King's Shield (15 page)

He beckoned to Hadand, then dismissed the men.

“I would like the benefit of your eyes and ears,” he murmured to his wife. “She’s not just Venn, but a mage.”

Hadand hid her consternation. A
mage?
So that’s what Jeje meant!

Evred sat down in the great carved raptor chair one of his ancestors had taken from the Montredavan-Ans after their defeat. “Who are you?” he asked in slow, clear Iascan.

Signi stood before him, outwardly composed. Evred, whose keen gaze missed little, noted the fast pulse at the side of her temple. The cause of tension could be anything from simple human fear to deviousness, but it meant that her mind would run fast.

Well, so could his.

“My name doth be Jazsha Signi Sofar, second daughter of Jazsha Fafna Sofar, Hel Dancer to the Venn. My life-place doth be Sea Dag of the third rank, though outward be that place.”

Outward be . . . She was using, with great care, the outdated verb forms of Iascan that related most closely to Sartoran. Evred switched languages to Sartoran—“Does that mean you have a public rank and a secret rank?”—and saw her eyelids lift in surprise.

So Marlovan kings spoke Sartoran! Rumor persisted in the far north that they did not even know how to read. Prince Rajnir had been told by the well-traveled Dag Erkric that they were ignorant in all things except war.

This king’s accent was the elegant court accent of two generations ago; she had no idea it was the Sartoran the Adrani king had brought home after his service in Sartor and taught to his daughter Wisthia, who brought it west when she married Evred’s father. In Signi’s world Sartoran was the language of magic and scholarship. This king spoke like a scholar. He was subtle, the shimmer around him was the deep blue of midnight that blends with and hides the presence of other colors. A blue deep and vast enough to house the distant stars. Blue was the color of knowledge, magic, the eternity of sea and sky. Deep blue was blue made dangerous: the red of anger and malice was easy to comprehend because its motive was so single-minded, it did not take you by surprise. The motivations of midnight blue could not be predicted.

“I do,” she replied.

“Is this doubling of ranks customary?”

“No.”

“Tell me,” he said, “how came you to meet Inda.”

The questions were strange. She had expected a military interrogation, or demands for magic spells: again she saw the shimmer of midnight all around him.

A young man sat in a corner, writing fast. He was a herald, surely. The Venn had been taught that Marlovans had no written records, only the boasting war songs of warriors.

A brief spurt of humor prompted her to begin at the very beginning. “I was born in the Land of the Venn, in service to the family Durasnir. When a child I was trained to be a . . . a hel-dancer. It translates as hall dancer, but you could say a court dancer. It is the ritual of the King’s Hall . . .” She frowned; the Sartoran and Venn courts were such very different concepts. And she was not at all certain that Marlovans had a court at all.

The king returned to what interested him. “How did you become a mage?”

Signi gazed down the years, flickers of emotion-laden images running rapidly through her mind, evoking all the hopes, anxious competitions, determined training. All for that one goal. To be told at the last level of training but one, when she’d reached an age where most had already begun their life’s work,
You will never attain the Hel-Dance.
“I was not good enough to be a hel-dancer,” she admitted.

Not for her the far easier life of the play or pleasure house performer. Dance was art, art was truth, truth was dance, the triune concept so drilled into her that it was impossible to adapt to the notion of dance as mere entertainment or enticement. So she had stopped using the name Jazsha that she shared with her furious mother. She became Signi, and faced the necessity of learning an entirely different way of life, memories not relevant to this moment, definitely irrelevant to these people.

“I was adept with what we call the small magics as part of the dance. I professed an interest in magic knowledge. And so the Skalt—the person in charge of our training—took me to the House of Blue, where dags are trained, and I learned very rapidly.”

Rapidly indeed, but that was to be expected when one is surrounded by children half one’s age who think that two bells’ time is a strenuous workday, and she had come from a life wherein two bells of warm-up exercise was the daily regimen before one even had breakfast.

Evred leaned forward. “Learned what, exactly?” He gave her a near smile. “Do not be afraid that too much detail will bore me.”

Chapter Fourteen

IT amazed Vedrid to be pacing side-by-side at last with the infamous Elgar the Fox. His reputation was not as real to Vedrid as the memories of the small, scruffy boy who vanished in disgrace from the academy years ago, or as the terrible memory of the more recent long, difficult, and nearly mortal search in Bren.

