“You know this place, then,” Herewiss was saying. “That’s a help.”
She found herself blinking back unexpected tears. “They’ll be glad to see players. Not many come down here, especially after the bad weather sets in. They probably haven’t been entertained since last summer.” She glanced at Freelorn. “If things are as bad in Arlen as they are here… don’t overcharge them, Lorn. From the look of the fields, this year’s harvest won't be any better than the last.”
Freelorn nodded. Good harvests were a king’s responsibility. Bad ones were a sign of trouble—like the empty throne in Arlen. “I’ll see to it,” he said.
Segnbora nodded. Inwardly she felt a twinge of satisfaction, for Lorn was changing. In many respects he was still the same brash, adventurous prince she loved so dearly, but increasingly he was overcome by thoughtful silences…which was as it should have been. The land through which they traveled was his by right, and its plight was desperate. The crops in the fields were poor; the people they’d seen of late, over-taxed, had a threadbare look. What prince could see this and fail to feel his heart swell with outrage? A cause was growing in Freelorn’s mind, not some self-centered desire to get back what should have been his, but something more worthy, something with other people’s needs at its heart. Did She find it there when She spoke to him in the Ferry Tavern? Or was it born of that conversation? That was between him and Her. One way or another, the shift was there. But they were all still a long way from restoring Lorn to his throne. They were so few, and he’d been away so long...
Indeed, it was months since they had heard any reliable news from Arlen. The usurper Cillmod’s authority had been well established for some time, but now they needed to discover whether support for him was still so solid as it had been. Chavi, inconspicuous, far off at the edge of things, had been Lorn’s choice for a first foray after the news they needed; out here, no one would be surprised by traveling entertainers asking for it.
At least, we hope no one will…
(How about this?) Sunspark said. (The Goddess is walking down the road and She sees a duck—)
***
They rode up to the town’s rough fieldstone-and-mortar walls and were readily admitted. Chavi was much as Segnbora remembered it. The town’s central square was stone-paved, surrounded by earth and fieldstone houses with soundly thatched roofs. A few, though, still had turf roofs, with here and there a scamp flower growing. Men drying their hands on dishtowels and young women with floury hands came to the windows, attracted by the sound of hooves on cobbles
Up at the front of the line of riders, Dritt unslung his timbrel and began banging it earnestly, calling their wares: “Songs and stories, tall tales! Shivers and chuckles, sleepless nights, horrors and heartthrobs, deaths and delights! Mimicry, musicry, tragedy, comedy—”
A small crowd began to gather. Dritt began juggling two knives and a lemon, breaking the rhythm occasionally by catching the lemon in his mouth, and making puckery faces when he let go of it. Harald was strumming changes on Segnbora’s lute, and angling it so the torchlight from the cressets by the inn door would catch the mother-of-pearl inlay.
Herewiss dismounted, pulled the saddle off Sunspark, and snapped his fingers. The stallion disappeared, replaced by a great white hound of the kind that runs with the Maiden’s Hunting. The fayhound danced once about Herewiss on its hind legs—bringing oooh s and aaaah s from the audience, for upright it stood two feet taller than he did—then, at his clap, it sat up most prettily and begged. At another clap it bowed to the audience, grinning with its huge jaws – and at a fourth clap, without warning, it turned and sprang at Herewiss’s throat.
The crowd gasped as man and hound struggled on the cobbled street, then gasped again as the fayhound turned to a tree that creaked and groaned on top of Herewiss as if a wild wind tore at it, then to a huge serpent that coiled around Herewiss and tried to squeeze the life out of him, and after that to a buck unicorn that Herewiss barely kept from goring him by wrestling its head down to the ground by the deadly horn. Finally there they lay in the street again, man and fayhound once more; but the fayhound lay on its back with its eyes starting and its tongue hanging out, and Herewiss was kneeling on its chest, gripping it by its throat.
A delighted cheer went up from the crowd, the kerchiefed ladies and dusty-britched men applauding such illusion as they had only heard of before. Man and hound held their tableau for a few seconds, then rose up as man and horse again, while Moris turned handsprings on the stones, and Freelorn went inside to dicker with the innkeeper for the night’s room and board.
