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Unable to Scream
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"You won't be heard," the girl whispered
Urjan knelt and took her hand, "What was that, Mira?"
"'m tryin' ta 'member," she mumbled back. Across the room, Miss Dorna looked up from her stitching and corrected, "It's 'I'm trying to remember,' milady." The duchess made a face that the governess smiled at. She went back to her embroidery, still smiling. As the person with most experience with the new Mira, the former nursemaid had been elected to be the girl's governess. Her bad luck at drawing straws had turned into a bit of good fortune. If only Mathin was there to congratulate her. There was still no news whether her love was dead, killed by the roads' perils, or just lost. Some fantasy in her head imagined him riding towards her open arms that very moment.
Dryn was more practical, but he held out a little hope for her. Every night he sat and talked with her. He made sure she ate and cracked enough jokes to help her forget. When he ran out of things to say, he always asked about Mira. The girl was the driving force of the entire duchy. Hardly anything was done anymore if not for the duchess and her future. Every toast she had heard in the last three days was to Mira.
"To Mira," Dorna whispered as she set the final stitch of her white rose. As a child, she had learned of embroidery and loved it, but nursery maids had little time for the fine but tedious work. The governess of a child that never caused trouble had hours to whittle away. Dorna switched threads and started on a scale of the cockatrice. One day, perhaps in a year or two of solid work, the grand piece of work would be finished. Lesandor cloth and embroidery was prized as the best in Tortall. Dorna was used to creating large tapestries commissioned by different lords. It was tradition for noble houses to have some sort of wall hanging that proclaimed their lineage.
Dorna saw no reason why Lesandor shouldn't outdo all the others. After all, the duchy had been its own nation before Tortall's formation. The prosperous towns and villages in the surrounding countryside still paid liege to the Lesandor family. The duchy held a lot of weight in the kingdom; it had to right to be proud. That was why the governess created the embroidery as large as a tapestry with fine silk and metallic threads. She had no illusions about her skill, but she was the only person with time to complete such a task.
It was unwritten law in Lesandor that -unless the artist died- the person that started a piece finished it. A trained eye could always tell when several people had worked on one piece. The type of stitching would change or the direction of the stitches would be different. So Dorna worked on the enormous task, given daily advice by the duchy's best embroiderer. One day, the majestic cockatrice would curl about the Giant's tree as white rose vines twined about it.
She paused a moment to look through the window at the pure white roses framing it. Those magnificent roses grew on the trees of Lesandor's forest. Some had been coaxed to grow along walls and in hanging gardens, but not one vine had ever survived outside of the Lesandor, even when planted in the duchy's own soil.
Settling back into her work, the governess heard Mira laugh quietly at something Urjan had said. It was the most wonderful sound in the world.
The dining hall grew hushed as Krimise strode in. Over the last week, the Riders and the early arriving trainees had grown used to the girl's vivid and exotic costumes. It was shocking to see her dressed in something that somewhat resembled Tortallan garb. Brown leather boots were covered by long tough trousers of the same bark color. Her shirt started as the brown of her lower body, but branched out to reveal a sky blue in between. The effect was rather like she was a tree in winter. The Scranran's hair was also bunched together in a horsetail. Most of her ever-present jewelry was gone.
The girl sat at her usual place between Onua and Sarge. Immediately, she turned to the bellowing giant and stated, "I wish to become a rider." She then dug into her tray as if she had said nothing. The horse mistress looked at the large man over her former assistant. They had no legal grounds to actually turn the girl down but they had never thought they would have too. Onua felt a twinge of greed and almost flat out refused.
Krimise was by far the best traveling partner she had ever had, including Daine. She had never seen unbroken ponies move half the speed at which the Scranran could lead an entire train. For the first time in her many years of bringing ponies to Corus, she had arrived early, before the Riders' cutoff date. There was nothing a trader loved more than arriving early.
