The Will of the Empress (21 page)

She took a deep breath and let it out. If Tris had gotten that angry in my shoes, every thread in this room would have knotted right up, Sandry thought with pride. But
I
have control over my temper. “I would like to ride to Pofkim tomorrow and review its situation for myself,” she told Ealaga loftily, holding her chin high. “Will you make the proper arrangements, please?”

Ealaga curtsied. If there was a mild reproof in her eyes, Sandry ignored it. I answer to no one but Uncle, she thought stubbornly. It’s time
all
these Namornese learned that. To Tris, she said, “I believe I will join you and the others on the watchtower.”

Tris propped her fists on her hips. “Not if you’re going to act the countess with them,” she said flatly. “I’ve just got Zhegorz calm enough to go out among people at all, and the way Gudruny’s been telling her kids about your generosity, and how splendid you’ve been, they’ll bolt and run the minute they see your nose in the air.”

Ealaga quietly left the room as Sandry lowered her nose to glare at Tris. “I am not acting the countess!” she said tartly. “And
you
should talk!”

“I mean it,” retorted Tris. “Act like a decent person or you can’t come.”

Sandry met her friend’s stormy glare and quickly realized how ridiculous she was making herself. “I
am
a decent person,” she said mildly. “Tris, you don’t understand. I’m going mad with all these games people play to get me to do what they want. ‘Fit only to be waited on and to be married,’ remember? It’s what that woman said to me all those years
ago? Well, all these curst Namornese think I’m fit for is to be sold off to the highest bidder, like some prize…mule.”

“I suppose I’m supposed to be sympathetic now,” replied Tris at her most unsympathetic.

Sandry had to laugh. “No,” she said, linking her arm through one of Tris’s. “You’re supposed to take your sister and fellow mage student to say hello to your friends.”

“Good,” Tris said, towing Sandry toward the door. “Because I’m not in a sympathetic mood.”

Sandry made a face when Gudruny opened the shutters the next morning to reveal a gray and drizzly dawn. After her request at supper the night before, Ambros had sent word to Pofkim that their
clehame
was coming for a visit in the morning.

It seemed she would be visiting with a smaller group than usual. Even early morning riders like Rizu and Daja chose to return to bed when they saw the dripping skies. “Yes, Tris can keep us dry,” Daja told Sandry with a yawn, “but there will be mud, and inspecting, and people bowing and curtsying, and the only time that’s bearable is when it’s a nice day. Have fun.” She twiddled her fingers at Sandry and Tris in farewell.

The guardsmen who had been assigned that morning to accompany the girls and Ambros had never been treated to one of Tris’s rain protections before. For some time they rode under her invisible shield in silence, with frequent
glances overhead at the rain that streamed away from three feet above.

“It’s quite safe,” Sandry told them, trying to make them feel better. “She can do it over an entire Trader caravan and still read without losing control over it.”

Tris, crimson-cheeked, shot a glare at Sandry and continued to read. Ambros finally drifted over to Sandry’s side. “I’d get sick to my stomach doing that,” he told Sandry in a murmur. “I can’t read in carriages or ships, for that matter.”

“I think if Tris got sick she wouldn’t even notice,” Sandry replied. “Look at Chime.” The glass dragon flew in and out of Tris’s magical shield as if it were no barrier at all, sprinkling rain droplets all over the members of their small group. “
She’s
having fun,” Sandry added with a grin. She looked at Ambros. His blue eyes followed the little dragon. Chime gleamed rainbow colors in the morning’s subdued light. She spun and twirled as if she were a giddy child at play. There was a smile on Ambros’s lips and a glow in his eyes.

He’s not such a dry stick after all, thought Sandry, startled. You just have to catch him being human.

Suddenly she felt better about this man who so often reminded her of her obligations. She had been seeing him as a taskmaster. Maybe if I tried treating him as family, he might warm up to me, she thought. She fiddled with an amber eardrop, then asked him, “Did you know my mother’s father at all?”

He was willing to talk of their relatives, and proved himself to be a good storyteller. Sandry was laughing as they rode over one last ridge and down into the valley that cushioned the village of Pofkim. Startled by what lay before her, she reined up. Now she understood why flooding had hurt the place so badly. It was all bunched in the smallest of hollows, huddled on either side of a narrow, brisk river that churned in its channel in the ground. “Were they mad, to build it here?” she asked her cousin.

