VI: Home of Vagabonds, Mother of Orphans

Rothesay sprang wildly awake: how late the morning! The clear light slanted down from a high window much too steeply. Where would the children have got to?

Better question: where had she got to? She stared around, unable to account for the airy chamber with its exuberantly frescoed walls, tall windows framed in carven timbers, and a half dozen of double bunks like the one beside her. Colderwild.

She sat down again, fingering the heavily embroidered linens. Morning in Colderwild: now what? Her eye traveled to a small table by the bed, and a chair draped with folds of black cloth. Dress her ‘in the Black,’ Dav had said. She fingered a fold of the silken stuff: clothes indeed. Man-fashion they were, she found as she covered her nakedness swiftly, though the over-tunic hung longer than customary among Sferan men, past her knees, and the side points almost touched the floor. The trousers, too, were loose and long; no laces for cross-garters were forthcoming, nor yet any kind of footwear. But she smoothed the heavy silk of her sleeve with pleasure: whatever its style, it felt wonderful.

Quickly she straightened the disordered blankets, soft as fur and smelling cleanly of lavender, and noted thoughtfully that only one other bed was covered. It, too, had by it a chair, a small table with some candles, and a mug and plate and a small pile of furled scrolls. Remembering that she too had personal belongings somewhere about this pile, Rothesay nosed about and discovered under the foot of her bed, not her pack, but a wooden tray with the small knife, tin cup, water flask and amulet-bag which comprised all her worldly wealth—except the sword, and the blossom-kalasin. She scowled and nosed further, but they were not in this room. In a moment, neither was she.

The hall without, though beautifully pillared, was empty and uninformative; but down the wide stairs she found, first, double doors whose painted and gilded splendor suggested more importance than she yet wished to confront. To the right, light flowed in through narrow windows flanking a door of less exalted design, which brought her out under a shadowed porch into a sunlit courtyard, flagged with many-colored stones. Across the way, another wing of Colderwild’s great keep rose against a fine blue sky; to the west a garden flowered with fruit trees in bud. From around the next corner to her right came voices. She braved the corner.

She faced a loose semicircle of a score of youths, clad much like herself, intent on a lean black figure at the center. Master Dav turned and pierced her with a look as intense and remote as starfire.

“Here,” he announced to the group, and beckoned Rothesay over.

Surprised murmurs broke out among the younger ones; the elders, better trained, made no outburst, though their widened eyes darted over her. One alone, at the far end of the arc regarded her wholly impassively, showing no sign of surprise, nor of recognition, though she knew him: Rory, the Master had called him, the one who had failed to drop on Dav from above. At the near end, Kahan, tallest of the lot and seemingly the eldest, greeted her with laughing eyes and a white smile, and she felt unaccountably, but gratefully, safer.

Dav made no introduction, no explanation. Having placed her before the group, he ranged himself beside her, shoulder to shoulder, and extended his arm. Mystified, Rothesay hesitated, then raised her own. Dav bent his elbow. So did Rothesay. He jumped forward. So did Rothesay. Abruptly he strode forward, appropriated a pair of wooden training swords from the two nearest boys, tossed one to Rothesay and struck a challenging pose. She held her ground, but imitated his stance, albeit halfheartedly. Dav dropped his attitude, and turned inquiringly to his pupils.

They shifted restlessly, and then Rory strode purposefully forward. Sunlight gleamed on his copper curls, but his brooding dark eyes rivaled Dav’s intensity, and the drooping ruddy moustache gave him an almost sullen look. She remembered his heavy muscles; though now veiled in black silk, he seemed no less intimidating. Standing before her he mimicked her pose, relaxed from what Dav had shown her but uneasy still. Then he swept his own sword up and around in a great arc, and regarded her expectantly.

She glanced at Dav. He gave no sign of his expectations. Turning back to this new playmate, she discovered him folding his arms with a disgusted snort. Dav nodded, and held up a significant finger.

“What told Rory he would not succeed?” With no answer forthcoming from the group, Dav raised a eyebrow at Rory. “I noted that you recognized it at once,” he said approvingly, and the young man flushed with pleasure. “Tell them what you saw.”

Rory grinned, which transformed him suddenly from a stormy young thunder-god to a jovial sun deity. “She looked to you! Even if she had mirrored me, it would still have been you she was truly following.”

