Marion Zimmer Bradley - Trillium 05 - Lady of the Trillium

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The Lady of the
Trillium by Marion
Zimmer Bradley
Chapter One
The stone Tower of Noth stood desolate, surrounded by dying weeds.
The little bit of water remaining in the moat was covered with scum,
and the smell of death filled the air. The girl ran across the drawbridge,
through the courtyard and the garden, into the chamber of the
Archimage, only to see the old woman die and her body crumble to dust.
As the girl stood there, stunned by the suddenness of it all, the entire
Tower turned to dust around her and blew away, and the only thing left
was the white cloak of the Archimage…
Haramis, the White Lady, Archimage of Ruwenda, woke suddenly,
feeling very old, especially in contrast to the young girl she had been in her
dream. This was not particularly surprising; she was old, several ordinary
lifetimes old by now, she thought ruefully. As Archimage, soul-bound to
the land, her life span had been lengthened long past those of her two
sisters. Though born at one birth, their destinies had separated long ago,
and now she, the eldest of the triplet princesses, was the only one left.
Kadiya, the second of the sisters, had been the first to leave. After the
great battle with the invaders from Labornok and the evil sorcerer
Orogastus, she had disappeared into her beloved swamps with her
Oddling companion and her talisman, the Three-Lobed Burning Eye,
which formed part of the great magical scepter the triplets had used to
defeat Orogastus. For a time she and Haramis had communicated
occasionally by scrying, but Kadiya had vanished many decades ago. By
now, Haramis thought, she must be long dead.
Anigel, the youngest, had married Prince Antar of Labornok, uniting
their two kingdoms, and died peacefully of old age, surrounded by her
children and grandchildren. The combined throne passed on through her
descendants. Was it her grandchild or great-grandchild who held it now?
Haramis couldn't remember; the years slipped by too fast. Maybe it was
even a great-great-grandchild.
Haramis, the eldest, had been chosen to replace the Arch-image Binah
as guardian of the land. Ruwenda had prospered over the years, and
Haramis loved the land as if it were her own child. In a way, it was.
But now she was having strange dreams. This was the third night in a
row she had relived Binah's death in her dreams and awakened in the
morning too tired to get out of bed. Was this a warning that she was to die
soon?
Perhaps the time was nearing for a new guardian to take over. If her
successor were chosen soon, Haramis might even have time to train her.
Haramis would have appreciated some training when she had been
chosen, but had been given none. She wanted to do better by her own
successor. But who would her successor be?
Binah had simply handed Haramis her cloak and died, and the Tower
where she had lived and worked had crumbled to dust along with her
body. Haramis, who had been until that moment heiress to the throne,
had been trained since childhood to be Queen, not Archimage. She had
found the sudden shift in her duties disconcerting, to say the least. This
was not the legacy she wished to leave for her successor.
Haramis dragged herself out of bed, ignoring aching joints and a
general feeling of malaise. If she were still living in the Citadel of
Ruwenda, where she had grown up, she would doubtless have felt much
worse—the Citadel was a typical stone castle, impossible to heat. But the
Tower where Haramis had lived since becoming Archimage was warm
inside, even though the Tower was located near the Labornok/Ruwenda
border at the top of Mount Brom and the season was winter. Orogastus
had held the Tower before her, and he had furnished it with every luxury
he could track down and steal or purchase. He had specialized in devices
of the Vanished Ones. While a good many of these were dangerous
weapons, some of the devices were quite practical and made daily life
much more comfortable.
Orogastus, unfortunately for him, had never quite grasped the
distinction between the leftover technology of the Vanished Ones and true
magic. He had depended so heavily on the former that Haramis and her
sisters had been able to destroy him with the latter.
To Haramis the difference between magic and ancient technology was
so obvious, though difficult to articulate, that she still could not
understand how Orogastus could have been so stupid, especially since he
had possessed some magical abilities of his own.
Haramis still winced when she recalled the glamour he had briefly cast
over her—for a few weeks she had even fancied herself in love with him.
But that seems to have worked against him, she remembered. He missed
several opportunities to harm me, even after I made it clear I did not
love him. It was as if he were convinced that he loved me and could not
harm me, and I would necessarily love him in return and help him in his
plans.
She crossed to an ornately carved wooden armoire and took a silver
bowl out of one of its drawers. Placing it on a table in the center of the
room, she filled it half-full with clear water from a pitcher at her bedside,
and bent over it.
Water-scrying was practiced by several of the Oddling races who lived
in the swamps surrounding the Citadel. The Oddlings were not humans;
they were aboriginal descendants of the original inhabitants of the land.
