Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

At sunset, they crossed a broad and even highway. The land here was green and open; not a tree could be seen for miles about. Small white clouds of sheep floated slowly over the far grassy swells. The road ran on a raised causeway some three feet high, flanked on both sides by shallow ditches full of brown water, darting polliwogs, and cresses. Rothesay picked a sprig to nibble, and looked west, to where three hilltops bore crowns of tall stones, ancient Ceidhi rings. Though not more than a mile off, they looked strangely remote, as though they stood in some other land than that which stretched beneath her feet.

In the middle of the road, Dav paused. Its cambered top was fully six yards wide, smoothly bricked in three stripes; the middle one was red: the high king’s personal lane. Straight as a rule, it cut the world from horizon to horizon. Now nothing stirred over that diameter but a pair of curlews calling mournfully from the high air, and a bit of breeze that trifled with the grass. But in her thought ghosts of generals long gone marched by unseen, bound westward for conquest or homeward in glory; in their train, soldiers loudly eager or silently weary. She imagined the creaking of the heavy wains of foreign merchants and traders with exotic wares.

Dav pointed southeast. “The road to Andrastir.”

Rothesay stopped nibbling. Andrastir! Padriag might prefer to avoid that ancient wonder, but the fabled city called to her, boasting of marbled parks where the daughters of emperors strolled, wide boulevards where the great heroes paraded, wharves that welcomed fleets from the edges of the world. “Do we go that way?” she asked hopefully.

Dav did not answer. He was looking at the road. “So well these served to carry the will of the empire out,” he waved northwestward, “so well they served to carry the armies of the invader in.”

He left the road and pressed on south.

They camped that night in a small wood just south of another, smaller highway, and shared a rabbit Dav had caught. Rothesay was still thinking of enemies advancing up roads as if personally invited. Come to think of it, they had been personally invited.

“Master? Why did—er, what happened to the Last-king?” She spoke cautiously, careful of her words. “In the north, at least, we hear that the Runedaur were the high king’s guard and that you—that they betrayed him when Berulf turned on him; and I, er, wondered what the truth of that is.”

“We did.”

His brief reply was not even curt, only casual. Shocked, she stared as he went on gnawing a thighbone, but her indignant silence provoked no excuse from him. “What good are you, then?” she snapped.

He grinned, recognizing his own cold voice thrown back at him, and that she used it unawares. But he left that trifle unaddressed, for now, to reply, “Suppose that I think we are some good. Can you propose an answer for me?”

She sat back and bit her thumb pensively. Padriag had often enough insisted on examining the other fellow’s point of view, and she thought she was good at it, but this exercise made her think she had never really tried at all. How to see an evil act in a good light? If she succeeded, would she then be evil, too? Was this her first step towards demonhood? But Padriag—

“No?” the Runedaur said after a silence. She shook her head. “Shall I?” After a hesitation, she nodded, reluctant but curious. “What did Talherne do?”

“He called in the warlord Berulf to help him put down the princes who were in rebellion against him.”

“Why were they in rebellion?”

She tried this one more warily. “They wanted more power for themselves?”

“That, always.” Dav flashed his predator’s grin. “Is that always wrong?”

Suspecting a trap in the word ‘always,’ she dodged. “A king must have power if he is to protect his people.”

Dav cocked an ear. “If he is to what?”

“Protect his people—the king and the lord and the clan-chief and even the stupid village chief—they defend the people and see to the laws and keep justice and all.”

“Do they,” he said neutrally. “And we, the Order of Runedaur: we are to defend the defender.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“And when the defender calls an alien army against those whom he is supposed to defend—?” The cold dawn of a new perspective suddenly chilled her confident righteousness. “We are sworn to the king. When this man Talherne betrayed the crown, we abjudged his authority and,” he shrugged, “left him to the justice of the world.”

“But what else could he have done, with his own people against him?” she protested.

“He could have tried being a better king.”

Berulf accepted Talherne’s invitation, and his gold, but he said to his thanes, “What manner of man calls a stranger, not even heart-kindred, to strike down his blood-kin? And he is no king whose own earls heed him not!”

The Godenaldring, the Council of Elders, considered this in long moot, whether to participate in the treachery of Talherne was a man’s work or a devil’s; but as the night deepened, and their disgust also, it seemed to them that prophecy was on Berulf’s lips. Perhaps the gods had brought them to this hour, their fists yet heavy with the last victory of Menovargia, for this very reason. They noted the signs. How fair the winds and tides had been, that sped the messengers between Berulf and Talherne, strangely fair! How curious, that the harvests of Menovargia had been rich and plentiful these last few years, strengthening the arms of the Golden Clans, where Peria had seen only deepening famine. Men spoke anew and with ringing voices of that comet that had blazed against the constellation of the Dragon, and when was that but in the year that Berulf had won manhood?

