by Sarah Remy
AVANI AND PETER stayed the night, bedded down in the stables. The lord’s ginger-haired son offered up his own small cell, but the night was clear; a languid breeze chased away much of the day’s heat. The horses in their stalls picked through flakes of hay, farting and grunting peaceably. Avani unrolled her bedding just inside the small stable’s peaked roof to better enjoy moonrise.
Peter, seated upright against a timber, his own blankets wrapped like a shawl over his shoulders, dug a thin cigarillo from his pockets. He lit it with a match, inhaled slowly, then exhaled in a rush of sweet-smelling air.
“Plague cigarettes,” he explained, catching Avani’s thoughtful stare. “Tobacco weed and tansy. The smoke is said to keep disease at bay. They’re dearly bought this time of year, but I’ve connections. Whether or not the smoke is palliative, I find the habit soothing.”
“Perhaps not in the stables,” Avani suggested, bland.
“I won’t set us alight.” He puffed thoughtfully. In the light of his little cigarette, his face appeared extraordinarily drawn, stark in the shift of shadow. “You did a good thing, today, lass. Much as I regret the lost time, I remember now what I’d forgotten.”
“Kindness?”
Peter snorted. “Duty. No matter the state of the capitol, the king has a duty to all his people, to ensure their welfare and safety. Mors Keep won’t be the only outpost in need of tuning, especially if the barrowmen are growing restive.”
Avani sat up. She propped her elbow on her knees, and cupped her chin. The smoke from Peter’s cigarillo made her want to sneeze.
“Earlier you believed the lad was imagining things.”
“I spoke to his father,” Peter admitted. “Lord Gavin is more frightened than the boy, though he hides it better. He’s a solid kingsman, not likely to fall prey to night fears. He asked me carry his concerns to Renault.”
“They’re re-inhabiting old tunnels, or digging new,” Avani guessed. She nibbled a thumbnail, remembering the rush of river against underground walls. “Tunnels without inscrolled gates to keep them back.”
“Malachi has a map.” Peter took a last drag of smoke, snuffed the cigarillo on the sole of his boot. “A map of the barrows. Mal found it, buried in a chest beneath Katie’s herb garden. If the map is to be trusted, their tunnels extended everywhere under the earth, some of the oldest beneath Wilhaiim itself.”
“To the coast and back again,” Avani agreed. She’d remembered the trek with Everin and Faolan, traveled too quickly from sea to mountain. “Faolan watches over the gates.”
“His Majesty was skeptical.” Peter stretched out on his blankets. “I’ll admit I had other, more pressing concerns. Now I think it’s time we gave this more thought. They’ve been dormant for generations; we’ve grown inexcusably lax, I fear.”
Avani lay back, folding her hands beneath her head, and studied the night sky. The breeze cooled the sweat on her brow, and made her feel almost energetic again.
“I don’t believe the sidhe want war,” she ventured.
“Nay?” Peter replied. “Perhaps not. But they seem fond enough of mortal meat and bone. We’re not cattle to adorn their supper boards.” He pulled his blankets over his head, effectively ending the conversation.
Avani stayed wakeful long into the night, listening to the soothing sounds of sleeping horses, watching the stars fade beneath the greater shine of a fat yellow moon. When she finally drifted away, she dreamed of sea salt and ships sinking, and of Mal, wind battered and wild-eyed, calling fire down upon waves tall as the keep, boiling away the sea until nothing remained but mountains of salt. She dreamed Helena Baker’s placid little spirit stood in her opaque skirts on the steaming ocean floor, and merrily called her absent children home for supper.
Peter was quiet when they rode out at dawn. Avani, fortified with a flask of still-warm black tea and a packet of journey potatoes salted and roasted, let the man be. The breeze died away with the rising sun, but the early morning was cool enough to be pleasant, the horses fresh and rested enough to spook idly at the birds come to drink from the river.
Avani remembered the birds from her last journey west. Their bright, varied plumage and red breasts, as well as the scarlet flowers scattered along the riverbank were famous for lending color to the king’s red woods. Soon enough the Mors branched away south as the horse track curved north, and a small army of fingerling evergreens pierced the flowering carpet. The edge of older growth was visible ahead.
