I don’t think Nico even noticed her anger. There was something he wanted to tell her, and it was taking all his strength.
“You. Are. Castellaine. Now.”
What? I threw a wild look at Dina, who stood near the bed, rolling up a bandage with jerky movements, as if she was as angry as Carmian. And all the while, her eyes were bright with tears.
“They made a contract,” she said in a low voice. “A contract of marriage that was to come into effect at Drakan’s death. Which is now.”
Nico and Carmian? I stared from one to the other. She didn’t look like a tender loving wife. More like she wanted to strangle him, actually.
“Marriage contract?” I murmured, making it a question.
“She wanted to be castellaine. To rule at Dunark, or so she said.” Dina tucked in the loose end of the bandage, put the roll into a basket, and reached blindly for the next strip of linen.
“Is that what you want?” Carmian looked down at Nico. “To make me your castellaine?”
“Yes.” The word was just a gasp, but quite clear for all that. Nico’s hair was so soaked with sweat that it glinted in the lamplight, and I could only guess at the kind of pain he was feeling. Still he wouldn’t take his eyes off Carmian; still he fought to deliver his message to her.
“Why?”
“You. Understand. Those. Who. Have. Nothing.” He had to break off for a moment to gather his strength. “And. You. Are. Strong. Enough. Clever enough. To rule. Those. Who. Have. Everything.”
There was sound from her, a hiss of anger and despair and… and something else. I couldn’t quite tell what.
“Oh, sure. If you die now, Nico, do you believe for even a moment that they will let me enter Dunark as its ruler? They will scream and howl and fight me. They will never accept me.”
“Let. Them. Howl.” He made a small movement with one hand, and Mama apparently knew what he meant by it. She held out a piece of vellum to Carmian.
“He sealed it,” she said. “With his Raven signet. It is binding, and he is right. They may howl, but there is nothing they can legally do.”
Carmian looked at the vellum as if she thought it might bite her.
“It’s a will,” she said. “A last will and testament.”
He nodded, a tiny, tiny nod. He spent what strength he had left grudgingly, like a miser counting out each penny.
“Make. Dunark. A Gelt. Village,” he said.
Which made absolutely no sense to me. But Carmian seemed to understand.
“Nico! I can’t! Have you seen them out there? They can’t even work out how to get home without somebody giving them permission. And you think they can choose who is to rule them? Nico, they don’t know how!”
“Then. Teach. Them.”
“That would take years. That would take up my whole lifetime!”
“Yes.”
The word hung there between them. Nico looked at her until she knew that he meant it. This was what he wanted. This was what he demanded of her. And Carmian looked completely overwhelmed by it.
“Nico. That’s not fair. You can’t be—you can’t just…”
Mama stirred uneasily. I knew she was watching Nico sharply, counting each sign of fatigue, each danger signal. Carmian caught the slight movement and turned to her.
“Don’t you dare let him die!”
“I’m doing everything I can to help him,” said Mama. But the fact that she let Nico talk at all when he was obviously so weak… I knew well enough that this was because this couldn’t wait until tomorrow. And Carmian knew it too.
She looked back down at Nico.
“Don’t you understand?” she said. “What you’re asking, it’s impossible!”
He was silent for so long that I began to wonder whether he had any strength left at all. But there were still a few words that he wanted to say.
“Not. For. You.”
And then he closed his eyes, and Mama chased us all out.
All night Carmian paced the barbican like a wolf in a ditch. I felt like pacing too, but my ankle was too sore. All I could do was sit and wait.
“He had better not do it,” she said through clenched teeth. “He had better not die!”
“I thought you wanted to be castellaine,” I said bitterly. “Wasn’t that what Dina said?”
She stopped for a moment and looked at me. Her eyes were more gray than green just then.
“Not without him, you idiot.”
It was dawn when Mama and Dina finally came out. They both looked deadly tired, and there were tiny splatters of blood on Dina’s face, and larger blotches of it on Mama’s blouse. But the worst thing was… the worst thing was that neither of them would look at me.
“I’m sorry,” said Mama. “We did what we could. It just wasn’t enough.”
Dina said not a single word. But Carmian leaped to her feet, and her face was as pale as Nico’s had been.
“It’s not true!” she said. “You’re lying!”
Mama didn’t say anything. She just looked at Carmian.
And Carmian turned and ran. Through the barbican, up the steps, to the wall above. She leaned out across the parapet, and even at that distance I could see her shoulders shuddering. She was crying. She was crying so hard it seemed like she might never stop again.
And still Dina just stood there. Wooden-faced and silent, as if she had been turned to stone.
DAVIN
A Hero’s Grave
We buried him two days later. It was a bright and frosty morning, and the mists had finally disappeared. The castle folk stood silent and unmoving, their breaths like plumes in the chill air.
Six men carried his body. I would have liked to be part of that, but my foot was still too sore and unreliable. Astor Skaya and Ivain Laclan went in front, with the bier resting on their shoulders.
