Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

Next morning the Sferan armies gathered to withdraw into Andrastir. Tents and banners were struck; gear, and the dead and wounded, were piled onto wagons; and amid a triumph of horns and drums, the victors poured slowly and majestically back into their great city, her honor untarnished and her security reassured. Proud trumpets; but Rothesay, watching from the side, thought the pride seemed hollow, somehow: the pride of the doomed. The Geillan tide rose, and showed no signs of ebbing. Yesterday had but stemmed it, for a time. Some of them knew it.

Rothesay watched, because the Runedaur remained on the field, not to enter till tomorrow, with ‘Runedaur business’ yet to be finished at sundown. She watched the parade, and drummed her heels impatiently on Stand-in-grass’s flanks; he ignored her. Andrastir! She could hardly wait to walk its fabled streets—the Avenue of the Imperium, the Way of Arches, the Gold Road—and to see its thousand temples and peer into its countless markets. She wondered if students would be allowed to buy anything—I certainly hope I’m not expected to steal it! Bother ‘business.’

Hint of that business rose from the edge of the field of battle: two plumes of dark smoke. Two Runedaur had died in the night; two pyres now burned, tended by silent wardens from among the Kingscroft Healers. A solemn and respectful farewell it might seem, but for the tendency of the smoke to change colors: a puff of dark red, a twist of smoky green, a sudden billow of purple rose in the greyness. Kahan had laughed, a soft, sad laugh for he had been fond of Harlan. “That’s just to put the wind up everybody else,” he explained, grinning guiltily. “They know we do cremations—they think that’s all we do, or they hope it is—so they know what the smoke is. The colors, well, they’re free to speculate on what they mean!”

“We’re frauds, you mean,” she said severely.

He chuckled. “Hey, is it our fault they take us too seriously? Didn’t I warn you something about running your own mind? I know I did. Fluff up my pillow for having forgotten it.”

She had beaten him with it instead, very gently, and left him to sleep.

Rory she had not seen since before supper yesterday. Turning away from the armies’ withdrawal and back towards camp, she saw him now, walking up from the quayside; walking with Dav. She hurried Stand-in-grass back to the corral, but Rory had vanished again by the time she was done. And Dav was gathering students in the little grassy ‘court’ at the center of camp.

They sat in a rough circle, the oldest next to Dav—or opposite him; the newest, like herself, huddled as far out of the line of those fire-blue eyes as they could.

For a long time, no one said a word. Dav sat like a stone, not waiting, merely present, like stone, earth, or the wind. Rothesay scowled, confused, and shifted restlessly, and exchanged puzzled glances with a boy from Raven’s Trace. Then one of the senior students, a beefy youth wearing Kingscroft’s holly, spoke up curtly.

“So, did Rory betray us, or not?”

The rest of the group inhaled, very quietly, as one. All eyes turned towards Dav.

“What does it mean, to betray?” he asked.

“Are we going to play word games?” Beefboy snapped cynically.

“If you had no words, what would you think?”

“About Rory?” Lacie, not far from Rothesay, asked. Dav with an upturned palm invited her to consider it.

Rothesay sat back and thought about it. How did one think anything without words? She looked around at the clustered students, a sombre black ring-shadow—rather grubby—with a few gleams of silver-grey, and a splash of red, green, or yellow among the older, bolder ones. Color—one could know color without words, she supposed. And faces, and moods—like that smug fellow over there from Rose House.

The Runedaur Silents, like Sothia: how did they think? What would Sothia have seen, watching Rory yesterday? The charge, the halt, the charge again—what had Rory seen?

“Who else was there?” Lacie asked. “Maybe it was something else that caught his attention.”

A bold-looking girl about Rothesay’s age spoke up scornfully: “And all the sheep jump off Conclusion Cliff assuming it’s all about Kahan!”

Rothesay glanced at her, grass-stained feet thrust out from under a tattered grey hem. Kahan’s dart of the night before returned unbidden to her mind: So did you.

“Maybe he saw someone he really loved,” a small boy piped up from behind Rothesay’s elbow.

“Then it sure as hell wasn’t Kahan!” roared the beefy boy, and several others, including Green-toes, joined loudly. Dav glanced at the youth; but he did not laugh.

“There might have been something else,” the Master mused, as if considering it. “How would you know?”

“We could ask,” said Lacie.

