Kings of the North

by Elizabeth Moon

  On the way to the back of the house, she smelled the chickens in the oven and decided to let Efla back in the kitchen to finish preparing a meal. Out in the yard, the older man and younger ones from the burial guild were scrubbing at something in a bucket; laid out on a cloth on the cobbles were a few tools. Jaim squatted near the gate, looking sick; Efla stood by him. Perin had tied one of the horses in the yard and was brushing its tail.

  They all looked up when she came out; Perin looked grim but went on brushing. Efla had the blank look of someone not sure what she felt. Dorrin walked over to the yeomen, who had put aside their blue tabards and rolled up sleeves and trousers. “I came to thank you,” she said. “Which of you is Sef?”

  “I am,” the older man said, standing up. “And these are Pedar and Gath. It’s their first.”

  The young men indeed looked like soldiers who had just seen violent death for the first time.

  “Your people were upset,” Sef said quietly. “I suggested they go back to work, but the boy—”

  “I’ll speak to him,” Dorrin said. “Thank you.” She walked over to the gate. “Efla, we think it’s safe for you to return to the kitchen—can you do that?”

  “Yes, m’lord. Jaim—”

  “I’m not going in there,” Jaim said. His voice shook. “There’s a dead man in there! I heard him scream!”

  “Jaim!” Efla said, scowling. “Be a man!”

  “Go on, Efla. I’ll deal with this.” Efla moved away, turning her back on Jaim. Dorrin turned to him. “Now, Jaim. Sitting here scared won’t help you,” she said in the voice that had unfrozen many a recruit. “If you can’t go inside, you must help with the horses.”

  With her eye on him, Jaim got up and slouched over to Perin, who handed him the brush and grinned across the yard at Dorrin. She watched a minute or two as Perin led out another horse and went to work on its hooves. When Gani came out of the stable with a cart of dirty straw and manure, she spoke to him.

  “You and Perin make sure Jaim keeps his mind on his work. We’ll bury Jori in the morning; I expect everyone to attend.”

  “Yes, m’lord. Come time, will we all go back inside tonight?”

  “I’m not sure,” Dorrin said. “The Marshals are at work below; I hope—I expect—the house will be safer tonight than it’s been since we arrived. If you want to sleep in the stable instead, you can, but turn out clean, in uniform, for Jori’s burial.”

  “Only, if those chickens are ruined, the Leaf Street Market closes in a glass or two.”

  Efla, who had loitered nearby, added, “And if we’re feeding all them as is in the cellar, my lord, I’ll need more.”

  Was nothing ever simple? Dorrin shook her head; she knew better than that. “Whose turn is it to go to market?”

  “Inder’s, m’lord.”

  “Well, then—Gani, you take Inder’s place out front and send him to market.” Dorrin fished coins from her belt-purse and handed them over.

  “Stuffed rolls,” Efla said. “And a handbasket of redroots, and some greens, any kind, but they must be crisp.” She followed Gani into the house; Dorrin paused to speak to Perin about Jaim.

  When Dorrin went back into the cellar, she found the Marshals clustered in one corner of the largest room.

  “Do you sense anything?” Oktar asked.

  Dorrin extended her hand. “It’s another Verrakai lock,” she said. She spoke the command words, and the invisible lock released. Slowly, the apparent stone faded into a stout wooden door heavily barred in iron. She pulled on the chain attached to a ring bolt, and the door tipped up. Under it, a ladder led into an underground passage.

  “That’s one,” Oktar said. “We’ll find at least one more.”

  By the time Inder came back from the market, they had found two more exits, one into the same underground passage but the other into a separate passage that appeared to lead westward.

  “Do you think it goes under the street?” Dorrin said.

  Oktar looked grim. “I think it leads under the palace grounds,” he said. “That’s how the assassins got in, I’ll wager. We followed every underground passage we knew of but never found one that ended within the palace walls.”

  “We’ll take this one,” the palace guard sergeant said.

