by David Drake
Garric dismounted, feeling a mixture of pleasure and pain as the blood returned to pinched muscles. Carus grinned at him.
Because of his ancestor’s long practice, Garric could ride as well as any noble from northern Ornifal, but his muscles were still those of a boy whose personal experience with horses had been limited to walking the beasts to water on a rope halter when a rider arrived. A day spent in the saddle left him feeling as though two of the Sister’s demons were chewing the insides of his thighs.
A heavyset man came out of the inn, wearing a bloody leather apron. He’d dunked his hands in a bucket and was wiping them on the dried pulp of a bottle gourd.
“Good day, sir,” he said in a friendly tone. His eyes nicked over Shin, but they didn’t linger and his voice didn’t change. “I’ve just been butchering a hog. Will you be staying with us tonight?”
The boy slipped out behind the host and sat on the section of tree bole. He picked up his brush again, but though he made halfhearted cleaning motions, his whole delighted attention was on the aegipan.
“Yes, and glad not to be sleeping rough,” Garric said. “You’ve a stable for my horse?”
“An excellent one, sir,” said the innkeeper, pointing to the passage between the left wing and the central portion of the inn. “Around the back. There’ll be an extra charge for oats, or will hay be enough?”
“Oats, if you please,” said Garric. It was odd to be on this side of a transaction that’d been one of his earliest memories. “And a private room, if you have one.”
“Indeed, indeed,” repeated the innkeeper. “Will your, ah—”
He made a two-finger gesture toward Shin but didn’t look squarely at him.
“This one, that is, be foraging for himself or are we to feed him as well?”
“Porridge for me, Master Hann,” the aegipan said. His drawl perfectly mimicked that of a Sandrakkan noble; Garric suspected that it would read as an upper-class accent to the innkeeper. “And turnip greens, raw, as well.”
He looked at Garric and added in feigned boredom, “The worst thing about travel is the shifts one’s put to for food, wouldn’t you say, master? Though I suppose we must be thankful for what the Lady offers.”
The innkeeper—who Garric had just learned was named Hann—stared at Shin for a moment with his mouth half open. Then he bowed low and said, “Please come in to my house, Your Lordships. And, ah …?”
“You may call me Shin, my good man,” said the aegipan. “Just Shin.”
“Lord Shin,” the innkeeper resumed, “there are still a few apples from last year’s crop. Would you like them in your porridge?”
“I would indeed, Master Hann,” said the aegipan with what struck Garric as real enthusiasm. “Dried apples would be an unexpected pleasure.”
Garric slung his saddlebags across his left shoulder and untied the heavy cloak bound to the crupper. In his mind Carus grinned and said, “Our friend Shin can take care of himself, right enough. Watching him move, I wouldn’t be surprised if he could teach a cat beast something too.”
More soberly the ghost added, “Don’t underestimate that one, lad.”
I don’t, thought Garric.
Hann’s eyes lit on the boy. “Megrin, stable His Lordship’s horse in the first stall,” he snapped. “And see to it he has oats when he’s cooled down. Tell the mistress a full pannier, mind.”
“I’ve got Master Orra’s boots,” the boy said shrilly. “Have Mirri do the horse, why don’t you?”
Hann leaned forward with surprising speed and slapped Megrin over the ear. The boy sprawled in the dirt, then hopped up and took the gelding’s reins. “Pardon, Your Lordship,” he muttered as he trudged through the passage to the stables.
Garric kept his face still as he preceded Shin and Hann inside, but he was professionally offended by what he’d just seen. Reise’s lessons had fitted Garric and Sharina to rule the Isles. Shouts, insubordination, and violence would’ve been very bad training, for kingship or for life.
“Aye, lad,” Carus agreed, “as I know to my cost. But this is a harder world than your father’s was.”
The hearth was on the right end of the common room. A girl younger than Megrin tended three pots, two on cranes and the third among the ashes at the corner farthest from the low fire.
