The Song of Andiene (5 page)

“There is neither kin nor covenant to bind us. Are we, am
I
to keep her for thirty years?” He left unspoken the unforgivable words.
Am I to have another burden on me all my life?
The mere thought appalled him. He had never belittled his father before, even in thought.

“Son, hold your tongue,” Hammel said. “It has not been thirty years, nor yet thirty days. What would you do, return her helpless to her family’s murderers? Hand her over to the butchers for a few coins?”

“She is one of the lords of the land. We owe them nothing,” he said, but already his momentary rebellion was dying down. He reached out and stroked her silver hair, which had not curled even though it had been cut short. It was hard to believe that she was rightful ruler of this wide land. And what ailed her? No blow to her head, or she could not have run so far and hid so well.

Her mouth opened, a little whimper, a tiny thread of sound. “Nane?” It caught their attention more surely than the roar of a sea-courser would have done. Then she tried to sit up, stared around her, and screamed, again and again.

Kare took three quick steps to where she lay, and knelt beside her, holding her tight in her strong arms, rocking her and murmuring gentle wordlessness. The girl clung to her, sobbing, “Nane, Nane.” Presently she looked around her, a wide half-focused stare like a new-born baby. Ilbran met her eyes. He had been right. They were gray as the clouds that hide the sun.

Her sobbing died, and she pulled herself free of Kare’s arms. “Where … am … I?” She spoke the words as though each one was a battle and a victory.

Hammel answered her gently. “You are safe. In the city still, but safe. I am Hammel Rotefil Mareefile, and my wife Kare Ilessesfil Karefile, and my son Ilbran.”

“I … am … Andiene Rejin Mareja.” She looked amazed to hear her voice speak her own name. After a moment’s silence, she added, “Unless Ranes Reji, my father, still lives?”

“He does not. Welcome, Andiene, to our home.”

She looked at him angrily. “Why do you not rise? Why do you not name me my rightful title?”

“I cannot rise, Rejin.”

Her eyes widened in shock and she flushed red. “Furthermore,” he went on, “you would be wise not to insist on royal privileges. An uncrowned queen is not safe, nor are those who shelter her. You are proscribed throughout the city.”

“I know. I know. They killed all but me. I thought I dreamed.” The words came haltingly to her, but they waited patiently for her to speak. She shook her head as though to clear it of the fumes of some drug. “I thought I dreamed … There was a dragon. He spoke to me, and called me … promised me revenge. Gray, on the high cliffs above the fog.”

“That was a dream, child.” Hammel held up a hand to stop her from saying more. “No, child. Think what the city folk would think if they heard us saying ‘My lady,’ or ‘Rejin,’ and making obeisance. Habits are easy to make and hard to break. For as long as you are here, you are Rile, my wife’s brother’s daughter, spoken to as to any other child.”

She frowned, then nodded. “Then I shall be Rile.” She looked around her in puzzlement. “What manner of place is this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why have you chosen to live like this?” she asked simply.

Hammel looked at her as if to see if there was some sarcasm, some under-meaning in her words. Her face showed none. He smiled grimly. “You should have learned more of your land. A ruler must know more. We do not live this way because we choose to.”

“Then who compels you?” she began. Then her voice trailed off into silence. Color rose in her cheeks. “I ask your forgiveness. I lack wisdom.” She looked at them uncertainly. “Had you heard of me, before?”

Hammel shook his head. “You were only one among many, a child.”

“I saw and understood, but did not speak … I know not why … till that day. They never taught me, but I watched them.” She shivered, and did not seem to be able to stop. Kare put a comforting arm around her. “How long have I slept and dreamed?”

“For a week.”

“A week?” She looked at the coarse brown robe she wore, looked at her fingernails cut short and grimed with soot. She reached up and touched her shorn hair. “I was afraid it might have been years.” She shivered again. “Blood and fire.”

“Forget that,” said Hammel. “Try to forget it. It is past.”

“Not past,” she said urgently. “Still to come.” Then she shuddered. “Why did I say that?” She faced Hammel appealingly. “You must forgive me. I have no knowledge, no practice in dealing with people. I do not even know where I find the words to speak.”

