To Green Angel Tower, Volume 1

by Tad Williams

  “I know.” The Wrannaman’s wide eyes were still fixed on the monk. “He gave himself away. I knew then that he was after it.”

  “For the love of Aedon,” Isgrimnur growled, disgusted. “Just give him something to make him sleep. Even I know the monk wasn’t trying to steal anything.”

  “Even you, Rimmersman?” Cadrach murmured, but with none of his usual sharpness. Rather, there was an echo of some great hopelessness in the monk’s voice, and something else, too—some peculiar edge that Miriamele could not identify.

  Worried and confused, she turned her concentration onto the search for Tiamak’s yellowroot. The Wrannaman, his hair damp and tousled by sweat, continued to glare at Cadrach like a maddened blue jay who had found a squirrel sniffing about his nest.

  Miriamele had thought the entire incident merely the product of Tiamak’s illness, but that night she woke up suddenly in the camp they had made on a rare dry sandbank, and saw Cadrach—who had been delegated the first watch—rummaging through Tiamak’s bag.

  “What are you doing?!” She crossed the camp in a few swift paces. Despite her anger, she kept her voice low so as not to wake any of the rest of her companions from their sleep. She could not escape the feeling that somehow Cadrach was her responsibility alone, and that the others should not be brought in if she could avoid it.

  “Nothing,” the monk grumbled, but his guilty face belied him. Miriamele reached forward and plunged her hand into the sack, closing her fingers on his own and the leaf-wrapped parchment.

  “I should have known better,” she said, full of fury. “Is there truth to what Tiamak said? Have you been trying to steal his belongings, now that he is too sick to protect them?”

  Cadrach snapped back like a wounded animal. “You are no better than all the rest, with your talk of friendship! At the first moment, you turn on me, just like Isgrimnur.”

  His words stung, but Miriamele was still angry to find him doing this low thing after she had given him her trust. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “You are a fool,” he snarled. “If I wanted to steal something from him, why would I wait until he had been saved from the ghant’s nest?!” He pulled his hand from the sack, bringing hers with it, then took the package and thrust it into her hands. “Here! I was merely interested in what it could be, and why he turned goirach ... why he became so angry. I had never seen it before—didn’t even know that it was there! You keep it, then, Princess. Safe from grubby little thieves like me!”

  “But you could have asked him,” she said, more than a little ashamed now that the heat had passed, and angry to feel that way. “Not come creeping after it when everyone was asleep.”

  “Oh, yes, asked him! You saw the kindly way he looked at me when I merely touched it! Do you have any idea what it is, my headstrong lady? Do you?”

  “No. Nor will I until Tiamak tells me.” Hesitantly, she stared at the cylindrical object. In other circumstances, she knew, she would have been the first to try to find out what the Wrannaman was protecting. Now, she was caught by her own high-handedness, and she had offended the monk as well. “I will keep it safe, and I will not look at it,” she said slowly. “When Tiamak is well, I will ask him to show it to us.”

  Cadrach stared at her for a long moment. His moonlit features, touched with crimson by the last few embers of the fire, were almost frightening. “Very well, my lady,” he whispered. She thought she could hear his voice hardening like ice. “Very well. By all means keep it out of the hands of thieves.” He turned and walked to his cloak, then dragged it to the edge of the sand, far from the others. “Keep watch, then, Princess Miriamele. Make sure no evil men come near. I am going to sleep.” He lay down, becoming only another lump of shadow.

  Miriamele sat listening to the night noises of the swamp. Although the monk did not speak again, she could almost feel his unsleeping presence in the darkness a few short steps away. Something raw and painful in him had been exposed again, something that, for the last few weeks, had been almost completely hidden. Whatever it was, she had thought it might have been exorcised after Cadrach’s long revelatory night on Firannos Bay. Now Miriamele found herself wishing desperately that she had slept through the night tonight and not awakened until morning, when the light of day would have made everything safe and ordinary.

