The memory dimmed on the outcry of disgust from the other thirteen-year-olds. She’d joined it, too. The last thing she wanted to think about in those days was adult stuff.
But she understood it now. She yanked the shard out by facing the truth: though Connar liked, enjoyed, even respected her skills, there was nothing he got from her that he didn’t get from others.
Whereas she had never looked at anyone else because they were not Connar. She held onto that, as tears leaked out the corners of her eyes. Finally, because she was safely alone, she gave in and cried herself to sleep.
Of course that meant bad dreams. But morning comes anyway, and so she forced herself to sit up slowly, and with her good hand she automatically checked her golden notecase in its hiding place between the trunk at the foot of her bed and the bedframe.
It had been weeks since she’d received any letters, but there was one now. Moving with exquisite care, she clicked the box open and pulled out the folded paper, smiling when she recognized Quill’s handwriting.
I miss the windharps. Did I ever tell you about the night I slept alone on the cliff below them? What do they sound like in this season?
The windharps! How could she have managed not to hear them, instead miring herself in memories of blood and horror? The fight had happened. But it was not the entire world: the windharps were still there. Beauty still existed. She had only to reach for it. Again, she sustained one of those profound shifts of focus, but this one left her feeling a little lighter in heart.
She got up and went to the window. Though the air was gray, the sound a hiss of rain, she listened for any hint of windsong. Then sat down to write carefully with her good hand:
What happened on the cliff?
She folded and sent it, and at his end, Quill—who had kept the notecase in his pocket, though they were not supposed to do that—instantly found a secluded corner in order to take it out and read what turned out to be a single line in a different handwriting from her usual, evidence of her broken arm.
He pocketed note and case, continuing on his way to the king’s interview chamber, where he was serving that day as runner-in-waiting. Of course Lineas wasn’t going to confide in him. He’d thrown away the privilege when he ignored her for five years. But he could still try to buoy her spirits.
He ran up the stairs, mentally composing his letter about his night camping under the stars as the winds sang.
EIGHT
In Larkadhe, life resumed its accustomed rhythm. The ghost was forgotten, to Lineas’s relief—she was horrified when she recollected that part of the nightmarish day. She began to suspect that the ghost episode was far overshadowed by their memory of the attack.
She vowed to lose the sling before the end of the second month, and to exercise her arm to get her strength back as soon as possible—and then to work harder to get stronger.
Connar was gone within a few days to resume his patrols, taking Ghost Fath as his captain, and a good portion of Ghost’s men to replace those of Stick Tyavayir’s too injured to ride.
That left Stick in charge of the garrison, where he could watch over his recovering men, three of whom were critically injured. He could also recover himself.
Connar and Ghost reorganized their company to include scouting forays ahead and behind. Their route now overlapped with Tanrid’s Olavayir Riders’ most northern reach, and Lindeth’s northeastern territory; Ovaka Red-Feather, Connar learned, claimed to be king of the mountainous peninsula capped by the harbor called the Nob. Nobody assumed that the entirety of his followers had been on the road that day.
Back in Larkadhe, as Andahi Day and Victory Day came and went, bringing occasional bouts of cooler, rainy weather, Noddy kept putting off trial of the Bar Regren prisoners crowded in the garrison’s detention wing.
It was partly because he did not want to deal with the prisoners, who he had discovered everyone expected to be executed. The thought of flogging to death, shooting, or even beheading (which was at least quicker) more than forty people—some of them no older than academy boys—made him sick to his stomach.
Then there was the fact that nobody could understand them, and they were apparently unable to understand Marlovan or Idegan or Iascan. With her other duties curtailed, Lineas set herself to the task of learning their tongue, which seemed to be an impossibility—a fact that Noddy was secretly grateful for, as it put off dealing with them, and he had plenty of other work to do now that harvest season was on them. Starting with overseeing all the conflicts that had to do with tax and tally gathering and accounting, the traditional dread of autumn up and down the kingdom.
