The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  “And kill him,” Cheiso said. “Kill the king.”

  With a faint prickling she realized he meant William.

  “King William is already dead,” Alis said. “He is not your enemy. Your enemy is Robert. Do you understand? Prince Robert’s word put you here. Then he killed his brother, the king, and left you to rot. He probably doesn’t even remember that you exist. But you will remind him, won’t you?”

  There was a long pause, and when Cheiso finally spoke again, it was in a surprisingly passionless and even voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I will.”

  Alis drew out her lock-picking tools and set to work.

  ANNE TOOK a few deep breaths, closing her eyes against her tent and its spare furnishings. She’d sent Austra away, and the girl had gone with what had seemed to Anne a sense of relief.

  Did the little tart just want to get away from her, or did she want to get to Cazio?

  Hush, she told herself. Hush. You’re just getting angry with yourself. Small wonder Austra would rather spend time with someone else.

  Anne settled into the darkness and then looked deeper, trying to find her way to the place of the Faiths so she could ask their counsel. In the past she had been wary of their advice, but she felt she needed something—some guidance from someone who knew more about the recondite world than she.

  Faint light appeared, and she focused on it, trying to draw it nearer, but it slipped to the edge of her vision, tantalizingly out of reach.

  She tried to relax, to coax it back, but the more she tried, the farther off the light drew, until in a sudden rage she reached out for it, yanking it toward her, and the darkness in turn squeezed, tightened until she couldn’t breathe.

  Something rough seemed to press about her body, and her fingers and toes went numb with cold. The chill crept up her, stealing all sensation until only the pulse of her heart was left, beating dangerously hard. She couldn’t draw breath or utter a sound, but she heard laughter and felt lips against her ear, murmuring warm words that she couldn’t understand.

  Light flared, and suddenly she saw the sea rolling out before her. On the broad waves rode ships by the dozens, flying the black-and-white swan banner of Liery. Her view shifted, and she saw that they were approaching Thornrath, the great seawall fortress that guarded the approach to Eslen. It loomed large enough to make even so vast a fleet seem tiny.

  Then, suddenly, the light was gone and she was on her knees, with her hands pressed against stone, the smell of decay and earth in her nostrils. Gradually a faint light sifted down from above, and slowly, as if waking from a dream, she began to understand where she was.

  She was in Eslen-of-Shadows, in the sacred grove behind the tombs of her ancestors, and her fingers were pressed against a stone sarcophagus. And she knew, was certain that she had always known, and she screamed in the most utter despair she had ever experienced.

  Hush, child, a small voice said. Hush and listen.

  The voice calmed her terror, if only a little.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I am your friend. And you are right; she is coming more for you. I can help, but you must seek me out. You must help me first.

  “Who is she? How can you help?”

  Too many questions, and the distance is too great. Find me, and I will help you.

  “Find you where?”

  Here.

  She saw Castle Eslen, watched it ripped open like a cadaver to expose its hidden organs and humors, nests of disease and thrones of health, and after a moment she understood.

  She awoke screaming, with Neil and Cazio staring down at her. Austra was next to her, holding her hand.

  “Majesty?” Neil asked. “Is something wrong?”

  For several long heartbeats she wanted to tell him, to reverse what was to come.

  But she couldn’t, could she?

  “It was a dream, Sir Neil,” she said. “A Black Mary, nothing more.”

  The knight looked skeptical, but after a moment he accepted her explanation with a nod.

  “Well, then, I hope the rest of your sleep is dreamless,” he said.

  “How long until we break camp?”

  “Four bells.”

  “And today we shall reach Eslen?”

  “If the saints will it, Your Majesty,” Neil replied.

  “Good,” Anne said. Images of ships—and more terrible things—still burned behind her eyes. Eslen would be the start of it.

  The men left, but Austra remained, stroking her forehead until she fell asleep.