“Come,” said Kare. “Let us eat. You are tired.” She rose and ladled out their meal. Andiene looked cautiously at her bowlful, tasted it carefully. Then her hunger overcame her fastidiousness.

Ilbran watched her as she ate. She was hungry as a courser, and the fish stew had to be thinned with water to stretch to fill four bowls.

He glanced at his father and mother. Kare watched her with maternal protectiveness; Hammel with quiet appraisal. And he himself? Exasperation and resentment. A mouth to feed, a constant danger—he could see no way to honorably be rid of her. He wished that she had taken shelter elsewhere, anywhere, so her blood would not be on his hands. And if he listened, in his mind he could hear the echo of the grizane’s words. “Whatever choice you make, it will bring you sorrow.”

Chapter 4

“There are some in the city, nobles, who’d be glad to have her,” Ilbran said to his father, a few mornings later. “Raise her for two more summers, then marry her and name themselves king. If I were one such as the one I spoke to on Festival day, I would know their names, know who they are, which ones are ambitious.”

“I’ll have no part of kingmaking and politics,” Hammel said softly. “She would be safer outside the gates.”

“Yes, but how will she pass the guards?” Ilbran asked. “Unless we can curl her hair and darken her eyes and broaden her bones?”

Kare looked up from the lace that she was knotting. “Her hair can be curled well enough to pass the guards, and if she keeps her eyes cast down, they will not see their color. This city is full of ones who look enough like her.”

“If we only wait till the hue and cry dies down,” said Hammel, “she could go and take refuge in the forest.”

“What! What kind of refuge … ?”

Hammel smiled at his son. “It is not so bad as that. I brought your mother from out of the forest, once. It is safe if you know its ways.”

Ilbran had known that his mother had been born in the forests to the north, but he had never thought of what that meant. He looked at his father as he had not done before, trying to see him as a young man, wandering for the pleasure of it. How had he kept from bitterness, come to this, to be tended and carried about like a baby?

Hammel smiled, remembering, and went on. “They guard their women well. They do not like them to leave. I could have stayed with her by their rules, but I could not bear to live my life under the shadow of the trees. And the salt sea runs in my veins. I could imagine no other life, for all my joy in wandering.”

Kare’s laughter rang like a bell. “I was glad to follow him wherever he would go. Gladly I would have stayed, but gladly I went.”

“They value children,” Hammel said, not to be distracted. “Any village would take her in, with delight. A safe place for her, and it would, in a sense, repay them for the treasure I stole from them.” He and his wife exchanged glances, long and loving.

“But what of the devils in the forest?” Ilbran asked. “The rissan, the grievers, all the ones I have heard you speak of?”

“There are dangers everywhere,” Kare said. “You fear the ones you do not know; you respect the ones you do know.”

Ilbran nodded, though unconvinced, and went to the curtained-off corner by the hearth that had been his sleeping place. He pulled the curtain aside to look at Andiene. Wild stories were told of her in the marketplace, growing wilder each day. Witless jabbering, he had assumed, of how the king’s daughter had spoken in an unknown tongue, she who had never spoken before, and had forced eight-score men to do her will, and so had walked out unharmed from a charnel house.

He had laughed at that. It had seemed more likely that someone had warned her and she had scrambled out of a window to escape. Now, as he saw the look of power on her face even as she slept, anything seemed possible.

It was foul weather outside, too foul to set to sea, except in times of desperation. There was little work that Ilbran could do. His hands were stiff and clumsy already—useless for the fine work of mending the nets. He watched Fel, where the courser lay on the blanket near the door where Ilbran had slept the night before, and groomed himself, an infinitely occupying task.

Andiene woke and came out from her corner and sat watching Kare knotting lace by the window. After a while, she found a piece of wire not yet bent into a fishhook. She hammered it with a stone to straighten it, then hammered a tiny hook into the end of it.

“What are you doing?” asked Ilbran.

“Lace making, the way my nurse taught me.” Her voice trembled; she half-whispered. “They killed her when they came for me—already I had half-forgotten. Nane. She had dressed me, she was brushing my hair when they came in … ”

Kare laid her work down and clasped Andiene’s hands. “You must forget.”

“But so soon? I feel as though there is a cleft between my life then and my life now. Wider and deeper every time I look back. I look across and that other life was lived by some other person. A little girl that walked here and walked there. They combed her hair and washed her face, and dressed her like a doll.”