“Good. Challenge: why should a villein chit who till a week ago knew me only by the very worst of my reputation, obey me so implicitly now? One mark towards knighthood for whomever answers that within—” he whistled thoughtfully, “say, two months. Yourself included, chit.” He stalked towards her, and the group of boys, in some sense dismissed, erupted into a dozen virulent skirmishes. Kahan and Rory swiftly put down insurrections against themselves and, as the vanquished sought out easier game, drew up in Dav’s wake.

Could the force of repulsion between two magnets be felt as all the work of one against the other, it would have described neatly the approach of an indifferent Kahan and a bristling Rory. Kahan, slender, loose-limbed and dreamy-eyed, might be nineteen or twenty; rock-solid Rory, less tall but more massive, she took to be her own age. And whereas Kahan bestowed on her the full measure of his friendly curiosity, Rory spent half his attention suspiciously on Kahan.

She herself was more concerned with their pensive, inscrutable master. Something—

Dav moved, a minor explosion; Rothesay sat gasping in the dust, unhurt but considerably startled. She ignored his proffered hand.

“What was that for?” she demanded.

“Comparison,” he returned shortly. The hand became imperious. He swept her to her feet and swept off, expecting to be followed, and so he was.

They crossed the courtyard of colorful flagstones, and statues of several ancient styles, ducked through a colonnade connecting the palatial keep with a huddled pile of smaller halls, rounded the wing that stretched toward the south like a lion’s paw, stepped into the semicircle with the two crescent pools and Rothesay almost danced in a joy of homecoming for mere recognition’s sake. Not since breakfast at the Sternbridge, and Teginau before that, had she seen the same place twice over since leaving home.

Between the lion’s paws rose the high steps to the great door she had entered last night; a hundred feet above, the great gilded dome shone like a second sun. The most of the stone that upheld it, without as within, was pale as mist in the mountains, and glittered like crushed crystal. The towering javelin windows, many perhaps five times her height yet scarcely more than her breadth, stood framed in slender pillars of black rock like twisted ropes. The slates of the acorn-cap roofs below the dome made mosaic patterns for eagles—and for a pair of men now running along the gilded gables and sliding crazily down gilded flashings to disappear in the folds before she could cry out.

A quartet of servants like farmhands, armed with shovels and rakes and wheeling a couple of barrows full of muck, rumbled past. Though they touched their breasts respectfully before the Master, they grinned, and gave him more than twice their shovels’ length of berth. In a moment, though, Rothesay spun at the sound of combat behind her, and found one fleeing before Rory, now in possession of the man’s rake. With a quick jab, Rory buckled his knees for him, swept the rake’s teeth down in a vicious bite at the unguarded back, and at the last minute hooked them gently under his victim’s trouser-belt. The farmhand grinned round sheepishly.

“Yuus kehhp’n ys honor tow-us,” he apologized in a drawl almost too lazy to leave his lips. After a moment she worked it out: Just keeping ‘yous’ on your toes.

For a moment longer Rory dared him to try to escape with or without the shreds of dignity intact, then tossed the rake to one of his fellows and turned to chase after Dav, who had paid no more heed than a dragon to a kitten.

They passed the huge fire-pit, cut through the stand of cherries she had passed the night before, leaped the little brook, and waded into a torrent of black and grey wolfhounds that then swirled into a furry whirlpool about her, sniffing at her new scent eagerly. Then it was down a few steps under an archway into a wide courtyard that reeked of coal-smoke and—something, an unfamiliar metallic stench that made her head swim, and the hounds fled. To one side a black marble sculpture showed the Earthshaker battling the Lao-serpent; to the other stood a youthful runner frozen in porphyry. More statuary, rather soot-smudged, graced the open doorways of the smithy, itself an art of stone, and its sturdy outbuildings.

