She walked around it.
The slave made a point of not watching.
The back was more ornate than the front. Its sides were intricately carved. Certainly the designs looked regular—though the reason she would have written ‘certainly’ in their description was because, when she was three steps closer, it became clear that they were not; both the ‘certainty’ of their similarity and the ‘clarity’ of their differences were lost in the decorative profusion. Well…
It had wheels. There was a place to climb into it.
Pryn climbed.
The bench was covered with material beneath which was something soft as fresh straw but without straw’s pokes and prickles. Bits of torn fabric? The finest moss? What, she wondered, was under that dark purple? The soft, sloughed scales of baby dragons?
While she wondered, the driver bent forward; the cart started south.
Relinquishing the mystery of the cushion stuffing, she looked over the far side of the cart’s carved wall—the carvings there were completely different from those on the side she’d first seen. Those on the side she had climbed up suggested animals, rocks, and clouds. She immediately slid back over that side to make sure; those on the far side (while she looked at animals, rocks, and clouds she was sure) had suggested plants, birds, and fish. She slid over the wondrously comfortable cushion to make sure: yes (while she looked at plants, birds, and fish), they were clouds, rocks, and animals…
Catching her breath, she threw back her head, because suddenly the cart was the whole world—or an image of it. Blinking, she saw the whole world around her—oh, only a part of it, with any certainty, any clarity. But the trees she passed, the rocks she passed, the clouds she passed under, the animals and birds they might contain very much suggested the whole, in its greater invisibility.
She went back to examining carvings, this time on the cart’s inner rail, so that she hardly noticed the slave swing right at the crossroads. She only glimpsed the lopsided dragon when she happened to glance back at some bird call.
The stone beast disappeared around a bend.
The road ahead was all wonders: rocky streams, shaggy trees, flowering copses—each, a moment later, followed by some artfully made thing, a wooden bridge, some group of winged stone leopards, a marble bench. Culture informed nature with a host of human ghosts, or nature surrounded culture with a field of breath-stopping beauty and unknown history. In concert, astonishment and agnosia abolished their own distinctions. (Was that magic?) The cart slowed.
A woman ran up. ‘You’re here!’
Pryn had never seen her before, but her smile was familiar, though Pryn was too a-quake from the ride to remember from where. The woman wore a shift of a brilliant red Pryn had never yet seen in fabric. The dress was finished at sleeves and hem and scooped neck with bits of something shiny that may have been gold or may have been red. The way they flashed and flickered, Pryn couldn’t tell. The woman’s toes pushed and poked from the glittering hem. Were her nails the wrong color? As she came, they glimmered and teased the eye on the polished terrace flags. Yes, for some reason her toenails were also red!
‘I’m so glad you could come. The earl’s account has left me mad to meet you!’ She reached up, taking Pryn’s hand and, by subtle motions to the left and right, helped Pryn down so that descent did not feel like climbing but floating. ‘I’m the earl’s wife—Lady Nyergrinkuga—but do call me Tritty. Everyone does. His Lordship is waiting for you inside. Did you have a nice ride up from Rorkar’s?’
‘Yes!’ Pryn said. ‘It was wonderful!’
The nameless slave—though she could, just then, have been the nameless god of all travel—drove the cart off among trees.
Tritty took Pryn’s arm. Her sleeve against Pryn’s forearm was shockingly soft.
Noting it, Pryn searched among wonders to compare it to. Tritty smiled, and Pryn told her of the jade-backed flies that had deviled one of the horse’s haunches, the angle of two great trees that had crowded by one bend of the road, the profusion of tiny yellow flowers that had lain out all along the bank at another—things Pryn would not have ordinarily chosen to speak of, but things that would have come back to her had she been writing, say, later; and because she could write, when pressed for talk, such things had become, more and more, what she talked of; for years that would make her, to some listeners, at any rate, an interesting conversationalist. She talked…
At one of Pryn’s silences, Tritty said: ‘You are enthusiastic! That’s charming.’
What had silenced the girl was two stone beasts with raised wings and grasping claws. Eagles? Dragons? They walked between them into a foyer a-flicker with burning bowls of oil set on high tripods.
Tritty spoke now: ‘The earl only told me you were coming this morning, so I didn’t have time to plan.’ They passed hanging cloths with colors as astonishing as, if more delicate than, Tritty’s red. The far wall had defeated the stone dresser. It was as rough as a cooling cave. Firelight flickered over banks of weapons: racks of spears, lapped shields, an overhead beam hung with thirty or forty swords. ‘You’re catching us, I’m afraid, at our most “at home.” A confession: when he invited you, his Lordship hadn’t realized all the children would be descending at once—which they have! Ardra, my boy—he’s not far from your age, I’m sure. He’s fourteen…?
