by Helen Lowe
“He got both nicknames,” Girvase said, “because of the way he waged the Lathayran campaign. And they say he’s killed more than one man in tourney melees.”
Audin looked as though he would have liked to argue, but could not. Raher and Ado exchanged glances as they turned into a cross-lane leading back to the Normarch site, but Jarna was looking toward an adjoining square of black tents. Kalan followed her gaze and saw a white banner flying above the central pavilion. Even in the darkness his eyes were keen enough to make out its unknown black unicorn device. He could also see fire-glow from between the tents, and guessed they must surround an enclosed central space. Unlike the other sites they had seen, this one had turned its back on the rest of the tourney camp. No voices carried from either the central area or from inside the tents, and Kalan wondered if the campsite might be empty—until the night breeze billowed the nearest tent, drawing his attention to the tall presence standing in its shadow.
Kalan took in details without seeming to: blue-black armor beneath a long black surcote, and gauntleted hands resting on the pommel of a tall, two-handed sword. The guard’s visor was open, but he wore his mail coif in the Ishnapuri fashion, veiling the lower part of the face, so that Kalan could detect little of his features. He did not think that the man was Ishnapuri, though, despite the coif.
The guard did not speak or move, simply watched as they walked past, and now Kalan saw another posted near the end of the encampment. Like the first guard, he stood very still within the shadow of the tents and it was difficult to see his face. Kalan glanced across at Girvase, whose night vision was almost as good as his. “That armor,” he said, “and the black unicorn device? They’re not from the southern realms.”
“Nor were the giant and his friends,” Girvase replied. “The reputation of the tournament must have grown.”
Raher slid a glance toward Ado, grinning slyly. “Ser Raven says that the Midsummer prizes here are richer now than any given on the River.”
I suppose we value the tourney more, Kalan thought. Still, it was strange to think of knights coming to compete beneath coats-of-arms that Emerians did not even recognize. And he had never expected to encounter Derai this far south. Fortunately he looked northern or central Emerian anyway, with his House of Blood coloring, so there was little risk of being recognized. And even if the Sword warriors did recognize him as Derai, what could they do? This is Emer, Kalan told himself grimly: the Derai have no power here.
“You look serious,” Jarna said.
“Do I?” He had to stop himself from reaching out and giving her braid a light tug. “I was thinking about what Gir said—how great the tourney has grown.”
He watched her consider that, her expression as serious as any he might have worn. “Audin says the prize for each individual contest is to be a bag of gold coin. If I could win one . . .” Her tone was wistful. “That would mean a good dowry for Aenide.”
Kalan nodded, because he knew that Aenide was the eldest of Jarna’s younger sisters—and about the importance of dowry to making a good marriage in Emer. “You’ll have a fair chance in the horsemanship trials,” he told her. “The horse archery, too.”
She made a face. “The Lathayrans always win that.”
“Do you think the Jhainarians will compete?” Raher asked abruptly. “We all saw the way they rode today. They’d definitely give the Lathayrans some competition. You, too, Jarna,” he added, by way of an afterthought.
Kalan reached out and shoved him, hard enough to send the Marcher youth sprawling in the dust. Raher sprang up in an instant and hurled himself at Kalan, and the next moment they were grappling on the ground in a flurry of arms and legs while the others shouted encouragement. Kalan was half laughing, half serious, and could see the same snarling grin on Raher’s face. For a brief space the contest between them was even—and then Kalan had Raher facedown in the dust with his arm shoved up his back.
“Enough,” said Audin, their usual arbiter. He was grinning, too, though. “We should save our energy for tomorrow.”
Raher was still half laughing as he got to his feet. “Wrestling against you, Hamar, is always like fighting stone. And saying the Jhainarians would give Jarna competition isn’t the same as saying she’d lose.”
“I can do it again,” Kalan warned. Looking past Raher, he saw someone else grinning at their scuffle. A very young knight, he noted, barely more than a boy, wearing the same blue-black mail and dark surcote as the guards between the black tents. Something about the planes of the youth’s face looked familiar to him, although Kalan could not place the resemblance. The young knight looked as though he wanted to speak, or even join them, and Kalan raised his hand, prepared to be friendly. But someone moved in the shadows behind the youth, speaking in a language Kalan did not recognize. The warning tone was clear, though, and the young knight nodded, his expression regretful as he turned away.
