A Princess of the Chameln (25 page)

“Instead we dragged ourselves across the plain to Zerrah, where we had lodged once before, at the manor house. At Zerrah before there had been only a friendly steward who kept the manor for the Daindru. Now we found a garrison, led by a captain of Mel'Nir, but he was kind and let us stay there and had us nursed back to health. Sir Jared's wounds festered, he lost the sight of his right eye; I was nearly as bad. It was a vile sickness, which would not leave its hold; it wracked our joints and does so sometimes to this day. Sir Jared tires easily and is halting in his speech.”

“And you see some link between that meeting on the High Plateau and a curse laid on the house of Wildrode?”

“I do. I think of what was said by the magic being we saw there. As if Wild of Wildrode was a name well-known, as if some old spell first drew us to the place and then caused Sir Jared to be cast out, driven away, because the curse was not yet worked out. Even the sickness was part of this family misfortune.”

“Was there ever in the family a history of some wrong done to a person with magic powers who might have placed the curse?”

“None that I know of. But the story goes that the bane set in during the lifetime of old Sir Dirck, Jared's grandsire, a violent man, in the days when Athron was poor and full of misery. He buried three wives and died mad, chained to the wall of his chamber lest he do himself a mischief.”

Jessamy Quade stared about the chamber, as if the telling of these old dark tales brought no relief but rather increased her unrest.

“You must leave all this,” said Aidris. “Let us think rather of your new life. Let me write to Prince Terril.”

“My dear,” said Mistress Quade, “you have given me new spirit. I am glad I have told this tale and hope I have not burdened you with it. Guard it well. I know that I can never repay your kindness in coming to me today.”

“Do you recall the story you told me at the Varda Benefit . . . concerning the royal children of the Chameln lands?” said Aidris as casually as she could.

“Another accursed race!”

“Not so!” said Aidris. “For I have heard out of Achamar that both of these persons still live.”

“I cannot think this is possible. The captain I told you of was not a brute or a fool.”

“Maybe not,” said Aidris, “but he was a man of Mel'Nir. It was in his interest to believe such lying tales.”

“How can we know the truth?”

“I know Nazran Am Thuven very well. He was a friend of my family. I know that he would never have harmed the Heir of the Firn or the Heir of the Zor. I pray you, do not repeat this tale you told to me.”

“If you wish it,” said Jessamy Quade with a smile. “I will be quiet.”

She rose up in her trailing red velvet gown and walked to one of the slit windows of the tower. Aidris followed and stood by her side. She saw the mountains, towering close by, only a few miles away across the fields and the downs.

“How fine to see the mountains!”

“The hour is late,” said Mistress Quade. “Come to me tomorrow, and I will have pen and paper ready. I must prepare for my journey.”

As she went down from the tower on its dark, winding stair, Aidris took out her scrying stone. It had no light in it at all, it was a cold grey-blue. She looked around at the blackened stone walls of Wildrode Keep and felt it for the first time as a place accursed.

Next morning Sir Jared Wild was married in the Great Hall of Wildrode. The sun was shining and a concourse of young maidens from the Wildrode lands and the neighboring manors carried spring flowers. His bride was the lady Corlin Ault, youngest child of Lord Bran of Aulthill. The visiting kedran, looking down on the bright scene from a gallery near the musicians, saw that she was a fair-haired girl, slender, smiling as became a bride. Sir Jared, in his knight's surcoat, looked handsome, carefree, unmarked, just as Aidris remembered him from the streets of Achamar where he had ridden among the autumn leaves with his true kedran by his side.

After a ceremony among the maidens, of flowers offered to the Goddess, the marriage was performed by the bride's uncle, Sir Kenit Ault, a travelling justice out of Varda. The trumpets blew, the guests sat down to feast, nothing marred the happy time. Who could not believe that the darkness had lifted from this corner of Athron?

Yet before evening Aidris had spoken again with Quartermaster Roon and heard what only a few retainers knew. In the night Mistress Quade had dressed herself in her old kedran tunic with the emblem of the Foresters and had climbed up to the battlements of her tower and had cast herself down to her death. She had been found at dawn and her body carried secretly away and buried no one knew where and no word brought to Sir Jared to disturb him on that day.

Jessamy Quade had left no words of farewell but a few packets with jewels for those members of the household who had been her friends in happier days. One packet, which the quartermaster now pressed into her hand, was labelled for Kedran Venn of Kerrick Hall. Inside Aidris found an enamel brooch with a pattern of white jessamine flowers and a piece of thin, shaped grey stone, a mere chip of stone. She knew at once where the stone had been found. Now she was one of the very few persons who had heard the tale of strange adventure on the High Plateau of Mel'Nir. She was not sorry when Sergeant Lawlor took the troop away early and set out for Kerrick.

They rode another way this time, and the highroad carried them a little to the north into the lands of Lord Bran of Aulthill. The spring weather had made the countryside a lush soft green; they came into a village called Hatch and might have ridden right through the place without stopping. As they came gently into the square, however, they heard some kind of commotion in the distance, and two or three villagers ran up and hailed Grey Company.

“Pray you help us, good Sergeant,” panted a fat man. “They are killing each other on the fairground!”

“Who then?” asked Sergeant Lawlor, raising a hand for the troop to stop.

“The tumblers and the kemlings, the hill-folk,” put in a young woman. “They are tearing the ground to pieces and fouling the duckpond!”

Then the crowd that had gathered all begged the kedran to stop the fight.

“We are travelling to Kerrick,” said Sergeant Lawlor. “Where are your own watch or your lord's kedran?”

“At the wedding by Wildrode!” was the reply.

The sergeant gave a signal, and Grey Company trotted out of the square in the direction of the riot. The fairground lay at the bottom of a gentle slope, and a fierce fight was laid out before them like the diagram of a battle. Twenty brightly clad tumblers were locked in combat with a clump of dark, shaggy folk clad in hides and beaded headbands.

“All right,” said Lawlor, with a weary gleam in her eye. “Part them. Use your lances as staves, d'ye hear? Herd those hill-folk back to their tents.”

She flung up her hand, gave the order, and Grey Company, in perfect order, with a walk, a trot, a canter, charged down the hill. Aidris had no time to feel elated or afraid. She was surprised at the way all the kedran shouted, herself included, as they descended on the fighters. Another tumbler went into the duckpond, a young kemling was nearly ridden down, but the effect of five mounted warriors, however untried, was overwhelming. The fight stopped, the shaggy ones were herded to the right, and the tumblers to the left. The fat man, who was the town reeve, came running down the hill.

“What now?” asked Sergeant Lawlor. “Why were they fighting, good Reeve? Can we work out the dispute?”

“The kemlings don't have much of the common speech,” said the reeve. “I think the tumblers have wronged them some way.”

“Goddess, what do they speak then, the bears' language?” said Lawlor impatiently.

Aidris, who had heard the shouting, let Telavel move a few paces forward. She gave a salute.

“Sergeant,” she said, “it is the Old Speech. Shall I talk to them?”

“Venn . . .” said the Sergeant, considering. They all stared at the hill-folk licking their wounds before a cluster of rude tents.

“Venn,” said the Sergeant, “they are all yours.”

Aidris gave her lance to Ortwen, got down from Telavel and led her across the soft, muddled ground towards the hill-folk. They were indeed hers. She perceived that
kemling
was a version of the word
Chameln
, just as Kerrick was another word for Carach. Yet these were the roughest, most primitive folk she had ever seen: by comparison the northern tribes or even the Tulgai were very tame and civilised.

She stood a little way off and called,
“Who is your leader?”

The murmur of their speech was hushed; he came forward, a middle-aged man, gap-toothed, almost as broad as he was high. His face was black with anger and streaked with blood and sweat.

“Ark, Chieftain of the Children of the White Wolf!”

Aidris bowed her head but held her ground.

“Good Ark,”
she said,
“tell me what is played out here, and I will see that you have justice.”

“Justice,”
he rasped.
“Bleeding Athron, justice! What is a decent Chameln maid doing among these robbers?”

She fixed him steadily with her gaze, looking straight into his black eyes as if he were a wolf or a mountain cat that must be tamed.

“
I am in exile,”
she said softly.

He dropped his eyes.

“All right,”
he said.
“Come into the tent, lady. You will understand our plight.”

“Let someone hold my horse,”
said Aidris.

A young girl was pushed out of the crowd, and she took Telavel's bridle and spoke soothing words to her. The crowd opened up, and Aidris walked behind Ark, the Chieftain, into the largest tent. It was dark but very orderly, and it smelled powerfully of pine and mountain and the Chameln lands. Ark sat down on a rough settle covered with hides and gestured to another. A younger man and a middle-aged woman had followed them into the tent; they fetched bone cups filled with a spirit that smelled and tasted like sour milk.

“They have despoiled our treasure,”
said Ark shortly.
“A dancer named Enk or Ennerik came to have his future read and behaved lewdly and stole a fetish. We asked for it back. One thing led to another.”

“I saw it done,”
said the woman.
“This was a practiced thief. He thought our treasure could not see, being entranced, but I was there watching.”

“Your treasure?”
asked Aidris.

“The Blessed Maid,”
said Ark.
“The Spirit Child.”

“And the fetish?”

“A crystal,”
said the woman.
“Her smaller scrying stone called the Wolf's Eye. The larger, called Garm's Fist, is set into the table top.”

“And he behaved . . . lewdly?”

“He bent forward and stroked her hair and her arm,”
said the woman.
“She is a holy person and should not be touched familiarly.”

“May I see the Blessed Maid?”
asked Aidris.

“Come then,”
said Ark.

They went out of the tent again and approached a smaller, colored tent set apart from the others. Aidris was aware of the kedran, the reeve and his people, even the tumblers watching them. Inside the colored tent there was a blaze of sunshine; the back flaps were rolled up and two older women had been helping the Blessed Maid to wash her hair. They were brushing it out to dry, a fine silky light-brown mass, longer than the hair of the bride at Wildrode.

She was about twenty years old and pale skinned, more of the Zor than her Firnish companions. Her eyes were grey of two shades, a dark rim round the light pupil; she was thin, bird-boned, not quite in her right wits.

“Blessed Ilda,”
said Ark,
“this kedran will help us find the Wolf's Eye.”

The Blessed Maid looked at Aidris, lowered long sooty lashes to her pale cheeks and smiled.

“She cannot even find her way home to the two oak trees
. . .” she said in a sweet voice.

“Oh, I will in time,”
said Aidris.
“Perhaps the Blessed Ilda can tell me when that will be?”

“Soon enough,”
said the maid.
“Give me your own scrying stone, little queen, little oak maid, it is stronger than the Wolf's Eye.”

“No,”
said Aidris, “
I will bring your stone back again.”

“She talks in these riddles,”
murmured Ark,
“but her gift is great.”

“It is indeed,”
said Aidris.
“Good Ark, come with me to the village reeve and my sergeant and the leader of the tumblers. We will find out this Enk or Ennerik.”

He thought it over, glowering; looked to the Blessed Maid who nodded.

“As you will,”
he said.

As they went out of the tent the Maid cried out,
“Do not lose your heart!”

Aidris found a place for them both to stand and called to Sergeant Lawlor and the reeve. When they came, she made introductions, always presenting the others to Ark, as the chief. He responded with dignity.

“We need the leader of the tumblers,” she told the reeve.

He ran back to the tumblers and sorted out a tall old woman and a younger man. They were well dressed in a kind of striped motley, red and yellow. Aidris felt the ground lurch under her feet. She thought: how tall, how well-grown he is now. His hair was a very smooth long cap, pure gold in the sunlight, his eyes were the dark remembered blue.

“Kedran Venn . . .” said Raff Raiz.

“Master Raiz.” She felt herself blushing.

The old woman, Mother Storry, folded her arms and glared at Ark, the chief.

“We've been attacked and put upon . . .”

“Wait, I pray,” said Aidris. “This will be easily settled, good mother. Is there a tumbler called Enk or Ennerik?”