by Greg Keyes
“What am I, my dear? I am your beloved uncle. I am your dear friend.”
“I don’t know what you are,” Anne said, “but you are not my friend.”
Robert sighed dramatically.
“You are distraught, I can see that. But I can assure you I am your friend. Why else would I protect your throne as I have?”
“My throne?” Anne said.
“Of course, Anne. Liery has kidnapped Charles, and in his absence I have acted as regent. But you are the heir to the throne, my dear.”
“You admit this?” Artwair said.
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I? I have no reason to go against the Comven’s decision. I have only been awaiting her return.”
“And now you plan to give me the crown?” Anne asked, staring in disbelief.
“Indeed I shall,” Robert agreed. “Under certain conditions.”
“Ah, now we’re to the viper’s bargain,” Artwair said.
Robert looked annoyed for the first time since his arrival.
“I’m surprised by the company you keep, Anne,” he said. “Duke Artwair was commanded to protect our borders. He has abandoned that duty in order to march upon Eslen.”
“To return the throne to its rightful owner,” Artwair said.
“Oh, really?” Robert replied. “When you began your march west, you knew that Anne was alive, well, and ready to take her place in Eslen? But that was before you had seen her, or spoken with her. In fact, how could you have known that?” He switched his gaze to Anne.
“How do you imagine he knew you were alive, my dear? Have you ever asked yourself exactly what our dear duke might want from this bargain?”
Anne had, in fact, wondered just that, but she withheld her confirmation.
“What are your terms?” she asked.
Robert nodded appraisingly. “You’ve grown up, haven’t you? Though I have to say, I’m not sure I like your hair cut short. It seems mannish. When it is long, you look almost like—” He stopped abruptly, and what little color there had been in his face suddenly drained.
He looked away, first at the western sky, then at the distant rise of the Breu-en-Trey. Finally he cleared his throat.
“In any event,” he said, his tone more subdued, “you’ll understand if I’m a bit concerned, given the manner of your coming.”
“I can see that,” Anne said. “Your men resisted our march here, and you’ve flooded the poelen. Clearly, you are prepared for war. So why would you suddenly capitulate?”
“I had no idea this army was led by you, my dear. I assumed it was more or less what it appeared to be: a revolt by greedy and disaffected noblemen of the provinces. People who would use this time of troubles as an excuse to place an usurper on the throne. Now that I see they have chosen you as their poppet, it changes things substantially.”
“Poppet?”
“You don’t really think they will let you be queen, do you?” Robert said. “I think you are brighter than that, Anne. All of them had to be promised something, didn’t they? After they have lost blood, men, and horses, do you think their appetites will lessen?
“You have an army here you cannot trust, Anne. What’s more, even if you could trust it, you can’t take Eslen easily—if at all.”
“I’ve yet to hear what you propose.”
He held up his hands. “It isn’t complicated. You come into the city, and we arrange a coronation. I shall function as your chief adviser.”
“And how long, I wonder, would I survive that honor?” Anne asked. “How long before some poison or dagger of your design finds my heart?”
“You may bring a retinue of reasonable size, of course.”
“My army is of reasonable size,” Anne replied.
“It would be foolish to bring all of them in,” Robert said. “In fact, I cannot allow it. I do not trust them, nor, as I’ve mentioned, should you. Bring in a strong bodyguard. Leave the rest of them out here. When the adjudicator from the Church arrives, he will sort this out, and we will abide by his decision.”
“That’s an easy promise for you to make!” Artwair exploded. “It’s well known that you and the praifec are villains together in all of this.”
“The adjudicator comes directly from z’Irbina,” Robert said. “If you cannot trust our most holy fathers, I cannot imagine who you would trust.”
“I’ll begin by not trusting you and work my way out from there.”
Robert sighed. “You aren’t really going to insist on fighting this silly war, are you?”
“Why is my mother imprisoned?” Anne asked.
Robert’s gaze dropped down.
