Andrea Cullinane turned to Kethol. Which figured; women found Kethol to be brighter than he was. Probably just because his features were even and regular, nice-looking in a rugged sort of way.
"What do you think?" she asked.
Thinking wasn't Kethol's best skill. He took a moment, glancing over to Pirojil for support or help, but Pirojil just shrugged. It was one thing to follow Kethol into a bloody piece of work, but Pirojil felt no obligation to make him look bright in front of the dowager empress. That would be, somehow, disloyal. It wasn't Kethol's – or Pirojil's or Erenor's – sterling intellect that the Cullinane family had hired; it was their swords, and the arms and will behind those swords.
"I think we should go back," Kethol said.
What? For a moment, Pirojil wasn't sure that he had heard correctly. Kethol, the one who was always first, always eager to dash into some dangerous situation, urging caution? Kethol, who had just this morning charged a bowman, hoping that he could outrun a crossbow bolt? Kethol, who had gotten Pirojil and Durine into more trouble than anyone could reasonably expect to survive?
No, it made sense. Kethol was doing his job, after all. "There's a troop quartered in Manderel's Green – and that's just a quick day's ride. We would be only a couple of days late for Parliament, and it would be a lot safer."
Ahira frowned. "I know we found only one assassin, but I'm not sure I believe in just one assassin."
The Old Emperor used to say something about the test of a man's intelligence being how often he agreed with you, and Ahira was sounding awfully intelligent to Pirojil. If he had been setting it up, there would have been at least three or four men involved: a scout, to keep track of the baron's party; a lookout, to give the final signal for the bowman to move into position, and at least two bowmen.
But just one? One who gave up and ran back to a previously prepared position, ready to snipe at any pursuit, or just give up and try another day if nobody pursued?
It was possible; but it wasn't likely.
Toryn nodded. "It does sound too... convenient. Or inconvenient, depending upon how you look at it."
Convenient for whom? Betrayal by Toryn didn't seem likely – he had been kicked out of the Pandathaway Slavers Guild for his failure to kill Jason Cullinane, and it was unlikely that even if he did finally complete the job, they'd take him back, and certain that the baron's friends and family would hunt him down.
"I know we would have heard about a troop of foreigners moving through the barony, but a couple, maybe half a dozen, could be traveling along the Prince's Road." The young baron nodded, agreeing with himself.
So did Pirojil. Traders of various sorts were often coming through, now that the war had ended, bringing buttons or spices or bolts of cloth from near and distant lands, trading for the imperial marks that were the only coin that could buy New Pittsburgh steel. And that was a good thing; trade, in some way that Pirojil never really did understand, did seem to make fixed wealth grow. It didn't make sense, not really, but if you kept swapping things around, everybody seemed to end up better off.
But the increase in trade did mean an increase in travel, and that meant more strangers wandering through the baronies.
Erenor shook his head. "I don't like it."
Pirojil cocked his head to one side. He could not have cared less whether or not Erenor liked it at all.
Ahira held up a hand. "Hear him out," he said, his fingers spread wide.
"Whenever..." Erenor licked his lips. "Whenever something gets complicated, you've got to wonder why.
One man, left alone?" He shook his head. "If somebody wants the baron dead, and is able and willing to pay well for having it done, why can't he afford to hire three or half a dozen men?" He pointed with his chin toward where the deer path led into the woods. "And leaving one alone, all by himself?" He waved his fingers back and forth. "Go forward, and we may well be into an ambush; move back, and we are even more likely to be riding into trouble."
"I don't see why," Jason Cullinane said. "It should be safe to go forward – if this is some sort of elaborate trap, then the purpose of putting the assassin here was to get us to go back, which we wouldn't have done otherwise ..."
His mother smiled. "That's too neat by half," she said. "Maybe it's not as elaborate as Erenor is thinking – Erenor, you seem to be the sort who likes things complicated, but not everybody is that way. Maybe somebody sent just one assassin. Maybe that's all that Beralyn could locate."
