Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

Casting a major spell demanded considerable strength, of spirit if not of body. Treskiel likened it to sailing: however much wind filled one’s sails, if the tillerman wearied and faltered, so failed the ship. Indeed, if the ship were not brought home to port ere the tillerman broke, she might be overborne by the gale, capsized, destroyed. The earnest young man representing Lostforth was the first to take leave of the Council, after nearly three hours of dismally barren wrangling, and shortly afterwards, Gariel too withdrew. Treskiel knew Prince Ddonan’s chief wizard, whose aura ‘colored’ the eidolon; and unless the man were already wearied from some other cause, he should not have succumbed yet. Probably it was Ddonan’s injury, not to mention deepening inebriation, that caused Gariel to retire.

He was damned glad of it, though. Having a double eidolon to sustain as well as intelligent participation in council, he felt he had run more than double the course, but he was far too proud—he chuckled mirthlessly at himself—to have left early. That, and he was not about to risk missing anything, neither great decision proclaimed nor unintended nuance let slip. Who could say what he might need to know?

The six Houses remaining agreed to adjourn, with nothing more than “Fight on!” for a strategy among them. And “We are to ‘fight on,’ my lords,” Treskiel reported dryly to his councillors when he closed his spell at last. They erupted in indignation, and seemed perfectly disposed to rant and rage, shadow-boxing together at the folly of Andrastir, to what end Treskiel could not imagine, and he dismissed them, rather sharply. He fairly quivered with fatigue and his head ached like a smith’s anvil, and he wanted them well away before he slipped and betrayed either fact. Only Huw he entrusted to bring him, in perfect discretion, a headache-powder.

Alone in the Great Hall at Cannisfell, Treskiel na Cathforrow put his face in his long hands and astonished himself with weeping, long, deep yet dry sobs that shook him like an ague. The wracking of his body redoubled the pain in his head to a blinding agony and yet still he wept, desperate to empty himself of a bottomless grief he could not name. Not even five years ago had he wept like this.

An eternity later, physically unable to sustain it longer, he slowly subsided to heavy, irregular, gasping breaths.

“Highness?” Huw asked mildly at his elbow. There was a cup of a cloudy, cool broth in his hand, and cool concern in his eyes.

Treskiel shook his head slightly, though he regretted it as he did. “Reaction,” he explained curtly, and, taking the cup, added an attempt at a smug smile to confirm the lie: “That was quite a work, you know.”

Huw seemed to accept this. “Indeed, my lord. I regret Her Highness of Rhyllandon was not there to appreciate it.” He watched his charge drink the medicinal brew, giving Treskiel, not for the first time, the impression of a Master of Horse tending a prize stallion. “A curious matter, the defection of Rhyllandon,” he went on pensively, and glanced at his prince for comment.

Treskiel felt strongly disinclined to provide it just now. “I will send to Clar Meyl in the morning. Have the falconer report to me at the second hour. Now I will go up to see the Ristovrysel.” He returned the cup to Huw. “Let my supper be sent with hers there.”

“Very good, Radiance.”

Treskiel, already beginning to be comforted by the headache-powder, rose and started for the far doors with what he was sure was no sign of his recent strain, but he stopped at the bottom of the dais as the black maw of grief suddenly threatened to open again. “Huw?”

“Yes, my lord?”

“A world is ending, Huw,” he said softly, not looking back, his own words taking him by surprise. “You’d think there would be—fanfares. Portents. Falling stars. Earthquakes.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Yes, my lord, Treskiel thought darkly. Agree with whatever madness the head under the coronet spews forth, so long as tomorrow’s duties are not significantly unlike today’s. He turned, to bend a glittering gaze upon the patient chamberlain, and had the satisfaction of seeing the man flinch. “There will be. If I have to make them myself.”

A fraction of a hesitation. “Very good, my lord.”

Treskiel snorted and bounded out, though he had to pause two or three times on the staircase to ease the pounding in his head.

The Ristovrysel was in her garden, several large stone planters brimming with flowers and dwarf fruit trees at the very top of Cannisfell’s western tower. A rainwater catchment in scroll-carved marble leaked its contents in a musical trickle to a small, shallow pool at the center. Daliowna Atil, Ristovrysel, sprawled belly-down on a cushion by the pool, elbow-deep in the water, satin-slippered feet entwined and waving over her back so that the unbound ribbons of one brushed her bare shins rhythmically. Three matronly ladies-in-waiting started as Treskiel strode out of the domed chamber that covered the stairwell and, at a jerk of his head, lumbered to their feet and hurried past and away.

Her attention caught by their movement, Daliowna raised her chin from the lip of the pool to look wildly about. “Kel!” she cried gleefully. “I’m catching fish, Kel! I’m catching fish and I will catch you one and we will eat him!”

