Time of Daughters II Read online

  TIME OF DAUGHTERS II

  Sherwood Smith

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café 2019

  Copyright © 2019 Sherwood Smith

  MAP OF MARLOVAN-IASCA

  A VERY BRIEF PREFACE

  The second half of this record begins five years after the end of the previous. Arrow (Anred-Harvaldar) and Danet still rule Marlovan Iasca. Their three children have reached adulthood.

  A list of Who’s Who can be found at the back.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Spring 4083 AF

  There were no fanfares for the merchants, artisans, and runners riding in and out the city gates, after being holed up as a frigid storm swept through.

  Bunny, now a riding master in the queen’s training, had just brought the new arrivals to the stable, splashing two by two through the wide, sky-reflecting puddles as Lineas walked at the back of the group.

  A lone horseman rode in through the gates. Princess, royal runner, and girls turned to stare at the comely young man riding easy in the saddle, his dark blue royal runner’s coat water-dappled. Familiar? Dark hair queued back, sharp cheekbones so familiar, though planed by the past five years—

  “It’s Quill!” Bunny shouted, forgetting that as a master, she was supposed to model proper discipline. Her fingers swooped and dived, the equivalent of shouting in Hand as she cried, “He’s back!”

  Quill laughed, his gaze flicking from Bunny’s happy smile to the lone bright red head among the various blond and dark haired crowd. Nearly six years of carefully cultivated emotional distance vanished like smoke as he gazed down into Lineas’s equally happy smile, her wideset eyes crinkled in friendly welcome. Without a vestige of heat.

  “You’re back, you’re back,” Bun crowed, then belatedly recollected herself as the staring sixteen-year-old girls whispered together.

  “Quill is a royal runner,” Bun explained, hands still signing. “And a friend from when we were all small. He’s been gone, doing the magic renewals all over the kingdom.” And to Quill, “Was it fun?”

  He laughed. Only Bun would ask that. What was she now, twenty-one, twenty-two? He was glad to see all her old enthusiasm, with no hint of longing. As he’d hoped, her teenage crush had died long ago.

  He slid from his horse and relinquished the reins to the waiting stable hand. “It was.” And because it seemed that Hand was now a part of everyday speech, he signed as he said, “Have things changed much while I was gone?”

  Bun turned to Lineas, rolling her eyes. “Where to start?”

  “I’ll show him, if you like,” Lineas said, her long, slender fingers graceful and dragonfly-quick in Hand.

  “Do that. We’ll be starting with the hooves, so take your time,” Bun added with meaning, remembering the state some of the horses had been in on certain girls’ arrival.

  And so Quill’s plan to slip back into castle life unnoticed also went up in smoke, leaving him to face the one person he’d wanted time to prepare for. But time, as well as desire, were not his to command.

  “Thank you,” he said to Lineas as he hefted his travel bag over his shoulder. “Lead on.” And in Old Sartoran, “Class in basic horse care?”

  “Yes,” she answered in the same tongue. “Many of them arrived with runners having done all such care. They’ll learn fast.” She smiled up at him. “Congratulations on your new sister. Oh! Did you know about her?”

  “Camerend has been writing to me all along.” And because it was Lineas, “I could see his happiness in the way he formed his letters.”

  Lineas’s smile brightened, then dimmed, her gaze direct, an echo of grief in it and in her voice as she said softly, “I’m sorry about Shendan.”

  “I saw her at the beginning of my journey,” he said. “She was content.”

  “Content,” Lineas repeated, and as she stepped onto the landing, she turned to face him. “Content. What did she mean by that? That she was ready?”

  “She didn’t want to face another winter, but mostly it was contentment at the current of our lives. The kingdom at peace, or as much as it ever is. I stopped in Darchelde on the way back, but didn’t see your parents. Your mother was reported to be somewhere near the western border, and I was told your father volunteered to serve in the king’s call.”

  “Yes. He’s been up in Ku Halir, helping build the new garrison.” Lineas opened her palm northward.