Andiene shook her head. Her voice rose higher. “Now I dream. Every night, I dream. Walls of fire and lakes of blood. Sunlight in a wide valley, and the golden-winged birds circling outside the walls.”

She looked blindly around the room, not seeming to see the smallness, the dirt that clung to everything, the curtains imperfectly screening off corners of the room, the smoke stains on wall and ceiling, the only chair always occupied by Hammel, the straw mats serving for all other furniture. She seemed to look past all that, as though she could look through the wall out to sea. “And the calling, always a voice calling me. It is like a rat gnawing at my mind.”

“You will grow older and forget,” Kare said softly. Andiene looked at her for a moment as though she were a grown woman, and Kare but a child. Then she took the roll of thread that Kare offered her and began playing with it, or so it seemed. She twisted it, looped it, pulled loop through loop, catching it on the hooked wire. And to Kare’s amazement, the shape of lace began to make itself clear, a star design, lace made in the air.

“Your nurse taught you to do this kind of work? Where did she come from?”

“From the forests. The forests to the south.”

Kare brought her hands to her forehead, palms out, the old sign to ward off evil. “Do they all know this craft there? I have never seen it. Still, I suppose that not many from there … come back to the city.”

Ilbran smiled in amusement to see that his mother, so soon after her lecture to him, still feared some things. It seemed that there was a difference between the northern forest and southern forest.

“Could you sell this kind of lace?” asked Andiene hopefully.

“Yes. It is fine craftsmanship. But, no!”

“Why?”

“How many in the city know how to do this kind of work?” Kare asked. “Few. Some servant buying goods would see it. And they might guess. The risk is too great.” She took the lace from Andiene, unraveled it. The thread came rippling free.

“Then what can I do? What can I do to help you?” Andiene looked around the bare room again. “What became of my rings?”

“We buried them,” said Ilbran. “They are safe, never fear.”

“The plain gold one I must have. It is my signet. The other two you may take as payment.”

“No.”

She went on, unlistening. “You can crush the settings, and sell them as lumps of gold. Surely there are people who will buy.”

“Enough,” said Hammel. “If we took payment for helping you, we might take payment for betraying you.”

“What do you wish me to do, then?” The look she gave him would have daunted many men.

“Learn patience. Stay here until they have given up searching for you, and until you have learned to put on a peasant’s manners with your peasant’s clothes. Then you may walk out of the city past the guards. We know where you can find shelter.”

“You have no peasant’s manners about you, for all the way you live.”

He smiled slightly. “I thank you.”

“I am rightfully Rejin, the lady of this land. What if I declared myself openly?”

He shook his head. “You would be killed before you had a chance to speak more than a few words. From what I have heard, Nahil planned well, and his men guard the city well. None would dare to help you openly.”

Her gray eyes were unfathomable. “What if he died?”

“You have no hope of that,” he said, answering her meaning, rather than the words. “If you walked ten paces in the streets someone would call the hunting cry after you. Forget the throne.”

“You are wise. Very wise. But it is your wisdom, not mine. And what has it gotten you?”

Ilbran stepped forward, ready to punish her impudence as he had been punished when he was young. His father shook his head slightly, looked at Andiene and waited silently. In a moment, she said, “I ask your pardon.”

“It is given.”

She went back into her sleeping corner. No one spoke. The storm lashed the house, driving water through the roof, here and there, to soak the floor into sticky mud. Autumn storm, Ilbran thought, and another kervissen run to follow it. Enough money to pay for the thatching, maybe.

They heard a loud “Halloo there! Shelter from the storm!” and their door was brushed aside. Giter, the fat butcher, stood on the threshold, the least welcome guest that Ilbran could have imagined. Fel raised his head and growled. “Quiet!” Ilbran said. He knew that a stranger must be welcomed to one’s hearth, whether he was invited or not.

The butcher did not wait for a welcome. He walked across the room, and planted himself by the fire with a gusty sigh. “I give you great thanks, and you, my lady,” he added to Kare. “This is not fit weather for man or beast. My home is far on the other side of the city, and a man could drown before he reached it.” He held his hands to the fire. Water streamed from his fine clothes, and puddled on the floor.