Treskiel smiled, and sat down on the edge of her couch. She rolled onto her side, pillowing her head on the stone edge of the pool, heedless of her hair falling into the water, and raised dripping hands, clasped tight about an imaginary fish, to his face. “Eat him,” she commanded solemnly. Equally solemnly, he gently bit her thumb.

“Ow! No, Kel, no, that’s not the fish!”

He smiled and drew her by her shoulders to sit up by him. Her sleeves were soaked to the shoulders; her glorious chestnut ringlets rioted in gleaming disarray, except for the one side, darkened and streaming with pool-water. Scolding blue eyes flashed at him.

A different grief assailed the Prince of Ristover, though he still smiled. She was becoming quite the beauty, he thought; and no brotherly sentimentality could subvert his fastidious standards. She looked very much like their mother, whose face and grace had inspired a generation of poets in her native highlands.

“Don’t bite my fingers,” the beauty ordered him crossly. “Then I won’t be this many any more.” She spread both her hands wide. “How many is this, Kel?” she asked plaintively, holding them out for him to see.

“Ten, sweet. That’s ten. But you are more than that.” He ranged four of his own fingers beside hers and counted them out for her. “Fourteen. You’re fourteen. And you’ll still be fourteen even if I bite them all off!” and he grabbed a hand and pretended to try to eat the fingers. She squealed with laughter and fought to escape, and he would have let her if the pool had not been in her inconsidered way. Instead, he snatched her up and crushed her to him in a desperate hug. She had not been able to grasp any quantity greater than ten, if indeed she grasped that, for five years.

But at least she could attempt it. At least she could chase after make-believe fish, or delight in a rose from his hand, could scold and tease him as she would. He who had been born her twin had for five years known only the silence of the grave.

Once, Daliowna had been as remarkable for her wit as Mother for her beauty. Once, both she and her twin brother Killown had been marked for fosterage with Andras, under the particular tutelage of the strategist Aristande, for both children showed a keenness of mind that Treskiel, twelve years the elder, frankly envied, and—frankly—would have feared, had they been closer in age. As it was, he had delighted in grooming Killio as the likely heir of Ristover after him, having only just come to the throne himself. The boy had had flair, and a real gift for command, a perfect alloy of charm and steel. Now there was only that damned Runedaur whore Sorchone. Blood-duty notwithstanding, Treskiel had never seriously pictured himself as a father, but he would see to it rather than permit Ristover to be ruled by his cousin. If only he could contrive a son that was even a ghost of his lost Killown!

And he had delighted in appraising every eligible Sferan male and damning each one as utterly inadequate to his sister’s hand. But now. . . . What could she hope for now? If only she could remain in body like to the child’s mind left to her! Yet already she was losing the delicacy of childhood, beginning to acquire the solidity of adulthood; the priestesses of Dere and Oraay had begun to hound him about her someday woman’s rites. Foolish old hens! What could they say, that she would remotely understand?

Treskiel rocked her gently where they sat, till she wriggled away. “No, Kel, you’re too hot today. I’m all cool. I’m wet!” She patted his face with one of her dripping sleeves. “There!”

“Thank you, Princess,” he said gravely.

She nodded, satisfied. Then she hopped off the couch and skipped across the flagstones. “I want to go play with Killio, now, Kel. Where’s Killio? He doesn’t want any fish but I will feed him one anyway.”

Every day. Every blessed day. Treskiel crushed his eyes shut, as if that would shut out the grim truth. He had long ago given up trying to explain to her what had become of her twin. “You already did, sweet. He was just here, but Lady Sennana had to take him away to get a dry shirt.”

“Did I splash him?”

“Very much, you wicked girl.”

“And he yelled at me!”

“We heard him all over the castle, and Captain Garragan promised to scold him for speaking to you so.”

“He’s old and fat and you should watch out for him,” she said importantly.

Though he smiled at that, she peered back anxiously at him.

“Are you sad, Kel?” she asked suddenly, strangely, in the gentlest of voices. “Are you ready to come back to me from the sad place? Come back, Kel, because—look!” She reached down for a handful of water and flung it into the air. Probably she meant to please him with the way the drops sparkled in the sunlight, but most of it caught him full in the face, and she gasped in dismay before she laughed. He pulled a silk from his sash and dabbed patiently at his face till she stole it from him to do the task herself. Then she took his dried face in her two hands and studied it thoughtfully. “Were you doing magic, Kel? You were doing a lot of magic, weren’t you?” Oddly, it was not a question. Whatever little she understood, somehow Dali always knew how he felt. “Can you do me some magic, Kel, please?”

That was almost the last thing he felt like doing just now, but he brushed an errant curl from her eyes and murmured, “Like what, sweetness?” But he knew what she wanted, knew when he came up here that she would ask this.

She curled onto the stones at his feet and leaned against his knees. “Make me remember, Kel,” she said softly. “Make me remember Mother. And Killio.”