Kalan shrugged and turned away himself. They were almost back at their own campsite and he felt all the weariness of the past two days’ events settling into his shoulders. He rotated them, loosening tension, as someone added wood to a fire up ahead. A gout of flame shot up and he realized it was their campfire, but the person feeding it was not Ser Raven. Kalan tensed again, and both Jarna and Girvase glanced his way—but the fire sent up another explosion of sparks and this time he recognized the herald, Tarathan of Ar, sitting back down beside Jehane Mor.
The heralds looked up as if his stare had caught their attention, the firelight refracting across their eyes. Raven nodded, his own gaze inscrutable as they all trooped in, greeting the heralds and settling noisily around the fire. Audin and Ado both brought out ale, and everyone rummaged through their gear for mugs as the flagons went around. Kalan concentrated on filling his cup, then looked across its rim at the heralds. “We didn’t expect to see you here so soon.”
“We met another herald pair just past the turnoff for Aeris,” Jehane Mor replied. “They took our dispatches back to the River while we have brought theirs on here. We called in to Normarch again,” she added, “and all was quiet there. Lord Falk said he might come south if it stays that way, but for Autumn’s Night, not Midsummer.”
All the young knights, with the possible exception of Audin, would have moved on from Caer Argent by then, either hiring out as a company or serving individually as knights-at-arms to some great lord. Kalan and blew ale froth off the top of his cup, not wanting to think about where he might be on Autumn’s Night, and studied Jehane Mor instead. She looked just as she always had, no more or less than a Guild herald in travel-stained grays. But Kalan could not shake off his memory of the new moon’s slender curve rising into a sky that should have remained dark.
So much power, he thought. He had thought so then as well, and tried to discuss it with Solaan after their return to Normarch. The Hill woman had just looked at him, apparently surprised. “Heralds have power,” she had said. “The whole world knows that.”
Malian, though, had spent the past five years on the River and disagreed. “Not that much power,” she had commented shortly. Yet perhaps she’s wrong, Kalan thought now. Tarathan and Jehane Mor have always had a lot of power; we saw that on the Wall, five years ago. And they had been eluding the beast-men for days when they helped Gir and me in the woods above the hill fort.
“Meanwhile,” Jehane Mor was saying, “Lord Falk gave us more money for Ser Raven, since tournaments and festivals, as he put it, are an expensive business. Most of the River dispatches are for merchants at the fair, so we’ll ride that way tomorrow and then on to Caer Argent.” The herald paused, her gray-green eyes reflective. “Tourney camps always breed rumors, but the camp is full of talk tonight—mostly of a queen of Jhaine arriving here, but there were also mutterings of an attack on Countess Ghiselaine?”
“Both true.” Audin kept his voice low. “We think the attack involved sorcery as well as poison. As for the queen—” He shrugged. “We rode with my uncle the Duke when he met her today.”
“She has a Seven with her,” Ser Raven said idly, “all young and wild as hawks.”
Jehane Mor nodded. “If the queen is young then her Seven will be also. They are always bound together from their cradles. Why is she here, do you know?”
“What do the rumors say?” Audin countered bitterly. “I’m sure there are as many variants as there are people to tell them. And don’t heralds hear them all?”
The herald regarded him thoughtfully. “Not always. The main theory we heard is that the queen is here to marry Duke Caril in some special ceremony at Midsummer.”
They all glanced quickly at Audin, but he just shrugged, as if this sort of tale was no more than he expected to hear. Tarathan of Ar lifted his eyes from contemplation of the flames. “The second rumor,” he said, “was only spoken by those who whispered of an attack on the Countess of Ormond. It also mentioned marriage, but not to the Duke.”
