Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  Bringing me to zathumbre, this time not metaphorical: the stormy spring that year provoked me to experiment with weather. I knew the magic for bringing cold air from the clouds into hot rooms, something that better-trained herald mages did for palaces. It was tedious magic, for the mage had to maintain the spell in person by creating a sort of air tunnel, or funnel, so that hot air and cold did not mix. My reasoning was that if I experimented with that spell, it would harm no one—we all lived with a variety of weathers—but might it not be an effective way to summarily put a stop to battle?

  But I could not experiment close by. I understood enough about violent weather to know what it would do to growing crops. Where could I go? I asked that question of the Herskalt in one of my letters, then set the matter aside.

  You will be aware that I was actually mastering magic at a prodigious speed, but you must remember there was no school, no set of peers with whom to work. My measure of progress was the castle and city ward project, and so I was only aware of my limitations, and how much work had yet to be done.

  It was the day after Midsummer when I left that letter about weather magic for the Herskalt.

  I walked out of my tower to the gunvaer’s suite to join the others for a meal—made incommodious by Kendred’s high shriek as he ran around playing games with two of the guards’ children. Pelis told me that Lasva insisted their play be unfettered, which seemed to mean door-banging, shouting, and throwing things about in some kind of wild game that only almost-three year olds could invent.

  So I finished my meal in haste and walked out to get exercise. I happened to be near the garrison when riders appeared, making way for a train of wagons bringing in wounded warriors. I didn’t ask what happened. I just added myself to the squad of healers and healers’ aides, and once again I performed those spells I’d first learned at the Olavair battle. Now they seemed simple. My mind turned eagerly to a new task—one whose good effect I could see immediately and whose mastery could be measured with satisfying rapidity.

  I had found a new challenge—I would study healing!

  I delved into the library of magic books that Andaun had left behind and, sure enough, found an old record of healer magic done for the garrison. I was a month into my new studies when I shifted to Darchelde and discovered a note in an unknown hand where my pile of letters had been. It said only, Excellent progress—here is a Destination to use for weather work. You will be in the Ghildraith mountains, where there are constant storms. It is therefore a considerable transfer, so take tokens to use for your return. The note finished with a facsimile of the Destination tiles on which I must form my focus. That meant I had to make myself tokens—but that was relatively easy by now. I began making up a few each night before I went to sleep. The rote magic functioned to calm my mind.

  The Herskalt had not commanded me to drop the study of healing, but this was a hint that I’d strayed from the king’s work. After all, there were healers aplenty, but only one Sigradir—me.

  And so I transferred to the new Destination. It took me the space of three breaths to discover my error. It was frigid, and though the sun was in the same place in the sky, it was different, the light intense, the shadows extraordinarily sharp. I drew in a deep breath, almost giddy. I braced myself and transferred back. The rest of the day I spent on ward work, but the next day, early, I dressed in winter clothing, brought paper and pen for taking notes, and transferred again.

  As that year wore on, I noticed with each successive visit that the sun’s position that far north was increasingly higher than it was in the south. The air was correspondingly colder, though I was closer to the belt of the world. I had to be very high up indeed.

  And here I took the greatest joy, regardless of my toes often going numb despite thick socks and sturdy boots, and despite my body trembling in the knife-cut of the high winds. I tested myself to the limit, reveling in the speed with which I controlled the internal heat-build of powerful magic and the snap of release as my mass of hot air, pulled from below, thrust up into the cold and sparked towering monuments of clouds that billowed and colored through darkening hues from startling green to deepest violet. And then the lightning danced and shivered from cloud to cloud, releasing thunder that shook the world below my feet.

  By New Year’s the weather was too vile for me to visit that Destination, but I could call up powerful lightning storms. What I could not do was control where the lightning would strike.

  A few days before New Year’s Week, the entire castle staff went into the usual frenzy of cleaning, airing, and preparing, which stirred me out of my cocoon. In the midst of these interruptions, Ivandred came to my chambers. “You have something new for me?”

  After I explained (apologizing for the fact that I still could not control lightning’s strike) he said, “It’s excellent. Surpasses my expectations. I don’t know how much more magic I can manage in the field and still command. Teach me this spell, and that should suffice.”

  I worked him through the spell several times until he had it. Then he said, “Put your time into the wards. I need the Herskalt’s experience. Surely you have felt the need as well.”

  “Oh, yes. Is it possible we could hire him from whoever he works for now?”

  “That’s my plan. But he has to have access to Choreid Dhelerei.”

  I asked, “Could he not teach you, or guide you, from a place outside of the city? He can’t be refusing to help you until I finish the wards!” I could not believe the Herskalt would be petty, though it was a little reassuring to think of him having human failings like the rest of us.

  “Not at all. That is, he visits me if I ask him to, and advises me. I don’t understand why he cannot stay,” Ivandred said. “Probably has something to do with the work he does elsewhere.”

  “I will redouble my efforts,” I said.

  And did to the exclusion of everything, and everyone, else.

  It was the smell of cinnamon that broke the wall of my isolation.

  Winter had been extraordinarily difficult, with a very late spring. Each time we thought the snows were over at last, and we’d see the ground with little green tufts, yet another heavy storm would boil up on the northeastern horizon.

