Time of Daughters II

by Sherwood Smith

  Jethren—who hadn’t been drinking because Connar wasn’t drinking—whirled out of his wingbacked chair and flung himself toward Ranet, who had not planned to live beyond that moment.

  Henad Tlennen had been on the watch. She signaled a pair of women who closed in, knives flashing as they blocked his way. He dashed hot wine into one’s face, leaped over the table, and booted the second in the chest, sending her crashing over a chair. Then, poised on the table, he swept his gaze at the dead and dying, and bolted, bending long enough to pick up a knife dropped by a woman curled over a broken arm.

  He vaulted over two of his men, now dead, and swept the exits. At least two figures at the south door. At the north, for some reason, that royal runner Quill stood alone.

  Quill stood there in shock, until he saw Jethren coming at him with knife upraised.

  Before Quill could speak, Jethren grinned, bloodlust fueled by anger. Everything destroyed, everything he’d worked for so hard—he would kill anything that got in his way. He struck.

  But the royal runner was like water, impossibly fast, impossible to pin down. Rage made Jethren wild, until, he shifted to avoid a stab at his eyes, then felt ice flower just below the arch of his ribs. He looked up, his oddly numb lips struggling to curse, but the third blow went straight to his heart, and he was dead before he hit the ground.

  Breathing hard, Quill looked up, to see Vanadei and Cama Tall running toward him from the direction of the south door.

  “What—why?” Vanadei asked breathlessly.

  “He wasn’t going to back down,” Quill began.

  “I saw that,” Vanadei cut in. “If you hadn’t, I would’ve. But what’s going on in there?” He stared through the open doorway. “Wait, is that the king...?”

  The three stared in at the carnage as the women went from one to the next, making sure they were all dead.

  “What do we do now?” Cama Tall asked faintly.

  Dannor Basna appeared in the doorway, filmy mask hanging, a spray of blood marking her face. She pointed to the inner door then said hoarsely, “Moonbeam got out. He cut up four of Henad’s Riders.” She wiped her face with shaky fingers, smearing the blood. “I don’t know if he left them alive.”

  “Moonbeam?” Quill repeated.

  Vanadei blanched as he glanced across the banquet hall to that inner door. “That’s where we stationed Cama Basna....”

  A young runner appeared in the hallway behind Quill. “There are dead sentries out beyond the throne room! Where’s the king?”

  “Where? Which direction?” Quill snapped, ignoring the question.

  “Toward the royal wing,” the runner keened, eyes stark.

  Vanadei and Quill spoke together. “The second floor.”

  Where Lineas had been stationed, in case any of the royal family woke from whatever it was Ranet had slipped into their afternoon coffee.

  Quill said, “Run.”

  In the banquet hall, Henad Tlennen sent one compassionate glance Ranet’s way, then said to the rest of the women, “Go.”

  Once Bunny was safely seen to bed, Maddar and Snow disappeared down the stairway to the stable to ready the horses, leaving the royal floor quiet once more.

  Unaccountably, to Lineas it smelled like lilies.

  Quill had asked Lineas to watch the second floor, just in case, though there were the two guards at either end. She watched Maddar and Snow go as she drew in a slow breath, trying to recollect where she had smelled that before. It had been a long time, that’s all she remembered. Had Bunny been wearing scent? But she never wore scent. Yet it was impossible for lilies to be growing while spring had barely fuzzed the trees.

  Lineas walked a little ways along the hall, then halted when noise from the two guards at the far stairwell alerted her: a shout, followed by a cry, then a gurgling moan that ended with a choked-off yelp.

  Lineas’s attention shifted to the tall, pale-haired man in night-assassin black who walked toward her, blood-dripping knives in both fists: Moonbeam.

  Moonbeam stopped a couple of strides away and regarded her through pupils round and black as holes cut out of the night sky, then sheathed one of his knives, nasty as it was, and signed: How many?

  She breathed in as she made an effort to still her trembling fingers, then signed as she said, “Too many to count. Do you smell lilies?”

  At that moment, from the far landing behind Lineas, footsteps as the other pair of guards came at a run.

