Mapping Winter

by Marta Randall

  “Jenci?” Leyek said. “The Rider Guildmaster?”

  “Murdered,” Kieve said.

  “I did not kill him,” Leyek said, alarmed. “Only one, only the woman. I did not even know he was dead.”

  Ilach frowned. Esylk said, “He is an idiot, but I think he is innocent of Jenci’s death. Torture is not a Trapper’s style.”

  “I agree,” Endres said. “And it is too easy. It is what we are meant to believe.”

  “By the man who ordered Jenci dead,” Kieve said. “And who ordered the death of the apothecary, because of what she may have seen on Lord’s Walk. And who will turn the Shadeen Guild from Dalmorat, to protect himself from the truth.”

  One by one they sought each other’s eyes around the pool. The bird called from the far reaches of the bathhouse.

  Ilach shook his head. “This is supposition. It is not proof.”

  Kieve didn’t respond. Endres said, “Why didn’t they pitch the boy over the edge? Why leave him on Lord’s Walk?”

  “Gadyn needs his body,” Kieve said. “If a Trapper is found then the rumor is proven, isn’t it? Best if the Trapper is dead, but even alive the scheme would work. No one will believe the word of a Trapper.”

  Braith cleared her throat. “Do we believe the word of a Trapper?”

  “If there is other evidence, then yes, we do,” Ilach said. “But it is best if we do not have to rely upon it.”

  “Commander,” Esylk said. “You swore that Leyek would be given to me once we are finished here, into my keeping. If you force him to say this in public...” She made a graphic gesture. At their feet, Leyek moved abruptly and was still. Ilach frowned at her for a moment. The bird called again.

  “Jenci must have been held and tortured in the ossuary. There may be marks of this,” Ilach said at last. “Braith, could you find this room?”

  Braith shook her head. “The ossuary is a labyrinth. The rooms I know are the newer ones, those in current use.” She shook her head again. “It would take weeks to explore them all, I think. We don’t have the time.”

  “There is another way,” Endres said. They turned to him. “Gadyn still cannot be sure of the sword. Aedin’s death brought some to his banner and others away—there is talk that Baron Kelyn will challenge him, once he hears the news.” He tucked his hands under his belt. “He still has need of Kieve’s pledge, I think. If the rumors about Kelyn are true, then without the lordship Gadyn stands to lose more than Dalmorat.”

  “And so?” Braith said.

  “And so, if she will agree to it, I believe the Rider is our bait,” Endres said. “He will call her, and likely to the same place he used before. If you go, Kieve, and if you are followed, Gadyn himself will lead us to the evidence we need.”

  Ilach chewed at his lip. “He won’t call her if her bodyguard is present.”

  Esylk said, “He has twice tried to kill the people he brought to that room, and once he succeeded. It puts the Rider at grave risk.”

  “But he needs her,” Endres said. “He needs her pledge, done in public. If we cannot follow her, we can wait until he brings her to the Great Hall.”

  Ilach rocked back. “We have declared a truce, you and I, but how can I trust you in this? If Gadyn takes the sword, then your Guards—”

  “No. He came to me and asked and I said no.”

  Ilach grimaced. “You said no? You, who hate the Guild, who says the Guild has been your enemy?”

  “The Guild doesn’t confer honesty or truth, Commander,” Endres retorted. “You hold no monopoly on virtue.”

  “Your plan puts the Rider’s life at risk.”

  “Stop this,” Esylk said with some impatience. “We speak of the Rider’s life against the future of an entire province. It seems an uneven balance.”

  They all looked at Kieve then. She took a deep breath, smelling the fragrance of the bathhouse.

  “There seems to be little choice,” she said. “I’ll do it.” She looked down at Esylk. “And if we fail, there are other Riders. You will find someone to explore the Outlands for you. It need not be me.”

  Into the small, bleak silence that followed, Endres said, “Nonsense. You will be watched. As soon as you are in the room, we’ll be there. Or in the Great Hall. He will not harm you in public and we can take you back. There will be no danger. There will be no chance of danger.”

  “Yes?” Kieve looked at him. “How did Aedin die, Captain Endres?”

