V. The First Half of 769
Through many nights of her first winter as Countess, Vivian sat in her high room and explored her interior landscape--and the portals to the landscape of the "other world" of which her father had taught her so little. There was so much else her father had not quite gotten around to teaching her--for instance, what the Counts of Clane had for many generations done in a dingy little room in the Citadel's cellars. Once only, when she was sixteen, she had come down here with him, and it was obvious he didn't like being in the dim and grimy place with its film of baked-on supernaturality. It was where the Counts came to do their cooking.
Today, a chill windy day of January, she had done her own cooking. Like all first attempts, this product seemed to defy the recipe. Sometimes as she handled crucible and boiling solution and five different ingredients sitting powdered on five little plates, it seemed as though the cookbook expected her to have more than two hands. Other times it seemed to ask for something twice, or expected something done that it had not yet told her to do. Still, it was a recipe that had been used by generation after generation of Counts--the current version was in Countess Tereza's handwriting, a century old--and the result, a dash of a clear crystalline powder, looked more or less like it was supposed to look.
Now she settled in on the rug in the high room, with her candles, one lit and one unlit, and her book and her cards and her wine--and her crystals, which she scraped into the cup. There was no change in the wine except that it swirled of its own accord for a few seconds. She picked up the cup. It didn't seem different.
She drank. There was no change in the taste of the wine. She felt no different once she drained the cup, and there was no residue left in the bottom. She closed her eyes. There was only the sound of the February wind prying at the weak points in the windows. Then the unlit candle glowed--a spark formed on the tip of its wick. With infinite patience the flame rose. After a century or so the candles were twins. Vivian did not notice.
She was falling through the darkness, hurtling across the night, fronds of shadow brushing her in their weakling attempts to take hold of her as she passed. Shreds of evil and bane swirled about her as, with the weight of life, she fell through them. In the dark zone between, nothing was strong enough to impede her.
There was a gate. It rose from nowhere she could see and sank back again, a catenary curve of mathematical perfection. She fell toward it. At first it seemed as if she would miss: nothing she tried seemed to alter her course. Then her course did alter, and she flew straight toward the opening. Beyond it there was no light and no darkness.
She was through the gate. She picked herself up from a ground and found a place about her. It was twilight, and far off there was a long mansion with the sky bright behind it. A few stars gleamed above. Around her rose hedges, lines of trees, stems and blooms of tall grey flowers. As she moved along the paths among the plants, she moved from smell to smell in a terrain of perfumes.
Long hours she walked the aisles, but the light in the sky did not change. There were boundaries, great tall opaque hedges, and through them there were gaps. A nostalgic odor led her to a gap in the hedges along the side of the mansion.
Through the gap there was a large fountain. It was ornately carven, but she could not say whether there were figures on it, or flowers graven in its white stone, or geometric curves. She heard the water gurgling down it. She stood transfixed. A woman walked there, a thin woman with long beautiful dark hair, and there was a child holding her hand, a girl of five or six. They sat down on a stone seat by the fountain and talked as mothers and children do.
Vivian went forth into the realm of the fountain. Now the woman and the girl were gone, just ahead of Vivian's advance. She stood by the fountain and looked down into its pool. There she was, twenty-two going on twenty-three, five foot three with sad blue eyes, with brown hair cut to shoulder length, with a few new lines around her eyes and mouth. She saw something in the pool. She looked up. The woman and the girl stood a little way off. At first Vivian could not see any of the lady's face but blue eyes gleaming in the twilight, tears trembling on their rims. The woman smiled at Vivian. She mouthed a word: it was, "Go," or maybe it was "Thanks," or maybe she was hoping Vivian would return.
Vivian turned from the fountain, wafted up the aisles of the garden, and suddenly before her there was the strange arch of vines spiraling into the night. Above, the vines were decked with stars. Below, there was only the dark. And behind her, the woman--and behind her--?
She flew through, flew past the impotently grabbing evils, flew on toward a point of light that grew before her into a window, a window in the middle of the world. The light split into two. The girl sitting on the floor woke up. The candles burned before her. She took in long breaths, as though she had not breathed for many minutes.
Vivian rose, put out the candles and went down the narrow stairs. She found dinner with the cook Marjorie and the maid Jen for comrades: they kept trying to get her to eat more. Then she went up to her library and spent an hour poring over the diaries of Countess Tereza, with the calico cat Simone in her lap and a glass of last year's red in her hand. After an hour she felt stronger, and she turned to the subtler writings of Tereza and Theodred, but she found no obvious reference to a shadowy figure.
"I fear the wine tonight is only two years old, my lady," said Jen, filling glasses.
