Time of Daughters I

by Sherwood Smith

Handas followed Carleas’s gaze into the yard, and he exclaimed, “What are you thinking?”

  Carleas smiled. “Officially, the Cassad family will report a son and a daughter instead of two sons. If Rider families are really included, the Noths can decide for themselves, of course. With two of them in the garrison guard, they might not mind their boys going north. But Barend stays here, and he can share a name with his cousin Chelis.”

  Handas Cassad turned his attention back to the training court, where the elder boy ran about with a pack of grubby castle children. Barend had turned about on his blanket to watch the shadows of leaves moving against the honey-gold wall, as Baby Carleas watched the older children at drill, waving her hands in the air, and calling, “Ba! Ba!”

  He said, “So let me get this straight. Our Barend is now a girl named Chelis?”

  “As far as the king is concerned,” Carleas said serenely. “And when his brother or cousin replaces him in some bloody coup in five years, maybe ten, we can reevaluate. In the meantime, no one will know.”

  After he watched the last of the jarls ride out, Arrow ran straight upstairs to the queen’s chamber, giddy with relief that his ordeal was over for another five years. By then, he reasoned, everything would be orderly and quiet, and he’d be used to being king.

  Danet lay flat on her bed, staring straight up, as the early mornings were the worst, and by now even the smell of ginger steep set her stomach boiling.

  “They’re gone,” Arrow said, twirling around and kicking in a couple of the sword dance steps, hands high. “I’ve got the academy. Second sons to start with. Though Noddy will go, of course. He’ll need to know what they know, and his future commanders.” He mimed swinging a sword.

  Danet shut her eyes tight. Any movement—even seeing movement—caused burning nastiness to claw at the back of her throat. She had to swallow three times before she murmured through barely parted lips, “We still don’t have all the current births and betrothals. My runners couldn’t get some of the jarls to talk to them.”

  “Oh, Norsunder take it,” Arrow exclaimed, hands dropping to his sides. “Well, send out runners to the ones you didn’t get to, and I know it’s gunvaer business, but after talking to them all, I have two things to ask.”

  She turned over her palm in invitation.

  “First. If the Algaravayir Iofre has a daughter, I want Noddy to marry her. Inda-Harskialdna’s greats-grandchild! Second, my father once told me that the Riders are really private armies. In the past, jarls had limited numbers of Riders, and the rest came here, but the jarls have been defending themselves for so long that....”

  He saw her compressed lips and blue-veined closed eyes, then cut himself short. “Well, anyway, I was listening to a couple of them talking. The Jarl of Yvanavayir, a cheerful sort, admitted that he inherited an entire battalion, which is a lot of food and fodder.”

  Danet struggled up and fell back. “Was he issuing some kind of threat?”

  “No.” Arrow flattened his hand. “At least, it didn’t seem so. He sounded pleased with everything, and offered to send his second son as soon as we got set up—said the boy has been army mad since he could toddle.”

  Danet let out a cautious sigh of relief as Arrow went on, “So I thought, the best way to break up private armies is to bring ‘em in, instead of passing some new laws that’ll get ‘em rising up on their hind legs and howling. See, if the Riders’ boys come to me, well, I'll have them in my own army for ten years, and if the Venn come, or we get more pirate fleets up the Narrows, or Hal gets murdered and the Idegans try to attack, I could get all the Riders under the same sort of command. Right? Right?”

  Danet did not care. She longed for quiet, but she could see how important agreement was to him, so she wiggled her fingers.

  Correctly interpreting that as agreement, he went on quickly, “So when you send out word, we can send along my plans for the academy. But. After,” he corrected himself, “you find that army.”

  “Finished,” she whispered.

  “What? You know where they are?”

  “Were.”

  “You didn’t tell me? Why?”

  “Don’t. Yell.” She closed her eyes. “I had to wait. For one last letter. Proof. Which I got yesterday.” She had hoped to get into all this when she felt better, but he obviously wouldn’t wait. She made a great effort to speak. “Arrow, it’s not anything to worry about.”

  “How can a secret army not be anything to worry about?”

