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After weeks on the road, Stasya and Pallavi crossed the border into Myrcia. The rolling grassland gave way to high, yellow sandstone cliffs and dark forests. Huge thickets of brambles and rhododendrons clung to the side of steep hillsides under the shade of cedars and birches.
The road here followed the great River Trahern, the artery of the Kingdom of Myrcia. At the border, it was still so thin and shallow that you would barely get your feet wet crossing it. Stasya had heard that there were sometimes ferocious floods along the Trahern in March and April when the snows melted in Loshadnarod. Now, in late summer, however, the water had slowed to a trickle again, slipping lazily through the hills, as if resting after its springtime exertions.
Just past the border, they stopped to eat in a small clearing next to an ancient stone cairn. Pallavi announced that this was the site of “the famous Battle of Yusipova’s Fields. Surely you’ve heard of it.”
“Surely,” agreed Stasya. She only vaguely remembered Evika mentioning something like that, however.
“I was there,” Pallavi said, looking wistfully around. “I fought in the battle.”
“Oh.” Stasya wasn’t quite sure what to say. “That must have been very...exciting.”
It looked as if Pallavi was going to say more. But then she shook her head sadly and announced that it was time to get back on the road.
On either side of the wide valley of the Upper Trahern, there were mountains, though the land around the river was so hilly and thickly wooded that Stasya rarely had a glimpse of the far-off peaks. Hardly a mile went by, however, when they did not cross a little tributary stream or two, or see a high waterfall pouring down over a cliff and joining with the little river. By their third night in Myrcia, the Trahern was no longer a river in name only, but was forty feet wide and so deep that you could no longer see the bottom.
That afternoon, they camped in a field near a town. They didn’t dare look for an inn; they could see the plague mounds near the churchyard, and it was safer to keep as far away from such things as possible. When supper was finished, however, and they had cleaned up, they walked through the field for a closer look at the place.
There was grass growing high in the little town square, and trailing ivy covered the front door of the church. All the windows in town were dark, even though it was near dusk, and the doors were shut, except the door to what appeared to have been the town tavern. It hung halfway open and was already starting to come off its hinges. There were no footsteps, no calls, no laughing voices. There were no sounds of animal life, either, unless you counted the bees buzzing in the meadow. The only sign of life in the town, ironically enough, was the larger of the two plague mounds, which had newly-disturbed earth on one side.
Stasya pointed this out to Pallavi, who then wondered aloud what had happened to the people who had buried the dead in those mounds. There was a pause, as both hillichmagnars studied the dark windows of the town. Then they both shuddered and walked quickly away. Stasya did not sleep well that night.
The next morning, the last day of August, they skirted the village and continued down the river road. Near mid-morning, they were surprised by the cry of a hawk, and looked up to see the bird circling barely twenty feet overhead. Stasya was about to remark that this was very odd behavior for a bird of prey, but then she felt the magy. It was a low sort of pressure or ache in her jaw, almost as if her teeth had suddenly grown slightly larger. Nine years earlier, when she had first started to feel that sensation, she had found it very annoying. Truth be told, she still did, but it was useful, at least in theory, to be able to know when there was magy around, so she had learned to live with it.
“Someone’s sent us a bird,” said Pallavi.
“Is it from Vasily?” asked Stasya. “I wonder if he’s sent it to tell us everything is fine and we can come back. Or maybe he’s been kicked out, too, and wants to meet up somewhere.”
“Well, let’s see, shall we?” said Pallavi. They dismounted and tied up their horses to a crumbling fence. Then she held up a hand, and Stasya could feel the spell of summoning that she used. The hawk circled once more, dipped lower, and then, spreading its wings wide to arrest its descent, it settled gracefully onto Pallavi’s outstretched arm. It was a little bird when it folded its wings up again, but it was very handsome, with gray feathers on top and neat little red stripes on its breast. Stasya recognized it as a Columnian Sparrow Hawk—one of the more common small raptors of Loshadnarod and the southern Empire. She had heard they were particularly good for falconry, though she’d known few people who kept birds for hunting.
Now that the bird was close to her, she could feel the magy radiating from it like warmth from a campfire. “Is it from Vasily?” asked Stasya again.
Pallavi laughed and held out the bird so that it hopped over onto Stasya’s shoulder. “You tell me. I assume you’ve learned how to do this sort of thing, haven’t you?”
Stasya nodded—very carefully, as the bird was inches from her ear, and she didn’t want to disturb it. Evika had often let Stasya practice with birds and other animals. Only the most powerful hillichmagnars could send worded messages with birds. Mostly they could convey feelings or vague directions. So she took a deep breath and tried to focus on the spell the sparrow hawk was carrying. But there was merely a jumble of confusing pictures. She kept trying to see Vasily in the images, but every time she did so, the scene shifted, and she could see nothing for a few seconds but a swirl of color.
Shaking her head and focusing her mind back into the temporal world, Stasya said, “I can’t see him. I can barely see anything.”
Pallavi took the bird back. “No, no, dear. If you try to impose your own image on the spell, it will never work. You’re trying to see Vasily, but maybe the bird isn’t from him. Look at the hawk and try not to think of anything else.”
Stasya did as she was told, and almost instantly she saw a vague, shimmering image of a tall man with auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. In the background, there was a second man, with black hair, though his features were not quite so clear. Then a quick jumble of pictures, seeming to show turns in a road. There was an image of a castle with high walls and an impossible tower next to a wide river, and then the redhaired man again.
Pallavi, who was presumably seeing the same vision that Stasya was, gave a cry of recognition. “It’s Caedmon! Oh, dear, dear Caedmon, I haven’t seen him in years. That other fellow must have been his student. Ellard Koen, I think his name is. Or is it Koehler? I forget.”
“Caedmon?” gasped Stasya. “That man is Caedmon? You mean like Caedmon Aldred?”
“I mean exactly like Caedmon Aldred. I suppose you’ve heard of him.”
“Who hasn’t heard of him?” Long ago, the great hillichmagnar had visited Loshadnarod in the company of Queen Ferryn of Myrcia to persuade the Loshadnarodski king and the Emperor of the Immani to make peace after generations of pointless war. The treaty hadn’t lasted forever, unfortunately, but the people of Loshadnarod still remembered the queen and her hillichmagnar advisor with great fondness. There were a dozen songs about them, two or three of which were so popular that barely a night went by during the long, cold, winter months when someone wouldn’t sing at least one of them around the fire. Stasya told this to Pallavi, and by way of explanation, sang a few lines from her favorite of these songs, “The Queen in the Heather.”
The Queen in the heather,
Oh, who is that by her?
Oh, who could advise her?
Oh, who could stand with her?
It’s Caedmon,
The prince of the angels.
Pallavi, who was searching through their packs for some stewed rabbit to feed the hawk, applauded. “That’s very nice. You have a good voice, too.”
Stasya was sure that was not true. Loshadnarodski people loved singing as a rule. Often, when the clan was on the move, everyone would join in the same folksong or hymn, just for something to do. Growing up among such people, singing had come naturally to her. When she was at Atherton, for example, she hadn’t understood why all the other girls thought four-part harmony was so difficult. But growing up in a culture where everyone sang had also given her a very accurate sense of her own talents. She knew that she was a middling singer at best—a weak soprano with a tenuous grasp of intonation. Nonetheless, she accepted the compliment with a polite nod.
“Evika Videle told me something else about that, too,” she went on. She hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to her history lessons, but some of the stories were salacious enough that she remembered them in spite of herself. “About Caedmon Aldred and Ferryn, I mean. Apparently there are people who say that he and the queen were lovers.”
“H’m.... I wouldn’t mention that in front of him, if I were you. I don’t know the truth of it myself, but I can tell you he’s very sensitive about it.” She paused and frowned. “Actually, there’s a lot of his life that he’s sensitive about. He was an advisor to generations of Myrcian kings, and he doesn’t like to talk about that. He helped Edmund Dryhten beat the Odelanders and found the nation of Myrcia, and he doesn’t like to talk about that, either. Of course, that has a lot to do with what happened to Kuhlbert.”
“Kuhlbert, the dark hillichmagnar?” Once again, there were some stories from history that were so famous that they had managed to penetrate Stasya’s indifference to the subject.
“Yes, that’s the one. For some reason, Caedmon and Astrid and the others who killed Kuhlbert now all seem to think it was a mistake. Earstien only knows why. Even if Kuhlbert wasn’t a second Koarthak, he was just too powerful. But anyway, that’s another thing you probably shouldn’t mention when we meet Caedmon.”
“We’re going to meet him?”
Pallavi laughed. “Didn’t you see the rest of the message? Caedmon and his student are going to Leornian, too. Judging by where they were when they sent the message, I’d say we’ll get there almost the exact same time.” She patted the hawk gently on the head. “I think I’ll send this little fellow back to let them know we’re coming. And while we’re stopped, let’s all have lunch.”
She fed the hawk, while Stasya broke out the pots and pans and started making a fire. Afterward, when they packed up and the hawk had been sent on his mission, Pallavi pointed to a weed growing in a nearby ditch. It was a low, creeping mass of tiny leaves and stems, with white flowers and little seed nodules the size of peas. “Pearlwort,” announced the Sahasran woman. “Also called ‘Mothan’ in these parts. It’s amazing no one has gathered it yet. I suppose there’s so little traffic on the road these days that no one has seen it.”
Stasya picked a sprig of it and examined it closely. “Is it medicinal?”
