by P. J. Fox
Apple, seeing herself defeated, summed herself up and, with as much dignity as possible, turned and strode off. To her tent, which had just been collapsed. She stared at the ground, refusing to turn around and face them all. The mercenary captain scratched his head and, muttering something under his breath, turned toward his men. There were twelve of them total, not half the fighting force they needed if they were attacked.
But the earl had ever been stingy, except with himself.
Isla glanced up at her companion. “You know,” she said, a smile quirking at the corners of her lips, “I do have trouble picturing you in a pointy red hat.”
Eir shot her a look.
Hart appeared finally, lacing up his breeches as he emerged from the trees.
“What,” asked one of the mercenaries, “taken to abusing yourself in your despair, bastard?”
“Left all the beautiful women behind in the West?”
“She’s available.” One of the northerners patted his mare.
Hart smiled genially. His teeth were white and square, but he was missing a molar. He’d lost it in a roadside fight the season before, after he was set upon by brigands. He got along well enough with the other soldiers; they called him bastard, but teasingly. And he, in turn, insulted their mothers. “Oh, you’d recommend her?” he asked, pointing to the horse. “How many times have you had her?”
“Not as many as I’ve had your sister!” And then, realizing what he’d said, the man stopped. And stared. At Isla, who was standing right there. Isla, the woman known—if Rowena could be believed—as Tristan’s Harlot and whose virtue had been a subject of discussion for weeks. The only subject, on some tongues.
Isla laughed.
TWENTY-SIX
The man’s embarrassment, his sheer misery had made it impossible to be mad. Besides, he’d meant the remark innocently; men joked about bedding the sisters of men who had no sisters. And with the sun warming her hair and the wind in her face, she’d felt nothing so much as free and glad to be on the road.
To be the subject of an honest joke, at this point, was relieving.
She held Piper’s reins lightly, trusting the mare to know her path. Which she did. Hart rode with her, as did one of the northern men. Not the one who’d made the joke but another, a member of Tristan’s personal guard named Callas with whom Hart seemed to share a special bond. They’d spent a great deal of time together since Tristan had first arrived, hawking and shooting and practicing with polearms in the yard.
“He makes a point,” Callas said. Although he hadn’t addressed Isla directly, she knew that she was included in the conversation. Northerners, for all that they were just as convention-bound after their own fashion, didn’t show quite the same distaste for actually talking to women.
In a world where the snows came early and warm spring nights could kill, women were expected to know the rudiments of weapons craft and self-defense. Especially during the last years of the civil war, many women were abandoned entirely to defend their own farms. Taking advantage of what was already known in the annals as the Great Anarchy, roving bands of displaced farmers and battle-crazed soldiers and who knew what else preyed on the weak. A woman who couldn’t defend her own farm would be easy pickings, indeed. Isla thought again of the burned out husks she’d seen the day before, and shuddered.
She couldn’t imagine what it would be like, to glance out her window and see a band of men riding toward her. Knowing that they were come to rape, or pillage, or worse. Or to wake up to their voices, catcalling, in the middle of the night as they sawed through the walls.
She tried to listen to Callas. Anything to distract herself. She’d never before left the safety of Enzie, except in books. Seeing this broader world was…more unsettling than she’d imagined. Already, and just approaching the foothills that led to the true North, she’d experienced more variety than she’d thought possible. Places that no one wrote about, because they were too boring or too depressing. They had poverty in Enzie, but not on this scale. She’d seen—they must have passed hundreds of people on the roads, some walking along beside them and some huddled in the ditches, their eyes vacant.
So many people, people no one needed. So many people who’d given up. And this was an improvement? Even his detractors spoke of how Piers had made the roads safer, of how families were being resettled on new tracts of land. Tracts that had only recently been battlegrounds, where plows still turned over skulls.
