by Dave Duncan
His explanation was persuasive but not comforting. It raised more dragons than it slew.
“If this matter did come before Parliament,” the Chancellor continued, “I should have to report words your honored father said to me not long before he died. Concerning Lord Granville, he said that the man was a brilliant soldier but too ruthless to be a ruler and that if his lordship were to attain supreme power he would soon start treating the Chivians as bloodily as he had treated the Wylds. I would not serve such a king, Your Highness.”
She nodded her thanks for that assurance. “You think he will be content to remain Lord Protector?”
“While you remain heir, yes. The alternative is civil war to take the crown by force, and why should he risk that when he already has the power? He can eliminate you painlessly with a foreign marriage, and he expects to neutralize Prince Courtney by implicating him in his mother’s mysterious death. Lord Granville is smart enough not to underestimate the Prince. He is also vain enough to believe that he can provide four or five years of competent rule without difficulty, and he may well be right. At that point, if anything were to happen to His Majesty, then Parliament would almost certainly accept a coup.”
And she would be working on her fourth or fifth baby in some distant land. “How can I help Amby survive his childhood?”
Again the celebrated fencer deflected her stroke. “We must wait on Parliament, my lady, and gamble on its good intentions. My main reason for wanting to see it convene is that it may set aside your father’s will and name you regent. More likely, I think it will try to restore the Council to the sort of governing body he envisaged, replacing most of the Granville toadies who now control it. I and others like me have very little influence at the moment and are at constant risk of being dismissed entirely. Parliament will certainly want to see you married to a Chivian, not sent into exile.”
Malinda looked around at her companions. Lord Roland had been offering comfort to her but not to the Blades, and their faces were grim. “So we play for time—and you advise me to accept banishment to Ness Royal?”
The Chancellor sighed. “I have nothing better to suggest. Flight overseas would ruin your case and cannot be considered while the Baels maintain their blockade. If you flout that warrant, you will be arrested, which means death for your staunch defenders here.” He looked around at the youngest of them. “Sir Abel, you are in grave danger of being arrested anyway, after what you did to Sir Hilaire today. I wish I had seen that! It’s amazing that you got away with it.”
Abel’s boyish grin lit up the room. “He was afraid I was going to get away with it—on the end of my sword.”
Roland led the laughter, but it was short-lived. Worry returned. “Obviously the journey will be dangerous. The last I heard, your escort is to comprise four Yeomen lancers and thirty mounted archers of the Black Riders, under Marshal Souris himself.” He glanced interrogatively at Malinda.
“Wasn’t he on the committee questioning me? Small, long nose, very fierce?” Mouse Rampant. “Clever, I thought.”
“Yes, indeed. His Black Riders are one of the most respected mercenary units in Eurania. They learned their trade in the Fitainian Wars. In Wylderland Souris was Granville’s chief lieutenant.”
“The Little Butcher?” Winter wailed. “We’re dead men!”
“I hope not. What I suggest is this. Nothing much is likely to happen for the first few hours, and you will have to pass close by Beaufort. If we send word to Sir Dominic, then surely he will spare an escort of a dozen or so Blades—they must be going whirly sitting around guarding a child in the middle of hay meadows. A force of, say, sixteen Blades would discourage Souris from trying anything nasty on the journey.”
Malinda detected no signs of enthusiasm among her troops.
Audley said, “With respect, Excellency, the Lord Protector has vowed to disband the Guard, and he can only do that by force. Her Highness is not its primary ward. Will Leader risk dividing his forces and sending a third of his strength on so perilous a trek? That may even be the Lord Protector’s intention—we four and a sizable portion of the Guard removed at a stroke. Perhaps even Her Highness, too.”
Winter took the warrant from Audley’s hand.
Durendal pulled a face. “I hate to think even Granville would be capable of that.” But obviously he was baffled and close to admitting it. “The Black Riders are good, not superhuman. Frankly, Commander, your task is almost impossible, because four men cannot oppose the state. If your ward defies that warrant, she will be imprisoned or outlawed. Where could she flee, where would you conceal her? Unless anyone else has a better—”
“Shush!” said Dog.
