Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

VIII: Carialla

Rothesay had not leisure that afternoon to return to Merrithorander’s library: Carialla sent for her.

Dressing again after the meal and cleanup, in garments not yet wholly dry, Rothesay felt her spirits sink at murmurs of awe and sympathy, mixed with a grisly curiosity, from the other students. But she straightened her spine, and followed Flick’s lead to Carialla’s chambers, though she scarcely noticed the child’s challenge halfway along, nor her own triumph.

The door opened before she could knock. She was not encouraged by Carialla’s slim, lowering brows, either, though she was beginning to recognize that a look of brooding storm was, if not natural, at least little worse than habitual with the Mistress. As on her first night, she was waved to a cushioned chair by the hearth, where a bright fire vied with the afternoon sunshine for the honor of overheating the room. Rothesay was glad she was still damp, yet Carialla was robed as heavily as ever. A fat gray cat watched her sit, then hurled itself into her lap and rolled over lasciviously. Carialla seated herself with that grace more usually associated with felinity, and stared deep into Rothesay’s wide guileless eyes.

“A fortnight I’ve waited,” the Mistress purred, a distant, threatening thunder. “Lee owes me.”

“Yes, Lady,” Rothesay murmured vaguely, glad it was the Arms-master who drew Carialla’s lightning; presumably Leoff could hold some of his own against his Mistress.

“I knew your mother. That is—close your mouth, girl. That is almost more than you can say yourself, apparently. Do you know anything of her, other than the name?”

“Er—she was noble, Lady. That’s why Padriag taught me things. Reading and—um, such.” She did not care to say ‘magic’ and invite the Runedaur sorceress to humiliate her trivial skills in the arcane arts as Leoff did in the physical ones.

Carialla’s eyebrows lifted. “Then you know even him less well than you think: the Hand of the Dragon does not trouble with birthrank any more than do we. I do not value you for any presumption of a Darian rank, which you do not own, but only because you are Cherusay’s child. No, not even that; because you were with Cherusay, when she was lost.” Carialla, her voice having never risen above a murmur, fell fully silent for a thoughtful moment, then added offhand, “What value you possess intrinsically is yet to be shown. So, you come down now from Kelmhal’s country, from Bruic’s, in Anstrede. They still call it Anstrede, I believe?”

“Yes, Lady. Except they make it ‘ean-streeda.’ ”

“Anstrede, Elomar, Maldan—all of them kingdoms of lesser kingdoms: why have the barbarians no one king among them? Not even Fergil, last of Berulf’s line?”

Of course Carialla knew this, as well as she and probably better, but another of her new teachers asked, and she answered. “Because of the pact. About the Three Treasures.”

“The pact,” Carialla agreed. “They are rivals among themselves—but they do not let their rivals make them forget their enemies. Which,” she smiled thinly, “is more than can be said of their enemies. Yes, the pact, to rein rivalry in the face of the enemy.”

The night of Talherne’s death, and their own slender escape, Berulf’s after-court was very quiet. The three chiefs on their cushioned camp stools sat about the hearth-fire, silent over their mead. Berulf sat at the east, the place of honor; Galbric had the south, the place of vigor, and Felka the north, the seat of power. In the problematic west, on a red pillow on a low chest, Teillorn glowed in the firelight like a fairy thing, present and yet incalculably remote.

Who should wear it? Berulf, whose enterprise this was? Galbric, whose deed won it? Felka, who already commanded fully half of them, and to whom the gods seemed to cast it? A bard had stood behind each man’s shoulder, till they withdrew to take counsel among themselves and the gods. The bard Narhald, it seemed, stood behind Teillorn even now, and his words, unrepeated by any since they left his own lips, thickened the silence.

Berulf’s bones ached. He should wear the crown, he grumbled to himself, if only because his remaining years were shortest—if they were even to be years. The Sferan tooth had bitten deep into his old thigh, and it was an iron tooth: the Geillari believed that a wound from steel was deadlier than any other. The Runedaur had spoken poetry on the wall this morning; but Berulf was inclined to disregard the poetry on a foreign voice. Then what must he do? He had meant to supplant Talherne, of course—but not like this, a guest slaying his host. Such a deed fed the demons who clustered beyond the firelight, beyond the warded walls, and weakened the gods. He began to reckon the cost of the sacrifices of kine and swine that would be called for, and the poems and songs to be demanded of his bards and the gifts that they must have. He would need much booty from this land.

