Time of Daughters I

by Sherwood Smith

  She picked up the basket and walked out, saying, “I’ll take him to the nursery myself.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  As was traditional after a change of king, Convocation had been called for Midsummer Day. And all the jarls wanted to get a look at this new king.

  The Jarl of Senelaec (who alone of the jarls had met Arrow) believed it a good idea for his son to accompany him, so that Wolf would get a sense of the royal city, the jarls, and how the traditional Convocation was going to be with this new king, before he had to begin attending as jarl. “This is the problem with waiting until you’re well into your forties to marry,” he said. “By the time your children are old enough to ride with, you’re getting too old to ride.”

  Wolf disliked his father talking about his own death as much as he disliked being away at during the last weeks of Calamity’s pregnancy, but he kept silent on both counts. It wasn’t as if he could do anything whenever the babe decided to come.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “One thing,” the jarl cautioned his hot-blooded son. “No trouble with the Marlovayirs, mind. Not in the royal city, the first Convocation in years. My guess is, they’ll ignore us as if we weren’t there. That’s fine with me.”

  “All right,” Wolf said, suppressing disappointment. He had been half hoping for a tangle with that strut Knuckles. At least the Senelaecs had won the most recent encounter, with Calamity’s shooting at the wargame the previous summer.

  Spring had ripened into summer heat. Once they were on the open road, Wolf felt less terrible about leaving home. He was interested in seeing the royal city, and meeting Arrow and Danet again. So long as the Marlovayirs kept their distance, he even looked forward to it.

  The trip was hot, the city even hotter.

  Wolf’s best moment occurred the first day they rode into the royal city. He liked the rippling fanfare welcoming a jarl blaring from the towers as they trotted toward the gates, the Senelaecs’ black hunting cat on the crimson banner flapping in the rising summer breeze, and then Arrow himself appeared in the stable yard to greet them. His flaring grin and his clear delight assured a fun stay.

  Or seemed to assure. That assurance faded fast as the company dismounted and the runners fetched saddlebags—Arrow asked how everyone was, but scarcely listened before he started talking. “I’m going to...you’ll see a lot of changes...you won’t believe….”

  Wolf could see that Arrow was excited, and full of plans, so he tried to adjust his expectations. Surely Arrow would find him again when he had time.

  But Arrow—still new to the burden of kingship—had no free time. In his anxiety to establish himself, he felt obliged to heed every demand for a private interview by most of the jarls and garrison captains.

  Wolf—struggling with a sense of betrayal over that treaty with the north that everyone else seemed to accept—refused to request an interview. He and his family knew that their sense of betrayal was entirely personal: Arrow had clearly forgotten all about little Marend when he dealt with the north. What was the use of bringing it up now?

  Arrow had indeed forgotten, but more importantly, he had yet to make that vital alteration in perception expected of kings. In his own mind, he was still the Jarl of Olavayir’s second son, scrambling to stay with the relentless current of events. So he labored from sunup until midnight through the week of Summer Convocation, but the only time he and Wolf glimpsed one another were when the jarls came forward to make their vows on Midsummer Day, and then again at the banquet, across the cavernous, stuffy chamber.

  Wolf never saw Danet at all after her single appearance when the jarls made their vows, and she announced the betrothal system to be re-established within the year.

  He didn’t know that she was barely able to speak. This far into her pregnancy, she was still so ill that it took all her concentration to stand beside Arrow and not puke on her shoes.

  As the jarls came forth one by one to mumble or bellow their vow to heed the laws of Marlovan Iasca and to come to its defense at the king’s call, as Arrow in his turn promised to protect and defend the lives and trade of the kingdom, and to respect their governance within their borders, she gazed up at the proud new banner made by Hliss, the deepest and most brilliant royal blue from the Farendavan secret dyes. The soaring eagle was gorgeously embroidered in overlapping golden stitchery.

