A dog barked. Shapes moved suddenly at the crest of the stony ridge, which rose steeply above them—still higher than Morgon had imagined.
“Freeze!” hissed No Head.
A voice shouted far away, and a horn sounded.
Sheep gave voice at the sound of the horn.
“I know that voice,” No Head said.
“Shut the fuck up before we’re all made into someone’s breakfast,” spat Tippit.
“Sod yourself, ya whack.” No Head stood in his stirrups. “Hullo!” he roared.
The shout rang, and echoed off two great hillsides. A dozen No Heads greeted each other.
“Ya daft weasil!” growled Tippit. “Fuckin’ scout? Fuckin’ dimwit is what you are. That’s what comes of readin’ books!” He was sidling away.
Another horn sounded, this one closer, and then there were horsemen—at least a hundred of them—pouring over the ridge.
“Fuck me!” Tippit shouted. “It’s the Wild Hunt.”
But No Head had been in the company since its earliest days, and he sat on his small mare and waited while Tippit started noisily down the slope. “Wager you ten silver, hard coin, it’s friends,” he said.
Tippit pulled in his horse. “Yer only saying that ’cause if ya lose we’re all dead anyway.”
“That’s just stupid,” No Head said. “Death against ten silver?”
Smoke was a man of few words. But he put out a hand. “Shut up,” he said gently. “Shut up and listen.”
Nonetheless, his hand went to his sword.
Three horns sounded, and one was already down slope of them.
“Hulloooooo!” No Head roared.
The horsemen were close enough to be more than movement and noise. They were big men on ponies, their feet incongruously close to the ground, but the leader rode a war horse that stood seventeen hands, black as the night.
“Bad Tom,” No Head shouted.
“You’re in the wrong valley, you loons!” Bad Tom roared back. “Tar’s tits, we almost gave up on you!”
Chapter Seventeen
Albinkirk—The Company
The arrival of the Queen and the young King should have been a wonder in the streets of Albinkirk, but the threat of imminent war—war with the Wild—was distracting, and the distraction was personified by the soul-splitting shrieks that emanated from the citadel. The citizens should have grown used to them, after three weeks, but they couldn’t—the sounds were always discordant and sudden, and there was neither rhyme nor reason to them—just the endless screams of an anguished soul in the fires of hell, or so many said to one another as they looked at their terrified children and their equally terrified cats and dogs, ears back, hissing or barking.
The Queen entered her city of Albinkirk on the second Wednesday after Easter. She rode easily with her babe on her lap, and the Red Knight rode by her side. She was attended by a dozen ladies, and at their backs came more than two hundred knights, led by the Red Knight’s retinue, and then the Royal Guard, both in scarlet, and they were followed by the riot of armorial bearings that marked the lords of the northern Brogat—Lord Wayland with his knights and retainers, and the Squire of Snellgund and his men, and a dozen lesser lords. Behind them came the archers of the company, such as were present, and then companies of archers from throughout the north and east of the realm—twenty small companies that the Red Knight had gathered on the road, or that had already made camp in the fields around the chapel at South Ford.
Last of all—a post of honour—came two dozen knights of the Order of Saint Thomas, led by their Prior. They had already gone as far west as Lissen Carak and returned in the night, but whatever they had said to the Queen and her captain was known only to a few. Men marked that they looked grave.
Blanche Gold was one of the few. She rode close to the Queen, ready to take the babe if required, and carrying water and a cup in case the Queen had need. That morning, Toby had brought her a fine riding horse with a new saddle, and she had not spurned it.
“For the entrance,” he said, and he grinned.
She accepted it. In the midst of war, and peril, her own troubles had sunk away to nothing. The Queen’s insistence that she be treated, not as a servant, but one of her ladies, had met with no resistance. War changed many things. The Queen’s court was a riding court, and by the time she passed under the archway that marked the stained old gates of Albinkirk, Blanche was Lady Blanche in every way that mattered.
She liked it. Come war and Wild, she was happy enough.
