by Sharon Shinn
He gave her a tremulous smile. “Your father sounds a little terrifying.”
Senneth laughed. “Malcolm Danalustrous is more than a little terrifying, but Kirra is right. That would be a very good place for you, in the service of a great lord.”
“Or the king,” Justin said, as always jealous on behalf of royalty.
“Or the king,” Senneth acknowledged.
Cammon looked alarmed. “I don’t aspire so high!”
“If he had use for you,” Justin said with great haughtiness, “you would serve him and be glad of it.”
Kirra looked over at the other Rider with a bright curiosity. There were no end of tensions between the members of this little group, but Tayse had always thought the animosity was greatest between these two. Justin hated Kirra for embodying all the rank and power of a privileged, pampered class—and Kirra scarcely could bring herself to remember that Justin was even alive.
But she seemed to see him, at least briefly, this night. “So what’s your story, Justin?” she asked. “How did you come to be part of the king’s elite?”
Justin glanced quickly at Tayse, who nodded. Then he shrugged and began telling, with elaborate unconcern, the story he simply never told. Most of it, even so, he edited out. “I grew up in Ghosenhall, five miles from the palace. In the thieves’ district. My mother had four children, none of whom had a father they could name. We lived in a place so filthy I cannot describe it to you.” He nodded across the fire at the dark-haired man next to Kirra. “Donnal maybe might know what it’s like to grow up in poverty, with absolutely nothing, but none of the rest of you would understand, no matter how long I made my story.
“My three sisters were gone before I was ten. I don’t know where they went or if they still live. My mother died of a disease that started between her legs and rotted her body inch by inch. I was already spending much of my time on the streets, roving the roads and alleys with other boys just like me.” He smiled, an evil smile at an evil memory. “There is a reason the very wealthy do not walk certain streets of the royal city unescorted. Boys like us would accost them in deep night or full daylight, and steal their purses and offer to take their lives. Some of us died in skirmishes with civil guards and paid escorts. Others died of starvation and sickness. The rest of us—we became very, very dangerous. I could disarm a man in twenty seconds if he chose to fight me. I could defeat three men at once. After I turned twelve, I never went a day without enough money to buy myself food and, sometimes, lodging. None of my friends went hungry.”
There was a short silence. “Did you ever kill anyone?” Cammon asked.
Justin gave him one brooding look. “I don’t know. Every man I fought was still alive when I left him in the streets. I don’t know how well they all recovered from their wounds.”
“I can hardly wait to hear the transition,” Kirra said.
But Senneth was looking from Justin to Tayse; she had figured it out long ago, Tayse realized. She said nothing, though, and Justin resumed his story. “One day as I set out to rob a man of his wallet, we dueled in the street. He was better than I was—so much better that I was astonished, because no one had ever been able to stand against me longer than a minute or two. But he used a dagger like mine, and he sparred with me, and he didn’t tire and he didn’t give way, and I never got his purse. In fact, I was the one who slipped and fell to the cobblestones, and I lay there expecting the knife to come and end my life. But the knife didn’t fall. The man knelt beside me in the street and said, ‘I could use a man with skill like yours. Come with me to the palace.’ ”
“To the palace?” Kirra repeated.
Justin nodded. “It was Tayse. He brought me to the king’s palace and had me train with the civil guard. It was another five years before I was found good enough to be a King’s Rider. I’ve been a Rider now for seven years.”
“I thought the Riders were the best and most faithful of the king’s soldiers,” Cammon said.
Tayse said, “They are.”
“And so King Baryn overlooked your rough past and named you one of his own,” Kirra said. “That is rather a remarkable story. And yet I believe you. The best hound my father ever owned was a stray who arrived at our estate bloody and abused, so broken that the head groom wanted to cut its throat to put it out of its misery. But something in my father made him want to keep that dog. He fed it with his own hands, and changed its bandages, and let it sleep in his own room when it was strong enough. To this day, that hound is abjectly devoted to my father. Follows him everywhere—would protect my father with his life, I truly believe. And yet it was nothing to look at when it first arrived.”
