Wintermoon

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Wintermoon Page 7

by Mercedes Lackey


  Anatha laughed at that. “No, my lady. You’re right, of course. It was all just kitchen talk.”

  “Then I count on you to be sensible,” Moira replied, with a nod. “When that sort of talk begins again, make sure you are the one who keeps her head.” She yawned and set aside her work. “And I believe that I will be sensible and go to bed.”

  Tucked up in bed, with the curtains closed tightly all around to prevent icy drafts from waking her, Moira did not feel in the least sleepy. She turned on her side to think.

  If someone was a powerful magician, and could control the weather, at least in part—he’d use that power to make himself a king. Wouldn’t he?

  But what if he already was a king? Or, say, a Khaleem, which was basically the same thing.

  Massid had said that the Khaleemate had never lost a ship to storms. Maybe that wasn’t just good luck. Maybe the Khaleems of Jendara had power over the weather.

  If that was their only power, it was a cursed useful one, especially for a nation that fielded an enormous navy, and unofficially fielded a second enormous force of pirates.

  But why would that be attractive to her father? It was true that bad storms could bring a few more ships to grief on the Teeth of Highclere, and that in turn would certainly increase the coffers of the Lord of Highclere Sea-Keep. But the gain would be offset by some loss; the worse the storms were, the less hunting there would be, the less fishing, and the more likely that one of those unfortunate accidents would befall whoever was supposed to be working outside. She vividly recalled a particularly wretched winter when frequent, though not violent, storms had kept everyone pent up within the walls right up until late spring. The number of fights had been appalling. Feuds had begun that were probably still being played out to this day. Ferson had lost a dozen men to accidents and to fights; it had been hard to replace them, and the keep had been shorthanded for nearly a year.

  So what possible use could Ferson make of such a power that would outweigh the disadvantages?

  She couldn’t think of anything. So whatever had brought the Prince of Jendara here, it probably wasn’t that.

  She fell asleep still trying to figure out what had.

  After four days of wind and storm, the morning of the fifth day broke over calm seas and a cloudless—if icy—sky.

  Immediately, the scavengers went out to comb the shores for whatever the sea had cast up. Heaps of extremely useful kelp was always thrown upon the rocks, of course, but there were other things. Amber, jet, sea coal. And sometimes the sea in her fickle nature elected to toss back things that had gone to the bottom in previous wrecks. By the time Moira went down to breakfast, the keep was practically empty. Everyone who could be spared was out combing the shore, and everyone who could hunt was up in the forest doing so. The cook would make only one hot meal today, as most of his helpers would be elsewhere.

  It seemed as good a time as any to send the Countess another message. But what? Moira still had no idea why Massid was here. No marriage had yet been proposed. And yet—

  Frustrated, she essentially repeated her previous warning with the addition of the rumor about the storm being “sent,” adding only that Massid was spending all his time in her father’s company. She released the dove with a sense of futility, and carried a basket of eggs down to the cook as her excuse for being up there in the first place.

  With nothing much to do, she went into the Great Hall before returning to her rooms, and stood at the window, brooding down at the ocean.

  “Pining for a beloved, my lady?” Kedric’s dry voice came from behind her.

  “If you know anything at all about the women schooled by the Countess, you know we don’t pine for anything,” she replied, without turning. “And as for a beloved, you would know that we also are aware that our lives are not our own to give.”

  “Ah yes, you are well schooled in obedience—” The bitterness in his voice made her turn and regard him with a lifted brow.

  “Perhaps, Kedric, you are insufficiently acquainted with the meaning of the phrase noblesse oblige,” she replied, keeping her tone cool, and just on the polite side of sarcastic. “It means that those who are born into a position of power inherit obligations and responsibilities far in excess of the benefits of privilege. It means that we are obligated to protect those who give us their loyalty and service. Sometimes that protection comes at the cost of a life. Sometimes the cost is only freedom. But we owe them that. This is what noblesse oblige means.”

  She could not read Kedric’s face, so she continued. “Men,” she said with some bitterness of her own, “think that being willing to lay down their lives is difficult. They have no conception of what it means to be willing to lay down your life as a woman does—not for a moment of sacrifice, but for years, decades of sacrifice. To surrender it in that way so that the people you have sworn to protect are protected.”

  “And so, you lie down and let yourself—” Kedric began.

  She interrupted him, a cold fury in her voice that she could not entirely repress. “Is that what you think? That this is mere, passive obedience, weak and weak willed? I thought you wiser than your motley, Kedric. It is hard, hard, to subdue the will, to force aside I want for I must. But you mistake me. Even in the most loveless and calculated of marriages, there are children to love and be loved by. I refer to the hardest sacrifice of all, for a woman to steel her will to live alone and unwedded, not because she wishes to, but because, for the sake of her people, she must—to look down the long years ahead and see nothing at the end of them but an empty bed and a lonely singleness.”

