by Dora Machado
“I shall send up hot water to reheat your bath in about half an hour,” she said, diving for the door and followed by the servants.
Half an hour. That’s the time he had earned for himself. A least he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed until then. As soon as the door clicked shut, he pulled up his pants and searched his bag for the contingency tool kit he had requisitioned prior to coming to Tolone. He tucked the small roll into the back of his pants.
The hallway was empty when he cracked the door open, but the lady’s bodyguard wasn’t too far off. She sat at the bottom of the stairs, sharpening her dirk, muttering a string of complaints to the cat on her lap. “Why should I have to play nursemaid to a cranky old man?”
Silently, Hato limped down the back stairs and around to the library. The guard was standing at the doors. Hato scurried out the back door and crawled behind the manicured bushes edging the elegant manor, out of sight of the sentinels, until he found the library’s long windows.
The windows were locked, but Hato had come prepared for the eventuality. He unrolled his kit on the ground, revealing the glazier’s tools he had carefully selected. He fitted his sharp glass cutter against the window’s lower pane, cutting the green glass along the copper came.
Carefully, he removed the glass pane and set it aside, before snaking his way in between the iron rods’ narrow space. Once inside, he propped up the cut panel in place before he rose to his feet. As he expected, with the lady gone, the library was empty. He didn’t waste any time. He grabbed the manuscript from the shelf and tucked it into his belt.
He was tightening his belt to secure his prize when voices sounded outside. He barely had time to cram himself beneath the desk before the door swung open.
Someone’s steps clattered across the stone floors. The person dropped something on the desk with a slight thump. As the steps retreated, Hato pressed his face to the cold floor and spotted the back of the lady’s bodyguard.
He waited until the door closed again.
After making sure no one remained in the room, he emerged from his hiding place. He had only a few moments before the servants came to his room to warm his bath, but he had one last thing he had to do.
He worked his way through the papers on the lady’s desk, scouring the signatures on the open letters, tracing the names on the accounting ledgers, inspecting the lady’s newest batch of unopened correspondence.
That’s where he found it, at the top of the pile, no doubt placed there on purpose.
His stomach twisted into a knot. King Riva’s black seal stained the creamy envelope like a plague boil.
More voices outside. He couldn’t afford to be caught rummaging through the lady’s things or away from his room. He hesitated, holding the envelope in his hand. Tatyene had seen the letter. If it went missing or turned up open, she would know that something was amiss and so would the Lady of Tolone.
He would be their first and only suspect.
Hato couldn’t afford to be detained, especially with his lord missing. For Laonia’s sake, the alliance with Tolone had to be preserved at all cost. He had the manuscript and his suspicions had been confirmed. He would have to be satisfied with that for the moment.
He put the letter back on the desk and slithered out of the library. He still needed a few moments to apply some mastic and refit the glass in place. With a little bit of luck, nobody would notice for a while.
In stealth, he climbed the stairs back to his room and secured the manuscript in his saddlebags among his valuables. He was still undressing when the knock came.
“Hot water, my lord.” Tatyene entered the room ahead of the servants carrying the steaming buckets. “And your men. They insist they must see you right away.”
An agitated Severo stood by the door, holding his cap between his hands, together with young Clio and a dour-faced Cirillo. The servant’s slow pouring tested Hato’s patience.
“That’s enough!” he barked when he couldn’t stand it anymore.
The servant scurried away. The bodyguard left, but Hato knew she would linger by the door. He gestured for Severo to speak quietly.
“I found his tracks,” Severo reported as soon as the door closed. “He was following some other set of tracks. Smaller. Lighter. He wasn’t running from us.”
The woman, then.
“Three dead,” Severo said, “marked with my lord’s distinctive blade. I discovered signs of a fight in the forest and the sunken ruts of a heavy wagon on a road beyond the wood.”
“Do you think he’s been taken?”
Severo nodded somberly. “Did she lure him out there? Was she a trap?”
“She looked like a nice girl,” young Clio said, “pretty and sweet, the kind that could one day warm the lord’s bed nicely on a long winter’s night.”
“What do you know of women or kindness?” Cirillo snapped. “That woman wouldn’t hesitate to deliver our lord’s head on a gilded basket to the gods’ hungry demons.”
Clio’s expression crumpled like an old man’s face. Disappointment was always hardest on the young.
“Get ready,” Hato said, rising from the tub. “We’re leaving.”
Clio, Cirillo and Severo stared at him, or more likely, at the sodden pants he was still wearing.
“Don’t mind that.” Hato shed his pants and dressed quickly. “Fetch my horse.”
“But your knee,” Clio said.
“Never mind my knee.”
Hato didn’t waste any time. He informed the lady’s bodyguard that his lord had departed, avoiding her inquiries with impenetrable coolness. Only over his dead body would he give the woman’s mistress the satisfaction of announcing his lord’s demise. He didn’t have any proof that the Lady of Tolone had broken any of her oaths, but his instinct—not to mention the wax seal he had spotted on the envelope—warned him against placing any more trust than was absolutely necessary in Eleanor’s crafty hands.