  They reached the second floor, which led to the royal residence. The ring of boot heels caused them both to look up, and then to step to the wall when they recognized Connar. Lineas’s face brightened as Connar’s blue gaze flicked from one to the other.

  “Quill is back,” Lineas said in Marlovan.

  “Quill,” Connar said equably, and to Lineas, “We saw one another at Larkadhe.”

  Lineas smiled. “I’m going to show him around, since everything has changed since he left.”

  “Someone else can do that,” Connar said.

  “I don’t mind. Bunny truly doesn’t need an assistant for today’s lesson, and I want to hear all about his journey. He’s been everywhere.”

  Then she stepped close to Connar, standing on tiptoe. He leaned down as she said softly, “The gunvaer was called to the barn.” She backed away again, her expression grave.

  Connar’s eyes shuttered. His hand rose to touch her cheek in a gesture equal parts tender and possessive. Quill felt it like a kick in the gut.

  Then the prince ran down the steps three at a time.

  Lineas said to Quill, “The stable people will keep Bun in the courtyard with her class. It’s Firefly,” she added with a compassionate glance toward the stable. “She made it to thirty-three. The gunvaer doesn’t want Bunny to know that the mare is dying. Even when animals live quite long for their kind, Bun always takes their deaths so very, very hard, as if she were at fault. And Firefly is one of her favorites.”

  Lineas thumbed away the sting in her eyes, reminding herself that Firefly was not writhing in pain. And not alone.

  Before Quill could find words that didn’t sound forced or sickening, she started up the steps to the third floor and began enumerating the alterations to castle life. “...so the middle wings have all been reassigned, out to the garrison, the barns, and the pottery. Here we are.”

  They topped the last step at the third story landing—they had reached the floor belonging to the royal runners, called the roost.

  She indicated the slit window looking into the castle’s interior structures. “Those roofs are now the queen’s training. They drill in the courtyard below the queen’s suite, exactly as they did in the old days. All those carts and the pottery clutter we used to hide in and under is all gone, and what can’t be used or remade shifted out to the other side of the north river.”

  She waved eastward, and started down the hall. “But at least you’ll find things mostly the same in the roost. We’ll go straight there, because the schedule is so different now. Tell me about your travels! I know you were renewing the magic, but surely you had time for other things. Connar said you were at Larkadhe. Did you hear the windharps?”

  “I did. I stayed on an extra week against a prospective wind change.” Memory assailed him, sound, smells, sense: sitting high on a mountaintop with Vandareth as they shared a packet of fresh-picked cherries while Vanda reeled off the galloping rhythms of poetry in Old Venn against the wind’s threnodies.

  “...I saw the great trees in Shingara....” Lying on an ancient Dawnsinger platform, rain tapping on the front-woven roof as singers wove complicated triplets in singing up the sun.

  “And was there for the Feather Dance up above Khanivar, which the locals call the Roof of the World.” High, crystalline voices of children in a
ir so cold it seized the throat, but the light there was so pure, so brilliant it hurt. They sang and sang, yet the Fire Dragon of the Flying People still did not come, and so the singing changed timbre to lament, leaving him wondering what story lay behind a myth, and ritual, clearly ancient.

  “...A triple rainbow over the ocean after a storm while I was on a houseboat below Parayid Harbor....” As a mysterious trader posed three riddles to Quill in Old Sartoran before he would permit him to see the statue of an egret taking wing carved of silverwood from the walking tree people of the east.

  “I planted rice in a terrace farm all the way south....” As a flock of long-tailed jezeels crossed the sky, calling to one another, until they vanished beyond the mountains above the Sartoran Sea.

  Which he climbed over the next three weeks, having gone off the right trail. He’d nearly frozen to death, with scant food left in his pack, his gloves ripped and palms bleeding from the jagged rocks when in desperation he followed a little white goat into a village built straight into living rock, whose people, dark of skin and clever of fingers, carved their history into a glistening moon-white stone, their work so fine and intricate you’d take the long narrative screens for paper.

