Time of Daughters I

by Sherwood Smith

  “Then you heard wrong,” Lineas said, as the other two runners-in-training kept weeding. She bent over to yank a stickleback. “I don’t know any of you. I certainly haven’t talked to you, so whatever you heard didn’t come from me.”

  The second twin, who alternately sympathized with his Gannan cousin, and privately thought that he could use a dose more of what he’d apparently gotten in the tunnel (which he wished he’d seen) crooned, “I heard you scrapped with Gannan here.”

  “No. We bumped into each other.”

  Gannan shot her a puzzled frown. She didn’t act like the whirlwind she’d been that day.

  But then came, “What’s happening here, Big Mouth? These feet giving you lip?”

  Feet, Lineas had learned, was academy slang for runners in training.

  All six looked up at the boy sauntering their way. Tall at nearly sixteen, Manther Yvanavayir looked old and tough to their eyes.

  Gannan refused to answer, dead set against accepting Big Mouth as a nickname. None of the bigger boys had used it until now, so he had to squash it—and yet you ignored the bigger boys at your peril.

  Lefty Poseid didn’t mind teasing his cousin, but stopped at involving older boys. He said quickly, “Just some talk with Red here.”

  “That’s Pimple,” Gannan snarled, unable to let the earlier grudge go. “She’s Pimple.”

  “That the fuzz that dumped you on your butt, Gannan?” Manther sneered. “What is she, six?”

  “She caught me off-guard,” Gannan retorted, relieved that Yvanavayir had used his name.

  Lineas’s lips shaped the first word of That’s a lie, but she caught Fnor’s warning glance as she and Cama kept working as if no one were there. Lineas forced herself to kneel again, and feel with shaking fingers around a cabbage for weed tufts.

  “Nothing to say, Pimple?” Gannan goaded, this time kicking her directly in the side.

  It was not a bruising kick, but strong enough to knock her into the dirt. She fought the instinct to roll to her feet, hands up and ready, and forced herself to tumble flat.

  He came at her again, tromping two cabbages as he leaned down to swat at her, for he’d been raised to take out his anger on those below.

  Lineas knew how to deflect blows, but Gannan was faster than her fellow runners-in-training, who were all so careful not to hurt each other in drills. She flung herself aside, as one of the twins hissed in protest at the cabbages Gannan kicked up.

  Gannan didn’t even see. Being a jarl’s son, he had never gone anywhere near the kitchen garden at home—unlike the twins, who along with all the youngsters of Riders and castle staff had to help at harvest time, and when small, in the kitchen garden all spring and summer.

  Lineas scrambled away, mindful of Cama’s advice, but Gannan just kept coming, trying to provoke her. One of Gannan’s slaps caught the side of her ear, and she rolled away, her ear stinging. “Ow!” she shrilled, then caught Cama’s covert smirk of encouragement, and howled, “That hu-u-u-u-u-urts!”

  “I barely touched you,” Gannan retorted. “What a rabbit!”

  “But you’re so tough,” Manther said goadingly, laughing at how easy it was to fetch Big Mouth.

  Gannan caught himself up short, completely thrown by this unexpected attack, when he’d just proved that he wasn’t a coward, and that he could beat the snot out of the brat.

  “Go away.” Lineas hated the way her voice quavered. It was not fear, but anger. She reminded herself of Cama’s window, and shrilled, “Go away!”

  “Go away,” Fnor added, arms crossed, a short, stolid figure with ash-blonde braids.

  The academy boys knew they were breaking rules, if not bounds, and there was nothing whatsoever warlike in Fnor or Lineas kneeling there, twelve years old, feet bare because summer weeding was so much easier barefoot.

  But Gannan—who saw himself not as a bully but as a victim—couldn’t let it go. He couldn’t lose, he was right. He scowled at Lineas. “Stand up and fight, Pimple,” he snarled.

  Lineas bit back her anger. She was a veteran of a pair of roaming bullies in Darchelde, who’d had a talent for catching their victims out of sight of anyone who might defend them. She knew from hard experience what escalation cost.

  Where was the supervising kitchen staff, she wondered as she dodged another kick.

