Prisoner of Haven

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  “Please, Dez. Don’t do anything foolish.”

  “Foolish?” Dezra’s voice was no louder than a whisper, and it carried all her anger and grief on it. “Foolish would be going after that bastard knight and sawing off her head with her own dagger. Not that it wouldn’t feel good. No, I’m planning to be sensible. You said it yourself, Usha. They’re mad here in Haven. Well, there’s no need to stay in a madhouse full of murderers when I can find—”

  The watch came around again, their horses snorting, bridle iron jingling. In the street the clop of hoofs paused, the conversation of the riders ceased. They started on again, and Usha leaned forward, her voice barely a whisper.

  “Dez, what are you talking about? There is no way.”

  Dezra tossed her head. “There used to be. There used to be all kinds of secret ways out of Haven.”

  “Into Haven,” Usha corrected. “And Aline has abandoned them.”

  “Maybe so, maybe not. She’s a crafty woman, your friend Aline Wrackham.”

  Usha raised an eyebrow. “Dez, do you know something?”

  Dezra hesitated the barest moment before she shook her head. “No. Qui’thonas sleeps. Aline said she was abandoning it, didn’t she? But that doesn’t matter. I don’t need Aline or Qui’thonas. If they’ve abandoned the old routes, so be it. But they can’t have obliterated them. Not all of them. There hasn’t been time for that. So, what once led in can now lead out.” Dez flashed a mirthless grin. “And if I can’t find those ways, no one can.”

  She came closer. Usha felt her determination quivering in the air between them.

  “Usha, listen. It’s crazy not to try to leave if I can get us out.”

  It would be crazy, and just as crazy to think of sneaking past tightened patrols in the city and circling dragons. But, stubborn they were, those Majere children. Usha had been married to one for many years. She was the mother of two others. If she’d learned anything, it was not to make a Majere feel obliged to become a wall to bang her head against.

  “Go,” she said, then she caught her sister-in-law’s hand. “But be careful, Dez. Don’t do anything—”

  “Rash or foolish?” Dezra flashed a bright and dangerous smile. “Too late. That’s just what I’m off to do.”

  The dwarf Dunbrae stood just inside the doorway of the high chamber Dez knew from the night Haven fell. He’d brought her there with Usha. At Aline’s bidding he’d seen them safely through the embattled city. Now he watched her with eyes slightly narrowed. Dez didn’t think she saw mistrust there, but she did see uncertainty. Dunbrae had found her nosing around a quarter of the city where the knights had spread their watchmen thin, a warehouse district that had once been busy with ships loading and unloading and now stood quiet, as though with breath held. Dunbrae had been watching that place himself, for he knew most of the weak points in Sir Radulf’s perimeter.

  “Just keeping up,” he’d said, and then he’d invited her to go with him to visit Aline Wrackham. The invitation had been politely offered, but Dez didn’t think it could have been easily declined. And so, curious, she’d followed him to Rose Hall, where she’d been courteously received, offered refreshment, and stood now waiting to hear the reason for having been waylaid.

  The door to the corridor closed softly, Dunbrae was gone.

  “Waylaid,” Aline said, musing. “An interesting word. You could have been killed if any of Sir Radulf’s men saw you out so late after curfew.”

  “I could have been. But none did.”

  “I’d say that was luck, wouldn’t you? Three men are already dead from being caught out.”

  Whatever cocky reply Dez would have given vanished from her lips. She saw again the three hanged men, Dalan Forester, his brother Rolf, and the dark elf she and Dunbrae had left tied up at a crossroad.

  “You lost someone to that hanging. Didn’t you, Dezra?”

  Dez didn’t bother to ask how Aline knew. Lir Wrackham’s widow had been long in the business of knowing things others didn’t. Simply, she said, “Did you know him?”

  “Dalan? No. Nor his brother. I knew of them, and I’ve heard that…” She chewed her lower lip; working the tender flesh till it grew slightly red and swollen. “I’ve heard they were good men.”

