Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda

by Joel Rosenberg

  Kethol started to say something in protest, but Leria quickly laid her hand on his arm.

  “Please, Captain Thirien, don’t punish them. I’m sure that they did their best. They probably rode by when we were off the trail. Resting.”

  She very carefully didn’t look at Kethol, and hoped that he wouldn’t start with the blushing again. It would be beneath the baron to brag about his exploits, but it would not be in character for him to be ashamed of them, and it was no more unusual that a landholder’s daughter’s wedding dress would be loosely cut when she and her betrothed were presented to the baron for marriage than it would be if she had started to show when she and Forinel were presented to the Emperor. Yes, there would be laughter at his expense, but it would be familiar laughter.

  Thirien gave a slight bow. “As you wish it, Lady,” he said.

  And if he noticed the two pieces of dried grass that Leria had carefully tucked into her hair, he didn’t say anything.

  5

  JASON AND WALTER

  JASON CULLINANE HAD just handed the big bay gelding’s reins to the stableboy when his sister walked into the stable, more dragging than leading her skittish brown gelding.

  “Aiea?”

  “Hey, you recognized me,” she said, grinning. “It’s been days since you left Biemestren; I was worried that you’d forgotten me entirely.”

  The scent of a strange horse immediately had Falsworth snorting and kicking in his stall, and while the stallion wouldn’t get out — the last time he had kicked through the gate, Ereken had replaced the too-thin pine slats with thick oak — the noise disturbed all the other horses, as well.

  Jason could always trust Aiea to bring confusion out of order. That was the way sisters were, he guessed.

  As usual, she was dressed close to indecently: her scoop-necked blouse was cut too low, and her black leather trousers were cut too tight, although he had long since given up complaining about that, since her only response was amused condescension.

  “Hunting?” she asked, although she obviously knew the answer. Not that there was any great secret about it — the bloody knees of his trousers were a good indication, and if much or any of the blood had been his, he wouldn’t be walking so easily.

  “You had some luck, I take it?” she asked, gesturing at his clothes.

  “I’ll change and bathe right away, I promise,” he said. “I just got back, and Taren’s got the bathhouse first.”

  She nodded. “Venison for supper?”

  Not a bad guess. His clothes showed every sign of his having messily field-dressed something, and the most likely candidate for that was deer, after all. “No. Orc — but it’s not for supper.”

  She made a face. “I’d imagine not. So why did you dress them out?”

  “Just trying to figure if there’s a better target to shoot at than the hip,” he said. “Since they won’t hold still while they’re alive, Taren and I have been taking to cutting some up, after.”

  “Any luck in that?”

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “But it was worth a try. We even learned a little.” He tapped on the center of his chest. “If you ever have to shoot one, don’t aim for the breastbone — it’s thicker than a boar’s.”

  He was supposed to be surprised to see her — ever since she had married Uncle Walter, something that always seemed more than vaguely incestuous to Jason, she had been spending almost all of her time in Biemestren — but she was expecting that, so he just acted as though it was no surprise for her to turn up.

  “How many?” she asked.

  “Two. Sow and a buck.” He shrugged. “Still some sort of colony of them, up in the hills.”

  “Not good.”

  That was true enough. He wished that the orcs weren’t getting better about hiding.

  When they had first flowed out from the rift between reality and Faerie, they had been preposterously easy to track, if only from the trail of grisly remains that they left behind. Legends aside, most meat-eating animals avoided humans entirely, and only fought men in self-defense — and then, largely, only when cornered. Orcs seemed to prefer human flesh, with pork in second place.

  But the orcs were getting smarter, or perhaps they had just killed off all the stupid ones. Jason and Taren had followed the trail that these had left from dawn until after noon until it circled back on itself, and he was confident that the two he and Taren had finally happened upon weren’t the ones they were trying to track.

  They would go out again tomorrow. The pair that they were hunting had taken to baby-snatching, and that made them a top priority.

