Know what a man wants, and what he fears, Inaglione had written in his study of the thirteen princes of Ardashir, and he is yours. It was as true today as it had been two hundred years ago. Leferic had Brisic. He would have Merguil. Then he’d have Gerbrand’s head.
CADARN’S MESSAGE CAME TWO DAYS LATER. Lord Ossaric was still on his sickbed, clinging to life while staring at death, and Leferic was glad for any excuse to leave the castle. He’d secured Sir Merguil and ten of his riders to accompany him to Littlewood. Nothing kept him at Bulls’ March.
The rider who carried Cadarn’s tidings, and who was to escort them to Sir Gerbrand, was a broad-shouldered youth named Ulvrar. His long hair was white as ice, and he bore a vicious scar on his left cheek. The scar was similar to the ones Cadarn and all his men wore, but distinct, like a different letter in the same alphabet. Ash had been rubbed into the wound to blacken it.
Leferic wondered how he’d earned it. All Cadarn’s men were exiles, which perplexed him. The tribes of the White Seas did not give up fighting men easily, and by any measure Cadarn’s company was superb. Why had they been allowed to go?
Ulvrar must have caught him glancing at the scar, for less than an hour after they left the castle, the northman reined his horse back to ride alongside the lord. He gave Leferic a long, challenging look, and then deliberately turned away so that the left side of his face was fully exposed. He rode in that fashion, stone-faced, until Leferic waved his knights aside and nudged his own gelding a little closer.
“You want to know why I am marked,” Ulvrar said flatly, without so much as a glance his way, before Leferic could ask.
“I’m curious, yes.” The northerners were a blunt people; Leferic did not think the youth would be offended by his honesty.
If he was, he gave no sign of it. “I was a wildblood. I tried to leave before the third rite. My people exiled me for cowardice.” The youth’s hand strayed toward his cloak clasp—a small gesture, soon caught and stilled, but enough for Leferic to notice. The cloak was white-tipped wolfskin, a single hide with its head intact, like all the others in Cadarn’s company. The clasp, however, was silver and cunningly wrought; it showed a wolf with its muzzle raised to the moon. A long silver bar connected the crescent moon to the wolf’s heart. None of the others wore anything like it.
Leferic raised an eyebrow, but Ulvrar was not looking at him and in any event seemed to feel he’d given an adequate explanation. It wasn’t, though; none of those words meant anything to Leferic, and he wanted to know more about these skar skraeli. He was relying on them to help hold his own loyal liegemen in check over the winter.
“Forgive me if I pry, but I’m not familiar with your customs,” Leferic said. “What is a wildblood, and why would not doing a ‘third rite’ make you a coward?”
Ulvrar blinked at him, and Leferic read puzzlement in his clear blue eyes. “The wildbloods are the greatest of our warriors. They consume the hearts of beasts, and from them draw magic. Courage, strength, stamina … other things. There are three rites: the first to enter the brotherhood, the second to deepen connection with the beast, the third to master its magic and truly become one with the wild. Some say the power is cursed, but it is a price most readily pay. I refused. I did not have the courage to master my beast. Thus was I a coward. I do not wear this brand wrongly, Leferic-lord.”
“I doubt Cadarn would have chosen a coward for his company.”
Ulvrar gave him a small, pitying smile. “Cadarn Death’s-Debtor is an exile himself. What choice has he? Did you think we would sell our swords to you if we still held raid-right? No. A warrior takes. That is his birthright. He does not serve soft greenlanders. The thanes cast us all out, Leferic-lord. We are all cursed. It happens that Cadarn the Wolf is an honorable man, and will not turn brigand if denied a thane’s blessing. It happens that we who follow him share those thoughts. But if we were not outcast, we would not be here.”
“Then I must be grateful to your thanes,” Leferic said, using courtesy to mask his bewilderment. “Their loss has been my realm’s blessing.”
The scarred youth accepted the words with a nod. He touched his heels to his horse’s ribs and the animal cantered forward, joining the other armsmen under the banner of Bulls’ March. Leferic regretted letting him go; there were many other questions he would have liked to ask, but it would have been unseemly to hurry after a hired man. He could wait.
