Master Of The Planes (Book 3)

by T. O. Munro

  “Sir Ambrose has Prince Rugan’s confidence,” Pietrsen assured her. “He only bid me come here to ensure you were kept informed.”

  Niarmit leant forward, scanning Pietrsen’s face. The man shifted his weight a little from one foot to the other. “He said that you were not to concern yourself,” the Master of Horse insisted.

  “If Prince Rugan had wanted me unconcerned then he could have sent a simple rider from Lavisevre on a five day ride directly here.” She shook her head. “Instead he uses the portal to send a message to you and Lady Isobel at Karlbad, just two days away, and he sets no mere lancer to the task of carrying his news but despatches the Master of Horse himself.”

  “I wanted to come, your Majesty.”

  Niarmit shook her head. “And I need to go, Pietrsen, to Prince Rugan’s palace and then the Gap of Tandar. I need to see for myself what the treacherous witch is up to.”

  The door burst open and Hepdida tumbled into the room. She was breathing heavily from some exertion and the scars on her face showed white against a red flush across her cheeks. “Niarmit,” she cried out then bit off the rest of what she had been about to say at the sight of Pietrsen.

  “I’m going to The Gap of Tandar,” Niarmit announced without ceremony. “I can’t leave you behind,” she added, spotting an opportunity to remove her cousin to a place of greater safety. “You’ll have to come with me, at least as far as Laviserve that is.”

  “Lavisevre?” Hepdida echoed dully.

  The door opened again and the boy Jay slipped in, wiping at his face.

  “If you like,” Niarmit offered a hasty carrot. “You could bring someone with you, someone to keep you company on the journey.”

  “Someone for company?” Hepdida looked towards the boy. He stood a little taller, a little straighter, anxious for her approbation. “Yes,” she went on. “I’d like that.”

  Niarmit nodded, happy at the easy victory. Let her cousin by all means chose a companion and think herself empowered by that option, to the point of overlooking the fact she had been given no choice as to where she would go or when.

  “I choose Thom, he’ll keep me amused.”

  “Thom? Are you sure?” Niarmit could not keep the surprise from her voice.

  “Yes,” Hepdida assured her, calm and confident, smoothing the skirt of her dress with her palms. “I’ll go and tell him myself and then I’ll pack. I take it we are leaving immediately?”

  Niarmit nodded dumbly as Hepdida shouldered her way out of the room, so oblivious to Jay that the boy had to step quickly out of her way. He looked at the queen and then she saw the darkening bruise on his head and the line of thin bleeding scratches on one cheek. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened to ask a question she had not yet formulated. Before she could find the words, or an order to put them in, the boy ducked his head in a quick bow of obeisance and then fled from the room.

  ***

  “We have three thousand six hundred spearmen near to completing their basic training, Sensechal. Cavalry, however are in shorter supply.”

  “Thank you Sir Vahnce, that is good progress nonetheless.” Kimbolt replied. In the weeks he had spent in Oostport he had been surprised but relieved to find at least one dependable ally in the form of Lord Leniot’s drinking companion.

  Vahnce gave a twitch of a smile at Kimbolt’s gratitude. The knight wore his habitual black garb, relying on the loose lightness of the silk cloth rather than its colour to fend off the late afternoon heat of incipient summer. “If we go into battle against wolf riding orcs our spearmen can hold a position, Seneschal, but it is a tactic of defence. Without cavalry I do not see how we will attack.”

  Kimbolt tapped the parchment infront of him. It showed a number of square formations bristling with outward facing spear points. “It is a matter of training, Sir Vahnce. The men know how to hold a formation, next they must learn how to move in that same rigid formation. To traverse the battlefield, an impregnable walking fortress on whose spears the wolves and their riders will perish.”

  Vahnce nodded, stroking his jaw thoughtfully. ”That requires great discipline and the protection of archers.”

  “Discipline is what we have training grounds for. We will have archers a plenty when the Salicia garrison returns. With a fair wind, that should be in less than a week.” Kimbolt gave a nod of satisfaction.

