by Ann Marston
Cullin leaned back in his chair. “He would be amenable to hearing more of the details,” he said. “Then perhaps would be willing to enter negotiations.”
The Ephir put his hands on the table, palms flat, fingers splayed. “Negotiations will take time,” he said. “Isgard already has enemies on two borders.”
“She has enemies within, also,” Cullin said. “When last did you speak with your nephew Balkan of Frendor?”
Something flickered in those flat, silver eyes. “I have not spoken with Balkan for nearly a season,” he said. “Have you news of him?”
In terse, precise sentences, his voice flat and uninflected, Cullin told him what we had seen in Frendor, and what had transpired at Balkan’s manse. When he finished, the Ephir remained silent for a long time, a faint frown creasing his brow .
The Ephir looked at Sion. “Had you known of this?” he asked.
“One hears rumours, of course,” Sion said. “Until Cullin confirmed it just now, I had no proof of anything happening in Frendor.”
The Ephir’s gaze remained on Sion, but didn’t ruffle Sion’s composure. I wondered if anything actually could. Finally, the Ephir looked back to Cullin. “I am in debt to you for that information,” he said quietly. He touched one gnarled finger to his chin, the other hand dropping absently to stroke the cat again. “So my dear nephew thinks to depose me, does he? We shall have to do something about that.” He got to his feet, sending the indignant cat scrambling to the floor. “Thank you,” he said again and gestured toward the door. “If you will excuse me, I have things I must do. We will speak again tomorrow, and perhaps begin working out a viable plan of mutual defence between Isgard and Tyra.”
When we were once again in the hall and walking back toward the reception room, Sion said, “I shall advise your father to be circumspect in his negotiations with the Ephir.”
Cullin grinned. “Very circumspect,” he agreed. “I trust that man less than I trust a Laringorn whip snake.”
Sion laughed. “He would fight the Maeduni down to the last Tyr,” he said. “Then he would negotiate a truce with Maedun that would no doubt be much to his own advantage. He’s a wily old lizard, is the Ephir, and he’s held Isgard strongly for most of his lifetime. No matter what he agrees to, he will move first to see Isgard with the advantage, whatever the cost to his allies.” He shrugged. “But then, Medroch dav Kian, too, has always been as slippery as peeled willow and as hard to trap as a handful of quicksilver. I trust his judgment as much as I suspect the Ephir’s principles.”
Cullin paused at the door of the reception room. “You’ll make our apologies to the Ephir when we don’t come tomorrow, Sion?” he said. He glanced at Kerri and smiled. “We have pressing business in the northeast that needs to be attended to immediately.”
“Of course,” Sion said.
Kerri laughed. “And will you make my apologies to the good Captain, my lord ambassador?” she said. She put her hand to her head and fluttered her eyelashes dramatically. “I think I’ve developed a terrible headache. I believe I must return to the inn.”
“Kian will escort you back to the inn,” Cullin said. “I want to stay for a while and test out the temper of this Court. I’ll follow in an hour.”
I offered my arm to Kerri. “I should be your escort, my lady,” I murmured politely. “If, of course, you don’t mind being seen in the company of a man all looks and no substance.”
“I didn’t mean to imply you were only good looking,” Kerri said contritely. She smiled at me. “I meant you were all brawn and no brain. Brawn is not handsome.” And she fluttered her eyelashes mockingly at me then laughed and took my arm.
***
They came at us from the shadows as we stepped down from the carriage. I had just turned to extend my hand to Kerri when I saw a quick, furtive movement off to one side. I spun, already reaching behind my left shoulder for my sword before I remembered in despair that it was still in my room at the inn. I had no weapons but my hands.
I counted four men as I turned quickly, pushed Kerri unceremoniously back into the carriage before she could protest, and slammed the door. “Get her out of here,” I shouted to the startled driver. He gave me one terror-filled glance, then shouted to his horses, slapping the traces hard onto their backs. They lurched into an uncoordinated canter and the coach whirled away, leaving me alone with the four attackers.
