Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

As the light waned towards sunset she left the forested hills for the wide meadows of the Carolanth. No folk dwelt here for miles about, though shepherds must surely wander the rich fields from homes in the south. Rothesay hurried over the naked lands, nervously singing a twilight-protection song and trying to remember her geography. What was in the Carolanth? other than kingdoms of aurochs and swans. She wished Padriag had said a little more about human animals.

Upon a gentle rise in the grass, she came to the edge of the deep past.

Nineteen great grey stones stood in a long ellipse stretching from northeast to southwest. Eighteen of them were twice her height, their outward faces incised with many complex lines and unreadable shapes, unreadable except for two unmistakable eyes that stared over the eons from the top of each. The nineteenth, at the southwest point, looked like a stony tooth with a notched tip; standing straight, she could just peep through the notch. Season and weather permitting, she would have seen there the last fire of the last sun of the year.

This was work older by far than the Sferan empire, older than Marennin herself. Near Harrowater, high on the last ridge, a straight line of smaller stones watched the rolling of the sea, though Padriag could not tell her why. He could say only that they were wrought by some tribe of the Ceidha, the Elder People, the Fair Folk. The eyes in the stones here, though gracefully drawn, had an inhuman look.

She drew back in amazement at the eyes. The stones at Harrowater had no such graven ornament; she could not think when she might have seen them in waking life. But in her dreams—they haunted her now and again, not these bare lines but the living orbs the stones only remembered, brooding and remote. Sometimes they looked at her; sometimes not, but she could never see what else was the object of their . . . consideration.

Rothesay’s long eyebrows drew together as she studied the ring of stones. She tried to imagine their smiths; my father’s people, she reflected. She knew nothing about him, not even his name; she could not recall ever hearing her mother speak of him. I am like to the builders here, and all I know are fireside tales and antique rumor.

Still, she felt kinship enough to escape the dangerous hour of sunset by leaning her back against a cool grey slab inside the ring and taking a bit of supper. She seldom thought about the mystery of her father, though she had more than reason to believe her mother’s tale was truth. Padriag said that men who were born to the Dragon’s magic shaped and directed their power, all the time, with such chants and charms as he himself used only for teaching, and which she, once taught, discarded like empty husks, except as she liked the sheer sound of them.

“Then you are a dragon!” she exclaimed. She had long suspected something of the sort.

“I forget,” he smiled. “But certainly no fay spirit needs words to stir what is—er, at least half her nature!”

Now she tried the story-spell, that had failed so oddly on the sword of Arngas. Here at the between-time, neither day nor night, in a place of ancient magic the spell should work wonderfully. This time, though, as she pulled it forth, she attended to its—shape? a dreamlike form that no geometry of the waking world could compass, and that bloomed, or flowed, from casting to conclusion. For her it also had textures, and something like mass, and, once learned, a kind of location. One could ‘feel’ it with chanted words, as if the syllables were hands by proxy, or dust cast upon an invisible thing to reveal its surfaces; but once you knew where it was, so to speak, knew how to find it, what were the words for? Could Sferan magicians not remember, from one summoning to the next, where they had ‘left’ it?

The spell opened . . . .

. . . . And there had been festival here, in the gay sunshine; and immeasurable grief in the moonlight. Seasons bent; dancers wild and dancers solemn passed like blossoms, leaves, snowflakes, on many winds. Stars wheeled, matched by glowing eyes at the stations of the stones. The oval ring pulsed through the years like the heart of the people that raised it. Then little people came, short and dark, beside whom the dancers seemed like veiled lanterns; and then only the dark people remained, bewildered by the stones, and the dancing ceased.

Rothesay blinked. The settling evening was only a little dimmer; she could still see her oatcake, pale on her lap. She had thought about sleeping the night in the ring; but the immensity of time within pressed on her like all the weight of the rock that shaped it. Rolling to hands and knees, she dragged herself beyond the circumference, and lay in the wet grass and sucked air as though she had not breathed in centuries. She hoped that was not in fact the truth; who could tell, at such an hour?

Straightening wearily, she cast a last, curious look at the fairy ring, and trudged on.

By midnight she had slipped deep into what had once been Erodonica like a weasel into a burrow. She glimpsed bright-cloaked clansmen twice again, once away westward as she crossed a broad road, and once at the edge of a town by the light of gate-torches flickering and spitting in the drizzling rain. She carried Padriag’s token, a wizard’s tassel that begged professional passage for her among the Geillan tribes; but she intended to avoid all human habitation. True enough, as Padriag had said, that no one in his right mind would follow her into Colderwild; but that did not prevent someone from following her to Colderwild. Moreover, women simply did not travel alone, and she was keen to the impropriety of her position, whatever Padriag might think; between the dangers of the wild and the chagrin of social indecency, she preferred the danger. Figuring that pursuers would seek out village and hall first, for their own comfort as much as for guessing the quarry’s mind, she kept to the empty meads; but now the wet weather and the shelterless land argued hard otherwise. Unable to sleep in the sodden open, yet fearing men, she merely plodded on, till, stumbling and shivering, she found a remote byre. A handful of sheep stirred as she dropped among them, and finding no danger, slept again.

The corner of Cluthmere she nipped through next day bustled, but not with the usual business of springtime. Oxen, harnessed by pairs to their plows, stood all but forgotten in half-turned mud, while men turned new-polished spears in the sunlight, and raised their voices in joyous anger. Now and again someone, disgusted with the turn of an argument, maybe, would remember his business and goad the team on for a furrow or two, before being drawn back by the siren lure of setting his fellows straight. Soon, Rothesay knew, their women, or boys yet short of manhood, would be set to drive the plowing, to free the men for their eager preparations. She knew the signs. Only a few years ago Harrowater, too, burned with this same restless fire, as Kelmhal laid plans for summer campaigns. Alrulf had been too young then for a chance to win booty and renown, and perhaps his family’s freedom from kin-thrall; too young for war, but not for plowing. But Thyrne earned her limp in one of those summers; and the love of Mat.

Rothesay wondered what clan these folk belonged to, and whom they meant to contest for land or loot; but though summer was the season for war and she meant to be far away by then, she did not wish to be taken for a spy. All her thought bent to airy stealth; striving to move as invisibly as the wind, with a breath she called on the Lord of Air, great Kavin, traditional patron of the land of Peria. Sleek as a hare, she skittered along hedgerows, writhed down ditches on her belly, bolted for the shadow of stone-piled Geillan cairns; and noted, irrelevantly, that the little blue stars of skybright bloomed for Geillan and Sferan dead equally. She reminded herself to mention this to Padriag; then remembered that it would be some while before she would have the chance. A wave of homesickness for her family swept over her -- but not for the wizard, whom she felt uncritically certain of seeing again, most probably after doing something foolish.

In mid-bite, near the end of her midday meal taken furtively under a plank bridge with her still-soggy toes almost in the rivulet, a sudden fire flared in her heart and she flung off her rabbitish desire for stealth. What matter who pursued her? She was dangerous. She snatched up a stone from the stream bed to see if her power could crush it; and bruised her hand, but not her spirit: so there were limits to this strength? It was well to know. Flinging off her cloak as well, she drew herself boldly to her full height, smacked her skull into the plank and knocked it awry. Snarling, she set the board to rights, and strode off, defying, now even hoping for, challenge.

All that met her that bright afternoon was a muddy east-west track. No sign could she see of a southward turning; shrugging, she crossed, forcing a way into the wilderness of budding sloe and sumac beyond, in a mood to spit even in Dagn’s cold green eye. Wiry vines of old honeysuckle impeded her not at all, and she acquired thick anklets of twisted vine and grass before noticing them, but the raspberry canes ripped at her and her threadbare garments. The day grew hot, and the land steamed in the bright sunlight.

Presently a queer sensation began to creep over her: a shade of horror, a wisp of rage and despair, like echoes of something long forgotten. She stopped, glanced about, strained to listen. The sun shone cheerily in the blue-washed sky, over birds busy singing for their mates or rustling up a nest; an enterprising bee hummed past; a mouse skittered by under the greening grass where no blood spilled. No; no blood anywhere to be seen, and only the rich smells of warm dirt and grass rising in the soft air. The twilight chill she imagined was only a fancy.

Ahead of her, several leagues distant, the land rose in the first of the great downs that stretched saddlelike between the mountains of Tre-Uissig and rugged Sparca. She strode forward briskly to meet them, clean heights above whatever she had stumbled into, ghostly magic or morbid fancy. In a moment she stumbled into something hard in this spongy land, stubbed her toes against something solidly real under the grass.

