Windsinger

by A. F. E. Smith

  Why?

  Because Elisse believed in her.

  Because she had a responsibility towards Corus.

  Because she kind of, sort of, a little bit enjoyed being trusted by the Captain of the Helm. Being given steady work that she knew wouldn’t involve torture, or murder, or kidnap. Being part of something bigger than herself.

  Because she cared about her country …

  She swore again, long and low. Then she retrieved her knife, and went to carry out Caraway’s orders.

  SIX

  Unless she had business that took her outside the tower, Ayla always spent the last three chimes of the second bell with her children. She had started the practice when it was just her and Marlon, trying to make up for the distance she’d allowed her brother’s death to put between them. Being the overlord of Darkhaven could consume her if she wasn’t careful, until it was all that mattered to her in the world – she only had to recall her own father to know that. She didn’t want her children to grow up feeling the lack of warmth she’d experienced herself as a young woman. She’d come close enough to that with Marlon as it was.

  Of course, it was often difficult to carve the time out of her day; there was always a crisis somewhere that needed fixing. But over the years, one of the most important lessons she’d learned was which tasks had to be done by the overlord of Darkhaven and which could be left to someone else. She had more than enough competent people working for her, starting with Tomas and the rest of Darkhaven’s staff, and spreading out to all the magistrates and overseers who applied her law across the whole of Mirrorvale. Between them, they could handle all but the most pressing of emergencies. For a precious segment of time each day, they could spare her to her children.

  In all honesty, Ayla hadn’t expected to be a very good mother. It wasn’t as if she’d excelled during the first two years of Marlon’s life. Her own drive to have children had come purely from the knowledge that the more Nightshade babies she brought into the world, the more likely her family gift was to survive. And yet, once she actually started spending time with Marlon, she found herself enjoying it. Not only that, but he responded to her tentative parenting overtures with such delight that she could never have withheld her attention from him again, even if she’d wanted to. By the time Katya was approaching two and Wyrenne was about to be born, Ayla had become so enamoured with motherhood that she was determined to have a huge family solely on her own account, not because it was her duty.

  But then everything had changed again.

  Giving birth to Wyrenne had nearly killed her. She had bled far too much, for far too long; it had been touch and go whether she’d survive at all. Tomas had sat beside her for days on end, never letting go of her hand, whilst tiny Wyrenne was cared for by a wet nurse and Marlon and Katya played in whispers, and Ayla herself swam through fever dreams and clung to life by a thread. Though she didn’t remember any of that, she remembered very clearly the moment when she’d first come round afterwards.

  She was awake. That was the first thing. Awake, when before she had been … something else, walking on the cusp between dreams and darkness. Whatever it was had left her weak, as if her limbs had lost their purpose. And there was an empty ache inside her …

  One hand went instinctively to her belly, but found nothing except her own shrinking skin. Where –

  ‘The baby?’ she whispered hoarsely.

  Tomas was at her side in an instant, bearded and dishevelled. ‘She’s fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine.’

  Tears shone in his eyes, sending the panic inside her spiralling higher.

  ‘Tomas,’ she said. ‘The baby.’

  It was only once she had Wyrenne in her arms that she allowed herself to believe there hadn’t been a terrible disaster. And it was later still they told her that it had been her life in danger, not Wyrenne’s. That she could never bear another child.

  ‘Was it really that bad?’ she asked the old physician, once she’d recovered enough to contemplate the idea of going through it again. He took her hands in his and looked her straight in the eyes.

  ‘You are lucky to have survived at all. Lysael wasn’t so lucky.’

  Lysael was Myrren’s mother, who had died giving birth to him.

  ‘It runs in the family,’ the physician added. ‘Increasingly so in recent generations. I’m sorry, Lady Ayla. There’s no arguing with Nightshade history.’

  No, there was no arguing with Nightshade history. The family had nearly killed itself off in its drive for purity. Her ancestors had thought their strength lay in rigidity, exclusivity, lack of change. They’d built a fortress around themselves and defended its walls with vigour, all the while ignoring the cracks at their foundations. It was as if they’d taken a beautiful sculpture with a worm at its heart and hidden it away so no-one else could touch it, guarding it jealously while the worms multiplied through the wood and turned it all to dust.

