Time of Daughters I

by Sherwood Smith

  “Order is what I want, too,” Arrow said, then added, “We.” With a hand opened toward Jarend, whose well-deep voice rumbled, “That’s right.”

  Arrow could hear his Da. “Lock down the castle, trusted men at every intersection. Say orders are coming.”

  “From?” Noth prompted.

  Camerend interjected smoothly, “Perhaps all the Olavayirs should be seen united in the throne room, if the all-castle summons is rung.”

  Captain Noth grimaced as he glanced down at Evred, then up again. “I know who to talk to first. Who’ll make sure there’s order. Before the news gets to the Royal Riders.” His gaze rested somewhere between Arrow and Jarend. “There are three times more of us than there are of them, right now; maybe it’s a good thing that company rode out this morning.”

  Arrow nudged his brother, and Jarend said obediently, “That sounds right.”

  Noth turned, a flare of coat skirts. “Then I’d better get at it,” he said, and ran down the stairs.

  Camerend lifted his gaze to Arrow and Jarend. He spoke gently. “When the bells ring the all-castle summons, which I am very certain Noth will see to once he positions the garrison sentries and the city patrol. You must be prepared to speak. What you say, how you say it, will be carried through the doors into the kingdom.” He glanced down. “As for them, leave the fallen to us. You can promise a proper memorial come midnight. We’ll see to it they are properly prepared.”

  Arrow was glad for any excuse to leave. “Jarend, first thing, we need to tell Danet and Tdor Fath.”

  Jarend’s jaw muscles had begun bulging again. But the mention of his wife caused a slight easing, and Jarend followed as Arrow led the way down the stairs, trying to figure out what to say first.

  At the landing, he saw his own Riders standing in ill-fitting runner gray-blue, all eyes going to the blood splattered across his front.

  “What’s going on?” Sneeze asked, low-voiced. “People running around. Some with weapons out.”

  Arrow resisted the impulse to wipe his still-sticky hands down his ruined coat and said to the expectant faces, “Mathren is dead. He killed Evred. Don’t say anything to anybody, just go and raise the rest of eagle-clan Riders. No dolphins. Be ready for anything. When the bell rings, if there’s no trouble, report to the throne room. And you can put your own coats back on.”

  They tapped two fingers to their chests and ran downstairs. Two fingers. It was then that Arrow remembered how vague Captain Noth’s salute had been, and that he hadn’t saluted at all when he departed.

  The truth slowly dawned on him, that as Evred’s heir—by treaty between the two Olavayir families, made twenty-some years ago—Jarend was now not just the new Jarl of Olavayir, but the king.

  Jarend was the king.

  Well, unless someone else ran around the corner, sword in hand. Then there’d just be two more corpses for the memorial.

  Arrow lengthened his steps, Jarend breathing hard as he stumped along beside. When they reached the suite, they found Danet and Tdor Fath each holding a sleeping boy in one arm and a knife in the other. Tesar had ranged herself beside Danet, also armed. Nunka stood behind them burdened with heavy bags, ready to go.

  To the row of wide, questioning eyes, Arrow said, “Mathren is dead. So is Evred....” And he described everything in a backtracking, repeating ramble, until Jarend stirred, and swung his head Arrow’s way, his eyes as puffy and red-rimmed as the knuckles on his right hand. He finished carefully, “And so by rights, Jarend here is king.”

  Jarend worked his jaw, then, “Arrow, I don’t want to be king. I want to go home.”

  Tdor Fath’s eyes closed. Tears glimmered in her lashes and slipped down her cheeks.

  Danet flicked a puzzled glance from one to the other, and Arrow saw the exact moment she understood what they meant.

  Tdor Fath turned to Jarend, and handed Rabbit’s limp form to him. “Could you put him down in his bed, Jarend, since it seems we won’t have to escape this very moment?”

  Jarend bowed his head, carefully took his son, and shuffled into the next room.

  Tdor Fath shut the door behind him and said, “Please, Arrow. Please send us back. Jarend knows what to do, at home. He gets these headaches when things change around him. He grew up expecting someday to be jarl, and his mother is there, and Sdar, and all the Riders Lanrid didn’t like, which probably means the ones Jarend likes. Please, please.”

