by Melanie Rawn
He had just enumerated the items Col had already slipped into his pockets—secretly, or so he’d thought. Surprise helped chase away the headache; if the triggering word was not repeated, it would not return. But he had never known why some words brought pain and others didn’t—there was no pattern to it he had ever been able to discover. Just thinking about a possible pattern brought a threatening twinge.
Jescarin was smiling. “Why don’t you just give me the list and we’ll go hunt up the rest, and save ourselves the bother of a grand tour?”
Collan shook his head. “Touring is natural. Racing around to specific plants isn’t. Besides—” He grinned. “I want to see this place.”
“Can’t blame you. Fa did good work, and I’m not bad at it either, even if I do say it myself!”
They left the Garden of Ever-Snow for an alley of trees spreading down to the river. After a moment, Collan asked, “How’d you know, anyway?”
“Plants talk. What do you need next? This is the Hall of Green Shade, by the way. You’ll notice that leaf-color darkens toward the water, to contrast with the stand of aspens on the opposite bank. In autumn it’s solid gold over there, and quite spectacular.”
Col took a moment to imagine it. “Must be. What I’m looking for is goldenrod, broom, rhododendron—”
“Who needs protection against danger?” Jescarin gestured the question away with the shears. “Never mind. Forget I asked.”
They strolled on. The turf underfoot was springy and uniformly dense, but Col counted at least six kinds of grass, differenced by leaf shape and greenness, making a subtle quilted pattern down to the river. “How do you get all this the same height and thickness?”
Jescarin snipped the shears in the air. “By hand, Minstrel! By hand!”
At that precise moment, as if cued onstage, two gardeners came along with scythes and started in on the area surrounding a chestnut tree. Collan eyed his host, who laughed uproariously.
“And now I owe you a cutting of bramble, as apology for the lie!”
“I’d rather have some more leaves—ash, oak, and thorn, to be precise.”
All humor died in the expressive eyes. “Those three? All together?”
Collan nodded.
“Things are that bad?”
“Getting that way, seems like.”
Jescarin closed his eyes for a moment. “‘Summon the Guide.’ May St. Rilla protect us all, especially my good Lady and her husband.”
The morning passed quickly. They followed Verald’s usual route with a detour to the greenhouses to find the plants Collan required. Lavender stalks were taken from a drying shed, and a twig with hazelnuts was finally discovered in the pantry of the gardeners’ day-kitchen. The Master of Roseguard Grounds provided commentary, naming the flowers and trees and bushes, pointing out their color effects, detailing his future plans for this area or that. Collan listened, and deposited each needed plant in his pockets, and nothing more was said about the Rising.
“Nearly Eighth,” Jescarin observed at last. “Sela will be wondering where I am. Come back to the house and eat with us, Domni. We have an excellent cook.”
A quarter-mile from the river was a trim thatched cottage of two stories and many windows, each with a bright flowerbox overflowing below. The gravel path was bordered with a dozen tree-roses, and on either side of the door were wooden tubs gaily painted, bound in polished brass, frothing with white Miramili’s Bells like soapsuds on washday. Collan leaned down to sniff their fragrance, and immediately sneezed.
As he straightened, rubbing his nose, he caught Jescarin frowning at him. The next moment the door opened. A long-limbed, dark-haired, very pretty, very pregnant young woman blinked at Col with wide green eyes. He sneezed again.
“I knew I’d seen you before!” Jescarin exclaimed. “Sela! Do you know who this man is?”
Sela inspected Col’s face narrowly and gave a sweet peal of laughter. “My First Flowers!”
Mystified, Collan took a step back. But Sela had seized his arm and was pulling him into the cottage, chattering all the while. Jescarin talked over and around her.
“—familiar, but I couldn’t place the name except as a Minstrel—”
“—just a child, and my mother told me not to expect—”
“—inside the archway, sneezing your head off—”
“—always remembered how sweet you were to a little girl—”
“—turns out to be you—”
“—I bragged about those flowers for years!”
