A Princess of the Chameln (29 page)

“It is the place where I can be found,” she said. “When the time comes for my return.”

“And if the time never comes?”

“I will go anyway,” she said. “In two years or a little longer.”

“I would rather Gerr and his lady had had a son,” said Niall suddenly, “to inherit this manor.”

“What, will you never marry? Never have sons?”

“I may never inherit,” he said. “I may give my brother the right. How is it with inheritance in the Chameln lands, Kedran Venn?”

“A woman may inherit in her own right, as first born,” she said. “Surely you know that? I am sure that your brother knows it, although he has not made much study of Chameln life.”

“I know something of his foolish notions,” said Niall, “but we are not as close as brothers can be, and he cannot confide in me. I know that someone bound him harshly with an oath, more than one. He may not question, so he is driven into all kinds of imaginings. His fancy fights with his honor. For a nature such as his, these oaths are plain cruelty. What would drive anyone to demand them?”

Aidris stared at him angrily.

“Fear,” she said. “Your brother was already full of foolish notions when I first set eyes upon him. He deceived me and deceived himself. And I was afraid, Master Kerrick, afraid for my life.”

She turned her back on the bonfire, and the pale winter shape of the Carach tree, and strode off down the hillside.

“Wait!”

He ran after her, and the dog Crib danced ahead of him and sat in her path.

“Kedran . . .” said Niall. “Aidris! My dear friend! You were unprotected then and you were very young, I know that. But to come as a kedran is one thing, to marry into our family is another. What have you brought to us? Who is the lady Sabeth? What manner of person is she, if she is not . . .”

“She is an orphan out of Lien,” said Aidris. “And you see very plainly what manner of person she is. She is most true and lovely and kind.”

“I do see that,” said Niall, “but her estate . . .”

“She is my friend,” said Aidris, “and so is Gerr.”

“This is all you can offer?” He smiled.

“My friendship will be enough!” she said.

He stared at her where she stood, wrapped in her cloak, and she saw that he had begun to unravel the long, tangled thread. She turned again and walked off down the hill.

Chapter Seven

The wheel of the year turned; she rode out in the first days of the Willowmoon as Ensign of New Moon Company under Lieutenant Yeo. They came to Varda with the lord's tribute, and Aidris saw Nenad Am Charn again. The city was as strange to her as before; she felt again that sensation of being in a foreign land as she looked up at the tall house with the sign of the double oak. It was Mid-week, a market day in Varda, and at this time, early afternoon, the trading room was busy. A party of Varda ladies were buying furs; there was at least one customer, tall and burly, who might have come from Mel'Nir. As she waited at a dark table for one of the shopmen, there was a commotion upon the stairs. A party of people were descending with much ceremony, and she saw that they were all from the Chameln lands.

A thin elderly man came briskly down the narrow stairs of this townhouse; he wore the beaded tabard of a page or cupbearer, slightly motheaten, and had a Chameln lute, a tarika, slung over his back. At the bottom of the stairs, together with a younger woman, he unrolled a strip of woven carpet. Aidris did not know whether to laugh or cry: they were performing the old and uncomfortable task called “smoothing the way.” She had last seen it done when she was nine years old and walked through Achamar with her mother in the Fir Moon to lay branches upon the sacred stones in the south wall. A score of citizens, sweating in their furs, had unrolled and unrolled the heavy leather-backed carpet, stiffened with wooden battens and embroidered with birds and spring flowers, where their feet touched.

Now the carpet strip was unrolled for an old lady, stiff as a poppet in her long beaded robe and her “star-maid” headdress, with its two thick plaits of horsehair trimmed with brilliants. Her face, under the coif, was lively and proud, with snapping black eyes and a nose like an eagle's beak. She cried out in the Old Speech, “
Are those two Athron lackeys come with our carriage?”

A middle-aged waiting woman soothed the old dame, and her progress through the trading room continued. At the door, the lady and her retinue stood still, and the elderly page or minstrel called in a strong voice for a cheer. The double cry rang out “for the two oaks, the Daindru and the blessing of the Goddess” and then, the Athron lackeys having arrived with the carriage, the old lady was laden in with her servants and driven away.

Aidris saw that Nenad Am Charn stood upon the landing of the stairs with a lady in a plain Vardan cap. She stood looking up at him and saw his quick movement to take the arm of his wife. So she came up to them, smiling, and he bowed and his wife sketched a curtsey.

“You have visitors who stand on ceremony,” said Aidris, unable to keep from smiling.

“Exile is hard for them to bear,” said Nenad Am Charn. “Our house is honored by your presence. My wife, Lallian Am Charn . . .”

“Come up, Dan Aidris,” said the envoy's wife in a low voice. “Come Nenad . . . let us get off the stairs . . .”

So they went up and stood at the door of a room with books and papers where Nenad had been receiving the strange visitors. A young man was inside gathering together a heap of parchments. He came out briskly, his Firnish brows twitched together in a frown, which hardly lifted when Nenad Am Charn presented him.

“My son . . . Racha Am Charn. Kedran Venn, also from the Old Country.”

“Ensign Venn,” said the young man. “Isn't that an ensign's shoulder knot?”

“Yes, I have made ensign,” said Aidris.

“Bravo!” said the young man. “How pleasing to see an exile who does not look for charity.”

“For Shame,” said Lallian Am Charn. “You must forgive my son, Ensign Venn. His manner is too harsh.”

“I am an Athron lackey, Mother,” said Racha Am Charn as he hurried off down the stairs.

The living rooms of the house were full of music and cooking smells, and she glimpsed young girls in Athron dresses. Nenad led her into the study and shut the door.

“I must say again ‘forgive my son,' Dan Aidris,” he said. “He knows nothing. I have confided only in my dear wife.”

“Who were those people?” asked Aidris.

“Exiles,” said Nenad Am Charn heavily. “The Countess Palazan Am Panget, relict of a southern lord, has gathered about her a little court of loyalists. They live in House Imal on Goose Lane in a pleasant quarter of Varda.”

“And they are poor? They make demands upon your charity?”

“They are indeed . . . pensioners.”

“Are there other exiles from the Chameln lands?”

“Not too many,” said Nenad. “Some mining families from the Adz, who have settled in the south by the Grafell Pass. A trickle of folk from the Chameln lands always crossed the mountains, Dan Aidris, seeking their fortune . . . going away to Cayl, to the sea. The number more than doubled for a short time after the fall of the Daindru, even though the borders were closed. Now things have settled a little; some exiles have simply gone back home, others have found a place in Athron. I send what help I can to any who need it: the miners for instance and that household in Goose Lane. My son does not understand the ways of the Chameln and the claims of hospitality.”

“I have heard of the old lord Panget,” said Aidris. “Perhaps I saw him and his lady at court.”

“Dan Aidris,” said the Envoy most earnestly, “do not be tempted by these people!”

“I would not fail in my duty to any folk of the Chameln,” she said. “I have left you to carry all the burdens, good Nenad, while I was far away at Kerrick.”

“It has not been a heavy task,” he said. “Do not trouble yourself, my Queen. It would be reckless for you to mingle with these people here in Varda. They live out their lives in a dream of the old ways . . . as you saw from this ridiculous procession. Oh, you might have been Queen in Goose Lane and kept a maimed court in exile, with empty ceremony and intrigue to pass the time, but you have chosen a better way, however lonely. You are still young; you will come into your kingdom.”

“If I hold fast to my hope,” she said, “it is because of the great joy it will give me to reward those who have been as faithful and steadfast as yourself.”

“I must not give you any false hopes,” he said, “but I have heard that the Chameln lands will have a rising, an insurgence . . . more than one. I will be travelling this year to Achamar for the first time since the troubles. Be sure I will find out all I can.”

“Pray take care,” said Aidris.

“I will.”

“Has there been any word of Nazran Am Thuven and the lady Maren?”

“None, Dan Aidris.”

“I pray you, do not spare me the truth. I know that their manor house was destroyed and they were rumored to be shut up in Ledler.”

“That is all I know myself,” he said. “Hope cannot be too strong in this case. Old Nazran wrote once, and his letters were smuggled from the fortress. Since then there has been no word. But there was a disquieting whisper over your aunt, the widow Micha Am Firn . . .”

“So disquieting that you did not tell me?”

“It is better so, my Queen. You have chosen silence . . . it is better so, believe me. If I repeated every foolish tale . . .”

“You are right.” She sighed. “But tell me now. What has been done to my poor aunt?”

“Not any usual form of torture,” said Nenad Am Charn with a grim smile. “Werris would have married her.”

She thought of Lord Werris, handsome, correct, civilised, a dry and distant man when she knew him.

“We have all underrated Lord Werris,” she said. “He has shown decision, now he shows ambition. What of my aunt? Did she take his offer? Was she brought to it?”

She remembered the quiet, dark, pleasant-voiced little woman, going about in her stone rooms, stricken by her widowhood. How long ago? Eight years?

“We do not know,” said Nenad Am Charn.

Varda in early spring was bustling and pleasant. As she walked the streets, invisible, she tried to recall Achamar but could only remember bright pictures like illuminations from a book of seasons. At the palace of the princes, when they left the tribute, the kedran troop were entertained well below stairs. She had no glimpse of Prince Terril. The news of the royal household was that the heir, born to poor Princess Josenna after the royal visit to Kerrick Hall, was dropsical and did not thrive. So New Moon Company rode back, with Aidris riding second on Dusk, the handsome, ill-natured black house nag that Megan Brock had given her to manage.

“For Old Hop's sake, Ensign Venn,” said Marten, a red-haired woman who rode behind with her friend Farrer, “Keep that vicious brute in order. If he side-skips again I will run mad.”

“Ease up,” said Farrer. “If anyone can ride him, Venn can.”

Dusk lugged badly, as if he knew he was being talked about, and Aidris wrestled with him and scolded. She was embarrassed when the kedran complimented her on her riding: it was as if one said she breathed well or knew how to eat her dinner. The likeness to table manners held good: her style, even after five years, was different. She did not come naturally to the dressage, her talent was rather for staying on. Raff Raiz had said she rode like the jockeys, the prize riders of Lien.

When they came home to Kerrick, she made haste to visit Telavel, out in the paddock with the brood mares. She counted again . . . Willow, Birch, Elm, Oak, Apple . . . it seemed like a life sentence. She traced a few white hairs on Telavel's nose; the mare was ten years old.

Ortwen said she was pleased to hear that Aidris had kept out of trouble in Varda.

“New Moon . . . do they suit you, those hearts?” she asked slyly.

Grey Company had had no pairs of kedran lovers, but in New Moon only Aidris and the Lieutenant were unmatched, and Yeo was the friend of Megan Brock. She found them no better or worse to ride with than other soldiers.

“Everyone will have a friend if she can find one,” said Aidris. “It makes no difference if some of these are lovers too. Remember how I was called your dear and your kedran wife?”

“Gossip,” said Ortwen, “‘maids' talk. But what of your lady at the hall?”

“I love Sabeth,” said Aidris. “She is like my sister. I would say I loved you too, except that you would throw me in the horse trough . . .”

She ducked under Ortwen's arm as it swung over her head. The tall girl blushed and smiled.

“We are too shy, maybe,” she said, “or it is simply not in our blood.”

Sergeant Fell kept a close watch on Telavel and believed she would come to term early because of her small size. The little mare, who had been late to show, rounded out like a tun. Aidris had a nagging worry. She thought of a foal's birth as more painful and dangerous than the birth of a child. In the middle of Lindenmoon, Gavin woke her early; she scrambled into her gear and ran to the birth stall. The old sergeant stood in the doorway, and Aidris saw that her eyes were full of tears.

“Oh tell me . . .” she cried out.

“Oh Goddess!” said Sergeant Fell. “Oh heaven and earth! It is a dream, a wonder! Venn, why did you not tell me?”

Aidris ran to the stall, and Telavel was on her feet, snorting and sweat-streaked. The foal lay in the straw, and it was pure, pearly white, more beautiful even than the foals of the Chameln grey: it was a colt foal of the Shallir, the children of the sea. The Sergeant and Aidris knelt and soothed and praised Telavel like two fools. Telavel nudged the foal to its feet, and it stood with splayed legs nuzzling for her milk, while Sergeant Fell extolled all its points.

“So rare . . .” she said at last. “I have heard of mules, marked with grey, from the donkey mares, but this is a wonder. I tell you they never breed in captivity. Venn, Venn . . . you could sell this lovely thing for a king's ransom!”