Prisoner of Haven

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  “Show me.”

  Wisely, he didn’t smile when he held the door wide. “Come inside.”

  Dezra stepped into darkness and stood perfectly still. Behind her, the ambient light of night seemed startling. Light of stars, of rosy candles in the windows at the top of Aline’s house, the waning moon shining down. These combined to thin the darkness a bit outside the shed door.

  “Wait,” he said, and took a long stride ahead of her. A vague shape in the dark, he moved. She thought he bent down, then stood again. “Come here.”

  She followed the sound of his voice and collided with him. Madoc cursed, caught his balance on something Dezra couldn’t see. She looked down and saw a deeper blackness, a square opening that seemed to drop without end.

  “What’s that?” She almost reached for her knife again, then felt faintly foolish.

  “A secret way.” He crouched down, looked up and around at her, his face a pale oval in the feeble light from outside. He turned his head and vanished.

  Dezra heard a thump and grunt, then he called, “Wait. There’s a ladder here somewhere. Damn… somewhere.”

  Her general mistrust of the mage didn’t quell curiosity. Dezra stood at the edge of the drop. Steel scraped on flint, a spark, a hiss, and a small torch flared to bright light. In the sudden glare, she saw that the drop was not much more than half again Madoc’s length.

  “Move,” she said and followed him down.

  Mud squelched under her boots. Firelight ran on the surface of puddles and sheened off walls where trickles of water ran. Dez saw a ceiling of damp earth and walls shored up by thick beams. The ladder that should have been propped and ready lay in the mud, it’s footing undermined by the wet, shifting earth.

  “A pirate road,” Madoc said. “This is one tunnel of several that run out to the river. I’m here to check it and the others, to make sure all’s well after the rain. Things get unsettled by even a little water.” He lifted his torch, inspecting walls and ceiling. They dripped, but the wooden beams shoring them seemed strong enough to Dezra’s eye. He turned and seemed to take a brand from the earthen wall itself. This he ignited from his own torch. “As long as you’re here, come on along.”

  “On your inspection tour?”

  Madoc handed her the second torch. “If you like. Or you can go back up and kick your heels against the cobbles with old Dunbrae until it’s time for him to leave.”

  Again curiosity sparked. Dezra took the torch. “You don’t much like him. Why?”

  Madoc didn’t reply, and she followed him through the tunnel. It wasn’t long before they came to two branches. One looked fairly dry. The other was clogged with mud and rocks and fallen shoring beams. When Dez turned down to look into the clear tunnel Madoc pulled her back.

  “No. These branches aren’t going to be safe, even if one looks like it. Listen.”

  Beneath the comfortable hiss of torches, she heard the steady trickle of water. “It’s going to fall soon.”

  “Yes. Let’s go.”

  She lifted her torch and followed, careful to mark her way. At every intersection, he showed her where brands and oil-soaked rags were stored in waxed canvas pouches. “If you have to run these tunnels, you’ll want to know where to find fire at need. Without light, you could wander around under Haven for longer than you’d like.”

  Dez noted the places and followed in silence. They splashed through puddles up to their ankles, but found no worse. Three of the small off-shoot tunnels proved dry, and Madoc told her where they led.

  When they stopped to check the last cache of torch materials, she said, “There haven’t been pirates up the river since well after the Cataclysm. All this looks a little more recent than that.”

  “It is, but only the shoring up and the widening. The tunnels themselves are as old as I say. Before the elven kingdom finally fell, Qui’thonas used them to get elves into the city when it was too dangerous to make a clear run from the river into Haven. A back door, if you will.”

  “How? These don’t connect to the river on the Qualinesti side, do they?”

  “They don’t. I hear it wasn’t the favorite route—right through Darken Wood. It got harder and harder at the end. More elves died than were saved. But if they made it, they ran north to Haven through the woods, vanished into caves in the hills, or scrambled through those and to the riverside. If they got that far and safely across the river after that, they dashed for the tunnels and came up behind Haven’s walls.” He shrugged. “And then the elves stopped coming.”

