Time of Daughters II

by Sherwood Smith

  When they did briefly encounter one another, Plix whispered quick words of praise, and exhorted Lineas to find her first if she thought she heard anything that should be passed along. Lineas didn’t even know who the courier was, for safety.

  The only sure relief was sleep—and the days when certain items could not be trusted on the baggage wagons because of the threat of sleet, and so the bottom rung of servants were forced to sit in the wagons instead, allowing the precious items to ride in the servant coach. Lineas and the boot boy and the kitchen sweep sat shoulder to shoulder, shivering, but at least the air was pure.

  And so, it was tediously same...until it wasn’t.

  Lineas firmly believed her mission was a waste of time. She’d discovered within a day or so of her arrival that the Nyidris all possessed golden notecases, and they had personal runners for messages to those they didn’t, or couldn’t, communicate with by magic. She was never going to see any of those messages.

  At least she was warm while serving in the plastered and painted rooms exclusive to the nobles. Each piece of furniture was a work of art, and she liked dusting and polishing them so she could admire the details, but the entire effect chilled her. All these still, artfully posed statues, those wrought so cleverly in gold, seemed to replace the living, breathing company that might look less perfect but would bring warmth and love to those otherwise empty rooms. One reward she could furtively enjoy was music, though she had to make certain her face reflected indifference: though nothing was said, Lineas wondered if she would be forbidden the room if Lavais Nyidri didn’t believe she was deaf, for she became certain that the jarlan would believe that servant ears would pollute the music through pleasure in hearing it.

  But music was rare. Only when the Sartoran princess was present. The talk was invariably about people and places she did not know. She learned to shut out the idle, often cruel, gossip as if she were deaf, and retreat into memory.

  But one evening Lavais’s sharp voice changed, and Lineas knew the woman was looking her way. “She’s deaf. But if you’re worried, speak in Sartoran. Alef said she comes from the north coast, where the Iascan is even more barbarous than Marlovan, and they’re too ignorant to know what Sartoran is.”

  Demeos said, “The only use we could possibly get out of Connar Olavayir is to sic him on the Tax Gang. But they have to have listening ears in every tavern and stable between here and the mountains. They surely know he’s coming. And they won’t come anywhere near.”

  “They’re thieves.” Ryu laughed scornfully. “You put out a tempting enough prize, thieves will come out from behind every barn and bush.” He draped himself over a beautiful chair carved with intertwined lotus leaves. Tapping one knee with his fan, he mused, “What would happen if we were to, oh, put out the word that we’re shifting the king’s tax from somewhere to somewhere.”

  Demeos flicked his fan at his brother. “Yes, and what then?”

  “They come for it, of course. And we sic the Olavayirs on them.”

  “And?” Demeos drawled. “And then Connar Olavayir offers to escort the rescued treasure north to the royal city.”

  Ryu prowled around the perimeter of the room, then turned suddenly, and leaned against another chair. Demeos held up his arm to admire the light running along the gold embroidery down the length of his sleeves.

  Lineas had always been sensitive to beauty of all kinds. Demeos was also, she’d noted. Ryu affected the accoutrements of beauty, but his gaze always stayed on people. He carried himself as if he were beautiful. Demeos was as handsome as Connar, his ruddy-black hair braided with gems, contrasting the light silks he wore; unlike his brother, he never colored his hair.

  She watched them to make certain they did not notice her. If their posture indicated a turn her way, she focused on the table of refreshments she was there to refill whenever a tray, plate, or bowl was empty.

  “But what if he doesn’t go back?” Ryu smiled, and asked dulcetly, “Because he’s dead?”

  “What?” Demeos looked up.

  “You saw that report.” Ryu waved his fan to and fro. “He’s not riding down here with the entire army. It’s barely as many as our former and tiresome stepfather’s garrison holds.”

  Demeos turned the colored side of his fan flat, his upper lip crimping slightly. “Surely you do not wish to turn our people, who’ve only their pitchforks and sawblades, loose on them? It would be a slaughter.”

  Ryu licked his lips. “I read the description of Ku Halir that you ignored.”

