The entrance hall of the inn was empty and he was glad of it, for though he was calm enough at present, that would change if he came face to face with Lord-Commander Voord. The man was probably back already, returned in the same stealthy manner as his departure. Those recent events had all happened so fast: according to a big case-clock in its alcove by the stairs it was only half an Alban hour since Aldric faded into the shadows while Voord stalked by.
The door of the taproom was open as he passed it, but a glance inside showed Tagen and Bruda’s wine-flagon lying in a bowl of snow-melt, their cups upside-down on a tray and the drinkers nowhere in sight. Aldric reached his own room without incident. It was darker than it had been when he left; either a servant or a lack of oil had reduced the lamplight to a mere glow. He pushed the door shut, ran its heavy deadbolt into place… And hesitated, for something beside the dimness wasn’t right. His gear was untouched, the furniture and shuttered windows were as he remembered, and other than the reduced lamp, nothing had changed.
Then he saw the thing which hadn’t been there when he left.
A sheathed sword lay down the centre of the bed, dividing its mattress in two precise halves. It was a Jouvaine estoc, not carried by anyone in the rescue party yet somehow familiar. There was a presence in the room, a living person hidden and waiting. His muscles tensed, his spread fingers moved quick and quiet to close on Widowmaker’s hilt—
And it whipped out from under his grasp even as he touched it.
An expert hand had gripped the taiken’s scabbard with just the proper lift-and-twist to unhook it from his belt, while another released its cross-strap and sent it slithering free of his shoulder with the sound of a viper on parchment. Between one heartbeat and the next the sword was out of reach, taken by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Moving with the speed of panic he grabbed for the taipan instead, but in the same instant a voice spoke in his ear, so close behind him that he could feel the warm, lancemint-scented breath carrying each word.
“ ‘What is life except excuse for death, or death except escape from life?’ I still recall your name with kindness, Aldric Talvalin. How do you recall mine?”
Aldric stared for a long moment at nothing at all, swallowing once or twice against the hot constriction that was surely his own heart, halfway between his mouth and its proper place. He didn’t hear it pounding, or the sound of his own breath in a gasp like coming to the surface out of deep water. All he heard was that voice. The words were his own, but the voice was…
“Kyrin?”
He turned, expecting to be wrong, expecting his imagination to cheat him again as it had cheated him so many times. But he wasn’t cheated now.
*
There were no glad cries or long-parted lovers running together with open arms. Their farewells had been too strained and strange for any such display. Instead Aldric stared at her without even a smile, his expression shuttered and unreadable expression.
“You remembered,” he said at last.
“I couldn’t forget it. Or the reason for it. And it was the only thing that would stop you from…” Kyrin didn’t need to finish. Instead she looked at the taipan’s blade, still menacingly half-drawn, and kept watching it until Aldric slid the hilt home with a snap and gave her the ghost of a bow. Then he walked across the room and adjusted the dimmed lamp until it flooded them with light.
“Your eyes are as blue as I remember them. Your hair is as fair.” He didn’t move to touch her. “And you’ve troubled my dreams this six months and more, Tehal Kyrin, Harek’s youngest daughter. I understand you throwing my bad verse back at me, but why not take both swords?”
“Because I trusted you. I took just this one because I wanted to hear you speak without your sharp-tongued mistress shaping the words.”
“A mistress who didn’t leave me for someone else,” he said softly. “That choice was yours. You made it. You alone.”
There was a brief flicker in Kyrin’s eyes and he recognised it as one he had caused before and in the same way, so many painful months ago, by speaking truth when a lie would hurt far less.
“I travelled far to find you, Aldric-an,” she said, using respect not affection in a way her Valhollan accent made all too plain. “Alba first, then Drusul. With an uncertain reception waiting at the end of it, that was foolish. Or not. Now I know how things are, I can leave again and this time be at peace. Here.”
She held Widowmaker out to him and as his right hand closed on the scabbard, reaffirming possession, she rotated the longsword so the loops and forks of its guard made a metal fence between them. Yet when his left hand came up to close on hers, she didn’t pull away. Instead it was as if the contact gave her enough reassurance to meet him stare for stare past the black steel of the taiken’s hilt.