Jehane Mor nodded, her voice joining with his. “The real plan, these whispers claim, is for Lord Hirluin to marry the queen and dispense with the need for either Countess Ghiselaine or the peace.” The heralds paused, the firelight turning their faces to masks before they spoke again as one. “So Emer can finish with Ormond once and for all.”
Chapter 35
Caer Argent
The rooms set aside for the ducal cartographer turned out to be two small chambers crammed under the eaves of one of the older towers, on the far side of the palace complex from either the main Black Tower or the new guest wing adjoining it. The sleeping room was barely more than a closet, although the day room was larger, with a view out over the city’s rooftops. Malian had been shown to the rooms close on midnight, and the first thing she did then was persuade the lead-paned casement to open, initially to let in cool air and secondly to swing herself out and climb to the tower roof.
Even when her eyes adjusted to the dark she had not seen much of the palace, just a surrounding patchwork of roofs and towers. An early morning climb to the same vantage point revealed a great deal more. “ ‘The island of Emer’,” Malian murmured, knowing that this foothold in the Argent had been the dukedom once, during the troubled centuries that followed the Cataclysm, when war had surged back and forward across what was now Emer. Control of the island with its command over the river and surrounding countryside had been one of the great prizes, but the Black Tower was an Old Empire structure and it had never fallen, in part because of foundations dug too deep into rock to be undermined.
At least by Haarth technology, Malian reflected, although she had to admit that the tower was impressive, rising sheer from the northern end of the island. The great dome of Imuln graced the skyline to the south, with a small, enclosed wood on its river side. The rest of the ducal palace was a series of halls and wings sprawling out from the Black Tower: a warren, she thought dispassionately.
The much smaller tower she crouched on was built into a palace wall, which backed onto the mews that formed the first circle of the old city. Another wall extended beyond the southern bounds of the palace, with more towers spaced evenly along its length as it followed the river toward the temple complex. The towers must have been guard posts, she guessed, although they looked abandoned now. On their landward side, a ribbon of green curved between the wall and the mews, while beyond the mews she could see more rooftops crowded together. Narrow towers rose everywhere, tapering into steep spires, until finally the old city leaped its walls and spilled across the river.
Malian shaded her eyes against the morning sun, noticing what appeared to be a relatively large area of open space on the river’s eastern bank, located close to the water. The distance was too great for her to guess what she was actually seeing, so she pulled her focus back to the palace’s jumbled sprawl. “An insecure warren,” she said aloud—and her best proof that the Ijiri School of Assassins was not yet active in Caer Argent.
She stretched, aware that it was time to find Ghiselaine and go over the apartments assigned to the Countess of Ormond, which she hoped would be considerably better than those given to the ducal cartographer.
And the supposed Maister Carick, Malian reflected, as she climbed back down and in through the small casement, would probably be summoned soon to present his credentials to the Duke.
Her good clothes were still stained with dust and sweat from yesterday’s travel, but Maister Carick did not have many, so Malian had to brush off the cape and jacket, settling for a clean tunic and wearing Nhenir in its guise as a fashionable silver cap. “So what impression did you gain of Ser Ombrose yesterday?” she asked the helm, descending the tower’s narrow twist of stairs.
“Competence, efficiency, indifference to others. Lord Tenneward,” the helm continued, “was all noise and bluster, fearing that he might be seen as the hand behind the poisoned cup.”
“But he wasn’t?”
“Neither he nor any of the lodge servants knew anything of it. It turned out that supposed female relatives had brought the girl from town earlier in the day and then left again—or appeared to do so. The bodies of the Bonamark messengers were found in a ditch, close to the main road.”
“So someone watched and waited?”
“And would have seen Maister Carick act,” the helm agreed.
Malian shrugged at the note of reproof. “To have let Ghiselaine take the cup would have been worse. I can dispense with Maister Carick if need be.” She would prefer not to, though, at this stage.
At ground level, a skein of corridors reinforced Malian’s first impression of the palace as a warren. She was certain she could find her own way, but it was useful to know what routes the palace dwellers took, so she snared a passing page and asked him to guide her to the Countess of Ormond’s suite in the guest wing.