Some of the Oddling races were fairly human in appearance, while others
looked like the stuff of nightmares, but generally they lived at peace with
the humans.
The Nyssomu were among the more human-looking Oddlings, and
several of them had served at the Ruwendan court when Haramis was a
child. Her best friend, Uzun, a Nyssomu and the Court Musician, had
possessed quite a bit of magical ability in addition to his musical talents,
and it was he who had taught Haramis to water-scry. It was a notoriously
unreliable method of divination, and only slightly better as a method of
communication, but Haramis discovered that when combined with her
powers as Archimage, it was quite accurate. It was easier and more
reliable, however, if done on an empty stomach.
Now she cleared her mind as much as she could, although she found it
impossible completely to banish her recent dream, and looked into and
through the water.
Almost at once she seemed to be flying through the air, as if on the
back of one of the great lammergeiers that carried her at need,
approaching a tower. She recognized it as the main tower of the Citadel, a
comparatively recent addition built by humans (within the last five
hundreds), as opposed to the main building, which was another survival
from the time of the Vanished Ones.
She landed lightly on the roof of the Tower and allowed her spirit body
to sink through the trapdoor into the uppermost chamber. Now, in her
vision, the room was empty. The last time Haramis had been there in
reality this room had been filled with Labornoki soldiers trying to capture
her and Uzun, and only the timely arrival of two lammergeiers to carry
them away from the top of the Tower had enabled them to depart alive.
Memories of that long-ago day returned as Haramis continued to
backtrack her former escape route.
The next floor down had been a dormitory for some of Citadel's
soldiers. To the best of Haramis's recollection, the crazy idea of making
the soldiers sleep seventeen flights of stairs up from anything else had
been her grandfather's. Her father had been much more a scholar than a
warrior and hadn't bothered to change the arrangement.
But obviously someone had been sensible enough to scrap this custom
before it became hallowed by tradition. Although the room still contained
half a dozen cots and their associated clothing boxes, there were only two
people in the former barracks, and they were children, a boy and girl who
both seemed to be about twelve years old. They sat facing each other on
the floor, in the center of a pool of sunlight coming through an open
window.
"I think it works by light," the boy was saying. He was slender, with
dark thick hair in need of cutting. It fell across his face as he bent over the
object they were studying, and he shoved it back absently. It fell back as
soon as he removed his hand, but he ignored it.
"It can't be just that," the girl objected. She had bright red hair, done
in sloppy braids that fell to her waist. Haramis hadn't seen hair like that
on anyone since her sister Kadiya, and from the look of her, this girl took
just about as much care of her appearance as Kadiya had. Both children
were dressed in clothing that was obviously handed down from older
siblings, and neither seemed to feel any need to take any thought to
keeping it clean. The wooden floor appeared not to have been swept in
months, if not years, but the dust was disarranged in patterns that
suggested that these children, or someone else, were in the habit of
sprawling on the floor, heedless of dust and splinters. And the girl was
even thinner than the boy. Doesn't anyone feed these children? Haramis
wondered.
"It doesn't work in the dark." The boy was still arguing his point.
"Oh, I agree that it needs light in order to work, but if it were just light
that activated it, all of the tunes except the bottom one would play at
once."
Haramis's vision-self crossed the room to see what the girl was holding.
She recognized it at once; it had been one of her favorite toys when she
was a child. It was a music box, surviving from the time of the Vanished
Ones, a cube that played a different tune depending on which side one set
it upon.
"Look, Fiolon," the girl pointed out, holding the cube so that one edge
touched the floor between them. "If it were just light, it should be playing
at least one tune now—it's getting direct sunlight." She shifted it to lie flat,
and a tune started. "See? It has to have one face flat on the floor or"—she
lifted it straight up and the music continued unchanging—"parallel to the
floor."
"Horizontal, you mean," the boy said.
"It's the same thing, if the floor is flat. Now look." She turned the box to
one side, moving it slowly and carefully. "The tune stops when you tilt it
more than two finger widths, and when the new side is horizontal there's a
pause before the music starts again. And during that pause," she finished
triumphantly, "I can feel something shifting in the cube. The music
doesn't start again until whatever it is reaches the bottom." She shook the
cube next to her ear. "There's some kind of liquid in here. I'd love to open
this up and see what's inside and how it works."
Fiolon reached out and grabbed the toy from her hand. "Don't you dare,
Mikayla! This is the only one we've got, and I like it. If you break it, I won't
marry you when we grow up."
"I'd put it back together," Mikayla protested.
"You don't know that you could put it back together," Fiolon pointed
out with quiet practicality. "You don't know what the liquid is—it's too
heavy to be water—and you'd certainly spill at least some if you opened
this. And we don't have anything else that lets us know what the music of
the Vanished Ones was like."
