Recluce Tales

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Alaren stepped back.

  I swallowed. I had never asked her, although I had dreamed.

  “How could I not love a man who saved my life three times, and only asked for my respect?”

  That was true enough, but how had she known?

  Later, after we had cleaned up and had fresh clothes, we stood by the railing.

  She took my hands. “I promised myself to you the day you knelt and kissed my hand. I could see the love and the concern. Then, before long, I could feel it.” She looked down. “I had to work so hard not to let you know. Not until we were free.”

  That I understood.

  My fingers touched the edge of her jaw, and she lifted her head. I looked into her eyes, realizing that they were not muddy green, but golden green.

  Sometimes, even those things that are lost, forgotten, or passed on almost unremarked have their own stories.

  BURNING DUTY

  You want to know why I made you sit in that chair, Fedryrk, when I was doubtful about the truth of your words? Well … now that you’ve got children of your own, I’ll tell you, and I’ll even let you have the chair if you’re so inclined. You must know by now, seeing how often you had to sit there, that it’s not just a chair. Any time I thought you weren’t telling the truth, or all of it, I sat you down in it until you got to be looking mighty uncomfortable. You remember that, I’d wager. How did I get the chair? That’s a story in itself. It all happened before you were born, not long after your ma and I were married.

  * * *

  Stefanyk stood at his post just outside the bailey door of the Prefect’s palace. His post was one of the least desirable for the Prefect’s guards. It was so undesirable that it was almost always assigned to the most junior guard in that duty shift. He was the most junior. The only consolation was that he was assigned to the mid-afternoon to evening shift and the area around the north-facing door was in shadow most of the time.

  He didn’t worry too much when the alarm bell began clanging from the front of the palace, although he did check his gear and survey the empty bailey to see if a thief had come over the side wall. There were no thieves … or anyone else, not for a quarter of a glass after the bell stopped. Then the outer gate opened, and a squad of regular troopers marched into the bailey, arraying themselves as if they expected an attack of some sort. But who would attack the palace in the middle of Fenard?

  He shook his head. He’d heard that some of the regulars were having trouble with the Autarch of Kyphros, but they all said the Kyphrans never crossed the borders. Besides, the border was more than a hundred kays away.

  Then the palace door opened, and an officer peered out. After a moment, his eyes landed on Stefanyk. “Guard! You!”

  “Yes, ser?”

  “I need you inside.”

  “But … I can’t abandon my post, not without authorization or my relief, ser.”

  “The outer door is more than safe enough with a squad of troopers there. Now! Move! This way.”

  There wasn’t much else Stefanyk could do except obey. “Yes, ser!” He hurried toward the door.

  “The second door on the right—the open one. Go in there and wait. Don’t touch anything. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Yes, ser.” Stefanyk walked quickly toward the open door, but if he was being ordered in as a shield, he wanted to be prepared. So he drew the shorter blade used for guard duty before he stepped into the chamber.

  He almost stopped just inside the door, but managed several more steps into what had to be a study. The walls were paneled in golden wood, and a huge desk and a matching chair stood in one corner, and a round table in the other, surrounded by four chairs … except he saw a fifth lying on its back on the heavy woolen gold-and-blue carpet. Lying beside the overturned chair, one on each side, were two men, elite guards in their black tunics, trimmed in brilliant blue. One of them didn’t seem to be breathing. There was no one else in the study.

  Stefanyk just stared.

  “Soldier! Put your hand on that black chair there.”

  Stefanyk looked back at the captain, confused because he was a guard, not a trooper.

  “Just put your hand on it! The one on the floor.”

  Stefanyk could sense the anger and exasperation in the officer’s voice. He reached down and brushed the top of the chair.

  “On it!”

  Stefanyk grabbed the top of the back of the chair with his free hand.

  “Pick it up!”

  The bewildered guard did so.

  “Carry it out to the rear courtyard out to the burn yard. Put it in the burn pit. Leave it there and come back and carry the other four out.”