Some of these men—and women, too—had done terrible things during the war. Isla knew this. They were rapists, and thieves, and murderers. They’d taken advantage of their friends, and left them to die. They were alive, now, because there had been mass pardons after the official end to the conflict.
In Morven, there was little middle ground: offenders were let off with a fine, or sentenced to death. There was little other choice, really; there existed no facilities in which to keep a prisoner, and no funds with which to care for him. One petty lord or another might have dungeons, but those black places were reserved for political prisoners. A man caught stealing his neighbor’s goat was hardly in the same category as a man who’d been caught trying to poison the king. And it was better, or so went the common wisdom, to let a man work and earn back the price of the goat than it was to let him molder.
Moreover, who would care for his family? A jailed man meant more mouths for others to feed—when even the nobility could barely feed themselves. These were bleak and desperate times. Only those who could not, or would not be curtailed faced justice, which came from the headsman’s axe. Rapists. Deserters. Those who murdered for sport.
Tristan had described the operation as like putting down rabid dogs. Some dogs bit, because they were tormented into it; these posed no danger because, under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t bite again. But some dogs developed a taste for the fear they instilled and some, having contracted hydrophobia, couldn’t help themselves.
Especially in that last case, death was a mercy. And so it was, he’d told her, with some men. And at the time, she’d thought she understood.
She’d heard that there were prisons in Chad, terrible places where men lived out entire lifetimes in cells known as oubliettes. From the Chadian word meaning to forget, they were wide enough only to permit standing upright. A man could neither lie down nor squat to relieve himself. Food, if he got any, was dropped down from above. As was water.
“Isla, what do you think?”
Isla jumped. “What?”
Hart rolled his eyes in mock reproach. “I told you she wasn’t listening.”
“With a brother like you,” Callas said, “who’d want to listen? I imagine that she’s gotten very practiced at the art of ignoring you, and with good reason. Hart,” he added seriously, “you’re my friend and all, but you’re a windbag.”
“My question,” Hart repeated, ostentatiously ignoring him, “is where are all the women? Going north,” he began, waxing poetic, “I’d expected to ride past villages full of adorably half-timbered cottages, buxom tavern wenches galore. Taverns galore! Gallons of beer, for which the North is supposedly so famous. Strudels!
“But I’ve seen—nothing! Nothing but hills and grass and now more hills and more grass”—they’d ridden into another open patch, again—”and black cows with funny looking white belts around their middles.”
“They’re called Belted Redwalls,” Callas offered.
“Belted what?”
“Redwalls. Because they’re from Redwall. They’re a breed of cow.”
They were passing some now. Some of the cows were still grazing, and some had lain down for their nap. Cows, in Isla’s experience, were great ones for naps. A few, hearing the horses, turned to watch them pass. Isla stared back, her eyes meeting theirs in an unspoken communication. Then, unsettled, she looked away.
Hart and Callas were still bickering.
“So my point,” Hart cut in finally, “is—what must a strapping young specimen like myself do, to get a little s
atisfaction around here?”
Eir, who’d ridden up beside them, studied him blandly. “Pay,” she said.
“Now—hey now! I’ll have you know—”
Eir turned to Isla. “We’re just now reaching the borders of a place called Hardland. I wouldn’t expect you to know this; there are no signs, no markers in this accursed wilderness.”
And no people, either, Isla thought. She couldn’t see so much as a cottage in any direction. One faint wisp of smoke, miles in the distance, gave the only hint of any human habitation. But for that, they might have been intruding on a kingdom of cows.
The thought made her obscurely nervous; she couldn’t help but feel that something was waiting for them.
Waiting, and watching.
Seeing the shadow pass over Isla’s face, Eir grimaced. “I, too, dislike open spaces. But Hardland guards the mountain passes.” She produced a map from somewhere about her person and, unfolding the oft-scored vellum, traced a thin finger down its surface. She was a good enough horsewoman that her mount, a gelding called Surtr, made nothing of the event. She controlled Surtr with her knees, just like Tristan controlled his destrier. Surtr, Isla had learned, was the name of the northern god responsible for making fire. Sometimes, Eir claimed, jets of molten destruction erupted from the very mountains themselves. Although Isla found that idea hard to credit.
