Banner of the Damned (86 page)

Her brows shot up. Then she said something that I did not expect: “You did not see that they are afraid of you?”

“Ah-ye! My understanding was, they call us ‘peacocks.’”

“So they do.”

“And I myself was once likened to a bean on a hot pan.”

“Very true.”

“And the jarl, so very grim. The jarlan, imposing. The both seeming as soft and welcoming as an avalanche.”

She tapped her fingertips together on each point.

“And yet, you say they are afraid of me? Might I beg you to explicate?”

She said, “You are a mage.”

“Why? They know I come to mend and to secure. I attended to their own list. I did nothing that was not requested.”

With an air of gentle mockery, she made The Peace on each point. “I think…” She gazed upward, then said slowly, “My thought is that they fear what you
might
do.”

I laughed, but as the sun sank toward the flat horizon, my circumstances began to connect in my mind. “So… Retrend and the lancers, are they there to protect me, or to protect the Marlovens from me?”

“Both, I suspect,” she said.

“Yet their king studied magic.”

“He is their king.”

“And I am a foreign peacock who rides like a bean popping on a hot pan.”

Anhar let her mirth show at last.

“I am delighted to serve as amusement,” I said with so high a manner that the mirth erupted in a soft laugh.

“From what they all say, Totha is going to be far worse,” she said, with another laugh. “And here I am a coward.” She sobered. “Cowards know
how quickly circumstances can become fearful. From girlhood I worked to stay unnoticed, except when I wished to be a player. In life? I tried to be furniture, which calls for the skills of a player, but in another way. No one threatens the furniture,” she finished with cheery irony.

A few days later, Retrend announced that we were near the border of Totha, and to my surprise called a halt not far from the bank of a river, though it seemed to me we had at least another hour’s riding time left.

Anhar and I retired, and I discovered a letter from Lasva waiting. I could tell from Anhar’s quick, intimate smile that she’d heard from Birdy.

I had been staring, and she glanced up. “Do you want to see it?” She held out the strip of paper, her gaze steady. “You can read it, if you like.”

“I thank you for the offer,” I began, preparatory to refusing.

She shrugged. “He seldom says anything that could not be cried out at city center at the Hour of the Bird. I assumed that the private thoughts, the complete thoughts, were reserved for his letters with you. I know that his letters to you are long,” she added, still with that steady gaze. “I saw him writing to you, one night when I was Colend, when he thought I was asleep and safe from being bored.” She stared out at the campfire, the silhouettes of the Marlovens as they stomped and twirled to the tap of drum and the cadenced ballad. “He wrote a long time,” she went on, her tone slow and reflective. “Sometimes he looked up, and then he would lean over the paper the same way he leaned toward you when the two of you got into one of your arguments about history. I think those aren’t letters. They’re conversations. Probably in your scribe form.”

“It is true,” I said. “We were drilled in those forms. It’s comfortable.”

“You value these conversations by letter.”

“Yes. I look forward to them.”

“But you don’t want to be closer to him?”

I let out my breath in a long sigh. “It is not him. It’s everyone.”

She studied me as she ran the strip of paper through her fingers again and again, not quite an absent motion, for the pull of paper was slow, as if she felt the curve and stroke of each letter that he had inscribed. “It was always you first,” she said slowly, still studying me. “I knew that. We even talked about it the month before he left. I accepted that, and in his turn, he accepted that I would not go back to Colend except to visit.”

How strong was the urge to say that I wished I could go back! In spite
of the ambivalences, the hurt I saw in him that we did not feel the same sensations. But I dared not explain about the mages and Sartor, not after those accusatory letters. The less she knew the better for her.

In any case, she did not have magic on her mind. “Just now you looked down, and you recognized his hand. And then there was that in your face.” To illustrate, Anhar touched the middle of her forehead, which puckered with a mock frown. “My little letters each night are like the soft words before bedtime. They are never profound. They are not words to be archived, or even remembered, not that kind of conversation—the elegant form, the expressions with a lot of Sartoran worked in as decorative language that he shares with you.”

There were so many things I could say, but what came out was, “You do not wish to return to Colend, and live with him?”

She gestured irony. “You would not ask that if you met the Duchess of Alarcansa.”

“I saw her once or twice, when I was still a student,” I said. “They called her the Icicle Duchess then, even though she was merely acknowledged as heir. Does Birdy find duty with her so onerous? He has said nothing in his letters.” As I spoke the words, a quick sense of regret, almost constraint seized me: though I did not talk about
everything
—meaning magic—to him, I had assumed that he told me everything. I hated the necessity of holding secrets from him and wondered why he should hold any from me. There were no Sartoran mages looming in shadow over him.

“His duties are at a remove from the family,” Anhar replied. “And he has been befriended by the duke.”

