Geder
In the rolling flint hills where Sarakal gave way in no clearly marked fashion to the Keshet, the term prince had a different meaning than Geder was accustomed to. A man might call himself a prince if he controlled a certain amount of land, or commanded a force of soldiers, or had been son or nephew to a prince. Even race had little impact. The princes of the Keshet might be Yemmu or Tralgu or Jasuru, and there was apparently no formal barrier to other races, though in practice no others were.
Firstblood were especially absent from the wide, arid plains, and Geder found that his small group - himself, his squire, and four men of his father's service - quickly became an object of curiosity in the towns and villages east of Sarakal. The Firstblood prince, they called him, and when Geder tried to correct them, confusion followed. Translating his rank into the terms of the Keshet was a pointless and probably impossible task, and so when the traveling court of Prince Kupe rol Behur extended Geder its hospitality, he found it easiest to pretend he was more or less an equal to the gold-scaled Jasuru lord.
"I don't understand, Prince Geder. You've left your land and your people searching for something, but you don't know what or where it is. You have no claim to it, nor any idea whether claim could be made. What profit do you hope to make?"
"Well, it isn't that kind of project," Geder said, reaching for another of the small, dark sausages from their communal plate.
When Geder had seen the dust plume from the traveling court rising above the horizon like smoke from a great fire, he'd expected it to be like being on campaign. He'd imagined the tents to be something like the kind he'd slept in to and from Vanai, that he slept in now in his quiet exile. He had misunderstood. He hadn't ridden into a camp - not even a grand and luxurious one. It was a township of wood-framed buildings with a temple dedicated to a twinned god Geder hadn't heard of and a square for the prince's feast. Weeds and scrub in the streets showed that it had not been there the day before. Geder assumed it wouldn't be there tomorrow. Like something from a legend, it was a city that existed for a single night, and then vanished with the dew. Torches smoked and fluttered in the breeze. The stars glowed down. The summer heat rose from the ground, radiating up into the sky.
Geder popped the sausage into his mouth. It tasted salty and rich, with an almost occult aftertaste of sugar and smoke. He'd never eaten anything like it before, and if it had been made of lizard eyes and bird feet, he'd have eaten them anyway. They tasted that good. Of the sixteen communal plates that the slaves carried around the table, this was his favorite. Although the green leaves with red spots and oil was a close second.
"I'm not looking," he said through his full mouth, "for something that will get me gold."
"Honor, then."
Geder smiled ruefully.
"Speculative essay isn't something that gives a man great honor. At least not among my people. No, I'm going because I've heard about a thing that existed a long time ago, and I wanted to see what I could find out about it. Write down what I've learned and what I suspect, so that someday someone can read it and add what they know."
And, he thought, stay away from the turmoil in Camnipol and find a corner at the farthest edge of the world where the trouble's least likely to reach me.
"And then?"
Geder shrugged.
"That's all," he said. "What more would there be?"
The Jasuru prince frowned, drank from a mug either cast in the shape of a massive skull or else made from one, and then grinned, pointing a long worked-silver talon at him.
"You're a holy man," the prince said.
"No. God no. Not me."
"A cunning man, then. A philosopher."
Geder was about to protest this too, but then caught himself.
"Maybe a philosopher," he said.
"A man, his mount, and the horizon. I should have seen it. This project is a spiritual matter."
The prince lifted his massive arm, barked something that sounded like an order. The hundred men and women at the long tables - knights or only sword-and-bows, Geder couldn't be sure - raised a shout, laughing and sneering and pushing one another. A few long moments later, a pair of guards appeared at the edge of the square, each with an iron chain in his hand. The chains led back into the darkness, slack in a way that left Geder thinking they were mostly ceremonial.
The woman who came into the light at the end of the chains looked ancient. The broadness of her forehead and the swirling black designs on her skin marked her as a Haavirkin even before she lifted her long, three-fingered hand in salute. Geder had met Haavirkin before when the elected king of Hallskar sent ambassadors to court, but he'd never seen one as old or with the same sense of utter dignity.
The guards walked before the woman as she approached the prince. Geder couldn't tell from the noise of the crowd whether they were mocking her or celebrating her presence. Her eyes swept over Geder, sizing him up.
"This is my seer," the prince said to him. And then to the woman, "This man is our guest. His travels the Keshet on a spiritual matter."
"He does," the woman agreed.
The prince grinned like she'd given him a present. He put his hand on Geder's arm in an oddly intimate gesture.
"She is yours for tonight," the prince said. Geder frowned. He hoped that this wasn't a question of having a bed servant, though he had heard stories about that kind of thing from old stories about the Keshet. He coughed and tried to think of a way clear, but the seer only lifted her hand. Another servant hurried forward with a wooden stool, and the Haavirkin sat on it, staring at Geder's face.
"Hello," Geder said to her, his voice uncertain.
"I know you," she said, then turned and spat on the ground. "When I was a girl, I had a dream about you."
"Um," Geder said. "Really?"
"She is very good," the prince said. "Very wise."
"My uncle had an illness," the seer said, "only it had no signs. No fever, no weakness, nothing, so there was nothing we knew to cure."
"But then how can you say he was sick?"
"It was a dream," the seer said patiently. "He ate bitter herbs to cure himself, and afterward the water he drank tasted sweet. But there wasn't anything in it but water. The sweet was in him, and it wasn't sweet really. Only that it wasn't bitter. It didn't have the power to cure anything."
The seer took his hand, her long fingers exploring the joints of his fingers as if she were searching for something. She lifted his palm to her nose and sniffed at it. Geder's skin crawled, and he tried to pull away.
