Time of Daughters I

by Sherwood Smith

  “This is Tes,” Gdan said. “If you need a runner, Tesar’ll do for you until you decide on someone.”

  Danet turned to Tesar. “If it’s all right with you, it’s all right with me.”

  Tesar ducked her head, brushed her fingers over her heart, and loped off without a word.

  Gdan glanced off to the right, then also brushed her fingers over her heart and walked away. Danet had a few moments to consider how her status had changed. She began to wonder if a change of state was something that happened in how other people treated you, when someone approached, his step slow and uncertain.

  Danet didn’t recognize Arrow at first. His face was bruised and swollen, and instead of moving at his usual brisk bounce, he shuffled like an old man.

  As Danet stared in bewilderment, from behind came the arms mistress’s bawl, “No, Leap of the Deer from the hips! Turn from the hips—you’ve got ‘em, use ‘em! There’s your strength!”

  Arrow’s bruised, swollen mouth got out the words with difficulty, “I hear Cousin Lanrid tried to spark you last night.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you turned him down.”

  Danet didn’t see any reason not to speak the truth. “I don’t know him, but I don’t think he was sparking me so much as sparking trouble.”

  Arrow squinted at her as if he saw her for the first time. “He was,” he said. “Can we start over?”

  He sounded surly, but what little she could see of his expression past the distortion reminded her of her brother when he knew he’d done something stupid. And the last thing she wanted was the drag of resentment between them before they’d had so much as a single real conversation.

  “Let’s,” she said.

  “My head aches too much for talk,” he said, gently touching his purple eye ridge. “Tonight. All right?”

  “You know where I’ll be.”

  He stumbled off, and Danet went in to eat breakfast.

  Most of the table was empty. The jarlan, so congenial earlier, was now white-lipped and silent, which kept everyone else silent, so all Danet heard was the tap of knives or spoons on plates.

  After breakfast she ran down to fetch the laundry that she’d left the night before her wedding, to discover that Tesar had been ahead of her.

  Coming out of the hall, she spotted a cluster of the Rider cousins smirking and laughing as they swaggered in from the baths, but as soon as they saw her, Lanrid blew her a kiss, then they ran upstairs to the mess hall, guffawing.

  When Danet reached her bedroom, there was Tesar smoothing the fresh linens on her bed. All the rest of the laundry had been shaken out, folded, and put away.

  Danet said, partly to test the limits of their relationship, “Something happened. I mean, after I left, last night. Do you know what?”

  Tesar tucked and smoothed down the blanket to military precision. Danet thought the girl was going to ignore her, and mentally resigned herself to losing a runner as fast as she’d gained one, until Tesar turned away and straightened up, and what had looked like a frown in profile was in full face the wrinkled brow of thought.

  Tesar said slowly, as if choosing her words, “Lanrid Olavayir and his two cousins scragged Arrow last night. After Arrow had a shouting fight with Fini sa Vaka, and she went back to her Nevree counting house.” Tesar made spitting lips to the side.

  “They scragged him? Why?”

  “And then threw him in the stable midden waiting to be wanded,” Tesar said, softly, as if someone else stood in the room with them. Her gaze dropped, and Danet couldn’t help notice that Tesar had the longest lashes she’d ever seen on a girl. “Said it was because he’d disgraced our connection with the Faths and the Arvandais, getting drunk at his own wedding and dishonoring you.”

  “They certainly didn’t ask me, or I’d have told them I can speak for myself. But they didn’t ask. They don’t care what I think. What’s the real truth?” Danet asked. “What’s between them?”

  Tesar’s gaze shifted from object to object, her shoulders tightening. Clearly she thought she’d already said too much. “Ask him.”

  She was done, Danet could tell. So she said, “About wall hangings. Are there some in storage, or do I have to send for some from home?”

  Sure enough, Tesar’s tense shoulders eased, and she told Danet all they had were some old, moth-eaten tapestries. All the good ones apparently went south to the royal city with the first Olavayir king Aldren, and the secondary hangings when Jasid went south to take the kingship from Haldren-Harvaldar in ‘29. Clearly making more was not a priority for the Olavayirs.

