The Tears of the Sun (62 page)

It was a pleasant enough chamber, shaped like a wedge of pie since it was in a circular tower, with plastered walls painted in hunting scenes. The location also made it easy to guard. There was no way in except through the outer gate, the keep gate, and then a guarded portal at the base. None of the windows were big enough for even a very
small
and lithe assassin to climb through.

The staff had set out a cold collation for them; regular dining in Hall had gone by the board, with everything upset by the mobilization. She'd heard someone grumble that they were all grazing like a herd, wherever they found a moment.

“Oh, good,” Shawonda said. “I'm starved, but in weather like this a regular cooked meal makes you feel so logy and stuffed afterwards.”

Yseult flipped off the white linen cloth. “Let's eat!” the sisters said in chorus, and took off the covers.

There was sliced ham, roast quail, potatoes done with garlic and herbs, a salad of roasted peppers and sweet Walla Walla onions and cauliflower dressed with oil and vinegar, another of greenstuffs, along with good manchet bread and a big apricot tart with cream. The girls waited while she said grace, then ate with what she recognized as good manners of a very old-fashioned sort, and enthusiasm.

Janie grinned and rubbed her hands after she'd loaded her plate. Yseult poured them all a glass of white wine. Janie paused and looked at hers a little dubiously.

“Am I allowed to drink wine?” she said.

“Well, some,” Yseult said, surprised again.

Wine was what you drank with food, unless you had beer, which was slightly plebian. This wasn't anything special, just ordinary drinkable wine decanted from a cask to a carafe and sent up from the kitchens.

I knew they were from a different country, but it's like they're from a different
time
. I knew Boise clung to the old ways, but I didn't expect so much.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because I'm sort of young?” Janie said.

“You're what . . . eleven?” Yseult said.

“Since June.”

“Well, I started drinking wine when I came out of the nursery . . . when I was six. Watered at first, of course. But don't worry, I won't let you get drunk!”

Janie nodded a little dubiously, sipped, made an interested sound but switched to the cool water instead.

“And it's exciting to be in a real
castle
,” she said. “Pass the mustard, please . . . A castle with knights and everything! It looks just the way I imagined!”

Shawonda nodded and jointed one of the little birds, a little more restrained as befitted a maiden in her mid-teens.

“It's really interesting. But I don't want to have a banquet and everything
all
the time, not yet at least,” she said.

Yseult blinked as she broke a piece of bread and buttered it.

“We don't have banquets all the time,” she said instead. “Well, it's a little different at Court, naturally they keep more state than anyone else and entertain more, and this is a royal castle. But normally we . . . ordinary Associate nobles and our retainers . . . just eat in Hall, you know.”

“What's that mean?” Janie asked.

Yseult blinked again, forced to think how to explain something she'd taken for granted all her life.

“Well, in
Hall
. . . you've seen the Hall here?”

Shawonda nodded. “The great big building with the dais at one end and that marvelous huge fireplace and the stained-glass windows down one side and the tapestries? And the lovely coffered ceiling.”

Janie nodded. “Yes, we saw that when we came here. Mathilda . . . I mean, the High Queen . . . met us and gave a sort of speech, and there were a lot of people. But wouldn't that be for banquets? It's awful big for just a dining room.”

“You don't have Halls?”

“Not like that,” Shawonda said. “I mean, the capitol building in Boise has a big place where they have meetings, and sometimes special dinners. If you have dinner in a Hall, isn't that a banquet?”

“Well, no, it's used for banquets
too
, but those are special occasions. Banquets are different, it's mostly guests then, sometimes everyone's a noble. But a Great Hall has to be big because all the Castle people eat there, except some of the extra troops if there's a call-up, and it's where you have dances and things, and music and performers and maybe mystery plays, and a lord may sit in judgment there for his manor court or the Court Baron, and you play games in winter or sew there at times in the summer if the solar gets too stuffy. A Hall will be a bit smaller in a manor house than a castle but it's the same thing really.”

“
Everybody
in a Castle or a manor eats in the hall?” Janie said.

“Most days. The family and any noble guests at the head table, and then the Associate retainers, and then the commons down below the salt, from the highest-ranking servants down to the stable hands and that sort. We don't all eat the same
food
, of course, or use the same tableware, but one reason common people want to serve in a castle is that they eat better than what they would get at home in their family's cottage.”

Shawonda returned to the subject. “So you eat in this Great Hall place every day?”

“Not
every
day, especially not breakfast or luncheon, sometimes a lord will eat
en famille
with his wife and children or a few select guests in a solar or ladybower, but it's . . . well, people will think you're odd and, ummm, sort of . . . what was the old word . . . antisocial if you do that all the time. It's good lordship to sit at meat with your folk. Though it's nice to be private now and then, like this.”

Shawonda looked down at her plate and realized it was empty except for a few clean-picked bones. Yseult thought she blushed, though it was a little difficult to tell for sure with the brown complexion.

“Go ahead,” she laughed. “You've been on short rations, I know. Here, have some of the ham this time. The honey glaze is excellent.”

“We were eating jerky and these hard biscuits and cheese and not much else while we rode so fast,” Janie said. “We were so tired we didn't realize how hungry we were until we got to Ashland and we could sleep in a bed again!”

Her sister nodded. “Everything sort of blurred together after the first couple of days. I think there were bandits once and I didn't even
notice
because I was so tired and sore and half-asleep.”

