After changing in her rooms, she took a light meal and then went to the Conference halls. Bistane stepped out of a doorway and took her by the elbow.
“Talk to me. You must, sooner or later.”
“Formal or here and now?”
“Here and now.”
“You press our friendship.”
“From where I stand, there is no longer one.”
“Then perhaps you should become more illuminated.”
“Lariel!” His grip tightened as if he thought to shake her. She did not look down at his hand, for if she did, he would be forced to let go of her, and she wanted to read the emotions in his hold that his face and words would not give her.
“I listen.”
“Whatever is being said of my father, I know he rode out in defense of the kingdoms.”
“Word from this battlefield is strangely muddled. I’d like to believe you, Bistane, but he rode with ild Fallyn. Old enemies, in a common cause? Unlikely, and you know that. Did they battle one another? Tressandre is keeping her own counsel, and your father hasn’t returned yet for his accounting.”
The hand on her arm quavered a bit. “He lives, that I know. As for the ild Fallyn, yes, odd allies, but we’ve both been watching Abayan Diort and not liking what we see.”
“Diort’s troops were not involved in this.”
“No. Someone else hit them and hit them hard when they rode in to keep two armies from merging. My father sent to me. He stays behind to find out, and he will appear at the Conference when he has evidence.”
“No coincidence you told me you wanted the Accords abolished.”
Bistane stood closer to her. “You yourself put them in abeyance with the others.”
“Because now I arm for war.”
“And because you do, we should stand together! Lariel, you were loved because no one feared that you would carry out your title.”
“Then they were fools to think of me and love in the same breath.” She watched his face.
“Not foolish at all. Now they fear you.”
“And I don’t know this?”
“I have never overlooked you, Lariel Anderieon.” His hand stayed steady on her arm, closing a bit in warmth.
“We are not allies, Bistane. Not yet.”
“Nor are we enemies.” He let go of her then, withdrawing from her space. “And I would have so much more with you, you know that.” With his hair now cropped short and his eyes of blazing color, he looked more than ever like his father’s son. Bistel had alliances but few closely held friends, known for his difficulty since their first appearance on Kerith. A mere youth then, Bistel still held the edge of a Vaelinar in his prime, though surely that prime was finished, and he was looking death in the face. Did that make him more or less reckless now? And did Bistane follow inevitably in his father’s footsteps?
“I have a committee waiting,” she told him, and pushed by. He let her go, though she thought she heard a sigh follow after.
Jeredon cornered her after the committee broke up, a luncheon tray in his hand, and a stormy look on his face. He let the tray crash upon a table, food bouncing up and over as he did, goblets rattling and their contents frothing up.
“I take it you found my reports on the armory order.” She took a salad that looked fresh enough and picked a nut from the leaves to crunch.
“We can’t quarter an army the size you want equipped.”
“Of course not. We place our orders with an armorer, he will not be able to fulfill it, we shall settle for a lesser amount which we both can afford, and yet word goes out about our projected strength.” She found another nut to chew in relish.
He stopped in mid-pace and gesture. “A foil?”
“A wise one, don’t you think?” She seated herself to devour the salad in earnest. “Because more armorers have been operating more-or-less quietly out of watch of the Accords, we’re not likely to find a single weaponsmith who can equip us as it is. It will not hurt, I think, to exaggerate our strength.”
“What if we find one who can meet our order?”
“Then, my brother, we make allies who can foot the bill and fill the barracks.”
“I’m against this.”
She stopped eating. “That, Jeredon, is why I am Warrior Queen and you are not Warrior King. Not our circumstance of birth, but our resolve.”
“It’s not resolve. You’re cursedly headstrong.”
“How can you say that to me?”
He leaned both hands on the table’s edge, his body shadowing her. “Because I have to. Because you have the title does not mean that it is right and meet in your lifetime to execute it!”
“Jeredon, sit down.”
His jaw tightened.
“Please. Sit down.”
He threw himself into a chair, legs sprawling, arms over his chest.
