King's Shield

by Sherwood Smith

  Tau made a gesture of deference. “But then you are saying that art is beauty. Is beauty therefore art?”

  Inda rose to his feet, surprising them all. “What I want to know is, is art necessary to magic?” Without waiting for an answer, he loped out, wincing at every step.

  Chapter Seventeen

  HADAND frowned. We will not come back to war, we are not barbarians. “Magic is necessary to life. We have been learning again what our ancestors knew, as our magics begin to fade.”

  Signi said, “I know. I have seen. I will do what I can.”

  Hadand’s expression eased. Her husband’s remained inscrutable.

  Inda reappeared then, and set on the table eight slim golden cases. Six of them were paired, each pair covered with matching images in very fine scrollwork: leaves, ribbons, poppies. One had roses—Jeje recognized that as the mate to the one she had in her gear—and one, the mate to the box he’d given Fox, was carved with stylized flames.

  “Tau there knows what they are; he got ’em for me. Only one is missing—staying aboard my flagship.” He avoided Fox’s name. “T’other missing one Jeje has. They’re made as art, but my use was intended to be military. Your Rajnir must use ’em, right?” He turned to Signi, who bowed her head in assent. “Well, my first question is, must they be in gold with all the artwork, and second, how does he manage with eighty-one pairs in order to talk to his captains?”

  Signi said, “Eighty-one pairs? I do not comprehend.”

  Inda turned on Tau. “You said they only came in pairs.”

  “So the mage told me.”

  “Ah.” Signi’s brow cleared. “It is a misapprehension. You do not have to have them in pairs. Perhaps your mage thought that was what you required?”

  As Tau assented, Signi observed tension in both men. She remembered the rueful conversation by the Marlo-Vayir people about the lack of mages for spell renewal. Here was yet another fraught question: magic. Would they accept the magic renewal so badly needed if offered by a Venn?

  She forced her thoughts back to the subject at hand. “You can make them talk with as many others as you wish, but the cost is greater because each must be spelled to match each of the others in turn. Every possible exchange requires another layer of spells.”

  “So that’s how it works.” Inda dropped the one he’d been holding. “Too bad they’re worthless on the sea.” He turned Evred’s way. “I’d thought we could put together a semblance of the Venn communication, but you need line of sight. There are no landmarks beyond the horizon to give your position in reference to anyone else.” He turned back to Signi. “Your navigation is like a net laid over the world, right? And only your captains know the system of knots.”

  “True.” She inclined her head. “As for your first question, gold is merely the conduit. Those in power have always preferred gold. My chief dag said it was the way of the powerful—whether in governing or in trade—to secure this tool to themselves, for who else can afford so much gold?”

  Tau added, “So there’s truth in the assertion about ostentation. The paired ones are called lovers’ golds in Sartor. When I bought these I told the mage they were for a popular player in Bren. For her dalliances and as gifts to favored admirers. It was the only thing I could think of to deflect any interest in why I wanted ’em. In case mages duplicate messages for some political reason.”

  “You cannot do that.” Signi leaned forward. “You cannot make two sheets of paper out of one, except like this.” She mimed tearing. “But you can divert a message, often without the correspondents knowing. And then restore it.”

  Evred’s brow puckered in doubt, then he walked out. He was gone only a very short time, returning with a golden locket suspended from a chain. Everyone except Hadand looked at it in surprise.

  “Have you ever diverted anyone’s messages without them knowing?” Inda asked, turning back to Signi.

  “Not I,” Signi said, scrupulous as always. “But my . . . my mistress had begun to try, yes. To Dag Erkric. To do so is very, very dangerous,” she added.

  Evred had been toying with the locket, his ambivalence obvious to Hadand and to the observant Tau. With a sudden movement he cast the locket onto the table before Signi. “Can messages sent inside of these be diverted?”

  Signi touched it with a tentative finger. It was warm, as if it had been just taken off; she was startled, but hid her reaction. “This is old-fashioned,” she said. “It is a court love locket, from Sartor, very common the generation before us. They usually come in pairs.”