"Never you mind," said the Countess. She was as usual dressed in grey, a comfortable loose ankle-length dress, along with her gold medallion. "Fill yourself a glass and sit down. Or are we poor drinking companions?" Jen did as she was told.
"More belt-tightening?" asked Angeline. "And your treasurer--has he tightened his belt?"
"That's what I always think when someone uses that phrase in a Council meeting. It comes up a lot these days, so it's getting to be a real problem. Neil says 'We need to tighten our belts,' and I have to try to look serious."
"I still say he's awfully well-furred," said Ellean. "Maybe we can sell his furs to the Farlainers. That's better than selling off wine."
"No joke," said Angeline, "the fur business can be profitable. I have a guy that pays me a toll on each pelt he takes on my land."
Simone woke suddenly, seated in the fifth chair at the table in the drawing room. She stood up, stared straight at Angeline, arched her back, yawned toothily, gave herself a lick or two, then, turning her back on the conversation, coiled herself again. "Someone," said Vivian, "is a bit sensitive about what you call the fur business."
"We'd never take that beautiful pelt, babycakes," Angeline assured the cat, running a hand across her plushy cheek. "Why don't you pay us a visit, Countess? There's a spare bed--especially since my sister seems to be mostly living in the Citadel."
"I have to be close to the action," Ellean explained. "You never know when the Countess might need the fastest errand-rider in the Empire."
"Yes, well, the Countess might want to get away from the fast life of Vonnis. Trade all her stress and paperwork for a breath of the country air."
"The stench, you mean," said Ellean.
"Oh, the wind's not always from the chicken coop. And I love the sound of the stream outside the window. You should visit sometime, Countess. You never get out of the Citadel except for campaigns."
"You're right," said Vivian, "and if I have my way, we won't have any more campaigns for a while. There is an extra bedroom, isn't there?"
"There's a guest room. We never use it. No one ever visits."
"Yeah," said Ellean, "except Francis, and he doesn't use the guest bed."
"Hey," said Vivian, "don't throw that wine around, Angeline, it's in short supply these days."
On the first sunny morning of February, Vivian, getting over her second bad cold of the winter, knelt in the Sun House across the square from the Citadel. It was a short cube with a peaked roof on top, not an impressive edifice but a peculiar one in its setting; for one thing, it seemed to use as much glass in its single square storey as the Citadel did in five floors plus towers. Around it the cold wind whistled, but a couple of hours of sunlight and three dozen people inside had heated it up to the point where everyone was rolling up their sleeves.
Father Trofim was speaking, in the strange language of the priesthood. Vivian had always wondered if it meant anything. Somehow, all of a sudden, she was sure it did. She had no idea what--but something.
And for a quarter of an hour she and three dozen of her household--Jen was at her right--listened to him intone, and she tried to grasp what he was saying, and all the while the Divine Sun shed its warmth upon them unjudging.
It was a fine day of middle March. The air smelled of deeply thawed turf, the sun bore down on the soil, patches of snow on the heights of Bald Mountain held out against inevitable doom, the songs of birds crowded against each other for the now-uncovered ears of walkers abroad, and the first wild flowers were peeking out. Vivian sat through ten hours of military reports. The main goal seemed to be to predict the next invasion.
The Avars' strength was laid out in bright yellow wooden rectangles on a map ten feet long and six feet wide. The "Imperial" armies were in their lords' colors: Clane's in grey, Farlain's blue, Shadewind's red and the remnants of the army of Inzil in green. Three thousand troops represented by blue squares sat along the Farlain-Clane border, but the rebels they fought there were not dignified with their own markers, so it was as if the Farlainers were fighting the hills themselves. The Rugians were given a little indeterminate pile of black markers at the mountainous upper left of the map.
The upshot was that only the Avars constituted a definite threat, but that they would not endanger Clane as long as Chalris's beleaguered Inzil stayed afloat. Sir Everard was concerned that Inzil might in fact be wearing out. "Our intelligence is sketchy," he said, "but the Avars hold Kemif and the western hills of Inzil. Count Chalris still holds Annavil and Pellay and the south, but the Avars can now raid all along the fertile land between the capital and Allorane. I don't suppose there's much planting going on in the middle Allor valley this spring. The city of Allorane and its great fief, here in the south near to Shadewind and Orzali, is on its own--and it can contribute nothing to the feeding of the capital."
What Vivian got out of ten hours of talk, besides a sore rear end, was that Chalris was still on shaky ground, and that the Rugians still hadn't made their anticipated move, and that the only fighting currently going on near Clane was in northern Farlain, where Duke Maladar was still chasing his rebels across into Thane Karlan's Intror.