  But Danet was too ill to take any pride or pleasure in the fine banner, hers and Arrow’s splendid clothes, or the clean-swept and scoured throne room with its new torches bound with the usual leddas-imbued strips that had been stored in fragrant herbs. She kept swallowing, her body drenched with cold sweat as she fought against dry-retching from a long-empty stomach.

  At the end of the vows, she slipped out the side door adjacent to the dais, leaving Arrow alone on his throne.

  Whispering the Waste Spell over and over, she made it back to her bed and collapsed dizzily, muttering with her eyes shut, “Forget the interviews. You runners will have to track down the jarls and find out how many children they have, and who is betrothed to whom. If they even remember,” she whispered acidly.

  As that day blended into the next, Wolf tried to hide his impatience as he had to sit and listen to his father reminiscing with their Eastern Alliance connections, and on the third day, being hauled off to the pleasure houses with his Sindan-An cousin and his friends. Even the Marlovayirs were boring—Knuckles had obviously been given a similar lecture by his old da. Every time Wolf side-eyed him, Knuckles was looking away.

  And he didn’t see Arrow at all, except at the oaths.

  Wolf’s disappointment slowly turned to disbelief. Arrow certainly had changed from the fellow who sat in their den repairing horse stalls and talking about stings.

  As it happened, at roughly the same moment Wolf was muttering to his father that Arrow seemed to be having too much fun strutting around being king to give any time to old friends, Arrow was sitting stiff and tense in a formal interview chamber, facing the Commander of the Parayid Garrison, and the new husband of the Jarlan of Feravayir—a tall, brown, hard-faced Noth in his late thirties.

  This man had recently married the woman who called herself a queen, Arrow remembered, and who claimed to hold the title, as Ivandred Noth scrupulously launched into the speech he had promised his wife to deliver.

  Noth’s expertise, and interests, were in riding the border and protecting Parayid Harbor; he wasn’t the least political, an observation that Arrow was as yet too inexperienced to recognize. The jarlan, who was extremely political, had sent Noth in her place, coached carefully with a speech that was supposed to intimidate this Olavayir barbarian.

  Noth half-understood the palaver about differing languages and customs, and on seeing no encouragement from this stiff, unsmiling king he passed right on to the part he did understand. “But if it is your desire to return to the old ways, as you say, then we desire in our turn a promise that you will defend us if need be.” If this new king is forming an army, (the jarlan had said) make certain he’s willing to use it for defense of the coast, unlike too many of his family, who were too busy taking our taxes in order to fight each other, leaving us to ourselves.

  “That I can promise.” Arrow’s expression lightened, and he leaned forward, rapping his knuckles on the massive table supported by legs carved with stylized raptor wings and claws. “I want us to go back to the way it was in the old days of Inda-Harskialdna. The best army in Halia. Every jarlate safe from outside and inside.”

  As soon as Noth heard that, his entire demeanor eased. That sounded excellent to him.

  After that, the talk was much easier for both, as Arrow rambled on, enthusing about his new subject, and Noth offered stories handed down through the various Noth connections over the generations.

  That interview was Arrow’s first real success, so he ended up using the same words during the next, when he faced two jarls, the tall, thin, deceptively vague-looking Jarl of Telyer Hesea—which combined two old
er jarlates belonging to the Cassad and the Faralthad families—and the shorter, broad-chested, tough-looking Jarl of Jayad Hesea, chief of the biggest jarlate of the vast lands in the south.

  Between these two sat a banner in the green of the Algaravayirs, with an owl stitched on it in silver. Arrow took in the owl, the silver, the green, recognizing this representation of a direct descendant of the legendary Inda-Harskialdna.

  On the surface, they seemed benign, but Arrow had just enough experience to recognize the implied...not quite threat, but intimidation, most certainly, in this appearance of a threesome. That meant a strong alliance between the three.

  “This banner represents Linden-Fareas-Iofre,” Andas Cassad said in a calm, clear voice, his gaze steady. “Her brother Indevan has formally abdicated. He’s remaining in Sartor to pursue the study of magic. Linden-Fareas is too close to giving birth to travel, and so she requested us, as first-cousin kin, to carry her banner and with it her vows.”

