Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  “Only as a study partner. And he recently left for Chwahirsland.”

  “Poor thing! What an ending for the fellow who thought himself the smartest of us. So you two never trysted?”

  “Never even thought about it.” I was about to say I hadn’t had time, but I was afraid she’d think me bragging about how important my time was. “As for pleasure houses, Mama offered to take me for my first time, last home visit. When I didn’t particularly want to, she told me she didn’t warm until she was twenty.”

  Tif snickered. “Maybe you’ll warm if you hear her highness groaning away—she’s sure to be better at it than everyone, like we hear about everything else she does. How close are her rooms to where you sleep? Does she really have rosebud carpets on her bed as well as all her floors?”

  The princess hadn’t been forgotten. Tif’s voice was casual, but the way she leaned forward, her breath caught as she waited for my answer—this is why I was invited. It wasn’t family, it wasn’t our old friendship. It’s ambition.

  Betrayed, even affronted as I was, enough of the old bond remained for me to say evenly, “I have not seen her sleep chamber, but I’d be surprised if anyone hears anything.”

  “Then again there might be nothing to hear. In the new play at the Slipper, there was a new Handsome wearing a blue bow all the way through, and the Veil couldn’t see it, though everyone else did.” “The Veil” was always a royal figure, usually the princess, and the blue ribbon in Handsome’s hair meant that the court’s most popular man had his eye on someone royal. Except that no one gossiped about the queen’s private life, so it had to mean Lasva.

  Tif peered intently into my face. “You are now the closest to her. If you tell me—I am determined to find out any way I can, because it’s the only way to get ahead—then I’ll know what to do. And you needn’t think I will tell anyone who my source is. I don’t want you stolen, so any secret you tell me is perfectly safe.”

  What a blow to my heart—and, it must be confessed, to my pride. Here was the real reason Tiflis had written to me at last. She was using our family connection to delve for whispers!

  I knew I should get up and march away. But what would happen? Tif would do what she said she would do, find another way to worm into Lasva’s private life.

  So… what if I tell her what Lasva doesn’t mind the world knowing?

  “They have to be making up something that isn’t there,” I said, and because Tiflis gave me a skeptical smirk, “I see Princess Lasthavais every day in court. There is no veil hiding her expression, so I can attest to the fact that she’s never taken the least interest in Lord Vasalya-Kaidas Lassiter, if he’s the new Handsome. Nor, from everything I’ve seen, does he in her. He’s too busy with his many flirts.”

  My tone, my hand in Lily-Gate mode—openness—caused Tif to sit back. “Ah-yedi! If you haven’t heard anything, then it’s only smoke, to sell seats. I thought so. I shall take great pleasure in telling Sheris she’s made a hum of herself yet again.”

  You have to remember that everything that had to do with the Chwahir culture was despised by us. For generations Colendi were scolded out of the otherwise innocent human penchant for humming because of the famous Chwahir humming choruses. To be a hum was to be risible.

  “Sheris thinks the new playwright at the Slipper is a courtier in mask. She only comes over here to brag about how the archive is the center of any news. Hum! Now, my friend Nali says…”

  I left soon after, my emotions in the greatest turmoil I’d felt since the day of the Fifteen.

  My cousin pretended an interest, but what she really wanted was news. However, that didn’t disturb me nearly as much as her words about Birdy.

  EIGHT

  OF A DISINTERESTED IMPULSE

  F

  or days Tif’s remark continued to disturb me. I could not define why. Not loss. Not regret. I was unsettled. Birdy? Interested in me? Birdy with the jug ears and the juggling, always ready with a joke? I never would have thought of Birdy that way. He was just a friend. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the look in his eyes when he had said “us” had been hurt.

  I am going to sidestep into another’s thoughts again.

  Lord Kaidas (called “Handsome” after the male figure in court plays, representing the latest male who’d caught a royal eye) was impatient with formality.

