There is always spring, Irza was thinking as her mother went on ahead. She and Arlas followed, hand in hand. At least, they were home.
Mendaen and Sana and Vanya and Pouldi accompanied the remaining guards from a hundred years ago to their barracks, to tell them what had happened since they fell into enchantment.
Hinder and Sin vanished to report to Grandfather.
At last Atan and Lilah were left alone.
“You might as well send me back,” Lilah said. “I know what comes next, from watching Peitar. You’ve got to start queening, which means you’ll be busy. I can’t do anything about that and anyway, I want to spend New Year’s with Peitar.”
Atan hugged Lilah tightly, wordlessly, then said, “You were my first friend here, and one of the most loyal. Do not let this be our last time together.”
Lilah shook her head, snuffling a little, then wiping her nose defiantly on her black Norsundrian jacket.
“If I may, I’d like to come talk to Peitar,” Atan added. “Once things settle down.”
Lilah said fervently, “I know he’d like that.”
Atan did the spell.
When the transfer nastiness wore off, Lilah found herself in Miraleste. She ran through the quiet palace, which seemed new and modern after the one in Eidervaen. She found Peitar at his desk, as always.
When she appeared, his face eased. She said, “Sartor is free again!”
Peitar laughed and drew her to the kitchens to eat. She talked the entire way, finishing up very late that night.
“... and there was a vast big blue light, kind of. Sort of like lightning, but it didn’t hurt. But it made everyone dizzy. And when we all got over being dizzy, some of the Norsunder people vanished by magic, others ran together, ready to fight as they retreated. A few of them looked around like everyone else, then ran into the crowd.”
“I suspect that some of them were bound by enchantment,” Peitar said.
“Anyway, they were gone, so Atan said we would do a mourning circle at sunset tonight. Just like Sartorans have done for centuries! I felt a bit like some kind of spy, being the only one not a Sartoran, for Rel was gone. But Atan seemed to like me being there, and oh, I felt like a girl in one of the old stories! Then, when we got back, Merewen was there, and Atan smiled again. I was afraid she would never smile again, and I wondered if it was being a queen that made her so solemn. Even sort of sad.”
Peitar Selenna frowned a little as he gazed out the window. As usual, Lilah found it impossible to tell what her brother was thinking. Outside their cozy parlor room, snow fell with steady softness. Beyond that, Lake Tseos lay, a silvery frozen stretch. And beyond the lake, way beyond, impossible to see through the soft white fall, were the mountains that divided Sarendan from Sartor, which was now free.
“Go on,” Peitar murmured.
Lilah sighed. “Then they all went home, and we were alone. And I think she wanted to explore that palace, but I got the feeling she wanted to do it by herself. Because she didn’t ask me to come, like she did for the mourning circle. She asked me what I wanted, and I said if she didn’t need any more help, could she send me home. Sartor has about a million years of customs and rules and stuff, and I felt like I didn’t belong.”
Peitar nodded. “I see. So you felt you’d shifted from help to being another problem for her to solve.”
“Exactly,” Lilah said, relieved her brother understood, and that his pensive expression—so oddly a mirror to Atan’s after Rel left—had vanished. “She made me promise to come back, and wants to talk to you when she can.”
“Of course she’s welcome,” Peitar said, still smiling. “Good job, Lilah. In fact, a great job. I could not have done half so well. Here, your dinner’s gone cold. Let’s get some hot chocolate, shall we?”
SARTOR
Atan walked inside the palace, her palace, knowing what had to come next. She would have to arrange tomorrow’s coronation. It would be a slapdash affair, but that was all right. Nobody would expect the customary panoply because everything was still a mess, and her father’s body had probably been Disappeared a century ago.
Holding the ceremony three days after the death of a king was custom, and Tsauderei had taught her enough about history to understand that when everyone readily re-establishes custom, it means they want order.
