X: Andrastir

So this was a great city.

So this was Andrastir.

Late afternoon threw long golden spears through the thick roof of leaves. One or two lucky casts reached the thin undergrowth of a few brambles and a wisp of a grass Rothesay did not recognize. She sat, leaning her back against the bole of an oak that had been an acorn in Berulf’s day: its vast crown spread an early, green twilight that Areolin’s spear-casts only enhanced, like a few small candles in a great dim hall. Before her, the shadowy ground ran eastwards as flat as a lawn and then dropped off; Rothesay could just see the top of a ruinous stone wall over the edge. Beyond that, the crowns of sycamores and poplars billowed on down the hill, still bright and green under the open sun, down to what looked like a fishing village as remote as Harrowater. There, a white beach trimmed the edge of Gulf Rhostial, blue-black and littered with whitecaps. Above, above her, the great oak waved its outermost branches and talked loudly to the wind.

In a long line of spooky silence, the Runedaur had paraded through Trysfarin Gate in yesterday’s midmorning. The white and vitreous stones of Andrastir’s famed walls blazed at them over the grass, brilliant even from a mile off, eye-searing near at hand under Summer’s high sun. Paired pillars of the same glossy quartzite warded the road, taller, and taller yet, as the Gate drew nearer, a visual drumbeat pounding out the rising power of their builders to whoever dared their highway.

Shadow lay under the sun at the feet of the walls: the swell of the open plains broke at a deep fosse gouged into the earth. Sharp stones rimmed it with peril, and thornbushes filled its depths and climbed up against the gleaming walls themselves. A heavy bridge fortified with scorpions and arbalests carried the road across.

The Gate itself: no tetrapylon, as at the Dawn Gate of Teginau, but two vast dragons, sitting erect, patient as the ages. Their adjacent wings made the roof, at once sheltering and threatening, some forty or more feet over Rothesay’s head; their outer wings curled down, half-concealing somber men of the Gate watch.

Rothesay stared and shivered, despite the muggy heat. The colossal mass of the great stones oppressed her, in the pillars and the figures, and especially in the house-sized blocks of the lowest tiers of the walls themselves. How could they ever have been moved at all, what deep reservoirs of magic must have been broken just to aid rope, wheel, and sinew? A hundred tons apiece—and how many of them in the miles of the wall!

The Gate gaped. The soaring, graceful arches of the dragons resembled no mouth ever seen, yet once again Rothesay fought off a horror of being swallowed, far stronger here than at the entrance to Colderwild. The fear of looking truly idiotic, if she were to break rank and flee, overmastered her, however, and numbly she kept her pace. Her impatience of the day before seemed to belong to someone else entirely; how could she ever have wanted to enter such a, such a—she could not think what. She glanced about, distracting herself from her improbable fright by attempting to admire the workmanship. My, how smoothly finished were the curves of that complicated cranny where a dragon’s neck met shoulder and wing—

The snowy stone itself was almost pure of any lesser, darker inclusion. But the details of the dragons and other graven ornament were well outlined where lichens clung and dusts from a thousand past years had shelter from a thousand years’ rain. And, there on the dragon’s shoulder—a swift’s nest. Mama-swift peered out warily, and then swooped off. Up from the thorny fosse rose a small music of crickets, and a smell of rabbits. And Rothesay strode into Andrastir, grinning like a fool.

Beyond the dragons, they entered a cleft in the lower, outer Wall, open to the sky and bright on either side with beautiful colored tiles; a few heat-drowsy bowmen looked down from the embattled heights. Then came the second, inner Wall, half again as high, pierced by a pillared and half-pillared archway nine or ten yards deep: mysterious holes in its barrel ceiling commended peaceable intentions to any entrant.