About the time Herewiss finished dusting himself off, Lorn emerged, and gestured to the crowd for silence. He was wearing the very slight crease of frown that was all he allowed himself when disturbed in public. “Kind gentlemen, good ladies,” he said, “we’ll begin our evening’s entertainment an hour after sunset. Please join us, one and all.”
The crowd in the street, murmuring appreciations, began to disperse. Herewiss was glaring at Sunspark. “What the Dark was that about?!”
Sunspark gazed at him, absolutely nonchalant. (Just testing…) it said, and smiled at heart in slightly wicked satisfaction.
Herewiss sighed. “Everything all right?” he said to Freelorn, noticing Lorn’s expression.
“Yes,” Freelorn said, in the same tone of voice he would have used to say “no.” “The innkeeper worries me, though.”
“He’s stingy?”
“No. We hardly had to bargain, he gave right in. Something about his manner—”
“Maybe he was busy.”
Freelorn shrugged. “Could be—the place is lively inside. Come on, I want a bath before dinner.”
They stabled the horses, including Sunspark, who wanted to indulge its fondness for oats but promised to follow later.
The inn itself, the “Yale and Fetlock,” was a long, low, battered-looking place of fieldstone with a weedy turf roof and a rammed dirt floor. The main room was smoky and full of people in the linens and woolens of townsmen. Some sat eating at long rough tables starred with rushlights. Others stood eating at sideboards, sat drinking in the middle of the room, or simply milled around. All were talking at the top of their lungs.
(Sweet Immanence,) Hasai said, sitting up in alarm behind Segnbora’s eyes and looking out at the jostly drinkers’ dance, (what’s being decided here?)
(What?)
A memory surfaced, but not one of hers. In a stony deserted vale, Dragons, a great crowd of them, moved among one another in a precise and graceful pattern, and song wound around the dance—
Segnbora laughed under her breath, for this was a sort of memory that had come up repeatedly in recent days. It was a bout of nn’s’raihle, Convocation— apparently the form of disagreement and resolution that Dragons found the most congenial, partaking of sport and ceremony and family fight and celebration all at once. She supposed she could see a likeness to nn’s’raihle in the tense movement in the room. (No, mdaha, this is social. They’ll talk about whatever’s happening, but they won’t be making any decisions here.)
(How can they all abrogate their responsibility like that?) Hasai said, uneasy. (You all live here; how can you not act to run the world when you come together?)
(Um… Trust me, we do. But it doesn’t look like this, usually.) Segnbora turned to watch Freelorn. He had somehow already found a mug of ale, and was shouting in an old man’s ear, “Hey, grand’ser, what’s all the pother for?”
“Reavers!” the gaffer shouted back, and started telling Freelorn about incursions to the south, in Wasten and Nestekhai.
(Well?) Hasai said. (How does it look when you manage things here?)
Segnbora wasn’t sure where to begin. (Uh. Hasai, most humans are empowered only to make decisions regarding themselves—or those close to them. They don’t sit down, have an argument about something and then make a decision by which all humans will be bound. They’d never all agree—)
(Then how do you get this
world to work? How do you get anything accomplished for your species?) Hasai said, bewildered.
Segnbora shook her head. “Done” didn’t translate well; “do” and “be” seemed to be the same word in Dracon—stihé. (That’s going to take a while to explain….)
(Never mind, then. I see that there are more important matters to be concerned with. These incursions by the Reavers…are they close by, do you think?)
Segnbora made a face. (Too close. I wish we were farther north. But we daren’t be; we would arouse too much curiosity there. …Hasai, forgive me, I’ve got to get ready for our show—)
(Certainly.)
She found the innkeeper. He was a knifeblade of a man, all grin and nervous energy, and Segnbora could see how he might have made a quick business of the dickering. She got a mug of rough cider from him, and went to her bath.
Half an hour later, scrubbed and dressed in her worn but serviceable black gown with the tai-Enraesi crest on one shoulder, Segnbora went back to the common room and began talking to the patrons, assessing their mood, asking for requests. Just the sound of their voices gave her pleasure, for they spoke in the old reassuring South Darthene accent that had been her mother’s. It was a rich speech, slow, broad and full of archaisms. “Maistress,” the slow-smiling, staid-faced townsfolk called her. “Ay, gaffer, tha’st hit it,” she would drawl back, and they would laugh together.
