Irons in the Fire (Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution)

by Juliet E. McKenna

  Branca held up a hand to silence him. "I know that." She frowned, though not at Aremil. "I can think of a few scholars we could approach, but don't get your hopes up."

  "No." He tried to curb the eagerness rising within him. "Please, do you think I could use Artifice?"

  "I think it's worth making the attempt to teach you." She leaned back, looking at him with new interest. "Why don't we hire a gig and go to the lower town? I can cover the cost, and buy us lunch, as long as you can pay me back. I take it your mother-mastiff keeps some coin in the house for daily bread and firewood?"

  "I believe so." There was no way he would eat or drink with her but Aremil didn't want to risk her newfound cooperation by refusing. It would undoubtedly cost him aches and pains, but he had tinctures for those.

  Branca smiled. "There's a tavern where many of us who see our Lescari blood as an irrelevance gather. You should talk to them before you go trying to convince them otherwise."

  "Very well, then." Aremil nodded, even though he knew full well Reniack had addressed himself to this question. The rabble-rouser had left a stock of broadsheets with Master Gruit before setting out on the road to Lescar.

  Branca tilted her head. "Now, are you going to ask me to loosen your collar for you or do you want to stay stewing in your own juices?"

  Aremil caught his breath. "I thought you weren't going to intrude into my thoughts any deeper than you had to."

  "I can see you're sweating like a cheese without using Artifice." Branca shook her head. "If you learned to accept help with what you cannot manage, and set your mind to making the most of what you can do, you'd find your life a great deal fuller."

  "Did your father tell you that?" Aremil asked crossly.

  "No, I worked it out for myself." She was quite relaxed. "Just as I realised I'd make precious little of myself if I allowed myself to be beaten down by the fact that my sisters and I had to share a single pair of shoes some winters. If I let threadbare pride stop me from accepting the charity that meant I could learn to read and write. So I sat at the feet of Maewelin's statue with orphans and paupers and practised my letters on my slate. I scrubbed the university's dining halls in the evenings so I could spend my days in the libraries and didn't let myself notice there were laundry maids there with better gowns than my own."

  If she hadn't noticed, why did she mention it? Aremil thought. "Tathrin worked as a scholars' servant so he could study."

  Branca nodded. "I look forward to meeting him." She made no move to rise from the seat. "So, are you going to bend that stiff neck of yours so you can be more comfortable?"

  "Very well. Thank you," Aremil managed to say with distant courtesy as she unbuttoned his collar with deft fingers.

  This was not a price he'd imagined paying when he'd wondered what inducements might secure an aetheric adept's assistance.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Faila

  Viscot Crossroads, in the Lescari Dukedom of Carluse,

  Summer Solstice Festival, Day One, Night

  "You can see the stars so clearly." Reniack gazed upwards.

  "Get off the road before someone sees you." As Derenna snapped, her horse flattened its ears.

  "There are plenty of people still travelling home for festival." Failla soothed her own mount, stroking its neck. She was heartily sick of trying to keep the peace between Reniack and the noblewoman.

  "Precious few will be lurking round gibbets at midnight," Derenna said waspishly.

  Reniack was unconcerned. "What do you suppose that poor bastard's crime was?"

  Failla had been trying not to look at the gruesome shape hanging from the post by the mile-marker. Fortunately there was scarcely any wind to set the chain squeaking as the body swung. Better yet, the dead man, felon or merely unfortunate, had been dipped in pitch before a smith encased his corpse in the iron lattice, so they were spared the reek of decomposing flesh.

  She could sympathise with Derenna's weary ill-humour. Thirty days' travelling, near enough, and only two spent on mundane matters such as washing their linen and brushing dust from their skirts and cloaks. At least Reniack rinsed out his own shirts and drawers, even if the two women were masquerading as his wife and daughter.

  How safe were they now? On Charoleia's advice they had shunned the high road since Duryea, still five days' journey inside Caladhria, because there just might be some boot-boy or maidservant who'd fled the uncertainties of Lescar for safer servitude at a Caladhrian inn, and who just might recall seeing Duke Garnot's whore.