They called him before them and said, “We will go with you to the Wyrd-land, the Dragon’s country, but not as hirelings. We go as lords, and you will lead us to our greatest glory.” Then bards made songs over the richest sacrifices the Geillari had ever offered up, and burned sweet smoke to please the gods, and the stars looked down on the bronze glitter of the spears of Berulf’s armies as if into a mirror.

Only the bard Narhald the remote, owned by no man, spoke against them, saying that by neither sacrifice, smoke nor song could they escape the taint of the Dragon-king’s evil, if they took his pay. Not one of those who now made ready to sail to Peria would ever wear the golden crown; though he spoke, he said, not curse, but prophecy of his own.

With the wind of the dawn, the great red sails bellied, the oars struck out, and countless ships took flight over the mile-broad bosom of the Teodh-nan-Feill, to Talherne’s last stronghold at Feillantir. Narhald watched from the western shore, and lit his pipe and turned away.

They leaped from their ships screaming their battle-lust. The Lions, the princes in rebellion, turned their forces like an architect’s machine and cut them down like straws. But the straws kept coming. Every westerly wind bore still more ships on its breath, ships filled with madmen, as it seemed to the beseigers, and Talherne’s own troops burst from the city and struck as one with the wild men. When the third morning paled over the harbor thick with still more blood-colored sails, the beseigers, as hungry as the beseiged and aghast at the savages who knew no rule of war, broke and fled. Talherne watched the rout from the dark walls of Feillantir, and danced in triumphant delight.

Galbric Longhair turned to stare at him, appalled and revolted.

They stood on the wall with the king of the Dragon-kings, the three Geillan chiefs: Berulf, sixty and grey but still tall and strong; and Galbric and Felka, his right hand and his left. Galbric son of Gundr was first among Berulf’s liegemen and hearthwards, as well as his heart-brother; Felka the Grim commanded the half of the army that now drove the Sferan Lions like sheep. Talherne had bidden them there to watch rather than lead, saying that great generals wielded men as men wield swords. They came, still dazzled by the great king and his magnificently-armored troops and his polished marble halls and the rumor of the wisdom of the Sferiari. They came, but they chafed, and their swords were restless at their sides.

Galbric glared now at Talherne, still surprised that the king was so small, a full head shorter than himself: a short, scrawny old man with a scrawny beard, who shook his thin fists in the air and cackled with glee over the blood of his people spilled and their honor trampled.

“Who calls you king?” he asked of no one, certainly not Talherne, who did not know the Geillan speech. And his sword leaped, as if its own bronze spirit revolted against this unholy little gremlin’s wearing the name of a king of men. Talherne’s body fell in a fountain of blood. His head fell somewhat farther; the gold crown of the Sferiari struck from the stones a golden chime, and rolled almost to the feet of Felka. The barbarian picked it up dumbly, with fingers that scarcely felt it, like a man ensnared in dream.

Galbric’s shock at his own deed glissaded to battle-alarm: they were not alone on the wall. A dozen of their honor guards stood, colorful in red and green wool and gilt leather, and equally restless in idleness, in an uncomfortable mass away from Talherne’s retainers, like jewels in their fine silks and almost twice the Geilliadh’s numbers. For a moment every man of them, Geillan and Sferan, gazed stunned at the sudden corpse. Then Prince Caoine, last of Talherne’s faithful, turned with a shriek to the forgotten black border of the bright patchwork of uneasy allies. Not less than thirty Runedaur, the high king’s personal guard, ringed them all.

“Will you do nothing?” Caoine screamed.

Galbric’s grip clenched tighter on his sword. Berulf moved, only a slight shift to readiness. No man matched even one Runedaur and lived to tell of it; Galbric would die; but not alone.

Master Iridon glanced at the prince, who recalled belatedly that Talherne chose his guard from that branch of the Runedaur who did not speak, and thought as most men did, that Iridon and his kind no more answered an address than did their silent Lord. Only a phrase came to mind, like a memory of some scrap out of some ancient tale, though he could never afterward place it: I am Death, not Judgment.

Iridon looked at Felka, and the golden glory in his hands, and to the wonder of all, spoke, and in the barbaric tongue. “Do you know its name?”

“Teillorn,” said Berulf quickly, knowing his henchman’s ignorance.

The Runedaur turned to him. “What does it mean?”

