“The hell!” Rurik snapped, rubbing the back of his head.
As Alviss relented with a demoralizing pat on the shoulder, laughter broke from behind. Others followed from the trees, five horses led by three people, a chestnut-haired beauty at their head. She came at them with one hand plastered over her lips, a soft baying filtering out from between calloused fingers—supple yet powerful, like steel molded by an artist’s brush. Such elegance pervaded motion, as well as craft, and every motion betrayed her grace.
Two things shaped this woman: the dance and the hunt, and they had her still in body, mind and spirit.
In truth, they had Rurik too, though that was a different matter entirely.
Behind her followed one of similar face, though slighter build. While Essa had all the trimmings of a dryad, with her grassy eyes and slim figure, she also had an archer’s arms. Yet her cousin Rowan was the fire to her earth. His hair was red as the tunic he wore, though less an eyesore. It was short, as was the good and manly fashion of the time, though little else about him betrayed such roles. Every piece fit the part, though the whole remained…something else. He was a grounding to certain areas of life that Essa, Rurik’s nymph, generally neglected.
Last was the oddest personage of their curious assembly. To the others’ chagrin, he was also the most infamous. The spear across his back was the butchering tip of countless legends—which was to say lies—but also the authentic slayer of many Imperial men. Chigenda, the whispers named him. They said it meant Black Devil, which he was just as likely to be called. In truth, the masses wouldn’t know. The Empire had a bounty on his head, though their own racial bias was oft their undoing in spotting him—all Zuti looked alike as far as most Marindi were concerned, and the bounty notices reflected it. Brown skin was nearly all anyone had to go on. Suffice to say, it was not enough.
But everyone knew Chigenda did not travel in groups. In many regards, he may as well not have anyhow. Rowan remained constantly between his cousin and the Zuti. He was not the only one that liked it so—Rurik preferred it as well, and he knew Essa shared the sentiment. She had been skittish around the man for months and Rurik could not abide anything that offended her particular sensibilities.
Their horses were laden in the myriad numbers of goods the Company had acquired over the course of their trek. Each member of their group had one—a rancher’s fortune, and a parting gift from another friend. They were not the steeds on which Alviss and Rurik had started off, alone, and he felt a pang of guilt for it, though these were much the better. Grey and mottled and slow to gallop—the old had been old, though as strong and loyal as any one might find. They had been pack horses, but these were horses bred for riding.
The sacrifices one must make to keep his road.
“Is my honor so forfeit,” Rurik began to say, “that I am to be ridiculed in the shadow of my own trees?”
Essa giggled. “Quite so, milord.”
Such a tongue. Were the Maker just, he might have leave to see it wrapped around certain other pursuits. As it was, such luck evaded him. Not for lack of effort on his part, but he supposed timing had a great deal to do with it. His mind wandered down old paths, hideaways from younger days. Inwardly, he smiled at the possibilities.
But reality shook him, as it always did. This time literally and forcefully. Once Alviss had his attention, he more gently chided, “These lands are friend to you no more.” His tone was sour, as though he didn’t expect the boy to believe him. Quite the contrary—he simply had other, grander issues to focus on.
Such as his father. The noted inhospitality was precisely the reason for their return. It had taken nigh two months to crawl across the Empire, battling hunger, thirst, and the odd touch of sickness on frail Rowan’s part, but they had come, all on his whims. Rurik was not a boy to be deterred. He liked to think of himself as a thoughtful man, but when he put his mind behind something, Hell itself would have to part to see it come undone. It wasn’t his fairest trait.
All of the others—save the Zuti—had counseled him against their present course, at one point or another. His path had been set, however, from the moment Rowan had handed him his father’s crest, plucked fresh and bloodied from the pocket of a dead assassin a nation’s length away. Absently, Rurik touched the rib the man had snapped. The memory was still a dagger in his bowels.
At the least, they hadn’t encountered any more of those creatures in their returning travels. It was by far the longest he had ever gone, from the very day he had been banished.
