Elegy (The Magpie Ballads Book 1)

by Vale Aida

  Hiraen Safin was reclining on a mattress at the back of the room, his bare feet propped up against the wall. Savonn sat down by his head, jingling a palmful of knucklebones. Rendell settled opposite him and caught the piece skimmed at his head. “I gather there’s no use trying to talk you out of this?”

  “You can try,” said Savonn. The coloured stones shimmered between his hands, fast as falling hail. “It’d be entertaining.”

  A laugh bubbled from the neighbourhood of the mattress. Hiraen raised his arms over his head and stretched, biceps rippling, like a splendid hunting cat. “Don’t bother. Father would be so disappointed. He’s rather hung up on this idea of Savonn as Governor, gods save us all.”

  Rendell leaned back on his palms and gazed at his two protégés. Up to the day of his death, sculptors and painters had travelled across the realm to beg Kedris Andalle to pose for them. Savonn had missed his father’s head-turning looks, but retained instead a certain nondescript pleasantness about the face, an inoffensive symmetry that melded easily to any persona he chose to play. Hiraen, on the other hand, with his tousled chestnut hair and laughing green eyes, belonged to that blessed subset of mankind that was both obnoxiously handsome and filthily rich, and singularly unaware of all the privileges this afforded them. Rendell seldom knew what to make of him.

  Grimly, he set his mind to his self-appointed task. “Our men will vote for you. Those who are of age, at any rate.” The soldiers of Betronett loved their enigma of a captain; or, at least, they hung around to see what he would do next, which passed for love when one was young enough. Emaris, several months short of the grand eighteen, had complained long and loud about his perceived disenfranchisement until Shandei threatened to cast her stone for Willon Efren just to shut him up. “That’s about—”

  “—two hundred, yes,” said Savonn. “The rest will have to be persuaded.”

  “And you’re certain you can persuade them?”

  Savonn opened his hands, and a shower of stones skittered across the floor. “No.”

  He drew out the consonant, sounding very much like a petulant Emaris when Shandei was ragging on him about something or other. Rendell tried to imagine Savonn at a council table, quarreling over policy with the likes of Willon Efren, and was beset by the hysterical urge to laugh. “Well—”

  Hiraen heaved himself to a sitting position, hair sticking up at the back of his head. “No,” he said. “I mean it. Don’t bother. You don’t understand why he’s doing this.”

  Like a patron deity, Hiraen had to be propitiated before one could get through to Savonn. Judiciously, Rendell said, “Savonn would hate being Governor.”

  One had to admit there were few other choices. Willon, though experienced, was no battlefield commander. Neither was Lucien Safin. But the idea of Savonn as overlord of a city was the stuff of nightmares and apocalyptic prophecies. Rendell did not say so; Hiraen was not a complete fool, and could see that for himself. “Maybe,” said Savonn. “But someone has to prove that Marguerit is working some mischief, and stop her from doing whatever she’s doing in the Farfallens. Besides…”

  “Besides?”

  “There is the niggling detail,” said Savonn, “that by all the laws of gods and men, I am obliged to hunt down the Governor’s killer and serve him due justice, in the most unusual and unsavoury way I can devise. Otherwise the deceased’s vengeful spirit will roam the earth forever—a terrifying prospect for anyone who knew the good Lord Kedris—while the Ceriyes pursue and torment the unfilial kin for all eternity. Or something like that. As a godly man, no doubt you’re better informed than I am.”

  Not even the sacred law of a blood feud was spared Savonn’s flippant discourse. Unsmiling, Rendell said, “You have the gist of it.”

  “And this,” said Savonn, as if he had not spoken, “is an excursion that will require more than two hundred men, doughty as they are.” He looked peeved. “Where are my knucklebones?”

  “Under the wig stand,” said Rendell, his patience evaporating. The Farfallens campaign did not perturb him. Under Captain Merrott, both he and Savonn had spent plenty of time patrolling the passes, spying on Saraian merchants and trading news with Lady Celisse in Astorre. Between the two of them and Hiraen, they could easily lead an expedition there. It was the rest of it that baffled him. “Look, this thing tomorrow is hopeless. You’ll make a good showing, I’ll grant, but Willon will win. As he should. All you’ll do is anger the Council.”