  “I don’t want to be king either,” Arrow snapped. “I don’t know the first thing about being king. I’ve had enough bad dreams about not being able to figure out anything Da ordered me to discover. How am I supposed to command a kingdom?”

  “Evred knew much less than you do,” Tdor Fath stated, her voice unsteady. “And Jarend never trained for being king either. He was heir only in name, for a treaty that was a bandage over a wound in the family that Mathren’s branch never would let heal, that’s what the jarlan always said.”

  No one was going to argue with that.

  Then she turned to Danet, swallowed a sob, and firmed her voice with an effort. “Right now, what Ranor-Jarlan always says is, the kingdom is really a lot of petty kings. The jarls can do anything they want. They need a king who can fix that, but also they need a gunvaer who can organize. And there is nobody I have ever met in my life who would be better at that than you.”

  “But...” Danet began, as she handed a sleeping Noddy carefully to Gdan.

  Tdor pressed her hands against her eyes. “Don’t say anything about tradition. What traditions are left? Assassinations? It’s happened twice in one generation—and once when our parents were young. I think whatever you do is going to be better than Mathren or Evred.”

  “That’s not what Mathren’s Riders will think,” Arrow said. “I’ll wager you anything half the Royal Riders are in that damned private army.”

  “That can’t be helped right now. It sounds like that royal runner went to the right captain, which means that the royal runners might be in favor of your taking the throne. Because he could just as easily have sent Mathren’s people up to that tower to attack the both of you. Clearly not all the guards are Mathren’s.”

  Arrow was going to point out that the royal runners were powerless—mere runners—but the women knew that. He knew they had no more answers than he did. He turned around in a circle, trying to comprehend as vast a world change as anything in his life. King? It seemed a joke, or a bad dream. Where were the great heroes of old, who always knew exactly what to do?

  But this was now, and as his father had said many times, the days of heroes were over. There was just them, and what was that Mathren said about Lanrid being massacred by Idegans—a king would have to deal with that. But there was no king’s army, not unless he raised the jarls….

  “Norsunder take it, I don’t even know where to start,” Arrow said, his voice cracking. “Why does there even have to be a king? Aren’t there places with no kings? Why can’t we do that? Everybody goes home. Takes care of their own.”

  Danet could hear her mother’s dry voice. “Because they won’t just go home and take care of their own. Because even if you call the king a chief, or a guild chief over guild chiefs, or a...herald, or whatever other people call them, someone always wants to hand out orders. Better to choose them if you can. A riding of nine has a riding captain. The artisans have a guild chief. The holders and market towns have a jarl. The jarls have a king.”

  Tdor Fath added, “Better to have someone handing out good orders, rather than someone like Mathren, killing and lying and having private armies.” She thumbed the tears from her eyes. “You know Jarend will do his duty if you tell him to. But he’ll always look to you. Or if you go back to Nevree, he’ll trust whoever is kind to his face. Whatever they said behind his back. You know that.”

  It was Arrow’s turn to drop his gaze, remembering how, when they were boys, if Arrow wasn’t on the watch, Lanrid had figured out how to sic his followers on Jarend, flattering and following him until they
got him to do something they all thought was hilarious. They’d fooled him most of the time, because Jarend had a good heart. A clean heart. He always believed people were better than they really were.

  But he would no longer be fooled at home if Lanrid was really dead. Jarend would have their mother and Tdor Fath to look out for him. The household, too, now that Lanrid’s own followers were much diminished. Arrow knew they all loved Jarend, because he was steady, and kind, strong as a river, and always wanted to do the right thing.

  Arrow turned to Danet.

  They faced one another across that room, both feeling similar emotions: how sometimes it felt they had known one another since childhood, and other times they were strangers. How neither had ever foreseen anything like this situation.

  Danet’s gaze caught on Arrow’s sleeve, as if noting small things would somehow make sense of this strange version of the world. It was Arrow’s second best coat, with the left sleeve still slightly longer than than the right, and she had meant to fix it once the wargame was over. Better than looking at that horrible dark spray down the front. She didn’t want to know whose blood that was.

