Mapping Winter

by Marta Randall

  She stepped away. He let his hand float between them for a moment before bringing it down to rest on his hip. “Tomorrow Cadoc might be dead,” he said.

  She glanced at his dark blue eyes. “Or tonight. Where’s Isbael?”

  The steward’s mouth twitched. “In her rooms. Waiting, like the rest of us. The four agreed to come to Cadoc together or not at all.”

  “Trustful of them,” she said.

  “Kieve, Isbael doesn’t matter, not about this.” She waited for him to explain that, but instead he added, “And if we wait you may be gone.”

  “I know,” she said, and after a moment he nodded.

  “Tomorrow night, then. In the baths.” He ran a fingertip over her cheekbone and turned and went back into Cadoc’s room. Afternoon light slanted through the window and touched his copper-colored hair.

  * * * *

  A group of visitors squatted by the one of the huge fireplaces in the Great Hall, playing at blades and boundaries. Fercos, Cadoc’s fat minstrel, banged a drum and shouted out a song, and in a corner a young, pale-haired soldier in Myned blue argued with a dark-haired man over a dice bowl. At the far end of the hall, a table draped in Gadyn’s dark blue, russet, and grey held the remains of a feast. There were no out-province Lords in the hall. These were land-barons, those who would elect Cadoc’s successor, and they filled this time of waiting with shouts and games. At Kieve’s entrance their voices dropped a little. She ignored them. Close by, two servants flanked a glittering device and talked with a tall man in Kyst Province’s green on green. Kieve hesitated in mid-stride, pivoted, and went over to them.

  “Kieve!”

  The man grinned at her. It took her a moment to place him, and then it was by the deep red of his hair and his extravagantly freckled skin.

  “Daenet? Is it you?”

  “Of course it’s me,” he said. “A bit older, I grant you, and twice as handsome, but Daenet nonetheless. Give us a hug!”

  He dragged her into an embrace and kissed both her cheeks. “By the Mother, but you look good,” he said, oblivious to her ill temper. “Hurt your eye? Nothing permanent, I trust. I swear you’ve grown a good hand in the past—is it nine years? One hand in—no, two I think. Yes, two hands—you used to come to my shoulder, remember?”

  “Clearly,” she said. Daenet was her senior by four years. Their major contact had been during weapons and sparring practice, where her long body precluded pairing her with any of the apprentices in her own group. He had thrown her without mercy, time after time, until the day he left for his first oathing. Now, though, his body looked out of balance, both thin and soft.

  “I had heard you were on Sterk,” she said. “Have you seen Jenci?”

  “No.” He frowned. “Nor do I wish to.” His smile returned. “Come, look at this. It is one of the marvels of the age, Kieve. You’ll appreciate it even one-eyed. It belongs to the Lady Drysi. Look!”

  The servants moved aside as Daenet led her forward.

  “I have memorized it all,” he said. “Pay attention, now. Do you see that stone in the middle? That’s us, I mean, that’s our planet. You can see it, can’t you? Monocular as you are?”

  She scowled at him before peering at the stone. “I can see it. It’s wrong. Everyone knows that the sun is at the center of the universe.”

  “Yes, Rider, pardon, but the device, it works better this way,” one of the servants said, with just a touch of condescension. “It is easier for the seminarians to read the meaning, with the planet at the center, as it is here.”

  “Cheating,” Kieve muttered, bending closer.

  The central stone, an unfamiliar, milky green gem carved into strange shapes, hung suspended from wires so thin they were almost invisible. “It’s supposed to be a Trapper stone,” Daenet said, “But whether it is or not is anybody’s guess.”

  “Pardon, sir, but of course it is, sir,” the same servant said, interrupting.

  “Yes, of course, of course.” Daenet grinned. “Look, see the sphere around it? That’s the first Circle of Heaven and that huge and gaudy pearl is the moon. This other great white stone,” he said, pointing, “is the Sun, and these the four Circles of Heaven surrounding it, here.”

