Queen of the North (Book 3) (Songs of the Scorpion)

by James A. West

  Algar abruptly nodded. “I’ll do what I must.”

  There came a rustling, Algar’s face vanished, and then Jathen was left to sit peering at darkness swirling inside his seeing glass.

  Chapter 8

  The celebration had escaped the common room of the Cracked Flagon, but still roared up and down the snowy streets of Valdar. Shouts, drunken songs, and laughter seeped through inn’s walls, along with drafts of cold night air. Queen Erryn had feasted her men, but now she was grateful for the relative quiet. Her mind had a will to wander without General Aedran or his captains bothering her with details of the coming march.

  Sipping wine that she didn’t need, it struck her that a queen ought to have a bard. She laughed at the idea of having some grinning fool trailing her about, spouting clever turns of phrase.

  Breyon shot her a questioning look from across the common room. She shrugged, and he went back to pacing. He was so silent that she had almost forgotten he was there. Crackling flames danced on the hearth, casting his crookbacked shadow across wooden paneling and racks of antlers. The Cracked Flagon was not much in the way of a keep, and its common room sorely lacked the majesty of a proper throne room—or, for that matter, a proper throne—but it was the best Valdar had to offer its first sovereign.

  “’Tis not right for you to leave,” Breyon said abruptly, his tone scolding. He showed her about as much respect as General Aedran and the rest of the Prythians, which was to say very little.

  That didn’t trouble Erryn anymore, for why should anyone show deference to someone who had not earned it? That was the way of the fat and pampered, those born to power, those who had never earned gold and glory with steel, blood, and sweat. The way she intended to win support harkened back to ancient times, before men had plopped their arses into cushioned chairs and settled pretty crowns upon their heads. As it stood, she didn’t even have a crown. But I will have one, and I will forge it with my own hands.

  When Breyon cleared his throat, Erryn turned her mind to what he had said. “I must leave … unless you want to have a weak queen who points and commands, but otherwise never lifts a finger to achieve her desires?” She had spoken slowly to keep her words from slurring, and felt confident she was hiding her drunkenness fairly well.

  Breyon mumbled under his breath as he moved to the feast table—not a proper High Table, but three rickety tables pushed together. Her steward searched the confusion of platters, wooden cups, and trenchers. He ripped a drumstick off a decimated chicken, and took a bite with his few remaining teeth. By the time he tossed the bone into the fire, grease shone on his whiskered chin. Wiping his fingers across the chest of his tunic, a ratty thing of patched brown wool, he set to pacing again. Each clumping step swayed hanks of oily gray hair around his long face.

  Watching him plod one way, whirl, and come back, made it seem like the room was spinning more than ever. With a groan, Erryn reclined her chair, eyes lidded. She tossed one leather-clad leg up on the table, her foot kicking a bowl of half-eaten stew to the stone floor with a dull clatter.

  A pair of wiry-haired dogs crept from the shadows toward the mess. They snarled and snapped at one another, and the larger dog gave ground without much of a fight, its tail tucked between its hind legs. The smaller one watched its beaten adversary with ears pricked, then set to lapping up the stew.

  “Is that all it takes to win,” she asked, “be it a battle, or a crown, or a bowl of stew?”

  “Eh?” Breyon had returned to the tables, and now held a heel of dark bread. One edge was soggy with wine. The steward took a bite so big he could not close his mouth.

  Erryn waved her hand at the smaller dog. “To win followers, wars, whatever else you desire, is courage all you need to beat greater strength?”

  Breyon squinted at her, soppy breadcrumbs littering his chest. “Eh?”

  “Have the gods struck you deaf, you old fool?”

  Breyon swallowed, his throat working convulsively. He managed to get the food down without strangling himself. He looked at what was left of the bread in his hand, made a face, and tossed it aside. “Courage? Strength? What do I know of such things? Till you come along, I was naught but a humble woodcutter and sometime gaoler for Lord Sanouk.”

  “The dogs,” Erryn insisted, needing to hear from someone, other than the voices in her mind, that success could be won, if you had courage enough.

