Spellsong 02 - The Spellsong War

by Modesitt Jr, LE

  "Two days, mayhap three. Or four, should the rain fall harder and the roads turn to mud." Jecks' words were clipped, as though the white-haired and hazel-eyed lord's thoughts were elsewhere.

  Anna respected Jecks, his honesty, his comparative open-mindedness, and his intelligence. And there was definitely chemistry between them… but there was also a huge cultural gap—and the endless problems of the country she'd ended up ruling as regent for his grandson.

  Anna glanced up at the indistinct grayness. Was the rain lessening? How could she ask for it not to rain, when Defalk had suffered such dryness for so long? Especially in the case of a gentle rain.

  "There might be a way station at Hygris," Jecks offered, easing his mount onto the shoulder of the road and drawing abreast of Anna. He gestured at a group of buildings emerging out of the mist and rain ahead.

  "There wouldn't be any real shelter for the lancers, would there?"

  "Not likely. The old inn burned three years ago."

  "We'll stop for a little rest," Anna said. "But we might as well push on. There's no point in having armsmen sit in the rain and get wet so I can stay dry."

  "I thought you might say that." Jecks laughed. "Just like Alasia."

  "We're similar, but not exactly alike." Anna wasn't sure she wanted to be thought of as Jecks' daughter. "For one, I'm a little older. And I'm not…" She broke off the sentence with a rueful laugh. "Let's leave it at that." She didn't want to state blatantly that she had no intention of being treated as his daughter.

  "No, you're not," Jecks answered with a grin. "As your actions often declare."

  Alvar struggled to keep a straight face. So did Anna, almost forgetting the rain that misted around her and the column of armsmen and wagons that followed.

  22

  ENCORA, RANUAK

  THE two women stand at the edge of the crowd in the wind-swirled square. Behind them rises a canvas banner that flaps in the wind, proclaiming in bright blue lettering, SouthWomen: For Eternal Harmony!

  "Mother warned you, Vena," says the slender brunette. "She only said that it was unwise to distrust someone in accord with the greatest of the harmonies. This sorceress is nothing more than another power-hungry woman of the north who will turn on anyone at the first need or opportunity. She also supports a man's claim to rule Defalk. She will not even rule in her own right. There is nothing worse than a woman serving as a stalking goat for men. Better an honest man than a deceitful woman." Veria's words are low, but intense. "Mother or Matriarch, she did not say one word against my joining the SouthWomen."

  "Not in so many words, but it was a warning."

  "Why are you here, Alya? To act as Mother's spy?"

  "Mother didn't send me." Alya coughs twice, then continues. "I'm here because you've always heard what you wanted to hear and seen what you wanted to see."

  "She has you spying on me."

  Alya laughs. "She knows what you're doing. She needs no spies. She has let us choose our own way. This way is wrong, and in time, you will pay dearly for it."

  "Then let me pay in my own coin. Why should you care?"

  "You are my sister, and you will suffer."

  "You've never cared that much before. Why now?"

  "Because Mother and Father care, and when you suffer, they will suffer."

  "You really believe that rubbish about the harmonies? That a power-hungry woman from the mist worlds really cares about anything we hold dear? How could you?"

  "It's very simple, Veria. Very simple. Simple enough for you to see… if you would. Let me ask you this—on the important events, has Mother ever been wrong? Have she and Father ever been wrong about what has happened?"

  "They did not foresee the very sorceress they caution against opposing."

  "Then see as you will." Alya shakes her head. "Do as you will. Only recall that I have tried to caution you. Those blades you will buy—if you have not already—will cut you more dearly than any of you would wish." The noise of the crowd rises as a tall woman steps onto the platform below the banner. Alya's eyes flicker toward the speaker as the crowd subsides. When she looks back beside herself, Vena has slippe away.

  23

  ANNA stretched surreptitiously in the saddle, then shifted her weight to ease the continual soreness in her posterior, a posterior far more slender than it had been a year earlier. Her stomach grumbled slightly, reminding her to take another of the hard biscuits from the cloth pouch tied to the front saddle ring.

