Banner of the Damned (106 page)

Tired as I was, having a goal restored me enough to perform the necessary
spells. Then I finished by removing the spells around the dyr. My mood was dark enough for me to think,
If something happens to me, it’s no more than I deserve
.

Nevertheless, my heart pounded unpleasantly as I picked the dyr up and then turned it over in my hand. It felt like it looked, a heavy object not quite stone and not quite metal.

I dropped it into my robe’s inner pocket, where scribes usually kept their tools, then stepped through my access way into my tower.

Nothing happened.

I looked around again, startled to find the room so warm, especially as the fireplace was bare. The air was not only warm, but fresh. I wandered to my bedchamber, but my jug of fresh water was empty. I could summon a runner… I could get water on my own… But it felt good to sit down on my bed and then to stretch out my aching body.

I woke when someone gave a gasp.

I opened my eyes to discover a runner staring at me. An image of myself, starkly staring—pale, even gray-faced, struck me behind the eyeballs, and I closed my eyes. “Water,” I whispered, my hands over my face.

Surprise, dismay, the urge to run goaded me before the door shut.

Oh. The dyr in my pocket was bringing me the runner’s emotions. In spite of the throbbing headache, I rebuilt my mental shield. The reward was blessed quiet. I was alone in my own skull.

The door opened, and the runner was back with water. I drank down two glasses, gasping for air, then wiped my eyes on my sleeve as I became aware of the rustle of cloth, the manifold breathings of several people.

“Emras?” That was Anhar, speaking quietly. Cautiously. “You’re back.”

She and Pelis and two more runners gazed curiously at me.

“Where have you been?” Pelis asked.

“Been?” I repeated witlessly. “I was on an errand,” I said in Kifelian, “I was just here yesterday. Wasn’t I?”

Anhar and Pelis exchanged looks, then Anhar said, “If you were, no one saw you. No one has seen you for eight, almost nine months.”

I gave a cry of dismay; I wanted to disbelieve them. “The Fox vision,” I said. “That single glimpse must have thrown me out of time for nine months. I did not know that time would be so unreliable—” I stopped myself before I loosed incomprehensible babble about magic. “I’m glad I didn’t listen to an entire conversation, I might have vanished for a hundred years.”

I became aware of painful silence and looked up. Four sets of eyes stared back at me.

The time for secrets to end is now, but don’t be stupid about it
. I rubbed my eyes, gathered my wits, and switched to Marloven.
Normal. Sound normal
.

“I need a bath,” I said, and watched the runners’ faces clear at that. Pelis as well.

As they all turned away, I caught Anhar’s robe. “Get Birdy,” I whispered wordlessly.

Her brows shot up. She gave a slight nod, ducked around the others, and fled.

Nine months?
Reaction wrung through me, my limbs watery.

Birdy and Anhar arrived together, both breathless. “I had to say you sent for him,” Anhar said. “He was on duty.”

“Please tell me what I’ve missed,” I said, no longer trying to hide my urgency.

Birdy came up to me, his gaze searching mine. “Will you tell us what
we
have missed?”

My heart beat hard. “I will,” I promised. “Where is the king?”

“He’s been in the north since spring. Lasva went to join him early in summer.”

“She was in Olavair,” Anhar put in. “Talking to the Northern Alliance. She says they want Ivandred to agree to the Compact against arrows. They all have their hair cut short.”

“Prince Macael’s brother hired mages to cause an avalanche in both passes,” Birdy said. “High and low. There’s no crossing over to Enaeran.”

“Has Ivandred declared war?”

“It has not been declared. But he’s been riding around up there, exercising the army. You know how the king can call up levies if the kingdom is in danger? Well, levies have been raising on their own, volunteering all across the north—”

“Yvanavar, Tiv Evair, Khanivar,” I said.

“Not just them,” Birdy said. “Sindan-An, Tlen, and Fath as well. They seem to have united in one purpose, to regain their hereditary lands. Their cry is ‘river to river.’ I guess that means the glorious Marlovan empire of old, which was bordered between the rivers all up and down Halia. But Ivandred has held out against declaring war against the northern kingdoms. He says that no one has broken any treaties.”

