Mapping Winter

by Marta Randall

  “You assume,” Gadyn said, “you assume that I murdered the guildmaster. You have no proof. There is no proof.”

  “But there is,” Cairun said. He leaned toward the arm of Gadyn’s chair and lifted a small grey rope tipped in blue. It took a moment for Kieve to identify it as one of Jenci’s braids. “This, and bits of cloak, and the words of the Myned boy.”

  Gadyn spat. “A Trapper.”

  “And here is the man who was your hands,” Isbael said, her voice serene. Dav jerked at this, almost pulling Kieve off balance. Isbael looked him over. “He won’t withstand the question, will he? Nor is physical courage one of your strengths, little brother. Rider, has he admitted killing your guildmaster?”

  “Cairun knows,” she said, and cried out as Dav jerked her arms up, wrenching her shoulders. Through her involuntary tears she saw Cairun move to the pile of weapons and lift one.

  “So we have the evidence of your bone room, and your tongue, and your accomplice, and the testimony of the Myned boy.”

  “And this,” Bredda said behind them. They turned. She had pulled herself away from the wall. Her hand rested on a pelvis on which someone had drawn the feathered serpent of time, swallowing its own tail. Jenci’s seal. All around Bredda the floor was covered with splinters of ancient bones.

  “And I have the guildmaster’s stylus,” Kieve said. “Tipped in soot.”

  Isbael laughed. “Run indeed, little brother,” she said. “And be grateful I leave you with your balls.”

  “It was your idea,” Gadyn said to Cairun, with fury.

  “It was not,” Cairun said.

  “No,” Isbael said, her smile even broader. “It was not.”

  Kieve’s breath caught. Gadyn cursed and drew his sword and lunged toward his sister. Cairun lifted his blade and came between them. “Gadyn, don’t be a fool,” he said, beating Gadyn’s sword aside. Gadyn leaped back, both hands grasping his sword’s hilt, intent on Cairun.

  “Traitor,” he said.

  Dav pushed Kieve aside and drew his sword and started toward the fight. She rolled with the push toward the pile of swords and grabbed one up and ran back to crouch in front of Bredda and Pyrs, the sword in her fist. Gadyn and Cairun engaged with flat, heavy strokes that moved like liquid in the torchlight and sounded like harsh bells, echoing from the walls of bones. Isbael had retreated to stand behind Gadyn’s abandoned chair. She watched the fight with wide black eyes. Dav stalked Cairun. Cairun spared a moment to lunge at him. Dav jumped back into the doorway and into the arms of Endres, who grabbed him by his elbows. It distracted Cairun for a moment. Gadyn leaped forward and slashed at his arm, nicking the forearm before Cairun danced away. First blood. Dav cursed and writhed, until Endres hissed something at him and he froze.

  “You’ve improved,” Cairun said, the full of his attention on Gadyn again. He forced him across the ossuary room. Their faces gleamed with sweat. Gadyn circled and engaged again, trying to push the fight toward his sister. Cairun saw it and beat at Gadyn’s left, forcing him away from the chair and back across the room toward Bredda and the boy. Kieve braced herself. The sound of the strokes pulsed against her ears. They came together, straining, and broke apart and stalked each other, breathing heavily. Their feet shuffled in the litter of dirt and bones. Gadyn moved in and the swords clanged again until the room was a pestilence of noise. Gadyn feinted and Cairun half-engaged and drew back, and in the moment that Gadyn’s extension overcame his balance Cairun drove in and spitted him. Gadyn looked down at the sword in his chest and turned his stretched eyes to Cairun. When Cairun jerked his sword free, Gadyn collapsed. For a moment his breath bubbled in the silence, then stopped.

  Kieve dragged air into her lungs, beginning to straighten. Cairun stood panting in the room’s center, hands braced against his thighs, a bright line of blood trailing down his forearm. Isbael looked beyond her brother’s body and beyond Cairun to Endres and, after a moment, widened her eyes. Dav twisted free of the captain’s grasp.

  “Cairun!” Kieve shouted, but before he could turn Dav was upon him. The warning gave him time to move only enough so that the sword missed his belly and pierced his side. Cairun shouted and fell. Kieve leaped forward as Dav raised his sword again.

  Something crashed. Dav turned, staring, as Kieve plunged her sword up through his belly. They froze for a moment, joined by the steel.

