The River King's Road

by Merciel, Liane

  “Who made the requests?”

  “The man. One with the scarred chin.”

  “What did you get for your betrayal?”

  “Money.” The drunkard shifted his weight, looking away again.

  “Just money?”

  “They said … they said they’d use my village if I didn’t do as they asked. My parents, my wife, my friends. She said that. I believed her.”

  “You knew they were going to slaughter Willowfield. If you were afraid for your own kin, you knew.”

  “I guessed,” the man admitted unhappily. He glanced up at Brys and, just as swiftly, back to the anvil. “What would you have done?”

  I’d have killed them. And died doing it, no doubt, but it might have spared his kin. No point carrying out threats made to a dead man, especially since they’d have done so at the cost of their real goal. Brys didn’t bother answering aloud. “How much did they pay you?”

  “Fifty silver solis and a gold rayel.”

  Brys grunted in dour amusement. “Moranne the Gatekeeper.”

  “Aye.”

  Moranne the Gatekeeper was a child’s morality story, popular throughout the Sunfallen Kingdoms. Two thousand years ago, in the age of legends before the Godslayer’s War, King Cadarn Frosthand built a castle of ice in the north. The castle was enchanted: battering rams splintered like glass on its gates and boulders crumbled to powder upon striking its walls. No enemy could hope to take Icewall Castle by storm, yet the Baozites had marched on it all the same, for their god had granted them a vision of bloody victory.

  For a full generation, the story said, the Baozites laid siege to Icewall Castle, winning nothing but frostbit death for their troubles. But the castle’s magic did not protect the countryside around it, so the Baozites raped and slaughtered the commonfolk because they couldn’t reach the king. Their predations were so vicious that scholars and princes gave up all their treasures to bribe their way into the safety of Icewall Castle.

  Moranne the Gatekeeper was the one who profited by their pain. A venal man, he let in anyone who could pay his price and barred the door to anyone who could not. Neither mercy nor reason could sway him; silver was his only measure.

  One fateful day, he let in three petitioners. The first paid him twenty pieces of silver. The second paid him thirty. The last one paid him a gold coin worth double all the rest. Moranne the Gatekeeper took their money and never looked at their faces, and so he never saw that the last man he admitted was Old Man Death.

  Old Man Death laid the king’s guards low with a touch of his corpse-cold fingers. Then he threw the portcullis wide and let the Baozites rush in, streaming fire and blood. As the castle’s inhabitants fell under that steely hail, Old Man Death went back to the postern gate and invited Moranne to watch what he’d wrought. The story usually ended with Moranne weeping and clutching his worthless coins, and either the Baozites or Old Man Death finishing him off.

  The payment of fifty silver solis and a gold rayel for Willowfield suggested the Thorn’s hand at work. The scarred man had to be Albric, one of the knights from Bulls’ March, and he didn’t have the black sense of humor or the profligacy needed to make that joke.

  If Albric made the requests, but Severine held the purse strings, who was it that really wanted Galefrid dead? Clearly Galefrid had been the target; Willowfield was nothing more than a convenient place to kill him. But why?

  Brys drew one of the chisels from the smoldering coals. The tip shone dirty gold. “When was the last time you saw them?”

  “After … after they were done in the village. They made me stay and watch. Told me they’d do the same to mine if I betrayed them. They’d give my mother and my wife to the soldiers and burn the rest in their homes. Then they threw me the money and left. That was the end of it.”

  “So you came here?”

  The drunkard stared at the chisel’s glowing tip, hypnotized. “Thought it’d be easier for my family to believe I was dead. If I never went back, maybe the Baozites would think I didn’t care about them anymore. Then, if something like this happened … they’d have no reason to kill them.”

  Brys believed about half of that. A man could drink himself to death faster and cheaper outside Mistress Merrygold’s house. Then again, there wasn’t any reason to pinch pennies before the end. “Where’s the rest of the money?”

  The man fished a small, greasy leather pouch from inside his shirt and handed it over. Brys glanced inside. Ten solis, a handful of smaller coins. “This it?”

  “Spent the rest. You going to kill me?”

