Time of Daughters II

by Sherwood Smith

Connar couldn’t imagine the haughty woman knowing one end of a garden trowel from the other. While he relished the thought of an execution, that would be over fairly quickly. Whereas being forced to grub in the dirt like the lowest of her servants, or starve, seemed more fitting.

  His recent intimate acquaintance with starvation prompted him to say, “I expect Da would prefer that. If there isn’t proof that she gave the orders, proof he could present before the jarls.” Now he really regretted killing Ryu, who of all of them deserved a formal execution in all its pain and gore as the jarls lined up to watch.

  Connar’s back twitched at that. But a glance at Noth made it clear his mind was still on Lavais Nyidri. “And I know Ma would approve that over an execution. She hates them,” he found himself adding.

  “What sane person doesn’t?” Noth turned up his palm. “If you concur, let’s put that in orders, then, and send her off right away. The king can always countermand the order if he wishes.”

  “What about Demeos?” Connar asked. “Are you going to turn him loose? You know he was part of it.”

  “The question is, how much. There are two of his and Ryu’s riding mates yet to question. They should be brought in within a day or so, though I can guess what we’ll find. But the royal runner Quill told me something that might provide a solution.”

  Quill? Connar’s brows shot up. “What did he say?”

  “It wasn’t what he said so much as what he overheard Danet-Gunvaer saying, after my son and the princess were given permission to marry. That was, perhaps Starliss Cassad, who is right outside the gates on patrol right now, should be reassigned to marry Demeos, and someone else would be found for Ryu—assuming of course that the jarlan ever agreed to make those betrothals into treaty marriages.”

  Starliss Cassad. Connar’s mind shot to the strikingly handsome new captain of a flight of skirmishers who had ridden down with Rat’s brother Mouse Noth, senior captain at Hesea Garrison.

  “I spoke to her last night. She says she’s willing,” Noth added, with a thin smile. “If you were to see your way to detaching her and her flight from Hesea Garrison, I believe that would solve the Demeos problem.”

  Demeos would spend the rest of his life as a hostage, thought Connar. Of course he’d be surrounded by Noth’s most trusted men, but who could watch him closer than a wife, and runners she selected? He suppressed a laugh. “We can hold the wedding before we ride. Call it a peace celebration.”

  Two days later, under a sky full of patchy clouds moving slantwise, Seonrei invited Iaeth to walk the Purrad with her.

  The briefest definition of the verb napurdiav is a ritual and meditative walk in a certain pattern, centuries old. Older. ‘Walking the Purrad’ is the idiom, often translated by outsiders as wandering a labyrinth or maze, though few Purrads are walled. The oldest were not built on one surface, though the centuries since those lost days reduced the Purrad to garden areas, designed for aesthetic refreshment.

  Usually one walked it alone, but custom also permitted shared walks, usually for conversations upon matters of reflection.

  There was no Purrad in the winter palace’s back garden, but a lifetime of walking the fourfold intersecting triads imposed a palimpsest over that space, visible only in their minds, as Seonrei said, “Commander Noth received a messenger that a trade ship is at Parayid, preparing to sail for home. We will request passage. Once Demeos’s wedding is over, I believe it will be time to depart.”

  Iaeth laughed. “Demeos seems a lot more amenable than I’d expected, for someone who expected to marry a princess and gain a coronet being reduced to what in any other land would be a hostage, and told to marry a warrior captain.”

  “It helps,” Seonrei said dryly, “that she’s so handsome. Donais heard gossip that she’s related somehow to the Dei family.”

  Iaeth snapped her fingers. “That’s right. There is, or was, a branch of the Deis right here somewhere. What an...odd thought.”

  “Odd because you can’t imagine Deis dressed in dull-colored wool and wanding stables?”

  Iaeth was surprised at the bite of sarcasm in her cousin’s voice. “It was the opposite, in fact,” she mused, ducking under a budding branch—their invisible pattern had at its center a great, spreading oak. “Odd that the Dei family wasn’t mentioned in connection with the capital, or government, or some kind of potential trouble, as is customary in Sartor. In other words, the Marlovan Deis apparently lead quiet lives. I’m wrong?”