"I think," said Thane Karlan, "there is no threat as long as it's clear we do not willingly harbor the rebels. No Sovereign Lord has ever invaded another to seize territory, and Farlain does not as far as we know harbor a pretender to your title."
"There are no pretenders to Clane," said Sir Rogier. "We're lucky we had even one heir when the late Count died." The old men glanced at Vivian, then cleared their throats and turned to study the map again. Vivian had been staring at it all morning and hadn't been able to see what was hiding there.
"So what about the Avars?" Vivian asked suddenly, interrupting the discussion of Angeline's and Ellean's romantic situations. Beside her, Sir Rogier and the errand-rider Willd sighed in appreciation of the change of topic. The five, along with the maid Jen and the long-haired calico cat Simone, were sitting around in the conference room under the big portrait of Countess Tereza, and all but the cat were sipping a recent red wine. "I mean," she went on, "are they still a threat or what?"
"They're deeply tangled in Inzil right now," said Willd. "The scouts say that they only have three thousand warriors not in Inzil. The question is, how long will Annavil hold?"
"And will Count Chalris still be around, in any case?" asked Sir Rogier. "What does our youngest member think? She was in Inzil more recently than any of us."
"They sure have enough advisors," said Ellean.
"Countess Vivian does not lack in that department either. She just doesn't listen to us."
"Oh, I listen," said the Countess.
"Anyway Annavil does have strong walls," said Ellean. "When I was there--was it only last spring?--it seemed like they were already preparing for invasion. They have an awful lot of men under arms. I saw soldiers everywhere in Annavil and Kemif."
"Annavil can't hold forever," said Vivian. She turned over a thought in her mind, cutting it down like a gem. At last she said, "The Avars may have a few tricks of their own."
"You mean their explosives?" said Sir Rogier. Vivian thought, Explosives? "Fireworks would be a better term. Didn't do a whole lot of good at Orlad."
Willd said offhandedly, "They are thought to consort betimes with sorcerers and witches."
"They had no sorcerers at Grassyfields," said Sir Rogier. "I'll believe it when I see it. Their main weapon is enthusiasm. Of course, that's the main ingredient in every successful army."
"There's one way to sap their enthusiasm," said Ellean. "We just have to win the next battle. And the one after that."
"How many more foes await?" asked Vivian, "Bazir and Maklos we can stand to lose--they never had many people, and they weren't even added to Clane until the reign of Countess Tereza. But if we once lose a battle here on our old soil, then what?"
"Yes, my lady, I know," said Sir Rogier. "We can't convince the other Lords Sovereign of the danger until they themselves get invaded. Look at Inzil: now they wish they'd sent us troops."
"But the trouble is, before Farlain and Shadewind get attacked, we'll likely be overrun. Only the Sun sees where they're all coming from. I can't help but take it personally."
"Wait until the Rugians show themselves," said Sir Rogier, "before you start taking it personally. I bet we see them before long."
"I won't take that bet," replied Vivian. "They know the Empire's falling apart, and no one's coming to our aid, and they know the famous Count Edmund is gone, replaced by a mere girl. You can't say that doesn't matter to the barbarians." She sighed again, thinking of the peculiar things she had sensed among the Avars. "Well," she went on, "all I know is that I don't know a darn thing. And that we can't expect help. Any thoughts on how to survive on our own?"
"Maybe," said Willd, "we can come to an understanding with the nomads."
Sir Rogier shook his head. "It hasn't been done since the last years of Countess Tereza," he said, while Vivian stared into her glass and wondered if she would ever understand what was going on.
The wine in the cup, swirling of its own accord, dissolving a few grains of something. The candles, one lit, then both. The book, open to her grandfather Theodred's glyphs. The Countess, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the High Room.
The arch, the shreds of bane and evil impotently reaching to her as she hurtled past. She tried too hard to adjust her trajectory and flew through at an odd angle, and had to pick herself up off the thick springy turf. She caught her breath. There was a shadowy figure by the corner of a hedge.
It was gone. Someone was beside her: there was the sad, smiling face of the woman with long dark hair from the realm of the fountain. She wanted to reassure Vivian, but she could not hide her concern. About what? Oh, nothing.
Vivian rose. The woman departed with but one sad smiling backward glance. Vivian went forward to the end of the corridor of hedge, then on into a wide area where the paths were bordered by rows of waving irises and beds of wildflowers under waving trees. She was alone.