  The requisitioning of merchant transport ships had been easily done once the coffers of the Prince of Oostsalve had been unlocked. That had been another point on which Kimbolt had been grateful for Vahnce’s assistance. On their arrival Lord Tybert had swiftly disappeared into the dubious company of his and Maia’s friends. Lord Leniot had not even thought to emerge from the drinking and gambling dens to formally receive the queen’s seneschal. Even their father the unloved Prince of Oostsalve had complained of an attack of the vapours and insisted he must stay abed for a fortnight or more on the strict instructions of his physician.

  It was Vahnce who had secured Kimbolt an audience with the prince. The meeting had been an ill-tempered affair. The grossly overweight ruler pleading ill health and poverty from beneath the silk sheets of an opulent bed. Until, that is, the black clad knight had disclosed the precise sum of gold residing in the provincial exchequer. Then a brief passing mention of the word treason by Kimbolt had suddenly dissolved all of the prince’s objections. A convoy of merchantmen had swiftly been despatched, confidence and loyalty bought with the payment of half their fee upfront. The other half would follow on safe delivery of the seven thousand crack troops who had held the outpost of Salicia against the hostility of the eastern kingdoms.

  More troops would be mobilised from the fertile lands of Oostsalve, so far untouched by taint or even rumour of the war in the west. The seneschal fancied he might in time assemble a force to rival the host of Medyrsalve. He frowned. No matter what army he might raise, the queen’s instructions had been clear. He was to remain in Oostport, raising and training still more. He thumped the table with a gentle fist.

  “Something troubles you, Seneschal?” Vahnce asked.

  “It is nothing.” When the black clad knight seemed about to press the point, Kimbolt seized on a note from with a pile of papers on his desk. “The sergeant at arms reports that the latest batch of spear points are too brittle. He thinks there must be a flaw in the armourer’s processes. Can you attend to it?”

  “Of course, Seneschal.” Vahnce took the offending memorandum and read it carefully. “It could be that haste is leading them to quench the points too fast from the forge. That could lead to shattering on impact.”

  “Exactly.” Kimbolt agreed pinching the bridge of his nose against an incipient headache.

  “I will deal with it.” Vahnce frowned. “You should take some rest, Seneschal.”

  Kimbolt simply nodded as the knight left. A weariness had been creeping up on him for days. Free of immediate concerns, he sat at his desk resting his head against the back of his chair and, for just an instant, shut his eyes.

  She was there on the battlefield, green eyes blazing, red hair streaming in the wind. He called to her. She turned and looked at him, a look so cold, an abrupt wave of her arm gestured him away. Then she turned her back on him and stalked towards the enemy lines and a legion of soldiers marched behind her, filling in the space between them with row upon row of spearmen. He called her name across the forest of glinting spear tips but she did not turn, he could not even see her anymore.

  And there was a hand on his brow and a soothing voice. “Rest, Seneschal, it is only a dream. You will forget it when you wake.”

  And he was awake, suddenly vigorously awake, his hand clasped around a slender wrist. His eyes fired with fury as he looked at the startled face of the Lady Maia.

  “You were asleep,” words tumbled from her mouth. “You were dreaming.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I came to present you with an invitation,” she pulled at her hand, but he still held her firm. “The guard let me in. I
didn’t know you were asleep.”

  “You didn’t think to wake me?”

  Her lips moved wordlessly for a moment. She shook her wrist. “Let go, you’re hurting me.”

  “You shouldn’t creep up on a sleeping soldier,” he growled, though he did at last release her.

  She rubbed at the skin where his fingers had been. “That will leave a bruise,” she chided.

  “What do you want, Lady Maia?”

  She straightened, stiffly formal. “I had an invitation to extend to you.”

  “One of your parties?”

  She scowled. “I know you are too serious for such frivolity, Seneschal. I have persuaded Duke Unslow to host a formal reception in your honour.”

  “Unslow?”

  “He owns most of the North-East of Oostsalve, as rich as the prince himself.”

  “And why would I want to meet him?”

