The Lady Read online

  No old woman should run so fast.

  “Where were you?” Deyandara demanded, searching for the bow she had dropped, queasy with nerves now that it was all over. There, and not trampled, thank Andara.

  “Up the hill.”

  “Doing what? You said you’d circle around.”

  “Circling.”

  “You took your time.”

  “I’m an old woman.”

  “Not so as anyone would notice.”

  “I was persuading a fool of a Praitannec scout that I wasn’t a Marakander mercenary, if you must know.”

  “What?” That cry. “Andara prevent you didn’t kill one of Marnoch’s scouts!”

  “No, he’s still up there, and in one piece. Or,” as there was a sudden slithering and crashing, “perhaps not. Down here, boy!” she called, raising her voice. “The Marakanders are dealt with, and Lady Deyandara wishes your escort to Lord Yvarr.”

  The scout was no boy but one of Marnoch’s own huntsmen, balding and with a grey-grizzled beard. He came through the hazel thicket much more slowly than Lin had, spear levelled and a red welt rising on his cheekbone.

  “My lady Deyandara!” He raised the spear and grinned. “It really is you.”

  She not only knew his face but remembered, after a moment’s frantic thought, his name. “Faullen! Well met. This is Lady Lin, a wizard in the high king’s—in my service.”

  “We introduced ourselves just now,” said Lin gravely.

  Faullen eyed her. “Wizard, eh? It’s been a while since an old woman kicked me in the face. And I wasn’t even trying to steal a kiss. I think you’ve loosened a tooth or two, as if I had any to spare.”

  Lin kissed her hand to him. “Next time, friend Faullen, listen when a lady whispers in your ear.”

  He grinned. “Next time, Lady Wizard, try whispering something more to the point than, ‘Hush, I’m a friend.’ A man believes that when he’s stalking Marakanders, he deserves gutting. I take it you’ve dealt with all three of them, or our happy get-together would have been interrupted by now. Can I ask, Lady Deyandara . . .”

  “I’m on my way to Lord Yvarr,” said Deyandara.

  “The Lord Seneschal is up at his own dinaz, four days ride, but Lord Marnoch’s army is camped just a few miles northwest of here. He’s been making a circle, to come at the royal dinaz and the Marakanders from the west.”

  “Even better,” Lin answered for her.

  “Yes,” Deyandara said, with a quelling look at her. They had overshot, then; they had left the road almost at once after Marakand and struck out into the trackless hills, angling towards where Lin’s nightly divination told her Marnoch would be. And for over a week, she’d had Lin telling her, Remember you’re their queen’s rightful heir returning from a mission set you by their goddess, not a truant child slinking home. Lin had better remember she was Deyandara’s wizard, not her tutor or grandmother, to speak for her. “Can you take us to him?”

  Faullen and Deyandara salvaged everything useful from the Marakander mercenaries, and Deyandara recovered her undamaged arrows, dividing the Marakanders’ quivers with the hunter. By then the third horse had returned. Faullen caught it, saying that spare mounts were going to be useful. He left dealing with the dead to Deyandara, who pulled up a handful of muddy grassroots and dropped it on the one lying by the brook; she did the same for the man who had gone for the horses.

  “Go to your road in peace,” she said. “Don’t stay here to trouble the decent folk whose rightful land this is.”

  Lin had remained within the hazel thicket, kneeling with a hand on the chest of the man she had killed. Praying, maybe, though she hadn’t bothered to pray over others she had slain in their two previous encounters. The light murmur of her voice rose and fell, paused and rose again. By the time she rejoined them the dusk had thickened into night.

  “They were on their way back to Ketsim with the news that Marnoch was near,” she said.

  “I knew that,” said Faullen. “Why do you think I was looking for their camp? They wouldn’t have lived past the dawn. I was about to leave to report back when someone started sticking them full of arrows.” He clapped Deyandara on the shoulder. “You shouldn’t take such risks, my lady, going in outnumbered like that.”