To Blanche, the town looked dirty and ill-used. It was hard to hide that it had been taken—brutally—by the Wild the year before. A few house fronts were new—the Etruscan merchants had frescoed the fronts of their houses, and rebuilt the fine porticos that had once lent the street distinction. But for every house repaired, five looked at the street with gaping empty windows and broken doors. The cobbles themselves were ill kept, and raw sewage ran down the middle of the High Street.
It was all rather provincial to a woman from Harndon, with deep cisterns, sewers that functioned most days, and where a stream of effluvium like this was only seen by the poor north of Cheapside.
But Blanche took her cues from the Queen, who beamed with apparent pleasure at everything, smiled at children however furtive, and raised her son to be cheered by even the thinnest, meanest crowds.
They were well up the High Street when the first scream echoed down from the citadel. Men flinched. Women hid their heads.
The Queen looked around as if she’d been struck.
The Red Knight made a face. Blanche found she spent far too much time looking at him, assumed everyone knew she did it, and cursed herself for it, but one result was that she’d learned he had a repertoire of facial expressions he used when he thought no one was looking, or perhaps he didn’t care—at any rate, she knew that one, and it told her he knew what the noise was. Even that he was responsible for it. He didn’t say anything, though, and it was not repeated.
In the main square—scorched and broken and marked by last year’s battle—the Queen stopped before the gates of the citadel and met the city’s sacred lord—the Bishop of Albinkirk. He escorted her to mass in the once great cathedral, which currently had a roof only over part of the nave. The knights of the Order did a great deal to aid the singing, as did a dozen monks and nuns who’d followed the Queen from Lorica.
Blanche enjoyed mass—the first proper mass in a proper church that she’d seen since the Troubles, as she had privately christened them, had begun. She enjoyed the thing, well done, with proper responses and good singing, and she reminded herself to go to confession as soon as ever she could—and then mass was over and she was swept along with the household, the Queen’s household, into the nooks and crannies of a fortress on the edge of war that had never, on its proudest day, expected to receive even a very small court.
The citadel had barracks space for two hundred soldiers and perhaps as many servants and support staff, and maybe—at full stretch, and sharing beds—maybe forty knights and noblemen.
The staff were overwhelmed immediately. The absence of their master—Ser John, the famous Captain of Albinkirk—was a disaster, and he had no master of household, no wife, no kin to oversee. He was his own steward.
As a result the Queen stood, almost forgotten, in the great hall—a great hall almost completely undecorated.
Blanche watched her temper rise. She had come to see that Desiderata was not unmarked by nights in a dungeon and a day waiting to be burned at the stake. Some of her light-heartedness was gone, perhaps forever. And she felt slights where none were intended, where before she had been immune, and sunny.
Blanche gave her wine from the glass flask in her basket. There was none for the other ladies.
Blanche waited as long as she could. It had only been moments—two hundred heartbeats—but the Red Knight was already sitting—he was reading a report and issuing orders at a great rate, and he appeared to have forgotten the Queen, and B
lanche knew they were headed for trouble.
She made an attempt to work through the staff—but they had closed against outsiders, and a senior woman—a cook or a laundress—stood at the end of the hall and told Master Nicomedes that there were simply no rooms for the Queen or any of the great knights. Blanche caught a glance from Nicomedes—it made her bold.
She walked up behind the Red Knight as he sat on a camp stool surrounded by his own men. Ser Michael was clerking, writing quickly. Prior Wishart had a fine, five-fold ivory tablet, each tablet holding a sheet of fine beeswax, and on it he took rapid notes. A very handsome young man of her own age stood waiting, surrounded by other men congratulating him—his face beamed with the happiness of heroic accomplishment. He wore a mail shirt and thigh-high boots and no weapon but a dagger. Behind him was another such—almost as handsome, but she didn’t know him.
Ser Michael saw him first and put a hand on his captain’s hand. “Galahad D’Acon,” he said.
The Red Knight stopped dictating orders. In fact, all conversation stopped.
“You made it,” Ser Gabriel said. He rose to his feet even as D’Acon dropped to one knee.
