Utrachet greeted them outside the walls, which were two courses higher than when Freia had last seen them. Prospero sent his son and daughter on ahead to the gate and spoke privately with the Castellan; Freia watched them over her shoulder, afraid Prospero would vanish again.
A light but steady rain had gusted in from the southeast early that morning, now carrying a fresh-earth smell from the ploughed and planted fields. Freia and Dewar left the horses with a woman at the paddock outside the half-built walls and, as Prospero had directed, went through the clumps of mist and rain to the stone house above the river where they had stopped before.
In a flat, beaten-down grassed area within the walls, a whirling vortex of naked and near-naked children played some game of speed or pursuit. Distracted by the arrival of the travellers, the vortex broke into confused eddies, coalesced briefly into staring faces, and then, with a few high-pitched shrieks, began moving again after they had passed. People Dewar didn’t know greeted them both in the strange local language, sober as if Prospero’s mood had already touched everyone; Freia returned the greetings soft-voiced, almost shy, and answered questions scantly or not at all.
She had nothing to say to Dewar, either, as they waited for Prospero together. Dewar took a book from his bag and sat near a window, reading. Freia looked out the window, but there was only the scaffolding and walls; the rain and mist hid the forest, so she sat with her head on her folded arms, her eyes on Dewar without watching him. Prospero himself joined the two, in the low-roofed upper room with the long table, as they were brought a cold luncheon by two young women. With a nod, he accepted the wine his daughter poured for him. She poured for Dewar too after a moment’s hesitation.
The rain thinned as they ate, then halted. The wind backed to the northwest, dried, and began to break the clouds and scatter them.
“There’s no ground to delay the blow,” Prospero said when he had picked at a platter of meat and a plate of winter-kept fruit and cheese. “This night I’ll accomplish what be needful and on the morrow hie to Landuc with—”
“Father—” The word tasted so odd that Dewar had to stop after saying it.
It was odd to Prospero too; they stared at one another a moment before both smiled with embarrassment.
“I read that treaty,” he went on, his smile fading. “I wondered how you intended to comply with it.”
“I’ve sworn already. Shall kindle a bonfire of books and trinkets, fine instruments o’ the Art and sorcerer’s toys,” Prospero said gruffly.
Dewar nodded and steeled himself. “I don’t mean to be impertinent, sir, but it seems a terrible waste that all your life’s work be destroyed,” he said, and caught a look from Freia: startled and grateful.
“I cannot call it all,” replied Prospero; “I have left to me what would make, should make, shall make a lesser man content enough.”
“Papa, don’t,” Freia said. “You love your books. All you do is sorcery.”
“Have told thee not to speak of’t, baggage.”
“Father,” said Dewar, hoping the storm rumbling in Prospero’s voice could be averted, “all know you to be the Master of Elements, of Elementals; none has ever approached your knowledge of the subject. That so much of learning, of your original, definitive work, be cast away, is—”
“ ’Tis the terms of my vow!” Prospero shouted, pounding the table and addressing them both, “and I’ll not hear another word from you!”
Dewar held his tongue. Freia, to her brother’s surprise, did not.
“Papa,” she said in her sweetest, smallest voice, and got up and went around the table to him. She put her arms around his broad shoulders, her cheek against his hair.
He growled, “Cease this; thy pity strangles me.”
“Papa,” Freia repeated. “Could one or two books not be forgotten?”
“Nay,” he said curtly.
“A few pages?”
“Nay.”
“Suppose I took away—”
“Nay.”
“Papa, you are difficult to help.” She hugged him.
He drummed his fingers and then patted her arm. “And thou’rt a stubborn and persistent wench.” Further surprising Dewar, the Prince looked up at his daughter, fond, not angry, and squeezed her hand. “Nay. It cannot be, child. I have given my word; I have told thee greater ill should follow, harm to thee belike and thy brother, and I be forsworn, and I shall not be forsworn. Thy scheming’s for naught, but kindly meant, and kindly taken.”
Dewar saw his moment and spoke. “What about copying,” he said softly.
“Na—” Prospero began, and Freia looked up, wide-eyed.