  “As long as I’m wishing,” he said, “I’d wish I were a better tracker.”

  “Or had a better tracker around?” she asked.

  He forced a smile. “Yes, it would be good to have Kethol back.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Any word from Pirojil?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “He’s not much for writing.”

  Pirojil was the most literate of the three — of the two of them, and Jason knew that he could read and sound out English letters, and knew at least enough Erendra glyphs to get by, and Jason had had a suspicion that he could read a bit of Low Elvish, as well, although where and how he had picked that up was something that he didn’t talk about. Not that he talked about himself much at all.

  “Then again,” Jason said, “I’m not much for writing, come to think of it.”

  It would have been good to have Pirojil around, and better to have him and Kethol. But Kethol had gone off to Therranj to retrieve Forinel, and had taken service with the elves, and if there was a tracker or woodsman as good around, Jason had yet to hear of him.

  He tried to tell himself that it was just that, and not the sense of betrayal that he felt. Which hurt him more than he thought it would. Fairly silly — but Pirojil and Kethol and Durine had been around, well, forever, almost, and he had been used to the three of them.

  But now Durine was dead, and Kethol had stayed on in Therranj to serve some elven noble — and had done that without so much as a by-your-leave. Pirojil had taken service with Forinel — only for a while, so he said — and Jason wasn’t sure which of the three he was most angry with, although it seemed both silly and somehow disloyal to be angry at Durine for dying, after all, any more than he should be angry at Father for having done the same thing.

  But he was.

  While Jason Cullinane had tried to learn that he didn’t need to let his every feeling show on his face or in his words, he at least tried to be honest with himself.

  She was smiling at him. “Very good self-control, baby brother.”

  He hated when she called him that. Which was, of course, why she did it.

  He could have responded, honestly, that he had been Karl and Andrea Cullinane’s son longer than she had been their daughter — Aiea had been adopted, after all, and once, years ago, when she had teased him just a little too much, he had said just that, and he didn’t like to remember the look of disgust on Father’s face.

  “Where’s Uncle Walter?” he asked. If he couldn’t get a little revenge one way, well, there were others, and if that was a little juvenile for a man of more than twenty, well, his sister, adopted or no, did tend to bring out the juvenile in him, and probably vice versa, as well.

  “Uncle Walter?”

  “Your husband?” He held up his palm, flat, just at his brow level, but off to the side. “Bearded guy, oh, about this tall, smiles a lot, and probably even means it, every now and then?” It was strange that Aiea had ended up marrying Walter — who wasn’t really his uncle, and whom he hadn’t actually called Uncle Walter since he had been a kid — but they were both adults, of a sort, and what they wanted to do wasn’t any of Jason’s business.

  Even if it was a bit bizarre, given Walter’s history.

  “Uncle Walter, it is, eh?” a familiar voice said, from the doorway.

  Walter Slovotsky walked into the stable, his usual, all-is-right-with-the-world-now-that-I’
m-here smile firmly in place. His brown hair was thinning a little, these days, and smiles — it couldn’t be work or worry — had added some lines around the corners of his lips and at the eyes, but he was, still, Uncle Walter.

  And it was good to see him, even though it had been only a tenday since Parliament had closed.

  Walter Slovotsky stopped a few feet away and gave a quick bow. “Baron Cullinane,” he said. “I hope I’m welcome?”

  “If not, it’s a little bit late for you to be asking, isn’t it?”

  Aiea snickered. “I’ll leave the two of you to talk.” She turned to Jason. “Mother up at the house?”

  He shrugged. “She doesn’t report to me on her comings and goings. Quite the contrary.”

  “Poor baby,” she said, patting him on the cheek, as she left. He watched Walter watch her walking away, and found himself glaring, so he stopped.

  “Hey, take it easy,” Walter said. “I married the girl, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  Walter looked like he was going to say something — probably some comment about Jason and Janie — but then stopped himself. Which was just as well.

