Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  The foremost rider throws a javelin to strike down into the ground before the inn door. Attached to that javelin is a peculiar banner—a length of cloth, all black with a fox face on it—a strange sort of fox that almost looks like a hunting bird, a ruff fanned around its head in petals shaped like flames.

  And I knew at the very moment that javelin struck the ground that everything in our lives was going to change.

  Hindsight, of course, is always accurate in prediction.

  The Countess did not lie. She was there and saw Ivandred’s personal runner throw down the javelin bearing the Montredaun-An fox banner—which had, historically, been the heir’s and was again, now that they were back on the throne of Marloven Hesea.

  The Countess, her younger sister Lissais, and Ananda Gaszin had been walking about on a shaded knoll under carefully tended fruit trees, glad to stretch their legs after the long barge journey. Each carried her travel album. On seeing the newcomers they all stopped, the albums’ tassels dancing in the wind as the ladies took in the blue-eyed leader.

  The other fellow was not as exotic, though perhaps more dashing; taller, handsome, with a generous smiling mouth, his blond hair worn loose. And he was dressed in the latest fashion: dupion silk woven in green and blue, edged with silver braid.

  A short time later Ivandred stood in the center of a spacious chamber, the walls hung in pale green watered silk, the quilt matching, a copper bath in a small room adjacent, with tiled knobs that released magical spells summoning (and later transferring underground) heated water. Ivandred, scrutinizing that bath, was impressed. At home, posting houses and castles had general baths in great pools siphoned off from underground streams, with the water-heating and cleaning spells on them.

  “Will it suffice?” asked his cousin, Prince Macael.

  Ivandred glanced aside, a hand still on the copper rim. “Fine. I don’t know about that bed, though. Looks like a whole lot of pillows. Stifling.”

  “Then sleep on the carpet.” Macael cast himself gratefully into a chair. “No one will know, unless you invite someone in. But you’d better get rid of the day’s sweat and dress for dining, unless you want to lose our wager by offending the princess’s pretty nose.”

  Dress for dining. Ivandred reflected on that as his cousin shut himself into the bath. At home they dressed for dining once a year, on New Year Week’s Firstday, after he stood behind his father’s throne and listened to the jarls renew their vows. He wore the same battle tunic every year, handed down from his grandfather.

  Ivandred approached the empty fire place and raised both hands, concentrating as he intoned a spell. Heat built behind his eyes, his teeth vibrated, the sense of danger increased rapidly but he pictured the spell held between his outstretched hands, finished the words of power, and—

  There! Flames shot up the flue. He clapped his hands lightly and spoke the word of quittance. The flames went out, leaving the acrid tinge of hot stone.

  Too slow, he thought as he opened the window, and fresh air off the river scoured out the smoke. If only he had time to practice!

  When we first arrived at the inn, Darva had watched Lasthavais’s blue gaze read the salon as if a written record, for she was always kind to those excluded, or troubled in countenance. It was this quality, remarkable in one so young, and not her beauty, that made Darva love the princess.

  Lasva was emerging from her bath when Darva called.

  When I told Lasva who had requested to see her, she assented, but with that blank smiling countenance that had become painfully familiar. We entered the small outer chamber together.

  Darva observed, “The day has been long.”

  “The summer has been long. I am grateful for any signs of autumn’s approach,” Lasva was tired enough to admit.

  Darva curtseyed. “I told the innkeeper to send for musicians. Until they come, we have been reminiscing over the drawings.”

  In other words, Darva promised her a peaceful evening, if she could contrive it.

  I was glad. Too many evenings we’d spent shut in, Lasva lost in reverie as I contrived to keep myself busy until it was time to retire.

  As for her reverie, here is what she was thinking when she withdrew to dress for the evening and stood looking down at her fans. How strange. For a moment she saw the familiar fans as bizarre objects. I think about which I shall choose and what message that sends, and I use it to say things I cannot voice. Some things you couldn’t say even with a fan, such as how much she hated Ananda’s angry obsession with the news from Alarcansa. I’d thought that was idle attraction. Was it more, did Ananda love Kaidas, too? Lasva thought, her fingers tracing up and down each fan, then back again. Do we share a grief?

