Time of Daughters I

by Sherwood Smith

  Lineas smiled at that. Then, “Fledges,” she repeated. “And what did you call me, fuzz?”

  “Hatchlings.” Quill walked his fingers uncertainly over the table top, mimicking a chick learning to walk. “Fuzz, fuzzies, are first year chicks fresh out of the egg. Fledglings before you’ve been appointed a post, or declared your preference. You’ll pick it up fast enough. Not much imagination. The inventive stuff,” he lowered his voice, “we usually say in Sartoran, which no one outside us understands. But never around the seniors.”

  He flashed a conspiratorial grin, and Lineas consciously turned her gaze away so she wouldn’t be caught staring at the light freckles on his nose, or the golden tips on his eyelashes.

  She swept her gaze around the rest of the room, noting those wearing dark blue staying together, and those wearing gray in their own groups.

  Quill watched her assess the familiar space and wondered what she saw. How it compared to Darchelde, which he remembered as brief, bright colors, and a blur of faces, except for his mother’s cottage deep in the woods, where he spent most of his visits, when he wasn’t in the castle studying. His father had told him that he’d met Lineas, but he hadn’t been able to distinguish her from his memory of a cluster of more or less red-haired youngsters.

  Trays slammed down next to them, and here were three girls and a boy, curious about the newcomer.

  At first, they all looked alike to Lineas, whose nerves prickled at those unwavering gazes. “You’re the new fuzz from Darchelde,” one girl said. “Kind of young, aren’t you, for a fuzz?”

  Lineas was uncertain how to answer such obvious utterances. She didn’t have to worry about it because Quill said impatiently, “Hasn’t been tested. Just got here. Bunk off.”

  The boy, the most blond, and apparently the youngest, snorted as he pointed at Quill’s mug of punch. “Of course you fingered some. As usual.” He reached for the stone water jug on the table and poured water into his empty mug with a notable lack of enthusiasm.

  “Got the last of it,” the tallest, weediest of the girls said with satisfaction, her hands cupped protectively around her mug.

  “Hog,” the girl next to her said, but without heat.

  “Why’d they send you?” the short, round girl asked, then her brows twitched together as she studied Lineas’s small form. “Are you even ten?”

  Lineas suppressed a sigh. “I’m twelve. I’m here because I was slow—” She remembered then that she was no longer in Darchelde. Her guides, in ignoring her, had not given her the chance to practice what she ought to say and what not to say.

  She heard the word “slow” suspended in the air, and closed her lips. It didn’t matter, did it, what sort of slow they thought her?

  Maybe it did, for the others exchanged looks, then the tall one said, “Well, you’re here. If you like the stable, I’ll see you around. I’m asking for road training.”

  The round girl stated with flat conviction, “I’m for the scribes.”

  Quill said, “Dannor is the best of any of us at drawing.”

  Dannor, the round girl, smiled, her cheeks pinking.

  Lineas was glad to get the attention off herself, and stayed quiet as the others began chattering about their day, using so much slang that Lineas had a difficult time understanding much.

  They’d all nearly finished when an older runner-in-training—this one with an actual blue coat that was fitted and had shank buttons—approached to say, “Quill, you’re wanted in the roost. Take the fuzz with you.”

  The little group had fallen silent. Quill finished off the berry drink that he’d been sipping slowly. Lineas gulped hers down, picked up her tray, and followed Quill to a table where a huge bucket of water waited. Lineas blinked away the faint ribbons of light weaving around the edges of the barrel. She hastily popped the last of her bread into her mouth and dunked the tray into the water. Magic scintillated in a million greenish silver dots of light. She blinked them away from long habit, stacked her wet tray on Quill’s, and followed him out, insides roiling at the prospect of being tested.

  The roost turned out to be the schoolroom area of the royal runners’ lair.

  Camerend and Mnar were there, both unwilling to leave Lineas’s testing to the other instructors. It wasn’t their competence in question, but their patience: Camerend and Mnar would have a thousand questions about the child’s words, tone, and demeanor, far more important than the results, which assuredly would be satisfactory at the least, or Shendan would never have agreed to send her.