  The road followed the ridge west of the Falche River, and the higher tilled fields between the road and riverbank already showed signs of green. It was barely past dawn, and the lower fields were still clothed in ground fog. The green sprouts in the higher fields, though, she could clearly see, unlike those outside of Falcor pointed out by Hanfor days earlier.

  "Not too much farther to go," said Alvar.

  "Do you think Arkad knows we're coming?"

  "If he has seers, he could see us on the road." The captain straightened his burly frame and turned in the saddle as if to check on whether someone watched.

  "But he wouldn't know where we're headed. Not yet."

  "Not yet," added Jecks.

  Anna peered through the morning mist toward the river, toward the buildings rising out of the white ground-fog beyond the stone bridge that arched over the Falche and into Cheor itself.

  Supposedly, Synfal—Arkad's liedburg—lay farther north of Cheor on a low hill that overlooked both the Falche and the Synor Rivers. That meant crossing the river and then riding back north.

  "How much farther to Cheor?" Jimbob asked from Anna's right. As it neared the river town, the road had widened enough for Anna's force to ride four abreast—if no one happened to be headed north out of Cheor.

  Anna smiled again. Definitely, some things remained constant with human nature, like the impatience of the young, although Anna had to admit that Jimbob hadn't asked that question until after the second unlike Mario, who had asked it ten minutes after the car left the house.

  Within two deks, the ridge the road had followed began to slope into bottomland, dark rich soil tilled recently and filled with green sprouts. The ground fog began to dissipate with the growing warmth of the spring sun.

  Anna gestured toward the fields that seemed to stretch westward from the river for deks and deks, looking at Jecks.

  "Corn and maize here—even some sorghum, about the only place in Defalk. We grow more barley. Heartier stuff."

  "Barley is better for beer," offered Alvar.

  Anna hadn't seen that much beer in Defalk, and she glanced at Jecks. "Do you brew much beer at Elheld?"

  "Some. More in recent years. We lost many of the old vines."

  Were the vineyards another casualty of the Evult's drought? Along with how many other crops and people you don't even know about?

  The road curved over the next dek to head directly toward the river. An arched bridge with three spans and two heavy stone piers in midstream offered the sole access to Cheor from the west—a bridge that had been far enough downstream to survive the Evult's floods of the fall before.

  The dark-brown clay road widened even more closer to the bridge, as the riverbanks narrowed and deepened and the muddy water filled the entire streambed. From what Anna could see, when the Falche was full, the river would be nearly ten yards deep. The battered clay levees on both sides testified that the Falche had indeed run deep in the past and that it had not recently, not with the gaps in the banks in places.

  As they rode closer to the bridge, Alvar leaned toward Anna. "I would suggest a van."

  A van? Anna paused, then finally had to ask, "A van? I'm not a military person, Captain…"

  "A forward guard, lady. We do not know exactly how friendly…"

  "Of course."

  "Just a half-score," suggested Jecks.

  Alvar nodded.

  "And you might have your instrument and a spell ready," added the white-haired lord, turning to Anna.

  "First ten from the
purple company!" called out Alvar. "Form a van!"

  As the armsmen eased their mounts onto the shoulder of the road and around Anna, she twisted in the saddle and extracted the lutar. What spell could she use for defense? A variation on the repulsion spell? She hummed the melody, mentally trying to fit the words into the tune.

  A single-horse wagon groaned over the stone paving blocks of the bridge and toward the column. The driver looked up at the line of riders, and immediately drove the cart south along the crude way formed by the levee.

  "He didn't like our looks," observed Alvar.

  "Would you?" asked Jecks with a laugh. "With near two hundred horse?" He glanced at Jimbob, and added in a lower voice, "Most tradesmen and farmers will flee armsmen. They fear losing their goods and life. Never give them reason to fear. Remember, armsmen grow nothing and create nothing. They only allow you to hold what others grow and create. Farmers and tradesmen are the heart of a land."