Vivian wandered for a time. At first she saw only things she remembered from before. Shades of color came through to her eyes, pastel pinks and purples of blossoms and deep greens of stems and leaves. On one side was the dark mansion. Running straight out from the arched door she found a long avenue of flowerbeds and parallel walkways, and she turned along this boulevard under the sea-blue sky. Far off the clouds at the horizon had the look of dusk or dawn, but the heavens behind them were infinite indigo. She strolled hasteless and planless, but did not turn from the direction she had chosen. Eventually she crossed a side avenue that ran on her left to a gap in the high hedge. She decided to turn aside and have a look.
She looked around, but she was alone in a wide landscape under an empty sky. There was no Lady of the Fountain, and no shadowy figure. She turned and went on. She came to a gap in the hedge. Behind her, the green-grey perfumed evening of the garden and the mansion; ahead of her only night, and a stone-paved walk ending in a stone balustrade. She ran on, and stopped at the balustrade, gasping and smiling at the sight, too big for her eyes to contain.
A broad city spread out below her in the night, lights rising and falling on streets laid across unseen hills, great curved highways bordering gulfs of blackness that she thought must really be gulfs, of some dark sea perhaps. She heard faintly many voices mixing, bickering and bargaining and singing, and music, and noise as of bells almost beautiful enough to be music. All was remote, and all mixed like the flavors of a long dinner.
She stood and took it all in, and felt the wind rising to chill her, and the tang of the sea was in it, which she had never known in waking life. There were as well the odors of cooking oil and spice and sweat and refuse and excrement. She seemed to be wearing a thin filmy dress, but the medallion of the Counts was around her neck. On either side of this overlook, a stair crept down the side of an unseen wall. Down the lefthand staircase she flew, her feet barely touching the stone. The chill moist air froze her to the bone, but she laughed. She felt as if she had not an ounce of flesh under her pale skin. She came to the bottom of the steps, and the city opened out around her on all sides, and she was swept into the crowd of colors and sounds and smells in the great open plaza at the foot of the stair, which seemed to descend out of the firmament.
There were sellers and buyers scattered among tables and mats and booths with black curtains, and hawkers with their wares hanging from their clothes. There were jewels, rings, necklaces, ornaments of a hundred descriptions hanging from ears or wrists or in the depths of ample cleavages, there were scarves, dresses, hats of wild design, shoes bedecked with sequins and bells and cloth flowers. There were herbs and substances of every color and texture, powders yellow and white and brown and clear, little piles of many-colored crystal, horns and claws and teeth of unguessable creatures, dried leaves and flowers and spices and seeds and ointments and oozes and jellies and liquids light and viscous, clear and opaque, tars and oils and juices and residues. There were stones chalky and semiprecious and precious and beyond price. There were fine brandies of every color and bottles of wine a century old, and kegs of ale just tapped, quaffed a quart at a time by laughing warriors. There were pipes and men pulling on hookahs, herbal smokes filling the air and making passers-by giddy with their intoxicants, great bubbling water-pipes and long carven ivory bowls and fat rolls of leaf dripping with resin. Vibrant circles of brilliantly dressed people sipped strange liquors and passed gem-encrusted pipes and daintily chewed sugared fungi and bitter numbing leaves and sniffed powders from golden lockets as shabby folk passed flasks and hungrily sucked the cloying vapors of perilous narcotics. There were weapons, sabres flashing as their dealers waved them theatrically, little secret stilettos, knives with large carven handles and short sharp blades, staves and spears with heads in the shapes of brave and dangerous beasts, bows of clever design, crossbows small enough to fit in a hand, longbows twice her height, axes long and short and two-headed ones of burnished steel, and she noticed particularly a swinging curved scimitar reflecting in its passing the scenes from several rows of stalls away. Vivian saw something there reflected that disquieted her, but the blade swung around and around again and now as she looked she saw only faces.
And such faces! Great bearded blond warriors, gnarled and jovial dwarves, women beautiful beyond the power of minstrels' words to praise, dark or red or pale or deep brown like the folk she had heard of from far off, tall women with black skin and white teeth clothed only in golden strands, huge men in skins, pretty sneak-thieves with thin moustaches and pointed goatees, old geezers, frail aging princesses in long brilliant shawls, women of secret beauty hidden behind veils and folk of middle age bearing the handsome scars and lumps of every sort of experience. Then also there were other faces, missed at first, then glimpsed: one long and white as paper, another grey with a flat nose and tiny slitted eyes, another brown with a nose that split into short waving tentacles, another black like coal and symmetric with two great pale ovals flanking a central pinnacle. Others were cloaked and hooded and covered with such clothing as to conceal all but the vaguest hints of abnormality. Yet the most awful horrors had a place at this bazaar, and to Vivian they seemed innocent as they rubbed elbows with the beautiful and the wealthy and the conniving.
