The River King's Road

by Merciel, Liane

  In places the Oakharne held their conquests for months, even years: time enough to try strengthening a weak hold by marriage, or to birth a few children and call them heirs. But it never lasted. Step by step, inexorably, they were beaten back to the Seivern, leaving a wake of broken hopes and broken bodies. And for a hundred years since, the cycle of grievances had ground on.

  Old grudges, old claims, old wounds that never healed before the next raid ripped them raw … the repercussions of Uvarric’s Folly never ended. Its ripples never died out before someone threw a new stone to make more. Hundreds had died for Widows’ Castle alone. That was a worthless endeavor if ever there was one, but Leferic’s own brother had been too blind to see it.

  Hardly anyone remembered the castle’s true name. Its fields were long reclaimed by pines and brambles. Its keep was nothing but a pile of rocks crowned by a drafty, bat-infested tower. Its only link to Oakharn was that one of the daughters of Breakwall had married a Langmyrne lord there, fifty years back during a rare lull of peace, and ruled the castle in her own name for a few years after her husband died. Then one of the husband’s brothers held a mockery of a trial, convicted her of treason, and executed her to take the castle himself. A few bards had written songs about it. One, a politically minded playwright from Seawatch, had made it a popular tragedy. That was all. Yet not a decade went by without some fool lordling trying to retake Widows’ Castle, and there was never any lack of men willing to join up and die for no better reason than that their fathers had died there too.

  Galefrid had wanted to take Widows’ Castle. His brother had been that foolish. They had a claim through some uncle of Lord Ossaric’s, and occasionally their father had mumbled about the castle when he was in his cups, but he’d never mentioned the precise nature of their claim or, more importantly, how anyone from Bulls’ March was supposed to take and hold the castle without an army sufficient to lay siege across the Seivern. Yet Galefrid dreamed of glory, and Widows’ Castle sang that siren promise, so he wanted it.

  Even his visit to Thistlestone—the visit that was supposed to open a new door to peace—was meant as a subterfuge. Galefrid thought it would give him the chance to scout Lord Inguilar’s defenses, perhaps plan an attack later on. He couldn’t imagine any real peace, only a pretense that he could play for advantage in war. It was Leferic who’d spread most of the rumors that his brother was visiting Lord Inguilar to seek Langmyr’s friendship; he’d hoped his lies might sow the seeds of truth. Galefrid, however, hadn’t had any interest in seeing Thistlestone until he got it in his head that he could use the journey as a scouting trip. He was completely, willfully blind to any other possibility.

  That was what Uvarric’s Folly had done to them. It buried the future under a history of hate. It was madness and stupidity and Leferic wanted no part of it.

  It was, he assumed, what had driven Lusian the Fat to murder those children.

  He had known, of course, that there was some risk of hotheads shedding blood over Galefrid’s death. When Leferic designed the plan, that had seemed an acceptable loss. If Galefrid died in a hunting accident or fell off the parapets and broke his neck, someone might get suspicious. Where would those suspicions fall, if not on the younger son who stood to inherit upon his brother’s demise?

  But if Galefrid died across the river, and by strange and terrifying sorcery rather than an arrow in the back, that did not look like assassination—certainly not any assassination a bookish younger brother might plot. It looked like an attack by Ang’arta. Who but the Spider could command the Thorns? Who but the Thorns could inflict such a slaughter? Bloodmist was their weapon. Thousands had seen its grisly work on Thelyand Ford, laying waste to the pride of the Sunfallen Kingdoms and bridging the river with corpses. No one wanted to make an enemy of the Iron Fortress.

  Some might mutter that there was another hand in the ambush, but there had been mutterings about the Slaver Knight, too, and no one had gone to war over that. Lord Inguilar of Thistlestone was not one to call his knights to battle over a few lost peasants. Inguilar wanted peace badly enough to swallow his suspicions for it; he’d shown that five years ago, when they’d handed him the Slaver Knight and he’d asked for no other names. He’d reinforced it with his eagerness to let Galefrid visit him under a peace-banner. The man had little stomach for war.