"You will see her thrice," she said, "and you will be different people each time. And each time, she will give you what you want. You have already seen her once."
The seer lifted her eyebrows, as if to say, Do you understand?
That was supposed to be about me? Geder thought.
"Thank you," Geder said, and she nodded as much to herself as to anyone else. The dancing torchlight made the black marks on her skin seem to shift with a motion of their own.
"That's all?" the Jasuru prince said.
"That is all that I have for him," the seer said mildly. She rose to her feet, the chains leading from her neck jingling. "You and I will speak, but later."
She made her obeisance, turned, and walked back out through the low scrub and dust, the wooden tables of Keshet warriors and shadows. The chain bearers followed her as if she were leading them. The silence was broken only by the sound of the chain and the mutter of fire from the torches. Geder thought he saw surprise, even shock, on the faces of the knights, but he didn't understand it. Something had just happened, but he couldn't say what.
The prince scratched at the scales along his jaw and neck like a Firstblood stroking a beard. He grinned, sharp dark teeth like a wall.
"Eat! Sing!" he called, and the knights' voices and clamor rose again as they had before. Geder took another sausage and wondered what he'd just missed.
The feast left Geder's stomach unsettled. He lay in his tent listening to the soft summer wind moving through the desert, and failing to will himself to sleep. He heard his squire's soft snores, smelled the fine Keshet dust that seemed to get into everything, and tasted the spiced meats from the feast, the pleasure of them long since gone. Moonlight pressed in at the edges of the tent, turning the darkness silver. He felt restless and torpid at the same time.
The sweet was in him, and it wasn't sweet really. Only that it wasn't bitter. It didn't have the power to cure anything.
Of all the seer's ramblings, those were the words that gnawed at him, as troubling as the spices. It seemed to him now that the Haavirkin woman had been talking about Vanai and Camnipol. If he thought about it, he could still feel the scar healing in his leg where the bolt had struck him. In exactly the same way, the smallest shift of his attention could remind him of the black knot in his chest that had bent him down on the long ride back from Vanai. He couldn't quite recall the shape of his dead mother's face, but the silhouette of the woman against the flames towering above Vanai was as clear to him as the tent around him now. Clearer.
The celebrations and revels that had greeted him in Camnipol should have washed that away, and for a time they had. But not forever. It had been sweet - he'd thought at the time that it was - but maybe it hadn't been. Certainly it had felt glorious when it was going on. He'd risen in the court. He'd saved the city from the mercenary insurrection. And yet here he was, in exile again, fleeing from political games he didn't understand. And as unpleasant as the unease in his belly might be, it was still better than the nightmares of fire.
In truth, what had happened in Vanai wasn't his fault. He had been used. The lost sleep, the constant dread, even the suspicion that during all his revels and celebrations Alan Klin and his friends had been laughing down their sleeves at him. They were the scars he bore.
He turned the thought over in his mind. The court games that soaked the Kingspire and Camnipol weren't anything he'd ever chosen to put himself into. The relief he'd felt coming back from Vanai to adulation and approval were hollow to him now, and at the same time, he wanted it back. It had let him forget the voice of the flames for a little while. But like the Haavirkin seer's dreamed water, the sweetness hadn't been sweet, just relief from the bitterness. And it hadn't cured anything.
If he only understood what had happened, if he could see through the games and the players, he'd know who was really to blame. And who his own friends really were.
He shifted to his side, pulling his blankets with him. They smelled of dust and sweat. The night was too warm to justify them, but he found the cloth comforting. He sighed and his belly gumbled. The Haavirkin seer had been right in her way. Maybe she was as wise at the prince said. Geder considered finding her in the morning, asking her more questions. Even if it were all superstition and nonsense, it would give him something to think about in the long, isolated nights in the desert.
He didn't notice that he was falling asleep until he woke. Sunlight glowed the fresh yellow of wildflowers, and the brief dew made the world smell cooler than it was. He pulled on his hose and a tunic. It was rougher wear than he'd had last night, but he wasn't going to a princely feast. And after all, this was the Keshet. Standards were likely different. The wooden buildings still stood, and Geder marched out toward them, his gaze shifting, looking for the sentries. He didn't see them.
He didn't see anyone.
When he reached the structures, the great open square where he'd dined less than a day before, they were deserted. When he called out, no one answered. It would have been like a children's song where they'd all been ghosts, except he could follow the footprints and smell the horse droppings and see the not-quite-dead coals still lurking white and red in the firepit. The horses were gone, the men and women, but the wagons remained. The heavy winches that the prince's servants used to construct their sudden towns were still where they had been. He even found the long chains that the seer had worn, wrapped around a bronze spool and dropped in the dust.
He went back to his own camp, where his squire was just putting down a meal of stewed oats and watered cider. Geder sat at his field table, looking at the tin bowl, then up at the abandoned camp.
"They left in the middle of the night," Geder said. "Took what they could carry without making noise and slipped away in the darkness."
"Perhaps the prince was robbed and murdered by his men," his squire said. "Things like that happen in the Keshet."
"Lucky we weren't caught up in it," Geder said. His oats were honey-sweet. His cider had a bite to it, despite the water. His squire stood quietly by while Geder ate and the other servants struck camp. The sun was hardly two handspans above the horizon when Geder finished. He wanted to be away, back on his own path, and the eerily silent camp left well behind.
He did wonder, though, what else the Haavirkin had seen, and what she had told her prince after the foreign guest had left.