Prisoner of Haven

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  Her curiosity piqued, Dez glanced at her brother’s sister. “I’ve heard it’s run by Laurana, the Qualinesti Queen Mother.” She pulled a wry smile. “And I’ve heard it’s funded by humans in Abanasinia.”

  Usha watched Lir Wrackham’s widow riding by. “The truth lies somewhere in between, but that woman has fed both the spirit and the purse of Qui-thonas. She gave her life to it, her youth and her heart.”

  The line of mourners passed, winding away to the part of Haven where the cemeteries lay on the high ground away from the river. Usha watched it go, thinking how Palin had asked for her help when Qui-thonas was in danger of falling apart. He’d told her no one could ensure that the mission—“The marriage,” Usha had corrected him—would go well the way she could. “You are magic,” he’d said to her, not only then, but later, at night when she went into his arms.

  They had been hopeful then. She and her husband had still been lovers, then.

  Usha watched the last of the mourners go by until Dezra jogged her elbow, inclining her head toward a tall young man at the edge of the crowd. He wore much-mended clothing, and his boots were scuffed and worn at the heels. He kept to the back of the procession, hanging around the rougher edges of the crowd.

  “Looks like he’s up to no good,” Dezra murmured.

  At first glance, Usha agreed, thinking he was a pick-pocket looking for a mark in the crowd. A second, closer look and she saw past the beard and the shabby clothing to the high-boned shape of his face, the aristocratic hook of his nose. In that moment, the young man’s intense brown eyes met hers, and Usha felt a shiver of recognition.

  “I thought him long gone from Haven.”

  The crowd thinned, onlookers drifting back to their homes and businesses now that the grieving and gaudy were gone. Dezra urged her mount forward into the narrow street. “You know him, too?”

  Usha looked over her shoulder, but the man was gone, vanished into the shadows of a high wall or down some secret alley. “He is Madoc ap Westhos,” she said. “They called him Madoc Diviner, in the days of magic. He accompanied Aline on her wedding journey from Solace.”

  “To guard the bride?”

  “And to make sure a wedding gift arrived for the groom from Palin and me. I’d painted a locket portrait for Aline to give her husband on their wedding day, for she was to marry a cold, old man.”

  The narrow city street widened, on either side stretches of greensward and garden replaced taverns and humbler homes. Beyond, they saw the high stories of the houses of the wealthy and powerful, balconies on high, broad gardens surrounding. Amid them all, the Old Keep, a tower of granite, rose over the city. It had been built by dwarves from Thorbardin to defend Haven, long ago in the days when pirates ran up the river and lordless folk swarmed in from Darken Wood to raid. Still the proudest building in Haven, Old Keep now stood as an armory for the citizens who kept watch on the walls.

  “So,” said Dez, looking around now for the High Hand Tavern. “Your friend Madoc carried a bride and a gift to Haven. Never left, eh? Well, some people don’t. The city’s not for me, not for long, but some people like it just fine.”

  “Not Madoc. Madoc is—or was—the kind of man who stays long enough to build up a tavern debt, and never long enough to pay it off. But…”

  “But?”

  Dez turned her horse’s head down a shaded lane, and Usha followed.

  “You know how some of my paintings are just… paintings, and some are… more?”

  Dez nodded. Most people who knew Usha knew that her reputation as a portrait painter was well deserved. Some knew there was more to her art than mere portraiture, something mystical, enchanting, and not wholly akin to the gods-given magic of mages like Palin Majere.

  A thin youngster, all legs, skinned knees and pansy blue eyes called to them from the doorway of the High Hand. She shouted something about how her father had been expecting Dez some days ago. “But yer room’s all ready, just like always.”

  Dez waved acknowledgement, but absently. The girl in the tavern doorway hopped out into the dooryard as the two women stopped. While Usha and Dez dismounted, she held the reins of each horse.

  “This portrait wasn’t just a painting,” Usha said, handing her palfrey over to the care of the landlord’s daughter.

  Dez cocked a grin, understanding. “A love token to charm an old miser? Nice. How did it work?”

