by Sean Stewart
“You have to understand, Mark: stewards believe in, well, stewarding people. It’s the way they see the world.”
“What about—ugh!—you? Do you think Richard can be trusted?”
“Who cares?”
Eh?
Mark looked at her in such puzzlement that she burst out laughing. “If he’s up to something devious, Lissa will deal with it. It pleases her to be suspicious of him, because it makes her more important. But every scheme involving me must come down to my actions, sooner or later: at which time I shall do just as I please. And nobody, not Richard or Lissa or his Majesty my father, can make me do otherwise.”
“That’s a pretty straight furrow,” Mark said, frowning. “Lissa and Valerian make it sound much more…subtle.”
Gail grinned. “One of the privileges of being a Princess is that you don’t have to be subtle. In fact, even if you aren’t a Princess you don’t have to be subtle, unless you care about power.” She turned on her side to face him so her body made an S, her head propped on her elbow, the line of her side sloping down to her waist, the swell of her hips. “Look: Richard meant to marry me in the hope I would be chosen Queen and the Crown would pass to (ugh!) our child. But what Richard doesn’t know, and Father does, is that I wouldn’t be Queen for all the reeds in Fenwold. Anyway, let’s imagine Richard is angry and disappointed. Who cares? What can he do about it? Nothing.”
“He could try to have our marriage annulled,” Mark suggested.
“Father and I would tell him I would never be Queen, and that would be that.”
“What if he were just a sore loser, and got the annulment and made your father give you to him?”
“I wouldn’t marry him. I’d rather beg in the streets. If I had to, I could make a scene on our wedding day that would destroy his reputation forever.” She smiled. “Isn’t it simple? No matter how many schemes he has, and counter-schemes, he hasn’t a hope, because I don’t mind settling for less than I’ve already got, while he has to try to get more than he has. At the very worst, my father could disinherit me: we’d be on our own, your life would be no worse than it ever was, and I would never have to wear a ball-gown again!” She closed her eyes and shivered. “Bliss!”
Mark turned to sit with his back to her, unrolling his stockings. “I hope you’re right,” he said doubtfully.
“Parker’s Jervis is a character, isn’t he? He used to terrify me when I was a child.”
“Should I blow out the candles?”
“Mm.”
Mark felt his way back to the bed in the dark. “You impressed me, in the High Holt. For a girl wh—”
“Woman!”
“Er, right. For a woman who says she can’t stand Court life, you sounded like, like—”
“Like a real Princess?” In the darkness Gail giggled. “My sister Teris does it the best. Willan and I just parody her, but hardly anybody gets the joke. You have to see her sometime when she’s really trying to be impressive. She oozes regal power, even now that she’s pregnant. We think she’ll be Queen. Father doesn’t like Duke Gerald, though; says he can’t be trusted. And he sweats too much.”
Mark felt the bed rock as she swung her legs over the left edge. There was a sound of rustling cloth, and she pulled a dark shadow up over her head. He sat on the right edge, looking the other way, and pulled off his tunic.
“Lissa tells me I have a tendency to prattle,” Gail said seriously. “If it bothers you, let me know, would you?”
“It doesn’t bother me.” The darkness loosed Mark’s heart a little; he felt a rush of longing take him. “Don’t stop talking. I…I like to hear your voice,” he said, greatly daring.
Gail laughed. “I think you may be alone in that preference.”
“Lucky I married you, then.”
…“I guess it is.”
The bed bucked and her small feet slapped on the tiles. A moment later she shook back the coverlet, and he did the same on his side. They stood there for a moment, facing one another in a darkness barely paled by moon and starshine. A tension curled in Mark, like fear and yet not like, as if he was listening for Gail, listening with his ears and eyes and skin for any touch of her in the darkness, for the warmth of her body, the sound of her heartbeat.
Between any pair of lovers there come moments when the rules change, or are broken, and both know it, and let it happen. So it was then. They looked at one another, naked under their nightshirts, pretending the darkness was so dark that this moment was chaste, though both could taste of something wild in it, and sweet.