“For her own protection,” he said. “After the deaths of your sisters, she became first melancholy, then inconsolable. She was unbalanced, and it showed to her detriment in governing. You have heard of the slaughter of innocents at Lady Gramme’s, I presume. Still, it wasn’t until she attempted the unthinkable that I felt I had to step in.”
“The unthinkable?”
His voice lowered. “It is a most closely guarded secret,” he said. “We kept it quiet to prevent embarrassment and, frankly, despair. Your mother tried to kill herself, Anne.”
“Did she?” Anne meant to sound skeptical, but something caught at the back of her throat. Could it possibly be true?
“As I say, she was inconsolable. She remains so, but under my protection she is at least safe from herself.”
Anne had been considering Robert’s offer.
She didn’t trust him, but once in the castle she would be able to find the passages. She would be safe from Robert and his men there, and she could open the tunnel that led into the rinns and move men into the city, if not the castle itself.
There was an opportunity here, and she wasn’t going to let it pass.
“I should like to see her,” she said.
“That is easily arranged,” Robert assured her.
“I should like to see her now.”
“Shall I send for her?” Robert asked.
Anne took a deep breath, then let it out. “I rather think I should like to go to her.”
“I’ve already said that you could bring a retinue into the castle. We can see your mother first thing.”
“I would rather that you stayed here,” Anne replied.
Robert’s eyebrows arched up. “I’ve come here under a flag of truce, unarmed and unguarded. I never imagined you would be so dishonorable as to take me captive. If you do, I warn you, you will never enter Eslen. My men will burn it first, if anything happens to me.”
“I’m asking this as a favor,” Anne replied. “I’m asking you to agree to stay here while I speak to my mother. I will take only fifty men. In turn, you will send word to your men to allow me free access to the castle so I can verify the truth of these things you say. Then—and only then—might you and I come to some sort of agreement.”
“Even if I trust you,” Robert said, “I have already made it plain I don’t trust your followers. How can you be sure they won’t murder me while you’re gone?” He glanced significantly at Artwair.
“Because my personal bodyguard, Neil MeqVren, will defend you. You may trust him absolutely.”
“He is only one man,” Robert pointed out.
“If anything happens to Sir Neil, I will know I have been betrayed,” Anne said.
“That would be a small comfort to my corpse.”
“Robert, if you are serious about your good intentions, here is your chance to prove it. Otherwise, I will not trust you, and this war will begin in earnest. Most of the landwaerden are on my side. And Sir Fail will arrive soon with a fleet, do not doubt it.”
Robert stroked his beard for a moment.
“One day,” he said at last. “You return to Eslen with my word, on my boat, and I will stay here under the care of Sir Neil, whom even I do not doubt. You will speak to your mother and determine her condition. You will assure yourself that I am honest in my intention to give you the throne. Then you will return, and w
e will discuss the way in which you will take your place.
“One day. Agreed?”
Anne closed her eyes for a moment, trying to see if she had missed something.
“Your Majesty,” Artwair advised, “this is most unwise.”
“I agree,” Sir Neil said.
“Nevertheless,” Anne said, “I am to be queen, or so you all say. It is my decision to make. Robert, I agree to your terms.”
“My life is in your hands, Majesty,” Robert said.
DANGER TINGLING at his back, Stephen paused to catch his breath.
Behind him Ehan said something, but although his ears had begun to heal, it was still too muddled to make out, as if he had water in his ears. He tapped the side of his head to indicate as much, something they had all gotten used to in the past two ninedays.
“Rest?” the little man repeated a little louder.
Stephen nodded reluctantly. During his time with the holter he’d thought his body had hardened to travel, but the trail was too steep to ride the horses, so they had to lead them. His legs, it seemed, had not been strengthened by months on horseback.
He settled onto a boulder as Ehan produced a waterskin and some of the bread they’d bought in the last village they’d passed through, a gathering of a dozen huts named Crothaem. That lay someplace far below them now, beyond the unnamed valley below and the folds of the Hauland foothills that ran along it.
