King's Shield (6 page)

Cherry-Stripe gawked at the tear-stains gleaming on Inda’s scarred cheek. “Something amiss with the spoon?” he asked in a tentative voice.

“It’s good to eat with a spoon again.” Inda held up the plain, carved-wood implement with its wide, shallow bowl. “A Marlovan spoon. No more forks.”

Buck and Cherry-Stripe turned to the other for clues, just to find mirrored perplexity.

Cama said, “Forks are useless. You have to stab things. Imagine stabbing rice. Especially with one eye. I remember that from when I was a boy, and got taken to the healer down south. They eat Sartoran-style there. I thought I’d starve!”

Fnor had also noticed the spring of emotion in their scar-faced guest as he turned the spoon over and over in his hands. She, like Cherry-Stripe, was nonplussed at Inda’s reaction, but she could try to be a good host. “I remember those forks, when we girls had to do duty up in the queen’s room. Just think, the girls now get to eat with Hadand, and not sit there with those funny dishes, listening to the tootle and footle music.”

Mran said, “Woodwinds and strings. Like in Sartor.”

Fnor waved a hand in a circle. “Wheedle-deedle is what it sounded like. Nothing like a good strong beat, or a melody you can sing a ballad to. Well, no more!”

Buck moved impatiently, and sent a scornful glance at his brother and Cama for their cowardice, but one was busy studying his spoon, the other the walls. “Back of my hand to music! Inda, you should by rights talk to Evred-Harvaldar. Better, your sister—”

“Hadand-Gunvaer defended the throne herself,” Fnor put in, and Mran signified agreement and approval with a flick of her thumb upward. They had been in the queen’s training with Inda’s sister, had liked her then, and respected her now as a proven fighting queen, young as she was.

Buck said, “Evred or Hadand, they can tell you the details. The gist is this: the king was killed. It was a conspiracy started by Hawkeye’s dad. Only Hawkeye wasn’t in on it. But the three of us were there at the end, see, on account of Mad Gallop Yvana-Vayir dragging our father into it blind.”

Now that Buck had broached the subject, Cherry-Stripe leaned forward. “Noddy was there, too.”

“King’s room full of blood, all his Runners killed—” Cama put in grimly.

“But he died in the Sierlaef’s room. Opened his arms to the blade,” Buck put in.

“Yvana-Vayir killed him. King wasn’t even armed!”

“Yvana-Vayir went down to try to take the throne, and your sister headed him off. And when he tried to ride her down and grab the throne—” Cherry-Stripe mimed a side-cut and thrust from a sword “—she took him down. Only wounded him, because his son was there. Later she said she should have finished him.”

“—execution in the parade court, because he wouldn’t take a knife and do it himself.” Cama’s husky voice was even rougher with disgust. “Of course they had to put all his captains against the wall. Even the ones who claimed not to know anything about the plans.”

Inda turned his palm up, remembering talk from childhood, exciting at the time: a commander who led his men into treasonous action took all his captains down with him. But they weren’t flogged to death, being under orders. The thought of it actually happening made his gut tighten.

“The rest of the royal family was killed by some of the Jarl’s men,” Cherry-Stripe said. They had fallen back into Marlovan, the language of their ancestors. “Four more sent to kill Evred, but he escaped.”

“What?” Inda exclaimed. “Evred—you mean Sponge, right? Wait, wait. The rest of the family, including the queen, and Barend’s mother? Why? Surely they didn’t blame her for the Harskialdna’s plots?”

Fnor consciously switched back to Iascan, though she would have rather the guests had gone away. It didn’t seem decent, to talk of these things in front of strangers. “Not the queen. She being an outsider, no one noticed her. As for Barend’s mother, Hadand thinks that the Harskialdna knifed her, and not the Yvana-Vayir men.”

The king’s brother killed his own wife? “I don’t know which is worse.” Inda rubbed the scar on his jaw. “And Sponge? I mean, you said Yvana-Vayir sent—”

“—four of his riding captains north to assassinate him. Evred was in command in the north, see, while his brother was riding around in the south. But Evred dressed as a Runner so they couldn’t find him, and Captain Sindan routed the assassins until backup could get there. Died in the process,” Cherry-Stripe said.

Inda whooshed out his breath. “This sounds worse than us fighting pirates, if you ask me.”

