Senrid

by Sherwood Smith

  “If he doesn’t trust you…he should throw you out,” Senrid said. “I would. But he’s weak. Nothing will happen.” He waved a hand, his voice going hoarse. “Few days, all will be. Same as before.”

  “You are talking about my home, and my comfort, all for some stupid mess of yours. It would serve you right if I told him everything.”

  “And you’d be foresworn,” Senrid retorted. His voice had no force, but his eyes were exactly as derisive as ever. “And I’d know it. Forever.”

  “You’ve ruined my life!”

  He winced. “Stop bellowing. I can hear you.”

  “If yelling will get what I want then I will yell! You don’t deserve any better!”

  “Since when—” He was taken by a fit of coughing.

  It sounded nasty, and it lasted a long time. When it was done, both kids were equally embarrassed, she for causing it and he for not being able to control it.

  Kitty eyed him, then flounced to the door. “You wait, Senrid whatever-your-name is—”

  “Montredaun-An.”

  “—I’ll get that promise back!”

  “You won’t.”

  She slammed the door.

  Senrid lay in the bed, considering. He did not want to think about the dreams he’d had. Why? Though they had been difficult to endure at the time—harrowing—they were, in the light of day, meaningless. Just dreams, caused by the fever, and the residue of magic-poison. What he did need to think about was his place here, and his plan of action when he got home.

  And how he’d get home, since he knew without even trying that Tdanerend would have destroyed all his magic wards, and would have tracer-wards on the border—on him, actually—for half-a-dozen spells, beginning with the transfer spell.

  He reached for the steeped leaf that Llhei had brought. It was fresh, not too hot, and tasted good. It was gone in three gulps—even his throat felt better, though the swallowing hurt Then there were the fresh oatcakes. Oats! At home, the oat crop belonged to the military first, for the use of the high-bred Nelkereth horses, or for warriors in the field. Only if there was a surplus did civilians get any.

  He ate his oatcakes and thought about Llhei, who had tended him without fear of what anyone else might say. Including Senrid.

  There was also the younger one, Nelyas. She’d brought the clean bedding in before Llhei came, and said, “So what happened to your uncle anyway?”

  “Tried a summons-transfer against me, to send me home. Dungeon. I mirrored it. Sent him. Tried to go home, not enough strength for the long transfer. Got outside this castle, walked. Holed up in some burned barn. Don’t remember anything else.”

  “So he’ll be coming back at us?”

  “Doubt it,” Senrid said. It was all he had strength for.

  She nodded and left.

  No servant at home would ever question any of the family. They wouldn’t think of it. Senrid wasn’t sure if he disliked it or was just unused to it. He remembered that at home he had never liked the fearful glances, the closed faces that made it very clear thoughts did indeed go on behind those shuttered expressions, but he wasn’t going to hear them.

  Tdanerend arrogantly maintained that servants were stupid, and that’s why they were servants. Senrid had never considered the truth of that, because servants did not present any threat, but he considered it now. Llhei wasn’t stupid, and neither were these others—Nelyas, or that Arel, who’d carried him in to the bath at dawn.

  If the same thing had happened at home, with his and Leander’s places switched, there was no doubt that Leander would have been killed as soon as he’d been found. Unless someone wanted to make some kind of gesture and designed a more protracted end for him.

  He couldn’t remember what it was called, this attitude that you did not take a life except in defense. Maybe it under the category of that mystery called morality. Tdanerend had taught him—and the writings of many of his ancestors backed it up—that there were no such thing as morals, only expedience. As soon as you acknowledged any kind of a moral standard, then you weakened yourself through the accompanying guilt. That was using your own power against yourself. Yet there were others among his ancestors who had felt differently, writing long thoughts about moral standards, passages that Senrid had read and reread, but the sense had eluded him, like a butterfly flitting beyond his grasp. His own father had written something about it, in the one record not destroyed by Tdanerend, probably because it had been appended to an older one, and missed. Yet Senrid had been taught that his father died because he was weak.

