by Melanie Rawn
He knew Falundir would notice. But as day after sunny day passed, the Bard made no indication of his curiosity. They rode farther north into rich cropland and stayed in comfortable inns, occasionally singing for the awed patrons—Collan giving them the words while Falundir hummed high harmony. The landscape changed to rolling hills and orchards, and then on the horizon there appeared the vast thick redwood forest of Sheve Dark.
Collan reined in a few miles from Sleginhold, pausing to drink from his waterskin and remember. There, in the village, on St. Sirrala’s Day, he had met Sarra for the first time. A vile little gap-toothed brat she’d been, insulting him with the impunity of a Blooded lady for all that she was only nine years old. He’d met Verald that day as well. And Sela Trayos, just ten and adorable in a green dress with a pink sash, had given Collan his first kiss.
He smiled, still tasting the candied violets on his lips. He remembered all the things he’d been Warded not to remember about his years with the Bard. Glancing over his shoulder, he knew Falundir was remembering, too.
“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” he said.
Falundir grinned and whistled a few bars of the very old song he’d stolen the line from. Then they rode down the hill to Sleginhold village, and up the rise to the mansion.
Halfway to the gates, a slim blonde girl of fifteen dodged merchants and farmers and horses and carts to skid to a halt before Collan and Falundir. “We saw you from the windows!” she reported excitedly. “Well, Cailie saw you first, but she’s too little to come greet you in all this.” She waved to the bustle around them. “Welcome to Sleginhold!”
“Many thanks, Lady Tevis,” Col responded formally, then reached a hand down to swing her up in front of him in the saddle. “So tell me—when did you get beautiful?”
“Last week,” she laughed over her shoulder as they rode. “It’s been threatening for over a year, but it finally happened!”
“Truly told, it did,” he informed her with a smile. “From now on, the word will go forth wherever Tevis Ostin is bound: Ladies, lock up your sons!”
Tevis wrinkled her freckled nose at him. With beauty had come humor and poise; a shy child, scarcely daring to say two words, she had bloomed delightfully. Collan was always a favorite, but not even he had ever been treated before to this smiling, confident young woman.
They grew up so fast, he told himself, thinking of Taigan and Mikel. The point was emphasized when Alyn and Cailie met them at the family’s entrance. Alyn had lengthened from chubby child of eight to tall, slender girl of eleven on the verge of adolescence. Cailie, just six, seemed six inches taller than when Col had last seen her. Soon he had to readjust his mental image of their four-year-old brother, Renne, as well. Miram, a true Ostin, had added to her family last year: Kantia, named for her mother’s second husband.
Miram and Riddon, happier together now than on the day she’d told him she would marry him whether he liked it or not (he had, and she did), eventually shooed the children out of the sunroom and settled down to discuss Collan’s visit. He told them about the sprigs of rue and the puzzle piece that yielded Sleginhold as a direction, then asked what they’d heard.
“Not a thing,” Riddon said. “We lent the Maklyn boy a horse, as we always do for the Minstrelsy, and sent him on his way.”
“Did he have any idea what it all meant?” asked Miram.
Collan shook his head. “I don’t even know which of my people originated the message. But I’m sure someone will contact me, now that I’m here.”
It happened the day after Col arrived. He was in the village with Tevis, shopping for gifts, amused by the furtive glances young men directed at Miram’s pretty daughter. He asked her whether she’d noticed—teasing her; every woman noticed when she was being admired.
“Oh, it’s not me they’re interested in—not today, at any rate. It’s you. You’re famous, you know. All the women are staring, envying me my handsome escort!”
“You, Lady,” he said severely, “are a flirt.”
“I’m a shameless flirt, Grannie Lilen says. And she’s right!”
He laughed with her, and they entered a bakery to buy pine-nut brittle. He was munching a sample when another customer came in. Short, dark, compact, about Collan’s age, with the ruddy complexion and worn boots that proclaimed a life on the road, the woman made straight for the cream cakes and bought half a dozen. While the baker’s apprentice wrapped her order, she devoured a chocolate tart and inspected first Tevis and then Collan head to toe.