“Stay close,” Peter cautioned. “The trees in the forest are ancient, and resistant to change. His Majesty orders the path cleared twice a year, but it’s easy to stray if one doesn’t know the signs.”
“I remember.” Avani eyed the spreading canopy with suspicion. “I also remember the bone-deep damp, and the rain.”
“We’re not like to get rain,” Peter urged his mount forward. “The damp’s another story. No matter the season, the king’s woods are always wet.”
They rode beneath the edge of the forest and daylight dimmed to an unnatural twilight. High above Avani’s head, more birds chattered, darting from branch to branch in a display of rainbow excitement. Thorny brambles and bright fern choked the forest floor. The small red flowers grew in flocks at the base of wide evergreen trunks, interspaced with white-cap mushrooms and orange deathwatch fungi.
Many of the oldest trees seemed mountain tall, stretching far beyond the low canopy. Water ran in small streams along branches and trunk, and dripped to the forest floor below. Avani pulled her hood lower over her eyes, glad of the protection. Days on a good horse, assuming Peter didn’t lead them astray, and they’d emerge from the woods wet through.
She swallowed a self-pitying sigh, reminded herself that she’d only a day earlier been made irritable by summer’s heat, and gave her gelding a reassuring pat. She’d made the forest journey twice before, and emerged healthy and whole, without so much as a sniffle for all the damp.
They stopped the first night in a small clearing free of brambles. Avani cut fragrant evergreen boughs for a mattress. The branches and needles were drier than the muddy ground. Peter managed to coax to life a small fire, but it was more smoke than flame, and did little to warm Avani’s flask of tea or their dinner. They ate potatoes cold and in silence, as the forest grew still and black, robbed of the thin trickles of daylight that managed to pierce the canopy.
Gathered moisture dripped all through the night, and the next day. Peter’s pensive silence grated on Avani’s increasingly dour mood. She attempted to draw the man into conversation, but he remained visibly subdued until she purposefully poked at his journey skills.
“We’ve passed that same clump of fern twice. Ai, are you certain we haven’t strayed? Mayhap we’d have been wiser to bring Everin as guide.”
“We’ve not strayed.” Peter’s shoulders were rounded beneath his cloak, his hood pulled down near to his nose. Dark stubble shadowed his cheeks. Avani supposed he was growing a beard for warmth, but it was just as likely he decided there wasn’t enough good light for a shave. “I know the signs.”
“What signs?” Avani made show of looking from fern to tree root and back again. “What little track there was disappeared yesterday.”
“You’re looking in the wrong direction.” Peter turned about in the saddle. Avani couldn’t see his eyes beneath the drape of his hood, but his mouth quirked in a reluctant smile. “It’s clear enough for those in the know: foresters and journeymen priests and the regular tinker or traveling merchant. Your Everin must have asked the right questions. I expect he’s in truth more at home on sand or in city than deep forest.”
“What questions?” Avani demanded, intrigued.
“I wasn’t speaking metaphorically. I recognize the signs, my lady. Lift your gaze and look about, pay attention to more than the incessant drip.”
It was a fine clue, and the game brightened Avani’s spirit
s, but it was another good half league of neck craned this way and that before she cottoned on. When she did she laughed in triumph and discovery.
“It’s the grand old trees.” She urged her gelding forward until its nose brushed Peter’s calf. “Someone’s marked them with—what is it? A dye? They glow, the stripes, like slivers of moonshine on high.”
Peter nodded. He brushed a droplet from the dip of his nose, sneezed halfheartedly.
“The foresters call it quicksilver. I know little else, other than they sometimes use it to mark danger spots as well. It’s a hardy substance, I understand, and repugnant to both insects and birds.”
“One stripe?”
“Continue ahead,” Peter confirmed. “Two stripes for a west turn, three for a turn to the east. Simple, really. So long as one knows where the track begins and, as I said before, so long as one doesn’t stray.”
Avani’s neck shivered.
“They’re less comforting than they should be, the quicksilver marks. Here I was, assuming you had some skill as a woodsman, to lead us through.”
