"So I'm coming," Tathrin growled. "Happy?"
"Happy enough." Sorgrad carefully guided the carriage horse through a narrow gap. "Though I suggest you mend your manners before you meet Evord. It's your case you'll be arguing, not mine. If he turns you down, we can find some other way to make a coin or two, me, Gren and Charoleia. You won't find a better hope of bringing peace to Lescar."
Tathrin bit back a pointless retort and sat in resentful silence. Assured with whip and reins, Sorgrad drove the gig towards the far slopes of the Pazarel and a district where once-fine houses were sliding into decay. He turned the horse between stone gateposts stained with rust from hinges holding desultory remnants of wood.
"Gruit does have his finger in a lot of pies." Gren was studying the derelict house ahead.
Tathrin looked warily at a man emerging from the depths of the overgrown garden before recognising him as Gruit's coachman. "Draig?"
"You don't want to be hefting all that around Solura." Sorgrad nodded at Tathrin's chest as he pulled two sturdy drawstring sacks out from under the seat. The pommels of short swords stuck out from both. "Take what you need. Draig will ferry the rest to Aremil for safe keeping." He looked at the coachman for a nod of confirmation.
Tathrin quickly stowed necessities in the same leather bag he'd carried on the road to Draximal. After a moment's thought, he added the finely made dagger that Sorgrad had retrieved for him. "All done."
Draig grunted an acknowledgement and drove the gig away. The wheels left dark lines on the crushed weeds and the scent of bruised tansy in the air.
"Gren!"
As Sorgrad called with some exasperation, Tathrin looked up to see that the younger Mountain Man was climbing up the cornice carved above the empty house's wide front door. He acknowledged his brother with a wave before coming down, the boards nailed across the window frames as good as any ladder to him.
"Empty." He brushed dust from his hands. "It's always worth making certain."
"What now?" Tathrin looked nervously at Sorgrad.
"This." Sorgrad reached for his left hand and Gren took his right.
Intense white light bleached Tathrin's view of the shabby garden to nothingness. Could magic blind him? Apprehension rising, he screwed his watering eyes tight shut. A faint aroma teased him. What was it? Recollection of his mother making sure the maids finished up the laundry came to him. He could smell the subtle scorching that hung around freshly ironed cloth. That made no sense.
Colour played across his inner vision, but not as it did after a long day's study, when he tried to ease his tired eyes with gentle fingertips. This wasn't shifting darkness laced with ruddy gold. Vivid coils of scarlet and blue threaded through creamy pallor.
Now a breeze was wrapping round him, warm and dry like the breath of summer noon. He realised he couldn't feel his feet. Or rather, he couldn't feel the ground beneath his feet. Or the weight of his leather bag on his shoulder. He still didn't dare open his eyes. Was this really a breeze he could feel? Or was he being blown through the air, tumbled like some helpless leaf?
Dizziness crept up on him. First it was unease, like he'd felt for the first day or so aboard the sailed barge he'd travelled down the river on. The sensation worsened and he swallowed apprehensively. Now he was recalling the day when he and some friends had stolen a bottle of white brandy from his father's cellar. He hadn't drunk himself to puking but the world had swirled around, his hands clumsy, his feet numb. Which way was up? As he wondered, he felt violently nauseous. For the first time that morning he was grateful for his empty stomach.
Then his feet found the ground with a thump that ran right up his spine to jar his neck.
"Welcome to Solura," Gren said without enthusiasm.
Chapter Sixteen
Tathrin
Castle Breven Demesne, in the Kingdom of Solura,
7th of For-Summer
As the magical glare dissolved, he felt the two Mountain Men release his hands. Tathrin cautiously opened his eyes. Purplish smudges blurred his vision and he had the beginnings of a sickening headache. It was like the time he'd spent too long in the harvest sunshine without a hat. He blinked as he clutched at his travelling bag, its bulk some reassurance, but things didn't improve much.
"Solurans don't like wizards." Sorgrad looked meaningfully at Tathrin as he pulled a sword-belt out of his own baggage. "At least, not ones like me who refuse to be apprenticed to a mage who's already sworn his life away in obedience to an elder wizard's circle. That's how they work magic hereabouts."