No child of Danet’s could have escaped basic lessons in keeping tallies, so vital to a kingdom’s wellbeing. Poor Noddy had no head for numbers, though he did grasp what they meant if explained carefully: he could see the architecture of them, so to speak, though he could scarcely articulate how he saw that.
But Vanadei had been suggested for him partly for his ability to recollect columns of numbers, a side-benefit of having learned as a boy verses and verses of balladry. He only had to hear a column once, and he had nearly perfect recall. So it was Vanadei’s turn to sit across from Noddy, handling the chalk and slate, as Lineas took on the chore of feeding the prisoners and seeing to it they had water, in hopes she could get some of their language.
The detention area had four empty cells, the rest used as storage, as punishment tended to be swiftly handed out by Marlovans. Having to feed people who sat around doing nothing seemed a pointless chore. When first herded in, the prisoners were arbitrarily shoved into each cell, roughly ten per.
When the weather took a sudden sharp turn toward winter, Lineas took it upon herself to wheel in a cart of blankets. There was no furniture whatsoever, only a blanket apiece. After two weeks, when those blankets weren’t changed, Lineas collected them, hauled the filthy, smelling mess to the laundry cave adjacent to the hot springs the castle people used as baths as well as laundry, dunked them in the magic-purified vat, and hung them to dry in the windy corridor nearby.
After those two weeks of unsuccessful communication, Lineas went to Noddy and asked if they could separate out the young ones, and rearrange the others to balance out the numbers.
Noddy said, “Why? I thought they won’t talk to anyone.”
“No, but I see their faces every day. I think...I think if the older ones aren’t there, some of the younger ones might talk to me,” she said. “Might we try?”
Noddy gave permission, though he felt extremely ambivalent about any success, because that would bring the need for a trial closer.
The following morning Lineas discovered that three of the storage cells had been more or less swept out and the prisoners redistributed. The five teens were in a cell by themselves.
At night, when she returned to hand out the evening meal, she gave out more clean blankets, and also lugged in an ensorcelled bucket so that anyone who wanted to dip hands, or clothes, in, could.
So far the prisoners had refused to speak to her. They could all hear the armed guards waiting in the background as Lineas distributed food, water, blankets, so no one attacked the skinny girl with the arm in a sling. They knew what would happen. So they ignored her, though each day she tried a different language, rotating between Marlovan, Iascan, and Idegan, to no effect.
But the third day after the youths were separated out, and she brought breakfast, as usual she felt five gazes following her every movement. “Here is your breakfast,” she said in Idegan, trying to improve her accent. “You’ll notice that we’re getting shirred egg as well as cheese in the biscuits. I found out the cook seems to think that adding egg somehow offsets cold weather.”
She set out the last bowl—she always set them in a row inside the door, since there was no table—and turned away, when the skinniest boy snarled, his voice cracking, “You said we.”
She turned back. “Yes, we.”
“You’re a prisoner too?”
“Shut up, Thiv.
”
“You shut up. They’re going to kill us anyway, right? So why not talk to her? If they kill us for just talking, better than sitting here smelling your stink and being bored to death.”
Since he’d spoken in Idegan, Lineas knew he wanted her to understand.
She said, “We as in all of us. We all eat the same thing.” At the wary, skeptical looks she saw in their faces, she added, “Of course the garrison gets theirs hot, then everybody else, and you’re last. I know it’s cold by the time I bring it. Can’t be helped. You get everything the rest didn’t eat, which is why sometimes there’s more and sometimes less.”
One of the other boys muttered something in what Lineas suspected was their own tongue, and the one who told Thiv to shut up threw his hands out wide as he answered in the same tongue. Then, switching to Idegan as he eyed Lineas truculently, “No matter what we say, we’re going to get killed, right?”
“I can’t predict what is to happen,” Lineas said carefully. “All I can tell you for certain is that the crown prince will hold a trial.”
“A trial!”
