by Sean Stewart
Indeed Val was a picture of elegance, with a charcoal-coloured cloak draped easily over a dove-grey doublet and breeches. His copper tube was sheathed at his side, and on his head he wore an excellent felt hat with an emerald-green plume that just matched the stone on his ring. His beard was neatly trimmed and his fingernails gleamed. Pity he can’t keep from yawning, Mark thought gleefully. And every time he looks at owt too long his little glinty eyes go wide and bleary. Makes him look like a well-dressed owl after three beers too many.
Wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t for the one bit o’ landscape he can’t keep from staring at.
“Your pardon, sir,” Lissa snapped. “Is there a stain upon my dress, or mud upon my cheek?”
“Er, n—!” Val squawked.
“If so I beg you, tell me like a gentleman so I may fix myself, and leave off this, this staring.”
“Oh!” Val squeaked. “O, O no! Your habit is perfection, your countenance divine! My eyes are but a trifle weary from too little sleep, and as a tired man would rather rest on heather than on rocks, so these orbs of mine without my thinking sought the gentlest bed on which to take their rest.”
Gail snickered. “Now now: let’s not have anything bedding on my Lissa.”
Lissa glared at Gail and Val in turn. “Indeed,” she said frostily.
Valerian gulped; fluffed; pushed his spectacles higher up his nose.
“Nice nip in t’air,” Mark said quickly.
“O Lord it’s barely light,” Lissa groaned.
But despite the hour she was her perfect self in a rich blue swallow-tailed jacket and knee-length walking skirt, gold tights, and calf-high boots, also golden. Her long blond hair was triple braided; a gold hairpin held it gathered just above her neck. She wore a pair of fine silk gloves: gold, of course.
Gail had whipped Mark out of bed with barely time to tuck in his shirt-tails. He looked at Lissa in awe, wondering when she managed to achieve such stylishness.
The Duke and Duchess don’t measure up at all, he decided. Gail was dressed all in royal black, thinking to be dramatic, but in the pre-dawn light the effect was rather drab, and spoiled by the dirty brown cloak and boots she insisted on wearing.
And as for you, Shielder’s Mark, you look like a slaughtered sheep. Gail had laid out a white shirt and pants, with blood-red boots, cloak, belt, and scabbard. Any style he had was completely shot by the monstrous pink leather hat he had clapped upon his head.
Ah well; you’re a Duke now. You can do what you bloody like. Besides, you don’t want to look like the breed that whelped a cur like Peridot.
“Come on!” Gail cried impatiently, stumping ahead of them all. “Do you want our baggage to catch us on the road?”
“Captured by a feather bed,” Lissa muttered morosely. “God send me so cruel a fate!” But when the sun began to climb into a vast blue sky dappled with white clouds, even she had to admit it was a fine day for walking.
It was hard for Mark to believe that just one month ago he had left the Ghostwood and come trudging up this very road. Then he’d been a filthy, common man, breaking ice in the ditches to drink each dawn. Now he was a Power in the land: monied, landed, wived.
The barren land was under plough now; the slanting early sunlight glistened on black clods slick with dew. Every third field was unploughed, a tussocky meadow of long grass and frogcalls. “What are they doing out here?” Gail asked, pointing at a farmwife wandering the fallows with her two young daughters.
“Herbing,” Valerian said. “Shepherd’s purse, this time of year, and sweet violets, from which the herbwife brews a remedy for coughs. They also say it helps to clear a clogging in the chest.”
Mark gaped. “How the hell would you know village simples?”
Val blinked. “Um, well. It’s, er, a hobby of mine.”
Prompted by Lissa’s questions he went on to talk about other spring medicines: broom tops to strengthen sluggish hearts, Black Willow bark for fevers and pain, and elder flowers, which made the best brew when you had a cold.
Unfortunately Val was not so good at chatting as he was at lecturing. When the talk turned away from herbs, he remembered all at once it was Lissa he was speaking to, and his eloquence failed. Mark sighed. What a pudding.
Gail stumped beside Mark, her short legs eating up the road, straight bangs going swish, swish, swish.
