Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

The warm sunlight of early summer spilled through many tall crystal-paned windows, flooding the high room with light, bringing a dawnlike twilight even to the mazy alleyways winding among shelves twice as tall as Rothesay could reach. There seemed to be thousands of works, the brass or ivory caps of scroll-cases protruding from uncounted pigeonholes, and gilt-leather spines of bound codices and folios striping whole lengths of the thick, ornamented boards. Tall tapestries and maps—sometimes one and the same item—blanketed the ends of bookshelves and the few scraps of wall left between shelves and windows, and many more hung efficiently together on cunning racks with swinging arms. Wide tables attended by cushioned stools clustered before the windows, their bright polish casting glimmering lights away into the stony vaults above. Rothesay was awed and delighted; yet an uneasy sense of familiarity seemed to echo back out of forgotten wells of memory. Where—?

Smells of leather, paper, ink and age hung in the air; especially ink. Following her nose and a soft scraping sound into a wide, north-lit bay, she came upon the Lore-master’s lair.

Here were shelves of bottles, bins of colored powders, and racks of brushes, knives and chisels. Master Merry bent deep in concentration over a worktable, his lanky body folded to the perpendicular at the hips and propped on his arm so that one bony shoulderblade poked up like an ungainly wing, and his neck swooped low. Streaks of green striped his ash-gold head, suddenly brightened as he raked the dangling strands back, out of his work, without troubling to put his quill aside first. Before she could laugh, he looked up and grinned.

“Hullo, Rothesay! Wondered if e’er tha’d learn to escape Lee’s courtesy!”

“Good morning, Master! I might not yet, if I hadn’t run into Rory this morning. There is so much I don’t know yet about the ways of this place!”

“And place full of folk who’ll freely exploit that!” Merry laughed.

“Even you?”

“Nature gives no quarter for ignorance,” he confessed cheerfully. “What wouldsta now?”

In short order, she had a tour of his domain, beginning with his work at hand, recopying a five-century-old map of Andrastir. A good deal of his work involved recopying crumbling manuscripts, as much for his own enlightenment as for the preservation of the Order’s treasures, and he seemed to have almost as much copied into memory as onto fresh vellum. Almost any remark provoked a scrap of rhyme, a verse, or a whole tale out of the ages.

“How do you remember all that?” she asked, awed.

“Eh? Seek’st to seduce me?” he inquired brightly.

Shocked, she blurted, “No!” And then hoped he was not offended by the vigor of her denial, despite Leoff’s advice.

“Then ask indeed how I do remember such stuff as if tha wished to know for theyself, and not to flatter me.”

She looked long and hard at him, feeling as puzzled and blindsided as at one of Master Leoff’s master blows; yet he looked as foolishly engaging as he had the night of her Welcoming. Considering, she saw that her question had been no request for instruction, but only a conversational device, though she was genuinely amazed at his mnemonic capacity.

“Something wrong with everyday conversation?” she hazarded.

“Now, that depends. Hadsta been a boy, I might have let it pass.” He shoved aside a globe, a model of the celestial sphere in a cunning bronze mount, and sat down to make his point more comfortably. There were ladders in the library, but she learned that the recesses carved into the sides of the shelves like hand- and foot-holds, were just that, and Master Merry had conducted a good part of the tour walking on the curio-strewn tops of the shelves, fifteen feet above the floor. “Or maybe I might still have taken it amiss,” he went on thoughtfully. “Questions are important tools, not to be dulled by careless use. This is a power, Rothesay, to see what lies implicit in the things of everyday. Unexamined, they are traps for the unwary, and shape one as not always desired! Now, everyday women learn to beguile a man through flattery, and especially flattering questions—and they will play this play whether they truly want him or not. And if they succeed, then like so many victors they do come ultimately to contempt for the ones whom their power commands.”

“But, Master—the Runedaur are all about acquiring power over others! And is there not something of contempt in your talk of ‘everyday women’ and ‘everyday people’?”

