by Tony Daniel
That had been two years ago. By now the Roll Call of the Dwarves was second nature to him, and Wulf was working on part three of Andul’s. What was more, he used Tolas’s knife trick on himself when he was having trouble with one of the saga lists.
Now Wulf sat through the lore lesson, which had something to do with famous northern cathedrals dedicated to both Sturmer and Regen. Normally this would have interested Wulf. There weren’t many cathedrals for two divine beings at the same time. But today he was having trouble concentrating. Then thankfully he heard the midday bell ring from the cathedral. Wulf stood and begun to file out. When he was almost out the door, Tolas called him by name.
“Lord Wulfgang, stay a moment please.” Tolas called him “Lord Wulfgang” when the cousins were around, “von Dunstig” when he was the only family member present.
Tolas said nothing else until the others had left. Wulf heard the boys’ chatter ringing off the stone walls of the castle hall as they made their way toward the midday meal and a rest period before afternoon fight practice.
“Sir?” Wulf finally said.
The gnome hopped down from his box and went over to gather up several of the scrolls and Masshoff’s Codex of Cathedrals he’d taught from. Tolas always reshelved these materials carefully in the castle library after class. During class, though, he used them as if they were common and familiar objects.
“You look terrible, von Dunstig,” said the gnome. “Are you sick?”
Wulf shook his head. “No, sir. I don’t think so.”
“How is the third section of Andul’s coming?”
“Fine, sir,” Wulf said.
“No doubt you were working on Andul’s, and that’s why you were late to my class.”
Wulf felt his face blush. Tolas could always catch him off guard. Sometimes he wondered if gnomes could read thoughts. “No, sir. I overslept.”
“I see.” Tolas rolled a scroll neatly and loosely. He’d taught Wulf never to roll them too tightly, since that was bad for the sheepskin. He tied a leather strip around it to hold it in place.
Tolas was the size of a child, but you ignored him at your own peril. He was very good and very quick at whacking with a stick, for one thing. Koterbaum, the marshal of weapons, had asked Tolas for lessons in fighting with singlestick. The two practiced once a week together.
The gnome and the human weapons master were on friendly terms, even though both were about as opposite as could be in personality. Koterbaum was a good instructor, but he also wanted the boys he worked with to like him. Tolas didn’t care whether his students liked him or hated his guts.
The gnome had on a gold and gray University of Raukenrose robe. He wore a purple shoulder covering. He also had on a striped black, white, and red sash under the shoulder covering that went down to his waist. All of these things meant that Tolas held a high position at the university. One of the university’s highest ranked scholars was always given the honorary appointment as castle tutor. This person usually sent a student aide to do the actual teaching. Not Tolas. He took his appointment seriously and taught at the castle in the morning. In the afternoon and evening he was back at the university, where he was docent of law and lore, and a master of the library.
Tolas’s feet stuck out from under the folds of the robe, and, like all his folk, they were covered with a mat of curly hair down to the tips of the toes. Bound to the sole of his foot was a strip of flat leather that was as thin as a piece of scroll parchment. This was as much of a shoe as the tutor wore. Wulf had heard Tolas more than once muttering about the “dictatorship of boots, imprisoning the toes.”
Tolas set down the scroll he was rolling up and reached inside the front of his robe. From one of the many pockets in his robe he pulled out a clay pipe with a long stem. From another pocket, he took a tobacco pouch and a clump of dried willow sticks. He picked out one of these wands and handed it to Wulf. “Do me a favor, von Dunstig, and light this for me in the fire.”
Wulf took the long stick to the fire and got a good coal burning on the end. When he returned, Tolas had loaded his pipe with tobacco and put the pouch away. Tolas accepted the burning stick, put it to the tobacco wad, and took a long drag on the stem of the pipe. He breathed out a couple of huge clouds of smoke until the tobacco was all the way lit in the bowl. After that, he took a long first puff, blew out the burning end of the stick, and pulled the pipe from his mouth. He handed the stick back to Wulf, who took it over and tossed it in the fire. He went back to stand in front of Tolas.