She would have to find a crown in that storage room upstairs, if they hadn’t all been looted, and she’d go inspect the Star Chamber room, which she knew the servants had been cleaning. She had no idea how badly it might have been damaged, but it was the traditional space, so they would meet there and knit order back, one person at a time, as they spoke the old vows.
Then would come all the messy stuff as life resumed.
Tonight she must contact Tsauderei and talk to him, and she would bring Gehlei back, for she’d promised her once to give her any position she wanted. Gehlei had said, Not for me the coronets and lands, and all the elbow-wrassle of politics and precedence. Make me steward of your palace, and I will make it a home again.
All that could wait a little while yet. The first thing she had to do, while she was by herself, was to go into her parents’ wing.
She took a candle and climbed alone to the area that Gehlei had described so well. She looked up at the stairwell, the light making the long shadows jump over scorched tapestries and a few shattered statues. She tried to scold herself into practicality. The violence had taken place a century ago, not yesterday.
She trod upward until she reached the royal wing. She laid her hands on the latches to the double doors, drew in a deep breath, and then opened them.
Horrible imaginings of blood and mayhem, or burnings or lootings, had troubled her ever since she was small. What she saw in the dim light were the three main rooms, each opening onto the next.
She set the candle down and experimentally snapped her fingers. To her surprise, the glowglobes responded with a flood of light. Either the spells were good after a century, or they had frozen in time.
Unless someone had been here and renewed them.
The outer room was a kind of parlor, apparently undisturbed. The next was the bedroom. Again she snapped her fingers and said the word, and light glowed into being. There, just as Gehlei had described it, lay her mother’s nightgown, thrown across the bed.
Grief seized Atan by the heart as horribly as if the tragedy had happened yesterday. Tears flooded her eyes as she remembered Gehlei’s words... and your mother dressed, giving orders all the while, while your father clutched his head, exclaiming in bits of unrelated poetry while he searched all through his desk, leaving everything a welter of papers. It was the last time I saw them, for I took her at her word, and scooped you up, and ran out into the rainstorm, glad of its cover...
Atan scrubbed her wrist across her eyes. There was much to be done this night. But she had to finish this first.
She ran her hand over that nightgown, trying to imagine her mother’s warmth in it. What scent had she worn? It would be something nice, like fresh flowers. Atan lifted the fine fabric and pressed it to her cheek. It smelled like dust and cotton, and a fleeting sense of autumn leaves, carried in no doubt through the windows left open these many years.
Atan laid it gently down and looked around, aware of some kind of anomaly.
Everything was orderly, with no signs of looting. The wardrobe—she opened it—was still full of clothes.
She trod to the far door, the one to her father’s private study. It was a beautifully appointed room, dominated by an equally tidy desk.
... leaving everything a welter of papers...
There was no welter of papers here. The desk was orderly, the papers stacked and aligned. By whose hand? Atan knew it could not have been her father’s, for he had been so desperate that last night. Even at the best of times, he had apparently seldom been very orderly.
Someone had confined the pillaging to the west wing—someone with enough control over Norsundrians, who were not known for merciful tre
atment of their prey.
She looked at the desk, sickened at the thought of Detlev, for it could only be he, seated here at her father’s desk, reading everything at his leisure.
She approached, her flesh unwilling, her mind clamoring. She had to know.
She looked down at the papers in their stacks. The words were difficult to make out in the light from the bedroom. She snapped her fingers and said the magic word, and the glowglobes forced back the shadows.
She turned back to the desk.
The first stack of papers appeared to be domestic lists. Another was of logistical reports for an evacuation order that apparently was never carried out. More—lists of fallen, of demands, of losses.
On the top shelf, a single paper lay, with a note in a neat, slanted hand.
She bent closer, picked it up, and discovered her full name written out.
Yustnesveas Landis.
She dropped it as though her fingers had been stung. It had to be from a Norsundrian, for surely no one else could have been there.
Her first instinct was to carry the note straight to the fireplace and use magic to make a blaze, but she knew this was a stupid idea, that whatever the note said, it was better to know than to wonder and perhaps to be denied, through her own weakness, a clue to her enemy’s thought.