“A moment,” I said. I shut my eyes, released the shield and concentrated on Lasva, partly to test my reach with the dyr—and there she was,
desperate to keep her voice even, to hide her anger as she said,
Danrid, permit me to disagree. Heroism is not overlooking wounds, tiredness, fear, in order to kill others, but in overlooking wounds, tiredness, fear, to save others.

I snapped the shield close again.

“Em?” Birdy had knelt down directly in front of me.

I took a deep breath. “I believe I am in trouble,” I said. “And if I am right, so is Ivandred. And Lasva. And the kingdom.” I reached for the water. “This will take some time.”

Anhar said, “Then you had better eat something. You look dreadful, Emras. No trouble, I’ve found, is the easier to solve while hungry.”

“You are right,” I said. “I’d be grateful for some bread and cheese.”

Anhar whisked herself out. Birdy stomped purposelessly to my desk, glared at it, then came back, decision in his face. “Emras, the truth is, I came back because of you. Not so much because you didn’t write—people do get tired of other people and move on, I understand that, I’ve done it myself—but there was something in your last letters, an evasiveness that was so unlike you. Unlike who I thought you were. Ah-ye! That is not what I meant to say. I thought, ah, how to say it? That you were turning into a Marloven. And it was all right,” he added hastily. “Lasva had married one, she meant to be one. But Anhar said you were in trouble.”

“Anhar? Trouble?”

“She couldn’t tell me what it was. Only that you worked harder than anyone else, but you didn’t talk to anyone, and you seemed to be living under the shadow of Thorn Gate. And we began to wonder what they were making you do.”

“She never said anything to me about that.”

“Oh, she did. She tried. You fended her off.” He gave the old gesture for south-gating, and when I stirred to protest, he went on quickly, “She told me early that Lasva and Kaidas had been lovers right before they both married, which made sense of all his questions about Lasva. Because each year, he always came to me for news of her. So last year, when the duke wanted to leave Colend, Anhar and I thought of Marloven Hesea—so Kaidas could speak to Lasva, and I, you.” He gave a short sigh. “But you didn’t want to talk to me. Ah-ye
di!
This was much easier in my head, when I thought it out a thousand times, crossing the continent. I’d say how much I cared, and you would fall into my arms.” He hugged himself, making smooching noises, then grinned crookedly.

“Birdy, I can’t do that.”

“I know. I know. It is not your nature. I am joking, see? Only it’s not a
joke if no one laughs, is it? The other thing I thought you might say would be,
Birdy, I was so lonely
.”

And I said unsteadily, “Birdy, I was so lonely.”

He dropped down beside the bed, all the humor gone. “Talk to me, Em. Just talk. Tell me why you pushed us away, even after we found out you were a mage.”

“Yes,” I said. “That is what I intend to do.” Now that the time had come, I did not know where to begin. With my first lie to Birdy? Or should I begin at the end and work backward? “Kaidas and his son. Are they still here?”

“Yes.” Birdy frowned down at his hands, then said, “Fan practice had become the best part of our day. I am willing to guess it was Lasva’s, too. All we did was talk. But there was one day, late in spring. Kaidas was telling a story about one of his colts. It was funny—he’d been kicked several times, and then this colt nipped him, and he fell… yedi! The point is, we were all laughing. Anhar could not remember hearing Lasva laugh since she was first hired, back in Alsais. Kaidas and Lasva looked at each other, and she turned away, and wiped her eyes, and next thing we knew, she and some of the guard women were riding for the north.”

“I can find out what happened,” I said, figuring that this was as good an entry as any.

“You can?”

“Right here. Right now. At least, I think I can hear a memory from here.” I closed my eyes and concentrated, but the moment I lowered the shield and reached for this memory of Birdy’s, there were his thoughts: worried, tender, fearful, uneasy. I forced the shield up again, before my mind could delve into his.