Gail stood before the window, across the bed from Mark, a shadow next to deeper shadows. The line of her neck showed against the window, topped by a tiny glimmer that might have been an earring, or a star. It was the sense of her that made Mark’s heart drunk, her nearness in the darkness, how close she was, his wife. His feet were naked on the floor and he knew hers were too, and the coverlet hanging off the bed must brush her thighs as it brushed his.
She could see him as he saw her.
Don’t go.
Mark stood still, tension stringing his gut like a bow. They were close, then; close as two drops of rain on a pane of glass, breathlessly waiting for the instant when they must touch and fuse and run down the window like a streak of wet lightning.
Don’t
…go.
Gail took the coverlet and turned it down, her slender wrists curiously slow, as sure as they had been stroking Lissa’s hair.
Then, almost reluctantly, she climbed into bed, making the linen hiss and rustle where it touched her skin.
Damn.
The moment had passed.
Mark crawled in beside her. His muscles squeaked and gibbered as he tried to get comfortable. “I don’t think I’ll be going out tomorrow,” he gasped.
“If you think you’re sore now, wait until morning! We can beat the southern bounds tomorrow without you, and then you can come with us the day after to do the west and north. We’ll have to decide where exactly the Border becomes ours. Fishing rights and so on.”
“Great.” Fishing rights.
The moment had passed. They were no longer lovers.
Mark’s body fell asleep again, turned dull, no longer tense and waiting, but grumbling instead with bruises and sore muscles after two days of riding. His backside ached and his mind swam. Was Richard as kind as he seemed? If not, why not? Did it even matter, or could they ignore him as Gail seemed to think? And what should Mark do with his own castle and the Ghostwood, which made most of his duchy?
Why did his hand still hurt, six weeks after leaving the Red Keep? And what were ghosts doing on the battlement of the High Holt? If the ghosts weren’t real, why were people suddenly talking about them? Why did the Red Keep seem so much like High Holt? What meant the serpent-charm Queen Lerelil had given him?
Husk’s lean-to, rustling with squirrels, their quick dark eyes aglint with firelight. The past creeping in like black water through the boughs, making his fingers wet with memories; a day—so long ago!—when the moon fell like a cherry blossom onto a spire of red stone and the boy within him began to wake…
“Mark?”
“Wh-wh-what? What?”
“Are you awake?”
“O God. Ugh. I am now.”
“Sorry.”
“Mark?”
“What? What!”
“Have you had any…dreams?”
“O God, Gail.”
“…I was just wondering. Ever since we talked to Janey at that inn, the Ram, I’ve been having the strangest dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Oh, just…strange.”
“What kind of dreams?” Mark asked again.
But Gail had drifted into sleep and did not answer.
For a long time Mark lay unfairly awake, staring up at the ceiling, cherishing a secret feeling in his heart, and breathing her faint scent, that stole from the pillow next to him.
Mark woke the next morning feeling as if his
body were made of scorched planks and haywire. His hips ached and his hams burned and his butt was sore. He moaned and winced his way through breakfast. No one was surprised when he decided not to beat the southern bounds with them.
In truth, he could have gone. He hurt like hell, but then he was used to it: a man who gets up before the sun to make a warrior of himself, and then spends all day in the fields or before the forge or in the cooper’s workshop is no stranger to sore muscles. Mark had been a long time ’prenticed to pain; he was pretty much a master of it now.
And he wanted to see his borders, dammit.
…But not enough to take another day with the gentlefolk. He could grit his teeth and bear the riding, but not another day of gaffes, quiet laughter, gentle corrections, shame.
Val offered to stay with him, but Mark shook his head. “I need a quick pair of eyes out there,” he said. “And I’d like a voice there besides Gail’s too.”
Val didn’t take much coaxing: not to ride a whole day with the Divine Lissa. Mark had to grin, watching them trot out through the big iron gate: You may not have eyes quick for Court, Mark, but they’re plenty keen for courting! Val’s heart is about as hard to track as hoof-prints in snow.
As they rode away he turned back to the Pension and felt a loosening in his chest, as if the wire around his heart had slipped out another notch, and he could breathe a little easier.
