Elder Race(7)

For a moment I am about to disable the DCS shielding again and let all that emotion in. My readouts suggest that I am feeling quite a complicated cocktail of things right now, and it might be interesting to actually experience that, rather than just read over the reports. I am still looking at my visitor’s face, I realise, hand still out to help her up. She has frozen like a rabbit before a serpent. I force myself to straighten up and step back, because we’ve been like that for some time now and it’s a bit awkward. Her friend or servant helps her stand up. That one’s a descendant of the old kelp farmer augments, a labour division of the first-generation colonists which somehow became an inherited trait and then a whole population. I have an incomplete report on the subject that I feel I’m not going to get round to finishing. And now I’m staring at her, and she has her hand on the hilt of a weapon and obviously feels threatened. I need to stop making eye contact; it’s culturally inappropriate here compared to back home. Like touch, it’s not a casual thing.

“I will go with you to . . .” and I can’t even remember where she said this warlord has set himself up, except it can’t be that far because all the kingdoms are tiny here. “I’ll take a look at whatever this is and see if it’s my business.” Without emotions to influence me, my decision is purely based on the fact that I made this decision in similar circumstances before. Or that is what I’ll put in the report, anyway. It’s possible I’m experiencing some bleeding through the DCS. It’s also possible that I’m just resigned to being a very bad anthropologist. Which is a shame. I might be the last one left.





Lynesse


THEY TOOK THE HIGH passes away from the sorcerer’s tower, ostensibly because, with Esha as guide, it was a swifter road to the Ordwood than winding around the foothills on the wheel-roads. She had a whole speech prepared, elaborately constructed to conceal the fact that she was, in truth, avoiding being seen by any who might carry a message back to court about what the queen’s delinquent youngest daughter was about. As matters fell out, he seemed not to register that their path was unusual, and just strode along in their wake without word or comment.

There were no songs sung for a Fourth Daughter, nor did histories often record them. Certainly there were none for a Fourth Daughter with a past as chequered as Lyn’s. She had met the formal adulthood of her fourth Storm-season with none of the accomplishments of a princess. She did not play music, nor could she manage the accounts of a fiefdom. Her one venture into diplomacy had been disastrous. Her sisters had quietly put aside stories, brawling and running away from their lessons. Suddenly they had all three become responsible human beings while Lynesse was still clinging to her childhood. They were all polite manners and needle wit. They’d rather the formal appreciation of the duel than stories where the enemy leader was called out to single combat. Rather ambassadors and accountants and intelligencers than foolish talk of heroes. Or sorcerers.

And the desperate petitioners who had come from the Ordwood’s forest fiefdoms had hardly been ambassadors. Travellers bearing unlikely stories, refugees babbling of horrors. Lannesite merchants fleeing home with their goods unsold. And, in the midst of this rabble, a handful of emissaries from this woodland hold or that, begging aid.

A demon, they said. A thing that could not be fought. That was devouring the wood and its fiefdoms both. Evil magic that had not been seen since the days of Astresse Once Regent and her war against Ulmoth. And perhaps it was their attempts to conjure by that name which had sown the seeds of Lynesse’s own action.

Because her mother, the queen, had heard them all out. Had sorrowed with them. Had expressed the Crown’s deepest sympathies. And then, in private council with her daughters and advisers, had confirmed that nothing would be done. Nobody believed there was a demon, only that the eternal infighting between the forest polities had reached some new peak, and every finger pointed at its neighbour and cried dark magic. Not for the first time. And fighting between the Ordwood fiefdoms was, perhaps, no bad thing for Lannesite influence. Should the queen bring any force across the Barrenpike and into the trees, she’d only be miring her realm in a generation of squabbles and skirmishes.

There is no demon, was the enlightened decision of the queen and her council. Let them sort out their own mess. We’ll shed no Lannesite blood over it.

Even when Esha had come forwards, still the court’s roving eye out in the world from time to time, the queen had been unmoved. She’d listened to the woman’s eyewitness accounts of the displaced host of forest dwellers camped at the banks of the river, of their second-hand tales of monsters and corruption and the uncanny run wild, and she’d dismissed it all. No doubt they suffer, the queen had agreed. But there is enough in war and bad harvests without inventing a supernatural threat.

Lyn had nodded along, but in her head were all the old stories. She’d barely been able to focus on the actual words spoken, because of the older and far more persuasive words in her mind. Astresse Regent rode forth, and at her side the sorcerer. Battles against Ulmoth’s monsters. The undoing of evil magics and the salvation of the realm. And so she’d gone herself, after that closeted council meeting. She’d spoken with those same emissaries, heard their wild stories. She’d tried to pierce through their panic to some mundane kernel of internecine strife, just as her mother believed. But it wasn’t what the refugees believed. A demon.