Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1)

by Jordan MacLean

  “But tell me. If we would defend the castle, I must know. How did the temple fall? What enemy attacked you?”

  The priest shook his head. At last, he drew a deep breath. “Would that I could say it was an army of men, or even of demons,” he said, turning to Renda. “Such an attack you might well understand. But it was not.”

  Daerwin cocked his head. “Yet the temple was destroyed—actually destroyed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Please tell us what you saw.” Renda sat forward in her chair. “Not an army of men or demons, very well, but flashes of light? A creeping blackness?”

  The priest shook his head firmly. “I cannot describe it in any of those terms except to say that we were overwhelmed at once, and from every side. And yet we saw no one.” He sipped at his tea, and his cup shook. “The sheer power of the force against us, that it had no boundary, no limit...”

  The sheriff’s eyes widened slightly, but he said nothing.

  “Was it this nameless god Himself, come against you?” Renda glanced at her father then back at the priest. If Arnard had seen Him, perhaps they might better know who He was. “The god of the slain priests?”

  Arnard seemed uncertain for a moment. “I cannot know, but I think not. My memory is dark and colored with fear, but while it seemed at once a single being, I recall noise, the strangely disordered energy of an entire army of beings, all of a single goal but of many minds. But I also remember a child. At the end.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I make no sense. Forgive me; I have had no sleep in days.”

  A child. Renda frowned.

  The door pushed open slowly, and Nara hobbled through, drawing her shawl up about her thin shoulders. She seemed to have recovered some of her strength, especially since Renda told her about Pegrine. While Nara had not yet seen Pegrine, already the white light of her habit shone stronger, and her eye carried a gleam of purpose Renda had not seen since before Pegrine’s death.

  Pegrine.

  I also remember a child.

  Renda’s lip trembled, and she wondered if she had not made a terrible mistake to trust her dead niece so. But surely Pegrine would not attack the temple of B’radik, the temple of her guardian. Unless she had been fooled, unless her guardian was not B’radik at all. Renda felt ill.

  “I greet you,” breathed Nara with a bow to Arnard.

  “And I, you, Venerable One,” he breathed, glancing excitedly from Renda to her father. “How have you kept such a one secret all this time?” He looked back at Nara in astonishment. “Is it she, keeps the plague from Brannagh?”

  Renda and her father looked at each other bewildered.

  “But you mistake me,” Nara said quietly. “I am no more than a governess in a childless house.”

  Arnard met her eye and nodded, with a glance at the two knights. “Forgive my…presumption.”

  She squeezed his hand and smiled sadly. “Any strength I have against this plague is by B’radik’s own grace.” She saw his broken arm and rested her hands on either side of the break. A moment later, the glow of her habit flared a brilliant white, and Arnard’s arm was whole again. The priest stood wriggling his fingers and flexing his elbow while she tended his other injuries.

  The two knights left Arnard to speak with Nara while they set the servants about clearing out the empty garrison in the courtyard.

  The building, a stout, square tower, was all that remained of the original curtain wall built by Lexius. Just before the war against Kadak began, Borowain the Peacekeeper built an outer curtain wall five score paces further out that was better suited to archers and prolonged siege. Then, during the early part of the war, the inner curtain wall had been severely damaged by fire and had had to be demolished, all but the garrison.

  Over the years, it had been used to billet knights and infantry and to shelter the farmers and villagers during times of siege, though since the war’s end, the farmers had been using it as yet another marketplace, bringing their foods, crafts, newfangled farming tools and used goods each Marketday to barter and sell between themselves. The building was large, built of the same stones as the castle itself, but with only thin angled slits for windows that now faced the newer curtain wall and more slits in the stone roof high above for letting out the smoke that rose from the fire pits cut into the huge floor. Ingeniously, the roofing stones had been laid such that even in the worst storms, smoke could escape but no rain could come in.

