XIII: The Price of Peace

Storm raged in the great Gulf Rhostial. Wind howled down the streets of Andrastir and rain hammered almost horizontally into the walls; every shutter—every shutter that still sheltered a living person—stood barred tight against the savage play of Kavin of the Air and Teodhan, Lord of Water.

Of course it was play. Or so the Runedaur thought as, housebound in Kingscroft, they raised nearly as much torrent indoors. More than once, Rothesay fled out through the rain to find shelter in some empty old mansion, just to catch her breath. Not even the Kingscroft Library was off-limits during such confinement. The Infirmary had been restricted to the most grievously wounded, as the less hurt, like Kahan, began to take a livelier interest in Ghosting: once, he had leaped from apparent slumber to ‘cut her throat,’ though it had cost him bitter pain and all he demanded as a prize was that she help him back into bed. Oh, and did he not deserve at least a kiss for helping hone her nerve?

Still, at least he was still here, as the storm pinned even the mad Runedaur sailors in port. Since he was wakeful, she seldom stayed out long, but returned, with a swiftly-growing power of stealth, to play at chess or dice with him, and to talk. She asked him about Lostforth. He shrugged.

“Well, that’s our people’s legend, inquisitiveness. In my clan, though, it’s just an excuse for nosiness, and my family was worse: my old man was a hell of a busybody; still is, probably.”

“Do you ever get to see him?” she asked, trying to feign a merely polite interest.

If he sensed her sudden hunger to know anything about fathers, he made no sign of it. “I get not to see him,” he retorted with unexpected frost. He glanced up at her start, and softened. “He used to beat us, all of us, even Mother, even when she was with child. I used to run away a lot. There was this wonderful crazy old bird up on the other side of the glen: I’d go stay with him for, oh, days, weeks, as long as I could get away with. But I suppose it’s him I have to thank,” he spat the word out sourly, “for my being Runedaur.”

“He, er, sent you here?”

“Hah!” Kahan laughed scornfully. “He’d shit himself, he’d have an apoplexy, if he knew I was here. He sent me, all right, but not by intention!”

“What did he do?” she breathed. And he winced and shut his eyes and she wished that she could recall the question, un-spin it from the thread of Time.

But he answered, without opening his eyes, “He beat Mother again, broke my head when I tried to interfere. And she gave birth that night, though it was months too early, and died the next day; the baby hung on into that night; would’ve been a sister. I was holding her when she finally quit breathing.” He sighed, a long, deep, rolling sigh. “The day after, I couldn’t get my other sister or my brothers to leave, they were that terrified of Father. Beastly, beastly temper he had. Has. I don’t know. And I—oh, I’m his son, all right!”

“You?” she teased, but gently. “You haven’t got any temper at all!”

Kahan opened his eyes, and his slow and easy smile spread like incoming tide across his face. “No, I guess I don’t. Not any more.”

“What happened?” She did not tell him of her pact with Rory, not because she thought he would mind, but that Rory probably would. She hoped Kahan’s solution would turn out to be something Rory could use.

“Dav happened,” he replied, grinning wickedly. “It took him no time to find out every little thing that would fire me up, and he poked, prodded, pinched, twisted, stung, stabbed and tweaked every last one, every day, day after day—not like Father, by doing anything I could proudly hate him for, just stupid obnoxious stuff, stuff I felt stupid about afterwards, and I couldn’t even beat him up for it, couldn’t even get close, and of course that only burned me up more than ever.” He covered his face and laughed through his long fingers. “Oh, ye gods, I was such a mess!”

“Why did you even stay?” she marvelled.

He chuckled. “Lots of us come because it’s a last resort. Where do you go after that? But I finally did run, again. I told you about that, or I mentioned it. There were a couple, three days I was too enraged even to sleep, and I realized I was going to be angry, furiously angry my whole life and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it, and I just bolted. Master Ramad found me, the Hunting-master—Hunting-master at the time, now it’s Mistress Iril—and brought me home, and I just lay in the infirmary for days. Just lay there. I was so tired, though not in body; just so tired of—of anger.