  I’d gone to get a meal and found no one in the queen’s suite, except the duty guards, who looked glum, almost grim. Was something terribly amiss? It could not be. Surely someone would warn me…. I walked out in search of those I knew. When I got farther down the smoothly plastered hall with its stylish, running and soaring figures, my nose encountered a faint, familiar scene. I turned toward it, walking until I identified the heady aroma of cinnamon and spice mulled into hot wine.

  This was unprecedented! I followed it downstairs to discover the Great Hall filled with castle folk, the younger people trading off drumming and singing as everyone else talked, laughed, and danced in big circles.

  Lasva was in the center of a group of women, looking like a teen again as she stepped and twirled, her robes whirling. She knew every step and every gesture, but nothing could make her look Marloven: grace had been drilled into her from early childhood, and smooth were her movements out to the fingertips.

  Surrounding her was a circle of teen-age girls and young women, kicking up their heels so that the silk-stitched interlocked patterns along sleeves and hems gleamed in the torchlight. I watched how girls cast glances over their shoulders at the young men drumming, gave hips an extra roll, backs arched a little more.

  When the song ended, the young men put the drums down and raced onto the floor, as older folk and some of the women took up the drums.

  Now the boys began to show off, some crossing the circle with flips and twirls, others glancing back at the girls as they stomped their heels and leaped higher. I didn’t know a step of any of these dances, though I’d once loved to dance.

  When the men finished (roaring in counterpoint to the drums, which the girls thundered in antiphon) the air filled again with the heavy, sweet scent of mulled wine as wide, s
hallow cups were passed hand to hand.

  It’s Flower Day, I thought. Today is Flower Day, the spring festival at home. No, not home anymore.

  Someone nudged me, and I jumped. Turned. A guard I recognized held out a cup, and I took it, caught by the sight of my hands. They looked like a stranger’s hands. I’d been working so hard for so long, but I had only seen the papers, the results of my work, or others’ memories… I had made none of my own.

  That was it, I thought as I gulped the warm spiced wine. I had not eaten in so long that the wine’s effect mounted to my head in the space of three heartbeats, leaving me blinking rapidly against stinging eyes as someone took the cup from my unresisting fingers, sipped and passed it on. I had made no memories with anyone, not for a long time.

  Again a cup went around and again I drank as the drumbeat thrummed through my bones and sinews and blood.

  In the center of the room Lasva moved, hands held high, palm to palm with other women. Their feet brushed and stamped in a complicated rhythm that set their robes swaying as their hands stayed steady, or almost steady. When someone faltered and broke her touch on one of her partners’ palms, the watchers crowed and laughed, and she had to sit down. As the circle got smaller, the beat quickened until Lasva was left with Tesar and one of the weavers. Round and round they went, their steps a blur until Lasva whirled away, laughing, and declared all three of them winners.

  Alone, and no one noticed. Who could blame them? The unconscious became conscious, as I counted up the months since Birdy’s last letter and discovered how long it had been.

  In the center of the room, it was the men’s turn. Out came the swords. It was not the strange, almost somber dance with two swords laid on the ground that I had seen before the battle in the north, and never since. This dance was performed with laughter and mock challenge, the swords thrown back and forth, wielded in arcs and circles, then passed on.

  Compared to Colend, these dances might seem crude. They were certainly not graceful, nor full of the oblique innuendo that Colendi courtiers enjoyed. The way that people watched one another was open, desire made plain, challenge overt. And there was Lasva in the middle of them, having created a Flower Day all of her own, though she had no flowers. But the Marlovens did not miss what they did not have, and it was clear that the real meaning of the day—the celebration of spring, and youth, and growth—was a success.

  And I had not known about it. I had not even remembered the date. High shrieks caught my attention as Prince Kendred led a stream of other five-year-olds in and out among the adults. From their gait it seemed the children were pretending to be horses.

  Kendred was small and light, his curly hair darkening to chestnut. In the middle of one of the dances he dashed into the center of the circle, though the other children faltered, not quite daring. He ran up to Lasva and caught her robe. She whirled around, exclaimed in surprise, caught him up and kissed him soundly, as a roar of approval and laughter went up around us. Then she set him down and would have taken his hands to dance with him, but he declared in his high voice, “It’s a women’s dance! I’m not a women!”

  “No you’re not,” came a shrill voice from a little girl. “You have to get out of the circle, Kendred-Laef!”

  Kendred dashed away as another laugh sounded, and I caught Marnda talking in our home language, querulous with old age, “Look at this—did not touch a bite, and I fetched all his favorite foods. I really think Prince Kendred lives on air, because he does not eat enough to sustain a bird.”

  Anhar said with a voice of authority, “This I know from my cousins. When he starts to grow, he will eat.” And from there, “Did you hear what he said the other day, when we were reading The Tales of Peddler Antivad?”

  “What did he say this time?”

