Lineas found Connar sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing a fresh, unlaced shirt, trousers, and his boots. Fish had laid his winter coat on a trunk, and was probably seeking tailors to get a new summer coat made.
She could not see Connar’s face in the weak light of a single candle, as his wet hair hung loose, long black curls hiding his profile. But she sensed tension in his shoulders, and in his hands as they rested on his thighs.
She set down her bundle and held up her robe between him and the candle. “I thought I felt sharp pinpricks. Look.”
He glanced up, seeing the candlelight through the many tiny burn holes.
Nand at the Sword had told him when he first went with Noddy to the pleasure house, There are two things I tell every first timer who comes through here—yes, I know it’s strictly not your first time. You said you’ve romped with the boys at the academy. But you’ll find that there are as many ways to have sex as there are to love. First: don’t mix up the two. They can be blended, and it’s wonderful when they are, but don’t mistake attraction for love. There can also be love without attraction.
Like a family? he’d asked.
That’s one form of it, she’d replied. Second, unlike the order in society, no one truly controls love. It can spark and die, whether you’re a king or a cook. You can love someone passionately, and they won’t love you back. It doesn’t mean anything is amiss with you. Or with them. It just means love is like the weather. No one can command, or order away, a snowstorm. Remember both of these things, and you’ll do.
“No one truly controls love.” He hadn’t thought about love. He still wasn’t certain what love really was, other than loyalty to his family. Lineas was...she had always been there when he looked for her.
She was here now. He understood that there were questions he could ask but he was not clear on whether or not he wanted to hear the answers.
She was here. For today, for right now, that was enough.
It was nearly dawn when the weather changed with a spectacular flare of lightning and a crash that reverberated through the stone. Lineas lay awake next to Connar, who slumbered on undisturbed. She slipped out of bed to close the shutters in case the rain was driven into the open slit windows, then crawled back in and shut her eyes.
On the surface, everything seemed to be the way it always was, but she sensed a shift in her heart, which she hadn’t the experience to define. All she could think of was a memory from a time when she was very small, and her father had taken her down to the lake as winter waned. The entire world had gone white, from the ice on the lake to the smooth banks, where little humps dotted the expanse. Before she could ask what they were, a crack smote the air—the once-solid ice shot out spiderwebs of silver-blue—and those thousands of smooth white dots lifted into the air, stretching into birds in flight. They became a cloud of wings, lifting over the cracking ice, and then swooped down to settle on the far bank.
She turned her head to look at Connar’s long lashes lying on his cheeks, a silky strand of blue-black hair tangled in them. Her heart warmed toward him, but it did not burn. The birds had lifted to the far bank.
SIXTEEN
It was Lineas’s habit to rise early, and be gone before Fish arrived with Connar’s breakfast. She stepped out into the narrow hall, her ruined robe, now dry, tucked tightly around her filthy clothes, with the journal and notecase wrapped inside.
She ran downstairs, then paused when she saw a long shadow cast by a single flickering torch. Cold air eddied around her feet, from the ground-level door around the corner. She slowed so she wouldn’t bump into someone, then stopped when she recognized Quill.
He had been leaning against the wall. He straightened up at the sight of her, marks of tiredness in the fine skin under his eyes. His smile flickered, his brows lifting slightly in question.
“Quill,” she breathed, her heart brimming with joy and tenderness and wonder so intense that her throat ached, and she had no idea how to go on.
He signed in Hand, “Come outside? Voices echo up that stairwell.”
She assented with open palm. They slipped out into a world that had gone from simmering heat to the gray of a slow, steady rain, after the spectacular thunder a few hours ago.
Quill closed the outer door. They pressed up against the damp stone wall under the dripping eaves, and faced one another, barely an arm’s distance between them. “Lineas, I would give anything to stay,” Quill said. “But I’d better go before I’m given orders that I have to obey.”
“Go?”
