“I am not as rich as the king, but I can support a wife,” Justin answered, and that earned a laugh.
“What did you like about Ellynor?” another girl wanted to know.
Justin grinned. “You mean, before she saved my life? Because I liked that a great deal.”
That elicited a flurry of questions and exclamations. She saved your life! What happened? Were you ill? When did this occur?
“I had gone to visit Ellynor at the convent, but novices were not allowed to meet with men from the outside world,” Justin said soberly. He had realized days ago that this story would work in his favor, though he hadn’t expected to have such a public chance to recount it. But the Lirren men liked any recitation that had to do with battle and bloodshed. “Some of the convent guards followed me home and attacked me on the road. Ellynor was worried about me, and she came after me, and found me almost dead.”
“How many guards?” Predictably, Torrin was the one who wanted to know.
“Five.”
There was a moment’s silence at that.
“And Ellynor saved you?” her mother asked softly. “For the Great Mother has gifted her with a tremendous healing power.”
“She did indeed bring me back from the brink of death.” He glanced at Ellynor, who was looking pale. She didn’t like to be reminded of his close brush with mortality. “But I had fallen in love with her before that day. For her smile and her kindness and for the way she made me feel.” He put a hand to his heart, and there was a sound of sighing approval from the women.
“So you live in Ghosenhall?” someone said.
“Yes.”
“Tell us about your family.”
This was it. This was the tricky moment; this was the answer that would define him in their eyes. He had considered what to say, but he hadn’t rehearsed the words. He spoke slowly, as if remembering it all as he went along.
“I have two families. My mother was a farm girl from the Storian lands, orphaned after some plague. Living with neighbors who didn’t care for her much and didn’t have much notion of charity. When she was sixteen, she headed to Ghosenhall, thinking she could find work in the royal city. Well, there’s not much work suited for a young girl with no skills and no friends. What would you expect? She was pretty enough, and a man offered to pay her to take her to bed. She stayed with him a few months, till he got bored and left, and she found another man. And another.”
The silence in the room was absolute. He could not tell if Ellynor’s assembled relatives were horrified, repulsed, or saddened. “Eventually she found a house of other women who sold themselves by the day or the hour. A place of filth and stench and rats. She bore four children—a hazard of the job. I was the fourth, and the only boy. My sisters were all gone before they turned fourteen. I haven’t seen any of them since. I have no idea if they live and, if they live, what they do. My mother died the year that I was ten.”
He thought Ellynor’s mother was weeping. Ellynor herself seemed on the verge of tears. She knew the story, but not the details. He was keeping his voice calm because, in reality, he felt no strong emotion, no outrage, no shame, no anger. It had been his life; it had been all he knew. Not until he left it did he find himself marveling that he survived it.
“I left the brothel and lived on the streets,” he continued. “Even then I was strong, and I knew how to fight. I made friends, boys just like me, and we patrolled the alleys at night, looking for easy prey. We robbed, we stole, we quarreled. One night I assaulted a rich man and took his wallet and his sword—taught myself how to use it. I’d always been good with a dagger, but I liked the long blade better. There was a crazy old man who lived in the sewers and claimed to have been a fencing master in Arberharst. He gave me lessons that I still remember today.
“I’d been living on the streets three years—a long time for a boy like me to survive—when I picked the wrong man to attack. He was big, but I thought he looked slow, and I didn’t see any weapons on him. I tried to rob him, but he pulled a dagger and put up a real fight. He was so good! It wasn’t long before I knew he could kill me. And I thought he would. When I slipped and he had me helpless, I waited for his blade to come down. But he sheathed his dagger and pulled me to my feet and told me he wanted to train me for the king’s guard.”
That caused another murmur in the crowd, this one of interest and approval. Anything to change the bleak tone of the earlier confessions, he thought. He glanced down at Ellynor, who was watching him with a face filled with pain. He smiled. “That was Tayse,” he told her, loud enough for everyone else to hear. “He took me back to the palace. He made sure I received the best training available. And when I was good enough, he nominated me to be a King’s Rider.”
He swept the rest of the tables with a glance. “The King’s Riders are the best of the best—the fastest, strongest, and most loyal fighters in the king’s army. Baryn chooses each one himself and would trust any one of us with his life. A King’s Rider can walk into any room in the palace at any time, night or day, and be admitted into the presence of royalty. If a Rider makes a statement, the king knows it is true. A Rider has more than skill—he has courage and honor. He would die for his king.