  I moved away, bored and a little grieved. It was not that I disliked the prince. I didn’t know him well enough to like or dislike him. I did dislike his noise—so unlike anything I’d ever experienced. We never made such noise, I thought as I distanced myself. From my earliest memories I gained praise for quietness and neatness. My last session on a ponder chair was after Tiflis and I had argued about some paints when I was no older than six. I do not care who began it, my mother had said kindly. We use our words to find agreement, not to foster disagreement. Sit for a time and reflect on how you might have arranged to share, then join us for supper.

  The remarkable thing, I soon discovered, was that Lasva had known even less freedom than I had. Her earliest memories were of kindly but firm hands disengaging her fingers from something forbidden, and admonishments if she tried to run, or leap, or shout, always beginning with the phrase A princess must…

  “Emras!” Lasva herself was there, her entire countenance expressing pleasure. “Emras! I am so glad to see you here. Come! Here is food. And places to sit. Or would you like to dance?”

  I declined, without telling her I did not know the dances. She stayed with me until I had a plate and a cup of my own, but I could not eat: the fast I was breaking was the hunger of the heart. I watched with the dizzy languor of emotional starvation as she tripped lightly off to dance again, leaving me surrounded by people having a good time, while I remained effectively invisible. I forced myself to take a bite. Another. But my eyes blurred as I watched them all: Pelis, fingers entwined with a blonde potter; Nifta head to head with a tall, somber herald; Marnda gesticulating as she talked to a couple of silver-haired women on the far side of the room.

  Anhar kissed the assistant baker with the attitude of a lover, and I thought, When did that happen? She left him to join the dance, every bit as graceful as Lasva, but part of the circle instead of in the center. She danced on her toes, her fingertips up in Bird-on-the-Wing, while around her hands flapped or gripped into fists of concentration or dangled, as dancers concentrated on their steps. Did she still write to Birdy? Did she dance when she went to Colend? I had never asked. I had never cared, though she had been thoughtful enough to bring me back little gifts: pastry, and letters.

  I put the wine cup down. It was making me maudlin. Yet I could not blame the wine for the sorrow aching in my chest. No one noticed me because I had cut all the connections we make to others by asking such small questions, Did you dance in Colend? and Who is your new friend? And then listening to the answer.

  I slipped out, my emotions in a turmoil of self-pity worsened by the unaccustomed wine, and returned to my tower to discover a letter waiting in my scrollcase, which I had bespelled to form an illusory candle flame when a letter transferred in.

  It was from the Herskalt: We need to consult.

  Grateful—desperate to get away—I transferred immediately. He was there waiting. When I met that acute gaze, the urge to defend myself, to explain the smell of wine that surely accompanied me made me flustered, but all he said was, “Ivandred is in the field, as I’m sure you know.”

  “I did not, actually,” I said. “I probably have been remiss, if I am to be of use to the king and queen. I have been unaware of events outside my tower.”

  “Recollect that Marloven kings prefer their mages to be unaware of events, until their services are needed,” the Herskalt replied. “You’ve done nothing amiss. Your progress is excellent.”

  Somewhat steadied, I said, “Am I going to be needed, then?”

  “Not at this moment. I suspect the trouble will come within the next few months, and it’s probable it will be in the south,” the Herskalt said.

  “I thought Totha was settled after… after what happened.” I knew it was weak to avoid stating the truth, but I could not get my lips to form the word massacre.

  The Herskalt’s lips twitched. “Suffice it to say that Totha is only part of the problem. Jarl Bluejay has been flattered by his cousin in Perideth into thinking that he deserves an independent kingdom. What Perideth wants is the Jayad. And Totha as a buffer.”

  “Does Ivandred know all this? What am I to do?”

  “You will continue doing exactly what you have been:
working on those wards.”

  “I have been working so hard.”

  “I read your notes here. I presume they were for me,” he said, touching my papers, now neatly stacked. “I hasten to give you credit for hard work. But I think you have lost sight of magic’s potential by miring yourself in details, then coming back here to lose yourself in the lives of individuals who will never make a difference in the world, in spite of their intriguing minds.”

  “What should I be doing?”

  “Let us combine two lessons in one,” he said as he made a curious gesture with his first two fingers and picked up the dyr.

  The adjacent wall that I had wondered so much about vanished. Beyond it lay an impossibility in the middle of a castle late at night: a garden in daylight. He led the way, and I followed, distracted for a moment by the long tail of brown hair he wore neatly tied back. My own hair was just as long—unnoticed until now, as I had not bothered to get it cut.

  He stepped onto grass as I put my foot through the divide between the hidden chamber and the garden. I tried to study the transition but my eyes slid away. I forced my gaze back, but black dots dappled my vision as I tried to bring the doorway into focus. At that moment, my foot stepped through, encountering sudden cold. It was a shock, like the touch of ice that burns then goes numb.

  But just as my lungs contracted on a gasp, I was through, and the cold was gone. I looked around, though there was nothing to see that would explain the imperceptible disorientation: the garden was surrounded by a hedge of thick flowering trumpet lilies. The grass was thick and green, the flowers growing in scattered profusion summer bright. Some I recognized, and some I did not.

  “Sit down,” the Herskalt invited, indicating a marble bench. He sat down beside me and put his hands on his knees. “Today’s lesson is about ordinary people who choose to influence those in power and whose choices therefore affect nations.”