“Aren’t you the one who calls himself Rosvenir?”
“An honorable Name,” he responded warily.
“And mine,” she retorted.
He blinked. “Truly told?”
“Just once in all these years did you ever come to pay your respects?” she went on severely. “Or apologize for the trouble you caused? In the years before the Rising, every official in a hundred miles came to the Farms all hours of the day and night to interrogate us—”
“For that, I’m sorry,” he replied, trying to mollify her. “It was never my intention—”
“Huh! We Rosvenirs are good honest folk, and your wild ways nearly ruined us!”
Collan had no idea how to respond. It was true that he’d never made much effort to contact the Rosvenir kindred, who were no kindred of his. They kept to themselves at the Farms along the Dindenshir side of the River Rine, and for Generations had been invisible in the greater world. Fine with him; at least he never saw “Rosvenir” on petitions for investment.
“Now, Domna Amilie,” the baker began, “he’s more than made up for his wildness since.”
“The only good thing to say for him,” the Rosvenir went on, “is he isn’t Mageborn, like my great-great-grandmother’s great-nephew Viko. But a Minstrel’s damned near as bad.”
Tevis, who’d been listening wide-eyed, now frowned in a way reminiscent of both her grandmothers. Those were Lady Agatine Slegin’s gold-flecked brown eyes kindling with anger, and Lady Lilen Ostin’s strong jawline turning rigid. But the arrogant lift of the chin was all Tevis’s own.
“Lord Collan saved my father’s life in the Rising—and plenty of other lives, too. He’s a brilliant Minstrel and a substantial man of affairs in his own right, he husbands a Councillor for Sheve, and—”
“Who might you be?”
“Tevis, First Daughter of Miram Ostin and her husband Riddon Slegin.”
Amilie Rosvenir sniffed. “Your shoes squelch in the mud just like everybody else’s.”
“That will do,” Collan said rudely. Scorning him was one thing; one could say she had the right, being a real Rosvenir. But insulting Tevis was quite another. “I believe your purchase is ready, Domna.”
“Time for me to leave, that it? Let me tell you something, Lord Collan—you may wear our two knives and our gray and turquoise, and sign documents and even spell it right, but if I had my way you’d be as Nameless as the slave you used to be!” And with that she grabbed her bag of cream cakes and huffed out of the shop.
Collan smiled a rueful smile and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well. That was pleasant.”
A moment later the door slammed open again. Amilie Rosvenir was back, holding a folded scrap of paper she thrust at Collan. “Our First Daughter of the Name lives at this address. The least you could do is send flowers on her Birthingday. You can afford it.”
“I did—once,” he snapped back. “There was no reply.” And now he knew the reason: they all hated him.
“Try again,” she retorted. “She’s ninety-four this Candleweek. And don’t think this means the rest of us are softening—she ordered all of us to be looking for you. Pure chance that I saw you first.” She looked him down and up again, derisively. “Grandmother’s getting addled in her old age.”
Once more she stormed out, this time for good. Collan sighed, pocketing the paper unread. Tevis was still fuming.
“Two brass cheeks, that what she’s got!” exclaimed the baker.
“Four,” Tevis corrected. “And blows foul air out of both sets!”
Collan choked on laughter. The baker whooped until she wheezed. “Saints, child, if your father ever heard you talk that way—!”
“Where do you think I learned how?” Tevis grinned, humor restored.
Four kinds of brittle bagged and ribboned, they returned to the mansion. At dinner that evening, Tevis regaled the family with a spirited retelling of the incident—though she didn’t include her own remarks. Collan chuckled to himself; Riddon might employ a few pungent phrases now and again, but knowing his daughter had repeated them in public would mortify him. Kind of Tevis to spare her father’s sensibilities. Saints knew Taigan rarely spared Collan.