Among the eight or nine men in the yard, she recognized Nessian by his silver head gleaming in the spring noonlight; the big red-bearded fellow, naked but for a colorful loincloth and half a hundred beaded necklaces, amulets and bracelets, was surely the swordsman who had fallen in the pool last night, and there was his small opponent opposite. They were head to head with a small burly man in smith’s leathers who turned in his stubby fingers—her missing sword. She glared, but before she could make a move to reclaim it, “Leoff!” Dav barked. They all looked up, but the small knight with the dainty grace of a great lady seemed most directly interested. “I’ve a—”

The big redheaded man stomped over to Rothesay, cutting Dav off. For a moment he stared thoughtfully at her, his fists on his hips. Then he swept her up in a huge bear hug, a hug that lifted her off her feet. There he hefted her for several heartbeats, and she had the odd sense that he was weighing her, in some mysterious way taking her soul’s measure rather than her body’s.

“—one for you to try, of your courtesy, Arms-master,” Dav finished, slightly ironically, when Redbeard put her down again.

The little man raised one elvish eyebrow fastidiously. He raked her over slowly in a professional appraisal, noting her height with a glance at his large colleague. He was himself fine-featured and colorless, his fair thin hair and moustache making small contrast with a face so pale that the thin white scar from temple to jaw barely showed. But his eyes were dark, cavernously dark, and his black garb lent him a spectral look.

Presently he sighed, and held out one slim white hand. Kahan respectfully placed in it the wooden sword he still held; a wide-eyed Rory had to poke Rothesay gently with his before she noticed him and took it stupidly in nerveless fingers. Bright curious stares ringed her like so many bale-fires. She flushed hotly, scrubbing one sweaty palm on her tunic skirts; she did not look at Kahan, preferring to imagine his kindly sympathy and fearing to see aught else in him. Leoff attacked.

“Awp!” Rothesay leaped away, dropping her weapon and nursing a shocked hand.

Ignoring Leoff’s indignation, all the more bitter for its silence, Dav retrieved Rothesay’s fallen sword, and considered her thoughtfully. Then he sneered, cynically, knowingly. Yearning to swing it into his teeth, she all but snatched the blade from him, and Leoff was upon her again. This assault she parried deftly, and some half dozen blows passed between them before she wondered what in the name of the World-mother she was doing; again her hand smarted, and the wooden blade rattled away over the cobbles. Someone behind her, Kahan or Rory tossed it to Leoff, and the Arms-master himself returned it to her, his pale face alight with astonishment. He tried again, and she waved the blade at him as if she were shooing crows, crying despairingly, “No! You don’t understand—it isn’t me!”

“Oh, that is unarguable, chit!” Dav spat.

A few furious moments later, it was Leoff’s sword rebounding from the smithy wall. He let it lie, and stared transfixed into her sheepish face.

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“Now, what am I to think, Dav?” he asked softly in the quiet sunlight. “I should have taken as axiomatic, that an angry fighter is a losing one—till now.”

“I’m sorry,” Rothesay murmured.

“Yes, you are,” snapped Dav. “Let’s hope training will correct that! —I have been wondering how best to train her to a blade,” he went on to Master Leoff. “And you’ll note she has small advantage in other areas.” He took two quick steps towards her, and once again she found herself knocked without recourse to the ground. She blinked bemusedly at the long brown hand and the strong ruddy one offered from either side; rather than fuel the palpable heat between them, she refused both with a wan smile and stood up again by her own office.

Dav wrapped up a brisk explanation of Rothesay and the sword of Arngas with a mention of yesterday’s skirmish in the woods. The big knight‘s grin split his vast red bush, and his thunderous mirth rolled out to echo from Colderwild’s towers. Nessian, nodding courteously to Rothesay, appeared satisfied of last night’s question. Leoff still stared, amazed.

“Dav! What a challenge!” he breathed. He sounded delighted, as if a ‘challenge’ were a gift more rare than jewels.

“Isn’t it? You might say she is literally of two minds! Teach her the letting-go—”

“—And what a power we shall have returned to us, to prove the hounds of Peria!”

“Something of the sort,” Dav drawled.

Rothesay sat with Kahan, Rory, and lunch upon the second-highest horn on Colderwild’s walls, and looked out on the wild spring in southern Peria. Below the walls, at the cliff’s foot, the wide river-meadows were emerald jewels of young grass. The two towns could be seen plainly: Dorchastir, not a mile away where a stream sparkled down from the hills to the young Daorlas, and Kavinsrae on the valley floor a mile or so beyond that. North away, across the Daorlas, the stiff hills wore spring lace of white, pink and tender purple mists upon their shadowy shoulders. And somewhere far beyond lay the rim of the Dragon Sea, and Harrowater’s snug harbor. Padriag’s peas would be blooming.

