Not one of the people crowding the parapets, wall walks, and towers of the ancient city assumed it accidental, this triumphant arrival on the first day of spring, which marked the turn of the year for the Venn.
So far north, each day’s gain of light was noticeable, dawns and sunset often dramatic, if not stormy. A rare sight, the rising sun in a milky-pale sky behind the city; for many in the southern fleet who possessed spyglasses, it was a heartening sight after more than ten years away.
The southern fleet commander, Stalna Hyarl Fulla Durasnir, did not notice the weather.
For those watching from the walls and tower crenellations the complicated geometry of wind-curved sails were silhouetted against a dark western horizon, from which racing clouds tumbled, bringing yet another storm.
As they neared, the fleet peered hungrily back at Twelve Towers, so named for the twelve original ships that had gone a-viking in search of glory and trade. Finding no trade or prey, the twelve had sailed north toward what they thought was home. They’d found instead a rocky, grim coast and no humans anywhere: somehow they had ventured out of their world and into another. Faced with the immediate prospect of a winter that promised to be even less merciful than those at home, they’d dug in and built a city. Twelve ships, twelve towers, twelve clans in varying precedence. By the time those clans had renamed themselves the Oneli, the Sea Lords, the twelve towers had been reinforced into mighty, bastioned edifices on the surface connected by a single stone-patterned road that bridged the river; large as the towers were, they gave no sign of the far larger complex of domiciles underground joined by a system of tunnels.
Those onboard the ships, sweeping their spyglasses over the thick-walled imposing towers of pale gray stone, strained to pick out individuals from the clusters of mostly flaxen-haired heads. Already the wind had begun to rise, ripping across the gray seas from the snowy northern wastes, and hoods came up, some faces covered entirely except for the eyes.
From his position before the koldar, at which two strong men braced against the running current, Stalna Hyarl Durasnir stood in full battle armor, silver over white, his winged helm fitted over his long, thinning gray-streaked yellow hair. The rising wind whistled through the wires holding the wings in place and tugged at his sweeping white fine-woven wool cloak. He braced his feet on the surging deck, knowing that he was an object of scrutiny by all those gathered on the walls in the city.
With the steadiness of long practice he kept his glass aimed as the towers gradually emerged from the predawn shadow. There was the Anborc, the King’s Tower, highest of all, reigning over the widest complexity of underground tunnels and dwellings. As he expected, the glints of color along the upper parapet resolved into the formal cloaks and hoods of Elders in the Houses . . . but not all twelve. He swept the gathering again, narrowing his eyes, and yes, two were missing.
Why? No, the question that mattered was whether the Elders had convened a Breseng, which would be a formality appointing Rajnir king. Not every House would deem it necessary to mount the walls to view the return of the fleet for that. If the Elders had invoked a full council, a Frasadeng, that required everyone to participate in choosing a king.
And required a candidate for kingship to answer all questions put to him.
Durasnir spared a thought for Prince Rajnir, who sat in his cabin, Dag Erkric attending him. As the fleet neared the outer reaches of the harbor, fleet watched towers, towers watched fleet. The prince stayed hidden.
Durasnir swung his glass to other end of the visible part of the city, and leveled the sights on Sinnaborc, the Tower of Transgressors, or Traitors’ Tower, where despite the racing wind, black specks circled high in the sky. Durasnir ignored the death birds, which kept vigil long after the bones of traitors chained to die of exposure had been picked clean. He stared at the blobs of light glowing around the tower: several new ghosts shimmering as the last shadows of night dissolved. As the first rays shot outward from the rising sun, the ghosts glimmered, paled, vanished.
Back to the central tower, the Saeborc, or Sea Tower—more important to Durasnir than Leofaborc, Tower of Concord, from whose towers those high in the council and the Hilda watched. The wind-flagged figures along Saeborc’s upper and lower parapets were more distinct now: he recognized some of the wives of Oneli commanders and captains. His gaze slid past the occasional colors, and a handful in the unrelieved white of honorable mourning. Far more were dressed in the black of dishonorable death, either real or the symbolic death of being formally cast out.