They had clad him in armor and helmet, with the sword and the shield Tano had made on his breast. You could still see the dents and scars from the duel, the marks left by Drakan’s sword. I saw only a brief glimpse of his face, half shadowed by the helmet, and already it seemed alien and strange, not Nico anymore. And I wanted to yell at them and tell them this was wrong, this wasn’t who he was. They had made him look like a soldier, and he would have hated that. But that was how you buried heroes, and that was what Nico had finally become, a dead hero.
He would have hated it so much. He would have hated the trumpets and the drums and all the uniforms. I think the only part of it he might have liked was what Dina said at the end.
“He told me to tell you of his last will and testament,” she said, and her voice cut cleanly through the crisp air though she wasn’t actually shouting. “The House of Ravens has no male heir now, and Dunark has no ruler. But Nico wanted… Nicodemus Ravens married Carmian Gelters, and it was his will that she should be castellaine and ruler of Dunark, its city and its castle. It was all written down, witnessed, and sealed with his signet. But I ask all of you, here and now, to bear witness to the truth of what I have told you.”
Carmian was standing next to Dina, dressed in a black robe. It was the first time I had seen her in skirts. But though every eye in the place was on her, she stirred not a muscle. She stood there, tall and straight as a candle, staring into midair, and already she looked like the sort of castellaine one doesn’t get around too easily. And besides, when you looked at Dina, you knew that every word was true, exactly as Nico had said it.
“We bear witness,” said Astor Skaya in formal tones. And some of the men, Skaya and Kensie and Laclan, too, pounded their shields slowly and respectfully to show their agreement.
“Thank you,” said Dina. And now she was crying, I could see, for the first time since she and Mama had come out of the sick bay with that awful message. I think only those standing nearest heard her last words:
“I’ll really miss him.”
There was so much to be done. So many messes that needed cleaning up. Perhaps it was always like that after a war. There were people wh
o no longer had homes, people who no longer had a job to do or a place to belong to. People who had lost everything, or nearly everything. Fourteen Dragon knights had survived, as far as we knew. Three had made good their escape in the confusion, the rest were under lock and key in Astor Skaya’s dungeons.
Obain had his Maeri back and returned to Arlain. The Harbormaster was promised Kensie aid in building a new ship to replace the Swallow, and from the look Maudi Kensie gave me when she made that promise, I knew I would have to work hard in that effort. Carmian and the Weapons Master gathered what was left of Drakan’s army and made for the Lowlands. There was trouble, of course—it would have been strange if there were not—but most of the men seemed pleased, on the whole, to have a commander again. I heard they gave her a nickname, the Lioness, and bragged to the clansmen about how tough she was. I think Nico was right; she would be a good ruler. Not an easy one, a good one. Probably better than Nico himself would have been.
Still, I couldn’t get used to it. It was so unfair. Everyone else got to go home, but not him.
Yet another two days went by before we ourselves could return home to Yew Tree Cottage.
“Rikert is coming,” said Dina. “And Tano.”
Rikert, yes, I could understand that, sort of. But Tano?
“Just who is this Tano?”
“Rikert’s apprentice,” said Dina. But she blushed as she said it, and even though I still hadn’t found a girl-talk dictionary, I had no trouble figuring out what that meant.
“He had better treat you right,” I said. “Or you come straight to me, you hear?”
“Don’t worry,” she said, giving up on pretending it was nothing. “He will. He does. But, Davin…”
“Yes?”
“There is one more thing. And I know you are going to be angry. But promise me—promise me, hear?—that you’ll say absolutely nothing about this until we’re back at Yew Tree Cottage.”
What?
“About what?” I said suspiciously.
“First promise.” She looked at me, and even though she was my sister and I had known her my entire life, I couldn’t refuse that look.
“All right, I promise. Now, what is it?”
“Come this way.”
Astor Skaya had loaned us a sleigh for the trip home, the kind that had a canvas hood to keep out the snow and the wind. A dark brown mare Dina had picked up somewhere waited patiently between the traces, with Mama on the box holding the reins.
“Did he promise?” asked Mama.
“Yes.”
“Show him then.”
I didn’t get all this secrecy. Or at least, I didn’t get it until Dina eased back the canvas a tiny little bit.
Inside, wrapped in blankets and furs, lay Nico. And he did not look very well. But he was still very far from dead.
At first I was just so stunned I had to sit down. And then I was furious.
“How could you let me think—How could you lie?”
“You promised not to say anything before we got home!” said Dina.
“But why?”
“Because I told your mother that I would rather die than be castellan for the rest of my life,” said Nico in a paper-thin voice. “I… was not quite myself at the time.”
“Sometimes the difference between life and death is very small,” said Mama. “And if you don’t want to live, it can be very easy to die. So we decided that Nicodemus Ravens had to die. But that Nico might live on.”
“But… but Dina was crying.”
Dina still looked pretty sad, come to think of it.
“He can’t stay, Davin. As soon as he is well enough to travel, he must leave. He must go find a place where no one has heard of Nicodemus Ravens, a place where no one will recognize him. So when I said I’d miss him, that happened to be true.”
Then something else dawned on me.
“But we buried you. I saw it!”
