“I know. Don’t worry, Seer Murzemire. Your seventh will take care of herself. If worse comes to worst, I have a certain Dagger.”
“Oh, chile, don’t even think of that unless you must. It’s a wicked weapon, to be sure. Remember always that those of the wize-art do not use great powers for small things. And great weapons, we use those only for great need.”
But I had thought of it. If I had not thought of the Dagger, it would have been impossible to face the two of them—not even with the School servant sitting only a little way away, as he would, where he could see anything untoward that might happen.
I went to the Queen. Somehow she was not so forbidding as I had remembered.
“I have learned I am the daughter of a Dervish,” I told her, giving no preamble. “You will know how Dervish daughters are born, though I did not.”
She blinked, flushed, started to say something, then was quiet. Finally she nodded for me to go on.
“The woman they paid to bear me is no blood kin to me. The child she had borne earlier, Mendost, is no kin to me at all. They have asked to see me, and though they are not kin, I am willing to see them. But not like this!” I gestured at myself. Tattered leather trews. A new, clean shirt, but it was too small. Murzy hadn’t known how much I’d grown. My boots were full of holes. “I am a Dervish’s child,” I said again. “I will meet them when I look like a Dervish’s child.”
“You are ... a Dervish?” She was very curious about this, and I realized that no Dervish daughter would ever be Schooled in a place like this.
“What Talent I have is my own affair. I do not ask for the fringes of a Dervish. I ask merely for dignity suiting my station. I am the betrothed of a King and a Dervish’s daughter.” What station that might be was subject to some bitter conjecture. Only in this false world did it have importance. To me, what did it mean to be a Dervish daughter?
That night and the following day, for the first and only time at Vorbold’s House, I took advantage of the tiring women and the bath attendants and all the rest of it. My hair was cut and curled. My nails were trimmed and polished—and a hard time the woman had of it, too. There were ashes beneath my nails that had been there for two seasons. They made my dress gray, like a Dervish’s dress, with fringes that would remind one of a Dervish’s fringe, but of an iridescent fabric, glistening like a seashell, with a flowing cape and train and a close headdress with a veil. I was asked if I would wear a device, and I told them yes. Beasts embroidered in an endless procession on the hem of the cape. I think six sewing women stayed up all night to finish it. I refused to be ashamed. It would go with me to Dragon’s Fire if I had to go to Dragon’s Fire. It was not too much to ask in return for what the King had paid. After all, Vorbold’s House had not had to feed or clothe me for most of a year.
And on the morrow I went to the visitors room off the courtyard, letting them wait a good time for me before I showed myself.
She, Eller, was smaller than I remembered. As a child I thought her beautiful, longing to be like her, enough like her to be loved by her, perhaps; but now I saw the deep lines from her nose to the corners of her mouth and her eyes darting at me, quick and away, quick and away, like some predator seeking prey. Mendost had grown fatter, with piggier eyes, but then I had not had centipig to compare him to before. His expression and hers had not improved. They were hot and avid both, Eller with a fine bead of moisture on her forehead. I moved to my chair quietly, regarding them in silence. The School servant was one I knew well, Michael, bigger even than Mendost. He sat quietly in one corner, merely being there in case he was needed. Except for meetings with female servants and kin, some such servant—strong, discreet, very well paid—was always present at meetings between students and the world outside. Only if King Kelver himself came calling could I be alone with him. Mendost looked at him and shifted uneasily, hitching his chair closer to mine.
“Leave the chair where it is, Gamesman,” rumbled Michael. I smiled at him. Mendost did not.
“Jinian,” said Mother—what do I say now? un-Mother? Not-Mother? “Jinian. We have quite longed to see you.”
“Oh?” I asked politely. I moved my arm so the gray fringes swung. She saw the fringes but did not understand. Her forehead creased as it had used to do before a tantrum, but she bit her lip, turning to Mendost, those tiny beads of sweat glistening above her brow.
“We have thought ... perhaps we did not do well to ally you to Dragon’s Fire,” he said, all in a rush.