  Moonbeam’s hands moved so fast she was only aware of a dark blur and the glint of steel pinwheeling past her head on either side, reflecting the torchlight above her. Then the nasty sound of knives striking flesh: a groan, a cry, and the heavy fall of bodies.

  Lineas froze, her heart thudding frantically against her ribs as Moonbeam reached behind him and brought out another knife with his left hand.

  With his right he signed, Six.

  “Which six?” Lineas was aware of her voice sounding high, childish. Trembling—then, because she would be scrupulously honest until her last breath, she blinked rapidly. Was that a flicker to his left, and on his other side? “Wait. Wait.”

  Moonbeam took a step toward her. He could see her gaze shifting to points around him. He signed, How can you make them real?

  “Real as in living?” Her gaze was stark.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes.”

  At that moment Quill, who had been advancing in utter stealth, reached for Moonbeam, who had been concentrating so hard on the one person who seemed to understand him, he neglected his surroundings until the hiss of cloth reached his ears.

  He began to spin, knife arcing—but Quill was faster, one blocking, the other slicing gently, inexorably, across the beating artery at Moonbeam’s throat.

  Lineas wailed as she leaped forward. Moonbeam dropped the knives, pressing one hand to his spurting throat, but already he was weak. He fell to his knees, fighting to use the last of his rapidly diminishing strength to turn anguished eyes to Lineas, desperate to understand. To be understood.

  Her stinging eyes filled with tears that acted like a prism, and she perceived them all: the pale-haired mother, the father in a warrior’s coat. A small sister, and three others who blended in shifting panes of light, the resemblance achingly clear.

  “I see. I see. These six, they’re your family,” she whispered to Moonbeam, throwing herself down beside him. She took his hand, bloody as it was, and leaned down into his fading gaze. “They are here with you. You are not alone—”

  The scent of lily blooms strengthened as the ghosts around her melded into a glow like starfire. In its light the castle walls appeared as insubstantial as smoke. Lineas turned her head, enthralled, for now she could see a multitude of ghosts, bright and faded, some still retaining human shape, others blobs of pale light.

  Far below and away to the south Lineas beheld the familiar blond ghost in the blue tunic with the golden dolphin leaping across his chest, visible in a slow ripple of light like the sun over water, intermingling with the brightness of a new ghost, hair dark, eyes bluer than the summer sky. The two blended until the starfire expanded in coruscant rings to envelope them all, and then they winked out, leaving the fresh, heady scent of lilies until that, too, faded, and was gone.

  Lineas laid Moonbeam’s lifeless hand on his breast, tears running in a silent cataract, bouncing off her robe in splotches.

  Vanadei, who had come up at Quill’s left as shield, spoke urgently. “What now?”

  Quill tried to claw sense out of the chaos of the last hour. “I don’t have any authority to be giving orders.”

  “Someone has to,” Pereth spoke up from behind. He and a host of royal runners approached, dark blue robes flapping, some of them pulled over night gear. He glanced at Moonbeam lying in a pool of blood, and said flatly, “Who else is dead?”

  “Jethren and his captains, scouts, and runners,” Quill said. “And the king.”

  Pereth’s expression remained unchanged. “In that case, I’m free. A
s of this moment, I resign.” He held out his hand in an ironic gesture toward the royal runners clustered behind him, and pulled off his robe, revealing he was still wearing a sleep shirt over his trousers. He dropped the robe down beside Quill. “Far as I’m concerned, they’re all yours.”

  Quill cast weary, distraught glances at the five still figures in the hallway, one of them dead by his hand. The numbness of shock protected him, but he knew that would not last. In the space of an hour he had killed two people. One of them the king’s right hand....

  But Connar was dead.

  He squeezed his eyes shut against the sudden image of Ranet deliberately raising that crossbow as she said something too soft to be heard.

  Then Lineas’s voice broke through his fugue. “I truly hate to disturb Commander Noth, but shouldn’t we raise the guard?”

  “The night duty captain,” Vanadei said, snapping his fingers.

