarkable, round as children’s faces are usually round, framed by thin, lank light brown hair. The short, ragged ends looked as if a hand like Sindan’s had hacked it off with a knife. And there had been no one to ‘even it up’ for her.

  She set the tray down on the desk. On it was a pot of hot chocolate and cream pastries of the sort Colend made famous, the first Shevraeth had seen in this country.

  “Do you like pastry?” the girl asked in Sartoran. Her accent was somewhat flat, a foreign accent Shevraeth had never heard before.

  Shevraeth restrained the urge to bow. The girl’s face was dominated by her eyes, which were so light a brown they looked golden in the lamp light, their expression steady and acute in a way he’d never seen before in adult or child. She seemed to be aware of his impulse and its correction, for he saw a subtle flicker in her brow, not quite a contraction, but a pucker, then she smiled shyly. “Please, have a pastry. Senrid likes ’em and I brought enough up for three.”

  “To the rescue, eh?” Senrid asked, not saying whom she was rescuing.

  The girl looked at him, her manner still. Senrid turned away, busy rolling up his map. No words had passed, but Shevraeth sensed a challenge from the girl, one accepted by Senrid. He was astonished at this interaction, which was so unconventional—as was her appearance—he once again felt he’d slipped out of the world into dreams.

  “This is Liere.” Senrid raised a hand toward the girl, and Shevraeth saw the scarring was on the underside of his wrist as well.

  “Lee-AIR-eh,” Shevraeth repeated, trying to get the vowels right. Had he heard that name before?

  “What shall I call you?” Liere asked.

  “Shevraeth will be fine.” And to Senrid, in answer to his question, “No one in the academy knows it for a title. They thought it was my family name, which they had trouble pronouncing. So I let it be.”