“Circle of Sorrow.”

“Why?”

Berulf faltered. Iridon nodded. “Who answers that, wears it.” Then he turned as if to leave the wall. Caoine screamed again.

“Is that all you will do?”

Iridon thought about it. He walked back, stooped and lifted Talherne’s head by the fine grey hair and tossed it over the parapet. Then the Runedaur flowed like shadow before sunrise, and were gone from the wall. The battle the fifteen Geilliadh had to leave the palace at Feillantir became a matter of legend.

Later Rothesay spoke into the quiet night, “The Runedaur reshaped their vow to mean the office, and not the man.” She thought Dav was probably asleep; she also imagined he would answer.

“Yes,” he said.

“So, you’re shifty, and mutable according to the circumstances.”

“Absolutely,” he chuckled, relishing the irony.

She raised up on an elbow. “Standing firm is a virtue,” she challenged, scowling unseen.

“Often. Is it always?”

“I should like to be thought—” she began coldly.

“Answer the question asked,” he snapped. Then, once more conversational, “Is it always a virtue to be—rigid?”

She lay back down, worsted for now. Dav went back to sleep.

They travelled the next day in silence, a cross and suspicious silence on her part. Early in the morning they struck another highway, where it bent southward by a great stone-paved circle, an old Sferan site of Kavin’s airy worship, used now by the Geillari: charred wood in the central pit suggested a recent ceremony. Along this road, tracks branched straight out to either side, to clusters of farmsteads near or farther: the Geillari found the Sferan villas well served their preference for small scattered towns, and they filled them more gladly than the cities.

Traffic was sparse: a small party of a bard and his apprentices, and a blacksmith with a wagon, who stared without friendship and hurried on. Dav spoke up enough to explain. The road, of old the Cannisbe Way, now marked the uneasy border between the Dun Fearic of the kingdom of Wexsa to the east, and the Dunaltrealt’s Daradvag on the west. Dun Fearic served Odhru the Brean, but Daradvag answered to Deorgard the upstart; and as the Houses of Ristover, Carastwyth, and Andras lay just across the river, or at Andrastir, they were both that much more uneasy about strangers on the road.

“We should not be troubled; it is not so many seasons since our latest foray to, ah, dissuade the clans from hindering the Order’s travels.”

“But you don’t count on that?” she asked, hearing reservation in his voice. The Master laughed. No, you wouldn’t, she thought; ‘He who keeps not faith, expects only faithlessness,’ after all.

Folk tending their lands watched curiously as the travellers passed. Late in the afternoon, an elderly shepherd waved his boy away, and the lad ran for a clustered village a mile over the green. Dav hauled Rothesay up behind him; though he spoke no word, she felt his scorn for her awkwardness.

“I’ve never ridden before,” she mumbled. The ground seemed a long way down. She very much wanted something to hold onto, and equally had no wish that it be Dav himself.

“Indeed. And your first ride shall be uncommonly brief, if you do not hold on, unless your balance is as uncanny as your strength.” He reached back for her arm and planted it firmly about his waist. He glanced around at her, and licked his leering lips. “You’re a leggy one!” he observed merrily, and urged Dark Walking—Winddancer—to a brisk pace.

She overcame an urge to leap right back off. Instead, “I could squish you,” she growled, trying to be threatening.

“Yes; then what?”

She had no answer, but nursed her rage and humiliation in silence. Not for long: the strangeness of riding soon occupied all her thought, as her thighs stretched and her back ached and her bony backside wore thinner than ever. An increasingly miserable hour later, she suddenly realized what had provoked the Master’s remark: sitting about on a level with him, she was now no taller; the most of her height must be in her legs. Very well; but had it been so very necessary to be lewd about it?

“Ah, Midlands hospitality,” said Dav.

She started, then looked out. Shadowed against the reddening sunset, more riders approached, coming quickly along a side road that lay ahead and below them, down on the floodplain of a great river. One or two carried spears, glinting bloodily.

The highway descended through a wide cutting in the high bank to the bottomlands, and they briefly lost sight of the company.

“Do you think you can hold yourself on without, ah, squishing me? Do so,” he ordered without waiting for answer, and goaded the stallion to full gallop.

As the world lurched beneath her, she grabbed him with her other arm as well, and the horse with her legs. Her head cracked into his, dislodging his hat; she snatched it, slipped, and recovered, thanked him silently for sparing her another rude comment on her performance, and struggled to find the rhythm of this surging career. Dav yanked her close. Plastering herself to his back, she moved with him and he with the horse, and the crazy tumult became swift and seamless flight.