  Kieve wrenched her sword free. Dav grunted and fell across Gadyn’s body. As he did, Kieve saw behind him to Isbael and the toppled chair and Isbael’s bright smile.

  “Well done, Rider,” she said.

  Kieve flung the sword away and dropped to her knees beside Cairun. He lay with his hands pressed to his side. Blood welled between his fingers.

  “My lord?” Kieve said.

  “It is the Marubin gift,” he said, his teeth together. “Never extravagant, but sufficient. Sufficient.” She replaced his hands with her own, leaning to provide pressure over the wound. He glanced at Isbael. “Well contrived, cousin.”

  She shook her head. “I contrived nothing. I am the beneficiary of my brother’s intemperance and your greed. And Baron Rive’s inept suggestions, and Adwyr’s desire to please. At the most, I just touched things to set them in motion, like one of Drysi’s toys, then stood back and let it happen.” She sat in Gadyn’s chair. She had taken one of the swords and now she laid it across her lap. “Captain, it is time for litters, I think, and for Commander Ilach. Will you find them?”

  Endres glanced around the room, nodded, and left. She smoothed the material of her dress around the sword and said to Cairun, “Are you dying?”

  “As you see.”

  “It is as well,” she said. “Someday you would have caused someone a great deal of trouble.” She looked away from him toward Bredda and Pyrs. Kieve’s back stiffened but Isbael merely said, “You are Bredda Innkeeper, I think.”

  Bredda had come upright, leaning on Pyrs’ shoulder. Her wooden leg was gone. Pyrs stared at the floor.

  “Who brought you here?” Isbael said.

  “A ferret, a man in a blue hat,” Bredda said. Her voice sounded rough and dry. She looked at Kieve. “He came back to the inn and followed me. I should have thought of that.”

  Kieve shook her head. “Not your failure,” she said. “Mine.”

  Cairun coughed. “No Rider, not your failure. Isbael’s success. Admirable.”

  “But she killed you,” Kieve said. “She signaled Endres, she looked at him and he released Dav.”

  “Rider,” Isbael said, still with amusement. “You imagine things.” She shook her head a little. “Besides, who is to believe you? The man is dead. Captain Endres is mine, and I will protect him.” Footsteps sounded in the distance. She rose. “Will you last, cousin, until we reach the Great Hall?”

  “And for a while after that,” Cairun said. “Indeed, between your little man and the Rider’s warning, I may have as long a dying as Cadoc’s. And as ugly.”

  “He, at least, was not my little man,” Isbael said, as the door filled with soldiers.

  * * * *

  The stairway narrowed and turned a little before they reached the Great Hall. Isbael put her hand on Endres’ arm and they stood back to let the litters pass, so that when they came into the Great Hall the litter with Gadyn’s body entered first. Kieve, walking just behind Cairun’s litter, looked into the abrupt silence and saw Taryn stand from the chair beneath Isbael’s banner. He looked from Gadyn to Cairun and then beyond Kieve to the door, mouth tight and eyebrows drawn together. His expression altered as Isbael came into the room; his eyebrows rose just a little, then straightened as his mouth relaxed. Kieve’s hands curled into fists. Pyrs put his hand over hers, light and dry.

  “It appears the succession is settled,” Kyst said. Daenet, behind him, stared at Kieve. She looked away. Taryn came across the hall.

  Ilach had detailed two soldiers to take Bredda back to the barracks. Pyrs, without speaking, had refused to go with her. He sank his fists into Kieve’s cloak a
nd would not be parted from her until they neared the Hall and she touched his hands. He let her go then but followed at her heels. As they walked into the Great Hall she resisted the urge to reach back to touch him.

  The soldiers slid the litter with Gadyn’s body onto the dais to one side of Cadoc’s chair, and Cairun to the other. Braith had dressed his wound, wrapping his torso in linen through which the blood still crept. Kieve stopped beside him. She had removed her blood-soaked gloves but her hands felt stiff. They had left Dav in the ossuary room, pushed out of the way against a wall, eyes open.

  The bone with Jenci’s feathered serpent on it nestled against Gadyn’s side. One of the soldiers lifted it away. Isbael walked around the litter and, after waiting a moment to gather all eyes, sat in her father’s chair. The soldier gave the bone to her and she put it in her lap. A murmur grew.

