Sartor (22 page)

When all was ready and those carrying supplies had hefted
their packs, they got into their groups, and walked over the bridge and away.
Only a few looked back.

Lilah started out walking by Atan, with Merewen on the other
side, the way they’d traveled from Sarendan’s border to Shendoral.
But people kept crowding up to ask Atan this question or that, and Lilah would drop
back to make space. Finally she stayed back, looking up at the enormous
redwoods and trying to guess their age.

“Having trouble remembering everyone’s name,
your highness?”

Lilah was surprised to be addressed by the blonde girl who
talked like a court snob. Even though her clothes were ragged with many
washings, she was careful of them.

“Irza,” the girl said, smiling. “Lirzaveas
Ianth Yostavos, third circle. Your highness.”

“Sorry. Were we introduced?” Lilah’s face
heated, and she wondered if she was supposed to know what
third circle
was. “You don’t need to say ‘your highness’ to me. Lilah
will do. The king and princess business is too new, and anyway it really
belongs back in Sarendan.”

Irza smiled confidently. “A princess,” she stated
in her precise way, “is a princess anywhere. And it’s all right if
you forgot my name. It took me the longest time to sort everyone out after what
happened to us.”

Lilah nodded. “You remember—what happened?”
She tried to choose her words carefully.

“I remember the war, yes. I don’t want to forget
how Norsunder slaughtered my family,” Irza said, her mouth pressing into
a white line. “And I want to remember how I got my sister away by
slipping down through the grating into the old tunnel, where we’d once
been forbidden to play. But we’d explored anyway, because I wanted to see
what the ruins of the ancient city were like—who wouldn’t?” She
flashed a quick smile. “Especially if it’s forbidden.”

Lilah laughed. “If all the grownups told me to stay
away, I would have explored it first thing.”

Irza pointed at a girl with long blonde braids who was tall
and thin, and looked about Lilah’s own age. She walked hand in hand with
little Julian. “There’s my sister Arlaseas, but everyone calls her
Arlas. Once my younger sister, now my only one.” She smiled again and
stepped back, with a practiced gesture giving Lilah precedence when they came
to a great mossy root in the trail.

Lilah hopped over. Irza stepped over, holding her skirts in
the correct manner.

“So who else are you confused about?” she asked.
“Do you want the names, or who we are?”

“Who you are?” Lilah repeated, glancing back at
the clumps of two and three or four. Three girls sang a round, but one of the
voices rose above the others, reminding Lilah of crystal in the sunlight.

“That girl with the good voice,” Irza said,
nodding over her shoulder. “Sana. She’s also quite good as an
archer. She had one parent in the king’s forces, and the other was some
sort of player or performer. I hope,” Irza added, “that our new
queen will remember her with a royal patent for players, or something
appropriate.”

Lilah heard a generous tone and saw a smile, but her mind
still lurched, as if her foot had stepped on what she thought was solid ground
and it turned out to be slippery mud. “Does she want to be a player?”

Irza gave Lilah a fast glance, and Lilah felt the
conversational ground shift again. “I don’t know. But she’s
quite good, isn’t she?” Again she gave a pretty smile.

“Yes,” Lilah said, as from behind, Sana’s
voice soared faultlessly up a long series of tripled notes in the old ballad
style, the sound echoing through the trees.

Irza said, “None of us know who is still going to be
found alive. Obviously there must be people still living, for Savar pulled us
all from the time-binding. Our new queen will need to make order once again, and
we don’t know who from the important families has survived. All we are
sure of are...” In that same easy, confident voice she named half a dozen
of those walking in a cluster with Arlas and Julian.

Clearly Irza was a noble, and wanted Lilah to understand
that she was important. Why?

Because I’m now a princess?
Lilah wondered. Except
no one here had once asked any questions about Sarendan. Not to be mean. They
were just too busy thinking about Sartor—and the Sartor they thought
about was over a hundred years old. Probably, Lilah thought as she and Irza
separated again in order to hop from stone to stone over a stream, if any of
the older ones thought about who might be on the throne of Sarendan, they would
name Lilah’s great-great grandmother. Weird!

“Mendaen, there, is son of one of the best army
leaders,” Irza said, as though continuing a conversation. “Died
defending the king.”

“What about the morvende, Hinder and his cousin?”
Lilah asked.

“Oh, they came of their own desire,” Irza said. “That
is not to say that many did not die in the fighting, for there were quite a few
who allied with the king, and kept their word and didn’t just vanish into
their caves when Norsunder came. But these ones all chose to come to the
surface. Except the boy who does the cooking, but his family had been on the
surface for at least a couple of generations.”

“Doing what? Cooking?” Lilah asked, sneaking a
sideways look.

Irza’s shrug was expressive—and threw Lilah
straight back in memory to her snobbish cousins at court in Miraleste, during
the bad old days under her uncle. “Probably something of the sort.”
Irza’s little shoulder twitch and faint smile were dismissive. “No star
chamber families, no position.”

Lilah wanted to ask what ‘star chamber families’
meant, but she didn’t want to give this Irza the satisfaction of
answering. Besides, her tone made it clear enough: they were special in some
snobbish way.

“Well, maybe that will change,” Lilah said,
thinking of her own experiences and how her brother had appointed people in
positions of responsibility based on merit, and not on family background.

And as soon as she said it, she saw in the quick tightening
of Irza’s features that this girl did not like this idea.

“Irza?”

Both looked up. Blonde braids swinging, Arlas hopped back
down the trail. “She’s tired,” Irza’s sister said in a
low voice, nodding at the drooping Julian.

Irza gave a quick nod and looked around in question.

Arlas pointed off to one side to where Atan walked, deep in conversation
with Merewen and Sin and a couple others.

Irza smiled at Lilah. “Will you pardon me?”

Lilah nodded and watched as Irza moved with swift, graceful
stride to Atan. She couldn’t hear the conversation, but she saw Atan look
up with a quick gesture, her expression full of concern, even remorse.

Soon the group was settled in a mossy clearing, some seated
on a fallen log, eating the cheese-stuffed bread that Rip and his group had
prepared. Lilah sat with Hinder, whose friendly smile was the same even if he
wasn’t being watched. He reminded Lilah of Bren, except not as moody.

Little Julian seemed to be in the charge of Irza and her
sister. The Ianth sisters got Julian fed, and then settled on either side of Atan
as Julian squatted happily in the dirt, playing some sort of game with twigs
that she hopped and skipped about. She was whispering under her breath. Acting
out a story with twig people? Lilah grinned, remembering when she used to do
exactly the same thing in the garden at her old home in Selenna, before the
Revolution. She wondered if a Sartoran kid’s story would be anything like
a Sarendan kid’s.

A flicker of color at one side caused her to look up, and Atan
said, “Ready to go?”

Lilah nodded.

“Julian?” a voice called.

The solemn-faced little girl tossed her twigs away and
hopped to Arlas to taken her hand.

Atan fell in step beside Lilah. The group started down an
animal trail that Brick and Sana had picked, walking mostly in twos and threes.
After a time, Atan said in a soft voice, “May I put a question to you
about etiquette?”

Etiquette?
Lilah’s lips framed the word.

“Is it still proper etiquette for monarchs to require
titles and bowing, and the precedence at all times?”

Lilah said, “Well, it was in my uncle’s court.”
She thought back, then added, “That is, I always saw it done, though he
never actually said anything. My father used to get mad if people forgot
etiquette, but my uncle didn’t. Of course, I don’t think anyone
forgot, when he was king. He was so very scary.” She shrugged, a sort of
laugh escaping her—more a nervous sound than one of light-hearted
amusement. “He certainly didn’t expect me to bow when we got away
from the Norsunder base. He only asked me to stop calling him Uncle
Dirty-Hands.”

“You
didn’t
say that.” Atan winced.

“Um, yup. Habit. A nasty moment.”

“Yes! So your brother requires the protocols of rank,
or doesn’t?”

“Well, he’s never said anything around me, but
people just do it, I think.” Lilah frowned, trying to recover a memory. “Wait,
I was wrong, he did say something... If I can just remember...”

While she sorted through the jumble of memories from summer,
Atan said, “Gehlei taught me all the ins and outs of court etiquette.”

“Then you can tell me what star chamber families
are?”

“Those are families whose lines go back a certain
number of centuries. There is apparently a formal hall for certain kinds of
gatherings, where representatives of families stand on their star, and get a
say in certain kinds of decisions.”

“It sounds complicated.”

“It is very complicated, because the stars alter
according to seasons.”

“Wow.” Lilah tried to imagine that. It sounded
so very...
Sartoran
.

Atan went on. “When Hinder first introduced me to the
entire group, and Irza made them all bow, I felt, well,
stupid
, and I
said, without thinking,
No protocol
. But—certain reactions from
some of them—convinced me that was a mistake, though I’m not
certain why. Had I somehow denied my true background or diminished my family in
some symbolic way? And so I added,
Not until Eidervaen is free again
,
which I guess turned it into a sort of heroic statement instead of me being a
coward.”

Lilah laughed at the self-deprecating irony she heard in Atan’s
voice on the word ‘heroic’. “That reminds me! I knew there
was something. Peitar did say that when we were in the formal rooms that formal
etiquette serves to transform an ordinary person into a symbol of the state.”

Atan nodded slowly. “Yes, I see that. And also that
the symbol must be separated off, in order to enable him—or her—to
make decisions that might affect all the others’ lives. And to enable
those others to accept those decisions and to act upon them.”

Lilah sighed and kicked at a pile of withered autumn leaves.
“Peitar was going on one night. About that first moment of power. How it’s
created, when one speaks and the other chooses to act as directed. As usual, I
understood about one word in ten. He kept going on about whether or not this
power ought to exist, and if it could be sustained without the clank of pikes
on the floor, and the march of boots when the guard changes.”

“Moral authority versus power,” Atan said. “Tsauderei
has talked to me about it since I was small, but I’m beginning to see
that what you read about and talk about while sitting with your tutor in a
hermit’s cottage, and when you’re dealing with others... well, let
me say this. I wish I could have had more time to talk to your brother! But I
guess if he could figure out all these things for himself, so can I.”

Lilah flapped her hands. “Besides, he doesn’t
always make sense. Like when he started mumbling stuff about why and when the
guards choose to obey, transferring their implied power to him. So I said,
We
all know the answer to that—we lived through it this summer, when no one
was in power, and everything was a mess, and no one planted the crops
, and
he laughed at me and said,
As always, Lilah, you cut through the illusions
and find the truth
. But you know, I
don’t
always know the
truth, and I’m definitely not always right!”

“But you’re practical,” Atan said,
laughing very softly, so her voice would not carry. “I suspect—little
as I know your brother—that he both values and admires that quality in
you.”

Lilah shrugged, feeling a conflict of emotions: pride, and
laughter at her own mistakes. “About that bowing,” she said. “I
think you were absolutely right. Making the kids bow while wearing rags in the
forest seems kind of pompous, if you ask me. Time enough for etiquette, and
fancy clothes, and the like, after you kick the villains out of the kingdom. And
you know,” Lilah added, feeling surer of herself by the moment, “if
you do manage to get rid of Norsunder, then people might
want
to do all
the old polite forms, because it makes life orderly again. Like they do at
home, for my brother.”

“I thought of that, too.” Atan lifted her chin, glancing
ahead.

Lilah gazed in the same direction, and spotted Arlas and Irza
on either side of Julian. The sisters held the small girl’s hands,
swinging her over every rock and root in the path, while Julian laughed in
delight, as they sang an old marching ballad in counterpoint.

Gradually the abrupt shift from the eternal spring of the
glade to the winter of the rest of the forest began to trouble Atan and her
band.

During the day, while they kept moving, they were fine. But
the first night was troublesome, and Merewen was startled when she discovered little
Julian’s fingers stuffed in her armpits the second morning, her lips
bluish. Blue was a good healthy color for a Loi, but not for anyone else, and
the sisters were trying to figure out which of them could do without their own
scanty warm things when Merewen stooped down and wrapped her yeath-fur cloak
around the child.