The end of the passage erupted out into an enormous city square. Buildings three and four storeys tall walled it around, window-pocked cliffs split by the hairline cracks of countless little alleyways, while here and there wider chasms opened for streets and avenues into the city beyond. Three lofty arches, sheer architectural extravagance, marked their road—the Way of Arches, surely!—on its true-eastward progress across to a tetrapylon in the far wall of civic edifices. Tall marble statues presided over fountains in the various quarters, and many smaller ones adorned the edges. A sea of people in jewel-hued garments filled the square and lapped about the margins of the road. Rothesay had never seen so many people in one place: crazy Dagn’s thwarted burning in Teginau drew not a quarter of this crowd.

They were curiously quiet; something less than market-day noise hung in the air as every eye marked the Runedaur passage. Maybe they were supposed to be cheering, or something; at any rate, children threw flowers as the parade passed. But they threw them jerkily, nervously, and Rothesay found it simple to match child to parent, as they kept glancing back into the massed adults, from whom came grim nods to continue.

But there were a few: bold little fellows, and even a few girls, who threw their bouquets with mischievous violence and laughed at their own daring. Up ahead, one boy, about six, maybe, darted up and away, playing at tag with the black fringe or points of Runedaur tunics, squealing with the thrill when he scored a touch. Once, twice, his gleeful shriek rang out, then turned to terror on the third: Rothesay saw a burly arm snatch him up and he vanished from her view. A quick glance into the crowd revealed a horrified woman, her upraised hands frozen in impotent claws before her as she made no move to reclaim her son. The flower-throwing children melted back into the adult forest. The boy’s screams abruptly stopped. Silence rippled out as the Runedaur marched on.

Then the child burst from the ranks ahead and ran to the motionless woman; freshened crowd-noise drowned what he piped to her, but he seemed likely to tear her apron off in his excitement. Rothesay saw the mother shake her head dumbly, and then scream and push the child away. He hesitated, seeming puzzled, and then ran back to disappear again into the Runedaur line. He popped into view once more, this time straight ahead, high on a pair of black-clad shoulders, and he waved both his little hands. Lacie, walking next to Rothesay, giggled.

Beyond the eastern tetrapylon, city more like Teginau sprawled, though nowhere in Teginau did the streets lie nearly so level. Rothesay looked about at the walled gardens of hundreds of family enclaves and noticed, peripherally, that Lacie too stared about her with awe. Of course: she was accustomed to the little towns about Colderwild. Rothesay felt almost smug, having actually lived in a big city, if only for a few days. Maybe she could give Lacie a few pointers, later on.

Then city faded suddenly into farmland. Rothesay gazed upon rolling meadows of goats and cows, and fields of barley just beginning to gain a little height. That was Andrastir? a pompous square surrounded by barely more than mountainous Teginau? Huh! But she said nothing, only watched the sleepy livestock and wondered with a sudden agony how Thyrne’s new sheep were doing, and Alrulf and Pinnar, and the girls. She had not even had a chance to say good-bye.

A mile through gentle hills and a couple of winding streams further on, they came upon more city, gilded temples, fabulous painted statues, and another square larger than the first; markets were clearly in full swing. Beyond that, still more city, great houses with gleaming ornamental towers and decorated gates, and a huge park with a lake full of swans, and more city, and then a quarter-mile of woods. Rothesay and Lacie turned to each other and gawped wordlessly.

Then the rolling road rose steadily to another magnificent gate—Rothesay began to feel quite jaded: ‘oh, just another impressive artwork,’ and then felt stunned at that in turn—and city greater than they had yet seen, more monumental statues, fountains, miniature but exquisite gardens, temples like vast jewel boxes, and houses taller than ever, five and even six storeys in parts. The road broadened to twice its original width, and the Runedaur passed among gem-spangled horsemen, and bright-colored litters and sedan-chairs whose occupants seldom deigned to peep out, liveried servants, and glittering processions of priests or priestesses who nodded with grave courtesy. And this time there was fanfare. As they climbed into a high sector that seemed to have an overall octagonal arrangement, trumpeters and drummers in House Andras’s purple and silver colors greeted them at every intersection, and a herald cried out words of praise for their valor in the battle. Rothesay’s head swam in the glory.

