Banner of the Damned (101 page)

“You knew they were coming,” I said.

“It was my idea,” Anhar admitted. “She’s so unhappy, and, ah-ye! On my last visit, the duke parted with the duchess, and he wanted to go far away. Farther than Lassiter, where his father and his father’s new wife are. He did not want any of the duchess’s money, and Birdy did not want me to pester you for transfer tokens. So I returned here and arranged for them to be hired. It wasn’t difficult. They remembered Birdy, and trained people are needed. They worked their way across the continent.”

“They?”

“The duke—he says we should call him Kaidas. That is how he’s known in the stable. Anyway, he brought his little boy, Vasande. Come
with me tonight, after the watch change. We often eat together. Birdy so wishes to see you.”

She whisked herself away. I’d thought Kaidas and Lasva’s relationship was a secret I’d shared with Lasva. She had been so careful, bringing him in and out of her suite by the back way—sending me out in her clothes to parade along the Isqua’s Assent at the Hour of the Lily—but Anhar, I had learned, was both observant and quiet.

Who was she, really? In her own way, she had influence. How do we measure influence, I wondered as I walked back to my tower, my emotions in turmoil. What did Anhar do now that Kendred was in the Academy, other than water potted plants?

As always, my instinct was to shift to Darchelde, use the dyr, and delve into… whose mind? I could not bear to look into Birdy’s. The duke would be little better, if his constant companion was Birdy.

I fretted around my work room uselessly until I noticed something in my sketches—had to adjust it—tested the spell, and the next thing I knew the watch bells were ringing beyond my windows, and Anhar appeared in a fresh robe, her hair fixed in a Colendi style.

I brushed drawing chalk off my sleeve. “What are your duties now?” I asked as we walked out.

She laughed. “I’m the Seneschal. You didn’t know? Your tower seems to be more guarded than the city.”

“I cry pardon,” I said. “I have been so busy with my assigned tasks—”

“Oh, everyone knows how hard you work, Emras. And I have seen you. I cry
your
pardon, but I cannot help finding it funny, how powerful you are said to be, yet how… ah-ye… oblivious.”

She chuckled as we ran down the stairs. The stable had living quarters over it, noisy dorms at one end, where younger folk lived, and at the other end sets of four small rooms built around a central gathering chamber. Each had a table and mats all around it. Into one of these shared salons Anhar walked, me on her heels.

The sound of Birdy’s voice after so long made me prickle all over, and I ducked behind Anhar as she spoke her greetings. Sitting cross-legged on a large mat in a corner was a cluster of children, plates on their laps, laughing as they ate; a fair-haired boy ate neatly, his fingers passing small bites behind his lips in Colendi style. His eyes were black.

“… and here is Emras.”

Anhar stepped aside, and there was Birdy. He stooped over me, held out his arms, then dropped them quickly to his sides. “Em,” he said. “I
forgot what a little thing you are.” He ducked his head to peer into my face. “You are thin as a leaf. And you look tired. What do they have you do, bespelling horse stall wands all day and night?”

“Something like that,” I said. “But I like it.”

“You were always a good worker,” Birdy said and gestured. “Meet Kaidas.”

The duke made The Peace and spoke a formal greeting, as if we were first meeting. I responded in kind as we sat, me at the empty place at the end of the table, Anhar at Birdy’s side, their thighs touching. The three stable hands adjacent to me exchanged uneasy looks and left, taking their plates with them, the last one calling to a girl in the corner, “Marend!”

The girl heaved a sigh and got up to follow.

Kaidas put his brows up, and Birdy said, “It can’t be us, so it has to be you, Em. Are the rumors true that you slew half an army with thunder and lightning?”

“I used stage magic to frighten a… a what did they call it? A wing. However many that is.”

“Eighty-one warriors,” Birdy said. “How did it get from that to a slaughtered army?”

“The king used some of my spells in another instance,” I said. “I wasn’t there.”

The atmosphere of hilarity sobered, then Birdy shook his head and made an effort to lighten the atmosphere again. “Do they really think you’re going to sit down to supper and then smite them with lightning?”

Kaidas said, “I think it’s more like they are afraid if they say something amiss she’ll mutter something mysterious and their pricks will fall off.”

The children in the corner howled with laughter at the word “prick” as Anhar observed with hands at Neutral, “One was a woman.”

“Her nose?” Kaidas offered.

One of the children said, “Breasts!”

“You don’t have any,” a boy said scornfully. “And two things can’t fall off for one spell.”

“I don’t have any
yet
,” the girl replied just as scornfully. “So one falls off.”

“Maybe your butt falls off,” another boy said, causing another howl of laughter.

“That’s two things,” Vasande observed, two fingers up.