The Duke’s father, Jervis, met him at the door. “She sits astraddle well enough.”
“Eh?”
“Your wife. She rides well. Not a usual accomplishment in a lady of her rank.”
Mark smiled. “I hear she’s a dead eye shot too.”
“She will find no lack of hunting by the Border, should she wish it: fowl as well as game. Are you a hunter?”
Mark shook his head. “Where I come from it’s only work, not pleasure.”
The old man nodded. “I have no time for hunting; a useless occupation unless stranded far from markets with an empty stomach. I warn you that for youth there is but little to amuse, here. Nor for age,” he added, laughing drily as he turned to go inside. “To what there is, feel welcome. Our library perhaps will please; it is of all my failing years the sole accomplishment. You should find something in it to amuse yourself.”
Mark stopped awkwardly in the passageway. “I don’t think so,” he said shortly.
“Oh.” The old man looked back at him, steel eyes narrowing. “Oh, I see. That was thoughtless of me.” He sighed, and his grim, seamed face seemed suddenly weary. “One danger of imprisonment is this: when you are your only company, it’s easy to forget that not all men are like yourself.”
“You’re not by yourself,” Mark said. “I’ve seen a village-worth of servants.”
The old man paused. “Well—servants. Servants now are something different.” He glanced sharply up at Mark. “You will learn that soon enough. For now, perhaps a walk among the trees? I have things I want to ask you, Shielder’s Mark, if you can throw a grizzled dog a scrap of time…”
“You are the man who brought our Sweetness back,” Jervis said. “For this I thank you.”
“Thank the King,” Mark grunted. “I didn’t give it up by choice. He threatened to set Sir William on me, and I figured better to be a live rat than a dead lion, as they say.”
The old man laughed, dry as cork, bitter as wormwood. “Then will I feel a bandit’s gratitude.” They paced a winding path between crabbed apple trees with rough grey bark, all in blossom. “Knotty, gnarled, cranky things,” Jervis said, laying a hand on an overhanging branch. “Like white-haired men with twisted backs. But in their autumn they bring forth a fruit, which old men seldom do, these days.” The thought seemed to mean something profound to him; he paused and glanced sharply at Mark.
“I should dearly love to see the sword,” he continued. “If Richard will not send it down, then must I crawl into the hills, and beg entrance at what was once my own damn door for the privilege of seeing it. Hah! That will make the young cock crow.”
“It’s worth seeing. And hearing,” Mark added.
The old man’s eyes sparkled. “So the legends then are true?” he asked hungrily. “The blade sings?”
Mark nodded, remembering the haunting song; a melody of loneliness, of empty places in the world, hollows in the heart. “It has a tune for every hand, I think: it sang a different song for Stargad than for me.”
“Stargad, say you! You spoke with him?”
“Well, he broke my sword and I ran,” Mark admitted. He didn’t want to tell Jervis about seeing Stargad die.
The old man nodded. “Well you chose. He was a mighty man, by all accounts. Perhaps the greatest of my longfathers.”
“Your family has a better crop of fathers than mine,” Mark said drily.
“Our line is old. And remember this: as he who broke the ancient curse, your name will stay forever in your line. But I have done no greatness: my name will die with my last breath. God knows you will not hear it on my Richard’s tongue.” Jervis stopped to rest, leaning against the trunk of an ancient apple tree. “You know it used to bother that fool Astin that he had no sons? Hunh! But this is not a country for fathers, Duke Mark. Not any more.” He started forward again, walking more quickly. “Upon a knoll there is a bench I like to sit sometimes, when the sun comes out, and let my old bones drink the light.”
Mark followed Richard’s father to the knoll at the orchard’s edge and climbed up into the mid-morning sunshine.
“Here’s a little riddle for you, Mark, locked within a name. Our family, you know, is ancient in this land. Since before Duke Aron’s time the High Holt has been ours; our name is long. Now in my study is a book, perhaps the oldest in the kingdom, full of rules of etiquette. One chapter of this tome is given to Long Names: the rules by which the Sable must decide if Such-and-So, upon his death, shall have his name committed to the family patronymic. Imagine my surprise to see our line used as an example! But there, the name is different: Nobody’s Gregor’s Henry’s Coll is how they styled our patronym.” The old man looked up slyly, touching his tongue to his old grey lips. “We are Nobody’s sons, my Richard and I; I wonder why.”