It was dull and dark, and metal, half-buried in the soil, new grass leaping up about it. She pulled away the weeds from a helm rather like the one in the barrow—

—the world reeled, out of the darkling sky a blade flashed straight for her eye-slits, she leaped back—and sat down hard onto a squishy tussock. A startled mouse bounded several inches straight up between her knees and fled in annoyance.

Rothesay blinked in the quiet sunlight. Her breath came quick, her thoughts slowly. There had been screams of battle in the rain, long ago. She was sure it was long ago. Quite sure.

She rose up carefully. She did not touch the helm again, had no wish to lift it up and see the skull within cracked across the orbits, nor blind baby mice nestling in a brainpan. “No fair,” she grumbled, hastening for the beckoning heights. “I get giant’s strength, and hallucinatory battle. No fair!”

In the summer that followed Berulf’s Winter, the Princes of Morag were Scaramor Tammas and Suriag Dyntari, cousins born in the same hour to twin fathers, and neither sorceror nor astronomer could say which was the elder. They had grown up the most affectionate of rivals, and each fought harder for the other’s respect and envy than for that of any other soul, till so skilled were they in every grace and art, that two more perfect knights could not be found among the Sferiadh. Dark Scaramor might be bolder and stronger; red-haired Suriag more grave and scholarly, but not less proud and high-spirited. Joyfully they shared in fame and in the love of their clan; they shared their jewels, their swords, even their boots, for they were much of a size. One thing only they could not share: Kiselle Aurhei, the daughter of Andragon the philosopher; and she was loath to choose.

Their fathers perished in the Rebellion of the Lions, that had inspired Talherne High-king to summon the wild Geillari; their lord grandfather’s death in the hungry winter just past left them, eighteen and untried, the masters of Morag. And then they faced one more thing they could not share: the lordship of Morag. It must at last fall to one or the other; they shrank from pressing that choice, which both ardently desired, and said that the time was evil, the clan too unsettled, with the grim Ollaf Bearkiller hunting and harrying their folk even before spring dawned. When that danger had been crushed, was time enough to settle the succession.

A raid in early spring drove the folk of rich Genresdale flying from their burning homes to the high keep at Genallic; then that, too, fell, before the Moraigh knights could muster to its defense. A third of the dalesmen died there, another third fled into the wild and were lost, and those who limped at last into the Moraigh stronghold at Farhallic found small comfort, for the harvest had been poor, with more folk set to arms than to tend the fields in that last war-scarred year; provisions were desperately low.

The princes led a raid of their own, striking not to kill but to steal, and snatched meat from the very teeth of the enemy and plundered his stew and his kettles too. The starving Morachari ate well for a few days, and praised their young lords in prayer and song, but it little soothed the humiliation of raiding, raiding like bandits—or barbarians—instead of standing forth in proper battle, that rankled in the princes’ hearts.

Ollaf was forced to pause to feed his own and replenish his stores. Morag regrouped, drawing in clansmen from the southern dales of Erodonica and from the near banks of the Coull; but those from the wide fields beyond were lost, and the ashes in their empty towns were cold.

The warriors of Morag abandoned Farhallic to the old and the feeble: it was a strong place, but it would be all too easy for the Bearkiller to block the mouth of its narrow gorge and hold the place in siege. Rather than risk them all in a stony trap, Scaramor led half their force in one band, styling themselves the Shadow Serpents, while Suriag commanded the rest, as the Ghost Hawks; and sported still, snake against bird. Then through the spring their two little armies snapped and bit at the Geillan band like curs worrying a mountain bear, stalling, stalling, buying time for their elders and children, their sick and wounded, to hunt and gather and—with the blessing of the Holy Ones—grow strong again.

That gave Ollaf no great concern, who ignored Farhallic for now. Far more worrisome to him was the chance of some stronger House, Kinnaith maybe, or Rhyllandon, or dread Andras, answering a Moraigh call for aid. But so far as he could tell, no such call was made; at least, no reply ever came.

