Sasharia en Garde

  “I wanted to thank you for making things as easy as you could,” I said, not really sure what I was doing, just following instinct. It was that misery in his eyes. “Listen. I’ve been nabbed by Jehan. A couple of times. It won’t be so bad.”

  “Nabbed,” Damedran repeated, the anger fading from his expression.

  “You’re his hostage. And while I’m trying to sort out what’s what, this I will say. You won’t hear any death threats from him. Or, if you did, it would surprise me.”

  Damedran turned his head sharply, and I followed his look. Jehan was busy with the horses some twenty or thirty paces away, though he glanced our way. But not in earshot, which I considered an honorable gesture. A gesture I knew Dannath Randart wouldn’t make. “I am a hostage, then?” he asked, his voice lifting at the end. “Us. We? Are hostages? Or prisoners of war? Or what?”

  I called out to Jehan, “Damedran has the same question I had earlier. Is he a hostage, prisoner, or what?”

  Jehan took that as an invitation to join us. “You can define your exact status at your leisure. All I’m going to say is that Uncle Dannath is not going to get his hands on you unless certain demands are met, and then only with your permission. I can explain on the ride. We’re going to have to pick up our feet, if we want to stay outside of Randart’s search perimeter, which will be dispatched by sundown, if they aren’t riding already. So say your farewells to the princess, because she’s presumably going off in another direction.”

  Jehan held out his hand toward my mare. I saw a new feedbag hooked to the saddle gear. With the other hand, he held out a folded paper. “Here is a map I made last night, to help me orient on you all. Go ahead and take it. I know where I am now. You’ll see the major roads, cities, garrisons, and towns marked. Castles as well. You should be able to find several routes out of the kingdom.” He gave me a bland smile.

  In silence I took it.

  I don’t know what I might have said or done if we’d been in private. Probably made things worse. But before all those watching guys—both sides in brown uniforms, which was kind of funny and kind of heartbreaking—there was only one thing to do.

  I swept as flourishing a bow as I could, turning at the last to include the entire company. Then I said in English, “Gents, it’s been real.”

  And leaving exceedingly puzzled faces behind me, I mounted up and rode away.

  Yeah, I managed what I thought a suave exit, but I swore when I first took up my pen I’d tell the truth in this thing, and so I have to admit that within about thirty seconds of choosing a random direction I was snuffling into my sleeve.

  Talk about confused. I was sad, scared, angry, mostly at myself for having kissed Jehan again when I knew, I knew, I’d feel terrible afterward. Because the kiss itself was so great. Despite everything. And oh yes, what was “everything”?

  I didn’t snivel too long. The sky was clouding. If I lost the sun, I’d lose my sense of direction, and the map would be worthless.

  Map.

  I unfolded it. There was Jehan’s handwriting, in even, slanted letters with slashing curls. It was a dashing handwriting, and I resisted the impulse to kiss the map. Yeah, I know.

  Focusing my blurred eyes (this is the last time I wipe away tears, I vowed) I saw he’d marked a place on the map below Ambais, where he wrote: Should find D. here. D of course had to mean Damedran.

  That meant I could use that point as my orientation.

  Tracing my finger straight north, I discovered that Ivory Mountain was not all that far away.

  “Papa, I sure hope you are ready to rock and roll,” I muttered, kneeing the mare. “Because the house is packed and the band is playing as hard as it can.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Almost directly to the west the rain had already begun, a soft plopping of cold drops, when the single sentry at the gate of Zheliga Castle burst into the buttery, where Hilna and Pirie Famid worked alongside their servants, the sisters sharing the title of “baroness” for simplicity’s sake as they shared the baroness chores. In this case, pressing butter into the molds and seeing it carried down in neatly wrapped blocks to the cold room.

  “Gate,” the boy said, his voice cracking.

  “Army?” Hilna asked doubtfully, knowing that Orthan and his brother Dannath were somewhere on the other side of the hills to the east, busy with their big siege game. She hadn’t expected Orthan and Damedran until the siege was over, and it was time to settle in for winter. The sisters had been laying in extra stores for weeks.