“Did you think you were the only one with troubled dreams and sleepless nights? There were many times I lay awake in the darkness and wondered if my choice was right or wrong. Seorth had already married my sister Eyrin to assure the alliance and keep the peace, but no word of that was spoken until I was aboard ship and the ship was under sail. Have you ever found yourself an excess number, Aldric-an? That you were one too many under your own family roof?”
“But you went willingly! Eagerly!” Aldric burst out, then bit off anything else. In a small voice halfway between accusation and uncertainty, he said, “There was a letter…”
“Yes, there was. Written by Seorth, to another’s dictation. Something else I learned about on his ship. We were both deceived, Aldric. You had to believe it, and I helped make it convincing because… Because I wanted to believe it too. That Seorth had come all that way for me. And I was afraid. Afraid of them, and afraid for you. Even you and—” she forced a smile, “—and your cold mistress here, couldn’t turn their no into yes. You’d have come to harm if you tried. Because you would have tried, Kailin-eir Aldric ilauem-arluth Talvalin. And the trying would have killed you.”
“Kyrin.” The taiken was no longer a fence between them; it hung from Aldric’s grasp, as near to being flung aside as it would ever be. “Who are they?” He was already sure he knew the answer.
“Dewan,” she replied without hesitation, “Dewan and the king.” She saw a muscle start to tic along the renewed scar beneath his eye and realised what it meant. “But – but they promised they would explain. They promised to tell you everything after I was gone. All their reasons, all their needs… Aldric, they promised.”
“They spoke words. That’s what promises can be. Just words. Made with honour they’re worth having, but otherwise they’re just breath with a little noise in it. Like someone telling a story. So what did you say that they wanted to hear so much?”
“That there was no love between us, nor ever had been. Dewan asked me and he wanted to hear No, so I said No. But…”
“But?”
“But I should have had spoken truth and said Yes.”
“The truth is Yes?” Aldric didn’t move for a moment, then reached out towards her face and his fingers stroked along the line of her cheekbone in the old caress.
“Yes then, yes now, yes always. Not that it matters.”
“If it didn’t matter, Kyrin, why did you come back?”
“To prove I had the right to do it. To prove I was my mother’s daughter.”
“And to prove you’re done with other obligations?” He smiled. “Now there’s a feeling I’m familiar with. So we’re free to marry—”
“No, Aldric, we’re not. You’re cseirin-born and a high-clan lord in your own right.” Aldric’s smile went tight. From what King Rynert had told him, that was open to question, but explaining would take too long.
“Then you’ll just be my warm mistress, alongside this cold one?” He gave Isileth Widowmaker a little shake and the blade rustled in its scabbard like something alive. “I can do better.”
“You can’t fight tradition with a sword!”
“And you already said that once.”
“It still
holds true!”
“Not now. Not for me. Duty and Obligation are two edges on the same sword. It’s our proverb, it cuts both ways, and it’s the proper sword for fighting a tradition.” He glanced at Widowmaker and smiled again. “More effective even than this. After what I’ve done for Rynert, he owes me honesty at least. No more deception, no more broken promises, and afterwards we’ll see what a sword can do about tradition.” He laid Widowmaker down on the bed alongside the estoc. It was Kyrin’s own, he had seen her wear it a score of times, yet hadn’t recognised it until now. As he hadn’t recognised so many things. “It was you on the road to Egisburg,” he said, wondering how he could have missed her. “I thought I saw someone once or twice, and I thought I felt a presence, a watcher, many times. How?”
“Dewan ar Korentin,” she said, confusing him even more. “And a Drusalan woman he told me to meet in Tuenafen.”
“Kathur the Vixen?”
“Yes. She told me enough to get here.” Kyrin studied him for a second as if unwilling to ask what was on her mind. “Did she give you any reason to… To hit her?” The look on his face was answer enough. “Because someone did, and much more besides. Hush now, I’ll explain later. When I came to Alba looking for you, you were off on a task for your king. But Dewan sought me out in secret and told me: ‘Look for Aldric here and here, find him if you’re able, help him if you can, stay with him if you both still want each other.’ ”
“Dewan said that, and you believed him?”
