XIX: Holy Days

Rain in Colderwild. The cisterns filled, and overflowed in torrents down cliff or hill. Paving-stones and roof slates grew slick and the students of the Black and the Silver banded together, hunted out and trapped their seniors who had the surest footing, to compel the teaching of balance—and recovery. Now having learned to fall correctly proved its worth; and even so, more teaching followed as the healing-houses filled with sprains, contusions, and broken limbs, or more than usual.

Under Mistress Enllian’s eye, Rothesay set and splinted Flick’s sword arm, and helped him into dry clothes. There had been no need to help him out of wet ones. Nearly everyone playing on the rain-slick stones had simply stopped bothering to dress at all, and before long Rothesay, having been Ghosted in the middle of peeling out of clinging soaking clothes once too often, gave up and ran as naked as the rest.

In Harrowater, no one played in the rain. Apart from bathing, or having to fish in inclement weather, people avoided getting wet at all, as far as they could. Colderwild answered the fear of catching cold with great steaming mugs of boneset tea—coincidentally useful—and cabbage salads, and lots and lots of hot baths. These last were communal and festive, and often in the rain as bathers filled fountain-basins from kettles hung over sheltered fires. Nor had Rothesay any fear of the opinions of the townsfolk upon her nakedness: they seemed to share Harrowater’s idea of a wetting, and stayed fast home. The Runedaur had their home to themselves.

In the baths, learning to hide underwater with a straw naturally arose, as did the idea of developing one’s wind or stilling one’s body to hide without one as long as possible. Learning how to resuscitate someone new to the techniques also came up, practiced upon Arnaf and on Rothesay with mocking admonitions about how often stubbornness summoned Death to His office. She and Arnaf, though publicly thanking their instructors, met later in shared mortification, building ever more elaborate designs for humiliating them in turn ‘one of these days.’ Immensely cheered by having a companion in chagrin, they returned to play bolstered by conspiratorial glee. Learning how to drown someone in his own bath came as an afterthought.

The weather chilled as Autumn wound the year down. Hot outdoor baths became no more than weekly affairs. The red and gold fire of changing leaves spread slowly down from the southern heights, enveloped them, and rushed to meet the leaf-blaze working its solar way from the north. Rothesay woke up.

That was how it seemed to her, every year: with the autumn equinox, called by the Sferiari Dureya, ‘the Sunset’—when all the living world was said to be turning to sleep, something bright and fiery sparked within her, tingled through her veins like waking to a glad day. As a child she had been careless enough to insist on this to her neighbors, which won her no friends; out of that old habit, she said nothing now to her new community. But she watched the high-flying geese and thought, not for the first time, how much she wanted to follow, to travel the world. Then Iril the Hunting-mistress invited her hunting, and she accepted with astonished delight. Into the vast Kaine Forest behind Colderwild they wandered, sometimes for days on end.

A queer and wonderful sense of homecoming buoyed her, as she wandered through woods she had never seen before, a sense she was loath to examine too closely lest it vanish, like a dream at the touch of dawn. Mistress Iril eyed her askance, and when they would return, draped and dangling with rabbits and fat geese, set Rothesay in the library with texts on wood-madness, full of warnings of the power of the Piper, especially at this season.

Rothesay glanced at the writings, found them powerless and tiresome, especially the illustrations of Dagn Himself, none of which seemed quite right. She might entertain fancies of running off to live wild by day, but night only reminded her of her bed of thick furs, her feather-stuffed pillow, her pile of manuscripts to read in between dissuading attacks with a raised short bow, her latest armament of interest. If there were some way to build a library in the Wild, then she might be in danger. One near a hot spring, for hot baths. And with a place to stash a pretty silken dress, or two.

Iril herself was Silent, like Sothia. A lean, spare woman of perhaps forty, she seemed to Rothesay to be the most stripped-down person she had ever met. No jewelry adorned her; tunic, trousers and boots were only just enough to protect her skin and no more; of course she never spoke, but nor did she ever move except for what was needed. Never an extraneous sigh, a shoulder shifted, a nose rubbed. Only her eyes moved, to track a rustle or a bird-call. Trying to read this stillness, Rothesay found the same emptiness she sensed in her barrow-sword, the silence of Arngas.

Phrases came back to her:

Oh, no one reads my thoughts. I don’t think any more, you see.

We will teach you our art. And we will teach you the only means of thwarting it.

there can be no map for a land never before seen

She shivered. “Mistress?” she asked one night over their small fire. “Do you, er, think?”

Iril’s brown eyes wrinkled in amusement, and nothing more. Rothesay gazed into the fire and avoided thinking further about it just now.

Colderwild had celebrated Dureya, the equinox, the Sunset of the Year, with games of balance: hunkerhawser, rope-walking, log-rolling; with intricate, braiding set-dancing; and with a bright bonfire in the central fire-pit that they kept tended the whole week. Now a great Quarter-day approached, Wintersgate, and no hint of preparations stirred the Hall.

“It’s a high holy day up north,” Rothesay said to Lacie the night before the great day itself.

“So it is here, too. Maybe the biggest, bar the Midnight at Yule.”

“But we haven’t done anything! No cooking, no garlands — !” No charms against hauntings, she refrained from adding, having a sense that the Runedaur would laugh at that one.

“We don’t prepare for it. We just do it. If you’re up at dawn and go to the Vasty Hall, you can see some of it, if you like.”

She did. Lacie, wakened, stuffed her head further under her pillow and refused to join her, saying that if Death wanted to take her in her sleep, He could just go right ahead. Rothesay ‘killed’ her and landed her with scullery duty that night, and hurried off through the chilly dim corridors for the Vasty Hall.

Garrod was dancing when she arrived. Half the rest of the community filled the stone tiers to watch, and they were all, even the sorceresses, dressed in black. Rothesay glanced down at herself. Not everything she wore was black anymore, not since her sunstroke, and Mistress Iril insisted on dark green or brown; but her luck was with her this morning.

For the rest of the day, people took turns dancing at the center of the Hall, sometimes to music or singing, sometimes to soft drums, sometimes in silence. Rothesay watched, fascinated, and slowly it came to her that the dances were stories. Later she asked if the stories, the dances, grew and changed each year; Garrod agreed that it was so. A story-dance: the idea stirred something in the depths of her soul. She thought she would quite like to be one of those dancers; next year, not with the childish jumpings-about that served her now in private moments of joy.

Very few people breakfasted. The day-meal was whatever an individual dug up for himself. Few spoke, and then in whispers.

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Last to dance was Dav, at sunset. Thirteen white stones, hollowed into bowls, made a wide circle and he wound in and out among them with a grace that took her breath away. The light faded, the Hall lay utterly dark even to her eyes, and still Dav’s feet could be heard soft upon the stones. Then there was silence. After a while, people filed out slowly, though some remained, for how long she did not learn.

And still there was silence, and no one lit torches in the halls. Only the lesser dining hall had light, from the long hearths in the floor, and everyone pitched in to make an impromptu supper of whatever needed little cooking. Lacie’s scullery tasks were few and light, and she stuck her tongue out at Rothesay.

In Harrowater, noise was the order of the day, to scare away evil intent, to bar the Door Between the Worlds. Gifts of food would be set outside, to placate peeries and ghosts and the Dark Folk, while within men raised a hearty riot. Padriag usually travelled, back to his occult birth-hearth, neighbors said, though Rothesay knew that on at least one occasion, he had gone to Feillantir city. He had bought her a scented soap there.

Colderwild embraced the silence and the dark. Many, she found, embraced the silence literally, to speak no word till Yule; Dav was one. No one lit so much as a candle, let alone torch or magelight. This made blind-training the rule, at least after nightfall. Again Rothesay found her peculiar gifts also a handicap: she could see passably well long after her companions were blinded, and she rather resented that they must learn sightless skills more quickly than she, till Lacie, exasperated, suggested that if it bothered her that much she should wear a blindfold.

For a week, no one cooked. Many simply fasted, though students, especially the younger ones, were encouraged to eat at least at midday. Some of the children, like little Mardiel, tried to imitate their elders, but apples, cheeses, nuts and small breads were kept piled within easy reach of small people. No one hushed their play, but they felt the quietness, and whispered their games—often quite loudly.

At the end of the week, a shadow of normal life returned. Cooked meals reappeared, at least, and the first one, though only soup and bread, seemed like a Fair feast. Some who had kept silent all week now spoke up, quietly; many continued their speech-fasting. People lit candles and torches again, but few, and briefly; the library filled, though, and stayed well lit until late into the nights. Rothesay wrestled and wrangled within herself, and finally surrendered pride to desire and went in search of Dav.

She found him in his apartments. Though she had made up her mind, still she stood for a long time before him, trying to unbend enough to say the words, wishing he would just read her mind and knowing full well he would force her to speak, may the gods pitch him into the hells. But how he had moved, like wind made visible, like a glitter and a shimmer, and she would kill all pride to feel such light and fire in her own limbs.

“You are Master of Dance.” At least that part was painless. “I w—I—” She shut her eyes, blushed, drew a breath and shot it out. “I want to be a dancer.”

As though stirred by her speaking out, a memory awoke. She grinned and added, deliciously: “You lose your bet.”

He laughed, and made an acquiescent nod. She wished he had the grace to grumble, so that she could gloat properly. Damn and bother the man.

Studying with a silent instructor began strange, but swiftly grew to seem, not merely natural, but necessary. Once she grasped what he wanted, she wondered how he would ever have conveyed it, if obliged to attempt to say it. Only once did he offer her any words, a week after they had begun: he pointed into an open codex so that she might read there:

Do not despise the children

She who loved children shot him a shocked look. With a wave, he asked her for the First Passage, from ‘earth’ position to ‘air,’ and she sighed and stumbled through it. He repeated it flawlessly, like a leaf fluttering. She glared. His glance flicked at the book again.

Do not despise the children, the small beginnings of great power to be. Oh.

“But I get so cross with myself, Master! You make it look effortless, and I—I feel like an oaf and an idiot!”

He grinned, and swept out of the room, summoning her after with a tip of his head. They ran down to the first floor and over to the women’s wing, and found Terge in the quarters she shared with the Music-mistress, her sister Maarfi. Terge’s infant, nursing the night Rothesay had first seen her, had begun to walk; Maarfi’s two-year-old daughter, her wispy hair as red as Master Cal’s, held her little cousin’s hand and crooned at her encouragingly. Dav, delighted to have found what he wanted so readily, bowed extravagantly to the child and withdrew again.

“Master Leoff says that it’s play that makes a Runedaur,” Rothesay offered sheepishly, and his raised eyebrow said, Then play! So she drew a deep breath, forgot—or tried to avoid thinking about—how she wished she could move, and blundered with a lighter heart through such moves as she could yet make.

Visitors came, apparently to hole up in Colderwild till Spring returned. Elraic Marre, the First Poet whose earlier visit had been only a rumor to her, returned with a small entourage. A handsome man, especially for a man of fifty, who wore his grey hair swept back like a mane, he was almost a pleasure to be ogled by, and ogle he did. Lacie urged Rothesay to go ahead and flirt back—learn how, you great silly girl! — as he was perfectly safe, the three young men he had brought with him being as far as his lust extended. He deigned to enliven a few evenings with some of his songs, though he apologized for declining later. Runedaur silence in the last few weeks of the year was, he said, something he looked forward to from Lightsolstice on, and he would rather not trespass on it.

“Oh, is that it?” Mistress Maarfi shared a mead-bowl with him in the supper-hall. “I’d have thought you would have flocked to Carastloel with the rest!”

“Ah, you have heard of Cathforrow’s court, then? I was invited, of course—”

“Implored is more like,” smirked one of his young men.

“—but I sent him my prettiest regrets, promised him a poem for his Winter Court, and begged off till spring. I am too old to be undoing my traditions even for a prince, my dear.”

“He’s commissioned quite a lot of new work, so we hear,” Maarfi went on. “Some young architect out of Lostforth, isn’t there, with new ideas for an amphitheatre, come together with a Garis singer and harper?”

“He’s certainly rebuilding the River Road: it was a pleasure, riding the last miles to the Gold Road. And he’s all but begun his own college of magic, though, there! he has much to teach, that lad. Of course the rest of Peria want to know what he is using for money.” Elraic paused, and glanced demurely down at his elegant fingers.

“I’ll take the bait,” Navan, Facechanger, jumped in. Rothesay wondered how the apparent young man, being actually a young woman, took to the poet who liked young men. Navan had flirted heartily with Rothesay, or tried to, early on, and Rothesay’s usual confusion in such matters was gravely complicated by not knowing if she were supposed to know Navan’s sex or not, or if Navan even cared. Rothesay, at least, was still too shy to ask. “What is he using for money?”

“Brass tokens,” Elraic replied. “Of no value, none at all, but to jackdaws and magpies; save that he has ordered a new tax—a quarterly tax, if you care for such detail—which, he graciously allows, may be paid in: proper coin, or in his little tokens, or both. Or in works.”

“Hey! That’s how we do it!” yelped Navan. “Who taught him that?”

Laughter ran around the hall, though no one offered an answer. Then Carialla stirred, in the shadow of a pillar where she sat almost as still as Iril, to rattle her fingernails on the arm of her chair. “It is just possible we have someone in his household,” and she almost smiled. “A great lord should have great resource, I think.”

“Oh, but you never told him it was our strategy—he would never have used it, then!” Navan laughed.

“You mistake him,” Carialla murmured. “To use our devices is not to use us. There are those who cannot, or will not, make the distinction; Cathforrow is not so straitened.”

Rothesay sighed privately, and withdrew to the library, as the First Poet showed no signs of being poetic that night. So the rude Prince Treskiel had some praiseworthy habits. He could be clever enough to use something, if he found it useful, even if he disliked the author. And he was doing proper princely things, roads and all, for his people. And he seemed to be attracting all manner of gifted artists and thinkers to him. Rothesay imagined a palace, like the governor’s in Teginau, or Kingscroft, filled with lights and works of art and fancy people dancing to fine music, and that sunken face with its cold humor at the center of it. Why could not bad people be wholly bad, so that one need not feel half this and half that about them?