  “You’re not wrong. Forgive me for my assumption. Another of my many errors here. From what I’ve learned, this branch of the Deis has largely blended into other families, unlike the Sartoran Deis.” (The context being their mutual awareness that the Sartoran Deis were careful to bring into the family only those as handsome and as clever as themselves—they married out their less prepossessing progeny, and they intermarried every fourth or fifth generation.) “But one can certainly see the Dei mold in that Starliss Cassad.”

  “True.” Iaeth laughed as she sniffed the air, catching the aroma of fresh baking. She still didn’t fit her clothes, and ate as often as she could. “And so, it has ended better than we dared to expect, though perhaps not with the aid of your diplomatic accord?”

  To her surprise, Seonrei blushed to her hairline. “Ah-yah! I expect my arrogance about that is going to haunt my dreams for the remainder of my days.”

  “Eh? Cousin! We survived, and without the massacre we dreaded. All is settled to the prospective improvement of everyone, excepting perhaps Lavais Nyidri. But there, I see justice.”

  “Nothing is wrong with a peaceful accord. But everything was wrong with my arrogance in assuming that I would bring it about.”

  Iaeth said, “Ah?” And here they were on the Purrad; clearly her cousin wished to unburden herself, and so Iaeth assumed a listening attitude as their footsteps crunched, crunched, crunched.

  Seonrei said slowly, “I thought I would sweep into this benighted land of barbarians where no one civilized dares go, and—demonstrating my own superior culture—on a tide of the awe that my name and lineage would surely inspire, gently shepherd the Marlovans into civilization.”

  “So.” Iaeth’s smile was more of a wince. “So.”

  Seonrei sighed. “I can’t really penetrate the thinking of these Marlovans. Their language is a barrier, of course, but they are difficult to read for such...unsubtle persons. Prince Connar does not seem to be stupid, and he commands a vast army, standing second only to the king. And yet the Marlovan style of ruler appears to have little social hierarchy. Prince Connar eats what his stable hands eat. He wears what they wear.”

  “All true.”

  “I once attempted a conversation upon the theories of statecraft with Prince Connar, which perhaps I ought not to have done, our understanding of each other’s languages being minimal. Once he comprehended my fumbling attempt at a question, he informed me shortly that such subjects belonged to his father. As if my question was some sort of trespass.”

  “Perhaps it was,” Iaeth commented. “Which does not shed a very pleasant light on this unknown king, if even his son cannot discuss the verities of governance.”

  “I thought of that. But then he might have misconstrued my intent. That aside, if the king and queen in that far city do govern the way this Ivandred Noth believes they do, their rule cannot be as terrible as we have been told.”

  Iaeth said, “Overlooking the fact that so much of this kingdom is organized around the life of the warrior.”

  “True. What is a warrior to do but make war? And yet Ivandred Noth, who could have slaughtered that pack of rioters Ryu and Artolei had gathered, didn’t. Because of his understanding of the wishes of this faraway warrior king.”

  Iaeth gestured with her hand in the fan pose for dichotomy.

  Seonrei went on. “The more I ponder human nature, the less I seem to understand. But all questions of social covenant always come back to kings.”

  “Kings!”

  “Every country
has one.”

  “Not so!”

  It was Seonrei’s turn snap her hand in Pardon my Protest. “They do, whatever they are called. In Three Rivers, they are called Surveyors. In Hael Vendreon, chieftains. Across the water on the other continent, though both are old Venn colonies, I believe you might have heard of the country that calls their monarch Servant of the People.”

  Iaeth had not studied other lands to the extent that Seonrei had, for her life’s work was bound to Sartor, but even she remembered reading about those bloody selections, so notorious for violence and bribery that trade shut down for increasingly long times beforehand, as each guild member or farmer over the age of twenty turned in a Counting Stick at the local Hall of Justice to select their ruler. And yet that colony had begun itself as a reaction to Venn rule, each who did the work of the country to have a voice in the running of it.

