Two Years Late

ROSEMARY

Varlin. The last week of the thaw. Eighty-eight days to midsummer.

The envoy from Haze had been lying to the Queen of Varlin for the better part of an hour, and his tea was very nearly boiling, and he hadn't noticed yet.

"The late Colonel Maximo," he said, "was a friend of Your Majesty's, I think?"

He said it into the cup, lightly, like a man dropping a coin to hear what kind of floor he stood on, while the rain ran down the red glass of the small council room and Varlin steamed below it like a wet brick.

He was a slim young secretary of the Council with hair oiled flat in the Haze fashion and a silver chain of office he touched whenever he wanted to be believed. He had sat through two cups and the river tolls before he came to what he had been sent for.

Rosemary had kept his cup warm through both pourings and all the river tolls without once looking at it, because in Varlin a guest drinks at the heat his host gives him and a host who lets it cool has insulted him past mending. Now she let it climb, a little at a time, like turning up a lamp to read by.

"Half the Empire was his friend," she said. "He had that knack. Why?"

His eyes went, once, to the ruby on her right hand, the only jewel she wore, and away again, the way a man's eyes go to a dog he has been told doesn't bite.

"A tidying matter, Majesty. Simply that." The secretary smiled. "The Chancellor is putting the Colonel's correspondence in order for the Archive, for the statue's anniversary. It's come to our notice that he wrote a great deal in his last winter, to all sorts of people. One likes to be thorough. Oh, and we've stopped looking for his squire, by the way. A deserter is a deserter; one can't spend the Council's money on him forever. So now we're simply asking his friends. We wondered whether any of his letters came here."

Across the table Lyrra hadn't looked up from her minutes. She was a tall, spare woman with cropped iron-gray hair and the long bony hands of a harpist, and she sat as she always sat in council, very straight, as if her spine were a staff of office. Under the table, where only Rosemary could see, her hand lay palm-down on her knee, and the air above it had a faint shimmer, the kind that stands over a forge-hearth an hour after the fire is drawn. It was a seeking, and a small one. Lyrra had been First Mage of Varlin for eleven years and could do it while taking minutes.

Rosemary reached for the young man's warmth as she would have felt for a draft under a door. Every fire mage carried that sense under the skin; most never trained it past knowing when the soup was hot. His was quick and high and steady, and pleased with itself. Nothing in it flickered.

"He wrote at midwinter asking whether Varlin glass could be had cheaper for his wife's shop," she said. "I said no. The Chancellor's welcome to it for the Archive, if he wants a record of my thrift."

The envoy laughed politely and lifted his cup, and put it down again rather quickly, and looked at his fingertips. A little steam stood off the tea now, though no one had poured.

"I'm sure that won't be necessary, Majesty. Nothing else, then? No parcels? No messengers? One does have to ask."

"Should there have been?"

"Not at all. Not at all." He rose, bowed, and touched his chain. "The Chancellor sends his warmest regards."

"Return mine," said Rosemary. "At whatever temperature you think best."

When the door had shut behind him, Lyrra let the shimmer go out of her fingers and put down her pen.

"He wasn't lying," she said. "That's the unpleasant part. He doesn't know what he's looking for. He was sent to see what your face did."

"And?"

"Nothing at all. As usual." Lyrra reached across and moved the inkwell an inch away from the queen's hand, which she had been doing since they were both girls in the mage quarter and Rosemary had first set an inkwell boiling. "Your face did nothing. Your hand boiled his tea. He'll write that down, Rosemary. He's the sort who writes things down."

"Let him. In Haze they'll think I'm rude. They already think I'm rude."

"They think you're provincial. Rude is worse. Rude has a reason." Lyrra gathered her minutes. "There's a gate-sergeant in the corridor dripping on the tiles. A beggar came to the Ember Gate last night leading a gray horse, Majesty, and fainted in the mud, and when he woke he said his master was Colonel Maximo of the Emperor's Guard. They've put him in the west tower." She paused. "The envoy's galley doesn't sail till tomorrow's evening tide."

We've stopped looking for his squire. The envoy had said it as a kindness.

The infirmary was in the old west tower, down a long cold gallery where the rain drummed on the leads and the stone smelled of lye and old blood. The red glass windows laid the color of a healing burn across the white beds. Rosemary went down with her hood back, and sent a page running for her daughter on the way.