“Of course! A copy’s not the original,” said she. “Papa, is it not so? You didn’t say—”
“Silence,” he commanded her, and removed her arms from his neck. She sat beside him. “ ’Pon my honor I’ll be harried to death by you, a brace of cannibal hounds,” he said after a moment, glaring at her and then at Dewar. “Shall I rend out my lights and liver, and—”
“Prospero,” Dewar said, “if it is your preference that all your lore be forever lost, so be it. But I’d ward it well and it would not be forgotten, a life’s labor wasted, if you give me what you deem the most important parts and let me copy them. Surely there’s time for some. I shortened your journey hither by Summoning you.”
Prospero’s glare did not drop, but the expression in his eyes altered slightly.
“Prospero, it is your very life’s work I would preserve. Would I ask otherwise? No. It is an exceptional idea, for an exceptional time, a time no one would ever have thought we might see, when an honorable sorcerer is robbed of his sorcery by an Art-blind clerk’s cheat! Yet still you have a will, Prospero, and you can thwart Avril’s theft in a small way.”
Prospero studied him, his son, his heir in more vital ways than his daughter. The notion of letting the boy even look at the books was to be vigorously, instantly denied, and yet—it was truly not Prospero’s will that they be burned. Better to burn them than let them fall to Oriana’s hands, or Esclados’s. But his son, his own son—his daughter was worthless for sorcery; she must have an earthier destiny—he was an able young fellow, and disliked Avril, and his alliance would be useful. And Prospero’s pride reminded him that sorcery comparable to his would likely never be seen again in this age of the world, and why not let his name live on, in some small way?
“So be’t,” he said.
Dewar breathed again, his head pounding with disbelief.
“Come with me instanter,” Prospero said, rising, “for there’s but scant time for such a labor as thou shalt have. Come. Son,” he added, glancing back, and Dewar jumped up, and followed him out.
Freia watched them go.
Pens, ink, paper, lamp, and words.
Prospero had selected the texts for Dewar to copy. Dewar, surreptitiously browsing when the Prince had left him, gleaned a few others Prospero hadn’t indicated. The places were marked with slips of paper, the books piled on the floor and table beside the sorcerer, and now Dewar wrote.
Oh, the books were beautiful; at first he wasted minutes at a time raging silently at their imminent loss. Prospero’s life-work, centuries of sorcerous research and information collected from other sorcerers, was set out in neat, legible, unvarying pen-work. He had employed the Art in dozens of disciplines, and as Dewar comprehended the scope of his father’s erudition, his respect for the man grew, as did his pain at the loss of so much knowledge. Among the books of sorcery which Dewar could not copy were anatomical dissections, physiological treatises, herbals; books of medicine and music and cookery, books of venery and poetry and trade; building-plans, geographies, celestial and oceanic charts; scores of volumes treating every branch of the Art; and the books were only a part of the whole treasure. Dewar looked at, but dared not touch, ingenious devices of polished brass and steel, gems glinting in their oiled works, stored under crystal domes; draped circles and ovals on the walls, which must be Mirrors for Summoni
ngs and Ways; a pair of disused orreries, high on the shelves, enamelled in brilliant colors, their sharp-edged hoops and lines blurred by dust; stacked trays of crystal lenses and metal lozenges and disks; four sturdy scales and their sets of brass weights; shelves of bottles, crocks, jars, and boxes, with neat-written paper labels naming each herb, distillation, or unguent contained therein.
Dewar did open cautiously one slender drawer in an ebony cabinet of uncountable drawers, from thumb-sized to large bins at the bottom, for it was unlocked, unwarded. In the drawer lay shells, hundreds of pale spindle-shaped sea-shells, and as he closed it in puzzlement he saw that each drawer was labelled with a tarnished silver plate. He opened another and held the light near it, first glancing over his shoulder. Cyclones, Aestival, these: conical brown-and-cream spiralled shells, their ends stoppered with red wax. Another drawer held Clouds, Cumulus, Autumnal, Nocturnal: small mussels, thumbnail-sized and mated, moon-white on one paired edge, fading through indigo to black at the other. Zephyrs; Boreal Blizzards; Sciroccos; Fair Sunsets; Wet Dawns: tiny winkles, each differently striped and scratched; spiny white whelks, colder than ice to the fingertip’s touch; large fat sand-brown land-snails, near-meaningfully scribbled in white; tight-closed whole scallops, stained every hue from palest gold to dark storm-crimson; thumbprint-sized cowries, polished to watery purple, their toothed mouths, like the rest, sealed with red wax. Dewar moved away reluctantly; then he turned, and looked again at the first drawer, just to know. Clouds, Cirrostratus, Vernal, Diurnal.
