plains and moved into the castles they’d stolen from the Iascans? ‘Great Vayir strongholds’ indeed!”
Inda had always liked those verses. He grimaced. “Dogs including my own ancestors.” He pointed at her. “But it wasn’t strut when the Haucs and the Davan-Ans and the Vayirs put ‘Montrei’ before their names?”
Shen’s lips tightened. “It was always part of our name. It had all slurred together by the time the Haucs and the Vayirs thought to put ‘Montrei’ to theirs. Montrei means ‘leader.’ ”
“It means ‘fist’ in ancient Venn,” Inda retorted. For the first time he was glad of all those afternoons studying with his mother when the rest of the boys were out running around, free as air. “Marlovans changed that to mean the strongest leader. Montrei-Hauc, leaders of the mountain families, Montredavan-An, leaders of farmers and forest, and Montrei-Vayir, leaders of the plains. It was supposed to unite them. But it didn’t.”
Shendan lifted her shoulders, then gave him a reluctant grin. “You’re the first boy I’ve ever talked to who knew that. Besides my brother.”
“My ancestors pretty much had to add Vayir onto their names, I was told,” Inda said. He was ready to make peace if she was.
Shen nodded, and indeed returned a kind of peace offering. “I learned that too, and why: because they got their title by marriage even before my great-father rode into Darchelde. I think old Anderle, so good at backstabbing, probably expected your Algaras to turn Iascan, and maybe expand Choraed Elgaer’s borders at the expense of the incoming Marlovans, and so your ancestors had to add Vayir or find his army at your castle gates.”
Inda’s mother had told him that some families spoke of unity when tacking “Vayir” onto their names, but most of them had done it to avoid Anderle’s wrath—and his retribution. Only the very strongest landholding families, like the Tlens and the Sindan-Ans, could really choose whether to add it or just keep their names as they were.
But he didn’t say any of that now.
Shendan was used to being the smartest of any boy or girl she met, not that she met many, exiled here on her own land. A daughter of a king without a crown. And here was one who would ride out free and easy, and she just had to test him one more time.
So she laughed softly, hugging her arms to her, and stepped closer, staring straight into his eyes. “Did you know,” she asked in that goading voice, “that that very next generation stopped speaking Marlovan? Except for all their silly titles they were acting more Iascan than the Iascans, because the real Iascans thought us a lot of barbarians.”
Inda retorted, “Iascans had writing. Marlovans did not. They used Iascan for records, and Marlovan for war. It’s a matter of what’s easier, not if they were barbarians.”
“ ‘Marlovan for war.’ Not until recently. No one spoke it at all, except at your academy, did you know that? Until the last generation or so, Marlovan was for ignorant boys in a stupid war school!”
At home Inda would have taken that as a challenge to be settled out in the fields, the other boys and girls yelling encouragement, but he remembered he was a guest, and so he had to behave like one. No matter how much frost this daughter of kings flung at him.
Shendan snorted again, then she noticed Inda’s red face and his tightly pressed lips, and all the anger drained out of her. She’d expected arrogance, maybe even pity, and all she’d found was more civility than she’d offered—that and equal knowledge.
So she finally spoke the truth. “Anyway Mother says we live with the result, which is the treaty that binds us here to our land for ten generations, on pain of death if anyone enters or leaves without due escort. We can only defend our land, we can’t go beyond it. So while I can go to the queen’s training in a few years, my brother has never been to your academy, can never go, is supposedly