Time of Daughters I

by Sherwood Smith

  Danet exhaled an “Ah-h-h-h. I assumed there would be translators aplenty in Algaravayir, but this would be far better. She can begin to teach me while we travel.”

  Mnar was aware that Camerend, who had always been close to the Iofre and her brother Indevan before he left for Sartor, had gotten a great deal closer to the Iofre after Isa had ended their marriage. But that had nothing to do with the security and welfare of the kingdom. “Lineas can also visit with the girls while you and the Iofre speak, and if you ask her for her impressions, she will give you as truthful a report as she is able.”

  “Can she ride?” Danet asked doubtfully, remembering that tiny weed of a child—then recollected the stringent training sessions she’d glimpsed in the far fields, when the academy was elsewhere. “Never mind. Of course she can. Excellent notion. Have her ready by daybreak.”

  At last she had the night to herself. She considered sending a runner ahead to warn the Algaravayirs she was coming, but hesitated. She recollected what Tdor Fath had said about beggaring jarlates, but that was with enormous parties. Arrow wouldn’t send more than a riding, and Danet was taking only Sage and now Lineas.

  No doubt they’d be spotted by border riders when they reached Algaravayir, which would give the Iofre a day or two of notice. Much more than that, and what couldn’t be hidden?

  Danet hated thinking like that, but her confidence in herself—in how others viewed her intentions—had been severely shaken by that discovery about Calamity and the boy who’d been called a girl.

  EIGHT

  Ghosts, Lineas had discovered at an early age, seemed to have a logic of their own.

  Since her arrival in Choreid Dhelerei, the royal city, she’d regularly seen four ghosts in and about the royal castle. One, glimpsed the single time she was in the heir’s outer chamber, was in the doorway. Lineas was glad that Nadran-Sierlaef was away when she was sent to put a corrected slate in his room, as she had not yet met either of the princes, and dreaded encountering both the heir and a ghost at the same time. At least it was a vague ghost, no more than a tall, pale-haired figure, probably male, though even in that she was not certain.

  The brightest and most frequently glimpsed was the young man she was fairly certain was Evred, as someone had told her the ancient gunvaer who used to live in the south tower had said his ghost was in the throne room the day the king and queen were crowned. Lineas believed it, for it made sense that a prince who would have been king had he not been murdered might stay—except that ghosts seldom demonstrated any logic that she could figure.

  Since no one but her seemed to see ghosts, she couldn’t ask about them. Anyway, another was so faded it was no more than a blur, more there than here, Aunt Isa had said once.

  When Lineas asked, There where? Aunt Isa had blinked and opened her hands. Where the music goes, my great-great aunt used to say. But then, she heard music that no one else did. And only at times.

  Like the windharps above Larkadhe, Lineas had decided—another subject she couldn’t discuss, because normal people didn’t hear singing counterpoint to the soughing mountain windharps, any more than they saw ghosts. Most didn’t believe ghosts existed.

  Her single trip to Larkadhe, early when she first commenced magic studies, had furnished her only exposure to what she thought of as ghost music. The royal castle had no ghost music (at least, none that she could hear), but late that summer, when she was finally trusted enough to run errands to the royal residence on the second floor, she discovered her first and only ghostly scent: in Bun’s room, she walked into the faint, heady scent of flowers.

  By then she was used to Bun, who seemed to be at the stable every time Lineas was sent down for riding lessons. Bun didn’t act like the princesses in some of the records brought from Sartor into Darchelde. She was a stick figure much like Lineas herself, only with a round face, and lank brown hair instead of bright red frizzle. She had a short upper lip exactly like a kitten, Lineas privately thought, but apparently when Bun was born, her head was covered with short, soft hair, and she’d been small and round: bunny.

  She talked to everyone with the same cheerful demeanor, always ready to laugh, so when Lineas was sent to fetch Bun, she was not too intimidated at the prospect of meeting one of the royal family on their own turf.

  She found Bun kneeling on her floor, waving around a feather tied to a stick as kittens scrambled and pounced.

