Inda (45 page)

“You should not have permitted that to happen.”

Dun said, “I thought about it, but two things stayed me. One, not one of those men will ever set foot a hundred paces inland. They’ll never know what they learned. And second, the rumors of pirates are growing worse. You did say to keep him alive.”

“And that is still my mandate.”

“Well, then, the ship’s crew had better know how to fight,” Dun stated with grim conviction. “Things are going from bad to worse in the east, and there’s troubling news closer at hand.”

Sindan was silent for a time. Neither had really touched their food. Dun began to eat in an absent way.

“Then leave be,” Sindan said finally, and Dun realized he was not going to find out what had happened to cause the son of a prince to have to vanish. Especially since the boy was obviously not a thief or a coward, the usual suspicions.

Dun again regretted that his Runner duties had kept him so long on the coast, that his family background in ship carpentry had made it easy to assume this disguised self. But he’d been patient for a year and a half, and now that duty was done.

Or?
It’s still my mandate,
and
Leave be.
Those suggested he was not free after all.

Sindan broke into his thoughts. “You said he has the way of command. Is it just the drill, then?”

“No. The reading classes.”

Sindan raised his brows, and for the first time smiled a little. “Tell me, frivolous as it may seem.”

“Little to tell. I didn’t know the academy taught them reading and writing, even Sartoran.”

“They don’t. Classes are spoken. The education in letters was the doing of Fareas-Iofre.”

“Ah. Well, few hands can even write their names, and of course it’s not needed. Now, mids can’t become mates until they pass a test, because there’s writing involved. Well, it’s the purser’s mate’s job to teach the mids, there being little clerical work while the ship is at sea, but this fellow either is an extraordinarily bad teacher, or else he doesn’t want competition. Inda didn’t know any of that. He saw a couple of the mids struggling over some text, glanced down, corrected them. Imagine their surprise that he could read! Soon he conducted classes in the rat-hole—uh, their cabin.”

“But that’s teaching, not command.”

“And I don’t perceive it?” Dun retorted, but without heat. “The cruise was largely uneventful, as I said. Until we got caught in the middle of a civil war in Khanerenth. The ship was impounded, all the sailors were seized and imprisoned in an old barracks. Nothing much happened while we waited for them to sort it out; this was beginning of spring last year, you see. We were penned in adjacent warehouses. Captain and mates controlled the sailors in the big one, but the boys, next door, started dividing into factions, fighting, that kind of thing. Kodl, the first mate, who was permitted to check on the boys, reported that Inda got several of them learning to read and write, and then drilling. Gradually they absorbed the rest of the young ones. The only ones who stood out were the older mids who despise the rats. That, my friend, is the instinct for command.”

Sindan sighed. “Now I see. You’re right.”

The regret in his voice silenced Dun. But only for a moment. Obliquely approaching the subject that meant most to him, he said, “You mentioned trouble.”

Sindan leaned forward. “As soon as the ground dries out from the last snow, Tlennen-Harvaldar raises his war banner and sends Anderle-Harskialdna to march on the north.”

Dunrend betrayed his shock only in the widening of his eyes. Tlennen Harvaldar,
war king,
not Tlennen-Siraec,
ruling monarch
. For though the Shield Arm could command defense, it was only the king who could declare war; his brother defending at home would remain Sirandael, but if he rode to war, he took the coveted title of Harskialdna.

Sindan saw the question in Dun’s face, and murmured, “He was forced into it, of course. The Venn sea war in the east just postponed that trouble, and those who counted on glory and land have been poised to turn on one another. And so our excuse is the Idayagans’ refusal to accept the treaty sent north last summer.”

“But I thought that the treaty offered our warships in sea defense, and had to be dropped when our ships were sunk.”

“Another treaty was sent—the Sirandael went himself. The new treaty would shift the defense from sea to land, requiring them to quarter warriors there for defense against the Venn when they do come. The Idayagans have not answered, and the year they were given is up.”