  Failla's gaze was drawn to the hanged felon. Would this be her fate, if Duke Garnot caught her? Forbidden a funeral pyre and the sanctity of a shrine for her ashes? Her body left to rot as her spirit lingered amid the torment of Poldrion's demons? When long-delayed dissolution of her remains freed her to cross the river of the dead, would Saedrin grant her rebirth into the Otherworld?

  "The Aldabreshi read all manner of prophecies in the skies." Reniack made no effort to move his horse from the crossroads. "Foretelling births and deaths and charting the fates of their children."

  "Does anything up there suggest when these friends of Charoleia's might arrive?" Derenna asked tartly.

  Failla shivered despite the balmy summer night. Catching the draught of Poldrion's cloak, that's what her mother called it. According to her grandam, one of the Eldritch Kin in the Otherworld had stepped on the spot where your shadow lay in this world. She looked down to see her shady outline cast on the beaten earth by the unclouded light of the Lesser Moon. Then she heard hoofbeats.

  "Reniack?" Derenna stiffened.

  "I know." He wheeled his horse around, drawing his newly donned sword, too incongruous to be worn by a meek tutor travelling in Caladhria. No one looked twice at an armed man in Lescar.

  Failla encouraged her darkly dappled horse into the shadow of a holly thicket and saw Derenna edge her mount behind a flourishing birch tree. If these men proved to be mercenaries or worse, Derenna would break for the north while Failla fled to the west. On their way to this rendezvous, Reniack had indicated a deserted farmstead that would serve as a refuge in such a crisis.

  Failla watched, tense, as he waited in the road, sword hanging loosely, hidden from the riders approaching on his other side.

  "Fair festival and Saedrin's blessings on you and yours." The younger man rode a grey horse so pale it shone in the moonlight.

  "It's late to be travelling, friend," his older companion observed.

  Reniack shrugged. "I'd rather have two moons to guide me, but the Lesser's sufficient on its own at the full."

  The second man nodded. "As long as there are no clouds."

  "So Charoleia says." Reniack sheathed his sword, gleaming steel vanishing into the dark scabbard. "I'll have your names, friends, just to be sure."

  "I'm Welgren, and he's Nath." The second man encouraged his horse towards the gibbet. "You're Reniack, I assume. Who's our friend here?"

  "Are you talking about the felon or me?" Derenna emerged from hiding.

  The man made a graceful half-bow, sweeping off his hat to show a balding crown surrounded by sparse white hair. "My lady."

  "Derenna will suffice." She walked her horse out into the moonlight.

  "You haven't got time to cut him down and cut him up." The younger man sounded apprehensive.

  Reniack turned his head to stare at the older man. "I thought you were an apothecary."

  "I am," the older man confirmed, "but one of the nicer things about Lescar is that no one asks to see your Physicians' Guild credentials before you anatomise a corpse. Don't worry, Nath. He's been tarred to keep the crows off, so he's no use to me."

  "You're the map-maker?" Reniack turned to the younger man. "You sound like a man of Tormalin."

  "I'm Tormalin born and bred but my father was a weaver born in Draximal," Nath said firmly. "That blood is all that counts as far as Tormalin's princes are concerned. If we can have peace in Lescar, I'll bring my sons and daughter home to a land where they won't b
e so unjustly despised."

  "You escaped being tied to a weaver's loom. Who do you make maps for?" Derenna asked bluntly.

  "In Tormalin, I work for merchants who have won themselves a fortune without being beholden to any noble family. They like to buy land and build grand houses, so I chart streams and measure hills and advise on clearing trees and digging lakes." Nath smiled engagingly. "In Lescar, I survey boundaries to make sure no one is claiming a finger's width more land than they're entitled to. I look for ores or quarrying stone, and if a vassal lord pays me enough, I won't tell whichever duke would claim the greater share for himself. As I travel, I chart the roads and I sell those maps to whichever printer pays best for accurate maps in his almanac."

  "And you sell Charoleia whatever secrets you glean on the way?" Derenna was unmoved by his charm.

  Nath's face hardened "I have children to feed, a wife and a widowed mother to support. I have no claim on any Tormalin noble family; no such fealty will save me and mine from starving by the roadside."