  Anna nodded, almost to herself, then glanced at Jimbob, who nodded at his grandsire's words, but with a nod that meant he heard the words, not necessarily their meaning.

  Jecks glanced at Anna.

  She shook her head and offered a faint smile.

  He shrugged in return. "We say what we must."

  "As often as we have to," she answered.

  Alvar nodded slowly, but a vaguely puzzled expression remained on young Jimbob's face.

  As Farinelli's hoofs clicked on the stones of the bridge, Anna one-handedly readjusted her felt hat, a copy of the one she'd lost at Vult, comfortable, but scarcely stylish. She doubted she looked stylish event without the hat, not in pale green trousers and tunic, although the green' leather riding boots might have offered a hint as to her station.

  Station? You're worried about that? She smiled to herself.

  From the height of the second arch, Anna could sense that Cheor was an old town, clearly older than Falcor. Less than fifty yards past the stone-paved approachway to the bridge, a hodgepodge of buildings began. The houses were not stone, but mainly of yellow bricks. Some were coveredf with stucco, once whitewashed, but now dingy and gray. The roofs were made of a dark red tile, and more than a handful of the roofs showed cracked and missing tiles.

  The vanguard rode silently off the bridge and down the main thoroughfare, if a street paved with cracked stones, with weeds sprouting intermittently, and open sewers on each side of the pavement, if that constituted a main thoroughfare. The sound of the main force behind on the bridge echoed down the constricted street.

  A calico cat sidled up to a damp-sided rain barrel on the right, then vanished into the adjacent alley. On the left side of the narrow street, before a shop that bore a weathered green sign with crude line drawings of a basket and a barrel, stood a dog, straining at a heavy rope tied to a post that supported a sagging porch roof. The dog continued to growl as the riders neared.

  From the basketmaker-cooper's porch, a scar-faced woman glared as the column neared. Anna met the woman's eyes, and, after an instant, the woman looked away, her mouth moving, but with words inaudible to the sorceress.

  Anna took a slow deep breath as she passed the basketmaker's, and wished she hadn't. The stench reminded her of an ill-tended jakes—or certain public banos she'd encountered on her sole South American tour.

  Two women bearing large baskets glanced up at the clacking of hoofs, then darted down a side alley.

  Farther toward the center of the town, a man with wispy white hair stared from under a tattered gray awning that sheltered three tables as they passed and rode into the open square.

  The square of Cheor held a low yellow-brick platform roughly thirty vards square. The platform was empty except for a bearded man covered with a ragged gray blanket and slumped in one corner. His mud-covered feet were bare. A rope ran from his hand to a yellow dog who lay on the bricks, his eyes on the riders.

  The street around the platform was cobbled, except for a handful of irregularly spaced potholes, each partly filled with rainwater.

  On the far side of the square was another cooper's, with a man-sized barrel over the door, bound with twisted willow rather than with iron hoops. The sound of hammering echoed from the general direction of the cooper's shop. Beside the cooper's was a larger structure, bearing the crossed candles of a chandlery. On the other side of the cooper's was another shop, or something, which had no sign.

  On the short side of the square—to Anna's right and beyond the restaurant or cafe under the awning—were four buildings, each two stories high, and narrow. The windows and doors of the last building were boarded closed, and one of the second-floor shutters of the adjoining building hung at an angle, as if held only by a single hinge.

  A heavyset red-haired woman peered from the window of the second building, one with a white sign bearing the image of a pair of boots. At the sight of the horses entering the square, her mouth formed an O, soundlessly, and her head vanished.

  Alvar eased his mount toward a gangly figure standing by the mounting block before the building Anna would have called a dry goods store. The red-painted shutters were drawn back to reveal an unglassed window, behind which were bolts of cloth displayed on a rack.

  Anna reined up, waiting, and behind her the column slowed.

  Is this a good idea? We could be sitting ducks… or whatever. Her eyes flicked around the square, but she could only see what she would have expected to see—women carrying bundles, a young woman half holding the hand of a toddler, half dragging him toward the cooper's, a youth carting a plank into the cooper's.