“No,” said Nico. “We buried Drakan. My half brother, who will now get a fine headstone and be recognized at last as a true Ravens.” He coughed very carefully. “There is a kind of long-delayed justice in that, I suppose.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed. When I thought how Astor Skayark and Carmian were already busy planning a real hero’s tomb with a statue and everything…
Nico and Drakan. Drakan and Nico. I knew they were related, of course, and I knew they looked alike, a bit.
And Nico would have hated such a place, statue and all. So perhaps it was quite fitting after all.
DINA
Snowballs
Yew Tree Cottage sat there with snow on the roof, looking like its old self. Even the sheep were back; Maudi had herded them home the day before. It would be a while before we would be able to fetch Silky and Falk home from Farness, though. They were still chomping hay in the Harbormaster’s stables.
“It’s weird,” I told Tano. “Everything looks so ordinary.”
“You were lucky the Dragon men never got this far.”
“Yes.”
And we were. So many others had returned to find their homes in ruins, like we had once done in Birches. But that was not what I meant. It was more…. So much had happened that it seemed strange that the Stone Dance was still where it used to be, that the paddock and the sheep shed and the apple trees were still there, neither larger nor smaller, nor in any other way different from when we left. When everything inside was so changed. So completely changed.
Callan had borrowed a horse from Maudi, and even though Mama would rather have had him in the sleigh with Nico, he insisted that he was strong enough to ride. I could see how his eyes kept darting from one side of the trail to the other, like a hound searching for prey. Even though he was still not quite himself, he was watching out for us, for Mama, and the rest of us.
“Drakan is dead,” I said, partly to hear how it sounded.
“Aye,” said Callan. “But there are still a few of his knights out there, so it is no use getting careless.”
Rikert was looking around too, but in a different way.
“Is that the brook?” he asked, pointing.
“Yes.” It was not easy to see it because of the snow; it was just the faintest shadow amidst all the whiteness.
“Then we might build the smithy there, just beyond the orchard.”
“We might,” said Mama, “if you are certain that you want to stay. We would be more than happy, but Birches might not be so pleased to lose their good smith.”
Rikert made a sound in his throat. “They’ll find another,” he said. “Now that the Dragon Force is no longer swallowing up all the good craftsmen. And there isn’t much for me to go back to. Not now.”
Not now that Ellyn was dead, was what he meant. And when I thought of the neglected house and Rikert himself, and the way he had looked like an ungroomed horse, well, I understood his choice. And I was certainly not unhappy about it. I liked Rikert, and there was Tano too.
It was almost as if Tano could feel me thinking of him.
“Do you want to help me put up the horse?” he said. “There is something I want to talk to you about.”
Rose was looking at us with wide-eyed curiosity, but she didn’t say anything. And in the next moment, she had other things to think about. Davin threw a snowball at her and hit her right between the shoulders.
“You beast,” she said, leaping off the sleigh before it had come to a stop. “Just you wait!” She snatched up a handful of snow herself, and her revenge snowball hit my brother on the nose.
“Me too!” shrieked Melli. “I want to play too!”
It was a while before we got around to unhitching the brown mare, and even Rikert ended up throwing a few snowballs before Mama stopped the rumpus to remind us that the fire had to be lit and dinner prepared, and that Nico shouldn’t be outside in the cold air longer than he had to be.
After dinner, Tano tried again.
“Do you want to go and see the horses?” he asked.
I blushed. I wish that whole blushin
g thing would stop, and soon, please! But at least he didn’t see it, because we had only the one lamp lit, and the fire in the hearth.
“All right,” I said. And this time we succeeded in sneaking out without being noticed by anyone except Rose, and she just smiled, a sort of smug that’s-what-I-thought smile.
Outside, the stars were bright in a clear sky, and it was so cold that the snow crunched beneath our feet. Tano halted in the middle of the yard and stopped pretending that he had a keen and deep interest in seeing the stable.
“I have something for you,” he said. “It’s a sort of birthday gift.”
He gave me a small linen pouch that was very pretty in itself. But when I saw what was inside…
“It’s just a bit of copper wire,” he said. “And pewter. We didn’t have silver and the like.”
It was a… no, not a buckle. This was jewelry. A clasp for my hair, light and strong, and shaped like a butterfly. And it had three pins instead of just one.
“It has three pins.”
“Your hair is so thick,” he said. “So I thought the clasp would hold better that way. Do you like it?”
I had tears in my eyes. This was so beautiful, far too beautiful for me. And yet he had made it for me. And he had looked at my hair, and then he had shaped the clasp so that even my thick coarse horsetail hair would have to behave. That was the best part. That he had seen so much, and thought so much.
I couldn’t say anything. I just nodded. But I think he could tell how happy I was.
“Can I put it on?” he asked.
I nodded again. His hands were gentle even though they were so big. I didn’t know how often he had touched a girl’s hair, but he did a fine job.
“Thank you,” I said.
He just smiled. He was happy because I was happy.
Suddenly I thought of Carmian. And I’m not sure why, but that nearly made me cry.
“What is it?” asked Tano. “Suddenly, you look so sad.”
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