  “Alas!” said Savonn, clasping his hands over his chest. He and Hiraen exchanged identical mournful looks. “Like Willon, you look but do not see. You assume that we abide by the same rules—indeed, that we play the same game—”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Savonn gave a voluminous shrug. “Misdirection.”

  He opened his hands. The complete set of knucklebones lay in his cupped palms, not one of them missing. Rendell goggled at them. Then he looked down at the ruined mosaic. There was a ragged hole in the tiles near Savonn’s foot, more recent than the rest of the damage. With typical sleight of hand, he must have wriggled loose a few tiles of about the right colour to use as decoys. “You haven’t improved the mosaic,” Rendell remarked.

  “That’s arguable,” said Savonn. “When I was little, my chorus master told me that the mosaic used to be a picture of Ederen Andalle seated in state on his throne at Evenfall. After he died and his heirs were dispossessed, the people smashed all his images with clubs.” He tossed the fistful of knucklebones at Hiraen, who caught them deftly. “You see, not all of us were born with fashionable surnames.”

  Hiraen produced a lavish grin. Rendell began to form an answer, something cutting about having come to make a point only to misplace it under the wigs with Savonn’s mosaic stones. But just then the unicorn door gave its unmistakeable scroop, and they all fell silent. A heavy tread approached, then hesitated in the tunnel. “Captain Savonn? Sir?” The door slammed again. “Lord Silvertongue?”

  The speaker was unfamiliar. Rendell sighed, resigning himself to the end of their conversation. “Leave the Sphinx. Your face has the same effect.”

  Savonn looked affronted. “Stay here.”

  He stepped over Rendell and let himself out into the tunnel. Fortuitously, it was his command voice that drifted back to them, brisk and exacting. “Are you invoking a pantheon? One name will do. What is it?”

  After a fraught hesitation, the newcomer said, “I bring a message from my lord Willon Efren. He would be honoured if you would sup with him this evening.”

  Rendell’s brows leapt upwards. Rumpled and scowling, Hiraen began to pull his shoes on. There was another screech, and the voices receded, but remained audible. Savonn had left the door ajar. “I tremble at the thought,” he said. “Is the Council convening? Who else will be there?”

  “It is only a dinner, sir,” said the spokesman. “All the members of the Council have been invited.”

  “That’s not true,” said Hiraen. He was trying, without success, to tidy his creased shirtsleeves. “Father hasn’t been invited. My sister would have mentioned it.”

  “Then,” said Rendell, “I don’t suppose he condescended to invite Lady Josit either?”

  “I will be otherwise occupied this evening,” Savonn was saying. “A matter of much sadness and many regrets. Would you tell your master I said so?”

  A pause. “Lord Efren will be very disappointed, sir.”

  “Not for long, I trust.”

  “But—”

  A moment passed. Then, though Savonn had said nothing, they heard the spokesman retreat. Rendell could imagine the expression that had routed him. The rejection, he surmised, was unexpected. Willon Efren wanted to meet Savonn before the assembly took place. But what for? And why, for the life of him, had Savonn passed up the opportunity to find out?

  The immediate crisis having been resolved, Hiraen returned to his supine state on the mattress. Rendell said, “Wait here,” and expelled himself from the room in a hurry.
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  After the torchlit catacomb, the unadulterated sunlight half blinded him. Dust motes rose and fell on invisible eddies of air, as if the light itself had solidified into little particles, settling on the bare skin of his forearms and the cotton of his sleeves. The stagehands were gone, the vast Arena empty save for Savonn, sitting alone on a bench in the lowest ring. Perhaps, divested of his toys and his conjoined best friend, he could be persuaded to listen for once.

  Rendell shut the unicorn door and went to sit next to him. “Lord Safin hasn’t been invited. I think Willon wants to talk to you alone.”

  “You think he’s scared?”

  “Perhaps,” said Rendell. “Might be he doesn’t want to risk a vote. Might be he meant to try and pay you off some other way. You should have accepted.”

