Supper itself was a quiet affair just before sundown, as usual, till the arrival of the guests raised heads and hearts: three Runedaur from Raven’s Trace, the itinerant house-without-a-hall, travelling with three from Rose House. One of the Ravens was a poet and a singer, and presented his news in song. The overlord of Maldan, Odhru the Brean, was making a push for Andrastir, and Princess Aristande of House Andras asked the Runedaur to stand with her and Carastwyth against him. Clearing away the supper dishes then became an exercise in tactics: “Don’t take that bowl: it’s a Carastwyn cavalry! And that wine puddle’s the river mouth!” Some of the boys who were supposed to have scullery duty with her, lingered over the knights’ talk and no one urged them to be about their work; Rothesay then did only as much as she felt was strictly fair before listening in herself, and thus stumbled right into step with Runedaur custom.

She heard no formal decision, but a consensus of agreement seemed to arise: in two weeks’ time, the Order would ride to battle. Students, it appeared, were to go along, or not, as they themselves felt ready for the trial.

No two of them had the same opinion of the prospect. Arnaf fairly slavered for the chance, and groaned so loudly over having to wait a fortnight that Rothesay began to wonder who he was trying to convince. Cobry was simply stunned: rather like Rothesay herself, he had been so caught up in the details of his study that its purpose had been wholly driven from his thought, and he said frankly that Ghost games were one thing but real killing was something he had yet to weigh. Rory and Ulflaed, both veterans of other campaigns, meant to go, neither of them for glory. Ulflaed seemed to have some ulterior motive he would not discuss; Rory grumbled something about having two weeks to master suturing, and she realized he was a particular student of the Mistress Healer. Lacie, having torn herself away from ogling the singer of the Ravens, said softly that she too would be there: “We learn that you don’t kill till you know him so well that it will hurt to end his life, and then only if the death is still worth the hurt. But that’s assassination, that’s personal. I just don’t know about war.”

Rothesay toyed silently with the end of a braid. Scared sick, still her only thought was to go and fight, just to show Thyrne that she was, too, marriageable.

She left the students’ brooding to listen again to the adults at their planning. The three visitors from Rose House of course were Silents, but these were signing Silents; watching the curious beauty of their gesture made her forget war and fired her with a desire to learn this art, and soon. She settled at the elbow of the younger of the two Silent men, a flirtatious rake well pleased with her attention who obligingly taught her a phrase. When she grasped its meaning, however, she went pink to the ears, shook her head mutely and exited as politely, and as quickly, as she could contrive.

She escaped out into the courtyard, to be alone with Night and her thoughts of Death and lust. What would it mean to kill someone?—intentionally, she reminded herself darkly. And what would it be like to go intentionally to someone’s bed? She tried to drive the heels of her hands into her bewildered brain through her forehead. The little brook under the well-leafed cherry trees made a pleasant thoughtless noise and she headed toward it.

By the north wall of this courtyard, a soft, unidentifiable sound reminded her like a dash of icy water that Colderwild was the last place outside a battleground where she could afford to be woolgathering. As she froze, taking stock of her position, her surroundings, and her possibilities, a body dropped from above directly behind her, catching her in the circle of its arms like a score at rings-and-bottles. “Hi!” said Kahan, and squeezed her.

She sank an elbow in his ribs and whirled to take a poke at his jaw, or where his jaw should have been, terribly glad to see him but remembering keenly what she was in this madhouse to learn, after all. Her blow went wild and she tumbled neatly over his practiced shoulder, praised herself for the grace of the resulting somersault, and twisted up for a lunge at his belly. Kahan went down too obligingly, planted a foot in her stomach and lofted her on over, then flipped himself over in a catlike pounce, pinned one wrist and her throat, and dropped asprawl upon her. “Ghost!”

She stabbed at his ribs with her training knife, intending to retort, “Ghost, yourself,” but his snakelike midsection arched up and snapped down on her hand, trapping it just long enough for the hand on her throat to prove that it had the mastery. Suddenly infuriated, because victory had seemed so hopeful for a moment, she yielded in a surly bark; but Kahan only gathered her up in a hug and began to laugh.

