Fortune and Fate (Twelve Houses)

by Sharon Shinn

  Cammon yawned and seemed to shake himself awake. “It will,” he agreed. “And good to see Justin again.”

  “Justin’s meeting us today?” she said with a great deal of pleasure. “Does Tayse know?”

  “I suppose so, since I had to ask him the name of the inn we’re staying at. In fact, I think Justin’s there already.”

  Indeed, when the royal procession pulled up at a modest establishment in a fairly small town, Justin was waiting for them in the doorway. Senneth supposed that if it hadn’t been sleeting, he would have cantered on up the road to meet them, since Justin didn’t have much patience for sitting still. She didn’t even wait for Cammon to climb down from the coach first, but jumped out and rushed forward to throw her arms around the burly Rider. His answering hug almost broke her ribs.

  “Justin! It’s so good to see you!” she cried. He’d been gone about six weeks, and she had missed him dreadfully. “How was your visit to the Lirrens?”

  He laughed and shook back his sandy hair, then clapped Cammon hard on the shoulder. Justin was always properly respectful to Amalie, but he couldn’t stop treating Cammon like a little brother. “Full of lots of challenges and mock battles, as always,” he said. “I swear, if I didn’t lock and barricade the door, Torrin would creep in at night and see if he could take me by surprise when I was sleeping.”

  Torrin was Justin’s brother-in-law, a wily and aggressive fighter whose greatest ambition was to defeat Justin at swordplay. “Did you duel with him?” Cammon asked, ducking inside out of the rain.

  “I did.”

  “And did he ever beat you?”

  “He did not.”

  “In other words, a successful visit for you,” Senneth said.

  Justin laughed. “Torrin will never beat me. Sometimes I let him get close enough to keep him from getting discouraged.”

  Senneth gestured vaguely toward the door. “It’ll take Tayse a few minutes to get everyone settled. Have you asked for a private dining room? Cammon has been winning the hearts of the fawning multitudes by sitting in the taprooms and eating with the masses, but for tonight, at least, it would be nice to talk in privacy and hear your travel stories. If that suits you, Your Majesty,” she added.

  Cammon grinned. “Just for tonight, I suppose.”

  Justin was leading the way down a rather narrow hallway to a small room with heavy timbers and brightly painted whitewash. “I’ve already ordered the pitchers,” he said. “Figured we’d want to talk.”

  By the time a very wet Tayse maneuvered his big body into the room, they were on their second set of pitchers and had started in on the food besides. Tayse and Justin, of course, did not exchange any effusive greetings, just nodded at each other and looked pleased. “Good trip?” Tayse asked, dropping to a chair.

  “No troubles,” Justin said.

  Senneth scooted her own chair closer to Tayse’s. She could feel the cold emanating from his clothes and skin. “Give me your hand,” she said, and folded both of her warm ones over his broad, icy fingers. “You, at least, don’t have to be chilly as long as I am nearby.”

  Normally Tayse would shrug off any suggestion that he needed to look to his own comfort, but all this time later he still considered it a privilege to touch the hand of this particular serramarra. He laid his palm against hers and accepted the grace of her magic with a private smile. They held hands under the table and turned their attention back to their friends.

  “You don’t seem to have made much progress,” Justin said. “I thought you’d be a hundred miles farther along by now.”

  “Cammon’s taking the opportunity to spread goodwill, so our journey has been very slow,” Senneth replied. “So tell us about your trip! Was everyone excited to see Ceribel?”

  Ceribel was Justin’s daughter, a little more than a year old. Her eyes and hair were as dark as her mother’s, but she didn’t display much of Ellynor’s sweet tranquillity. No, she had Justin’s energy, curiosity, will, and temper. Senneth was absolutely positive the girl would grow up to be a Rider.

  Justin laughed and helped himself to more food. “Well, yes, of course they were, but I’m not sure they got what they expected,” he said. “Last time we visited, Ceribel was only two months old, and she wasn’t walking around smacking people and trying to grab everything for herself. The Lirren girls are all very meek, you know. But Ceribel . . .” He shook his head. “She’s a handful. Ellynor can handle her, but I could tell before I left she was starting to resent her mother’s comments about how we were raising her.”

  Senneth started to say something, glanced around the room, and then laughed. “I thought I would murmur, ‘I believe all young couples find that their parents disapprove of their child-rearing methods,’ or something like that, but then I realized not one of us knows a damn thing about what a normal family is like. So I’m afraid none of us can give you any advice.”

  Justin grinned. “Don’t need any advice. Ceribel is perfect.”

  Tayse also looked amused. “Have you shared with Ellynor’s parents the fact that you’re teaching her how to hold a dagger?”

  “Justin!” Senneth exclaimed.

