King's Shield by Sherwood Smith Page B

Mun’s still alive. I was only there once, as it happens. The day Tanrid introduced me.”
    “I know. I saw how you and the others never went.”
    “You did? But we were so careful not to say anything. Well, and it wasn’t like a great vow or anything. We, that is, some of us didn’t want to be all gone and you alone in the scrub pit. Did they all stay with it, then, after I was taken away?”
    As if I hadn’t noticed, Evred thought, and the memory of their innocence, their uncalculating good will, was a knife-strike of bittersweet anguish.
    Aware of the stiffness of his hands, Evred clasped them tightly behind his back. “Oh, more or less,” he said. “Kepa sneaked over whenever he thought the others didn’t notice, usually taking Lassad. But the others, I think, never got into the habit. We made our own secret meeting places. And when we got older, I could always bring food. Nobody was going to punish us for that.”
    Inda plunged across the street, moving with a slight stiffness in his walk that made Evred wonder if he carried more severe wounds not visible to the eye.
    Inda paused outside the Daggers door. “I don’t hear boys.”
    “No, the scrubs would be in the stable picking hooves, the pigtails out with the scout dogs, now that the weather’s finally broken—” Evred shook his head. “Never mind.”
    But Inda looked surprised and delighted. “ You run ’em all now, right?” He sniffed the air. “And a very late spring. Those pits must be pret-ty chilly.” He grinned in remembrance, using the old slang word, pit, for barracks.
    “Winter was reluctant to let go this year. The boys have been shivering here for a month, and the last snow melted scarcely a week ago.”
    Inda gave one of those “Hah!” laughs of memory as he swung inside the tavern, his head barely clearing the low door. Evred ducked his head and followed.
    “Mun! You here? Maybe you won’t remember me—”
    “I do. Indevan-Laef.” Kethan Mundavan was the proprietor, a retired lancer the boys were privileged to address by his academy name, Mun. He was grayer, stiffer, but very much alive, his eyes alert as he and his grand-nephew polished glasses. “You’ve got a look of your brother.”
    Was every reminder of Tanrid going to hurt like stepping on glass? Inda opened his hand. “I’m here to present my brother-by-marriage, Evred-Harvaldar Montrei-Vayir.”
    Tau might have smiled; Jeje would have laughed, believing them to be participating in an elaborate joke, but to the Marlovans everything was as it should be. The city answered to the king, yet this little tavern within the city was Mun’s kingdom, and they were there by his leave.
    Mun indicated a table with his gnarled hand, and the two sat down by the fire, at the table reserved for the teenage horsetails, top of the academy ranks. Though neither had actually ridden as a horsetail, he made it plain that in his view they had earned that right.
    “Tell me about Tanrid,” Inda said, aware of Mun’s presence; the man made no pretence of not listening as Evred unlocked the memory of Tanrid’s death. He described everything he had seen, heard, thought. And what he had promised at the last.
    Inda had thought he’d wept out his grief back at the Marlo-Vayir castle that first night. Elation and sorrow chased through him now, choking up in his throat. He could so clearly see Tanrid at the end, there, saying “Inda” with his last breath.
    He rocked on his bench, deep in memory—regret—re newed grief, unaware of the lengthening silence, until the thump of two mugs of clear amber ale on the table startled him back to the present.
    Evred had fallen into watchful silence.
    Inda’s first sip caused a sudden, indrawn breath—this time of pleasure. The grief began to recede.
    “Bad ale?” Evred asked.
    “No. Good.” Inda closed his eyes, then opened them; the bright sheen of unshed tears reminded Evred of Hadand at rare, unexpected times.
    Inda set the mug down with a