Sartor (40 page)

Late at night there came a noise below and the girls had
crouched in fear on the landing, regretting the lights until they saw servants enter,
bearing bulky receptacles, following which their mother strode in, looking
around with a frown.

Her face had changed to relief and a smile when she looked
up and spied the two faces on the landing, but that after that bright moment,
everything after felt like the descent of the sun.

Mother had called them into her formal receiving room, and
required them to recount everything. She had stopped them frequently to correct
pronunciation—
You have picked up some disgustingly low idiom and
enunciation. That will change at once
—and to ask questions—
Who
is this Savar? He’s gone? What was his title?
—after which Arlas
had asked, “What happened to you, Mother?”

“Never mind that. The past is past, and we survived,
the three of us. We must not betray the memories of House Ianth by letting
sentiment get in the way of service. This young queen owes you a great deal, enough
I should think to gain us Second Circle or higher. You will help her understand
this by reclaiming the Dei brat. With her turned out properly, when Yustnesveas
Landis summons her first Star Chamber, you can claim guardianship of Julian Dei...”

Julian had refused to come to Irza, even though she’d
scolded and, in fear of her mother, begged. No one at that pleasure house
listened to Irza’s commands to hand her over. Nobody paid Irza any
attention, except to say, “The child may stay as long as she
wishes.”

Irza had walked out and found...

“There is a mob about to execute someone,” she
said to Atan. “They will not listen to me—”

Atan pushed past and ran down the steps.

Irza led the way past the orderly line (everyone turning
heads to stare at Atan as she dashed by) to the other end of the square,
through an arch and into a smaller square, outside the old palace guard
enclosure, which the Norsundrians had taken over. This was where Hinder and
Lilah had been so briefly imprisoned.

As the two girls arrived, several people tried to drag a
struggling woman toward a wall, where two men and a woman stood with bows in
hand, arrows nocked.

“What are you doing here?” Atan yelled, but no
one heard her above the screams of the woman and the angry shouting of the
crowd.

Fury gave her energy. She murmured the spell, aimed the ring
she still wore up toward the sky, and the courtyard lit with a flash of light
painful to the eyes.

Silence.

Atan turned to the leader of the mob, a stout man with a
thick beard. “I am Yustnesveas Landis. What are you doing?”

“I’ve had Candal Mityan in my cellar since your
father died, princess,” the man said. “We in the House Guild—”

“That’s inns, eateries, and pleasure houses,”
the thin woman with the bow pointed out in a self-important tone.

The man sent her a look. “We swore to close down when
the city was taken. But Candal Mityan broke that ban. We burned her house just
before they put the binding spell on us, when we found out she’d been
collaborating with those Norsundrian soul-suckers, excuse my language—”

An old woman shrieked, “She took booty as payment! Booty
they looted from the dead here in the city!”

“
Entertained
them!” yelled a burly man
with bright red hair. One of his huge hands held the struggling woman by the
arm. “We swore she’d die first thing we got peace, and so we mean
to keep that promise!” He shook the accused woman as he spoke.

“Then we haven’t peace,” Atan said.

“What?” The thin woman gawked.

The bearded man flushed. “We’re keeping the new
peace by executing a traitor.”

“Not true,” the bound woman said hoarsely.

The red-haired man let go and she dropped to the ground,
where she struggled to rise. It was difficult, due to her bound hands.

“Cut her free,” Atan said.

No one moved.

Anger flashed through Atan, so hot and bright it made her
prickle all over. “Fine, then I will do it myself, but if anyone moves
before she has a chance to speak for herself, then... then I’m going to
go back to Sarendan, and you can fight among yourselves for another hundred
years, and save Norsunder the trouble of destroying Sartor for good.”