  So who was smart, strong, yet moral?

  The problem was, he did not know how to measure strength. Leander wasn’t stupid. And their situations were remarkably parallel: both born princes, parents of both murdered by the usurper. Only where Senrid had kept his rank, Leander had lived as an outcast in the woods. They both had loyal friends. Senrid’s were fewer in number if higher in rank, and they were trained in warfare, but he’d seen Leander’s friends. Their loyalty—their mutual trust—was their strength.

  He wished that Leander would come in. There were so many questions he had!

  But the day wore on, and he slept again, and when he woke it was dark. He realized that Leander was not going to come. The only one he’d see would be Kyale, a loud, narrow-minded, utterly worthless kid who would not last a week in Choreid Dhelerei. Again, that loyalty. Though their actual connection was tenuous at best Leander accepted her as a sister, useless as she was, and that was that.

  One of the dream images struck him again, this one from memory: Leander’s face while Senrid held him underwater.

  The fight had been initially a reaction of anger, and when he’d won and was drowning Leander he had thought in triumph, I can take his little kingdom back right now, and nobody could stop me.

  He couldn’t define the expression he’d observed in those green eyes looking up at him through the running water. Not betrayal, for Senrid had promised nothing. Nor was it surrender precisely. Nor even anger. Regret?

  Regret, and acceptance. An act of will, a profound sort of acceptance that had smoothed out his features. Leander had been ready to die.

  That wasn’t cowardice, though Tdanerend would deem it so. Likewise a coward would never have marched on the castle with an ill-trained rabble of a dozen servants in order to face, for all he knew, the entire east wing of Marloven Hess’s light cavalry; if Tdanerend had had his way, Leander and his gang would have faced them. No, that was not cowardice, whatever else you might call it.

  But civilians whose mages worked the weakness of white magic didn’t have courage, that he’d always been taught.

  All the old concepts seemed meaningless. No, it was their definitions that had warped until they no longer held any truth.

  Was there any higher truth? Or was that all just a matter of whose perception could be enforced on others?

  He was tired again.

  He made a resolution: he would sleep, and by morning he would be gone.

  He was not the only one making resolutions.

  Senrid, Kitty, and Leander all thought about the other two as the evening wore on, but they all stayed in their rooms alone.

  Kitty avoided Leander because she didn’t want any more uncomfortable questions—or looks.

  As for Senrid, she spent the day mapping out a verbal campaign. If she thought ahead to what she’d say, and what Senrid would say back, then she could have her answers ready, and not get mad—and maybe she could grind him down until he gave in. After all, it was only selfishness, pure and simple, that kept him from letting her tell Leander where that magic had come from. Her resolution was to have it out with Senrid and not give up until he took back that stupid promise.

  Leander tried not to think about Senrid. What was the use? He felt stupid for having liked the kid at the very beginning. Of course a liar would know how to make himself likable to the fools he was trying to deceive. But he felt as the day progressed that he was going to have to visit Senrid,
just once, even if only to say “How are you?” and listen to a one-word answer.

  So he resolved on doing it as soon as he woke up.

  When morning came, he dressed, walked down to eat, and then started back up to keep his resolution when he met Llhei in the hallway.

  “He’s gone,” she said, and handed him a paper. Across it, printed in a neat hand, was Kyale Marlonen.

  Regret and relief were Leander’s strongest reactions. Leander said, “Thanks. I’ll give this to Kitty.”

  Llhei nodded and passed by.

  Leander continued down the hall to Kitty’s room. Her door was open—she was coming out.

  “Senrid’s gone,” Leander said. “Left this note for you—”

  “Oh, no! He can’t!”

  “Kitty, please tell me—”

  “Argh!” She reddened with rage as she ripped open the note, read it, then tore it into bits and stamped on it. Then she looked up, obviously determined. “I can tell you everything if you will send me after him.”

  “Did you two make some kind of deal?”

  “Anything I say will make you mad and get me into trouble,” Kitty snarled.

