Evred glanced skyward. The bells for Convocation were probably ringing right now, bringing the Jarls to the throne room for their yearly oaths.
How many are whispering to one another about my brother’s postponed wedding? No, they will only talk behind closed doors.
Where was Aldren-Sierlaef now? Probably still in the south. How long since he’d been home? A year? More? Twenty-five years old, the year heirs were expected to be married, and no word of a royal marriage.
As Evred ate breakfast alone, he considered the reasons his brother must have sent to their father. He had the excuse of war, of defense of the western coast. And the coast still held, though there had been terrible attacks, burnings, looting, according to Sindan’s Runners. Sindan had said recently that the pirates had been seen sailing south in a mass.
Evred put his dishes in the bucket and walked out, footsteps loud in the now empty hall. He wondered if it would be better not to listen to the reports.
Inda signals to Jeje. “I’ll command from Vixen.”
Fast Vixen under Jeje’s steady, sober hands.
“Use the sloops to transfer reinforcements.”
“Bring them up now?”
“Yes, one to a ship—where is my glass?”
Evred looked down, resting his fingertips on the bony head of the scout dog who paced steadily next to him, claws clicking a counter-rhythm to the ring of Evred’s heels.
A canopy of arrows like pen scratches against the sky— Jeje’s pale grimace—
Jeje takes an arrow in the forearm—Inda yells for bandages. One of her crew dashes up, pulls the arrow out, and binds the arm with his scarf—Jeje insists she stay at the tiller—Inda divides his attention between the bandaging and the scout rounding Death to bear down on the nearest pirate—
“Go, Inda! Go! I can steer!”
At midday Evred brought a stack of reports to the mess hall and finished reading them.
When he laid aside the last he tidied the pile, then let his hands drop. Now what? The rest of the day lay, heavy as the snow, ahead of him.
All right, then. Time for an inspection.
He buttoned his coat tight, pulled on a knit cap, and walked around the quiet castle, the patient dogs shadowing him, pausing only for sniffing.
Evred listened, observed the changing of the watch. Sentries walked steadily, dark silhouettes against the pewter sky. Stable orderly. Horses dozing in the loose boxes.
He climbed slowly up the ice-white tower stairs.
Smoke drifts off pirate and privateer ships alike; blood washing down from scuppers, a startling red stream, mixed with icy rain from the sudden sleet squall, the noise of weapons, shouts, screams, the creak-and-smash of a lightning-struck mast falling, sending up a column of white water . . .
Evred paused at a narrow window, watching the drill down below. Clash, stamp, shout—breath clouding—the sounds echoed up the frozen stone walls.
Everything as it should be. He considered that “should be.” Ala Larkadhe—poised between Iasca Leror, Olara, and Idayago—now his city.
His? There had been four assassination attempts so far. The castle was riddled with old tunnels and passages. No one had the time to search them all out. So the scout dogs roamed freely, sniffing doors, ears cocked.
Evred smiled down at the one pacing beside him now. He liked their company, though it made extra work for his staff, having to wand halls and corners.
He hoped Hawkeye had made it safely home, then thought of Jasid Tlen, who also wouldn’t be either home or at Convocation: he and Senelayec were probably holed up somewhere along the north coast, if the storm had hit on that side of the mountains, until they could finish their patrol to Ghael and back again.
Evred thought about that ride along the northern coast. The way people stopped in the fields and stared, their faces stony. The towns quiet when they entered, the inns closed. Now he knew why—not that that fixed anything.
As he paced downward, he thought, I can send proclamations of the truth to be read in every city, I can demand witnesses to every supposed murder outside of that one near the Ghael Hills—but will any of it kill the rumors?
The answer was: not likely. People believed the rumors because they wanted to believe them.
Only in the harbors did they find a semblance of welcome, partly because they helped defend them, but also because harbor people seemed to pay scarce heed to politics, governments, and rumors from the other side of Idayago. Their lives were bound up in tides and ships.
