Queen of Storms

by Raymond E. Feist

“There’s an abandoned charcoal burner’s hut on the road a few miles on. Deep enough in the woods and small enough you’d likely miss it if you didn’t know it was there.”

  “How would they know it was there?”

  “That Catharian . . . more to him than meets the eye” was all Molly said.

  When Molly turned her horse’s head toward the road north of where they entered the woods, Hava followed, hoping the young archer was correct and they might find Hatu there.

  Donte sat in the back of a wagon, bouncing a bit as the road turned uneven, but glad not to be walking. He had had to bribe one sergeant and bully two younger fighters into letting him “guard” the contents of the wagon, foodstuff and resupplies for a company in the field. He had no idea where he was bound, save that it was to the north, and somehow he knew that was where he must travel.

  The war seemed to be unfolding up there. A large army had left before he had arrived in Marquenet, and he had been able to secure a place with a ragtag company of mercenaries, overseen by a “captain” who went by the name Quinn. He had no intent of serving with the company, but this temporary enlistment gave him a relatively easy passage, compared with walking to wherever this Beran’s Hill was, or risking stealing a horse, which normally would have been no issue, save that the entire road between here and his destination appeared to be choked with the baron’s soldiers. As he was traveling behind with the baggage and lesser swords for hire, he was spared scrutiny, but even so he would have rather avoided unnecessary delay.

  His only regret was that he had spent so little time in Marquenet, as he was impressed with what little he had managed to see in the city. Since recovering his memories—all but a blurred jumble of impressions from the time he had been captured until walking out of the surf—he had found all the changes from the village where he had first found shelter refreshing. After the relative quiet and simple pleasures of that village, he now saw the world was a far bigger and more complicated place than he had thought, and he found he liked that fact.

  Donte didn’t deal in complex thinking as a rule, but he was by no means a stupid man. He thought he might have traveled with his masters and bosses as a youngster, but he had no clear memories of doing so, which was annoying. Indeed, the further he moved on from his imprisonment by the Sisters of the Deep, the more infuriated he became over his missing memories of that time. All he had been left with were impressions: a barely remembered chill, fleeting pain, and a stench of decay—things that came to the very edge of his understanding, then fled. He was left with conflicted feelings of anger and . . . some compulsion about Hatushaly. It was a constant frustration to him, one that would eventually blossom into full-blown anger. He pushed away his rising annoyance and considered his brief visit to the city he had just left.

  Even the most prosaic fixtures there—the stalls of foodstuffs, a baker’s cart, a clothier’s shop—seemed fascinating to him and hinted of wealth beyond anything he’d seen before. Even the most commonplace clothing was of finer weave than anything he was used to, and the people looked happier. Also, it was the cleanest place Donte had ever seen!

  He sensed that Marquenet would be a wonderful place to explore, and what little he had seen suggested it was rich with luxury items to steal and beautiful women to bed. He wondered if any masters had a crew there, and if so, who they were, and if not, perhaps he could persuade his grandfather to let him set one up. But as much as he had wished to linger in Marquenet, he could not escape the almost painful need he felt to find Hatushaly, and it lessened only when he was moving in what he assumed was the correct direction.

  He felt a strange enjoyment at finding himself traveling with this army. His training had given him a keen ability to assess these mercenaries as if he had some enchanted lens through which to examine each man.

  In every company there were some hired swords who were quite simply bullies, but who were easily avoided or put in their place as needed, but there were fewer of that type among the main army than he would have expected. Most of these men were truly hard-bitten veterans of combat, battles won or lost, bloody and unsparing; men who wouldn’t waste time and blood over trivial issues. These men put Donte in mind of the more experienced crew bosses and younger masters at home, while the rest were like the familiar street thugs back there. Then there were those who were neither veteran fighters nor thugs: those who remained were thieves, confidence tricksters, pickpockets, and wily types, the last being the cleverest—they needed to be to avoid being killed by their fellow soldiers. But there were also ample camp followers, a sea of people from whores to tailors and armorers, to fortune tellers and sellers of trinkets and charms, to providers of drugs and drink—every manner of purveyor one could imagine following an army.

