Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses) (23 page)

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Authors: Sharon Shinn

BOOK: Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses)
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“But nobody shot me, and the lady came a step nearer—and then, to my utter astonishment, she melted. She just—there was no other word. She melted into a wolf shape herself. I had been a shiftling all my life, you understand, but I had never seen anyone
else
transform, and it was almost enough to send me howling across the valley. But I was too afraid to move, and when she shifted back to human state, I shifted right along beside her. And then I just stared at her.
“She looked entirely pleased with herself. ‘Very well, you can come study with me,’ she said. ‘My father has already engaged a tutor to hone my abilities, but he thought it would be helpful if there were other students who might challenge me to try harder. So far, we haven’t been able to locate anyone else with any magical ability, but then I heard some villagers talking about you.’ We lived about ten miles from a small market town, and, as you might guess, everyone within fifty miles of us had heard my story by this time. I just hadn’t thought they’d be repeating it to noble folk.
“She turned around and got on her horse. And then she turned to look at me like I was the stupidest man in Danalustrous. She said, ‘Well? I told you you had to come with us.’ And I got all mad again, and I said, ‘Lady, I wouldn’t come with you to study magic if you were the daughter of the village mayor himself.’ And she said, ‘I’m the daughter of Malcolm Danalustrous, and I think you’ll do whatever I say.’ And from that day on,” Donnal added in a rueful voice, as the others began to laugh, “that’s pretty much been the way of it. She gives the orders, and I do what she says.”
“And did you really study magic with her?” Cammon asked.
“Off and on, for the next ten years,” Donnal said. “It wasn’t very formal, you understand. Just if some mystic or another happened to be traveling through, and Lord Malcolm heard of it, he would accost the poor soul and promise him all sorts of rewards if he’d come teach his wayward daughter and her scruffy friend. Or, who knows, maybe he promised all sorts of dire punishments if the fellow refused.”
Cammon glanced at Senneth. “Were you one of their tutors?”
She nodded, her white-blond hair vivid in the soft firelight. “One of the early ones. I don’t know that they learned much from me, since I don’t have the temperament for teaching. And I was there selling other skills at the time.”
Justin looked up at that. “Oh? What would those be?”
She grinned. “That’s when I thought I could make my way as a freelance blade. I was hired as part of the lord’s civil guard. I wasn’t bad at it—and I must say, I learned a lot under his watch commander—but I eventually realized the life was too confining. I was not much better at following orders than I was at teaching students.”
“Now, I find myself surprised,” Justin said with heavy irony. Senneth merely laughed.
Cammon had turned his attention to Kirra. “What about you?” he said. “What did your father do when he discovered you were mystic?”
Kirra grimaced. “Well, first you have to understand my father. He is—he believes he is—the shepherd of Danalustrous, the living representative of all the generations of Danalustrous heirs who have gone before. That all the weight of all those centuries of Danalustrous pride sits squarely on his shoulders—and that Danalustrous itself is the most powerful, important, and precious place in this world. To somehow belong to Danalustrous is to be made holy almost—to earn the right to be protected to the death. I was mystic, but I was Danalustrous. Therefore, I was to be cherished—no matter how strange or dangerous I might turn out to be.”
She brooded a moment. “My father has had three wives,” she went on. “The first two were far from happy. He is a powerful, determined, and difficult man. His first wife died after ten years of marriage, and everyone said it was because she could not think what else to do to get his attention. Even that didn’t do it—he remarried again within six months. His first wife had come from Tilt, an eldest daughter of a respected House. He decided his second wife should be someone with lower expectations, so he chose a woman who—while perfectly respectable—”
“Thirteenth House,” Cammon said. He liked to use the phrase, Tayse had noticed; it seemed to tickle him.
Kirra smiled. “Exactly. She came from a lesser estate on the Danalustrous property, and she had not been trained in all the proprieties a true noblewoman would have understood by instinct. In fact, she was dead wild, according to everyone who knew her. Never quite appreciated the honor my father had done her. Never seemed to really enjoy the gorgeous house, the rich property, the handsome husband. I think she got bored. Two years after I was born, she left.”
