Valdemar 05 - [Vows & Honor 02] - Oathbreakers

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Look—we’re tired, we don’t know anything about your land, and our friend, who might, is not even half-conscious. ”

  So that was what was making Keth’s voice sound like she was walking on glass.

  “I seem to be making a mess of this,” the man replied ruefully. “I am Roald, one of the Heralds of Valdemar. And you may believe your large, hairy friend there, that any Herald is to be trusted.”

  :They are, mindmate,: Warrl confirmed. :With more than life. There is no such creature as a treacherous Herald.:

  All right, Tarma thought, worn past exhaustion. We’ve got no chance out here—and you’ve never been wrong before this, Furface.

  “Lead on, Herald Roald,” she said aloud. And wearily hoped Warrl was right this time, too.

  Eight

  Tarma clasped her blue-gray pottery mug in both her hands and sniffed the spicy, rich aroma of the hot wine it contained a trifle warily. The stuff was too hot to drink; not that she minded. The heat of it had warmed the thick clay of the mug, and that, in turn, was warming her hands so that they no longer ached in each separate joint. And the heat gave her an excuse to be cautious about drinking it.

  She blinked sleepily at the flames in the fireplace before her, trying to muster herself back up to full alertness. But she was feeling the heat seeping into her bones, and with the heat came relaxation. The fire cast dancing patterns of light and shadow up into the exposed rough-hewn beams of the square common room, and made the various trophies of horns and antlers hung on the polished wooden walls seem to move. She didn’t want to stir, not at all, and that had the potential for danger.

  She was wearing, bizarrely enough, some of Roald’s spare clothing, all of her own too thoroughly soaked even to bother with. A Kal‘enedral in white—Warrior bless, now that’s a strange thought. Roald was the only one of them near to her size; off his horse he was scarcely more than a couple of thumblengths taller than Tarma, and was just as rangy-thin. He was exceedingly handsome in a rugged way, with a heavy shock of dark blond hair, a neat little beard, and eyes as blue as his horse’s.

  I thought I’d never be warm again. She settled a little more down into her chair and the eiderdown they’d given her to wrap around herself, and blinked at the kyree stretched out between her and the flames. Warrl was fast asleep on the red-tiled hearth at her feet, having bolted a meal of three rabbits first. He trusts them. Especially Roald. Dare we?

  Her chair was set just to one side of the fireplace, practically on the hearthstone. Directly across from her, Kethry was curled up in a second chair, wrapped in eiderdown, looking small and unwont tedly serious. She’d been summarily stripped of her wet gear, the same as Tarma, but opted for one of Lady Mertis’ soft green wool gowns. Jadrek had been spirited away as well, and regarbed in Stefansen’s warmest—heavy brown wool breeches and tunic and knitted shirt.

  If Roald hadn’t come when he did—Star-Eyed, we came perilously close to losing him. If I’d known he’d taken enough of that painkilling stuff to put him out like that—

  Jadrek was pacing the floor beside the two chairs and within the arc of heat and light cast by the fire. He limped very badly—walking slowly, haltingly, trying to shake the fog of his medicines from his head so that he could talk coherently again. He was moving so stiffly that Tarma hurt just watching him.

  I wonder; he knew we were in bad trouble when we stopped that last time. I wonder if he didn’t dose himself on purpose, figuring that we’d either find shelter and he’d be all right, or that we wouldn‘t, and while he was unconscious the cold would kill him painlessly and get him out of our hair. That’s something a Clansman might do. Dammit—I like this man! And he has no reservations about Stefansen and this Herald. But I do. I must.

  Stefansen’s wife, Mertis (that had come as a shock to Jadrek, that Stefansen had actually wedded), was seated in another chair a bit farther removed from the fire, nursing their month-old son. I like her, too. That’s a sweet little one—why do I have to distrust these people?

  Stefansen, who resembled Idra to a startling degree, (except that on a man’s face the features that had been harsh for a woman were strong, and those that had been handsome were breathtaking) was talking quietly with Roald, the two of them sitting on a pair of chairs they’d pulled up near to Mertis. A most domestic and harmonious scene, if you could ignore the worry in everyone’s eyes.

