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In spite of herself, Stasya was terribly nervous. It wasn’t every day you met a figure out of song and legend. Caedmon Aldred—the wisest hillichmagnar living, according to the old tales. He was among the leaders of Diernemynster, and many people said he would be the next Freagast, whenever old Astrid of Haydon passed away. Stasya had spent nearly two years at Diernemynster with Evika before leaving for the east, with Caedmon and Ellard arriving just a few months after they left. And so, much to her regret, she had never met him.
Stasya thought about what would have happened if she and Evika had never left Diernemynster, and she had met both men years earlier. Would she have been friends with them? Would they have felt as out of place there as she had? It was hard to imagine that Caedmon, who was said to be the Freagast’s most trusted advisor, disliked Diernemynster. But perhaps Ellard, being somewhat younger, might feel the same alienation that she felt. Perhaps they would have been friends. Unfortunately, Pallavi kept smirking and making comments about how handsome this Ellard person was supposed to be, until Stasya was quite determined to hate him on sight.
Then, two days after they first had encountered Caedmon’s hawk, and after sending the poor bird back and forth several times to coordinate their meeting, Stasya and Pallavi rounded a bend by the ivy-bound wall of some old estate, and saw two men waiting ahead on the road with their horses. The little sparrow hawk was perched on the wall nearby, and if there had been any lingering doubt as to the identity of the two men, the one on the left, with longer, lighter hair, raised his hand and waved. “Pallavi Ratnam!” he called, in a booming baritone. “Of all the people to meet on the Upper Trahern. How good to see you again!”
“And you, too,” cried Pallavi with a little, girlish squeal of glee. She spurred her horse the last few yards, and Stasya followed, and that was how she met the great Caedmon Aldred.
He was taller than she had imagined. The songs said he was tall, but then, the songs said everyone was tall. All the great heroes were tall and handsome and had shining eyes. When she shook his hand, she noticed that his eyes were blue and were shadowed under a pair of impressively bushy eyebrows. There was a certain quality to his gaze that she found somewhat unnerving. It was not that he looked at her in any way that was improper, or that he seemed angry. Quite the contrary, in fact. He was smiling and laughing and patting Pallavi on the shoulder in a brotherly sort of way. But whenever he looked at Stasya, she had the uncomfortable sense that here was a man who saw her exactly as she was, warts and all. There was no point in trying to conceal anything from him, because he had seen it all before, hundreds and hundreds of times over the centuries. And Stasya didn’t even consider herself a particularly bad person. She could only imagine what it must be like to wither under that gaze if you had actually done something wrong.
Ellard, the student, was very different. To begin with, the rumors Pallavi had passed along about his looks were quite correct. If anything, they had understated how handsome he was. Caedmon was good looking, too, though in a very staid, middle-aged way. And Ellard was very tall, too, perhaps within an inch of his teacher’s height. And they both wore their hair long and tied back in ponytails. But those were the only similarities. Ellard’s smile was thinner than Caedmon’s, and twisted slightly to one side, like he had looked all around the world, and had seen the joke. His eyes were dark, nearly black, but when he looked at Stasya, there was nothing cold or judgmental in his gaze. He looked at her as if he was ready to believe the best of her. He looked at her as if he liked what he saw. Stasya blushed a little and shook his hand.
At first, the conversation was general between the four of them, as they discussed which roads they had taken and where they had seen plague mounds. But then, gradually, Caedmon and Pallavi drifted off, laughing about old jokes and reminiscing about places they had been together centuries before. Stasya would have followed them, but Ellard drew her aside, and they sat together on a fallen stretch of wall. “Is it really true that you survived the plague?” he asked. Pallavi had mentioned the fact when effecting the introductions.
“Yes, I did.”
He smiled. “Fascinating. How on earth did you manage that?”
“I...I’m not really sure, to be honest. I just survived.”
Perhaps noticing her reluctance to talk about her experiences in Nivia, he changed the subject. “So you’re from Loshadnarod, then.” When she had confirmed that she was, he smiled. “I love Loshadnarod. There’s something so magnificent about the nomad life there. It’s so much simpler and purer than this, isn’t it?” As he said, “this,” he patted the fallen stonework of the wall.