  Baron Rive pushed his way to the dais and stood for a moment staring at Gadyn’s body and chewing on his beard. Cairun raised himself on his elbow, face pale, and said something to him. Rive listened, shook his head, listened more, then straightened.

  “Lord Cairun renounces his claim to the sword,” the baron said. “His wound is mortal.” He turned to Isbael, still frowning. She stared at him until he looked down. She nodded to the soldiers at Cairun’s litter. Kieve watched them carry him through jostling crowds more intent on the dais than on the dying man. She turned back. Isbael looked around the room, calmly, the pale bone cradled in her lap, Cairun already forgotten as the land-barons came close. Taryn stood behind his lady, his head bent to listen to her. Esylk stood at her other side. Rive pushed through the crowd, toward the staircase leading to Cadoc’s tower. She remembered Isbael’s expression as she looked beyond Kieve to Endres at the door, and the movement of her eyes that summoned Cairun’s death. Kieve took Pyrs under her cloak and followed Cairun’s litter from the room.

  Mazus wept, ushering them into Cairun’s rooms. Cairun’s face was white with pain and stiff with his refusal to show it, but once in his room he gasped, hands clutching the edges of his narrow bed, and turned his head from side to side. Kieve sent one of the soldiers for Asgaut, Cadoc’s physician.

  She put Pyrs in a chair beside the fire and wrapped him in a blanket. Mazus brought a posset and put a pitcher of wine to warm at the hearth. As he set it down Asgaut came in, followed by a servant. The servant put Asgaut’s box on a table.

  “Leave it,” Cairun said, gasping. “You cannot physic this away.”

  Asgaut ignored him, peeling away the layers of linen. Blood welled in the wound. When Asgaut probed it, Cairun screamed and fainted. Kieve put her hand on Pyrs’ shoulder as the physician cleaned the wound and bound it up.

  “He is right,” he said to Kieve. “This is beyond my power to heal.” He pulled flagons and bottles from his box and lay them across the table. “Are you injured?”

  “No. Cadoc?”

  “Thank the Mother, he is in his final agony,” Asgaut said. He poured some wine into a flask. “By midnight, I think, he will be gone.” He inspected the label on a small jar and tapped powder from it into the wine. “Baron Rive came to shout into his face, although Cadoc cannot hear him. There is talk of the succession?”

  She closed her eyes, resting her hands on the back of Pyrs’ chair. “Gadyn Marubin is dead, killed by Cairun, who is dying in turn by Gadyn’s man, who was killed by me. Drysi withdrew her claim when Jenci Guildmaster was killed.” She opened her eyes. “After Cadoc’s death you can steeple your hands to the lady Isbael, who will be the new Lord in Dalmorat.”

  Asgaut didn’t respond. He opened a small flagon and added a few drops to the wine. He stoppered the wine and shook it, then un-stoppered it and wet his finger in it and touched it to his tongue. Kieve found a second blanket and wrapped it around Pyrs, who stirred under her hands and was still again.

  Asgaut opened the flagon and put another few drops into the wine. “I cannot cure him,” he said. “But I can leave this.” He closed the flask and gave it to Kieve. “Mix it in a cup of wine. If he takes a sip it will quell most of the pain, but not all. If he drinks it all it will kill him. It is an easy death. Many prefer it.”

  “Cadoc didn’t, did he?”

  Asgaut shook his head. “No. He fought every step of the way. Not all men are so foolish, when their pain is upon them.”

  Kieve cleared her throat. “Will you look at my boy? Please.”

  The physician looked at her from under his brows before nodding and turning to the chair.

  At Asgaut’s command, the boy opened his clothing. Bruises ran down his sides. He flinched when Asgaut touched them.

  “Tell me how this happened,” the physician said.

  “The man in the blue cap,” Pyrs said to Kieve, around Asgaut’s arm. “He caught us outside the city and he brought us back in the storm, back to Sterk. But the road was too slick, we couldn’t go up and we had to stay below, in a hut by the docks. When the storm stopped the other man came and brought us up. I tried to get away. He caught me. When he finished hitting me, he took Bredda’s leg.”

  “The other man?” Kieve said.

  “The one you killed.”

  Asgaut’s hands hesitated, then resumed feeling along the boy’s chest. He finished and pulled the boy’s tunic down.

