Time of Daughters II

by Sherwood Smith

  She was about to speak when she remembered that he got embarrassed easily, talking about intimate things. She didn’t understand it, but she respected it. She drew him inside, signaling in quick Hand for hot drink and dry clothes, and as soon as they were alone, said, “Remember, just before you rode to Algaravayir, I told you I wasn’t sure....”

  He blushed all the way down to his high collar. “Then it’s true?”

  “Third month.” She swallowed quickly. “And I seem to have inherited my mother’s touchy guts. Though if I don’t move fast, and stay upright, and watch what I eat, I can keep it down.”

  Rat was going to throw his arms around her but halted, then fell into a fit of coughing. Bunny patted his hand, then snatched it back. “You’re cold all the way through! Let’s get you changed.”

  Digger and Jugears, his first and second runners, had warm clothes and hot food waiting by the time he got upstairs to the two rooms that he and Bunny shared.

  He coughed his way through the meal, listening to one report after another, before calling in Pepper Marlovayir. With him, Bun, and the two runners present, he said, “I’ve been demoted. Pepper, you’re commander, as of now.” Pause for a cough. “But you’d better be ready for a possible summons to ride against Lorgi Idego.”

  Pepper had been wrestling mentally with the idea ever since Rat had warned him why he was riding for the capital as fast as a grass runner. Pepper’s private feeling was, if Connar was going anyway, why not with the best? But if Rat wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t do it. Pepper would if ordered.

  Rat saw much of this in the side glances and subtle shifts in Pepper’s stance. He accepted it. People were going to do what they were going to do.

  “So, I may’s well get in some bunk time while you take over.”

  Pepper saluted a last time and withdrew, leaving Rat sitting tiredly, waves of exhaustion weighing his eyelids.

  Bunny leaned down to kiss him, but he fended her off. “No—I really am sick. You’ve got a child in you. I don’t know if they can get sick off someone and I don’t want to find out.”

  Bunny was torn between wanting to stay with him and longing to be horizontal and quiet. She paused at the door. “Did you tell my mother what we suspected?”

  “Didn’t see her,” Rat croaked. “Rode in. Talked to Connar. Rode out.”

  It was then that Bun realized how upset he was, so she held her breath, bent down to kiss his clammy forehead, then backed away. “You get some rest in our bed. The lazaretto is empty. I’ll bunk there. It’s closer to the kitchen, so Dannor can bring me ginger-steep. It seems to help. We can talk it out tomorrow.”

  Rat stretched out his hand, clasped her warm fingers, and let go.

  He woke with a gasp, aware that he was not alone in the room. The near total darkness was broken by a sliver of moth-pale light between the shutters. That line was partly broken by the angle of a masculine shoulder.

  With senses honed by years of danger, Rat knew that whoever was in the room with him was male, and big. Rat’s fingers groped beside the bed for the knife he kept in the loop in his right boot. His fingers closed on the handle and he surged out of bed, the hammer of a headache nearly dropping him.

  A breath, the scrape of a foot, then a faint line of light glinted along the edge of steel. Rat crouched, mind floating free: so this was it, then. A familiar feeling from the midst of battle, as his body reacted faster than thought. He had killed too many people to count, people he might have liked if he had not met them in the ferocity of war; he had always thought, the rare times he let himself think of such things, that he would probably die by violence. He’d assumed it would be in battle, not in his bedroom.

  If it was to be, he would still go down fighting.

  Moonbeam respected Rat Noth as a great warrior. Only orders had brought him here. He had even waited until Rat Noth had seen his wife, and had slept a little, for Moonbeam had gotten close enough in the chase to see that his target was ill.

  But he had orders, and he had to do everything right before the ghosts could be real again.

  Rat whirled and struck—air.

  Thin blades scythed with lethal precision out of the darkness. Icy heat struck the inside of Rat’s wrist, and when the boot knife fell from fingers that had lost their grip, the cold blade sliced across his throat. His headache diminished in beats, drowning in lassitude as he fell to his knees. But he scarcely felt the impact for he was blinking against the fulgence of dawn, only it was brighter than the summer sun, far too bright to see.