  Lineas loved kittens, but she was so surprised by a faint but heady scent as she walked in the door that she stopped short and exclaimed, “Oh, where are the flowers? And where did they find them during winter?”

  Bun glanced up, her laugh like a bubbling stream. “Everybody else says it stinks of dog in here. Or cat. Or horse. Really, you really smell flowers?”

  Lineas sniffed harder, and now all she could smell was dust, dog, and horse, probably from Bun’s clothes, which were dusty, and her knees covered with horse hair. She’d obviously been currying. “Now I don’t smell it,” she admitted. “Maybe I imagined it.”

  “If you did, you aren’t the first,” Bun said as she scrambled to her feet.

  “Really?” Lineas asked, cautious in case she had stumbled into another not-normal thing.

  “A long time ago,” Bun said with her usual cheer. “Everybody said this room was haunted, but by smells instead of ghosts. I should love to see a ghost,” she added. “If it wasn’t horrible, like carrying its own head if it was executed, or something nasty like that.”

  “I wouldn’t want to see that either,” Lineas said, mentally adding Bun to the enormous list of those who didn’t see ghosts. “I was sent to fetch you for tutoring.”

  Bun groaned. “I always hope they’ll forget me, but they never do.” She dusted herself off, eyed her smock, decided it would do, and they ran out together, Bun asking Lineas who were her favorites among the horses.

  After that, Lineas had occasion to go to Bun’s rooms twice more, and each time, if she just breathed, not thinking of anything, there were the flowers again. But the moment she concentrated, or sniffed for location, it was gone.

  By spring, the anniversary of her arrival, she was so thoroughly accustomed to her new life that she no longer reacted with alarm at unexpected summonses.

  So when Mnar herself arrived in the runners’ recreational area, where Lineas was busy setting a sleeve in her new smock, she only looked up, touching finger to chest.

  “Pack for travel,” Mnar said. “As soon as you’re done, come upstairs for instruction. You’ll be leaving at daybreak.”

  Before the sun rimmed the distant hills, Lineas shivered in a wind scouring over snowy mountains to the northeast. She waited in the stable yard next to the horse chosen for her, amid armsmen who seemed impervious to the cold checking saddle girths, weapons, and pack distribution. They talked quietly, their breath frosting in the air.

  The gunvaer appeared, another person Lineas had only glimpsed from the safety of distance, as well as the king. Lineas was not afraid of the gunvaer—nothing she’d heard made her fearful, and Bun talked cheerfully about her mother—but intimidated, yes. Danet-Gunvaer strode toward them, straight-backed and narrow of eye as she took in every detail. At the gunvaer’s shoulder walked Sage, who had been a senior runner-in-training the previous year, and who had helped Lineas with her handwriting.

  Danet stepped aside as Sage reached up to load her travel pack onto her mount. Danet glimpsed knife hilts at both wrists, and remembered that royal runners traveled armed. She reflected as Sage went to load her own mount that she had never actually seen the royal runners drill.

  Sage flashed a smile Lineas’s way, then the two turned to face Danet, their expressions mirroring expectancy. As were the faces of the honor guard.

  Danet cast her own expectant gaze around. They were all ready. What were they waiting for?

  Ah.

  As ranking person, it was for her to give the command that had always been Jarend’s on their previous long journey.

  “Mount up,”
she said, and they all got into the saddle. “Ride out.”

  The trumpeters, who had been rubbing and biting numb lips as they waited up on the wall, blew the king’s fanfare in reverse: the queen was riding.

  That cleared the streets, which were mostly empty except for the returning night patrol and early wagons heading to market. All pulled aside as the small cavalcade trotted out—Danet was not one for showy gallops.

  She missed Firefly at once, mostly out of fondness, but also because when she rode Firefly she didn’t have to think about her riding. On the other hand, it was interesting to get a feel for a new horse’s signals. The stable chief had told her that Firefly was getting too old for sudden long journeys during the uncertain weather of early spring.