Well, the other dowager empress was the obvious candidate.
"Or," she went on, "perhaps she's hired several, and this one was just the first put in our path."
Ahira nodded, smiling. If Pirojil didn't know any better – and, come to think of it, Pirojil didn't know any better – he would have thought that the dwarf was enjoying all this. "So, heads they're in front of us, tails behind." He removed a silver quartermark from his pouch and flipped it.
Erenor snatched it out of the air. "When you've got a six-to-six bet, the wise man doesn't play," he said, holding up the coin and considering it in the bright light of midday. "Half the time, you lose. Or more than half – perhaps there is a party of assassins in front of us and another in back."
Can't go forward, can't go back. Pirojil didn't much like that, but there always was an alternative. "Everybody," he said, his voice pitched to carry, but not very far, "on my signal, everyone is to mount up, and follow Kethol straight across the cornfield to the farmhouse across the ridge."
"Pirojil." Jason Cullinane shook his head.
"No." Ahira laid a thick hand on the young baron's arm. "It's his job to get you safely to Biemestren. Fire him there, if you're of a mind to, but for the time being ..."
Jason Cullinane nodded.
"Very well." Pirojil let his hand rest on his horse's neck.
"Kethol first, Toryn and you two," he said, indicating two of the mounted soldiers with a quick jerk of his thumb, "the empress and the baron next, and the rest of us after that. Ahira and I will bring up the rear."
Pirojil was not surprised to see that the others were looking to Jason Cullinane. There was no particular reason they should be obeying a simple soldier, particularly an ugly and misshapen one. But it was a good thing – they were looking to the baron, and not to the dwarf or the dowager empress: he was no longer just the heir, or just the baron-to-be.
Pirojil wasn't the only one to notice. Kethol gave him an encouraging grin, while Erenor's was amused, the way that the wizard was always amused by the vagaries of lesser – which was to say: all – humans.
The baron drew himself up straight. "Make it so, all."
Kethol, his hand just happening to rest on the butt of his flintlock pistol, rode between the two stacked-stone pillars at the main gate.
The farmstead had been restored, and looked prosperous enough. Perhaps two dozen chickens ran loose and wild inside the low stone wall, and beyond it, and a half-dozen large plowhorses stood lazily chewing on bales of hay over in the corral in front of the barn. Smoke puffed into the air from the chimney of the main house and from two of the workers' cottages, as well.
He had to look for it, but the scars of war still showed: the cluster of barns and crofters' shacks along the main road were too new, and the main house was roofed in slate, rather than thatch.
Probably not the right choice, if you were looking at it reasonably. Slate was expensive, leaked when it rained, sucked the heat from the house in cold weather, and retained it in hot weather; thatch warmed you when it was cold, let in air to cool you when it was warm, and shed water like a duck's back. But slate didn't burn, and thatch did.
Somebody who had been burned out once would understandably not want to look up at his roof and see it, in his mind's eye, once again in flames.
A dog – at least, he guessed it was a dog: it was definitely a small, noisy, floppy-eared animal of no particular breed – came running up, clearing the stone fence with a quick bound, yapping all the while. Kethol kicked it away from his s
tirrup, resisting the urge to do something more violent and more effective. That was the trouble with peacetime. You had to put up with indignities like a small, bite-sized dog yapping at your heels, while in wartime you could easily end that with one quick stroke of the sword.
Well, there were disadvantages to wartime, as well....
A young girl, no more than eight or nine, perhaps, ran out of the main house, a bulky woman after her in hot pursuit. Both were dressed in the cheap blousy tunics and pants common in the country, although belted with leather, rather than the usual piece of rope, and the woman was in boots, not sandals.
"Efanee," the woman shrilled, not meeting Kethol's gaze, "stop right there."
She snatched the girl up as the girl – Efanee, was it? – was reaching for the still-barking dog. "Your pardon, noble sir," the woman said, more to Kethol's feet than to Kethol. "She means no harm, and the dog – "
“– is no problem, either," Kethol said, trying to sound reassuring. "I've been bitten by a dog before, and it didn't kill me then." He had, of course, killed the dog, but that didn't seem like a reassuring thing to mention, not at the moment. He waved the problem away. "I'm Kethol, with the baron's party."