The plaza's crowd overflowed into the wide streets that fed into it from among the towering dark buildings whose magnitudes were hidden in the mist. She turned up an avenue oily with fog condensing in beads. A party spilled out from a night spot, spilled some of its light into the darkness, but next to it were shuttered shops and vacant doors. Shadow folk crouched and sprawled in alleys. Jewels glittered from arms and necks and ears and fingers and waists of women. Garishly dressed toughs swung singing down the middle of the street arm in arm, sweeping all in their way to the side. There, little clumps of shady people conferred in undertones. Beside Vivian, a painted man burst out laughing. A gentle knight dressed all in purple bowed low before his lady, who deigned to let him give her a tiny rose.
Vivian felt invisible and yet also a citizen of this place. She strolled the ways of the strange crowded city, dark and bright, flitted through broad cemeteries and passed along the shores of misty bays. It had its quiet regions, rambling streets and stately manses, echoing canyons of stone overseen by gargoyles, empty circles centered on dry fountains, high streets reaching up to colonnaded parks, hills topped with odd statues, wide round metal doors in the street, grates through which only a fathomless darkness could be surmised.
There was a broad expanse of paving stones along the shore of a black river, with an assortment of inscrutable monuments captioned by disconcerting glyphs. Mist crept across this flat stone space in dense ropes, but above she could now see a populous field of stars. The fog closed together four feet deep, so she stood, dressed to the shoulders in mist, a floating head, a spirit loosed from the last remaining memory of its physical form.
She was in a silent empty universe alone. No, not alone: something moved on her left, or something came there that had not been there. She was frozen in place, examining with her mind what lay in the periphery of her vision. A figure stood there, looking toward her but not at her with eyes that hid in the dark wells of its face.
The mist slowly circled in the open space. Vivian ducked down into the grey soup, scurried away, her heart in her throat. Then down narrow brick streets she ran, down alleys with houses leaning against each other overhead, turning and ducking through narrow low arches and sidling past unidentified obstructions, turning and swerving and then sprinting full out, until she rounded a corner and flattened herself against a wall. There was no sign of pursuit, nor had there ever been any.
She felt like a child, running in fear of a wisp of fog. She gathered herself and went forward: she had come around to the bazaar again, and she was soon lost in its weave of crowd. She paused at the margin and looked back upon the darkness beside her, sea or great river, and she drew its air into her lungs. So quiet, the sound of the sea. There, at the edge of her left eye, a figure. She looked, and a wing of fog obscured a dark side street. She turned and hurried into the crowd, and then, worn out with strangeness and tired of the absurd passions and compulsions of the inexplicable creatures around her, and now touched by fear, she slipped up the stairs and out of the city. She came to the top and found herself face to face with--the lady with the long dark hair and the worried look.
She hurried away, and Vivian hurried after her, leaving the city's lights scattered across its hills and coastline. Under the twilight sky the garden was yet quiet, although Vivian heard the wind rustling and the calls of birds. Down a hedged aisle she saw the gate. The woman hurried on toward the fountain where Vivian had first seen her, but Vivian turned aside. She looked back from a little way on: the woman was kneeling, smiling, to fix the bow on her little girl's head.
Vivian hurried on past openings in the hedge. She paused for a moment at several of these to glance in: one showed more hedged gardens, but another led into a piny misty land, another to a barren seashore, and yet another into a high plain among mountains. All so soothing. She could not shake the sense that things in plain sight were hidden from her.
She leapt into the gate and hurtled back toward the world, her eyes wide open. The earth was tiny below her as if it were carven on the side of a penny, but she free-fell toward it and it blew up until the citadel's high tower reached out to her. Then she was outside the window, looking in at the young woman with shoulder-length hair in her dark cloak and dress. Then the world turned over and she opened her eyes and everything settled back into its usual place: the walls, the window, the candle. Then it split into two candles and she remembered who she was as the city and the garden and the woman with the little girl and the faces and the smell of flowers--and the figure in the mist--took on the tint of dream.
Who was the lady at the fountain? Who was the little girl? Who was the shadow figure? What was the city in the night? Vivian spent many hours scouring the writings of her predecessors and pondering her few hints, but all she knew for certain was that she would need a lot more hints. The journals of Mattas the Old and Robert the Wise and Tereza and Theodred and her father Edmund, as far as she could decipher them, only gave her more questions.
