Sasha

the bushes and swept the paths, and servants scurried about their early morning duties. Few of the guesting nobility had risen.

Their morning run took them on the road circuit within the city walls. Sasha pointed out the Soros Library, the Royal Guard barracks and the merchants' square, now filling with traders unloading carts of fruit and vegeta bles, bags of grain and racks of fowl or fish. Many of the traders were Goerenyai and gave a cheer as they saw her pass. Sasha waved cheerfully in return.

Their run completed, she sparred with Teriyan and Andreyis in the great training hall beside the Royal Guard barracks. By now the hall was filling with soldiers, and some nobles, and the trio met with men of the Falcon Guard, who greeted them warmly. The ensuing session was lively, yet Sasha refrained from making too much of a scene. Some Verenthane soldiers, and a few nobles, gave her dark looks across the floor.

'Word is the Kradyc family's right mad with you, M'Lady,' said one man-at-arms as he recovered his breathing, rubbing the bruise on his side.

'Kradyc?' Sasha asked him, lowering her stanch to a ready posture. A true svaalverd fighter was never truly resting, and the blade was always ready.

'The Ranash family. Their uncle was the adjudicator you near pulled from his horse yesterday.'

'Oh, the lagand match.' She shrugged and twirled her stanch. 'The adjudicator was Ranash? No wonder he wouldn't give us a call.'

'Master Pyter Pelyn means to take the field without us,' said the grizzled corporal nearby, leaning on his stanch. He had a scar across one cheek that took half an ear and the upper side of his jaw, turning his speech to a mumble. 'No Falcon Guard'll ride with the fool, not after what he did to Master Jaryd. Tyree will miss the title matches for sure.'

'First time in three Rathynals,' the man-at-arms sighed. 'Probably Taneryn will win now, that'll make Lord Krayliss real happy.'

'Is Krayliss competing?' Andreyis asked.

'No,' said the corporal, 'not before his trial. Might I ask when the trial is, M'Lady?'

'No idea,' said Sasha, in all honesty. No one had told her. She suspected controversy on the question of Lord Krayliss's trial. Krayliss was full of bluster and determined to pick a fight. Should the trial be closed from public view to deprive Krayliss of a podium for his grievances? Or would a closed trial make the king and his lordships appear weak?

'Any idea of where the new Lord Telgar might be, M'Lady?' the corporal pressed, raising his lock-jawed mumble to carry above the yells and clashing wood of the hall. 'Given neither he nor the Hadryn have come for Rathynal?'

'I don't know why you ask me,' Sasha said a little testily. 'No one tells me anything around here.'

'Something about you being the king's daughter,' Teriyan said sarcastically.

'Am I really?' Sasha gave Teriyan a warning look.

'Is it true the Hadryn are going after the Udalyn Valley?' the man-atarms wanted to know.

'That's just a rumour, lad,' the corporal said gruffly. 'We shouldn't be bothering M'Lady Sashandra with rumours. Besides, Lord Usyn wouldn't dare. I'm no Goeren-yai, but I serve with plenty, and they'd never stand for it.' He gave Teriyan a wizened stare.

Teriyan shrugged broadly. 'We'd have to make a unified stand to stop it,' he said. 'Just in my part of Valhanan alone, we've got villages that have barely spoken or traded with each other for centuries, and others that still skirmish to this day, despite the king's law forbidding it. How is that rabble going to stop the lordships from doing anything?'

'You sound just like a Verenthane bigot!' Andreyis retorted angrily.

'I'm Goeren-yai, I'm allowed to,' said Teriyan, putting his stanch across his broad shoulders and hooking his arms onto the ends. 'I just speak the truth, lad. To find the solution, first we must recognise the problem. Otherwise we're like a man with a broken leg who refuses splints or crutches to save his pride and ends up a cripple for life.' He glanced at Sasha. 'That's what Kessligh always said, anyway.'

'Kessligh said a lot of things,' Sasha said quietly.