  Tesar left with the sheets and other laundry to be washed, and Danet, mindful of her first border patrol, changed into her sturdiest riding clothes. At the bottom of the stairs she encountered the jarlan, who said, “We postponed your first border ride a day.” She took in Danet’s clothes, then added, “You might want to take your Firefly out for a good long run, rather than just circling the training corral.”

  Danet slapped her hand over her heart, wondering what that was all about.

  It felt great to get away from the castle. She galloped Firefly until they were both tired and refreshed, then brought her back, and though the Olavayir stable hands were excellently trained, Danet enjoyed the rhythms of a thorough curry. She didn’t speak, Firefly couldn’t, but they communicated through hands and muscles until the mare huffed and blew into somnolent contentment.

  At dinner, Danet and Sdar-Randviar talked about morning drill, and where Mother had learned hers, and that led to stories about Danet’s famous foremother holding Larkadhe—called Ala Larkadhe in those days—and the legends about how tough she was.

  “If she had been with the Jarlan of Arveas and the women of Andahi Castle, they would surely have held out against the Venn an extra week,” the jarlan said, and the randviar agreed.

  Danet sensed that this praise of a long-dead relation was in a way praise for her. She said, “Mother told us once that our great-mother regretted not being there to her dying day.”

  At twilight she did not have laundry to deal with for the first time since her arrival, so she took a walk around on the walls, as it was a balmy evening. She heard singing on the air. One of the boys had a good voice, at least as good as any traveling bard she’d heard. But she didn’t see where the singers were gathered.

  When the night watch bell rang, she went up to her room, where she found Arrow leaning against the wall beside her shut door. He looked sullen and in pain.

  She opened the door and gestured him inside.

  She knew that the high ground here was hers, but she could see in his sideways glance and general hangdog atmosphere that he was aware of it. So she said in her lightest voice, “What does marriage mean in Olavayir? I want to know what to expect, so I start out right.”

  He dropped onto her trunk, and one hand fidgeted, his thumb running along the carved edge as if he checked the honing of a weapon. “What does it mean in your family?” he asked his knees.

  She wasn’t quite ready to sit on the bed, and the room had no other furniture besides the trunk and a tiny table with two floor mats, as she was seldom in there. So it was her turn to lean against the wall as she said, “My mother calls it a partnership. Each with their duties.”

  He glanced up, then said to his boot tops, “My father wants us having children right away.”

  No apology for his drunken beginning, but at least he was talking to her.

  Danet didn’t hide her surprise. “I know Olavayirs marry young, but I thought that was to get used to your ways. Isn’t there plenty of time for children?” Then she remembered Jarend’s little boy, though she had no idea how old Jarend was. He was so big he could have been forty as easily as twenty. She thought either would look the same on him.

  Arrow lifted his one-eyed gaze at last. “You might not know that my father’s first two sons, our older brothers, were both killed defending the last king.”

  “I heard a little about that, but not about your
brothers being there.”

  “They were. Father wants the family strong,” Arrow said.

  It seemed strong enough to Danet, but it was clear that Arrow had orders from the jarl, and she didn’t see any reason to start their marriage by arguing. Children were a part of the partnership. If you accepted that, then there didn’t seem to be any reason why she couldn’t get that part done now instead of in ten or even twenty years.

  “All right,” she said.

  The side of his mouth not swollen into distortion lifted, and he said, “Give me a few days?”

  She smiled back, thinking that it probably took all his strength just to walk.

  “When you’re ready,” she said. “I’ll tell the healer to give me gerda steep. I don’t want to chew it.”

  The next morning, at breakfast, the servants brought in a small clay pot with gerda leaves floating in the boiled water. It was an odd smell, somewhere between ginger and anise, Danet thought. The jarlan looked on in approval as she poured it out and drank it.