Nobody’s son.
The words ran down Mark’s spine. How many times had he thought that about himself? Nobody’s Son.
“Oh I should love to know just who that No One was,” Jervis said, gasping as he climbed. “I wonder why our shield is plainer by far than that of any other family half so ancient as our own. There was more to it once than a single silver sword; I’d bet my life on it.
“Once sentenced to my dotage, history became my study, Shielder’s Mark. An old man does not like to think about the future. Instead I gaze into the past, and wonder how this ever came to be.” Reaching the top of the little knoll Jervis grasped the back of a wrought-iron bench and wheezed, showing grey teeth in a tight smile. “Would you like a seat?”
“God no!” Mark said. “After two days on horseback I doubt I’ll ever sit again.”
Jervis settled himself on the bench, and wrapped himself in his heavy cloak as if it were a blanket. “Old men had a job to do, back in grandfather days. Did you know that? Books tell us that in Aron’s time both sexes had a mystery. The women’s was of birth, of course: of life and the pain of life, and the joy of it. That mystery is still preserved, by our midwives and our mothers.
“But men had a mystery too, a mystery of death. It was the old man’s job to teach the young men about death…Everybody loves the spring: but fall and winter are seasons too, and they have been forgotten. They have been forgotten because we want to forget! Do you want to think about dying?” Jervis seized Mark’s wrist, his old fingers dry and hard as bones. His steel eyes were cold, cold. Mark squirmed and looked away. “Of course you don’t,” Jervis said; and he let Mark’s hand fall.
“We want to be young! We are all like my Richard. We want youth and beauty always, and the apple trees should always be in bloom; never should we have to see their br
anches bare…But this is not life, Shielder’s Mark. Every fall these apple trees let drop their crop of sin. The first frost kills their leaves, and then the snow flies: for a time they die and are dead.”
Mark shivered. Trapped, he stood with his right hand on the cold iron back of the bench, trying not to meet the old man’s bitter eyes. To his right he could see the track they had travelled the day before, climbing back into the hills, winding its way around outcrops of stone blotched with moss. Before Mark spread the great horse-runs that fell down to the Border River. Tiny gusts of wind ran through the tall grass like hidden animals, making it weave and shiver.
Close by, sheep grazed the hill’s flank, and cows lazily cropped, bells tonking as they swung their heads. Farther off, a herd of horses, half-wild with so much freedom, galloped swiftly north.
“And maybe there is something more,” Jervis said quietly. “A reason we old men have lost our way. After all, what should it matter if the young men do not wish to see? It should be our job to make them, to take our gift and stab them with it. But we have lost our wisdom: lost it back in Aron’s time, and can’t remember where we put it.
“The old books say—no, they demand! The ancient books demand that when a man has reached a certain time in life he put aside the playthings of this world, and this we still do. But the ancients do not say old men retreat to idleness, but to something else. We are to start upon our ‘greater work’…”
Jervis’ grey eyes slid through Mark like steel pins through an insect. “Do you have the healer’s touch, young man?”
Mark didn’t know how to answer.
Jervis sighed. “I do not. All that I touch withers; for I am barren of life, and of death too. But History requires a healer’s touch!” He grimaced in frustration. “So much past is jammed in this old head, and yet…I can make its dead bones dance, but I cannot bring it back to life!” Jervis laughed his dry, unhappy laugh. “You have been to the Ghostwood, boy: tell me if these old bones can speak to you:
“If the Ghost King was real, then Aron must have laid his armies with a spell. So where did the magic go? Why has there been no magic in the land since then? Could Aron be the only man in history to wield it? Absurd. Of course he was not the only one: but it seems he was the last. Fifty generations since are buried in our graveyards; in all that weary time no other man has been a proven warlock. Why even the tales our granddams tell, of ghost and spook and Devil: even magic stories all run back before the Ghost King brought the Time of Troubles down on us.
