She lost a maddening number of Ghost challenges that day, finishing, shortly before supper, by terrifying both herself and Juris: in frustration she swung a mighty backhanded blow that missed, merely ruffling the top of the boy’s brown silky hair—and shattering her wooden blade to toothpicks against the wall.

Master Caltern rounded the corner while the two combatants still stood stunned.

“Aye?” he said, once he had worked out what had happened. Then, “Jump!” he bellowed, and leaped into the air. Startled, they too jumped, and glanced about for whatever attack might be avoided this way.

Caltern went on jumping, bounding in place, waving his massive arms, and all his necklaces and jewelry flew about. “Jump!” he commanded like thunder. So they did.

“Shake!” he ordered next, and shook himself like a wet dog, sending his red hair flying, then down through his shoulders, hips and knees, to a kind of pattering dance of his hairy bare feet. “Nah, shake! Good and hard! Good! Now, clap!” He swung his arms wide and slapped his palms together with a great crack, then again and again, faster and faster until the three of them made the stone walls ring with their applause.

“Right, then,” he said at last, planting his fists on his hips and staring at their bewildered faces. “No tellin’ when death will come, or how. If you’re not ready to die, you’re not living,” he told Juris, who was still a little pale for all their exercise. “And you never know when you might be His instrument—o’ course we’d all favor actin’ a-purpose, but it ain’t always ours to choose, hey? Now, both of ya: ya want to wallow in the piss you scared out o’ yerselves, or learn?”

“What?” Juris yipped like a stung puppy, and Rothesay almost laughed that for once the “what?” was not hers.

Caltern sighed. “Boy, you ain’t moved of your own will since I come round that corner. Wet yourself like this in real combat, and how long you gonna ask your enemy to stand around while you wipe yourself? I’ll ask again: you want to go on shiverin’ and shakin’ till you’re too tired to keep it up, or you want to learn from this little adventure?”

Silly question. Both students pricked up hopefully.

He leveled a thick, callused finger at Rothesay. “Now, you: it’s to your credit you’re upset you nearly killed one of your mates. What would you think of someone who wasn’t? Aye, there—I see you get it. Right—but that credit’s only good for a heartbeat, meanin’ you don’t get more the longer you fret. What’s it for, this fright of yours?”

Juris and Rothesay stared at the Master, then at each other. “‘For’?” Rothesay echoed.

“Fear is for warning. Fear’s always for warning. That’s the learning. Here’s the trick: you have to get chuck of the fear to get the learning. Faster you can do that, the faster you’re master.” He paused to await the obvious question.

“Er, Mas—Cal? How do you ‘get chuck of the fear,’ then?” Rothesay obliged.

“Firs’ thing I did, babe.”

“What, just now?” Juris cried. “All that—?” he flapped his arms about.

“All that,” Caltern agreed, smugly, Rothesay thought. “Not the only way, o’ course. Effective—but you’ll want quicker, when it comes to it. Still, that’ll start you gettin’ the feel o’ it.

“You gotta get chuck of what your fear thinks is goin’ on, before you can master what is goin’ on. Any mood too hot or too cold might as well be dust in your eyes. Notice it. Then embrace it. Then chuck it.”

“‘Embrace it’?” Rothesay repeated.

“Get its teachin’. Ever’thing ya do, ever’thing ya feel, everything that happens, teaches ya. What should yours ’a taught you?”

“That I need to be more careful!”

Caltern’s caterpillar eyebrows had the power of arching, independently, halfway to his scalp. One did so now. “There’s a time for careful, and a time for wild. Don’t want to get so careful you can’t cut free! Let’s say you need more control, instead. But what kind of control?” He squinted as if to think better. “Now, were you maybe worked up already, goin’ in?”

And she burst into tears. She barely noticed Caltern gently waving Juris away.