  The Wran fell away at last, not in a single broad stroke, but with the gradual dwindling of trees and narrowing of waterways, until finally Miriamele and her companions found themselves floating across an open scrubland crisscrossed with small channels. The world was wide again, something that spread from horizon to horizon. She had grown so used to the hemming-in of her vision that she found it almost uncomfortable to be confronted with so much space.

  In some ways, the last stage of the Wran was the most treacherous, since they had to carry the boat over land more frequently than before. Once, Isgrimnur became stuck in a waist-deep sandhole, and was only rescued by the combined efforts of Miriamele and Camaris.

  The Lake Thrithing lay before them, a vast expanse of low hills and, except for the ever-present grass, sparse vegetation. Trees clung near to the hillsides; but for a few copses of tall pines, they were dwarfish, barely distinguishable from bushes. In the late afternoon light it seemed a lonely, windswept land, a place where few creatures and no people would live by choice.

  Tiamak had at last brought them beyond the bounds of his territorial knowledge, and they found increasing difficulty in choosing streams wide enough to carry the boat. When the latest channel narrowed beyond the point of navigability, they clambered from the boat and stood silent for a while, collars lifted against the cold breeze.

  “It looks as though it’s time to walk.” Isgrimnur gazed out across the wilderness to the north. “This is the Lake Thrithing, after all, so at least there’ll be drinking water, especially after this year’s weather.”

  “But what about Tiamak?” Miriamele asked. The potion she had brewed for the Wrannaman had certainly helped, but it had not provided a miraculous cure: although he was standing, he was weak and his color was not good.

  Isgrimnur shrugged. “Don’t know. I suppose we could wait a few days until he gets better, but I hate to spend any more time than we need to out here. P’raps we could make some kind of sling.”

  Camaris abruptly stooped and put his long hands under Tiamak’s armpits, startling the Wrannaman into a whoop of surprise. With an astounding absence of effort, the old man lifted Tiamak high and lowered him onto his shoulders; the Wrannaman, who began to understand in midair, spread his knees to either side of Camaris’ neck, settling like a pickaback child.

  The duke grinned. “There’s your answer, looks like. I don’t know how long he can go, but maybe at least until we can find better shelter. That would be more than fine.”

  They took their belongings from the boat, packing them in the few cloth sacks they had brought out of Village Grove. Tiamak took his own bag and clutched it in the arm he was not using to hold onto Camaris. He had not spoken of the bag and its contents again since the incident in the boat, and Miriamele had not yet felt inclined to press him to reveal what he carried.

  With more regret than she had expected, Miriamele and the others bade a silent farewell to the flatboat and marched out onto the fringes of the Lake Thrithing.

  Camaris proved more than equal to the task of carrying Tiamak. Although he stopped to rest when the others did, and moved very slowly through the few patches of swampy ground that still remained, he kept the same pace as the less burdened members of the company and did not seem inordinately tired. Miriamele could not help staring at him from time to time, full of awe. If he was like this as an old man, what prodigious feats must he have performed when he was in the bloom of youth? It was enough to make one believe that all the old legends, even the wildest ones, might be true after all.

  Despite the old man’s uncomplaining strength, Isgrimnur insisted on taking the Wrannaman onto his own shoulders for the last hour until sunset
. When they stopped at last to make their camp, the duke was puffing and blowing, and looked as though he regretted his decision.

  They made camp while the light was still in the sky, finding a spot in a grove of low trees and building a fire from deadwood. The snow that had covered much of the north had apparently not lingered on the Lake Thrithing, but as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, the evening grew cold enough to keep them all huddled by the fire. Miriamele was suddenly grateful she had not discarded her tattered, travel-stained acolyte’s habit.

  Chill wind sawed in the branches close over their heads. The surrounded feeling of the Wran had been replaced by a sensation of being dangerously exposed, but at least the ground beneath them was dry: that, Miriamele decided, was something to be thankful for, anyway.