The K'mir had no idea why the girl would want to become a rider. She had shown no sign of it on the trip. It wasn't as if she needed a job. Half the palace was falling on her to teach them about her wardrobe's dyes and patterns. The other half begged the girl to show them the designs of her jewelry. When Krimise revealed that she had made the majority of her possessions with her own two hands, the members of five different guilds had offered to take her in as a full journeyman. As Onua had originally suspected, the foreigner would be the center of attention around the palace for a while. She was just to obvious and exotic to miss.
Besides being unable to think of a reason why, Onua could think of several reasons why Krimise shouldn't become a rider. The foremost was that Riders dealt with Scranran raids the more than any military group. It would hardly be fair to keep the girl's unit from the fighting in the north. Krimise would have to kill her own people.
She sighed and stood up. "Krimise I need to talk with you privately. You can take your tray with you." The horse mistress led the Scranran away towards her office. Behind them, there was a silent moment before Sarge roared for the trainees to stop gawking and start eating.
Urjan reviewed his notes on the desk of the late Duke Kirnathan. Mira slept and Miss Dorna worked on some enormous piece of embroidery. The early afternoon sun warmed his back as he paged through his findings. One of Mira's nightmare drawings stood propped against the back of the desk.
It was a strange piece of the puzzle. Ever since the little artist was able to, Mira had drawn with a critical eye for accuracy and detail. Her pictures from after the murder were still very detailed and realistic, but the mind healer knew for a fact that at least some were distorted imagination.
He had no doubt that the murder weapons or the drawings without the monsters were true. It was the pale, bestial men and the ragmen that made no sense. Given that Duchess Mira had only drawn things she had seen with her own eyes in the past, Urjan had held a mage conference with the palace's expert on Immortals. Tkaa, though very troubled by Mira's mental images that the mind healer sent him, said he knew of no such creatures.
With the Basilisk's assurance that the monsters were imaginary, Urjan began to look through Mira's mind for the true events of that night. Strangely, there was no record to be found. Yet she dreamed of it vividly every night. The mind healer was unwilling to take the small child through guided dreams to search for the answers in Ganiel's lands. Children's imaginations could be quite deadly and he had no desire to fall prey to Mira's monsters.
Instead he studied the pictures for clues. One drawing that he had found on the floor the night he arrived was quite startling. In it, there were seven jars of glass. Inside six floated human hearts: three large, two medium, and one tiny. The seventh was empty. The jars were very close and the details of the hearts were easily visible. Urjan had no doubt that the image was real.
Next to the empty jar, there was a dark liquid. It took him a moment to realize what it was in the black and white picture. It was blood.
"Dorna," he said softly. The governess looked up and walked to him, skirting the rug a bit. When she was close, he asked, "When you found Duchess Mira, did she have a scratch or cut over her chest?" The woman's lip trembled, but she nodded. "Thank you, that's all I needed to know."
Urjan was more confused than before. If the same gruesome murder had been begun on the child, why had she been spared? Why did Mira draw imaginary monsters? What had been that mysterious fog that stole the voices of the entire duchy?
He put the questions aside and went back to his duty, to heal the duchess' mind. He didn't need to know what had happened to fix it. He only needed to know what was broken.
Onua sat at her cluttered desk with Krimise across from her. "I'm sorry girl, but I can't allow you become a rider. I don't doubt that you can do it and do it well, but have you thought about what will happen next spring when the Scranran raids begin?"
The girl's response surprised her. "Yes, it was the key factor in my decision. My gods pushed me to you for a reason and I know this is it. Scranra is disgraced by the filthy Hillmen. The Northern Empire prefers privacy, yes, but not to the point of being forgotten. It doesn't desire to be thought the same as its southern bastard cousins."
The horse mistress shook her head. "One may not be the voice of an entire nation, Krimise. Becoming a rider will make no difference. Killing your own people will make no difference."
The girl looked at the ceiling pleadingly. Standing up, she placed a hand on her hip. "I have no love of my people. Forest folk, Plains children, Hillmen...they are all bastards to me. There is no life for me there."
Krimise looked to Onua pleadingly. "Yet I believe. In that deep emotional place your people call the heart, I believe. My gods. My...my culture, my heritage."
