Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  Faura sat on Sheris’s other side, running her fingers through those golden curls of which she was so proud, as none of us were old enough to earn a wage to pay a hair dresser for a better color. She always had some excuse for not tying her hair back—but the tutors didn’t always believe her, and so she’d often gotten deportment marks.

  Deportment marks—like having a disordered robe or forgotten tools—meant tending ink pots and cutting paper for the tutors for a week. A protocol mark meant recreation time would be spent in service for as long as the tutor giving the mark deemed appropriate.

  Faura fingered her hair and glanced Sheris’s way, but Sheris ignored her. “Protocol marks, and we didn’t even know. I so wish they wouldn’t do that to us.”

  “Life in the palace is always a test,” Birdy said.

  “Ah-yedi!” Tiflis exclaimed, eyes rolling in Too Obvious. “Remind us your sister is on the queen’s staff, Birdy. We might have forgotten.” She wrinkled her snub nose again. Though she’s a year older, we look enough alike that people think we are twins, as our mothers are twins. We are both small and wiry, with round faces. Only Tiflis got our grandfather’s dark waving hair, and my hair is plank-straight and light brown.

  Tif nudged Sheris the way she used to nudge me. “So who do you think is out?”

  Their speculation was boring, mostly justifying the brilliance of their own answers. I was glad when Sheris signaled she was done, and Tif and Faura followed her out, leaving Birdy and me alone.

  “Want to know what I don’t think you heard?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “There is likely to be a single opening in the royal staff, for the princess.”

  Princess Lasva was still “the princess,” for her sister was still trying every Midsummer to get an heir via the Birth Spell. If Lasva were to be proclaimed the royal princess, or heir, she would be given a staff of scribes and tutored in statecraft.

  “That’s why the senior scribe tested us,” Birdy finished.

  I touched a dab of wine jam to a finger biscuit and set my knife down. “Why us? Won’t the princess pick from among the journey scribes?”

  “None of the three is eligible.”

  “No one eligible? What is amiss?”

  “The fellows are elas. If one was elan or elor…” He shrugged.

  I stared.

  I had dropped through an unseen hole in the familiar world when I was summarily sent to the kitchens. Now I was back in the scribe world again, but it seemed as soon as I had stepped on the familiar ground it had opened once again, dropping me to a new and terrible world in which Tiflis turned away.

  Birdy’s words caused yet another drop. “Why should anyone care if they like women, or men, or no one at all? Rule One is no interference or influence—”

  Birdy flicked another look down the table, then said in a low voice, “My sister says that elas or elendre fellows all seem to go zalend over Princess Lasva.”

  I will not assume you understand our idiom. There are many words with elen, to love, as base. The feminine suffix “as” joined with third person singular “el” meant a preference for women, as “an” was the suffix for a preference for males, elendre meant a preference for both, and elor, for the person who prefers to remain asexual. And, combining zad, or storm, to the adjective form of love, elend, indicated a wild passion. We all used the term—but about food or fashions or the momentary ecstasies of youth. None of us knew what the adults meant, though we all thought we did.

  “They’ll want to pick a female for her, unless the princess asks for a male. For sure it must be someone excellent not only in writing but parroting.”

  Being trained to hear and repeat conversations was common among scribe families. The toughest tests were in languages one did not actually speak. My parents had made it a game, becoming more serious when I turned six and showed my readiness for the family trade. “Parroting” sounds more difficult than it is. There is a trick to recognizing the patterns of speech, anchored to root words, and remembering the whole.

  But not everyone could do it. The first elimination of potential royal scribes happened around age ten, and the inability to master parroting was most often the cause for students to be sent to less arduous, less prestigious training.

  So I was still eligible to train as a royal scribe—and the others had known it. That explained my lack of welcome. “So the class wanted me out.” Yet another hole to drop through.

  Splat! One of the bags landed on the table, knocking into my cup. “You’re too loyal to that cousin of yours,” Birdy muttered.

