Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  She wanted more details, but how could I give her what I did not have? By describing exactly how the Marlovens did their best to shut me out and otherwise limit me?

  The Jarlan of Marthdaun sent an honor guard—everyone dressed in their formal colors—to meet us at the city gate. The jarlan herself met us at the castle gate, a tall, weather-beaten woman of some forty years. She walked at my horse’s bridle to their enormous stable, where the jarl waited to greet me. He seemed tall, though when I dismounted he was not much above my own height, but so massive was he through the chest and arms that he seemed like a mountain on legs.

  “The young king speaks well of you, Sigradir,” he said. His voice was low and rough as gravel.

  Then this imposing couple closed in on either side of me to conduct me up the stone steps into a typical castle, opening into a great hall, which led off to smaller chambers.

  There, with rather intimidating ceremony, they offered food and drink. As we partook, they enumerated the things that needed magical reinforcement.

  When we rose, there was no conversation, or even an offer of a bathe or a rest. They clearly expected me to get right to it. So I did.

  Most of what needed doing I had already done on an earlier visit for emergency repairs. As before, I added extra layers, repeating the spells until my head buzzed and specks swam across my vision. My intention was to ensure that no matter how much use these various things saw, there would be no need for a mage for at least ten years. I did not want to make this arduous journey again anytime soon.

  When I could do no more, there was another meal waiting. I stared down at those wide, shallow dishes full of steaming rice, sweet-pepper fish, cabbage rolls, and rye biscuits, and swallowed convulsively, unable to speak.

  “She needs to bathe and lie down,” came Anhar’s voice.

  The jarlan, who had been with me every step of the way, returned a noncommittal answer, and soon I floated in the bath, my eyes closed, as Anhar’s fingers smoothed the knotted wires around my head, my jaw and neck, and my cramped hands. Oh, the relief! I wondered idly if her clever hands, so sensitive to the hidden pain in muscles and nerves, made sex into an art, and I thought, of course they do. The vivid image of her lying with Birdy imprinted against my eyelids, but absent was that small ball of disgust at the notion. All I felt was gratitude that he found that elsewhere, and the sense of our abiding bond, like being aware of the sun lying below the rim of the world before Daybreak. Love—from the devouring intimacy of sex to the undemanding touch of tenderness—is as mysterious as magic.

  “What was that?” Anhar said.

  “Did I speak aloud?” I discovered I had the strength to respond. “What you do… is magic.”

  She laughed, a soft sound. “It’s training. Like your own.”

  “It feels like magic to me,” I said idly as I climbed out of the bath.

  I did not think anything more of it as I employed what little strength I’d regained to record each spell I’d performed. The strict accounting, which I was to turn over to the Chief Herald, was a part of the king’s fulfillment of his vows.

  Thinking about how I, at my extreme distance, thus functioned as an extension of the king’s will, I crawled at last into the bed and fell into profound sleep.

  I woke to Anhar singing the carillon pattern of the Hour of Leaf. As well that only two tasks remained, for it was clear from the way that the jarl and jarlan gravely thanked me after I finished that there would be no relaxing, no sharing of entertainment, no extra night of rest. I was expected to move on.

  Once again the formal farewell, a reverse of our arrival: the jarl and jarlan walked me to the stable; the jarlan, as commander of castle life, paced beside my horse to the castle gate, and an honor guard accompanied my own guard to the city gates, the lancers exchanging last conversations with their friends among the Marthdaun guards. As we galloped away, I had the distinct sense that we couldn’t be gone fast enough.

  Once we were out of sight of the city and had slowed to a more comfortable walk, I was so irritable about the prospect of an aching night on the ground when I could just as well have slept in a bed, and so mindful of the total lack of conversational detail to report to Lasva, that I observed to Anhar, who was riding next to me, “They might have invited us to stay the night.”

  Her brows shot up. Then she said something that I did not expect: “You did not see that they are afraid of you?”

  “Ah-ye! My understanding was, they call us ‘peacocks.’”

  “So they do.”

  “And I myself was once likened to a bean on a hot pan.”

  “Very true.”

  “And the jarl, so very grim. The jarlan, imposing. The both seeming as soft and welcoming as an avalanche.”

  She tapped her fingertips together on each point.

  “And yet, you say they are afraid of me? Might I beg you to explicate?”

  She said, “You are a mage.”

  “Why? They know I come to mend and to secure. I attended to their own list. I did nothing that was not requested.”

  With an air of gentle mockery, she made The Peace on each point. “I think…” She gazed upward, then said slowly, “My thought is that they fear what you might do.”

  I laughed, but as the sun sank toward the flat horizon, my circumstances began to connect in my mind. “So… Retrend and the lancers, are they there to protect me, or to protect the Marlovens from me?”

  “Both, I suspect,” she said.

  “Yet their king studied magic.”

  “He is their king.”

  “And I am a foreign peacock who rides like a bean popping on a hot pan.”

  Anhar let her mirth show at last.

  “I am delighted to serve as amusement,” I said with so high a manner that the mirth erupted in a soft laugh.

