Crown of Renewal (Legend of Paksenarrion) (67 page)

“And they have a fair,” Arcolin prompted.

“Yes. Where they reenact the Battle of Greenfields every year. The one Gird won, the last big battle of the war.” Donag had a straight face, but his eyes twinkled.

Arcolin laughed. “I suppose that makes sense. Nobody’s going to
reenact a battle they lost, and without mages, nobody could reproduce the spouting well anyway.”

“Exactly. I doubt they did that in Gird’s day, but sometime after that whoever was Marshal-General started coming to Hoorlow’s fair and presiding over the mock battle. It’s a great time … three times the population or more for the week of the fair. Inns and taverns make most of their year’s income. Competitions for everything you can imagine. Marshals and High Marshals in Fin Panir vie for the honor of escorting the Marshal-General. We get to command the enemy, you see. Stand around in plumed helmets and wear what’s left of the ancient robes found in magelord palaces. Of course, then we have to die ingloriously, but … I’ve always enjoyed it.”

“Die ingloriously? She didn’t tell me
that
when she invited me to this year’s,” Arvid said, putting on a look of horror.

“She never does, the first time,” Donag said. “That’s part of the fun for the rest of us. Anyway, you’re not going;
you’ll
be here trying to talk ‘it is that’ and ‘is it that it is’ with a lot of sober, industrious gnomes and learn the local peasant dialect, perfectly safe from inglorious fake death while exposed to the real thing. Life of a Marshal. Whatever Gird wants.”

“Why do you have a cow on your banner?” Arcolin asked. “Is it that rumor I heard about a cowhide on sticks someone was calling Gird’s Cow last spring?”

“That story made it to Tsaia? Yes, that happened. It stank.” Donag finished off his mug of sib. “They’re very earnest, the Gird’s Cow people. They sing songs about Gird’s Cow. Badly. But Marshal-General, she thought it was a good idea, says Gird did, too, and they’ve got a man whittles these little cows—” He pulled a cow-shaped piece of wood out of his shirt. “Arvid’s got one, too, and Marshal-General … most of us. Mage-hunters hate ’em. So now Salis and his crew are trying to carve a cow-size cow. They were draggin’ that other all over, and people started cuttin’ bits off the hide to take home and tack up. And then some mage-hunters poured oil on it and set fire to it. This way it’ll be solid, Marshal-General says.”

“Do they sing about what color cow?” Arcolin asked, thinking of the dead man’s reaction to what he’d said.

“Yes, indeed: dun. Gird’s favorite cow color. Least important
thing about Gird, if you ask me, is what color cow he liked. We’ve never taught that in the granges. A cow is a cow.” He poured himself another mug of sib. “ ’Course, where I grew up we milked goats.”

“When do we meet the Gnarrinfulk gnomes?” Arvid asked, ignoring Donag.

“Soon,” Arcolin said. “Tomorrow I’ll take you—”

“Excuse me, my lord.” Kaim stuck his head in the tent. “There’s a gnome to see you.”

“Timing,” murmured Arvid, “is everything.”

Arcolin and his squire Kaim rode into Vérella before Autumn Court, having left his mixed cohort on Duke Elorran’s lands to bolster that duke’s almost nonexistent local militia and patrol the western border. He had sent word ahead that the Gnarrinfulk threat no longer existed and that the gnomes were acting in support of the Marshal-General, so felt free to visit Calla’s parents before going to the palace.

“Had a letter just yesterday,” her father said. “She’s in good health. Jamis, too, though he took a tumble off a horse. Wanted to ride a real horse, down in the village, apparently. No harm done.”

“You’re back early, aren’t you? It’s a full tenday to the Evener,” her mother said. “And who’s this with you?”

“Yes, I’m early,” Arcolin said. “And this is Kaim, my squire. Count Halar’s son.”

“Surely you’re hungry, a tall lad like you,” she said to Kaim. “I’ve baking fresh from this morning.”

Kaim looked at Arcolin. “Go ahead,” Arcolin said. “I should go to the palace now, but I won’t need you—bring your horse along later.” To Calla’s father: “They’ll take them at the palace—no need for them to be eating your fodder.”

At the palace, he met Duke Marrakai in the courtyard. “Did you hear the news?”

“I sent some news—is this about the Gnarrinfulk gnomes?”

“No … the dragon. The dragon came to Mikeli and told him
Camwyn is still alive but has no memory of his past. Mikeli … Well, you were not here all summer; you do not know how it’s been. He blamed himself, though we all knew it was not his fault. He was sure Camwyn had died and the dragon had chosen not to tell him. Now … he is grieved, of course, that his brother has no memory but rejoices that he lives.”

“Where is Camwyn? Here?”

“No. Somewhere in the dragon’s care. The dragon said it would be a long, slow process—that Camwyn can now walk a little but must relearn everything he learned as a child. Mikeli agreed not to search for him; the dragon promises a good future.”

“Any more iynisin problems?”

“None. Thank Gird and Falk and all the gods there are. Of course we have other problems, magery not least among them. Mikeli let us read your courier’s letter … Did you get to see Elorran?”

“Yes. And he does have the scars you mentioned all over the side of his head, and one eye’s gone. The other’s blind now. A sad case. They keep him tied upright in a chair by day and locked in at night. His steward’s done his best, but with no help from Elorran—not even a sensible word from day to day—he’s struggled to keep the holding together.”

“Do you think it was magery?”

“How could it be magery?”

“I don’t mean an injury made by magery—but an attack by someone who thought he had magery. Or maybe he did and they wanted to destroy it.”

“But who?”