“So one day I’m tired of just lying there, too, so I get up, wander out, wander about, and Master D drops down in front of me, in that little passage behind the Library. And he’s got this grin, the one that’s just daring you to try and smash it in, and he says—” Kahan paused, and his gaze drifted off to the oil lamp, the only light in the shuttered room though it was only afternoon. The thin sound of tearing wind came distantly from the storm. “You know,” he laughed, “I forget what he said! Just that it was one of the things I hated most: I remember that. And I remember,” his eyes half-closed, “I remember feeling obliged to get angry about it; obligated, just as if it were a horrible chore I’d agreed to do and he was here reminding me of my promise, and, gods! I was so weary of it! But I tried one more time to summon the strength for it—and that’s when it dawned on me that it was an effort . . . that it was a thing to be chosen, or not, rather than something that just happened to me. And I said, ‘Well, a pox on that!’ And, you know, not even that with any energy!” He glanced up at her from his pillows, eyes twinkling, to see if she shared the humor.

She grinned back. “What did he say to that, then?”

He grinned more broadly. “‘Welcome home.’”

“And that was it, then? Just like that?”

“That was it, but you say ‘just like that?’ like it was easy. I don’t think I’ve conveyed the proper degree of exhaustion. Remind me someday; I’ll chase you over the hills till you’re screaming with fatigue and then I’ll go on chasing you till you’ve nothing left even for whispering. Then try saying, ‘Just like that?’”

“All right, all right, I’m sorry! But . . . .”

“Yes? And are you going to diddle that pawn all afternoon, or are you going to play him?”

Rothesay found a spot for the pawn. “So, why doesn’t Master Dav do that to Rory? He helped you over it; why not him?”

Kahan nudged one of his own pawns a square. “Most likely because Rory’s challenge isn’t temper.”

“What! Are we talking about the same boy? Middling tall, redhaired, red moustaches, sometimes really surly?”

“Have you ever seen him lose his temper?”

“Well, er, not really lose it, no. But I know he’s been really angry sometimes.”

“I’m sure he thinks he has. But compared to me, O thou Beautiful, he’s been, at worst, just a bit peeved. And I didn’t tell you the precise thing that drove me away from home, only the stuff that led up to it. It was my beating my younger brother Lhian bloody, for reason of his stupid refusal to get the hell away from Father and his beatings. Mindless fury. He screamed, ‘You’re just like Father!’ and if I’d been any older, or bigger, I probably would have killed him for that. And I knew it, and I ran, in sheer sick terror of myself. Ever put a river rock in a fire?”

“They—they sometimes explode.”

“Uh-huh. One moment, dull old rock. Next moment, rock shards flying like arrowheads. That’s temper. That was me. Maybe Lacie remembers. I know Móravn does: I put him in the infirmary with a concussion, over a raisin-cake.” His dark eyes danced at her appalled astonishment. “But haven’t I grown up into just the loveliest dear?”

She laughed aloud. “Haven’t you, though!” And, feeling greatly daring, she leaned over and swiftly kissed his cheek.

“Hey, you missed!” he pouted, pointing to his pursed lips. She blushed and drew back shyly, though she smiled; he went on pointing. She blushed more deeply, writhed, laughed nervously; he went on pointing, puckered, seeming prepared to wait all day for her amendment. She glanced around the room. No help there, and when she looked back, he was still waiting. She made a start, froze, started again and drew back; finally, she drew a deep breath and dived forward.

At their touch, his lips melted away beneath hers. Again she froze, and, confused, her eyes sought his.

They merely waited. Half a finger’s breadth separated their lips.

She tried to work this out. Probably, she thought, he wanted to kiss as they had the night before the battle. And—? Maybe he wanted her to want it, too? Which would make this her call, then. . . . She wished greatly she had already been through Initiation; on the other hand, this probably had not been specifically covered in the teachings: what to do when a half-trained Runedaur demands a kiss and then expects one to push it on him.

Maddened by a horde of thoughts as a horse in a cloud of flies, she closed her eyes and pressed her lips to his.

His mouth replied with utter gentleness. Her bunched muscles unclenched, slowly, and though she did not relax wholly against him, a sense of ease began to warm her. Not this time the terrible thrill of before; he clasped his arms comfortably about her, touching no strangeness, and she gave all her attention to this meeting of mouths.