  Ananda wrote every day to her cousin in Alarcansa, who was connected to a baron there. It was as if she could not forbear plucking at a healing wound. She insisted on uttering daily bulletins in a wicked voice, mocking Carola and her newly wedded duke with his hair tied back in a white ribbon.

  Lasva never answered the slanders or joined the mirth at Carola’s and Kaidas’s expense.

  She tried to wish he’d found love, but it was her mind exhorting her heart without effect. She dreaded seeing him again and picked up a fan at random, moving away as if she could leave the familiar pain behind. “Emras, do you have my album? Thank you.”

  We walked out, silence between us.

  “The dining rooms are that way,” Macael said to Ivandred as they walked downstairs. He pointed with his thumb in one direction, along a carpeted hallway with inlay paneling. “The private ones have closed doors, my man told me. The one at the end, double doors open, is for anyone who didn’t request private dining.”

  “Private dining,” Ivandred repeated, entertained by the notion. “If the princess is dining in private then we won’t see her. Why don’t we sup with my riders?”

  Macael shook his head. “We should join Nanvo and the boys in the public dining room, and practice our Kifelian. We all need it,” he added.

  Ivandred could not argue with that. He’d discovered on the month-long ride north and east that Geral had been right. The language itself was deceptively easy to learn, for it was related to Sartoran. But the way people spoke it was quick, curiously drifting, with convoluted tenses whose meaning was difficult to grasp without reflection, and word clusters separated by pauses that appeared to convey yet another layer of meaning. In addition to that, these courtiers seemed to sing, almost, the way their voices rose, fell, paused, with drawn-out vowels that sometimes changed notes.

  At times, the language seemed less like expression and more like code.

  I stepped back to permit Lasva an unimpeded view of the inn’s main salon, which had been hired by the Duchess of Gaszin. Lasva returned bows and curtseys, her fan held open at the neutral Anticipation of Artistic Pleasure, giving a smile and polite word here and there, as she made her way across to the room to the table by the fire.

  The focus of this side of the room was Lord Rontande, whom I had quite unreasonably hated ever since he used my desk without asking and hurt Lasva by his ambition. I knew he was no worse than any others, and some said he was better than most. But experience shapes emotion.

  His hair was dark again, contrasting with his robes of a subtle straw hue. He was holding forth to Darva’s smiling sister Lissais, another popular lord, and a very bored Ananda, leaving a young lady new to court sitting all alone.

  “May I see your album?” Lasva asked Farava as she took her place on a satin couch next to her.

  Farava blushed and handed it over. The Duchess of Sentis cast Lasva a grateful look for this attention to her niece, but Lasva did not see it as she bent over the silk-bound album.

  Lasva leafed through the heavy, crackling pages of finest rice paper, looking at the sketches of Farava, ranging widely in skill (and in the case of the written ones in wit), halting at one marked with a golden ribbon. There was a fast but well-executed sketch not only of tall, thin Farava, her merry brown eyes caught b
y a masterly hand, but in the background, Lasva discovered a sketch of herself, standing pensively framed in a window. No, a mirror, and she wore a lace mask. But her gown was unmistakable.

  “That was at the Twelfth Night Masque. Isn’t that a wonderful drawing?” Farava whispered, leaning forward. And, in an under-voice, “He said I am as beautiful as a princess, which is why he sketched you and me together like that.”

  Sketches of masks and mirrors conveyed their own hidden meaning. The drawing was not signed, except by a quick semblance of a coronet: the younger Landis prince.

  Marry me, he’d said to Lasva, bending over her chair and laughing as if I was not seated within arm’s length. But then scribes are supposed to be invisible. We are so alike, he’d whispered.

