Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (46 page)

The road was muddy and pocked with hoofprints; perhaps her brother’s party had just passed on its way to his provincial seat of Taryoon. He had spent much of the past two weeks attempting to persuade her to accompany him there, promising her rooms and attendants in his palace, under his benign and protective eye, as though she had not rooms and attendants and prying eyes enough here. She turned in the opposite direction.

Court mourning and silk slippers were no garb for a country road. Her skirts swished around her legs as though she were trying to wade through high water. The mud sucked at her light shoes. The sun, climbing the sky, heated her velvet-clad back, and she broke into an unladylike sweat. She walked on, feeling increasingly uncomfortable and foolish. This was madness. This was just the sort of thing that got women locked up in towers with lack-witted attendants, and hadn’t she had enough of that for one lifetime? She hadn’t a change of clothes, a plan, any money, not so much as a copper vaida. She touched the jewels around her neck.
There’s money.
Yes, too much value—what country-town moneylender could match for them? They were not a resource; they were merely a target, bait for bandits.

The rumble of a cart drew her eyes upward from picking her way along the puddles. A farmer drove a stout cob, hauling a load of ripe manure for spreading on his fields. He turned his head to stare dumfounded at the apparition of her on his road. She returned him a regal nod—after all, what other kind could she offer? She nearly laughed out loud, but choked back the unseemly noise and walked on. Not looking back. Not daring to.

She walked for over an hour before her tiring legs, dragging the weight of her dress, stumbled at last to a halt. She was close to weeping from the frustration of it all.
This isn’t working. I don’t know how to do this. I never had a chance to learn, and now I am too old.

Horses again, galloping, and a shout. It flashed across her mind that among the other things she had failed to provision herself with was a weapon, even so much as a belt knife, to defend herself from assault. She pictured herself matched against a swordsman, any swordsman, with any weapon she could possibly pick up and swing, and snorted. It made a short scene, hardly likely to be worth the bother.

She glanced back over her shoulder and sighed. Ser dy Ferrej and a groom pounded down the road in her wake, the mud splashing from their horses’ hooves. She was not, she thought, quite fool enough or mad enough to wish for bandits instead. Maybe that was the trouble; maybe she just wasn’t crazed
enough.
True derangement stopped at no boundaries. Mad enough to wish for what she was not mad enough to grasp—now there was a singularly useless lunacy.

Guilt twinged in her heart at the sight of dy Ferrej’s red, terrified, perspiring face as he drew up by her side. “Royina!” he cried. “My lady, what are you doing out here?” He almost tumbled from his saddle, to grasp her hands and stare into her face.

“I grew weary of the sorrows of the castle. I decided to take a walk in the spring sunshine to solace myself.”

“My lady, you have come over five miles! This road is quite unfit for you—”

“No attendants, no guards—five gods, consider your station and your safety! Consider my gray hairs! You have stood them on end with this start.”

“I do apologize to your gray hairs,” said Ista, with a little real contrition. “They do not deserve the toil of me, nor does the remainder of you either, good dy Ferrej. I just . . . wanted to take a walk.”

“Tell me next time, and I will arrange—”

“By myself.”

“You are the dowager royina of all Chalion,” stated dy Ferrej firmly. “You are Royina Iselle’s own
mother,
for the five gods’ sake. You cannot go skipping off down the road like a country wench.”

Ista sighed at the thought of being a skipping country wench, and not tragic Ista anymore. Though she did not doubt country wenches had their tragedies, too, and much less poetic sympathy for them than did royinas. But there was nothing to be gained by arguing with him in the middle of the road. He made the groom give up his horse, and she acquiesced to being loaded aboard it. The skirts of this dress were not split for riding, and they bunched uncomfortably around her legs as she felt for the stirrups. Ista frowned again as the groom took the reins from her and made to lead her mount.

Dy Ferrej leaned across his saddle bow to grasp her hand, in consolation for the tears standing in her eyes. “I know,” he murmured kindly. “Your lady mother’s death is a great loss for us all.”

I finished weeping for her weeks ago, dy Ferrej.
She had sworn once to neither weep nor pray ever again, but she had forsworn herself on both oaths in those last dreadful days in the sickroom. After that, neithe weeping nor praying had seemed to have any point. She decided not to trouble the castle warder’s mind with the explanation that she wept now for herself, and not in sorrow but in a sort of rage. Let him take her as a little unhinged by bereavement; bereavement passed.

Dy Ferrej, quite as tired out as she by the past weeks of grief and guests, did not trouble her with further conversation, and the groom did not dare. She sat her plodding horse and let the road roll up again beneath her like a carpet being put away, denied its use. What was her use now? She chewed her lip and stared between her horse’s bobbing ears.

After a time, its ears flickered. She followed its snorting glance to see another cavalcade approaching down a connecting road, some dozen or two riders on horses and mules. Dy Ferrej rose in his stirrups and squinted, but then eased back in his saddle at the sight of the four outriders clad in the blue tunics and gray cloaks of soldier-brothers of the Daughter’s Order, whose mandate encompassed the safe conveyance of pilgrims on the road. As the party rode closer, it could be seen that its members included both men and women, all decked out in the colors of their chosen gods, or as close as their wardrobes could manage, and that they wore colored ribbons on their sleeves in token of their holy destinations.

The two parties reached the joining of the roads simultaneously, and dy Ferrej exchanged reassuring nods with the soldier-brothers, stolid conscientious fellows like himself. The pilgrims stared in speculation at Ista in her fine somber clothes. A stout, red-faced older woman—
she’s not any older than I am, surely
—offered Ista a cheery smile. After an uncertain moment, Ista’s lips curved up in response, and she returned her nod. Dy Ferrej had placed his horse between the pilgrims and Ista, but his shielding purpose was defeated when the stout woman reined her horse back and kneed it into a trot to come up around him.

“The gods give you a good day, lady,” the woman puffed. Her fat piebald horse was overburdened with stuffed saddlebags and yet more bags tied to them with twine and bouncing as precariously as its rider. It dropped back to a walk, and she caught her breath and straightened her straw hat. She wore Mother’s greens in somewhat mismatched dark hues proper to a widow, but the braided ribbons circling her sleeve marched down in a full rank of five: blue wound with white, green with yellow, red with orange, black with gray, and white twined with cream.

After a moment’s hesitation, Ista nodded again. “And you.”

“We are pilgrims from around Baocia,” the woman announced invitingly. “Traveling to the shrine of the miraculous death of Chancellor dy Jironel, in Taryoon. Well, except for the good Ser dy Brauda over there.” She nodded toward an older man in subdued browns wearing a red-and-orange favor marking allegiance to the Son of Autumn. A more brightly togged young man rode by his side, who leaned forward to frown quellingly around him at the green-clad woman. “He’s taking his boy, over there—isn’t he a pretty lad, now, eh?”

The boy recoiled and stared straight ahead, growing flushed as if to harmonize with the ribbons on his sleeve; his father was not successful in suppressing a smile.

“—up to Cardegoss to be invested in the Son’s Order, like his papa before him, to be sure. The ceremony is to be performed by the holy general, the Royse-Consort Bergon himself! I’d so like to see
him.
They say he’s a handsome fellow. That Ibran seashore he comes from is supposed to be good for growing fine young men. I shall have to find some reason to pray in Cardegoss myself, and give my old eyes that treat.”

“Indeed,” said Ista neutrally at this anticipatory, but on the whole accurate, description of her son-in-law.

“I am Caria of Palma. I was wife of a saddler there, most lately. Widow, now. And you, good lady? Is this surly fellow your husband, then?”

The castle warder, listening with obvious disapproval to such familiarity, made to pull his horse back and fend off the tiresome woman, but Ista held up her hand. “Peace, dy Ferrej.” He raised his brows, but shrugged and held his tongue.

Ista continued to the pilgrim, “I am a widow of . . . Valenda.”

“Ah, indeed? Why, and so am I,” the woman returned brightly. “My first man was of there. Though I’ve buried three husbands altogether.” She announced this as though it were an achievement. “Oh, not all together, of course. One at a time.” She cocked her head in curiosity at Ista’s high mourning colors. “Did you just bury yours, then, lady? Pity. No wonder you look so sad and pale. Well, dear, it’s a hard time, especially with the first, you know. At the beginning you want to die—I know I did—but that’s just fear talking. Things will come about again, don’t you worry.”

Ista smiled briefly and shook her head in faint disagreement, but was not moved to correct the woman’s misapprehension. Dy Ferrej was clearly itching to depress the creature’s forwardness by announcing Ista’s rank and station, and by implication his own, and perhaps driving her off, but Ista realized with a little wonder that she found Caria amusing. The widow’s burble did not displease her, and she didn’t want her to stop.

There was, apparently, no danger of that. Caria of Palma pointed out her fellow pilgrims, favoring Ista with a rambling account of their stations, origins, and holy goals; and if they rode sufficiently far out of earshot, with opinions of their manners and morals thrown in gratis. Besides the amused veteran dedicat of the Son of Autumn and his blushing boy, the party included four men from a weavers’ fraternity who went to pray to the Father of Winter for a favorable outcome of a lawsuit; a man wearing the ribbons of the Mother of Summer, who prayed for the safety of a daughter nearing childbirth; and a woman whose sleeve sported the blue and white of the Daughter of Spring, who prayed for a husband for
her
daughter. A thin woman in finely cut green robes of an acolyte of the Mother’s Order, with a maid and two servants of her own, turned out to be neither midwife nor physician, but a comptroller. A wine merchant rode to give thanks and redeem his pledge to the Father for his safe return with his caravan, almost lost the previous winter in the snowy mountain passes to Ibra.

The pilgrims within hearing, who had evidently been riding with Caria for some days now, rolled their eyes variously as she talked on, and on. An exception was an obese young man in the white garb, grimed from the road, of a divine of the Bastard. He rode along quietly with a book open atop the curve of his belly, his muddy white mule’s reins slack, and glanced up only when he came to turn a page, blinking nearsightedly and smiling muzzily.

The Widow Caria peered at the sun, which had topped the sky. “I can hardly wait to get to Valenda. There is a famous inn where we are to eat that specializes in the most delicious roast suckling pigs.” She smacked her lips in anticipation.

“There is such an inn in Valenda, yes,” said Ista. She had never eaten there, she realized, not in all her years of residence.

The Mother’s comptroller, who had been one of the widow’s more pained involuntary listeners, pursed her mouth in disapproval. “I shall take no meat,” she announced. “I made a vow that no gross flesh would cross my lips upon this journey.”

Caria leaned over and muttered to Ista, “If she’d made a vow to swallow her pride, instead of her salads, it would have been more to the point for a pilgrimage, I’m thinking.” She sat up again, grinning; the Mother’s comptroller sniffed and pretended not to have heard.

The merchant with the Father’s gray-and-black ribbons on his sleeve remarked as if to the air, “I’m sure the gods have no use for pointless chatter. We should be using our time better—discussing high-minded things to prepare our minds for prayer, not our bellies for dinner.”

Caria leered at him, “Aye, or lower parts for better things still? And you ride with the Father’s favor on your sleeve, too! For shame.”

The merchant stiffened. “That is
not
the aspect of the god to which I intend—or need—to pray, I assure you, madam!”

The divine of the Bastard glanced up from his book and murmured peaceably, “The gods rule all parts of us, from top to toe. There is a god for everyone, and every part.”

“
Your
god has notably low tastes,” observed the merchant, still stung.

“None who open their hearts to any one of the Holy Family shall be excluded. Not even the priggish.” The divine bowed over his belly at the merchant.

Caria gave a cheerful crack of laughter; the merchant snorted indignation, but desisted. The divine returned to his book.

Caria whispered to Ista, “I like that fat fellow, I do. Doesn’t say much, but when he speaks, it’s to the point. Bookish men usually have no patience with me, and I surely don’t understand
them
. But that one does have lovely manners. Though I do think a man should get him a wife, and children, and do the work that pays for them, and not go haring off after the gods. Now, I have to admit, my dear second husband didn’t—work, that is—but then, he drank. Drank himself to death eventually, to the relief of all who knew him, five gods rest his spirit.” She signed herself, touching forehead, lip, navel, groin, and heart, spreading her hand wide over her plump breast. She pursed her lips, raised her chin and her voice, and called curiously, “But now I think on it, you’ve never told us what you go to pray for, Learned.”