  She crossed her arms, feeling exactly as lost as he did, except for two things: first, the inner itch to wade into those archives, and second, the knowledge of what Mother would have to say about shirking duty.

  “If you do it, I’ll figure out the kingdom tallies,” she vowed. “Whatever else is going on, a kingdom has to have a treasury, and a record of what comes in and what goes out.”

  Arrow turned away again, trying to hide the flare of fury. He knew that he’d let her decide, and she had decided. What’s more, she’d chosen what was right—if anything could be called right in this mess—and not what he wanted, which was to go back home to the life he’d grown up to expect, and had been missing every day since their arrival.

  He yanked off the blood-stippled coat and threw it down. In his shirt, riding trousers and boots he stalked to the nursery and plunged his hands into the ensorcelled diaper bucket to rid himself of the last of the blood. When he slouched back in, wiping his hands on his pants, he said heavily, “Everybody better put on their House tunics. We’ll figure out what to say as we hike down to the throne room.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Later on, Danet remembered only shards of that hasty throne room assembly. First, stepping onto the dais in a vast chamber of stone with banners and shields on the walls below a high gallery under a vaulted ceiling. The throne room was so cold that even the entire castle population filling it, standing shoulder to shoulder, did no more than make the honey-colored stone of the walls darken with moisture.

  Danet stood at one side of the throne on which the frail old grand gunvaer sat, and stared down at her scraped and dusty boots, holding her breath in expectation of being shot or stabbed.

  Every shuffle and scrape, every whisper seemed imbued with threat, or derision. She sensed an equal tension in Arrow next to her, and eventually heard his voice, but the words he and the others spoke could have been in another language. She was too giddy, and too bewildered, to make sense of anything except her own two feet below her.

  On stepping up onto that dais, Arrow had shared that same sick, grim sense that they were walking straight into ambush. The dais, to him, meant he presented a clear target.

  But, though he knew he was no king, neither was he a coward.

  So he stood braced for attack before the entire castle population, as the gunvaer stated in her thin voice that the former Commander of the Royal Riders had broken oath and struck down the unarmed Evred-Sierlaef as well as his blind first runner, which caused a murmur: most of the guards and all the castle staff had liked gentle old Mard.

  As she spoke, Arrow forced himself to look back at all those staring eyes, and began to resolve the mass into individuals, and then to perceive patterns, specifically how Captain Noth stood at the front, flanked by those who had to be his allies among the captains, and Arrow suspected he’d salted his most trusted men among the mass gathered behind. He knew those subtle signs of eye and chin. They were all watching certain others, whose tight faces gave away leashed anger, or grief.

  He began to perceive that Camerend Montredavan-An, in choosing Noth to report to, had been more aware of the inner workings of the castle garrison than maybe the guards knew themselves. But then, runners would know such things, passing in and out where others couldn’t go, for years.

  The grand gunvaer, who only saw a blur of faces except for a slender flame drifting toward her, ended by stating that there had been a witness, who would now testify to what he had seen and heard.

  She gestured, and Tarvan, lurking behind Jarend on the other side of the throne, stepped out, his armpits prickling. He’d always been aware of being the smallest and ugliest of the runners in training, sent to serve with old Mard because the Commander Mathren despised him. Now he was suddenly the focus of the entire staff—it felt like the entire kingdom—and having all those eyes on him was acutely painful. Camerend had done what he could to bolster the boy’s wavering courage, by rehearsing with him on the long walk to the throne room.

  Tarvan spoke those words in a shrill rush. Only the front heard, but they whispered to those behind. The key words were Mathren’s deliberate lies, and the fact that Jarend—unarmed—had felled him with one blow, though the commander still gripped his bloody sword, ready to kill again.