“Well asked! That is indeed a danger, wherever power is used.” All at once she recalled Dav’s ‘grave danger’ on the roof in Floodholding: an awareness, and rejection, of imminent scorn. Then Merry went on, “Cansta think of a time when no power of man or woman avails?”

“Umm—death?” she said, her voice very small.

“Tha seest somewhat why we are who we are,” Merry smiled. “Now ask thy question anew.”

Bewildered for a moment, she recalled it with a jolt of absurd satisfaction. “How do you remember so much, Master?”

“I want to.”

“Wait a minute!”

“Na, ’t is true enough: desire is the first step to any power! Brother Davi’ll not be bothered to carry the whole of ‘Peregrine Arnaf’s Lay’ in his head, not when he can shout for me. When tha wish’t, come and learn then the strategies of lore.”

“Lore has strategies?” she asked, following him back down to his work corner. Leoff made strategy seem the exclusive province of combat.

“Power does,” said Merry. “Lore is a power.”

She passed the morning helping with the Lore-master’s project, learning his tools and his art and several new songs. Master Merry had a good voice, a bright tenor, and, discovering that Rothesay could hold a tune, indulged a passion for counterpoint till the high arches rang. Other voices joined in, sometimes in song and sometimes complaint, from a few men and a woman, busy reading or making copies themselves at some of the other tables. From time to time Rothesay paused to appreciate the pleasure of not being beaten upon, even through padded leather armor. She could almost feel her bruises healing.

“Nearly dinnertime,” Merry announced suddenly into a late silence of brushstrokes, and she learned cleanup.

As she wiped abluent from her hands, a man strode abruptly to Merry’s table, a man who made her recoil with one hand waving vacuously about her hip till she realized she was reaching for a weapon that was not there.

Here was a Runedaur, a real Runedaur, the black warrior of all her earlier fancies about the Knights of Death. Power crackled about him, a cold air of violence resentfully suppressed swirled in on his wake; dark-bearded, dark browed, he stared at her like a wolf eyeing a chicken. So intense was his aura of deadly menace that it took her a moment to realize that he was clad, not in strange armor of black demonhide, but only homespun and a leather apron, and instead of hideous nameless tools of pain and murder, his only apparent weapon was a small cloth bag. By then his glance had let her go, and turned to Merry questioningly.

The Lore-master, still finger-deep in brush-cleaning, looked thoughtful, then nodded in some signal Rothesay could not read. But the stranger flicked open his bag, pulled out a brown, wrinkled mass of what looked like sausage-skins, counted out four and tossed them to the table. He glanced back at Rothesay, skeptical, dubious; he did not need to say, I am to trust my back to the likes of you? to make her burn with indignation, and then he was gone as brusquely, and silently, as he had come.

She watched till the great east doors closed him out, and turned back to Merry. She almost asked about the stranger-knight, but decided against awarding the boor that much courtesy, and instead picked up one of the skins, soft and supple and marvelously thin. There was nothing about the Lore-master’s workplace that suggested any likely use for them. “What are these?”

Merry’s head shot up, both scruffy eyebrows rising in an arch of surprise, and vehement disapproval. “Know’st not?” he demanded. When she shook her head mutely, startled by his displeasure, he looked her over carefully and one eyebrow dropped. “Ignorant and virgin,” he murmured, as if to himself. “Learn this, then, lesta come to motherhood unaware: these a man may use to keep his seed from the womb of his lover. No seed, no child. Dosta follow?”

She nodded, blushing furiously, dropping the skin hastily. Merry’s brushes splashed quietly. She stared at the crumpled little pile. “But, Master—” She broke off, biting back the observation that the man who brought them seemed more the sort to rape and let the seed be damned, but Merrithorander cocked his head to the horizontal and regarded her with mild inquiry. Unexpectedly emboldened, she ventured blindly, “But, well, why? Who uses them? Nobody seems—well, nobody’s tried me . . . .” And then she longed to sink into the stone beneath the keep, but Merry answered.

