The River King's Road

by Merciel, Liane

  “Do you have a better place in mind?”

  “No. I just don’t like being so close to … to a place where someone died.” Odosse watched the dog warily. The animal raised its ears and circled around their fire, sniffing at the smoke but staying out of reach.

  Brys snorted. He went back to the saddlebags, returning with a dented pot half full of venison chunks. After throwing another to the dog, he set the pot over the flames to fry the rest. “Met a man once while I was campaigning in Thelyand. He’d been to the far north, almost to the White Seas, and his company got caught out in a blizzard. Only a day from town, but that was a day too far. Half of them froze. He lived because he built a hut from the frozen bodies of his friends, packed it over with snow, and waited inside until the storm passed. That’s uncomfortably close to the dead. This is nothing.”

  “It’s the worst I’ve seen,” Odosse said softly.

  “Then harden fast, or what’s in the world will break you.” He shook the frying meat as if trying to see how high he could throw it against the sides of the pot. “It takes strength to survive. The weak die.”

  “That’s what they say in Ang’arta, isn’t it? The Baozites. That’s what they believe.”

  His eyes flashed up from the fire to meet hers, and Odosse flinched back from what she saw there. For an instant she thought he might actually strike her. “How would you know?”

  “Our solaros gave a sermon on it. I think his answer to them was right, too.”

  “What was that?”

  “That they’re wrong. Their view is too narrow. Strength is more than force of arms. It’s compassion, courage, wisdom. People are strong in different ways; few are truly weak. If they understood that, they’d be right—and a good deal less cruel.”

  “Pity his wisdom couldn’t protect him from the mace that smashed his face in.”

  Odosse took Wistan gently down from his carrier, settling both babies on her lap as she sat on the far side of the fire. “Is it so hard to believe that strength might take other forms?”

  “What’s hard to believe is that people think compassion will save them when the wolves come howling at their doors.” Brys speared a piece of meat on the end of a stick. He took up a length of rope and made a loop of one end. Holding the meat out to the dog with one hand, he readied the rope in the other. When the animal thrust its head forward to snap up the offered food, Brys snared the dog neatly in the loop and led it back to the charred cottage, where he tethered its crude leash to a wall post.

  “Thank you,” Odosse said when he came back. This time she meant it. She unlaced her blouse to feed the babies, welcoming the fire’s warmth for them as well as herself.

  He shrugged her thanks off ungraciously. After spearing half the chunks onto another stick and handing it to Odosse, Brys sat back to eat the rest of the tough, twice-cooked meat with the same stick he’d used to lure the dog. “Let’s say someone tries to kill those children you have at your breast. What do you do? Pray at them? Appeal to their sense of decency? No. You fight. Hard. If you spend even a heartbeat thinking about anything else, odds are, you die.”

  “Maybe so,” Odosse said quietly, watching Aubry nuzzle against her, “but don’t you see? I’d fight for them. I’d fight to protect them, because they’re weaker than I am and because I love them. Love protects them, and strengthens me.”

  “Pretty words from a pious heart. Best hope it’s never tested beyond that.”

  “Why are you so hostile to the idea?”

  “Because it isn’t true.” He jabbed his stick across the fire at her. The tip glistened with fat, hissing as it passed through the flames. “Piety protects no one. Honor protects no one. Of all the brave and noble knights who rode with Galefrid into Willowfield, do you know how many survived? One. Me. Because I wasn’t in the chapel. Everyone else prayed and died, and the sinner came out alive. What does that tell you?”

  “That you blame yourself for having good luck,” Odosse answered.

  He stared at her for a long time after that. Then he laughed, even longer, in short harsh rasps that sounded more like sobs than mirth. But there were no tears, and when Brys was done laughing, he tossed his stick into the fire and went to his bedroll without another word.

  In the morning he untied the dog. They went on, and it did not follow.

  WINTER’S FIRST FROST FOUND THEM AT Tarne Crossing.

  To Odosse’s eyes, the town was very nearly a city. She had never seen a settlement so large. Walls of mounded earth and sharpened stakes ringed Tarne Crossing, reinforced by wings of stone along the water. At the town’s center, a tower of stone and wood rose from an earthen mound to overlook the surrounding land.