“You didn’t ally me,” I reminded him. “You sold me. It was you who were allied. Or are. If the alliance has not been broken.” I knew in that moment that they wanted to break it. They had sought to use King Kelver, but he had turned the Game on them and used them instead.
“No, it hasn’t been broken. But ... but you were very young ...”
“I believe I remarked so at the time.”
“Well, at the time perhaps we didn’t give that fact sufficient weight. But ...”
“But, Jinian,” said un-Mother, “we’ve thought it over since. It wasn’t fair to you. I’m sure if you were to tell the King you are unwilling ... too young ... he would consider breaking the contract.”
“After all,” interrupted Mendost, “He already has a living wife.”
“Had,” I said, giving them time to think that out. “Had a living wife.”
Mendost recovered first. “Even so. You are still very young ...”
“I am sixteen,” I said, “Of those who marry, many do so at that age.”
“You could stay here at Xammer until you are twenty some odd. Though you have no Talent, Stoneflight Demesne would pay ...”
“As we should have done, dearest daughter. As we should have done.” Mother was patting the air with her hands, gulping, aware that a tantrum would not answer, a fit would not accomplish, but unable to come up with much else in the way of response. What monstrously important thing must have brought her here that she controlled herself like this! “Now that Garz is gone, there would be no objection ...” As though Garz had ever objected to anything she or Mendost had wanted. As though Garz had been solely responsible for their treatment of me!
Enough of this, I said to myself.
“Why would Stoneflight Demesne pay for a Dervish’s daughter?” I asked them.
Un-Mother started up from her chair, face chalk white, hands raised against me as against a ghost piece. Mendost growled in his throat, turning red, and I saw his hands clench. Now, if the servant had not been there, he would have hit me. I pretended not to notice.
I went on, “I am grown now. I have met my true mother. She is not pleased that Eller of Stoneflight Demesne broke contract with the Dervishes. Perhaps Stoneflight Demesne should consider what it will do if the Dervishes declare Game against it. A broken contract with them can be very dangerous, I understand.” I stood up, turning to make the gray fringes swirl and flow. Let them think what they would about my true inheritance. Let them fear it. Let them fear lest I choose to return to Stoneflight Demesne. Let them fear to return there themselves.
“They wouldn’t ...” Mendost.
“It was long ago ...” Un-Mother.
“It was that same sixteen years,” I pointed out, “which you say is not long. No, no, Mendost. If I am very young, then sixteen years is a short time. If sixteen years is not a short time, then I am not young.”
“Why would they?” he blustered. “After all this time.”
I pretended to consider this. “It may have been concern for my safety which has held them until now. Once Stoneflight Demesne sold me to King Kelver, however, my safety was no longer a concern. Now the Dervishes will do as they like.” I said this idly, as though I didn’t care, staring out the window into the courtyard the while. The Dervishes would do exactly as they liked, of course, and ignoring Stoneflight entirely would probably be part of it. No matter. The two of them didn’t know that.
When I turned back to them, I wore the expression I believed Dervishes might wear.
Remote and cold as ice. Whatever the reality, my pretense was good enough. They could not answer it. Could not speak to it. They had found guilt enough in themselves to tally over for a season or two, seeking where the danger to themselves might lie. They had not thought of that when they had cheated the Dervishes. They had not thought of that when they cheated me. Well, let them think of it now.
I had intended to let it go, coldly, as a Dervish might. The sight of them there, so avid, so intent upon their own needs, stirred me to a baffled fury. “Why?” I demanded of her. “Why didn’t you let them have me? Why didn’t you let me go among my own kind, where I would have been ... been cared about? You didn’t care about me, and they’d paid you.”
“Not enough,” she cried, shaking her hair into a circling cloud, moved by some wild imagining to become for an instant as mist-eyed and lovely as I had dreamed her as a child. “Oh, not enough. We had a dream crystal, Mendost and I. It showed us. There’s a thing the Dervishes can do. To be young again. New bodies. I wanted one.” And she reached to Mendost, clinging to him, so I saw in his face that mixed repulsion and lust toward her which I had seen so often in his face without understanding until that moment.