  “It’s wooden. It’s fine,” Justin reassured her. “I wasn’t going to tell them, but then she was sitting on Torrin’s lap and she tried to pull his knife from his belt, so—I had to explain a little. I thought he’d pitch a fit, because Torrin is so fierce about Lirren rules, but I think the idea tickled him. I figure by the time I go back to get Ellynor, he’ll have taught Ceribel how to play hoop toss—and probably win it, too.”

  As hoop toss involved catching metal rings on the tip of a sword, Senneth rather doubted this, but she was glad to hear the warlike Torrin seemed to be so fond of his niece. “Has her family accepted the idea that Ceribel will be raised outside of the Lirrenlands?” she asked.

  Justin drained his glass and poured another one. “I don’t think so, no. I could see Ellynor’s mother and sisters sort of crowding her sometimes, talking very seriously. I’m sure they were trying to make the point that no Lirren girl should be raised across the Lireth Mountains. And no doubt Torrin and Hayden will add their voices as well. But I’m not too worried. Ellynor is pretty stubborn.”

  “Did you see Valri while you were there?” Cammon asked. He had been very close to Amalie’s stepmother, who had returned to the Lirrens shortly after the war. She had not been back across the mountains to visit, but Senneth was fairly sure both Amalie and Cammon kept in touch with her regularly—Amalie by letter, and Cammon by more mystical means.

  “She was there for a few days when we first arrived,” Justin said. “And Arrol with her. I swear I almost didn’t recognize her at first. Her hair was long—all the way down her back and covered with those strange designs—and you wouldn’t believe how it changes her face. Also, she just looked different. Happy. Relaxed, maybe. She never looked that way when she was living at the palace.”

  Senneth sighed. “Well, I don’t think any of us were looking too relaxed those last few months in Ghosenhall before the war,” she said. “Valri might not recognize us, either.”

  “I don’t think I look any different,” Cammon said.

  Justin laughed and scrubbed his hand through Cammon’s hair, which hardly had the effect of making it look any worse than it had a moment before. “You’re all cleaned up,” Justin said. “Dressed in fine clothes. She’d never know who you were.”

  “At least I own decent clothes these days,” Cammon said. “Unlike some people.”

  Justin glanced down at his muddy trousers. “I’ve been traveling.”

  “So have we,” Cammon replied.

  “When did you tell Ellynor you’d be back?” Senneth asked.

  “Thought it would be a couple of months, but I wasn’t sure how long this mission would take,” Justin said, a note of inquiry in his voice. “In fact, I’m not really clear on what we’re doing or where we’re going, just that Cammon indicated I should join you.”

  “We’re ma
king a circuit of the southern Houses,” Senneth said. “Gisseltess then Rappengrass then Fortunalt. I would have thought we could complete that in way under two months, but given Cammon’s insistence on personally speaking to every single human being who resides within a twenty-mile radius of our route, I am beginning to think a year won’t be long enough.”

  “And we will need to spend some time at each House, so that adds to our days,” Tayse put in. “But if you feel a pressing need to return to the Lirrens, we are defended well enough. Seventy soldiers in our train, and seven other Riders.”

  “Who else?” Justin asked, sounding pleased. After Tayse listed the names, he said, “I’ll go out and see them when we’re done here. But I’m still not sure I understand the basic purpose of the trip.”

  At times, Senneth wasn’t sure she understood it, either. She could not rid herself of a feeling that Cammon had motives that he had not shared. What kept her from being truly uneasy was the knowledge that Cammon’s entire bent was for harmony and unity. If he had an unstated goal, it would be a peaceful one.

  “Amalie wants to travel throughout the realm,” Cammon said. “I know there’s been some restlessness in the southern regions. I thought if I made the journey first I would be able to sense how safe she would be.”

  Justin grinned at Tayse. “Guess we couldn’t keep Amalie penned up in Ghosenhall forever,” he said. “That’ll be an interesting trip.”

  “This one might be interesting, too,” Senneth said, watching Cammon’s innocent face. “You just never know.”

  Chapter 13

  WEN HAD A LITTLE EXPERIENCE WITH MYSTICS, SINCE SHE had fought alongside a handful of them during the war and even trained with one or two. Senneth Brassenthwaite had been a decent fighter intent on honing her swordsmanship without resorting to magic to win an encounter, but Cammon had been utterly incapable of going into battle without drawing upon his ability to read his opponent. That mental sensitivity had given him insurmountable defensive skills—it was literally impossible to land a blow on him. It had scarcely mattered that he had no offensive skills to speak of.

  Even so, Cammon had killed three men who had tried to assassinate Amalie, or so Wen had heard. That had been the very day Baryn himself had died.

  Wen shook her head and again concentrated on the task at hand—which, this morning, was figuring out how to incorporate a mystic’s skills into the strategy of the battlefield. She had paired Moss with Orson, because if Moss could disrupt Orson’s attack, she could outfight anybody. Well, except a Rider.

