Senrid

by Sherwood Smith

  Nobody talked about revolutions, or executions, or anything else like that. Mostly it was about horses. Horses, and food, and snow.

  She got her stiff, aching legs to move, and resigned herself to another long, dull day.

  While her spirits flagged, Senrid’s soared.

  It was good to be out in the wind again, riding fast. Walking would have worn him down, but he could ride forever. He was free, he was going to meet his people face to face for the first time, without his uncle’s spies watching and ordering his behavior for his own good. Anticipation lent him strength.

  He knew now that Keriam, the one officer he had always respected, was on his side, so much that he was now risking his own life on Senrid’s behalf. Others might back him against the Regent—motivated by a hope that they would eventually control the little boy-king—but Senrid knew Keriam too well. Had come to regard him as the most honest man in the kingdom Keriam had trained him, had talked history with him, but had never suggested he take the throne. Nor had he given any hint of secret organizations. Or covert support.

  The fact that this message reached him now meant that Keriam had decided, somehow, that Senrid had become worthy to take his father’s place.

  Somehow. What did it? Senrid thought as the horses crested a hill, and trotted past a long train of fodder-carrying wagons.

  Senrid longed to talk to him, ask questions he’d never dared speak aloud hitherto.

  He also longed to keep Keriam from Tdanerend’s fangs, but knew that the man would stay there in the place of most danger, in order to monitor all that was happening.

  The end of the second day’s riding brought them to Berdua—another walled town, all built of peachy gold stone and granite, with its ubiquitous guards. The stone was familiar enough, and the slight tilt to the roofs on hills, but in Vasande Leror walls had long since been knocked down in favor of gardens or vegetable plots, saving only their royal castle, and Leander planned to fix that as soon as he could justify the expense. These towns all looked war-like, and Kitty felt scared all over again, but Senrid got them past as messengers. Apparently kids, boys especially, were a common enough sight, riding back and forth across the country bearing communications from this citadel to that. It was good practice for those who wanted to attempt to get into the academy, whose admittance test selected for riding skills above all. War training was what you learned after you got there.

  Inside the town, they threaded their way slowly along busy streets, for neither of them knew their way about, and a messenger ought to know. It was Kitty who dismounted and asked directions at an inn, which brought them finally to the home of a prosperous trader in honey and beeswax candles.

  They rode round to the stable nearby that catered to businesses along that street, then walked back to the shop. Kitty marched in, sniffing in pleasure. The shop smelled wonderful. As he walked in close behind her, Senrid looked quickly about for a half-expected ambush.

  No one was in sight. A girl their own age emerged from a back room. “May I help you?”

  Kitty said, “Collet sent me.”

  The girl’s gaze shifted immediately to Senrid, who stood under her silent, acute scrutiny. She then surveyed the only other people in the room, a pair of teenage prentices arguing in a far corner about which candles burned slower, and whispered, “This way.”

  They were soon established in a small upper room, into which half a dozen adults crowded.

  Senrid’s heart drummed against his ribs, which were sore from the coughing, but he met every assessing gaze with his own. This was the first time, ever, that he’d gotten to meet ordinary unknown Marlovens without his uncle or his spies. Before he’d been thrown off-world he’d been surrounded by Tdanerend’s guards and toadies, and outside them, ringing the royal citadel in a vast perimeter, the rest of the guard, keeping a gulf between the rulers and those who were ruled.

  No one spoke; they seemed to be waiting. A small boy appeared, bearing a tray from which wafted the aroma of fresh coffee, and a sigh escaped Senrid. The boy blushingly offered him a fine porcelain cup, which he accepted. The rest of the cups were passed to the other adults. Kyale, he was relieved to see, did not grimace or comment, though he had already heard plenty about how disgusting she found coffee. She had good enough manners when she wanted to bother.

  Then the doorway darkened and an old woman came in, her face seamed and weather-beaten, her gray hair pulled high on the back of her head in the old-fashioned horsetail style. Like the light cavalry had worn a couple generations before, and apparently long, long before that.

