“Where . . .”
“There are players’ quarters in the liedburg. You get quarters and food and the silver. Do you wish to serve the Regency?”
Delvor went to his knees. “Yes, lady.”
Anna lifted the bell, and Cens entered.
“Cens, this is Delvor, and he is one of the new players. He can have one of the small rooms in the players’ quarters by the stables. I’d appreciate it if you’d get him settled. Then tell Dythya about him.”
“Yes, Lady Anna.”
When Cens and the player had left, she looked down at the table. There was another reason why poor Daffyd hadn’t been able to find many players. Most of them didn’t have any spines—except for those who’d already died at the Sand Pass or in the destruction of Vult.
She sighed. Then, what player in his or her right mind would want to serve her when most of those who had were dead? Poor Daffyd—he’d been a good viola player who had helped spell her to Defalk and then served as her chief player, and he was buried under the lava of the volcano she had raised to destroy Vult and the dark Evult who had directed the darksingers of Ebra against Defalk. So were all of the others who had followed her to Vult. She sighed again. Get back to a problem you can do something about . . . maybe.
She couldn’t get supplies or move troops if the roads turned to mud every time it rained. She couldn’t use sorcery to repair the roads without players and stones being carted nearby, and she couldn’t have the stones carted except in dry weather. And she couldn’t find enough players.
Anna took a deep breath. She still hadn’t paid that visit to the kitchens and Meryn. She might as well do that, before she forgot. The liedburg ran on meals as well as coins and arms.
The ubiquitous Blaz followed her down the corridor and out to the section of the liedburg that jutted into the rear courtyard, almost standing alone—probably for fire reasons.
Meryn stood at the far end of the huge hearth, with one of the oven doors open, easing a wooden paddle containing the dough that would be bread into the oven. At the table behind her, Jysel was plucking a just-scalded chicken, and other sodden birds lay beside the first.
Anna waited until Meryn closed the oven door.
“Oh . . . Lady Anna.” The head cook’s hands fluttered. Behind her, Jysel’s mouth opened.
“I don’t have any problems,” Anna said. “I’ve enjoyed your cooking, and I really liked the way you spiced the mutton stew the other night. It wasn’t bland, and it didn’t burn my tongue.”
The cook’s hands stopped fluttering. “We do as we can, lady. But with so many mouths . . .”
Anna held in a sigh. Like everything else in Defalk, the liedburg kitchen was probably overworked. “You could use another good cook?” She gave a smile.
“I could use three, lady, not that there be three in Falcor I’d want.” Meryn shook her head.
“If you find one you would like to help you, let me know.” Anna sniffed. “The bread smells good. I don’t know how I’d manage without all the bread you’ve baked for me.”
“That be good.” Meryn smiled. “Unlike some, you appreciate good food, and the folk who fix it.” She paused. “Molasses for the dark bread, it be getting dear.”
Anna half nodded to herself. Everything was getting dear. “Once, a long way away, I fixed a lot of fancy meals.” The sorceress offered a laugh. “And not with sorcery. But I had things that made it easier. I wouldn’t want to try to cook in that hearth.”
“Takes watching, lady, that it does.”
“I’m sure it does.” She glanced toward Blaz. “I wish I could stay longer, Meryn . . . Jysel . . . but I wanted to tell you again, personally, how much I appreciate all the cooking and the work.”
Both women bowed.
Once back in the receiving room, Anna rang the bell even before seating herself at the worktable.
“Find me Menares.”
While she waited, she began to make a list—yet another of the endless lists that grew faster on the bottom than she could complete on the top. This list held the key roads from Falcor to the borders. Should she add molasses to the supply list?
“Lady Anna?” Menares bowed. His eyes flicked away from her to the floor, then to the empty gilt receiving chair.
“What did Tirsik say?”
“The stablemaster will talk to the messengers, he and Captain Alvar. They should ride on the edges of the roads, and he will tell them where not to ride.”
“Good.”
“He also sent his thanks for the coins for the extra straw.”