Bitter laughter met this from the two who understood Idegan, after which the others clamored in their own tongue, asking (Lineas suspected) what was said. Then five mutinous faces glowered at Lineas. She saw the fear in tight bony shoulders and gritted jaws, and left, surprised at the flow of pity though memory of the attack still jolted her out of sleep, leaving her sweaty and gasping.
...they spoke fast, but I’m fairly certain I heard Idegan verbs—actually Sartoran verb roots—with different conjugation. And though they looked at me in anger, they did speak to me for the first time.
Lineas had been writing to Quill nightly ever since that first exchange about the windharps, a happy subject that lasted a week. Lineas reported each day’s windsong, then woke up to comments about windharps elsewhere in the world, learned while Quill delved in the archives.
From there it seemed natural to talk about their day, and when Lineas took over the task of dealing with the prisoners, she shared her lack of success.
Quill responded with funny accounts of his disastrous first attempt at child-minding his willful little sister (involving bribing with jam, which caused him to wonder how a tiny pot of jam could not only get in Blossom’s hair, but on every available surface), and like matters. They were all easy letters, undemanding, and Lineas began to look forward to them enough that she sewed a pocket on the inside of her winter singlet and carried the golden notecase there so she wouldn’t miss the magical tap that announced the arrival of a note. Even if she couldn’t get to it all day, just knowing it was there waiting cheered her through hard and increasingly cold days of labor.
After that first exchange with the teenage Bar Regren, Lineas wrote back what she’d observed linguistically, and together she and Quill worked on the language—Lineas unaware that Quill, during his limited free time, endured two long transfers in order to visit the stringers’ guild at the Nob to obtain a list of basic Bar Regren words and their Iascan equivalents.
Once the wall of silence had been broken, the boys waited for Lineas to show up, bombarding her with insults and questions, truculent and anxious by turns. All she could say was, “The crown prince hasn’t decided yet. It’s his decision.”
She found herself glad that it was his decision, a relief that sharpened as autumn closed in, bringing spectacular thunderstorms over the mountains as the west winds weakened with the sun moving northward again, and the icy winds off the eastern peaks strengthening.
One morning, as thunder rumbled beyond the peaks and the harps moaned a long, sustained series of low notes, Vana appeared in the kitchen looking for Lineas. She stood by the bake oven, warming up her hands. She loved her tower room, and she had plenty of warm bedding, but it was getting harder to get out of that bed into frigid air in the mornings.
“He wants you,” Vana said, aiming his well-cut chin over his shoulder in the direction of Yvana Hall.
“What about?” Lineas asked as soon as they reached the hall.
Vana’s bushy brows drew together in a line as he said in Old Sartoran, “Scout showed up from Prince Connar, asking when the execution was to be held.”
Lineas’s gut clenched as if an invisible fist had punched her.
They didn’t speak again until they reached the hall, which was warmed by fire sticks burning brightly in both fireplaces, front and back.
Noddy said, “Do you know enough of their language to translate before the court?”
Lineas turned her gaze from Vana, who stared down impassively, to the scribe who sat with his pen poised, ink and paper ready.
“Yes,” she said slowly.
Noddy eyed her. “You don’t sound sure.”
Lineas bit her lip. “I can. That’s not the problem that I see.”
“What is the problem?” Noddy’s voice rose slightly.
“I don’t believe the men will speak. They haven’t. They won’t. The boys....” She fought the impulse to twist her fingers together. “They talk. A lot. But I think you’ll find that they don’t know anything that would be useful in a trial.”
“Isn’t one of them the chieftain’s son?”
“Grandson. Oba is the youngest. Big for his age, turned fourteen this spring. But I don’t think he’ll say anything before Yvana Hall.”
Noddy’s frown was more frustrated than angry, but Lineas’s heart crowded her throat as Noddy said slowly, “We promised that all proceedings are held before witnesses.”
Vana stirred, then stilled.