Buck turned his thumb up in agreement. He was about to go on when he remembered the rest of that terrible day, and sidled a glance at his brother.

Cherry-Stripe made surreptitious motions that Buck couldn’t make out, but when Inda glanced his way he yanked his hands down, thumping the table. Fnor repressed a sigh as she righted a spilled pepper dish. Cama’s head turned sharply as he tried to keep everyone in the view of his one eye.

“So Evred and Hadand had to marry. Did that on Midsummer Night, and Evred officially took everyone’s oaths as king.” Buck hastily shifted to a description of the coronation, joined in relief by the other two. They spoke in Iascan, but they may as well have stayed with Marlovan. Their words were so quick, their accent so strange, and their Iascan so full of Marlovan slang, that Tau, Jeje, and especially Signi found it difficult to follow.

The Marlovans had all been trained by the same masters in giving a report; Inda had given and received enough since then to know when he was being bustled past details the speakers did not want to address. That was all right. Like Buck said, he could ask his sister or Sponge—now the king. Even after a few weeks, he still couldn’t get used to that idea.

Inda listened, assimilating most of what they said, but his attention was on his old friends and how they had changed. Except for Buck being seven years senior, they all were pretty much of an age. But in Inda’s memory they had drifted through the years as scrubs of eleven and twelve, dressed in academy smocks as they played war games through the eternal sunshine.

Cama’s sudden, white-flashing grin, Cherry-Stripe’s waving hands, his laugh—the same laugh as in boyhood, only deeper—sparked recognition yet caused those cherished memory-images, sharp for so long, to blur and evanesce.

The account of the coronation and Evred’s first Convocation fumbled to a close in a morass of mutual interruptions and half-finished gossip, until Buck cast a quick look around as if spies had crept into his own citadel. “Is it true you were really sailing with the Montredavan-An heir?”

Inda’s first impulse was to laugh, but Buck’s uneasiness reminded him of the historical context. Every Marlovan grew up knowing that the Montredavan-Ans had been exiled by Evred’s own ancestors to their land for ten generations when the throne had changed hands. If they crossed their border except to go to and from the sea they would be killed as treaty-breakers. This was why Fox had gone to sea in the first place—not stepping over the border included not being permitted to train at the academy with the other Marlovan heirs.

“Yes, I did,” Inda said. “He saved my life.”

As soon as the words were out Inda regretted the impulse—which he couldn’t really explain.

Sure enough, they all looked surprised, and Cherry-Stripe said, “What happened?”

Inda loathed any reminder of the days of torture at the hands of the Ymaran Count Wafri. Either he explained it all—which he had no intention of doing—or he skipped over the complicated story about how the Ymaran count had pretended to be a Venn ally but wasn’t. His old friends wouldn’t care anyway. Inda suspected that to them, Venn and Ymar and Everon were all alike. So he said, “Stupid plan went wrong. Fox Montredavan-An put it right. Here’s the fun part. On our way out, we set fire to the enemy’s castle.”

Sure enough, that worked to divert them. Cherry-Stripe crowed, Buck laughed, Cama demanded the story.

“It was the biggest sting I’ve ever done,” Inda said, and gave them a fast description, mostly of the chaotic aftermath—chickens squawking, people running around yelling and throwing buckets of water at one another, the furious hand-motions of some guards who each thought the others should try to storm the wall as he and Fox sat there alone, holding off the entire garrison with their bows and arrows.

Cherry-Stripe led the laughter, and launched into boyhood memories of stings—safe territory. Or so it seemed at first.

“Remember that first call over? We thought Gand was going to thump us right there!”

“The first flag run?”

“The first overnight? The horsetails stuck us with cook drudge!”

The cider, well laced with distilled rye, had caused their speech to slow, making it easier for Tau and Jeje, if not for Signi, to follow. For the first time in the nine years they had known Inda, they were hearing his boyhood memories—explored with the boys who had shared them.

Inda laughed, and laughed again to rediscover laughter. At the sight of Inda’s shaking merriment, Cama and Cherry-Stripe batted reminiscence between them; by now all that was required were a few words.

“The horse piss in the bunks?”

“Th-the bread pills?”

“Spying out the pigtails when they tried to—”

“—shoeing at the Games—”

“Oh! Oh! When Basna took bets on beetle races?”