Running from Swangard to the High Holt, the West Road was banded with hoary poplars. Their pale leaves were still damp from the bud, delicate as butterfly wings. Larksong rustled from between their boughs, or soared up out of the farmlands beyond. The road was one of the principal highways of the kingdom, and they passed many people as they walked. Carters who would have kicked Mark out of their way a month before bowed as he passed, and touched their forelocks.
A brace of young women went by, curtsied to Mark, then burst into giggles once they were past. Damn hat, he thought, regretting that he’d ever sworn to wear the pink monstrosity.
Instantly he was shamed to have thought badly of Gail’s gift. And what care you what a canty lass thinks, eh? You’re a married man now. The thought surprised him. And your eyes aren’t to dawdle below a girl’s neck no more neither.
Gail stumped on beside him, tireless.
They passed inns like mile signs: the Prodigal Son, the Jolly Carter, the Green Ghost, the Cob and Cup. As the sun sank slowly in the west, each one seemed more bewitching to Mark: his nose tingled to the scent of bacon frying, and his mouth was parched for a pot of cool brown ale.
In the early evening Lissa groaned as the Dancing Duck receded slowly behind them. “It’s turning cold and cloudy, Gail. You know what rain will do to my boots.”
“That’s Adventure,” Gail grinned. “The wind, the sky. Look at the sunset! And the way our shadows stretch out behind us, like giants.”
“I never knew a shadow was so heavy,” Val complained. “The bigger mine grows the wearier I am.” A great yawn came over him, and his spectacles slid down his nose. He pushed them up, blinking, and smiled. “With luck when darkness falls I’ll feel much lighter.”
Lissa laughed. “That’s a pretty paradox.”
Beneath his soft brown beard, Val smiled a small pink smile.
Sic ’em, Mark thought. Atta boy!
“There, Lissa,” Gail cried. “Let the wind of adventure fill your sails!”
“Wait a minute,” Mark complained. “I’m with her. I’m a Duke now. I don’t have to sleep outside any more. That was kind of the point.”
“What sort of hero are you?” Gail demanded.
A cool wind came up as darkness fell, muttering among the poplar leaves. Empty fields stretched around them, and a line of low cloud came in from the west, bringing nighttime and the smell of rain. They were a clopping of pony’s hooves then, a creak and sway of saddlebags in a tunnel of hissing poplar leaves. The road had emptied with the coming of nightfall; of other travellers they saw only a single lantern swaying in the distance. Then it too swung off to the left, headed for a lonely farmhouse.
Val fumbled with their lantern and got it lit at last. The bull’s-eye threw a swaying yellow shadow down the road before them. “The miles squat heavy on my feet and shoulders,” he grumbled. “I pray we reach a tavern soon!”
“If we don’t find one we can always sleep outside,” Gail said cheerfully. “That’s why I set aside bedrolls for us.”
“Ah,” said Lissa. “Bedrolls. Yes.” She sighed. “It happened that I saw them, Gail, and thought they were misplaced. I sent them back to Steward’s Davin last night. It had not occurred to me—and for this I take all blame—that you would wish for us to bed down in the ditches overnight. Really, it was thoughtless of me.”
Gail drew a deep breath. “No bedrolls?”
“None.”
A long silence followed. The wind seemed suddenly colder, and the night more dark. Warm yellow light spilled from the windows of a farmhouse far away across fields of mud; it might as well have been on the other side
of the moon.
The wind turned damp. Mark felt a tiny cold kiss on his brow. Then another on his hand, his neck, his cheek; and the sky began to stream in earnest.
“It’s raining,” Val observed.
“The tent? The tent didn’t make it onto our pony either?”
“My apologies, Princess.”
“Ah.”
They walked on through the rain.
“It’s strange,” Gail said at last. “What the darkness does. It’s like the whole world has dwindled down to just us four, and the pony of course. Like nothing else exists: only us, walking down this road…”
“Which has no start or ending,” Valerian said softly. “And we always have been walking, and the world’s a cage of leaves around the wind, and footsteps mark the only time, each washed away as swiftly as knife-cuts in a river.”