  Brys hesitated. He’d planned on it, but that was before he’d talked to the man and seen what a pitiful thing he was.

  Still, he’d been willing to betray people to the Baozites once. He might well do it again, and Brys was disinclined to let them know he was alive and asking questions.

  “Yes,” he decided, setting the hot iron aside, and snapped the traitor’s neck cleanly.

  He scraped the unburnt coal out of the forge and left the rest to smolder out, let the chisels cool, and wiped the soot off of them before replacing them with the rest of the blacksmith’s tools. Then he slung the dead man over his shoulder, carried him to the river, and dropped him into the water with his pockets full of rocks. It wouldn’t deter a determined search, but Brys didn’t expect there to be a determined search. A man like that wouldn’t have many friends.

  He was back at the inn before daybreak. Brys took a plate of cold roast chicken and day-old bread from the kitchen and went up to his room. Odosse lifted a sleep-tousled head from the pillow as he came in.

  “Best if you go,” he said around a mouthful of chicken, tossing her the last of the traitor’s money. “Take this to get started.”

  She opened it with shaking hands. After staring wordlessly at the coins for far longer than needed to count them, Odosse looked up. “Why? What happened?”

  “Found our friend from Willowfield. We had a little talk. He gave me that present”—Brys jabbed in the pouch’s direction with a bone—“and then he told me who paid him. Happens that it involved a man I know.”

  “Who?”

  “Fellow named Albric, if he wasn’t lying to me. I don’t think he was. That means we’ve a problem. Albric’s a knight sworn to Bulls’ March.”

  “That’s where Wistan’s from,” Odosse said, confused. She pushed the pouch and its coins away.

  “It is. Smells like treachery, but I don’t know whose, and that worries me. Younger son’s the obvious guess, but Leferic never struck me as the murdering type. Spends all his days with his nose in a book; they say he faints at the sight of blood. Hard to match that up with using Thorns for a massacre likely to start a war … but it’s enough to make me think we don’t want to go to Bulls’ March, even if that is where Blessed Andalya’s gone.”

  “Could it have been someone outside Bulls’ March?” Odosse suggested. “Or maybe this … Albric … was acting on his own. Wouldn’t a knight earn more glory in wartime?”

  “Maybe,” Brys said, unconvinced. Albric wasn’t ambitious, as far as he knew, and he still wondered what role the Thorn had played. Why pay the traitor so lavishly if she was only a hireling herself? But why get involved if she wasn’t? The Thorns had no interest in Bulls’ March or Sir Galefrid that he could see. “We could sit here guessing until the snow melts and come no closer to the truth. I need to look around, ask a few more questions. In the meantime I think it’s best if you take the babies and go off on your own. Stay close, but not so close that anyone puts us together. If whoever hired that man is still watching, he might remember that I was with Galefrid in Willowfield, and he doesn’t need to know that you and the babies came from there too.”

  “Where should I go?”

  Brys shrugged. “Where would you have gone if you came here on your own?”

  She didn’t like that answer, but she didn’t complain. “Are you going to leave us?”

  “What?”

  “You promised to tak
e me to a town. You’ve done that, and . . . and I thank you for it.” Odosse swallowed. “I don’t have any right to ask more than what you promised, but …”

  “Said I’d see you safely to a town. You’re not yet safe. None of us is. If you want to go, you’re free to. If you don’t, I’ll keep watching. From a distance, for a while, but I don’t intend to abandon you with Thorns involved in this.”

  “Why not?” She fingered the greasy leather pouch. “You owe us no loyalty. Sir Galefrid was your lord, and—”

  “Galefrid was an employer. A better man than some, worse than others, dead and gone either way. I swore to his service, but I never meant to stay longer than a year or two. Now that he’s dead, it’s done.”

  “You’re a knight.”

  “I am that.” He tossed the last chicken bone away and reclined on the pallet, lacing his fingers under his head. “So how can I leave a lady in trouble?”

  11

  Odosse wasted no time after Brys’ warning. That same morning, as he lay sleeping in their room at the Broken Horn, she went out to find a bakery.

