Banner of the Damned (108 page)

My first project was to test my scrollcase. At first I detected nothing amiss, until I went over it carefully, then found a tiny mirror ward, so cleverly built that it was easy to overlook. Think of a sliver of lead hidden in filigree. I left it alone, and made myself a new scrollcase.

Then I set myself the task of solving the mystery of Darchelde. That meant shifting to my secret chamber, but Anhar made me promise to work only eight turns of the hourglass before my return. So I stepped through my transfer access way each day armed with an hourglass. From inside my secret chamber, I began systematically assessing every spell in that vast castle, from the highest of the eight towers down to the cellars.

Choreid Dhelerei began the preparation for New Year’s Week, as rumors flew about war, defense, threats. Each morning before I left for Darchelde, I joined the fan practice with Anhar, Kaidas, and Vasande. Gone was the wit and range of discussion, until one day, after the children had run out, and it was just the three of us adults, Kaidas closed the door and said, “You hear everything in stables, and there is war in the air.” He flicked his fan in Imminence.

Anhar said, “How can you tell? They always talk this way.”

Kaidas snapped the fan shut. “I can’t quite describe it. But it feels like it did before our fight with the Chwahir up at the border. Only that, I have learned since being here, was barely a skirmish.” He lowered his hand, his gaze serious. “I think my son and I ought to depart. I am weak enough to permit myself a last indulgence: I will take my leave of Lasva face to face. There’s nothing else I can do for her.”

I was not done with my assay.

Desperate to finish, I began staying longer at night, though Anhar wouldn’t sleep until she’d seen me safely in my bed.

Then one morning we heard the distant horns announcing the coming of the king, soon followed by the thundering arrival of Ivandred, Lasva, and a swarm of warriors through the gates. Sick with trepidation, I waited for the inevitable summons, as word flew through the castle
that the First Lancers were not among the arrivals. Deep in my own set of worries, I paid little heed to the news.

The summons came immediately.

We arrived at the same time in Ivandred’s outer chamber, so rarely seen by me. He dropped tiredly into one of his great wing-backed chairs, his boots and the skirt of his coat mud-splashed, his hair damp from a fresh fall of snow. Lasva had somehow contrived to neaten herself between dismounting and coming upstairs to his room. She sat in the chair next to his, feet together, hands pressed together.

“Hannik couldn’t ride in with us,” Ivandred said. “When we talked last, you had a few weeks of work ahead to replace the wards, and that was nearly a year ago. What happened, Sigradir?”

“Instead of removing and rebuilding the last four layers of wards, I have strengthened them,” I said. “If you order it, I must release the personal wards, which will permit Hannik—the Herskalt—to enter this city. But you should know that I believe he is a Norsundrian.”

“What?” Ivandred half-started out of his chair, then sat back, scowling at me.

Lasva blanched.

I clasped my hands tightly. “This is what I have learned and how I learned it.”

Though the danger was from Ivandred—and I knew he was going to be angry—it was Lasva I watched as I confessed. Not everything. That is, I told them what I had done, but not everything I saw; I kept from them only the names of others whose lives I had penetrated.

Like Kaidas.

Lasva’s eyes closed at I described the first betrayal of her memories. After that every flutter of her lashes, subtle tightening of her lips—every wince that she tried to hide, but couldn’t—stabbed me deeper with the knife of guilt.

At the end, I waited for them to pronounce judgment.

Ivandred said, “This object. You say it is not here?”

“I thought it better to get rid of it. If the Herskalt gets it again, he will use it against us both. As well as against anyone he wishes.”

Ivandred stared down into the fire, a vein beating at his temple. When he looked up, he said, “You say you only listened to me in private? With my wife?” Disgust lifted his upper lip. “Anyone knows how I feel about my wife.”

“Yes.” I did not mitigate it by telling him how few of those scenes I’d watched. I should not have seen anything at all.

Lasva said softly, “Emras, I would have told you anything you wanted.”