  “From what they all say, Totha is going to be far worse,” she said, with another laugh. “And here I am a coward.” She sobered. “Cowards know how quickly circumstances can become fearful. From girlhood I worked to stay unnoticed, except when I wished to be a player. In life? I tried to be furniture, which calls for the skills of a player, but in another way. No one threatens the furniture,” she finished with cheery irony.

  A few days later, Retrend announced that we were near the border of Totha, and to my surprise called a halt not far from the bank of a river, though it seemed to me we had at least another hour’s riding time left.

  Anhar and I retired, and I discovered a letter from Lasva waiting. I could tell from Anhar’s quick, intimate smile that she’d heard from Birdy.

  I had been staring, and she glanced up. “Do you want to see it?” She held out the strip of paper, her gaze steady. “You can read it, if you like.”

  “I thank you for the offer,” I began, preparatory to refusing.

  She shrugged. “He seldom says anything that could not be cried out at city center at the Hour of the Bird. I assumed that the private thoughts, the complete thoughts, were reserved for his letters with you. I know that his letters to you are long,” she added, still with that steady gaze. “I saw him writing to you, one night when I was Colend, when he thought I was asleep and safe from being bored.” She stared out at the campfire, the silhouettes of the Marlovens as they stomped and twirled to the tap of drum and the cadenced ballad. “He wrote a long time,” she went on, her tone slow and reflective. “Sometimes he looked up, and then he would lean over the paper the same way he leaned toward you when the two of you got into one of your arguments about history. I think those aren’t letters. They’re conversations. Probably in your scribe form.”

  “It is true,” I said. “We were drilled in those forms. It’s comfortable.”

  “You value these conversations by letter.”

  “Yes. I look forward to them.”

  “But you don’t want to be closer to him?”

  I let out my breath in a long sigh. “It is not him. It’s everyone.”

  She studied me as she ran the strip of paper
through her fingers again and again, not quite an absent motion, for the pull of paper was slow, as if she felt the curve and stroke of each letter that he had inscribed. “It was always you first,” she said slowly, still studying me. “I knew that. We even talked about it the month before he left. I accepted that, and in his turn, he accepted that I would not go back to Colend except to visit.”

  How strong was the urge to say that I wished I could go back! In spite of the ambivalences, the hurt I saw in him that we did not feel the same sensations. But I dared not explain about the mages and Sartor, not after those accusatory letters. The less she knew the better for her.

  In any case, she did not have magic on her mind. “Just now you looked down, and you recognized his hand. And then there was that in your face.” To illustrate, Anhar touched the middle of her forehead, which puckered with a mock frown. “My little letters each night are like the soft words before bedtime. They are never profound. They are not words to be archived, or even remembered, not that kind of conversation—the elegant form, the expressions with a lot of Sartoran worked in as decorative language that he shares with you.”

  There were so many things I could say, but what came out was, “You do not wish to return to Colend, and live with him?”

  She gestured irony. “You would not ask that if you met the Duchess of Alarcansa.”

  “I saw her once or twice, when I was still a student,” I said. “They called her the Icicle Duchess then, even though she was merely acknowledged as heir. Does Birdy find duty with her so onerous? He has said nothing in his letters.” As I spoke the words, a quick sense of regret, almost constraint seized me: though I did not talk about everything—meaning magic—to him, I had assumed that he told me everything. I hated the necessity of holding secrets from him and wondered why he should hold any from me. There were no Sartoran mages looming in shadow over him.

  “His duties are at a remove from the family,” Anhar replied. “And he has been befriended by the duke.”

  “The Duke of Alarcansa?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yes. He joined us twice while I was there. I’m given to understand that he and the duchess are opposites in that way. He was certainly very informal, and he seemed to like hearing about our lives in Marloven Hesea.”

  “Our lives?”

  “We Colendi,” Anhar explained. “Lasva in particular. He encouraged me to join the conversation and share any experiences I wished to.” Anhar gestured irony. “Except for Birdy, he was alone in encouraging me to speak.”

  Here was another secret I would not tell: that the Duke of Alarcansa had painted Lasva a lover’s cup. “Is the duke interested in the Marlovens, then?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Anhar closed the flap and slipped out of her robe so that she could prepare for sleep. “One night,” she said, as she hung up her robe on its peg to air, “the second or third that I was there, the duke came to us for the first time. I was so surprised, first to see him and then to see how informal he was with Birdy. I forget how it came about, but the Duke asked what would happen if someone leaped into the middle of Marlovens at a meal, waving a sword threateningly. Birdy said that they would all attack. The Duke said that if such a thing happened to Colendi, they would run away.”

  “As would I,” I said, as she crawled into her bedroll and turned her head away from my candle flame. She chuckled, and composed herself for sleep.

  I turned to the letter from Lasva.

  Emras:

  My forming idea is this. The Marloven women, in guarding and guiding the cities, fostered trade. The jarls and their men, in riding around looking for trouble, kept away would-be invaders. It seemed to work, from the brief historical references, except when either of these two “kingdoms” attempt to assume the other’s role, there is disaster. The kingdom of trade, accustomed to being defended, cannot defend itself, for tools are not weapons. And when the kingdom of guards tries to trade, everyone else sees them as making war.