There was a slight pause. “Left?” Cammon said. “And didn’t come back?”
“And didn’t come back,” Kirra repeated. “I have no idea if she’s even still alive.”
Senneth looked at her. “I didn’t know that part,” she said. “Your father always spoke of her as if she was dead.”
Kirra laughed. “Well, he had her declared so, in order to marry a third time. Fortunately, his third wife turned out to be exactly what he needed—clever, self-sufficient, accomplished, and devoted to Danalustrous. She’s my sister Casserah’s mother, and she’s been a very good stepmother to me.” Kirra smiled. “She was not thrilled when I turned out to have mystical powers, you understand, but she didn’t faint or shriek or demand that my father throw me out of the house. She did watch Casserah with some apprehension for a few years, because she was afraid that the taint may have come from my father, but Casserah has always been quite determinedly normal.”
“How did they first show up?” Cammon asked. “Your mystical abilities.”
“I was about ten. My stepmother was trying to teach me how to curtsey. She would say, ‘Pretend you are curtseying to the queen,’ and so I would imagine what the queen looked like—and then I would turn into the queen, or a ten-year-old’s perception of the queen. You can imagine how disconcerting it was for her the first time it happened. But as I say, she handled it all quite coolly. And my father—well, it never occurred to him to turn against me. Which is why he sought tutors to train me. And he insisted I take my place as a rightful daughter of the Twelve Houses. He forced the Tilts and the Storians and the Gisseltesses and everyone else to accept me for what I was. I never suffered a single social stigma because of my magic. And, you know, there are many other children of the aristocracy who cannot say the same.”
“Yes, we have all heard some of those stories,” Senneth said somewhat curtly, though Tayse had not, and he wondered if the others in the room had. “How does your sister tolerate your magic? I have always found her a little hard to read.”
Kirra laughed, seeming truly amused. “Casserah is—completely unaffected by anything that does not pertain absolutely, directly to her. As long as I don’t turn her into a spider, or burn down the house while she’s sleeping in it, Casserah doesn’t really mind who or what I am. We are quite close, actually, though it is a hard relationship to explain.”
“And I suppose your father and your stepmother and everyone eventually realized the tainted blood must have come from your mother, the restless one,” Senneth said.
“Must it always come from somewhere?” Cammon asked. “Don’t people ever just—develop magic on their own?”
Tayse looked up at that question. He couldn’t say he’d ever given it much thought till recently, but in fact, that was something he would like to know as well. Where did the magic come from? Could anyone suddenly discover in himself a mystic trait, or was it a power that had to be handed down through the generations?
Senneth and Kirra were exchanging glances. “No one is quite sure,” Senneth said, “but it seems to follow bloodlines. That is, Donnal’s wandering father may not have been a mystic himself, but his father was, or
his
father. Many a scandal has unraveled in the aristocracy when a serramar of the house is suddenly discovered to have special skills. Generally, it turns out the mother confesses she has played the father false, because of course neither one of them could admit that magic ran in their veins from generations ago! But Kirra could sit here and name you a mystic born in one generation or another to every one of the Twelve Houses. I think the magic is inbred a lot more deeply than any of them like to believe.”
“I think it was my father who was the mystic in my case,” Cammon said. “Just because my mother always seemed so devoid of any—any power at all. Any strength. Surely she would have used it at some point if she’d had it.” He smiled a little sadly. “Anyway, from what you say, it sounds like all mystics have a restless streak, and he certainly had that. And look at the four of us—we’re all wandering. Maybe it’s something in the blood.”
“When did you first know you were mystic, Cammon?” Kirra asked.
He laughed. “When you pulled me out of Kardon’s tavern! But I knew I was—strange—before. I could sense when something was not quite right—and I always knew when someone was lying to me. I think my father was also a sensitive. He would make these impossible deals with people—choose to trust the unlikeliest individuals you could imagine—but the crazier the scheme, the more likely it was to pay off. I think he would have been a wealthy man if he’d ever learned how to hold on to his money.”
“How did he die?” Senneth said.
