In the Company of the Dead (The Sundered Oath Book 1)

by Ballintyne, Ciara

  I’m just another job to her. Bitterness welled up—but why should it matter what she thought?

  “I did,” he said, forcing the words out, and resenting the look of satisfaction on her face. With the words sour on his tongue, he described what he’d seen of the camp layout, the guards, the gate, the palisade, the food stores, and the useful proximity of horses and wagons.

  “We could raid their supplies by taking a small force over the wall. It’s easily scalable from this side, and we’d be over before they knew it. We’d break the force into small groups to negotiate through the sleeping camp and then reform at the stores. We might have to kill some sentries. Then we’ll load the supplies onto their wagons, steal some horses to haul them, and head back to the castle full tilt, slamming through the defences at the old gate. They’re prepared for an assault from this side. If we can reach the other side of their camp without causing a fracas, our attack will catch them flat-footed.”

  She said nothing, chewing on her lower lip and her eyes distant. “It might work. If we can make it to the other side of the camp, we could send a fresh set of messengers to the king as well. But since you lost your grapple, there’s every chance that by dawn, Sayella will be aware that we penetrated her camp, if not why. Security is likely to be tighter, with more sentries along the wall and around the camp perimeter. Most likely we’ll need to eliminate a number of them. I assume you’ve pegged yourself for that role.”

  He grinned, slightly enlivened by the ongoing battle of wits with her. “Who else?”

  “Me.”

  His grin died. “In all honesty, it probably requires both of us.”

  “You’re going to kill us all!”

  Lyram was stretched flat on the floor and rooting around under the bed for a missing boot. At the sound of Leinahre’s voice, he paused and looked over his shoulder. She stood in the open doorway to his suite, out of breath as if she’d run all the way from the banqueting hall, and her black hair tumbling loose of its pins. Her fragile face was almost overwhelmed by the cloud of hair, and her blue eyes seemed even wider than unusual.

  He sighed and went back to fumbling under the bed for the lost boot. His fingers brushed against leather, pushing the boot deeper under the bed, and he shoved his head under the frame. “Who told you? Everard?”

  “Galdron! I heard Sayella demanded you give yourself up—and you should!”

  Lyram banged his head against the bed frame as he sat upright. Glaring, he rubbed his skull with one hand. No one else had suggested any such thing. “I should what?”

  “This raid risks us all.” Her breasts heaved with ire, almost spilling from the top of the vest she wore over her blouse. “Three outcomes are possible: you secure no food, or you are all killed and leave the castle defenceless, or you succeed. I don’t like odds that give the residents of this castle a two in three chance of horrible death! There are children here, you know.”

  The words shot cold horror right down into the marrow of his bones. Was their death worth his revenge, worth the mere chance of revenge? Blaming Ellaeva was the easy, obvious choice, but he wasn’t the kind to shy away from the consequences of his actions. No, the plan was a sound one. Besides, with Drault doubtless behind the siege, Lyram’s surrender wouldn’t guarantee an end to anything.

  “I am well aware of that, Leinahre.” His voice came out steadier than he expected. “And I have made the decision I think most likely to succeed. There are no guarantees whatsoever that my surrender will end this siege, and I have information Galdron does not. Either trust that I know what I’m doing, or not—but I am not justifying my decision to you any further.”

  He thrust his arm back under the bed, and his fingers brushed leather. Seizing the offending boot, he yanked it free and sat up to find Leinahre still staring at him with a mixed expression of cold anger and frustration. Her expression immediately softened, but fresh annoyance surged in him at the idea that such a loyal servant of long standing should think so little of giving him up. Dragon balls, even Janun threatened to stop me going.

  “This discussion is over.” He shoved his foot in the boot and climbed to his feet. Lying on the floor helped no one’s authority. “You’ve had my patience so far, owing to your long years of service, but my tolerance is wearing thin. Go.”

  She opened her mouth as if to argue further, considered the expression on his face, then spun on her heel and flounced out the door, her blue-and-green tartan skirts disarrayed by her haste. Her heeled boots echoed in the stairwell.