“There are fifty Riders—mostly men, a few women—and they became my second family,” Justin went on. “They didn’t just teach me more about how to fight. They taught me how to live. They taught me about the sort of strength that does not come from the body. They watched over me, they corrected me when I was wrong, they praised me when I was right, and they made me understand what it meant to belong. I know that, if at any time I were to cry out for help, forty-nine brothers and sisters would come to my aid.”
Ellynor had been right, after all, he thought; he knew exactly when he should present his bride gift. He reached into the pocket of his shirt, where he kept Senneth’s gold chain, and he pulled it out so that the charm dangled loose for everyone to see. “Two weeks ago, Tayse married a woman named Senneth, who is kin with the Persal family,” he said. “In some way I cannot explain, she is also kin to me, though we are not related by blood and we have not formally adopted each other. But she is as close to me as family. Her own tale is as strange as mine, for she left home when she was very young. Her grandmother handed her this pendant as Senneth was walking out the door, a reminder that love still existed, even in a harsh and careless world. Senneth gave the necklace to me, and I give it to Ellynor as my bride gift.”
He took Ellynor’s hand and folded it over the loops of gold, then lifted her hand and pressed her knuckles to his lips. “My family welcomes you, Ellynor,” he whispered. “And they love you as well as I do. I hope that you will very soon be my bride.”
IT was a couple of hours before the commotion died down. Justin gauged how well his presentation had gone by the number of women at the tables who were sobbing. Wouldn’t Kirra laugh to think any speech of Justin’s could reduce young women to tears! As for himself, he felt a little more raw than he had expected to, but he certainly wasn’t on the verge of crying. Merely, he was not used to talking so long about such intensely personal feelings. He didn’t think he’d want to be returning to the Lirrens all that often if emotions were always going to run so high.
But the speech had signaled the end of dinner and the beginning of a dizzying round of congratulations. Ellynor’s relatives—every last one of them, or so it seemed—came pressing up to Justin to take his hand and wish him well. Ellynor had been enveloped in her own crowd of well-wishers, mostly girls, but he watched her dark head as it bobbed in the sea of sisters and cousins and aunts. Several times she turned around to glance at him and always smiled to find half his attention given over to her. Once she laughed and blew him a kiss. He thought the aftermath of the evening would never come to an end.
But slowly the visitors dispersed and sifted out. Hoping that Ellynor was watching him, Justin slipped out the side door and stood in the garden, which was stripped and bare in the dead of winter but still decorated with a fe
w wispy stalks. The moon was a full and perfect circle, though small and high; must be close to midnight. The still, frigid air was a welcome contrast to the heat and chatter inside the house.
In less than a minute, Ellynor found him, coming up from behind and putting her arms around his waist. He turned to take her in a more proper embrace, shielding her from the night air, curious eyes, and any other hazard, small or calamitous, that might trip along to offer her menace.
“That seemed to go well,” he said cautiously, in case he’d misread these Lirrenfolk, and it hadn’t.
“So very well,” she murmured into his chest. “And all this time I’ve been planning how to comfort you when you stumbled through your presentation or didn’t manage to find the right words.”
He laughed. “Never was much of one for making speeches.”
“Well, that’s the last one you’ll have to make for me.”
He kissed her. “So what next? When do we get to marry? When do I get to leave Torrin’s room and come to yours?”
She giggled, but even by moonlight, he could tell her face heated up. “Tomorrow, of course. The wedding breakfast is always the day after the groom presents the bride gift.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he exclaimed. “I’d have flung the necklace over your head as we were riding up to your parents’ house.”
“Because this was perfect,” she whispered, lifting her mouth once again to be kissed. “And tomorrow we will be married in the morning.”
A voice called to her from the kitchen—this was a family that knew better than to give courting couples too much time alone—and Ellynor sighed, kissed him again, and hurried back inside. Justin was too restless to reenter the big house, climb the stairs to the room he shared with Torrin, and lie awake on his mattress, counting the hours till the morrow.
His wedding day.
He strolled out of the garden, through the central open area, and around the barn where the cows were gathered. He felt remarkably good, alive with sensation, excitement buzzing through his veins like the first taste of excellent wine. If there had been another Rider nearby, Justin would have offered him a challenge, a little swordplay by moonlight. As it was, he considered taking off up the road at a run, just to release some of his coiled energy.
A footfall behind him—surely deliberate, because these Lirren men could move without making a sound—and suddenly Torrin was beside him.
“I met this Tayse and this Senneth you spoke of,” Torrin said.
Justin nodded. “That’s right. In Coravann. Senneth told me.”
“She is kin. If he is married to her, that makes him kin as well. They are excellent fighters. They will bring honor to the Lirrenfolk.”
Justin had to grin at that, but he answered solemnly. “I think you can be proud to call them family.”
