After a long time, Secca gently disengaged herself from Alcaren’s hug, good as it felt, and stepped back.
“Is something the matter?” asked her consort-to-be.
“You have to tell me more about your parents,” Secca said. “We’re going to meet them in less than a glass, and I know almost nothing.”
“You know about my mother—or have you forgotten?” Alcaren offered a mischievous grin, his broad hand reaching out, his fingers caressing her cheek momentarily.
“I remember everything you told me, but it was all about you and your mother, and how you’d never make a trader like she is—or like your sister. You didn’t tell me anything really about her. I don’t know what she looks like or what…” She shook her head. “Please…just tell me.”
“Well…” Alcaren drew out the word. “She’s tall, taller than I am, and her hair was sandy blonde, but it’s mostly gray these days. She laughs a great deal, sometimes when she doesn’t mean it. I suppose that comes from being a trader. She’s never liked matters that deal with householding, and we always had a cook, because she doesn’t care what she eats, and the rest of us would have starved.”
“Your sister—I’m sorry I’m interrupting, but this is all so unexpected—will she be there?” Secca paused, then added, “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. Nedya will like you.”
“She’s your sister? You’ve never mentioned her name.”
“I haven’t?”
“Not once.” Then, in all fairness, Secca had to remind herself, she hadn’t known Alcaren that long—less than two seasons.
Alcaren shook his head. “She’s small and dark, wiry, like Father, but she’s strong. She can hoist cargo with the strongest of the crews. Her voice is like Mother’s, though. Even when we were small, everyone in the neighborhood could hear her.”
“Does anyone else have a talent with the mandolin or with voice?”
“Father has a pleasant voice. He was the one who first taught me to play, but he dislikes sorcery, perhaps even more so than Mother, and I’ve never heard him sing.”
Secca winced. “What do they think about your consorting to a sorceress?”
“Nedya thinks that it’s for the best…” Alcaren grinned. “She said that it would be good for me to have someone who can understand me and keep me riding in the right direction.”
“How about your father?” Secca wasn’t sure she wanted to ask about what Alcaren’s mother thought.
“He hasn’t said much. He never does. He didn’t even shake his head or curse when I broke chisels and ruined stone blocks and broke clay molds. He knew I was trying, and that I just didn’t have the talent.” Alcaren’s lips curled ruefully.
“What did he say when you told him about us?”
“He just smiled, and said it was about time I found someone who could take care of me.”
“Take care of you?” blurted Secca.
“Remember? I’ve never proved particularly adept at what they think is important. My hands can finger a lumand or a mandolin, but not work clay or stone. I get sick on ships in rough water, and I never enjoyed counting up golds.”
The sorceress almost shook her head, thinking about how well Alcaren rode, how accomplished he was with a blade, how effectively he seemed to organize and lead people, and how much he knew. “And your mother?”
“She said that I was consorting well above my station, and that it was for the best, but that I should thank the harmonies and not get airs about it.” He was the one to shake his head. “She said that being your consort would be the most difficult task I’d ever tried.” The warm smile followed. “She might be right in that.”
“Now I’m difficult?” Secca raised her eyebrows.
“What you will attempt in attacking the Sturinnese has never been successful,” he pointed out. “Then, what you’ve already done has never been done, either.”
Secca frowned. Anna had done far greater sorceries and become the first woman regent truly to rule a northern land in Defalk.
“No one else has ever destroyed a Sea-Priest fleet at sea. Even your lady Anna only destroyed them at anchor in the harbor.”
“No one else was ever foolish enough to try.” Secca glanced toward the windows. “I suppose we should go. You said we would be there by midmorning?”
“Before midday.”
Secca turned toward her bedchamber to gather her riding jacket and her sabre, but Alcaren intercepted her and drew her into his arms.
“We do have to go,” she whispered.
“In a moment.”
It was a very long moment before he released her—or she released him.
