Prisoner of Haven

6

Morning sun streamed into the common room of the Ivy, flooding past the open doors and shutters thrown wide in hope of a breeze. The clop of horses’ hoofs on cobbles mingled with the chatter of the enterprising urchins in the dooryard. Someone yelled, “Yaahhh!” in a high childish voice, mocking. A horse snorted, a harsh voice cursed.

Usha looked out the window and saw two knights riding by, armed and lightly armored. Heads high, they ignored the children. The disdain of Sir Radulf’s patrols played out this way each morning, noon time, and from time to time during the day until curfew.

Usha sat alone, for early risers had eaten and gone out to find cooler precincts to do what they could to relieve boredom and frustration. Dez still hadn’t come down to breakfast. Passing by her closed door, Usha had heard the soft sound of a sleeper’s breathing.

You’re becoming an owl, sister, and I wonder where it is you go.

Dez hadn’t come in before curfew last night. She had not done so lately anyway. She hated the rule and counted it a mark of pride to flout it whenever she could. Usha’s best guess was that she went to a lover. Dez was an intensely private person, one who’d spent a good deal of time in Haven over the years, and the fact that no one knew the name of any man Dez was attached to didn’t mean such a man didn’t exist.

Usha didn’t remember hearing Dezra come in at all, before curfew or after, and she herself had been long awake, as she had been each of the three nights since her conversation with Loren Halgard. Each night she lay thinking about the hope of passes out of Haven. Her contentment to work and be able to pay for their keep until Sir Radulf’s grip on the city loosened had evaporated like mist in the morning sun. Memories of lovely Tamara Halgard troubled Usha, as did the cold-eyed dark knight who plainly believed that for the fee of a few days or weeks courtesy the girl would tumble into his hand if he wanted her. She couldn’t help remembering the girl’s father, whose voice had betrayed his anguish while his words had spoken of a bow to bitter necessity.

She wanted nothing more than to get out of Haven. She didn’t know where she would go—home to the empty house in Solace with memories of bitterness and anger lurking in the shadows, or somewhere else. But she could think of that later. Now, she simply wanted to go.

Boot heels clattered on the stairs then across the wooden floor. Usha looked around to see Dezra striding toward the bar.

“Rusty!” Dez called into the kitchen. “Breakfast, eh? But not much.”

When the innkeeper stuck his head out the door to acknowledge the order, Dez sat opposite Usha and yawned mightily.

“What are you doing here?” Dez asked over the sudden clatter of pots and crockery from the kitchen. “I’d’ve thought you’d be working on the portrait of the Gance boys. You’ve been nothing but hot about that job since you got it.” Dez eyed her keenly. “What? Not so happy about it anymore?”

Usha shrugged. “Happy enough. But not so happy to be quite this transparent.”

Dezra’s laugh rang through the room. “Usha, your expression is as transparent as the modesty veil of a Palanthian eldest daughter a year past marriageable age.”

Usha couldn’t help her smile. “I’ll be at the easel this afternoon. But this morning I want to go walking by the river.”

Dez snorted. “You’re not going to get very close to it.”

“Close enough to smell it.”

And to see the tops of masts and the occasional tip of a sail. Close enough to remember what it was like to move freely.

“Want company?”

She did not, though she didn’t quite know why, or perhaps wouldn’t admit the reason. And so Usha accepted her sister-in-law’s offer.

The river gate where Usha had earlier gone to be near the water and think of home opened—when it did open—to a stretch of river where housewives and servants used to take their washing. It had a broad grassy bank, tall reeds growing in waving clumps with plenty of stones for rubbing out stains. It was a place where girls flirted with handsome young men, dockworkers, sailors, and sometimes the chandler’s lad bringing candles to sell. Older women sat on the bank, watching the clothing stretched out on the rocks to dry in the sun, keeping an eye on the children and making sure none tumbled into the water. From there, the bank wandered upstream to a series of willow-shaded walks from which led paths back into the city through small gardens held in common by the people of the district, and swathes of grass where sheep could be folded or horses pastured. Above these stood the houses of the wealthy—some the expanded towers and four-square stone fastnesses of Haven’s earliest days, built in the years before Old Keep became an armory and ceremonial meeting hall. From these, the city had grown and the wall had receded, putting the wealthiest folk of Haven on stony hills above the river and the business districts of the city.