The men from the gallery had come down by the straight staircase to look over the newcomers. Two wore dressed skins, though their breeches from knee down were homespun. They must be trappers who expected to stand in water frequently. Cloth will dry but leather—particularly rawhide—shrinks and cracks.
They didn’t speak, but the barefoot third man—presumably Orra, whose boots lay outside where the boy had dropped them—said, “If I may ask, Your Lordship, where is it you’re traveling from?”
“How do they guess you’re a noble?” Carus said. “You’re wearing plain wool and your tack is no better than any common trooper’s.”
Garric would’ve smiled dryly if he hadn’t been concerned that Orra would misinterpret it. His ancestor had no doubt seen his share of peasants, but he’d always been riding past them at the head of an army.
Because I’m wearing a very good sword, Your Highness, he said silently. Which would cost more in ready cash than any of these people, Hann included, will see in a year.
“I’m Garric or-Reise, sir,” he said politely as he settled onto the bench built into the front wall. He was taller than any of these fellows; by sitting down, he made himself less threatening even though that meant he had to tug on his sword belt so that the scabbard could stand upright between his legs. “I’m traveling to see new lands.”
He gestured with his left hand. “All this was sea in my day, sirs,” he said. “Before the Change, as folk call it in Valles, where I come from.”
The innkeeper had stepped behind the bar on the wall opposite the hearth. He returned with a tankard of tarred leather and walked to Garric. “Here you are, milord,” he said. “We brew our own cider here at the Boar’s Skull Inn. I think you’ll say we have a right to be proud of it.”
Garric drank deeply and smacked his lips with false enthusiasm. “An excellent pressing, my good host!” he said. That wasn’t exactly a lie: it may well have been good, though Garric didn’t care either for cider or for the taste of tar. Some did, he knew; his father kept several jacks for travelers who asked for their beer in leather. Folk in the borough, Garric included, generally drank from elmwood masars.
“Ah, and your companion, Your Lordship?” the innkeeper said, eyeing Shin sidelong. Garric’s insistence that he was a commoner obviously hadn’t done much good.
“I’ll drink water from your rain barrel, Master Hann,” the aegipan said. “Were I to become drunk on your strong cider, who knows what might result?”
Garric looked at his companion sharply. Shin certainly had a sense of humor, but that didn’t mean his deadpan warning wasn’t a warning in fact.
“My name’s Orra,” said the barefoot guest as he sat down on the bench facing Garric. His breeches and short tunic were of good cloth, but his vest had been cut from the pelt of some spotted cat. “I wonder since you come from Valles—can you tell us anything about the new government?”
“They sent a pair of fellows by on horses like you, Your Lordship,” said the innkeeper. “They told us we were in a kingdom, now. They were just doing a survey, they said, but there’d be other folks coming later. We’re concerned about what this new king has in mind.”
Carus laughed. Garric smiled wryly and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“I can’t tell you much,” he said truthfully. “I believe the government in Valles tries to be a good one. Human beings, even the ones who try to be just and fair, fail part of the time, though. And there’ll be taxes, I’m sure, but I couldn’t tell you what they’ll be.”
I couldn’t even say what this region would use to pay taxes, he thought. Apples? Muskrat pelts?
“There’s a great danger facing the world,” Gar
ric went on aloud. “Creatures that’ll destroy all life but themselves. They call themselves the Last. It may be that you as well as others will be called to join the army to face them.”
One of the trappers said, “I come out here so I’d not serve nobody. If other folks want to fight, then they can do it without me.”
“Your only chance of survival is that men stop the Last,” Garric said without raising his voice. “Others will do it for you if you’re unwilling to save yourself.”
The trappers looked at one another. The one who hadn’t spoken said, “Suits me,” in a gravelly voice. They turned and went up the stairs again; the treads squealed beneath their weight.
Hann watched them go. “There’s so much going on,” he said, lacing his fingers. “I’ve built this place up over the past fifteen years, fifteen! That’s what I’ve invested here. And everything’s changing. I’m worried, Your Lordship, and I don’t mind telling you so.”
