Banner of the Damned (102 page)

Time passed. Summer’s heat settled over the city. So great was my wish to drop the Sigradir post into the Herskalt’s hands that I worked exclusively on the wards, either studying and sketching the structure, or sifting through the former sigradir’s messy library, bit by bit, paper by paper, looking for anything about wards. I resented the Sartoran Mage Guild’s arrogant exclusivity—I should be able to order the books I needed.

If that library was organized, it was on a system that made sense only to the old sigradir. Either that, or he had built atop older material that he’d inherited. My library excavations paralleled my magical excavations, as I recovered forgotten strata of magic spells, notes, experiments, scrawled in old-fashioned handwritings.

My reward was on the bottom shelf, clearly neglected for centuries: a small scroll squashed flat between a record of household magical spells that dated back seven hundred years, and a Brennic book of stage illusions that had probably been brought by Taumad Dei, who built a theater near the castle during Inda’s lifetime.

The scroll was written in Old Sartoran, which I hadn’t perused for ten years. Here I found, clearly laid out, some of what I had been struggling to formulate on my own. The most important thing, though, was the comparison between dark magic wards, which are mostly traps, and mirror wards used to reflect magic—think of a mirror set behind a candle sconce—so that less magic was required to sustain a spell.

The first type of spell required strong magic, bound to a protection (with lethal effect). The second was a series of small spells, interlocked in now-familiar chains.

My immediate reaction was,
Now I’ve got the basics for the bottom layer of wards.

My second reaction was,
Most of the magic I have been making is the first type.

I was going to write a letter to the Herskalt when I blinked at the paper, my head feeling odd, as if it might float away from my body. Again, I’d forgotten to eat, and I couldn’t remember when I’d slept last. Yet I could not possibly sleep. On impulse I decided to shift to Darchelde and walk through the castle in hopes of finding the Herskalt at a meal, or in one of the other chambers.

I was aware of noise coming from the direction of the stable, but no one was about inside. I passed along quiet corridors, appreciating the decorative touches that had been too austere for my Colendi notice when we first arrived, such as the Venn knots worked into doors and high on walls, the patterned tiles, the carved doors. As I gazed up at them, I sensed magic worked into the painted or carved patterns.

I breathed in, my senses heightened. I felt magic everywhere—the Herskalt’s signature. As was to be expected, if he was renewing the protective spells, though my work should certainly have been good enough for another eight to ten years. Also, the spells felt stronger than protective magic, but that might be the peculiarity of walking in an enormous castle without anyone in sight.

I transferred back to my tower when a series of yawns made my eyes sting. The sooner the Herskalt took over, the better, I thought, and went to bed.

One morning, when I walked up to the staff room after an early session with the fans, I discovered that Lasva had returned. I was shocked when I saw her with the strong morning light full on her face. For the first time, I noticed subtle signs of aging in fine lines at the corners of her eyes and across her brow. She was still beautiful, but in the way of a statue, cool as marble.

“Emras,” she said. “I hoped to find you out of your lair.” She gestured to her private room, and I walked inside, breathing the subtle floral scents that always brought Alsais to mind.

“Was your journey successful?” I asked.

“I did my best, but someone was ahead of me. Everywhere I went, I had to answer, ah-ye, misapprehensions about me. About Colend. It’s as if someone did their best to undercut anything I would say. In Tiv Evair, they had the idea that I’d made a secret treaty with Totha at the northern jarlates’ expense, culminating in my being given Tdor’s trunk, which had not left Totha for three centuries.”

“What secret treaty?”

“I don’t know.” Lasva opened a travel bag and pulled out a ribbon-tied roll of heavy paper. “Then there was Tlennen, who had heard that I wanted to turn Marloven Hesea into a nation of traders. The warriors would become caravan guards.” She fluttered the roll of paper in Mock Horror.

“Better that than warriors,” I said.

Lasva smiled. “I think so, too, and how could I summarily take their weapons away from them? Then I reached Tdiran Yvanavar.” Lasva untied the ribbon and began to lay out the papers on her desk. “She told me the truth, that the north has decided the peace treaty I made with Olavair was a peace without honor.”

“How?”

“Because of the granted right of sovereignty.” She tapped her head. “Such things—kingship and borders—it’s all up here. I understand why people want to be kings, but the people they rule? Why should anyone care if your leader calls himself king or jarl, so long as they are left in peace? But somehow, the ordinary folk in Yvanavar and Khanivar and Tiv Evair have decided that Olavair’s being a sovereign nation dishonors the rest of Marloven Hesea. They have always hated the Olavairans. Emras, my mission was a failure. I returned to consider something else, something to try at New Year’s Convocation, perhaps.” She frowned down at the papers, which I could see were sketches.

“May I ask what those are?”

“Certainly. Tdiran insisted that I honor her with my advice—it seems that she’s been taken by the notion of reviving the art of tapestry-making. They have looms, of course, but she has no idea how to lay the whole out. I don’t know how serious she is, but I promised I’d try to make some sense of these sketches.” Her lip curled. “Not that a battle has to make artistic sense.”

“They want a battle scene?”

“The Battle of Andahi, to be precise, where the Yvanavar ancestor, named Hawkeye, achieved a great triumph just before he died on the battlefield.” She shook her head. “I suspect they want him at the moment of triumph, judging from these sketches of Danrid, who of course is the model for Hawkeye. This runner is a fine artist, isn’t he? It’s a remarkable likeness of Danrid, to the toothy smile. And Inda Elgar is to be posed in suitably martial triumph next to him.”

“According to the Fox memoir, Inda Elgar was on the cliffs above,” I said, glancing down at the sketch she laid next to that of Danrid.

What I saw made me bend down to look closer, for whoever had
made these sketches had caught the Herskalt, or someone who looked remarkably like him.