Standing a little apart from the others, squarely centered on the highest wall, wearing black from head to foot, was Durasnir’s wife, Brun.
So the sham begins, he thought.
This thought was shared, though he did not know it, by several of the women on the Saeborc wall, including Brun.
At the other end of the wall, a captain’s wife with a glass pressed to her eye said in an undervoice to her companion, “I’ve got the flagship in view now. There’s Stalna Hyarl Durasnir, with his glass turned up here. I think he saw us.” She uttered a laugh, the wind snapping away the vapor from her breath. “I think he saw her. By the root, he’s gone back into the cabin.”
Both captains’ wives turned their faces into the wind, now keen and cold, and surveyed Vra Stalna Durasnir, who stood alone, plainly wanting no company. “Brun Hatchet-Face was the first to wear black.” The first one huffed a laugh; her breath froze and whipped away instantly in the keening wind. “He’ll get an icy welcome tonight, you can be sure.”
“At their age?” retorted her companion, with the superior confidence of a young wife. “That bed’s been cold since the last Breseng.”
“Halvir, their boy, is just turned five,” a third said, from just behind. “And he wasn’t a Birth Spell.”
The two whirled around, then deferred as a tall, stout older woman took their place. The newcomer, whose cloak and long, tasseled hood were a stark black that emphasized her age-white hair, was wife to Captain Seigmad, Left Flank Battlegroup Captain, veteran of sixty years of service.
“You and your icy beds,” Vra Seigmad pronounced, disgusted with their ignorance and presumption. She snorted as she raised her glass toward the ships surging in on the rising tide.
“There’s Petrel,” the first woman exclaimed, peering past Vra Seigmad’s shoulder.
From farther down the wall the waiting women gazed into the strengthening wind and named out loud the great warships as their smooth, arched prows resolved out of the fleeing night. The impressive formation—the horn of triumph—passed the Dragon’s Claw that marked the outermost reach of the harbor, and the fleet tacked in exhilarating precision, the Battlegroup flagships in a row behind Cormorant, the others grouping behind in station. As the wind rose, sails loosened, brailed up and furled, magnificent in synchrony.
When the flagships vanished beyond the outward jut of the guard wall in order to dock along the Oneli jetty, the women withdrew inside, shutting inset doors tight against the sleet that began to tear horizontally across the gray-green waves. There were no windows anywhere facing west; the only doors giving onto the western walls were tucked inside bastions.
“Vra Seigmad must be berserk. Everyone’s gone berserk! The Oneli in triumph when we all know they lost Halia?”
“Hatchet-Face in black makes sense,” the young wife whispered, with a quick glance over her shoulder. “Friya Haudan herself witnessed Vra Durasnir throwing her scroll-case into the sea after word came about the loss of Halia.”
“Ho!”
“Shh.”
A quick look from side to side caused the young wife to look around as well. She’d forgotten the rumors about the dags’ listening magic. Her own House dag was boring, she could not imagine him casting spells to spy on people or daring the gates of Norsunder in order to gain mysterious spells like was said about Prince Rajnir’s Dag Erkric, who had to be seventy! An old dag, making up spells for warfare? It had to be rumor. How could a dag make war? Even the
greatest of them could not bespell a sword to fight on its own or an arrow to loose itself from a bow.
What she definitely did not want was to catch the attention of the Yaga Krona, the dags who served as Eyes of the Crown. If they caught you spreading gossip during the Frasadeng, you could find yourself in the Hall of Judgment being fitted with an iron torc and given three years’ menial service for contributing toward Rainorec. The powerful can talk, they can even raise crowds, but you can’t, her mother had once said. And even the powerful sometimes fall. She’d made the gesture toward the north that everyone understood, no matter where you actually stood, to mean Sinnaborc and its infamous bloody tower roof.
Despite their furtive glances and lowered voices, the women’s rapid exchange echoed off the stone walls with the peculiar sibilant clarity of sound in icy air, audible to anyone following ten paces behind. As Vra Seigmad was.
“So the senior wives will demand an accounting at the Frasadeng?”
“I’m certain that’s what’s going to happen. Why else wear black?”
