Sasha atobas-1

by Joel Shepherd

  "Not I, my Lord," said Heryd, fixing him with a pale blue gaze. A big man, with blond hair beneath his helm and a heavy, honest face. "Family Ansyn has been an ally to Family Telgar since before the Liberation, and always shall be."

  "And Family Varan?" Usyn asked bluntly.

  "Family Telgar won the great lordship through valour in battle," Heryd replied. "Your ancestors slew many of the Cherrovan, and then many more of the traitorous pagans in the cleansing to follow. Clearly your blood was chosen by the gods to rule. None in Hadryn dispute it. Prove yourself now, my Lord, and remind them of that choice. The gods' will cannot so easily be undone."

  Another catapult shot clattered and whistled. Heryd finished his tea, bowed and departed. Usyn watched him go, his fingers clenched tightly about his cup. Victory in battle, the cornerstone of all honour. He'd show that fool Varan. He'd show him the true meaning of victory.

  A new presence arrived at his left elbow and he turned to find Father Celys in black robes with his staff in hand.

  "My Lord," said Celys with a bow, a bald man with a thin grey beard. "My Lord, I wondered if I could have a word?"

  "Of course, Father," said Usyn, turning to face him with as much lordly dignity as he could muster. He liked this part-the part where men he had known his whole life, and who had never shown him the respect he deserved, now suddenly had to bow before him and lower their eyes. "How can I help you?"

  "Well, my Lord… there is the matter of the pagans' bodies. It is the custom of the order that even an enemy should receive a proper burial…"

  "These are not merely enemies, Father," Usyn said coldly. "These are pagans. They spit on the rightful gods, as their ancestors spat on them during the Liberation and assisted their enemies. Their souls now descend to the fires of Loth to burn for eternity, and I say good riddance. Burn the bodies. And do it before the walls, so the rest of them can see."

  Father Celys took a deep breath and swallowed hard. "Aye, M'Lord." Usyn regarded him disdainfully. His father had suspected Father Celys of defective moral character for a long time. The Bishop of Hadryn had always been more interested in converting pagans than killing them. "However, if it pleases my Lord, I would request permission to entreaty the pagans behind the wall to save their souls by conversion."

  Usyn snorted. "That is your right, Father-souls are a bishop's prerogative just as lives are a lord's."

  "And should they agree, M'Lord… would you consider a surrender?"

  Usyn glared at him, lips pressed thin. His temper boiled. "We hold the Hadryn's most ancient enemies by the throat and you would beg for mercy on their behalf?"

  Father Celys ducked his head. "No, M'Lord. But… but one would like to make contingencies, for future plans. When the walls are breached, M'Lord, there will be many more bodies to dispose of, and their souls too will be in question…"

  "Burn them," Usyn said coldly. "Burn them all."

  "Aye, M'Lord. And the prisoners, M'Lord? What of them?"

  Usyn raised a thin eyebrow. "Prisoners?"

  "The women and children, M'Lord." Looking up at Usyn hopefully, from beneath lowered brows. "When the holy armies reached Torovan from the Bacosh five centuries ago, they did report a great success at persuasive con versions with the women, without their menfolk there to protect them. The pagan womenfolk are good workers, we could…"

  "There shall be no prisoners, Father Celys," said Usyn Telgar, Lord of Hadryn. "This valley is lacking in firewood, I would guess. Best that you make plans to collect some."

  Twelve

  S asha woke early the next morning, and did her exercises on the floor of Sofy's chambers while her sister slept on, peaceful in the wash of morning sunlight through the windows. The taka-clans woke her, however.

  "I'd never thought something so deadly could look so beautiful," Sofy said from her pillows as Sasha lowered her blade. Sofy gazed with amazement. Sasha performed the last third of the defensive elia-dan, the silver blade flashing in the sunlight, finding the perfect form of foot, wrist and shoulder. Then sheathed the sword over her shoulder in one, smooth motion.

  "Da'el she'hiel alas themashel," Sasha told her.

  "Is that Saalsi?" Sofy asked, enchanted. "What does it mean?"

  "Literally, "the beauty of danger"… only that doesn't translate well, does it? Most Saalsi doesn't. It basically means that all dangerous things are beautiful. But serrin words rarely state things so directly."

  "Oh, I'd love to learn Saalsi," Sofy sighed, rubbing her eyes. She yawned. "Are you going for a run?"

