Time of Daughters II

by Sherwood Smith

  With a broken arm, how clearly would she be thinking?

  He found her drooping over her plodding mare an hour or so later, going in the wrong direction. When he caught up, she raised a feverish face and squinted as if trying to bring him into focus. He swallowed the words he’d been preparing, took the reins from her lax right hand, and said only, “Let’s go home.”

  The sun had begun sliding down behind them when they caught up with the princes. Stick Tyavayir’s first runner supported his captain, whose face had gone paper white under his tangle of dark red hair. Gannan had sent a scout to report to Lindeth, and stayed with the princes as escort to them and the prisoners, the latter of whom were stumbling with thirst and exhaustion by the time Larkadhe’s white tower emerged from the hills, glowing in the slanting late-afternoon rays.

  Vanadei led Lineas up to the front. Noddy’s tight expression eased when he saw them. Connar glanced over, and flashed a quick smile at Lineas before they turned toward the open gates, trumpets blaring.

  The echoes were dying away when Lineas raised huge, feverish eyes, and said, “Why is Evred here?”

  “Evred?” Neit asked, as Connar and Noddy slewed around to stare.

  Lineas’ face lifted, pale except for hectic red in her cheeks, and her too-bright eyes. “His ghost,” she said. “Right there, on the wall. With the others.”

  SEVEN

  “She’s delirious,” Connar said. “Let’s get her inside.”

  Lineas lifted her good hand. “He’s so bright! How could you not see him?”

  She did not see the worried look Noddy sent her, or Connar’s wary skepticism. She stared at the ghost, whose blue gaze stared out into eternity. How could he be here? Lineas was quite certain Evred had never left the royal city.

  “I’ll take her,” Neit said.

  “You need a healer yourself.” Noddy reached over, laying a gentle hand on her arm, between dirty bandages tied in two places.

  Vanadei said, “I’ll take Lineas to Healer’s Assistant Inda.”

  They had dismounted by then. At Noddy’s gesture Vanadei guided Lineas through the lower region of the castle to the wing connected to the garrison, where the elderly healer lived with his assistant, tall, long-faced Healer Assistant Indevan Janold.

  At the sight of Vanadei, the assistant’s somber countenance changed as he smiled.

  “Inda,” Vanadei said.

  “Never mind explaining. I can see,” Healer’s Assistant Inda murmured, raising a hand to cup Vanadei’s cheek. “Go. Get yourself cleaned up. Or do you have anything I need to look at right away?”

  “Bruises only,” Vanadei said. “She’s hallucinating,” he added over his shoulder.

  He would have liked to stay—he and Inda had been exclusive since they met—but stronger right now was the longing to rid himself of dirt, sweat, and Bar Regren blood. He knew Lineas was in safe, gentle hands.

  When he returned, clean and in clean clothes, the aches had begun to seize his muscles. He knew everybody had to be feeling the same, if not worse.

  He found Lineas sitting on a mat, staring fixedly into space. “Green kinthus,” Inda said. “I suggest taking her upstairs now, while she’s free of pain.”

  “It was a clean break, wasn’t it?”

  “The secondary fracture wasn’t. And the joint in her elbow wrenched badly. The fracture and break are spelled, but you know the magic just holds the bones together. It takes time to heal, and magic cannot take away pain.”

  Vanadei promised to return as soon as he had liberty, which earned one of those brief, sunlit smiles. Then he coaxed Lineas to her feet, careful to avoid the new sling cradling her left arm.

  “I was clumsy,” she said in a dreamy voice as they walked toward the stairs. “Slow.”

  Vana said, “Not trained for battle. You stayed alive, which is all anyone would ask you to do.”

  “I was useless,” she whispered.

  Vana wondered how to get through to her, or even if he should try while she was under the influence of green kinthus. As they started up the stairs, the approach of a hasty step caused Vana to pause, ready to pull Lineas back against the wall if a superior came down.

  It was Fish. “They want her,” he said, turned, and ran back up. He was still filthy, bruises on his face purpling.

