In a way, I was sorry, seeing as the Knight may not have been born yet who'd take my brother on as squire, and I might be a grandsire myself, gray and doddering, before he'd have another chance like this.
Slowly, his eyes fixed on his hands, my brother began to speak. Listening, I rose and walked toward the window.
"I expect I cannot blame you, Weas-Galen. No, I expect I cannot blame you at all, seeing as I have not been a good older brother and all."
It was hard to argue with him.
I opened the shutter. The thick air of the afternoon rolled into my quarters, bearing the smell of mud and of distant rain.
"So I cannot ask you as your brother, but for our father, Galen. On account of he sits up there in the moathouse and looks at my future, which he cannot figure out. He says it is a dark one, if there is any future at all.
"And I believe him."
My brother's head sank into his hands, and his shoulders heaved.
"But what's the real reason, Alfric?"
He looked up, expressionless and dry-eyed, a bit surprised that after a long absence I still knew his tricks.
"Why are you willing to be my squire and borrow trouble," I asked, "when you can inherit the old man's castle and spend the rest of your years squandering his patrimony?"
For the first time in years, my brother looked at me directly, with a gaze free of guile and meanness and malice and brutality. I almost failed to recognize him.
"Girls, Galen. I will become a squire to meet girls."
With a sinking feeling, I knew where the conversation was heading. Far better than his customary threats or blackmails, my brother had stumbled upon a ready way to squirehood-to appeal, simply and forthrightly, to my sense of the ridiculous.
"You see, the last of the serving girls left Coastlund a month before we came here. The peasants hid her… told me they'd rather die than tell me her whereabouts. The moathouse gets kind of lonely without women around. And I get to thinking… thinking, what would be more respectable than Knighthood, and all of them ladies like Enid and Dannelle and Marigold-"
With the last name, he shot me a sly look, then continued.
"With all of them flocking about you? So I think to myself, what is squirehood, anyway, but a time that you have to wait before the girls are a sure thing? And who would be easier on his own squire than my own brother?"
I looked out my window, over the wall into the bed of the huge moat Bayard had ordered dug around the castle to allay the pressure of the huge artesian well from which the castle drew its water. It was not yet completed, but the rain had half-filled it, and for a moment, I thought of jumping, of hitting the ground running and continuing to run to a country far away from ambitious fathers and philandering brothers and Marigolds of all sizes and stripes and appetites.
I suppose that land lies somewhere. Somewhere near the best of all worlds, no doubt.
The breeze picked up, warm from the west. There was the faintest hint of smoke upon it, like you might catch in the depth of winter from the chimneys in a town miles away, the whiff of dark evergreen and warmth taken up by the wind and passed your way by chance. But this was midsummer- terrible midsummer, with its morning heat and the dry days that promised to stay forever-and the smell of smoke at this time of year was the odor of unchecked fires.
To the west, the Vingaards rose out of a bed of dark smoke, as though they floated on the backs of thunderheads.
"Very well," I said, my words surprising me more than they did my brother. "Your squirehood begins this moment."
Chapter V
So that was how I was visited with the squire some said I so richly deserved.
I will grant you that my decision to employ my brother did not arise from the purest of hearts. For it is hard going in the Order when one's relatives are scoundrels or fools-I had only to look at Father, to see how he had suffered for his sons' general wretchedness, to know that the knighthood was unforgiving and fierce. With history stacked against me to begin with, I could scarcely suffer a running tally of Alfric's misdemeanors.
Then again, neither could Father. I must admit that I felt for the old man, whose middle son was a mystic in the mountains, whose youngest son attained to the Knighthood only by Sir Bayard's finagling, and whose scion and heir was promising to be the sorriest of the lot. My taking on Alfric was in part for the good of Sir Andrew.
It would be even better, of course, on the off chance that my brother had a dash of the squire in him. So what if he aspired to knighthood for the simple and unproven reason that women are drawn to a man in armor? No doubt some heroes have begun under worse circumstances, with even more self-serving motives.
