Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  Mother signed agreement.

  Disquiet stifled my irritation. “You mean, the queen might… might summon me to reveal Las—the princess’s secrets?”

  Mother said, “It’s one of the reasons why we hired this room in a discreet house. Ranflar’s palace is notorious.” She made the old-fashioned signal for spywells, left over from the days when mages could put spells over rooms so that conversations could be spied upon. But those spells had long since been warded against. Now the gesture just meant that there was a danger of being overheard.

  “People spy on you in Ranflar?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Ah-ye! Just that the air conduits often carry voices as well, whether by accident or design,” Father said. “Here, we can talk freely.”

  Mother touched my hand. “You have risen high at a very young age.”

  “But Lasva is not the heir—there is nothing political in her life,” I protested. “You said as much, and I have seen nothing political. All I do is write what she dictates. For important notes she chooses the paper, the scent, the ribbon, the flower, and I even fold them as she directs. Her choices are for style and beauty. She has never mentioned politics. As for the Readings in the Reeds, she has asked me to hunt out the poems.”

  “So the Readings began,” Mother said. “Poems were chosen for their beauty, but even beauty can embroider themes. And later, you know, people brought their own poems, to surprise. Or to convey delicate meanings.”

  “Yes, we talked about that. They were arranged by those who wished to make an oblique comment upon state affairs—or personal things. Princess Lasva tells everyone that I pick the poems, to make certain no one will think there is any hidden meaning. The Readings have been very popular. Her themes are things like autumn, water, friendship.”

  “There is still no heir,” Father said, his fingers absently stacking the cups in a neat tower. “Everything her highness does has political prospect.”

  “And if you get summoned to the queen in what is decreed a matter of state, the line between private and public blurs—from a queen’s point of view.”

  “The princess would never order me to find poems that—oh, but you are talking generally. She would never confide in me something that would be…” I could not even force such words as treachery or treason past my lips.

  Mother shook her head. “Emras, nothing is safe when you find yourself involved in state matters. And the affairs of a princess one step from a throne can be personal and state at once.”

  “But we trust in your good sense. Our conversation is a reminder, as I’m certain your scribe guide will also remind you when you go for your first review. Just remember the Rules,” Father said.

  “Especially the First Rule: Do not interfere,” Mother added. “Especially the first.”

  I worried about that First Rule as I traveled back to Alsais and discovered that Lasva was involved in such a round of flirtations and dalliances that I scarcely saw her, except at noon, when she met me to go over the day’s correspondence.

  Since court was not yet in season (though some courtiers lived in the city year round, especially second sons and daughters and cousins who had no duties of heirship at home), there were few public events for me to witness. Therefore I plunged back into my studies and practice. I had gone to Ranflar feeling adult, but had returned feeling like a student again.

  As for romance, I decided in my teenage wisdom that it didn’t exist—that it was just poetic words for desire. When I wanted to be social, I joined the kitchen folk or the friendlier dressers on excursions to the pleasure house, but when the others went upstairs, I stayed below where the company was merry and there was singing and poetry, and people got up impromptu play readings. I was popular, trained as I was to read well, so I had a good time in the public areas. As for romance, and desire, I kept thinking, Maybe next year I will want to go upstairs.

  When spring warmed the air, I was summoned by Noliske to my first year’s review, two hours past midday at the Hour of the Quill. I knew that I was not in trouble; an admonitory interview would have taken place at the Hour of Stone, before midday.

  When I arrived, I found two senior scribes, Halimas and Noliske, there to interview me, instead of the traditional one.

  I told them everything, including my conversation in Ranflar.

  At the end, Noliske said, “You have been diligent and hard-working, Emras. We hear nothing but praise from everyone you work with, including Seneschal Marnda.”

  Halimas said, “She reports that you are discreet and polite. No higher praise can come from Marnda. You know that when we were young she was first handmaid to Queen Alian.”

  As I put my hands together in agreement, Halimas ran his quill through his fingers. “We deem it time to let you know that you are an anomaly. You are what the princess asked for, but you are not the older, experienced scribe that Queen Hatahra would have preferred to give her sister.”

  “That is why there are two of us,” Noliske said. “You must understand that the anomaly is not just you. In truth, the princess herself is also an anomaly—her birth took everyone by surprise—though everything has been done as if her birth had been planned for.”

  Here was a new trapdoor to fall through. Is this what adult life is, then? I thought. Surprises at every turn?

  “Is this why I have not been interviewed by the queen?” I asked. “I thought at first she was too busy, then I wondered if my work was amiss.”

  “She is never too busy for any royal matter,” Noliske said. “Especially those relating to the princess.”

  Halimas said, “But when the princess turned sixteen the queen gave her control of her own staff. And in turn, the princess kept her old staff, though they had been appointed by the queen. Consequently the queen has been careful not to interview you, to avoid the appearance of interference.”

  “So… the queen would not have hired me because there is something amiss with me as a person?” I asked.

  Noliske laid her hands together in The Peace. “It is my pleasure to negate so reasonable but painful a question. The subject is before us so you will truly comprehend that everything the princess does raises questions. She was born when the queen was an adult, so in a sense she was never like a true sibling. And there is no heir.”