  Kings would pay a kingdom’s ransom for the smallest of these, he’d said to the daughter who served him almond-flour cakes and spiced goat milk. She’d shrugged as she retorted mildly, What use is that to us? We live as we live. To which he said, I trust unscrupulous thieves never find you. She chuckled, replying, Ah, but the fogs hide us from wicked hearts. And as he’d made his way down the mountain, he had looked back, but could not find the trail among the dappled shadows and drifting mists....

  “Quill?”

  He blinked into Lineas’s face so close to his he could see his own reflection in her widened pupils.

  “Are you reliving a memory?” she asked, a pucker of concern in her brow.

  He forced a laugh. “I was. Forgive me! It’s just that most don’t want to hear a very long tale of travel, weather, and people without fame, or doings without blood or steel.”

  “I would,” she said, too gravely and too gently for rebuke. “That’s my favorite kind of tale. But I’m certain you’re tired and travel-worn, and hungry at the least. And the seniors will be so glad to see you. I’d like to hear the tale of your journey, if you ever decide to tell it.”

  “I’m afraid that would take as long to tell as it was to live.”

  She ducked her head, hiding her expression, and he would have cut out his tongue if it meant he could take the words back. Dolt! He’d managed to forget how quick she was, how sensitive to deflection. And once again he saw Connar caress her.

  “Forgive me,” she said, hands together.

  “No, forgive me. Lineas—”

  “There you are. At last!” Mnar bustled down the hallway toward them. Other than looking a little grayer, she seemed unchanged. “Lineas, on your way downstairs, send a fledgling for a meal, and Quill, I’ll fill in anything you’ve not already heard through your notecase.”

  Lineas flitted off.

  Mnar said, “Was it good, your journey?”

  “Very,” he said, fighting the urge to run after Lineas. He made himself turn away as Mnar clapped her hands together.

  “Excellent,” she said. “Later on I’d like to hear all about your journey. Right now, let me go over the changes since you left. As Lineas probably told you, they’re considerable, beginning with putting together a staff for Noren, who the queen is preparing to take over the queen’s training when she’s had a year or two more. . .”

  Quill actually knew more about the schedule than Mnar assumed, having received a long letter that morning while both he and Camerend waited out the same massive storm at opposite ends. But he sat politely, assuming an alert look, while resolving to smother all the questions arising from that single touch from the prince’s hand to Lineas’s cheek—out of all the news he’d received, there had been nothing personal, of course. And he had stupidly, stupidly, not asked her to write to him while he was gone, for oh, such sterling reasons.

  As Mnar talked, people showed up, smiling and welcoming Quill back. The most startling changes were in the former fledglings, now runners, and in the former fuzz, nearly unrecognizable with over five years’ steady growth.

  He discovered that though he’d considered carefully what he could tell and what not to, no one had time to hear much of it. They really wanted to be heard, for all their interest was bound up in the constantly flowing river of castle life. As it should be, he told himself.

  At the end, Mnar paused, pointed at the cooling food that had been waiting for him all this time, and said, “Any questions?”

  “None.”

  “Excellent. Get that meal into you, then go straight to work on the map with any emendations you’ve noted....”

  After Lineas’s warning about Firefly, Connar changed his route, and his intention. He waved off his first runner, Fish, who stood in the courtyard with Connar’s practice weapons, and noted Bunny in the courtyard, busy with a line of girls laboriously learning the rudiments of horse grooming on the oldest and most placid of the animals.

  It looked like the conspiracy to keep Bun from finding out about Firefly was working so far. A relief. Connar found Bun entirely incomprehensible, especially her passion for fixing whatever broken animal came her way and descending into wild grief when she couldn’t.

  He slipped into the stable, a vast building more airy than some of the best rooms in the castle. Foreigners who scorned the Marlovans and barbarians sometimes said that they treated their horses better than they did each other. It was often true. The royal horses had the largest stalls, roomy, always clean, whatever the time of year.