  Really, they deserved everything they got.

  Yet the knowledge was a bitter seed, because she was the one who had to bear the weight of it – she and her daughters. That gave her sorrow a keen edge. She’d lost her dream of a large family, only to gain a premature fear in exchange. The Nightshade line might still fail, and it might kill her girls in the process.

  She let it all consume her, for a while, before confiding in Tomas. As always, he knew just what to say.

  ‘You’re only half a Nightshade, Ayla. Your father never tired of reminding you of that. And as far as I can see, that just makes you stronger.’

  ‘I nearly died,’ she objected.

  ‘But you didn’t. That’s what matters. You survived, and our daughters will too. They’re only quarter Nightshades. If there’s a weakness in your blood, they don’t have much of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But surely that means they have less chance of inheriting the Changer gift, as well.’

  ‘You’re assuming the two go hand in hand. But Nightshades have been Changers far longer than their women have been dying in childbirth.’ He tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. ‘Besides, our daughters might not even want to have children of their own. So it’s a very far-off problem you’re worrying yourself over, love.’

  Ayla began to protest that it would be their duty to have children, to continue the line, but caught herself before she got too far. For all her rebellion against tradition, maybe she’d absorbed more of it into her bones than she’d realised.

  ‘Do you ever wonder?’ she asked softly, instead. ‘If they’ve inherited the gift? Two chances for it to survive … it’s a slender thread to hang my hopes on.’

  ‘No slenderer than when you and Myrren were children,’ Tomas reminded her. ‘But it’s not two chances, is it? It’s four.’

  He was right, of course. She had not only Katya and the new baby, but Marlon and – out in the wilds of Mirrorvale – their cousin Corus. Four chances for the Changer gift to survive. She’d worried that her own children wouldn’t inherit the gift. But perhaps it didn’t matter if it was one of her daughters or one of the boys, as long as someone turned out to be a Changer.

  ‘Now,’ Tomas said, squeezing her hand. ‘How about we give this one a name?’

  She nodded. She’d originally wondered whether Tomas would want to give his children names from his own family – Marlon and Corus had both been named for their maternal grandfathers, neither of whom were Nightshades. Yet as it turned out, he’d been surprisingly insistent on continuing the pattern of naming that had been followed in the Nightshade line for generations.

  It’s not a tradition that needs breaking, he’d said with a smile. And Nightshade names are pretty.

  With that decided, it hadn’t taken them long to settle on Katya for their first daughter: a name that was as close as they could get within the Nightshade tradition to Ayla’s mother Kati. That had been easy. But now, gazing at the new baby cradled in her arms, Ayla found herself at a loss. Not because she couldn’t think of anything, but because she was very aw
are of the fact that this was the last child she’d ever give a name to.

  ‘Do you want to name her for your mother, this time?’ she asked hesitantly.

  ‘My mother’s name was Pearl,’ Tomas said. ‘I don’t think you’ll find that anywhere in your family history.’

  ‘Then …’

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.’

  To that end, with the baby sleeping peacefully against Tomas’s shoulder, they spent an evening poring over the leather-bound tome that held the family records, starting at the back where the ink was fresh and bright. The last completed page held only four records for the past sixty years, each one written – like most of the entries – by several different people. Ayla lingered over each entry in turn, starting with her own.

  Day 7 of the Frozen Moon, 1756: Ayla Nightshade. Daughter of Florentyn Nightshade and Kati Farrier. Change: unknown. That was in her father’s hand, the last word darker and more vehement than the rest. She’d crossed it out later, replacing it with Alicorn. And then in her own hand, from the day of their wedding, Married: Tomas Caraway, Longest Night, 1777.

  Day 22 of the Fallen Moon, 1753: Myrren Nightshade. Son of Florentyn and Lysael Nightshade. Change – and here Florentyn had left an eloquent gap, which she’d defiantly filled with Wyvern before concluding the entry. Died Day 8 of the Flame Moon, 1774.

  Day 13 of the Leafless Moon, 1736: Lysael Nightshade. Daughter of Tylon and Dynelle Nightshade. Change: Griffin. Married: Florentyn Nightshade, Longest Day, 1752. Died Day 22 of the Fallen Moon, 1753.