  Evred said, “It is not a single artifact. Can its messages be diverted and read?”

  “No. No one would think to divert them: the magic transfers love tokens from one locket to the other, and it would take the presence of both before they could be re-spelled to cause a third party to receive their tokens first.”

  Evred retrieved his locket, ran his fingers through the chain as if to lift it, then he dropped the whole into his pocket.

  Signi was astonished. That old-fashioned, quaint ornament—intended for the idle times of wealthy Sartoran city dwellers—functioned as a communications device for this king. Were they truly so devoid of magical aid here? She wondered if she should have told young Shendan, who had taken her by surprise after the king had sent her and Hadand away from the map room, what she had about basic magery and how to find books on learning. Yet knowledge was to be shared—that was what her own secret order had sworn.

  As the meal ended and talk became general again, Signi came to a decision. She whispered it to Inda.

  Evred’s head turned sharply at the sound of her soft voice, but he said only, “Inda. We must get you equipped, and see to the last of the preparations.”

  He leaned down to speak to Hadand. She rose, and together they went out, talking rapidly in low voices.

  “Do it,” Inda said to Signi, pointing with his chin in the direction Evred and Hadand had gone. “From the sound of it, we’ll be busy a watch, maybe more. And you’re right, it will be a while before he trusts you. Go ask Hadand. I think she’d welcome your help.”

  Evred was going to keep Inda busy most of the night with preparations to ride. Signi would have the night to herself in this vast, martial castle. She would use it to do some good for those whose patient faces turned their king’s way—and Inda’s—with such hope.

  Chapter Eighteen

  MARLOVAN women had been required to defend their camps back in the plains riding days.

  Their defenses had been adapted to castles ever since the Marlovans had taken Iasca Leror. And so Hadand and Evred swiftly arranged the shift of certain of his duties from him to her on the walk to their royal suites across the hall from each other. Each was matter of fact, terse in speech because each understood the other so well. There would not be another chance to speak; Evred’s mind was clearly racing ahead to the north.

  He left her after this short colloquy and she summoned her captains, issuing orders for new patrol patterns to be given out. Among their new duties the women would take to horse, defending the city’s perimeter. The girls here for training would combine with the men over fifty and the boys in the academy under eighteen for sentry and gate duty.

  When the women left she discovered that she had a headache. And so she retired to her inner room, because she would rise early indeed. The men would not depart in silence.

  Tau retreated to the high sentry walk between the towers, and strolled along in the cold, rye-scented evening air, studying everything and everyone. The entire city smelled of baking bread.

  He stopped at the east tower. Below, the vast stable yards were lit by torchlight, smaller hand torches being carried in and out of side buildings so that the whole resembled a great beehive filled with orderly activity picked out in golden pinpoints of light. Once or twice he caught sight of Evred striding hither and yon, always with Inda by his side. There was no indication Inda needed Tau, so he was content to observe.

  A quiet step behind brought Tau r
ound, one hand brushing over his wrist, touching the handle of the knife strapped to the inside of his forearm. Tdor recognized the gesture. It was strange to see a man mirror what she was used to in women on guard.

  She stopped, hands out. “May I talk to you?” she asked, her manner hesitant, even contrite. As if she expected rebuff.

  He was intrigued at once. “Please do.”

  “I am here on behalf of Hadand,” Tdor said, without any coy preamble. “She doesn’t know I’m here. I thought perhaps you were interested in her.”

  “Mmmm.” Tau gave the sound an interrogative rise at the end.

  “Well, if you could see your way to visiting her,” Tdor gestured downward. “She’s alone now. She shouldn’t be.”

  Her profile, lit by the ruddy light from below, was troubled. Kind, and Tau sensed that rarity, the generous nature that expects no gain. “No one should be,” he said. “Unless they prefer to sleep alone.”

  His tone was ambiguous. Tdor sent him a quick look, then stepped back, and gave a half laugh, awkward, troubled, sad, and Tau, on impulse, said, “Your king is . . . enam ored of Inda, did you see that?”