Noddy flicked a glance at him. “Vana?”
Vana turned his hand down. “Sorry.”
Noddy slammed his fist on the table. “Nobody is talking to me. It’s not just the prisoners. The guild chiefs talk around me when I mention the trial. The Idegans won’t talk to me at all whenever the words ‘Bar Regren’ come up. Why won’t you speak when I ask you to?”
Vanadei and Lineas turned to each other, then Vana said, “Our orders are never to interfere in royal matters.”
Noddy was so rarely sarcastic that it was unsettling to see his lips twist sardonically as he commented, “And if I order you to?”
Another exchanged glance, Vana waiting for Lineas, as the court runner—and Lineas waiting for Vanadei, as Noddy’s first runner—to speak.
The scribe murmured deferentially. “If you’ll forgive my interjection, Nadran-Sierlaef, I have chanced to overhear references to the fact that many in the council feel that this is solely a military matter.”
“Of course it’s a military matter,” Noddy said. “What....”
He frowned, thumbed his eyes, then said to the scribe, “Barend, where are the proceedings from the last military matter like this one?”
Barend’s blue eyes narrowed, then widened. “There’s nothing that I could say is like this situation, but.... Would a similar situation be...the Slaughter at the Pass? I don’t remember it. I was too young. But when in training, we had to study the debates....” He interrupted himself. “Those records are not here.” He indicated the tightly packed shelves. “I’d have to go up to the storage.”
“Bring them to me.”
Barend laid down his pen and went out, casting a vaguely disgruntled glance Lineas’s way. He clearly thought that a runner ought to be sent on what was obviously a runner’s errand, but he’d been given a direct order.
As soon as he was out the door, Noddy got to his feet, crossed the room, and shut the door. “Barend’s a good scribe, but he’s a scribe. They all blab. Ma said once they can’t help it. You two are royal runners. You’re sworn to us, the royal family, and you don’t blab. So tell me what I’m missing. Start with why a military matter sends them all scattering. When you’d think they’d be howling on their hind legs, if we held a trial without them.”
Vana said, “I think in this situation, the Idegans want you to execute the prisoners without them having to witness. I think it’s because everybody thinks the trial is a...mere play,
that the verdict is foregone. This much I’ve overheard, the Idegans don’t want the mountain Bar Regren hearing that they had anything to do with executions. And the guilds don’t like anything to do with executions. They consider the subject Marlovan.”
They all had gotten used to overhearing “Marlovan” said in that tone, meaning savage, bullying, uncivilized.
“But at the same time,” Vana finished on a sour note, “they all hate the Bar Regren, who attack their own trade and towns repeatedly.”
Noddy’s voice deepened with his displeasure. “So they want us to get blood on our hands, and keep theirs clean.”
Nobody denied it.
Lineas spoke softly, “The boys all believe they are to be executed, and they keep asking me when.”
“Fourteen,” Noddy whispered, pinching the skin between his brows. Then he glared at Vanadei. “If they really think we’re holding a false trial, doesn’t that mean they think we’re false? Then everything we’ve been so careful with, it doesn’t matter?”
Vana opened his hands. “When people are frightened, or angry, they’ll say a lot of things.”
Noddy thumbed his eyes again, then looked up at Lineas. “What was it you said? When we first came to Larkadhe. We talked about justice. You said, people will remember one injustice longer than all the proper justice. Something like that. Is that what they expect from us here, injustice?”
Lineas tried to feel her way among the mental thorns. “I suspect...they believe we Marlovans have the power to point at anything we want and call it justice. Including executions. And if they object, the finger might be pointed at them.”
Vana added, “The subject here is that everybody, including the prisoners, seems to be convinced that no matter what we say or do, forty people, including boys of fourteen, are going to be marched out to the parade ground to their deaths.”
“I hate that.” Noddy slammed both fists on the table, making everything on it jump and clatter. “I need to talk to them. Should I go down there?”
Time of Daughters II Page 11