  I righted the cup, which at least had been empty. “I thought we are supposed to be loyal to each other. Isn’t that part of the Second Rule!”

  “So did I.” Birdy started the bags circling again, a little faster, as he lurched from side to side on his cushion. “So did I until I woke up that day and they were south-gating you for being sent to the kitchen, even though we were all there in the room when Kaleri asked for help, and we all ignored her.”

  “You didn’t say anything to her. I did.”

  “Don’t you see? We really were all to blame, because we were complicit.” He said the word with a slight emphasis, the pleasure of knowing just the right word. “After you were sent off, the others were glad. And, yes, I was glad, too. Not that you got into trouble, but that you were gone. Out of the competition.”

  One of the bags flew beyond his fingers, and crashed into his cup. He flattened his hand on the top of the cup. “But then we heard you at The Fifteen, and I think we were supposed to. I think the test wasn’t about what we know. They know what we know. I think the test was about how we act, how we treat others.”

  I said, “You always used to talk about shadow kissers in my direction.”

  “Yes.” Crash! A bag clattered into the serving bowl, causing the students at the other end of the table to look our way.

  Birdy made The Peace in apology. “You were always so good, though you’re the youngest. Never a deportment mark. I thought there was no difference between you and Sheris, who also never got deportment marks. As soon as you were gone Sheris started praising Tif. Soon as Tif started following her, she shoved Faura away. That’s not the Second Rule, it’s a pretence at it. Do you see?”

  “Maybe Tif was lonely,” I said, feeling my way. Yes, that explained Tiflis’s turning from me. I could understand it. Maybe I could forgive it, if she came back.

  “See? See?” He tossed the bags in the air. “They pretend to live by the Second Rule, because today, when Scribe Halimas gave us the protocol mark, as soon as he was gone, they blamed you, and not themselves. But when you gave your answers there under the tree, and we all heard you, I thought, you are trying to live by the Second Rule. You didn’t blame anyone but yourself.”

  He thrust the juggling silks into his pocket, put his dishes on his tray, and left.

  THREE

  OF THE HIERARCHY OF STYLE

  A

  s soon as we’re born, we become a part of patterns, the intimate ones we create with those we live among, and the patterns so large that it takes a lifetime to perceive a fragment of the possibilities. Our first lesson was to differentiate between what we observed, what we had learned, and what we conjectured, or assumed, because sometimes cause and effect are not so simple to identify.

  I know it will seem fantastical (if not prevarication) to add to my defense testimony parts of other people’s lives—incidents that you would think I could not have seen, and words I did not hear spoken at the time. Thoughts that the thinkers locked inside their heads.

  I promise these are not surmises.

  At the far northeastern end of the kingdom, Lady Carola Definian sat down to breakfast with her father, the formidable Duke of Alarcansa, as the palace bell rang the three-note chord of the Hour of the Leaf. This was the time the duke had been raised to consider the most civilized and decorous for an aristocrat to begin the day.

  The duke had not criticized her for wel
l over a year. “You’ve turned out prettier even than your mother,” he’d said last winter on her sixteenth Name Day, after eyeing her meticulously: dainty and small, but perfect proportions, straight back, rounded at bosom and hip, hair that never required a curling iron. She had the best of the Ranalassi looks (for which her father had married her mother), and the Definian brains. “If you demonstrate melende commensurate with your breeding, I will take you to court.”

  I must pause here and remind those not familiar with Colend that melende does indeed come from the Sartoran malend, or the love of-grace-in-movement. In Sartor, “malend” came to be used for the dance. In our Kifelian, as always, the singing three syllables of melende—emphasis in the middle—connotes what has often been translated in other tongues as “honor” or as “the court mask.”

  The definition of honor differs from land to land, culture to culture. I will have more to say about that eventually. But melende is the life of art, it means control and grace even when you are alone in your chamber, even if a lightning storm burns down your house.

