Time of Daughters II

by Sherwood Smith

  “Do you read the reports that come in?”

  “There’s no time. And a lot are sealed.”

  “What happens to a sealed report?”

  “It gets taken to the roost’s scribe desk. Noted who sent a message, and to whom. Who on the rota is taking it. Mnar Milnari mostly tends to that. She explained to me that if a message goes astray, they can start from there to track it. She said that the outpost scribes also note who arrives, and where they’re going.” Pereth saw signs of impatience in Connar, and finished, “There’s a lot more.”

  “I’m sure there is. You’ll get used to it. But right now I want you to make this a priority: to learn their magic.”

  Pereth bit back a What?

  “I want to know exactly what they can and can’t do,” Connar said. “How they do it. How long it takes to learn it. Mostly I want to know if any of it can be used in the field. Quill told me it was impossible, but the royal scribes aren’t trained to think in military terms.”

  “But they start those lessons at twelve!”

  “You surely can learn what a child of twelve can,” Connar retorted, brows rising.

  Only one possible answer to agree, salute, and get out of there.

  Pereth did, giving vent to his frustration by smacking his hand against a stone wall as soon as he reached the stairwell to the third floor. He had skimped reading history when he was a young runner in training, but even he knew that magic was mostly useless in war. It was unwieldy, and spells could be negated.

  However, Connar had not asked for an opinion. He wanted facts.

  So, as the rest of the season streamed past, Pereth began magic lessons with carefully chosen youngsters, memorizing nonsense sounds and words. It was tedious almost beyond bearing, and the more frustrating as he saw what he was building toward: repeating spells over and over in order to make fire sticks and glowglobes.

  The sun began arcing northward, and the weather changed from one day to the next, one day hot and sunny, the next full of thunder and stinging rain, as the prevailing winds fought one another high over the mountains.

  By the time the east winds won, bringing cold off those eternally snowy peaks, the hole that Arrow had made in life gently but inexorably closed in. Danet still found herself watching the opposite door, sometimes even getting up to go over with the intention of sharing a thought, then she’d catch herself.

  Not that she couldn’t talk to Connar. Of course she could. But the door to the king’s suite was rarely open. Connar didn’t like people walking in on him. If he came to breakfast (which he often did) then Danet knew he was in a ready mood for conversation. Even better, she saw Connar on Restdays making an effort to pay attention to his girls, who were very much in the trying puppy stage, their minders constantly chasing after them.

  One morning as winter drew near, when everyone had finished and gone off to their chores, Danet put out her hand to Ranet. And when they were alone, “I like seeing Connar with the girls. That has to be your influence.”

  Words piled up unspoken behind Ranet’s lips. The gunvaer had lost too much this last year—her mother, her husband. She seemed as tough as ever, but Ranet knew she could be hurt. “I asked him to.”

  “Good. He isn’t a natural with small creatures the way Bunny is. I notice the girls are always slipping off to her rooms if they think they can get away with it.”

  “Kittens,” Ranet said succinctly, smiling.

  Danet uttered a short laugh. “Well, it doesn’t come naturally to Connar, I can see. Any more than it did to me. But he’s making an effort. Maybe that will help Iris be a little less shrill for attention, now that she’s getting some from her Da.”

  Ranet agreed and left to get started on the day’s labors. She started down the hall to her room, which now had an empty suite across from it. She sometimes looked at that closed door, finding it emblematic of her life. Marriage was a treaty. Everyone grew up knowing that. It was the weft to the warp of family and work, but what gave it color was the relationship the people built. Hers was a neutral thread spun out of silence.

  She turned her back on Connar’s old rooms and began to reach for the latch to her door when movement at the periphery of her vision caused her to look up. She saw Quill at the stairwell. He’d paused.

  “Looking for me?” she asked.

  “If you have a moment.”

  “Certainly. Come in.”

  He covered the distance quickly, and followed her into her room. “Do you need privacy?” she asked, as her runners were in the bedroom straightening things up.