  "Always," said Sasha, stretching her thighs. "Want to come?"

  "You're crazy!" Sofy laughed. "What would people think?"

  "I don't know. What would people think?"

  "A princess of Lenayin does not run," Sofy said primly. And yawned again. "Especially not so early."

  "Thank the spirits for that, then," Sasha said cheerfully. "I'd hate to be mistaken for something I'm not."

  She collected Teriyan and Andreyis from their chambers in the southern guest quarters and walked with them along the grand halls, alongside balconies overlooking the southern courtyards and gardens. Groundsmen trimmed the bushes and swept the paths, and servants scurried about their early morning duties. Few of the guesting nobility had risen.

  Their morning run took them on the road circuit within the city walls. Sasha pointed out the Soros Library, the Royal Guard barracks and the merchants' square, now filling with traders unloading carts of fruit and vegeta bles, bags of grain and racks of fowl or fish. Many of the traders were Goerenyai and gave a cheer as they saw her pass. Sasha waved cheerfully in return.

  Their run completed, she sparred with Teriyan and Andreyis in the great training hall beside the Royal Guard barracks. By now the hall was filling with soldiers, and some nobles, and the trio met with men of the Falcon Guard, who greeted them warmly. The ensuing session was lively, yet Sasha refrained from making too much of a scene. Some Verenthane soldiers, and a few nobles, gave her dark looks across the floor.

  "Word is the Kradyc family's right mad with you, M'Lady," said one man-at-arms as he recovered his breathing, rubbing the bruise on his side.

  "Kradyc?" Sasha asked him, lowering her stanch to a ready posture. A true svaalverd fighter was never truly resting, and the blade was always ready.

  "The Ranash family. Their uncle was the adjudicator you near pulled from his horse yesterday."

  "Oh, the lagand match." She shrugged and twirled her stanch. "The adjudicator was Ranash? No wonder he wouldn't give us a call."

  "Master Pyter Pelyn means to take the field without us," said the grizzled corporal nearby, leaning on his stanch. He had a scar across one cheek that took half an ear and the upper side of his jaw, turning his speech to a mumble. "No Falcon Guard'll ride with the fool, not after what he did to Master Jaryd. Tyree will miss the title matches for sure."

  "First time in three Rathynals," the man-at-arms sighed. "Probably Taneryn will win now, that'll make Lord Krayliss real happy."

  "Is Krayliss competing?" Andreyis asked.

  "No," said the corporal, "not before his trial. Might I ask when the trial is, M'Lady?"

  "No idea," said Sasha, in all honesty. No one had told her. She suspected controversy on the question of Lord Krayliss's trial. Krayliss was full of bluster and determined to pick a fight. Should the trial be closed from public view to deprive Krayliss of a podium for his grievances? Or would a closed trial make the king and his lordships appear weak?

  "Any idea of where the new Lord Telgar might be, M'Lady?" the corporal pressed, raising his lock-jawed mumble to carry above the yells and clashing wood of the hall. "Given neither he nor the Hadryn have come for Rathynal?"

  "I don't know why you ask me," Sasha said a little testily. "No one tells me anything around here."

  "Something about you being the king's daughter," Teriyan said sarcastically.

  "Am I really?" Sasha gave Teriyan a warning look.

  "Is it true the Hadryn are going after
the Udalyn Valley?" the man-atarms wanted to know.

  "That's just a rumour, lad," the corporal said gruffly. "We shouldn't be bothering M'Lady Sashandra with rumours. Besides, Lord Usyn wouldn't dare. I'm no Goeren-yai, but I serve with plenty, and they'd never stand for it." He gave Teriyan a wizened stare.

  Teriyan shrugged broadly. "We'd have to make a unified stand to stop it," he said. "Just in my part of Valhanan alone, we've got villages that have barely spoken or traded with each other for centuries, and others that still skirmish to this day, despite the king's law forbidding it. How is that rabble going to stop the lordships from doing anything?"

  "You sound just like a Verenthane bigot!" Andreyis retorted angrily.

  "I'm Goeren-yai, I'm allowed to," said Teriyan, putting his stanch across his broad shoulders and hooking his arms onto the ends. "I just speak the truth, lad. To find the solution, first we must recognise the problem. Otherwise we're like a man with a broken leg who refuses splints or crutches to save his pride and ends up a cripple for life." He glanced at Sasha. "That's what Kessligh always said, anyway."

