The Silver Branch, page 31
part #3 of The Tales of Aeron Series
“Well, yours!” Fionnbarr laughed at her stunned expression. “It is your birthday, is it not? Time it was, any road, you had a ship of your own; you will very soon be beset with far-flung chores, and you will need a swift way of arriving at them—you may not wish always to rely upon the starfleet. Elharn and Rhain designed her; so, in part, did you yourself. Do you not recall all those questions they were forever asking you this past year, about ship design and what would be desirable to have in a personal craft?”
“Aye, well, I but thought they inquired in general.” Aeron ran a hand over the shining hull, admiring its sleekness, then touched a silver plate set into the smooth black metal—síodarainn, it was called; “silk-iron”—and a door slid silently open on the ship’s interior.
“Your thoughts on design were well taken, Aeron,” said her cousin Rhain, coming round the side of the ship and giving her a warm greeting. He was one of her favorite kinsmen, though she saw him but seldom. Tall, brown-haired, affable, a Druid scientist who advised the Fianna on military technology, he was a prince himself, the eldest of the four children of Fionnbarr’s brother Deian.
“We used many of your suggestions in the building,” continued Rhain, leading Aeron round the ship on a quick inspection. “And added a few of our own: For instance, there is a cloaking mechanism installed—a tirr. No other ship in the starfleet has one as yet, not even Firedrake. It might prove useful some time. As for speed, with a reasonable weight aboard her, only the courier cursals and scout sloops are in a class with her; even heavily laden, she will be faster than most.”
“What shall you call her?” asked Emer, after Aeron had finished expressing delighted thanks to all concerned.
Aeron hesitated, as if she listened for some word that had not yet been spoken. “I know not just yet,” she said. “For the moment, let her use-name be Dubhlinnseach, ‘The Black-sailed’; until such a day as she herself shall tell me her truename, and fairly earn it.”
•
By the time Aeron returned with the others to Turusachan, the birthday ceili she had hoped for was in full cry: wisely limited by her mother and grandmother to close friends and family only. And so among the many Aoibhells and Kerrigans there were old friends and dear ones: Morwen, and Sabia, and Dafydd Drummond, and the Camerons, and Vevin ní Talleron; and newer ones as well, that she had made on Fian service or at the Hill of Laws or in her recent travels around Keltia. Some of these, less accustomed to such company or such surroundings, seemed a little daunted by it all, but the others did their best to put them at their ease, and very soon all their discomfortableness was forgotten.
Not so, however, Aeron’s own: As she had known they would be, and was both fearing and longing to see, both Roderick and Gwydion were among the revelers gathered to celebrate her day. Well, they could scarce not have been asked; and it is not as if I have seen naught of them these past few years… But she was a little shy of them all the same, and on arriving at the palace had not had nerve enough to face them at once. Instead, she had made excuse to go to her rooms and change her ceremonial attire to less stately garb; a reasonable cause for delaying her appearance at her own ceili. But she did not attempt to deceive herself: The respite had been needed to restore herself a little after the strain of the investiture, but needed still more to prepare herself a little to face the two who awaited her below.
So now Aeron threaded her way through the crush, accepting the felicitations and kisses and embraces offered her on every side, and she soon found her spirits rising to merriment almost in spite of herself. Then, in a lull, she saw Rhodri across the room, with Mared his mother, his dark-gold head overtopping most of those around him, and she knew at once she was not yet ready for him, and in her confusion she instantly turned the other way.
But there was still less peace for her in that quarter: Gwydion stood in an alcove, the center of a group of laughing friends. He had not seen her, and for a moment she had leisure to watch him unobserved.
