Protector of the Small Quartet

by Tamora Pierce

  Kel stepped into the stall to inspect the mare thoroughly, feeling as if this were a test, at least of her knowledge of horses. That made sense, if she was to spend time with some of the realm’s finest horsemen.

  The mare’s eyes were clear, her teeth sound. She seemed affectionate, butting Kel in fun. Someone had groomed her; there were no burs or tangles in her black mane and tail, and her white socks were clean.

  “She’s beautiful,” Kel said finally. “Looks like she’ll go forever. Not up to your weight, my lord.” She smiled at the six-foot-four-inch Knight Commander, who grinned. “But she and I should do well.” Jump crawled under the gate. He sniffed the mare’s hooves, as if conducting his own inspection. The horse turned her head, keeping the dog under observation, but she seemed to have no objection.

  “Very good,” Raoul said. “As your knight-master, I give her to you, as is my obligation. What will you name her?”

  Kel smiled at the mare, who lipped her new rider’s arm. “I’d like to call her Hoshi,” she replied. “It’s Yamani for ‘star.’ ” She touched the white star between the mare’s eyes.

  “Hoshi it is. Now, why don’t you settle Peachblossom there,” Raoul nodded to the empty stall beside Hoshi’s, “while we discuss other details?”

  Kel led Peachblossom into his new stall and unsaddled him. More than anything she wanted to run back to the iron door of the Chamber of the Ordeal and snap her fingers at it. You see, she wanted to tell it, not a desk knight after all!

  Neal was out when Kel returned. She stood before his closed door, disappointed. None of her other friends among the first-year squires—Seaver, Esmond, and Merric—were in their rooms either. Her news must wait: she had to pack. Unlike her friends, she would not be returning to the squires’ wing most winters. She was to live in rooms adjoining the Knight Commander’s, in a palace wing closest to the barracks that housed the King’s Own.

  She was explaining things to the sparrows who had adopted her when Jump and the birds raced for the open door. Neal walked in. He was dead white; his green eyes blazed.

  “Neal, what’s wrong?” Kel asked.

  He actually wrung his hands. “Sit down,” he told Kel. “Please.”

  Kel sat.

  He paced for a moment. Jump looked at him and snorted; the sparrows found positions on Kel and the furniture to watch. Crown, the female who led the flock, lit on Neal’s shoulder. She rode there for a moment, then peeped loudly, as if telling him to speak.

  Neal faced Kel. “This wasn’t my idea,” he said. “Remember that knight I was to see today?” Kel nodded. “Well, the knight wants to take me,” Neal continued, “and Father and the king say I should do it. They said that you are getting a very good offer, too. I want you to know I argued. I said it should be you. They say that’s a bad idea. That people might question if you were really good.”

  Kel stared at her friend. What was wrong with him?

  Neal took a deep breath. “Lady Alanna has asked me to be her squire. She’s a healer, Kel. That’s why Father wants me with her. Maybe that’s even why the king stuck in his oar. You know I wish I’d had more training. Lady Alanna says she’ll teach me. But I swear by Mithros I had no idea she was going to ask.”

  Kel nodded dumbly. After all her hopes Lady Alanna had taken a squire, though she had done without for her entire career. The problem was, that squire was not Kel. It was Kel’s best friend.

  “Kel, please . . . ,” Neal began. Then he looked around. “You’re packing. You’re—why are you packing? You’re not leaving?” The worry in his face made her heart ache. Yes, he had the place she wanted, beside the realm’s most legendary knight, but this was Neal. They had fought bullies, monstrous spidrens, and hill bandits. They had studied together and joked on their gloomiest days. He’d shown her the palace ropes; she knew about his unrequited passions for unattainable ladies. The only secret between them was Kel’s crush on him.

  I can’t turn on him, she thought. I can’t not be his friend, even if I can’t be his love. “Lord Raoul asked me to be his squire.”

  Neal collapsed into a chair. “Raoul? I’ll be switched,” he said, awed. “Lady Alanna told me you were looked after, but this? Gods all bless. Goldenlake the Giant Killer.” He whistled. “This is very good. I love it. Not even the conservatives will question your right to a shield if he’s your master. He may be a progressive, but he’s still the most respected knight in Tortall. Even the ones who claim you’re magicked to succeed will have to shut up.”