They reached the outer fields of Littlewood as the first stars were rising over the apple trees. The holding was a small one, and not rich; its fields were tiny and uneven, its people few. Most of Littlewood’s meager wealth was in apples and chestnuts and pigs: things that could be grown in trees, or among them.
Trees were Littlewood’s blessing and its bane. They concealed its commonfolk from raiders across the river, but they hid bandits just as readily. Robbers had plagued this stretch of road for near as long as Leferic could remember. Only in the last few years, when there’d been peace enough along the border for Sir Gerbrand to turn his armsmen against bandits, had they finally been quelled. And now the same knight who’d defeated the robbers was using them as a disguise for his own men.
Leferic sighed and rubbed wearily at his eyes. They’d been riding since breakfast, longer than he was accustomed to sit in the saddle, but that wasn’t what tired him. Sir Gerbrand had been one of his father’s most loyal knights. This was an ignominious end to an honorable career, and Leferic did not relish dealing it out … but Gerbrand had chosen his rebellion, and he had earned its reward.
He was honest enough to admit that it would have been easier if he could send his men in his stead; then he wouldn’t have to see Sir Gerbrand’s face. As he hadn’t seen his brother’s, a small traitor voice in his head whispered.
But that was why he had to be here. Not only to show his liegemen that he was unafraid, but to prove the same thing to himself. If he was to be a worthy ruler, he couldn’t be a coward. Not in the eyes of his men, not in his own. He had to see the bloody price of power, and learn to pay it out of his own hand without flinching.
Cadarn’s arrival spared him any further introspection. The northerner had shed his white bearskin cloak in favor of brown wool; winter had yet to lay any snow on the ground, and white drew too many eyes in the wood. Despite his size, Cadarn moved like a ghost through the trees, and the men who came with him were equally skilled. Leferic saw not a hair of them until they stepped forward to hail him.
“Leferic-lord.” Cadarn’s voice was a rasp that emanated from the darkness. He took hold of the gelding’s reins to keep Leferic’s horse from startling. “Best you should wait the night here, away from the town. The bandits will strike in the morning.”
“At us?” Leferic asked, confused.
The brown-cloaked man shook his head. “There is a group of Langmyrne staying at the inn. In the morning they will go back to their village with the profits of their trade, and the bandits will try to stop them. Foolish of them to cross the river … but there is supposed to be a peace, and the commonfolk say there are worse things than bandits in Bayarn Wood, so perhaps they have their reasons.”
“And we must wait until the bandits attack them.” Leferic couldn’t quite keep an edge of anger from his voice. At Gerbrand, for this foolish provocation and the lives it wasted; at himself, for not having the skill to avoid bloodshed before it began. Killing, he thought, was an admission that reason and manipulation had both failed. He hated Gerbrand for forcing him into it.
“Yes. Otherwise they might only be your knight’s men, and not bandits at all,” Cadarn agreed evenly. “We will wait until they are in the wrong. Then they die.”
“Protect the Langmyrne, if you can,” Leferic ordered. “I will not be forced into war by Gerbrand’s rebellion.”
Cadarn nodded. “I will leave Ulvrar with you. He has good eyes for the night. Keep your men close, and sleep if you can. ‘With morning comes peril, but that does not mean the night will be safe.’ So our oldwives say, and they
are not wrong.”
With that he was gone, and his skar skraeli with him. Only Ulvrar stayed behind with Leferic and the knights. The scarred youth swung down from his saddle, landing with scarcely a leaf disturbed, and took up the reins of Leferic’s horse along with his own. He led the animals north on a winding course that seemed visible only to his eyes. Leferic could not make out any trail they followed, and the mutters of confusion and discontent from Merguil’s riders behind him suggested that they were equally baffled.
But Ulvrar’s progress was steady and sure, and in time they came to a lonely cottage in a ring of cleared stumps. Gray mushrooms furred the damp wood of its doorway. The thatch was rotted through in places, buried by dead leaves in others, and the forest had begun to reclaim the tiny clearing in which the cottage stood.
