The Fox (32 page)

Her eyes lifted, narrowing in humor for a moment. “No protest? No defense?”

He opened his hands. “It’s the truth.”

“Yet you yourself have governed with a light hand. You did not even put to death those sent during the leaf-falling season to enter the chambers above to kill you.”

“They didn’t succeed. The dogs sniffed ’em out, and my guards gave them enough to think about, I believe. As for the ones after—” He opened his hand, making a shooing motion.

“You are flippant.”

“Then I will be serious. I’ve seen enough death. I don’t want to see it again unless I cannot avoid it. I know they hate me and my people. I can only try to govern fairly.”

She said, “So it seems. Your actions indicate a character made for peaceful pursuit, but you live among warlike people, and war forms your life’s task.” She paused, and observed with that hint of humor again, “You say naught?”

“I dislike being watched when I cannot see the watchers.”

A very slight shrug. “So it must be when you come among others unasked, with steel in your hands. But we will do you no harm. You are even protected when you are in this chamber, and shall be so long as you continue to use your strength to establish peace. I am here to grant you access to this archive, so you can learn what you will of the past.”

Intense pleasure flooded Evred. He stepped closer, noticing that her robe was not in fact featureless white cotton, but woven of polished threads in a subtle, complicated pattern that suggested the twining of vines. “What is where?”

“Look about you. The scrolls are the oldest records, for we keep the copies in the same forms as the original document. Do you read the Old Sartoran?”

“With difficulty.”

“You will find no translations here. It is the purpose of this archive to maintain what we find exactly as we found it. And to protect it,” she added.

“Fair enough,” Evred said, looking at the shelf of scrolls. He thought of Hadand’s mother, Fareas-Iofre, who Hadand said stinted her own personal stipend, wearing old, much-mended clothes and making do with furnishings that others would hand to servants, so that she could order such records from Sartor, at ruinous expense. “May I copy anything?”

She indicated a desk across the chamber. “There you will find ink, pens, and paper. Our second purpose is to preserve knowledge, and share when we can. And so we recopy the aging scrolls, exactly as the original was written. And make copies of those as needed.”

He laid his hand flat to his heart. “I thank you.”

She put her hands together and then opened them, palms up, in the ancient gesture of peace. “I come and go during winter’s storms. But you will find that the doors are not locked against you. When you are here, I must request that you keep the doors closed behind you.”

“What if they need me?”

“You can hear a summons.” He knew she would not approve of any reason he might be summoned. “Have you any further questions?”

“Yes, though this one I do not know if you can answer.” He hesitated. “That sound. Do you hear it? Under the wind—”

“Ah.” Her eyes widened; they were a pale brown, closer to amber. “You hear the wind harps.”

“Wind harps? What could that be?”

She looked up, frowning at the shelves as if for guidance, then trod with soundless step to the oldest scrolls. “Do you know about the disirad?”

“Dih-sih-rahd,” he repeated. The front-of-the-teeth consonants and singsong vowels, the liquid “r,” were Old Sartoran.

She touched the glistening wall, so like ice mixed with silver. “This is disirad, but with all the magical virtue leached out. Some say that these few remains are all that is left of what was once abundant, before the end of Old Sartor. We do not know. But the wind harps on the mountain above this city were an experiment by my people, oh, a thousand years ago. Maybe more, for we do not reckon time exactly as you do, but it was an experiment to imitate the . . . the sound in the spirit, you might say, of the disirad of old.”

“It . . . it sang? It is stone, then, and it sang?”

“It was like stone and yet like metal, and it resonated with all living things in the world. Humans used it to good purpose, and then to evil, finding magic to destroy it. That was before Old Sartor died. Since then, these harps were carved. The experiment was deemed a failure, and so the wind harps stand abandoned on the high escarpments to sing their own song until time and wind and weather reshape them back to silent stone again.” She touched old scrolls. “Read more about them here. I shall depart and leave you to it.”

He held up a hand, palm up in habitual gesture, not knowing his ancestors had used it to show a hand empty of weapons.

She waited.

“Will you tell me more about you—and the morvende of today? Like where you live, what your lives are like?”

“Perhaps one day,” she said, and murmured something under her breath as she made a quick sign.

She vanished, light winking for a moment where she had stood, a soft gust ruffling the air.

Evred stepped back in surprise, and then, unnerved, he looked around slowly, running his fingers along the shelves of old, carefully rolled scrolls. Selected one at random, and with careful fingers slid loose its ribbon. The heavy rice paper crackled as he unrolled it.

Hawkeye Yvana-Vayir pulled on his wedding shirt, regarding with a grimace of distaste the yellow and blue sash lying on his bed.

“If it helps,” said his favorite, a merry young potter named Fala, “I did all the stitch-work. It is strange how I can make the prettiest cups, yet I cannot seem to use a needle with any grace.”

Hawkeye bent down, touching the somewhat crooked Yvana-Vayir eagle in blue woven between (very) stylized yellow flames, then grinned, pulled Fala to him, and kissed her. She laughed and flung her arms around his neck.

