His Own Good Sword (The Cymeriad #1) (3 page)

The sky was still the deep bluish-black of early morning when he got
up, the room cool and damp because he’d forgotten to close the
shutters. He splashed cold water from the wash basin onto his face,
strapped on his gold-bossed leather cuirass over the indigo-dyed
woolen uniform tunic, buckled his sword-belt on his hip, and went
into the anteroom. The Cesino slave had been sitting cross-legged by
the doorway again, his head tilted back against the wall, his eyes
closed, but he came awake immediately and got to his feet. Tyren
picked up his bags and went out into the dark corridor, out to the
atrium portico. The Cesino followed him without a word. The echoes of
their footfalls went racing round the marble as they walked, and the
great door creaked when Tyren eased it open, but no one came after
them. It was too early even for the house slaves to be stirring. They
went down the steps and crossed the yard to the stable.

Inside the stable Tyren set down his bags in the corner by the
doorway and went along the row until he found Risun’s stall. He
saddled Risun himself, while the Cesino saddled the black colt, and
led him out into the row so he could feel out the hooves. He
straightened in time to see his father come in. He held Risun’s
reins in one hand and waited, lifting his chin a little.

“Your mother was in tears last night,” Torien said. He
leaned against the post of the stall door and looked at Tyren with
his arms folded across his ribs.

“Maybe Tore should learn to hold his tongue,” Tyren said.
“There was no need to upset her with the idea of where I’m
going.”

“He told me what happened—why Marro’s determined to
have his revenge on you.”

“I’m surprised to learn Tore was there when it happened.
I didn’t see him.”

“Watch your own tongue,” said Torien. “This isn’t
about some quarrel with that Marro whelp. This is about the Risto
name.”

“I’ve done nothing to shame the Risto name.”

“Do you think the Rani will see it that way?”

He said, “The Rani?”

“You really think Chæso Rano will see his daughter wed to
you when you’re commanding a handful of undisciplined commoners
in a muddy farm village in the Outland? And there are other
considerations. You made it clear you had more regard for this Cesino
than you had for a Vareno noble. Did you give any thought to how that
might appear to the Senate? To the Emperor?”

He’d given thought to it, of course—afterward, when
there’d been time and space to give thought to it. He’d
given little thought to it at the time it was happening. There’d
been nothing but hot, senseless anger in him then. There’d been
no time to worry about the consequences. The Cesino would have been
dead if he’d taken the time to worry about the consequences.

He spoke through shut teeth. “It makes no difference he was
Cesino. If he’d been Vareno I’d have acted just the same
as I did. It was injustice either way.”

“It makes a difference for you,” said Torien. “They’ll
say your loyalty is conflicted, use this as proof we can’t be
trusted with the governorship.”

Tyren said nothing.

Torien turned his face away and let out his breath heavily in
exasperation. After a moment he looked back.

“I’ll write to Choiro,” he said. “I’ll
write Rano, try to convince him this marriage is still worthwhile for
him. That means I must convince him you still have a future. Do you
understand me?”

“I understand you,” Tyren said.

That was goodbye. Torien went back up to the house, not saying
another word, not looking back once. Tyren watched him go. There was
a kind of bitterness knotted up inside him again but it wasn’t
anger this time. No—regret, maybe. He wouldn’t see his
father for a long time and there was the very real possibility he
wouldn’t see him again—the Outland was dangerous—and
this wasn’t how he wanted to leave it between them. There’d
always been a kind of gulf between them, but why did it have to widen
now? He wished it hadn’t widened now. He wished there were no
gulf at all, that for once they might be father and son without
tradition or expectation or pride to come between them.

Better, he thought, if he hadn’t come back.

The Cesino slave had stood there all that time, holding the black
colt’s head and saying nothing. He’d put Tyren’s
bags across the saddle and when Torien had gone he brought the colt
slowly over and the colt threw out his legs in excitement as he
walked, as if he were dancing. It was a fine animal, Tyren couldn’t
deny that. But Risun was his horse. Risun had been with him for three
years now—an old soldier’s horse. Reluctantly he gave
Risun’s reins to the Cesino and took the black colt’s
reins in his left hand and wound a thick lock of the black mane round
his fingers and pulled himself up into the saddle. The black colt was
powerful beneath him, all fluid muscle, so finely thin-skinned Tyren
could feel the fire in his blood when he put a hand on the colt’s
shoulder. The Cesino mounted Risun and sat waiting, expressionless.
Tyren heeled the black colt and rode him down the row and out into
the yard at a smooth canter. He understood now why Tore had been
angry the colt wouldn’t be raced. The gaits were perfect. The
colt could have beaten anything. This wasn’t the sort of horse
you gave a soldier.