‘I’m fifteen.’
‘Are you? You seem quite a mature young woman—though I was only a year older when I married my first husband. Fortunately, he liked to travel. Otherwise, I’d have seen as little of this wild and wondrous land as any village girl. My first husband was Ardra’s father. The rest of the children are the earl’s by his former wife—now they’re a little older than you. The earl said you were very well traveled.’ They passed through another arch. ‘Where are some of the places you’ve been recently?’
‘Before I came here I was—’ Pryn looked about the hall. Distantly, she heard free water rushing beyond the ornate rail that crossed the hall’s center. This space was even larger than the Spur’s ancient cellar—‘in Kolhari. And I was in Enoch too.’ But before such domestic grandeur, Enoch didn’t seem worth mentioning.
They walked out across the dim cavern; here and there in it rose a sculpted pillar. Tritty returned Pryn’s openmouthed and upward stare to ground level with a press on the arm. ‘We’ll be using one of the informal receiving chambers this evening. I know the Large Hall is more impressive, but really—anything less than a hundred guests and you feel simply lost.’ She turned Pryn toward a side door, over which a stone beast arched. ‘Last week the Usurper of Strethi was with us, along with a retinue of thirty-seven. We never even went near it—didn’t even use the Small Hall here!’ Tritty gestured at the cavern as they left it for a corridor. ‘Yes, I thought we’d use one of the receiving chambers this evening.’ She bent nearer. ‘Tell me of Kolhari. I’ve only been there a few times—for six weeks, once, when I was a year younger than you, at the High Court of Eagles—but I never got outside the palace! Though everyone I talked to was filled with tales of the city itself, the Old Market, Potters’ Lane, the Bridge of Lost Desire…’ She sighed. ‘To me, that was Kolhari—the Kolhari I never saw.’
‘I did see those!’ Pryn said. ‘Some of them.’
‘And that’s why I like my husband’s visitors! The Usurper of Strethi comes to pay his respects to me, you understand—while his Lordship drives out in a common cart on the highway and comes back with adventurers, warriors, even—sometimes—merchants. Though, really, traveling merchants tend to talk only about money. It makes for a dull evening. But we love interesting people, my husband and I; and when the choice is yours and you gain a bit of experience as his Lordship has, it’s not too difficult to avoid the bores.’
They turned through a smaller door.
A young man wearing a short leather skirt stood up from a hide hassock.
The same moment, someone shrieked from the corner stairs. A boy with barbaric, nappy hair leap down the last six of them. Laug
hing hard, a young woman chased him. Both stopped at the steps’ foot.
Standing by a dark fireplace filled with things that could have been for torture as easily as for cooking (though they looked too shiny and polished to have been used much for either), the white-haired earl opened his marvelous blue cloak back from his white robe. ‘Well, you’ve arrived, Pryn! You’ve met her Ladyship, I see. And these, I’m afraid, are my obstreperous children. This is my stepson, Ardra.’ He gestured toward the boy at the stairs’ bottom. The boy wore rough cloth shorts and a sleeveless shirt of the same material that did not come all the way down his thin, heaving belly. Seeing him standing there returned Pryn to a moment in childhood: She was bringing the cloth-covered food bowl to her mother’s kid brother, who had run away from the army to hide for weeks in the tool hut of a neighbor. Ten-year-old Pryn had pulled open the hut door. Her young uncle, waking, had leapt up in sudden sunlight, his armor—some rusted, some gleaming—in the straw about his feet: Ardra wore the traditional undergarments for a light-armed soldier. ‘Hello,’ Pryn said.
‘Ardra, this is our guest for the evening, Pryn.’
Breathing heavily, Ardra just blinked.
Had Pryn not been filled with the ride’s beauty and the house’s size, she might have found the silence rude. But all she could see now was wonder.
‘And this is my daughter, Lavik.’
Lavik was short, no taller than Pryn—and plumper. Her black hair was handsomely braided over one shoulder. Her brown shift looked as though she had picked it up in the brewery commissary where, a week before, Yrnik had issued Pryn the one she now wore. ‘Hello.’ She came down the steps and paused with her hand on her stepbrother’s shoulder. She looked about twenty. ‘Ardra, speak to father’s guest now.’
‘You work at the brewery,’ Ardra said. ‘Father won’t let me. He doesn’t think it’s right.’