  Renda made her way past the makeshift stalls and tables and threw open the doors at the far end to let light and fresh air wash through the place. But having done so, she turned to see the huge task ahead of them. Rotting hay was strewn across the floor and piled against one wall next to several large mounds of dried manure where she supposed the farmers were wont to keep the animals they would sell. In another area sat a pile of rotting vegetables, most decayed beyond recognition.

  She saw, to her pride, that the servants had not waited for her orders. The maids ran to fetch as much clean linen as they could find while grooms from the stables swept away the hay and rubbish left over from the last Marketday and brushed out the stale manure and rotting vegetables. Sedrik brought out several more servants, each carrying a mop and a bucket of water, to swab the floors behind the grooms. While it might not be quite as clean as the hospice, it would serve the priests well, if for no other reason but that it was large and open. Renda swallowed hard. If Arnard was right, it still might not prove large enough.

  Before long, they had cleared the better part of the garrison, enough that the priests and their patients could settle themselves while the servants finished clearing the rest. At a word from Arnard, the priests brought the wagons and gratefully began to unload.

  They had brought what they could from the temple—burlap sacks to use as mattresses, healing unguents, shrouds, bandages, a few personal effects. The Damping Mantle and the bishop’s miter were locked away in a crate in one wagon, rescued from the main sanctuary of the temple by Arnard even while the walls of the building had been crashing down about his head. He had not expected to survive, but survive he had, and now he presented the box to Nara for safekeeping.

  Having seen the priests installed in the garrison by midday, Renda and her father had planned to make their way back to the fields, to continue the harvest. But when they reached the gates, they saw outside a farmer and his family from Sir Ralton’s lands near the temple who had apparently followed the priests.

  A woman no older than Renda sat against the wall outside the gate holding a bundled baby in her arms and propping up her ill husband. Nearby, two somber-eyed children sat stifling their sharp, barking coughs. The mother looked up hopefully as they approached, took in their worn tunics and breeches, and turned away in disappointment, rocking the baby in her arms.

  The gate opened, and the two knights ushered her inside with her family. Renda tried not to meet the gaze of the young mother, but she could not avoid it. When she watched the woman open the bundle in her arms to coo and coddle, to Renda’s horror, she saw that the woman carried no more than the bones of her newborn child in her arms. The rest of the blanket was full of ash and dust.

  The sheriff led them back toward the new hospice, and he and Renda carried the woman’s dying husband, trying to ignore his screams of agony as they moved him as gently as they could. Beneath the man’s clothes, they could feel his flesh sloughing away to leave a trail of ash behind them—dust and ash that his wife and children walked over numbly. She would be haunted by their eyes in the night, but for now, she was grateful that this simple act of necessity left her no room to think or feel. They set the dying man down inside the garrison on one of the straw-filled burlap sacks that the priests had brought with them, wondering that he should still be alive at all, and Arnard knelt beside him at once.

  Another priest ruffled the two boys’ hair and settled them together on a pair of sacks far from their father and the rest of the more advanced victims in the hope that by keeping them away from the disease in its wo
rst stages they might survive it. But the hope was vain; no one had yet survived the plague, not once they caught the telltale cough.

  “Please,” spoke the man’s wife, turning her head away from them to clear her throat. “I cannot bear it, the smell.” She broke down in tears. “Please, make it go away!”

  Arnard quickly put the man to sleep and put his arm around the wife’s shoulders, leading her away to her own mat. He took the bundle from her as they walked and opened it carefully. Only Renda saw the slight widening of his eyes, but he only smiled at the mother and carried her baby away. Renda watched the woman settle herself on one of the burlap sacks, and the knight found herself overwhelmed by the fear and grief that must have driven the woman mad.

  “Renda,” called her father quietly. She turned and followed him most gratefully into the light and fresh air of the courtyard, basking a moment in the warm afternoon sun before they went once more toward the gate. As they walked, the sheriff brushed the strange ash of the dying man’s flesh from his arms with the sort of insouciance she might have expected him to show toward the blood of an enemy. Then, with a chill of horror, she felt herself doing the same.

  “It’s but the beginning,” sighed the sheriff.

