Time of Daughters I

by Sherwood Smith

  Connar stared, too stunned to move, then fury ignited, but before he could launch himself onto Gannon, Noddy caught his arm in his much stronger grip, his other hand making the two-fingered sign for eyes. Connar remembered the sentries who of course were watching, and enough of the white heat subsided for him to take in Gannon’s triumphant grin at having fetched him.

  Connar curled his lip in scorn. “You’re stupid, Big Mouth.” Then, seeing no reaction to that nickname, he observed in light-toned sarcasm that cut like glass, “Look at you, enjoying yourself grubbing in those cabbages. Right where you belong. Cabbage. Let’s go, Noddy.” He turned, and as he started away, kicked up a spray of soil into Gannon’s face.

  He walked away, his righteous fury intensified by doubt.

  When they were out of earshot, he said, “What did he mean by that?”

  Noddy shrugged. “You know not to believe anything Big Mouth says.”

  “Cabbage. From now on, he’s Cabbage.”

  Noddy said equably, “All right.”

  Connar brooded. He’d always known he was adopted. Well, he remembered finding out when he was around five, when the stable chief was about to have a baby and he’d asked his mother how long he’d had to stay inside her. She’d said he was inside someone else, but Ma and Da wanted him as a son, and so he came to them. She’d said, “Me and you, we’re both adopted. People come into a family in two ways, birth and adoption. And there are two kinds of birth.”

  That was already more than he wanted to know, but Ma’s voice reassured him, and so he’d run out to play again. But he remembered it now and then, like on Noddy’s and Bun’s Name Days, when some old person or other would bring up how Noddy was born at a Great Game, or how Bunny had come during a terrific thunderstorm. But nobody said anything about his birth on his Name Day, because nobody was there.

  He didn’t even know when his true Name Day was, but he liked having it on Spring Firstday. Ma had said, “We picked that day because everybody celebrates it. So everybody celebrates your Name Day.”

  He hadn’t thought much about it since then. He had no interest in what the adults did, if it didn’t impact what the boys were doing. But lately he’d noticed how Aunt Hliss sat beside Da for many meals, and sometimes she wasn’t there, and Commander Noth was sometimes there, sitting next to Ma. It all had something to do with favorites and mates and sex, which were as remote as the idea of being grown up.

  For the first time, as he and Noddy trudged through the garrison in the simmering heat, he began to put together favorites, sex, and birth. It was still confusing.

  When they reached the top of the stairs, Connar said, “Go find Bun, and get our horses saddled. We can ride before the watch change.”

  Though Noddy was the physical defender, Connar had been the leader of their games since they were small. Noddy turned obediently and ran off.

  Connar sped down the hall toward the royal suites. Ma could be anywhere on most days, but on Restday she almost always stayed in, writing letters.

  She was deep in composition, a letter she’d put off since the Restday previous. She hated writing to the Jarlan of Feravayir, who packed her letters with Sartoran phrases, and who seemed incapable of stating a straightforward truth. When dealing with the woman, Danet never forgot Arrow telling her that the jarlan was reported as having said that she was Queen of Perideth.

  Writing to her was a battle sentence by sentence, so Danet glanced up impatiently when her door burst open, and there was Connar, his startlingly blue eyes wide, the fine black hair escaped from his tied-back hair lying across his high forehead in damp strands.

  His distraught expression, with the anger flattening his arched brows, turned a half-formed sentence to smoke. “What’s wrong?”

  “That baby inside Aunt Hliss. If it’s a boy, will he be a prince, a real prince, instead of me? Because Da is his da?”

  Danet laid aside her pen, her mind working rapidly. This was the second time she’d been caught off-guard, expecting this sort of question later. The first had been when Connar and Noddy were around five.

  “You are a real prince,” she said. “What bonehead put the idea into your head that you aren’t?”

  Connar’s gaze dropped. “One of the boys.” While he loved the idea of royal retribution on Gannan, he knew what everyone else would say about snitches, and anyway it would be extra horrible if the beaks landed on Gannan for it. Then Gannan would know he’d got to Connar. Which would be worse than a thousand tortures and death by fire.

