King's Shield (31 page)

Cherry-Stripe flushed down to the collarbones at having his family name said out loud so unexpectedly. He grinned around in obvious pride.

Evred took in the drink-ruddy, triumphant faces, grins of anticipation, laughter, pleasure. “But I am also calling upon the Jarl of Marlo-Vayir, Aldren-Dal, to ride to the coast to reinforce our men there, in case the Venn bring ships to our shores.”
Let any Venn spies assume that means he’ll ride up and down the coast.

Buck was still outside, monitoring his people and resources, both taxed to capacity by this enormous gathering. Everyone in the hall shouted, some drumming with spoon and knife handles on the tables.

Laughing, Cherry-Stripe knocked his chair over and ran from the hall to tell his brother the news. Cama leaped on the table, saluted Evred with his wine cup with such enthusiasm the wine sloshed to the table, bright as blood. “Evred-Harvaldar Sigun!” he shouted.

“Evred-Harvaldar Sigun!” the crowd roared as one.

Cama then turned with a flourish, his coat skirts flaring. “Indevan-Harskialdna Sigun!”

“Indevan-Harskialdna Sigun! Sier Danas Sigun!”

The shouts rang up the stones. Evred, smiling at last, saluted the room full of people, fist to heart.

Thump! Fists to hearts, which beat for joy, exhilaration, triumph.

Everyone then turned to his or her neighbor to exclaim, laugh, ask questions no one listened to. All except the old Jarl who sat back looking after his second son, his face grim—almost grief-stricken. He was proud, yes, but the prospect before him was not glory, not with both sons going off to war. The prospect was duty—and death.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Whipstick’s voice echoed up the walls outside Tdor’s open windows, the men’s responsive shout reverberating from the stone. Tdor leaned out to look down at Whipstick in the court. He wasn’t smiling—he never did running drill—but she could see pleased anticipation in the way he strode back and forth, and she heard it in the men’s enthusiastic responses to his shouts. They were happy, because they’d been ordered to the harbor to reinforce the dragoons already guarding it.

Happiness.
She considered that, absently running the quill through her fingers. Should she write about how strange that was, happiness at the idea of being hacked to death, at hacking apart other men? But that was duty, so why shouldn’t they enjoy it? Maybe she should write about how happy she was to be home. She liked the royal city, and seeing Hadand as queen, how well everything seemed to be going, how much the women admired her. But oh, small as her room was, worn as the castle furnishings were, it was so, so good to be
home
. But would Hadand misunderstand?

Another shout, followed by a confused clatter of horse hooves.

Tdor ran the feather over her ear. How long had it been since she’d thought Fareas-Iofre so cool, so calm, so free of the tangle of emotions that seemed to be confined to the young? Tdor poked the pen at a glob of dried ink (time to make some more) as she thought back to her childhood, and her comfortable conviction that adults didn’t feel love when they got old. Only what, really, was “old”? Until just a couple of years ago, Tdor had never considered the fact that Fareas-Iofre had been younger than Tdor was now when she was taken away from the people she’d grown up with and told that she was going to marry a man twenty-five years her senior. And everyone had expected her to be pleased because that would make her a princess.

She hesitated, the quill in the air. Should she add how uneasy it made her, thinking that the Venn were probably making the very same sorts of jokes, away up there somewhere to the north? A droplet formed at the end and she hastily tapped the quill against the side of the inkwell.

Before she could write more, Tdor’s Runner entered. “The Iofre,” Noren said, and Inda’s mother walked in, looking thin and worn. But she’d been smiling since she heard that Inda had returned to his native soil at last.

I was stupid to think she never had feelings,
Tdor thought.
I just never saw them. Because when she was sixteen and came here to marry the Adaluin, she hid her feelings behind duty.

But she couldn’t hide her yearning now.

“Willing hands everywhere,” Fareas-Iofre said. “The men will be ready to ride out long before they can possibly be needed.”

“Even Branid’s hands are willing?” Tdor asked.

Fareas opened her palms. “Whipstick thinks your message from Inda acted on him as a threat.”

Tdor protested, “It wasn’t a threat. Inda just said, ‘Tell him I’ll talk to him when I get home.’ Just like that. I didn’t intend to misrepresent Inda’s words.” She smiled ruefully, more of a slight grimace than a smile. “I guess I’d make a bad Runner.”

Fareas leaned her elbows on the broad stone windowsill, the diffuse light on her profile softening the lines in her face. “You know that what we say and what Branid hears have always been askew.” Her mouth curled up at one corner, a rare expression. “He certainly heard a threat, even if neither you nor Inda intended him to. But then hasn’t his life with his grandmother always been understood in terms of threat, bribery, and guilt?”

Tdor laid her pen over the inkwell. “I don’t know how this will sound, but I feel bad now for how happy I was last night when you told me his grandmother was dead.”
Finally.
She wouldn’t say that word, even if they were both thinking it.

“There was no grief visible at her funeral fire, though we scrupulously saw to all the forms.” No emotion in Fareas’ voice either, but her entire body was expressive of relief. Inda’s mother then glanced over her shoulder. “I see you are busy. I will wait to indulge my motherly questions.”

“I only saw him the one day,” Tdor said. “Half a day.” Fareas’ pupils contracted as she breathed, “I have not seen him in nine years.” Tdor had gained just enough life experience to perceive the almost frightening intensity of a mother’s enduring hunger for her missing child. “Any little thing you tell me will be news.”

Tdor obediently described Inda, what he’d said and done before riding out. Fareas listened, still with that unhidden hunger. This was a different sort of hunger than what Tdor had seen so briefly in Evred, but just as frightening, because it was so intense, expressed by a person who had always been as calm and cool as the lake.