It must have been many years since anyone spoke like that to Lord Roland. His eyes widened. Winter was reading the warrant by the light of a candle on the mantel shelf. When he reached the end he went back to the beginning again. He was chewing a nail, and Malinda had thought she had broken him of that habit.
The Chancellor shrugged. “I was about to say—”
“Shush!” Dog repeated, louder.
This time Roland’s eyes narrowed. There was an embarrassed silence as everyone else tried to pretend they hadn’t heard.
At last Winter turned to Malinda with a puzzled frown. “It says you have to move to Ness Royal tomorrow, my lady. That’s going to be today very shortly.”
“That’s right.”
“And an escort will be made available.”
“Yes.”
“It does not say you must avail yourself of that escort.”
After a pregnant moment, Roland said, “I must be going senile!”
“Me too,” Audley agreed, “and I’m only a year older than he is.”
“I don’t get it,” Dog growled.
Abel thumped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about that, Horse. When we need someone killed, we’ll call you. The rest of the time, you just do whatever Her Highness tells you.”
26
You condemned me to languish on this frightful, barren, ghost-ridden, uninhabitable, storm-lashed rock with a pack of subhuman, ogreish, verminous, troglodytic domestics.
LADY GODELEVA, LETTER TO KING AMBROSE IV, THIRDMOON 354
It was the ride to Ironhall all over again, except that Ness Royal was more than twice as far away. It began like the Night of Dogs, with fugitives creeping through the secret passage to the boathouse. Sir Victor stood on the jetty with boatmen ready to take them a short way downstream, to where Snake and Bullwhip waited with horses. As the knights’ “Good chance!” rang in their ears, the fugitives clattered off along the unlit cobbled alleyways of Grandon. By the time the sun came up, they were ten miles from the city, riding north on fresh horses—one princess, one matron companion, and four swordsmen, with not a single sumpter beast. Back at the palace, Arabel and Moment would delay discovery as long as possible. It should be hours before the government learned that Malinda had run and might be days before it knew where.
Even Audley, who was required to be chief worrier, soon agreed that they had made a clean getaway. He could also concede that any group’s speed was set by the pace of its slowest horse, so a small party would travel faster than a large one. The weather was fine, the roads in fair shape, and highwaymen would not meddle with a troop of four Blades. Having no need to kill themselves or their mounts with heroics, they might as well enjoy the journey.
Malinda was grievously tempted to turn aside at Beaufort to check on Amby, but she knew she would just upset him and the delay might put her at risk. Late on the first day she was similarly tempted to visit Oakendown, the famous tree city of the White Sisters, but that would require an even longer delay and her curiosity must wait for happier times.
One experience with travelers’ inns had been educational, a second would be morbid folly. Toward evening she told Audley to find out the names of some local landowners, but Winter, that bottomless well of information, recalled that the castellan at the Duke of Eastfare’s seat, Valglorious, was a
knight in the Order. The detour required was not serious; old Sir Vincent and his gracious lady were overjoyed to have the Princess stay overnight. Next morning he provided Audley with a list of other knights residing along their route, so the second evening they found hospitality with a Sir Havoc, who had achieved every Blade’s ambition by marrying an heiress both beautiful and wealthy. His home on the banks of the Knosh was not a ducal palace, but nor was it the King’s Head at New Cinderwich. On the afternoon of the third day, the fugitives came to Ness Royal.
The Blades had talked of little else the whole way, demanding every scrap of information about the island that the women could muster. It was reputed to have been the birthplace of Ranulf himself, and had certainly been in his descendants’ possession for centuries. For much of that time it had been a favored repository for persons of doubtful allegiance—princes and others whose suspect loyalties required sequestration without the embarrassment of actual imprisonment. Its single entrance allowed the authorities to inspect all who came and went, or, in extreme cases, to block any coming and going at all.