  Carola shared her father’s conviction that a Definian must always excel in everything—that the Definian melende must transcend style, rather than merely harmonizing with it.

  In anticipation of her presentation at court, she’d paid a poor courtier connected to her mother’s family to sketch the latest fads and fashions each month. She spend a small fortune luring a well-regarded court dancing master to Alarcansa, and she practiced at baronial balls and fêtes. If she could not excel (and no amount of practice made her riding or singing any better) she dropped an activity. Meanwhile she ordered an extensive wardrobe that could be adapted at the last moment, so when her father determined by his internal standard that she was ready, she would be able to give her servants a single command, and they could depart the next day. That was style, the outward-most form of melende.

  So when her father bade her good morning, examined her from pink hair ribbons to satin-covered toes, and said, “Tomorrow we shall depart for Alsais,” she was able to reply with complete composure, “Very well, Father.”

  She reveled in the minute relaxing of his narrow lips that indicated approval, and said the thing she knew would please him most. “I will make my farewell visits to our dependents.”

  Visiting the dependents was the tedious but necessary dictation of personal messages to be dispatched to baronies of Alarcansa, then the equally tedious carriage ride to call on the principal guild masters and mistresses in Alarcansa’s capital, and last of all, on the palace people.

  She fully intended to carry out this duty. But first, the delicious triumph of giving the news in person to her two female cousins, who awaited her in the dining room as Cousin Falisse tried to coax Carola’s silver-tailed parrots to quote poetry.

  Tatia Definian, whose mother was younger sister to Carola’s father, would accompany Carola. Her joy was expressed in gales of high, tiny giggles and breathless, fawning praise. Carola smiled, turning as she always did to the mirrored insets along the wooden inlay in the wall in order to assure herself that her smile accorded with melende.

  Falisse Ranalassi, cousin through Carola’s world-traveling mother, was not to go to court. The Ranalassis were well connected, but Carola had so many excuses—the expense, the smallness of the palace suite allotted to dukes, the problem of servants—everything but the truth, which was that Falisse was as pretty as Carola, could dance as well, and she had a beautiful singing voice. Tatia was scrawny and plain, her chief skills shadow-kissing and scudding around noiselessly in her tiny court steps, spying on conversations, so that she could report them to Carola.

  Tatia was indispensable, Falisse unthinkable.

  A sly, triumphant glance from Tatia, that superior little smile when Carola’s light gaze met her own eyes in the mirrored inset, and Falisse could not resist observing, “I hear Princess Lasthavais is the most beautiful girl in court.”

  Tatia tittered as she swiveled to Carola, who broke her gaze from the mirror. “That’s what everyone says about princesses,” Carola retorted, watching the shape of her mouth as she spoke. Melende required that she never speak a word that made her lips ugly. “It’s a convention. Father told me they said it about the queen when she first appeared, though she looked like a toad standing on its hind legs.”

  Falisse flirted her fan in amusement mode. “From what I’ve heard, Princess Lasthavais is the image of the greatmother for whom she is named.”

  I assume everyone knows the history of Lasthavais Dei the Wanderer, who at the age of thirty-nine came to the court of Alsais, dusty and travel-worn, and the king, notorious for his casual affairs, never looked at another woman for the rest of his life. He not only married her, but rebuilt most of Alsais to please her and then began expanding Colend, some say to remake the world around her.

  This praise of the princess was not new to Carola. Far more irritating was Falisse’s glee. Falisse was a pensioner, her family too poor to keep their own house. Falisse was a dependent, but she never acknowledged it properly. And now? Now she was gloating.

  Carola whirled and with palm cupped, wrist straight, and arm propelled from the shoulder blade, struck Falisse across the face.

  Falisse gasped in shock, a hand rising to cover her throbbing cheek. Though Carola was in the habit of slapping her personal attendants (and Tatia, the rare times Tatia annoyed her) until now she’d respected Falisse’s mother, her quick-tongued aunt, enough to never strike her child.