The page’s eyes widened, before comprehension stamped itself across his narrow features. “She’s not in the guest wing, that’s where the foreign queen is staying. The Ormondian lady’s housed in what we call the Gallery wing—it’s older, but it’s been kept up because of being right next door to the Black Tower, where the Dukes always live.” He darted away down a narrow corridor thronged with people and said back over his shoulder, “Not that she’ll be there. She’ll already have gone to the reception hall—you know, where the Duke grants audiences.” The boy grimaced. “He does a lot of that at Midsummer, which makes more work for us.”
He dashed ahead again, and Malian quickened her pace to keep him in sight as he switched from one corridor to another and led her up and down between levels. Buildings layering onto each other, she guessed—and then they were passing through a wide hall with a floor of checkered red-and-yellow tiles, darkly paneled walls, and considerably fewer people. The double doors at the far end were also painted red and yellow and opened onto a long gallery with sunshine flooding in through tall windows.
Malian blinked at the brightness, taking in the few, brightly clad courtiers strolling on a lawn outside, and the halberdiers in ducal uniform at the far end of the gallery. The latter studied Malian as she approached, but barely spared a glance for the page. Emer is not the River, she told herself—because in Ar not even a page boy, however well known, would ever be taken at face value. Her companion stopped and threw out his chest. “Maister Carick of Ar,” he said, “the new ducal cartographer, here to pay his respects to the Duke’s Grace and the Countess of Ormond.”
The halberdiers looked Malian over again, not quite hiding their doubt, but eventually one of them nodded and opened the door. Malian fished in her wallet for a coin and handed it to the page. “What’s your name?” she asked, pausing on the threshold while the halberdiers looked on, expressionless.
“Hirluin,” he said, slipping the coin inside his tunic rather than the wallet at his belt. “Because I was born on Lord Hirluin’s birthday—but everyone calls me Luin.”
“Or trouble,” a halberdier muttered, but Luin had already started back down the red-and-yellow hall, waving a cheerful farewell.
The room on the other side of the doors was
as large and light as the gallery, with sunshine spilling through more tall windows to dapple the polished floor. Sepia tapestries hung facing the windows, while a golden oak tree with leaves of beaten silver decorated the wall opposite the entrance. The intervening space was crowded with courtiers, and although a few looked around as Malian entered, most returned to their prior conversations immediately.
She shrugged inwardly and began looking for Ghiselaine, but it was only when a knot of courtiers separated that she saw the three tall chairs set in front of the golden oak tree. Ghiselaine sat in the chair to the left of the tree, with Ilaise standing beside her; the chair to the right was occupied by Queen Zhineve-An. The queen’s Seven had formed a loose semicircle around her, and Malian caught the glint of mail beneath their flowing tunics. Zhineve-An’s expression was as closed as it had been on the Vertward road, and her only ornament, in a gathering bright with jewels, was a necklace with a crescent moon superimposed onto a disc of dark, antique gold.
“She’s like a gilded doll,” Alianor said softly, slipping between two groups of courtiers to stand at Malian’s elbow. “I don’t think she spoke two words together on the trip downriver yesterday.”
Malian turned, taking the cup of wine that the damosel held out. “While you look like a great lady of the court,” she murmured, her nod encompassing silk and jewels.
Alianor shrugged. “I am Ghiselaine’s friend and a Sondazur. I must play my part.” She studied Malian’s silver cap. “Is that a River fashion? It’s very distinctive.”
“The cap disguise may have to go,” Malian said to Nhenir, “since it seems the fashion has not yet reached Emer. Unlike,” she added dryly, seeing the crowd make way for Ser Ombrose, “the parti-colored hose and lined tunic favored by the Duke’s champion.” She watched his progress down the room and had to concede that the man had presence, both in the way he held himself aloof from the courtiers’ effusions, and in his clothes, which outpeacocked them all. He has even chosen peacock colors, she thought, secretly amused as she took in the full robe of royal blue, lined with emerald, and the matching emerald and blue hose. And yet, Malian reminded herself, you need to look past appearances: this is the man Lathayrans call the Sondargent wolf.