My throat hurt so much I could barely speak. “I know,” I said.

Ivandred looked my way, his expression altering to consideration. “He was keeping you busy.”

“I see that now,” I said. “At the time, he told me that I needed to understand people in power, how they thought. In order to help Lasva. And you.”

Ivandred lifted his chin. “He said the same thing to me. Only he told me what they said. Told me what they thought. Private conversations, concerning the kingdom. He let me think it was intelligence-gathering. Even my own runners couldn’t get that much information.” He traced a curious sign in the air—then opened his hand. “I wonder if they’ve been compromised?”

“They?”

Ivandred pressed his fingertips to his eyes, then dropped his hand. “My runners, the king’s runners. They learn a little magic. Nothing like what you know. During the bad years, before we regained the throne, they were the only organized force, you could say. My family had a sign.” He slashed his finger in the air, making that same curious sign. “You recognize the letters of the alphabet? If you draw them that way, they look like an eagle in flight. It was a signal… ah, it’s no matter.” He struck the air with his hand. “I always feared that if he could tamper with scrollcases, then anyone might. In this, I trusted my father’s suspicion. But I had no idea about this dyr.” His brows lifted. “The fact that he never told me is the most damning evidence against him. He would know how I’d use it.”

“Instead, he would use it to command you.”

“Or to aid me in my plans?” Ivandred gazed into the fire, so tense he did not seem to breathe. “He has worked hard for Marloven Hesea. All spring and summer I heard nothing but talk about Marloven glory.”

Lasva looked from one of us to the other. “I believe, if you will permit my intrusion, that he told you both what you wished to hear most.”

“Again, why?” Ivandred said.

“I have been worried all along that this man has trained you Marlovens not to use weapons so much as to be a weapon,” Lasva said.

Ivandred gave her a quick look at the words “you Marlovens.”

“The warriors,” she corrected herself, and then fell silent, so all we heard was the beating of the flames and the echo of a clarification she should not have had to make.

Ivandred stirred, one fist tightening, then he said, “Hannik rode down to Darchelde with the First Lancers.”

Darchelde again!

Ivandred went on, “I will go there later on this winter—just me, and not the rest of the lancers, as we’d originally planned. As soon as New Year’s Week is over, I’ll send the Second Lancers to patrol the middle plains, Third to the northern border, and Fourth to the east.”

“There is a lot of magic over Darchelde,” I said uneasily, knowing how inadequate were my words, how unconvincing. “Far more wards than necessary for protection.”

Lasva said, “Maybe you should send orders to the First Lancers, giving them home liberty for the winter.”

Ivandred’s smile was bleak. “I don’t trust any means of sending orders. We know scrollcases are compromised, and runners can be ambushed. The First Lancers are accustomed to the garrison at Darchelde—nothing will happen to them there. It’s been our winter camp whenever we could use it. Herskalt and I often met and conversed there. I do feel that I owe him a chance to explain himself.”

“What did you learn from my memories that you could not have learned by asking me?” Lasva asked.

We were alone in her inner chamber, which was determinedly Marloven in look, but smelling like a Colendi herb garden.

How can one honestly answer such a question?

“That is misspoken.” Lasva caught herself up. “Ah-ye, Emras, you look like poor Haldren did, before his own friends put him up there to be flogged. I do not want to make you suffer. Let me ask this. Did your trespass cause anyone harm? Do not answer ‘yes’ without thinking. I know you know it was wrong. But did you do harm.”

“I don’t believe I did,” I said cautiously. “I can’t say for certain.”

“Very well. Did you do anyone any good?”

“Only once.”

“Tell me.”

I had made an oath that I would answer every question with the truth. So I told her about Tatia and Vasande. At the end, she said, “Yet it was not by your mental whisper, say, or by your wish that Kaidas came here?”

“I did not know they were coming,” I said emphatically.