  Dezra’s nod of agreement was no more than a short jerk. “I knew them. I knew Dalan. He was—”

  No. No, this wasn’t going to be a sodden interlude of women sharing confidences and baring heart and soul in a rush of grief. It wasn’t Dezra’s way. She stiffened her spine and shook her head when Aline proffered a tray with fussy little cakes and steaming cups of some fragrant tea. Her throat tightened suddenly. Those were “granny confections.”

  Dalan had called them that. She heard his voice in memory, the words as clear as though he were speaking them now. Granny confections, the kind you give to your grandmother when she comes visiting, or the kind she makes for you. Sweet and airy, and you’re hungry an hour later unless she lets you have half the tray. We sell quite a lot of them around festival times… when most people’s old grans give out from too much baking.

  And then he’d popped one into her mouth, laughing as the honeyed icing stuck to the corners of Dez’s lips. They’d taken a whole tray upstairs to his chamber with them, leaving Dalan’s good-natured brother to make up the loss.

  “I knew him,” Dez said, speaking almost before she could stop herself. “He was a good man. He was a baker. With his brother. They were…” Her words ran out. “They were good men.”

  Though the soft look of sympathy didn’t leave Aline’s eyes, her head came up, just a little, like one who hears something more than is being said. “You knew him very well, didn’t you?”

  “I knew him some.”

  “More than that. Oh,” she said, answering Dez’s frown. “I know what a woman’s face looks like when she’s lost a man she loves.” She cleared her throat, a small sound. “I see it often in my mirror.”

  The hour was late, the night warm in spite of that. The muffled sounds of the watch passing by Rose Hall drifted up, only slightly disturbing the silence between the two women. Then Aline sat a little forward.

  “It’s all over the city that Dalan and his brother were trying to get out of Haven. What about the dark elf?”

  Dez, in no mood for games, said, “You know about him. Dunbrae told you.”

  Aline covered one hand with the other, as though trying to keep them still. She arranged each finger with careful precision, one on top of the other. Still, they looked too big where they sat on her lap. Everything was too big about her—her hands, her feet, her nose, and good gods knew, her long face. This was the woman Madoc Diviner had fallen in love with, enspelled. And this was also the woman Lir Wrackham had fallen in love with from the urgings of his own heart.

  “You’re right,” Aline said, “and it was wrong of me to pretend I don’t know. Dunbrae did tell me about your exploit, and now I’d like to talk to you about it.”

  In the tiny room that served as a bedroom for Usha and Dez, as well as her studio, Usha lighted two tall pillar candles. She took a freshly prepared canvas from the three leaning against the wall and held it for a moment, the weight well-balanced and not unwieldy for all that the canvas was a wide rectangle nearly as high as her waist. In the golden glow the recently scraped pa’ressa, the primer coat, no longer reflected light as though it were thin ice. Outside, the air was still. The breeze that had wandered listlessly around the garden when she sat talking with Dezra had fallen soon after Dez was gone.

  Made restless by the events of the day, by the half hope that Dez would find a way out of Haven and the full-blown fear that she would fall afoul of Sir Radulf’s knights and Lady Mearah’s justice, Usha had come into the inn, ignored her bed, and paced around her cramped studio. Not eased, she prepared the next morning’s work by pinning her sketches of Kalend and Thelan to the walls. Some she put where the morning light would touch them, others where the moon’s would light them out of the darkness. She never
worked by moonlight—who could?—but she thought by moonlight, and moonlight seemed to rouse in her soul that intuition all artists had to one degree or another, the instinct of knowing how to see patterns, to understand how and why they went together, why they seemed to wander away only to come back again to make something startling in its beauty, its passion, and sometimes a thing very near to perfection.

  Usha set the canvas on its easel, now no longer dark-dusty from charcoal but polished and gleaming. On impulse, she blew out the candles. As from a distance, she heard the night noise, but something else had her attention, for each sketch peered out of the darkness, each face white and alight.