  Perhaps they were, in mirrored rooms and decorated with court masks, but not in the realm of the spirit, or he would have seen that her acknowledging the truth of his remark did not admit of it being a compliment.

  “If I have to marry, it will not be to a mask,” she had said to me as soon as he moved away. That was the first observation she’d offered in days.

  Lasva paused, bending a little closer to Farava’s album as she stared down at an arrestingly beautiful likeness of Farava, each eyelash, the glimmer of light on her ear-gems, all lovingly and faithfully rendered. “Oh. How brilliant.”

  “I love it the best,” Farava whispered.

  Lasva’s brows rose in surprise at the initials below: R.A. for Rontande Altan. She had not known that moody, wayward Rontande had found someone to train him to far better skills than the days of his cat sketches. What surprised her more was that his ignoring of Farava was not cruel intent but protection against idle gossip.

  “You know he’s painting a great mural for his cousins at Altan Castle?” Farava asked.

  “My dear, recall that the princess has spent her life surrounded by work from the best artists in the world,” the Duchess of Sentis put in, drawing attention to royalty seated with her niece, as Rontande bowed ironically in the background.

  “Such as that of Mazin Phee,” came Ananda’s voice, brittle as glass.

  Lissais sat down beside Farava, her light gray eyes wide with interest. “I heard before I left that the queen hired Phee to paint the royal princess on her first Name Day!”

  “By then he ought to be finished with his present… challenge,” Ananda said, deep quirks on either side of her pouting mouth.

  Lasva had turned her head, and I knew she wished she was elsewhere.

  Rontande flipped his fan up before one eye for just a heartbeat, and Farava was too young to resist displaying her curiosity. “What? What is it that makes you smile?”

  Ananda’s fan dipped into Art is Eternal but mocked the pose with a questioning flick. “My cousin Suzha had the news two days ago from Tatia Tittermouse. It seems that the Icicle Duchess hired Phee to paint the newly wedded pair—in the fashions of Lasva Sky-Child and King Mathias the Builder.” Her fan arced at a plangent angle, a mockery of Becoming Modesty.

  “Oh!” Lissais and Farava said together, stunned into silence.

  Lissais whispered behind her fan, “She’s not that beautiful.”

  A baroness whispered back, “But some think he is.” Her fan twirled slowly in Ananda’s direction. “I don’t see how. Those Lassiters are as raw-boned as the horses they prize so much.”

  Ananda stilled then caught a slack-lidded, warning glance from her mother, the Duchess of Gaszin.

  “I understand we’re to have music,” Lady Nollafen spoke up from her chair near the duchess, her fan fluttering in the Heedless Youth mode. “Where can the musicians be?”

  The Duchess of Sentis rose, smoothing the silken layers of her robes. “I believe I will seek the music of the river. A walk would be refreshing.”

  Though her tone was kind, the rebuke was felt by the Duchess of Gaszin, who sent her daughter Ananda a long glance.

  Ananda gazed over her fan—trailing ribbons of the pale gold called Summer Thunder.

  Lasva smiled at Farava. “Let’s see who else admires you,” she said into the silence, turning over the next leaf of the album with enough deliberation to shift attention, although she longed to be back on the river, watching the moon trail liquid light over the dark waters, far from Ananda’s scalding whisper, Alarcansa… Alarcansa… Alarcansa.

  Lasva forced herself to listen as Farava told every detail of the parties she’d attended with her elusive, complicated cousin, now betrothed to the equally romantic Lord Adamas, second son of the problematic Dei family.

  “… and I hear they will combine their names. Dei-Sentis. It sounds… historic,” Ananda said.

  “Well, you know that the Deis have married into royal families,” Farava was saying. “In fact, someone in Sartor said that they have more royal blood than any other family.”

  “King-makers but never kings,” Rontande drawled. “But the Deis seem to be the more romantic for all that.”

  Lasva turned the subject yet again, and Darva sat back, staring at Ananda’s fan and its ribbons swaying to and fro, as she contemplated the lingering poison of Carola Definian. She did not understand: why pursue and then bind a man who shows no interest? Was it because he showed no interest?