  Not a hundred paces away and coming fast, running alongside the roaming patrol sentry, who had been flagged by a wall sentry.

  The sudden adult voices caused all six children to recoil, startled into stillness.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded the sentry.

  “Who ruined these cabbages?” demanded the kitchen runner.

  “He did!” All three runners in training pointed at Gannan. The twins just stood by, stiff as posts, hoping to remain unnoticed. Yvanavayir laughed—then choked it off as the sentry crooked his finger at him.

  “You’re all going to the watch commander,” the sentry said, annoyed at his utterly unnecessary hot run during summer. “On the double.”

  “And I’ll be lodging a complaint about the damage,” the kitchen runner added, pointing at the ruined cabbages.

  The boys slunk away, arguing and protesting all the way.

  The kitchen runner squinted against the sun at the rest of the unfinished weeding and the scattered cabbages, and said to the fledglings, “Let’s see if we can rescue any of these.”

  Silent, the young runners bent to do what they could to replant the cabbages, then they were sent to fetch buckets of water from the canal. Lineas’s fingers ached as they lugged buckets of water from the canal to the vegetables.

  They were all drenched with sweat and bursting to talk when at last the watch bell clanged, the kitchen runner dismissed them, and they were finally alone.

  After thoroughly and repeatedly reviling against the academy boys, Fnor said with gloomy satisfaction, “What you want to bet they got dusted?”

  “How many, do you think?” Cama asked.

  “A hundred, I hope,” Fnor retorted. “Two hundred.”

  Lineas’s head pounded by the time she entered the cool, shadowy building and stood in the mess line.

  But her headache was forgotten after she sat down, and Quill stopped to say, “Cama told me what happened. Good job!”

  Lineas hadn’t meant to say anything, but out came the words, “He kept calling me Pimple. They’re all going to do it.” Tears threatened. She had grown up hearing the horrible nicknames of famous Noth elders.

  “They might try,” Quill said. “If you don’t like it, don’t answer. And all of us will say ‘who’? until they drop it. He hasn’t the sway to make it stick.”

  You like Quill? Lineas thought miserably as he went away to join his own table. But it would never occur to her to question anything Senrid said.

  The older girls at home had laughed at her when she admitted to her first crush, at age eight. She still remembered that black-haired shepherd’s boy and his turned-up nose.

  “Oh, you’re in love,” Haret had cooed, laughing. “Because all seven-year-olds are so-o-o-o-o-o experienced with heats.”

  And tall Chelis had said kindly, though patronizingly, “What you say, Lineas, is that you hope you will be friends. Heats aren’t appropriate until you’re out of smocks,” she added with a squelching look at Haret, “and have at least a faint idea what that means. Same with ‘in love.’”

  Lineas had crept away from those tall, knowledgeable twelve-year-olds, no longer wanting to explain how much she liked looking at Keth the Shepherd, and how, when he looked at her, he made her feel outlined in light.

  But one day he’d shoved a snowball down her neck after she brought him a tart made from the last apples, and he’d howled with laughter as she danced around trying to shake it loose.

  After that she wondered how she had missed how mean his grin was, and her infatuation withered. At nine, she was in love with Lnand, the miller’s second daughter. Lnand was eleven, and everybody said she was the prett
iest girl in Darchelde, and had the best singing voice.

  Whatever Lineas did to try to please her, Lnand accepted with the calm smile of one who knows what is due to her, and finally Lineas noticed how many other people also gave Lnand gifts, and tried to get her attention. Lnand gave them all that smile that Lineas gradually sensed was smug, though as yet she didn’t know the word.

  After that, Senrid came to visit his mothers, and lightning struck again.

  In her journal that night, Gannan and Yvanavayir got a paragraph of insult-laden description, and the rest of her scribbling was about Q and how pretty his flyaway hair was and how wonderfully he played the drums on Restday.

  While she was busy writing, Commander Noth had been pulled away from the staff wardroom, and his all-too-rare rec time. He joined the headmaster in facing the boys, who sat there with a variety of expressions from sulky to grim endurance. They had been left to stew all day, and all knew what was coming.