Mikayla laughed. "You just don't want to risk destroying any source of
music, I think your father must have been a musician."
Fiolon shrugged. "We'll never know."
Mikayla took the cube back and hefted it in one hand. "I think you're
right about the liquid. This does feel too heavy to be water, and the
whatever-it-is inside moves too slowly for it to be floating in water." She
sighed. "I wish we could find more of these."
"Me, too," Fiolon agreed. "Maybe then we'd get some more tunes."
"And if we found a duplicate, I could take it apart and find out what's
inside."
"Why do you always want to know how things work?"
Mikayla shrugged. "I just do. Why do you always want to write a song
about everything?"
Fiolon matched her shrug. "I just do."
They looked at each other and burst out laughing.
Haramis started to chuckle, and found herself back in her Tower
looking at the bowl of water. Her breath had disturbed the surface,
breaking the vision.
Well, she thought, they certainly seem intelligent enough, but I have
difficulty seeing her as Archimage. I'll have to find out more about her—
and about him. From his remark about marriage, it sounds as though
they might be betrothed, but it's certainly odd that he doesn't seem to
know who his father is. And while their clothes are clearfy handed down,
they were good clothes originally, and the children don't speak like
servants.
Haramis dressed quickly and went to eat breakfast. She had letters to
write and messages to send.
Information about the land was as accessible to Haramis as her
heartbeat. Information about people was much more difficult to obtain. It
took several weeks for Ayah, a Nyssomu servant at the palace, to receive
the Archimage's message, get leave to visit her sister, and get far enough
away from the Citadel so that a lammergeier could fetch her without being
seen. Nobody in the royal family knew that Ayah's sister worked for the
Archimage, and Haramis wanted to keep things that way. But finally a
lammergeier arrived at the Tower with a well-wrapped-up Nyssomu on its
back. Haramis went out to meet the bird and carried the little woman
indoors herself. The main drawback to living where she did was that her
Nyssomu servants could not safely go outside. Even after almost two
hundreds, Haramis still recalled vividly the day her friend and companion
Uzun had nearly frozen to death while they were searching for her
Talisman. She had lost an entire day's travel backtracking to a lower
altitude and thawing Uzun out, before sending him back to the lowlands
and continuing alone. The Vispi were the only Oddlings that could survive
in the mountains, and even they preferred to live in isolated small valleys
warmed by hot springs.
So Haramis carried a well-wrapped bundle into the Tower and turned
her guest over to Enya, her visitor's sister, to be taken to her room and
given some refreshment after her journey. What Haramis wanted to know
had waited this long; it could wait a few more hours.
When the three of them were gathered in Haramis's study, sipping
from mugs of hot ladu-juice, Haramis asked Ayah about the children she
had seen in her vision.
"Princess Mikayla and Lord Fiolon?" the Oddling asked in surprise. She
obviously wondered what interest Haramis had in the two children, but
Haramis chose not to explain—at least not at the moment. She merely
waited until the woman continued.
"Mika—Princess Mikayla—is the sixth of the King's seven children. The
King concentrates on the education of his heir; the Queen fusses over her
'baby'—who is now ten years old, and the other four are close together in
age and tend to band together." The Oddling woman shook her head. "So
nobody cares much what Mika does, and Fiolon's parents are dead—or at
least his mother is. If they didn't have each other, she would be a very
lonely child, and so, I suspect, would he."
Haramis considered that. "I always had Uzun for my best friend," she
said, smiling fondly at a polished wood harp with a bone inlay at the top of
its post that stood next to her chair. She ran a hand along its back as if
stroking a household pet. "But still, I can't imagine what childhood would
have been like without my sisters. They were always there—whether I
wanted them to be or not." She pulled her thoughts back to the present.
"So how does Fiolon fit in? Exactly who is he?"
Ayah continued her report. "Lord Fiolon of Var. His mother was the
youngest sister of the King of Var—our Queen is the middle child. Fiolon's
mother died when he was born, but it was over six years before our Queen
persuaded the King to allow her to foster her late sister's child."
"And Fiolon's father?" Haramis had been wondering about that point
ever since she had heard the children's conversation.
Ayah shrugged. "Nobody knows. His mother wasn't married."
Haramis raised her eyebrows. "The sister of the King of Var had a baby
and nobody has any idea who fathered it? Given the lack of privacy in any
palace I've ever seen, that seems incredible. Surely somebody must at least
suspect who her lover was."
"Gossip has it that she died claiming that one of the Lords of the Air
fathered her child."