Cynical as I could be, especially with Alfric as the subject, I still held out hope that the boy could turn around, could make something of himself under the watchful eye of the Order.
That was until my brother went to work.
It was like a natural disaster. By noon, Alfric had torn one stirrup from my saddle and brought to pass the dismantling of three stalls in the stables when he curried my chosen horse too roughly.
It was only later that he lost my armor.
"Brother," I had begun in exasperation, as two grooms cleared the stalls of fractured boards. A third groom sat stuporously in the sunlight, stunned by his horse-propelled inspection of the barn's double doors. "Brother, I send you to prepare my horse, and you wreak havoc with the livery."
Alfric shuffled and tried to look repentant.
"And save that chopfallen look for someone who hasn't hated it since childhood. Father may forgive your monstrosities because you're first in line for the moathouse, but as my squire you'll answer to me, and I'll have no counterfeit anguish in the bargain."
"It was the damn horse you chose, Weasel-nothing I done. Why, if I didn't know better, I'd suppose you set this up in the hopes that the beast would kill me and solve your problem of taking me on as a squire."
'That is something you do not know better, Brother dear," I bluffed, hoping that somewhere in the deep recesses of my brother's thinking, something like healthy respect might emerge. "But the animal solved me no problems, despite his bucking and backlash. I suspect we are stuck with making you useful."
Being useful was how Alfric lost my armor.
I set him to the task of polishing the breastplate, although the page, Raphael, had done the same thing far better only the night before. Alfric's best efforts would do little to mar the workmanship, I figured, so I decided to risk letting him oil the leather straps of the greaves, so that they wouldn't dry and crack on the gods-knew-how-long journey ahead.
It was scarcely an hour later that I came upon my brother in the castle tannery, poised anxiously over a vat of oil kept to soften dry leather, silence squealing machinery, and hurl boiling over besieging enemies. Alfric stood by my helmet and breastplate, shield and sword, staring down into the darkness of the vat as though he had lost something.
"What was it I said about making yourself useful, Brother?" I began.
But Alfric kept on staring.
I called him once, twice. But he gazed at the glittering surface of the oil as though he were reading it for signs or omens. Finally he looked up, gasping and gaping like a large and ungainly trout pulled out of the Vingaard River at low water.
"Brother, I am afraid your greaves are sunk," he began meekly.
"Sunk? As in submerged? Underwater?"
He shook his head slowly, stupidly.
"Under oil."
I followed his eyes to the barrel.
"I figured it would save trouble if, instead of oiling all them leather parts, I just dipped the greaves into the barrel," Alfric explained, looking up at me dolefully.
"Dipped?"
"And I kind of lost hold on them."
His eyes returned to the vat. I reached for my sword.
"Alfric, you are going in after them."
"What?"
"The greaves. You let them slip to the bottom of that mire, and by t
he gods, you are diving into there and coming out with greaves or you are not coming out at all."
I raised my sword for emphasis.
For a moment, my brother turned toward me with the same old bullying airs that had served him well throughout my bludgeoned and blackmailed childhood. He rose to his full height and looked at me scornfully, eye to eye.
"Bluff and bluster as much as you like, Alfric," I whispered calmly, turning the sword until its nasty-looking point tilted up beneath my brother's stubbled chin. "I hold the weaponry."
Whether it was my newfound Knighthood, his complete and natural cowardice, or the simple good sense that urges you to cooperate when someone directs a sword at you, Alfric backed away. Reluctantly he looked down into the vat, then stopped short.
"Brother," he said frantically. "Kill me if you must, but by Sirrion, I'm not touching it! Look!"
He pointed down into the oil.
"The damned stuff is boiling!"
Indeed, the surface of the oil rolled and shuddered, then circles began to radiate within it, swirling outward as they do when you drop a rock into a pond.
It was then that we felt the first tremor. All about us the walls began to shake, the beams above us to shift and crumble. Dust and gravel dropped from the ancient ceiling, and for a moment, I entertained prospects of being buried alive under tons of rubble.