  Twelve

  Outside Farras

  She applied countless eyelash-like hairs across her chin, some in patches and some one by one over the tacky maquille, conscious that Chul was sitting on his haunches in the brush watching her with utter fascination. Now and then, she’d see him look out over the road and toward the tavern which was to be the site of his lesson today, making sure no one saw them, but mostly, he was watching her.

  “Just a bit more, lad.” She lifted her brow and placed a few hairs under it to thicken it.

  “I don’t understand,” Chul said at last. “You disguise yourself, but you already look like all of them.” He touched one of his braids and looked down at his leathers. “I am Dhanani. Unless I disguise myself as well, I will surely be seen.”

  Gikka paused. “No, lad. The point of disguise is not to go unseen. The point is not to be recognized, first, or remembered, second. Expect not to be seen at all, count on it, and you’re fleeked sure.”

  “Fleeked?”

  She smiled, sticking a few hairs to her upper lip. “Caught by the guardsmen. Fleeks, we called them in Brannford.”

  “Fleeks,” he repeated the strange word, rolling it off his tongue. “I don’t want to be fleeked.”

  She laughed. “Aye. that you don’t.”

  Chul cast a nervous glance toward the tavern. “But I stand out. I will be remembered. I look Dhanani, I sound Dhanani…”

  “You do.” She applied a few tiny hairs between her brows. “There’ll be no hiding it, lad, not for all the maquille in Syon, and it’s foolery to try. Besides, even the best maquille only stays good an hour or two ere it comes running down your face, especially in any heat at all. Is why I’m at it here in the brush and mire and not at my mirrors at Graymonde. You, you’re best hiding in plain sight. But,” she added, dusting her face with fine sand, “this means you can’t ever give cause for your mark to look for a Dhanani. Not ever.”

  She stopped and looked at him, this boy who trusted her to keep him safe, and her smile faded. Once again, the precariousness of his situation struck her, this Dhanani boy with the Touch. She worried for him and hoped she could teach him well enough to survive. Part of her wondered if this was what mothers felt sending their children off to war. “Understand this, lad. You’re caught once, you’re done.”

  “Fleeked,” he grinned.

  “Aye,” she chuckled, letting her sudden fears be cheered away, “fleeked.” She wrapped herself in a plain woolen cloak, looked to see that no one was about, and stepped onto the road as if she’d been there all along. Her step, her manner, everything about her was now of a man rather than a woman.

  He fell in beside her. “What is my lesson today?”

  She grinned as she reached for the tavern door and deepened her voice. “Watch. Listen. Learn everything you can.”

  Chul chose a table near the door, and he and Gikka sat. She saw, to her satisfaction, that before he even settled into his chair, he’d already taken in the whole tavern and everything important within.

  “Ah, go on.” A large man standing at the bar glanced up at them for a moment and went back to picking the soot out from under his fingernails with his teeth. “The Brannagh child, gone to undead, you say?” He squinted at his comrade and grinned a toothless grin. “What, next you’ll accuse the sheriff himself of black magics?”

  “Aye,” snorted the other over his pint, “or the very duke, what.”

  Chul looked up at Gikka in alarm, but she only tapped one long nail against the table’s edge. Patience. This was why they had come to this place, and she saw the understanding dawn in his eyes. Yes, they were here to spy.

  The two men laughed, and the barmaid slammed two empty mugs down on the counter. “An’ I suppose you’ll be saying I make up the plague, as well?” she snapped.

  At once, their laughter stopped. The smith’s hand moved reflexively to the small soot-blackened sachet of herbs he wore at his throat, and his fingers played over it anxiously for a moment. “No, the plague’s real enough. Chatka says it is.” He reached for his mug as if his throat had suddenly gone dry.

  The smith’s friend nodded piously. “Them as turn from the gods, they’s the ones what come down of it, and no others, says Chatka.” He frowned sideways at the smith’s sachet. “Ain’t no protection from it with blasphemous trinkets and wards, save you pray, what.”

  “Got this from Chatka’s own hand, I did,” the other man growled at him, clutching the tiny bag of herbs. “Do as you like and I’ll do the same.”