He didn’t read the note until he returned to his room late that night. It was lying on his bed, still folded. The longvest it had been in was gone, taken away to be laundered by efficient servants. Expecting an address in Dindenshir, he was startled to find six words that abruptly turned this journey from interesting to urgent: Falundir’s Cottage, Sheve Dark—Velenne’s Vow.
Oh, shit. Amilie Rosvenir was his contact.
Col shook his head to clear it. He’d picked every member of the Minstrelsy himself, and he was its only Rosvenir. How had she known? The burned-out shell of Falundir’s old place was one of a few havens in each Shir; nobody knew their location but the Minstrelsy, Cailet, and a few Mage Guardians. (He’d thought about using that peculiar house he and Sarra had stumbled upon in The Waste years ago, but the price of leaving it was a Truth—and he didn’t want his people forced to confess their personal secrets just to get out the door.) Even more telling than knowledge of Falundir’s Cottage, however, were the last two words. “Velenne’s Vow” went back to a song about the Bards’ Saint, found by Falundir in the Bard Hall archives.
In the darkest week of all
Neversun, when spirits fail
Through blackest nights and grimmest days
While winds that wreck and wail
Blow bitter cold into your soul
I beg you, sing this tale
Of Velenne’s Sacrifice and Vow—
Bard, sing sweet in Her praise.
The odd rhyming scheme marked it as very old indeed. There was only the one version, which was unusual for something that ancient. Songs that had been around more than a hundred years developed ten or twelve variations. Not this one. It told how St. Velenne sang the sun back into the sky over the eleven days of Neversun. By the time the sun finally reappeared, she could barely whisper her songs and the lute itself was bleeding. Velenne turned her face to the sun’s warmth, vowed that thenceforth all Bards would sing during that bleak dark week each year, and then died. The lyric ended with a charge to all those who could make music: use the gift, for music challenged the dark so light could triumph.
Collan and Falundir agreed that “Velenne’s Vow” would signal only the grimmest of messages. He’d seen or heard it eight times in the five years of the Minstrelsy, each time to report a Malerrisi discovered.
He’d taken his time leaving Roseguard for Sleginhold. He couldn’t miss his children’s Birthingday, and there’d been the problem of Josselin Mikleine. But now he had to do something, and right away. Rue was the Wraithen Ward. And “Velenne’s Vow” signaled the duty of all musicians to sing back the darkness.
But a Minstrel had no hope against Wraithenbeasts.
10
THE morning after he received Amilie Rosvenir’s note, Collan mounted his Maurgen Dappleback and rode to the site of Falundir’s old cottage. He didn’t ask the Bard to come along; the memories of those first years of his maiming would be too painful. Or perhaps, he thought as he entered Sheve Dark, perhaps recollection might be kinder than that, of the years he and Col had spent together in peace and quiet.
Certainly nostalgia was one of Collan’s emotions when he came upon the charred ruin. Tethering his horse to a log, he walked slowly to the chimney, thinking of all the times he’d sat before it with music folios in front of him and Falundir’s lute cradled in his arms, practicing. Always practicing. Kicking fallen roof timbers out of his way, he stood on the stones where he’d sat so long ago. His mind rebuilt the cottage. Door there, windows here and here, sink and kitchen counter behind him, table and benches in the middle, sagging comfortable armchairs on either side of the hearth. Outside, the vegetable garden and woodpile, and a cauldron of rocks where the cauldron of mead rested over the fire.
All of it a wreck now. Blackened timbers, ashes, and weeds. It reminded him of another cottage near Maslach Gorge in Tillinshir. He’d been there in 968, poking around to see if there was anything left of his real family, anyone who’d known them. No luck. Well, it had been twenty-five years, after all.
Two scorched houses, and a pallet in the slave quarters of Scraller’s Fief. That was what remained of his childhood and youth. Now he lived in what was almost a palace. Sarra had asked him once if he wasn’t curious about his past, if he didn’t want to find out who he truly was. Looking around at the remains of more than four years of his life, he repeated to himself what he’d told her then.
