Sing the Four Quarters (17 page)

"Hobble him," Otik commanded. "And after you've got the pack back on him, tie his hands. I should've remembered that traitors have no honor."

Annice stared down at the blank page without seeing it, her attention held by the movement under the loose folds of her smock. Over the last few weeks, the baby had grown increasingly more active and almost impossible to ignore. Her awareness of it ran under everything she did; under her music, under time with the fledglings, right
through
eating and sleeping.
It's like having a house guest you can't get rid of
, she thought, chewing on a handful of raisins. I
can't
believe
some women do this more than once
.

Giving herself a mental shake, she finally laid pen to paper, discovered the ink had dried on the quill, and shoved it back into the well. While she usually enjoyed transcribing recall notes, the thought that the king, Theron, would be seeing them kept distracting her.

What was he like now? The evidence of how he wore the crown was hardly hidden but what kind of a man had he become? What kind of a father had he been? Onele was seventeen, a woman grown. Antavas, at thirteen, tottered on the edge of being a man. And Brigita, the baby she'd never seen other than at a careful distance, was a child of ten.

Did he love them? Or were they merely imperial playing pieces as the previous generation of royal children had been

—shuffled from lesson to lesson, brought out and put on display when the occasion merited a show of family.

Did he ever think of her?

Would he listen if she went to him and said…

And said what? Please excuse the fact that I committed treason with a man you're about to behead for the same crime.

Don't hold it against me, don't hold it against my baby. Dream on, Annice. He wouldn't see a coincidence, he'd see a
plot. He's a king before he's your brother
. She'd learned that at fourteen when he'd rejected everything she was and everything she wanted for herself.

In the early days of her training, when the anger had dimmed until only the hurt remained, she'd dreamed about the day when he'd realize what he'd done and come to her and ask her forgiveness. With every year that passed, the hurt grew and more of the anger returned.

And now, it was too late.

A sudden blaze of light drew her out of a deepening spiral of self-pity as one of the librarians moved around the room tending the lamps. If it was that late, maybe Tadeus had a new message from Stasya.

"Hello, Nees."

"Hello, Imrich. Where are you off to in such a hurry?"

The young man beamed proudly at her, close-set eyes nearly disappearing in the folds of his smile. "Going to get ribbon for Tadeus." He held up one thick-fingered hand. A scarlet ribbon had been loosely tied around his wrist. "Must match this one 'zacally."

"But it's after dark, all the ribbon makers will be closed."

"Not going to shops. Going to Ceci's rooms. Tadeus says she has ribbons to match."

Annice had no idea how Tadeus, being blind, could possibly know what color ribbons the other bard had, or even that she
had
ribbons, but had no wish to confuse poor Imrich by saying so aloud. With one arm curled protectively around her belly, she watched him walk down the hall, stocky body rocking from side to side as he hurried off to complete his errand.

Imrich was what the healers called a Moonchild. They
said
that the name came from the round and flattened features, but Annice suspected that, way back in the beginning, they'd thought the moon somehow responsible—healers were very touchy about outgrown superstitions. The son of one of the cooks at the palace, Imrich had headed for music of any kind the moment he could creep and had finally, to his great joy, been taken on at Bardic Hall as a server. He adored Tadeus, who occasionally had to be reminded not to take advantage of his good nature.

No one knew what caused a baby to be born a Moon-child or why some were more affected than others. Imrich lived a happy, productive, albeit simple life. Others Annice had seen sat grunting in corners, barely aware of self or surroundings. She felt a sudden rush of fear at the thought that her baby could be one of those.

"Are you coming in, Annice? Or did you just come up to lurk about outside my door?"

Jolted out of dark imaginings by Tadeus' appearance in the hall, Annice felt her jaw drop. "What is that on your head?

"

"Do you like it?" A gentle shake sent the heavy fringe hanging off the broad brim of his felt hat swinging, the arc just clearing the tip of his nose. "There's only so many ways you can tie a scarf around your eyes before it gets old so,
hokal
!" He threw the Petrokian word in with a flourish and stepped to one side. "My cousin the milliner made it up for me."

Mesmerized by the swaying fringe, Annice slid past him into his room. "I thought your cousin was a tailor."

"I have a lot of cousins," Tadeus declared with satisfaction, following her in and closing the door. "And they're all in the clothing trade."

Blindness forced Tadeus to keep his room compulsively neat and the visitor who moved a chair or set a mug where it didn't belong was never invited back. Carved letters on the edge of his shelves kept clothing sorted by color. There were a great many shelves.

"You're going to have to request a double room soon," Annice observed, "so that you and your wardrobe can continue to live together."

"I'm going to have to go through all this and pass on the no longer fashionable," Tadeus corrected, carefully removing a kettle from his fire and pouring two portions of hot cider. "Shall I arrange it that you get a shirt or two?"

"Thank you, no. I've no desire to look like a slaughtered sheep when that crimson fabric of yours loses its dye in the rain."

"Try to keep up, Nees. That doesn't happen anymore." He passed her a mug and settled into the room's second chair, one slender leg draped nonchalantly over the padded arm. "Sea-trader came back from the south last summer with the secret, and, now local cloth, provided, of course, it's bought from my-cousin-the-dyer, will be just as colorfast as the imported. There's this stuff called alum they add to the bath…" Warming to his subject, Tadeus went into a complicated explanation of the process to which Annice paid little attention.

"Has a message come from Stasya yet?" she asked when he finally paused for breath.

His expression grew instantly contrite. "Oh, center it, Nees, I'm sorry. I meant to tell you right away. You shouldn't have let me babble on like that."

"I've never found a way to shut you up." The smile in her voice took the edge off the words. "So. What's she have to say?"

"The due tried to escape again."

"Again? How many times is that, three?"

"Four," Tadeus corrected glumly. "Stas is afraid he's trying to goad Otik into killing him out of hand."

"No. He's trying to stay alive. To escape the block. That's all."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure. He was one of the most alive people I ever met."

"Meet a lot of dead people, do you?"

"Tad!"

"Sorry." He didn't look very sorry. "After you leave and I can get a kigh to come around, I'll tell her."

Annice tried very hard not to resent the fact that she'd been cut off from air, that messages had to be passed through an intermediary. She wasn't entirely successful. "Anything else."

"Just the usual mushy stuff." He grinned. "She misses you. I'm to see that you take care of yourself. You're not to worry about her. What do you want me to answer?"

That I'm afraid of dying. That I don't want my baby to pay for its father's crime. That I want her here to help me deal
with all this
. Leaning forward, she flicked the fringe above Tadeus' nose and forced a calm she didn't feel into her voice. "Oh, just the usual mushy stuff."

"I
can't
keep him under Command all the time! He'll go insane!"

"What difference does that make?" Otik growled. "He's going to die anyway."

"There're twenty-one of you," Stasya snarled. "And only one of him. I should think you could control him without my help."

A few feet away, Pjerin sucked in a shallow breath and grimaced as even such minor movement ground bones together. He'd very nearly made it this last time. Would have made it if those unenclosed kigh hadn't given him away.

Arms cruelly bound high on his back, one cheek pushed into the mud, he listened to the argument and almost wished the bard would give in, would give him an excuse not to keep trying and failing and with every failure sliding faster and faster toward despair.

"Get up!"

The boot drove into his thigh hard enough to lift him a few inches from the ground.

"I said; get up, oathbreaker!"

The second kick smashed into his hip. Gagging from the pain, Pjerin struggled to raise himself to his knees, terrified that a third kick would hit ribs already broken. A helping hand buried itself in his hair and yanked.

He fought to stay conscious. He wouldn't give them the satisfaction of throwing his limp body into the back of a wagon like so much carrion. If they were going to get him to Elbasan, they were going to have to fight him every step of the way.

Gerek looked at the family crest etched into the pommel of the Ducal sword and then up at Olina, his eyes red and puffy from crying. He'd been so certain his papa would be back by First Quarter Festival that not even the festival gifts piled by his bed at sunrise had prevented a morning of tears.

Sighing deeply, he wrapped both hands around the wire grip as far as they would go.

"
As your papa isn't here, Gerek
," Olina had told him as they'd walked hand in hand down to the field, "
you've got to
take care of things. It's up to you
."

The gathered villagers murmured approval. Gerek ignored them. They'd said bad things about his papa. He remembered. He wasn't a baby anymore.

Olina released her hold on the sword.

Gerek hung on. The point quivered in the air for an instant then dropped, burying itself in the dirt, marking the first furrow of the new season's ploughing. Legs braced, he stood and watched as the team of slow moving oxen dragged the plough to the far end of the field, peeling back the first trench for the spring planting. Not until they began their turn, did Olina reach down and take the sword out of his hands.

"I'm very proud of you," she whispered as she turned him to face the cheering crowd. "You've woken the earth from its Fourth Quarter sleep and ensured that your people will have bread this year."

He twisted his head to stare up at her. "I have?"

"Yes.
You
have." She smiled at him and was rewarded by a tentative smile returned. In a very short time, this child would be the Due of Ohrid, hers to teach, to train, to rule.

CHAPTER SEVEN

"… carrying low, so it's likely a girl. Although…" The heavyset young woman reflectively rolled a ball of damp earth between her fingers. "… as I think on it, my cousin Onele—the one who always said that Her Highness the Heir was named for her—well, she carried so high her tits stuck out like a shelf and still ended up delivered of a fine healthy girl. But, on the other hand, my Aunt Edite when she was carrying my little nephew—such a pretty baby he turned out to be…"

Annice let the steady stream of chatter flow in one ear and out the other while she sipped at the traditional bard's cup of clear water.
I'm so tired of hearing about babies. Can't anyone think about anything else
? It didn't help that she was Singing fertility and the hope of high yield into the earth. She'd been Singing almost constantly since First Quarter Festival, roaming the city, calling her services out for anyone who might have a bit of garden they wanted Sung—and she rather suspected that a number of people who wouldn't normally bother took one look at her condition and figured it couldn't hurt.

Cup drained and formalities satisfied, she handed the small clay vessel back to her hostess and, so smoothly that the other woman had no idea she'd been interrupted, asked for the use of the privy.

"Oh, certainly, for it's very important that you keep your bladder emptied, not only because of discomfort—and don't I know that babies seem to bounce on it purposefully—but because if you wait, well, infections can grow. I mark how my partner's sister waited too long and…"

Closing the privy door muffled the stream of information and Annice sighed as she maneuvered her bulk around in the enclosed space. I
think I've seen the inside of every privy in Elbasan. What a recall on city sanitation I'll be able to
make. I can only hope that the captain herself gets to read every single word of it
.

It had been the captain who'd pointed out that as she was now Singing earth so strongly and as she was in no condition to begin a First Quarter Walk, she could do some work in the city. Annice had no objection to the Singing, but the symbolic watering-the-bard that followed had floated her through the last twelve days. Out in the country, village bounds were Walked and the area enclosed all Sung at once. One Song, albeit a long one, meant one watering. In the city, outside the rough community gardens of the poorer areas, every individual household wanted an individual Song and poured her an individual cup of water which symbolism required her to drink. Annice had never realized how many people actually lived in Elbasan before.

Nor would it have occurred to me that every single one of them would have an opinion on my belly
. As it appeared that the young woman had finally run out of stories concerning childbearing relatives, Annice hastily rearranged her clothing and stepped back out into the small yard.

Although only watering-the-bard was required from the householder, most added a small, easily carried token for luck.

In the country, buttons or spoons or combs intricately carved from wood or horn over a long winter trapped inside were usually presented. Annice had a horn spoon so beautifully translucent and skillfully carved that once when eating porridge in an inn, she'd been offered a double-anchor for it. She'd laughed, spun the heavy silver coin on the table, and pocketed her spoon. In the city, coins predominated; gulls for the most part but two half-anchors nestled in the bottom of her pouch and as she moved into the richer neighborhoods she expected to get more. The Hall would take a percentage, the rest would be hers to spend as she wished. Normally, she'd toss the lot at the Hall—fed, housed, and clothed she had little need for money—but with a baby on the way, she supposed it wouldn't hurt to have some set aside.