The morvende boy set aside his book. It seemed entirely natural that one of the mysterious morvende would be a casual friend to the queen of Sartor.
“Do you think your people could extend tunnels as close to the Norsunder Base as possible?”
“Probably,” Hinder said, grimacing. “But why?”
“To effect a rescue.”
He shrugged. “I have to ask the elders, of course, but supposing they say yes. The tunnel we can make, but the rescue? We’re not strong enough against an army of Norsundrians.”
Linet pursed her lips. “By the time you have a tunnel ready, I think a plan will be as well. We can work on that at our end.”
Yustnesveas turned to Jenel. “We’ll do our best to rescue your friend. Would you like to stay with us until it is done?”
“If it’s not an imposition,” Jenel said fervently.
Yustnesveas laughed. “The place is big enough to house half of Eidervaen, and most of it is empty, for we, too, are recently free from Detlev’s plots. You have only to choose the room you like and settle in.”
And so, for a time, Jenel Sandrial became one of the guests at Rive Dian, or as it was once called in the days of Old Sartor, Erivei-Dian. Most of the grand rooms were indeed empty, and had been for years and years.
Jenel walked through a series of shadowy anterooms, their gilt, stylized painting high on the walls now softened with age. The portraits along the walls had darkened, some so much that only old faces stared palely from shadowy backgrounds with those same heavy-lidded eyes. Some of the portraits retained the glitter along the frame that promised a magical capture from the subject’s life; most of the frames were dark, indicating that the magic had dissipated over the centuries.
The accumulated authority of all that history, evidenced in the shape of her eyes, imbued Yustnesveas with gravitas, even though her manners were not at all formal, nor did she require any kind of royal protocol. She seemed just as happy to entertain a housemaid as a duchess.
Much as Jenel appreciated being accepted for herself, she found this attitude unsettling. The other guests were an equally disparate group. Social status wasn’t even mentioned, so there was no deference. It was nice, but . . . awkward.
If I wanted to be treated like a princess, Jenel thought, finger-tracing the fine acorn carving on an ancient chair, it would be wonderful. But I don’t. I like the old ways, and I wish these rooms would be lit again, and see masquerades, and be filled with music.
Yustnesveas enjoyed Jenel’s earnestness. Her own life had been so thoroughly smashed when she was just an infant that she was just learning what normal life was supposed to be. She was always a little afraid that Detlev and his minions were waiting for her to acquire a taste for normalcy so they could have the fun of smashing it all again.
It was easier, in some ways, to live in this huge monument to Sartor’s past as if any day she’d have to go back to her rude hut high in the border mountains.
One day, Jenel dared to express some of her thoughts. Yustnesveas listened as she always did, head tilted, her expression considering. But then she surprised Jenel by saying, “I have to admit that I prefer freedom from social rules. I respect status that is earned, not just conferred at birth, because I was educated by a mage.”
Jenel’s lips rounded. “I know Sartor was closed away from the world for a century. Like Everon was closed away. But . . .”
“But you thought I sprang forth from my closet, gowned and crowned?” Yustnesveas grinned. “No. I was hidden as a babe. Fifteen years ago, the spell over Sartor had receded enough that my guardian was freed, and she took me to Sarandon’s border mountains. So though I was born a century ago, I’ve only lived fifteen years.”
Yustnesveas glanced out the window, considering her words. Tough as it was for Sartor to re-enter the world, she knew that Sartor’s history made reintegration easier. Though the rest of the world had changed, goods a hundred years out of fashion were instantly treasured, just because they were from Sartor.
Yustnesveas leaned forward, elbows on her closed book. “But here’s something to consider about protocol. A princess doesn’t always have the freedom of her farm-girl friend. She knows that her words might affect not just her own life, but many. Her good manners help her to control her tongue, and to move about without peril.”
Jenel cautiously assented.
“As for the pretty clothes and rooms, they are pretty. But they can also be used as a kind of social weapon.”
Seeming harmony, Jenel thought. “I’ve been learning about that, how words can be a weapon. That’s why I like looking and not doing.”
