Now she brushed her fingertips across Kivik’s face. “Dear heart,” she said, “you must make up your mind to come back, whatever happens. We have lost too much already, how could your father and I bear it if we lost you, too?”
He took her soft hand and raised it briefly to his lips, then turned on his heel and followed the King out of the garden.
When the Prince left the Heldenhof, crossing one of the wooden bridges over the stream that divided the fortress from the town, he headed for the market at the center of Lückenbörg. On a patch of open ground between the market square and the guildhall, an area generally set aside for cattle and horse trading, someone had raised a banner, the golden oak of Skyrra on a green field, and they were recruiting men there. It was Kivik’s intention to handpick a dozen riders to add to his own troop.
The houses he passed along the way—of timber, or stone, or undressed logs—were of no great size, but they gave that illusion with roofs steeply pitched to shed snow during the winter. They all had brightly painted wooden shutters, decorated with an entire menagerie of fantastical beasts, lions and camel-leopards, winged stags and unicorns, along with objects both mundane and mysterious: hearts and hawkbells, leaves and acorns, the moon and the stars, the sun in glory—clan badges and family emblems many of them, but the symbolism of others was harder to trace. The householders repainted them every third or fourth year in the exact same patterns and colors they had used before. At this season, with the paint on many of them still fresh, the figures shone out brightly: red, yellow, blue, and green.
As Kivik neared the marketplace, following a narrow, unpaved lane scarred with wagon tracks, his cousin Winloki appeared out of a side street, and fell into step beside him.
“You leave at dawn?” She sounded breathless trying to keep up with him, though she was a tall girl, with a stride nearly as long as his own. Her grey silk gown, belted with a chain of bronze links shaped like crescent moons, showed dirt about the hem; her thick red-gold hair seemed to be working loose from a long, careless braid; and it was evident to Kivik she was in a passion about something.
He nodded, one short, preoccupied jerk of his head.
A stain of crimson flooded into her cheeks; her chin came up defiantly. “I want to go with you—why not?” she asked, forestalling a protest she obviously expected. “You asked for more healers.”
Kivik stopped at the edge of the square and spun to face her. At nineteen, she was inclined to be headstrong and impervious to argument, but even he (who thought her a little spoiled) was not immune to the charm and high spirits that sooner or later won all hearts to her. He ran a hand through his hair, rifled through a hundred disorganized thoughts, searching for the right words to say.
In the end he decided he might just as well be blunt, for he had nothing to tell her that she wanted to hear. “I asked for more healers, but my father has said you’re not to be one of them. Winloki, I have a thousand things to attend to today—”
“It’s folly that the King has forbidden me to go,” she flashed back at him, not to be deterred by his other concerns, his other preoccupations. “Other women will be going—others have gone before—girls much younger than I, and less powerful for healing. Why should I alone stay behind, like some bauble made of glass wrapped up in wool for safekeeping?”
“That,” he answered, as patiently as he was able—though not without a sidelong glance at the men congregating in the field across the square, “is for the King to decide, and not for me. If it were my decision, you would certainly come. I would gladly take you, we have such need of healers.”
But as soon as the words were out, Kivik knew he had spoken amiss. He saw her lovely face radiant, the leap of hope behind her grey eyes. And much as he hated to dash that hope, it had to be done. “If you might go with the King’s blessing, not otherwise,” he said sternly. “Not otherwise, Winloki!”
An hour later, she was pleading her case to the King, in the great audience chamber with its beautiful embroidered banners and tapestries, where he listened to petitions twice every fortnight. Knowing what she meant to ask him, what was likely to follow, Ristil sent his attendants away with a motion of his hand and a nod.
“I know why you keep me here,” said Winloki, as soon as the others filed out. “You do so against the day when some unknown kinsman arrives to claim me. But Uncle, Uncle, that day may never come. There may not be anyone living who knows my real name or to whom I belong.”