  Everything seemed fine so far, except he didn’t miss the fact that this Linden-Fareas had not requested confirmation of her title. Like the Jarlan of Feravayir, she was claiming it.

  Arrow had decided on the spot to go along with the Feravayir claim because he took a liking to Noth, who was the jarl, as far as Arrow was concerned. There was no representative of Algaravayir here, except that banner. But who was going to deny a direct descendant of Inda-Harskialdna?

  “All right,” Arrow said, suppressing the impulse to wipe his hands down his trousers. Then he stiffened his back and did his best to look kingly as he turned his gaze to the Jarl of Jayad Hesea, who had a son his age. “So it’s just rumor, your wanting to turn your back on us and declare yourself a king?”

  Arrow heard how truculent his voice came out, and fought against a grimace. He didn’t want to strut as Lanrid always had, but how do you get back from that without sounding stupid?

  The jarl placed fists on his knees, then said equably enough, “Rumor, as usual, gets it backward. What we like is what we have, free trade with you here in the north. Because of the mountains against our eastern border, it’s also easier to get silk, spice, and even coffee from shipping down the west coast and inland from Parayid, with which we have trade agreements that don’t have anything to do with you up here in the north. For generations, we’ve sent the required men, horses, and taxes to you up here. In my own family’s Hall of Ancestors, there are monuments to those of us who died in the king’s service—always up north, here or farther up. The Marlovan army has never come south. We’ve a tradition in recent generations of seeing to our own problems.”

  He paused, as if waiting for Arrow to disagree or deny. But from what Arrow had managed to learn in his six months of intermittent study of Marlovan history, he knew that everything the jarl said was true.

  The jarl continued when Arrow didn’t speak, “These past years, there was no academy, no Convocation, nothing in short that the crown used to provide. So our oath-promised levies bring us nothing.”

  Another pause—and Arrow said, in haste, “That’s about to change.”

  “To whose benefit?” the jarl asked.

  “To the benefit of Marlovan Iasca,” Arrow said, looking surprised they would even ask—and sounding a little affronted. “I said yesterday, we’re starting the academy again.”

  “Meanwhile,” Cassad cut in smoothly, “there is the entire north shore beyond the Pass, apparently a separate kingdom again. Though both of us have ancestors who died up there. You say things will change, but does that mean another northern war?”

  “No,” Arrow said—not seeing the trap. “I concluded a treaty with them. Everything peaceful.” And sensed it closing.

  “And so,” the Jarl of Hesea Jayad said, “there are those of us who want the same treaty.”

  Cassad added, “For all the good reasons it made sense to let them go.”

  “Except,” Arrow said, fighting a rise of temper, “they have Andahi Pass.” He heard the implied threat in his own voice—which was not what he’d meant—and he reddened, scowling in confusion. “That is, I don’t want to lead an army up the Pass to a slaughter. They hold the Pass, and they have our own training, straight from the days of Bloody Tanrid. Also, I don’t have the King’s Riders in numbers and training that I can trust. But I will. You heard me yesterday, after the oaths.”

  At this, the two men shifted, narrowed eyes and stiff hands easing from wariness to question.

  Arrow, subliminally aware, flashed his disarming grin. “The academy is not going to be run the way it was under Bloody Tanrid. First of all, I am not asking for heirs, as he did. You’ll send me second sons, third welcome, too, and same with the sons of Rider captains. Ten years of training, they serve in our army ten years, then they can go home unless we have to muster the kingdom. If I have to put out the call to defend the kingdom, they come back as commanders. We’re going back to the way things were in Inda-Harskialdna’s day. Well, mostly. My point is, we’ll have the best army in Halia. But it’ll be for protecting our borders, north and south. I know Mathren neglected Parayid in favor of Hesea and East Garrisons, but I won’t.”

  Neither the jarls nor Arrow wanted civil war, and they could see Arrow’s resolve—and the enthusiasm of young manhood—and so the conversation ended with mutual assurances of good will, though in tones that didn’t quite hide doubt.