  Webs of slender golden wires connected constellations of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds, and a fine mist of silver that, she assumed, represented the Scarf. By twisting her head she could see the star clusters in their individual spheres: Mill, Loom, and Wheel clustered near the white stone; Horse, Tree, and Ice Palace in the second circle; the Minstrel, the Scarf, and the Child in the third; and surrounding them the sphere of the Eye. When she tried to focus on them, her eyes watered. Pyrs, she thought, would love to gawk at this.

  Drysi’s crafters had represented each of the ten houses of the Zodiac to glittering and expensive perfection. Kieve reached one finger toward the constellation of the Lady and the two servants stiffened. She pulled her hand back, wondering how Drysi could afford this, and remembered rumors that the woman had been selling her lands, piece by piece. Hence, Kieve thought, her desire for the sword—to improve her fortune if nothing else.

  “Those beryls there, those are the planets,” one servant said. “They have their own circles. And the colors are for the elements. Gold for earth, sapphires for air, rubies for fire, emeralds for water, and diamonds for time. You should see it, Rider, when it’s working and all the spheres turn in their times and directions.” He blew an invisible speck of dust from a star near the Eye. Moon moved in the tiny breeze.

  “It’s very impressive,” Daenet said.

  Kieve snorted. “What use is it?”

  The servants looked outraged. One said, “My Lady’s seminarian says that it has eased his work a hundredfold, by clarifying the desires of the gods. And it predicted the time we arrived here, didn’t it?”

  The other said, “This morning it said that that which is unrevealed shall be known and the dead tree will bear a strange and powerful fruit.” He paused. “What do you think of that?”

  Kieve’s lips parted, and Daenet said “Hush!” and took her by the arm and started pulling her away. “Thank you very, very much,” he said to the servants. “The device is both beautiful and impressive, please compliment your Lady on it for me. Most generous of her to share its beauty with us, and its remarkable powers. We have nothing in Kyst Province half so grand.”

  “Horse shit,” Kieve said, but by then they were far enough away so the servants didn’t hear.

  “Taller, but no more tactful,” Daenet said with delight. He released her arm and faced her. “It’s a lovely device, Kieve, and serves to while away the otherwise wasted hours.”

  “Wasted drinking, do you mean?” she said. “What has happened to you, Daenet? Look at yourself, look at this.” She thumped a finger against his slack belly. “Is this what you imagined, when we were at Koerstadt? That you would live your life in a pot of ale?”

  His lips narrowed, not quite a smile, and he shrugged. “It’s what I do, these days. Not a bad way of living, taken all in all. You might give it a try. Think of it,” he said, cutting off her response, “as practice for the future, when drinking and complimenting silly old women on their jeweled foolery is all we have left to do.”

  He turned neatly, still with the dancer’s grace she remembered from the practice yard, and strode away until his dark tunic faded into the woolliness that her distance vision had become. For a moment she thought to let him go, then followed, sorry for her ill temper. She caught up to him near the far hearth and put her hand on his arm, slowing him.

  “Daenet, wait. I—I’m sorry.”

  “An apology from Kieve Outlander? Truly a banner day.” But he turned toward her. “What do you want of me? I warn you, I will not listen to well-meaning admonitions about my state. Or ill-meaning ones, for that matter.”

  She hesitated, unsure, then said, “I just want to talk. It is—solitary to be here. And good to see another Rider in the hall. Someone from out-province.”
r />   The arch look left his face. “We took bets on it, you know. About how long you would last with this Lord.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “Come toss a pot with me. Is there a quiet place to talk?”

  “Is your cloak close by?”

  He fetched it while she waited and together they went through the small door set in the enormous Ceremonial Door. It had warmed enough so their breaths did not freeze to the fur lining of their hoods. The Shadeen on duty at either side of the door glanced at them and looked back the ward as a group of Guards walked by in tight formation, one after another, arms swinging and legs pacing in unison, looking neither right nor left.

  “Wonk wonk wonk,” one of the soldiers honked under her breath. Geese, the soldiers called them, ridiculing their formations and stiff-legged walk. These geese disappeared into the Snake, the alley running between the walls of Hueil’s Garden and the apartments of the nobility, at the far side of the Great Hall from the stables.

