Treason's Shore (4 page)

Flatfoot chuckled. “Done.”

Chapter Two

A
S soon as word traveled inward from the perimeter patrol outside Iasca Leror’s royal city that the king’s banner had been spotted, people put down tools and lined the main street behind the city gate. When low clouds rumbling overhead brought huge splats of rain, some ducked inside doorways, but no one returned to work or home.

At last the tower and the now-visible outriders exchanged the thrilling trumpet chords announcing the return of the king. The Bell Runners enthusiastically plied the ropes, and people surged from under cover to line the streets and began to shout and pound on hand drums.

“Evred-Harvaldar Sigun!”

“Evred-Harvaldar Sigun!”

“Evred-Harvaldar Sigun!”

The rhythmic shout gained volume as their young king rode through the city gates, tall and straight, his red hair darkened to the shade of his father’s by the rain, color emphasizing his cheekbones. They cheered him and his men all the way to the castle gates, and only when he was inside did they go back to work in small clumps, everybody laughing and cheerful. Innkeepers promised to draw an ale for everyone (many knowing that that would begin an evening of festive largesse) to cheer the northern victory as they looked forward to the stories the returning warriors would tell.

Inside the castle courtyard Evred slipped from his saddle, leaving his Runners to supervise as the last remnant of his army—the King’s Riders who guarded the city and castle—rode over to their barracks to dismount, unpack, and reunite with families for the promised liberty.

The warm splatters of rain dotting brown circles on the honey-colored flagstones began to merge as the young queen appeared, short like Inda, her wide brown eyes and unruly brown curls so much like his. But where Inda was broad in chest and shoulder, Hadand-Gunvaer was broad in bosom and hip. She and Evred clasped hands, and the tower sentries—men and women—sent up a cheer.

“Hadand-Gunvaer Deheldegarthe!”

Deheldegarthe: a fighting queen, one who had by her own hand defended the kingdom. It, like
Sigun
for the king, was the highest accolade—one that must be given, it could never be asked for.

The royal pair smiled upward, and as the rain abruptly increased walked inside together; Hadand observed her beloved’s distant gaze and waited for him to return from wherever his thoughts had taken him.

The air was motionless and warm inside the tower, assailing Evred with familiar smells, comfortable smells, which were now free from the power to harm; his uncle and brother had receded to occasional distorted voices in dreams.

When he and Hadand reached his outer chamber, he discovered chilled wine-and-punch waiting. “Ah,” he said on a long outward breath. “How good it is to be home.”

“Your last report via the magic case stated that all is well in the north.” Hadand dropped onto a waiting mat.

Evred sat down next to her and cradled the broad, shallow wine cup in both hands. “It is as well as can be expected. Ndand Arveas is there in the pass, holding Castle Andahi while Cama rides back and forth from Idayago to Ghael. We’ll have to find someone to back her until Keth is grown, though she’s strong enough to hold it on her own.”

Hadand’s lips parted. She longed to say,
So why don’t you make her a Jarlan, and let her pick her own Jarl? Why can’t women command castles?
It seemed so obvious—especially since it had been women who had held Castle Andahi in the teeth of the entire Venn invasion, down to the last one.

But now was not the time for new ideas. She had learned through letters from women across the kingdom that most of the men who had gone north to fight (those who returned) longed to resume the old ways, the comfort of tradition.

So she turned her attention to Evred even as he studied her. Out of a lifetime of habit, each tried to descry the inner workings of the other’s mind: as children they had shared everything, but time and experience had built personal boundaries that were difficult to surmount, despite their best intentions.

“We’ll have to establish watches all along the north coast,” Evred continued, sounding tired. “Something like Flash’s beacon system, which would have worked had there not been treachery from within. But I’m keeping our best dragoon captains up there, headquartered at Ala Larkadhe, since my twin cousins want to swap off yearly as Jarls of Yvana-Vayir and commanders of the northern force.”

“Aren’t they a bit young for that?” Hadand asked.

“A year older than I was when I was first sent north to command,” Evred said wryly. “And yes, my authority was limited. So will theirs be, at first. They know Cama is under Inda in chain of command, and they report to him. They accepted it without argument. Good boys, both of them. Though Beaver never seems to stop talking.”

Hadand said, “Will they keep swapping off by year?”

“For now. I hope by the time their cousin finishes here as a horsetail and can serve as Randael at Yvana-Vayir they’ll settle it among themselves . . . if we do not have any more wars.”

Hadand’s brown, unwavering gaze was so much like Inda’s—and yet not. Evred realized he was searching for Inda in Hadand’s eyes. His emotions roiled until he locked them down hard. “To finish with Ala Larkadhe, the Morvende archive in the white tower was closed to me.”

Her face changed from the tension of worry to comprehension. She knew what that archive meant to him. “Did the Morvende say anything?”

“Nothing. I permitted the archive to be used as a transport, which seems to have alerted them. But the closing was inevitable because I dared to lead an army to war.” He tried, and failed, to keep the bitterness from his voice. “It appears that no one wishes to hear my reasons.”

Hadand poured more punch, maintaining a compassionate silence. She perceived the effort he made to relax, to look up and around. “All seems well here.”

“Yes. But we had no war to contend with.” How it hurt her to see the effort he made; what could she do? She had worked hard to have everything just right when he came home at last, down to his favorite foods, now rapidly cooling.

He looked blankly at the biscuits, then up. “The war, yes. You must have questions. I know my reports were scant. Those magical boxes. I don’t really trust them. And even if I could send a sheaf of papers instead of quarter sheets folded small, there remained the matter of trying to find the time to write on them.”

“Indeed I have questions. Beginning with the Venn surrender. What exactly happened? I’ve heard several conflicting accounts, and Inda has never written to me. Tdor says he wrote only that he was still alive.”