“By the gods, was there ever such a place? Where else is attempted murder a warm welcome home?” He hugged her tightly as she began to grin, too. “Thank you for the battle. You’ve learned a lot since I left!”

“Where have you been? Are you allowed to say?”

“Making wishes come true.” He ticked them off on his fingers, as they sat where they had fallen. “Your Alrulf’s master of Pinnar’s farm, so he has an inheritance, even if it is ‘edgeling’, and she has a strong back around the place. Your sisters are living with Thyrne and Mat and their new sheep and copper kettle. The ladies all have something pretty to wear—oh, that Meryth’s going to be a heartbreaker! I may have to marry her myself—and Alrulf and Mat have spears and bows, and a fishing boat between them. The ponies and the other boat will come later. We do look after our own, my friend!”

She hugged him thoroughly and pressed him for the smallest details. He complied, lounging close by her in the cool spring night and shamelessly and blatantly encouraging her to think he was the most wonderful person in all Peria till she laughed aloud.

Perhaps startled by the sound, a mouse bolted across the stones, barely visible even to Rothesay in the starlight. Kahan’s head snapped around as if jerked, to follow it, and she felt his body tense, then relax again slowly.

“What, not afraid of mice, are you?” she teased, tempted to call the creature to her hand.

“Hnh? No—” He shook his head, a tight little shimmy to shake off something, and bounded to his feet. “Is there supper left? I should eat. Man-food: carrots? peas? or radishes—do we have any radishes? I’d love a radish. No, I’m not afraid of mice—but I tend to be acutely aware of them for days, after trips like this!”

“Trips like what?”

He grinned down at her. “Two questions: how quickly could you go home and come back, with time for business while you’re there; and what do people call me?”

“Lady Kahan?”

He whooped with laughter. “Sorry: wrong name, similar reason! What else do they call me?”

“Hawkma—” She stared, hard, back where the mouse had been. “You can turn into a hawk?” she breathed.

“No, not all by myself. But our Mistress finds it so easy to get me to assume hawk-shape that I think I am in danger of becoming Carialla’s errand-bird, and never a knight at all!”

A quick glance revealed the mirth in his eyes that betrayed the complaint; still, she was troubled. Padriag was very coy about shape-changing. The body wore whatever form the soul believed in, and the risks in altering belief were high.

Kahan kicked gently at her foot. “Radishes!” he said plaintively.

She came to her feet from a roll well out of his reach, and he laughed at her smug look. As they walked down together into the kitchen, he asked why she was not on the list field with Leoff, and she told him of her escape thanks to Rory’s advice. Kahan chuckled.

“No, you don’t have to jump when a Master says ‘frog,’” he agreed as she turned to reach deep into the cool root barrel. “And it’s downright hazardous to jump when a senior student says ‘ghost.’—Go ahead, say it, it’ll make you feel better.”

She had frozen in place, trapped between his one gentle hand on her windpipe and the point of his dagger right between the braids at the base of her skull. “Bastard!” she spat.

“See? All better. Now add ‘yield’ and we’ll go have a picnic somewhere.”

“I will, I swear by all the gods I will get you for this!”

“I hope you do,” he replied, his cheerful sincerity briefly confounding her wrath. “Come on, yield, I’m hungry!”

She opened her mouth to commend him to starvation, remembered Rory’s fate at his hands, and snarled. “Yield.”

As soon as he released her, she spun around hunting hungrily for anything she might recognize as an ‘opening,’ but something in his manner stayed her: how could anything so relaxed still seem so dangerously alert and ready? His eyes danced over her. “You must’ve been idling while I was away, if no one’s jumped you in the latrine yet!”

“Nooo!”

“Yeees!”