  Vanadei grimaced, wondering what Connar had been having Fish do, when mercy, or a sense of decency, would at least let him bathe.

  He steered Lineas up to the royal suite, where Noddy and Connar sat on their mats, Connar wearing clean clothes, looking like his usual self except for the bulk of a bandage around his right arm, and above his left knee. Noddy was still in his dusty, blood-splashed clothes.

  “Bring her in here,” Connar said. “Otherwise we’ll argue all night about whether or not she lost her mind.”

  Lineas stared at the wall, blinking slowly, her pupils enormous.

  Vanadei said to Noddy with a pleading glance, “She needs to get to bed before the kinthus wears off. She won’t complain. She never does, but she’s got two fractures in that arm. The pain is going to be bad.”

  Noddy turned uncertainly to Connar, then said, “A couple of questions. So we can all rest.”

  Vanadei helped Lineas ease down onto a mat.

  Connar leaned forward. “Lineas, what did you see when we arrived at the gate?”

  “Evred’s ghost,” she said in a calm, detached voice. “The brightest one. I don’t know the others. Many are just blobs of pale light. Though maybe they aren’t ghosts. But some other life form?”

  Noddy looked away, distraught. He was remembering the first time he’d noticed Lineas staring at nothing, like a cat. He didn’t know what to believe.

  Connar said evenly, “Have you ever seen it before?”

  “Many times. I saw Evred the first day I came to the royal city.” She spoke so low they had to bend forward to hear her. “Ghosts, I’ve seen them all my life.”

  Vana said slowly, “I think she’s related to the Cassads. Somewhere in her family tree. You know they’re famous for seeing...things.”

  “They’re famous for being crazy,” Connar stated. “I don’t believe she’s crazy. It has to be the fever she got in the sun, with the broken arm. She started hallucinating.”

  Noddy still looked worried, so Connar turned to Lineas. “Let’s prove it. I know you’re good at drawing. How about this, you draw a portrait of your ghost. And when we get back to the royal city, we can ask Da or Ma—anyone who actually knew Evred—if they recognize it.”

  Noddy’s expression cleared, and he said soberly, “Can you do that, Lineas? Or does your arm hurt too much?”

  She said in that dreamy voice, “If you put something down to anchor the paper, I can draw with either hand.”

  And she did. It wasn’t her best work, but a face emerged from the chalk sketch. The two princes stared down at the young man sketched. It seemed eerily detailed for a creature of imagination, right down to the graceful arc of the dolphin embroidered across the sketched House tunic, and a chipped tooth.

  Connar pinched the skin between his eyes. “My head hurts too much to think. We’re done. Fish. See that she gets up to her bed.”

  By then Fish could scarcely move, and his various cuts stung mercilessly, but he’d not been granted time to see to them, much less bathe. He clamped his jaw tight and stuck his hands under Lineas’s armpits to haul her up. As tired and stiff as he was, she was as light as a bird.

  He steered her out of the door and down the hall—then spotted one of the house runners. Since Connar’s order hadn’t been to see to Lineas personally, he hailed the runner. “Can you get Lineas to her bed? Maybe get her out of those filthy clothes, too,” he added.

  First runners were ahead of house runners in the chain of command, making Fish’s question an order. Besides, everyone liked Lineas, and it was clear that she hadn’t long before she dropped.

  “Leave her to me,” the runner said, sliding an arm around Lineas’s shoulders, car
eful to avoid the bandage.

  Fish returned and found Connar alone, staring into space. At Fish’s step he glanced up. “Rough day. You did well. Take the night off. And tomorrow.”

  He walked off to his room, leaving Fish staring in amazement. His eyes stung. Aware of it, he laughed at himself. Praise? Lineas wasn’t the only one out of their mind, Fish thought, but still, he felt surprisingly buoyant in spite of aching muscles and the string of unwashed cuts rubbing against his grimy, sweaty clothing.

  He hesitated, unwilling to leave a mess even if he had liberty—Connar was notoriously fastidious, and he might not wake to that expansive mood. So Fish tidied the room, and put away the chalk. Then he stared down at the drawing. What to do about that? His instinct was to get rid of it, but what if the princes remembered it when they all returned to the royal city? Best to be safe.