  Madoc pointed ahead to a place where the tunnel narrowed. “Up ahead is the way out. Not to the river,” he said, answering her questioning look. “That’s down the west arm of the last intersection.” He doused his torch and, reluctantly, she did the same. “Come with me.”

  In the dark, with only Madoc’s after-image lingering, Dezra felt familiar distrust crowding in. He’d been forthcoming, careful not to do or say anything to arouse the distrust. Still, she felt it. If Madoc knew that, he gave no indication. She followed as he went a few strides farther then stopped. He took her hand and put it against the rough wooden leg of a ladder. When Dez craned her neck to see up, she had the sense that wood covered the opening.

  “Where?” she asked, instinctively whispering now.

  He moved her aside, took to the ladder and slowly lifted the hatch. He gestured, she followed, and the feeble illumination of stars and a sinking moon seemed bright to Dezra as she lifted herself out of the hatch. They stood in a small thicket of conifers of the long-needled kind that didn’t grow naturally in this part of Abanasinia. These had been planted for someone’s pleasure many years ago. They made a screen around the tunnel entrance, thick and dense.

  The boom of bullfrogs sounded like thunder, the shrill of peepers like screaming. Dezra smelled the water of a pond nearby, muddy after the rain. She looked around for bearings and caught them at once. Across the road she saw the back of the Ivy. In a high window, light burned in Usha’s new studio. A week ago, Usha had counted her savings and decided she’d be able to pay her debts in the city, pay rent in advance for the room she and Dez had been sharing, and pay for the room across the hall. The decision made, it didn’t take long to carry out. With Rusty’s help and Dezra’s, Usha had trundled her easel and paints, her canvasses and sketches and all the rest across to a much larger space, a room that served as her studio with an alcove for her bed. At this hour, she wouldn’t be painting in such uncertain light, but she might well be writing, reading, or immersed in the play and pattern of light and shadow, dreaming half-dreams and thinking about the work to hand.

  One dash across the road would put Dez at the inn’s back door. She turned to say something to Madoc. Swift, he pulled her back into the pines, his hand over her mouth. Instinctively, she twisted away from him. He held harder and pointed out to the road.

  Three knights walked by. Lightly armored but well-armed, they made little noise as they went, only the sound of their voices and coarse laughter could be heard.

  Madoc waited till they were well gone, then let Dez go.

  “Do you see, now, Dezra Majere?” His voice grew cold. “This is why Aline needs me. Sir Radulf changed the timing of that watch only this evening, and he added a man to it. No one who isn’t a knight knew it but me. It’s a safe bet I will know where the watch is every day, in every corner of the city.”

  Suspicion flared, and Dezra said, “It’s how you know that troubles me.”

  Madoc’s eyes glittered, hard as stone. His expression was no longer congenial. “I know, but telling you how will compromise more people than you or Aline. You say I have no allegiance. You’re wrong. But you don’t know where all my loyalties lie, and there’s no reason for me to tell you. Aline can live with that. Can you?”

  Dez made a choice. “I can, and I hope Aline and everyone else won’t die of it.”

  He looked up the road and down again. All was quiet. “You’ll have to take the chance.”

  “You, to
o,” Dez said. “If I even think you’re going to be a danger to Aline or to Usha…” Her hand moved swiftly, the knife flashed from her boot sheath. “You’re a dead man.”

  Madoc shrugged as though to say she’d spoken the obvious. “But for now, we work together.”

  “For now.”

  Dezra dashed across the road and slipped through the shadows and across the garden behind the inn. Not surprisingly, she found the kitchen door bolted. It wouldn’t be opened again until Bertie the cook’s boy roused himself to go out and see if there would be a delivery of produce from the market or whether he’d have to dig around in the kitchen garden. It could go one way or the other. Sometimes the knights confiscated cartloads of produce from the outlying farms, and sometimes they didn’t. When they came back lacking, rumor said it was because farmers were hoarding, secreting their fruit and vegetables in root cellars and caves. It was the kind of thing that put Dez in two minds. Good for the farmers if they were cheating the knights. Too bad for Haven, which would go hungry soon if food stopped coming in.