  But after all, Lineas was here because she had failed at magic studies.

  So they sat side by side, unaware of how stern and imposing they looked to Lineas, who tiptoed in, her fingers stiff at her side lest she forget herself and begin pleating the folds of her tunic.

  She recognized Senrid’s father, of course, who had occasionally appeared at Darchelde, but she had only heard about Mnar Milnari, chief of the runners-in-training, as Camerend Montredavan-An was chief of the royal runners.

  Both chiefs, to test her?

  Her throat constricted in fear.

  Camerend and Mnar took in the tiny person before them, almost lost in her garb, her twig-thin wrists barely visible beneath the rolled sleeves, her long fingers stiff, her triangular face wan beneath the freckles. Tufts of ridiculously bright, wiry red frizz escaped from her stiff, thick braids. Mnar suppressed a flutter of laughter at the notion that there was far more hair than person in this unprepossessing little mite.

  Camerend sent Mnar a look, which she correctly interpreted as invitation to speak first. “Welcome to the royal runners, Lineas. What can you tell us about your progress in your studies?”

  Lineas was desperately honest, in the way of someone who has had to carefully check her perceptions against others’ all her life. “I’m not very good at....” But here she had to stop, as she had been trained never to mention her magic studies outside Darchelde.

  And then there were all the other things she couldn’t do! She couldn’t construe the ribbons of color in the air, or the patterns in the wind harps high above Larkadhe City in the north, though the beauty of both made her soul yearn with a hunger much sharper than an empty belly ever could.

  Mnar’s brows shot upwards at Lineas’s vacant expression. Camerend gave Lineas a puzzled look that shaded into concern the longer Lineas gazed into space. Shendan had insisted that Lineas was not burdened in the way of Isa. Could that be wrong?

  But then a far simpler reason presented itself, and gratefully he tried it. “It’s all right, Lineas. With the two of us, you may talk about magic, though not to anyone else. I know you were not able to master elementary magic, but I also know it was not for lack of trying.”

  To his relief, Lineas’s expressive little face altered, her relief echoing his. That was it, then—the child had merely made a verbal stumble. It was now clear that she had been coached not to mention magic, a subject forbidden outside of Darchelde’s tower given over to magic studies. It was equally clear that she was scrupulous in observing that boundary of silence.

  “I did try,” she whispered. “I tried so very hard. I know all the elements by heart, but they won’t go together. For me.” Her lower lip trembled. “I can’t even renew firesticks,” naming the most elementary and useful of spells, which beginners do repetitively each summer. “The one time I tried, it caught on fire.”

  Mnar waved a hand. “We’ve enough help with the firesticks, and everything related to magic renewal, as I’m certain Shendan told you. You’re here, where different skills are needed. What we want to find out is what you are good at, what you like to do, and what you don’t like to do, plus any problems you feel we should know about—”

  “I don’t have any problems except magic,” she said. “I love to study and I am very, very normal!” Her voice rose, reminding them of the piping of a bird, as she smiled brightly.

  “Excellent,” Camerend said, restraining the impulse to sneak a look Mnar’s way, to see her
expression. “Begin with a list of Marlovan kings, and the principal events of each reign....”

  Lineas gulped in her breath and reeled them off.

  Maths, Old Sartoran alphabet and vocabulary, modern Sartoran, Iascan, all went by in quick review.

  “Now your report capability.” Camerend and Mnar began a conversation, mentioning names and places and what had been said by whom, after which Lineas had to report it all back.

  Just before the end, Mnar suddenly swung an open-handed slap at her, but Lineas knew that move from drills, and up came her forearms. She stepped in, turned against Mnar’s arm, and stuck her bony little hip into Mnar’s side as her foot trod inside Mnar’s ankle and she pulled at Mnar’s wrist.

  Mnar let herself be pulled off-balance, as Lineas had executed the defensive move properly. Mnar then patted her on the head, as Camerend set down a slate and chalk, and said, “Now, last thing, a map of the kingdom.”