“We should be coming to the fortified town, soon,” Eir said.
“If it’s still there,” Isla grumbled morosely.
Eir turned sharply. “You have had a vision?”
“A—what?” Isla shook her head. “No, I…don’t have visions. What I meant is, so much of the world has changed. Farms burned, entire villages abandoned….” Isla trailed off.
“Ah.” Eir refolded the map and returned it to her inside pocket. “Well, Hardland was here when I last rode through, which was recent enough. Had the place burned in the meantime, we’d still smell the smoke.” Smoke, Isla had learned, clung to the earth around the humid bogs. Eir was right; they would still smell it.
They’d dropped a little behind Hart and Callas, who were now bantering about tavern maids and whose native province had the best.
“Eir,” Isla asked hesitantly, “why did you think that I—that I had….”
Maybe, Isla reasoned, the gnome had spent so much time around Tristan that she assumed everyone did. Or maybe everyone in the North did! Isla still knew almost next to nothing about the northern religion. She’d taken the claims of magic as largely apocryphal—the church tended to label anything as magic, which fell outside the knowledge of its priests—but now she wondered if she’d been too quick to do so.
“Because you have the eye,” Eir said simply.
Isla’s head whipped to the side. “The what?”
Eir seemed surprised at her surprise. “That was, I assumed, the basis of your union with Lord Tristan. The same magic runs in your veins.”
It did?
Isla, thunderstruck, almost fell off her horse. Only years of long practice kept her in the saddle. Gripping the reins, she felt the world tilt. Eir’s statement was as impossible as if—as if she’d just told Isla that she was a demon, herself. But at the same time, so many things made more sense. The feeling she’d had, at the tomb. The feeling she’d had, at Cariad’s. Cariad’s interest in her. So often in her life, Isla had just had…feelings. That a certain person would be at a certain place. That something was about to happen.
Feelings she’d usually ignored, because they made no rational sense. But when she paused, and let herself be guided by—not her rational mind, but by something else—she almost always ended up in the right place. Like how she’d simply known where Tristan was, that first night. Or how she’d known that something—someone—was in her tent.
It was sheer animal instinct but it was also…more.
Of course, this same sense had failed her. Like with Father Justin. But again, she wondered if that had been because she hadn’t been ignoring what she should have known in favor of what her rational mind told her must be true. Her rational mind, which, lately, had so often been wrong. Was it possible that part of what had propelled her to talk to Tristan, to offer herself to him, had in fact been this silent recognition of a kindred spirit?
“I—I don’t know,” she said. We fell in love. It sounded so stupid, even within the confines of her own mind. She’d fallen in love. But Tristan, whatever promises he’d made, remained an unknown quantity. She fingered her ring, and fell silent.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“We’ll be passing through Hardland after lunch.”
“I know,” Isla said. “Eir told me.”
Eir had once again disappeared. Isla, personally, was excited to see Hardland. It would be the first fortified town she’d seen, outside of Enzie. And she thought Hart was excited, too. They were such a pair of bumpkins, the two of them, excited to finally see the world and trying so hard not to show it. Rowena, beside them, had her nose buried in The Chivalrous Heart. Isla doubted very much that she’d even noticed where they were. Or cared.
“Hardland,” Hart said around a mouthful of food, “has sort of an interesting history. Their main industry is farming, of course, but there are mines in the hills. During the last years of the civil war, there was tremendous demand for iron ore. You know, for weapons. Arrowheads in particular.” Which made sense; spent arrows were often difficult to reclaim. Especially when the enemy was competing for them, too. After a battle, each side sent out pickers to reclaim anything of even questionable value. And, of course, there was no shortage of enterprising free agents doing the same. And then selling the men’s own supplies back to them at an exorbitant rate of exchange.
