Baking under the early afternoon sun, the Runedaur milled in Kavin’s Circle at the south end of the lawn. A white silken pavilion had been raised in the center of the Circle and two thrones, black-stained wood laced with silver inlay, stood upon thick black-and-white carpets beneath. These were flanked by eight more upholstered chairs, some black, some bleached, and all the Masters and Mistresses of Colderwild Hall seated themselves there. A few of the senior knights and sorceresses stood about them in the thin shade of the silk; nearly all the rest of the hold, plus guests, made do in full sun, and everyone had fans.

Rothesay admired hers, black silk stretched over a black frame with silver fittings. More she admired the jugs of scented water being passed around, for wetting the fans and the twisted headscarves that many were wearing, including herself. The headscarves made an unusual element of fashion, but a good soaking one kept a head beautifully cool, whatever it looked like. One man filled the crown of his big black leather hat with water and jammed it on his bald head: it fitted so snugly that the water trickled out only a few drops at a time, and he looked a little more conventional, apart from his trickles.

Everyone dressed gloriously, as Lacie had promised. Carialla’s gown was stiff with white embroideries, silver threads, and starry gems. She wore also a great silver collar, linked plates embossed with skulls, and one almost large enough to be a breastplate had diamond eyesockets and teeth. Beside her, Dav glittered in ornaments of jet and obsidian. Both went bareheaded, alone among them all.

And around and among the chairs, chests and boxes stood open, revealing golden, silver, jewelled treasure, coins, gems, plate, ornaments; or bolts of costly cloth—including the work Rothesay had glimpsed in Carialla’s loom—and furs. A sheaf of swords and another of spears gleamed beside Dav; and a basket of herb bundles, talismans and odd polished fingers of trees, by Carialla. To the sides of the pavilion they had arrayed humbler fare, rakes and shovels, baskets of potatoes, pots and crocks.

Rothesay expected Lord Benniforth or the Marchess to approach the pavilion first, but after the two-note fanfare from Garrod, the lone Runedaur herald, the mayors of Kavinsrae and Dorchastir walked up together, trailing a variegated entourage of wives, merchants, and flower-bearing children. The two mayors bowed together under the pavilion, and solemnly required of the Runedaur their ancient duty, to protect and to aid those who lived under the shadow of their walls. That sounded plain enough, she thought, and hard to make trick of; and the Master and Mistress agreed equally solemnly. Then every one in the mayoral party made request of some small item or other—fans seemed popular today—and Garrod played them a cheerful retreat.

That was the signal for a slow chaos. Beyond the encampments of Benniforth and the Marchess had gathered most of the population of the two towns, as well as many from towns and settlements all up and down the Daorlas, and from Carastwyth to the east and Ristover and Andras from the north and west. These now bore down on the Runedaur, but slowly, even cautiously. The Runedaur spread out to meet them.

An old man who reminded Rothesay strangely of the widow Pinnar back in Harrowater approached her, to ask shyly for a gold coin.

“It dahn’t hev t’ be any big a tall,” he assured her, as if it would help.

Only that, when they could ask for anything? “Why don’t you ask for a whole bag of gold?” burst out of her uninvited.

The old man ducked his head, but he grinned. “Nah, miss. Bags’re o’ hemp, if t’ be any use a tall!”

She conceded with a bow and a laugh, and ducked into the pavilion to pick out a nice fat one for him. He looked at it for a long time as if he might cry, then pocketed it with a smile and wished her a full harvest and a life of joy. She swelled as he shuffled off. Maybe being Runedaur was not all so gruesome after all.

A woman she recognized as the Dorchastiri brewer collared her next. Hands planted on her stout hips, she studied Rothesay critically, before nodding to herself.

“A’ right, you, then—Rowshi, is’t?”

“Yes, Mother.”

The brewer pursed her lips thoughtfully, and began, “Uh want that what can never be stolen, nor given awa’. Many things can mak’ one, but yuh’ll mak’ mine. It can be smaller than flea or big as sea, but mine ’ull be—” again she appraised Rothesay and shook her head, “abaht yur length—but thrice yur girth. Yuh’ll mak’ it o’ nothin’, till I can see it’s done. Yuh ken?”

