King's Shield (11 page)

As word spread outward (a passing carter having asked the Marlo-Vayir Runners who the foreigners were) that the one with the earrings was in truth Elgar the Fox, Tau stayed back, holding the reins of his and Inda’s horses. He observed how with two swift gestures this king got everyone moving. In the midst of orderly chaos he separated Inda from the rest and they promptly vanished into the crowd.

After Signi and Jeje took their gear from the saddle straps, a couple of stable hands led the women’s animals away. The short woman who looked like Inda made inviting gestures to Jeje and Signi; the tall one stood at her side, staring bemusedly into space.

A pair of stable hands approached Tau, their manner expectant. What was
he
supposed to do?

One held out his hand for the reins to Inda’s horse, the other waited for Tau’s reins. Tau relinquished the reins, but then the men just stood there. Waiting for? Was Tau supposed to remove his own and Inda’s gear?

One of the stable hands made a motion toward the saddlebags, and the two helpfully steadied the animals. Ah. So he was now a servant. With a rueful smile, Tau unloaded the bags and hefted them over his shoulders. The animals were taken away, leaving him standing there alone.

Inda’s sister was conducting Jeje and Signi toward the entrance to the tower looming over them. He decided to follow the women.

Hadand and Tdor stopped just inside the tower entrance. Tdor closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her nerves tingled. Shock pooled inside her; her mind refused to work, senses walling off color, smells, noise, until Hadand stepped close beside her, giving a watery chuckle. “Can you believe that?”

“Believe?” Tdor tensed.

Hadand flicked her hand outward. “Evred and Inda slinking off like a pair of scrubs scamping wand-duty!” A quick look back at the two strange women who stared upward at the winding stone stairway of the tower, shafts of light angling down from the slit windows. “I don’t know what to do with Inda’s people. I guess take them upstairs and give them something to eat until Evred brings Inda back.” And she gave quick orders to her personal Runner in a whisper.

As Tesar sped up the stairs ahead of them, Hadand gestured to the women. “Come with me,” she said in Iascan, and to her relief, both signified agreement. Good. They spoke a language Hadand knew!

Tdor trailed after Hadand and the two strange women, peripherally aware of the tall young man with the golden hair falling in behind her, burdened with a double load of travel gear. Her insides now cramped, her knees had gone watery. She did not see the stairs or hear Hadand’s determinedly polite questions. She could not reconcile her own reaction to seeing Inda again with the vivid memory of Evred’s wide, hungry gaze. She found herself relieved that Evred took Inda away too fast for her to be noticed. She couldn’t define any of her emotions—she needed time to think.

Deeply withdrawn, she walked uncomprehending past Vedrid, Evred’s First Runner, who stood very still on the first landing.

Kened had reported to Evred only that Inda traveled with two women and a man he’d defined as a Runner. Evred had issued orders to Vedrid to get Inda’s Runner situated once they arrived; he’d been on the guard-side, at the far end of the long castle, when the wall sentries had signaled the arrival.

So he’d come at a run, but when he looked past Hadand-Gunvaer and the other women to find a familiar golden-haired man, he froze, wit-flown.

Tau also stopped, surprised at this Marlovan blocking his path, whose face had blanched almost as pale as his hair.

“Angel,” Vedrid whispered as the women vanished up the stairwell leading to the royal wing.

Tau’s mild surprise sharpened.
Angel?
That’s what they’d called him in Bren. A series of rapid memory images: a tall, thin man with pale hair almost kicked to death on the floor of an abandoned building, mistaken for a Venn spy. His whispered words a mumble because of a broken jaw.

“I remember you,” Tau said. Yes, it was the same man, now buttoned into one of those blue Marlovan coats, his pale hair skinned back into a squirt at the nape of his neck “In Bren, was it not? Aren’t you the Runner those sailors jumped?”

“Vedrid Basna. King’s First Runner. You saved my life,” Vedrid said slowly, his eyes wide and staring. “I thought I’d dreamed—” He made a visible effort to gather his wits. “If you are Indevan-Laef’s First Runner, I am to show you the chamber set aside for him.”

I did not know what a Runner was—or for which king,
Tau thought, his perspective shifting. Now he comprehended the questioning looks, the hesitations. All these Marlovans, including Evred, were trying to define his relationship to Inda. In the Marlovan world, everyone had a specific place.