“A curious thing that may interest you, von Dunstig…I was walking over from my quarters at Ironkloppel this morning,” said the gnome. “Now, as you may or may not know, the quickest path between here and there is through Allfather Square.”
Uh oh.
“Now usually I enjoy my walk through the square. The oak is magnificent, a marvel of its kind. It is Eastern white oak, by the way. I estimate its age to be around four hundred years. Not the original Olden Oak, of course, but a remarkable tree nonetheless. Usually it is just myself and the oak tree in communion. But not this morning.”
Tolas took another drag on his pipe, and breathed out. They both watched the trail of smoke as it rose.
“There was a crowd gathered around the oak this morning,” he continued. “Naturally, I wanted to see what the excitement was about so I made my way through the crowd—nearly got stepped on a couple of times, let me tell you. I’m sure it was an accident.” Tolas took his pipe from his mouth and frowned at the stem. “At least, pretty sure,” he added darkly.
“What was it all about, Master Tolas?” Wulf asked.
“I’m coming to that,” said the gnome. He carefully took the pipestem in his fingers and expertly broke off a section of the clay. This gave him a new mouthpiece. He did this whenever the taste of the pipestem got sour. He handed the used bit of pipestem to Wulf. “Take care of this on your way out, please, von Dunstig.”
“Yes, Master Tolas.”
Tolas pulled in and puffed out another cloud of smoke. He smiled. Evidently the stem now tasted better to him.
“As I was saying, I finally got to the front of the gathering—there were perhaps fifty people there, all told—and had a look at my friend the tree. And what do you think I saw?”
Tolas gazed up at Wulf as if he expected him to know the answer. And, since he did, Wulf almost blurted it out. But he managed to keep from doing that and answered, “I don’t know, sir. What was it?”
“Someone had plunged a dagger into the Olden Oak.”
“A dagger, sir?”
“That’s right. And not just a little way in. All the way to the hilt.”
“That would be…well, almost impossible to do, sir.”
Tolas nodded. “And yet not impossible, because I saw it with my own eyes. Several of the older town boys were trying to pull it out, but no one had any luck with that. I suppose someone may eventually chisel it out, which will be bad for the tree, but probably not fatal. I guess my old friend the tree has seen worse.” Tolas took a puff. “Much worse,” he added.
“I’d hate to see the tree harmed, sir,” said Wulf. “Will that be all, sir?”
Tolas nodded. “I recommend you get some rest directly after your afternoon practice,” he said. “You look terrible, like you’re coming down with something.”
Wulf nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll do that.” Then he remembered. “But Rainer has a match, and I’m going to be his second.”
“Not the best day for it, perhaps. Mr. Stope didn’t look so well, either.”
Wulf shrugged. “You know Rainer. He won’t back out.”
Tolas nodded. Wulf turned to go and had taken a step when Tolas called him up short.
“Oh, von Dunstig?”
“Sir?”
“Speaking of daggers, where is yours?” Tolas pointed his pipestem toward Wulf’s belt. “You usually wear it attached to a dirk frog strap there on your belt, do you not?”
“I do, sir,” Wulf answered. Now he re
ally was flushed, and about to break out into a sweat—he could feel it coming on. He scratched his chin nervously. “I must have forgotten to bring it this morning. I overslept and was in a big hurry to get here.”
Tolas nodded. “And your servant didn’t remind you?” he said. “Very unusual, because your man—I should say your faun—is quite competent, I hear.”
“Yes, sir. Grim’s the best, sir.”
Tolas eyed him for a moment.
Here it comes, Wulf thought.
But then the gnome shook his head and went back to rolling a scroll. “Good day, von Dunstig.”
“Good day, Master Tolas.”
Finally he was out the door and away. Rainer met him in the hall.
“What did he want?”
“He says he saw a big crowd around the Olden Oak this morning,” Wulf answered. “They were looking at the dagger.”
“Great,” said Rainer. “So much for nobody noticing it.” Rainer sniffed the air. “Did you manage to take a bath?”
“Yeah. You?”
“In the horse trough by the stables,” he replied.