  “What do you mean?” Kel demanded. Sometimes Neal took forever to get to the point; sometimes, even when he got to it, the thing didn’t feel like a point at all. This was starting to feel like one of those times.

  “You’ll be in public view most of the time,” Neal explained. “Not everyone you meet will be your friend, so they won’t lie for you, and some will have enough Gift of their own to tell if magic’s being worked on you. No one will be able to claim you did anything but what was under everybody’s nose after four years in the King’s Own.”

  “If I cared for their opinion, I’d be relieved,” Kel informed her friend. “So you think this is good.”

  He nodded vigorously. “I’m envious,” he admitted. “Lord Raoul’s got to be the most easygoing man alive. My new knight-mistress is famed for wielding sharp edges—sword, knife, and tongue.”

  Kel scratched her ear. She hadn’t considered the Lioness’s temper, though the realm’s sole female knight was infamous for it. “You’ll just have to get on with her,” she said. She knew her words were silly as they left her mouth. Neal couldn’t just get on with anyone. He could no more resist poking at other people’s conceits or ideas than he could resist breathing.

  “I’ll manage,” Neal said. “She and Father are friends, so she probably won’t kill me. Now,” he went on, changing the subject, “why are you packing, if you have such a wonderful knight-master?”

  “I have to be ready to go with him at any time,” she explained, sitting on her bed. “My room’s next to his. I don’t even know how often I’ll be in the palace—he’s on the road all year.”

  “We’ll see each other during the Grand Progress,” Neal pointed out. “Unless—maybe you won’t . . . I know you wanted Lady Alanna.”

  Kel had to make this better. “Not see you, when you won’t eat vegetables if I don’t nag you?” she demanded. “I’ll bet Lady Alanna—” Her throat tightened. Dreams died so hard, and this one she had kept for most of her life. “I’ll bet she doesn’t care what she eats, let alone what her squire does. I should send Crown along to peck you as a reminder.”

  Neal’s answering grin was shaky, but it grew stronger. “As if these feather dusters would be separated from you,” he retorted.

  “I hope they can,” Kel told him. “I doubt even Lord Raoul will welcome fifty-odd sparrows.”

  Neal slung his legs over the arm of the chair. “I bet he and Lady Alanna planned this. They’re friends, and she did say you were looked after. And she has to know what people would say if she took you.”

  “That maybe I was right to look up to her all these years? That if anyone can teach me how to be a lady knight, it’s her?” Kel asked bitterly. She wished she hadn’t spoken when she saw the hurt in his face. Most times I can keep silent, she thought, folding a tunic with hands that shook. But the one time I say the first thing in my mind, it’s to Neal. I should have said that to anyone but him.

  His eyes were shadowed. “You are angry.”

  Kel sighed and straightened to work a cramp from her back. “Not with you.” Never with you, she thought, wishing yet again that he liked her as a girl as well as a friend. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I feel. First I was just about as low as I could be—Neal, I had a vision.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “My dear Kel, I’d say Jump, your sparrows, even Peachblossom are likelier to have visions than you. I have never known anyone who had both feet nailed to the ground.”

  She had to smile. H
e was right. “It didn’t come from me,” she informed him. “I was in the Chapel of the Ordeal—”

  “Finally!” he interrupted. “You took your own sweet time in going—”

  It was Kel’s turn to interrupt. “Do you want to hear about my vision or not?” She described what had happened when she touched the Chamber’s iron door. “And then I went to the tilting yard and Lord Raoul found me,” she finished. “But Neal, it felt just as real as anything.”

  He smiled crookedly. “Then here’s a word of advice—don’t touch the door again. That Chamber is a law to itself. No one knows how it works. It’s killed squires, Kel. Killed them, driven them mad—”

  “And left plenty to become knights,” Kel pointed out before his imagination galloped away with him. “Like it will us.” She refused to admit he’d raised goose bumps on her skin. I climbed down from Balor’s Needle, she thought, reminding herself of the day she’d finally lost her terror of heights. I can handle the Chamber of the Ordeal.