“You heard the report yesterday. We’ve been caught by surprise. None of us know how bad the danger is.” He looked away, then down. “I’m as sorry as I can be that I managed to fall asleep while waiting for you to return. I didn’t mean to.”
“Quill.” She reached to touch his lips. “Don’t. I know how tired you were. I know how tired I was. It was as well. I....”
“I know you were with Connar,” Quill said, his expression shuttering. “And if that’s where you want to be—”
“I want,” she said, “to be with you.”
He stilled, his gaze rising to her face.
She sighed, hugging the acrid-smelling cloth to her. “But I think...I can’t....” She struggled with inchoate emotions. Thoughts. Staring out at the gray sky, she said slowly, “A long rain ends, but it doesn’t leave the world dry. There are the drips on the leaves, and the rushing streams. It’s...it’s like that, with Connar.”
Quill had not even let himself expect that much.
She peered into his face, and what she saw encouraged her to go on. “He has this invasion to worry about, and I...I find the idea of saying no to him hurts, when he seems to need me.”
Quill looked up, then down again. Though he’d spent that entire first year on his journey sporting with anyone who asked in his effort to forget Lineas, he hadn’t been able to displace her from his heart.
This was new territory for them both. Better not to say anything about Connar. “I want to be with you,” he said. “As soon as possible, as long as possible. If it can’t happen now, then it can’t happen now.”
And he watched the tension ease in her face.
He went on, forcing a brisk, report tone, “I’ve been writing letters half the night. Vana is with Noddy-Sierlaef, riding down from Larkadhe. Ivandred went to the royal city. We have two royal runners here besides us, but both are under Ventdor’s orders. There’s no one else to find that army, and if necessary relay its movement by notecase. Camerend agrees—the danger is significant enough to risk revealing the secret of the notecases, if we can’t hide their existence while relaying necessary information. The secret was going to come out sometime, and we’ve a more stable government now than in generations. And we dare not get caught by surprise anymore.”
Lineas thought of Tlen and Halivayir, and pressed her fingers against her lips.
“So as soon as you and I finish speaking, I’ll go to Ventdor and offer to get any messages to the royal city. I’ll do the same with the scribe chief. And I’ll send them to Mnar once I’m on the road, so she can release them when the time is right—and then I’ll ride east instead of south.”
Lineas said, “But Braids Senelaec and his company are there watching them—oh. Several days’ ride away.” Her throat hurt, but she forced out the word, “Yes, you’re right to go. It’s too important.”
He smiled. “We can write to one another, can’t we?”
Instead of answering, she pulled him into a tight hug. He pressed a kiss on the top of her bright, frizzy head, then let go, and stepped back. “Go first,” he whispered. “Or I’ll never get out of here.”
She was shivering in the loose robe the quartermaster had loaned her. She opened the door, looked back once, memorizing his face, the raindrops dotting his robe, the strand of dark hair that had come loose from his queue, and lay on one shoulder. She stretched out a finger to caress it. He moved, pressing a kiss onto her hand.
She squeezed her
eyes shut and ducked inside. Then she ran to the bath, keeping her head down lest she meet someone who would see the tears she could not prevent.
She cried herself out, for no reason she could define, keeping her face underwater as long as she could. When others arrived for their morning bathe, she rose and dressed.
Her old robe was impossible to save. She used it to wrap her journal and notecase, then reported back to the quartermaster to see what cloth they had, and was delighted to discover they had several lengths of what she recognized as Farendavan linen, dyed dark blue. Of course the queen would never forget the royal runners when going over the supply lists for the garrisons.
By the time she got outside, the sun was fully up behind the clouds, rain slanting silver. She could make a new robe later. She got a hunk of fresh bread, cut some cheese off the wheel, then headed for Commander Ventdor’s office to see if there was any task she could do to keep herself busy.
She was passed by the outer guard. When she heard Connar’s voice echoing from the commander’s office, she paused, uncertain.
“...and I want you to send Quill to the royal city. He’s the fastest of the royal runners.”
