Treason's Shore (16 page)

A surviving dragoon captain from Gand’s generation had said of Inda after the Andahi battle,
He may look like his skull’s empty, but it isn’t. You watch. He stands there at the back of morning drill watching, but one of these days he’ll go up front, and start in with the “Do it like this,” and next thing you know, every muscle has turned to knots and you can’t get out of your bunk next morning. That’s what he did to us all the way up north
.

Gand held up a hand, and Inda stopped. “They’re not good ideas?” Inda asked, looking puzzled.

“You know they’re good. Problem isn’t with your ideas, it’s with the boys. Think back, Inda. Your year with me. How many of you were serious about what you did after the first few weeks? No, think past the punishments. You boys were serious about jokes, stings, getting away with extra sleep or less work, and with competition.”

Inda grimaced. “So we were pugs and slackers. But isn’t that what a change will do, get everyone thinking about the good of the kingdom?”

“In my long experience, the only time everyone is together working for a goal like the good of the kingdom is when there is an immediate threat or an immediate reward. Men or boys. Inda. This is all I ask. Give it a year. Watch them, listen to them. Get to know them and the ideas they bring here. What they have to unlearn before they can learn from us. Spend as much time with them as you will. Demonstrate. Impress them. But don’t change anything until next year.”

Inda’s carefully, lovingly thought-out schedule vanished like smoke. Gand had been his ideal all those years, his standards Inda’s. Inda was going to point that out, but he remembered himself as a scrub. How much of his later determination to keep himself to Gand’s standards was because he wanted—somehow—to become worthy enough to be permitted home?

If he hadn’t been exiled, would he be lazing around at Tenthen right now?
No, I still would have been in the war. But maybe not leading it.

Then who would have led it? Inda grimaced again. Too much “what if.” He forced it out with a breath. “All right.”

“Good man.” Gand gave him a sympathetic half smile. “You’ll see everything differently, I believe, when we meet next year to have this conv—what is it?”

One of the King’s Runners-in-Training had slammed the door open. These boys were taught to be quiet and unobtrusive on duty before they were ever sent out. Gand’s irritation vanished when he saw the boy’s eyes wide and stark.

“King wants the Harskialdna.” The words came out in a rush.

Inda ran past the boy, jerked to a stop. “Where?” His hand came up before his face, the ring glinting. “Oh.” And he was off again, leaving the Runner-in-Training to follow after.

Inda had never used the ring before, though Evred had used his several times so far to find Inda. He skidded at intersections, hand before his face. The magical “snap” of the ring was quite distinct—more so than the internal tug that used to alert him to danger behind his head, when he’d carried the ghost of Dun the Carpenter, who (Inda only found out this past summer) had secretly been a King’s Runner before he died defending Inda.

The ring pulled him splashing through the puddles of a recent storm, past the kitchens from which emanated the smells of baking rye bread and cabbage-and-rice rolls simmering in garlic, and up the old tower steps through a building Inda still got lost in. All the halls and doors looked pretty much the same to him; he tried to orient himself by the rooftops of the academy, when he could find a western window.

Up more stairs and to another set of rooms that he identified by the tables and papers as the oath project rooms adjacent to the archive. His frustration at getting lost burned away at the sight of Evred’s wide green stare—green because his pupils had constricted to pinpoints. Next to him stood a tall, lean man whose gray coat was splashed to the thighs. Black curling hair, eye patch—

“Cama?” Inda exclaimed.

Cama struck his chest in silent salute, a corner of his hard mouth relaxing into an almost smile.

Inda turned from him to Hadand’s somber, tear-stained face. Finally Inda noticed her outstretched hands, from which hung two rumpled, ragged-edged pieces of crimson-and-gold cloth splattered with brown dirt.

No. Inda had spent too much time around spilled, stained, dried blood to mistake the sight of it now. “What’s that?”

Evred indicated a fourth person, whom Inda had glanced right past. This was a weedy boy of fourteen or fifteen at most, all awkward joints and knuckles, his unprepossessing face straining with his unsuccessful attempt to master awe and fear at being in the same breathing space as the king, the queen, and the Harskialdna, all at once.

“This is Radran. Connected to the Sindans and Tlens.” Evred-Harvaldar opened his palm toward the boy. “He is the one who rescued the banner.” He was about to say more, then thrust his hand toward the door. “Not in here.”

