by T. O. Munro
“People need not die, Kaylan,” she said. “If the nomads go in peace, then there’s a thousand or more Colm Galdors that could return in health and happiness to their families. Farmers who might otherwise spill their guts on another bloody battle field. Is that what you want?”
“I want my land back, my mother’s land. I want my people to be free.”
“Free, yes, but alive too. Why won’t you listen to Vezer Khan?”
He gave a slight shake of his head. “It is not my place to treat with the queen’s enemies. I cannot promise them the agreements and privileges that Khan seeks. They have murdered and slaughtered and now they beg leave to keep what they have already stolen. I cannot do that, it would be treason.”
“Niarmit would do it.”
“What do you know of the queen’s mind?”
“I know she sees no glory in death. I know she would take whatever chance was offered to get an honourable peace.”
Kaylan gave a dismissive sniff. “You know? Or you hope? I have no love of death, but I have seen too much of betrayal to trust much further than the reach of my sword.”
“Let me at least go to her. Let me take Vezer Khan’s offer and bring you her reply. If you have not the authority to decide this matter, then you must pass on the decision to one who does.”
They stood a moment in a frozen tableau. Then Kaylan gave a grim nod and, without an obvious glance at Khan, sheaved his own sword. With a brief shrug Khan did likewise, barking a demand at his son for a translation of Kaylan and Elise’s exchange.
Jocasta gave out a low moan of relief from her position at the juncture of wall and floor.
***
“I thought I’d find you here.”
The little Lordling Andros was drooling happily in Hepdida’s arms when Niarmit came into the nursery. Giseanne was sitting by the balcony smiling at the sight of her son and her niece enjoying each other’s company.
“You rushed off at breakfast,” Niarmit said. “Thom too.”
Hepdida laughed. “We had finished, you were just sitting there playing with your food, and I wanted to say goodbye to this little man.” She jiggled the baby on her knee and he gurgled and waved his arms excitedly with a wet grin on his face.
“I had something on my mind,” Niarmit excused her desultory appetite. The sickening thought that Hepdida might have believed Kimbolt capable of the same offence as Albrecht had stayed with her for several hours. Although that had now faded, she found that the prospect of renewing her confrontation with Quintala at the gap of Tandar, had set her stomach tumbling all anew. The necessity for another awkward conversation with Hepdida only added to the digestive turbulence.
“You always have something on your mind,” Hepdida said without rancour. “Here, come hold our cousin.” She lifted Andros beneath his arms and held him out towards the queen. The baby flapped all four limbs in delight at being high in the air.
As Andros was drawn closer he brought a clash of odours, sour milk and something altogether less pleasant. Niarmit blenched. “I think the lordling might need some attention,” she said from behind a raised hand. The baby’s face crumpled swiftly from smile to dismay at the splayed palm barring his approach. But, before the tears or cry could start, a nurse stepped forward and took him away. Hepdida watched him go with a bereft expression.
“I’ll miss him,” the princess said.
“You don’t have to,” Niarmit said. “In fact, you won’t at all.”
“What?” Hepdida frowned.
“I’m going to the Gap of Tandar alone, well alone apart from Sergeant Jolander and his lancers. I want you and Thom to stay here.”
“Oh.”
“It’ll be safer.” Niarmit braced herself for a storm of protest from the crown princess. However, none came beyond a slight inclination of the head, an upward twitch of the eyebrows, a wry expression of doubt. “I know I’ve said that before, but this is different.” Niarmit hurried on. “Quintala is at Listcairn by the Gap of Tandar, not here. Rugan has set wards about this palace which are strong enough to protect you from his sister’s malice. I need to know you’re safe, if I’m to do what I have to do.”
“And who will keep you safe?” Hepdida asked.
In answer, Niarmit merely touched the crescent symbol around her neck, running a finger along its filigreed rim.
“Well Andros will be pleased that at least one of his cousins will stay to entertain him and maybe witness his first steps.” Giseanne forced out a light observation.
“When do you leave?” Hepdida asked.