Hinder glided round one of the adults. He pulled a stone
knife from a hidden pocket in his tunic and silently cut the woman’s bindings
as she sobbed. “Princess,” she said, making a visible effort. “I
am no traitor. I did take them in. Entertain them. The stone-backs killed my
daughter the first night. She was a guard at the palace. They were taking what
they wanted anyway, all my drink and food. I—I thought to turn on them,
but not by fighting, but by my arts. And so I got them drunk, and talking, and
bragging, and every word they said I passed on to my brother, also in the
guard.”

Hannla appeared at Atan’s elbow, her aunt beside her. The
older women looked grim, and Hannla afraid, her eyes huge.

Then an old man at the back muttered, “And made
yourself rich doing it?”

“Where’s this brother?” someone asked.

“She had a brother in the guard, right enough,”
the thin woman with the bow admitted in a grudging voice, her gaze down. “Might
be dead, though.”

“I don’t know. He hasn’t come by, so far.”
Candal Mityan lifted her chin. “What would he have to come to? If Garrod
Thesvar there hadn’t caused my house to burn, you would have found every
single thing I took in payment down in my cellar, waiting to go back to its
owners. I never took one silver of blood money, not one. Go look in my cellar. See
if you don’t find melted metals, silver and even a little gold, for they
never paid much. Mostly they just took.”

Atan had been thinking rapidly.

So far she had listened to people, and the decisions, the
orders, had been easy.
Settle the wounded in this room. Send guild problems
to the guild houses. Find out who is willing to serve food, and we’ll pay
later.

Now she had to take command in the sense of passing
judgment. She had the title. The question was, whether or not the title and the
look of a Landis were enough to mantle her with authority.

She lifted her voice. “Everybody here has discovered
that some family members aren’t going to come wandering back. And another
thing I’ve learned as I listen to people is that we all know people who
ought to be honored.”

Except for a stirring and a few whispers, no one spoke.

Atan turned in a circle, meeting as many gazes as would meet
hers. Her heartbeat drummed in her ears as she declared, “At sunset we
will make the mourning circle through the boundaries of the old city, as we
have done ever since Sartor was first established. Then
everyone
will go
home and begin to rebuild their lives. Everyone.”

A hundred people began to remonstrate, but she held up her
hand.

“Tomorrow, on the third day, as is proper, I will
summon a convocation of the Star Chamber. And we’ll meet every day, as
long as there’s need. Anyone who wishes justice, speak to your guild
chief or to your governor. Everyone can speak, and everyone will be heard after
we make our vows, me to you, and you to me. There is to be no taking of lives,
or we may as well hand the kingdom right back to Detlev.”

Another silence met this pronouncement, but Atan, so used to
watching others for tiny clues to what they thought, saw in exchanged looks and
loosened hands, and shuffled feet that though no one was particularly happy,
again they were willing to have a kind of order imposed. They knew what to
expect.

“So go eat dinner. Find your families. And your white
robes for mourning.”

The crowd dispersed. Hannla’s aunt led the accused
woman off to the wounded wing.

Atan ignored her quaking insides, her watery knees and dry
mouth, and tried to remember what she had been doing—

“Rel is gone,” Lilah said, appearing at her
side. “And Irza was trying to make Julian go with her. That’s why
they’re here.” She tipped her head toward Hannla, who stood nearby,
looking a little lost.

Atan swallowed painfully, aware of the sharp knife of
disappointment.
Rel’s only doing what he said he would.
She did
not have so many friends that she could bear to lose one. This pain was worse, however,
the opposite of feelings she was beginning to acknowledge. Though Lilah had
been her first friend, and Hinder her favorite of the Shendoral group, it was
Rel she kept thinking about most, whose conversation she remembered most.

As Atan walked slowly back to the great square and the
palace entrance, she remembered what Lilah had said about her mother’s
diary, and the behavior of adults in love.
They think about nothing else. It
turns them stupid.

Atan wasn’t full grown yet, but she knew it would
happen in the next year, unless she cast that spell to delay it. She had not
crossed the physical threshold between child and adult, and yet, when she
thought about Rel, it was like the days when she used to fly high to the border
of Sartor early on summer mornings. There she would hover and watch the sun
come up, shafting golden light upon the ranks and ranks of mountains.