  Reniack broke in before Derenna could respond. "What about you, Master Welgren?"

  "Why do I correspond with Charoleia?" The older man looked mildly at him. "Or why do I want to see peace in Lescar?" He answered his own questions briskly. "I correspond with Charoleia because that's the price of her sending me news of advances in physic and surgery that I'd never hear about otherwise. I don't go out of my way to ferret out secrets. I just tell her things I've observed."

  He shook his head slowly. "I have always longed to understand the mysteries of anatomy and of all the marvellous processes of vitality. But if Saedrin himself were to offer to explain it all, as a boon, I'd ask him to end this wicked waste of life in Lescar instead. In return for such a gift, I'd lay my scalpels and potions on his altar and never probe another wound or visit a sickbed again."

  Failla rode out onto the road. She was less concerned with their motives. "You both travel from dukedom to dukedom without anyone hindering you? You've never come under any suspicion?"

  "As far as anyone's concerned, I'm Tormalin," Nath said wryly.

  Welgren shrugged. "The sick are more concerned with a doctor's effectiveness than his origins. Anyone stopping me on the road generally lets me pass when I explain they risk Ostrin's vengeance if the desperately ill patient I'm hurrying to dies."

  Derenna looked dubious. "Have you never been robbed or detained?"

  "I carry little enough coin and my books and instruments are of no value to anyone else. Most of my medicines can be replaced straightforwardly enough, and when I explain how easily they might accidentally poison themselves, would-be thieves tend to lose interest." Welgren smiled a little. "The price of my freedom has been treating some mercenary band's wounded a few times. That's no great trial. I can test new treatments and they don't hold the deaths of men already written off their muster against me."

  "Charoleia trusts them." Reniack looked at Failla and Derenna.

  Derenna nodded. "Then let's make haste before we miss our next meeting."

  "Follow me." Failla headed past the gibbet.

  Uncle Ernout had insisted, in his ciphered letter replying to the one she'd written at Charoleia's dictation, that she was to be the only one who knew where to find him tonight. What would his answer be, she wondered, to the astonishing proposal that had come from the conspirators in Vanam? Would he join with them or send them away? If he rejected this scheme of theirs, what would she do?

  "What do we call you?" Nath the map-maker brought his horse up beside her.

  Derenna followed, flanked by Reniack and the apothecary Welgren.

  "Failla." It was a common enough name and Charoleia had advised against trying to use something unfamiliar. She'd said few things attracted attention like someone failing to answer when they were supposedly addressed.

  "Where are we going?" asked Nath.

  "This way."

  The sprawling blackness of the ducal hunting forest lay ahead.

  There was a rattle and Failla saw Nath making sure his own sword was ready to hand.

  "Runaways and bandits lurk along forest tracks," he said defensively.

  "We should be safe enough." Failla smiled. "From the Woodsmen anyway."

  Behind her, Derenna was immediately curious. "The Woodsmen?"

  Welgren chuckled. "According to tavern tales, they're the ones the peasants have to thank when a fresh-killed deer is laid on their doorstep the very day after some mercenary band has stolen their only pig. Or when some despairing goodwife measuring out her last barley to brew ale for selling finds a bag of coin in her grain bin to pay the ducal levy."

  "How often does that happen?" Derenna asked acerbically. "Outside tavern tales?"

  "We can turn tavern tales to our purpose, whether they're true or not." Reniack dismissed her cynicism. "As long as they show how woefully Duke Garnot fails his people."

  Failla kept her mouth shut. She'd already said too much. She didn't want Reniack's broadsheets linking her Uncle Ernout and the guildsmen to such charity. As long as Duke Garnot sent his mercenaries hunting the mythical Woodsmen, they stayed safe.

  As Welgren regaled Reniack and Derenna with more stories, Nath was searching the darkened coppices flanking the road ahead. "Charoleia tells me you and I will be travelling together. As brother and sister," he added hastily. "I have a wife and three young children."

  "My felicitations." Failla looked for the waymarks Uncle Ernout had described. The first was a lightning-struck tree.

  "Do you have a steady hand and a good eye for drafting?" he asked diffidently. "If so, you could act as my assistant."

