The Fall of Neskaya Read online

  Coryn pawed through the chest until he found the soapwood box. The bag of river-opals was there, as well as the stick toys, but no handkerchief.

  Coryn’s stomach plummeted like a stone. He started shaking, bone-deep shivers like those of a man caught in a killing cold.

  His hands moved of their own accord, pushing aside the remainder of the chest’s contents. He took out the cheek strap from the bridle of his first pony, wrapped in a scrap of the animal’s blanket, the vest of age-softened crimson leather which Eddard had passed down to him. And there, shoved into the far corner, a scrap of white. . . .

  He drew out the handkerchief with its tiny embroidered cherries, smoothed its wrinkles. The fabric, delicate to begin with, had worn almost through in places, giving it the weight and feel of gauze. What had possessed him to rumple it so carelessly?

  No matter, it was here. Everything was here. Last night’s nightmare had been just that, a fevered vision born of too much wine after the stress of so many days on the fire-lines. He’d also been suffering from threshold sickness, that’s what Dom Rumail had called it. No wonder he’d had bad dreams. Now, with the handkerchief safe in his hands, everything made sense.

  A tap sounded at his door, more mouse scratching than a real knock. He tucked the handkerchief inside the soapwood box and scrambled to his feet, heart beating unaccountably fast, just as the door swung open. Kristlin stuck her head in.

  “Wait till I say to come!” Coryn flushed, acutely aware that he was standing there in his nightshirt with his legs bare to the knees. Then he saw her face and broke off.

  Kristlin’s cheeks were pale as milk, except for two spots of vivid color and crimson ringing her puffy eyes. Today, as she had since the fire, she wore boys’ breeches, this pair fairly clean, patched over the knees and seat, and a shirt two sizes too big for her. She sobbed and threw herself into Coryn’s arms.

  He sat her down on the bed. “What’s the matter, chiya? What’s happened?”

  “No! No! I don’t want to go!” Her words dissolved into sobs. She buried her face against his chest.

  “Nobody will make you do anything . . .” His words sounded hollow to his own ears.

  “Papa says I have to—have to—go away. To Ambervale,” She pulled away from him, her eyes snapping with her old spirit. “To marry that stinky old Belisar! I told Papa I never, ever want to get married! Not to anyone!”

  Coryn sat back, bewildered. Just when things started to make sense, the world turned itself upside down. Kristlin, his baby sister, to be wife to the heir of King Damian Deslucido? She must have misunderstood. Surely it must be Tessa, who was grown up enough to be married and certainly looked like a Queen, or even Margarida, who had complained so much about the rash from her starstone—surely that meant she had laran. But Kristlin?

  “There has to be some mistake. Just let me get dressed and I’ll talk to Father. We’ll sort it out, you’ll see—” He disentangled himself from her arms. When he rose, his knees threatened to buckle under him. He caught himself on one hand on the bedpost, blinking back sudden grayness.

  “I think you better have some breakfast first,” Kristlin said with one of her quixotic shifts in mood. She’d obviously decided that the matter was settled now that her favorite brother was taking her part. “You slept in all day yesterday, lazyhead.”

  “I did what?”

  “Well,” she counted on her fingers, “it was two days ago Dom Rumail tested you, and he said to put you to bed afterward, because you’d had a bad spell of threshold illness, and the next day you didn’t get up, so he gave you some kiri—, kirian, well, anyway, stuff to help you, and wouldn’t let any of us try it, not even Margarida and was she mad ’cause she says she gets revulsions of the stomach just as bad as you, and then Tessa got bossy and said you’d need something to eat when you did wake up, so here you are.” She folded her hands in her lap. “If you aren’t hungry, can I have your eggs?”

  Coryn thought that if he had to put up with any more of her chatter, he’d pack her off to Belisar himself, but she left him cheerfully enough. He devoured the entire breakfast. It all tasted wonderful, even the ripened chervine cheese.

  The food steadied his stomach. He pulled on his boots and the cleanest shirt and pants he could find, and went in search of his father.