Usha wanted to go out to the river and walk along the shady waterside until the call of fragrant, cool gardens became too strong to resist and called her back to the city. That was no longer allowed.

“We can walk to the gardens from inside the wall,” Dezra said, “and still get a whiff of the river.”

After a short walk through Haven’s streets still bustling and humming, Usha noticed that the streets and byways closer to the river were quieter. Fewer people walked along the streets than had the first time she’d come there. The businesses that depended on the merchant fleet—the rope-maker, the chandler, the cooper and carpenters—had no work to do. No captain had been allowed near his ship, and no crew had been aboard since the start of the occupation. Goods and materials sat stacked in warehouses. Watchmen and restless owners prowled the aisles and brooded on their stores, but the district was quiet, nearly deserted.

Usha and Dez passed by a rope-maker’s deserted yard, crossed the way, and caught sight of a white froth of blooming bushes up the hill. They made for it and soon were among the crowds again.

“I heard Rusty telling someone yesterday that the plan is to get the fleet manned to Sir Radulf’s standard,” Dez said.

“I suppose that means with knights and goblins and foot soldiers.”

Dezra nodded. “Likely a knight aboard each ship, and a lot of the crew pulled from the ranks of the army. That’s as much to make the sure ships come home as to ward off any raid by Solamnic knights. Ten or twelve days and no word from Haven. You can be sure the Solamnics know what’s going on and are planning something.”

The speculation didn’t cheer Usha. She’d heard something like this often before, a version of what the Solamnics might be planning with each meal, in fact. She knew enough about Solamnia’s fabled knights to know there weren’t enough to spend on an assault on walled Haven. Even if there were, they’d never prevail against dragons.

They came to the last street but one before the river and caught a glimpse of one of the gates in the gaps between a sail-maker’s tidy stone hut and a tavern with a recently painted sign having something to do with a dog and a bird with improbably large eyes. The gate, like the others in the wall, had a pair of stout doors wide enough to let through wagons or carts. Normally manned by citizens in the two watchtowers on the wall, the gate was held now by Sir Radulf’s men.

“Anyhow, Solamnics or not, the fleet could be sailing down to the sea in another three or four days.”

“According to Rusty,” Usha said, wryly. In the sky, gulls cried, their voices like the creaking of a ship’s masts. “Who knows a good bit of what’s going on in Haven.”

“Well, he should.” Dez shrugged. “He’s an innkeeper, and his ale isn’t bad. Like my father says, news comes in and sits down for a drink from time to time.”

In this way, quietly talking and keeping to inhabited streets, they passed two river gates, each warded from the wall and on the ground. The streets were lined with small homes, each with a bit of garden in the front. One of the streets lost its cobbles and turned into a dirt path that led into a sunny, rectangular common garden nearly hidden behind the houses. The regular, neat rows of plantings marked out the plots of the common ground held by different families in the district. Some were filled with flowers, others with herbs. One was home to three apple trees, and this was larger than the others. So old and hoary did the trees seem that Usha could only imagine the plots had grown up around the trees; perhaps these were all that was left of an orchard. The far end of the common was hedged with tall bushes called moonglow, their tops and sides blooming with the carpet of tiny white flowers that gave them their name. These Usha had seen from below, and now she caught their sweet scent and started into the common.

Usha heard the child’s terrified shriek before she saw him.

A flash of white face and streaming black hair, and a small boy ran toward them from the shadows behind the little clump of apple trees. He hurtled between them, and Usha instinctively turned to go after him, chasing back along the path to the street. She caught sight of the child again and her initial fear that he was hurt vanished. No one could run that fast if he were seriously injured. Stopping to catch her breath, she saw him once more, something white and frightened vanishing into the alley between two houses. On her way back, she found Dez standing at the feet of the apple trees.

In that one stark moment, Usha realized that the harsh cries of ravens had drowned the creaking of gulls.

“Go back,” Dez warned, but it was too late.

“Oh,” Usha said, her hand to her mouth, her stomach roiling.