Yustnesveas said, “My tutor, a great mage who’s lived a long time, taught me that we humans tend to organize into categories. If we are put into a place by tradition, those who want change badly enough seem to find a way to do it.”
Jenel thought of Cassandra, forced to be a false princess. “I just wish everyone could find her right place and be happy there.”
“I think,” Yustnesveas said slowly, “what’s the right place in one person’s mind isn’t always right for the next person. It’s good to find happiness if we can without taking it away from others. First,” she said grimly, “has to come safety.”
Jenel sighed. “Yes.” She, too, glanced out the window, and Yustnesveas understood that Jenel was as restless as she was; she worried every day that her friend was imprisoned.
If she was still alive.
So she said, “Before my morning interviews today, Hinder’s cousin Sinder brought me word that the morvende have been working to extend their tunnel deep into Norsundrian territory.”
Jenel pressed her lips together. She appreciated the creamy hot chocolate that she drank out of a fine porcelain cup of deep midnight blue edged with a pattern of gold leaves. At the word ‘Norsunder’ the peaceful room seemed as fragile as the cup in her hand—which had, she noticed, been expertly mended once by clever but unknown fingers.
“When will it all be ready?”
Yustnesveas could have laughed at the valiant but unsuccessful attempt Jenel made to school her expression into gratitude, but Jenel’s eyes revealed her fear.
Yustnesveas smiled. “I don’t know, but it doesn’t concern you, since they won’t permit you to attempt the rescue.”
“But I—”
“Linet’s part Loi. Space and time are different for the Loi, who live in and guard Shendoral. They dream things, or hear things—somehow—not just here in Sartor but that affect the entire world, even though they seldom leave Shendoral. Anyway, you can’t go because if you get caught, the entire morvende geliath would be endangered. You have to realize how old the geliaths are here in Sartor—hundreds and hundreds of years at least. Don’t think of them as mere caves, but as cities underground.”
“So they are making a new one?” Jenel asked.
“Not a geliath, but a tunnel. However, tunnels do connect, and they have to plan for—”
Yustnesveas broke off as a bluish flicker resolved into Linet.
“Guess what I have,” Linet began in a triumphant voice—but her surprise was spoiled when the small black thing in her arms leaped lightly down onto the table, where it began lapping at the cream.
“Well it sure is a hungry thing,” Jenel exclaimed.
They laughed. The cat looked up at them, then resumed its delicate lapping.
“This cat,” Linet pointed, “is going to free your friend.”
Yustnesveas and Jenel studied the cat in surprise. She looked very ordinary—black with one white spot behind an ear. Linet stared down at the cat, head to one side, smiling with proprietary glee.
“Yes,” she said, “she is. We had a, oh, a fascinating exchange last night. I learned that dena Yeresbeth—the mysterious unity that permitted our ancestors to talk mind to mind—is not completely dead in the world, as we’d so long believed, and neither is it confined to upright beings. Animals have their own version. According to Rina, some are willing to ally wit
h humans against the threat of Norsunder. Just think what this alliance could mean to our world, were we to get rid of the likes of Detlev?”
Linet paused, looked at Jenel’s tear-glistening eyes, and decided she could air her favorite theories some other day. “So,” she said briskly. “To the problem at hand. . .”
Chapter Eleven
Senrid Montredaun-An and Cassandra Muria were the only kids kept prisoner in that particular wing of the fortress at the Norsunder Base. Though they were kept next to one another for the convenience of their jailors, the stone walls were thick and the grating in the doors very small. They were scarcely aware of the other’s presence.
Senrid heard Cassandra screaming a couple of times.
Cassandra became aware of Senrid when she tried pressing her face to the rusty iron grating in a vain effort to see even a tiny scrap of sunlight. There was only the ugly reddish glare of magic-perpetuated torchlight. While she searched for any evidence of a window, she became aware of guards clattering up the corridor. She froze in fear, terrified that they were coming for her, but they stopped at the next cell down, unlocked the door, and hauled out a short blond boy, and thrust him down the corridor in the other direction. She remembered that she’d heard some comings and goings from that cell, but she was too miserable to wonder who he was, or why he was there.
