The Fox

  But needs drew his attention; she, sensing his attention elsewhere, began to watch him.

  On the deck of his ship he wore authority naturally, as comfortably as he exhibited his strength and the resilience of youth. How beautiful he was! Emotions clear to see as a stream in spring, yet as complex as the knotwork tapestries at home.

  Signi let her gaze stray to the two young men on the forecastle, the redheaded one watching the last of his drill crew turning to new tasks, the golden-haired one at a halyard. Those two were startlingly alike, both hiding their natures in similar fashion, the one with trained habit, the other with trained grace.

  She was so intent on her observations she was surprised to discover Gillor at her shoulder.

  “Come,” Gillor said. “They’re hull down on the horizon. We need to lock you below.”

  Interest—joy—doused.

  But Signi had given her word. The path lay before her. She had chosen it. She must walk it, and accept what it would bring.

  She did feel better when Gillor brought her a lamp, water, and a biscuit she’d stuffed with cheese before she barred the cabin door.

  And it was Gillor who let her out just as dawn began to lift the darkness from sky and sea.

  Inda leaned on the rail despite a cold, wet wind that smelled of imminent snow, watching the last of the Venn ships slip below the green waves, billows of smoke drifting toward the sky.

  The long barges were filled with Venn, all heading north. Through the glass Inda could see mostly yellow heads and broad backs, the oars dipping and rising, as the small craft harried them northward.

  He turned, sparks of pain lancing through his temple, his bad wrist, one knee. New wounds or old, he didn’t care; he wanted only sleep.

  The door to his cabin was ajar. He slipped inside and leaned on the table, frowning down at one of the charts, when he became aware of Signi’s scent. It reminded him of roses right before they bloom.

  A quiet step beside him. She was carrying a candle, the flame a golden flicker over her face.

  “You did not kill them.”

  “No.”

  “Why?” She poured a little wax on the table and then set the candle into it. Inda watched her fingers: short, capable, blunt-nailed. There were red welts on her wrists, evidence of silent, futile struggle at some point during her long incarceration. He glanced at his own wrists and was startled to see his barbed wrist guards there. He fumbled them off, feeling uneasy, though he was too tired to figure out why.

  “They will seek you.” She used Sartoran verbs when Iascan failed her.

  “They already seek me,” he retorted. “They have for over a year. The ‘seek’ has probably became a hunt since I took you.”

  She looked up, her pupils enormous. “They might not know where I am.”

  “Oh, I suspect they know. Your Venn spies in Bren Harbor would have winnowed out the news by now, if not from Chim’s Longnose, certainly from some other rat. And though I lied and said I was going east, it’s inevitable these will report I’ve gone west. Though it may be a week or two before they reach the north shore—oh, yes! I’m thinking of our own communication times. The sea dags on the ships must have transferred at the beginning of our attack and reported before tucking up in bed for the night.” He threw down the golden case onto the table, where it clattered, sending the candle flame dancing, then streaming. “I see what I missed before. It’s the positioning that makes communication with other warships possible. I have to keep my ships in line of sight, or how do we identify our positions? We might as well use the flags. You Venn have some method of marking position without landmarks.”

  She made no answer, yet her lack of denial was, in itself, an answer.

  Weak blue light glowed in the stern windows. The candle flame touched with tiny golden sparks of light the contours of her arms, the fine hairs drifting around her face, having escaped her braid. The flame erased lines, making her curiously ageless, both young and old.

  “They will try to kill you,” she repeated, with that steady gaze.

  “And I will fight back,” Inda replied, sweeping a hand over the chart; his fleet had reached the eastern end of Idayago.

  He frowned down at the coastline as though words of import had been written there. It kept his hands busy, it kept his gaze away from the dip in her shirt that exposed the little hollow in her neck, and the vein beating there, counterpoint to her beating heart. She was alive, she was Venn. They were all alive, Iascan, Venn, Bren, Delf, pirate—alive, with busy hearts and minds and hands, desires, aspirations, fears, hatreds. It was so easy to make them dead; it was his only skill.