  Usha said nothing for a while, recalling the intense, starved look of Madoc Diviner’s dark eyes. “Very well,” she said at last. “But it worked on the wrong man.”

  2

  Late day sun felt hot on Usha’s arms and neck as she stood to look at the mullioned windows of Lir Wrackham’s house. Light danced over the rippled glass—four windows of glass!—in imitation of light on the surface of the river. Lir Wrackham had been a wealthy man to have that many windows of glass. As far as Usha knew, there was no glassblower in Haven capable of doing work of greater complexity than cups and candlestick holders. Aline’s husband must have had these windows imported at enormous cost, perhaps from as far away as Tarsis.

  The street was quiet. At first Usha thought it was dozing in the sun, most folk keeping indoors for the shade. That might be so in this part of the city where the wealthy had others to work for them, but few servants were to be seen. A black-bearded dwarf wearing a forgeman’s soot-stained leather apron stood across the street talking with a young human woman who held a basket full of fat skeins of blue and white yarn. Usha felt his dark-eyed gaze slip over her then slip away. She saw no one else, nor had she seen much activity in the city as she’d walked from the High Hand Inn to the river and along the cool and willow-shaded paths to this comfortable enclave of Haven’s wealthy. It was a quieter city in the fading afternoon than it had been at dawn when Lir Wrackham’s funeral wound through the streets.

  Usha didn’t imagine that whole quarters of Haven had gone into mourning, but when she and Dez had parted at the High Hand, Dez to make the rounds of her usual suppliers, and Usha to offer Aline her condolence, Usha had thought she’d find more than shadows on her friend’s doorstep. She looked up and down the street and saw no sign that anyone had come to offer the widow sympathy.

  The house, half built of timber, half of stone, was much like others in this part of Haven, but Usha knew it at once for Aline’s. “You’ll know Mistress Wrackham’s house by the roses,” the landlord at the High Hand had assured her. “That place is a’climb with roses. Rose Hall, the old man called it. Just like he was some nobleman tryin’ to keep his castles and estates in order.”

  It was indeed a’climb with roses. The vines and canes reached up the stone foundation, the walls of the bottom floor and up to the timbered second floor upon fanned trellises, red and white entwined as high as the second story. Close to the street, a well-kept bed of peach and ivory-colored roses embraced the front of the house, stretching the length of the short block that began at River Way and ended at Wrackham Street. The beds had been recently watered and the air still smelled of the rich fragrance of wet earth. Usha sipped the scents as though sipping wine. Across the street the woman with the basket on her hip laughed, and the dwarf chuckled as he toyed with a ring on his finger. He slipped another glance Usha’s way.

  Well enough, Master Dwarf, she thought. You see me, and I see you.

  Smiling, she nodded gracious greeting then turned and climbed the three stone steps to Aline’s door. She did not wait long on the doorstep before a housemaid came to answer. Her name given, Usha was shown to a small room off the entry hall and made comfortable while the servant announced her. Seated beside a window, this one unglazed and open to the air, Usha looked out upon the street. The woman with the yarn basket was gone. The dwarf stood a moment looking at Rose Hall. He tugged his coal-black beard, as though considering a choice, then took a seat upon the bottom step of the house opposite.

  “Ah, Dunbrae,” said a voice from the doorway. “He keeps a close and faithful eye on me, doesn’t he? Usha, it’s good to
see you.”

  Thick and rough, the voice. Madoc Diviner had once described it as being like that of a half-grown boy with the ague. The voice as unattractive as the speaker, the homely girl no young man would look at twice had hoped to study with clerics and bards and spend her life in poetry and scholarship. It was not to be.

  “Aline.” Usha rose. “How sorry I am to visit under such sad circumstances.”

  “You are kind,” Aline said, stepping around the possibility of her own sorrow.