“We stay here tonight,” Ulvrar said, leading the horses into the clearing. “Sleep with weapons at hand. In the morning we await Cadarn’s word, but we must be ready when it comes.”
The cottage had been readied for them: there were mattresses of pine branches piled on the floor, and buckets of water for the men and their horses. That night they had no fire, and made a meal of cold smoked goose with herbed bread. There was little conversation and no wine, though Leferic would have welcomed either to take his mind off the coming day. He laid his bedroll down with the others, but he could not sleep.
He’d never faced real combat before. He had hardly ever seen blood. Like any noble youth he’d gone hawking and deer hunting, but with no great success, and when he did bring something down it was at a distance. Peasant girls knew more about killing than he did; Leferic had never so much as wrung a chicken’s neck with his own hands.
He didn’t think the morning’s work would find him squeamish—but clumsy? Unsure? He was more afraid of making a mistake through his own inexperience than of getting wounded in a fight. Cadarn’s northmen and his own knights would protect him from Gerbrand’s “bandits,” but no one would protect him from himself. Leadership was as much theater as skill, de Halle had written, and he couldn’t afford a bad performance with his grasp on the Bullmarshals’ Chair so shaky.
Leferic sighed and turned over on the pine branches. His cloak offered little warmth and less padding from their prickles, but he willed away the discomfort. He couldn’t show weakness. They already thought little enough of the Booklouse.
Lost in worry, he never noticed when he finally drifted off. No sooner had he found a half-comfortable position on the pine branches than one of the knights was shaking his shoulder, his face indistinguishable in the predawn gloom.
“Wake,” the man whispered hoarsely, and was gone.
The stars were gone but the sky was still a deep, pearly blue when he came stumbling out of the cottage. Sir Merguil, already armed and armored, pressed a cup of steaming bitterpine tea into Leferic’s hands. The warmth was soothing, and the tartness cleared the fog of sleep from his mind. He wondered where they’d built the fire, and when. Everyone else was so much more efficient.
“When do we ride?” he asked Ulvrar.
The youth’s eyes glittered in the dimness. There seemed something not quite human about them: a pallid light more akin to a wolf’s eyes than those of any man. “We go when we hear the signal,” he replied, belting on a set of iron-hilted knives. “Then we will know Cadarn has attacked.”
“Won’t we miss the fighting?”
“Yes.” Ulvrar shrugged. “Safer that way. Stray arrows, panicked horses … no man can guess his fate in battle, and your duty is not to die here.”
Leferic nodded, for the sense of that was too plain to dispute, but discontent gnawed in his belly. He wanted to prove his courage. He needed to prove his courage. Riding all the way out here to pronounce justice on a handful of disarmed bandits … well, it would show his liegemen that he meant to enforce his peace, and that he was not too lazy to leave his castle to do it, but it wasn’t much for glory. Not the way a personal charge to battle would be. Man against man and blade against blade under the wild winter sky, that would set the bards to singing.
The mourners, too, probably. He wasn’t a swordsman. Ulvrar’s plan was for the best.
A harsh horn’s cry shivered through the air, setting their horses to whickering nervously and jangling their harness. Leferic felt a thrill of excitement. Perhaps the fighting was over; perhaps Gerbrand’s rebels were already taken. But it was still closer to battle than he had ever been—and, unless he failed, and the fragile peace broke, it was closer than he should ever be.
“We go,” Ulvrar said.
They came to a scene of carnage. The Langmyrne peasants were a pitiful lot: a handful of men and two frightened women, those with the worn look of widows forced to make their way in the world without brothers or sons. They clustered around a wagon laden with netted hams and tar-caulked barrels. Two donkeys stood between the wagon shafts. One was dead, arrow-struck and slumped in its harness, while the other stood paralyzed by fear. The wagon driver was dead too; he had fallen in his seat with his arms trailing to the ground. Arrows studded his corpse like cloves stuck in a pomander orange.
Two of the “bandits” were dead or dying as well. One was sprawled in the dirt, his throat and collarbones smashed by a vicious blow from some massive, crushing blade. The other sat slack-jawed against the wagon, his eyes glazed and blood trickling slowly down his brow. The top of his head was a cracked pink egg. Leferic stared at it in revolted fascination.
