Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  She was gone on the last word.

  Behind her, Kaidas painstakingly set aside the cup and his brushes and paints. With equal care he set the remaining cups on the floor, each perfectly made, holding light within its circle.

  Then he smashed them all to dust.

  I whirled into action, dispatching the entire staff to put together a party suitable for a queen and a future queen; the kitchens had already begun the baking of the specialties appropriate to the day. The Grand Seneschal gave me the royal sunrise chamber, and loaned me a staff to set things up as Princess Lasva wanted them. I issued my orders as if they were hers, then dispatched an army of pages to inform the waiting court of time and place.

  No sooner was the page gone than Carola sent her own page to Kaidas, to settle their arrival together. She could not wait for the pleasure of viewing Lasva’s face when they appeared, her future duke wearing her jewel.

  And so the day closed with Lasva presiding with smiling grace over a charming Name Day party, the babe the center of talk, and Lasva serving out the spun sugar queensblossom lily cakes and star-shaped berry tarts with her own hands.

  Those on the watch for such things observed Carola and Kaidas arriving together. Attention arrowed straight to the gem he wore, and from thence to the princess, as he bowed before her.

  She did not hold out her hand to be kissed.

  The queen, observing over the babe’s lacy headdress, watched with approval as he laid the Alarcansa gem and Carola set the newly painted cup on the tray for gifts, then sat together on the opposite side of the room from Lasva.

  Fiolas whispered to Ananda and Isari, “I shall expect my lengths of lace to match a traveling gown.”

  SEVEN

  OF SPICED WINE

  T

  orsu slid into her chair in the servants’ quarters of the royal palace in Alsais, as she had for the last eighteen days. Eighteen days! It seemed forever—over two weeks—and it would be two forevers until the princess returned around Martande Day. She stared in resentment across the table at that hummer Nereith, without whose big mouth they never would have been living out this humiliation.

  Nereith ate steadily, her lowered gaze never rising from her plate. The dinner was superb. The cooks were experimenting again, something light and delightful, tasting of wine and herbs and cheese, to serve Them if it was a success. But Torsu was too angry to enjoy it.

  She was a dresser and good, too. She could unerringly cut a length of fabric by measuring with her eye. So why was she being treated like the stupidest shit-wander on the street, just for a comment about Princess Lasthavais that no one would have repeated anyway?

  Here was the irony—the princess was far kinder than her noisome servants.

  Several women laughed at the other end of the table, and Torsu grimaced, pushed aside her plate, and reached for the ice-drink. Even the taste of lime and berry and a hint of apple, usually so refreshing, did nothing to cool the heat of her anger.

  The Princess had gone to Sartor without any lovers. Her rooms had been thoroughly cleaned, all her remaining clothes taken out, mended, reordered against autumn. Dessaf should have said, “You’ve kept silence well, Torsu. You may speak again.”

  Torsu turned toward the stable hands’ table and happened to catch the eye of the new bridle-man. He smiled and saluted her with a little lift of his cup.

  Torsu didn’t smile back, of course. Just watch some poke-nose at her table see that and go chirping to that old toad Dessaf!

  “And maybe a little more butter,” someone was saying.

  Still talking about that humming cheese-pastry!

  Torsu turned a little on her chair, so she could peek over at the stable hands’ table without being obvious. The bridle-man—what was his name? Kivic. He mostly sat alone, though sometimes the old coachman talked to him. Some said that he looked too much like a Chwahir, with his round, flat-cheeked face, but he wasn’t any Chwahir. Everyone knew they had black hair and pale skin, and he was normal brown with some darker freckles, his hair a rusty color.

  “Nobody likes new people,” she thought, remembering how long it had taken to get anyone to speak to her after she’d been hired. Thinking back to her high hopes when she’d left her boring little town and her triumph at being hired at the palace after only four years’ drudgery in Alsais, made her lips curl sourly. She hid her face, pretending to drink. Dessaf had sharp eyes, the fat old claypot.

  So why sit here? It wasn’t like she could speak. She left her dishes there for the kitchen maids. Let them do their jobs. She’d help them out if anyone ever showed the least sign of helping her out.