  Breyon glanced around, baffled. “Dogs? What’ve dogs got to do with anything? They wallow in the shit of lesser beasts, eat their own vomit quick as they gobble what you toss ‘em. Gods protect you if you look to the way of dogs for answers to anything.”

  Erryn exhaled a gloomy sigh. If she wanted promises and hope, false or otherwise, she was not about to get them from Breyon. That left the truth. “You said it was not right for me to leave. Why?”

  “Well,” he said slowly, “who’s to lead Valdar, if not the queen?”

  “Until I return, you’ll lead Valdar. I named you steward, you accepted, and that’s what stewards do. I also leave with you two thousand strong Prythians to secure my holdings. With winter nipping our arses,” she added, trying for a humorous tone, “most likely you’ll spend your days making sure the miners aren’t pilfering any gold they take out of the mountains, and your nights drinking wine and dandling whores on your bony knees.”

  Face wooden, Breyon turned back to the fire. “Never led anyone but myself, an’ mayhap an ox or two.”

  “And you’ve done well,” Erryn said, aware that instead of receiving assurances, she was doing all the consoling. Maybe, she considered, that was part of being a good queen.

  “I’ve you to thank for most all of it.”

  “As I recall, you played a part in sacking Fortress Hilan—a large part. I dare say we’d not have won, if you hadn’t led your woodsmen friends to join me, Loro, and Lady Nesaea’s Maidens.”

  He shrugged off the praise. “Lord Sanouk was a cruel bastard—evil, if the stories of what he did to those folk down in Hilan’s catacombs are true—and he deserved what he got. Could be that the gods lent me a bit of strength and wits, just to bring him down a notch.”

  Lord Sanouk had been brought far lower than a notch, Erryn considered. He was a corpse. And, even if it had been Rathe’s hand that made him so, the Scorpion of Cerrikoth would not have had that opportunity if not for the efforts of others, many who had perished that night.

  “The gods might’ve played their part in helping you,” Erryn allowed, “but as I see it, you still have strength and wits enough to secure Valdar while I’m away.”

  Breyon shook his head. “I’m just a woodcutter.”

  “No!” Erryn said fiercely, sitting up straight and jabbing a finger at him. “You’re Steward of Valdar. If you don’t start acting the part, I’ll have off your manhood, and feed it to yonder dogs.”

  He cracked a gap-toothed grin. “I believe you would at that.”

  “If I cannot keep my word, I’ll not make much of a queen.”

  He bobbed his head in agreement. “Aye, true enough.” A moment later, he grew serious. “You have a care in those accursed mountains.”

  “As long as you promise to have a care here.”

  Instead of agreeing, Breyon faced the common room’s north wall and raised his gaze toward the ceiling. His wizened face fell slowly, as if he could see beyond the planks and timbers to the Gyntors and all the dark mysteries that crept and crawled amidst their snowy crags, things that could drive a man to madness before devouring him. “May the gods keep you safe,” he whispered.

  In the days that followed, Erryn had little time to contemplate the gods or their protection.

  Chapter 9

  General Aedran shouted into the frigid gale, but the howling winds ripped his words to shreds, and tumbled them away with gleeful menace.

  Hunkered as deep as she could get within her hooded wolfskin cloak, Erryn sat her saddle wishing she were still warm and drunk in the Cracked Flagon. “What’re you on about?” she shout
ed back.

  Aedran angled his horse closer to hers and leaned in. “We’ll get through!” His blue eyes burned with irrational confidence. Crusted ice hung from the deep red stubble on his chin, and clods of snow dangled from the fur lining his hood. He looked like a bear risen from its den at the first hint of spring.

  Erryn nodded, too cold and weary to contend with the storm. She could not remember the last time she had been able to feel her fingers or toes, but her arse felt like frozen slabs of iron encased in the icy wool and leather of her trousers. The rest of her burned and tingled by turns from the constant touch of frost.

  She looked from Aedran to the trail cutting through gorge around them. At dawn, sheer rock walls on either side, hung with beards of ice, had reached high to embrace a pale blue sky. Now the storm concealed everything beyond a few paces in screaming white.

