Banner of the Damned (11 page)

Gradually her voice and mood lightened, leaving me wondering why it is that so many of us humans may love a thing, but we still test its value against others’ opinions: She was happy here, but she still wanted me to envy her, because she envied me being employed by a princess, even if she had scant interest in the actual work.

“… and so I’m hoping to find an illustrator to pair with me. Nali says you get promoted faster if you can create a style together. Nali also told me, in the first week, that everyone wants illustrated books, at least the capital letters, these days.”

That was the fourth “Nali says.” I wondered if Nali had replaced Sheris in the way that Sheris had replaced me.

“How about Thumb?” I asked. “He was one of us—he was easy to get on with—and I never saw anyone draw as well as he did. Remember that sketch he made of Scribe Aulumbe when she stuck the quill behind her ear when it was still full of ink? Three lines, it seemed, and he had her very expression.”

“Thumb’s already been promoted to inker, and they say next year he’ll be an illuminator, youngest in thirty years. Way beyond me from
the start. He’s at Laurel House, doing erotica, so I couldn’t get him as my illustrator even if he wasn’t so far ahead of us all.”

“Erotica,” I exclaimed, trying to imagine absent-minded Thumb illustrating people cavorting in sensory abandon.

Tif grinned, clasping her hands around her knees—the princess now forgotten, I hoped. “Did you know that most men arouse seeing drawings, the more detailed the better, but most women prefer poetry and text? But it all changes when they give one another pillow gifts.” She shook her head. “I don’t quite get it yet, though Nali insisted I go to the pleasure house with her a year ago winter, for my first time. And it was fun, but…” Tif wrinkled her upper lip. “Here I am, already eighteen, but it still takes forever to warm up. I like practicing on myself, and at the House of the Thistle, I play cards. I am deemed quite good, especially at Riddle.” She turned her head cantwise as she regarded me. “Have you and Birdy twistled yet?”

“Birdy!” I exclaimed. “We never—”

“Em, you’re not a baby anymore.” She threw up her hands in
don’t cross my shadow
. “The way he used to stick to you, we thought he was sweet on you.”

“Only as a study partner. And he recently left for Chwahirsland.”

“Poor thing! What an ending for the fellow who thought himself the smartest of us. So you two never trysted?”

“Never even thought about it.” I was about to say I hadn’t had time, but I was afraid she’d think me bragging about how important my time was. “As for pleasure houses, Mama offered to take me for my first time, last home visit. When I didn’t particularly want to, she told me she didn’t warm until she was twenty.”

Tif snickered. “Maybe you’ll warm if you hear her highness groaning away—she’s sure to be better at it than everyone, like we hear about everything else she does. How close are her rooms to where you sleep? Does she really have rosebud carpets on her bed as well as all her floors?”

The princess hadn’t been forgotten. Tif’s voice was casual, but the way she leaned forward, her breath caught as she waited for my answer—this is why I was invited.
It wasn’t family, it wasn’t our old friendship. It’s ambition
.

Betrayed, even affronted as I was, enough of the old bond remained for me to say evenly, “I have not seen her sleep chamber, but I’d be surprised if anyone hears anything.”

“Then again there might be nothing to hear. In the new play at the Slipper, there was a new Handsome wearing a blue bow all the way through, and the Veil couldn’t see it, though everyone else did.” “The Veil” was always a royal figure, usually the princess, and the blue ribbon
in Handsome’s hair meant that the court’s most popular man had his eye on someone royal. Except that no one gossiped about the queen’s private life, so it had to mean Lasva.

Tif peered intently into my face. “You are now the closest to her. If you tell me—I am determined to find out any way I can, because it’s the only way to get ahead—then I’ll know what to do. And you needn’t think I will tell anyone who my source is. I don’t want you stolen, so any secret you tell me is perfectly safe.”

What a blow to my heart—and, it must be confessed, to my pride. Here was the real reason Tiflis had written to me at last. She was using our family connection to delve for whispers!

I knew I should get up and march away. But what would happen? Tif would do what she said she would do, find another way to worm into Lasva’s private life.

So… what if I tell her what Lasva doesn’t mind the world knowing?

“They have to be making up something that isn’t there,” I said, and because Tiflis gave me a skeptical smirk, “I see Princess Lasthavais every day in court. There is no veil hiding her expression, so I can attest to the fact that she’s never taken the least interest in Lord Vasalya-Kaidas Lassiter, if he’s the new Handsome. Nor, from everything I’ve seen, does he in her. He’s too busy with his many flirts.”

My tone, my hand in Lily-Gate mode—openness—caused Tif to sit back. “Ah-yedi! If
you
haven’t heard anything, then it’s only smoke, to sell seats. I thought so. I shall take great pleasure in telling Sheris she’s made a hum of herself yet again.”