Gail shivered and smiled. “How different it is from balls and dinners and a palace full of lanterns! Only Lissa’s cloak rustling and the pony’s hooves, and our voices…”
A strange mood had come upon Mark, melancholy and yet distant, as if he stood in a high place and looked back along his life, a path stretched far behind him, and far below. How many times had he walked alone, in rain and darkness? Feinting and lunging and dodging in fields soaked with rain until he was a man of mud, too tired to move, his whole body shaking with cold and wet. Each day another patient hammer-blow, forging himself into Shielder’s Mark, Hero. Legend.
At the palace he had been a ’prentice again; Gail and Lissa and Valerian had been his masters. But here, out with the wind and the rainy night, what seemed so strange to them was like a child’s secret hiding place to him; as achingly familiar. As full of memories. “The world seems small because you listen to nowt but yourselves,” he murmured. “Pull down your hood, Gail. Hear how big the darkness really is.”
Slowly she raised her hands and drew back the hood of her battered old cloak, so her pale face emerged from its shadow like the moon sliding from behind a cloud.
For the space of many heartbeats all four walked bareheaded. Rain slicked Mark’s hair and trickled down his cheeks, and the sound of it rolled in from every side, gusting through the trees and streaming into the ploughed fields around them. Their footsteps rang suddenly on a plank bridge; a streamlet hurried by beneath them and was gone. The air was heavy with the smell of wet earth.
“You’re right,” Gail whispered. “We aren’t everything. We’re so small we’re barely here at all.”
“No less than fox or marten,” Mark said. “And not much more.”
“A sobering thought for a Princess,” Gail laughed. “I’m not so sure I want to listen often to the world.”
Mark laughed with her, love and sadness strangely in his breast at once. “But that’s what Adventure is, Gail. That’s what it means, if it means owt at all.”
“And that means rescue!” Lissa cried, pointing down the road. There, at the top of a long, gentle rise, they could just make out a faint glimmer of light at the edge of the road. “Better than a palace!”
It would be a damn poor palace, Mark thought, that had less to offer than the Ram. There was one rushlight over the bar, one embering fire in the big hearth. Long black cats of smoke, unwilling to get wet outside, skulked around the roofbeams. Mark hung his dripping cloak and hat on a peg by the door. The tables were knife-scarred and stained with spilt beer.
It was a small, sad, decent little inn, the sort of place a carter might stay on his way to Swangard. Not where Mark had imagined bringing the Duchess of Borders, his lady wife.
“Paradise!” Valerian said, slumping into the first chair he could find.
“I always pictured Paradise with windows,” Lissa remarked, brushing out her skirt and sitting down. “So you could watch God stroll by.” Her blue swallow-tail coat was splotched with rain and mud clung to the sides of her golden boots. Her blond hair was plastered to her skull. Mark guessed she was wearier than she had been in years. It was impossible she should look as elegant and stylish as ever, but of course she did.
Gail looked like a waterlogged gnome. “Told you we’d be fine,” she crowed. “I’m hungry enough to eat the Devil.”
“We only serve him Tuesdays,” said the innwife, coming out from behind the bar. She wore a kerchief around her head and her apron was stained with grease. “Is there owt else I can get to please your honours?”
“Anything hot would be a marvel,” Gail said. “Beef stew or baked potatoes, chicken pie or sausages; perhaps a roast of pork. Pan-fried fenceposts would do, or boiled rocks. Just so long as it’s hot!”
The woman laughed. “I hate to tell it, but you’re a mite too late! Kitchen’s closed, milady. We can heat you up some wine, if—”
“Closed! The kitchen’s never dosed to Quality, you stupid woman!”
The innkeeper, a tall, thin man with a silver hoop dangling from his left ear, smiled apologetically at the table of gentry. “We’ve a pork roast we can do, or bacon if you’d like it quicker. Plenty to follow, and hot as you can stand it, I promise. Janey, fetch these fine folks two loaves and a dish of butter.”
His wife stood still a moment, fighting to hold her smile, and then did as she was bid.
The innkeeper rolled his eyes. “You must forgive the missus. A good soul, but she doesn’t deal much wi’ Quality.”
“You’re sure it isn’t any trouble?” Gail asked.
The innkeeper answered with a vigorous shake of his head. “No, madam, none at all. We hadn’t really shut down all the way; Janey just don’t like to do more work than she must, if the truth be known.”
“I wonder why,” Lissa said, so softly Mark could barely hear her.