“So anyway,” Hart continued, “the miners ended up being just—horribly exploited. Hardland was under the control of House Terrowin at the time and they did just about everything to keep the miners and agents from Piers’ camp apart. Intimidation, espionage, harassment. Even murder.” He took another bite of apple, washing it down with a gulp of ale. “At one point, trying to intimidate them, men from House Terrowin rode through one of the mining settlements at night and torched several dozen of the miners’ cottages. They were drunk.” He spat. “In the confusion, they fired on women and children.”
“I suppose,” Rowena said with some asperity, “that that…friend of yours told you this.”
Hart shrugged. “If by ‘friend’ you mean Callas then yes, he is my friend but no, he didn’t tell me this. Our own sergeant at arms did, back at home.”
Isla had heard the tale, but from Tristan. Ultimately, Piers’ agents did infiltrate the town, with help from the outside. Burghers in the independent town of Matawan, their nearest good-sized neighbor, were sympathetic to the miners. What had become known as the Hardland Massacre was, unfortunately, a disaster typical of the last years of House Terrowin’s reign. Piers seemed a good enough man so far, but in truth anyone would have been preferable. It was only their good luck, as a kingdom, that they hadn’t ended up with someone worse.
A miner was paid according to how much he produced; not how many hours he worked. Some miners took their whole families underground, trying to get as much ore as possible. Each member was given a different job, according to their age and skill. It wasn’t uncommon, in the more desperate regions, to see dust-covered toddlers of three or four.
Foul air was an eternal problem that only grew worse the deeper they tunneled. The smarter miners brought birds down with them; for whatever reason, birds seemed to be more sensitive. When the bird died, it was time to run. But sometimes the miners delved too quickly and too greedily and great clouds of noxious fumes were released, pouring into the cavern so quickly that none had time to escape.
Firedamp, called so because it was as flammable as peat; chokedamp, because the air suddenly turned as unbreathable as if the miners had suddenly been plunged under water.
Candles were too dangerous to use, because in the noxious air they exploded. So the miners brought down
rotting fish, which gave off a gentle glow. Isla looked out at the fields surrounding them. She couldn’t imagine living in such a place, knowing that no life awaited her other than herding someone else’s cattle or choking and sweating in the mines.
“Thousands of people died, in the uprising.” Hart threw his apple core into the grasses. “There’s a memorial in town, supposedly. I guess we’ll ride right by it.”
Rowena sniffed. “Serves them right,” she said.
“What?”
“They should never have abandoned the true king.”
Hart stared openly. Isla found herself doing the same. What Rowena was talking was treason. Traitors were hung, drawn and quartered, their heads removed from their bodies and dipped in tar for preservation until they could be displayed openly on poles in the capital.
A woman might be barred from politics, but she was not immune from a charge of treason. Even the lesser crime of petty treason—treason against one’s direct overlord, such as the treason of a wife against her husband—was punishable by death. Except instead of being hung, drawn and quartered, the offender was merely hung.
The result, however, was the same.
“The Chivalrous Heart says that pity is treason,” Rowena replied. “Pity for those who forsake their overlords and thus the greater calling of chivalry! The Gods called House Terrowin to be the true kings, and Piers is nothing more than—than an upstart! A licentious, devil-worshipping upstart! He has no divine claim to the throne and thus no worthwhile claim. The church hasn’t recognized him, won’t recognize him.”
“Rowena,” Isla hissed, “you don’t know who’s listening!”
“And I don’t care!” Hart thundered.
“The Chivalrous Heart—”
“Is a book! It’s just a book. A bunch of meaningless twaddle meant to amuse the impressionable. But your head on the chopping block is going to be a real thing if anyone catches you.” He lunged forward and Rowena shrank back, clutching the prized possession to her chest. Hart ripped it from her. “I’ve had enough,” he grated. “This stops now.”