  All eyes turned to Jarend, whom they knew was Evred’s heir. Both Royal Riders and, when they went out to drill, the royal guard, had been drilling with the huge, silent young man for weeks, and had discussed his physical strength among themselves where their captains couldn’t hear. Not everyone was loyal to Mathren, especially those passed over for the Royal Riders, or promotion to one of the garrisons. One blow? Hah. Those who had endured ferocious floggings for what they regarded as tiny infractions quietly reveled, wishing they’d seen it happen.

  For Arrow, first came hope, then a gradual and amazed acceptance, as Jarend, racked with grief, looked as impressive as he ever would in his life: he uttered no laughter, or betrayed unease, for when he knew what to do, he did it. And the whispers were still ringing outward, Took out Mathren with a single punch.

  With utter conviction, Jarend said, “As Evred’s heir. Stipulated by treaty. I as king will give only one command. That is that my brother Ar, ah, Anred, here, remain as king. I will return to Olavayir as jarl. And only come if the king calls us to war.”

  Glances flashed between Noth and his allies and they sent up a shout, eagerly joined by Arrow’s Riders. More joined, though some remained silent, angry, bewildered, and a few afraid. Arrow continued to pick out individual faces, and with an invisible gut-thump recognized Retren Hauth, a distant relation through Lanrid’s branch of the Olavayirs, promoted to lance master when Lanrid got his promotion.

  Hauth looked as pale as his hair, except for his one eye ringed with the dark skin of exhaustion, the other covered by a patch. Arrow remembered Noth saying something about Hauth having arrived that morning from the north. He had to be the one who’d brought Mathren the news of Lanrid’s death.

  Arrow looked up. Now everybody was staring at him. Time for his own speech.

  He sucked in a breath.

  All his life he’d lived in the shadow of bigger, stronger boys, Jarend at his side, and Lanrid against them. He had no notion that he’d grown into a straight-backed, taut figure in his own right. He would never be beautiful, but he looked as much like a young king as could be expected as he said, “We’ll assemble here at midnight, then, for the memorial Disappearance, and I’ll take oath as king. Captain Noth, dismiss the guard, and have them patrol the castle. You, Hauth, give me a report on what happened up north.”

  And so Anred-Harvaldar gave his first orders.

  Retren Hauth limped painfully forward, and in front of half a dozen lingering ears, gave Arrow a vivid report on the massacre.

  At the end, Arrow said, “What do you know about this private army Mathren ha
s been raising?”

  Everyone in earshot, already riveted stepped closer, shock ringing through them.

  Hauth said quickly, stolidly, “There is no such thing.”

  “Yes there is,” Arrow shot back.

  Hauth’s gaze shifted away. “I never heard of it. I was Lance Captain in Nevree. You know that.”

  Arrow did. But as he stared at the man, he realized that further questions were useless. How could he prove anything Hauth said was true? It was becoming more clear by the hour that Mathren had lived in a world of lies, which would be supported by everyone loyal to Mathren.

  He waved Hauth off, unaware of how the news about the private army began burning through garrison guards, city guards, and perhaps most damaging of all, through the Royal Riders.

  Arrow muttered under his breath to Camerend, “Isn’t there some stuff like green kinthus, but stronger, that makes you tell the truth?”

  Camerend said, “White kinthus. But I do not know that anyone in the castle, maybe even the city has any. It’s extremely dangerous. Hauth is still recovering from severe wounds. He probably wouldn’t survive a single dose. My suggestion is to avoid using it unless you are truly convinced that the individual in question isn’t telling the truth.”

  Arrow wasn’t sure. That was the whole point. But then he remembered Mathren’s office, still guarded, and said, “Never mind.”

  By then Hauth was nearly at the door, having slowed his steps; he had made his report, but instead of swearing vengeance against the Idegans for their treachery, that idiot Arrow had brought up Nighthawk Company.

  A day or two later, when Jarend’s runner came down to the barracks to call for volunteers to return to Olavayir as the new jarl’s honor guard, Hauth was first in line; it would be easy to vanish along the road, and make his way to Nighthawk Company’s training ground, where they must decide what to do with their commander dead, and his plans in smoking ruin.

  TWENTY-TWO

  And so I have given you the truth behind the infamous Night of Four Kings. (The third being Mathren, for even less time than Jarend.)