  Donte looked at the company to which he had falsely pledged allegiance, trudging along on foot with a sad little donkey cart carrying their baggage, with only Captain Quinn riding as poor a horse as the donkey, and tried not to laugh. They were one step above scavengers, battlefield ghouls, and he expected they’d contrive to be at the rear once real fighting started. There wasn’t one man he’d met in this small company who impressed him. Donte was openly boastful with his friends and always put on a show of bravado even when he didn’t feel it inside, but with these men, he knew he could take away the sword any one of them held and hit them with it.

  His perception of the bountiful serenity of this barony had begun to change earlier when the wagon trundled past the first graves. Enough slaughter had been inflicted on those fleeing south that individual graves had been counted a luxury beyond the capacity of those burying the dead. Graves for a half dozen bodies at a time had been dug and covered over, so freshly dug burial mounds arose on both sides of the road, easily identified by the large, bare patches of earth amid all the Marquensas lushness.

  By midafternoon they had reached the burial details, who were hard at work, and even larger mass graves were being dug. Donte was impressed. He’d heard stories of war, like all students of Coaltachin, and was always caught halfway between wonder at the level of bloodshed and bravery claimed by those telling the stories and the conviction that those stories were exaggerations. But there was nothing exaggerated about the amount of blood spilled here. He couldn’t begin to count how many had been slain, but it was at least in the hundreds.

  “We’re here,” said a voice up ahead, and Donte jumped off the back of the wagon, took a deep breath, and reeled at the stench of burned flesh and the acrid sting of water-soaked charred wood.

  Donte glanced to where Captain Quinn sat on his tired horse, waiting for someone from the baron’s retinue to tell him what to do. Without a word, Donte walked off, looking for the most likely place for information, which was probably the soldiers’ mess tent. As he moved away from the wagon, the captain’s second-in-command, a bully named Beslan, shouted, “Where are you going?”

  Without looking at the jumped-up “sergeant,” Donte shouted, “I’m going to take a shit!”

  He had discovered over the years that few people wanted to follow him once he shared that information. He doubted he’d ever see Beslan again, but if he did, he’d happily gut the man.

  He followed his nose. The faint aroma of cooked food cut through the stench. The morning mess was over, and the kitchen staff was busy preparing a massive evening meal for the baron’s army. Donte saw a young kitchen boy. “I’m looking for someone,” he said with as much faux authority as he could muster.

  The boy’s face drained of color, making an exaggerated contrast between his brown hair and eyes and his now nearly ashen complexion. “Sir?”

  “I’m looking for a man, a friend.”

  The boy seemed void of answers and merely nodded.

  “His name is Hatushaly.”

  The boy said nothing, but from behind Donte a voice asked, “Hatu?”

  Donte turned around to see a young man, bloodied and bandaged, who was doing the best he could to help around the tent by attempting to pull a large sack along
to the washtubs. Donte crossed to meet him and took the bag from him. “You know Hatu?”

  “Not well, but I’ve drunk at his inn . . . or what was his inn before they burned it down.”

  Donte was surprised to hear Hatu had been an innkeeper and wondered, not for the first time, how long he had been a prisoner of the Sisters of the Deep, but he pushed all that aside and said, “Do you know if he survived”—Donte made a waving gesture with his left hand toward the rubble—“all this?”

  “I heard one of the soldiers tell his wife—”

  “Wife?” interrupted Donte.

  “Yes, Hava.”

  Donte’s eyebrows rose, but he said nothing.

  “Someone said this monk—I forget his name—saved Hatu during the battle and carried him off. I saw Hava last night . . .” He glanced around to where Hava and Molly had been under the overhang. “. . . over there.” He pointed. With a fatigued sigh he added, “I don’t know where they are now.”

