Treason's Shore (72 page)

He looked up. “What is Inda doing these days? Has he ever thought about going back to sea?”

Fox leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “Don’t think I can run a battle?”

Dhalshev was too deeply disturbed to hear Fox’s sarcasm. “None of us can, not the size of a fleet to face all the Venn in the world. I don’t see how anyone runs a battle that large, once you set it up. How could anyone possibly keep a thousand ships in sight?”

Fox lifted his chin.
So my instinct to stay was right. But why didn’t I hear the news from you Inda first?
“They have to believe someone can command, is that it?” His chair crashed forward. “Maybe it’s time to write to Inda again. Who knows? This time he might actually answer.”

Chapter Eight

T
HE day after Midsummer, while the academy boys were out practicing for the Summer Games, Inda walked over to the stable with Gand, Olin, and half a dozen others, to be there when one of the mares foaled. He exchanged smiles of satisfaction with Olin and Lennad. They had four more foals due this week, but none from Clover’s line, so far unmixed, all from the Nelkereth Plains to the east. The new one—they’d already picked her name, Wisp, for the puffball flowers that grew on the plains and blew apart in the wind—was handsome, long-legged, with intelligent eyes.

Wisp had just given voice to the distinctive chuckle of a newborn foal, a sound that made them all smile, when one of the castle girls appeared, panting. “Harskialdna-Dal.” She waved her hands. “You’re to come. The queen’s giving birth.”

Inda leaped over the foal struggling to her feet and took off for the residence.

In the queen’s rooms, Runners cleaned everything up, and Signi dressed the baby herself, as Noren and Hadand’s other personal Runners had no experience with babies. They watched, frightened and entranced, as Signi gently rubbed and patted the baby clean and dry, pulled on the waiting nightgown, and laid the babe in the lap of his mother, a towel beneath him. He would get his first diaper when the cord dropped off.

Now everything was ready for visitors.

Evred entered with quiet step as soon as Tesar opened the door. His son lay on Hadand’s lap. He bent to kiss Hadand, and then just touched his lips to the thin, veined skin over the babe’s fragile skull. “How are you?” he asked Hadand.

“Tired. Sore. But fine.” She smiled, still euphoric: even the soreness was bearable now, though the healer had warned her that that wouldn’t last and not to get up too fast.

She’d sent Evred a Runner just before dawn, and though he’d offered to be there if she wished, she’d chosen to keep only women at hand.

Hadand watched the new Sierlaef wriggle, his small mouth working, dark blue eyes looking about vaguely as they tried to find Mother’s face. Evred moved behind Hadand to the window, where he stood, hands behind his back, as he struggled with equal parts joy and apprehension.

The women forgot his presence, so absorbed were they. Hadand said to Tdor, “I so wanted him to be Tanrid. Evred said traditions and expectations being what they are, he’s got to be Hastred.”

“Hastred-Sierlaef,” Tdor said experimentally. She would have said more, but a surge of nausea dried her mouth.

“If we have a second boy, he can be either Tanrid or Tlennen.” Hadand turned her gaze back to her baby. “How odd, to look at his face, and see Tanrid in the shape of his forehead, but Evred in the shape of his chin.” And then, in a rush of words, “When we made our treaties, we always talked about
a
baby. Now, he’s
this
baby. He’s a person. With eyebrows like an uncle he’ll never meet. Will this black hair turn red? What will his life be like in the nursery? Will he be friends with his future wife? While he was inside I thought and thought. One thing I promised myself: If I have a girl, there’s nothing I can do about her being promised to Cama and Starand’s boy, but I’m going to raise her first. She can see the boy when he comes to the academy. But Starand is not going to get her claws on my daughter until she’s old enough to learn some defenses.”

Tdor shivered, overwhelmed by the strangeness of change, and love, and wonder. And the slow burn of nausea that had been steadily increasing for several days.

Even the nausea was forgotten when she imagined a daughter out of her own body going to Shendan at Darchelde, an idea once so alien.

“I have a question,” Signi said.

She so seldom spoke that Hadand and Tdor said instantly—their words colliding—“Ask!”

“Is Hastred not the same name as Fnor and Buck’s baby? Will that not be confusing if they are contemporaries in your training school?”

Hadand chuckled. “Likely they’ll lose their given names by the time they’re sheared. Fnor says already they’re calling their boy Hot Rock, though it might not last the year. If my boy doesn’t end up being ‘the Sierlaef’ like his uncle was, he might be Hasta, or he might end up with something like Wolfhound.”

Signi said, “Ah! I had forgotten these other names such as Noddy, and Rat. They did not seem to mind them.”

Tdor’s stomach ceased bubbling. She leaned forward and stroked a finger gently over the baby’s soft black fuzz. “Here’s what the academy means. The spring before you came, Inda was riding around up north all winter. He almost killed himself riding home from Olara, just so he would not miss the first day of the academy, or the second day’s shearing—when they cut the hair off the new boys.”

Signi looked puzzled. Hadand sent her a brief smile, then went on contemplating the singular and exquisite beauty of her newborn son, already smarter and more handsome than any baby ever born.

