Prisoner of Haven

4

Sunlight poured through the open windows of the Ivy’s common room, making the polished oak table and benches gleam like gold. Usha looked up from breakfast to see Dez at the bar speaking with the landlord. The men near her stood restively, some talking, others brooding. At the tables, women gathered with their children. These were the caught, visitors trapped in Haven when the dragons came.

“No news; and nothing from Aline,” Dez said when she rejoined Usha. “As far as anyone’s heard, nothing has changed in the city. No one’s coming in and no one’s leaving. Only thing new is that there’s a curfew. No one’s to be on the streets after dark without good reason or a pass from the commander of the occupation.” She made face, as though the word was bitter in her mouth. “And so we’re stuck here, cheek by jowl with every stranded traveler in Haven and spending a fortune for a room my father wouldn’t consider a closet.”

Breakfast sat untouched on the table before them. Dez had pronounced the eggs barely fresh, the size of a hummingbird’s, and sold for the price of pearls. Usha had to agree. A merchant city, Haven had risen to the challenge of shifting market forces and was beginning to lick its wounds while the occupation kept all customers conveniently within the city walls. Throughout the city, frustration with costlier accommodation crossed paths with each rumor about passes out of Haven. This had been discussed endlessly in the common room last night, and no one saw any reason for the topic to fail to occupy people again today. Outside, boys in ragged breeches, patched shirts, and bare feet jostled each other in the dusty dooryard. Here the young among the businessmen of the city gathered, one troop in the small army of children haunting the dooryards of inns and taverns of Haven. For a bronze coin, any of them would carry messages throughout the city for stranded travelers, those like Dez and Usha who’d come on business in the days before the dragons descended. As in every inn throughout Haven, humble or high, those facing raised rates for room and board with thin purses sent pleas for lodging to friends or family. Others hoped to get word out of the city to those who must be despairing of their safety.

As soon as they’d found a room at the Ivy, Usha had let Aline know where they were, and Dez had tried to get word out of the city with no luck. A letter to her father to assure him she and Usha were well had not made it out of Haven, and it had not come back to them. The boy who’d carried it said knights were taking all letters, reading all, burning most, and keeping some.

“Yers got read and then it got burnt,” he told Dez, who was not reassured.

Immediately after, Usha sent a runner with another such letter, this time telling him to give it to the folk at Rose Hall. She’d enclosed it with a note of her own, short and to the point: Dez’s family will be frantic. Can you help? She believed that if Aline knew a way to further the letter along the way to Caramon in Solace, she would. But the boy had gone on that mission yesterday and returned with the briefest of messages: Go no where! Wait.

Usha waited. Dez waited with less patience than she, but by this morning no one had come with further word from Aline.

Dezra shoved her untasted breakfast away. “I’m sick of milling around here like sheep in the slaughter pen.”

At the words “slaughter pen” a woman at a table near the door looked around, alarmed and gathering her children close.

“Hush!” Usha whispered. “There’s no use scaring everyone in sight with exaggeration.”

Dez snorted. “I’m not sure how much of an exaggeration it is.”

Out the corner of her eye Usha saw the innkeeper come into the common room from the kitchen. Shaped like a dumpling, freckled and bearded, and called Rusty by all for his ginger-colored hair, he came to her table, two pieces of paper in hand.

“Lady Usha,” he said, inclining his head but managing not to bow.

She raised an eyebrow. Usha would not be addressed as “Lady Usha” in Haven. She had never liked the title, considering it something that tagged along with her husband’s title Lord Palin. She preferred the simple title most Abanasinian women enjoyed. In Haven, she was Mistress Usha.

The innkeeper corrected himself. “Mistress Usha, two missives have arrived for you.”

Dez managed to swallow a smile at the annunciation of the arrival of missives when mere notes had come. Usha nodded graciously. Rusty blushed to the ears and dropped the two notes, one crisply folded so the neat inscription showed, the other somewhat wrinkled and marked with the rings of someone’s over-full ale cup.

“A rascal came last night to give you this,” he said, nodding to the latter. “He said to tell you that you’ll find help if you need it at the Grinning Goat.” He snorted. “The Goat’s no place for a lady to go. Ignore it.”