  Tiamak was a little better the next day, and was able to walk most of the morning before having to be hoisted onto Camaris’ broad shoulders again. Isgrimnur, out of the confining and confusing swamps, was almost his old self, full of songs of questionable taste—Miriamele enjoyed counting how many verses he finished of each before stopping, flustered, to beg her pardon—and stories of battles and wonders he had seen. Cadrach, on the other hand, was as silent as he had been since they had escaped the Eadne Cloud. When spoken to, he responded, and he was strangely courteous to Isgrimnur, acting almost as if they had never had harsh words, but the rest of the day’s trip he might have been as mute as Camaris for all he contributed. Miriamele did not like the hollow look of him, but nothing she said or did changed his calm, withdrawn manner, and at last she gave up.

  The low-lying ravel of the Wran had long since disappeared behind them: even from the highest of the hills, there was little to see back on the southern horizon but a dark smear. As they set up camp in another copse of trees, Miriamele wondered how far they had come—and, more important, how long a journey still awaited them.

  “How far are we going to have to walk?” she asked Isgrimnur as they shared a bowl of stew made with dried Village Grove fish. “Do you know?”

  He shook his head. “Not sure, my lady. More than fifty leagues, perhaps sixty or seventy. A long, long hike, I’m afraid.”

  She made a worried face. “That could take weeks.”

  “What else can we do?” he said, then smiled. “In any case, Princess, we are far better off than we were—and closer to Josua.”

  Miriamele felt a momentary pang. “If he is really there.”

  “He is, young one, he is.” Isgrimnur squeezed her hand in his broad paw. “We’ve come through the worst.”

  Something awakened Miriamele abruptly in the bruised light just before dawn. She had scarcely an instant to gather her wits before she was grabbed by the arm and jerked upright. A triumphant voice spoke in rapid Nabbanai.

  “Here she is. Dressed like a monk, Lord, as you said. ”

  A dozen men on horseback, several of them carrying torches, had surrounded them. Isgrimnur, who was sitting on the ground with one of the horsemen’s lances at his throat, groaned.

  “It was my watch!” the duke said bitterly. “My watch ...”

  The man who held Miriamele’s arm pulled her a few steps across the copse toward one of the riders, a tall figure in a capacious hood, his face invisible in the gray of night’s end. She felt a claw of ice clutch at her.

  “So,” the rider said in accented Westerling. “So.” Despite the strange mushiness of his speech, his voice was unmistakably smug.

  Miriamele’s horror was warmed a little by anger. “Take off your hood, my lord. You have no need to play such a game with me.”

  “Truly?” The rider’s hand rose. “Do you wish to see what you have done, then?” He pushed the hood back with a sweeping gesture like a traveling player’s. “Am I as beautiful as you remember me?” asked Aspitis.

  Miriamele, despite the soldier’s restraining hand, stepped back. It was hard not to. The earl’s face, once so handsome that, after their first meeting, it had haunted her dreams for days, was now a distorted ruin. His fine nose was a blob of flesh skewed to one side like a lump of ill-handled clay. His left cheekbone had been cracked like an egg and dented inward, so that the torchlight made a shadow in the deep hollow. All around his eyes black blood had gathered beneath the skin and the rumple of scars, as though he wore a mask. His hair was still beautiful, still golden.

  Miriamele swallowed. “I have seen worse,” she said quietly.

  Half of Aspitis Preves’ mouth curled in an eerie grin, displaying the stumps of teeth. “I am glad to hear it, my sweet lady Miriamele, since you will be waking up to it the rest of your life. Bind her!”

  “No!” It was Cadrach who shouted, lurching up from where he lay in the darkness. A moment later, an arrow shivered in the gnarled trunk of a tree, a handspan from his face.

  “If he moves again, kill him,” said Aspitis calmly. “Perhaps I should let you kill him anyway—he was as responsible as she for what happened to me, to my ship.” He shook his head slowly, savoring the moment. “Ah, you are such fools, Princess, you and your monk. Once you had slipped away into the Wran, what did you think? That I would let you go? That I would forget what you had done to me?” He leaned forward, fixing her with bloodshot eyes. “Where else would you go but north, back to the rest of your friends? But you forget, my lady, that this is my fiefdom.” He chuckled. “My castle on Lake Eadne is only a few leagues away. I have been combing these hills, hunting you for days. I knew you would come.”

  She felt miserably numb. “How did you get off the ship?”