  The air out in the vegetable garden was only marginally cooler, and the atmosphere felt thundery. Rain would be a relief. She breathed deeply, wishing she could shout to hear her own voice.

  Only that would get her into trouble. She glared at the carrot tops. What made her furious, more than anything? That no one seemed to care that she couldn’t talk. After all those weeks of flattering the upper maids and pretending an interest in the other dressers, how far had she gotten? They knew her name, but none had spoken to her since Dessaf landed on her so unfairly.

  “Hot night, eh?”

  She whirled around, stared up into a round face. Kivic!

  She nodded.

  Kivic looked down into that mutinous face, the full lower lip, and laughed softly. He checked in both directions. “I know you cannot speak, though I don’t know why. But you can drink, yes? I have an ice-jug my cousin gave me, and it contains sweet wine. Surely you can spare enough time for a sweet cup of wine.”

  She wavered. Dressers were forbidden to dally with other palace servants; that was the very first rule she had agreed to. For sex, they were to go, always incognito, to the pleasure houses where the crown-steward held an account.

  But he wasn’t offering sex, only a cup of wine. And she was already laboring under the effects of one soul-sucking rule.

  He leaned close. His breath stirred her hair. “I like silence. When it’s companionable.”

  Her nerves tingled.

  “Meet me on the north side of the winter-carriage barn. No one ever goes there in summer. I live right above.” His breath stirred her hair.

  She whirled around and made her way through the extensive vegetable garden. When she glanced back, he was nowhere in sight.

  She took her time, making certain every few steps that no one followed. When she reached the huge barn, the moon was now fully covered by clouds, and the heat was stifling. Thunder muttered in the distance.

  “This way.” Kivic led her inside a narrow side door and up rickety steps. His room was at the top, tucked into a corner. Private, though it must be a longer walk to the stables.

  The room was plain, clean, smelling faintly of oats and hay. He snapped his fingers and a small glowglobe lit. “Take my good seat,” he offered, shutting the door and pointing to a low chair near the narrow bed. “Few like being housed here, but I find it’s out of the way. The others are all gone into town to The Slipper,” he added. “So no one will see you leave.”

  He didn’t say when that might be. Torsu watched him open a trunk and lift out a fine stone jug. It had moisture beads on the side, a sure sign of its being magic-made.

  He pulled out a pair of plain cups, poured, and handed her one. “I salute us, the invisible newcomers,” he said, raising his cup.

  She raised hers and drank. The wine was delicious. “How—” She remembered and stopped, blushing.

  He shrugged. “Go ahead and speak. Who would I tell? I’m new,” he said ruefully. “No one ever talks to me.”

  Who indeed? She sighed. “In truth, it feels good to speak,” she admitted. “How can you afford such a wine? It’s good.”

  “Isn’t it? My cousin works at a vineyard to the north. He sends it to me.”

  That was hardly sinister. Feeling relieved—she hadn’t even known she was uneasy—she sat back, sipping more.

  “I probably shouldn’t say this
,” Kivic admitted, laughing over the rim of his cup. “But you know what the stable hands call Dessaf?”

  “I know the kitchen helpers call her Princess Pickle.” Oh, it did feel good to talk!

  Kivic’s eyes quirked appreciatively. He had quite nice brown eyes. “That’s good. Her nose does have that shape, doesn’t it? Though I think the boys have it closer when they call her Gruska.” Gruska—the gray mushrooms found under trees after long rains.

  Torsu groped for meaning, then the image came, superimposed over Dessaf’s sniffy face. “Ugly, and not even good to eat.” She burst out laughing, and Kivic leaned forward to refill her cup. “Oh, this is good,” she said, coughing, then wiping her eyes. Outside thunder rumbled closer, and fat droplets of rain tapped, pocketa-pock, on the roof directly overhead. “Just this, then I’d better go. I don’t want to get drenched. It would cause all kinds of questions.”

  “That’s right, you girls are forbidden to consort with the likes of us, eh?” And on her nod, he sighed with disgust. “Is that because that old broomstick Marnda’s too dried up to ever look for a lover, and no lover with sight would look at Dessaf?”