He stroked her head, the weary weight of his hand pressing her close. Why fear any gods when no hell held greater torment than life itself could inflict? “Yes, love,” he whispered. “And do you remember what to do?”

She snuggled into him. “I close my eyes.” She tipped her face up so he could see. “And I pretend to look at the sky. With no clouds,” she added quickly.

“Well done, Princess,” he murmured, and, now with both hands, began gently massaging her forehead and temples. He glanced at the opal on his breast, for focus, sighed deeply, and opened his memory-spell, casting it net-like upon—if that were the word—Dali’s psyche, that now seemed to breathe under his hands. And then the sensation of net and soul and even of hands melted away, and it seemed that he walked within her, with her though not of her, like wandering through a heavy mist. Here and there mist condensed into more or less solid masses: the image of Lady Sennana, who had departed on Treskiel’s arrival, was a vague dark cloud already fading, but the image of Dali’s fancied fish was bright and sharp, gold and yellow, cold with wet and so perfectly geometrically conceived as to be a philosopher’s ideal fish. Garragan, too, stood out clear and hard, vividly colored with her loathing of him, and creatively envisioned with vampiric fangs. Treskiel shook his head, amused.

He attuned his memory-net to thoughts of their brother. He had had to use his own thoughts and memories when they first began this kind of spell-working; not ideal, for his elder-brother’s view of Killown so little resembled her twin-thoughts, but close enough that, with work, he had been able to capture an image or two, to ‘bring’ them within her crippled mental grasp. Once she had hold of a memory this way, it often blossomed, sometimes almost exploded, into a re-living intensity—for as long as he held it there for her. He could seem to find no way for her to keep one, not even one, without his presence. When he withdrew, all that would remain for her was the memory that he had done this for her, like leaving her with a cup that could only ever hold the fragrance of its wine.

It was better than nothing. He trolled the ‘net’ through the mists, idly looking for something new to amuse her. For his own interest, he very much wanted her memories of the capsizing that, almost drowning her, had drowned her wits, and their brother and mother and nearly twenty kinsmen as well. He doubted it had been natural, storm or no. Yet, tune his searching net as he would, he could find no trace of it, nor of anything at all within a week of her near-death. Strange; he imagined that images so dramatic—the unveiling of the new pleasure-yacht that she had so pined for, much less the raging lake and the grip of a horrid cold death—would be hard to destroy.

He touched on a recollection of Killio—and swiftly crushed a fresh onrush of grief (again! he thought, bewildered and angered by this sudden plague of passion; the eidolon-spell must have taken more out of him than he had reckoned on) for fear lest Dali, soul-entwined with him as they were now, suffer it with him. She stirred, and he knew she had caught a hint of it, fleetingly, but he hid it away and she let it go.

Instead, he pulled in for her a time, not long before the deadly cruise, when she and Killio had spent a merry hour roping yet another hapless tutor into a mathematical quagmire. At least, it was a quagmire to the poor man, and certainly at least treacherous boggy ground to Treskiel, but the twins danced over it like will-o’-the-wisps utterly at home.

On the Cannisfell stones at his feet, Dali sat motionless, playing once again with her lost brother, along ways only the two of them seemed able to wend. Treskiel, too, sat enthralled by phantoms more real, for now, than the sultry afternoon garden about them. He let himself revel in Killio’s hawklike keenness, in that brilliant penetrating gaze that belied his nine years, though he knew it would only fuel his rage, later, that such promise would be broken.

At long last and yet all too soon, the tutor had fled and the twins, growing tired, were about to turn querulous. Treskiel himself shivered with fatigue, and he let the spell fade. He stroked his sister’s hair again, easing her back to the present, and tipped her face to see if he had pleased her.

To his shock and dismay, her blue eyes welled with tears. “Oh, Kel,” she whispered, chin quivering. “Oh, Kel! I used to be clever!”

She leaped up and flung herself into his chest, and sobbed aghast. And the only power that the mighty sorceror-prince of Ristover could wield now was to hold her and despair.

That night, in a porch cooling slowly in darkness, Dav lay back on the couch Kingscroft had set aside for him. Silent guardian, Mael na Brin, Master of Kingscroft, crouched nearby.

Nothing guaranteed such a guardian’s fidelity; both parties understood and acknowledged that the warded could betray the warden’s outward focus, just as the warden might take any advantage of the warded one’s lowered defenses. Both acknowledged that their respective choices, to betray or not, colored and shaped the character of their personal bond. And finally, both understood that, as they were Runedaur, neither fidelity nor betrayal was always what it might appear to be.

Tonight, Mael preferred that Dav achieve his aim. There were many reasons for this, but they did include the consideration that the Mistress of Runedaur, distant as she was, would be the better pleased for that success.