Curious, Usha, said, “Who was the rascal?”

“Madoc Diviner,” the innkeeper said. “Used to be a mage, in the days when you could count on magic working. Or so they say. Calls himself an information broker now, and that’s true enough. He’ll get information for anyone. For a price. You ladies stay away from him. He’s no good.”

Dez pricked up her ears at this description of Usha’s old friend, but Usha herself smiled and thanked the innkeeper for his trouble. Madoc’s note was sealed with a blue wax seal, the impression a heron in flight. Curious, Usha scanned the page and found a second wax seal above one penned line in a neat hand: Send this seal if you need me.

Dez raised an eyebrow.

“Offering help if we need it,” Usha said. Careful of the seal, she tucked the note into her belt and turned to Aline’s note.

Dezra’s eyes grew wide when she saw it. “It’s... gods! It’s as good as a letter of credit. Usha, how much money did old Wrackham have that his widow can be so generous?”

“Aline would be generous with her last coin,” Usha said, moved. “It’s good to know she’ll be there if we need her, but I’m going to make sure we don’t have to.”

“Nice sentiment,” Dez said, unimpressed. “But at the rates they’re charging here and everywhere else, we’ll be out of money soon.”

Though she would not impose on Aline’s generosity, her friend’s openhanded offer spurred Usha to action. She consulted for some time with the landlord, and by noon the innkeeper had their belongings moved from the little chamber Usha and Dez had occupied the night before to an even smaller one across the hall. The room appeared to have been part of a larger space, one that might well have been portioned into smaller rooms to increase the number available to rent. The only windows the tiny chamber had faced north to an even, cheerless light, one high up and another, narrower one squinting out onto a corner of street below.

“And the virtue of this move?” Dez asked, looking around the chamber from which all furniture but two small beds had been removed. Their gear, such as it was, lay piled between the beds making the place look more like a store room than a bed chamber.

“I’m going to have a studio,” Usha said, spreading her arms as though embracing the idea. “Dez, the light in here is perfect.”

“Such as it is,” Dez muttered.

Usha nodded. “It’s north light, perfect and clear. That’s what I’ll need if I’m going to support us by painting.”

Dez’s expression went from puzzled to skeptical. “I don’t think people are in the mood for buying portraits or landscapes or little lockets with a child’s adorable smile captured in miniature.”

Usha was not discouraged. She paced the length of the room then stepped out the distance between the doorway and the far wall. None of that took very long to do, and it seemed to her that the room had grown suddenly smaller since she’d looked at it with Rusty only a few hours before. Still, her course was set.

“I’ve been supporting myself very nicely with my painting since Palin decided he’d rather spend his time away from home. When things settle down, I can support us here, too.”

Dez looked for a moment as though she would flare in her brother’s defense, then kept still on the matter.

“Have at it, Usha,” she said. “If you like, I’ll go around with you while you figure out what supplies you need and where to get them.”

Looking around the space that had, in her mind’s eye, already become her studio, Usha gladly accepted the offer.

All that day and evening the two spent learning where to find the suppliers of such things as Usha needed.

The next morning, Usha went out with energy, ready to begin assembling her studio.

“I will mix my own paints,” Usha said, “of course.” She shot a glance at the leaden sky, hoping the clouds would lift. Nothing of what she wanted to purchase today could be delivered if there was the least risk of rain. “Some like to have an apprentice for that kind of work, but I’ve always liked doing it myself. There are a lot of components to buy—the base, the oils and pigments for all the colors. It’s going to be very expensive.”

Dez shrugged. “Not a problem. I haven’t dealt with the sellers of paint, but whether we’ve done business together or they’ve only heard of me, there is hardly a provisioner of anything in Haven who doesn’t know he’s in for a serious time of bargaining when I walk in the door.”

“It is what I hoped,” Usha said, flashing a smile.

In Haven, the center of Abanasinian commerce since after the Cataclysm, in that Lord City where generations of men and women built empires of commerce and waged battles in the counting houses whose outcomes were known to few and affected people far beyond the stout gates of the city, dark knights manned the five watchtowers and the walls.