She writhed, muscles knotting, and then she flung herself blindly at his chest. For thirteen years life had flowed like the weather, one day as much like its predecessor as the slow-shifting seasons allowed: days of dearth, days of plenty, festive Fair days—the sisters chasing down Alrulf to decorate him forcibly in their daisy wreaths—and days of mourning: how bright the sun had been on the snow, the morning after Mina died of her fever in the night under the single blanket they shared. Death was no more a stranger than His son Winter, but came round in His turn like the seasons.

Only now the seasons themselves were cast into confusion. Nothing in the last month had been anything like the lifetime before; even the flavors in her mouth and the accents in her ears were alien to her now. She pounded on his breast, rather feebly because he held her in so close, but there were no tears, only a semi-articulate roar of insanity. He held his arms lapped around her shoulders and rocked gently on his feet, saying nothing, only letting the torrent howl past; once or twice she felt him shift position and only later learned it was to warn off would-be assassins.

She at length puffed out that she knew just how poor old Móravn felt, and she had half a mind to run off and go with him.

“Oh, Ravn’s finally run, has he?” he chuckled, a little sadly, she thought, but she could not see his face, not with hers pressed into the hollow of his neck. “No, love, you don’t know how he feels. This,” he squeezed her gently, “this is like, oh, stripping off our clothes, Geillan tunics or Sferan jerkins or Isorchian great-robes, down to our skin to put on black-and-silver. But when you strip down to your soul—you’re in for a few surprises. I ran for the mountains, myself,” he cocked his head southwards. “Stayed out for a month, nearly froze to death. Nothing at all like just being confused by this place.”

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“Oh, that’s encouraging!”

He chuckled. “Ah, sweet anticipation! Can I have my radishes now?”

She pushed slowly away from him, rubbing mindlessly at her scalp: Kahan was in great need either of a shave or another week’s growth and his bristles had prickled. She glared at him warily, reluctant to turn her back again. She backed up carefully to the root-barrel, reached cautiously into its depths, found a beet and considered that Arngas’s strength ought to enable her to put a nasty sting to it, thrown. She flung a whole handful of roots, radish, beet, and carrot, at him then, and vegetable war escalated thence, spilling out into the night and acquiring nearly all the rest of Colderwild before midnight.

A high-vaulted room; on a stone dais a great bed, thick with white blankets and dark furs, untidy under a disarray of books and scrolls, and letters crumpled beneath the bodies of three sprawling cats. The bedposts, thick as a man’s leg, had been carved by a master and gleamed with the glory of golden oak in the firelight, but their owner seemed to care little, obscuring one as an elaborate cloak-peg while two more served as map-hangers. But the slate floor was clean, bare except for two wide rugs, one at the hearth, one at the first of three tall windows. A clothes-press, two chairs, a writing desk were almost the only other furniture in the apartment.

Dav stood, barefoot on the rug, window thrust open, looking deep into the night. A silver chain slithered through his fingers, rhythmically between his hands, slippery, almost liquidly supple; he liked the metaphor. Runedaur adapted, they had always adapted: they had met the challenge of two millennia and more and still walked the land, as much like what they had been in the beginning as the man grown was like the infant. Adapt, change, and grow—or die. And sometimes—he paused, and pushed the twisted silver links together, feeling them mesh till a length of it formed, not a ribbon but a bar, locked and hard—sometimes it was in the way of wisdom to set firm, and stir the adaptation of others in their turn.

Erriol had been a wise Master; the Order had prospered in his term. Apart from enforcing the respect, if seldom the fealty, of the Geillan warlords, he had also demanded a blossoming of art and skill within the Order herself, driving against the urge to conserve more than create in this war-ridden age. But he had had little respect, still less interest, for the mass of men outside her holy Circle: if violent men chose to battle for a single day of rule, squandering their powers on rage and vengeance with nothing left for making a life worthy of a man; if the many allowed themselves to be yoked to squalor and debasement for the privilege of being protected by the few who created most of the hazard in the first place; if they did no more than dream of something better, Erriol would not be so indelicate as to interfere, and, frankly, the sooner stupidity killed itself off, the better. He turned his own considerable powers to awakening the powers of his people; Dav acknowledged a great debt to the man, though they had often disagreed, once to the very threshold of death.