Mendost and his mother. Lovely Eller and her son. I had seen that balance changing, too, over the years as the dream crystal dwindled and the lust faded and the revulsion increased.
A dream crystal! Fools, oh, fools. Every simple Schoolgirl knew the dangers of that. Every pawn, every half-wit. What of themselves had they sold to buy a dream crystal? What of themselves had they sold to suck it together, like two avid children with a lolly? And such dreams! False, foolish, corrupt. Oh, gods, why had I let them come here at all?
“Dervishes can’t do that,” I said flatly, telling her what Cat had told me without caring whether they would understand it or not. “The Dervishes can’t do that. They can only prolong their own lives through such self-denial as you would not submit to for a moment, but that is all. The crystal was false. Most of them are false, I understand. Long ago there were true ones, but no more. You’ve sold your safety for a false, obscene dream. And now the dream is dead.”
So he sat looking at her with an expression I could not define. Was it pity mixed with horror? I think perhaps. And she at him, a kind of haggard terror. And both at both, hideous and hellish. I knew then that their crystal was gone, sucked to a shard, to nothingness, that the dream which had held them had faded.
“Michael,” I said, sickened, “show these people out.”
And that was the end of my tie to Stoneflight. The Demesne did not last long. Poremy and Flot came to Xammer a few days later, stopping to see me, telling me they were going to Dragon’s Fire. Evidently they had struck up a friendship with Joramal and had been won away to the banner of the King. They did not know we were not kin, and I did not tell them. They were not bad boys.
Mendost did what I assumed he would, Gamed so ardently on his own behalf that he died soon thereafter. His rages were already legendary, but his life was brief. I didn’t find out for some time what happened to Eller. Truth to tell, I did not ask.
After that one dramatic, self-indulgent scene, I went back to invisibilty. The gorgeous dress was hung away in dust sheets. From somewhere they found half a dozen simple gowns and suits for me. I went back to classes feeling like a large goose in gosling school. I knew—oh, I knew things they did not. The classes seemed not only irrelevant but childish. What did they have to do with the real world in which old gods walked and the shadow loomed? Only in this false little world of Xammer, this false little world of the Game ... Well. No matter.
I talked often with Silkhands. She knew something of the real world and she was only a few years older than I. If someone had reached her in time, she might have joined a seven, I think. Now her mind was full of other things. Coming as she did from a much frequented Demesne on a main road, she knew a lot of what was going on in the world. She whispered of the strange alliances that were rumored in the north, those even the sevens had worried over. “Huld the Demon,” she said, “and Prionde, King of the High Demesne! One would think Prionde would have learned from Bannerwell not to trust the Demon.” I told her I had heard of Prionde, and of his sister-wife, Valearn, the Ogress.
“Valearn!” she said. “Another strange alliance. Valearn is reputed to have gone north of Betand and joined there with Huldra, Huld’s own sister-wife. So the two men stand together at Hell’s Maw and the two women farther north under the protection of the Duke of Betand, so it is said!”
I did not know what to make of this. “I’m sorry, Silkhands. Should I know of this or be concerned?”
“Know of it? Not necessarily. Huldra has scarcely been heard of since her son, Mandor, was born. If you remember my words at all, Jinian, simply remember to give wide berth where any of these are: Huld or Huldra, Prionde or Valearn, or the Duke of Betand. Where they are, trouble and death are, also.” She shook her head, her face full of sad remembering. I mentally added Dedrina Dreadeye to the list and committed it to memory.
Silkhands, too, had suffered at the hands of those who should have been most dear. Brother, sister, one dead, the other lost, partly through the connivance of that same Huld. Sometimes she was very sad, and we sat together in the sun, commiserating. I think it helped us both. She told me of her friends, the Wizard Himaggery and the Shifter Peter, and all their adventures. It was then I learned that the lair of the Magicians was no more, that her friend Peter was responsible both for its destruction and for thwarting Huld’s plans for it. I marked her warnings in my mind, not really thinking I would need to pay attention to them. Dragon’s Fire Demesne was far east of Betand. It was not likely I would encounter the dangers she mentioned.