  "Kessligh said a lot of things," Sasha said quietly.

  "Aye," said Teriyan, "he always told a person what he thought, whether it was what they wanted to hear or not. I always liked that about him. He wasn't always right, but he always tried to make a person think. Lots of Goeren-yai never liked what he had to say about them-folks never do like being told their own worst flaws, most especially when they're true. But being scared to face the truth is cowardice, I reckon. And no Goeren-yai likes a coward."

  Sasha left Teriyan and Andreyis to their sparring and headed back to merchant's square-Andreyis needed as much practice as possible, and she herself found sparring against non-svaalverd fighters only so helpful. It exercised her eye, reflexes and muscles, but she knew she'd achieve more for her technique by practising taka-dans alone.

  As she walked along a cobbled road through morning crowds, she thought on what Teriyan had said. "To find the solution, first we must recognise the problem." It was Nasi-Keth thinking, through and through. Teriyan was a well-read man, and had accumulated many books, a rare thing for a rural Goeren-yai. He was also one of the proudest Goeren-yai she'd ever met. Surely he was angry, and frustrated, to be saying such things at such a time. Sasha knew he had friends about the land, contacts with whom he kept in touch, as Kessligh did with his Nasi-Keth friends in Petrodor. He would be talking now with Goeren-yai soldiers and others attending Rathynal, with all these events and rumours afoot. Suddenly she was worried for him. She hoped he wouldn't do anything stupid, or get drunk and start a fight with that big, loud mouth of his.

  She headed to the Garrison Barracks, where Jaryd was quartered with the Falcon Guard. It was a broad, grey-stone building with several wings about a central courtyard, all teeming with Falcon Guardsmen and men of the Black Hammers of southern Rayen province.

  All the provincial companies of Lenayin were required to serve six months garrison duty in Baen-Tar at one time or other… all save the northern companies, who were on constant watch against the Cherrovan threat and could not be spared. Such rotations helped the unity of Lenayin, it was said. What was not said (or at least not as often) was that it also underlined how little true power the Lenay king held. The Royal Guard were hisnearly a thousand men, drawn from all over Lenayin. But they were rarely used away from Baen-Tar, lest the capital be left undefended. The Lenay throne, ultimately, had only as much power and protection as the great lords wished it to have. The great lords allowed the king to rule because the archbishop said the king was the gods' chosen representative in Lenayin and, more to the point, because it was better to tolerate a king in Baen-Tar than the awful, bloody squabble that would surely erupt if he were removed and the provinces fought for power amongst themselves as they once had.

  Even Sasha, uninterested in the affairs of nobility as she typically was, could see that it was an imperfect arrangement at best. Such were the compromises that her great-grandfather Soros had been forced to make in order to sell the fractious peoples of Lenayin on the new, central power of Baen-Tar. So far, successive Lenayin kings had refrained from spending any more of the royal tax revenue on building royal armies-King Soros had known that a powerful king with enormous armies would have been opposed tooth and nail by the provinces whatever their newfound Verenthane fervour. The alternative would have been for the great lords to raise those royal taxes themselves… but considering the purposes to which they would wish to put such taxes, there was no way the Goeren-yai were about to wear that, either. And so, what remained was a shaky agreement between the great lords and the king that if the provinces did not cause trouble, the king would not raise armies, and would instead continue to spend the royal tax on things the people needed… or at least were thought to need, on the rare occasion they were actually asked.

  That shaky arrangement, Sasha could see more clearly of late than ever, was now being tested. It had lasted roughly a century now, a period of unprecedented peace and stability in Lenayin. Kessligh, for one, had voiced amazement that it had even lasted that long. A great wind, he'd said, would break a brittle tree. And at some point, the king would have to decide whether his own relative powerlessness was a worthwhile price to pay for stability…

  A Falcon Guardsman admitted her to the commander's chambers with a friendly greeting, and she found Jaryd seated upright in his wide bed, dressed in a plain shirt with the sheets pulled to his middle, his left arm in a sling across the chest. A boy of perhaps ten, with sandy hair and freckles, sat on Jaryd's bedside, talking animatedly.

  "M'Lady Sashandra!" Jaryd exclaimed cheerfully as Sasha entered. "Have you met my little brother Tarryn?"