Justin looked both amused and furious. “Just so,” he said. “Take away the insult, and the stories are exactly the same.”
Kirra seemed surprised. “I intended no insult.”
Senneth was laughing. “The nobility value their dogs almost above their heirs,” she said. “A compliment of the highest order.”
“At any rate,” Tayse said, “the king chose wisely when he admitted Justin into the ranks of the Riders.”
Now Kirra’s curiosity was piqued. She gave Tayse a considering look. “And you? How did you earn your grand place?”
Tayse smiled. “Oh, my story is quickly told. My father is a Rider—my grandfather was a Rider—I was born to it. It would have broken my heart to have been judged unworthy, so everything I did—from the day I was old enough to hold my first practice sword—I did in order to win my place. There was nothing else I wanted to be, nothing else I could have done. I am what I was fated to become.”
Senneth was watching him, her eyes flickering to darkness and back to gray as the yellow flames postured before her. “It would have been interesting to see,” she said, “what would have become of you if you could not have attained the dream. If you were turned away from your purpose and set loose on the world to forge some other way.”
“As you did?” Tayse replied politely.
He had thought to discomfort her, but she merely smiled. “That is, to some extent, my story.”
“Tell us that story, then,” he invited. “All the rest of us have opened up our hearts.”
“Some of you have,” she said. “Some of you have merely recited a tale.”
Now Tayse grinned, for that was surely aimed at him. “Then recite a tale for us,” he said. “Tell us the story of your life.”
CHAPTER 13
SENNETH seemed to deliberate a moment before she started speaking. Tayse found himself wondering how much of the truth they would learn at last, how much Senneth would still conceal. “My father never had high hopes of me, because he had no interest in daughters,” she said at last. “He was far more attached to my brothers, who were numerous. He was not particularly attentive to my mother, either, though she tried very hard to be a good wife and to please him. She only failed twice, that I ever saw. Once, when she produced me. Once, when it turned out I was a mystic.”
Another pause. “I try not to relive those days too often,” she said, her voice very dry. “To remember my father’s rage when it became apparent that I had strange abilities. In truth, I had had them since I was quite young, but my father had managed to spend very little time around me, and so he did not see my accidents with fire, the way I could make a candle gutter and go out, the way my touch could sometimes burn my mother or my nurse. I had mostly learned to control these aberrations—or so I thought—but when I was seventeen, they suddenly gathered even more force and potency. They grew past the point that I knew how to direct them.”
Kirra was nodding. “That happens sometimes. It is usually between the ages of twelve and eighteen that a mystic’s power grows strongest. They say that if you have exhibited no signs of power by the time you’re eighteen, you never will.”
“Safe, then!” Justin breathed, and they all laughed.
Senneth smiled, but she did not laugh. “So. My father learned my terrible secret, and he turned me out of the house. He would hav
e sent me on my way without food or money, but my two youngest brothers ran after me, sobbing, pressing on me what few coins and trinkets they had. My older brothers merely watched from the windows as I was cast out into the night. My mother lay sobbing in her room. My grandmother—” Senneth smiled again. “My mother’s mother turned to my father—stood beside him on the walkway that led from the front door—and cursed him to his face. Told him that he would die within three years from his own internal fires—his blood would boil, his liver would cook, his heart would burst into flames. All sorts of terrible things. Then she came running after me and gave me this pendant.” Senneth tugged out the gold charm she always wore, then tucked it back into her shirt. “And away I went.”
“And did he?” Cammon asked in fascination. “Die? Your father?”
Senneth nodded. “Almost exactly three years later. Yes, he did. I can’t say whether his heart caught fire or any of those other dreadful things occurred, but he did die from some internal cause. He didn’t get thrown by a horse or die in a brawl. His body betrayed him.”
