The boy twisted and craned and gaped, trying to see everything at once. Beyond the armory the land sloped upward to a smaller ward surrounded by the barracks and stable and the kitchens. Servants rushed, busy on errands. Gossiping shadeen lounged about the stable entrance. Kieve saw the colors of Moel, Bergdahl, Kyst, and Myned among those of Dalmorat, and wondered if the out-province troops were allowed to keep their weapons. Some of Cadoc’s Guards stood by themselves in a corner of the ward. Their barracks and mess lay in the small extension between the kitchens and Scholars Garden, over entrances to the ancient warrens beneath the castle. The Guards never mingled with the castle brigade. Now they leaned against the walls, laughing. Endres was not among them.
“There?” The boy pointed to the stables.
Kieve shook her head. “Those are the military stables and their barracks. We go to the Lords Stables.”
The first carts came into the ward and stopped by the kitchen storerooms. Shadeen moved toward the carts but Balor Cook and his undercooks stormed from the kitchen, shouting and flapping their aprons. The soldiers retreated, laughing.
Kieve led the way through the narrow, up-sloping passage called the Neck and into a third, even smaller yard where horses were being groomed or exercised. An equerry near the stable doors saw Kieve and turned to shout inside. Kieve and the boy dismounted as a thin man strode into the yard, wiping his hands on his leather apron. He ran his palms over Traveler and peered at his mouth and eyes while Kieve removed the saddlebags. The horse rubbed his head against the thin man’s hair.
“He looks all right,” the man said. “What’s this other one?”
“Myla. Stable her with Traveler.”
“I’ll see if there’s room,” the man said. “We have every horse in Cherek in there.” The boy moved to follow as he led the horses away, but Kieve put her hand on his shoulder.
“No. Lud’s no innkeeper’s slouch.”
He hesitated a moment, then took up his bags and followed her along the edge of the yard, up a set of open stairs, and along a narrow portico. A corridor leading off the portico held torches unlit in their brackets and two doors. She opened the first one, entered, and dropped her bags on the floor, unclasping her cloak and throwing it over them. Pyrs lingered at the door, looking uncertain.
“Come in.” She moved to the tiled woodstove. “Close the door. That hallway funnels the wind right through it.” Kindling and logs, slightly dusty, lay within the firebox. She struck a spark, nursed it to flame, and lit the kindling. When it caught she rocked back on her heels, holding her palms toward the small flames. “Are you thirsty?”
He didn’t reply and she looked over her shoulder at him. He stood with his back against the closed door, his saddlebags forgotten on his shoulder, while he stared at the room. She followed his glance. Shelves held mugs and plates and equipment and the ragtag belongings she had collected in her four years at the castle. One shelf held a few books, most of them borrowed. Below them a number of trunks and crates were shoved against the wall, proof that Gaura had at least started packing. The more delicate objects were still out: the porcelain bowl Taryn had given her two years ago, the even more fragile glass sculpture he’d given her the past spring, one crystal lamp of which she was very proud. She had forbidden Gaura to clean it for fear of breakage and as a result it went from one season to the next covered with dust. The aged tapestries still hung along the stones—they were Cadoc’s, not hers. She looked at the table for eating and the other, under the window, where she worked; the wooden chair and bench, a couple of scattered braziers. The locked map cabinet and the curtained doorway leading to the other room of the suite. Not seeing anything unusual, she turned her attention to the fire again.
“I’m thirsty,” she said. “Pull that rope and put your bag behind the cabinet. I’ll have a pallet made up for you later.”
“Is it—” He coughed to clear his throat. “Are we supposed to be here?”
She turned to look at him. “These are my rooms. I live here. For the time being, so do you.”
He looked full at her for a moment before he crossed the room, carrying his saddlebag. He stopped to tug at the bellpull and disappeared around a corner of the massive map cabinet. Kieve added another log to the fire.
Gaura, her cap askew, came to stand in the doorway.
“Mistress, I didn’t know you were coming,” she said. “The rooms haven’t been aired.”
“I noticed.” Kieve dusted her hands on her thighs and rose and turned, stretching. “Are you going to carry that thing about forever?”