“Let me try again.” Tdor’s nausea had definitely eased. She grinned. “If I have a son, I will pick his name very carefully, because names are important to families and alliances. Probably it will be Jarend, same as Inda’s father, since Inda’s now the oldest son. He might get a nickname at home. They usually do. But most nicknames don’t get past the academy. Inda did, and so did Noddy. And Whipstick. But that’s because the academy accepted those names. If they don’t—if they give the boy a new one—that’s what he’ll be known as for the rest of his life, even if he lives another sixty years beyond his horsetail days.”

“You changed my name from Sponge,” Evred said.

Hadand smiled up at him. “True. But I am convinced it only took because you were a prince.”

Tdor thought about the pleasure that stained Evred’s face when Inda or Cama or Cherry-Stripe slipped and called him Sponge, and wondered if she dared to speak, then the door banged open, and Inda stumbled inside, breathing hard. His eyes widened when he saw the baby lying there in Hadand’s lap. He pointed. “Boy?”

“Want to make sure?” Tdor asked, moving to lift the blanket, and all the women laughed at him as he blushed to the hairline.

“Well, they all look alike at that age,” he protested.

“Don’t tell me you never saw one at home,” Tdor asked, laughing.

At home
. Evred felt a spurt of annoyance as Inda said, “Who cares about babies when you’re eight or ten? They don’t do anything but shit and spit.”

Evred’s irritation extended to Inda not noticing that “at home,” then snapped inward by habitual effort of will. “He’s got black hair!” Inda exclaimed, and the women found that funny.

No one was aware of Signi, who slipped out of the room without anyone noticing.

It took no skill for her to leave. She was not truly a part of their lives, though they accepted her presence, even the shuttered young king, Evred. Inda treated her as he always had, his face lifting in welcome when he saw her. She had even found a measure of peace in telling him what had happened to her after she felt question in his touch, question that reached his face and voice. He had always been empathetic. That quality had first drawn her to him.

When Inda did not see her he was busy with his life, sometimes so busy that if she encountered him anywhere but in the Harskialdna suite, once he’d greeted her he forgot her presence in the room. Tdor’s tranquil acceptance extended to the little courtesies, but Signi descried the difference between the thoughtful awareness that always included her, and actual belonging. Signi was not a part of Iasca Leror’s work, and that was what defined the daily lives of Harvaldar, Gunvaer, Harskialdna, and Harandviar.

So Signi tried to make herself useful in little tasks to free Hadand and Tdor from their unending labors. She taught Old Sartoran and carried verbal messages and helped the healer. But others could have done all that. This was not Signi’s home, and though she had a lover, and their time was precious beyond words, he was not her mate. When she left for Sartor to fulfill her vow—for someone must teach the world Venn navigation—he would not follow.

Will I wander the world and never find rest?
No, that was self-pity. There had been a single time in her life when pity was justified. But she had survived the Beast.

Her steps led to the converted stable where Taumad’s theater was located. The building had halted. The stage was still scarcely more than a raised platform with cushions for the front on the dirt floor, benches in the back. But people liked to come here and perform, or watch others perform. They seemed to revel in exactly the same thing over and over again, down to all forty verses of tedious war ballads, or stupid and obvious jokes that were not at all a surprise. The anticipation of them sent the audience into paroxysms of laughter.

She became aware of singing. The melody was familiar, and recognition was an inward blow: it was the lament she’d heard on the wind during the Marlovans’ Convocation, when she walked the walls: the Andahi Lament. The melody belonged to old Sartor, with the Sartoran triplets replaced by the trumpet charge, but with just the middle note shifted to the minor mode in such a way as to change the chord to a compelling, poignant sound.

The singing did not come from the stage, but from the hackle-yard behind the spinners’ warehouse adjacent to the theater.

Signi paused by the open door to the theater, which still smelled of horse. She closed her eyes.
Scutch, scutch, scutch,
sticks beat the flax straws in rhythm while the plaintive song ivy-bound the air. Signi kept her eyes shut, seeing the scutchers at home beating the flax that had been steeped since the summer before, the rotting vegetation rinsed just before winter and the flax put in water with bluing. The women combed it after beating it, then repacked it in barrels with more bluing to be laid out in the sun the next summer.

The Marlovan women worked in the same way as had the ancestors they shared with Signi, those who shared their ancestors they sang the Lament. First came the painful story, but simply told, and then the shifting, triple-step melody over and over, a long series of names.

When the Lament ended, the women’s voices split into groups of three and they began to sing the Lament in round. If possible, it gained in beauty and in poignancy by this interweaving of the melodic line.

This lament will be remembered
, Signi thought, walking into the theater, where sun shafting through holes in the roof lit whirls of dust.
And so the women will be remembered
. The dust flurries brought her hands up in mimicry; she slipped out of her shoes and leaped up onto the stage, stretched carefully, and then took a cautious step or two in dance mode, toes testing the smoothed boards.

Once before she had danced outside of the boundaries of her own closed chamber, despite her vow never to do so after she had been dismissed from the hel dancers. It was at Tdor’s wedding, because Tdor had asked.

She had believed until now that her body, twisted from the cruelty of Erkric’s torturer, must never dance again. She did her daily exercises only to keep herself healthy. But where there is life, there is hope, and the possibility of joy. And she had always, always, expressed joy in dance.