He collected Bren’s abandoned luggage and, leading the Twenty, marched out of Tolone in an orderly gallop that set his throbbing knee on fire.
Two days later, after a tortuous descent and an exhaustive search that took them north and south on both sides of the river, after his knee had swollen to the size of a melon and his hopes to find Bren had began to wane, they discovered a dead horse rotting in the mire in an isolated part of the road on the kingdom side of the Nerpes.
Bren’s distinctive chest plates lay in the mud next to the horse.
Hato’s stomach churned with the bile corroding his guts.
Worst of all, the trail ended there. There was no sign of his lord after that. He could be anywhere in the kingdom, including, and most probable, in one of Riva’s dungeons.
“What do we do now?” Clio asked.
“We keep looking,” Hato said, determined to find his lord, whole or in tiny pieces.
Chapter Fourteen
AS SOON AS HE SPOTTED THE silent shadows wading ahead, Bren froze and put his finger to his lips. A few steps away, Lusielle halted. Her face drained of color. Bren took cover behind a gnarled oak, motioning for her to do the same.
“Stay put,” he mouthed, climbing the tree to get a better look.
From his new vantage point, he surveyed his surroundings. Had the figures lurking among the bog’s shadows been completely immobile, he might have missed them altogether. As it was, Bren’s eyes focused on movement, identifying the men hidden along the bog’s western border.
There were quite a few of them, no doubt waiting for him and Lusielle, stalking the narrowing cove where the swamp met the hills, one of the few places where the bog neared the road.
Damn Orell. He had anticipated the spot. Not that it was hard. The Dismal Bog clung to its victims. Surrounded by crumbling ridges and extensive mud pits, the bog granted easy exit only at a couple of places.
Bren scrambled down the tree and, moving cautiously, crept over to where Lusielle stood. “We’re going to have to trek through the bog for a little while longer,” he whisp
ered. “There’s another spot north of here where we can get out.”
“Over there!” a man shouted very near. “Get it, get it!”
A spear whistled in the air and crashed only a few spans to Bren’s right. A set of boots splashed in the water. Lusielle made to bolt, but Bren grabbed hold of her and forced her down into a crouch behind the twisted roots.
Someone whooped. “Got it!”
Bren stole a look over the roots. He spotted one of Orell’s thugs, lifting a spear in the air. A skewered turtle dangled bloody and limp from the spear that had shattered its armored shell. Other men hooted further afield.
What a bunch of buffoons. To cast a net so wide and then fail to keep the discipline.
“We’ll make our escape as soon as these fools settle for lunch,” Bren whispered.
“All right.” The color was returning to Lusielle’s face.
They waited in quiet companionship. She was alert but calm. Bren realized that trekking with Lusielle across the deadly bog had proven to be a different experience from what he had expected. For two days, she had followed him at a good clip and without complaints. She was a bit like the Twenty, swift on her feet, bold but cautious, reliable and steady, quick to assess the circumstances without needing lengthy explanations.
She was also handy to have around.
When the swamp’s gruesome bugs began to prey on him, she smeared his neck with a paste of crushed wild tansy and rat tail warts. It was a less than fragrant combination of leaves and roots, but it kept the pests away. When the time came to eat again, he didn’t have to stalk any of the bog’s odd creatures. She curbed the worst of his hunger with a pocketful of berries, and the flowers and lichens she collected as she went. It wasn’t fitting food, he told her several times, but as she told him, it was better than nothing.
“Let’s go,” he said, when he had judged that enough time had passed. “We’ll have to be swift if we want to beat Orell to the next spot. Just a few more leagues to go.”
“The leagues I don’t mind,” she said. “Orell and his men, now them I mind.”
Bren set a course north by northwest. He kept his eyes and ears open for traps. Orell tended to cast his nets far and wide.
They didn’t speak again until after they had left Orell’s men far behind. Even then, they spoke quietly and mostly in whispers.
“I’m curious.” Bren edged a bubbling nest of bog vipers, motioning for Lusielle to follow. “How did you come to marry that poor excuse for a human being?”
“Aponte?” She grimaced, but made her way around the nest. “It’s just fate, I suppose. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“I think maybe not.”
“Is it because I’m highborn?” he said. “Or is it because I’m a man?”
She flashed him a cutting look.
“I’m still curious.”
“Well then, you better be willing to give up something in return.”
“Are you trying to trade stories with me?”
“A question for a question.”
“Hmm.” Bren considered the notion. “What if I can’t answer your question?”
“I’ll ask another one.”
“Fair enough.”
“I’ll start,” she said, keeping up the pace. “Why wouldn’t you be able to answer all my questions?”
She was too bright for her own good. “Oaths, honor, consequences and lives.”
“But—”
“My turn,” he said. “Why did you marry that oaf of your husband?”
“‘Cause I had to.”
“That’s barely an answer—”
“That’s as many words as you used in your reply,” she said. “My turn again: Why do you hunt a birthmark like the one I bear?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Highborn secrets and sacred oaths.” She frowned. “Am I supposed to be impressed or scared?”
“I don’t know the answer to that either.”
She pursed her lips, pondering her next move. “Are my questions troublesome to you?”