  Remembering the realness of her vision, Kel shivered. She checked her hands to make sure there were no ink blotches on them, then picked up a shirt.

  When Kel’s maid, Lalasa, returned from signing a lease for her dressmaker’s shop, she found Kel and Neal trying to fit Kel’s weapons-cleaning kit into a trunk that was nearly full. After shedding tears over the news—Lalasa was sentimental—she banished them, saying the palace staff would see to everything. There was nothing to do but go to lunch and share their tidings with their friends. They talked there until the second bell of the afternoon about where they all would go.

  When Kel returned to her room, only her night-things remained. Everything else had gone to her new quarters, though she wasn’t to report for duty until noon the next day. “I like to sleep late when I can,” Raoul had explained. “It’s not something I get to do often. Neither will you, so take my advice, and sleep in.”

  Lalasa sat by the window, sewing basket open beside her, a wad of green cloth in her lap. A stack of neatly folded green clothes lay on a stool beside her.

  “I took the liberty of getting your new things from the quartermasters for the King’s Own, my lady,” she said as Kel closed the door. “These are some of Lord Raoul’s spares—he gave word to use them—but grain sacks have a better fit.” She clipped a thread and shook out the garment, a tunic in Goldenlake green bordered in yellow. Though Kel would ride with the Own, she served Raoul the knight, not the Knight Commander. “Try these, and the breeches,” Lalasa ordered. She held out both. “I measured them against your clothes, but I want to double-check.”

  Kel stripped off tunic and breeches and donned the new clothes. Something had changed her retiring Lalasa into this brisk young female. Kel suspected that Lalasa’s getting her shop and dress orders from Queen Thayet may have caused it. They had both changed since their long, frightening walk down the side of Balor’s Needle six weeks ago. Kel thought that Businesswoman Lalasa was a treat; she still wasn’t sure about Squire Keladry.

  Lalasa gave the clothes a twitch and nodded. “Now these.” Kel tried on two more sets of Goldenlake breeches and tunics while her maid pinned and straightened. Kel’s shirts, at least, would be the same white ones she’d worn as a page; it was one less piece of clothing to try on.

  “You’re not to take things to those sack stitchers at the palace tailors’,” maid informed mistress. “They come straight to me, and not a penny will I take for the work.” Her brown eyes filled with tears. “Oh, my lady,” she said, her voice wobbling. “Out with all those men, and just a dog and some little birds and that dreadful horse to look after you.”

  Kel had to chuckle. “The animals look after me just fine,” she said, offering the older girl her handkerchief. “And surely you’ll be too busy to work on my clothes.”

  “Never,” Lalasa said firmly, and blew her nose. “Never, ever.”

  Kel looked at the sparrows perched on her bed. “I need to talk to you, all who can come,” she said. “Crown? Freckle? Will you get the others?”

  The chief female and male of the flock that used to nest outside Kel’s window in the pages’ wing sped outside. The sparrows already in the room found perches. The rest of the flock soon arrived.

  Kel shook her head. Even after four years she felt odd talking to them as she would to humans, but they understood far more than normal birds. Ever since Daine, known as the Wildmage, had come to the palace, her magical influence had changed every animal resident. Kel’s dog Jump had refused to live with Daine, and deliberately worked his way into Lord Wyldon’s good graces so the training master would let him roam with the pages. Peachblossom had negotiated his no-spur agreement with Kel through Daine. The sparrows had moved in with Kel, who’d been feeding them, with the first winter snows. In less than a year they were defending her and acting as scouts for a spidren-hunting party. They had even found Lalasa on Balor’s Needle and fetched Kel to help.

  “I mentioned this, remember,” Kel told the flock. “I have to go with my knight-master. It’ll be hard to keep up. I don’t know how often we’ll be here. Do you want to leave your nesting grounds? Salma told me she’ll go on feeding you, so you won’t go hungry. You don’t have to stay with me. It’s not that I don’t love you all,” she assured the fifty-odd birds. “But this isn’t practical.” She stopped, seeing all those black button eyes fixed on her. They were dressed as soberly as merchants in brown and tan, the males black-capped and black-collared, but Kel knew they were far from sober. She had seen them in battle, their tiny claws and beaks red with the blood of her enemies, or riding gleefully on Jump’s back. Most had come to the flock as newborns, raised in the courtyard and introduced to Kel by their elders.