But he must no longer think of him with the foreign name. Elgar the Fox was gone. No, he had come home. He was once again Indevan-Dal Algara-Vayir, Laef of Choraed Elgaer.

Indevan-Laef chose the pace—slow—and paused often, sometimes staring into empty courts or at jumbles of worn willow-swords and old gear, sometimes listening to the childish voices through the open windows of the barracks. Once or twice he stopped without looking at anything; he shut his eyes and breathed deeply. Clearly Vedrid would not have to exert himself to keep this exile-returned-home occupied. Indevan-Laef’s own memories did that.

The first court with activity contained pigtails at staff practice. Inda halted outside the narrow archway, watching from an angle that kept the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys from noticing him.

The preliminary drills were the same, right down to the remembered drum cadences. But the boys looked slow, their movements sloppy. Without focus. The sights, the smells, brought back memories of slouching through drill, especially when it was raining and cold after a night of short sleep.

The boys paired off. Again, as in Cherry-Stripe’s castle drill, they were so slow, so clumsy, not at all like Inda had remembered the older boys looking to his ten-year-old eyes. During training sessions on Freedom Island—first with Dun and then later with Fox—he’d exhorted the crew to speed up, to think ahead, to refine skills and measure up to remembered standards.

He had to laugh at himself. His recollection of the older boys’ skills had obviously receded like a mirage. No matter how good he got, he always saw them as far better. That was before Fox Montredavan-An took over the training. Fox really was superlative. His boys and girls of similar age back on the deck of the
Death
were much faster, stronger, and more skilled than these pigtails. But then they also had been seeing action.

“What are the horsetails doing?” Inda asked Vedrid.

“Lance practice.”

“Take me there.”

They crossed to the side of the academy Inda had only glimpsed as a boy: the senior riding field, where the horsetails were doing lance evolutions.

Inda peered under his hand, blocking the sun, and trying to see past the clods of mud kicked up by the horses’ hooves. The lances were warlike, but seemed worthless except for a charge. Or did you use them like a boom? From horseback?

The boys’ riding was as good as he remembered. Inda had adapted his early training in riding and shooting to riding the upper masts and shooting at sea. Could he readapt fast enough? More to the point, could he adapt his shipboard tactics to horse?

A familiar voice broke his thoughts. It was a man’s voice, but he recognized the intonations.

A lean fellow his own age, wearing the academy masters’ plain coat over riding trousers and boots, led boys toward the stable. Inda’s gaze scarcely touched on the boys, who shoved and poked and scuffled like groups of boys the world over. The man turned his head to see who they were. A narrow, snub-nosed, fire-scarred face and familiar eyes.

“Lassad?”

It was! It was Smartlip Lassad! A master? Oh, hadn’t Cherry-Stripe said something—

“Olin is waiting,” Lassad said to his charges. “Run.”

They ran.

Lassad said slowly, “Algara-Vayir?”

Inda opened his hands. Lassad’s gaze flickered over him: earrings, scruffy old boots, weapons, back to Inda’s face, searching, searching. Waiting. Though he no longer hunched his shoulders, or slunk, Inda saw the apprehensive Lassad of old who had lived for others’ approval.

“You saw some action,” Inda observed.

Lassad flushed. “Pirates. Fire arrows, here and here.” He indicated his jaw and the top of one shoulder. His constantly moving gaze flickered toward Vedrid again. “They said you’d become one. A pirate, I mean. Went up against the Brotherhood.”

“I never thought of myself as a pirate, but I took some pirate ships. Rest is true enough as well,” Inda said. “You’re a master.”

Lassad’s shoulders hitched tighter. He was defensive, though Inda couldn’t imagine why. He assented with an open hand, then whipped the hand behind his back.

“Sponge sent me to observe. He wants me to relearn the old ways,” Inda said.

Lassad’s expression changed. Eased. “This is my first year. Most of the old masters had to go back in the saddle. For defense.”

Inda turned his palm up. Lassad began talking fast, describing the academy’s changes over nine years, his tone of pride gradually becoming more strident. And when Inda did not answer, he shifted to his experiences on the coast.

At first the details were precise and vivid. Inda listened, envisioning with the ease of experience the shoreline battles, as he and Lassad paced through the academy.