  Two high bridges of pale stone arched over the wide slow waters of the Seivern River to meet the town, joining Langmyr and Oakharn across the waves. The bridges were made of the same luminous stone as the River Kings’ Road, and they shone with captured light under the cloudy sun. They were ancient when the first townsman settled at their feet; beside them the walls of Tarne Crossing looked like a child’s scattered toys.

  Graceful towers of glimmering white stone framed the bridges, two at each end. Whoever controlled the towers controlled the crossing, for it was impossible to cross the bridges without passing between the two towers at each side, and archers from all four had a clear field of fire across their span.

  The Kingsghost Towers, they were called in Langmyr; if they had another name Odosse did not know it. Two kings and two princes had died in those towers, and countless others not blessed with crowns and so forgotten by the singers. The tales that survived were grisly enough. She looked away as she walked past their lacy windows.

  Brys and Odosse were not taking the bridges. They had, instead, traveled in a lopsided curve northward, crossing upstream at Seivern Ford and coming back south through Oakharn to approach Tarne Crossing’s north gate. Sometimes they had walked on the milk-glass smoothness of the River Kings’ Road and sometimes on winding game trails that took them deep beneath the branches of Bayarn Wood. For nearly a fortnight they had not seen another living soul. Perhaps that was the point of taking the game trails, but it left Odosse exhausted and more than a little lonely. She was glad when the town came into view, Oakharne though it was.

  The bridges of Tarne Crossing were very old, but the town itself was not. The Empire of Rhaelyand had built the bridges to join Langmyr and Oakharn when the two kingdoms were provinces under the same crown-and-sun banner. In those days, Odosse imagined, there had probably been market towns on both sides of the towers, peaceful and prosperous.

  Today there was only one town, on the Oakharne side of the river, and it crouched behind its walls and spike-fringed ditches in readiness for an enemy that might come at any moment. The Langmyrne side of the river was cut bare in a wide band facing the town. Past the weedy swath of stumps, the forest rose unbroken around the white thread of the River Kings’ Road.

  The Oakharne had done that. They sent raiding parties out regularly to destroy any sign of Langmyrne settlement within a league of Tarne Crossing. Not a single charcoal-burner was allowed to live that close to the river. If Langmyr wanted to try retaking the crossing, they would have to do it through a thick barrier of unsettled forest, across a killing field cut bare around the water, and over the bridges and towers themselves. There were no towns nearby to serve as supply bases, only tiny villages that couldn’t begin to feed or field an army. Villages like her own. Defenseless.

  The nearest Langmyrne castle, apart from the rattling ruin of Widows’ Castle, was Thistlestone, thirty or forty leagues to the west. Everything in between was hostile or helpless. Odosse had never felt so isolated in her life.

  Pennants showing a black bull on a field of red snapped from the town’s gates and the high tower at its center. The sign of Bulls’ March, Odosse knew; in this part of the world, the black bull was as ubiquitous as Lord Eduin’s ring of thistles was in hers. She was on enemy land. The thought made her hold Aubry closer. Her so
n was in her arms, as he had been for most of the morning, while Wistan rode in the carrier on her back.

  At the gate Brys pulled something from a leather thong around his neck and showed it to the guard, then tucked it back under his shirt. They exchanged a few words, too hushed for Odosse to follow, and the gate guard let them in. She thought there was a touch of respect in the young guardsman’s face, or at least something more than the bored sullenness that had been there before.

  “What did you show him?” she asked Brys in a whisper, but he didn’t answer.

  He led her to an inn near the town’s north wall. A battered wooden sign over the door showed a broken bull’s horn with a handful of letters at the bottom. Odosse could not read, and the writing was so weathered that she doubted she’d have been able to make out the name even if she could. But it looked clean, and the smells that drifted from the kitchen set her stomach to growling. She hadn’t had a real dinner since leaving Willowfield.

