Gods help her people. If I was what I’m pretending to be, I think I’d go hunting a sharp knife, and I’m not sure if I’d use it on her first, or myself. . . .
“Thought you might end up here,” drawled a strange, well-trained voice, as he bolted out the door and into the street. He turned, blinking in the bright sunlight. Lounging against a wall across the street was the grizzled minstrel who’d been playing the gittern in one of the other taverns the night before. He was dressed in dull colors that blended with the wall; he’d taken up a post right opposite The Green Man. He looked bored and lazy; as Valdir watched him suspiciously, he pushed away from the wall and walked slowly toward him across the cobblestones. In the light of day he was clearly much older than Valdir; hair thinning and mostly gray, square face beginning to wrinkle and line. But as he approached Valdir, it was also plain that he had kept his body in relatively good shape; beneath the loose, homespun shirt, leather tunic and breeches, he had only the tiniest sign of a paunch, and the rest of him looked wiry and strong enough to survive just about any tavern brawl.
. To someone like Valdir, this stranger meant danger of another sort. The man could be looking to eliminate a rival, or intending to bully him—or worse.
Talk about luck being out. Have I leaped out of the pan into the fire?
Valdir backed up a pace, letting his uncertainty show on his face.
A tired horse pulled a slops-wagon down the center of the street, and the stranger stepped deliberately toward him once it had passed.
“Ah, ease up, boy, I’m not about to pummel you,” the minstrel said, a faint hint of disgust twisting his lips. Valdir continued to step back, until the minstrel had him trapped in a corner where a fence met the inn wall. Valdir froze, his hands pressed against the unsanded wood behind him, and the minstrel reached for his face, grabbing his chin in a hand rough with chording-calluses. He turned Valdir’s cheek into the light, and examined the slowly purpling bruise.
“Got you a good one, did she?” He touched the edge of the bruise without hurting his captive. “Huhn. Not as bad as it could be.”
The minstrel let him go and backed up a few steps. Valdir huddled where he was, watching him fearfully. The stranger scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Heard you last night when I went on break. You aren’t bad.”
“Thank you,” Valdir replied timidly.
“You’re also going to get your hands broken if you stay with Bel for very long,” the other continued. “That’s what she did to the one before the one that ran off with her girl.”
Valdir did not reply.
“Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Valdir asked, letting his suspicion show. He stood up a little straighter, and rubbed his sweaty palms on his patched and faded linen tunic in a conscious echoing of an unconscious gesture of nervousness.
“Because the one before the one that ran off with her girl was a good lad,” the older man said, impatience getting the better of him. “He was pretty, like you, and he was fey, like I bet you are, and I don’t want it happening to another one. All right?” He turned on his heel and started to walk away.
Don’t turn away a possible ally!
“Wait!” Valdir cried after him. “Please, I—I didn’t mean—”
A bit of breeze blew dry leaves up the street. The minstrel halted, turned slowly. Valdir walked toward him, holding out his hand. “I’m Valdir,” he said shyly. “I’ve been—north. Baires.” The other showed his surprise with a hissing intake of breath. “I made a bit of a mistake, and I had to make a run for it.” He looked down at his feet, then back up again. “It hasn’t been easy; not while I was there, and not getting across the border to here. They got me out of the habit of looking for friends up there, and into the habit of looking for enemies.”
“Renfry,” said the older minstrel, clasping his hand, with a slow smile that showed a good set of even, white teeth. “Not many real musicians on the Row. I s’ppose I should be treating you as a rival—but—hell, a man gets tired of hearing and singing the same damn things over and over. Bel had Jonny for a long while before she ruined him, and he trained here.”
“What happened to him? After, I mean.”
“We clubbed together and sent him off to a Healer the very next day, ended up having to send him across the Border. Uppity palace Healer didn’t want to ‘waste his time on tavern scum.’ Never heard anything after that.” He shrugged. “If the poor lad ended up not being able to play again, I don’t imagine he’d want anyone to know.”