The earl raised a bushy white eyebrow, then laughed. ‘I think it’ll be right—when you’re at least as old as this young woman here.’ He looked at Pryn. ‘You’re sixteen now, aren’t you?’
‘Fifteen,’ Pryn said.
‘Oh,’ said the earl. ‘Well. I see nothing wrong with my children working in some local field or orchard. I did it. Lavik did it. So did Jenta. But I simply require that you be of the age of reason.’
Tritty moved to her son. ‘I thought you didn’t want to work in the brewery, dear…?’
‘I don’t.’
‘What do you want to do?’ Pryn asked.
‘I want to be a general in the Imperial Army and go about putting down rebellions in outlying provinces.’
‘Only I’m afraid,’ said the young man who’d first stood before the hassock. ‘Ardra hasn’t quite resigned himself to the fact that he’s now a lord of just such an outlying province—one that’s been, in its time, as rebellious as anyone could wish.’ Everyone laughed, except Ardra, who sat down on the bottom step, elbows on his knees, chin on meshed fingers, watching with bright, rather dazed eyes.
‘Pryn, this is my son, Inige.’ The earl gestured toward the young man standing. ‘He just arrived from the Argini. We weren’t expecting him—’
‘We were expecting his brother, Jenta,’ the earl’s wife said, ‘actually. Only Jenta sent a message yesterday that he would be arriving today, sometime this evening. You see, we are in a state. Darling—’ this to Lavik—‘where’s the baby?’
‘Upstairs,’ Lavik said. ‘Asleep.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘She’s sleeping,’ Lavik said. ‘Hasn’t shit in four hours.’
Tritty took in a relieved breath. ‘Lavik came home three days ago, with Petal—they’d been off somewhere together in the very deep south. The baby picked up a case of dysentery—it’s just been constant diarrhea! When she came, she looked like a sun-shriveled apricot. I thought we were going to lose her. But she’s seemed to rally. And she’s been so good through it all!’
‘How old is she?’ Pryn asked.
‘Three months,’ Lavik said. ‘She’s a wonderful baby. But she’s been so sick—that’s why I brought her back. I know she would have died if I stayed down in that horrid swamp where I was.’
‘Did your husband come, too?’ Pryn asked.
‘Don’t have a husband,’ Lavik said with a great grin. ‘Don’t want one, either. I’ve been trying to get dad used to the idea that this one’s father is actually quite a well-respected warrior in a famous hunting clan. Dad would like him—if he’d consent to meet him. The way I figure it, he’s about the equivalent of a captain in the Imperial Army. That’s the rank Ardra will start at if he ever gets a commission. He’s the youngest son of a warrior who was once the leader of his whole tribe. This particular clan changes leaders every six years, by vote. It’s very different from here.’
‘And I’ve been trying to explain to Lavik—’ the earl’s white eyebrows lowered—‘that youngest sons count for very little, even if their fathers are, or have been, noble lords.’
Tritty looked at her stepdaughter. ‘You’re going to upset your father—’
‘No,’ Lavik said. ‘He isn’t going to be upset.’ She stepped around seated Ardra, smiling at Pryn. ‘Did you ever have a baby?’
Pryn shook her head. ‘No.’
‘It’s scary,’ Lavik said. ‘Though I’m awfully glad I did it. I mean, now that she’s going to live; though I cried all yesterday morning when I thought she wouldn’t…Really, except for the dysentery, the south’s wonderful! You’re a traveler—you must go there someday. It’s beyond Nevèrÿon, and there are times I think life doesn’t even begin until you get outside the very muzzy borders of this tiny and terrified land. Believe me, it’s better than being cooped up in court—oh, dear!’ Lavik put her hand over her mouth. ‘I was about to tell a story! But I can’t. Dad’s always liked it, because it insults the north. But mother—’ Lavik glanced at her stepmother—‘hates it, because it insults the court.’
‘Well, yes, I think it’s a funny story,’ the earl said. ‘But I never really liked it that much.’
‘I don’t hate it,’ Tritty said. ‘It’s something that happened, so there’s no reason not to tell it. Do tell it, dear, if you want. I just don’t think it’s…well, as representative as you do. I’m certainly not denying it happened. Go on. I don’t mind.’
‘Well…’ Lavik paused in quizzical concern. Then she asked: ‘Does the idiocy that goes on at the High Court of Eagles interest you at all? I mean, if it doesn’t—’
‘Oh, yes!’ Pryn declared. ‘Please tell me! You’ve been there too?’