  Dorrin and the Marshals went into the other one and edged forward carefully. After some time they came to five steps up and a door. They all felt something evil nearby, and the lamplight showed a pile of clothes: the red robe, gloves, and mask of a Liartian priest with the iron chain and the symbol lying on them.

  The door itself, however, was untrapped, and they came out into an alley opening onto a street of shops in the cloth merchants’ district. The building was a warehouse belonging to the Cloth Merchants’ Guild, and inside it they found no sign of the door into the passage.

  “They could hardly be unaware of a door on the side of their building,” Marshal Veksin grumbled.

  “It’s behind that angle,” Marshal Tamis said. “Whoever built the place wanted a secret entrance—the wall juts out just enough—it’s not obvious. And it may have had an innocent use originally.”

  “Maybe, but it’s going to have no use now,” Veksin said. He went off to tackle the Guildmaster; she and the others returned to her house, rolling the priests’ habit into a tight bundle, mask innermost.

  “I’ll take that away,” Oktar said. “We’ll deal with it elsewhere. What are you going to do about that trap?”

  “Tear down the cell walls, dismantle the trap … Will the metal be useful for anything, or is it too saturated with evil?”

  “You’ll have to ask a priest of Sertig about that,” Oktar said. “Or a dwarf. Depends how it’s forged, they say, and if it is imbued with evil, it will take someone who knows forge magery to undo it. All the smiths now operating here were cleared back when we had that trouble.”

  “How should we secure these openings in the meantime?”

  “We did it several ways before. If you take rubble from the cell walls, for instance—any that don’t reach the ceiling can’t be bearing walls—and pile it in that passage, then have a mason block the hole itself, it’ll be effective. Other than that, we can mortar some rocks in there, but someone could break through in time.”

  “We need something for tonight,” Dorrin said.

  “Oh. In that case, close up the holes and—”

  They heard noises coming from the third exit and Dorrin quickly drew her sword, but the dust-streaked men who came out wore palace livery, including an officer of the Royal Guard. “This passage comes out in the saddler’s room in the old stables,” he said. “It’s illegal to build or maintain secret ways into the palace grounds. Who’s in charge here?”

  “I am,” Dorrin said. “Duke Verrakai.”

  He blinked at her, apparently not recognizing the Duke he’d seen in formal court clothes in the mercenary captain’s garb.

  “And I,” the Marshal-General said, “am Marshal-General Arianya. We just found this passage and sent your patrol back to you, suspecting where it might lead.”

  “How long have you been in this house?” the officer said, glaring at Dorrin.

  Dorrin had to think—two days before the coronation, then that, and then today—“Less than a hand of days,” she said.

  “And you didn’t know—”

  “I was summoned here for the coronation,” Dorrin said. “I had duties at the palace.”

  “Oh. And you had not been here before?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, you’ll have to have that passage closed up. We have secured our end; I must see this end secured.”

  “We have three exits to seal,” Dorrin said. “A temporary seal, to start with. On Marshal-Judicar Oktar’s recommendation, I’ll have some of these dividing walls pulled down and piled into the passages and then stone laid into the exits.”

  “I suppose that will do,” he said. “I’ll have to talk to the Marshal—er … that would be you, wouldn’t it?”

/>   “Right,” Oktar said. “Never mind; we’re all confused by this. Duke Verrakai lost a man today in a trap in this very cellar. I’d recommend you post guards down here. The Duke doesn’t have the resources right now, and the safety of your king demands it.”

  “Post guards in a private house? We don’t usually—”

  “It would be a great help,” Dorrin said. She had not thought of that, had wondered how her remaining four militia could possibly guard the cellar, the front, the back …

  “Would you want any assistance upstairs?”

  “If you could post someone at the front door,” Dorrin said. “My people are understandably upset at Jori’s death. He and Eddes were close friends; Eddes saw how he died. But my concern is that the cellar may not be completely safe. These Marshals and I have done what we can in a half-day’s time, but poor Jori’s death …”

  “How did he die?”

  “He thought an illusion was real and walked off the landing up there.” Dorrin pointed. “He fell into that trap.”

  The officer shuddered. “And you think there might be more?”