You have to remember that everything that had to do with the Chwahir culture was despised by us. For generations Colendi were scolded out of the otherwise innocent human penchant for humming because of the famous Chwahir humming choruses. To be a hum was to be risible.

“Sheris thinks the new playwright at the Slipper is a courtier in mask. She only comes over here to brag about how the archive is the center of any news. Hum! Now, my friend Nali says…”

I left soon after, my emotions in the greatest turmoil I’d felt since the day of the Fifteen.

My cousin pretended an interest, but what she really wanted was news. However, that didn’t disturb me nearly as much as her words about Birdy.

EIGHT
O
F A
D
ISINTERESTED
I
MPULSE

F

or days Tif’s remark continued to disturb me. I could not define why. Not loss. Not regret. I was unsettled.
Birdy?
Interested in
me?
Birdy with the jug ears and the juggling, always ready with a joke? I never would have thought of Birdy that way. He was just a friend. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the look in his eyes when he had said “us” had been hurt.

I am going to sidestep into another’s thoughts again.

Lord Kaidas (called “Handsome” after the male figure in court plays, representing the latest male who’d caught a royal eye) was impatient with formality.

It had only been impulse to wager against the Gaszins. He couldn’t have said why. He hated trouble. But the Gaszin brother and sister had been a shade too smug, and so, for the sake of a moment’s laugh, he promised more money than he had to wager against them.

The result? He was the slightly embarrassed recipient of a small fortune. Though he was continually stressed for funds to support his racing stock, those things were separate in his mind: his racing wins went to
racing needs. A windfall must be spent on whim. So when court left after Midsummer (and still no heir) he travelled south for the first time, to attend the Music Festival in Sartor.

His friends practiced their well-honed wit on him at this sudden curiosity for old culture. At that time, few knew about his talent with painting.

After two days of slow travel, he hated the journey.

No, he did not
hate
it.

Nothing bothered him enough for hatred. It was even a matter of pride. As his father frequently said, you regarded the vagaries of life with a sense of humor, and if you didn’t like something, you did something else. Hatred was too fatiguing an exertion and never flattering to one’s style.

His father had also said when Kaidas first went to court, “If you don’t want to end up exiled like Thias Altan for five years, then stay away from Hatahra. And her pretty little sister, when she comes to court.”

Kaidas, young and already popular, had said lazily, “Right now I have trouble finding time to be alone.”

“That can change with a snap of the royal fan,” said the baron, his expression sardonic. “Ask Thias someday how many friends he had left after a half a year exiled to his estate. He laid out more money than we’ll ever have in either of our lives in his attempt to set up a second court. But they all go back to Alsais sooner or later.”

The baron rarely spoke seriously. His son listened when he did, and avoided the crowd around Princess Lasva. Not that that was any hardship. Court was full of attractive people.

Then came the Dance of the Spring Leaves, and that smile she gave Jurac of Chwahirsland. He was intrigued enough to stay assiduously away from the princess. Too assiduous; when he realized that his determined distance was causing idle speculation, he left court entirely, claiming he had to get ready to go south for the music festival.

He was going to find out what sort of nature lay behind that smile, but he was going to manage it without causing gossip. That made it a game.

He lived for games.

Above all, humans crave happiness, we are told.

Sublime is the sense that
now I am happy.
The curious thing, at least in
my experience, is that one can look back and think,
I was so happy then
, even if at the time one thought the day filled with an unending stream of small vexations.

Lasva’s elaborate entourage set out for Sartor.

I reveled in belonging to the royal carriage, which would never have to halt for other traffic. My place was with my back to the horses, and I could not command a stop when I was tired, or demand food and drink when hungry and thirsty, but I had earned my place.

The happiness was unalloyed only in retrospect. At the time, I was also anxiously determined to observe something of use for Lasva. I longed to make so penetrating an observation that she would clap her hands and throw them out in Bird on the Wing, overjoyed with my perspicacity. And if I didn’t, would she want another scribe?

After a day or two at Skya Lake’s peaceful shore, in order to recover from the exertion of the gentle ride down the river road, the courtiers set out again. They paired off as we rolled west through aged forest shaded by what some said were a hundred types of oak and hickory, stippled by red maple and white ash. We’re told that many of these trees were brought in hoarded bags of acorns through the World Gate eons ago. If so, here was evidence of the trees’ children, grandchildren, and blended descendants, all in the green glory of summer.

I watched courtiers flirt—not that I witnessed anything worth relating. We scribes are supposed to remain invisible, which means we must never be caught staring. The eye is quicker than the mind at catching other eyes. Though I also tried listening, the courtiers’ soft voices in the musical cadences of our language revealed even less than visual clues. I began to fear that the princess would be disappointed in me and send me back.

At an elegant riverside village we stepped into waiting barges for the ride up the Eth, and then another road journey along the north-flowing river on whose barges we would return to Colend.