She blubbered out her pain beside the Horsemaster, sharing a nearby bench, till embarrassment took over: no, no more! I feel like such a soggy hat—

“Nah,” rumbled Caltern as she gently pushed away at last. “A human’s gotta mourn, lass, or ’e ain’t human. Losin’ yer whole family—most anyone’d say that’s worth cryin’ over. ’Specially me.” When she glanced up at him, surprised, he murmured, “Aye, I’m the last o’ my lot. I was ten, nice little farm over Trysnefra way. You can see a bit o’ intermarriage in me,” he patted the top of his lofty red head. “That’d be m’ grandfather. Came an’ lived as Lostforth, instead o’ takin’ Granna back to Dunbrodie. Then one day Dunbrodie came lookin’ for more farmland. We lost.” He shrugged.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Thanks.” He leaned back and stretched hugely. “Ya can’t live there, though, in yer grievin’, I mean. Takes ever’one different, and ya gotta take yer own time comin’ out. But ya gotta watch you don’t get stuck there. Too early yet for you, you’re only just now facin’ it. But keep it in mind. No traveler in life ever travels the same land twice, and holdin’ on to what’s done while life goes on’ll only make ya mad, sure as sunrise.”

She started at his choice of words, but if he noticed, he made no sign.

“Feelin’ a bit quit of it now?” She wiped her nose and nodded. “Right, then. This other one’s smaller and easier, then. Ya coulda killed the boy, but ya didn’t, so which’ll give ya more power tomorrow: crawlin’ on yer belly for shame an’ chagrin, or offerin’ thanks for the tip?”

“The tip?”

“The hint? the warnin’ about keepin’ a clear head?”

“I can’t be thankful I nearly killed him!”

“If you’d’a missed more gently, you’d’a missed a damned powerful learnin’.”

“Oh.” Powerful, indeed! “But, I can’t like it, all the same.”

He chuckled like honey pouring. “Oh, ya can. It’s a right scary thing to like, so it is, but it’s still yer friend. Treat it like one. Challenge: practice likin’ it. I’ll see ya again in a fortnight, an’ you’ll tell me about it.”

She rubbed her nose again. In a very small voice she asked, “What about—actually killing someone? When you didn’t mean to?”

“Ah.” His look was kindly, though she was certain he knew of her two kills. “What about doin’ somethin’ ya didn’t have the power not to do?”

“Um—you go find the power, er, not to do it again?”

“Sounds good to me. Think ya come to a good place for that?”

As good as any she was likely to find; she could think of no other place to learn how to command what she had become. She nodded.

“Me, too. O’ course, once ya learn not to be stupid enough to follow a sword-master into a melee, you’ll be enough of a swordmaster yourself to go ahead and follow!” He shared her small laugh, and then went on, “Sometimes, when ya make a prime mess, it’s possible to clean up. Offer reparations. You’ll want to look up their families, see about payin’ the one lad’s blood fee, and all.”

“And—that’s it? Pay off, and go home whistling?”

“What else ya got in mind? Summonin’ their souls to beg pardon? Even Carialla won’t do that—and maybe they’ll refuse to pardon! ’Cos some folks’ll refuse all amends, if it means they can make you go on crawlin’. Then, all ya can do is give ’em your best and, aye, go home whistlin’. Ya did your part. And like I said, ya don’t get more credit for bein’ more sorry.”

“You—just forget it, after that?”

He rubbed his beard, and then grinned. “You’ll never forget it. Put it by, though. And if ya ever find yourself slackenin’ in your trainin’, pull it out to flog yourself back to business. And about that trainin’—I can think of a few exercises, for controllin’ power. Come muck stables in the mornin’, and I’ll show ya.”

She returned to Carialla that evening in greater humor. Caltern—not all Runedaur were demonlike. Maybe she should become one of his particular students; she could already talk to his four-legged charges. She accepted a cup of wine from the mistress, while they discussed where next to explore, and savored its rich sweetness, pleased that she had learned how to drink the stuff without betraying herself to idiocy.

“And what did Master Cal have to say?” Carialla asked suddenly. When Rothesay’s jaw dropped, she said dryly, “’is way o’ talkin’ ’s a mite contagious.”

Rothesay blushed, but she grinned. More carefully, then, she said, “He told me how he lost his family.”

Carialla nodded. “Consider, then, that one king over these peoples will make such losses at least less common. Ah, you like? Come, then; sit.”

They returned to the unlocked chest in Cherusay’s apartments; it contained linen undergarments, sennw and skirts, in which the infant Rothesay was fond of dressing, or attempting to dress, and in which she was hugely indulged. There was also a small box of dark wood inlaid with pale, which she could not open, but it was half again too small to hold the Sferemath.

They explored the walls, seeking any imperfection that might suggest a hidden cavity. Or perhaps under the bed: Darian beds lay on a platform too low for even an infant to scrabble beneath, but if the bed could be moved—

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Now the sleeping chamber was dim, gold-lit by the embers of a fire in the open hearth. Mali snored on a pallet by the fire; Rothesay the child, this time perhaps three, sat upright on Cherusay’s bed, clinging with both fists to the thick pelts piled upon it. Cherusay in a white nightgown sat on the floor, back braced to the wall, feet braced to the bed, and pushed in synchrony with the slave’s rasping snores.

When she swung around onto her knees, the child climbed warily to the edge. Looking down onto the pale polished slabs, she heard her mother murmur a charm, and a long plank quivered, and separated from its partners. Cherusay dextrously pried it aside, revealing a hole as long as a forearm, its depths lost in the darkness till the princess lit a pale green magelight.

A black-swathed bundle, bigger than a man’s fist, lay in one corner; it appeared to be tied with a long lock of dark hair. Bright in the magelight, though, was an icicle of silver, almost the length of the hole, with a transverse grip of some dark stuff finished on each end with a pearly stone. This the princess lifted out, and tipped before the enchanted child’s view.

“Careful, it’s sharp,” Cherusay murmured as little-Rothesay reached out, and smiled. “But perhaps it’ll not harm you, love.” She laid it on the bed, then quickly closed up her hole and pushed the bed back—

The two memory-walkers paused to investigate the hiding-hole as best they might. Carialla felt fairly certain that the black bundle hid the Sferemath; Rothesay noted two more items: a small wood-and-pearl box, and what looked like a snail-shell so perfectly wrought in gold that a golden snail ought to thrust out gold feelers.

—and caressed the icicle-shaped dagger with satisfaction. “Mali shall make us a scabbard for this tomorrow. Wearing this, we shall know who is friend and who is foe!”

“I remember her wearing that,” ghost-Rothesay murmured. “Everywhere, and she was always sort of stroking it. I thought that was because its scabbard was mink; at least, I always wanted to pet it!”

“A pretty toy,” observed Carialla; “I do not recognize its make. Well, this suggests where the Sferemath was; would she have brought it on ship with you, I wonder?”

“Er, wasn’t that the point of the trip?”

“So many think; yet she may have meant only to persuade me of her possession. Did she trust me not to rob her of it? We should have traveled to Daria to perform our part, if we would; time enough then to pay us on completion. I do not know.”

Rothesay feared that this discovery would end their exploration, but Carialla wished to study Cherusay. “Where the Eye was tells me nothing of where it is. Perhaps we shall find your recollection of her packing it up—perhaps in the extent of her distress at your infant curiosity, if you probed too near her hiding places.”

They tried, logically enough, the one time Rothesay had actually seen the treasure. The pre-dawn air was sweet with mid-summer fragrance; a door from the sleeping chamber stood open on a tiny garden, where Cherusay sat by a dark pool. Perhaps three, Rothesay toddled out, dragging her doll. Cherusay sighed on noticing her, but smiled, and beckoned her to her side. The child cut short her intent to climb into her mother’s lap: it was occupied. Glinting violet, seemingly lit from some great depth within, lay the most beautiful jewel Rothesay had ever seen. Drawn, as all childish hands are drawn towards what commands their attention, she reached for it—hesitated, because adults are capricious, and jealous of their wonders—then dropped her doll and lifted it in both hands. Cherusay’s fluttered near, in case of accident.

Rothesay put her face close to it, till she could feel her eyelashes brush its crystal, trying to see into the depths; she wanted to climb in and go exploring.

Cherusay gently took it back, gazing at her child in wonder. “It does not frighten you,” she murmured. Rothesay only stared; was it supposed to? But the princess wrapped it again in its black linen. “I will be glad when it is—It wants too much—Oh, never mind, babe!” And she pulled a silver necklace over her head, to let the little girl play with the mother-of-pearl bauble at its end, a favorite treat. Cherusay took them both back to her bed then, the mysterious bundled prize tucked between them in the pillows, but what she did with it afterwards was not in front of Rothesay.

For several more sessions, they explored Cherusay’s quarters. A small, windowless chamber off the main room contained her clothes, and various of Mali’s tools, including oils for rubbing down her “pet” and for doctoring Rothesay’s infant bottom: indeed some early experiences were best forgotten.

Strangely, however, Cherusay protected this room with a violent jealousy, flying into a fury if any other servant presumed so much as to polish the door handle. Rothesay, once left sleeping in the care of another, younger woman, woke to the sound of the closet door opening and let out a shriek of outrage, to the slave’s deathly fright, though the child understood no more than Mama said No. Carialla noted after that how anyone other than Mali made furtive study of the door, fascinated by its dreadful prohibition. Yet once the young man “Dor,” visiting in the evening and amusing the child by spinning a top for her as he and Cherusay talked, entered the forbidden closet and brought out a robe to drape around the princess, without her so much as watching even a little sharply.

Carialla laughed. “Ah, yes! Divert and distract: well done, Highness!” she said softly. “And see how she moves to yonder corner when someone knocks, and feigns unease about it when they enter?”

“What’s special about that corner?”

“Nothing, or I have no craft at all. Lady Cherusay, I think I would have liked you well!”

Rothesay grinned, and felt just a little less cold towards the Mistress.

Venturing out, they explored a great wooden house of rooms clustered about a busy hall with one great open hearth at its center and large bronze braziers in its corners, often lit even in summer. The house itself was a dower house, Carialla guessed, set apart in one of the royal gardens by King Herumer for his divorced wife’s use rather than rouse the ire of Eirenseld by banishing her outright—

“What?”

Carialla paused. “Curious, that the principal should know so little of her own well-known tale. Briefly, then: Herumer’s first marriage brought him no children at all; his second, to Arrowy el-Narronwy, gave him only a daughter—your mother. Some years later, impatient and aging, he divorced her to marry . . . I forget; some child. She bore him Rumil and his brother before he died, though it is a loud rumor that neither boy was his. And Princess Cherusay, inarguably his by temperament alone, by all accounts, was not one to surrender her claim as eldest, whatever her father may have willed. She was proud and dangerous from a very young age, and the infamous autumn elk-hunt was not the first attempt to destroy her.”

Rothesay stared her question, especially as a secretive little smile flickered in the Mistress’ glance at her.

“The hunt, upon the knees of the Dur Manthanor, in the middle of Tallerod, the Hunter’s month. An unseasonable blizzard—no one believes it were natural at all, though they do happen—took them, and half the party was lost, including the princess.” Carialla’s smile grew, savoring the irony. “She alone returned, a month later, in time for her own funeral, quite strangely dressed and jeweled. And, presumably, pregnant.”

Rothesay swallowed. Eventually she said, “Oh.” She gazed about at the spruce-bordered gardens. The great height of the dark trees cropped the sky to a modest turquoise oval; no glimpse of the Dur Manthanor, the greatest mountains in the Dragon-sea lands, could be had through the thick needles. Her—father?

“I have no magic to take us there,” Carialla murmured softly. “But, oh! it is to be wished!”

Rothesay nodded distantly. Then she shook herself, and chased after her toddling self chasing her mother’s hem across the grass.

Arrowy sat by a fountain, spinning a black wool; the child petted it, and recollection of its softness and smell rocked the adolescent girl. Grandmother gazed down at her uncanny descendant from some deep and distant thought. Rothesay had an idea of how grandmothers were supposed to be. Back in Harrowater, Anie’s mother had been mortified by her whore-daughter’s brood and kept her distance, but she doted on her respectable children’s children, fattening them on treats even as she exhorted them to grow up strong and beat them if they ever whined. Arrowy seemed almost perplexed by Rothesay, as though, having borne a daughter, it had never crossed her mind that the daughter might do so as well. When she spoke to the child at all, it was in adult tones. Only when it came to her dolls did some merrier light shine in her.

Dolls as tiny as a thumb, dolls the size of a child. Dolls of wood, dolls of fine cloth stuffed with sweet or pungent herbs. Rothesay had a favorite, half her own size, made and clad by a generous spirit with tougher linen to survive being dragged through the hedges by its neck or its black-yarn hair. Most of Grandmother’s dolls rather frightened her, though, and she seldom ventured to approach them. But Arrowy would watch as she did, if she did, and murmur to herself and take the doll up for further work. Some few became friendlier then; most became scarier, and the child Rothesay watched astonished when they were given as gifts to people who seemed delighted and honored to receive them.

“You are sensitive to such things,” Carialla observed, as they shared wine after the night’s work. She waved lightly about her apartments. “Can you say which of these things bears an enchantment?”

“Most of them. Especially the mirrors. And your loom. Not the furniture, though.”

Carialla glanced down. “An enchanted footstool? There’s a droll thought.”

Rothesay grinned. Then she slunk down in her seat. “I was a right brat, then.”

“You were a child.”

Of course true; but she had just perceived herself hot, screaming, her hands and flying hair slimy with her own snot, when Cherusay had taken the precious doll away to sew up a great gash in its head. That it came back all neat and clean and with a new dress—sewn on, of course, to keep the thing clad—had not mollified her in the slightest. Well, not that she let on: she did like it, but she was far too proud to admit it, and sulked for hours.

They watched the packing-up for the great voyage, but Cherusay had not, to Rothesay’s knowledge, ever again approached the cubbyhole under the bed, and nothing resembling that ball of black cloth could be glimpsed in the packing.

“Hell of hells,” Carialla murmured, disappointed. They were watching “Dor” load boxes onto a cart bound for the wharf. “That young man has something on his mind, though, does he not?” He had been unusually grim recently, and even though he rocked the young Rothesay in his arms as he had ever done, he did not smile until she forced him to—and sometimes not even then.

“He should,” Rothesay muttered. It would not be so much longer before he stood at the fore of those forcing them onto the afterboat.

She and Carialla at last trod the deck of the doomed ship. The voyage had been pleasant, but for one storm that thrilled the little girl: she stood in the bow and shrieked back at the wind, with “Dor” crouched behind and clinging to the sheets for both of them. He had become more his old self once they set sail, sweet and quiet and patiently attentive on his volatile princess. Rothesay called him “Dorridor,” a childish folly that embarrassed her now; Carialla seemed not to notice, to her relief.

Rothesay the child swung happily in her hammock as the ship gently rocked, and turned her doll end over end as she sang to herself, until a strange silence from without the cabin sank in upon her. She crept out on deck into a fair morning and a wordless war. Cherusay bent to make only one request from the armed men ordering her into the boat: her cloak and Rothesay’s, and a glance from “Dor” sent another man running, running as though in fear of Dor, back to the cabin to fetch them.

“Aren’t you coming, Dorridor?” she had demanded, alarmed as the boat swung out over the side without him. It made no sense: he had always gone where they went.

A small, fey smile crept free then on his face. “Not just yet,” he called softly, and something like real amusement lit his eyes, for the first time in a very long time.

And that was all right, then, at least as far as Rothesay had been concerned. Turning to share her complacency with her mother, she was struck silent with terror of the deadly light in Cherusay’s eyes, and buried herself under the princess’s silken skirts.

Carialla took them back aboard the ship. “Look,” she said, pointing about. Not more than half the seamen were standing; many lay about in odd corners of the deck. The child had thought nothing of it, adults were always such peculiar creatures. “There seems to have been—some difference of opinion.”

“Are they dead?” Rothesay breathed. No blood was visible, but some of the men must have fallen: no one would sleep so contorted.

“Dead then, or dead later.” She turned to study Dor, to revisit the several minutes between the child emerging on deck and her descent over the side, over and over again. “Girl,” she said, just before Rothesay drew breath to scream, “this man meant to die. Expected to die. And soon.”

“Er. Oh? Um. Going to kill himself in remorse, or something?” A queer bitterness had been growing in her, as she saw through memory after memory Cherusay’s deep affection and trust for him—trust and affection that had at least appeared reciprocated.

Carialla looked at her steadily. “The ship foundered—and you were not there. By my guess, he knew the date set. Perhaps his masters included that boat for his own escape; or maybe it was meant for deceit: that he should believe he was to be spared, and he given the wrong date of destruction. And I think,” she continued softly, “he was not deceived, and had some other means to guess when they would strike.”

Rothesay started. “You mean—he saved us?”

“I do. Oh, yes. I do.”