She peeked past his ear. Ahead, a long grey bridge leaped the dark breadth of the water in seven vast spans of crumbling magnificence. On the near shore, a rubble of stone marked the destruction of the old bridgehouse, and several other buildings as well. Glancing westward as they cleared the high bank, she saw the other horsemen taken by surprise by the trespassers’ gait, saw them leap at once to the gallop, but she and Dav should win this race, she thought.

They shouted in Geillan as they neared. “Alt-realt! Alt-realt! Liberty breathing, vengeance bleeding! Oeroe!”

“King Donalt’s out for glory points again,” Dav snorted.

On the road before them, a weird white bonfire blossomed suddenly; she felt its heat just as Winddancer reared with a scream and plunged aside. Dav hauled him back at once, straight through the fading ghostly flame. The air seemed full of tiny sparks that prickled her face and hands.

“Loosen up, damn it!” Dav’s remnant voice was a hoarse whisper. She almost let go entirely, then the horse leaped the first of the scattered boulders and she scrabbled for the Master's belt for a handhold. Another fireblossom burst open, this time falling behind them. An arrow smacked into the hard saddle leather just above Dav’s knee, as several others clattered into the rocks. The horse danced neatly through the tumbled stones at a pace that appalled Rothesay, and then they were on the open bridge, flying across to the grim southern towers. Dav laughed. “They think those stones lie just as they left them, when they ruined this place a score of years ago.”

Intrigued, she turned her thought to the horse. There burned familiarity, but in some distant place; he knew this lie, had trained on it and trained well. And she saw also a bright, fierce playfulness, a revel of skill and power. Dreamlike, in Dark Walking’s thought the pallid stones were also foxes, with teeth to break a careless leg, foxes that he, great stallion, spurned with his hooves. Once past, he wanted to turn and scream his triumph at them; but the other part of him, the rider, set his heart on speed, and the stallion emptied his own into the wind.

She blinked and tried a glance back, and saw their pursuers stopped, picking an uncertain route for themselves. As she looked, a giant spear, as it seemed, smashed into the rocks from somewhere ahead, and a second pierced the bank below the bridgehead. Two great machines on each of the southern towers readied two more missiles. Another handful of arrows rattled upon the bridge under the horses' hooves or fell to the bosom of the river, but the party behind conceded and drew back. Dav galloped all the way to the southern gate, the portcullis rolled up, and they trotted into haven.

A horseman, helmed much as Arngas once had been, with several more men on foot behind him, barred their way and swept them with a hard survey, then saluted curtly. “Master,” he acknowledged.

“Captain Dacharion,” Dav returned, and the man’s eyebrows leaped up.

“You know me?”

“But of course. Did you not rout that foray up the Farrastream last year? How do like the Sternbridge for a post?”

“More interesting,” Dacharion conceded with a grunt, clearly reappraising the Runedaur reputation. “Will you ask the hospitality of the Bridge-watch, or go on up to the castle?”

Dav paused. Rothesay wished she could see his face. “Which do you recommend?”

For all his unease, Dacharion could not wholly restrain a wry grin. “You ought to pay Lord Cathforrow a visit,” he allowed, “but you’ll find warmer welcome here.”

“I never refuse local wisdom,” Dav replied gravely. “We will lodge here, then, Captain, by your leave. Show me where I may wash: no need to scare Cathforrow more than I shall!”

He grasped Rothesay’s arm, pulling her toward the horse’s near side and extending his foot for her to step down by. She crawled stiffly from her perch, but when her feet found the safe ground, her legs buckled and she sat down hard on the cobbles. Dav dropped lightly to his feet and reached down to pluck the remains of his hat from her. The crown was crushed, and the gay plumes, snapped, dangled mournfully. He considered it while she waited for his wrath.

“Thank you for saving my hat,” he said at last, speaking with great care. Plainly he fought back laughter; equally plainly, he meant it. He regarded the hat a moment longer, then carefully and firmly settled it on her head. “Captain? Where will you house us?”

Despite weariness—she did not walk nearly so long or so vigorously alone as she did chasing the Runedaur, and three days of it had devoured her—Rothesay lay awake for some hours that night. She ached in strange new ways, but it was not only soreness that chased sleep from her. Even as her buttocks still remembered the pounding of the horse, her arms and breast and thighs still seemed to feel the hard body of the Master clasped close against her. She blushed in the darkness, and writhed against a fey pleasure that she did not understand.