“Na, of course not. Th’art new: tha ask’st first.”

Now it was her head that shot up, and her eyes went round. ‘Ask’? What was this ‘ask’? And who, her? She thought she would sooner die than invite a man to bed. She stared at him, wondering what lusts burned beneath his idiot’s demeanor; yet it was hard to take this scarecrow creature for a male at all, much less as anyone’s impassioned lover. Then his slack smile, still dangling sideways, broadened suddenly, and one eyelid flickered: it might have been a wink; or it might not.

Thoroughly undone, she spun away, blushing royally. Would she ever learn Kahan’s warning about mind-readers? And what a thing to be caught thinking! True, he had not seemed offended, but nonetheless . . . and the very idea of asking someone for. . . . She almost fled there and then straight back to Master Leoff’s training ground, for there only martial embarrassment lurked, easily mended.

And then she saw that she had spent a fortnight learning how to kill, with no more qualm or chagrin than for learning to cook. Only her incompetence had troubled her. Where had she ever learned that it was less evil to skewer a man, than to stroke him? She stuffed her fingers deep into her hair and peered back, shaken, at the Lore-master.

Merry cocked an amiable head at the towering shelves. “Books are often easier to talk to. Dosta come up after lunch, I’ll finda some. But tell, now: does it soothe thy soul to distress thy hair?”

“What?”

“A place of peace, this our Order,” he said irrelevantly, and fished a splendid jewelled bone comb from his rat’s-nest of a desk behind the worktable. She stood dumbly, suffering him to make smooth again the hair above her braids, as a suspicion dawned that a propensity for odd, irrelevant remarks was some prerequisite for Runedaur mastery. In this she was not wholly wrong, and had she marked the slight easing of her dismay, and the restoration of sense, that followed on the Lore-master’s comment, she might have been more suspicious.

Done, Merry pitched the costly comb heedlessly back to his desk into a pile of rags and leather scraps, and ambled off like very fast walking kelp, for Colderwild’s kitchens.

Padding after the Lore-master, she suddenly remembered Raian, and his refusal to learn his geometry because he could always call on his tutor—like Dav calling for Merrithorander and his memory. It still seemed a dereliction; she said as much to Merry.

“I don’t understand! One should strive to learn all one can.”

Merry made no reply at first. Then, “All at once?” he marvelled, awed.

“Er—well, of course one has to start somewhere . . . . ”

“Ah, aye. So tha dost.”

They descended a spiral stairs together in silence as Rothesay’s color rose.

“One must choose,” mused Merry. “What if I choose differently than tha?”

“Oh! Then we would know more between us?” she hazarded.

The Loremaster gave her an uncertain glance. “Tha’d not scorn my choice?”

“Oh, no! At least, I don’t think so. Maybe if you picked something truly silly—but maybe it wouldn’t seem so foolish if I knew more about it?”

Merry’s only reply was a thoughtful, almost interrogative hmm? Presently he spoke again, thinking out loud: “Master Cal studies only horse.”

“And food! All right, then,” she conceded after a polyphonic laugh, “it’s good some folk should specialize.” She mulled silently down the hall in his wake. No, one person could not learn everything. Then there existed a power, and so certainly a strategy, in surrounding oneself with people of various gifts, who would answer and gladly when shouted for. In that, the young master of boys was learned indeed, and she apologized in thought—though she meant to learn everything herself anyway. How to choose what not to learn? “Aiye! I thought learning everything was everything! Are there no absolute principles, then?”

“Oh, but yes!” said Merry, and pointed down the steps to the raucous under-kitchen. “‘To the best of thy power, never miss lunch!’”

It was mayhem. In the low-arching cavern under the lesser feast hall, half a hundred people tried variously to snatch a quick bite, work in small groups on collective dinners, compete for space, supplies and inventiveness, or simply interfere with one another for sheer mischief. Rothesay’s noon meal for the last two weeks had been a picnic carried to the lists -- or the hall, the day it rained -- by a shy little peasant girl from Dorchastir, and she joined in joyously. The grim knight of the morning was nowhere in view.

She discovered the smooth slate wall next to one of the greater fireplaces, on which people wrote in colored chalks, listing so many tasks to be done about the hold; beside them, others had written in many hands the names of whoever claimed responsibility for them. She stared, enchanted: plainly, the Order expected even its drudges to read! Most of the names had been crossed through and a new one added after it; and the more onerous the chore, the longer the list of names, roughly in order of decreasing age. It was a common ploy of the older, more competent students to sign up for something truly offensive, such as cleaning out the stables or the toilets, specifically to pass them on to their well-Ghosted juniors. Her own name was nowhere to be seen but she did not care to inquire about it just yet.

Arguments raged in many circles. At one table, a one-eyed fellow rolling dough engaged an apple-peeling matron in a combative discussion on the nature of the fundamental substance of the world. Rothesay felt smug that she knew some of the arguments: the Geillari had no grasp of such concerns, and folk at home used to mock Padriag’s interest, though not in his hearing. Next to these two, the talk was political: “The Madroch’s got the Midlands by the throat. Once Odhru submits—”

“Him? He’ll die first!” the speaker laughed.

“—Andrastir’s for it, and the throne’s taken! And then what country will this be?”

And of course, where Caltern was, all talk centered on horseflesh, in the most passionate argument in the room, though the laconic Horsemaster himself contributed little more than an infuriating grin.

Dav was there. Rothesay had not seen him since Leoff waylaid him the other day: his brow and nose were still scabbed. He sat on a low stool between a hearth and a bucket of water and pared potatoes with frightening speed, splashed them clean in the bucket, then cast them aside in a high and graceful arc. Ten feet away, Ravenbeard met the descending tuber with a pair of flashing knives, the resulting slices piled into a wide wooden bowl, and never once did his fingers touch food.

As she watched in awe, a dagger whirled out of the crowd behind her and took the next potato out at the top of its arc. Ravenbeard grabbed wildly after it, his own blades dropping into the bowl, and caught it by the hilt at the very end of his reach.

Amid broad laughter and some applause, Rothesay spun around, and in the middle of the kitchen steps, Master Merry bowed and bowed, whipping his lanky hair about and grinning like a lunatic. Once again the dagger flew from behind her; Merry plucked it from the air with all the cleverness his looks belied, tucked it away at the nape of his neck, winked roguishly at Rothesay and eeled his way into Caltern’s group, who were already eating.

“Nice recovery, Kiel,” she heard Dav remark to Ravenbeard.

“Huh! And no mistake!” he agreed, chuckling. He tossed the potato for himself and sliced it as it fell. “And if it’d been cooked yet, you know old Merry’s pig-tickler would’ve had a string on it! Hullo, chickie! Have a seat and rub some garlic, there’s a good babe. Word has it you’ve escaped Leoff, so eat up: soon’s the boys catch on, you’re back on the choreboard—”

“Hey, that’s right!” crowed a passing youth, possessor of a huge bowl of mushrooms, a long brown pigtail and an unfortunate complexion but also a gay and rakish grin. Ulflaed, she thought his name was; and him some chieftain’s runaway son? “Hey, she’s free!” he shouted to the room. “Chain’s off! Put her up—and she’s got my Stables, Flick. Mark that for me!” Ten-year-old Cisconnar, the same child who brought linens to Carialla the night of her arrival, pulled up a tall stool to the wall as Ulflaed turned and poked a finger in her face. “Dibs on your serving me my supper tonight—in case you had any other plans.”