  She sat down before Senrid, in the front, the best seat, and the others arranged around her, ceding her the right.

  “You’ve a look of your father,” she said.

  Senrid opened his hands.

  “The plan is?” Her back was straight, her gaze unreadable.

  “The plan is to march on Choreid Dhelerei. If no better date is set, at the first of the month. A circle around the capital all people rising, too many for Tdanerend to order shot down. It’s not my plan, but I agreed to it.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “Go straight to the capital, find Keriam. Win him. The academy. Beyond that I hadn’t planned, not until I knew who was with me and who not.”

  “Mph.”

  He felt sweat prickling his armpits. “I already have Gherdred’s word that he won’t oppose me, but he will not attack Marloven citizens, on anyone’s orders. I don’t want a civil war.”

  “So why do you want the throne?” she asked, her expression difficult to interpret.

  “If Tdanerend had been a great king, I’d—” He stopped, gulped. Could he say it? Would it be true? But he’d grown up realizing that his uncle wasn’t a good ruler, a conviction that had warped his own life into its present path. There had never been any question in his mind of not getting rid of Tdanerend and then ruling himself. He remembered Leander during the summer, the diffuse green gaze as he considered dropping all claims to power and going blithely off to travel. Senrid had thought him a liar, until he realized that Leander didn’t lie.

  He dismissed memory, and refocused his eyes on the old woman, who had not stopped watching him. “If my uncle had been a great ruler, then no one would listen to me,” he said, and paused to blow his nose. No one moved, or spoke, or made any sign. The sound was ridiculously loud, and Senrid felt that inner flutter that presaged laughter. He tried to see what they saw, and decided with grim humor that he had to be about the worst looking excuse for a king in history—short, scrawny, with a red nose and voice that sounded after too short a time like the quack of a duck. “If he had been great, none of us would be here now.”

  The woman grunted. “You have the look of Indevan, but you have the quick tongue of Kendred.”

  Fast looks, a shifted shoe, whispers. Senrid felt surprise at the mention of his exiled uncle, the shadowy, mysterious Kendred who had made a last, spectacular ride cross-country just ahead of the old king’s assassins. That had been when Senrid’s own father was too small to remember, so of course he’d left no writings about his older brother. The old king had destroyed whatever existed; Senrid knew his name, and about that last ride, but little else.

  So he said, experimentally, “Is that bad?”

  And won a laugh. A single noise, almost like a bark. “He was quick-witted. Like you.”

  This told him nothing.

  “And after?” she asked. “What then?”

  They were all watching. It seemed none of them breathed. Mostly light-colored eyes under fair hair, people of all ages and degrees—except military. Though Senrid had his doubts about that old woman. He wished that he could see her hands, except she had them hidden in the wide sleeves of her dark blue woolen robe.

  “And then,” he said, “back to my father’s laws.”

  Keep it simple, he’d decided back in Hibern’s tower. They wanted Indevan’s Law, and so did he. How to implement it, he as yet had not idea, but he was sure that
the less he showed his ignorance about the actual work of governing, the better he’d sound.

  She leaned forward. “So you would reinstate Indevan’s Law? Over whom?”

  Senrid closed his eyes. So wasn’t going to escape after all! How had Indevan worded it in the one personal record Tdanerend hadn’t found and destroyed? He had read it so many times, but was only recently beginning to understand a bit of it. “Over us all. The only way to justice is for the continuity to be in the law, not in who holds power. My father said that. Means the law holds for all, ruler on down.”

  Quick whispers. The woman made a slight sign, no more than a raise of her chin, and the watchers fell silent.

  She grunted. “Some like things fine the way they are. What about them?”

  He’d expected questions, but not this interrogation. He was tired, and the single sip of coffee after that long ride made him light-headed. He was tempted to say, as his grandfather would have said, Then up against the wall with them, but he didn’t. “I don’t know.” It was out before he could consider.