  There was Kalend with an imp’s gleam in the moment before he punched Thelan’s arm for making rude noises. She smiled, remembering the mischief, more amused than she had been at the time. Beside that freckled face was a sketch of the two boys together. In it, they were icons of fraternal solidarity and good will. They looked like their mother. Usha thought, suddenly, that Kalend looked more like Loren Halgard, their uncle. The same strong jaw, and a tilt to his chin that reminded her of Loren on the afternoon he’d argued that he would do anything to protect Haven, and everything to protect his daughter.

  Kin defending kin, father and daughter, brothers…

  Soft, Usha said, “Ah, yes.”

  Though they had run screaming out of the room like vengeful goblins moments later, at the instant Usha had made the last line, the two boys had been still enough for her to produce this sketch, this image of the trustful companionship that bound the two brothers. This sense of solidarity, of kinship, was what Usha must reproduce.

  She found her way into her work, and as she unpinned that sketch from the wall and set it on the table near the easel, she became aware that the tensions of the day had melted. She could go to bed now and rest, if not sleep. She could wait for Dez to return and trust that her sister-in-law’s heart would not outrace her sense, that Dez would go carefully after what she wanted.

  The moon had moved across the sky. Time had passed. On the stairs Usha heard the sound of quick steps, and they turned into the hall.

  Usha struck flint to steel and lit one candle. The light flared. Shadows jumped and made the images in her sketches seem to cringe back. One fluttered to the floor and Usha went to pick it up.

  Dez stuck her head in the doorway. “Usha.”

  Her voice thrilled as it always did when she had something exciting to tell. Usha waved her in and bent to pick up the fallen sketch. In the dancing light of the candle’s flame she saw it was one of Kalend perched on his stool.

  “Usha, Aline—” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She isn’t giving up.”

  7

  The upper room at Rose Hall where Usha and Dez had taken refuge the night Haven fell had changed substantially in the weeks since Usha had last been there. Aline had removed all the furniture but for a few blocky wooden chairs with deep seats and high arms. A long oak table now served as a desk. Other than these things and a few objects that had once decorated a small desk or the tops of wooden coffers, the room was bare. Aline was transforming it into something else, something much like a commander’s austere field headquarters.

  “And that’s what it will be,” she’d said to Usha when her friend showed surprise at the change. “People were murdered in this city. You saw them.”

  Usha nodded, chilled when she recalled the hanged men.

  “Those are my people, Usha.” Her eyes shone, her long, homely face flushed with feeling. “Maybe you’ll tell me I’ve only lived in Haven for a few years, but… no. You sent me here. I agreed to come here and marry an old man in the cause of a good fight.” She closed her eyes, and in that moment sorrow made her face lovely. “Qualinesti might be lost, but Haven won’t be. She is my city, and I can help her.”

  My city. Her words in no way recalled the arrogant sense of possession Sir Radulf Eigerson’s had. Aline spoke with the quiet, intense passion of a woman speaking of her home.

  I am proud of her!

  Now, looking around the changed room, Usha thought it was a good place to hold a conference. High windows showed the street and broad stretches of sky above the river. She amended her thought—a good place to plan a resurrection. Qui’thonas would indeed live again. At the moment, though, the resurrection was proving harder than imagined.

  Usha looked at Dez pacing up and down where the magnificent Tarsian carpet used to be, at Aline carefully unrolling a map on the table. Neither of the two spoke, and neither looked at the other. Dez was marshalling her arguments. Aline looked around for heavy objects to hold the corners of the map in place. This, or scenes much like it, had been going on for most of the morning, and in this particular lull between arguments, Usha sat in the deep window embrasure looking down on the street before Rose Hall.

  Dunbrae sat comfortably enough on one of the steps leading out from Rose Hall to the street, nodding curt greeting to those who passed until a young man leading a long-legged red mare stopped to talk. Dunbrae seemed completely at his ease, but the young man shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, now and then casting a quick look up and down the street.

