Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  “Tapestry? Hah! What d’you think my people would make of a big cloth full of ribbon dancers and flowers, or whatever it is you put in your art?”

  Lasva made the gesture of Harmony. “I thought I might make one celebrating your ancestor, the one who first united your kingdom.”

  “Hah!” He coughed horribly. “Old Savarend! You won’t show him being stabbed in the back, I dare swear.” He cackled, then coughed.

  “I would surround him with representatives of all the jarl families.”

  “I like that. I like that. Put my old friends, my most loyal friends, up close in front.”

  Lasva hesitated a heartbeat, then assented gracefully.

  “So. How far did you get with your map, eh, girl? Start at the top.”

  “Olavair is the farthest north, bounded by Fath, Tiv Evair, and Khanivar.”

  “When was Fath created?”

  “At the Treaty of the Rivers.”

  “Year?”

  “4094.”

  “And south of it?”

  “Tiv Evair.”

  “Why do they hold out with two names?”

  “An internal treaty, between the jarl family, whose name Tya became Tiv under King Senrid in the year 4285, and the federation of free cities…”

  On and on it went—names and dates without the reasons why one should remember them, until the king summoned his subordinates for the Restday sharing of wine and bread.

  Perhaps Lasva wanted me to learn them, too. She would know that I only had to hear it to remember it all, but if so, she could have said so. I was being punished, and I accepted the rebuke with sorrow. She might guess that whatever I withheld was on orders, was intended for her benefit—but she knew I was lying.

  He sent Lasva away with scarcely more respect than he’d dismiss a runner, and we were free.

  All the way back to her chambers I formulated possible responses. I even considered kneeling down to offer full confession. I wanted her forgiveness, the flow of converse which I had lost once, on the way to Sartor. It had taken this long to recover it, only to lose it again? No!

  But when we reached Lasva’s chambers, she said briskly, “I believe he expects the tapestry to be set in the contemporary mode, and here I was ready to order you to discover the oldest families and their traditional clothes. Well! I must ponder. Who would have thought that my idea, meant to keep my day filled with unexceptionable activity, would already be so fraught. The rest of the day is yours, Emras.”

  In sorrow I made The Peace. I had been dismissed.

  Confession would have to wait.

  I had to go outside the castle to make transfer tokens. I found a secluded path between the boundary of the kitchen garden and the yards where flax was turned into linen. One yard abutted the end of the garrison where the women guards lived.

  To secure an excuse to be over there, I’d taken on the task of running messages back and forth from the guardswomen’s captain to Lasva, an extra task the runners were happy to relinquish to me. I had to choose a time when no one would notice how long it took me, so I went directly after bathing, before the time when Lasva liked doing the Altan fans but after her breakfast with Ivandred—when he was there.

  After I delivered messages, I would retreat to my hideaway and pull from my pocket a selection of carved wood shank buttons. The Herskalt had said that the material did not matter, and I could not requisition the usual metal discs without raising questions.

  I worked my spells. By the time I reached the last button I was bent over, my teeth clenched. The spell kept dissipating on me, like trying to catch and hold water.

  When at last it was done, I sat down with my back to the fence to recover. It was getting easier each time.

  THREE

  OF REGRET AND REMEMBERED BELLS

  O

  ne morning, when I emerged from the women’s side of the baths in the sub-basement, I chanced on Birdy and Anhar, who were coming from the area where genders mixed, a wide room furnished with nothing but stone benches. As a place to congregate it offered nothing but the dank smell of wet stone, yet people strolled about in the warm, humid air, talking, flirting, exchanging news. They saw me at the same time. Birdy grinned. “Em!” He looked younger, with his hair wet and slicked back off his clean, shining face, his long body clad in a shapeless robe. He approached within a step of me, then halted abruptly, an awkward halt that described an invisible boundary around me. “I have seen so little of you. What has the princess got you doing?”

  “Lasva is planning a tapestry,” I said, though surely Anhar had told him.

  We said little more than that, but the next day, there they were again, and I sensed that they were waiting. Once again we talked about the details of daily life, so unimportant a subject I was surprised when Birdy suggested we take advantage of one of the benches. But I agreed, for it was good to see him again, hear his voice. But all the while I was anxious not only about my magic work for the day but also about questions that might lead in that direction.

  Later that evening, when I went to Anhar to get my nails trimmed, and as always, she smoothed the tension from my fingers, palms, and feet, she said, “You do not object to my touch.”

  I had shut my eyes as I reviewed my latest lesson. This question seemed to come from nowhere. I asked, “Have I been rude?”

  “Not to me.”

  Then I understood, and discomfort made me twitch my fingers from her grasp.

  She let go. “Will you explain? I am trying to understand. Is it Birdy who doesn’t attract you, or everyone?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Ah-ye, elor. You are the first I have known, so may I ask just to learn: Are the rest of us repulsive?”

  “No. Yes, if I feel crowded. I like people. I just don’t want them…” I shrugged, hugged myself with one arm, my half-finished nails brushing over me as if insects crawled up my sleeves. “I don’t seem to have whatever it is that you feel when you let someone that close.”

