Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

The sight of him standing there so still, his empty hands turned a little outward as though in appeal, the drape of his shirt sleeves over the contours of arms and shoulders, caused her heart to beat a little quicker.

  One hand came up, the palm open. “I told you I am not good with words,” he said, his tone tentative. Like a preamble.

  With Kaidas there would have been words, oh so many, enchantingly oblique, quick as a duel only with poetry and wit, scored by laughter and kisses. With a flicker of anger she untied her wrapper and let it drop to the floor. No arts, no allurement, blunt and direct. She held out her hands. “We will do away with words.”

  When Lasva reached the age of desire she’d delighted in all the arts of pleasure, at first for pleasure’s sake. Then came the birth of tenderness, followed by the blossoming of love. And then love’s flower had been cut, leaving a void in body, mind, and soul. But here was the man she had married, who woke her body’s hunger. She was determined, even desperate, to employ all her arts in easing the mind and soul.

  He was not at first certain how to begin; his habit was rough and ready but he would not handle this beautiful, fragile creature with that roughness. Sex for him had been confined to the Academy, brief and violent, sometimes mixed with laughter, often with anger. And few words. She trailed her newly painted nails from his brow to his collar bones and then down and down, urging him flat on the bed, and he obeyed. So began a long, slow, striving that was not combat yet engaged all the senses—from the enticing fingernails along the contours of muscle as she undressed him to the soft touch of lips on his eyelids, in the hollow of his throat, and on all the places where the skin is most sensitive—until he was nearly out of his mind with desire. But he did not act because she had not given him leave to act, and the waiting, the anticipation, was far more intense than any intimate act he’d ever known.

  The smell of her hair fresh with herbs he could not name, the taste of her, the whispering sigh of silken sheets over his skin, her secretive smile and clever hands that touched him in ways he had never experienced—all these reasons gave him at last, at last, the to mount and ride, to gallop to the rim of the world: “Obliterate me,” she breathed.

  It is one thing to imagine giving hints on marriage to a famous princess, Tharais reflected as she prowled around the room just below her freshly swept dining platform, and another thing when that princess appears and looks at you from unreadable eyes, her manners so good and so polite and so… so like a swan, or a lily, or anything that isn’t human.

  Tharais had ordered Colendi delicacies. The table was Geral’s finest; carved bluewood, the edges a braiding of ivy leaves, a symbol from her own home, the cushions brocade in the cable pattern in deep violet silk. The dishes were fine porcelain of the type she’d heard they used in Colend, the food thin wheat cakes in rolls no bigger than a child’s little finger, daubed with a fluffy thing made of butter with thrice-boiled molasses whipped into it, making a light, frothy pale gold sweet. Tharais had never heard of such a food, but when she stuck a finger in it, she discovered it was delicious.

  There were tiny cuts of tangerine, and another new item, caffeo, which turned out to be coffee, chocolate, honey, and fresh milk with the cream still on it, all whipped together into a light froth. Assembling the ingredients for this drink cost nearly as much as the dishes.

  Time in Remalna was measured by marked and colored candles. Mid-morning’s Hour of the River was called Third Gold, which was when Lasva had been invited to join Tharais for breakfast.

  She appeared, her arms full of rich silk worked in patterns of narrow leaves. As Tharais gazed in wonder, Lasva laid the bundle down on a side table, opened it, and disclosed what first appeared to be hundreds and hundreds of rosebuds, mostly crimson in graded shades.

  “Ivandred told me you like crimson,” she said. “This is my gift to you for your wedding.”

  The rosebuds were tiny rolls of silk connected by exquisitely embroidered silken leaves. It was a carpet! Gorgeous, probably too fragile to actually step on, it seemed to symbolize Colend. “It’s beautiful,” Tharais said. “I… have never seen such a thing.” She dared not ask, What is it for?

  But Lasva heard it, or saw it, and smiled. “They are found in our private chambers. Many enjoy lying on them when engaging in dalliance. Some keep them for their use after a bath, as the sensation on the bottoms of the feet, when tender from the water, is so pleasant. They can be washed, but far better is to have your chamber servant put them through a cleaning frame after each use.”