  When they were through the gates, Danet saw the two scouts glancing expectantly back at her, and opened her hand. They rode off down the road, hooves kicking up clumps of mud.

  The guards arranged themselves in column, and Danet looked around for Sage and the little runner girl. Sage rode behind and to her left, very properly, but the child had dropped way back. Danet beckoned her forward.

  Surprised, Lineas urged her mount into a trot outside the column, and when she neared the gunvaer, she was motioned in beside Sage.

  “What’s your name? Lanet?”

  “Lineas, Danet-Gunvaer.”

  “Lineas, I understand you know Hand-speech. I want you to teach me, so we’ll know enough to get by when we reach Algaravayir. Sage? How much do you know?”

  “Only what we’re taught—the basic twenty signs. My extra languages are Sartoran and Iascan.”

  “Then teach us both, Lineas.”

  Lineas struck her hand flat to her scrawny chest, flushed with pride at the idea of teaching the gunvaer, but she was also a little afraid of doing badly. Sage recognized that fear, and started them off with the first of the basics: Come, Go, Stop, I/me, You.

  By evening, Danet’s thighs and hips reminded her she hadn’t ridden long hours for years, but she grimly walked it out while the others set up camp, aware that everyone else had jumped off without any apparent discomfort.

  They ate a cold meal then retired early. She’d forgotten how much tents stank and got stuffy.

  They woke before dawn, and rode with first light.

  She’d recovered her old muscle tone by the end of a week, and could form very simple sentences in Hand, but she had to ask for two or three repetitions before she could translate what others signed. It turned out that Hand-speech was not predicated on the Marloven alphabet, and had its own word order and verb tenses.

  By the time they skirted Darchelde and turned the animals southwest (Danet staring with interest into the forest-covered hills of the forbidden jarlate, and Lineas wistfully) Danet was beginning to assemble a rudimentary vocabulary.

  “It’s Spring Day,” Sage said one morning, surprising Danet.

  She thought immediately of Connar. Though she suspected he’d been a winter baby, or even New Year’s, she’d suggested they pick a festival day that everyone liked for his Name Day, one that wasn’t close to Noddy’s, so Connar’s would never be overshadowed. And she’d made certain that he had exactly as much attention on this chosen Name Day as Noddy did on his Name Day.

  She hoped Arrow hadn’t forgotten. He always had to be reminded of anyone’s Name Day, including his own. But would Connar understand that? She leaned her head against her horse’s warm neck, struggling with guilt, but then reminded herself that the boys had reached the age when peers and not parents were all-important. Noddy would remember, if Arrow had left them in the academy.

  Lighter of heart, she mounted and slowly, awkwardly formed a sign to Lineas. Or tried—what was the sign for spring again?

  At week’s end they crossed the eastern tip of Marthdavan, where people were busy planting, the rise and fall of old planting songs carried on the balmy air. They crossed a last great river, then headed into the hills that divided off Algaravayir. Here and there they glimpsed clusters of the distinctive Iascan houses with their round roofs.

  “Find out all the stories about Inda you can,” Arrow had told Danet. “We have almost nothing. Did he write anything? Either bring it back or copy it!”

  The days had warmed considerably. By the time the towers of the Algaravayirs’ Castle Tenthen jutted above the hills, they were sleeping out under the stars instead of closed in the tents.

  At last they rode into view of Tenthen Castle.

  Danet was surprised to discover that it was a lot smaller than the Olavayir castle at Nevree, which she had learned was considered awkward compared to the splendid Yvanavayir castle. Tenthen was more like an outpost.

  Small as it was, it was well maintained, the fields around it orderly, crops growing, with two orchards glimpsed. The scouts, having gone ahead on this utterly uneventful trip, rode back to say that the Iofre was waiting for them, just as Danet had expected.

  And so they found Tenthen’s walls lined with guards both male and female, the brisk breeze fluttering the green-and-silver Algaravayir flags and royal blue-and-gold Olavayir, striking a festive note.