She dropped to her knees on the steps below the dais, urgent, vehement, trembling with the force of her desire. “And in the meantime, what must people think of me, when their own sons and daughters go to war, while I stay here in ease and comfort?”
“They will think what they have always thought: that you are a brave heart and an ardent spirit,” he answered—not unkindly, not unmoved by her plea. “They will understand that it is your duty to me that keeps you here.”
Winloki covered her face with her hands. “And would they understand the same thing if Kivik stayed behind…or Aesa, or Sigfrid, or Arinn?” she asked, envying her cousins and her brother their masculine privilege, their uncontested right to risk all in defense of their people.
She lowered her hands, looked up at him pleadingly. “Why won’t you allow me to do the work I was born to do? Why deny me, as you would never deny your own sons, my fair share of the danger?”
“My dear child,” said the King, reaching out to touch her bright head. “My beloved niece in all but blood, there may be peril in your future, and great deeds, too. But not in Skyrra. Your Wyrd—your fate for good or ill—is in the south.”
She sat back on her heels. “You know who I am,” she said softly, wonderingly. “You know more about me than you ever told me!”
And she remembered, suddenly, the southern wizard, Aethon, who had come during the winter, asked so many questions, then, abruptly, departed. “You have reason to believe that someone is on their way to claim me even now!”
Ristil shook his head; yet he looked troubled, uncertain. “I have no way of knowing when the summons will arrive, or how it will come, only that when it does come you must be here. I have promises to keep, and you have a duty far beyond Skyrra.”
But by then she was well and truly frightened. The King might not know anything about this Aethon, his reasons for coming to Skyrra; but that part of her which sometimes gave warning of things, the mysterious intuitive gift that was somehow tied up with the secret of her birth, did know.
Winloki rose slowly to her feet, her brain awhirl with wild surmises. They were coming for her, those unknown kinsmen who haunted her dreams, they would take her away from everyone and everything she loved, claim her at a time when the need for healers grew daily more desperate.
A cold stab of fear went through her; Winloki struggled for control. She had to think and to think clearly; she would not sit and wait with folded hands for events to sweep her away. She wondered, If I’m not here, how far would they go to seek me out? Into battle? Into danger—when they were content to forget me for so many years?
She made up her mind that they could wait a little longer.
If they come to Lückenbörg looking for me, she resolved, they can stay at Lückenbörg, while I go to war.
Visits to the Jarl Marshal, to several of the elder healers, and to the Queen were no more satisfactory.
“I don’t understand what you expect me to do,” said Sigvith, looking up from the fine needlework with which she beguiled her afternoons. “Do you think the King could possibly be made to accept my judgment in place of his own?”
Winloki sighed. It was only a variation on what she had been hearing all day. Still, there was that nervous beating in her blood, that pressure around her heart urging her so insistently to be gone.
She went in search of Skerry, finally running him to earth at the stable where he kept most of his horses. Kivik, she immediately realized, had already warned him; he greeted her appearance with something less than the ardor that
might be expected of a young lover.
“What is it you want of me?” Skerry asked with a wary look, as he closed the gate of the stall that housed dapple-grey Grani and stepped out into the aisle.
She drew a long breath, inhaling the dusty sweet scents of wheat straw and oats, the earthier odors that came of the horses. “A place among your riders, disguised as a man. It would work. I am tall enough, and I ride well enough.”
“Madness,” he answered, latching the gate behind him. “Utter madness. You’d be discovered at once, if not much sooner. And how would we ever explain our disobedience to the King?”
She gnawed on her lower lip, clenched her hands into fists. “You were not so ready to bow to tyranny three years ago when we exchanged tokens!”
“We were children then, selfish and heedless. What we mistook for your uncle’s tyranny was merely his kindness…and his very good common sense! I hope that we’re wiser now.”