She, seated, and Rory, crouching, leaning against the crenelations that ringed the top of the tower, did hearty justice to a sweet, nutty loaf and a wedge of fine old cheese; Kahan nibbled a sliver of each, little more than a symbolic gesture of communion. Her tour of Colderwild had been exuberant. Shelving animosity, her guides had led her at a full run through all the best places: a secret passage into the kitchens, the place where one Morcai fell to his death last summer, and where to jump from the wall to the stables’ thatched roofs standing out most clearly, if not their relative positions: Teginau was as orderly as a geometer’s text by comparison with this rambling maze.

Certainly Colderwild was run like no other place she knew. The boys climbed, fought and ran in the most precarious places, and no adult demanded their caution. The hapless Morcai, in Kahan’s phrase, was ‘entitled’ to his death.

“You have to ask yourself if a thing is worth getting killed for. If your answer is yes, who am I to hinder you?” Kahan had explained.

“It isn’t right or wrong,” Rory added. “It’s how you rank things. I let you make your choices, and you can damned well leave me to mine.”

“What if I don’t know how to choose?” objected Rothesay.

Kahan had smiled and cocked an inquiring eyebrow.

“What do you need to make a choice?” Rory asked her.

“Uh—knowledge?” she ventured.

Rory snapped his fingers. Kahan’s smile broadened. “You may survive,” he laughed gently.

She looked out now on the flower-frosted land and shook her head, unable to picture such complaisance to death in herself. Of a sudden, Rory burst from the preoccupation that had held him nearly silent through lunch, and demanded, “When would you have been hungry?”

“What?”

“Hawk-man asked if you were hungry, and you said, I could eat. When would you have been hungry, if we hadn’t eaten now?”

‘Hawk-man’ evidently meant Kahan. She wondered what he had done to earn that appellation; then considered Rory’s question. Suppertime would have had her belly rolling, to be sure, but petty inner turmoil hardly qualified as hunger. And missing tomorrow’s breakfast, or even lunch, she could bear, reluctantly. “Tomorrow’s supper, I guess. Why?”

“Huh!” he grunted, staring.

“Why?”

Kahan answered. “An exercise in personal grammary. Though we use the same words, we do not all mean the same things by them. Rory, here, will be ‘hungry’ by suppertime; Lore-master Merry gets ‘hungry’ at the mere thought of food. If you are going to control someone, it helps to know how he talks to himself.”

“Am I going to control people?”

“Are you going to be Runedaur?”

“What about what you said before—about making your own choices, and letting others make theirs?”

Kahan laughed. “Who can’t—or won’t—master his own soul must be thrall to one who will master it for him. And someone else will, when you do not. You have been warned.”

“Right.” She crushed a bit of bread into a doughy ball, and changed the subject. “Thank you for showing me around today. It’s the closest thing to common hospitality—” She cut herself off, not wishing to be rude, however truthful.

Rory snorted. “Not by half, it isn’t!”

“We’re hiding out,” Kahan apologized.

“It’s your grace day,” Rory explained. “There’ll be a Welcoming supper for you tonight, and then you’ll have till dawn. After that—well, you’re in it with the rest of us. Meantime, the safest place in Colderwild is within your reach!”

Even as the words left his mouth, Rory sensed danger. From his crouch against the battlements behind, a mighty froglike leap carried him halfway across the tower’s top; but Kahan, swift and powerful as a striking snake, took him down in midair. Rothesay leaped to her feet, heart in mouth as the two tumbled violently over the flags. In a sudden tableau, live bronze in Rory’s hand glinted against Kahan’s throat. Something twitched; the blade chimed softly as it fell, and the frozen moment boiled into fresh violence, leaving in her mind a floating afterimage of Rory’s fury, and Kahan’s broad, tranquil smile.

She glanced down from the tower to the top of the wall below. Thirty feet, maybe: farther than she cared to jump. The only exit was through the trapdoor they had come up by, the trapdoor upon which this battle raged. She watched the tumult apprehensively. It was as like to the brawling of Harrowater bullies, this silent, deadly game, as a midwinter’s wolf fight was to the butting of rams in a sheep pen. And tomorrow she would be ‘in it with the rest of us’?