  The boy shook his head. “Women,” he said succinctly.

  Pirie and Hilna exchanged puzzled looks. The sisters were not given to needless chatter. They untied their aprons, dropped them onto the table and left, one smoothing back her gray curls, the other brushing flour off her skirts left from the morning’s inspection of the milling.

  Neither was prepared to see a couple hundred women either riding or walking over the bridge, which two generations ago had been a drawbridge, but had been left down for over fifty years. A couple of hundred? More than that, all strung out in a slow-moving line, as far as one could see.

  Hilna gasped when she recognized the tall, tough-looking woman walking beside a horse. “Plir Silvag?”

  Plir lifted a hand in greeting, and waved at the woman on the horse. Hilna blinked up at a pretty woman her own age, with pale hair done up elaborately on the top of her head. She looked vaguely familiar—

  “You remember Princess Atanial?” Plir asked.

  The sisters stared in mute surprise.

  Hilna gave a stiff curtsey, her expression changing from blank surprise to a wary question.

  Atanial looked down into those faces, seeing yet again the question, doubt, resentment that had been mirrored in variations during her long journey.

  They had passed along the old paths, far from the fine military roads and the waterlogged main roads. The worst of the journey had been at first, when Atanial’s conversation with Plir was repeated, sometimes with far more hostility than Plir had shown. But Atanial listened, and said the same thing over and over: We cannot permit an invasion. A few refused to join. Of those, half caught up later, like Plir herself. With her she brought a number of relatives and old contacts. Since then more were catching up day by day, women of all ages, from girls barely in their teens to women far older than Atanial and Plir.

  Women led them to other women who they felt would embrace the cause, and so the group swelled in number every day. The strange thing was, Atanial had realized one night, by now they could hardly be secret, and yet at least so far, no one seemed to have sent word to the king. She did not know if all Canardan’s spies were all at the war game, or if some had quietly changed their minds about what side they were on.

  Atanial returned Hilna’s bow as best she could from the back of a horse, then said, “May we speak privately?”

  Hilna rubbed her forehead. “I suppose. But what shall I do about all these people?”

  “Most of them brought their own journey bread. And we’ve been buying fruit along the way.” Atanial did not mention that she alone hadn’t come prepared. Most of the women shared, but Atanial did not like taking too much. She was always hungry.

  Hilna shaded her eyes to ward drops of cold rain. Among those faces, most her age or older, and a very few young, were a couple of guild mistresses, a baroness who had inherited her title in her own right, and at least one garrison captain’s wife. “I think you all had better come inside.” She cast a glance at her sister. “We can fit you into the hall out of the weather.”

  “And the sun room, too. This way.” Pirie gestured to the women accompanying Atanial. “I’ll see to food and drink for those who need it.”

  “Princess, you come with me, if you will.” Hilna waited at the door.

  Atanial dismounted with a smothered woof and tried to be delicate about rubbing her inner thighs as she walked stiffly behind her hostesses. A smothered snicker from behind testified to her success, before t
he last of the women vanished into what appeared to be a parlor with plastered and whitewashed walls; they moved through that to the rest of the ground floor of the castle beyond.

  But Hilna did not crack a smile as she stalked into a low entry of bare swept stone, the enticing smell of baking apple tarts drifting from somewhere. Atanial’s stomach rumbled.

  A sharp turn, up a short stairway to a room off a landing, and the smell was cut off by a thick wooden door swinging shut. Hilna indicated a massive wing-backed chair that had to be a hundred years old at least.

  Atanial winced at the prospect of her aching hips dealing with that ungiving wood. She sighed in relief when she spotted a newly stuffed cushion on its seat, embroidered somewhat crookedly with tulips and bluebells. There was another such chair, both angled toward a fireplace where a good fire already burned.

  Hilna perched on the edge of one and Atanial collapsed into the other, plopping her cold feet onto the fender.