Well, why not go along? He was used to playing roles. And it was clear that the personal Runners—whatever those might be—had the inside line of communication. “Yes,” he said. “I’m Inda’s First Runner.”

And Vedrid’s brow cleared. “Please. I owe you my life. I was charged to assist you, but it would be my privilege.”

Inside line indeed. Tau opened his hand for Vedrid to lead the way.

 

 

 

Inda and Evred had forgotten them all.

As they passed through the gates and into the street, Evred talked at random, even laughed, merry and free, body, mind, and heart afire with joy. Inda laughed as well, cast back in time to the happy days of boyhood: his welcome had extinguished in a heartbeat the last shadows of homesick betrayal.

It was inevitable that the random questions would settle first on the circumstances of their last meeting. “. . . and so Cherry-Stripe told me what little they knew,” Inda was saying.

Was that anger or a wince tightening the corner of Inda’s eye? Inda’s voice was husky as the words tumbled out. “Why didn’t the Harskialdna believe me? He had decided against me before I spoke a word. I figured that much out, sick as I was. Cherry-Stripe and Buck say it’s because of a promise made to the Kepri-Davans, but that sounds too easy.”

“Right. Underneath that was a lifelong jealousy,” Evred said; the word
jealousy
taunting him with an image of that tall, golden-haired young man in the courtyard. Evred was sure he was the same one with Inda at Lindeth Harbor that terrible day.

Inda tipped his head in question, the same way he had as a boy of ten. The gesture, so well-remembered, was curiously painful.

“Lifelong jealousy?” Inda repeated. “Lifelong. Then you can’t just mean at the academy. Over what, my father’s first wife, Joret? I know she was as beautiful as the Joret we grew up with. Everyone seemed to want her. Did that include your uncle, then? Is that it?”

Inda grimaced again, almost a flinch. Evred frowned, disturbed that he could not interpret Inda’s reaction.

“Wait.” Inda flung out a hand, whirling to stand in the middle of the street, oblivious to traffic. “Your uncle was only a year older than my Uncle Indevan—ten. Aunt Joret would have been almost done with the queen’s training, and my father had to have been nineteen or twenty, because their class started a couple years late on account of the war up north. So your uncle can’t have wanted either Joret
or
my father. Not at ten. That dog won’t run.”

“Not the jealousy of thwarted desire, but of my father’s notice.”

“Huh.” Inda’s brows rose, as if such a concept was blind ingly new. “Wait!” He patted the air with his hands, neither of them aware of wagons rolling past laden with sacks of rice, a young boy hawking fresh-baked pies, a trio of stone-layers trundling by some new-shaped honey-colored stone. “Wait,” Inda said again.

Evred braced himself for the shock of Inda’s wide brown gaze, still guileless in spite of the years and their unknown burdens.

Then Inda made an impatient movement, flipping his fingers up, another remembered gesture. “But you can’t say ‘Oh, everything he did was because he wanted his brother’s attention.’ Too easy. Nobody acts on a single cause except in the old heroic ballads.”

They started walking again—neither aware of it, anymore than they were aware of the unconscious pull of very old habits—in the direction of the academy.

“Can we ever define exactly what shapes an individual’s character and perception of events?” Evred answered. It was like the old days, their endless debates in the summer sunshine while pitching hay, or tending horses, or repairing tack, or drilling over and over; he shivered inside, then coughed to clear his throat, to force his voice to normal. “My uncle wanted two things. He wanted to be first to my father and he wanted to keep the kingdom safe. How he exerted himself to get these things is shaped by these other matters.”

“But that doesn’t explain why he blamed me for Dogpiss’ death,” Inda said. Then he cast a furtive look behind him, which surprised Evred. No one was following them—he’d made that order clear.

Evred was further surprised when Inda abruptly shifted the subject.

“This might seem an odd question, but was there any mention in all those records of a fellow . . . named Dun?”

“Do you mean Hened Dunrend?” Evred asked, surprised at this sudden, completely unrelated turn of subjects.

