Elegy (The Magpie Ballads Book 1)

by Vale Aida

  “The Master of the Revels,” said the stranger in an odd voice, “come to receive his due…”

  No one knew what to do. The councillors stood gaping and pointing, even as the choir melted away. The guards wavered in place. And then, in the midst of the cavalrymen, Hiraen began to clap.

  The sound echoed off the high walls and hung over the eerie stillness of the graveyard. Up on the wallwalk, someone else joined in. Then another, and another, splintering the awkward reticence, until at last Shandei said, “Damn it all,” and clapped furiously.

  It was not polite applause. What happened had not been in the least bit polite. In turn, the response was the sort of tumult that scared the horses, that could only arise from an overwrought crowd such as this: their emotions pent up for days, their minds worrying at the void where their leader and bulwark had been. But here was something certain, which they knew to be good—a fine piece of music and showmanship, crafted for their solace. The mourners clapped and stamped and cheered in relief, like the release of a long-held breath, and tears glistened on more than one face.

  Savonn Andalle stood there only a moment longer. Then, without bowing, he slipped behind the falcon and vanished with his choir.

  The girl on Shandei’s left said, “Is that all? Is it over? But what about the hymn?”

  Shandei groped for her handkerchief and blew her nose vigorously. “I think,” she said, “that was the hymn.”

  The crowd was still yelling. Judging by the wild gesticulation, the councillors were having an argument. Emaris had yet to close his mouth. “Well,” said the stranger, “I did not know funerals in Cassarah were so hair-raising. The dead go unsanctified, the living try to arrest one another… I had best be gone, daughter of Rendell. The roads will be thronged as soon as people start to leave, and I do so hate crowds.”

  Shandei took a last look over the balustrade, and said, “I’ll come with you.”

  Getting back out took nearly as much butchery as getting in. The man stayed close to her, letting her cleave a path for both of them. As she pulled open the stairwell door and he swung it shut behind him, plunging them into sudden darkness, she realised he was whistling Savonn’s song.

  “What did he do that for?” she asked, pulling off her veil. Foreigner though he was, he appeared to know a thing or two. “The Council looked fit to tear him apart. If we hadn’t started cheering they really would’ve arrested him.”

  The window on the half-landing was covered with a black mourning drape. Coming in from the sun, she could see nothing except the outline of his back retreating down the stairs. “Who can guess? Why do people like him do anything?”

  A half-forged shred of intuition struck her. She said, “Do you know him?”

  He stopped on the lower landing. His answer was a beat too late, but it sounded cheerful enough. “We have met. That doesn’t mean I know him. The soul is a shack built from oddments, my dear. Who really knows anyone?”

  His abrupt halt had brought her up short next to him. She realised that they were quite alone, because no one else had left the wallwalk yet; and without the press of bodies around them, she really had no reason to stand so close to him. She moved back onto the bottommost step, reclaiming the higher ground. “Are you a diviner? You talk like one.”

  “No,” said the man. “Just an observer who uses his senses. Lord Silvertongue seems to be promising vengeance, but your Council does not look interested. Soon they will be too busy squabbling over the governorship to concern themselves with anything else. Who does Savonn think killed his father, I wonder? Marguerit?”

  She kept her face blank. At least the window had a low sill. There was always the option of shoving him out through the drape. “Marguerit?”

  “—Ah,” he said. “So you are suspecting she is involved.”

  She had not even said anything. But at the back of her mind was her father’s letter from Medrai, heavily annotated in Emaris’s round scrawl. Not bandits. Lord Safin thinks they were Saraians in Queen Marguerit’s pay. Savonn is inclined to agree.

  She let out a careful breath. “You are a diviner.”

  “You think I read your mind?” asked the man. “Don’t worry. It is nothing important. I would have found out anyway.” He was smiling again, not unkindly. “If it pleases you, you may shove me out the window.”

  She managed, just barely, to conceal her shock. He laughed. “You keep looking behind me, you see. You give your tricks away like candy. How many years have you? Nineteen? Twenty?”