  “So my touch, when I rub your hands or your neck, it’s not unendurable.” She took my hand back to begin the next nail.

  “Far from it. But the effect is to make me sleepy, not ardent.” I said, gesturing pardon for intimacy with my free hand. “You and Birdy share ardency, for that I am glad. For him.”

  “And yet our natures differ, too. He is inclined toward exclusivity, and I am not. But he is my favorite.” She gave me a considering glance as she began the last nail.

  “And so?” I asked, sensing that she had something further to say. “The direction of your query?”

  “My mother held a conversation with my sister and me,” she said, “before my sister chose to hire to a pleasure house with her skills. You know, my mother taught us both not just the arts of the nails but also of massage.”

  I remembered her telling me long ago that she’d wanted to be an actor, a player. But this did not seem the time to ask about that. “We learned how the body reacts to muscle work. It is like the making of lace,” she said. “Boundaries interweave, cross and recross. Those who like sex cannot imagine anyone not wanting it. Those who like power assume everyone does. So much depends on what patterns of behavior we expect—are taught to expect—grow to expect.” She leaned toward me and said quickly, “Birdy likes to talk to you in the mornings. I think he misses your conversations.”

  “I miss his,” I said. “I do love Birdy, but we have all been so busy.” I think my sorrow showed, too, for I did regret avoiding him.

  “And so he devised this plan to catch you when we are all clean, so that you will not find him objectionable. Emras, do not take away those morning talks from him.”

  “Now I feel terrible,” I said.

  She smiled. “Do not. Please talk to him instead, like always.”

  And so I shifted my magic-making to the free watch at night, when the rest of the staff went off for social pursuits. It meant being outside in the dark, bundled up against the cold, but that was incentive to work faster. And it ga
ve me extra time for talking to Birdy each morning in the communal bath alcove. At first we spoke in our own language, but gradually we became more accustomed to Marloven, and we were back to our old debates, just like our student days—what we’d learned of Marloven history, customs, and culture—funny stories about servants or horses. Anhar often met us. She listened in silence at first, and gradually joined the talk.

  We on Lasva’s staff spoke Kifelian whenever we were alone. We talked endlessly about minutiae that at home never would have been worth comment: foods, scents, the exact shade of the canals on winter mornings, who first put out window boxes, the cries of the canal boaters. The feel of silk on our skin. The sweet songs of Colendi bells, scarcely noticed before now but well remembered. Sometimes, when we were all together, just us, we sang—or, at least, three of us sang. Belimas always sat silently, her face so long set in sullenness and resentment that the soft folds of her skin in candlelight were beginning to resemble grooves.

  “Hour of the Leaf,” Nifta would say, and I would take the high bell, “Dinga-dinga ding-ding-ding!”

  Pelis, on a lower note in the same chord: “Ring-rung-ring, ring-rung-ring!”

  Anhar: “Dong-dong… dong-dong… dong-de-dong.”

  Nifta, in a low moo: “Bon-n-ng!”

  Lasva ordered Marloven foods, so the rest of us arranged, with tortuous complications worthy of state diplomacy, to find bakers willing to make our breads—an indulgence that used up most of our pay.

  Ananda sent a herald with not only a letter but a gift, a gaudy brooch. This wedding gift was from the Duchess of Alarcansa. I assume it’s a commentary on my presumption in surpassing her in rank when I married Macael and came to Enaeran. Having laughed over it, I pass it on to you, to remind you of our foolish youth.

  We did not hear anything about what Lasva thought of the letter. We often saw her wear that brooch when she attended the king. It was so heavy it pulled at the fabric of her gowns. None of us dared ask why she wore it.

  Side by side every morning after breakfast, Lasva and I worked through the Altan fan form. We often talked, but gone was intimacy, which made the thought of confession more difficult. I was afraid not only of the risk, should that terrible king hear, but what if the result was a greater divide between us?

  She chose subjects for conversation that interested us both—history, reading. She was never petty; she simply erased her inner life from our discussions. It was exactly like the days of her simulacrum, only that had been unconscious and borne of grief. Now she closed herself in consciously.

  Gradually she sped up the fan form until some days we whirled through it so fast, our fans snapped in and out. I usually stopped before the final cuts, but now she had four stands, one at each wall. She liked to whirl from one to another, building speed until she ripped the cloth across with one stroke, left hand, right, left, right. The first time she succeeded in cutting all four cleanly on each stroke she laughed aloud like she had when I first met her, her arms hugged against herself. But it was not the free, joyous laugh of those days. It was one of triumph.

  As I got faster at making tokens and, thus, had more time to myself, I would take walks around the city. I tested myself by finding and identifying the signs of magic. If you are not a mage, think of these as seeing sigils etched in the pale glow of moonlight, or luminescent moss. The colors had to do with intensity, from old spells fading into a dull blue to the bright yellow of newly restored spells. Complicated chains of spells—necessary for just about anything to do with water, for example—were like Venn roses, circles of interlocking links. Sometimes, if the wind was not too bitter, I’d pause and count them, observing where they connected and how: sometimes interlocked, at other times layered.

  I had to learn every step of the sorts of magic we took for granted. I put water-purifying spells on cups, buckets, streams.