  Deyandara was on the verge of saying it was Lin’s insistence, not her own, and that this was the third time they’d taken on greater numbers of Marakander scouts, when Lin’s pinch on her arm silenced her. Yes, don’t make childish excuses, pinning the blame elsewhere. “We thought they might be carrying word of where Yvarr’s made his stronghold,” she told him, picking the best of her reasons. “We couldn’t let them betray that to Ketsim.”

  “You shouldn’t risk yourself,” he repeated. “I’ll see you safe to Lord Marnoch, now. Do you bring word from your brother?”

  “I’ve been in the south,” she said briefly.

  “Best you save the tale for Lord Marnoch,” Lin added.

  Faullen, reproved along with Deyandara, merely bowed.

  Faullen had been doing his stalking on foot; riding one of the captured mounts, he accompanied them over the gorse-covered hill and up a bend of the brook into the narrow valley where they had left their own horses, leading the way on between the hills again. Marnoch wasn’t trying to conceal his presence yet; from a hilltop half a mile away they saw the fires—too few, surely, for an army—but they had been challenged by a patrol well before that. Faullen sent a boy from the patrol that met them riding ahead to “Tell the war-leader that Lady Deyandara’s come back to us, with news from the south.” Deyandara felt queasier at that than she ever did in the aftermath of attack. She’d told that meeting over in her mind so many times on the way from Marakand, and somehow it always ended up being only herself and Marnoch, alone, and the words came easily. Now they fled her. It would be a public meeting, of course it would. By now the entire folk would know Cattiga’s bastard niece had fled the royal dinaz before it was abandoned to the enemy.

  She should have believed Lin when the wizard said she would go with her if she ran away, and not haul her back to her brother by her ear. She didn’t want to be here. She shouldn’t be here. She had walked into a little room, a narrow, windowless room, thinking she could bear it, telling herself it was duty, and now they were closing the door and there was no key and her heart was racing, the reins slippery in sweating palms.

  Marnoch rode out to meet them, in a shirt of ring-mail such as only a king could afford, at least among the Praitans, and very formal. Probably it was some treasure of the royal house, saved when they evacuated Dinaz Catairna. Her heart lurched at the sight of him. Him, most of all, she did not want to believe she was a girl—a woman—who would flee her duty. At least riding Ghu’s white mare Deyandara felt larger, or taller, anyhow, and less foolish at being bowed to, though she would rather Marnoch’s face had not been so set and blank in the torchlight, or his words so stiffly correct. Lin didn’t help, keeping half a length back, equally expressionless. At least Lin could be counted on to always look regal, never a torn thread of her brocade from racing through the undergrowth, never a smudge of ash or moss or mud.

  Even once Faullen, to his disappointment, had been dismissed, and a girl had taken their horses, another bringing hot towels and wooden bowls of watered wine, Marnoch remained cold and correct, ushering them into his lanthorn-lit tent and introducing the two lords, one lady, and one lord’s heir who stood waiting. Only Gelyn, the chief bard’s daughter, seemed glad to see Deyandara safe. The woman embraced her like a sister.

  “We haven’t known what to think, since you disappeared from the dinaz in the night, Lady Deyandara,” Marnoch said. “It’s good to see you safe at last. But why aren’t you with the high king?” Did you run away to him, he meant, of course. Are you returned as his servant?

  Deyandara drew a deep breath. I only came to say I didn’t mean to run away, but I can’t be your queen, I can’t live trapped in a hall with people about me every waking moment of the day. I
need the hills and the wind, a horse and a dog and old songs. . . . Now, if ever, she should speak queenly, but . . . how would the bard Yselly have had a princess tell it, in a tale?

  Lin, at her shoulder and a pace back, arms folded, was more queenly than she could ever be, and more threatening than the armed lords about Marnoch, for all her grey hair and lined face, if only they knew it. She should live up to that escort, but the truth was, Lin mostly made her feel small and young and shabby.

  “I did not abandon the Duina Catairna of my own will,” Deyandara said, and heard her voice tremble. She clenched her hands on the hem of her jerkin and relaxed them again, carefully. “After we met, you and I and the Lord Seneschal and some of the lords, I went out to see to my pony, to be ready when the time came to leave the dinaz. We had been speaking of that—”

  “Speaking of Ketsim’s approaching army,” muttered the youngest lord, Fairu, who had been there. “And you fled.”