Different kinds of love, different kinds of hunger?
Tdor felt she was riding over a rickety bridge. “And then they rode off. But here, I am writing to Hadand. Would you like to add a letter? I can let her know Evred’s order is being carried out, and you could ask her about Inda.”

Fareas-Iofre rose, frowning at the gold case lying there on Tdor’s plain wooden table, the intent focus of her brown eyes bringing Inda vividly to mind. “Are you very certain no one else will see what we write?”

“Dag Signi promised it would be so.”

There was a brief pause, broken only by the flutter of birds nesting under the sentry-walk crenellation just overhead. “Do you trust her?” Inda’s mother asked.

Do you trust someone who—no. Stupid ballads—“stole your beloved’s heart” meant nothing but a claim to victim-hood. Tdor’s inward struggle was short; she’d fought the battle and won, and won it again during her long ride home. Lust, she could honestly attest to—the thought of Inda’s splendid shoulders, his big, expressive hands. The way he laughed, a burr deep inside his chest: the Sartorans (as always) had a word for it,
fremitus.
Everything about Inda made her want to laugh, to cry, to sing, to hold him close enough to breathe his breath and feel his heart beat against hers.

That sudden fire inside—that was lust.
Hunger.

Tdor said slowly, “I think I must trust her. Inda does, though Venn she be. If she is full of guile, it is the deepest guile ever known, deeper than any of us can see. And she will be living among us, I suspect, so it’s better to assume good will.” She burst out, “I don’t know why we have marriage treaties anyway. Wouldn’t it be better if we were like the Anaerani, where Joret is, where they can pick the person they marry?”

Fareas-Iofre had not moved from the window. She laid her hands flat on the sill. “The girls are finished with knife practice. Chelis tells me the streams and the river are down enough to send the girls out to collect feathers from the high-water debris.”

Tdor was about to say, “And so?” when she realized the Iofre meant for
her
to give the order. She felt hot all over.

Fareas-Iofre regarded Tdor’s red face, and interpreted her expression successfully. “Yes, your first order as future Iofre. And your next act should be to go downstairs and use the measuring string on the Rider who seems closest to Inda’s size, because you need to begin on his wedding shirt. And so you should tell the men, because it will cheer them enormously to think about that during the weeks to come, when these high spirits fade away. As they must.”

Tdor—always so capable—stood up, sat down, and picked up her quill, playing with it absently as she frowned.

Fareas said, “As for your question. I never told you girls why we make wedding treaties—or why, for that matter, we make wedding shirts. Events being what they were, I always felt the subject could wait.”

In other words, while the heir to the throne was trampling treaties and tradition by chasing Joret all around the kingdom.

“True,” Tdor said soberly.

“Easiest first. In the plains days, we know from songs that men used to weave bands in clan colors for the wife, and the wife for her husband. Those bands were treaty markers: no war between the clan, and to seal it they sent a daughter to the other family to be raised with the son, and eventually married to him.”

“I knew that much,” Tdor said.

“Well, just before we made the change to living in castles, one of Evred’s foremothers made a shirt for her intended, who was also her lover. She made a shirt for love—she embroidered it all over with his house symbol, and various ballad images and so forth. Thus the shirt was better than a mere band for a treaty-wedding. So then it became a matter of derision for the men who didn’t have wedding shirts, the implication being no one would have picked them if there hadn’t been a treaty.”

“I think I get it now,” Tdor said. “Jealousy? Lovers and spouses competing? Because of the wedding-treaty system?”

Fareas opened her hands. “No matter what kind of system you have, there are inevitably going to be lovers and spouses competing. Meanwhile, the move to the castles changed almost everything. The bands went out of use. Men, living in castles now, lost their skills at campfire weaving. The bands in clan colors were also considered barbarian. Everyone wanted
written
clan-treaties. So on.”

Tdor was ruining her pen. She laid it carefully down again.

“As for treaty marriages, surely you know by now that there is no way to put rules to love or attraction. Because nothing successfully controls it.”

“No,” Tdor breathed.

“So we try to lessen enmity between clans with the treaties, the promise that
your
children and
my
children will produce
our
children. And we hope that a boy and girl who grow up together will know one another well enough to have family love.”

Tdor’s lips parted. Then her eyes blanked: she was thinking of how Signi had observed her, as if for a sign of what her place might be in Inda’s household. Just as there were stories about favorites who entered a house and began changing the furniture, as the saying went, there were others who (there were sayings for every situation, Tdor realized) who found snakes in their bed.

Tdor remembered Inda’s and Signi’s self-conscious care around her. How that hurt!

“I’ll give the order,” Tdor said, going to the door. As if that would leave those memories behind.

“And I shall write to Hadand. Thank you, my dear,” Fareas-Iofre said.

 

 

 

Tdor fingered the neatly hemmed length of Castle Tenthen’s best, fine-hackled, double-bucked linen, nearly smooth as silk and finer in substance: warp and weft both the same size yarn, made not into the formal tablet that they used for the house robes and tunics, but the honeycomb, only used for the best sheets and shirts.

She ran her hands along the fabric, wondering what she herself really knew of love. She thought:
To say that I am “in love” with Inda would make everyone laugh, for I had not seen him since we were small, and when we did meet again, it was for only a day.

The ache in her throat had nothing to do with her lack of skill at embroidery. She knew her Runner, Noren, who was skilled with a needle, would show her how to embroider, and she knew that Inda would not complain if the result was not exactly deft.