Mapping Winter

by Marta Randall

  “Very well, Master Pyrs. I’ll send someone to do it now.”

  The boy frowned at the sarcasm. “I’ve done it already.” He turned to Kieve. “Do I eat in the kitchen, mistress?”

  “No, go into the public room. I’ll pack. We have to leave soon.”

  “I’ve already packed my gear, and most of yours.” He pushed stiff-shouldered through the door.

  “How could I eat that?” Kieve said, rising.

  Bredda picked up the teapot. “You’d best figure out what you want of him, Kieve, and what will become of him once you have finished.”

  “Once I have— Do you think I think he’s a toy?”

  “I don’t think you know what you think he is,” the innkeeper said, turning away.

  The Rider banged her cup down. “How much do I owe you?”

  “I’ll tell you after Master Pyrs finishes breakfast,” Bredda said over her shoulder, stumping across the floor.

  Kieve pressed her lips together and went into the public room. The boy sat on a windowsill, bent over a plate of eggs and sausages. His bright hair glowed in the morning light but the tilt of his mouth was still angry. Around him guildspeakers filled the room: weavers, potters, herders, saddlers, farmers, porters, foresters, the brown folk of the mountains and the blonder folk of the Morat Valley. Kieve, anonymous in her plain breeches and shirt, helped herself to a mug of small beer and perched on the windowsill beside Pyrs. The guildspeakers ignored her and the boy shoveled in his breakfast as though he hadn’t eaten in the past three days. Which, she thought, was close to the truth. He bit into a sausage and helped himself to a sip from her mug.

  “You’d think she could afford a decent stable master,” he said, putting the mug down. “She must make a fortune from this place.”

  “She does well enough.”

  “Well enough! Unig would be wild to have this many people in his inn.”

  Near the fireplace, a tinker and a riverman disputed the value of steam engines over sails. She leaned her head against the embrasure, watching the room.

  “It’s not always this crowded. Listen to them. It’s not every day that a lord dies, so they feel important.” She hesitated. No one was close enough to hear them through the room’s noise. “They’ll swagger around the city and think they have a say in what happens, then they’ll swear the oath and go home and never be fit to live with again.”

  He swallowed a bite of eggs and said, “Don’t they confirm a new lord?”

  She made a rude, quiet noise. “No. All they do is confirm whoever the land-barons have already chosen. A Lord can’t rule without the land-barons’ support, and they don’t care piffle for what the peasants or town guilds say. So these people will hear about it when Lord Cadoc dies, and the land-barons’ choice will make a speech in one of the squares, and they’ll all cheer and think they have made history when in fact they have made nothing at all.” The Lady Isbael knew that, Kieve thought, which was why she spent nothing to court Dalmorat’s guildspeakers.

  He thought this over. “Is this only in Dalmorat too, like the ferrets?”

  She was surprised that he remembered, and wondered what else he remembered, and did not know how to ask. Instead, “No,” she said. “Cadoc didn’t invent that one. It’s true all over Cherek.” It reminded her of another thing. “How do you know about Constain?”

  He looked at her in silence for a moment. “Welfred let me work in the common room, when the seminarian was holding classes. As long as I was quiet, he let me stay.”

  “Unig didn’t pay for that, did he?”

  The boy shook his head. “Unig paid for nothing,” he said.

  “Can you read?”

  He refused to answer. After a moment she came off the sill. He scrambled down and followed her to Bredda’s room. There was, she noted, nothing left for her to pack. He took up his own saddlebags and followed her out of the inn. A stable hand boosted him onto his horse. The sleeves of his shortcoat fell over his hands as he held the reins, and the borrowed cloak straggled over Myla’s flanks. Bredda came out, the reckoning in her hand, and gave it to Kieve.

  “Have you thought to wonder,” the innkeeper said, ignoring Kieve’s glare, “just why you were allowed out, given what you must do when Cadoc dies?”

  Kieve shrugged as she counted out coins. “Who else would go? Who else rides mountains in winter?”

  “You were not the only idiot available.” She glanced at the boy. “Send him home, Kieve.”