“Know your man,” agreed Dav. Many of the students shifted uncomfortably, as the reminder bit them. “But,” he went on briskly, “suppose we have asked, and he has confirmed your darkest suppositions: it was Kahan, and he hated the thought of riding to his aid. What then?”

“Then I know I can’t trust the dog,” Beefboy shot back promptly.

“Why?” Dav snapped up one finger. “Does Rory hate you?” A second finger joined the first: “He is Runedaur: will he be tomorrow what he is today?”

Next to Dav, a gaunt young man who reminded Rothesay powerfully of Prince Cathforrow held up a finger of his own. “If Rory’s loyalty is worth something to you—what’s the surest way to kill it?” Cathforrow’s own cynical smile curled his pale lips.

All eyes turned to him—including Dav’s. Pseudo-Cathforrow looked back at his master and shrugged. “Grieve him for a stupid student mistake any of you could make,” he answered himself.

Beefboy shot to his feet, fists clenched. “Mistake!” he bellowed. “That ‘mistake’ cost Harlan One-eye his life!”

“It did?” Dav gaped, round-eyed, as astonished as if the boy had claimed that Andrastir floated off across the bay. Then his scorn burned afresh, “Your omniscience astounds me.”

Beefboy trembled, but held his ground. “Do you say that it did not?” he demanded, but more fragilely now.

“I say that you cannot know that—not in any meaningful sense of ‘know.’ Thus it is something that you choose to believe,” Dav returned. Again he held up a finger. “Challenge:—” and every head snapped up at that magic word, “why?”

The burning gaze of the Master of Runedaur seared all the circle of his students with that question. Rothesay bit the back of her thumb. I didn’t!—I did. I did. Why, indeed?

Dav rose abruptly, waved dismissal, and stalked off towards the healing-tent. Rothesay started. “Hey, wait a minute!”

If he heard her, he did not answer; maybe half the students, equally taken aback, looked bewildered from one to another. “What manner a talk’s this?” the puzzled Raven’s Trace boy burst out. “This is teaching? What are we supposed to think?”

This provoked an inordinate amount of laughter, to Rothesay’s ear. From reminiscent kindliness, to the amused tolerance for an imbecile, to wild scorn, the older students howled, but none offered a reply as they too left the circle, many in anger, some deep in thought. The newer students watched them go till some of them, too, left in aggravation.

Rothesay stayed. Pseudo-Cathforrow alone of the seniors lingered; she wondered why. He held his place, arms looped loosely about his knees, as only his eyes moved, following those who walked off, till only Rothesay, Cobry, and the boy from Raven’s Trace remained.

“Want to help me pack up the big tent?” he invited unexpectedly.

The Raven boy lifted his chin, and shot a pointed look at Pseudo-Cathforrow’s holly leaves. “Tha canst make me.”

“No more I can,” he agreed blandly. “You can go right ahead and be a parasite.”

The boy bolted angrily to his feet. “I am not a parasite!” he barked, and stalked proudly towards the main Runedaur pavilion. Pseudo-Cathforrow laughed softly, and rose to his feet like smoke ascending.

Rothesay stood up too, finding herself nearly a head taller. “You can’t make him—except by ridicule?” she asked coolly.

He winked back. “As long as he lets me!” He started off. “Coming?”

Cobry rolled to his feet and followed.

“You’re from House Ristover, aren’t you?” Rothesay asked. The resemblance was too striking; she could bear it no longer. “What’s your name?”

“It isn’t Treskiel,” he chuckled, darkly. “How did you come to meet my esteemed relative, pretty sister? Tell me: does he well? All in good health, I hope?”

Rothesay started to ask how he knew she had seen the Prince, then thought about Runedaur ‘mind reading’: she must have been staring, and he must be used to people catching the resemblance. Even his voice—his accents were smooth, cultivated; he was not of the humbler branches of the great House. “I was with Master Dav.”

“Oho, you’re the one!” He stopped, his face alight. “Curse of Arngas, and all that?” He raised a hand in an eager invitation to arm-wrestle.

She took it uncertainly; there was no table, but he pushed, hard, she supposed; she could scarcely tell, except that she was obliged to resist. As an afterthought, she pushed back. The mysterious scion of Ristover flipped himself over his own right shoulder, and snatched back his hand from her surprise-loosened grasp.

“Damn,” he murmured with a grin, shaking out his hand. Cobry folded his arms, smugly proprietary. “Sorchone am I. And exceeding glad,” he looked her over appreciatively, “that I found that out,” he shook his hand again, “ah, beforehand!” He gave her a sultry wink.