  He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to press back the throbbing in his temple, the swoop and soar of strong emotion that he could barely control, and sometimes could not control since his escape from Wafri.

  Her voice came again, closer. “Who is he?”

  Surprise brought down his hands, banished the flood of remorse. “Who?”

  “He who walks at your shoulder. The man so like Venn and Marlovan. How do you say in Yaskani? Spirit-being?”

  Shock struck him cold. “Ghost?”

  “He is there. Sometimes a shadow. Sometimes less than shadow. I see him now, so very clear. He looks at me.” Her eyes focused at a point above and beyond Inda’s shoulder.

  The hairs prickled on Inda’s neck, and he stepped back as he turned, hands up in a defensive block, but he saw nothing. He dropped his hands and uttered a semblance of a laugh.

  The woman did not laugh. She gazed and gazed, then said, “He is distinctest one ever I see.”

  “Blond? Hair long like mine? Tall?” Because Inda strongly suspected who it was.

  “Yes,” she said, her gaze focused steadily on the air beyond his shoulder.

  “His name is—was—is Dun, that’s all I know,” Inda said, shaking his head in wonder.

  Her brows lifted. “You see him, then?”

  “No. But I . . . think once I have. Ramis showed me, or tried to. And since then, once or twice I had a sense of someone there.” Disbelief had been banished when he stood with Ramis on the deck of the Knife and watched the spirit-shades flow in and out of time on Ghost Island.

  “Your friend? Brother? Kin?” She shifted her attention from his shoulder at last, met his gaze, then dropped hers. Her posture changed subtly and he struggled against the urge to stare at her body the way she had been staring over his shoulder.

  He swallowed. “None of those. Friend, maybe. Crew. He was on my first ship, when I was first sent to sea.”

  For a time they stood there on either side of the table, both looking down at the candle, which had burned halfway to the table in a puddle of beeswax, but by now the light coming in had strengthened, revealing the bruised look of exhaustion and old pain under his eyes, and the desperate attempt to comprehend—to grasp the truth— narrowing hers.

  He brought his hand down on the weak little flame, snuffing it, and shook his head. “Never mind.”

  She brushed her forefinger across the back of his hand. Her lips parted as if she would speak, but then she left.

  He watched her glide, so graceful, smooth, quiet, and cradled his hand where her touch had burned.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  THUNDER was rare in early spring, but when it occurred it roared across the sky like a charge of heavy cavalry. Blue-white lightning flared in the windows as Hadand followed the little Runner along one of the upper corridors in Iasca Leror’s royal castle, past the former Harskialdna’s rooms, which were now used for storage.

  Evred so rarely broke his impossibly busy schedule she couldn’t imagine what he wanted her for. The weather certainly suited a terrible emergency of some sort, except his note had said, If you are not busy, and next to it he’d drawn the Old Sartoran sun glyph, which had become a private signal for amusement.

  As they stopped near what had been Ndara-Harandviar’s rooms—now belonging to Barend, though he’d spent less than a month in them
all told—the Runner-in-training called over his shoulder, “He said he’d meet you here, Hadand-Gunvaer. I have to take all these down to the guard side, and I daren’t cut across the big court.” He waved a sheaf of sealed orders, then sent a glance at the window where a greenish flash, bright and fierce, made them step back.

  Five paces away was a familiar cubby with an arrow slit, bricked in overhead the century before, from which Hadand had watched Inda and Evred during their first year in the academy. How long ago that seemed!

  Evred’s step brought her attention around, and she smiled to see him smiling. He’d gotten thin over the past year, he was all bone and muscle, which made him look older than his twenty-two years. But he would not abate his terrible work schedule a jot, for either meals or needed sleep. “There’s time enough when I’m dead, or we have peace, whichever comes first,” he said once, and she did not ask again.