  Coryn made his way to the eastern tower, where Lord Leynier met with Padraic to go over the estate accounts and conduct other business early in the day. The room resembled a solarium with its thick glass windows along the curved outer wall, bright in all but the stormiest winter mornings. As a young boy, Coryn loved to sit on the pinewood floor and play quietly while his father worked. He’d even sneaked in uninvited once or twice alone, although that was strictly forbidden, until one day Petro got caught doing the same thing and spent a week scrubbing out the latrines.

  Petro had a talent for getting into trouble, not so much for what he did but how he’d always argue why it was right and necessary when he got caught. Sometimes he’d even convince his father, or at least so entertain him as to receive a lesser punishment, which only encouraged him. If it had been Coryn caught in the eastern tower room, he’d have had a month at the latrines, not just a week.

  Coryn paused in the small connecting chamber and lifted his hand to knock on the inner door. Voices reached him, his father speaking the name of a Tower. Neskaya.

  “. . . for the sake of the boy’s health and sanity,” rumbled a bass voice. Dom Rumail. “. . . there should be . . . no delay . . .”

  Coryn held his breath in the silence that followed. Above the pounding of his heart, he heard his father’s quiet words, sensed the fear and love behind them.

  “You are sure Coryn is at risk? That sending him to a Tower is his only hope?”

  “Nothing is certain but death and next winter’s snows,” the laranzu replied, his voice rising in forcefulness. “But this much I can swear to you, vai dom. In all my years, I have never seen a child suffer threshold sickness this severe . . .” His voice lowered, the words muffled. “. . . without skilled care. Perhaps, if he had been taught from early years by a household leronis . . .”

  Rumail’s words trailed off and the silence lengthened. Coryn’s hand ached from the tension of clenching his fist. His mind jumped and darted from one thought to another—his promise to Kristlin, the vague uneasiness from last night which even now stirred once more, and now this news, that he himself must be sent away—that he had laran—

  Unable to contain himself any longer, Coryn rapped on the door, startling at the loudness of the sound. At his father’s word, he lifted the latch and went in. The scene was much as he expected, his father sitting behind the big burl-wood desk, Dom Rumail in a cushioned chair.

  “Ah! There you are!” His father gestured for Coryn to come in, just as if he’d been expected.

  Coryn lowered himself on the bare stool, wiping damp palms on the thighs of his pants. He kept his eyes fixed on his father’s. He did not want to look at Dom Rumail.

  “It’s about Kristlin,” he began. His words spilled out as he stumbled through her story.

  “She is indeed the one who tested strongest for the laran qualities King Damian is looking for in a match,” Beltran said gravely. His brows, black shot through with gray, drew together briefly. “So it is for her that the marriage offer is proposed.”

  “But she’s only—” —eight! Coryn bit off his words, sensing his father’s distress. He did not need to be reminded how badly Verdanta needed this alliance. It was not so long ago that children even younger than Kristlin were forced into matings in order to breed exotic new strains of laran.

  “Dom Rumail assures me that no true marriage will take place until Kristlin is of a suitable age, which will not be for some years,” Beltran said. “Today she will be handfasted by proxy and the contract signed, nothing more.”

  Coryn caught the edge of his father’s thought, A handfasting is not a marriage. I pray this one will hold until the alliance can be made irrevo
cable.

  “She—I’m not sure she understands that, Father,” Coryn said.

  “But in time, she will,” his father said. “If things were otherwise, I would have done my best to make a good marriage to someone else for her. She would have had to leave her own home for her husband’s. That is the way of things in this world. As it is, this is a far better match than she could have ever hoped for. With a future Queen for a sister, the other girls may look in higher places for their own marriages, so everyone benefits from the match.”

  Rumail turned and Coryn could not evade his glance.

  “And I—I am to go to a Tower?” He posed it as a question, although he already knew the answer.

  “I thought you might have heard a word or two while you waited outside,” his father said. One corner of his mouth quirked upward, as it did when he was trying not to smile. “Dom Rumail has already told you that you may be gifted with laran—”

  “Not may be,” Rumail interrupted, with a resonance in his voice which bespoke his years of Tower authority. “He has a powerful gift. We must not lose it, or him.”