  Lineas’s heart expanded with anticipation. “What do you want on it?”

  Neither Camerend nor Mnar missed the pleasure lighting Lineas’s face. “Whatever you think belongs on a map,” Mnar said. “We’ll be back presently, after which you will be finished with the testing.”

  Lineas scarcely heard the last few words. She sank onto the cushion before the low table, staring in delight at the large slate. She did not regard herself adept at drawing people or animals or anything that moved, unless they remained still enough for her to sketch from. She loved detail, and inevitably when she finished one bit, her model would have shifted and the whole thing always ended up distorted. But maps...she adored drawing maps. Any kind of map. With sure strokes she sketched the shape of the kingdom, and began happily putting in the jarlates, rivers, trade cities, and provincial capitals.

  In the far room, Mnar and Camerend sat down together.

  “I’m very normal?” Mnar repeated, uttering a soft laugh.

  “Probably left over from her early days. Shendan told me that Lineas’s mother is deaf, her father a blacksmith. Until she was four or five, Lineas never spoke, or considered words relevant. She played in silence with village children until some brat decided to mock her, and she learned fast to put sound and words together.”

  Mnar flicked open her fingers. “You’d think she would have forgotten that by now.”

  “Well, Shendan also said she has two Cassads in her family tree, one on each side.” Like Isa. “Not just two Cassads, her grandfather was a Dei. From the branch that changed their name. But that doesn’t keep Dei oddities from cropping up, the Cassads insist. However, her mother is a Noth, which seems to steady down those oddities. Noths might turn up deaf, like her mother, but they’re steady.”

  Mnar accepted that with relief. She was related to the Noths herself, a family not known for flights of fancy. Unlike the family-tree-obsessed Cassads, who were careful not to match with any Deis. Too many offspring had been strange in ways that had made life difficult for them as well as for those around them. “She does seem present, as you’d expect from a practical Noth. Truthful as well as quite advanced in vocabulary.”

  Camerend held up a finger and opened the door. Through it they glimpsed Lineas’s bony shoulders hunched up as she drew carefully with a bit of chalk, so absorbed she didn’t notice Camerend coming up noiselessly, glancing down, and retreating.

  He shut the door. “Her map is very nearly perfect,” he said. “She’s working in the woodlands and the eastern hills.”

  Mnar said, “But she’s so small.”

  Camerend said, “And in some respects, Shendan says, young for her age. We have plenty of time to figure out if she’ll do for Bun.”

  Both the king and queen were quite firm about it: none of the three royal heirs were to have a royal runner assigned as personal runner until they turned sixteen. They were to make do with the family runners until then.

  “So we needn’t say anything now,” Mnar agreed, knowing who among the runners-in-training wanted such a prestigious appointment, and who might side-eye anyone obviously being trained for it. “I think it will be salutary for certain of our more ambitious slackers to see what appears to be a nine-year-old put among them. Lineas’s appearance should shake up the lessons nicely.”

  Camerend opened his hands in assent, then went to his own duties, leaving Mnar to rejoin Lineas, who was detailing major springs in the hills between the capital and the Nelkereth Plains.

  “You may take the rest of the afternoon to explore and acquaint yourself with your fellows,” Mnar said. “Report to our mess at the watch change. After the meal, everyone will come up here for study, recreation, and what we call mend and make.”

  “Is that when I can do my laundry?” Lineas asked, and blushed. “Everything is dirty.”

  Mnar laughed. “To be expected if you’ve been traveling. The next door down from the baths is the staff laundry, which opens into our drying court. We recently shifted to the outside lines, now that the sun is getting stronger.”

  Relieved, Lineas slapped her hand to her skinny chest, and Mnar stepped into the next room, where a group of teens awaited their lesson. The door closed quietly, leaving Lineas alone.

  She ventured onward, studying everything. Her attention snagged on the big slate on the opposite wall, with what looked like a map of the castle painted on the smooth stone, and between and adjacent to those lines, chalked initials and symbols.