The boy lay in the last bed by the window.

He was seventeen and looked twelve and fifty at once, his sandy hair hacked short with a knife, the backs of his hands scarred like any farrier's, little pale crescents and one broad shiny patch. When her shadow fell on him his eyes went to the door before they came to her, and then to her hair, Ward red going gray at the temples, and stayed there, as if it settled something.

"Majesty. I'm sorry. I'm so late. I'm sorry—"

"Lie still. Your name."

"Ostin, Majesty. Farrier's son, from Tull. I was the Colonel's squire." He swallowed. "Am. Was. I don't know which you say."

"Was. When did you leave him?"

"The day his order came, Majesty. Five days before Southport. Two years ago this spring. I counted." He wet his lips. "Hal Dunmore put me on the gray that night and sent me north with the letter, and I rode north. Ten days out, two men with no colors stood in an inn yard and told the innkeeper about my hands." He turned them over on the blanket to show her the farrier's scars. "Down to that one. I was in the stable doorway with a bucket. So I turned round and went south, and shod horses under a bridge in Dura. Then at the thaw a herald cried it in the market: the search for the deserter Ostin was closed.

So I came."

They had stopped looking so that he would stop hiding. And a secretary of the Council had come up her river the same week, to drink her tea and see where he went.

He drew out of the ruin of his left boot a flat square of oilcloth, worn soft as skin, and held it out, and didn't let go of it at once.

"Into your hand and nobody else's, he said. If I couldn't, burn it. If I was caught, eat it." Almost a smile. "It's oilcloth, Majesty. I don't think I could have."

She opened it there, standing at the foot of his bed, with her back to the door.

R.—

If this reaches you, I couldn't bring it myself. I'm sorry for that, and for the rest, which you know.

You told me in the autumn I was imagining the sword. I wasn't. They have me on the Haze gate this winter, and I've stood by the carts at the old customs gate at night and felt it through the boards. The same cold. You know which cold.

They are making the stones again.

I've been given an order this morning. It sends me south after a drake over the Hollow-Eye Hills. You know as well as I do that drakes don't come south.

The boy is Ostin. He doesn't know what he carries.

Whoever wrote it, it comes from higher than I can reach.

Don't come to the funeral. They'll be watching who comes.

Look after yourself. Look after the girl.

—M.

She had reached the girl when the gallery door banged and Eloise came in still smoking.

A thin gray thread rose from the cuff of her right sleeve where a practice flame had got away from her, and she was pinching it out as she came: nineteen, half a head taller than her mother, freckles going dark across her nose, soot along her jaw in a bad shave. Lyrra was a step behind her.

"If this is about the target-master, it was only his hat, and it was a stupid hat—"

"Shut the door," said her mother, and gave Lyrra the letter.

Lyrra read it at the window. Rosemary watched her reach the line about the stones and stop, and her free hand find the bed rail and hold it.

Eloise had come to read over Lyrra's shoulder, which nobody stopped in time. "Stones," she said. "Plural. You always told me there was one, and that you saw it come up the ridge, and every torch went out."

"By a man nobody names," said Lyrra, very quietly, to the window. "With one apprentice."

Eloise looked at her. "The deserter? They hanged him in Market Square the year after the peace. I was fifteen. I watched."

"Yes," said Lyrra. "So did I." And she didn't say anything else, and Rosemary didn't look at her.

Eloise was still looking at them. Something in their faces got through to her. "You sent me away the whole last year of the war so I wouldn't see how it ended, and all I've had since is the tutors' version. You knelt. You were both there."

"Maximo of Jul thought somebody was making a second. He wrote this the morning he was ordered south after a dragon. And this morning Haze sent a boy to drink my tea and ask whether he'd written to me." Rosemary nodded at the window. "That boy's galley is still at the west dock."

Eloise got to the end of it and flinched, and then, because she was Eloise, got angry instead. "Then we take it to the Emperor. Today."

"With what? A dead man's letter, carried two years in a boot, accusing nobody by name. The Chancellor's clerks open the Emperor's post. The Chancellor's clerk sat in my council room an hour ago."