Silence fell for a few minutes; Yseult felt a bit amused at how the two made up for lost time, and restricted herself a little, passing over most of the red meat. Even if her time as an oblate was fading, it wasn't quite over yet, and the Rule of the Sisters called for moderation. Yseult poured them all more wine, red this time, and sliced the tart and handed round the honeysweetened cream.

“You've heard all about us, Lady Yseult,” Shawonda said.

“Please, let's be Yseult and Shawonda and Janie in private? You know, you're actually princesses, so I should be the one who goes after. I'm just a baron's daughter. Sister, now.”

“We
are
?” Janie said. “Princesses? Really and truly?”

Her sister looked at her. “Remember what Mathilda said back when they came to our place? I thought she was joking but now I think she really meant it. But don't start
calling
yourself a princess, Janie. It might cause trouble, people at home wouldn't like it.”

She looked at Yseult. “But we don't know what happened with you, just that the CUT . . . got at . . . your mother the way they did at . . . Martin. Would you tell us? It . . . it would make us feel less alone.”

“Like we're part of an army, not just people something bad happened to,” Janie said.

She's no fool. Neither of them are,
Yseult thought as she sipped her wine.
Maybe I should. We
do
have this in common. And . . . not to be cynical, but they
are
princesses. I like them, and it certainly can't hurt to be friends. You need friends in this world. Friends, and strong allies. And you can't have friends unless you're prepared to be one yourself.

“Well, my mother was arrested, when the Lady Regent found out what she'd done,” Yseult began slowly. “Everyone suspected Huon and me, too.”

“That must have been awful,” Shawonda said

“Were you locked up in a
dungeon
?” Janie said, with the ghoulishness of her age.

“Not quite! What happened was—”

Her quarters at Todenangst were not quite a cell. There was a room that was small and whitewashed within and furnished with a plain bed with equally plain but adequate sheets and blankets, a small cupboard and a commode. There was a Spartan sitting room next to it, with a table and chairs and an étagère. The place smelled of soap and wax and, very slightly, of concrete still curing after all these years; a maid came through and cleaned thoroughly every day.

There was no need for her do to anything menial, no
dérogeance
, but it was very bleak.

She rose each morning when the sun came through the high slit windows, dressed in her riding habit, waited for the door to open and was escorted by an unspeaking squire with an equally taciturn middle-aged duenna to the stables and rode for two hours, in a walled tilt-yard of the Protector's Guard, under instruction and ward of the Master of the Stables, Sir Henri Gallardo.

Castle Todenangst was more than a castle; you could have lost Castle Gervais in it a dozen times over. It was a palace and a city in itself, the inner keep here alone a vast labyrinthine complex of towers and courtyards, little hidden gardens and terraces, armories and barracks, offices and halls and galleries, archives and libraries and chapels and quirking passageways. Some of it was bleakly plain like her rooms; some parts she traversed were stunningly beautiful and decorated with things new-made by the Protectorate's most skilled artists or plundered from half a continent. All of it had a faint air of menace that might be her imagination. After days she still felt she'd be hopelessly lost if she took one wrong turn, and almost grateful for the constant escort.

Sometimes late at night she thought of its building, twenty thousand men laboring through five years of hunger and brutal toil just for the main framework, some leaving their bones in its mass concrete bulk and most in the nearby graves. From the bed, if she stood, she could see the Black Tower glittering with the crystal inclusions in its dark granite sheathing. That had been the Lord Protector's lair, and of him men still spoke with awe and dreadful fear.

After riding she went to confession—brief ones, where every day was the same—and Mass in an astonishing Lady Chapel that was like being inside a jewel, sitting between her guards of the day. Then the guards escorted her to the sitting room and a late breakfast, plain but adequate. After that she was free until her lessons and the escort to the baths where she was always the only occupant.

Free,
she thought as she paced, after a time that seemed to stretch out forever and flick by in instants, both at the same time.

Her books, brought from Gervais, she placed beside her bed; she arranged a little prie-dieu in her sitting room and spent hours trying to pray. A lute was brought at her request, and she was allowed to borrow, through Virgilia, any book she wanted out of the Todenangst libraries. That was one good thing, because they seemed to have all the books in the world. Virgilia gave her lessons from three to seven. The very first day the older woman told her bluntly that there were eavesdroppers, and her skin crawled at the thought that eyes might be on her at any moment of the day or night, and how the whole castle might be honeycombed by secret passages. The Spider had designed it, after all.

After that she kept her mind strictly on her lessons when Virgilia was there.

Each day she came back to the bare little room and tried to focus on a short list of tasks. She worked at making the hours pass by assigning to each one a different task. For the most part, she paced; unable to focus on any one task as raw worry gnawed at her balance.

Odard,
she thought.
Where is he now, out in the barbarian lands? Huon . . . is he still a page at Mollala? Mother . . . Fen House . . . people whisper about it. Better than the dungeons, but . . . and will I ever leave here? What happens if I start to scream at the walls?

She paced four quick steps one way and the seven at right angles, over and over as noon crept to one and Virgilia arrived to distract her. The fourth day as she sat and picked up a new piece of embroidery she'd started in hopes of focusing her attention once again, the door opened and Huon walked in.

The fine linen cloth with the pattern of yellow roses growing on it went flying as she sprang up. For one long second she stared at him and then they rushed together. Strong arms went around her and his tears fell on her shoulder. They swayed together, laughing and crying.

Huon had been a good three inches shorter than she when he left to go be Lord Chaka's page. Now he stood just slightly taller, and he even
smelled
different; clean, but with an overtone of smoke and leather and horse, and his hands were rougher with callus. When their spate of tears had passed she found herself sitting in the little window seat, still in his arms.