  It had only been impulse to wager against the Gaszins. He couldn’t have said why. He hated trouble. But the Gaszin brother and sister had been a shade too smug, and so, for the sake of a moment’s laugh, he promised more money than he had to wager against them.

  The result? He was the slightly embarrassed recipient of a small fortune. Though he was continually stressed for funds to support his racing stock, those things were separate in his mind: his racing wins went to racing needs. A windfall must be spent on whim. So when court left after Midsummer (and still no heir) he travelled south for the first time, to attend the Music Festival in Sartor.

  His friends practiced their well-honed wit on him at this sudden curiosity for old culture. At that time, few knew about his talent with painting.

  After two days of slow travel, he hated the journey.

  No, he did not hate it.

  Nothing bothered him enough for hatred. It was even a matter of pride. As his father frequently said, you regarded the vagaries of life with a sense of humor, and if you didn’t like something, you did something else. Hatred was too fatiguing an exertion and never flattering to one’s style.

  His father had also said when Kaidas first went to court, “If you don’t want to end up exiled like Thias Altan for five years, then stay away from Hatahra. And her pretty little sister, when she comes to court.”

  Kaidas, young and already popular, had said lazily, “Right now I have trouble finding time to be alone.”

  “That can change with a snap of the royal fan,” said the baron, his expression sardonic. “Ask Thias someday how many friends he had left after a half a year exiled to his estate. He laid out more money than we’ll ever have in either of our lives in his attempt to set up a second court. But they all go back to Alsais sooner or later.”

  The baron rarely spoke seriously. His son listened when he did, and avoided the crowd around Princess Lasva. Not that that was any hardship. Court was full of attractive people.

  Then came the Dance of the Spring Leaves, and that smile she gave Jurac of Chwahirsland. He was intrigued enough to stay assiduously away from the princess. Too assiduous; when he realized that his determined distance was causing idle speculation, he left court entirely, claiming he had to get ready to go south for the music festival.

  He was going to find out what sort of nature lay behind that smile, but he was going to manage it without causing gossip. That made it a game.

  He lived for games.

  Above all, humans crave happiness, we are told.

  Sublime is the sense that now I am happy. The curious thing, at least in my experience, is that one can look back and think, I was so happy then, even if at the time one thought the day filled with an unending stream of small vexations.

  Lasva’s elaborate entourage set out for Sartor.

  I reveled in belonging to the royal carriage, which would never have to halt for other traffic. My place was with my back to the horses, and I could not command a stop when I was tired, or demand food and drink when hungry and thirsty, but I had earned my place.

  The happiness was unalloyed only in retrospect. At the time, I was also anxiously determined to observe something of use for Lasva. I longed to make so penetrating an observation that she would clap her hands and throw them out in Bird on the Wing, overjoyed with my perspicacity. And if I didn’t, would she want another scribe?

  After a day or two at Skya Lake’s peaceful shore, in order to recover from the exertion of the gentle ride down the river road, the courtiers set out again. They paired off as we rolled west through aged forest shaded by what some said were a hundred type
s of oak and hickory, stippled by red maple and white ash. We’re told that many of these trees were brought in hoarded bags of acorns through the World Gate eons ago. If so, here was evidence of the trees’ children, grandchildren, and blended descendants, all in the green glory of summer.

  I watched courtiers flirt—not that I witnessed anything worth relating. We scribes are supposed to remain invisible, which means we must never be caught staring. The eye is quicker than the mind at catching other eyes. Though I also tried listening, the courtiers’ soft voices in the musical cadences of our language revealed even less than visual clues. I began to fear that the princess would be disappointed in me and send me back.

  At an elegant riverside village we stepped into waiting barges for the ride up the Eth, and then another road journey along the north-flowing river on whose barges we would return to Colend.