  Danet had envisioned Inda’s direct descendant somehow being larger than life. Instead, the woman who met her was short and round-bodied, her head made rounder by a halo of thick flaxen braids.

  But her countenance was friendly as she welcomed Danet and introduced two sturdy blond girls, her hands fluttering so quickly that Danet sighed inwardly. She caught perhaps two Hand words in a hundred, if that. At least Lineas was able to keep up, judging by her own fluttering.

  Lineas, of course, was thrilled to every nerve to meet these cousins her own age whom she had thought she would never see. They fell in step beside Lineas, one signing as fast as she could a series of questions, as the other smiled down at her feet, each foot placed just so.

  Lineas answered as speedily as they were conducted upstairs to the heir’s suite, which the twins shared. Lineas looked around the bright room, with its old furniture. Central, covering the stone floor, lay a now-threadbare rug in Algaravayir green, its silver owl almost obscured by the footsteps of generations of Algaravayir children.

  Noren signed that Lineas would be right next door, in what used to be the second child’s room, as there weren’t any other Algaravayir children, and the guest chambers were at the other end of the castle.

  In the courtyard, horses were led one way, and runners carried gear in another.

  Danet was conducted by a runner to a guest chamber that didn’t look much different from any other stone-walled chamber she’d ever been in.

  She was invited to bathe and join the family for a meal. The Iofre asked about the journey, and made easy conversation, hands and mouth going at the same time in what was clearly thirteen years of habit. Afterward, the castle folk did their best to entertain their guest with ballads and drumming, then all retired early.

  After a grateful night in a bed again, Danet—a light sleeper—woke to the sunrise bell calling everyone to drill. She rose and dressed, and when she got downstairs, she found women and girls lining up in the courtyard.

  The Iofre saluted her formally. “Would you like to lead drill, Danet-Gunvaer?”

  Danet said, “The truth is, I haven’t been drilling seriously since my daughter was born. All I find time for is the basic warmup and the occasional ride, and little enough of that. I’m happy to follow from the rear.”

  The Iofre held out a pair of wooden practice knives as she said, “I expect if any of us woke up and found ourselves gunvaer, we’d have to give it up as well. I wouldn’t face your workload for a barrel of gold.”

  Danet laughed, and took her place in the back, behind the girls.

  The Iofre led them through the old odni drills that Danet’s mother had been so proud of. Danet was soon sweaty, and muscles that she hadn’t thought about in years trembled from the unaccustomed effort. It felt good to move like this again, though she knew she would be sore later.

  The women put away the
ir wooden practice knives and fetched the bows for archery drill. Danet took her turn, expecting to be terrible, and she was, but old habit at least sent her arrows close enough to the target.

  After that, the Iofre dismissed them to ready for breakfast. They retired to bathe as the men gathered for their longer drills.

  After breakfast, the Iofre and her daughters took Danet, Sage, and Lineas for a ride around Tenthen. As Danet peered westward at a cluster of round Iascan houses on the other side of a shallow river, Noren and Lineas were deep in conversation, hands moving in a constant flutter as the other twin looked on, her expression never changing.

  And rather than force a visual language into unnecessarily awkward diction by attempting transliteration, I shall translate it the way I would any language.

  “What is the heir like?” Noren wanted to know. “Does he like animals? What’s the princess like?”

  “I haven’t met him,” Lineas signed back, scrupulous as royal runners were trained to be to differentiate what they observed from what they heard. “But everyone likes him. He loves to ride, and likes the princess’s pets. She loves animals. We all see her often at the stable, where she goes whenever she can.”

  “Is she a great rider?”

  “I know not. All I’ve seen is how she loves to take care of animals. All of them, not just the horses.”

  They went on to talk about the royal castle and the city. For Noren, who had never left Tenthen or its immediate environs, the idea of a huge city was at least as exciting, maybe more. The idea of marriage was hazy at best.

  As the girls rode in front, Danet finally said to the Iofre, introducing what she assumed would be an easy, pleasant subject, “It probably won’t surprise you to know that my husband admires Inda-Harskialdna.”