  He made a little strangling sound, and she sniffed, interpreting his odd expression, she thought, correctly. “What? You thought the Countess remained single because she wished to? Or because she does not care for men? Oh, she mourns the Count her husband, and she truly loved him, but she stays a single widow because it is her cousin the King’s will, so that she can be the stalking horse, be dangled, like a prize at a fair, for all to see but ultimately never be won by any. And she takes no lovers, for she is the King’s cousin, and like Caesar’s wife, she must be above reproach. She knows that, has always known it, and she makes sure her Gr—her ladies know that there is more than one way in which the King may ask for their obedience, and what the cost may be.”

  “I—see,” he managed. “That had not occurred to me.”

  “And to protect my people, if I thought it would protect them, yes, I would give myself over to be locked away in a seraglio in Jendara,” she added, turning back to the window. “But I do not think it would protect them. I think the opposite, and I think the King would agree.”

  “I think he would, too, my lady.” Kedric’s tone was firm again.

  Well, there it was. The unspoken message and alliance she had been hoping to hear. Kedric was the King’s man, and he was here to be the King’s eyes and ears. “The trouble is, I do not know how to prevent it,” she said, sadly. “Short of throwing myself into the sea.”

  “You are the heir to a sea-keep, my lady, and as such you can wed any of the King’s subjects you choose without his leave,” Kedric said slowly, as if he was thinking aloud. “But by the law of the land and the charter by which a sea-keep is held, you cannot wed someone who is not one of his subjects without his leave.”

  And there it was—her escape. Or at least a way to stall for time. Her father would have to pretend that he was sending for the King’s permission. Probably he would forge such a message, but she had been schooled by the Countess, and she had seen and learned how to recognize the King’s hand and seal. She didn’t think there was anyone here with sufficient talent to successfully forge a royal decree.

  “That,” she said aloud, “is quite true. And it is exceedingly useful to keep in mind.”

  “I am pleased to have given you something useful, my lady,” he replied, as she turned back to look down at the ocean.

  A movement along the cliff face caught her eye. It was the work crew, going out to reple
nish the fuel for the beacon—and that reminded her, suddenly, of the mark she had made on the window of the nursery, a mark which might give her some information, though what use she could make of it, she was not yet sure.

  “You’ll excuse me, I hope,” she said, after a moment—but then, abruptly, added, “unless you would care to accompany me to the old nursery. I think I might have left something there that might interest you.”

  He looked at her askance, but nodded. “If you wish, my lady, and you think I may be of service.”

  She smiled without humor. “Say, rather, it might be instructive to you to see how a sea-keep child begins its life. We are not sheltered.”

  “That,” the minstrel said, raising his eyebrows, “I can truly believe.”

  He followed her to the nursery, and did not voice any objections to the chill, stale air as she opened the door. It was dark, as she had expected. As far as she could tell, no one had opened the shutters on the window since she herself had closed them.

  She went straight to the window, and opened them—she didn’t fling them open, she moved them quietly, to make as little noise as possible.

  “What are you—” Kedric began. She held up a cautioning hand.

  “This, you see, is the view every child of the lord of a sea-keep gets from the time it leaves the cradle,” she said, as she leaned down to scrutinize the windowpanes. Finally she resorted to finding the scratch she had made by touch rather than by sight. Somewhat to her surprise, it wasn’t standing out the way she had thought it would. Perhaps too many fantastic tales of lovelorn maidens or tragically imprisoned heroes inscribing poems on the windows of their rooms had given her the mistaken impression that all it would take was a little rubbing with a diamond to leave a visible mark.

  At length she found it, sat down on the window seat, and tried to make the mark line up with the beacon just visible from where she sat.

  It did nothing of the sort. The trouble was, it didn’t line up with any place that people would be able to get to. While she could certainly imagine that her father would have the cleverness to construct a false beacon, this one was apparently somewhere beyond the cliff itself, out in the water.

  Which was…odd.

  “It’s a bit of a harrowing view for a child, I would think,” Kedric said. Then he whispered, “What exactly are you doing, my lady? I hope you didn’t bring me here to reminisce.”

  “During the storm, I made a scratch on the glass to line up with the beacon,” she whispered back, “because it seemed to me that it was in the wrong place, and the only way to know for sure was to see if the mark lined up with the structure when the storm cleared.

  “Here, take my seat and see for yourself,” she said, louder, relinquishing her spot on the window seat. “Generations of sea-keep children grew up on this view, come storm or sunshine.”

  He replaced her, while she spoke in conversational tones about the beacon, the storms, and the beachcombers down on the rocks and what they might find.

  He lined himself up with her mark, and peered through the window, frowning. “What keeps the beacon alight?” he asked, still frowning.

  “Sea coal, but something’s done to it magically,” she replied. “A little of it burns with a tall, bright flame. There are reflectors behind the flame to send as much of the light as possible out to sea. We have to get the special coal from the King and store it. He sends it to us by packhorse. It must be very hard to make, because we have to account for every bit burned, and if we use more than we’ve been allotted, we have to say why.”

  With his back to her, she could see that one of his shoulders was significantly higher than the other, and his spine was slightly twisted. It looked very painful.

  Perhaps that accounted for his sourness.