At last she gave up and struggled stiffly to her feet. Dav was still out, on his call of courtesy, if it was courtesy, to the Lord of Ristover. She stumbled out onto the balcony, and hearing the river whispering past fifty feet below, wished for a swim; and found the narrow stairs, little more than jutting wall-stones, that led down from Captain Dacharion’s private porch to a small jetty. In the eddy in its embrace, hidden by the black cloud-veiled night, she peeled off her rough garments and slipped into the silky water and for a timeless while forgot soreness and strangeness, exile and faithlessness, under the comforting touch of Teodhan, gentle Lord of Water and of compassion. She crawled back to bed without bothering to dress, and slept at last dreamlessly.

She woke in the morning straight to the recollection that she was sharing this room with the Master. Dacharion had surrendered his own apartments to honor his august guest, placing Dav in a stony alcove well-softened with thick furs and silks; the novice had a pallet and blanket on the floor next the wall. Silently, warily as a small hunted thing, she turned her head.

“Good morning,” said Dav. He stood before a small, elegant table, and combed his moustaches in the captain’s mirror. Rothesay curled into a tight ball, pulled the blanket over every bit of bare skin below her chin and wondered how to get into her clothes without getting out of her wrap. Dav looked around at her silence. “Good morning,” he repeated, and when she peeked up, grinned insufferably. “Bit of a dilemma?”

“Good morning,” she mumbled back, as if politeness would inspire him to go away.

“We could see who’s faster,” he offered mockingly, exchanging the comb for a razor and beginning to lather his chin. She sat up cautiously, and when he turned back to the mirror, made a strike for her bundled clothes. The man remained intent upon his toilet. She dressed swiftly, clumsily, several times getting her cold, wet braid—still plaited in the fourfold handiwork of Raian’s little servant, though practically felted by now—caught into the windings of her breastbands, and making of those an untidy mess that would be falling to her waist ere noon. She lashed the crossgarters about her calves with wrath. By the time she was done, he was leaning casually against the table, watching her; she had no idea how long.

She blushed. “Amused?”

“No,” he replied thoughtfully. “Are you ready now?”

“Er, for—?”

“Breakfast comes to mind.”

She blushed again, feeling abominably stupid. She nodded, hunching into her shoulders. Breakfast—would it be with the garrison soldiers, like supper? They had teased her, or tried very hard to do so, ragging the ‘boy’ about whether ‘he’ thought even the Runedaur could make a man of him; she had idiotically suffered for a while, till she realized that, in the safety of the Master’s escort, she need not. Then she had turned and brightly pointed out that she did not want to be any kind of man: she was a girl and she was going to be a sorceress. That had worsted them, briefly.

Suddenly she frowned at Dav. “How did you know I was a girl? Back at the inn, when I was, er, in the brawl?”

To her surprise, he told her. “Women put their weight forward, more on the balls and toes; men ride more on their heels,” he began, demonstrating. He showed her differences in gesture, in speed and in character of grace; subtleties in the use of eyes and tensions of the mouth; even breathing, high in the chest to low in the belly. He warned her that no one woman, nor any one man, showed all the appropriate traits: one watched for an overall impression—and for incongruities. Yes, it was a lot to remember, he agreed; most interesting things were. With practice, observation would be as habitual as breathing. And with that, he told her how to breathe, and turned to go down to his breakfast, and she followed awkwardly, for the first time in waking memory confounded by trying to breathe and walk at the same time.

In the mess hall, while the Master sat again with Dacharion, she gave up on the breathing instruction for a while, in favor of practicing the manly nuances and trying to observe the reactions. Then she carefully downed a mug of small beer, stared deep into it for a long time, and set about clearing her place with all the feminine character she could recall. Breakfast ended suddenly.

As she hobbled sorely after Dav and Dark Walking as they passed at last under the iron—iron! and it was just as black as rumor made it; she wondered what it felt like, as it looked like a very hole in the stuff of the world—gate of the Sternbridge, Dav glanced down at her. “Quirky sense of humor you’ve got, chit.”

“What?”

“Clearing out the breakfast-hall like that.”

She beamed, surprised and delighted that someone, even Dav, saw her joke. “Oh! They did notice, then, did they?”

“Without knowing what they noticed, yes, they did indeed. And you played it not too broadly, either. Well done.”

Her spine straightened with the praise, and she walked gladly for a ways, as the stony street wound up the high and hilly riverbank. The bridge-town of Carastloel leaned into the steep slope: second and even third storeys, facing riverward, opened onto ground level behind. The road twisted beneath the wall-girded sheaf of towers of dour Cannisfell Castle; and out of its shadowy gate a horsed troop rode across their way.