Starcrossed (11 page)

“They taught magic there too, didn’t they?” I asked. A dangerous question, but one that seemed tantalizing and mysterious in this remote starlit night.

She nodded. “Not for hundreds of years, of course — there’s nothing to teach anymore. But back when this land had magic, certainly they did.”

Nothing to teach anymore. I glanced across the fire, where I could barely see Meri sitting with her father and the guardsmen. I spun the silver bracelet on my wrist, and said something guaranteed to earn a Celystra girl the cane. “I heard — people say that magic is coming back.” I raised my eyes to see her reaction, but her face was still and calm as the face of a moon.

“I think they’ve always said that. If it were true, I think it would be a very good thing for a lot of people, and not just in this country.”

“Just not Bardolph.”

Lady Nemair barked out a short, sharp laugh, then covered her mouth with her white hand. Smiling, she rose and smoothed down her skirts. “That bracelet suits you, Celyn. Good night.”

I watched her leave, wishing she’d stayed for me to ask more questions. Every child in Llyvraneth knew we lived in a world of dying magic, no matter what the king and the priests tried to tell us. The Celystra’s official position was that magic did not — could not — exist, that Sar had never knelt upon the earth and breathed her power into our world, that those who claimed otherwise were lying or delusional. Dangerous heretics spreading their blasphemy like a plague. Centuries ago Llyvraneth had overflowed with Sar’s power, until her temples and priestesses rivaled Celys’s own. But now only faint traces remained in the odd charmed antique, the odd nobbish girl, the odd thief — rare, but enough to send the church and the king into fits, until Sar’s few remaining faithful had been driven from the island, forced into hiding, or bled on the gallows.

A generation ago, a few powerful families decided Bardolph had gone too far, and had staged a rebellion under Sar’s banner. It was hard to say whether any of those rebel Sarists had much to do with magic themselves — and it hadn’t mattered anyway, since their strike against the Crown had failed, and they were all soundly crushed by the king’s Green Army.

After that, whatever magic there was in Llyvraneth retreated even farther underground, until it was impossible to learn anything about it; that knowledge had crumbled to dust in the abandoned mages’ college at Breijardarl, burned in bonfires in city circles, and been locked tight away in convent libraries. I’d never understood this odd skill of mine — there was never anyone I could ask about it, of course. Or show it to. Or trust with it.

Kind as Lady Lyllace Nemair seemed, she was not that person.

Finally one evening, under the faint light of Mend-kaal and a waxing Sar, we crossed one last hump of crumbling rock and rumbled into Nemair lands. I was on the wrong side of the coach and could see nothing, but I felt the caravan stop suddenly, as if we’d all sucked in our breath at once. I leaned my head out the wagon and tried to see something, but there was only gray-dark sky above and gray-dark stone all around.

“Are we here?” I pulled my head back in and looked at Phandre.

“Looks like it.” Phandre climbed out of her seat and pushed past me to the door.

Close to, that tiny miniature castle we’d seen across the valleys was
huge
. Not as big as Gerse’s royal palace, of course, but nearly the size of the Celystra. Mismatched buildings of stone and brick piled in on one another, watchtowers crowding into walls, all crisscrossed by narrow stone walkways and bridges, until the castle seemed even more a part of the ruined landscape than the mountains themselves. A tight, rocky path twined up the steep slope, the only approach from the treacherously narrow ridge below.

We’d come to a stop on a level plain that spread out around the castle, surrounding it with a great ring of lands and grounds. Still, everyone dismounted and milled about in a tight cluster, as if afraid to stray too far from the safety of the crowd. The night and the cliffs and the utter impossible
size
of the place made it seem risky to take even one step in any direction but toward the castle.

But I saw that tall white tower, with its sharp narrow fretwork, and suddenly wanted to see what Bryn Shaer looked like from
up there
, wondered what was behind all those tiny starlit windows and iron- barred doors. I pushed through the crowd, leaving Phandre and Meri behind. Lord Nemair fell in step beside me, his dark mare whickering uncertainly.

“Celyn.” He nodded to me. “Long journey. How are you bearing up, then?”

“Very well, milord. Thank you.”

Even in the darkness I could see his broad cheeks part in a smile. “Celyn, my dear, you are a very good liar.” He gave me a clap on the shoulder that sent me stumbling, and led the way to the castle gates.

The high wall, maybe three times the height of a man and
begging
to be climbed, parted in a wide double wooden-and-iron gate, large enough to drive the wagons through, three abreast. Liveried guards in Nemair black and silver ushered us through to an open courtyard where torches flickered over a mix of cobbles and lawn. I saw a paddock marked out at one end of the courtyard, while in the shadow of the white tower stood a great half-timbered lodge, still hugged by scaffolding, built around a curved center court.

“Planning an attack?”

Meri’s mother’s voice in my ear made me jump. “What?”

Lady Nemair laughed. “You looked like you were scrutinizing the Lodge pretty severely, there, Celyn.”

I bit back my reply — because that was exactly what I’d been doing: measuring up the walls of the new building for handholds and toeholds and counting windows, just as if cracking this building were one of Tegen’s jobs.

“How far is the pass — the Breijarda Velde?”

“Three miles,” Lady Nemair said cheerfully. “You can see it from the wall, just there.”

She pointed, and under the last wisps of sunset, I could see the gap in the mountains. Three miles, but I could blot it all out with my thumb.