Eight days had passed since the city fell. Red dragons patrolled the sky, wheeling in long lazy circles over the river and the city. Word had gone through the streets and byways like fanned fire that the name of the commander of the occupation force was Sir Radulf Eigerson, and that he had met only once with the Lord Mayor and his council. It was said Sir Radulf had laid down the law at that meeting—literally—by using his dagger to nail a copy of his official writ to the oaken table that had served generations of Haven’s wealthy. The Lord Mayor and his advisers came away with the chief point of the writ, that the person to reckon with was Lady Mearah of Palanthas.

“A lovely woman,” the rumors said of her. “Delicate beauty, alabaster skin, hair like a spill of midnight sky.”

And a woman whose reputation for ruthlessness followed like a shadow.

The lady knight used no family name, and that was not a thing for wonder. She was a fallen child, a daughter of Solamnia who had turned away from her noble heritage to dark armies. Sir Radulf’s name caused a stir, for that knight was otherwise known as Red Wolf, a battle name gained on war grounds and well earned. Mention of Lady Mearah of Palanthas raised a different kind of murmuring, for it had been heard since the fall of the city that here and there folk had been taken into the custody for unspecified offenses. Few came back. Those who returned had nothing to say, and they met no one’s eye. Terrified, perhaps, or ashamed. Or both. Those who didn’t return were executed as traitors by Lady Mearah’s order, their bodies dumped unceremoniously—and very publicly—outside the low stone wall enclosing the city’s cemetery.

“That one,” the people said in the taverns and around the home hearths, “that one is going to be curse the dragons brought.”

People said so, yet in Haven life went on as householder, taverner, wealthy merchant, lord, and humble servant adjusted to the changes. They were Haveners after all. They lived on a river whose capricious moods could get dark indeed. They were hearty enough and had been for centuries. They could manage with mounted patrols of knights manning all the major intersections. They’d survive the flood of foot soldiers that poured into Haven on the third day to join the dragonriders in guarding the city walls.

Among those lower ranks were at least a dozen goblins, but most of the soldiers were humans, men and women hardened on battlegrounds all across Ansalon. They kept to their barracks in the lower floors of Old Keep, and for the most part they kept out of trouble. This was not to be wondered at. Two of the corpses who appeared by the cemetery wall had been those of occupation soldiers.

Haveners could survive these, and Haveners could manage, though some quarters their city smelled of the burned wharfs. But it also smelled of baking bread and tapped ale kegs, of the river and the particular scent that lingers in the air as the summer grows old and thinks of turning to autumn.

Usha cast an eye on the leaden sky then glanced at Dezra who wore her doubts about their mission plainly on her face.

“This is going to turn out to be no kind of day to be buying things like sacks of powders for your pigments and dyes and all the other stuff you need.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t order them and have them delivered when the weather is of a mind to cooperate,” Usha said.

It didn’t. The only thing that would prevent that would be the unavailability of such things as wood for an easel and palette, martin fur for brushes, and all the components needed to make paint—an arcana not as dangerous as any a mage might practice, but certainly as complex. Much depended on being able to find what Usha needed, what she’d gambled their dwindling resources on finding. If she lost the gamble, she’d be going to Aline with a begging hand, and Usha was determined she wouldn’t do that. She’d taken care of herself before. Times were harder now, but her willingness to take a chance was no less keen.

And so, yesterday Usha had sat in conference with Dez and a very willing Rusty to learn where she could find such things as lime, azurite, and red porphyry. And where should she go to get good blades for scraping, a mortar and pestle for grinding? Who had the finest walnut to make a palette? There was more—linen, canvas, easel, two kinds of oils ... her list of supplies was longer than her arm, and her list of possible suppliers a good deal shorter. Usha would not be daunted, but that night counted out the all the money she and Dezra had (not much, and becoming scarce). In the morning, she told the innkeeper she’d be pleased to pay for their room by waiting tables.

“I’ve pitched in at the Inn of the Last Home when Caramon needed help.”

