Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  These accusations seemed to drive invisible wedges between everyone, and they angered me sufficiently that if I overheard one, I began to offer excuses that were less justifiable, until the day I offered one that was outright preposterous—“I believe a bird flew over the sun”—causing the second dresser, Pelis, to snort with laughter.

  Thereafter Belimas would not speak when I was around. I expected that. I was glad not to be the recipient of her complaints. The thing I did not expect was how Pelis began sitting next to me in the coach, and sometimes she turned my way when offering observations, even joking.

  Marnda’s instructions became more frequent and longer as she endeavored by force of will and attention to the tiniest detail, to impose order on the messiness of nature. She followed Lasva about, straightening things with angry little twitches and shakes almost as soon as the princess set them down.

  Lasva reacted by closing herself inside her skull, leaving us with a polite, pleasant, utterly blank simulacrum.

  Life did not halt behind us.

  King Jurac wished it would. For a time, he wished the entire world blasted to splinters by Norsunder. Nothing could be worse than the humiliation of defeat. If only he hadn’t gone himself! But he’d had to. Nothing else showed her sufficient honor.

  And that Marloven prince had come himself. The problem was, he’d succeeded. Why was that? Because he had better information, from no less than the queen’s consort.

  Jurac transferred to his capital, leaving his defeated men to travel the mountains home. The first thing he did was rid himself of the Colendi, except for the ambassador, who was the necessary link to that vital trade.

  Kivic had figured out within heartbeats after the disaster that the blame was going to fall squarely on him, probably sooner than later. On the long, wearying journey, he put in useful time forming friendships with the guards, expertly teasing out those most responsive to “us” against “them” thinking.

  When they arrived back at Narad, the king ordered the guards to fling Kivic into prison, citing Colendi demands. Everyone knew it was for form’s sake. The spy protested his innocence all the way, but that, too, was just for form’s sake. A few weeks later he was summoned before an unsmiling, remote king, to be told, “In accordance with my agreement with Queen Hatahra of Colend, you will be remanded to their custody to make restitution according to their laws, since you committed murder of their people on their ground.”

  The ambassador bowed and withdrew. Before Kivic was led away, Jurac said, “It was a stupid idea, Kivic. That should have been me, on the horse, coming to the rescue.”

  Kivic didn’t bother to say that the wretched woman had done her best to rescue herself—that if there’d been no Marlovens, and Jurac had gotten her back to Narad, his life would have been reduced to a misery. You don’t tell a king that the princess in question didn’t want him as a man or as a king; that she’d wanted the other fellow. So he kept silence as he paced past all the guards, until he came abreast of his man. “Fun ahead.” He breathed out a laugh.

  “That’s it,” the Duke of Alarcansa said, and the tailor stepped back, his mouth an unhappy line.

  Kaidas made an experimental turn. Once again the damned sword thumped his side. And the folds of his robe covered the hilt again; he glanced in the mirror. Yes, the line was ruined. Now he understood why those Marlovens wore their coats so tight to the waist—though they hadn’t worn their swords. Maybe they did at home. In the salon? In the dining room? In the bedroom?

  “It will have to do,” he said, glancing at the sandglass. He must not be late for his interview with the queen. Who wanted him wearing a sword.

  It thumped and rattled against his side as he crossed the palace from the wing hastily given over to the new military arm. It tried to tangle in his legs when he mounted the curving stairway, and when he kicked it impatiently, it did its best to spin, nearly tripping him. He caught himself on the balustrade, glanced around to see who had witnessed his near fall, and caught the gaze of an armed herald at the top of the stair—her sword decently hidden behind a panel of her new livery. The corners of her mouth tightened. Yes, she was laughing, but he sensed from the angle of her brows the sympathy of one who had been in the same ridiculous position.

  He banished his anger and smiled, fingers flicking in Irony before he put his hand on the hilt and pressed down so that the tip of the sword angled safely behind him, which permitted him to lengthen his strides. Much better. He’d just have to march around with his hand on the hilt, feeling like a strutting rooster in a barnyard.

