Inda (6 page)

This family had produced the first real Marlovan king, and now were exiles on their own lands. Old history seemed suddenly immediate, and he wondered what Shendan was going to say next. He suspected he would not find out until he answered as she wanted, so he chanted in Marlovan, the words sounding to him, as always, like the galloping of a horse:

Shendan echoed in a derisive singsong, “ ‘Allies and equals, before they were kings.’ How many lies in that line?”

Inda knew plenty of girls, but not one was anything like this Shendan. “Not lies,” he stated. “Poetic embellishments. That’s what my mother calls ’em.”

Shendan cast him a sideways look, full of inward laughter. “I should have known you’d be familiar with such things. Your mother grew up here, after all, and I’m glad she taught you. I’ll bet a horse you even know the dates in Sartoran time.”

Marlovan history was sung, and time was measured by great deeds, not years. But Inda said, “Your ancestor made a treaty by marriage with the Cassadas family in 3682, when he took over Iasca Leror.”
After which they changed their name to Cassad, and became as Marlovan as the rest of us.

“And do you know when Anderle Montrei-Vayir had my ancestor, as you call him, assassinated?”

“3718,” Inda said, feeling uncomfortable—as if it had happened last week, and not almost two hundred years ago.

“Well, lies or poetry, it sounds good, doesn’t it? All right, then. Skip away to ‘riding the ranges’—”

Inda chanted,

The old words, sung over and over since Inda was small, suddenly took on different meaning now that he was standing in the stronghold of the Montredavan-Ans so vilified in the song.

Shendan’s mouth curved in her soundless laugh, then she continued:

Fame-fire—the craving for never-ending renown—that was the way the words translated, but until now Inda had never thought about what they really meant. His face heated under Shendan’s trenchant gaze. What came next were the triumphant verses about how the new Jarls swore allegiance to the new Montrei-Vayir king, who pledged peace and plenty. He said, “So the old songs lie, is that it?”

Shen snorted. “Didn’t it ever seem silly to you that all the dogs yapping at Anderle Montrei-Vayir’s heels added ‘Vayir,’ which means ‘plains,’ onto their family names, just when they left riding the plains and moved into the castles they’d stolen from the Iascans? ‘Great Vayir strongholds’ indeed!”

Inda had always liked those verses. He grimaced. “Dogs including my own ancestors.” He pointed at her. “But it wasn’t strut when the Haucs and the Davan-Ans and the Vayirs put ‘Montrei’
before
their names?”

Shen’s lips tightened. “It was always part of our name. It had all slurred together by the time the Haucs and the Vayirs thought to put ‘Montrei’ to theirs. Montrei means ‘leader.’ ”

“It means ‘fist’ in ancient Venn,” Inda retorted. For the first time he was glad of all those afternoons studying with his mother when the rest of the boys were out running around, free as air. “Marlovans changed that to mean the strongest leader. Montrei-Hauc, leaders of the mountain families, Montredavan-An, leaders of farmers and forest, and Montrei-Vayir, leaders of the plains. It was supposed to unite them. But it didn’t.”

Shendan lifted her shoulders, then gave him a reluctant grin. “You’re the first boy I’ve ever talked to who knew that. Besides my brother.”

“My ancestors pretty much had to add Vayir onto their names, I was told,” Inda said. He was ready to make peace if she was.

Shen nodded, and indeed returned a kind of peace offering. “I learned that too, and why: because they got their title by marriage even before my great-father rode into Darchelde. I think old Anderle, so good at backstabbing, probably expected your Algaras to turn Iascan, and maybe expand Choraed Elgaer’s borders at the expense of the incoming Marlovans, and so your ancestors had to add Vayir or find his army at your castle gates.”

Inda’s mother had told him that some families spoke of unity when tacking “Vayir” onto their names, but most of them had done it to avoid Anderle’s wrath—and his retribution. Only the very strongest landholding families, like the Tlens and the Sindan-Ans, could really choose whether to add it or just keep their names as they were.

But he didn’t say any of that now.

Shendan was used to being the smartest of any boy or girl she met, not that she met many, exiled here on her own land. A daughter of a king without a crown. And here was one who would ride out free and easy, and she just had to test him one more time.

So she laughed softly, hugging her arms to her, and stepped closer, staring straight into his eyes. “Did you know,” she asked in that goading voice, “that that very next generation stopped speaking Marlovan? Except for all their silly titles they were acting more Iascan than the Iascans, because the real Iascans thought us a lot of barbarians.”

Inda retorted, “Iascans had writing. Marlovans did not. They used Iascan for records, and Marlovan for war. It’s a matter of what’s easier, not if they were barbarians.”

“ ‘Marlovan for war.’ Not until recently. No one spoke it at all, except at your academy, did you know that? Until the last generation or so, Marlovan was for ignorant boys in a stupid war school!”

At home Inda would have taken that as a challenge to be settled out in the fields, the other boys and girls yelling encouragement, but he remembered he was a guest, and so he had to behave like one. No matter how much frost this daughter of kings flung at him.

Shendan snorted again, then she noticed Inda’s red face and his tightly pressed lips, and all the anger drained out of her. She’d expected arrogance, maybe even pity, and all she’d found was more civility than she’d offered—that and equal knowledge.

So she finally spoke the truth. “Anyway Mother says we live with the result, which is the treaty that binds us here to our land for ten generations, on pain of death if anyone enters or leaves without due escort. We can only defend our land, we can’t go beyond it. So while I can go to the queen’s training in a few years, my brother has never been to your academy, can never go, is supposedly forbidden to learn to use a sword here, though he can learn while at sea. But he can never bear one here. Understand now?”

