Buck shook his head in silent amazement, then grabbed a last bread roll from the plate on the table. “Cama up yet?”
“I don’t think so,” Cherry-Stripe replied, rolling his eyes as he dropped down onto his seating mat before the long, low table his ancestors had had put in generations ago, when Marlovans had first taken over the Iascan castles.
Buck snickered. “Mran?”
Cherry-Stripe groaned. “Wailing like balladeers.”
Who could have predicted that little buck-toothed Mran, Cherry-Stripe’s practical, quiet, efficient twig of a wife, a daughter of the ancient and efficient Cassads, would conceive the grandest of passions for the handsome one-eyed Camarend Tya-Vayir? No, that was to be expected. All the females seemed to lust after Cama. What was strange was that he—the handsomest man in the kingdom and once the lover of the handsomest woman, Joret Dei—had fallen for Mran just as passionately.
Buck found the absurdity hugely entertaining. He laughed as he loped down the stairs to begin the day. But Cherry-Stripe lounged on his mat, one elbow on the table as he slurped down a last cup of steeped mountain-leaf. He scowled at the prospect of facing the icy air. Wasn’t winter supposed to end some day?
His sour mood received an unexpected diversion, the quick step of his First Runner. The man ran in, amazement widening his eyes. “Word from the outer perimeter Riders.”
“Attack?” Cherry-Stripe leaped to his feet.
“No. They encountered a party on the west road at sunset, about to camp. Two men, two women, all dressed in outlandish garb. Four horses from the south—river lending stock. One of the men says to tell you, and the words are these.” His expression smoothed into the studied neutrality of formal mode, approximating the tone of the verbal message as close as was humanly possible, “Tell Cherry-Stripe Inda is here.”
“Inda,” Cherry-Stripe repeated, at first thinking of his old academy mate Noddy’s newborn baby, and then he grabbed the Runner by the tunic laces and yelped, “Inda?”
The man’s head rocked. “Yes,” he wheezed, eyes bulging.
Cherry-Stripe let go, threw back his head, and yipped the ancient cry of Marlovans on the charge.
From far below came his brother’s voice, Yip! Yip! Yip! And then from the guest rooms above came a faint answer: Yip! Yip! Yip!
All over the castle servants, Runners, armsmen, bakers, brewers, weavers stopped what they were doing and exchanged wondering glances.
It was inevitable the first one they noticed was Tau.
Buck, Cama, and Cherry-Stripe drew rein on a grassy bluff above the curve of the road. As the newcomers rode sedately around the bend below, accompanied by a pair of Marlo-Vayir perimeter riders, the three surveyed them: two men, two women, all in outlandish garb. One, a scar-faced fellow, medium height and broad through the chest and shoulders, the other fellow, tall, fair-haired, and striking.
Cherry-Stripe muttered in amazement, “Is that Inda?”
“Nooo,” Cama drew the word out, expressive of disgust. His breath clouded in the cold air. “Inda wouldn’t ride like an old sack of bran.”
Buck smothered a crack of laughter, and they studied the party more closely, bypassing the short, solid woman with the chin-length, flyaway dark hair and a glittering ruby at one ear. The tall man wore one as well. The other woman was even more nondescript. No earring. The husky scar-faced fellow wore a long brown sailor braid down his back. Same outlandish attire—his long shirt-tunic was sashed with pirate purple, old and stained as it was. And he wore two rubies, one in each of the gold hoops in his ears. But at least—unlike the others—he knew how to sit a horse. He rode easily, his head bent as he listened to one of the others jabbering—and when he turned his thumb up, that gesture resonated down nine years of memory.
“Inda?” Cherry-Stripe said in disbelief, and then howled, “Inda!”
Who jerked his head up, hands snapping to the knives strapped to his forearms inside his loose sleeves. He peered up at the three silhouettes on the hill. The diffuse sunlight glared from behind them, but he could make out some details: two blonds and a black-haired young man with an eye patch.
Inda’s heart drummed when he saw that eye patch. “Cama?” Then one of those blond men had to be—“Cherry-Stripe!”
Signi flinched as the three on the hill uttered high, harsh cries like some predatory beast on the run. Their horses seemed to leap down the hill, raising a spectacular cloud of dust. The rising wind sent it swirling as the three circled Inda, laughing and shouting questions that no one could listen to because they all spoke at once.
