Senrid had been taking in his surroundings. He had to admit he was impressed, even if the first impression was a lot of clutter: statues, fountains, decorative carving that would be the first thing smashed in street fighting. But Sartor was too civilized for that, wasn’t it?
Oh, yes. The war in which Atan had lost her entire family wasn’t hazy generations ago, but relatively recently, for most of the people walking around before his eyes.
Rel had taken in the direction of his glance, and obligingly furnished names and dates and a brief story behind the local sights. Senrid grinned at the funny ones, and then they were there. The Carriage House was an imposing building on a corner where five streets met, its walls made of marble, with gargoyles and the like carved over all the tall windows.
Senrid was about to thank him when Rel said quickly, “I understand you know magic. Would you send me to that southern harbor so I can do some scouting?”
Senrid squinted up at Rel, a tall silhouette against the low northern sun resting on the city rooftops. “You don’t think anyone is going to scout?”
“The mages might. I don’t know. But they won’t be looking for the same things I would.”
Senrid could understand that. “Here’s the problem. You say ‘southern harbor,’ which isn’t a Destination. Unless you know there is one, and you can give me the pattern, I can’t send you. Beyond my skills.”
“No Destination that I know of.”
“I think you’d need a mage like Tsauderei.”
“Tsauderei,” Rel repeated. “Great suggestion. Atan can send me to him. Thanks.”
With a casual salute Rel left him, and walked off. Senrid watched for a few steps, wondering why CJ hated this Rel, who made no pompous speeches. He was going to do what needed doing. Anybody else would call that heroic behavior.
He shrugged it off and headed for the formidable building called the Carriage House.
He approached the front desk, whose carved wood depicted a sylvan scene. “I’m looking for the Prince of Renselaeus.”
“He is dining in company,” was the reply. Interesting, how this fellow’s Sartoran was subtly different from Atan’s. Regional difference or time difference? “But he has left instructions to pass on messages. Do you wish me to do so?”
Senrid hesitated, wondering if ‘dining in company’ meant no one was permitted access, or what the etiquette was. He found the whole question annoyingly pointless, but he didn’t want to antagonize someone who found such stuff important.
So he said, “Senrid Montredaun-An would like to speak to him.”
The smooth-faced man behind the counter mangled Senrid’s name with a heavy enough accent to make Senrid want to grin.
A very short time later, he was back, leading a white-haired elderly man who leaned heavily on a cane. Senrid glanced at, then ignored, the fine velvet long coat over an old-fashioned tabard-vest, the loose long trousers and embroidered shoes, and met a pair of heavy-lidded dark eyes.
The old courtier greeted him in a smooth drawl, but the man had never heard of mind-shields, and Senrid braced against the sharp, anxious question.
“Your son is fine,” Senrid said. “Right now he’s sitting in my castle library, I’m sure, along with several others who stay at the academy year round.” And left the question open: if you’re so worried about your son, why haven’t you brought him home?
“Please. Come this way,” the old prince said, gesturing through a pair of tall doors carved to match the relief-work on the panels along the front desk.
Beyond these doors lay a hall, off which opened small, discreet anterooms, each with its tall window that overlooked the five-points intersection. Senrid could make out a couple of the palace spires above the inward-slanted rooftops across the way.
The chairs were big, comfortably cushioned. Senrid sat on the edge of one, glad it was low enough that his feet weren’t off the floor, as the elderly prince took a moment to sink into the other.
During the walk, Senrid had been turning over what to say to Shevraeth’s father while half-listening to Rel’s explanation of the local sites.
Senrid had acceded to the prince’s request to invite his son to the academy, but at first he hadn’t liked Vidanric Renselaeus, Marquis of Shevraeth, known only as ‘Shevraeth’ in the academy. Then Liere had made the painful, but true, observation that jealousy lay behind most of Senrid’s dislike.
Jealousy because Shevraeth had a living father.
True.
But Senrid had thought about it ever since, and knew that there was also Shevraeth’s apparently effortless self-possession, a quality Senrid didn’t have, knew he didn’t have, and doubted he would ever have.
Well, he’d seen enough evidence that Shevraeth didn’t have it all the time—that it wasn’t effortless. More like habit, and when he was hurt, he broke like anyone else.
And so here Senrid was, facing Shevraeth’s admired, wise, beloved father . . . who was alive. “The Sartoran Queen is going to be letting people know soon that Norsunder is on the march, down below the border,” he said.
The prince sighed. “We have been dreading such news, but rumors have been flying too frequently and fast for it to come as surprise. As well I’ve finished my affairs here. Thank you for informing me.”
The question he was too courtly, or too something, to ask, lay heavily in the air. Senrid said, “Your son’s doing very well with us. As I think you know from his letters.” Senrid made the gesture people recognized as tapping the lid of a notecase. He’d given Shevraeth one so he could communicate with his family.
The prince said, “Affording me the opportunity not only to thank you for this news, but also for providing us with the means for that communication.”