  “Then they’ll tear you apart like a wolf pack with a rabbit.”

  Senrid’s eyes itched. He wanted to rub them, but kept his hands motionless. Don’t show weakness.

  “I’ve been kept out of too much of current affairs to speak with any conviction,” he said slowly. “By the time I realized I would have to take what I wanted, events got away from me.”

  Shifts, exchanged glances.

  The old woman grunted again. “Looked bad enough, from a distance. Like you ran. And others maintain you will say anything if you think someone wants to hear it. But.” She gestured, a flash of robe sleeve. “Commander Keriam says that such use of wits was your only weapon. To him you told the truth. Then, what you did over the mountain, that showed some promise. Something’s missing, we know that much, but then we’ve known for some time now we weren’t going to hear everything. Not from the Regent.” She didn’t wait for him to answer, instead saying, “So what do you do with those who resist going back to Indevan’s Law?”

  “Find out why. If I can. Some are going to compromise, some will leave. Some,” he hesitated, thought of the worst of Tdanerend’s toadies, and papers he’d been forced to sign. The ones who’d been given permission to slap him, beat him, humiliate him in front of others—all for his own good—who had enthusiastically carried out the Regent’s interrogations, assassinations, tortures. Anger flared through him, and he said, “Some are walking dead.”

  And she gave a grunt of approval, sitting back, and putting her hands on her knees. A flash of old, seamed palms, with callus marks, the kind you got after years of work with sword and bow and spear. “There are indeed some who deserve the wall.”

  Murmurs—names. He caught a few. Two he knew, and loathed. A few he didn’t.

  “And supposing,” she said, her voice lifting. Behind her there was instant silence. “Supposing you get us back to Indevan’s Law. And then?”

  “And then we go on.”

  “To?”

  He opened his mouth to say it was a waste of time groping so far into the future, but then he remembered her hands, and realized what she meant. If he straightened out the army, then what would he do with them?

  An army doesn’t sit still. You keep it busy, or it will find ways to keep you busy, all his ancestors had agreed on that. Highly trained warriors, all clamoring for glory, for rank, have to make war.

  The old woman said in a low voice, “I was with your grandfather, academy scrub to captain. We all would have fought and died at his side. Then. When he took the throne, we thought for a time that the Golden Age was back. For a time.” Her lined mouth thinned. “He discovered too late you rein ‘em or ride ‘em. He rode. And couldn’t stop.”

  Senrid thought of the wars his grandfather had initiated.

  “Indevan’s Law. Then?” she prompted.

  And it all fell into place—Hibern’s concerns, Tdanerend’s mysterious rages. Detlev’s sardonic smile.

  The essence of strategy is to use what you can’t control.

  “And then we make ready for the big war,” he said. “Norsunder is on the move.”

  It hit them all, he saw it. Only the old woman didn’t stir or speak, but her eyes had gone so narrow they were almost shut, except he saw a tiny pinpoint of golden gleam under her eyelids, reflection from the candles up behind Senrid. Around her murmurs, glances, made it clear that the word Norsunder had been whispered, maybe not overtly, but in private.

  “So you won’t ally us with them,” the old woman said.

  “No.”

  “The old king said we Marlovens were born to ride under the Banner of the Damned,” the woman said.

  The old king. The tone of voice, the emphasis on old, made it clear whom she meant: his many-greats grandfather, the terrible warrior-mage who’d built an empire with his First Lancers, who had vanished straight into Norsunder with that entire force riding behind him, his personal banner at the head of a ghost force that had galloped—dark and bloody—through Marloven legends ever since. No one ever spoke his name aloud, lest he hear and come a-riding for more recruits; nobody used the old fox banner, ancient as it was.

  They all knew he could come charging out of Norsunder, at the head of the First Lancers, again.

  Senrid said cheerily, “Well, I wasn’t.” And sneezed.