Then Cherry-Stripe yelled in a field-command voice, “Weather’s on the way! Come on, let’s ride for home!”
Buck yipped again, taking the lead. Cama and Cherry-Stripe were after him like arrows from a bow. Inda started to follow, then kneed his horse to a prancing, snorting stop as he called over his shoulder, “Come on, Tau, Jeje. Signi?”
Tau waved. “Ride on, we’ll catch up.”
Inda sent an inquiring look to Signi, who understood at once that he was torn by concern for her and longing to be with the friends he had not seen since childhood. She lifted her hand toward them; he smiled, wheeled the horse, and was gone in a cloud of dust.
Jeje cocked an eye at Tau. He lifted his chin. Jeje and he parted, and with some determined knee-nudging and tugs on the reins, got their horses to jounce forward to either side of the Venn dag.
The storm Cherry-Stripe had seen on the horizon was sending sleet pounding against the windows as the party sat on mats in the Marlo-Vayirs’ dining room.
Since their arrival they’d been barking questions at one another. The servants coming and going stared at the exotic dress of the newcomers. None of the old academy mates noticed. Jeje stayed by Signi, who never made an unnecessary movement at any time; she seemed smaller, almost invisible again.
“I can’t hear anyone. Let’s ask questions in round,” Buck said. “Me first. Inda! D’you really command a pirate fleet?”
Cherry-Stripe leaned over the table, ignoring his brother. “Barend said it really was you, scragging those soul-sucking pirates two winters back. How’d you come to fighting pirates?”
“Didn’t Barend tell you?” Inda replied, turning from one to the other. “What’s happened to Noddy? Flash?” And to Buck, “We were building a fleet in the east, when—”
“Flash is a great man now—Flash-Laef, no, what’s his real name?”
“Tlennen.” Cama snickered. “Now Tlennen-Laef. Imagine calling Flash Tlennen.”
“His mother must.” Cherry-Stripe whacked Cama. “Quiet. Inda, Flash is now Laef of Olara, his father being Jarl. Brother died leading an attack against the damned red sails on the Idayagan coast—”
“—and Noddy married a year back, because his cousin never did get an heir, and Noddy’s dad being Randael before he died at—”
“—ho, Evred told us we all needed to marry early. On account of the war—”
Inda’s head jerked back and forth as he tried to keep up his end of the question-answer cross-shoot. “—and took his raffee, then we netted us a couple of trysails—”
“What’s a raffee?”
“—and Noddy’s wife had a baby over winter. Did you know he named him after you?”
“Barend Montrei-Vayir stopped here before he went north, and he said you were goin’ after the Venn up on the north coast—”
“What’s a raffee?”
The voices got louder and louder until Buck smacked his hand flat on the table. “Quiet! All of you!”
The guests fell silent. Cherry-Stripe made a rude noise.
“I can’t hear, and worse, no one can hear me.” Buck scowled down the table.
Cama was laughing silently; Cherry-Stripe flipped up the back of his hand at his brother, at which Buck’s wife Fnor made a scandalized hiss, tipping her head meaningfully toward the guests. Mran quietly made certain everyone got some hot cider to drink.
Buck hooked his thumbs toward his ches
t. “First me, since I’m the Jarl here.” And over his brother’s even louder rude noise, “What is a raffee?”
“It’s a capital ship, named after its foresail, which—”
Buck smacked his palm on the table again. “What’s a foresail?”
“On the foremast you have—”
“What’s a foremast?”
Cama was laughing so hard his face was crimson, which made Buck and his wife begin to laugh. Even Mran chuckled, a sound not unlike boiling water.
Cherry-Stripe now smacked the table, making the dishes clatter. “That’s enough with the boats. Nobody wants to hear about boats. Not until we see one, which we never will. Inda. Your turn to ask a question.”
Inda said, “How did Sponge come to be king?”
Chapter Five
THE humor vanished as quick as the sun that morning, as all three of Inda’s old academy mates reacted typically: Buck busied himself with unnecessary gestures to the servants now bringing in the meal, and waited for his brother to speak, Cherry-Stripe having been Inda’s scrub mate. Cherry-Stripe grimaced at Cama, waiting for the others to broach the subject, knowing it was craven, but sometimes he just had to rabbit out of a nasty duty. He wasn’t any good with words anyway, he told himself.
