Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  “The Herskalt,” I said as I felt my way through the tangle of thoughts, “never quite lied. But he didn’t tell me all of the truth. It’s like the mirror wards in that garden, distorted reflections of what’s real. Though the Sartoran Mage Guild is probably not as controlling, as venal, as he led me to believe, I think there is a little truth there. I do remember some of the things Queen Hatahra said.”

  “She had definite opinions,” Birdy said with a quick, somewhat humorless grin. “But I don’t know that I’d go to her first on the subject of mages and magic.”

  “But she had some convincing observations about mages in history who tasted power and liked it. Birdy, everything I’ve been told for the last ten years is suspect. My own morals are suspect. But I know three things. First, the Herskalt is going to be desperate to get the dyr back. Second, I have to confess to Ivandred and Lasva, and though I suspect she will feel the way you do, he will see it as an aid to kingdom protection. Third, I can’t seem to stay away from using it. There’s a craving in me, which probably means I’ve turned into an evil mage.”

  “An evil mage would justify its use.”

  “Don’t you see? I do justify it. Birdy, I used it not an hour ago. I know how much it’s going to hurt Lasva, how betrayed she is going to feel…” I caught myself. “That is my personal burden. The dyr is a world burden, and the only thing I can think of is to ask the greatest favor I ever have from you: to take it and dispose of it.”

  “What? Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Em, may I remind you that I know nothing about magic?”

  “That is exactly why I am asking you. The Herskalt cannot trace it if you carry it in that box. If it moves by normal means—walking, riding, aboard a ship—then magic won’t find it. All its tracer wards are gone. I saw to that before I left Darchelde.”

  “Should I throw it in the ocean?”

  “Yes. Perhaps not. What if the mer folk find it? What will it do to them? I think the only safe thing is to bind it to some future date, when maybe mages will be wiser. Will know what to do. Yes. The Sartoran Mage Guild might be angry, but on reflection, they might decide they are well rid of it. As for Norsunder, ah-ye! I hope by the time you reach wherever you are going that I will have solved that problem.”

  He gave a short nod, his jaw working.

  “The box will be carefully warded. The rest you will have to do, but it won’t be difficult, just laborious. I will write it all out and set up the enchantment, which is a series of interlocked spells. All you have to do to finish it is to choose as key the family name of someone who seems to be established and sensible. You’ll complete the spell by naming one of their descendants many generations away. Very specific. That will make the enchantment pretty much impossible to break, if someone finds it. Don’t tell anyone what it is, or where. Including me.”

  Birdy looked around the room, then said, “Where do I go?”

  “As far as you can get.” I crossed to my desk, where I kept the few coins left over from my days in Alsais. I took them out and stared down at them. For some reason hot tears blurred the gold on my palm and tickled my cheeks. “This is what I’m worth? Olnar asked who am I, and I don’t know, Birdy. An evil mage—ah-ye, I can see you are going to protest, and I know I’m overstating it just for the comfort of hearing it denied. But maybe I shouldn’t hear it denied. I am morally suspect, a mage who can destroy weather patterns for half a continent and place dangerous wards. I am even an evil scribe, for I’ve broken the First Rule so many times I can’t even count them, and I helped others break the Second.”

  “You are Emras,” he said, “and I love you.”

  I met his eyes at last, startled, apprehensive—but I did not see in his gaze the grasping desperation of zalend, or the poetic passion of rafalle. It was the warm and steadfast love of human for human, necessary and infinite as light and air.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  TEN

  OF A WITNESSED GLANCE

  B

  irdy was gone when I woke the next morning. When Anhar brought me breakfast, she told me he’d left at first light. I was still too weak to walk downstairs any appreciable distance—and in that castle, everything was an appreciable distance. The time was coming—soon—when I was going to have to act, but just then, it passed with the cold trickle of snowmelt as I tried to recover.

  Anhar finished her daily tasks and offered to read to me from Hadand’s letters, which I had avoided all this time. I could read them myself, of course, but I found her voice soothing and even entertaining, as she employed her talent at altering her speech to match the tone of the writer. I found it interesting and oddly cheering to hear the female perspective on the lives presented in the Fox memoir.