  On the first reverberating strike of the Hour of Stone the heralds opened the door to the white-marble and slate interview room that was reserved for military matters, and as such, had not been used for years. Kaidas walked in, imagining the scurry of servants scrubbing the marble and polishing the ebony-lacquered furnishings.

  The queen was there, dressed in judgment robes of dark blue and white.

  “The murderer Kivic will be presented at the border arch in the middle pass in three days,” the queen said. “You will oversee his delivery into the hands of the Judicial Masks to commence restitution for his crimes. You will take as many of your defenders as you think necessary, at crown expense.” Her fan snapped. “You will see to it that nothing interferes with justice, for I do not trust that hummer Jurac past my next breath.”

  Since his marriage, Kaidas had become an expert at shuttering his emotions. He employed that skill now to hide his abhorrence. Guard duty, that was what “defenders” really meant.

  He bowed, withdrew, and returned to the Alarcansa suite, where he found his wife walking back and forth in the vestibule so that no wrinkles would crush her silken panels of sheerest silver, embroidered with moon-pale pond lilies and redbirds with tiny rubies at their wingtips.

  She lifted her fan upward, as if toward the bell towers, for it was not commensurate with the melende of a Definian to remonstrate.

  He bowed, hand out in polite apology. “We will not be late to the Rising, for I was summoned to a private interview with the queen in my new capacity,” he said as he removed the exasperating baldric. The Grand Seneschal had been exact about the etiquette: when summoned to the queen on Defender affairs, he was to wear the sword. The rest of the time, the weapons ban was to be observed.

  He resisted the impulse to fling baldric and sword and handed them to the waiting man in the hallway. “Tell the tailor we need more of an angle,” he said, and the man bowed and vanished.

  He handed the new service robe, edged in royal blue, to another waiting servant, shrugged into a brocaded robe with rubies studding the swinging tassels at the shoulders—all without breaking a step—and offered his arm to his wife in the correct manner.

  She slid her fingers over the smooth linen silk of his sleeve and smiled as he matched his pace to hers. On the surface, everything was as it should be. The new duke of Alarcansa had alone (the departed barbarians, whom she had never seen, were effectively forgotten) figured out the Chwahir king’s evil plot, and had been recognized for his foresight by the queen with his new position as Defender of the Crown. Carola herself, on arriving in Alsais, had been personally welcomed by the queen, and before all the court had been appointed Chief Lady in Waiting to the Princess Royal. And She was gone with the barbarians. Gone and it was to be hoped, soon forgotten.

  All as it should be. But every time Carola glimpsed her duke after even a brief separation, there was the shock of that short hair. An act of war, was all he had said in explanation, and the strict demands of melende prohibited her from pressing further. Until he chose to explain, she would wait.

  This lapse might have been forgotten with time had not every hothead who wanted to swing a sword cut off their hair, male and female. Carola was convinced that Lady Isari, striding off to the military practice barn each morning, had more swords than her own on her mind. But who would want her, with that ridiculous short hair flying untidily about her face?

  She could not
speak any of that, but melende permitted questions about duty. “More military matters?”

  “I am sent to fetch the Chwahir murderer. Apparently the heralds’ judiciaries can’t be trusted, though they have handled restitution for generations.”

  “The murderer is a Chwahir,” Carola stated, flourishing her fan in No Matter. “Of course the queen would send you.” He showed no sign of regret for his imminent departure, and once again, she could not prevent the pent-up words, “You are pleased to be going?”

  Kaidas gave her a glance of surprise. “Pleased to be riding out in bad weather, with a damned sword rattling my thigh at every jog? No doubt to be kept waiting by the Chwahir, who won’t be in any hurry to spare us wind or weather. I would rather be running the Ym Hunt. I would rather be tending the two-year-olds. But we have both been honored with calls to service.”