At last, at long last they turned, northward. Some great enclave lay on the west; to the east a huge garden bloomed, and beyond and through its trees, Rothesay glimpsed a greater forest of towers than even Colderwild boasted: the Imperial Palace itself. Flags whipped from the peaks: she recognized Andras’s purple dragon, and Carastwyth’s blue and copper heron; the red and silver might be Ristover and the yellow and violet matched the emblems the Moraigh edgelings of Harrowater kept hidden, but she could not name any other. Twelve flew there; but the Moraigh banner bore long tails of black, and flew lower than the rest. Her gaze fell; she could guess what it meant, though Pinnar and the other edgelings at home still lived.

They crossed another avenue, this one lying west by northwest, greater even than the one on which they had entered, and it passed on under elegant arches to the grounds of the Palace. Then at last there rose the gate of Kingscroft, a festoon of cheerful stone skulls grinning southeast at the Palace through the blossoming trees of yet another splendid garden.

Inside, the Runedaur train disintegrated into chaos. Rothesay lost three Ghost challenges and won two, before a strange young woman in silver seized her arm, fell to Rothesay’s counterattack, and waited, laughing, for Rothesay to help her up again so that she could say, “Hi! You’re Colderwild—and new, too. I’m Annteodha. Call me Teo. C’mon, I’ll show you around!”

Colderwild was a maze built piecemeal by hundreds of independent architects each constructing whatever he fancied, without regard to any predecessor. Kingscroft seemed to be the product of one inspired artist, only later sabotaged by playful, not to say eccentric, successors; it had, at least, an overall symmetry. Sometimes this helped in finding one’s way about; sometimes not, such as the place where a fine carved door, matching one from the north, should have entered the Great Hall from the south, but the door-latch instead dropped the floor out from under one. Ah ha ha. But Teo did admit she was impressed by the way Rothesay caught the door handle so as not to fall into the room below. Not till Teo cried Truce, however, would Rothesay trust the girl’s lifting-spell to carry her back to firm floor again.

A fine dinner awaited them, all the better for being cold, and then their Kingscroft hosts swept the students from the other houses out into their city, small groups of them barrelling off in all directions.

Rothesay delayed to visit Kahan in the infirmary, a pleasant, airy little stone house in the middle of the Kingscroft gardens. He urged her to get out and have fun, recommended a sweetshop in ‘Blackwell,’ and asked if she could maybe bring him back an ale from Drummers Inn. “Mistress Healer says I can’t have any yet, but she’s only saying that to liven my appetite. Please? Just ask the Bursar for some tokens. We don’t have one at Colderwild: hey, what’s to buy in Kavinsrae?”

“Ladies’, er, favors?”

He grinned. “Why buy, when barter is so much more fun?” When she looked bemused, though, he did not laugh, but only took her hand and murmured, “Oh, dear,” with an odd, pensive smile.

Sorchone showed her where to find the Bursar, and then Teo, Rory, and Lacie joined them and bustled out into the streets. The Kingscrofters had no interest in the Palace—“Faugh, you can see that any time, just hop across the street, mind the groundskeepers when you go through the garden,” said Sorchone—but wanted to hurry off to the afternoon markets. ‘Blackwell’ suited them fine: it turned out to be two blocks of shops directly above Hollycrown Harbor, renowned for the high quality of its wares and the sophistication of its patrons.

Here Rothesay saw long and excitingly-tinted fingernails to her heart’s satisfaction, and not just on the ladies. Gentlemen, too, had themselves painted, brow, cheek, lip and hand, and when Teo towed them all into a cosmetics shop, Sorchone too indulged. He came out with a tiny black star under each eye, and dark red lips, but he took only a clear varnish on his nails. Rory flatly refused. Teo mocked him for a barbarian with no style, but, to Rothesay’s surprise, Sorchone neither laughed nor coaxed, and something in his open, rather empty manner made Teo flush and desist.

Rothesay gaped at Lacie, who looked more like twenty than twelve when the shop’s artists were done with her. Rory and Sorchone both made her extravagant bows, and for the first time Lacie actually looked bashful.