  Leferic, in turn, had predicted that he should be able to keep his own people from blaming the Langmyrne for the deaths. There might be a few isolated incidents, but the killing was so clearly a Thorn’s work that he didn’t think anyone would truly believe Langmyr was to blame. A few fools might claim otherwise, might even kill a Langmyrne peasant or two, but there would be no war over it. Anything less was a price he could pay.

  Sitting on that chair, though, and listening to Cadarn make his accusations, Leferic had become uncomfortably aware that accepting a loss in the abstract was one thing. Having it thrown in his face was another. He’d sent fat Lusian to the headsman, but the guilt was his as much as the condemned man’s. More so, truly. Lusian had killed two children, but how many had died in Willowfield? Leferic had never even thought to ask.

  What did that make him?

  A ruler, he decided. The people of Willowfield were necessary sacrifices to cover his tracks and divert suspicion. If both sides suffered losses, neither would leap to accuse the other, and war could be averted. Their deaths, therefore, were not wasted. Many more might have died otherwise.

  Lusian’s killings, on the other hand, were wasteful, and so he had been justly punished.

  It was a neat bit of sophistry. It did nothing to soften the corrosive knot that sat in the pit of his stomach.

  The truth, Leferic thought, was that he was not as cold-blooded as he wanted to be. Needed to be. The truth was that he was wracked with guilt over the needless deaths and desperately afraid of what he had set in motion. What had been elegant and tidy in the controlled abstraction of his plans had to unfold in the living chaos of the world, where the smallest mistake could cause catastrophe. It terrified him, and the fact of his fear frightened him anew. Now more than ever, he needed to be flawlessly calculated.

  The murder of those two children, left unpunished, could have been the spark that set the Seivern on fire. He’d stamped it out, but there would be others. His fate rested on how he dealt with them.

  Too soft, and the Langmyrne would be outraged. The massacre of Willowfield put them very near the edge; Leferic was loath to test them any further. Lord Inguilar had turned a blind eye to the Slaver Knight’s conspirators, true, but his patience had to have limits. He wasn’t eager for war, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be forced into it. At some point—and Leferic feared he was very near that point, if not already past it—Eduin Inguilar would have to answer with fire and sword.

  Too harsh, and his own knights would rebel against him. If that happened, it would hardly matter whether Albric found and removed his infant nephew. Dozens of landless knights and petty lordlings could claim some distant connection to the rulers of Bulls’ March, enough to take its throne if Leferic proved unfit. They wouldn’t need Galefrid’s boy as a figurehead.

  What Leferic needed was time. Time, calm, and swords he could trust.

  With that thought in mind, he sent a servant to find Heldric.

  By the time the old gesith climbed up the tower stairs, other servants had brought platters of cheese, smoked meat, and black bread. The food tasted like dust, and the autumn ale that went with it might as well have been water, but Leferic made himself eat while gazing through the windows at the castle courtyard. He’d need his strength.

  At Heldric’s knock, he turned. “Come. There’s food if you’re hungry, ale if you’re thirsty.”

  “Thank you, but I have no need.” The gesith stroked the snow-flecked gray of his beard. “That was a brave thing you did. I hope the fates see fit to reward you.”

  Leferic gave him a sardonic, disbelieving smile as he stepped back from the windowsill and returned to his favo
rite armchair. He left his half-eaten plate behind, but took his ale mug with him. “Was it?”

  “Your lord father would not have done it. Nor would your brother. I pray that you were in the right, my lord.”

  “I am not my father, or my brother. That man was a murderer. He deserves the block.”

  “He was a murderer,” Heldric agreed. “But the victims were Langmyrne, and though we may not have proof, as you say, that the Langmyrne killed your brother, still most of your people believe it. Some will say you betrayed your brother’s honor and are unfit to sit your father’s chair. They will not like your decision today.”

  Leferic looked at him hard, wondering if there was a threat hidden in those words. Heldric’s favorite nephew had been caught and killed on the other side of the river when Leferic was young. He had been a child then, and not privy to the details, but he remembered that Heldric’s nephew was hanged, and that the insult cut deep.

