by Carol Berg
“Tomas! Listen to yourself,” I broke in at last. “All I hear is how you are humiliated, how you will have to wallow in dishonor, how your triumph has been turned to dung. Did you ever consider me for even a moment? Did you ever think what it is to be deemed of no more value than a plot of land or a chest of gold to be paid out because your brother is loyal? You would pledge your sister to a man she despises. For what?”
“For everything. I would have made you queen, you little fool! We would have been the most powerful family in the Four Realms.”
Blast all stupidity, I thought, as Tomas trembled with rage. It was not just for loyalty and friendship. I’d not given Tomas enough credit. It had never crossed my mind that his ambitions stretched beyond Evard.
I tried to soothe him. “You’ll have all the power you wish, Tomas. You’ve been Evard’s most devoted friend; you’ve fought beside him since you were boys. You are the Champion of Leire, and not just because you’re his friend. You’re the finest swordsman in the Four Realms and none in any realm will dispute it. But I don’t want to be queen, Tomas, not if it means being Evard’s chattel or even yours.”
Tomas threw up his hands. “You prefer Martin’s endless Long Night follies and juggling shows. Are you his whore, too?”
So much for unmendable rifts. I slapped him, leaving a darker red mark on his red face. “Your tongue is as foul as your choice of friends, Tomas, and just as unimaginative. The only foolish thing I’ve done this day is think that somehow, given time, you might understand.”
My brother answered with cold hatred that was far more terrible than his anger. “I will never understand, Seri.” He opened the door and flung his last words over his shoulder. “Don’t bother returning to Comigor. I’ll have your things sent to the townhouse and set up a means to keep you respectably. I trust you’ll return to some semblance of decorum after this despicable performance.” He slammed the door, leaving me alone in the gilded room.
The anger I had expected. Tomas had been indulged from his first breath, deprived of nothing save the remotest inkling that there were others in the universe besides himself. But the unyielding hatred—that I had not expected. I would have to tread carefully. In one day I had made enemies of the two most powerful men in the land.
Well, I had made my choice and I had no intention of regretting it, though I could see now the painful consequences that must follow. An ornate little desk in the corner of the anteroom housed paper, pens, and ink, so the first thing I did was to write a message to the housekeeper at our townhouse, saying the house must be opened that night, rather than later in the fall as had been the family custom. And then I wrote a letter to Martin.
My dear cousin,
As you have seen, it is done. My fate, at least in the realm of marriage, is in my own hands, and I do not regret my choice. But as with all choices of any significance, especially those which tread on the pride of kings and brothers, certain consequences must temper any celebration of success in my endeavor.
I cannot express too deeply my gratitude for the education and friendship you have given me in the past four years. My view of the world has been irrevocably changed by the enlightened company at Windham, but for now my participation in those pleasant activities must end. Though not my desire, this too, is my own choice.
My brother and I have agreed that I will take up residence here in the city. I am well provided for.
You must tell my friends that they will ever be in my thoughts, and for any who go traveling, may the road be filled with nothing but beauty.
Highest regards,
Your cousin,
Seri
It was not enough, but what could possibly be enough to tell them what I wished? They would read between the lines.
Year 1 in the reign of King Evard
I plunged immediately into the social life of the court, renewing girlhood friendships I had abandoned when I had begun attending Martin’s salons. I found it ironic that I was supposed to find the “decorum” Tomas so prized in the drunken revelry of idle nobles who could converse on no topic more serious than who was whose mistress, and what were the prospects for the fall campaign, and weren’t last year’s vintages the most bloody awful in history.
But between afternoon feasts, hunting parties, and evening entertainments, I read and studied furiously. Until the years at Windham I had never been studious, preferring a ride across the downs to reading a book or a game of draughts to composing an essay. Even at Windham, my scholarship had been mostly confined to avid listening, unschooled argument, and persistent questioning. Only Tennice’s challenge had sent me to reading. But now that I was deprived of that company, I discovered a hunger for knowledge that I could ease nowhere but in books. In the back of my mind I held fast to something Tennice had mentioned in passing, that one or two women had been allowed to study at the Royal University in Valleor. To make something different of my life . . . I liked that idea. Things more unlikely had come about.