‘All right.’ Plump, braided Lavik smiled (while Pryn suddenly wondered if Lavik assumed the ‘too’ referred to Pryn rather than to Tritty, as Pryn had intended). ‘You know it’s customary for the daughters and the sons of outlying nobility, when they reach age seventeen or eighteen—’
‘When I was a girl, it was fourteen or fifteen,’ Tritty said. ‘But they expected more of children back then.’
‘—to go to court and spend six weeks, or even three months, meeting people, getting to know other nobles of the realm, learning about power across the nation from people with first-hand experience—’
‘When I was a girl, a talented youth with real ability might stay at court as long as three years, or even five, working as an attaché to the ambassadorial wing or as a secretary to an older official.’ Tritty sighed. ‘I don’t know why they’ve discontinued that.’
Pryn glanced at Tritty.
Lavik did not. ‘The court, you know, is huge. It’s more like a small city-within-a-city than it is a single castle—’
‘And we didn’t compare court to things,’ Tritty said, ‘when I was a girl. That, I suppose, is what distresses me most. There were formal ways to speak about things in my day, and believe me, you could say anything you wanted within those formal protocols. But you didn’t say court was like anything. Court was court, origin and end, of all benevolence and all power; and the reign of the Emperor—I was at court bef
ore Her present majesty, the Child Empress, you see—was always fine and felicitous. Lord knows, people will say anything of this reign now!’
‘My dear’ the earl said, ‘If you don’t want Lavik to tell her story, we can always talk about something else—’
‘Oh, no! No!’ Tritty said. ‘I want her to tell it!’
‘Please don’t worry,’ Pryn said, wondering whether it was the stepdaughter’s tale or the husband’s rebuke that brought the distress to Tritty’s mahogany features. ‘I’ll laugh and smile at the right places—but I won’t judge any of what Lavik says until I go to court myself—which is not likely to happen for a long time!’ It didn’t seem to relieve Tritty. Watching her and wondering if they’d caught her oblique confession that, indeed, she hadn’t been to court, Pryn lost the beginning of Lavik’s next sentence.
‘…hundreds of people living there! You could take ten of this house here, pile them together, and you still wouldn’t fill a third of it. There must be twenty-five kitchens. They feed the various suites—so of course when you go, you must go under the patronage of someone already permanently connected, who has a kitchen and staff. Well, Father had arranged for me to go under the patronage of his cousin, the Lesser Lady Esulla—so there I was, all of seventeen, creaking and joggling up the north road to Kolhari, alongside a wagon full of clothes and furniture and…well, once upon a time you had to bring your own servants, but that never worked very well. Now they ask you to bring only one attendant and a driver, for general dressing and carrying. Lady Esulla was very sweet, but she was also very forgetful. And she had six young women and three young men under her patronage that season. Over the first few days, we were presented at various private lunches and suppers, where we reclined on cushions and drank cider—no beer at the High Court of Eagles!—and met all sorts of fascinating people, heard all sorts of fascinating talk. Indeed, I suppose if I’d been listening harder, I might have avoided what happened. But the fourth night, after we’d made just dozens of informal acquaintances, we were presented at a marvelous supper-ball. The Empress sent Lord Krodar himself to make a welcoming statement. We danced, we ate, we met dozens more lords and ladies, some who’d been there a while, and others, like ourselves, who’d just arrived. I’ve no idea what time I got to bed! But the next morning I woke up in my very small, very stony room—the furniture hadn’t been brought up yet, because there were no porters in the lesser lady’s retinue who were free to carry it in through the stades and stades of corridors and up all those narrow little stairs…’ Lavik looked about with wide eyes. ‘Anyway. When I woke up, there wasn’t a sound! Everything was silent! Nothing moved…Now if you’ve ever lived in a castle with a complement of over a hundred, you know how unusual that is! By four o’clock in the morning there’re always servants about in the halls to get things ready so that you may rise comfortably by five. And because I had been up so late, I knew it was at least six-thirty. Finally, I wrapped a day-robe about me and went out into the corridor—no one! I went to the rooms of the other young women recently come under patronage. Their beds were made, their clothes were hung up, and their rooms—empty! The lesser lady’s own rooms were locked. So was the kitchen! You might imagine, I was terrified! Over the course of the day, as I wandered up and down the hall, a thousand dreadful thoughts came to me: there’d been some political coup during the night and everyone had been taken out and executed, while I had been accidentally overlooked; or some sorcerer had put the whole castle under a spell, but thanks to one of Dad’s counterspells I’d been spared—’