Banner of the Damned (65 page)

“So I listened to this catalogue of my flaws: eyebrows too faint, nose too pointed, upper lip this, lower lip that, ears not quite another thing, until they had thoroughly assessed every single feature, then they moved on, leaving me feeling like… like a commodity handled in the marketplace.”

She looked up at Ivandred, the hunger so acute and so painful I was flung out of the circle—then caught and flung back. I perceived the Herskalt shaping the perception, creating a bubble of awareness around me.

Then he let the bubble pop, and I gazed down into Lasva’s face from a perspective I’d never had in life: from a taller person’s view, one who noticed the length of her eyelashes, the shudder of her bosom beneath the flimsy gown. It was a distinctively male awareness. His senses organized differently from mine, with a strong erotic component that sent a
thin thread of fire through my vitals, the urgency more painful than pleasant. Even more disturbing was the echo of his thought, a memory of the Herskalt’s wry voice,
Most foreign kings and queens make speeches. They want to be remembered, and no one will tell them, or can tell them, how very boring they sound.

Voice distorted into mushy loudness, and once again my identity shredded, now going three ways, tumbling between the “now” of the scene, the now of my body crouched in the hidden chamber, and the then of three people’s memories. I was propelled out of the circle, into swimming black motes.

And I found myself lying on the stone floor. Excruciating pain lanced through my head at the tiniest move. For a time I could only listen to my own breathing, evaluating each one. This breath was a good one, the next bad. I tried to move. My stomach surged. Another good breath. A third, deeper.

Gradually my awareness included the wash-and-thump of my heart, which sent counterpoint pangs hammering in my skull. The nausea quieted, the pain eased enough for me to become anxious about lying there alone on the floor. Where was the Herskalt? Would he really leave me there to die?

No. Teachers did not do that.

It’s a test.

I knew all about unexpected tests. I’d endured six months of one, and as a result became first choice for royal scribe.

I could overcome this pain. It took a long time to achieve a sitting position, though I had to grip the leg of the table for the world swung and hitched so mercilessly I knew I couldn’t stand.
And I still have to transfer.

No, I couldn’t bear that. I opened my eyes a crack and caught sight of something lying on the table beside the Fox manuscript. It was a slim book. I slid my fingers over it, then tried to fully open my eyes.

No one knew where I was, and I had not eaten or drunk anything. The pain in my head nearly struck me unconscious again. I was just able to sweep the book off the table. I lay down again, the book clutched to me, and slid into sleep.

When I woke, I braced myself and underwent a transfer, straight to my bed, then slept again. I woke feeling feverish and clammy, my skin sensitive, my eyes confused by a gradual change in the room: dawn.

I made it to breakfast. After a few bites of bread and some water, I began to recover.

Nobody showed the least interest in my having missed meals. They went about their daily affairs as if I did not exist. I did not see Birdy walking the outer hall, which meant the weather had cleared enough for the animals to be exercised again. So I returned to my bedroom and opened the book. It was entirely written in Old Sartoran. Another test!

It was tedious and difficult. The language was archaic, and the magic concerned binding ships against water, mold, and other types of damage. This knowledge was nothing I would ever use, and for that first day, as the headache slowly diminished, I wrestled with impatience. But work steadied me, and when I became accustomed to the rhythms of the words and the antique turns of phrase, I began to gain a rudimentary awareness of how magic must balance against the natural inclinations of things to fall, or to be rent apart by forces such as wind, waves, and weather.

The days were marked by study and by the occasional glimpse of Birdy, who always seemed to be busy.

When I finished the book, I transferred to the secret chamber, where I found a new book, thinner than the Old Sartoran ship preservation text. It was written in more modern Sartoran: spells for securing a forge and for separating and returning to the ground the impurities caused by smelting. This topic was even more tedious than ship-binding, but again I found myself absorbed.

Birdy was an indistinct and bulky object in the drifting snow, yet I knew him at once. Only his eyes were visible between his muffler and knit hat, but the tiny lift to his brows sent warning through me. Something was wrong. He had been on the watch for me when I crossed the small court between the stable hands’ wing and ours.

He bent toward me, murmuring in our language, “When the prince arrives, I’m to go with them to Choreid Dhelerei, the royal city.”

My throat constricted. We stood so close together to avoid the howling wind, that I can still recall the pale blue light on his profile, nestled within the muffling of his scarf, coat, and hat, as well as the tiny gleam of reflected light in his pupil, the way his jaw moved, and the vibration of his voice in his chest, next to my ear.

I said, “I am sorry you are going.”

“You are?” he asked, and the disbelief in his voice chilled my nerves.

“I am,” I said. “Come inside. We have a sitting room for staff, just inside that door.”

There were a few others in the room. We found a small table opposite the fire and sat down at either side. He stretched out a hand then pulled it back and flushed. “Anhar says…” He hesitated.

“That I am
elor
?” I asked.

“Is it true?”

“I think so. That is, I haven’t really thought about it since I was fifteen or sixteen, and all of you went off to the pleasure houses without me. When I did finally go, all I wanted was the company. Nothing more. And gradually…” I shrugged.

“You don’t feel anything?” He leaned forward, his forehead wrinkled. “I feel something for you. I can understand if I’m not attractive…”

“I love you,” I said. “I think. I’m pretty sure. I just don’t want physical love.”

Birdy sat there, eyes averted, hands loose. Then he turned back. “I don’t know what I feel,” he admitted. “I think I grew up wanting you, before I even knew what want was. I don’t know if I can love without…” He opened his hands. “Without all of it.”

“What about Anhar?”

“What about her? She knows how I feel.” He ran his fingers back and forth along the edge of a table, as if he must touch something. “I know how she feels. We started with homesickness. Though she was glad to leave.” He looked away, as if reluctant to reveal things told him in intimate moments. Then he continued softly, “We both missed Colend in unexpected ways. Every time I ride out…” He was barely audible over the rise and fall of a ballad that someone in another room was singing, punctuated by laughter and the tap of drums. “… I see the same pale sun riding low in the north, and it throws me back to riding when I was a boy.”

“Riding?” I asked.

“I first saw the moon ride the horizon when my mother put me on a horse. When I think back to my visits home I see bare hawthorn and smell the evergreen on the cold air. I hear the ice, like broken glass, no, like crystal wind chimes, running in the streams.” His voice was slow, and dreamlike.

“Tell me about your mother,” I said. “I know nothing about your family. You remember, how we were not to speak of such things at scribe school, so that those whose families were not traditionally scribes would not feel left out.”

Surprise twitched through him. “And you obeyed? Ah-ye, most of us spoke as we pleased, we just knew better than to brag. My mother
trained horses for the Baron Lassiter until a whole year went by and she still wasn’t paid. That was when their household broke up. My mother chose to go to Sarendan with the baroness and her daughter. I visit when I have home leave. You would like Sarendan, I think. I hear that it’s as beautiful as Sartor.”

“Baron Lassiter!” I thought of Lasva’s romance. “How well did you know any of the Lassiters?”

“Only saw them if they showed up wanting to ride. My sister and I spent most of our time in Alsais with my uncle, who started our scribe training early so we’d be selected at the testing.”

“And you were chosen.”

“Along with you.”

“But when you went to your mother, you learned about horses.”

“All New Year’s Week we rode and rode, no matter how much it snowed.”

The queen had known about Birdy’s background, but I hadn’t. I thought about that, and about how strange it is that one can read and read about the many kinds of love, but only experience teaches one to widen one’s perceptions to include another.

“W

It took no insight to comprehend that she was hungry for crumbs from Colend, so I gave her the gossip gleaned from Lasva’s scrollcase, the only two items of import being that Ivandred’s cousin Prince Macael had returned to Colend to visit court (“He wants someone like our princess,” Pelis observed, and added, “but there isn’t anyone like her.”) At the end of the month came the news that Macael and Ananda were to return to Enaeran to wed.

“Lady Ananda,” Pelis said, kissing the backs of her fingers in Willful Blindness. “Did you know her own servants call her Lady Demanda? How long before that pretty Enaeraneth prince regrets
that?
”

Birdy and Anhar vanished on Restdays, so I studied the magic lessons I found waiting for me each time I transferred to the chamber: how to purify water; the capture of sound; the formation of a cleaning frame.

The Herskalt himself came once, and I asked to learn about wards instead of all this basic stuff I would never use even in an emergency. He
replied without any sign of emotion, “Review the definition of emergency.” And his assignment? To make a fire stick by myself.

That meant finding a suitable piece of wood and then repeating the sunlight-gathering spell over and over during daylight hours, then focusing it down to a spark. At least a thousand times.

After that, my lesson was in the construction of a cleaning frame, which was enormously complicated magic.

On the morning after I reported to the Herskalt the success of my cleaning frame, I went in to breakfast. When I’d been sitting there a while, the dining room went silent.

I’d begun sitting alone. I knew it was absurd. I knew that Anhar and Birdy (when he was there) would include me if I sat with them, but there was this part of me that wanted them to seek me out—to value me as me, though I was not a sex partner for either of them.

I heard Anhar’s light voice on the other side of the room and forced myself not to look, though there was that in her tone that convinced me she sat with Birdy. I closed myself mentally into lesson review so thoroughly that I was startled out of it by the rap of heels on the stone floor—a sound distinct in the sudden silence.

I turned on my cushion just as Ivandred reached me. Too many years of training forced me into a deep bow. Then I remembered that Marlovens do not bow and jerked upright. So powerful was Ivandred’s presence that no one laughed as I accidentally knocked my cup to the floor.

Ivandred gave me a slight smile, then said, “The Haranviar has asked me to bring you to Choreid Dhelerei.” “Haranviar” was their title for a crown princess. “We depart as soon as we change the horses and eat.” He was mud-splattered to the waist, his hat spangled with melting snowflakes.

I fled, rejoicing. I would be traveling with Birdy, I would see Lasva again—she had asked for me! Oh, the joy of knowing there is a welcome, that one is wanted! I would—

I would no longer be learning magic.

I stopped. The disappointment was so sharp I just stood there, a hand braced against the smooth plaster of the wall. Then I thought,
I transfer to the chamber by magic
. So the Herskalt lived in Darchelde? Transfers could be done from anywhere in the world, though I understood that
the longer the transfer, the harder it was physically. But people did it all the time. I had done it, when I went south from Alsais to Ranflar each New Year’s Week to visit my parents, though I’d used a transfer token. I did not think that the relative distances were all that different, and the spell was second nature by now.