She’d shot Dez a narrow and meaningful glance that resulted in Dezra offering to work behind the bar.

For a moment Usha thought he’d take her up on it, the look of sudden delight that crossed his round face spoke clearly of how much he’d enjoy spending the day working with a woman whose beauty still left him stammering and sighing. But in the end, he told her he’d have none of it, saying he’d rent the room to them on a monthly basis with the rent not due until month’s end, nearly four weeks away. For his trouble, as he said, he’d tack a small surcharge to the rent. For the sake of being able to husband their resources for a while by not having to pay on a shorter term basis, Usha and Dezra accepted the offer and went out to look for the parts and pieces of a studio and the myriad ingredients of paints.

They walked for a time in silence. In the streets around the Ivy, they encountered the obvious evidence of Sir Radulf’s occupation. A dragon in the sky flew lazy circles, at the major intersections knights made themselves evident, and upon the encircling wall others of Sir Radulf’s men stood watching inward and outward. Now and then from a tavern the rough sound of soldiers’ voices spilled out. Usha noticed more people on the streets than since their abortive attempt to leave Haven. Haven coped, but no one relaxed. Men and women looked over their shoulders, children seemed subdued, and when people laughed their laughter sounded forced and shrill.

On a narrow lane, where the air still carried the smell of week-old burning, Usha stopped, looked up the street and down, then pointed north and to the other side where a simple sign hung above a door proclaiming it a carpenter’s shop.

Dez hopped across a trickling gutter while Usha, mindful of her skirts, went farther to step carefully along a plank laid as a make-shift bridge. As they walked they caught the clean scent of sawdust and freshly planed wood drifting beneath the darker odor of smoke.

“We start here,” she said. Suddenly she laughed, anticipating the delights of setting up her studio and preparing to work again. She had not a single commission or even the promise of one, but still her heart lifted and her blood seemed to sing differently in her veins. “And by the time the day’s over, Dez, we’ll have made a good start at getting me a studio.”

They made the rounds of the merchants’ quarter, those narrow and winding streets that bordered the market square. They visited mageware shops for much of what would be needed for the paints, for the resources of field and forest and earth were sometimes used by both mages and painters, though for very different purposes. They spent an hour with a woman who made brushes, and though her brushes were themselves too expensive, she was willing to sell them a bundle half the size of her small fist of long, soft hairs from a marten’s pelt. They found a palette, a dwarf who would sell them the oils Usha needed, and finally they stopped at the shop of Pryce Davil, Purveyor of Pigments and Dyes.

“But—” Dez said.

“Oh, we’re not here to buy pigments or dyes. I’ve heard all day that here is where we’ll find the best canvas and linen. They say the owner is a young widow. Her husband left his business to her in trust for their daughter.”

In the shop of Elenya, the widow of Pryce Davil, Purveyor of Pigments and Dyes, Usha met an enthusiast. There, Dezra reluctantly garnered an education on the suitability of linen or canvas, the making of the perfect mixture of the primer called pa’ressa—what Dez at once began to call “that awful smelling goo you smear all over a nice fresh canvas”—and seven different ways to see red.

“Well, it isn’t goo,” piped a voice from the doorway leading out to a garden. Dez looked around to see a small girl frowning very seriously. “It’s pa’ressa. Mother mixes it all the time, and real artists know that it comes from a secret recipe that elves made up a long time ago.”

“Does she? And does it smell awful all the time?”

Scrunching her nose, the girl nodded. “It smells terrible.”

The child’s mother looked up as though to shoo the girl away, but Usha said, “I think I’ve ordered all the canvas I need for now, and I only want enough linen to use for miniatures.” She winked at the little girl. “And she’s no trouble.”

“None at all,” Dez agreed. She looked out the back door and saw that the sky had made no decision about rain. To Elenya she said, “If you like, I’ll come and work out the numbers with you, and then we can talk about when to have it all sent to the Ivy.”

“My name’s Gussie,” said the girl, after he mother and Dezra left.

“I’ll bet Gussie is short for Altheguslina,” Usha said.