Rothesay wanted the brilliant, fiery red varnish for her own hands, but the shop-mistress insisted on a wine red “to complement my lady’s marvellous hair.” Wine-red too was the lip color chosen for her; at last Rothesay stared into a silver mirror at a woman she did not recognize, with high and blushed cheeks and turquoise-shadowed eyes outlined with black antimony. The looks on Rory and Sorchone’s faces, shown Rothesay’s new one, made her want to scrub it all off at once so that they could be friends again, but she resisted bravely, and even managed to giggle with Lacie and Teo over it.

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Then they called at a dressmaker’s. Lacie and Teo both found samples already made that fitted them well enough; Teo urged Rothesay to be measured for one to be made for her.

“I don’t know how long we’re staying,” Rothesay hedged. She dearly wanted a dress; she had not worn one since she became the tallest female on the Coast when she was fourteen, yet she could not bear to have to wait for one to be made. “I don’t think I can wait.”

“But, dear, they just don’t make any your size otherwise!” Teo objected.

“Oh, but they do,” Sorchone intervened, smiling. “But you must know your shops. Come, children; this way.”

“What—oh! Oh, Shoni, no!”

“Shoni, yes,” he purred, taking Rothesay’s arm paternally. “Marron’s is always of the finest quality, and they are unquestionably the first star of fashion, no?”

“Well . . . yes, but. . . .”

“But what?” Rothesay demanded suspiciously.

“They’re expensive,” said Sorchone blandly. “But we are heroes today, so worry not, babes.”

Marron’s lay discreetly behind a high marble wall of antique, understated elegance. Within, shapely trees and fragrant flowers around several small, tinkling fountains made a pleasant garden to welcome patrons. The entire front of the shop opened onto the garden, with bolts of bright cloths and piles of sumptuous furs displayed under the light shade of flowering vines. Wooden statues with painted faces wore samples of Marron’s renowned craft—and some of them were as tall as Rothesay.

“Madame Sindau,” Sorchone bowed low over the hand of the woman who glided forth to greet them. This was a magnificent lady, as tall as Sorchone and probably twice as old, though her shining black hair showed not a thread of white. She was gowned in a shimmering silvery net over a deep blue robe, subtly jeweled, which she wore unbelted the better to veil the loss of a girlish waist; but her bust was more than ample, and bore two large shell-pink roses in the cleft. Hers was a stern, commanding face despite its delicate paint, and haughtier than any queen might show: Rothesay felt as though her own gawky presence tainted the very air about Madame. Maybe it was only the blue dress, but Rothesay ‘reached’ gingerly for her bard-protection charm.

Sorchone gestured wordlessly to present Rothesay. Madame Sindau raked her over critically enough, but in her eyes sparked a gleam not unlike Master Leoff’s when presented with a problechallenge.

“My limits?” she rapped in a curious husky voice, not taking her eyes from Rothesay.

“None.”

“The occasion?”

“Mmm—afternoon walking party.”

“Hmmm.” Madame turned to survey her shop, her jewelled hands on her hips.

In short order, Rothesay felt like a puppet in a shadow-box, such as Raian had shown her in Teginau: a prop on which to display a dizzying flurry of fabrics, gowns and jewels to the audience of her friends and Madame. Even Rory seemed to enjoy the game, once startling everyone by abruptly voicing his disapproval of a wine-colored gown “’cos it’s too much of that color already, a’n’t it?”

At last, Madame Sindau escorted Rothesay to a tiny mirrored room at the back, with an armload of new garments to put on in privacy. Rothesay hung them carefully on the many hooks, and hesitated, uneasy.

A small window above her head, just large enough to crawl through, let in light and air, its grille pushed wide. She eyed it, and listened.

An easy leap, an elbow catching the sill, and her head and arm thrust through. She snagged the hair of a very grubby boy outside, standing on the shoulders of another, who panicked and ran off through Marron’s back-alley shrubbery. For a moment the smaller fellow dangled, screaming, solely by his hair in her fingers, and she gave him a vengeful little shake before she let go, adding grimly, “I’ll remember you!” She dropped back down, but disrobed facing the window, her back to the little door.