  Noth compressed his lips against a brief impulse to laughter. They reminded him so much of young animals. They were young animals, somewhere between lanky pups and colts, exhibiting the unconscious grace of strength and skill when enjoying themselves in the sun and wind, but seeing no further than their noses. They should have known the inevitable consequence of their actions, but boys typically looked little beyond some version of We won’t get caught.

  “The headmaster,” he said without preliminary, “tells me that your rec periods from now until the Great Game will be in the stable. And you’ll shortly be getting ten reminders of the price of stupidity from me, so brace your shoulders, boys. But before that. Yvanavayir. Next spring you’ll be a senior, handling lances, and—ostensibly—commanding ridings in wargames. I can’t believe someone who has been here six years could act like a scrub.”

  Stung into self-righteous defense, Yvanavayir protested, “I didn’t do anything!”

  “No, you stood there goading Gannan into recklessness, which he obediently complied with. Gannan, do you need to go back with the ten and eleven-year-olds to learn basic rules?”

  Gannan flushed. “No, Commander.”

  “Meanwhile, none of you seemed to be aware that you were harassing the runners-in-training who were busy working on raising the food you eat every day.”

  Sulky, resentful gazes dropped to the stone floor. They were on the verge of shutting Noth out as they nursed resentment and mentally spun out all kinds of retribution on one another and the hapless runners-in-training.

  So he tried again.

  He snapped his fingers, and they looked up, startled. “Imagine ten years from now. The king calls us to war, say, up north.”

  They looked puzzled and wary, but they were listening.

  “We might even be meeting the Venn, or the Chwahir, or some other empire-seekers in the Pass, where too many of our ancestors bled out their lives. You fight all day, maybe take a couple of bad wounds. The weather turns foul, because it’s always going to turn foul on you. The medics are spread too thin. Your personal runner is dead, defending you on the left—”

  “But—” Gannan began to protest.

  “Your personal runner,” Noth sharpened his voice, “is dead. There’s no one around but royal runners. ‘Feet.’” His teeth showed when he repeated the word. That predatory flash of white was not pleasant to see.

  He paused. Their mulish expressions had not changed, but the angles of heads, the tight shoulders, indicated they were still listening.

  “The royal runners bandage who they can, and set up tents as fast as they can, and take away bloody clothes to mend, then, while you’re lying nice and dry, they’re over at the cook tent fetching water and food—maybe helping with the cooking. And while you’re asleep, who’s riding to the royal city with news of the battle?”

  Yvanavayir’s eyes shifted.

  “These are not Iascans who not-so-secretly despise us, or foreigners who endure us. They are fellow Marlovans, with the same pride, who sing the same songs at Restday and Victory Day—but all during their training years, who treated them like enemies?”

  He leaned over to pick up the ash switch. As he cracked it experimentally on the air, he added, “Gannan, every Restday until you go home, you will report to the kitchens, and do whatever they tell you. It seems that you are unaware of where the food comes from that appears before you each mess, and how much work went into putting it there. Now, Yvanavayir. You first, while my arm is fresh.”

  FOUR

  For Gannan, the first Restday was the worst.

  He was convinced that the entire academy, all enjoying themselves at their ease, were laughing at him trudging to the kitchen gardens behind a tall, grim-faced woman wearing the apron of kitchen staff.

  As is often true, others are far less interested in our movements than their own, unless we’ve become notorious. Being stuck with kitchen duty was good for a laugh, but most of the academy had forgotten long before the marks on the boys’ shoulder blades faded.

  That first Restday, the adults in charge made certain that Gannan would be alone so that he would not be distracted from the lesson in garden protocols. Also, both kitchen and garrison chiefs agreed that making the boy work hard would get the point across.

  He was acutely miserable, his ears red with vexation and shame, as he began work that was unfamiliar to his hands. But one thing about weeding: it’s simple, and repetitive, and as time slid by under the hot sun, and no one came around to poke fun at him, he actually...didn’t hate it as much as he’d expected to.