“How far up do y’ think we are?” Ehan asked. Now they were facing each other, and it was easier to communicate.
“It’s hard to tell,” Stephen replied, because it was, even in the most visceral sense. “We must be in the mountains themselves by now.”
“The trouble is there aren’t any trees,” Ehan offered.
Stephen nodded. That was the problem, or at least one of them. It was as if some ancient saint or god had ripped up a monstrous expanse of pasture from the Midenlands and settled them over the Bairghs like a sheet. Stephen reckoned that what he saw was the result of two thousand years of Mannish activity: cutting trees for house timbers and firewood and to clear pasture for the sheep, goats, and hairy cows that seemed to be everywhere.
The effect, though, was a disorienting loss of perspective. The grass soothed over the steepness of the slopes and tricked the eye about distance. Only when he focused on something specific—a herd of goats or one of the occasional sod-roofed steadings—did he have some appreciation of the vastness of it all.
And of the danger. Inclines that appeared gentle and friendly—which he imagined he could roll down like a child on a small hill—actually hid fatal drops.
Fortunately, the same millennia and the same men that had produced the treeless landscape had also created well-worn tracks to tell them where it was safe to walk—and where it wasn’t.
“You still reckon the woorm is following us?” Ehan said.
Stephen nodded. “It’s not following us exactly,” he said. “It didn’t follow us across the Brogh y Stradh uplands; it swam up the Then River to meet us.”
“Makes sense that it would prefer traveling in rivers, a thing that size.”
“That’s not the point, though,” Stephen said. “While we followed the Ef down to the Gray Warlock, it was actually getting ahead of us, as we discovered in Ever.”
“Yah,” Ehan said, his brow furrowing at the memory. Ever had been a village of the dead. The few survivors had told them of the woorm’s passage just a few days before.
“From there we could have gone anywhere. And even if it was determined to dog us using the rivers, it might have gone up the Warlock, down to the confluence at Wherthen. It might have gone to Eslen. But it didn’t. It went upstream on the Then to cut off our overland flight, and it very nearly got us.”
He shuddered at the memory of the monster’s head breaking the iced surface of the stream like a boat made of iron. The impression was enhanced by the pair of passengers, bundled in furs, who rode on its back. He’d been wondering what those two would do if the woorm ever dove below the surface when its gaze—its terrible gaze—had found him, and he’d known in his heart that it was the end.
But they’d turned away and nearly killed their horses riding that night. And they hadn’t seen it since.
“But we know it came through Ever on its way to the monastery,” Ehan said. “Maybe it was just going back the way it came, and we were unlucky enough to have chosen the same path.”
“I wish I could believe that, but I can’t,” Stephen said. “The coincidence would be far too great.”
“Then maybe it’s not coincidence,” Ehan pressed. “Maybe it’s all part of some larger design.”
“I wouldn’t put too much weight on that leg,” Henne interjected, peering intently at them both. “It’s got two fellows riding it, don’t it? If either of ’em knew the lay of the land and a thing about tracking, they could’ve reckoned which way we were headed. Saints, they could have stopped to question them poor folk near Whitraff, the ones we talked to. They’d remember us, since we were near deaf at the time, and I don’t think they’d hold out on a woormrider.
“Once they knew what road we were on, they could figure out where we’d have to cross the Then; there’re only a couple of fords and no bridges.”
“That’s possible,” Stephen acknowledged. “It didn’t meet us at the ferry on the White Warlock. If it’s following us now, it’s coming overland again.”
“Unless you’re right,” Henne said, “and it canns where we’re going. In that case, it would have gone on up the Welph, and it’ll be waiting for us two valleys over.”
“What a wonderful thought,” Ehan muttered.
Midafternoon they reached the snow line, and soon the wet, muddy trail froze as hard as stone.