  Danet had been considering for several days how to explain in the shortest possible words, knowing that Arrow would never read the records himself; the last time they’d discussed it she’d tried to explain that she was finding the evidence around the army through numbers, and he’d promptly lost interest.

  He was paying attention now. Taking a cautious breath, she said, “We know Mathren destroyed direct reference to them. But. You can’t hide large groups of people. They have to eat. They need horses. Those horses eat. Need stabling and shoes.” She took another deep breath. “The scribes collected all jarlate tallies for the last ten years. Trade cities. Then all I had to do was look for bumps.” She drew another shaky breath, and forced out a few more words. “All the evidence. Pointed to that old castle of your father’s. The one they stopped using when your brothers were killed. Near the coast.”

  “I’ll send—”

  “Listen! Didn’t you get a letter from Jarend?”

  Arrow flushed. “I got a bunch of letters, but I’ve been too busy to read ‘em.”

  “He probably explains more. Ranor-Jarlan’s letter explains that Jarend sent all the Olavayir Riders to that old castle. Also all the Lindeth garrison. Found a few left. Bloody battle. Thad—the false Parnid—dead. Captains dead. Mathren’s secret assassins—all killed.”

  Arrow grimaced. “So Jarend cleaned ‘em out?”

  “Faction fight before he got there. Because, no more pay. No supplies. Jarend offered to forgive those still standing and bring them into Nevree Riders. Or they could leave the country. Most went with him. Some went to sea.”

  Arrow scowled, thinking rapidly. That sounded just like kind-hearted Jarend. But if those soul-suckers were thinking of taking Nevree from within, in some kind of bloody revenge ruse—

  Danet correctly interpreted his expression. “Arrow. Dolphin-clan is gone. Except for a few Rider-cousins. Like that Retren Hauth. The one-eyed one. Ranor-Jarlan says he’s drinking himself to death. Though they offered to make him a lance captain again. Your mother knows who they are. There’s only one clan now. Jarend the head.” She waited for the obvious question—the one question she still couldn’t answer, which was what Mathren had intended to do with that army—but it didn’t come.

  Arrow’s mouth opened and closed. He kicked at the harmless cushions.

  “I’d better read Jarend’s letter,” he said, looking at her fondly. She really was an excellent gunvaer, and if she had another son, he had nothing else to ask for. He bent down to put his arms around her—carefully—and held her against him.

  She enjoyed his warmth, and the steady lump-lump of his heart against her ear. He might remind her now and then of a gangling yellow bird hopping around and then flitting off, but there were far worse sorts than birds, if you had to be married to one. And it probably didn’t matter why Mathren Olavayir had spent years slowly building and training an army that no longer existed; she knew it was merely her wish for tidiness to find out.

  She sighed. But even that much movement caused the nausea to well up. “Arrow. Have something to ask from you.”

  “What? If I can do it, you know I will.”

  Swallow. “If this is a girl.” Another swallow. “We adopt Connar as ours. I think of him as ours. I nursed him with Noddy until I got too sick. He’s an Olavayir.”

  “He’s dolphin-branch,” Arrow muttered. “I thought he could be Noddy’s first runner. Or a Rider, if he has the skills.”

  “He’s an Olavayir. If he’s ours, then that wretc
hed feud. Between dolphin and eagle. Ends.”

  Arrow sighed. “We don’t really need three princes.”

  She struggled to rise, then fell back flat, moisture glimmering in her eyes. “He and Noddy are good together in the nursery. They don’t cry nearly as much when they share that bed. And Connar’s already making noises like he’s going to talk early. I can’t say, don’t call me Ma, when Noddy just started saying Ma. I can’t. He’s just a baby. I want us to be his parents in all ways.” She drew a careful breath, her face yellow-green and blotchy as she fought nausea. “And. I’m not going. Through this again.”

  Arrow looked down at her thin form shrouded by a single sheet, with the still-small mound between the bony protrusions of her hips. He glanced at the uneaten single biscuit on the bedside table that had sat there since the night before, and stirred uneasily: he knew she was still working with her scribes, sick as she was.

  “Whatever you want,” he promised.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Neither the Jarl of Senelaec nor Wolf spoke as they rode away from the royal castle into the breathless heat of summer.

