Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

Sorchone stood by the apple’s bole and breathed very, very evenly. A knight of the Runedaur could walk blindfold with ease -- and many could run -- down unfamiliar halls; some of the masters, the ones with a taste for such skill, could run blind through wilderness. Blind combat was a favorite part of training, a game Sorchone played well. Now drawing on all his skill, once again he stilled himself, for any sign of an adversary, or quarry, within these ruined walls.

Rothesay was not here.

He looked up into the dim branches. If she had run back up into the tree, he had heard no sign nor sound of it, still less of her branching out again. A master could have known if she were up there, he supposed; at least, he intended to have so much skill in time. But for now he would resort to other means.

Assured of his solitude, he turned awareness within. Silently, he called up the syllables to open a finding-spell. He had power enough at hand for so simple a working; nonetheless he felt his knife, his real, bronze blade, not the wooden training toy, grow warm at his side: in this he kept such power as he could not bear to contain in himself; it was his talisman, his ‘magic canteen,’ as he sometimes wryly called it, though it held many times over what he himself could endure.

The ‘light’ created by the spell, a fine golden glimmer invisible to those not witch-sighted, filled his folded, cupped palms. He raised his hands over his head, and opened them, releasing the light, directing the glow up through the branches to the outermost leaves; spreading his arms, he sent it out and back to earth like a golden mist, and everything it touched sang in his mind, a cacophonic music of shapes and places and textures.

The feel of the power flowing through his soul was, as always, an almost physical pleasure, but this time he observed also its alienness. Trying his senses without magic, as he had done just a moment before: unusual it might be, but it was natural, human, no less human than a keen thought or a perfect gesture. But the spell felt strange; if it had a nature, he might have thought it almost reptilian. On consideration, it always had, but he had always ignored that, buried that beneath the effort to make it more. He felt faintly queasy.

As he closed the spell, it brought him one last impression: in the tree, in the very stuff of the tree itself, he thought he saw a swirl, as of a thick fog or smoke disturbed by some recent passage. But there was no Rothesay, not anywhere in the reach of any of his powers.

He stepped back, frowning in thought, but not unease. She was here, and now she is not, nor gone by any means I can make out. Thus either I am overlooking something I know, or I am encountering something new. Either way, I am vulnerable. He turned slowly, stretching his awareness out through the little enclosed grove, letting the apple ward his back for him, and someone tackled him to the ground—from behind.

“Awp—phh!—uh, hi!” Rothesay squeaked as he writhed about to strike.

He seized her throat, but forbore to press: her eyes in the dimness already showed white all around. She clutched at his tunic.

“Back to the Hall? Good idea! Yes, let’s, why don’t we?” she babbled, but without the sense to get up to do so.

It is a rare and potent thing, to be a young man on a sweet warm night in late spring, sprawled beneath a lovely but distressed young woman. He loosed her throat and kissed her.

“Mmphha!” She leaped away in surprise, stumbling to her feet. “Oh! Oh, that was rude of me, Shoni, I’m, uh, sorry . . . .” She put one vague hand to her lips, as though her fingers might make more sense of the event than her mouth had.

“The apology is mine,” he replied smoothly, flowing to upright himself. “It was callow of me, to take such advantage of your distraction.” He felt no little distraction himself: on the one hand, roused and unslaked lust cursed the interruption; on the other, being thus mastered by impulse, however fleetingly, shamed his self-mastery. Trying to be Runedaur could be a damned pain, at times. And there was the little matter of her curious disappearance and return, and the alarm that radiated like cold moonlight from her, demanding immediate heed. “Roshi, where were you? You’re frightened.”

“No, oh, no, really, I’m just—er, let’s go back?” she pleaded.

She still touched her lips as though she touched his kiss. She felt thoroughly rattled, like a leather ball in a kickball game, bounced from one weird boot to another, yet however weird kissing still seemed to her, it struck her now as wonderfully human. She wanted to plunge back into it, if she could think how. And she did not want to tell Sorchone, or anyone—any human, she thought, with a little shiver as she saw how she distanced herself from the name—where she had just been or what she had done, and mostly she wanted to forget it herself, just now.