  The inn was dim and already half-full, although it was only early afternoon. Brass sunburst emblems, their rays stained dark by smoke, hung from the pillars and dangled over the windows to invite the Bright Lady’s favor. Banked fires burned in the commons’ two hearths, offering just enough warmth to ease the chill in the late autumn air. A communal kettle of bitterpine tea steamed over one of the fires, filling the room with a pungent spiciness and masking the less pleasant scents of old rushes and hard travel. One of the patrons, a short, stolid-faced fellow in the plain brown wool and folded boots of a Seawatch man, ladled tea into a dented metal cup and went back to his chair, sipping the bitter draught.

  While Brys made arrangements for them to stay at the inn, Odosse took a chair in the corner. She was bone-weary, and starved for the sights and sounds of human conversation, but she felt nervous as a cat clinging to a branch over a kennel yard. One misstep and she’d be sprawled among her enemies. She could expect no mercy there.

  The Oakharne she saw hardly seemed capable of inflicting such horrors. Most of the inn’s patrons had the look of locals. Their dress and their manner were very like those of Willowfield’s people; the familiarity of it brought an ache of longing to her heart. Her father liked to spend his evenings in the village tavern at this time of year, when the harvest was safely stowed away and the first brush of winter sent men looking for a warm fire and friends.

  Hastily she pushed the memory away, blinking rapidly before the tears could rise to her eyes. She couldn’t think about that now. Not here. The pain was still too raw. It would cripple her if she let it, and Aubry needed her strong.

  She focused on the differences instead. The speech in the taproom was nothing like that in Willowfield. Odosse could barely follow the snatches of conversation she heard. Strange that dialects should change so greatly only a few days’ travel from her home. Or, perhaps, not so strange; Odosse had never been more than twenty leagues from Willowfield in her life, and she supposed that the same might be true for many of the people here, even in a town as large as Tarne Crossing. Each village had its own voice in Langmyr, and she saw no reason that it should be otherwise in Oakharn.

  A serving girl brought her an iron key. A wooden disc painted with a red-combed cockerel dangled from the end, showing which room the key opened. That, too, brought a lump to Odosse’s throat. In Willowfield they had the same custom of marking inns’ doors with pictures, since most visitors could not read.

  She nodded gratefully to the serving girl, who patted her shoulder and returned a moment later with a bowl of chicken broth, speckled with onion and carrot, and a chunk of coarse bread. Odosse dipped the bread into her bowl and fed broth-soaked pieces to Aubry. She offered them to Wistan, too, but the baby ignored them as he ignored everything outside his own delirious dreams. He’d become dangerously thin, despite her forcing milk and water down his throat, and his fitful sobs grew weaker every night. She worried about that, but she had done all she could for it and the worry was not new. They’d reached Tarne Crossing. He’d get help soon enough.

  “… money to be made there, and a bit of sport besides,” said a jowly man at the next table. He was already drunk, and leaned excitedly toward the two others sharing his table. All three carried the stale urine stench of the tanning vats; no doubt that was why they had been seated at the fringe of the commons.

  “Where?” asked one of his companions. That one was so tall he looked like a grown man sitting at a child-sized table. His sleeves ended halfway between wrist and elbow, and he plucked at them constantly to stretch out the difference. The ends were greasy and frayed from it.

  “Littlewood. Sir Gerbrand’s put out the word. Quietly, mind, quietly, with Weakshanks still sitting his father’s chair—may Celestia send a pox on his bloodless coward’s arse. Sir Gerbrand, now, he’s a proper man. He knows we ought to be taking vengeance on those traitors for doing in poor Galefrid and his boy. We join in with him, we’ll have revenge on those baby-killers and maybe more. They say Thistlestone’s rich, and Mauverrand’s ruled by an old woman. Win enough, who knows, Gerbrand might find himself sitting the Bullmarshals’ Chair.”

  The third man stirred uneasily, casting glances from side to side. “Not so loud. Someone might hear.”

  The square-faced tanner made a sun sign across his chest, then looked around and laughed. “No one’s listening, you old fool. What, you think Weakshanks has his white wolves sitting in on talk at the Broken Horn?” He hawked and spat, hitting the rushes near Odosse’s foot. She pulled away uncomfortably.