“Don’t even think it,” she growled. She saw surprise flicker on his face, and then—did he look hurt? It was too brief to tell; Cathforrow’s cynical smile reappeared.

“My cousin,” he said, answering what she had not yet asked. “Tell me he looked well. In the flush of health. All robust and full of vigor?”

She thought back. The Prince had not seemed the least unwell, though ‘robust’ would never have come to mind. “I suppose so.”

“She supposes so.” Sorchone sighed elegantly. “Babe, do you not understand that if misfortune befall the good Treskiel ere I am properly knighted here, they will come to get me?”

“‘They’?”

“Ristover,” he replied, as another man might have said, ‘plague.’ “Here, let you take the center pole, while we lesser mortals do the corners.”

At sunset, the Runedaur mounted a perimeter guard. The rest gathered in a sober, silent circle at the center.

Two Runedaur had died in the night, the smoke, both the true and the false, of their pyres now only wisps. Harlan Grey was one. “Dav probably killed him; they were pretty good friends,” Lacie confided to Rothesay, and to Rothesay’s horrified stare returned one equally appalled: “A belly wound is a nasty way to die!”

“But—”

“But what? Everyone goes to Ges at last, even the Great Ones! If all you can do for someone is make the going gentle—well, wouldn’t you?”

Rothesay truly did not know. The prospect worried her. She sat now at the edge of the circle and chewed the back of her thumb uneasily, till the silence seduced her to peace.

Not a sound but the eternal wind could be heard over all the camp. Several people near her, she slowly realized, breathed together in one of the meditation rhythms; she did not know which one. Then she noticed that she was doing it too. Maybe the whole group was.

The last limb of the sun vanished beyond the earth, and a long summer’s twilight lay full upon them. A man stood up, somewhat across the circle from her; he looked strikingly like Harlan Grey, save that he had both eyes. Rothesay straightened eagerly: Harlan’s ghost?

“Harlan was my brother,” the apparation said over the still-silent crowd. “We were born at Colderwild; I came down here to Kingscroft.” He gave a nod toward Andrastir’s distant walls, themselves ghostly in the half-light. “He was forever asking me if we of the Holly had found the king yet.” He paused and seemed to sigh; then he chuckled. “I’ll keep looking, Harlan,” he laughed softly, and sat down again.

“Mallacagan was my father,” said a young man, standing in his turn. He held out a staff in both hands: it gleamed with a high polish that its deep carvings seemed to ripple. “He was a swordsman of two blossoms, like Dav and Rystan—but he was, he was—” he paused to let his throat loosen again. “He loved working wood best. Life, and death—” the youth pointed out designs in the wood that only the witch-sighted, or his immediate neighbors, could have made out, “he made it so that at every step it was, in its way, um, finished; each cut, or shave, see, and you could have said, that’s good, that’s done. It’s not, it’s not more complete now than it was,” his voice broke, “than it was five—years ago—’s just more—elaborate, see?” He stopped to weep quietly for a moment, and wiped his face on his sleeve. The staff glimmered with the movement. “And now he’s as, as elaborate, as he will ever be. But he was always. . . .” Mallacagan’s son stopped, and gazed into the west so long that he might have turned to wood himself. Then he finished quietly, “He was always complete.” He sat down slowly. The staff began to pass from hand to appreciative hand.

So the hours went. One by one, those who had known the dead rose to tell some tale, often to share some jest to broad unstraitened laughter. Dav stepped forth, and in silence danced, and his gesture brought surprise and mirth, boldness and sorrow, emptiness, and then a swift infilling of wonder. Rothesay lost the worry that had nagged at her since Harlan’s brother recalled her Dragon’s-quest to her, as she yearned to dance like that; and for the rest of the evening joined in wholly with the rest, learning with those who had not known the dead from those who had.

A woman with a voice like sunrise and all the art of a bard sang a song of the deeds of Harlan Grey, but none of them were great or glorious deeds. Instead, there was a verse about how as a novice knife-thrower he learned to quit missing to the right by attempting to miss to the left; Rothesay overheard a couple of grateful student sighs at that one. There was one about repeatedly besting Dav at some game, till Dav at last worked out just how Harlan was cheating. And Rothesay gathered from a verse about his great pastime of woman-watching that he had at least magic enough to make up for his missing eye, but she never discovered how he had come to lose it. From the tales told and the verses sung, she had to conclude that it was a battle-wound: not one story or song came any closer to combat than its training.