She found Freelorn and Herewiss and the others at the best table by the central hearth, and sat down with them to a meal of aggressively garlicked lamb and buttered turnips, baked bannocks, and a soft, sharp sheep’s-milk cheese to spread on them. Freelorn, reviling the vintage of the cool white potato wine that had been brought up for them from the ice-cellar, nevertheless drank off three cups one after another, and by mistake almost drank the Goddess’s cup as well.
Lang gave Segnbora a covert nudge; they traded glances. Freelorn had been in a mood like this the night he’d gotten them all chased out of Madeil, the night Segnbora first ran across him. But Herewiss merely relieved Freelorn of the wine-jug and looked around the room. “Time for more of this later. They’re getting impatient out there. Who’s performing first?”
This started the predictable argument, punctuated with exclamations of, “I need more practice!”, “Oh, you are too in good voice, I heard you in the outhouse!”, “Coward!”, and “I’m a coward, huh, then you go first!”
Segnbora sighed and groped under the table for the lute, briefly causing more exclamations. She winked at Lang and pulled her chair over by the hearth. Behind her, as she tuned the lute’s slack ela-string, the fire leaped, roaring up the chimney. There was a momentary hush close to the hearth, then intrigued whispers. The fire had acquired eyes.
Segnbora sat stroking the lute for a few moments, to check the tune. “This is how it was,” she said then: the storyteller’s opening line from time immemorial. In response to it, the quiet spread far back in the room. “There was a queen who would not die…” It was a relative’s story, easy to do well because it was an old favorite: the tale of Efmaer d’Seldun tai-Earnési, the first woman to be both Queen of Darthen and a Rodmistress.
In the fourth year of Efmaer’s reign, lunglock fever had broken out in Darthen. Fire is of no avail against it, but like many another Rodmistress, Efmaer did what she could to treat those of the royal household who were ill, and soon she caught the fever herself. There was bitter mourning then, for Efmaer’s use of the Fire in conjunction with the priestly rites of royalty had made the land prosper as never before. When finally she fell into the unconsciousness that precedes death, her attendants stole weeping from her rooms, leaving her to die peacefully in the night.
But none of them knew their Queen’s determination. Efmaer had fought the fever hard for seven days and nights, convinced it wasn’t yet her time to die. When she suddenly found herself standing before the open Door into Starlight, and felt the forces at her back pushing her toward it, Efmaer rebelled. She caught at the black doorsills and hung over the starry abyss by ten straining fingers. Peace and the last Shore awaited her at the bottom of the darkness, but Efmaer would have none of them. She hung on.
When her tearful attendants slipped into her bedchamber in the morning to prepare her body for the pyre, they found her not dead, but sleeping. She looked drawn and fever-wasted, but the sickness was broken; and in her hand, clutched tight, was a long sharp splinter of darkness—a broken-off piece of the Door.
Later, when Efmaer was well again, with Fire and craft she wrought the splinter into a sword. Skádhwë, it was called in Darthene, “Dark-harm.” It would cut anything, stone or steel or soul, and many were Efmaer’s deeds with it across the breadth of Darthen and down the length of her reign. If anyone spoke in fear to Efmaer because she had cheated Death at its own Door, the Queen would laugh, unworried, certain the Shadow would never bother avenging so small a slight. Yet perhaps It did: for one day Efmaer’s loved, Sefeden, killed himself, and his soul passed into Méni Auärdhem, into Glasscastle, to which go suicides and those weary of life.
In her grief Efmaer grew frightened, for Sefeden knew her inner Name; she feared his captive soul could hold hers captive too, trapped in this world, when it came her time to pass onward and be reborn. In haste Efmaer rode to Barachael, and climbed Mount Adínë, above which Glasscastle appeared at times of sunset and crescent Moon and Evenstar.