Gussie’s eyes went wide. “It is! How did you know?”

“That’s a Qualinesti name, and I know a few. How is it your mother gave you an Elvish name?”

Gussie shrugged. “She didn’t, my da did. He liked them, the elves. But he died.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. He left you with a very nice name, though. Do you know who Altheguslina was?”

Gussie nodded. “An elf lady who liked rabbits.”

That was the short of it. The long of it was that Altheguslina had been an elf-mage who, in distant times, changed a small army of advancing goblins into a springing leap of rabbits. It seemed the child’s father hadn’t gone into that much detail about legendary elf-maiden Altheguslina of Lealnost who was not a very good student of magic, but who did recall one spell in time to save her little village.

“I had a bunny once,” Gussie said. “But he died, too. Like my da. A dog ate the bunny. My da got sick.”

Usha held out a hand, and the child came shyly closer. “I’m sorry,” she said, “about the bunny and your father. I know it must make you very sad.”

Gussie shrugged, but she tucked in her lower lip. “How do you know?”

“Well, I know.” Usha picked up the girl and set her on the counter where she and Elenya had been drawing up a list.

“Did your da die?”

Usha’s throat tightened around an old grief she didn’t often allow herself to remember. Her father had died, and her mother, too, soon after her birth. She’d been taken into the care of the mysterious Irda, and she hadn’t learned even that much about herself until she was a young woman. The great pain of not knowing her kin was something she’d let no one see but the husband who now seemed to be tiptoeing out of her life.

Usha, my Usha, Irda-girl!

So Palin used to sing to her in the first years of their marriage, but she was no daughter of the Irda. She had been raised by them, a magical folk whose personal beauty surpassed anything a poet could dream. She’d lived with them until the time of their vanishing during the Chaos War. She had loved them and perhaps breathed some of the magic that was so unlike the vanishing magic of Krynn, a magic that made the Irda unlike any other race. But she was not one of the Irda. Usha was a mortal woman, a human woman. So the Irda finally told her. It had helped, somewhat, to know she wasn’t simply an ugly and untalented Irda. It hadn’t helped to know herself a kinless orphan.

Usha picked up the stub of a charcoal stick she had used to write out her list of paint components and turned over a clean sheet of parchment from the stack of scraps on the counter.

“Yes,” she said, answering Gussie’s question. Her hand moved swiftly, the charcoal rendering stroke and stroke, her eyes on the girl. “My father did die, and my mother, too. I don’t know if I miss them because I never knew them. I do have two children, though, and I love them very much.”

Gussie’s eyes lighted. “Where are they?”

“Oh, I don’t know for certain. My daughter is a knight.”

Gussie gasped.

“But she isn’t a dark knight. She wears the silver armor of Solamnia. My son is an alchemist.” She made a face to imitate Gussie’s of earlier, scrunching up her nose and squinting her eyes tightly. “And some of the things he makes smell really awful!”

Gussie’s laughter pealed through the shop. Usha smiled and—stroke and stroke upon the parchment—her eyes never left the child.

“Will your daughter-knight come and save you?”

An arc, a curve, a plump cheek, a spill of curls. The charcoal whispered the magical words to the parchment that are common tongue to every artist.

“I’m sure she would want to come rescue me if she knew I was here. She doesn’t, though. She thinks I’m home in Solace.”

“What about her da? Won’t he come and get you?”

Behind her, Usha heard a footstep, and Dez said, “He would if he knew. But he doesn’t know we’re here, either.”

The moment chilled. Usha said nothing but looked away and worked closely on the sketch, then looked at Gussie again.

“I’m not too worried. I’m making friends here in Haven, and I’ll be all right till I can go home again.”

She took up the sketch and showed it to her subject. Gussie clapped her hands in delight to see a picture of herself sitting on a garden bench with a basket of lettuce on her lap. She jumped from the counter to fetch the picture, but stopped when Usha pointed toward the door.

A rabbit, looking slightly confused, sat on the threshold, just then lifting her paw to scratch behind a floppy gray ear.

“Magic!” the child cried.

Of a kind, Usha thought, looking at the charcoal sketch.