  “Well, you ought to know better than to listen to them. First of all, boy or girl, that baby is Aunt Hliss’s. It won’t be adopted into the Olavayirs. It will be a Farendavan, unless it adopts into some other family later. Aunt Hliss wants a child to inherit the Farendavan weaving secrets. And she tried hard for—that is, she hopes it will be a girl.”

  Connar skipped over the “tried hard,” assuming it meant wishing hard. “Farendavan,” he repeated.

  “That’s Aunt Hliss’s family. My birth family, too.”

  A new question occurred. “What’s my birth family?”

  Mother’s gaze shifted away, then she looked back at him. “I don’t know. That is, your parents didn’t marry, so there wasn’t any adoption treaty. And your birth-mother’s side don’t name families the way we do. They’re Iascan.”

  He’d learned at the academy that Iascans were mainly sea traders or fisher folk. “So she went away to sea?”

  “Yes,” Danet said, grateful to see the lessening interest in Connar’s face. She had promised herself never to lie to her children, but she did not look forward to discussing Fi. Especially as Connar seemed to have inherited her temper. But he wasn’t Fi, or Lanrid, she reminded herself. The one who calmed him the fastest was always Noddy. The boys were loyal to each other in a way that Arrow and Lanrid never had been.

  “But my birth father was Olavayir.”

  “Yes. He died in the Pass, when Lorgi Idego split off from the kingdom.”

  Connar nodded, relieved. He was a real prince, then, and he had a hero as a birth-father. A last doubt assailed him. “He said everybody knew.”

  Danet let her exasperation show. “Who is this everybody? If ‘everybody’ knows something, wouldn’t we all be hearing about it?”

  That was certainly true. Connar let out a breath of relief. No one had said anything until Big Mou—Cabbage Gannan yapped those words. Hatred burned deep at how Gannan had gloated.

  “You should know by now that when someone starts jawing about ‘everybody knows’, they’re inventing rumor to convince you, instead of stating facts. Even if they didn’t make it up outright, it’s still just rumor.” She laid the cover over her ink, then said, “If I were to tell you that everybody knows that Lorgi Idego is a staging base for a Norsunder invasion, would you believe it?”

  “Yes,” he began, then scowled.

  “Right,” she said. “Most of us can’t forget that slaughter before you were born, and they hate the Idegans for it. So it’s easy to believe that they invited Norsunder in. But the truth is, there’s no evidence that Norsunder had anything to do with that attack.”

  He shifted impatiently, and she heard the echo of her own words beginning to sound like a lecture. No wonder Mother used to clip her words short.

  Danet choked off what would have been useful instruction about always asking for sources, and waved her hand. “Go play. The bell will ring soon enough.”

  He flashed a grateful smile and fled, determined to get that new name for Gannan well spread before lights out. Much better vengeance than snitching.

  She watched him run off, so unconsciously graceful, with that clear, musical voice, unlike her darling son. But she had only to see Noddy’s bony, bucktoothed face, or Bun’s round, equally bucktoothed countenance, and her heart brimmed with love.

  Connar...though she didn’t think of herself as a mothering type any more than her own mother had been, but in the course of nursing him she had come to love him fiercel
y. But it was a conscious love. She couldn’t help but notice certain expressions, especially as he altered from round-faced babyhood into boyhood, that brought Lanrid to mind, and once in a while, Fi. Then love would surge up, smothering that inward catch as she reminded herself that he wasn’t Fi. He wasn’t Lanrid. He was hers.

  She turned her gaze back to her letter and dipped the pen with a determined tap, but then held it suspended as she labored to retrieve the careful phrasing she had toiled over.

  No use. Gone. Instead, questions bloomed until she gave an exasperated sigh and threw down the pen again. Glad that Restday afternoons were understood to be her own, she left without catching curious eyes, and took the back way via the baths to the ground floor, then roundabout to the airy, open barn where Hliss had caused the looms to be moved in spring.

  There was Hliss, recognizable by the thick braids wrapped around her head to keep them off her neck. Her hair had darkened to the rich honey-brown of good ale, glinting with golden highlights in the slanting shafts of light.

  Danet crossed the space, watching dust motes from her steps whirl upward like tiny fire-stars, and she breathed in air heavy with the scents of cloth, wood, dust, and the home-smell of wet flax laid out to dry before hackling.