  This reminder of her own honor should have been a triumph, but it wasn’t. Within a week of her new duties, Carola’s vision of elegant and select little parties—at the queen’s expense on behalf of her daughter—as courtiers came to pay calls upon the infant, had vanished when no one seemed inclined to call upon a babe-in-arms. Carola still had evenings free, but with her freedom curtailed by her not-very-onerous duties, she felt her influence over the ever-changing eddies of court slipping.

  “You will be pleased to return, then.” She recovered modulation as they approached the double doors leading to the conservatory, where everyone was gathered for the Rising—and Carola would have to follow the royal family back to the royal suite to begin her day as Chief Lady in Waiting. “I will offer you consolation with a masquerade and invite your particular friends, if you will honor me with a list before you leave.”

  There was nothing like an exclusive party to tighten one’s grip on the court’s inner circle.

  TWO

  OF PATTERNS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE

  “H

  ai ho, it’s another letter from Macael,” Tharais exclaimed, opening her scrollcase.

  I still have yet to hold a conversation with Lasthavais (wrote Macael), whose manners are so good that I cannot tell if hers is the silence of nothing to say or nothing to think.

  “Ouch.” Geral picked up his goblet of spiced wine, more to warm his fingers than to drink, and sat back on the cushion they shared, ready to be entertained. “Where are they now?”

  Tharais bit her lower lip, scanning rapidly. “He says, ‘another miserable, wet, befogged road just like the past four days.’”

  A fresh fire burned on the grate, but it had not yet taken the chill off the room. “Go ahead,” he told her. “Read it, if you’ve a mind to.”

  “There isn’t much.” Tharais fingered the tiny curl of paper.

  “Uh oh. Trouble, I gather?”

  “I don’t know.” Tharais offered the letter. “Here. Tell me what you think.”

  Geral took it from her callused fingers. “Your brother still goes off in the mornings, but he’s always back by dawn. Lasva the Rose doesn’t emerge from her tent. Her tent?” Geral looked askance.

  Tharais lifted a shoulder as she sank back on the silken cushion, her blond curls spreading around her. How she adored varieties in custom! In Marloven Hesea, you used cushions when you traveled but tables and chairs in your home. Here, cushions at home, tables and chairs if you traveled outside the borders of this small kingdom with its famous goldenwood trees, guarded, it was said, by tree-spirits.

  “It’s not necessarily a problem,” she said slowly. “One thing I learned between Marloven Hesea and Enaeran, there are different notions of privacy. Tents are only private up here.” She touched her forehead. “They might sleep separate for her sake.”

  “All right,” Geral said, and looked askance. “Are you sure you want to know what I think, when I don’t even seem to know how to read this thing? Your customs are as much a mystery to me as is your brother. Or for that matter, as is Princess Lasthavais the Rose. Frankly, I am astonished that she married him, given the number of princes who must have been crowding in to court her.”

  “Fair enough.” Tharais’s capable fingers rolled the paper into a little ball as she stared out the window at the sleet plunking momentary craters in the light brown, soupy soil. The winter breakfast room faced north, where the faraway sun arced lower each day against the bleak gray sky. “Geral, I hope this makes sense, but until she married Van she wasn’t real to me. Now she is. I… I have to talk to her.”

  “Because?”

  Tharais turned her face toward the fire, knowing that it was impossible to hide her reaction to the memory of Van’s parting with Tdiran Marlovair. “Can we invite them here?” she asked.

  He sank down beside her. “Is that wise?”

  In spite of the color flooding her cheeks she looked unexpectedly like her brother as she said, “I think I need to tell her certain things that she had better know.”

  When the carriages got stuck in the mud left from an earlier storm, Ivandred called an early stop. It was Restday—but there was no rest. We were not in sight of any civilization. The Marlovens pitched the tents with their usual speed, then vanished beyond a distant line of tall ash that must once have marked a border. Marnda marched all the dressers to the river to wash everything we had, to make full use of precious daylight. Birdy was busy with the animals and the carriages.

