with a promise: that one day Andiene would come and restore the true kingdom.
In the silence as she finished the night-birds called; the crickets sang. At last Syresh spoke, with no mockery in his tone. “You sang that well, my lady minstrel. Well enough to get you praise in a king’s palace—any king but one!”
“Oh, do not praise me. My fingers ache for the lute strings.”
“I praised you for the words, not the voice.”
She chuckled, and did not rise to the tempting bait. “Many in the Mareja believe those words, but it would be death there to sing or speak of it.”
“And you,” asked Andiene. “What do you believe?”
“I was in the city that day, but I saw nothing of it. Magic is stuff for the grizanes, the village herb-wives, the forest creatures,” Lenane said carelessly. “A gently-bred child of the royal house—what would she know of it?”
“Nothing,” said Andiene softly. “Nothing.”
They slept that night in an open field. The weather was clear, as always at the end of spring, giving the folk time to harvest blaggorn and dry the thornfruit. But Andiene seemed troubled, though she kept her plans to herself.
“What lies between us and the city of this land?” she asked Syresh, the next morning.
“Many leagues of plain and villages, or a few days travel north through the forest.”
“That choice is simple,” she said.
Lenane interrupted them. “Not as simple as you might think. Have either of you traveled through the forests?”
“I have,” said Syresh. “I went with Nahil’s men to fell the trees to build his flagship, this last spring.”
The minstrel looked amused. “How many of you did the villagers kill?”
“Only arrows shot from a distance and many threats and warnings. We came back unscathed.”
“All very well for you, but still it was not wise. The trees are not our friends, but they are not our enemies, either, if we treat them well. Your men came and went, but the trees’ anger will fall on those who must stay.”
“That may be as it may be,” said Syresh. It had been his first command, and he was proud of it. “I know the rules of traveling through the forest,” he said.
“Then we will go that way,” said Andiene. “I want to spend the summer in the palace of Oreja, not in some farmer’s cellar.”
Lenane looked doubtful, but she followed them as they turned and went north, their path running alongside the coastline instead of going far south and inland to circle the woods.
Whatever shadows had surrounded Andiene seemed to have lifted. She talked more, and smiled frequently. Syresh felt that he knew her better; he feared her less.
He kept a wary truce with Lenane. When they passed through the villages, he would turn and look at her. She followed them demurely, a few paces behind. He could not catch her in any wrongdoing, but it seemed to him that the pack she carried on her back grew heavier, bulkier as they traveled.
One night, she said to Andiene: “I could get you better clothes, and sandals to wear.”
“No,” said Andiene.
Syresh chuckled and thought of several sarcastic things to say, but reined in his tongue. His face was not yet healed.
“At least trim the cuffs, then,” Lenane said. Andiene stood obediently while the minstrel cut off the heavy cuffs at wrist and ankle. “No need to look more clownish than needful,” she said, with a sidelong glance at Syresh. “Besides, they could trip you. These clothes were made for one taller than you.”
“I know. I took them from a dead man.”
Lenane’s eyes widened. She looked at the other woman to see if there was some joke she had been too slow to catch. Then she was silent. For the rest of that evening, nothing that Syresh said could provoke her to sharp words.
But out on the open road, she talked constantly. She had a minstrel’s memory—Syresh was forced to admit that—and she spoke of everything but herself. Andiene drank in her talk of magic, love, history, and wars. She even listened greedily to the long genealogies stretching back more than nine centuries to the time when the people of the nine kingdoms, the Rejiseja, first entered the land.
Then there were no more villages as they traveled north, but the land was fair in the last weeks of spring. Though no fields of blaggorn or hedges of thornfruit grew on these plains so near the forest, flowers and shrubs bloomed and were covered with bees and butterflies. Sweet-snow and skyglass made bright