Time waddled on. So long as the weather remained unsettled we were in no hurry to depart. The old dams still had much to teach me, and I spent all the time with them I could. They had not yet decided whether to travel north with me when I went there, but all seemed agreed that I was to go for some reason or other. Not to marry King Kelver, but for some other thing. I remembered the calm gong of the Dervish’s voice, ringing in the forest. “Murzemire Hornloss, the Seer,” she had said. Murzy, who evidently saw more and further than I had ever given her credit for. She, too, spoke of my going north.
“There’s many a seven separates for years,” she said quite calmly, while leaving me in no doubt as to her affection. “Some meet only at long intervals. And there’s others tight together as flea on fustigar. No matter where you go, you’ll come to us or we to you. No matter where any of us be, you’d find us.” They did not seem worried by it, as though Murzy had some Seer’s vision that reassured them. Long ago I had given up asking. They would tell me when they felt it wise or appropriate and not until.
The season wore on to the time of the song competition at Xammer.
The song competition is a tradition in Xammer. There are contests at all the Houses, though Vorbold’s is probably the most prestigious. It goes on for ten days. Each of the first seven days there is a topic assigned, and all the songwriters must come up with something on that topic to be sung at banquet. During the last three days, the entrants sing their own selections. Students participate by choosing the topics or by submitting songs.
The final three days are most interesting—both musically and for the content of the lyrics—as the best songs are sung then, old or new, including some the musicians have written. Those who receive the prizes are those who please the audience most each night at banquet—and the judges, of course. Old Vorboldians, all of them, brought back through what they call the “old girls’ net”.
So, since it was a splendid affair, I chose to wear my fringed dress and was not out of place to do so. There were those present who wore ten different dresses, one each night of the gala, but they were the girls who were being approved by some Negotiator or Diplomat or even by the Gamesman who was seeking alliance himself. I remember Lunette of Pouws being very nervous at competition time. Her brother was trying to
make an alliance with the Black Basilisks of Breem—though I understood that no Basilisks had been born in Breem for fifty years. It was mostly a Demesne of Elators, now, though there was a strong strain of Tragamorians running in the people there. Lunette seemed well content with the idea of alliance, so I did not speak against it. There was a hard-faced man representing Burmor of Breem who came to dinner each night and stared at her.
I had no such worries. Silkhands had told me we would leave for the north soon after the competition was over. There was nothing I could do about that, not at the moment, so I was extraordinarily relaxed and amused by the whole thing.
The final night came. The favorite singer, Rupert something or other, was to present something entirely new that no one had heard before. There were many giggles and little squeals from the younger girls, who talked of him as though he had been some major Gamesman rather than a mere pawn, however skilled. I was to be at Silkhands’ table.
See it, if you will. The great arched doorway is carved all about with leaves and fruit, two stories high, and the massive doors that swing in it are carved also in massive forms that shine like oil in the light of the chandeliers, crystal and silver, holding one thousand candles when they are filled. During the competition they are filled and every candle lighted. Great fat candles, too, to last out the evening. A long balcony runs around four sides of the hall, and on three sides of this are guest tables, laid in white cloths and silver, with crystal shining and more candles. Eight steps down from this to the floor, where the daises are raised up five steps again, each with its table. And between the tables the servants go, below the level of our eyes, so we do not see them.
The great doors open on the fourth side of the balcony, where no tables are. So the guests assemble and are shown to their tables on the balcony. Then the great bell rings, and a trumpet sounds, and a Herald shouts, “All present give ear, all present give ear.” Drums, more trumpets, and we come in, glittering like frangi-flies, all jewels and draperies, to descend the stairs to the floor, then up once more to the proper dais, where we sit on backless chairs in order that the view of us not be impeded.
The End of the Game Page 20