  Beltran went on without missing a breath, “—and that for your own health, you require the care of people who know how to treat threshold sickness, how to teach you to use your laran. If you truly do not want to leave home,” he went on, ignoring Rumail’s pointed frown, “it might be possible to arrange for someone from Neskaya or Tramontana to come here.”

  “I do want to go to a Tower,” Coryn blurted out. His voice shook, but perhaps only he could hear it. But not to Neskaya. He knew nothing of the Tower, beyond that was where Rumail served. He shifted uneasily under the laranzu’s gaze.

  “I thought you might look upon it as yet another adventure,” his father said, sighing. “And I much prefer this be of your own choosing. When you knocked on the door, we were just discussing the matter of which Tower.”

  “I am, of course, most familiar with Neskaya,” Rumail said. “The workers are highly skilled, and have great matrix screens capable of almost any laran work which can be imagined. But when I left, several new commissions required their combined attention. With those priorities, they already have all the young people they can properly train. I am not returning directly there, so I could not escort Master Coryn in any event. But Tramontana is just as qualified to begin his training. I will be happy to arrange it.”

  Tramontana . . . Relief, like a cool breeze in the stillness of a sultry summer night, swept through Coryn.

  “Yes, that makes sense.” Beltran nodded. “To get there, you must take the longer route to avoid crossing into High Kinnally lands, but the weather is mild, so that is not a problem. In addition, we have distant kin at Tramontana, and it would be well to cement those ties, come next fire season.”

  “When I have learned to use my powers, I will summon Tower gliders and their chemicals,” Coryn said. “We will have no further need of outsider help.”

  Rumail looked at him sharply, but Beltran chuckled and said, “That is true enough, should you still want to return to us after seeing the wide world. Now, go and find your little sister, so we can explain to her that she need not leave home quite yet.”

  The doors had been thrown open to the warm summer night. Coryn stood at the threshold, looking out over the empty courtyard and wondering when he would see it again. It seemed a century ago that he’d watched the frenzied activity of the firefighters. Here Padraic had shouted out orders in that bellow of his, and there Kristlin had fallen on her backside, almost trampled by Beltran’s unruly bay stallion.

  Kristlin . . .

  He’d hardly recognized her when she’d come downstairs for the handfasting ceremony, wearing a dress that rippled as she walked, blue trimmed with ivory lace at the high neckline and tied about her slender waist with a matching ribbon. Ruella had brushed her unbound hair until it shone like polished brass. At least, Kristlin looked like the child she was, although a pretty one. No one could reasonably assert that she was old enough to be married.

  Tessa had worn her good dress, the same as at the banquet after the fire, but she wore no jewels, looking more like a somber young matron than a still-eligible damisela. Margarida practically giggled with relief that she had not been chosen. She wore her hair in a child’s braids over a smock she’d embroidered with her own designs of butterflies and windflowers.

  Unlike the previous celebration, there had been little rejoicing past the simple proxy ritual. Petro disappeared into one of his black moods and Tessa refused to sing without him, claiming a delicate voice. Eddard’s wife excused herself early to take to her bed. Although she had not complained, her skin was ashen with the fatigue of her pregnancy. Coryn worried that Kristlin would mind, but she seemed happier to have the whole thing over with.

  “Brother . . .” She’d come up so silently he hadn’t heard her. “Are you sad?”

  He shook his head, startled. Had she sensed his mood? “Not sad, just—just wanting to remember this.” He swung his arms wide to the yard, the estate grounds, the mountains with their forests and wild streams beyond.

  He hugged her hard, feeling her wiry arms tighten around him.

  I’ll miss you. The words formed in his mind, so that he could not be sure who had said them. In their separate ways, they were each bidding good-bye to childhood. She would stay at home for a handful of years and then go on to her place as di catenas wife to a king, maybe the mother of kings even greater. His way led to a Tower, to Tramontana, to the secrets of the starstone and clingfire and things he could not yet imagine. He shivered, wondering if he would ever see her again.