Anna nodded. “I need you to find something else. Find me an artist. One who can do good sketches of bridges and roads and forts. There ought to be someone who can draw somewhere near Falcor. I’ll pay him—or her.” With the word “her,” she thought of poor Garreth, who’d drawn her picture, and who had been killed merely on a whim by Cyndyth while Anna had been saving the Prophet’s armsmen.
“Yes, Lady Anna.” Menares’ voice contained a resigned tone, the one that suggested she was being unreasonable or frivolous.
“I’m not crazy,” she snapped. “We need better—” She groped for a suitably impressive word. “—infrastructure here in Defalk, and that means roads and bridges, and since we don’t have any dissonant builders and no coins, that means sorcery, and I need images for sorcery. Is that clear?”
Menares nodded, backing quickly out of the receiving room.
Once again, she was getting a reputation for being a temperamental bitch. Why couldn’t they see? She wasn’t even a military type, and it was obvious. Defalk was surrounded on all sides by potential enemies.
With Blaz and Giellum following her, she left the receiving room and took the small service hall. Her boots echoed on the stones of the narrow passage. She opened the back door to slip inside the large hall that was being used as the de facto schoolroom for her pages and fosterlings. Trying not to sneeze, she remained behind the long tapestry and listened.
Dythya was speaking.
“Remember . . . the position of the numeral determines the amount of its greatness. In the first position, a six is just a six. In the second position, it is a sixty, or ten times greater. In the third position . . .”
“Numbers different when they are in different places. New symbols! You confuse us. Why do we even have to use new characters for numbers? The old ones were fine,” said Hoede, almost red-faced.
“Once you learn them, using figures is easier,” Dythya said patiently. “It is easier to check accounts, and to keep track of what you have spent.”
“You haven’t told me why we must use different symbols for numbers.”
Anna decided to put an end to the discussion. She stepped out from behind the dusty arras depicting Lord Donjim’s grandsire.
“Lady Anna . . .”
“Sorceress . . .”
“I beg your pardon, Dythya.” Anna nodded to the woman who was the liedstadt accountant, or the closest thing to an accountant.
Dythya merely nodded, a faint smile playing around her lips.
Anna turned to the youngsters seated at the long table, grease markers and rough brown paper before them. Her eyes took in each in turn. Secca, the youngest redhead, glanced up at the sorceress openly. Skent, at the end of the table, did not quite meet her eyes. Nor did Ytrude, the shy and tall blonde. But Anna did get a flashing smile from the redheaded Lysara, the older sister of Birke, who remained with his father at Abenfel. On the other hand, Cataryzna smiled shyly. Cens just looked blank, as did Resor. Hoede swallowed and pursed his lips. Jimbob, at the end of the table, met her eyes for a moment.
“Hoede.” Anna fixed the sandy blond with blue eyes that were as cold as the Falche River beyond the liedburg walls. “If you spent as much time learning your digits and how to use them as you do arguing about it, you’d not only be able to improve your sire’s accounts, you’d have time left over for more pleasant pastimes.”
Hoede’s eyes fell.
“Since you wa
nt an answer, I’ll make it simple. Defalk almost perished under the old ways. Nordwei, Ranuak, Neserea, and even Mansuur have adopted more modern ways of doing things. We either adopt even better methods, or we will be forced to submit.”
“But you have sorcery,” murmured a voice.
Anna shook her head. “I managed to hold off the Dark Ones, and bring back the rain. Magic does not work on crops, or on accounts, and a sorceress can only be in one place. I cannot be there to tell every lord and holding how and when to plant. I will not live long enough to advise your children. If you don’t learn as much as you can, most of you won’t hold what you have.” She smiled. “I know . . . some of you are not the heirs, and that means knowledge is even more important for you, because what you can do is determined even more by what you can learn.” She turned back to Hoede. “You can ask all the questions you want about why something works or how to calculate or use your knowledge. If you wish to ask questions about the necessity of learning such matters, then come to me. If you persist in wasting the time of those who teach you with such childish inquiries, then I will send you and anyone else home and invite another young person.” She smiled. “Is that clear?”