  Cama Tall came up behind them. “Cama Basna is still alive, and one of the sentries. They should be taken to the lazaretto immediately. I’ve sent—”

  At that moment squads of guards emerged from both ends of the stairwell, having been alerted by a wall sentry who’d spotted the three royal runners dashing along the halls, weapons in hand. Shouts echoed as they encountered the bodies left behind by Moonbeam on his way to the second floor, then they spread out, weapons bare, to check the royal rooms, where the family slumbered under the effects of sleep herb.

  A captain approached, looking down at Moonbeam in his blood, knives beside him, then to Quill, still holding his own blades. “I take it you stopped him?”

  “Yes,” Quill said tiredly. And, to Lineas, “Let’s go.”

  Still trembling, she sent one troubled glance back at Moonbeam, then took Quill’s arm. They retreated to the now-deserted third floor, leaving the captain to restore order over the crowd of runners and guards moving around as if to shed tension in the aftermath of violence.

  When they reached Lineas’s room, Quill shut the door and turned around. “Not that I could have done anything. But I really thought Ranet and those women were going confront them, or argue, or even hold the men hostage until they promised to see reason. We were going to back them up in case Nighthawk turned on them. I never thought she would walk up to Connar and shoot him dead. How is that going to be anything but treason?” He dropped his blades on the floor, sat down heavily, and muttered, “I feel sick.”

  Lineas pulled him against her, and for a time they held tightly to one another, finding comfort in the sound of each other’s breathing, and beating heart.

  Finally he let out a sigh. “What next?”

  “Let’s get a bath. It’s late. If the castle is locked down, that means no one will be doing anything more until morning, when the royal family wakes up.”

  “Right,” he breathed, and forced himself to his feet, then as the great bell began tolling, sank down again. “Who’s going to tell the family?”

  “Morning,” Lineas said firmly, though she didn’t feel firm at all. “Everything can wait until morning.”

  “Very well,” he said wearily, knowing that he owed it to Noddy and Vanadei to be there when Noddy heard the news. He and Lineas both.

  She picked out clean clothes for them as he wiped his knives on his ruined robe. Then they went down to the bath.

  Quill could not relax. Too much was poised on a pinnacle, and a breath of wind either way could cause a rock fall. Skytalon. He winced, surged out of the bath, dressed, and found Lineas waiting.

  When they got upstairs, they found Pereth standing against the wall outside Lineas’s room. “I think,” he said, as the last clang of the great bell died away, “there are things you should know.”

  Sleep was decidedly not going to happen. Lineas silently opened her door, and for the first time, Pereth stepped inside. “It’s going to be long,” he warned.

  And it was. Knowing that Quill would tell her anything she hadn’t heard, Lineas went out to fetch hot steep for them all, as Pereth began with how Retren Hauth had been secretly training Connar at the academy—and why.

  It was soon evident that Pereth had not been trained as the royal runners were in recounting events in order. Either that or he was too unsettled to remember the forms as he skipped forward and back in time. Some things he summarized, others he described in detail, such as how badly Connar had reacted to that Victory Day conversation his Uncle Retren forced on him, and the realization that he had not been picked for his talent, but entirely because he’d been the product of—as he put it—as stupid a pair of shits as had ever been born, and the grandson of a worse shit.

  Then Pereth leaped to the secret Vaskad training that the Nighthawk people had been so very proud of, and Jethren’s goal to win Connar the kingship, after which he jumped to the story of Cabbage’s murder at the riverside, with Jethren as witness.

  “But that doesn’t explain why he killed Cabbage Gannan. Or was that whim?”

  “It might have been premeditated. Don’t know,” Pereth said. “All I can tell you is that he hated Gannan since the day he started calling him Cabbage, if not before. But that’s when I saw it.”

  Lineas—who had slipped back in unnoticed—murmured, “I think I remember that time. But it wasn’t Connar there, surely. It was other boys.”

  Pereth signed his thanks as he took a sip, then he said, “What you remember is the day Gannan got assigned kitchen duty. Connar and his brother came to gloat on another day, and I remember it because my brother told me to tell Gannan what seemed to be a big secret, that Connar wasn’t a real prince, and that the king would replace him with the Chief Weaver’s baby, if it was a boy. Later, much later, I figured my brother got the orders from my uncle, as his first attempt to cut Connar off from his family....” And he went on to relate what had happened between Connar and Cabbage Gannan.

  At the end, Quill said skeptically, “I can see that causing a squabble. We squabbled over everything in those days. But I can’t believe Connar would even remember it all these years later. He had to have known he was adopted. We all knew upstairs that it was no secret. And it certainly didn’t divide him from his family.”

  “All I can tell you, from my experience, is that Connar never forgot anything, especially if it humiliated him.” He finished off the steep in three gulps.

  Quill glanced at Lineas in mute enquiry, and she said, “I don’t know how he felt. We rarely talked about anything except immediate matters.”

  Pereth sighed. “Right. He didn’t talk to anyone but his brother, if he could avoid it. So I had to learn to watch him for clues.” He turned the empty cup in his hands. “Any more questions?”

  “Yes,” Lineas said, when Quill didn’t speak. “What can you tell me about Moonbeam?”

  Pereth flinched at the name—a common reaction, Lineas had become aware. “Almost nothing. Uncle Ret told us only that, as a boy he survived the fight between Mathren Olavayir’s commanders at the Nighthawk castle, following Mathren’s death. He was already crazy when the Jethrens took him into their family. Could hear just fine, wouldn’t speak. He grew up with Kethedrend Jethren as his bodyguard and runner combined. Halrid, Keth’s father, kept up the assassin training. Kethedrend kept him leashed by giving him assassin-root, which supposedly made it impossible to see the ghosts he claimed were always around.” Pereth shrugged. “I did say he was insane.”

  Lineas did not try to explain how the dangerous dose must have altered Moonbeam’s vision enough to suppress his ghosts. She hid the sorrow she felt for him, a once-loved child, fractured by the pain she had seen beneath all the physical and psychic scars.

  But the other two hadn’t seen it, and she knew Pereth emphatically did not believe ghosts existed. So she shifted the subject. “What do you want to do now?”

  Pereth opened his hands. “Don’t know! I just did what I was told, and kept my head down.”

  Quill said, “You’ve got to have more military experience than most, following him through all those battles
. You were certainly with us every step of the way on that wretched march up Skytalon.”

  Pereth lifted a shoulder. “It got so that I could usually predict what orders were coming next, and ready things so he didn’t have to ask, which he liked. But when I spoke orders, it was always in his name. I’ve never held any position of command. I certainly was no good up on the third floor. I know the other runners went to Mnar Milnari behind my head. Can’t say I blame them.” He glanced furtively up, but neither Quill nor Lineas betrayed the contempt or disgust he dreaded. They just looked tired and unhappy. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Quill said, “I wasn’t in the banquet hall, but outside of it, so I had a confused view. No doubt there will be an investigation, and more details will emerge.”

  Pereth accepted that, and went to his room, where he lay awake staring at the ceiling.

  Lineas shut her door. She and Quill lay down together, exhausted but unable to rest. She dreaded the dawn, which would bring the royal family to wakefulness—and the discovery of yet another royal death. She couldn’t imagine Connar, so vital, so intense, lying lifeless. It hurt to try.

  So she turned to Quill, who lay with his arms crossed behind his head, his gaze wide open, reflecting the pale stars of impending dawn through the open window opposite the bed.

  “You can’t sleep either?” He smiled her way, then sat up. “Sunrise soon. We may as well go see what’s happening instead of fretting about it.”

  They walked out to find Vanadei coming up the steps to the third floor. He turned around to join them. “They’re awake.”

  “How bad is it?” Quill asked. They all remembered how devastated Noddy had been after his father’s death.

  “Bad.” Vanadei looked down. “But he wants to see you.”

  Quill started down the steps, then paused, saying in Sartoran, “Those women. I recognized a lot of them. Like Neit. Henad. I thought their dressing like the foreign troupe was odd, but maybe part of the entertainment.”