  Good thing we had Jadrek to vouch for us, or Stefansen might have left us to freeze, and be damned to his Herald friend. He did not like the fact that we’d come looking for him out of Rethwellan. He’s still watching me when he thinks I’m not paying any attention. We’re both like wary wolves at first meeting, neither one sure the other isn’t going to bite.

  This turned out to be Roald’s own hunting lodge, which, since it was not exactly a small dwelling, told Tarma that whatever else he was, the Herald was also a man of means. It was now the “humble” abode of the Prince-in-exile, his bride of ten months, and their infant son. Valdemar had given Stefansen the sanctuary he needed, but it was a secret sanctuary; the King and Queen of Valdemar dared not compromise their country’s safety, not with Rethwellan sharing borders with both themselves and their hereditary enemy, Karse.

  The wine was cool enough to drink now, and Tarma had decided she couldn’t detect anything dangerous in it. She sipped at it, letting it soothe her raw throat and ease the cold in the pit of her stomach. While she drank, she scrutinized Mertis again over the edge of the mug.

  Tarma watched the gentle woman rocking her son in her arms, studying her with the same care she’d have spent on the reconnoitering of an enemy camp. Mertis was not homely, by any means, but not a raving beauty, either. She had a sweet, soft face; frank brown eyes that seemed to demand truth of you; wavy, sable-brown hair. Not the kind of woman one would expect to captivate an experienced rake like Stefansen. Which meant there was more to her than showed on the surface.

  Then again—Tarma hid a smile with her mug as she thought of the moment when Roald had brought them stumbling up to the door of the lodge. Mertis had been everywhere, easing Jadrek down from his grip on Kethry’s saddle, helping him to stumble into the warm, brightly lit lodge, building up the fire with her own hands, issuing crisp, no-nonsense orders to her spouse, the Herald, and the two servants of the lodge, without regard for rank. That just might have been her secret—that she had been the only woman to treat Stefansen like a simple man, a person, and not throw herself at his feet, panting like a bitch in heat.

  Or it might have been a half dozen other things, but one was a certainty; Tarma knew love well enough to recognize it when those two looked at each other. And never mind that Mertis was scarcely higher in birth than Kethry.

  “Jadrek?” Stefansen called softly, catching Tarma’s attention. “Have you walked yourself out yet? I’d rather you got a night’s sleep, but Roald seems to think we need to talk now.”

  “Not just you two—all of us, the mercenaries included,” the Herald corrected. “We all have bits of information that need to be put together into a whole.”

  Stefansen is looking wary again. I’ll warrant he didn’t expect us to be included in this little talk. Ah well, duty calls. “Just for the record,” Tarma said, unwinding herself from the eiderdown, “I’d tend to agree. And the sooner we get to it, the less likely one of us will forget some triviality that turns out to be be vital. My people say, ‘plans, like eggs, are best at the freshest.”’

  Kethry nodded, and got up long enough to turn her chair in a quarter-circle so that it faced the room rather than Tarma; Tarma did the same as the men pulled theirs closer, and Roald brought in a third chair for Jadrek. Mertis left hers where it was, but put the babe back in the cradle and leaned forward to catch every word.

  Tarma watched the Prince, his spouse, and the Herald as covertly—but as intently—as she could. Warrl trusted them, and she’d never known the kyree to be wrong. He trusted them enough that he’d eaten without checking the food for tampering, and was now
sleeping as soundly as if he hadn’t a worry in the world. Still, there was a first time for everything, even for the kyree being deceived.

  There’s no sign of the Captain here, either. But that might not mean anything.

  Jadrek spoke first, outlining what Raschar had been doing since Stefansen’s abrupt departure. Tarma was surprised by the Prince’s reactions; he showed a great deal more intelligence and thoughtfulness than rumor had given him credit for. He seemed deeply disturbed by the information that Raschar was continuing to tax the peasantry into serfdom. He looks almost as if he’s taking it personally—huh, for that matter, so does Mertis. And I don’t think it’s an act.