Blanche gathered her courage and hissed, “The Queen.”
The Red Knight’s head snapped around. He saw her—smiled, she treasured that—and then nodded.
“Ser Michael, be so kind as to fetch the Queen to hear her messenger,” he said. Then, suddenly realising where the Queen was standing, he spoke rapidly to Toby. Toby grabbed Blanche’s arm and together with Nell and Lord Robin and a dozen squires, they swiftly stripped the hall of stools and chairs. A great chair was taken from under the very nose of the hall’s senior servants, who protested that it was Ser John’s chair…
Almost seamlessly, the Queen was brought to the work table, seated in a chair almost worthy of her, her cloak taken, and given wine by Toby on bended knee.
“You must have ridden like the very wind itself,” she said.
Young Galahad stayed on one knee and made no answer.
Blanche watched Ser Gabriel. He did not fidget with impatience. His hands, however, were trembling slightly.
Under the table, one foot was grinding, grinding, as if it could cut a hole through the stone flags.
Somewhere high above them, the damned soul screamed its torment again.
“Damn,” the captain said.
The Queen looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
He cleared his throat.
“We are all anxious to hear your messages,” the Queen said.
Galahad D’Acon nodded. “Your grace, I found Ser John—that is, the Count of Albinkirk—in fine spirits, well dug in with almost five hundred lances at Gilson’s Hole.”
Blanche saw the captain pound a fist into his own left palm—he and Ser Michael shared a grin.
“He reports…” Galahad dropped his voice. “The defeat suffered by the Emperor on Monday at the Inn of Dorling. The Emperor is dead, and his army badly beaten up. He’s mustered more than a thousand survivors at Gilson’s Hole and intends to cover their retreat.”
Blanche saw it on all their faces—all the men and women that she’d come to know on the road. She knew they’d served the Emperor. She knew that they had friends in that army.
She saw Ser Christos, who was always courtly and fine to her with his pretty accent and his funny manners, turn grey and age a year. She saw Michael wince. But most of all she saw Ser Gabriel.
His face did not change. He swallowed carefully, but she’d been watching him for more than a week. She saw the blow go home as surely as if he’d been punched in the jaw.
His voice was even. “And Ser Milus?” he asked.
Galahad knew he was delivering bad news. “No word, my lord, except that your company was not with the Emperor.”
The Red Knight nodded. “Of course not. They lost all their horses. Where is the Emperor’s body?”
Ser Christos looked at him. For the Moreans, it was the right question. She saw that, too.
“At Gilson’s Hole, under the guard of the surviving Nordikaans. Ser John wished to send them here, but not until he feels the road is secure.”
Ser Christos shot to his feet. “I would like to volunteer,” he said thickly. All the Moreans in the hall were on their feet.
Ser Gabriel met the Morean’s eye. He glanced at the Queen. She looked puzzled.
“Go and fetch the Emperor,” he said. “Take fifty knights. Chris, it is all I can spare. You know I would send more.”
Ser Christos bowed. He was crying. He paused to bend a knee to the barbarian Queen, and Ser Alcaeus stepped up behind him.
“Your grace, it is almost a thousand years since an Emperor has been lost in battle,” he said.
Desiderata was not slow. “Please, gentlemen…” she said. She rose. “Please give these gentlemen every assistance. I know that the loss of my husband bade fair to cripple me—I cannot imagine what effect the loss of the Emperor has on his people.”
Ser Gabriel walked with Ser Christos and Ser Alcaeus to the door of the great hall, talking softly. The only thing she heard was, “Don’t let the Nordikaans suicide.”
Then the Moreans were gone, and with them, most of the company knights who had gone to the joust—so long before.
The second messenger was from Lissen Carak—an Order volunteer.
“Diccon Twig, your grace,” he said with a bow. “I bring news that the Faery Knight is at the fortress with an army of the Wild.”
Before anyone could speak, the Queen raised her hand—the sharpest gesture Blanche had seen her use.
“And seeks alliance with you,” he went on. “If your grace allows, he will come here with his captains for parley under safe conduct.”