In the dimness beneath the trees, dark figures swayed on the branches. She could not look away from them, the hanged dead with their eyes protruding, their tongues gone black and swollen, and each with a look of horror on his face that death could not erase. The branches bobbed under their weight. Unripe fruit littered the ground beneath their feet. Two human men and what seemed to be an elf. What seemed to be an elf; it was hard to tell. The poor creature had been savagely beaten and—

“Damn,” Dezra whispered.

—and tortured.

Regretting her breakfast, Usha steeled herself as Dez went closer to the hanged. She stood before the elf. All color drained from her face. Usha saw the reason. Around the elf’s neck someone had hung a wooden board painted black. Upon it were painted two lines in white, like an evil poem: Swift Judgment. Swift Justice. A red sigil, a shape like a sword, was neatly printed beneath—the mark of Lady Mearah’s justice.

Dezra turned, and her green eyes blazed like fiery emeralds.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, her back firmly to the nauseating sight.

Usha didn’t argue, and neither said a word until they were again in the heart of the city.

“That’s Sir Radulf’s work,” Dez said. She said nothing more for a moment, then, “Usha, I remember the stories you and my brother used to tell about the Chaos War and—” She shook her head. “I know they were true, what you and Palin said about the things the dark knights did.”

Usha listened in silence, remembering. When Palin had been a young man and Dez only a child of ten years, he used to tease his little sister with tales of the dark knights, until he realized it was not childish delight in fright-tales he provoked in Dezra but anger at the injustices the stories portrayed. After that, he had not thought it good or wise to make a joke of such passion.

“I hear stories out of Qualinesti,” Dez said. “Like anyone does. And I’ve had my battles, seen some things. But...”

She turned and looked back, then quickly away.

Usha thought she saw something in Dezra’s eyes akin to that childhood anger, but deeper, much deeper. It vanished before Usha could be sure.

Dezra drew a long breath and started out again toward the city. “They hang murderers. I suppose they do that anywhere. Those weren’t murderers hanging there, Usha.” She paused. “Or most of them weren’t. I don’t know about the elf, but the two men were brothers. He—” She stopped and cleared her throat softly, then changed the pronoun. “They had a bakery a few blocks away from the market. People came from all over to buy their bread. Whenever I came to Haven that used to be my first stop. Last time I was there they were talking about how they’d decided to leave the city.”

Her initial horror turning to disgust, Usha said, “Sir Radulf’s criers said his judgments would be swift.”

“No. They said Lady Mearah’s would be. He’s not getting his hands bloody. Not yet, anyway.”

They walked again in silence till the sounds of the city overrode the cries of ravens and gulls. The rumble of wagon wheels, the shout of a child from an open window, rough voices of a group of men arguing outside a tavern, cold ring of a knight’s chain mail shirt... these did nothing to erase the terrible thing Usha had seen.

“Dez,” she said, as the chimneys of the Ivy came into sight. She was careful not to sound very curious or even gently sympathetic. Neither would be a key to Dezra’s confidences. “Did you know one of those people well?”

Dezra’s strides grew longer, her pace quicker, and so her gruff words came back only muffled when she said, “Don’t talk to me about it, Usha. Don’t.”

Usha had her answer.

A red dragon flew high over the city, its rider’s armor gleaming in the light of the full moon. Usha sat watching it, her seat the stone wall separating the garden of the Ivy from a narrow length of land belonging to the potter on the north side. A silvery brook ran down that strip, fresh and shining in the moonlight.

Dezra leaned against the post of an arbor, darkly silent as she picked leaves from the rose canes. Here in the garden behind the Ivy, the roses were of the variety known as First Love, early blooming flowers whose leaves were becoming weary as their petals fell away. Soon only the dark red hips would speak of the season’s bloom, and all the arbors would belong to honeysuckle and wisteria.

Out in the street a sharp voice called and another answered—a patrol of knights beginning its turn at watch. Usha listened. Dezra scowled. The patrols had been doubled since last night.

As though it were the topic of conversation (but there was no conversation at all, only silence,) Usha said, “It has been too hot today.” She scattered a handful of dried petals with a breath.

