by Kate Elliott
“If she is what we think she is, you will find she has less choice than you believe. The Tandi lineages will not leave this alone once they discover her.”
“Why should they discover her if you do not tell them?”
“People have eyes, Lady Dannarah. Regardless, I will respect your wishes and not send another token to the girl.” She rose. “We are finished here.”
“I do not mean to quarrel with you, Dia. But never again try to go around me when it comes to the reeves under my command.”
“I understand,” said Dia curtly. “My people will show you out.”
Dannarah walked to the door, then paused. “Let us not be enemies, Queen Dia. It is a difficult time for us both. I hope Prince Kasad is weathering the disgrace of his two loyal friends.”
Dia’s expression was stone. “I will be escorting him to my country estate where I can be sure he bides safely. Princess Kasarah will come to the palace to represent my interests in the meantime.”
“If Prince Kasad is at risk then surely his twin sister may be in danger as well.”
Dia glanced at her guards, so Kellas did, too, shifting his hands forward in case he had to grab his knives. Yes, there was a blowing tube mostly concealed in one woman’s hand, the nub of a knife’s hilt glimpsed up the sleeve of another, and an inner door open a crack behind which someone knelt, listening.
“According to the custom established by King Anjihosh, a woman cannot inherit the kingship, so Kasarah is no threat to Chorannah’s sons. Anyway, Chorannah understands that Kasarah is not to be trifled with as she is Jehosh’s only surviving daughter.”
“Good fortune to her in this nest of vultures,” said Dannarah, and she left with the brisk stride of a person close to losing her temper although, in truth, Dannarah had walked in that assertive way for her entire life.
“As for you, Captain, my business with you is swiftly said.” The severity of Dia’s clipped tone wrenched Kellas’s attention back to her cold, pale face. “Never again under any circumstances ask a child of my household to spy for you and by doing so put their life at risk. Never.”
Aui! It took him a moment to remember the child he’d sent after Tavahosh and Ulyar. He offered a slight bow. “It was an act of opportunity, Your Highness. May I ask if the child overheard anything?”
“No.”
Through the slightly opened inner door a voice piped up. “Please, Aunt Dia. Please let me say. For I did a very good job spying. You even said so afterward. Wouldn’t you hate if something bad happened and it could have been prevented?”
“What a rascal,” muttered the queen with affection. One of the armed women smiled as fondly as if it were her own child, and maybe he was. “Come in and repeat what you heard.”
The child slipped into the room. No longer enveloped in court clothes, he was revealed as a handsome boy with a slight build and a bit of a strut as he braced himself like a soldier reporting for duty. The words poured out as smoothly as if he had repeated them over and over to himself lest he forget. “Prince Tavahosh spoke of trouble at a river’s bend. A crossroads of five roads must be swept clean and burned down so no trace remains because it has caused offense to the prince and there is a rebellion of people living there. He told Supreme Captain Ulyar to send men right away to kill anyone who resists and brand all the rest for the work gangs.”
“Well done, ver,” said Kellas with a solemn nod. The lad giggled and was promptly chased out of the chamber and the door shut behind him. Kellas measured the queen for whatever her reaction might betray. “Have you any idea what it means, Queen Dia?”
Her shrug told him nothing. “Is there a crossroads where five roads meet at a river’s bend?”
He reviewed the elaborate map of the Hundred that he carried in his mind’s eye, considering and dismissing possibilities. “Horn isn’t close enough to a river. Nessumara is on a delta. The city of Olossi lies on a bend on a river but has the wrong number of roads…”
“What do you think it means, Captain Kellas?”
“I will let you know as soon as I am sure.” He heard Dannarah’s voice on the porch as she spoke to one of the guards. “Your Highness, as chief of security I must ask when your household is departing.”
“Under the circumstances, and to protect my son, we are leaving tomorrow. I will leave a trusted group of retainers to guard my daughter when she arrives. In the meanwhile they will make sure no unwanted feet tread in these chambers.”