Evred reached the landing. Next would be the ancient archive room, its great, carved double doors closed and locked with some kind of magic that made your fingers ache, like ice held too long, if you touched them.
Inda scans. Jeje aft on the Vixen, purple wool hat turning this way and that as she leans into the tiller, watching always for signals from Dasta and Fox commanding Cocodu and Death—
Smoke-enveloped ships. Clashes of steel and cries carrying over the icy water . . .
Whistler! Where?
“Inda, that was Tau—from that big trysail—hai! You think that’s their flagship?”
Evred rounded the corner—and the archive doors stood open.
He stopped, then took a step backward, wondering if he was seeing another magical defense, something more lethal. All that he’d been able to find out was that the palace, mostly empty since his grandfather brought this area into Iasca Leror fifty years ago, had this unimaginably ancient archive behind carved doors that was not tended by the previous family, but by the morvende.
Morvende! Yet another rumor, a different kind? Stories about the mysterious cave dwellers filled most histories, but Hadand, who had read more ancient history than he, had told him that the most recent records insisted the morvende lived either on Drael or under the mountains near Sartor. None on Halia, and they never interacted with “sunsider” humans.
He took a tentative step, one hand out. The dog sniffed at the threshold, wagged its tail slightly. The animal did not seem to sense danger, but perhaps a dog wouldn’t be alert to magical threat.
“Enter.”
The voice was soft, low, the word spoken in heavily accented Iascan.
Tau rides the bowsprit of the biggest enemy pirate ship, his long legs astride the spar, arms loosing another whirtler in perfect form despite a windstorm of arrows flying all around him, some of them leaving comet tails of white smoke . . .
Evred walked in, his footsteps unnaturally loud on the glistening white flooring. The round room smelled of dust and ancient paper with a fresh, astringent overlay of steeped summer herbs. Expected were the shelves and shelves of very old hand-bound books and ribbon-tied scrolls. Unexpected was the short figure in white, with white hair, who stood by the fireplace, reaching for a steaming pan.
Jeje hauls on the tiller, the Fisher brothers haul the sail around, and the Vixen slants in a tight circle. The sail is loosened and the scout slows as it crosses beneath the pirate bowsprit.
Tau cups his hands around his mouth against the scream of the wind and the shouting and clanging of steel. He yells down to Inda, “This is the flagship. They all expect you to take on the captain. They won’t surrender until you fight him—it’s the pirate way.”
A glance out of pale eyes, so pale the color was indeterminate. Evred’s astonished gaze moved from detail to detail as the person—female, he realized, seeing the slight swell of breasts, the outward curve of hips under the white robe—poured the steaming water into a bowl made of deep blue glass. The hands were hands, not twigs, though the talons were really talons, long, curved, sharp—like dog or cat claws growing on thin human fingers. He glanced down to see if she had taloned toenails but the robe hid her feet.
The face was a human face. Her thin skin was pale as milk with a faint blue tracery of veins below the smooth surface, her hair fine as cobwebs, so white it was almost blue. Her age was impossible to guess; there were no lines or wrinkles, but then people who lived for untold generations away from wind
and sun would not show age as others did.
A stronger scent of pungent herbs pervaded the round chamber.
“So long shut up, this place always makes me sneeze,” the morvende said in a singsong-accented Sartoran. “Unless I sweeten the air.” She muttered a word, made a gesture, and the doors closed behind Evred. He perceived a faint scintillation on the edge of his vision as a clean breeze ruffled through the room.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am she who tends the archives here. It is my charge to examine the records and to recopy any that age has made brittle. It is I who placed protective magic on the doors. You have tried to enter.”
He didn’t ask how she knew. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“When I have time to myself I like to read.”
She pressed her hands together. “I know who you are,” she said. “You are the grandson of the conqueror who rode through killing those who had lived here for many years. And he descended from those who took this land you call Iasca Leror from the people who lived there.”