One of the joys of Sferan clothing lay in the abolishment of breastbands. Sferan women wore instead a kind of short shirt, usually sleeveless, that ended just under the breasts. The front was cunningly shaped to hold, even coddle, rather than squash, but the great joy, from Rothesay’s perspective, was that it was perfectly impossible for a sennw to fall down, as even the most carefully wrapped band was all too prone to do. Presumably one might fall open instead, but only if one were careless with its lacing. Rothesay double-knotted.

She looked at the one provided by Madame. They might be low-cut to be revealing, as favored by Madame herself as well as Lacie; they might also be padded with tufts of lamb’s wool or little bags of scented linen-scrapings, another of Lacie’s artifices. This one—a gay dandelion color, embroidered with flowers and stars of a paler yellow, it matched the underskirt she had already donned—this was ridiculous. Did Madame think she had no breasts yet at all?

She grabbed her black tunic up across her nakedness and cracked open the door. Madame seemed to be deep in talk, maybe argument, with Sorchone, and Rory, who looked particularly mulish, but she noticed Rothesay at once and strode swiftly to her aid. Sorchone followed. Annoyed, Rothesay tried to convey her dilemma to Madame out of his hearing.

“Please, Madame, this—” she tried to slip the sennw through the door out of sight of Sorchone, “—could you, I mean, do you have one, maybe, that, um, has room for—uh, me?” She pointed discreetly to the perfumed padding that completely filled the little garment.

Madame took it, bemused, and then, to Rothesay’s uttermost chagrin, turned to Sorchone and raised one plucked eyebrow inquiringly, imperiously, imperatively.

“She’s real,” Sorchone answered simply, as though it were obvious, whatever it was.

Madame exhaled softly through narrow nostrils; Rothesay felt sure that that breath would have flamed, if it could. “Does your Order mock me?” she growled, with almost manly depth and power.

“We honor you,” Sorchone protested. “The best of quality and first in fashion: said I thus?” he appealed to Rothesay, who nodded. To Madame he continued, “Where else—no, where better—to bring a maid of her, ah, proportions?”

Madame glowered, her dark gaze flicking between them. Then her mouth twitched, and at last she let out an undignified snort, half disgust, half laughter. “Well,” she began, and looked down at the little sartorial ploy in her hand. “Well! You’re demons all. A moment, my dear,” she half-curtsied to Rothesay, “and we shall put this to, er, rights. Anhela!” she bellowed, striding off towards a tall and sturdy shop-girl, who nonetheless jumped and cringed before her indomitable mistress.

“What?” said Sorchone’s innocent gaze to Rothesay’s glare, and then he glanced down at the black tunic she clutched before her as if she had let it slip too far. “Suppose I explain when you’re dressed?” Rothesay snapped the door shut on him.

Shortly a brilliant turquoise butterfly fluttered out of the cocoon of Marron’s dressing chambers and spread her wings upon the garden’s scented air. Rothesay leaped lightly onto a marble bench, raised her skirts, blue, then pale rose, then dandelion yellow, just enough to show off delicate sandals that were little more than slender ribbons of the same hues laced over her feet, and danced a pattering step. Sorchone, laughing, raised a hand to her; accepting regally, she leaped down again and the tissue-thin silks billowed up around her in a great tricolored flower, and she blushed and beat them back into place with a hasty hand.

Still holding her fingertips, Sorchone looked into her face, radiant with awe and delight. He did not ask, Have you never had pretty new clothes before? Why state the obvious? Nor could he bear to spoil this new joy with ugly care, not least because doing so would not further his romantic ambitions; yet as the senior student present, on him lay the onus to keep his people alert. Hmm.

The newness of these lovely things endangered her, if faintly. Teo, certainly, and maybe even this little Lacie, had been jaded enough by Runedaur wealth to scorn their new finery if assaulted by misfortune or miscreant, or even a fellow student out a-Ghosting; Rothesay, though, would surely attempt to save these new things, and maybe fail her own self, as well as her companions, in divided concern. Yet to tell her so outright would spoil that wonderful new fun shining from her astonished face.

