Blood flowing and lives ending, either in Twelve Towers or overseas, that’s what a “win” meant. “So who leads us, if Durasnir will not? I would crawl on my knees through Thrall Gate and wear the iron torc around my neck until the Tree withers at the root, until the Great Serpent returns and swallows the world, if Abyarn Erkric is tampering with the prince’s head, and we do nothing to fight—”
She stopped. More war, either at home or at sea, is that the answer? Who is to blame here, women for proclaiming themselves honorable to expect their men to supervise the killing of other women’s sons, or the men themselves for doing it? So crazy a thought seemed treason, all in itself, and so she reshaped the question, “Why do we make war to keep peace?”
“I don’t know.” The furrows in his face deepened as he gripped his gnarled hands to the tiller, then he nodded up at the faint, but revealing twinkle of light up on the ramparts. “They’re watching us from Saeborc.”
She yanked the sail taut, and they sped toward shore.
Chapter Seven
SIGNI did not think she would need Evred-Harvaldar’s permit-of-passage because she’d been regarded as next to invisible by his army during those long spring and summer months. And she prided herself on her ability to remain unobtrusive.
But that was before she set out alone into a kingdom too long under attack. At her first destination, a crossroads town called Hesea Spring, her offer of magic renewal was met with suspicious questions. Who was she? What kind of magic? Why hadn’t they heard? Where was her escort—didn’t the King’s Riders keep watch on foreign mages? It wasn’t until she brought out Evred’s letter that brows cleared, voices eased, and much later there were even smiles and small stories about making do as people offered to share a meal and a place to rest.
So she was not surprised when, a day or so after she crossed the bridge at the border of Marlo-Vayir, a group of Riders came galloping up and reined in when they saw her. “Are you Mage Signi?”
“I am.”
“Fnor-Jarlan requests an interview,” the leader said.
She studied the faces of the men before her. Serious expressions. No anger, no threat. But intent.
“I will come.”
“We have an extra mount,” the leader said.
From this encounter she understood that word had traveled ahead; she had learned during the summer that the borders of the Jarlates were watched.
Twice before she had ridden through these gates. Both times the castle’s people had exhibited high spirits and good cheer, though the shrill pitch of war fervor had buffeted her psyche on the last.
As they dismounted, the Riders did not talk with the freedom and laughter she remembered of the Marlo-Vayir liegemen earlier in summer, and the blue-robed woman who came into the court to meet Signi was polite but distant.
The once noisy castle was silent now, except for her guide’s quiet footfalls. Signi felt closed in, as if the bare, honey-colored stones had absorbed sorrows that had little to do with the arrival of the winter chill. She no longer believed, as outsiders did, that Marlovans liked those prison-bare walls, but rather they just did not notice them.
As the silent Runner conducted her along the passage, she thought she saw faint traces of color up high here and there, and puckers in the stone, as of decorations removed by those driven from their castles several generations before. The Marolo Venn forgot all the arts of stone carving in the centuries after they left us, she thought. And they forgot mosaic, which I had thought so much a part of our people.
As soon as the door opened on Fnor’s room in the main tower, the Jarlan threw down her quill and bustled around her table to greet Signi, hands out. Signi sustained another shock: Fnor seemed to have aged in the past half-year. Her face was thinner, taut, lines drawn by far too many days of distress.
“Thank you for coming.” Fnor lowered herself to a mat, as Signi sat neatly across from her. “Thank you.”
“What can I do?”
“It’s Buck. Well, and Mran. Buck said you saved his leg from being cut all the way up to his hip. And you helped the army healer sew up him there.” She jerked a thumb down toward her privates. “They all said you were a great healer.”
“Buck is not healing?”
Fnor pressed her fingers over her lips for a moment. “No. Yes. No. I’m sorry. Cherry-Stripe’s Runner was at Hesea Spring just after you did your magic on the baths. He was going to the royal city to ask Evred ... Well. Let me start at the beginning. No. Hold hard. You’re all muddy, and you have to be wet. Why don’t you change into something warm? I’ll bring up the meal I ordered soon’s the outrider told us you were on the way.”