  "I have not had the honour," said Sasha. The boy twisted about to stare at her. "Master Tarryn, I'm very pleased to meet you. I hope you're better at staying on your horse than your brother."

  Jaryd laughed.

  "He was knocked off!" Tarryn said indignantly. "Pyter Pelyn did it, he never plays fair. I was just telling Jaryd, Pyter Pelyn's son Garret cheats at four-sticks! He's in some of my classes here, I never liked him."

  "I'm not surprised," said Sasha and bounced onto the end of Jaryd's bed. Tarryn stared at that most unladylike act. "How's the arm?" she asked Jaryd, kneeling.

  "It's not so bad," said Jaryd. His face was pale and his brown hair hung lank and unwashed, but the confidence in his tone made Sasha believe it. "The healer says it's just a small break of the forearm, he didn't need to use the knife. He bound it and put in splints for support, but it should heal clean in less than a month. The elbow and shoulder are all swollen, but that should heal too, he said."

  "That's wonderful!" Sasha exclaimed with feeling. "The way you came off, I was certain you'd smashed something good!"

  "He says it doesn't hurt," Tarryn said eagerly, with a mischievous smile. "He always says it doesn't hurt. He fell down some stairs once and split his head open, there was blood everywhere. Our house healer had to clean the wound with boiled wine, and Jaryd said that didn't hurt either."

  "Nothing hurts after you faint," Sasha said wryly. There was a wine pitcher on the bedside table and a bowl of something that smelled strongly of crushed herbs. Sasha knew well that even with such remedies, Jaryd's arm would hurt like hell. But few Lenay men would show pain in a woman's vicinity… and even less so to a younger brother.

  "I never did," Jaryd said mildly. "This is my third break, I've never yet fainted."

  "You're pretty," said Tarryn.

  Sasha blinked at him in surprise. And grinned. "Thank you very much!"

  "Fenyl Harys said you were really ugly," Tarryn continued. "He said you were an ogre, and that you had a moustache and warts."

  "I shaved off the moustache just this morning," Sasha admitted.

  "You did not!" Tarryn laughed. "Are you really as good a fighter as Kessligh Cronenverdt?"

  "Who said I was?"

  "Jaryd," said Tarryn. "He said you were the best fighter he'd ever see
n." Sasha raised an eyebrow at Jaryd, who shrugged.

  "But Jaryd's never seen Kessligh fight," Sasha told Tarryn. "Not really. Kessligh's better than me, but I'm close." Close… well, that was maybe stretching things a bit, but she wasn't about to throw away her good reputation entirely.

  Sasha sat on the bed and talked with Jaryd and Tarryn for a while. Jaryd seemed pleased of the company and Sasha wondered if he'd had any other visitors, besides his guardsmen. Tarryn and the Great Lord of Nyvar were the only members of Jaryd's immediate family presently in Baen-Tar, Sasha had gathered, but for Rathynal there were cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and family allies aplenty. Tyree was a prominent province and Jaryd was possibly just a few months from the great lordship. There should have been a queue of well-wishers, friends and assorted sycophants crowding about the bed. Instead, the broad flagstone floor remained sparse and empty.

  The hour-bell rang to ten from the courtyard and Jaryd firmly informed Tarryn that he'd best attend to his studies. "I wish our sisters were more like you," Tarryn told Sasha as he reluctantly got up to leave. "You're fun. They're never fun."

  "I'm sure your sisters are wonderful," Sasha said diplomatically, but crawled on the bed to give him a big kiss on the cheek anyway. Tarryn squirmed, and grinned, and ran off to his lessons with a wave. "He's a darling!" Sasha exclaimed once he'd left.

  "Ladies have been known to think so of all the men in my family," Jaryd said mildly.

  Sasha grinned and leaped across to sit beside him propped on the remaining pillows. "Even with your arm in a sling, you'll still have a try, will you?"

  "A true man of Tyree never rests."

  "Someone would catch us," she suggested.

  "Not if we were fast."

  "Are you always?"

  Jaryd grinned. "Not always, M'Lady."

  Sasha laughed. "I'm not "M'Lady", I'm Sasha."

  "Sasha," said Jaryd, thoughtfully.

  "Were you not offered chambers in the palace?" Sasha asked. "It's customary even for soldiers to take adjoining chambers at the palace when their families visit. For important nobility, anyhow."