Rothesay bit her thumb. Arngas’s gifts might not be truly hers, but they were in her keeping, and accessible to her use—partially; certainly she had no other hope of defending her skull from a cracking. What could Padriag want, sending her into this? Well, she might not be Arngas, but she would certainly put him to as much use as she could make.

‘Hawk-man’ should be snake-man, she thought, as Kahan’s sinuous limbs coiled remorselessly about his opponent’s body. Rory flung them both backwards, intending to land on Kahan; Kahan managed a pirouette. Rory loosed his grip to catch himself on his hands, and kept on rolling. But Kahan’s arm slipped from its lodge on Rory’s chin to his throat. “Ghost!”

“See you—in hell first!” Rory strangled on his reply, and went slack.

“Mother Goddess!” Rothesay shrieked, as Kahan oiled up from under Rory, whose unconsciousness was plainly no feint.

“He won’t yield to me,” Kahan complained wistfully, as Rothesay dropped to her knees beside the vanquished and slapped at his face, wishing for water. “I give him marks for tenacity, but I have to recall some for bullheadedness. It is sometimes useful to surrender.”

Rory blinked, and flung himself away, then caught her startled face, and blushed hotly. “Son of a—!”

“You can take my kitchen duty tonight,” Kahan suggested, “cooking and serving. Beats scullery!” he pointed out, as Rory looked mulish.

Rothesay glared from one to the other, and settled on Kahan. “Look, was that necessary? Can’t you give each other a little peace?”

Kahan glanced sunward. “We’ve given each other a good two hours’ peace. And necessary? It is my duty to him, as a brother in the sacred Order,” he smiled broadly, and winked. “I expect no less from him.”

“As tomorrow,” Rory put in, still a little sullen and rubbing his throat, “it will be our duty to you.”

“And yours to us.”

Rory looked thoughtful. “Never jumped a girl before—like that.”

It was not a lewd remark, Rothesay realized with surprise, though the reference was clearly intended: it was strategy, and not sexuality, on which he mused now. She was puzzled. Runedaur had the reputation of rutting goats, yet so far only Dav had regarded her with anything like lust, and was only being rude, at that.

“Question?” asked Kahan.

She blushed. She would no more give voice to these thoughts than dance naked on the walls. “Um—how is it you’re not knighted yet?” She instantly regretted this subject, too, but it was better than the other.

Kahan laughed low and dangerously. Rory clapped a hand to his face. “Oh, gods!” He crossed back to kneel by her. “Look, Sugar,” he said earnestly, his red brows knitting, “you don’t want to talk about something, just say so, and no apologies! But you go getting embarrassed about something, and you’re giving people all kinds of openings to mess with you. As for lying—that is one thing you don’t do! Ever!

“Unless,” Kahan chuckled, “you are teaching someone how to perceive a lie. For the time, you might as well resign yourself to having your thoughts read, accurately or not, by every non-witch in the place. You might learn the art yourself, if only for self-defense.”

“How do you like having your thoughts read?” Rothesay shot back.

“Oh, no one reads my thoughts. I don’t think anymore, you see.” He laughed, but it was a gentle merriment, and she could not stay cross with him. “What was that about not being knighted?”

“Well—I thought you were knighted at fifteen or sixteen? The squires of Teginau—”

“A’n’t Runedaur,” Rory said bluntly. Kahan agreed with a shrug.

“When do Runedaur get knighted, then?”

“Whenever. Dav was eighteen, I believe. Your, er, patron Arngas—sixteen? Mostly between twenty and twenty-five or so. Whenever the Masters agree.”

“What do you have to do?”

“Depends on who you are. My requirements aren’t Rory’s, for example.”

“How do you find out what your requirements are?”

There was a bit of head-scratching over that one. “Likely,” Kahan grinned at last, “by being knighted and seeing what you’ve done!”

“You do Challenges,” said Rory.

“Like the one about finding out why I obey Master Dav?”

“Pooh, that’s minor! That’s trivial—just an exercise in sorting out what matters to you. Any decent conversation ought to turn that up. I mean a challenge, like the beaut I was handed this morning!”

Kahan perked up, all ears. “What’s that?” asked Rothesay.

“I,” said Rory grimly, “am to steal the Earl of Maldan’s mistress!”