  For now, however, what the knights took, they dropped off at the market, loading the carts of those who could pay good steel coin and ignoring those who couldn’t. Distribution they left up to the carters, for now. Bertie had a kinsman of some degree or another in the carting business with whom he was on good terms. The Ivy was making out well, so far.

  Still, we’ll have to do something about a better way inside than waiting for Bertie, Dez thought as she settled down in the fragrant shadows of a honeysuckle hedge to wait for night to end.

  10

  Usha sat in the cushioned window seat, the city quiet behind her. It was as though all the world was sleeping, and she was a solitary island of wakefulness. She felt so until she turned and looked out the window. Old Keep, high on the hill, blazed with light. Sir Radulf Eigerson was said to seldom sleep; Lady Mearah—said rumor—never did. Usha imagined them pacing the corridor of the place, issuing curt, cold orders to knights and soldiers. A chill slipped down her neck and slid along her spine. How easy must have been the order for a hanging? She remembered Sir Radulf’s ice cold eyes. Not difficult at all.

  The scent of the river moved only faintly on the night. The breeze came from another direction tonight, and so the fragrances and sounds of the inn’s gardens drifted through the high windows of Usha’s studio. Honeysuckle and wisteria mingled with the rich odor of dark wet earth, and the peepers still shrilled by the pond across the road behind the inn. Underneath it all, the tang of paint and turpentine remained to speak of a week of her work.

  Usha wondered where Dez was now. They hadn’t spoken this morning. Dezra had been up and out early, and she hadn’t come home yet. She was Qui’thonas now, more often with Aline and Dunbrae than at the Ivy. By design or chance, they hadn’t seen much of each other in the week since Madoc had walked her home from the Grinning Goat. Usha wasn’t prepared to lay the blame for that at Dezra’s feet—or not all of it. She hadn’t been able to forget her sister-in-law’s insinuation that Usha’s behavior wasn’t appropriate for a married woman. Still, she wondered where Dezra was.

  The night was hot. Usha tucked up her skirts into her belt, as farm girls do. She drew up her bare legs, wrapped her arms around them and rested her chin on her knees.

  Shapely legs, Palin used to say. Wife, come here and bring those shapely legs of yours along. He hadn’t said any such thing in a very long time.

  Usha stretched and yawned. She thought of abandoning the studio for the little alcove of a bedroom, but returned her chin to rest on her knees. She had been on her feet all day, mixing paints and working at the canvas where the portrait of Lorelia Gance’s two sons was now nearly finished. Another hour of good light and it would have been finished, the complete work drying now. It was not to be, but Usha hadn’t been ready to leave her work once the light left her studio.

  And so she’d sat in the window, studying her painting by the moon’s light as it traveled across the room, sweeping the canvas. The images of young Thelan and Kalend had been illuminated by silver for as long as the moon hung outside her window. Shadows had draped most of the portrait, but the eyes of the two boys seemed to gleam with mischief. That silver light was gone now, replaced by the warm glow from two banks of candles, and the faces, once a little distant in the moon’s light, now had come to rich, full life.

  Usha laughed softly. She could imagine that if she looked away for even a moment, Lorelia’s imps would leap from the canvas and tear around the studio like a couple of wild goblin-children.

  But there on canvas they were quite tame. Kalend stood beside his seated brother. In the end, Lorelia had left the choice of setting in Usha’s hands, and Usha had chosen the solar. She had painted a richly appointed room, one in which books lined the wall, rare bound books of the kind only seen in libraries like the one in Palanthas. Velvet curtains draped the windows, and vases full of roses graced the tables. Thelan sat with quill in hand, a lap desk on his knee. Kalend held a model ship in his hands as though he’d just lifted it to study. She had painted them among the icons of their parents’ riches, and she couldn’t doubt that Lorelia and her councilman husband would be pleased.

  A silvery lock of curling hair slipped from beneath Usha’s kerchief. She tucked it back behind her ear, and with the motion came the sudden feeling that were the painting dry this instant, it would not feel finished. Usha didn’t know why, but she knew she should sit and watch; she should wait.