  “Not at all. I merely wondered if you’ve heard from Braids lately. I’d thought he was coming into the royal city, but if he did, I didn’t see him,” Quill said.

  “Braids?” she repeated, wondering what Quill would want with Braids, especially now that he was no longer a royal runner.

  Quill looked apologetic. “While I’m no longer on the third floor, I pass through when I’m with Lineas for the night, and people still have a habit of asking me things. Like, updating locations of various people. In case we—they—have to run a message. It seems that these days Braids could be any number of places that are weeks or even a month or two apart. He must live on horseback.”

  Ranet laughed. “I think he does. And he always liked it, too, when we were young. I expect right now, this time of year, he and Hendan are running the perimeter as the studs release the horses for winter grazing. They’ll be completely out of contact, probably until New Year’s Week, going by how things were when I grew up.”

  “Oh, that’s good to know. I’ll pass that on,” he said. “Thanks!”

  They parted, Ranet forgetting completely about Braids as she struggled not to envy Lineas. She knew that Quill, as Noddy’s scribe, would have been given a room with the scribes at the other end of the state wing, which meant he crossed all this distance to be with Lineas, and they weren’t even trying to have a child—not that she’d heard, anyway.

  She glared at that closed door opposite, slammed hers, and firmly turned her attention to how much cloth to requisition from the weavers, for the academy next spring.

  Quill moved swiftly back to the stairs and down, relieved that he hadn’t been seen. Not that there was anything overtly wrong with his question, but he very much wanted to stay unnoticed as much as he could.

  Lnand, the most experienced of all the ferrets, had transferred to Ku Halir, and had spent fruitless weeks ever since hunting Kendred, Cabbage’s first runner. She’d met bewilderment—Wouldn’t he be sent back to Olavayir? She met ignorance. Who? Oh, well, why aren’t you asking at Stalgoreth? Why would one of their runners be down here in Tlen...in Sindan-An...And she met question. Why are all these people looking for him? Did he steal something? It was the question increasing to suspicion at a trade town in Sindan-An that caused her to report failure to Quill: She couldn’t find Kendred, she couldn’t even find Braids, and asking was beginning to draw attention.

  Every time he decided to give up, he remembered those ferrets of Jethren’s searching—and the fact that Jethren himself, with his first runner, had vanished abruptly not long after Connar became king. But no one seemed to know where.

  Vanadei, as yet, was the only person Quill had discussed the matter with. Every time he thought about sharing it with Lineas, he remembered that he’d have to begin with that night at the quartermaster’s, and forbore. His argument with himself went like this: It would be mere selfishness to drag her into the quagmire of questions without answers. There was nothing she could do, and she would have to hide her reactions from Noddy, who could be very observant at unexpected times.

  But underneath all that lay the subject of Connar, as volatile as fire.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Midsummer 4090 AF

  The throne room in Choreid Dhelerei’s royal castle was originally a gathering hall and retreat for the entire trade town, which was poised on the middle hill of three, divided off from the other two hills by rivers to either side. As
the town spread mostly southward, the castle was enlarged to the north. By the time the Cassadas family came to rule Iasca Leror, the castle had been rebuilt four times. The gathering hall had been elevated to a throne room with the dais added, as well as the Sartoran-influenced clerestory windows high up, to bring in more light and add a hint of grace.

  The Cassadas family made that chamber beautiful. During their rule, that vaulted ceiling had hundreds of glowglobes hanging down at various sizes and lengths, resembling a starlit sky whose magic could generate warmth in winter, and be reduced to cool, tiny lights in summer. The bland sand-colored stone was hidden behind fine carving, exquisite plaster and tile and tapestry, designed to lead the eye upward, to convey airy lightness and aesthetic harmony.

  When it became clear that the Marlovans could not be defeated, the Cassadas prevented a wholesale slaughter by surrender, marrying one of their daughters to the Marlovan chieftain—but before they left, they stripped the castle bare.

