Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

Twilight filled the sheltered dale with a tide of grey quietness. Windows of clustered cottages gleamed, and she hoped she could wheedle an apprentice wizard’s welcome from someone. Now out of the wind, she left her hair undone: she was man-clad, she might as well go wholly manlike, though only bards usually wore it so long. She had little doubt that she could play the part. At home her only serious suitor, much to everyone’s amusement, was Dagobeord, who was widely believed—though no one could ever prove it—to prefer boys. And surely no one here would have heard tales out of Anstrede yet; she would be safely anonymous. She hurried down from the lonely hills, leaped over a wall of dry-laid stone into well-tilled mud, leaped back out and trotted around from the blind rear of the first stone cot into a fracas.

A handful of Geillan bloods played knock-a-ball with the edgeling cottager. Rothesay knew the sport. She wondered what terrible sin the crofter had committed: having a face that the chieftain’s son disliked, perhaps. That would be that noble youth there, his yellow beard split in a bigger laugh than any of his cronies, and braided tight the better to flash the bright silver of his heavy torque. More silver sparkled in the embroidery of his bold-checked tunic, and on the rings of his hands as he shoved the stumbling cottager back into the circle of the others’ fists.

“Now just a minute!” she chided, striding up, as if they were the squabbling Harrowater infants who half-feared the wizard’s apprentice.

Cold stares froze her in mid-step. Old habit seized her in an icy grip: kin-thralls, only one slippery step above fine-thralls paying for their crimes in servitude, hardly dared address their free cousins; challenging the lords of the clan was begging for unhappiness. One, short and stocky and no more than her own age, thrust the battered peasant at her like a weapon. She caught him by his shoulders as effortlessly as so much feather-down—and a wonderful warm delight welled up in her.

She set the man gently aside and turned back to the noble bullies. A wide grin shone white in her face all unbeknownst to her; but sight of it, and her queer canines bared, drove the stocky youth to step sharply back, and then to cover this chagrin by raising the stakes: his sword rasped forth to chastise the unarmed interloper.

To her own surprise, Rothesay whirled, bounced a heel in his crotch, stole the hilt from his suddenly-loosened grasp and, coming round, sent the blade-tip flicking into his face, twice, just as Arngas’s sword had done at Harrowater. Two swift runnels of blood striped his cheeks as he stared, blinked and stared and hardly dared believe the miracle that he still could see. Rothesay stared too. That magic was not in the old Runedaur’s weapon, then?

Roaring his rage, the silver-torqued leader bared his own sword and lunged for her, heedless of the crofter scuttling from his path. Then the man behind him, a tall, gaunt figure hidden deep in a cloak of dark and bardic blue, pulled him up short with a fierce hand on his shoulder. The lordling shrugged him off indignantly; but he waited on the dark one’s pleasure.

Rothesay studied him warily. The Geillari regarded their kings with reverence; their bards, with awe. The bard, wielder of words, kept the story, the very soul, of his clan. He it was who remembered and interpreted the ancient laws of all their race, and so was first among the four, the only four, professions free to travel unchallenged across their land: bard, smith, healer, mage. The power of a bard’s satire could bring plague, pox, or blight; he saw the future in the staves of his poetry; he could weaken a brave man’s arm with one withering glance. Padriag had once, quite offhandedly, taught her a charm to avert a bardic curse; she summoned it now, her grip flexing on her stolen sword.

The bard fixed his hard gaze upon her bosom. But her breastbands squashed her modest endowments quite flat; puzzled, she put up an involuntary hand, and felt the blossom-kalasin, still warm from her body, displayed upon her jerkin and blazoning her with dark meaning in its gay petals. He turned the stocky youth, standing stiff as a plank, and tipped his face to see the delicate wounds so precariously laid at the edge of each orbit. Avoiding Rothesay’s stark face, he pulled his princeling closer and muttered low into his ear.

“So?” that one demanded gracelessly, not taking his eyes from her.

The older man shrugged. “There are but five of us; four, armed. But that is not the whole of it—”

The man cast Rothesay an ugly sneer. “But it’s only a girl!” he spat.

The bard looked her over once more. “Of course it is,” his tongue agreed, his face denied, and he drew his kinsman after him. “Of course it is. Come, Guthrac, Halthu. Good evening—ah, mistress.” Irony whispered beyond the reach of challenge.

“That’s right,” she bluffed, unable to believe she had pulled it off. “Get along, then.”

“Or what?” roared the young noble, rounding back on her again.

Mischief flared hot in her thin insides. Baring her teeth in a deliberate grin, she made the captured blade twitch like the tail of a waiting cat.

“Or not. . . .”

The bard grabbed his prince’s cloak and dragged him away into the dusk.

Watching them go, Rothesay saw an amazing, an exhilarating thing: she saw their backs as they departed. Never mind that one or another face glared back at her defiantly over a shoulder, it was their backs that spoke to her soul. When a gloom of trees well down the lane finally swallowed them from view, she stabbed her new-won prize into the earth before her and punched both fists skyward in an exultation of triumph. Then she flung her arms wide as a soaring eagle’s wings and danced, whirling herself tightly about, her feet beating a hard tattoo on the ground.

From the tail of her eye, she caught sight of the edgeling family standing mute, staring at her. She snapped at once to normal posture, slightly hunched with sheepishness, blinking back at them with wide eyes. But, the flush of power flowing still warm within her, she unfolded like an opening petal to her full height again, and her broad white grin repossessed her face.

“Good evening, Mother,” she said politely, speaking Harrowater-Sferan, “and would you have a bit of supper to spare a poor traveller?”

By moonlight made fickle by the raveling cloud, Rothesay crossed the dark Merestream by stepping-stone, to climb the flanks of Great Cernefell, barren and windswathed in the roaring midnight.

“Mind the tubs.”

The family had so bidden her at parting, and precious little else they had to say. If anything, Rothesay’s intervention only assured them of retribution sterner than the rudeness they had just escaped. She offered to stay in their defense, though the thought so alarmed her she could barely stammer it. The crofter shrugged, and murmured a phrase, about a single stone against a tide. He started when she finished the quote, from the Classic poet Ddreio: “yet joined in a great company/shall lonely stones turn back the sea.” But he only shrugged again, and, disheartened, Rothesay paid for her meal with such coin as she had, stacking logs for them with her queer strength, and singing the frightened children to sleep with her voice lovely and hollow as the wanton, eternal wind.

She left then, not staying the night. Once her blood cooled, she felt herself trembling like a harp, though she felt neither cold nor afraid. The bronze blade of her problematic prize shivered in her grip as she turned and hefted it. As if I knew what I was doing with it! she chided herself in alarm; though I did well. . . . I am bigger than anything that can ever happen to me; and for the first time she wondered, Well, maybe—?

A sword, however, was an ell of metal treasure, a portable fortune—and the difference between freeman and noble. Its former owner would not idly accept its loss. The crofter refused to take it, and Rothesay reluctantly swathed it together with the sword of Arngas across her back. Murder in Anstrede, theft in the Meredale: she stood a good chance, she felt, of becoming eastern Peria’s most wanted outlaw before coming within miles of Colderwild. To her own surprise, she laughed aloud at the thought, drawing fresh stares from the wary family, and she set off into the night with a will.

Mind the tubs. Rothesay watched the ghostly ground shifting from silver uncertainty to black emptiness, and scowled. These tubs were ‘holes in the ground; big ’uns.’ When the track they promised her led her by several depressions larger than Padriag’s hall and almost half as deep, she breathed easier and strode more lightly, and almost tumbled into a shadow no moonlight could dispell.

Lying flat under the wind and clutching the tough grass, she groped, found a small rock, and lofted it into the darkness. One heartbeat; two; three and four before she heard, clear but remote, amplified by the shaft, the clack of stone on stone. She sucked a deep breath and crawled well away before venturing to stand again.

The ‘tub’ was scarcely ten or twenty feet broad, its contours irregular, and dropped forever, or as near as made no difference to whomever dropped in. She wondered what had made it, and whether its appearance improved by Areolin’s holy sunlight, but she did not stay, pressing on with unplumbed care till she had skirted half a dozen of the dreadful pits, and, crossing Great Cernefell at last, descended into Scealdale with Little Cernefell beyond, crowned with cold stars. That which followed, eddying up from that first troubled pit, took no shape by which to be seen or known.