Before the sun actually appeared, she could feel the nascent
warmth as well as see the first glimmerings of light lifting the darkness. Then
the sun would come, blinding if she looked straight at it, warm and then hot on
her skin.

Is that was adulthood felt like?

Now all the poems and songs
made sense. That is, she’d always known what the words meant, but
they’d seemed either silly or decorative. She hadn’t guessed at the
depth of pain when love was not returned for whatever reason. She could imagine
the brilliance of that internal sun rising, if it was. That dazzle was for
those who had the time for it.

And I don’t.

She excused herself from Lilah, pushed past the others
without hearing them, and went to retrieve her pack. As soon as she found a
corner without people, she stopped and held her breath, her eyes squeezed shut.
It hurt so much to think of Rel gone. How much worse could it get? Again she
remembered Lilah’s mother and the snow bank. It might seem romantic to
those who had time for love, but to anyone else it was as Lilah had said,
selfish.
I can’t let it get worse
, she thought desolately.
I
can’t afford it now
.

If she used that spell to retard physical maturity, she
could leave it that way for, say, a year, while she settled Sartor. If Rel didn’t
come back, then the feelings would go away, right?

With shaking fingers, she took out that spell. Her eyes
blurred with tears and she couldn’t see the paper, but she scrubbed her
sleeve fiercely across her face until her sight was clear. And she performed
the spell.

Nothing felt different. The thought of Rel walking away
toward the border hurt exactly the same.

But it will go away
, she thought, and made herself
walk downstairs to where she knew people were waiting for her.

o0o

Unknown to either, Rel’s thoughts paralleled
Atan’s as he passed the old north gate and headed up the road away from
Eidervaen. He’d never felt those feelings before. He knew what they were,
and where they might lead once he released the youth spell.
After I find my
father
, that’s what he’d told himself when he first got the
spell done on him to slow the approach of adulthood.

Now he was glad of the spell. These feelings were intense
enough. He didn’t want them—not for Atan, no, give her the full
name, Queen Yustnesveas Landis, the only living representative of the oldest
kingdom in the world. All those friendly faces—Irza at the head of them,
all the rest of her nobles—would sour if they thought that Rel the
Traveler had pretensions.

Someday Atan might choose to marry, at which time she would
be courted by every prince in the world. That was the way things worked.

So he’d better get on with his life, be glad he was
able to help, and busy himself somewhere else in the world.

o0o

When the sun crowned the highest peak in the northeast, the
streets were full of people of all ages, dressed in white, or as near as they
could get to white, each bearing a candle.

They converged on the remains of the ancient city wall,
called Grand Chandos Way, though it actually comprised a great circle. On two
sides it bordered the northern and middle branches of the river, the waters of
which threw back reflections of liquid light as people slowly circled behind the
old tower, along the north side of the palace, and through the exclusive shop area
called Aliana Circle, though it had not been a circle for centuries.

Atan peered into the faces she passed along the way, knowing
that their grief was new and raw. Her vision blurred. The older folks stopped
to sing ancient songs at each of the twelve stations, which were ancient
symbols for the Twelve Blessings. Some of the buildings were empty and others nearly
destroyed. People struggled to join the memories of a century ago with the
present time.

When Atan reached the grand doors of the palace, called the
dragon gateway, opposite the tower, she spotted a small blue figure gazing up
at the gleaming carvings that were still grand, though smoke-blackened.

“Merewen?”

Atan stopped. Those following her wavered, whispers muting
into a susurrus.

“Who is that?”

“She’s blue!”

Merewen skipped lightly down the steps, blue eyes wide, hair
floating behind her. She was very much alive, and Atan smiled mistily as
Merewen exclaimed, “I found my people at last!”

“Yay!” Lilah yelled, as Atan exclaimed,
“Come. Join us on the mourning walk, and tell me everything.”

Merewen skipped. “How pretty the candles look, like a
river of light. As for me, I don’t have words. Yet.”