  Then Tarma and Kethry took up the thread, telling the little conclave what they’d observed in their week or so at the Court, and what they’d noted as they passed through the southern grainlands of Rethwellan.

  The Prince asked more earnest questions of them, then, and seemed even more disturbed by the answers. He plainly did not like Kethry’s report of the mages lurking in the Court—and the tale of the attack on Jadrek shocked him nearly white.

  And that is not an act, Tarma decided. He’s more than shocked, he’s angry. I wouldn’t want to be Raschar and in front of him right now.

  And finally all three spoke of Idra—what Jadrek knew, and what the partners had heard before she’d vanished.

  That changed the anger to doubt, and to apprehension. “If she headed here, she didn’t arrive,” Stefansen said, unhappily, the firelight flaring up in time to catch his expression of profound disturbance. “Damn it! Dree and I had our differences, not the least of which was that she voted for Char, but she’s the one person in this world that I would never wish any harm on. Where in hell could she have gotten to if she didn’t come here?”

  Tarma wished at that moment that she could have Warrl’s thought-reading abilities. The Prince seemed sincere, but it would have been so very easy for Idra to have met with an accident once she’d crossed into Valdemar, particularly if Stefansen hadn’t known about her change of heart. He could be using his surprise and dismay at learning that to cover his guilt.

  At the same time all her instincts were saying he was speaking only truth—

  If only I knew!

  She turned her attention to Roald. He seemed to be both holding himself apart from the rest, and yet at the same time vitally concerned about all of them. Goddess—even us, and he just met us a few hours ago, Tarma realized with a start. And there was a knowledge coming from somewhere near where her Goddess-bond was seated that told her that this Herald was, as Warrl put it, someone to be trusted with more than one’s life. If Stefansen murdered Idra, he’d know, she thought slowly. I don’t know how, but somehow he’d know. And I bet he wouldn’t be sharing hearth and home with him. I can’t see him giving hearth-rights to a murderer of any kind, much less a kin-slayer. Now I wonder—how much of his worry is for us two, and how much is about us?

  After a long silence, Jadrek said: “This is not something I ever expected to hear myself saying, but whatever has happened to Idra, I fear her fate is going to have to take second place to what is happening to the Kingdom.” Jadrek turned to the Prince, slowly, and with evident pain. “Stefan, Raschar is a leech on the body of Rethwellan.” Tarma could see his eyes now, and the open challenge in them. “You never retracted your oath to your people as Crown Champion. You still have the responsibility of the safety of the Kingdom. So what are you going to do about the situation?”

  “Jadrek, you never were one to pull a blow, were you?” The Prince smiled thinly. “And you’re still as blunt as ever you were. Well, let me put it out for us all to stare at. Do you think I should try to overthrow Char?”

  “You know that’s what I think,” Jadrek replied, eyes glinting in the firelight. He looked alert and alive—and a candlemark ago Tarma would never have reckoned on his reviving so fast. “You’d be a thousand times better as a king than your brother, and I know that was the conclusion your sister came to after seeing him rule for six months.”

  “Roald?”

  “You’ve matured. You’ve truly matured a great deal in the time you’ve been here,” the Herald said thoughtfully. “I don’t know if it was fatherhood, or my dubious example, but—you’re not the witling rakehell you were, Stefan. The careless fool you were would have been a worse king than your brother, ultimately—but the man you are now could be a very good ruler.”

  Stefansen turned to Mertis, and stopped dead at a strange, hair-raising humming. Tarma felt the tingling of a power akin to the Warrior’s along her spine; she glanced sharply at Kethry in startlement, only to see that the mage wore an equally surprised expression. The humming seemed to be coming from the heap of saddlepacks and weaponry they’d dumped just inside the door, after Mertis had extracted their soiled, soaked clothing for cleaning.

  Stefansen rose as if in a dream, as the rest of them remained frozen in their seats. He walked slowly to the shadowed pile, reached down, and took something in his hands.

