Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  We approached another gate, only somewhat narrower than the city gate, and stopped in an enormous courtyard, the animals blowing and steaming. Stable hands ran out to the halters as we dismounted.

  Among the many runners in subtly different versions of the typical austere Marloven coat or robe were women in dark blue belted overrobes with fine bleached linen robes beneath. They picked Anhar, Pelis, and me out and led us up a crowded spiral staircase made out of stone. Bare stone. The only thing that made many parts of this castle seem less than a prison was the stone’s warm sandy color.

  Ah-ye! How dismal I found that castle! It was cold, the air was stuffy from inadequate venting and far too many people walking the halls, and the halls were unconscionably long and determinedly bare of any attempt at civilization. Servants in various dull colors moved to and fro. The hallways were no more than long stone tunnels.

  Anhar’s eyes were wide. Pelis walked head down, her brow contracted. We stopped before a wooden door carved over with Venn knots of barley-beards and little four-petal flowers. Women carrying steel weapons stood guard at these doors, but after exchanged glances and some signal I did not catch, they let us pass.

  Inside lay a colorful Bermundi rug, predominantly crimson, worked in geometric patterns and giving an otherwise sparsely furnished room some warmth. There was a single low table with plain cushions on either side, and a door on each side wall.

  One of these doors opened, and a gaunt old woman entered. I recognized Marnda only after she’d taken a few steps toward us. She too wore the dark blue overrobe with an inner robe of undyed linen. Her gray hair was braided.

  Her expression when she saw me was unmistakable relief. “You are here at last, Scribe Emras. Dressers, you two go that way.” She gestured to the door on the other side of the room. “Ask for Gislan. She will tell you what is expected.”

  Pelis sent back a somber glance as they went. As soon as the door shut, Marnda said, “Follow me.”

  She opened the door behind her, and we passed into a room with a leaping fire; two enormous chairs with great winged backs sat on either side of the fireplace. I’d glimpsed similar chairs at Darchelde. The chair legs were like those of birds, complete to talons.

  Marnda said in a dry voice with the faintest trace of a quaver, “Those chairs are built to keep the sitter safe from assassins creeping up behind.”

  “Ah-yedi!” I made the shadow-ward.

  Marnda gripped her hands. “This castle is Thorn Gate come again. And that king is the worst of them all. Emras, I crave your pardon for usurping your rightful place, and I earnestly beg you will assume the position of first runner.”

  Since this was what I had come all this way to do, I bowed a full Peace, acknowledging the difficulty she must be feeling to make such an admission. I said, “This way I can truly determine if Norsundrian magic aids this king, as our queen ordered me to do.”

  “Norsunder!” she repeated, shadow-warding. I wondered how many times she’d had occasion to make that gesture since her arrival. “I could not think Norsunder any worse than what we find here, yet this king reviles against Norsunder as much as anyone. More.” She drew a deep breath. “He summons our princess at irregular hours. He talks to her like, ah-ye, like a pet, only do people threaten pets? Not that I have heard him speak any threat directly. He doesn’t need to. I have had to stand behind him for hours. They call it ‘watches,’ and you must stand until your bones want to break.”

  “I will take that duty,” I said.

  “You are truly loyal. I will remember that, when our queen…” She looked away.

  When our queen calls us home, were the words she wanted to say. But when would that be?

  Her voice regained a little of the old briskness. “Let me show you everything before they return. The prince and princess are attending on the king at this moment, in the Great Hall, with the jarls. If they do not run into the meal time, Lasva might bring back those women again, and we will have these rooms filled with them and their runners. This is Lasva’s private interview chamber. Through here is her public room, which, as you see, has a door to the hall, which would be one door down from where you entered…”

  She flung opened doors to a suite fully as large as the princess’s suite in Alsais, though the pages’ chambers at home were finer. “… but it was empty—and oh, the webs! It had been at least a hundred years since a gueen had possessed these rooms, you see. There was some furniture in the back rooms that they despised as Olavair. They seem to revile against these Olavairs, though they once ruled. It is all of a piece.”