At last the moon, just at the full, sank to the western rim of the dark world; the east paled, but not yet to lighten the land, as Rothesay paused at the crest of the path bending down from the last of the downs. Weariness ached in her bones, but it was not for fatigue that she hesitated.

Now was neither day nor night, neither the waxing nor the waning of the month; another step and she would tread the plunging slope, walking land that was neither peak nor vale. Times between times, places between: the veil between worlds thinned, magics peaked in power, fay or mortal either might easily stumble into the other’s world. Padriag had works he performed preferentially at dawn or dusk, on the shore where the white waves laced the hem of the sea about his ankles. Yestereve she had a village to run to; here, she stared down into inky emptiness. She looked back.

The wind had fallen almost still in the last hour; only a few fine hairs lifted on the air to tickle her cheeks. But away in the northern darkness, now a roar was rising, the voice of a mighty gale bearing down to sweep the whole world clean.

The track bent sharply down; the slope fell perilously. One stiff gust from the torrent approaching and she might descend from Caelhill without the aid of feet, and break her neck on the unseen stones on the way. With only moments to choose, she fled recklessly for the dim path, and the questionable shelter of the stony hillside.

The roaring surged above her head, whined over the dark gulf beside her, dropped away, and then came thundering back up to meet her. The path wrenched back in a hairpin bend; Rothesay missed the turn, slithered over the gravelly berm, tumbled briefly down the lumpy slope and snapped like a dishrag about a writhen shrub. The wind—if wind it was—fell still.

There were eyes in the stillness. Rothesay twined all her long limbs about the bush, and slowly turned her head, though she was certain that she did not want to see whatever might be there.

With the eyes in her face, she saw the shadowy ground, the black horizon, the westering stars pale in the last of the night. Without them, she ‘saw’, clearer, nearer, more immediately real, two broad eyes, like glowing pits, portals to a long fall to elsewhere. If they had had a color, they would have been yellow, wan and weird as an ailing moon.

No, maybe like feeble firelight in a lonely window; she could almost believe she saw movement, deep within. She screwed up her face, trying to ‘see’ better, before remembering that she ought not. . . .

The yellow pits billowed into one pallid maw, the maw wolfed her down, she tumbled gibbering into the witchlight, her stomach swooping with the fall even though she could feel the shrub still hard and prickly in her grip.

The shrub, a stunted tree, rather, was holly. Tiny scratches began to burn on her face and hands, and she shrank away from the needling leaves. She wondered what it portended: the Geillan clans were wont to bury their dead with a shining leaf of it on the tongue, for the safe passage of the soul; in imperial tradition it symbolized immortality. Both considered it holy to the Lord of the Dead. Nonetheless she hugged its limbs tighter, clinging to its solidity, and strained to see rocky hillside instead of witchy pit.

No hill could she see at all. She could feel the bush, feel even the sharpness of stones digging uncomfortably into her thigh, but she could not see them. She was—in a cave, a great cavern, maybe; there was a subterranean silence, and an impression of vastness all around her. The yellowness had faded like sunset into a profound violet glow.

“Ah. It’s you.” The voice rolled out of the purple darkness like imprisoned thunder. “You are a little fool.” The thunder was disappointed.

Rothesay paid no heed to the insult, which she considered only observation anyway, but her heart climbed to her throat at the phrase, "it’s you". Me, who?

Steel scraped slowly over stone. Pebbles rattled down from a height. Glossy and black as a thing carved of jet, casting violet gleams like flashes of strange fire, a vast creature emerged like Shadow taking form. Jaws, as long as Rothesay was tall, parted slowly, ice-pale teeth the size of her legs glimmered in the strange dimness. Then, as suddenly as the blinding golden fire that belched forth over the blue tongue, without needing to see the empty whiteness where the left pupil should have burned like a coal, she knew the dread author of this magic about her. Being roasted by Marennin: she felt the high honor of this death even through the terror; though less honor and more life would have been her preference.

The flames bathed her in hot glory—and did not burn. The great dragon looked at her astonished face and laughed, doom, doom, doom, like monstrous drums deep underground. “You are all bone,” grumbled Marennin, flicking her tongue disdainfully over her snout. “And what should I say to Padriag?” The drums chortled again.

“But—” Rothesay moved to touch herself, to verify that she was not two ells of charred meat, and banged her arm on a tough branch. “What—?”

“You are like a kitten, baffled by her reflection. You are in my mirror.”

“Oh.” This was magic beyond her apprentice’s comprehension; especially, she wanted to know exactly what the word ‘in’ meant here. But at least she now understood the dragon’s recognizing her: on her thirteenth birthday, to her fright and lasting awe, Padriag had shown her to the dragon, through his own mirror (which behaved like a window at the time; could his, too, hold a being ‘in’ it in this curious possessive way?); Marennin evidently remembered. “Oh. You, er, were you looking for me, Majesty?” she squeaked politely, jittery after a long spell of uncomfortable silent scrutiny.

“No.”

Rothesay squirmed as the monosyllable chopped conversation dead. She appeared to have no power to look away; experimentally, she let go of a branch of the shrub. Perhaps if she disengaged from it entirely, she could simply walk off and resume her journey. Perhaps Marennin would think it rude. Perhaps having the Dragon of Peria annoyed with one would not be altogether in one’s best interests. Right.

“I look for the king,” said Marennin after what seemed like hours. “You are a fool, Bones-that-walk; unless you live. Yet then, you may do.” She chuckled again like falling boulders. “Indeed, child of Ystalyfera, you may serve me best of all.”

“Oh, good,” Rothesay thought weakly, and was horrified to hear it as spoken.

“Find the king.”

Kelmhal? What was worse, now: returning home to a charge of magical kinslaying, or offending a dragon—the Dragon—?

The purple glare of a baleful eye stabbed into her baffled brain; she put up an involuntary hand to ward off its brilliance and banged the branch again. “Spare me the trifles; they are Tryddaini. Find the Eye: the king wakes the fire. Men will see.”

A hundred questions tumbled over one another in her thoughts: who? how? what were Tryddaini? Ystalyfera? The one that tumbled forth was, “Er, what am I to do with him—?”

After a moment of what might have been surprise, Marennin laughed again, louder than before, like a whole hillside collapsing, and Rothesay whirled dizzyingly away, thistledown in a tempest. A many-tentacled black horror grabbed at her face out of the dimness; she screamed and flung herself backwards, scraping her side through dirt and stones. It was the holly, and the sky paled with the advancing dawn.

There came an unearthly shriek from the slope above her head, a keening of rage and indignation. The unseen eyes, eclipsed by the power of the dragon, blazed in frustration and roared away like a mighty wind over the top of the hill.

A lark sang in the quietness.

Rothesay crawled out from under the bush, dragged herself three yards up to the bend in the path, and blinked, dazed with magic, stupid with fatigue, at the burning sunrise. She shook her head slowly, trying to unravel the cryptic words of the dragon. Find ‘the king’; find ‘the Eye’: she was fairly certain that those were two different requests—or orders? What if she failed? If she succeeded, what was she to do—punch the king on the shoulder and yell, “Tag!”?

She rubbed her eyes fiercely. That thing that had hunted her: now she came to think of it, she thought she could recall a sense of surprise, and outrage, when she tumbled into its gaze, and guessed that Marennin had somehow possessed it, used it to snare Rothesay. But she had not been looking for me; she caught me by accident. . . . And now she wants me to find a king. Holly, she remembered with a start, staring down at her recent shrubby shelter, was also a token of the high kingship. Little jewels of blood still welled through her skin from its scratches.

Dawn came to the heights as a yellow flood over the rumpled backs of pale cloud running to the end of sight about the top of Caelhill. Somewhere below, men woke to crawl about their rounds of toil in greyness; up here, Rothesay was alone with the waking of warmth and color: the yellow light brought blue to the ancient sky, gold to the frosted grass, green to the winter-darkened yew nestled in the crook of the path. She sat and ate the edgeling-woman’s bread slowly, drank deep of the dashing Caelghyll nearby, and crawled under the yew to sleep the hours of revealing color away.

