Banner of the Damned (93 page)

I ran my gaze down the rest of the letter, and saw Lasva’s name. Again, Birdy intuited that my quotations from the Herskalt were not my thoughts, but he seemed to be attributing them to Lasva. And again, here was Kaidas involved. Might this protracted discussion be an indirect way for Kaidas to communicate with Lasva?

I should straighten out the misunderstanding
, I thought as I laid the letter down. But later. Writing such long letters, engaging every point, was more fatiguing than interesting when I already had so much to do: there were still kingdom emergencies and castle spells of various sorts to repair, from new water-purifying spells on buckets to wands to make for the stables. The stewards brought their lists to Gislan, who gave them to me once a week. I found that I was much faster if I dispatched these
tasks in the middle of the night, when there were fewer people around to distract me with their questions and curiosity or to offer me unwanted advice.

The second layer of castle ward spells had been easier to dismantle and replace than the first, but then overconfidence nearly caused me to fall into a very nasty magical trap. I might have but, as a way to perceive wards, I took the time to refashion my spells into colors. In the middle of a very tangled chain there was a single wink of blood red. I almost overlooked it. The “red” spell was a transfer worked into the structure around it. This transfer would have sent me between time and place, with no destination.

That frightened me into slowing down to beginner’s deliberate pace again.

When I discovered Birdy’s letter and forced myself to take a night to answer it—with an introductory paragraph about how Lasva had been too busy to talk these things over with me—Birdy responded within two days.

Was that last bit a moth-kiss aimed by Kaidas at the Marlovens?

I pulled paper forward to reply, beginning with a fair statement about Marlovens (who, I had witnessed personally at the border of Totha, were
ready to sacrifice themselves for what they believed was the good of the kingdom, whereas I couldn’t name any Colendi who would) when I thought,
But Anhar told Birdy about that incident
. Which ended with mass slaughter because of my magic.

Birdy might be trying to delve deeper into my life, this being an indirect prompt to get me to talk about magic. I tossed the letter aside to deal with tomorrow.

Two months of tomorrows later, I forced myself to answer it, quoting from Scribe Halimas’s lectures about kingdoms, service, and the Scribes’ First and Second Rules, which were still the guiding principles of my life.

Unnoticed by me, half a year passed.

With the removal and reestablishment of the Choreid Dhelerei’s top, or most recent, set of wards, Ivandred now had complete access to the city. I knew that he wanted more spells. I wanted to give him as many as I could that would make warfare impossible, or at least difficult. The spells I’d already given him I’d named Fog, Water, and Rock, and the specifics are in my magic books, which you already have.

But the Herskalt still did not have access—the wards against him had somehow been placed deeper. And so I continued the ward project.

As spring ripened into summer, Fire’s idea came to me when I reached the bath, to find it full of kitchen staff. They were commiserating with a young kitchen worker who had become impatient while making cabbage rolls, and had dropped water onto the hot flatsheet smeared with pressed olives. The result was horrible splatters that flew up and burned her hands and her cheek.

What if I could send little globs of water-encased oil into torches, causing them to splatter? It would sting, like my rocks, but no one would be hurt. The sting might be enough to cause horses to break order. Torches would waver and even be flung down as untrustworthy. No one could be busy killing other humans if their horses and torches were fractious.

I took torches and oil into my experiment room. By now I was not only at home in my tower, but I also could not imagine how I’d existed without four rooms and Andaun’s library, scant as it was, all to myself. I worked until the acrid stink nearly choked me, but the result was worth it when I showed Ivandred. He listened with his customary lack of expression, then had me take him through the magic a step at a time. At
the end, he said, “I can take this with me to practice with the First Lancers on Midsummer games. Excellent work, Sigradir.”

That praise I used as an excuse to visit the dyr, though I’d been the day before.

By now I had finished with Falisse Ranalassi, known as Larksong, whose life I am not detailing here. But I had reveled in her audition. In fact I had twice revisited that particular event. Oh, the joy, the
power
of looking out at a room full of people and knowing that you have the ability to bind them in awe and wonder! It was more intoxicating than using magic to burst little stones and drive off warriors set to kill you. We all want to be admired, emulated, remembered.

If I was to be a great mage, then I needed greater understanding. And so I left the pleasure of Larksong’s happy life and turned my eyes to her most vivid memories of Carola… from inside Carola’s mind.

Why am I cold? I thought impatiently. Summer shouldn’t be cold.

But when I glanced through the tall, narrow windows set deeply in the thick stone walls of my work chamber and thrust my fingers into my armpits, I was astounded to discover the sun setting. I had not eaten all day.

I walked out and down the hall to Lasva’s staff chamber, where I found the others finishing a meal. They greeted me with muted surprise, and I realized I had stayed in my rooms for… how many weeks?

Pelis said, “She’s alive!” And sang the carillon for the Welcome at Lily Gate, causing Anhar to laugh. The Marloven runners ignored this sally with the absence of long habit. Then Pelis said, “Did you really throw lightning and thunder at warriors from Totha, the spring before last?”