Gaura put her hands under her bulging stomach. “Another three weeks, mistress. It doesn’t get in my way.”
“It should.” She frowned. “Promise me again that it’s not Cadoc’s.”
Gaura shuddered and made the furca. Kieve smiled, pleased to see the gesture made against someone else. Gaura pushed hair from her broad forehead and smiled back.
“Mistress? I still lack three stivers to buy prayers for a safe childbirth.” She patted her stomach. “Master Balor said I might work a little for him—”
But Kieve was already shaking her head. “No. You need to finish my packing.” She thought for a moment, adding up the money in her pouch. It wasn’t much. Cadoc would pay her expenses for the ride after she did her accounting, an unfavored task. Still, there was no help for it.
“I will find them for you,” she said and interrupted the woman’s thanks. “Find me something to drink, and something for Pyrs, the boy. Pyrs! Come here so that Gaura can see you.”
He came round the corner, looked at the servant, and ducked back again.
“He’s not to go out without my permission, understood?”
Gaura nodded and left.
Kieve unlocked the map cabinet. Everything seemed in order, flat maps and scrolls and tools, and on one shelf her few most precious possessions. She reached a finger to touch the spine of Hovath’s Compendium, the old, leather-bound folio of maps that she had found in a shop in Koerstadt years ago, and snatched up for her own before the bookseller realized what he had sold. The leather felt cool and smooth under her fingertip. She pulled her hand away and stacked her maps and instruments inside the cabinet.
Pyrs had come to her side and now looked at the book. “What is that?” he said.
She hesitated before pulling the book from its shelf. She carried it to the table. Pyrs reached around her and ran a fingertip along the tabletop, making sure it was clean. It was. She put the book down.
“You know that only the Printers Guild can make books, yes?”
He nodded.
“There is one exception. The Mapmakers of my own guild can make books, because the work of making the maps is so careful and detailed. One wrong line can become a ridge that isn’t there, or a river that doesn’t exist, or can divide a land-baron’s property in half. So the mapmakers draw with great care, and transfer their drawings onto copper plates—there is an entire section of mapmakers who do nothing but prepare the plates. The plates are incised and corrected, then they are inked and paper is pressed against them. And then, after the printed map is dried, the mapmakers mix their paints and color each map.”
She rested her fingers on the worn leather binding of the Compendium. Pyrs waited.
“There was a man from the Printers Guild named Hovath, Hovath Bookbinder, who loved maps but could not print them because he was not a Rider. What he did, instead, was to collect maps, old maps, hand-drawn because printing hadn’t been invented yet. Some of the maps were very large, and some as small as your hand. Some were painted on skins and others inked onto old paper. Some were gilded, and some so faded they were hard to make out at all. He collected them over many years, and stitched them together to make a book of his own—a Compendium.” She turned the cover with her fingertips.
“Printers keep copies of their books and pass them down, but Hovath’s great-grandson died without issue, and a bookseller bought his library. Including the Compendium, which I found l
ying under a pile of proof sheets and manuscripts, and bought for a quent two stivers. Look.”
The page sizes varied, as did the shapes. Fierce monsters and strange plants decorated the edges of the maps, named sometimes in clear Cheran and on other maps in languages that had disappeared centuries before. Hovath had bound them chronologically, so that as Kieve turned the pages the boundaries of the world expanded, the monsters pushed farther away from Cherek’s borders. The first map, faint almost to invisibility, showed the land cluttered with small holdings, the lands of petty kings and dukes and earls, as it was before the days of Mistet Lawgiver.
Another map, barely legible, showed every stream and river like the veins in a translucent leaf. Another was turned on its side, so that Mother Sea brushed the left-hand edge of the page, lapping at the book’s gutter.
The next one showed a Cherek recognizable to Kieve’s eyes, most of the provincial borders established, the provinces themselves named. Kieve estimated it dated to a hundred years after the Lawgiver. A recognizable, solid, stable country, each province governed by its Lord and Cherek itself ruled by the Assembly of Lords in Koerstadt.