  Up ahead, she could just make out the shuffling column of Prythians beating a path through the snow. Eight hundred soldiers, fully three-fourths of the men she had brought with her, walked ten abreast on wide snowshoes. The front ranks wielded flat-bladed shovels. Laboring to a Prythian chant, they scooped the snow and flung it aside, creating berms along either side of the path. Those who trudged behind the first ranks carried stout poles attached to rounded squares of flat iron. Working to the same monotonous chant, the tampers beat down the snow in time with their shoveling brethren, creating a lumpy road. To gain a handful of leagues each day, they worked from first light to well after dark.

  Behind Erryn came the rest of the Prythians, those who had worked the shovels on the first day, the iron tampers the second, and on the third day had earned the far easier task of guiding the supply train of four hundred blanketed horses, each harnessed to a sledge heaped with all the army would need to cross the Gyntors. All they would need, that was, if they could cross the mountains in the abysmally short time Aedran had allowed….

  “We take longer than a fortnight,” Aedran had warned before setting out, “we will die.” To this, the Prythians had beat their chests with their fists, and roared a challenge to the mountains, as well as to the gods and demons who claimed those crags as their home.

  What lives here? Erryn wondered, because thinking of that was better than wondering if her nipples might turn black and fall off from the cold. She had heard many grim tales, but had never believed them. Shadenmok hunted the forested foothills around Hilan and Valdar, a race of she-devils that took the seed of dead men into their wombs and gave birth to Hilyoth, a hellish beast with the form of a hound and the head of an ape. Most folk believed far worse lurked in the high vales of the Gyntors.

  “The Gyntors frighten most folk who live in their shadow,” Aedran told her and Breyon. “But don’t fear. We Prythians are born to snow and cold, and our mountains are higher and far more merciless. The elders among my people say the Gray Horns of Pryth are the children of the gods of war and lust, fire and lightning, and that from the craggy loins of those mountains crawled their feebler children—the Gyntors.”

  Breyon’s bulging eyes scanned the mountains in question. Their crowns, unusually free of clouds, had been made into ragged pink teeth by the light of the rising sun. If he had anything to say, the fear in him closed his throat.

  “Nonsense,” Erryn declared, trying to imagine gods of stone rutting with each other to make what … rocklings?

  “Perhaps,” Aedran answered blandly. “Either way, we know many paths across the Gyntors, and also the safest routes around places where men once lived, but where only the dead walk now. Make no mistake, it will be a hard go, for where winter winks and smiles at us here in Valdar, it rages in the high passes.” A dark, taunting gleam came into his eyes then. “Of course, those of my kindred who never returned home are out there still, frozen where they fell, or naught but lumps of dung shat out by whatever ate them.” He roared laughter at that.

  Erryn managed a nervous smile that felt like a grimace. “Can you promise to get us across?”

  “Aye,” Aedran said, all jesting gone. “I don’t want to freeze, and neither do I care to fill the gullet of some filthy beast … or worse. We’ll follow only the lowest valleys, which are nothing to fear, if you don’t mind a bit of cold….”

  A bit of cold, Erryn thought now, squinting against the icy gale. What had decided her before setting out, and what kept her from ordering the column to turn around now, was that if they succeeded in striking Cerrikoth and its sovereign in this most unexpected way, she would never again have to worry about King Nabar and his armies. There would be other enemies, there always were, but Nabar was the most immediate threat. Besides, defeating him in the way she intended would make her a legend—and legends had a way of giving pause to any foe.

  Yet first, her and her army must survive the crossing.

  ~ ~ ~

  The storm grew fiercer every day they traveled. When Erryn lay in her billowing tent after marching all day, wrapped in a dozen blankets and still shivering, her breath turning into a sparkling mist in the light of an oil lamp, she saw herself crossing the mountains and entering the Iron Marches, said to be a great and frozen wasteland beyond the Gyntors. None of the tales of those lands ended with smiles.