"So keep your mouth shut about whatever you think he can do." Gren buckled his own weapons on.
"In general, keep your mouth shut," Sorgrad advised.
Tathrin nodded mutely as he looked around.
This was very different from the countryside where he'd grown up, and it wasn't like any of the places he'd seen travelling between Lescar and Vanam. Wherever he'd been between the White Mountains and the Southern Sea, he was used to broad sweeps of land with long vistas reaching to the horizon. Where there was high ground, like the fells to the north of Carluse, the ground rose steadily towards it, the hills visible from a good distance.
Here the land was rumpled with hillocks and gullies like the blanket on an unmade bed. There was no neat delineation between field and forest, no regular pattern of villagers' strip-fields and common grazing. Haphazard stands of scrubby woodland were separated by stretches of cropped grass. Here and there, erratic stone walls enclosed small patches of land. Tathrin couldn't see crops being protected or any stock confined. Apart from the walls, the whole landscape looked untouched by man and beast.
He swallowed, his throat unaccountably dry. "What do we do now?"
Gren handed him a leather-bound water bottle. "Evord's the lord of Castle Breven."
"A castle?" Tathrin didn't know whether to be impressed or overawed. It was some recommendation if this mercenary captain had earned enough coin to retire in such style. On the other hand, how was he supposed to coax the man out of peace and comfort to take up arms again?
"I don't suppose it would impress a Lescari duke, but it's never fallen to an enemy." Quenching his own thirst from a silver flask, Sorgrad was already walking towards a scar running across the turf.
The Lescari wouldn't dignify this with the title of track, Tathrin thought, never mind call it a road. Though it wasn't too long before he saw that there must be people living somewhere around here. Once they left the dell, handfuls of coarse-coated black cattle picked their way through rough pasture. Several already had calves trotting at their heels and the rest looked ripe for giving birth.
Without anyone to tend them? Who milked them? Tathrin looked around. A land as wild as this must surely have wolves? He didn't fear attack, not in daylight, but what losses must the cattle suffer? This Captain-General Evord was no herdsman, however fine a mercenary he might be.
He still couldn't see anything like tillage for crops. The only sign of anyone taking a spade to the land was some way further on. The road, such as it was, continued on a narrow embankment across a stretch of rank bog. Tathrin tried to make sense of black lumps stacked beside a moist hole dug into the sod. "What's that?"
"Peat." Gren looked at it incuriously. "For fires."
How could anyone burn earth? Tathrin wondered. Wizardry? He didn't ask.
A little further on, the road took them around a rocky outcrop scarred with stonecutting.
"Castle Breven." Sorgrad paused. "Evord's ancestral home."
Gren chuckled. "You can see why he went looking for a more comfortable life."
"Where he could earn some solid coin," Sorgrad agreed.
A small lake shimmered at the far end of the shallow valley. Sharp-edged against the bright water, a tall, narrow tower stood defiant. A stone wall protected lesser buildings clustered around it, their tidy thatched roofs and smoking chimneys just visible. Tathrin had only seen Carluse Castle, but he'd heard tales of Sharlac Castle and Draximal, too. A Lescari duke wo
uldn't think this was fit for a hunting lodge.
"You don't see villages here, not like in Lescar." Sorgrad was striding onwards. "There are steadings scattered across the land. When there's trouble, everyone comes running for their lord's protection."
"How far does his writ run?" While the tower was solid, it wasn't very big. Tathrin counted four tiers of windows beneath the steeply pitched slate roof.
"As far as his reputation in times of strife." Gren chuckled. "So for Evord, that's pretty much all the way to the Solfall River and the border with the wildlands."
"He exaggerates." Sorgrad spared his brother a glance. "We're a good long way from the wildlands here. Thirty days' hard march, maybe more."
"Anyone between here and there would be happy to swear fealty to Evord," Gren protested.
"He won't let them." Sorgrad glanced at Tathrin this time. "I told you, he has no such ambitions. He won't want to conquer Lescar and hold it for himself."
Tathrin frowned. "Where's the gate?" The wall presented an unbroken barrier on this side.
"Facing the lake." Gren was walking alongside Tathrin. "Some of the small castles right by the border, they don't have any gates at all. Everyone goes in and out by ladder."