Cama, who was on the wrong side to see Cherry-Stripe’s not-so-subtle glances and surreptitious jabs of the chin in Inda’s direction, glowered down at the table through his one good eye while the food was served, thinking about how to word the bleak story.
A servant offered Inda the rice-and-cabbage balls that were so familiar from his childhood. That sight, and the long-missed aromas of the food and the fresh-baked rye biscuits made his eyes sting. He had to get used to that, how joy and pain together would fountain up inside him until it splashed out in tears. He dashed his sleeve impatiently across his eyes.
Cherry-Stripe gawked at the tear-stains gleaming on Inda’s scarred cheek. “Something amiss with the spoon?” he asked in a tentative voice.
“It’s good to eat with a spoon again.” Inda held up the plain, carved-wood implement with its wide, shallow bowl. “A Marlovan spoon. No more forks.”
Buck and Cherry-Stripe turned to the other for clues, just to find mirrored perplexity.
Cama said, “Forks are useless. You have to stab things. Imagine stabbing rice. Especially with one eye. I remember that from when I was a boy, and got taken to the healer down south. They eat Sartoran-style there. I thought I’d starve!”
Fnor had also noticed the spring of emotion in their scar-faced guest as he turned the spoon over and over in his hands. She, like Cherry-Stripe, was nonplussed at Inda’s reaction, but she could try to be a good host. “I remember those forks, when we girls had to do duty up in the queen’s room. Just think, the girls now get to eat with Hadand, and not sit there with those funny dishes, listening to the tootle and footle music.”
Mran said, “Woodwinds and strings. Like in Sartor.”
Fnor waved a hand in a circle. “Wheedle-deedle is what it sounded like. Nothing like a good strong beat, or a melody you can sing a ballad to. Well, no more!”
Buck moved impatiently, and sent a scornful glance at his brother and Cama for their cowardice, but one was busy studying his spoon, the other the walls. “Back of my hand to music! Inda, you should by rights talk to Evred-Harvaldar. Better, your sister—”
“Hadand-Gunvaer defended the throne herself,” Fnor put in, and Mran signified agreement and approval with a flick of her thumb upward. They had been in the queen’s training with Inda’s sister, had liked her then, and respected her now as a proven fighting queen, young as she was.
Buck said, “Evred or Hadand, they can tell you the details. The gist is this: the king was killed. It was a conspiracy started by Hawkeye’s dad. Only Hawkeye wasn’t in on it. But the three of us were there at the end, see, on account of Mad Gallop Yvana-Vayir dragging our father into it blind.”
Now that Buck had broached the subject, Cherry-Stripe leaned forward. “Noddy was there, too.”
“King’s room full of blood, all his Runners killed—” Cama put in grimly.
“But he died in the Sierlaef’s room. Opened his arms to the blade,” Buck put in.
“Yvana-Vayir killed him. King wasn’t even armed!”
“Yvana-Vayir went down to try to take the throne, and your sister headed him off. And when he tried to ride her down and grab the throne—” Cherry-Stripe mimed a side-cut and thrust from a sword “—she took him down. Only wounded him, because his son was there. Later she said she should have finished him.”
“—execution in the parade court, because he wouldn’t take a knife and do it himself.” Cama’s husky voice was even rougher with disgust. “Of course they had to put all his captains against the wall. Even the ones who claimed not to know anything about the plans.”
Inda turned his palm up, remembering talk from childhood, exciting at the time: a commander who led his men into treasonous action took all his captains down with him. But they weren’t flogged to death, being under orders. The thought of it actually happening made his gut tighten.
“The rest of the royal family was killed by some of the Jarl’s men,” Cherry-Stripe said. They had fallen back into Marlovan, the language of their ancestors. “Four more sent to kill Evred, but he escaped.”
“What?” Inda exclaimed. “Evred—you mean Sponge, right? Wait, wait. The rest of the family, including the queen, and Barend’s mother? Why? Surely they didn’t blame her for the Harskialdna’s plots?”
