Oathbreaker (The King's Hounds series)

by Martin Jensen

  I got down on my knees and peered in the one window opening without seeing anything besides darkness inside. I stood back up and made a mental note that I would have to find out what this strange addition was for.

  I walked back to the door in the palisade, grabbed the heavy crossbar, and pulled up as hard as I could. At first the bar wouldn’t budge; then I thought to push on the door with my shoulder and pull up on the bar at the same time. Suddenly it slid free, and I was able to remove it and lean it against the nearest pole in the palisade.

  I pulled the door in toward me. It moved easily on its hinges, and my knuckle taps indicated that it was neither rotten nor worm-eaten.

  From the open door I had a clear view to the west, down the hill and across the low, rolling knolls covered with fields—like small pieces of cloth in shades of green, yellow, and brown—interspersed with thickets and low woods.

  Right outside the palisade was a strip of grass as wide as five of my paces, bordered by a low blackthorn thicket. I looked to both sides. A path ran along the palisade. Apparently it wasn’t used all that much, because the grass in it was tall. All the same, I got down on my knees and carefully studied the area outside the door all the way over to the thicket and then off to both sides by a length about equal to my height.

  As far as I could tell, no one had come this way in several days. The only sign of life was dried sheep dung.

  I walked back in, closed the door, and replaced the crossbar—with less trouble than it had taken to remove it since I now knew the trick. I strolled along the west end of the church down to the gate, where the guards stood as they had before. There was no sign of Winston. I briefly considered going to look for him but brushed the thought aside.

  I had told him I was going to check out the palisade, and my investigation was not yet complete.

  The guards let me walk through the gate with a quick nod. They said they knew who I was and that their orders not to let anyone leave the monastery area did not apply to me.

  Once outside, I walked to the right, toward an open area that ran between the village and the monastery. I followed a small creek that flowed a few paces from the palisade. Soon I had to find a way through the mud, as I reached a spot the village swine were obviously fond of wallowing in. The creek spread out over a flat area there, making it a lovely place for a pig to lie about in the muck and relax.

  My detour around this area took me close to the hospital, but I didn’t see or hear anything since the building faced the other direction. The palisade swung upward to my right, and I realized I’d passed the guesthouse on the other side, so I jumped over the creek and followed along the posts in the palisade until I stood on a path that must be the same one I’d discovered through the door.

  It was somewhat overgrown, suggesting that it hadn’t been used recently, but I wanted to be sure, so I leaned over and focused my eyes on the ground in front of me as I walked slowly up the path. I didn’t see any sign that it had been used recently by anyone—other than sheep, that is; sheep dung was all over the place here, too. I reached the outside of the door in the palisade and kept going until the path ended in a clump of gorse scarcely a half spear’s throw later. The gorse grew right up to the palisade and made it impossible to go any farther.

  I stood there for a bit, then walked back to the village, wondering about the intended purpose of the path and the door. At the end of the path I heard a giggle to my right, coming from behind the blackthorn thicket.

  It definitely came from a girl, so I stopped and sternly asked what she was doing.

  “What are you doing?” the girl’s voice responded flirtatiously.

  “Come out and see,” I replied.

  A woman would be a welcome addition out here in the middle of nowhere, a place that so far seemed to be populated solely by relatively cranky monks.

  I heard footsteps from inside the thicket, but they were not coming closer to me. Then I realized: the lass—because I could tell from her voice that she was quite young, which suited me just fine—was wise enough not to try to come through the blackthorn.

  So I walked on until I came to a path leading into the blackthorn and waited there as I heard her footsteps approach.

  Chapter 17

  She was a disappointment. Not because of her hair, which bounced over her shoulders in blonde curls. I would have liked to run my hand through it. That wasn’t the reason. She was clean, too, and although her skirt was worn and her top had seen better days, they’d been washed not too long ago. Her eyes were blue and unafraid, her lips slightly parted, and her ankles slender and tan.

  My disappointment stemmed from the fact that she couldn’t be any older than twelve.

  “What are you doing?” she repeated, giving me a look of curiosity.

  “Who are you?” I countered. I was in no mood to be interrogated by a cute little girl.

  “Elvina. What are you doing?”

  “Why are you creeping around in the blackthorn staring at strange men? Haven’t your parents told you that can be dangerous?” I tried to look ominous.

  “Dangerous?” she asked. I did not seem to have frightened her in the least. “When half the village could hear me if I screamed?” The wench put her hands on her hips and watched me, undaunted. “Aren’t you going to answer my question?”

  “I’m minding my own business,” I replied coolly.

  She made a smug snort and said, “You’re not from Brixworth or the monastery, so there’s nothing here that’s yours.”

  She was really quite something. I eyed her angrily.

  “All the same, my business is still my own.”

  “And what business would that be?” she continued.

  What actual harm could it do to answer her?

  “I was examining the path,” I replied.

  She snorted again. “I could see that. Why?”

  “Tell me, do you always ask so many questions?”