Tereza's writings seemed the closest to being accessible: Vivian was now fairly sure of the meaning of a dozen or so of the hundreds of glyphs she used in her thousands of pages of cipher. The most tantalizing near-clue was just a name. A few years into her reign, Countess Tereza suddenly began using a new pictogram, one that didn't seem to symbolize anything at all, just a union of geometric shapes. Her son Count Lenward, Vivian's great-grandfather, wrote in the margin of the page containing the first occurrence of this glyph the single word "Arrenuim". Vivian had no idea if that was what the pictogram stood for, and could find no occurrence of the word besides that one marginal note in Lenward's crabby script, but she found the word "Arrenuim" haunting her daydreams.
Her dreams of night were haunted, on a few nights of the spring, by what she had half-seen in the strange city. She dreamt of dark alleys and misty plazas, and ever she glimpsed something watching from the side. At least the vague portents were gone: it was as if her sleeping mind concentrated on this one mystery to the exclusion of all the others. One night as she wandered a vast and dusty library, she felt something nearby, and she turned to see the edge of a dirty cloak from the side of a shelf. She swallowed her apprehension and walked right up to it. But it fled with a muffled squeak. She pursued it through the stacks, with no intent stronger than to see its face, but it was unwilling to be confronted. Oh, you like to watch, do you, she called after it, as she followed its trailing dust from shelf to forest trail to narrow nighted street to--well, it seemed a tumbled canyon, but it was a tumbled ruin instead. It echoed with her footfalls. She called out, but there was no response.
Suddenly she got the willies. She had pursued, but now it was all she could do to keep from fleeing headlong. Only an overwhelming reluctance to turn her back on whatever was in that place kept her rooted. So she stood frozen, and thus she awoke in her chamber in the Citadel as the first grey touched her ceiling. She lay frozen, her body yet unresponding, her eyes staring upward. Did someone stand near, barely breathing? There was a little sound--and then Simone stood up from a corner of the bed, stretched, rearranged herself and lay back down against Vivian's arm. She petted the cat, and the cat purred, and together they drifted back into dreamless doze.
The twenty-third of May was a warm clear half-breed of spring and summer, and the shadowy figures and the inexplicable faces of the Other Side were as far away as if they were of, well, another world. Vivian and Ellean rode in the high woods behind Bald Mountain, on trails that they both knew well, among pine and maple and birch and oak and great boulders cast off the mountain an age or two ago. The last snow was gone from the open summit, and the sound of small birds and mammals was everywhere. It was four days after Ellean's birthday.
"So what are you doing these days," said Vivian, "now that you're fifteen and grown up?"
"You know I rode to Radun and back last week, right? I hope you're not going to take me off the list of errand riders just because I'm not eighty-seven pounds anymore."
"Since we switched that colt for Lulubell, and since the colt's turned into a stallion, I don't think your weight is going to be a problem. Unless you're planning to get fat."
"Oh, no, my lady. I'd worry about Angeline--she's settling into the rustic life. I'm still on the go."
"I hardly see her anymore. Is she so busy on the farm?"
"Yes, she's very busy, she never fails to reproach me for how easy I've got it, but on the other hand she has certain perquisites."
"Oh," said Vivian.
"Oh yes. Francis has two days off together every week, and he always rides up to Rain Hall. They're quite serious. It's actually kind of gross seeing them together."
"I think it's sweet. I wish my own suitors were like that."
"No, that wouldn't do at all! Then you'd get married and put forth a bunch of heirs and we'd never see you and you'd always have royal rug rats crawling all over and whoever the guy was he'd probably want to run things and good old Countess Vivie would be gone forever."
"It won't happen," Vivian replied. "Whoever he is, he'll still be my subject. So no Sovereign Lord or his heir. And I don't plan on producing more heirs than necessary: my family has a history of difficult childbirth. My father had two wives and all he got was me, and my grandfather had just one child, and--"
"Oh, I know, I've been reading."
"Very good. Have you read Countess Tereza?"
"Oh no, I've only gotten through John the Bald in the annals. He wasn't much. But of course I've heard interesting things about her."
Vivian opened her mouth and closed it again. Oh, there were plenty of interesting things, if only she could decipher a few more glyphs. She smiled and said, "Her diaries are pretty racy. I wouldn't want you to get any ideas."
"I'll make sure to have a look then."
They rode on through the day in a land so empty of people that they might have been the first to see it, north of Bald Mountain in a half-wooded valley below higher peaks where the snow still shone in the sunlight. They stopped along a ridge of rocks to sunbathe, and then cooled themselves in an icy stream. They rode back a different way, seeing no one until they came down to pastures on the west side of the mountain, as the sun set over the Rocky River Valley.