“I comprehend you perfectly, Your Highness. I will work with them to make sure nothing is disturbed and that Princess Kasarah remains safe.” He cocked his head, no longer hearing Dannarah. “If that is all, may I go?”
“I can see you are eager to depart. Do not fail Jehosh, Captain.”
“It is not my intention to fail the king.”
He hastened out to find Dannarah still on the porch, one boot on and the other in hand.
She caught Kellas with a look of mischief. “If we are going to keep meeting, Captain, we may wish to do so with more secrecy. Perhaps we can use the old watchword. Do you remember?”
He glanced away, disconcerted by her smile. “I do.”
“That’s not what I meant. Everyone guesses we are allied in supporting Jehosh. Yet they also wonder if we are enemies because of Atani’s death. Let them wonder.”
“Good advice. May I escort you to the Thousand Steps, Lady Dannarah?”
“You may escort me to the gatehouse where a coach awaits. I have an assignation arranged with an old acquaintance at the House of the Dagger, where I hope to spend the night in some comfort.” Whatever expression marked his face he did not disguise well enough, for she laughed again. “I assure you I am not too old to have given up my pleasures, Captain.”
“No, indeed, Lady Dannarah. Nor should you or anyone feel the need to do so.”
She was not inclined to speak as they walked through the narrow-walled streets of the palace, and he wanted more privacy before he confided in her. Smoke curled from kitchens as they passed the apartments of courtiers and officials, its threads washed to shadows by the dusk. The four guards walked behind, half lost in the gloom.
A lighter set of steps underlay their own. Thank the gods he still had decent hearing! He used the age-old trick of raising a hand to halt their party and then listening to the pat of feet, which abruptly ceased. He glanced at Dannarah, but she hadn’t heard.
By the lanterns of the gatehouse he examined the coach before she got in. The coachman was Ri Amarah, with a younger kinsman seated beside him holding a club across his knees.
“Take care,” he said to the driver, “for I know one of your people was brutally killed some weeks ago.”
“My thanks, Captain. You’re the new head of security for the lower palace.”
“I am. A piece of advice: Be cautious with your valuables in your households. Hide them, or move them elsewhere. Better to be overprotective than not vigilant enough.”
“May you have blessings. Still, the old contract my people made with King Anjihosh holds. King Jehosh hasn’t forgotten how we helped his grandfather. He has ordered extra patrols in Bell and Wolf Quarter although I admit we are still pestered by angry slurs and thrown rocks. You see I’ve brought my son with me when he might be driving a separate coach.”
“It’s not my purview to command the city militia, but if you hear anything you think the militia aren’t paying attention to, let me know.”
Dannarah leaned out the still-open door. “Always on duty, aren’t you, Captain?”
He touched a finger to his forehead as to acknowledge a hit, then leaned farther in, speaking softly so the coachmen could not overhear. “You may be interested in what I just heard, Lady Dannarah. On the day of the reeve convocation, Prince Tavahosh ordered Ulyar to send soldiers to burn homes and kill or indenture people involved in a rebellion at a crossroads where five roads meet, where a river bends. Have you any idea where that might be?”
“The hells! The Ili Cutoff, the Weldur
Path, the Haya Track, and the Thread all pass through the town of River’s Bend.”
“That’s four.”
“The fifth is a secret trail through the center of the Wild, which reeves can see from the air and some of the local clans know about if they have business in the forest. But it runs close to no redheart groves, more’s the pity.”
“Redheart groves?”
“Just a random thought I had. My thanks for the information, Captain.”
“Do the prince’s words mean something to you?”
“They mean my night off is interrupted.” She pressed a coin into the startled Silver’s hand for his trouble, clambered down, and headed for Guardian Bridge and the Thousand Steps.
He returned to the gatehouse, where Oyard greeted him on the porch in a pretty glow of lamplight. “What was that about, Captain?”
“I’m not yet sure but I’d like to get more information about the Tandi consortium,” he said as he took off his sandals and rinsed his feet. “Also, run an extra patrol through the lower palace and set a doubled sentry here. I may have heard someone following us.”