  Stefanyk wasn’t about to question that order, not with the way the captain had looked at him. He set the chair upright, replaced his blade, then picked up the chair once more and made his way out of the study, carrying the chair back along the service hallway leading to the bailey door. He did see more of the elite guards stationed along the wider hallway toward the center of the palace.

  As he walked toward the open courtyard door, he wondered why the captain was so insistent on burning the chairs. The one he carried felt cool to the touch, and yet somehow warm. But … if the captain wanted the chairs in the burn pit, what else could Stefanyk do?

  He kept walking, out through the door and then at an angle across the wide and long north courtyard to the gate on the far end that led into the service courtyard. He had to put down the chair to unlatch the gate and open it. He felt like holding his nose when he stepped into the service courtyard that held the burn pit because of the stench from the adjoining rendering yard. A lower stone wall, a little over two yards high, separated the burn yard from the rendering yard, where all the waste offal and animal parts were carelessly and quickly dumped into a score of huge barrels, usually by the kitchen help. In the middle of the service yard was the fire pit, a circle a good five yards across, the edge being a wall of sooty and cracked bricks a yard high.

  When he reached the pit, Stefanyk thought about throwing the chair into the pit, but, as his eyes took in the elegant lines and smooth finish of the dark wood—dark oak, he thought, or maybe even lorken—he decided against doing that.

  “Not until you’ve carried out all five,” he said to himself.

  Instead, he set the chair beside the low wall of the fire pit and walked back across the yard to the door and made his way back to the Prefect’s study, where the captain still stood, watching. The two bodies had been removed.

  Stefanyk picked up the second chair, carried it out of the palace and to the service courtyard, where he set it beside the first.

  Then he looked at the two chairs, identical and beautiful. He looked around the burn yard. There was half a squad in the bailey, guarding both the palace door and the bailey … and the entry to the burn yard, but he was alone with the chairs in the burn yard itself. He glanced around once more, then sat in one of the chairs. Somehow, sitting in it made him feel calmer. Finally, he rose and looked around. The burn yard was still empty.

  He knew he had to have at least one of the chairs. But how would he ever manage getting it out of the burn yard … and over the walls … or out through the rear refuse gates, past the outer guards?

  His eyes strayed to the rendering yard, and he hurried through the ungated opening, quickly glancing around. He quickly checked the line of barrels careful not to brush against them with his uniform. That required some contortions, but he was rewarded. There was an empty rendering barrel. In fact, there was a line of empties.

  Stefanyk smiled. Then walked back to the burn pit and carried one of the chairs into the rendering yard, easing it into an empty barrel and then rolling the empty across to the line of barrels that were full, then squeezing it between two others. It took him several moments to find an end and wedge it in place, at least well enough that the barrel looked full.

  Only then did he return to the Prefect’s study for the other chairs. When he returned for the fifth chair, the
captain followed him out to the burn yard.

  As Stefanyk set the fourth chair beside the other three, the captain demanded, “Where’s the other chair? I only see four.”

  “I already put it in the burn pit,” replied Stefanyk.

  “Let’s see.” The captain marched up to the pit and studied the ashes and the few coals remaining from what had been burned earlier.

  The guard’s guts tightened, but he remained calm. He was counting on the fact that the captain wouldn’t think of the rendering yard and that, if he did, he wouldn’t look in every barrel.

  “I don’t see anything that looks like it burned.”

  “It was there,” insisted Stefanyk, trying to keep his voice firm and strong. “It was. Maybe it burned already.”

  The captain walked to the entrance to the rendering yard and peered into it, then walked back to the burn pit, then looked at the ashes and embers in the middle of the burn pit. Finally, he shrugged. “The chairs are out of the palace. Put the others in the pit.”

  Stefanyk slowly lifted the first chair into the pit.

  “Put it in deep enough so that the embers will catch the wood on fire.”

