Banner of the Damned (4 page)

I

I knew my face was blotchy and my eyes red when I appeared in the kitchen dorm. At least the only ones there were the early morning bread-makers, all asleep. I scrubbed my face and hands. Then I put my trunk on a roller and made my way back to the scribe students’ quarters above the heralds’ hall. My sense of triumph was dashed by grief when I discovered that someone had taken my old bed next to Tiflis’s, where I’d slept for almost five years. We entered the school aware that we did not own anything but our tools and clothes, yet I’d thought of that bed as mine. And I knew that if Tif had been sent away, I would have done everything I could to keep it empty against her return.

I ran down to the dining hall, wanting to be the first so either Tiflis would sit next to me like the old days, or she wouldn’t. She must choose. I could bear her walking away slightly better than being south-gated, that is, turned away.

I heard their voices. My stomach roiled as Tiflis sat across from me. Not next to me, but at least she didn’t sit at the end of the table. The girl who sat next to her with a chin-lifted, proprietary air was Sheris.

“After your interview. We all got protocol marks for not helping you.” Tiflis wrinkled her nose at me.

“You didn’t help me,” I said, hands flat in Observation Without Judgment mode.

“And the tutors know it.” Birdy took the place next to me. “Nash said we would have gotten them anyway, and Emras would have gained one for lying if she had said we helped her.” He addressed Tif, who gave a tiny jerking shrug, like shaking loose a leaf that has fallen on her shoulder. Or the touch of a hand.

Faura sat on Sheris’s other side, running her fingers through those golden curls of which she was so proud, as none of us were old enough to earn a wage to pay a hair dresser for a better color. She always had some excuse for not tying her hair back—but the tutors didn’t always believe her, and so she’d often gotten deportment marks.

Deportment marks—like having a disordered robe or forgotten tools—meant tending ink pots and cutting paper for the tutors for a week. A protocol mark meant recreation time would be spent in service for as long as the tutor giving the mark deemed appropriate.

Faura fingered her hair and glanced Sheris’s way, but Sheris ignored her. “Protocol marks, and we didn’t even know. I so wish they wouldn’t
do
that to us.”

“Life in the palace is always a test,” Birdy said.

“Ah-yedi!” Tiflis exclaimed, eyes rolling in Too Obvious. “Remind us your sister is on the queen’s staff, Birdy. We might have forgotten.” She wrinkled her snub nose again. Though she’s a year older, we look enough alike that people think we are twins, as our mothers are twins. We are both small and wiry, with round faces. Only Tiflis got our grandfather’s dark waving hair, and my hair is plank-straight and light brown.

Tif nudged Sheris the way she used to nudge me. “So who do you think is out?”

Their speculation was boring, mostly justifying the brilliance of their own answers. I was glad when Sheris signaled she was done, and Tif and Faura followed her out, leaving Birdy and me alone.

“Want to know what I don’t think you heard?” he said.

“Yes.”

“There is likely to be a single opening in the royal staff, for the princess.”

Princess Lasva was still “the princess,” for her sister was still trying every Midsummer to get an heir via the Birth Spell. If Lasva were to be proclaimed the royal princess, or heir, she would be given a staff of scribes and tutored in statecraft.

“That’s why the senior scribe tested us,” Birdy finished.

I touched a dab of wine jam to a finger biscuit and set my knife down. “Why us? Won’t the princess pick from among the journey scribes?”

“None of the three is eligible.”

“No one eligible? What is amiss?”

“The fellows are elas. If one was elan or elor…” He shrugged.

I stared.

I had dropped through an unseen hole in the familiar world when I was summarily sent to the kitchens. Now I was back in the scribe world again, but it seemed as soon as I had stepped on the familiar ground it had opened once again, dropping me to a new and terrible world in which Tiflis turned away.

Birdy’s words caused yet another drop. “Why should anyone care if they like women, or men, or no one at all? Rule One is no interference or influence—”

Birdy flicked another look down the table, then said in a low voice, “My sister says that elas or elendre fellows all seem to go zalend over Princess Lasva.”

I will not assume you understand our idiom. There are many words with elen, to love, as base. The feminine suffix “as” joined with third person singular “el” meant a preference for women, as “an” was the suffix for a preference for males, elendre meant a preference for both, and elor, for the person who prefers to remain asexual. And, combining zad, or storm, to the adjective form of love, elend, indicated a wild passion. We all used the term—but about food or fashions or the momentary ecstasies of youth. None of us knew what the adults meant, though we all thought we did.

“They’ll want to pick a female for her, unless the princess asks for a male. For sure it must be someone excellent not only in writing but parroting.”

Being trained to hear and repeat conversations was common among scribe families. The toughest tests were in languages one did not actually speak. My parents had made it a game, becoming more serious when I turned six and showed my readiness for the family trade. “Parroting” sounds more difficult than it is. There is a trick to recognizing the patterns of speech, anchored to root words, and remembering the whole.

But not everyone could do it. The first elimination of potential royal scribes happened around age ten, and the inability to master parroting was most often the cause for students to be sent to less arduous, less prestigious training.

So I was still eligible to train as a royal scribe—and the others had known it. That explained my lack of welcome. “So the class wanted me out.” Yet another hole to drop through.

Splat! One of the bags landed on the table, knocking into my cup. “You’re too loyal to that cousin of yours,” Birdy muttered.