“It was stage illusion,” I said.

“Told you,” Anhar put in, as she reached for the clay pot full of freshly steeped leaf. (I had recently visited her past. Never any memories with Birdy, but I’d looked at her audition with the players and discovered that she was very good indeed, especially at comedy. But it was clear in the faces of her judges, who responded to every quip with a twitch of affront, that they were seeing a Chwahir mocking the Colendi.)

“The lancers all insist Emras’s lightning was a real attack,” Pelis replied.

“I didn’t tell them that it was illusion,” I said.

The others laughed, then Pelis said, “That was probably smart. Much
more frightening for those terrible people and their arrows to think you could shoot back lightning at them. “I wish you knew spells for mending clothing! Marnda insists these Marlovens don’t know a proper silk-stitch.”

“We don’t,” said a new runner, a teenage girl with freckles and braids the color of cream. The other Marlovens regarded the peacocks with tolerant scorn, as the Colendi regarded the barbarians with tolerant scorn.

The conversation shifted to Kendred. Anhar led by relating little details of the prince’s life—adorable mistakes he made in his reading and writing. I was amazed that everyone seemed to find them as entertaining as Anhar did. But I did not know the child, and so, my mind turned back to a particularly involved knot of wards. By now I could discern the different creators of the wards and how they thought. I was five layers down, but this next was horrific, and I did not have to look up the history of that period to know that whoever reigned had been afraid of his or her own shadow.

“… Emras?”

I looked up at the sound of my name, to discover that everyone had left except Anhar.

“I asked,” she said patiently, “if you would like me to bring you anything from Colend. I’m going to Alarcansa next week.”

“Next week?”

“It’s nearly New Year’s,” she said and then regarded me intently. “What is it you are working on now, to make you so absent?”

Irritation flashed through me, and I banished it. The question was perfectly normal. I busied myself with a bite of honey-smeared biscuit until I knew my face and voice were under control. “Wards,” I said.

“Which are?”

“Elementary magic, but very, very tedious. Like stonemasons’ workers, you don’t want them laying stones awry.” I patted the bare wall behind me. “I have to clean up all the old wards and lay new ones. Thousands and thousands of spells. Like laying walls, it might be tedious, but it has to be done.”

It was all true, except for the elementary magic part, but who would know the difference?

Then she unsettled me by saying, “It’s just that we never
see
you. I thought you might have been sent on some exciting tours for the king. And glad I am not to be sent along!” She warded Thorn Gate.

“I am as busy with tasks for the king as you are in training the prince,” I said, knowing it was inadequate.

She seemed to accept my words, then indicated my hand, in which I held my biscuit. “Do you want me to do your nails? You don’t like Starand?”

“She’s adequate. But not as good as you were, so it’s easier to do them myself. I have a clipper,” I said. “And I thank you for the offer, but are you not free of that duty?”

“I still do it for some. Like Birdy—he likes my touch, though they have the best of everything at Alarcansa. Which they will remind you, if they think you might have forgotten.” And when I bowed my thanks, “Ah-yedi! If you ever change your mind, you can always find me when I’m off duty. As for my visit, if you can think of anything you’d like me to bring back besides cream-cakes and nut-rolls, let me know.” She fluttered her fingers, then whisked herself out of the room, and I was alone.

I helped myself to another biscuit and turned back to my problem—if I could see a way to the center of the knot, I promised myself, I’d look at Carola’s last day at court when she was seventeen.

THREE
O
F
C
INNAMON AND
Z
ATHUMBRE

A

nother year passed, the only event to report being Ingrid-Jarlan’s death. She was sitting with her women in the morning, as always, and interrupted a series of orders to ask for some listerblossom steep for a headache. The runners were debating whether or not to summon a healer, as the jarlan had never mentioned any kind of physical weakness before, but by the time they got back with the requested leaf, she had leaned her head on her hands and died.

You could see the generational divide among the guardswomen by the sincere mourning in the older faces. Lasva and Ivandred went to Darchelde for the memorial bonfire. On her return, she summoned the entire staff, saying briskly, “Since there are no cousins to inherit, the king has decided that Darchelde will be set aside for his son as a retreat. Anyone who would like to be transferred there as caretakers, speak to me.”

It was an opportunity for the older staff to obtain an easy post. None of the Colendi volunteered, and life returned to normal.

I reached the seventh layer of wards—and with it, discovered that some mages had the skills to bury nasty transfer traps or personal wards—that is, warnings that an individual had crossed a particular boundary—into lower layers. I had been all ready to report to the
Herskalt (saving the news until I saw him face to face) that the seventh layer had been put down roughly two centuries before, so he should be perfectly safe entering the city.

But now I understood why he told me I must replace them all: while I did not believe that Andaun-Sigradir could have inserted personal wards so low in the entire structure, someone else might have had the skills to do so.

With the dyr, I discovered that all Carola’s waking thoughts seemed to be bound up in conjecture about the smallest details of Kaidas’s life, and a horrible, distorted semblance of Lasva. The motivations that Carola attributed to Lasva reflected her own.