“Tranta did not fall from the cliff of Tomarq, he was thrown. The Shield weakens, and he can’t find the Way to recharge it. We know that the Ravers have gotten stronger and bolder. Are they preparing for the Raymy to come back? If all our eyes and blades are turned to the east, what happens to our back from the west? Our coast has always been vulnerable and even more so now.” She paused. “I know more than I’m prepared to say in this place, but you’re more than my brother. You’re my heir and my closest friend, and the voice of my father in my ear.”
“And yet you haven’t been talking to me.”
“I needed truth instead of rumor.” She turned her head away, looking across the room, away from its tapestried walls and bannered ceiling. “It comes in shreds, and I weave it together fitfully. Gods are stirring. We’ve been tolerated on Kerith, but now we may have come to our moment of judgment by Them. We’re still Strangers, invaders.” She looked back to him. “We’ve no Way home and no Way to the future.”
“This used to be the Panner stead,” Tolby mourned, looking down at char and broken stone.
Sevryn had squatted, digging through the ruin with a stick, looking at the green shoots coming up from the burned ground. “It’s been a month or so, I’d say.” He poked at the grasses and weeds.
“I’d no news on this. I’ve hopes they live and are hopping mad about it, and building elsewhere.”
“Mistress Greathouse would have written, or Honeyfoot,” Nutmeg told her father.
“Aye, so I’m thinking. Likely, anyway. Then again, the Panners kept to themselves. Like their family name, they oft took to the mountains, sifting the streams for metals and gems.”
Sevryn stood, tossing his stick away. “Did they have any luck?”
“Some. Enough that they did not farm or ranch like most others roundabout here. Not rich, no. Just getting by, but th’ Panners had a nose for stream mining.” Tolby fetched out his pipe, and pointed the stem across the landscape. “Barrels are thataway. I imagine they’ve a lad or two who will ride with us to th’ old place.”
“Can we make it by nightfall?”
“It’ll be close, but I think so. If the weather holds.”
Rivergrace looked up. Clouds mounted on the horizon, and she could feel water growing heavy in the air. The hot, unbearable summer of Calcort had been left behind and now they were in the high country, where the edge of the fall months could be felt approaching. The mare shifted under her, ears moving forward and back, and she pawed at the ground.
“All right, then.” Sevryn swung up as did Tolby, and he led the way out of the burned-out yard.
The weather did not hold. The skies opened up and poured, and they hung tarps from tree branches and huddled under them, trying to keep their stores as dry as possible. Daisy stood out in the open, his short tail bobbing in irritation, but refusing to come in out of the rain once his pack had been unloaded from him. Soon the camp stank of wet goat. When night came, it came without a moon, and Sevryn sat alone in darkness that had only the sprinkling of stars to guide him. He listened for that which trailed them and did not hear it, but instead Rivergrace’s soft steps to the rocks he sat upon.
“He watches you as much as you watch him,” Nutmeg said, shaking her pot to dry it.
“I don’t watch him.”
“And the sun doesna shine!” She looked up at the night sky, still dripping with rain. “You know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Grace, for all you’re taller than I am, and raised with me, I know you’re younger inside. It’s the elven blood. But you’re still a woman grown, and it’s not wrong to be watching him.”
“It’s not that.” Rivergrace packed up her share of the dinner things.
“Then what is it?”
“Something I can’t explain. When I can name it, I’ll tell you.”
Nutmeg nodded slowly. “All right, then. It wouldn’t hurt to go say good night.”
Tolby had run out of his toback and so walked down the river a bit to settle himself, still upset over the Panner steading. It wasn’t the Silverwing, not yet, but a tiny offspring of it, and it lay under the rainy skies like an afterthought, a puddle drawn thinly out upon the land. The Panners could never have plied their luck in it, Rivergrace thought, as she walked up to where Sevryn sat. What she might say to him, she really hadn’t the slightest idea. It was much easier when music played and they had dancing to hide their thoughts.
She found a rock that seemed almost dry and perched upon it. “I came to say good night.”