Evred said nothing.
Her eyes lifted, narrowing in humor for a moment. “No protest? No defense?”
He opened his hands. “It’s the truth.”
“Yet you yourself have governed with a light hand. You did not even put to death those sent during the leaf-falling season to enter the chambers above to kill you.”
“They didn’t succeed. The dogs sniffed ’em out, and my guards gave them enough to think about, I believe. As for the ones after—” He opened his hand, making a shooing motion.
“You are flippant.”
“Then I will be serious. I’ve seen enough death. I don’t want to see it again unless I cannot avoid it. I know they hate me and my people. I can only try to govern fairly.”
She said, “So it seems. Your actions indicate a character made for peaceful pursuit, but you live among warlike people, and war forms your life’s task.” She paused, and observed with that hint of humor again, “You say naught?”
“I dislike being watched when I cannot see the watchers.”
A very slight shrug. “So it must be when you come among others unasked, with steel in your hands. But we will do you no harm. You are even protected when you are in this chamber, and shall be so long as you continue to use your strength to establish peace. I am here to grant you access to this archive, so you can learn what you will of the past.”
Intense pleasure flooded Evred. He stepped closer, noticing that her robe was not in fact featureless white cotton, but woven of polished threads in a subtle, complicated pattern that suggested the twining of vines. “What is where?”
“Look about you. The scrolls are the oldest records, for we keep the copies in the same forms as the original document. Do you read the Old Sartoran?”
“With difficulty.”
“You will find no translations here. It is the purpose of this archive to maintain what we find exactly as we found it. And to protect it,” she added.
“Fair enough,” Evred said, looking at the shelf of scrolls. He thought of Hadand’s mother, Fareas-Iofre, who Hadand said stinted her own personal stipend, wearing old, much-mended clothes and making do with furnishings that others would hand to servants, so that she could order such records from Sartor, at ruinous expense. “May I copy anything?”
She indicated a desk across the chamber. “There you will find ink, pens, and paper. Our second purpose is to preserve knowledge, and share when we can. And so we recopy the aging scrolls, exactly as the original was written. And make copies of those as needed.”
He laid his hand flat to his heart. “I thank you.”
She put her hands together and then opened them, palms up, in the ancient gesture of peace. “I come and go during winter’s storms. But you will find that the doors are not locked against you. When you are here, I must request that you keep the doors closed behind you.”
“What if they need me?”
“You can hear a summons.” He knew she would not approve of any reason he might be summoned. “Have you any further questions?”
“Yes, though this one I do not know if you can answer.” He hesitated. “That sound. Do you hear it? Under the wind—”
“Ah.” Her eyes widened; they were a pale brown, closer to amber. “You hear the wind harps.”
“Wind harps? What could that be?”
She looked up, frowning at the shelves as if for guidance, then trod with soundless step to the oldest scrolls. “Do you know about the disirad?”
“Dih-sih-rahd,” he repeated. The front-of-the-teeth consonants and singsong vowels, the liquid “r,” were Old Sartoran.
She touched the glistening wall, so like ice mixed with silver. “This is disirad, but with all the magical virtue leached out. Some say that these few remains are all that is left of what was once abundant, before the end of Old Sartor. We do not know. But the wind harps on the mountain above this city were an experiment by my people, oh, a thousand years ago. Maybe more, for we do not reckon time exactly as you do, but it was an experiment to imitate the . . . the sound in the spirit, you might say, of the disirad of old.”
“It . . . it sang? It is stone, then, and it sang?”
“It was like stone and yet like metal, and it resonated with all living things in the world. Humans used it to good purpose, and then to evil, finding magic to destroy it. That was before Old Sartor died. Since then, these harps were carved. The experiment was deemed a failure, and so the wind harps stand abandoned on the high escarpments to sing their own song until time and wind and weather reshape them back to silent stone again.” She touched old scrolls. “Read more about them here. I shall depart and leave you to it.”
