by Tad Williams
At last they reached a small but prettily decorated courtyard that rang with the sounds of a fountain. At one edge of court, where the tiles gave way to a pocket garden with paths of pale sand, a muscular, sun-browned young man sat on mounds of cushions beneath a striped awning big enough for a dozen guests. As if he were the groom to Qinnitan s bride, he, too, wore a robe of flowing white. He stood as they approached, hesitated a moment between Qinnitan and Luian, between nominal rank and actual power, and then lowered himself to one knee before the girl.
“Mistress. So kind of you to come.” He rose and turned to Luian. “Respected cousin, you do me honor.”
Luian produced a fan from her sleeve and snapped it open with a clack like an eagle taking wing. “Always a pleasure, Captain.”
Jeddin beckoned his visitors to join him beneath the awning, then sent his servant to fetch refreshments. After an appropriate time of small talk with Luian about her health and the health of various important residents of the Seclusion, he turned to Qinnitan.
“Luian says you remember me now.”
She blushed, since many of her chief memories were of him being humiliated by older boys. It was even harder to reconcile that with the present now that she saw him again. The Leopard captain’s muscles moved under his dark skin like those of a real leopard she had once seen in a cage in the Sun’s Progress marketplace, the most fearsome animal she had ever encountered. For all its strength, though, despite its dreadful teeth and claws, that leopard had seemed sad to her and not altogether present, as though it saw not the crowds of people around it but the shadow-splashed woodlands where it had once roamed—saw those places, but knew it could not reach them.
Oddly, she thought she saw something of this in Jeddin s eyes as well, but knew she must simply be romanticizing, muddling this handsome young man with the trapped beast. “Yes Yes, Captain, I do remember you. You knew my brothers.”
“I did.” Like an eminent man asked to recall the pivotal moments of his career, Jeddin began to reminisce at length about the days in Cat’s Eye Street, describing the adventures of a group of young scapegraces—of whom, he felt compelled to admit, he had not been the least mischievous. To hear him speak, he had been one among equals, and none of the miseries she recalled on his behalf had ever truly happened. It was strange, as though he had lived his childhood on the other side of an ornamental screen from the rest of them, making up his own mind what things meant, seeing only what he wished to see Several times Qinnitan had to bite her tongue when the urge to correct him became strong. There was something about Jeddin, the way he talked, that made her feel as though telling him now that even a small part of his memory was faulty would be no different than the way her brothers had sometimes pushed him from behind as he ran, making him go so much faster than his legs could carry him that he stumbled and fell.
The refreshments came, and as the servants poured tea and piled sweetmeats on plates, Qinnitan watched Luian watching Jeddin, which the Favored did with the sort of avidity she usually reserved for things like the rosewa-ter jelly being spooned into her bowl. It seemed unusual, not that Luian should find Jeddin attractive—he was more than that, his body as hard and wonderfully defined as a statue, his face befittingly serious and noble of cast, with nose straight and strong and eyes a surprisingly bright green under the heavy brows—but that someone like Luian, who in all other ways seemed to have settled into a kind of premature, matronly old age, and who, after all, had given up her original organs years ago, should still have such feelings at all.
“Well,” Luian said abruptly, ending a silence. “To think that after so many years we of the old neighborhood should have a reunion here!”
The captain’s emerald eyes now turned to Qinnitan. “You must be very happy, Mistress Of all of us, well as we have done, you have risen highest. A wife of the Golden One himself? He dropped his gaze. “An unmatched honor.”
“Yes, of course.” Although I might as well be married to a hassock or a sandal for all that comes of it, she almost said, but didn’t Jeddin had the look of a religious man, and obviously he must be devout at least where the autarch himself was concerned. “I am blessed by his notice.”
“And he is blessed by.” He paused and to her amazement appeared to blush.
“And he, our autarch, is blessed by all the heavens, and especially by his heavenly father Nushash,” said Luian abruptly and loudly.
“Yes, of course. All praise to the Golden One,” said Jeddin. Qinnitan echoed the blessing, but could not help feeling something important had just happened and she had missed it.
“We should go now, Cousin.” Luian waved for the Tuam girls to help her to her feet, which they did, fighting the Favored’s great weight like nomads trying to put up a tent in a high wind. “Thank you for the refreshments and the courtesy of your company.” There was a new tone in Luian’s voice, faintly cold.
Jeddin scrambled to his feet. “Of course, respected cousin. You grace us with your presence.” He bowed to her, then to his other guest. He did it with some grace, but that didn’t surprise Qinnitan, she imagined that even for a soldier, bowing well must be almost as important in the autarch’s court as handling a sword or a gun. “I wish you could stay longer.”
“Propriety forbids it,” said Luian shortly, setting sad for the door with her servants and Qinnitan fluttering in her wake like gulls. The huge Favored guard fell in behind them in the corridor, mute and sleepy-eyed.