  The conquering Marlovans moved from tents to castles, finding nothing but stone. As castle life was new to them, they remained unaware of the silent commentary on their lack of civilization; they affixed iron sconces to the walls of the throne room, and hung up banners and weapons taken in battle as decoration. The second king (mindful of how he had replaced the first king) added a good, sturdily built throne with an assassin-proof raised back and winged sides, thus engendering the first (and some will maintain, only) Marlovan fashion: raptor-footed wingback chairs. Mats on the floor were eventually replaced with benches.

  All the coronations since those days took place in this nearly bare chamber, the only pageantry the drums rumbling in galloping counterpoint from the gallery below the windows, as new kings strode to the dais between the jarls and their captains, the commanders, and the guild chiefs. If the new king had married a suitable fighting queen, she was the one who gave him the two swords—one the old king’s, one his own sword—sometimes in a display of skill of her own, after which he performed the sword dance—a ritual before battle—with three chosen men.

  Then came the oaths, king to jarls, and jarls to king, after which all would retire to the secondary hall across the way, for a huge feast. That was it for ritual and pageantry.

  So it was this year. Connar and Ranet made an astonishingly good-looking couple. Since winter Ranet had been practicing handling two swords, for though she was only gunvaer in name—as she was a wife—she knew what she owed both families, the royal Olavayirs and her own. Wolf Senelaec had dragged himself back to the royal city, and he was out there whooping the loudest as she tossed the swords spinning high into the air, then caught them by their handles before turning them over to Connar.

  Their fingers touched briefly—hers warm, his cool and dry—and that was all the physical contact they had had for a year.

  She backed up between Danet and Noren, and watched as Connar, Noddy, Stick Tyavayir, and Rat Noth (there in his father’s place, before transferring to Hesea) performed the sword dance with athletic grace. Up on the dais, Ranet gazed out over the gathering, her expression serene, her emotions in a tumble; from the front, in the place of Captain of the Honor Guard, Kethedrend Jethren observed through narrowed eyes, burning with regret that he had not been asked to make one of those three with Connar. But he would get that place, he vowed silently, his gaze straying to Connar’s beautiful wife, who had tossed those swords so spectacularly.

  After that came the innovation that was received with enthusiastic popularity: It seemed that Keth Jethren, Commander of the new king’s honor guard, had gone all the way up north to bring back...a dance troupe, to perform for the jarls at the banquet.

  “How did he even think of that?” Knuckles Marlovayir asked Camrid Tyavayir, who had inherited Tyavayir this past year.

  Camrid shrugged, his eyes on the floating draperies worn by the female dancers. “The Olavayirs used to have some connections up over the Andahi Pass, that’s what I heard. He had leave, went to visit, and met up with these dancers. Brought them back for the coronation.”

  Knuckles grinned as the lissome women twirled and leaped, the draperies revealing, and concealing, enticing curves. Low-slung belts made of tiny coins jangled, drawing attention to the dip between rounded hips, watched raptly by men from eighteen to eighty. Marlovan women just didn’t dance like that. And why ever not, grizzled old Captain Basna muttered to his jarl.

  Male dancers were a part of the troupe. At first certain jarls, on discovering these foreigners didn’t carry any steel, shrugged, wanting the women back, until the dancers brought out fire.

  “Now that is worth watching!” Old Zheirban said to Mareca as a pair of men tossed whirling torches back and forth.

  Mareca, who was very much enjoying the men for themselves, concurred, and added, “A good way to begin a new reign, I think. Very good.”

  Everyone seemed to agree—except of course for the Jarl of Gannan, wheezing purple-faced in ill-concealed fury. But there was no gainsaying the three witnesses who had been with Braids Senelaec during the entire clash with the mercenaries. The older jarls who had gone along with Gannan despite his dubious accusations, because it was always a good idea to put reins on a king, especially a young one hot to gallop, privately agreed that the old wolf was barking at the moon.

  “As for young Connar,” Khanivayir’s Riding Captain said, his gaze dwelling appreciatively on the handsome young king currently watching the dancers and smiling, “unlike some sons, he hasn’t been ordering up a lot of rock-headed changes just because he can.”