  Kieve dropped the coins in Bredda’s palm and swung into the saddle. “I’ll do as I think best,” she said.

  Bredda stepped back, frowning, as Kieve wheeled Traveler from the yard.

  Folk filled the City Market, trampling the ice to mud. Voices rose and fell as Kieve and the boy picked their way through the maze of shops and street vendors. In the morning light the buildings were shabby, the ruts in the street unfilled, the vendors wrapped in patched cloaks and their goods often dingy. The boy stared around with wide eyes.

  Two constables guarded the doors of City House. Shadeen stood in twos and threes on corners, leaning against their spears and watching the crowd with hooded eyes. She recognized Dunun from the castle and guided the horses toward him. He dipped his spear in informal salute and she leaned down to talk.

  “Lasted the night,” he said, answering her raised eyebrow and quick nod toward the river. She stilled a moment of disappointment.

  “Otherwise quiet?”

  “At least until noon, when the last of the sluggard land-barons get out of bed. But most of them will be back on Sterk soon enough.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “The party last night—perhaps you didn’t know. Gadyn made another land-baron and they took over Whores Hall for the celebration.” The soldier left his expression blank.

  Kieve nodded. “I wasn’t aware that Gadyn had much more land to give,” she said.

  “Enough for a barony, enough to make Matyns happy at any rate. They say he drank an entire barrel himself and bedded three whores at a time.” Dunun snorted. “Whether he could do anything with ‘em...”

  Kieve nodded and gathered the reins.

  “Headed up castle? Drop this at the inner gate? I can’t spare a messenger and Ilach wants his blessed reports on time.”

  Kieve took the folded paper and put it into one of her pockets. “Anything else?”

  Dunun grinned, revealing large yellow teeth. “You won’t have heard— Lady Drysi’s got this prediction machine. A regular wonder it is, too, with bells and buzzers and clockwork gimcracks, and all gold and silver and jewels. She says it says the sword will pass in blood and blizzard.” He spat. “There’s always a blizzard come winter, and only a bloody fool wouldn’t believe that, is what I say.”

  Kieve smiled. “And who does it predict will take the sword?”

  “Nothing a normal human could decipher.” He looked around. “Nor discuss.”

  She nodded and turned the horse away from him. Shadeen policed their own and therefore had little to fear from Kieve or the ferrets, for which she was grateful; what friends she had in Dalmorat were, for the most part, among the castle regiment.

  The streets, like the market, were full. Leafless trees reared against the pale morning sky, all the way to the quay at the avenue’s foot. Kieve lifted her baton. People moved aside before them, caught between the press of the crowd and the desire to avoid her.

  As they neared the river the boy’s horse slowed. Kieve glanced back and found him staring at Penitence, stretching along the river’s edge. No figures occupied the stocks and the gallows were ropeless and bare. Overhead a dangling cage twitched in the light wind.

  “What is it?” The boy’s voice was very quiet.

  “It is Penitence, the executioners’ ground for peasants and servants. And bondslaves. There is one in that cage.”

  The boy’s face tilted up, pale against the darkness of his hood. “When...when will they let it down?”

  “When the slave is de
ad. They starve, so as not to waste any more of their masters’ resources. Or, in winter, die of cold first.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I have nothing to do with that,” she said. “It is not ferret business, or Rider business. It is the law.” He didn’t reply. “The higher classes are killed on Sterk, when they are put to death. That is also the law.” When he still didn’t reply, she cursed herself and turned her horse toward the quay. Myla followed a pace behind.

  A flat iceferry waited at the quay, already full of people and supply carts. Its luffing sails snapped and rustled in the breeze. A city constable gestured Kieve forward but caught the grey’s reins and held the boy back. Kieve turned in the saddle.

  “He’s with me,” she said. “Let him go.”

  “Pardon, Rider.” The constable braced his legs. “We have orders. Authorized travelers only.”

  The city constables, lowest on Dalmorat’s ladder after the Shadeen Guild and Cadoc’s personal Guard, were known for exercising as much petty power as they could. Now a second constable came for her papers. She handed them down without taking her gaze from the one by Myla’s head.