I forget, between times of seeing him, how tall he is, and how very fine to look upon—though it is scarce a punishment to have to look on Rhodri either… The formal dress Gwydion had worn to the day’s ceremony, and still wore now, was but a richer version of his usual attire: Instead of wool or linen, the black tunic was of velvet; the snowy white leinna beneath it of sith-silk instead of the everyday gwlan; the sapphire signet of Gwynedd was upon his hand and the coronet he so rarely wore was upon his brow. He had risen that year to the rank of full Fian general—one of Keltia’s youngest ever, for he was not yet thirty-three, and one of the most gifted ever, according to those equipped to judge of such matters. And all this in the teeth of his mother’s and his planet’s fierce opposition, for he had been Ruling Prince barely two years, and they were unwilling to let him continue to risk himself in combat, lest they should lose him so soon after losing his father.
But he was here tonight, and Aeron’s joy at seeing him was as great as her disquiet; her surprise was greater than both, to see his sister. I did not know Ari was to be here—we have not been on the same planet, much less in the same room, these seven years past, save at the rites for Arawn-maeth… She cast a covert glance at Arianeira, feeling a deep, somehow shameful, reluctance to go and greet her foster-sister, and for all her efforts she could not master it.
Arianeira decided the thing for her. Catching sight of Aeron standing there irresolute, she left the group of which she had been part and came over to join her.
“Tanista!” Before Aeron could move to hinder, Arianeira sank in an elaborate court curtsy before her fostern. “My greeting on your birthday, and your day of glory.”
“Oh, get up, Ari, that is no way to do after we have been so long apart.” Embarrassed and discomfited—and with the uneasy impression that that was exactly how Arianeira had intended her to feel—Aeron embraced her, but there was from the other no answering warmth; she might have been embracing a standing stone, or an unbending white tree. Nay, not even those, for tree or stone, at least, would greet me back, and she does not… Aeron stood away and took a hard look at her foster-sister, using Ban-draoi tricks that she did not like to employ with those close to her, and which use she carefully shielded from Arianeira, who was after all a Ban-draoi adept herself. She is lovelier than ever; and colder than ever she has been to me; I wonder whyfor…
“If I may make petition of the Tanista on her birthday—”
Aeron felt herself coloring, aware of the many listening ears. “Anything, Ari; you know you need but ask.”
“Aye so? Well then, only a moment’s private speech with you, if you can bear to absent yourself from this rout awhile. Is that too great an asking?”
Why does everything she says sound as if she holds me in the wrong… “It seems scarcely favor enough… Come, there is a withdrawing room close by; we will talk in there.” Aeron led the way through the throng, where dancing was now general, smilingly declining all invitations to join the reel with promises for later. Coming to a door half-hidden behind draped gold curtains, she stood aside for Arianeira to precede her into the little chamber and closed the door behind them.
“I spoke not entirely true just now, Tanista,” said Arianeira without further prelude. “There is a favor I would ask of you.”
“Ari, you are my foster-sister; no need to call me by my title—in truth I wish that you would not.”
“It is right that I should call you so,” she countered, “when I am petitioning for a place in your household here at Turusachan.”
Aeron’s surprise showed on her face, and she spoke before she thought. “A place for you! I had not considered it; we have been so long apart, and the places are largely already spoken for—”
“Oh, do not pretend with me!” For one who was suing for a favor, Arianeira’s tone was scarcely one of entreaty. “You could easily find a place for me—if you so wished. Is it that you begrudge it me? You had no problem finding offices for other of your friends: You named Sabia ní Dálaigh as captain of your guard; Morwen as your chief advisor; Struan Cameron as master of horse in your marca-sluagh. Even former lovers—is not Deio Drummond appointed one of your household officers? Am I so much less to be honored than they, so much less your friend?”
“I had not thought of you,” admitted Aeron frankly.
“Nay, you had not! But that is naught new—”
Arianeira had begun to pace up and down in the room’s confines; the sounds of the revel came muted in from outside, and Aeron found herself longing to escape back into it. Better to face Gwydion and Rhodri both together than to have to endure more of this… But Arianeira was speaking again, her voice vibrant now with bitterness long suppressed.