“I’m worried too, Master Hann,” Garric said, rising to massage his thighs. “But if everybody does his part, we’ll come out of it all right.”
“If enough of you do, you mean,” said the aegipan sardonically. “And if you’re lucky besides. Don’t forget being lucky.”
“AND THIS IS the warrant setting up the Fourth Regional Assembly,” said Liane as she slid a perfectly indicted document on a piece of fine vellum before Sharina. “It’ll meet in Carcosa. We have more information on Region Four than on most of the new lands, since the Viceroy of Haft was already beginning to explore the district before he got back in contact with Valles after the Change. It’s mostly settled by Grass People.”
Sharina was very tired, but she made a point of signing these warrants carefully. They were too pretty to deface with a blotted or hen-scratched signature, and by the time they’d been decorated with seals and ribbons, they’d be works of art to be hung beneath the rostrum every time the assembly met.
“I suspect Lord Reise, the viceroy’s chief of administration, was responsible for the patrols,” she said dryly. “My father isn’t a dynamic leader, but he was certainly two or three steps ahead of anyone else in Barca’s Hamlet at seeing what was going to be necessary.”
It seemed even more strange to call her father Lord Reise than it was to think of herself as Princess Sharina—in part of course because she didn’t think of herself as a princess, though people called her princess and she did the sort of work a princess did.
She looked across the table at which she and Liane were working. Cashel, sitting on the bench beside the door into the chamber, smiled back at her. The frieze just beneath the ceiling showed cherubs doing all manner of adult jobs from bottling the year’s wine vintage to a fuller’s shop where they trod woolens in troughs of urine to clean them.
Cashel had been examining the paintings while he waited. Most of the cherubs’ tasks were things Cashel wouldn’t have seen in real life: every housewife in Barca’s Hamlet baked her family’s bread on her hearth, so the commercial bakery with big brick ovens was as alien as the cosmetics factory next door to it. Despite his ignorance, Sharina recognized in Cashel’s expression the delight he took in all things whether or not they were familiar.
“And here’s the last warrant,” said Liane, offering a fifth sheet of vellum. “We haven’t had as much contact with Donelle as I’d like, though that’s possibly because of the distance. Pandah’s in the middle of the direct route, of course, so couriers have to swing widely around it.”
Sharina chuckled as she signed. When she passed the warrant back, she noticed Liane’s lifted eyebrow.
“If I’d been asked what a princess did when I was a girl in Barca’s Hamlet,” Sharina said, getting to the core of the implied question, “I’d have said she ate dainties and chose between suitors for her hand. That’s what they did in all the stories I read, anyway. I don’t think I’d have guessed she signed her name over and over again, setting up councils for tracts that haven’t been properly surveyed, let alone brought in the kingdom.”
Liane blushed slightly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Garric, that is, the prince, liked—”
“He’s been my brother Garric all my life, Liane,” Sharina interrupted. She was tired or she wouldn’t have misworded her comment that way. “He’ll stay Garric among the three of us, please. And I wasn’t objecting to what we’re doing: this is the best way for me to learn what’s really going on with the kingdom that I’m suddenly ruling.”
“Yes,” said Liane with a grateful smile. She wiped her eyes quickly with a handkerchief; tears had started at the corners. We’re all very tired. “That’s what Garric says too. And really, the regional councils seemed the best way to incorporate folk from other periods. By offering the local leaders medallions of office—Lord Tadai’s come up with some suitably gaudy ones—and scrolls of office signed by Princess Sharina—”
Liane smiled, looking younger and happier than Sharina’d seen her in some time. Certainly since Garric rode off, anyway.
“—then they’ll want to become part of the kingdom.”
“I certainly can’t imagine a better plan,” Sharina said. She rested her head in her hands. She was sure it was a good plan, but for the moment she couldn’t imagine tomorrow’s sunrise. She felt completely overwhelmed.
Liane had asked to stay behind after the council meeting. Sharina had agreed gladly. They’d sent away even the clerks who were normally as much a part of the business of governance as the polished cherrywood table at which they were working.