Sorchone knew well, by now, that two horns of a dilemma could be resolved into one—with Master Dav’s mystery, the right question. Thus, ‘shall I keep her alert and safe, or let her enjoy herself a bit longer?’ only widened the breach; such a question only made clear the horns, and offered nothing towards resolution. No, the constructive question was always, How to do both? How might he waken alertness, in the very midst of the fun?

He kissed her fingertips—peripherally aware of Rory’s resentment; oh well—and then announced to them all, grandly imitating actors’ imaginings of Runedaur masters’ pronouncements: “I declare Truce: a Truce of Pretty New Clothes.” He bowed to Teo and Lacie as well. “As they are all afternoon wear—what! Oh, never, sweetheart! You would never dream of wearing such fluff after sunset! We shall find you evening wear at the Hall—for the hours remaining until sunset, we shall none of us train any of us except in the dark arts of noble society. Thus I will it be so.”

Teo snickered. Lacie laughed. Rothesay smoothed her skirts wistfully, but she grinned at his performance, and he felt satisfied of his aim.

“But now you must have something, Rory; you and Sorchone look so frightfully dull next to us,” Lacie announced.

“Not from here!” Rory all but snarled, his dark eyes ablaze.

“Well, of course not,” said Rothesay, puzzled. “This is a women’s shop.”

“Ah,” said Sorchone. “And ‘hmm.’ And thus we are led, children, to the philosopher’s question: what does it mean, then, to ‘be’ a ‘woman’? But you must know, love, that the patrons of Marron’s are, as a rule, patrons, and seldom if ever patronesses, if you follow me.”

“Er, no—?”

“Marron’s sells to men,” Teo translated brusquely. “Men of—”

“Remarkable,” suggested Sorchone.

“—exceptional,” Teo preferred, “taste.”

“What!”

“Exceptional,” her hallmate concurred. “Like Marron’s shop-, er, -folk themselves. But we may take our philosopher’s question to Raven’s Trace: their Mistress Healer, Lolosta, is as magic, nor nature, has made her. Like the staff here, though maybe theirs is more art and less arcane.”

Rothesay’s eyes bugged at Marron’s marble wall. “All of them?” she breathed, remembering Madame’s two roses.

“Oh, but certainly.” He took Rory’s arm. “Come, brother: let us look elsewhere for man-rags with which to do our ladies justice!”

It took the combined wheedling of Teo, Lacie and Rothesay to persuade Rory to yield up his Runedaur black—“But it’s ever so hot, Rory! You give me the headache just thinking about you!” Lacie scolded—for something brighter, but in a shop only a little less refined than Marron’s, they coaxed him into a tunic of an airy linen in rich goldenrod boldly embroidered in black. Sorchone evaded the blood-red that Lacie wanted for him—“Red suits me but so ill”—and decked himself in cream and Rhostial-blue instead.

Rory kept trying to pull his tunic longer. Neither young man could bend over, or bend far at all, without displaying anatomy that Society decreed should be veiled, but Lacie mocked his discomfort: “Oh, come, Master Fusswort! You’ve worn less. You usually wear less!”

“I’ve worn less,” he agreed with another tug. “I’ve worn nothing at all. Funny, though, how much nakeder you feel when you’re wearing what’s supposed to cover, but don’t!”

“Of course,” said Sorchone. “Fully clothed excites no prurience. Nor yet fully nude, though those who seldom behold it, seldom believe that. As with any magic, it is the borderland wherein the power lies!” He raised his arms high in a dancer’s mien, put forward a pointed foot, and, thus levered, thrust one hip forward as sharply as a blow. The tunics were not merely short, they were closed at the sides only by their sashes, and Sorchone’s fell open upon half a lean buttock carved in perfect alabaster.

Only for an instant. He dropped his pose, the silken curtains closed, his gaze swept the two girls. Lacie, well pleased, coquetted; Rothesay had not yet broken the glaze of her surprise, and he released her from his attention before she did. “Oh, yes, we were going to find your sweetshop, were we not?”