“And what happened to you? Did you ever go back home?” Cammon said.
She shook her head. “No. I haven’t been back since. I took off and began my wandering.” She smiled a little. “I tried my hand at almost every trade I could find, if the work seemed honest and the guild master was willing to hire a woman. I was strong, you know—I’ve always been. I liked working at the smith’s, because I’d always been drawn to fire, and I was never afraid of the hot metal or the leaping flames. The smith and I got along famously, too, so I stayed there a year or more. But he died, and his son didn’t like me—and I was restless anyway—so I moved on.”
She shrugged. “I tried soldiering—took a few jobs before I signed on with Malcolm Danalustrous. I tried farming, but I found it too dull. I hired on for a while with a merchant ship, and I liked that job just fine. The captain was a woman, and half her crew were women, and there wasn’t a soft one in the bunch. But I didn’t like being so far from home. I found that the farther I got from Gillengaria, the weaker I became.”
“What do you mean, weaker?” Justin asked.
Senneth glanced at Cammon. “I have a theory that those of us who are born mystics really only have any true magic while we’re standing in Gillengaria. That we are somehow bound to its soil. So that you, Cammon, really only had a whisper of power when you lived in places like Sovenfeld. At any rate, my magic faded while I was away from this land. My body was still strong, but my—my power was almost gone. I couldn’t control fire. I couldn’t summon my own heat. If I’d been trying to run away from my abilities, then I’d have stayed forever on board ship, or disembarked at Arberharst and lived there the rest of my days. But I missed that peculiar strength. I missed—being out of the ordinary. So eventually I wandered back.
“Since then it’s been mostly wandering,” she continued. “Though I lived for a year or two in the Lirrens, as I’ve mentioned, and for a while I thought I might be settled there. That whole place is strange—all those people are strange—I was not like them, and I didn’t understand them, but I could live among them and feel at ease.”
She smiled over at Justin. “You might fit in well with the people there. They’re very fierce. They have this complex network of kin and friendship that binds them in some way to almost every family in the entire region. But they hate outsiders. They are absolutely ruthless to anyone who tries to enter their society and does not belong. Like your Rider friends.”
“Why did they accept you, then?” Justin demanded.
“I did a favor for one man in one family, and he in a sense adopted me. And when I was part of his family, I was part of all families. I could go there tomorrow, and whisper a few names, and be welcomed at any household I tried. But if you did such a thing—” She lifted her hands in a half circle, a mild gesture of chaos. “You would probably be destroyed by nightfall.”
She leaned forward a little, and Tayse watched how the bright fire illuminated her whole face. “This is the worst of it, if you are a Gillengaria man and you fall in love with a Lirren girl. If she agrees to marry you—which she never will—you have to prove you are worthy of her by battling one of the men of her family—to the death. That’s right, you have to kill her father or her brother or her uncle or her cousin, or you will not be given the right to marry her. Well, as you might imagine, very few Lirren girls want to see their family members murdered—and of course, if they truly love some man, they don’t want to see him die, either. So you almost never hear of any Lirren girl running off with a man her family has not approved. There are a few ballads—songs the women sing when the men aren’t around—and they are quite heartbreaking to hear. Of a love so great it had to be put aside.”
“I think, if I had been born a Lirren girl, I would have run off to Gillengaria before I turned sixteen,” Kirra remarked.
Senneth smiled. “Maybe. But it is quite an amazing thing to be surrounded by a family that loves you so much it will not let you go. I did not truly belong there, and yet there were times I would have gladly stayed forever, just to have that sense of being enveloped and beloved. Something I lost quite early—or maybe never really had.”
“You mentioned something about them the other day,” Cammon said. “You said they worshiped a different god—not the Pale Mother everyone here talks about, and not the sun goddess, either?”
Senneth nodded. “Oh yes. In the Lirrens they’re all devoted to the Dark Watcher—the Black Mother. The goddess of night,” she explained, apparently reading the bafflement on their faces.