  “Come, Seneschal, you are, as you are fond of saying, a blunt and simple soldier. But even blunt soldiers must indulge in a little politicking from time to time. Unlock Duke Unslow’s coffers and you can buy horses by the score and pay the men to ride them.” She smiled. “And where Duke Unslow leads, the lesser land owners will follow.”

  Kimbolt grimaced. “They should not need my presence to remind them of their duty.”

  Maia reached out a hand to brush Kimbolt’s cheek. He flinched from her touch. “Come now, Seneschal Kimbolt, you underestimate the power of personality. You are the man that has faced Maelgrum, known the medusa, pursued the half-elf traitor, shot spears at a dragon, and walked at the queen’s side. They would double their donations just for the chance to look at you, treble or quadruple the sum if you would grace them with so much as a word or two.”

  “I am the queen’s servant, not some popinjay to prostitute my stories in a ducal mansion.”

  Maia paused, a thought playing across her face. “What was your dream about?”

  “It is no concern of yours.” He stood and turned towards the window.

  “The queen?” she came to stand beside him. “I heard you call her name. Did she answer?”

  “I think you should go, Lady Maia.”

  “You haven’t answered my question?”

  “Which question?”

  “Any of them.” She was standing very close, filling his nostrils with the scent of her. “I do not want to cause you any distress, Seneschal. But you have grown thinner since we left Laviserve and the shadows beneath your eyes have grown deeper.”

  He felt dizzy. Exhaustion was competing with the alluring aroma of the courtesan to numb his senses. She reached up to turn his face towards her, the gentlest pressure of her fingertips on his jaw. “I can give you a restful sleep, Seneschal, untroubled by the past or the future,” she sighed, breathing out a sweet smell of flowers. “It is what I do. Let me do it for you.”

  He felt her fingers fluttering lightly on the back of his neck, the digits of her other hand danced down his chest. He gulped back the shock at how such tiny expert gestures had inflamed his senses.

  ***

  It was an old trick with which to illuminate and enliven their old quarters at Lavisevre. Thom had done it before, though, as always, its crackling denoument of a ball of fire brought an ‘o’ of wonder to Hepdida’s lips. Niarmit saw the illusionist’s pleasure in his performance, the grin with which he flicked the flaming apparition into nothingness. But this time she saw her cousin’s expression too, the weary disinterest which seized the girl’s features the moment that Thom turned back to his breakfast.

  Niarmit pressed her lips together, puzzled at the princess’s behaviour. She was indulging the illusionist, playing a passable act of amusement to conceal her boredom and shield his feelings. It was a kindness but if so why then had she asked him to join them on the excursion to Lavisevre. The conundrum had the queen picking desultorily at her own repast. The hens were laying, the bacon was freshly cured, but the cares of rulership continued to stifle Niarmit’s appetite.

  Thom, by contrast, wolfed his meal down and bid the cousins a polite farewell. There was a piece of research he wished to pursue and Rugan’s fine library was sure to yield most of the answers that he sought. It was, apparently, too good an opportunity to miss in the brief stop over before heading on to the Gap of Tandar. Niarmit dismissed him with a wave. Hepdida graced him with a quick smile and then the royal bastards were alone with their own thoughts and each other’s company.

  Niarmit waited a moment or two before a fairly safe question offered itself from her musings. “Do you miss him?”

  “He’s only been gone a minute,” Hepdida retorted fork poised with studied daintiness just shy of her mouth.

  “I didn’t mean Thom.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was talking about the boy, Jay.”

  “Ah.”

  “I thought you two had been getting on all right.”

  “Uh.”

  Niarmit grimaced. Threading a needle would have been easier than picking a path through the monosyllables of adolescent conversation.

  “It’s been six days since I heard you even mention his name. Not once on the ride here. Not last night. You didn’t even speak of him when Lady Giseanne asked how you’d enjoyed Colnhill.”

  Hepdida was carefully chasing food around her plate, fierce concentration as she pushed morsels on and off her fork, interspersed with brief phantasms of eating when she raised an empty implement to her mouth.

  “That’s a serious fight you two must have had.”

  Hepdida shrugged. “He kissed me.”