The man was a courtier. Senrid should have known not to expect anything but empty flattery put in polite parlance. But in spite of the prince’s dignified posture, trained into bone and muscle, Senrid sensed on the mental plane the weariness and anxiety the old man had no idea he was revealing. Remalna might be an inkblot of a kingdom, but it was home to this man and his family, and that home was being squeezed dry of its lifeblood by an evil king.
“So I came,” Senrid said, “to tell you that, and also to make an offer. If you happen to know your exact Destination pattern, I can send you home by magic, before I return to my own home.”
Surprise and gratitude lifted the weary lids. “Permit me to gather my belongings? It is little enough,” the prince requested.
“Certainly. If you’ll tell me your Destination pattern,” Senrid said, “I can set up the spell. I’m not nearly as fast at sending another somewhere I’ve never been as my mage friends are.”
“The Destination in my own palace, then.” The Prince of Renseleaus described the pattern to Senrid, then excused himself with a polite word.
Alone, Senrid decided to test the spell first, though even that much would hurt like a punch to the gut. But he’d feel better if he made a trial.
So he looked around. Someone had set an aromatic plant on a table in front of the window. Senrid pulled off a leaf, set it on the carpet, depicted the Destination, muttered the spell—and withdrew so fast he staggered backward, missed the chair, and fell on his butt. He sat there on the rug, shock ringing through him, then mentally worked backward. The leaf ought to have vanished with a little puff of air. But the stench of burning metal that had smacked him backward meant that a lethal magical trap awaited anyone who used that Destination.
A present for the prince from the evil king, maybe? Senrid waited impatiently until the prince returned, then told the prince in a few words what he’d found.
This time, the courtier mask didn’t hold. The prince’s face blanched, and he groped behind him, sitting down far quicker than he had before.
“Where else can I send you? That is safe?”
“Perhaps the harbor at Mard
gar? I know that Destination. Used it often when I was younger. I can hire transportation to carry me north along the coast.”
Another leaf, another test. Poof! They both watched the leaf vanish. The Mardgar Destination was safe.
Senrid transferred the old man. And as soon as he’d recovered, he transferred home. After that much transfer magic, he needed to sit and gather his wits again. As soon as he could move, he went straight to find Keriam.
If it was true that Siamis (or Detlev) wanted a ready-made army, then they’d destroy Senrid’s wards and protections and come in intending to take and hold, not slaughter. If that was their initial tactic, Senrid and Keriam had decided the best defense was none—that is, there would be no army, and no academy, to find.
Time to step up the plans.
Chapter Seventeen
Chwahirsland
NO one but the Chwahir would understand resistance to tyranny expressed through nature, covertly and subtly shifted to make music or art.
Such as a dripping water trough.
Jilo entered a tiny village whose inhabitants made quilting for saddles and under chain mail. Everyone worked with the cotton grown on the north faces of the mountains, carefully tended; villagers carried pannikins of water to each plant during the long, dry days between rainstorms.
They lived in dilapidated, unpainted houses, with tiny blocked-in windows to conserve warmth. The way station for couriers was nothing more than a narrow bed of straw beside the stabling for two horses, meeting the minimum required by law. That was all the locals could scratch together.
Jilo had wanted to leave his horse and move on, but there was no fresh horse, the other having a strained hock. And so Jilo perforce must let his horse rest. He was impatient to get to Burda, to discover if there were women pretending to be men in the garrison there, if they had hand language, if they . . .
A woman offered him a bowl of stewed oats with shredded carrot to sweeten it, then withdrew in silence, and Jilo was left to eat where he might. He did not want to sit on that sagging bed made of sagging hemp rope under a thin, mildewing mattress of lumpy quilting, so he wandered around the village, the bowl tucked against him. At least it was warm. The days were definitely colder, the sun dropping lower in the north each day.
Jilo stopped out of the wind beside the last house, indistinguishable from the others but for the noise. He was barely conscious of it at first, though that was how it began with them all, and so he began actively to hunt.
He soon found the warped trough that carried water from the nearby hill to the village. Behind the house the trough dripped through cracks in the old wood. It looked old, broken-down, the big muddy-sided jars beneath the trough apparently abandoned.
Yet droplets from the cracked wood, on falling into the small hole in the enormous jug, plinked in soft melody.
Music. Forbidden on pain of death.
You couldn’t hear it well unless you were close by. Jilo turned his head, and discovered open windows all along the back of the dilapidated house.
His shoulders tightened. He glanced behind him, catching no more than a flicker of movement. But retained in the inward eye, much like the distorted glow of lightning after the thunder has died away, remained a face, eyes like pits, mouth round in horror. It was too easy to imagine frightened villagers inside the houses, waiting for him to exclaim, to point, to kick aside the jar or say that he was going to report the trough for its noisy disrepair. But he backed away, and returned to the stable, where he finished the meal.
He returned the bowl. No one spoke. He didn’t speak, and the villagers understood his complicity in his silence. His generous, unlooked-for, silence. And word swiftly and silently rang out behind him.
Unaware, he turned away from Burda, and headed toward the tiny town he’d only heard of, where his father’s family had been born.
It didn’t take long to reach. He’d been skirting the area all along.