  “A bribe?” asked Savonn, his smile indolent. “For shame!”

  Six years into their uneasy acquaintance, talking to Savonn could still put Rendell on edge. Few but him still remembered the Silvertongue at seventeen, the new boy in his patrol, trailing trinkets and frippery from the theatre. They had taken bets on how long he would last. Rendell also remembered, and tried to keep at arm’s length, the various occult disasters that had befallen his tormentors. Flea-ridden bedrolls. Unexplained bouts of diarrhoea. Strange rumours about their virility or lack thereof. Somebody, he recalled with another burst of suppressed hysteria, had gone around hiccuping for three days straight.

  “You could have bargained with him,” said Rendell. “Willon as Governor, and you the High Commander of his army. Free rein to mount a campaign in the Farfallens. Men and gold to pursue your blood feud. He’d give you anything if he thought it would spare him the inconvenience of conducting a war himself.”

  “You underestimate his pride,” said Savonn. “He’ll offer me nothing but platitudes. Shall I submit my guesses? You have no chance, which is true. It’s a waste of time, which is also true, but many necessary things are. You just want to do right by your father, which is not false, and you’ll feel different with time, which is a matter for philosophers.”

  Stricken by a sudden, incoherent revelation, Rendell found himself struggling for words. He heard again Emaris’s outraged voice, yelling that their horses had been hamstrung; saw the walls and watchtowers of Medrai from afar, and Lord Safin white-faced and beside himself, hurrying out to them with the news. “Savonn,” said Rendell. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

  “That,” said Savonn, “is also a matter for philosophers.”

  “I know we haven’t sent a patrol up there since Merrott died. We were at peace. If that was an oversight, the blame belongs to all of us.”

  Savonn’s expression remained opaque. Suddenly aware of how ridiculous he sounded, that he was all but asking to be humiliated, Rendell executed a rapid change of subject. “For heaven’s sake. Put your philosophy away for a moment, will you? Willon will hold this against you when he’s Governor. The Safins won’t be able to protect you. He’ll invent some excuse to put you in prison, or have you exiled, or killed. Would it hurt to go and make nice with him?”

  With a sinking heart, he received the full brunt of Savonn’s cold, luminous gaze. His lashes gave a grisly flutter. “What in the world,” said the Captain of Betronett in his softest, deadliest voice, “gives you the idea that I require anybody’s protection? Willon will rule this stinking quagmire if he wishes. With or without you, I can fend for myself.”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “But you doubt me. So,” said Savonn Silvertongue, “I’ll send another messenger ahead. You’ll go to his dinner, and tell me if my predictions are right.” As Rendell started to protest, he added with vast, savage satisfaction, “I hope you have a splendid time.”

  * * *

  Full of misgivings, and wishing he had kept his mouth shut, Rendell braced himself for a thoroughly unpleasant evening with Willon Efren, councillor of Cassarah.

  His own modest house near the Salt Gate—a neat, two-storeyed red brick affair with a white gable roof—had rung with the clack of wooden swords all afternoon. He watched from the stoop of the back porch as Shandei drove her brother across the yard with swift, spare strokes, weaving between the beds of thyme and tarragon and the trellises where peas and tomatoes grew. Lord Kedris encouraged the cultivation of herb gardens with generous stipends, so that even if besieged, Cassarah could grow enough food within her own walls to feed herself for a year or more. The late Governor had been full of ideas, and more than that, he liked to care for things and watch them grow.

  Quite unlike his son.

  Rendell coached the fighting until the shadows lengthened and both Shandei and Emaris disappeared on dinner appointments of their own, and then began to dress. It seemed absurd to go armed to Lord Efren’s mansion. For all its shortcomings, the Council liked to maintain at least a veneer of civility. But Rendell had been a soldier for most of his life, and that wily fox Merrott had taught him never to let his guard down. He tucked his dagger into his right boot, reassured himself that his coat and doublet were suitably opulent for the likes of the Council, and set off into the warm night. He was, he decided, going to bring back the terms of some reasonable, adult agreement, and Savonn would abide by them whether he liked it or not.