  Anne had made the trip from Glenchest to Eslen many times. She had ridden there on her horse Faster when she was fourteen, accompanied by a guard of Craftsmen. That had taken her two days, with a stop in the Poel of Wife at her cousin Nod’s estate. By carriage or canal, it might take a day longer.

  But it had taken her army a full month, even though most of their supplies were floated downstream on barges.

  And a bloody month it had been.

  Anne had seen tournaments: jousting, men battering about with swords, that sort of thing. She had seen real combat, too, and slaughter aplenty. But until the day they marched from Glenchest, everything she knew about armies and war she’d had from minstrels, books, and theater. Those had led her to imagine that they would march straightaway to Eslen, blow the horns of battle, and fight it out on the King’s Poel.

  The minstrels had left out a thing or two, and Castle Gable had been her first lesson in that.

  Armies in songs didn’t have to keep their supply lines open so they didn’t have to stop and “reduce” every unfriendly fortress within five days’ ride of their march. Most of them were unfriendly, it turned out, because Robert had either coerced or cajoled the castle owners to fight for him or had simply occupied them with his own handpicked troops.

  Anne had never heard the word “reduce” used to describe the conquering of a castle and the slaughter of its defenders, but she quickly came to the opinion that a better word was needed. The siege of Gable cost them more than a hundred men and almost a week, and when they left it, they had to leave another hundred men behind to garrison it.

  Then came Langraeth, Tulg, Fearath…

  The old songs also didn’t talk much about women throwing their children over the walls in an insane attempt to save them from the flames or about the smell of a hundred dead men as the morning frost began to thaw. Or how a man could have a spear all the way through him and appear not to feel it, keep talking as if nothing were wrong, right up until the moment his eyes lost sight and his lips went lazy.

  She had seen horrible things before, and these were differences in scale rather than in kind.

  But scale made a difference. A hundred dead men were more horrific than a single dead man, as unfair as that might seem to the single fellow.

  In ballads, women keened in grief over the loss of their beloved ones. In the march to Eslen, no one close to Anne had died. She didn’t keen in grief; instead she lay awake at night, trying to stop the cries of the wounded from her ears, trying not to remember the images of the day. She found that the brandy Aunt Elyoner had sent with her was helpful in that regard.

  The minstrels also tended to leave out the drearier aspects of politics: four hours listening to the aithel of Wife drone on about the comparative virtues of dun-colored cows; an entire day spent in the company of the spouse of the Gravwaerd of Langbrim and her not-so-subtle attempts to present her hopelessly dull son as a possible suitor for “someone—not Your Majesty of course, but someone of note”; two hours in Penbale watching a production of the musical theater that had “opened the eyes” of the landwaerden to the evils of Robert.

  Only the fact that most of the singers were so terribly off-key kept her eyes open, though it did leave her wondering what the original could have been like. The only thing amusing in it was the physical portrayal of Robert, which involved a mask made of some sort of gourd and a nose that was noticeably, inappropriately made to resemble another, nethe
rer, body part.

  All because occupying the castles wasn’t enough; the countryside had to be wooed. Besides drumming up more troops, she had to make sure her canal boats could come and go to Loiyes, which was where her provisions came from. While Artwair and his knights reduced castles, she spent her time visiting the neighboring towns and villages, meeting with the landwaerden, garnering their support, and asking permission to leave behind even more soldiers to watch the dikes and malends that kept them drained. That turned out to be almost as grueling as her flight from Vitellia, although in an entirely different way, a daily march of audiences and dinners with town aithels and gravwaerds, flattering them or frightening them, whichever seemed more likely to work.

  In the end most of them were willing to give her passive support—they wouldn’t hinder her progress, they would let her leave troops to occupy the birms so the canals couldn’t be flooded or chained—but few were willing to relinquish manpower. Over the course of the month only about two hundred joined their forces; that came nowhere near offsetting their losses.