  Lyram muttered under his breath. Leinahre never would have questioned him before Zaheva’s murder. His gaze lit on the whisky flask on the desk, and he swore. Too often only the whisky dulled the pain enough to sleep, and this was what resulted—people were losing faith in his decisions. A pox on that. Thrusting his jaw out, he grabbed the flask, unstoppered it, and deliberately emptied it into the washstand, which still contained the lather and whiskers from trimming his beard that morning.

  He reached for his claymore, then let his hand fall away. A weapon that big couldn’t be taken on a stealth raid, and any Gallowglaighs that attacked them should be fresh from their blankets and unarmoured. The broadsword would do fine for this trip. He shouldered the baldric on over the hauberk, and headed downstairs.

  He stepped out of the stairwell into the courtyard, where torches on the walls cast the shadows of waiting men large and menacing across the cobbles. The creak of armour and jingle of harness filled the darkness with the sound of waiting death.

  A hand seized him in a sudden, crushing grip that pulled him up short and swung him around in a vicious arc. He threw his free arm up to protect himself against a collision with the wall. The impact drove the breath from him.

  “Liar,” a voice grated from behind him. “Murderer. Wife-killer. I guess all the things they say are true. The great Lyram Aharris of my childhood would not save himself at the cost of the lives of innocents, and so I can only assume that man was a lie. You are nothing but an honourless dog.”

  Lyram drove his elbow back into the unseen assailant’s gut, and a man gasped.

  Spinning, Lyram opened his mouth to defend himself—then snapped his mouth closed. Damn Drault and his blasted blackmail. The urge to defend his honour and clear his name burned like whisky, but fear for his family paralysed his voice.

  The man doubled over before him was Kastyn, and barely a man at that.

  Infuriated, Lyram seized the boy by the back of his shirt and shook him. “You will not speak to me like that again, and you will not mention my wife again in my hearing.” He shoved Kastyn so hard the boy nearly tripped over his own feet.

  Kastyn whirled, his face contorted with a black kind of fury and his fists clenched at his sides. His mouth worked, as if searching for words, and he spat on the cobbles at Lyram’s feet and dashed off.

  Lyram glowered. By rights he should arrest him, but... the raiding party stood assembled by the barbican, and the plan allowed for no delay. This second attack on his decision left a bad taste in his mouth. Was he making a mistake?

  Galdron supervised the waiting men with an impatient scowl, Everard stood as immaculate as ever in his uniform, and Ellaeva made a dark patch of stillness. As Lyram crossed to join them, cold dread settled into his bones. Two people had attacked him for the same decision, one urging him to give himself up and the other berating him for not, and both made him uncomfortable with the decision he’d made. And all with a necromancer in the castle they couldn’t find.

  Lyram looked at his closest companions, and remembering his thoughts from last night on the necromancer’s identity. Galdron’s recent nervousness and Everard’s thoughtful solicitousness took on a sinister cast, and then there was Leinahre, urging him to surrender, and Kastyn, who he should arrest—well, he’d tend to it when he got back from the raid. At least he trusted Ellaeva to be who and what she said she was.

  Or can I?

  What better way, after all, for a Rahmyrrim to manipulate him, than by po
sing as Ciotach an Bhais?

  Lyram dropped lightly to the ground outside the old wall. Turning, he reached up to help Ellaeva down, but she landed on the grass beside him with a slight thump without taking his hand. A small smile tugged at the corners of her mouth in the faint moonlight.

  “This way.” Turning the outstretched arm into a broad wave, he darted the short distance from the wall to the cover of the sparse woods and crouched in the shadow of a thick-boled tree.

  On the inside of the wall, thirty men in dark leather and mail stripped of all insignia waited for the signal.

  Ellaeva squatted next to Lyram, her eyes scanning the darkness. For the raid, she’d divested herself of the bulky robes in favour of a man’s shirt and trews with layers of armour ending in a black cuir bouilli and iron plate harness. It fit her too perfectly to be anything but her own. Even in the armour, she was surprisingly lithe.

  “There.” She pointed.