Felka eyed the crown with a craftsman’s eye. Long ago he had almost sold his birthright to become a bright-smith himself; he admired the art of it, even though its style—Callemórine, though he could not know that, never having heard so much as rumor of that vanished race—displeased him. It had a light look, almost playful, that only some bardic satire could ever have named ‘sorrow.’ But it was bootless to waste good drinking time on wondering who would wear it. That man would be rald dunrald, king of the kings, whom the bards chose, as they had gone to do. He reached for the mead jug.

Galbric drank the golden light of the magical crown and not his honey brew, and hungered to taste its weight and power.

The bards woke them just before dawn. In the night they had woven a great poem, seeking wisdom in the staves. The poem remembered that there were three great tokens of the Dragon-kings, all potent with deep magic. First and eldest was Teillorn the revered; strongest was the Sword, Maerre the Kindler; but greatest and most dangerous of all was the Sferemath, the Eye of the Dragon: who wielded the Eye wielded Marennin herself. The poetry (and the restraint of bardic rivalry on behalf of their respective kings, as well, though that was never openly spoken) demanded a high-king who possessed all three—and no one, not even the Dragon-lords themselves, knew where the other two were to be found.

Felka laughed. Berulf sighed. Galbric made no sign, veiling his fury from bardic eyes, but he set his poets on the hunt before the sun had risen another fingerspan.

“So it has stood for two centuries. They grow restless.” On the arm of her chair, Carialla rattled her fingernails rhythmically. They were neither long nor polished, Rothesay noted disappointedly. Paintings and sculptures showed noble Sferan ladies with nails impressively long and excitingly colored, and she thought they looked so elegant.

“They have one of the Three. What if they could find another?” she mused.

Rothesay blinked, then leaped to her feet, sending the cat flying. “My sword!”

“No, girl. Maerre would have burned your little cobweb mind to nothingness, and what walked out of that tomb would not have been you. Metaphorically speaking,” she added, chuckling at some joke out of Rothesay’s ken. And as Rothesay dropped back to her seat, clutching her burning thighs, she laughed outright: “You will be Runedaur when you can jump from under a cat scatheless!”

“It’s not funny,” Rothesay grumbled, but low, a chattel’s flirt with dignity.

“It will be.” She lifted a delicate glass filled with what looked like water and was probably that wild stuff in Dav’s flask, but she drank deeply of it before she spoke again. “We are expensive allies.”

“Um,” said Rothesay, her thoughts skidding, trying to follow Carialla’s. “Yes, Lady.”

“Your mother wanted our aid. Did you know?”

“To help her take the throne,” she murmured, staring through a memory of spruce branches at the top of a Darian wig.

“Aye, the Pearl Throne. No little bauble, regicide and usurpation, and alliance after.”

“But—well, why? Did she have any kind of claim?” Rothesay did not want a rogue king-slayer for a mother, but she could imagine no royal ties for her, either.

Carialla shrugged, her eyes, strangely bright, never leaving Rothesay’s. “She was old king Herumer’s first-born child—maybe his only child,” she all but whispered. “Some call that a claim.” Watching Rothesay turn stark white, she smiled, showing her canines.

Then another thought drove that incomprehensible royalty of her parent safely from Rothesay’s mind.

“You let her die! You didn’t help her!” Rothesay shrieked, stumbling to her feet again, half-prepared to choke Carialla on the spot, or try to.

“Did we not?”

The cool disclaimer cut through Rothesay’s shock. “Um. You did?” She hulked awkwardly, arrested in mid-threat over the smaller woman.

“No.” Carialla watched dispassionately as confusion contorted the girl’s face, before deigning to explain. “We had barely opened the flirtation with a few letters, she and I—”

“You?” Rothesay blurted. “Not, um, Master Dav?”

“Do sit down.” The purring voice made the few syllables an unspeakable threat; Rothesay’s suddenly-buckling knees dropped her compliantly back in her chair. “Not,” she went on, “Master Erriol. Dav was still a sword-happy brat; how old do you think he is? But why myself and not Erriol? Reputation, I fancy.” Carialla flashed her teeth again.

“Reputation? But you couldn’t have been more than a girl yourself!”

“Shall I thank you for the compliment or rebuke you for muddy vision? Never mind. Look now at a spirited and ambitious princess. Look at power to take a throne, a power possibly for the buying. The usual fees are: gold, and influence, and both together worth still more. The world knows Cherusay proposed to hire us. The world still wants to know what coin she had to barter with, and, most especially—where is it now?”