I also hired an elderly gentleman to teach me to play the flute. He was a drunkard, but in the rare times he came without spirits on his breath, he could sear the soul with the beauty of his music. He said he drank because no one would listen. I listened, and I learned.
One morning, as I sat in my library studying a history of the Four Realms, Darzid came to visit. “Just to discover how this new life suits you,” he said. “No need to stop what you’re doing.”
He settled in a chair by the window and seemed to mean what he said. He browsed through the stack of books I had left beside the chair: one on law, one on philosophy, one on the history of Valleor that I was devouring with new eyes, hunting any mention of Avonar. The task of opening a conversation was left to me. The trouble was, I was far more interested in what I was reading. The tattered book in my hand purported to recount the history of “the reign of horror and the noble restoration” some four and a half centuries in the past. I purposely did not offer Darzid any refreshment and did not move from my library table to a chair that might facilitate our conversation.
“You must report to Tomas that I appear comfortable and well fed, and I do not seem to be moping for the loss of his companionship or Evard’s.”
“Mmm.” He thumbed idly through one of the books, but I didn’t think he was reading it.
It was tedious to make conversation when you had no heart for it. “So, Captain, are you finding sufficient fodder for your character sketches, since Tomas has dragged you so high? Have you decided to write them down as you threatened? I think the kingdom could do with a good laugh now the war has taken up again.”
“The world is absurd. I—” He broke off, threw the book on the table, and sat back, tapping his long finger rapidly on the arm of the chair. Though his dress was as sleek as ever, Darzid didn’t look well. The sunny window at his back left his haggard face in shadow. The mischievous glint was gone.
I waited for him to resume his thought. He was not one to dance about a topic or adhere to polite protocols. But the silence stretched so long and so heavily, I felt compelled to say something. “Captain, why are you here?”
A hint of his sardonic smile flashed across his face. “I’ve missed our dinner conversations. Every fishwife in this city knows of your estrangement from your brother, thus they refuse to seat me next you. You’ve always brought out my best humor.”
“So, is it court life or soldiering that’s quenched it?”
“Truth to tell, I’ve not been sleeping well.” He drew up to the edge of his chair and leaned forward. “Tell me, lady, do you ever have the sense that you belong somewhere else? That your life has taken a course you cannot explain?”
“On occasion,” I said. Certainly on the night I had learned that the society I believed built on honor had perpetuated a horrific lie—that sorcerers were universally evil and deserved to die in torment. “Usually when I am at some baroness’s masque—”
“No, no. This is something else.” A gold chain hung about his neck, its links g
leaming in the sunbeams. “I visited a village in the far north of Valleor last month, a place where I’ve never been. The people of the village claimed to know me. To detest me. Old people swore they’d met me in their youth. I thought it an oddity, but at three other villages in the district, it was the same. My lady, they told me of a duel fought there thirty years ago. I killed a local man, they said, a man well regarded in their district. They described the combat in detail. I scoffed at the tale, but they swore to it, mentioning a star-shaped scar left on my shoulder from the incident. I told them it was nonsense, of course. Tomas got a great laugh.”
“But you’re not laughing.” Indeed he was as serious as I’d ever seen him.
“I have such a scar on my shoulder, exactly as they described it.” Absentmindedly, Darzid rubbed his left shoulder, as if some ghost pain bothered him.
“Coincidence. You’re a Leiran soldier. You have a number of scars, I’m sure. And every Vallorean hates every Leiran ever born.”
“But, strangely enough, I can’t tell you where I got this particular scar. The whole matter got me thinking. There are a number of things I can’t remember: stories of my family, my career, that I’ve told so often they seem true, and yet when I turn my mind to them, they vanish like movements you see only out of the corner of your eye.” He stared at his hands and the ugly burn scars that crossed his palms. “And there are images floating in my head that have no place there, images that have the truth of memory, and yet are so fantastical . . .” He shook his head as if to rid himself of those very thoughts. “Foolishness. You must think me drunk.”
