Sartor

  And as soon as she said it, she saw in the quick tightening of Irza’s features that this girl did not like this idea.

  “Irza?”

  Both looked up. Blonde braids swinging, Arlas hopped back down the trail. “She’s tired,” Irza’s sister said in a low voice, nodding at the drooping Julian.

  Irza gave a quick nod and looked around in question.

  Arlas pointed off to one side to where Atan walked, deep in conversation with Merewen and Sin and a couple others.

  Irza smiled at Lilah. “Will you pardon me?”

  Lilah nodded and watched as Irza moved with swift, graceful stride to Atan. She couldn’t hear the conversation, but she saw Atan look up with a quick gesture, her expression full of concern, even remorse.

  Soon the group was settled in a mossy clearing, some seated on a fallen log, eating the cheese-stuffed bread that Rip and his group had prepared. Lilah sat with Hinder, whose friendly smile was the same even if he wasn’t being watched. He reminded Lilah of Bren, except not as moody.

  Little Julian seemed to be in the charge of Irza and her sister. The Ianth sisters got Julian fed, and then settled on either side of Atan as Julian squatted happily in the dirt, playing some sort of game with twigs that she hopped and skipped about. She was whispering under her breath. Acting out a story with twig people? Lilah grinned, remembering when she used to do exactly the same thing in the garden at her old home in Selenna, before the Revolution. She wondered if a Sartoran kid’s story would be anything like a Sarendan kid’s.

  A flicker of color at one side caused her to look up, and Atan said, “Ready to go?”

  Lilah nodded.

  “Julian?” a voice called.

  The solemn-faced little girl tossed her twigs away and hopped to Arlas to taken her hand.

  Atan fell in step beside Lilah. The group started down an animal trail that Brick and Sana had picked, walking mostly in twos and threes. After a time, Atan said in a soft voice, “May I put a question to you about etiquette?”

  Etiquette? Lilah’s lips framed the word.

  “Is it still proper etiquette for monarchs to require titles and bowing, and the precedence at all times?”

  Lilah said, “Well, it was in my uncle’s court.” She thought back, then added, “That is, I always saw it done, though he never actually said anything. My father used to get mad if people forgot etiquette, but my uncle didn’t. Of course, I don’t think anyone forgot, when he was king. He was so very scary.” She shrugged, a sort of laugh escaping her—more a nervous sound than one of light-hearted amusement. “He certainly didn’t expect me to bow when we got away from the Norsunder base. He only asked me to stop calling him Uncle Dirty-Hands.”

  “You didn’t say that.” Atan winced.

  “Um, yup. Habit. A nasty moment.”

  “Yes! So your brother requires the protocols of rank, or doesn’t?”

  “Well, he’s never said anything around me, but people just do it, I think.” Lilah frowned, trying to recover a memory. “Wait, I was wrong, he did say something... If I can just remember...”

  While she sorted through the jumble of memories from summer, Atan said, “Gehlei taught me all the ins and outs of court etiquette.”

  “Then you can tell me what star chamber families are?”

  “Those are families whose lines go back a certain number of centuries. There is apparently a formal hall for certain kinds of gatherings, where representatives of families stand on their star, and get a say in certain kinds of decisions.”

  “It sounds complicated.”

  “It is very complicated, because the stars alter according to seasons.”

  “Wow.” Lilah tried to imagine that. It sounded so very... Sartoran.

  Atan went on. “When Hinder first introduced me to the entire group, and Irza made them all bow, I felt, well, stupid, and I said, without thinking, No protocol. But—certain reactions from some of them—convinced me that was a mistake, though I’m not certain why. Had I somehow denied my true background or diminished my family in some symbolic way? And so I added, Not until Eidervaen is free again, which I guess turned it into a sort of heroic statement instead of me being a coward.”

  Lilah laughed at the self-deprecating irony she heard in Atan’s voice on the word ‘heroic’. “That reminds me! I knew there was something. Peitar did say that when we were in the formal rooms that formal etiquette serves to transform an ordinary person into a symbol of the state.”