  One morning when Aedran came to rouse her from her blankets, she asked him about their destination. He cast a look over his shoulder and watched the men preparing to march, then crawled deeper into the tent, and closed the flap behind him. A shadow seemed to smother some of the normal brightness of his eyes.

  “The Iron Marches are nothing compared to these blasted mountains,” he said, sounding nervous for the first time since she had met him. Always with Aedran it was charge ahead, laugh in the face of death, and die well. Hearing that hint of unease troubled and angered Erryn.

  “You said the Gyntors were the lesser children of the Gray Horns, and nothing to fear.”

  Aedran scraped nuggets of ice from the short beard he had started growing. He had to sit hunched over, but his head still brushed the top of the tent. “Aye, I did say that.” He flashed a rueful smirk. “And I hold that my words were true … but the Gyntors are often savaged by the most fearsome storms I’ve ever seen.”

  “Maybe if you’d admitted that,” Erryn said hotly, “I’d not have marched my army until spring.”

  “By then there wouldn’t be much reason to march anywhere, let alone to the Iron Marches.”

  Erryn had been wondering about that, as well. “You also claimed we could trust the report—”

  “Mayhap I left out the part about how terrible the storms are,” Aedran interrupted, “but I don’t abide with scaring folk for no good reason. Weather is just weather, sometimes bad, sometimes not, but still just weather. As to the doings of King Nabar, I did not deceive you, nor did the man who sent the message—a man I trust more than any other upon the face of the world.”

  “Trust who you will,” she said, “but I want to know why King Nabar—a weak man and a weaker ruler, by all accounts—would act with such boldness?” She realized she should have asked about that long before now, but queenly thinking was new to her. After her father, a woodcutter, had felled a tree on himself, her mother had died of a wasting sickness, Erryn was left on her own to find hot meals and comfortable places to sleep until the day she named herself queen.

  Aedran laughed, a deep rich sound that warmed her from the inside out, and brought a flush to her cheeks. “As to Nabar’s way of thinking, it could be the woman he married put a boot to his arse.”

  “Mirith of Qairennor?” Erryn knew only that the former princess, and all of Qairennor, had been Cerrikoth’s enemy not a year gone. After the death of King Tazzim, Nabar had taken his father’s throne and ended the long war between Qairennor and Cerrikoth by taking to wife Princess Mirith. “What reason would she have to spur her new husband to such a course?”

  “Many of my brothers who’ve sold their blades to the Crown of Cerrikoth all agree that Mirith is a very ambitious woman.”

  “That doesn’t explain what King Na
bar and his new wife are up to.”

  “I couldn’t say,” Aedran admitted. “Highborn do things for their own reasons, and being as they’re highborn, they don’t often feel the need to explain themselves. Rarer still is the fool who questions them. All that need concern you is that King Nabar is acting the fool, and in doing so, he’s given you an opportunity to destroy him.” When she failed to respond, he added, “We’re nearly halfway across the mountains. If you want to surrender and turn around, now is the time to tell me.”

  Erryn’s nostrils flared in anger. “Who said anything about surrendering?”

  “No one … directly.”

  Erryn flung aside her blankets. “I may not know what Nabar intends, but that doesn’t change my plans against him. We go on.”

  “As you will,” Aedran said, bowing his way from her tent with exaggerated solemnity.

  As soon as she crept from her tent, Aedran had more bad news for her.

  “A dozen horses froze in the night,” he called above the wind, “and two sentries have disappeared. Like as not, they also froze.”

  Fighting to stand against the frigid blow, Erryn peered at him above her scarf, already crusted with ice. What would a good queen do? What will I do?

  At no more than ten paces, the men tending the horses and packing the sledges were slow-moving apparitions. She was tired and cold and hungry, but all she had been doing for days was riding on the back of a horse. Her soldiers had been cutting a path through waist-deep snow and ice. They had earned better treatment than abandonment.

  “We must search for the missing men!”

  Aedran shook his head. “If they’re not at their posts, and not in camp, then they are lost.”

  “How can you know?”

  Aedran raised his hands. “If the storm hasn’t buried them in a drift … then something took them. Sending others out to hunt will only end with more missing men. We must to go on.”