“Why should you have thought of me? You will be Queen of Kelts. Morwen shall have the dúchas of Lochcarron, and most like more besides. What is there for me to content myself with? I shall never be more than I now am: the sister of the Prince of Gwynedd. If Gwydion condescends to throw me some crumb of governance in my own planet, that is one thing; or if I marry some other prince or duke and rule with him over his dúchas. Otherwise, nothing.”
Aeron looked down at her hands, seeing in memory the Silver Branch as she had held it a few hours since, recalling the weight of it—and all it represented. “I had not known you felt so.”
“Nor did you try to learn,” said Arianeira, calmer now. “You did once promise me when we were children that you would give me whatever title or place I wished, so that you and Wenna and I should ever be together, here in Turusachan. Have you forgotten that promise?”
To my sorrow and shame, until this minute I had so… “It seems that you have not,” said Aeron aloud. “When I am Ard-rían—”
But the other was not to be pacified, and all her anger kindled anew. “When you are Ard-rían! Comes that time and you will take all the future from me as you have just taken the past. You will take Morwen from me completely—and she was my sister too, Aeron, not just yours—and I think you will take my brother as well, if you have not already done so, and you who will have so much will leave me with nothing. Even from the time we were children together at Kinloch Arnoch have I known this—Do you remember my white dog Wynos? He was mine at least until you arrived, and then you took him also.”
“I did nothing of the like, the poor puppy came to me for that you whipped him when he would play—”
“Aye, you have ever been the one to protect those not so strong as yourself—though that tender heart never seemed somehow to reach out so far to me… I say you will leave me nothing, and you will leave me alone.”
“Ari, Ari, that is not true, it will not be—”
“Nothing!” she flared. “I see it all so clear—And what shall happen then, Aeron—Tanista—what shall come of it in the end… it will be upon your own head!”
The door slammed behind her, rattling the room. Aeron stood without moving in the center of the floor. Have I been truly so selfish, then; there was so much all these years to contend with, but I should not have forgotten Ari so—only… only it seemed that she wished not to remember me… She took a deep breath to quiet herself, in the Ban-draoi way, then flung wide the door, only to meet Rohan on the point of entering, two cups of usqueba in his hands.
Aeron took one without a word and gratefully downed it, then, after the briefest of pauses, drank off the other as well. Rohan made no comment, and she knew he had guessed much of what had happened.
“What had Ari to say?” he asked at length.
“Little enough,” said Aeron, surprised at the strength of the anger she felt; it seemed somehow to have passed blazing from Arianeira to her. “Though, I daresay, more than perhaps she meant to.” She shook her head and shook off the mood. “But I have missed you, braud; you have been much away of late. It is not like the old days with all of us here together, and I do not see near enough of any of you as I might like.”
“It will be so again,” he assured her. “Once we have satisfied our duties elsewhere—we will all be back here once more, you and I and Ríona and Nuala and the twins; it will be a fine thing as before.”
A wistful little quiver passed over Aeron’s face. “Fine enough,” she said. “Though perhaps the duties will be rather different—But it is my birthday still, and I hear a strathspey being played. Would the Prince of the Name care to dance it with his sister?”
“He would indeed,” said Rohan smiling, and they went out together.
Chapter 25
Aeron’s Tanistry was little more than one year old before it was put to its first real test.
A challenge had been sent to Fionnbarr some time since: a question of land-rights and inheritance, one of the usual matters upon which such challenges bore, in the time-honored way among the Kelts that any subject should have the right in settlement of grievance to challenge the monarch in fíor-comlainn, the truth-of-combat, magical or military as the litigant party should choose.
And Royne Druchar, a landholder of the Venton Country on the planet Kernow, had chosen the sword.
“‘Lex est ata regis’,” said Aeron, quoting the ancient maxim. She set aside the challenge-screed and looked up at her father. “‘The law is the armor of the King.’”
“That is surely seen,” agreed Fionnbarr. “But in Keltia it could as easily be turned ‘Rex est ata legis’—‘The King is the armor of the law.’ And in nothing so much as fíor-comlainn is that so clearly proved.”