The clatter of the cook and his boys cleaning the kitchen sounded as though it came from far away. In the common room the fire burned low. The night was warm and close, and no one wanted to make it hotter. Though the air was cooler in the garden, Dezra and Usha sat alone in the deepening dark. The news of the three hanged men had flown through the city by noon, faster than fire before the wind. No one who stayed at the inn ventured out of doors tonight. Usha would have wagered the case was the same throughout Haven.

Just as walls could not contain Dezra’s restlessness, they could not contain Usha’s anger at the idea that anyone (she did not shape Loren’s name, even in her thoughts) would consider appeasing or cooperating with a brute like Sir Radulf Eigerson. No reason could be good enough.

“They are mad here,” she said to Dezra. “Every one of them. If they think things won’t go as horribly in Haven as they are going in Qualinesti...”

She spoke in a low voice, for while they were not actually breaking curfew as they were not abroad on city streets, they were keenly aware of the dragon above and the pairs of mounted knights patrolling the city streets.

Dezra ran a finger around the frothy rim of her beer mug and looked up at the wheeling dragon and its black-armored rider.

“Like a cockroach riding a red lizard,” she said. She got to her feet and stretched. “I’m going out.”

Usha stared. “Where?” She pointed to the sky, and Dezra’s bark of laughter startled her. “Dez—”

Dezra turned. The look in her green eyes said she’d come to a decision. “There’s no official way out of this damned place. They prate about passes, and on every corner I hear those passes will go only to people on legitimate business, pack traders and the like. Those will go only to people who can prove they’ve been doing business outside of Haven before the occupation, and they’ll cost a person’s firstborn for a hostage to insure his return.” She sneered. “And whoever doesn’t like that arrangement can pay half a fortune to some lowlife parasite for the chance that they’ll be shown a safe way out.”

“I’d take that chance,” Usha said. She scattered another handful of rose petals and watched them tumbled along the stone fence before a small breeze. “I’d try it.”

Dez stared at her, and it seemed to Usha she was caught between laughter and honest curiosity. “Are you serious? You saw what they did to ... the bakers and the half elf.”

“I saw, and I want to get out of here, Dez. I’m earning money from my painting. There are two more commissions waiting for me when I want them. One’s small, but the other is a good one. With it alone I could move my studio into another room, pay Rusty for both our rooms, and still have enough to be able begin saving for passes. Don’t do anything rash, Dez.”

She said it, and she saw by the thrust of Dezra’s jaw and the stiff line of her shoulders that Dezra would not be advised. That look make Usha’s blood chill. They were a stubborn clan, the Majeres, come by it honestly from their hard-headed father and their mother Tika, the woman who adamantly insisted on her right to follow him to war. Dezra had inherited her full share of that stubbornness. She’d lost someone to Sir Radulf. That much Usha guessed. And she’d guessed with good clue when she remembered the soft break in Dezra’s voice when she’d spoken of the men who’d sold her bread. One of them had been more than an acquaintance. Usha had been expecting talk of vengeance. She had not expected talk of finding a way out of Haven.

“Please, Dez. Don’t do anything foolish.”

“Foolish?” Dezra’s voice was no louder than a whisper, and it carried all her anger and grief on it. “Foolish would be going after that bastard knight and sawing off her head with her own dagger. Not that it wouldn’t feel good. No, I’m planning to be sensible. You said it yourself, Usha. They’re mad here in Haven. Well, there’s no need to stay in a madhouse full of murderers when I can find—”

The watch came around again, their horses snorting, bridle iron jingling. In the street the clop of hoofs paused, the conversation of the riders ceased. They started on again, and Usha leaned forward, her voice barely a whisper.

“Dez, what are you talking about? There is no way.”

Dezra tossed her head. “There used to be. There used to be all kinds of secret ways out of Haven.”

“Into Haven,” Usha corrected. “And Aline has abandoned them.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. She’s a crafty woman, your friend Aline Wrackham.”

Usha raised an eyebrow. “Dez, do you know something?”

Dezra hesitated the barest moment before she shook her head. “No. Qui’thonas sleeps. Aline said she was abandoning it, didn’t she? But that doesn’t matter. I don’t need Aline or Qui’thonas. If they’ve abandoned the old routes, so be it. But they can’t have obliterated them. Not all of them. There hasn’t been time for that. So, what once led in can now lead out.” Dez flashed a mirthless grin. “And if I can’t find those ways, no one can.”