At Henne’s suggestion, they’d found a tailor in Crothaem and bought four paiden, a sort of local quilted felt coat lined with sheepskin. The paiden cost them more than half of what remained of the funds the fratrex had sent with them, and to Stephen the price seemed exorbitant.
His mind was firmly changed now as they walked up into low-lying clouds and found them to be a freezing mist. The horses slipped too often for them to ride, and walking became more difficult both because the path steepened and because the air seemed somehow less substantial.
Stephen had read about the bad air at the tops of mountains. In the Mountains of the Hare, the highest peaks—those known as Sa’ Ceth agSa’Nem—the atmosphere was said to be completely unbreathable. Up to now, he had doubted the veracity of those accounts, but this part of the Bairghs wasn’t very high as mountains went, yet he already was becoming a believer.
It was growing dark when they chanced across a goatherd driving his flock along the trail back the way they had come. Stephen greeted him in his best Northern Almannish. The herdsman—really a lad of perhaps thirteen with raven-dark hair and pale blue eyes—smiled and answered in something akin to the same language, albeit with such odd pronunciation that Stephen had to take his time to understand it.
“Dere be a vel downtrail, het Demsted,” the boy informed them, “ ’boot one league. Du’t be-gitting one room-hoos dere. Mine fader-bruder Ansgif’l git du’alla one room,” he added cheerfully.
“Danx,” Stephen replied, guessing at the local expression of gratitude. “I wonder—have you ever heard of a mountain named eslief vendve?”
The boy scratched his head for a moment.
“Slivendy?” he asked at last.
“Maybe,” Stephen said cautiously. “It’s farther north and east.”
“Je, very far,” the boy replied. “Has ’nother namen—eh, net gemoonu—not ’member? Du ask mine fader-bruder, je? He is talking better Almannish.”
“And his name is Ansgif?”
“Je, at room-hoos, named svartboch. Mine namen is Ven. Du spill ’im du seen me.
“Mekle danx, Ven,” Stephen said.
The boy smiled and waved, then continued on his way, vanishing into the fog, though they continued to hear the sound o
f the bells on his goats for some time.
“What was all that?” Ehan gruffed after the boy was out of earshot. “I started off understanding you, but then you started talking like the boy, and it all turned to gibberish.”
“Really?” Stephen thought back. He’d only been adjusting his Almannish based on the boy’s dialect, guessing at how the words ought to sound in his version of the tongue.
“Didn’t understand a word after you said hello and asked him if there was anyplace to spend the night.”
“Well, there is, a town called Demsted in the glen up ahead. We’re to look for an inn called the svartboch—‘Black Goat’—and his uncle Ansgif will rent us a room. He’d heard of our mountain, as well, and he said it had another name, one he couldn’t remember. He said to ask his uncle about that, too.”
“Is it going to be like this from here on out, people gabbling near nonsense?”
“No,” Stephen said. “More likely, it’ll get worse.”
Their day did get worse, if not in the way Stephen had predicted. A bit after the pass dropped back below the snow line and began its slow downward snaking, Stephen was drawn from reviewing his reasoning on the location of the mountain he sought by a strangled cry from Ehan that immediately brought his wits back to his feet and sent a jolt through his heart and lungs.
Peering in the direction Ehan was pointing, he at first found it impossible to sort out what he saw. It was a tree, especially noticeable because it was one of the few he had seen in many leagues. He didn’t know the variety, but it was leafless, and the branches gnarled and twisted by the mountain winds. But there was a large flock of birds perched in its branches.
Birds, and people, climbing…
No, not climbing. Hanging. Eight corpses with blackened faces depended from thick ropes tied to the boughs. Their eyes were gone, presumably eaten by the crows that now cawed and muttered at Stephen and his companions.
“Ansuz af se friz ya s’uvil,” Ehan swore.
Stephen swept his gaze around the narrow pass. He didn’t see or hear anyone, but his hearing was still damaged, so that was no surprise.
“Keep watch,” he said. “Whoever did this may still be nearby.”