  Macael invited Lasva to join him and his noble friends, as the remaining pair of Marlovens established the perimeter circle around us.

  So I had the tent to myself. Oh, a precious moment alone!

  I hung up my water-warded cloak to drip at the far end of the tent, plunged my hands to the bottom of my modest trunk, and yanked out my book of magic. I was deep into puzzling out patterns in the nonsensical phrases when quick footsteps outside the tent made me wrap the book and plunge it back into my trunk. The tent flap opened, sending in a draft of cold, clean air, droplets catching the lamplight like fireflies.

  “Supper,” said the Prince of Marloven Hesea.

  He left, moving between the light and me. So it always was, the Marlovens and Enaeraneth flashing shadows over us without the slightest gesture of politeness. They don’t know anything, so we kept saying, but the implied rudeness—they should know—was a continual source of irritation, like ill-fitting shoes that rubbed blisters on your feet. But hard on that was the unsettling surprise of a prince coming to fetch me. He could have been passing by, but in Colend, no royal would take a single step out of the way for that. That’s what pages were for.

  But Marlovens didn’t seem to have pages. They had runners, whose purpose we couldn’t define.

  I pulled my water-bespelled cloak around me and followed Ivandred to the other side of the camp, where the Enaeraneth had set up their row of tents. We found Lasva sitting neatly on her cushion, the way Colendi ate in formal company. My job was to serve her the way we Colendi liked to be served.

  The rest lounged about on their cushions, careless of light and space, talking while Lasva sat and smiled.

  “You’re late,” Macael observed, smiling lazily up at his cousin.

  “Change of my outriders.” Ivandred sat down next to Lasva. “Short drill, as we’ll ride early tomorrow to make up the time. If you concur?” He turned to Lasva, who (as always) gestured Harmonious Agreement and smiled. Smiled. Smiled.

  The Enaeraneth waited politely for me to fix Lasva’s plate, which she accepted with her smile already going absent. She formed a portion of the corn-meal and fish into a tiny ball in her fingers and passed it behind her lips, her movement small and neat and noiseless. She knew, as I knew, that it was not for the Enaeraneth or the Marlovens to adjust, but for us. Every day, every cold breath, was a reminder that we moved farther from Colend.

  Ivandred leaned forward to tap a scroll lying on the table near the food. “This latest map must be a generation out of date. The road goes nowhere. I sent a pair to scout,” he said. “I’d rather we don’t encounter any more Dandy Glamacs lying in ambush.”

 
“To which I agree.” Macael spread his hands, rings glittering. He was friendly and was certainly pleasant to look at when he sat back on his cushion, his hair like corn silk, hanging long and loose over his open jacket, revealing a brocaded waistcoat and cambric shirt. His hands, negligently holding a half-eaten cabbage roll, were well-made. “Do you think we were sold an old map as a setup for ambush?”

  “Possible,” Ivandred conceded. “If so, they will learn their mistake.” His teeth showed. “Though I’d rather not lose the time.”

  “Speaking of travel. Your sister wrote to me moments ago. She wants us to come to Remalna. She promises a proper bride party for Lasthavais.” Macael made a graceful bow in her direction. “You can take ship from there. I smell winter on the wind.”

  “Lasva?” Ivandred turned her way.

  Lasva said, “I will leave that to you. I know so little of the terrain past our border.”

  The lords and Macael heroically kept up a three-way conversation about hunting customs across the continent: in the east they chased and garlanded deer, but deer were rare in the western plains, where they hunted the trained fox, and hunted to kill the marauding wolf. In the case of the trained creatures, animals that often won were prized so that stud fees might cost as much as a castle, and they compared the prices of fast horses against what they’d heard about fast deer in our part of the world.

  The meal ended at last, and we picked our way over the muddy turf back to our tent, where I discovered the scrollcase full of notes. Of course it was—today was Restday, the courtiers’ favorite day for writing letters to those far away, and for some of the letters in the scrollcase, a week had passed.