By the time they had gotten their mounts from the stables, which were a good hundred yards behind the guest quarters and past the barracks that housed her lancers and the two companies of SouthWomen commanded by Alcaren, the cold rain had turned into an even finer mist. The formless gray clouds had lightened, and a cooler breeze swirled through the long, stone-paved courtyard. Infrequent light gusts of cool air alternated with warmer damper air.
“It will be colder tonight,” Alcaren said, as Secca mounted her gray.
“I like that better than rain,” she replied.
A discreet cough interrupted their conversation. “Lady, Overcaptain…”
Secca turned in the saddle.
Wilten stood by the stable door.
Beside him was the SouthWoman captain Delcetta. The strawberry blonde woman had an apologetic smile on her face. “We have taken the liberty of having a squad of lancers from Loiseau and one from the SouthWomen to escort you. They are drawn up and awaiting you. Also, your chief archer Elfens has requested to accompany you with several of his best archers.”
“The Ladies of the Shadows have not been released from the White Tower, have they?” asked Alcaren.
“No, ser. But we do not know all who may follow them,” replied Delcetta.
Wilten nodded, and added, “It is best that none think you unguarded.”
Would she seem more formidable guarded or unguarded? Secca wondered.
As she and Alcaren rode out of the courtyard, the lancers eased their mounts into position, leaving the two of them between the crimson-trimmed, dark blue riding jackets of the SouthWomen and the green of Loiseau. The measured clopping of hoofs echoed through the damp morning as the column headed between the neatly trimmed boxwood hedges that flanked the lane leading to the main avenue.
Secca glanced forward at the SouthWomen lancers leading the way, then at Elfens, riding behind the vanguard.
The tall archer seemed to feel Secca’s glance and twisted in the saddle, grinning as he offered an angled half bow.
Secca grinned and shook her head. After a moment, she turned in the saddle to take in the column behind them. “I feel almost like a prisoner.”
“You are,” Alcaren said with a laugh. “You’re a prisoner of your own power. None of us can afford to lose you.”
“Even you?”
“Me…most of all.”
Once out of the lane, they turned their mounts northward, in the direction of the Matriarch’s small palace. The misting rain stopped completely, but wisps of fog rose from the gray stones of the avenue, twisting into vague shapes in the seemingly more frequent bursts of cold air that had begun to chill the warmer damp air.
“What is your…your parents’ dwelling like?” Secca asked after a silence.
Astride the brown gelding that was almost the size of a raider beast, and far larger than Secca’s gray mare, Alcaren shrugged. “It is a dwelling with two small wings and a stable that will hold four mounts, perhaps five if we double stall in the front corner. We have no carriage. There is a small formal flower garden off the portico and a much larger vegetable garden. Father has his studio in a small outbuilding. It is all very modest.”
“Do you still have a chamber there?”
“I suppose so. I have left nothing there, but Father calls it my room.”
T
hey continued riding past the Matriarch’s palace and then turned onto another avenue that led uphill and to the northeast. Secca noted that some of the dwellings flanking the avenue were nearly as large as the Matriarch’s. None was small. “Is their dwelling on this side of the hill?”
Alcaren laughed. “I fear not. It is smaller and more to the south on the lesser hill.”
Secca nodded, but as they rode to the top of the hill and then followed a narrower way to the right and down onto a lower hill, the houses and grounds did not get much smaller. When they rode up into a stone-paved circular drive, Secca was scarcely surprised that the dwelling was more than the simple house Alcaren had suggested.
“Here we are,” announced her consort-to-be, gesturing toward the small villa with two wings branching from the circular and columned rotunda that dominated the stone-paved lane leading to the covered entry and the mounting blocks.
Alcaren reined up in front of the mounting blocks, leaving them to Secca. While she appreciated his courtesy as she dismounted, once more she felt almost patronized because of her small stature.
“Alcaren!” The young woman who hurried out through the columned archway was indeed small and wiry, perhaps even shorter than Secca herself, and more boyish in appearance. She glanced up at Secca and flashed the same warm smile that Secca had seen from Alcaren. “Lady Secca…” Then she laughed, warmly and openly. “Welcome…welcome.”
