Treason's Shore (75 page)

Chapter Ten

T
HREE people did not sleep that night.

Inda’s mind cascaded the familiar stream of images and ideas, beginning with his dash up to the archives for a continental map to recover current and wind patterns while he waited for an answer from Fox.

Twice he stuck his head in Evred’s door. The first time, “Did they say Rajnir was with them, like when they came against us?”

“I gained that impression. I do know from something I read in the Ala Larkadhe archive about the Venn that the Golden Tree banner only goes where the king is, or a prince under the king’s orders. Taumad mentioned once a thirdhand report of that banner being flown on the flagship.”

The second time, “A Marlovan navy. Does that mean the exile treaty will be set aside?”

Evred could not sleep until he had confronted the profoundly disturbing threat of Erkric stooping through the skies and reaching magical talons to pluck him from the once-regarded safety of his fortress to be used against his own people. The Venn truly had become an evil empire, but even so, he could not trust impulse and emotion. He had to get control of his emotions. To think everything out, in the most methodical way.

Exile. Montredavan-Ans
. “I will have to put the question of the Montredavan-An treaty to the Jarls at Convocation,” Evred said.

Inda grunted and vanished.

He prowled around the Harskialdna suite. Tdor was asleep in the big bed. A ghost-hand squeezed Inda’s heart when he looked at her still form, outlined by the knife of light through the cracked door.
I won’t be here for my boy’s birth,
he thought. He couldn’t imagine having anything but a boy. Especially since a girl was supposed to go to Darchelde to marry Fox’s son, a decision made long ago in accordance with some treaty. It had been a promise made to Inda’s mother when she was forced to leave what had been her home to marry Inda’s father. It had also been an implied insult to Montredavan-An ambition that the Algara-Vayir second son, and not the heir, would provide their treaty daughter . . . and look what happened! No, the idea of a girl was too strange, her future too unclear.

Inda shook his head, closed the bedroom door, and saw the gleam of light below Signi’s door. He tapped.

“Enter,” she said.

On her desk lay a complicated map drawn on thick heralds’ paper, with a webwork of interconnected lines laid over the outline of Drael and the Sartoran continents.

“Is that what I think it is?” He pointed. “I was just coming to ask if you’d teach me Venn navigation.”

Her smile was crooked as she turned her ruined hand over in a graceful gesture, her wrist veins close to the surface of her white, puckered skin. “Our first big test is to draw an accurate map from memory.” She touched the map. “A quick explanation, then questions, then the long explanation if you and I agree. This is what we call a mirror map. These mirror maps are easy to make. When I was a sea dag, we used them to check on our peers’ positions. You can also ting anyone—”

“Ting? Is that like tigging lances?”

She smiled faintly, a smile more sad than merry. “Perhaps, but we use the image of a bell. If you tap a bell in a forest, people can follow the sound. You ting ships and map-dags on either ship or on shore. They ting you back. The mark shows up as a little magical glow.” She whispered, and the paper filled with what looked like firefly dots all over the paper, clusters along the western end of Drael, and a mass off the fish-mouth of Llyenthur Harbor.

“That’s the fleet at their latest ting,” she said, then made a sign and the lights vanished.

Inda lunged forward, hands grabbing at air. “Wait!”

“No, first I must ask you to promise. If this forming alliances does choose you as leader. Will you promise me not to loose a slaughter?”

Inda flung his hands out wide. “D’you see,
that
’s my plan! What I figured is if Rajnir is going to battle himself, but he’s . . .” He knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “It has to mean your Erkric keeps him close by, right? Because only he can control him, right? And he can’t let anyone else know, right? I’ll lay out a good battle plan. I’ve got some ideas, pending information from Chim. But the real plan is I go after Erkric myself.”

Signi stilled, her face distraught.

“What is it? I won’t go alone, I’ll have a picked team to help ward off those fellows in white. Erkric’s the cause of all the problems, right? So if they’re gone, well, things can’t get any worse, can they?”

Signi trembled. “Oh, Inda, you can’t. Erkric is the most powerful dag of the Venn. You cannot challenge him to a
halmgac
—”

“A what?” Even as he spoke, Inda heard the familiar root for Marlovan
duel
in the unfamiliar word.

“It is old, very old. Forbidden now. At least, according to the old form, where they rowed away to an island and one returned. Some say that’s where we get the notion of the far shore, though we have the far shore in so many meanings. . . . Is that something exclusive to us Venn? Or is it a part of human nature, to go from the group, or force one from the group, but what does that say about the group?”

There she went, in that soft voice, her gaze far beyond the limits of furnishing and walls. Inda loved those conversations, when one thing would lead to another, and then to another, often not resolving, questions netted to other questions as he and Signi and Tdor speculated about every subject under the sun.

But that was before time pressed him for answers. Time, and Evred. He sensed Evred waiting there in his office.

And Signi heard, or felt, or saw some subtle clue in Inda that brought her back. She squared her shoulders. Her tone shifted from wondering to brisk. “We still have duels. Anyway, too many were dying, and Drenskar, the . . . the honor of service, replaced it. But Inda, this is what’s important. You cannot attack Dag Erkric, either alone or with your warriors, however well they are trained. His flagship will be filled with wards and traps.”