  So far, it hadn’t helped much to have Moss try to jerk Orson’s sword from his grasp. It startled him, but he just leapt over it and assaulted Moss with his bare hands. And while she was having the life choked out of her, she couldn’t focus on pelting him with small stones and other pieces of debris.

  “I think you have to be more aggressive in your own attack,” Wen said thoughtfully once the combatants broke apart. Moss was panting, but Orson seemed completely unaffected by the recent struggle. “Don’t let him get close enough to do any damage.”

  “That’ll be hard to manage in the heat of battle,” Orson observed. “She needs to learn tricks that will help her after she’s already engaged.”

  “We’ll get to those, too,” Wen said. “I want to see what advantages she can summon up most easily.”

  “I can drop a rock on his head,” Moss said between gasps. “Minute I see him coming toward me.”

  “How much mass can you move all at once?” Wen asked. “How much weight?”

  Moss shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been practicing with different sizes of boulders. Some seem pretty heavy. But I have to concentrate to lift them and move them where I want them to go.”

  “What if you didn’t have to lift it?” Wen said. “What if you just had to push it?”

  Orson saw where she was going and gave her his wicked grin. “Well, let’s try that,” he said, dropping into a runner’s crouch. “You try to shove me back.”

  Without any more warning than that, he sprang for Moss across five feet of trampled earth. She gave a little shriek and flung her hands up—and Orson actually seemed to thump against blank air before he skidded backward and landed on his rear. He was just stunned enough to sit there silently for a moment, and then he started laughing.

  “That’s the idea,” he said, picking himself up. “That’s exactly what you want to do.”

  Moss looked at her hands, a little bemused. “I never tried that before. I didn’t know I could do that.”

  “That’s what fighting for your life will teach you,” Orson said. “The limits of your physical strength.”

  Wen was pleased. “Yes, Moss, that was very good. We’ll need to keep practicing that so it becomes automatic every time you’re threatened.”

  “Ought to see how many people she can shove aside at once,” Orson suggested. “A whole line of fighters? A man on horseback? Now, that would be worth something.”

  “First let’s see if I can knock you over again,” Moss said. She had pushed her pale hair behind her ears and her strange eyes were bright in her broad, plain face. Wen thought she had never seen Moss look so triumphant—even though this was a relatively minor victory. Or maybe not, in Moss’s life, which remained largely unknown to Wen. Such a small success might be the first one the other woman had ever had.

  The three of them worked on Moss’s skills for the rest of the afternoon, Wen taking her turn running at Moss in case the act of repulsion was affected by an opponent with a different center of gravity. Moss could knock Wen over with more ease, but Wen was faster to recover and managed to skid forward on her knees and bring Moss down with her.

  “You’re completely dead,” Wen said, miming a slash to Moss’s throat.

  “I love to see women fight,” Orson said.

  Wen met Moss’s eyes and shared a thought. Wen stood up and brushed herself off as Orson strolled forward to offer Moss a hand up. Instead, he got knocked flat on his back, and Wen pounced on him, pummeling his chest and shoulders. He yelped and bucked her off, but by this time Moss had used her magic to snatch up a rock about the size of her own head, and she dropped this with a satisfying splat right in the middle of his stomach. He groaned and rolled to his side, not making any attempt to rise.

  “I love to see women fight, too,” Wen said. “They’re so much smarter than men.”

  Then she heard a sound that she had come to think did not exist. Moss’s laughter.

  IT turned out that Jasper Paladar had been thinking about the uses of magic, too, which Wen discovered that night as she joined him in the library. They were almost two weeks into the cruxanno game, and she was tired of it; she had every hope it would be finished soon.

  On the other hand, the long, slow game had practically invited the two of them to make idle conversation during the hours they played, and Wen had come to really look forward to the discussions. It was hard to predict what topic would catch Lord Jasper’s fancy from day to day. Sometimes he might ask her prosaic questions about the guards and their progress; other times he might want her opinion on a piece of news he had learned from Ghosenhall. Just as often, he would launch into a tale about some marlord dead these hundred years—stories that Wen would have expected to find excruciatingly dull, but which, in fact, could hold her interest long after they had given up on cruxanno for the night.

  She liked Jasper Paladar. She didn’t understand why, precisely. He was not like anyone she had ever met and he didn’t have any of the qualities she was used to requiring in her friends. Merely, he was interesting to her. She found him baffling half of the time and intriguing all of the time. She couldn’t imagine what he found in her own personality to appeal to him, but he never seemed bored in her presence, never seemed disappointed by her replies. Perhaps he merely possessed the grace of his elevated social station and knew how to put any other individual at ease, but she thought it was more than that. He liked her, too.