The Scranran bared her ritually scarred wrists to the horse mistress. "My blood. I believe in that, all of that!" Desperation filled her voice and she dug her wrists into her belly.
"I believe that my children do not deserve to be thought of as barbarians and beasts! They deserve a lineage that fought against ignorance and racial hate, ancestors that spilled and lost blood for honor and innocence, they deserve a mother that fought for their innocence so they would not be judged guilty for the deeds of some filthy Scranran bandit!"
Tears filled her eyes. "Don't they deserve that, Onua? Don't I deserve that? I've seen the people here and I have seen what they think of me. Even as they adore me, they think me primitive. Even as those...what is your word...craftsmen, guild members? I call them parasites. They praise my skill, but in their eyes I see their distaste, as if I were secondhand goods."
She grew cynical. "And I mean that in every possible meaning."
Exasperated, she cried, "Don't you see? If I stay here and become a craftswoman, my children will be second class, wealthy, but a leprous thief will be trusted before them. I must do this, become a Rider, I must!"
A rich voice from the doorway said, "Very well...Krimise is it? You may become a trainee on the condition that you do not ruin that wonderful, persuasive speaking voice of yours.
Krimise turned to see a woman of mixed descent. Behind her, Onua sighed, "Well I am hardly one to disobey my superiors. You do realize though girl, that this means you must move into the dormitory." The Scranran waved dismissively, bowed to woman who apparently held some weight with the Queen's Riders, and left to pack.
The foreign woman took Krimise's discarded seat. She smiled and commented, "Really Onua, where do you find these assistants? I still have not gotten over having a god rant at me through a boy of fifteen years. How old is this one, by the way?"
Onua smelled something. "Seventeen. I dare say she's nearing her eighteenth year, Majesty."
Thayet made a little delighted sound. "Good! I had worried she would be too young. Have put in for officer training then."
Onua's nose had yet to fail her. "Do you think that wise, Thayet? There's a goodly chance she would have subordinates whose families were killed by Scranrans."
The Queen shook her head. "Better to have superiority over that type than to serve underneath. She'll be able to prove herself to them better as a leader than a soldier. Besides having leadership qualities, there's another reason I want her as an officer. Zahil was made an officer as well, did you ever wonder why?"
"That Bazhir was a very capable and charismatic young man."
"And Krimise is not both capable and charismatic? I do believe she could have melted Wyldon's resolve with that speech."
Onua smiled wryly. "You don't like the new training master, do you?"
The Queen wrinkled her strong nose. "That's avoiding the subject, but for the record, he's a bloody stone in my hoof. A very long, pointed one that is quite painful, but is so round and smooth on the visible side that I can't remove it without lopping off the foot altogether. And we both know what happens to crippled horses." She slit her throat with a finger, and then shrugged her shoulders.
"So I am forced to hobble about with my foot bleeding; deal with this damned pregnancy -which is horrible, by the way; and do my juggling act of being a military leader, mother, wife, Queen, and the darling of a country whose best praise is, "If her Majesty didn't have bad blood and a mind of her own, she'd be perfect."
Thayet opened her mouth to rant some more, and then paused. She laughed, "Damn, you're good. Back to Krimise and Zahil, I want people like them as officers because they know the terrain and the people they will be fighting. Krimise will know the method to the Scranran madness. She will know where they will strike and when. More to the point, she will know where and when to strike to cripple them. She is dedicated, smart, and will not allow herself to fail.
"Why are you arguing with me? I'm your queen and you actually think I have a brain in this lovely little head. Put her in the officer training course or we'll be having a less pleasant conversation than this tomorrow. I'll bring my toys."
Onua winced and nodded. She still thought it was crazy, but who was she to argue with a ruler who could trounce her on the battlefield without disturbing a hair on her royal head.
Thayet stood. "Well," she sighed, "it's time to hobble away and be the darling juggler again. I need a break."
"You'll just have to wait for Roald to grow up and take the throne, Thayet," Onua said sweetly.
The Queen talked to herself as she walked out the door. "Good gods, he's only nine years old! I can't wait that long! I'll go mad, absolutely raving mad."