I had only time enough to drive my shoulder into the belly of the man who leaped after the carriage and knock him to the cobbles before something bashed into my head. It turned me off as effectively as pinching out a candle.
XX
Sick. I was sick.
Sick and dizzy.
And I hurt. Dimly, I remembered I could Heal it if I wanted. I could make it stop hurting. Ground and centre. Ground and centre. But there was no ground. No centre. Just dizziness and pain.
The world spun too fast and my head whirled with it. Spinning too fast and in too many directions at once. I was caught in the middle and it was tearing my head apart.
Spinning and dizzy and sick.
The plane of the world began to tip, slowly at first, then more rapidly until it was a sheet of glass tilted at a crazy, impossible angle and I felt myself sliding toward the edge. Desperately, I tried to flatten myself against it. There was nothing to hold onto.
I fell off.
***
I lay face down across something that lurched and jolted, driving flashes of pain like shards of glass through my head. The taste of blood filled my mouth, thick and sharply metallic against my teeth. I could not move to ease the thumping of my head. I realized vaguely that my wrists and ankles were lashed to something, forcing me to maintain the folded position. The crushing pain drove out coherent thought. Consciousness rode the crest of the pain as foam rides a wave. I slipped into a stupor, enduring from moment to moment waiting with torpid patience for the jolting to stop. After an eternity, it did stop, and I hung therein a red haze that felt like peace by contrast.
I tried to focus, thought I saw Dergus Keepmaster with the shadowy, nearly transparent figure of the General behind him. Dergus pointed at me, and a thread of black mist poured out of him and wound itself around my head. It flowed into my nose, my mouth, and slithered down my throat, into my chest, tangling itself around my heart and lungs, choking and smothering.
A hand grasped my hair and yanked my head up. I stared at a face, blurred and disembodied, that floated in the haze--a face bearing a terrible, purple burn scar, the left ear deformed and ugly . The mouth moved and made sounds, but I could make no sense of them. Just meaningless noises. I closed my eyes.
***
It was quiet and dark, and there was no part of me that didn’t hurt. Head most of all. Every time I drew a breath, my ribs protested. My hip bones felt as if they had been pummeled by Gerieg’s Hammer. Hands and feet throbbed painfully with each pulse beat. But my head. Oh gods, my head had been torn in two and clumsily fastened back together with half a hundred horseshoe nails.
Fighting nausea, I lay on my side and tried to sort out what had happened to me. The pounding headache scrambled my brain and I couldn’t think straight. All I knew was that I hurt, and I must be still alive because not even Hellas could hurt like this.
How long I lay there, I could not begin to guess. Gradually tangled threads of recollection trickled into my memory, but the sequence was hopelessly tangled. Nothing made a lot of sense.
... Kerri in a shimmery gown, her hair done with pearls and gold.
... Cullin, lace at his throat and wrists, sitting before a polished worktable, leaning forward, his face serious in the light of candles, while a small man with narrow shoulders listened with a frown on his face.
... Turning, reaching for a sword that was not there.
... Drakon grinning at me in malicious anticipation, his scars livid in the sunlight.
... Men running,out of shadows, taut with purpose, noiseless, like wolves.
... The Ephir of I
sgard turning from a window, silver-coin eyes flat and watchful as a lizard’s..
... A carriage clattering down a cobblestone street.
Jumbled puzzle pieces, hopelessly tangled. How did they fit? And if I could fit them together, would they explain why I hurt so much?
I came to only one useful conclusion, the only one that seemed to make sense. I had been betrayed, either for the Maeduni gold on my head, or the Falian gold placed by Mendor and Drakon. And since it was Drakon’s face that persisted in sliding through the tangle of fragments, it was reasonable to assume it was also his gold that had sent those four thugs tumbling out of the shadows. Sorting that out left me inordinately pleased. Torn in two my head might have been, and lurching along like a wagon with one square wheel, but at least it was working again, after a fashion.
