When Inda did not see her he was busy with his life, sometimes so busy that if she encountered him anywhere but in the Harskialdna suite, once he’d greeted her he forgot her presence in the room. Tdor’s tranquil acceptance extended to the little courtesies, but Signi descried the difference between the thoughtful awareness that always included her, and actual belonging. Signi was not a part of Iasca Leror’s work, and that was what defined the daily lives of Harvaldar, Gunvaer, Harskialdna, and Harandviar.
So Signi tried to make herself useful in little tasks to free Hadand and Tdor from their unending labors. She taught Old Sartoran and carried verbal messages and helped the healer. But others could have done all that. This was not Signi’s home, and though she had a lover, and their time was precious beyond words, he was not her mate. When she left for Sartor to fulfill her vow—for someone must teach the world Venn navigation—he would not follow.
Will I wander the world and never find rest? No, that was self-pity. There had been a single time in her life when pity was justified. But she had survived the Beast.
Here is the truth. I am halfway between forty and fifty. The change of life will come soon.
Her steps led to the converted stable where Taumad’s theater was located. The building had halted. The stage was still scarcely more than a raised platform with cushions for the front on the dirt floor, benches in the back. But people liked to come here and perform, or watch others perform. They seemed to revel in exactly the same thing over and over again, down to all forty verses of tedious war ballads, or stupid and obvious jokes that were not at all a surprise. The anticipation of them sent the audience into paroxysms of laughter.
She became aware of singing. The melody was familiar, and recognition was an inward blow: it was the lament she’d heard on the wind during the Marlovans’ Convocation, when she walked the walls: the Andahi Lament. The melody belonged to old Sartor, with the Sartoran triplets replaced by the trumpet charge, but with just the middle note shifted to the minor mode in such a way as to change the chord to a compelling, poignant sound.
The singing did not come from the stage, but from the hackle-yard behind the spinners’ warehouse adjacent to the theater.
Signi paused by the open door to the theater, which still smelled of horse. She closed her eyes. Scutch, scutch, scutch, sticks beat the flax straws in rhythm while the plaintive song ivy-bound the air. Signi kept her eyes shut, seeing the scutchers at home beating the flax that had been steeped since the summer before, the rotting vegetation rinsed just before winter and the flax put in water with bluing. The women combed it after beating it, then repacked it in barrels with more bluing to be laid out in the sun the next summer.
The Marlovan women worked in the same way as had the ancestors they shared with Signi, those who shared their ancestors they sang the Lament. First came the painful story, but simply told, and then the shifting, triple-step melody over and over, a long series of names.
“We honor Liet-Jarlan Deheldegarthe,
oath-keeper, giving life and blood . . .”
When the Lament ended, the women’s voices split into groups of three and they began to sing the Lament in round. If possible, it gained in beauty and in poignancy by this interweaving of the melodic line.
This lament will be remembered, Signi thought, walking into the theater, where sun shafting through holes in the roof lit whirls of dust. And so the women will be remembered. The dust flurries brought her hands up in mimicry; she slipped out of her shoes and leaped up onto the stage, stretched carefully, and then took a cautious step or two in dance mode, toes testing the smoothed boards.
Once before she had danced outside of the boundaries of her own closed chamber, despite her vow never to do so after she had been dismissed from the hel dancers. It was at Tdor’s wedding, because Tdor had asked.
She had believed until now that her body, twisted from the cruelty of Erkric’s torturer, must never dance again. She did her daily exercises only to keep herself healthy. But where there is life, there is hope, and the possibility of joy. And she had always, always, expressed joy in dance.
She stretched up her arms, whirled as light as a wind-scudding leaf, and leaped. She danced to the sweet-voiced threnody on the bare stage in an empty horse barn, twirling and flitting in and out of the sunbeams and dust. First she saluted those unknown women who had given life and blood, though the battle had been against her own people, who had also given their life and blood. People who all should have been alive today, smiling at spring growth, watching children grow. But love and loyalty had demanded this sacrifice, each on the steel of the other.