  It took all of Stefanyk’s willpower to do that, not just for the first chair, but for each of the four. Then he and the captain waited for them to catch fire. It took quite a while, but the captain did not comment.

  When all four chairs were finally blazing, the officer turned to Stefanyk. “You can return to your post, guard.”

  “Yes, ser.” Stefanyk marched back to the bailey door and resumed his post.

  Shortly, the captain returned and, without looking at Stefanyk, re-entered the palace.

  More than half a glass later, another officer appeared, and ordered the squad of troopers out of the north courtyard. Even at the end of his duty, no one told Stefanyk what had happened inside the palace.

  While Stefanyk had hoped to reclaim the chair before the renderer arrived to pick up the barrels, something else happened at the palace—far worse, he judged, since all the elite guards surrounded the place the next day, and the word was that several officers had just dropped dead, and that there was a black mage on the loose. With elite guards and troopers everywhere, Stefanyk could do nothing, especially since he’d been moved to duty guarding the side gates, except wait each morning at the end of the alley that ran past the palace—wearing a ragged shirt and old trousers—hoping to see the renderer before his afternoon guard shift began.

  Three mornings later, Stefanyk saw the rendering wagon, with the gray-haired Raestel on the seat, turn into the alley, creaking toward the palace and the rear gates of the rendering yard. He stepped out of the early morning shadows.

  “I’ll help you, old man,” offered Stefanyk, as the rendering wagon creaked toward the rear gates of the rendering yard.

  “You’re the young guard, aren’t you? Mairie’s boy?” Raestel tried to straighten up and look more intently at Stefanyk. “What are you trying to get out of the palace?”

  “A chair that the Prefect wanted to burn. My wife and I … we could use it.”

  “How would helping me do that?”

  “I hid it in a rendering barrel.”

  The old man laughed. “Any man who’d hide a broken chair, even a sound one, in a rendering barrel deserves it! Meet me at my place when you get off duty.”

  “Thank you.” Stefanyk could only hope that the chair was still there.

  He was still worrying after his duty shift as he hurried through the dimly lit streets of Fenard out toward the section that held the refuse gatherers, the rag-pickers, and the rendering yards.

  He needn’t have worried. The chair, if dripping some grease and a redolence of rendering yard, was waiting for him on the sagging side porch of the structure that served as the renderer’s dwelling.

  “I can see why you wanted it.” Raestel’s bloodshot eyes surveyed the lines of the somewhat greasy-looking chair. “Good work. You know why the Prefect wanted it burned?”

  “No one ever said. They made me carry it. No one wanted to touch it.”

  The renderer shook his head. “Must be cursed. You sure you want it?”

  Stefanyk nodded. “It’s not cursed. Not for me.”

  “Could be the curse was just for the Prefect. Heard tell of things like that. Strange happenings around the palace this eightday.”

  “No one tells guards anything, not the outside guards. A curse on the Prefect won’t mean anything to us. I thought Baryna would like a fine chair like this. She deserves it.”

  “Deserves the man who risks so much to get it for her. Better cover it with rags when you take it.”

  Even walking home in the darkness, carrying the chair, Stefanyk didn’t feel worried, but once he was back in the two rooms he and Baryna shared in Maman Surtyn’s, it took two full glasses and most of the rags he had to remove the stench and the last of the grease.

  “I won’t sit in that,” Baryna declared.

  Stefanyk took a small square of white cloth and ran it over the entire chair, then showed it to his wife. “See?”

  “You sit in it.”

  He did, for a time, and it was as though many of his worries vanished. Finally, he rose and turned to her. “You sit in it. You’ll see.”

  Gingerly, she lowered herself into the chair. A puzzled expression crossed her face. “There’s a comfort in it. You didn’t just get it from Raestel. Where did it come from?”

  “You can’t tell anyone.”

  “You didn’t steal it?”

  “Not exactly. The owner didn’t like it. He wanted it burned.” Stefanyk smiled. He could have seated himself in the chair and said the same thing, word for word.

