Inda (32 page)

Inda saw with a rush of sympathy that Joret had withdrawn into that closed, tight-shouldered manner she drew on like a cloak when she was aware of being stared at. The color in her cheeks, the extravagant curve of her lowered lashes, did nothing whatever to hide her startling beauty. Being still in smocks—and the future wife of the Adaluin’s heir—gave her the choice of speaking or not, but she hated those restless gazes.

And so she performed her part in the Restday bread-giving with a graceless, unsmiling brevity, relaxing only when she handed bread to the restless Tveis who cared not whose hand they received it from. They only wanted to be singing, dancing, and talking. She was especially kind to one-eyed Cama Tya-Vayir, at first out of pity, but when she looked into his face, a strange coldness tightened along the insides of her arms.
One day he will be beautiful,
she thought,
and he doesn’t even know it.

“As strength to the body, so strength to the spirit.” Her hand pressed his, and Cama gave her a shy, absent smile, for he was wondering what Dogpiss was hiding in his kit.

Then the first watch departed to their posts. Inda, Cama, Rattooth, and Dogpiss perched themselves along a row of rocks that jutted up like green dragon’s teeth, remnants of an ancient fence, now moss covered, as the men began the songs. No drumming for the boys; the horsetails claimed the shallow drums used by youth. Joret was handed the drum with clashing brass cymblets. She performed her rhythms with competence, if not inspiration, her gaze on the fire, and not on the boys who waited, in vain, for her to look up so they could show off before her.

As the songs soared and thrummed, Inda said, “So, Cama, Rattooth, I want to know what it was like down south. Any interesting sights?”

Dogpiss put in, “Any good jokes, Squint?”

Cama shrugged, hating to talk, of course, but at least these were friends, and used to his squeaky voice. “Different,” he said. “Real different. More than Iascan and Marlovan differences.” He waved a hand, struggling for the words. “Their songs are different. They don’t have drums at all, way south, near the Sartor Sea. There were some palaces, but no castles. Big cities. Very big, and the clothes are all different.”

“Iascans didn’t have drums, not until the Marlovans came,” Dogpiss said, shrugging. “Mother told me that.”

“What did they have, then, on Restday?” Cama, Dogpiss, and Inda turned to Rattooth, whose family was Iascan in origin.

Rattooth Cassad wiggled his fingers, looking like a blond rodent with his prominent front teeth. “Reed-pipes. Though we now use ’em for Marlovan songs, of course.” A careless, confident statement resulting from that far-seeing great-mother who had said to her family on the eve of her wedding to the king of the Marlovan conquerors,
We will wear their style of clothes, and speak their tongue, and learn their songs and stories, but they will learn ours. And they will use our fine swords, our pottery, our castles and farms. And one day they will forget to see us as “them.” If so, then in a sense we win the war, for we will keep what is ours, and lose no more lives.

“I want to hear about your eye,” Dogpiss said, waving away the blather about musical customs. “Did they do anything disgusting?”

“What was the magic like?” Inda asked, leaning close, the better to see Cama in the flickering golden light of the fire, around which young men danced, swords whirling in unison as the war drums rumbled.

“Slow,” Cama said. “If I want to see out of this eye again, they said I have to go back. You remember, it kept opening, the cut, I mean, and I’d wake up and this gunk came out, and it hurt. It wouldn’t heal. They had to take care of that first, and then wait. First heal this bit of skin, and then that muscle. And afterward, always waiting, and the mage gets sick as if he’d fought ten duels. During the spell-casting you feel as if a thousand bees stung you. No, it doesn’t hurt. As if a thousand bees walked over you, their wings humming.”

“Ecch,” Dogpiss exclaimed with delighted revulsion.

“They do one little thing at a time, like I said. And so it will cost a lot. They say our ancestors knew such magic as common.”

“Aw, that,” Dogpiss said, waving a hand. “We always hear that, how they knew it all in the old days, and we lost it all.”

“But they did,” Inda said. “Tdor and Joret are always reading me things. Everything was different then, even time.”

“Time,” Dogpiss scoffed, “is time. It can’t be that different. Not
here.
”

There was no need to speak of what they all knew: that time did not progress at all in Norsunder, where the soul-eaters lurked, waiting for another chance to try to take the world again. If one wanted to escape from the effects of time he found his way to Norsunder. The price was that his soul belonged to the masters of that terrible place.

“I didn’t believe time could vary in the world either. At first.” Inda thought back to that dreamlike memory from the year before, when he’d been given kinthus. But he couldn’t explain what had happened. So he said, “What Joret told me was that time here isn’t always going forward, the way we assume.”

Dogpiss snorted. “If you try to tell me it goes backward, then I’m going to rub your face in that mud.”

The boys laughed, Inda included. He thought, but did not say, that he had once stared up at a banner in the throne room and heard the sounds of battle, as if two times met.

“Boys.”

Four scrubs leaped to their feet. Four faces turned upward.

Jarend-Adaluin stood silhouetted against the fire, the mail under his war coat jingling faintly as he gestured toward their bedrolls. “Sleep,” he said. “We shall ride hard on the morrow.”

Chapter Twenty-three

J
UST before dawn, the younger boys were kicked awake by the horsetails. Over the gratifying yelps and howls of younger brothers, Tanrid, the ranking horsetail, issued orders for the breakdown and packing of their gear. The horsetails fixed their hair and smoothed their clothes so they could to stroll over for morning mess when Joret did.

Tanrid had just tightened his hair in the silver owl clasp when he realized the scrubs had gone quiet. Instantly suspicious, he whirled around to see Horsepiss Noth standing nearby, arms crossed.
Captain of Dragoons
Horsepiss Noth. Nobody knew what his real name was—if he even had one. Twenty of his forty-five years a captain, sun-seamed and hard as old wood. So hard the horsetails, who’d just been thinking themselves so very tough, looked like a row of guilty youngsters, all failing to see the faint narrowing of the eyes, the slight shadow at the corners of the thin lips, that hinted at strictly controlled mirth.

“Time,” he said, “for you boys to run a little drill, eh, while the scrubs finish your packing?”

His tone promised that the scrubs were not getting the worst of morning’s work. As the horsetails picked up their weapons and trooped off to the trampled ground where the guard had already finished warm-ups, Dogpiss chortled, and Inda, who had seen the humor in Noth’s face, joined him.

“Make it quick,” Dogpiss said to the other scrubs, and ran off to where his brother stood near the horse lines. Whipstick Noth, rejected as a mere pigtail by the lofty horsetails, had stayed with his father’s men, all of them known to him by name.

As Inda packed Tanrid’s bedroll with efficient, absent-minded speed, he watched the Noth brothers. The grins on their faces were startlingly alike: they were up to something.

“Come on,” Rattooth grumped. “Just because his dad’s here, Dogpiss seems to think he can buck drudge.”

Inda whispered, “I think they’ve got a sting in mind.”

Rattooth’s face cleared into an expectant grin, strictly schooled by the time Captain Noth released the crimson-faced, sweat-soaked, slow-moving horsetails.

The scrubs sat in a row eating their breakfast, watching as Whipstick put just enough saunter in his stroll toward the cook pot to catch the attention of the wary Ains. Was he gloating?

Dogpiss drifted alongside the cook pot as the horsetails lined up, last of all, to get their food. They all watched, with ominous intensity, Whipstick’s swagger as he returned from getting seconds. Was that the back of his hand, or was he just scratching his head? They were paying scant attention to the food doled out into their bowls, and no attention whatever to Dogpiss standing helpfully right by the Rider on cook duty.

The Ains got their oatmeal, topped with honey. Inda, observant of detail as always, frowned when he glanced in the wide, shallow wooden bowls. There were dark bits in the oatmeal, as if it had burned. But his had been perfectly cooked.

Still eying Whipstick, who was definitely on the strut as he moved toward the horses, the horsetails began to eat.

“Get the saddle pads on the mounts,” came the command, and Inda and Dogpiss turned their hands to that work, Dogpiss’ face crimson with repressed emotion.

Cama was the first to realize what Dogpiss had done. The horsetails’ mouths were green—startling, bright green—as were the fronts of their tunics where they slopped in their haste to eat fast before the horses were ready.

Laughter from the men busy gathering their gear brought the horsetails’ attention onto one another. They exchanged swift, shocked glances then realized what had happened, which of course caused universal merriment: added to their food had been tiny pellets of an herb so rich in color it bled off at the slightest touch of moisture.

“Right,” Tanrid Algara-Vayir said, and the men laughed the more heartily, and his father smiled, as he and the other horsetails dropped their bowls onto the grass and efficiently surrounded the wheezing, weakly running Dogpiss.

He fought mightily, but without success, as the bigger boys held him down and scrubbed the remainder of their food over his face and clothing, then carried him down to the stream and tossed him in.

Dogpiss emerged, streaming, shivering, green-splotched, whooping with laughter. The horsetails’ green mouths were evidence of their having been royally stung. They realized too late that Dogpiss’ green skin was a banner of triumph.

 

 

 

The horsetails nursed their grievance in silence during the wearying days following.

The last jog was accomplished single file at night, under cover of rain, after they had set up a false camp and waited until the sun went down. All they got was cold food and a long walk, stopping frequently so the scouts and scout dogs ahead could find and be certain of their trail, everything metal muffled against jingling, and no talk whatsoever allowed.

That cold, soggy walk seemed eternal to the youths, but it did finally end. Midway through the night they were separated, all according to plan. In silence the young people were taken up the trail to a ridge lying east of the battle site, accompanied by a young Jaya-Vayir Rider captain popular with the boys, and two each of Algara-Vayir and Jaya-Vayir armsmen. Shelter meant a sort of warmth, and their first thought on reaching that camp had been to burrow down and sleep.

The Adaluin and the Jarls then turned north and eased up through a silent forest of beech and pine toward the northern end of the bridge, where they took cover and waited out the night.

Dawn found the young people camped amid trees and rocks on the far side of a little gully, with strict orders to lie low. Captain Samred and his four Riders had spent the night on a ceaseless patrol bounded by the gully, the road lower down, and the river. Weak light showed to the west, thick trees forming a dark, tangled line between the road and the great Marlovar River that flowed toward the bridge where their fathers lay in wait.

The next thought of the horsetails was vengeance on Dogpiss, and that no adults were present to interfere with their creativity.

Tanrid muttered in surprise, “Hey. Dogpiss isn’t here.”

Inda kept his face averted so no one saw his grin.

“Shall I fetch water?” asked Joret’s Runner, Gdand.

Sudden silence behind him brought Inda’s attention around. All the older boys were staring, or trying not to stare, at Joret, who sat beside a tree, her face turned resolutely toward the forest as she swiftly braided her glossy blue-black hair.

“I can wait,” Joret replied softly.

Unconcerned with Joret, Gdand, and the riveted horsetails, Cama picked at his eye, all purple and pink with healing flesh, which made Inda’s stomach turn. The imprint of Smartlip’s heel was still clear. Rattooth watched as well, his lips curled in fascinated revulsion.

No one spoke. The horsetails made hasty, self-conscious groomings of clothing and hair, and everyone packed up their bedrolls. Tanrid had been given charge of the cheese and biscuits. He passed out shares with quick efficiency. Inda took Dogpiss’ and laid it aside.

“Where did your brother go?” Cassad murmured to Whipstick Noth, who shrugged. Whipstick was in a rotten mood because, until last night, he’d thought it was only these Vayir boys who’d be stashed away, that he’d be able to ride with his father. But Jarend-Adaluin had insisted the king meant all the youths. Even those accompanying unexpected reinforcements.