  Atan nodded slowly. “Yes, I see that. And also that the symbol must be separated off, in order to enable him—or her—to make decisions that might affect all the others’ lives. And to enable those others to accept those decisions and to act upon them.”

  Lilah sighed and kicked at a pile of withered autumn leaves. “Peitar was going on one night. About that first moment of power. How it’s created, when one speaks and the other chooses to act as directed. As usual, I understood about one word in ten. He kept going on about whether or not this power ought to exist, and if it could be sustained without the clank of pikes on the floor, and the march of boots when the guard changes.”

  “Moral authority versus power,” Atan said. “Tsauderei has talked to me about it since I was small, but I’m beginning to see that what you read about and talk about while sitting with your tutor in a hermit’s cottage, and when you’re dealing with others... well, let me say this. I wish I could have had more time to talk to your brother! But I guess if he could figure out all these things for himself, so can I.”

  Lilah flapped her hands. “Besides, he doesn’t always make sense. Like when he started mumbling stuff about why and when the guards choose to obey, transferring their implied power to him. So I said, We all know the answer to that—we lived through it this summer, when no one was in power, and everything was a mess, and no one planted the crops, and he laughed at me and said, As always, Lilah, you cut through the illusions and find the truth. But you know, I don’t always know the truth, and I’m definitely not always right!”

  “But you’re practical,” Atan said, laughing very softly, so her voice would not carry. “I suspect—little as I know your brother—that he both values and admires that quality in you.”

  Lilah shrugged, feeling a conflict of emotions: pride, and laughter at her own mistakes. “About that bowing,” she said. “I think you were absolutely right. Making the kids bow while wearing rags in the forest seems kind of pompous, if you ask me. Time enough for etiquette, and fancy clothes, and the like, after you kick the villains out of the kingdom. And you know,” Lilah added, feeling surer of herself by the moment, “if you do manage to get rid of Norsunder, then people might want to do all the old polite forms, because it makes life orderly again. Like they do at home, for my brother.”

  “I thought of that, too.” Atan lifted her chin, glancing ahead.

  Lilah gazed in the same direction, and spotted Arlas and Irza on either side of Julian. The sisters held the small girl’s hands, swinging her over every rock and root in the path, while Julian laughed in delight, as they sang an old marching ballad in counterpoint.

  THREE

  Gradually the abrupt shift from the eternal spring of the glade to the winter of the rest of the forest began to trouble Atan and her band.

  During the day, while they kept moving, they were fine. But the first night was troublesome, and Merewen was startled when she discovered little Julian’s fingers stuffed in her armpits the second morning, her lips bluish. Blue was a good healthy color for a Loi, but not for anyone else, and the sisters were trying to figure out which of them could do without their own scanty warm things when Merewen stooped down and wrapped her yeath-fur cloak around the child.

  Julian’s color returned to normal almost immediately. Merewen smiled. She’d worn the yeath-fur cloak because her mage guardian had given it to her, but she’d discovered that she didn’t really need it. Dressed only in her tunic, Merewen still felt a pleasant sense of coolness, not cold, and so too did the morvende
, used as they were to the stone depths never warmed by the sun. As long as they were dry, the morvende did not mind cold. But as the forest thinned and they emerged onto the hills above the River Ilder, the others felt the grip of winter closing around bones and flesh.

  That wasn’t the only problem. Used as the patrollers were to gleaning for nuts during autumn and fresh berries during spring as they roamed Shendoral, trading work for milled wheat from the miller, they had assumed that scavenging along the road would make their stores last longer.

  But the land was barren, ready for winter, and the streams they’d found so far had no mills. There were no other spring glades with fruit growing year round, much less the vegetable patch that the Poisoners had tended so carefully. Unless they found people who had extra stores, food was going to become scarce.

  Bigger than both these problems was that of the riders.

  The kids emerged from the protection of Shendoral just before sunset. As they peered down the road toward a winding river, they saw horseback riders on the other side, between the river and the twinkling lights of their first village.