“Did I do something wrong, Luian?” Qinnitan asked after they had walked for some distance in silence and were nearing the gate to the Seclusion Luian only waved her hand, whether because of discretion or irritation was hard to say.
When they had left the immense guard behind and were back within the walls, Luian leaned toward her and said, in a harsh whisper that might or might not have been too quiet for the Tuani servants to hear, “You must be careful. And Jeddin must not be a fool.”
“What do you mean? Why are you angry with me?”
Luian frowned. The paint on her lips had begun to smear a little into her face powder, and for the first time she appeared grotesque to Qinnitan and even a little frightening. “I’m not angry with you, although I will remind you that you are no longer a low-caste girl in the alleys behind Feather Cape Row. You have been given great honors, but you hve in a dangerous world.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh? You couldn’t see what I could see as clearly as my own hand at the end of my arm? That man is in love with you.”
Even in her astonishment, Qinnitan could not help thinking that the anguish on Luian’s face seemed less like that of a guardian unheeded than a lover scorned.
16
The Grand, and Worthy Nose
FLOATING ON THE POOL:
The rope, the knot, the tail, the road
Here is the place between the mountains
Where the sky freezes
—from The Bonefall Oracles
Collum Dyer had been cheerful all through the day’s ride, full of mocking remarks and droll assessments of life in Southmarch, and had managed to coax a few weak smiles out of the merchant Raemon Beck, but even Collum was grimly silent as they reached the crossroad. Dyer came from near the Brennish borderlands in the east and had never seen the old Northmarch Road. Ferras Vansen had passed this crossroad many times, but still found it a disturbing place.
“Gods,” said Collum. “It’s huge—you could drive three team-wagons abreast on it.”
“It is not that much wider than the Settland Road,” said Ferras, feeling a need to defend the more mundane thoroughfare that had so entranced him in his youth, which had led him to Southmarch and his current life.
“But look, Captain,” said one of the foot soldiers, pointing along the last clear stretch of the huge and disturbingly empty Northmarch Road before it vanished into the mist. “The ground drops away there on either side, but the road stays high.”
“They built it that way,” Vansen told them. “Be
cause north of here it gets even wetter in the wintertime months. They built the roadbed up with stones and logs to keep it above the muck. They did things right back then. In the old days wagons and riders were going back and forth between Northmarch and Southmarch every day, and also the Westmarch Road joined it just on the other side of those hills.” He pointed, but the hills could only be seen m his memory; the mists were so thick today that someone might have draped a huge white quilt across the forested lands. It was strange to think of so much life here once, merchants, princes with their retinues, travelers of all sorts in what was now such a desolate place.
A thought flitted across his mind, quick and startling as a bat. Perin’s Hammer, what if we have to ride into the mist? What if we must pursue the caravan across the Shadowline into that. . . nothingness? In his life he had heard half a dozen people claim to have come back from the far side of that boundary, but he had not believed any of them. The one man of his village that everyone knew for certain had crossed the Shadowline and returned had never claimed anything. In fact, he had never spoken at all after his return, but had haunted the fringes of the village like a scavenging dog until the winter killed him. As a child, Ferras had seen that man’s constant expression of astonished horror—a look that suggested whatever had happened to him across the Shadowline was happening to him still and would continue happening every moment of every day. Although no one had said anything but what was correct and pious, everyone in the village had been relieved when the mad old man had died.
Collum’s question yanked him back to the here and now. “How far does the road lead?”
Ferras shook his head. “Northmarch Castle was about four or five days’ ride from here, I think. So the old gaffers in my village said, although it was at least a century before their time when anyone could still go there. And its lands and towns extended a good way farther north, I think.”
Collum Dyer clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Mesiya’s teats! And just think—now it’s all empty.”
Vansen stared at the wide road cutting across the hummocky land to where the fogs swallowed it. “So you think. So we hope. But I don’t want to consider it just now, to speak the plain truth. I don’t like this place.”
Collum turned and nodded toward Raemon Beck, sitting on his horse at the far side of the troop of guards, staring resolutely southward with a face pale as a fish’s belly. “Neither does he.”
FerrasVansen felt a tug of yearning as they rode along the Settland Road past the towns and villages of Daler’s Troth—Little Stell, Candlerstown, and Dale House, the seat of Earl Rorick Longarren, who would have wed the young woman stolen from Raemon Beck’s caravan. Vansen had not returned to his hilly home since he was still a raw young soldier, and it was hard not to think about how some of the men in Creedy’s Inn at Greater Stell would sit up to see him at the head of an entire troop, undertaking a mission at the direct order of the princess regent.
Yes, a mission that’s httle better than a banishment, he reminded himself.