  “That boy is in bond to me,” she said. “He is my property, as much as my horse or my cloak.”

  He shook his head. “My orders—”

  “I claim Rider’s Passage on that scow,” she continued, lifting her baton, “so it cannot sail without me. The boy comes with me, or we sit here and argue until Master Adwyr comes to inquire. As he will.”

  A sergeant emerged from the guard booth, holding Kieve’s papers flat against a tally board, and came to stand by her stirrup. “If you will sign a statement of responsibility...”

  She took the paper and held it close, but could not make out the words. Muttering a curse, she lettered her name along the blankness at the bottom. The sergeant initialed her papers and handed them back, and the constable dropped Myla’s reins and stepped away. The gesture he made was not the furca.

  The grey balked at the foot of the gangplank but the boy urged her aboard and into the corral. The borrowed cloak spread beyond his feet and tripped him until he took it off and stuffed it into a saddlebag. Ferrymen hauled in the plank and cast off, using long poles to push away from the quay until wind caught in the sails, snapping them full, and the ferry moved away from Abermorat and across the frozen river. Wooden runners hissed against ice. The rigging creaked. Kieve leaned against the rail, watching the city recede. After a little silence she glanced at Pyrs.

  “That paper,” she said, “says that if you do anything wrong up castle, I’m liable for it. If you step out of line at all, I’ll beat you bloody. Understand?” He hesitated before nodding. “Good. Come with me.”

  She led him around the farm carts to the bow. Cold wind cut at their faces and he buttoned his shortcoat all the way up, its collar hiding his ears.

  “That island is Sterk.” Kieve pointed. “You can’t see the castle from here.”

  The island was a dark, featureless peak rising from the white of the river. A vendor came by, hawking cider from a firepot strapped to his back. Kieve bought two steaming mugs and gave one to the boy. She rested her hip against a bale of parchment, watching the forested bank race toward them.

  “It doesn’t look like much,” he said.

  “Sterk? Not from this angle, no.”

  He licked cider from his lips. “The stable master at the inn, the old one? She said that when Cadoc dies, Gadyn’s going to take over the castle and hold it until he’s confirmed as next lord.”

  “Indeed. Bredda’s stable master has a thick head and a loose tongue. People have disappeared for speaking rumors.” She turned her back to the railing and looked at him. “Does it interest you? The succession?”

  He nodded.

  “Very well.” She told him, pitching her voice for his ears only and thinking about Cadoc as she talked. Dalmorat’s Lord was a stocky, powerful man with a weathered face. Some whispered that his coal-black eyes had no soul behind them because he’d sold it to Death and the Father and never felt its loss. He had been thrice widowed and left with one daughter and one son, Isbael and Gadyn, who hated each other and their father with equal passion. Isbael had been absent from the province for decades and Kieve wondered what she was like. Smart and sharp and silent, Bredda had said. Perhaps. As for Gadyn, after four years she still could not understand what use his father saw in him.

  The great sails moved as the ferry changed course for its final run up river to Sterk. She knew Pyrs saw the castle when he stopped listening to her. Looking at him, she remembered her first sight of Sterk as she came up the Water Road to her oathing four years ago, when it all seemed fresh and hopeful and new. She turned to look over the boy’s head, seeing it half in the sunlight of this winter day and half in the light of her memory, and surprised, as always, by its beauty.

  The island was a half-sphere of dark rock, its convex side looking north to northeast and its concave side facing down the river and across to Abermorat. Halfway up the concave side, the castle occupied an immense ledge of rock, backed in turn by a huge crescent overhang. Built half of wood and half carved from native stone, it rose straight from the lip of the ledge, an austere grey stone wall topped by turrets, wall walks, and arrow loops. Behind this outer rampart rose another wall, and beyond that a maze of towers and barbicans, buttresses and steep roofs, marching in pale, glorious disorder into the darkness of the overhanging rock. Arches and covered passages connected the towers, walls, roofs, and balconies. Light flashed from windows and caught the occasional roof tile, making a spot of intense color on the pale grey stone. White snow outlined the peaks and valleys of the ramparts and the crowded masonry behind them. Behind the castle walls treetops loomed, bare, deciduous limbs stark against the dark green of conifers. To the far right, Lord’s Walk reached a tentative finger over soaring cliffs, tumbled with rock and footed in huge, frozen waves. This side of Sterk, in summer, was protected by a series of fierce rapids, white and seething; in the winter the water froze to a treacherous jumble of ice and rock. To the far left, a semaphore tower rose from the edge of the precipice, facing its twin across the river at the city’s edge.

