Shadowsinger (28 page)

Encora, Ranuak

Outside, a fine mist drizzles down across Encora, so fine and so thick that it is more like fog than rain. In his small study, Aetlen glances from one ledger to the next, shifting them carefully as he makes notes in a fine hand on the sheets of paper to one side. Absently, he scratches his head above his ear, leaving a smudge of ink amid the silver-and-blond hair.

Silently, the Matriarch appears at the doorway to Aetlen's small study. Her face is drawn, but she says nothing until he senses her presence.

He looks up from the ledgers that surround him. “I was trying to balance the ledgers, my dear, and to see who might be shading the accounts.”

“I know how tedious that is, and I would not disturb you, save that I wished you to see this.” Alya extends the browned scroll to her consort. “It arrived a short while ago. By sorcery, from the Shadow Sorceress.”

“By sorcery? Then, it is most urgent.” He does not take the scroll.

“I fear it is more urgent than we know, and yet…” A tight smile appears on her lips. “I will say no more until you read it.”

He sets the quill back in its stand, then looks at his ink-stained fingers. He rubs them on the grayish towel until no more ink appears on the soft fabric. Only then does he take the scroll from Alya.

She watches as he reads, her eyes studying his face intently.

Finally, he looks up. “Will you send her the ships?”

“If I must offer my own body,” Alya replies. “If I must sell all that we own. If I must grovel before the Exchange—”

“I understand,” her consort says hastily.

“You understand that I am distraught, and that you will say aught to calm me. What the sorceress wrote is disturbing enough, but what she did not write is even more so.” The Matriarch clears her throat, then
continues. “You know what has occurred. She has used greater and greater sorceries, and so have the Sea-Priests. There is a truly mighty sorcerer in Neserea, perhaps even one as great as the Maitre himself. The Liedfuhr has hazarded too many lancers, and they will perish. Defalk has no defenses left to speak of, except two sorceresses and their assistants. The fleets of Wei are too far south to reach the Sturinnese fleet in the Bitter Sea, even were they inclined to give battle.”

Aetlen waits, then speaks when he realizes that she wants words from him. “You fear that she may unleash some great sorceries from the great sorceress?”

“I do indeed. Do you think that Secca is the type to ask for ships on a whim and to sail more than a thousand deks unless she has a plan and a thought of success?”

“She could be mistaken.”

“She could be.” Alya smiles wanly. “Consider this. The west of Liedwahr stands within the grasp of the Maitre. But there is a cost. For the first time in generations, most of the ships and lancers of Sturinn are well away from the home isles.”

“But…how can she defeat them if they are not there?”

Alya looks at him, her eyes unwavering.

His face pales.

“Exactly, my love,” she says. “Exactly. Yet…do we have any other choice?”

He looks down at the scroll as if it bore the announcement of his daughters' deaths.

“Do we?” she asks again.

He shakes his head slowly.

Outside the small dwelling, the wind whispered, not quite wailing, but never subsiding, strong enough at times to send darts of chill air through the shutters and into the cottage. Inside, under the light of the single oil lamp in the hamlet—one Delcetta had
brought all the way from Encora—Secca looked once more at the lines on the paper before her.

Secca rubbed her eyes, stifling a yawn. The idea was good, and the rhymes matched, but there were too many words, and the note values were another question. She looked at the words again and sighed.

“Do you need to do this tonight, and so late, lady?” asked Richina from where she lay in her bedroll on a narrow straw pallet on the far side of the hearth from the larger pallet where Secca's and Alcaren's bedrolls were laid out.

“I should have done it, and cast the spell, before I sent that poisoned tube to kill Belmar. The Sea-Priests have a spell like it, I would guess, from what you have discovered.” Secca swallowed another yawn and handed the sheet with the spellsong words to Alcaren, who had seated himself across the table from her. “Would you look at this?”

He took the sheet and began to read. “The lines are long…”

“I
know
that. Can you think of any way to shorten them?”

Alcaren finished reading through what she had handed him, then thought, and finally spoke, slowly and distinctly.

He broke off and shook his head. “Yours is better.”

“It's too long,” Secca reiterated.

“How about this,” suggested Alcaren,

“What comes next?”