  And so that day passed, and another, and the days turned into a week. Restday came and went, the castle filling with the rich aroma of harvest barley wine, and here and there, mulled wine spiced with cinnamon, a Colendi scent. Some peacock things had been accepted, like many of our pastries, now made by bakers all over the city.

  Gradually I recovered my strength as the week stretched to the thirty-six days of a month, and another week after that. As my strength returned, so did the impulse to reach for the dyr. It was a hunger, its absence like losing sight and hearing. The only way to endure it was to keep busy, because somehow, I had to put the puzzle pieces together.

  My first project was to test my scrollcase. At first I detected nothing amiss, until I went over it carefully, then found a tiny mirror ward, so cleverly built that it was easy to overlook. Think of a sliver of lead hidden in filigree. I left it alone, and made myself a new scrollcase.

  Then I set myself the task of solving the mystery of Darchelde. That meant shifting to my secret chamber, but Anhar made me promise to work only eight turns of the hourglass before my return. So I stepped through my transfer access way each day armed with an hourglass. From inside my secret chamber, I began systematically assessing every spell in that vast castle, from the highest of the eight towers down to the cellars.

  Choreid Dhelerei began the preparation for New Year’s Week, as rumors flew about war, defense, threats. Each morning before I left for Darchelde, I joined the fan practice with Anhar, Kaidas, and Vasande. Gone was the wit and range of discussion, until one day, after the children had run out, and it was just the three of us adults, Kaidas closed the door and said, “You hear everything in stables, and there is war in the air.” He flicked his fan in Imminence.

  Anhar said, “How can you tell? They always talk this way.”

  Kaidas snapped the fan shut. “I can’t quite describe it. But it feels like it did before our fight with the Chwahir up at the border. Only that, I have learned since being here, was barely a skirmish.” He lowered his hand, his gaze serious. “I think my son and I ought to depart. I am weak enough to permit myself a last indulgence: I will take my leave of Lasva face to face. There’s nothing else I can do for her.”

  I was not done with my assay.

  Desperate to finish, I began staying longer at night, though Anhar wouldn’t sleep until she’d seen me safely in my bed.

  Then one morning we heard the distant horns announcing the coming of the king, soon followed by the thundering arrival of Ivandred, Lasva, and a swarm of warriors through the gates. Sick with trepidation, I waited for the inevitable summons, as word flew through the castle that the First Lancers were not among the arrivals. Deep in my own set of worries, I paid little heed to the news.

  The summons came immediately.

  We arrived at the same time in Ivandred’s outer chamber, so rarely seen by me. He dropped tiredly into one of his great wing-backed chairs, his boots and the skirt of his coat mud-splashed, his hair damp from a fresh fall of snow. Lasva had somehow contrived to neaten herself between dismounting and coming upstairs to his room. She sat in the chair next to his, feet together, hands pressed together.

  “Hannik couldn’t ride in with us,” Ivandred said. “When we talked last, yo
u had a few weeks of work ahead to replace the wards, and that was nearly a year ago. What happened, Sigradir?”

  “Instead of removing and rebuilding the last four layers of wards, I have strengthened them,” I said. “If you order it, I must release the personal wards, which will permit Hannik—the Herskalt—to enter this city. But you should know that I believe he is a Norsundrian.”

  “What?” Ivandred half-started out of his chair, then sat back, scowling at me.

  Lasva blanched.

  I clasped my hands tightly. “This is what I have learned and how I learned it.”

  Though the danger was from Ivandred—and I knew he was going to be angry—it was Lasva I watched as I confessed. Not everything. That is, I told them what I had done, but not everything I saw; I kept from them only the names of others whose lives I had penetrated.

  Like Kaidas.

  Lasva’s eyes closed at I described the first betrayal of her memories. After that every flutter of her lashes, subtle tightening of her lips—every wince that she tried to hide, but couldn’t—stabbed me deeper with the knife of guilt.