Signi shook her head. “All that can wait. I will survive being muddy and wet a little longer.”
Fnor drew her knees up like a girl, and wrapped her arms tightly around her legs. “The trip home was very bad for Buck. He didn’t want the men to see him weak, I guess, so he never said anything, even when the roads jarred that stitching open.”
Signi exclaimed, “That has gone unrepaired until now?”
Fnor waved her hand. “No, no, the castle healer sewed him up again, and tended all the wounds until they healed over. But that just added to the pain, d’you see? He’s got a leg cut off at the knee, his right arm cut off at the elbow. And that.” She whooshed her breath out. “He arrived home about the same time Mran started walking around looking like a ghost. Oh, she did her work. She always does. But you remember Mran. She’s a Cassad, they’re all strange. I grew up with her, but there’s no hiding that Cassad nature.” Fnor shrugged. “She was always like a summer bird, flitting around. Got that high voice, like a pipe. The old Jarl used to called her Bird-peep. Everyone loves Mran. But at summer’s end she just . . . I don’t even have the words. She went quiet and small, like a stunned bird. I thought it was the war, you see. And what happened to Buck. Then I thought she was worried about Cama, so I made double sure. Sent a Runner north. When she came back with word Cama was fine, Mran shut herself up for a day. Then she came out, apologized and went right back to work.”
Puzzled, Signi said, “And so?”
Fnor sighed. “And so just a couple days ago Cama and his party galloped along our eastern border on their way to the royal city for Convocation. They have to get there early, on account of—” The banner Liet-Harlan struck down rather than surrender to you Venn.
She stuttered to a stop and blushed a fiery red. As Signi looked at her in silent wonder, Fnor continued in a rather hasty voice. “The important thing is, when they stopped, some of the Riders were talking, as they do, as half are related to someone who’s related to someone else. Said that Cama and Ndand Arveas have fallen pretty hard for each other. Word spread.”
Signi tried to understand the customs implied here. Mran was married to Cherry-Stripe, but marriage here compassed work and family more than it did personal relationships. “I remember that Mran and Cama were lovers,” Signi said. “Did they part badly?”
Fnor jerked her hand flat out, as though pushing something away. “No, Cama would never do anything hateful. If you’ve been mates with someone and find someone new, you talk face-to-face with the old. First, if you can.” She shrugged. “But Cama lives months away now, and he has to get to Convocation before New Year’s Firstday.”
“I think I understand.”
Fnor looked askance, as if she didn’t believe it; she was wondering why she’d even brought it up. It was just that Signi, though a Venn, was so easy to talk to. And Fnor hadn’t had anyone to talk to about these matters.
“Well. Mran’s a Cassad, like I said. They know things, somehow. She admires Ndand, who’s an excellent woman. We always liked her. That helps some, and it will help more if he stops here on his way back north, after Convocation, and talks it out with her.”
Fnor jumped to her feet and strode to the window. “I don’t know what to do.” She gazed down into the stable yard. The bleak winter sun shadowed her tense features and leached her blond hair to silver. “Buck’s
been so unhappy. He’s a terrible patient.” Fnor smiled faintly. “It’s almost a relief to see him angry and impatient. Better than those early days when he just lay there, waiting to die. Hoping.”
Her chest heaved. Just once. Then her head dropped back, the muscles and tendons of her neck emphasized by the harsh winter sun as she fought to regain control.
Signi remained silent, sensing that comforting words would be inadequate, even irritating. Fnor did not want comfort, she wanted a solution. But there wasn’t one.
“But he didn’t die.” Fnor’s mouth was crooked as she tried to smile. “We were too vigilant for that. So now he frets about Convocation. He thinks he cannot do anything here, so he should be in the royal city. To ride shield for Evred, in case Horsebutt tries something stupid.”
Signi nodded, remembering the Jarl of Tya-Vayir, and the way he watched everyone when they were unaware. His expression had reminded her of Dag Erkric’s, only this Jarl they called Horsebutt was far less competent. Everything he said seemed designed to put people on their guard, if not to offend. There was nothing subtle in his manner—unlike Dag Erkric’s.