She came closer. Usha felt her determination quivering in the air between them.

“Usha, listen. It’s crazy not to try to leave if I can get us out.”

It would be crazy, and just as crazy to think of sneaking past tightened patrols in the city and circling dragons. But, stubborn they were, those Majere children. Usha had been married to one for many years. She was the mother of two others. If she’d learned anything, it was not to make a Majere feel obliged to become a wall to bang her head against.

“Go,” she said, then she caught her sister-in-law’s hand. “But be careful, Dez. Don’t do anything—”

“Rash or foolish?” Dezra flashed a bright and dangerous smile. “Too late. That’s just what I’m off to do.”

The dwarf Dunbrae stood just inside the doorway of the high chamber Dez knew from the night Haven fell. He’d brought her there with Usha. At Aline’s bidding he’d seen them safely through the embattled city. Now he watched her with eyes slightly narrowed. Dez didn’t think she saw mistrust there, but she did see uncertainty. Dunbrae had found her nosing around a quarter of the city where the knights had spread their watchmen thin, a warehouse district that had once been busy with ships loading and unloading and now stood quiet, as though with breath held. Dunbrae had been watching that place himself, for he knew most of the weak points in Sir Radulf’s perimeter.

“Just keeping up,” he’d said, and then he’d invited her to go with him to visit Aline Wrackham. The invitation had been politely offered, but Dez didn’t think it could have been easily declined. And so, curious, she’d followed him to Rose Hall, where she’d been courteously received, offered refreshment, and stood now waiting to hear the reason for having been waylaid.

The door to the corridor closed softly, Dunbrae was gone.

“Waylaid,” Aline said, musing. “An interesting word. You could have been killed if any of Sir Radulf’s men saw you out so late after curfew.”

“I could have been. But none did.”

“I’d say that was luck, wouldn’t you? Three men are already dead from being caught out.”

Whatever cocky reply Dez would have given vanished from her lips. She saw again the three hanged men, Dalan Forester, his brother Rolf, and the dark elf she and Dunbrae had left tied up at a crossroad.

“You lost someone to that hanging. Didn’t you, Dezra?”

Dez didn’t bother to ask how Aline knew. Lir Wrackham’s widow had been long in the business of knowing things others didn’t. Simply, she said, “Did you know him?”

“Dalan? No. Nor his brother. I knew of them, and I’ve heard that...” She chewed her lower lip; working the tender flesh till it grew slightly red and swollen. “I’ve heard they were good men.”

Dezra’s nod of agreement was no more than a short jerk. “I knew them. I knew Dalan. He was—”

No. No, this wasn’t going to be a sodden interlude of women sharing confidences and baring heart and soul in a rush of grief. It wasn’t Dezra’s way. She stiffened her spine and shook her head when Aline proffered a tray with fussy little cakes and steaming cups of some fragrant tea. Her throat tightened suddenly. Those were “granny confections.”

Dalan had called them that. She heard his voice in memory, the words as clear as though he were speaking them now. Granny confections, the kind you give to your grandmother when she comes visiting, or the kind she makes for you. Sweet and airy, and you’re hungry an hour later unless she lets you have half the tray. We sell quite a lot of them around festival times... when most people’s old grans give out from too much baking.

And then he’d popped one into her mouth, laughing as the honeyed icing stuck to the corners of Dez’s lips. They’d taken a whole tray upstairs to his chamber with them, leaving Dalan’s good-natured brother to make up the loss.

“I knew him,” Dez said, speaking almost before she could stop herself. “He was a good man. He was a baker. With his brother. They were ...” Her words ran out. “They were good men.”

Though the soft look of sympathy didn’t leave Aline’s eyes, her head came up, just a little, like one who hears something more than is being said. “You knew him very well, didn’t you?”

“I knew him some.”

“More than that. Oh,” she said, answering Dez’s frown. “I know what a woman’s face looks like when she’s lost a man she loves.” She cleared her throat, a small sound. “I see it often in my mirror.”