As he closed the distance, he worked out a story in case anyone spoke to him. But they wouldn’t. The law proscribed that, and everywhere he went, people existed in silent isolation, precisely as Wan-Edhe had wanted them.
But only on the surface.
* * *
—
In the old days, before the crown had assumed all land ownership, his family had worked in the guardhouse for the local nanijo, or warlord. That was a very long time ago, before family names were forbidden. Even so, Jilo remembered the few things he’d learned about the family Back Home. To the Shadowland Chwahir, Chwahirsland was always Back Home, even though the Shadow outpost was several centuries old.
Before Jilo’s father vanished, he’d told detailed stories about his single visit to the castle where his ancestors had lived. Jilo recognized the castle the moment it came into view: the twin towers, one crumbling, both overlooking the river road. The confusion of houses built up against the walls, which were honeycombed with passages, the stone removed to reinforce flimsy walls of mud and old wood.
This castle, like pretty much all midlands buildings, showed the cost of many years of drought. The quarries, under Wan-Edhe’s orders, supplied the border garrisons against an invasion that never came, and served the coast against his next planned war.
The buildings were as described, but as Jilo entered the castle courtyard, he ran into difficulties with the people. Jilo remembered his father’s description of his Uncle Shiam: “He looks much like me, but taller, with a limp from the battle off Imar.”
Jilo expected a hale man of thirty or forty, father-aged, but the guard commander was grizzled and stooped. The only thing Jilo recognized was the limp.
Had to be the same man. Jilo mentally added a generation of aging to those remembered features. Then there were the unknown young faces who had to be the cousins of whose existence his father, and therefore he, had been ignorant.
Nobody asked questions. They went about their business, scrupulously quiet, until the silence coagulated in a way that seemed to cut off all the air. The only signs of his connection to this world being glimpses of people with light brown eyes shaped like his, and his father’s pendulous ears.
His attention went to those closest to his own age. The girl (cousin?) whisked herself out of sight, quite properly, whenever she saw Jilo walking about, but the livable portions of the castle were so small that the people were in fairly constant contact. Jilo found an old arrow slit while he was poking around, from which he could handily see an inner court between the stable and the garrison kitchen. There he saw the girl cousin in head-bent, earnest conference with a brother who had to be her twin. They were exactly the same size, their hair the same blue-black, somewhat like his own, only thicker. He hadn’t known that girl and boy twins could be identical; it wasn’t until the vagaries of wind brought their voices, which were so alike he could not tell them apart, that the obvious occurred to him: the supposed boy might actually be a girl.
Interest sharpened. He had to test his theory.
A rainstorm, thick with sleet, provided a convenient reason to postpone his having to carry his false messages onward. It was while he was trying to find another way into the stable, and lost himself in the broken honeycomb of small rooms long since ruined by law-enforced neglect as well as the weather, that he unexpectedly came face to face with the girl.
Girls were forbidden to speak first. He stepped aside (which was strictly against regulations, as it was for females to get out of males’ way) and moved on, prompted by a pulse of guilt for spying. But when he reached the extremity of the ruin, which was little more than piles of broken stone rejected for reuse elsewhere, that it hit Jilo. She’d been stalking him.
And here it was again, so unexpected: danger.
For all the years he’d been Kwenz’s student, he had lived with danger as his daily companion, far away when Wan-Edhe was distant, brought sharp and close with his proximity. Since Prince Kess
ler had taken Wan-Edhe away, the danger had been from his magic, and the possibilities that Jilo dreamed up: What if the army revolted? What if the people revolted? What if they caught him (whoever ‘they’ might be) and squashed him flat for his temerity in pretending to be a king?
He clutched at the ring on his finger, ready to transfer back to Narad, whose poisonous atmosphere was at least a familiar danger.
But while he stood there in the half-sheltered ruin listening to the hissing roar of sleet, and nothing happened, his heartbeat slowed, and his breathing eased from the rasp of fear.
Nothing was going to happen. Now. Wild thoughts of a knife in the darkness assailed him, to be dismissed. That was thinking like Wan-Edhe. It made no sense. Thinking himself threatened made no sense. He was only a courier. This was an unimportant flatfoot garrison. The girl was curious because . . .
Her curiosity sharpened his own. Wan-Edhe’s conviction that females, generally born smaller than males, were therefore stupid and useless, had been proven abundantly wrong by the Mearsiean girls.
This girl, possibly a cousin, was curious, and that made her interesting. Jilo had to find out why she was curious.
The bell rang once, a sour iron clang. He made his way around to the mess hall.
Jilo’s entrance shut everyone up, and they moved in strict rank order to the long benches. But Jilo kept the image in his mind’s eye, the natural groupings that made it clear where the twia were, and further, that family members were bound into some of the twia, though that was also forbidden. Twia were supposed to become patrols or support staff if one member attained officer status, entirely military in purpose.
Jilo was about to enter when he heard a light footstep from behind: the girl cousin again, bearing a tray of food. She stepped against the wall, but did not lower her eyes. Jilo could see fear in the tautness of her high forehead. The tension of her shoulders was not due to the heavy tray she carried.
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