“Give him my sacred word,” the Queen said solemnly. “Let him have this, my regal ring with my seal, that he knows we mean what we say.”
Diccon bowed. “My other message is more private,” he said.
He looked around. “Is the Earl of Towbray’s son, Ser Michael, here?”
Ser Michael shot forward.
“Ah, my lord—your wife is delivered of a daughter, already christened at first light: Mary. And your lady wife and babe do well.” Young Twig bowed.
Ser Michael hugged him and kissed both his cheeks, to the younger man’s acute embarrassment.
“You must send her here to us, that we may play with our children together,” the Queen said.
The thing in the tower screamed again, and the Queen, standing—everyone was standing—shook her head. “What is that?” she asked in her beautifully authoritative voice.
The Red Knight flushed. “If it please your grace,” he said. “It’s probably my griffon. It needs company, and food. Would you care to see it? And perhaps we can find all these ladies and gentlemen food and lodging.”
Blanche gave him a nod.
Luck—and a little shoving—got her a second at the turning of a stair.
“She’s more alone than she’s ever been. She needs you.” She got those words out before Ser Michael realized who was interrupting.
Gabriel nodded. “Got it,” he said tersely, and continued up the stairs. Michael pressed her from behind, and she climbed.
There were rooms in both big towers. Blanche looked into several and they were empty—empty of all but heavy chests which probably held wall hangings. It was a start.
She paused on a landing, let Ser Michael pass, and waited until Nicomedes came.
“Can we get Sukey and put her in charge of the castle?” she asked.
Nicomedes shook his dark, ascetic head. “She is managing a great camp,” he said. His voice was sober, and it struck her that he, too, was Morean.
“If I start issuing rooms?” Blanche said.
Nicomedes nodded sharply. “I’ll back you,” he said.
“I need a tablet,” she said.
Prior Wishart, passing, stopped. “For what, daughter?” he asked.
“Father, I need to assign people rooms. I need t
o get everyone out of their travel clothes. There needs to be food and drink…”
The great Prior handed her his ivory tablets. “All my knights can share one room,” he said, “or sleep with the soldiers in the barracks.”
She took him at his word. Before the court had climbed to the top—she never got to see the monster that afternoon, although she wanted to something fierce—she was all the way down the other stair. She found the senior servant, a handsome woman in a good blue wool gown with two dozen silver buttons.
“I’m Lady Blanche Gold, and I’ll be handling the Queen’s arrangements,” she said. She gave the woman a brief, professional smile.
The woman shook her head. “We can’t, my lady. We just can’t—all the men are out with the militia, and we’ve no one here but laundry staff and cooks.”
Blanche took a deep breath. “We’re not afraid of work,” she said. “There’s a war. I’m going to put people into rooms. Your staff can just take them bedding. Let them see to it themselves. Are there empty houses in the town? Looked like it to me. What’s your name?”
“I’m Elizabeth Gelling. This is Cook—we call her Cook.” The woman in blue nodded.
Cook sketched a curtsey. “Your ladyship.”
It almost made Blanche shout: “I’m one of you.”
Almost. But that moment of honesty would lose her the battle. Ladies could give orders that laundry maids could not.
“May I have two maids to run for me?” she asked.
Two maids—barely old enough to be away from leading strings—were pushed forward.
Blanche didn’t look back. “Attend me,” she said. She turned and moved swiftly back to the great hall.
As she’d hoped, she found Toby and Robin setting for a campaign dinner in a great hall.
“I need you two,” she said. She carried them with looks and smile—she knew how.
She outlined her plan of campaign and had them fully in four sentences.
“Cook needs to know who she’s feeding. My notion is that anyone below the rank of earl takes a house in the town.” She looked at them.
Toby shook his head. “Close, but won’t work. I’ll write a list.” He took her tablet and wrote—starting with Ser Ranald. “He’s got to be here. My master—Robin’s—the Prior. All the messengers—they can go to the barracks, but then there’s…” He scribbled furiously.
The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) Page 68