  No flags or banners flew from the turrets, as they had not since Cadoc was taken ill, but along the outer curtain guest flags flapped against stones above the gatehouse. Kieve saw them as a blur of colors. She hadn’t expected so many. A single narrow road climbed from the quay at water level to the castle, disappearing behind stone walls or spanning ravines on slender, arched bridges. A few wagons moved along it and more congregated at its foot. The wagoners stamped their feet against the cold. Sails rattled down, brake beams hissed and groaned on the river ice, and the ferry slowed and swung against the quay. Kieve tucked her cloak close about her neck as she turned to the corral. Pyrs closed his mouth, looked at her awestruck, and went to help.

  They came off the ferry first, leading the horses around the carts. Myla skittered and did not calm until her hooves touched the roadbed. They mounted and cantered past the staging area where the carts were set on the notched track paralleling the road. Their small, serrated inner wheels meshed with the notches, metal grips clamped to a thick moving cable and the carts climbed the face of Sterk, powered by the cable which was, in turn, powered by teams of horses hitched to an immense winch at the top of the steep cliff. Kieve thought the arrangement ungainly but clever. The boy stared at it with admiration, craning his neck and twisting in the saddle to see the details. Their horses climbed the stepped roadbed. Wind tugged at Kieve’s cloak and Traveler quickened his pace, eager for the pleasures of his own stable.

  Shadeen paced the outer ramparts, dark blue and russet in the crenellations and balistraria, spear tips poking above the merlons. The small wagon gate stood open beyond the upper staging area where wagoners and teams waited for the carts. Guest flags slapped above the closed ceremonial gate. The shadi on duty scrutinized the boy, marked Kieve’s papers, and waved them through.

  This outer
ward sat well away from the stone overhang. Snow covered the terraced gardens and grazing fields, clung to the roofs of the square houses in the holders’ village, was churned to mud in the stockyard. Farms and houses stood secure between stone boundaries, the village shops and inn prosperous, the freeholders healthy and fat. Some half-bowed to Kieve as she passed, others tried to hide their hands as they made the furca. The boy was too busy gawking to notice.

  The inner curtain rose from the glacis, the strip of dead land at its foot, a smooth palisade of rock crenellated at its top. At the gate the shadeen on duty lowered their spears and a third one came from the gatehouse and waved.

  “Kieve! You took your time getting here.” Braith, second in command of the castle brigade, rested her hand on Kieve’s foot. A long thin scar parted her face from her left eyebrow, across her nose, and to the right side of her jaw. It skipped her eye. Winter always made it livid.

  “All’s well here?” Kieve said.

  Braith shrugged. “Too many visitors. At least this dying happens in mid-winter, with the borders quiet.” She gestured. “What happened to your face?”

  “An eye full of ice, crossing above the Morat.”

  “It happens. And this one?”

  Kieve glanced at the boy, who had ducked his head but was staring at Braith through his lashes. “He’s in bond,” she said.

  “Truly? You bought a child? You’ll have stories to tell. Come by tonight, Ilach and I will be off watch at the same time, for a wonder.”

  “If I can. Here, from the captain in the city.”

  Braith took the note and stepped back. The shadeen raised their spears and the light breeze died as Kieve and Pyrs rode through the gate into the main ward. Kieve shook her hood back. Her hair tangled in the folds of the cloak, brown on black, escaping from its plait. On the left side of the ward a clatter and roar rose from the armory, directly ahead the ornate doors of the Great Hall were closed fast, to the right the piled grey disorder of the noble’s apartments rose from the darker stones of the ward. Traveler moved left past the armory.