  Lyram forced himself to follow her pointing finger. They’d come in from the opposite end of the camp to where Lyram had crossed the night before, as far from the old gate as possible. That way, if Sayella realised he’d infiltrated her camp, hopefully security was still lax on this side of camp. Certainly more guards were posted here than he’d seen last night. If they were alert... Well, dead men told no tales.

  Not far away, a sentry leaned against a tree in the darkness. Lyram scoured the night, searching for the next man along, but the moon had set since he first scouted their positions, and the sentries blended into the deep blackness of the night. He frowned at one shadowed shape, and nudged Ellaeva.

  She turned to follow his gaze, lips pursing as she considered the shape that might be a sentry, then nodded.

  “And here,” she whispered, pointing further along again.

  He squinted, but saw nothing. How did she see so far in the night? Another gift of her goddess, probably.

  “You take that one,” he said. “And the middle one.”

  She stood and glided away into the shadows on noiseless feet. He watched her go, his eyes following the curve of her legs and buttocks in the breeches.

  He wrenched his eyes away, cheeks burning.

  It’s a sin to think such things of the Death Priestess, I’m sure. At the very least, she’d kill him for such thoughts. And even if she was the right woman, which she wasn’t, this was not the time or place.

  Loosening his dagger in its scabbard, he crept towards the first sentry, sliding around behind the tree. The Gallowglaigh’s head nodded forward, drowsing.

  Smoothly, he reached around and cut the man’s throat.

  The man jerked, eyes flashing open, but the blade had opened his windpipe as well as the artery and he had no breath to scream. Only a low gargling noise emerged. Blood jetted from the severed blood vessel, and the sentry’s hands clutched at the wound, trying to stem the blood flow with already weakening hands. He sagged to the ground, his eyes lifeless.

  Lyram imitated the shrill cry of a nighthawk, turned and headed deeper into the camp. The men would come over the wall in response, then split up into pairs to make their way to the wagons on the far side of the camp. There they’d hitch up the horses, loose the rest of the remounts to create as much bedlam as possible, and drive the wagons back to the castle as fast as they could, praying they didn’t break a wheel axle in the dark. And that assumed everything else went to plan.

  If it didn’t, they’d all end the night in shallow graves.

  He shrugged that bleak thought off and searched the camp around him as he wound his way amongst snoring mercenaries. He and Ellaeva were supposed to meet his men at the wagons—but she could do that alone, whereas only he could question Bradlin. Whether she followed him in order to protect him, or whether she stuck to the plan, might tell him something about her loyalties.

  He made straight towards the pavilions, striding between the fires and the forms of sleeping mercenaries as though he belonged. The hour was later than when he’d visited last night, well after midnight, and most of the mercenaries slept wrapped in their cloaks by the banked fires.

  The sentries still stood outside the tent, though. Given their erect posture, they weren’t Gallowglaighs, though they were garbed like them. They were probably guards of Bradlin’s own, brought from home for his protection.

  Lyram boldly strode up to the tent, already armed with a name overheard the night before. “Report from Holbrook.”

  “His lordship’s sleeping,” the guard on the left said, his speech more polished than that of the other mercenaries Lyram had spoken to.

  Lyram shrugged and turned to go. “I’ll report to Sayella then.”

  “No, wait.” The guard on the right ducked inside the tent.

  Lyram waited, arms folded. Bradlin likely had tenuous control of the mercenaries, and his greatest need would be information. If reports came to him only via Sayella, she could withhold critical details from him.

  The guard reappeared. “You can go in. Leave your weapons here.”

  Lyram unbuckled his baldric and dropped it on the ground next to the tent canvas. He ducked his head to enter.

  With only a brazier for light, darkness shrouded the inside of the tent. A shadowed figure sat on a camp stool, rubbing at his eyes, his mouth stretching wide in a jaw-breaking yawn. Lyram fought the urge to mirror it, his jaw cracking from the strain. The man stretched.

  “Report, man.” Bradlin’s voice, without a doubt, and he would recognise Lyram’s easily.

  Lyram stooped, drew a knife from his boot, and lunged cross the tent in the same fluid movement. Bradlin’s eyes widened and Lyram seized his hair. The viscount’s neck stretched back under the pressure until the tendons stood out. The point of Lyram’s knife rested in the hollow of his throat.