By the Solstice, the Bearkiller had taken good measure of his quarry. He knew who they were and what they wanted, and he was weary of their harassment. Their forces were small but that much quicker, and they knew this land well. Not since spring had they let themselves be caught in battle, wherein a man might earn honest glory: dearly though they wanted it, they could ill afford it. Yet even knowing that, Ollaf was loath to close with them, for they had a magic, a flying fire. Burned once, with a dozen men lost to a grisly flaming death, the war-chief was more than twice wary. He did not know enough of Sferan sorcery to know its costs and risks, did not know that if he pressed hard and fiercely enough the Sferan spell-casters would be unable to attain or sustain the concentration they needed, nor that he could simply starve them to powerlessness. Ollaf brooded, wondering how best to play his adversaries. Then Kiselle Aurhei fell into his hands.

She had attended the little Moraigh bands, first with one and then the other of her lovers, and back again. In her hands lay one of the flame spells, and she had spent the better part of her strength wielding it. Now she crept away under cool cover of a short near-solstice night, seeking a way back to rest at Farhallic; and stumbled unawares upon a Geillan scout patrol.

With this prize in hand, Ollaf asked for two men bold enough to risk slaughter at the hands of the Dragon-lords, men to save their brothers from the horror of the magic fire-death by creeping near the separate camps, to be taken prisoner, and surrender false news.

Angwald Longarm and Rack Full-moon (so named for his wholly bald and well-scarred skull), pressed hard by their Sferan captors, at last confessed, each the same story: he was a messenger between the Bearkiller and the other Moraigh prince, to whom Ollaf offered alliance, aid in assuring the Moraigh lordship, and the hand of Kiselle, who had not left at all but gone to the other camp to the man she truly loved. And each captive claimed he was on his way back to Ollaf to report that the other prince had accepted. At dawn, the Geillari would stand with their new ally and cut down his challengers.

Scaramor was quick-tempered even at his best; now he was weary, hungry and frustrated. As reward for this ugly fool’s-tale he slew the doughty Longarm with one blow, where he crouched helpless in the grip of Scaramor’s lieutenants. Then shame bit deep, and he passed a long and sleepless night, doubt and anger twined in a smoky dance in his hot blood, doubt leading anger, and then anger, doubt. His men caught his mood; as they talked into the night, reason twisted and struggled to escape the shame of the killing of a defenseless prisoner. Before dawn he knew, they all knew, that the spy spoke truth: Suriag had betrayed them. And there was only one thing then to do.

Suriag, ever more thoughtful and slower to act, for his part seized Rack’s full moon in both his hands and burned into the man’s thoughts, and read there the whole sordid stratagem. He laughed grimly, scornfully, that this Geillan brute thought so shallow a scheme could trick men who had the gift of the Dragon. Knowing that Scaramor could, and would, do just as he had done and as easily, Suriag gave it not another thought, but slept deeply.

Dawn came slow and grey with rain. Suriag woke to his watch crying the alarm, crying with a shock and dismay he had not heard this whole bitter season. He looked out upon the charge of Scaramor’s troops, and knew with despair that Scaramor had believed. Maybe, maybe if every man of his own cast all weapons aside, their brothers’ wrath would be foiled. But now from the north the barbarians came, as if bringing the promised aid; and he dared not disarm before them, for he knew they meant death to all.

Then his own slow fury kindled, rage and hurt that his friend from the cradle thought no more of him than this. If Scaramor thought Suriag capable of such a betrayal—what did that say of Scaramor’s own heart? Drawing his blade, he roared a roar that cracked into a wail of such desolation that all who heard it quailed and cowered; and he rushed forward to doom, and cared nothing for who followed or failed him.

Folk said after, that Suriag died of his wounds in Scaramor’s arms; and Scaramor closed his friend’s eyes and slew himself, piercing his heart with Suriag’s bronze dagger, overwhelming its encrusting rubies with the ruby of his own heart’s blood. And that blade, and many others, too, were thus lost to men, for no one ever came to tend the bodies of the fallen men of Morag. The Geillari took their own away; but a strange dread fell all about the field later called Morachallow, and they would not go near the bodies of the Dragon-lords for any price.

The Geillari triumphed; but not Ollaf Bearkiller. He took the captive Dragon-woman, Kiselle of Andragon, for his wife that very night of victory, and never saw another dawn, for she cut his throat with his own knife. As for Kiselle herself, some tales say one thing, and some another. Some hold that, having killed Ollaf, she took her own life in her grief for her beloved princes. Some say she fled in the night, already with Ollaf’s child. And still others say that indeed she fled, but with the seed of one or another of her lovers, for that was why she sought to return to Farhallic at the first.