“Why are you telling me these things?”
He forced a laugh. “I’ve no one else to tell of my fancies. Tomas and Evard are quite single-minded, and everyone else in this kingdom gets the megrims from such talk. But you sit here wide-eyed and act as if you hear such mysteries every day. I knew you’d not laugh at me. You are exceptional. . . .”
I’d never seen such a look on Darzid’s face—unmasked admiration . . . a request for intimacy . . .
I stood up abruptly. This conversation was going somewhere I didn’t want to go. “I’m sorry I can’t hear the whole story, Captain. But for now, I’m in the middle of some work. . . .” I waved at my book and a stack of papers on my desk.
Face scarlet, he leaped to his feet and called my butler for his cloak. “My apologies, my lady. I had no wish to make you uncomfortable.”
“This thing with Tomas will pass.” I said. “We’ll sit at many a tedious dinner where you can tell me more.” His story was indeed curious, but I had no need and no desire for intimacy with an ambitious courtier. Those entrusted with mortal secrets had to be careful about intimate relationships.
In a flurry of farewells and deprecating humor, he took his leave. “If Tomas fails to come to his senses and you find this studious life as boring as a dinner party, perhaps you will invite me back sometime and restore my wit.”
“Anything is possible, Captain.”
But in truth, I never invited him back. I cared nothing for Darzid and his humors and his mysteries. Rather, my thoughts remained at Windham, and I would smile to myself and wonder what dusty tomes Tennice had discovered lately, and who would ally with Julia to argue with Martin that women should own property, and was Karon even there or was he traveling again, searching for knowledge and beauty to feed his strange power. Someday I would know more of sorcery. I’d had too small a taste of that exotic fruit.
When I was a child of five, King Gevron had decided that subjugation of the other three of the Four Realms was the only answer to the centuries of bloody disputes with our neighbors, Valleor, Kerotea, and Iskeran. He began with Valleor, the fertile kingdom to the northwest, also the weakest of the three and the one with the longest shared border. Eleven years passed until the day the last Vallorean fortress fell; only the kingdom’s vast size—and frequent interruptions from the more warlike Keroteans and Isker—had made the conquest take so long. Gevron spent three years ravaging conquered Valleor, and thus had turned his full attention to Kerotea only in the last years of his reign. That war had gone nowhere.
Evard marched out of Montevial one week after his coronation, bragging that he would finish off the Keroteans in far less time than Gevron had taken to crush Valleor. By midwinter of the first year of his reign, he claimed decisive victories on the Kerotean frontier. But dismal weather cut the campaign short, and gossip was that everything gained would be lost again by spring.
On the eve of Long Night, I decided to stay home. There had been an unending siege of entertainments celebrating Seille—the midwinter season that culminated in Long Night and the ten days until year’s end—and I had refused no invitation lest any slight be noted. I flirted with any man who would look at me and made sure there was enough gossip at court that Tomas and Evard would hear of it. The king would be able to blame no man for standing higher than himself in my favor. Eventually, perhaps, he would lose interest and stop listening. But enough was enough. I pleaded the grippe and spent the evening with a wool comforter and a book of Vallorean folk tales, the winter shadows held back only by the flicker of my library fire.
The front bell rang. I assumed it was one of my latest suitors, most likely Viscount Mantegna, pleading with the butler that he would be eternally devastated if he could not drive me out in his new sleigh. Mantegna was a slobbering pup, but amusing enough. Luckily I had Joubert, the butler, well trained. “No” meant no.
There came a tap on the library door, and Joubert entered with a long, thin parcel in his hand. “Your pardon, my lady. A gift has arrived.”