  “Not that we know of. But again—not until I have had this taken apart to the outermost walls, and those walls carefully examined, can I be sure it’s free of danger.”

  “My lord! The chickens are ready!” Efla sounded more like Cook every day.

  Dorrin’s stomach growled. She was suddenly ravenous. “If you can watch down here even the turn of a glass, I can offer the Marshals some supper.”

  “You haven’t eaten? It’s late.”

  Dorrin felt the last of her energy running out as if she were the hourglass. “We’ve been busy. Excuse me,” she said. “I need to go back upstairs.”

  Despite the stuffed rolls Inder had brought and the two baked chickens, it was a somber group around the kitchen table for supper. A faint odor of death seeped through the house along with the sharp fragrance of herbs. The two local Marshals went back to their own granges. The Marshal-General and Marshal-Judicar stayed, but the talk was all of Jori: things Dorrin knew and things the others knew from the days before she became Duke.

  “He had this girl,” Gani said. “From the same village and all. Pretty, she was, but then one of the lord’s sons saw her, and that was that.”

  “There was the time he lost his badge, remember?” Perin said. “You wouldn’t know this, m’lord, but the old duke-that-was, he’d have the hide off a man’s back for losing anything he provided, badge most of all. And Jori was sure he’d left it on the ledge in the bathhouse and someone tooken it. He even quarreled with Eddes about it.”

  Eddes swallowed and took up the story. “But it was Kir, really. Kir went off with them as fought the Fox—the king—that time and never come back. Anyway, he took Jori’s badge and threw it to that dog—the brindle mastiff the old duke had—to get Jori in trouble. I saw it in the kennel; the kennel man, he hadn’t seen it yet. Jori and me, we stole some meat and baited the dog, but it left tooth marks on the badge, and Jori was punished, just not as bad.”

  Jori had been, it seemed, the butt of many jokes, apparently because his girl had ended up in the Duke’s son’s bed. Dorrin felt sick at yet more evidence of her family’s cruelty, and yet she had always known. Why hadn’t she, in adulthood, told someone? Even Kieri? As a duke, perhaps he could have forced an investigation into Verrakai practices. If others had known, it could have been stopped sooner.

  She had little appetite after that thought and sat waiting while the others finished.

  “Is the chicken too dry, m’lord? I did it just like Cook taught me—”

  “The chicken’s fine, Efla.” Dorrin forced herself to eat the last of it. “I’m not as hungry as I thought.”

  After supper, all of Dorrin’s people except Jaim, who refused, went to see Jori one last time. Eddes and Efla broke down, sobbing; the other three stood a few minutes and then walked out. When they had all left, the yeomen of the burial guild wrapped Jori’s head until nothing could be seen but the white strips of cloth. Dorrin waited until it was done and then, as the Marshal-Judicar had quietly suggested, gave Kosa a Tsaian gold coin wrapped in a white cloth as a grange-gift.

  Before she left, the Marshal-General took Dorrin aside from the others. “Do not take this amiss,” she said, “but because of your family, no Marshal-General—no High Marshal, even—has visited your family’s domain for a very long time. With your permission, I would accompany you eastward—meet with any Girdsmen in Verrakai lands, and perhaps—if some evil still lingers—be of assistance.” Dorrin said nothing for a moment, and the Marshal-General went on. “It is not out of suspicion of you yourself, not now. But you are one alone and cannot be everywhere all the time.” She smiled. “And as Paksenarrion is there, perhaps she will ride back with me to Fin Panir to see the necklace.”

  Dorrin shook off the heavy grief she felt for Jori’s death. “Of course you can come, Marshal-General.” How many, she wondered, would the Marshal-General bring along?

  “I travel light,” the Marshal-General said. “And since I’ll be with you, I need no other escort.”

  Dorrin blinked in surprise, but the Marshal-General waved a farewell and went out into the night.