“I know it. I make no delusions of it. I thank Assal every day I’ve you to remind me though, Alviss.”
The Kuric’s bushy brows furrowed as he withdrew his hand. Apparently, he did not appreciate his sarcasm.
Only in the last twenty years had Rurik’s father—the lord Matair—delivered the final crushing rout to the Surinians and placed the Ulneberg under some form of permanent security. At a time, the Surinians might have been able to ward such assaults. Corruption, and the steady progress of other, grander neighbors had reduced them near to ruin. They put much of what remained into the defense, but Kasimir rode over them like so much chaff upon the wind. It was one of those noble tales the people sang about. Glittering knights and gallant steeds and all that, resplendent in their fantastical glow. The commoner gaining his nobility from a gracious emperor. It was a common misconception, though—the man had already been a knight. He didn’t exactly have far to climb.
Nevertheless, rumor made it the story of the rise of the family Matair, a story that ended in disgrace at the lecherous hands of a younger Rurik. Rapist, they called him. Deflowerer of virgins. The former was a lie. The latter, not so untrue.
For that, they put him to exile.
He was just a boy, a man not two ten-turnings through the world. At the time, he was only acting on those animal urges which Assal himself had seen fit to grace him with. Besides, the future countess had been just as eager, and it had been her room he was led to, not the other way around.
Yet he was the “handsome,” the “fiery,” the “carefree” lord. He was the debauched and pompous noble. He, the devil-eyes Matair—whose legend was morphed more for his curiosities than his normalities. He was the child of the brown and the blue, one eye given over to each. The brown, his father; the blue, his mother. More than a few took it to be an ill omen. He could not rightly say they were wrong.
Anticipating another blow to the head, Rurik was thankful when his lovely dancer closed the rest of the distance to them and took his hand in hers. Her other hand patted Alviss on the fur-laden shoulder.
“Forgive the lad,” she said pityingly. “He suffers still his childhood: always to speak, never to listen.”
“One should examine themselves before they so accuse another,” Rurik replied contemptuously.
The frown Essa shot him made him smile through any sense of guilt. “I ought to take you over my knee,” she said.
“Would you kindly?”
Behind her eyes, he could see the urge build. She wanted to slap him. Badly. If she did, she knew where that would lead, however. As much as one might chide the other, both recognized the child still at play within their hearts. They were friends, many turnings past, and the old interactions remained ever-present. With age, nothing seemed to be lost—merely new interest and possibilities gained. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.
“Oh how they flirt,” her cousin called from across the field. “Is it not the sweetest?” Clutching his hands to heart in overtly dramatic fashion, the man swooned as if to fall. “If only I had such love. Alas—for who would have a rose like me?”
“More likes the thorns,” Essa replied. Shifting her focus back to Alviss, she continued, “Shall we be off?”
And so they were. Essa was sent ahead of them, their eyes and their ears amidst the trees. Typically, Rurik accompanied her—at the least it could be a chance to sneak a little romance—but Alviss withheld him for the time being. Apparently, he didn’t trust him. R
urik feigned offense. After all, it was only the second time he had run off. Third, if Alviss counted that incident on the river—but Rurik continued to maintain that he was just chasing a very elusive deer. It wasn’t his fault if the others didn’t see it.
They passed old trees, tall and thick and dark, sprouting canopies that offered only dim flickers of sunlight. Some were as old as the Empire itself, pre-dating both man and religion. In the distance, wolves howled and the air was aflutter with the flap of many small wings. It seemed as peaceful as the boy had ever known.
Here he could see a young boy hiding from friends. There he could see the same boy climbing high—only to be torn from his perch by an equally glory-hounding girl. Then he was there, lying in the grass, staring up at the clouds and the leaves, laughter all around him as the girl stood atop her perch, grinning wildly.