  Jason liked Walter, and he trusted him, devious though his mind tended to be, but it didn’t help keep their relationship simple that Walter was married to Jason’s sister and Jason involved with Walter’s daughter — and never mind the strange looks that Walter and Mother passed between them; he didn’t want to think about that — and when you were dealing with Walter Slovotsky, it was always best to try to keep things simple.

  Not that there was much of a chance of that.

  “Pleasure trip?” he asked.

  Walter smiled. “Hey, any time I see you, it’s a pleasure.” He sobered. “But, more seriously, after the last Parliament, I needed to get out of town for a while” — he raised a palm — “just because the walls were starting to close in on me, eh? Not any kind of trouble, okay?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Well, I do. I figured I’d combine a visit with you and your mother — without having Beralyn glaring at us, like we’re plotting treason, every time the two of us exchange a couple of words — with seeing how you were doing. So: how are you doing?”

  Jason shrugged, and then cursed himself for it. Trust Uncle Walter to make him feel twelve again, with a shrug for this and a shrug for that, as though he had, yet again, been caught skipping out to go hunting with Kethol when he was supposed to be in the library with Doria.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “It’s good to be back.”

  Walter nodded. “I know the feeling. Orc troubles, I hear. Getting better?”

  Jason shook his head. “Worse, if anything. They’re smarter every year, it seems like.”

  “Evolution in action?”

  Jason forced himself not to shrug. “I don’t know. I do know that it’s … getting tougher. Not killing them —”

  “I never found them all that easy to kill. Shit, Tennetty never found them all that easy to kill, and she was good at it.”

  “It takes some practice,” Jason said. He tapped himself on the chest. “Don’t try for a chest shot, because while that will kill them, sooner than later, it doesn’t slow them down enough, not right away. Hold low and outside,” he said, patting himself on the hip. “Break the pelvic girdle, and they fall right over. Gives you enough time to spear them.”

  A rack of boar spears hung on the wall; he pulled one down, and tapped at the crosspiece, welded to the back of the long, broad head. “It’s more like boar hunting than anything else — except that boars don’t have hands, and they do.”

  “Of course, if you miss …”

  Jason nodded. “I’ve done that, from time to time. It can get kind of messy. Which is why you need the boar spear — and somebody you can rely on to get around behind, while you’re holding on, because even with a spear in an orc’s chest, you’re not going to be able to hold one off very long.”

  “And if there’s another one of them, as well as another one of you? It could get ugly.”

  “Yeah. Just as well they don’t work together, because if they did, I don’t have the slightest idea what we’d do.”

  “Hmmm … then again, if they did know how to team up, they probably wouldn’t be hiding in burrows up in the hills, eh?”

  “There is that.”

  Walter nodded. “Well, as long as you trust this Taren …”

  “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t hunt with him at all, much less for orcs.” Jason frowned. “But more is better than fewer, and I’m hoping that you’re not going to try to talk Pirojil into staying on in Keranahan any longer than it takes to get the baron settled. As though that should be his problem, just because he and Erenor brought Forinel back from Therranj.”

  “I dunno. You’re not going to tell me that you need one soldier that bad, are you?”

  “No. But —”

  “But you’re used to having him and Kethol around, and you’d rather hunt with two or three men you know and trust than with a whole company that treats the young baron as though he’s baggage, eh?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I can understand that.” Walter seemed to consider it for a moment. “If you want my guess, Pirojil’s absence has a lot more to do with Leria than it does with the baron.”

  “Leria and Pirojil?” Jason cocked his head to one side. “Is there something going on that I shouldn’t know about?”

  “Almost certainly.” Walter smiled. “Why should today be unusual?”

  Jason was suspicious. “Something between Pirojil and Leria? That doesn’t sound awfully likely. I mean, he’s, well —”

  “He’s terribly ugly, yes, and that bothers him more than it bothers anybody else, I think. Women? Some. Many, maybe.” Walter tilted his head to one side. “If women were all that impressed by looks, neither of us would be able to get a date to the prom, eh?”