Of the two, she was the most miserable, though her sojourn had been much less lengthy and less violent than Senrid’s.
She’d only had one visit with Detlev, who’d asked her a lot of questions that didn’t make any sense to her. Once he seemed to realize that she wasn’t the one he wanted, he never bothered with her again.
But she was so scared of a second visit that for a while the guards entertained themselves with mentioning his name and describing detailed tortures. It was too easy to reduce her to terrified screams and then weeping, whereupon those inclined for such recreation would slap her into silence.
Poor Cassandra! Take a dawn-singer out of the sunshine and freedom of the native forest, and she (or he) will be unhappy; put her in Norsunder, and she’ll be very unhappy. Add the proximity of her worst-feared enemy, double that for a kid, and you get a perfect picture of woe.
She was far too sunk in her well of gloom to note that the boy next door was subjected to more bully visits than she, and they lasted a lot longer.
Senrid had no illusions to lose. Having spent his life so far in a martial environment, he knew what to expect—and because prison guards are not picked for brains, he gave as good as he got.
At least verbally.
Once he’d realized that Detlev had been specific in his orders—alive, and no permanent damage—Senrid couldn’t bring himself to back off on the comments. It was too much like surrender. He felt no compunctions about lying or faking unconsciousness when he’d been knocked down, so he could listen to any conversations the Norsundrians held; they didn’t always remember to switch back to Norsundrian.
Most of what he overheard wasn’t worth hearing, but he did learn a few things while he endured uncountable days, waiting for that dreaded interview with Detlev.
He finally met Detlev, unexpectedly. It was the same day he managed an escape, though he only made it as far as the inner door to the prison wing of the fortress before he was missed and hunted down.
Since Detlev happened to be at the Base that day, the goons muscled Senrid directly along to him.
“Escape attempt,” one of them reported, giving Senrid a shove so he landed on the stone floor at Detlev’s feet—hoping he’d get the order to kill him. What fun they’d have—the brat had been far too much trouble.
Somehow Senrid now understood their lingo. (Threat? Probably, he decided.)
Senrid rolled over, blinking dizzily. Gray-green eyes looked down at him with cold amusement. “I shall have time for this one presently,” Detlev said. “See to it he’s there—and in one piece—when I want him.”
He stepped over Senrid and walked on.
The disappointed guard snapped out an expletive. A big mitt gripped Senrid’s disintegrating shirt collar, and hauled him to his feet.
Back in his cell, the guards he’d evaded put a very liberal interpretation on ‘in one piece.’
o0o
At last Linet’s expected hero showed up.
Very wisely she did not use the word, nor did she approach him directly. Instead, she transferred to Rive Dian and said to Yustnesveas, “The morvende tunnel is finished. What they wait on is someone big enough to disguise as an eleven, who can go in with Rina.”
Yustnesveas frowned in perplexity. Linet vanished, leaving Yustnesveas with—she believed—a tough problem. Because she did not know that Linet already had someone in mind, she cast her mind over likely candidates. She knew if she asked directly, her city and palace guards would never refuse, whether they were actually capable or not. So many of her enthusiastic guards were young—not much older than she—and almost all were orphans, as she was.
And they were mostly still untried. Norsunder’s predilection for vicious infighting among those vying for power had benefited Yustnesveas’s children’s ‘army’ during their relatively recent bid for freedom. It was not the kids’ prowess so much as the two Norsundrian factions’ sabotage of one another that had garnered for Yustnesveas and the Sartorans the country’s freedom. The worst fighting, the war that had decimated their parents’ generation over a century ago in enchanted time, lay barely within memory.
A day later, she was still considering her dilemma when one of her messengers came in from the city guards to report having spotted a familiar figure on the North Road.
Relief and joy lit whole being. “Thank you,” was all she said to her messenger, and to her Steward, “Prepare Rel’s room, please?”
