Time of Daughters II

Sherwood Smith

Description

In a time of rising danger, women go to war, and ghosts walk the walls...A few years have passed since the Night of Four Kings, when the least expected candidates for rulership found themselves in charge of a disintegrating kingdom. These years of tenuous peace see their children reach adulthood. Threats from the border become raids, led by an idle noble with an eye to kingship. The two princes, Noddy and Connar, newly emerged from the military academy, are dispatched to patrol the troubled area until they find themselves under attack.Their loyalty to one another is strong, but what happens when one brother discovers a taste for war and the other a loathing for it? Matters of marriage and love tangle up with the menace of war. But the greatest threat of all comes when the world's strongest army faces enemies from within. This is the concluding half of an epic story of politics, war, family and magic in the beloved world of Sartorias-deles.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Book View Cafe
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611388442
• Langue: English

Extrait

TIME OF DAUGHTERS II
Sherwood Smith

www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café 2019
Copyright © 2019 Sherwood Smith
MAP OF MARLOVAN-IASCA
A VERY BRIEF PREFACE
The second half of this record begins five years after the end of the previous. Arrow (Anred-Harvaldar) and Danet still rule Marlovan Iasca. Their three children have reached adulthood.
A list of Who’s Who can be found at the back.
PART ONE
ONE
Spring 4083 AF
There were no fanfares for the merchants, artisans, and runners riding in and out the city gates, after being holed up as a frigid storm swept through.
Bunny, now a riding master in the queen’s training, had just brought the new arrivals to the stable, splashing two by two through the wide, sky-reflecting puddles as Lineas walked at the back of the group.
A lone horseman rode in through the gates. Princess, royal runner, and girls turned to stare at the comely young man riding easy in the saddle, his dark blue royal runner’s coat water-dappled. Familiar? Dark hair queued back, sharp cheekbones so familiar, though planed by the past five years—
“It’s Quill!” Bunny shouted, forgetting that as a master, she was supposed to model proper discipline. Her fingers swooped and dived, the equivalent of shouting in Hand as she cried, “He’s back!”
Quill laughed, his gaze flicking from Bunny’s happy smile to the lone bright red head among the various blond and dark haired crowd. Nearly six years of carefully cultivated emotional distance vanished like smoke as he gazed down into Lineas’s equally happy smile, her wideset eyes crinkled in friendly welcome. Without a vestige of heat.
“You’re back, you’re back,” Bun crowed, then belatedly recollected herself as the staring sixteen-year-old girls whispered together.
“Quill is a royal runner,” Bun explained, hands still signing. “And a friend from when we were all small. He’s been gone, doing the magic renewals all over the kingdom.” And to Quill, “Was it fun?”
He laughed. Only Bun would ask that. What was she now, twenty-one, twenty-two? He was glad to see all her old enthusiasm, with no hint of longing. As he’d hoped, her teenage crush had died long ago.
He slid from his horse and relinquished the reins to the waiting stable hand. “It was.” And because it seemed that Hand was now a part of everyday speech, he signed as he said, “Have things changed much while I was gone?”
Bun turned to Lineas, rolling her eyes. “Where to start?”
“I’ll show him, if you like,” Lineas said, her long, slender fingers graceful and dragonfly-quick in Hand.
 “Do that. We’ll be starting with the hooves, so take your time,” Bun added with meaning, remembering the state some of the horses had been in on certain girls’ arrival.
And so Quill’s plan to slip back into castle life unnoticed also went up in smoke, leaving him to face the one person he’d wanted time to prepare for. But time, as well as desire, were not his to command.
“Thank you,” he said to Lineas as he hefted his travel bag over his shoulder. “Lead on.” And in Old Sartoran, “Class in basic horse care?”
“Yes,” she answered in the same tongue. “Many of them arrived with runners having done all such care. They’ll learn fast.” She smiled up at him. “Congratulations on your new sister. Oh! Did you know about her?”
“Camerend has been writing to me all along.” And because it was Lineas, “I could see his happiness in the way he formed his letters.”
Lineas’s smile brightened, then dimmed, her gaze direct, an echo of grief in it and in her voice as she said softly, “I’m sorry about Shendan.”
“I saw her at the beginning of my journey,” he said. “She was content.”
“Content,” Lineas repeated, and as she stepped onto the landing, she turned to face him. “Content. What did she mean by that? That she was ready?”
“She didn’t want to face another winter, but mostly it was contentment at the current of our lives. The kingdom at peace, or as much as it ever is. I stopped in Darchelde on the way back, but didn’t see your parents. Your mother was reported to be somewhere near the western border, and I was told your father volunteered to serve in the king’s call.”
“Yes. He’s been up in Ku Halir, helping build the new garrison.” Lineas opened her palm northward.
They reached the second floor, which led to the royal residence. The ring of boot heels caused them both to look up, and then to step to the wall when they recognized Connar. Lineas’s face brightened as Connar’s blue gaze flicked from one to the other.