  “Only until I get answers.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. She wasn’t half-bad, this little girl. “I wanted to see if it had been used recently.”

  “It hasn’t.”

  “And I suppose you know all about it?” I asked with a laugh.

  “No one ever uses it,” the lass said with a haughty look. “You can’t get through the door up there.”

  “Ah, and yet there is a path.”

  “It’s there because the sheep love to graze there. The grass is sweeter there than other places.”

  “Ah, so you’ve tasted it then?” I teased her.

  She didn’t look haughty anymore, more like downright condescending.

  “Of course not, you nitwit, but that’s what Ebba says, and she knows because she tends the sheep.”

  That was the way of the world, I knew. After all, sheep may be some of the dumbest animals in the world, dumber than cows and certainly less clever than horses, but for some reason or other they can always find the tastiest grass. Back home there was a mound where to human eyes the grass grew just as nicely on both north and south sides, but the sheep wanted to graze only on the northern side.

  “But,” I objected, “someone besides sheep must have used the path at some point. There is a path there.”

  The lass nodded and said, “The Lady Path.”

  I stared at her. “The Lady Path?”

  “Yes,” she said, grinning, “the monks used to use it to come down and see the women in the village.”

  This wasn’t the first time I’d heard stories about monks not being able to keep their vows of chastity. All the same, I raised my eyebrows in disbelief.

  “It’s true,” Elvina responded indignantly. “My father said so himself.”

  I let it be. Monastic discipline was none of my business, plus I’d just determined that no one had used the path for lewd forays down to the village for a long time.

  “So what are you doing here?” I asked. After all, she had gotten me to tell her why I was here.

  “Hiding,” she admi
tted.

  Oh, she was playing a game. I looked around for other children, but it turned out it wasn’t that sort of game.

  “Ebba found out I’d borrowed her blue kerchief,” she said.

  “And you weren’t supposed to do that?”

  She offered an impish grin. “Sure, but I wasn’t allowed to rip it.”

  “But isn’t this Ebba out with the sheep?”

  “Sure,” the lass said with a nod. “But she wasn’t this morning.”

  “So you’ve been hiding in here all morning?”

  “Yeah,” she said, her lower lip jutting out in displeasure. “Ebba had the sheep grazing right out there, so I didn’t dare to crawl out.”

  “Well, you could have taken the path through the blackthorn thicket.”

  She laughed slyly and said, “Sure, but mother was doing the washing, and then I would have had to help her.”

  “I don’t hear any sheep,” I said.

  “Not anymore, numbskull. Ebba led them off, but then you came.”

  And the lass was curious to find out what I was up to, so she had stayed.

  “So you’ve been lying here bored?” I asked.

  “Nah, I dozed a little and then I watched the birds. There’s a hawk that always hunts around the thicket. And then there were the horsemen.”

  “Horsemen?” I stifled an exclamation.

  “Hmm. They met and talked to each other down there. On the trail that leads west.” She pointed through the thicket with her tan hand.

  I walked over to the path the girl had come out on. The thicket closed in over it, but after I’d taken a few steps in, I could see the rolling hills and a trail that wound its way through them.

  Elvina had followed me. “They met there, where the trail goes between those two hills.”

  Three arrowshots from us, the trail ran between two elongated ridges for the length of an arrowshot, which meant the horsemen had been hidden from prying eyes. Unless, of course, the eyes belonged to a clever young lass, who herself happened to be lying in a blackthorn thicket overlooking the trail.

  “How many riders were there?”

  “The three who came from the monastery and then two who came from the west.”

  “Are you sure they came from the monastery?”

  “Where else would they come from?” The girl sounded insulted that I had cast any doubt on her report.

  “Well, what do I know? There must be farms and estates around here, right?”

  “They came from the monastery.” Her tan foot kicked at the grass in the path. “I heard them ride the whole way through the village.”

  “Hmm,” I said, still sounding skeptical. “What did they look like?”

  “The one in front was a nobleman. The two in back were spearmen.”

  “And you’d know a nobleman when you saw one?”

  She just glared at me and didn’t respond.

  “Was he wearing a sword, for example?” I pried.

  Elvina nodded. Then she got a faraway look in her eyes.

  “Nah, now that you mention it,” she said. “He wasn’t, which was strange. But he was a nobleman,” she continued, certain.

  And of course she was quite right. Ælfgar hadn’t had his sword fetched from the church before he rode out. Either to emphasize that he acknowledged the authority he had given Winston or because he wasn’t expecting to encounter any difficulties.

  “That’s the truth. It is!” The girl kicked the grass again.

  I put a hand on her shoulder to calm her. She didn’t pull away.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “And the other men?”

  “The ones from the west?”

  “Yes.” I heard a cry from a bird of prey and glanced up. A kite was soaring over us.

  “Noblemen, both of them,” she replied right away. “And they wore swords.”

  “So neither of them was a spearman?”

  She shook her head in response.

  “No, they rode side by side,” she said.

  “And then the two groups met each other, said hello, and rode on?” I asked.