  Arlas was certain they were villagers, Hannla cheerfully pointed out that here was proof Sartor was waking up, and shouldn’t they flag down the riders?

  “They’re searching,” Lilah said, remembering the king’s patrols of summer. ”They’re not riding around having fun. They’re on a search.” She watched the riders as she spoke, appearing and vanishing again beyond the distant hedgerows and fences and the last of the trees. She saw weapons at the saddles, the back-and-forth movement of heads.

  “Searching for us?” Atan looked up. “Who even knows we’re—oh, yes.” She grimaced when her gaze fell on Lilah’s black clothes. “They’re looking for me.”

  Searchers. The whisper worked down the line, quieting everyone. Faces turned Atan’s way. She felt those gazes, felt the question behind them.

  Brick pointed from behind a broad tree. “Are they Norsundrians? Mendaen, you’d know.” He turned his head the other way and beckoned wildly.

  Mendaen had supervised the small ones ducking behind a hedgerow. He ran quick and low to join the others. “They wear no one’s livery,” he said.

  From above in the tree, Sindan said softly, “They all wear gray.”

  “Norsunder,” Atan whispered. She glanced at those expectant faces, then said, “Hinder, I think you and the others ought to go back. I will go on alone, because they have to know where I’d be going if they really are searching for me.”

  “I’m going with you,” Lilah forced herself to say, though her insides quivered like watery jelly. But she’d seen how those others had almost began yelling for the horsemen’s attention.

  “I am, too,” Hinder said from behind a tree, so that his white hair would not draw the riders’ eye. Lilah crouched beside Atan, her shoulders hunched to her ears, arms folded across her front.

  Merewen was nowhere in sight.

  Atan was thinking rapidly. “Since we don’t know who they are, let’s stay quiet,” she suggested. “We might wait until midnight, and then we’ll see the magic that Merewen saw, showing us who is free of the enchantment, and who not. If it’s safe, maybe we will find allies in the village.”

  Her suggestion was turned into an order as it passed down the line.

  This plan spread down the line, and they clumped up together on top of the highest hill so they could peer at the village, with its golden lights in a few windows.

  None of them had any idea that they’d been spotted.

  Wend and Xoll, Dejain’s trackers, found the footprints of Atan’s group in the otherwise undisturbed dust of the road. So they eased up until they heard the kids’ voices clear on the cold air.

  “They’re sitting on the ridge on the other side of the river, watching the village in the valley,” Wend reported to Dejain after they transferred back.

  “Why?” Dejain asked.

  “One of them said that at midnight they’ll perceive some sort of light picking out the domiciles of those breaking out of the time-bindings. They seem to think these people will be potential allies.”

  “Some sort of light?” Dejain repeated. “Magic. But whose?”

  Wend shrugged. “Didn’t say. Only that they were waiting to see it.”

  “None are adults, you say?”

  “None.”

  “How many?”

  “Somewhere between three and four dozen. Oldest ones look sixteen or seventeen. Most younger.”

  “Irad wasn’t with them?”

  “No adults. No sign of Irad, other than the hoof prints we spotted at the very north end. Might be his, might be someone else’s.”

  It was midnight now. Dejain studied Zydes’s best tracker and tried to read the long, ugly face. Ech, he was ugly, and she preferred men to be pretty. This one had a broken nose, scars, belligerent cast to eyes and forehead, but he was good at his work. He also had to be considered a danger because she didn’t—yet—know his weakness.

  Xoll, now, standing there licking his lips, his weakness was a craving for catching and playing with prisoners. He loved killing. Give him an order to kill, and he worked for you.

  Dejain said, “What does Zydes know?”

  Wend’s mouth twisted into a sneer. “Nothing. Too busy ranting.”

  So he didn’t deny reporting to Zydes before coming to her. Lesca the head cook had seen Wend coming out of Zydes’s office, or Dejain wouldn’t have known, but her question didn’t seem to worry Wend. “Let me guess,” she said. “A new search for Irad?”

  “Eastern border. Mountains. And if not, then he wants me to go covert over the mountains and down into Miraleste.”