Valdir shuddered, genuinely.
“Ol’ Bel don’t believe in letting the help sample the goods. She got drunk and thought Jonny had his eye on one of the girls.” He snorted in contempt. “Not bloody likely.”
“She must have slipped up once—” Valdir ventured. “I mean—the one that romanced her girl, like you said.”
Renfry laughed, and started up the dusty, near-empty street with Valdir following. The thin autumn sunlight stretched their shadows out ahead of them. “She did, because she was bedding the fellow herself. She never figured him for having the stamina to be double-dipping! Truth to tell, I hope he was good in bed, because he surely had a voice like a crow in mating season, and maybe four whole chords to his name.”
Valdir thought about the way Bel had tried to come on to him, and could actually feel a shred of sympathy for the unknown minstrel. “Were you waiting out here for me?” Valdir asked, as they approached the closed door of The Pig and Stick, the tavern Renfry had been playing in last night.
Renfry nodded, holding the door to “his” inn open.
“Why?”
“To warn you, like I said. Let you know you’d better make tracks.”
Valdir shook his head, and his hair fell over one eye. “I can’t. I—I haven’t got a choice,” he confessed sadly. “I haven’t anywhere else to go.”
Renfry paused in surprise, half in, half out of the doorway. “That lean in the pocket?” he asked. “Lad, you aren’t that bad. You’re a good enough musician, for true. Unless you really made more than just a mistake.”
Valdir nodded unhappily. “Made a bad enemy. Sang the wrong song at the wrong time. Used to be with a House. Now I’ve got the clothes on my back, my lute, and that’s mostly it.”
“Save your coppers and head over the Border into Valdemar,” the other advised. “Tell you what, I’ll stand you a drink and a little better breakfast than you’d get from old Bel, then I’ll steer you over to a decent corner. Not the best, but with the palace a wreck, there’s a lot of guards standing about with nothing to do but make sure our High and Mighty Lord Visitor doesn’t get himself in the way of a stray knife round about the Town Elder’s house. You ought to collect a bit there, hmm?” He grinned. “Besides, I got an underhanded motive. You’re about as good as me, and you know some stuff new to our folk. I’m going to bribe you with food to learn it, and then I’m going to get you out of town so you aren’t competition anymore.”
Valdir smiled back hesitantly, at least as far as his sore cheek permitted. “Now that I understand!”
• • •
By nightfall Bel was sober, and when Valdir crept in at the open door she waved him to his place on the hearth with nothing more threatening than a scowl. He sat down on the raised brick hearth with his bruised cheek to the fire, and began tuning the lute. There were one or two customers; nothing much. Valdir was just as glad; it gave him a chance to think over what he’d picked up.
It had been a very profitable day. The Town Elder’s servants were entertainment-starved and loose-tongued; once Valdir had gotten them started they generally ran on quite informatively and at some length before demanding something in return.
Ylyna had been a child-bride; that made Tashir’s arrival eight-and-a-half months after the wedding so much more surprising. Several of the Mavelan girls
had been offered as prospective treaty-spouse, but of them all, only Ylyna had lacked mage-powers, so only Ylyna had been acceptable to Deveran Remoerdis or his people. It was generally agreed that she was “odd, even for a Mavelan.” And strangely enough, it was also generally agreed that up until the night of the massacre Tashir had been a fairly decent, if slightly peculiar, young man. “A bit like you, lad,” one of the guards had said. “Jumpin’ at shadows, like. Nervy.” If it had not been for his mage-powers there likely would have been no objection to his eventual inheritance of the throne of Lineas. But once those powers manifested, it became out of the question. No Linean would stand by and see a mage take the seat of power.
“We seen what comes o’ that, yonder,” an aged porter had told him a bit angrily, pointing with his chin at the north. “Put a mage in power, next thing ye know, he’s usin’ magic t’ get any damn thing ’e want out ’o ye. No. No mages here.”