Lines and curves had changed, shifted, and little girl with the basket of lettuce on her lap had become a lovely young woman in elegant white mage robes, smiling with Gussie’s bright eyes at a rabbit sitting on her knee.

The rain that had threatened all day began to fall in fat drops when Usha and Dez were a long block from the Ivy. About then, the two spoke for the first time since leaving the pigments shop.

“Your brother,” Usha said, “is fortunate to have someone to come so quickly to his defense before defense is needed.”

“Why shouldn’t I defend him?” Dez bristled and shot Usha a narrow glance. “He’s your husband. Why shouldn’t you think he cares enough to worry about you?”

“Recent history,” Usha said, “speaks rather loudly on that score.”

The rain fell harder, like needles on the skin. The only people they saw were those scurrying to get indoors. Silence between the two grew colder. When they reached the Ivy, soaked to the skin, Dez walked in the door trailing water and ordering ale. Usha went up the stairs to their room.

The room seemed a bare, tiny place in the gathering gloom. She’d replaced the clothing she’d lost in the fire with two sensible skirts, blouses, hose, another pair of shoes. They lay on the bed, looking like someone else’s clothing. Thinking herself petty, even as she felt it, Usha missed her closet at home, the neatly hung skirts, folded blouses and gowns both common and festive. She lifted a hand to her ear and missed the weight of earrings.

“It is home I miss,” she whispered. She missed more than that. She missed Palin. But she would not frame the feeling in words, let alone whisper it aloud.

Rain drummed against the shuttered windows, and shadows lurked in the corners. Usha lighted the lamps, but she was little cheered. She did not speak with Dezra again until morning when they came out of the inn with most of the other guests and much of the staff to hear what was being cried in the street.

“Hear!” shouted a small man who walked before a chain-mailed, mounted knight. The small man rang a big bell loudly. “By order of the commander of the occupation, Sir Radulf Eigerson”—Clang! Clang!—“the city of Haven will be ruled as ever”—Clang!—“by the Lord Mayor and his Council!”

He lifted the bell to ring again, then felt the knight’s horse nudge him in the back and he muffled the brass with his hand.

“The Lord Mayor and his Council will be guided by Sir Radulf Eigerson. Haven’s system of magistrates will be disbanded. The people will not carry weapons. Breach of this order will be considered the high crime of treason. In all criminal matters, including breach of Sir Radulf’s orders and Haven’s peace, justice will be meted out by Lady Mearah, adjudicator for Sir Radulf. Milady’s justice will be swift, and it will be fair.”

In the gathered crowd a murmur of anger and fear rose, then fell as the crier shouted that the people of Haven were to go about their business as usual. Then he and the knight passed on along the street, the clanging of the bell resuming as they turned a corner.

“The high crime of treason.” Dezra laughed. “Against what? Good sense? And not a word about loosening control of the roads.”

Usha shook her head. “And nothing about passes.” She looked out across the road, up to where Sir Radulf’s soldiers walked the walls. “It’s like being in prison.”

Dez snorted. “He can’t keep a whole city imprisoned. He’s got to know that will get him a population boiling to get out. And he can’t keep the merchant fleet in the harbors, or he’s got nothing to send back to his masters. Sooner or later, he’ll open the river gates and let the captains man their ships. He’ll let them go—with armed knights aboard to make sure they come back. It’s wealth Sir Radulf is here for, nothing more. And granting passes so a few merchants can come and go on the roads again will take the pressure off a restless population.”

“I don’t see why he should let merchants go,” Usha said, “and think they’ll come back again.”

A grim smile twisted Dezra’s lips. The sight of it chilled Usha.

“Dez, what... ?”

“A man might not come back for his business once he’s left it. But he will come back for his kin.”

In the distance, Usha heard the ringing of other bells and imagined she heard the voices of other criers as news of Sir Radulf’s orders went through the city. The two women met each other’s eyes for the first time since their dispute.

“Hostages, Dez? Against the return of the merchants?”

“I’m no commander of knights.” The moment stretched out in silence, then Dez shrugged a little. “But that’s what I’d do.”