“And yet you found a seat to do so. Have you a long good night in mind?”
“I haven’t anything in mind.”
“Sometimes that’s best.” He shook his cloak out and laid it over her lap. She knotted her fingers in its comforting weave.
“You seem to know who you are.”
“Do I now?”
She nodded slowly.
“Maybe that’s because I’ve been thinking on it a bit longer than you have.”
“You serve Queen Lariel and Jeredon. They hold you in high regard.”
“I think that’s because they’re not quite sure what else to do with me. I didn’t come from a Dweller family but from the streets. My mother was a woman named Mista, a Kernan, and when I was old enough to run well, she brought me to the town and turned me loose, saying it was time I looked after myself.” Not quite the truth but close enough. Few would ever have that absolute truth from him. How could they bear it if he could not?
“She left you?”
“She did. I learned quick enough to hide my ears, which are not as pointed as they might be, but pointed enough, and I hadn’t the eyes, so that kept me from being beaten about. I ran the streets.” He looked at the stars, seeming to see something else. “I didn’t age like the others, and so I realized I would have to move on, and did, from quarter to quarter and then town to town, hiding my blood.”
“No one wanted you.”
“No.” He shifted from one hip to another.
“They want you now.”
“I found a mentor who didn’t believe that blood and ability was thinned by mixing.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was killed,” Sevryn said flatly.
“Is that what you meant when you said your memories were as broken as mine?”
He did not speak for such a long time, she grew nervous. “I’m sorry for prying.”
“You’re not prying. I’m trying to decide what to tell you.” His hand came out as if to hold hers, then dropped back to his knee. Instead, he peeled back his sleeve, and then took her hand, putting her fingers on his wrist. A thin white scar met her touch, wrapped about his skin. She traced it before drawing her hand away. “I know about shackles. I was held for at least eighteen years. We had gone, my mentor and I, to a smithing operation in the mountains, hidden smugglers. We were caught. He died. I did not.”
Before she could murmur sympathy, he added, “I don’t remember those years. Not that they are vague or trouble my dreams, but that there is nothing. And I need to. I need to know where I was and what happened.”
“Why?”
She sensed him looking upon her face, felt the warmth of his regard sweep her. “Why do you go back for a piece of a blanket?”
“I want to know who I am.”
“As do I. Those missing years are as much a part of what I’ve become as the years I do remember. Perhaps even more important.”
The force in his voice wrapped around her, and she shrugged into the cloak he’d placed over her. “I don’t have a story like that.”
“But you do. You came from somewhere, Grace. You rode downstream on a river, on a raft someone knotted together for you, and placed you on in hopes you’d find freedom, like an old tale.”
“Maybe I did it for myself!”
“Likely you did not. And although Tolby is angered by parents he thinks did you no good, do you think he’s right?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like the Silverwing is my only parent.”
“But it’s not. Is there nothing? Not a voice or a song, or a touch, or a fear . . .”
She answered slowly, reluctantly, but feeling she must. “Aderro. I knew that word when you called me by it, but not why.”
“And Stinkers?”
She shivered. “Yes.”
“You called them that.”
“Because they do. Their bodies reek of themselves and—” She looked away, into her thoughts.
“What else?”
“Smoke. Sometimes that smell you get around the farriers when the horses are being shod. The hot metal. The water barrels the shoes are plunged into.” Rivergrace felt a moment of panic, as if the earth rose to close around her, and she fought to breathe through it.
He slipped his arm about her shoulders. “Don’t fret. It’s all right, and you’re free.”
She turned her face about quickly, finding they were nose to nose, and she thought . . . she wanted . . . to see what his kiss felt like, and she leaned toward him, brushing her mouth across his tentatively. He went as still as the rocks they sat upon, and she felt the warmth of his lips, and the sweet taste of the dried fruit they’d had from dinner still honied upon them, and then he drew her close and kissed her back, long and hot and soundly until she went breathless.
“That, aderro, is how a man kisses a woman,” he whispered to her temple as he let her go.