“Its most famous inhabitant was Queen Adela,” Malinda told them. “Ever heard of her?”
Winter remembered better than the others, of course. “Chivial’s first queen regnant.”
“Exactly right. But within months of her father’s death, her husband declared her insane and shut her up in Ness Royal. When he died, her son continued the tradition.”
The Blades did not like that story. How much family history did Granville know?
“That’s the Gatehouse,” Malinda said, shouting over the gale. “And the lumpy bit beyond it is Ness itself. Come on!” She kicked her weary horse into a last game effort.
For an hour they had been riding across a plain of coarse grass that seemed as infinite as the wind or the pale blue sky. They were all tired—even Blades could be tired. Without warning, the trail dropped steeply away to a cluster of weathered stone buildings, beyond which the ground rose and fell in bizarre swells and hollows. The sea remained hidden from view, but its tangy scent was everywhere.
Although about two hundred men and women lived on Ness Royal, there was no harbor or farmland to provide a living and little pasture. Its only industry was making children and its only export adolescents. When the King needed servants for his great house, the inhabitants were cooks, pages, scullions, footmen, or hostlers. When the lords and ladies departed and the island sank into neglect again, they scratched out a living from garden patches and whatever thatching, carpentry, and masonry work the seneschal commissioned. Most of the money the Treasury had provided over the years for upkeep and repairs had gone straight into seneschals’ pockets, of course, but the current caretaker was phenomenally honest, although not by choice.
His name was Sir Thierry. He had lost a leg as a knight banneret in the Isilond War and was now a crotchety old man, embittered by his disability, an unhappy marriage, and an infuriating inability to skim enough off the maintenance budget to fund his retirement somewhere far away. His predecessors had been ignored for years on end, but he was mobbed by auditors and deluged with acid demands for reports. He had pretty much concluded that the Greymere bureaucrats were using conjury to peer over his shoulder, but the truth of the matter was that all his actions and inactions were reported by Dian’s mother in her letters to Dian, Dian told Malinda, and Malinda made the Lord Chamberlain’s life a misery.
She had never been interested in the condition of the Gatehouse, though, and it had fallen into ruin—windows boarded up, a few doors creaking eerily in the wind, weeds in the courtyard. Ness Royal stone was a dove-colored marl, soft and drab, easily weathered. Half the walls were ready to crumble away completely and most of the thatch had gone.
Audley yelled, “Halt!” and everyone reined in. “They’ll be refurbishing this place. Let’s explore it while we have the chance. I want every man ready to walk through here blindfold in pitch darkness.” He belatedly looked to Malinda for permission.
“Go ahead!” she said. “Dian and I will hold the horses for you. Holding horses is one of the things I do best. No, I’m joking. Go.” She slipped her boots from the stirrups and uttered a plaintive, “Ooof!” as Dog lifted her down. “Thank you, love. Without you I’d have been stuck up there forever.”
Abel, Audley, and Winter ran off. The weary horses were not going to go anywhere and could be ignored.
“This place has shrunk! It used to be much bigger.”
“Oh?” Dian was pointedly looking elsewhere.
Malinda turned as suggested and saw Dog flat on his belly in the nettles and thistles, head on the ground. Now what? She went over and knelt.
“Dog?”
He lifted his head, then rose slowly to his knees. His eyes, all white in the sunlight, were wide with…fear? horror? She put her arms around him, which usually felt like embracing an oak tree, but in this instance he was trembling.
“Dog! What’s wrong?”
His teeth chattered.
“Tell me!”
“Surf. I can hear surf. I didn’t know there would be surf!” He spoke in a whisper, although Dian had wandered tactfully away and there was no one close. How could that be fear in his eyes when he had not been afraid of a sword through his heart?
“You’ll hear it everywhere on the island, all the time. It never stops. Surf can’t hurt you.”
“It kills people!”
“Are you frightened it may hurt you?”
