Treason's Shore (116 page)

The next spring, Tdor-Iofre send a letter over the mountain to Queen Joret of Anaeran-Adrani, her foster sister.

She caught Joret up on Inda’s last Convocation, where he was confirmed as Adaluin, and granted the lifelong accolade that his father had had: he was no longer required to ride to Convocation unless he had business to present. Evred then sent Inda home with a barrel of the same root brew supplied to the academy boys’ tavern, Daggers Drawn. Evred knew that Inda would never have thought to ask the Tenthen brewer to make it, so the barrel was for him to match.

By the next year, another child was on the way, and the Algara-Vayirs and the steady trickle of returning people were busy restoring Castle Tenthen and its lands to their former state.

Evred did not destroy the lockets. He and Barend wore the last two, so that Evred had a pair of eyes on Savarend Montredavan-An, with whom he never communicated directly.

Barend had no idea how Fox would respond when, one day, he emerged from the cabin aboard
Death
and walked up to Fox on the captain’s deck. “Your father is dead,” he said.

Fox squinted out to sea against the sun spangles, so still that for a long moment Barend wondered if he’d heard. He was considering whether or not to repeat himself when Fox spoke.

“Let me off near Marlovar River basin. I don’t want to be shot.”

Two months later, a crew rowed him ashore. He’d forbidden Barend to tell anyone, knowing that the change in command would little affect the routine that had adapted easily from fleet to navy. Fox loathed the idea of parties and foolish talk, he just wanted to disappear.

So it was a quiet departure. The fleet sailed away, and Fox watched them go, suspecting that Barend’s announcement would be accepted with a shrug, and maybe some muttered insults from the lazier crew on how life might get easier. He never knew how many regretted his departure in the sense that, with him, the great days of adventure had passed on.

Fox turned his back on the sea, laughed as he hitched his gear over his shoulder, and walked up the low, marshy beach toward the riverside, where he remembered the old road had been in his boyhood.

He wondered how long before perimeter riders spotted him, whether they would be Marth-Davan or King’s Riders, or if peacetime had caused them to slacken.

By noon the Riders appeared on a distant ridge, crimson banner waving. When they reached him and he identified himself, he discovered that he’d been expected. Proof of Evred Montrei-Vayir’s efficiency, Fox thought, and at last he permitted himself to turn his thoughts toward home.

He expected a welcome from his sister. The question was really Marend, whom he’d left as a bitter, angry teen. They’d just begun messing around in the way teens did, and he distinctly recalled a lot of wild talk about never having a son to echo his own meaningless life, and how angry she’d got at being reduced to part of his meaninglessness. When she’d turfed him out of her bed, he’d departed that day, cutting his leave a week short.

Such drama! And hugely funny from this distance . . . funny and sad, when he considered how long it had taken him to realize he’d been training all the girls in the Fox Banner Fleet to be Marend and Shendan.

They were all there when he arrived home at last, a welcome that befitted a Jarl, even one who had never done a stroke of work or had even communicated with them. But the same strange loyalty that brought him back had operated on them, too. He found his father’s rooms swept out, fresh linens on the bed, no trace of the maudlin, defeated stench of sour wine anywhere.

Marend and his mother were pleasant but wary. Shendan kept cracking jokes as they conducted him over the castle, explaining what had been done in the stables, the gardens, the land.

Finally they ended up in the main hall, with the beautiful mosaic of the screaming eagle worked in obsidian and gold. The doors to old Savarend’s throne room were closed; that room had long been gutted, leaving only its enormous fireplace, and the enormous carved stone table with its raptor feet where once the king and his new Jarls had gathered. Irony still loured in the air.

Fox leaned against the doors, arms crossed as he regarded the three women. “Well?”

“Well what?” his mother retorted. “You’re here, you must know what’s expected of you.”

“How long do you intend to remain?” Marend asked, her brows lifted.

“Evred is not the monster his grandfather was,” Shendan said. “He’s let me in and out of their castle and pretended not to notice. But I guess you know that, you saw Inda afterward. Odd!” She laughed, and shook her head. Her hair in the lantern light was as bright as it had been in childhood; by day Fox would discover that it was sun-bleached to the color of straw. Shen often led the perimeter riders on the inside of the border. She added, “If you have a son, Hadand said he can go be a Runner. I hope you won’t get sniffy, think it some insult.”

Fox smiled. “Contrary. A King’s Runner is a way inside.”

Shendan laughed, flipped her hand, and took off. Fox was back at last, and she’d get time to pester him for tales of his adventures later, probably after she’d got some drink into him.

The Jarlan cut a glance from her son to her prospective daughter-in-law, then found something to do, leaving the two together.

They walked away, heads down, listening to the other rather than looking: they’d both become too good at masking their expressions. “And so? What’s my place?” Marend said.

“I thought that was pretty clear,” Fox said. “If nothing else was. The question from my end would be, what is my place?”

Marend said, “All right. If we marry, I’ll be the next Jarlan, which gives me my proper rank in everyone’s eyes. If we have a son, then everything carries on. I know you might not want that—”

“I was seventeen when I said what I said. I hope I can be forgiven the pugnacious wisdom of seventeen.”

Marend laughed, wrung her hands, then smiled, her first genuine smile. “This is harder than I’d expected. Well, if you are willing to carry on, then you should know this about me: I’ve a life mate. Keth, now the miller. We’ve got a daughter, born two years ago. We were always agreed that I’d marry you, and if need be, move back upstairs, even. But he has first place in my bed.”

Fox found these simple words unsettling. He had never expected Marend to suspend her life. Presented with the evidence, he discovered he had to redefine their relationship. But she did not seem unwilling, or even unfriendly.

“We’ll all adapt,” he said. “There’s time.”

Chapter Thirty-five

T
HE following spring, after the passes cleared, a Runner carried a letter to Queen Joret from Tdor:

Though Tdor remained fond of her former foster sister, it had been years since they had seen one another, and the fondness was based on memory of shared experience, rather than immediate. So Tdor did not share everything, like how relieved the castle people were when Inda decided to ride the border. Not that they didn’t love him. The problem was, they loved him too much to tell him how terrible were his attempts to work alongside them at tasks for which he was not trained—and how he got in the way when he meant to aid in the planting, based on imperfect boyhood memory of how things had been done.

A year or so after that, her letter was less joyful.

Inda halted his line when he drew even with the captain of the Darchelde perimeter patrol. He started to speak, then squinted. “Basna? That you?”

The captain grinned. “I think you’re mistaking me for my cousin Mardred? Er, he would have been Basna Tvei, back at the academy.”

Inda laughed aloud. “You look like him. What I remember.” He hefted a squarely built child with tousled brown hair escaping a knit cap, whom he had been carrying at his hip. “I’m here to bring my daughter to Darchelde.”

Captain Basna hesitated. The standing orders had been the same for years: no one to cross the border, except for betrothal home visits, and the fetching and delivery was done by Runners. It had been a generation since there’d been betrothal home visits, so had anything changed?

Inda said, “If you let us pass I’ll write to the king myself.” Thus taking responsibility for the breach of rules.