Just as they reached the senior barracks, Inda, deluged by memory, found the pieces of Lassad’s stories increasingly difficult to put together.

The bells rang for the midday meal. Beyond high walls rose the gull-shrill voices of stampeding boys. Inda was surprised to discover the old wariness and hunger back in Lassad’s gaze.

Inda had wanted to see the senior barracks, but now he just wanted to get away. “I’d better go. Sponge will be looking for me.”

Lassad mouthed the word
Sponge
, then flicked his fingers to his tunic, an inadvertent gesture.

Inda returned it and started back. The details did not fit. Just as in the old days, Lassad had been strutting, maybe outright lying. Perhaps not at the beginning, but certainly toward the end.

When he and Vedrid reached the archway connecting the academy to the castle, two women emerged.

Inda looked up.

“Tdor?” He jolted to a stop. She was taller, older, but he knew that face better than he knew his own.

“Tdor-Edli,” Vedrid said, saluting. The other one in Runner blue he did not introduce, though he was aware of her sardonic smile.

“I’ll take him,” Tdor said, and Vedrid ran off to report to the king.

“You’re . . . tall,” Inda managed, and then his face heated. What a stupid thing to say!

Tdor chuckled, that same wonderful sound, like the whuff of a pup, that he’d cherished in memory through all his years at sea. “You’re not tall.”

They laughed; seeing one another again made them both feel giddy and awkward, their minds filled with nine years of questions and nowhere to begin.

Then Inda put together the clues at last. Midway between amusement and irritation, he said, “I suppose Sponge is grilling Signi.”

“She’s a Venn,” Tdor answered with a sober look. “You brought her here. We’ve been at war for years, and the Venn have been behind it.”

Her voice, it was just the same, but lower. His scalp itched, his clothes pulled at him; a flicker of memory, of Tdor’s hands smoothing out his unruly hair and pulling his shirt laces right. He shook his head, trying to gather his wits. Signi was in trouble—with Sponge. “I wouldn’t bring an enemy.”

Tdor turned a palm up. Her hand was still square, but bigger than he remembered, hard from years of bow and knife work. “I suspect he knows. But he cannot afford to be wrong.” Her hand swept to one side. Inda finally perceived Tdor’s companion.

“Inda,” the blonde woman exclaimed. Inda had only peripherally been aware of the short blonde in mud-splashed Runner blue next to Tdor. He flicked a questioning glance her way. The sardonic quirk to her dark, wide-set eyes was familiar. “Remember me?”

“Sh—Shendan?” Inda asked, amazed. He laughed. “Last time I saw you, I was ten.”

“Yes.” She crossed her arms the same way Fox did when he was in his nastiest mood. “I rode all the way here, and you are to tell me where Fox is, and why he did not come home.”

“He is with the fleet. He’s my—the commander now,” Inda said. “As for why he didn’t come—”

“Don’t feed me any bran mash,” Shen cut in. “I’m not sick. Or old. Or weak. I want the truth.”

As Inda squinted up at the sky, Tdor’s emotions swooped. Despite the years, and the scars on his face, she still knew what he was thinking: he wished he were anywhere else.

But instead of slouching off as he might have as a boy, he said very quietly, “He doesn’t want to come home.”

Shen drew in a breath. “All right. Tell me this. Is it us? Mother and me, and Marend? Or . . .”

“No. It’s the treaty. Mostly. And I think your father as well.” Inda considered, then added with a tentative air, “He hasn’t said. But, well, you travel a lot with someone, you learn to hear the words they ride around. If he comes home, it’ll be later. After your father—”

“Drinks himself to death,” Shen stated in a hard voice. “Yes.” She swiped at her eyes. “Thank you for the truth.” Without a word she swung around and vanished after Vedrid up the short tunnel.

Inda whistled. Then shook his head. “I could have done that better. Though I don’t know how, with no warning.”

“That’s why she waylaid you. So there wouldn’t be any well-considered speeches.” Tdor thought back to the single visit from the Sartoran mage all those years ago, and how she’d used diplomacy to deny them magic. Because they were Marlovans, that had been the real reason for all the compliments and diplomatic assurances, making her refusal much worse to bear—as if they were dangerous animals to be coaxed and praised back into their loose-boxes. She turned his way, wondering how to explain when she saw by his expression that he’d guessed.