  Hadand and her people are so interesting. On your return, you must read from the letters of the old Jarlan of the Marlovairs, whose blunt style and trenchant view of the world makes me laugh.

  But there is my other task, my attempt at building this net that Hadand inherited and propagated with such wit and brilliance. I fear that such wit as I possess is too characteristically Colendi (which is, to most of my correspondents, the equivalent of incomprehensible.) As for brilliance, you know what they call us: peacocks. So beautiful to look at but regarded as silly. No Marlovens put peacocks on their banners.

  The rapid crunch of footsteps broke my reverie. Anhar also sat up, her black hair a waterfall against the dull tent wall. “Something’s wrong?”

  It felt late. The Marlovens had not sung or played drums at campfire like they usually did if there was no rain or snow. The quiet, interrupted by unprecedented noise, caused me to open the tent, gasping in the wash of bitter cold. No lights whatsoever.

  The quick footfalls, the jingle and rattle of gear, the muffled thud of hoofbeats reached my ears. I strained to see but couldn’t. My heartbeat pulsed in my throat as I pulled on my coat and plunged outside the tent, where I found Retrend standing guard, sword drawn. There was no moon, it had already sunk, leaving us only weak starlight to see by.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Scouts heard at least half a wing out there.”

  “Could they be travelers, or on training?”

  “No one rides in this darkness without purpose,” was the brief reply, as his head turned in one direction.

  I made an effort to contain the questions he obviously could not answer. My pulse was still quick. I could transfer out, of course. I had four transfer tokens with me. If the impossible was possible—if for some mad reason someone intended us harm—I could save three lancers and Anhar.

  Or I could… do something.

  My first thought was of my magical fog. I pulled on my shoes, then stood in the door of the tent, listening. The muted thunder of many riders seemed to come from everywhere to my untrained ears, but Retrend’s entire countenance acted as a beacon.

  The riders, whoever they were, proceeded slowly along the river’s edge. That made my task much easier. I took a moment to gather my strength, to concentrate. To remember the water’s edge, where we’d gone for a drink before eating. Magic must be exact.

  From the water I drew vapor. Again and again, building the mist. What direction was the air moving? I pulled off my glove, licked my finger, and held it up. Good. The mist could be left to drift on its own, so I kept making the spell over and over until my head buzzed with my effort.

  I opened my eyes and staggered; my sight was blurred, and I had to sit down, but even so, I smiled in triumph. The entire camp was thickly enshrouded in swirling, drifting mist.

  No one was going to be finding us, whoever they were, whatever their purpose. They would have difficulty finding their own feet.

  I crawled back into my bedroll and dropped into sleep.

  The next day, we crossed the border into Totha, our lancers alert and wary.

  Nothing stirred. The first village we came to seemed empty, until we reached the center, where we found armed people awaiting us.

  We drew rein, and Retrend turned my way.

  “I am here to renew the protection spells,” I said.

  “We will accompany you,” was the reply, from a bleak-faced old woman. She gripped a knotted stick that looked very much like a weapon.

  So it went, in that village, and in the two castellated towns we visited that day.

  That night, Lasva wrote again:

  Emras:

  Ivandred spent the morning issuing orders that I believe concern you in the South. I cannot believe that the friendly, appealing young jarl and jarlan from Totha would be secretly planning some sort of vile attack. When I asked Ivandred, he said something about their desire to withdraw from the kingdom and set themselves up as king and queen on their own. I do not believe it. I cannot believe it. I am well aware t
hat my sentiments are going to appear trite. I know that I am not the first mother to stare at my precious child patting his hand in rain puddles and think of him lying broken and bleeding in some faraway land. Every single one of these young warriors came from loving hands. Surely no one would deliberately cause a war over borders and titles, which are no more substantial than air.

  She used words with such emphasis that her request carried the gravity of an order. She wanted me to find the evidence that someone somewhere else was behind these indefinable threats, but not the “appealing young jarl and jarlan.”

  The next morning, I carried Lasva’s questions to Retrend and put them as my own, lest it seem like I was interfering with his orders by invoking Lasva’s name. He was distracted as they mounted up, with their weapons out, alert for trouble. He said, “We are sure to find out before we leave Totha.”

  One or two of the others in earshot seemed to find his words funny, for they uttered short laughs as they went about securing and tightening things.

  Anhar mounted her horse silently, so pale that her Chwahir ancestry was pronounced.

  As the day stretched into a week of tension, I gained the sense of a people whose entire life was a preparation for battle. My honor guard was paced by another, larger, honor guard that stayed between us and the locals.

  Mindful of Lasva’s request, I wrote to her:

  Everywhere I went, all week long, I was watched from a distance, sometimes by crowds. But those Tothan warriors on horseback, riding restlessly back and forth, kept me from speaking to anyone. And no one came near enough to speak to me once I’d been told what was needed. Though I travel to keep the king’s vow—to complete necessary tasks that make life easier—I always feel relief when we leave. And we resume our travels on roads without plinths or signposts.