“Someone in the family. Afraid of having it known.”

Arcolin shuddered. “That kind of fear … that hatred … it hasn’t saved us from real dangers, like iynisin or blood mages. It’s just made people kill and hurt those who have done nothing wrong.”

“Indeed. Come to us for dinner while you’re in the city. Oh—and Gwenno’s now in the Bells and wildly happy about it. Now the older of the Mahieran girls at home is clamoring to train there. I don’t suppose you want a girl squire …?”

“No,” Arcolin said. “Not one in the royal family, anyway.”

When he reached the king’s office, the king did look less strained than he had before. “You sent good news, Duke Arcolin.”

“I just heard better news from Duke Marrakai,” Arcolin said. “Prince Camwyn alive—”

“Yes. Though not likely to return. However, at Midsummer Court, the Council—in your absence but with, I told them, your concurrence—agreed to Rothlin’s marriage to Ganlin of Kostandan when she has finished her training. Roth is happy, and I am momentarily off the hook where marriage is concerned, though I expect the nudging and winking will start again soon.”

“Do you want to marry?”

Mikeli sighed. “Yes, but not with all the trouble it takes, on top of other troubles. You didn’t marry for years, possibly for some of the same reasons. When Queen Arian was visiting … well … a queen like that would brighten the whole palace. But she was not happy here, though she was courteous about it. So there’s a tangle: if the kind of woman I feel attracted to dislikes the life I must lead—and she must lead—then by marrying her I make her unhappy. I don’t want to do that.” He shook his head.

“I hope you don’t have to wait as long as I did,” Arcolin said.

“At least you didn’t have people nagging you about it from the moment your mother died,” Mikeli said.

Dorrin roused to the feel of hot sun on her back and legs and uncomfortably hard lumps under her. She opened salt-crusted eyes—they stung, and she blinked repeatedly—to see in front of her a glare of sunlit sand and … under and immediately around her body … a dazzle of jewels, most blue and white. More jewels than she had carried with her, more jewels than she had imagined existed.

She lay blinking for some moments, then shifted stiff limbs and aching back—why aching?—only then remembering the blow that might have severed her spine if it had landed with all its force. She had fallen into the sea, tried to swim, but her legs would not respond. She remembered sinking … looking up to see the water’s surface from underneath, a long narrow shadow that must have been the galley, then deeper and deeper. Vague memories then of the light fading, fish flashing past in silver and blue, and other sea creatures staring at her. Then, in the dim green-blue light, a time of rest on soft mud. She could not have been breathing … but she did not recall feeling any distress.

What, then? Swimming? Walking? No, being pushed or pulled or carried or otherwise moved through the water.

Surely it had been too long for a human to stay alive underwater. But past the initial moments, she remembered no fear, no struggle not to breathe, no helpless gasp for air that filled her mouth with bitter
saltwater. Just peace and strange noises—squeaks and clicks—she had never suspected lay beneath the waves.

Perhaps a dream? But the pain in her back proved—when she put her hand back to feel it—a definite bruise. Surely she couldn’t dream so realistic a bruise. She sat up finally, the jewels she had lain on shifting beneath her, coalescing into a narrower and taller heap until she sat on a sort of chair. She felt weight pressing on her head, a rim on her brow, and, lifting her hands, met a familiar shape—the crown she had first seen in the hidden niche of her study.

“You,” she said aloud, her voice hoarse.

No words this time but a sense of joy.

From her seat, she looked up and down the shore. Sand nearby, a long stretch of it, but in the distance a headland of dark rock. Aside from the strange seat on which she rested, no sign of humans—no footprints on the sand, no sails on the sea. Inland, the sand rose to dunes, and behind that more dunes, and some distance away—she could not tell how far—rough rocky hills backed by higher mountains. No grass, no trees. Rock and sand alone and the jewels that now gave back the sun’s light.

“This is Aare,” Dorrin said. “And this is where you wanted to come. Give back your water, then, and restore the land.”

You. Your magery
.

“I don’t know how.” Looking around again, Dorrin saw no sign at all of fresh water or anything that might be food. Though the sea might be full of creatures, she had no idea which were edible or how to find and catch them. For a moment that was funny—a woman brought up inland, in forested country, skilled with bow and sword, now alone on a sandy shore where none of her skills—or for that matter the bow and sword, if she’d had them—had use.

You go here
.

Into her mind came a vision of a place and a sense of direction: inland, past those mountains, a void in the land wider than she could see across … rocky cliffs in different colored rock down to a lumpy, unlevel bottom … what a huge lake or inland sea might look like, she realized, without its water. Near the rim of it, the ruins of three towers and a tumble of fallen white stones around them. A thread of
trail down, a flat place, a circle of something flat and pale. Sand? Dried mud? She could not tell.

The vision faded, but the sense of direction did not.

Queen of Water … bring us there
.

While she sat there, the sun and breeze had dried her; her boots and her leather jerkin were still damp. But she had nothing in which to carry the jewels that made up her seat … and though a shirt had held the bones from the well, it would not hold these. And besides—she had no water, no food, nothing but the clothes she wore and the crown on her head.

Then the goblet from the set of regalia rose in front of her as the crown had done before.

Drink
.

The goblet moved closer. She reached out, took it, brought it to her lips. Cool water eased her salty lips, ran down her throat … she only then remembered the frightening verse engraved in its rim. But nothing bad happened.

You are the Queen of Water
.

Dorrin stood; the stones slithered down from the seat shape into a pavement beneath her feet that extended perhaps ten strides in front of her in the direction she felt sure was right. Well, then … she took a step; the jewels supported her in the sand.