“None at all,” Peter replied, gone flat and distant once again. “For our sakes, best hope nothing spooks the horses into bolting.”
Chapter Eleven
THE KING’S WIDE cobblestone highway thronged with travelers. Avani was grateful for her gelding; pedestrians walked single file on the edge of the road, and were splashed liberally with mud as merchants in tinker carts bounced past in both directions. Travelers on horseback avoided the road and took to the muddy track on either side, jostling for space. Avani recognized the king’s couriers by their reckless speed and zealous use of crop against any horse flesh unlucky enough to get in their way.
Avani scanned the road in dismay. The crush of sweating people and animals was as surprising as the weary resignation clear on faces young and old as they waited patiently for an overturned cart to be cleared and righted, blocked front and back like fish against a spawning dam.
“Didn’t you say the Fair was closed?”
Avani’s chestnut and Peter’s bay were pressed flank to flank. The bay wasn’t pleased. He pinned his ears and bared yellow teeth while the chestnut swished his tail about in irritation, nearly unseating the young miss on a fat pony just behind.
“Aye, ’tis,” Peter replied. He’d shed his cloak and gloves and gone ruddy and sticky beneath the sweltering blue sky. “But the trade never stops. It’s only moved farther west, outside Wilhaiim and the quarantine. These people”—he cocked a brow at a farmer balancing six chickens in a cage on his shoulders—“are taking advantage of today’s fine weather to move their wares.”
“Fine weather, is it?” Avani wrinkled her nose and plucked sweat-sodden hair from the back of her neck.
“No wind, missus,” the lass on the pony piped. “First calm day in ten, and Mum’s wild to get spring onions to the market. The wind’s that awful, tossing about the soil and the horse shit and the Worm.”
“Farmers and tinkers go to ground when the wind’s up,” Peter confirmed. “A homesteader will let good produce go to rot and risk winter starvation rather than travel in a plague wind.”
Avani frowned. “And if the weather changes mid-journey?”
“Won’t, missus,” the lass replied. “The Masterhealer promised. Two days of calm, another sennight of the winds, and then Summer Ceilidh to wake those we’ve lost to the Worm.”
Peter wagged his head at Avani’s glance.
“If the temple could control the plague winds,” he said, low, “we’d still have our young to rock in cradle. That child’s mother is either foolish or desperate. I wouldn’t have mine out in a crowd like this, not for all the coin at market.”
Avani looked under her elbow at the smiling lass on her plump pony, and sent a quick, murmured prayer the Goddess’s way. Peter flashed a cynical smile, shaking his head.
“They’ve turned away, I think.” He jerked his chin skyward. “The lot of them. We’re dammed for no other reason than Renault’s refusal to take a theist wife.”
“Ai, you’re not serious. You, of all people.”
“I am,” Peter replied. “I loved my sister more than myself, and it’s hardly Katie’s fault she attracted His Majesty’s eye, and she paid for it, paid dear. And now she’s gone two years and there’s still no breeding queen on the throne, and Wilhaiim’s paying the price.”
The highway wound gently through low green hills. The streambeds that were so plentiful in fall and winter were muddy snakes. Stagnant pools bred biting flies and an ugly gray, stinking weed. The sun rose midway in the sky, and clouds of the vicious insects descended upon the mass of humanity navigating cobblestone and cart, biting. Tempers flared and complaints and exhortations grew loud and unfriendly. Avani tensed in the saddle, and the chestnut shook his head in reaction.
“At least the winds keep the bloodsuckers away,” Peter remarked, slapping a fly from his neck. “Take a breath. The fuss is mostly nerves and guilt. Most would rather not look upon Wilhaiim’s walls. They’re grateful they’re not trapped inside, even as they regret being locked out.”
As he spoke he fished a square of beribboned fabric from a saddlebag. He wadded the black silk into a ball, then tossed it into Avani’s lap. She unfolded the fabric.
“Put it on,” he said. “Tie it tight.” He knotted his own mask, arranging folds of silk over his nose and mouth. “If nothing else, it will keep you from strangling on smoke and incense.”
