Rory chose silence for the season, though he had also elected to sign, and Rothesay quickly picked up some skill in ‘chatting’ with him. Dav would not sign with her, though he seemed to approve of it generally; well he might, as she felt that it was like dancing with her hands alone. When she signed this to Rory, he started, stared at his hands, and grinned.
Grin.
Lacie’s hands danced suddenly down between them. and her signs were both emphatic and lascivious. Rory just gave her a wink, and she laughed, and dodged Rothesay’s training dagger.
The eve of Yule, the last night of the year, saw nearly all of Colderwild huddling outdoors on the towers and walls or in the open courtyards, watching the stars. The young moon, a little short of her first half, had set hours before, and no fire or candle burned anywhere in the hold. From the mountains behind to the forest beyond them, starshine upon snow was the only light in the world.
Two of the previous Loremaster’s particular students and one of Merry’s, all knighted now, were astronomers, and set up on the Tower of Stars with bobs and angles. Clouds skittered over the heavens, and Rothesay clearly heard one of the astronomers swear, to be soothed by one of his fellows. Beside her on the wall under the Tower of Night, Flick shivered and stomped his feet, but he was too proud to accept her invitation to join her under her cloak. Rory snorted, shoved the younger boy aside, and huddled in gladly. Then he poked her in the ribs, tucked his unlit torch under his arm and signed, slowly in the faint light,
She shrugged.
Rory’s undignified snort made her look round in puzzlement, but he only stared across innocently at the astronomers on the far tower.
At last one of them raised his hand and, a moment later, sent a brilliant white flare streaking into the dark sky. With one voice, Colderwild roared. Those armed with hand bells brandished them vigorously. The two great bronze bells at either end of the hold began to toll their deep, sweet voices. The astronomers lit torches, passed the flame to the people standing by them, who in turn lit the brands of their further neighbors. Someone touched off the huge pile of logs in the fire circle and a great cone-flower of golden light blossomed. With the flame came song, as folk sang as their torches caught; the hand bells slowly faded, light blazed in a great meandering necklace, and Colderwild sang much as they had on the field before Andrastir, or for Hael, but livelier now, quicker to change from one tone to the other, and the two-note chord leaped and twisted, danced across the hold from wall to wall like a flame of song.
For perhaps a quarter of an hour the song played, before dissolving into laughter and cheering. Everyone filed, or leaped, from the walls and high places and hurried within, lit fires in every hearth, set cauldrons of cider and wine mulling with honey and fine spices. Black garb was cast off for green, red, and gold robes instead. Songs of the more usual kind, with melodies and words and verses, spread through the halls. Those who had been silent seemed bent on making up for it, as though speech welled up behind a dam that now burst. Someone launched a kissing-chain: take one, pass it on. Rothesay, having accepted a determinedly friendly salute from Rory, passed hers on to Elraic, who, as expected and hoped, received it with great decorum. Lacie rolled her eyes, but she crowed, “At least you played!”
The party rocked and reeled till dawn. Hungrier people roasted acorns and apples, geese and turnips, but many simply drank their way to the sunrise. The game of Ghost did not abate, though Rothesay saw more than one encounter which she was sure neither victor nor victim was sober enough to remember next day. The first fiery limb of the Sun blazed above the southeastern heights—its position carefully marked by the Lore-students, as the last one had been marked yestereve—everyone cheered, banged things and rang bells again, and by the time Areolin fully cleared the earth, nearly everyone had gone back to bed.
Rothesay did not. Though groggy from staying up the whole night, she had drunk little, and still felt like dancing, if rather more gently than earlier. She wandered through the now-quiet passages, out into the half-snowy, half-icy courtyards where she tossed another log onto the great fire, and ambled up along the walls. A sharp whistle from Kavin’s Tower brought her head up, and Master Cal gave her a friendly wave.
“Just keepin’ an eye out,” he explained when she had climbed up to him. “And there’s little Navan on the east wall. Garrod was up on Night, but I told him two was enough.”
“Who assigns guard duty on the holy days?” she marvelled.