Fnor drew in a breath. “If he gets on a horse, I don’t know if he’ll make it back. Don’t think he wants to.”
Signi leaned forward. “What are you asking of me?”
Fnor returned to the mat and sank down. “He can’t raise the staff. No matter how tired he was—even if he’d been at the distilled rye—he used to wake of mornings bannered for the charge. No more. When I try—” Fnor’s palm turned down flat.
Traveling with an army had given Signi a thorough education in Marlovan slang. Her neck tightened with chill. The mechanics of sex were simple. Far less simple were the emotions behind sex. “I don’t know what I can do. You must know I am not a trained healer. I learned a little over many years when I helped the proper healer aboard my ships, but I am a navigator.”
“They said you did much for the men at Ala Larkadhe.”
“I did some reading on healing in the Morvende archive at Ala Larkadhe, and what little I learned I put to use. But the archive closed before I made much progress.”
“Please. Just talk to him?” Fnor kept her voice even, but her arms were locked against her taut body, expressing such unhappiness that Signi shivered in empathy.
“I will, if you believe my talking might be of any comfort.”
Fnor brought her hands together, and Signi discovered that she did not mean later, after she’d eaten, bathed, and changed, but now. This moment.
She understood the urgency as a measure of the melancholy she saw in the faces around her as she walked with Fnor to the room they’d set up for Buck. It was a large, airy room, chosen so he could look out the windows and oversee the stable and the guard training ground adjacent.
Even after the warnings, Signi was unprepared for the gaunt, fretful figure on the pillows in the Jarl’s bedroom.
All the shutters on the windows were wide. The light, thin as watery milk, sharpened Buck’s hollow features, the wide black pupils in desperate eyes. His sun-brightened horsetail, once hanging proudly down to the small of his back, was gone. Buck had cut it off with a knife after a particularly bad night of bed-drenching cold sweats. His hair hung in his eyes, tangled and darkened to the color of dirt.
“Dag Signi,” he whispered. And to Fnor, “Did you tell me she was coming?”
“No. She crossed the border just a few days ago.”
Buck struggled against his pillows. Fnor reached out of habit, then snapped her hands back at Buck’s furious glare.
Nobody spoke as he rolled onto his good elbow, and batted pillows into shape with the stump of his other arm. Then he pushed himself up, one leg moving for balance under the quilt. The other leg lay immobile, the blanket flat from the knee down. At last he dropped back against the pillows in a semi-sitting position.
Signi approached. “Fnor-Jarlan asked me to see if there’s anything I can do.”
“What can you do now that you couldn’t do earlier?” His voice would have been truculent if it had had more force.
“I don’t know,” Signi answered, her gaze steady, her tone quiet.
He remembered that quiet voice from the agonized days when they’d tried to save his arm, how comforting it had been. What comfort could she offer now?
She said, “I never studied the healing magics closely, though I heard the beginning lessons, as we all do.” She was reluctant to admit that the implied level of human suffering that led to knowledge about such things as nerves, and which inner parts would function if punctured and which wouldn’t, had driven her away from such studies. “But I listened when your healer talked about his experience with non-magical healing. May I put some questions to you on numbness, skin sensations, and the like?”
He made an impatient gesture of acquiescence.
In a calm voice she asked a series of questions. At first his answers were short, no more than grunts. Gradually he spoke more, if disjointedly, until Signi gained the impression of a once-active man whose purpose in life had been as mercilessly hacked apart as his extremities. His people assured him he could supervise (though his father and uncle were doing that just fine), he could train (though his brother had willingly taken on those duties in addition to his own), but in truth he couldn’t even pour the wine for Restday drum.
When Signi was done with her questions, she said, “You could travel to a land where the healers have mastery over the deeper magics, though I do not know how much they could do. This I do know. Time does heal and strengthen. Especially if you help it by being as active as you can.”
He dropped his head back, murmuring something unintelligible. She knew he was doing his best to summon up the words to thank her for what he regarded as nothing, so she slipped out.