“—and an agent of the Rising into the bargain!”
Tempted to clap a hand over each mouth, Col settled for a piercing whistle instead. “I’m not an agent of anything!”
Instant silence. Sela stared with those big green eyes of hers.
The awkward moment was punctuated by a sudden pounding inside his skull. Col said, “I’m sorry, but you’ve mistaken me for someone else. I’ve never met either of you before, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you remember!” the young woman exclaimed. “St. Sirrala’s Fair at Sleginhold, when—”
“If he says he doesn’t,” said Jescarin, “then he doesn’t.” Sela frowned. “But—” She gulped back the rest, and put a bright smile on her face. “Well, certainly. That’s the way of it, truly told. Be welcome to my house, Minstrel Rosvenir. Please, sit down.”
11
Col stayed for two pleasant hours. At Half-Ninth Sela’s First Daughter Tamsa, not quite four, arrived with a tribe of other children who’d been on an outing. The cottage became an immediate chaos of grubby hands, red-cheeked faces, discarded gloves and hats and coats, squeals, giggles, yells, and demands for water, juice, and the direction of the toilet. Collan was inundated in stomping little feet (ruining the polish of his boots), jabbing little elbows (too low to damage precious parts of his anatomy), and grabbing little hands (attached to aspiring lumberjacks who tried to climb him like a tree).
Sela and Verald worked frantically, assisted by three young and two older men who scooped up children and deposited them on the rug as fast as they could snag them, with orders to “Stay there!” The only inhabitants of the cottage viewing the invasion with supreme unconcern were three lion-maned cats, each occupying a windowsill well out of reach of eager little fingers.
“The husbands take turns giving the mothers a day of peace every week!” Verald shouted at Collan over the din. “We try to run the legs off ’em so they’re tired enough for a nap! Sometimes it works!”
Col peeled a climber off his leg and held it out from him by the shoulders. Big brown eyes in a small brown face met him stare for stare. Looking around helplessly, he spied one of the older men and extended the now squirming child. “Can you—unh!” For something this age, it had long legs; Col had just gotten a little foot in the stomach. “Do something with this, will you please?”
“Maidalin!” the man exclaimed, relieving Col of the girl. “Go on and sit by Tirez, there’s a sweetheart.”
Verald was grinning. “You’ve never been a father, truly told!”
“Never more truly,” Col replied with feeling. No matter what a bedmate’s plans might be, he was always scrupulously careful.
“Viko!” Sela called out, and a twinge stabbed at Collan’s left temple as his rescuer of before glanced around. “Help!”
“Do you want a story?” Viko asked the children, and winced at the raucous chorus of “NO!”
Not the face, the name, Col thought, and applied his usual remedy: calculating the area of the room in square inches.
“How about a song?” Verald said desperately. “We’ve even got a real Minstrel here today! If you’re all very quiet, maybe he’ll sing for you!”
“Song! Song! Song!” one of them chanted, and the others joined in, and it was worse than before.
When necessary, Collan could make himself heard above taver
n brawls. This was the greater challenge.
“QUIET!” he bellowed.
Little mouths rounded with astonishment. Big eyes widened with shock. And adult lungs heaved with sighs of sheer relief.
“All right, then,” Col said in his normal tones. “And stay that way. Domna Trayos, you wouldn’t happen to have a stringed instrument handy, would you?”
Verald raced from the room and came back an instant later with a child-sized mandolin. “It belongs to—”
“Mine!” a little girl shrieked.
Green eyes, dark skin, high cheekbones—Sela’s daughter, all right. Col bowed to her. “Will you do me the honor of allowing me to borrow your very fine mandolin, Domna?”
Thrilled by this dignified grown-up title, her head bobbed up and down.
“My thanks.” He caught her parents’ grins from a corner of his eye. The six fathers had escaped to the dining room for sustenance—of the liquid variety, Col surmised, and if they were smart, it’d have a considerable kick.
