Cold shock rang along Connar’s nerves.
He knew them now. This young captain was the tall boy with the unblinking stare who had been part of that silent salute to a king in the Olavayir castle’s back stable.
Connar’s mouth tightened, but the fist was only there the briefest moment as Jethren’s hand flattened into the proper salute.
It could almost have been a mistake.
Ventdor was saying, “...sent a runner to the royal city. While we waited, they’ve been taking watches alongside our men, and going out for drill. I’d hoped to hear from your da....”
Not your da, whispered Hauth’s voice, followed by the usual acid spurt of hatred. Yes, my da, Connar argued back, unaware of the thin line of his mouth, the flatness of his intense blue gaze. My da, who chose me, raised me, and gave me this command.
“...but here you are. I figure, you can always use trained lancers.” Ventdor faltered to a stop.
Connar barely heard. He and Kethedrend Jethren took in the other, each recognizing that Connar remembered that day—and that he obviously hadn’t spoken about it.
Connar recovered first. Trained lancers. They always needed them. Still. Connar opened his hand in a gesture of acceptance, thinking: One word, one sign, you’re taking orders from Hauth, and you’ll be sent to the Nob to wand shit.
Jethren was thinking, The king at last.
TWENTY-THREE
Quill to Lineas:
First, I want to thank you for your letters every night, though I had to read them in stolen moments. Thank you also for your understanding my infrequent answers. Is it strange for me to find it comforting to think of you sleeping in my bed? Though I wish I was there beside you.
The trouble with caravan living, especially at the bottom of the hierarchy, is the lack of privacy. I shared a tent with three others, one a wagoneer whose snores shook the wagon we all had to sleep in with the tent pitched over us until we reached the outpost. The ground (and the air, and everything we wore or carried) was too wet for sleeping on.
At last, as you can see, I have a little time to myself, now that I’ve warmed my hands enough to write.
I wonder if it’s human nature that the slower a person speaks and moves, the faster everyone else’s patience runs out.
I successfully inserted myself into the last supply train before winter, having bribed the scribe in charge of the lading bill to quit the day before departure in favor of spending New Year’s Week at home. I showed up in time to be hired for a job no one else wanted, and so we wound our way up the mountain slope until today we reached the fortress, no longer a mere outpost. On the map, it’s just east of Threefold Falls. That landmark really is three waterfalls, quite spectacular, especially the lower level, as long as the upper two put together.
As for this “outpost,” I now know why our Marlovan traders and runners the past five years were housed so splendidly at the better inn near the old gates: so they wouldn’t see the very extensive fortifications being built behind the second set of gates.
Being loyal Adranis, we have been invited to spend New Year’s Lastday here, to make up for the weather having made us miss the rest of the festival week. All the more welcome as the commander has quite heartlessly scolded all outland travelers—after searching everything they carry and wear to the seams—to keep moving. Tomorrow we must push on as the wagon chief is worried about clearing Skytalon Peak before winter sets in hard. Apparently from there on the supplies will be sledded down to the lower outpost.
I’ve managed to secure to myself a tiny space about the size of a broom closet for the night, but I share it with no one, so I can sit here with my candle and reread your notes while I wait for the mess bell—
And there it rings. I would so much rather try your patience by writing out everything I thought to share with you over the days of bumping along the bad road, but I suppose I had better go out there and be dutiful....
In Marlovan Iasca’s royal city, The new year began with a hard frost that the royal family welcomed with relief, for it sent the jarls hustling to start their trips homeward under the hard blue sky and white, heatless northern sun.
Lineas remained in Quill’s room until the morning she arose, early as always—but Mnar was earlier, waiting outside in the dim hall still lit by torchlight.
Lineas stopped guiltily, though there was no reason for guilt. It was her old habit of worry about breaking invisible rules she hadn’t known about.
Mnar said, “I’ll accept my part of the blame for leaving you in that tiny closet of a room with no fire nook, but really, Lineas, why didn’t you speak up? You needn’t be creeping up here to empty rooms for warmth.”
Lineas’s lips opened but no sound came out; if Mnar noticed the cold fireplace there next to Quill’s bed, she said nothing, only, “That tiny room was appropriate when you had to be in call of the princess, and because you were rarely in it except to sleep. But now your schedule is more regular. You ought to be up here with the masters. Ivandred has moved into the city now that he’s officially retired, and has relinquished his room.”
Lineas glanced at the door directly across from Quill’s, and flushed, not knowing what to say.
Mnar said, “I’ll send someone down to fetch your trunk, if you’ll have it packed by the morning watch bell.” She walked away, leaving Lineas staring after her, wondering if Mnar knew about her and Quill. So far, no one had said a word to Lineas about Connar’s surprising appearance in the roost, for which she was grateful.
She hastened down to the baths, then to her room—her old room—to pull the few clothes off the peg, sweep pen and ink off the little desk, and fold everything into her trunk. A brief glance out the slit window that she would never watch the light change through again, and away to her class.
That night, when she turned habitually toward the second floor, she forced herself to keep going. No more would she walk the royal floor unless summoned. How odd it felt, such changes.
She reached her new room across from Quill’s closed door. It was warm with a firestick glowing on the tiny hearth. The bed was freshly made, her trunk adjacent. Someone had thoughtfully left a lamp lit on the desk, which was not only twice as big as her old desk, it had a bookcase up above it. And on the other wall, a long deep-set window—wide enough to sit in and read during summer, after the winter shutters came down.
She opened her trunk and dug down to take out her notecase. No note from Quill. He must be with another caravan. She cut a small strip of paper, jotted down the day’s small news, kissed it, sent it, and burrowed under the quilts in her new bed.
Quill to Lineas:
It was so cheering to open my notecase on the sly and find more little notes covered in your handwriting. My happiness is marred only by the awareness that I can so rarely reciprocate, but you know that when I can, I shall.
We were mired twice in snowstorms, but the caravan chief was determined to get us to Mt. Skytalon, and so at last we did.
East Tower is an outpost on a cliff so high only the top of the tower is visible, if you know where to look. I wonder if that’s even visible during summer melt, the stone being indistinguishable from the stone around it.
The road up is guarded by traps watched by hidden guards, also invisible from the road below.
We were taken up with the supplies. The outpost is a single tower packed with guards, with a view of the entire eastern end of the pass, down into Anaeran-Adrani. I discovered when our carts pulled in at last, and we were allowed to walk around, that the castle has been built over an Ancient Sartoran atan, a sky-viewing platform. I recognized the beautiful tiles, worn down by wind and weather over the centuries, even if no one else did....
Quill paused, gazing out into the weak, wintry blue light of the grotto he crouched in as he stuffed his fingers under his scarf to warm against his neck.
It was absurd, this instinct to shield Lineas from what he thought of as close calls, when he considered that she’d survived the Chalk Hil
ls attack, and had been sent as auxiliary to Tlennen Plain.
There was already one subject he hadn’t raised lest she choose to raise it: Connar. She hadn’t mentioned him since that single line reporting that they’d parted.
“Let’s not make that two voids of silence between us,” he muttered, his breath clouding.
And so he dipped the pen in the congealing ink and wrote quickly:
When we had all stamped the worst of the snow off our feet and exclaimed about the cold, one of the guards said that before we embarked on the sled for the downward slope, there were orders being passed on.
“We’ll send a guide to get you past the traps leading to West Tower. Once you begin your descent, you’re to be on the watch for suspicious individuals from the Marlovan side, not just disguised warriors. Here’s the list of specific individuals to report if seen....
Among those listed: “. . . anyone claiming to be a Marlovan scribe: tall, dark hair, brown eyes, pale blue robe with wooden shank buttons, talks fast, his Adrani Iascan-accented. This is a Marlovan spy. When you secure him, be sure to take the robe, as the shank buttons are bespelled for magic transfer, and who knows what else.”
“Brown hair? Everyone has brown hair,” the caravan chief declared, sounding disappointed.
“I thought all those horse boys had yellow hair,” our cook commented.
“We got us a brown-haired scribe,” Old Snorer put in, jabbing my way a thumb the size of a potato. “But he speaks regular words, no foreign gabble, and he’s in proper green. No buttons.”
At this they all swung around and stared at me in my stained blue-green Adrani scribe robe, no wooden shank buttons in sight, as my transfer token is worn against my skin.
“And besides, he’s slow, if you know what I mean,” the caravan chief added, rolling her eyes and poking her chin a few times in case the guard didn’t catch her drift.
The guard looked at me with my cow-jaw hanging, looked back, then said sourly, “Did he come from the west?”
“No,” they all said, wagging their heads the way Adranis do. I wagged my head, too.
“Well, then, he pretty much doesn’t fit any of the description, does he?”
“Brown hair,” the cook grumbled. “If you ask me, more scribes will have some shade of brown than yellow or black or red. That description is useless, if you ask me.”
We were let into the mess hall, which smelled of pepper soup. I crowded in among the carters, ate as much as I could hold, and then blundered about, taking note of not only the defenses, but the fact that there was not only a dispatch desk with a tray revealing the glow of magic, for the sending and receiving of important reports, but in the back of the command office someone had worked a transfer Destination into the floor.
When I finished my soup, I caught a mutter somewhere behind me, “...didn’t come from the Marlovan side, but he does have brown eyes and dark hair. With that large of a reward offered, doesn’t it make sense to at least make sure?”
I decided not to wait to hear the end of the discussion. In the general shuffle to find a place to bed down in the crowded tower, I grabbed my gear and slipped out into the cold. Here is where our studies came to my aid. You are probably thinking, as I was, where there is an ancient atan platform there are surely morvende trails.
I found one that led upward, certain that any search party venturing into the frigid air would instinctively head downward toward the pass. The upward trail was battered by enough wind to erase my footsteps in the powdery snow.
I climbed up and up, always thinking that surely I’d reached the summit, until the trail bent in a promising manner—which led to my current quarters, a grotto filled with rock formations. It is cold, but I have my firesticks, and am out of the wind as well as dry.
I believe it’s time to shift away from the pass and look for those alternate routes. Yes, it’s very cold—and so my ink might freeze up—but I have my transfer token if I get too desperate. In the meantime, if a few days pass without my writing, it will because there is little to report beside rock, cold, and snow.
I close this thinking of you warm and secure, which in turn warms me.
The one thing he didn’t tell Lineas was how difficult it was to breathe. He’d thought he was acclimated to the thinner air while riding ever upward, but when he began to climb, he discovered how wrong he was. He had to halt every fifty paces, then every thirty, and finally every ten, breathing carefully through his scarf. Too sudden a breath and his throat and lungs burned with cold fire.
Cold.
Winter cold on the top of the highest mountain in the eastern range required another word besides ‘cold.’ Winters on the plains ranged from sleety cold to frozen cold, with windswept ice for variety. This was a type of cold so severe it burned with merciless cruelty.
The second discovery besides the difficulty in getting enough air was that his woolen coat, mittens, and scarf were not enough. After a terrible night sitting close enough to his firesticks to singe the wool of his coat, he shuffled out to explore the bleak gray world outside the grotto, clouds so low it seemed that if he reached up he could touch them.
The third discovery was how very difficult mountain climbing was on the feet.
He edged near a cliff. Alarm jolted through him when he spotted a bulked-up group of armed warriors laboring single file along the southern slope, moving toward another tower, visible at a distance, built at unimaginable cost. That had to be West Tower, overlooking the west end of the pass. This meant that those holding the towers could see anyone coming from either end. And there had to be similar traps and treacherous footing on the that tower’s road leading down to the floor of the pass.