  She touched her lips in the moth kiss then opened yet another door. “This is the princess’s bedroom. He comes in through the other side—those are his rooms beyond. Across the hall from his rooms are the king’s. Your room is here, where you can hear her if she opens her bedroom or summons you from the personal chambers.”

  She pointed to a door, as yet unopened.

  “At least our staff has private rooms, though they are ugly little closets, like this.” She glanced at the door to my room, still shut. “Their equivalent of a seneschal is not unlike my position in Alsais: Gislan will be glad to leave it all to me. I took care to let her know how our princess likes things to be nice.” A little of Marnda’s old pride showed. “You will have four runners attendant on you, two for night and two for day. The guards are commanded by someone else, but you can request of them anything that pertains to safety. The runners fetch things or take them away.”

  Marnda finally opened the door to my room. It was oddly shaped, long and narrow. The window was a slit, looking down into a tiny court formed by this and another wing of the castle. Directly above was the sentry walk: a warrior’s shadow moved along the building adjacent, cast by the faint, low sun. The bedroom was bare stone, swept clean, furnished only with a bed and a tiny desk with a stool. Closet indeed.

  “At the far end of the hall is the tower where that mage lives.” Marnda raised her hand against Thorn Gate. “Will you know Norsundrian magic if you hear it?”

  I was about to reassure her with the knowledge that I’d met Prince Ivandred’s tutor at Darchelde, then remembered that the king did not know that Ivandred was a mage.

  “I will,” I said, aware that I was not as sure as I sounded.

  But that was what Marnda wanted to hear. She breathed out in relief once again and left the subject. “Do you have the princess’s scrollcase?”

  “Ah-ye,” I exclaimed. “I do. It is full of letters, but I dared not stop to deal with them.”

  “If you will entrust it to me, I will take care of it.”

  I pulled the scrollcase from my gear, feeling one burden fall from my shoulders as I dropped the rich gold into Marnda’s hand. Before either of us could speak, a door opened somewhere, and women’s voices reached us.

  Ahead of the newcomers came Lasva, seeming to float ahead of the free-striding, pale-haired women. They were all dressed in brightly colored overrobes of a simple line, made of fine linen. I soon learned that they wore family colors. These were their formal robes. The edges were embroidered in complicated Venn geometries. Each woman wore a kind of embroidered sash-belt low around the hips, the clasps worked in gold or silver, usually in the form of claws or talons, the sash ends swinging in front with each stride. Only Lasva’s was still; she was startling dressed so, in black and gold, with a cream-linen under dress. Her hair was braided in the Marloven loop, which framed her face.

  Marnda hid the scrollcase in her robe, bowed, and vanished.

  Lasva did not seem to see her. She flung her arms wide in the Bird on the Wing, as she had the first day I met her, but her fingers flexed into stiffness for a heartbeat, expressing or releasing tension; the old, artless rush of words was stemmed.

  “My first runner is here,” she said to the women behind her, and to me, “Emras, you must be exhausted! You shall begin duty tomorrow. Today you may rest. We have everything in hand.”

  She led me back toward the little room
that would be mine. In Kifelian she murmured, “I am very glad you are here. You must help me turn this place into less of a prison.” She waved at the long windows set deep into the thick stone walls. “Here and there I’ve seen evidence of once-lovely windows, of fine rooms made to let in light, but then they were all bricked up by Ivandred’s ancestors, to protect the castle.”

  She sighed, without waiting for me to answer. “Oh, Emras, I so need your observation. They seem to take me as a birdwit. Even my name is gone, though I must say,” her voice deepened with irony, “their attempts to say ‘Lasthavais’ correctly make me glad to keep Lasva. At least they can say that.” She flicked her fingers in Rue. “The king seems to find my ignorance not just entertaining but reassuring.” Her eyes narrowed. “He goes on at great lengths, teaching me the rudiments of warfare, though he will not tell me anything about how he manages his state. Not that anyone can’t see it’s by force. Yet he’s not ordering deaths every day—they wouldn’t stand for that. If you read any of their history, you will find that their kings are not any safer than anyone else, it just takes more people to successfully attack them.”