He frowned, yet she knew Inda was all right. Tdor had sent a message when Inda arrived safely home, that they were about to marry. And though Tdor had not written since, Hadand knew that nothing disastrous had happened, or surely,
surely
she would have heard.

“It was not really a surrender, though everyone believes it to have been.” He spoke slowly, hesitating between words.

She breathed in relief. The problem was not Inda. Absurd to have thought it concerned him! “What exactly happened with the Venn? Are they really gone? So many rumors have run ahead of you, and like you say, your report was scant. I have it by heart now, I’ve read it so many times, trying to wring extra meaning from every pen stroke.”

His smile was perfunctory. “Some of those rumors began just after the battle. I did nothing to interfere with them.” Evred drank his punch down, then pressed his fingers to his temples, eyes closed. “It seemed to hearten the men to think that Durasnir, the Venn Fleet Commander, surrendered to Inda. That he and Inda fought a duel. That he knelt before me and swore allegiance. None of those things happened. He asked for a truce, said that their king was dead, and that Prince Rajnir had to sail home to claim their crown.”

“That was all?”

“There was one more thing. It was very strange. I don’t know why I did it, but I asked if they were coming back.”

“He’d lie about that, of course,” Hadand exclaimed.

“So I thought the moment the words were out.” Evred crumbled a rye biscuit without awareness of what his fingers were doing as he thought back. “I braced for threat or dissembling. Scorn, even. We heard none of that. You must realize first that we learned before the attack that the one we have to fear is the mage Erkric, who was using magic to aid the war. According to Inda’s Venn lover, the Dag Signi—do you remember her?”

Hadand vividly remembered the small, older woman who had so kindly and quietly renewed all the castle magic spells for them, working all night while Evred and Inda raised the entire city to march to war. But Evred so distrusted magic that Hadand only signified assent without speaking.

Evred said, “She told us that Dag Erkric has attempted to strike a bargain with Norsunder in an effort to learn magic that will control minds. It is possible that he has done so.”

“I find that more difficult to believe than anything,” Hadand exclaimed. “You know how I’ve been researching magic ever since I could read, but I’ve never found mention of magic—in our present time—that does that. In the days of Old Sartor, perhaps. We thought it all figurative language.”

“I have trouble believing it, too. I retained my distrust of Dag Signi to the end, but something that Commander Durasnir said seemed to corroborate . . . well, you tell me what you think.” Evred leaned forward. “He asked Inda if he’d ever met Ramis of the
Knife.
The mystery pirate who commanded the ship with black sails.”

“The pirate who Inda said caused the rift to the sky through which the Brotherhood of Blood command ships were forced. I remember that.” Hadand poured more punch in hopes of getting Evred to drink if he would not eat. “I always thought this mysterious Ramis was a, oh, a dream figure or something.”

“Inda insists he’s a real man. He met him. Spent some time with him in conversation. Anyway, Inda answered Durasnir. Told him that Ramis had said there were three men who were dangerous to Inda: Prince Rajnir, the mage Erkric, and Durasnir himself. After which Durasnir said, ‘Two of us must obey.’ And then he vanished by magic. Shortly thereafter, the Venn marched back down the pass, boarded their ships, and sailed away.”

“Two of them? But that just means the commander and the mage must obey the king.”

“Why did he not say so?”

Hadand’s eyes narrowed, bringing Inda forcibly to mind.

She said, “You think the Commander of the Venn, your enemy, was
warning
you in some way? But that makes no sense. A threat I can understand. A warning?”

“If Dag Erkric truly does control their prince—now their king, surely—then the warning becomes clear. The danger we share is the threat of magic. Unfortunately Durasnir spoke in Sartoran, so of our people the only ones who understood him were Inda and Taumad.”

“Well, what does Inda say? He could ask Dag Signi.”

“They don’t discuss the war. It’s an honorable truce, and I understand that. As for Inda . . .” Evred touched a ring on his hand that she had never seen before. She did not often see his hands; though they were long and beautiful, he habitually hid them by clasping them behind his back.

“As for Inda, we did not talk to much purpose. He was either riding along the lines encouraging the men, especially the wounded, or else abstracted . . .” Evred paused, remembering the campfire conversations, painfully repetitive as Inda went over every move, almost every sword stroke of the fights he could remember. After a few weeks of that, Evred thought it a victory when Inda shifted from what he should have done to what he could have done.

Evred looked up. “We seldom had much time alone to discuss that.”

Hadand did not ask why the two most powerful men in the entire kingdom couldn’t send the whole army out of hearing if they did not want to walk apart. There were times when speech was insufficient, even impossible. She remembered the days following the Jarl of Yvana-Vayir’s conspiracy: the vivid memory images, the long pauses when she couldn’t remember where she was. Waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, reliving the worst, and wondering if she could have done something to prevent it. Words had come with difficulty, if at all.

She nodded agreement.

He closed his eyes and faced southwest. “He’s on his way.” And at Hadand’s questioning look said, “It’s a location ring. Inda wears the other one. We used them in the Andahi Pass so we would not lose each other.”

“So you trust this ring, but not the golden scroll-cases?”

Evred’s expression was always reserved, but now it tightened.

He made an angry, determined effort to lock away the conflict of emotions. The golden scroll-cases had been bespelled by Dag Signi; the location rings had been provided, Evred strongly suspected, by Savarend Montredavan-An, otherwise known as Fox.

Evred knew Inda’s loyalty to Iasca Leror—to Evred himself—was total. Yet Inda had somehow gained the personal loyalty of not only the Venn mage Dag Signi, but the potentially troublesome Fox, who now commanded Inda’s old pirate fleet and who had, it seemed, rescued Inda from certain death at the hands of the Venn.