  The brightness of the morning dazzled her. It was a cold clear day on the cusp of winter, and though there was no snow on the ground, the world was filled with a brittle whiteness and a clarity that broke her heart. The beauty of it lifted some of the gloom that had begun to settle over her. She went out into Tarne Crossing with a lifted chin and a renewed resolve that she would find a way to survive here.

  She hadn’t realized, until Brys told her to go, just how much she had hoped he would somehow make all of her problems disappear. It was a child’s wish, and Odosse would have chastised herself for it if she’d recognized it before it was gone. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—stay with her and Aubry forever. Nor did she really want him to; it was increasingly obvious that he was nothing like the knights of song and story. Of course she’d have to find her own way in the world.

  It wasn’t even that she liked their shadowy existence in the Broken Horn. It was just easier to hide there, clinging to a half-believed illusion of safety, than to go out and face the ugliness she’d seen in Tarne Crossing.

  But that wasn’t a real life—it wasn’t any kind of life at all—and it turned her stomach to depend on dead men’s money. She needed her own work, her own place to live.

  A bakery was the best place to find that. Odosse had no other skills. And, she thought, in a travelers’ town it might not be impossible for a Langmyrne girl to find work.

  Tarne Crossing, like all the border towns, swelled during the winter. Travelers wanted refuge from the frozen roads, freeswords wanted to heal the wounds of the past year’s fighting and train for the next, and crofters in isolated cottages wanted the safety of walls and guards around them. Winter was a hard time, with wolves and wild men hungry in the woods. When the weather warmed, people would go back to the fields and the roads, but until then it was good to be in a town.

  There were too many outsiders for Tarne Crossing to shun them, no matter how hotly tempers burned against the Langmyrne. All Odosse had to do was follow the sellswords and merchants to see where they bought their morning bread, and she knew which bakers were friendly to foreigners. Those were the ones she approached with her tale of woe.

  Odosse gave them her real name—it wasn’t in her to lie more than she had to, and she doubted she’d remember to answer to a false one—but she claimed both babies as her own. Twins, she said, their father gone or dead. She told one baker that her husband had been a good, honest farmer, killed when his hatchet slipped chopping wood and the cut sickened. To another baker, who had the stump leg and straight back of a wounded veteran, she gave a story about a soldier who left to fight a far-off war and never came home. A third man heard about a sellsword she’d loved one summer night and never seen again.

  Every time she told the tale, Odosse changed it. She didn’t care if they believed her, as long as they pitied her. And gave her work.

  It was the stump-leg baker who finally let her into his kitchen. His name was Mathas, and he had served under Lord Ossaric before a bandit’s arrow and a bad infection took his left leg below the knee. Coarse black hair bristled along his jaw and out of his ears, while his head was bald and shiny as a brown-speckled egg. He wasn’t a handsome man, but he might be a kind one.

  “Hard for me to get around for the deliveries,” he explained, stamping his wooden peg, “and I’m not as nimble around the ovens as I once was. You’ve worked with dough?”

  Odosse nodded. “Bread, cake, sweet and savory pie—I’ve learned them all.”

  “Let’s see it. Start with a simple bread.” He waved her to the kitchen, a single drafty room with a flour-powdered floor and high windows that let in light and gusts of cold air. Pillows of dough rose on wooden boards slotted in shelves and covered with damp cheesecloth to keep away dust and drying. Sacks of flour and salt slumped against the walls; barrels of water sat by the door. The roaring heat of the ovens in the next room kept the kitchen warm enough to be bearable. Eggs, milk, and butter were stocked on the other side of the kitchen, as far from the hearths as possible, while the rising dough nestled near its warmth.

  Odosse tied her unruly brown hair back and knotted a linen coif over it, took a spare apron from its peg, and rolled up her sleeves. She’d walked for hours before getting this chance, and Mathas was the only baker who’d asked her in. Everything had to be perfect. Drawing a deep breath, she willed herself to be calm.

  She added boiling water to cold until it was just warm on her wrist, mixed in a fair pinch of the baker’s sponge, and set it aside to ripen. In a second, larger bowl, Odosse portioned out flour and salt, fluffing them together. She made a shallow dip in the center and poured in the cloudy water from the first bowl, mixing it with her fingers to make a shaggy dough that pulled together into a ball.