Steward Gehlei did not hide her smile.
Probably, Yustnesveas reflected as she ordered dinner, the world-roaming Rel would be astonished to discover how popular he was in Sartor’s capital. He’d been back twice in the year and a since he first showed up in the middle of the final struggle for freedom, and took up their cause with the matter-of-fact casualness that others would use to take up a fork and join a meal.
He arrived just before sunset, after stopping by the guardhouse to catch up on news of the friends he’d made during the freedom fight.
Yustnesveas discovered she couldn’t concentrate on any of her usual tasks; she turtled around her favorite sitting room, picking things up and putting them down again just so, until at last she heard Rel’s quick tread.
“It’s good to see you in Sartor again.”
Rel’s strong-boned face, his dark eyes and hair gave him a formidable countenance, an impression augmented by his height and breadth of shoulder. He looked like a grownup until he smiled, which was a rare event. Then he looked like the nineteen-year-old that he was.
“Was on my way south,” he said. “Prodded in an otherwise forgettable dream by blue people, a week or so ago. Decided to pick up my pace.” His eyes narrowed as he added, “Know any reason why?”
“The Loi. Dinner is ready. Come—we can talk in the dining room.”
Rel sat at her ancient table with the same matter-of-fact ease with which he’d sit cross-legged on the ground at a crude campfire with a rough gang of border riders—or a party of tradespeople.
“We could use your help,” Yustnesveas said. “But have some dinner first, then I will explain.”
Jenel Sandrial was intimidated by the tall, handsome Rel, and seldom spoke. Just before they gathered, a well-meaning distant aunt had pointed him out as he stood near Yustnesveas in his worn traveler clothes, and she whispered, “That’s Rel the Hero from our Battle for Freedom. I’ll just wager that the queen sent for him, and he’ll be going to rescue your friend.”
That a total stranger would go deliberately into danger on Jenel’s behalf rendered her speechless both with gratitude and with fears for Cassandra, for the unknown Hero, and for the morvende who had made the tunnel and risked thei
r geliath.
The next evening was cold and rainy, but neither Jenel nor Yustnesveas saw it.
Everyone had expected a wait of a few days, but Linet appeared at noon, saying, “Detlev is gone from the Base. The time to act is now.”
Rel said only, “Did someone see him leave?”
Linet shook her head, and Yustnesveas turned his way. “We dare not watch. Not even the morvende.”
Linet said, “The Loi listen in the dream realm for his absence.”
Rel shrugged. That obviously made sense to the Loi. All he needed to know was that the information was trustworthy, because if Detlev was there, they hadn’t a hope of success. He was able to sense people’s comings and goings by mind.
So they transferred by magic to Sartor’s southern border, and the morvende geliath there. Linet and Hinder met them there.
“Here is your clothing,” Linet said to Rel, holding out a bundle. “The uniform is left over from the old days, but the boots we fashioned. They look like the others, but they will be easier to move over rough ground in, for they are not capped with iron. Loi magic won’t alert the Norsundrians to the presence of light magic.”
Rel didn’t ask why; it didn’t really matter. He suspected that it had to do with the nature of Loi magic—that it was integral to the structure of the world in a way that the mirror-image “light” and “dark” magics were not.
He nodded his thanks and ducked into an adjacent cavern to change.
Hinder followed him. “I wish I could go,” he said longingly.
Rel gave his head a shake, recognizing the longing from his own boyhood. It was not a taste for bloodshed so much as a craving for action, for the chance to have a part in righting wrongs. “I’d like to have you at my back,” Rel said. “And we may come to it yet, if all this talk about Norsunder’s future plans is true. But today, can’t be done. They catch a glimpse of that white head and pale face, they’ll know right where to look.”
Hinder grimaced, dashing back the drifting snow-colored hair from his brow. There was certainly no arguing that short of total disguise, morvende were easily distinguishable. “The elders said when they decided to risk building this tunnel that it was only Norsunder’s arrogance that would protect us. They won’t think any lighter allies have the courage to attempt that Base.”
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