The hour was late, the night warm in spite of that. The muffled sounds of the watch passing by Rose Hall drifted up, only slightly disturbing the silence between the two women. Then Aline sat a little forward.

“It’s all over the city that Dalan and his brother were trying to get out of Haven. What about the dark elf?”

Dez, in no mood for games, said, “You know about him. Dunbrae told you.”

Aline covered one hand with the other, as though trying to keep them still. She arranged each finger with careful precision, one on top of the other. Still, they looked too big where they sat on her lap. Everything was too big about her—her hands, her feet, her nose, and good gods knew, her long face. This was the woman Madoc Diviner had fallen in love with, enspelled. And this was also the woman Lir Wrackham had fallen in love with from the urgings of his own heart.

“You’re right,” Aline said, “and it was wrong of me to pretend I don’t know. Dunbrae did tell me about your exploit, and now I’d like to talk to you about it.”

In the tiny room that served as a bedroom for Usha and Dez, as well as her studio, Usha lighted two tall pillar candles. She took a freshly prepared canvas from the three leaning against the wall and held it for a moment, the weight well-balanced and not unwieldy for all that the canvas was a wide rectangle nearly as high as her waist. In the golden glow the recently scraped pa’ressa, the primer coat, no longer reflected light as though it were thin ice. Outside, the air was still. The breeze that had wandered listlessly around the garden when she sat talking with Dezra had fallen soon after Dez was gone.

Made restless by the events of the day, by the half hope that Dez would find a way out of Haven and the full-blown fear that she would fall afoul of Sir Radulf’s knights and Lady Mearah’s justice, Usha had come into the inn, ignored her bed, and paced around her cramped studio. Not eased, she prepared the next morning’s work by pinning her sketches of Kalend and Thelan to the walls. Some she put where the morning light would touch them, others where the moon’s would light them out of the darkness. She never worked by moonlight—who could?—but she thought by moonlight, and moonlight seemed to rouse in her soul that intuition all artists had to one degree or another, the instinct of knowing how to see patterns, to understand how and why they went together, why they seemed to wander away only to come back again to make something startling in its beauty, its passion, and sometimes a thing very near to perfection.

Usha set the canvas on its easel, now no longer dark-dusty from charcoal but polished and gleaming. On impulse, she blew out the candles. As from a distance, she heard the night noise, but something else had her attention, for each sketch peered out of the darkness, each face white and alight.

There was Kalend with an imp’s gleam in the moment before he punched Thelan’s arm for making rude noises. She smiled, remembering the mischief, more amused than she had been at the time. Beside that freckled face was a sketch of the two boys together. In it, they were icons of fraternal solidarity and good will. They looked like their mother. Usha thought, suddenly, that Kalend looked more like Loren Halgard, their uncle. The same strong jaw, and a tilt to his chin that reminded her of Loren on the afternoon he’d argued that he would do anything to protect Haven, and everything to protect his daughter.

Kin defending kin, father and daughter, brothers ...

Soft, Usha said, “Ah, yes.”

Though they had run screaming out of the room like vengeful goblins moments later, at the instant Usha had made the last line, the two boys had been still enough for her to produce this sketch, this image of the trustful companionship that bound the two brothers. This sense of solidarity, of kinship, was what Usha must reproduce.

She found her way into her work, and as she unpinned that sketch from the wall and set it on the table near the easel, she became aware that the tensions of the day had melted. She could go to bed now and rest, if not sleep. She could wait for Dez to return and trust that her sister-in-law’s heart would not outrace her sense, that Dez would go carefully after what she wanted.

The moon had moved across the sky. Time had passed. On the stairs Usha heard the sound of quick steps, and they turned into the hall.

Usha struck flint to steel and lit one candle. The light flared. Shadows jumped and made the images in her sketches seem to cringe back. One fluttered to the floor and Usha went to pick it up.

Dez stuck her head in the doorway. “Usha.”

Her voice thrilled as it always did when she had something exciting to tell. Usha waved her in and bent to pick up the fallen sketch. In the dancing light of the candle’s flame she saw it was one of Kalend perched on his stool.

“Usha, Aline—” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She isn’t giving up.”