“I’ve met a lot of people in Myrcia who say they admire the nomad life,” she replied, “but I notice that most of them live in houses.”
Ellard put a hand to his heart. “I promise you, I have never owned a house in my life.” She couldn’t help but laugh.
***
CAEDMON HAD FORGOTTEN how chatty Pallavi could be. Not that he minded, of course. He had always liked that about her. It was a relief sometimes to be with someone who would happily carry the burden of the conversation all by herself. But as she went on and on about her travels through Loshadnarod, he found his attention wandering.
Ellard and the Loshadnarodski girl were laughing. More than that, it was the peculiar kind of sympathetic laughter that one saw when people had formed an instant connection. They were not laughing at anything in particular; they were simply laughing together. Because Caedmon went to Atherton to train new hillichmagnars, he had spent more of his life among teenagers than he cared to remember, and the easy camaraderie between Ellard and Stasya filled him with instant foreboding. The girl was pretty, too, unfortunately. Caedmon couldn’t help but notice that. She was tall and slender, with dark hair and green eyes. Immani sculptors would have worshipped her high cheekbones and the gentle curve of her jaw.
“No, I will not do this,” he said to himself. “I will trust Ellard. He has earned my trust.” Granted, the boy had made a few missteps along the way, but who hadn’t, really? That girl at Atherton, the Freiherr’s daughter in Sudlichstadt—decades had passed since then. Ellard had learned. He was a better man than he had been; Caedmon was sure of that. So Caedmon turned his back on the two young hillichmagnars and forced himself to listen to what Pallavi was telling him about Vasily and the death of the Loshadnarodski king.
Caedmon was sure that Vasily, who was one of his best friends, must have already sent a bird to inform Astrid of the king’s death, but just in case, he sent another one, telling the Freagast that he and Ellard were only a few miles from Leornian. He was going to add the fact that they had met up with Pallavi and Stasya, but Pallavi put a hand on his arm and said, in a low voice, “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather that Astrid not know where I am.”
He knew Pallavi had fallen out with Diernemynster in general, and with the Freagast in particular. He had never heard the precise details, though he could make some educated guesses. She had married several times and borne numerous children, which surely hadn’t endeared her to Astrid. And she had taken an aggressive role in the wars of her homeland, Sahasra Deva. That was something else that Astrid heartily disapproved of.
But whether it was the soldiering or the mothering, or something else entirely, that had made Pallavi unwelcome at Diernemynster, Caedmon had no idea. It really wasn’t his business to pry, and no one needed to know where Pallavi was, so he complied with her wishes and sent the bird off without mentioning her name.
He had originally planned to ride directly to Leornian after meeting Pallavi and the new girl, but it was getting close to dark, and he wanted to see the city in the daylight before meeting the duke. He wanted to see clearly what kind of measures his grace was taking against the plague, because that would give him some sense of whether he and Ellard were right to hope that the duke might be a man of science and learning. The sort of man, in other words, who might be open to cooperating with Diernemynster in the future. So he suggested that they find a place to camp nearby, and then proceed to the city and the duke’s castle in the morning.
Ellard pointed across the field, beyond the wall where he and Stasya were sitting. “There’s a manor house over there. It looks abandoned. I bet we could stay there for the night.”
Caedmon said that it might be better if they pitched their tents in the field, instead, but then Ellard, Stasya, and Pallavi all informed him that the ladies did not have a tent. Feeling a bit stupid, Caedmon relented and agreed that the abandoned mansion was their best option.
They rode past a small gatehouse, covered in cheap plaster copies of Immani statuary, and up the weed-choked lane. Clearly there was no one at the house anymore. They all speculated, in whispers, as to what might have happened to the occupants, but it was clear to Caedmon that the people who had lived there must all be dead. If, as Stasya suggested hopefully, they had gone off to a different estate or to their house in town, then they would have left servants or farmhands behind to keep the place looking neat. There was no sign at all that anyone had been on the estate or near the house in a year.
So it was quite surprising for all of them when they reached the house and were hailed from an upper window. “No closer, I beg you!” It was a woman’s voice. “I have a crossbow here, and I assure you I know how to use it.”