Mapping Winter

by Marta Randall

  She pulled the ring from his finger, a band of gold incised with symbols that she could not decipher, set with a single blue stone.

  “Remember me by this,” he said. He curled her fingers over her palm.

  “My lord, I can’t—”

  “It is a tradition,” he said. “Say my name.”

  “Cairun,” she whispered, and slid the ring into a pocket.

  He moved his fingers to lace them through hers. “It hurts again. Would it please you to give me the wine, or shall I drink it by myself? I want it all.”

  She shook her head. “I do not want to see you dead.”

  “No?” He smiled again, lips tight against the pain. “I have endangered you, and played with you and those you love, and despite the pleasure we had of each other there is little else beyond that pleasure, and the danger, and the pain. I did you no favors, Kieve Rider. I too carry blame for your guildmaster’s death.” He paused. “Does that make it easier to kill me?”

  “No,” she said. She sat on his bed and slid her arm under him until his head rested on her shoulder, and bent, and kissed him. Like his hands, his lips were cold. She held the cup and tilted it as he drank, careful not to spill a drop.

  When she put the cup down he sighed a little.

  “Don’t go,” he said, so she braced her back against the headboard. Mazus had piled extra wood on the fire in an attempt to warm his lord. Firelight gilded the old tapestries, layered one over the other against the stones, and pinked the stones themselves.

  “It’s warmer in Koerstadt,” Cairun said. “Remember the street of fruit trees? I would walk down it in the late summer, stealing peaches.”

  Despite herself, she smiled. “So did I. And apples later, in the fall.”

  “Bright green ones. The sound of the Great Mill.”

  “Grinding and grinding, the big five-wheel grinds heard throughout the city, all during the summer and the fall.”

  “Until we barely heard it, so common was it.” She paused. “Remember how the river lies along the stone quays,” she said, “and it’s cooler there in the summer? There is a place just beyond the markets, where the hills come down, that place where the stonework ends and trees lean over the water.” His eyes had closed. His lashes were thick, dark crescents against his pale cheeks. “On summer evenings you can lie there and listen to the chorus from Lords College. I wonder if I listened to you?”

  He moved his hand a little. She took it.

  “In the late summer the greengrocers’ stalls are so full of color they glow,” she said. “Melons and berries, grapes with the bloom still on them. There was a man who sold them along the bookseller’s street, and the bookmen chased him away for fear people would dribble fruit in the poetry.”

  “But he always came back,” he said, whispering.

  “Yes, my lord. He did.”

  He turned his head against her shoulder. “Am I still bleeding?”

  “Very little, my lord.”

  “Say my name,” he whispered.

  She did so. He sighed a little. “It doesn’t feel like me anymore,” he said.

  A while later he murmured, “In Koerstadt.”

  When he stopped breathing she slid away from him and laid his hand across his chest, and picked up Pyrs, and walked out. Mazus, seeing her go, wrapped his arms around himself and wailed.

  * * * *

  She left Pyrs sleeping beside Bredda in Kieve’s bed. In the front room, Gaura and two small bundles lay curled up on the pallet behind the woodstove. A heavy-set man in a brown tunic sat beside her, holding her hand. When Kieve came over he scrambled to his feet and backed into a corner, eyes wide. Kieve squatted beside the pallet and Gaura pulled the bundles open to reveal small red faces, bald as loaves. First one, then the other mewled. Gaura put them to her breasts. Kieve touched the warm skin of the little girl’s head.

  “Mistress, thank you for the lamp,” Gaura said.

  About to gesture this away, Kieve paused, then put her other hand on the servant’s shoulder. “You are welcome, Gaura. You have been good to me, and it could not always have been easy. Thank you.”

  She rose, nodded to the man, and crossed the yard again. The Great Hall was dark, the land-barons and lords and guild representatives gone to their chambers, their retinues asleep against the walls. Fercos’ place by the fire was empty.

  The corridor leading to Cadoc’s room, and the anteroom at its end, were both deserted. Kieve put her hand to the door and entered. Asgaut dozed in a chair by the fire. Two attendants from the ossuary waited with him. A seminarian leaned against the wall, eyes closed but finger cymbals clashing periodically. He opened his eyes as Kieve came in and clashed with a bit more alacrity. Asgaut blinked and rubbed his eyes and rose.

  “Lord Cairun?”

  “Dead,” Kieve said. “I am come to confirm Cadoc’s death.”

  Asgaut gestured at the bed.

  She pulled the blankets away from the body, trying not to breathe in the stench of him. She untied his jaw, which dropped, and put her hand flat against the cold skin of his chest and felt for breath, and found none. She slapped at his hand, his foot, his belly, and his face. She took her belt knife and cut him along the arm. The body neither moved nor bled. Lastly she turned him to confirm that the corpse had voided at death, and let the body roll back into its own filth. She stared down at him, thinking of Jenci, and Aedin, and Cairun, and Pyrs’ parents, and the countless, faceless others.