Alfric forgot his oath and was into the oil before the first gravel dropped, submerged in the vat like some grotesque muskrat or otter. The oil closed above him, and for a moment, I was left frighteningly alone, the walls tilting uneasily around me.
A torch fell from its sconce by the tannery door, shivered on the rocking ground, and sputtered out. The room fell into a curious gray shadow, streaked by light from the high windows, as the dust rose until it became difficult to see or even to breathe. All the while the building shook, and I grabbed for the side of the vat to keep my footing.
"Alfric! Alfric!" I shouted, plunging my arm into the oil and reaching down into its wet, heavy darkness for a handful of my brother. Twice I came up with nothing, but on the third try, I pulled him, sputtering, to the surface, my fingers entangled in a shock of red, oily hair.
'There's no safety there, Brother!" I urged, clutching his arm and pulling in a vain attempt to draw him out of the vat. Twice he slipped from my grasp, toppling over backward into the oil, lost from sight again and again as the dust rained and the floor rocked.
On the third time, I managed to tug him over the side of the vat, losing my balance with the effort and the slipperiness of the now well-lubricated floor. My brother landed on top of me, and both of us lay still for a moment as the light and air seemed to leave the room entirely.
Then Alfric was on his feet, pushing me back down in his scramble for the door, which he struck headlong and burst open as the tannery flooded with daylight. Gathering my breath, I followed him, diving with a yell into the open courtyard.
The whole castle rocked at the edge of disorder. It was like my memories of the Scorpion's Nest that nightmare afternoon in the pass near Chaktamir. All around us, the walls shook. Stone, mortar, and beam dislodged, and the bright afternoon air dusted over.
A shriek descended from the battlements, where a lone sentry dangled from the very ladder that I had climbed to speak to Bayard that morning. Suddenly, with the crisp, splintering sound that a quarterstaff makes when broken across stone, the ladder gave way, and the sentry fell and lay still, sprawled in an ungainly fashion in the courtyard.
All around us were the shouts of men and the screams of horses. You would think we had walked out into battle, or into the Cataclysm come again. I turned to see after Alfric.
Who was nowhere to be found.
Then I heard a familiar cry arise over all the others, and I rushed toward the source of the noise, fearing the worst. The cry was Bayard's.
I found him lying in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by Sir Brandon, Ramiro, and the Blue Knight. Valorous, Bayard's black stallion, who it seems had provided the final touch to the disaster quite by accident, stood unsteadily only a few yards away.
As I rushed toward my fallen comrade, the rumblings stopped as quickly as they had begun, and Brandon turned toward me, his handsome face ashen, his eyes enormous.
"Quickly! Arrange for a litter!" he shouted. "I fear it's his leg." Nor did such a fear arise from special wisdom or insight. Bayard clutched his shattered leg tightly in his enormous hands.
It had all happened quickly, as disasters will. It seemed that as the aftershocks grew more frequent and violent that terrible morning, that Bayard, astride his most reliable mount, had set about to comb the castle grounds, trying to control damage as best he could.
It was a dramatic gesture and a brave one…
"But not altogether wise," Bayard chuckled, benumbed and bemused and stretched on his back across his bed, Lady Enid and two drawn-faced surgeons in attendance. "For ground that is unsteady underfoot is also unsteady underhoof, my hearties."
Ramiro, Brandon and I had become "hearties" after Bayard, who scarcely took even a glass of wine, had taken his third glass of dwarf spirits-Sir Ramiro's remedy for whatever ailed a Knight or even remotely promised to ail him.
As far as I could tell, the pint of Thorbardin Eagle had done as much damage as quake and horse combined.
Enid was of the same mind. She signaled to Raphael, who removed the bottle. Unaware of his pain-or of his surroundings, for that matter-Bayard continued to speak at bleary length.
One of the physicians brought forth a textral stone-the small, egg-shaped rocks from the Elian Wilds that are known to knit together broken things-that would mend his leg entirely in a month or so if applied constantly. The stone sputtered, as it was supposed to do, and while the surgeon passed it over the fractured leg and the smoke rose, smelling of burnt evergreen and clove and sleep, Bayard told us how the accident had happened.