The witch began to laugh long and softly, her shoulders shaking in a mirth Rothesay did not share or understand. Carialla—who, Rothesay thought despairingly, could still be called beautiful when she laughed—thought she might have a clue to her mother’s secret hoard? She, who could not even find this room unaided? She thought of the hearthwards who had ridden to Harrowater at the whim of Baron Fancy-name, who had heard of a half-Ceidhan child nearby. . . . So that’s what he had wanted: he too had thought she was the key to treasure! And so, then, did every other fortune-hunter who had ever heard the name of Cherusay. She shivered, as implications sprouted like deadly tentacles of unguessed peril. Colderwild itself seemed a trap waiting to spring—and its mistress toyed with the trigger. Her eyes wide, she stared horror-deep into Carialla’s. I will never be safe again! she screamed, but soundlessly, in the hollow of her heart.

“Ignorance is a fool’s security: you were never safe,” snapped the witch as if she had heard. “Except as men thought you were dead,” she added with a shrug. “Nor do you know the half of your peril. Why did Daria not take Peria, when Talherne fell?”

Rothesay shook her head sharply, rattled like a child’s toy at this new turn. Carialla answered the question for her.

“She was—ah, busy. King Orhade had much the same troubles with his barons as had his cousin Talherne, but he proved the wiser of the two: he kept his crown and his head both. He made swift peace at home, to send at once to Peria and claim the crown by blood kinship.” Carialla chuckled. “Alas, that mattered nothing to the barbarians; and the Perian princes regard the Darians as scarcely more Dragon-blooded than the invaders. Daria was far over the sea, and too weak yet to press her claim; she could be ignored. Orhade then tried the indirect route, pitting one chieftain against another. Thus he created a few powerful overlords out of a gaggle of petty jealousies; thus do the high-kings of Anstrede, Elomar and Maldan owe their power to the machinations of their rival across the sea.

“But the claim might still be made, though two centuries of estrangement have thinned the blood still further. They say no one will wear Teillorn, who does not also possess the Sword and the Eye. And yet,” she amended, slow as dripping honey, “and yet it might be that one who wields enough dragon-magic might do without one or the other: having three out of four, we may say. Such a man might once have been Orhade of Daria. Such a man today might be—your uncle, Rumil. What if he could find one, even one, of the lost treasures, eh?”

Rothesay faintly shook her head. The idea of calling the king of Daria ‘uncle’ fit into her imagination as well as a pig in a pint-pot, and she sat mute and stupid. But feeling obliged to make some sort of sensible remark, she managed to work out, “Or, um, one of the Sferan princes?” Cathforrow’s sunken face swam into memory, and she hoped Carialla would say no.

The witch of Colderwild chuckled. “Could one of them command the fealty of the rest—oh, perhaps. Rumil has the power of a whole people behind him; the Perians are rent by many ancient grudges. But the Geillari, now: they are sworn to this; they will live by this. And some of them have the blood-power.” She rattled her fingernails again. Then her thin lashes fluttered, half-veiling her brooding gaze. Her hands rose, seeming to cup something before her breast, a cup tipped toward Rothesay. Light swirled suddenly there, light laced with silver whiteness bright as splinters of sunlight, that pierced the eye and made all else dim. Then she held, or appeared to hold, a globe of amethyst crystal as large as Caltern’s clenched fist: firelight glanced off its perfect, polished shoulder, rich violet light gleamed in its depths like dark wisdom in the eye of some ancient, magical creature. Three silver claws clasped it from above, themselves surmounted by a flower of five mother-of-pearl petals with a center of clustered diamonds that flashed and flamed.

Rothesay cried out and reached toward the glittering thing. “That!”

“You have seen it before?”

She had, she knew she had, but all that remained was the recognition. No frame of place or time anchored the shining wonder to any other memory; she could connect it with Daria only because her recollections since washing ashore in Harrowater left no room for it.

“No matter,” said Carialla, so informed, letting the beautiful image vanish; and the sun-bright room seemed dimmed. She folded her thin hands and her eyes gleamed, like a cat’s who has scented cream. “No matter,” she purred. “You have thus answered my foremost question. I did not think Cherusay could be fool enough to offer what she did not have to give; yet it seemed incredible that she indeed possessed it. She did have it, eh? Memorable, isn’t it?” she grinned.

“Is that,” Rothesay breathed, as image and legend suddenly merged, “is that the Sferemath?”