  “Who killed her?” He kept his voice low. The guards might hear the hum of conversation, but if they discerned his words, they’d raise the alarm.

  “What are you doing here?” Bradlin’s eyes rolled like a spooked horse, trying to see Lyram crouched behind him. “How are you here? The gate is guarded, sentries along the wall—”

  Lyram jerked on his hair, and Bradlin cut off with a muffled grunt.

  “Who killed her? Drault or Traeburhn. I know it was one of them. I saw you, I know I did. Cleaning up at Traeburhn’s request, like you do. But I got to her before you made her disappear.”

  “Aharris, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Bradlin’s voice was level, but a note of strain hummed below the surface.

  “No, you’re just besieging a castle I’m commanding because you felt like a spot of treason.” Lyram yanked on his hair, eliciting a small squeal, and pushed the point of the dagger into flesh until a ruby drop of blood welled at the tip.

  Bradlin squirmed, his face gone pasty.

  “Hush,” Lyram soothed. “If the guards hear, things will get ugly.”

  “I didn’t know the business of these mercenaries. I’m here only to make them an offer of employment over the summer. I swear!”

  Lyram dug the point in and carved a thin line in Bradlin’s neck, roughly L-shaped. The viscount’s breath whistled harshly in the confines of the tent. “Try again. Drault or Traeburhn. I’m not interested in anything else you have to say.”

  “The duke! It was the duke. Well, he ended her life, but Drault doomed her. He saw her riding to meet you and thought she’d make fine sport. He took her down with an arrow. I’ve never seen Traeburhn so spitting mad—said your wife was credible enough to ruin the prince, so Drault said... Drault said...”

  The words had tumbled from his lips like water from a burst dam but now he bit his tongue. His breath came as hard and fast as a blown horse, his chest heaving.

  Lyram leaned close to Bradlin’s ear. “So Drault said?”

  Bradlin squeezed his eyes closed. His lips moved, but no words emerged, except perhaps a jumbled prayer.

  “Drault said?” Lyram prodded him again.

  “If she... if she had to die, he might as we
ll have some fun first.”

  Ellaeva stared down at the sentry’s corpse. The throat gaped from a knife slice, and blood made black by the night fanned across the dead man’s chest.

  There was no sign of Lyram.

  Was she being over-suspicious? She chewed the inside of her cheek. Would she find him at the wagons, or did he give the signal and then run off on some personal errand?

  She dropped the bundle from her shoulder and unrolled it. The great cloak unfurled to reveal a pair of black leather gloves, which she drew on to hide the tell-tale tattoo on the back of her hand. Despite tying her hair up in a knot, she was still obviously a woman. While some of the Gallowglaighs were women, they numbered less than a hundred, and most of them were fair-haired sword-dancers from Dayhl. A strange Tembran woman was likely to be noticed, so she swung the cloak around her shoulders and pulled the hood up, turning her into a shapeless, faceless shadow.

  Drawing the cloak closed around her, she headed into the camp. Most of the mercenaries lay around banked fires, the embers glowing dimly in the deep darkness of the hour after midnight. A few snored, and she studied their chests as she passed, measuring the slow rise and fall of sleeping breaths.

  Who was behind this siege? Oh, Prince Drault without a doubt, but Zaheva’s death led to the events that put Lyram here in Caisteal Aingeal. If the Rahmyrrim came with Lyram from the capital, as seemed increasingly more likely, were Zaheva’s death and Drault’s attack parts of the same web?

  Coincidences made fools of people all too often.

  Ahead, a wagon resolved out of the shadows. To its left, more were drawn up in ordered lines that spoke of a quartermaster’s organisation. To the right, away from the wagons, two large shapes hulked within an open circle of space. Glancing around to check for awake mercenaries, she walked over.

  Canvas covered the shapes, so she circled around the other side, out of sight of anyone in the camp. She lifted the canvas and sucked in a breath. Siege towers. Still under construction and likely several weeks from completion, but if the besiegers filled in the moat sufficiently, these would change everything. A few more weeks and there might be enemy soldiers inside the walls.