The arm-length bundle of green silk was tied with a gold ribbon and had no card. Unrolling the layers of silk revealed a rose . . . in the middle of winter, a single, perfect red rose. The tips of the scarlet petals curled out, on the very instant of bursting open. Poised on one of them was a single dewdrop, no stray snowflake or ice pellet melted in the warmth of the room, for as I gazed upon the flower, wreathed in its sweetness, I smelled the dew-laden gardens of Windham. Enchantment . . .
I ran to the foyer to see if he was there, but the front of the house was dark and deserted. I was overwhelmed with disappointment, but only until I touched the rose again. Then I smiled, put it in a crystal vase, and set it on a low table where I could see it from every angle. The rose was message enough.
Spring brought the Month of Winds, when we celebrated Arot’s wedding to Mana, the wind maiden who had given birth to the Twins. On each day of the Month of Winds, parents gave children presents and sweets in remembrance of the gifts Mana had given to the creatures of forest and sky at her wedding, hiding them around the house and gardens as Mana had hidden nuts for the squirrels. Midway through the month came the Feast of Vines, supposedly the most propitious day of the year for engagements and betrothals. Certainly it was a propitious day for wine-merchants.
On a rainy afternoon five days after the feast day, I attended the funeral rites for the Duke of Gamercy, a jolly, hard-drinking, foulmouthed old man who had been one of my father’s closest friends. Gossip said the old man had enjoyed the Feast of Vines a bit too much for one in his sixty-seventh year. Tomas did not attend the funeral, being at Evard’s side on the new campaign in Kerotea. Martin was present, though, sitting across the cold stone expanse of Annadis’s temple with Tennice at his side. It was the first time I’d seen them in the seven months since Evard’s coronation. Neither of them looked my way.
After the incense-filled hours of songs and stories commending the old warrior’s name to the Twins as worthy to be entered on their lists of earthly heroes, the guests retired to the duke’s townhouse for refreshment and reminiscence. Though I wanted nothing more than to fling myself into Martin’s arms and beg for news, I followed his lead. My cousin engaged himself with a serious group of men I didn’t know, making no move to approach me. Tennice left early after speaking with the widow and no one else.
As I took my own leave of the duchess, a footman presented me wi
th the customary engraved commemorative card, folded so that the duke’s arms and martial history were scribed on the outside, and the tale of his lineage on the inside. It wasn’t until I got home, lonely and disappointed, that I discovered that my card had a scrap of paper inserted. The note was not signed, but two years of handwritten tutorials on the law enabled me to recognize Tennice’s hand quite easily. The text read like someone’s random, philosophical musings, but to me the choice of words was not at all random.
The wisdom of the fair sex is proved.
Safety for the traveler lies in prolonged absence.
Four is not enough for true diversity of opinion.
The first line confirmed my belief that Martin’s failure to discourage my withdrawal from Windham was a recognition of its necessity. I wondered if he had more concrete evidence of my wisdom than did I myself. I had only instinct.
The second told me that Karon was gone. I couldn’t decide whether it was more difficult to think of him traveling in some distant, unknown land than it had been to think of him at Windham, so close, yet a place I could not be. I could not consider the prospect that he might never come back. Not after the rose.
The third told me that I was missed, and that made it all very hard.
Summer brought the fascinating news that Evard was betrothed to the daughter of Dagobert, the last Vallorean king. It was a brilliant move on Evard’s part—the legitimization of Leiran dominance over Valleor. Princess Mariel was sixteen and had been “sheltered” in a remote temple school since the day her entire family had been beheaded in front of her.
Though Leirans did not usually execute women, out of respect for Arot’s holy wife Mana, spared by the monsters of earth and sky in Arot’s battles in the Beginnings, they had made an exception for the Queen of Valleor. As her husband’s and sons’ severed heads yet stared up at their executioners, Queen Margereth vowed to lie with the first healthy Vallorean man she could find, whether noble or peasant, and thus produce an heir to Valleor more legitimate than any Leiran king. She was beheaded straightaway. But King Gevron had allowed the girl child to live, as long as she was locked up tight in a temple school and never allowed to look at a man. Perhaps even marriage to Evard would be better than that sterile prison and never tasting life at all.