"Then Markwin. Lord Daniel. Somebody—"

"And tell them I believe it? I do. That isn't proof. That boy will be back within the month with a warrant and a polite face, and when he comes there will be nothing in this palace to find." She looked at Ostin, white against the pillow. "A dead man's handwriting with my initial on it isn't evidence, Eloise. It's a rope. And he'd hang Ostin with the other end."

"Mother, that's the only—"

Boots on the tower stair. The healer's boy put his head in, white. "Majesty, the gentleman from Haze. He's at the foot of the stair. He heard the gate brought in a sick man, and he'd like to pay his respects, he says, on the Council's behalf."

Ostin's hands closed on the blanket.

Rosemary read the letter once more, all of it, slowly, as she had learned to read dispatches in the war: so that she would have it in the dark, word for word, forever. Then she held it over the brazier.

"I know what it is," she said.

She let go of it. For a moment the square hand stood up in orange lines off the page, they are making the stones again, and then it was ash on the infirmary floor, and the healer's boy swept it up and tipped it into the brazier, and when the envoy came round the turn of the stair, smiling, the queen of Varlin was sitting on a sick man's bed asking him about horses.

The envoy stayed a quarter of an hour, and learned that the sick man was a farrier from Tull with a marsh fever, and that the queen liked her horses shod cold. His warmth went down the stair pleased with itself. When the door had shut, Ostin looked at the brazier. "Was it any use, Majesty? Two years late?"

"Yes." She sat on the end of his bed. "Tell me something about him. Not the letter."

"The night he sent me off, his collar was turned in on one side. I saw it in the lantern. I nearly told him. I didn't, because he was giving me an order." He looked at his hands. "He had a daughter. He talked about her on campaign. She asked him once if the sword talked to him. He said she'd be trouble. Is somebody looking after her?"

Rosemary had turned that collar out for him herself, more than once, in corridors where she shouldn't have been.

"Somebody should be," she said. "You'll stay and shoe my horses. That's an order."

"Fine," said Eloise, to the ash, in the voice that meant nothing was fine. "So what do we do instead?"

"Now," said Lyrra quietly, "she asks."

In the study, an hour later, with the door locked: "Markwin wrote at the thaw," Lyrra said. "His stone going cold when the covered carts pass under the Spire. He means to close the mountain road to them."

"Then they'll come by the sand." Rosemary unrolled the old survey map across the desk. "The salt track, in the storm season, when every patrol stays home. One well on the whole of it. We sit where they have to come."

Eloise had come round the desk to look. Her cuff was still smoking, and as she leaned over the map a thread of it touched the paper. A brown spot bloomed on the salt track, right on the well, and opened into a small black hole with an orange rim.

Lyrra put it out with her thumb without looking down.

"There," she said. "That's the well. That's what it'll look like with you in it."

"I'll be in it," said Rosemary.

"You're the queen. Send a captain."

"A captain wouldn't know it if he was standing on it." Rosemary looked at the fire in the grate, not at either of them. "On the last day of the war, in the breath before the light came up, my fire went out. All of it. Like a hand closing on a wick. It came back a moment later, and I held the flank, and I never told anyone, because a fire mage whose fire can fail is a fire mage nobody follows." She made herself look at Lyrra. "Not you. Not him. He wrote to me in the autumn that the sword had gone cold at the customs gate, and I told him he was imagining it.

I had felt that cold myself, and I told him he was imagining it."

Lyrra's hand went flat on the map, over the burned hole, and stayed there. Eloise was looking at her mother as if she had never seen her before.

"No," said Lyrra. "She didn't tell anyone." Then, for the first time that morning, she said the queen's name, the way she had said it when they were twelve and caught on the mage-quarter roof after curfew. "Rosemary. I was a hundred yards behind you for six hours, watching your fire, because if it went, we all went. And you're telling me it went."

"For a breath."

"For a breath." Lyrra looked down at the map. "And if it goes out longer, with you standing next to it, you'll reach past your hands for whatever's under them. I know you." She said the next part to the burned hole, as if it were a thing every apprentice knew and the queen had simply forgotten. "The one under your ribs isn't borrowed. It doesn't come back. And you'll take your daughter."

"I haven't said anything about my daughter."