  “It was disgusting.”

  Ryu lifted a shoulder. “It was enlightening in its detailed proof that Marlovans die just as well by a pitchfork as a blade. Slower.”

  Lavais spoke up mildly. “Ryu. We do not need the details.”

  Ryu flung his long hair back, and reached for a goblet. “My point is, the ratio of Marlovans was too high, and so the northerners lost. But it was a very near thing. If we contrive it, Connar Olavayir will not have that advantage.” He drained the goblet, then held it out sideways. Lineas picked up the spice-wine decanter and filled the goblet.

  His muscles tightened, which was all the notice she would get that he was about to pull the goblet away: servants had been thrashed for spilling a drop. She lifted the lip of the decanter a heartbeat before he brought the goblet to his lips to drink, and she faded back.

  Demeos sighed. “According to what I keep hearing, half the countryside is secretly in sympathy with the Tax gang—”

  “Something,” Lavais interjected in her quiet voice, “we ought to address, if that’s true.”

  “Anon, Mother,” Demeos drawled. “But my point remains, the rumors insist they give away what they take, and the greedy commons could never resist that. Thedren insists most of the boys apprentice age would join them if they could find them.”

  “All the more reason to see them dead. Soon. Set it up at the right place, Connar rides in, wipes out the Tax Gang, and then our people rise and bottle him.” Ryu set down goblet and fan to clap his hands lightly. “And we do what the north shore Idegans did, declare independence. What are the Marlovans going to do? The king is too old and too drunk to fight, everyone says. The heir too stupid. The worst of the young commanders is that shit Rat, and he’s with Connar. We make certain he dies first. In fact, I reserve that privilege for myself.”

  Demeos sighed again. “It sounds vile.”

  “You don’t,” Lavais leveled a cold gaze at her son, “seem to be achieving any kind of success with your music and courtship.”

  Demeos lifted a shoulder. “I tried. Speaking of. Where does Seonrei fit in your hypothetical plan?”

  Ryu’s lip curled. “Since Seonrei is writing to the queen every day, we’ll make certain that what she writes is alarm. She’s being attacked by the barbarian Olavayirs. If she dies,” he added in an undervoice, for he’d come to loathe her for her total rejection of his advances, “then the Olavayirs get blamed. We win either way.”

  Demeos rose at last, and stopped before his mother. “My only worry is Noth.”

  “My only worry,” Lavais interposed smoothly, “is, what if it fails. You must be certain to protect your names. Your previous plan left you safe because there was no proof leading to you. Which, I will attest to Ivandred Noth’s credit, if in no other wise, he insists on obtaining. As well the king is a lazy sot, too; if this had happened in Mathren Olavayir’s day, we all would have died in our beds one night.”

  Demeos sighed more quietly, and Ryu flicked away the words with his fan. “But this isn’t the past, which is the whole point. We do have a lazy sot as king. As for the rest, Demeos and I can be champions of the people without claiming our right rank. Yet.”

  “So who leads, then?” Demeos asked, hiding his growing ambivalence. This entire plot threatened to be even messier than the last one.

  “Who else, but Cousin Artolei? You know he’d love it. But...Mother, you’re right about Ivandred Noth. He’s neither lazy, nor a sot, and he’s much too close.
”

  Lavais had been thinking rapidly. “Ivandred won’t ride against commons.”

  “Even if Rat is the first to die?” Ryu took a bite of a pastry, curled his lip, then threw it aside so that it skittered off the porcelain dish and landed on the floor.

  “Not if it’s all over by the time he arrives. Which means whatever you do must be at the far end of the kingdom,” the jarlan said, as Lineas noiselessly picked up the pastry and with the cloth tucked in her sash began to wipe up the fine tiles of the floor.

  Lavais tapped her diamond-studded nails on the gilt-edged porcelain plate before her. “He won’t ride against common people if they throw down their arms—”

  Lavais’s eye was caught by the red-haired servant cleaning the floor. Deaf, right? Still, they were breaking their rule about private discussions. “Get out!” she snapped.