So as soon as it had become evident that several of Tashir’s younger brothers—all of whom markedly resembled Deveran—were going to live into adulthood, the Council demanded that Deveran disinherit the boy. They didn’t have to pressure him, according to the Lord Elder’s first chambermaid; he gave in at once, so quickly that the ink wasn’t even dry on the copies of the proclamation when his heralds cried the news.
And strangely enough, Tashir didn’t seem the least unhappy about it. “Didn’ ’xactly jump for joy, but didn’ seem t’ care, neither,” a fruitseller had observed.
Lord Vedric—that was who Valdir assumed was the “Lord Visitor,” though he was never referred to as anything but “that Mavelan Lord”—had come as something of a surprise to the folk of Highjorune. They’d expected him to attempt to defend Tashir; instead he’d listened to the witnesses with calm and sympathy, and had expressed his horrified opinion that the boy had gone rogue. He’d kept displays of magery to a minimum, and had made himself available to the Council as a kind of advisor until someone figured out how to get Tashir back to be punished, and until they determined who the new ruler of Lineas would be.
As for the startling resemblance between Lord Vedric and Tashir—
“’E said th’ boy could be ’is, ’e didn’t know,” one of the chambermaids—a pretty one that Valdir suspected of getting gossip fodder via pillow talk—had whispered, sniggering, to Valdir. “’E said th’ girl couldn’ keep ’er skirts down, an’ that she’d bribed ’er way inta lots o’ beds, takin’ the place o’ th’ girls as was s’pposed t’ be there. Said ’e’d found ’er in ’is bed more’n once, an’ that ’e didn’t know it were ’is own ’alf-sister an’ not the wench ’e’d called fer till mornin’. That was why ’e were tryin’ t’ keep th’ boy heir, so ’e says; tryin’ t’ do right by ’im, like, just in case.” She sniggered again. “I ’eard ’nough fr’m m’ cousin ’bout ’Er ’Ighness an’ ’er lightskirt ways I believe ’im.”
And the cousin, it seemed, had been one of Ylyna’s personal maids. More importantly, she had been out of the palace the night everyone else had been killed. The chambermaid had promised an introduction in a day or two.
“You gonna sit there all night diddlin’ that thing, or you gonna play?” Bel growled, breaking into his thoughts. With a start and a cowed look, he began playing.
• • •
The young girl scampered back to her duties, leaving Valdir alone with the last surviving member of the palace staff, her cousin. The woman pondered him for a moment, then, a trifle reluctantly, invited him into her tiny parlor. The cousin was old; that surprised Valdir. And the odd look she gave him as he took the seat she indicated surprised him more.
“Why are ye askin’, lad?” she queried, as she settled into her own chair. “If it’s just morbid curiosity . . .”
He rubbed the bruise Bel had gifted him with this morning—it matched the first—and tried to get her measure. She was a bit younger than Savil, and small, but proudly erect. There was something very dignified about her, and out of keeping with her purported position; she didn’t hold herself with the air of a servant. She was plainly clothed, in dark wool dress and white linen undertunic, but the wool was fine lambswool, tightly woven, and costly, and the linen as fine as he had ever seen on his mother. She watched him from under half-closed lids. Her eyes seemed full of secrets.
She had been out of the palace that fatal evening, the girl had told him, because she had been here, in the home of her aged mother, who had fallen and could not be left alone at night. There was a great deal about her that prompted Valdir to trust in her honesty; enough that he decided to tell her a certain measure of the truth.
“I want to find out what really happened,” he said, as sincerely as he could manage. “The stories I’ve heard so far don’t make a lot of sense. If there’s something that needs to be told, perhaps I’m the one to tell it. A minstrel can tell an unpleasant truth with more success, sometimes, than anyone else. I’m a stranger, with no interests to protect. It might be I’d be believed more readily than a Linean.”
She looked away from him, and her face was troubled. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “This . . .” She looked down at her hands, and her attention seemed to be caught by a ring she wore.
It was an unusual ring in the fact that it was so very plain; burnished, unornamented silver, centered with a dull white stone. The stone was nothing Valdir recognized; it looked like an ordinary, water-worn quartz pebble.