  It sounded too simple, as it sounded too simple to attribute Carola’s obsessive and barely hidden hatred of the princess to mere jealousy. Carola had more power than the princess did and her own wealth, yet all spring Darva was convinced that Carola had whispered evil of the princess through that tittering, tittupping cousin of hers: imputations, questions, hints that together besmirched Lasva’s reputation, painting a distorted image of her as a heartless flirt. Carola had taken up the pale gold as tribute to her own coloring, determined to make summer thunder her personal sigil; Ananda was just as determined to keep summer thunder as the fashion of Lasva’s Roses.

  Lasva did not see the sketches though her head was bent and her hand leafed the pages. After a proper time she returned Farava’s album and glanced wearily past the row of soberly dressed people carrying their musical instruments. She must hope Kaidas was happy. She did not want him hollowed out by the memory of passion the way her body, mind, and spirit seemed hollowed out.

  How she missed his touch, the sound of his voice, the sweet fire of rafalle! Her gaze drifted to a stir inside the doorway, and her weariness gave way to mild interest. People parted, their attention on the musicians, and a few on the newcomers, in particular a pale-haired young man dressed all in black.

  Lasva gazed as he sauntered to the doorway with a heart-catching swinging stride, and lightning struck.

  But it was not lightning, for there was no thunder, or rain, or burn. The shock was entirely inside her skull, leaving her staring witlessly at a pair of eyes that were not black, but pale blue, the exact shade of Skya Lake’s deep-winter ice.

  ELEVEN

  OF SUMMER THUNDER

  I

  vandred and Macael followed six musicians into the music room as the crowd stirred to make way for the entertainers. Ivandred scanned the room, looking for the remarkable Dei features that occasionally appeared every couple of generations, and there she was. Ivandred stopped dead, staring.

  The first impression was of blue and silver complementing warm shades of brown skin in a perfect oval face framed by curling dark hair threaded with glints of gold. Extravagant winged brows arched over brilliant eyes the dense blue of a summer sky over the plains. Dark lashes lifted, and their gazes met.

  Sound and sense vanished, leaving only the drum of his heart against his ribs.

  “Come along,” Macael urged. “We’re direct in the doorway.”

  Ivandred was nearly dizzy, so sudden was the shift from deafness to being acutely aware of people to either side of him, waiting for him to cease blocking the doorway.

  He shifted as the musicians bustled about, four bearing wind instruments of various sizes, one with a twelve-stringed tiranthe, and another brandishing a percussive tambour with bells around it
, which he rang to gain attention.

  The musicians took up a station opposite the fireplace, and struck up a lively melody. More people entered, drawn by the music, until the room became quite crowded.

  Ivandred elbowed Macael and jerked his head toward the door.

  Outside the air was much cooler, the sound only some night birds, and the rush of the river downslope from the back of the inn. He could breathe again.

  “Don’t you want to stay and talk to her?” Macael asked. In the reflected light from the long row of windows Macael looked interested, even amused, but not the least stricken by desire.

  “Hear her talk first,” Ivandred said. His skin hurt, and his heartbeat thundered in his ears. “Later.”

  “For once rumor was, if anything, stingy,” Macael offered. How strange these things were! Here he was, a practiced flirt, but he had not managed to garner more than a distracted glance from the princess, whose face and form transcended rumor. But his appreciation was aesthetic.

  Ivandred, who had obviously shared that thunderbolt of instant attraction—so very, very rarely did it go equally both ways—did not answer.

  Lasva said, “Emras, will you find out who they are?”

  Alone of the Colendi, who had been busy finding seats for the music, I’d seen the zalend in his face. And when I turned to Lasva, I found it mirrored in hers. Not rafalle, this was something different. Purely physical, for they had not exchanged a word.

  I hoped that the two young men had scribes with them, for that would make my task easier. As it turned out, I did not need that middle step, for the same moment I left the salon, Macael re-entered the inn.