A yawning guard ordered the opening of the gate for them and they
rode the gravel path down through the city to the causeway. Vessy was
still asleep, though down on the lake-shore a few fishermen were
uncovering their boats and shaking out their nets by torch-light.
Tyren and the Cesino went west on the causeway, round the lake
towards Chælor. They’d reach the crossroads by dawn,
maybe earlier—could be better than halfway to Rien by sundown,
if there weren’t any trouble on the road, and Rien was the last
big city before the mountains.

II

It was an hour yet until daybreak, two hours at least until Chæla
would rise, but Torien didn’t return to the bedchamber. He went
instead to his study, took off his cape and draped it over the back
of the desk chair. Then he sat down in the chair and lit a lamp
against the early-morning darkness and pretended to give his
attention to some ledger-work while his thoughts wandered.

He’d hoped to convince Tyren to stay, of course—to shame
him into staying until this thing could be investigated further, if
the fool wouldn’t be dissuaded from it merely by the prospect
of Souvin itself. Foolish, maybe, but Tyren had never been a coward.
But he’d known the manner of determination in Tyren’s
face, had known his words were little use against it. Well, let him
go, then. The matter would be settled quickly enough.

Sere Moien, captain of the household guard, found him there in the
study later. By then the pink light of dawn had started in through
the east-facing window and Torien could hear the house slaves moving
along the corridor beyond the study doorway, making their
preparations for the morning meal and the day ahead.

He spoke to Moien without looking up from the ledger. “I’d
hoped to talk some sense into him.”

“He’s gone, then?”

“An hour ago or more. I couldn’t threaten him out of it.”

Moien sat down in the cross-legged chair before the desk, adjusting
his sword round the chair as he sat, stretching out his long legs.

“No, he’s too much like you for that,” he said.
There was a touch of amusement in his voice. “You know that,
Torien. You know you weren’t going to stop him.”

A sharp reply started on Torien’s tongue. He swallowed it
before it could come out and spoke instead in grudging
acknowledgment. “He’s no coward. I suppose that’s
one consolation.”

“There was a time when you might have done the same as he’s
doing now. In fact—I remember clearly you doing much the same
as he’s doing now, against all better judgment.”

There was a sudden pain in his heart, keen as a dagger stroke. There
always was when the memories woke. He looked up.

“Once,” he said. “Before all this. It was simpler
then, Sere. Everything was simpler then.”

Moien dipped his chin in a brief nod. He didn’t say anything to
that. He knew better than to press it further.

There was silence between them a while. He’d kept writing this
whole time: figures from the steward Rovero’s ledger, and from
the report the stable-master had given him yesterday, and from
Moien’s own reports of the guard-house and armory—rows
and rows of figures copied down neatly, precisely, mindlessly, out of
habit. His thoughts were elsewhere.

“I’ll write Mureno,” he said, at length. “There
has to be one man left at Vione who isn’t licking the
sandal-straps of the Marri. I want the truth of the matter. I want
Marro to answer for it.”

Moien said, “Have you thought that perhaps this is more than
the Marro boy’s petty vengeance plot?”

“Of course I’ve thought of that.”

“You should be on your guard. You and Tore both. I’ll
spread the word among the men, if you’ll permit it.”

“Do it quietly,” said Torien.

“Yes, sir.”

He worked on the letter to Mureno when Moien had gone. The words he’d
spoken floated through his head while he wrote: simpler, once. Yes,
how much simpler it had been at Tasso, all those years ago, with no
other concerns than the straightforward, practical business of
commanding a garrison. How much simpler to be a soldier, to be away
from politics, away from Choiro. And how quickly it had all been
complicated—the word coming to him in the headquarters of the
fortress at Tasso that his father and brother were dead in the same
day. Killed by Cesino rebels in the mountain pass between Varen and
Cesin—or that was the story spread round the Empire, at least.
He’d learned the truth later, in Vessy for his own installation
as governor, from careless words dropped by a drunk Marro guardsman.
He’d learned the truth and could do nothing, for he never saw
the guardsman again, the Marri had made sure of that, and there was
no other evidence for it. He carried the black, bitter anger still,
had carried it bound up inside him twenty years now, and all the
while the Marri had been building up their power here in Cesin and
their standing in the capital.