Valerian peered wistfully through foggy spectacles. “Did someone offer us mulled wine?”
Soon Jane had returned with four cups of hot wine and two fat loaves of oatbread. “This is wonderful!” Gail said. “I didn’t know you could make bread from oats.”
“It’s good bread,” the innkeeper’s wife said defensively. “I make it myself and I’ve never had complaints.”
“No offense meant, goodwife. The Duchess is just too rich to know any better.” Laughing, Mark cut himself a slice. “I never ate white bread in my life before I came to the Palace, Gail. Real people eat oatbread mostly, and rye.”
Gail blushed. “I’m so sorry!”
Jane shook her head. “I didn’t have any call to get edgy. Just something in the air these days. I haven’t been myself.”
“Well, there’s worse could happen!” the innkeeper said, popping into view with a grin and a platter heaped with rashers of bacon. “Is she whistling about the wind? You’ve heard too many stories, our Jane.” He rolled his eyes again. “We’re no examples, to shiver at ghost stories at our time of life.”
Valerian looked curiously at the innkeeper’s wife. “What sort of stories?”
“I—”
“Nothing worth mentioning. You know how it is,” the innkeeper said. “The awd wives have nowt to do all day but chatter, and an innkeeper’s wife gets more chances than most to listen to any lie that comes along.” He looked around anxiously to make sure their cups were full. “Carter’s Kev, I am. If there’s anything you need, anything at all, just ask it. I’m having the girl make up our best rooms.”
“Pray,” Lissa murmured, “If it please you, we would like to hear your goodwife’s tale.” There was the slightest edge to her voice, so faint Mark barely caught it.
Their host was better used to dealing with Quality. He snapped to attention. “Of course! Well, Jane? Don’t just stand there! Tell their worships!”
Jane reddened and stared at the floor.
Lissa glanced at the innkeeper. “I do not have to tell you. Carter’s Kev, the Princess does not care for lumpy mattresses. Make sure a ewer of hot water waits in both our rooms. You will find my purse as open as your feet are swift, and your fingers diligent.”
“Prin- prin-…the Prinsssss!” the innkeeper gasped. He started for
ward, peering in the gloom at the black tunic just visible beneath Gail’s weather-beaten cloak. “Oh, yes ma’am. Thank you, ma’am!”
Discovered, Gail winced and shrugged off the dripping cloak, letting it hang over the back of her chair.
Lissa turned back to the innwife, doffing her grand manner like a pair of gloves. She smiled a warm, conspiratorial smile. “To tell the truth, Gail here adores a lumpy bed.”
Jane chuckled in spite of herself and then bit her lip. “He means well, miss. We…we don’t often see such fine people as yourselves at the Ram.”
Lissa looked down at her mud-spattered boots and laughed. “Well, we’re not so fine as we were this morning, but the Duke in truth is generous, and his lady wife. Weary as we are, I’m sure we would not notice were our beds but blankets over boulders. I pray you, do not be offended. I dearly wish to hear your stories, but it seemed they were not like to come, with our good host a-hovering by.” Lissa glanced at Mark and Valerian. “If it please you, I can make these fellows disappear: there are some things only silly women can really understand.”
Jane laughed out loud. “Oh, ’tisn’t much, miss. Last moon I started having funny dreams. I soon found out I weren’t t’only one. We started hearing stories in here. Someone said there’d been a spook in High Holt three nights running. ‘Like a sojur on the battlements,’ they said, ‘Only awder, and dressed up for a funeral.’ Then too, folks have been…remembering. Remembering things as we’ve worked hard to forget,” she added quietly.
Sadness settled on them, soundless as snow falling into water.
Then Jane blinked, and sucked in a big breath, and smiled, all business. “Kev’s right; there’s nowt to it. Just spring turning. Make a start on your bread and bacon, and I’ll have you some fried taters in a minute.”
Gail shivered with satisfaction as the innwife left. “Ghosts! It must drive Richard mad, to have something at High Holt he can’t boss around.”
“Now we know the real reason the Duke chose not to join the celebration of your nuptials at Swangard,” Val mused. “A spirit! Think what it must be like to breathe, and know before you stands one whose chest rises with air ten centuries old.”