  His back still ached—and that was before he had to lug pails of water to his assigned rows—but he, like the rest of the boys, lived in an atmosphere in which muscle ache equated with the gaining of strength.

  When he returned to the academy for Restday drum, the others knew exactly how far to go with teasing lest they get themselves into trouble, and his worst enemy, Olavayir Tvei, wasn’t even there. He and his royal Ain (for the academy had resurrected the ancient practice of number brothers in birth order: ain, tvei) were up in the castle, doing Restday with the king and queen. The princes always returned at lights out.

  And so things settled down to routine for the next couple of weeks, until Connar decided enough time had passed.

  It was Gannan’s fourth weekend, and probably his last, since the entire academy would ride out for the Great Game the next week, following which would be the Victory Day competitions and then home till next spring.

  Connar said to Noddy, “Let’s go see Big Mouth grubbing in the garden.”

  Noddy accepted this suggestion, as Connar knew he would, and so they set out, Connar leading them the long way around past the back end of the stable yard, and behind the weavers’ buildings, where linen stuff soaked and dried. As they skipped over a low wall intended to keep sheep from wandering in, they caught sight of Chief Weaver Hliss at the same time she saw them.

  She stood by the dye shed, her hands pressing into her lower back, her huge stomach sticking out. “Hai, boys,” she cried, smiling wearily, for it was the hottest day of summer so far, still and humid. “What are you doing?”

  “Just walking around, Aunt Hliss,” Connar called. “It’s too hot for anything else.”

  “Don’t wander beyond the back barns,” she warned. “Sunset’s not far off.”

  “We won’t,” Connar promised, and Noddy echoed, “We won’t.”

  She smiled and turned away to speak to someone, as the acrid smells of dye wafted in the thick air.

  “I think it’s going to thunder,” Noddy ventured.

  Connar ignored that with a lifetime’s habit—Noddy was always making obvious remarks about animals, the weather, and everything else that had nothing to do with their evolving plans now.

  “Slow down,” Connar breathed. “We’re just wandering around.”

  Both boys knew that the wall sentries as well as the patrols always watched them, or rather, watched over them. They knew it was for their safety; as yet it had never occurred to think bey
ond that for other motivations, any more than they perceived how laughably predictable boys their age were.

  Everyone in the lower academy knew about the feud between Gannan and Connar, which had originated when they were ten-year-olds when Gannan tried to gain the admiration of their fellow first year scrubs by calling Noddy Rockhead. Of course Connar would want to see Gannan grubbing among the vegetables.

  So they moseyed along toward the kitchen gardens, as if it were a surprise to find themselves there.

  Gannan, by now practiced enough for his hands to keep busy while his mind wandered, had been trying to count up the days since the Restday meal had included honey cakes. His count broke when he heard the crunch of footsteps. He looked up, scowling—then gloated when he saw who it was. When he’d cut through the garrison on his way to the garden, he’d been stopped by a garrison runner in training who shared a juicy rumor. Gannan had been saving it for the academy, but this would do.

  “Big Mouth,” Connar exclaimed with a fake start of surprise. “All alone? What happened, scare off all the six-year-old feet?”

  Simmering with anticipation, Gannan snarled, “You’re out of bounds.”

  “It’s Restday.” Connar flicked his hand down his House tunic with the eagle embroidered on the front, a reminder that the princes attended Restday with their parents. “And when we’re in civ, the whole castle belongs to us. There are no bounds.”

  Noddy opened his mouth to point out that that was not true—they were not permitted in the state wing, or the third floor—but Connar, knowing his elder brother’s proclivity for extraneous details, dug a warning elbow into his side, and gave Gannon a toothy grin.

  And Gannon shot his hoarded bolt. “Nothing will belong to you if the weaver chief has a boy. And won’t we laugh!”

  “Huh?” Noddy looked puzzled and Connar wary.

  Gannon dropped his handful of weeds and sat back on his heels, giving a hearty, scornful laugh. “Are you too stupid to know what everybody knows? That child inside the weaver chief is the king’s, and you aren’t. If it’s a boy, he’ll be a real prince, and you’ll be nothing! Ha ha ha!”