“Within the hour, Jolander is getting the horses saddled now. I have some things to pack.”
“I’ll come with you.”
The princess made to rise but Niarmit waved her down. Despite the muted protest from her cousin, the queen still found her senses unbalanced as though from a wearying argument. She swayed a little as she and urged Hepdida, “Stay a while longer with Giseanne. We can say our farewells in the courtyard.”
Then she turned and stumbled from the room. The nervous tension which she had been experiencing was taking on an altogether more palpable form. She stopped in the corridor in stunned surprise as her stomach gave a forceful heave which all but parted her from her meagre breakfast. Recognising this as merely the opening round in a cycle of nausea which could have only one outcome, she fled to her room. She was just in time, leaning over the empty commode to retch the contents of her stomach up.
The aftermath of vomiting brought an easing of her symptoms and a clarity of thought. She reached for a cloth to wipe her mouth, puzzling at the magnitude of a tension which had made her physically sick. She had faced a dragon, the Dark Lord and even death itself without the fear in her mind finding such physical expression. Why should leaving Hepdida or the idea of facing Quintala have unnerved her so? She couldn’t be ill? She was never ill. One of the advantages of dispensing the grace of the Goddess was that a certain residual charm kept most ordinary sicknesses at bay.
Dominos of thought toppled in her mind. A young couple recently wed, coming to her when she just been newly ordained in the Goddess’s service. The conversation about how priests and priestesses were never ill, but the young woman was sorely troubled by a sickness that afflicted her when she awoke. They all had known what lay at the root of the young woman’s sickness. Swopping smiles, the man patting his wife’s belly as they sought a blessing to reduce her symptoms and make the first few months of her confinement more bearable.
Niarmit’s jaw dropped. The vision of that long ago couple, lost now somewhere in the fall of Undersalve, sharing their moment of happiness with her. She sank to her knees on the marbled floor shaking her head at the empty room.
“No!” she whispered. “No!”
She seized her crescent in one hand and placed the other over her navel. Then she shut her eyes and murmured a spell she barely recalled and certainly had not used in five years and never on herself. “Ego Gravida, per dea?”
The symbol grew warm beneath her touch, tears stung at the corners of her eyes. “Oh shit!” she said. “It can’t be. I can’t be.”
Fear flooded every pore. She shook her head in disbelief. She murmured the spell again and again until the symbol was hot enough to burn her hand. She shook her head at the Goddess’s fickle favour, to inflict this upon her. She shook her head at her own folly, the Goddess did not protect people from their own mistakes.
Fear, overwhelming, all consuming fear. The ultimate responsibility had come to her and she was not ready for it, had no idea how to face it. There were no swords or spells to defeat this problem, no walls or castles that would let her hide from it.
With that fear the nausea gave notice of its return with a slow tumbling sensation in her belly. That, at least was a problem she could address for herself, as she had for that long ago couple joyful in the promise of their first child. “Levare aegritudine, per Dea.” The blessing of the Goddess restored an equanimity to her senses and gave her ease to think.
/>
It was a problem like any other, it would surrender as other problems had. A plan, a course of action. What to do. Her conscious mind took refuge in dry analysis. How far gone was she? When? When would it have happened? Who should know? Kimbolt obviously, but how could she tell him? Yet all the while that she tried to marshal the facts and the solutions in disciplined ranks and rows, her subconscious ran through them scattering any attempt at ordered thought and screaming, “shit, shit, I’m pregnant!”
There was a hesitant knock at the door.
“Who is it?”
The words came out more sharply than she intended and the answer from beyond the door was tinged with reproach. “It’s just me, Hepdida.”
Niarmit caught herself on the brink of issuing an impatient dismissal. It would be an inauspicious start to motherhood to vent her frustration on one who had no blame for her current predicament. Shit! Motherhood? “What is it?” she moderated her tone. “I’m a little busy. I said we’d make our farewells in the courtyard.”