  Torsu snorted. “Ah-ye. They think that if we take lovers on staff we won’t be able to keep our mouths shut. As if we’re too witless to know not to blab—as if they wouldn’t find out! We can only go to the pleasure houses. You can’t even marry or have a child for ten years.” Not that I want either, she thought. I have better plans than that.

  Kivic whistled. “Now, that’s a swindle. Is the pay bad? It is for gear men, though I’ve ambitions. I’m learning from the farrier.”

  The storm broke right then, lightning reflecting so brightly through the tiny window it was almost blinding. Before the thunder died away the rain began, a steady roar on the roof.

  Torsu looked up apprehensively, and Kivic said, “You watch. It’ll be over before your third cup is drunk.”

  The wine, its sweetness and warmth, the coolness rain brought after the relentless heat, all conspired to make Torsu very well satisfied with her place now, in contrast to her lonely bed up in the dressers’ dormitory, surrounded by chattering hummers to whom she could not speak.

  Kivic poured out more wine and made a motion as if refilling his own cup, though he hadn’t yet finished his first.

  “They pay us well enough,” Torsu admitted, shrugging sharply. “But it’s not what a person could make who has ambitions.”

  “I take it that means you’re saving your wages?”

  She grinned, bumping her cup against her teeth. “Someday, when I have all the secrets of the royal wardrobe, I’ll move to a wealthy town where the women have pretensions, and I’ll be rich in a year. But I’ll need stock.” Torsu had never told anyone that.

  “A fine ambition,” Kivic said.

  The rain ended as abruptly as it had begun, except for steady drips from the cornice outside Kivic’s room. She’d drunk too much. She’d better go.

  “Now, I bet you have to pay extra for a simple massage,” Kivic said. “I know we do. And what a shame. Because, if you were a horse, I’d say you had tension here and here.”

  He set aside his cup and stepped behind her. Finger pressed on her shoulders either side of her neck—the very muscles that got so tired sewing the fine stitches that had earned her her position. “Oh that’s right on the spot,” she breathed.

  He chuckled. “You know, this is good practice. I could pretend you were a horse, and you don’t even have to pay, like you would at the pleasure house. How’s that?” As he spoke he pressed his fingers into her muscles. He wasn’t as adept as the pleasure house men, but she was a little drunk, and she liked the slow circles that sent sparks of pleasure down her back, to pool, like warm wine, in her belly.

  “It’s good,” she muttered hoarsely.

  The fingers moved outward along her shoulders, to the muscles inside of her shoulder blades, and she breathed in, leaning into his fingers.

  “So many knots. A race horse doesn’t get so many. They must work you girls a whole lot harder than anyone knows.”

  The fingers shifted down to her collarbones. She winced when he dug in too hard. He shifted to light caresses outward, and the tingles spread before them. She knew by now that he was seducing her—the massage was clumsy, but the slow approach to the places that tingled was so… so different from the pleasure house men who gave expert massages before sex, always so matter-of-factly, always with an eye to the sand glass. Kivic seemed to be in no hurry, and her muscles melted into warm wax. She closed her eyes, scarcely aware when a hand lifted, nipped the cup from her lax fingers, and set it aside, while the other smoothed and smoothed at the base of her neck.

  Scarcely aware when a piece of cloth was cast over the glowglobe, so the light on her eyelids cozily dimmed, and when, at last, slow fingers moved to her bodice strings and untied them, one by one, she welcomed the shivery feeling of air on her flesh as she stretched out on the bed that she discovered was conveniently nearby.

  The storm boiled furiously overhead then diminished into the east, taking the thunder with it. The single toll of the third-hour bell echoed through the rain-washed night air as Torsu hurried back to the dormitory, smiling with pleasure at the dripping trees, flowers, plants.

  Kivic had asked nothing about the princess, nothing at all. Dessaf was an old Gruska, and meanwhile, a girl had a right to pleasure, hadn’t she?

  Kivic stood at the top of the barn and watched as she skimmed along the pathway, holding her skirts up. He stretched, laughing to himself, then returned to his room, and hastily straightened up. Not long after, he heard voices as the rest of the hall’s inhabitants returned in a group, now that the rain was gone. He snuffed the light, lay down, and pretended to sleep.