  Beheading was the usual method of execution. It was still a condemned man’s fate, and therefore ignominious, but at least it was a death by the blade. There was no honor in hanging. Common criminals died that way: wretches who had forfeited their right to die like men. Even Lusian the Fat, killer of children, was granted a death on the block.

  Some inkling of Leferic’s thoughts must have showed on his face, for Heldric turned away slightly and stroked his beard again. The firelight caught the shadows in his craggy cheeks and gilded the white in his beard. “Edoric was about your age. Seventeen. Seventeen, and certain he would be the one to restore the Sunjewel to our house.” He rubbed his knees as if soothing an old ache. “Instead he died. But you know that.”

  “Only how,” Leferic said. “Not why.”

  “The ‘why’ was a wild fancy,” Heldric said with a bare, bitter trace of a smile. “Family legend claims that long ago, when we were still House Edorrin, one of my ancestors rescued a prince of Khartoli from bandits while he was on pilgrimage. In gratitude he gave us the Sunjewel: a golden brooch set with a gem big as a quail’s egg and fiery as the Bright Lady’s heart. Supposedly it was enchanted so that no one could lie to its wearer, but without that it would still have been priceless. It was the one great treasure of our House.

  “We kept the Sunjewel after we lost our title and our lands following Rhodric’s Disgrace, but in the end we lost that too. My grandfather was captured by the Langmyrne during the Fall of Widows’ Castle. His son, my uncle, carried the Sunjewel to the castle as ransom … but Lord Veltaine murdered them both and kept the stone. Later he had it taken from the brooch and set into the coronet of House Veltaine, and his grandsons wear it still.

  “That is the grievance that cost my nephew’s life. They caught him trying to sneak into Veltaine Castle dressed as a serving boy, convicted him of thievery, and hanged him. I had not thought he was so foolish.” Heldric shook his head slowly. He glanced back at Leferic. “He would have done better to think the way you do. Forget the old legends, the old grudges. Forget what we’ve lost. Look to today. They murdered your brother and nephew, yet you had the forbearance to do justice by their slain children. I cannot say that I would have shown your patience, my lord, but I can admire it in another.”

  “Thank you,” Leferic said, because he did not know what else to say. He set the gesith’s words aside to consider later. “But I summoned you to discuss another matter. The northerner in the great hall today. Cadarn, the one who brought Lusian to us. What do you know of him?”

  “Little enough, my lord. He travels with perhaps ten of his fellows. All skar skraeli from the White Seas, all claiming to be exiles. Mercenaries, I believe. They were in Isencras for the Swordsday competitions, where I am told they placed highly in the melees, and were traveling east to seek employment in Thelyand when they were diverted by the … misfortune in Littlewood.”

  “Thelyand’s battle is already lost,” Leferic said, “and King Merovas impoverished. The ironlords make hard enemies. Cadarn’s men might do better to spend the winter here. Find out where they are staying. If not in the castle town, arrange lodgings for them there. The Rose and Bull should suit. See if they make any trouble in the inn, whether they drink too much or fight with the patrons. If they are reasonably sober, and all like the man who came before me today, offer them posts in my guard. One season at good rates. Tell them that if they do not like my rule at the end of the winter, they are free to go; but I was impressed by Cadarn’s honor today, and I should like to have such courageous men at my side.”

  Heldric cocked his head to the side, looking thoughtful. “Wisely played, my lord.”

  “One can never have too many good swords at hand,” Leferic said, shrugging with feigned nonchalance. He doubted Heldric was fooled. Both of them knew it was not a routine matter of supplementing the castle guards.

  If Leferic misjudged, and his liegemen began plotting treachery in earnest, he would need force to quell them. He dared not trust any of the armsmen in Bulls’ March that far. They’d been Galefrid’s men, not his. Outsiders, on the other hand, would have no ties that might compromise their loyalty to him, and a man who prized honor enough to personally drag a killer from Littlewood to Bulls’ March for justice was as trustworthy as anyone else Leferic could imagine.

  “Of course,” Heldric agreed smoothly. “Was there anything else?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  After the gesith had gone, Leferic sat alone in his library, rereading Inaglione’s Thirteen Graces for the thousandth time. A shrill wind rattled at the panes. He scarcely heard it, so deeply absorbed was he in the writings of that shrewd old courtier.