  Now I must return to Kaidas, who had taken a different barge from ours. Lasva did not know he was attached to our company, he was so careful to remain on the periphery. Ananda Gaszin, Rontande, the beautiful Isari, tall, thin Sharith, and other young courtiers circled around him, ready to smile, to flirt, to get up an impromptu dance or ensemble, for in those days courtiers still made music with instruments that looked well being played, such as strings and crystal-bells.

  Though he was circumspect, his presence prompted enough glances, smiles, and witty rejoinders to send him on a stroll with Lady Darva of Oleff one Restday evening. “Aunt Darva” was the only one of his father’s many lovers who had been kind to him when he was a youth, giving him gentle advice when needed. On this day they strolled an embankment where the princess’s barge was docked. They were well along a meandering path that dipped down to the rush and chuckle of the river before he asked, “Aunt Darva. Am I the subject of a wager?”

  Lady Darva had bent to examine the puffs of foam flower among the cattails. As she straightened up, the snow cloud of blossoms poofed into the air, and several ruby-glowing dragon-wings whirled skyward, humming. The last of the setting sun glowed in fiery tones through the insects’ long tails then vanished against the emerging stars.

  “I think so.” She gave him a pensive smile. “I don’t understand the impetus, but Lissais says that some have noticed you’ve never danced with the princess. They’re wagering on when and how you will change that.”

  “They’re wagering on how well I will dance?”

  “On how you, oh, get her attention. Have you taken an interest in that direction? You have joined her party, if in the public sense.” Her tone was peaceable, but he was annoyed anyway.

  “Very public. It is the largest party going south.” He knew it was hypocritical to be annoyed. He’d wagered carelessly on others’ caprice.

  Darva turned her back on the trees with nut-sized glowglobes winding up the trunks into the branches. The mellow sandstone village transformed to silhouettes among a forestland of lights. “Are you disturbed?”

  “Isn’t everyone, when precious self is the target of wit’s arrow?”

  Her shoulders lifted slightly, but she did not remonstrate with him for using such ugly images. Arrows! For centuries Colend had been part of the Accord banning the use of arrows. Better to leave such images to the barbarians of the western subcontinent.

  He said, “Do you have a book of boring poems?”

  She laughed. “Why would I bring such on so long a journey, when packing is already a puzzle?”

  They were in sight of a mossy old arched bridge, along which travelers and villagers crossed to and fro, many with swinging lanterns carried by servants, their laughter wafting on the fragrant summer air.

  “I want boring poems… for diversion.”

  “Ah. I believe I have what might be almost as good. The Altans always bring a scribe who is my age—a connection of some cousins. He’s also a Reader. Used to be able to quote pages and pages of bad poems, recited in comical accents, or voices of a cat or a mouse. A horse. So amusing when we were young and the winters were long.”

  “Is he discreet?”

  “You know how scribes are.” Her fan flickered in Surprise.

  “As I recall, not all are discreet.”

  Her smile vanished. “Ah-ye! I’d forgotten that dreadful—but surely that would be the exception, and explains why we remember.”

  “Since my father’s private life furnished his fund of particulars, I’ve inherited Father’s distrust for the ubiquitous blue-clad scufflers. But I’m willing to be proved wrong.”

  “Let us turn back. I will introduce you, and you may judge for yourself.”

  She was considerably surprised—so was everyone—when at the gathering that evening, Kaidas asked the duke’s permission to address his scribe in public, and then, as several listened, the two began a long discourse on Sartoran poetry during the Symbolist Period—sometimes considered the most obscure poetry ever written. Few would have claimed that Kaidas knew anything about poetry, and Rontande drawled that he hadn’t known any Lassiter could read.

  For several days afterward Kaidas amused himself with quoting poetry to anyone who came near—especially certain among his old friends and lovers. The effect was to encourage them to find other pursuits with as much haste as would not be unseemly.