“I have something for you.” Hepdida’s puzzled voice came through the door. “I should have given it to you long ago, but…” The oak obscured the next words, or maybe there had been none, just a long pause followed by a rattle at the door handle and a request. “Can I come in? Please?”
Niarmit stood up and wiped at her mouth before opening the door. “What is it?”
The princess was holding out a rectangle of painted parchment. “I found this,” she said. “I thought it might be important.”
Niarmit took the object from her. It was the cover of a book, scorched black on one side, on the other side only an illustration and a single word remained of the work it had once been. Niarmit wrinkled her nose in thought. She did not see a relevance to it, but the artefact clearly held some importance for Hepdida, or at least the princess believed it should. She turned it back and forth finding no significance, though the image of a blue oval was oddly familiar.
“It was what started the argument with Jay, he took it from me and made fun of me over it,” Hepdida said quickly.
Niarmit nodded slowly, careful to give the matter a more weighty consideration than the boy Jay must have done. “Where did you find it?”
“It was in the ruins of that hut, the one you said Haselrig was using. The one that burnt down. This was all that was left. I found it weeks ago.”
The nagging familiarity of the swirling oval of blue was plucking at Niarmit’s awareness. “Why did you keep it?” It was not an accusation, so much as a question to occupy Hepdida while Niarmit pursued the elusive memory of a similar image.
Hepdida dropped her gaze examining her fingers with demure humility. “I thought I might puzzle it out myself. You had so many secrets that you didn’t share, I just wanted this one. I thought I could discover something useful that I could share with you.”
“From one word and a picture?”
Hepdida shrugged and shook her head. “It was stupid I know. But… ah hell I’m giving it to you now. It was Haselrig’s, it’s all he left behind.”
“Why now? What changed that made this something to share, rather than to hide?”
Hepdida scanned the walls for a moment. “I just realised that I was being childish, that’s all. You have your secrets, you need to have your secrets, you’re allowed to have your secrets.”
Niarmit gulped at the thought of the secret she had just discovered was growing inside her, another secret she would most certainly and guiltily be keeping from her cousin.
“It wasn’t my place to keep things from you in a tit for tat trade off. It’s not my place to argue when you tell me I must stay here or go there.” She pointed at the book cover in Niarmit’s hand. “It’s not much of a gift, it’s just to say, to share, to show, I’m sorry for all the times I’ve been a bitch to you.”
“Ah,” Niarmit gulped. “Thanks.”
“And I’m going to try hard not to be a bitch, but I can’t promise, not all the time.”
“All right,” Niarmit shuffled her feet avoiding Hepdida’s gaze. “Well we can all only do our best.”
“And with Jay it really was just a kiss, it was only a kiss. I wouldn’t want you to think he was like Albrecht. I wouldn’t want you to set any orcs on him, or even worse, Kaylan.” Hepdida gave a broad smile at her own humour, but drew only a weak reflection in Niarmit’s face. “There,” the princess patted her cousin on the arm. “Now hadn’t you better be getting ready? I’m sure I can hear Sergeant Jolander’s spurs jangling in the courtyard from here.”
“What? yes, no, ah.” Niarmit found she had raised the scorched book cover waving it with indecision. “Um, go and tell Jolander we won’t be leaving yet. Not today.”
“What? Why?”
“Er… this book.” Niarmit looked at it again. There was something dreadfully familiar about the swirling blooms of blue and not in a good way. “I need to spend a bit of time on it, a day or two.” She needed time, time to work out what to do about her condition, time to tell Kimbolt before anyone else could know.
“You mean it could be important,” Hepdida squealed with excitement. “You mean I found something important?”
Niarmit shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. It might be nothing. It’ll just take a couple of days I hope.”
Hepdida’s face fell and she thumped her palm with a fist. “I’m a stupid cow,” she said. “It might be important and I didn’t give it to you straight away.”
“Don’t worry,” Niarmit assured her guiltily. The book was probably as irrelevant as it appeared, but it made a convenient excuse for a sudden adjustment to the queen’s plans. Better that than all the world should know she was with child. “Now run along with the message. I am sure you are right and Jolander is already mounted champing at his own horse’s bit.”