  Despite all of that, she somehow had it in the back of her mind that when they reached Eslen, they would still stage the final battle on the poel. What she found instead was what she was looking at now from the birm of the north dike. Artwair, Neil, and Cazio stood beside her.

  “Saints,” she breathed, not certain what exactly she felt.

  There was home: the island of Ynis, her stony skirts draped in fog, her high-peaked hills overlooking Newland, the city of Eslen rising on the greatest of those hills. Within the concentric circles of her walls were the great fortress and palace whose spires seemed to thrust into the lower provinces of heaven. It looked both impossibly huge yet ridiculously tiny from this strange vantage point.

  “That’s your home?” Cazio asked.

  “It is,” Anne said.

  “I never saw such a place,” Cazio said, his voice timbred with awe, something Anne wasn’t sure she had ever heard before. Thanks to Elyoner’s tutors and Cazio’s quick mind, he did so in the king’s tongue.

  “There is no other place like Eslen,” Neil said. Anne smiled, realizing that Neil himself had seen Eslen for the first time less than a year ago.

  “But how do we get there?” Cazio asked.

  “That will be the problem,” Artwair said, scratching his chin absently. “It’s the same problem we were always going to face, only multiplied. I had hoped he wouldn’t do this.”

  “I don’t understand,” Cazio said.

  “Well,” Anne said, “Ynis is an island in the confluence of two rivers: the Warlock and the Dew. So there is always water around it. The only way to reach Eslen is by boat.”

  “But we have boats,” Cazio asserted.

  That was true enough; they still had, in fact, every one of the fifteen barges and seven canal wolves they’d had at the beginning of the journey. There had been no river battle.

  “Yes,” Anne said. “But normally we’d just be crossing a river, you see. This lake you’re looking at now used to be dry land.” With a wave of her hand, she indicated the vast body of water that now lay before them.

  Cazio frowned. “Maybe I didn’t understand you,” he said. “Did you say dry land? Tero arido?”

  “Yes,” Anne replied. “Eslen is surrounded by poelen. That’s what we call land we’ve claimed from the water. You’ve noticed that our rivers and canals all flow above the land, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” Cazio said. “It seems very unnatural.”

  “It is. And so when a dike is broken or opened up, it all floods again. But why didn’t they wait until we were here, marching across the poel, before they opened it? That way we might have been drowned.”

  “That would have been too risky,” Artwair explained. “If the wind is blowing the wrong way, it can take a long time for the poel to fill, and we might have made it across. This way Robert has made our task very, very difficult.”

  “Yet we still have our boats,” Cazio pointed out.

  “Auy,” Artwair replied. “But look there, though the mist.”

  He pointed at the base of the great hill. Anne recognized the shadowy shapes, but Cazio didn’t know where to look.

  “Are those ships?” he finally asked.

  “Ships,” Artwair confirmed. “I’ll wager that when the fog lifts, we’ll see nearly the whole fleet. Warships, Cazio. They couldn’t have maneuvered very well in the river channel, but now they’ve got a lake. We might have slipped across the Dew and set up a beachhead, but now we have to cross all of that, in full view of the imperial fleet.”

  “Can we?” Cazio asked.

  “No,” Artwair said.

  “There’s more than one approach to Eslen, though,” Neil said. “What about the south side, the Warlock side? Have they flooded the poelen there, as well?”

  “That we don’t know, not yet,” Artwair admitted. “But even if that side hasn’t been flooded, it’s a very hard approach. The rinns are difficult to march through and easily defended by a few archers on the heights. And then there are the hills: difficult to take but easy to defend.

  “But you’re exactly right. We need to send someone around the island. A small group, I think, one that can move quickly, quietly, unseen.”

  “That sounds like the sort of thing I might be able to do,” Cazio volunteered.

  “No,” Anne, Neil, and Austra said at the same time.

  “What good am I otherwise?” the swordsman asked irritably.

  “You’re an excellent bodyguard,” Neil said. “Her Majesty needs you here.”