“You have proved it so yourself, a fair number of times.”
Her father smiled. “True, though some times with more notable success than others… But if the King may be shield at need to the law, better still if the King’s heir can be sword-arm to the King.”
“Ah, now it all comes out!” said Aeron, laughing. “Well, you did warn me it should be so, once I was Tanista—and I take your point.” Her smile turned wicked. “And so, if I have the luck of the fight, will this Royne Druchar take mine.”
•
The noise of the spectators hushed dramatically as Aeron, followed by her chosen seconds Sabia and her cousin Desmond, Elharn’s son, stepped out onto the compall, the dueling floor behind the Fianna Commandery across from the palace. She was clad for contest, not for battle, in the close-fitting unisuit with its protective plastron front. Both hands were gauntleted to the elbow, and her hair was bound up in braids at the back of her head.
She briefly ran her gaze over the onlookers in the stone benches that rose in tiered galleries around the combat floor: officials of the government, many of them, here as their duty commanded to observe the fight according to law, and officers of the Fianna come to see how one of their own would carry herself. But there was a fair number of plain citizens among them, though the day and hour of the contest had not been made known until that morning.
Which is only to be expected, she thought. Any fíor-comlainn against the Crown brought out those eager to watch and judge the royal participant; whether they came out of pure curiosity or out of some deeper motive—even in hopes of seeing her fail—mattered no whit to her. Today they were here to see her—win, lose or draw. And that my father knew well; therefore did he pass this challenge over to me… Still, she had to learn sometime; Fionnbarr had fought the truth-of-combat often enough himself, and would again if need demanded. All the same, Aeron had a strong suspicion that should she prove herself here today abler with a blade than her father, there would be many more of these antics in her future, before she herself even came to the throne, or had an heir of her own on which to foist them in her turn.
She accepted Sabia’s ministrations of water and oxygen tablets; quite lawful, and across the ring her opponent was receiving the same. From under her cousin’s arm Aeron studied her adversary, his way of moving, his height and reach and port.
“Well, do you think you can best him?”
Aeron looked up to see the humorous glint in Desmond’s eye, and bent her head to hide her grin from the watching crowd.
“That bannock?” Sabia’s indignation was genuine, if hardly politic in public. “Shame to you, Aeron, if you give him more than two hits in ten, and Struan Cameron will cry more than shame if you do so.”
“Bannock or no,” said Aeron, “that is a trained fighter over there; else he had never chosen the iron-fight. Two good blades to choose from, and—presumably—two good hands with which to wield them.”
Desmond, who had picked up Aeron’s own swords for her to choose, raised his brows at that.
“Aye so? Then what hand is best in this ring?”
She caught the blade he tossed her. “It is here.”
“And the second best?” asked Sabia.
Aeron flipped the sword to her left hand. “It is there.”
•
She had fought under the gimlet gaze of an audience before now, so that was of little concern to Aeron as she stepped out into the ring; she had fought to save herself and others in battle, where no polite rules of the dueling code did apply. But today there was a reason beyond personal pride or even survival for her to wish for victory. Macha Ruadh, ran her brief prayer to the Erinnach battle-goddess she often besought in combat, your strength to my arm… if not for my sake, then for the sake of the Ard-tiarnas of Keltia I defend here.
After the formal reading of the grievance brought against the Crown of Keltia by the litigant, Royne Druchar, of Caerhays in the Venton Country of Kernow, and the acceptance by the combat judges and the plaintiff of the Tanista Aeron to act as her father’s arm in this matter, the two combatants stood forth, saluted the judges and each other, and commenced.
Aeron quickly realized that though her opponent was far from the slow-footed lumberer Sabia had scorned him for, neither was he the product of three years’ hard hammering by Struan at Caer Artos. Had it been true battle, or other life-and-death matter, she could have dispatched him in a minute’s exchange. As it was, an honest fight, and a real one, mattered more here than a quick triumph—though not more than the need that that triumph must of course be hers…