  It was inadvertent, but the anticlimax seemed to release them all from the grip of memory, or of the inexorable grip of the past.

  They were all talking now, and the old woman leaned forward and struck his knee with her fist. “You’ll do. You live through this, and bring it off, and we’ll back you.”

  Instinct prompted him then. “And you. Will you come to Choreid Dhelerei?”

  She cracked a laugh. “I’m too old to meddle with kings any more. But we shall see, boy, we shall see.”

  The others were talking now, earnest conversations on all sides. The interrogation was over.

  He blurted, “Kendred. What was he like?”

  She had been about to rise, and sat back again, considering. “He wanted power. Had courage. Your father had courage, accepted power. Tdanerend wants power, has no courage.”

  Senrid shook his head. “I don’t see—”

  The old woman turned her head, made a spitting motion, then said deliberately, “Kendred was a horse-turd.”

  There was no time to react. She moved out, her long robe swaying behind her. A nod here, and whispered word there, and she was gone.

  Senrid sat back, his breath trickling out. His shirt was clammy with sweat, and his gut growled with hunger. He he onto the cold coffee cup with both hands, lest his fingers tremble. He hadn’t even gotten to drink it.

  But then the girl reappeared, and said, “There’s food downstairs, if you’ve a mind.”

  Senrid got up and followed gratefully.

  So did Kitty, who yawned and yawned again. Finally!

  She had very quickly gotten bored with the political talk—the soft, urgent undervoices mentioning names and places she’d never heard of. She’d hoped to hear plenty of reviling against Tdanerend, and maybe some nasty plans for him, but was disappointed. Instead, that ugly old woman had yakked on and on at Senrid as if they would be stupid enough to believe what a liar would blab at them.

  Well, they were Marlovens, and they deserved whatever happened to them.

  She yawned again, hoping the dinner wouldn’t be disgusting. The next town, she knew, was going to be another long ride away.

  TWO

  Before they left, a man drew Kitty aside and gave her not only the name, but instructions on how to find the next spy in the river town Chardaus.

  She obediently committed them to memory, telling Senrid as soon as they were outside Berdua’s walls.

  It annoyed her considerably that except for the spy-name business, the Marlovens had exhibited no interest whatever in Princess Kyale Marlonen. She’d thought they would wonder at her presence, would treat her like, like
what? Like a royal visitor? Like she was some kind of ambassador? Like she was interesting, at least? She had given up on anyone in this barbaric country treating her like a princess ought to be treated.

  Now she was stuck riding through a miserable winter on an errand that had nothing to do with her, and danger could threaten any moment. But she couldn’t leave and go home.

  She pestered Senrid once or twice about the promise, but only because it annoyed him. She didn’t expect him to give in, not any more, and anyway, would she go home if he did?

  As they raced side-by-side westward toward Chardaus, she thought about what Arel’s cousin had said. What was his name again? Oh, who cared. The important thing was Leander’s message about giving Senrid whatever aid he could.

  She hadn’t really thought about that until she’d seen Hibern’s reaction, when she told them about that interview. Hibern’s expression had surprised Kitty. The message had obviously meant more than it seemed to, and whatever extra meaning it carried, Hibern had approved.

  Leander was good at making his words say more than they seemed to. The rotten thing was, sometimes a person didn’t figure out the extra meaning until later—when she couldn’t really get mad at him about it.

  When Kitty considered Hibern’s reaction, she wondered if Leander had somehow guessed what had happened, and was sending Kitty herself a kind of message. Like he approved of what she’d done, and he wasn’t angry about the magic, or that she’d left.

  Or was that her imagination?

  She stewed about it as they rode. What she wanted was to be able to tell Leander everything, and to have him tell her she’d done the right thing, and to hear him condemn Senrid for being a selfish idiot—though it was true that without Senrid’s help, they’d probably both be dead. But why couldn’t Senrid have rescued them all, without all the sneaking and the secrecy?