  “I’ll try to be brief.” Inwardly she resisted the strong desire to sleep right where she was for at least a year. “You don’t have to answer. I don’t want to put you into a bad position. But Mistress Silvag insisted we should stop here and at least let you know what we’re doing. Whatever you decide to do about it, considering who you are married to. Or rather, who your husband is brother to.”

  “Dannath,” Hilna breathed.

  “I don’t know how much you know, but the evidence is clear that Dannath Randart and the king will be invading Locan Jora in the spring.” Atanial braced for—anything. But oh, she did so hope she wasn’t going to have to leap to her aching feet and bucket down those stone steps and back onto that horse, sword-waving women on her heels.

  Hilna’s mouth tightened.

  “I know the reasons put forward in favor,” Atanial said swiftly. “Locan Jora has been part of Khanerenth for most of recorded history. Though the outer borders have danced about quite a bit from generation to generation. I know there are people who lost their homes when the takeover happened. I know they want their ancestral homes back. I know that there is a belief that the economy will vastly improve, that there will be land and titles for the loyal, that this and that will all make things better. But. I really want you to consider the cost. The real cost. Which is lives. Not necessarily ours, but young people’s, like your son’s. Because he’s supposed to be leading this war, isn’t he?”

  Hilna’s eyes narrowed.

  “At least, he’ll be right at the front, with all the banners and so forth, but we know who will really be in command.” Atanial paused, wondering if she’d gone too far.

  Hilna rocked on her chair while rain tapped at the leaded glass window in the deep stone embrasure, and the fire on the hearth crackled and snapped. “If I interfere, I’ll never see my son again. It’s rare enough I see him now. Either Damedran or my husband, Orthan.”

  Atanial leaned forward. “Tell me.”

  Hilna brushed a strand of hair off her forehead with trembling fingers. “What is to tell? I get to see him once a year. If that. Then he pushes me away with ‘Uncle Dannath says I’m too soft.’ Uncle Dannath says after every visit home, always something aimed at me. My husband, too. Dannath says Damedran has slid back into boy habits, and requires a week of drills to toughen him back up again.”

  “So you disagree with their goals?”

  “If I wished to be known as a traitor,” she retorted. “I cannot have an opinion that differs from Dannath’s. None of us can. Why do you think I never adopted into the Randart family? It was the one single thing I could keep of my own, my family. Even this barony is nothing but an air title—Orthan saying, often and often, that soon we’ll live in Vadnais, we’ll have a real title, and this castle, which I have spent the past fifteen years making into a home, is good enough for Pirie and Wolfie.”

  Atanial had used the past two or three days forming logic chains to argue against every conceivable point of view against an invasion. She had never expected this reaction.

  “What would you like to do?”

  Hilna dashed her wrist angrily over her eyes. “Is that meant as a jab? No, I see by your face it isn’t. But how can you ask that, knowing Dannath? Oh, I knew from the very start that Orthan was loyal to his brother, but in those days the goal was rebuilding the army, which had gotten slack, with pilferage and cronyism and scandalous behavior shrugged at in the upper ranks. That’s how we lost half the kingdom in the first place! But after Damedran was born, there were more and more hints about royal vision and royal gifts and . . .”

  She wiped her eyes again, frowning down into the fire. “About five years ago, I realized they were not talking about the king. They meant Dami. And at first I conceded, with a mother’s pride. I thought he’d make a fine king. I didn’t consider how he might get there.” She looked up, saying fiercely, “And it’s as well I conceded, because I vow as sure as I sit here otherwise, Dannath would have seen to it something happened to me. He’s never had any use for women—for anyone, really—unless they can fight.”

  Atanial nodded. “Or serve. But not think. That seems to go for men, too.”

  “Yes. Orthan is plenty smart, and loyal, but he’s no grand thinker. So what is it you are doing?”

  “We are marching across the kingdom.” Atanial swept her arm wide. “Where, you shall see. None of the other women know the destination, only that I strongly expect that we will meet the king there, and War Commander Randart. I knew that nothing I did on my own would ever make any difference. But if there were enough of us, maybe we could get them at least to listen?”