“Quill is back,” Lineas said in Marlovan.
“Quill,” Connar said equably, and to Lineas, “We saw one another at Larkadhe.”
 Lineas smiled. “I’m going to show him around, since everything has changed since he left.”
“Someone else can do that,” Connar said.
“I don’t mind. Bunny truly doesn’t need an assistant for today’s lesson, and I want to hear all about his journey. He’s been everywhere.”
Then she stepped close to Connar, standing on tiptoe. He leaned down as she said softly, “The gunvaer was called to the barn.” She backed away again, her expression grave.
Connar’s eyes shuttered. His hand rose to touch her cheek in a gesture equal parts tender and possessive. Quill felt it like a kick in the gut.
Then the prince ran down the steps three at a time.
Lineas said to Quill, “The stable people will keep Bun in the courtyard with her class. It’s Firefly,” she added with a compassionate glance toward the stable. “She made it to thirty-three. The gunvaer doesn’t want Bunny to know that the mare is dying. Even when animals live quite long for their kind, Bun always takes their deaths so very, very hard, as if she were at fault. And Firefly is one of her favorites.”
Lineas thumbed away the sting in her eyes, reminding herself that Firefly was not writhing in pain. And not alone.
Before Quill could find words that didn’t sound forced or sickening, she started up the steps to the third floor and began enumerating the alterations to castle life. “...so the middle wings have all been reassigned, out to the garrison, the barns, and the pottery. Here we are.”
They topped the last step at the third story landing—they had reached the floor belonging to the royal runners, called the roost.
She indicated the slit window looking into the castle’s interior structures. “Those roofs are now the queen’s training. They drill in the courtyard below the queen’s suite, exactly as they did in the old days. All those carts and the pottery clutter we used to hide in and under is all gone, and what can’t be used or remade shifted out to the other side of the north river.”
She waved eastward, and started down the hall. “But at least you’ll find things mostly the same in the roost. We’ll go straight there, because the schedule is so different now. Tell me about your travels! I know you were renewing the magic, but surely you had time for other things. Connar said you were at Larkadhe. Did you hear the windharps?”
“I did. I stayed on an extra week against a prospective wind change.” Memory assailed him, sound, smells, sense: sitting high on a mountaintop with Vandareth as they shared a packet of fresh-picked cherries while Vanda reeled off the galloping rhythms of poetry in Old Venn against the wind’s threnodies.
“...I saw the great trees in Shingara....” Lying on an ancient Dawnsinger platform, rain tapping on the front-woven roof as singers wove complicated triplets in singing up the sun.
“And was there for the Feather Dance up above Khanivar, which the locals call the Roof of the World.” High, crystalline voices of children in air so cold it seized the throat, but the light there was so pure, so brilliant it hurt. They sang and sang, yet the Fire Dragon of the Flying People still did not come, and so the singing changed timbre to lament, leaving him wondering what story lay behind a myth, and ritual, clearly ancient.
  “...A triple rainbow over the ocean after a storm while I was on a houseboat below Parayid Harbor....” As a mysterious trader posed three riddles to Quill in Old Sartoran before he would permit him to see the statue of an egret taking wing carved of silverwood from the walking tree people of the east.
“I planted rice in a terrace farm all the way south....” As a flock of long-tailed jezeels crossed the sky, calling to one another, until they vanished beyond the mountains above the Sartoran Sea.
Which he climbed over the next three weeks, having gone off the right trail. He’d nearly frozen to death, with scant food left in his pack, his gloves ripped and palms bleeding from the jagged rocks when in desperation he followed a little white goat into a village built straight into living rock, whose people, dark of skin and clever of fingers, carved their history into a glistening moon-white stone, their work so fine and intricate you’d take the long narrative screens for paper.
Kings would pay a kingdom’s ransom for the smallest of these , he’d said to the daughter who served him almond-flour cakes and spiced goat milk. She’d shrugged as she retorted mildly, What use is that to us? We live as we live . To which he said, I trust unscrupulous thieves never find you . She chuckled, replying, Ah, but the fogs hide us from wicked hearts . And as he’d made his way down the mountain, he had looked back, but could not find the trail among the dappled shadows and drifting mists....
“Quill?”
He blinked into Lineas’s face so close to his he could see his own reflection in her widened pupils.
“Are you reliving a memory?” she asked, a pucker of concern in her brow.
He forced a laugh. “I was. Forgive me! It’s just that most don’t want to hear a very long tale of travel, weather, and people without fame, or doings without blood or steel.”
“I would,” she said, too gravely and too gently for rebuke. “That’s my favorite kind of tale. But I’m certain you’re tired and travel-worn, and hungry at the least. And the seniors will be so glad to see you. I’d like to hear the tale of your journey, if you ever decide to tell it.”
“I’m afraid th