Sorchone grabbed her shoulders. “Don’t push me away!” She blinked stupidly, wondering if that meant she should hug him, but then he let go one hand to caress her cheek. “You’re frightened,” he repeated softly. “Tell me why.”

Right: if she were frightened, he must be wondering if whatever-it-was might come get him too. “Oh—no, it’s all right,” she assured him. “It—uh, it’s not, uh, here.” In a manner of speaking, it was; she could cross into the Otherworld probably at any point in this one; or could, once she had worked out what Onions had been trying to show her.

“Don’t push me away,” he said again, gently but implacably. “Are we not friends?”

“Oh! Yes, of course we are, Shoni. But—oh, please, I don’t want to talk about it now, all right?”

Both his hands stroked her face, and he shook his head. “You look as though you had looked on the dead,” he murmured.

“No, I quite like ghosts.” She peered at him in the gloom. “What do you want of me?” she asked suddenly, not knowing why she asked at all, much less then.

Sorchone laughed in surprise. What did he want, indeed? In many ways, she seemed so much more like almost-seven than almost-seventeen. He squeezed her shoulders affectionately, and, taking her arm, started for home. “I think,” he answered slowly, smiling, “I want you to grow up.” It occurred to him that Kahan had seen this long since. That would explain a great deal about his approach. “And I think your Kahan must be my best friend.”

“What?”

“Ah, no, and that I do not want to talk about now, all right?” he echoed her. “Kingscroft dances tonight; will you dance with me?”

“I’d like that.” After a while, she sighed. “Shoni?”

“Hmm?”

She sighed again, more deeply, but there was nothing for it, so she tried to ‘disembowel’ him.

Back through the Swale they passed in truce, silent guardians of one another’s flanks. Then Sorchone led the way through a derelict district. Pocked and root-cracked lanes wound back and forth up the lower northern slopes of Caiernarrand; Sorchone cut them short by way of crumbling stairs and brick-littered alleys.

Stone struck stone, somewhere ahead. He pulled her into an arching hole in the wall that had once held a door, and peered cautiously out. The half-moon would not rise for an hour or so yet, but the stars were bright enough to wash the ruined tenements with a thin grey pallor—and deepen the shadows. Rothesay peeked out around him.

Three—five—no, six men lurched into the alley’s mouth. Sorchone melted back, as if to seek the deeper reaches of the room at his back, but stopped almost with a jerk. Wood, too weakened and weary to groan, sagged underfoot: no more than two ells’ length was left of the former floor, and neither could guess what lay beneath, bare ground or deep cellar.

Footsteps beat erratically in the alley, but they were trying to beat softly. Once or twice, a stray thump joined them. Once, someone growled indistinctly, and someone else hissed a whisper.

The footsteps stopped short of the arched doorway. Then a red glitter, like a faint powdering of ruby dust, spread along the alley’s far wall, along its floor, and, presumably, along the near wall as well, thinly illuminating the bricks and the breaks: someone out there had magelight.

Rothesay saw its sheen glint in Sorchone’s eyes as he turned to her. There was meaning in his glance; she could only hope she understood. She felt more than saw him leap for the door, and then an explosion of golden light usurped all vision. A hand—Sorchone’s—grabbed at her wrist, and they burst into the alley, barreled through the blinded vagabond band like balls through ninepins, and ran.

Pursuit thundered after them. But after the almost instinctive, “After them!” the yells from the men became strange, nonsensical: “Arroot! Sonder!” “Arroot! Cap lace!”

“Signals!” she heard Sorchone mutter. “Damn and blast.” Darting from lane to alley to broken boulevard, he fled like a fox. Other voices answered their pursuers, near, far, some even from rooftops. “Well, two can play at that.” He rounded a corner, redoubled their speed, turned another corner, stopped short and bellowed, “Arroot! Novarre!” Then he pushed Rothesay into an empty room, and paused to gulp for breath.

“What—was that?” she gasped, as silently as possible.

“Novarre—name of the street opposite this one. Hope that they buy it! Ah, then: let us see what may be down here.” He made his own magelight, keeping its golden glow dim as he played it over the floor. Apparently disappointed, he collapsed it, and the blind dark reclaimed them. “Nothing helpful here,” he murmured, surprisingly close to her ear. “A bit further, then, hmm?”