"The baron?"
"Yes, Baron Cullinane. The baron. Unless you have another in mind?" He waved a thumb at the party following him down the dirt road.
She didn't know quite how to take that, so she just stood there, mute. Probably the right decision.
"I'll need to see the landowner," he said. "The baron will need quarters for his party, and someone to see to the horses."
"He's ... he's out working in the fields – it's a workday, after all." She bent and whispered in the girl's ear, then sent her on her way with an affectionate pat, and turned back to Kethol, the set of her jaw belying the loose tone of her words. "Efanee will bring him back quickly, along with some ... people to help you with your horses and gear."
Pirojil brought his horse to a prancing halt beside Kethol's. "Is there anyone in the house?" he asked.
"No." She shook her head. "The rest of the children are at work in the fields – Efanee is helping me and two of the crofter women with the housework."
"So there are two people in the house."
"Well, yes, but I didn't mean that – "
"Don't worry about what you mean," Pirojil said quietly, his voice pitched low. "Worry about answering carefully."
"I don't understand – "
"That's correct," he said. "What you don't understand is that the baron's company has killed an assassin, one who was sent to murder the baron," Pirojil said, sounding more sure of that than Kethol was, "and the assassin was hiding out in the woods, just across from your cornfield." He held up his left hand, fingers spread wide, and the clopping of hooves on the road behind stopped.
Kethol almost smiled. When Pirojil forgot that he was just an ordinary soldier, he had an air of command about him. That probably had something to do with that signet ring of his, the one that he always wore, with the stone turned inward. Did he really think that even somebody as slow-witted as Kethol hadn't noticed that? Kethol was hardly the brightest of men, but you couldn't stay alive in Cullinane service as long as he had, doing the things that he had been doing, if you went through life with blinders on all the time.
"I think," Toryn's voice sounded from the darkness of the main house's doorway, "that what we have here is just a case of people being cautious – too cautious, for my taste, but my taste in caution of others is limited – preferring, as I do, to keep caution conserved for myself." He herded three men and two women out onto the porch, his sword held at a jaunty angle. "Then again," he said, "it's possible that these are the fellows of the assassin we encountered earlier this morning." He made an ornate flourish of a gesture back toward the house. "They were waiting with cocked crossbows, inside."
"They – we ..." she cut herself off before anybody else could. She was a typical peasant – although, apparently, a landowner's wife, and not just a crofter or plot owner – face weathered by sun and wind, arms thickened and hands callused from too much work, muscles too hard, skin too saggy, teeth gapped from too-infrequent visits from the Spider, face white in fear, knowing that whatever the armed men looking down on her wanted to happen was going to happen.
Pirojil looked down at the woman. "We wear the green-and-gold of Barony Cullinane," he said, running a blunt finger down the embroidery along the seam of his tunic, "and you greet us with lies and hidden bowmen?" Pirojil's voice was calm and even enough, but Kethol felt the undertone. He was deciding whether or not to ride her down, probably slashing at her neck in passing.
Kethol disapproved, but it wasn't his decision, and nobody was asking his opinion, after all. If things were going to go to shit here, better it was here and now than later and by surprise, and if killing a peasant woman who was setting them up to be assassinated was what Pirojil wanted to use to trigger all the excitement, well, then Kethol could just back him up, and criticize him for it later, in private.
If there was a later.
"Stand easy, Pirojil," Jason Cullinane said, trotting his big red mare up, putting himself between Pirojil and the peasant woman. "No apologies necessary, freelady," he said, using the honorific more commonly used for middle-class merchants and tradespeople of the cities, rather than a peasant woman, even a relatively glorified one, "if there's any fault to be found, it's likely mine, not yours." He removed his feet from his stirrups, and in a move that Kethol had never seen anyone do before, popped his feet up onto the saddle and stood on the back of his horse, balanced easily, while the big mare stood, rock-steady, beneath his boots. "In case none of you know who I am, let me introduce myself: I'm Jason Cullinane, your baron. I've been, so I'm told, spending far too much time away, instead of making a tour of the barony, as I've been told repeatedly."