Fnor consciously switched back to Iascan, though she would have rather the guests had gone away. It didn’t seem decent, to talk of these things in front of strangers. “Not the queen. She being an outsider, no one noticed her. As for Barend’s mother, Hadand thinks that the Harskialdna knifed her, and not the Yvana-Vayir men.”
The king’s brother killed his own wife? “I don’t know which is worse.” Inda rubbed the scar on his jaw. “And Sponge? I mean, you said Yvana-Vayir sent—”
“—four of his riding captains north to assassinate him. Evred was in command in the north, see, while his brother was riding around in the south. But Evred dressed as a Runner so they couldn’t find him, and Captain Sindan routed the assassins until backup could get there. Died in the process,” Cherry-Stripe said.
Inda whooshed out his breath. “This sounds worse than us fighting pirates, if you ask me.”
Buck turned his thumb up in agreement. He was about to go on when he remembered the rest of that terrible day, and sidled a glance at his brother.
Cherry-Stripe made surreptitious motions that Buck couldn’t make out, but when Inda glanced his way he yanked his hands down, thumping the table. Fnor repressed a sigh as she righted a spilled pepper dish. Cama’s head turned sharply as he tried to keep everyone in the view of his one eye.
“So Evred and Hadand had to marry. Did that on Midsummer Night, and Evred officially took everyone’s oaths as king.” Buck hastily shifted to a description of the coronation, joined in relief by the other two. They spoke in Iascan, but they may as well have stayed with Marlovan. Their words were so quick, their accent so strange, and their Iascan so full of Marlovan slang, that Tau, Jeje, and especially Signi found it difficult to follow.
The Marlovans had all been trained by the same masters in giving a report; Inda had given and received enough since then to know when he was being bustled past details the speakers did not want to address. That was all right. Like Buck said, he could ask his sister or Sponge—now the king. Even after a few weeks, he still couldn’t get used to that idea.
Inda listened, assimilating most of what they said, but his attention was on his old friends and how they had changed. Except for Buck being seven years senior, they all were pretty much of an age. But in Inda’s memory they had drifted through the years as scrubs of eleven and twelve, dressed in academy smocks as they played war games through the eternal sunshine.
Cama’s sudden, white-flashing grin, Cherry-Stripe’s waving ha
nds, his laugh—the same laugh as in boyhood, only deeper—sparked recognition yet caused those cherished memory-images, sharp for so long, to blur and evanesce.
The account of the coronation and Evred’s first Convocation fumbled to a close in a morass of mutual interruptions and half-finished gossip, until Buck cast a quick look around as if spies had crept into his own citadel. “Is it true you were really sailing with the Montredavan-An heir?”
Inda’s first impulse was to laugh, but Buck’s uneasiness reminded him of the historical context. Every Marlovan grew up knowing that the Montredavan-Ans had been exiled by Evred’s own ancestors to their land for ten generations when the throne had changed hands. If they crossed their border except to go to and from the sea they would be killed as treaty-breakers. This was why Fox had gone to sea in the first place—not stepping over the border included not being permitted to train at the academy with the other Marlovan heirs.
“Yes, I did,” Inda said. “He saved my life.”
As soon as the words were out Inda regretted the impulse—which he couldn’t really explain.
Sure enough, they all looked surprised, and Cherry-Stripe said, “What happened?”
Inda loathed any reminder of the days of torture at the hands of the Ymaran Count Wafri. Either he explained it all—which he had no intention of doing—or he skipped over the complicated story about how the Ymaran count had pretended to be a Venn ally but wasn’t. His old friends wouldn’t care anyway. Inda suspected that to them, Venn and Ymar and Everon were all alike. So he said, “Stupid plan went wrong. Fox Montredavan-An put it right. Here’s the fun part. On our way out, we set fire to the enemy’s castle.”
Sure enough, that worked to divert them. Cherry-Stripe crowed, Buck laughed, Cama demanded the story.
“It was the biggest sting I’ve ever done,” Inda said, and gave them a fast description, mostly of the chaotic aftermath—chickens squawking, people running around yelling and throwing buckets of water at one another, the furious hand-motions of some guards who each thought the others should try to storm the wall as he and Fox sat there alone, holding off the entire garrison with their bows and arrows.