A Princess of the Chameln

by Cherry Wilder

  “What would you have,” snapped Aidris Venn, the kedran, “a kind and patient officer or a pretty one?”

  Every year then she looked forward to her days in the Hall; Nenad Am Charn sent a big New Year’s gift box of delicacies and presents from the Chameln lands for herself and Sabeth. One winter’s night she met the young messenger from Varda lurking about in the passageway by the Hall kitchen, having delivered the box. He gave her a packet of letters.

  She ran shivering up a little winding “secret” stair and took a candle into a window bay near the bright south bower where the fire was lit and the musicians played songs for the season. She sat hunched against the cold, mullioned windowpanes, broke the seal and saw Nazran’s handwriting. He wrote without signature or superscription; it was a long dispatch rather than a letter:

  Werris makes no pretence of holding the north, he has not the forces to do it, his envoys and commissioners are mocked and harried and put to flight by the loyal tribes. It is a matter of Achamar and the south and the west. If the so-called Great King is hard-pressed by his own unruly subject lords, and if the garrisons and the households of the southern landholders are reduced in the Chameln lands, then there is real hope for our enterprise of arms. The spark will fall upon dry grass and the countryside will be ablaze from end to end, calling for the return of its true rulers and an end to the domination of Mel’Nir.

  There was more in a similar vein, every line burning with hope. Aidris could almost hear the rattle of preparation, the storing of arms, the work of blacksmiths in the night. Then the screed continued:

  Yet I must tell you of what is painfully rumored hereabout, of Werris’s plan and of those others who are rumored to support this most treacherous shift. The Daindru shall be broken and Sharn Am Zor will rule alone. Kelen of Lien and his advisors will stand by this foul act in exchange for bounties, especially the gift of a slice of rich mining land in or near the Adz. I cannot learn with certainty what Danu Aravel feels in this matter, whether her judgement and wits are clouded or whether she bends to her brother’s will. The prince himself was ever of good understanding, most forward and, as I have heard, tenacious of his rights. Do you, therefore, write to him most plainly, and our faithful envoy will see that it comes directly into his hand. Give some proof that Dan Sharn will recognise so that he will know who it is that writes to him, for it is often said that the Heir of the Firn is dead and will not come again. Do not be so bold, however, as to reveal any hint of your present refuge, lest the letter miscarry.

  The letter had been written over a period of weeks, the inks and pens different, the script often cramped as if the light were not good or the hand that held the pen crippled. The old man’s spirit flared out again in the final words.

  The news is good. The call may come soon, so I charge you to be ready. Yet if we fail at this attempt, I swear that our spirit will never fail. All will be done again, though it take all our lives and all our strength. Be patient and be uplifted by the unending love and loyalty of those who serve you and your house.

  The excitement she felt was almost stifling; she wanted to run and shout. “The call may come soon . . .” There was another fold of paper with Nazran’s letter and a hard object, a coin perhaps, behind the rough thumbprint seal. She opened the paper and found a gold ring embedded in the wax, a simple gold ring with a turquoise. Once again the letter had no beginning and no end, it was no more than a few lines scrawled hastily with an ill-trimmed pen.

  Take this ring in token of my love and duty. We were true friends, I think, almost before you could speak or I could write, and I pray that this bond, tested and proved by an absence of long years, will grow into a more enduring love.

  The signature was bold: Bajan Am Nuresh. Aidris leant her cheek against the windowpanes and fitted the ring first to one finger, then another and found that she could wear it best on the middle finger of her right hand. She was seized with terror and yearning. The northern tribes would rise up, the Chameln lands fly to arms, he would fall in the battle, and she would never come to him again. Almost she wished Nazran’s plans and schemes away.

  She heard footsteps and folded the letters quickly. The curtains parted before the window bay, and Sabeth came in, bright-faced.

  “Thank heaven, it is you. Put out the candle!”

  They sat in the dark and heard a rush of steps going past with a tinkling of bells and the voices of the other waiting women calling, “Sabeth! Sabeth!” Then there was a sound of heavier steps and a long whoop of “Where away? Lady! Lady!”