“Emras?” he said, on a new note.

“I think I’d better begin back in Alsais,” I said. “When Tif sent me a magic book, because I asked.”

I was still talking when Anhar returned. The sight of food woke my appetite, and though I kept talking as I ate, which is vulgar behavior in Colendi, the other two gave no sign that they noticed. They were concentrating too hard on my words.

When I reached the recent events at last, Birdy said, “Have you listened to me?”

“Only that once.”

“Can you hear me now?”

“I have the shield up.” I tapped the top of my head.

“Try,” he said, watching me intently.

“Are you sure?”

“I just want…”

“Proof?” I asked, knowing that I deserved his disbelief.

“Ah-ye, I believe you, it’s just that I want to know what that thing can do. May I see it? I won’t touch it.”

I took the dyr out of my pocket and laid it on my hand.

“How can a thing make others hear thoughts? Might I try it?” he asked.

Fighting my intense misgiving, I laid it on his hand. He looked at me, then quickly to Anhar, as if to avoid hearing my thoughts, then stiffened. He was within arm’s reach of me, which was the distance I’d always maintained from the dyr, so I heard the clamor of his emotions, Anhar’s, and mine echoing back at me through the distortion of Birdy’s perception.

He gasped and snapped a strained look my way. “It’s like you poked me from inside my skull.” He threw the dyr in my lap. “That’s enough of
that
. It’s…”

I heard
evil
. I put up the mental shield again.

“Dizzying,” he said. “So this is what mages learn to use?”

“Yes. That is,” I corrected myself, wondering how much of what the Herskalt had said was true. “So I was given to understand.”

He grimaced. “I think you’d better start by questioning everything that man told you.” He shook his head. “I can’t even think, my head hurts too much. Anhar, what think you?”

“I’m not a planner.” She gestured Rue.

“You are deft at seeing what is there.”

Anhar said slowly, “That kind of trespass, it is almost as evil as days before written history, when there was sex without consent.”

I made a warding, too distressed for words.

She gave me a glance of sympathy, but went on. “You could say no, not the same—the person doesn’t feel it—but this is even more intimate, and the scars here and here.” She touched her head and heart. “Would be terrible if you revealed these things to others. And what if you can use it to force ideas into someone’s head? Like the enemy commander that you mentioned, could you bend this commander’s thoughts by your will to force him to lose a war?”

Birdy turned my way. “Can you?”

“I do not know. I never tried any such thing. I only listened.”

“Without consent,” Anhar repeated, and I winced.
This is a direct consequence of my actions
. “So far, from what you say, the only evidence we have of any mage using this dyr is Ramis, who you think is your Herskalt.”

“From Norsunder,” Birdy said. “So we can assume evil intent.”

“Can we?” I said. “Oh, make no mistake. I will never again step into that garden. I see it was set up to lure me, and the trap could snap around me any time. I even know the magic for it. But why would someone from Norsunder spend all this time to help Ivandred train his army? Is that evil? Lasva thinks any war is evil, but the Marlovens all seem to want their kingdom reunited. They aren’t evil people.”

Birdy said, “I don’t think we can define Norsunder and its goals while sitting here.”

“We have to figure out this man’s goals if we are to convince the king,” I said. “And the key is Darchelde. That much I am certain of.” The euphoria from the meal had worn off, leaving my body feeling leaden. My throat hurt, which I attributed to the amount of talking I’d done—more than I had in years. “I beg your pardon, the both of you. Though I know how inadequate it is.”

Anhar said, “You have mine. Easily given, as your trespass against
me
was so small.” Birdy nodded as she said, “The hardest pardon lies ahead of you.”

Lasva.

“I know. But first, perhaps, I ought to contact the king about the greater matter.”

Anhar put her palms out in
Do not cross my shadow
. “Carefully, yes? Because the single advantage you have is that this Norsunder mage might not know yet that you know.”

Birdy said soberly, “If this Hannik-Herskalt finds out you have that dyr thing, he’s going to come after you.”