Sartor (41 page)

“What happened on the tower?” Atan asked,
glancing over her shoulder at the tower, gleaming in the moonlight.

Merewen shivered. “I was so afraid, but the blue
people were around me, and when that horrid thing came at me out of the air,
they
pushed
, and I, um, learned how to unbody—no, that sounds
silly. How to not be human, and be a Loi instead.”

“Oh,” Lilah let out a long breath. “Is it
as wonderful as the caves?”

“Different,” Merewen said. “Words
don’t work. And time is different. I thought I was gone a little bit, but
I wanted to come and tell you that the Loi said that now I know how to go back
and forth, I can be your Aroel.”

“Good,” Atan said happily. “So the Loi are
formless?”

“No. Yes. I will explain when I understand
better.”

Merewen shivered. “This I can tell you. Savar was
killed by some Norsundrian magician. Vashee—Vorshee—Vatiora. That’s
it. Not that Dejain, the pretty one who was doing all the magic against us. An
even worse one, they said. “

“I feared so,” Atan said, and added firmly,
“When a new building is built, it’s going to be named for him. That
I promise.”

Merewen smiled mistily. “That makes me happy in the
middle of my sad.”

o0o

The mourning circle was done.

The aristocrats were the first to peel off and resume the
excavation of their stately homes along Parleas Terrace.

Arlas skipped along, happy to still be alive, for she was
not the target of her mother’s low, irritated voice. “You could not
reclaim the child, I comprehend. Those pleasure house people are, of course,
out for whatever they can get. I will take my place tomorrow at the convening
of Star Chamber, but only long enough to make my vows and demonstrate that
Ianth House is alive. We will not waste our time with the rabble that will no
doubt line up to make demands that that child cannot yet give. She has an empty
treasury, unless there are outland holdings, and it will take months to sort
that out. But there is always spring.”

There is always spring
, Irza was thinking as her
mother went on ahead. She and Arlas followed, hand in hand. At least, they were
home.

Mendaen and Sana and Vanya and Pouldi accompanied the
remaining guards from a hundred years ago to their barracks, to tell them what
had happened since they fell into enchantment.

Hinder and Sin vanished to report to Grandfather.

At last Atan and Lilah were left alone.

“You might as well send me back,” Lilah said. “I
know what comes next, from watching Peitar. You’ve got to start queening,
which means you’ll be busy. I can’t do anything about that and
anyway, I want to spend New Year’s with Peitar.”

Atan hugged Lilah tightly, wordlessly, then said, “You
were my first friend here, and one of the most loyal. Do not let this be our
last time together.”

Lilah shook her head, snuffling a little, then wiping her
nose defiantly on her black Norsundrian jacket.

“If I may, I’d like to come talk to Peitar,”
Atan added. “Once things settle down.”

Lilah said fervently, “I know he’d like that.”

Atan did the spell.

When the transfer nastiness wore off, Lilah found herself in
Miraleste. She ran through the quiet palace, which seemed new and modern after
the one in Eidervaen. She found Peitar at his desk, as always.

When she appeared, his face eased. She said, “Sartor
is free again!”

Peitar laughed and drew her to the kitchens to eat. She
talked the entire way, finishing up very late that night.

“... and there was a vast big blue light, kind of. Sort
of like lightning, but it didn’t hurt. But it made everyone dizzy. And
when we all got over being dizzy, some of the Norsunder people vanished by
magic, others ran together, ready to fight as they retreated. A few of them
looked around like everyone else, then ran into the crowd.”

“I suspect that some of them were bound by
enchantment,” Peitar said.

“Anyway, they were gone, so Atan said we would do a
mourning circle at sunset tonight. Just like Sartorans have done for centuries!
I felt a bit like some kind of spy, being the only one not a Sartoran, for Rel
was gone. But Atan seemed to like me being there, and oh, I felt like a girl in
one of the old stories! Then, when we got back, Merewen was there, and Atan
smiled again. I was afraid she would never smile again, and I wondered if it
was being a queen that made her so solemn. Even sort of sad.”

Peitar Selenna frowned a little as he gazed out the window. As
usual, Lilah found it impossible to tell what her brother was thinking. Outside
their cozy parlor room, snow fell with steady softness. Beyond that, Lake Tseos
lay, a silvery frozen stretch. And beyond the lake, way beyond, impossible to
see through the soft white fall, were the mountains that divided Sarendan from
Sartor, which was now free.

“Go on,” Peitar murmured.

Lilah sighed. “Then they all went home, and we were
alone. And I think she wanted to explore that palace, but I got the feeling she
wanted to do it by herself. Because she didn’t ask me to come, like she
did for the mourning circle. She asked me what I wanted, and I said if she didn’t
need any more help, could she send me home. Sartor has about a million years of
customs and rules and stuff, and I felt like I didn’t belong.”

Peitar nodded. “I see. So you felt you’d shifted
from help to being another problem for her to solve.”

“Exactly,” Lilah said, relieved her brother
understood, and that his pensive expression—so oddly a mirror to
Atan’s after Rel left—had vanished. “She made me promise to
come back, and wants to talk to you when she can.”

“Of course she’s welcome,” Peitar said, still
smiling. “Good job, Lilah. In fact, a great job. I could not have done
half so well. Here, your dinner’s gone cold. Let’s get some hot
chocolate, shall we?”

Atan walked inside the palace,
her
palace, knowing
what had to come next. She would have to arrange tomorrow’s coronation.
It would be a slapdash affair, but that was all right. Nobody would expect the
customary panoply because everything was still a mess, and her father’s
body had probably been Disappeared a century ago.

Holding the ceremony three days after the death of a king
was custom, and Tsauderei had taught her enough about history to understand
that when everyone readily re-establishes custom, it means they want order.

She would have to find a crown in that storage room
upstairs, if they hadn’t all been looted, and she’d go inspect the
Star Chamber room, which she knew the servants had been cleaning. She had no idea
how badly it might have been damaged, but it was the traditional space, so they
would meet there and knit order back, one person at a time, as they spoke the
old vows.

Then would come all the messy stuff as life resumed.

Tonight she must contact Tsauderei and talk to him, and she
would bring Gehlei back, for she’d promised her once to give her any
position she wanted. Gehlei had said,
Not for me the coronets and lands, and
all the elbow-wrassle of politics and precedence. Make me steward of your
palace, and I will make it a home again
.

All that could wait a little while yet. The first thing she
had to do, while she was by herself, was to go into her parents’ wing.

She took a candle and climbed alone to the area that Gehlei
had described so well. She looked up at the stairwell, the light making the
long shadows jump over scorched tapestries and a few shattered statues. She
tried to scold herself into practicality. The violence had taken place a
century ago, not yesterday.

She trod upward until she reached the royal wing. She laid
her hands on the latches to the double doors, drew in a deep breath, and then
opened them.

Horrible imaginings of blood and mayhem, or burnings or
lootings, had troubled her ever since she was small. What she saw in the dim
light were the three main rooms, each opening onto the next.

She set the candle down and experimentally snapped her
fingers. To her surprise, the glowglobes responded with a flood of light.
Either the spells were good after a century, or they had frozen in time.

Unless someone had been here and renewed them.

The outer room was a kind of parlor, apparently undisturbed.
The next was the bedroom. Again she snapped her fingers and said the word, and
light glowed into being. There, just as Gehlei had described it, lay her mother’s
nightgown, thrown across the bed.

Grief seized Atan by the heart as horribly as if the tragedy
had happened yesterday. Tears flooded her eyes as she remembered Gehlei’s
words...
and your mother dressed, giving orders all the while, while your father
clutched his head, exclaiming in bits of unrelated poetry while he searched all
through his desk, leaving everything a welter of papers. It was the last time I
saw them, for I took her at her word, and scooped you up, and ran out into the
rainstorm, glad of its cover
...

Atan scrubbed her wrist across her eyes. There was much to
be done this night. But she had to finish this first.

She ran her hand over that nightgown, trying to imagine her
mother’s warmth in it. What scent had she worn? It would be something
nice, like fresh flowers. Atan lifted the fine fabric and pressed it to her cheek.
It smelled like dust and cotton, and a fleeting sense of autumn leaves, carried
in no doubt through the windows left open these many years.

Atan laid it gently down and looked around, aware of some
kind of anomaly.

Everything was orderly, with no signs of looting. The
wardrobe—she opened it—was still full of clothes.

She trod to the far door, the one to her father’s
private study. It was a beautifully appointed room, dominated by an equally
tidy desk.

...
leaving everything a welter of papers
...

There was no welter of papers here. The desk was orderly,
the papers stacked and aligned. By whose hand? Atan knew it could not have been
her father’s, for he had been so desperate that last night. Even at the
best of times, he had apparently seldom been very orderly.

Someone had confined the pillaging to the west wing—someone
with enough control over Norsundrians, who were not known for merciful
treatment of their prey.

She looked at the desk, sickened at the thought of Detlev,
for it could only be he, seated here at her father’s desk, reading
everything at his leisure.

She approached, her flesh unwilling, her mind clamoring. She
had to know.

She looked down at the papers in their stacks. The words
were difficult to make out in the light from the bedroom. She snapped her
fingers and said the magic word, and the glowglobes forced back the shadows.

She turned back to the desk.

The first stack of papers appeared to be domestic lists. Another
was of logistical reports for an evacuation order that apparently was never
carried out. More—lists of fallen, of demands, of losses.

On the top shelf, a single paper lay, with a note in a neat,
slanted hand.

She bent closer, picked it up, and discovered her full name
written out.

Yustnesveas Landis
.

She dropped it as though her fingers had been stung. It had
to be from a Norsundrian, for surely no one else could have been there.

Her first instinct was to carry the note straight to the
fireplace and use magic to make a blaze, but she knew this was a stupid idea,
that whatever the note said, it was better to know than to wonder and perhaps
to be denied, through her own weakness, a clue to her enemy’s thought.

So she sat down at her father’s desk and, without
touching the paper again, read the words written there.

The report has just reached me that my orders have not in
fact been carried out, and your governess dispatched the one who would have
been your assassin
—

Coldness roughened the flesh along Atan’s outer arms. This
letter had been written not long after the defeat—and—she glanced
down to the bottom—it was unsigned, but she knew. She
knew
it had
to be from Detlev himself.

Her heartbeat drummed in her ears. She read on.

Though my subordinates are roaming about, gloating over
their victory, your continued existence causes me to consider this exercise
incomplete
.

Tension tightened the back of Atan’s neck.

All right, she thought, get some control. The villain is not
omniscient—or I wouldn’t be here. He’s assuming that I would
someday reappear, and that I—or someone—might manage to negate his
spells, or else I would never see this nasty note of his. So here comes the
threat, no doubt.

You will do well to remember that what I begin I always
finish
.

She looked up. Well, that was sufficiently sinister.

The instinct to glance fearfully at shadows for lurking
Norsundrians kept her muscles tense, so she forced herself to get to her feet
and to cross the room, and look out the broad window overlooking the river
below, and on the other side, the broad boulevard of the Chandos Way below
Parleas Terrace. In the darkness, orange glowed skyward—bonfires. They
were part of the celebration, for through the open window came the sounds of
singing.

Facts.

Detlev was
not
here. Nor had he appeared to wrest
Sartor back. She’d won. The singing swelled as people added their voices.
Directly below the window, someone laughed.

Right now the city was hers. The kingdom was hers. Battered,
bewildered, and a century backward, Sartor was hers. Impoverished,
grief-stricken, angry, facing a winter with few resources, Sartor was hers. Its
problems were hers, and its defense was hers.

Was she happy? No, her feelings were too deep for mere
happiness. What she felt as she stood at the window in her parents’
silent room, listening to the singing voices in the rise and fall of the
melodic triplets of Sartoran music— once thought vanished from the world—and
looking out at the ancient rooftops outlined by the ruddy glow of bonfires, was
joy. It was a quiet joy, a determined joy, one aware of sadness.