Tathrin suspected he was being teased. "Even the horses?"
"They're stabled outside in compounds tucked away in defensible places," Gren allowed. "But when they need to get wagons into the castle precinct, they just take down a section of wall and then build it back up again." He sounded perfectly serious. "Misaen blind me if I lie."
Sorgrad smiled at Tathrin's scepticism. "That way the wild men can't launch a strike on a permanent gate."
"Wild men?" Tathrin realised Vanam's obligatory lectures on Tormalin history had told him almost nothing about Solura.
"You know all those tales your grandmother told you about shadow-blue men stepping through rainbows from the Otherworld, armed with flints struck from moonbeams, lying in wait for lost travellers and naughty boys?"
"Yes," Tathrin said slowly.
Gren's smile broadened. "The Eldritch Kin would run screaming from the beast men who roam the wildlands across the Solfall."
If that was so, Tathrin found it all the more remarkable that cattle were left wandering the landscape.
A pair of riders appeared, coming from the castle. Tathrin guessed there were sentries in the slim turrets rising from the encircling wall.
As soon as the horsemen came within hailing distance, Sorgrad cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, "We're here to see the captain-general."
Raising a hand in acknowledgement, the riders wheeled away to carry this news back.
As the three of them walked around the outer wall, Tathrin heard the clash of blades within and the solid drumming of hooves amid the general bustle. When they reached the gate, he saw nothing akin to a village but rather an armed camp that wouldn't have disgraced a Lescari duke's standing guard. Over to one side a farrier was shoeing horses, the smithies flanking him echoing with the strike of sword-makers' hammers. In front of lean-to sheds lining the wall, men sat making chain mail, taking advantage of the sunlight.
In the open space, youths about Tathrin's own age practised sword-strokes against imaginary foes in repetitious drills. Older men circled in wary two and threes, broadswords ready to test each other to the edge of injury. Quarterstaffs clashed and pole-arms were swung with lethal grace.
The sentry said something Tathrin couldn't understand and Sorgrad answered in the same language.
"Don't they speak Tormalin here?" Tathrin quietly asked Gren.
"Why should they?" He looked puzzled. "This is Solura."
As they were allowed through the arched entrance, hooves pounded on the hard-packed earth. Tathrin saw a mounted warrior run a lance right through a figure made from sacking and straw. Its canvas head was a snarling mask of teeth and glaring eyes, sewn with rank strips of animal fur for hair and beard. At least, Tathrin hoped it was animal fur.
"Sorgrad." A grey-haired man half a head shorter than Tathrin and slightly built turned away from a fiercely fought wrestling match. Like everyone else, he wore sturdy boots and buckskin breeches, with a chainmail hauberk over his homespun tunic.
Whatever he said next was presumably in the Soluran language. Sorgrad replied, as fluent as the old man. Tathrin reflected that whatever entrenched evils the Old Tormalin Empire had bequeathed to Lescar, at least all the countries that had fallen within its reach still shared the benefits of a common tongue.
"Gren." The old man nodded cordially.
"Captain-General." A wicked smile teased Sorgrad's lips as he continued in smoothly accented Tormalin. "This is Tathrin Sayron, scholar of Ensaimin's finest university and son of Carluse's finest ale-seller."
"You studied at Col?" The man, who Tathrin now saw was not so much old as prematurely grey, extended a courteous hand. He might be slightly built but Tathrin was willing to bet he was as tough as whipcord and leather.
"I studied at Vanam, my lord." He refused to look at Sorgrad.
"I won't hold that against you." Evord turned his hand to show Tathrin the silver seal ring on his own middle finger.
Well worn, the engraving was still clearly the shield and blazon of the city of Col. Evord's tone was as cultured and his formal Tormalin as fluent as any of the senior mentors who governed Vanam's university. So Tathrin bowed as he would to any master scholar.
As he straightened, he saw a smile crack Evord's solemnity. "I gather you three have an interesting proposal for me. While Sorgrad makes his case, Gren, take the lad to meet Ludrys."
"Captain." Gren snapped his head up and down in the briefest of bows. He led Tathrin over to some men armed with a miscellany of swords, long knives and small studded shields. "Got that pretty dagger on you, long lad?"