Ambros shook his head. “You can’t see them, but the clay pits are in the hills on the far side of the river. They need to be close to the water to transport the clay. They can’t get enough of it out by horseback to make it worth the expense, but people in Dancruan are eager to line up at the wharves to bid on loads. They make very good pottery with it in the city. And goats and mules find plenty to graze here, but the footing’s too steep for cows and the growth too scanty for sheep.”

Sandry looked the village over. Now she saw the flood marks on the lone bridge over the river and on the walls of the buildings. Here and there were houses that had collapsed in on themselves. The outside walls of several homes were braced with wooden poles.

“If the wells are bad here, how can they put down new ones that won’t be bad, either?” she asked.

“The one well they’ve been able to sink is higher up.
They built a makeshift aqueduct to carry the water to the village, but a good wind knocks it over. With money they can sink new wells up where the water is good, and build stone channels to bring it to the village.” Ambros sighed. “I’d wanted to do that this year, but…”

Sandry scowled. Was there no end to the repairs her family’s lands required? “Sell the emeralds my mother left to me, if we haven’t the cash,” she said briskly. “They aren’t bound to the inheritance. I can sell them, if I like. If you can’t get more than enough money for them to fix all this, you aren’t the bargainer I take you for, Cousin.”

“Are you sure?” he asked as they entered the outskirts of the village. “Won’t you want them to wear, or to pass on?”

“The need is
here.
And I’m not much of a one for jewelry,” Sandry replied as people came out of their homes.

“Oh, splendid,” she heard Tris murmur. “The bowing and scraping begins.”

Sandry sighed windily and glared at the other girl. “Let loose a lightning bolt or two,” she snapped. “
That
should put a stop to it, if you dislike it that much.”

“Instead, they’ll fall on their faces in the mud,” Ambros said drily. “Somehow that doesn’t seem like an improvement.”

Sandry shook her head—Ambros has been listening to my brother and sisters too much! she thought, half-amused—and dismounted from her mare. One of her guards also dismounted and took her mount’s reins. Once
that was taken care of, Sandry looked at a small boy. He was doing his best to bow, though the result seemed shaky. “How do you do?” she greeted him. “Are you the Speaker for this village?” The Namornese called the chiefs of their villages Speakers.

The boy sneaked a grin at her, then shook his head. A little girl standing behind him said, “You aren’t stuck-up. They said you would be.”

“Maghen!” cried her mother. She swept the little girl behind her and curtsied low. The curls that escaped her headcloth trembled. “
Clehame
, forgive her, she’s always speaking her mind, even when it will earn her a
spanking
…” She gave an extra tug to the child’s arm.

Sandry lifted the mother up. “I’m glad there’s someone who will speak to me directly,
Ravvi
,” she replied softly. “Maghen? Is that you back there, or some very wiggly skirts?”

The girl poked her head out from behind her mother. “It’s me,” she said frankly.

“Do I seem stuck-up to you?” Sandry wanted to know. “
Ravvi
, please, I’m not offended. Let her come say hello.”

“She has a way with people,” Sandry heard Ambros murmur to Tris. “I wish I did.”

“You show them you care about them by looking after their welfare,” she heard Tris reply. “Do you believe her when she says put whatever funds you need into help for your tenants? Because she means it. She won’t ask you later
what you’ve done with her emeralds. When she gives her word, you may trust it.”

Whenever she makes me truly cross, I have to remember she says things like this, thought Sandry as she acknowledged Maghen’s curtsy. I still wish she hadn’t closed herself off from me, but I’m so glad she came!

T
he village Speaker soon arrived, trailing a few bewildered goats. Tris stepped back, out of the way of the dance of manners required when Namornese commoners met the noble whose lands they worked. Once the greetings were done, Sandry asked to see the homes and wells damaged by floods in earlier years. Tris watched it all with Chime on her shoulder, her book safely tucked in a saddlebag. Since the dragon was clear unless she’d fed recently, most of the villagers couldn’t see her until they were close to Tris. One bold girl reached out to touch the small creature, and only looked around when Chime began to purr. When her eyes met Tris’s, the girl jerked her hand away with a gasp of alarm.