  Seonrei’s light, ironic voice went on, “No matter how much ritual they tried to add to insure fairness, people still coerced others, or bought them. Many didn’t even go to the selection, but claimed sick and took to their beds until it was over, saying that one stick didn’t matter. Until the scribe guild took things in hand. And so now they have a splendid ritual, in which everyone knows ahead of time who will win—coincidentally, always someone from the guild master’s family.”

  “I concede that one, but—”

  “The other old Venn colony calls their monarch Chief Counselor. I’m told these rulers wear the clothing of their commons, they use the language of the commons, but they are still monarchs descending from one of the most powerful guilds.”

  Iaeth pondered for a step or two, then observed, “The first lesson in history I remember is learning that we’ve gone backward since the days of Ancient Sartor, when we had a single queen, who had no power. Hers was an entirely symbolic presence.”

  “With immense prestige,” Seonrei said, her upper lip curling. “Queens these days can be much the same as kings, though they still retain a higher status in Sartor and Sartoran-influenced lands, as princesses stand above princes. All is so very different from what we perceive of Ancient Sartor, in which armies were entirely unknown.”

  Iaeth sighed. “Our first lessons in such matters posit that humans need some sort of hierarchy, or there is a chaos.”

  “Correct. Somebody has to rule. We know that much from historical situations in which the ruling center, however you termed it, vanished. People did not settle down contentedly, each to their life—someone has to intervene if my neighbors’ chestnut tree has grown so that it ruins the light during spring over my kitchen garden. I can try to talk my neighbors into trimming a branch, but what if they insist that their livelihood depends on those chestnuts? I cut the branch myself, she tears up my garden, and before we know it, the entire village is choosing sides and picking up rocks.”

  Iaeth folded her hands.

  Seonrei sighed. “I know, I know.... I’ve descended from discussion to lecture. But all my childhood lessons emphasized how government truly takes place in the minds of the governed, even in their acknowledgment of us as a ruling family, and how ritual and manners and fashion are the outer forms of authority and its implied responsibility.”

  “And,” Iaeth stated, stamping on a slate rock in emphasis, “my lessons were in how those are infinitely superior to the use of force to impose order.”

  “Yes. Yes! So. I come back to the fact that Ivandred Noth did not loose his warriors to eradicate Ryu’s rabble, and made it clear enough that mercy was expected from that king so far away. What we were told about the Marlovans seems, in fact, to have been fundamentally incorrect.”

  “Yet.” Iaeth waved her hand to and fro in What matter? “No one is asking our opinion on their governance.”

  “But I need to understand what happened here. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s the implied responsibility in positions of power, whatever they might be called, that is the first to erode. Look at Lavais, as greedy as she was ambitious. The worst of her was her sense of privilege, a sense I share because I grew up knowing that I am a Landis, descendant of the oldest ruling house in the world. I can walk into any house in Sartor and expect the principle seat—as long as my royal cousins are not present. Then I sit at their right. We all know it so well we move in an orderly manner on entering or leaving a room, each to her place.”

  Iaeth said, “And so?”

  “That foolish Khael Artolei! In the time I spent with him and their court circle, before he and Ryu initiated their violent conspiracy, when he wasn’t being goaded into talk about war by Ryu, he wasn’t a bad person.”

  “Yes he was, unless you count murder on whim as not bad.”

  “I did not know!” Seonrei’s gait faltered, then she struck out again, as if to leave the ugly realization behind her.

  “I didn’t tell you many things, as the knowledge was a burden and you already knew he was untrustworthy.”

  “I see we will have much to discuss before we wait on the queen.”

  “Yes. Please resume. I sidetracked you, for which I apologize.”

  “Thank you. I found Artolei very...unthinking, particularly in his belief that because he was born Artolei, it was not a mere matter of coming first socially, but that anything he did must be right. Ah, and that accords with your grim discoveries. His shadow-kissers, as the Colendi say, certainly reinforced his conviction that he did no wrong, but you notice they were the first to run when the Marlovans appeared on the horizon.”

