As they waited for the men’s competition to begin, Lady Hadda put a hand on the ground and drew up a stunning tulip in a purple so dark it was nearly black, with edges of deep red.
Issa clapped at this use of the newyer, and the others joined in.
The ladies looked at one another. Who would best this?
It was Lady Willa, who drew up an enormous iris, with each petal a different color, from pink to pale blue to lilac and butter yellow.
Issa realized it was five different iris plants melded together at the stem and that before the petals opened, Lady Willa had chosen the color of each one.
Now Lady Sassa put both hands on the ground and leaned over it, as if her breath itself would cause a flower to grow. Then she stepped back to show a rosebush that she had grown waist high in just a few moments. The roses were the pale blue of the sky in spring, and the color of the Weirese flag.
Issa hesitated and she knew that all the ladies were waiting for her reaction. The rose was lovely, but it was also the flower of Weirland. Lady Sassa seemed to be making a statement about Issa’s loyalty to Weirland, since she was leaving for Rurik in mere weeks.
Issa plucked one of the blooms and said, “I shall have to take this with me to Rurik to plant just outside the palace and remind me of home. Thank you, Lady Sassa.”
With that, the tension dissipated, and the ladies turned their attention to the jousting field. Lady Neca’s brother, Riob, was in the tournament, as was Sir Tomah, who was betrothed to Lady Willa. As for Lady Sassa and Lady Hadda, they seemed to be in love with every male figure that they could see and cheered for all. Issa knew how like them she had once been and how shallow she must have appeared. But she had been happy, as well, and she missed that.
For the jousting, her father cleverly paired rash noblemen who were rich in taweyr with others who had great physical strength. The contest would leave both with so little taweyr that they were no threat to the kingdom. The jousts were King Jaap’s way of containing the taweyr that might otherwise be set against him. Issa thought her father generally had better relationships with his nobles than those in Rurik.
Lord Riob rode by with his worn and blackened helmet under his arm and waved to his sister. He wore his family’s sigil of the boar on his breastplate, but no ribbon from a lady.
“So dashing, so muscular,” said Hadda.
“I would not mind having those strong arms around me,” said Sassa.
“You should be so lucky,” said Neca. “My brother will not throw himself away on a pretty face.”
“Oh? He wants land to go with it?” suggested Sassa.
“He wants a mind. And a heart,” said Neca tartly.
“Ha!” said Willa. “No man wants that. They may say they do, but it is never more than bluster. Men want a pretty wife with a little neweyr to help them along, but no more than that.”
Would anyone think she was pretty in Rurik?
“Make him come closer,” Sassa begged.
Neca beckoned to her brother. For a moment, he seemed not to see her, but then he turned his horse toward them.
Lord Riob had a freckled face from spending a great deal of time outdoors. His hair was sandy with streaks of gold on top. He held himself well in his seat, and his back was straight and tall. Though his breastplate and helmet were little different from any other, there was something in the way he held himself that made him appear very regal.
“Princess Marlissa,” he said, nodding to her first.
“You look very strong, Sir Riob,” said Issa.
“Looking strong is hardly the point,” said Lord Riob soberly. “I must prove my strength on the field of battle.”
“Are you afraid of the joust?” asked Lady Sassa. “I know I would be. Though, of course, I have no taweyr.”
Lord Riob said, “I have learned to control whatever fear I may feel, milady.”
Before Lord Riob could ride away, Hadda said, “Lord Riob, I see no ribbon under your armor. I could offer you one of mine.”
But Lord Riob refused. “It is the king’s name I fight for, and his house,” was all that he would say.
“For the king’s house?” said Willa. “Oh, then you should offer him your ribbon, Issa.”
Issa looked to Riob. “Would you like one of my ribbons?” she asked, noticing how blue his eyes were against his freckled face.
“I would be honored, Princess Marlissa,” he said.
Issa allowed herself to consider for a moment the possibility of telling her father that she did not want to marry Prince Edik of Rurik, that she would remain at home, loyal to her kingdom as Kellin was to his. She could marry someone like Lord Riob. Why not? Why should she be the one to make an alliance with Rurik? There was no guarantee that this would be the answer to the prophecy. It might be for nothing, after all.
Could she have no small happiness for herself? A handsome young man who could love her and laugh with her? An honest and uncomplicated man who had nothing to do with King Haikor and his heir?
Lord Riob came close enough that Issa could smell his clean scent. She flushed and held out the ribbon. He took it, slipping his fingers across her wrist. His skin was smooth and warm, and she looked away immediately.
“Thank you, Princess. I shall surely win now,” said Lord Riob. “For I would not dare dishonor your father.”
“I look forward to seeing you next to my father at the end of the day, on the dais with the other winners,” said Issa.
“You can go away now,” Neca told her brother. “You’ve conquered all the hearts there are to conquer here.”
Lord Riob glanced once more at Issa, then trotted away on his horse.
Willa snickered. “He will win, because no one will dare to unhorse him, wearing the king’s colors.”
“He may not,” said Issa. “My father has always asked for fair battles.”