“What I don’t understand is why Hatchet-Face is throwing over her marriage. Stalna Hyarl Durasnir was not in command of the invasion. Stalna Talkar of the Hilda was.” She twiddled two fingers, indicating “army.”
“Doesn’t anyone tell you anything out there in your faraway tunnel?”
“No one wants an iron torc and three years of scraping ice-mud from the streets for their pains.”
“They only call ‘treason’ and ‘Rainorec’ on one another, those in power,” came the scoffing answer in a lowered tone. “Here’s what I was told. Stalna Hyarl Durasnir negotiated the defeat with the Marlovan king himself. The first defeat ever in our history.”
The young wife snorted. “They can’t send him to the far shore as outcast. Not a Durasnir. My mother used to say that Durasnirs don’t use the Waste Spell because they shit gold.”
“What I heard was Dag Erkric forced him into it.”
“Then we’ll never hear the truth. Who can gainsay a dag? All the talk about how he’ll turn your brain into stone—”
“Shh! If you want to wake up iron-thralled tomorrow, just say his name when you walk into a spiderweb.”
The young wife lowered her voice slightly. “But if Hatchet-Face parts with him, will she go back to her people? Who are they, anyway? I never heard that she was part of any of the Great Houses.”
“She isn’t. She was a scribe from a collateral family connected to Lefsan House. They own nothing.”
“Lefsan? A Durasnir allied with a Lefsan? I don’t believe it. They haven’t put forward a king candidate at Breseng for a hundred years!”
“And you can count their captains granted helm wings on one hand. Even so. She and Durasnir met when he was a mere third son, born in a Breseng year.”
“Oh!” Ordinarily this ancient history about old people would have been boring, but the fleet coming home, the rumors and whispers, even the Frasadeng made everything deliciously immediate.
The young wife wasted a heartbeat or two on the notion of the famed Fulla Durasnir being born a mere third son, conceived only because a Breseng year had come, from which the Houses would choose the next king candidates—though everyone knew how that law had been twisted by paid adoptions and other connivings as the great Houses struggled for supremacy.
Both women had grown up hearing about these struggles, but neither would have questioned the system that had governed their lives: every thirty years there would be a thirty-year-old king, young and strong, as the old king retired at sixty. Boys born that Breseng year were nurtured for fifteen years, at which time the future heir would be selected; the heir would then leave his family to live with the king and train for the next fifteen years. No king (or queen, selected by the women by different criteria) was permitted to have children.
The older wife enjoyed her position of superior knowledge, though she was scarcely more connected to the exalted Durasnirs than the young wife. “Like the others not picked that Breseng year, Fulla Durasnir was sent to sea, until his senior brother died in battle.”
“I remember hearing something about a duel.”
“There was talk about how and why the oldest son died in that skirmish over on Goerael. The second son died in a duel as the result of the talk. He won, but only outlived the loser by a day. And so Fulla was called back to take title and to marry. Vra Durasnir was his lover at the time—she was younger than you are, second assistant to the House Skalt—but he insisted on marrying her.”
The younger wife was impressed. From a negligible family with no thralls to a House with maybe six homes above ground and below, an entire floor in one of the Twelve Towers, and at least a hundred born thralls, what a leap!
“And she was adopted into House Durasnir with the birth of Vatta, their first son. Who was killed in a sea battle just after the fleet was sent south.”
The young wife did not explain that she had known Vatta, but she’d rejected his shy, awkward flirtations in preference to luring Prince Rajnir. You did not tell stories on fallen heroes, even sixteen-year-old ones.
The two reached the bottom of the stairs and joined in the crowds hurrying toward the tunnel decorated with silver and white mosaics that lay directly under the King’s Road, leading to Anborc and the Hall of Judgment.
The young wife wanted to catch a glimpse of Prince Rajnir again. They’d had that passionate dalliance just before he was sent south to gain land for the Venn. She hoped that ten years and kingship would not have cooled his ardor; how fun it would be to become a king’s first favorite!