  The clouds looked ominous, and the air was tangy with petrichor. The Efrens lived on the far side of town, in the rich district by the Bronze Gate. He went on foot, since his route would take him across three of Josit Ansa’s aerial gardens, through which it was forbidden to ride: the new covered bridges that spanned Cassarah’s less traversable districts, their roofs and sides heavy with herb-beds and flowers. Crossing the first of these, the Hydrangea Bridge, his mind wandered. He thought of Shandei, who lacked the patience to either marry or learn a trade that did not involve knocking people down, and so passed her time with various odd jobs around the neighbourhood. He thought of Emaris, whose sweet, open nature was about as suited to dealing with Savonn as a paper kitten was for fighting off leopards. Most of all, he thought of Serenisa of Bayarre, their mother, a touring dancer he had met in Astorre long ago: the wild girl who had informed him in no uncertain terms that she would not give up her art to make a home with him, but who had borne him two children, and even visited them once or twice when her troupe took her upriver to Cassarah.

  All things taken into consideration, it was perhaps unsurprising that he was on the other side of the bridge before he noticed that his footsteps had acquired an echo.

  It did not bother him. The shops were all closed for the night, and no one else was about, but this was a good district, not the sort where cutpurses and hooligans lurked in the alleys. Like as not, it was just someone who happened to be going the same way. For his peace of mind, he turned left into a side street, and then left again into a still narrower one, ducking for cover under the leaning eaves of a ropemaker’s and a smithy.

  The echo followed.

  He wondered if this was another of Savonn’s little amusements. Either way it was a nuisance: it was a bad night to get into a fight, when the assembly was tomorrow, and he wanted to reach the Efrens’ before the storm broke. He ducked into a dark archway at the back of the smithy and slid his dagger from his boot. He was late, and in half a mind to be ungentle.

  His tail—whoever it was—hesitated at the end of the alleyway, then began to approach. Rendell pressed himself flat against the cool stone at his back. The follower was eight paces away, maybe seven. It was almost certainly not Savonn, whose tread was lighter. The dagger seemed to thrum in his hand, eager to fly. He pressed his fingers into its ivory hilt and inhaled noiselessly.

  Four paces. Three. Two. He stood poised on the balls of his feet, blade firm and ready—and then a shadow slid across the lip of the archway, and a hand shot out lightning-quick to catch his wrist. “What are you doing here?”

  Relief washed over him. He lowered the blade. “What are you doing here?”

  4

  “What a lot of things,” said Emaris, surveying
the towers of crates that stood in the middle of the late Governor’s apartments, and the denuded shelves that surrounded them. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep any?”

  They had spent the evening packing Lord Kedris’s rooms in the citadel, the vast granite keep that rose from the heart of the city like a spur of bone. To put a finer point on it, the servants had packed, while Emaris got underfoot and Savonn did something he called supervising, which seemed to mainly involve reading on the window-seat and gesturing dismissively whenever someone tried to hand him something, be it a book or a map or some other esoteric item. “Look,” said Emaris, prodding at one of these: an odd contraption of coloured cylinders, rigged to dangle from a stick. It gave an obliging tinkle. “Where did he get all this?”

  “You can have it if you like,” said Savonn. “Are you coming? I, unlike you, have to be up at dawn.”

  They were alone. The servants had long gone, the relics itemised and crated up for sale. Nothing but furniture remained in the Governor’s suite: the crimson velvet rugs on the marble tiles; the teak writing-desk swept clean of its papers; the empty bookcases, looking somehow bereft. Savonn tapped his foot at the window, gazing out across the roofs of the barracks and guardhouses to the great bowl of the Arena. Unlike Emaris, dusty and grubby-fingered, he was impeccable as always, dressed in a dark green vest and slashed leather jerkin that he wore cinched around the waist and open at the throat. There was no weapon on his belt. He seldom went about the city openly armed, which Emaris found bizarre in one of his standing. But then, his father had warned him often enough that Savonn Silvertongue was a bizarre man, and must be handled with caution.