“Your father has asked that all pretend the battles are fair,” said Willa archly. “There is a difference. Sir Tomah has told me the truth that is understood and never spoken.”
“But my father has never taken first place,” Issa protested. “Not once in all the years I have seen him.”
“No. He is always in second or third place, never below that. Have you not noticed? My father told me the king is always very high in the rankings, and whoever is ahead of him one year will never be ahead the next year. It would be too dangerous for the king, if there were one man who bested him consistently.”
“Are you saying that my father is a fraud?” asked Issa. She had her own complaints against him, but she would not hear others speak ill of him.
Willa shrugged. “He is the king. He cannot afford to have an accidental outcome here today. It is far too important.”
Perhaps her father was not so different from King Haikor, after all, thought Issa. It was not a pleasant thought, and she felt ill at ease the rest of the tournament.
All the ladies watched as Lord Riob passed once, twice, and then three times, without being unhorsed. Issa’s ribbon of green and blue fluttered in the wind.
“He won’t even look at me,” complained Hadda.
“And he never will,” said Neca. “Not at a twittering idiot like you.”
But Lord Riob did glance once in Issa’s direction. He won another joust, and then King Jaap was set against him. This time, Lord Riob fell and the king was roundly applauded.
Issa looked at Neca.
“He was fairly beaten,” she said. “I have no doubt of it.”
“And you ask her for the truth?” said Hadda. “He is her own brother.”
“Would you lie for him?” Issa asked.
Neca hesitated a long moment. “I would lie for my brother,” she said. “But I am not lying now. Riob was exhausted. Your father is more used to conserving his strength. That is why he won.”
Issa looked around at everything that was familiar to her here. When she was in Rurik, she would miss this simplicity. She would have to give up her simple gowns and her braided hair
and her privacy. There would be servants everywhere and always the need for show. Yet she would never be at ease there, never sure of her place, even as queen. And it must be done. There was no choice now. She had agreed to it when Duke Kellin was here, and she could not go back on her word now.
At the end of the day, Lord Riob was awarded third place in the competition, receiving for his pains a large haunch of pork. King Jaap took second and donated his prize of a newly born lamb to the villagers. Lord Karod, who was the new lord of the traitorous Lord Umber’s lands, took first place and received a fully mature bull, which he struggled to control as he stood for applause. Issa tried not to think of it as an omen of for the future.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Issa
AS SOON AS THE ROADS through to the land bridge were dry that summer, Issa was to leave for Rurik. Everything to do with the betrothal had been negotiated and agreed to on both sides, down to the colors she and Edik would wear and the words they would say. Sometimes Issa wondered if her father and King Haikor had decided for her how many breaths she would take at the ceremony. And yet the ceremony was not until the first of autumn, several months away.
On the morning of her departure, Issa woke up very early, unable to fall back to sleep. She walked through the castle in Weirland one last time, noticing the tiny details that she had always taken for granted, the dull wooden floors, worn down over so many years, the windows made of fine greased cloth rather than glass, the smoking fires with their ancient chimneys. She knew that when she came back to Weirland, it would be temporarily, as a visitor, and this was the last time it would be home to her. After this, she would be returning as the betrothed of Prince Edik.
There were sheep in the courtyard, and Issa knew their names. She had found them out from the shepherds only last summer. It seemed a lifetime ago. She would miss the sheep and the shepherds both. She would miss the feeling of neweyr all through the castle. It would take more than a month to reach the palace in the south of Rurik, and once there, she would have to think before she used her neweyr. What would it be like to have it so stifled?
Nervous, she went back to her room, where her trunks stood, already packed. The gowns she would have to wear in the Rurese court bothered her. She was sure that no garment made in her own land could be good enough.
Finally, after a last breakfast together, King Jaap held her hand as they walked out to the castle gate in the bright sun. It was a perfect day for traveling.
“They will take care of you,” he said, nodding to the two dozen servants who were loading the packhorses and donkeys and who would accompany Issa on the journey. Some of them were castle servants, two of her father’s guards, one a maid who had served Issa on occasion.
Issa stopped a moment to be sure that the hound she was bringing for Prince Edik was properly secured in the basket tied atop one of the donkeys. It whimpered at her, and she put a hand out for it to smell and spoke a word of comfort.
Three of the servants who had come with them Issa recognized as ekhono she had seen in the underground courtyard years before, two men and a woman.
“What a terrible risk they take. Why would you command them to return to Rurik with me?” asked Issa.
“What makes you think that I commanded them?” her father asked.
“But—if you had given them a choice, I am sure—”
“They were all given a choice. These want to return to Rurik, to see King Haikor for themselves, under the protection of the king of Weirland. After all, he is the man who encourages the hunting of the ekhono.”
“What if someone recognizes them?”
“They are well disguised, dressed as natives of Weirland. Perhaps they felt it was the price they must pay, to look back and see the world they were saved from.”
This was bravery of the highest order, and Issa felt she must meet it with courage of her own. She lifted her head and took one last look at the verdant green fields, in full glory. She focused on the song of the plants, but something felt different.