“The Eye of the Dragon: aye, indeed. The greatest treasure of the Sferiari, the manifest symbol of our race.” She swirled her crystal cup, making its contents glimmer. “And if I could put that in a man’s hands? Help him take the crown as well, and hold both—eh?”

Rothesay’s head snapped up. “You, um, want a puppet king?”

“A king of my choosing, answerable to me, amenable to my influence, very much so.”

“But not—not a Runedaur king?”

Carialla merely stared, a pale, bland look; only much later did Rothesay recognize it as betrayal, however remote, of the Mistress’s shock. “No,” she said, repressively; and then a giggle escaped her. “No, that would not be at all suitable. Men are not ready for such, ah, rule. But you see how I was . . . interested, in treating with Princess Cherusay.”

“But where could she have gotten it?”

Carialla seemed surprised. “Why, I imagine—from your father, girl. It seems to have been in no mortal hands.

“Now, you have seen it, I must guess in your mother’s hands—”

“I don’t know where it is!” Rothesay almost shouted. And I wouldn’t tell you if I did!

Years ago, Padriag had shown her a simple little spell for veiling her thoughts from magical prying. She had never learned it; there was no one in Harrowater with any such talent, however many had the desire, including herself. She wished mightily for it now.

“We can teach you,” Carialla drawled, and grinned a little as Rothesay turned away wishing chagrin were fatal. “But you’ll find such magics of use only outside our walls.”

Rothesay looked back. “You reserve your greater spells for people of rank.” She was not resentful; it was only the way of the world.

But it seemed to anger the Mistress. “Our greater spells are for whoever cares to risk them,” she snapped. “That most often follows experience, as does rank—but neither necessarily. No, girl, they’re of no use because the reading of the Runedaur is not magical, and so cannot be magically blocked.”

“Not magical?” She was startled. The way she ‘read’ animals was not magical, either, as she had told Dav, but she had never experienced it from people. She told Carialla about ‘talking’ with Dark Walking.

“How? Do you know?”

“No, Lady. I just do it.”

“And men just walk, never knowing how they move, and thus does rope-walking seem like sorcery. We will teach you our art. And we will teach you the only means of thwarting it.”

“In exchange for—?” Rothesay asked suspiciously. Carialla shrugged.

“You tell us.”

At once she remembered Caltern’s price for sending aid to her family; and she remembered them with a freshened agony of homesickness. Their faces filled her sight, their laughing chatter, their foolish jokes, even their shrieking fights rang in her ears. An unguessable time later, then, a soft murmur said, “You may go now.”

“What?” Rothesay snapped a hundred leagues back to Carialla’s rooms, to find herself sweltering and half-suffocating in the heat. “I thought—weren’t you going to make me tell you where Mother’s treasure went?” she babbled, as the dread fell away that had pressed on her since she was first summoned.

“I have learned enough for now. We may try stronger measures later—spells for remembrance,” she reassured coolly, seeing Rothesay blanch. “If you do not know where she stowed it, you may recall things that will serve us for hints. Would you like—oh, to remember your grandmother, perhaps?”

Grandmother: an image of formidable power somewhere away at the top of silken skirt folds deep enough to hide in. What would it be like, to remember a time when she was always warm, well fed, and welcome? To remember Cherusay herself . . . but to do that she must become a pawn in Carialla’s game. What a demon’s bargain.

She drew up her head and gazed steadily at the witch, a long, appraising stare, so remote from fear that she did not even note its absence. “Of course I would. But I don’t know about your price.”

Carialla stared back. Terror returned on the flood, but Rothesay held her gaze for one more moment, not in defiance but desire, a desperate wish not to lose the fearlessness she had just tasted, and recognized only as she lost. She dropped her eyes, and missed the gleam of approval in her Mistress’s.

“You may go.”

Rothesay nodded, rose, and shambled away, awkward between a lust to be gone and a fear of offending. Then one of Carialla’s mirrors pulled her up short. If Padriag’s belongings were half-awake, Carialla’s seemed acutely perceptive: the room felt crowded with watchful souls. Look at me. Demanding ones, too. But she had so seldom seen her reflection that her own image was almost a stranger’s; she obeyed recklessly. She watched herself raise a hand to her face. It was all angles and planes, and the mouth was too wide. “Er, Lady? What did she look like? My mother?”

Carialla raised an eyebrow. “Had I ever learned that, you would now be Princess Rothesay el-Cherusay of Daria, and maybe my own king would be competing for your hand.”

Rothesay blushed and slunk out.