Inda bumped gently against the table and frowned down at the map. “Well, so much for the easy way. We’ll just make my other plan the real one. Signi, I can’t promise how others will behave, you know that. But I can promise that my own orders will never include massacre or torture. Fight until they surrender or retreat. Then end it.”

She trembled there on the opposite side of the desk, eyes half closed as she gazed down the path that he could never see. But he’d always sensed it. And so he waited.

Her gaze lifted and searched his, her brow tense with questions. “I think . . . I think I see the true path. And I believe you.” She held herself tightly, then opened her eyes. “Here is how it works.”

When Inda walked into Evred’s office at dawn, he discovered the king there, and though glowglobes did not reveal time like candles, and Evred was scrupulously neat in his person, Inda sensed he had not slept.

“Your report?”

“Fox just wrote back. They’re off the coast of Khanerenth, trying maneuvers with them, Dhalshev’s independents, and some volunteers from Sarendan. It gives me half a year to get to Bren.”

“If you leave after Convocation,” Evred said, “you can ride north with Cama and a wing of dragoons. He’s already started down with just a flight, but I can give him more. Was going to rotate some to the north anyway.”

“But I—”

“Don’t you think you will be a target? If I were the Venn, I’d be watching for you, especially if your name is on everyone’s lips.”

Inda looked surprised, then his brow cleared. “Right.”

Evred rose from his wingback chair. The weak morning sun highlighted the tension sharpening the bones of his face. His voice was calm and deliberate, but Inda heard the strain of the old days at Andahi. “We’ve got almost four weeks until Convocation, and a lot to do before then.”

The women took the news in characteristic ways: Hadand resigned to Inda’s being sent off again, but busy with her son and her own enormous workload. Tdor’s resignation was far sharper, driven by fear that she would never see him again, that the distant seas would swallow him, sped by Venn steel.

She held him tightly to her all the next night, and after he fell asleep she lay awake watching over him, with only the cold metallic disk of the moon to witness when she wept.

After supper the next night, when an early snow whirled in crazy patterns outside the windows, Signi sought Tdor out in her workroom that overlooked the white-quilted roofs of the queen’s guard barracks.

“Do you have time to speak in private?” she asked in her accented Iascan. “About Inda,” she added.

Tdor set aside her pen.

“I am here to beg of you a thing of terrible cost, I know, and it will be worse when you realize that I will then do a more terrible thing.” Signi pressed her fingers against her lips, her eyes closing for a moment.

Tdor’s curiosity chilled to fear. “Speak, Signi.”

“I-I have reason to believe that when Inda leaves, I will probably get the signal I have waited for that will send me to Sartor.”

“I assumed you’d go with him,” Tdor said, not hiding her regret. “You’re a ship dag, you are free to go.”

Signi touched her fingertips together. “I am not free.”

“What? Why?”

The mage looked worn and almost ill; Tdor realized she had not slept. “It is harder than I thought, this conversation. He goes north, to lead a war against my people. My path lies south. And after that . . . I do not know. Much depends on what occurs in the strait. But I do not believe I will ever return here.”

Tdor slid her hands over the knife hilts in her sleeves.

Signi pressed her misshapen fingers against her lips again; even the distortion of protracted pain had not taken away the neatness of her movements, grace without flourish. “My path seems to lead elsewhere. But I would have this one thing.” She faced Tdor. “I would take with me a child of Inda’s begetting, if I can.” Her voice suspended. “My cycle was last week. I could this day begin to drink birth-herb.”

Tdor said gently, “Should you not be discussing this matter with him? I don’t see my place in it.”

“Because I do not want him to know. That is what is so terrible, a moral trespass in both our cultures—all the cultures of the world. But I do not want him to worry about a child he will never see.
You
will know and make a place in the records, for I also know that secret children of those in power beget future problems. I will make certain we are together in the time of my cycle likeliest to make a girl.”

Tdor signed agreement. Though no one had any control over if or when the Birth Spell worked (other than desire of a child) she’d been taught how, when conceiving children the ordinary way, girls most often resulted from mating before the egg white appeared, and boys that day, or a little after. Not always predictable, but as close as human endeavor could contrive.

“She will know wherefrom she comes, and you will have her name, Tadara Jazsha Sofar, in your family scrolls.”

Tadara: a version of Tdor. A gesture of goodwill that would ramify through the future. Tdor had just enough vision to perceive it.

There was only one answer to be made to that. “So shall it be.”

Signi placed her palms together in the gesture that Tdor had come to understand was akin to the fist to the heart. “If there is a thing I can do for you, who never asks anything for herself, I will.”

Tdor breathed slowly, her palms damp despite the cold. “All right. If you truly mean that. I have a question, though I know you don’t like to speak of battles. And I know this will probably sound frivolous, but, well, I’ve wondered all my life. Is it true you, um, see ghosts?”

Signi’s face altered, her pupils huge. “It is part of our training, to see what is there.”

“Supposedly there was a ghost at Inda’s castle. I never saw it. I never believed that ghosts were possible. I don’t understand how, or even why, they could be. Were there really ghosts on that battlefield in the Andahi Pass?”