  “Of course,” Tharais repeated, not saying that cleaning frames—though admittedly useful—were crushingly expensive, and that she did not have a maid whose single job was to tend her bedchamber. She expressed her gratitude as they took their places at the table. Though she intended to store so precious and frivolous a thing, as the breakfast went on, her fingers kept straying to it so she could rub her palm over the silken buds.

  Geral had warned Thar that Colendi did not talk with food in their mouths, so she was careful to ask easy questions between bites. She’d never been aware of how like a dance eating can be. But Lasva’s manners were so dance-like.

  “Would you like music?” Tharais asked, ready to signal those waiting in the antechamber. “My wind octet awaits our word.”

  Lasva’s quick intake of breath, the way her fingers stiffened slightly, gave indefinable emphasis to her polite, “Thank you, I hoped you would choose to honor me with just your company.”

  So they ate in silence, Tharais trying not to make noise or drop her silver, or clatter the utensils on the plate. She ate as little as she dared, mostly confining herself to tiny sips of the Colendi caffeo, which was delicious.

  Lasva also ate little. Tharais watched anxiously, and as soon as it seemed there was no danger of either of them being caught with food in their mouths, she said, “I’ve found you a fine ship. That is my wedding gift to Van.” Tharais laid her right hand over her heart. “For you, I have picked out four of my own women to accompany you, because you’ll need them, oh, in so many ways. I don’t mean as a bodyguard, for Van will see to that. But I shall make certain that you have the eyes you need, the ears you need, the wit to answer your questions when you get home.” She waited, and when Lasva bowed her thanks, she said tentatively, “As you will be the first queen in generations.”

  Lasva’s brows lifted in surprise. “No queens? Has this to do with the… the martial elements of your culture?”

  “It has to do with the fact that our kings don’t usually marry.”

  Lasva took in Thar’s wide, pale-eyed gaze so like Ivandred’s yet so unlike, then shifted her own gaze to the window, beyond which bare, silver-barked trees rustled in the rising wind. “It has been the same in Colend for several generations. No kings, only consorts.”

  Tharais breathed out. “I can see Van is… happier.” She hesitated.

  “But?” Lasva prompted, her fluttering fingers poised at an inviting angle.

  Tharais had all Lasva’s attention, which made her nervous. “The last time I saw Tdiran and Van together… well, it was the morning before she left. She was bruised here and here.” Tharais touched her face, her jaw, and her wrist. “That was her visible flesh. And two weeks later came the news that she was going to marry Danrid Yvanavar.”

  Lasva crossed her forearms over her chest, closing her eyes on the vivid rush of images and sensations, memories all the more intense for the sensitivity of her flesh. So much can be concealed through intimacy, and so much revealed. And not always through intent. When she opened her eyes, she found a sober question in Ivandred’s sister. This is now my life, she thought. These are the people I have chosen to live among.

  Aloud she said, “I thank you for the… is this a warning? Did you see him?”

  Tharais looked startled. “What?”

  Lasva said, “Did you see your brother?”

  Tharais’s eyes widened, then narrowed, and she blushed crimson. “No. I did not.”

  Tharai
s’s lips parted, making her look younger than her nineteen years. Then her gaze dropped, her shoulders tight with guilt. “My father is so violent, and I was afraid that Van might… especially since he spent all those years there, but then Tdiran is also one of them. I should have remembered that.”

  “Them?” Lasva prompted, leaning forward to lay two fingers briefly on the top of Tharais’s hand.

  Tharais did not understand this gesture inviting her to a private circle, but she found it soothing. “The Academy. Tdiran and Van had been together since the Academy,” Tharais said quickly, squaring up with assurance. “Van won’t talk about this, either, because he doesn’t see it as a danger, but it is… because you share his heart with it—with the Academy. You cannot come between him and the Academy, or expect him to choose between you.”