“Maps tell stories,” she said. She turned back to the first map. “See how there are all the lines, dividing the country into pieces? All the pieces fought with each other, sometimes for decades. No peace, no laws, just the rule of petty lords. No prosperity.”
“This is Cherek?” the boy said.
“You have never seen a country map before?”
He shook his head. “Only your maps, the ones you showed me.”
She turned pages to the first post-Lawgiver map. “Look, this is where we are, in Abermorat. This is Dalmorat Province. Here is Mother Sea and these mountains are the Alvansi Range to the north, and the Deyhas to the east. See how the lines divide the land? Those were the gift of Mistet Lawgiver, who conquered all the lands and established the provinces, and gave us laws.”
Pyrs traced Dalmorat’s border, his finger reverently above the page. “The seminarian told us a little.”
“I will teach you more,” she said, and turned the page.
Another, gaudy with crimson and gold and azure, showed a corner of Kyst Province in the south; deep green lines swooped in parallel along the land, sporting grape leaves and clusters of purple fruit.
“Look, this one was made for Constain,” she said. They bent their heads over a map that showed almost all of Cherek as the tyrant’s fiefdom. “But he never conquered this much, so sometimes maps can lie. It’s important to remember that.” Her fingertip traced the boundaries of Constain’s desired world, then she turned the page. “And they can tell stories, too. See this mark, here? This is the plain outside Tebec, in Vedere Province, where Constain was defeated. And this line is the route his army took, or what was left of it, up the Solanti and into the Outlands.” The map was bordered with the crests of all the fourteen provinces, even tiny Teneleh along the coast where Constain had never come. The mapmaker had layered the parchment with gold leaf and silver and deep, almost enameled colors. The map seemed to glow off the page.
The following map, by contrast, was stark, black ink on parchment. Pyrs bent close to it and she gave him room.
“What are these?” He put his finger on one of the symbols that punctuated the flow of the land. “They look like sticks with, with stuff on top.”
“They are guild pennants.”
He came upright and blinked at her. “The Guild Wars.”
“Yes. This was made just over three hundred years ago, after the Lords tried to disband the guild and peasant armies that defeated Constain. I think it was made for the guild captains during the last months of the war. See how they have Koerstadt surrounded?”
He nodded. “The seminarian said the Guilds cut off the capital for almost a year.”
“Yes, until the Lords Council gave in and opened the gates.”
“And then they created Koerstadt Council, with the guilds and the lords both.”
She turned to the last page. This final map, triumphantly, showed the provinces returned to their proper boundaries and Constain nothing more than a marginal notation deep in the Outlands mountains. The mapmaker’s symbols were for grain in the broad plains of the heartland, minerals in Vedere, fish and grapes along the coast, the dense forests of Yost, Dalmorat’s wool. And, always, the monitory freaks and monsters inhabiting the parts of the map that Kieve most desperately wanted to see.
“They’re beautiful,” the boy said.
Kieve nodded. “It is the most precious thing I own,” she said, returning the book to its shelf. “And you are not to touch it, do you understand?”
He flinched a little at her tone. “Yes, mistress.”
She locked the map cabinet and, humming a little, took her bags and cloak through the brown curtain into her bedroom. Touching the Compendium always made her feel better, even though looking at it had made her eyes ache.
The room was clean and cold and musty. She went through the cloak’s many pockets, pulling out gloves, a missing pen, and a small package wrapped in soft lamb skin. She opened the lamb skin and took out the little clay ocarina she had bought in Three Crossings. It fitted neatly within her palm, a tiny, lumpy, earth-colored sphere with bands of black between which lay the fingering holes. She hadn’t tried to play it, but Taryn, for whom it was intended, would figure it out. She thought, with pleasure, that he could discover how to play anything.