Vra Seigmad was behind them. She’d listened to the two fools, gauging how much of the gossip was truth and how much hearsay (and what that meant), head angled up to catch the sound of footsteps following her. Surely Brun Durasnir would be coming down behind her at any moment. And Vra Seigmad not only had a ring bespelled to warn of magical spiderwebs, she knew how to keep her voice down.
As she stared up the empty steps she brooded on the protocol, which required those of the senior rank to speak first in any exchange. The only way around it was if your House was allied with the House of the person you wished to talk to, but Durasnir and Seigmad were not House-allies, despite the long friendship between individuals of two generations.
Maybe because of that friendship? So many alliances were forced on people, predicated on agreements between one’s rivals. But she could see no way to change that, especially now when every second person appeared to be looking over his or her shoulder for the shadow of Rainorec.
Rainorec: Venn Doom.
On impulse Vra Seigmad swung around and began vaulting back up, grimly smiling as she moved her bulk with the unflagging speed she’d trained with when young and more lithe.
Venn got stout with age—in this climate, it was better for health. But Vra Seigmad refused to let any of her added flesh turn to flab. She bustled up the six or seven stair turns as the air became more chill. When she gained the bastion she paused and pulled her hood down to her chin, yanking the cord so that it snugged at her neck, stabilizing the slits over her eyes.
From long habit she shifted her body against the door, knowing it would take all her strength to get it open. When she’d eased it a handsbreadth, she peered through and stared in surprise at the tall figure who waved impatiently.
Vra Seigmad forced herself outside. The most dangerous conversations had to be held outside. Though the House skalts all knew how to place (and to ward) what were called spiderwebs, magical spells that somehow captured words spoken within spell-bounded spaces, everyone knew that the most powerful dags knew deeper, more dangerous spells. They also knew that magical spiderwebs, like the real thing, required physical boundaries. No one could bind one to the eternal wind.
“I hoped you would come forth,” Brun Durasnir said. Her lips were already turning blue. “Thank you for heeding my message and wearing black.”
Vra Seigmad clapped her gloved hands in a quick peace mode. “I hoped you’d
find a way to tell us why.”
Vra Durasnir bent toward her; it was getting harder to hear over the rising howl of the wind along the stones. “You have a scroll-case? What did Seigmad tell you?”
“He only wrote once. Said they lost. Never wrote again. I tried to find out more.”
“Hold to it,” Brun shouted. Her voice was faint. “Hold to it! Demand. An. Accounting.”
She bent her head into the wind and fought her way to the door, Vra Seigmad following close enough to be whipped by her skirts and hood. Brun Durasnir held the door by main force so they could both slip inside.
Brun Durasnir raised a hand to halt Vra Seigmad there on the stairs, where she shivered, counting slowly nine times nine. They could not be seen together. Everyone would be whispering, trying to discover what they talked about. Everyone. And maybe even fitting words into their mouths in speculation.
Vra Seigmad was grateful to Brun Durasnir for sparing her that. She was also grateful for the water-repellent magic on her cloak and hood, the heat-retaining magic woven into the wool, as she ran down the stairs.
The tunnel leading to the Hall of Judgment was full of people, but as always, the moment people saw her black cloak and long hood with the Seigmad colors in the tassel, they deferred. She set a brisk pace, unhindered until she reached a group from Tharfan House spread across the tunnel and walking at a deliberately sedate pace. As the former Senior House, they still claimed precedence, and as there was no accepted king, Vra Seigmad must drop behind those long, arrogantly lengthened pointed hoods, the silken tassels of silver and white swinging to the backs of their owners’ knees.
From long habit people’s voices dropped when they entered the Hall of Judgment, which alone of all Venn buildings was not decorated with rich color. The groins curving up to hold the vaulted ceiling were bare white marble, reminding Vra Seigmad of clean-picked ribs. In the galleries sat ten of twelve senior House Hyarls, the Council of Elders, the Senior Guild Skalts, and the senior dags in sober blue. Everyone else ended up on the general floor. In this room the kings had spoken, but now the Council of Elders had declared a Frasadeng, a gathering of the Houses, and though everyone could speak, the horror of recent condemnations seemed to grip them all.