  She sighed the way Marnda did, a long breath in an attempt to ease strain.

  Then she warded it all, a quick gesture very like Ivandred’s flat-handed motion. “We haven’t time. Later I will tell you everything. But first, what did you do for all these weeks? Did the jarlan keep you occupied?”

  This would be my moment to tell her that I was learning magic in order to protect her. Except that the queen had seen fit to separate Birdy and me out when she gave those orders. And here was Lasva, under the king’s eyes all the time. Many thoughts streamed through my mind in the time it took for my heart to beat twice, but these two in particular: the horrible things I heard about this king, and Queen Hatahra’s orders. My instinct was very strong: I must keep my magic studies to myself.

  And so I lied. “I studied history,” I said.

  “In Alsais,” Lasva said to me the next morning, “my sister’s presence was more felt than seen, except at the Rising. Everyone knew she was there, but the mood of the court seldom reflected her mood.”

  She paused, and I made the Peace in agreement.

  “Here, these frightening warriors and their guards and their servants are all aware of the king’s mood. Even when they do not see him.”

  “I felt it the moment I walked in.” I would never commit the vulgarity of saying that I had smelled it in that faint tang of sweat, though it was true.

  “Today, when you take your place behind me, please observe. I have been longing to talk to you about… everything. But I will not tell you what to see. I want to see again through your eyes.”

  As I walked behind Lasva into the Great Hall, wearing my new robe of dark blue over beautifully soft, finely woven undyed linen, my mind entered a fugue composed of memory and unfamiliarity. For a giddy moment I was fifteen again, taking up my station as observer in Alsais’s beautiful octagonal fountain chamber, aware of being in public yet expected to remain unobtrusive.

  “Since the civil judgments did not last past yesterday and there are no military judgments to be witnessed, today is what they all look forward to,” Lasva said. “The exhibitions and, tonight, promotions. Then tomorrow the jarls and jarlans can start for home.”

  “They do not stay all New Year’s Week?” I asked, surprised.

  “Ivandred says the king doesn’t like them around any longer than they like being here. If there is nothing to keep them, they leave.”

  Lasva laid her hand against her heart, head inclined slightly. We fell silent as a guard opened the door for us. We entered an enormous throne room and approached the king on his daïs of black marble. Ivandred was already there, seated on a cushion below his father’s throne. It, too, was carved of black marble.

  I joined Ivandred’s first runner, out of the king’s vision, but within sight of the vigilant guards behind the king, who stood with spears grounded, other hand resting on sword hilts.

  I took up my observer stance, unused for half a year.

  “What did you see?”

  “Color, first of all. Brilliant color in those overrobes and in the sashes. It surprised me, because so far in this kingdom all wear browns, grays, undyed linens. Except for the three all in black.”

  “Those three are First Lancers,” Lasva said. “There are many wings of King’s Lancers, but the perceived elite is the First Lancers, followed by the Second, Third, and Fourth, with somewhat less prestige. Only those four units can wear the black robes at formal affairs.”

  “Is there significance in the colors? Crimson, green, cyan, violet, yellow, royal blue—which was the most unsettling. Am I to understand that royal blue is not reserved for the king, here?”

  “That is correct. These others are representative colors for jarlates.”

  “Where are the owls and the marmots and the sigils of the Inda history?”

  “They have gone out of fashion, just as our dyeing our hair silver. Except for the eagle on the king’s banner and the fox for the heir, both in the black and gold of the royal family. The rest of them can use any colors except black, silver and gold, but they only wear them to Convocation and a few other rare and special events.”

  “But one wore gold trim to his white robe,” I said.