“Yes, Captain. Yero left a tray of cold food in your office. I’ll bring a lamp.” He went off to fetch one.
Kellas thought of mangoes half drowned in fried coconut as, with a foot, he pushed aside the door to his darkened office. A waft of air blew at his ear. An object thunked into the door next to his head. He leaped back, whistling sharp and loud, and slammed the door shut as a second spike tore through the rice paper screen. Oyard appeared, burning lamp in hand, looking startled.
“Down.” Kellas grabbed the lamp, shoved the door open, and tossed it in. Its trailing flare illuminated a person standing in the corner next to the altar. For one eye-blink the lamp distracted the killer. Kellas threw a dagger, drew his sword, and grabbed a reeve’s baton from the rack of wooden practice weapons in the outer chamber as he shouted “Ya! Ya! Ya!” to break the enemy’s concentration.
The lamp thudded onto the mats, oil spilling and fire hissing along its thread.
The dagger had missed but forced the man to dodge, giving Kellas time to advance, not really a sprint. Already people were converging on the office, yelling and rattling weapons. The man came up with Kellas’s own dagger glinting in his gloved hand but by the time he flung it Kellas had gauged his angle of motion and the speed of his throw. He batted the knife aside with the baton. In silence the man leaped, thrusting with a slim short sword perfect for closed spaces.
Kellas meant to parry with his sword and knock the man unconscious with the baton but the twist of the man’s blade caught a glint of fire right into Kellas’s eyes. The body acted, no conscious thought, just survival. A step to the right, a jab with the baton to the chest to knock the enemy back, and his own blade thrust up under the ribs.
Oyard and multiple recruits slammed the doors aside, lamps and staffs and swords in hand, as the man slumped at Kellas’s feet, grunted, and rolled onto the flames, putting them out.
“Find where he came in,” snapped Kellas. “Does anyone recognize him?”
He had an ordinary face, any man one might see on the street. Several recruits vomited. They were the ones he had roll the body up in a length of cloth and lay it out in the courtyard. No one could find where the man had come in until Kellas himself walked a circuit and showed them two loose tiles in the kitchen roof. He had then to wake up Yero without disturbing her children.
“Heard you anything, Yero?”
“No, Captain.” She was white-lipped, clutching one of her cooking knives.
“It may not be safe for you and your children to stay here, Yero.”
She glanced at Oyard. “Captain, I have nowhere else to go, no kinsfolk, no village. Who is to say I would not be murdered if I took the children elsewhere in the city? We are still safer here.”
“I am at fault,” said Oyard.
“We have all been complacent. Chief, had I been killed, what would you have done?”
“Closed up everything tight, hunkered down, and waited until morning to alert the king.”
“Let’s do that. We’ll send a messenger at dawn to the king’s chambers, and see what rats crawl out from beneath the floor.”
37
Lifka and Tarnit sat beside the open doors of the tack room, harness draped over their laps, the Runt dozing on his back with legs splayed. Lifka always felt most relaxed working in tandem with others. She found it easy to confide in Tarnit as they oiled and inspected the leather, hooks, and buckles. “Queen Dia can say what she wants about me, just like in the Tale of Fortune where the farmer passes off a rooster as a hen.”
“You look like a hen to me,” said Tarnit.
“It’s just a scar, not ink.” She displayed the inkings on her forearm, the flames that marked her as born into the lineage of the Fire Mother. Tarnit, of course, wore the inked waves of the Water Mother. “If there wasn’t a fortune involved do you suppose anyone would care?”
“Don’t you wonder?”
“To be honest, mostly I’m wondering if there is a fortune involved, because my family is poor. But Papa and Mum would never want coin gotten under false pretenses.”
“Too proud, neh?”
“They would say it was wrong.”
“Do you think you could be a Tandi child?”
“I only remember snatches, like dreams, from my life before. I just don’t know.”
Tarnit hung up the harness, lit a pair of lamps, and hung them to either side of the door so they could go through the signal flags for rips and worn spots. Outside the carpenters ceased hammering and sawing for the day. The extension to the loft hulked like a skeleton behind them.