Winloki felt the world close in on her, a lump rise in her throat. Sensing her agitation, the horses grew restless in their stalls: grey stallion Grani, gentle mare Gisl, chestnut Arvak and his half brother Bavor, stamping their heavy hooves and whickering in protest. As they sensed her anger, Winloki knew their distress.
“Do you regret it, then, that secret pact we made between us?” she asked, stiffly, angrily, feeling betrayed where she had placed the most trust. “Do you wish we had waited for the King’s consent?”
“Do I regret pledging myself to you? No,” Skerry said emphatically. He reached out to lay a placating hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it away. “But this that you ask of me now—I can’t and won’t!”
She wanted to cry out: And what becomes of us if they take me away? Where is our pledge then? But that was the one argument she was too proud to use against him. She could only look at him, bewildered and angry. “I never took you for a coward, Skerry.”
Another man might have taken offense, but he knew her temper of old. He knew how it flared up suddenly and passed almost as quickly—that she did not hold grudges or take petty vengeance—but while the mood was on her there was simply no reasoning with her. He did not even attempt it; he merely folded her hands between both of his and turned on her a deep, clear glance.
There they stood for several long minutes: Skerry patient, silent, waiting her out; Winloki seething, and nursing her anger. She knew when she was being managed. In truth, they knew each other far too well, she often thought. This time she was determined not to yield to his wordless influence.
She snatched her hands away with a violent motion and turned her back on him. “If you have any respect for me at all—” she began.
“No,” said Skerry, gently but forcefully. “I do love you, Winloki, but I won’t go against the King in this, scold how you will.”
And so, after all, she was forced to take matters into her own hands. With a plan but half-formed in her mind, Winloki headed for the Healers’ Hall.
It was a large house three stories high, of split logs on a stone foundation, with runes of great virtue carved above the door. There as elsewhere, the activity was frantic: simples being brewed, herbs being ground up in mortars or dried in ovens, powders and compounds and salves sealed up in glass bottles or earthenware jars with blots of red wax, then packed away in chests to be transported in the morning.
She felt a brief twinge of guilt as she slipped past the stillroom, knowing that she ought to be in there helping. It was because she was expected to be with the healers that she had been able to move so freely all day, without her usual flock of attendants.
I have other business that is even more vital, she reminded herself, as she climbed two flights of narrow wooden stairs to the top of the house
In one of the dormitory bedchambers under the eaves, Winloki found Aija, the youngest healer, nervously packing for her journey on the morrow. “So you, too, are going. Every healer in the hall but the old, old women—and me!”
“There will be a need for healers here as well.” Aija looked up from rummaging through a clothes chest at the foot of her bed, where she had been sorting through woolen stockings, linen shifts, and bright woven hair ribbons. “Children will be sick. Women will deliver babies—”
“And there will be nursemaids and midwives to attend them,” Winloki finished for her, sitting down on a bench by an open dormer window, where the late-afternoon sun came through in a golden bar.
It was a long room, bright and airy, with five low wooden beds lined up in a row, a chest at the foot of each bed, and a beautifully carved clothespress of solid oak opposite the window. But Aija had it all to herself now; the other healers who used to sleep there had left with the army months ago.
“What use am I here,” asked Winloki bitterly, “making charms for colicky infants and hysterical mothers, when men are dying—men I might save?”
Aija found the thing she had been so desperately looking for: a little triskele amulet carved of ivory on a thin leather cord. She slipped it on over her head. “You could have my place in one of the wagons for all of me,” she muttered. “I’d trade places with you a thousand times over.”
But then—glancing up to see her companion glowing, triumphant—she cried out, “No, no, I didn’t mean that. Besides, my lady, you know that we can’t. They would never allow it.”
On Winloki’s face, the bright look died. “Yes, I know,” she said, with uncharacteristic meekness, as she left her seat on the bench and began to help the other girl pack up her things. “But it’s very hard luck for the colicky infants. You were always much better with them than I was.”