  “He is bruised, but there is nothing broken. Feed him and keep him warm.”

  His servant finished packing up the box. Asgaut tucked his hands back in his sleeves.

  “You will not wait on Cadoc?” he said.

  Kieve shook her head. “I will come for the Deathnote, after,” she said. The physician glanced at Cairun, who had not wakened, and nodded, and left.

  Pyrs fastened his clothes. He hadn’t touched the posset. Kieve came around the chair and squatted beside it.

  “Pyrs? Has it been long since you last ate? You should drink this.”

  He turned then and grabbed her hands.

  “Swear to me,” he said, but his voice clogged up and he coughed.

  “Pyrs?”

  He shook his head at her and caught his breath. “Swear to me. That you won’t leave me again, ever. Swear it.”

  She filled her lungs. “I can’t. I don’t know what my future is, I don’t know yet if I have one. I can’t hold you hostage to—”

  He shook his head. “Swear to me,” he said again.

  “Pyrs, if I swear to you, you will have to come with me. You will be my apprentice. You will become a Rider.” She rocked back. “Do you understand what you are asking of me? What you are asking of yourself? In a year I could be in the Outlands, chewing on valros blubber. Living with Trappers. It is not farfetched. Do you want to be a part of that?”

  “Swear to me,” he said. “That you will never leave me again.”

  “You could do better,” she said.

  “Swear it!” he shouted.

  She turned her hand in his until she could steeple her hands together, within the warmth of his small, dry palms.

  “I swear to you, Pyrs Freechild, that I will never willingly leave you.”

  He stared. “At all. Ever.”

  “Pyrs, I can’t do that. I don’t know what time will do to me, to us. But I will never leave you when I could have you with me. I have sworn it. As an oath.”

  He thought about that, then nodded and released her hands. From his ripped shirt he took the paper she had written above the wineshop in the city, the paper that gave him his freedom. Without opening it, he leaned forward and threw it into the fire.

  * * * *

  Cadoc died just before midnight. Mazus came into the room where Kieve sat beside Cairun, her hands tucked into her sleeves. Pyrs had fallen asleep on the rug before the fire. She looked up from the boy at Mazus’ step and realized that Cairun was awake and staring at her. Together they heard the Chancellor’s news.

  “Isbael wins,” Cairun said when Mazus left. She had given him a little of the drugged wine earlier. He said it made the world seem built of fog.

  “Do you care, ev
en now?” she said.

  “Yes, a little. I worked for that.”

  Kieve sat back. “For Isbael? Not for Gadyn?”

  “No. How could I support an idiot? But he had his father’s backing, which counted for something. And Baron Rive, and Adwyr. He would be little better than a puppet, and I thought I might pull a string or two. Then Isbael came. I like money and promises. She offered more of them.”

  He turned his head a little to look at Pyrs. “It was Rive’s idea to steal the child. Gadyn would have killed the boy, that first time, out of ignorance, leaving him in the bone rooms.”

  “So you took him to the Guards’ warrens, where he would be found.”

  “Just so.” He smiled, tilting the pale, perfect lips. “Endres was a surprise, wasn’t he? She’s clever, my cousin Isbael. Give me your hand.”

  She did so. His fingers were cold.

  “You too are a surprise.” He paused for a moment, lips tight, then sighed as the spasm passed. “I don’t understand why you are here.”

  She turned her hand a little, tilting his back and forwards again. “She played with all of us. With you. I could not leave you to die alone.”

  “I have done you no favors, Kieve Rider.”

  “You saved my boy. I am sorry that I could not save you.”

  He grimaced. “You carry no blame. Isbael would have found a way, eventually.”

  After a moment, she said, “You forgive her?”

  “Oh no, Rider,” he said. “No. I do not want to die.”

  He called Mazus to him and recited his last act of will, bequeathing money and goods to his servants and, to Kieve’s surprise, to a mother still living. He left five capits to buy prayers to ease his way through the Mountain, and he had Mazus open his box and pay out to Kieve the eight capits he had promised, in return for her porcelains and crystal.

  “You do not need to do this,” she said, looking across the room. Pyrs still slept, wrapped in blankets, a scrap of hair bright in the firelight.

  “I do not need to do anything anymore, except to die.” He tugged at one finger, and grimaced. “I am too weak to pull this off. Do it.”