  Day 19 of the Flame Moon, 1721: Florentyn Nightshade. Son of Samlyn and Jeryssa Nightshade. Change: Firedrake. Married: Lysael Nightshade, Longest Day, 1752. Married (2): Kati Farrier, Longest Night, 1754. Died Day 2 of the Flame Moon, 1774.

  A great deal of tragedy lay between the dry lines of that single page: Ayla’s brother and her father, both gone within a week of each other, and Myrren’s mother, who had married her far older cousin out of duty and died at the age of seventeen without ever seeing her first and only child. Not to mention Ayla’s own mother, whose death – belonging as it did to a mere commoner – had gone unrecorded in the Nightshade annals. Perhaps I should change that … yet what does it matter? I loved her, and she loved me. Everything else is irrelevant.

  Before that were Lysael’s parents and Florentyn’s, and back and back beyond that: turning the pages of the vast old book was like peering through a tiny window into the past. A long list of Nightshade ancestors, broken only rarely by other names – an occasional second marriage, a younger daughter allied with a Parovian prince or Ingalese lordling who was willing to give up his own home to live in Darkhaven. Barren alliances, for strategy or perhaps for love. With such a large extended family, there had been no need to procreate outside the bloodline – or at least, if any such children had existed, they hadn’t been recorded. The ink grew more and more faded, the handwriting increasingly archaic, and the family … the further back she went, the more complex and densely populated the family tree became, until within a dozen generations it was impossible to tell who was related to whom.

  They had been sowing the seeds of their own downfall, Ayla thought. And even her father, nearly at the end of the line, had been too blind to see it.

  She only realised she was staring blankly at the open book when Tomas murmured, ‘If you’re considering one of those, love, you should know I can’t even pronounce half of them.’

  She glanced down the page, picking out the female names one by one from the cramped lines of writing. Corythys. Myanisse. Fenylla. He had a point, but she raised her eyebrows at him anyway.

  ‘I thought you said Nightshade names were pretty.’

  ‘They are. But whichever we choose, I’d like to have at least a fighting chance of being able to spell it …’ He paused, finger tapping on a name near the bottom. ‘How about this one? Wyrenne.’

  ‘It’s a big name for a little girl,’ Ayla said doubtfully, and he smiled.

  ‘But it can be shortened to Wren. I like that. It suits her.’

  Nicknames were not at all a Nightshade tradition; Ayla couldn’t imagine she’d ever call her second daughter Wren. She’d heard Art Bryan refer to Tomas as Tom, once, and it had taken her far longer than it should have to understand who he was talking about. On the other hand, Tomas was right – it did suit her.

  ‘This Wyrenne was a Phoenix,’ she said, glancing up at him. ‘Maybe ours will be, too.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  They were quiet a while. Surreptitiously, Ayla watched her husband – one hand cupping the baby’s downy head against his shoulder, his expression content – and the ache of loss gripped her all over again.

  ‘You should write them in,’ he said, turning to her as if he could read her thoughts from her silence. ‘All of them. It’s about time we did it.’

  And so she flipped back to the end of the book and wrote, in a bold hand that left plenty of space for all the Changes and weddings she hoped were to come:

  Day 8 of the Flame Moon, 1774: Corus Nightshade. Son of Florentyn Nightshade and Elisse Mallory.

  Day 1 of the Butterfly Moon, 1775: Marlon Nightshade. Son of Myrren Nightshade and Serenna Raine.

  Day 25 of the Petal Moon, 1778: Katya Nightshade. Daughter of Ayla Nightshade and Tomas Caraway.

  Day 12 of the Awakened Moon, 1780: Wyrenne Nightshade. Daughter of Ayla Nightshade and Tomas Caraway.

  ‘There,’ Tomas said gently. ‘That’s not so bad, is it?’

  ‘You do know I’ll love them whatever happens, don’t you?’ she said – suddenly anxious for him to know that she’d never turn out like her father. ‘Whether they can Change or not, I mean.’

  He smiled. ‘I know.’