“I’d hate to be the horse that had to drink that water,” Wulf said.
Rainer nodded his head. “What about the draugar last night?”
Wulf frowned. “I think you killed it.” He wished he sounded more convincing than he did.
“Wulf, that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
They turned and made their way toward the dining hall where the castle children were usually served a midday meal.
“I can’t think straight right now,” Wulf said. “The draugar, and Grer, and the rest. I don’t know.”
Rainer slapped Wulf on the shoulder and grinned. “We’ll figure it out. Right now, I’m going to play a round of Hang the Fool.” This was Rainer’s favorite card game. “The l’Obac Terror thinks she can beat me again, but I’m going to crush her and break her spirit.”
“Uh-huh.”
The l’Obac Terror was Ravenelle Archambeault. Like Rainer, she was a castle fosterling, but under very different conditions. Ravenelle was a war hostage. Her staying in Raukenrose was a pledge of truce from Vall l’Obac, the country that was on the border of Shenandoah to the south.
Ravenelle was not happy to be in the castle. She was not happy to be in Raukenrose or Shenandoah. She could be very mean about it, too. But at the same time, Wulf couldn’t help liking her. She had an incredible imagination. Plus, they were drawn together because they were both readers. Ravenelle’s rooms were filled with actual books, sent up from the Roman colony by her very rich family. They were all written in Tiberian. Ravenelle read it fluently. Wulf could read it, but only slowly and with a dictionary nearby.
Most of Ravenelle’s books were popular in the south. He’d read a few. Ravenelle called them “heartbreaking tales of ardor and terror.” They usually involved a misunderstood heroine, often a governess or disregarded princess, and some kind of brooding hero. He was always royalty, but had fallen on hard times. They took place in crumbling old manor houses overgrown with roses and castles full of ghosts. The books frequently ended with both lovers dying in some weird but fitting way.
He remembered one of them where the governess was rushing to meet her lover after receiving an urgent message from him. She believed he had finally overcome his father’s objection to their marriage. She pushed the horse hitched to her one-horse carriage too hard, and when the carriage bounced, her long hair had gotten tangled in a wagon wheel. This broke her neck. Her lover, on the other had, had found out just what his father’s opposition had been about. The governess was actually the hero’s half-sister. When he found out his lover—and sister, yuck!—was dead, he had died of shock and a shattered heart.
Wulf knew Ravenelle wanted to be in one of those stories and half the time imagined she was.
He sighed. “Maybe I’ll go take a nap. There’s nothing like Ravenelle to make a day even more complicated.”
“Yeah, on second thought, let’s avoid her,” Rainer said. Wulf knew Rainer would never do this. Ravenelle was their friend, despite her mean temper. The odd ones in the group of castle children tended to stick together. “She’s the only one around here who can play me a decent game of cards, though.” He nudged Wulf. “Come on,” he said. “You know she’ll be there. She and Ravenelle are tight as barrels these days.”
Saeunn would be there. Saeunn Amberstone.
The truth was that Wulf was in love with her. Rainer knew it. Wulf knew it.
And the hard and painful certainty was that all Saeunn would ever feel for Wulf—no, could ever feel—was pity.
Maybe he was stuck inside one of Ravenelle’s romances himself.
Chapter Eleven:
The Match
Hang the Fool was a card game with lots of strategy and bluffing. That was why Rainer liked it. It also had cutthroat action. You had to make quick decisions. You had to either keep a card or throw it down in a rush before the other player could take the trick. Wulf figured this was why Ravenelle was good at it.
You bid on how many tricks you thought you’d win and whether you could “hang the fool” and take all the discards. When you played with two people, the idea was to build up a valuable middle tower of cards between both players until somebody went on the attack to claim them all. Then the game turned into all-out card war.
They set up a card table in a corner of the dining hall after the midday meal was served. The table was below a window of red and blue stained glass. It was also in Wulf’s favorite spot near the huge fireplace. Logs the size of tree trunks burned in the fire on cold autumn days.
Rainer was right. She was here.