“You can say the past made me who I am, but the making wasn’t all that enjoyable. The past is gone, and can’t be changed. What I have right now is what’s important.”
It was true, and he believed it—yet now, as then, he couldn’t help but wonder if the Wards set by Gorynel Desse had included a strong antipathy to wondering about his past.
Well, it didn’t matter anyway. For one thing, it truly didn’t matter. For another, he couldn’t live his life second-guessing his own instincts, wondering if they were really his or something left him by Desse. For a third, he was too damned busy to worry about it.
Like now. Impatiently he waited for whoever had been following him for half an hour to arrive at the cottage. If stealth was a goal, this person had failed miserably. Seating himself on what had once been the front step, Collan let his forearms rest loosely on his drawn-up knees, hands in swift reach of his boot knives, and decided once and for all that the present and the future were infinitely more interesting than the past—whatever that past might have been.
When his follower finally arrived, he wasn’t surprised to see it was Amilie Rosvenir. She swung down off her horse, slapped dust from her trousers, and said, “You’re early.”
“You didn’t specify a time.” He didn’t get to his feet.
“I’ve heard you’re always late.”
“No, that’s Lady Sarra.”
Amilie snorted, kicked a rock, and sighed. “Not all Rosvenirs loathe you.”
“Nice to hear,” he drawled. “If I cared one way or another, that is.”
“Grandmother’s threatening to visit you. She hasn’t left the Farms in fifty years.”
“She’s always welcome at Roseguard. Or maybe one of these days I’ll go see her in Dindenshir.” He stretched out his legs and leaned back on his hands. “All right, what’s the problem so serious it merits a ‘Velenne’s Vow’?”
“I can’t tell you. I have to show you.”
“You’ll tell me or I’m going back to Sleginhold.”
A corner of her upper lip lifted in a sneer. “Manners like that are one reason you could never pass for one of us with anyone who knows us.”
Collan smiled pleasantly. “I wouldn’t even have to open my mouth. I’m much too tall to be one of you. Now, are you going to tell me, or am I riding out of here?”
Amilie gave in with poor grace. Seating herself on a boulder that had once marked the boundary of the herb garden, she seized his gaze with her dark brown eyes and said, “There’s a child. Not one of our Name.” She didn’t include him in the our.
In a village of foresters near the Wraithen Mountains lived a little boy, six years old, named Toman. Though there were many others his age to play with, he p
referred his imaginary friends. Nobody thought anything of it, and indeed indulged him more than other children because of his sad history.
He was born three weeks after his father died in an accident, and was named for St. Tomanis, patron of widows. In the spring of 982, when he was a year old, his mother took him along on a picnic with his older sisters and three other children. The baby lay in a blanket-padded basket at his mother’s side in the wagon. Clouds came up over the mountains and a thunderstorm broke in the high country. As the wagon crossed a gully, the water rose in a flash flood. The terrified horse strained against the traces, snapping them. The wagon overturned, and Toman’s mother, sisters, and three other children drowned. The baby in his basket was swept downstream. He was found that afternoon, washed up on a sandbar, as snug and dry as if in his own cradle at home. Identified by the blanket his mother had woven, he was taken to his grieving grandmother.
Because of this infant trauma, he was treated very tenderly. No one ever talked to him about the tragedy, even when he was old enough to understand. He was always considered a little fey—he stared into the distance for an hour at a time, babbled to people who weren’t there, and was slow to talk with his grandmother and others.
One day this spring a relative came to visit. This cousin asked his name—and he gave the name of one of his dead sisters.
Amilie broke off her tale and took a swig from her waterskin. “His grandmother and this cousin questioned Toman—gently—and discovered that he had five imaginary playmates. All had names: Jennia, Felena, Imilan, Imbra, Deik—the children who died that day. Not only that, he knew their Birthingdays, the names of their mothers, sisters, brothers. And he could read and do sums as well as a child of ten or eleven—though he hadn’t yet started school.” She paused for another long swallow of water. “He and his grandmother are waiting at a farm near town.”