His heart aching with envy and admiration, he sat down to work.
Though the sorcery books on the table were but Prospero’s own pick of the harvest, meagre to compare, yet they were rich beyond Dewar’s dreams. There were clean, precise diagrams in dozens of colors. There were doodles here and there in the margins, which proved to be not doodles but miniature notated force-diagrams, Prospero’s innovation which Dewar despaired of duplicating. Prospero hadn’t stayed to watch his son work, and so Dewar could not ask him about the diagrams he imperfectly understood. He copied them as well as he could, deciding not to waste time puzzling over them now, and his pen raced on across the pages. Freia brought him food and smoky, stimulating tea. He thanked her the first three or four times, spoke to her, and then forgot her; the food appeared, the plates vanished, the pots of tea refilled themselves, and Dewar saw nothing but black ink looping, rising, falling on white leaves.
Scudamor and Utrachet were counting swords, bows, and arrows, armor, spears, and shields, setting aside the damaged ones. All had been stacked helter-skelter in an old thatch-roofed long-house usually used for winter food storage, dumped there by the remains of Prospero’s army and untouched since. Prospero had commanded that the weapons be set in good order for use again, and thus these two were picking through splintering pikes, nicked swords, and shields with broken straps. All the Argylle-made weapons that they had brought with them had been taken in Landuc on Prospero’s surrender; these were mostly things that had been seized by the prisoners when they escaped from Perendlac.
Freia wanted a bow, and so she found her way to the warehouse where the Seneschal and the Castellan were taking inventory. She hesitated in the doorway, but Scudamor saw her and smiled at her.
“Welcome, Lady,” he said. “How may we serve you?” When the Seneschal spoke, Utrachet turned from a basket of vexatious arrows which had been forty-six and forty-nine the first two times he’d counted them; he smiled and bowed as well.
“What are you doing with the bows and swords?” she asked.
“Lord Prospero commands that they be tallied,” Utrachet said. “He wishes to know how many there are of each thing.”
“There is only one of each thing,” Scudamor said, “but of each class of thing, there are many.”
“Twig-splitting,” said Utrachet; Scudamor laughed. “Lady, I’ll guess you desire a bow.”
“How did you guess that?” Freia wondered, tipping her head to one side and eyeing the bows that hung on the wall.
“Because you have none,” he said, grinning, “and it’s turned fine bright weather for the hunt.”
“I have lost my good crossbow,” she said, not smiling. “They took it from me, in Landuc, and I need a bow of light pull, because my arms are grown watery in idleness.” She crouched in front of a basket of arrows and began taking them out one by one, squinting along them.
Scudamor nodded. “It is an evil place,” he said. “May we never hear of it again.”
“Prospero thinks we shall,” Utrachet said, “and for that we must have the walls around us.”
“I don’t like those walls,” Freia said, pushing aside the arrow-basket. “They shut things out. There is nothing here to shut out, or in, not like Landuc, where they have only walls; everyone in Landuc is shut out, or in. These are poor arrows.”
“They are from Landuc,” said Utrachet. “There are some of our own arrows, Lady, somewhere in this burrow; and the bow I made that Miruin’s daughter got too tall to use.”
“Utrachet told me of the walls in Landuc,” Scudamor said. “Our walls will be better.”
“There are no good walls,” Freia disagreed, standing.
“Ours have doors in them,” said Scudamor firmly. “And they are made well.”
“We don’t need walls,” said Freia. “Please show me Sherlon’s bow and the arrows. I am going to hunt something for Prospero for supper.”