“Yes and no,” said Pallavi. “Depends on what you mean by ‘medicine,’ I suppose. But the Kenedalic people who lived in these hills before the Leorniacs took over were very fond of it. It’s supposed to be a protection against all sorts of evil things. Last year, you saw a lot of people in this valley wearing sprigs of it as a charm against the plague.”
“I would say it doesn’t work very well,” Stasya pointed out. “At least judging by all the mounds we’ve seen.”
“Perhaps not. You also were supposed to hang a sprig of it over a child’s bed. That kept the Sardaraken, the evil fairies, from stealing the child and leaving a changeling in its place. And if you put some of it under the left knee of a woman in labor, it eased her pains. Frankly I don’t think that sounds terribly likely, but it’s a nice thought. Oh, and if you gave it to a cow to eat, then it would protect the cow and her calf and make the milk taste better. That last one might be true, for all I know.”
As they mounted up, Stasya took a stem of the plant with several flowers on it and put it in her hair. Pallavi applauded the gesture, and as they rode along she told a number of stories about the old folk beliefs of the Kenedalic people of the Wislicbeorgs. “Caedmon wrote a book about it,” she said. “Though it is a little ironic that someone from Diernemynster would do that, since it’s Diernemynster—and the Leafa church—that wiped out all those old folk traditions of magy.”
“But they clearly weren’t wiped out completely,” Stasya pointed out, “if people last year were still using these flowers as a charm.” It was a bit pathetic, really. She thought what a shame it was that even with all of modern science, and all the centuries of learning at Diernemynster, no one had figured out what caused the plague yet, and no one was close to discovering how to cure it. She thought of the people who had died in the plague hospital, of poor Evika, and of King Fyodor and his household. “I might as well have tossed sprigs of Mothan on those people for all the good my nursing did,” she said to herself sadly.
“What are you so glum about?” asked Pallavi. Pointing at the flowers in Stasya’s hair, she said, “I suppose I ought to tell you the other thing the people around here used Mothan for. If you twist it into a ring and wear it, you can’t help but get a kiss from the boy you like. Maybe wearing it in your hair will work, too. I don’t know if anyone has ever tried it. You can be the first.” A knowing grin crept across her features. “You know, I’ve never met this Ellard fellow, Caedmon’s student, but I have heard that he’s very handsome.”
“I can’t see what that can possibly have to do with me,” said Stasya, who could feel her face starting to flush.
“Well, if you can’t see, I would bet young Ellard might be able to give you some ideas,” chuckled Pallavi. “You know, you never did tell me whether you’ve got a boy you like somewhere.”
“Could we please not talk about that?” snapped Stasya. She spurred her horse ahead a little ways, trying to get away from the sound of Pallavi’s laughter. As she did so, she tore the sprig of Pearlwort from her hair and tossed it to the ground. Why did that woman have to be so vulgar and nosy? Just when they were getting along together, too.
The subject of men was a sore point with Stasya. The boys at Atherton had made fun of her clothes and her accent when she had first arrived. They tripped her and made her drop her books in the snow. They stuffed muddy leaves down the back of her dress. The leader of the bullies had been a stocky football player named Bryan, the eldest son of a Baron, and Stasya could not think of him now without wishing to commit horrible acts of violence.
As they got older, the quality of Bryan’s interest in her had changed considerably, though it remained just as unwelcome. He had tried to kiss her many times, and her indignant refusals had somehow only encouraged him to try again. Then one day, after a football match, something very odd had happened. Perhaps it was seeing him sweaty, slightly unshaven, and covered in mud, which was a very good look for him. They had sneaked over the wall together, and then, propelled by strangely new and urgent feelings, she had permitted him to do a great deal more than kiss her. It had all been very quick and messy, and Stasya could hardly think of it now without shame. It wasn’t simply that she had done exactly what Evika Videle had told her so many times a proper young lady must never do. It was that the experience had been so completely not worth it.
Bryan had finished so quickly and so inconclusively that Stasya didn’t know whether she had lost her virginity or not. If, in tending your flocks or herds, you happened to wander a few yards over the border into the Province of Nivia, could you really say that you had “visited the Empire”? Or did it only count if you went all the way to a town or major city, like Tendria or Terminium? It was the sort of question that Evika might have been able to shed some light on, if only Stasya had ever told her about the encounter, which she never had done, and never would have done for all the silver in Loshadnarod. In any case, Bryan barely acknowledged her presence after that night, so she had kept her shame to herself, and resolved never to make the same mistake again.
After having galloped nearly half a mile down the road, Stasya slowed her horse. It wasn’t Pallavi’s fault; the woman couldn’t have known that the subject was so uncomfortable for her. No, the woman was annoying, but she wasn’t deliberately cruel. So Stasya sat and waited, and soon enough, Pallavi came riding up, smiling and singing a lilting Kenedalic ballad at the top of her lungs.