  “I—” Ignore him. She almost heard the words, in Lin’s voice. “Catairanach came to me, there in the stables.”

  Fairu sniffed. Lin shifted, ever so slightly, to look in his direction.

  “She said—” Catairanach had said she would have no child of another god’s land rule her folk, but repeating that would do no good now, “—the goddess told me to take a message for her, to an assassin of the Five Cities dwelling near Gold Harbour. She appointed him her champion to see her vengeance brought to the Voice of Marakand for the murder of blessed Cattiga and my cousin Gilru, and the treachery done against them in their hall. I wasn’t permitted to tell you, Lord Marnoch, or to ask your aid in this, though Andara knows I would have wished to. The goddess’s will surrounded me, overwhelmed me, and I simply—I went, like a goose drawn south in the autumn. I have no memory of leaving the dinaz or of how I avoided the advancing Marakanders. I came to myself again well away from the dinaz, knowing it besieged or abandoned behind me.”

  “Abandoned and burned,” said Marnoch.

  “They’ve quarried the south of the hill away and built a wall in stone atop your dyke,” Lin interjected.

  Another sniff. Lin simply rolled a hand in the air, sketching some sign, and held it up brimming with liquid light, as if to study Fairu’s fluffy-moustached face more closely. The sceptical lord backed hastily away.

  With an effort, Deyandara ignored the byplay. “I found the Leopard, as the goddess bade me, and accompanied him and his servant to Marakand, where I met Lady Lin, a wizard and my former tutor, who had come in search of me. She has sworn herself to my service rather than my brother’s, to accompany me safely back to you.”

  Short, to the point, and every word true.

  “The high king was at the ford of the Broasora, awaiting the last forces of the Galatan and the Duina Lellandi just over a week ago, Lord Marnoch,” Lin added, rolling formal phrases grandly off her tongue, but then, she always did have an old-fashioned formality to her speech. “He may be on his way west, by now.”

  Marnoch’s face had lightened as Deyandara spoke. “Deyandara, this is true?”

  “If Lin says so. We came from Marakand.”

  “We did know he was at the ford, with a large army. We’re not without wizards ourselves and at my father’s dinaz we thought it safe for them to work. It’s much more easily defended than Dinaz Catairna, being folded tight in the bare fells. Numbers can’t come at it. We’ve seen a few scouting patrols; none have lived to return to Ketsim.” A brief smile touched his face, reporting that. “To tell the truth, we expected to find Durandau at Dinaz Catairna by now, but there’s been no word come up of that. We haven’t dared work another divination since we set out, for fear of betraying ourselves to the Red Masks. It’s true they smell magic. A soothsayer with my scouts disobeyed orders and cast the leaves to search for enemies out in the hills, when he was far too close to Dinaz Catairna. Red Masks came down on them not long after, and took him. Two of the scouts with him were slain and the third left for dead, which is how we know about it at all.”

  “The five of you are all that march to meet with Durandau?” Lin asked. “Do the rest of the lords of the duina follow?”

  Marnoch’s jaw tightened. “All who could or would join me have. The Lord Seneschal would have come, but someone has to stay apart from the fighting to keep order, or we’ll have war behind as well as ahead of us.”

  “Costen and Hicca are already at feud,” muttered Fairu, “and between them they’ve driven my folk out of their eastern grazing. Do we need that light, wizard?”

  “And Hicca has entered into some kind of treaty with the Marakanders, we know that. Paying tribute, maybe, maybe even sending some of his bench-companions to Ketsim at Dinaz Catairna,” said the older lord, Goran. The lands of the ridge of high hills between Dinaz Catairna and the caravan road were Goran’s, the first to be overrun by the Marakanders.

  “We can’t fight the Marakanders, not with the Red Masks leading them and—we saw it first when they drove the rearguard from the burning dinaz—reducing everyone who comes near to a cowering child. We’d all heard those stories from Marakand, but I didn’t believe it until I saw it. Felt it. They didn’t bring that power against us in the hall. They didn’t need to. And they still fight invulnerable, with their Lady’s hand on them,” Marnoch said. “The lords know it. Too many see it as a choice between death and saving their own folk.”