“How he howled when Gand measured his shoulder blades with King Willow,” Cama exclaimed, flipping up his eye patch to mop his eyes with his sleeve; Jeje quickly looked away from the purple scarring round the bad one.

Inda whooped for breath. “Basna squawking
gambling? That’s gambling? Nobody ever told me that!
None of the beaks believed him.”

“That’s Basna all over.” Cherry-Stripe thumped the table again. “Invents gambling just to get himself dusted and gated.”

“Remember when Flash—”

“—Fijirad and Tuft had that fight over—”

“—tried to get Noddy to laugh?”

As the memories slid past those first two years into the summers after Inda had gone, Fnor kept smothering yawn after yawn of boredom. But she was Jarlan now—Buck and Cherry-Stripe’s mother had moved back to live with her own mother, and while Fnor knew little (and cared less) about the minutiae of the fellows’ academy history, manners were manners. The Algara-Vayir name required that, as did the presence of outland guests—a rarity, after all these years of pirate and Venn-enforced embargo. Not that Tau and Jeje were strictly outlanders. Both said they had been born on the coast of Iasca Leror, one in the north and one in the south, but to the inland Marlovans they may as well as been as foreign as . . . where was the sandy-haired woman from? Fnor smothered another yawn, longing for bed. Her day always began well before sunup.

“Remember the shearing, when you got us a month’s gag?” Inda leaned toward Cherry-Stripe.

“Ah, I’d forgotten. It was fun, wasn’t it, until Lassad made it sour? D’ya know he’s a hero now?”

“Smartlip Lassad? You set him and the rest onto us,” Inda said, pointing at Buck. “We always thought the Sierlaef was behind it.”

“Of course he was. We thought he wanted Sponge toughened up.” Buck Marlo-Vayir scratched his nose. “It was fun, watching our little brothers busy shying rocks and scragging beds and the like, all of ’em dead serious. You scrubs were better than anything for laughs. We didn’t think it really meant anything. Nothing did. Except winning.”

Mran sat beside Cama, her hazel eyes wide, wondering when she could break into the old memories and ask Inda to go back to talking about the sea. She wanted to hear what it was like, being on the ocean that she’d glimpsed just once.

Jeje listened at first, but couldn’t make sense of much. Her interest shifted, as did Tau’s, to the astonishing change in Inda as he ranged freely among these old memories, to which he had never once referred during all their nine years together. He looked like a ship rat again, despite the scars—younger than his twenty years.
Do you remember ever hearing Inda laugh?
He laughed now, more than she had ever seen.

“—and our very first Restday, and Dogpiss’ story about the Egg Dance?” Cherry-Stripe wiped his eyes, thinking
Dogpiss, everything was funnier with Dogpiss
—and then his thoughts galloped off the road. “Oh, shit. Oh, damn. Inda, that was what ditched you, wasn’t it? What happened to Dogpiss?”

Tau’s heartbeat quickened. In one conversation they were learning everything about Inda’s past that they’d spent nine years speculating on; Jeje sat there, food forgotten, her lips parted as she tried to catch the quick words.

“Dogpiss,” Inda repeated softly. The pirate commander was back with that narrow, direct gaze, the jut of his jaw and thinned lips. His words were slow and reluctant. “I tried to stop Dogpiss from running that sting in the prisoner-of-war camp.”

Prisoner-of-war camp?
Jeje sent a questioning look at Tau:
Weren’t they just boys?
He flicked his hands outward in question.

Cama said, “All I remember is you reminding him of banner-game rules. No stings. So me ’n’ Flash, we rolled up. Remember how tired we were, the horsetails running us all night long? Slept in a heartbeat.”

“Night? Nights!” Cherry-Stripe protested.

“We talked about it for a long time, after,” Cherry-Stripe said. “Tried to figure it out. What happened? What did Dogpiss do?”

“Argued. Then slipped out when I was half asleep, and I went after him. Hawkeye jumped up. Took us by surprise. Dogpiss slipped on that big rock, I tried to catch him—almost got his wrist. But he fell. You know the rest. Hit his head.” Inda pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I saw him like that in dreams. Still do. If that rock hadn’t been there—if I’d gotten his wrist—”

Buck said in a low voice, “He also broke his neck.”

Inda laid his hands on the table. “Noddy was on guard, he saw the most, and I told him everything afterward. Why wouldn’t the Harskialdna listen to him?”