Ahira chuckled thinly. "Where have I heard that before?" he asked.
"Shush, dear," the dowager empress said. "It's not nice to say, 'I told you so.' "
"Allow an old man some idle pleasures."
Pirojil turned and gestured at the soldiers. "Melden, Arvin – check the house," he said.
One of the men on the porch looked to Toryn for permission, and at his slight nod stepped forward.
"My name is Kelleren; I'm the landowner," he said. "We were ... unsure." He and his wife could have been brother and sister – entirely possible, at some points in Biemish history; he was flabby where she was flabby, wrinkled where she was wrinkled, and his upper arms and thighs were tree trunk thick, like hers.
"Unsure as to what?" Toryn asked. "Whether green and gold are green and gold? Whether Cullinane troops wear Cullinane livery?" His thin lips tightened further. "I don't know, Baron, but I think we have traitors here, and I know what to do to traitors, being a traitor to the Slavers Guild, and all."
At that, there was a trickling sound, and a dark, spreading stain at the crotch of one of the prisoner's trousers. One of the Cullinane soldiers snickered, but shut up at a quick growl from Ahira.
Pirojil grunted in irritation – not at the prisoner, but at the soldier. Kethol agreed. If shit and piss were gold, nearly every soldier would get rich in damn near every battle.
Jason Cullinane dropped easily to the ground, letting his knees soak up the shock of his landing. The courage of youth – that was an easy way to sprain your ankle, if you landed wrong. But the young baron was spoiled nobility – with a healer or a flask of healing draughts almost always at hand, you could take risks as a matter of course that an ordinary soldier couldn't and wouldn't, not a sane one.
"Well, Kelleren," he said, "I think it's time you make your choice – are you a loyal imperial subject, or not?" He softened the question with a smile, but only a little.
***
Pirojil let the talk flow over and around him as he sat back on his sleeping blankets, his back pressed up against the front wall of the house, his eyes closed. He probably looked like he was sleeping, and perhaps he was driftin
g in and out. It was restful, is what it was. There was something about the solid wall of a house – no, of a home that people lived in – a home, not just a house, had a solidity that was more, well, solid and reassuring than could be explained by the materials alone. It was as though the stone and mortar and wood had taken on a personality of their own, a tender and motherly one, that whispered quietly, so quietly that only your soul could hear it, I'll take care of you. Don't worry. Lean on me.
He folded his arms across his chest and let his head loll back against the rough surface. He was comfortable enough. The farmhouse contained a total of six chairs, and those were for the noble guests – if you included Ahira and Toryn as well as the baron and the dowager empress – and, at the baron's insistence, Kelleran and Bekana.
He grinned. Not that Bekana was using her chair much; she bustled about, making sure that every glass was kept constantly full of the sour beer that came, pitcher by pitcher, from the cellar.
Pirojil didn't mind the lack of a chair. He had long since learned to take his ease when he could, and with guards posted on the lookout platforms on the roof of the house and barn, there was little or nothing to worry about, at least in daytime.
Which meant that he could eat and let the beer go to his head, and perhaps even nap. Once those in charge figured out what they wanted to do, there would be little enough time to rest for a while.
He could see it coming, after all. You didn't have to be a swordmaker to know a sharp edge when you saw it.
"I don't keep track of your troops, Baron," Kelleren said, his tone getting less scared and more irritated as the day went by. "We can go tendays here without seeing a patrol. But, as far as I know, the nearest group, company – "
"Troop," Toryn put in. "They are called a troop."
“– the nearest troop, then, is at Denial's Ford. Or possibly Belneten's Spring is closer, if you take the shortcut through the forest."
Not Quite Scaramouche Page 10