  They had not seen each other in several years, not since Usha and Palin had sent a grimly determined young woman down the White-rage River to her marriage. The marriage would ally the wealthy merchant houses of Caroel and Wrackham, giving the latter access to the long and cherished relationships Aline’s grandfather had in Abanasinia’s merchant and shipping communities. In return for Gault Caroel’s granddaughter and his business contacts, Lir Wrack-ham would continue to fund Qui-thonas, an organization suggested by Laurana, the Queen Mother of the Qualinesti elves and devised by Palin and Usha to rescue the growing number of elves determined to flee their homeland. It had been funded by Gault Caroel himself, until his coffers ran dry. With Aline’s marriage, the effort would continue, and those who simply wanted to flee to peace could do so.

  Wrackham had not reneged on his bargain. His bride had come to him, as promised, but he never caught sight of the magical portrait. On their wedding night the locket remained with Madoc. “For no one will love me as you will,” Aline had said when they parted. “No one will ever have the chance, and no matter if I am unhappily wed.” But she was not unhappy in her marriage. The shrewd old merchant had not only a keen eye for business but one that could quickly uncover a person’s character and spirit. In his own way, Lir Wrackham became enchanted. He’d been pleased to give his wife anything she asked for. Aline, who had all her young life believed passionately in the ideal of elven freedom and the freedom of all Krynn from the hateful dragons, had asked for Qui-thonas.

  And so Lir Wrackham had not been enspelled by Usha’s magic. Madoc Diviner had. By the mage’s account Aline had gone only reluctantly to her wedding after that. Usha had never heard Aline’s account. Standing now in the oak paneled reception room, among treasures and artwork from distant lands, she wondered what that account would sound like.

  Aline held out her hands—large hands, knob-knuckled and brown as those of a farmer’s wife. “By the departed gods, Usha, you never age a moment, let alone a day! You are lovely as ever. But I’m surprised to see you here. I’ve known that Palin’s sister comes to Haven for supplies for the family’s inn, but…” She trailed off when Usha offered no explanation. “Well! It’s good to see you. Will you come and take a glass of wine with me?”

  Despite the heat of the day, Aline’s hands were cold. Usha pressed them between hers as she would have her own daughter’s. “Yes, I’d like that.”

  But having offered, Aline did not herself seem interested in the golden wine or tempting poppy seed cakes brought by a servant to the high-ceilinged, airy room where she did her best to make her guest comfortable. She poured wine into pale blue goblets, then barely moistened her lips. She served cakes and honey but did not taste them. She paced up and down the length of the richly woven carpet of black and red Tarsian wool while Usha tried to do justice to her hospitality. In these dragon days such carpets as this one, the work of a year or more of a weaver’s life, were worth a king’s ransom. But Aline might as well have been pacing rushes freshly flung from the fields to a cottage floor for all she seemed to be aware of the thickness of wool beneath her feet.

  “Aline,” Usha said, setting down her plate and moving her wine glass away from the table edge. “You seem…”

  Aline turned, her long face pale but for two spots of bright red over each cheekbone. “I feel like I could jump out of my skin. I’ve been like this all day. Please—” She managed a smile, an apologetic shrug. “Come walk in the market with me. This house is stifling.”

  Outdoors, Usha found the air cooler than before. A fresh breeze was coming off the river. Aline sighed almost contentedly. She had been all day indoors, receiving those who came to offer condolence on Lir Wrackham’s death, deflecting the too-close questions of others who came to ask whether the rich man’s widow lacked for anything.

  “These,” she said with grim irony, “are the thoughtful souls who will soon be asking whether the widow lacks for company. Or, more likely, someone to help her spend her inheritance. I’ll have a flock of suitors before long, Usha.” She pushed her thin brown hair away from her face. “Imagine that. An hour ago I shut the doors on them all and gave the servants instructions to let no one in.” She brightened. “But when the housemaid heard your name… well, Majere isn’t a name to be turned away, is it?”

  Usha put her arm through Aline’s as they walked along the quiet street. She glanced right and left, but saw no sign of the dwarf Dunbrae. The breeze off the river drifted fresh through the city, and the nearer they went to the market, the more folk they saw. It was late afternoon when canny housewives sent servants or went themselves while the vendors considered their sales for the day and whether it was better to sell what was left at lower prices than to pack up their wares again.