  Asgaut gave her the Deathnote, written out in his own fussy hand. The physician had already signed it. She entered her confirmation and blew on it to dry the ink, then rolled it and held it in her hand for a moment. It felt as she had imagined it would. As she turned to leave, an ossuary attendant stripped away the remaining bedclothes and the other came forward with rags and a pot of water. The seminarian held out his hand, but Kieve ignored him.

  She stopped, frowning, turned back, and looked around the room. The cabinet was gone.

  * * * *

  Isbael was still awake. She had already moved into the large, airy rooms above the Great Hall where Cadoc had spent his days, and had begun the process of transforming them. Taryn escorted Kieve toward the inner room, past attendants carrying out Cadoc’s dark, ponderous furniture and carrying in Isbael’s lighter pieces. Kieve wasn’t surprised that the lady had brought them all from Koerstadt. Isbael must have always known that she would win.

  “I have the Compendium, and the capits,” Taryn said. She stopped at that, remembering, and took the last eight capits from her pocket.

  “For my boy,” she said, giving them to him. “I have freed him.”

  His long, musician’s fingers closed around them, but he didn’t move.

  “Kieve, I did not mean to deceive you,” he said. “About Isbael. It was something that we never discussed.”

  She looked at him, at the broad mouth and blue eyes. “No, we never discussed that,” she said.

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant. I need to see your mistress.”

  For a moment it looked as though he would argue, then he turned and pushed open the door to the inner chamber. Isbael sat by the fire, a ledger spread open across her lap. She looked up at Kieve, who knelt.

  “You have the Deathnote?” she said.

  But Kieve was looking beyond her. Cadoc’s cabinet was in its place against the wall, the only old piece in a room that Isbael had already made her own.

  “The note,” Isbael repeated.

  Kieve took it from her pocket and, at Isbael’s gesture, rose. Isbael read through the note, nodding, then put out her hand. Taryn handed her a pen already dipped. She signed her name below Kieve’s, and held out note and pen for Taryn.

  “Lord Taryn signs as my chancellor,” she said.

  The corners of his mouth were white. He lettered in his name below his lady’s, blew the ink dry, and handed it back. Kieve looked again at the cabinet.

  “It’s an ugly piece,” Isbael said. “I thought to
replace it, but I changed my mind. It will be my memorial to my father.”

  “A memorial,” Kieve said.

  “Yes, a useful one.”

  When Kieve looked at Isbael, the lady moved the ledger a little. Kieve recognized the key hanging from her belt and remembered Isbael’s words in the ossuary: Endres is mine, and I will protect him.

  “My cousin is dead?” Isbael said.

  Kieve nodded.

  “Alas,” the lady said. “Was sex good with him, Rider? I’ve wondered about that.”

  “Is it required of me to give you that, too? I think not, Lady.”

  Isbael laughed. “I begin to see,” she said, “why my father liked you. Perhaps you should stay with me, Rider. You might find it entertaining. You wouldn’t have to deliver warrants, you know.”

  Captain Endres is mine. She breathed deeply and put it aside. In a few hours Dalmorat would be behind her. She glanced at the Deathnote, then read it again.

  “Lady, you do not include a request for a new Rider,” Kieve said.

  “No. No, I have not yet decided whether I need one,” Isbael said. She smiled. “I will send word if I change my mind, Rider.” Her smile widened. “By the semaphore.”

  * * * *

  They left at dawn, in the ice-boat that had brought the Lord of Kyst and his retinue to Sterk and was now taking them away. Jenci in his deathrobes lay packed in ice in the hold. In a cabin on the deck above him, Lapsi huddled shivering under cloaks and blankets. Kieve stood in the stern, looking up the dark face of Sterk to the castle. The Deathnote rested in the pocket in her breeches. Traveler stamped in the corral amidships.

  “Set, Lord?” the captain called.

  “Yes.”

  Daenet and Kyst stood together, the Lord leaning back a little to rest against his tall Rider. Before them on the quay, Bredda sat on a horse and raised her arm as the dockhands slid the gangplank onto the boat and pushed away. Wind slapped into the sails. Above them the semaphore tower caught the first of the light. Flags moved through their silent alphabet, spelling out Cadoc’s death.

  Pyrs’ shoulders shifted under her hands. He pulled her cloak around him, leaving only his face free. She swayed a little with the movement of the boat and he swayed with her. Sterk rushed away from them, black and white and grey in the pale light. She touched the slender coldness of the silver map case that Esylk had sent to her rooms last night.

  “It is called ket, snow,” she said to Pyrs. “When it falls, the Inguruki call it a’aket. And we are sailing on a’keq tokey, because e’tokey, the river, is of ice, a’keq.” He shifted under her hands again. “You will need these words, and more. Lady Esylk has work for me, north of Myned. We will go there in the summer, I think. And by next autumn we will travel farther, to find the Ice Fair and a cold northern sea at the top of the world.”

  “And make a map of it,” the boy said.

  “And make a map of it,” she agreed.

  The iceboat moved between walls of snow along the cleared path down the river. She raised her head to look north, over the top of Sterk to the snow peaks dark against the lightening sky. They disappeared as the boat tacked and bore her south down the frozen Morat toward the sea.

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