The Song of Andiene (18 page)

Syresh saw the amazement and half-doubtful respect in the minstrel’s face. “I do not serve any code,” she began.

“Then choose some other path.”

Lenane shook her head. “Let me finish,” she said hastily. “I am not of noble blood, like your servant, to follow the nobleman’s code, but I will serve you, since you saved me. I’ll quarrel no more—if he does not touch me.”

Andiene nodded. “Good enough. There is sandray growing near. Pick some leaves and dress your comrade’s face with them.”

Syresh would have protested, but speech was too painful, and the look in Andiene’s eyes told him that his words would not be heard. He watched glumly as Lenane gathered sandray and crushed the hairy leaves to a juicy strong-smelling pulp.

She bound the blood-stopping and healing poultice on, using a whole leaf for a bandage, working competently, but not gently, and chuckling as she gummed it on with resin scraped from a lanara tree, another of its hundred uses.

“This will stick to your beard, what there is of it. Now if you do not speak or smile or eat for a sevennight, it might heal without a scar.”

“Enough of that,” said Andiene quickly. “They said you were a minstrel. Let us hear your singing.”

Syresh would have smiled if the bandage had allowed him
. With two comrades at drawn swords, she may learn tact. It will serve her well when she regains her kingdom.

Lenane looked mournful. “What talent I have lies in my fingers, not my throat,” she said, “but I will sing you some songs you may not have heard. What sort of a song do you wish, my lady? One of magic, or bravery, or love?”

“Of magic, if you please,” said Andiene. Syresh was silent and grim.

“I will sing you a song of magic in the mountain forest,” Lenane said. “A song of love, too, in its way. This is the song of Carne’s Lover.”

She sang in a low husky speaking voice. What skill it had lay in the shaping of the phrases. Syresh had heard better singing in the king’s court, or in the mouth of ones singing for their meals in the market square, for that matter. He thought that she cooked better than she sang, but the pain of his torn face reminded him that such clever thoughts were better kept to himself.

Then the story gripped him as it told itself, hitching its way through the web of words. It was the story of Carne and her sister Yrase, and how Aren rode the forest and stayed with them through the burning summer. He courted them both, but he chose the oldest, jealous Yrase. Then gentle Carne grieved, and walked long hours in the forest, and soon her belly grew big with child. When it could not be hidden, she called Aren the father, though he denied it. Yrase did not believe him, nor did their mother, for there were no other men.

When Carne was near her time, her sister brewed deadly herbs and smiled as she gave them to Aren. Then she found Carne walking on the edge of the cliff and threw her over. And as she watched, one came from the forest who was furred and ran on all fours, but had a man’s face.

When he saw Carne lying dead, he howled so loud that the mountain rocks might have shattered. Then he took a knife, and cut a baby from her belly, a dark furred child, not of human kind. When he held it in his arms and breathed into its mouth, it cried and lived. And as he carried it back into the woods, he turned and called down curses on Carne’s kin, mother and sister both.

Andiene shivered. “Is that a true story?” she asked, as simply as a child.

“I do not know,” Lenane said. “In the north, the forest grows in the valleys between the mountains. He who sang it to me believed it. He said that he met wandering Yrase, and she told it to him. But I was raised in the forest—as your companion knows—” She gave Syresh a malicious look, then went on, speaking seriously. “I cannot believe that any common ground between us and them could be found. No room for love, no place for treaties, nothing but hate and war to the last man.”

“I have heard that the southerners have found room for treaties,” said Syresh, trying to hold his face motionless as he spoke. “That they have struck a filthy bargain.”

He had hoped to anger her, but her response was disappointing. “I have heard that too.” Her smile sparkled. “Do not worry, my kin left the southern woods long ago. I know no more of those things than you.” She was quiet for a moment. “Still, in the song, you must wonder. Because, whatever he was, he loved her.”

“Sing another song of magic,” said Andiene.

Lenane smiled with the compliment. “From your voices, you come from the Mareja. Are you loyal to the King?”

Andiene smiled grimly and did not answer. “No,” said Syresh. “If you wish to sing a song of sedition, it will please us well.”