  “Oh I was surprised and put utterly to shame,” whispered Sabeth. “I had not a moment to set my hair to rights . . .”

  “I have had news . . .” said Aidris.

  Her voice was solemn, she could not control it; she could not help feeling impatient with whatever game it was they were playing. Sabeth, visible a little now in the snowy radiance from the window, turned towards her.

  “Is that why you hide yourself away? Oh, I hope it is nothing bad to spoil the day!”

  “It may be good news,” said Aidris.

  She longed to tell everything, to show her gold ring, to gasp out all her plans, but as before the words stuck in her throat.

  “I may be able to go home again,” she said.

  “Goddess be praised,” said Sabeth.

  She was still preoccupied but she reached out and pressed Aidris’s hand.

  “Did Gerr or Niall speak to you?” she asked, “or Lord Huw . . .?”

  “What about?” asked Aidris, mystified.

  They heard the noise of bells and cries repeated, far away in the long gallery.

  “About me, of course,” said Sabeth, with a laugh that was almost a sob.

  “Lady Aumerl said something.” Aidris tried to concentrate. “Yes . . . she asked after your parents, and I said that they were dead. She asked if you were free to make contracts, if you were of age. I answered, yes, of course.”

  “Nothing about lands or goods?” asked Sabeth.

  “Not a word.”

  “The dowry,” said Sabeth. “I have thought about it even if he, dear soul, has not. Oh, here they come again!”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh you silly goose!” cried Sabeth in exasperation. “It is my bride-calling! It is my betrothal! Gerr has asked for my hand!”

  At last Aidris understood.

  “Well, I thought Lady Aumerl must mean something of that sort,” she said, “but I knew nothing of this racing and chasing. As for the dowry I can promise you a little . . .”

  “You have been so good,” said Sabeth. “I know your family in Chameln Achamar are well-found. I wondered about that little store of gold we divided . . .”

  “You may have it all and another string of the pearls, but when I come home again, we can do better. There is a place I know, called Zerrah, a little manor on the road from Achamar. It is not as large as Kerrick, but . . .”

  “Is that where you live?” asked Sabeth, listening as the steps of her pursuers came closer.

  “I slept there once,” said Aidris. “On my way into exile.”

  Then Gerr pulled aside the curtain and gave a cry of triumph.

  “A bride! A bride!”

  He saw Aidris in the corner of the window bay and said, “Now, Kedran, you have served this lady long enough and can safely give her up to me!”

  “He will serve her better!” cried one of the young men.

  Then the women, Genufa, Amèdine and the rest, cried out for Shame, and Gerr led the rosy-faced Sabeth into the south bower to the sound of bells.

  Aidris was about to follow the procession when Niall of Kerrick appeared round the billowing curtain. She could not tell if he had been part of the bride-calling.

  “My brother is very jealous of his new betrothed,” he said. “I hope his words did not offend you, Kedran Venn.”

  Aidris shook her head.

  “I wish them very happy,” she said. “It was a love match from the first.”

&nb
sp; “It is a tale from one of those knightly chronicles that Gerr and the Lady Sabeth read together,” said Niall. “The dark forest, the frowning mountains peopled with goblin creatures and every kind of wayward spirit, then suddenly the loveliest of ladies, attended only by one faithful kedran . . .”

  Aidris laughed and shuddered. “Do not mistake our peril, Master Niall! Your brother saved us from the giant warriors of Mel’Nir, not from elves and goblins. If he sets a kind of glamor over the meeting, it is surely because he comes from Athron, this magic kingdom.”

  “I had thought perhaps he was enchanted,” said Niall. “That he saw only what he was meant to see . . .”

  “No, you are wrong again,” said Aidris. “He saw only what he would see . . .”

  “Tell me what he should have seen,” said Niall softly.

  “You are teasing,” she said. “Do you know that your brother swore a solemn oath, more than one, to Sabeth and to me? I do not like to speak of the time before I came into exile. Yet I will say one thing, just to tease you in return. I served no one. I was no one’s faithful servant until I came to Kerrick Hall and joined your father’s kedran troop.”

  Niall pondered this a moment and then began to smile.

  “Are you telling me that the Lady Sabeth was your servant . . .?”