  “We’ve even tried fire-arrows!” burst out Dellan, daughter of Austellan. “They can’t be killed. Small wonder if the lords would rather keep their folk home, but my father says, better to die true than live a forsworn bondsman of some city goddess. He’s with the Lord Seneschal, my lady. You know he’s blind, since the pox last autumn, or he’d be here with us, but—”

  “And even if their own followers are as unmanned as we by whatever power gives them such fear, there’s always more of them sweeping around the edges, killing warriors still too panicked by the Red Masks to resist,” said Marnoch wearily, waving the young woman to silence. “I’ve seen men just wrap their hands over their heads and wait to be dropped dead like a clubbed rat. But if we can meet up with Durandau, if he has even half the warbands of the kings with him, maybe there’ll be so many of us we can prevail and leave the Red Masks standing alone, without anyone to follow them. For our own honour and that of Catairanach, we shouldn’t scatter and hide and wait for the high king to tell us it’s safe to come out of our holes, or wait for the Marakanders to lure half the duina to them with promises of favours and wealth at their neighbours’ expense. However few we are, we need to be there, with the high king, to remind him we are the Duina Catairna and he comes at our asking.”

  He took a breath. “But Deya—my lady—the goddess sent you from us? I had the wizards divine for you, once we were away. We thought it safe enough to call them back and have them to do so; Ketsim seemed to be settling in to rebuilding the dinaz with no urge to push farther north. They could learn nothing of where you had gone, or even if you were alive or dead. They began to think dead, and then one, I think it was Mag, said no, only very far away. We thought, if the last drawing of the wands was right and you did live somewhere that the wizards couldn’t see, that you must have gone back to your brother in the Duina Andara. That’s when the lords began to withdraw to their own valleys. Without you . . .”

  “I didn’t mean to leave you,” Deyandara said, and her voice shook again. She steadied it, looked around at them all, chin up. “My lords, believe that. I knew my duty as blood-heir of Cattiga and Gilru. I didn’t mean to abandon you. I had no choice.” The lies came easily, because they were the right thing to say in a tale. She almost wished the fatal snake had bitten her instead of Yselly, in the long-vanished autumn. But Marnoch was smiling at her again.

  “We could ask Catairanach, if she’d speak to any of us,” muttered Lord Fairu. His dinaz lay in the east on the borders of the Duina Broasoran. If one of his neighbours was already allied with the Marakanders, he might have no way back to his own hall but through a victory
at Dinaz Catairna. “No one’s heard from her since the night we abandoned the dinaz.”

  “You’ve no call to doubt Lady Deyandara’s word,” Marnoch said. “No one saw her pass out of the gate. We’d feared some foul magic of the Red Masks abducting her.” Or shielding her flight, if she were an agent of Marakand after all, no doubt. “If Catairanach’s hand was over her, that accounts for the way she disappeared from the eyes of men and the divination of the wizards.”

  “Easy for her to claim that, when the goddess refuses to come even in dreams to the wizards or to the Lord Seneschal. Have the wizards test her words for truth, before we trust her,” said Fairu. “But not here, so close to Dinaz Catairna and the Red Masks.”

  “There are those who will stand to defend Deyandara’s honour.” Marnoch set his hand to his sword’s hilt. “If you mean to accuse your queen of treachery or even cowardice, Fairu, do so openly. She will not be insulted so, taken before the wizards for judgement as if she’s a servant accused of theft.”

  “Indeed,” Lin purred, without moving at all. “But you, Lord Marnoch, have duties as war-leader of the duina, at present. I will stand as the champion of the queen-presumptive.”

  “It is the truth and you can ask the wizards to try me, for all I care,” Deyandara snapped. Lin put a hand on her shoulder, demanding silence.

  “A champion who is wizard cannot bring wizardry into the circle of judgement against an opponent who is not,” said Fairu. “Perhaps your foreign wizard doesn’t realize that, Lady. And I’m certainly not going to fight an old woman.”