“Yes.” If only she knew how.
“Why do I believe you?”
He had no idea, but it was his turn again. “Using many more than four words, what are all the reasons you had to marry Aponte?”
“A carefully crafted question.” She sighed. “All right. Aponte used to hire a room every month in my parents’ inn. The inn was on his route. He trades in ingredients, you know.”
He knew.
“He had approached my father before, offering coin in exchange for my hand in marriage. But my father wanted nothing to do with him and my mother thought he was vile. They both died in a fire which destroyed the inn. The king’s magistrate revoked the lease. I begged the magistrate to allow us to rebuild it. We had the skill to manage it, but he gave the property to someone else. We were left destitute.”
Bren paused, listening carefully. He thought he had heard a noise breaking the bog’s eerie calm. Lusielle stopped too. A flap of wings confirmed that it was only a rook drying its wings. Bren reassumed the cautious march.
“Did I hear you say ‘we’?” he asked, helping her climb over a tangle of roots.
“My brother and I,” she said. “He was barely fourteen. Without a business or an inheritance, without a penny to his name, his prospects were doomed.”
Bren noticed she didn’t mention her own dismal and perhaps even more dangerous prospects.
“What happens in Laonia when a young man is orphaned and destitute?” she asked.
“It’s never an easy thing. If the children are young enough, we place them with other families. If not, we try to place them with apprenticeships throughout the land. Regardless, I must provide for them. After all, when they lose their parents, they become my wards.”
“Your wards?” She sounded intrigued. “That’s a lot of responsibility for one man.”
“It’s the way of the house of Uras.” Bren halted. “Hush. Did you hear that?”
Lusielle listened then shook her head. “Are you perhaps hearing some of the bog’s ghosts?”
For a man who dreamed of ghosts, he didn’t think the joke was funny. They reassumed their cautious march.
“So what happened to your brother after the inn burned?” Bren asked.
“In the kingdom, if a young man is orphaned and destitute, there’s only one choice: He must sell himself to the king as a slave to work the salt mines for twenty years.”
Bren was familiar with the practice. Riva believed that a man without prospects was desperate, and a desperate man was always dangerous. How right he was.
“The main way of avoiding the salt mines is to garner enough money to pay for a free man’s right or to buy an appointment for the king’s guard,” Lusielle said. “We didn’t have the coin to pay for either. We’d heard that the Sea Port Cities were hiring youngsters for crew. The Sea Port Cities were far away. If only we had the money to buy passage ….”
“Enter Aponte.”
“Aponte came three days after the fire. I was just another transaction to him, one he felt he could accomplish at a bargain. Riva’s greedy magistrate was due back that afternoon to enforce his ruling. My brother would’ve been shipped to the king’s mines that night.”
Lusielle herself would have been killed on the spot or taken to one of the king’s infamous pleasure houses. She didn’t mention that.
“Aponte said he’d pay for my brother’s passage to the Sea Port Cities if I married him. He didn’t require a dowry, which I didn’t have, and he didn’t make any claim on my brother’s future earnings. It was by far the only chance my brother was going to get.”
“So Aponte secured your brother’s station in life at your expense?”
“Tristan didn’t want to go at first, but I knew what would happen if he stayed. To make sure Aponte kept his promise, I didn’t give my consent for the marriage until after Tristan was gone.”
Aponte had to be a lowly, perverted
scoundrel to force himself on a young and destitute orphan. He was a scamming weasel, getting the little brother out of the way at a bargain price. Bren had learned all about Aponte when he scouted the lead. The bastard had gotten more than a child bride out of the deal. He had secured a capable housekeeper for his holdings, a most able administrator, and marriage rights that he abused almost as often as he squandered them.
“Why did you stay with him for all these years?” he said.
“What was I supposed to do? I was sixteen when I married him. I gave the man my marriage oath. I had no rights, no coin, no way to run, no place to go. I did the only thing I could do and I tried to do it well. Obviously, I must have displeased him.”
“You did nothing wrong, nothing to provoke what’s happened to you.” He halted the march and crouched behind a cluster of bushes to survey the clearing ahead.
She crouched next to him. “You don’t believe that cause is followed by consequence?”
“I don’t believe we can always understand the connection.”
“I seem to be running into that a lot lately.”
“What could you have possibly done to provoke Aponte’s anger?”
“I never really loved him,” she said, in a small voice, “but he knew that when he married me—”
“The guy is a heap of scum—”
“And I refused to give him children.”
“What?”
“I drank my special brew every morning.”
“Your special brew?”
“He didn’t know,” she said. “Base or highborn, every man wants an heir. Isn’t it true?”
“I suppose—”
“Then it’s wrong, that a wife should refuse her husband the offspring he demands. You see? I’m a wretched soul and Aponte had good reason to turn me in to the magistrate after all. Come, I think it’s safe to cross here.”
For the first time in years, Bren found himself doing something he hadn’t done in a long time: thinking about someone else’s troubles above his own. Her sadness poked a hole in the armor he had fashioned to keep himself apart and, simple as it was, her grief seemed akin to his. He rushed to catch up with her.