“At first I did, enough to bring me to the Empire. But the more I thought about it, the more he was like an actor in those plays you told me about, the ones with speeches ready for all occasions. He was saying what I wanted to hear.”
“Will you listen to another speech like that?” She nodded. “Then Kyrin-ain, I too say Yes. Now and always.” When he put his arms around her and held her close, it was like a dream. There was the scent of her hair, the cool smoothness of her skin, the warmth of her lips and the simple nearness of her being there, but unlike so many other dreams there was no bitter waking. “I missed you far more than I ever knew till now. I prayed you would come back, somehow, some day. And death strike down the first one who comes between us again…”
He kissed her again, gently and then fiercely, hungrily, and she was as gentle, fierce and hungry, and they were both trembling in each other’s arms, for it had been too long, too long, six months and a lifetime apart, and the bed was just two steps away…
A fist hammered on the door.
“Get yourself armoured-up and neat, dear hanalth, sir,” came Voord’s voice, edged with a sneer barely blunted by the heavy timber. “We leave in ten minutes for the Tower!”
“Who was that?” asked Kyrin, but when she glanced at Aldric’s face she needed neither name nor answer, because for an instant there had been a glitter of pure hate in his eyes.
“Death strike the first man who comes between us,” he repeated. “If Hell or Heaven heed prayers and curses, I hope they heed that one.” He took a reluctant step away from Kyrin and shrugged out of the military rank-robe, flinging it across the bed in a no-nonsense manner very different to stripping for more pleasant purposes. “Did you understand him?”
“I don’t speak Drusalan.”
“What he said was hurry up. None too politely, either. And I can’t use your name to make excuses.” It wasn’t the right time to tell Kyrin that her name and home were already in Voord’s dossier and had been used to threaten him, so instead he jerked with his chin at the racked armour near the wall. “Could you help me with that, please?”
She hesitated for a second, about to ask what was wrong, then shrugged and pulled the officer’s-pattern harness from its frame beside the window where she had come in. There was no sign even now that the shutters had been disturbed; Tehal Kyrin’s talent for subtle burglary had never left her. Coupled with a lithe, slim build and a natural gymnastic ability, hunger made an excellent trainer of thieves.
“What are you doing tonight that’s so important?” she asked, kneeling beside him to tighten the buckles of armoured leggings with long fingers which had a distracting tendency to wander. Those fingers told her that despite his outward air of calm, Aldric was trembling a little. Part of it had to do with her, but the rest wasn’t fear, not even the flash of fury she had seen. It was the tension of a full-drawn bow, and with Isileth Widowmaker within arm’s reach it was unsettling.
“I didn’t believe it at first,” he said, “so most likely you won’t either. The Emperor’s sister, Princess Marhala, is in the Red Tower. And tonight I learned that…”
Between grunts and oaths and struggles with intractable armour that didn’t fit as well as it looked, he got out a shortened version of the story even when the scarlet arming-tunic muffled his voice as it was pulled over his head in mid-sentence. The quilted cloth had heavy leather padding at the shoulders where the hauberk’s weight would lie, it was made for a larger man and, when his face emerged from its neck-opening, he was almost the tunic’s own colour with exertion. He held out both arms so she could buckle the plated-mail vambraces on his forearms, flexing elbows, wrists and fingers to make sure they all moved freely.
“Light of Heaven, that’s more comfortable!” Aldric said at last. Then he looked at Kyrin in a way that made her arch one eyebrow. “I’ve realised something that hasn’t been mentioned yet.” Kyrin’s other brow went up. “A quick escape. And you’re just the one to help with it.”
CHAPTER NINE
It was snowing again as Bruda’s squad of soldiers left the inn, dense white flakes falling from a dense grey sky past the dark tower brooding over the city. Though he was muffled as tightly as the rest against the weather, Aldric still halted for a moment and pulled back his hood to look at the fortress again. It didn’t matter that he had seen it before in clearer air and better light; he hadn’t been walking towards its gate to go inside.