  “Thanks,” said Donte, returning the heavy bag to the injured man. He moved to a soldier standing guard at the edge of the infirmary and asked, “A man named Hatu or a woman named Hava, do you know them?”

  The soldier shook his head, and Donte moved on to ask the next soldier he saw. After a few more were questioned, a mercenary said, “Saw the gal—innkeeper’s wife, right? Anyway, saw her and that archer friend of hers riding off across the field to the east, looking like they were going to get some hunting in.” The mercenary, a greying veteran, scratched his neck as he continued. “But what sort of game they’ll find this close to a battle is beyond me. Might be why they were packing gear. They may be out hunting for a few days.”

  Donte nodded. “Thanks.” He knew without question Hava wasn’t out hunting but looking for Hatu. He felt it in his bones.

  He walked a short distance, glancing to the east. Pickets had been established just far enough apart to keep the men on guard down to a reasonable number, but close enough that slipping past would prove problematic, even if he hit the perimeter at a gallop. He made a quick survey up and down the line as far as he could see and spotted the most likely place to dash past the pickets into the sheltering woods. He paused for a moment in his observation and then turned to go and find himself a horse.

  “What are you doing, lad?”

  Donte turned to see a grizzled old soldier wearing the baronial tabard, his weather-beaten face set in an expression of suspicion. Donte knew instantly that the man knew he was thinking about leaving this destroyed town. Donte turned his back on the horse he had just been inspecting. The remounts were not guarded but attended to by stable boys who had arrived earlier with the baron’s baggage wagons.

  “Looking for a horse, Sergeant,” he said, guessing the man’s rank although he wore no clear insignia.

  “Well, that’s a horse,” said the old fighter, “but what gives you the idea you’re free to simply pick out one of the baron’s own?”

  Donte tried to look slightly confused and a little bit stupid as he said, “My captain just said get a horse. Mine went lame and he said something about a patrol or something.”

  “Who’s your captain?”

  “Captain Quinn,” answered Donte without hesitation.

  “Quinn?” echoed the soldier, his tone one of outright mockery. “That ragpicker?” He shook his head. “Well, he failed to mention that you had to find one that doesn’t belong to my baron, didn’t he?”

  Donte shrugged. “I suppose so.”

  “Maybe we should go have a chat with your captain,” suggested the sergeant, taking a grip of Donte’s arm.

  Donte sighed. “Oh, hell.” He drew back his right fist and hit the old soldier as hard as he could.

  The old man staggered three steps back, shook his head, and said softly, “Oooh.” Then he fixed Donte with what the young man could only think of as a murderous gaze.

  Donte didn’t hesitate. He launched himself forward, drawing back his arm and hitting the old soldier as hard as he could.

  Again the old man staggered backward, stopped, shook his head, and once more said, “Oooh!” rather more angrily.

  “Oh, shit,” said Donte, and for one last time he came at the sergeant. This time, before he could even draw back his fist, Donte saw the old man move with a speed he couldn’t have imagined, taking a large stride forward to unload a blow that he barely avoided. The man’s fist still grazed the side of Donte’s face, and he felt something crack in his left cheek and a burning pain as his vision swam.

  Donte’s legs went wobbly and he staggered backward a step. He shook his head, trying to clear it.

  The old soldier said, “If you want to play stand-down, youngster, you’re going to have to put on a mite more weight and experience, though I’ll grant you’ve got ample sand in your craw.”

  Donte thought he should probably say something, but nothing came to mind as he tried to focus his attention as another blow came his way. Again he ducked at the last second, and this time the blow glanced off his neck and shoulder, and pain shot through the left side of his upper body.

  Abruptly two other soldiers appeared and one said, “Need help, Deakin?”

  “I think I’m just about done here. Thank you anyway.”

  A third blow lifted Donte off his feet, and he never felt himself strike the ground.

  Daylon Dumarch, Baron of Marquensas, with his half brother, Balven, at his side, rode into the destruction that had once been the pride of his northern border. As they approached the east side of the destroyed town, the baron said at almost a whisper, “Words fail me.”