  “Prom?”

  Walter Slovotsky shook his head. “Oh, never mind. Then again, it’s a different thing — Pirojil is a soldier, and you’re royalty, and I’m, well, me. I don’t think there’s anything going on there — except maybe some unrequited passion on Pirojil’s part.”

  “Which is why I shouldn’t be expecting him to hurry back to the barony?”

  “Yeah. Give it some time, okay?”

  Jason shrugged. Well, if it was that way …

  “Now, tell me more about these orcs,” Walter Slovotsky went on. “You want to go hunting tomorrow with Taren and me?”

  “The chances of me deliberately putting my tender flesh in the way of huge beasts that think of me as an appetizer are zero, zip, and none, Jason.” Slovotsky smiled. “Not unless I had to — and I sure don’t think that I have to.”

  As they walked out into the bright light of the noon sun, Walter Slovotsky was keeping his eye on where the tall oaks of the forest rimmed the eastern field. “That said, of course, you never know — you were telling about these boar spears you’ve been using?”

  It was all that Walter could do to keep a smile off his face as the talk turned to matters of orc hunting that interested Walter only in a distant, academic sense, as important as they were to a country baron.

  Walter had been in a fight with an orc, once, and once was more than enough, and he had been entirely truthful in telling Jason that he had no intention of ever doing so again.

  But he had been right in worrying that Jason would start to get itchy about Pirojil’s absence, and maybe begin to wonder why Pirojil had suddenly developed such an attachment to Forinel. That might — might — lead to some awkward questions, and Walter Slovotsky would rather awkward questions never be asked in the first place, rather than answered.

  There was no reason that Jason had to know that Forinel was really Kethol, and it was always easier to keep a secret if you never knew it in the first place, and better to supply an answer to a question before it was ever asked.

  Besides, Walter Slovotsky thought to himself, if you couldn’t fool your friends, w
ho could you fool?

  6

  MORNING AT THE RESIDENCE

  IF YOU CAN manage to sleep until noon, the rest of the world will have worn itself out solving its own problems before you have to get involved.

  If, that is, they don’t get worse — which is, let’s face it, the way to bet.

  — Walter Slovotsky

  The sun hadn’t fully risen over the walls when Pirojil found Miron out behind the barracks, giving a lesson in swordsmanship to a half-dozen soldiers.

  The fencing circle had been cleared in the gravel in the center of a small grove of old cherry trees. Bent and crooked as only old fruit trees could be, they trembled in the wind, as though excited to watch the competition.

  Like the others, Miron was stripped to the waist, barracks-style. While his broad chest held a few scars, including a long, ragged one over his heart that spoke of a serious wound and the lack of available healing draughts at the time he had gotten it, it sported none of the fresh, painful red weals that amply decorated the chests and arms of all of the soldiers, and proclaimed that Miron had been at this for a while this morning.

  “A good morning to you, Captain Pirojil,” Miron said, raising the hilt of his practice sword to his head in a quick salute as he stepped back out of the circle. His boot heel crushed a fallen cherry, its juice red as fresh blood on the graveled ground.

  “And to you, Lord Miron.”

  Turning from him, Miron saluted his opponent, a boy of perhaps eighteen at most, who looked far too young to be a soldier.

  A balding, fortyish decurion took up a position between them, his short staff outstretched.

  “Make yourselves ready,” he said, raising his arm. He didn’t quite have the bored tone of a real swordmaster down, and he called out “Fight!” and snapped his arm down before stepping quite out of the cleared dirt circle that served as the practice ring.

  Miron and his opponent closed.

  It was possible that the boy had simply never held a sword of any sort in his hand before, or that he refused to attempt to score off a noble — Miron quickly beat the blade aside, tapped the boy lightly on the chest, retreated, then instantly reengaged and scored again, even before the decurion could step between them.