“Bad luck all around,” said Aija. Her breath came quickly, and she seemed close to tears. But when the princess commented on her agitation, she passed it off with a wave of her hand. “It’s just excitement, that is all that it is.”
In the evening, Winloki sent a message to her servants at the Heldenhof, telling them that she meant to spend the next few days working with the healers. No one would be surprised, no one would think anything amiss if she did not come back to her rooms during all of that time. There was work in plenty to be done in the Healers’ Hall, and after the coming morning very few hands to do it.
Then she went into the stillroom, knelt by the hearth, where the coals were still red, and stirred up the fire.
That was a pleasant room, fragrant with the herbs that hung drying from the ceiling, cluttered but still orderly, even after the recent spate of activity. As the flames rose, there was dazzle of light off of bottles on the shelves, crystal and alabaster and dark green glass; off jars of salt-glazed clay, and off boxes of cedarwood, ebony, and brass. There, too, were piles of brittle old papers or parchments bound together by cords or string, antique scrolls stored upright in brown jars, codices bound in crumbling leather: compendiums of herb lore and spells for healing, learned treatises writ down in Niadhélen—all of the books and most of the writing that remained in Lückenbörg. Books were a part of that discredited past abandoned along with the cities. Very few people could read anymore and fewer write—only the healers, the King and his family, and a handful of officers in Ristil’s army who sent messages back and forth, laboriously inscribed.
But Winloki had no need to consult those tattered old volumes. She knew what she had to do, and she had to work swiftly, lest anyone come in to ask awkward questions. She moved quickly around the room, gathering up the things she would need, trying not to drop or break anything in her haste.
Returning to the hearth, she heated milk in a pannikin over the fire. When it was warm, she poured it very carefully into a beaten copper cup with a wooden handle. With shaking hands, she took a small staghorn flask off one of the shelves, unstoppered it, and let three drops of a clear amber liquid fall, turning the milk a deep buttercup-yellow and scenting the air with honey and spring flowers.
“To help you rest—you’ll be calmer and stronger tomorrow, if you can sleep tonight,” she said a short while later, standing by Aija’s bed with the cup in o
ne hand and her heart rattling against her ribs, wondering if such a transparent device could possibly succeed.
She thought she might compel Aija’s cooperation if the younger girl balked, her will being so much stronger—only that was a magic she had never tried, to enforce her desire on the mind of another. It was also a line she was reluctant to cross.
But Aija was caught up in her own fears, her own dread of the night still ahead, and of all the days and nights to follow. She accepted the potion with a grateful look. “I’m to rise before dawn,” she said, sniffing at the cup. “If I were to oversleep, to have trouble waking—”
“I measured it out with the greatest care. But if you would like—” Winloki pretended that the suggestion had suddenly occurred to her. “If you would like, I will sit by your bed, stay with you until the rest of the house wakes, make certain that nothing goes wrong.”
Aija lifted the cup and swallowed the potion in three short gulps. “You are kind, Princess. I don’t know how to thank you.”
Taking back the cup, Winloki put it down on the chest at the foot of the bed. She reached out to take the other girl’s hand, gave it a reassuring squeeze. “As to that,” she said, with the faintest blush, “I am doing no more than I ought. Rest now, my friend, and fear nothing.”
Already, Aija was growing drowsy; it seemed she could hardly hold her eyelids up, they had grown so heavy. She yawned, sat down on the bed. Without undressing, she laid her head down on the coarse woolen blankets and was almost immediately asleep. Winloki watched the hectic flush fade from her face, then bent down and loosened her laces and removed her shoes, that she might rest more comfortably.
True to her word, the princess remained by her friend’s bedside for many hours. But when the other healers in the house began to stir just before dawn, she did not wake Aija. Instead, she lit a stub of wax candle and stood over the bed, watching the other girl’s slow, steady breathing. She had indeed measured the potion most carefully. Aija was certain to sleep all through the day and into the night, nor was anyone likely to disturb her in this great empty house.
The Hidden Stars Page 24