  Endres put his shoulders back. “I had him killed, Rider. As I was ordered to do, by my master and yours. If it is consolation, I gave him a quick death, and as honorable as I could make it. He left messages, for his wife and father and Chancellor.”

  “But still you killed him.”

  “And still you brought him to me,” Endres said.

  She turned away from him. “Can we do this thing? Now?”

  “Yes,” Ilach said. “The sooner, I think, the better.”

  * * * *

  An hour later she was alone in her rooms, sipping a cup of wine and staring out the window by her worktable. She had saved out one pen, some ink, and a small stack of paper. At her request, Braith had sent one of the cadets to take the Compendium to Taryn Steward. She had packed up the crystal and porcelain herself, and labeled the box for Cairun. When the cadet returned he could deliver that one, too.

  She had come to her rooms alone and as publicly as she could through the ash-covered walks, through the Great Hall, and through the yards, her hood thrown back so that no one could mistake her. Aside from sending a messenger to Gadyn, she did not know what else she could do to make her isolation known.

  What else? The clutter from that morning, which in their sudden leaving had remained scattered over the larger table. Kieve took it down the hall to Gaura’s closet and came back. The cadet had told her that Gaura had borne twins, a boy and a girl, tiny but healthy as was Gaura herself. Perhaps the bought prayers had helped. Two new lives, who would grow up knowing of Cadoc and his Rider only as bogeymen used to frighten children into good behavior.

  Thinking of that, Kieve reached up to touch her crystal lamp, the one she forbade Gaura to clean for fear of breakage. On impulse she picked up her pen and wrote a note leaving the lamp to the servant. She could sell it, Kieve thought. The capits and quents and stivers would make a portion for the children, perhaps enough to buy them apprenticeships with a guild and away from menial service.

  She wrote this in the note, sealed it with a drop of wax, and wrote Gaura’s name on the outside. Someone would deliver the note and read it to her. Kieve put the note aside. She pulled another piece of paper from the stack, and hesitated.

  What could she say to him? She had pulled him out of his home and abandoned him to the care of a stranger. She had nourished in him a dissatisfaction for his life and made his future vanish like smoke from Raven’s back. She had left him landless and guildless and alone. She had set him free, with no place to go.

  She took up her pen and again put it down, and picked it up. She tapped it against the paper. Un-inked, it left small pocks in the paper, invisible but, when she touched them, apparent to the pads on her fingertips.

  She lifted the wine cup and drank. The best thing she could say to him, she thought, was nothing at all. Let him make a future free of her. She left the paper blank.

  Jenci’s guild token clicked against its chain. She took it from her pocket, and the necklet Pyrs had given her, and fastened both around her neck. Opening the collar of her shirt, she let them drop against her skin. For a moment they felt sharp with cold, then they warmed and she could not feel them at all.

  Braith said that Kyst had come to the barracks, his own men at arms behind him, and demanded the return of his Rider, blowing and blustering and shouting until Daenet appeared, well hung-over. His lord had put the Rider’s arm over his shoulders and taken him, slipping on the ice, back toward the Great Hall, Daenet draped over him like a cloak.

  If need be, Daenet could ride the Deathnote to Koerstadt.
He and his master would have to take the Water Road back to Kyst in any event. She took her map of the Water Road from the pocket of her breeches and put it on the table. She tapped the pen against the paper and laid it down again. Daenet would figure it out. He didn’t need a note. At least he could stay now with his love in Kyst, until they tired of each other. If they did. She thought of Daenet, younger, his body taut and strong from the training yards at Koerstadt, kneeling before his new master in a garden, struck blind and breathless with love. When she searched within herself for an echo of longing, of recognition, even of jealousy, it seemed that all her hidden doors and rooms had disappeared. She felt cool and hollowed and distant from the world.