Cashel had stayed too, of course. He had no business here except to be Cashel, imperturbably solid; and the way Sharina felt at the moment, there was nothing in the world more valuable.
“It’s the army that’s worst,” Sharina said softly, her palms covering her eyes. Time with Liane in Cashel’s silent presence was actually better than solitude. She desperately needed friends: completely trustworthy, sympathetic friends. “I don’t know anything about soldiers. These appearances of the Last…”
“All the incursions have been stopped and the pools have been covered over,” Liane said when she realized Sharina’s voice had trailed off. “No one could’ve done a better job than you did, dear.”
“But there were almost eight hundred dead and wounded on Tisamur, Liane,” Sharina said, raising her head and putting her hands flat on the table before her. “That’s what the messenger himself says, anyway, and since Lord Lomar, the resident advisor, doesn’t give a figure in his formal report I’m inclined to believe the messenger. That’s terrible, isn’t it? Someone must’ve blundered badly. Should I replace the military commander?”
Liane put her right hand over Sharina’s left. “We don’t know,” she said. “We can’t know. And we don’t have to worry about it now.”
She squeezed Sharina’s hand and grinned. “Because we have far more important things to worry about,” she added.
Sharina smiled back. She felt relieved, though nothing had changed. “Garric would know what to do,” she said, without the bitter despair that would’ve been in the words a moment before.
“I really don’t think he would,” Liane said musingly. “But King Carus would, I’ll agree. He had an instinct for that sort of thing. His technique for dealing with foreign envoys lacked subtlety, however.”
Sharina burst out laughing; an instant later Liane was laughing also. They’d both watched Carus behead the ambassador from Laut as part of the same motion in which he drew his sword. At the time, of course, it hadn’t been funny; and perhaps they wouldn’t find it funny now if they weren’t on the verge of hysteria.
There were voices in the hallway; the rhythms though not the words were audible through the chamber’s thick door. Cashel got up silently, nodded to the women, and opened the door just enough to slip out. Sharina found watching him move to be a continuing wonder and delight. Cashel didn’t seem to do anything quickly, but he never made a false step and he never slowed because he’d run into something solid or heavy.
A mom
ent later, he reappeared with Tenoctris. “I told the guards it was all right,” he said. “You didn’t mean her not to come in when you said they shouldn’t let in anybody.”
“Of course!” said Sharina. The trouble with the way Attaper trained the Blood Eagles was that they tended to interpret orders very strictly. Thinking about it, she wasn’t sure they’d have passed even Garric without discussion.
Tenoctris always seemed alert, but this evening her expression had a febrile brightness that Sharina found disconcerting. Though she smiled toward Liane, it was to Sharina that she said, “Dear, I believe I’m as prepared as I can be. With your permission, I’ll put my research to the test in the Old East Burying Ground now.”
Sharina nodded calmly, though her heart had gone to ice again. Aloud she said, “I told Lord Waldron to give you any assistance you wished. I trust he’s done that?”
“He offered me a regiment of soldiers,” Tenoctris said with a twinkling smile. “Actually, he offered me my choice of regiments, as if I’d know one from another. I believe he was pleased that I’d gone to him rather than Lord Attaper. I asked him for ten men who were willing to dig if necessary, which he assured me they would be.”
She cleared her throat. “And I would also like Cashel to accompany me, Sharina,” she continued. “I believe I’ll need his company for some time.”
“Of course,” Sharina repeated. “We’d all assumed that, I think.”
She got up and waited for the dizziness to pass, then walked briskly around the table and threw her arms around Cashel. She hadn’t expected Tenoctris to say “need,” though. She didn’t know what that meant, but she didn’t see any advantage to pressing the old wizard for a detailed explanation.
Cashel was as solid as a great oak. While Sharina was with Cashel, nothing could go wrong. And she was about to lose Cashel’s presence.
“Excuse me, Tenoctris?” Liane said from the world outside Cashel’s arms. “I’m not familiar with the Old East Burying Ground.”