"Valorous had not traveled a hundred feet from the stable when he capsized," Bayard began. "Capsized most grievously."
He paused and stared at all of us dramatically.
"Most grievously indeed, falling heavily upon this… appendage."
He slapped his fractured right leg. Enid gasped in alarm.
The surgeon jumped back, the textral only half burnt away.
"Are we going to have to restrain you physically, dearest?" Enid asked pleasantly, when she had recovered her composure, but Bayard was off on an elaborate story, in which he swore-by Huma and Paladine and everyone connected in any fashion with any of the gods that you swear by-that the accident had nothing to do with Valorous's footing, that there was nothing the poor creature could help or avoid.
That indeed the venerable stallion had been "ethereally startled."
"I beg your pardon, Bayard?" asked a puzzled Ramiro.
"Something spooked Valorous, Ramiro!" Bayard explained. "Spooked a horse that has stood firm before ogre and minotaur, hobgoblin and the walking dead, in earthquake and in fire. It was as though the poor beast had seen a ghost beyond its reckoning."
Red-eyed and drowsy, Bayard sank back onto the bed as my memory fixed on yellowed faces in the stones.
"And did you… see anything, sir?"
"Galen?" His mind floated back from some distant, abstracted place-the vats of Thorbardin, no doubt. "Had forgotten you were here, boy."
He smiled drunkenly at me.
"So now you're a Knight. Insanity and all."
I decided that now was not the time for interrogation, so I smiled and nodded.
Alone in my quarters, I thought long and hard upon Bayard's ghostly visitors. Things about Castle di Caela had grown altogether too supernatural for my tastes. I rummaged my memories of folk literature, taught to me at the wobbling knee of old Gileandos. Surely he had said something about ghost lore.
Or were his only familiar spirits distilled ones?
"Let's see…" I spoke aloud, seating myself by the faintly glowing fireplace and dabbing a rather hopeless rag
at my oily greaves. "Spirits come back to… urge someone to complete a task he failed to complete while he was living.
"Well, if the spirits in question are those of Plainsmen, it's no doubt a dark and bloody quest that promises plenty of mileage and casualties. With my imperiled brother at the end of it.
"Sometimes, though, ghosts don't want a journey at all. Instead they come to urge the living… to avenge their untimely murder.
"I doubt that. If it's Plainsmen, they'd no doubt keep it in their own family like the Pathwardens do, or the di Caelas. Every family has enough intrigue and betrayal without calling in outsiders. And it's beyond me what Brithelm would have to do with a murky tale of vengeance."
I cast the greaves aside, rummaged through my other belongings, and picked up the brooch.
"Damn! Elazar and Fernando will drum me out of the Order if they don't have their self-righteous mitts on this at once."
But the brooch jogged my imagination, and leaning back in my chair, I held it to the light, speculating further.
"Then again, ghosts sometimes announce the prospect of treasure…"
But those days were over. Though a faint greed stirred at the back of my attentions, I could not dwell upon it long. Avarice grew silent at the thought of poor Brithelm, spectral knife at his throat.
It was then that the centermost opal began to flicker. A faint light, fixed at the heart of the stone, expanded, deepened, until it seemed to split the gem like a column of fire in darkness. The room about me tumbled into blackness, as though the only source of light in the world came from the stone in my hand.
I gasped, breathed in moist, subterranean air, carrying with it the chilly smell of mud and water and stagnant time. It felt as though I had fallen into the stone or lay submerged in sunless caverns.
The white light at the center of the opal took on shape, definition, resolving itself into a thin, pale arm, a pale hand clutching a long, menacing dagger.
I grabbed the arms of the chair and waited. No doubt it was the hand I had seen before-the hand at my brother's throat. I steeled myself and looked more closely into the stone, searching intently for movement, for other light, for any sign or clue or landmark that would locate the vision in the world I knew and understood.
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