The Red Tower looked as threatening as a hungry animal. With its coloured glaze lost in snow and darkness, it was a great dark block of stone set down square in the middle of the city, eyed with lamps and fanged with the iron spikes of its drop-gates. It was an evil building by repute and by appearance, and as he got closer he saw nothing to change that.
They were four armoured men flanked and followed by eight more as an honour guard, drawn from the squad of cavalry who had ridden with them. Black and scarlet, silver and gold, the soft swaddling of fabrics and the hard glint of metal were all an intense contrast with the snow. There were few on the streets to remark on that dramatic appearance for the festival was running down, its momentum gone on this last night of holiday. The foul weather had forced the revellers indoors, talking, reminiscing, drinking and getting drunk against the sober thought of oncoming winter. That was convenient. It meant fewer eyes to see and speculate about what this armed and armoured group was doing.
Aldric was guarded about what he knew and apprehensive about what remained undiscovered. His nerves were tingling almost to the snapping point, sensitive as never before to sounds, reactions and emotions hidden well or badly. He could sense something about Bruda, Voord and Tagen, and not merely because he knew such sensations should be there. They might feel the same about him, for under his rank-robe, pushed through his weapon-belt and out of sight but within quick reach, was the telek from his saddle holster with eight lead-shod steel darts in its spanning-sleeve. A missile weapon of any sort could prove a vital advantage tonight, since he was sure that someone else’s cloak concealed the other one.
Hoofs thudded for a moment behind them as a string of horses passed in the measured cadence of a slow walk, the sound dull and muted in the snowfall silence. No one turned for no one was very interested, but Aldric had expected such a sound and smiled to himself within the shadows of his helmet. Then he composed his face again and walked on towards the Tower.
*
Bruda hadn’t exaggerated the influence of his passes and certificates; forged or genuine, they all worked. When
he presented them at the Red Tower’s outer ward, there was only the briefest inspection before he got a stamping full salute from the sentries on guard. When he and the others made their response, Aldric’s acknowledgement lagged half a watchful second behind the others so he could imitate how it was done. There wasn’t much to mimic; the returned salute was an open hand raised to helmet-rim, casual to the point of carelessness as if emphasising the gulf between senior and subordinate.
The soldiers at the gate, and those met with increasing frequency as they crossed the Red Tower’s grounds, gave further salutes but showed no other interest. Passing the outer guard-posts had confirmed their right to be here, and from what Aldric had overheard, visiting officers were common enough around the Tower. Whatever the reason, one more gaggle of rank-robes wasn’t worth noticing.
At last they reached the Red Tower’s own gate, yawning to receive them, jagged above and below with the interlocking teeth of iron shutters that gave it a snarl of unappeased hunger. Aldric stepped into the shelter of its lowering outer works and threw back his hood, stamped a time or two to rid himself of loose snow and looked about him. He had decided that trying to hide his curiosity about this place would seem more false than indulging it, so he indulged.
Even though the Tower was a comfortable residence for noble guests, the fanged maw of its gate declared its true function as a prison too clearly for denial. The famous red glaze didn’t extend beyond the outer cladding, except for big six-sided tiles which paved the floor of the gatehouse and gave Aldric the unpleasant notion he was standing on a tongue. Its inner walls were massive blocks of dressed grey stone, several tons apiece, and it wasn’t the winter cold but an errant memory which raised his skin to gooseflesh.
That memory was of an ancient tomb, lost and all but forgotten in the Jevaiden Deepwood, made of monstrous stones like these. This place had the same feel to it, of things long dead and better left to sleep out the rest of eternity undisturbed. Breath drifted from his mouth and nose and he realised he had been holding it this past few seconds for no reason other than his own imaginings. He could hear Bruda’s voice in the background, saying little of interest but the conventional courtesies of rank to absent rank by way of a junior serjeant. ‘I convey by you respectful greeting to the noble commander of the Tower, desiring his permission to…’ And so on.
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