A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  Aneas gave her a nod, as if of recognition, or approbation. “We don’t have the numbers to defeat and destroy his forces. In fact, I’m going to guess that he’s already found new allies as he moved through the woods. Gabriel or Gavin is going to send a major force against him. We have to track him until then.”

  “But he outnumbers us,” Irene said.

  Aneas grinned wolfishly. “By an order of magnitude.”

  “And we’ll follow him anyway,” she said. “So your brother sent me here to die or be captured.”

  “Ever lived in the woods?” he asked. He had stopped listening to her when she had turned sarcastic, like a dancer turning on one foot and changing direction.

  “I’ve hunted boar,” she said. “With twenty huntsmen and some cousins and a lot of big tents.”

  “Can you maintain a fire?” he asked. “I have other work I should be doing.”

  She looked at him. “Your brother suggested that I marry you. He said he’d make you Duke of Thrake.”

  “Did he?” Aneas smiled. “I’d rather like to be Duke of the North. I think I’d be good at it.” He looked at her. “He mentioned it to me, as well.”

  “I can maintain a fire,” she said.

  Aneas nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “Keep the fire just as it is now, Irene.”

  He began to walk away. She caught his arm.

  “I’m here for you to woo me, I assume?” she asked, more boldly than she felt.

  He shook his head. “I think you have to woo me,” he said. “This is one of my brother’s idiot japes. I’m always the butt of them.” But his smile was not as nasty as his words.

  Then he left her, and the fire.

  * * *

  An hour later, and everyone was up and fed, and they were walking. Her soft fingers still burned from washing the pot that had held some noxious pudding of ground grain. She’d eaten her share.

  One of the men had told her that the pot wasn’t clean enough.

  In fact, as the pack straps dug into her shoulders, she thought that it wasn’t the work she resented. Work was itself good. And being a princess had always been work. A day’s correspondence, dancing lessons, some theology, some basic magery, and a long set of pointless meetings and audiences...her daily routine was nothing but work.

  It was that everyone gave her orders. Most of them were polite about it, as if she were a child.

  But the tone was clear. She was the lowest-ranking person there.

  She thought about what a nunnery might have been like.

  She thought of how pretty Aneas was.

  She thought she might try harder to kill the Red Knight. She wondered, just for a moment, flirtatiously, if she could marry Aneas and arrange for both Gabriel and Gavin to die.

  She smiled to herself and kept walking.

  * * *

  They walked. No one asked her how she was all morning, although the strange tattooed boy looked into her eyes from time to time in a way she found intrusive.

  Twice they stopped. The first time, she slumped to the ground. She didn’t rise until one of the Outwallers grunted at her, and she had no idea why they’d stopped or for how long. She was in a haze of mild pains...her hips, her feet, her shoulders. The perfume in her hair attracted hordes of small, biting insects. The neckline on her shift allowed them access to her neck and the tops of her breasts, and by the time the sun was high in the sky, her misery had reached a level where she could no longer tell herself she was lucky to be alive.

  But she was tough. She had danced every day, practiced dagger fighting with a master, ridden her horses and hunted. She was not soft. It was merely that this walking in the Wild required a kind of hardness that she lacked.

  The second halt was more sudden, and lasted longer. She slumped with her pack against a tree, and her mind was working. She was thinking of that pack, and how the Red Knight must have packed it himself. She was thinking that his brother must have been involved.

  She was thinking that the painted man they called Lewen must be an irk. He spoke pure, unaccented Archaic because it was his own language, not because he was one of her subjects. She wondered if she could appeal to him. That she might just suborn him, if she played him correctly.

  And there were half a dozen Outwaller warriors who spoke some Archaic, as well. Their war chief had already gone east to Ticondonaga and the inn, but they had stayed to track the enemy. They were certainly her subjects, she thought. She heard two of them talking about serving alongside Turkos, and she knew that name.

  Except that the Red Knight had rescued Turkos, in the Winter War. When everything had come apart. When the barbarian mercenary had proved first an able ally, and then a cunning plotter. That he was now going to make himself emperor was like gall on her lips; that her father’s army had acclaimed him burned her like fire. He was a barbarian.