But it had been a mistake to meddle with the army—Lucho Marro’s
first mistake, maybe. A mistake to think he could send the son of
Torien Risto to a place like Souvin and see no repercussion for it.
There was too much of the army still beyond his grasp, too many men
of the command who’d see the blatant offense of this thing and
raise a clamor against it, when the truth got out. A grave mistake to
try to use the army against the Risti. Lucho Marro would find he’d
closed his fingers round empty air.

He’d finished the letter, and had given it to a messenger to be
taken down to the post-station in the city, by the time a servant
brought him the summons to the morning meal. The meal was served in
the garden room, adjoining the kitchens, and the rest of the family
were already present when he went in: Chæla and Challe, Tore
and Juile. Chæla was pale, sickly-looking, her eyes still
rimmed with tears, her lips pressed in a thin, tight line.

Tore was in a better mood.

“My brother’s left for his new command, I hear,” he
said.

“Before dawn,” said Torien, shortly, as he took his seat.

“He realized you wouldn’t buy him some new post?”

“That isn’t what he wanted of me.”

“Better he goes, anyway,” said Tore. “That’s
the only honorable way to deal with this thing.”

“Maybe,” said Torien. “We’ll see. I’ve
written to Vione to find out the truth of it.”

“What more is there to find out? The Cesino drew a blade on
Marro. That would be a serious offense even were it a Vareno who’d
done it—and a man of the nobility, an officer. This was a
commoner, an enlisted man—and Cesino, to finish it off.”

“Tyren must have had compelling reason to risk defending him,
then,” said Torien.

“Compelling reason to spit in Luchian Marro’s face for
the sake of a Cesino foot-soldier?”

“Occasionally there are other reasons to act than for the
thought of political advancement,” said Torien.

Tore shook his head. “Now’s the time to be strengthening
our ties with the Marri, not looking for ways to provoke them
further.” He paused, to give his next words more weight. “You’d
see that, maybe, if you’d think more about your duties as
governor and less about pursuing this tired, pointless thing against
the Marri for your own mad reasons.”

There was a long, tense silence over the table, broken only by the
sound of Chæla crying softly. She’d turned her face away,
cupping it in one hand, as if she thought no one would see the tears
that way, or see her shoulders shaking. Juile and Challe sat frozen,
their eyes down, Challe with food forgotten in her mouth.

Torien spoke quietly. The anger had risen at once in his throat, of
course, the old black anger burning fiercely inside him, but it had
died away again quickly as it had come. There was deep, heartsick
pain spreading through him instead—the sudden realization Tore
didn’t understand the weight he carried, couldn’t
understand it. He’d carried it alone twenty years; the Marri
had seen to that. He couldn’t expect Tore to share it with him
now.

“When you are governor of Cesin,” he said, “you may
make your own decisions about the things that constitute your duties
in that office. You may forget your duty to me then, if you wish—but
only then, do you understand?”

“When I’m governor,” said Tore. There was a
harshness in his face and in the short laugh he gave. “If the
Risti still hold that office—if you haven’t succeeded in
ruining us.”

III

It was the southwest road that led from Chælor to Rien and
eventually—though it was probably little more than a mud track
by then—to Souvin. For the most part the road cut across wet
green farmland, rising fields of wheat and barley, and there were
villages occasionally, earthen thatch-roofed huts and low, dark
flag-stone cottages clustered close along the road. Very little
Vareno influence here, the heartland of Cesin, lying between the fort
at the crossroads and the bigger city of Rien. He’d forgotten
how much he loved this country. Rough and wild compared to Varen—raw
black earth and pine wood instead of marble and brick. But there was
a deep peacefulness here, an unhurriedness he’d missed in
Choiro, a sense of age, of long memory. You felt the years had
weathered this place, gnarled and knotted it, and the petty things
that mattered so much to the younger places of the world didn’t
matter here at all.