“Yes, Lady Anna.” The murmured answer was nearly in unison.
“There’s an even shorter answer, Hoede,” Anna continued. “I saved Defalk when no one else could or would. Since my ways worked, and nothing else did, you’ll learn my ways.” She paused. “I also might point out that the more powerful lords in Defalk have already adopted these numbers and this system. They say it takes less time and works better. Now . . . Hoede, I’ve given you three reasons. Do you need any more?”
Hoede looked down, his face as red as the stripe in his tunic.
“Dythya will examine you on how well you learn the new number system, all of you. I expect you all to do well.” She smiled, then nodded, and left by the front door, where Giellum waited.
She glanced at the young guard. His eyes dropped.
Why did everything she did shock the young? Or some of them? She was supposed to accomplish grand deeds—like figuring out how to keep Defalk from being dismembered by its neighbors when she had next to no armsmen, few coins, and drought-ravaged cropland that would take years to recover even with the return of the rains.
Anna paused outside the receiving room and looked to Barat, the one page not in lessons.
“Yes, lady?”
“I’ll need some bread and cheese. And a piece of fruit, if there is any.”
Leaving Giellum outside with Blaz, who had hurried back from the large hall, she entered the receiving room, glancing to the rear window, and the hint of sunlight after the days of mixed rain and snow.
With a sigh, she slumped into her chair at the table.
One player, no weapons smith, no messengers getting anywhere fast, and enemies on just about all sides.
She had to do something!
First, she shuffled through all the papers she’d reclaimed from Loiseau, Brill’s hall in Mencha, until she found those dealing with building. There were no spells of bridges—just for a barn and a fort. For a moment, she studied Brill’s spell for the fort, probably the one he had built at the Sand Pass, murmuring the words as she read, trying to get a feel for the rhythm.
“. . . replicate the bricks and stones.
Place them in their proper zones . . .
Set the blocks, and set them square
set them to their pattern there . . .”
The spell melody notes were a cross between chord symbols and medieval tablature—and hard enough to decipher, let alone turn into music.
“Lady?” Barat stood in the door with a platter in hand.
“Thank you.” The growling of her stomach reminded her—again—how. she couldn’t put off eating, especially with what she had in mind for the afternoon.
After she finished everything on the platter, a feat that would have turned her into a butterball once upon a time, she began to scrawl out possible spells on the brown paper.
Then she took out the lutar, tuned it, and tried the words—only in her head—with the chords.
Finally, she lifted the bell and rang it. This time Resor opened the door.
“Resor, would you tell Fhurgen that I am going riding in a bit, and that I’ll need two squads of guards, or whatever he and Alvar think is right.”
“Yes, Lady Anna.” Resor did not close the door, then asked, “What should I tell them if they ask me your destination?”
“Somewhere around Falcor.”
“Yes, lady.”
Anna replaced the lutar in its case, and picked up both the case and her jacket and hat.
Blaz and Giellum flanked her on the walk from the main building to the stables.
Tirsik met her before she had taken a pace inside. “Lady Anna.” The white-haired and wiry stablemaster nodded, glancing at Anna’s riding gear and the lutar case. “The roads are foul.”
“I’m not going far. Just to the other side of Falcor up by where the bridge was.”
“Even the roads in Falcor are slippery.”
“Then few will be out.”
A wry and wintry smile crossed the white-haired stablemaster’s face. “As you wish, and it usually is, my lady.”
“I know, Tirsik. I’m being difficult. So is most of Liedwahr at the moment.” She added, “I hope I didn’t ask too much of you when I sent Menares over to have you instruct some of the riders and messengers on foul-weather traveling.”
“It be my pleasure, lady, and glad to put what these gray hairs have learned to service.”
“You are a learned rascal.”
“Once, lady. No longer.”
Anna grinned and headed for Farinelli’s stall. The palomino gelding greeted her with a loud whuff.