There was no way for one still in the body to cross to the castle; the souls of the dead and the minds of the mad had no need of a physical road to make their way there. Efmaer might have attempted the crossing in a bird’s shape, or as a disembodied soul, but she knew the terrible magics of the place would warp her wreaking out of shape and kill her. Nor did she dare open a door to bring her there; such a wreaking could let the deadly twilight of that place free in the sunlit world.
But Efmaer had a plan. She waited for the time of three Lights, when the castle faded into being. When it was fully there, she drew Skádhwë and smote the stone of Adínë with it, opening a great rent or wound in the mountain. With her Fire, Efmaer wrought the greatest wreaking of her lifetime, singing the mountain’s blood out of its wound, drawing out the incomparable iron of the great Eisargir lodes, tempering it in Flame and passion and forging it with ruthless song into a blue-steel bridge that arched up to the Castle, fit road for a mortal’s feet.
When had she wrought the bridge, she climbed it. Efmaer came to Glasscastle’s crystal doors and passed them, seeking for Sefeden, to get her Name back. But she did not come out again. At nightfall Glasscastle vanished into its eternal twilight, until the next time of three Lights in the world...
“And from that day to this,” Segnbora said at last, unnerved as always to feel the tears coming, “no one has been so bold as to say they have seen Efmaer d’Seldun among the living or the dead. With her, Skadhwë passed out of life and into legend; and in the years since the Queen’s disappearance, cheating Death has gone out of style…”
The applause embarrassed her, as usual. She was glad to get out of what was now a very hot chair, and give place to Dritt and Moris and their juggling. Someone pushed a cup of cold wine into her hand. She took it gratefully and made her way to the back of the room, wiping her eyes as surreptitiously as she could.
“Smoke,” she said to Lang as she came up beside him.
“Mmm-hmm.”
Together they held up the wall awhile, leaning on one another’s shoulder and watching Moris and Dritt juggle objects the audience gave them: beerpots, platters, clay pipes, truncheons, rushlight holders. Nothing fell, nothing at all.
“I can’t believe it!” Lang whispered. “Did all that practicing actually pay off?”
“Not a chance,” Segnbora whispered back. “I smell Fire. Herewiss has to have thrown a wreaking over them. I doubt they’ll even be able to drop a hint until he shuts it down.”
Freelorn came toward them through the crowd, with another cup of wine in his hand.
“Lorn,” Segnbora said softly as
he joined them, “just you watch it.”
“Yes, mother.”
Segnbora settled back against the wall again and went back to watching the jugglers, particularly poor Moris, who had just been handed a full wine jug to add to the other objects being juggled. He was giving it a look such as the King gave the Maiden when he’d come to beg one of the hares She was herding. Glancing back at Lorn to see his reaction, Segnbora saw that he wasn’t paying attention. He was watching someone off to one side, out of the hearth light, eyes wide with what looked like admiration.
A blocky man moved, and Segnbora could see over his shoulder. Past him, there, a small figure slipped out of her cloak, accepted a cup from the passing barmaid and raised it to her lips, looking over the rim in Freelorn’s direction. She was a short woman with close-cropped hair of a very fair blonde, small bright eyes like a bird’s, a mouth that quirked up at one corner—
Segnbora froze for a breath, two breaths, watching the light from a wall-cresset catch in the butter-blonde hair, giving its owner a halo. (Tegánë,) she said silently, fighting hard to keep her delight off her face. The Precincts seemed a hundred years ago, sometimes, yet here was her old loved, unchanged, as if their days apart were only a matter of a hundred days. (You’re a long way from home: is Wyn keeping supper hot for you?)
(‘Berend? Are you here?!) The face across the room didn’t change a bit, but Segnbora heard the old familiar laughter, sounding all the more real for being silent. (Now I see! ‘Berend, you—!)
(Me what? What are you doing here?) She bowed her head over her cup, needing the darkness to hide the smile that wouldn’t stay in.
(I was told to come! I dreamed true last night. She told me, ‘I know your troubles, and your questions. Go quickly to Chavi and you’ll find answers.’ I used the Kings’ Door, and a mile away I smelled so much Fire that—oh, ‘Berend, I’m so glad for you!)
(Not me, Tegánë.) She flicked a mind-glance at Freelorn. (It’s this one’s loved.)