  I had to take apart the Waste Spell while reading its history. I learned how the spell first shifted waste to a specific location, until that became a noisome sump; how the spell was altered and altered again until it shifted waste to soil that met certain specifications; how that had to be altered to prevent cities from being ringed with evil swamps; how it was altered to remove the waste directly from the body; how it was broken into components when shifted to the soil, that it might become useful material again, the more swiftly.

  With these lessons came an appreciation of the power of magic.

  Ivandred came and went without any of the staff seeing much of him. He used the tokens I made him to visit Lasva of nights, then he would be gone again before sunrise.

  We only heard about his triumphs—the settling of the southern border, the routing of a foray by the principality of Stalgoreth against the jarlate of Tlennen—which sent the king from triumph into dark moods whose cause no one understood, which seemed to increase the universal tension.

  The king sometimes prowled the halls during the night. Lasva heard from Fnor that he was looking for traitors meeting in conspiracy. I could tell when the king had been by due to the scent of stale sweat and elderberry-ginger steep that he drank in great quantity. Those halls were frigid in winter, the air so still that aromas lingered for a day or so.

  I’d begun exploring the castle to identify where wards were anchored. Whenever I smelled sweat and elderberry-ginger, I retreated rapidly.

  The king transferred away twice and was gone for a week each time, which freed Lasva’s day. She spent her free time studying and working on the tapestry under the watchful eyes of the king’s closest servants.

  FOUR

  OF TURNED CUFFS AND MOUSTACHES

  E

  verything changed that spring. On a Restday evening as the snows were beginning to melt, I found the Herskalt awaiting me when I transferred to Darchelde.

  He took the book I held out, and I settled in my chair, awaiting a test of my knowledge.

  He said, “It’s time to use what you have learned. Your assignment is to pick apart Choreid Dhelerei’s wards. Eventually you will rebuild them again, but for now, you must only note the transfer traps and the personal wards—some of which are centuries old. You must accomplish this without breaking Andaun-Sigradir’s own alarm spells. Then you will do the same for the castle itself.”

  I said in surprise, “Does he know I am to do this?”

  The Herskalt smiled. “Of course he does not. He would be obliged to alert the king.”

  “But… that’s…”

  “Dangerous? If you plan to assist in protecting the kingdom, will you refuse any challenge that includes risk? That would limit your usefulness in any emergency.”

  “Will the Sigradir not know immediately that the wards are not his?”

  “He will not test them if you give him no reason to do so. Begin simply, with caution.”

  The next day, the king summoned Lasva. Over the course of three weeks, she’d finished the design of a tapestry depicting the unification of the kingdom under Ivandred’s ancestor who became first king.

  When the message came, Lasva said, “Attend me, Emras.”

  I resisted the persistent urge to make The Peace and instead laid my hand over my heart in the proper sign of respect, then followed behind as she made her way to the king’s formal antechamber. There was still a daïs, but a table and cushions replaced the imposing black marble throne, and the room was smaller. Also warmer.

  I took up my stance and prepared to review lessons when the king took me by surprise. “You’ve summoned the guardswomen’s healer, girl.”

  “I have, Haldren-Harvaldar.”

  “Does that mean you are with child?”

  “I am.”

  The old man cackled, leaning back and forth, slapping his knees. I stared at the back of Lasva’s glossy head, hurt that I had not known, but aware of the thrill of newness. Of possibility.

  The king said, “We’ll make sure he learns kingship.”

  Lasva agreed, and from that I understood that she had tried to beget a boy, probably a
t Ivandred’s wish. Fresh sorrow at our lack of communication hurt me. As the king went on at tedious length about the right way to educate a prince, and Lasva agreed to every word, I consoled myself by reviewing my lessons on wards; not until the end of the session did I see that the king was watching Lasva suspiciously. Her very compliance seemed to disturb him, and he dismissed her abruptly.

  On the way back, she said in Marloven (for she’d forbidden us to converse in our own tongue where others could hear), “I’ve written to Ingrid-Jarlan about those robes, Emras. I forgot to mention that she answered last night, sending me sketches. How vexing! She located, probably at great trouble, a single surviving scrap from those very old days, a sketch someone had done of the first Savarend to become king, surrounded by his friends.”

  “What is amiss?” I asked.

  “Moustaches! The men wore these long moustaches in those days. It looks like worms crawled onto their faces and died there. Their hair was loose, too, and from the look of the sketch, seldom cleaned or brushed, though perhaps the sketch was made on their arrival from a long ride. Their clothing looks like what the stable hands wear when they ride. The point is, they are not suitable models for a tapestry.”

  “I thought we were going to put them in modern dress.”

  “I just wanted to see if the old-fashioned dress looked better, because modern dress seems absurd when we’re depicting an event of centuries ago.”

  “But we do not know anything about the actual event.”

  “Correct,” Lasva said, as we passed the women guards. I felt their gazes. “So all must be symbolic.” And when we were inside, the door closed, “Some of the king’s jarls were not in any of the old lists, either, which creates another sort of difficulty. Modern dress it is. But we’ll surround them with artifacts of history. That ought to lend the whole sufficient… glory.”