A black night lay on the loudly singing upper Rocky River, as dense clouds sat on the mountains. A dozen riders ambled along the track that ran up the meadowy valley north of the fortified village of Hildiwern. Each was in his own world, one thinking of his girlfriend, another measuring the addition he wanted to build onto his house, a third wondering who had swiped his pocket knife, a fourth trying to forget a stupid song he had going in his head.
They rode and rode and yet in the blackness they seemed to make no progress: there was no point of reference aside from one another. Then there was. A little light burst into being with a faint sound, off ahead somewhere. It looked as though the moon was rising, although it was the wrong time of night, and the cloud cover was complete, and they were facing north.
The light grew quickly larger than any possible moon. It was orange and yellow and shaped like a house. "It's Shervin's barn!" several shouted.
"Come on, sluggards," said the lieutenant. "Maybe we can be of some use to the old guy. There's plenty of water about."
"He's probably dropped his torch in that firetrap," said a rider as they spurred toward the light. For five minutes they went as fast as they dared in the night, and the only sound was that of the horses' footfalls on the soggy turf. The sound of crackling wood came to them, then of beams breaking and falling as rushes of sparks hurried toward the low clouds. They were nearly there, but old Shervin was nowhere to be seen. A few cattle stood about at a safe distance. They began complaining to the riders as soon as they heard them coming. Then the lieutenant reined back his horse.
There was a shape lying in the light of the blaze in the casual pose of the dead. There was an arrow sticking up from his stomach into the air. The riders gawked.
Out of the night came a piercing cry, then a chorus of them. Arrows flew among the Clanish riders, but they were not quite in the light yet--only one gasped and slipped from the saddle. The rest were still bewildered when the attack hit in earnest.
The lieutenant had his sabre out of its scabbard before one great blond fellow reached him with an axe. The attacker wasted no time on the man in the saddle, and instead slew his horse with a single blow. The lieutenant leapt to the ground, steadied his feet and lunged at the axeman. The axe swung, heavily, slowly, and before it reached its destination, the sabre had gotten underneath and run the axeman through. The lieutenant looked for his next foe.
The other riders were not so ready to fight. In a few seconds, all but the last in line had been pulled down and stabbed to death or cut from their steeds and hewn into pieces or simply skewered as they sat in the saddle. Green fools! What froze them all solid, so they could not even defend themselves?
A battle shriek turned the lieutenant around. A horse's hooves pounded: not the light swift steed of the Clanish plains, nor the dignified warhorse of the knight, but an overpowering shaggy giant, and on it, without saddle, was a striking apparition. Great black boots there were, as all of the marauders wore, and a ragged cloak, and rough pants, and sections of fur covering a studded leather tunic, and an iron helmet painted black. Red-blond hair swung long, as from all the marauders. But amidst the hair and the armor and the fur there was no beard. In a moment he knew that none of these warriors wore beards. The last thing he saw before his death, before the long sword fell upon him as he stood aghast, was the face of a beautiful woman, contorted into the grin of battle rage.
By then one rider in Clanish grey was a mile off and riding fast, thinking of what he might have done, thinking of his comrades, thinking of the old man dead and the faces of women warriors, thinking of swords swinging, thinking of his girlfriend. When he had reported all he had seen to his commander, and then to the castellan of Hildiwern, then its Lord, and finally to Thane Ellimer, he went to her and cried in her arms until she rocked him to sleep like a baby.
The twenty-seventh day of June was a busy one for the Countess. She inspected a dairy farm in the morning, lunched with her ministers, followed the meal with a superficial discussion of the budget, in the heat of the afternoon took accounts of the wine, cheese and brandy aging in the citadel cellars, and had tea with Ellean Rain on a sunny second-floor balcony. She was just sitting down to her cup, for which she had longed all day, when she received shocking news.
"With child?" she exclaimed. "Are you sure?"
"Oh, yes," said Ellean. "She hasn't had her visitor since April. I mean her monthly visitor, not Him, he's visited regularly."
"Oh, he's been her visitor, all right! Honestly. With child! You'd think they could keep themselves under control." They sat and stared at each other. "Honestly, honestly. I guess it's hardly surprising, but still." She shook her head. "Honestly."
They stared at each other some more.
"What's to be done?" asked Ellean.
Vivian just stared at Ellean, who stared back. Suddenly she stood. "I'll take care of this. Jen! Jen!"
Jen came hurrying from several rooms away. "Yes, my lady?"
"Jen, go and get Captain Weaver. He should be in the barracks, or, no, he may be out on the riding field. Bring him here to me."
"Yes, my lady."