  * * *

  That’s how it happened. Oh … it was useful a few other times as well, like when your sister—she couldn’t have been a year old—when she got a terrible flux and like on died. Your ma thought I was crazy, but I wrapped her in blankets and turned the chair into a crib of sorts, and tilted it so I could sit on a stool and rock her. Anyway, after that night she got better, grew up strong and tall like the rest of you. Don’t know as that would work now, but it did then. Anyway … any time you want to take the chair, it’s yours for the asking. Fine piece of furniture even now. Doesn’t look like it’s older than you are, more like almost fresh-crafted …

  Sometimes, readers want to know what happened to a character … looking for some sort of resolution … but I have my doubts if that resolution turns out exactly as they expected, just as is often the case in life.

  WORTH

  I

  Late on twoday afternoon, Martenya watched as the blonde woman in the worn fringed leathers rode up the main street of Llysen, a single long blade at her left hip, and a knife not quite so long at the right. Her hair was cut short, not quite raggedly, and it was so fine that even the slight breeze of early fall ruffled it. Even from twenty yards, the patroller could see the weary wariness of the rider. So she waited until the stranger dismounted and tied her mount to the short railing in front of the chandlery before stepping out of the afternoon shadows toward the broad-shouldered and long-legged woman, a woman almost as tall as Martenya herself.

  The stranger stopped and surveyed the patroller.

  Martenya let her, then asked, “Where are you bound from?”

  “Sarronnyn. Kyphros before that.” The stranger’s brown-flecked green eyes hardened.

  “And before Kyphros?”

  “Why are you asking me all that?” demanded the blonde.

  “Because I’m a patroller of the Marshal, and it’s my job.”

  “Is this Southwind … or Recluce?” Bitterness tinged the words as the stranger’s eyes quickly took in the patroller’s blue sleeveless tunic and the white long-sleeved undertunic before lingering on the twin blades at Martenya’s wide belt.

  “It’s Southwind, and the Marshal doesn’t care who you are and where you come from. She only cares whether you obey the laws and contribute something to the land.” Ma
rtenya paused, then added, “Unless you’re just passing through, and then you only need to obey the laws.”

  “Sounds as bad as Recluce.” The stranger’s lips curled into an expression somewhere between a sneer and disgust.

  “We don’t much care whether you’re white or black, so long as you keep it to yourself,” replied the patroller.

  “Part of your laws?”

  “You might say that.” Martenya made the effort to smile politely. “You look like you’ve been a blade for hire.”

  “I have. When they’d pay me what I’m worth.”

  Martenya waited again before speaking. “There’s not much call for blades here.”

  “You’re wearing them.”

  “All patrollers do. That’s why there’s not much call for them by anyone else … anywhere in Southwind.”

  “So no one goes against the Marshal.”

  “So no one does anything hurtful or against the laws … and no one forces anyone else to. If you have a problem with that,” replied Martenya evenly, “Southwind might not be the best place for you.”

  “I won’t be bothering anyone,” said the broad-shouldered woman. “Where would be a good place to stay that’s clean and cheap?”

  “The hostels begin one block down. Women’s is one block down on the right, men’s three on the left, and the family hostel is two on the left. Copper a night. Special arrangements if you have no coin.”

  “Slop and clean chores?”

  “Unless you’ve got other talents besides spreading your legs or using a blade,” replied Martenya with a lazy smile.

  “Who determines that?”

  “The hostel mistress. Who else? The mistress of the women’s hostel is Eliendra. Words don’t impress her.”

  “Thank you,” replied the stranger.

  “What name do you go by?”

  “Wrynn.”

  “When did you leave Recluce?” That was a guess on Martenya’s part, if not much of one, given the blades and Wrynn’s attitude.

  A momentary look of surprise was followed by the clipped words, “A few years ago. Maybe longer. I haven’t kept track.”