  Balven said, “We couldn’t have expected this.”

  “I thought the governor at Port Colos was firmly with us,” Daylon said as they reached what appeared to be a field kitchen next to a field infirmary. Dismounting, the baron waited as Balven instructed the servants where to erect the pavilion.

  Then Balven stepped close to his brother and said quietly, “We should speak in private, but I will say, between fear of your army and ample gold, the governor should have been firmly with us. Something impossible to anticipate must have changed his mind.”

  Daylon nodded. “I’ll start taking reports now. You see what this is all about”—he waved at the field tents—“and who’s arranged this camp, then catch up with me.”

  “Understood, my lord.”

  Daylon motioned for one of his personal guards to accompany him, then did a quick walk through the infirmary, speaking briefly with a few of the men he knew by sight. At the makeshift field kitchen he stopped, surprised at how well provisioned it was. “Where did the food come from?” he asked.

  A kitchen boy said, “The woman, sir.”

  “What woman?” asked Daylon.

  At that moment one of the cooks came over and shooed the boy away.

  “Who provided all this food?” asked the baron.

  “Some woman who ran an inn, my lord. It seems she’d just provisioned her cold cellar for the festival. But it’s a good thing you’re here, as we were going to run out in another day or so.”

  Daylon said, “I should thank her.”

  “Last I saw,” said the cook, “she and a friend went walking off that way.” He pointed toward what had been the center of town before it was razed.

  Daylon and his bodyguard picked their way through the rubble and found themselves standing in what had been a major street. The baron stopped and took a long look around. “Nothing left . . .” Daylon whispered.

  “My lord?” asked the guard.

  “Nothing.” He looked at a knot of men near a makeshift corral in which a good number of remounts were kept and saw something that struck him as odd. Three of his soldiers were pounding a stake post into the ground. He couldn’t quite make out what this was, so he walked in that direction.

  As he approached, one soldier saw him and said, “My lord!”

  Instantly the others turned and bowed in his direction. The center of their activity seemed to have something to do with a you
ng man who had obviously been beaten almost insensible.

  “What’s this, then?” he asked.

  An old veteran Daylon recognized, a former sergeant who had been reduced in rank for brawling several times, said, “Sir?”

  “Deakin, isn’t it?”

  “Sir,” he said, nodding. “We caught this lad trying to steal a horse, but there’s nothing around high enough to hang him from, unless we drag him out to the forest, and we thought it would be quicker to just set up a post and garrote him.”

  Daylon’s eyes widened slightly. “Who gave the order for that?”

  “Ah, well, truth to tell, my lord, no one officially. Sergeant Mackie’s hands are full with everything else, and we have no proper provost, so I just assumed . . .”

  Seeing the swelling around both Deakin’s eyes, Daylon said, “Assumed, yes. So the lad hit you, and you thought you’d settle things by crushing his throat.”

  “Well, he did try to steal a mount, my lord. One of your own horses.”

  Daylon was tempted to say several intemperate things at that moment, but realized he was on the verge of taking out every shred of anger, pain, and guilt he felt over losing Beran’s Hill on this soldier, even though Deakin was a known malingerer and troublemaker.

  Looking at Donte, who required two soldiers—one on each side—to keep him upright, he asked, “Did you try to steal a horse?”

  Through swollen lips, Donte answered, “Tried to borrow one.”

  Deakin backhanded Donte and said, “Show some manners to the baron!”

  “Enough!” shouted Daylon. “Deakin, get out of my sight!”

  “Yes, sir,” said the old soldier, obviously familiar enough with his lord and master not to hesitate in obeying for more than a second.

  To Donte, the baron asked, “Why were you trying to borrow a horse?”

  “I was going to look for a friend.”

  “Friend? You from around here?”

  “No . . . my lord,” said Donte, then spat out a small clot of blood. “But she was here this morning. Told she went hunting.”