  The sun hovered above the horizon. Cadoc still lived. They said that it could not go on much longer, that he might die by full nightfall, by midnight, by morning at the latest. She thought of Calton’s proof of infinity and of Cairun’s lips, and paused for a moment before turning her face from the memory. They had not talked of a future between them, and indeed there could be none. She touched the items in her pockets again: the map of the Morat, Jenci’s finger in its box, the sliver of bone. Her fingers told them over again, like the prayer beads the seminarians used, as though if she touched them the right way, in the right sequence, they would speak, yield up meaning, give her an answer to questions that she knew had no answer at all. People were born and lived and died. Oaths rested on running water. Things happened. Time moved, and cared nothing for those it altered. It made no difference. She made no difference. Time moved, whether she was there to see it or not.

  She stood at the center of her room and repeated the gestures that Leyek had made before the forfeits game, murmuring the words that brought her soul into harmony with the world so that when she died her soul could die with her, clean and at peace. It was difficult at first, touching the memories of sunlight, anger, wine, disappointment, food, love, sex, fear, laughter, a register what she had and what she had missed. She sang them into silence, the Inguruki melody riding just under her breath, the Akeguruk words simple and harsh and comforting.

  When the peremptory knock came she was not startled, and not surprised when she opened the door and saw a greasy, grinning little man.

  “Dav,” she said, as though naming a disease.

  His smirk widened. “I have something for you,” he said. “Perhaps you misplaced it.” He thrust his fist out, turned it over, and opened his fingers. In his palm lay her own Rider’s token.

  She reached for it. He closed his fingers on it, moving his fist away. He almost giggled.

  “Will you come?” he said, “or do we need to send a finger, too?”

  * * * *

  The journey in darkness was dizzying. He bound her eyes and pushed her along corridors (twenty-nine running paces, then forty, nine, eighteen), forcing her down steps slick with ice (twelve, thirty, then five), a few times holding her against the wall while they listened to distant footsteps. They left the stench of sulphur behind. Her boots rang on the stones. Ilach’s watchers sounded ever fainter, until she could not hear them at all. Dav had the token she had given Pyrs. She tried not to think about what that meant.

  They descended another flight of stairs, walked along another corridor. Dav pushed her sideways and she stumbled into a room where a voice said to remove the cloth around her eyes. He unclasped her cloak and kicked it away, then twisted her sleeves together at the wrists and used them to hold her arms behind her with one hand while he pulled the cloth away from her face. She blinked and saw Bredda leaning against a wall, her mouth pinched down. Pyrs lay against her, his face purple with bruises. A lantern hung from one wall. Across from it a torch smoked.

  “Yours, I believe,” Gadyn Marubin said. Dav jerked her around to face him.

  He sat in a broad, backless chair, dressed in his battle costume, brilliant with embroidery across the surcoat. He had added a sword in a jeweled scabbard, which hung from a broad leather belt and stuck out behind the chair. Beyond the chair a frieze of dark old bones covered the wall up to a ceiling clothed in scapulae. A pile of naked swords lay against the wall to his right. Bright colors flashed from their hilts. The room smelled of lantern smoke and soot and of cold, damp stones. Her skin heated. She made herself wait until the flush of anger faded a little.

  “What do you want for them?” she said.

  “Rider, don’t be stupid,” he said. “We will go up to the Great Hall and you will bend the knee to me, and steeple your hands, and make your oath.”

  She frowned at him. “Until your father dies, no oath I make is legal. You know that.”

  Dav jerked her wrists up. The sudden pain made her gasp.

  “Be respectful,” Dav said. He smelled, incongruously, of rose water.

  “Indeed.” Gadyn’s scabbard knocked against the side of the chair. Perhaps Ilach’s watchers had not lost her, perhaps they were even now closing in. From the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of Bredda’s cloak. “We do not need to hurt the Rider,” Gadyn said. “We have the boy.”

  “Leave him alone,” Kieve said. “Leave them both alone. They are no part of this.”

  “No?” Gadyn scowled. “It would have been much simpler if he had not been found, that first time. If not for that, none of this would have happened. You would have knelt to me in an instant, but someone stole him from me. If you wish to cast blame, Kieve Rider, look no further than that.”

  The anger rose again but she refused to hold it. “I will do what you require,” she said after a moment.

  Gadyn grinned. “‘My Guild requires that I not swear falsely,’” he said, mimicking her.

  She would not look away. “I will do whatever you want. But release the boy and the woman first.”