“Assigns?” Caltern took another deep swig of spiced tea, still warm in its well-blanketed little pot. Then he shrugged. “Whoever’s got a sense of survival assigns himself. Or herself. Then if you see it’s pretty well covered, you leave it to whoever’s more wakeful than you are.”
“What if you go to sleep on them yourself?”
The big man shrugged again. “Nothin’s perfect.—Tea? Good for ya.—Come out here, find your guards asleep—Ghost ’em. Beat the devil out of ’em. Then go away and remember nothin’s perfect. What’re ya gonna do about that? Depose the gods an’ make your own world to show ’em how it’s done?” He put his mug down daintily, took her wrist, planted one foot behind hers, and gently shoved his fingertips into the base of her throat, gently, but it still made her cough. Worse, it made her want very much to step back away from him, but his foot was there, and beyond that the emptiness of the open air and a long drop. Had he put any intention into it, not all her peculiar strength could have kept her from going over the edge.
“You could get killed any time. By anything. Ravn got that in his face—lucky him, he’ll work it out before the rest of ya.”
He let go and Rothesay edged over and leaned to peer down into the spiky tops of spruce trees, far down the cliffside below the tower. A stupid death, Móravn had said. And so had Mina’s been, her foster-sister; and her mother’s. Going into battle was different: death was the point, even if one’s own was not precisely planned for. Just going along in one’s life and then suddenly dropping dead like poor Hael: what was the point to that?
“Why’s there got to be a point?”
Her jaw dropped. Wrinkling her nose, she retorted, “Back in Floodholding, Master D was about to kill this fellow and he cried, ‘Spare me!’ and Dav said, ‘Why?’”
“Sounds like him. Good question. What was the answer?”
“Good question?” she cried. “Here’s a good question: why do Runedaur masters ask crazy questions, like ‘Why do you want to live?’ and ‘Why should there be a point to anything?’ and think they’re good questions?”
She had to leave Caltern after that, as he could not seem to stop laughing. Too much Yule wine, maybe.
Alone she climbed the Tower of Night herself, nestled in the same southeastern dragon’s mouth that the students used for the Truce Hole. Her view looked down upon the meeting of the Dorchastir-Kavinsrae road and the track by which Dav had first brought her, neither of them much more than a horse-trail through the snow. Dav’s Track (as she thought it; Colderwild called it only the Back Road) disappeared under the snow-heavy boughs of Kaine Forest through which Mistress Iril had led her hunting. Beyond the Kaine rose the teeth, white now, of the Dur Daorfen and faint beyond them a hint of the high Dur Nefraith. Blue the sky and white the dazzling world under an untroubled sun; a good omen for the coming year, or so she hoped.
The Sferiari looked on the year as a kind of Great Day, and they counted a day from one midnight to the next. Yule, the Midnight of the year, was for them an intercalary day, counted with neither the last year nor the coming one. The Geillari began their year with the spring equinox, making today the thirtieth of Thaer-orn, Dark-month, but not less holy for that. Either way, a feast greater than last night’s partying would begin at sundown; toothsome smells were already beginning to waft up from early cooking.
Padriag used the Sferan calendar, and Yule always gave Rothesay an airy feeling of standing outside time, as though from this day the future could become anything and the past could have been anything. This year, that seemed to have come true.
Last Yule she had been, as ever, a foundling, ‘the’ outsider of her little village, the wizard’s apprentice. Now she was the granddaughter of a dead foreign king and niece of a current one, and long ago saved from death by someone who seemed to be working also for her would-be killers, people out to stop her mother from taking the throne with a hidden treasure, perhaps the greatest treasure of the land she now called home.
Two men had died at her hands, her strange enchanted hands that sometimes seemed to belong to someone who was himself long dead. She ducked her head shamefully. There at least was something comprehensible: she had killed twice, and if it had happened almost accidentally, still she was responsible and she owed—something.