  Grunts and palm-up gestures of agreement from the oldsters met this: they were all aware of jarl sons who had, on inheriting, thrown all their fathers’ ways to the winds, which struck very close to home.

  The following day, they were equally entertained by watching the academy boys and girls compete in riding, shooting, and weaponry.

  Connar invited Rat Noth to sit beside him. Rat enjoyed the clear, warm sunlight. He was in an excellent mood. He was finally reunited with Bunny, who would ride to Hesea with him, Danet-Gunvaer had promised. The Nyidris were gone except for Demeos, but he was a follower, currently trotting after his new wife. And with this transfer to Hesea Garrison, Rat never had to see him again.

  As the ride and shoot commenced, Connar said to him, “I’m glad you’ll be at Hesea. That puts you in reach.”

  Rat glanced sideways in question. “For?”

  “Next summer I want to try something new. Instead of the academy seniors pitted against each other, I want a better challenge. You bring up a company of seasoned warriors. They’ll be facing seniors out with something to prove, so it shouldn’t be too boring.”

  Rat was surprised, but not displeased. Everybody loved wargames. Much more fun than drill, and no one got killed. He foresaw a good winter, as everyone competed to get picked for the wargame company.

  “What kind of games are you thinking?” he asked.

  The new king looked up and away, as if considering. He didn’t seem to notice the youngsters working so hard on the parade ground, every so often looking up expectantly at the royal family. “Different things,” Connar said finally. “Different terrain. Different problems. We’ve seen a few in the past few years.”

  “That we have,” Rat acknowledged.

  The last competition finished, and covert glances were sent toward the king—who raised his fist in approbation, and a pleased shout erupted from the stands and the field alike, sending birds squawking. Rat hadn’t thought Connar was watching but he clearly was, watching everything everywhere. Great commander, great king. Rat left smiling.

  And he was still smiling two days later as he and his escort rode for Hesea, Bunny with them.

  Danet stood on the wall, her feelings sharply ambivalent. She’d always dreaded sending Bunny south, but these circumstances were so much better than what she’d dreaded in the past. Bunny was happy. She was only going as far as Hesea Garrison. And, Danet thought , determined to find something good in this situ
ation, the Noths were known for almost always having boys. She adored her granddaughters, but it would be good to have next generation’s heir growing up under her eyes.

  She knew Arrow would have agreed.

  With the jarls and their captains gone, Connar at last had leisure to sit down with Jethren and his map.

  It was an extraordinarily detailed map. At first glance it was overwhelming. “How did you get this close without raising suspicion?” Connar asked.

  “It was the dancers,” Jethren responded. “Found them early on, at the far end of Andahi. Their caravan leader had quit on them. They were looking about for someone to manage the animals and their carts. They were glad to hire Moonbeam and me, and when I found out they were traveling the length of the coast, and that military camps tended to hire them as entertainment, we stuck to them all winter and through the spring. At Ghildraith, they were arguing about whether to cross the strait and risk one of those pirate-infested harbors, or go back along the north coast, competing against all the other troupes, when I got the idea of telling them to come south. As cover.”

  “Cover,” Connar repeated. “Not just for the Idegans.”

  “And it worked. Everyone who asked why I was gone, when I told them I’d brought that troupe back for the coronation, not a one argued. The queen told me yesterday when she saw me down in the stable that the troupe is taking over some old building in the city, that has a raised platform, like a stage. Rumor has it, it was for plays, back in the old days.”

  Connar already knew that Noren had hired the male dancers for a gathering she’d given the night before to the female masters in the queen’s training and in the academy, as a reward for their efforts during the Convocation.

  Connar was not tired of the dancers—far from it—but he was tired of them as a subject. “I sent the Nob runner back empty-handed. We’re done with the Nob. I told Fish to put a couple of royal runners to shadow him up the peninsula, ones who know something about boats. They can go doggo up there. Listen. If Lorgi Idego strikes, the royal runner scouts are to sail for Lindeth, as Nermand said it’s far faster than taking horses back down the peninsula. Then a grass-run to alert us. I’m gambling on it not happening right away.”