  His eyebrows rose. “I am not an idiot,” he said. “Hit her.”

  Dav did, a blow to the stomach that drove the wind from her.

  “First you will do what is required, then I will release the boy and the woman.”

  Kieve shook her head. “Wait,” she gasped. “Wait. You can’t. Bring me. Injured.”

  “She is right,” Gadyn said. The pressure on her arms relaxed a little. He shifted in the chair again. “But the boy and the woman stay here, until you are done.”

  Kieve forced air into her lungs. “No,” she said. “How can. I trust you? I will do as. You require and you. Will kill them. Release them. First. Or bring them. With us.”

  Gadyn frowned at her. “I will not bargain with you, Rider. Come.” He rose. “We will do this now, before it grows later. The old bastard may die at any moment, and I don’t want the bitch my sister there if I am not.”

  Kieve straightened. “You killed. My guildmaster. I won’t speak. If you leave them here.”

  “Your guildmaster died,” Gadyn said, furious, “because you weren’t on Sterk and could not be found. All you had to do was come when I summoned you, but you didn’t, no matter what I sent. The guildmaster died because of you, not me. I am not to blame.”

  “Cousin!”

  Dav jerked her around as Cairun came into the room. Kieve filled her lungs. Cairun glanced at Bredda and Pyrs, nodded at Kieve, and came to stand between her and Gadyn. “You have reached an agreement with the Rider, then?”

  “Yes,” Gadyn said, as Kieve said “No.”

  Cairun shrugged. “It no longer matters, Gadyn, it is too late. The Myned boy is found, and alive and talking, or so I hear.”

  Gadyn waved this away as he sat again. “He is a Trapper. He may talk until the moon falls and he won’t be believed.”

  “You stake your life on that? I would not. Release these people, Gadyn. The storm is finished. If you leave now you may save your neck.”

  Gadyn sniggered. “You think to rescue your leman, but it won’t work. My future is more important than your lust.”

  “Gadyn.” Cairun’s voice was easy, amused. “Have you ever known me to put my pleasure above my fortune?” Kieve stared at his brown curls.

  “I’ve never known you to
have pleasure.” Gadyn tilted in his seat to look at Kieve. “Did he have pleasure of you, Rider? Or did he strip you to find thorns and brambles? It matters not. You will come with me to the Great Hall, and bend the knee, and say the words, which will be believed because,” he grinned again, “your Guild requires it. And when you are believed, I will release these two. Not before.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Cairun said. “Already a message has been sent by the semaphore telegraph to Aedin’s father. There is talk of holding you to justice, regardless of Cadoc’s orders. Your only hope is to flee, Gadyn, now. I have arranged a boat for you and have put money in it and your clothes. You can take your man, you will need a traveling companion. But you must leave, it is the only way.”

  Gadyn came to his feet. “This is treason,” he said.

  “Treason?” Cairun echoed. “Against whom? You are not yet the Lord of Dalmorat.”

  “I never touched the guildmaster,” Gadyn said. “You will testify to that.”

  “You did not touch him but you had him maimed, and to hide it you had him killed. Run, Gadyn. They’ll string you up in a slave’s cage at Penitence if they catch you.”

  “Yes,” said a new voice, from behind Kieve. “Run, Gadyn.”

  Gadyn stared at the doorway. Dav lowered her arms a little. Kieve risked turning enough to look at Bredda and Pyrs. The boy sat against the old woman’s body. Kieve had time to exchange a long, undecipherable look with Bredda before Dav jerked her forward again. In that moment Isbael came into the room and stood with her hands in her sleeves, smiling at her brother.

  “How touching that you remembered our old play room,” she said. “Remember how you brought skulls here and named each one? One for every person on Sterk you hated.” She laughed. “There were quite a number of those. By now you need must more than one room.”

  “Did he bring you here?” Gadyn demanded, jerking his chin toward Cairun.

  “No.” She rocked back a little. “It wasn’t difficult to figure out where you were, brother. You were never very difficult to figure out, and age has not deepened you.” She smiled. “Torturing a guildmaster, and to murder him after...because he could identify you? Neither subtle nor intelligent.”