“I don't know,” confessed her consort. “I thought you might have a way to bring it to a close. You are the Sorceress Protector.” He grinned, half-apologetically.

“It's your spell, my love,” Secca said.

“I am a beginner at this, my lady. Do have mercy upon me and my words.”

Both stopped speaking as the wind rose to a whistle and then died to a moaning, before rising to a shrill whistle again.

She looked at Alcaren, his face warm in the golden lamplight. “I want you to sing this one with me in the morning, with all the players. If I finish it.” She stopped, then added, “When I finish it, and finish it I will. Tonight.”

“As you wish, my lady, although I am not near so accomplished as you.”

“Remember how much stronger the spellsong was against the Sturinnese with more voices?” asked Secca.

“Would you like me, also?” Richina inquired from her pallet, her voice sleepy.

“I would like that, but it would not be good for you. Or for the rest of us, either,” Secca said firmly.

“I can—”

Secca held up a hand. “You sing well. But this spell is a draining spell, and it takes strength all the time from those who sing it. One of us should not be drained, and because you know more spells than does Alcaren, you must be free to sing those spells should we need them.”

“Oh…” Richina smiled shyly in the darkness of her corner, but the shyness carried into her voice.

“I am placing a burden on you, as well as on us,” Secca said. “Yours is but a different burden.” She smiled. “You can do little now. Best you try to sleep.”

“I am…tired.” There was a hint of a yawn in Richina's reply.

Secca looked down at the sheets of brown paper, then turned one, and then another to find a vacant space on one side. It took her three sheets to find one with enough space to write. She picked up the marker and wrote three words, then three more, before scratching out the last, and frowning, then sighing.

Alcaren winced, but said nothing.

Richina rolled on her side in her bedroll.

The wind whistled beyond the walls.

Despite the wind of the night before, the air was hushed and still in the orange light of early morning as Secca swung up into the saddle of the gray mare. She glanced back to the western end of the hamlet, where the players were strapping their instruments behind their saddles. Beyond them milled lancers—both the SouthWomen and those from Loiseau.

With a faint smile, she looked eastward out along the river road that would lead to Dumaria, and then to Narial. The one advantage of what the Sturinnese had done in blocking the passes to Neserea was that they couldn't easily turn back and chase Secca or do any more damage in Dumar. Not that they hadn't already done more than enough.

Secca half stretched as she settled into the saddle. The warding spell—if that were what it happened to be—had gone well enough, but Secca supposed she wouldn't know just how effective it might be until or unless the Sea-Priests tried sorcery against her. She glanced around.

Alcaren had already mounted, but had ridden to the western end of the hamlet to talk with Wilten and Delcetta. Richina was mounting, and another rider—gray-haired—was walking her mount toward Secca.

Palian nodded to Dymen as she drew up beside the sorceress. “How long do you think the ward will hold?”

“I don't know,” Secca admitted. “A few glasses…a few days…a few weeks. It could be any.” She smiled crookedly. “It might not work at all.”

“It will work. I could sense…something…drawing together.”

“Let us hope so.”

Palian gestured toward the players. “All are ready, except Bretnay.” She turned her mount. “Perchance…someday she will learn.”

The two women laughed. A vaguely puzzled expression crossed Richina's face as she reined in her mount beside them. Before either Palian or Secca could speak, Alcaren joined the three, his mount moving at a walk, with Wilten and Delcetta following him.

“The lancers are ready,” announced Secca's consort.

“Best we be going,” Secca said.

“Best I get Bretnay into the saddle,” said Palian dryly, turning her mount back toward the players, who all were mounted, save Bretnay, who looked helplessly at a snapped lashing thong while struggling to hold her violino case and the reins to her mount with her other hand.

“There is always one,” Secca murmured, more to herself, before turning to Alcaren. “How do you feel?”

“A little tired,” he admitted. “How about you?”

“The same.”

“How did you know it would be this way?” he asked.

“Lady Anna told me about spells that have a lasting effect. That was how she created the dam on the Falche, the one that caused the flood of Dumar, but she didn't know what she'd done until she was so tired that it broke in her sleep.”

“Column forward!” came Wilten's order.

“Forward!” echoed Delcetta in a slightly higher voice, and one that carried farther.