  This time she made sure to keep her attention on his face, which was no great hardship. His eyes were long-lashed and deep-hollowed, hazel flecked with green and amber. “I’ll tell you if you tell me your name.”

  He grimaced. “Names are just words. As a rule, I don’t give out false ones. Is it a keepsake you want? You have my face, which seems to please you, and my hair, which offends you—”

  She said, “It’s a three-storey drop from here.”

  “Oh, dear,” he said. “And you are not altogether joking, because you feel you have told me too much.” He lifted his brows again, as if to say, Am I right? “Consider me nameless and faceless, but not godless, unlike the marvel we just watched. I mean you no harm, my bloodthirsty friend. Can you content yourself with that? I expect I could survive the fall, but really, I am no gambling man.”

  “I’m not bloodthirsty,” she said.

  “No? Good.” And with that he darted around the newel-post and down the next flight of stairs, out of her reach. “A morning well spent. Thank you for the company, daughter of Rendell.”

  “You owe me!” she shouted. He bounded down the steps, humming as he went. His auburn head went round and round the stairwell, and Savonn’s song wafted up to her in bars and snippets, until at last he pushed open the door at the bottom and disappeared into a flood of sunlight.

  It was a long time before she saw him again, and under circumstances completely different.

  2

  “These bloody roses,” said the gardener, in a carping mutter that somehow still carried all the way across the lawn. “Dumb fuckin’ roses, what’d they need so many bloody thorns for?”

  It sounded an accurate summary of Cahal’s morning, since—in what might easily be mistaken for a morbid show of sentiment—Willon Efren had seen fit to convene the Council of Cassarah right over Kedris’s grave. To be more precise, Lord Efren had elected to make his bid for the governorship in a pavilion surrounded by blooming hedges and noxious gardeners, so close to the graveyard that Cahal caught whiffs of fragrant incense when the wind was right. As far as gestures of sincerity went, this was not one of his lordship’s more subtle choices. But then, ten years as the Efrens’ captain of guards had taught Cahal that none of them were particularly subtle.

  The gardener continued to whine as Cahal passed him on his rounds. Lord Efren had made it clear that he meant to come away from this meeting as Governor of Cassarah or not at all, and would brook no ungodly interruptions like the one that had upset the funeral. “Gods take the morons who planted these things,” said the gardener, with a piteous flail of his hands. “Look. Yon hedge’s more prickly than a phalanx of spears. Ain’t it?”

  Cahal was surprised to be addressed. Like as not, this fellow was a freedman, and freedmen preferred to mind their own business. Most of the city’s menial servants had once been slaves, taken in battle or sold in bankruptcy to their creditors, until Lord Kedris had changed the laws, released them, and offered them work on his various gardening projects. If anyone was unhappy about it—and many had been—they had his Saraian mistress to blame, that woman Josit Ansa, who whispered things in his ears and put strange ideas in his mind. Or so Lord Efren said.

  He stared at the gardener. A devastation of leaves and stems and scarlet petals lay strewn around their boots. “You’re killing the hedge.”

  The gardener favoured him with a winsome grin. “The hedge is killing me.” He was a young man, at least going by what Cahal could see of his face
under his wide-brimmed straw hat. He had deep brown skin, and a smear of dirt under his left eye. The rest of him was swathed in the tattered folds of an immense cloak that might not have been washed since the Battle of the Morivant. “I’ve been pricked three times already. You a soldier? You ever had to fight for your life against a bloody plant?”

  He must have been freed as a child, before servility was bred into him. “Can’t say I have,” said Cahal, drawn into conversation in spite of himself. He had nothing else to do, anyway. No rowdy chorus of Ceriyes had as yet erupted to perturb Lord Efren’s tender ambitions. “But I’d tackle a rose hedge over a charging cavalryman any day, if you take my meaning.”

  He resumed his progress down the garden path. Without asking permission, the gardener abandoned his ungentle ministrations and fell in step beside him. “O’ course,” he said. “But kill the cavalryman and you get gold and glory. Kill his lordship’s hedge and you get flogged… What’re they talking about in there that’s taking so long?”