  “Are you stupid?” Elvina pursed her lips in outrage. “I already told you they talked to each other.”

  “For a long time?”

  “For a while,” she said with a shrug.

  “And did it look like they knew each other?”

  “Yeah. And the ones from the west arrived first and waited for the other people.”

  Maybe I ought to consider asking Winston to hire this lass. She could see and think.

  “And then what happened when the riders from the monastery arrived?”

  “Well,” she said, and then thought for a moment. “The two from the west dismounted, and then when the other three arrived, the nobleman got off his horse. One of his spearmen rode on and waited, down where the trail comes out from between the ridges. The other spearman positioned himself where the ridges begin.”

  So Ælfgar had expected problems after all. Or maybe he was just being overly cautious. Or maybe he didn’t want even his trusted spearmen to be witness to the conversation.

  The girl kept talking, eager to show me how wrong I had been to question her powers of observation. “And then the nobleman from the monastery asked a few questions that the other two answered. Then all three of them talked. And then finally they shook hands and parted ways.”

  “And you couldn’t hear what he asked?”

  “No, you nitwit,” she said, looking annoyed again. “But I could tell he was asking questions from the way he talked.”

  She was good, this little one.

  “But didn’t the man from the monastery ride a little way with them once they were done? Out of politeness?”

  “No,” she shook her head emphatically. “He waited until they were gone, and then he rode back, too.”

  But I hadn’t encountered them or heard them coming back. No, because they had ridden right past the village and on to the north. I mulled things over, convinced that Ælfgar would return to the monastery from a ride to the north, where he would have been exercising his horse as he’d said he would.

  “Thank you very much,” I told her. “You are very observant.”

  Elvina looked at me and then said, “And you are very curious.”

  “Yes, I am,” I said, smiling at her. “And I have my reasons. But now I have to get back, and don’t you think you should be running along after your playmate, Ebba the Shepherdess, and apologize about the kerchief?”

  Her response was yet another snort.

  “She’s not my playmate. She’s my older sister.”

  I swallowed a mouthful of air out of sheer excitement. Now things were getting interesting.

  Chapter 18

  Winston was displeased. No, that was an understatement. He was as sour as last year’s ale. I had scarcely stepped through the gate when he popped up from where he’d been waiting, watching for my return. He had spent an inordinate amount of time looking for me, he insisted tersely, while I’d been traipsing around out there.

  “Picking up girls, I suppose,” he grumbled.

  I had intended to yield to his anger. Instead I laughed out loud.

  Ebba hadn’t shown up. No, of course not. She was off with her sheep. Elvina and I had walked back through the village, until darn that lass if she didn’t dart behind a wattle-fenced pigpen just as we reached the largest farm in the village.

  I got my explanation when I saw a woman step out from between the wings of the farmhouse. She had blonde hair like her daughter, and a stern-looking mouth, and sharp eyes that didn’t miss a thing. The woman walked over to the pigsty fence, and I wasn’t even halfway to the gate before girlish squeals of protest told me that Elvina’s mother had pounced on her.

  “What is so funny?” Winston seethed with exasperation. “That I worry while you traipse around, unarmed, among people who may know that we’re the king’s men?”

  I held up a conciliatory hand. As I explained myself, his face softened some
what, but he was still indignant enough that when I paused, he hissed that I could at least have let him know I was going to continue my investigations outside the palisade.

  “The guards could have told you that I’d gone out, couldn’t they?” I pointed out.

  He nodded sullenly. So he wasn’t really angry because he’d been afraid something might happen to me. He felt left out.

  “And what good was this lass?” Winston asked petulantly.

  I explained what Elvina had observed.

  “So Ælfgar didn’t go out to exercise his horse,” I concluded. “He went because he had an appointment. We’ll have to ask him what the meeting was about when he sees fit to come back.”

  “Not necessarily,” Winston said, shaking his head. “He’ll just claim it’s none of our business or that the meeting wasn’t planned, that they just happened to run into each other. And, besides, he could just lie. Better to keep it to ourselves for a while longer.”

  Winston had made up his mind, so I shrugged my consent and asked if he’d spent the time we were apart doing anything besides wallowing in discontent. He looked annoyed.

  “A man needs us to solve this murder, and we will accomplish that best if we cooperate.”

  “I thought the shire reeve was going to give us however much time we needed.”

  “The shire reeve?” Winston said. “What do I care about him? I’m talking about Godfrid. His behavior was repugnant, but even the most loathsome man deserves to have his murder solved.”

  “Have you learned anything that might help us do so?” I asked.

  “Not much. The gate guards swear no one entered overnight. So we still have to assume that the murderer was someone who was inside the palisade last night.”

  That fit with what I’d learned. “And did anyone else have anything to add?” I asked.

  Winston hadn’t had a chance to talk to anyone else. All he could report was that the monks had met in the chapter house, and that he’d popped his head in for a moment. Edmund and Simon had been present, although it remained unknown whether they’d been invited or had intruded.