  “Yet,” Noliske said quickly.

  “Yet. This is why we waited a year for this conversation, rather than telling you when you first commenced your position,” Halimas said. “We did not want to burden you before you had learned what you have in this past year.”

  Scribe Noliske stretched a finger toward the lily petal floating in the cloud blue porcelain wine cup. “You have done well. Continue to do well. Just…”

  “Just be aware of what you say. And to whom,” Halimas finished.

  “Especially when off duty.” Noliske made the spywell gesture, to emphasize discretion. “Now. Let us celebrate your excellence by partaking of this fine honeyflower wine. The almond-cakes were sent by your friend Delis, who was recently promoted to pastry.”

  As I said, in Kifelian there are so very many verbs and nouns for love. Not to say that other languages do not furnish many variations in meaning, it’s that (I’ve found, so far) they tend to rely on metaphor or variation in the descriptors: a new love, an old love, an ardent love, a tranquil love. In Colend, we seem to delight in words for the sake of words, and so I find that I must choose from many in order to convey what I mean in languages that have no equivalent.

  Therefore. If I say “flirtation,” it means the easiest of relationships; what some say is light in heart and some say involves no heart. People come together for enjoyment, sometimes to share passion, and then go away again with no emotional ribbons binding one to the other. I counted seventeen nouns used by courtiers for this type of relationship, but I will not list them or how each differs from the next. Flirtations vary from public to private in duration and degree.

  “Dalliances” are usually more ardent and are conducted privately
. They end, usually with a fading of interest into friendly indifference or sometimes in equally passionate anger, hurt, or hatred.

  At the time I write about, the various noun-ramifications of “flirtation,” and “dalliance” were modified by names of scents, from mild to strong, representing degrees of intensity. The courtiers talked about them endlessly, entertaining themselves with extended metaphor, the more oblique the better, as they strummed or sang or composed elegant poetry.

  A week after my interview with the senior scribes, I entered Lasva’s outer chamber with new poems for another Reading in the Reeds.

  I found Lasva looking out her window. I said, “I seem to have misplaced my lap table—”

  That was when I discovered that Lasva was not alone. Lord Rontande sat on the couch in the sunken circle. He’d been partially obscured by one of the potted flowering plants. I made my formal bow, which hid my blush at having been caught in error.

  “Sorry, scribe,” Rontande said with a soft, pleasant courtier’s laugh. “Need you your table now?”

  He sat at his ease, long legs crossed one over the other, their shape outlined by the silken night robe that he wore. His dark hair lay loose on his shoulders.

  My inks lay open on the lap table, and with quick strokes Rontande was painting. His question, so simple if you are not Colendi, did not allow for negation. Courtiers avoided negations to one another, and for one such as I to deny a lord or lady would be unthinkable.

  “Your pardon.” I bowed. “It is an honor to relinquish it to your use, my lord.”

  Lasva turned away from the window. She, too, wore only a silken robe that matched his in shade. His was embroidered with geese in flight, chained round it and flying upward; hers with entwined lilies. Pillow robes.

  “I told him you wouldn’t mind if he was careful,” Lasva said to me. “Are those the poems?”

  “Nature poems, your highness,” I said, striving for normalcy. “The chrysalis, the surprise. Kileili of Jhamond, two centuries ago.”

  The young man’s hand rang my brush against the inside of the water glass, then he scrubbed it to loosen the color faster. I hid my irritation—not that he bothered to look my way.

  “We were thinking,” Lasva gave a breathless laugh, “of cats.”

  “Cats, your highness?”

  She gestured toward Rontande’s painting, and I took that as permission to satisfy my curiosity.

  Sketched so swiftly—no more than a suggestion of figures—was a row of cats seated on the window sill, staring out. Rontande’s skill was quite good.

  “Six of them.” Lasva’s hand opened toward the opposite window. “Watching so intently.”

  “May I ask what, your highness?”

  Lasva put a hand to her cheek. “That’s the mystery—I don’t know. Could be some birds teased them.”

  “You shamed them with your beauty.” Rontande smiled up at her, brush in the air.

  “Cats are cats,” she retorted, leaning down to caress his cheek. “I don’t think they see beauty. Or do they?”

  She turned to me, question in the faint contraction of her brow. Question outside of her words. Had she seen my reaction?

  “I thought they see ghosts, your highness.” I strove to smooth voice and manner into neutrality, next to invisibility.

  “If they do, they don’t seem to care,” Rontande drawled, giving me to understand that my opinion was unessential to his experience of art and beauty.

  “Well, if ghosts are part of their daily life, why should they care?” Lasva asked.

  “You are always full of these questions.” Rontande’s low tone was intimate. “Do not make me laugh, I beg. If one is to offer oneself as a skilled painter, one cannot stutter one’s efforts through laughter that later cannot be explained away with grace.”

  “I will be as quiet as a cat,” Lasva retorted, slipping down beside him. She put her hand on his free arm, her chin on her hand. “And watch.”

  I performed my bow to their averted heads and left to return the book to the archive, where I exchanged it for one containing poems about cats.