  At last his lantern guttered low. Leferic rubbed his eyes, startled at the blackness in his windows. Night had fallen while he wasn’t watching. Morning waited, and with it the promise of another day in the uncomfortable chair.

  5

  They were seven days out of Willowfield when Odosse got her first glimpse of war.

  It was a small thing, really: the burned-out skeleton of a crofter’s cottage. Its blackened timbers stood in a tiny clearing where dead leaves scattered gold over a ring of ashes. The branches of the trees nearby were singed; the fire had burned hot and high before it died.

  There weren’t any bodies, or at least none they could find. A low circle of stones with a wooden cover marked the crofter’s well at the bottom of a nearby dip. Odosse smelled carrion when she lifted up the cover in hopes of filling their waterskins, but it was too dark to see what lay rotting in the well.

  A skinny black-and-white dog skulked around the house’s charred bones, alternately snarling at and cringing away from them. It favored its left side when it walked, and between its jutting ribs Odosse could see the gnawed-off shaft of an arrow poking out. The dog’s fur was crusted brown in a ragged teardrop around the wound.

  “Shouldn’t you shoot it?” she asked Brys the first time she saw the dog. She had Wistan on her back and Aubry in her arms, and the animal’s snarls frightened her. “It might attack the babies. The poor thing’s half-starved.”

  Brys straightened long enough to shrug, then went back to breaking the cottage’s fallen beams into smaller chunks for their fire. His hands were soot-smeared to the elbows, but he’d found nothing else worth salvaging in the ashes. “If he’s lasted this long, he might live. Makes me like the little bastard. I don’t see a reason to shoot him unless he starts giving us trouble.”

  “Liking him is fine, but I won’t have a hungry dog near my son,” Odosse said sharply, stepping away from the animal. It was the first time she’d raised her voice to him—the first time she’d argued with him at all, let alone angrily—but it was also the first time he’d suggested leaving Aubry or Wistan in danger.

  Brys seemed to realize that too. He gave her a sardonic smile and a mocking half bow. Putting the hatchet aside, he went to his saddlebags and dug through them until he came up with a chunk of cold venison left over from last night’s dinner. He tossed the meat to the dog, who snapped it out of the air, and threw a seco
nd chunk after it. While the dog ate, Brys wiped his hands on his thighs and went back to chopping wood. “There. Now he’s not hungry.”

  “Thank you,” Odosse said, although she kept her eyes on the gaunt animal and didn’t relax her grip on Aubry for a heartbeat. The dog was very thin. Two chunks might not be enough. Two babies, on the other hand …

  “Where are its owners?” she asked, to take her mind from that thought.

  “Dead, most likely. Maybe in that well. Not many people would shoot a man’s dog and burn down his house if they were looking to make friends.” He wiped ash off the hatchet’s blade. “These beams are cold. The leaves in the ashes have been beaten down by rain, probably the same drizzle that caught us on the road yesterday and the day before. This fire happened days ago. If whoever lived here ran away, I’d hope he’d at least have come back for the dog by now.”

  “Why?”

  “Dogs make better friends than people, generally.” Brys slung the hatchet into his belt and carried an armful of irregularly cut wood from the clearing. He built a pyramid of logs on a patch of ground he’d scuffed clear with his boot, set a handful of dry twigs in the center as tinder, and went back to his saddlebags for flint and steel.

  “No,” Odosse said, flushing. “I mean, why would anyone kill the crofter?”

  “Why does anyone kill anyone in this part of the world? Because he was from the wrong side of the river and whoever killed him was unhappy about something. Willowfield, probably. Doubt it was robbers. Not enough to interest robbers, and no reason for them to poison the well. This was done out of hate.” He struck the steel along the flint’s slanted surface as he spoke. On his third try a spark jumped into the tinder, and Brys blew gently to encourage it. Soon the light of a young fire warmed his face, and he sat back on his heels.

  It was nearing dark. An owl hooted in the woods. Odosse shivered, drawing Aubry up to her chin and nestling her cheek against his warm blankets. “Do we have to stay here tonight?”