Cammon made a little grimace. By firelight, he looked almost ageless, Tayse thought. His face was round, sweet, unmarked by experience, but his flecked dark eyes were old and knowing. It was not hard to believe he possessed a special wisdom, that he could look into any soul and read its secrets. Tayse shifted on his blankets and cast his own eyes down.
“We were in Arberharst. We had spent almost all the money we had accumulated in order to buy passage from Sovenfeld. There was some man my father was to meet in Arberharst, someone who was going to set him up in”—Cammon shrugged—“some enterprise. I’ve always thought something must have gone wrong when they were making the deal. Maybe, this one time in his life, his ability to judge a man’s character was wrong, and the person he was dealing with turned out to be a liar. Maybe there were others present that my father hadn’t known about beforehand, and he said out loud that he didn’t trust them. In any case, he didn’t come home that night. His body was found the next morning, not far from the harbor. They brought me over to identify him because my mother was too hysterical to leave the inn. Three weeks later we sold what we had to pay for our tickets back to Gillengaria.”
Senneth was watching him. “That wasn’t so long ago,” she said. “Your father died in Arberharst, and then your mother died on the journey home, then you got sold into slavery, and now you’re wandering an unfamiliar world with people who are still virtually strangers. Yet you seem content and not so full of woe as I would be.”
His smile was rather small and painful. “Perhaps I am just still numb. I have come to believe there are no safe harbors. I am just grateful when there is not a storm raging over my head at that very moment.”
Tayse glanced up at the roof, where patches of snowy starlight filtered in through numerous holes. “There
is
a storm tonight, of a sort,” he said.
“It is not this kind of weather that bothers me,” Cammon said.
Kirra reached out and gathered him to her in an easy hug. “We’ll be your family now,” she said. “When this journey is over, if we haven’t found a place for you in Ghosenhall, I’ll take you back to Danalustrous, where you can be an advisor for my father. He would like very much to have someone standing at his right hand who could always tell him whether someone was lying or telling the truth.”
He gave her a tremulous smile. “Your father sounds a little terrifying.”
Senneth laughed. “Malcolm Danalustrous is more than a little terrifying, but Kirra is right. That would be a very good place for you, in the service of a great lord.”
“Or the king,” Justin said, as always jealous on behalf of royalty.
“Or the king,” Senneth acknowledged.
Cammon looked alarmed. “I don’t aspire so high!”
“If he had use for you,” Justin said with great haughtiness, “you would serve him and be glad of it.”
Kirra looked over at the other Rider with a bright curiosity. There were no end of tensions between the members of this little group, but Tayse had always thought the animosity was greatest between these two. Justin hated Kirra for embodying all the rank and power of a privileged, pampered class—and Kirra scarcely could bring herself to remember that Justin was even alive.
But she seemed to see him, at least briefly, this night. “So what’s your story, Justin?” she asked. “How did you come to be part of the king’s elite?”
Justin glanced quickly at Tayse, who nodded. Then he shrugged and began telling, with elaborate unconcern, the story he simply never told. Most of it, even so, he edited out. “I grew up in Ghosenhall, five miles from the palace. In the thieves’ district. My mother had four children, none of whom had a father they could name. We lived in a place so filthy I cannot describe it to you.” He nodded across the fire at the dark-haired man next to Kirra. “Donnal maybe might know what it’s like to grow up in poverty, with absolutely nothing, but none of the rest of you would understand, no matter how long I made my story.
“My three sisters were gone before I was ten. I don’t know where they went or if they still live. My mother died of a disease that started between her legs and rotted her body inch by inch. I was already spending much of my time on the streets, roving the roads and alleys with other boys just like me.” He smiled, an evil smile at an evil memory. “There is a reason the very wealthy do not walk certain streets of the royal city unescorted. Boys like us would accost them in deep night or full daylight, and steal their purses and offer to take their lives. Some of us died in skirmishes with civil guards and paid escorts. Others died of starvation and sickness. The rest of us—we became very, very dangerous. I could disarm a man in twenty seconds if he chose to fight me. I could defeat three men at once. After I turned twelve, I never went a day without enough money to buy myself food and, sometimes, lodging. None of my friends went hungry.”

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