  “Yes.” She breathed the word, looking away. “I didn’t know anyone else saw it. Hadand didn’t.” Tdor gripped her elbows. “She only saw her brother. Back again.” Then, quickly, “Only how could he be in love with Inda, after only a day? Is that love?” Her tone made Tau wonder how many shadows that question cast.

  “From the little I’ve heard today, it sounds like all his brother love went to Inda when they were boys. And remained steadfast all these nine years.” Tau remembered his mother’s discourses on love, scarcely understood when he was small. But remembered, as she had intended. “At some point that changed to something else. Despite the poets’ praise for such steadfast love, it’s not always good. That is, if it’s unreturned, it can become . . . consuming.”

  “You mean a craze.” Tdor’s gaze was unwavering. “Those are common in his family. His father, Tlennen-Harvaldar, had one for Captain Sindan. That one was good because it was two ways. They were mates. Evred’s brother had one for Joret Dei, who was to marry Inda’s brother. That one was bad, because she didn’t want him. So it brought about many deaths, beginning with Inda’s brother Tanrid, and ending with the Sierlaef himself.”

  Tau grimaced. “Princely passions can be dangerous.”

  Tdor said soberly, “I don’t know what to think, except to be afraid for them.”

  “If your king doesn’t act on it, Inda may never see it.” Tau stepped closer, lowering his voice. “You knew Inda when he was a boy. I’ve known him since. My guess is he was surrounded by love back then.”

  “Yes.” Tdor sighed. “His mother, Hadand, Joret. Me. The castle children—” Except Branid. No, even he in a twisted way, but then everything in his life is twisted. “—the servants, they all loved him, hugged him, kissed him, wrestled with him, laughed with him, retied his sash when he forgot. His father, from a distance. I once thought his brother didn’t love him, but since then I have changed my mind. Tanrid loved Inda the way he knew best—the way he loved the castle dogs. Who adored him.” Her eyes lifted skyward, her voice dropping to a whisper with the depth of long-suppressed feeling. “And it seems to have been the same when Inda went to the academy.”

  “So love was Inda’s natural state. Love—loyalty—was like air to him. And though I believe his ability to love was frozen up with his memories of his home for nine years, his loyalty wasn’t. He is loyal to us all. That’s part of his appeal as a captain.”

  Tdor let her breath out. What an extraordinary conversation, with an extraordinary person. He resembled a painting of an impossible hero in one of the ancient scrolls, haloed as he was by the torches beating with ruddy light above and around them as they cast a glow onto the courts busy with the preparations for war. But she had grown up with a girl whose beauty had brought her more grief than pleasure and in a sense Tdor was inured to the effect. What intrigued her was the shape of his features and the subtlety of his mind.

  Still. The conversation had turned intimate of a sudden, and that made her uneasy. Life this day had taken so very many peculiar turns. She would expose no one’s secrets any further.

  She struck her hand over her heart, and said, “I thank you.”

  She left without saying what for.

  Tau lingered, thinking, thinking, and at last made his way back down, and to the room where Jeje had retreated. “I shall probably not be back tonight,” he said, in apology. His expression, not his tone, asked a question.

  Jeje understood the question. She regarded him for a long breath, half lit through the reflected glow in the open window, tall, graceful. Truth was, she was disappointed, but then she had never expected to hold him to her anymore than one holds the sun that warms you and then leaves at night.

  But the sun always returns. Instinct said he was telling her because he would always come back, if she would have him, like the sun greets the world each day.

  “It’s the queen, isn’t it?” she asked, her husky voice low. “I saw the way she looked at you at supper. Though she was trying not to.”

  “Are you displeased?”

  “No,” Jeje said, looking inward and finding it was so. “I like her. She’s a good person, like Inda. Well, she’s Inda’s sister.” She snorted a laugh. “Go on, give her a night to remember.”

  He blew her an airy kiss and slipped out, running downstairs to one of the old parlors where he’d seen a lute, set aside after the former queen left and forgotten since. He stopped long enough to tune it, and then trod down the hall to Hadand’s rooms.