  They walked most of the way in silence, Aline with a look that reminded Usha of the drawn expressions of people she’d seen about the city. It wasn’t until they came to the edge of the great square that had for generations served as Haven’s chief market that Usha felt the sense of a living, breathing city asserting itself. The place was a riot of color, harvested yellow wheat, limes and oranges brought by ship from distant lands, peaches and strawberries grown right here in Abanasinia piled high on farmers’ tables. Women balanced laden baskets on their hips, their clothing summer green, sky blue, and sandy or brown as the river’s edges. But those who had children kept them in tow, and the restless little ones danced and skipped impatiently, longing to race through the market chasing each other.

  Usha lifted a silk scarf the color of twilight and listened to it whisper through her fingers, then another the color of brown chestnuts. She purchased them and declined to have them wrapped or sent. With swift, practiced gestures she tied the brown silk loosely around Aline’s neck. “The very color to make your green eyes like emeralds.” She used the other to bind her long silvery hair back from her face and keep it from the tugging fingers of the wind. They moved on, passing the booth of two young people of the Plains, a man and a half-grown girl who offered the beautiful feathers, for which the Plainsfolk were known, and quills for beading and decorating leather work. More than one person stopped to watch them as they moved through the market, the homely young woman, often recognized as Lir Wrackham’s widow, and her ethereally beautiful companion rumored to be Usha Majere.

  Comment and whisper followed them, murmured speculation about what Palin Majere’s wife was doing in Haven, about whether the great mage himself were in the city. They went on through the market, Aline pointing out the stalls of jewelers and weavers, of pot throwers and chandlers. They stopped at the stall of a portly fruit-seller who was flapping his hand to keep flies from a gleaming pile of strawberries. His stock was not much in need of replenishing, his mood grim.

  “It’s been quiet like this for days now,” Aline said. “I think poor Lir’s funeral was the noisiest thing in two weeks. Most followed along for diversion.” Her eyes darkened and she shrugged as though to dismiss a troublesome thought.

  Usha wondered whether Aline had seen Madoc at the back of the crowd. She almost asked, but folded her lips upon the question best left for later.

  Aline said, “Mostly we listen for news from the road and the river.”

  “Dark knights.”

  “Yes. Did you and Dezra have any trouble on the road?”

  “No, but we worried about it. Dark knights lurk all over the road between here and Solace, not making trouble yet, but making their presence known. I’ve heard that the green dragon is looking this way.
More tribute to be had here than from poor ravaged Qualinesti, they say.”

  The breeze quickened, making the awning over the fruit-seller’s stall flap and ripple with a sound like distant thunder. Usha cast a glance at the sky, the blue dome arching over the city and the river shone cloudless.

  “More tribute for green Beryl,” she said, “but that’s not the only concern.”

  Aline’s eyes darkened. “I know. If Beryl is sending dark knights into Abanasinia, that means she’s ready to challenge Malys.”

  It could mean little else, for the pact between the great dragons who had savaged Ansalon’s native dragons and divided the spoils between them in the Dragon Purge was that each would hold its own territory and not try to upset the balance of power between them. That was the pact. In truth, any dragon who could, would amass whatever territory it was able to. Among the dragons, the true contest always lay between the most powerful and devious, green Beryl and red Malys.

  “I’ve heard people say,” Usha said while a woman and her impatient child selected a basket of peaches, “that Abanasinia could find itself a sudden battleground. What do you—?”

  Quick as a kender, the little boy danced away from his mother, laughing as she lunged to grab him and missed. He spun around to elude her grasp and ran right into Usha. She caught him when his mother’s frustrated cry rang sharply. He wriggled out of her grasp and pushed her back into the table in front of the fruitseller’s stall. Peaches tumbled onto the dusty earth, and strawberries followed in a fountain of red sweetness. The exasperated mother, offering harried apology to Usha, snatched her child out of the mess and out of the market as the fruitseller rounded on Usha with snarling curses.

  “Damn it! Isn’t it enough that I can’t sell the damned peaches or strawberries these days? Now look! Ruined!”

  Usha and Aline scrambled after rolling peaches, keeping their skirt hems away from the dashed strawberries. To mollify the red-faced seller, Aline bought some strawberries, blueberries, and peaches.