“Why are we running? We can’t handle them?” She had no desire to fight; she had less desire to run, and still less for Sorchone to think her weak.

“We could kill them.” A thoughtful moment later, he added, “At least, I could. Sometimes, babe, honor obliges power to flee.”

“Oh.” And I wanted power so I’d never have to flee again!

Back outside, Sorchone crept, silent as shadow, deeper into the maze of rotting architecture. No sound of pursuit could they hear, not running feet nor shouted cant, but the young Runedaur moved as though hunted by a Master. Rothesay’s shoulders began to ache as if she carried a massive weight. The night stretched into eternity.

At last, nearing the heights of Caiernarrand, Sorchone found a particularly narrow alley that seemed to please him. He hurried along it for perhaps twenty yards, and then froze. Rothesay bumped into him. A whiff of meat just beginning to go bad hung on the heavy, warm air.

“Now, what—?” he murmured warily, and pushed gently at a shadow in the shadowy wall. Old wood muttered annoyance at being disturbed, and the unpleasant smell thickened. They stepped in softly, and Sorchone, casting his magelight upon the floor, cast himself into pure black silhouette for his companion behind and lit up a man almost at her left elbow. With all the grace and accuracy of Arngas, Rothesay loosed her belt knife and plunged it into the outlaw’s belly.

Too much force. He scarcely quivered, yet her forearm sank into the meat of him almost to her elbow, and she felt the cloth of the back of his shirt wipe her knife-hand. Appalled, she tried to yank away and he came after, his tongue-lolling leer unchanged. A stench of putrefaction rose like a choking fog.

Sorchone flung one arm about her shoulders and thrust the other against the outlaw’s chest; the man swung away as she pulled free her hand, but she was too maddened with horror to note that he swung, or to make sense of the sash rising from about his neck to the low ceiling beam. Gibbering faintly, she flung her knife away and flapped her sticky wet arm about as if to shake it clean again. Sorchone’s voice roared indistinctly in her ears.

A sudden blow; the world buzzed softly and faded into pale shades of grey and brown. A time of no time later, blackness returned, gilded at the edges with magelight, and stone was damp under her hands and the air was damp and cool and her head thundered.

“You hit me,” she mumbled thickly.

“I did,” Sorchone replied gently, and gently added, “and I may do so again, if you will lose your senses again.”

Rothesay sat up sharply, trying to push herself away from her own, stinking hand. “Gaaaaah—awph!” A gout of cool water dashed into her face. “What—?”

“This is an old cistern. Wash your hands, and let us continue. I’ve a rare eagerness to be home.”

Still she sat, glaring at her guilty limb, till Sorchone reached over gently and pulled it into the water for her. She let him wash it for her, numb as a child, and stared at it when it was clean again, as if making sure it was truly her own flesh. “I—oh, Shoni, d-did I kill him?” she whimpered at last.

“Not you, love. He had been dead a day, at least.”

Abruptly she remembered the neck cloth. “He—he killed himself?”

“Not with his hands tied behind his back. I fancy he was executed, but whether as a traitor or trespasser, I could not say; though, belike, we should have been companions to him.”

She still stared at her hand. The sensation of cold raw entrails sliding over her skin, up her arm, swallowed all the world, and she shook and shuddered. “Oh-oh-ohwphhh!” She bounded to her feet, and swiped her sleeve across her dripping face. “Would you stop splashing me! Listen, you—you’ve no idea how horrible that was, how disgusting, how, how, eww, aaughh—”

Sorchone clasped both her shoulders firmly, breaking the entrancement of her own hand, forcing her gaze from it to him, stilling her. “I would rather not even imagine. But you, babe: can you imagine how it had felt, had your arm fallen off and acted all of its own accord?”

“What?”

“Humor me.”

“Err—” She remembered one old tale, of a wicked enchanter’s severed hand that crept through windows to strangle infants; something like that, then. And what it must feel like, the cold, dead, wet corpse-flesh upon her arm, her disembodied arm . . . . She writhed, revolted, and shied away from the thought.

“Excellent,” Sorchone murmured. “Imagine it, then, as though it happened to someone else entirely.”

“What are you getting at? —Right, right: ‘humor you.’ Fine.” It remained a disgusting, loathsome thought, and she told him so.