  His friend shook his head sadly and murmured what sounded to Gikka like a prayer.

  After a moment’s contemplation, the smith turned a glance toward his friend, and his expression was sober. “Them as angers the gods, aye, all save Brannagh and Damerien…freemen, knights, farmers, just like the temple priests, all will fall, but not these, Chatka says. Not these.”

  Gikka muttered under her breath. So now the Verdura witch had gone on to talk to them of plague, had she, and to blame it on her betters? And the idlers, given leave to let their crops waste, had no better use for their minds than to be led a merry chase by her fancies.

  “And don’t be telling me it’s on account of their virtues, neither. That sheriff’s as human as any man,” the smith grumbled unhappily and hunched himself over the bar, “as prone to sin as any.”

  “That’s truth, aye,” his companion laughed darkly, “lusts and wants and greeds, him. Him and his damnable knights.”

  Gikka bit back her anger. How could these ungrateful wretches speak of Lord Daerwin and the knights this way? Had they forgotten the war so quickly?

  The smith raised a hand in agreement and swallowed a mouthful of ale. “Now, that’s just my point, y’see. I’ll show you greeds, I will. With us, now, seems we’s no better off than we was in the war, none the richer, none the safer, aye?”

  His companion nodded wisely. “Sure no better took care of.”

  “And our lords of Brannagh, still pulling their shares like they’d feed armies, what, saying it goes to pay their lord and on up to Damerien. But come the plague on us, and they’ll be shutting their doors, barring their gates. Just as Chatka said.”

  “Chatka,” the second man intoned piously. “Praise the gods for her sight.”

  “Aye, may the gods bring down them as brung this plague among us,” uttered the smith before he raised his mug to his lips.

  “Gikka,” Chul whispered, “are they talking about overthrowing the duke and the sheriff?”

  She nodded. “An they talk and splutter over pints, they but shadow fight, and then home they go to feel they’ve spoke their piece and done enough, is why there’s no point to silence them. Best let them talk, so you know their minds. No, what worries me more is Chatka and how they
bow and scrape to her more and more.”

  The old man sitting at a table not far from the smith shrugged. “Seems the goddess is already vexed at them of Brannagh, you ask me.”

  The maid drew two fingers across her chin in a gesture of warding. “It is evil afoot at Brannagh, I tell you, evil, that them of the house speaks to undead!” Her voice rose until it charged the place with an air of fear. “But more evil still, that even in the midst of such sin, the plague lets them lie!”

  Chul frowned. “Can she say things like that?”

  Gikka’s eyes narrowed, and conflict battled in her. Confronting the barmaid would be a risk, but her loyalty to Brannagh would not let her leave such accusations unanswered.

  “Be ready,” she said.

  “Shut your mouth, woman,” the tavernman muttered, nodding toward the table where Gikka and Chul sat and toward the door where another man had just entered the inn. “You’re hired to tend tables, not chat up the custom!” At his words, the young woman cast him a look of scorn, and he shook his finger at her. “See you to your work, or I can find another quick as I found you.”

  She sneered at the tavernman and started toward their table.

  “Mind yourself,” Gikka whispered to Chul. “We are not among friends.”

  “Dhanani,” the barmaid smiled, her eyes flashing. She cast a quick look at the cloaked one with him and turned her attention back to Chul. “Ooh, I do like a Dhanani,” she smiled. “Ale, is it, then?”

  Chul nodded. “Two.” He tossed some coins on the table.

  She glanced at the bar. The barkeep’s back was turned. She leaned over and mentally counted up the coins he had thrown on the table. “For a few pence, I’ve a story to chill your very spine and of Castle Brannagh, at that, though I should reap a round price of it for my trouble, say,” she picked up a coin and tossed it in the air, “this little coin?”

  Chul cast the maid a dark look. She’d picked up a shilling,

  “A shilling?” The old man sitting at the next table laughed openly. “Boy, a shilling’d buy more than talk, and with one more fair, my word on that.”