Then her attention was more than caught—
The stone flared with an internal, white flame for a moment, and it seemed that she could not look away from it.
The woman’s face took on a blankness of expression he’d only seen in the spell-bound.
Valdir felt the back of his neck chill. There was a Power moving somewhere, one he didn’t recognize. He longed to be able to unshield and probe, and maddeningly knew he dared not. This felt almost like someone was working a Truth Spell, only the feel of this was old—old—
“Lady Ylyna—” she said, in a strangely abstracted voice. “At the bottom of this, it all comes down to Lady Ylyna.”
“Tashir’s mother?” Valdir asked, biting his lip in vexation when it occurred to him that his words might break whatever spell it was that held her. But her expression remained rapt, and he ventured more. “But—how—”
“She was hardly more than a child when she came here,” the woman said, still gazing into the stone of her ring, “but I’ve never seen a more terrified girl in my life. She’d been the ignored one, until Deveran refused to take any girl to wife that had mage-powers. Then she was valuable, and you can believe her family kept the strings on her. She was terrified of them. She was so happy when she was first pregnant—Deveran made a great deal of her, you see. But then Tashir came early—there was no telling him that it was just accident the boy looked like his uncle. So he only came to her to get her pregnant, and once pregnant, he ignored her until the children were born.”
“But—”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “He ignored the boy, too. She was scarcely old enough to have left off with dolls, she hadn’t a clue what to do with a child. Then the letters started coming—letters from Baires, with the royal seal on them, from The Mavelan. She never let us see them, but they terrified her. And she took it all out on the boy. The other children, the ones that took after Deveran, they had nursemaids, and careful watching, but not Tashir. He was left to her. Poor child. Half the time she petted and cosseted him like a lapdog—that was when her letters seemed to be good. The other half of the time she’d take a riding crop to him till the poor boy was bruised all over. That was when the letters frightened her. Then the boy started showing wizard-power, and it got worse. I watched her watching him one day—I’ve never seen such jealousy in my life on a human face.”
“Why would she be jealous of him?” Valdir wondered aloud.
The old woman shook herself, and gave him a sharp look. “I’ve s
aid more than I intended,” she told him, almost accusingly.
He tried to look innocent and trustworthy. “But what you’ve said is important.”
She rose and walked slowly across the tiny sitting room to the door, and opened it. “Come back in two days,” she said, in tones that brooked no argument. “I may decide to tell you more then.”
Nearly ready to burst with frustration, Valdir left, doing his best to show none of it.
She shut the door behind him, and he wandered back down to the Row, looking for a good place to set out his hat for a few more hours.
He still had to eat, after all.
• • •
:How much of this can you trust?: Yfandes asked.
:Well, I’m hardly going to be able to run Truth Spell on her,: he replied, staring up into the darkness and listening to old Petar snoring loud enough to shake the chimney down. :Although—gods help me, it seems as if something was doing that for me. And you have to admit, this report of alternate petting and abuse certainly explains some of his reaction toward women. “Mothers” in particular.:
:But it doesn’t explain what happened that night.:
One of the two girls murmured in her sleep. Vanyel shivered, and pulled his blanket a little closer. The cold of the dirt floor was seeping through his thin straw pallet. :There’s more. I know there’s more. I think she—or whatever it was that made her talk—is testing me, and I don’t know why. Gods, and the questions I have—why allow only blood relations to serve the Remoerdis Family? And why does it feel as if the old lady is—Gifted? Or geased, bespelled. Or both, I don’t know. And I don’t dare test her to find out, with Vedric in the city.:
:Mm,: she agreed. :Wise. What’s he up to?
:Being utterly charming,: Valdir replied. :He’s got the locals coming more and more over to his side. And he’s agreeing with them on every point. It’s hard to believe that this is the same man my sister called a viper.:
:Interesting. And these Lineans are a hard-headed lot.:
The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy Page 61