  The taste reminded her of summer grass, neither delicious nor repugnant, Danet was glad to find. Mother had told her that one early sign of pregnancy was that the taste would suddenly go off. As Danet conscientiously finished the contents of the pot, she thought that this was another potential change of state.

  When she rose to leave, the jarlan broke off her conversation with two runners and gave Danet orders, sending her along with Gdan and a riding of experienced women for that postponed first border patrol. Tesar rode with Danet, to see to tent, gear, and weapons. They both would care for the horses.

  They had not sunk the three hills beyond the horizon when they encountered a lone rider. No one stopped; Gdan raised a hand in salute to the tall silhouette who at first seemed to be wearing black. Proximity resolved into a midnight-blue coat cut like those of the Riders, tight to the waist and flaring out. The man did not bind his ruddy-blonde hair on the top of his head, but tied it behind, and the golden embroidery over the heart turned out to be a leaping dolphin.

  Danet stared. This was a royal runner. Good-looking, too. Light brown eyes met hers then shifted away as he lifted a hand in polite salute, then he rode past them toward Nevree.

  Danet slewed around in her saddle to watch his long tail of hair, golden against the midnight blue, bisecting straight shoulders.

  “That kind,” came Gdan’s dry voice, “is all look but do not touch. Especially him.”

  One of the older women gave a rude crack of laughter.

  “Him? What’s wrong with him?” Danet asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Gdan said, as the older woman riding point laughed louder.

  “Try sparking a Montredavan-An,” she declared. “Just try. You’ll get frostbite—either that or a knife in the back.”

  Gdan snorted. “Oh, button it, Vnar. You know that’s ancient history. Probably not even true.” And to Danet, “It’s just that the royal runners keep themselves to themselves.”

  Vnar muttered in a relishing, broody voice as she gazed at the man vanishing beyond a copse of candlewood trees, “Only that one always seems to be riding to or from trouble.”

  Another of the cousins made a loud fart noise. “Of course they come and go when there’s been trouble—they’re messengers.”

  Vnar flipped up the back of her hand. “All I know is, after one of them comes, especially him, there’s always rush messages going out, ride hard, sleep in the saddle, rush rush rush and never a word why. We’re well out of it.”

  Nobody found fault with that, and they rode on, Danet doing her best to smother her wild interest. Obviously the royal runners dealt only with the likes of jarls and jarlans, and never the new brides of younger brothers. More important—and prospectively enjoyable—was this, her first border ride, and learning the landmarks for what she expected to be a lifetime of rides.

  FIVE

  Vnar was right, of course.

  A webwork of messages did issue forth from Nevree, though few of them had anything to do with the slim packet of sealed letters that Camerend Montredavan-An delivered to the Jarlan of Olavayir. Always thrifty, and mindful of her resources, the jarlan combined as many messages as she could, sometimes saving less important ones for weeks or even months, until something urgent needed to be sent to family or ally.

  This wave included the official invitation to the wargame that the jarl hosted every five years, to be held a month after Victory Day the next summer.

  Not everybody enjoyed traveling all the way to Olavayir to do what they could just as well do closer to home.

  Time to bring in the Senelaecs, whose importance will become apparent.

  The Senelaecs—a relatively new jarlate roughly midway between Olavayir and the royal city—were among those who considered the Jarl of Olavayir arrogant for issuing invitations that nobody dared turn down.

  The younger generation of Senelaecs usually liked nothing better than escaping such chores as they could be corralled into doing for camping and wargames, while everyone else labored to bring in the harvest and begin the arduous labor of readying for winter. But that was when they wanted to do it, and when they picked the ground. And when their usual opponents were either local youngsters equally happy to down tools and play attacking Venn or brigands or even pirates, or else their cousins among the Eastern Alliance.

  Usually when Camerend Montredavan-An rode through the gate into the familiar court before the rambling Senelaec house, he was greeted with friendly comments and questions, or smiles and salutes if people were busy. Their grandfathers had trained together as Riders and runners respectively under the later years of Hasta, son of the great Evred, who had ruled all Halia, defended by Inda-Harskialdna.