  “Aline, if you even send word to Madoc Diviner, you’re making a mistake,” Dezra said, not for the first time.

  Usha looked away from the street. Aline, her face calm, used an empty stone vase as an anchor for one corner of the map. She chose a fist sized rock for another and a heavy brass compass for the third. She looked around for something to keep the fourth corner flat. Usha reached behind her and took a brass candlestick from the window.

  Aline thumped it onto the table with a decided bang, missing the edge of the map. “Dez, I’ve been picking men and women to work with Qui’thonas for a few years now. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Maybe.”

  Usha raised a brow but did not intervene. For the moment.

  Outside the door, the voices of servants drifted by. Only a few were allowed near this room at the top of Rose Hall. All of Aline’s servants were trusty, or they would not be in her employ, but the fewer who knew that this room would soon be the headquarters of Qui’thonas the better.

  “Aline, I’m telling you, the mage is not to be trusted.”

  Of course, Usha would have intervened if the subject were not Madoc. She’d have appealed to the two women to reason calmly, to find common ground, to make the most of what their opinions had in common and build from there. On almost all subjects but Madoc Diviner, her appeal would have had a good chance.

  Absently, Aline rasped a fingertip along the curling edge of the map. A slight flush crept across her long, unlovely face, her freckled skin looked mottled. “Why is he not to be trusted, Dez? Because the landlord at your inn speaks ill of him?”

  “No, though he might as well; he’d be telling no lie. I saw—”

  “Yes, you saw Madoc talking to a knight in the garden behind the Grinning Goat one evening when you were out after the curfew.” The flush deepened when Aline spoke Madoc’s name, then cold, dry irony edged her words. “Dumping bodies, wasn’t it, with Dunbrae?”

  Dezra snorted. “We couldn’t leave the corpse in the alley, could we?”

  Usha slipped from the window seat and straightened the candlestick on the last curling edge of the map. “All in all, Dez, you’ve been doing a fair bit of talking to people well after curfew yourself. Do you really have reason to doubt Madoc’s good will toward Aline because he chooses to do the same?”

  “A dark knight, Usha.”

  “Yes, who might very well have been talking to him about the weather, the price of ale, or—”

  “Or thanking him for a bit of news he passed along.” Dez turned swiftly, making her appeal to Aline. “He’s an information broker. If you don’t believe me, believe someone you trust.”

  The skin around Aline’s eyes tightened, as though she winced a little at the implication that she didn’t trust Dezra, yet she made no assurance.

  “Dunbrae says Madoc Diviner c
an be counted on for two things,” Dez continued, “and one of them is that he cares for no one’s good but his own.”

  “And the other thing is?”

  Silence, then pacing. Usha waited, still and quiet, for she noticed that Aline’s fingers drummed a nearly silent rhythm of unease on the table.

  “The other thing,” said Dez, reluctantly, “is that his information can always be counted on as good.”

  “Well,” Aline said, “that doesn’t sound ominous.”

  “Not so much, unless you remember you can’t always count on Madoc’s reason for giving the information.”

  “You just said he cares for no one’s good but his own. Madoc’s good, then, must be the only reason he will sell information. To feed himself, to pay for his lodging… if I thought he were a man to care about such things, I would say to lay up wealth. If you know that, you can reckon your chances and gamble with him or not.”

  “You’re too trusting, Aline.”

  “Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I trusted him once before—”

  “And look what it got you. Your enchanted gift enchanting the wrong man. Him.”

  Aline’s face became still as stone, but it couldn’t cover the sudden flash of pain in her eyes. “You could say so. But if you do, you also have to say that Madoc brought me safely to Haven.” Her glanced flicked to Usha. “As he promised you and Lord Palin he would.”

  In the silence fallen between the three, tension thickened in the room. Dunbrae’s voice came up to them, muffled by distance but sounding as though he were calling a question to someone. Usha didn’t turn to see, for the invocation of Palin’s name drew her into the heart of the argument.