The Barbed Coil

by J. V. Jones

  Angeline stared at the door, stunned. She was so amazed that she hadn’t been caught out that she could barely take it all in. Snowy wetting the bed?

  As if aware that his name was being thought of, Snowy waddled out from under the bed. He looked about as smug as it was possible for a dog to look. Tail up and wagging, he scampered over to his mistress’s side.

  No-good dog. No-good dog.

  F I F T E E N

  D awn could offer a thousand shades of gray, and in his time Ravis of Burano had seen all of them. As they walked the horses alongside the limestone cliff, the sky was the color of charcoal. A thin line of silver cut across the horizon, illuminating clouds of ash, trees of lead, and hills of naked slate. Even the mist was gray. It swirled around the horses’ fetlocks, dampening all that it touched and most of what it didn’t. Ravis could feel it as a dank greasy film next to his skin, between his thighs and his horse, and deep within his lungs. It was everywhere yet nowhere, and there was no way to stop it. At least a man could put on a cloak against the rain.

  “The town is just over that rise,” hissed Camron of Thorn. “We could be there in less than an hour.”

  Ravis nodded. For the past two hours words had been kept to a minimum. They were in the valley just northwest of Thorn. It had taken them two full nights and a day to reach here, and although most men had slept for less than five hours during that time, none were drowsy. Even now, in the thin mists and subdued grays of predawn, all were alert, sitting forward on their mounts, eyes darting from side to side, hands never far from the hilts of their swords.

  Two men rode half a league ahead of the rest. Trained scouts brought in from Istania, they rode horses whose vocal cords had been cut at birth, lest they whicker at an inopportune moment and give away their riders’ position. Minutes earlier Ravis had noticed a circle of hoofprints on the trail marking where the scouts had stopped and dismounted. A single snippet of leather discarded on the side of the path was enough to tell Ravis that they had stopped for the express purpose of binding their horses’ hooves with cloth. They were getting nervous. And when an Istanian scout got nervous it was wise to be nervous oneself.

  Ravis reined in his horse. The gelding had been straying away from the shadows cast by the cliff, following its natural inclination to walk in the lightest possible path. Ravis patted its neck, glanced over at the horizon, then checked the looseness of his sword in its scabbard for the eighth time in less than an hour.

  “We’ll stop soon,” he whispered to Camron. “Wait for the scouts to report back.”

  Camron shook his head. He was riding barely a neck in front of Ravis. The two horses were so close, their barrels touched from time to time. “We’ve only got an hour before daylight. We can’t afford to wait.”

  We can’t afford to take any chances, Ravis thought, but didn’t say it.

  Something moved in the foliage to the left of the path. A pair of geese took to the air, their undersides lit by the broadening light on the horizon, their wings beating against the mist.

  Ravis glanced over at Camron. “That could have been one of Izgard’s harras lying in wait.” As he spoke, he felt the mist curl along his tongue. It tasted of things from the earth. “We need to know what sort of forces we’re dealing with before we approach the town. Izgard could have two hundred men stationed there.”

  “I don’t see why he would,” Camron snapped. “Everyone is dead. The animals have been slaughtered, the crops have been burned. Why in God’s name would he set men to guard a derelict town?”

  Ravis could name several reasons why Izgard would set men to guard Thorn, yet he chose to disclose only the most obvious one. “It’s his territory now. From what we’ve seen so far, I’d say this marks his deepest thrust into Rhaize, and I tell you now, he won’t be prepared to give it up without a fight.”

  Camron’s face was a gray mask against the cliff side. His grip on his reins was too tight. In the quarter-light of dawn his knuckles showed up whiter than his eyes. Seeing them, Ravis knew anything he said would be ignored: Camron heard only the cries of the slaughtered inside his head.

  Kicking his gelding, Ravis rode on. The light level was increasing steadily, and the horses responded to the dawn by becoming restless. Behind him, he heard a gust of nickering and blowing. Tack jingled as a fretful horse pulled against his reins and another shook out his mane. The gray mist thinned. No longer steaming clouds, it formed itself into thin wisps, then glided toward the earth.

  Ravis chewed on his scar. He didn’t like any of this: riding blindly into enemy territory, not stopping to hear the report from the scouts, not knowing what, if any, forces they might run into. They didn’t even have a proper purpose—not one they agreed upon, at least. The only thing a force this size was good for was spying or sabotage, and judging from the look on Camron’s face and his white-knuckled grip on his reins, he plainly wasn’t interested in either of those. He was spoiling for a fight.

  And knowing Izgard, he would probably get one.

  Ravis stood on his stirrups and looked back along the column. Beyond the four dozen mounted men, deep in the shadows perhaps three-quarters of a league behind the main party, rode the mercenaries and archers supplied by Segwin the Ney. Camron hadn’t wanted them riding with him—none of his men did—and although Ravis knew he could have forced Camron’s hand in this matter, he’d chosen not to. The mercenaries were exactly where he wanted them: bringing up the rear.

  Wheeling round in his saddle, Ravis spotted a smoke trail breaking the line of the horizon ahead. A second later he tasted woodsmoke in his mouth. Woodsmoke and something else.

  “Someone’s cooking breakfast,” hissed Camron.

  Ravis nodded. Though in truth he wasn’t sure if it was breakfast at all. Glancing down at the path, he searched for the hoofprints of the scouts’ horses. The light was growing brighter by the minute, and the two pairs of hoofprints, softened and distorted by the thick cloth covering that now bound them, were clearly visible to the eye. Seeing them, Ravis felt only a small measure of relief.

  He couldn’t shake off the feeling they were walking into a trap.

  They had come within a league of what was, presumably, an occupied town without seeing any signs of soldiers: no campfires, no camp waste, no lookouts, no tracks. And now a single line of smoke had mysteriously appeared on the horizon, and even as Ravis guessed it was a foil to lure them away from the path, Camron pulled on his reins and turned his horse toward it. The rest of the party followed without a word.

  Ravis held his position, letting the men pass him. He heard their breath coming sharp and fast, saw faces slick with sweat and backs held so straight, they had to be in pain. Plate armor did that to a man: wound him up in a tight metal case where every move was weighted, every breath was forced, and each bead of sweat had nowhere to go and nothing to do but form a damp haze against the skin. It was cool now, but the clouds were clearing and the earth was sucking back the mist, and it was only a matter of hours before the sun would be up and shining. By noon Camron’s men would be steaming at the neck.

  They had made a short, cheerless camp through the darkest hours of the night. No fires lit, no voices raised, no tents to cordon off the mist. Some men had chosen to sleep, most had sat in silence polishing their swords, waiting for the signal to strap on their armor and move. The mercenaries and archers had made a separate camp on the far side of the limestone cliffs. Ravis had ridden over to them. Handing around flasks of berriac still warm from being pressed against his horse’s flank, he had run through his last minute instructions. By the time he had returned to the main party it was time to up camp and head east.

  Hand slipping from his reins to his sword, Ravis scanned the area ahead as he waited for the rest of Camron’s men to pass him by. The source of the smoke was unclear: it could be coming from before, or beyond, the ridge. In the shifting gray light of dawn, distances were hard to judge.

  Briefly, just before he turned his horse to follow Camron, Ravis g
lanced back at the limestone cliff, his gaze traveling upward to the rocky brow above. If he were setting a trap, he’d have lookouts positioned there.

  Nothing met his eyes but chunks of jagged rock and bands of thinning clouds. Shrugging, he kicked his horse into motion and followed the rest of the men from the path.

  Tessa worked the pounce into the vellum with a small wooden block. Even so, she managed to get the chalk-and-bread-crumb mixture under her fingernails. Emith had offered to do the job for her, arguing that preparing the parchment to take the ink was the work of an assistant, not a scribe, but Tessa had refused his help. This was her first real illumination, and it seemed important to do as much as she could herself.