  Lasva made a graceful gesture. “I know what that is. It is your training school, for your leaders. I read about it in your record about Indevan the Fox.”

  Thar shook her head. “You read about the way it was four hundred years ago. It’s different now.” She drew in a deep breath, eyes closed. “Very different.”

  FIVE

  OF ROCKS IN THE SEA

  T

  he first sign that we had finally become one party was when the Marlovens let us hear their music. At the same time, we began to perceive them as individuals with names. Although it would be overstating to say that leaving the Enaeraneth was the reason, it contributed. But so did living cramped together on a ship for what seemed to be endless days (about two weeks) during which it would be difficult to say who suffered more, Colendi, Marloven, or horses. But one by one we recovered enough to gather on deck, or in Birdy’s case, to climb to the upper masts with some of the younger Marlovens, where I would hear them talking away in a language that I was still struggling with.

  My magic experiments were total failures. Yet it had looked so simple when Greveas did it.

  “It is interesting, the things people think important,” said Tesar Jevair, two days after we landed on the coast of the Bay of Jaira, as she stood with another lancer, looking down at the open trunks containing Lasva’s things.

  Tesar was the lancer I’d been assigned to ride with. I should note here that among themselves, on duty, they only used their family names, something never done in Colend, where family names are used only in formal (or ceremonial) situations. It was especially confusing because so many of the Marlovens were related—there were two Jevairs—and almost half of the males had been named for the king. But they also had private names, which we adopted and which will serve for this defense.

  To resume. Tesar observed, “What do you think this is?” as she held out a rosebud carpet to Lnand Dunrend, the lancer Anhar had been assigned to ride with.

  Lnand bent over it with her hands on her knees, her pale braid slipping over her shoulder as she examined the carpet without touching it. “It looks very, very costly.”

  “Ah-ye! This must be held with care,” Marnda exclaimed, hands high. “Emras! Have you nothing whatever to do but stand about at your ease gawking? Please show them how the rose rug is to be held.”

  Lasva turned their way and smiled, her voice a contrast to Marnda’s sharpness. “It is a gift for Prince Ivandred’s aunt. It will be safest sent in the trunk. Might Emras demonstrate how we wrap it in the brocade covering?”

  “Is that a command?” Lnand whispered.

  “Best to assume so,” Tesar whispered back and handed the rug to me—who hadn’t been standing about at my ease. I was stationed at the cedar chest, packing each item the princess decided must be sent by magic transfer, a very slow process with Marnda questioning every choice in that humble-but-hear-me voice.

  The tension centered around a fine box of polished darkwood with flying herons in cedar inlay. Marnda tried every way she dared to discover what was locked in it and the princess deftly, politely, but firmly evaded.

  “The box stays with me,” Lasva said for the third time.

  Marnda gasped and rushed away to the tent, where Anhar was shaking out some things. Her scolding voice drifted back; the word “hum” shrill, like an accusation.

  Birdy was waiting to carry the chest I was packing. He lifted his head, watching them with a slight frown. “You like Tesar? She asked to be assigned to you.”

  Tesar was a full hand taller than me—nearly Ivandred’s height and as tall as many of the men. She was built on spare lines, enormously strong. Her smooth braids were about the same color as my own lank locks—plank brown, and her eyes were an unremarkable gray.

  “She keeps calling me Er-mas,” I said. “But then correcting herself. She speaks slowly, which I appreciate. Why did she pick me?”

  “Because you’re the smallest, next to the seamstress, who is rounder,” Birdy admitted, chuckling as he indicated Nifta. “And Tesar’s the biggest of the women. Easier on her mount.”

  “‘We all want to be interesting to someone.’” I signed Rue as I quoted the old proverb from childhood.

  Birdy tipped his head, one hand mirroring Rue, the other making juggling motions. I remembered our orders—and I could see him remembering—because we consciously moved away from one another. Birdy walked off to check on the progress of the staff, who were busy adapting our sturdiest robes for riding, using the pattern that he’d already developed when making his own clothes. Marnda followed him, her voice rising as she unnecessarily pointed out the precautions everyone should take with Lasva’s clothes.