  There had, of course, been other barbarian emperors. In fact, there had been a dozen such, and most of them from Alba.

  She wanted to comfort herself that the Patriarch would refuse to crown him, but in fact, she knew that the Patriarch preferred him.

  Everyone preferred him.

  She let the ends of her futile, vengeful plots fall away. The captains were gathered around a spot on the trail; the tall Outwaller captain in his red paint, and the shorter imperial officer in his buckskins, and young Aneas, who looked like a boy next to the other two. He was a boy.

  She thought he might be seventeen.

  She remembered that she was only just eighteen.

  Aneas surprised her by walking back from the little huddle on the trail and kneeling by her.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m alive,” she said, looking for the right combination of pluck and pathos.

  He smiled. “So am I, so far. We have a thorny problem to solve. Take your pack off. Rest.” He rose and left her.

  The odd boy with the tattoos came and sat by her tree. He didn’t ask but put his back against the same tree, so that his muscled arm was touching hers. Irene glared at the boy, who met her gaze evenly and offered her some garlic sausage on a knife so sharp that the edge glowed in the sun filtering through the trees. The knife was close enough to her throat...

  “What’s your name?” she asked. The boy had the beautiful green eyes to which she’d awakened.

  “Looks-at-Clouds,” he said, but Irene was already reevaluating gender. It was a woman’s voice. “You are very beautiful. May I teach you a thing?”

  Irene blushed. When you are a princess, very few people tell you that you are beautiful, even if you suspect it. “You may,” she said with dignity.

  Looks-at-Clouds snapped a fern off at the stem. S/he held it out to Irene. “Fan yourself with it. Tonight I will teach you to wash.” The shaman bent over, far too close for Irene’s comfort, and sniffed at her neck. Irene shuddered.

  “Rotten meat,” Looks-at-Clouds said. “And musk. Smells that attract every predator from tiny to huge.” The shaman’s Archaic was not courtly, but it was very correct, with a little too much emphasis on consonants. Irene bit her lip in consternation.

  “It’s perfume!” she hissed.

  Looks-at-Clouds blinked. “Not here,” s/he said. “Here, this says prey.”

  “I am not prey,” Irene snapped.

  Looks-at-Clouds rose bonelessly, like a dancer. “Prove it,” s/he said.

  The shaman loped off and knelt by Aneas.

  Her next visitor was a bogglin. He crouched by her and offered her a carrot. It was fresh. It must have come with the Red Knight when she was left, drugged, in a camp full of barbarians and Outwallers....

  The thing was mottled green and grey and brown, and smelled a little like cinnamon. It had moss growing on its back.

  She took the carrot. It was kindly meant. And she was not afraid of a bogglin. In fact, she was fascinated.

  “Do you speak Archaic?” Irene asked.

  The bogglin shook his head. “No,” he said, in what might have been
Alban.

  She had some Alban. “Thanks,” she said.

  The old bogglin nodded. His face split in four.

  Irene was a young woman who had faced assassins and courtiers and public performance of duty. She straightened her shoulders and managed a broad smile.

  “My, my,” she said. “Those are a great many teeth.”

  “He’s smiling,” said another man, in Alban. “We calls ’im Krek.”

  “Good day to you, Krek,” she said, in her court-greeting Alban.

  The bogglin nodded. “Gut day to you, Eye-reean,” he said.

  “I’m Ric Lantorn,” the man said. “I’m to keep ye alive.”

  “Or kill me if I go wrong?” Irene asked.

  Lantorn shrugged. “Ser Gabriel didn’t say nothin’ about killin’ you,” he said. “He’d a’ mentioned that.”

  Irene looked at the man steadily. “I know you,” she said in Archaic.

  He shrugged. “Wager ’tis my sister you know, lady,” he said in Alban. “Looks-at-Clouds says you need to wash off the perfume and the bugs is gettin’ you.” He handed her a small clay bottle. “This stinks like shit, but it’ll give ye peace from the little bastards.” He smiled and even gave her a nod, as if she mattered. “Call me if’n you need help.”

