Kings of the North (23 page)

“If the gods favor us, perhaps the gift of magery will survive, but if it does not, so many being drawn from crafters will ensure that none go naked or roofless.”

Jeddrin thought of his own domain, where indeed skill at masonry and abundant rock meant none of his folk lived roofless, and the sheep provided ample wool for spinning and weaving. Yet in Siniava’s War he had seen vagrants enough, barely clothed in rags, starving, sleeping in heaps under bushes. That had not been Mikeli’s intent; he had wanted to create a land where hunger and rags and misery did not exist.

A wish-tale … but a better wish-tale than Siniava’s, or Alured’s, who wanted only to rule.

His eyes burned; his back ached. Far to the east, the first dull red of false dawn showed below the stars. He was too old to read the night through and then work all day. He shuffled the papers together, retied the ribbons carefully, and carried the stack indoors, to
put safely on a table, away from any morning breeze that might scatter the pages. A few watch lamps burned to show the way. A sleepy servant woke at the sound of his step, jumping up.

“Never mind,” Jeddrin said; he could not scold servants anymore, he but a stonemason’s get. “I read too late; I will sleep late as well. Tell the cook, if you will.”

In his bedroom, the curtains had been pulled back, as he preferred on summer nights; he drew them, put the documents on his table, and then undressed and washed himself before sliding between cool sheets. His mind produced scenes from Mikeli’s account, a city filling with sand and refugees struggling to get away, carrying their tools or a few days’ food … not the nobles riding away on horseback he had imagined before.

W
hen he woke and dealt with the day’s work and then once more delved into the archives, he found more. Some were but fragments: “A man came to the shores of the lake and being thirsty, he drank, and in with the water he swallowed a seed, as it seemed, a seed small and eager to be swallowed, and therein began the ruin of the towers and the land.” Others, also attributed to Mikeli, were longer, parts of a journal describing years of struggle to make a new Aare in a land unlike the old.

“The keys are gone,” Mikeli wrote in one entry.

I
t took days to figure out what the “keys” were and what had happened, or what Mikeli thought had happened. Days in which a message from Alured, Duke of Immer, arrived, along with a squad of stern-faced soldiers and a man who claimed to be a scribe, demanding access to Andressat’s archives, from which he hoped to prove Alured’s right to the kingship.

“I will gladly show you the archives,” Jeddrin said, “but we do not allow anyone to remove materials or to shuffle them about. I received the duke’s earlier request and have been searching.”

“But you are a busy man, Count Andressat,” said the squad’s
commander, who named himself Captain Nerits. “The Duke is pleased to lend you a scholar to assist in the search.”

“I have archivists of my own,” Jeddrin said. “It is not our custom to let strangers poke and pry.”

“It is not the Duke’s custom to have his vassals disobedient,” the captain said. He did not draw a weapon—Andressat had his own guards in the room—but the threat was clear.

“Duke Alured’s domain lies in the Immer valley,” Jeddrin said. “Mine was never part of it.”

“I would not be too sure,” the captain said. “And all the more reason for the duke’s scholar to study in your archives, as it would be in your interest to conceal evidence to the contrary. Nor should you miscall him Duke Alured now; he has chosen a new name to fit his new status, an ancestor’s name from records he found in Cortes Immer. He is Duke Visla Vaskronin: remember that. As the duke means to rule, it would also be in your interest to show your submission now.”

Cortes Immer was far from Cortes Andres: leagues and leagues lay between, forest and vale. Cortes Andres had never been breached, not even by Siniava, and in the aftermath of that war, Alured, Vaskronin, or whatever he chose to call himself could not have raised a large enough army to invade Andressat.

“Surely your duke has enough to do without bothering a poor stony land far from his own,” Jeddrin said. “I mean no discourtesy, but I will not see my hospitality abused, either. If your duke’s claim is proved true, I will accept his authority, but until then
I
rule Andressat, and none other. I will escort your scholar to the archives, to see for himself why it takes so long to read and check every scroll and book.”

“We will escort him—”

“You will not. You will remain here,” Jeddrin said, with all the command voice he could muster. The captain shrugged; Andressat told his own guards to find them quarters in the citadel’s outer ring. The scholar followed as he himself led the way into the inner citadel and then into the palace and finally, the main library.

The room was long, almost the full depth of the building, lit by tall narrow windows with shelves between. “This is one of the archives,” Jeddrin said, watching the scholar’s face.

“It is … impressive,” the man said. He did look like a scholar, stoop-shouldered, his fingers ink-stained.

“It does not contain what the Duke of Immer seeks,” Jeddrin said. “This room has been searched and cataloged. My own archivists—” He gestured to the end of the room, where a man sat working at a desk and a woman reached to a high shelf with a long pole.

“What is that?” the scholar asked, pointing at her.