“Heya!” Reyad trotted up to the tack room’s little porch. “When is Marshal Dannarah coming back? There’s a priest at the marshal’s cote claiming he has urgent messages to be flown south right away. At least that’s what the steward said he said. The priest only speaks Sirni.”
“Did the steward tell the priest that eagles generally don’t fly at night?” asked Tarnit.
“I don’t know. I got out of there. How can you live in a place for years and not bother to learn how to talk to people?”
Reyad had a way of slouching against the wall that amused Lifka because it reminded her of her second lover, a friend of Denas’s, who for months had hung around her family’s compound with pretended casualness hoping she would notice. Now that Reyad felt his boundaries around the women were clear—that he wouldn’t sleep with any of them, as if that was the foremost thing on women’s minds!—he had relaxed enough to reveal himself as a person who hated being alone.
“What do you know about Tandi merchants?” she asked him.
“They sail to the Hundred from a land overseas. Twice a year we cart our surplus bitter-leaf and sweetwort—the best in Mar!—to Port Rossia on the Turian Sea. I’ve seen Tandi ships there.”
“Did you ever see or talk to one of them?”
“The last time I went, right before I got jessed, a young Tandi woman invited me to come see her cabin aboard her clan’s ship.”
Tarnit winked at Lifka. “I’ve used that line myself.”
“If I hadn’t been courting Hetta at the time I would have taken her up on it just to see if it is true.” He gave up his slouch against the wall to kick a cushion into place beside them and sit.
“If what is true?” asked Lifka.
Like any well-brought-up child he pulled a flag onto his lap, joining the work. “They say Tandi ships have the souls of birds spelled into their hulls. That’s why they are said to be so seaworthy that they never sink.”
“No stranger than being jessed to an eagle,” said Tarnit. “But I thought you had to jess a living spirit to a living spirit. It seems cruel to harness a living spirit to dead wood.”
“Do you know anything else?” Lifka wrung the flag she was holding.
“Each ship is a family, not just sailors. You always see children onboard. The story goes that the Tandi do not hav
e fathers, that sea foam impregnates the women. But that’s got to be just a story. Every person knows who their father is.”
“Lifka doesn’t,” said Tarnit.
Her head snapped around. “I know who my father is.”
Tarnit paused in the act of rolling up a flag. “My apologies, Lifka. Of course you know. I meant to say that where I grew up there was a saying. A man knows the woman he has gone into but a woman knows the child who comes out of her. The man my sons believe is their father certainly seeded the older boy but there’s a chance with the younger that another man’s seed might have…” She frowned. “Never mind. It was a long time ago and it doesn’t matter.”
“You have children? You never talk about them. Where are they?”
“My spouse Errard and I grew up in neighboring villages in the region of Sund. He went for the Black Wolves and as it happened I ended up jessed by an eagle. We have two boys. It was easy enough for our sons, with two families to raise them even though he and I were usually gone.”
“Where is Errard now?”
The shadow in her face reminded Lifka of her uncle’s grief. “He died fourteen years ago. Huh. Now that I think about it, he must have died in the same campaign where you were captured.”
“Eiya! You must miss him.” Yet Lifka did not like to think that a man Tarnit loved had been part of the war that had killed her original people, whoever they might be.
Perhaps Tarnit understood her discomfort because she rested a hand on her arm. “There are a lot of reasons Marshal Dannarah is a good marshal. She may seem harsh but she knows when to rein a reeve in and when to allow slack. I see my sons every month.”
Reyad whistled. “At Argent Hall, under Auri, we were only allowed leave twice in a year, and then only if we hadn’t displeased the chief marshal or broken some pissy regulation.”
“Auri was not just an ass but a cursed useless marshal.” Tarnit flexed her hands like remembering a punch she’d once thrown. “I hope Prince Tavahosh deigns to expand this humble tack room as well. And doesn’t make us double-shift in these inadequate barracks because this place doesn’t have enough bunks for all the reeves he expects to live here! Heya!”