“Oh, but of course; there is naught to be done about that. But you, love: do you not notice?”

“No. I don’t. Notice what?” she demanded sullenly.

“Are you not so much calmer, when you put that thought, the very same thought, as if in the mind of another, not your own?”

Her eyebrows tried to merge in bewilderment. “Am I?”

“I haven’t thrown water in your face again,” he pointed out.

She frowned, and stared again at her hand, and sank once more into the grisly memory, from which she was snatched by Sorchone’s seizing her nose and chirping wildly, “Teedle-eedle-eedle-eedle-eedle!” as he jumped up and down. She leaped away from him, clasping her nose protectively.

“You’ve gone completely mad,” she breathed softly, and he laughed.

“But I am Runedaur: what else? Now, you: would you be mistress of yourself, or enslaved to your own fancies?” A tip of his head towards the black archway through which he must have hauled her from the corpse’s room made clear which fancies.

“What? ‘Enslaved’—that’s silly, I’m not—no such—it’s just—” and yanking her hand away from her nose, stared at it and fought not to vomit.

“Are you not? If you are mistress, dismiss it from your mind!”

She shook her head, slowly, her eyes huge and helpless. “I can’t. I can’t, Shoni. That’s impossible—I’ll never forget that—!”

“True enough,” he conceded cheerfully. “But you can command just how you remember it, and rob it of all power to distress you!”

And now she stared at him instead of her hand, a wordless stare that begged for his explanation. Gently he took that hand and as gently fastened it on her nose. “There, now: hold firm and, whenever that loathsome thought rear up again in your soul, take your nose, thus—twist, but gently—and shout, ‘Shoni’s got a great big whanger!’”

Rothesay flung her hand from her face and gasped, “What!”

“Come, come, Mistress!” he chided, at once merry and implacable. “Hand,” he took it; “nose,” he pushed her resistless hand onto it, “and: say it!”

A snort of reluctant laughter escaped her as she thrust her hand down again. “This is stupid! What’s a ‘whanger,’ anyway?” she demanded suspiciously.

His eyes danced, all innocence. “Whatever you wish it to be, babe! —A great sense of folly, perhaps,” he added, before she could object. “Come, do as I say!”

He reached for her hand, but she dodged his grasp; slouching, she touched her nose, then straightened with an exasperated giggle. “No! You’re just making sport of me. It was really horrible, Shoni, and you’re—”

“—Already reviving you from it,” he purred.

“Er—what?”

He grinned. “But, you see, babe, you will never, ever be able to think of . . . that . . . again, without also thinking: ‘What’s a whanger?’”

Her jaw dropped. “No!”

“Yes!”

“No. Er. Really?”

He shrugged. “Try it.” And cocked a masterful eyebrow when she looked at her knife hand, and snorted most gracelessly. She pitched him into the cistern for reparation, but he took her with him, and a glorious water battle ensued.

Still more gloriously, as at length they dangled breathless and laughing from the cistern’s stone lip, she accepted, first, his arm about her shoulders and second, his diplomatically offered mouth.

More like seven than seventeen. He sighed inwardly, broke off gently. “We are missing the dancing,” he deflected.

“Oh. Right. You said.” Her confusion between relief and disappointment almost made him laugh aloud; he kept silent, but noted it as optimistic for the future. She turned, set her hands upon the stone to haul herself out—

“Not that way, love,” he smiled, showed her the glyph carved in the wall, and vanished down into the water. Surfacing a moment later, he explained, “Many of the old cisterns connect. By this under-way, we shall avoid our hunters, and come out through the north-quarter baths, and be but a block from home.”

She glanced around the low-vaulted chamber, deep beneath some once-fine mansion. “Whyever did they build their cisterns to connect? Couldn’t thieves get into those baths, or something, and—?”

“They did not build them so,” he grinned. “We, ah, amended them. Come.”

Back in Kingscroft at last, several of her dancing partners remarked on her wet but no longer squelching garments. “Well,” she trilled giddily to one, “you’re naked and I’ll bet I’m cooler anyway!”

And in the Silver Novitiates Chamber, her young roommates thought it great fun that she gathered everyone’s pallets and pillows together so they could all sleep in one great friendly familial heap. Rothesay slept in the middle, walled on all sides against the long uncanny day.