  Once she was back in the rhythm of the work, the bread seemed to come together on its own. The rich smell of the yeast and the gummy texture of the raw dough were so familiar that if she closed her eyes she could imagine herself back at home in her parents’ kitchen, kneading feast breads to be braided and brushed with honey before they slid into the ovens’ flour-dusted maws. Tears welled up beneath her lashes and she dabbed them away hastily, hoping Mathas hadn’t seen.

  The baker cleared his throat gruffly. “You’re good. No waste. Where’d you learn?”

  “My parents.” Odosse coughed to loosen the thickness in her throat. She tried a smile. It felt shaky, but it came. “They had me helping from the time I was tall enough to hold up a bowl of pine nuts next to the benches.”

  “They taught you well. Mistress Halfrey at the Broken Horn wants a dozen almond tarts for her guests this evening. Wedding party. Think you could see fit to make them?”

  “Where are the molds?”

  He gestured to the shelves under the rising boards. Odosse pulled out a rack of wavy-sided metal pans, gauging how much dough would be needed to cover them. She cut a block of cold butter that looked big enough to suit, then chopped it into a bowl of flour, sugar and a scant palmful of salt, using a pair of flat-bladed knives to mix the dough so that the warmth of her fingers wouldn’t spoil it. When it came together, she sprinkled cold water over the dough and rolled it into six rough balls and a seventh smaller one.

  Her parents had taught her this, too. Odosse could remember them so vividly. Her mother had blindfolded her and fed her little spoonfuls of filling until she could identify them by taste and scent without trying, and knew instinctively which flavors complemented one another and which clashed. Apricots and almonds, figs and venison, beef and brandied dates—she knew them as well as the words to a lullaby.

  The little ball of dough was for her father. “Always make one to taste!” he’d boomed, repeating the lesson with every recipe even if it was the fourth time that day. “If they order seven, you make eight, and taste it! Never feed anything to a guest you haven’t tried yourself. If you’re too full, take a bite and give the rest to your dog, but—�
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  “—be sure it’s something you would feed to a dog,” Odosse murmured to herself, remembering, as she put the balls of tart dough under the windows to chill. She smiled, faintly and wistfully, but the moment vanished into sheer terror as she realized she’d spoken aloud.

  Mathas was watching her. There was a glint of sympathy in his black eyes. “Lose them?”

  She could only nod dumbly.

  “Recently?”

  Another nod.

  “You look it.” He grunted. “The husband too?”

  “He wasn’t—wasn’t really my husband.” She picked up the bread bowl. It was easier to talk while working: it busied her hands and gave her an excuse not to look at him. She stretched the dough out, punched it down, and kneaded it until her fingers ached.

  Mathas let her work in silence for a while. Then he said: “Which war?”

  “I don’t know,” Odosse said truthfully. She had no idea what brought the Baozites to Willowfield. Surely it was a war, though, of some kind. Sir Galefrid and his knights died to armed enemies of the realm. What was that, if not a war?

  She punched the dough down again. It took her anger, absorbed it, and rose softly around the dimples her knuckles left. “It was bloodmist,” she heard herself say. “At least I think it was. That’s what someone told me who was there. Who deserves to die like that? Why?” Tears trickled down her cheeks, hot and helpless, for Coumyn and her parents and all the others who’d been torn out of her life, leaving a ragged hole and flapping threads where strong fabric should have been. All that care and affection, all the little moments that made up the texture of life, ripped away in an instant. And not even for their own sake, not because anyone cared, but simply because they made a convenient backdrop for someone else’s death.

  Odosse cried but she kept kneading, sure now that she’d ruined any chance she might have had at work. She cried for that, too, silently, wiping the tears from her chin before they could fall. Still, she emptied the ball of bread dough onto the counter, wiped the bowl with an oiled cloth, and rubbed the cloth over the dough until it was slick and shiny. She put the oiled dough-ball back into the bowl and replaced its cheesecloth cover so that it could rise while she finished the tart shells. Then she waited, wondering whether Mathas would send her away, but he just watched without any expression she could read. So she kept working.