  “Thought you’d enjoy it,” he said. “If not, don’t feel constraint. ”

  Oh. He meant the new scrubs’ first callover. She and Evred had agreed before their coronation that it would save money to disband the Tvei training, but a general outcry at Convocation had made it clear that the innovation had become a tradition. Younger brothers wanted to come. Expected to come.

  And so, this year the scrubs were made up of Ains and Tveis—first brothers and second brothers, all ten or eleven years old—who stood about, looking absurdly small and skinny in their shapeless gray tunics, as rain beat down on them. The thunder was already passing; some of the boys hopped from puddle to puddle—they were wet anyway— and others gawked at the skyline. The rest stood in awkward clumps, until the new Master, Anred Lassad, strode in and shouted, “Line up!”

  Three ragged lines of nine formed up and Lassad faced them, taking his time to examine each rain-washed countenance. Up above, he, in turn, was examined by the royal pair. Lassad had become a stocky, snub-nosed man with terrible scars.

  “He knows every dirty trick boys can invent,” Evred said, smiling.

  Hadand bit her lip. “I can never forget what he did to Inda. Worse, to Cama’s eye.”

  “He can’t forget either,” Evred replied. “You do not know his record. Those fire scars are from his holding an outpost almost single-handedly against one of the pirate attacks on Parayid Harbor. He was barely horsetail age then.” He paused, saw Hadand’s unexpressed misgivings, and said, “Every act of bravery since, every time he volunteered for desperate missions, has been an attempt to get our scrub years out of his memory, and it never really works.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No. But I can see it—hear it in his words—so plainly. He knows the rules, he knows the traditions, he knows how boys will get around both,” Evred stated.

  The callover proceeded below, and when the boys were sent to arrange their bunk spaces and to enjoy the rest of the day in freedom, Evred observed, “When it came to it I was reluctant to end the Tvei training. I’m glad the Convocation insisted.”

  She remained silent, knowing it was his own inner voice he answered.

  “It is the academy that saved my own life, I am convinced, ” he went on, as they walked back to their own wing. They spoke in Sartoran, which had become habit. “My academy mates are my strongest allies in the kingdom.”

  “And every fifty years there’s some sort of war,” she observed.

  Did he hear? No, his gaze was distant as he paused, his hand on the latch of the door to the study, “I finally read my uncle’s papers.”

  She thought of the Harskialdna’s rigorously tidy office down in the guardroom, protected by Algara-Vayir Runners at sword point after that terrible day. Later the boxes and stacks of papers that Evred had insisted it was his obligation to go through had sat untouched for at least a year.

  “And?”

  He led the way to his father’s study, where he met with the council, with Barend when he was home and not overseeing the defense on the coast, and with the guard command. He crossed the great rug worked in Montrei-Vayir crimson and gold to his own study. It was warm, for he spent long watches there. The furnishings were those from the old schoolroom, the smell one of summer herbs worked into the beeswax candles on the table and the mantelpiece.

  A shaft of light lanced with brilliant suddenness through the window, striking the rug into a splash of glory.

  Evred stood before the window, hands clasped behind him. The stance, so like his father’s, seemed eerie to Hadand, and she felt uneasy, as if time’s river had plunged her over a waterfall, and they were suddenly old.

  But then he turned, and smiled, and he was young again, and so was she—young, and her palms moist and her senses alert to his voice, his movements, his every change of mood. “My uncle had become some kind of monster in my mind, but his papers revealed no monster. The academy was very well run, as was the Guard. I had to replace Brath because of proximity to my uncle—he reminded too many people of the past, but I gave him one of the new castles along the Idayagan coast to run. Twenty-five years of service did not make for a dishonorable retirement.”

  Hadand opened her hand. Of course Evred would think of that.

  “But in those papers I saw Uncle Anderle’s long plans. His idea had been to bind the Tveis to him, so that they would follow him when it was time to go to war. He was afraid of my father’s plans to strike from the sea in order to save our land; he thought ships clumsy, ill-suited for war.”