Fnor was on her heels. As soon as the door was shut, she said, “Well?”
Signi’s temple throbbed. It had been a mistake to come here. Buck had not wanted her intrusion into his shattered life.
So what could she say? “What I told him is true. Yet he sees what a Jarl must be and do, and he cannot be that and do that. He cannot see that you, all of you, value him as Buck, not just as Jarl. It is evident in the faces I see around me, in the care he’s had, even in the room, with the bed positioned just so to catch the light.”
Fnor’s mouth trembled. “So I feared.”
“And you cannot tell him. He will have to learn it on his own. Few people like to see themselves as a burden to those they love. Especially one whose own worth was bound up in being a leader.”
Fnor’s palm flattened in a sharp gesture, expressive of helpless agreement.
Signi put her hands together in peace mode. “I will retire to change.” And I will not make the same mistake with Mran: no intrusion that she does not invite herself.
Fnor said, “Thank you, Dag Signi,” braced her shoulders, and let herself back into her husband’s room.
Buck jerked up on his elbow. He snarled, “Why did you bring her here? Now she’ll blab that all over the world.”
Fnor was not the most even-tempered of persons. She knew that. The old Jarlan had given her lengthy series of tedious and exacting tasks during her girlhood in order to teach her to curb her temper.
Now she drew in a deep breath, and held it until she could speak with composure. “No, she won’t.”
“So you made some kind of deal? Or she thinks I’m too pitiful even—”
“I didn’t ask her, Buck. I wouldn’t insult her that way.” When he just cursed, a little of her pent-up temper escaped. “She’s kept better and more important secrets than your problem.”
Buck fell back against the pillows, his hair in his eyes. “Shit.” He gave his head a savage jerk to fling the hair aside. “So now you know her secrets?”
“No. But I’ve heard from others what you should have seen right under your nose up north. Or maybe not you, but your rock-headed brother. All that healing, and before that, she caused a geyser to blow a ci
ty sky high? That woman is a powerful mage. Did Cherry-Stripe learn a thing about her? No. No one did. She keeps her mouth shut. Give me one single instance when she yapped.”
Buck moved restlessly, his damp hair sliding into his eyes again. “Damn the Venn and her secrets. Fnor, there’s no feeling in my prick, not after half a year. Everyone keeps saying ‘Let it heal’ but nothing’s going to happen.”
He looked away at the window, his mouth so unhappy all her anger was doused. “Maybe we need more time—”
He flung up a hand. “I’ve been thinking. You should take a favorite. I know I’m no good to you lying here. And I know my temper’s been bad. You’ve been patient. You shouldn’t be left with me, as useful as shit on a plate.”
“Buck—”
“Go to the hot-house. Then come back and tell me about your fun. Maybe that’ll cheer me up, if you find a good fellow to whoop it up with. But go find one. Fair’s fair.”
And watch you drink yourself to death as soon as you can find your way to liquor? They’d already hidden the knives after he’d off cut his hair.
She hesitated, trying to find the right words. She needed Mran, who was good with words, but even setting aside Mran’s problems, instinct insisted that this conversation be private.
She had to resolve it on her own.
All right. The kingdom and custom only required there be a Jarl and a Jarlan. Whatever happened in your own rooms—or didn’t—was yours to decide.
She’d discovered since her queen’s training days that picked marriages, like Riders’ and her bow guards and castle people, were pretty much like Jarl treaty-marriages. People married for all kinds of reasons, and those reasons could change. But as you aged, your duties changed, too.
As youngsters she and Buck had thought it would be fun to reserve sex with one another for after they were married. She’d had Vedrid Basna as a favorite—oh, those were good days. But they’d parted at her wedding, as agreed.
She lifted her eyes, not seeing the winter sky, but Vedrid’s handsome face. The fire was still there, oh yes. And everyone liked Vedrid, even Buck. Vedrid would never marry—King’s Runners didn’t—and no one had reported that he’d picked a mate, so she wouldn’t be interfering with another woman’s life. Should she invite him back to her bed?