  This spring, though Camerend received the expected greetings, the smiles and glances ranged from sharp to questioning.

  As he relinquished his tired and hungry horse to the expert care of the stable hands and circumvented the worst of the puddles and pools from the recent rain, he was fairly sure of the cause.

  He was waved through by a bent, white-haired door steward who had probably been born around the time of the last Montreivayir king, and made his way through the series of large, low-ceilinged rooms that opened into each other, until he reached the vast kitchen, at one end of which the grizzled jarl sat, his bad leg stretched out on a small stool. Across from him sat his wife, a stolid woman whose ruddy-blond hair was as bright at forty-five as it had been in her girlhood.

  They each had a chalk slate before them, but at Camerend's appearance, they looked up as one, then set the boards aside. They both smiled a welcome, but the jarlan’s was a little livelier, for she always appreciated a comely young man.

  “Camerend,” the jarl said. “Wherefrom come you?”

  “If you have any bad news,” the jarlan said, “take it away again. Or else.”

  This was a joke, for everyone knew that no royal runner would ever breach the seal on a letter, or they would never have survived through all the governmental ructions of the past fifty years.

  “Alas, the sniff test seems to be unreliable.” Camerend pulled out a ribbon-tied sheaf of letters and ran it under his nose. “Bad or good news, they smell the same.” He handed the thin sheaf to the jarl. “If I have to run, give me a count of ten, right?”

  And while the jarl untied the ribbon and squinted down at the name scrawled on the top of each folded and sealed paper, the jarlan said, “Not sure if you know this, but Wolfie’s wife Ndiran disappeared on us the first week the snows melted. Took little Marend up over the Andahi Pass. Left the boy.”

  “Did she say anything before she left?” Camerend asked, his expression so concerned neither jarl nor jarlan noticed his non-answer to the implied question.

  The jarlan sighed heavily, as the jarl frowned down at a letter, turning it over and over in his hands. “Only a scrawl on the schoolroom slate to the effect that she wouldn’t leave Marend to be married to some southern rat-shit.”

  Camerend only remembere
d Ndiran by her northern accent, she had been so quiet—unlike the rest of the noisy, boisterous, and happy Senelaecs. “Was it a bad match?”

  “Wolf didn’t think so,” the jarl said, still turning the letter over and over.

  “The girls didn’t think so,” the jarlan put in, her tone impatient. “Boys can’t be trusted to know hay from horse-apple. As long as they’re getting sex, they think everything is great.”

  The jarl looked up at that, his gray brows beetling. “Wolf told me she shut the door on him after she became pregnant with Marend. He still thought everything was fine, just that she was queasier with this one. You remember she was alone a lot, but when we saw her she was cheerful enough.”

  “What I remember,” the jarlan said heavily, “is her flattery and compliments, and yes, I believed all that, too. I also remember her chatting up the Riders after a border run.”

  Camerend's interest sharpened at that.

  Unaware, the jarlan went on, “Though that could have been because she was homesick, or hoping for stray rumors, or...what I don’t understand is, she had three years on Wolf. You’d think she knew her own mind when the Jarlan of Arvandais wrote to us to negotiate the marriage treaty on her niece’s behalf.”

  The jarl said mildly, “I still think she approached us to make the match because of you being the sister of a queen.”

  “But what could the Arvandaises think that would get them? Especially since my poor little sister was scarcely queen for a year?” The jarlan heaved a gusty sigh. She still missed her sister, slain by unknown assassins, though the pain had dulled over the intervening years.

  The jarl’s fierce brows knit as he turned the letter over and over and over, until the jarlan reached for it impatiently. “Oh, give me that. That’s from that road-apple Ndiran, isn’t it.”

  Camerend had his orders, but he preferred to not break the seal on the letters belonging to friends if he could help it. It wasn’t that he couldn’t replace the seal perfectly, for he’d been trained in that before his first ride. There were other ways to discover the contents that didn’t push him over his own ethical boundary.