Haramis raised her eyebrows. "I had never heard that the Lords of the
Air took corporeal form—let alone fathered children."
Ayah sighed. "She was dying, Lady, and probably delirious. But I
agree—it is odd that nobody knows who fathered him. Very odd."
Haramis shrugged. "I doubt that it matters. Every large family has
surplus children. Are he and Mikayla betrothed?"
Ayah shook her head. "There's some talk of it—Mikayla falls into your
'surplus' category as well, as much as any princess can —but there's no
formal contract. I think it might well be a good thing; they're very fond of
each other."
"That's a pity," Haramis said. "Since Mikayla is to be the next
Archimage, she'll have to give him up."
Ayah's jaw dropped. "Mika? The Archimage?" She hesitated a long
moment before continuing. "White Lady, I really don't think she'll like
that."
"It doesn't matter whether she likes it or not," Haramis said calmly.
"One does not volunteer for this life. It is her destiny, as it was mine."
Chapter Two
Haramis felt she could delay no longer. She did not want to think of
her successor left as she herself had been—suddenly plunged into being the
Archimage of Ruwenda without a clue as to what that might entail. And
so she must, cruel and premature as it might seem to her (and obviously
to Ayah), begin to educate Mikayla for the office she would hold one day.
Ayah remained for several days at the Tower, with Enya to keep her
company, while Haramis made her preparations for the journey to fetch
her successor. She could, of course, simply have summoned a few of the
great lammergeiers to carry her to the Citadel and bring her and Mikayla
back to the Tower. But she wanted Mikayla to see in detail the land she
would be bound to, and so, on the day she sent Ayah off by lammergeier,
she mounted one fronial and loaded supplies and camping gear on a
second and set out for the Citadel to the south where her sister Anigel had
lived and died.
The first few days of travel were in the mountains. It was very cold, even
though the weather was mild for winter and no new snow fell. (Haramis
felt that she was suffering quite enough traveling through the snow that
was already there without permitting additional snow to fall.) Despite a
well-lined sleep sack, she ached in every joint when she woke in the
mornings. But by the end of the fifth day she was out of the snow and
watching the sun sink red and swollen over the marshes to her west.
Most of the way now she traveled by long-unused secret paths through
the marshes of Ruwenda. Once she had known every step of these paths as
well as the shelves of her own library. From the aching of her muscles, if
nothing else, it was evident to her that she had indeed dwelt for far too
long in retirement within the walls of her own comfortable Tower. It was
true that while all was well with the land there was no need for her to leave
the Tower, but still, she thought, she should get out more. How many
years had it been since she had seen the land other than in vision trances?
Despite her aching body, it was good to be out and about.
In physical appearance, she had put on the semblance of an ordinary
woman, no longer young, although still appearing hale and fit despite her
snow-white hair. This was the appearance she had always used when
traveling about the land, even when she had still been a young girl. It
ensured that she would be treated with a certain amount of respect, but
not with the superstitious awe that the recognized presence of the
Archimage would evoke. But by the end of each day, she wondered
whether this semblance of fitness were not as much a lie as anything that
would have indicated her more Arcane powers—or her true age.
She could, she reminded herself again, have justified summoning one of
the lammergeiers who served her, and she was frequently tempted,
especially late in the afternoons, to emphasize the urgency of her mission
in that way.
But it seemed to her that setting all Ruwenda astir by landing in the
courtyard of her however-many-times-great-niece's home in such a
fashion would give the girl—and possibly even her parents, who ought to
know better—an entirely erroneous idea of what the duties and difficulties
of being Archimage were, as well as an essentially flawed idea of the
proper uses of magical power. There was nothing at all magical about the
fronials; Orogastus had kept a stable of them (since he could not summon
the lammergeiers, fronials were his only means of transport to and from
the Tower), and Haramis had simply continued his breeding program.
Orogastus, always flamboyant, would almost certainly have arrived on
this errand by lammergeier if he could have. But that was not Haramis's
way.
So she went on, unattended, frequently leading the fronials when
low-hanging vegetation made riding impossible, with nothing outwardly
magical about her except her white cloak and staff. Her Talisman, the
Three-Winged Circle, worn on a chain about her neck, was hidden by her
clothing. She wore her stoutest boots, bespelled somewhat against the rain
and fog of this season, and against their wearer's being lost on the
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ScannedbyHighroller.ProofedbyELFprooferMadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.TheLadyoftheTrilliumbyMarionZimmerBradleyChapterOneThestoneTowerofNothstooddesolate,surroundedbydyingweeds.Thelittlebitofwaterremaininginthemoatwascoveredwithscum,andthesmellofdeathfilledtheair.Thegirlranacrossthedr...

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