  Now, Ayla picked up the sturdy, squirming bundle that was one-year-old Wyrenne and planted a kiss on each of her cheeks. The difficult circumstances of her birth hadn’t affected Wyrenne in the slightest; she was the most robust child of the three of them. Marlon was a serious, inquisitive boy, and Katya a bright little ray of sunshine, but Wyrenne appeared to be made of pure determination. Already she rebelled against everything that didn’t match what she wanted – and since it was difficult to tell what that was, given her current lack of intelligible speech, almost daily battles were waged between her and her nursemaids.

  Ayla had always thought that Marlon took after Myrren, in many ways, and she imagined Katya’s sunny temperament to be much like Tomas’s had been when he was a child, but Wyrenne …

  ‘You remind me of myself,’ she murmured, kissing the baby again. ‘Which means you’re going to be trouble.’

  ‘She already is,’ Marlon said solemnly. ‘Cathrin and Zoelle say she’s the terror of the nursery.’

  ‘Good for her.’

  ‘Were you naughty when you were a baby, Mama?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘Was I?’

  Ayla released Wyrenne to run across the floor, and scooped Marlon onto her lap instead. ‘Oh, not at all. You were very, very good.’

  ‘And Kati?’

  ‘Yes, Katya too. Wyrenne is the only one who inherited my rebellious streak.’

  She expected him to ask what rebellious meant; yet instead, he thought for a while before saying softly, ‘Tell me again ’bout how I was made.’

  ‘My brother Myrren made you,’ Ayla said. ‘Not for himself, but for me and your papa. Because he knew we’d have two beautiful daughters, but we’d also want a little boy of our very own.’

  It was a story she’d told many times before. She and Tomas had agreed that although they were Marlon’s parents in every way that mattered, it was important to bring him up knowing in some way who Myrren had been to him. Time enough for the full complexity of the truth when he was old enough to understand it.

  ‘That was good of him, wasn’t it, Mama?’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ Marlon asked, and Ayla replied as she always did.

  ‘Part of the w
ind and the rain and the sun.’

  Of course, it wasn’t true; the Nightshade overlords weren’t returned to the elements as other people were. Myrren lay in the vault alongside his father. Nevertheless, she liked to believe that some small part of him had escaped the tower and found freedom.

  ‘Mama!’ Katya came running up, a book clutched in one hand. Two dimples showed as she held it out and said, ‘Read this. Pleeease?’

  Ayla was in the middle of a tale about a clumsy duck, hampered only by Wyrenne’s tendency to wander off halfway through the narrative and start climbing the furniture, when a knock came at the nursery door. At the sight of a Helmsman’s striped coat, Ayla jumped to her feet. If Tomas had sent someone to disturb her here, it must be urgent.

  ‘Excuse me, Lady Ayla. Captain wanted me to let you know, the physician and the Kardise doctor have reached a conclusion.’

  They know how Tolino died. Ayla’s pulse began to race. She took a step towards the Helmsman, before glancing back at the three expectant faces grouped around the book. But the third bell hasn’t rung yet …

  ‘Don’t worry, Lady Ayla.’ Cathrin, one of the nursemaids, came forward from the corner where she’d been mending a hole in a pair of Marlon’s trousers. ‘I’ll finish the story.’

  Ayla hesitated a moment longer – but she had to go. However much she didn’t want being overlord of Darkhaven to distance her from her children, in the end, it always had to come first.

  ‘I’ll be back later if I can, my loves,’ she murmured, and followed the Helmsman out of the room.

  Rather than Tolino’s bedroom, this time, the Kardise had gathered in one of the reception rooms. Tomas was waiting for her at the door; they entered together, to find three of the Kardise grouped awkwardly on the chaise longue, while Darkhaven’s physician, Gil, and the Kardise doctor, Resca, stood in front of the fireplace. Gil looked troubled, but Resca’s expression was impassive. Already fearing the worst, Ayla sank into an armchair opposite the Kardise, while Tomas took up his usual position to one side. In the past he had tried standing at her shoulder, as tradition dictated, but neither of them had liked it. They couldn’t read each other, or exchange the little wordless signals that helped them to present a united front, unless they could see each other, however obliquely.