  Hliss spoke to a cluster of youngsters in training, then flicked her fingers and they dispersed to their various tasks. Some, catching sight of Danet, pulled up short and slapped their palms against their hearts in salute.

  Danet brushed her fingers outward to indicate they should carry on with their tasks, and Hliss lumbered over in the swaying gait Danet remembered unfondly, when the joints of hips and legs seemed loose as baby teeth in childhood.

  “Danet?”

  “Not here,” Danet said.

  Hliss’s face, rounder and fuller than twelve years ago when she was eighteen, glowed with the warmth. Danet thought that Hliss had been appealing in their young days, but she was beautiful now, her expression so mild it always reminded Danet of the first spring day, when you breathe in and know that winter is over.

  Hliss led her down into the cellar, where baskets of lupin waited for the dye pots.

  “Seeding done?” Danet asked.

  Hliss nodded, rubbing her hand over her damp forehead. “They were quite happy over at the kitchen with this year’s crop. We’ll begin the salting tomorrow, or the next day if the storm everyone says they feel breaks tonight.” She gave her sister a whimsical smile. “The bell hasn’t rung yet. Why are you down here, when I’ll be up there shortly?”

  “Because I want to talk to you with no listening ears around,” Danet said, and repeated her exchange with Connar. She ended, “Has Arrow been pestering you for adoption if you do have a boy? I want to know where this rumor came from.”

  Hliss shook her head. “No.” She laid her hand on her stomach. “He knows she’s a Farendavan.” Her broad, smooth brow puckered, the closest Hliss ever came to bad temper. “He also knows how bitter Mother was about my having a king’s child.”

  Danet remembered the long letter their mother had written, spelling out what horrors lay in the future if Hliss did have a boy, and the inescapable civil war that she would lay directly at her daughters’ doors.

  Hliss’s smile faded and she stared down at a basket. “I suppose it might have been wiser to marry someone else. It’s not as if I haven’t had offers, even now. But....”

  “No,” Danet said, coming forward to take her sister’s hands. “Arrow is better with you. You’re the only one who can calm him down. He drinks less when he’s with you,” she added.

  It wasn’t in Arrow to stay with one person. Danet always knew when he took up with a new favorite, usually from the Shield. At least he tended to choose professionals who wouldn’t make trouble; he’d learned that much from Fi. But when he ventured away from Hliss, he drank more, because professionals were expected to bring money into the house, and Danet could smell the result when they met in the mornings.

  “I think so, too. Anyway, I’m as sure as one can be that I have a girl. And if I made a mistake,” Hliss chuckled, “I could always make him a Ranet.”

  “A Ranet?”

  Hliss pressed her knuckles into her lower back and said, “You know. Ranet Senelaec.”

  “What?” Danet exclaimed. “Ranet, daughter of Calamity and Wolf?”

  Hliss stared, aghast. “You didn’t know?”

  “Are you telling me that Ranet...isn’t a girl?”

  Hliss sank down onto an upturned barrel, weary and horrified. “I thought you knew.” She blinked with that lost face that Danet remembered from late in her pregnancy with Noddy, when the heat seemed to boil your brains. Hliss gave Danet a puzzled, unhappy look. “Calamity is your friend.”

  “I thought she was my friend,” Danet said slowly.

  Silence fell between them as Hliss pressed her hands over her face.

  Aware of the growing silence, she looked up, to see Danet looking shockingly like Mother.

  Her mind might not have been working before, but it was now, as the implications of her careless remark proliferated remorselessly.

  Hliss sighed. “Danet, I want you to be Danet Farendavan for a moment, and not Danet-Gunvaer. You felt the same misgivings that I did when Arrow started his academy again. We talked about it, all that winter, especially after little Bunny was born, and you were so glad that she was a she, and so wouldn’t be drawn into it.”

  Danet crossed her arms, her fists tight. “All that is true. But what has it to do with Calamity making a fool of me? Ranet, or what I thought was Ranet, is betrothed to Connar!”