Now that I had a plausible explanation of what had happened, the next question I needed answered was, where was I? That I was lying on the ground under shaw of holly was partial answer. But was I still in Honandun? And if I wasn’t in Honandun, where was I, and where were they taking me?
I had missed something important in my slow limp through logic. Patiently, doggedly, I went back over the jumbled pieces, like a priest telling his prayer beads, looking for the thread in the tangle I had missed. But nothing new presented itself. Another sorting through produced the same result. But I knew I had missed something. Something important.
Mayhap Kerri was right when she called me dull-witted—
Kerri!
The realization jolted me like a burst of lightning. My head thumped and pounded with the startled shock. Hellas-birthing. Kerri was with me when the thugs attacked. I remembered throwing her back into the carriage and sending it careering down the street. Had the driver succeeded in taking her out of danger? Had she been able to find Cullin to tell him what happened?
Gods, but my head hurt!
Why was I lying here, suffering the agony of the damned, when I could Heal myself? That thump on the skull the thugs had dealt me must have truly scrambled my brain.
I concentrated.
Nothing came.
I met only emptiness, a void where the quiet place should be. My heart lurched in terror and I recalled a nightmare. No ground. No centre. Only an insanely tilted world too smooth to hang onto. My head throbbed and clanged, shattering thought.
It’s because your head is addled by the blow they gave you, I told myself firmly, reaching desperately for calm amid the storm of fear and pain that threatened to swallow me whole. I tried again. Then again. But there was nothing there. Nothing but an impenetrable blackness, cold and empty and deep. The harder I struggled, the more the emptiness grew until the edges of it were sharp as honed blades to flay the flesh from my bones.
Finally, exhausted, I gave up. It was useless now. Perhaps later when I had more strength.
As I lay there, I became aware of a different strangeness. A hollowness... No, a silence. A silence that had not been there before. The absence of a sub-aural sound, so familiar and intrinsic, I had not noticed it until it was gone.
The link with the sword—and with Kerri—was gone.
***
Pain knifing through my hip woke me. My body spasmed like a gaffed salmon trying to escape. The movement set my head to thumping again. I tried to bring my hands up to cradle the pounding ache. The sight of my hands, swollen to almost twice their normal size and dark with trapped blood, wrists tightly bound by thick leather thongs startled me sharply awake. Warily, I looked up to discover the cause of the new pain in my hip.
Drakon of Glaecyn Landhold stood over me, lips skinned back from his teeth in a feral grin. In the morning sun, the scars on his head showed livid purple, hideously puckered and shiny. Behind him, four men sat around a small fire, huddled over handfuls of bread and cheese. Several horses grazed, picketed securely, nearby.
“Awake at last, are you?” he said softly.
I lowered my hands to my thighs. My ankles were also bound. I sat there, watching him, but said nothing.
The smile stretched wider. “I trust you spent a pleasant night.”
“I’ve been more comfortable,” I said. My tongue felt thick and clumsy in my mouth.
“You’ll be less so shortly, I imagine,” he said. “I shan’t kill you. You need have no fear on that account.”
I met his gaze squarely. “I know you won’t,” I said. I managed a smile. I think. From the stiffness in my face as I bent my lips, it might have been more of a rictus. “You dare not kill me.”
He lost his smile. “I merely promised your death to another,” he said. “However, there are certain matters still outstanding from before you left us so abruptly at Glaecyn. According to law, the sentence may be carried out at any time.”
A cold chill rippled through my belly and my testicles tried to shrink right up into my body. I smiled at him again. “Qu’resh zith masht’n,” I said clearly. It was the worst insult one could offer a Falian, to call him a fornicator of hounds, a sire of mongrels. On far less provocation, duels had been fought to the death.
His face turned a curdled, pasty white, and his mouth tightened. I could not get out of the way of his hand, but I managed to turn my head enough so that the blow merely cracked against my cheek and jaw rather than my eyes. It was more than enough, though, to explode pain like long splinters of oak through my skull.