  And so she did, “watching the night grow dark as the moon sank. She watched the candlelight rise and fall with the breeze. She sat in the window, the stiffness of the day’s work fading, her muscles relaxing, and she knew when the breeze fell, when the stillness of the night became like a muffling cloak. She heard knights on patrol, the innkeeper’s dog barking, one of many shouting at the night. Cats screeched in the alley. Moments later, she felt the grim shadow of a dragon overhead, the fear of it sliding like ice through her heart. The dogs grew quiet, the cats suddenly silent. Usha felt fear melt when the beast was gone, sailing over another part of the city to chill sleep with nightmare.

  At last, the sky grew lighter. She heard the rattle and clop of the cart that made the rounds of the inns and taverns—the produce seller, who if he had anything to sell came first to these patrons with his fruit and vegetables and eggs before taking his goods to the market. The solid sound of hooves on cobbles roused her, as though she’d been sleeping.

  Usha yawned, stretched her arms, and stood to ease muscles gone stiff with sitting. Pale dawn’s light made the little candle flames seem to vanish. It lay gently on the painting. Though she had felt that the painting was not complete, the soft light showed her that nothing had changed during her vigil.

  “Ho! The inn!” an old man’s voice cried. “Ho! Bertie! Wake up, boy!”

  The produce cart by-passed the lane that led to the inn’s dooryard and went along the cobbled street so that Bertie the cook’s boy could dart out the back of the Ivy with empty baskets to fill. Usha heard the kitchen door slam, followed by the thud of the boy’s feet on the dirt path to the street.

  “Hey!” Bertie cried. “Pull up, old man! Don’t pass us by!”

  The carter laughed and pulled his brown mare to a halt. The laughter drew a smile from Usha. This ritual was old between the two, for the produce seller made it a point to arrive at the Ivy first and wait for a yea or nay from Bertie or the cook.

  Like a storm rumbling in the distance, the sound of galloping horses throbbed in the morning stillness. Usha’s smile died as Bertie turned to look up the street in the opposite direction from where the cart had come. From the height of her study window, Usha saw the knights before he did. In the narrow street, they spurred their horses, running sometimes side by side, sometimes three together, as though they were in a race.

  Usha leaned out her window, calling out to Bertie. Her warning went unheard as the laughing, shouting knights, five on tall horses, five in flashing mail shirts, swept arou
nd the cart, cursing the old man and hooting in laughter at his terror. The brown mare panicked and bolted. The cart lurched, then tumbled. The old man fell from the seat, trying to scramble out of the way of iron-shod hooves.

  Bertie ran to help the old man up, the poor creature shaking an ancient fist and cursing as loud as his quavering voice could manage. People poured out of the inn, children wide-eyed and clinging to their mothers’ hands, young men and boys milling around and snarling at the vanished knights. None bent to help the old man and the cook’s boy retrieve the spilled produce until Dezra came running round the corner.

  “Come on!” she shouted, elbowing a young man into action, shooing away a few children. “Help the old fellow, won’t you?”

  Prodded, the young man got the carter to his feet while Dez and Bertie gathered up what fruits and vegetables hadn’t been damaged. One or two others pitched in by chasing after the bolted mare and trying to right the cart.

  Thinking to run down and help, Usha turned from the window.

  Her breath caught hard in her throat. Her painting had changed. The boys still stood and sat where she’d arranged them. But behind the children, hardly seen but out the corner of the eye, two strong, well-grown men stood. One had dark hair, the other golden. Thelan went clean-shaven, a proper merchant prince in rich attire. His brother—

  Usha gasped, in her heart a pang of both fear and pride. Dark-haired Kalend wore martial attire, and he bore a shield whose insignia Usha well knew—that of a Solamnic Knight of the Rose. The insignia was the same as the one her own child wore, the Lady Knight Linsha Majere.

  Kalend stood tall in armor burnished like silver, the armor of a Knight of Solamnia. Painted upon his shield was the mark of an order of knights that even now, in lands beyond Haven, beyond Qualinesti of the elves, fought courageously against dark knights such as those who ran roughshod through Haven today.