Others on the road tied on similar squares of fabric as they walked. A handful of the masks were adorned with embroidery and feathers, most were simple squares of burlap. Several nearby travelers made due with threadbare lengths of scarf.
Peter caught Avani studying a mounted nobleman’s particularly garish striped and paisley ensemble.
“You’ll be in demand,” he said. His breath left a darker patch on silk. “Beaded masking is all the rage this spring.”
“Fripperies,” Avani scorned. The constriction around her mouth and nose felt confining. She tightened her fingers around reins to keep from snatching the mask away.
“You’ll get used to it. No one goes about the streets unmasked.”
A tremor ran through the crowd, a subtle shifting. Avani stood in her stirrups, trying to see past taller heads. The highway took a sharp northward turn, but the mass of restless travelers continued west, off cobblestones and onto a narrow, downhill track. The dirt road was never meant to accommodate so many; wheel and boot churned up mud and rock, and descending carts caught in the ruts, sliding dangerously.
“Coastal route,” Peter explained. “Whitcomb way. Lucky for you and I, my lady, we take the easier road.”
As soon as the way was clear, he turned his mount onto empty road, and kicked the horse into a canter. Avani followed suit. Hoofbeats echoed on cobblestone, overloud on the deserted highway. Avani suppressed a whoop of excitement as rushing air cooled the sweat on her face, and Wilhaiim’s great walls rose on the horizon. The horses stretched long, eager for home, and for an instant the green land and blue sky and the city beyond shone.
Then new hoofbeats joined their own, coming up fast from behind, and Avani heard the blowing of galloped horses. Peter slowed, and she did the same, glancing over her shoulder. Two men and a woman, clad from head to toe in leather and bearing Renualt’s badge on their breasts, gave enthusiastic chase. Avani wondered if they’d sprung from the hills, or if they’d been caught behind in the mass of traveling humanity.
“His Majesty’s guard,” Peter said. “Lying in wait. Mayhap there’s been news.”
The kingsmen reined up, black chargers drooling gobbets of white foam. Two of the three wore plague masks of supple leather and satin ribbon, and if the eyes above the masks were any indication, it wasn’t good news they carried. The third rode barefaced in the afternoon.
“Peter Shean,” the woman said, brus
que. “You’ve taken your time about it. His Majesty requires your presence, at once.”
Peter’s jaw bunched beneath silk, but he only nodded.
“Is there news?” he asked. “Is the Lord Vocent returned to us?”
“No news we’ve leave to repeat,” the woman replied. She leaned across her charger’s shoulder, grabbed Peter’s wrist as he turned the bay gelding.
“Not that way. Main gates are closed even to such as us. We’ve another way.”
“Closed?” Peter asked, staggered. “His Majesty’s been expecting us. Surely—”
“Not by His Majesty’s order,” the largest of the two men said, beard bristling in indignation below his mask. “Comes from the Masterhealer, it does, lord of the yellow-eyed bastards.”
“Lory, hush!” the woman snapped. She sketched a warding sign across her leather jerkin, then nodded at Peter. “The city’s closed to all, none in or out, by order of the temple. Aye, but no walls are impenetrable. Follow me, sir, my lady.”
IF THE KING’S highway bisected rolling countryside, the king’s walls road atop it, rising and falling with the dip of the land, sprawling and then contorting back to tighten around the castle. The walls were as tall as six men, topped with spike and grill. Graystone was rubbed smooth by time and many hands. Avani knew from experience that the battlements were maintained by practiced artisans between summer and fall; Renault employed an army of masons, as had his predecessors.
“Ai, you’ll not convince me there’s a hole in the wall,” Avani challenged as they rode through a copse of shade trees, ostensibly away from the city. “Nor that we’re hidden from eyes atop the battlement.”
“For the most part our guards are still loyal to His Majesty,” the bearded man replied. Avani didn’t miss the pointed glance he sent over his shoulder at the third member of their party. A tall fellow, the other man sat his charger with the ease of one born to the saddle. He wore a leather cap on his head, and was missing both his mask and two of his front teeth.