“It is for retrieving scrolls or scroll cases from the top shelves,” Jeddrin said. “My father invented it. He is the one who began the reorganization after a series of wet years brought a spring up—yes, even up here on this height—in the middle of the old archives. Things had to be moved in haste, dried, stacked anywhere room could be found, and the same weather that brought the spring gave his archivist lung-fever. Some records were lost and could not be restored, he told me—I was not yet born—and others damaged. It was some years before he could find someone qualified to begin copying the damaged materials, and as I’m sure you know, some once attacked by the black stain continue to decay—it was a race against the stain, not entirely won.”

“But why were the archives on the floor in the first place?” the scholar asked.

“According to my father, his father and his wife’s father both increased the collection—already large—buying up any antiquarian documents they could find. They were enthusiasts, and they vied in finding old and rare scrolls, books, loose sheets. My father’s father had not expected to inherit, and so had more leisure than I. But let’s see how you do with this one—” Jeddrin pulled out a scroll he knew had been written but seven generations back.

The scholar peered at it. “It’s old.”

“Yes. I’m wondering if you can read it.”

“I think—let me see—it is a record of … of goat breeding?”

“Yes. With notes of weather, diseases, and so forth.”

“I don’t recognize some of the words—” The scholar pointed.

Jeddrin said, “Rain.”

“Really? It’s not the same—”

“No. Our word for rain drops the second sound, and the breath-sound has narrowed.”

“You’ve studied this?”

“My father insisted. I was to be his scholar, you see; my elder brother was to inherit—much the same situation as with my father’s father. My elder brother slipped and fell on a vine stake and died of it; neither of us had married yet.”

“So you can read all these?” The scholar waved at the shelves.

“Of course,” Jeddrin said. “And older, besides. But now I’ll take you to the store-pile, as we call it, things still unsorted. Apparently all my ancestors collected writings; it may not be fully cataloged even in my lifetime.”

“I could help,” the scholar said.

“I think not,” Jeddrin said. “If you cannot read it, how could you catalog it?”

The store-pile filled a series of connecting rooms, divided by function. The farthest held unsorted materials, heaps and piles on floors and shelves. In the next, baskets and bins held roughly sorted items, those tainted by blackstain or blue carefully segregated from the rest, in closed containers. The two outermost rooms had tables where scribes copied out the most damaged materials.

“I employ five archivists and scribes at present,” Jeddrin said to the scholar, whose jaw had dropped. “In my father’s day, only one of these rooms had been cleared for copyists. Now two.”

“I am sure the Duke of Immer would hire even more, if you would trust—”

“No,” Jeddrin said, without heat. “Every family has records it does not share, and I am not handing over unsorted materials, that my family guarded for generations, without knowing what is in every one.”

“How much work do you do here?”

“I? I have little time for it, though I try to spend an hour a day reading, to retain my skills. I am presently reading a series of letters between my great-great-grandfather and someone in Pliuni, discussing the breeding of goats and whether our goats here were brought from Old Aare or tamed from wild goats in the Westmounts.”

“But if you aren’t looking yourself, how do you know what the Duke seeks has not been found already?”

Jeddrin gave him a look that made the man step back. “Does your
Duke, then, cook his own food? And will he himself read every item in the archives, should I send them?”

“N-no. He will hire scholars—”

“Even as I have done. He is a ruler; I am a ruler. I made it clear to my scholars what they were to seek, and they report to me. It might be found today, or tomorrow, or by Midwinter, or three winters after I am dead … or it might not exist at all. I wrote the Duke that if I found proof of his legitimate succession by blood from the nobles of Aare”—the words hurt as he said them, considering what he now knew about his own family—“I would tell him and publicly acknowledge it. And I will. In
my
family, we keep our word.” That, too, sliced his spirit, for the documents Alured sought were hidden away in the secret chamber off his bedroom, until he could decide what to do, the proof of his own lack of noble blood. “It would be helpful,” he want on, “if the Duke knew more of his parentage.”

Gray Fox Inn, Fin Panir, Fintha

A
rvid Semminson, now effectively master of the Thieves’ Guild in Vérella, finished his dull but satisfying lunch and picked his teeth while watching the staff of the Gray Fox common room at their work. He had not been in Fintha for several hands of years; the Girdish realm had outlawed the Thieves’ Guild. He would not be here now, but for the Marshal-General’s invitation; the Girdish wanted to know everything he remembered about their paladin Paksenarrion. The Marshal-General’s seal on her invitation to him brought instant respect from the innkeeper, and he’d been given a table in the quietest corner of the big common room all to himself.

A heavily-bearded dwarf in typical clothing—yellow doublet over a checked shirt, green trousers, a blue hat with a red feather—and a beardless one in a green shirt over blue trousers came in. Arvid looked at the older dwarf as a servant led the two to a table near him. No clan ring on the dwarf’s heart-thumb. A chain around his neck—not gold—which might hold a Guild symbol, like his own, tucked well into that shirt. Arvid looked away, listened to a serving maid stumble through a polite greeting in dwarvish and the dwarf’s stilted but understandable Common in reply. The beardless one said nothing; the bearded one ordered for both.