  “No, not that either,” said Aidris, wearily.

  She sprang up, took her candle and lit it again from a standing rack of candles in the corner of the landing. She settled into the window bay again.

  “If you will pardon me,” she said, “I have had letters.”

  Niall looked at her, frowning deeply, then let the curtain fall.

  She reread the letters all through the feast days and when she returned to quarters after the New Year she took a sheet of fine paper from Lien from her own writing case and composed her letter to Sharn Am Zor.

  To the most excellent Prince, Dan Esher Sharn Kelen Am Zor, Heir of the Zor in the Chameln lands, Keeper of the gates of Achamar, Lord of the Wells, Lord of Chernak, Winn and Farsn, Markgraf of Vedan, Viscount of Hodd—

  Dearest Cousin,

  I pray that you are well and greet you for the New Year, hoping that this next twelvemoon will bring us together in our rightful places. What these places are we have been well taught, since we were born. I am the Heir of the Firn, I am of age and therefore sole ruler of the Chameln lands and Regent for yourself, the Heir of the Zor. When you come of age, we will rule together, we will be the Daindru, which has ruled in Achamar for more than a thousand years. I have sworn that this ancient bond will not fail through any act of mine. I will hold to my right as long as I live and I beseech you to do the same.

  There are those who, claiming to be of better understanding, because of your youth, or claiming you owe them some duty, will urge you to break the Daindru, to rule alone or with some usurping Regent in my stead. Hold to your right and mine, dearest cousin, and resist these treacherous counsels.

  That you will know that I live and that this letter comes indeed from my hand alone, I will recall to you the Great Oak where we sheltered, and how we spoke there of the Tulgai and I said that they would do us honor if we came amongst them. And I will recall how we overturned a stone urn with a rosebush in the garden of the palace of the Zor at Achamar and ran off and were never charged with the deed.

  So by these memories of troubled times and of happier ones you will know that I am your Regent and above all your most loving cousin.

  Aidris Am Firn

  The letter was sealed and wrapped and sealed again and addressed to Nenad Am Charn. It was carried to the trading envoy by the kedran officer of New Moon Company, who rode black horses and escorted the quarter’s tribute to the princes in Varda.

  She did not expect a reply to this letter, and indeed she had none. She read and reread the long screed from Nazran and the shorter letter from Bajan until the inks faded and the paper became soft, crumbling along its folds. No call came and no other news, either good or bad, reached her out of the Chameln lands. She looked weeping into the scrying stone, and the Lady looked back at her with a sorrowing face and shook her head when Aidris showed the letters. A trail of ivy was laid upon the table within the stone, and she knew its message: patience. So her hope, which shone so brightly, was slowly dimmed. She still looked at her letters from time to time and at the New Year, but they were no more than talismans, a memory of that one hopeful season.

  II

  In the spring of her twenty-first year, Aidris rode with Grey Company and White Company and New Moon Company to Benna, on the border of Cayl, in the south. The kedran brought Gerr of Kerrick and Sabeth, his betrothed, together with their bridal party, to the Hospice of the Moon Sisters. They were married in a sacred ceremony by Mother Frey, head of the house, who was more than ninety years old. Then the blessed pair went on over the pass with a smaller escort, riding to Port Cayl, where they would take ship to Eildon for their wedding journey, many moons of pure honey.

  Sabeth, all arrayed in white and green and mounted upon a new bay mare, a gift from Lord Huw and Lady Aumerl, was lovely as the spring morning. Gerr of Kerrick rode in full panoply, a knight questor of the order of the Foresters of Athron. Aidris felt a thread of disappointment when she was not asked to ride in the special escort. She had not seen Sabeth face to face for many days, with the wedding preparations, and could only hope that her gift of silks, sent by Nenad Am Charn, had come safely to her hand. She thought of Port Cayl up ahead and sighed.

  “Never mind,” said Ortwen. “That is the way with gentlefolk and nobles. Hoity-toity the lot of them. You should have had a place in the escort, everyone knows that.”

  Aidris was surprised.

  “It is nothing,” she said. “I don’t feel slighted. And I know that gentlefolk and nobles cannot all be called proud.”