  "Which way to Lord Arkad's?" asked Alvar.

  "Ah… I couldn't be saying, ser armsman." The man swallowed almost convulsively. "His holding's north somewhere, they say. Me… I never been there."

  "You've never been there?" asked the captain flatly.

  "No, ser. No, ser."

  Anna recognized the signs. No retainer of Arkad's would reveal anything, fearing the wrath of a local lord far more than that of even armed men who would pass and might never reappear. It also meant Arkad was indeed feared, and that bothered her.

  She turned in the saddle, and her fingers ran over the lutar. Then she sang.

  "Tell the truth and tell us true,

  all we've asked of you…"

  The gangly man's mouth opened, then closed.

  "You haven't met the regent, have you?" said Alvar with a smile. "She doesn't care much for those who'd lie to her."

  "The… north… road… there, by the coppersmith's."

  Anna's eyes blurred, and, again, for a moment, she saw two images of the gangly man. She shook her head, trying to clear her sight. Then she massaged her forehead for a moment.

  The double image faded, and Anna's eyes went back to the narrow building in the far left corner of the square, where a copper pot glittered in the early morning sun. In the instant her eyes shifted, she could sense that people were easing out of the square, or back into buildings, anywhere away from her armsmen.

  Alvar gestured toward the street by the coppersmith's, and Anna flicked Farinelli's reins,, trying not to frown. The truthspell—was it Darksong? Was that why she'd gotten the double image?

  Even before she passed the coppersmith's, riding behind a vanguard clearly more alert, the square had emptied.

  The echo of hoofs was the only sound as they rode northward and away from the center of the town.

  Was it her imagination, or were most of the shutters of Cheor closed as they rode northward through the town? Anna glanced this way, and that, but the street wais empty. Even the dogs and cats seemed to have vanished.

  "Guilty, they are," said Alvar. "Not a good omen."

  "Not at all," agreed Jecks.

  "This didn't happen when we rode through Elhi," Anna said.

  "I had nothing to fear or hide," pointed out Jecks, with a smile.

  "That's true." Anna smiled back momentarily. Jecks' directness remained appealing, as did his smile.

  A dek or so north of the square the h
ouses spread more widely, with patches of ground, and gardens around each. The majority of the outlying houses were of unstuocoed yellow brick, and many had thatch or split-reed roofs.

  Anna pushed back her felt hat, already getting battered, and wiped her forehead. The sun had burned away the earlier mist and ground fog, and the day, early as it was, was getting warm. She eased off her jacket and thrust it through the saddle loops, then took a deep swallow from her water bottle.

  Still wearing his leather jacket, Jimbob glanced from the water bottle to Anna, clad in a pale green linen shirt and a green sleeveless lunic, and then to his grandsire.

  "She is from the mist worlds, Jimbob," Jecks said quietly. "They must be chill indeed." The redhead turned to Anna. "Are you really warm now?"

  "I would be if I kept the jacket on." Jimbob shivered.

  Anna almost smiled. Another thing that was hard to believe. On earth, it had seemed that, except in the summer in Iowa, she had been cold more often than not. In Liedwahr it was usually just the opposite.

  Outside a small hut, a dark-haired woman, barefooted, hoed at the dark soil of a garden row, as if to prepare it for planting. With almost every stroke of the hoe, she struggled with a toddler tied to a rope wound around her waist. Several gray geese pecked along the crumbling yellow bricks of the wall of the old house. The woman scarcely looked up at the column of riders.

  Anna understood. Mario had been a handful at that age, and there had been times when she wouldn't have cared if a row of tanks had rumbled past the little house outside Williamsburg, if only her son had given her a moment's peace.

  She shook her head. Now what you wouldn't give to have that time back? Her eyes burned for a moment. Careful… just get it together. You're the sorceress. You can do this.

  As they continued northward and Cheor receded behind them, Anna studied the fields—all rich dark bottomland formed in the area between the two rivers. Had it once been a swamp? It was flat enough. What Papaw wouldn't have given for land like this, rather than the rocky patch around the holler.