Dav breathed deeply, and stilled himself for sleep. His hand closed upon a silver amulet, set with moonstones, lying upon his breast as the Outerworld faded away.

And it seemed as though he stood between two great pillars of rough-worked stone, towering above him; white stars burned without a twinkle in Night’s far black dome. A path fell steeply away before him, marked with pale stones along the border.

Lightly he tripped down the craggy trail. Dark grasses grew tall and rustled beside him, as he neared the floor of the valley. Stones gave way to tussocks of moss, and the air grew warm and moist, scented with strange drowsy flowers. Pools appeared among the mosses.

A grey owl swept in from his left, and he followed it into the deepening marshland, upon stones that seemed to find his feet rather than himself to find footing. Then he saw, out of the shadows across the fen, a silvery glimmer approaching, as if upon a mirror of his own trail. He stopped and awaited her by a small pool.

Carialla glided up and stood at the pool’s edge opposite. Whenever she came to him in dream, she appeared wearing like a crown a slender wreath of tiny yellow flowers: thus, she said, could he always know that the sending was true, for no one—no one!—would ever fancy the terrible sorceress so foolishly bedecked, especially not before his eyes. It amused him. No doubt she knew her craft; but he thought it unlikely that he would ever mistake another for her, regardless of the accuracy of mere image.

“The Council?” she asked across the still black water.

He shrugged. “No more than it has ever been. A mirror to reassure themselves that they are still the Dragonfolk.”

“They ignored Kinnaith, as usual?”

“Of course. But this time they also passed over Celtannan. At Cathforrow’s insistence.”

“Ah!” she purred. “And how does our princeling?”

Dav grinned. “Coming along well, very well indeed. He has begun to see himself as more than Ristover at last. And,” Dav’s eyes flashed, “so have some of the others: the Gareidan, Ddonan, looks to him, for one. And by the end of Council, so did the Felindreissel, and the pup from Lostforth.”

“And the Magister of the Rhylliauveth?”

He snorted. “She looks to him, but not for lordship. Her, ah, rut grows deeper; pardon the jest.”

Carialla kept a silence as delicate as it was pointed. Presently she continued, “And Clar Meyl?”

There was a brittleness in her question. Dav looked at her askance. “No word,” he said shortly, and briefly described the failure of the Rhyllanden connection. “Have you had news, Lady?”

“No. Not—news.” She turned from him as if to look up the dream-valley, though he knew that what he saw and what she saw in this place held only slight resemblance. “Something has happened up there.” She shook her head slowly. “Sparca is fallen as silent as the dead. There are no dreams there this night.”

Dav’s dark eyebrows rose. “Windhome should know something.” The seafaring Runedaur hall harbored in the very tip of Sparca.

“I have not yet Called them; I was waiting to hear of the Council.”

“When I wake, Mael and I will Call up there.”

“And I. And Sothia shall contact Rose House: though they are farthest away, they often hear clearest.” The dream-Carialla hugged her own thin shoulders as if chilled. “This past winter, under the full moon of Tisorc,” she went on slowly, gazing unseeing at the star-filled pool at their feet, “I had a letter from her. Quite an ordinary letter, such as she sends—” She broke off, and a thin, mirthless smile twisted half her mouth, “Ah. Hmm. Perhaps I should say, ‘sent’? Such as she sent, then, when she knew I would hear anyway, one way or another, and wished that I know her opinion. And always she includes word of my old family.” She chuckled. “Men dread her; yet as princess of her people is she an old broody-hen jealous of her least chick: not one Runedaur out of Rhyllandon, but she has tried to seduce him back into Sparca’s nest!

“This time, she wrote that my mother asked, once more: Was I her true daughter?” She looked up from the pool into Dav’s eyes. “She had the specific question penned in moonsilver ink. There was enchantment in that asking; my answer would be, this time, truly my last.” She sighed, and smiled ruefully. “Perhaps—ah, perhaps!—I should not have felt so . . . nagged. I might not have been so swift to an ending. I might have paid closer heed,” she finished softly.

Dav nodded. Just when one thought one had undone the last little snare in one’s soul, something new turned up. So it would always be, as long as life lasted; so was there no point in savaging oneself over it. Only do what had to be done and get on with it. “How do you see this connected?”

She shrugged. “Only that, whatever it is, it was long planned. I might have known more.”

Dav grinned, knowing how the Mistress of Runedaur loathed her slightest ignorance. “Maybe.” He bowed low. “Good night, Lady. Tomorrow night, then.”

“Tomorrow night,” she agreed, and spread her arms and became mist, fading into the darkness of his dream. He became a dragon—it was his dream, after all—and soared straight for the vault of stars above.

Breaking through a cloud of burning sparks, he woke on his couch. Mael turned at once. Dav slapped his shoulder. “Let’s get Urlaf and Call Windhome.”