Just before she mounted her horse, she bent down and touched the tiny purple flowers that were called heart’s lace. She was astonished to feel a pinch of thorn. She looked more closely and saw that the thorny red scrub called red stone had hidden underneath the flowers. She sucked at her bleeding finger and told herself it was nothing, but the pain made tears spring into her eyes.
Her father helped her mount her horse, normally the job of a servant, but it allowed them a few last moments of privacy. “Did you know,” said King Jaap, “King Haikor and I met once, when we were boys. I was the heir already to the throne, but he was a younger son.”
“What was he like then?” asked Issa.
King Jaap smiled. “I thought him charming. He knew what to say to make others like him, even at an early age. He was smart, though selfish as children often are. And even then, he wished to control everything around him. If Haikor found someone who disliked him, he would focus all his energies on changing that person’s mind. His elder brother had no sense of how to make others like him. Sometimes I think it is just as well that Achter did not take the throne.”
Achter was the elder brother who, it was rumored, had been ekhono. He had died young, and Issa had heard that it was Haikor who had poisoned him.
“I caught Haikor practicing different voices near the river once,” King Jaap continued. “He must have thought he was far enough from the palace that no one would hear him. He tried out a booming, deep voice, and a mysterious, changing one. He even tried to sing a melody, which was lovely. I thought that he had a unique gift, and that he should use it. But I have heard that after he became king, he never sang again.”
“His daughter sings, I hear,” said Issa.
“She plays a flute,” said King Jaap. “But she did not learn music from her father. She learned from a foreigner, a music master from the continent.”
“Is she like him in other ways, then?” asked Issa.
“So I have heard. Far more like him than his son. I suspect you will need to know her well in time. Married or not, she will be a force in the court to balance yours.”
“Mine?” said Issa.
“Of course. You will have power if you are betrothed to Edik. Even more when you are married.”
“But I shall still be a princess,” she said, uncomfortable with the thought of holding power in the Rurese court.
“Yes, and Ailsbet is a princess, as well. She may resent you for that. She has been the only princess in Rurik for some time.”
And since Ailsbet was unweyr, Issa would not be able to talk to her about neweyr, would not be able to compete to see who could coax the most beautiful bloom out of the earth, as she did with Lady Willa.
She kissed her father on the cheek and then forced herself not to look back as the horses clopped forward. She could feel tears drying on her face, but she did not wipe them away. She must learn not to give her emotions away too easily when she was in Rurik. This was the beginning.
The party rode slowly that first day and stopped for the night some miles from the castle in a wood. Issa could almost imagine that she was simply staying overnight in a visit to the countryside. She slept well and led the whole party on her horse, enjoying the feeling of the neweyr all around her. She played with the puppy, which had adjusted well to the travel.
But the next evening, the terrain turned rocky and arid as the retinue approached the land bridge, and Issa felt the anger of the ocean. The neweyr here seemed no more than an echo. Even the living plants gave off only a faint sense of it.
Issa’s ears rang, and she wanted desperately to return home.
At a small stream, the party stopped their horses and dismounted. Issa ate a hearty stew for dinner and for dessert, a biscuit and some fresh berries. She could taste each rainfall in the berries, each bright spring day that had passed in their fruition.
“Your Highness,” said the ekhono woman.
“What is it?” asked Issa.
“I was onl
y wondering if you will save the neweyr in Rurik? It’s dying, from what I hear. King Haikor’s taweyr oppresses everything, and even the crops are being affected. The fields do not produce as they should, and there are people starving in the countryside.”
“You have no neweyr yourself. How do you know about the Rurese neweyr?”
The woman said, “My mother and sisters talked about it often before I came to Weirland. I cannot feel it myself, but the effect on the people of Rurik must matter to all those who are about the kingdom, whether or not they have neweyr.”
“Is that why you wanted to come back with us? To see how Rurik does now?”
“Oh, no, Your Highness,” the woman replied with a slight tremor of fear in her voice. “I wanted to come back to show myself I could. That I wasn’t afraid.”
Issa admired her courage. What a difference from what Issa had to face: power and responsibility, and a betrothal to a young prince. Was that so very terrible?
“Tell me about the taweyr,” she said. “How did you know that you had it instead of the neweyr?”
At first, the woman looked as if she didn’t want to answer. Then she said, “I thought I was unweyr for a time. I didn’t show anything. Then the taweyr came out one day when I was arguing with my father, and I struck him down. I was afraid he was dead and started weeping over him. ‘Like a girl,’ he said, and we both laughed and cried. After that, we went to tell my mother and sisters, and he told them he’d have to bring me here to keep me safe.”
“Do they ever come to visit you?” asked Issa.
“Oh, no. They can’t. Sometimes my father sends me messages, or gifts, things he thinks I would miss, like the round stones from the river, or a feather from the hawk we trained together.”
“You won’t see your family then, when you are here?”
“They have a farm to work and the other children to care for. And that’s hard enough in Rurik now, with the neweyr as it is.”
“Do you ever wish you had the neweyr instead of the taweyr?” asked Issa.
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