He watched the patrol, who confined themselves to their established road, until they vanished down the icy trail to their tower. He took care to keep himself hidden, but none of them ever looked up; whether they were a regular patrol or searchers for him, clearly none of them believed anyone would be mad enough to go higher.
When they vanished into West Tower ahead of a storm sweeping in, sending ice as sharp as arrows flying horizontally, Quill withdrew to the grotto, gasping and crowing for breath. He collapsed, black clouds boiling across his vision. For a long time all he could do was fight for breath. When a sense of lassitude nearly overwhelmed him, he forced himself to sit. Shaking almost uncontrollably, he fumbled for his firesticks.
He crawled painfully back and back until no wind reached him, then brought both fires to full capacity, though that used the magic faster. Gradually the warmth thawed him, and also warmed the air so that breathing became marginally less of a battle.
He got up, scouted out rocks among the windblown rubble, and carefully made a Destination pattern on the ground smoothed millennia ago by unimaginable cataracts. He braced against his dwindling strength, and used magic to transfer back to Darchelde.
The wrench knocked him out. He came to lying on the floor of his bedchamber, fighting nausea as his body thrummed with pain. He crawled to the trunk beside the cold fireplace and dug out firesticks, snapped the fire to life, and crouched there until he recovered from the transfer reaction.
When he could bear to move, he took his grimy self down to bathe for the first time since he joined the caravan.
When he came out, Camerend was there, having been alerted by a servant. Camerend eyed his son, then said, “Come to the kitchen. I asked them to heat water for listerblossom steep, and there’s half a chicken pie, just put back in the oven to warm.”
Quill discovered he was ravenous. After eating and drinking, he recovered enough to tell Camerend everything he’d found. “Thias Elsarion has spent a princely sum building those outposts in the Pass. And now he’s spending more to build up defenses. Against us.”
Camerend sighed. “I’m told that not a month ago, the king stood there at Convocation and promised justice to the jarls. Connar was so eager to get started he rode off in the teeth of a storm the very next morning in order to run winter exercises. I
t doesn’t take much effort to guess toward what end.”
“You’re saying war is going to happen no matter what?” Quill said flatly.
“I’m saying,” Camerend leaned forward, “gather all the evidence you can. It seems that Thias Elsarion is planning an invasion, but that invasion has not happened, and further, the final decision is not yours.”
“Right.” Quill expelled his breath.
“Arrow is not a stupid man. You’ve just begun your scouting trip, and already you’ve learned a lot. There’s far more to be discovered. And by the time you return, tempers might have cooled, and various alternatives considered.”
“I’m not going to survive winter up there if I don’t take a yeath coat,” Quill said. “Wool is nothing against that cold. The thin air seems to worsen it.”
“Then take a yeath coat. Take plenty of travel bread—and write everything down.” Camerend leaned in, eyeing his son, who looked drawn, gaunt even. “Senrid. You are in a very rare position, one you’ve been trained for. The king will listen to what you say. You have to write down every detail to back up your observations and conclusions.”
“I know.” Quill shut his eyes. “What do you think has been occupying my mind most while I was up there struggling to breathe, and to avoid losing limbs to frostfire?”
“Never forget that,” Camerend said earnestly. “Right now you are the most important person in the kingdom. You are in the pivotal position.”
Quill sat back. “That’s right, close another vise around my head. I don’t feel nearly enough pressure.”
Camerend got to his feet, a rueful smile flickering. “Come upstairs.”
Yeath fur—long, soft as feathers, beautiful white and silver—is far more costly than cloth of gold, for yeath are only found in mountains at the extremity of the tree line. When spring comes, they scrape off their winter fur on brambles, which has to be carefully picked lest one’s fingers get cut up. Then it must be brought down and woven in various ways, but for warmth nothing is better, and it lasts longer than good linen, if cared for.
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