  “Now I know why Convocation was always winter,” the jarl commented, once the trumpet fanfare had died away behind them, and they sneezed at the roiling dust of the Fath cavalcade a ways ahead.

  “Father—”

  “When we get home,” the jarl murmured out of the side of his mouth. “Not before the Riders.”

  Wolf had to bite down on his temper.

  At night, it was too hot for tents, so everyone slept in the open. It was so still you could hear the chirr of night insects a hundred paces away, and the shifting and snorts of the animals on the line. There was no private talk until they reached sight of home.

  By then Wolf was anxious all over again, and so, when they rode into their courtyard at last, he left his father and the Riders and bounded inside, seeking Calamity....

  Just to discover Calamity and Fuss shut up in the den, everyone else chased out.

  “Woooooolf!” Calamity shrieked on a long note—

  And Fuss said, “Good girl! One last push....”

  Wolf nearly killed himself vaulting up the stairs to the den. He’d made it in time! But barely. His eyes burned with tears as he stumbled forward and dropped on his knees. He promptly looked away again—what was going on seemed so painful. Worse than a sword wound to the gut.

  “Girl?” Calamity breathed.

  “Boy,” Fuss murmured.

  Calamity lay back, her trembling, sweaty fingers reaching for Wolf’s. He took her hand, staring in wordless delight at his new, tiny son as Fuss rubbed the baby into rosy color, then laid him on Calamity’s other side.

  Calamity drank in the world-changing miracle of his little fingers opening up, the vague gaze that searched earnestly for her face, and the open happiness beaming from Wolf’s countenance.

  Both parents stared down ardently, until Calamity whispered, “How was the royal city?”

  “Oh, horseshit,” Wolf exclaimed.

  Both Calamity and Fuss started, and turned twin gazes of affront his way.

  He saw that, his face flooded with color, and he stumbled over his words in his haste to clarify. “No! It’s not—faugh! You don’t understand.” When two pairs of female eyes narrowed, he yelped, “It’s that turd Arrow!”

  “Arrow?” Fuss looked around, as if Arrow had suddenly popped up in room.

  “No, yes. That is....” Wolf scratched his head, then jerked his hair clasp straight. “No, we may as well call him Anred. Because he’s just like all the Olavayirs,” he added bitterly. “He decreed that all second sons have to go to the royal city to be trained for the King’s Riders.”

  “At birth?” Calamity cried.

  “Age ten, eleven, twelve. Train for ten years. And stay for another ten years, fighting his wars.”

  Calamity gazed down at those perfect fingers, each nail so miraculously defined, and the jarlan’s broken voice echoed, Killing other mothers’ sons. “No,” she said. “No.”

  “No, what?” Fuss asked.

  “No, he’s not going.”

  “Then we’ll be foresworn,” Wolf snapped.

  “I’ll write to Danet.”

  “What can she do? If she even wants to?” Wolf hissed out a sharp breath, then added, “They didn’t even ask those northerners about getting my daughter back. Da didn’t say anything, but he hardly spoke a word on the ride back. Those Olavayirs just let the north separate off, and no one gave us a second thought.”

  Calamity stared at Wolf, not ready to admit that she hadn’t given little Marend much more than a thought or two since she’d become pregnant. It wasn’t as if Marend was dead. She was in another family—something that Calamity had experienced herself. Twice. Still, she knew how much Wolf grieved for the daughter the two-faced snake Ndiran had taken away from him. “Have Danet and Arrow changed really all that much?”

  “Yes,” he said bitterly. “They’re Olavayirs. Who even knows how true all that is about Mathren being a secret assassin, the hero who held the city against the assassins twenty years ago—they could have made that little runner say anything.” When he saw the twin stricken faces before him, he relented. “Oh, well, Da thinks it’s true. And Camerend did say it was, even if he didn’t see it.”

  “Then how does he know?” Calamity asked, as the baby marveled at the feel of air and light and sound, blinking slowly up at her face.

  “He was the first one in after it happened. Calamity, the important thing here is that they want to take this baby, right here, away from us, for whatever wars Arrow—Anred-Harvaldar,” he amended sarcastically, “decides he wants to fight. And he wasn’t all that great as a leader last summer, as you remember. Lanrid, in spite of being a walking horse apple, was better.”