Cadarn’s men had herded the rest of them into a ditch by the side of the road. The sight of Leferic’s banner, however, seemed to inspire new courage—or terror—in the “bandits,” and they fought with renewed ferocity as the black bull came snapping through the trees. The ground was against them and they were jammed too closely together to do more than jab at the northerners using their swords like spears, but they did that frantically.
One of the jabs found a gap in an exile’s armor just below his armpit and sank in deeply. He stumbled back, grunting in pain. At once three men rushed him, knocking him to the ground and swinging wildly with their swords as they ran. Though the ditch’s sides crumbled under their feet, sending one bandit sprawling, the other two managed to break free.
With a roar of inarticulate rage, another of Cadarn’s men swung his two-handed sword at one of the retreating bandits. The blade struck him across the back of his legs; the man went down screaming in the leaf-flecked mud. The other, startled, tripped but scrambled away on his hands and knees. He got back to his feet, lowered his head, and ran for the trees, arms pumping.
“Stop him,” Leferic said quietly.
Two of Merguil’s riders had dismounted and strung their elm bows. The strings thrummed, two notes plucked from a dissonant song, and the third man fell dying.
The rest surrendered.
Leferic rode forward when they were disarmed. They were injured, muddy, sullen. There were fewer than a dozen all told. He recognized some of their faces. Not as friends; not even as names he knew. Only as men that he had glimpsed at the low tables when his father feasted his liegemen. Nevertheless, it was enough to tell him that Sir Gerbrand had used his own armsmen for this folly.
He turned toward the peasants. “Are these the men who robbed you?”
There was a moment’s silence. Finally one of the widow-women stepped forward. She was younger than he’d first thought, and pretty in a plain way, but hardship had stolen her youth and cut lines of suffering in her face. “They are. They are, m’lord.” She rubbed her hands one over the other, eyes darting to the men penned up by Cadarn’s mercenaries. “They yelled for us to throw down our weapons and give up our goods, but after we did, they shot Dannaud anyway.”
“They kept shooting him,” another peasant said. “He was dead, and they kept shooting him, and laughing about how they was going to do the same to us. M’lord. Said if we was lucky they’d shoot us once we hauled the goods back to their camp, and if we wasn’t they’d do worse.”
Leferic frowned. “Th
ey didn’t shoot at you?” he asked Cadarn, puzzled.
The northman shrugged. He’d taken a handful of small cuts that dribbled thin lines of red down his arms. Like the rest of his men, Cadarn ignored his wounds except to wipe away the blood if it threatened to slip up his grip. “They were busy looking to the wagon. They did not hear us, and they had no concern for who else might be near. By the time they realized their danger, we were upon them.”
Leferic could only shake his head. Had Gerbrand been that confident that his provocation would go unpunished? Was that how contemptuous he was? All this while he’d been working to isolate Gerbrand politically and militarily, warning Cadarn to be wary of ambushes, and wondering what unexpected counterstroke his enemy might have prepared. All of that, and the man hadn’t told his “bandits” to keep their bows at hand.
There was, he supposed, a lesson in that: something about overplanning, or lulling one’s enemies into complacency. But mostly it was just insulting.
“Bind them,” he ordered, “and hang them. Except that one.” He pointed to one of the few men who had not bowed his head or cowered. “That one watches. When the others are dead, send him back to Littlewood.”
Leferic held the last bandit’s gaze without blinking as he pronounced his sentence. He felt a calm implacability settle upon him. It was the same feeling he’d had upon sending the Thornlady to seal his brother’s death; it was a feeling that seemed to cloak him more often as the days went by and his father crept closer to the pyre. Eventually the other man looked away.
“Tell your master that he has two choices,” Leferic said. “He may confess his treason and submit himself to justice. If he does, he will go to the block, make no mistake of that. I do not forgive rebellion. But his family need not share his disgrace. If he surrenders, I will pardon them. His sons can make their way in the world as armsmen; his daughters can marry without taint.
The River King's Road Page 16