  Two women guards stopped him. He brandished the lute. “I came to offer some foreign tunes for the queen’s amusement.”

  The female guards exchanged glances; one smiled at him with grim approval as the other slipped inside.

  The queen came herself and opened the door, looking up at Tau in mute question.

  The guard stepped out and took up her stance, facing out.

  Tau walked into an austere room that smelled of summer grasses and wildflowers and baking bread; all the windows stood open, despite the cold air. Candles burned at the far end of the room, where they would not worry her eyes.

  “Shall I play?” Tau asked, studying Hadand’s wide brown gaze. “I’m deemed very good. Or,” he said, not quite touching her brow, “I can get rid of that headache. I’m very good at that, too.”

  “Please,” she said, too distressed to ask how he knew she had a headache.

  At his gesture she lay down right before the fire, and he knelt beside her. And as heels clattered and horses clopped and steel rang in the courtyards below, he hummed softly, his strong fingers polishing one by one all the knots and splinters of her neck and shoulders and back into smoothly cambered silk.

  At the last she exhaled deeply. “You are good.”

  He laughed, and bent and kissed the lovely curve of her neck. She sighed again—a deep, pain-free breath—and turned over, stretching out on her back.

  The invitation was there in her smile, her welcoming posture. But—he bent and sniffed again, identifying the distinctive, slightly bitter herbal smell of—

  “Are you using birth-herb?” he asked.

  “My moon-cycle ended not two days ago,” she responded, and, her lower eyelids crinkling just the way Inda’s did at inward pain, she added, “I won’t be drinking it tomorrow. Or the day after.”

  Of course not, with her king riding off to war. Tau sat back on his heels for a long moment, appreciating those wide eyes so like Inda’s, and yet so unlike, and then with a deliberation that caused her to tingle he admired the enticing curves that her parting night-robe did not hide. “You are beautiful,” he whispered, as passion radiated up through him, echoed back in her breathing, blazing into incandescence.

  She made a sound midway between a laugh and a sob, but then his lips met hers, and the only sounds were those of love, and the music of the night birds outside, and bey
ond them the noise of preparation for war.

  Jeje, left alone, prowled around the room once, twice, and then gave up. She’d napped all afternoon when the others had been whisked away. It had seemed a good idea at the time. But now she couldn’t sleep.

  So she decided to take a walk from one end of the castle to the other. She’d see if she could make it without getting lost, and maybe it would tire her body enough to catch some rest before yet another horrible all-day ride.

  She slipped out. No one in sight. Not surprising. It was late. But when she reached the tower with the spiral stairway there was a bright glow in the slit windows. She stood on tiptoe. Below lay an enormous court full of men in gray tunics and long-skirted coats checking horses’ feet, adjusting saddles and gear, carrying loads this way and that.

  The rhythmic hiss of slippered feet coming up the stairs caught her attention. It was Tdor. She probably had a room on the same hall.

  She gave Jeje a tentative smile, and Jeje blurted, “Are you really going to marry Inda?”

  Tdor halted midway on the stair, and then resumed her climb. One, two, three steps, and then she reached the landing. “I don’t know,” she said finally. Her accent in Iascan was exactly like Inda’s. Until recently, only Fox and Barend had Inda’s accent. Now Jeje heard it all around her. “That is, I expect so, once he returns from the north.” She raised a hand to tuck a loose strand of hair back behind her ear. Her sleeve fell back, and there was the glint of a polished black knife hilt. Her smile was bleak. “If. If he returns from the north.”

  She doesn’t just mean if he’s dead.

  Tdor opened the door to her own chamber, and made an inviting gesture. “Do you want to come inside? Or am I keeping you from something else?”

  Jeje stepped into the room. “I was wandering around trying to get tired enough to sleep.”

  Tdor’s chamber was furnished exactly like all the others. Jeje plopped down onto a mat.

  Tdor sat more slowly. “Tell me about Taumad. Where does he come from? His accent is not northern Iascan, like yours. It’s more like ours in the south.”