Tris made herself smile in what she hoped was a friendly way. Looking at the trembling smile on the girl’s lips, she told herself, I think it worked.

After that first experiment with the village girl, she got to keep on performing her social smile. The children—those who didn’t have to return immediately to work at the tasks
of daily living—came to meet Chime. While she held the dragon so her new admirers could touch her more easily, Tris shifted until her nose was pointed into the rainy day breeze.

Someone upwind is making soap, she thought as she sorted through scents. And that’s butter in the churn. Oh! Household privies and animal manure, she thought grimly. Really, these people should learn to clean up more if they don’t want their water going bad. I’d better let Sandry know they need to collect their manure, before it starts leaking into their well water.

She smiled happily. There’s wet spring earth. I
love
the smell of wet dirt. And here’s the river under all of it.

She frowned. The river was young and ferocious, clawing at the banks. Tris didn’t know a great deal about bridges, but she did understand rivers. Left to its own devices, this one was probably digging the banks away from the piers that supported the bridge.

Handing Chime over to the girl who’d touched her first, Tris left their tour and ambled over to the steep banks near the bridge. Closing her eyes, she let her power spill down the earthen sides. They were awkwardly held in place with a patchwork of boulders, bricks, smaller stones, and even planks of wood. She felt the swirling and thrusting river as it tugged the man-made walls, trying to pry them apart. They needed to be strengthened without disturbing the bridge, or they would collapse into the river, clogging it.

Tris took a breath and sent threads of magic down into the ground as Sandry might set the warp threads on a loom, reaching deep into the clay soil. Stones of every size peppered the ground underneath her and under the far riverbank, more than enough to shape solid rock walls. The problem, of course, was that they were scattered throughout the ground, separated by the dense earth.

Tris grinned, her pale eyes sparkling. This is a wonderfully knotty problem, she thought. The trick is to warm the ground just enough to make it easy to mold, then to start shaking it just enough to move the stones as I want them—and just enough that the villagers don’t panic and run from the earthquake. Her fingers danced through her layers of braids, seeking out the ones she had used to trap earth tremors and those in which she had braided the heat of molten lava. They were heavy braids bound with black silk thread in special knots to contain the forces in them.

She sat down on the muddy earth with a plop, settling into the most comfortable cross-legged seat she knew. Carefully she began to undo the knots on her braids, sorting through the spells that would release their power for her guidance. Control is the thing, and patience, she told herself over and over, concentrating. They won’t know I did a thing.

“Oh, good, it’s one of her rainy-day gowns. Tris! Tris!” Someone—Sandry—shook Tris by the shoulder. Tris stirred. “Tris, you’ve been here for half the day. You’re
scaring the nice people! You’ve scared me, and Chime, and Ambros doesn’t look that well, either!”

Tris blinked. Getting the earth to calm down once she was finished had been the hardest part of the whole thing. She had forgotten how tiring it was to force what was left of the power of the tremors and the volcanoes back into their proper braids. Weakly she fumbled to tie them up.

“What?” she demanded irritably, squinting up at her sister. “I wasn’t bothering anybody. I was just sitting here.” The rain had finally stopped.

“She made the ground
ripple
,” said someone very young. “It all shivered and rumbled and twitched, and nobody dared go on the bridge.”

Tris turned her head on her
very
stiff neck. The speaker was the girl child Maghen. Of all the people who stood and stared at her, Ambros and their guards included, only Sandry and Maghen had dared to come within reaching distance of Tris.

“I was repairing the walls on the banks,” she explained to the child. “Otherwise they were about to drop into the river.” She looked up at Sandry, her gray eyes glinting. “Or would you rather I’d have let them alone until they collapsed and you
had
no river?”

Sandry smiled at her. “You’ll feel better once you’ve eaten something,” she said practically. “And I didn’t make your boots. They’ll be scraping mud off them for a week.” She offered Tris her hand.

Tris took it, and fought her body—it had been in one position for much too long—to get to her feet. The mud seemed far deeper than it had been when she sat down. As she struggled and lurched, worried that she would pull Sandry into the clayey soup, she looked at herself. From her waist down she was coated in mud.

Maghen saw Tris’s self-inspection. “You sank,” she explained. “The ground went soft and you sank, and you didn’t even move. Oooh,” she whispered as Sandry and Tris brushed at Tris’s skirts. The mud slid off as if the cloth were made of glass.

Tris grinned at Maghen. “When Sandry makes a dress for a rainy day, she makes sure no one will have to wash it twelve times to get it clean,” she told the child. “Really, she’s very useful to have around, even if she
is
a
clehame.
”

Sandry elbowed Tris in the ribs. “Shake that mud off your stockings, too, while you’re at it,” she ordered.

Tris obeyed.

“Come see,” begged Maghen. “Look what happened.” She towed Tris closer to the river’s edge. On both sides, a hundred yards upstream of the bridge and roughly the same length downstream, the riverbanks were secured by solid stone walls. Closer examination showed them to be made of thousands of pieces of rock, large and small, fitted tightly together into barriers a foot thick. Tris bent down to look under the bridge. The walls continued under it, supporting
and filling in the spaces around the piers. The riverbanks would stay put for a few decades, at least.

“Not bad for a day’s work,” she told Maghen, and trudged back to Sandry and Ambros. The man had procured sausage rolls, which he offered to her. Tris took two—she was ravenous—and ate quickly and neatly as the guards mustered the nerve to bring forward their horses. When she was done, she shook hands solemnly with Maghen and waited for Sandry to mount up.

“I’ll make sure the villagers thank you before we return to the capital,” Ambros murmured to Tris. “They’re just…unsettled. The ground quivered and growled for hours.”

“I didn’t mean to unsettle anybody,” Tris grumbled as she swung herself into the saddle. “I just didn’t want you to have to pay to repair the riverbanks along with everything else.” She smiled crookedly. “Sandry might actually have to sell rubies, or something.”

As Ambros mounted his horse, Sandry looked back at Tris. “Donkey dung,” she said. “I was so hoping to sell the rubies Papa bought Mama. I prefer garnets, you know. They have a much more pleasing color.”

Chime glided over to them from wherever she had been as they set their horses forward, waving good-bye to the villagers. Ambros shook his head and continued to shake it. “I’ve never known anyone like either of you,” he said, befuddled. “Not a noblewoman who didn’t prize expensive stones,
nor a young woman who could stir up the earth like a stewpot and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve just saved you a hundred gold argibs in riverbank shoring.’ Not to mention the lives of the few who always manage to fall into the river and die during the work.”

“Then you’ve led a sheltered life,” Tris informed him.

Sandry patted Ambros on the arm. “We lived in a very rowdy household,” she added sympathetically. “You should be glad we didn’t live here, with all the mistakes we made.”

“But you…,” Ambros said, looking at Tris.

Tris slapped her mount’s withers lightly with the reins, sending the horse into a trot ahead of the group. I hate it when they go on and on about the things I can do, she thought irritably. Why can’t Ambros just let it drop?

It’ll be different when I get an academic mage’s license at Lightsbridge, she told herself. Then I can just do all the work mages are expected to do: charms and spells and potions and things. The trouble with the Winding Circle medallion is that when I show it I have to explain about weather magic—a Lightsbridge license won’t require that. People won’t fuss at me for being odd. I can live a normal life.

As she crested the ridge, the wind brought an unexpected metallic tang to Tris’s nose. When she straightened to get a better whiff of it, the scent was gone. She drew her mare up and raised a hand to signal the others to slow down.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Ambros.

The wind shifted. Tris no longer smelled whatever it was. Slowly she lowered her hand.

“Maybe nothing,” Sandry replied to her cousin. “Maybe trouble coming.”

“Maybe one of those villagers slipped off to warn someone we’d be coming this way—bandits or the like,” one of their guards suggested. When Ambros frowned at him, the man shrugged. “Sorry, my lord, but we couldn’t watch everyone. There’s no word the Pofkim folk have any dealings with outlaws, but you never know.”

On they went, the guards with hands on their weapons, riding around Sandry and Ambros in a loose circle. Tris refused to retreat into their ranks. After seeing her work with the riverbanks, none of the guards insisted that she move inside their protection.

They had gone two miles when a spurt of wind showed Tris metal plates sewn to leather and shoved the tang of sweat, oil, and iron into her sensitive nose. She sneezed and reined up. Twenty men trotted out from behind a stone outcrop at the bend of the road and rode wide to encircle them. Some guards tracked them with their bows, sighting on first one, then another rider. Ambros and the remaining guards drew their swords.

Three of the newcomers halted directly in front of their party. One of them was an older man, gray with age and red-nosed from too much drinking, though his seat in the saddle was assured and his gaze clear. Another was a
redheaded man in his thirties who wore a gaudy blue tunic over his armor. He grinned at them, but there was nothing friendly about the double-headed ax in one of his hands. The third man was barely older than Sandry and Tris themselves. He wore a metal cuirass and held a bared sword in his trembling grip.

“Good day to you,
Saghad
fer Landreg,” the redheaded man said casually.

Ambros looked as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “
Bidis
fer Holm.
Saghad
fer Haugh.” He directed the glare that went with the
Saghad
title at the oldest newcomer. For the youngest of them, Ambros spared only a sniff of disdain. He spoke to Sandry, though his eyes never left the men in front of them. “Behold the least savory of the so-called nobles who haunt your borders in search of easy pickings.
Saghad
Yeskoy fer Haugh is uncle to
Bidis
Dymytur fer Holm and father to that young sprig of a rotten family tree.”

“Ah, but Dymytur is your eternal slave, fair
Clehame
,” the redheaded man said, bowing mockingly in the saddle. “Now, which of you wenches would that be? Please tell me it’s not the fat one, Ambros. Fat redheads always spell trouble in our family—look at my mother. I suppose I could cut this one back on her feed, get her a little less padded.”

Tris sighed and leaned on her saddlehorn. “I wouldn’t touch you to kick you,” she told him rudely, her brain working rapidly. Ambros must think I’m worn out from the river, she thought. Oh, dear. I suppose a little surprise won’t hurt
him. He really ought to know that Sandry isn’t a helpless maiden. Now seems as good a time as any for him to learn.

“You’re going to try that thing, aren’t you?” demanded Sandry, her eyes blazing. “You’re going to try and kidnap me and force me to sign a marriage contract so you’ll get my wealth and lands.”

“Oh, not
try
, dearest, wealthy
Clehame
,” Dymytur assured Sandry. “We’re going to do it. Your party has eight swords, and we have twenty.”

“Isn’t that just like a bully,” Sandry replied shortly. “You think you have a sword, so you don’t have any vulnerabilities. Out of my way!” she ordered the guards.

They hesitated long enough to infuriate Sandry. Before she could shout at them, Tris said, “Do as she says, please.”

The guards flinched at the sound of her voice. When they looked at Sandry and met her glare, they reluctantly kneed their horses to either side to open a passage for her. Ambros lunged forward to grab Sandry’s rein and missed. “Are you Emelanese mad?” he demanded coldly, his cheeks flushed.

“No, we aren’t,” Tris told him quietly. “We know precisely what we’re doing.”

Sandry rode forward until her mount stood between those of two guards.

“I’m not going with these people,” Sandry replied, her blue eyes fixed on her would-be kidnappers. “I can’t abide men who don’t dress properly.”

Tris saw the billow of silver fire that passed from Sandry to strike the three nobles in front of them. It spread to their followers, jumping from man to man, until it formed a ring that passed through them all. For a moment it seemed as if nothing had happened. The only sound was the wind over the grasslands around them.

Then a man yelped. He wore a leather and metal plate jerkin over his heavy tunic. Now the tunic collapsed into pieces, squirmed out from under the leather, and fell to the ground. Another man in Tris’s view grunted as his breeches fell apart at the seams and wriggled off. The tunic under the youngest noble’s breastplate also went to pieces and crawled away, while the cloak tied around his neck disintegrated into a heap of threads. Yeskoy hitched his chin, as if trying to adjust the shirt under his armor. Instead, a cloud of threads trickled from his sleeves and the hem of his armor, like milkweed down.