Wines went round, and ales, and the wake grew merry, but never loud: anyone who tried to chat however quietly with a neighbor, was promptly kicked by some other neighbor who wanted to hear the singer or speaker of the dead, or just the silence in between. A conversation sometimes crept away from the circle; sometimes it crept out to those standing guard, or up to the healing-tent. Food, in convenient finger portions, went round, and the deeper silence was lost till midnight.

Late in the night, Rory rose to speak. The students, at least, stopped eating to listen.

“I left Dun Brean when my father gave me my dead brother’s spear. I wanted—I mean, I thought there ought to be more to a life than working yourself into a foaming frenzy. Every year.

“I ran off; got good and lost in the Sindasawood. One day, I’m down to my last strip of jerky, and,” he stopped, his face knotted, and he drew a few hard breaths. “And this little one-eyed gnome pops up from under a mushroom.” In the moonlight, Rothesay could see him grin reminiscently. “That’s how it seemed—you know how he could move in the woods. So it’s like one of those old Ceidha-tales, where the bad son is rude and greedy and gets cursed with boils but the good son—well, he asked and I gave him that last bit of jerky. Then he asks who I am and I tell him all about Father and my bloody clan, how the first thing they want to do after a war is go plan the next campaign till I want to scream, ‘What’s the point?’ ‘They think I’m a coward,’ I tell the gnome, ‘but it’s not that: it’s just that, if I’m killed, I’d like it to be for some reason! Is that asking too much?’ and he says, ‘Sometimes.’ Sometimes it is.

“Anyway, I say, ‘I’m not going back, I don’t belong,’ and he says, ‘Got just the place for you.’” Rory spread his hands and his listeners laughed, especially the ones who had doubted him before: now they understood, now the Mystery of Rory’s Halt was solved. Most of them had the grace to feel a little sheepish, if not outright embarrassed.

“He was right,” Rory finished. “You give the gnome your last bite and he gives you a kingdom.” He sat down amid many hands reaching from the kingdom to touch him with their company. Rothesay picked her way over to give him a hug, but she had to wait her turn.

At midnight, Dav entered the moonlit circle at the center. A long koli of some dark, sheer silk, weighted with silver charms against the breeze, made him an uncertain shadow. He carried a kind of yoke with a bronze bell at either end; rapped sharply with a padded hammer, each sang a pure, eerie tone, one high, one more than an octave below, on the fifth.

The notes had names, Rothesay thought; there was so much she missed while Leoff commanded her to the list-field. And one represented life, and the other was death? Something like that. Dav struck each in turn, first high, then low.

Two knights brought out two cloth-covered crates, to which they bowed respectfully, and left. When full silence had returned, Dav held his bells high and struck the higher one once.

Some of the Runedaur took up the note, humming, or cooing with open mouths. Rory beside her did not, till Dav struck the second bell. Rory took that one, albeit an octave still lower. After a moment, Rothesay added her voice to the first note, which seemed as though it could use the support. For several minutes, the two-note chord hung like an aural mist over the company; only near at hand could Rothesay hear any breach, as hummers or singers broke for breath to continue.

Then it began to change. Rory rose to the higher note, as did several others of their neighbors, and the tone seemed to spread out from them. For an instant, maybe every throat tuned to the same note; and then slowly the chord returned, strengthened, and then the deeper note rose to prominence. For some minutes, the chant bounded slowly, from almost-pure low to high and back again, as though the music itself breathed in the pattern of tones.

The music shifted and seemed to split: Rothesay’s half of the circle had the high note, and they raised it in volume and power; she gulped for breath and it slowly fell away as the other side of the circle sent back a wave of the lower tone. And then the Runedaur assembly rang like a bell, from side to side across the circle. The sides themselves began to shift, sending the crest of the wave rolling around the ring, first widdershins, then sunwise. Rothesay found it great fun; it seemed to her that if anything should summon ghosts, a funeral like this ought to do it.

After what seemed like an hour, Dav began to touch the bells again, in time with the singers; softer and softer fell the human voices, and softer the metal ones, till they ceased as one.

Pure silence returned. Wind fluttered the few remaining tents. Oraay blazed across the whispering grass. Dav stooped, and pulled the cloths from the crates. In each one a white owl sulked. The Holies only knew where Dav had found them in the plains at Andrastir, but Rothesay’s heart ached for them: let them go!

And he did.