Re-wrapping the instrument and putting it aside, she finished emptying her pockets and threw the cloak over her bed. She raised the heavy leaded glass in the window and opened the shutters. Fresh icy air poured in. She leaned out, breathing deeply. The Morat glimmered in the distance and snow lay clean over the castle’s roofs and walls, save atop the kitchen where the heat had melted it, and over the Guards’ quarters where kitchen smoke blackened it. It happened this way every winter and struck her as ridiculously apposite. Someone sat in a barracks window, playing a flute. Its crisp music decorated the chill air. Kieve leaned further out and looked to the left, squinting to see the bare limbs of trees in the Scholars Garden and beyond them the castle’s precipitous collection of roofs. Both eyes stung and watered, but she could see, and see better than she had the day before. She touched her cheekbone below the patch.
The flute music stopped and a brief hush fell over the wards. Kieve looked toward the Neck in time to see a party of riders move into the yard. The man at their head slid from his horse and threw the reins, and a fast-moving stable hand caught them before they touched the ground. The man turned, hands on hips, talking to his companions. Kieve’s sore eyes couldn’t resolve his figure, but she recognized Gadyn Marubin’s colors, dark blue and russet and grey. She remembered what Dunun had told her of the new land baron’s celebration. Matyns—probably the one lying belly-down across his saddle, sick with drink. Gadyn must have taken Cadoc’s own boat into the city and back. He gestured with weary elegance.
She remembered Cadoc riding into the ward last winter, fresh from a hard, dawn-lit game of ice-flying on the river. The game of chase and capture, played on skates among the quick-moving iceboats, exhilarated him, terrified his courtiers, and left boat-captains up and down the Morat quaking with fear of crushing their lord while under orders to do nothing to diminish the danger and pleasure of his sport. Only Captain Endres rivaled him on the ice. The two set themselves against each other, hair and cloaks flying as they danced through the paths of the iceboats’ sharp runners. When the sun was fully up Cadoc rode into the yard demanding breakfast, his voice loud and argumentative. Grey hair, powerful stocky body, gestures sharp, black eyes alert and observant, not missing a thing. Seeing Kieve lean from her window, he would bellow “Good morning, little bitch,” before disappearing into the bulk of the Great Hall. It was what he had called her from the first, when she rose from making her oath and towered over him, rangy and tough and unlovely. Now Gadyn Marubin’s voice whined in the cold air and Kieve slammed the shutters closed. In the outer room Ga
ura hummed as she set out crockery. The boy fidgeted at the table, keeping his head down. He played with his cup after Kieve had watered the wine for him.
“I have to report to Adwyr but I’ll be back before supper. Don’t leave these rooms.” She poured wine for herself. “If you need anything use the bellpull but don’t pester Gaura. You may read my books if you want. Wash your hands first.” She gave him her Riders token on its thin chain. “If anyone asks, show them this and tell them you’re mine. Is all that clear?”
“Yes, mistress,” he whispered.
She frowned. “What’s the matter?” she demanded, but he only looked up at her and looked away again. She grimaced, exasperated, and went to splash water on her face and change her clothes.
Chapter 3
The sky had darkened into a mid-winter blue, clear of any clouds. A few servants swept the broad yard. By the stables, horses arched their necks into the steady rhythm of grooming. The sounds of practice came from the main ward, the clash of metal on metal and encouraging shouts. The sounds faded as she went through the gate into the Scholars Garden. Snow had been moved from some of the paths to create a great mound against the castle wall, pocked with the marks of children’s feet and lined with the paths of children’s sledding bottoms.
The path curved toward a slender tunnel between the buildings. Before she reached it Kieve put her hand to a side door and went in. She stood in the narrow corridor, blinking, until her good eye grew accustomed to the darkness. Noises rose from the Great Hall at the far end of the corridor: the rumble of voices, something thumping against something else, laughter, the sound of a minstrel trying to be heard over the roar. Normally the Hall at mid-morning was silent. The clamor increased as she came forward and paused at a side entrance, watching the crowd of guests and land-barons and their attendants. They clustered around the vast fireplaces, sharing a hectic warmth. It felt, she thought, as though Cadoc’s fist had loosened but no new hand had taken its place; as though the Castle and all within it lived in a clamorous, endless moment between one breath and the next. She hunched her shoulders within the cloak and took the stairs to Master Adwyr’s quarters. As she mounted the steps something shattered in the Hall and voices shouted.
Mapping Winter Page 8