  “Faster than Ryu’s,” Iaeth said grimly as they began treading the fourth triad. “But discerning, and avoiding, the lies and flattery of shadow-kissers is an old lesson.”

  “Yes. The new lesson for me—I come at last to my point—was my observation that all of them—Ryu, his mother, and Khael Artolei—were not emulating Marlovan barbarians. They were emulating us.”

  Iaeth did not deny it, and Seonrei’s cheeks glowed brighter. But she gritted on, determined on this ramble into honesty, wherever it might lead. “We do learn a sense of privilege, because it goes with authority, which we are taught must remain benign. I have to ponder, and will discuss with the queen, how readily our civilized, superior Sartoran style of government was being distorted into Lavais Nyidri’s nightmarish semblance of a royal court. She was using what she learned from us against her own people, to rob them not only of their livelihood in order to increase her own wealth, but of their voices, to increase her power.”

  Iaeth sighed. “The obvious retort is that she was not our government. She was only adopting the trappings of social superiority.”

  “How dangerous are those, is my question?” Seonrei persisted. “Can they be considered as dangerous as all this steel surrounding us?”

  “The obvious answer is that steel ends life. Falsity, greed, and pretense can be survived. There is no redress when you lie dead.”

  “Mm-mm. All right, from another direction. The Marlovans are definitely ignorant about magic. They lack amenities we assume are basic to life. Perhaps it is the word ‘barbarian’ that is the peccant notion, implying our social and cultural superiority, as it depends not upon deeds of war. Does the very idea of social hierarchy spell its own downfall?”

  Iaeth cast her gaze upward as they made the turn to finish the last triad. “We need hierarchies because all us humans are barbarians at heart.”

  That, heralds were taught from the beginning. One had to become conscious of one’s faults before they could be guarded against—and only then could one learn to truly guard others.

  But she did not feel superior. She, too, had made grave mistakes.

  They took the last steps and stopped, bowed to one another with palms together, and went their separate ways, Iaeth taking a roundabout path through the Marlovans’ cottages, which perforce they still used, as quarters were extremely tight. But these past few days the Marlovans were seldom in the cottages during the day. They were either patrolling or performing their endless training maneuvers.

  So she was no
t prepared to hear voices. From long habit she stepped sideways to the shadows, and peered around an archway carved with acanthus leaves. Though his back was turned, she immediately recognized Prince Connar. No one else had that long blue-black hair hanging down in a glossy river from its high golden clasp, bisecting powerful shoulders tapering down to a slim waist. Long legs flattered by those loose trousers and high-heeled boots. While they’d all been starving, she had gotten used to seeing him fighting for draining strength as they all had been.

  But now he stood there fully armed, knife hilts gleaming at the tops of his riding boots, a sword strapped crosswise over his back—he had obviously just come from fighting practice—but his posture was still, as if he was a breath away from reaching for that sword hilt at his left shoulder as he faced—

  Lineas?

  And Quill!

  The two runners stood side by side, both in blue robes. Quill had halted in the process of handing Lineas something.

  Iaeth ducked back to remain unseen. The tension she perceived snapped her heartbeat into thundering against her ribs, faster than the rumbling drums of the Marlovans when they did that dance with steel.

  Then the prince slid a foot back, and his hands dropped to his hips as Lineas said, “I’ve orders to ride for the royal city.”

  Connar’s head turned minutely. Iaeth saw his profile as his gaze lit on the golden ring glinting at Lineas’s heart finger, then flicked to the sealed scroll Quill held in his hands.

  Quill cleared his throat, then said to Lineas, “I’m also to tell you that Digger ordered the cook to make you up travel rations, and Dandelion can be saddled whenever you wish.”

  Lineas took the scroll with both hands, her round gaze lifting to Connar, then away. “I’ll leave at first light.” She walked away.

  Connar said to Quill, “And you?”

  “I’m to stay with Noth until he readies the follow-up report.” He laid his fist to his heart.

  Connar gave one of those smiles that didn’t reach his eyes, and as he turned away, Iaeth faded noiselessly, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling.