The Leopard (Marakand) (6 page)

They lit the hill-beacons, but of course there was no time for the lords of the outlying regions to come down the valleys and over the hills with their warriors. Dinaz Catairna was only a day’s hard ride on a good horse from the caravan road, and though the Marakanders weren’t advancing quite so swiftly, they were not dallying over-long at their looting, either. Deyandara was sick with headaches, throwing up whenever she moved too quickly, though the queen’s physician said her skull was sound and she had taken no permanent harm. She had strange dreams, of the Avain Praitanna, the western of the two rivers of Praitan, rising in flood and carrying her away; of drowning in a bog, a great weight on her; of a burning roof falling in on her while she screamed and beat at someone she could not see, who held her down by the wrists and shrieked with laughter. Fever, Lord Yvarr told her.

The assassin stirred restlessly. Yes, this wasn’t meant to be her story.

There had been no warning from Catairanach their goddess. Her spring on the hillside, where the clear water welled up into a pool of mossy stones overhung by three mountain ash trees, still naked and winter-grey, was troubled, cloudy with sand. When Yvarr knelt on the flat stone where the kings stood to call her, there was no answer but a skirl of wind and a spatter of rain, like tears, from an unclouded sky.

“Nothing but tears,” he reported back to the old bard in the hall.

“A goddess may mourn as much as a man,” the bard said.

“But we need her. If men crawled away and hid in their grief, the world would soon fall to ruin. If she would speak to someone, anyone . . .”

Marnoch was appointed war-leader, in default of any other, before the lords could begin quarrelling over that right. He led out a war-band to nip at the army’s heels, test them, harry them in the twilight and by night. He didn’t have the force to meet them in the open. Before long he was falling back on the
dinaz
, though they still made harrying attacks on the Marakander camp in the dawn and dusk, and few of the enemy scouts got far when they left the protection of their main body. But he could not hold up the advancing Marakanders for long. The nearby lords who answered the summons of the beacons had come with the bare minimum of spears, thinking it no more than a raid out of the Tributary Lands south of the road.

Who went to war now, in the cold rains of the lambing season?

A city folk. Mercenaries, with no land and no god.

And the Duina Broasoran to their east would not come to their aid, would not set old quarrels aside and stand together as Praitans should. Yvarr sent a messenger, but without much hope. There was outstanding between them the matter of a raiding party led by Queen Cattiga’s late brother, he who had died last autumn of the southern pox, and a woman of the Broasorans carried off from her husband, who was kin to the Broasoran queen. The Catairnans said it had been elopement, the woman a willing conspirator, but folk of the husband’s household had died in the pursuit, and the woman had died of the southern pox as well, so there was blood between them, and they had not agreed on asking a wizard to divine for the truth, neither tribe trusting the divination of the other.

If truth be told, they had expected either a demand for a combat of champions or outright war with the Broasorans to follow the lambing and spring planting. That did not mean they were ready for Marakand; maybe it was the threat of the Duina Broasoran that had led Cattiga to listen when the Marakander priests falsely spoke of alliance.

Lord Yvarr sent couriers bearing messages, pleas, to the high king in Dinaz Andara as well, but that was a ride of many days. Dinaz Andara lay east and north, between the two great rivers of Praitan, the Avain Praitanna and the Avain Noreia, and quite far north of the caravan road that was the southern boundary of Praitannec lands. Deyandara signed them, as Yvarr asked, and then she went away to the queen’s bower, a separate, stone-walled building, hung with tapestries from the distant east, where it was quiet. There she carried on turning words, discarding words, making a song of the death of Cattiga and Gilru. But they fell stiff and leaden, never the ring of true silver. She was not a poet. She thought she never would be, and there was an ache in her heart for that lack in herself, heavy as the weight of Cattiga’s death.

What followed was her own story. She did not need to tell the assassin how, when Marnoch returned to the
dinaz
, she, with Badger at her side, met him at the gate, watching as the file of men and a few women threaded their little horses up the twisting path between the earthen banks. They eyed her warily, wearily . . . knowingly. It was late afternoon, and the sun slanted over the hills, touching gorse-flower into golden fire. A few of the lords reined aside, once through the gate in the innermost dyke, the outer face of which had a drystone facing and was topped with wooden pales. They were already preparing to burn all that would burn, including the wooden gates, and flee, not to be penned up here like pigs awaiting slaughter. The lords milled about between the low-eaved roundhouses, as if waiting. Deyandara’s stomach had grown tight and sick. She wasn’t waiting for them; she had only come to see that Marnoch was safely returned. He rode near the last, muddy and tattered; he would have gone out with the scouts, she knew, war-leader or no. He was a fox of the hills, not a wolf. But maybe a fox was what the folk needed, now. For a moment she had thought that she should tell him so. There was defeat already in his eyes. But he saw her and swung a leg over his horse and came down to fling his arms around her, which startled them both. She pulled away, heart racing, and cursed herself the next moment for the look on his face, gone careful and closed.

“My lady,” he said. She had always been Deya, before. “When I left, I feared I’d come back to find you’d joined the dead.”

“It was only a knock on the head,” she said, and felt the blush burning from her breasts to the roots of her hair. “I’m—I didn’t come out here to be in the way. I wanted to see you were safe, you all were safe.” Damn her tongue for adding the last.

“Those we didn’t leave on the hills,” he said. “The Marakanders are close behind. They’ll be here tomorrow.” He crouched to scratch Badger’s ears, and the dog leaned into him, tail stirring welcome. “I should go to my father.” He eyed the hovering lords, sought Deyandara’s eye, which dropped to her boots; he waved the lords on. They went without a word, though they leaned heads together and whispered.

“We need to talk, lady,” Marnoch had said. “You and I and my father.”

She nodded, with a sick churning in her stomach that had nothing to do with the headaches that still chased her. She should have ridden with the first couriers sent to her brother, but had been too ill. And now . . . before she died, Queen Cattiga had spoken to Lord Yvarr about Deyandara and what she had sought in the Duina Catairna. Of course she had.

“Once we’ve started readying the folk to flee to the hills,” he said, “we’ll talk. The land’s lordless; Catairanach can’t like that.”

She had licked her lips and nodded; he had given her a weary smile and gone away.

It had not been only Yvarr and Marnoch waiting for her in the queen’s bower, later. The old bard and his daughter, all the lords and ladies who had answered the beacons, they all stood, waiting, when she came, hesitating in the doorway, a hand on Badger’s head for courage.

“Lady,” said Yvarr, “we need to know. Are you our—are you kin to our queen?” He looked around, a challenge, but no one disagreed. “All the hall has watched you all the winter, ever since you came in the last of the autumn. All the hall could see it, when you stood by the queen, like enough to be her sister. All the hall,” he sighed, “knew Prince Palin, and there have always been rumours out of the Duina Andara. Your mother was sent back to her own people after your birth, was she not?”

And died of a broken heart within a year. Deyandara nodded, took a breath, and looked up.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Nobody told me. I was supposed to be a seven-months’ baby, though my nurse says I was born fat and hale. But—but if I had been carried the full term, then my father, my mother’s husband, was away beyond the river fighting the eastern hillfolk with the Duina Noreia at the time I should have been begotten, and—and the bard Palin was in Dinaz Andara, they say, then.” She hadn’t dared ask the god the truth; she had been too angry with him, angry at all the hall, at all her kin and the lords who had kept this from her all her life. By the time anger cooled, she was with Yselly in the Duina Galatan, far from Andara’s land. And after Yselly died . . . “I came here to ask Prince Palin the truth.”

And came too late, on the heels of the bloody pox, to find him dead, and the queen’s husband dead, and the queen’s two elder children dead, and here she was, the high king’s sister, or half-sister, almost claiming to be the queen’s niece and next heir after her only surviving child, as if she wanted, as if she hoped . . . but all she had wanted was to know, to understand if that was why her mother’s husband, for all he claimed her and gave her a royal name, possibly just to spite her mother, had shoved her out of the way all his life, and taught her brothers to do likewise, to call her clumsy, unlucky, a lodestone for mischance.

Tainted with the curse on the royal blood of the Duina Catairna, she understood now.

“What did Cattiga say of it, lady?” Yvarr asked gently.

She took another steadying breath. “Cattiga said it was all too likely, knowing her brother, but that none other of his bastards had ever survived their first year; they were born sickly and never did thrive. He thought it was the curse and treated it as a blessing, freeing him from responsibility. She put our faces side by side in her mirror and said, ‘No one can doubt it.’” Red hair, golden-brown eyes, the dusting of freckles; that was something a score of women within a day’s ride might claim. Deyandara had her mother’s longer face, darker lashes, but the nose, the chin, the set of her mouth, were all doubled in Cattiga’s mirror. “‘I don’t wish another heir,’ the queen said,”—with sorrow in her eyes, because she knew and Deyandara knew that one child was not enough to safeguard her line—“and I said I was not looking to be one, that I wanted only to find my kin, to be—to be among friends.” She raised her chin. “So. Yes, she acknowledged me her niece. And no, she did not publicly acknowledge me her next heir after my cousin Gilru. Why should she have? She was still a young woman; she would likely have other children; she knew the need to remarry soon, whatever her grief. I didn’t come here for that. I’m a bard’s apprentice—” Still that lie. “I’m not of age. I’m no warrior, no wise old woman, I’m not the queen you need.”

“But you are the last descendent of King Hyllanim,” the seneschal had said.

“A bastard,” had been her harsh retort.

“Some,” the old bard said, with his fingers touching the strings of his lap-harp, waking no sound, “say that King Hyllanim was likewise.”

Silence greeted that. White-haired Lady Senara, lord of a valley in the north of the
duina
, coughed. “Well,” she said, “at least his father was
a
king.” And she chuckled. Marnoch made a face as if suppressing a smile, but most looked disapproving, blond young Lord Fairu outright shocked. It was not a story in which the folk of the Duina Catairna took any pride. Deyandara didn’t much care who Hyllanim’s father had been. He was her great-grandfather, and it was a long time ago.

“I don’t want to be queen. I’m not fit for it. I wasn’t educated for it.” She wasn’t educated at all, till these last few years after her acknowledged father’s death, when her brother Durandau realized he had a pretty and potentially useful tool for alliance-making on his hands, who was running wild as a feral cat about the
dinaz
. He’d inflicted a tutor on her, an elegant and ladylike Nabbani wizard who’d been travelling through the
duina
, and tried too late and all at once to make her a princess of the folk. Letting her have one season travelling with a minor bard of her mother’s folk had been a concession he proposed to stop the fights about learning court Nabbani, the accusations that he meant to sell her to some foreign merchant of the eastern desert. Her quarrels with brother and tutor—to herself she admitted she had thrown outright tantrums—had far more to do with the secrets no one would discuss than with any lessons of Lady Lin’s. She had never been Mistress Yselly’s apprentice.

“There’s no one else,” Marnoch had said. “Deya—my lady. We need you. We need to be able to summon the lords, the ones who think the
duina
is already lost, the ones who didn’t answer the beacons. And Deya, you know the high king as we don’t. My father’s already sent to him, in the name of the folk, but if we beg aid in your name—will your brother come?”

A good and dutiful and half-educated little sister, who had no idea how to be a queen, and needed counsellors and officers and . . .

“He’ll come,” she said wearily, and looked around them all. “Even if he won’t come to save Catairanach’s land from Marakand, he’ll come to make me your queen.”

After a moment, Yvarr had said, “Lady, you’re already our queen.” Though that wasn’t quite true, not without the approval of the lords and the blessing of the goddess.

After the letters were written and she had signed them, and the messengers who would carry them to Dinaz Andara had come and gone, she had gone herself to where her pony was penned with others of the royal hall, meaning only to check on him and on her gear in the stable, since she would be going wherever Yvarr and Marnoch fled to make their new fastness, no doubt of that, now. But in the dusky twilight of the stable there had been water rushing around her, a wind in her ears . . .

“The night that Lord Marnoch returned,” she told the Leopard, “the goddess Catairanach drew me into a waking dream and gave me a message to carry. I seemed to be at her spring below the
dinaz
walls. The boughs of the mountain ash over me were heavy with creamy blossom, and the bees . . .”

“Leave out the bard’s embroidery. I know the place. What did Catairanach have to say for herself?”