He adjusted the instrument to an open tuning, so all he’d have to do was move the flat of a finger up and down the strings to change major chords. The mandolin was half the size of any he’d played before, and his hands were much too big to attempt any fingering.
He gave them “Little Blue Pig” before asking them to help sing “How Many Mice?” because he’d forgotten some of the words. Then he slowed things down with “St. Jeymian and the Bear” and the “Lisvet Lost Her Shadow” before finishing with the old Ambraian lullaby “Moons in My Window.”
It worked. Heads nodded, eyelids drooped, and several children simply curled up on the rug for a nap. Col bowed once more to Sela’s drowsy daughter, set the lute on the mantle, and tiptoed his way to the door.
Verald followed him. “Thank you,” he murmured feelingly. “And while you may not be a father yet, you’ll make a damned good one.”
“Not if I can help it.” Col chuckled. “Fathering’s one thing. Being a father—that means one woman, one place, and no more taverns!”
“Talk to me again when you’ve met the one woman,” advised his host with a wry grin. “You’ve got all the plants you needed?”
“Yes, thanks.” He patted the muslin bag Jescarin had lent him and paused in the doorway to wave farewell to Sela. She gave him a smile and a nod on the way to carrying Tamsa off for a nap. “How long will you be hosting this lot?”
“Mercifully, no more than an hour. They all belong to people who work for the Slegins. It’s a good life, though it may seem dull to you,” he added as the door snicked shut behind him and they started down the path between rose trees. “Lady Agatine provides schooling and a start in a profession, and helps with dowries and marriage negotiations. If we’re sick, her Healer tends us. When we retire, there’s a cottage waiting at Sleginhold or another of her properties.”
“She’s a good, kind Lady,” Collan said, thinking of the frightening message he must deliver to her tomorrow.
“That she is. And Domna Liwellan will follow her example, though please St. Venkelos the Judge that won’t be for a long, long time yet.”
“Domna who?”
“Sarra Liwellan. She’s our Lady’s chosen heir, if the Council agrees.” He paused to nudge a border stone back into place with his boot. “She’s at Ryka Court now, presenting the petition.”
Sarra Liwellan. While this name brought no headache, it had distinctly unpleasant connotations—except for the satisfaction of smacking her rear after she kicked his.
“If you’ve time before you leave,” Verald was saying, “do us the honor of coming to dinner.”
“If I can, I will.”
“And bring your lute. I’d like to hear you sing something a little less cute than ‘Little Blue Pig’ !”
Laughing, Collan agreed and made his way back to the entrance to Roseguard Grounds. Nice people, he thought as he walked back to his lodgings. Nice house, nice little girl, nice life.
And dull as a day in Domburron.
12
Collan’s understanding with the Thistlesilk’s owner was that he’d perform for an hour and a half in early evening when the dinner room filled with high-class customers. His understanding with the Thistlesilk’s owner’s niece was rather less formal. Both ladies were seriously disappointed by his stuffy nose (“All those damned flowers—I should’ve known better!”). Singing was impossible, and the music tonight would be instrumental only. Dalliance was impossible, too—although his nose was just an excuse. He needed the night free to assemble the message. With regret, for the niece was inventive as well as pretty, he promised to make it up to her soon.
So he meandered among tables with his lute slung on a shoulder-strap, strumming or plucking as the mood took him, winking at married women to make them blush and keeping his eyes strictly off their unmarried daughters. Roseguard was no conservative country town where even a glance could earn a man a fist in the jaw; neither was it so “sophisticated” that a man could openly admire any woman he fancied. The patrons of the Thistlesilk were solid, forthright, upstanding citizens, successful merchants and crafters for the most part, whose daughters chose a bower lad, took a husband, had a few children, and only then did (discreetly) as they pleased.
Minstrels, no matter how famous or attractive, were not what the worthy domnas of Roseguard approved of for their daughters. For themselves, however, they enjoyed a sly look or two, and some giggled like schoolgirls under Col’s grin.