“He’s already gone,” came Ventdor’s voice. “He was here at dawn. Offered to take whatever we had, all right and proper. Rode out into the rain. He’s as excellent as his da, that one.”
“Already gone?” Connar said, and Lineas heard his smile. “Yes, that’s what I’d expect from Quill. He’s the best of the royal runners.”
Rat Noth had been born with a slight stutter, which was during his earliest years a mild frustration. It was mitigated by his parents insisting it was a badge of honor, inherited from one of best of the kingdom’s warrior princes, Jabber Montreivayir, second son of the Great Evred.
Then his mother died in a mysterious accident, and while he was trying to recover from that, his father married his stepmother, who already had two sons a couple years older than Rat and Mouse.
Rat had liked being called Rat, because that, too, was a well-respected nickname in the Noth family. But his Nyidri stepbrothers, Demeos and Ryu, started calling him ‘Lamb’ because he bleated, and laughed at him every time he tried to speak, which initially made the stutter worse. Then they’d pretended not to understand anything he said, and tormented him further by talking in Sartoran, telling him he was too stupid to understand it.
Rat learned to evade them. He then discovered that if he talked slowly, in very short sentences, the stutter could be tamed. By the time he turned ten and went off to the academy (his stepbrothers being sent to Sartor for schooling), he had nearly grown out of the stutter altogether, but the habit of speaking only when he had to, as short as possible, remained. He much preferred Hand, once he was introduced to it his first year at the academy.
The only situation where his silence worked against him was when he met girls.
Except, that is, for one.
An outsider looking in at Danet-Gunvaer with her daughter and soon to be daughters-by-marriage, might be amused by the range in expressions revealed by those three at their three-month meetings to discuss the kingdom’s affairs.
Ranet was the most focused. In her earliest days at the royal castle, she had dreaded the allocation meetings, for she had not wanted to admit that she was mildly short-sighted, like many of her Senelaec relatives. Distance vision was fine. It was numbers and small writing she had trouble with. To get past her difficulties with reading, she had early on learned to memorize whatever others read out loud. She brought that skill to the allocation meetings, and had become so adept at committing the lists of numbers to memory that Danet more and more often turned to her to recover a stray number.
In contrast to her intense focus, there was Bun, whose mind wandered far afield. It was odd, Bunny thought sometimes, how long stretches of silence would let in the sounds outside the windows, while the circle sat inside talking away in Hand. Then someone would break it—usually Ma, who still got her fingers tangled in words—and then there’d be speech and Hand for a while, until they went silent again, usually when Noren signed, because her Hand was so much faster than speech.
The best was when the silence was broken by a sudden laugh. That was usually Noren. Her laugh was a kind of goose honk that Bunny found tremendously endearing, it was so real, unlike the titters of the girls in queen’s training, many of whom giggled whenever their leader—whoever that might be—did. There was a falsity to those giggles, as well as a sameness that, when you thought about it, had to be learned, just like speech. It seemed sad to her that people had to learn a certain type of laugh.
In contrast to both Ranet and Bunny there was Noren, whose whole demeanor made it plain how much she relished these meetings four times a year: spring, when they looked at what they had left against needs across the kingdom; summer, they assessed what was beginning to come in against what needs had turned up since spring; autumn, they counted what was coming in from harvests. Last was the winter allocation, when they looked at the marriage treaties for the year, as reported either at Convocation or via messenger in the years Convocation wasn’t held: who had been born, who had married, what they had worked out in their betrothal treaties.
Bunny was bored stiff by numbers, but Noren saw them as the warp and weft of the kingdom. Greatmother Tdor had called it a net, but Noren saw good cloth in all these things people made and grew, and then sent as promised. It was a cloth woven by faith that each would do their part to make the whole.
“That’s it,” Danet exclaimed suddenly, hands in motion. “We know what we have, but until Halivayir is settled, and we get a report on Tlen, we won’t know what’s needed. Let us hold ourselves in readiness.”