“I’ve never heard of such a goddess,” Tayse said.
“No? Well, my grandmother said you used to be able to find a shrine or two dedicated to her in any of the regions of Gillengaria,” Senneth said. “Just as you could find temples to the Green Keeper and the Wind Maker and the others. I don’t think her influence was ever really very strong outside of the Lirrenlands. But there she is quite revered. They all wear black opals on chains around their necks, and they pray to her daily, and they believe that many things that happen at night are sanctified because they occur under her watchful eyes. There are a few of them who claim to have a direct connection with her—to have spoken with her, or to be descended from men and women who have spoken to her—and those people are treated with great honor and considered almost holy. And I confess, the one or two I met had really quite marvelous abilities.”
“Such as?” Kirra asked.
Senneth looked her way. “You’re an excellent healer, but these women—I saw them take men back from the brink of death. More than once. And they can—hide things. Houses, people. Once I knew a woman traveling with a party of ten. They were eager not to be spotted by some others who were looking for them—a feud between families, if I remember. We had camped on the road for the night, but we heard the sounds of horses approaching in the dark. And this woman simply cloaked us in darkness. No one could see us—the dogs couldn’t smell us. It was as if we were lost in the profoundest midnight imaginable. I have never felt so safe. And then there is the matter of the raelynxes—the power some of these people can exert over creatures of the night. Casually, without putting any effort into it, as we would call a dog or knock aside a moth.”
“It almost sounds like magic,” Kirra said. “All those things you describe.”
Senneth nodded. “Yes, that’s what I was telling Cammon the other day. I would like to take him to the Lirrens sometime and see if he could read the people for me, and tell me the whole lot of them are mystics.”
She fell silent, but no one else spoke; it was clear she was still thinking about some part of her tale and debating whether or not to go on with it. Her eyes were fixed on the fire. Tayse wondered if she was watching some picture in those flames that no one else could see.
“In fact,” she said slowly, “in fact, I sometimes wonder . . .” She glanced up at the crumbling walls around them and then back at the fire. “If the Lirrens get their power fr
om the Dark Watcher, and they are mystics, might not all of us derive our power from some god or another? It takes no great stretch of imagination to look at me and say, ‘You are a child of the Bright Mother, a descendant of the sun goddess herself. You can control flame because the Bright Mother herself is built from fire. You can will a room to fill with heat, you can create warmth from the cold bones of your own body, because you draw from that primordial source. Anything to do with flame or destruction or even creation, when it comes from the life-giving warmth of the sun, you can shape or summon with your hands.’ ” She looked up briefly, sending her glance around the faces in the circle, and looked back at her small fire. “I more than half believe it,” she said.
Tayse stared at the fire and wanted to be shocked and wanted to be disdainful, but he found himself both unsurprised and free of scorn. It made as good an explanation as any, and he was a man who needed explanations before anything ever seemed possible to him. She was descended from a goddess; well, why not? It was true she was not an ordinary woman.
He had never had much truck with deities. Ghosenhall had been an agnostic city since Tayse was born into it, and a king’s man placed the royal family above all other commitments. There might be gods, and other folk might worship them, but they did not matter much to Tayse or his fellow Riders. Truth to tell, the gods had not seemed to matter much to any of the people of Gillengaria, until the Daughters of the Pale Mother had started whispering tales of witchcraft.
Into the hushed room, Kirra’s voice came, equally hushed. “If it is true all mystics derive their powers from one god or another, then what god has touched me?”
Senneth looked at her. “I think the Wild Mother watches over you and Donnal and any who can shape-shift. The Wild Mother was the one who cared for all living creatures, who made the ox strong and the hare swift. She was never revered much, my grandmother said, because people did not understand her. They couldn’t determine what power she might give them—they already had dominion over animals as far as they were concerned—so they did not particularly worry about doing her honor.”