  Sure enough, a rough hand banged his door open, a drunken voice muttered, “Oh, he’s dead to the world.”

  “We better be, too. Dawn bells next, high-steppers!”

  Raucous laughter echoed down the flimsy wooden hallway as doors slammed.

  Kivic rose, touched the door, muttered a sealing spell. Tested it. When it held, he snapped on his light and then pulled out paper and pen, pausing to smile. Almost four months, he’d watched the royal cooks, runners, dressers, cleaners, all. Patience, he thought. Thinking back over the sweetness of the night was its own reward.

  He wrote, chuckling, My liege, I am in.

  Wasn’t that the truth! And he’d be in again before week’s end, if he wasn’t mistaken. By the time the princess returned, if he continued to be patient, he would be “in” the princess’s chambers at last, through a very sharp pair of ears.

  He put the paper in a transfer case, tapped it as he said the spell-word, and on the other side of the mountains, far to the north, King Jurac Sonscarna of the Chwahir felt the mental alarm that signaled a communication from his most trusted spy.

  Jurac rose, snapped on a light, retrieved his transfer case, read the note, and threw it into the fireplace, where it flared briefly and burned out. Though it was summer, Chwahirsland was seldom warm enough for the fires to be doused.

  He got up, though he’d had scant sleep. Events had transpired so rapidly—in a matter of days, and all his way. After years of effort and waiting. He’d always known that old woman would have an heir, but until he’d found Kivic, he’d never been able to get anyone past the layers of invisible barriers in that palace.

  Now, in the same year, he had both the perfect spy, and his princess forced out of inheritance.

  His princess. He laughed, walking about the room and rubbing his hands as he remembered her beautiful face, her smiles, all the more brilliant while she was surrounded with those smirking, drawling courtiers. Of course she would want to be a queen, but that had been taken away from her in Colend, as he’d always known it would be.

  Now she could again be a queen, and he was going to make her one. Sleep was impossible. Joy and anticipation made his heart race too fast for that. It was time to issue orders and make ready to ride south
. Time to claim Lasthavais for his bride.

  EIGHT

  OF ROYAL WAGERS

  “S

  o what do you think?” Tharais studied her beloved, whose gaze mirrored her anxiety, despite his darling smile. She couldn’t see it, but she sensed a question underlying the spoken question.

  “I love your home, of course,” Tharais exclaimed. One arm was looped most satisfactorily through his, so she waved her free hand to sweep around his world. “I love your arches and your tiles and all those pretty paintings that run along the tops of rooms.”

  “Athanarel is not as large as what you’re used to,” Geral observed.

  “I’m not marrying a huge castle, or even a huge palace. I’m marrying you,” she replied and kissed him.

  He kissed her back, thoroughly, until they both ran out of breath and broke apart, laughing.

  “I dug up an old map soon as I got home,” Geral admitted. “I suspect it’s long out of date, but from what I saw, your father rules a kingdom so large all of Remalna might fit right into your royal city.”

  “I’m not marrying a kingdom, either,” she retorted.

  Geral’s brow puckered. “Yes, you are.”

  Tharais sighed as she guided him out of the upper hallway in the royal residence wing, which he’d been showing her so they could decide what to get rid of, what to keep, and what to change—always with a mind to the budget.

  Tharais had never had to deal with the concept of budget before, but she’d mastered it quickly enough. The royal coffers here were not unlimited. She could see that Geral lived comfortably but not with the extravagance of the Enaeraneth court, or with the unstinting eye for military advantage that she saw at home in Marloven Hesea. None of which mattered a jot to her.

  “I love the palace and the kingdom,” she said, before her mind slid back to those cold winters at home and the constant fear she lived with in the royal city, with the ever-impending violence when her father grew angry, or Ivandred grew angry, especially at one another. Yes, the castle in the Marloven royal city was huge, but not huge enough. People had sometimes died as a result of Van’s standing up to the king, but mostly Van suffered savage punishments that he would then pretend had never happened, except he’d go very quiet.