“No. I saw it…once…Once I…”
She hugged him tighter. “Never mind what you saw. It must have been a long time ago, and this is now. Dog, I need you. Your ward is in danger and needs you. The woman who loves you needs you to protect her. Even if you can’t love her, she—”
“I hurt!” He gasped for breath and then said, “Not surf. Not just this place. It’s been going on for days. It hurts!”
“What hurts?”
“You do!” Words came pouring out in the longest speech she had ever heard from him, his throaty growl all chewed up by gap teeth: “I want to lock you up in a cellar where no one else can ever see you or harm you. I want to kill any other man who goes near you and yet I want you to be happy and laughing all the time and I can’t do both. I can’t be with you all the time. I hurt terribly, more than when…ever known. Want to serve you every minute. Most of all want you to want me and I know not worthy to look at your shadow.” His colorless eyes were wide with pain. “Is that love?”
“Yes, that’s love.” She assumed love might take a man that way. “And it does hurt. I would be happy in that cellar always if you were with me. I tremble at the thought that you may get hurt. I don’t feel worthy of you, Dog. I worry all the time you’re not with me. But it brings happiness too, doesn’t it? I am so full of joy when you come to me that I think I will burst. You don’t want me to send you away just because it hurts, do you?”
“No.”
“This is love, Dog. I love you.”
“And me you. You’re crazy.” He kissed her. It was a very long kiss for two people kneeling on hard ground, a highly improper performance for a princess in the middle of a courtyard, but she could feel his need and her own was no less. If Dian and the other men saw them, they tactfully did not interrupt. Gradually his trembling stopped and finally he gave her an abashed look and jumped up, lifting her with him. He growled, “Sorry!” with a suitable hangdog expression.
She clung to him. “I’m not,” she told the side of his neck. “Not at all.”
Dog had said he loved her! With that admission he had crossed a bridge. Soon he might trust her enough to tell her why he was haunted by dragons that sounded like surf that killed people.
“This way to the Baels’ Bathtub,” Dian proclaimed as they left the Gatehouse. The trail pitched down into a gully but soon opened up to become a ledge angling across a cliff that fell sheer to foam-mottled dark water. Waves surging through the canyon moved like monstrous lips over rocky teeth, chewing at the tall stacks, sucking in
and out of caves. The silvery walls echoed the sea’s mournful voice and the wailing birds, making the horses twitch and tremble. Ahead, and lower still, the trail ended at a rickety timber bridge that descended to a rocky, weed-circled pillar in mid-channel. A second span angled back and up to another stack, and the third rose steeply to the trail on the far side.
Malinda had told the story three times on the journey north: “There is no path down the cliffs and you can’t bring a boat near them anyway, because Ness is completely surrounded by reefs. The only road in goes over a bridge across a gorge called the Baels’ Bathtub. I don’t know what its old name was, but about thirty years ago, in the First Baelish War, a couple of dragon ships sacked Fishport, a few miles to the north. The raiders heard about Kingstead—or perhaps spotted it from their ships, although there’s very little to see—and came marching along the coast. The Gatehouse was unmanned and the bridge intact, so they left guards on the landward end while the rest went across. They found the island deserted, because everyone had hidden in the caves. The caves have openings near the seaward end of the trail, and in the night the defenders came out and chopped down the bridge.
“The Baels who had stayed at the Gatehouse ran back to Fishport and brought one of the longships around at the next high tide to try a rescue. The waves smashed it to toothpicks and them to jam. The rest of the raiders collected all the rope they could find and tried to cross the channel when the tide went out. The surf got all of them, too. They say the last half dozen just jumped off the cliffs, because that was a better end than what was done to prisoners in those days. It was one of the worst Baelish defeats in the war, and it was done by a gang of footmen and gardeners with wrecking bars.”
The canyon was as cold and dismal as its history. Hungry waves ran a hundred feet below the travelers; the sunlight was a hundred feet above. As the rumble of surf grew louder around them, Malinda kept careful watch on Dog. He was sickly pale, but seemed to be staying master of whatever haunted him.
