A Princess of the Chameln (28 page)

“I do not know if it will serve you or your father,” she said, “but I have been told part of Rosmer's parentage. He is the bastard son of Prince Ross of Eildon.”

“It is no secret, this claim of his,” said Raff, “but my father does not believe . . .”

“He should believe it,” said Aidris. “I have it from one who should know. From the prince himself.”

He took it in bright-eyed. It was as if their talk of secrets had returned him to the world of intrigue and unrest that he shared with his father, Jalmar. He was as much bound to his father and to his brother Pinga, the poor greddle, as she was to her own house. For all his wit and his gentleness and his tumbler's grace, he was the servant of powerful masters, and she was a queen in exile, her fate undecided. They could meet as man and woman only upon this faraway beach or in the lands below the world.

They walked down from the top of Nim's Head and kissed and clung among the dunes. He turned aside with a gasp of pain and began to run. She did not watch him, but went a little further on to the beach and sat down on a little patch of seagrass where the swamp met the sand. She remained there so long that Telavel left her grazing and came and nuzzled her, feeling her sadness. When she raised her eyes, the beach was empty. She rode about until supper time feeling guilty because Telavel had not been part of her dream of freedom. She could not have taken her to the lands below the world.

In the night a wind sprang up; when she slept at last in her narrow bed, worn out with weeping, her sleep was broken by the drumming of hooves and the cry of horses. She thought of the wild white stallion of the Shallir and his noble herd galloping through the wild night along the sands.

Then it was dawn and the little maid Edda was in her room gasping and crying, “Oh, Kedran . . . oh, she is gone! She is gone!”

Aidris hardly took in her meaning until she saw the door of the stall kicked down and the rail of the pen broken. It had rained in the night, and the tracks upon the sand were clear enough: Telavel had run off with the Shallir, the children of the sea.

She ran out like one possessed, ran to the dunes and shouted and called for hours. She came back to the beach and lay on the sand like a sailor cast away, half-drowned, from a shipwreck. There was nothing to be done; there was no one to help her search for the mare. The old woman and the child were very gentle with her in her loss; they thought she wept only for Telavel.

Every day she went further and further into the sea swamps and sometimes came close to the Shallir, saw the mares and their foals whisking away with a swirl of water about their hooves. One afternoon she gave up the search to sit on the beach and watch the waves and wonder how she would come home to Kerrick Hall. She walked about collecting shells, and at last she brought out her scrying stone, which she had kept in her saddlebag at the cottage. She had not looked into the stone since Birchmoon when she returned from Wildrode Keep and told the strange tale of Sir Jared and Mistress Quade and their quest in Mel'Nir.

The light in the stone was summery and green. The Lady touched her eyes, drew her hands over her cheeks, asking why Aidris had been weeping.

“I have a tale to tell that will make you rejoice,” said Aidris, not answering the question.

The Lady listened most intently, her image in the stone fading a little, then growing strong again. Aidris thought of Prince Ross and of Rosmer and of charms against old age. Then a cry rang out, faint and shrill, filling the world of the stone.

“Lady!” cried Aidris. “Oh, Guenna . . .”

The lady was there again laughing and weeping.

“The child,” she said, “the child lives!”

She rocked an invisible child in her arms.

“He has grown as large as Prince Gol,” said Aidris. “This cousin Yorath is one of the giant warriors.”

The stone was filled with a glittering cloud, and when it cleared, there on the table or altar was a hideous poppet, old and wrinkled, seated upon a throne and wearing a tall, jewelled crown. It shook and toppled, its crown fell off, and so did its head. Ghanor, the Great King of Mel'Nir, fell down and died. The stone went dark. Aidris recalled that she had not asked for a spell to find Telavel. The beach was empty, and the evening wind had freshened. She took her net full of turret shells and went back to the cottage. Having lost all, the hope of future triumph or the death of her enemies did not comfort her.

Next morning Telavel came back. Aidris heard the old donkey snuffling and honking in his stall and went out at dawn after another uneasy night. There stood Telavel by the broken rail of the pen, exhausted and drooping. Her coat was mired with sand and saltwater, her mane and tail thick with burrs; she had hoofmarks and teethmarks on her flanks and neck.

Aidris could only weep and cling to her. She cleaned and soothed and combed and burnished the little mare, fed her hot mashes, took her to the manor farm for a cast shoe. Then, before time, the pair of them set out for Kerrick Hall again. She came to the top of the first hill and hardly dared look back at the ocean. When she did look, the beach was empty and so were the dunes. She and Telavel returned slowly and sadly through the summer countryside.

She came back to Kerrick late one afternoon and was glad, when she saw the kedran going about their duties, that she still had a day or two of her leave. She tramped into quarters, lugging her saddlebag. There on her old pallet sat a tall figure, drooping, just as Aidris's spirits drooped.

“Ortwen!”

Her friend raised a long face.

“Back in harness . . .” she whispered.

Aidris sat down and took Ortwen in her arms.

“What happened?”

The suitor, the handsome lad, had played Ortwen false with more than one of the village girls.

“Little weasel!” said Ortwen fiercely. “I could not take his lying talk of love. Once, twice . . . and that red-haired wench lording it over me . . .”

“What did you do?”

“Do?” cried Ortwen. “I threw him in the horse trough!”

She began to weep.

“Oh Aidris . . . I loved him so . . .”

It had been a summer for love in Athron, but for love that did not or could not last. At Kerrick the harvest came in; Sabeth sat in the gardens and stitched at long robes. Her child was expected during the feast days at the year's end. The midwife swore she would come to term and that a winter's child had a summer life.

Telavel was collicky; she clubbed Grey Company when they drilled by turning the wrong way. Aidris had her to Sergeant Fell, and one morning Hanni, the ensign, raised a laugh in the stable yard.

“Venn . . . I don't know what
you
did on your long leave, but your horse is in foal!”

Sergeant Fell was distressed.

“Dear Goddess, Venn . . . did a farm horse get to her? Or a donkey? Would you breed a mule with this lovely Chameln grey?”

Aidris held her peace. Telavel rounded out slowly, but in the new year she would have to be quartered with the stud mares. Aidris would have to change her life; she would have no horse to ride, grey or otherwise. When the feast days came, Megan Brock spoke to her in quarters over a glass of good wine. She agreed to do the ensign's test in the new year and ride a certain black house gelding in New Moon Company. A recruit had come with a new grey to take Telavel's place.

The feast days were very quiet. Lord Huw and Lady Aumerl did not keep their usual state. Then at New Year the bells rang and fires were lighted: the Lady Sabeth of Kerrick had borne Sir Gerr a healthy girl child. Aidris was able to watch the birth customs of Athron, and she did not find them so very strange. They were more kind than those of Lien, but not so ancient as those of the Chameln lands.

There was the “long vigil” before the birth—and with a young mother it might be very long—during which she might have comforters in her chamber, a man, a mother and a maid. She sat the vigil with Sabeth and so did Lady Aumerl and Sir Gerr. It was plain from what the midwife said that she was already regarded, at the beginning of her twenty-second year, as an
old
maid. There were jokes about certain landowning families where a maiden aunt was kept expressly for this purpose. Sabeth was in good spirits, and her comforters got along well enough together.

“This was never my thought,” confided Lady Aumerl to Aidris at the fireside. “To sit the long vigil at all would have bored and frightened me as a girl. I longed to be a true kedran and ruler of my own house.”

“Who sat vigil with you, my lady?” asked Aidris.

“For Niall, the firstborn, it was Huw, of course,” said the lady, remembering fondly, “and my old Aunt Drusse, come out of Mel'Nir, as a maid, and for a mother I had my friend Margit, the reeve's daughter of Parnin, who married a knight, Sirril of the Green. I travelled there to sit vigil with her in the following year, and she bore a dead child and the next year so did I. We should not speak of it, I suppose. But all has not gone badly: she has two daughters and a son and I have my two boys and now I have Sabeth, for my daughter-in-law. Will you come to it too, my dear? If all goes well in the Chameln lands? Sabeth has told me you are betrothed.”

“I must,” said Aidris. “For a matter of inheritance.”

She watched the Lady Aumerl stretched out warming her feet at the fire while Gerr sat by the big bed murmuring to Sabeth. She realised just how discreet and kind the lady was, an excellent mother-in-law. She wondered about that Chieftainess of the Nureshen, Gezi, Bajan's mother, who had dressed her in the ceremonial lodge long ago and who would help her give birth.

Then the time was ripe, and the comforters went away and their places were taken by three mid-wives: the Garth midwife who was in middle-age, her young daughter and a very ancient creature from Stayn. This triad proved the rank of the mother, a lady of Kerrick Hall. The Garth midwife bade Aidris stay and watch the birth; she wanted her magic, her scrying stone close at hand. So she went to the head of the bed where Sabeth, rosy-faced, panted and asked what time it was.

“Lamp-lighting time,” said Aidris, smiling. “And it is snowing again. Tomorrow is the New Year.”

“So long . . . we have been so long in Athron . . .”

Then Sabeth's breath was caught, and the mid-wives held and instructed her and with a last struggle and a cry that was hardly a cry of pain, it was done. The crone held a rose-red, wrinkled newborn child that moved all four limbs like a reluctant swimmer and let out a gusty shriek. The three mid-wives cried out in triumph.

“There now, a girl,” said the Garth midwife. “But it was well done, my lady, well done. See there . . .”

Aidris watched, she could not help watching, the art with which all was staunched and cut and the afterbirth carried away. She hated the bright blood that had been spilt. The child, in its blessed cloth, was laid on Sabeth's breast, and she showed it to Aidris. They stared and laughed. For the creature, with quantities of black hair and wide-open eyes, looked exactly like Gerr of Kerrick. For the first and last time, the look of the young knight was stamped upon the face of his infant daughter.

“Ah,” cried Sabeth, “how will she be called Imelda, as her father wishes, if she has this black hair?”

“Pff . . . it will fall out, my lady,” said the old woman. “Depend upon it that is falling hair, pillow hair. By the time she is two years old, she will have your own lovely golden locks.”

“Run along,” said the Garth midwife to Aidris. “Bring the word, Kedran . . .”

So Aidris bent to kiss Sabeth, who lay in a dream, cradling the child.

“Wait,” said Sabeth, “it is snowing. Take your cloak, your beautiful fur cloak, from the press . . .”

“I will,” said Aidris, “but you must not weep . . .”

She saw that Sabeth's eyes were suddenly brimming with tears.

“I remember when I was cold and afraid and you gave me the cloak,” she said. “And now I have so much. I have all that I could wish for.”

“Hush,” said Aidris. “Rejoice. We all rejoice with you. One day, one day I swear to you, our children will play together in a garden!”

So she ran and brought word to Gerr in one bower with his male companions and to Lord Huw and Lady Aumerl in another and to the company in the front courtyard who rode into Garth. Then, slipping on her cloak, which smelled of sweet Athron herbs from the press, she crossed the north court, calling the word to any who were about, and climbed the hill to the Carach tree. She came to the top of the hill and called to the men at arms who waited there, beside a brazier and the unlit pile of the bonfire.

“Light up! Light up! The Lady Sabeth has borne a daughter, and all goes well with them both!”

There was a cheer . . . the men had had something to keep out the cold . . . and the cover was reefed from the heap of dried branches and a torch set to it.

“Kedran Venn!”

A tall muffled figure lurked by the trees; Crib, the black dog, bounced over the snow to Aidris and leaped up cheerfully.

“What then?” she said to the dog. “Do you like my cloak?”

Niall of Kerrick looked at the winter sky covered with low-hanging snowcloud.

“In this new year I will travel to Eildon,” he said.

The flames of the bonfire cast strange shadows on his face.

“Have you come so far in your studies?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I have not your natural gift for magic, but I have applied myself.”

“You make too much of my gift,” she said.

“Do I?”

He smiled and flicked his fingers at Crib, the black dog, who stood looking expectantly at his master. For an instant the dog was gone, it had vanished away, leaving only its shadow on the snow. He flicked his fingers, and the dog was back again. Aidris laughed.

“Chance has played a part in all my workings,” she said.

“Will you come to Eildon then, as part of my escort?” he said lightly. “Or does chance bind you to Kerrick Hall?”