  Niarmit bit back the words that bubbled to the surface of her mind, offering nothing more than a frown and “oh.”

  “He kissed me when I didn’t want him to.” Hepdida’s eyes were fixed on her plate, her gaze flicking across the barricades of breakfast which her monumentally inefficient cutlery work was building, demolishing and rebuilding.

  “Ah.” Niarmit frowned.

  “Then he called me an orc whore.”

  “Uh.”

  “So I hit him. I hate him.” She stabbed at a strip of bacon, it slid across her plate onto the table. “How fucking dare he?” A second rasher was speared with such force that Niarmit feared not just for the porcelain plate but the table beneath.

  “Did anyone ever call you a whore?”

  The princess’s question caught her cousin unawares. Niarmit’s mouth dropped open as a grinning face leapt at her from a dark memory. She gulped away the thought, straining for composure and suddenly aware of the curious stare that her cousin was giving her.

  “Someone did, didn’t they? Someone called you a whore. Even you.”

  Niarmit shrugged uneasily, her own breakfast losing what little attraction it had once held.

  “I bet you did more than slap and scratch him,” Hepdida went on, her appetite recovering even as Niarmit’s fled.

  “He’s dead.”

  Hepdida hastily swallowed away a sizeable mouthful in order to pursue the matter with a further question. “How? Did you…”

  Niarmit shook her head quickly. “No, an orc killed him.” She shook her head again. “It doesn’t matter. It was long ago. You don’t need to know the details.”

  Hepdida gave a grim nod. “So it’s a secret, another secret that I’m not allowed to know.”

  Niarmit sighed and gave a slow shake of her head as she rested her forehead on the heel of her hand. “It’s not that, you just… it’s just...”

  Hepdida waved her fork to bid her cousin silent. “It’s all right. You don’t have to say,” she insisted with weary resignation. “I know I’m just a child.”

  “His name was Albrecht.” Niarmit began with a leaden voice. If her cousin wanted the story, she could have it and much good might it do her. “It was after Bledrag field when Kaylan and I first tried to build a resistance. He was the son of a minor noble. I thought we might need him. He thought we were a match.”

  “You? You and him, this Albrecht?”

  Niarmi
t winced. “I was not much older then than you are now, Hepdida. I’d just lost my father, my home, my whole life. I thought I needed him.”

  Hepdida was silent, open mouthed, her remaining meal untouched. Niarmit shook her head at the ghostly memories. “Albrecht fancied he and I were king and queen of our tiny following. For a while, that’s what I thought we were too.“ She scanned the ceiling, the elaborate decorations of Rugan’s home, so unlike the forest bower all those years ago. “But when things didn’t go well, and in those days they often did not go well, then it was my fault. Or so Albrecht said, and I thought he was right. He was a big man. Not as big as Lord Torsden, but big enough and I thought that he must be right and I was wrong, after all who was it had lost the province anyway.”

  “He was… unkind?” Hepdida gave a timorous prompt.

  Niarmit pushed her plate away. “He kissed me when I didn’t want him to,” she said, glaring any further question into silence. “And he called me a whore while he did it. And then he went to put on his armour and said he was going to kill some Goddess-damned orcs. And Kaylan found me and we went looking for him, but it turned out the orcs had killed Albrecht instead.”

  “He kissed you?” Hepdida dragged the word into a long syllable of doubt.

  Niarmit looked anywhere but at her cousin. “Whatever Albrecht did, all that matters is I didn’t want it, not then, maybe not ever.” She shook her head free of the grasping memory and wagged a finger in Hepdida’s face. “Just because something may once have been freely given, does not mean a man or a boy can take it at any time they choose.”

  “Is that what Kimbolt did?”

  The question stupefied Niarmit, her lips working in confusion to mouth ‘what?’ in a dozen different ways. Hepdida probed deeper. “Is that why you sent him away? Did he try to take… to take advantage?”

  Niarmit’s mute distress only fed her cousin’s curiosity. The princess triumphantly tugged on the loose threads desperate to unravel another irksome mystery. “You were so close, getting on so well, and then it all changed. There had to be something, some reason. Was that it?”