Secca tried to halt the inadvertently quizzical look that she could feel appearing on her face.
“Alcaren never said how beautiful you are,” Nedya rushed on. “Or that you were a redhead.”
Secca wondered what Alcaren had said, since, from what she’d seen and overheard from the younger women in her hold of Flossbend or at Loiseau, they seldom mentioned the physical beauty of women who might be rivals—or consorts to their brothers. Secca didn’t have an easy response, but managed to reply, “He’s probably had other things on his mind. He’s been helping me plan what we have to do next.” Realizing belatedly the ambiguity of her words, she added quickly, “Against the Sturinnese.”
“He talked about that,” Nedya admitted. After a moment, she said, “I’d keep you both out here in the cold chattering, but Mother and Father are waiting inside.”
“As patiently as ever, I am most sure,” Alcaren said dryly as he stepped up beside Secca. He glanced sideways at the sorceress. “Mother has never been known for her patience. She has other virtues, but not that.”
“And my older brother can be painfully honest,” replied Nedya. “His grace is that he is as unsparing of himself as of anyone else.”
“I’ve always found him the soul of care and tact,” Secca admitted.
Nedya raised her eyebrows. “For that alone, we should be thankful.” She spoiled the arch effect by smiling.
Secca handed the gray’s reins to Gorkon, who had ridden up behind them, but not dismounted. Then she walked side by side with Alcaren up the steps and through the door that Nedya had left open. The entry foyer was not large, a circular space four yards across with white-plastered walls and a floor tiled in a pattern of repeating hexagons of alternating white and dark blue. A single tapestry filled the blank wall directly opposite the doors, and the scene upon it was that of a full-masted ship under sail, rendered entirely in shades of blue, save for the golden-braided border.
The broad-shouldered older woman who stood just before the tapestry in the small foyer was a good head and a half taller than Alcaren. She had a weathered face somehow both squarish and angular. Her eyes were grayish blue like her son’s—except even more piercing. Beside her stood a smaller, slighter man with dark brown hair streaked with silver.
The woman spoke first. “I am Carenya, Lady Sorceress, and I welcome you to our dwelling.”
Secca inclined her head. “I am happy to meet you. Alcaren has spoken much of you and of your success as a trader.”
“Were it not for your efforts, I fear, none of us would be traders for much longer.” A wry smile, but one with warmth beneath, appeared with Carenya’s words.
“I am Todyl.” The man who stood in the archway to the left offered a broad smile. “Alcaren has said how talented you are, but he had not told us that you are also beautiful.”
Secca found herself blushing, as if she were fifteen years old, instead of more than twice that. “You are most kind, and so is Alcaren.”
“Do come in,” Carenya offered, turning and gesturing in the direction of the archway in which her consort stood. “We should not be standing in the foyer.” She paused. “It is damp outside. Would you like some warm cider? Or a hot brandy?”
“Cider, if it would not be too much trouble.”
“For me, also,” Alcaren added, almost apologetically.
The trader glanced at Nedya. “If you would…”
“I’ll be quick,” promised the young woman.
The sitting room beyond the archway was both as Secca had imagined it, and not at all the same. Given Alcaren’s description of his mother, she found the spareness unsurprising, but not the vivid reds and yellows infusing the few hangings on the plaster walls and the three brilliant green cushions on the all-wooden settee where she seated herself.
Alcaren sat down beside her, protectively, as Todyl and Carenya settled into unupholstered wooden armchairs across a bare low table from the settee.
“Alcaren has said that you are one of the Thirty-three of Defalk, both by ability and by birth.” Carenya offered the words as an opening, but without a tone of questioning.
“I am Lady of Flossbend. My father held the domain, but he died when I was a child, and both my mother and my brothers were poisoned by my uncle. The lady Anna defeated my uncle and restored the lands to me. I became a sorceress, and when Lady Anna died last fall, Loiseau came to me as her sorceress-heir.”