Just before sleep claimed her, one last question surfaced, briefly: what the devil did a dragon know about kittens. . . ?

As Rothesay woke in the deepening evening, stretched coldly, and prepared to trudge on, a stranger rode up to the rescued edgeling’s door. He was too finely clad for any Geilla, in red and green satins and a wide-brimmed hat as blue as summer even in the dusky light. He paused, gazing about for signs he expected, and whose absence raised his brows and his hackles both. Nonetheless he spoke softly to the worried woman who peeked through the door; softly, suavely, in her own tongue; and, hardly knowing what she did, she let him in.

Sitting on their bench, a mug of sour ale at his elbow, the stranger displayed his bundle of gifts: fresh linen to replace winter’s worn woollens; ribbons as gay as his own merry plumage for the awed woman; soft-stuffed dolls, with delicate faces and hands of scented wood; a cunning horse on bobbing wheels; bags of seed for the spring planting.

Turning at last to the silent husband, the splendid visitor said, “Beyond that, friend, I can point you toward refuge, if you wish it.” He gestured toward the riches at his feet. “And now you must tell me why I do this.”

“L-lord?”

“‘Sir,’” said the stranger. “Last night Gyrthu’s sons came and made sport of you. Someone—intervened.” He sat back and lit up a fragrant pipe. “Tell me about him.”

Rothesay made little progress that night, as thick clouds settled in and even she, possessed of what Padriag inadequately called ‘respectable’ night vision, could see too little. She knew she wanted to bear west hereabouts, but the forest here was dense and dark, and the land was a careless tumble, haphazard of direction. This trip seemed endless enough; she had no wish to embroider it with lost circling, and camped grumpily, shortly after full dark, under a spruce’s bower near the sound of a spring. She was careful to sprinkle a bit of her cake as an offering to the spirits of the spring and the dell, hoping to ward off malice, and avoid any cousin of last night’s eyes. Still rested from her day’s sleep, she dozed fitfully, lying often awake to brood, to worry, and to fear, till fear ran dry and what remained ignited in anger, a fury with the gods and all the world, with Kelmhal and Marennin, Ottu and the baron and everyone who had the slightest part in driving her into this damnable exile.

Sleeping well at last, just before dawn she dreamed she climbed a steep-sided mountain of crystal, up through a band of drifting cloud to emerge at the rim of a small valley, a shallow saucer near the mountain’s peak. Moveless stars glared down from a night of unfathomable blackness upon a queer, flat-roofed house, pale as moonlight, near the middle of the bowl; a spring as bright as the stars bubbled from the shadowed doorway. Below the clouds there had been a howling or wailing, but here all was quiet. For a moment, she thought it was somehow Padriag’s house, and offered a step to run home to it; then she sensed it was nothing of the sort, but something inexpressibly vast and dangerous—and she was expected.

Waking with a start, she blinked stupidly at a roof of hundreds of bushy green tails dangling from the rafters, and recognized the spruce and the fact that it was morning before she was wholly sure of who she was herself. With that came recollection of her anger, and, warmed as if by strong drink, she washed briskly in the spring, packed up and set off with vehemence, eating as she went, determined to end this hike as swiftly as possible, the sooner to—

The sooner she might—

She drew all blanks. Past her fancy of this Colderwild, her imagination utterly failed her. Old habits triumphed: the coals of anger cooled to ashy embers, and she pulled her cloak of worry tighter about. What was to become of her, half-human stringbean, clanless and bewitched? Would she ever return to Harrowater and Padriag’s warm kitchen, or was she to stay at Colderwild, an exile forever? Or go traipsing on till she found Marennin’s front door to ask, Please, Majesty, what king? She had a sudden vision of herself wandering door to door inquiring, Are you the king? till she passed into legend, like the ghost ship that must sail till it found, built anew, the harbor town it had once betrayed, or that Classical skeptic searching for eternal Truth. What was in Padriag’s letter to the Runedaur? Why would he send her among demons? Why had she not brought a blasted oilskin?