Inda whistled, long and low. So far, only Signi knew about the ghost riding at his shoulder. Inda couldn’t see him, but he knew the ghost was real, because he’d felt a weird prod inside his head during battle, ever since Dun’s death, when Inda woke up a prisoner of pirates. It—he—had saved his life repeatedly with those unmistakable internal warnings.

Should he tell Evred? No, better to wait; a lot of people didn’t like talk of ghosts, and wasn’t there something nasty about one of Evred’s ancestors and a ghost? So he said, “I knew him as Dun the Carpenter’s Mate. He signed on with me that first day, when Captain Sindan first brought me to Lindeth Harbor. Afterward, well, I noticed things. He talked like the northerners, except some of his words reminded me of Marlovan. And he was really, really good at staff fighting, far better than any sailor. But then it was too late to ask. He died when we were first taken by pirates.”

Evred said, “He was one of the King’s Runners; I don’t know if you remember, but they have their own training. I discovered in my father’s papers that he sent Dunrend to run shield for you, though you were never to know it. If you came back—and I think my father wanted you to, but events got in the way—you could thus never reveal that he’d interfered in my uncle’s decisions. Sindan met with him, after your first journey, and that’s how we found out that you were alive. Did you ever ask him any questions?”

“No. And he didn’t ask me, either. Typical Marlovans, eh?” Inda laughed, the long white scar on his temple creasing. That scar hadn’t been there when Evred saw Inda in Lindeth. “Hoo! Look where we are.”

They stood directly across from Daggers Drawn, the tavern belonging exclusively to the academy boys. There was the weather-worn fox sign with its oddly raptorish face, the same face on Inda’s fleet foresails: the academy fox banner.

“It’s strange,” Evred said, expelling his breath in a not-quite-laugh, “but I have never looked inside that place.”

Inda acted on impulse. “Then you shall now.”

Chapter Eleven

THE custom in those days was for boys new to the academy to be introduced to Daggers Drawn by their fathers. In the cases of boys invited as a result of superior service on their fathers’ part, they were introduced by the nearest relative of the Jarl in whose territory they lived. When Inda came to the academy, it was the first year younger brothers were invited, so older brothers (or cousins) were expected to introduce the newcomers.

Aldren-Sierlaef, Evred’s brother, had so resented this change in tradition he had refused to introduce his brother, and no one else had dared to bring Evred, or to prompt the king, who never thought of it, as he’d had no interest in the place when he was young.

Inda hadn’t thought about Daggers Drawn since he was a homesick sea rat on the
Pim Ryala,
but now, as he looked at the worn sign with the fading fox face, all the emotions of those days crowded back into his mind.

“I’ll introduce you.” Inda took Evred’s arm. The muscle tensed under his fingers. Puzzled, Inda said, “It’s all right.” Though he had been long away from the customs of home he didn’t make the mistake of pointing out that Evred was king, that the entire city obeyed his will. “You haven’t a father now, or a brother, except me, through marriage. Let’s see if old Mun’s still alive. I was only there once, as it happens. The day Tanrid introduced me.”

“I know. I saw how you and the others never went.”

“You did? But we were so careful not to say anything. Well, and it wasn’t like a great vow or anything. We, that is, some of us didn’t want to be all gone and you alone in the scrub pit. Did they all stay with it, then, after I was taken away?”

As if I hadn’t noticed,
Evred thought, and the memory of their innocence, their uncalculating good will, was a knife-strike of bittersweet anguish.

Aware of the stiffness of his hands, Evred clasped them tightly behind his back. “Oh, more or less,” he said. “Kepa sneaked over whenever he thought the others didn’t notice, usually taking Lassad. But the others, I think, never got into the habit. We made our own secret meeting places. And when we got older, I could always bring food. Nobody was going to punish us for that.”

Inda plunged across the street, moving with a slight stiffness in his walk that made Evred wonder if he carried more severe wounds not visible to the eye.

Inda paused outside the Daggers door. “I don’t hear boys.”

“No, the scrubs would be in the stable picking hooves, the pigtails out with the scout dogs, now that the weather’s finally broken—” Evred shook his head. “Never mind.”

But Inda looked surprised and delighted. “
You
run ’em all now, right?” He sniffed the air. “And a very late spring. Those pits must be pret-ty chilly.” He grinned in remembrance, using the old slang word, pit, for barracks.