  “How about if I say I’m mad already?”

  “You’re mad? Huh! You have no right to be mad when you haven’t even—that is, you don’t even—oh, what a mess. Send me?”

  “No, because if he’s gone, it’s to Marloven Hess.”

  Kitty groaned, flounced into her room, and slammed the door so hard an echo came back, like the clapping of invisible hands.

  Leander sighed. He just about had it figured out: Senrid and Kitty had formed some kind of unlikely partnership. What he couldn’t figure out was why, and what they’d done, and why Kitty couldn’t tell him. That she was angry with her erstwhile partner was obvious—and unfeigned. Kitty is no dissembler, he thought. What you see is what she feels.

  He stood outside her room looking at the bits of paper then bent slowly and picked them up, and crushed them in his hand. Her motivation was easy to guess at: survival. Senrid’s was impossible.

  Leander retreated back to his room, and tossed the paper fragments into his fire, and watched it flare briefly. Whatever had happened, he had no part of it—both kids had made that pretty clear.

  So the best he could do would be to get on with the enormous pile of work that did concern him, and leave the rest to sort itself out.

  He shut the door, and sat down at his desk to begin.

  Senrid walked along the western road, relieved at its dryness. Every time it snowed Leander was going to have to renew whatever magic he’d done, but Senrid had to admit that this was a fine piece of magery—something that he could use in Marloven Hess, especially if he wanted to move armies around fast. Though the hesitancy and over-caution of white magic probably made the spells roughly five times longer than they needed to be—even if the personal cost was less.

  And so, for a time, he entertained himself trying to come up with something within his own magical knowledge.

  But even with good roads a person who’s been sick can only go so far, and before noon he was desperately tired, and all he could think about was rest.

  He got a ride on a wagon by a cheerful man carrying bolts of silk, who bowled along behind his horses. The man kept exclaiming over the clear road—even his horses seemed happy. Senrid forced himself to respond to the frequent repetitions of how wonderful it was until they spotted a very small trade town crowning a hill at the edge of the border mountains. The town was built on either side of a river.

  It, like Crestel, betrayed its origins in the way it was built, mostly of peachy stone, the light gray tile roof-gutters fashioned to take the load from the highest building, an interlocking geometric pattern shaping waterfalls downward toward the river; almost all doors facing east. This style of building was not Leroran, which was only a recent conceit in Senrid’s eyes, they were like those over in Marloven Hess, evidence of their shared past, an ancient past, reaching clear back to the mysterious Venn far in the north of the world.

  Just past the first hill the roads were no longer clear—at least by magic. The locals had done some dredging, but the horse, already tired, now slowed. The man leaned forward as if he could will more strength to his horses; all four were grateful when they reached the town at last. The man let Senrid down under the swinging sign of an inn.

  Back in the Crestel castle he’d searched the drawers of the guest room, and had not been surprised to find money; he strongly suspected that Llhei had in fact put it there. Had Leander known?

  Impossible to guess.

  Soon he was sitting at a table, hot food before him, and the prospect of a bed waiting—though apparently he was going to have to share the room.

  He’d scarcely taken a couple of bites of the eternal oatcakes and baked potato-cabbage-and-onion rolls that Lerorans seemed so fond of, when he felt uneasy. As though he was being watched. When he looked up, he made the unpleasant discovery that most of the patrons in the small common room were regarding him with a variety of expressions, most of them curious; some whispered.

  “Is there a problem?” His voice came out sounding like the bark of a dog.

  The oldest two in the room, a man and a woman, exchanged glances, then the woman said, “It’s just that you came up Crestel-road on that wagon. D’you happen to have news out of there?”

  Senrid opened his hand. “News like…?”

  The old man said, “Are them pony-rumps from over west comin’ back agin is what we want to know. There’s a few of us wantin’ to go home.”

  “So why don’t you?” Senrid asked.

  “And get shot for our pains? No one walks fast in the snow, you might have noticed,” a young woman at the next table stated with congenial sarcasm, before holding up the squirming baby in her arms, sniffing expertly, then saying in an undervoice to a little girl of eight or so, “Frame your sister, will you?”