“She mentioned that war could be coming to Gillengaria.”
Justin nodded. “Some of the noble Houses see an old king on the throne and think they could rule better than his daughter when he dies. We think there are armies being raised in secret and rebels making alliances against the crown.”
“The men of the Lirrens have no argument with any of your Houses,” Torrin said. “Heffel of Coravann says he will stay neutral if the rest of you fall into a war.”
“I wish him luck in that,” Justin said a little bitterly. “Sometimes it is harder to stay out of an argument than a man might think.”
“Will you be fighting?”
Justin nodded again. “All the Riders will take the king’s side. Or his daughter’s side, if war only comes once her father is dead.”
“When you marry my sister, you will be kin. You will have the right to call on your brothers and cousins to join you in combat. Tayse, too. You could both call on the sebahta-ris.”
Justin caught his breath. Senneth had not seemed to think it would be so easy. Senneth had also seemed to have grave reservations about embroiling the young men of the Lirrens in a war that could prove desperately bloody. “The King’s Riders would be grateful to have their Lirren brothers fighting beside them,” he said carefully. “But this isn’t your war, and I don’t want to be the one to ride back across the mountains to tell your women that you’re dead. Anyone who freely chose to fight would be welcome. But I don’t want to invoke the bonds of family. Not when so much family could be lost.”
“Speaking for myself, I like to fight,” Torrin said, and grinned.
Justin laughed silently. “Somehow, I had guessed that.”
Torrin’s eyes were gleaming with mischief, even by moonlight. “Senneth told me I would not be able to defeat you, if I decided to duel you for my sister’s honor.”
“Well, she’s never defeated me,” Justin said, drawling the words. “You might have better luck.”
“Of course, you were recently injured,” Torrin said, as if offering an excuse. “You wouldn’t want to duel so soon. Tonight, for instance. If you lost, you might say your wounds made you drop the sword, or wield it in a clumsy manner.”
Now Justin had to laugh outright. “I think I’m recovered enough to make a pretty good showing. Who do you think might want to challenge me?”
“Well,” Torrin said, grinning broadly, “I would.”
“Tell me where my weapon is,” Justin said, “and I’ll be happy to match swords with you.”
Torrin dropped his hands to his waist and began undoing his buckle. Justin realized that he was wearing two belts, two scabbards, two swords. “I brought it with me,” Torrin said. “In case you were interested in a duel.”
Wordlessly, Justin accepted his belt from Torrin’s hands and fastened it around his body, happy to feel the familiar weight at his hips, against his thigh. He drew the blade and held it up for an examination by the watery light of the moon. It didn’t seem to have sustained any damage while under Torrin’s care.
“Just so I’m clear,” Justin said, “this is a friendly fight? No one dies?”
Torrin laughed. He seemed bright with excitement, pleased at the notion of a quick clash by starlight, of measuring himself against someone he was unlikely to defeat. Justin was pretty sure he was better than the Lirren man, but he wasn’t going to be stupid; for so many reasons, it was important to win this particular battle. Still, he liked this young man—liked his eagerness and his arrogance and stubbornness. What a Rider he’d make, he thought. We’ll have to bring him to Ghosenhall.
“No one dies,” Torrin confirmed. “No one is wounded, either, except maybe for a scratch or two. Insignificant.”
Justin nodded. “Then you’re on. Raise your weapon.”
They swept their hands up at precisely the same moment, and then paused with their swords upright, eying each other past the slim, glittering blades. Justin took a deep breath of the cold air and calmed his mind, steadied his nerves. They were alone out here between the barns and the storage buildings, and yet he could not shake the thought that they had acquired an audience. The night pressed against his back as if someone had laid a cool hand upon his shoulder. The moon peered down through her single round eye. At least two of the goddesses were watching, curious to see how this contest turned out, pleased rather than not to find Lirrenfolk making alliances with Gillengaria men. At least two of the goddesses had tracked Justin farther than he had ever roamed, despite the fact that he had never given any of them a moment’s thought, the slightest pledge of honor. One had betrayed him and one had succored him and both of them were jealous for the attention of the women he loved, and so he would have to learn to understand them, to fit them somewhere within the contours of his life.
Where is the god of war? he wondered. Shouldn’t he be here, too, taking an interest in me? Or is he already watching—has he been watching my whole life, caring for me when I did not even realize he was nearby? Maybe all my luck was really some god’s intervention. Maybe, like the mystics, I have always drawn my strength from some invisible source.
“Are you ready?” Torrin asked.
> “I’m ready,” Justin said. He tightened his hand on his hilt, and he waited.