  “That is Ivandred’s cousin from the Telyer, whose family were the kings previous to the Marlovens. Marlovans,” she corrected herself. “There was a language shift under their King Senrid, who brought Ivandred’s family back to the throne. It seems important to them to remember the distinctions.”

  “And that very old man who wore a gold sash, with a robe the color of Colend’s royal blue?”

  “That is the Jarl of Olavair.” Her voice dropped. “That family ruled until the beginning of the last century, and in the north they still call themselves kings. Though not in the hearing of southern Marlovens.”

  What did she want? What did I miss? I thought again about the milling men, their voices sharp and quick. “At first I thought all those wearing baldrics were men, but that is not true.”

  “The baldrics mean they have been trained at the Academy.” Her gesture opened westward, toward the high walls we’d glimpsed on the ride into the castle.

  “Are they all trained there, the jarlate offspring?”

  “Not much is said about that place. Ivandred told me that, of those who do attend, many are sent home at the three year mark and more at the six year mark. Only those who stay for nine years can become lancer captains. Jarls who stay that long are very highly regarded by all. In war, they can command their own people—under the king—instead of handing their people off in levies.”

  I was already so bored my jaw ached. Levies, war, command… what a horrible place!

  “What did you think of the exhibition?”

  “I liked the dancing after dinner better than the horse riding before, however skillful it was. The danger frightened me. Though there was danger in some of the dances—when the fellows did that heel drumming and waved swords around.”

  “The women used to, too, but they were forbidden to wave their knives around after a dance some centuries ago, when the dancers then turned on a king and his adherents and assassinated them. Actually, I believe women assassinated a king twice. So women will often do the drumming for the sword dances.”

  “Ah-yedi!” I made the Peace. “Like the songs we heard when traveling, these songs have strong melodies, and I liked how so many of them sang when dancing.”

  “So you perceived only the danger of the Academy youths’ exhibition?”

  I thought back to the sudden quiet, the expectation after a distant bugle peal.

  Servants threw open the opposite doors and in raced nine young riders all in black—dressed like the lancers. The horses’ hooves struck sparks on the stone floor as the animals raced in nose to tail. The riders sat with their hands on their thighs, weapons hooked to the saddles but untouched as the horses galloped in
patterns, leaping, wheeling, and once rising to strike with their front hooves.

  In Colend courtiers often rode horses in similar fast and dangerous patterns, so I heard. But they didn’t fight in patterns, sword to sword, or shoot arrows at targets as they galloped by, much less leap down and exchange blows in a fast flurry of whirling hands, glinting steel, and black fabric.

  Then, quick as they came, they were gone. By then the air had warmed considerably from all the human and animal exertions. Stable hands came in to wand the droppings, after which a line of servants brought in food. My astonishment that food would be served where animals had been cavorting was mirrored in Lasva’s stiff back. My throat closed, and I had to swallow a couple of times, reminding myself fiercely that the droppings were gone—that customs differed—but my stomach settled only when I reminded myself I was here to serve and to observe. Not to eat.

  “I perceived great skill in the exhibition,” I said at last.

  “What else did you see?”

  “That the king sat between the two of you.”

  “He always does.”

  “Does he always breathe like that? I know they have healers here. There was a good one who tended our wounded.”

  “I’m told that the king’s healer died of old age twenty years ago, and the king doesn’t trust anyone younger not to try to assassinate him.” She clasped her hands. We were seated in her private chamber, an almost bare room save for a rug worked with Venn knots, a carved chest, a table and cushions. “What did you notice about individuals?”

  I concentrated. “There was that one very tall man with the hair more pale than Ivandred’s, and the yellow robe that seemed to be edged with silver. He fondled the hand of the pregnant woman to his right, who was quite beautiful. But he kept watching Ivandred.”

  Lasva’s hands clasped together tightly, then dropped to her sides. Another important person? “Yes. That is Danrid Yvanavar, a new jarl. The woman is his wife, sister to Haldren. Her name is Tdiran.”