  Those had to be the day’s watch assignments, Lineas thought, ignoring them in favor of the map itself.

  The instruction to meet her fellows slid off a child raised as she had been. She had no idea how to “acquaint herself” with strangers, and besides, what better way to spend the rest of her free time than memorizing this enormous castle?

  From her journal that night:

  At first I got completely turned around. I think it was because I lost count of the landings bending back and forth, and because the door let me out between buildings from which I could only see bits of the cloudy sky, so I couldn’t find the sun. So I swapped east and west, north and south.

  I came out of a short but dark tunnel that I knew S. didn’t show me [will I get used to Quill?]. It was cut through a wall even thicker than anything in Darchelde.

  I knew I was lost, but then I made out a bright spot in the clouds atop some roofs, and it nearly made me dizzy as my sense of direction righted itself. That was west, not east, toward the kitchen gardens and the dairy animals.

  So those roofs were the academy, and to the right lay an open space. I think it must be the parade ground. When I understood how lost I was, and where I almost got myself into, it felt like a slug right in the ribs. I right around fast, started to run back, and smacked hard into a boy—so hard I knocked him on his butt.

  I tripped over his feet and fell on top of him. Hit my elbow. Others laughed as the boy and I shoved away from each other and got up. They stood behind me in a row while I stood at the mouth of the tunnel, blocking my way to what I knew now was east. They had obviously been running toward the parade ground.

  What’s this, a spy, one said in a snaily voice. I got that slimy feeling, he wanted trouble. All big boys. At least fourteen, maybe even fifteen.

  I’m not a spy I said. I just got here and got lost.

  A bell rang in the distance and the pale-haired one I knocked down yelled look what you did you made us late. Late for what I said. I got lost. I’m new.

  Late to be picked for headmaster’s runners said one. This is our last year. Shut up said the one I knocked down. She ruined our chances.

  I could tell the pale haired one wanted an excuse. I was so afraid it would be like that horrible M at home or worse so when he swung a slap at me saying they’d teach me my directions I yanked his thumb and when he went off-balance I side-kicked out his forward leg at the knee.

  He screeched as he fell over holding his knee and the biggest one came at me. It was that sick feeling all over, my heart banging my ribs and me shaking all over as I put my fists together a
nd turned inside his arm and thumped his chin good.

  He screeched as he fell. They were all screeching and I think I might have been too but then the yelling turned into deep voices. A royal runner, I’ll call them RR, at the inner end and somebody in gray at the other, maybe even a master.

  It had to be a master, because the boys wouldn’t stop for a stable hand or servant I don’t think.

  The RR grabbed me and the master yelled something at the others. The RR pulled me all the way to an inner court that I found on the map just now, before asking what happened.

  He listened all the way as I explained. Then said, you should have asked for a guide. The academy is off-limits, as are the state buildings. Those boys will rough-house at the slightest opportunity. Yes I understand that you got lost. With a guide you wouldn’t have. Go to the mess hall and sit there until the bell. Now I have to report this idiocy, and I’m already late for what actually matters. Do you need directions to the—no, I’ll walk you there myself.

  He didn’t say another word. I couldn’t stop crying but as least I didn’t make any noise.

  When I got to the mess hall and told the kitchen staff I had to sit there they put me to work. I was glad. That made time go faster, though nothing made me feel any better.

  When the bell rang, Chief Mnar came herself and sat with me to hear it all over. I felt so sick I couldn’t eat until she said it was our mistake not to give you explicit orders to find one of your fellows who was free. I remembered that she did say find people, but that was only when I came upstairs to write this.

  They are all in one of the rooms where they have free time. I did not get gated or punished, but a rebuke on my first day is worse.

  I can hear the voices—

  Someone is knocking. It has to be bad.

  That was S, no I should write Q, with two others. I hid this before I opened the door.

  He said why didn’t you find us and I said I don’t like to go up to people I don’t know. What do you say to them? Especially when I can see they don’t want me? At D you stayed with your group, and we magic students had to stay away from everyone else, even the scribes, though we were called archivist-scribes.