  The scent of spring was so subliminal Quill could not have identified what it was, except that it breathed into his dreams until urgency worked its way through the image of Pereth poking him insistently with a lance.

  The pokes finally brought him up through the layers of dream into wakefulness, Lineas’s shadowed face bent over his, her fingers gentle but insistent on his chin.

  She leaned on an elbow, the rest of her half-pinned under him, their legs tangled. “Your notecase,” she whispered.

  The dream-lassitude and the insistent warmth of morning withered. He sat up, rummaging under the pillow. “I slept through it.”

  “You were tired.”

  Sometimes it was comforting to say the obvious, he reflected as he flicked the case open. Lineas had slid out of bed, and crouched before the fire to light a candle, which she brought, shivering, back to bed.

  “It’s Camerend,” Quill said after a glance at his father’s handwriting. Then a hissed intake of breath. “Better read it.”

  Senrid, I am sorry to report that someone murdered Flax Noth two days ago, while he was riding back from the winter pasture. The patrol found him yesterday, and I waited to investigate, knowing you would have the same questions I did—and still do.

  He had no enemies, nor was there any sign of a duel. The murder was certainly accomplished by a trained assassin, footprints were blurred by brush....

  It went on to state that the memorial would be that night. Lineas scanned rapidly through that, sorrow closing her throat. Flax had been popular. He was Lineas’s mother’s cousin, well-liked by all.

  She wiped her eyes and read the remainder of the note:

  At first we assumed it was random, but I sent a runner to Hesea Garrison to report to Rat Noth, in hopes he would order the roads watched by his patrols.

  But I was just now woken by our outer perimeter patrol, who escorted Itch Noth in—he had ridden all night. Rat Noth was murdered several days ago. Runners are on the way to the royal city to report.

  “Murdered?” Quill breathed, looking up. “Rat? Dead?” He rubbed his face violently, then sprang out of bed and began pulling on his clothes. “I’ve got to.... Wait. Wait. Where first?” He scowled at the fire, then up at Lineas, who was also dressing as fast as she could get her trembling fingers to work.

  “Lineas, what exactly did Ranet say happened with Connar the day Rat arrived and left?”

  “The gist of Connar’s speech, according to her, was that the Noths resigned and that they were thinking like women. The way she said it, without looking at me, I suspect she thought that Connar was aiming that at me in some way.”

  Quill’s breath hissed out. “Rat and his cousins must have resigned. Over the invasion of Lorgi Idego, which Connar would know your opinion of. I don’t think she’s wrong.”

  The idea made Lineas uncomfortable. But it was after all only guessing, so she finished, “Connar told her Rat left with orders for a change in command.”

  “Which Noths?”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  Quill reached behind the bedding for his knives. “But we know who commands where. I just need to think—the map. Where’s the map. Calculate distances—”

  Lineas was already sketching the map into a page of her journal. She blobbed ink at the approximate sites of each garrison or jarl castle where a Noth served as captain or commander. Then both looked at the horrible truth: assuming the assassins had all set out from the royal city,
and Rat at Hesea Garrison was already dead, then....

  “Parayid,” Quill whispered as he shoved his feet into his boots. “The only one they might not have reached yet.”

  “But—”

  He whispered the transfer spell. The faint burn of hot metal singed Lineas’s nostrils as the ribbons of color weaving through the air coruscated wildly, and he was gone, the flames in the fireplace stirring.

  He had sketched a Destination at Parayid on a previous visit. Magic propelled him violently into a stack of brooms and buckets, sending him crashing painfully. He kicked his way free and bolted out of the storage cubby into a castle full of flickering torchlight, shouts, and running feet.

  Quill dodged a patrol running with bare steel. The leader checked, looked at his blue robe, and ran on, the patrol streaming past, their footfalls drowning out his “What happened?”

  Quill shut up and dashed for the scribe station, which was where runners usually gathered. Sure enough, he found it full of people in various states of dress.

  “What happened?” he asked the nearest.

  “Quill?” an older runner declared. “When did you ride in?”

  “Just now. Nobody noticed me. What happened?”