  She watched the knight and lady ride in over the pass in bright sunshine and thought of the border forest, the dark ways, the last wild ride through the Wulfental. She felt a real wave of happiness for Sabeth and her true knight. She realised that she was herself absolutely unafraid, she had been for years now, free of fear in Athron.

  Lord Huw came up on Fireberry; he gave her a strange look.

  “Be of good cheer, Kedran Venn,” he said. “It is no time for sad thoughts.”

  “No indeed, my lord,” she said, “but I have envied the party a little because they ride to Port Cayl.”

  “Port Cayl!” he exclaimed. “What’s there to interest you? It is a rough place.”

  “I have never seen the sea,” said Aidris.

  Lord Huw was shocked.

  “By Carach,” he cried, “we must remedy that! You have a long furlough coming up, do you not? Then you must go to Spelt, a manor farm of ours on the western strand of Athron. You will get all the sea you want and more, and your sweet grey can race along the sands like the wild white horses of the salt marsh called the Shallir, the sea spirits.”

  “How fine that would be!”

  “Hold me to this promise, Kedran,” he said. “This year will be a busy one, and I need reminders. In autumn, when our lovers return, we have the visit of the two princes . . .”

  When he had ridden off, Aidris turned back to Ortwen.

  “You see?” She smiled. “Lord Huw is not proud but kind.”

  “True enough.” Ortwen grinned. “But it doan follow. He is not of noble birth, our good Lord Huw, but a plain man of Athron, who went for a sailor once, before he came to this high estate.”

  So the spring wore into summer, and the great wheel of the year turned slowly. Kerrick Hall made ready to receive its royal guests: Flor of Varda would ride out from the city with his consort, the Princess Josenna, and a retinue as bright and bold as he could muster in the land of Athron. He would meet, just beyond the village of Garth, with the scion of an elder house and a land of ancient heritage: Prince Ross of Eildon. In the train of this prince would ride Gerr of Kerrick and his lady, returned from their wedding journey, and Kerrick Hall wo
uld give hospitality to the two princes, to the old magic and the new, for the whole of the Maplemoon, the month of plenty.

  For the kedran this was certain to be a weary and unsettling time. A month on parade, long nights on watch and busy mornings when the rest of the world slept until noon; the prospect of having to remain sober when others did not. Aidris had to admit to a certain curiosity about her royal cousins, although she did not expect to come very close to them. To prove their magical inheritance, as far as she was concerned, the princes would have to do what she feared most: pierce her disguise at once.

  She was quite clear about the connection to Flor of Varda. Forty years or so ago, before the Carach returned, his grandfather, Duke Ferant, had carried off her great-aunt, Imal Am Firn, a lady two places from the throne. Aidris felt a faint envy for the pangs of this ballad heroine who loved her poor duke “more than horse or hound,” stole certain jewels of the Firn for her dowry and galloped off over the Grafell Pass “when the moon was dark.” Yet Imal must have been an unusual Princess of the Firn, or else the ballads lied. She had gone into Athron legend as Imelda Golden Hair, tall and straight as the birch, modest and seemly, though of savage blood.

  The connection to Prince Ross was more difficult for her to work out; there were at least three royal lines in Eildon, all richly entwined and intermarried. Her grandfather, Edgar of Eildon—that young father who died so soon that that only his own elder children had any memory of him—came from one house, Prince Ross from another, the aged Priest-King, Angisfor, from a third. She believed the name Ross had been borne by several magicians, warriors and poets in succeeding generations.

  Eildon had a more distant and shadowy connection to the Chameln lands but she liked it better, as a legend, than the story of Imelda Golden Hair. Once, long ago, a prince and princess of Eildon had braved the seas and the long journey through the forests of the Southland, unconquered by Mel’Nir, to marry with the Daindru of their time. These were the Tamirdru, the Sea Oak Twins, dark Eilda, who wed the King of the Firn, and bright Tamir, her brother who was consort of the Queen of the Zor. Even the makeshift names of these two—Eilda or Maid of Eildon and Tamir or Sea Oak—seemed to make them more authentic. It was so long ago, Aidris reasoned, that their real names had been lost.