When he was young, Rurik learned much from the flat of his back. Preceded by two brothers and a sister, he spent a great deal of his time there. Essa only exacerbated matters. Rurik was an adventurous youth, but she was the daughter of a hunter. The trees were her natural home, whereas the coddled halls of his father’s manor were his. Try as he might, Essa always bested him. It gave her a great deal of pleasure to rub his face in it. That, and to rise in the eyes of the mob.
Still, people didn’t learn from winning. They learned from losing. As much as he lost, Rurik always prided himself that he would one day be the most knowledgeable lord in all the land.
Pity I never learned to store it in my pants while I was down there.
He could still remember his first time. It wasn’t in a bed, or even in his house. He was fresh into his thirteenth year, and his brother Isaak brought him one of the local girls—a sweet thing, and not entirely unpleasant to look upon, but one of those that had never quite shed her baby fat. Isaak told him she was to welcome him to manhood.
As he could recall, the process took but a few moments, and he had a bed of pine needles poking into him the entire time. They had done it somewhere outside of town, in one of the many copses surrounding. It was a good thing the girl was experienced. She helped him through the process a few more times before she walked him back to his brother and proclaimed him a man. Rurik was less excited, however, when he saw his brother handing her the coins for services rendered. How Isaak had beamed.
That smile, like the leaves beneath his feet, had long since withered with the coming winter.
In those days, Rurik had owned the trees. Now he stole his way through them like some common thief—another chore that, to his distaste, he had grown not-so-unfamiliar with in the months past.
A shout from Essa drew them to a halt. She appeared from the brush a moment later and determinedly guided them to a small field dominated by a towering oak. Its sinewy branches curled out, already stripped of many of their leaves. In their place, three bodies dangled from varying heights, nooses creaking as their bodies twisted in the wind. Executions.
“Couple days gone, I’d say.” Essa prodded one of the bodies as her cousin pressed a kerchief tight to his nose. “Getting ripe.”
It made no sense to Rurik. Criminals or no, one did not let the bodies hang. Perhaps a day, at most, but then someone would always cut them down, that they might see their rest. Most of them, anyhow. A head or a hand or something might be taken to serve as warning, but the bodies rested. His father had always been especially adamant about such things.
“Be what they were in life,” his father had once told him, “All men are equal in death.”
Rurik joined Essa beside the tree, though he kept his distance from the bodies. “What is the purpose in this?”
“Warning,” Alviss noted. “To bandits, like. If your father rides, he must still show strength.”
Were it true, it would be but the latest sign of war in the Low Countries. They had passed many in the weeks of their trek, from companies of soldiers on the march, to the ever more stinging rise of merchants’ costs and the increasingly tight hold of the local authority. When royals set to play, the nobles come to prey. Tariffs and taxes were rising along the various internal divisions of the Empire, to make up for the nobles’ own losses in the levies.
It was no surprise more people were turning to thievery to make ends meet. Rurik himself could not claim innocence in that area. Unlike most of those dangling at the end of a hangman’s noose, however, he had the good sense to leave once the deed was done. The added steel of four other arms also helped his chances a bit.
Of course, that was something he did not mention to Alviss. His guardian would never allow him to so degrade himself. Alviss had more faith in Rurik than he did.
“We should bury them,” Essa said. She caught one of the bodies by the boot, to keep it from twisting further. “Isn’t right to let them dangle.”
Rowan mumbled something, but its meaning was lost in the ruffles of his kerchief. Rurik yelled for the man to speak up.
“I says we should do no such thing,” Rowan shouted back. “I see the travesty sure as the rest, but you know not what diseases they might have. Or, for that matter, who might spy us whilst we dig. Not exactly a quick thing. Or a clean one.”
Alviss took a step forward, examining the bodies as he stroked a hand through his great beard. He stood as such for a long moment, then nodded in agreement. “Point. And if lord’s law says they hang, they hang. No need draw more attention than we must.” He guided Rurik back behind him and motioned Essa away from the tree. Then he drew them away from the place at a wide berth, urging them back toward the trail they had long since lost. Rowan scurried to join them. Chigenda, ever silent, followed at their heels.