“The Duke of Alarcansa?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes. He joined us twice while I was there. I’m given to understand that he and the duchess are opposites in that way. He was certainly very informal, and he seemed to like hearing about our lives in Marloven Hesea.”

“Our lives?”

“We Colendi,” Anhar explained. “Lasva in particular. He encouraged me to join the conversation and share any experiences I wished to.” Anhar gestured irony. “Except for Birdy, he was alone in encouraging me to speak.”

Here was another secret I would not tell: that the Duke of Alarcansa had painted Lasva a lover’s cup. “Is the duke interested in the Marlovens, then?” I asked.

“Yes.” Anhar closed the flap and slipped out of her robe so that she
could prepare for sleep. “One night,” she said, as she hung up her robe on its peg to air, “the second or third that I was there, the duke came to us for the first time. I was so surprised, first to see him and then to see how informal he was with Birdy. I forget how it came about, but the Duke asked what would happen if someone leaped into the middle of Marlovens at a meal, waving a sword threateningly. Birdy said that they would all attack. The Duke said that if such a thing happened to Colendi, they would run away.”

“As would I,” I said, as she crawled into her bedroll and turned her head away from my candle flame. She chuckled, and composed herself for sleep.

I turned to the letter from Lasva.

The rapid crunch of footsteps broke my reverie. Anhar also sat up, her black hair a waterfall against the dull tent wall. “Something’s wrong?”

It felt late. The Marlovens had not sung or played drums at campfire like they usually did if there was no rain or snow. The quiet, interrupted by unprecedented noise, caused me to open the tent, gasping in the wash of bitter cold. No lights whatsoever.

The quick footfalls, the jingle and rattle of gear, the muffled thud of
hoofbeats reached my ears. I strained to see but couldn’t. My heartbeat pulsed in my throat as I pulled on my coat and plunged outside the tent, where I found Retrend standing guard, sword drawn. There was no moon, it had already sunk, leaving us only weak starlight to see by.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Scouts heard at least half a wing out there.”

“Could they be travelers, or on training?”

“No one rides in this darkness without purpose,” was the brief reply, as his head turned in one direction.

I made an effort to contain the questions he obviously could not answer. My pulse was still quick. I could transfer out, of course. I had four transfer tokens with me. If the impossible was possible—if for some mad reason someone intended us harm—I could save three lancers and Anhar.

Or I could… do something.

My first thought was of my magical fog. I pulled on my shoes, then stood in the door of the tent, listening. The muted thunder of many riders seemed to come from everywhere to my untrained ears, but Retrend’s entire countenance acted as a beacon.

The riders, whoever they were, proceeded slowly along the river’s edge. That made my task much easier. I took a moment to gather my strength, to concentrate. To remember the water’s edge, where we’d gone for a drink before eating. Magic must be exact.

From the water I drew vapor. Again and again, building the mist. What direction was the air moving? I pulled off my glove, licked my finger, and held it up. Good. The mist could be left to drift on its own, so I kept making the spell over and over until my head buzzed with my effort.

I opened my eyes and staggered; my sight was blurred, and I had to sit down, but even so, I smiled in triumph. The entire camp was thickly enshrouded in swirling, drifting mist.

No one was going to be finding us, whoever they were, whatever their purpose. They would have difficulty finding their own feet.

I crawled back into my bedroll and dropped into sleep.

The next day, we crossed the border into Totha, our lancers alert and wary.

Nothing stirred. The first village we came to seemed empty, until we reached the center, where we found armed people awaiting us.

We drew rein, and Retrend turned my way.

“I am here to renew the protection spells,” I said.

“We will accompany you,” was the reply, from a bleak-faced old woman. She gripped a knotted stick that looked very much like a weapon.

So it went, in that village, and in the two castellated towns we visited that day.

That night, Lasva wrote again:

She used words with such emphasis that her request carried the gravity of an order. She wanted me to find the evidence that someone somewhere else was behind these indefinable threats, but not the “appealing young jarl and jarlan.”

The next morning, I carried Lasva’s questions to Retrend and put them as my own, lest it seem like I was interfering with his orders by invoking Lasva’s name. He was distracted as they mounted up, with their weapons out, alert for trouble. He said, “We are sure to find out before we leave Totha.”

One or two of the others in earshot seemed to find his words funny, for they uttered short laughs as they went about securing and tightening things.

Anhar mounted her horse silently, so pale that her Chwahir ancestry was pronounced.

As the day stretched into a week of tension, I gained the sense of a people whose entire life was a preparation for battle. My honor guard
was paced by another, larger, honor guard that stayed between us and the locals.

Mindful of Lasva’s request, I wrote to her:

In spite of the rigid politeness with which I was addressed, you would think a mage was little better than a thief. Anhar, however, was regarded as no threat. In the course of seeing to all the little details of life—laundry, food, and fodder—she was able to cross outside of those armed circles. She asked small questions or exchanged easy comments, and learned about how people lived. Though no one discussed politics.