What creatures we are, she thought and leaped high, twisting her body to express wonder and torment; the aches, the shortened steps, the gnarled pull where once she’d moved without effort were her own minor mode, because oh, the sharpness of paradox! We make poems and music to celebrate beauty, and we train to kill, and call it art.
Though dance provided no answers, she could gain peace in expressing the questions with each leap and turn and step, until the midday sun shone directly onto the stage. The unseen women ended their song, one by one, until only a single voice remained, light and tremulous as a bird call. Signi whirled, her hands fluttering upward until she stopped in the center of the beam of light, face and hands lifted toward the warmth of the sun.
A caught breath was the first sign that her reverie had not been private after all. She opened her eyes, but her vision was dazzled by the sun. All she could see were shadows.
She stepped out of the sunbeam to discover a crowd of Marlovans pressed against the back wall. All remained silent, no one quite sure what to do next.
She had been taught that dance was a gift, and so she gave her audience a tentative smile as she slid her feet back into her shoes. She discovered from the cold on her face that she’d been weeping, so she slipped between the people, who parted to let her pass.
Just before she reached the street, she heard a man say, “Who is she? Where do you learn that?”
And a girl stated with the assurance of the young, “Oh, she’s obviously sent by Taumad the Runner. That’s how they dance in Colend. Everyone knows that.”
Signi laughed to herself, and ran back to the castle to bathe and change her clothes.
When she reached the Harskialdna suite, she stopped in the doorway, her nerves wringing coldly.
While everyone had been busy in the queen’s rooms, someone had laid before the door of Signi’s bedchamber a sprig of milkweed.
The first sign.
Chapter Nine
GRADUALLY over that long winter Evred began writing to Tau occasionally, at first strictly about guild matters. As the winter extended into spring, keeping most people inside—including the academy boys and the girls of the queen’s training—Evred found himself with more free time.
So he wrote cautious letters, not only reporting on Inda’s and Gand’s invention of lessons to be done indoors (the throne room resounding to the clickety-clack of double-stick fighting, the Great Hall set up for lance evolutions) but asking questions about the etiquette of foreign courts. Tau exerted himself to be entertaining, passing on current gossip about people in high places.
Then summer arrived abruptly. Gand and Inda vanished with all the boys on an extended banner game.
The day after the Summer Games, Evred returned from a council meeting to get ready for the departure banquet for the Jarls who’d come to see their girls and boys compete. As had become habitual, he checked the scroll-case and found another letter from Tau:
Evred, I think we’re going to need Inda. His name is on everyone’s lips. There’s a royal frenzy down the entire strait clear to the east side. Spring brought Venn envoys under the white flag with warnings that they’re coming back to take up where they left off. Their demand? Cede control of the strait or every ship they encounter will be sunk, and every harbor destroyed. The rumor insists that Rajnir is in command himself, and he won’t stop until they control the en
tire southern continent. Everyone is asking where Elgar the Fox is, and will he come fight the Venn as he once promised? Would you pass this message to Inda and see what he says?
Evred ripped the letter across, twisted it up, and dropped it onto the hearth. He bent, struck a flame on the old sparker, and waited until the note was ash, then walked out of the government office, past his surprised Runners and herald-scribes. The king had never done that before.
They shrugged and returned to work.
Evred checked his ring. Inda was over on the guard side with Gand, supervising the shift of horsetails to their two years of guard duty. Through a bank of open windows Evred glimpsed yellow clouds of sun-powdered dust as the boys lugged their gear over the sun-baked ground to their new barracks. The heavy, humid air carried the nasal crack of teenage laughter.
Evred stopped outside the Harskialdna suite. A female Runner on duty at the door indicated Tdor, at least, was inside.
Evred said, “Is Tdor ill?”
The young woman struck fist to heart. “Stomach.”
Evred considered. “Has she left instructions not to be disturbed?”