  Hilna let out her breath in a slow, shaky sigh. “I know I sound like a coward, and perhaps I am one. If I ever cross Dannath, even in a small thing, I will lose my son altogether. And what you are suggesting is no small thing. I shall have to think.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “There are two things I will say. First, I will only discuss it with Pirie. And maybe one other friend who I think will be sympathetic. But I’m not sending any messages to Orthan.” She gave a small sigh. “I could never force him to choose between his brother and—well, leave it at that. I’m mum. Best that way.”

  Atanial gestured her thanks.

  “Second, if you can convince Starveas Kender to join you, she might bring some of the old Joran nobility over. Her husband loved marrying an old noble family with a title, even if deposed. The Kenders have their title by courtesy, as do all the old Joran nobility. You know that.” She scarcely paused for Atanial to assent. “I know that he can hardly wait for the invasion to be over, so they can lord it once again on the other side of the mountains. But she’s worried. Not only about Ban. Also about her daughter Mirnic, who will be sent with the mages. Who end up as targets as often as the warriors.”

  “I would love to, but I don’t dare go back to Vadnais. It was too difficult to get past the guard on my way out. I don’t believe I’d make it back in without being caught.”

  “The Kenders don’t live in the royal city,” Hilna exclaimed. “They live in Ellir. They left that several weeks ago, knowing about the siege running into winter, and how those with castles along the west will all go home, taking sizable portions of the army with them for the winter. The Kenders are staying with her cousin, the Duchess of Frazhan. They stopped here day before yesterday.”

  “Frazhan on the border,” Atanial murmured.

  “They have that wonderful old castle directly across the river valley from Ivory Mountain.”

  “Ahhhhh.” Atanial smiled.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Magister Zhavic watched the king rub his forehead with tense fingers, the ruby in his ring winking and glittering.

  He looked up wearily. “Zhavic. I know you don’t trust my war commander. Neither of you has ever even tried to comprehend the other, it seems to me. Yet you are loyal and dedicated. So why can’t you see that we must work together now? We cannot afford strife among ourselves.”

  Zhavic struggled to suppress his annoyance
. It wasn’t as if this reaction of the king’s was unexpected. “Write to him, your majesty,” he urged, keeping his voice low, quiet. “Please. If there is a reasonable explanation, I vow I will never again bring forward any suspicions.” Not without undeniable proof, anyway.

  The king let out a long-suffering sigh, and with a spurt of ill-tempered impatience, threw aside a couple of stacks of papers in search of one of the small slips he used for the magic-transfer box.

  Zhavic bent, picked up the snow of papers on the floor and returned them, glancing covertly at the top of each. Most were supply lists, but one was from the Skate’s infamous Captain Bragail, on which Zhavic glimpsed the phrase . . . of the pirate absolutely no sign.

  The king extricated a small piece of paper, picked up his pen, dipped it, and frowned at the mage. “What am I asking again?”

  “I do not know what questions you deem appropriate, your majesty, but the questions that occur to me are why he considered it necessary to send his nephew and several senior cadets away from the siege on a secret mission, and why he suddenly had to ride off, again without telling anyone.”

  The king frowned down at the pen, apparently not seeing the slow formation of a droplet of ink. It was about to splash on the paper when he threw the pen into the well and leaned back in his chair. “You know, it really is odd, when I think about it. He mentioned nothing of any of these things in his report last night. I thought Damedran was with the other cadets. And that Randart himself was overseeing things at Cheslan Castle.”

  Zhavic put his hands behind his back lest they betray him. Long years had taught him to keep his face impervious, but the surge of triumph burning through him made him almost shaky.

  The king nipped up his pen. He wrote in a fast scrawl, folded the paper, shoved it into the box without waiting for the ink to dry and tapped it. He looked up, eyes narrowed. “If there is a good explanation I will hold you to your promise.”

  “If there is a good explanation, I shall be satisfied, that is a vow. You know I only have the good of the kingdom in mind—”