  “Come,” Kieve said. She led him along the inner curtain and up the archers’ stairs then along the wall walk until she came to a second flight of stairs. The Shadeen on duty glanced at them and nodded as she went up. A cold wind poured down the stairs and she paused to wrap her cloak fully closed.

  “You are, perhaps, taking me to the end of the world?” Daenet said, almost panting. A few minutes later they stepped into a bartizan carved in the mother stone of Sterk, high above the castle and to the side. Across the Morat, Abermorat shouldered up to its rock walls, jagged along the stretch where Old City crowned the Palisade. Beyond it the snow-covered fields stretched for leagues, broken by dark lines of evergreen windbreaks. Mountains reared at the horizon, white and grey and purple under a pale sky. The wind was colder here, and stronger.

  “Lovely, and worth the climb,” Daenet said. “Can we go back now?”

  “No,” she said, and went into a narrow tunnel. Sunlight disappeared as stone surrounded them. Daenet put his hand on her shoulder. She paced, one hand stretched to feel the sides of the tunnel for turns and curves. Her fingertip skated over the cold smoothness of ice and their cloaks hissed against stone. Grey stained the darkness ahead. The tunnel turned a final corner and opened onto a small balcony sheltered from the wind, facing east over the forests and north to where the Morat disappeared behind the shoulders of mountains. She raised her face in gratitude to the sunlight.

  “You lied to me,” Daenet said. “This is the end of the world.”

  She kicked a stone through the broken balustrade. “No, just the end of Sterk. I found it three years ago. I’m not sure anyone knows of it but me.” The balcony’s floors and walls were hacked out of the living rock. The balustrade, even when new, had been open and light; now much of it had fallen into the Morat, far below.

  “Thirty-two paces,” Daenet said.

  “Thirty-five,” she replied. “Your paces are still longer than mine.”

  He grunted a little. “Have you mapped it yet?”

  “The castle? You know it’s not allowed.” She kicked more stones away, clearing a place to sit.

  “If you did, you wouldn’t be the first.” He kicked a few stones himself. “What’s it like?”

  She sat and stretched her long legs through gaps in the stonework and let them dangle over the precipice. After a moment Daenet copied her. “Badly maintained, and complicated. The first castle was built during the years before the Lawgiver, at the very back, pressed up against Sterk. Later other sections went up, but not in any order. Lord Hueil put up much of it two hundred years ago and it hadn’t been invaded for three centuries before that, so he built wherever he wanted with no thought to protection.” She folded her arms along the top of the baluster and rested her chin on her crossed wrists. Sunlight warmed her shoulders.

  He looked at the parapet. “Is that safe?”

  “Probably not. It’s complicated underground, too, in caves and tunnels in the rock itself. People used to live in them. There are at least three or four layers under the earth: the ones used for storage and the servants’ passageways, the ones used by Cadoc’s Guards, and others below them, old and black. The ones under the Garden of the Lady are the cold rooms, and the catacombs.”

  “The Garden...the one with chimes in the trees?”

  “Yes. Cadoc will go there, and when he’s nothing but bones he’ll be portioned out and stuck into the walls, like all the other Lords.”

  “It ith not ourth to quethion,” Daenet said, “the peculiariteeth of Lordth.”

  Kieve smiled. “Old Misery—”

  “Mithery—”

  “I haven’t thought of her in years,” she continued. “Thpitting out her hithtory lethonth and daring us to laugh at her.”

  “Daring?” Daenet echoed. “I still have the scars.” He pulled a flask from his cloak, drank, and offered it to her. She drank. The apato burned, then felt warm inside her.

  “You were in Brodveld,” Daenet said. “How was that?”

  She snorted. “Like spending each day in the middle of a piece of empty parchment. I rode for a land-baron. My master stayed at his manor and threw the bones for endless games of Skull, and debated the finer points of irrigation, and sent me out on occasion to collect crop reports or deliver party invitations. I think I was not decorative enough for him.”

  “You were never decorative.” Daenet took another drink. “Jenci used his influence to get you this posting.”

  “I know it.” She took the bottle and helped herself. Daenet looked as if he wanted to say something and thought better of it. Together they watched distant clouds above the northern mountains.

  “You said, practice for the future,” she said after a while.