Inda drew in a breath. So it wasn’t just a test, it was a way—maybe the only bearable way—for this strange girl to warn him. “You don’t want me strutting about getting to go to the academy when I meet your brother.” He might have added that he hated strut, but he didn’t. Such statements, usually in Branid’s mouth, just sounded like more strut, and anyway it was a fair warning since Shendan didn’t know him at all.

Shendan nodded once. “Just don’t mention it. And when you leave, don’t talk about us. To anyone.” She cast back a serious look from her wide-set eyes, then added, “This way. We have most of the castle shut up, since we are the only ones here.” She waved. “But you can have your choice of beds. There’s a great old thing, all carved over with horses, that my great-great-grandfather died in when he was assassinated. Want that room?”

“Only if there’s a ghost.”

Shendan laughed. “Do you see ghosts, then?”

“No. There’s supposed to be one at home. Jo . . . one person has seen it, and Tdor wishes she could see it. Maybe if I saw one here, she’d be satisfied.”

Shen pointed to a door beautifully carved with horse heads, kingscrown blossoms intertwined in their manes, and Inda felt strange when he thought of his mother at home here when she was Shendan’s age. For the first time he wondered what it had been like to grow up in this castle, and then, at around the age Tanrid was now, to suddenly be sent south to Tenthen, to marry a man she’d never met. He shook his head.

Shendan waved a hand at one of the hallways. “That leads to our rooms. I’ll put you right across here. It’ll make it easier for everyone, as the old king’s room is a day’s ride away.” She flapped her hand behind her at silent corridors leading off to other portions of the castle, measured off by steadily decreasing shafts of light from the high slit windows. “So, what is Tdor like?” Shendan gave him that funny smile again. “We will probably be bunkmates when I go to the royal city, as I understand she and I are the same age.”

“She’s . . . she’s . . .” Inda frowned. No one else had ever asked him such a question before. Tdor’s face rose vividly before his inward vision: her serious eyes, her sudden grin that made her bony chin even bonier, her quick, soft laugh. Her kindness to everyone, including the animals.

“You like her,” Shendan observed.

“I . . . she’s my Randviar,” Inda said, as if that explained everything. “We’ll be married one day.”

“Good enough. I’ll wait for . . . ah, here he comes.”

Inda had already heard the familiar sound of riding boots on flagged stones. A tall, thin boy midway between Inda’s and Tanrid’s age appeared at the top of the steps.

“My brother Savarend,” Shendan said. “This is Indevan.”

“Indevan-Dal,” said this newcomer by way of greeting. He had a strange sort of smile, one side curving up higher than the other, a sardonic smile suited to someone much older than he appeared to be. His eyes were the same color as his mother’s, not the muddy hazel usually called green, but a bright shade the color of spring grass. His hair was red, as unruly as his sister’s. It was wet, as if he’d come straight from the baths.

“Inda,” said Inda, feeling awkward.

Savarend raised a long, thin hand. “No, no. Formality only. They’ll be most chagrined if we display any hint of friendship.”

Brother and sister exchanged glances, quick as the flick of a firefly, but not too quick for Inda. He remembered Tdor’s last shaky-voiced warning:
Don’t talk. Listen. That’s how you learn fastest where danger is, without drawing its attention
.

So he said nothing, not even to ask who “they” might be, and when Savarend asked if Inda would like to see the treasures garnished from his duties at sea, Inda agreed.

 

 

 

On the ride away two days later, Inda reflected on how kind the Montredavan-Ans were, once Shendan had decided not to make him an enemy. Both of them were older than he, and therefore could have been expected to ignore a ten-year-old thrust on them. But they had made him laugh. Savarend had not only showed him curiosities gained from his travels as a ship’s boy (duly sanctioned by the treaty, obviously), but he’d told him stories about pirate attacks and terrible storms, about sea legends concerning Ghost Island, where all the dead killed by pirates were said to walk. Shen had shown him around that great castle herself, pointing once to the highest tower where her father apparently had a room. “We will not go there and you will not see him. It’s better that way,” she’d whispered under her breath.

Marend Jaya-Vayir, Savarend’s betrothed—who was also Inda’s second cousin—had kindly asked what foods he liked best to eat. The Jarlan, granddaughter of a queen, had brought him fresh bedding herself, and seen that he was comfortable.

But he had not met the Jarl, who stayed up in his tower, and so he told the Guard who was waiting at the border two days later, after the storm that struck soon after their arrival had blown past. Even though they were going to be very late to the royal city, they still had to stop at an inn there to be questioned. By then Inda understood how very rare it was for anyone to be permitted inside of Montredavan-An lands, and so he hid his impatience at the long, detailed interrogation. The captain of the King’s Guard and his two Royal Runners listened closely when he told about Savarend’s sea stories, and Marend’s baking, and Shendan’s pretty singing voice.

He had become convinced that Shen’s fit of anger, certain wry words Savarend said before laughing off the subject, were because they were the son and daughter of kings through both sides of the family. But for an assassin’s knife in the night he would be at the academy, and Shen would get to marry, have children. Not that she wanted any of that. Inda heard in the songs she picked that what she wanted was a life outside of Darchelde, in a new place, where she wouldn’t just grow up to be a Randviar with no Randael.

Inda, already missing his home, couldn’t understand that part. Though he looked forward to the academy, he wanted also to be home at Tenthan, with Tdor and his parents and cousins and friends and everything just right. He didn’t understand the desire to leave home forever, but he could sympathize with the wish for justice that would never come.

So he kept to himself the things he knew he was not supposed to have seen. Such as the looks of secrecy between mother and children, between brother and sister, and the expert way that Savarend had handled a knife when he thought no one was looking.

Chapter Four

“FROM this moment on, you have no rank.”

Twenty busy minds braced against the harsh voice while trying not to stare at the great stone walls or to listen to the ferocious rhythm of clashing steel from beyond the tallest wall as the echoing bells of noon died away.