She puzzled over that for a bit. Geillan law demanded that a killer pay the blood-price of the victim. That set everything right, as far as the law cared. The dead man’s family, however, were all too likely to go on trying to exact further vengeance; the murder itself might have been vengeance for some still earlier retaliation, ultimately for some crime lost now even to the bards’ recall. She agreed that paying over a sum of gold seemed inadequate to a man’s life; but what else was one to do, after all? If we’re just going to go on feuding, why should I even so much as apologize?
Dav had spoken in ritual, not of atonement but of—transformation. I guess, she thought slowly, I’d better learn what that means. And slowly she decided that, whatever else she did in the coming year, she must settle those two debts somehow. Dying at any point seemed fearsome to her, but dying with even one unresolved murder on her name was surely a particularly bad idea.
Why, though? That must be something to do with her moral ‘code.’ She grumbled and pitched a cranky snowball far out beyond the wall. She was getting beastly tired of that project, and the more so as ineffable bits kept arising, like the weird emptiness that was the ‘emanation’ or something of Arngas who wrote cryptic notes about ‘no rules’—
What would you think if you had no words? Dav’s question after the battle before Andrastir leaped suddenly back to mind.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Aaaaaugh!” she bellowed.
— aaugh!
— augh
— ahh
echoed the stones of the hills. She stared out at the snowy land and with great deliberation refused to be embarrassed. Whether people notice me or not, whether they think me silly or ridiculous or uncouth, it’s no business of mine. And there’s not much I could do about it, either. She put her thumb to her nose and waggled her fingers dismissively at the world and, suddenly cheered, rolled to her feet and prepared to climb out.
She grasped a stone tooth by which to swing out onto the rope—and froze. Oh, hell. Oh, all the hells. She sat back down sharply, still clinging to the tooth.
Find the king.
Oh, yes—that, too: in addition to suddenly being an enchanted murdering royal granddaughter, I am also apparently in service to a dragon. The Dragon.
What did that mean, anyway? You don’t really want Treskiel, do you, Majesty? And if you do, what, am I supposed to go waylay him and drag him off to, to—?
She let go and bit the back of her thumb. On the one hand, here it was midwinter, more than half a year since she was first, um, commissioned, and Marennin had not so much as demanded a progress report. The great dragon was very old; doubtlessly, time passed differently for her, so maybe all these months scarcely mattered. Rothesay hoped so. On the other hand, she could hardly put it off forever—whatever ‘it’ might be. She wished she could ask Padriag.
Well, why not? If she was to so much as pay the one fellow’s blood-price, go she must back into the North to do it—maybe the Runedaur would let her simply send the payment somehow, but that seemed like cheating, oh my aching ‘moral code’!—and could she pass so close and not visit her old teacher?
In sudden delight, she flung herself over the stone dragon’s teeth, seized the rope and swung wildly wide.
“Yeeahhah!”
—ahhah!
—hah
—ah
Far to the north, torches, candles and magelights drove the early afternoon darkness from the halls of Castle a Geste. After the solemn daytime rites invoking the return of Areolin into the northlands, the people fought the early night with weapons of wine and ale, song and laughter, music, dancing, feasting, and flirting. At one end of the Great Hall the Solstice Tree sparkled, bedecked in gilt suns. At the other, by the roaring hearth Sonaay eldu-Seremay sparkled in the midst of a fair-sized orrery of admirers. Her sudden laughter pierced the merry crowd-noise, pierced to the heart of her eldest sister, brooding alone in the shadows of her now-habitual corner.
Asilay el-Seremay rolled her cup of wine slowly in her wasted hand. Time was when it was she, Asilay, who turned the head of every young blood in the province, Asilay in the center of every fashionable circle, ‘Asilay’ on every poet’s tongue.
Sonaay’s pregnancy had not yet thickened her waist beyond the power of artful drapery to conceal. Not that her admirers would have minded. In the capital’s decadent circles, yes, perhaps folk might have lifted a supercilious nose. In Eirenseld’s homeland, though, the old ways lingered, and a young woman of proven fecundity was rather more valued than not, for otherwise, how would anyone know whether a girl were merely chaste—or cursed with barrenness?