The children went on suggesting body parts as the adults looked my way, then back, and raised their voices tolerantly over the children’s. I
comprehended two things: that this was normal talk, and that I had missed a cue, perhaps to wave my hands mysteriously and intone something while gazing at someone’s body. But I had never done that sort of thing, even as a child. For the first time I wondered if Tiflis had dropped me when I went to the kitchens not because I’d been shamed, or even because I wasn’t showing her how to do our work, but because I was boring.

“… can actually move my elbows,” Kaidas observed.

Birdy grinned my way, breaking the unhappy thoughts. “You ought to sup here every day, Em. It’s nice to have the room to ourselves for once.”

After that it was all chatter. Twice before the end of the shared meal Kaidas asked about Lasva indirectly and listened closely to Anhar’s answers. When he finished his meal, he rose, saying, “Vasande. Time for lessons.”

The boy executed a perfunctory bow to us, then reluctantly followed his father out.

Birdy turned toward me, and I rose when I saw the curiosity in his face. “I had best get back to work.”

Birdy’s lips parted. Anhar dug her elbow in his side. He blinked, then said, “I hope you will join us again, Em. Soon.”

“When I can,” I said.

Kaidas caught up with me before I’d gone fifty paces.

“I’m here to see Lasva,” he said, dark gaze searching my face. “Anhar is a romantic. What do you think? Is Lasva happy? Do you think she will talk to me?”

Though all our lives had changed, old habits persist. My hands came up in the scribe’s neutral pose, and I expect my face smoothed into scribe mask, for his own expression altered.

“Forgive me,” he said. “This should not tax your scruples: if she asks, tell her I seek only an interview. If she asks.”

“I will,” I promised.

“What did he say?” Lasva was waiting in my rooms when I returned, dressed in her black and gold robes that I usually saw only at Convocation.

“He seeks an interview.”

“Why did he come?”

I said cautiously, “Anhar was there in Alarcansa when the duke decided to leave. Did she not tell you?”

“I have never asked about her visits home. I thought my questions might be an intrusion,” Lasva said. She passed her hands over her face. “It is better as things are. I must join Ivandred.”

On his way out of Colend, the kitten cradled in one arm, Kaidas and Vasande had stopped in Lassiter to say goodbye.
You were wrong, Father. Love does not die
.

So you are chasing across the entire continent after a woman who hasn’t written a word to you in ten years?

That I am.

The baron had laughed.
Ah, son! I will say this. Even when you act the fool, you do it with style.

Lasva and Kaidas saw each other the next morning when she went down to the women’s side of the garrison to talk about the New Year’s roster with the guard captain. Kaidas was in the training yard. He saw the flurry of women guards, and in their center Lasva walked, outwardly like the Marlovens, yet she seemed to float between the long-striding guardswomen.

She knew he was somewhere in the castle and looked around as she hadn’t for years. And there he was, taller than she remembered, broader through the chest. His hair was short like laborers wore it, thinning at the temples. The same and not the same.

Their eyes met. Both waited for the other to turn away, then unheeding guardswomen walked between them, and they were lost from one another’s view. She turned her steps away, aware of her dry mouth and shaky limbs. It had to be old habit, but even if it wasn’t, they were not the same people they had been… and love never lasts, everyone said.

She caught sight of her tightly clasped hands and the ring glinting there.

Lasva summoned me later that day. “I think it is time for me to make a journey and talk to the northerners face to face. I will start at Sindan-An, which is almost as pretty as Colend, if you look past the ugly stone castle. I am going to circumvent this war if I possibly can.”

She left that day, and I buried myself in wards, inspired by the relief I would feel once I’d relinquished the kingdom’s magical guardianship to the Herskalt. No matter how hard I worked, how much I studied, I was never going to understand things like the Herskalt could.

I did not intend to return to the stable, but when Anhar invited me to join them downstairs for Altan fan practice, I could not resist trying just once. It had been so long since I’d done my fan routines I was afraid I’d forgotten, but I swiftly discovered that the body remembers.

Anhar had begun to learn it—and so had Kaidas, apparently as a warm-up during his Defense days. So the five of us (Vasande alongside his father) worked slowly through the forms, and Birdy and I fell right back into our old discussions.

It was self-conscious at first; I had the sense that he’d thought out his questions beforehand. The universality of literature, the effect of interpretation. But from there we launched headlong into all the old byways: food, and its effect on culture, Kaidas admiring local pale ales and rich stouts, and Birdy observing that barley grows well everywhere, even in Marloven Hesea, which is noticeably colder than Colend; the differences between honor and
melende
, especially in court, where what mattered was the style with which affairs were conducted, sometimes more than soft words exchanged during the Hour of Reeds; the Chwahir, Sartor, and political casuistry.

Birdy never asked me about my work.

Two months later, at the height of spring, I received a letter from Lasva: