25 - Meeting the king!
And the queen! And, perhaps most relevantly at this moment, the commander of the Order of the Sworn but I don’t think Venla realises how important she is. Stopped in the middle of a conversation with the royal couple. I don’t think Tao and Mazao got round to saying what they want, except that they said earlier what they don’t want.
It’s a good thing that this story-arc is nearing its end because otherwise not only Venla, but also Amre will be masters before they’re sixteen from sheer PC-ness.
In the morning Imri went off to school, taking Jeran and the little girls, Cynla went to her goats, and Meruvin took the boys to the mill, and Amre was still with her sister, so I was alone in the house with Halla and Jeran. Jeran was still half asleep, but Halla managed to make him eat a bit of porridge. Then Amre came in and told us she’d had breakfast already with a woman on the way, a goose-boy’s mother who had two more children with runny noses.
We looked at Jeran’s legs and decided we could do with more help. “There’s no doctor in town, is there?” we asked Halla. No, there was the midwife, Halla said, and the priestess of Naigha but “she’s had a bad winter”, but young Jinla did most of the doctoring these days. I tried to call Jinla with my mind —she was teaching school, together with Ailin— and she heard me but didn’t understand what I was saying, so I went to get her. The girls were in a class full of children and I waited at the door until she saw me. “Hey! Weren’t you here a moment ago, too?” I said it had been only my spirit, and told her what we were about to do and she came along right away. “You can manage here, can’t you, Ailin?”
We examined Jeran completely first, I’d only been looking at his legs before. He’d got a bad knock on the head, and a couple of his ribs were cracked, he had some bruises, but most of the rest of him seemed to be whole except for his lower legs, broken in two places and twisted so his toes stuck out to the side like the feet of a duck. “We’ll have to put him to sleep,” I said, and reached for Amre’s bottle of sleeping draught, but Jinla said that if someone has had a knock of the head they shouldn’t have poppy juice because they’ll just vomit it up again. Then Amre remembered that we’d learned to put people to sleep with our minds, and that turned to be easy! I could fix some of the concussion too, it was like he was very seasick, but not all of it.
We couldn’t really do much about the ribs, it wasn’t even bad enough to need bandaging tightly like Veh’s ribs, but the legs were something else. Jeran had told us that it had happened less than a week ago, and the bones weren’t really starting to set yet, which made it easier, but there was one splinter of bone completely loose from the rest that I was worried about. “Oh, I can cut that out, no problem,” Jinla said, and we set to putting the broken bones right first. We put Jeran on the bed, where Jinla could put most of her weight on his hip, and Amre pulled at his ankle, and I pushed the bones with my mind as well as I could— first I didn’t get a grip on it, but Amre and I together managed to get everything in line, where it could heal straight.
This sounds as if it didn’t take much time but in fact it took hours! And it made me very hungry, but Amre not at all, as always. Halla was ready with things to eat and drink every time we paused for a moment.
After the first leg the other one was almost easy, but that took us hours too, we’d spent almost the whole day at it! Jinla pulled out the bone splinter with a pair of pliers that, she said, she pulled out rotten teeth with too. It left a strange kind of sack of skin, and we couldn’t do anything about that except clean and bandage it so dirt wouldn’t get in, there was bone under it so we couldn’t stitch it up. “I’ll take him to the temple,” Jinla said, “he can keep Ruang company!” I wasn’t sure if that would be a good idea, but taking him to the temple sounded right. Jinla got two men with a litter to carry him there, and Halla had washing-water and more food for us.
Meruvin and the boys came back, Jilan and Merain with them, all very tired and sweaty. “If there’s dancing tonight I’m not going!” Mazao said. “Hey, you look as if you’ve been working hard too!” So we told him about Jeran, and they told us that they’d made a plan and practiced a bit with their axes and were going to put up the uprights and roof-beams tomorrow.
“It’s a blessing that the fire didn’t damage the wheel or the millstones,” Meruvin said, “that makes it a lot easier. We shall need a new wheel next winter, though,” and looking at Jilan and Merain, “you can do that as your journeyman’s work!” That made them look at one another in alarm first, then beam with pride when they realised that Meruvin trusted them with something as big as that. “If only we could stay to help!” Veh said, but they’d promised to take us to Valdis. and take us to Valdis they would. “Well, it won’t be until the winter, you can come back, I think I can use you,” Meruvin said. Later, in bed, we heard him whispering to Halla “those boys can really work!”
The next morning, as Imri and Jeran and the twins went to school, Amre and I went with them. We still had a lot of learning to do. It always surprised people when they found that out, because we could do doctoring and semsin things, but you didn’t need to read and write for that! So we sat at the back of the classroom and got a slate each, a slab of black stone, with a stick of grey stone to write on it. We wrote all the letters we knew, and our names, and then Jinla came and gave us a book to read, “if there’s something you don’t know, just ask Imri or Jeran, or that girl there, she’s called Selle.” It turned out to be a story that would have been very exciting if we’d been Arvi and Aine’s age, about a duck looking for her ducklings. We could read all the words until we came to something that completely stumped us, and we asked Selle who looked at us incredulously and said “It says Quack! Quack! Quack!” That gave us a fit of the giggles. “I’ll never be able to see a duck again without thinking Quack! Quack! Quack!”
There was one girl in the class almost our age, she looked slow but nice like Arin, who was writing things that weren’t quite letters on her slate. All the others were no older than ten.
In the meantime Jinla and Ailin had rounded up another boy who ought to have been at school but wasn’t, because his mother made him watch the geese. His mother was the woman Amre had had breakfast with, with the runny-nosed children. The boy had his geese with them, but they had to stay outside while he was in class. “I don’t need letters for the geese!” he protested, and we told him that we’d taught Tao and Mazao and Veh letters, even though they had goats. I wrote Quack! Quack! Quack! on his slate, but he said “nah, that’s ducks, geese go Honk! Honk! Honk!” And they were doing that outside, so we knew that he was right.
After the lessons we went to see Ruang and Jeran, who were in the sick-room together, talking. “You really need to take him to the temple of Anshen!” Jeran said. “I don’t know if he’ll leave it alive, but he has to go there!” We’d been planning to do that all along, so that was no problem, and Ruang wasn’t dangerous any more, he was much too sick and contrite for that.
Then I remembered that I had Hylti’s mother’s letter with me. As we left the temple, we saw Senthi —not the midwife, but the high priestess— sitting outside peeling turnips and throwing the peels to the goose-boy’s geese. “Do you know where we can find Hylti?” I asked. “The house next to the smithy,” the priestess said. This was the workshop of a carpenter, who also made buckets and barrels. There was nobody in the workshop, but at the back of the house in the kitchen we found a woman of about twenty, scrubbing. “Hylti?” I called. “Oh! You’re the princesses!” (I wish I could find a way not to make people think that, without telling them every time. Ah well.) “I’ve got a letter for you,” I said, “from your mother.” She read it, half aloud, and tears started to come into her eyes. She said that she really wanted to go back, but she’d come to town to find a husband and nobody wanted to come along. So we told her what Jichan had said, that he wouldn’t mind farming in Vestynay with her, and offered to go and get him to talk to her. “But later,” she said, “I have to dress up nicely first!”
We found Jichan in the field, with a big slow horse, doing something farmish that the Ishey boys would have called “women’s work”. “Really?” he said, and yes, he did want to come and talk to Hylti, but he’d have to finish the bit he was doing and change his clothes first. It didn’t take him long to finish, and he helped us on the horse —its back was broader than many a bed I’d slept in, and we sat so high that we could look over the rooftops— and took us to his mother’s house, a farm inside the town like where we’d talked to the slow boy, Arin. There were cows and a calf in the stable, and one of the cows looked like she had a calf ready to be born. Jichan’s mother gave us milk with pieces of dried fruit and nuts in it while Jichan was upstairs changing, and then great slabs of bread with salt pork. “We’ll miss him if he goes,” she said, but she was glad he wasn’t with Lyse any more because she didn’t want Lyse as a daughter-in-law!
Jichan came downstairs in clean clothes and wearing leather shoes instead of the wooden shoes he’d had on in the field. “Are you coming with me?” he asked, looking very nervous. “If you like,” we said, and we walked to Hylti’s house with him. She was in the kitchen wearing a bright skirt and an embroidered laced bodice with white shirt-sleeves and a white collar peeking out from under it, and her face was as shiny from washing as Jichan’s was. And there was a pot of soup on the fire which smelt wonderful. “That’s a recipe from Vestinay,” she said. Amre and I couldn’t eat any more after Jichan’s mother’s bread, but Jichan wanted some, and as he and Hylti were eating we went away quietly.
We went to school for another couple of days, and the boys worked on the mill, and then suddenly it was the day before the Feast of Timoine. “Are you coming along?” Imri asked us, but we didn’t know what she meant. “With the children?” Halla helped us out, “what do you do for the Feast of Timoine, where you come from?” Amre didn’t remember, she’d hardly had time to be a child, but I remembered that we’d got sweets, at least when I was smaller. “We don’t get sweets,” Imri said, “but we go to the wood, and sing and dance!” I was in two minds whether I was a child or not, but Imri said “if you’re a child Timoine will come and get you!” So we went to bed still uncertain.
The next morning there was a knock on the door and Imri and Jeran and Arvi and Aine went outside. Amre and I looked at one another and decided to go too. It was a procession of children —we were the oldest— singing songs that we’d never heard before but they were easy to learn. We went to the wood, not the hunting-ground without any undergrowth but the real wood, about half an hour away. I carried the goose-boy’s little sister for a while, and other children who were too small were carried too. The slow girl from the school looked around just before we got there and said “This— two years ago, two years, it was wood and now it’s not” and indeed, there were old stumps where trees had been felled. “I think they cut the trees down to build something,” I said, and she was satisfied with that. (Now I think it was probably the town wall they built with the wood, but that didn’t come to mind when I was there.)
We stayed at the edge of the wood and danced in a ring and sang some more. Then, suddenly, it dawned on me that there weren’t twenty-two of us but twenty-three, but I couldn’t see which one was Timoine, only that she was there! After a while we somehow knew that it was enough and went back to town, where there was a table set out on the square with a great mound of pancakes on it.
In the afternoon we went to see Dushtan, and we got to hold one of her twins each so she could stretch, and get up to piss. “Oh, I wish I could get up and sit on a horse and ride!” she said. Yatiyor came in and said “I’ve found them!” and showed Dushtan what he had in his hand, two tiny earrings made of gold, one shaped like a wolf’s head and one like a cat’s head. He was looking at Dushtan expectantly, saying “Now we can tell them apart!” but she asked “may my sister have the honour?” and then Amre found a silver needle and a flask of strong brandy to dip it in, and pierced first one boy’s left ear and then the other’s right ear and put the earrings in. They wailed, of course, and had to be pacified with milk. The noise brought Senthi, who shooed us all out, “barbarians!” — well, except Dushtan and the boys of course.
In the evening there was a dance, and we wanted to be grown-up young people as well as children! Everybody was there except Hylti and Jichan— that neither of them were there probably meant they were celebrating somewhere together. Amre pointed out the goose-boy’s mother, who had told her that her husband had gone away to the war and she didn’t know whether he’d come back, and she didn’t even know whether she wanted him to come back! She wasn’t older than twenty or so, and she wore very revealing clothes and wasn’t interested in the young boys but went away with a slightly older man after a while. “Now I know why she didn’t want her man to come back!” Amre said with a scowl. Then we heard the sound of fighting outside, but we didn’t think it was any of our business —it sounded like boys— until Veh came and asked us to come and do some doctoring, because Tao had been fighting! It wasn’t Tao who needed the doctoring, though: two boys had challenged him to a fight together, and he’d kicked one in the shin so he’d fallen and twisted his ankle, and struck the other on the head. Nothing that really needed a doctor except to tell them that they couldn’t work for a week or so, and the one with the head that he’d have to stay in the dark. “My father will kill me when he hears I can’t work!” the one with the ankle said, “and my mother will kill me twice over!” “Because you’ve been drinking too much?” I asked, because I could hear that his voice was slurred. He nodded, and then Tao took him on his back and started to carry him home, while they kept arguing. “What happened?” I asked, but Mazao and Veh could only tell me that Tao had said something unfortunate about Lyse, and Geran (with the ankle) was Lyse’s brother. (Later, Veh told me that he’d been fed up with Lyse wanting to paw at him all the time, and Tao had said something about that.)
Mazao and Veh carried the other one home and got someone to watch him, because he shouldn’t go to sleep after that knock on the head until he could drink something without spewing it out again at once. Then Tao came back, half amused and half furious. “Was his mother angry?” I asked. “Yes! But not at him; at me! She was all ‘oh, my poor dear little boy’ over him!” As he told it to more people, he started to laugh about it more and more, but the spirit of the party was gone and we were glad when Jilan and Merain came and offered to escort us home. “Strange,” I said, “this morning I went to the wood with the children and in the evening I was grown up at a party!” “Well, would you like to be grown up with me tonight?” Jilan asked, but I said no, not now, not yet. It had probably been a joke, anyway— I think he’s more like Tao and Mazao in that. So he kissed my hand very gallantly, and Merain kissed Amre’s, and then they changed places and did it again!
Then, the next day, in the evening, we could finally see the new mill. “It’s already working!” Jeran said, who had probably sneaked off after school to take a look at it. “The wheel turns, and it makes the stones turn!” It turned out that not only we went, but everybody in town who could walk, and some who were too small to walk and were carried, half an hour downstream to where the river started to plunge down into the valley. It was a splendid big house, with the mill-part on one side and the house-part on the other, and another building close to it that looked like a shed. I couldn’t believe they’d built that in less than a week! “We’ve had up to twenty people working on it,” Meruvin said. So that was where Hylti’s carpenter had been! “Most of the gears were still whole, that saved a lot of work,” Veh said, and pointing at a little ridged wheel that was wider on one side than the other, “but I made that one all by myself, with the axe!”
The house was really beautiful though it was only half finished, with carving on the doorposts and at the ends of the roof-beams. There hadn’t been time to do any more carving, and the inside walls still had to be done, but Meruvin and the Trynfarin boys could do that by themselves, it didn’t need the Ishey. “The three of you should travel the country together, be travelling builders!” I said, and Tao and Mazao grinned at that but Veh looked thoughtful.
Amre and I had already packed the cart, so we’d be able to leave early the next morning. And so we did! I gave Imri one of my small tear-shaped pearls as a parting gift. Halla said “you shouldn’t do that, it’s much too expensive!” but I told her that we’d been in a place where people fished them out of the sea just like that, and I had a lot more and wanted to give them to people I liked. Amre suggested that Imri use it to pay for her learning, but I said she should put it on a necklace to wear. “When you’re older,” Halla said. “I’ll keep it safe for you.”
We went along the river, past the new mill, with the cart and the goats: the boys had five goats and a billy-goat each, with their kids, so it was quite a herd. Jeran was firmly our carter now: he didn’t want anybody else to care for the mule. Nobody minded, because he was good at it and getting better still. We fished in the river along the way, because we’d used up almost all the meat from Vestynay in Trynfarin, and left the rest with Imri and her parents. It was splendid weather —Jeran said this was real Valdyan spring— and we had enough room in the cart at night, because the boys wanted to sleep outside with the herd. More often than not we got a scowling Veh in the cart with us in the middle of the night, because Tao and Mazao were with the herd but definitely not sleeping!
One day Arvi (or Aine) asked why he (pointing at Veh) and he (pointing at Ruang) looked like girls when they pissed, and the other boys didn’t. That was a difficult question to answer, and eventuallly I said that someone very bad had cut Ruang’s willy off so he had to piss like a girl. “That’s mean!” Aine (or Arvi) said, and I had to agree. “And what about Veh, then?” “He was born with a girl’s body but he is really a boy,” I said. “I don’t understand that!” “No, I don’t understand it either but that’s the way it is.” “Well, I think it’s stupid,” the girl said, and her sister agreed, and they didn’t talk about it any more.
There’s not much difference in walking pace between a mule, people, or a herd of goats, and it took us two weeks to get to a very wide river with boats on it, and a busy road along it. There was a big village there, about the size of Trynfarin or perhaps larger still, but without a wall so it wasn’t a town. A man was coming from a house when we arrived, who looked at us as if he was seeing an apparition— and then I realised that we really must be a sight, three black boys and two brown girls and three Valdyan children and the cart and all those goats! And then we spoke to him and he could understand us, which puzzled him even more. When I said we had another person in the cart who we were going to bring to the Temple of Anshen in Valdis, he warned us not to use that name too much. Later I heard that the village (called Tal-Sorn) wasn’t completely of the Nameless, but mostly it was.
We were allowed to put the cart in an apple orchard and the herd in a field next to it so the goats couldn’t get at the apple trees. The man got his wife, Caille, who asked us “are you going to sleep in the cart, or would you like a bed?” Well, Amre and I would really have liked a bed, but we didn’t get one! When we said we had a sick man in the cart, and no, he wasn’t contagious —they’d had the lung sickness here too so they were very cautious— the woman told us where the priestess of Naigha lived. I thought I’d finally learned how to address priestesses, so I said “Holiness” to her, and she laughed and said she wasn’t a high priestess, she was just Jerna.
She came back with us and climbed into the cart (which made it shake because she was large and fat) and seeing Ruang gave her a shock, first because he was Khas, which we didn’t even notice any more, we were so used to him, and then because he was a eunuch. “And recently, too! That’ll make him sick!” She hugged him and fussed over him as if he was her little boy, and we could see that it made Ruang very uncomfortable, but he didn’t show anything in his face.
Then she climbed out and asked if Ruang pissed blood, and both Amre and I had to admit that we hadn’t noticed, and (blushing) that we hadn’t thought to check. But I got Arvi and Aine and asked them “when you saw Ruang piss, what colour was it?” And they could tell us that it had been dark after we’d eaten the red beetroot, and you could see right through it otherwise. “Trust a four-year-old about piss,” the priestess said, but she was relieved when we said we’d take him to a doctor in Valdis. “But you’d better stay with him,” she said, and that’s how neither I nor Amre got to sleep in a bed that night. “There’s a Khas boy in the temple of Naigha in Valdis, learning to be a priest,” she said, and that alarmed us a bit because of the priests of Naigha in Iss-Peran who were very unlike the priestesses in Valdyas, but it seemed to be all right, it was just that there was nobody else where he came from who could take care of the dead and Naigha had called him.
In the evening people brought us food in the field and stayed to eat with us and listen to our adventures— mostly how we’d helped Trynfarin get rid of the Khas, and a bit of what happened before but not all of it because it was such a long story now that we didn’t know which things to tell. They also told us that it was six days south to Lenay, and ten days north to Valdis. That confused me a bit because I thought we’d end up in Lenay when we took the road from Vestynay, but of course we’d been rounded up by the Ayaglen and taken to Trynfarin which must have been out of the way.
After Tal-Sorn we went north along the big river, the Valda. “I don’t think I can fish in this river!” Mazao said. “I wouldn’t even dare swim in it!” Fortunately the people of Tal-Sorn had given us bread and apples and salt pork and sausage, and we had fresh milk every day, and we spent the night in a village more often than not, so we didn’t have to go hungry. It did take ten days or perhaps more to get to Valdis: even if we’d been able to go faster with the herd, there were places where the road was so crowded that we couldn’t have gone faster anyway. At last we camped in a field where we could already see the city, but not reach it until the next day. Many other people going to Valdis were camping in that field too.
I’d felt strange for most of that day, half angry and half scared, without knowing what I was angry about or scared of. And in the night the boys woke us up: they’d caught a thief! Tao and Veh had him each by an arm, and Mazao had taken his knife. “Tell me,” I said, “what did you think you could steal from us?” And he gave a very confused story about ‘rich wagon, gold, jewels’ which I didn’t believe one word of, we didn’t look rich at all, but I could hear that he talked like an Iss-Peranian or someone who had lived there for a long time. I asked again in the trade language but he didn’t seem to understand (or pretended not to understand), but he said “I’m a thief! I’ve got to eat just like anybody else!” So we gave him some bread and cheese.
We had lots of people around us now, it was almost dawn and we’d been making quite some noise, and a man offered to tie him up —he was a rope merchant travelling with his grandson— to take to Valdis and give him to the sheriff there. “If he’s a thief we could kill him right now, if you’d prefer,” he said, but we preferred to take him to the authorities. So the grandson got some rope, and the thief travelled to Valdis on top of the coils of rope on the cart, trussed like a goose.
Someone must have gone ahead to the city to warn that we were coming, because just as we reached the gate, some time in the afternoon, it opened and several uniformed people came out to take the thief away. Also, there were about seven people in grey uniforms of the Order of the Sworn. The commander —it must have been, she had a very strong mind and people obeyed her— was a short stocky middle-aged woman with a serious and worried look on her face, who came and greeted us. “We’ve been expecting you!” she said, and all the Greys came to ride around us and take us into the city. It scared me! “Are we prisoners?” I asked. She laughed, “No, not at all! But we want you to be safe— things have happened, we’ll tell you when we arrive.”
The Greys took us through the gate, and over a bridge, and through an archway which made us end up in a large courtyard with buildings and stables. It felt like the safest place I’d been in ages— Anshen was here! “That is the temple,” the commander said when she saw me looking at the place that looked safest. Amre and I went in and found the boys already kneeling by the fire in the centre. The temple was eight-sided like Lady Jerna’s little temple room, very bare, no furniture or decorations, only the fire and a little window high up in each wall. As I was kneeling I felt Anshen fill me with pride —his pride in me, I mean, not my pride— and confidence and joyful power, making me feel big and strong and brave. I noticed that I was holding Amre’s hand, I couldn’t remember taking it, but it was clear that she was feeling much the same.
Someone had taken the goats to a field just outside the walls —the Order house had been built against the city wall— and Ruang to a sick-room, where we went to see him. One of the Sworn was sitting in the doorway with a sword across his lap. The room was bright, clean, whitewashed, a very good sick-room! “Is that man to keep me prisoner here?” Ruang asked, and I said “no, to make sure nobody can come in to hurt you.”
The commander —she introduced herself as Lyse and apologised that she hadn’t done it earlier— took us upstairs to a little room with a table full of papers. And there were two people we thought we’d never see again: Sevgi and little Hediyeh! “Ooh, you made it to Valdis!” we cried, and she ran and hugged us, but then told us that Captain Lyase hadn’t made it to Valdis, she’d been captured in Essle. Sevgi had seen it happen, and knew that she had to turn to “people in grey” if something bad happened, so she’d ended up at the Temple of Naigha, who had taken her to the Order house, but when the Order in Essle found Lyase she was being “questioned”, and had already lost both legs, and she was dead now. “Because she had the golden casket!” I said. “She warned us not to go by Essle.” “Yes, that was very wise of her, and of you,” Lyse said. “Lyase was a Guild runner, she willingly took the risk.” Poor Captain Lyase, such a good person, who lost her life for us— but then if we’d gone with her it would probably have been all of us.
“I’ve got the letters from that casket here,” I said and took them out of the satchel. “You are Guild runners, too!” Lyse exclaimed. “But Prince Namak said there’s not much in them that he couldn’t write,” I said. “We’re to take them to the king.” “Yes,” Lyse said, “he’ll probably be here later.” The king! Coming to meet us instead of having us come to him for an audience! But just as I was boggling about that the commander closed her eyes for a moment and said “no, Athal’s got a banquet with the heads of the trade guilds, we’ll take you to court tomorrow.” Then she wanted to know about the thief, and Mazao showed her the knife. “I don’t think it was a thief after all,” he said, “it was a murderer! Because this isn’t a knife to cut something with, but to stab people with, it cuts on both sides.” There was something strange about the knife too, as if it had been dipped in black shiny oil. When I said “is there poison on it?” Lyse looked at it closely and asked “you see that with your mind, don’t you?” and I could only nod confusedly because to my eyes the knife still looked like an ordinary nasty knife.
As if it was the knife that had made me feel dirty, I couldn’t help saying, “Excuse me, what I’d like most now is a bath!” Lyse had already thought of that, and there were bath-tubs in the wash-house downstairs filled with warm water. She looked at us girls, and especially at Amre, and said “As you’re from Iss-Peran— I’ve had some, well, Iss-Peranian bath things brought in, see if you like them.” Well, we did! We hadn’t had such fine soap and scrubbing salts and bath-oils since Solay, even the kind of oil that’s the only thing that can tame my hair when it’s frizzy from weather and travelling. Then we wanted to put on our best clothes, but the only thing I had that I could call ‘best’ was the Ishey dress that was crumpled and grubby and I’d grown out of it. One of the young Sworn gave me a blue skirt and grey shirt, a bit too large for me but better than anything I’d got, Amre, at least, could still wear her Iss-Peranian clothes.
The dinner hall was full of people in grey, and the others stood out much more than I did: the Ishey boys were all in full Ishey finery, Tao and Mazao smelling clean (though their blankets smelt of goat) and Veh smelling of goat still. We hadn’t seen him in the wash-house either, probably because he wanted to wash alone. After dinner some of the younger Sworn, journeymen, came to talk to us —or perhaps to gawk at us, but I didn’t mind— and one of them told us that they’d had an Ishey guest earlier, and he’d taught them to do this: he made several white mice made of spirit run across the table! “He only did that to tease his girlfriend!” the other one said. “His wife, she was pregnant last time they were here.”
Then we were taken to a room under the roof with a lot of beds, and we were asleep before we knew. In the middle of the night I woke because Veh was coming in, smelling of soap this time, who whispered “I’ve been to look at the goats, everything is all right,” and I didn’t wake again before someone knocked on the door and said it was morning. I’d had a dream about the king, and he had red hair and wore a crown.
There were clothes for us! Lyse had sent one of the Sworn, who was from a tailor family, to the market to get something that fit us. I had a blue skirt and a green embroidered jacket, a bit like Hylti’s but not quite as modest, and Amre the same kind of thing in red and yellow. The children had new clothes too, and there were some for the boys but they preferred to stay Ishey, of course.
After a short service in the temple there was breakfast in the hall, and then we went through the town in a real procession, we and the herd —“you can’t go to the king without your herd,” the boys said— with the Sworn around us. Lyse had brought me the satchel, which I’d left in her office! I was so ashamed, I’d never left it out of my sight unless I’d made someone else pledge to take care of it, but Lyse said that she took it as a compliment. She walked with us, some of the Sworn were on horses, some on foot with weapons that looked like a staff with an axe on top. Everybody we passed had to look at us— were we that strange? And if it was so dangerous, as Lyse didn’t stop telling us, why didn’t we go in secret? But perhaps if you’re protected by the Order you don’t need to go in secret because you’re safe anyway.
Valdis wasn’t all that large— not if you’ve seen Solay, or you were born in Albetire. The streets were narrow, the houses were built of small reddish stones, and the Order house was one of the highest buildings there, most didn’t go above two floors and an attic. We went along the river for a bit, tamed between walls, and then got to a square with larger buildings and there was a bridge and a gate with the palace behind it, only I wouldn’t have known it was the palace, because it looked like Castle Tal-Borin (only a lot more of it), not like a palace at all. When we’d crossed the bridge the Sworn got off their horses, and servants came to take the horses and put them somewhere, but they didn’t know what to do with the goats. Anyway, the boys wouldn’t go in without the goats, so we went in with them, through a long passage and a hall. There an oldish woman came with three little boys, one red-haired, one blond and one dark, and she took Jeran and the little girls along, “do you want to see the palace? But first the kitchen!” Another passage, into a really big hall, full of people, with a raised part at the other end where a man and a woman were standing.
The woman was taller than the man, and her hair was brown and very long and she was wearing one of those silver things with glass on her face that old people use to see through, but she wasn’t old, perhaps twenty or twenty-five. The man did have a crown or at least a gold headband, and red hair (though it was dark red, not bright red like Princess Ayneth’s as I’d dreamt), and a short neat red beard, and he was also wearing a silver-and-glass thing, and he wasn’t very old either. They were wearing splendid clothes, embroidered with gold thread, they must be the king and the queen! The boys promptly went down on their knees to kiss the queen’s feet, and she raised them up with a smile and said “I can see you’re Ishey.” Then there was some confusion because the goats were trying to eat the wall-hangings, but eventually we ended up in what the king called “the small reception room”, the king and queen, Lyse, some of the Sworn, as well as Amre and me. The king called an Ishey clerk to take care of the herd, but she was a woman and the boys wouldn’t have it. “Ishey women aren’t supposed to do that,” I said to the nearest person, who turned out to be the queen. And indeed, the boys took the herd away themselves, so they’d come later, but the king wanted us to tell the story from the beginning. (He was easy to talk to! Just as easy as Princess Ayneth. And he does really look like her.)
So we told the king and the queen about how we’d met in Albetire, and about the war, and why we’d left, and how we’d ended up in Dadán and what had happened there, and that’s where the first lot of letters came in. First the king noticed that there was a bit of anea on the letters, and I said that it was probably Mialle’s seal. “She’s in the Guild of the Nameless,” I said, and the king grinned and said he’d noticed. “Can you read that?” he asked the queen, and she could! Not very well, about as well as Amre and I could read the book about the duck. First she put a whole page aside, saying “oh, that’s just phrases” exactly as Prince Namak had done. When I said that, she said “Who? Oh, Shishe!” and we told her that Namak was his own name and Shishe the name of his family. “Oh! I’ve had that the wrong way round all the time!” she said. Strange, to have a queen admit that she’s wrong! But then there were some pages that really did say something: it seemed that the emperor invited the king to come and fall at his feet to show his submission, and in exchange the emperor would permit the king to keep the whole North in peace and prosperity. And he would also give him —and there the queen faltered— four thousand? “Amre, can you read Iss-Peranian numbers?” But Amre couldn’t read numbers that big either, especially not in that kind of court handwriting. “Well, let’s say four thousand. Four thousand saddlebags of gold.” I thought of the counting-room in Princess Ayneth’s palace, and especially of the room full of gold behind it, and apparently the king did too, because he said “Well, I’d say we have enough gold in Solay not to need it. Let’s give it a pass, don’t you think, Raisse?”
Then the queen asked “And why are you carrying these letters— why didn’t the envoy come himself?” I started to explain, but foundered and then Amre said “show it, then!” and I did, all the nastiness of the envoys and their priest and the soldiers, and Mialle —I’d completely forgotten how nasty Mialle could be, I’d only remembered her good parts and what she’d taught us— and I ended up shaking, with Lyse’s strong solid arm around me. “Thank you,” the queen said. “Yes, Athal, let’s give it a pass, I don’t think I want to have anything to do with this emperor.”
Next was the letter from Captain Ailse in Dadán. “They want more ships to call there,” the king said. “Sensible.” He put the letter on a different pile, probably to give to a secretary. “Is that my sister’s handwriting I see?” And yes, the next letter was from Princess Ayneth. The king and the queen already knew a lot of the things she’d written —apparently she’d written a letter after this one that had taken less time to arrive— but there was more about her kidnapping in this one. “This prince of hers, what’s he like?” the queen asked. “And what does Raith think of it?” We said that he was nice as far as we knew, and Raith had said that it was for the succession and didn’t object. The king said that he’d met Shishe Namak and that he might well be good enough for his sister.