***
Hustag had been unorc he knew that and the chains about his wrists only confirmed it. Orc values like the creatures themselves were deceptively simple. There was no sense of good or bad, no moral code, no numbered sins or complementary commandments of virtue. There was only orc and unorc. Hustag was either an orc, with all that that entailed by way of a fierce and cunning pursuit of naked self-interest, or he had fallen in some way from that standard and become unorc.
The chains and the dark cell were proof, if proof were needed, that he had got himself into some trouble from which neither his slow wits nor his quick fists had been able to extract him. He rattled the chains experimentally. The ring in the wall and the links in the chain were just as secure and unyielding as they had been the previous fifty times that he had tested them.
Hustag growled sourly and waited a moment, trying to think of his next move. Then he rattled the chains again, just in case anything had changed while he had been thinking.
Ripples of unease were making the short journey from the centre to the edge of Hustag’s mind. The big outlander human had thrown him in here last night with that jewellery encrusted nomad. There had been an argument with some humans, in the tavern. Grumbold had not said anything about avoiding arguments when he had let the orcs have a night on the town. Escorting the zombies had been a tedious and unpleasant task. The stench of them rankled even in orcish nostrils, so an evening crawling around the town had been well earned.
If avoiding arguments had been important, Hustag was sure that Grimbold would have mentioned it. But then Grimbold would know better than to give any more instructions than an orc could count on the fingers of one hand after a particular nasty machete accident. He had only told them one thing, one command to adhere to, or there would be big trouble. Grimbold had told them all “be back before sun rises.”
There was no sign of sunrise in the dark windowless cell with its guttering torches, so Hustag reckoned he probably still had time, if he could only get free of these chains. He rattled them again, and cursed a foul diatribe against the chains’ parentage. Pig iron smelted in a cooking pot and alloyed with brittle human bones, he asserted. Then, in a bid to surprise the ir
onmongery he gave the chain a sudden jerking twist. All to no avail. Hustag spat in disgust. It only had to work once that was all he needed, if he kept on trying surely it would work once.
The door to the chamber creaked open and Hustag roared and ran for the crack. He had built up an appreciable turn of speed in the three strides before the chains snapped him up short with shoulder wrenching force. The sudden jerk dragged him off his feet and he fell with stunning force onto the stone floor.
“Quiet foolish orc,” a voice hissed. “You make enough noise to break a spell of sleeping.”
“I not sleeping,” Hustag growled as he pushed himself up into a seated position.
“Not you idiot,” there was a bite to the newcomer’s voice like a yapping dog. “It’s the guard outside who’s asleep.”
Hustag blinked and looked up at the short pink human standing at the top of the steps down into the dungeon. He wore robes and his polished head was devoid of hair or whiskers. Hustag smacked his lips. The man’s head looked just like an egg, one good axe blow would crush it. He dropped his gaze suddenly remembering Grimbold’s other instructions. “Not kill all humans, some fight on orc side.” It was so complicated it made his head hurt.
“Do you know who I am?” the man asked.
Hustag shrugged. “You human.”
“Not what, you fool, who?” Again that buzzing tone to the man’s voice, like a marsh insect. Hustag longed to swot it with a fist or an axe. “Do you know which human I am?” He spoke slowly this time.
Hustag tried to concentrate hard, something about ‘which human?’ He shrugged and rattled a chain to test if his fall had loosened it. “All humans look same to me.”
The man sighed. “Do you know why you are here?”
Hustag tried the other chain. “Been unorc. Drank and argued. Man put me here. Chains make me stay.”
“What did you argue about? Can you remember that?”
Hustag looked up sharply. There was a smell about this man. He sniffed hard, flexing his nostrils. It smelt like fear but it wasn’t quite that. There was desire too. The pink human wanted something. A glint came into Hustag’s eyes as instinct clutched for the power of a bargaining chip. “Why you want to know?” he said, sly cunning blazing from his expression.