They went all three to the back of the warehouse, and among a clutter of discarded children’s bows and tools Utrachet found Sherlon’s bow, which Freia tested; the string snapped, so they found a new bowstring for it, and Scudamor rummaged out a basket of shorter Argylle hunting-arrows. Freia chose sixteen, put them in an oiled leather quiver, and thanked Scudamor and Utrachet for finding them and the bow. The bow was a lighter pull than she wanted, but it would do for small game, and small game was all she meant to take. She had already provided herself with a knife and a net, some thongs and a water-bottle, and thus kitted she set off for the forest.
Utrachet and Scudamor returned to their counting. Utrachet’s arrows were forty-seven, and he tagged them so and turned to arrowheads.
“The Lady’s much altered,” Scudamor said in an undertone to a tangle of bowstrings.
“It is that place, Landuc,” Utrachet said. “It changed us all that were there.”
“You, not.”
“Yes, me too: for now I know that to be a pard in Argylle is better than to be a man in Landuc, and to be a man in Argylle is the sum of joy. But it is a hard way to get wisdom. She has changed. Lord Prospero must mend her. All changes in his hands.”
Freia’s path took her past a pack of children excitedly building rock-and-mud walls in the dirt, which walls meandered and ambled without closing on themselves. They sat back on their heels and looked at her, nudging one another; Freia glanced at them and one of the older, less-shy ones piped, “Best of the day to you, Lady.”
It caught her off-guard; she said, “Thank you—keep well,” and hurried on. The children nonplussed her, as ever; she didn’t know what to say to the bigger ones, although the smaller ones, carried about and petted and cuddled, were more approachable, though given to alarming noises and incomprehensible demands. But playing in the mud was difficult to understand as well. What was the point of it? Had she played in the mud the way the Argylle children did, modelling buildings and walls with sticks and soil? She didn’t remember it. What would it be like to be so small, a suckling grub, and to become larger? She could not conceive of being other than she was. Her earliest memories were green and quiet, looking into grass, at flowers, at insects, studying the shapes of leaves; in the background ran Prospero’s voice, a comforting wordless bass rumble. The Argylle children always seemed to be running everywhere, imitating the adults, giggling and rolling about like cubs and pups, engaged in enjoyable but alien play.
Crossing the puddled, bare-dirt square, passing the roofed-over fountain in the middle, she caught Prospero’s e
ye, and he shouted at her from the staging where he was talking to some nearly naked, grimy men from the wall-crews. Freia hesitated, and Prospero waved at her impatiently: Come here, she guessed, and so she changed her path and stood at the bottom of the staging. Prospero, cloakless, wearing a padded, plain vest over a smoke-blue shirt with its laced sleeves rolled above his elbows, climbed down a ladder from the top of the wall.
“Now whither goest thou,” said he, his hands on his hips, looking down at her.
“Hunting.”
“Did I not say to thee, tend thy brother as he writes?”
“I made him ink and tea, and he has paper,” Freia said. “He needs nothing more.”
Prospero shook his head. “His work beareth great weight of consequence; thy sport’s but petty play thereto. Go thou, stay his wants, however trifling they be they’re of much moment to us now.”
“Papa, please, I do promise I’ll be gone only the day—”
“No larking i’ the wood for thee! Not today, not these twelve most precious days to come. Let nothing stay his hand from its work of preservation! Be thou devoted to his progress only. I enjoin thee, put by thy unmaidenly pursuits and be a true lady; serve him, forgo thy toys and whims. So would Lady Miranda do; so would I have thee do as well.”
Freia shifted from one foot to the other. Protest was useless; she knew Prospero’s tone of finality and command. No appeal would move him.
“Freia?”
“Very well, Papa,” she said, low-voiced, and turned away, walked toward the clutter of coracles and rafts, to row one over the water to the island. She was dazed, in a fresh turmoil of confusion and unfathomable pain. What did Prospero want of her? When she passed a group of women with baskets and babies going out to sow seeds in the fields, one of them, Dazhur, greeted her merrily and begged her to come with them, but Freia shook her head, called back “I may not,” and went on to the boats.
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 2