The boys still hadn’t arrived, and the queen went to the other room for a moment and came back with a cute (and hungry) red-haired baby. “Ooh, that’s the princess!” I said. “Yes, Princess Alyse,” the queen said, and she nursed the baby and then kept her on her lap where she fell asleep, while we went on with the story.
After Solay we had been on the ship with Captain Lyase, and the king and queen had heard all of that from Lyse and Lyse from Sevgi, but then we got to Idanyas and Tal-Borin, and the boys still weren’t there! They arrived, breathless and a bit subdued, just as we were starting to talk about the stolen children. “We put the herd in the courtyard,” they said, “and then we ran into Ezeh! She’s going to send us right back to Idanyas, and we’ll have to marry girls.” “Is Ezeh very scary?” I asked, and the Ishey clerk (who was still around, but so quietly that I’d hardly noticed her) said “Yes, she is.” “Nonsense,” said the king, “Ezeh may be boss over all the Ishey in Valdyas, but I’m boss over her and I forbid her to send you home, you’re my subjects and I allow you to do whatever you want. And marry whoever you want.” “Perhaps you should send them to Solay so your sister can marry them!” the queen said with a smile.
When we showed the letters from Tal-Borin, the queen got very quiet and I could see that she was very angry. “You found these letters with the children?” “Yes,” I said, “on a table next to the door to where they kept them. I thought they might be important.” “I think we’ve got enough here,” she said, shaking a fistful of letters, “to catch them all. How many children were there?” “Five,” we said, counting them on our fingers, Athal, and Imri who was back home in Trynfarin, and Jeran, and Aine and Arvi. “And they gave Aine and Arvi some nasty yellow medicine that still makes them sick at times, and we know there’s a doctor here in Valdis who knows about that.” “Yes,” the queen said, “that’s Janam Isal, I’ll have him called.” “But Jeran and Imri didn’t get any medicine, and I think Athal got some but not much, he wasn’t sick when we left him in Vestynay.” The queen nodded. “Twins are much in demand— and the supply of the poison is much less these days, since we stopped that in Albetire, so I’m not surprised that only they got it. —There’s mention of sixteen children in these letters, so there’s still a lot we haven’t caught.” “Didn’t your brother go to Essle after a few of them?” the king asked, and the queen nodded thoughtfully. “Still, there must be more. Well,” she said to us, “that’s not for you to handle. You’ve already done more than anyone expected.”
“Do you know what they want now in Tal-Borin— that I send a new baron, or have one of their own made baron, or what?” the king asked. “I think they just want to have the land as their own,” I said, “do they need a baron? They can manage very well for themselves.” But the king explained that all land belongs to the Crown, and that the barons take care of it, but he’d send people to investigate.
The next bunch of letters was from Trynfarin, from various people for people in Valdis, but those could go to the Temple of Mizran where they could sort them out, and also the letter from Ailin and the one from Senthi to the Temple of Naigha. “You’re not going to take those to the temples yourselves,” Lyse said, “that’s much too dangerous!” That was the last straw for me, and I almost shouted, even though it was in front of the king and the queen: “Dangerous! After all the travelling we did, as if that wasn’t dangerous! Can’t we take a couple of hundred steps in a city from one temple to another? We’ll want to take the little girls to Nesile too, and Jeran to his father in Rizenay, he says he’s got the best father in the world!” But she was serious. “There are now people after you who know who you are, and know where you are, and want your blood. Better lie low for a bit. I’m going to have to send people to Rizenay anyway, they can take the children home.”
“But now that you’re here,” the queen said gently, “what do you want to do with your lives?” Veh said that he wanted to go to the Plains and join a clan there, but he’d wanted to keep his promise to take us to Valdis or he’d have joined the Ayaglen clan at Trynfarin. But Dushtan had made Yatiyor promise to go back to Trynfarin every winter— he’d be able to stay in Valdis for the summer and go to Trynfarin the next winter.
“I want to learn to be a doctor,” I said. “I’ve got the apprentice fee from Trynfarin!” “And I want to be a doctor too,” Amre said, and that was new even to me, I knew she’d been thinking about it but she’d never said it outright. “Then we could send you to Turenay,” the king said, “or there’s a new hospital here in Valdis where you could learn, we have some very good doctors.” “But I think I want to be a Guild runner as well,” I said, with more courage than I thought I had. “Then you’ll have to go to Turenay,” the queen said. “Though it will probably be a lot tamer than you’re used to after all your travels.”