I righted the cup, which at least had been empty. “I thought we are supposed to be loyal to each other. Isn’t that part of the Second Rule!”

“So did I.” Birdy started the bags circling again, a little faster, as he lurched from side to side on his cushion. “So did I until I woke up that day and they were south-gating you for being sent to the kitchen, even though we were all there in the room when Kaleri asked for help, and we all ignored her.”

“You didn’t say anything to her. I did.”

“Don’t you see? We really were all to blame, because we were complicit.” He said the word with a slight emphasis, the pleasure of knowing just the right word. “After you were sent off, the others were glad. And, yes, I was glad, too. Not that you got into trouble, but that you were gone. Out of the competition.”

One of the bags flew beyond his fingers, and crashed into his cup. He flattened his hand on the top of the cup. “But then we heard you at The Fifteen, and I think we were supposed to. I think the test wasn’t about what we know. They know what we know. I think the test was about how we act, how we treat others.”

I said, “You always used to talk about shadow kissers in my direction.”

“Yes.” Crash! A bag clattered into the serving bowl, causing the students at the other end of the table to look our way.

Birdy made The Peace in apology. “You were always so good, though you’re the youngest. Never a deportment mark. I thought there was no difference between you and Sheris, who also never got deportment marks. As soon as you were gone Sheris started praising Tif. Soon as Tif started following her, she shoved Faura away. That’s not the Second Rule, it’s a pretence at it. Do you see?”

“Maybe Tif was lonely,” I said, feeling my way. Yes, that explained Tiflis’s turning from me. I could understand it. Maybe I could forgive it, if she came back.

“See? See?” He tossed the bags in the air. “They pretend to live by the Second Rule, because today, when Scribe Halimas gave us the protocol mark, as soon as he was gone, they blamed you, and not themselves. But when you gave your answers there under the tree, and we all heard you, I thought, you are trying to live by the Second Rule. You didn’t blame anyone but yourself.”

He thrust the juggling silks into his pocket, put his dishes on his tray, and left.

A

Our first lesson was to differentiate between what we observed, what we had learned, and what we conjectured, or assumed, because sometimes cause and effect are not so simple to identify.

I know it will seem fantastical (if not prevarication) to add to my defense testimony parts of other people’s lives—incidents that you would think I could not have seen, and words I did not hear spoken at the time. Thoughts that the thinkers locked inside their heads.

I promise these are not surmises.

At the far northeastern end of the kingdom, Lady Carola Definian sat down to breakfast with her father, the formidable Duke of Alarcansa, as the palace bell rang the three-note chord of the Hour of the Leaf. This was the time the duke had been raised to consider the most civilized and decorous for an aristocrat to begin the day.

The duke had not criticized her for well over a year. “You’ve turned
out prettier even than your mother,” he’d said last winter on her sixteenth Name Day, after eyeing her meticulously: dainty and small, but perfect proportions, straight back, rounded at bosom and hip, hair that never required a curling iron. She had the best of the Ranalassi looks (for which her father had married her mother), and the Definian brains. “If you demonstrate
melende
commensurate with your breeding, I will take you to court.”

I must pause here and remind those not familiar with Colend that
melende
does indeed come from the Sartoran
malend
, or the
love of-grace-in-movement
. In Sartor, “malend” came to be used for the dance. In our Kifelian, as always, the singing three syllables of
melende
—emphasis in the middle—connotes what has often been translated in other tongues as “honor” or as “the court mask.”

The definition of honor differs from land to land, culture to culture. I will have more to say about that eventually. But
melende
is the life of art, it means control and grace even when you are alone in your chamber, even if a lightning storm burns down your house.

Carola shared her father’s conviction that a Definian must always excel in everything—that the Definian
melende
must transcend style, rather than merely harmonizing with it.

In anticipation of her presentation at court, she’d paid a poor courtier connected to her mother’s family to sketch the latest fads and fashions each month. She spend a small fortune luring a well-regarded court dancing master to Alarcansa, and she practiced at baronial balls and fêtes. If she could not excel (and no amount of practice made her riding or singing any better) she dropped an activity. Meanwhile she ordered an extensive wardrobe that could be adapted at the last moment, so when her father determined by his internal standard that she was ready, she would be able to give her servants a single command, and they could depart the next day. That was style, the outward-most form of
melende
.

So when her father bade her good morning, examined her from pink hair ribbons to satin-covered toes, and said, “Tomorrow we shall depart for Alsais,” she was able to reply with complete composure, “Very well, Father.”

She reveled in the minute relaxing of his narrow lips that indicated approval, and said the thing she knew would please him most. “I will make my farewell visits to our dependents.”

Visiting the dependents was the tedious but necessary dictation of personal messages to be dispatched to baronies of Alarcansa, then the equally tedious carriage ride to call on the principal guild masters and mistresses in Alarcansa’s capital, and last of all, on the palace people.

She fully intended to carry out this duty. But first, the delicious triumph of giving the news in person to her two female cousins, who awaited her in the dining room as Cousin Falisse tried to coax Carola’s silver-tailed parrots to quote poetry.

Tatia Definian, whose mother was younger sister to Carola’s father, would accompany Carola. Her joy was expressed in gales of high, tiny giggles and breathless, fawning praise. Carola smiled, turning as she always did to the mirrored insets along the wooden inlay in the wall in order to assure herself that her smile accorded with
melende
.