“I know. I’m late, and you want to be groomed on schedule.” By the time she had Farinelli brushed and saddled, Fhurgen and her guards had formed up in the liedburg courtyard.
Anna pulled on the leather riding jacket and the floppy-brimmed hat of the type that had seen her through her time in Defalk, then strapped the lutar in the case behind the saddle. She led Farinelli out, mounted and nodded to Fhurgen. “Let’s go.”
She let Farinelli pick his way across the wet stones of the courtyard and out through the main gate. Fhurgen and the guards followed.
The north breeze was chilly, even for Anna, but the leather jacket kept her comfortable. She could sense the shivers of the guards, and catch a few phrases.
“. . . know she comes from the mist worlds . . . day like this . . .”
“. . . doesn’t even look cold . . .”
“. . . went through the Ostfels in six feet of snow . . .” “Tyres said . . .”
Anna wanted to snort. The expedition against the Evult had been in late fall, and there hadn’t been any snow to speak of. Some cold rain, but no snow.
As she rode across the flat outside the liedburg and toward the road that led through the part of Falcor north of the keep, Anna studied the buildings. A few more bore signs of life, like smoke from chimneys, or new shutters or even windows. There were still too many empty structures.
Two blocks up, she saw a new sign—a picture board depicting a golden lutar outside a refurbished, inn. Anna laughed. The Golden Lutar—clearly an attempt at flattery, since the instrument had been made by Daffyd specially for her and was, so far as she knew, the only one in Liedwahr.
Still, the rebuilt inn was one good signal at a time when there were few enough.
Her smile faded when they reached the north end of Falcor and the Falche River. Anna reined up and studied the ruined bridge buttresses, the remnants from the flood unleashed by the Evult of Ebra, and the riverbed, through which ran a muddy and winding track.
Originally, the old bridge had consisted of three spans, the ends of each outer span anchored in the rock on each side of the river. The center span had been anchored on the western side to a pier sunk into the rock beneath the riverbed and to a second pi
er on the eastern side which had rested on a rocky islet in the river. Parts of the two piers remained, and muddy water swirled around the disarrayed stones, covering the lower section of the rude trail that travelers had used after the bridge had been swept away.
Anna finally turned in the saddle and fumbled with the lutar case, easing the instrument out, and then easing Farinelli forward.
“Fhurgen, please move the armsmen back.”
“Yes, lady.” The dark-bearded squad leader raised his arm. “Back. Back to the pedestal there.”
As her guards guided their mounts back toward the pediment that might once have held a statue, Anna ran her fingers over the strings and checked the lutar’s tuning. Then she ran through the spell melody once, thinking the words.
She cleared her throat and began the spell, not belting, but using full concert voice.
“. . . replicate the blocks and stones.
Place them in their proper zones . . .
Set them firm, and set them square
weld them to their pattern there . . .
“Bring the rock and make it stone . . .”
The stone under the bluff seemed to shift even before she finished the first verse. Strophic spell, her thoughts corrected automatically.
A shiver in the harmonies underlying all Liedwahr followed the last chord, except Anna knew only she heard that shiver, she and any other sorcerer or sorceress. The lightning that flashed across the half-clear sky was visible to all, and murmurs swept across the armsmen as the white-and-gray clouds began to darken into black.
Anna, holding the lutar one-handed, used the other on the reins to urge Farinelli away from the edge of a bluff that suddenly felt all too insecure.
The ground rumbled, and dust puffed from beneath the sodden upper soil that overlay the rocks beneath. Another flash of light seared across a sky that had become dark gray.
The edge of the bluff from where Anna had begun the spell shivered, then peeled away in a brown-and-gray cascade, even as a shimmering mist of silver, sheathed in the faintest of rainbows, began to arch across the river.
The sorceress, feeling lightheadedness slashing across her consciousness, struggled to get the lutar back in its case.
The Spellsong War: The Second Book of the Spellsong Cycle Page 5