  At the end, I waited for them to pronounce judgment.

  Ivandred said, “This object. You say it is not here?”

  “I thought it better to get rid of it. If the Herskalt gets it again, he will use it against us both. As well as against anyone he wishes.”

  Ivandred stared down into the fire, a vein beating at his temple. When he looked up, he said, “You say you only listened to me in private? With my wife?” Disgust lifted his upper lip. “Anyone knows how I feel about my wife.”

  “Yes.” I did not mitigate it by telling him how few of those scenes I’d watched. I should not have seen anything at all.

  Lasva said softly, “Emras, I would have told you anything you wanted.”

  My throat hurt so much I could barely speak. “I know,” I said.

  Ivandred looked my way, his expression altering to consideration. “He was keeping you busy.”

  “I see that now,” I said. “At the time, he told me that I needed to understand people in power, how they thought. In order to help Lasva. And you.”

  Ivandred lifted his chin. “He said the same thing to me. Only he told me what they said. Told me what they thought. Private conversations, concerning the kingdom. He let me think it was intelligence-gathering. Even my own runners couldn’t get that much information.” He traced a curious sign in the air—then opened his hand. “I wonder if they’ve been compromised?”

  “They?”

  Ivandred pressed his fingertips to his eyes, then dropped his hand. “My runners, the king’s runners. They learn a little magic. Nothing like what you know. During the bad years, before we regained the throne, they were the only organized force, you could say. My family had a sign.” He slashed his finger in the air, making that same curious sign. “You recognize the letters of the alphabet? If you draw them that way, they look like an eagle in flight. It was a signal… ah, it’s no matter.” He struck the air with his hand. “I always feared that if he could tamper with scrollcases, then anyone might. In this, I trusted my father’s suspicion. But I had no idea about this dyr.” His brows lifted. “The fact that he never told me is the most damning evidence against him. He would know how I’d use it.”

  “Instead, he would use it to command you.”

  “Or to aid me in my plans?” Ivandred gazed into the fire, so tense he did not seem to breathe. “He has worked hard for Marloven Hesea. All spring and summer I heard nothing but talk about Marloven glory.”

  Lasva looked from one of us to the other. “I believe, if you will permit my intrusion, that he told you both what you wished to hear most.”

  “Again, why?” Ivandred said.

  “I have been worried all along that this man has trained you Marlovens not to use weapons so much as to be a weapon,” Lasva said.

  Ivandred gave her a quick look at the words “you Marlovens.”

  “The warriors,” she corrected herself, and then fell silent, so all we heard was the beating of the flames and the echo of a clarification she should not have had to make.

  Ivandred stirred, one fist tightening, then he said, “Hannik rode down to Darchelde with the First Lancers.”

  Darchelde again!

  Ivandred went on, “I will go there later on this winter—just me, and not the rest of the lancers, as we’d originally planned. As soon as New Year’s Week is over, I’ll send the Second Lancers to patrol the middle plains, Third to the northern border, and Fourth to the east.”

  “There is a lot of magic over Darchelde,” I said uneasily, knowing how inadequate were my words, how unconvincing. “Far more wards than necessary for protection.”

  Lasva said, “Maybe you should send orders to the First Lancers, giving them home liberty for the winter.”

  Ivandred’s smile was bleak. “I don’t trust any means of sending orders. We know scrollcases are compromised, and runners can be ambushed. The First Lancers are accustomed to the garrison at Darchelde—nothing will happen to them there. It’s been our winter camp whenever we could use it. Herskalt and I often met and conversed there. I do feel that I owe him a chance to explain himself.”

  “What did you learn from my memories that you could not have learned by asking me?” Lasva asked.

  We were alone in her inner chamber, which was determinedly Marloven in look, but smelling like a Colendi herb garden.

  How can one honestly answer such a question?

  “That is misspoken.” Lasva caught herself up. “Ah-ye, Emras, you look like poor Haldren did, before his own friends put him up there to be flogged. I do not want to make you suffer. Let me ask this. Did your trespass cause anyone harm? Do not answer ‘yes’ without thinking. I know you know it was wrong. But did you do harm.”

  “I don’t believe I did,” I said cautiously. “I can’t say for certain.”

  “Very well. Did you do anyone any good?”

  “Only once.”

  “Tell me.”

  I had made an oath that I would answer every question with the truth. So I told her about Tatia and Vasande. At the end, she said, “Yet it was not by your mental whisper, say, or by your wish that Kaidas came here?”

  “I did not know they were coming,” I said emphatically.

  Lasva prowled her room, then paused, her fingertips resting on the carved box in which she kept her letters. “Sometimes I miss court in Alsais, and sometimes I think about how I can never go back. Court is where love is mixed with business, and business with love. People hide their emotions as we hide our bodies behind layers and layers of silk. Our intent was to gain ascendance by being agreeable, to serve or to disserve, and intrigue and pleasure took up our time.” She looked my way. “Court is a kind of dance, tumult without disorder. Is that a kind of war? Is war in whatever form all we are capable of?”

  “Adamas Dei said that we are capable of infinite mercy and infinite beauty,” I said, my throat hurting. “As well as infinite cruelty.”

  She prowled around the room again, then stopped before me. “I find that it is necessary to redefine relationships at various junctures in our lives. Perhaps it is too early to do so, but I want you to know this, Emras. I recognize your love, and you have always had what I could give. You abrogated my trust, but you regained some of it in telling the truth about what you did that had magical and political consequences —and in being merciful about not going into all the intimate details.” The name Kaidas remained unspoken, but I think she heard it as clearly as I did. She took a deep breath. “Shall we begin again from there?”

  I could not answer, so I gave her the deep sovereign bow.

  New Year’s Week arrived, the atmosphere as tense as my first New Year’s in Marloven Hesea. Danric Yvanavar’s speech was especially fine, spoken in the rolling alliteratives and galloping cadences of their ancestors. He, or someone, had worked a long time on that call for restoring the glory of the Marlovens. He wrote for posterity, using every emotion-
hitching word save the crucial one: war.

  So I refuse to record his speech.

  The gist of it was repeated by the Jarls of Tlen, Tiv Evair, Khanivar, Fath, and the new Jarl of Sindan-An, who (it was rumored) had drowned his great-aunt, she being too tough to kill via a riding accident or a fall down stairs. I did not understand the significance of these six jarls’ similar speeches until the last day, which I will come to very shortly.

  Each morning, Kaidas asked Anhar, “When should I see her today?”

  And each day she answered, “Not today. It’s oath day, then the banquet,” or “Today she is hosting a memorial for the Jarlan of Sindan-An for all her friends,” or “Today is the riding and shooting exhibition—then they go straight to the great hall for singing and dancing.”

  Near the end of the week, after he’d gestured Assent and walked off, she whispered to me, “I hope he will change his mind. If he leaves, it’s going to break her heart.”

  “Having him here is breaking her heart,” I said, and Anhar gave me a quick glance. “She told you that? She’s not so much as mentioned his name to me since they came back.”

  “Nor to me. But here is the last thing I saw with the dyr.” And I described it.

  Anhar listened then wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I don’t see any happiness for either of them.”

  “Maybe she will find a measure of it if we win peace,” I said. “And he will find it somewhere else. But he’s going to have to leave first.”

  Anhar flung out her hands, then dropped them. “I’m going to have to ask if she’ll see him. But I’ll wait until Lastday.”

  Why did the structure of Darchelde’s wards distort when I sketched the layers?

  I’d done everything right, but my sketches were impossible. I had to find out why.

  But I didn’t dare walk around Darchelde to make a physical assessment. The Herskalt had tracers all over the castle. If I dissolved one, he’d be on me in a heartbeat, and in a contest of physical strength, I was going to lose. So I had to build another transfer ‘wall.’ Almost weeping with despair, I stayed up all night constructing this magical access way, then connecting it to one of the towers where the Herskalt’s magic distorted.