  While he was intent on rerouting curious courtiers, the entire court left the river Eth and began the journey along the Margren River, toward the transfer point. The inn at Arvin is an enormous structure but not a palace—that is, not a great building whose grand design uses space, fine materials, and artistry to impress as well as to please the eye. This inn had been added to over many centuries. Children saw the place as a labyrinth or challenge and ran from garden to garden or above our heads across bridge-ways that linked the many wings. They pounded along halls, shrieking and chasing in an uninhibited way that I never had.

  Here, at the second-to-the-last stop before transfer, Colend’s court found themselves among people from all over the eastern part of the continent; as I followed a servant along a wickerwork bridge built over a stream that tumbled between two buildings, I counted five languages.

  Sauntering in the crowd behind us was Kaidas Lassiter, who couldn’t afford a carriage. Not that he told anyone that. Famed for his riding, it was a tribute to his style that he was admired for the freedom with which he could trot from carriage to carriage at whim. If anyone got too speculative about why he made this journey, he pulled scrolls of obscure Sartoran poetry from his sleeve pockets and favored them with choice pieces. None of the courtiers knew he thus observed Lasva from afar.

  Lasva travelled with half her household. When he comprehended the extent of the inn, with its private wings and tree-shadowed balconies, Kaidas Lassiter followed us.

  We found the rooms of our suite warm and stuffy. Most courtiers retreated to the parlors at the front, which were cooled by magic, but Lasva surprised us by remaining as the servants labored to make things comfortable.

  As Marnda and Dessaf supervised the duty housemaids, Lasva and I moved at her desire to the narrow wickerwork balcony, which was shaded by the balcony of the rooms above. The waterfall splashed into a pool below. Layers of leafy trees rustled in the air, moving slowly above the falls, giving us a semblance of coolness.

  “What did you see today?” Lasva asked me, as had become habit.

  I strove always to have something to say, and so I offered my observation about the running children and their freedom from constraint.

  She perched on the edge of a table carved in the shape of a tree that framed the glass top. “Time,” she said. “Here it seems suspended. And my childhood the blink of an eye.” She rubbed at her forehead.

  As if reading her thoughts, Marnda appeared behind us. “Your highness. Shall I send a page for refreshment?”

  “Thank you, just send the hair dresser, please.”

  I caught Marnda’s look of surprise as she turned away. Though she was in a sense Lasva’s hlaras—heart’s mother—she could not question orders.

  “Go on
, Emras.”

  “I don’t know if my thought is worth the effort of speech in this hot air. Merely, I wonder if I should be sad or glad that childhood slipped away without my notice. We remember dramatic things—contrasts in emotion, as all the poets say.”

  “And dramatic contrasts in scenery,” Lasva added as she untied the ribbon of her hat. She tipped her head. “You’ve heard Isari. What do you think lies behind all these hints about how tiresome it is to attend to the color of our hair while we travel?”

  “Is it troublesome?” I asked. “Sitting quietly every few days, so that no vestige of root growth mars the sheen of silver or moon-blue or lemon-froth? The hair dresser is the one who makes the effort to create the magical spell that transfers the colors to your hair.”

  Lasva’s dimples flashed. “So exhausting, to sit for a hair dresser, when otherwise we sit in a carriage. I cannot decide if she wants me to begin fashions—or to make myself a hum.”

  “I don’t think there is any danger of that,” I said.

  “Neither did I,” she said, “but whenever I think I am safe from ridicule because of my rank, I only have to remember that poor fellow from Chwahirsland. He was a king, but they would have stepped on his shadow if they were not so afraid of my sister, who’d invited him for treaty purposes. So they hummed behind his back. What do they chirp behind my back?”

  The hair dresser arrived, showing no reaction when the princess gave the order for her hair to be restored to its natural color. The hair dresser had set out her pots but put them away again. Then she performed a different set of spells, that sent the false color into the ground in the manner of the Waste Spell we all learn soon after we begin to walk.

  Kaidas had slipped up the stairs, found the suite empty (Lasva always hired the floors above to prevent footsteps from disturbing us) and made his way to the balcony, from which he heard our voices.