"Yes," Tathrin said apprehensively.
"Best have a sword." Gren offered his own.
"I don't know how to fight with that," Tathrin protested.
"No," agreed Gren.
Before Tathrin could argue any further, a leanly muscled man with ragged hair and whiskers that weren't so much a beard as a dislike of shaving came towards them. He spoke in Soluran and whatever Gren said in reply made him laugh out loud as he studied Tathrin.
"What's going on?" Tathrin took Gren's sword. It was that or let the blade fall to the dry earth.
"You want to start a war, you'll need to fight." Gren was backing away. "Ludrys is going to see how much you've got to learn. Take your doublet off."
Tathrin jumped, startled, as the bearded man threw a dagger at him. Just as he realised it wasn't aimed at him, it fell into the dust an arm's span away. The onlookers laughed.
"Pick it up," Gren advised. "Two blades against his one and you'll be the one attacking. You'll have all the advantage."
Tathrin very much doubted that. "I don't know what to do."
Ludrys said something and someone tossed him a small round shield. He picked it out of the air.
"Try not to die." Gren wasn't smiling any more. "Ludrys isn't out to kill you, just to test you. Start by proving that Lescari men aren't the cowards everyone says they are."
Tathrin reluctantly unbuttoned his doublet and handed the garment to Gren. Ludrys said something. Tathrin hoped the bearded man's smile was supposed to be encouraging.
He bent and picked up the long dagger, keeping his eyes on Ludrys all the while. The Soluran stood with his weight on his back foot, the little shield defending his midriff while he held his own sword out wide.
"Do the same," Gren instructed.
As he took the same stance, still unwilling, Tathrin didn't need the Mountain Man to translate the shouts from the other men. They wanted him to attack. Ludrys stood patiently waiting.
There was no point attacking the man's sword. Tathrin swung his own blade at Ludrys's head, vainly hoping his greater height and reach might carry the strike over the small shield. But what would happen if he did hit the warrior? That sudden thought robbed h
is blow of any real strength.
Ludrys stepped inwards, easily deflecting Tathrin's sword with a swing of his shield. In the same movement, he brought his own blade down to rest on Tathrin's cuff.
Tathrin looked down. He could all too easily visualise the bleeding stump of his forearm, his severed hand on the ground clutching uselessly at Gren's sword hilt.
"Try again." Gren didn't sound amused.
Tathrin licked his dry lips as he copied Ludrys's ready stance a second time. So the Soluran's shield was as much a weapon as a defence. This time he stepped in himself and tried to cut at the bearded man's sword-arm with his own long blade. Ludrys swept his shield across to block the stroke, his body turning. Tathrin was half-expecting that, so as soon as his blade was knocked down, he dropped his sword's point to thrust at Ludrys's knee.
Fluid as quicksilver, the warrior angled his own weapon downwards to bar Tathrin's blade. Inside a breath, he twisted the point back up to prod his belt buckle. Tathrin looked down and imagined his innards spilling out like unruly sausages on a butcher's slab.
What was the point of this? As Ludrys took up his ready stance again, Tathrin just stood still, weapons hanging loose by his sides. Ludrys grinned and looked away as if to speak to Gren.
As Tathrin relaxed, Ludrys suddenly attacked, driving the shield straight at his face. All Tathrin could do was flinch and close his eyes. He felt the studs press lightly against his cheek as Ludrys said something.
"He says you must remember it only takes one man to make a fight."
Tathrin opened his eyes to see Gren looking exasperatedly at him.
"I might remind you that you have two blades, Misaen curse you."
Ludrys stepped back, briefly holding sword and shield in one hand so he could raise a single finger at Tathrin.
"One more time," Gren told him. "Even if he already has won the best of three."
Tathrin took a breath, adopted the stance and thought rapidly. If he attacked Ludrys's shield side, the blow would be turned aside. So he'd be ready for that. He moved, and as soon as his sword was knocked away, he stepped closer in still. Bringing his dagger up, he tried to stab at Ludrys's sword-hand. He was so close that the Soluran's heavy blade was swinging round behind Tathrin, useless.
Irons in the Fire (Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution) Page 19