  Cahal glanced over the top of the gardener’s hat to the pavilion, visible through the spreading branches of a willow. He snorted. “This ain’t nothing. I’ve known them to argue all day and most of the night after, when something’s got them riled up.”

  “Well, something has, hasn’t it?” said the gardener, polishing away the smear of dirt under his eye with the hem of the frightful cloak. They rounded the willow, and one of Cahal’s sentries dipped his head as they passed. “Else, what does he want with all you guards?”

  Cahal eyed him. “What does who want?”

  The man flung up his arms in exasperation, necessitating a quick dodge on Cahal’s part to avoid the shears. “Milord Willon. Who else? I may’ve been skewered by a hedge but I ain’t stupid. You’re in cream and bronze, the Efren colours. There’s the eagle badge on your collar. And those’re your men too, ain’t they, bowing this way and that?”

  They were within earshot of the pavilion now. Lord Efren was droning steadily away, occasionally interrupted by one of the others. Cahal stopped dead, in part not to disturb the Council, in part because he was sorely tempted to remind the gardener what the lash of a whip felt like. “What his lordship wants is none of your business. Get back to your work.”

  The gardener was still walking, twirling the shears round and round with surprising dexterity. “The roses are too lethal. I shall try my hand at the tulips.”

  His trajectory, however desultory, put him dead on course for the pavilion. Suddenly alert, Cahal said, “You can’t go in there.”

  He grabbed at the man’s shoulder and came away with an odious fistful of wool. Pulled loose, the cloak puddled on the grass between them, tangling around Cahal’s feet. He froze.

  It was all wrong. Beneath, the gardener wore a fine navy doublet, complete with embroidered sleeves and a high upturned collar filigreed with gold thread. His hose was dark silk, his calf-high riding boots good supple leather. He twirled the straw hat from his head and swept Cahal a deep showman’s bow, black curls rippling. “My lord Cahal. How pleasant to make your acquaintance.”

  The last time Cahal had seen this face, it had been under the sweep of a bronze falcon’s wings, surveying the mourners with a sardonic eye. The only coherent thought that surfaced was, That explains the bad gardening. “What in hell—?”

  “Eloquent,” remarked Savonn Silvertongue, son of Kedris. The country burr had sloughed off his voice like snakeskin. He spoke as a trained actor did, every syllable crisp and lapidary with precision. “Is your curiosity whetted, my lord? Shall we go and see what our friend Willon is talking about?”

  Cahal felt for his sword. “He didn’t invite you.”

  He confronted a perplexed smile. “Nor you, it seems. More’s the pity. Don’t draw your sword, good sir. Dear Willon can hardly afford to make a graveside scene… but, as we have all witnessed, I can.”

  The hat fell on the grass, tripping Cahal up as he lunged. By the time he recovered, Savonn had already vanished behind the nearest hedge. He was right, damn him. One could not draw steel on the Governor’s son while practically standing over his grave. The only course of action that remained to Cahal, however undignified, was to give chase.

  He did.

  * * *

  As far as Willon Efren was concerned, everything was going according to plan.

  Eminent patrician, upright taxpayer, a seasoned man in his sixties, he sat back at a predetermined pause in his speech and surveyed his four colleagues. Yannick, his cousin, whom he had convinced Kedris with such pains to appoint as the Council’s scribe and steward. The man was feeble and jumped at his own shadow, but at least one could depend on him. Oriane Sydell, a more vigorous if less helpful ally he did not like much. Lucien Safin, not yet cured of his wretchedly oppositional tendencies, but too spineless to be a serious threat. And Josit Ansa, Kedris’s whore, who was of no account, and of whom the less said the better.

  “So,” said Willon with an expansive gesture, also prerehearsed, “we have established that Kedris did not leave a will. One cannot fault our dear lord for this oversight: he was, after all, young and in the pink of health, and no one expected this tragic misfortune—”

  “Misfortune!” said Lucien. It was not his first interruption; nor, Willon thought bitterly, would it be his last. He was slouched in his chair, rocking it back on its two hind legs like a bored schoolboy, his arms folded behind his head. “Does anyone still believe that Kedris’s death was an accident? After all I’ve done to convince this Council of the contrary?”