“The Fox writer might have gotten it wrong,” Lasva said, looking through the rest of the drawings. “Unless he was there.”

“He wasn’t, but…”
He had someone’s memories—he had a dyr
, I thought, and tapped the drawing. “Who is this?”

“Some guard captain, I think. I don’t know—he has a familiar face, doesn’t he? Hemma, Hanas. One of these odd names.”

“Hannik?” I asked. “He’s the Yvanavar sword master.” Lasva had seen the Herskalt twice, as far as I was aware, once at the Olavair battle and right after the Totha one. Both times she was distracted by other matters, and it was clear from her expression of mild query that he had not stayed in her memory.

But I knew that face well.

“One of their riders made the drawings during training,” Lasva said, as she laid the rest of the drawings out on her desk and frowned at them, shifting them this way and that, then standing back to observe the whole.

“May I borrow this drawing?” I asked.

“Certainly. I have him from three angles, as I do Danrid and his favorite cousin. But these two are the best for the purpose of the tapestry.” She tapped the two in the center, turned her ring around on her finger, then fluttered her fingers in Rue. “Is Kaidas still here?”

“Yes.”

“Then I suppose I must interview him. I perceive my cowardice in avoiding him. In Colend, there are a thousand ways to say
our old love is dead
without ever making a trespass against
melende
. I suppose I owe him that much, though I really do not know why he came.”

The problem with the dyr, I thought as I walked out, is that at once you can know too much about a person—that is, facts you might not have wanted to know, and that you certainly cannot share—and yet not understand the person at all. So it was now. I could not understand Lasva’s reaction to Kaidas’s continued presence.

However, at that moment there was a more pressing puzzle: Hannik.

I transferred to Darchelde, where I half expected to find the Herskalt. He was not there. If Hannik was his brother (he did not look old enough to have a grown son) or even a cousin, it seemed odd that he wouldn’t have mentioned it when we talked about Danrid Yvanavar. So I would explore the question on my own.

I settled into my chair, laid the drawing on the table, concentrated and
found Tdiran. She was in the nursery with her son, and the daughter who was four. The boy was turning cartwheels as Tdiran admired his looks—annoyance at the thunderstorm keeping her in—Dannor was definitely left-handed. Then the boy knocked over the castle the girl was building with small wooden blocks, which set her screaming. As Tdiran dealt with them, I searched her memory for Hannik… and there.

Admiration suffused the memory of a straight-backed figure astride a horse. From the distance he did look like the Herskalt, except his hair was bright, catching the light and drawing the eye. I had to make an effort to look past that long streaming tail of sun-glinting hair… illusion?

I searched farther back in her memories for him. Only once did she watch him, but it was from a distance—drilling the men. Tdiran’s erotic response to the man’s speed and expertise forced me out of that memory. I could find no conversations. Tdiran never seemed to see—ah, echo of conversation,
Why don’t you bring him inside?
And there was Danrid in Tdiran’s memory, shrugging.
I have tried
.

Can you order him?

No. That was our agreement.

You can’t give your sword master an order?

Danrid flushed angrily, looking out a window.
That was the agreement we made. Tdiran, he had me pinned down. He could have killed me, and no one would have known. I’ve never seen anyone fight like that, he knew every strike before I made it. If he doesn’t want to talk to us, he doesn’t want to talk to us. I want our people to fight like that. If we do reclaim the north, no one is going to stop us.

I tried to access Danrid, but as the Herskalt had said, he was warded. All I could “hear” were distorted emotions, and the sound of his voice, but no sense.

So I returned to Tdiran’s memory of watching Hannik in training. I tried to access him from there. It was like bumping into a shield of polished steel. Vertigo seized me, forcing me out.

On impulse, I tried to reach the Herskalt and got the same thing, the shield of steel.

So I shifted back to my tower, and for the first time, wrote a note to Ivandred:
I must consult you
.

I sent it and turned to my ward sketches. I was in the middle of an experiment using the slow but subtle magic as set out in my scroll, when I received an answer from Ivandred:
We are camped beside the bridge at Or Arei.

Where I had first performed magic. I would never forget that place.

When the transfer reaction wore off, I found myself standing in the middle of a camp clearing a few paces from the royal tent, which was exactly like the others only larger, with the Fox Banner suspended from a lance stuck in the ground at one side. At the other, the black and gold Marloven screaming eagle in flight. Above it curved the magnificent bridge. The air was cold.

Around the camp the lancers moved about purposefully. A few stood near the campfire, from which emanated the smell of pan bread baking, a combination of rye and olive oil that threw me back to those days when we first arrived.

As I crossed the muddy ground to the royal tent, I caught sight of Tesar, who lifted a camp cup to me in greeting. Then she went back to her conversation; I saw her laugh, her breath clouding on the air.

I raised my hand in salute, amazed that she could turn down a high rank and a castle of her own just to stand around a muddy camp, weighted down with weapons, eating dry pan bread cooked over a fire instead of properly baked in an oven. Is this love? I wondered. Not the tender passion, as we Colendi would say—though maybe she was in love with someone here—but the kind of love that binds a group into one? Loyalty is one of the great loves, Martande I had written.

Ivandred appeared at the door to his tent, and Haldren Marlovair passed me by, raising a gauntlet in salute, chain mail jingling.

“You have a report?” Ivandred asked. “Wards are finished?”

“I discovered a text by accident that might speed me along. It’s a kind of magic that, ah-ye, you may not wish to hear the details.” His silence I took as tacit agreement, so I unrolled the drawing, and laid it on the camp table beside the ever-present map.

He glanced down. “It’s the Herskalt. Looks like he’s demonstrating an upward block against attack from someone on horseback. So?”