“Then I will sing you a song of magic and sedition,” she said. “This is the song of Andiene, the last and least and greatest of the children of Ranes Reji.”

Her listeners were still, no movement, hardly even the sound of their breathing. She sang of that day of slaughter, of a king watching as his children and his children’s children were slain before his eyes. Then, the youngest spoke two short words, and the blood and bones of the soldiers were frozen. They watched helpless as she walked out untouched.

In the song that Lenane sang, the child walked out like the princess that she was, and the Festival crowds parted to let her pass, and so she went down to the sea-strand. She spoke one short word, and a silver boat came sailing in against the tide, no man at the helm, no oars, no sail. She knelt in it, and it sailed away.

Lenane was too intent on her song to glance at her listeners’ faces, or she would have seen looks to puzzle her greatly. She went on, singing of Nahil’s savagery, his fears, the burden of dread and death that lay on all the land. She ended with a promise: that one day Andiene would come and restore the true kingdom.

In the silence as she finished the night-birds called; the crickets sang. At last Syresh spoke, with no mockery in his tone. “You sang that well, my lady minstrel. Well enough to get you praise in a king’s palace—any king but one!”

“Oh, do not praise me. My fingers ache for the lute strings.”

“I praised you for the words, not the voice.”

She chuckled, and did not rise to the tempting bait. “Many in the Mareja believe those words, but it would be death there to sing or speak of it.”

“And you,” asked Andiene. “What do you believe?”

“I was in the city that day, but I saw nothing of it. Magic is stuff for the grizanes, the village herb-wives, the forest creatures,” Lenane said carelessly. “A gently-bred child of the royal house—what would she know of it?”

“Nothing,” said Andiene softly. “Nothing.”

They slept that night in an open field. The weather was clear, as always at the end of spring, giving the folk time to harvest blaggorn and dry the thornfruit. But Andiene seemed troubled, though she kept her plans to herself.

“What lies between us and the city of this land?” she asked Syresh, the next morning.

“Many leagues of plain and villages, or a few days travel north through the forest.”

“That choice is simple,” she said.

Lenane interrupted them. “Not as simple as you might think. Have either of you traveled through the forests?”

“I have,” said Syresh. “I went with Nahil’s men to fell the trees to build his flagship, this last spring.”

The minstrel looked amused. “How many of you did the villagers kill?”

“Only arrows shot from a distance and many threats and warnings. We came back unscathed.”

“All very well for you, but still it was not wise. The trees are not our friends, but they are not our enemies, either, if we treat them well. Your men came and went, but the trees’ anger will fall on those who must stay.”

“That may be as it may be,” said Syresh. It had been his first command, and he was proud of it. “I know the rules of traveling through the forest,” he said.

“Then we will go that way,” said Andiene. “I want to spend the summer in the palace of Oreja, not in some farmer’s cellar.”

Lenane looked doubtful, but she followed them as they turned and went north, their path running alongside the coastline instead of going far south and inland to circle the woods.

Whatever shadows had surrounded Andiene seemed to have lifted. She talked more, and smiled frequently. Syresh felt that he knew her better; he feared her less.

He kept a wary truce with Lenane. When they passed through the villages, he would turn and look at her. She followed them demurely, a few paces behind. He could not catch her in any wrongdoing, but it seemed to him that the pack she carried on her back grew heavier, bulkier as they traveled.

One night, she said to Andiene: “I could get you better clothes, and sandals to wear.”

“No,” said Andiene.

Syresh chuckled and thought of several sarcastic things to say, but reined in his tongue. His face was not yet healed.

“At least trim the cuffs, then,” Lenane said. Andiene stood obediently while the minstrel cut off the heavy cuffs at wrist and ankle. “No need to look more clownish than needful,” she said, with a sidelong glance at Syresh. “Besides, they could trip you. These clothes were made for one taller than you.”

“I know. I took them from a dead man.”

Lenane’s eyes widened. She looked at the other woman to see if there was some joke she had been too slow to catch. Then she was silent. For the rest of that evening, nothing that Syresh said could provoke her to sharp words.