  “The jarl is dead,” the runner stated, red-eyed with fury and grief. “Throat slit in his sleep.”

  “Mouse?”

  “Alive. Barely. He woke when they came in, fought. He was losing—he was naked, and there were three of them—but his favorite, who’d gone out for hot steep, came in with the mugs, saw the fight, threw the steaming steep at the assassins and screeched as she pegged them with every bit of furniture she could lay hand to, waking everyone in earshot. One of the killers tried to go for her, but the runners came in, there was a fight, and the assassins got away.”

  “Any description?”

  “Yes,” a woman spoke up. “Desi said that they all had dark clothes, and scarves covering their faces, but when she threw the hot liquid into one’s face, he yanked the covering off and she got a fast look. She said he had a white scar here.” The runner drew a line down the side of her face. “And a piece missing out of his ear.” She tapped her ear above the scar.

  One of Mouse’s runners said dubiously, “That sounds like Rock Alca, one of Jethren’s captains.”

  “Jethren! Isn’t he captain of the king’s honor guard?”

  “I thought Alca was a lance captain. Why would he be in Parayid, trying to kill Mouse? It’s got to be some other man all scarred up. Or you saw wrong.”

  Quill half-listened, his mind reviewing a mental map. With sick conviction, he realized that distances and travel times roughly matched up: these assassins could very well have been sent the day Rat Noth confronted Connar.

  “Never mind the guessing!” The first runner spoke sharply. “We’re on lockdown, with a triple perimeter out beyond the city. We’ll find ‘em.”

  Quill hoped so, but trained assassins knew egress as well as ways of dealing death. His mind leaped to the mystery of the king and the bristic—still unsolved—as he said, “I guess I won’t be able to deliver my message to Ivandred-Jarl.”

  “Turn it in at the command center,” the chief scribe said somberly.

  Shock, Quill was aware as he made his way down to the command center, had iced over the well of grief, but it was thinning rapidly. How many deaths? Already Ivandred’s hurt like a knife dipped in poison.

  The reek of sweat and the sharp barks of helpless fury warned him of the chaos in the command center. He stood outside, listening. As expected, the captains under both Noths knew little more than the runners, and were doing their best to cope by sending out a stream of orders.

  Quill exited without them ever noticing him except as another runner in blue. He found his way to an isolated spot, and braced himself for the agonizing wrench of the return transfer.

  Lineas had been busy. Vanadei was in the room with her, and on the table waited a mug wafting the welcome herbal scent of listerblossom steep. Quill drank it down, but as the transfer reaction faded, the grief branched through him and he wiped his eyes as he reported.

  Lineas wept silently. Vanadei, who had only briefly met Noth, waited while his two companions recovered, then said, “Riders are on the way. The news will be official in a month. What do we do until then?”

  Quill’s hand slid to his sleeves, and gripped over the hilts of his knives. “I’ll wager my life that was Alca. I so want to go after Jethren and choke the truth out of him.”

  Vanadei’s voice flattened. “But what if he was acting on orders? From everything I’ve seen, he doesn’t scratch his ass without Connar’s approval.”

  Lineas whispered, “It might not have been Connar. Sending assassins doesn’t seem like him.”

  Quill sighed heavily. “Yes, he seems to attack people himself. Whereas everything I’ve been able to glean about Nighthawk made it clear they were trained in all ways to kill. Mathren Olavayir certainly relied heavily on assassins.”

  “Back to Jethren,” Vanadei said.

  Quill squeezed his eyes shut and his head dropped back. Then he gave a tired sigh. “But even if I challenge him to a duel in the style of the old days, what would it change? Connar’s entire honor guard is Nighthawk men from Olavayir. If Connar ordered these assassinations, then nothing can touch those men. It’d be treason. Which I’m angry enough right now to accept, because then I could witness to the jarls before Connar has me flayed at the post. But even confronting Jethren might make you a target for the rest of Nighthawk.” He turned to Lineas.

  “They don’t notice me. Except for Jethren’s first runner,” she amended.

  “Moonbeam?” Quill and Vanadei said together, startled.