  She and Emith had stayed up most of the night going over all the rules and proper procedures for illumination. The rules seemed strangely primitive to Tessa: plant forms and animals forms must be kept separate at all times, every line within an animal pattern must turn out to be part of an animal, and no matter how fantastically elongated a creature became as its body formed a latticework of knots across a page, its various parts had to adhere to the rules of nature: two eyes, four legs, one tail. Plant forms had to be seen to come from a source, like the ground or a pot, and they could not trail arbitrarily around the page, unattached to the earth. Colors had to be chosen from nature; certain forms had to be mirrored on both sides of the page and others repeated a set number of times.

  Tessa had sat in silence while Emith told her all he knew: nodding occasionally, repeating things back to herself in her head, concentrating hard on all the details.

  At some point during the night the tallow had gone out, and as neither she nor Emith had made a move to relight a fresh pat, they had spent several hours in the dark. As Tessa listened to Emith speaking through the darkness, her eyes conjured up the lines and forms of Deveric’s illuminations. Against a black backdrop, she saw green spirals, yellow ribbons, gold coils, and silver cord. Her life was caught up in those angles and curves, and seeing them there, in the shadows long past midnight, made Tessa more determined than ever to draw out the truth.

  She had to know why she had been brought here.

  “Do you want to put a stain over the parchment before you begin?” Emith asked, his voice gentle, as if he had known her thoughts were elsewhere. “Or are you going to put the pigment straight onto the pounce?”

  Tessa looked down at the even, now almost white surface of the vellum. The chalk and breadcrumbs had raised the nap, making it ready to catch and absorb the ink. Emith had ground the pounce coarsely, and the rough grains of chalk had irritated her skin. All her fingertips were red. One was bleeding.

  As she stared at the parchment, its perfect unmarred whiteness began to look too clean and new, like a child’s coloring book waiting to be filled in with colored crayon. She needed a more personal beginning for her first illumination. The ink should burn into a color of her choosing. It suddenly seemed important to exert her control over every element on the page.

  Glancing up through the window to the broadening dawn beyond, Tessa felt the skin on her scalp tighten minutely. A headachelike pressure pulsed in her temples as she gazed out at the dull expanse of sky.

  “Gray,” she said softly after a moment. “The vellum should be stained ash gray.”

  It took them forty minutes to track down the source of the smoke. They rode through row after row of scorched vines, their charred branches rising from the earth like monstrous many-legged insects, and then down along a dried-up stream bed and through its accompanying maze of reeds.

  Camron knew every rock, bush, ridge, goat path, and cattle path they crossed. He knew the lay of the land, the colors of the trees in full sunlight, and the quality of wine produced from each particular row of vines. This was his home, and as he rode past torched dairy farms and vineyards, deserted fields and decaying animal carcasses, a hard core of rage hardened in his gut. Izgard of Garizon had destroyed his homeland, his friends, his family, and his life, leaving him nothing and no one to fight for but his memories and himself.

  The column of smoke came from a rocky outcropping at the far side of a narrow valley. Chunks of limestone broke through the thin soil around the slopes, and pine trees ringed the area, creating a barrier between the valley and the dawn. Belts of dim gray light banded the valley as the sun, still below the horizon, sent ghost light filtering through the trees. The ground underfoot was hard.

  Strangely enough, the smell of woodsmoke and cooked meat had receded as they drew nearer to the source. Perhaps the breeze was blowing in the opposite direction. Yet when Camron looked up he saw the smoke rose in a level line, indicating little or no wind.

  Briefly, Ravis’ words of some fifteen minutes earlier crossed Camron’s mind. “Take a look around. We’re heading from high ground to low ground, from an open road to an enclosed valley. This is a trap, and we’re walking straight into it like fools.”

  Glancing up at the fringe of rocks and trees enclosing the valley, Camron had to admit there was something to what Ravis said. He only wished it mattered more than it did. The truth was he had followed the smoke knowing it could be a trap. He was in Thorn country now. He had come here to fight, and Ravis could advise, plan, and strategize from dawn to dusk, yet it would do little but postpone the inevitable.

  People had died here: good, honest men and women who had loved their country, respected the land, reared God-fearing children, and taken pride in their work. And somehow to approach the place of their death like frightened clerics at dawn, clinging to shadows provided by cliff sides, accompanied by foreguards, rear guards, and mercenaries, seemed like sacrilege. The people of Thorn deserved more than that. They deserved a tribute from brave fighting men.