Rothesay smiled a honeyed smile as all mischief welled up in her. Even before she moved, she saw his face change, saw him begin to fold away from her, saw him start to offer his burden of fungi for objection; but he was a heartbeat too slow. She crashed into him at the hips, rolled him to the stone floor, tangled his arms swiftly behind his back—and then lost them as, fearing to use too much force she exerted too little, and he pulled them free. But then she had his pigtail, a knee in his back and her garlic-paring knife pricking gently under his chin. “Ghost,” she purred.

“Awww—yield!” he grumbled.

“How nice. Serve yourself supper, then.” She released him, and rose to scattered applause and a few cheers. She had reckoned correctly that several pounds of mushrooms flung across the floor would not greatly disturb anyone except the one who had to chase them all down and wash them again; and she was letting him off easy, at that. Primly she took her seat again, gathered up her own fallen fruits, and resumed her task.

Ravenbeard—Kiel—offered her a thick slice of potato for a tidbit. “Like I said!” Eat: so she did, as he went on, “See, Lee wanted your, shall we say undistracted attention, so he invoked the privilege of holding you unaccountable for anything anyone laid on you, at least till he was done with you. That’s ‘Chain’s on,’ meaning a Master’s Chain, though, hell, I could call it, or baby Garrod.”

“And ‘Chain’s off’ is returning things to normal.”

“That’s exactly right. Everybody grumps and grumbles when the Chain goes on, but they sure make up for it when it’s off! Student’s got a memory like nobody else when it comes to keeping track of exactly who owes him what, let me tell you: there isn’t a one of them’s forgotten just what you’re promised to do, and—you note how the names only get marked through and not wiped off? That’s so we can see who was the previous whattayacallem, who was responsible, so in case you bum out on him, we know who to nail for it. If we can’t find him, we go to the next one up, and like so, but it doesn’t mean you can just skip out on everybody, because that’s exactly who’ll come looking for revenge: everybody!”

Kiel, apparently capable of endless talk and no more willing to give a conversational advantage than Leoff a martial one, rattled on then into descriptions of tasks by which her name was being enthusiastically added; but she listened only partially as she scanned the names for Kahan’s, and concluded at last that it was not there. She had not seen him about the Hall; was he gone, or only “Chained on” with someone else?

Dav intervened when her instructor began to detail toilet-cleaning: “Shut up, Kiel.”

The knight thrust his knives defiantly into the pile of potato slices and folded his burly arms across his chest. “Make me!”

“No!” roared a worker at the opposite corner of Kiel’s table, a stringy man stringing beans. “No, not now! Hell’s bloody breath, I’m—”

Dav and Kiel collided with elemental force, whipped suddenly into a tight cyclonic spiral in which bronze and steel flickered like Kavin’s lightning. With only an instant to escape, Rothesay failed to choose between a dive and a leap, attempted both, and fell prostrate on the floor just in time to cushion the toppling men. A flailing foot overturned Dav’s bucket, and a cold flood soaked her front.

“—hungry,” the stringy man snapped as Kiel, chortling almost too richly to speak, yielded.

“So? Start it cooking, Jennas,” Dav suggested, pulling Kiel to his feet. Jennas swept the potatoes into the cauldron boiling in the fireplace, followed by his own work and that of a couple of other contributors. The two wet combatants stripped casually before the fire; Dav hung their clothing on pot-hooks, as Kiel accepted a mop from a helpful neighbor and set to vigorously and playfully on the spreading puddle. The floor disgorged a stone-grey wolfhound, who snuffled and lapped at the water helpfully.

The high spirit that had moved in her all morning was with Rothesay yet. Steeling herself, she obeyed its impulse; and no one hooted, no one jeered, no one noticed anything at all out of the ordinary. Only Dav, turning to find her own dripping black garments offered on dainty fingertips for hanging by the fire, raised an eyebrow in token of a surprise that gratified her deeply. He splayed the clothing over a hook, and then made her a slight bow.

“I stand corrected,” he murmured, his eyes twinkling.

She made him a queenly nod, though she struggled to keep from covering her nakedness, and sat down once more to finish the garlic.