  She managed her court smile at his back as he walked away.

  Two miles later, she tried the oily stuff, which was brown and smelled more like turpentine than feces. With the help of the fern as well, she was less troubled and began to look around her.

  They crossed a little stream, and then another, and she began to perceive more. The little column moved steadily along, but there were pairs of rangers well ahead and off to the right in the deep green of the leaves, and at least one more pair reported back in late afternoon, and Aneas loped off with Looks-at-Clouds, as if the weight of his pack didn’t trouble him at all.

  She knew a great deal about military operations for a young woman. So she had to assume that only one or two rangers at a time were actually in contact with the enemy, or watching them. And that pair would rotate.

  They walked up a shallow slope to the top of a low hill. The stream ran along its base on three sides. Without a word said, everyone began to drop their packs and blanket rolls. Lewen, the irk, seemed to be in charge, but he didn’t actually say very much. He used a stick to scrape a shape, and Lantorn produced a shovel, a very small one, from his pack and began to dig a trench. The others began to cut boughs and some went farther afield and began to stack up firewood. They made more noise than she’d heard all day, but still they didn’t speak much.

  Irene had seldom felt so useless.

  But soon enough, Lantorn grinned at her. “Fill all the kettles with water,” he said. “Find a clean place wi’ a bit o’ hole to dip it out.”

  She nodded, took the four copper kettles that had appeared out of packs, and carried them to the stream below the camp.

  Suddenly, she was alone, in the woods. She could hear the others up above her, building shelters from branches, but she was alone. It occurred to her that she could escape. Of course, they were all woods people, chosen rangers; she’d be caught in minutes. And if she did escape, she’d be alone in the deep Wild. It was a foolish idea.

  Still, she looked off into the trees.

  After a little while, she filled the kettles and went back up the hill, two kettles at a time.

  Lantorn came and built tripods of green wood, and hung the kettles with light chains, so that the water began to heat over low fires in the fire trench, almost invisible even a few paces away. The smoke went up between the trees.

  Lewen noted her interest. “We cannot afford to be seen by the enemy,” he said in his fluid High Archaic. “Some days we do not cook at all.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Irene said.

  Two Outwallers came in with a dead fawn. The fawn was beautiful—its corpse pained Irene somehow, and she flinched every time she looked at it. Lewen, who seemed to be watching her, smiled his wicked Irkish smile. “You may help Master Lantorn break up the animal,” he said. “Butchering is a difficult job.”

  Irene was revolted. “I...” she began. “I thought irks ate...no meat.”

  Lewen opened a mouth full of sharp teeth as if mocking her.

  Lantorn ignored the byplay and drew a short, heavy sword that looked almost like a meat cleaver. It was the length of his forearm, and the blade was as wide as the palm of her hand.

  He grinned. “Good for making kindling. And cutting bogglins, when required.”

  Krek rustled his wing cases. “Good for taking a man’s head off, I think. If I wanted eat one.” His strange four-sided mouth moved. Irene hoped that was a smile.

  Lantorn bobbed his head. “Right you are, lad. Just as good fer butcherin’ a man. Not much for fancy fencing. Now, first, we get the little thing’s skin off...”

  What followed was perhaps the most terrible and disgusting hour of Irene’s life. Somehow the fawn was like a child; with her own hands she helped skin it, carefully separating the disgusting stuff that bound the hide to the muscles with a knife handed her by an Outwaller, who gave her a smile that had to have been meant as flirtation, except that just touching the dead fawn made her writhe in horror. But she was a princess of the noble house, born in the purple birthing room, and she did not show her anger or her disgust.

  Or she tried not to.

  When Lantorn ripped the last of the skin free—after cutting the poor thing’s feet off—it was time to open the fawn’s belly, and again the archer made her do it. She held her breath as long as she could, and when she breathed in she felt polluted by the dead thing’s warm and earthy intimacy, the smell of its intestines, the evidence of its last meal.