  Aspitis’ crooked smirk was horrible. “I was slow to realize what had happened, it is true, but after you had gone and my men found me, I had them kill the treacherous Niskie—Aedon burn her! She had finished her devil’s work. She did not even try to escape. After that, the rest of the kilpa went back over the side—I do not think they would have had the courage to attack without the sea witch’s spell. We had enough men to row my poor damaged Eadne Cloud to Spenit.” He slapped his hands on his thighs. “Enough. You are mine again. Save your prattling questions until I ask for them.”

  Full of anger and sorrow over Gan Itai’s fate, Miriamele struggled toward him, dragging the soldier who gripped her arm a full pace forward. “God’s curse on you! What kind of man are you? What kind of knight? You, with all your talk about the fifty noble families of Nabban.”

  “And you, a king’s daughter, who willingly gave herself to me—who brought me to her bed? Are you so high and pure?”

  She was ashamed that Isgrimnur and the others should hear, but a sort of high, clear anger followed, sharpening her thoughts. She spat on the ground. “Will you fight for me?” she demanded. “Here, before your people and mine? Or will you take me as a sneak thief, as you tried to take me before—with lies, and with force used against those who were your guests?”

  The earl’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Fight for you? What nonsense is this? Why should I? You are mine, by capture and maidenhead.”

  “I will never be yours,” she said in her haughtiest tones. “You are lower than the Thrithings-men, who at least fight to claim their brides.”

  “Fight, fight, what trick is this?” Aspitis glared. “Who would fight for you? One of these old men? The monk? The little swamp boy?”

  Miriamele let her eyes fall closed for a moment, struggling to contain her fury. He was vile, but this was not the moment to let emotions rule her. “Anyone in this camp can beat you, Aspitis. You are not a man at all.” She looked around, making sure that she had the attention of the earl’s soldiers. “You are a stealer of women, but you are no man.”

  Aspitis’ osprey-hilted blade slid from its sheath with a metallic hiss. He paused. “No, I see your game, Princess. You are a clever one. You think to make me so maddened that I kill you here.” He laughed. “Ah, to think that a woman exists who would rather die than wed the Earl of Eadne.” He lifted his hand and touched his shattered face. “Or rather, to think that you felt that way even before you did this to me.” He
held his sword out; the point wavered in the air not a cubit from her neck. “No, I know what punishment will best pay you back, and that is marriage. My castle has a tower that will keep you well. Within the first hour, you will know its every stone. Think how it will feel when years have passed.”

  Miriamele lifted her chin. “So you will not fight for me.”

  Aspitis slapped his fist on his thigh. “Enough of this! I grow weary of the joke.”

  “Do you hear?” Miriamele turned toward the rest of Aspitis’ company, who sat, waiting. “Your master is a coward.”

  “Silence!” Aspitis shouted. “I will whip you myself.”

  “That old man can thrash you,” she said, pointing to Camaris. The old knight sat wrapped in his blanket, watching wide-eyed. He had made no move since Aspitis and his soldiers had arrived. “Isgrimnur,” she called, “give the old man your sword.”

  “Princess ...” Isgrimnur’s voice was rough with worry. “Let me ...”

  “Do it! Let the earl’s men see him cut to ribbons by an old, old man. Then they will know why their master has to steal women.”

  Isgrimnur, keeping a careful eye on the watching soldiers, pulled Kvalnir out from beneath his sack of belongings. The buckles of the sword belt clinked as he slid it across the ground toward Camaris. For a moment, that was the only sound.

  “My lord?” the soldier who held Miriamele said hesitantly. “What... ?”

  “Shut your mouth,” Aspitis snapped as he dismounted. He walked to Miriamele and grabbed her face with his hand, staring at her intently for a moment. Then, before she had a chance to react, he leaned forward suddenly and kissed her with his broken mouth. “We will have many interesting nights.” The earl then turned to Camaris. “Go on, put it on so I can kill you. Then I will finish the rest of you, too. But I will allow you to defend yourselves or run as you choose.” He turned and looked at Miriamele. “I am, after all, a gentleman.”