“You can go in, Harvaldar-Dal,” the Runner replied, eyes round. The king had never entered the suite before, as far as she knew. “I’m just keeping out the girls coming to complain.”
Evred went in. The bedroom door was open, and Tdor’s pale, strained face turned his way. He trod quietly to the door and assessed the slightly greenish cast to her pallid cheeks. “Child-sickness, do you think?” he asked.
Tdor swallowed, her eyes closing. “I think so. I’ve stopped thinking it too many of those old almonds after supper or a peach past freshness.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“About three weeks. Not bad at first, but in the past few days . . .” She swallowed, and winced. “Hadand will preside at the banquet.” Her face flooded with color. “The healer said to stop drinking gerda. Good. I can’t keep it down.”
“The healer told Hadand when she felt like you do that the best thing is sleep and the next best is ginger-steep.”
Tdor smiled. “I drank some. It did help. For a while.” Her brow puckered. “Is there something?”
“Nothing that can’t wait.”
He closed the door soundlessly, and went to Tdor’s office, empty as expected. Hadand was putting on her good robes for the banquet; the ring indicated Inda was still guard-side. Signi would be finishing her Old Sartoran tutoring session with the heralds-in-training.
Evred reached into the plain wooden chest behind the “Files and Piles” table and pulled out Inda’s battered golden case, then opened it.
These things really could not be trusted: you had to know the particular spell to send a message, but anyone could open a case. Or at least this one. Evred had been checking it every few months, ever since he’d received that golden case from Tau. He’d sought out Inda’s and opened it just to see if anyone could tamper with one.
That explained Evred’s first breach of privacy. The ones after that . . . he called them necessity. And since Inda and Tdor had both forgotten about Inda’s golden case, Evred was the only one who saw Fox’s subsequent short, pungently funny letters, written in a small, neat scribal hand on tiny squares of fine rice paper. Nothing in them was of any military or political significance. The oldest and longest letter described the battle against the Venn off The Fangs; the most recent, and shortest, listed the marriages of persons unknown to Evred, the return of another faceless stranger called Woof, and had Inda heard that the Venn were in the strait? Everyone wanted to know if Inda was coming back to sea.
Evred opened the case, and there was a new letter, shorter than any:
Inda, if I get one more confidential note begging me to put you in touch with Chim, I’m going to have to defile your sacred soil myself to haul you to Bren. Who carved “messenger” on my back?
The date was two days ago.
Evred folded the note along its original creases and tucked it back into the case. He’d already ordered the harbor commanders to reinforce their patrols with detachments of his dragoons, so there seemed nothing more to be done as yet, as far as Iasca Leror was concerned. The rest of the continent could look after itself. It had certainly done nothing to aid Iasca Leror when it was the target, he thought as he went back to get ready for the banquet.
After Evred left her, Tdor got up wearily, worried that something was amiss. Unfortunately, opening the door to the Harskialdna suite somehow brought a whiff of the fish in braised onions that was being carried to the dining room for the banquet.
Tdor reeled back, convulsed with dry heaves, and plopped in a heap on the floor. Inda arrived moments later, to find her still sitting there with the door Runner bent worriedly over her. The Runner pushed past him, saying, “I’ll fetch more ginger-steep.”
Inda’s good mood vanished at the sight of Tdor’s drawn, pale face. “Tdor?”
“It’s a child,” she said bluntly. “Has to be. I’ve never been sick like this in my life.”
“Can you get up?”
“Every time I try, I get dizzy and the heaves.”
Inda picked her up and carried her into the bedchamber. She stretched out on the bed and sighed in relief. Then she opened her eyes and smiled at the comical look on his face. “Inda?”
“Is it all right to be happy?” he asked, scratching his head. “I mean, you’re sick. That’s bad. But . . .” He flapped a hand. “You and me? A child? It sounds so, hoo! So strange.”