  “Careful, lass, that’s the liver, and we’ll be wanting to eat that. Nice bit o’ meat,” Lantorn said. He laughed at her tentative strokes. His laughter drover her to cut deeper, to get the noisome job done, and he put his clean hand on her bloody, ordure-covered hand.

  “Nay, lass. Not so ’ard. You puncture that little sack and we ha’ deer piss on all our meat, eh?” He nodded. “That’s a fine meal. In your city, rich fucks will pay right well to have fawn. We ha’ it for free, or for a shaft or twa, eh?”

  She shuddered. She couldn’t tell if he was mocking her or if he took genuine pleasure in dismembering a dead animal. She cut again.

  “Na!” he said sharply. “Na. Not sa’ hard. I told ye.”

  She found herself pushing against his hand. It was too much—the blood on her hands, the juices of the dead thing, his words. Cut, but not hard? He made no sense.

  “Stop, damn yer eyes!” he spat, closing his hand on her wrist.

  She burst into tears. It hit her suddenly, and she was powerless to stop it, which only increased her rage, her frustration—appearing weak was the antithesis of her approach to life. Now they all thought she was weak. She rubbed her eyes and got the foul mess on her face and her gorge rose.

  Lantorn stripped the knife out of her hand and finished the cut deftly. “Nowt for tears, missy,” he said.

  She knelt and sobbed, hating it all.

  The rangers were more considerate than she would have thought of such hard men and women. Most turned their backs. None mocked her further. She used the hem of her plain, short linen kirtle to wipe her face of the gross mess and then her hands. Some she rubbed on the top of her moccasins.

  The creature’s intestines came out in a single wet plop onto a carefully arranged pile of leaves, and Lantorn made another skilled cut around the creature’s anus to release the last coil of intestine. Then he slid his hands under the leaves and lifted the whole glistening, horrifying mass and threw it hard, two-handed. His throw was so powerful that she saw the dead fawn’s guts fly, spreading as if alive, to fall into the stream with a soft splush. Immediately something moved, and then something else; the water didn’t precisely boil, but the deep pool where she had filled the pots was alive with something.

  “Snapping tur
tle,” Lantorn said. He grinned. “The Wild, eh, lass? Don’t let it get to ye. Things eat things. Best to be the one eatin’, and not the one et.”

  She swallowed hard, several times, and managed not to retch.

  “Now we cut the meat off the bones,” Lantorn said, as if teaching some useful skill.

  An hour later Aneas and the tall man-woman returned from wherever they had been. They were solemn, even somber. Irene, who felt filthy and wretched, noted that neither of them had done any work. The camp was modest but complete, with small shelters on frames, deep fire pits, and venison stew. Most people came and filled their bowls. Aneas waited and watched.

  He came and squatted by her. “You are not eating,” he said.

  “I...don’t want any,” she said carefully.

  He frowned. “Please eat. I cannot take food until you have eaten. And despite your...concerns, your body needs fuel.”

  In fact, the food did smell delicious. Irene sat there, hating the food and desiring it. It pleased her that he couldn’t eat until she ate. “Why don’t you just eat?” she asked.

  “I’m the captain,” he said. “I eat last.”

  “That’s a foolish rule. The emperor eats first.” She met his eyes.

  “Perhaps the emperor has different principles of command than my master-at-arms,” Aneas said. “Or perhaps when you are emperor, you don’t need to worry that there’s not enough food.” He smiled.

  She refused to smile back, although her lips twitched.

  “She is playing with you,” Looks-at-Clouds said. S/he smiled at Irene and handed Aneas a wooden bowl heaped with meat. “She enjoys the power she has over you. Just eat.”

  Irene glared at the shaman.

  Looks-at-Clouds met her eyes and smiled. “You have so much to learn,” s/he said. “I cannot wait to teach you.”

  Irene took breath to make a hot reply, but she bit down on it. This was not the time or place. Instead, as there was no longer a point in resistance, she took a bowl of food and ate it.

  The fawn was delicious, which angered her more, in a distant way.

  Later she rolled in her blankets and slept between Looks-at-Clouds and Lantorn. For an hour, she lay trying not to touch either.