After the maid left, the Countess and her lady-in-waiting sat on the balcony discussing the situation, to no particular effect. Ten minutes later, they were giggling, but Vivian was keeping her eye on the courtyard.
"Shush, Ell, he's coming."
"Oh. Do I get to stay?"
"No. Sorry. This is between the Countess and her officer. Take the back way out. Behind the kitchen, toward the stable. Oh, and Ell."
"Yes, Viv?"
"Let's not have this happen when you turn eighteen. Understand?"
Ellean smiled and was gone in a flourish of auburn hair. Vivian stared after her for a few seconds, a worried smile on her face: Ellean was clearly going to be at least as gorgeous as her sister. Vivian turned from that depressing thought, placed herself in the most elegant chair in the sitting room, crossed her legs and put on her most Countesslike look. She had been practicing in front of a mirror.
In walked Captain Francis Weaver, hesitant and nervous, but without a clue. "My lady," he ventured.
"Captain Weaver. Please sit down." She looked at her lap, then gave him Serious Glance Number Three. "A situation has come to my attention, Captain Weaver." He looked at her for a moment, but still had no clue. He looked down again. "Concerning a noble lady of the Countess's Domain." Now something was dawning on him, but not yet the light of truth.
"You must mean Lady Angeline," he said defensively. "My lady--I am in love with her."
"That's a good thing, Captain, as she is with child."
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
"Do you deny your paternity in this situation?"
Still nothing.
"Captain Weaver, your duty is clear. You must marry the lady." His mouth stayed open. No part of him moved. "Really," she went on, "you have no one to blame but yourself. It is time you took responsibility, if indeed you do love her."
Vivian gave him her second-strongest look, but he just burst into a relieved laugh. "My lady," he said, "do you think--is it possible--that she will consent to marry me?"
"Oh," answered Vivian. "she'll consent."
"My lady," he said, jumping up, "in that case, may I have leave? I would ride to Angren today, straight away in sooth, and put my case before her. And I have your word to back me up!"
"You do. Now go." He was out the door before she could add anything witty.
Vivian was still wearing her second most satisfied smile when, a moment later, Sir Rogier walked in trailed by another errand-rider. This one was a boy of twelve or so.
"My lady," said Sir Rogier, "we have news from Siret."
"My lady," said the boy, kneeling to hand over his message. She broke the seal of Thane Ellimer of Siret and looked at the page written in a woman's hand:
To Vivian, Seventeenth Countess of Clane, and her ministers and thanes that may be at Vonnis, this twenty-first day of June of the year 769 of the Empire. Unknown strength of Rugians have invaded our northern manors. Many raiding parties came out of the hills yestereve, burning villages and farms and ambushing patrols. We have lost three dozen soldiers as well as at least two score of peasants and various animals and material goods. Have no good estimate of enemy strength, but it is more than we have seen in this Thane's lifetime, and certainly in the thousands. We have three hundred pikemen and do not dare go up against the foe. Please send us relief. Your most obedient and humble servant, Ellimer, who is honored to call himself Thane of the province of Siret, by his scribe Anne Atgate.
"Well," said Vivian, handing the page to Sir Rogier. She looked at the boy. "What's going on up there, do you know?"
"My lady," said the boy, "I don't know nothing for sure, but what I heard is, night before I was sent here, my lady, all hell broke loose, if you'll pardon me."
"You're pardoned. What's your name again?"
"Emrik, my lady. Anyway, there was houses burnt and villages attacked and three patrols on horseback ambushed, and only one man survived of all three. And it was a lady that led them, my lady, so the man said. All blond and big and tough he said. He saw her slice the heads off two of his buddies. She screamed like to scare off ghosts. He thought she killed his lieutenant, but he didn't hang about to see. He reckons that's why he's still breathing."
"Rule fifteen," said Sir Rogier. "Always run, if staying to fight won't help."
"Well," said Vivian, "a lady barbarian. A frightening thought."
"Indeed."
"Thank you, Emrik. You did well. Get some food and make sure someone finds you a bed for tonight. Well, call the council for two hours from now," she said to Sir Rogier as Emrik left, "and tell Sir Everard to start calling back those swordsmen."
"My lady, that's an excellent plan, except that I might be so bold as to suggest we muster up the Rocky River a ways, so as to shorten the journey."
"Of course you're right. How about Angren? It's upriver but not too far upriver."
"All right, my lady, then that's settled. Anything else?"
"No, go ahead and get started. And one more thing."
"Yes, my lady?"
"You might send to Lady Alice, to let her meet you at Angren in a couple of days. I have inside information that there's going to be one of those big society weddings while we're there."