Asilay’s hand clenched her goblet. She hurled it then at the head of the young slave at her feet and, half-blinded by the inner smoke of wrath concealed, grabbled her way from the merry hall. Away, into the dark and cold of her secret passages she hurried, acid instead of blood burning in her veins. No one must see, no one must guess that she bore Sonaay anything but a doting sister’s love.
They were few in Eirenseld who were so blind, except the one who needed most to see.
Not long after her sister’s unremarked departure, Sonaay gave a little start. Wondering, she waited, the conversation about her passing unheard. Then it came again: a giddy little flutter as though some tiny butterfly tried its wings for the first time, deep in her belly. “Oh!”
The chatter around her faded. Before her radiant face, her audience of admirers paused, curious, expectant of some new festivity. Sonaay’s hands flew to her abdomen.
“I felt the child!”
In another gay hall another girl only a little younger than Sonaay also laughed and played before a court of admirers, though ones considerably more circumspect than their Eirenseld counterparts. For one thing, Daliowna Atil though incomparably lovely was nonetheless still a child before the law. More importantly, everyone knew that Prince Treskiel’s spies watched for the least hint of unseemliness towards his sister, and no one cared to probe the sorceror-prince’s definition of ‘unseemly.’ That she was a half-wit was plain to all. That she must under no circumstances be treated as such was just as plain: the one man ever caught at it still dangled from Cannisfell’s towers though his bones were three years’ picked clean and many had broken away as the wind dashed them into the stones—and him no churl but a noble son of Tregaron. And however bitterly House Tregaron had protested his murder, they had no one the match of Treskiel na Cathforrow.
Yet admirers Daliowna had in abundance. A child-minded wife was but a trifle to pay for alliance to such as the Cathforrows; a beautiful one and a pleasant, still better. Therefore Treskiel employed many spies—and some, people said and shivered deliciously, were never men at all but vipers and weasels under manlike enchantment. Daliowna teased and played and revelled in the Solstice celebrations in unparalleled security.
As his sister and his courtiers and his growing stable of young brilliants danced in his glittering hall, Treskiel Alan withdrew, for a while, to walk his frosty battlements. Frosty, not snowy: knowing their lord’s habits, the servants of the castle kept them scrupulously shovelled clear, even in the midst of blizzard. If a snake might be enchanted into man-form, the converse spell must also exist. Treskiel smiled to himself.
Above, the dim stars of midwinter. He cast them a wary glance; he had not again probed the mystery of their height since the night of meteors, and only slowly had he been able to force himself back out-of-doors under their lofty indifference. Now before him, however, close and familiar lay the starless velvety black of the barbarian-controlled lands beyond the satin-black river. Below him, as if within the grasp of his own hand, lights sparkled throughout Carastloel, merrymaking in many halls besides his own. Prosperity graced Ristover and her people bestowed their gratitude evenly upon their gods and their mysterious prince. How nice, he thought, wondering again what Heaven had to do with it, what divinity had ever inspired the least workman to replace so much as a loose cobble in a street, much less rebuild a road. Other powers in the world pressed far stronger claims upon respect. Treskiel lifted his gaze once more from his people’s homely constellations to the emptiness of the north and east, towards dark Sparca, and mused upon Catha-keys.
And a floor below the brilliant feast-hall, in the very middle of a long and doorless hall, Captain Garragan eyed his two hooded companions, took a coin from the bag they offered and bit it dubiously. Then his eyebrows rose, and he smiled.
In Angowin, the Geillari celebrated the northward return of the sun as joyously as the imperials. Hearthfires and torches blazed in every holding, torches blazed in long lines through the snow-packed forest as merrymakers paraded from hold to hold singing and begging and crying down blessings as they went according to the hospitality of the house.
Deorgard did not parade but stayed in his royal hall, to receive the singers and pelt them with fistfuls of honey-candies and bright brass trinkets. Among the trinkets flew the occasional gem, semiprecious or precious, and even a ring of copper or gold, and the king roared with laughter as the revellers scrabbled and squabbled among the rushes for every last treat. He roared still more when, as happened often enough, a real fight broke out for possession of one bauble or another. Then he would often order the combatants to wrestle, and on one of these occasions, late in the night and deep in his cups, he turned to give Raian a huge wink.