But he was not much moved by the idea of preening in any case. His mother’s death a year before had left httle to tie him to this land of his childhood His sisters and their husbands had followed him to Southmarch Town. The folk here that he remembered would scarcely remember him, and in any case, what was the enjoyment of trying to make them feel worse about their hardscrabble lives? It was only the children of the really wealthy farmers, the ones who had mocked him for his shabbiness, for hisVuttish father’s strange way of speaking, that he would have wished to humiliate, and if they had inherited their fathers’ holdings they were undoubtedly richer than any mere guard captain, even the guard captain to the royal family.
There truly is nothing here for me now, he realized, with some surprise. Only my parents’ graves, and those are a half day’s ride off the road.
A light rain had begun to fall; it took him a moment to pick Raemon Beck from the crowd of hooded riders. Vansen guided his horse over to the young merchant’s side.
“You have a wife and some young ones at home, I think you said.”
Beck nodded. His face was grim, but it was the grimness of a child who was one harsh word away from tears.
“What are their names?”
The young merchant looked at him with suspicion. Not all of Collum Dyer’s rough jokes had been kind, and clearly he wondered whether Vansen was going to make sport of him, too. “Derla. My wife’s name is Derla. And I have two boys.” He took a deep breath, let it out in an unsteady hiss. “Little Raemon, he’s the eldest. And Finton, he’s still . . . still in swaddling . . .” Beck turned away.
“I envy you.”
“Envy? I have not seen them in almost two months! And now . . .”
“And now you must wait -weeks longer. I know. But we have sent them word that you are well, that you are doing the crown’s business . . .”
Beck’s laugh had a ragged edge. “Weeks . . . ? You’re a fool, Captain.You didn’t see what I saw. They’re going to take you all, and me with you. I will never see my family again.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps the gods mean our end. They have their own plans, their own ways.” Ferras shrugged. “I would fear it more if I had more to lose, perhaps I honestly hope you come safe to your family again, Beck. I will do my best to see that it happens.”
The young merchant stared at his horse’s neck. Beck had a good face, Vansen thought, with strong nose and clear eyes, but not much of a chin. He wondered what the man’s wife looked like. Depends on Beck’s prospects with the family venture, he decided: a man could become surprisingly taller and handsomer merely by the addition of wealthy relatives.
“Do you . . . are you married?” Beck asked him suddenly.
“To the royal guard!” shouted Collum Dyer from a few yards away. “And it is a warm coupling—the guard gives us all a swiving every payday!”
Ferras grunted, amused. “No, not married,” he said. “Nor likely to be. One thing Dyer says is true—I am married to the guard.” There had been a few over the years he had almost thought possible, especially a merchant’s daughter he had met in the marketplace.They had liked each other, and had met and spoken several times, but she had already been pledged and so was duly married to a Marnnswalk furrier’s son with lucrative Brennish connections. Other than that, his dalliances had reached too low or too high, the taverner’s daughter at an inn called the Quiller’s Mint, friendly but twice widowed and five years his senior, and when he had first joined the guard, a woman of the minor nobility whose husband ignored her.
Too high . . . ? he thought. No, that was not too high—not compared to the madness that is in my heart these days. The image of Princess Briony’s face as she sent him away came to him, the strangeness of it, as though she did not entirely hate him after all. A year now I have felt it, this terrible, hopeless ache. There is nothing higher that I could aspire to, or more foolish How could I marry someone else, except for companionship? But how could I settle for any woman when I would think only of her?
Well, he thought, perhaps her wish will come true. Perhaps this journey will provide me with a chance to die honorably and everyone will be satisfied.
No, not everyone would be satisified, he realized. What Ferras Vansen really wanted was to live honorably, even happily. And to marry a princess, although that would not happen in this world or any other he could imagine.
*
He was meeting her near Merolanna’s chambers, in the back hallway of the main residence, known as the Wolf Hall for the faded tapestry of the family crest that took up a large portion of its south wall. It had too many stars and a mysterious crescent moon hung above the wolf’s snarling head, showing it to be a remnant of some earlier generation of Eddons. How long it had hung there no one could remember or even guess.
Like Briony, he had promised Merolanna he would come alone—no guards, no pages. She had been forced to speak sharply to Rose and Moina to get them to let her be, of course. Clearly her ladies feared she had
an assignation with Dawet, but their resistance upset her just enough that she did not bother to tell them otherwise.
She watched her brother saunter up the corridor through the slanting colums of autumn light that filtered down from the windows, uneven light that made the passage seem as though it were under water and which turned the bucket and mop left inexplicably in the middle of the floor and the small offering-shrine to Zoria on the broad table into dully glimmering things that might have spilled from the belly of a sunken ship. For a moment, as Briony noted by the way her twin held his arm close to his body that it was hurting him, they might have been children again, escaped from their tutors for a morning to play scapegrace around the great castle.