Fate seldom trespasses on the quick peck, but the kiss that seems bent on eternity has spread the mat, lit the lamp, and opened the door for Him.

“Next!” came Sorchone’s cheerful bid from the doorway.

Rothesay leaped to her feet, face scarlet, wiping her mouth hastily, but she recovered quickly enough to wave, only a little unsteadily, at Kahan: “Be my guest!”

Both young men laughed. “And were we better acquainted, you and I, I should do just that,” Sorchone drawled, “but I fear lest you mistake me today!” To Kahan, he apologized dryly, “Another time, brother.”

“I’ll pout,” he replied, grinning. “What did you want, damn your untimely backside?”

“Untimely? There’s gratitude: I will have you to know, I had the grace to leave and come back later.”

Rothesay started, and glanced from one to the other, looking for the laughter that had to be there; he could not possibly have—

“He did, too,” Kahan agreed. “You should beat him, for failing you as a fellow Runedaur and teaching you the price of your inattention!”

“I should beat you, for distracting me!”

“Oh, but no,” Sorchone purred. “Never think it, babe, that your attention is ever at any command but your own.”

His voice lay soft over steely intent; glancing at Kahan, she saw the same steel glinting in his eyes even though he smiled. “Right. Sure,” she agreed uneasily, stepping away from them both, and Sorchone turned to Kahan.

“Captain Urlaf meant to sail with the midnight tide, as you knew, but he has, ah, been persuaded to stay for the Lightsolstice feast.”

“As I knew.” Kahan laughed. “I’m crushed, to have to attend such a monstrous festivity!”

“Aye. And I am sure I am loath to disappoint you of that after all, but it seems you will sail tonight indeed. And it is I envy you this time!”

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“Why?” he asked, over Rothesay’s plaintive, “Noo!”

“Rhyllandon’s gone,” Sorchone almost whispered, his grey eyes agleam.

“‘Gone’? What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“Gone. Vanished. Pffft! No one there, no one home.”

“Go on!”

“Verity, children. Windhome—”

The door exploded open. Lacie, Teo, Cobry, and a youth named Pentallan from the Storm at Morning poured into the room, all talking at once.

“Have you heard?”

“Every house empty!”

“We sail t’ night, join t’ search!”

“I want to go, too!”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Swim, then, baggage!”

A sharp glance from Sorchone cut short the clamor. No one offered combat for the role of spokesman, but let him speak as they made themselves comfortable on the other couches; Pentallan seated Lacie snugly on his lap. Cobry snagged the flagon of ale from the tiled sideboard and passed it round.

“Our mysterious Mistress conveyed unease to our mysterious Master; I’ve no wish yet to know how. But it was past midnight after Council, and I hunted Rory down the Long Gallery, and we made truce on finding the Moot-hall alight and full of Masters. They had just bespoken Windhome—I recognized Mistress Aleid’s face in Urlaf’s mirror; do you know her?” he added in an aside to Kahan. “No? I give you joy of the meeting; she is—what shall I say?—only more full of life than any woman, anyone, I have ever met.”

“An’ she shares,” Pentallan added happily.

“Bountifully,” Sorchone agreed. “But this night she had no more to share than word that Rhyllandon has been deeply withdrawn of late; brooding, she said, and much concerned with their bloodline: who was, and who was not, of their House. They had noted it, but given it scant heed. She was unsurprised that Clar Meyl had not attended Council. But Carialla’s concern moved her, and she agreed to ask an audience with the Rhyllanthysel.

“The Waterspooks spent yesterday and this morning searching through Sparca; they still search, but it is so: they have found no one, nor any stock, not even a hound. Hearthstones still warm. A candle, guttered.

“Some great spell is being worked there—”

“‘Being’ worked?” Rothesay broke in, and Sorchone nodded.

“It is not yet complete; so says the Windhome Magic-master. Probably the Lightsolstice will close it, for this year we see also the dark of the moon, that day.”

She nodded. Padriag had been planning works around that conjunction since Yule.