Breathing hard, Drakon drew back. “At least I will still be able to fornicate when this is done,” he snarled. “I almost regret that I will not have sons or daughters of yours to house in my slave quarters.”
I spat out a mouthful of blood, but he moved his boot and I missed. “Any son or daughter of mine would do for the right side of your head what I did to the left.”
“Lord Drakon?”
Drakon turned quickly, stepping back. A man stood at the edge of the holly bushes. A Maeduni soldier, wearing the flash of the House of Balkan on the left breast of his black tunic.
“What do you want?” Drakon demanded.
“We are ready to leave, my lord,” the Maeduni said. He gestured to me. “Did you want him tied to the pack horse again?”
Drakon looked down at me, then shook his head. “He can ride,” he said. “We’ll make better time that way. Tie his ankles to the stirrup straps. And loosen the bonds on his wrists so he can hold onto the saddle. I don’t want him falling off and killing himself before we can deliver him to the General.”
***
Sitting the horse was an agony, but nowhere near as bad as being carried slung like a sack of meal across a pack saddle. My feet were numb, and I had no control over the horse with my hands bound and the reins knotted across the pommel of the saddle. Dergus Keepmaster held the lead rope with obvious pleasure. With the pain running rampant through my whole body, it was not difficult to ignore the smug, malicious glances he kept shooting back at me.
Each breath sent knives of pain lancing through my bruised and battered chest. Every jolting step caused flashes of pain to explode behind my eyes. My hip bones ached dully, making any effort to move with the horse next to impossible. By midday, I had drifted off in a haze of misery and merely tried to endure.
One of the soldiers gave me a cup of water when we stopped for the midday meal, but it was obvious they didn’t think it worth wasting food on a man under sentence of death. When they were finished their meal, they tied me to the horse again, and we continued the journey eastward.
Late evening found us near a river I recognized as the River Shena that curved sharply south a little more than twenty leagues east of Honandun to flow into the sea at Trevellin. It startled me to discover we had travelled so far. I must have been unconscious for a night and a day and most of a second night, rather than just the one night I had reckoned on.
Shortly before dusk, Drakon led our small party away from the track. A fire glowed near the bank of the river. As we pushed through the screen of bushes, Mendor rose from his place by the fire to meet his son. Five or six more Maeduni sol
diers watched as Drakon and Mendor greeted each other, but they did not move.
One of the soldiers freed my ankles from the stirrup straps and dragged me off the horse. I barely felt my feet under me, large, clumsy, unresponsive lumps of clay in my boots. He led me, stumbling and wobbling, down to the water and indicated I could drink and relieve myself if I needed to. The current was strong near the centre of the river, rushing in oily smooth ripples and swells, but near the bank it eddied gently enough.
I fell to my knees and plunged my bound hands into the cold water. It tasted of mud and water weed, but my throat was parched. I gulped down several handfuls, then had to fight to keep the water in my belly. I knelt there, breathing deeply for a moment until the cramp of nausea abated.
The river bank rose more than a metre on both sides of me, overhanging the water, trailing threads of grass and willow branches into the river. Where I knelt, the bank had crumbled to form a small half-circle of sandy beach, like a bite taken out of the fabric of the bank, barely wide enough to hold me and the guard. Above grew a thick copse of elm and alder, ringed by low bushes. The campfire burned near the edge of the bank, hidden from the track by the shrubbery and a small fold in the land itself.
My guard yanked me to my feet. They were a little steadier beneath me now, but the rush of returning circulation was painful. I could feel my toes flexing within my boots as the Maeduni prodded back up the gentle slope to the fire. He bound my ankles again, less tightly this time, and left me sitting with my back against the slender trunk of an elm while he went to claim his meal.
Some time later, another soldier brought me a heel of dark bread and a strip of leathered venison. He dropped both into my lap and returned to the fire without speaking. I looked down at the bread and meat in my lap. Slave rations. A chunk of dark bread and a strip of dried meat a day. My belly threatened revolt. If the stuff went down, it would come right back up again. In disgust, I pushed the food away, nauseated.