He was lucky to find him there at all. This one night no thrall had any duty—never mind that it must mean double chores on the morrow. Raian grimaced more than grinned at Deorgard’s acknowledgement, and rose and withdrew alone into the shadowy side-aisle and sipped his mead.
For much of the previous fortnight the king and his entourage guested in Maglad’s hold. There Raian had seen Deorgard’s one surviving child, his daughter Angolaf, she being married to Maglad’s eldest son. He had also seen Angolaf’s attendant kin-thrall, and could only stare.
About his own age, maybe a year older, Gulda was taller than he—though he had recently been shocked by realizing that he had somehow become nearly as tall as the Wolfman, if yet much bonier—but she was surely the loveliest thing in woman-form the gods had ever sent to grace the earth. He wanted to compose a poem likening her braids to rippling rivers of gold. Her eyes reminded him of the waters of the lake that had been their prison in the Myrinine, a beautiful blue in a girl’s eyes but nothing less than weird in a lake and he could not think how to turn all that into something complimentary. Word-trammelled, then, he had said nothing at all, till Wolf slugged him one evening.
“What do you want to go staring like that for? Give a girl the creeps, why don’t you!”
Far from stirring him to action, this reproof only knotted him more tightly in nerves and confusion. Eventually his own slave Sorchone offered a suggestion. Raian thought it sounded a bit too urbane. Sorchone proposed that urbanity was what this race craved, what they had come into this land to possess. Raian had only just wound himself up to giving it a try when Deorgard left for home.
So he sat now, never tasting the mead, hardly knowing that he drank at all. He had no idea what he might have done then, had he actually spoken to the girl. Maybe she would have wanted him to kiss her, and he would have had to be an idiot. If kissing was as simple as it looked—or maybe there was some subtle art to it that he should know—
Shadow fell between him and the unheeded firelight. Startled from his gloomy reverie, he looked up as the shadow sank down, fragrant with cooking-spices and washing powder, and he recognized Embroch, one of Deorgard’s lesser cousins. A pleasant-featured, pleasant-humored widow in her twenties, she had been a friend to him since his arrival, and often encouraged him to talk not of imperial battles and strategies, as Deorgard demanded, but of his family and the minutiae of his life back home. Now he felt something rough and crumbly touch his hand.
“Here,” she said, her voice as always seeming on the edge of laughter, “I tried to make that honey-cake you described, but I must use raisins until you teach me how to know winterberries!”
“Mmph,” he replied around a mouthful. It was not quite right; being no cook himself, he must have overlooked or mistaken one ingredient or another, but it was delicious in itself and he told her so as soon as he could. “Thanks!”
She shrugged and pushed dismissively at her hair, which he abruptly noticed flowed unbound, a heavy silken cape about her shoulders. As abruptly, he seemed to forget how to breathe. A few crumbs clinging to his fingers felt like huge embarrassments, and he wiped them away in a sudden daze. “’T is no night to be glooming, alone in the dark,” she observed warmly, and took his hand and flowed easily back to her feet, and waited.
He had no awareness of gaining his own feet. Neither had he any thought to decline—he had not missed Embroch’s deft accent on ‘alone’ and he felt now like a being all of fire and air—but against the chance of her disappointment or his chagrin, he had to speak. So he hesitated, and stammered, “I—don’t know what to do. . . .”
Embroch tipped her head, half-veiling her face with her swinging hair, and smiled oddly. “I do,” she said simply, and led him from the hall.
Flame spilled across a mirror. When the shifting veils cleared, the mirror showed again a darkened man-hall. Marennin waited.
You sleep, she grumbled at the rumpled, drowsy figure that shuffled into view.
I do, he chuckled.
The dragon paused. Then, Do you dream? she asked, diverted.
Yes. I dream.
The dragon’s tail twitched, shattering a splinter of rock. Celtannan used to dream, she mused.
No doubt, he replied. How may I serve you, Majesty?
Marennin stretched to lay her long head on her long forepaws and yawned luxuriously. My king has waked. We must prepare for him.
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