  I did not intend to overhear Lasva and Ivandred. The problem here was how we all understood the space of privacy.

  “… I begin to realize,” she was saying, “how much our civilization is centered around things. What I have thought necessary for daily life is not necessary at all, from what I am seeing in the faces of your company.”

  Ivandred said, “Have any of my people offered you a, how did you say it, a discourtesy?”

  “Never,” she responded. “Never. It’s merely the incomprehension I perceive in their countenances, when they look upon my necessities. And yet I am thinking, if I throw this or that away, am I throwing away my semblance of civilization?”

  His voice lowered, but passion heightened his articulation: “You could walk naked and make it look civilized.”

  Shock! Just like that, I was trespassing. I hastened away, glad of my quiet step as he grabbed and kissed her.

  I circled all the way around the edge of the camp as the sun vanished and the shadows closed in. As Lnand and Tesar carried a last trunk, Lnand muffled a soft laugh. Tesar whispered, “‘Hes-ay-ah.’ It is so comical, how she says that.” They set down the trunk in a line of trunks and other baggage and retreated. Ivandred moved along the line, stretched out a hand and slowly said a string of magical words. Each trunk vanished, sending out a puff of wind that smelled faintly of singed wood.

  I stilled. He was not using transfer tokens, he was doing the magic himself. But then, some rulers did.

  I recognized some of the pattern of words, and the hairs on my arms rose. I know now what it felt like: one of those rare, hot dry winds that sometimes blow from over the northern mountains dividing Colend from Chwahirsland, usually before a tremendous storm.

  I could feel how Ivandred drew magic to him through the words and gestures.

  In memory, my brother spoke again as we stood on the Sartoran street, talking about magic. What was it Olnar said, that magic is “the cup and the lip”?

  While everyone got ready for the next day’s ride, I paced a little way from the campfire in the gathering darkness, positioning myself between two sentries. Then I crouched down with my two candles, misshapen from my desperate grip as I attempted magic.

  Ivandred had used familiar patterns but shorter than those spoken by Greveas. I wondered if that was because Greveas was a new agent of the Mage Council, which would mean her magical skills were those of a beginner.

  So I recollected the shorter phrases that he’d used and tried to draw magic in. Twice I had to st
op when I was startled by that sense of dry heat, but when I used concentration breathing—the way we’d been taught while doing the Altan fan form—and spoke the words all the way through, a brief, intense internal heat flared behind my forehead… and flame leapt from the lit candle to the unlit one.

  By my magic spell.

  The sense of victory was as powerful as the day I was made a scribe.

  SIX

  OF THE PATIENT WILLOW

  T

  he sun was just lifting the darkness over the ocean behind us when Ivandred swiped his hand in a circle—the “mount up” signal. Birdy drifted into step alongside me. “Do your fan stretches as you walk right now,” he whispered. “And no matter how badly you feel later, do them again tonight. And in the morning. You won’t get as sore.” He passed by the other Colendi staff, murmuring. I heard Anhar’s higher voice, and Birdy’s soft chuckle, then he was gone.

  Tesar lifted me to the back of her horse. I felt as if I sat on a roof, an unsteady one as she mounted behind me. She tucked an efficient arm around my middle, and the rocking shifted to jolting.

  Two, three steps, and I was very glad for that arm.

  Most of the next week may be summed up in a word: ache.

  The weather at least was benign as we followed a river up toward its source in exceedingly dramatic, slate-dark and tumbled mountains. When we began the descent into the long, gently inclined valley called Telyer Heyas, tension increased.

  The Marlovens’ tension was due to military alertness. Within our little circle, it was due to Marnda, who fought the impossible battle—to impose cleanliness, beauty, and order over a muddy, tumbled camp. She hovered over Lasva, counting every bite until the princess gripped her eating utensils with white knuckles, her eyelids shuttered. Marnda’s anxious, low pleading often sounded like a woman addressing an infant.