Tdor laughed, then clapped her hand to her mouth. “Urp. No laughing. Oh, Inda.” She collapsed back, halfway between tears and happiness. “Go get that dust off, and be both of us at the banquet. And when you come back, don’t tell me about the food.”
Evred’s resolve lasted for another three months.
They’d just finished Restday drum in the guard parade ground adjacent to the women’s area. Over the quiet years Tdor, Hadand, Evred, and Inda had developed a smooth routine as they distributed bread and wine respectively to their captains. These crossed back and forth handing it out as the male and female Guards, the Runners, the castle and stable folk drummed and sang together. After that everyone except those on watch rotation got an evening of liberty, trooping off in clumps to the city pleasure houses and eateries, and the four plus Signi trod upstairs to dine together.
Tdor sniffed, and said, “Braised fish! Oh, I am so glad to have my appetite back.”
Inda said, “I still can’t get the idea of a son into my head. I just don’t think I’m old enough!” Then he made one of his sudden stops, causing everyone behind him to stumble, some muffling laughter. “How old am I, anyway?”
Tdor was going to tell him—she had never ceased secretly cherishing his Name Days—but Hadand chuckled. “There are plenty of fathers much younger than their midtwenties, Inda. Are you going to be like Peddler Antivad and declare that everyone else ages but you?”
“No! I just—”
Vedrid met them at the tower stair outside the Harskialdna suite, his demeanor formal. Inda fell silent.
“There is a . . . person who wishes to speak with you, Harvaldar-Dal. And you, Harskialdna-Dal.”
“Where’d you stash the body?” Inda asked.
A corner of Vedrid’s mouth lifted, but he stayed in formal mode. “She came to the throne room.”
“The throne room?” four voices repeated in variations of surprise and disbelief. No one used the throne room except for Convocation, royal weddings, memorials, or royal judgments with an execution directly following. The single exception had been spring, when it became part of the indoor academy.
“That’s where the south side roaming patrol found her. And that’s where she says she’ll stay. She says she is from Lindeth Harbor.” He added, “A Mistress Pim.”
The high clerestory windows glowed with nearly horizontal rays of ochre light. The row of banners on the gallery walls gleamed and glittered with rare color. Standing before the throne gazing
upward stood a stolid woman with a grim face and hair skinned back into a bun in the old Iascan style. This was Ryala, not her mother, who had retired from the business.
Evred, Hadand, and Inda were too familiar with the room to pay attention to the eerie lighting. Signi turned her gaze upward to see what it was that Ryala Pim studied so closely. When she identified the brown-stained, ripped bloodred banner that had flown over Castle Andahi, the cold of winter ice ran through her veins.
War is nigh. And I cannot stay. Signi bowed her head and slipped out unnoticed by three of the four.
Evred ran up the dais, flanked by his wife and shield arm, who took stances at either side of the throne. Only Tdor remained on the floor, a little distance away, where she could see everyone, including Signi’s quiet exit.
Pim stood stiffly, taking in the familiar faces of Marlovan king and war leader. In the fading light they looked even tougher and harder than they had seven years ago, when she’d glimpsed them last. She braced herself up. “You did fair by me once, the both of you. So I’m here, on behalf of the Fleet Guild,” she said in her slow northern Iascan.
“The Fleet Guild?” Inda repeated.
She ducked her head in a half nod, half bow. “The Fleet Guild wanted to get a message to you, Indovun Algraveer. No one else would come into your land, so here I am.”
Inda glanced at Evred, then said, “Your message is?”
“The Venn took Llyenthur and the western end of Drael. Last I heard, two months ago, they’ve settled in for winter. Right after the big typhoon raked the strait, they sent some bully boys in winged hats with a warning to Bren. Some say to the north side, too. To go back to the old ways, them ruling the seas. Tariffs and supplies paid them. Anyone surrenders, they say won’t be touched.” She pointed up at the bloody banner. “But we all know how well they keep their word. So Fleet Master Chim sent a message by magic transfer to our Fleet Guild desk, and I came here to ask you to go and defend Bren.”
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