He played for two hours that night, figuring he owed it to his host. When he indicated he was finished for the night, he accepted the Bard’s Cup of wine and drained it in four long swallows, as was customary. The Thistlesilk possessed a very fine Bard’s Cup made of beaten silver with inlaid circles of lapis around the stem. He paused to admire it, then drank while the owner chanted the Minstrel’s Rhyme, lutenist’s version:
First to thank good St. Velenne
Whose gift has kept me fed;
Next to thank the worthy Bards
Whose songs have bought my bed;
Third to thank my Lady Lute
Whose strings control my purse;
The last does not thank you, kind friends—
Instead, I thank my horse!
There were other versions, depending on what instrument had been played. But one thing remained constant: a Minstrel who did not finish the Bard’s Cup in the prescribed four swallows before the verse ended was compelled to play another song before trying again. And again. Until he got it right. Collan had on occasion become splendidly and inexpensively drunk by purposely failing—but only where he knew the innkeeper would indulge him, and only where they served good wine in the Bard’s Cup. Early in his career he’d learned that most did not; indeed, the absolute dregs, sometimes one step removed from vinegar, was often poured for Minstrels—who must drink as custom demanded or risk more songs. And more wine.
Belly full of excellent Cantra red, he stopped in the kitchen to pick up a tray: roast lamb with lemon sauce, potatoes seasoned with thyme, and a salad of greens and apples. A bottle of wine awaited him in his room, and in a little while the kitchen boy would bring up hot tea and the Thistlesilk’s specialty: orange and almond torte.
By Fourteenth, with the meal only a delightful memory and the wine long gone, he wished he could have indulged in several more Bard’s Cups. Confronted by the full implications of the message he would deliver tomorrow to Lady Agatine Slegin, getting blind drunk tonight was a real temptation.
Gorynel Desse had made him twice repeat the plants, their groupings, and the ribbons that went with each—an insult to a man who had only to hear a song once before being able to play and sing it perfectly. The insistence on repetition had served to impress him with the importance of the message. On his way to Roseguard, he’d tried to forget what the bouquet would say to Lady Agatine, and mostly succeeded. But now, as he assembled its parts, it was as if the mea
ning of each flower, leaf, seed, and root was inscribed in fire.
Pennyroyal—Flee—hid beneath the giant pink rhododendron that meant Danger. To its stem Col wired white poplar leaves, three at the top and eight below. Time; an indicator of when Lady Agatine should leave Roseguard. Third day of the eighth week? Eighth day of the third? It was the last night of the first week of the year. . . . He would have bet his numbered accounts in Neele and Shainkroth that departure would be sooner rather than later. The message was urgent; why tell someone to flee seven weeks before the fact?
Which meant Lady Agatine had nineteen days to plan an escape—assuming the leaves weren’t meant to indicate days and hours instead of weeks and days. Col thought not; nothing else in the bouquet had anything to do with time.
He gave a start, realizing St. Lirance’s had come and gone, and he’d forgotten his own Birthingday, or at least the one he’d chosen for himself. His thirty-first, give or take. Glancing over the plants again, selecting the next part of the bouquet, he had the feeling that if he didn’t deliver this message and get out of town fast, he wouldn’t be around to forget his thirty-second.
He braided the stems of ash, oak, and thorn leaves with more wire to hold them firm, combined with a juniper sprig symbolizing Succor. Two finished, two to go. He bound the dozen or so marigolds—white, not the orangey-yellow used to express sadness at a separation—at various places on the sprig of red oleander, and bunched tall lavender stalks around the whole. Together, they counseled distrust and predicted deceit. With no indication of the traitor’s identity, Collan thought, shaking his head as he worked. Maybe the next bunch was meant to be comforting: yellow carnations, purple broom, and the twig of hazelnuts emphasized the knowledge and protection given by magic.
With all four segments of the bouquet assembled and laid out on the table, Collan flexed his fingers before digging into his journeypack for the ribbons. These had been supplied by Desse with specific instructions as to which bundle must be tied by each.