But out on the open road, she talked constantly. She had a minstrel’s memory—Syresh was forced to admit that—and she spoke of everything but herself. Andiene drank in her talk of magic, love, history, and wars. She even listened greedily to the long genealogies stretching back more than nine centuries to the time when the people of the nine kingdoms, the Rejiseja, first entered the land.

Then there were no more villages as they traveled north, but the land was fair in the last weeks of spring. Though no fields of blaggorn or hedges of thornfruit grew on these plains so near the forest, flowers and shrubs bloomed and were covered with bees and butterflies. Sweet-snow and skyglass made bright mounds of blue and white at the side of their path.

Syresh did the hunting, and Andiene and Lenane laughed together at the sight of a soldier of the King reduced to throwing stones to try to kill grasskits for the evening meal.

Once or twice, when they could find no food, Andiene went off by herself and brought back grasskits. She would not let them see her hunting. Syresh suspected that she used some magic, too great a secret to be trusted to Lenane. He had not seen her use her powers since the minstrel joined them. They carried coals to start their fires. She had never given her name.

But Lenane asked no questions. They ate well, for there was blaggorn to be gleaned, though it grew far from the great fields that fed the cities. Here it grew one grassy plant at a time, stiffly holding up its stalks of dry-ripe black kernels that shattered easily from the thin stems. They gleaned it as they walked along, and Lenane gathered pot-herbs, seeming to know every kind of wayside weed that man could eat.

Travelers have other things to fear than starvation. In a week, they were at the edge of the forest.

The sight of it sobered Syresh’s spirits. Though that night they camped well out of its dark shadow, still he felt its presence.

“I did not want to go this way,” Lenane said once. “Especially not in company with one who has torn down the trees of the forest.” When she sang for them, she began with a riddle song.

Greenwood torn from living tree

Crieth out in witchery

Mother, they tear me!

Mother, they burn me!

Mother, hear my plea!

Paths are webbed with treachery

Souls are trapped within the tree

Mother, they tear me!

Mother, they burn me!

Mother, set me free!

Greenwood torn from living tree

Whispers to me warningly

Though they tear me …

Though they burn me …

Vengeance will come to me!

“Croak a merrier tune to us,” said Syresh, but no jester’s song would have lifted his spirits. In his dreams that night, a dragon loomed, old and cruel as the pitiless forest. It watched him, but did not speak. He felt the weight of its green glare upon him, even after he woke.

The forest lay dark before them; they reached its edge soon. “We have this map, for what it is worth,” Syresh said, as he looked doubtfully at the map that a villager had given him. Strings were knotted together like lace, and the knots were cunningly tied so they would not tighten. They slipped back and forth on the strings; if he was not careful, they would slide together in an unsolvable tangle.

Still, he spoke confidently. “We have enough food, dried meat and blaggorn, to keep us even if we do not find much to eat in the forest. But the safeholds are not always easy to find. We must find one by nightfall or risk our lives.” He glanced to Lenane for confirmation.

“We should camp here for a few days,” she said, not answering him directly.

“Why?”

“Have you not seen the stars, so clear, so bright? These forest creatures have more power then. Wait till the patterns break—then we may travel in safety.”

“What do you say, my lady?” Syresh asked.

Andiene regarded him. Her storm-gray eyes had the fierceness that he had seen when he first met her. “I told you before, I mean to spend the summer in the palace of Oreja. I will not sit here and do nothing while I wait for the omens to be right.”

Lenane looked from one to the other. “What is this talk of palaces?” she asked. Syresh suddenly saw himself and Andiene as they must seem to her. She knew nothing of them. She would see nothing but a pair of ragged wanderers.

“If I were wise, I would turn my steps to the south,” the minstrel said. “There is a city there, across the river, as good as any to the north.”

“If you are afraid, then you may leave us,” said Andiene.

“Did I say I was afraid? I have a feeling that if I live, there will be the bones of a fine song in your traveling.”

Syresh looked at Andiene. She was not afraid. When she looked at the forest, there was an eager light in her eyes. He felt that he knew what she was thinking—that her power would be enough to fight the forest creatures and win. For a moment, his fears betrayed him
. Indeed, she is half-kin to them already
.