As they regained the trail—a dusty, needle-ridden thing, identifiable by little more than the wheel and hoof prints pounded into the dirt—they were greeted by the sound of many furious hoof beats. It began as a flicker of cloth and hair, framed in seconds’ passes between the trees. Before long, a figure on horseback darted from the trees, shouting for them to move. They stepped aside as he whistled past, Rurik’s head tipped beneath his cap. When he glanced up, the rider was already weaving between another set of trees, a blur of yellow and red, and then all they were left with were the clop of the hooves once more.
“What do you suppose he was about?” Rowan asked.
Rurik knew the rider’s colors. It was hard to mistake them once seen—yellow and red, the nauseating collage of House Cullick, the Lions of Usteroy. A certain count was their head of home, a man to whom Rurik owed a great deal. His sword, for one. Through the old cat’s throat. Had Rurik never met the creature, nor his viperous daughter, a great many things would have never come to pass.
So they all gather in one place. He could feel himself grimace. How convenient. The killers do not even try to hide.
As thoughts of blood swam through his head, however, a thick hand caught him by the shoulder.
“This bodes ill,” the old Kuric grunted.
Rurik shrugged him off and proceeded on. The others followed. No more horsemen loomed from the darkness, and the path sat deserted as far as the eye could see.
Still, the thought of the rider plagued the boy. The timing is simply too perfect. There was no way of knowing how frequent the men’s contacts had been since his departure, though. This man was no noble, nor knight, nor soldier—merely a messenger, to whatever ends.
Rurik only hoped those ends did not involve his neck. They had gone so long without an assassin’s blade pressing at their throats—they did not need one when they were so close to home.
Perhaps it had something to do with the war. Perhaps it was a warning of a certain son seen headed back to home. Perhaps—and how he hoped!—it was a herald of the count’s coming. Were all there at once, he could have his questions, his answers, and a thorough playing at revenge as well. Even he did not expect such an attempt to go far, but he suspected the mere task of it would be good for a spot of fun. Until the guardsmen stabbed him down.
Regardless, the others seemed just as unea
sy. Not one of them had seen Verdan since Rurik had been turned out. It had been even longer for Essa and Rowan. Still, they might have lived a contented life elsewhere in the Ulneberg. But then the rain had come, and the first knife with it, and Rurik had dragged them both into his troubles, stumbling through the doors of their tavern. The whole night was a wash of steel and blood and dancing, the girl’s hips rolling to the beat, all eyes glued to the music made flesh.
It rained a lot when I left. He peered up through the canopies, toward the burning glints of light. It had been warm, but the rain had been merciless. That whole month had been peppered with it. Now he returned and the world was all sunshine and daisies—though the cold came on, relentless, and the wind nipped at flesh and fur. Autumn would soon be done.
All of nature rides against me. An absurd thought, perhaps, but the weather seemed rarely kind to him—at least when he needed it to be. Already he could envision the forest of Ulneberg when the snows came on. It would be a lonely place. The sun would shine bright through the corpses of the trees, but an endless sea of white would smother all the trails, and the frost would be bitter. It always was. What joy awaits.
The trail veered as the hill dipped. Rurik tried to spy out any further sign of their destination, but the trees were thick there and he saw nothing but endless rows of green and brown. At the bottom, however, the trail widened considerably, and it did not take long for them to press into the light of day again. It had not been as such before his exile. Apparently, the loggers had made some headway in those few years. All about them, bared stumps jutted like little corpses from the earth, a few stripped logs remaining between them, like picked bones. Other, smaller trees had given way to the fall of their larger brethren. They had been matted into the earth where the others had fallen and been pulled away. There was no sign of loggers, but in the distance they could hear the shouts as another tree toppled. They would return eventually.
The Hollow March Page 2