  At last Kel sighed. “I can’t think of anything else. Either you understand me or you don’t.”

  Crown, named for the pale spot on her head and her imperious ways, hopped to Kel’s shoulder. She chattered at the flock, looking from face to face as a human might. At last she uttered a series of trills. Most of the flock took to the air. They circled Kel like a feathered cyclone, then sped out the window. When Kel walked over to see where they had gone, they were settled in their home courtyard one story below.

  Kel turned to see five sparrows—three females, two males—land on Lalasa’s chair and sewing. The one-footed female named Peg settled on Lalasa’s shoulder with a peep. Lalasa smiled as she stroked Peg’s chest.

  “Who needs to talk?” she asked, her voice wobbling. “I know what you mean. You are all welcome at my home.”

  “Peg fetched me the night Vinson grabbed you,” Kel said. “I suppose she feels you belong to her now.” She took Lalasa’s hand. “You are still part of Mindelan, too. If you need a voice at court, or help, or just a friend, I hope you will come to me.”

  Lalasa wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I am still your maid, so it only makes sense that you bring me your clothes. I can never repay you for all you have done. I don’t even want to.” She stood. “If you’ll excuse me, my lady, I need more green thread. You will sleep here tonight?” Kel nodded. “Good. I should have the rest of these done by bedtime.” She left before Kel could say anything.

  “These aren’t goodbyes,” Kel told herself. “Just the next chapter in our lives.” She looked at her bed to see who had stayed with her and Jump. Crown, the white-spotted male named Freckle, and ten other sparrows perched there.

  “You’ll come with me?” she inquired.

  Crown nodded.

  “Thank you,” Kel told them. “I hope you like our new quarters. Do you want to see them?”

  two

  THE KING’S OWN

  Kel needed only a key to enter her quarters, no magic password. It seemed unlikely that anyone would maul her things and paint on her walls, as they had her first year, when the connecting door now led to Lord Raoul’s suite. Once inside, she looked around. This room, bigger than her squire’s and page’s quarters combined, boasted a desk, a bookcase, armor and weapons racks, and a map of Tortall over the d
esk. A dressing room with its attached privy was opposite the door that led to Lord Raoul’s rooms.

  Her belongings were here. Lalasa had set Kel’s collection of Yamani waving cat figures on the mantel. Kel’s old books were beside those already in the case. Her clothespress, weapons, and all the things she exercised with were neatly arranged; her silk painting of two Yamanis dueling with glaives was hung. The bed had fresh sheets and pillows: Kel or Lalasa would bring her nightclothes and blankets in the morning. Even the birds’ and Jump’s dishes were there, filled and ready. The twelve sparrows flew to them instantly.

  Looking around, Kel suddenly realized the connecting door was ajar. From inside Lord Raoul’s rooms she heard voices.

  “. . . isn’t decent. You know court gossips, Raoul. They’ll have you in bed with her before today is done!”

  “Now I’m confused, Flyn.” That was Lord Raoul’s voice, slow and good-humored. “I thought they’ve had me in bed with other men for years, since I’m not married.”

  “Not around me or the lads, they haven’t,” was the growled reply. “We’ve explained it’s nobody’s business.”

  “Then explain the same thing about Kel and me, Flyn,” Raoul said. “That’s easy enough.”

  Flyn—she knew the name. Of course: Flyndan Whiteford, nominally in command of Third Company in the King’s Own, in reality second in command to Lord Raoul, who personally led it whenever possible. Kel had met Flyn three summers ago, during the spidren hunt at the end of her first year as a page.

  “Stop joking, Raoul,” Flyndan replied. “I’ve served with you for fifteen years. I’ve a right to be heard.”

  Raoul sighed. “You know I listen to you.”

  “Then be serious. The girl will have no reputation, and neither will you. The conservatives will be furious you picked her.”

  “So?” Raoul asked. “They dislike me anyway, just for the changes I’ve made in the Own. How much more can they hate me because Kel’s my squire? And she’s had four years to think about her reputation.”