  So he took it into his alcove and chucked it into his trunk, grabbed fresh clothes, and headed for baths, longing for clean water as hot as he could stand it.

  Guilt gnawed at Connar.

  He knew that Cabbage Gannan had deliberately planted himself and his damned company squarely on what should have been the road back so that he could kiss Noddy’s heels in his “exercise.” So Connar had gone to the map to find a way around it.

  Yes, it was irresponsible not to ask if the way was safe, or really as fast as it looked on paper. As a result, Connar had blundered right into that trap. It didn’t matter that no one had known those Bar Regren were there. Come to think of it, it was probably a Bar Regren scout shadowing him the previous night—and that was another deadly error, because someone had most likely been shadowing him for weeks, if they knew him by sight. But he hadn’t been sending scouts ahead because he’d wanted so badly to lure that elusive Jendas Yenvir into attacking, because of course he’d win. Now, after his first real battle, he had to face his own ignorance. Very nearly lethal ignorance.

  He did not know the final death count among their own men. It had to be far fewer than the wounded, and both numbers were quite a bit lower than that of the enemy, but that didn’t hide the fact that anyone was dead at all because he’d blundered into a trap in order to avoid the very person who had rescued them so spectacularly.

  And it had been spectacular.

  Connar lay in bed staring at the ceiling. One shoulder throbbed, and a hundred small cuts stung—they were going to have to resume wearing helms, hot as they were, he knew that right now—but other than that, he was aware that that he’d killed more enemies than Noddy, more than anyone else.

  There’d been more pleasure than terror.

  But you couldn’t say it when men on your side had died, and especially when it was your orders that led everyone straight into a trap.

  He sighed. What was it Lineas said about justice that first night? If you rewarded people, it shut them up, or something similar. He’d been stupid and now he had to pay the price, which was to give Gannan the attention he wanted, and recommend him for promotion. Much as he loathed the idea. On the other hand, there were two advantages: first, promotion would give Gannan something to yap about besides figuring out Connar’s blunder, and second, even if Gannan someday got promoted all the way up to being a company commander in the King’s Army, he would come directly under Connar’s chain of command. Once Connar took over the army.

  If.

  Yeah. If Connar was to get that command, no more sloppy mistakes. From now on, lancers and cavalry wore helms, at least carrying them at the saddle during high summer. They’d send scouts, even go back to scout dogs, though Connar didn’t care for the messiness of dogs.

  So resolved, he turned over and fell asleep.

  Downstairs, at the healer’s annex, Vana—given a night of liberty—had joined Healer’s Assistant Inda, but he insisted on writing a report to Quill before retiring, so he sat at a little table as Inda kneaded the knotted muscles of his neck and shoulders. The healer could feel through Vana’s tension how terrifying the day had been—how much he hated what he wrote—so every now and then he bent down to plant a reassuring kiss on the curve of Vana’s neck.

  In the princes’ private bath alcove, Neit watched compassionately as Noddy scrubbed at his raw skin, scrubbed and scrubbed as if he’d never get clean, but she knew there was no scrubbing away the memory of your own hands covered in someone else’s lifeblood.

  And in Lindeth on the bay, Commander Nermand listened to the report by Gannan’s just-arrived scout. Those two young fools had walked straight into the most obvious of traps—and yet none of his own people had known that Ovaka Red-Feather had managed to gather that many warriors and get so close. Nermand had to admit that he hadn’t been lax so much as predictable, each year pulling all his command together to get the city through the festival. Of course they’d been watched from a distance. What he hadn’t expected, and should have, was that once again, Red-Feather had found enough people to act.

  But what had nearly been a disaster worse than the slaughter up the Pass twenty years ago was saved by a young riding captain and his first-year volunteers.

  Nermand knew he’d get no sleep that night until he’d composed his report for the king. What to say when you nearly lost both royal sons, all unheeding, in spite of what you thought was careful preparation? “Start with the heroic defense by said sons,” he muttered, squaring himself to his paper.