Saeunn sat nearby. She didn’t join the game, but put on a puppet show with a woman’s stocking that had holes in the toe for Wulf’s other sister, the youngest von Dunstig, Anya, who was eight. Saeunn had two fingers stuck out through the holes and was pretending they were the antlers of a deer that kept getting caught on things. Anya thought this was very funny.
Wulf quickly lost interest in the flow of the Hang the Fool game between Rainer and Ravenelle. He pretended to laugh with Anya at Saeunn’s puppet drama, but really he was taking the chance to gaze at Saeunn herself.
Saeunn was a castle fosterling, like Rainer and Ravenelle. Her presence was a sign of the alliance between Duke Otto and Saeunn’s folk, the elves of Amberstone Valley. “Elf” was the Kaltish word for Saeunn’s people. It was not one they used themselves. They called themselves “Saelith,” which meant “star-born.” Wulf had learned a little of Saeunn’s language—mainly so he could have her as a tutor.
Under her long, unbound blonde hair, Saeunn’s ears were pointed, and her eyes were slightly slanted. They were ice blue. She looked about sixteen or seventeen. She was the most beautiful thing that Wulf had ever seen. The problem was, she looked like a teenager, and, for an elf, she was still considered a teenager. But Saeunn was actually sixty-two years old.
“Full tower!” Rainer said after examining two new cards he had picked up. “I’m coming for you!”
Wulf tore his gaze from Saeunn and returned his attention to the game.
Rainer played a castle and a moat, two of the cards in the game deck.
“Really? You meant to do that?” asked Ravenelle.
“Sure did,” Rainer replied with a grin—a grin that quickly fell into a frown as Ravenelle played card after card on top of his two, literally crushing his hand under hers with better cards. He groaned as Ravenelle scooped up the tower and added it to her pile of already-won tricks.
“You thought you could beat me?” she asked him.
“I have before, m’lady,” Rainer replied moodily.
“You’ve only got a year left to come out ahead, Stope,” she said, tapping her growing set of tricks. “Better start winning.” Ravenelle liked to use Rainer’s last name. It was maybe a ploy to remind him of his commoner origin, Wulf figured. He couldn’t help thinking that Rainer enjoyed that she called him that,
though. The two had an odd relationship. They were friends who were destined to become enemies one day.
Ravenelle Archambeault lived in the mark as a kind of royal prisoner. Twelve years ago, the army of Shenandoah had defeated Vall l’Obac at the Battle of Montserrat.
This ended the Little War. It was called “little” because the allies of Shenandoah and the Holy Roman Empire, to which Vall l’Obac belonged, had stayed out of the fighting.
Wulf had barely been born at the time of the Vall l’Obac surrender. Part of the peace treaty was an agreement that the daughter of Queen Valentine and Crown Prince Piet would be raised in Raukenrose. She would not be allowed to return to Vall l’Obac until she turned seventeen, although her mother, father, and other family members were allowed to visit once a year.
That daughter was Ravenelle.
Ravenelle constantly reminded everyone that she was not in Raukenrose of her own free will. She would be moving back home to Montserrat the moment she turned seventeen. Ravenelle considered herself Roman, not Kalte like Wulf, Rainer, and everyone else in Shenandoah. Her religion was Talaia. She got one whole day to herself a week for ceremonies with her priest. Ravenelle owned slaves, and she was allowed to keep three of them in Raukenrose, even though slavery was outlawed in the mark. She called them bloodservants.
Ravenelle was also a von Dunstig. Her grandmother, Crown Prince Piet’s mother, was Wulf’s great-aunt Sybille von Dunstig, who had married into the Vall l’Obac Archambeaults. This made Ravenelle and Wulf third cousins.
It was complicated.
Ravenelle’s hair was a tangle of coal black curls that she held in place with at least a dozen hairpins and, usually, a scarf of crimson or black. Her eyes were brown, and her skin was brown from her Affric ancestry. She dressed like a woman of the south as well. Today she was wearing a red silk dress with a black brocade of lace over it. What was more, the dress was held together in the back not with clasps or brooches like Kalte girls and women used but with something almost entirely missing on Kalteland clothing.
Buttons.