  4

  Coryn would have preferred to leave for Tramontana without either breakfast or fuss, but Dom Rumail departed the same day, so the household stayed up half the night preparing an unusually elaborate meal, everything from cinnamon-flavored apple twists to fat sausages. He’d eaten far more than he wanted, mostly because Rumail kept lecturing him that loss of appetite was one of the danger signs of threshold sickness. He would rather have Tessa fussing over him with her herbs.

  Then, while still at the table, Beltran gave yet another speech thanking Rumail, and then one for Coryn’s special benefit. Coryn had heard all the phrases before: “family honor” and “noble deportment.” His body wouldn’t sit still, no matter how hard he tried. He wanted to be away, off to the adventures which surely must await him.

  Kristlin sat at her usual place, having defied Ruella and dressed in an old smock and underskirt. Her eyes looked red and she sniffled. Rumail took her small hand in his and said, “Let the joining of these children bind our lands in enduring goodwill and prosperity. May this union be a harbinger of a new world, one in which brothers no longer make war upon one another, but live together under one King, all obeying the same just rule.”

  “Peace and happiness for our children and their children is our dearest wish,” Beltran replied.

  “The question is,” Petro muttered as they left the table, “which King and whose version of justice?”

  Coryn, his stomach churning with the too-rich food, turned to his brother. They had drawn a little away from the others and spoke in lowered voices. Usually he paid little attention to Petro’s rambling, but now he asked, “Do you mean King Damian—or Dom Rumail—would be—would be—” He couldn’t quite force out the words, would be tyrants? He knew little of King Damian Deslucido, but Rumail filled him with an uneasiness he could not put words to.

  “I don’t know,” Petro answered. “Dom Rumail has been our good friend and I know nothing against this Damian. My objections apply to any King. If one rules over so many, who must he then answer to? If an ordinary man is treated unjustly—if a farmer starves because royal soldiers steal his crops or a woodsman has his hand chopped off for not bowing quickly enough to suit the King—what can he do but take up arms? And then what will stop the King from turning against his own people? But these are dangerous thoughts, little brother. Keep them to yourself. Promise me.”

  Cory
n gulped and nodded, thinking of his own formless distrust of Rumail.

  The party proceeded to the yard, where Rumail’s horse and pack animal stood waiting, alongside Coryn’s dun Dancer, and a chervine laden with everything a young man entering a Tower might want, from down-stuffed quilt to soothing winterberry lotion, tins of candied figs and rock sugar, even a set of reed pipes to while away the long winter nights.

  Coryn’s escort, a livestock handler named One-eyed Rafe, waited beside his own mount. No one knew how he’d lost one eye, although the other looked as pale as if all color had been burned out by gazing too long at the sun. Coryn didn’t know the man well, had barely exchanged a few sentences with him. Castle gossip had it that Rafe had been a mercenary soldier in his youth and he looked capable of single-handedly fighting off a small army. The long-knife strapped to his thigh in a well-worn leather sheath had done ample service.

  As the final round of well wishes and good-byes drew to a close, Rumail bent to speak to Coryn. “If I alarmed you with my frank talk, it was to prevent you from taking serious symptoms too lightly.”

  Rumail’s nearness sent prickles up Coryn’s spine. With relief, he turned to accept one last hug from Margarida. Then he moved toward Dancer, gathering up the reins in preparation for mounting.

  Rumail restrained him with a single feather-light touch on the back of the wrist. “You are feeling better now, I can see that. The kirian sometimes has a lasting beneficial effect. But travel, for even a few days, can upset that fragile balance.”

  He gestured to Rafe. “If the young master should experience any recurrence of threshold sickness, you must make sure he eats well and is kept warm. If he becomes disoriented—doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t recognize you, seems confused, or cannot eat—then you must give him this.” Rumail held out a small glass vial half-filled with colorless liquid. He placed it in a pouch of wool-lined leather and handed it to Rafe. “Only a spoonful at a time. If he can still ride, make all speed to the Tower. Under no circumstances must you leave him. Do you understand?”