  He finished halfway through the last nightwatch, and shuffled off to get what sleep he could.

  Quill was still awake in the royal city at that late hour, reading Vana’s report and pacing around his room in futile anger. Of all the people in the world who should never be in battle, he would first choose Lineas. Personality aside, she wasn’t trained for battle. The Fox Drills were superlative, but they weren’t a universal defense—they were at their weakest against mounted warriors. Fox had developed that fighting style for the close combat of shipboard, where there are no horses, and the royal runners had adapted the style to defense on foot, with weapons you otherwise kept hidden.

  He knew Lineas. She had to be awake right now, castigating herself for not living up to some impossible standard, her version of the inevitable what if I’d and I should have that harrows one after action.

  He circled his room a time or two more, then decided to break his rule.

  Far to the north, Lineas was indeed awake, the pain-blanketing kinthus having worn off. The agony of her shoulder and arm, the aches in her body she could bear, as long as she lay still. It was the memories that cut, like the shards of one of the beautiful glassware cups they made here in the north, that she’d made the mistake of picking up the same way she’d pick up broken ceramic.

  Shards of memory, for nothing was whole except her conviction that she’d been the most useless person in the entire cavalcade, which was why Neit had sent her instead of one of the scouts. And she hadn’t even managed to find Gannan’s volunteers—they’d found her. She recollected that much.

  Why did it hurt so very badly? She tried to apply rational thinking to this bewildering sense of failure. It was easy to think she’d betrayed the others through weakness, but that wasn’t right. She’d fought hard to keep the enemy from getting at the princes, but most of her desperate glances had been Connar’s way, until the chaos broke up the circle—

  Her mind shied away, ready to follow the familiar path of humiliation at her lack of physical prowess, but she forced it back. She knew she was very good at the Fox drills, with their emphasis not on strength so much as speed and balance. She was fast. Very fast. And she knew how to use her body to deflect blows from stronger arms than hers. But she’d seen at the outset that knife fighting aimed upward against a foe who would almost inevitably be taller was at a decided disadvantage when fighting on horse, against cudgels and spears. She’d managed to deflect the blows aimed at her, and the aches all down her indicated that she’d have the bruises to prove it.

  Chaos—

  Noddy’s sword whistling overhead—

  Another sharper sh
ard. She shut her eyes against it, but the images pushed their way into the forefront of her mind: Noddy and Vanadei both trying to circle around her. Defending her. She endured the pulse of guilt that they’d found it necessary, and there was the old path to humiliation again.

  No. She knew that she would do anything she could to defend her fellows. She had to grant them their choice to defend her. That was a side path, a familiar path, however much it hurt: her own shortcomings.

  But there was a deeper shard.

  And here was the image, of Connar surging into the thick of the enemy, sword whirling. Maybe he’d assumed she was good enough to hold her own. She hoped so. That idea assuaged pride. But the truth? The truth was that he’d never thought to look back at her, though she’d turned his way every chance she could. She fought against the assumption that he didn’t care for her the way she did for him. It was easy to choose hurt, when it was equally possible he didn’t look her way because he assumed she was as good a fighter as Neit and Vana and Fish. Yes, that was the way to think. She spent some time trying to remember if he’d looked back for Neit, Fish, or even Noddy: no, she didn’t remember seeing him looking back for anyone. He had charged straight into the enemy, confident that they all could defend themselves.

  It was logical, and she sensed that there was truth to it. And yet there remained doubt. And below it, hurt.

  Dismiss that, she told herself. Nothing had ever been said between them. He was a prince, and had different responsibilities. But Noddy, who had the same responsibilities, had looked out for her. Here was the shard of hurt again, because it was so easy, so very easy, to hate herself for not being good enough despite countless conversations about the balance of duty and desire.

  Then she remembered Quill coming in one day when she was thirteen or so, and proclaiming to their work group that he’d discovered that Colend’s butterflies in fans and clothing and even on ribbons weren’t just decoration, they were a symbol for how crazy love was, how it didn’t have any rules that made sense.