Out they went, Evred setting a pace that had the boy trotting to keep up.

Inda fell in beside Cama. When Inda left Iasca Leror as a bewildered eleven-year-old, Cama had been a somewhat bigger, morose boy with a voice like a kitten’s squeak. Inda had come back to find a tall, tough warrior who’d been serving as an unofficial Harskialdna in support of Evred’s cousins, Barend and Hawkeye Yvana-Vayir. The first time Cama spoke, Inda had been startled by his voice, which seemed to issue from the depths of a rocky abyss.

“Banner?” Inda asked him, and then he remembered where Cama had come from, and his heart squeezed in his chest. “Castle Andahi?”

“Yes.” Cama rasped the word.

Evred walked fast, leading the way down and down, stopping just inside the throne room. There he lifted his gaze to the high walls, the weak morning light slanting down through the clerestory windows onto the banners on the juts of the walls that formed the gallery, just below the windows.

Evred knew each banner. When they were young his father had taken him and his brother into the throne room to discuss the banners’ histories, praising his sons when they could later name them off. Evred knew whose House each belonged to, who had carried it in what battle, and who had brought it back.

He turned to Hadand, whose uplifted face implored.

He gestured to the boy. “Radran. Tell the Harskialdna-Dal.”

The boy’s neck knuckle bobbed as he swallowed painfully. “Everything?”

Cama spoke across the banner in Hadand’s outstretched hands. “Inda, the Jarlan sent Radran here up onto the mountain above the harbor. To count the enemy ships. He had a glass. He could look down at the castle. Saw the entire attack. Since he had orders and no weapons, he stayed put.”

The boy trembled, swallowing convulsively, his lowered gaze stricken.

“Later—after the army marched up the pass—he sneaked down and retrieved the banner. Though the Venn still held the castle.”

Inda whistled. “You went inside with the Venn in possession?”

“I know the castle,” the boy mumbled. “Knew the traps. They were busy down below. The banner was on the gate-side sentry walk.”

Hadand spoke for the first time. “Did you see her die?”

The boy’s face blanched. “Yes. It was at the end.” And because the adults all waited, he gripped himself hard, trying to keep his voice from squeaking. “At first they killed everyone soon’s they could. But on the second day they brought Liet-Jarlan out onto the sentry walk. Took three of them, even with her tied up.” He swallowed, his face slick with sweat.

Cama took pity on him. “They got her down, kicked her around. Then cut her arms off. Tied her to the counterweight windlass for the inner portcullis.”

Radran said, “They made her watch. When they brought out the last—” His throat worked, and his head dropped forward.

Cama finished. “The last three women, and one of the girls. They hacked them up, and when they were dead, they put out the Jarlan’s eyes. Then they loosed her to run a knife gautlet, but she dodged them and threw herself over the parapet. Cursing them all the way down.”

Radran said grittily, “It’s their blood on the banner. Hers and . . .” He lost his voice again trying to name them.

“And the last four,” Cama said.

Hadand’s eyes had closed, minute tremors running through her at each act of cruelty. Inda’s recoil was equally subliminal, mostly signaled in the change of his color and his breath.

Evred gripped his hands tightly behind him, then turned away from those waiting gazes, and faced upward again. The banners were evenly spaced, chosen by his forefathers. He’d never thought to touch them, thought that they would hang there reflecting the glory of his family for centuries. All his early life he’d accepted that glory unquestioned. Now most of the banners seemed little more than boastful shouts after ephemera; this banner in Hadand’s hands signified the fullest measure of loyalty and bravery. Even though the battle was lost.
Because
it was lost. It was hopeless from the beginning, yet each of those women and girls had fought to the terrible end in hopes of keeping off the inevitable just that much longer, keeping faith that he—Evred—was in turn keeping faith with them at the other end of the pass.

This banner was not a testament to Montrei-Vayir glory, but to honor, to faith in oaths to Iasca Leror.

He looked around, and knew his instinct was right. This had been the right place to hear the terrible history, and so it was the right place for the banner to come to rest. “That one there, by the throne. My grandfather brought back the Olaran banner he took from Ala Larkadhe. I think it has served its purpose. This banner will replace it. And at Convocation, we will sing Liet-Jarlan Deheldegarthe and all her women.”

He saw in Inda’s and Cama’s faces, and in Hadand’s and Radran’s, that this was right.

Chapter Nine

I
NDA to Tau: