XV: Riddling

When the light from the crack dimmed till she could scarcely make out the lines in her own palm, Rothesay stretched and prepared to go out once more.

At her best guess, the crack opened in the cliff wall a hundred feet below the healing-houses, and several hundred feet above the Daorlas. She could not see out of it, as it was easily twice her arm's length and little wider than her palm edge-on, but the rock of it was pale and glittery, and admitted enough light into her cubby-cave to read by—if the page were bright, the letters firm and dark, and the day without fine and cloudless.

Light it admitted, but little heat. Summer had always made her head swim, even before she tried standing watch on Colderwild’s black walls, and this summer’s heat had seldom been broken in rainy mercy; here, deep under the Runedaur hold, the subterranean coolth seduced and soothed her—and the subterranean dark hid her away from her hold-mates.

She dawdled to eat an apple, slowly and deliberately. Sometimes she wished she could stay right here forever, only sneaking up to the surface to raid the library, and never pay any attention to Runedaur ever again. She stopped chewing in mid-bite, her face crushed against the recollection of a living man disembowelled. Desperate to escape, her thought flicked to her half an apple in her hand, and danced about another memory she had been loath to keep.

Sorchone’s got a great big whanger.

For a moment, she wondered if she might try the same stupid trick to free her mind of the latest horror. She had to admit, now, that her only recollection of the grisly corpse in Andrastir was that it had been grisly, until Sorchone turned silly; the grisliness itself had become remote, powerless. Maybe she could do it; maybe that was what the rest of them did. Hah! Well, it was one thing to get quit of something merely disgusting, and quite another to shake off all moral shame at all. No, she wanted no equanimity about murder, and worse than murder. She would be no demon.

But, by the hells, she must learn the powers of the demons, if she were to escape them. And, sighing, she ate up the last of the apple, and set off through the writhing passages in the rock, crawling, even slithering on her belly like a serpent. Of course she blocked what little light she had at once, but she knew her way well by feel; and there was always magelight, if she did not mind giving advance warning of her approach. She did mind.

Presently she paused at a crack into the ceiling of a hewn tunnel below, listened carefully, and dropped lightly through. To her right she knew the narrow hall bent in a few yards to an unfinished end; left led towards the mazelike butteries and cellars, and the under-stairs. Utterly blind, she felt her way softly to the door, stood quietly, letting her breath still, listening. Satisfied of silence beyond, she pushed open the door—pleased that she had thought to oil its hinges—and stepped into the further blackness, this one smelling of ancient oak and old wine, and thoughtfully shut the door at her heels.

Something resisted; something firm. She leaped away, turning to face the unknown unseen unseeable, and her effort not to scream was undone by her tumble backwards over a sidelong barrel. Another barrel scraped her back, and her buttocks struck stone between them. Had there been light, she must have presented a clownish sight with her knees at her shoulders and her bare feet waving above her head.

“You’ve a gift for stealth, apart from that,” said Dav in the blackness.

“I hate you!” she shrieked, and wrenched herself to her feet.

“Yes, I know.”

She brushed her tunic back into place, though neither of them could see her discomfiture. “How long have you been waiting in there?” she demanded, with savage glee that he would, of course, have to have waited.

“Not above a quarter-hour. You’ve been quite punctual, this last week.”

She stuffed her fist in her mouth, not to scream her humiliation. Mastering herself, she observed, almost coolly, “You’ve been watching me?”

“Apart from yourself being of such interest—I like students.”

Her cherished horror swooped free. “Oh, really?” she shrieked, and the echoing stone made her subdue her voice to a grating hiss: “You like them to study cutting up people?”

“Ah,” said the Master softly in the dark, satisfied of something. “When the occasion presents itself, certainly. Had you stayed, you had learned much.”

“I don’t want to learn—that, thank you very much!”

“No? I lose my bet. I had you pegged as a healer.”

“That wasn’t healing!” She made the stones ring again.

“Have you had supper yet?”

“What?”

“I have not; dine with me.”

“I’m not hungry. . . .”

“You will be,” he said gently, suddenly within arm’s reach. “Come, chit.” Feeling then terribly, deeply lost, she followed the faint whisper of him out of the maze, up to the kitchens, and outside.

Kavin’s Tower had an acorn-cap roof standing on four pillars, one at each cardinal direction, and the floor beneath that roof was flat, without so much as a kerb at its edge. Wind, warm and dry, flowed through unhindered. Dav leaned his back against the north pillar; Rothesay sat at the edge of the trapdoor in the center. They ate in silence, cold squash soup from little pails, new apples, a jug of cream shared between them. The sun had set into the western hills beyond brilliantly gold clouds, but the sky above was blue still, and Ullenna’s pink Girdle glowed across the east.

Rothesay bore the silence as long as she could. “You brought me up here so you could explain to me how cutting live people open is acceptable healing study,” she prompted him sourly.

“More to ask what troubles you about it,” he replied, scraping around in the bottom of his soup tin.

She thought she ought to vomit; a pity, that her stomach was so complacent. Her mouth worked around several retorts, then settled on saying, slowly, as to an imbecile child, “Hurting people is bad.”

“Like . . . running a sword through someone?” Dav rattled his spoon into the tin and set it aside to look up at her at last.

The novice sword-mistress flushed, sweating doubly in the warm evening. “That’s different.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Several distinctions present themselves to the observant eye,” he agreed. “Which do you consider the most significant?”

“He was helpless,” she replied at once, pleased that her voice stayed level: she had learned, though she did not always keep in mind, that Runedaur considered that the moment their opponent raised the volume, they had him. Or her. “A free man has a chance to defend himself.”

He nodded again, then with a bit of apple slowly mimed a couple of sword-strokes, then spread his arms wide. “Ah, you have worsted me, disarmed me, I am at your mercy. What now will you do with me? What must you do with me?”

She eyed him uneasily. “I don’t have to kill you.”

“No more you do. But, I am in your power. What do you do?”

“I can’t do just anything I want with you,” she tried next.

“What limits you?”

She chewed that over warily. She wanted to argue that goodness, basic human decency circumscribed her—and gladly—but she figured he had as many answers to a novice disputant as to a novice warrior.

“But I don’t intend to beat you,” he said, and grinned as she blushed again, this time for the nakedness of her thoughts.

“What do you want, then?” she demanded, little aware of her own glowering pout.

“I want to show you what you do not know, which is: why you do what you do.” At her silent glare, he went on, “What limits you is your code of good and evil. It controls you—yet yours was not the writing of it. Challenge: write it. Write it as it now is. You may find you wish to amend it.”

“Oh?” she challenged back.

“You may find some, ah, clauses contradict others,” he said mildly. “You may find that evil will can hide behind the best intentions, and good actions, ill-considered, may yield evil outcome.

“But to return to our . . . study. His helplessness distressed you. Was he always helpless?”

“Against you? Probably.”

He grinned. “Except he had the choice not to encounter me at all.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to cut him open!”

“If he tries to kill me, or those I love, may I try to kill him?”

She shrugged. “That’s war, isn’t it?”

“So it is. Now, would it suit such of your code as you recognize, if I should consider it human—good—to kill, if I must, sparing my victim as much suffering as I may?”

She thought about it, searching his words for traps. “Yes.”

“Our subject, then: we did not hurt him.”

Her jaw dropped. How could he be such an idiot? “You killed him!” she screamed, and waved her fists and sprayed soup across the stone flags from her forgotten, and now crushed, tin.

“But we were going to do that anyway.”

“Er. Hah?” she said, dabbing at the mess, either in distraction or for distraction.

“When we study pain—and we do—we are our own subjects. Conscripts are so pointless. They—not unreasonably—ah, object to the inquiry too much to yield reliable insights. A volunteer participates with a whole heart.”

Rothesay paled. “Do—do I—have to—?”

Dav’s scorn flared. “Did I say ‘volunteer’?” Then, almost visibly settling his hackles down, added gruffly, “As it frightens you, however, I recommend that you do. Let the depth of your fear measure the imperative to face it. You will find strength beyond. And know that it is from such studies that we have learned many ways to remove pain. The man died without discomfort.”

“But . . . but . . . cutting—people—open. . . .”

“Now you must look to the hidden parts of your code, chit. If we had any right to kill the man at all, to save our own souls we had also an obligation to do so gently. This we did. Not only gently, but—economically,” and he laughed softly. “As long as we doomed him to die anyway, shall he not die to extend our powers to heal?”

After a long while she asked, in a small voice, “Who was he?”

“Do you wish to mourn him?”

“N-no. Well, maybe. I mean, we killed him and I’m—” Her voice trailed off, and she stared absorbedly at her thumbs, and did not see Dav’s milder glance.

“He was a hired assassin.”

“Oh.” Well, in that case—! said her voice in righteousness.

“You may mourn that ever he came to that.”

“Oh,” she mumbled, contrite again.

“And we would not have admitted you to that study until you did mourn him.”

That snapped her head back up so she could stare at him. She saw only a man leaning comfortably against the north, his face unreadable. Then he glanced aside, down into the bailey-canyon below, and his grin flashed.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

She followed his glance, but could not see what lay at the tower’s feet from her conservative seat. She rolled to her knees and shuffled closer. Light lingered on their tower top, but shadow filled the courtyard like still grey water. Deep below them, a bevy of orange will-o-wisps danced and flew, gold pennant afterimages tracing their paths. Matching paths—nearly so; what was familiar—?

“Juris is doing well with Carving Water,” Dav observed, and she caught on: the will-o-wisps swept through the Seven First Moves. She started to ask what caused the glow, when a faint hint of cedar-smoke reached her, and she remembered the hard, fire-blackened tips of many of the training weapons.

“We burn them?”

“Look,” said Dav, rolling closer to the edge. “That’s Cobry, on the end. Watch and you’ll see how he puts a little, almost a hook just at the end of his stroke—No! Ah, well done, boy! Has he got it? See if he can do it straight twice—ah. Still, better than it’s been. He’ll get it now.” He propped himself on his elbow and turned to look at her.

Rothesay remained entranced by the ribbons of fireglow below. She saw the little hook in Cobry’s stroke, saw Juris’s smooth elegant line, saw someone’s wild wobbling path. She began to wonder what her own strokes would show. Yes, Arngas of course, his would be perfect curves, probably like that fourth player. “Who’s the good one?”

“Rory.”

She felt her cheeks flush, as if she had just embarrassed herself in the sport below, and then her jaw set in determination to play well.

Dav slapped her arm. “Let’s go down.”

The boys welcomed them into the game, Rothesay almost as buoyantly as Dav. The Arms-master from Raven’s Trace, a grey weathered man still tall though he was reputedly over ninety, lit another pair of swords for them with a spark of magefire. Dav showed then the merit of being Master of Dance. The Arms-master called the Moves freely, in no pattern, and even Rory’s lines wavered and wobbled between one Move and the next, while Rothesay and Flick—he being until then the most erratic of the players—scrambled in the air for direction. Dav, though, danced, each Move flowing into the next as though there were only one Move, endlessly long, endlessly varying. So they played under the nearly-full moon for almost a quarter of Her passage.

In laughter she helped the boys put the weapons away, and then Juris and Rory tagged along as she took Dav’s and her own supper things to the scullery to wash up. Juris tried to pull her crushed tin back into shape and failed, but made no sign of amazement when she successfully straightened it.

“Handy, that,” he did say, and grinned as he added, “and I bet you’re tired of hearing about it!”

She grimaced. Rory laughed. “Might as well get used to it, Sugar. You can’t shut up everybody in the world, and you never know who’s next to make a fuss.”

She drew breath to shout at him, failed for words, realized he was only right, too right, and threw up her hands—instead of throwing something she might break. “‘Get used to it’?” she snarled.

His golden eyes met her green-dark ones squarely. “Don’t,” he said deliberately, “ask me.”

Understanding startled her and she grinned back on the ebb of ire. “Right.”

“Plans for the Arch?” Juris interrupted through a yawn.

“The what? Oh!” The Arch of Autumn, the eleventh day of Ilmeres, was only two days off. King Kelmhal’s great Fair would begin at Dunford then. Last year’s had tried to marry her off to Dagobeord if only for the duration, and had therefore cut short her participation as she fled to Padriag’s villa to escape the humor of her countrymen. She still resented it. Now she ducked out of the scullery into the under-kitchen to see the thick garlands of yellow straw and purple strawflowers as if for the first time. Preparations had gone ahead while she had gone to ground—again.

“I keep doing that,” she murmured, and was almost as surprised as the boys by her words: she was sure she had been about to ask how the Order celebrated. “Hiding, I mean.” They probably knew she had been, maybe even knew where and had only been letting her think she was hidden. The ghost of embarrassment arose once more—but it was a thin phantom, and she was so very tired of it. A sigh, and it dispersed; and a victory worthy of its own celebration passed unheeded, with only the sigh for a fanfare.

“Yuh?” said Juris. “So stop.”

She glanced at Rory, to catch him squinting at her along some invisible shaft. “Yeah,” he agreed, but slowly. “Only—only—I don’t know how to say it—” He cut short, his whole being tense and pursed as if that would flush the words out of some unguessable undergrowth. Juris in turn watched him like a cat—or like Dav.

Rory waved a hand. “See—now you see it, right? That you keep doing something? It wa’n’t a bad thing to do, maybe your best strategy—then, I mean, then when you didn’t notice you were, er, doing it—that sounds stupid, how could you not notice what you were doing—”

“Pattern,” suggested Juris. “Not the action. The habit of the action.”

Rory snapped his fingers in enlightenment. “Thanks. I’ll beat you to a pulp for it later. But, yeah, that’s the trick. You don’t have to have Masters pound you into the dirt to point out your—patterns. Only, now that you’ve seen yours, you sort of know what you’re doing. You don’t have to just stop,” here he shot Juris a superior glare. “You can go ahead and hide. But now you can—think about it. ‘Do I really want to’ or not.”

“That’s nice,” she said, and stuck her right fist sideways to intercept Juris’s leap at her. He grabbed her wrist, though she was certain she surprised him, and she could either fall back or let the wrist snap. Or try to flip over backwards rather than just fall.

Stars spun about her. Warm strong fingers probed her skull and neck. Someone picked pieces of something off her face and chest, and there was a ceramic sound. The whole world throbbed painfully.

“Nothing broken—”

“—except crockery—”

“Yeah, well.” Rory’s exasperated face appeared among the stars. “Fire’s demons, Sugar! Maybe you want to learn a stunt before you try it!”

The two boys helped her sit up. They were still in the kitchen: so far, so good. At Rory’s instruction, Juris lit a bright blue magelight right in her face. “No, hold still. All right, good.” Juris banked the light, and she could see the bowls and cups, and pieces, scattered about her, and a wooden shelf knocked free of the wall behind. “Good. Can you stand?”

“Do I have to?”

“Hell of a bed,” observed Juris, setting the shelf to rights, and she groaned, and tried, and succeeded.

They walked her to her long-forsaken bed in the Silver Novitiates Chamber. As they entered, Lacie almost set a false-fire spell on them—harmless but painful—but, grasping the approximate situation, fetched arnica and boneset from her personal stash.

“Girl,” she sighed, when they told her what had happened, “have you ever done a back flip before? Before Arngas got you, I mean? Or ever?”

“Er, no.”

“You don’t want for guts then,” Juris chuckled. “But, brains—?”

“Oh, go away!” Lacie scolded.

The boys gone, Lacie fussed from the edge of Rothesay’s bed and bathed her face from the water jug. “Are you going to be all right for Arch-day?”

“I just bumped my head,” Rothesay groused. “Master Leoff—er, your father—”

“‘Master Lee.’”

“—yes, that one. He’s hit me worse.”

“He knows what he’s doing. That wall didn’t.”

“It’s just a bump!” She put up with being daubed, though, as it felt so nice, but sleep was probably far from her tonight. “Um. Arch-day? Why? What do we do?”

Lacie brightened, sprang away, and came dancing back flourishing a silver-satin gown. The gold of a sewing needle flickered, dangling on a silvery thread from half a stitchery butterfly. A flock of butterflies, all silver, swept over both shoulders. “We dress up,” she announced, draping the gown on her front. “In The Colors. Sothia’s got a set for you all ready—of course it’s black. Probably plain, so you can decorate it yourself.” A moment’s dismay over the short time left dimmed her glee, and then passed. “But if you take care of it, you can decorate it for years and years. Carialla’s can stand up by itself now, or almost. I started on this one last year. The dress was too big for me then—”

“We dress up. Anything else?”

Lacie tossed the dress aside and pounced back on the bed. “Oh, yes! It’s Harvest day!”

“Well, yes—”

“No, it’s Runedaur Harvest day. Ssh! We have a great feast at midday, and then we go out to the Hallen Field—you know, just east of the hold, beyond the bridge—and we set up these thrones for Dav and Carialla. And this great crowd comes up from Kavinsrae—not just the local people, but oh! just everyone, from all over. And they ask for gifts, or services.” She dimpled and laughed. “Maybe, ‘a golden goblet.’ Like that. But if they can describe it well enough—if it’s maybe something we took, or maybe they gave it to us in tithe or something—if they can name it, we give it right back again!

“They can ask any of us for anything, but they mostly ask for the big things from the Master and Mistress. We students get to run fetch things. Us, they mostly ask for service. For a day, or for all eleven days. Or if it’s just one day, it could be, oh, a day next winter.

“The rule is, you give them exactly what they ask for.” She spoke solemnly, but her blue eyes glittered.

The glitter gave Rothesay the expected pause. “You mean—say they ask for a golden goblet, you might give them . . . a buttercup, maybe?”

“Ooo, that’s a good one!” Lacie clapped. “Yes, just like that! In Kavinsrae and Dorchastir—probably in any of the towns near our halls, I expect—they know the game so very well, and they’ll ask in riddles, maybe, and let you go rack your brains for a week to find out they meant an egg, just an egg.”

Rothesay grinned. “I like riddles.”

“There you are, then. And at sunset we have a dance. And then we do it all again two more days, and then we join the towns’ fair for the rest of it.”

Eventually Lacie wound down and went back to sleep. The night was very old. Rothesay lay awake still, thinking over all the riddles she knew. She pictured the face of someone receiving his buttercup “goblet,” and laughed. Perhaps it was rather a rotten trick, but it was funny.

Wasn’t it? Of course the butt of the joke would not think it funny; the butt never did. And it would be a dull old world without any jokes. . . .

You may find some, ah, clauses contradict others.

Now wait a minute; this is different. This is just having a little fun!

Like . . . trying to make you marry Dagobeord. But you’re still sore about that.

After a while, she thought, It’s only funny for the joker. It’s hardly ever fun for the joked. Then it occurred to her to wonder, Why is it funny for the joker? And then, What is “funny”? She rubbed her eyes and rolled to her side to sleep. But the demon of unanswerable questions was wide awake.

Well, what does Dav think is funny? What does Dav even think?

If you have an idea about how a sword might move, that is unlike how a sword will move, that assumption could well be your last. Beware your assumptions: the Order, within her halls, whispered, thundered, sang this lesson in a thousand little ways, not least in never assuming that one was safe. Maybe this Harvest game was their way of trying to teach others the same awareness. That would be, um, nice. Awareness was probably a good thing to have.

It was good to be nice to people; you should not let someone else fall down, for example. But if you never let an infant fall, he would never learn to walk. . . . Maybe you should never push someone down. Maybe. But if you tried to push them down, they could learn to push back, or keep their balance, or something else useful.

Ah. Why let an infant learn to walk at all? Because he will be helpless all his life if he does not and you will not always be there to provide for him—and anyway, wouldn’t he want to learn to provide for himself, and for someone else, the way you do?

That seemed hopeful. Rothesay rolled to her back. It is good to—do things that help other people be able to do things. Hah, well, that does not admit to cutting them open! —No, wait: the one being cut open was not one being helped, he was being killed for, for, for being, um, counter-helpful himself, for being a killer. . . .

Being rightly killed for being wrongly a killer? How did that work? Rothesay chewed that briefly, then shoved it away, unready for it. Back to that disembowelling. If they did learn useful healing stuff (like what? Well, you’d see where things were supposed to go, in case someone else were, say, gored open by an ox and the bits fell out—bleaugh), then they certainly were doing a thing that helped other people—not the victim—be able to do things. . . .

Rothesay stared up at the ceiling as it grew paler in the spreading light, and took up her pillow and beat Lacie awake with it.

The girls breakfasted together, but Lacie was uninterested in Rothesay’s dilemma. “I mean, can you even tell the difference—you personally—between ‘that’s disgusting’ and ‘that’s evil’? And that one’ll take you right in to Master Merry and whether if it’s beautiful, it’s good. Which is stupid, because—look, there’s Queen Myllia, or Dourchon Vrai, and the whole point of their stories is their being so beautiful, or handsome, and they both being evil and killing people, right? Philosophers!” she snorted. Rothesay dropped the subject.

The game of Ghost slowed to almost nothing as people prepared for Arch-day. The Moot, too, emptied out, and a tacit understanding spread that it would not continue, not formally, after the Fair-time. Rothesay joined a flower-gathering party, from which couples occasionally dropped out, to rejoin later, ruffled, breathless and cheerful, grass-stained and leafy-haired; they did not always drop very far out, and only Rothesay tried not to notice. Nor to—oh, no! Not really?—help.

She found Sothia and her new dress clothes. Lighter and finer than the ones she had worn on her first morning in Colderwild, they felt like black gossamer. They were summer-cut, too, so the sleeves only tied closed with a few ribbons. And though war-boots existed that, like these, bared the shins from knees to toes, covering only soles, ankles and calf with tough hide, these were of dance-slipper delicacy. She dressed in them all and danced for Sothia, but did not trust the abatement of Ghost and changed back into her scruffy everyday garb before taking leave of the Mistress.

As the day called the Arch of Autumn opened, clear and dry, students lined the parapet upon the east wall of Colderwild. Below them fell an awkward, tumbled slope, full of boulders and hidden holes, and holes exposed by someone’s fall into them, as Rothesay had done some weeks ago: awkward terrain for an embattling army—and rumored in the towns to be the graves of enemies of the Order. Beyond the slope stretched a wide smooth lawn, dim green in the dawn-light, cut by a dusty streak that was the road down to Kavinsrae. Beside the road, someone was already erecting a silken pavilion.

“That’s Lord Benniforth’s,” said a girl, a guest up from Kingscroft. “The rumor is, he’s going to ask for help to take down the Brean.”

“An offensive? That’d be a change,” grumbled Cobry, leaning through the crenellations.

“Why bother?” put in Rory. “There’s that Madroch, stomping all over Maldan. Let him do it. Then get him. Then you only have to do it once, see.”

“If he asks for help to take down the Brean,” said Rothesay slowly, “or whoever-it-is . . . then suppose we go into Dun Brean and knock his feet out from under him, and leave. Does that count?”

They laughed. “Yeah, you could do that,” Rory mused, stroking his moustaches.

“Maybe Benniforth will ask us to defeat the Brean,” suggested the Kingscroft girl, Morva.

“Then we could play him a game of chess!” Cobry laughed.

“How about, ‘to remove him from power’?”

“Install his heir.”

“See what you’ve started?” Rory chided Rothesay through a wicked grin.

A boy from Rose House whistled and pointed. A short caravan of donkey-wagons breasted the hill, to pull off the road opposite the Benniforth camp, followed by half a dozen mounted men-at-arms with blue and silver banners.

“That’ll be the Marchess Cuildon,” said Rory. “She’ll want something political, too.”

“Good luck to her!” Morva laughed.