  Neither jarl said much over the next couple days. They explored the old academy buildings that the younger men had heard so much about and never seen, as the oldsters reminisced, not always fondly, for the duels and ambushes before it was closed had reflected the kingdom’s fractures.

  There was one last feast, at which Arrow promised that there would not be another Convocation at winter, but in five years’ time, and whatever he had to communicate would come by royal runner before New Year’s. This raised a heartfelt cheer.

  The next morning early, under rain-scoured blue sky, fanfares resounded once again from the towers as the companies departed.

  The jarls of Telyer Hesea and Jayad Hesea party rode together once again, in company with Commander Noth of Feravayir.

  When they camped, Noth took the first watch guarding the camp.

  The two jarls wandered down to a nearby stream, putting the horses between them and the tents before speaking.

  “Well?” Handas Cassad asked.

  The elder jarl grunted. “Young Anred is ignorant, but not irresponsible. He’ll learn. Means well. I never thought I’d say this about an Olavayir, but I like him.” He turned his face up toward the sky, lips pursed, then added, “For now.”

  “You’ll send your grandson up to the academy, then?”

  “Why not? Excellent way to compare our training to what he’s putting together, though it might take him a year or three to find a good gait. I’ll give him the time. I do like what I hear of who he’s chosen for the masters. Stadas of Marlovayir, he’s famous all down the coast for his archery. Seems to me Anred-Harvaldar listened to good advice, and bestirred himself to find the best. And ten years is fair enough, if he really does support the south, and reinforce our defense of Parayid, for instance.”

  Cassad accepted that with an open-handed gesture, and they walked back, talking over inconsequentials.

  The journey proceeded quietly.

  It wasn’t until Handas Cassad rode into his own court and had closeted himself with his wife that he expressed his true thoughts. “The new king wants to rebuild Inda-Harskialdna’s army,” he said. “He said for defense.”

  Carleas Dei, his wife, said slowly, “But there are no Venn to threaten us.”

  “Exactly. I’ve been pondering this all the ride south. Jevayir of Jayad Hesea likes this young Anred, who’s not only planning to build a standing army, he’s beginning the academy again in order to fill it. He wants all our second sons, ours and our primary Rider families’. Third as well, though they’re optional.”

  “No,” Carleas said.

  “No, what?” he asked gently. “Do
we refuse, and become the first to defy him?”

  “No,” Carleas said, just as gently, for she was by nature a gentle person. “Here’s my thinking,” she said, her brown eyes narrowed. “Experience says those Olavayirs will be at each other’s throats before you’d have to send little Barend anywhere.”

  “But what if they aren’t?” Handas said.

  Carleas continued to gaze down at her older son in the training yard below, and her infant second son rolling on his blanket as he babbled at Hlar’s daughter, sent to them after Hlar and her husband were murdered defending the regent.

  Handas flattened his palm. “Easy as Anred appeared, I expect he’d turn on us fast enough if we refuse.”

  Carleas said, “Don’t refuse. We were all taught that the Cassad family deflects. We don’t attack. Don’t answer, or...just wait.”

  “But what if this king and his brother don’t go at each other?”

  Carleas turned away from the window at last. “Did you mention the children to anyone there?”

  “No,” he replied. “One of the gunvaer’s runners chased after me, but I avoided her. I admit that this was pique on my part. I was not going to be summoned by a half-grown girl as if I were an erring stable hand.” When his wife was about to speak, he raised a hand. “I know it was petty, especially when I learned just before we rode out that Danet Olavayir was flat on her back, ill with pregnancy, and not swanking about the way Mathren and Kendred Olavayir had, these past twenty years. My error. To the point, my talk with young Anred was all of sons in the plural, future tense, the context the academy. I never mentioned our children.”

  “So no one outside of us knows how many we have, or their gender.”

  “Us” meant their household, riders, servants included. The Cassad households were traditionally tightly bonded, with a protective layer of awareness between them and the rest of the Marlovan world that only they could see. That had only intensified over the past century.