  Quill said slowly, “You never told me he was stalking you. That man is dangerous.”

  Lineas flickered her fingers in Stay, stay. “No stalking. Just brief encounters, like in the royal hall when I go to tutor Iris, and he’s outside the king’s chamber, waiting. I doubt very much he’s going to attack me there! And he always asks the same thing, do I see them? And then the number. Of ghosts, I mean.”

  “Ghosts?” Quill repeated.

  Lineas briefly summarized her first encounter with Moonbeam at the memorial for Arrow-Harvaldar. Then, “The strange part is, where I usually see one or two, sometimes he’ll say four, usually six, and one time eight. Except for the time he said none, with this strange smile, and his eyes were completely black.”

  “Eyes all black? That sounds like the effect of bellflower root,” Vanadei exclaimed.

  “A regular assassin’s tool.” Quill grimaced. “To see in the dark. But it’s very poisonous. It isn’t just the eyes, but the heart affected, according to my mother, who studied plants and herbs.”

  Quill’s downturned mouth, his averted gaze, hurt Lineas to see. To distract him from the immediacy of his distress, she said, “He’s been most consistent in saying six. The last time, it was when I had to go over to fetch—no, that doesn’t matter. He was there. The wind was bad that day, and it made my eyes tear. You know how light is strange when there’s liquid in your eyes, it can almost be like looking through a prism. Well, I blinked, and I am very sure I saw a crowd of ghosts around him. But another blink and there was just the blobby one that I often see on the second floor.”

  Quill made an effort and mastered himself. Mourning could wait. “That is strange.” Then, lower, “I thank you for sidetracking me. I needed that moment.” He kissed her.

  Vanadei said, “I don’t see the worth of revealing magic transfer now. And a lot of danger.”

  The morning watch bell clanged. It was time for the royal breakfast, after which Lineas had tutoring.

  Quill said quickly, “Let’s go. Maybe it’ll be useful to observe how Connar reacts. But until then....” He tapped the wrist sheaths beneath his loose sleeves. “I’m going armed. I suggest the both of you do it as well.” To Lineas, “You might be beneath Jethren’s notice, but not Connar’s.”

  Alca and his tea
m had gone to ground, after two more tries to get into Parayid to finish off Mouse Noth. Each time they got no nearer than a sight of the castle, and were nearly caught. Security might have been lax before for trained assassins, but it wasn’t now.

  So Alca, furious at having failed half the assignment, gave the order to return to the royal city.

  They wisely avoided the main roads, but miscalculated how fast word might have spread in all directions, not just northward to Choreid Dhelerei. And, believing themselves the elite of the elite, they never considered that there were highly trained warriors who knew every bend in the smallest stream, every fold in the ground, every stand of trees.

  They’d reached a dip in a trail skirting the forest of Telyer Hesea when steel-armed figures seemed to spring up from the ground to surround them. The three of them faced ten or twelve dark-clad warriors.

  Alca said, confident in his skill, said goadingly, “At least give us the chance to fight one on one.”

  Colt Cassad’s soft tenor held no mercy. “The way you did Ivandred Noth?”

  He led the attack.

  Alca was the first one down, but took the longest to die.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Connar hesitated to give the order to muster and proceed to the north. Winter still held the kingdom in an icy grip, with endless ranks of snow clouds sailing over the eastern mountains.

  They could start riding. Connar’s temper had cooled enough for him to wait anxiously to find out the result of Jethren’s mission. He didn’t want Rat Noth dead. He wanted him obedient. But he had said Do what you want.

  So he set the army and the garrison guards against one another in various attack and defense scenarios around the city. Slopping and mucking about in the slush kept them busy and tired, until Jethren presented himself, head back, lips curled in triumph.

  When they were alone, he began the list.

  “Old Aldren Noth of Algaravayir?” Connar interrupted, appalled. “The man has to have been eighty!”

  Though Alca hadn’t returned yet, the rest had had the success Jethren expected of them, proving that they truly were the elite. “Your orders were to do what I wanted. I wanted a quick, sharp strike, or you know they all would have been popping up with demands, refusals, and even the old could’ve summoned the rest to back them.”