'Aye,' said Teriyan, 'he always told a person what he thought, whether it was what they wanted to hear or not. I always liked that about him. He wasn't always right, but he always tried to make a person think. Lots of Goeren-yai never liked what he had to say about them-folks never do like being told their own worst flaws, most especially when they're true. But being scared to face the truth is cowardice, I reckon. And no Goeren-yai likes a coward.'

Sasha left Teriyan and Andreyis to their sparring and headed back to merchant's square-Andreyis needed as much practice as possible, and she herself found sparring against non-svaalverd fighters only so helpful. It exercised her eye, reflexes and muscles, but she knew she'd achieve more for her technique by practising taka-dans alone.

As she walked along a cobbled road through morning crowds, she thought on what Teriyan had said. 'To find the solution, first we must recognise the problem.' It was Nasi-Keth thinking, through and through. Teriyan was a well-read man, and had accumulated many books, a rare thing for a rural Goeren-yai. He was also one of the proudest Goeren-yai she'd ever met. Surely he was angry, and frustrated, to be saying such things at such a time. Sasha knew he had friends about the land, contacts with whom he kept in touch, as Kessligh did with his Nasi-Keth friends in Petrodor. He would be talking now with Goeren-yai soldiers and others attending Rathynal, with all these events and rumours afoot. Suddenly she was worried for him. She hoped he wouldn't do anything stupid, or get drunk and start a fight with that big, loud mouth of his.

She headed to the Garrison Barracks, where Jaryd was quartered with the Falcon Guard. It was a broad, grey-stone building with several wings about a central courtyard, all teeming with Falcon Guardsmen and men of the Black Hammers of southern Rayen province.

All the provincial companies of Lenayin were required to serve six months garrison duty in Baen-Tar at one time or other… all save the northern companies, who were on constant watch against the Cherrovan threat and could not be spared. Such rotations helped the unity of Lenayin, it was said. What was not said (or at least not as often) was that it also underlined how little true power the Lenay king held. The Royal Guard were hisnearly a thousand men, drawn from all over Lenayin. But they were rarely used away from Baen-Tar, lest the capital be left undefended. The Lenay throne, ultimately, had only as much power and protection as the great lords wished it to have. The great lords allowed the king to rule because the archbishop said the king was the gods' chosen representative in Lenayin and, more to the point, because it was better to tolerate a king in Baen-Tar than the awful, bloody squabble that would surely erupt if he were removed and the provinces fought for power amongst themselves as they once had.

Even Sasha, uninterested in the affairs of nobility as she typically was, could see that it was an imperfect arrangement at best. Such were the compromises that her great-grandfather Soros had been forced to make in order to sell the fractious peoples of Lenayin on the new, central power of Baen-Tar. So far, successive Lenayin kings had refrained from spending any more of the royal tax revenue on building royal armies-King Soros had known that a powerful king with enormous armies would have been opposed tooth and nail by the provinces whatever their newfound Verenthane fervour. The alternative would have been for the great lords to raise those royal taxes themselves… but considering the purposes to which they would wish to put such taxes, there was no way the Goeren-yai were about to wear that, either. And so, what remained was a shaky agreement between the great lords and the king that if the provinces did not cause trouble, the king would not raise armies, and would instead continue to spend the royal tax on things the people needed… or at least were thought to need, on the rare occasion they were actually asked.

That shaky arrangement, Sasha could see more clearly of late than ever, was now being tested. It had lasted roughly a century now, a period of unprecedented peace and stability in Lenayin. Kessligh, for one, had voiced amazement that it had even lasted that long. A great wind, he'd said, would break a brittle tree. And at some point, the king would have to decide whether his own relative powerlessness was a worthwhile price to pay for stability…

A Falcon Guardsman admitted her to the commander's chambers with a friendly greeting, and she found Jaryd seated upright in his wide bed, dressed in a plain shirt with the sheets pulled to his middle, his left arm in a sling across the chest. A boy of perhaps ten, with sandy hair and freckles, sat on Jaryd's bedside, talking animatedly.