Dav looked out. Only stars brightened the night: no torches flared on Colderwild’s dark walls, no lights burned in the vastness of the Cristcasel Forest that stretched for leagues northward, and the moon was old. He unrolled the map of Peria in his mind across the darkness, seeing, there, the far rugged mountains of intransigent Sparca; there, the rich fields of Elomar whence he himself had sprung; there, Andrastir at the mouth of the Holywell on the windy Gulf Rhostial. And everywhere, blood flowed.

The grey stones of Dorrocan’s Wall of Sparca were black with the blood of the men of Dunhaldring and Dun Garlaf on the one side, with that of the House of Rhyllandon on the other. Blood dimmed the clear waters of Feillantir harbor, where Wegrulf warred with his brother Eglaf for mastery of the Teodh-nan-Feill. Grass rose green in Aorin’s Vale in Elomar, nourished by the blood of Dunbrodie and Lostforth. And from Sfellias to the Ferinlath, a ribbon of blood marked the retreat of the southern Sferan clans into the mountains.

Dav drew the circle of ‘his’ people considerably more broadly than had Erriol. It was, after all, out of that bloody slurry that jewels like Kahan, or Alfiera of Raven’s Trace, or this preposterous Darian chit emerged; who, he wondered in black fury at the waste and confusion, who lay dying even now who might have been another Arngas in his own right, another Sianna? Stupidity was not slain by stupidity at all; rather, murder and violence merely spread the contagion to the survivors, tenfold. Who might have known that awakening of the soul that was all the aim of his Order, whose mind was now dark with vengeance and blood-lust?

War interfered with Dav’s exercise of joy and duty. He would no longer brook the interference.

He knew the Mistress’s desire. Fortunately, her dreams and his turned alike on a unified country. And unity was possible. More Geillan blood than Sferan spilled of late, in internecine contests for land and power, yet they were still one folk; it should be between Geilla and Sfera that peace would be more hardly won. Yet there, too, was hope. In the highlands of Tre-Uissig, the House of Kinnaith and the Dunwyrding stood in fast alliance against the rest of Peria: hope was there, though the Kinnatiari were regarded by long tradition as a peculiar lot at best, a tradition the Dunwyrding had managed to marry into. There was Dav himself: if a drop of Sferan blood ran in his veins, it was a secret known to gods alone, yet he stood as the fell master of a most ancient Sferan power, and no Sferan noble questioned the fitness of the match or denied him honor therefore. There would be peace.

One king. Arms alone would not keep one secure, not from others eager for that power. A respect less susceptible to challenge was demanded; that was the duty of history. No king was ever wholly safe from usurpation, but some of the damnedest fools had worn, and kept, crowns solely because powerful men respected the myth of their lineages. This upstart Deorgard, now: men would grow accustomed to his rule; if his heirs should prove strong enough for long enough, the habit of deference alone would carry the occasional weak or foolish descendant, till one of that blood came to appear, as he might well claim, divinely appointed. And as to that, who was to say he was not?

Carialla and Dav did not mean to wait on history. If a strong leader did not emerge, they would create one; and the old tokens of empire would veil history’s lack well enough to start. And now Padriag had dropped Lady Cherusay’s daughter in their laps. How very interesting.

A soft knock at his door broke his thought. A student, it would be; a knight or witch seldom gave warning by troubling with formalities. He thought about ambushing the child, but he could guess who it was. Hael might announce himself with a knock, but he would expect his Master to attack. “Come.”

The door opened slowly, silent on its hinges: Dav liked a low threshold of alertness. For a moment the doorway was empty, and then Hael peeked past the jamb, from well out in the hall. Not bad.

“Master?”

“Come in.”

“It’s about Móravn, sir,” he said softly, not moving.

“Yes. Truce,” said Dav, smothering a smile.

“Thank you, sir.” Hael entered, but still warily, carefully checking behind the door as he closed it. “You said truce, but maybe somebody else hadn’t,” he explained bashfully.