  Hliss grunted as she swung to her feet and reached for her sister’s hands. “Think of what people have said about the Olavayirs for years, all the bloody changes of king. The fear of war up north. Remember the stories about the academy. Not the ones about how it was a miracle under Inda-Harskialdna, but how terrible it was when the Olavayirs took over from the Montrevayirs, and then, under Bloody Tanrid, all the duels and fights that led to it being shut down again. Would you—you’re a mother now—want to send your little boy so far away, to be put under people you know hate your family?”

  Danet could see it...just. Yes, she could see it. And, ruthlessly honest with herself as always, she sought for the source of the pain. She wasn’t really upset about Arrow being denied one more future army captain. It was because she had been exchanging letters with Calamity for twelve years. Almost thirteen. But there had never been any mention of Ranet not being a girl, not even after Danet had sent the betrothal letter—a betrothal that Danet had intended to be an honor, pairing Wolf’s and Calamity’s daughter with the second prince. She had even wanted to make Ranet Noddy’s wife, but Arrow had insisted on a descendant of Inda-Harskialdna as soon as the news arrived that the Iofre had had a pair of female twins.

  “Why didn’t she tell me?” she whispered, eyes closed. She hated to say the word betrayal. So dangerous and bloody a word. Her eyes opened. “What did she think was going to happen twenty years after they called a boy a girl, when it came time for all the pairs to meet and marry?”

  “But that would be in twenty years. Even more. Anything could happen. Danet, remember, when that baby was born, it was right after all those dolphin-clan murders. Which everyone outside the Olavayirs sees as Olavayir murders. Everyone was afraid there would be more and more fighting, especially as neither you nor Arrow had been brought up to rule.”

  Danet let out her breath. She herself hadn’t believed she and Arrow could hold the kingdom. There had been times, especially that first couple of years, when any sudden noise in the night sounded like assassins coming for her children. She had drilled hard every day that first year, until she got too sick with Bunny. For four years she slept with a knife under her pillow, and the inner door open to the nursery; she hadn’t let the children be moved into their own rooms until Noddy was almost five, even though the traditional crown prince’s suite was next down the hall from the king’s.

  Danet’s thoug
hts shifted. She eyed her sister. “How did you find out?” Her voice sharpened. “I take it they’re all laughing behind our heads? At me, and my betrothals, which I worked on for two years, as a way to keep the peace?”

  Sick at heart, Hliss realized the least said the better. Which meant, for the first time, the unconscious freedom of their communication had ended.

  No, stumbled. She had to save it if she could.

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Danet, I truly thought you knew, and like me, kept silent for Arrow’s sake, as well as for Calamity’s. I don’t believe one boy more or less will harm Arrow’s academy, especially a boy whose family doesn’t want him to be there. Arrow didn’t give anyone any choice.”

  “There was never any choice,” Danet said tiredly, her anger draining out, leaving her feeling sick. “Everyone always considered it an honor. All the records say that boys couldn’t wait to go—and girls longed for their two years at the queen’s training. I suppose there’s no use in my even thinking of starting that again,” she added bitterly. “Will everyone call their girls boys, to keep them away from me?”

  “Danet,” Hliss whispered, the tears dripping off her chin. She drew a breath, then attempted to shift a subject becoming more disastrous by the heartbeat. “Were you planning to begin the queen’s training again? You know we’ve sort of annexed old queen’s training barracks for dye storage, and so forth.”

  “Yes...no...sometimes.” Danet’s gaze wandered sightlessly over the stone walls. “Things have changed so in the last hundred years. The truth is, I think girls would be better training in the academy, because one thing I saw when I lived with the Olavayirs is that we are faster riders, and many of us better archers on the gallop. If it came to defending the country, why are the fastest riders and archers confined to the castle walls?”

  Hliss’s gaze shifted down. “I think...I think there are others who might agree.” She glanced up again. “Danet....”

  “I know what you’re about to say, that when Calamity met me, I was the wife of the second son to a jarl, meant to be a randviar. She was originally supposed to be a randviar, too. Maybe my becoming gunvaer broke something between us that I wasn’t aware of at my end. Maybe she thinks of me as a jumped-up gunvaer, maybe they even resent my falling into the place meant for Fuss. But she’s had twelve years to tell me. Do all the Senelaecs know about this boy-Ranet?”