  The little girl sighed and bore the stinky baby away.

  The boy who’d served him was about his own age. He said, “When they first came through, they shot two men outright. My father was one. Another the beekeeper. Crossbow-bolts—no warning. Someone else bawled orders at us, if we were seen on the road until we were allowed out by that soulripping Montredaun-An reeker, we’d be shot. Just like them. So everyone, even traders, been here since that day when they all rode through. Prisoned in our own town!”

  “Ruined every herb-garden in town.” The old woman added.

  Senrid rubbed his tired eyes. “Everyone in Crestel thinks they’re gone. Not coming back,” he said.

  “King?” the boy asked. “Is he alive?”

  “Yes, and busy with magic protections,” Senrid said, and then wondered why he would waste the breath defending Leander.

  “Well, then.” The old man smiled around the room as the others cheered, laughed, exclaimed. “Looks as if dawn’ll find me on the road.”

  They all talked at once—celebrative talk and laughter, mixed with colorful invective against Marloven Hess. All of it was so heartfelt. Senrid ate quickly, drank down the hot cider he’d been offered, and climbed the stairs to sleep.

  He woke up once, clammy and soggy-minded, to find it dark, and what had begun as another harrowing dream had resolved into noise: raucous singing, untuneful but enthusiastic, racketed from the common room, and outside in the market-square whoops and laughter and shouts. Intermittently, from closer, giggles and whispers; Senrid realized that a flirting couple were celebrating in their own way directly outside the ill-fitting casement above his bed. Disgusted, he turned over and pulled the quilt about his ears. Flirtation. Revolting weakness—an invitation for an enemy to gut you, that’s what “romance” amounted to.

  What was it Keriam had said? Your father was never a coward. He was fast, and courageous, and everyone knew it. But after your mother’s death, it was as if his spirit had died. I don’t think he feared the knife in the back so much as invited it.

  That was weak. Sen
rid had vowed that he would never put himself in that position.

  Remembering what Leander had said about that very subject, he wondered if he could find some white magic worker to put the no-aging spell on him as well. In this one thing he admitted that his own magic was less successful. But it was far, far better for defense, offense, and preservation of power.

  He drifted back into sleep, briefly waking when his roommates tiptoed in. They did not speak as they settled in the other beds, and he soon slept again.

  Old habit had him up and through the cleaning frame before dawn. He was the first downstairs. A sleepy-eyed innkeeper served him a substantial breakfast, and lots of hot coffee. He paid for extra food to carry, and asked about walking distances between towns; he knew his map well, but dots on paper are very different, he had discovered, from real geography. He did not want anyone knowing that his destination was Marloven Hess, so he asked about various towns in either direction, mentally calculating distances and comparing them to the nearest Marloven market town.

  Any way he looked at it, he had a long walk ahead. No help for it. Either he made it—or he didn’t.

  Bundling his bread-and-cheese under Leander’s old tunic to keep the food warm, he pulled on his cloak and departed. He looked distrustfully at the bleak sky, and the snowflakes drifting lazily down.

  As he plodded up the road to the west he thought again about the questions he’d answered, and the attitudes those people had revealed about Leander. Respect, that was clear Concern. Scarcely a year on the throne, and defeated in less than a day by a detachment of warriors in training, yet they seemed to want him anyway.

  He thought back, wishing Leander had confronted him. Even an argument would have offered a kind of exchange of ideas.

  Well, he hadn’t. That was in itself a message.

  He tried to thrust Vasande Leror, and its kid rulers, from his mind. They were the past. What he had to face now was the fact that he would need to begin his own work all over again. Tdanerend had to be sitting in Choreid Dhelerei right now, preparing against Senrid’s reappearance.

  Senrid walked without really seeing where he was going, as he considered his encounters with his uncle since his return from his inadvertent side-trip to the water world and then with Puddlenose and Christoph.