“And that’s the nearest habitation?”

“Yes, why? Were you wanting to visit somebody, then?” There was merriment in her voice. “I suppose we could all make a trip of it once we’re settled, if the weather holds. There’s not much to see, of course — just some farms and a lot of very temperamental goats. I’m not sure how the locals would feel about the neighboring lords descending upon them like an army, though.”

Just three miles — yet impossibly far away. Having spent four days twisting through the endless bleak press of stone and trees, I was beginning to have an idea of what a “wide pass” through these mountains might mean.

We settled in to Bryn Shaer with as much efficiency as the rest of our journey. The brand-new Lodge had been readied for our arrival by a party of servants who’d been sent on ahead, led by Yselle, the Nemair’s handpicked Corles housekeeper. The family rooms were on the second floor, above the central public gathering spaces of the Round Court, Lesser Court, Armory, and a half dozen other large and nearly identical rooms an ordinary person would need a map to keep straight. Phandre and I followed Meri upstairs, through a long corridor of dark paneling, flickering torchlight, and impossibly soft rugs beneath our feet. Shadowy and silent — a thief’s dream.

Meri led the way a little uncertainly, pausing in stairwells and looking down hallways with a little frown. Twisting her silver necklace in her fingers, she pushed open a door midway down the second floor, and halted in the threshold. Phandre shoved her way past, and let out a long, low whistle. Curious, I followed, leaving Meri lingering in the doorway.

Inside, I wanted to laugh. I had been in nobs’ bedrooms before — but city rooms, and never with the lamps lit. And never to
stay
. Even the rooms at Favom couldn’t compare to this. The top floor of my entire Gerse rooming house would have nestled comfortably in Meri’s Bryn Shaer bedroom, with its high plaster ceilings, wall of leaded windows, and ornate carved fireplace, already burning with a merry glow. And the bed — that
bed.
It was all I could do not to fling myself atop it and roll on the velvet coverlet like a happy dog in a pile of muck.

“Meri,” Phandre announced, “I do believe I love you.”

Meri still hesitated, but Phandre grabbed her hands and yanked her inside.

“At Charicaux, my window overlooked a garden,” Meri said faintly. “There was a pear tree right below, and a dove that would sit in its branches and sing to me.”

“Charicaux?” I said, adding, “Milady?”

“Durrel’s house.”

She looked so lost and forlorn I couldn’t help myself. I swung an arm around her shoulders. “Well,
my
last rooms in Gerse looked out on a sewage canal, and my room at the convent didn’t have a window, so I think this is magnificent.”

Meri gave me a weak smile, but leaned her dark head against my shoulder, her skin sparking faintly as her hair brushed my cheek.

As part of the gathering-in before Meri’s
kernja-velde
, Bryn Shaer was preparing to host any number of visiting nobs (among them several prospective husbands for Meri), and apparently there weren’t enough servants for all that work. Which is how I found myself, obscenely early the next morning, in the chilly courtyard with Phandre, beating clouds of dust from feather mattresses we’d dragged out of the guest apartments and draped over the paddock fence. The morning was misty and gray; the air smelled of smoke and damp and age, as if with every violent strike of the staves, we were beating some forgotten Bryn Shaerin generation from the linen and down.

“I could be in” —
thwup
— “Tratua right now” —
thwup
— “eating grapes from the fingers of Maharal serving boys.”
Thwup.
Phandre brushed an armful of hair from her smudged face and leaned on her staff. “But no! I’m stuck here, at the arse end of nowhere, with mousy Meri and General Lyllace, playing scullery maid with
you
!” She gave another savage thrust to the bed. It was a miracle she didn’t poke a hole in it. Hastily I rescued the mattress and moved it to the stack of clean beds waiting to be returned to the castle. I stayed well out of her range and kept the bed between us — Phandre didn’t know how to wield a staff as a weapon, but she had annoyance on her side and I wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t crack me upside the skull.

And then I’d have to rough her up a little, and nobody wanted that.

We were both beginning to suspect the truth of it all, though. The grown-up Lady Merista would be expected to know all there was to managing a fine household, and if Phandre and I had any hope of landing husbands in our lady’s wake, so would we. There was no sense objecting to this plan; if it came down to it, I didn’t think the Nemair could
make
me marry somebody. And Phandre didn’t dare protest: She was almost nineteen and an orphan; it was past time she cultivated a few assets that would please a farsighted suitor, and everybody knew it.

And so we all three were to have instruction in housekeeping, tending the stillroom, cheese making, needlework, and the torture of innocent mattresses with technique that would do a Greenman proud. As I hefted the next bed onto the hurdle of twisted vines and twigs, Lady Lyllace sailed by, Meri hard at her heels. Lyllace was rattling off instructions even Yselle would have strained to take in, but Meri was practically beaming — like a puppy thrilled to be included in the games of its older fellows. She was settling in nicely; as her mother’s shadow, she’d shed her ner vous ness. Or maybe she just preferred housework to luxury.

Lyllace paused a moment to inspect our work, nodding briskly. “Good. Stacking the beds like this will keep the moist air out. Be sure you get them back inside before too long, though. We don’t want them to mildew.”

I thought I saw Phandre’s knuckles whiten. Meri gave us a little wave as she scurried after her mother.

“That woman! You’d think she owned the whole mountain, the way she gives orders.”

“I like her,” I said — not entirely to annoy Phandre.

Phandre glared at me. “You would.”