  “Did he or did he not betray our first attempts at a fleet?”

  “I cannot find evidence that he did, but I think his scorn might have done the business. About everything that mattered to him he was secretive. His communications were all numbered and dated, checked off with different colors when received and executed, all of it in code. The things he considered negligible he talked about more freely, and I suspect that there were those who listened for mention of ships and knew what to do with the information when they heard it.”

  “What about the attacks against my family?”

  “Nothing. Nothing whatever, not even secret codes.”

  “Could mean anything.”

  “Except that map was in his hand. I know it now, his handwriting. He made that map himself, just as that pirate turned chart maker said to Barend.”

  “Then he might’ve had other secrets not even committed to code.”

  “Yes. And we might never know. Either that or we will find out suddenly, at the worst time, like poor Barend did with that damned map.” Evred sighed, touched a stack of papers, then turned. He wore a fine woolen tunic in Montrei-Vayir crimson, tied with a gold sash, because he’d been interviewing counselors and trade people. On other days, like his uncle, he had gotten into the habit of wearing his old gray coat and cavalry boots, riding trousers stuffed in them even though he seldom had time to ride. He said, looking away, “Back to the war. And the academy.”

  She knew then what was on his mind, and her insides hollowed out and filled with snow. A weed with no water will die, she reminded herself. But then came the answering thought that she had tried so hard to bury: To him my love is a weed. And for the first time in her life she did not endeavor to smooth his difficulties for him.

  He looked out the window at a last spattering of hail, then at the fire. “One thing I learned is that continuity is important. Especially now that times are so uneasy, we must convey a semblance of continuity, with a line in place.” A quick glance at her for her usual swift comprehension.

  It was petty, it was painful, but she stood there in silence.

  “Heirs,” he said, a little desperately. “I know we’re young for that—we married five years before people usually marry—and we’re ten years before most even think about a family. But, well, with the kingdom in such trouble . . .”

  She had a freedom from fear she never would have had as Aldren’s queen. What’s more, she was valued for her mind, her training, her good sense—but the human heart cannot be schooled to logic. As her mother had warned, there had been c
losed doors on the king’s side of the royal residence, and laughter, and sometimes men’s voices singing to the beat of drums.

  And so she waited.

  And he went on appealing to her reason, because it would never occur to him to appeal to her heart. “Not someday, the way we could afford to in peace. But as soon as we can,” he said, the voice she knew so well husky with embarrassment. “Life. Being so uncertain.”

  Embarrassed he was, but also concerned, for all at once she’d stilled in a way he hadn’t seen for a very long time, and had hoped never to see again, her mouth compressed to a line of pain.

  Here it was at last, she was thinking, the question she had yearned for for so very long. But what a mockery. He was asking permission to come to her bed, not in desire but in intent. And he would be fair instead of tender, careful instead of abandoned, scrupulous instead of passionate.

  For a heartbeat she burned with rage, and struggled against the impulse to grip her knives and strike. Against whom? The uncomprehending Evred waiting for an answer?

  It wasn’t his fault he would never want her! It was no one’s fault. It just was.

  The thorned rose.

  So that’s what Mother meant. The thorns prick my heart, but I cannot forget the blossoms, or all I am left with are the thorns.

  There was only one answer for a queen whose duty was guardianship of a kingdom.

  “Very well, Evred,” she said. And with an attempt at rational briskness, “Shall I chew gerda, then, to make myself fertile? Or would you rather name a day and time and we clasp hands and see if the Birth Spell cooperates?”

  Evred had never, in all their years together, heard her speak so sharply. He looked into her face, uneasy. “What do you want, Hadand?” He held out his hands. “I had thought—but we can try whatever way you like. You have only to say, the decision is yours.”

  Already she was angry with herself; she dashed her fingers over her eyes. He would always be fair and considerate. She probably would not have had that with Aldren, even if the passion had come.