  Connar’s steps slowed when he saw his mother’s old mare lying on her side on fresh hay, Danet sitting at Firefly’s head, stroking slowly and gently, her profile long with the grief she didn’t try to hide.

  The stall stood open. Firefly wasn’t going anywhere—she had lain down for the last time, as horses will do when they know the end is near.

  Danet looked up at the footfalls, and when she saw Connar, her lips parted, and her eyes sheened with moisture. Connar, seeing the sob she swallowed, hurried the last few steps. “Lineas told me,” Connar said as he knelt beside Danet.

  Firefly’s ears flicked, and she heaved a snorting sigh, but otherwise accepted Connar’s presence; it was on her back that all three royal children had had their first ride.

  Connar watched Ma’s slow, gentle hand stroking Firefly’s face, and when a tear splashed on her knee, he said, “Don’t be sad. Firefly had a good long life.”

  “I know. And it’s good to be here with her.” Danet took a deep, shivering breath and said huskily, “But it still hurts to say goodbye.” She tried a wry smile, crooked and trembling. “And I admit I’m feeling sorry for myself, a little. Because Firefly is the first of what I’ll be facing. I never think about it, but I’m getting old, too.”

  “No. You’re not,” Connar said fiercely.

  “Your Da’s got white hair coming in. The other day I saw him from the back and was reminded of his father....” She gazed off, and sighed.

  Connar had slept little, or he might not have spoken, but the words he wrestled with from time to time made their way out, there over the horse that breathed so slowly.

  “If. Something happens to Da. What if Noddy doesn’t want to be king?”

  Danet looked up, startled out of grief, and stared at Connar. He gazed back through those thickly fringed blue eyes, as beautiful as the summer sky. She wasn’t sure when he had learned to mask his emotions; she had only become aware of it the year after he took that terrible beating.

  Her first impulse was to retort, “Then he’d be smart.” But Connar’s question, so sudden, unsettled her. She stroked Firefly’s soft nose as she tried to reach past that blank gaze for the impulse behind it. Then said slowly, “Since this is actually a subject that becomes important only after yo
ur da dies—”

  Not my da, came the thought, and Connar, as always, hated that thought, hated Lance Master Retren Hauth for putting it there—hated the way his own mind twisted back and forth during those nights when he couldn’t sleep.

  Danet leaned toward him over Firefly’s head, her hands gripping her elbows, and gazed straight into his eyes, her pupils huge. “Since it’s just you and me here, I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t care which of you becomes king. As far as I’m concerned, you can settle that between yourselves. But it would kill me—I mean it, it truly would kill me, it would faster and more merciful if you took a knife and cut out my heart—if you two fought over that throne. The single pride of my life is how good you boys have been to each other. For each other.”

  Connar heard the ring of truth in her husky voice, and leaned over to put his arms around her. She always seemed so strong, he was surprised how thin and bony she was. Hugging her gently, he said, “Mine, too.”

  He only realized how tense she was when he felt some of that tension went out of her body, and he let go. “You know Noddy,” he said quickly, easily. “Says one thing, then another. I just wondered—you were talking about age, and so forth. I’ll forget it by tomorrow. The way he does.”

  He shifted the subject to Firefly, reminiscing about how Danet put Bun on her back for the first time, and she’d clung to the saddle and wouldn’t let go. He went on to other good memories of family rides, speaking in that warm, silvery voice that never failed to have an effect.

  At the sound of footfalls, they both looked up, and there was Noddy.

  “She’s down.” Noddy stated the obvious, as usual, and dropped to his knees beside Connar, his long face unhappy. “I checked on her last night, and she was still standing. But she hadn’t eaten.” He stroked the mare’s face and gently fondled her ears in the way she liked it. “Connar, if you want to go out with Second Wing, I can stay here with Ma.”

  “Ma, do you want us both here?” Connar asked.