  “The beacon and your scratch do not match up, my lady,” he said softly. “Is there any significance to the position where it does match up?”

  “Of course, the beacon is meant to show sailors where the coast is, when there are storms and fog,” she said aloud. “During times like those, ships hug the coastline, so they navigate by the beacons in order to avoid being lost at sea. But also a beacon has to be placed precisely, because at the spot where it has been built, there are generally shoals or rocks where ships can run aground.”

  He nodded. “So if, say, something were to destroy this beacon, the new one would have to be built on exactly the same spot?”

  “Oh, more than that. Even if this one were destroyed, some sort of temporary beacon would have to be put there immediately,” she replied. “It’s just too vital.”

  She watched his lips compress and his eyes narrow, only at that moment realizing that they were a dark grey that seemed to darken even as she watched. He knew something that she didn’t.

  “I wish, my lady, that we could discover just where along your coastline this scratch does line up,” he whispered.

  “There is no way to tell, and I wouldn’t care to go outside in a storm to try to find out,” she whispered back. Then she said, in a normal tone, “If it were not for the beacons, of course, it would not be possible for trade ships to sail in the winter, nor for the coastal patrols to keep enemies from our shores. Fishermen have no need of them, of course, for when the weather is foul they wisely do not put out to sea.”

  “Indeed. Well, this has been very enlightening, my lady, and I thank you for your hospitality.” He stood up abruptly, forcing her to step back with some haste. He sketched a bow. “There is a great deal more about this sea-keep and its daughter than meets the eye.”

  He held the door open for her courteously, and she stepped through. They parted at the intersection of the two corridors, and she returned to her room, feeling irritated and uneasy. She had shared her information with him, but he had given her nothing.

  Her irritation only increased when she returned to the Great Hall, intending, if nothing else, to watch the beachcombers and her father’s overseer below from the vantage point of the great window behind the High Table on the dais, thinking perhaps she might be able also to guess where the displaced beacon had been, though she could not for a moment imagine how the light had been displaced. As far as she could tell, though she was far from certain about this, it had been “moved” several hundred yards down the coastline and a bit farther out to sea. Which, if she was correct, would mean that any boat using it as a guide would think the promontory and rocks that the beacon stood over were there, and that once past, it would be safe to cut in closer to shore.

  Which would, of course, depending on the accuracy of the beacon, put a ship directly on the rocks.

  Was it just greed that had driven her father to storm-assisted piracy? That didn’t make a great deal of sense. In summer, when storms never lasted more than a day, yes. But winter storms lasted several days, and it wouldn’t do her father a great deal of good if the ship he wanted was wrecked on the first or second day of a storm. You couldn’t go out on the rocks for salvage in the teeth of a winter gale, and anything washed up after a wreck would soon be taken away by the sea and tides again. If he was colluding with the Khaleem to bring in invaders—

  Well, that made no sense, either. You would want the beacon where it actually was if you were bringing in strangers to this coast, and anyway, where would they land? The docks for the keep were small, nowhere near big enough for an invasion force. And anyway, the Khaleemate ran to pirates, not soldiers. It was one thing to turn them loose on the high seas and tax them on their booty when they returned to port. It was quite another to expect them to come in to land and act like soldiers.

  So why shift the beacon?

  And who had done it? The only thing she could think of was that it had been done by magic, and aside from Massid and Kedric, there were no obvious strangers here.

  And surely Massid could not be a magician. As rare as magicians were, surely the Khaleem would not allow a son who was also a magician so far away from home.

  She brooded down on the waves crashing over the
rocks in torrents of white foam, and felt a chill steal over her. That left Kedric.

  Kedric, who she, not that long ago, had told almost everything. So now, if he was her father’s man, her father knew everything—from her own reluctance to be handed off in marriage to Massid, to the fact that she knew about the beacon. After all, he hadn’t said he was the King’s man, she had merely read it into what he had said.

  Blessed God, I have been a fool! She stared sightlessly down into the water, feeling her heart slowly going numb, and her mind with it. She had showed him—she had told him—

  What? asked an impatient and surprisingly rational voice inside her. You told him that you would do your duty and marry Massid if you thought it would protect your people, but that you didn’t think it would do any such thing. You made it clear you were unhappy about the idea, and who wouldn’t be? You told him a few choice things about the Countess, but nothing that’s not common knowledge, and you didn’t reveal that you are a Grey Lady. You pointed out what your duty was to your people, and how much that duty could cost you. You showed him the scratch on the glass and told him why you’d made it, but so far as he knows, you have no way of telling anyone else.

  All that was true, certainly, but—

  But if he’s your father’s man, now he has all the arguments your father needs—or so he thinks—to persuade you to marry Massid when he proposes it. There’s no harm in that. He knows you are more intelligent than you appear, but there’s no harm in that, either. He doesn’t know about the birds, or your weapons, or any of your other skills. The only thing you showed him is that you are an intelligent young woman who suspects her father is up to no good, but who certainly can’t tell anyone and can’t do anything about the knowledge.

 

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