  Willon glowered across the table. Every time the fool interrupted, he lost his place in his speech. “It’s been three weeks since Medrai. You’ve certainly run your point into the ground.”

  Lucien drew breath to respond, but it was Josit who answered first. “What a pity that it was Lucien at Kedris’s side that sad day. If it had been you,” she said indulgently, gazing at Willon with her kohled eyes, “you would have beat them off, I am sure, and brought Kedris safe home.”

  Lucien gave a bark of laughter. Yannick released a loud, wheezing breath, and pressed his fingertips together in a gesture of forbearance. Incensed, Willon stared at Josit Ansa with loathing. By no laws of genteel society should she have been here. Petite and porcelain-skinned, with glossy ringlets of dark hair knotted above her shoulders, she had been related to the wrong people in Daliss, and so wound up in slavery when Marguerit took the throne. Somehow she had escaped across the Morivant and into the household of the Governor’s late wife in Terinea, and soon after, Kedris had freed her and put an end to slavery. A lesser ruler would have been impeached for it. Or hanged. But Kedris was a law unto himself.

  In a barbaric situation, Willon struggled for civility, and clung to it by his teeth. “My lady jests. Now, if you please—”

  “Oh, get on with it,” said Oriane. She was the oldest of them all, a broad, ebony-skinned woman with dark hair leaching to grey. “Or we’ll be here all day. You were saying?”

  Willon groped for the tail end of his sentence. The words emerged seething and stumbling, far too fast. “—He was young and in the pink of health, and no one expected—no one expected his death. I am of the opinion, as are Lady Oriane and Lord Yannick, that we should proceed with all possible haste in choosing ourselves a new leader. The city cries out for a strong hand, a mighty hand, that will steer her through the course of this—”

  “But your hand is trembling,” said a new voice behind him, high and clear and unnerving with sweetness. “And you’re reading off your sleeves. Don’t worry, we understand. It’s a very long speech.”

  Yannick knocked his cup over. Oriane sighed, rubbing her temples. Willon turned around so fast that he cricked his neck, and all at once his temper became a good deal more slippery.

  The owner of the voice was lounging in the pavilion entrance. Effete, insouciant and self-possessed, he stood over them, passing a pair of gardening shears—why?—from hand to hand. Clothed in sable and velvet, every line of his spare frame sp
oke of decadence, from the legs crossed lazily at the ankle to the elbow slung over the wooden rail at his side. His eyes were an untrustworthy blue, or green, or grey, depending on the light, but the lurid gaiety that inhabited them was a constant. Willon curled his hands into fists. “What are you doing here?”

  “Listening,” said Savonn Andalle, light with blithe cheer. Delicately, he tucked a runaway curl behind one small ear and turned on them all an ingenuous smile. Lucien—damn the man—was laughing again. “Besides, if you mean to do any steering, as you so pontifically put it, you should know the waters.”

  Willon’s neck was sore from craning. “What?”

  At that precise moment Cahal, his captain of guards, launched himself through the pavilion entrance behind Savonn, carrying, inexplicably, a filthy cloak and a floppy sunhat. “You knave!” he shouted. His face was the shade of a grape. “You ain’t supposed to be here!”

  The situation, already out of hand, was fast taking on tragicomedic properties. “You, sir,” said Willon, loosing a burst of spittle on the sibilant, “had orders to—”

  “—keep me out?” asked Savonn. He had not moved. “Don’t be angry, my lord. Cahal was good enough to escort me past all your fearsome guards. There are so many, one might think you meant to stage a coup.”

  “What, and they let you through?” Oriane asked. “Didn’t they recognise you without the choir?”

  “He was in disguise, ladyship,” Cahal protested. “I thought he was a gardener.”

  Of its own accord, Willon’s throat emitted a despairing honk. “Was it not enough to make a song and dance of your father’s funeral? Must you turn up whenever anything of import is going on, like a—a wasp at a picnic?” The shreds of his patience slipped through his fingers at last. He crashed a fist onto the varnished tabletop with a satisfying, meaty thump. “For heaven’s sake, don’t just stand there! I’m not going to twist my neck to look at you all day!”