  The tanner saw her move and gave her a smile that showed small, ferretlike teeth. Several were missing. “Nobody listening but this girl here, and I’ll wager she’d cheer us right on. Isn’t that so, sweetkiss? You’d give a smile for some brave lads going over the river to teach those murdering Langmyrne a lesson, wouldn’t you? Maybe a little more, eh?”

  Odosse smiled shakily. She didn’t dare respond aloud. Her accent would mark her as an enemy with the first word. Brys had gone out while she ate; she had no friends here.

  The ruins of the crofter’s cottage and the carrion stink of its well were vivid in her mind. She hoped they couldn’t sense her fear.

  She made a show of smoothing Aubry’s blankets in feigned modesty, then—praying for Celestia’s forgiveness and her son’s at once—gave him a sharp, hidden pinch on the underside of his left thigh. At once Aubry started wailing and kicking. Odosse kissed him swiftly on the head, mumbled something apologetic to the tanners that was masked by her baby’s shrieks, and escaped up the stairs away from their crudeness and their hate.

  The room with the cockerel on its door was just a few steps from the stairs. As soon as she was inside, Odosse laid the babies on the bed and locked the door. She pulled out the key and tested it; the lock held. Only then did the hammering of her heart begin to slow. She rested her forehead against the door, her palms trembling over the wood.

  Of course she’d known that the Oakharne would be unfriendly. She just hadn’t expected to be confronted with such bald ugliness so soon. That was all. She’d be better prepared next time. She would.

  Odosse took a deep breath, let go of her fear, and forced herself to look around.

  She was comforted by what she saw. The servants had laid a kettled fire in the room, and its warmth filled the bedchamber. A pan of water bubbled atop the contained fire. Folding a cloth around her hands to protect them from the heat, Odosse lifted up the pan and emptied it into the bucket of cold water sitting by a basin in the middle of the room.

  There was a bowl of cracked yellowish soap too. She’d missed that luxury. When the water was comfortably warm, she unwrapped the cloth from her hands and dipped it into the bucket, stepping into the basin to wash. She sponged the road’s dust off, then soaped her hair and sluiced the remaining bucket-water over herself and into the basin.

  The bath made her whole again, as if she’d washed off the tanners’ hatreds along with the road’s filth, and tending to the children calmed her nerves. She cleaned and chan
ged both babies, soothed and suckled Aubry, and forced milk down Wistan’s throat, burping him between each mouthful, until he would take no more. Then, exhausted, she curled around the babies on the bed and let herself drift off to sleep.

  Aubry’s crying woke her around dusk. Brys was sitting on a straw pallet on the floor, changing his boots; his hair was wet and a second empty bucket stood by the basin, so she guessed that he had come in and washed while she slept.

  “Where did you go?” Odosse asked while she checked over her son. Aubry seemed fine, just restless. She wished she could say the same for Wistan. His lips were dry and the skin under his eyes sagged like an old man’s. The soft spot on the top of his head was sunken, too; she could see faint shadows pooling there.

  “Into town. Needed a new pair of boots.”

  “Did you learn anything?”

  “Not much. No one knows who did the killings at Willowfield, though most have as many theories as lice crawling through their heads. Worth about the same, too.”

  “What about the Blessed? Did you get help for Wistan?”

  Brys grunted, tying the laces on his new boots. He stamped them as he stood up. They were better than the old ones, with a band of tooled leather about the tops that looked peculiar against the plainness of his other clothes. “Blessed Andalya left Tarne Crossing. She’s gone to Bulls’ March to see to old Ossaric. They say he’s on his deathbed, so I suppose they want to see if the Blessed can save him. No one knows when she’ll be back. I doubt even Celestia’s Blessed can heal a heart broken by grief, so if he doesn’t get better or die soon, she may be gone for a while and for no good cause.”

  “Then—then what will we do?”

  “You can do whatever you like. Try to stay out of trouble.” He swept on his travel-stained green cloak and fastened it with a copper brooch that Odosse had not seen before. Gems glittered on the brooch, the same bright emerald as his eyes. “I am going to see if Mistress Merrygold’s whorehouse is as warm as I remember.”