She flashed her rare, thin smile as she leaned over and tapped a scroll. “Unless Andaun gets a sheaf of late letters, next spring is when we put our ten-year-olds in with the boys. I would not have minded waiting a year or so. But it’s clear enough from what happened at Tlen. Braids’ girls did well, and no one is going to object, especially given the attacks in the east and the fact that we’ve fewer nine-year-old boys for next year than we’ve had in fifteen years. That lack will be filled out nicely by these eighteen girls.” She tapped the scroll again.
Noren kept back a grin: three of those girls were from Noth and Totha Rider families, and one from Marthdavan. Most of the rest were from the eastern alliance, save two from the Olavayir Riders, and one from the gunvaer’s own birth holding, daughter of her brother.
Danet sat back on her cushion in satisfaction. Then she looked up. “I’m starved. Surely the midday watch change is about to ring. Go get a meal, girls.”
Bunny jumped up with alacrity. Through the open windows had come the sound of a new arrival to the stable. She sped out to see who it was.
‘Braids’ girls,’ she thought, laughing to herself. Girls! To the queen’s training girls, Bunny and Noren were women with titles. How odd it was, to find yourself suddenly the oldest in group, after forever being the youngest. Maybe to Ma, she and Noren and Ranet would always be girls, even when they turned fifty—
She rounded the landing, and came face to face with Rat Noth. “Rat!” she exclaimed, every nerve thrilling in delight.
His reaction was even more intense. He turned a deep red, grinning down at his feet.
She exclaimed, “I thought you were up at Ku Halir, chasing after that Skunk and the rest of the murderers.” She grabbed hold of his arm and began to tow him down the royal residence hall toward her suite, so she could get the full story, without the sort of interruptions that made Rat go silent. “What happened? I want to know everything! How are the horses?”
Rat hesitated, then laid a tentative hand on top of hers as he halted. “I have to report to the king,” he said.
She smiled at his hand, squashing the urge to pull him close and hug him. Strange, how many lovers and crushes she’d had—all still friends—but the person she had begun to feel the most strongly about she had yet to even kiss. She wasn’t e
ven certain how it had happened so gradually over the years since that first time she and Rat spoke, when she was more interested in his horse than in just another senior academy boy.
She watched him go, hoping she could catch him before he was ordered off again; at the same time, he walked away, feeling the distance lengthen between them. He didn’t understand how he could visit a pleasure house with his body afire, then as soon as it was over, he was done. Most of the time he and whoever he was with scarcely exchanged ten words. He’d always liked it that way—until he started talking to the princess.
As he crossed over to the state wing, his mind flashed back to a conversation that still made him angry. It was like picking at a scab, only worse, because at least a scab healed. But Rat couldn’t forget his stepbrother Ryu smirking at him one morning. Heyo, Lamb, you’re always in and out of the barbarians’ royal castle. Is my betrothed really as stupid as she is ugly?
All Rat could say was, Go look for yourself. He still thought it was a boneheaded response, but everything Ryu did or said made him feel like a bonehead. At least neither stepbrother cared enough to see how much Rat liked her, or he would never hear the end of Ryu’s cruel “jokes” at Bunny’s expense.
He shook off the memory of Ryu the way he’d shake off a cobweb he’d walked into, then consciously rubbed his fingers over the place on his arm that she’d touched. It was worth it, riding hard during fierce Lightning Season heat followed by storms, just for that touch.
He reached the scribe chamber, where the runner downstairs had said the king was, and stopped long enough to get his thoughts in order.
Before he could reach for the door, it banged open, and the king himself took a step out, then fetched up in a halt. “There you are! Janold said you’d arrived. Come in, come in. Why are you here?”
Midway into Rat’s report, Arrow, who’d dropped onto his cushion, one elbow on the table, sat upright. “Yenvir wanted what? He’s going to do what?” He bounced up, strode to the door in two strides, yanked it open, and bellowed, “Ring the alarm! I want three companies out on a far perimeter. Now!”
Time of Daughters II Page 24