“If I might ask,” ventured Todyl, “what is your hold like?”
Secca smiled. “Neither Flossbend nor Loiseau is terribly large, just enough to support a small household and the lancers.”
“Lancers?” asked Carenya.
“The four companies of lancers in green are hers, not Lord Robero’s. She supports them and pays them,” Alcaren said quickly. “My lady is sometimes too modest.”
“Your lands cannot be that small, then,” suggested the trader.
“We do as we must in these troubled times,” Secca replied, not really knowing how she could answer the implied questions without being deceptive in some way or another, or revealing more than she had any desire to divulge.
Nedya hurried into the sitting room, bearing a tray on which were five mugs. Steam drifted from all five. She deftly set a mug before Secca, then before Alcaren. “Only because this is special,” she told her brother with the hint of a smile.
“I’ll do the same for you,” he whispered back.
“You’ll wait a long time, but I’ll hold you to it.” Nedya handed mugs to her parents, then sat on the stool at the end of the low table, cradling the mug between both hands.
There was a long silence.
“Besides fight battles,” asked Nedya abruptly, “what does a sorceress of Defalk do?”
Secca smiled. “Until the last two seasons, I had never fought a battle. In Defalk, sorcery is used to make life better for people. We build roads and bridges, sometimes buildings. Last fall I repaired an old dam and part of the aqueduct that provided water to the people of Issl. I have used sorcery to discover where a well might be dug.”
“That does not sound too taxing,” observed Carenya.
Secca tilted her head, wondering how she could explain. Finally, she began. “In one day, a sorceress and her players may be able to use sorcery to build one dek, perhaps two deks, of stone-paved road. That much sorcery will exhaust them. Defalk had no paved roads outside of Falcor when the lady Anna became regent. Today, there are more than a thousand deks of roads in Defalk. There is even one that travels most of the west of Defalk, from Nordfels to Denguic.” She paused. “It would ta
ke scores of men to build and pave a dek of road in a day. While sorcery can do such faster, it takes much effort and skill.”
“The roads improve travel and trade,” mused the trader.
“We also have had to build bridges and fords,” Secca added.
“Defalk had been the poorest of lands since the Spell-Fire Wars,” reflected Carenya, “but now…”
“Matters are better now,” Secca pointed out, “but Defalk is still far from wealthy. It has been more than a score of years since the terrible drought, and the land has still not fully recovered. Even my orchards do not produce what they did in the first years of Lord Brill.”
“You could have been a trader, lady,” replied Carenya with a slight laugh. “Nothing is as good as it could or should be.”
“How will you get to the ceremony?” asked Nedya quickly, as if to preempt another question by her parents. “It’s a long walk from the guest quarters to the Matriarch’s.”
Secca glanced at Alcaren, who met her inquiry with raised eyebrows. Then, he finally shrugged.
“I would guess that we’ll ride,” Secca replied. “I haven’t seen any carriages or coaches in Encora.”
“There aren’t any,” Nedya said. “Unless you count the wagons with benches.”
“It’s an old custom,” explained Todyl. “The Mynyan lords used carriages shielded with sorcery. No one has ever used a coach since.”
Secca nodded slowly. Just as she thought she understood Ranuak better, something like the matter of carriages popped up. Then, she should have guessed from the tailoring of the gown sent by the Matriarch.
Wondering how many other surprises she would discover in the course of the afternoon, Secca smiled and asked Carenya, “How did you become a trader?”
“That was easy enough. Once I could stand, my mother put me on the deck beside her…”
Secca nodded and continued to listen.
7
While the sun shone through a high and thin haze, the chill breeze out of the northeast reminded Secca that, even in Encora, the season was not yet spring. She and Alcaren rode at the head of the column, preceded only by four of the Matriarch’s guards, and followed immediately by Wilten and Richina, with a company of lancers in the green of Loiseau bringing up the rear.
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