  Both her sons startled.

  Lineas nearly did. Shock jolted her nerves, cold as ice down her back. She hadn’t reacted, had she? She kept scrubbing at the smear of apple-pastry on the marble, until Lavais tossed a fan and hit her back.

  Lineas jolted, hands trembling.

  Lavais pointed at the door.

  Lineas picked up porcelain, cloth, and mess. She closed the door noiselessly, her heart thundering.

  Back in the room, Demeos said patiently, “She’s deaf.”

  Lavais retorted, “Whenever you talk war, make sure nobody else is in the room.”

  Her sons sighed, exchanging a long-suffering look. They said obediently, “Yes, Mother,” hoping to stave off another lecture about carelessness.

  Lavais tapped her fingernails on the porcelain, tink, tink, tink, not hearing her sons debate what locale would be best. She moved to the door, opened, it, and saw her maid waiting in the hallway.

  “Follow the deaf girl. See where she goes,” Lavais ordered shortly, then resumed her seat as Demeos rolled his eyes. As if she had seen that, Lavais snapped, “It doesn’t do to be careless. Ever.”

  Demeos hastily smoothed his expression, as outside the door, Lineas walked softly down the hall, still carrying the ruined pastry, the broken dish, and the cleaning cloth. Every nerve felt unsheathed; invisible, inimical eyes watched her, or so instinct clamored.

  So she moved with deliberate care, going to the back of the kitchen where the crockery was stored. She laid the broken dish on the table, for someone to decide if, and how, it was to be repaired: if it was Sartoran, it might be mended with gold in the cracks.

  Next, the ruined apple tart went into the pig pen, and the cloth to the laundry. When she came out, she was certain she felt soft footfalls behind her, always one turn away.

  She had to get word to Plix—who was on duty supervising the kitchen until the jarl family retired for the night. Lineas’s neck prickled as she made her way to the kitchen. One glance at Plix, whose mouth tightened, and Lineas wondered what showed in her face.

  She recollected what Quill had taught her about cow-face, and let her jaw hang as she signed that the jarlan has dismissed her.

  Plix awkwardly signed back that she could retire.

  Lineas left. She could hear Plix going about her business, readying all the bread pans and flouring them, for the bakers who would be coming in soon to start the morning’s bread.

  She heard the footsteps all the way to the attic, where Lineas had the last bed in a long dormitory.

  The maid returned and reported to the jarlan that the deaf girl was dismissed to bed, and interacted with no one on the way.

  Lineas’s dreams were full of shocks and starts. It was a relief to rise, and a bigger relief when a dour servant cut her out of the scrum the next morning, all jostling to get to the baths first, and said that she’d been assigned to take the scraps tor the chickens, and to bring back whatever eggs there were.

  Lineas bundled up and trudged across the slushy yard to the roost, where the hens had all congregated together on one of their long shelves above the row of nests. It smelled musty even in the cold. Lineas bent to fill the shallow bowls with the withered greens set aside the day before—and shock ran down her nerves when the roost door creaked open behind her. But she kept moving without a hitch.

  “It’s I,” Plix said. “The jarlan’s personal maid was shadowing you last night. What did you hear?”

  Lineas cleared her throat—she hadn’t used her voice for weeks—and told her.

  At the end, Plix stared at the chickens murmuring fretfully in their roost. “It might just be talk...but that’s not for us to decide. I’ll send someone to Noth. Do and say nothing.”

  Orders, Lineas reflected as she searched for eggs, she would gladly obey.

  Plix left her to it, and withdrew in another direction. The timing could not have been worse. Both of her trusted contacts had been sent in opposite directions. She’d have to send her brother, who would complain bitterly. But his hatred of the Nyidris ensured he’d go.

  It was a couple of days before she could arrange a pretext enabling him to get away, under cover of a fast-approaching storm as the sun sank behind the clouds.

  The only other movement at that late hour was the cousin Demeos and Ryu had been expecting to return: Khael Artolei, whose mother had grown up with Lavais Nyidri. Nearly ten generations previously, the Artoleis had finally schemed and married their way into the elite of what became the Jayad—but as their honed strategy was to divide and play factions against one another, within the six years of their rule, they had managed to cause general unrest that threatened to erupt into civil war.