Rothesay blinked. “Er. No, I don’t!”

The woman laughed, showing all her few teeth, and slapped her on the arm. “If yuh’ve not figgered it by Fair’s end, come up t’tahvern wi’ yur forfeit, and we’ll see it done!”

Forfeit? she thought as the brewer stomped away.

“Oh,” said Flick, when she grabbed him to ask, “if you don’t work it out for yourself, they get to ask for another thing.”

“In a riddle again?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” He grinned. “But if they do, and you don’t get that one, either, sure you owe them a third!”

The nobles waited until the third afternoon, and then Lord Benniforth deferred to the Marchess. Runedaur made an unobtrusive screen around the Harvest pavilion, which only student water-bearers passed. Rothesay, taking a turn fetching water cold from the hall’s deepest well, caught the old Marchess’s testy rebuke:

“Fenustad faces me across Sionane, who is no great stream!”

That evening at the dance, held in the King’s Hall, Colderwild’s greater feast hall, she joined the other water-bearers huddled in a dark corner, to share scraps of eavesdropping. The Marchess, it appeared, feared the Geillan presence in westernmost Maldan, across the river Sionane that ran down from the Rusannmar heights; she had gone so far as to ask for the head of the Geillan kinglet who ruled there.

“No, she didn’t,” said Lacie. “Alduf said—”

“‘The head of the lord of Fenustad,’” Alduf, Hael’s cousin from Raven’s Trace, quoted himself.

A pause settled as the several students tried to wrest alternative meanings from the words.

“The Brean?” suggested Cobry. “Fenustad’s Maldan, and he’s over-lord—”

“Sure, why not?” Flick joined him. “And Benniforth wants the Brean: you could do two gifts in one move.”

Rory snorted. “Odhru calls himself high-king. I could call myself Areolin but I’d still need a torch in the dark!” The group laughed and he went on scornfully, “That Madroch’s eating Maldan like bread and jam, and the Brean gets the crumbs.”

Alduf nodded. “Nor even them for much longer. I’ve seen him, the Aellician. We passed through—well, they call it Angowin—last winter. Big man, big, huge man! A right battle-lord, too.” The Geillan-born, Alduf and Rory, exchanged glances of mutual understanding. Rothesay wondered, not for the first time, if Geillari in this Sferan Order ever felt like traitors. Rory had fled his war-mad clan—to train as a still-greater warrior, and one in service to his clan’s long-time foes. What was he thinking?

What is your code? she asked silently; and, I need to get mine written—

“Getting his head off’s no trouble,” Rory was saying. “Getting back out with it: that’d be work!”

She squeaked. “Er. We have to? Just because someone’s come and said, I want this, we have to go kill him?” A plague of murder, born of simple Harvest demands, swept through her imagination.

The entire group turned to stare at her.

“‘Have to’? Sugar, we never, ever—”

“—ever—” Juris piped up.

“—ever—” Lacie added.

“—ever!” said Alduf, but more in mischief than for guessing Rory’s thought, and laughed as the redhead punched knucklepoints into his arm.

“—forfeit the right to say No.”

“We’ll look things over for ourselves,” said Lacie. “And if we don’t like it, we won’t.”

“That’s why they say we’re such untrustworthy allies. We a’n’t shy about changing our minds, about saying, Oops, sorry, we were wrong.”

“Means we hardly ever say Yes we will in the first place,” said Juris. “And not everyone pays attention; they just hear what they want. But ‘We’ll consider it’ ’s about the best they’ll ever get.”

“But when we do decide to do something—!” Rory dropped a heavy fist to their table and all their crockery jumped and trembled.

“Of course, there’s the Oath,” Alduf mused, swinging his leather tankard to swirl his ale.

Rory scowled. “Aye? You know what it says?”

Alduf shrugged. “So tell me.”

“Me? I’m asking you!”

“Do I look like I’m knighted yet?” Alduf yelped.

“Oath? The one to the Perian high-king?” asked Rothesay. “You don’t know it?”

“You learn it at your knighting,” said Lacie. “It isn’t written down anywhere.”

“What if you don’t want to take it, then? They tell you it and you find you just can’t stick it? Are you—sort of especially Runedaur if you don’t, because you didn’t forfeit the right to say no even to that?”

They gaped. They stared at one another. Finally Rory shook his head and laughed. “Good one! Beats me, Sugar. I’ll worry about that on the day!” He drained his tankard and slammed it down. “Come on, let’s dance!”

She joined him happily, but only for the one. Then she slipped off alone to the library, took stylus and tablet from the niche Master Merry had allotted her, and considered once again her written code of good and ill.

Into the tablet’s dark wax she carefully carved the words, I should do what I say or not say it.

She stopped and looked it over. Yes, that one seemed all right. Since she had begun this work three days ago, she had written not one sentence that had survived further consideration. Now she was about to start on another, when a weary image arose:

I agree to dig Widow Pinnar’s latrine for her. Then I find out she does not need one, but wants the hole to hide a body. I should not do this. I said that I would, but I did not know, then, that it was to be used for an evil end. Does the lie negate the obligation? Should I always hedge, saying I will do this if you are yourself completely good and honest?

She sighed. She had already written off perfect honesty as being neither attainable nor desirable. Telling a woman that her husband was a fool might be honest but it could serve no good end.

She smeared that one into oblivion with the rest, and cut again:

It is good to uphold one’s kin and friends.

Even when they are in evil mood? Then would it not be best to restrain them, to protect them from an act of folly or evil? Perhaps it is good to help one’s friends be good.

‘Be good’—how, exactly? She had not yet been able to pin down one action as always and incontrovertibly good; how does one know when to abet and when to interfere? Even ‘It is good not to hurt people’ had evaporated in consideration of one, surgery, and two, having to refuse an unwanted suitor. Every single dictum, thus far, needed an addendum: except when. . . .

She sighed again and shoved the stylus and wax aside. Lifting one of the library’s magelight lamps, she carried it to the shelves reserved for ethical philosophies, and pulled out several scrolls and codices to read at the table.

An hour or so later she shoved them all aside and pillowed her head on her folded arms. Either the philosophers, too, had nothing to say, or she was too dull to understand them. A dry ripple and a thunk meant one of the books had slipped and fallen to the floor; she jumped to retrieve it, suddenly anxious for any harm to it.

Why do I think that it is good, to care for books? Because then I may have the use of them, and others may have the use of them, for longer; and why is that good?

Because I like them, she thought rebelliously.

Stolen novel; please report.

Now, now, that is no basis for good-and-evil: what of those who like doing harm, like that madman I helped steal last month? But rumor in Colderwild said that the youth in fact hated what he would do, and wished that the Runedaur would destroy him. What, then? Did they actually exist, people who liked hurting and harming?

And if they did, was there some greater purpose served by their doing what they liked, perhaps being therefore why they liked it? She shuddered, and hoped not.

As she put the book to rights, a scrawl out of line with the rest on its page caught her eye, and she opened there. Another hand had added commentary, between and down the side of the main text, not uncommon in this library:

rules are a map

a map guides a traveler over a countryside but no traveler through life ever walks the same ways twice

there can be no map for a land never before seen

No rules?

She frowned, and traced a finger slowly over the scrawl. Who wrote it? she wondered, and then without another thought ‘reached’ for her story-spell.

And in another moment gasped and shoved the book across the table. This time the impression was rather like a—a flavor, perhaps. And the ‘flavor’ of the scrawl was exactly that of her barrow-sword. Arngas.

Hastily, she tidied away the books and writing tools, and hurried off to bed, to bury any thought in sleep.

Her bonds of sleep snapped at dawn. She sat up with a laugh, bounded into her clothes, tried to ‘kill’ Lacie, who knocked her back with a spell that for one instant undid all command of one’s limbs, rolled away and danced out of the chamber. An hour later she stood under the eaves of the Flaming Horse, the Dorchastir tavern. She flourished her shovel like a spear and greeted the brewer cheerily: “Good morning, Mother! And where would you be wanting your hole?” For good measure, she added, “You aren’t going to be burying anyone in it, are you?”

The brewer shot her a narrow glance, and chuckled darkly. “Demons, the lot of yuh. Burryin’, is’t? Nah, girl, there’s none t’ be burried here without som’un falls in and drahns in ’is own shit.”

The Fair wound its merry way through the next week. The game of Ghost picked up again. Moot-guests went home, most of them, though Frele, the Rose House Mistress of Healing, stayed on with the Geillan captive in apartments high in the main keep, not far from Carialla’s. Colderwild seemed empty, and Rothesay missed Kahan terribly. She wondered what he thought was good, and what was evil.

And old Padriag—what was his code like? What was he doing? Thyrne, Matkin, Persli? She plunged into a pit of homesickness and hid away in her cave again. Rory tried to cheer her up once and she had not the heart to scorn him entirely, but he perhaps sensed her facade, and let her be after that, to her freshened despair. Then one evening, sneaking up to the butteries to steal a bit of supper, she heard someone talking to Sothia.

Carialla.

Standing rock-still in the shadows, she thought, if she could not go back to Harrowater—not yet—she could go yet further, at least vicariously, to a home she could not now bring to waking memory.

“Well, girl.” Carialla’s fingernails rattled on the arm of her chair.

Sunlight poured in through the slender windows, too-bright shafts slashing the shadows, to the confusion of the eyes’ adjustments. Rothesay shuffled backwards till she stood wholly in the shade between windows, and peered through the drifting dust motes to the Mistress in her own pool of dimness. At least the windows were open again, admitting a slight breeze, and no fire burned in the afternoon swelter. Carialla still wore heavy-seeming robes; Rothesay tried to imagine her in winter: so swaddled she would roll if she fell?

“Why do you want this?”

Rothesay jumped. This was Carialla’s own request, that they search Rothesay’s childhood memories; now she wanted Rothesay to justify the project? “I—want to remember my—when I was little. People. What it was like, then.”

Rattle. Rattle. “You seek in the past what you do not find in the present.”

Rothesay froze, too naked even to herself. “No! I—! No, I just want to remember!”

“Why?”

Rothesay found she was breathing hard, as if she had been running. Why? What kind of silly question was that? “W-why do you think?” she shot back.

“What I think about what you want can hardly matter to you, girl. What will memory gain you?”

“Why are you quizzing me about your own task?” she cried, waving her arms wildly.

“Are you my tool?”

“No!” And then she wanted to balk, afraid of having transgressed; but some new, sterner spirit stiffened her.

“Then claim your portion of this work!” the witch snapped. And, “Close your mouth,” she sighed. “Sit.” Gingerly, Rothesay took the fat chair opposite. “What do you at the least hope that memory will give you?”

For a moment Rothesay thought in futility. Then she considered not remembering. At last she said slowly, “Peace. I think. Because if I didn’t, I’d always wonder. . . .”

“A good beginning,” Carialla purred. “What else?”

“I’d—know things.”

“Why do you want to know things?”

She shrugged. “You never know what’ll come in handy someday.”

“True enough. I shall note that as a reach for power, however diffident. What else might memory gain you?”

“Who I was.”

Carialla tipped one hand palm up, a deprecatory gesture. “Aye. Who you were may have something to say about who you are. Have a care, though, that it does not dictate who you may become. What else, now?” After a moment, she prompted quietly, “Would you find love?”

Rothesay did not at once reply. She stared into the pool of sunlight in the windowed bay, seeing through it into another sunny spot, years ago and far away. Carialla should not talk of love. What could she know of it, her and her quest for a puppet-king? How could she but scorn such tenderness? Rothesay hastened to hide the thought even as it rose—and then reflected that the tender feeling wanted a champion. She looked up boldly, or as boldly as she dared. “No. Not real, present love. But it would be nice to know about—if it was there.” In truth she did want to burrow away into whatever friendly recollections she might find, but she knew before she spoke that it was a fool’s desire.

Carialla nodded. “If it was there. I think it was; but it is prudent to consider the chance of disappointment. Thus, then: peace; knowledge; identity; and the opportunity, maybe, of kin-feeling. Are these enough? For you will also find terror. A child’s fears are as deep as any; never mind that an adult may laugh at their cause, it is terror all the same. And—certain aspects of our earliest days are veiled, for mercy’s sake, it may be.”

“I just—want to know.”

Carialla’s brown eyes glittered above a small smile. “The greed for knowledge may be the most painful, but it is surely also the least deleterious. When you are sure of yourself, then come—” she dropped a small cushion between her feet, “lean back against my knees and we will begin.”

Rothesay hesitated, not for fear of this work, but for wondering how certain she was to be. Carialla sat with eyes downcast, perfectly motionless, as if prepared to wait for years. Rothesay bore this for little more than a dozen heartbeats, and then knuckled across the carpet and settled on the pillow.

And shifted to accommodate her ill-padded tailbones more comfortably.

And slightly uncrossed her legs to ease up on her ankles.

And rolled her shoulderblades back.

Carialla touched her temples, and all awareness of ankles, pillow, room spun away.

She had expected to remember in the ordinary way, seeing the world from two or three feet high. Instead she found a dreamlike double perspective: though aware of the child’s point of view, she perceived herself—her grown self—as a kind of ghost walking by the side of a misty, translucent Carialla. She could not look at her child-self, except down at her front. But though the infant Rothesay might be bound in cradle or lap, the ghost-Rothesay could wander freely about, looking more closely at what she pleased, though not all such attempts brought clarity.

“No, you cannot see more clearly now that which went unheeded then,” said the ghost-Carialla. She, it seemed, depended on ghost-Rothesay’s movement; but she could suggest, and Rothesay was not prepared to contest her. And once Rothesay had gone somewhere, Carialla could return to it independently.

On this occasion, Rothesay seemed to be two or so, and peering around a door into a room lit by candles, a roaring fire and a raging argument. Cherusay stood at a table, pounding it with her knuckles till the candle-flames flickered. Heavy winter robes of green and scarlet pronounced rather than hid the slightness of her figure; Rothesay blinked in surprise at how short she was, none less than the average but she would scarcely have reached her grown daughter’s shoulder. A great dark braid rippled down her back, and silver glinted from the riband binding her brow.

A tall man in robes of wine and gold paced the length of the room like a trapped cat. Darkhaired, dark-eyed, his pointy beard and moustache roused in the ghost-Rothesay all her childish fright. How she had feared this man! And the room wavered, became for a moment a sunnier space with this same dark lord, but Carialla murmured, “Not yet. Not yet. Return to the room glimpsed round the door.”

And again Cherusay banged the table. At Carialla's touch, Rothesay began to disengage from the infant’s fright, to look with older eyes at the pacing man.

“I do not concede, Balamer!” Cherusay shouted, and the man whirled on her.

“They will destroy you, Highness!”

“Let them try! —Oh, damnation! Not again!”

Rothesay, ghost and child, quailed, shocked. Cherusay had turned on her no face of joy, but of exasperation at the end of its course.

Carialla again touched her arm. “Let it pass. Behold: a young mother, a late night, a—spirited debate. And a child who, it seems, would not stay abed.” The amusement in her voice Rothesay found reassuring. Then it irritated her to be reassured by Carialla.

A young man bounded out of an unremarked corner and swept the babe up and out into the hall though she wailed and fought against him. “Oh, Dor, thank you!” Cherusay’s voice followed them.

Rothesay tried to break free of the memory. Carialla shifted, and they sat once more in her room. “Dor” had been her captain-of-the-guard—the man on the boat. Feeling that she owed the Mistress some accounting, she explained, briefly.

Carialla stroked her hair. “One more time, then. Let us find some cheerier thought on which to end.”

Again the witch’s fingers brushed her brow, and they stood in a sunny room of clean white plaster and pale ash wood. An immensely fat woman, pale hair cropped to a jawline that sprouted several tufts of straggling hair, sat spinning by the window. Rothesay knew her as an important woman who must be obeyed, and implicitly trusted; Carialla pointed out the short hair that marked her as a slave. “And the Darians regard a beard on a woman as unattractive, yes, but also as a sign of one god-touched, and they are thought to harbor hidden powers and insights.”

“Er. Are they? Do they?”

Carialla shrugged. “How would we know?”

The infant Rothesay, though she gazed at the spinning woman, toyed with a bit of feather that had worked free of her cradle pillows, when a door crashing open behind her made her jump. In strode Cherusay like green-clad storm surge, and the infant’s delight in Mama pulled up short: was this bowstring tension wrath or exhilaration?

Cherusay flung herself to the gleaming wood-slab floor at the slave-woman’s feet and buried her head in her soft lap. Rolls of fat rippled under a creamy apron as the princess pounded on her knee. “Mali, Mali, Mali! How can they be so stupid?”

Mali chuckled, a deep, froggy sound. Setting her spinning aside, she lifted away Cherusay’s silver coronet and smoothed her hair. “Who is it this time, pet?”

“All of them! Saying one thing privately—but, oh! quite another in council! Jonner, Agatur—I could bite them, indeed I could! Damn them all!” She shook herself free of Mali’s lap and turned to scrabble across the floor on hands and knees straight for Rothesay. “Let’s go bite them all!” she laughed in the delighted child’s face.

“Cherusay’s own suite,” murmured Carialla. “This should be interesting.”

Rothesay hungered to stay and watch her mother play with her child-self, a hunger that ached to her toes. Meekly she followed Carialla’s bidding, to set the witch free to explore while she herself watched Cherusay.

“Here, this bench is an unlocked chest. Open it, girl, and let us see what it contains.”

Rothesay jumped. “Open it? Won’t they—notice—? Er.”

“If you ever looked in it, your memory will shift to that time; that is all. Yet—no, do not. I promised you a pleasant thought on which to end, and this,” she waved towards the princess rolling across the floor with a babe too young yet to walk, while the slave Mali scolded her for being a boy-girl still, oh the scandal: an old, well-worn scold, uttered only for its familiarity. “This seems bright enough.”

“We’re done?”

“For now. You are weary.”

“No, I’m not!”

The memory faded into memory’s usual dreamspace, and Carialla’s quarters, now grey-pink in the wake of sunset, reasserted their claim on reality. Fatigue hit Rothesay like a boulder.

“Oh.”

“There is a pallet by my bed for your use.”

“N-no, thank you, Lady. I think I’ll go—” she crawled forward from her seat, and thought better of all the stairs, all the halls between herself and her own bed. “Right. Thank you.” She forced herself to her feet for dignity’s sake, and found enough life left in her for a chuckle at Cherusay’s lack of it. Beyond that, she wanted to weep, but she was far too exhausted to bother. She stumbled off, almost unconsciously accepting the apple Carialla pushed on her, clicked through a curtain of beads to the witch’s sleeping chamber and dropped to a thick linen-clad feather mat.

Carialla was at her loom when Rothesay woke at dawn. A light breakfast of bread, honey and fresh eggs lay on the table in the windowed bay; a cursory nod from Carialla invited her to eat. Rothesay ate with the view: the fourth-floor vantage laid most of the courtyard in sight, and the gardens toward the healing-houses. The green of the gardens twined with Areolin’s dawning gold under a clear blue canopy, but she could not rejoice in its beauty. Colderwild’s cisterns had reached extraordinarily low levels as the nearly rainless weeks passed, and everyone now took a turn at pumping from the wells.

Her first thought waking had been to fret over how to take leave of the Mistress. She might “beg off” easily enough from Master Leoff or even Dav, but Carialla seemed, to Rothesay’s fancy, like an overheated jug that might explode at an unwary touch. And she wanted to get away, to think, and to cry in private. Memory may bring you as much grief as joy—oh, true, too true. Memory cut deeper than any sword and she wanted to curl up around it, around the pain she would not have forgone even if she had known how it would be.

Helping pump water made an impeccable excuse. Cheered, she sucked one egg clean, and only then remembered the lump of salt with its grater. She ate a second egg, salted; taking the shells in her pocket to throw into the garden on her way, she explained a little too jovially about the pumping, and rose to leave.

Carialla caught the flying shuttle, and stopped. Around the loom, she studied the girl, giving her a fleeting fright that the Mistress might countermand her—but I should protest if she does, Rothesay thought, but I’ll crack and cry, right here in front of Madam Horrible if I try, oh please don’t say anything—and at last nodded shortly. “Tonight again, then?”

“Oh, yes, Lady. Er, thank you,” and she bolted for the wells.