  A long, narrow something.

  Bits of enshrouding darkness began peeling from it, and light gleamed where the pieces had fallen away. The thing he held was a sword—not hers, not Kethry‘s—a sword in a half-decayed sheath—

  As the last of the rotten sheath flaked off of it, Tarma could see from the shape of it that it was the dead man’s sword that they’d found—and no longer the lifeless, dull gray thing it had been. In Stefansen’s hands it was keening a wild song and glowing white-hot, lighting up the entire room.

  Stefansen stood with it in both hands, as frozen for a moment as the rest of them were. Then he dropped it—and as it hit the wooden floor with a dull thud, the light died, and the song with it.

  “Mother of the gods!” he exclaimed, staring at the blade at his feet. “What in hell is that?”

  Jadrek shook his head. “This is just not to be believed—Idra pretends to go haring off after the Sword That Sings—then we just happen to stumble on it on a remote trail, and just happen to bring it with us—”

  “Archivist, I hate to disagree,” Tarma interrupted, “but it’s not so much of a coincidence as you might think. Idra wanted an excuse to go north. If she’d wanted one to go south, I would bet you’d have found a different legend, but the Sword’s legend says it was stolen and taken north, so that’s the one you chose. There’s only one real road through the Comb. No thief would take that, and no fugitive—well, that left this goat-track we followed. I know it’s the closest path to the real road, and I’ll bet it’s one of the few that go all the way through. No great coincidence there. As for the coincidence of us finding the dead thief, and of Keth taking the sword—I’ll bet he was found a good dozen times, or why were the goldwork and the gems gone from the sheath and the pommel? But nobody in their right mind would bother taking a blade that wouldn’t cut butter. And we’ve been stopping in every likely sheltered spot, so it’s small wonder that we ran across him and his booty. But I would be willing to stake Ironheart that no mage ever ran across the body. Mages can sense energies, even quiescent ones; right, Keth?”

  “That’s true,” Kethry corroborated. “I knew there was something about it, but I didn’t have the strength to spare to deal with it right then. So I did what most mages would do—I packed it up to look into it later, if there was a later. Besides, knowing how these mage-purposed things work, I would say that the sword might well have known where it was going. It could well have ‘told’ me to bring it here.”

  “And the sword, once it sensed you were wavering on making a bid for the throne, made itself known,” Mertis concluded wryly.

  “It appears,” Stefansen said ruefully, “that I don’t have any choice.”

  “No more than I did, my friend,” Roald replied with a chuckle, and a smile. “No more than I did.”

  But Stefansen sagged, and his face took on an expression of despair. “This is utterly hopeless, you know,” he said. “Just how am I supposed to get back the crown when my only allies are
a baby, an outlander, three women, a—forgive me, Jadrek—half-crippled scholar, an outsized beast, and a sword that’s likely to betray me by glowing and singing every time I touch it?”

  “I really don’t see why you’re already giving up,” Roald chided. “Thrones have been overturned with less. What do you really need for a successful rebellion?”

  “For a start, you need someone who knows where each and every secret lies,” Jadrek said, sitting up straighter, his eyes shining with enthusiasm. “Someone who knows which person can be bought and what his price is, which person can be blackmailed, and who will serve out of either love or duty. I haven’t been sitting in the corners of the Court being ignored all these years without learning more than a few of those things.”

  “We could infiltrate the capital disguised,” Kethry said, surprising her partner. “Magical disguises, if we have to. No one will know us then; Jadrek can tell me who are the ones he wants contacted; if we can get one of us into the Court itself, we could pass messages, arrange meetings. I know Tarma could go in as a man, with an absolute minimum of disguising, all physical.”

  So we’ve thrown in with this lot, have we, she‘enedra? Is it the cause that attracts you, or the fact that it’s Jadrek’s cause? But, since Kethry had added herself to the little conspiracy, Tarma added her own thought, in spite of her better judgment. “Huh, yes—if we can figure something that would put me into the Court without suspicion.”