Lasva prowled her room, then paused, her fingertips resting on the carved box in which she kept her letters. “Sometimes I miss court in
Alsais, and sometimes I think about how I can never go back. Court is where love is mixed with business, and business with love. People hide their emotions as we hide our bodies behind layers and layers of silk. Our intent was to gain ascendance by being agreeable, to serve or to disserve, and intrigue and pleasure took up our time.” She looked my way. “Court is a kind of dance, tumult without disorder. Is that a kind of war? Is war in whatever form all we are capable of?”

“Adamas Dei said that we are capable of infinite mercy and infinite beauty,” I said, my throat hurting. “As well as infinite cruelty.”

She prowled around the room again, then stopped before me. “I find that it is necessary to redefine relationships at various junctures in our lives. Perhaps it is too early to do so, but I want you to know this, Emras. I recognize your love, and you have always had what I could give. You abrogated my trust, but you regained some of it in telling the truth about what you did that had magical and political consequences —and in being merciful about not going into all the intimate details.” The name
Kaidas
remained unspoken, but I think she heard it as clearly as I did. She took a deep breath. “Shall we begin again from there?”

I could not answer, so I gave her the deep sovereign bow.

New Year’s Week arrived, the atmosphere as tense as my first New Year’s in Marloven Hesea. Danric Yvanavar’s speech was especially fine, spoken in the rolling alliteratives and galloping cadences of their ancestors. He, or someone, had worked a long time on that call for restoring the glory of the Marlovens. He wrote for posterity, using every emotion-hitching word save the crucial one: war.

So I refuse to record his speech.

The gist of it was repeated by the Jarls of Tlen, Tiv Evair, Khanivar, Fath, and the new Jarl of Sindan-An, who (it was rumored) had drowned his great-aunt, she being too tough to kill via a riding accident or a fall down stairs. I did not understand the significance of these six jarls’ similar speeches until the last day, which I will come to very shortly.

Each morning, Kaidas asked Anhar, “When should I see her today?”

And each day she answered, “Not today. It’s oath day, then the banquet,” or “Today she is hosting a memorial for the Jarlan of Sindan-An for all her friends,” or “Today is the riding and shooting exhibition—then they go straight to the great hall for singing and dancing.”

Near the end of the week, after he’d gestured Assent and walked off,
she whispered to me, “I hope he will change his mind. If he leaves, it’s going to break her heart.”

“Having him here is breaking her heart,” I said, and Anhar gave me a quick glance. “She told you that? She’s not so much as mentioned his name to me since they came back.”

“Nor to me. But here is the last thing I saw with the dyr.” And I described it.

Anhar listened then wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I don’t see any happiness for either of them.”

“Maybe she will find a measure of it if we win peace,” I said. “And he will find it somewhere else. But he’s going to have to leave first.”

Anhar flung out her hands, then dropped them. “I’m going to have to ask if she’ll see him. But I’ll wait until Lastday.”

Why did the structure of Darchelde’s wards distort when I sketched the layers?

I’d done everything right, but my sketches were impossible. I had to find out why.

But I didn’t dare walk around Darchelde to make a physical assessment. The Herskalt had tracers all over the castle. If I dissolved one, he’d be on me in a heartbeat, and in a contest of physical strength, I was going to lose. So I had to build another transfer ‘wall.’ Almost weeping with despair, I stayed up all night constructing this magical access way, then connecting it to one of the towers where the Herskalt’s magic distorted.

I finished it in the Hour of Repose—the last before Daybreak—and tiredly raised my hand to gesture the last spell, revealing what was beyond.

Shock gripped me by the vitals with such ferocity I stumbled back and fell over my wooden chair. I watched that incalculable darkness, terrified it would swallow me as I gabbled the spell to thoroughly eradicate the access way I’d spent all night constructing.

Then I sat there on the floor, my arms and head on the chair seat as my heart thumped frantically and my mind struggled to comprehend the enormity of what I had discovered.