  Calamity pulled the baby tighter against her. Hadn’t she heard some stories about the Cassads of old, when she was little? Or was it because she’d grown up as a boy until she reached ten, and was sent to Senelaec?

  Whatever sparked the idea, she stared down at her new baby, and murmured, “Then he’s a girl.”

  “What?” Wolf gasped, and frowned quickly down to check: nope, still a boy.

  “What?” Fuss whispered, turning wide eyes to Calamity.

  Passion’s closest companion is anxiety when one feels any sense of threat to the object of that passion. Calamity said again, “He’s a girl.” And she drew a soft blanket around the evidence to the contrary. Now there were just waving arms and legs—with a diaper on, babies were just babies.

  And once the words were out, she breathed deeply, yes, yes. It solved everything. “She’s a girl,” she stated, and turned her stark, determined gaze to Wolf, then to Fuss. “Everybody in the castle is busy around your Da, and making the welcome home banquet. Nobody knows this baby is here yet but us. We can keep the secret. We can!”

  “Not forever,” Wolf said wryly.

  “But by the time he—she—gets old enough for it to matter, we can tell her what happened, and why. And she can keep the secret herself.”

  Wolf stared down at his little son. He hadn’t even told them yet who the new masters were going to be in that damned academy of Arrow’s, and shuddered at the vivid memory of Knuckles Marlovayir’s smirking profile when the king had called up one of the Marlovayir Riders to join the academy staff on the dais in the throne room.

  He absolutely loathed the thought of any strutting Marlovayir rooster having authority over his boy while he was not there to protect him. “Let’s do it.” And, once he’d said it, the sense of challenge—a prime ruse—sparked the old thrill. “But we can’t tell anyone. Not even the parents. Da will insist we have to stick to the king’s commands if they’re reasonable, and he’ll call this reasonable. I know he will—because he doesn’t have to worry about me or Yipyip,” he added unfairly. “So who do we get as minder?”

  Calamity was way ahead of him. “Pip,” she stated.

  “Pip?” Fuss repeated. “But she wants to be
a scout.”

  “She can be a scout sometimes, the way Ndara is when we ride out. Pip loves ruses more than anything. And she just turned seventeen, so she hasn’t been assigned a permanent place yet.”

  “I’ll go fetch her,” Fuss said, and flitted out.

  Wolf and Calamity spent the intervening time laying plans, until Fuss brought Pip in.

  Pip—Ranet Noth—had been born when her cousin Calamity was five, a surprise after a string of brothers. She, too, had grown up treated as a brother, until she was sent to the Senelaecs at ten, to train with their runners.

  She scowled at first, but when Calamity showed her the baby, and explained the plan, Pip’s unremarkable face glowed with glee. “I’ll do it,” she said. “Oh, what fun! What’s her name?”

  “How about Ranet, for you. And Great-Aunt Ranet Sindan-An. Mother will like that.” And, taking in Pip’s glee, Calamity added, “Nobody can find out. Until later, some day, when we’re safe from Ranet being sent off to that Olavayir academy.”

  Pip earnestly agreed, and ran downstairs to announce that Wolf had made it in time to see his daughter born, and Pip was to be her runner. Then, with an alacrity that surprised the jarlan, Pip bathed the horse hair and dust from her person and repaired straight to the nursery to get training—while insisting on all baby care for her new charge herself.

  That was easy enough, as everyone was too busy trying to make certain that this year, they didn’t get so behind on harvest and storage.

  Pip was scrupulous about guarding the secret from anyone in Senelaec...but she could not possibly keep the delicious secret to herself.

  The Jarlan’s runner departed in the first stretch of good weather, carrying a sheaf of letters, including a short one from Calamity to Danet, reporting on the birth of a daughter (which committed her to her ruse), and one from Pip to her only female Noth cousin, with whom she’d been exchanging letters since she left Telyer Hesea at age ten.

  Of course she swore her cousin to the strictest secrecy, but human nature being what it is, by the time a secret hits the third person away from the one most involved, any duty toward that original person has diminished.