  At first light, four more yeomen in the burial guild appeared out of the fog. Dorrin had all her people up and dressed in their best; at the Marshal-General’s recommendation, she wore court semidress. After days of clear skies, the fog felt chilly and dank. It seemed appropriate. The burial guild carried Jori’s corpse, and the others followed. At the grange, Marshal Tamis waited for them, then led the way out of the city. Guards at the south gate let them through. The fog thinned, and a thin drizzle started. Tamis went down the road Dorrin had ridden so often, then turned aside to the west. Dorrin estimated they walked another ladyglass, wetter every step, until they arrived at a field set off with white stones. Two yeomen stood beside an open grave.

  Dorrin had seen Marshals in Aarenis but had not paid much attention to the details of the funerals. Now, as the burial guild folded the pall and handed it to her, lifted Jori’s body reverently, and eased it into the grave, she felt an unexpected comfort.

  Over the next few days, Dorrin talked to the peers she’d met, asking what troops they’d been assessed and how they were raising and training them. Not entirely to her surprise, she found that many peers ignored their military obligations. “I will send troops if there’s a war,” one said, “but I see no reason to hold men out of the fields to fight in a time of peace. Besides, the Fox always had more than enough.”

  The dukes did better but, with their responsibilities at court, left the raising and training of troops to their militia captains. Only a few of those had been to war, though the dukes considered them knowledgeable about handling troops in drill and field.

  “Well?” the king said when she came to report her progress so far. “Are they as unprepared as I suspected?”

  “It depends what you expect to face,” Dorrin said. “Here’s a list of those who admit they haven’t drilled their troops in the past year. The escorts they brought with them are household only. This other list is those who have some kind of regular training program, though I don’t know if it’s actually followed.”

  “You don’t trust the word of your fellow peers?”

  “Sir King …” Dorrin hesitated, then went on. “I do not know the others well enough to know if they are trustworthy and diligent or not. I’ve been impressed by many of them. Others … but I could misjudge them in the atmosphere of the coronation, all the festivities …”

  He held up his hand, and she waited. “Dorrin, you of all my peers have both long military experience and recent evidence that this realm, long at peace, may not be as safe as we always supposed. As I supposed, anyway, during my years as a prince. The Pargunese crossed the river for the first time in living memory—with collusion from here, yes—but what they did once they might do again on their own. Arcolin’s reports, as you know, indicate the south is even more unsettled
than immediately after Siniava’s War. My ancestors came up that road. Why would not someone else follow if they perceived the north as holding riches they desired? And if he believes he is heir to the Kings of Old Aare …”

  No. You are. The voice of the regalia tingled in her head; she felt almost faint; her vision darkened.

  “Dorrin? Are you all right?”

  “I am well,” Dorrin said. The regalia had not spoken to her since she had laid the ring in the royal treasury—why now? She forced herself to concentrate. “I do not see that Alured would try to invade the north unless he had already subdued the south. Stealing treasure is one thing; mounting an invasion is another thing entirely. Have you had a new report from Arcolin?”

  “Yes. Rumors that the Guild League will fail are all over the south, he said. Tavern gossip, market gossip: that the cities are debasing their own currency, that the Guild League cities cannot keep merchants safe on the roads. He says the cities are not—as far as he can tell—debasing their coinage, but counterfeits are imported by merchants under Alured’s control. He captured one such.”

  “Alured was never stupid,” Dorrin said. “And that makes him all the more dangerous.”

  “So he might decide to invade?”

  “I still think he would need to conquer the south. Even if he succeeds, that will take more than a year. More likely longer.”

  “Read his letters,” the king said. He opened his letter box and handed her scrolls covered with Arcolin’s familiar script.

  Dorrin read through them swiftly, more familiar with Arcolin’s turns of phrase and the logic of his thought than the king could be. South of Vonja, trying to interdict brigand bands that weren’t simple brigands—with a single cohort? Her lips pursed. That would be difficult; he might be taking high losses if the brigands were as numerous as he indicated. She saw none of the phrases they’d used as codes in the Duke’s Company. Well, he wasn’t writing to her, after all, and if he had such codes with the king, she would not know them.

  “Why did he take only one cohort south?” she asked.