So she sat down at her father’s desk and, without touching the paper again, read the words written there.
The report has just reached me that my orders have not in fact been carried out, and your governess dispatched the one who would have been your assassin—
Coldness roughened the flesh along Atan’s outer arms. This letter had been written not long after the defeat—and—she glanced down to the bottom—it was unsigned, but she knew. She knew it had to be from Detlev himself.
Her heartbeat drummed in her ears. She read on.
Though my subordinates are roaming about, gloating over their victory, your continued existence causes me to consider this exercise incomplete.
Tension tightened the back of Atan’s neck.
All right, she thought, get some control. The villain is not omniscient—or I wouldn’t be here. He’s assuming that I would someday reappear, and that I—or someone—might manage to negate his spells, or else I would never see this nasty note of his. So here comes the threat, no doubt.
You will do well to remember that what I begin I always finish.
She looked up. Well, that was sufficiently sinister.
The instinct to glance fearfully at shadows for lurking Norsundrians kept her muscles tense, so she forced herself to get to her feet and to cross the room, and look out the broad window overlooking the river below, and on the other side, the broad boulevard of the Chandos Way below Parleas Terrace. In the darkness, orange glowed skyward—bonfires. They were part of the celebration, for through the open window came the sounds of singing.
Facts.
Detlev was not here. Nor had he appeared to wrest Sartor back. She’d won. The singing swelled as people added their voices. Directly below the window, someone laughed.
Right now the city was hers. The kingdom was hers. Battered, bewildered, and a century backward, Sartor was hers. Impoverished, grief-stricken, angry, facing a winter with few resources, Sartor was hers. Its problems were hers, and its defense was hers.
Was she happy? No, her feelings were too deep for mere happiness. What she felt as she stood at the window in her parents’ silent room, listening to the singing voices in the rise and fall of the melodic triplets of Sartoran music— once thought vanished from the world—and looking out at the ancient rooftops outlined by the ruddy glow of bonfires, was joy. It was a quiet joy, a determined joy, one aware of sadness.
As soon as she could, she would show Tsauderei the letter and discuss a strategy. She knew what he’d say—more important, she knew what to do. She would regard Detlev’s threat as a warning.
Imagining Tsauderei’s smile and his slow clap of approval, she laughed and slid the note into one of the pockets of the gown she’d sewn when she was a dreaming princess sitting in the Delfina cottage and wondering what her future would bring.
This was her life, and it was just beginning.
Copyright & Credits
Sartor
Sherwood Smith
Book View Café Edition August 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-192-4
Copyright © 2012 Sherwood Smith
Cover design and finished art: Dave Smeds
From source art by Maryna Halton and Julia Petrova, Dreamstime.com
v20120729
www.bookviewcafe.com
About the Author
Sherwood Smith was a teacher for twenty years, working with children from second grade to high school, teaching history, literature, drama, and dance.
She writes science fiction and fantasy for adults and young readers.
Her most popular book, Crown Duel, is currently in its 16th printing. The ebook edition available at Book View Café contains extra material not available in the print edition.
Her full bibliography (including awards and books in print) is at http://www.sherwoodsmith.net/Biblio/Biblio.html
Though she is known primarily as a fantasy writer, Sherwood and fellow BVC member Dave Trowbridge have collaborated on Exordium, a five-volume space opera.
Book View Café Ebooks by Sherwood Smith
Crown Duel
A Stranger to Command
Senrid
Fleeing Peace
Remalna’s Children
A Posse of Princesses
CJ’s Notebooks
Over the Sea
Mearsies Heili Bounces Back
Poor World
Hunt across Worlds
The Wren Series
Wren to the Rescue
Wren’s Quest
Wren’s War
Wren Journeymage
Exordium
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The Phoenix in Flight
Ruler of Naught
Short Fiction
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Being Real
Book View Café Anthologies
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Brewing Fine Fiction
Ways to Trash Your Writing Career
Dragon Lords and Warrior Women
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