Dun compressed his lips.
The Sirandael went himself.

Putting that together with the remarks about brothers, and Dun knew what Sindan could not say, and something of what he himself had come very slowly to realize, ever since he’d traveled to other lands, and could compare what he saw to what he had always taken for granted at home.

He had never been sent to the academy, of course, for his family had no influence. Runners were trained differently, but one of the ways they were trained was to comprehend those they might one day have to represent, to protect, and as they traveled ceaselessly around the kingdom, they listened.

He had heard enough to imagine what the Sirandael’s life had been like: raised not just to train for defense at home, but for war. Everything in his life an arrow to that one target. It wasn’t just duty, it was his life’s meaning.

Far away, while sitting and thinking in a Khanerenth jail, Dun came to realize that a man whose entire purpose for living is to command a war will not want to spend his life waiting for its possibility. He was going to have one, and he was going to see to it—after all, it made military sense—that he would have it on his own terms, the ones with which he expected to win.

Dun leaned forward. “You’ll need Runners. Send me north.”

“I need your skill as personal guard more. There is no one better than you, even among most of the Guard. You must protect Indevan-Dal.”

Dun protested softly, “He will survive. When he discovers how capable he is, he will even prosper.”

But Sindan shook his head, and said, reluctantly, “You have to understand that I speak with the King’s Voice in this matter. Though I do not wear the crown sigil”—he touched his breast—“and carry no written orders you see me as Herskalt, and these are the king’s own words:
You are to stay with the boy as his shield.
”

Dunrend closed his eyes, drawing in a slow breath. He needed that time to recover from the nearly overwhelming bitterness the command caused. Then he saluted, fist to heart.

“That’s it, then,” the server thought to herself, standing soundlessly behind the wooden divider, and she retreated through the kitchen, where the cook and her mates were busy, heedless of anything going on in the outer room. Step, step, out the door and up the back way to the barren attic room she’d held since she’d taken this job two and a half weeks ago, two days after the arrival of Jened Sindan, captain of the King’s Runners. Who had come here to sit every day, obviously waiting for . . . something.

Back in the eating room, both men sat in silence for a time, Dun wondering if the war would come while he was gone, if his beloved Hibern knew he was still alive, above all if he would ever be able to return; Sindan watching his young relative struggle to master disappointment, and considering the reach of the Sierandael’s decisions, consequences the king’s brother would never know of. Some he exerted himself to make certain the king’s brother never knew of.

Finally Dun said, “At least I can now tell Inda who I am.”

Sindan frowned at the window, which looked onto the busy street and the cloudy sky above the rooftops. At last he said, “Do you think Indevan-Dal wishes one day to return home?”

Dun said immediately, “I know he does.”

“Yet you say he has not spoken.”

“Not about his family, or homelands, or anything Marlovan. But you cannot spend close to two years watching someone, even a small boy, without coming to understand a little of what goes inside his head. I would say he longs for home. It’s there in his silences, the way the others tease him about bad dreams that he will never explain.”

“Then he cannot know who you are,” Sindan murmured, his hands open. “Do you not see? If Indevan-Dal wishes to return home, he will return home with stories of his experiences while exiled, and those stories cannot include a guard ordered by the king himself.”

Dun realized that the order extended to himself as well, and he sustained, in silence, the sharp pang of disappointment.
If I do not know the reasons for the exile, then I too can return home one day.
And he thought of Hibern, also a Runner. She knew about long missions, and silence. One learned to accept that in the royal service.

But she would not wait forever, and he could not blame her.

So the exiles must continue together, without the comfort of communication.

A Sartoran would have negotiated, a Colendi might have smiled, agreed, and done what he wished, a Delf would have argued, and a pair from Old Faleth would inevitably have ended up outside fighting a duel of honor, but Dun was a Marlovan. “So shall it be,” he said, and saluted again.

“Then let us part,” Sindan said, rising from his chair.