  "I believe so." She needn't explain how she'd honed such skills copying Duke Garnot's private papers.

  Seeing a leafless skeleton amid the summer's lush growth, she urged her horse on.

  "Will her ladyship be able to play the part of Welgren's nurse?" Nath sounded doubtful.

  "After five children, a sickroom shouldn't come as any great shock to her."

  To her relief, Nath took the hint and fell silent. Failla turned down a track that forced them into single file. As the trees grew taller, the boughs overhead hid the spangled night sky. Leaf litter muffled their mounts' hooves as they all slowed to let the horses pick their own way safely through the darkness.

  Nath spoke up behind her. "I can smell burning."

  "Solstice bonfires." Through the black branches, Failla saw moonlight striking pale rock.

  As they emerged into a clearing around a rocky crag, Nath looked dubiously at scorched patches of turf ringed with stones. A few half-burned logs were still smoking. "You'd think they'd quench them more thoroughly when the forest is so dry."

  "And risk the god's displeasure?" An old man, cloaked and hooded, sat in a niche carved into the rock.

  "Saedrin's stones." Reniack was startled. "I took you for a statue."

  "Uncle!" Failla slid from her horse and embraced him with relief.

  "Drianon's blessings on your birth festival, child." He held her, strong despite his scrawny frame and snowy hair. "Until I got your letter, we all feared the worst."

  "I'm sorry." Failla pressed her face to his woollen weskit.

  "Be careful." Her uncle's arms tightened around her. "Your aunts tell me too many folk are still curious as to what's become of you. The duchess's women are forever debating the latest gossip."

  Failla pulled away reluctantly, aware that everyone else was waiting. "Can we talk here?"

  Nath had caught up her horse's reins. The animal whinnied at the scent of fresh water. A spring flowed from the rock to fill a pool carved at its foot. Long ago, the crag above had been shaped into a sternly bearded visage surrounded by billowing clouds. Pious hands had scoured it clean ready for the Solstice rites.

  "This shrine is dedicated to Dastennin?" Derenna looked at Ernout. "You're its priest?"

  "No." He shook his head. "Lord Hanriss inherited that honour from his father, as his father had done before him."

  "Does he kn
ow we're meeting here?" Reniack asked suspiciously.

  "Only that I have come to supervise the Solstice rites in Saedrin's honour." Ernout shook his head. "Lord Hanriss is too frail to leave his home and he has no sons left to inherit the priesthood. They all died fighting for Duke Garnot's father. He feels no obligation to Duke Garnot's quarrels, nor to any hopes of greatness for His Grace's son and heir."

  Failla remembered hearing about the reclusive old lord from one of her cousins. He wanted revenge above all else, on Duke Garnot and his long-dead father, for the sake of his slaughtered sons. Would hatred that he'd already cherished through two generations keep him alive to see all the dukes brought low?

  "I know too many families who feel the same." Derenna accepted Welgren's help and dismounted. "I take it his death means his estates will fall into Duke Garnot's hands to be laid waste by His Grace's folly?"

  "Or used to bribe some favourite." Ernout waved a hand at the pool as several horses strained towards the water. "Let your mounts drink. I don't imagine Dastennin will take offence."

  "I believe you represent the Guilds of Carluse?" Reniack dismounted and led his horse forward. It joined the others already drinking noisily, bits and bridles jingling.

  "A Parnilesse accent," Ernout remarked. "Yet you're committed to the cause of peace in Carluse?"

  "To the cause of peace in Lescar," Reniack said firmly. "I leave for Parnilesse tonight, where friends will hide me from Duke Orlin as we spread new hope among all who despise his rule. Lady Derenna--" he spared her a nod "--will travel with Welgren through Sharlac and Draximal, telling those whom they trust to expect a new dawn. If you will spread our word through Carluse, Failla and Nath will head for Marlier, to find men and women of equal goodwill to support our endeavour."

  Ernout was unmoved by Reniack's oratory. "Goodwill is all very well, but Failla's letter said you were bringing an army to force Duke Garnot to his knees and to terms thereafter. Where are these fighting men now?"