  “He won’t be there, he’s still in Shendoral, hiding out—has to be,” Dejain said. “Unless he rode into the time binding.”

  Wend shrugged.

  Inwardly Dejain cursed the clumsiness of having to use these trackers, and having to slink around to hold these private conversations without unwanted witnesses. Magic tracers would be so much neater! But Zydes had a net of wards over the Base, and Sartor’s enchantment was still too strong for any other spells to work.

  As for the trackers... if only she could find out Wend’s ambition, his weakness. His desire.

  She pulled her cloak tighter about her. There was no weather—of course—but the cold had intensified. The fangs of winter were about to sink deep into their hides. It made her bones and joints ache. Even her teeth hurt. Twice she’d had to force her hundred-year-old self back to this youthful appearance, but dark magic could not truly rejuvenate.

  “Children,” she repeated, turning about and staring north. Her thoughts returned to Darian Irad and the brat he’d had in tow. “Find that child, the one Irad had. Bring him back here. Do what you want with the rest.”

  Xoll uttered his high, keening giggle, a sound like the dying shrieks of a ferret.

  o0o

  “We have to leave,” Merewen whispered, breathing hard from her run. “Now.”

  “What?” Atan whispered back. She looked around. The sky was clear, peaceful with brilliant stars, and below lay the village, apparently asleep. And... was that a silvery glow, above the middle there? No, it was probably her imagination. Midnight was still a while off.

  “I went back up the road, and I saw two more of those riders. But they weren’t riding. They sneaked up behind that old vine there.” She pointed. “And listened to you. Then they went away again, and I followed, and I saw them go out like lights.” She snapped her fingers.”

  “Transfer magic,” Atan whispered.

  Atan’s doubts resolved. “We can’t wait around to see lights. We have to get to Eidervaen, as fast as we can,” she said.

  “But—wouldn’t allies be good to get?” Hinder pointed to the village.

  She shook her head. “Can’t be helped. Merewen is right. If the enemy vanished by magic, they can transfer back by magic, and then they could follow us in and kill everyone we lead them to.”

 
Hinder whistled, short and sharp.

  Tired, cold kids scrambled into their groups, some whispering, others looking about fearfully. Hinder motioned them together.

  “We’re going to cross the Ilder,” Hinder said, “and run. Hard, fast, and stay low. No one go up a hill and create a silhouette.” That much morvende children, with their white heads, were taught from an early age.

  Hinder began to run, followed by the rest in a long snake.

  Mendaen and Sana separated and ran within sight of one another at the back, bows within easy reach. For a time, the long line pounded along in silence. At the bottom of a hill, the stream they followed dumped into the Ilder, and they pattered across an old bridge. On the other side, an old oak grove was just discernible in the darkness. Used to forest living for so long, Hinder made straight for it.

  Once they were running under the shelter of branches, the children separated, some laughing breathlessly, others trying to whistle up birdcalls. Lilah and Atan spotted Merewen in the midst of one group, silvery moonlight bathing her happy face as they raced across a glade.

  They stopped when the wood became dense, and they lost their sense of direction. Occasional cries rang out as people ran into unseen twigs and branches, which stung faces and arms.

  The smaller ones were lagging, a few sobbing quietly.

  As soon as Atan became aware of that, she said to Hinder, “We’d better stop for the night. But somewhere secluded.”

  Hinder paused and whistled the gather! signal. “Wait here,” he said. “I smell water. I’m going to find us a camping spot.”

  The smaller kids flung themselves onto the mossy ground, too exhausted to question. The teens whispered, sometimes looking speculatively Atan’s way. Lilah watched, uneasy.

  When Hinder returned, he gave a soft whistle, calling them together. Sighs and grunts and muffled moans accompanied the general rising. Slowly they followed in single file down a gulley into almost complete darkness.

  “Hold hands,” Sin called.

  They did, and soon found themselves in a rock grotto at the base of a waterfall. Above them the cliff was thick was growth; they could no longer see the stars.