He held up a hand, palm up in habitual gesture, not knowing his ancestors had used it to show a hand empty of weapons.
She waited.
“Will you tell me more about you—and the morvende of today? Like where you live, what your lives are like?”
“Perhaps one day,” she said, and murmured something under her breath as she made a quick sign.
She vanished, light winking for a moment where she had stood, a soft gust ruffling the air.
Inda shakes the sweat from his eyes, ignoring the struggling figures behind him, at his sides, ignoring the watchers on the captain’s deck where he now faces their commander after fighting his way step by bloody step along the entire length of the pirate ship.
Surprise. The arc, the snap of coincidence—this commander who resembles Master Brath of the academy—same shape of head, same square, muscular body, though ten or fifteen years older, and wearing scarlet silk, his hair short and not in a horsetail. Diamonds glinting coldly in the golden hoops at each ear: Brotherhood commander.
The pirates and Inda’s own crew alike step back to form a ring on the captain’s bloody deck. Inda gives them a fast glance. He senses their anticipation—sees the bloodlust in their grins, their avid eyes, hears it in their shouts, kindling the same hot lust inside him as the man plants his feet wide on his blood-smeared deck, barbed wrist guards on each arm, a heavy straight sword gripped in both hands, white-knuckled, muscles bunching under his sodden silk.
And as the ship rolls and cold rain hisses all around them, turning the blood to pink streams, Inda flicks out his blades, snapping them up his forearms in readiness.
Evred stepped back in surprise, and then, unnerved, he looked around slowly, running his fingers along the shelves of old, carefully rolled scrolls. Selected one at random, and with careful fingers slid loose its ribbon. The heavy rice paper crackled as he unrolled it.
Inda meets the man’s eyes. Now the battle has diminished to the two of them, and Inda’s enemy is not a fleet of ships, but a gray-eyed man with sweat dripping down his face, assessing Inda the same way Inda assesses him.
The man grunts and swings.
He’s good with a straight sword—but his heavy metal is slow, far too slow for the Odni Hawk-Stoop defense. Inda Uses the very first
block-and-strike he learned so long ago, and drilled in thousands of times since; he whirls inside of the arc of that swinging sword—the captain tries to alter the force of his lunge—the knife is faster.
The captain falls, the thin stream of dark blood from the gap in his throat shredded by the wind.
And as pirates and pirate-fighters alike shout the man lies there at Inda’s feet, the gray eyes staring sightlessly at the sky. Like Dogpiss, just like Dogpiss—
Hawkeye Yvana-Vayir pulled on his wedding shirt, regarding with a grimace of distaste the yellow and blue sash lying on his bed.
“If it helps,” said his favorite, a merry young potter named Fala, “I did all the stitch-work. It is strange how I can make the prettiest cups, yet I cannot seem to use a needle with any grace.”
Hawkeye bent down, touching the somewhat crooked Yvana-Vayir eagle in blue woven between (very) stylized yellow flames, then grinned, pulled Fala to him, and kissed her. She laughed and flung her arms around his neck.
“Then I’ll wear it with pride,” he mumbled into Fala’s hair. He felt a prickle of guilt, then dismissed it. He wouldn’t let himself say anything against his wife once she was his wife, but in the meantime, he knew that most people hated Dannor, who never made herself pleasant except to superiors. She was even more arrogant than her brother Stalgrid, whom he loyally tried never to call Horsebutt, though he secretly thought the nickname an insult to horses. At least Stalgrid was at Convocation, and thus far away. The Tya-Vayir family representative was one-eyed Cama. Everyone liked Cama. Especially the girls.
Hawkeye kissed Fala again, thinking: I wish I could marry you, but said nothing. It would only grieve them both. After tonight he would be honor-bound to go to Dannor’s bed first, if she wanted him there. He suspected she would just out of spite—at least until she found a new favorite who would put up with her demands.
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