"You will. I've known you thirty-eight years." Lyrra lifted her hand at last and looked at the soot on her thumb.

"The Ember, no banners, the long way round the Cape," said Rosemary. "A month to the desert beach. You and I, and three draughts, in case the only way home is the quick one."

Lyrra said nothing at all, which from Lyrra was a shout.

"Three," said Eloise.

Nobody answered her.

"Three draughts," Eloise said. "And I heard the quartermaster this morning. Water for three."

"No," said Rosemary.

"You and Lyrra make two."

"Three is a margin."

"Nobody keeps a margin the size of a person." Eloise straightened from the map. The cuff had started smoking again. "He said look after the girl. Fine. Look after me where you can see me. If you leave me here, I'm the first thing they take when they want something from you."

"Hold out your hand," said Rosemary.

Eloise held it out, palm up. A flame came into it, small and yellow and wavering.

Rosemary reached across the map and pinched it out between finger and thumb, as you'd pinch out a candle. It stung. Eloise's face didn't move. The flame was back before Rosemary had taken her hand away, smaller, whiter, perfectly still.

Rosemary pinched it out again. It came back again.

The third time she didn't reach. She sat looking at the little white flame in her daughter's palm, which had not trembled once, and then at her own fingers, which had blistered.

She took the ruby off her right hand. It was the queen's ring, the Ward fire-stone, older than the city's walls. It had been off her finger once in nineteen years, the night they brought her Edric's sword, and she had put it back on before morning. She held it out to Lyrra.

"Give that to the steward tonight, sealed, with my orders. If we don't come home by the first frost, he breaks the seal in front of the council and does what the orders say."

Lyrra didn't take it.

"You'd gamble the city," she said, "so she can watch."

"So she can see what I'm afraid of before she's queen, and not after." Rosemary kept her arm out. "Take it, Lyrra."

Lyrra let the arm hang there until Rosemary's shoulder ached. Then she took it. She closed her fist on the ring and kept it closed, all the way to the door, and Rosemary saw the fist shake once, and go still.

Eloise had gone quiet. She was looking at her mother's bare finger, at the band of paler skin where the ring had been for nineteen years.

"Pack," said Rosemary. "You'll hate the camels."

They sailed on the next evening's tide. The rain had stopped at noon, and the river below the city ran broad and brown and smelling of mud and cedar smoke, with the red walls doubled in it upside down. They went from the west dock, among the tar barrels and the shouting of the dockhands, where the merchantmen tied up and nobody looked twice at a woman in brown with a scarf over her hair. She had Daniel of Dron's thaw packet in her coat to read on the voyage. Lyrra carried the padded case herself and slapped a porter's hand off it.

On the gangplank she stopped Eloise, held out her palm, and waited until Eloise, scowling, dug a steel needle out of her sewing roll and laid it there. Lyrra dropped it in the river.

"Nothing cold near the draughts," she said. "Not a needle. Not a buckle."

Across the water, on the eastern dock, three tall Dron merchantmen rode at their lines, steel-gray at the mastheads, with their hatches battened and nobody on deck. "Nine days' more trading, the harbor-master says," said the Ember's captain, following her eyes. "Lucky for some." The Haze envoy's galley lay two berths down, taking on its last casks. Rosemary kept her hood up and her back to it. It was a fool's risk, sailing two berths from the man she was hiding from, and the only tide there was; and a young secretary looking for a queen would not look twice at a widow in brown going to her sister's.

She broke Daniel's seal first, at the rail, because his were the only letters that had ever made her laugh. Two pages of weather and harbor gossip in his big careless hand, and the jokes he had been telling her since they were both young enough to laugh at them. A new mole on the Steadfast's figurehead. A bishop who had fallen off a pier. Tell Eloise that Brannoc's Maren asks after her every summer. Rain, and more rain, and a complaint about his cook, who had taken up the flute.

She laughed at the bishop out loud, and the deckhand coiling rope beside her laughed too without knowing why, and she folded the pages into her coat and forgot them.

As they cleared the breakwater, she looked back along the city's waterfront: the red walls going dark, the lamps coming on one by one along the river stairs, the eastern dock where the big ships berthed.

The eastern dock was empty. All three Dron ships had gone, nine days early, on a tide nobody had written down.

End of Chapter 2