  Years of pent-up anger at Carola’s slights and sweet-voiced cruelties boiled up inside Falisse. What was the use of melende when she was never to go to court, just because she happened to be as pretty as Carola? She launched herself at Carola to claw that complacency right off her face.

  Carola instinctively threw up an arm to ward, and with the other hand, caught hold of Falisse’s hair, yanking viciously to throw Falisse off balance.

  Falisse screeched in pain and anger.

  Carola shrieked, “How dare you! How dare you!”

  The mingled screams echoed down the marble hall, reaching the duke in his scriptorium as he was giving his scribe last instructions.

  The duke, accustomed to decorum in his household, entered the formal dining room to discover one of his four hundred-year-old lyre-backed chairs turned over, the table linens all askew, dishes lying in pieces on the floor, with food scattered about the crane-patterned Bermundi rug. Expensive parrots flitted from drapes to furniture, squawking, as his daughter and niece-by-marriage rolled about, kicking and scratching.

  “What.” His voice was like a whiplash. “Is this?”

  The girls fell apart, Falisse weeping with rage and pain as she fingered her tender scalp where Carola had pulled out a huge chunk of her hair.

  “It is entirely Falisse’s fault, your grace,” came Tatia’s obsequious mouse squeak.

  The duke ignored Tatia as his gaze traveled from the lock of hair on the floor to Carola’s angry face and disordered appearance.

  “Carola. When you have restored yourself to order, you will attend me in my interview chamber.”

  The door snicked shut. Carola whirled to her feet, her voice shaking with rage as she turned on Falisse. There was no thought of how her lips shaped each word now. “I will deal with you later.”

  She had her explanation all worked out by the time she had changed her ripped gown and had her maid brush out and bind up her hair again in a fresh pink ribbon.

  The only person in the world she feared was her father, though he had never raised his voice or his hand. But he made his disapproval plain in ways that hurt much, much worse. Her palms were damp by the time the footman let her into the formal room where the duke dealt out judgment to those whose rank preserved them from the more public office on the ground floor.

  “Father,” Carola began, “permit me to explain—”

  “The spectacle I was forced to witness is not just risible but offensive.”

  She gulped, rigid with the effort it took
not to exclaim at the unfairness. It was all Falisse’s fault!

  “It appears I erred in believing that you understood the rudiments of civilized behavior.”

  “But Father—”

  He pointed his fingers at the floor in the sharp gesture that once preceded the deliberate stepping on another’s shadow, but now meant Shut your mouth. It was as shocking as a slap. “A Definian never forsakes melende. Even in death.”

  Carola trembled, struggling to control her breathing.

  “A Definian exerts authority through choice of word and precision of tone.”

  Then the real blow came; the duke was irked, and wanted to teach his heir a lesson, but he also welcomed the prospect of postponing the tedium of introducing her to court, a place that had ceased to interest him almost twenty years ago. “We will defer this journey to Alsais until I am assured that you are able to conduct yourself in civilized company.”

  Carola could only curtsey and retire. Her first impulse was to return to Falisse and claw her face to ribbons, but Falisse would only shriek again.

  So. Whether her father postponed the journey a day or a year, Carola would still triumph, because she would devote every day she was stuck at home to demonstrating the perquisites of authority to Falisse, without raising her voice or touching her. With style, the outward form of melende.

  She smiled.

  FOUR

  OF WHITE LINEN AND IGNORANCE

  W

  hen the collective age of any class reached sixteen, we all knew the Interview could come at any time. It was individual, and it determined the rest of your life. We all had hopes of being chosen as royal scribes, serving the most important people in the kingdom. After a year of very hard study, Scribe Halimas entered our history class one afternoon as usual. Instead of offering a topic to research and discuss, he said, “At the midday meal today, you were joined by a journey herald who insisted that Adamas Dei left Sartor for the west in 3391 when he discovered that he would not inherit the throne.”