  “I said... Oh, complimenting silly old women?” He rested his forearms along his bent knees and looked at her. “The Smiths Guild ran the Iron Road up to Trine this last summer. If they can engineer a way past the Falls of the Morat, it should reach Dalmorat in another ten years. Perhaps less.”

  Kieve thought about that. The Iron Road ran from Coaelani in the south up the valley of the Morat past the capital at Koerstadt, and bore the huffing, panting, belching machine the Smiths Guild had unveiled sixteen years before. A huge trough on wheels followed the machine, carrying coal or wood. Hitched behind that came flat platforms with low sides loaded with goods or produce or sometimes livestock, came houses with windows and chimneys and deeply upholstered seats where passengers could ride in comfort. The wood or coal fed fires in the black machine’s belly, water in an internal tank turned to steam, steam turned the collection of gears and shafts and rods that propelled the Smiths’ machine down the rich heartland of Cherek. A fast Rider on a swift horse could outpace the monster, for a time. During the fierce northern winters the machine traveled only in southern Cherek where deep snow and ice did not block its path.

  “They’ll still need Riders,” she said. “In winter time.”

  “No,” Daenet said. “The Smiths are an inventive bunch and they’ll think their way around that, too, once they come around the Falls of the Morat.”

  Kieve nodded, unhappy. “So the iron machines will deliver dispatches more quickly than we can. And the semaphore towers...”

  Daenet didn’t reply, leaving her to think about the network of signalers and towers spread over Cherek, a web with Koerstadt secure at its center. They depended on clear weather and sharp eyes, but year by year the web grew. If the weather was clear when Cadoc died, the Lords Council in Koerstadt would know of his death in a few hours. If the weather did not cooperate, they would still know of it within days, in far less time than it would take a Rider to bring the news. The Council would not note his death officially until Kieve came into its hall, the scrolled Deathnote in her hands, but this would be mere formality.

  Daenet settled his shoulders within his cloak. “There is more dubious news. The Smiths and Artisans together have invented a wire that talks. No, I don’t know how it works, but an Artisan on one end touches metal to metal, and on the other end the wire
sounds out clicks and clacks that another Artisan turns into words. They have one in Koerstadt running from the Smiths’ Guild Hall to the Council Chamber. And by next summer, they say, they will have one running all the way to Lymon. And beyond.”

  “This is a true thing?”

  He nodded. “The Alchemists have concocted lightning in a bottle, not the paltry stuff they crank up at the fairs but something made with stinks and powders, and it provides the power for the talking wire. I have not seen it with my own eyes, no. But I know it exists, as certainly as I know the moon will rise tonight.”

  She had gathered a handful of small stones as he talked, and now she threw them one by one off the parapet. They landed so far away she could not hear them.

  “My Lord of Kyst has not sent me out for three years,” Daenet said into her silence. “I deliver no messages for him—for that he has a woman from the Artisans at the semaphore, and free passage for his dispatches from the Smiths. The annual Survey, Kieve. Do you do it?”

  “Of course,” she said. “You...don’t?”

  He shook his head. “It’s Kyst Province. There are no unmapped places, and a new bridge or barn hardly deserves a full Survey.” He took another drink. “We still ride out, though. Myself, my Lord, his court. His hounds and cooks and his wife, and the children. We have wonderful carousings in the fields and my Lord takes me hunting, and after a fortnight or a month we ride back to Mayne again. But there is no mapping done.” He offered her the bottle. She shook her head. “The Guild is right, Kieve. I am not Kyst’s Rider. I am instead his boon companion, as I have been for almost all of three Oathings.”

  He was silent for a moment, then added: “It is not a permanent position, though. And fourteen years is a long time. He could find a more boon companion tomorrow, although I hope he will not. But what I do for him need not be done by a Rider. There is nothing I do for him that need be done by a Rider.” He gestured. “The Riders, my dear, are as good as obsolete, or will be as soon as the Iron Road runs to Abermorat. And then what shall you do?”

  “Map,” Kieve said. “Despite Kyst, not all of Cherek is discovered yet. The Smiths need maps to locate their Road, and the Artisans for their semaphore towers. If they hang talking wires, they will have an even greater need for maps.”