“Master Urlaf thinks yonder storm will break tonight, and then he means to make all speed home. What will you find there, I wonder?” Sorchone finished, looking at Kahan, and at Pentallan, with open envy.

Talk burst out afresh, everyone marvelling, everyone speculating on every means and motive they could collectively imagine. Rothesay participated only peripherally. She had a strong and alarming sense that, if she did not know what had happened up there, she knew someone who did.

She waited till after midnight before pursuing it. The storm indeed abated after nightfall, and she lingered with Kahan, helping him make ready for the voyage. In talking of his trip, he explained the strengths of the different Runedaur halls, and encouraged her, once she felt more settled in, to travel likewise and farm herself out to each of them. Sailing and weather-lore, of course, were the special province of Windhome. Rose House was the home of the Silents, and that meant far more than sign language, as they were at the root of the rumors of Runedaur soul-seeing. For statecraft, politics, diplomacy, and intrigue: right here in Kingscroft. They also excelled, quite naturally, in all urban arts, and the great joke was to speak of the Kingscroft Fashion-master. He was properly styled the Master of the City, a fine arrogance that the Lord High Mayor of Andrastir invariably resented, but no one of the Order ever used that title except in the Lord High Mayor’s presence.

“Call it silly if you will, but fashion matters, in a place like this. The Raven’s Trace Hunting-master himself says it’s just like learning coloring and camouflage in the wild! And if you want to learn how to pass yourself off undetectably in a crowd—speak to the Fashion-master.”

“I think Sorchone’s aspiring to that post,” Rothesay remarked, rolling a tunic into a tight log and stuffing it into Kahan’s canvas bag.

“He’ll be good at it,” he smiled.

“And Raven’s Trace?”

“What trace does a raven leave as it flies?”

“Erm. None?”

He grinned. “Got it in one. They’re the deepest, darkest, stealthiest sneaks of all of us. Starts with woodcraft. Then you get serious about it.”

“What about Colderwild? What’s Colderwild good for?”

His grin broadened. “Juggling. Or, puzzle-working. Or puppetry. Braiding. Weaving. How to take it all and make the world be whatever you want it to be.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, really? Gods, are they? And they want a Peria all at war and bleeding?”

His grin widened so far that his face seemed fair to split. “Well,” he drawled, “you do the best you can with what you’ve got.”

She helped carry his litter back down Drinkers Lane to the still-windy harbor, then let him use her as a crutch as he hopped one-legged from the litter to the edge of the pier. She lowered him down into competent hands in the rowboat that would carry him out to Sharkbait, passed down several pails of ale that Ellan and Berythane brought out from Drummers, and watched till long after he had vanished into the starless mirk. Sharkbait and Storm at Morning sent up a colorful volley of fireworks and then, presumably, raised sail and raced away on the wind. Lacie walked her back up to the hall.

“I’m—I think I’ll go back out. For a walk,” Rothesay mumbled as they reached the door to Kingscroft’s Silver Novitiates chamber.

“Sure. Uh, that’ll be nice.” She paused, seeming to forget to enter the room. “So it wasn’t quite Lightsolstice,” she confessed abruptly. “So much for plans!”

“What wasn’t? What plans?”

“Talla—Pentallan.” She rolled her eyes up at Rothesay, and sighed. “He’s really lovely!”

“I don’t want to know, do I,” she replied levelly.

Lacie giggled. “You? No, you probably don’t!”

“Right. Er. Sweet dreams?”

“Count on it!”

Rothesay fled, but stealthily.

Out across the Swale, back to the hilltop at Windgate she hurried, cloaked with the wind. Under the old oak she sat again, and waited expectantly.

Onions came to her alone.

“What happened—er, ” Whatever this peerie-speech was, it was hers also, now.

“” Somehow Rothesay knew he meant Clar Meyl. “” here he meant the original son, “<—had a Ceidha-key. Now, she has used it.>”

“”

Onions was surprised. “” he assured her.

Rothesay rubbed her temples fiercely. The images she had from the peeries gleefully defied all reason by being several contradictory things at once. Like dream-stuff.