“Then I’ll wear it with pride,” he mumbled into Fala’s hair. He felt a prickle of guilt, then dismissed it. He wouldn’t let himself say anything against his wife once she was his wife, but in the meantime, he knew that most people hated Dannor, who never made herself pleasant except to superiors. She was even more arrogant than her brother Stalgrid, whom he loyally tried never to call Horsebutt, though he secretly thought the nickname an insult to horses. At least Stalgrid was at Convocation, and thus far away. The Tya-Vayir family representative was one-eyed Cama. Everyone liked Cama. Especially the girls.

Hawkeye kissed Fala again, thinking:
I wish I could marry you
, but said nothing. It would only grieve them both. After tonight he would be honor-bound to go to Dannor’s bed first, if she wanted him there. He suspected she would just out of spite—at least until she found a new favorite who would put up with her demands.

“Hurry, now,” Fala said, nuzzling his shoulder and then stepping back. “Your father awaits you and Badger in his chamber. Beaver is down below with your cousin, helping host.”

Hawkeye whistled softly to himself. His journey, slowed by three smashing storms in a row, had taken full two weeks. Immediately on his arrival that morning he’d told his father what he’d learned from Vedrid. His father hadn’t said much. He’d looked shocked, then angry, but Hawkeye had been too tired and hungry to stay talking.

That his father wanted to talk now, with the hall full of wedding guests, made his shoulder blades twitch the same way they did just before an action, and he wondered if it had been such a good idea to tell his father everything. But that was duty. He had to do his duty by father and family. Right?

He sighed on an exhaling breath, “I wish Mother hadn’t ridden out on that ice.”

Fala had no idea why he said it, except in the larger context: she wouldn’t say anything against anyone in the family, but she knew—everyone knew—that the princess had been the only one who had any influence over Hawkeye’s father.

He kissed Fala one last time, then they left, each in different directions. She back to join the servants in putting the last of the wedding boughs up in the great hall. He to his father’s rooms, where he found one of his twin brothers—in spring they’d be seventeen and horsetails—waiting. “Whew,” Badger said privately, rolling his eyes.

No time for more. Their father strode in, resplendent in a new formal tunic, the blue eagle and yellow flames all edged in gold. Too much gold, Hawkeye thought uneasily. Gold was reserved for royal houses. Even the Cassads wore their ancient gold as yellow, at least on their banners and House tunics.

“You have done well, my son,” the Jarl said, embracing Hawkeye. “You truly are the son of a princess.”

Hawkeye grimaced and Badger made a gag-face as their father paced the length of the chamber. All their lives they had been hearing how their quiet, austere mother was a daughter of a line of kings, until the repetition was mere noise. They were cousins to princes, not princes themselves. Hawkeye would one day be a Jarl, and Badger and Beaver his Randaels. They were happy enough with that.

Hawkeye decided his recent year of command—even more than his wedding—gave him the right to speak to his father man to man. “Father, you’ve always told us that. But the truth is we all believe that being half Yvana-Vayir is as good as being half Montrei-Vayir.”

“Better,” his father said, in a low, intense voice that caused Hawkeye to step back, this time not daring to turn his brother’s way. “Better! You know, for you will be married under the banner down below, that twice in the last two centuries have we married into the royal family. Once with
them
.” His chin gestured southward over his shoulder toward the royal city. “And once with the Montredavan-Ans, who were far greater. Only the betrayal of an assassin’s knife in the night could bring them down. It was they who made this kingdom what it is. Never forget.”

Well, the boys knew that, too, having sung the older war ballads that were little more than lists of heroic names chanted to stirring drumbeats about the Marlovans’ triumph over the Iascans when they first came to this land. There was even one song—Hawkeye had discovered when he first went to the academy that no one else seemed to know it—that was all about hawks and foxes and white wolves, but seemed to hint that it was the Montredavan-Ans, and not the Montrei-Vayirs, who’d driven the Venn north the last time they came in force.

He frowned at the drift of his thoughts. Not enough sleep. He forced himself to listen. But what was their father getting at, going on and on about the family’s greatness? His eyes were wild, his fingers shook, and he paced about like a caged dog when the wolves ran beyond the walls, howling at the moon.

“You boys are all old enough to hear what happened, long ago, before I married your mother,” said the Jarl, thumping his fist to his chest.

It was a family given that what was told one twin would soon be known by the other. Badger grimaced behind his father’s back, fanning himself with a hand; Hawkeye opened a hand:
What can we do?

When the Jarl whirled again and faced them, the two stood side by side, their faces expressionless.

Their father said, “You have seen that the king honors my rank, but not my kinship claim through his sister. Denying you the chance to wed in the throne room is not an isolated insult, it is one in a lifetime of insults. And all of it the Harskialdna’s doing.”

The brothers resisted the strong impulse to share a grimace of disgust: this was very familiar territory their father was galloping heavily over.

The Jarl paced back and forth. “You did not know, for it was very nearly deemed a dishonor at the time, but when Queen Wisthia came from the Adranis to marry the king, your mother was to go to her brother as part of the treaty. The Adrani prince begged off with a lot of diplomatic flummery, bringing us near war. There were two things that stayed us. One, the trade dispensations—including taking the expense of sending the spell renewal mages—the Adrani king offered as compensation. Two, his heir had never actually met your mother, so there could be no insult to her. Their herald told us in a lot a fancy language that he had marriage ambitions in faraway lands to the east, the Adrani having no tradition for treaty betrothals. But that left your mother with no husband, and so she turned her eye to me.”