As she rode past the last small hut, Secca glanced around and back at the dozen or so hovels and cottages seemingly strewn at odd angles beside the road above the narrow Envar River. She hoped the people who had fled their arrival had not suffered too much.

For a time, she rode silently as the sun rose over the low rolling hills to the east, hills that flanked the river on both north and south. She pulled down the brim of the green felt hat, but still found herself squinting against the slowly rising sun.

“I can imagine how sorcery and countersorcery could become ever more involved,” Alcaren ventured after a time. “Before one knew it, nothing could be done for all the counterspells to the counterspells.”

“And the spells to counter those?” questioned Secca lightly, not really wanting to think, for the moment, about the implications of what she had begun.

“There must be ways around such,” offered Richina.

“Indeed?” replied Alcaren.

“You had a thought, Richina?” asked Secca, kindly, turning and smiling at the blonde, trying to draw out the younger sorceress.

“What if the spell were not directed at the sorcerer?” asked Richina.

Alcaren laughed. After a moment, so did Secca, partly because of Richina's words, and partly because her practical approach again reminded Secca of Richina's mother.

“So simple, yet so profound,” Alcaren said. “What did you have in mind?”

“Well,” Richina said, almost primly, “what about the great waves of the Sea-Priests? Or if you created a deep pit in the ground under a sorcerer?”

“Or had part of a mountain break off so that it would fall where a sorcerer might be?” suggested Secca.

“Still…” Alcaren mused. “Could you not sing a spell against physical harm?”

“I probably could,” replied Secca. “How long would we have the strength to hold it?”

Her consort nodded.

Secca frowned. “It might be a good idea to develop such a spell, for use in dire straits.”

“It might,” Alcaren said. “I would hope we would not need such.”

“I wager that the Sea-Priests already know how to do that,” Secca replied. “Each season we learn more about what they do know.”

“Why did not the lady Anna—” Alcaren broke off his question. “She was from the Mist Worlds.”

“Ah…lady, ser…” Richina cleared her throat.

“Why don't you explain?” Secca suggested to Alcaren with a grin. “You seem to understand her better than we do.”

Alcaren offered a wide and sheepish smile. “I beg your pardon, my lady.”

The older sorceress waited.

Alcaren shrugged. “My lady, if you would correct me if I err…”

“I'd be delighted, ser.” Secca softened the words with a warm smile, “but I may get little chance, since you err so seldom.”

Alcaren winced, then cleared his throat. “As you have told me, when the lady Anna came to Liedwahr, there was but one sorcerer in all of Defalk, and that was Lord Brill. He was most close-mouthed, and he died under the onslaught of the Dark Monks at the Sand Pass. Lady Anna came from the Mist Worlds, where sorcery was less effective, and she had never used sorcery in the fashion that the Evult or the Sea-Priests did. She learned almost all about sorcery, except for the mechanics of singing, in which she was most expert, by reading and by herself. Because she came from elsewhere, she viewed matters differently, and because she was so powerful and so uncontested…I would surmise that she never needed spells of defense.”

“But there were Sea-Priests then,” Richina protested.

Secca shook her head. “Not really. There were but a few sorcerers in Dumar, and most were killed by the river.” She cocked her head. “I would also wager that, then, the Sea-Priests had fewer sorcerers and had not thought about such spells, either.”

“They have developed such because of you and the others,” Alcaren said.

“There is still much we do not know,” Secca admitted, “but what has happened has been too well planned not to have been developed over years and years.”

“Distance affects spells as well,” Alcaren added. “The storm spells…your message tubes…”

“So a spell of defense should work better against a spell cast from a greater distance,” theorized Secca, “because a spell cast from a distance is not so strong?”

“I would guess so.” Alcaren shrugged. “But who would know?”

Who would know?
There were so many things like that facing them, reflected Secca, and she was stumbling, just trying to outguess a Maitre of Sturinn who had planned his conquest of Liedwahr for years, who had developed an entire company of sorcerers and drummers, and who had already left a quarter of the continent defenseless—except for whatever she and those with her could do.

Secca's eyes drifted over the grasses that flanked the road. Occasional thin sprigs of green grass had begun to appear at the base of the winter-tan stalks of older grass, and every so often there was the lower white and purple of a spring flower hugging the ground. Spring flowers were a sign of good luck.

She certainly hoped so.