  That was when the Marlovans came. And after a disorganized resistance best called token (the ruling Artoleis ran off), the Jaya family proved to be orderly, generous, straightforward, and best of all, gave short shrift to the brigands constantly coming around from the sea to the east.

  The remaining Artoleis were permitted to retain their old lands, and the next generations lived peaceably, until Khael’s grandfather’s time. He had ambitions to regain that lofty royal rank, and raised his daughter to share those ambitions. She and Lavais were sent to Sartor together to learn the language, and subsequently their sons were sent to do the same.

  Khael Artolei inherited early, when his mother resigned the Holding to him after snagging a prince in one of the little countries along the Sartoran Sea.

  He was in a foul mood because of the weather. His company were all seasoned flatterers because he didn’t tolerate anyone around him who contradicted him. He, like his cousin Ryu, also plumed himself on his martial abilities.

  He was nearing the end of a cold, boring ride, and his mood was vile until he spotted a lone rider coming from the opposite direction, who spotted his livery and then immediately pulled his horse into some trees to avoid an encounter.

  “Assassin,” Artolei declared as he pulled his bow, slapped an arrow to, and twang!

  The figure, half in shadow, tumbled from his horse. The animal panicked and ran off.

  “Look at that,” Artolei crowed. “Dead. Single shot!”

  The uttered the expected praise as they all rode forward to inspect the dead assassin.

  “Oh,” said the first toady. “Isn’t that what the Nyidri servants wear?”

  The toadies exchanged looks, not daring to glance at their lord.

  Who said, “If you don’t say anything, they won’t know. You. Drag him off somewhere. If they find him, we’ll blame those Tax Gang shits.”

  No one voiced the obvious, “What if he was coming to give you a message?” But Artolei was thinking it as he finished out the ride. He was aware of himself as a hanger-on to the Nyidris, and hated it. He had just as much right to a royal title as they did—but there was no taking on the Jevayirs, everyone knew that.

  He was still thinking up various excuses as a servant took him to meet Demeos and Ryo...but when the three were alone, what Ryu had to say made him forget all about the stupid messenger, who shouldn’t have been hiding in the first place. If he’d dismounted and bowed, as was only proper, he’d still be
riding, wouldn’t he?

  Ryu outlined his plan. Artolei listened with growing delight.

  Demeos noticed his enthusiasm, and suppressed his own lack, very aware that if Ryu continued to take the lead, Mother might decide he was the more kingly after all.

  SEVEN

  The royal progress, as Lavais called that winter journey (ostensibly in honor of Princess Seonrei) changed its route again, this time to fetch up against the border with the Jayad, at a sight promised to be truly splendid: Frozen Falls.

  And it was.

  The Artolei family had built a winter palace on a bend in the river, from which could be viewed the semicircle of falls in a vast panorama, below which the great river rushed over rocks before dividing into two. When winter was coldest and the water was low, the falls sometimes froze, as they had this year, and on certain mornings, the gradually strengthening northern sun would catch the ice at an angle that struck an icy luminance.

  To the delight of those who enjoyed such spectacles, the weather cleared for three days, during which sleds were driven out to a point that granted an unimpeded view.

  For Seonrei, these three mornings proved to be the highlight of what had been a strange journey so far. She gazed on the shifting colors glimmering in the ice as the sun moved incrementally, and enjoyed a chance to talk with Iaeth, who came along as maid in charge of the basket of hot foods carefully packed.

  “And the Marlovan prince is expected by week’s end,” Iaeth finished reporting, as she poured chili-chocolate from the cloth-wrapped heated jug into two tiny cups, and added cream. “Which brings me to another question. I gathered that they don’t expect more than a hundred or maybe two hundred Marlovans at most, and yet there are these wagons.”

  The point, on a cliff, overlooked the lower north shore, from which they could see a long train of covered wagons worming slowly toward the gleaming spires of the Artolei palace.