Dav shrugged. “Or Maolin might shake the earth, and all my spears and axes fall out on you. No, don’t look!”

Hael froze. “There are no spears behind your door, Master. Just a couple of banner poles.” But there was uncertainty in his voice.

“And a roasting-spit.”

Hael did not ask why; he too had used some strange things as weapons, whatever was to hand, and had a few things under his own bed that would be hard to explain to a stranger. He kept forgetting to put them back.

“Móravn’s run, sir.”

“Yes.”

The monosyllable slapped the youth. “You’ve got to bring him back!” he all but shouted.

“And prove to him that he is a slave?”

Hael started, and then sagged. “But, but you can’t just let him go . . . like you didn’t want him, like he wasn’t worth anything to you . . . .”

Very gently, Dav replied, “But I don’t want him, if he does not want us. Be here gladly, or not at all: I’ll waste none of my life’s span forcing someone else to waste his.”

“But he does want to be here! This is what he wants more than anything else, what he’s always wanted! He’s just—not thinking,” his voice sank, low and glum, confessing the greatest sin his master recognized.

“I know. That was for you, Hael: don’t run from me hoping I’ll prove your worth by running after you.”

The boy’s pink face paled as the Master’s words pierced to the heart. But he had been many years at Colderwild, and if he had not yet learned all he needed to know, he had learned much about how to tell insult from instruction—and about why Runedaur bothered instructing at all. “Yes, Master,” he managed to murmur; and found himself wrapped in Dav’s arms. That, however, he had long since come to terms with, and returned the embrace easily.

After a moment, Dav gave him a little shove toward one of his chairs. “Móravn.”

Hael sat without speaking: once chastised, twice wary, and he looked at Dav askance.

“Chasing him down won’t mean to him what it would to you, boy.”

Hael tried believing that. It was hard to imagine that someone would dislike being sought after; but he was a queer fish, Móravn. He might very well take it the wrong way. “What do we do, then, Master?”

“We let him go.”

“NO! Why?”

“Because he’s Móravn,” Dav said simply. “What is his greatest fear?”

Hael had no need of Runedaur mind-spells, nor even close friendship, to answer. It seemed to glare from Móravn like light from a balefire; even new acquaintances often noticed. “Being a prisoner.” He tugged uncomfortably at his yellow beardlet as a strange and alien point of view supplanted his own for a moment. “But, sir. . . . How will he know to come back?”

“He came freely at the first. Whatever brought him then will bring him back.”

“Unless he’s too proud to admit he was wrong.” Hael thought that was likely the case with Móravn—and then his pink cheeks flushed red as he wondered if that, too, was more his own truth than his friend’s.

“Then we would not be able to teach him anything anyway.”

Hael stared at the rug between his feet, and tugged and twisted harder than ever on his beard. The silence deepened in the apartment. He formed and aborted several approaches to speech, and finally sighed heavily. “I think I see that you can’t go after him—you, or any of the masters, or the knights. I . . . I think you can’t even catch him up somewhere just to say hi, without making him feel spied on, like you had a net out for him.”

“Very good.”

Again the boy let the silence fall, as the words behind his teeth feared to leave his tongue. At last he forced them out, “I, uh, I think I should go along. To, uh, remind him that it’s still home. Here. If you see what I mean. Sir.”

“I do.”

“I—” Hael swallowed hard. “I think I should, uh, go tonight. I know where he’s gone. I think.”

Dav matched his body to the boy’s, and considered what it evoked in his soul. Good: leaving the haven of Colderwild terrified him, but not blindly, not to the point of stupidity. He might exhaust himself with over-alertness in a few days, but little worse. “See the Hunting-mistress for whatever you need. And then some: I doubt Ravn went any too well prepared!”

“Yes, sir.” The youth hauled himself heavily to his feet.

When he reached the door, Dav added, “Come home when you’re done.” When Hael glanced back, Dav saluted gravely, touching his fingertips to his forehead with a small bow. Hael blinked in surprise, returned the salute hastily, and walked out with his back a little straighter than when he had entered.

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