  A few days later she came to my chamber and said, “Rontande wanted me to change the reading to cats.”

  I brandished the book. “I thought you might.”

  But she did not take it. She stepped close, regarding me wide-eyed. “You did mind. Didn’t you?” She sighed. “You did.”

  “I shouldn’t,” I said. “You—and her majesty—own these things, so I—”

  “You own them. They are your tools. The moment you set your hand to them, they became yours.” Lasva prowled around my small chamber, then bent and extended a finger toward one of my quills. But she did not permit her finger to brush the feathering. “I am willing to share my things, and so I thought you would not mind. But you did.” She straightened and pressed her hands together. “I’m trying to understand where the difference is. Is it that he did not ask you? Though I was sure you would have assented.”

  I said slowly, “I would have assented.”

  Her eyelids flashed up. “You had to assent, is that it? Ah-ye, I who thought I saw so clearly! But no one ever denies a princess, and so I never see denial, though I know it exists. So he asks knowing you cannot deny… and of course, you would never ask if you could share his.”

  Relief sighed through me. “That’s it.”

  She looked through her window, her voice meditative. “Just as no one would presume to ask for the smallest of my infinity of possessions, thus limiting the scope of my generosity. A humbling lesson! It is a week for lessons, it seems.”

  My window looked west, but even so there was enough light to reveal pink eyelids and a faint puffiness below her eyes.

  She turned my way. “I believe myself observant, yet my attraction for Rontande clouded my perceptions. I thought his heart was involved, as mine was beginning to be.”

  “It was not his heart, but his ambition?” I ventured.

  “Did you see it, then?”

  I said, “The way he kept bringing the subject back to himself. Or to flattery of you.”

  She sighed, flinging her hands out wide in the mode called Bird on the Wing. “That is the fourth one. And I was so careful, this time! Is it always this way? No wonder my sister refuses to marry, though I always thought Davaud the kindest of men. My sister has always been formal and distant. I thought it her nature, until I began to understand some whispers about the past. Or is it always this way for everyone? Ambition first, no true interest in the other person, as a person? Is that arrogance, that I want to be desired as Lasva and not as a princess?”

  When I saw that she wanted an answer, I said, “Yet he painted for you.”

  She breathed a soft laugh. “You did not know that painting is the new fashion? Come.”

  We moved through her suite to her private chamber, the one with access to her sleeping room. This room was enormous, but that was the end of my met expectations: in the place of fantastic art and textiles there was a complicated climbing structure covered in old carpet-work, much shredded, and around the room hosts of pillows, and even miniature houses in and out of which cats paced; the faint flash of magic from inside the houses indicated that the Waste Spell had been laid on them, instead of on wands, as is usual wherever people have pets. Extremely expensive to lay those spells time after time on the houses, but it meant that there would never be any smell, and the sand within the houses would always stay clean. And no servant had to come in to wave the wand over the boxes, as is common elsewhere.

  On the wall above the bed someone had affixed the painting of the cats, framed within two dyed-silk mats in contrasting shades of dull gold and rust.

  “They’re all busy with their brushes now,” she said as she took the painting from the wall and carried it to the outer chamber where she held her parties. “Those who can. It’s more popular than extemporaneous music. Did you hear what happened in the east?”

  “My parents mentioned a new treaty on the border. That
is all I know.”

  “It was made by Kaidas Lassiter, whose father Hatahra loathes. Maybe the son isn’t so… so frivolous. I do not know. I only met him to exchange bows. There was some sort of skirmish with brigands on the border with Khanerenth, when Kaidas was visiting his cousins. Some countess or duchess on the other side of the border was involved. Kaidas and this countess or duchess vanished into her castle, and for a time no one knew if he was a hostage, a prisoner, or what. After a week—this was New Year’s Week—they emerged, he with a new treaty and she bearing a lover’s cup, painted in her own colors and decorated with her favorite motifs. Though it was a pillow gift, she put it on her mantel. Peace, and so romantic! Now the style is painting.”

  “Ah-ye,” I exclaimed. “And so Lord Rontande made the cat painting for you.”

  “But do you not see? I didn’t, at first, but I think you did, didn’t you? That was not for me, he wants me to display it for others to see on my wall.”

  Pillow gifts are always private, intimate. Kept in one’s inner chamber and never shared. I hadn’t seen his intent, but I had seen his motivation.

  Though I wasn’t sure what to say, she was studying me carefully.

  She clasped her hands. “I love dogs as well as cats. However dogs can hurt you with their eyes, they are so devoted, and all they ask is love. And sometimes you are too busy to give it. What is the—the responsibility of love, and how many can one love? With cats, it doesn’t matter so much. Rontande reminds me of a cat. He is so… so smooth. But he’s not as interesting as a cat, who never bores one with its ambition.”

  She turned away to wipe her tears. I reorganized my pens, reversing their order, that I might keep my hands and eyes busy.

  “Remember when you first came, Emras? I asked you to see for me. Just like my sister’s scribes do for her. At my next party—nothing large—an informal reading, an evening of music, either our own or a concert—you must be my eyes, and if there is something I don’t see, you must tell me. Will you do that?”

  I bowed.