  “Over here!” came a cry, breaking the silence of dawn. “I’ve found the fire.”

  Camron looked ahead at the dense cluster of rocks and bushes that formed the far side of the valley. Although he hadn’t been aware that any of his knights had ridden ahead of him, he took a grim pleasure in discovering that at least one had. He was not the only man who needed to fight.

  A sharp intake of breath, like a hiss, echoed around the valley. A muffled thud followed seconds later. Hearing it, Camron kicked his horse into a canter and rode toward the rocks.

  The column of knights was close at his heels. No one was concerned with silence anymore, and tack jangled, horses whickered, plate armor cracked, swords rang from scabbards, and curses were spat into the air. Camron felt his chest muscles tighten. His mouth was perfectly dry. As he fell under the shadow of the rocks, Ravis’ words were like dust in his mind’s eye. This is a trap, and we’re walking straight into it like fools. . . . Almost unaware of what he was doing, Camron shook his head. No, not fools. Brave fighting men.

  Even as that thought brought him comfort, his eyes circled the valley’s slopes, searching for signs of movement.

  They found the knight’s horse roaming loose by a thick heel of limestone. The smoke, little more than a wiry gray line now, rose from the center of a crown of rocks. They would have to dismount to reach it. As Camron swung his feet down from his horse, he glanced behind him, looking for Ravis’ face in the crowd. He half expected the man to speak up, telling him that it was pure madness to dismount now, while they still didn’t know what they were dealing with. No words of warning came, however, and although Camron searched, he could find no sign of Ravis.

  A dozen men dismounted along with Camron, unbuckling shields from leather pouches, sliding daggers from sheaths, and adjusting grips on their swords. One man whispered a prayer. Another man tapped Camron on the shoulder and begged to be the first to go in ahead of the troop to check for dangers.

  “No,” Camron said, trying to find words to sum up the way he felt at that moment. “We must act and be as one in this.”

  The man nodded and fell in by his side.

  Camron turned to the remaining troop on horseback. “Spread out around the rocks and keep watch until we return. No man is to ride so
far that he cannot see his companions at his front and his back.” He waited until all men nodded. Looking into their faces, Camron realized that during the last few minutes the collective mood had changed. The troop was no longer merely watchful, it was ready. By unspoken consent they had decided the time was fast approaching when they would fight.

  “May God watch over us,” Camron said, his throat aching as his gaze passed from man to man, “and see fit to lend us His strength and His light.”

  The words were a simple enough prayer, spoken by Thorn farmers every morning in the field, whispered by Thorn women to their children every night; but as he said it, Camron heard it spoken through his father’s voice. A blessing from the grave.

  Abruptly, he turned from the troop. He couldn’t trust himself to say more. As if aware of his leader’s mood, the young knight who had begged to go alone into the rocks gave the order to move on.

  Camron headed in the direction of the smoke. Almost daybreak now, the light changed by the minute, altering shadows and perspectives. Someone called out to the knight who had found the fire. There was no reply.

  Up close the rocks were larger than Camron had first thought. They towered above him, blocking the view ahead and casting dark shadows on already dark ground. Jagged splinters of stone poked through the earth like spikes, and Camron was forced to watch his footing, lest the soles be ripped from his boots. Somewhere in the distance water dripped onto rock. Hearing the sound, a memory slid into place in Camron’s mind: he had been here before. Twenty years ago, when he was just a boy. The Valley of Broken Stones.

  It had been midwinter and the snow was thigh deep. A sudden storm had isolated the entire flock of Long Angrim’s sheep, and everyone in Thorn—from Camron and his father to Sterry the clock maker and Bowleg the village drunk—turned out to look for them. It wasn’t done as a great favor, it was just what people did in the mountains: looked out for everyone else. Of the three dozen sheep that were missing, thirty were swiftly found, huddled together in a high pasture; their bleats drew the search party to them in less than an hour. As the morning wore on, the search was extended westward onto rockier terrain. Four sheep were spied high atop a snow-covered cliff, and another was found, scared and disoriented, skirting the banks of a frozen lake.