Meanwhile, the former server crossed the alley to another small inn, where Ranet, Ndara-Harandviar’s Runner, waited. Ranet sat alone at a table, toying with bread and cheese, as she’d done every day since she followed Jened Sindan south. The server sat, murmuring, “I have found the Iofre’s son.” And leaned forward to describe everything she’d overheard.

While out in the alley, Sindan arrived, and with his own silent step approached the door, waiting until someone came out. When at last a stable boy banged the door open, he glimpsed the two women in the crack between door and frame, smiled, and noiselessly withdrew.

Chapter Five

H
ADAND raced down to the throne room, her breath clouding in the cold air. Outside the last snows were still melting, but she was warm with inward joy.

Sponge was there, standing just below the three steps to the throne on its dais, where the shadows seemed to pool the deepest, the air was coldest. Weak morning light just reached him; his silhouetted profile turned sharply at the soft sound of her footfalls on the stone floor.

She grabbed Sponge by the arms. “Inda’s alive!”

Tiny lights flickered across his vision, resolving into tiny golden gleams in Hadand’s tears, reflections of the torchlight outside the high clerestory windows.

“He’s alive,” she whispered again, just for the joy of saying it.

Sponge’s throat had gone tight, his mouth dry. When he could speak, he said, “Where?”

“They sent him to sea! On a ship, of all things! I just found out last night. A message sent to Ndara by Ranet.”

“A ship,” Sponge repeated, because at first the words made no sense. Then meaning came, a superb protective strategy. “Like Barend. My uncle would never guess that.”
Sindan told the truth. He is safe.

Hadand’s thoughts paralleled his in an unsettling way. She sat down cross-legged, face in her hands. “Captain Sindan didn’t lie to me, then,” she whispered, and her shoulders shook as she silently wept.

Sponge stood by awkwardly. Hadand almost never cried. He could probably count the times he’d seen her do it.

And as always, it was brief. She drew in a shuddering breath, pulled down her hands, pressed them together, then looked up at him with those wide-set brown eyes so much like Inda’s, and said, “Do you forgive me?”

Sponge stared at her in amazement.

Hadand swung to her feet and faced him, chin turned up. He was fully a head taller than she. “Have you forgotten, then? The day after Inda disappeared.”

It was Sponge’s turn to feel warm inside, the painful warmth of embarrassment, of regret. He remembered it well, the wild anger, the urge to strike out at someone. But he couldn’t strike at his father, or his uncle, or his brother, or his bunkmates who couldn’t be told anything at all, and so when Hadand had sent him a message saying,
Come when you wish to, we can comfort one another,
he had written in white-hot anger, not even troubling to convert it all to Old Sartoran,
Comfort yourself with your secrets.

Sponge winced. “I thought we talked that out. Before we started in here.” He flicked his fingers at the throne room.

Hadand opened her hands. “Oh, you said you understood when I explained my promise to my mother to just teach Inda. My promise to Ndara. But I have never felt you . . . forgave me.” She still could not bring herself to say the real word:
trust
.

Sponge sighed. “I did understand that it was not your secret to give out. That training Inda was your mother’s decision, and I agreed. How could I be enough of a pug to hold onto a grudge when you’ve trusted me enough with your training ever since?”

There was the word, and he’d used it. But Hadand, sensitive to every subtle modulation of his voice, still felt his hesitation, the care with which he chose words. Real trust, the old trust, did not require one to choose words.

He sensed her doubt, and said with even more care, “I just don’t want to compromise you any more than I already have, forcing you to choose between me and the secrets you share with your mother and my aunt.”

Sponge watched Hadand press the heels of her hands into her eyes—Inda’s gesture. The real truth was, they were here because Inda had broken his promise. Hadand knew Sponge believed he’d done it because he had valued Sponge above the necessity for secrecy.

The logical corollary was that Hadand did not value him as much, though she had grown up with him. He could not know how determined, how desperate the women were that their secrets not be discovered—for the good of the kingdom. If they had to make men stand down from violence, they needed to know skills that the men did not know.