So the power of Morag broke on Moraigh swords. The Geillari swept through like a scythe on the last stalks of harvest; and besieged Farhallic and burnt it to the ground, and their own people followed into the gentle swales

of Erodonica. But though the fields of the final battle were among the richest in the northern lands, no living man cared to try them with a plow.

Rothesay knew the tale well, for the edgelings at home were the northern remnant of Morag, and remembered their doomed young lords with love sweetened by the bitter centuries since; but she had had no idea where the Morachallow lay. She hastened across the vale of blood long faded and pressed on across the fields.

She stopped at sunset by a pool full of swans; too weary even to eat, she slept at once, soothed by the rustle of last year’s reeds, though it was poor substitute for the rumble of the surf at home. Waking to a cold blanket of fog, she hastily cast all the protective spells Padriag had ever shown her, appalled that she had forgotten them the night before: fogs and mists were bewildering-magics, favorite entrapments of Dagn and his wild retainers. Men stayed indoors when the white mists crawled. She hunkered low among the reeds and waited till Areolin’s sunfire burned the vapors away before she moved. A little marsh-bird shared her wait, and her cake-crumbs. I am bigger than anything that can ever happen to me, she told it earnestly, reciting the phrase like a charm rather than a conviction, and thought wistfully of raspberry sauce.

The land lay empty all the next day; she saw neither home nor track, and she sang out loud, just to hear a human voice. By afternoon she reached the feet of the downs. Long sunlight streamed across the treeless slopes. A small but enthusiastic brook tumbled down the hillside, sometimes crashing from pot-sized pool to pool in the grey rock, sometimes sluicing down channels that might have been carved by hand, so straight and even they were. Rothesay climbed with a will, not pausing for a cold, clean drink till she was well above the soggy meadowlands and her head was clear of mists and hauntings. Her spirits rose with the land, and she capered goatlike from rock to boulder along the stream. Passing its spring bubbling out of a tiny crevice, she bounded out onto the wide, flat crown of the great hill as the still-yellow sunset gleamed straight across it.

The wind poured in a great torrent over the hilltop, tugging and snapping at her tunic and baggy breeches as if it meant to rip them away for sheer mischief. Rothesay spread her arms wide into it. All that breathes is mine, saith the wind; and all petitions borne on breath do I hear. Before her the eastern lands rolled away into grey evening shadow and blurred with the sky, and she felt as though she danced upon the roof of Peria. She cast off her pack and danced indeed upon the hilltop, for a few moments free of both past and future. Then she unbound her braids and cast her heavy lengths of hair, still damp in part from the rain two days ago, upon the air to dry.

She pulled off her clumsy brogans to air her feet as well, and despite the stiff breeze, a great reek of rosemary rose about her. A sprig in a shoe was supposed to bring good luck to the traveller; Rothesay had padded hers with as much as she could pack in and still tie the thongs. Her feet were crosshatched with rosemary-needle impressions. She poked at the dank herbs, but decided against waiting for them to dry. Reluctantly, she bound her feet up again, but left her hair free: she was alone with the wind, and still by law a girl.

A Geillan woman past the age of menarche kept her hair religiously braided for propriety’s sake; the Sferan woman also, but her religion was fashion and her arrangements were elaborate and ornamented. No peasant was too poor to twist an intricate art in the wealth of her own hair, and flaunt feathers and flowers, shells or pebbles in the coils. And though the Geilleisil broadly regarded their Sferan sisters as effete, puny things, they lusted for the Sfereisil style, and embraced every imperial cosmetic art they could learn. The rage of austere Geillan priestesses against painted lips and scented bosoms went unheeded, especially by the young.

Rothesay could twist a pretty plait or two, but not when it was heavy with damp, and not with the great Wind-lord trying hard to style it for her. She gave up trying to thwart the divine help, beyond forcibly holding the bulk of it out of her face, and started down into the generous Meredale, grey in the evening.

Kavin watched her go with some interest. She smelled of Night, and He wondered greatly what involved the Lady with mortals this time. Soon enough to ask: She approached from the east as Areolin’s light fell away westward, and He looked forward to Her touch, and how it gentled Him.