The Song of Andiene - By Elisa Blaisdell Page 0,104
it did not trouble him. He narrowed his eyes to peer ahead of his destination. There should have been no movement around the cote now, for the doves had buried themselves deep in the sand, barely living, making no movement that would waken their fires again.
But there was a hunched mass of brown feathers on top of the cote, not moving even when Kallan approached. He lifted the exhausted bird and unrolled the scrap of thornfruit petal tied around its leg. He had to study it, for the writing was scribbled and formless, written in hasty terror. Its familiarity helped him. He had seen messages written in this same hand many times before.
“ … I tell you she is mortal. A knife when her back is turned will be enough … ”
Wise words, a simple truth. It is enough for us all. He wrung the dove’s neck and put it under his cloak. As he returned to the palace, he met the keeper of the dovecote, and nodded and greeted him, receiving in return a suspicious stare. A little further on, no one was in sight, and a black courser waited expectantly in the courtyard of some nobleman’s home. Kallan tossed the bird over the wall and saw it disappear in a snap and a flurry of feathers. “In a few more days of spying, I think you would take me for your master,” he said.
In the courtyard of the palace, Andiene sat cross-legged and knotted her lace, a wide collar of star-web stretched like the paths of the forest and trails of the stars. Kare kept her company.
Kallan sat down on the ground beside them. The child greeted him eagerly. “Look!” she said, and held up her lace, as grimy as her hands, so full of mistakes that they almost formed a pattern of their own. She did not wait for his praise, but thrust it into his hands. “Here, I will show you. You wrap the thread around the crook … See? And you turn and pull it through.”
Kallan tried to follow her instructions. The thread uncoiled easily from around the crook. Trying to wrap it again, he moved clumsily and too quickly; the thin pointed crook drove itself under his fingernail. He bit his lip and did not speak. When he shook his hand, beads of blood spattered onto Kare’s lace. Andiene smothered a laugh.
“As dangerous a sport as any duel,” Kallan said, “but I’ll make one good stitch of it.”
He drew the thread tight, so tight he could not pull it over the crook. He tugged harder, and the thread snapped short. Kare’s work began to unravel. “I am sorry,” Kallan said. Looking at the grimy and ragged lace, he said, “You are doing fine work, Kare. You are learning well.”
He gave it back. “Here, go and show it to your father now,” he said. The child obeyed.
Andiene held up her work, neat and beautiful. “My nurse said that it would help to bring the stars back, and shorten the summer. We need that, do we not?”
Kallan nodded, all foolishness forgotten. “Nahil sent another command to his spies, to have you killed. He is growing more afraid.”
Her face showed pleasure, not fear. “How do you find the messages so quickly?”
“Arilsan sleeps late, and heavily, and I rise before him. We drink together at night, good comrades indeed. Perhaps I drink less than he does, and perhaps my wine is purer. Our thief has taught me one of the drugging herbs.”
Andiene was amused at that, as he had known she would be. Then she became earnest again. “Is it safe for us here?”
“No. I do not know all his spies. I fear it might come to war, if we stayed. You do not want that?”
She shook her head. “I do not want to conquer this land. I want what is mine alone, and for the other lords of the land to fear me and stay far from me.”
“I know some of Nahil’s men,” Kallan said. “The ones who try to coax me and bribe me, and the ones I knew before. But if I kill them, the others that I do not know may act in fear. And if I misjudged, and killed Taules’s men, or ones he thought were his, I would make you an enemy here to the south.”
“I’ll have no killing here.”
“What then?” Kallan asked. “Though they have had no orders, sooner or later they will act without orders. I think that Arilsan suspects