“” he agreed. “”

“”

Onions held out his hand, or paw. “”

She stared at it. “”

“”

“” But he had said her magic word. Breathless, shivering, slowly she extended her hand, he clasped a fingertip, and the world that she knew fell away from them.

She was beginning to make sense of the experience. The world she knew, for the most part, had been defined for her. This one, on the other hand: this one demanded definition from her. Like clay, she thought. You could not ‘shape’ clay into, say, fire. But until you did shape it in some way, it remained formless, taking only such shape as clay would from random finger-twitches.

Intention. The trick is intention.

She looked about, her head aching with concentration, and the vividness of the view burned into her brain. There was the lawn; there, the unfamiliar grasses, the tops of the trees disappearing down the hill. And the sycamores blazed white, the leaves seared green, the stones grey and glittering even as she could see, equally plainly, that the moonless, overcast night was utterly dark. She was not seeing ‘green,’ so much as knowing ‘green.’

But not far. Turning, she ‘saw’ the ruins of the old manor house, and the apple tree within it, saw even the place in its trunk where she had first crossed ‘through.’ All the places she had already been in the Outerworld shone with this queer not-quite-sight. The unknown places remained ‘dark,’ untouched, unformed.

She looked down, intending to see herself. And—limbs! fingers! feet! Just where they should be, and looking pretty much as expected as well, except for something she could only describe as a ‘glow,’ that lay distinctly dimmer over her many bruises. Hmm.

She turned her hand before her face—and felt swiftly vertiginous as the world beyond her fingers threatened to run together and melt away, till she looked at it, command alive in her frightened thought. Tree became tree again. But she sensed that it might, for sheer mischief, shift again once her attention, or her intention, shifted. Oh no you don’t.

She spent some time trying to force both the background and her immediate target of interest to stay stable in her thought, till Onions, amused and baffled, suggested she simply not bother. Reluctantly, she let it go.

said her uncanny teacher, and she gave heed to the sounds here. The falling wind; a music of crickets; a passing owl: these sounds seemed much as she knew them, but they had a curious depth, as though they had as much shape as a jar or an apple, a shape that suggested something like age, or, maybe, universality. The wind not only sounded hollow but ‘felt’ hollow as well, sort of vase-shaped, and the mouth of it unguessably far away and unthinkably long before: it took her breath away.

And there were other sounds, or things like sounds. There seemed to be a music of the trees, and the oak behind her sang its own slow melody, and the grasses whined softly. Even the earth beneath her: some vast dark chord rumbled far below the range of any hearing ear, but the soul felt its tremor. She wondered what it meant.

Then, said Onions in her mind.

What in the world—? Did he mean for her to ‘intend’ whatever song of the earth rang in the stones of the north? No, she realized abruptly, he meant to ‘intend’ all of it, light, color, sound, weight, shape. And she must do it ‘correctly,’ whatever that meant; she had to get Sparca ‘right’ in order to get it at all. She frowned. The idea of spinning a whole country out of the thread of her fancy tickled her, but she doubted she wielded such godly power.

Onions mused.

She recalled Padriag’s map, with a jolt of homesickness, still under her bed in Colderwild.

he informed her gravely. he directed.

She closed her eyes, to imagine the map. Andrastir was but a tiny cartoon of rooftops and a gated wall; it would have to serve as sign for this particular hill. Sparca—

As she imagined crumpling the map, light burst across it, ruler-straight lines as fine as hairs and blazing white, crossing and radiating all over her image of the map. Several ran through the cartoon of Andrastir, and at least three of those passed through Sparca. Startled, still she thought, I should maybe keep it on one of those?

After waiting patiently through several fruitless minutes, he repeated,

It was like turning away from one thing toward another; it was like stepping across a threshold; it was like feeling a change in the air. She was still in the Otherworld, which stubbornly resisted all her efforts to force it into shape. She calmed herself by attending to her own body, and sensed Onions beside her, seeming nearly her own size for now. Presently she hit on the trick of ‘reaching’ for the world as she ‘reached’ for a spell, and was rewarded with the trunk of a pine tree, and cold mountain air.

said Onions, and slipped as through a veil back into the solid Outerworld.