  “Besides,” Anne said, “you don’t know the terrain. I’m sure the duke will have good men chosen for the task.”

  “Yes,” Artwair said. “I’ll pick a few parties. But you know Eslen as well as anyone here, Anne. What do you think? Have you any ideas?”

  “You’ve sent word to our kin in Virgenya?”

  “Yes,” Artwair said. “But the well has been poisoned, you know. Robert’s cuveiturs went ahead of us with stories of how your mother was in the process of handing the throne to Liery.”

  “And yet my uncle would give the country to Hansa. Which would they prefer?”

  “Neither, let us hope,” Artwair replied. “I’ve told them that if they fight with you, we can keep a Dare on the throne, one who will lean toward Virgenya. But it’s complicated. Many in Virgenya would prefer to see a high king back on their own throne, with no emperor in Eslen to lord over them. Even if he—or she—is one of their own.

  “That group reckons that Hansa would be content with Crotheny and let Virgenya go its own way.”

  “Oh,” Anne said.

  “Auy. And even if they started today, it would be months before Virgenyan troops could arrive over land, and almost as long by sea, considering that they’d have to sail the Straits of Rusimmi to get here. No, I think we must plan this without counting on Virgenya.”

  Cazio pointed. “What’s that?” he asked.

  Anne followed the direction of the Vitellian’s finger. A small craft was approaching, a canal boat flying the colors of Eslen.

  “That will be Robert’s emissary,” Artwair said. “Probably come to arrange a meeting. We might as well see what my cousin has to say before we make too many plans.”

  As the boat approached, Anne realized with a tightening of her gut that the emissary was none other than Robert himself.

  His familiar face peered at her from underneath a black cap and the golden circlet her father used to wear for less formal state occasions. He was seated in the center of the boat, in an armchair, attended by figures in black. She couldn’t see any archers or, in fact, any weapons at all.

  She had the sudden profound feeling that some mistake had been made. Robert was only four years older than she; he had played with her when she was little. She’d always thought of him as a friend. It was impossible that he had done the things they said, and she was suddenly sure that he was about to clear things up. There wouldn’t be any need for
a war at all.

  As the boat arrived, a slender figure in black hose and surcoat leapt off to secure the moorings; it took an instant for Anne to realize that the figure was female, a girl of perhaps thirteen. In the next blink she understood that all but one of Robert’s retainers were unarmed young women. The single man wore a gold filigree brooch on his mantle that identified him as a knight, but he was likewise weaponless.

  Robert certainly didn’t seem very worried.

  When the craft was secure, he rose from his makeshift throne, grinning.

  “My dear Anne,” he said. “Let me look at you.”

  He stepped out upon the stone, and Anne felt a shock run through her feet. The rock beneath her went suddenly soft, like warm butter, and everything blurred. It was as if the world around her were melting.

  And then, just as suddenly, all was firm again, re-formed.

  But different. Robert was still there, handsome in a black sealskin doublet sequined with small diamonds. But he stank like rotting meat, and his skin was translucent, revealing the dark riverine network of vessels beneath. Even more peculiar, his veins did not end at his flesh but trailed off into the earth and air, joining the otherworldly waters of her vision.

  But unlike the man she had seen dying, leaking the last of his life into the headwaters of death, everything was flowing into Robert, filling him, propping him up like a hand thrust into a stocking puppet.

  She realized she had stepped back, and her breath was coming fast.

  “That is near enough,” Artwair said.

  “I only want to give my niece a kiss,” Robert said. “That is not so much, is it?”

  “Under the circumstances,” Artwair replied, “I think it is.”

  “None of you see it, do you?” Anne asked. “You can’t see what he is.”

  The puzzled gazes that brought confirmed her guess, and even in her own vision the dark rivulets were fading, though not entirely vanished.

  Robert met her gaze squarely, and she saw something weird there, a sort of recognition or surprise.