by Mike Shel
“We do not,” said Agnes’s father, starting to dismount with a frown. Agnes shot to his side to help him down from Glutton, supporting his injured arm and shoulder. “And I am no longer with the League. We do journey for the Citadel, though. We won’t be any trouble here. We’ll make our camp at a polite distance off so as not to disturb you.”
“Nonsense!” Scylla exclaimed, coming to Auric’s side and taking his other arm. “We would be happy to have you join our campfire. Perhaps we can entertain you as we rehearse. We plan to run through our latest production: Bezhel’s The King of Calamities. I play the virginal princess. Come, see us ply our trade.” She pressed herself against his side, her breasts again threatening to overwhelm the neckline of her dress.
“What trade would that be, Scylla?” sneered Baucus, dusting himself off. “Your current profession, or your former one?”
“You really are an oaf,” sighed Chalca. “Why Kellian brought you on is beyond me.”
“He needed someone to play the male roles, half-man,” Baucus growled. “You’re so keen to play the minor female roles.”
“What a sour turd you are, Baucus,” said the man with the spectacles. “We’re fortunate to have Chalca’s versatility. And besides, if Scylla can play a virgin lass, Chalca here can play any man, woman, or beast that walks this empire, or the last.” Several gathered there laughed, including Chalca, and Scylla spared the man a playful swat.
“Hush, Murnay! Don’t plant such silly notions in our guests’ heads.”
Baucus looked ready to venture another verbal jab, but the good humor seemed to silence him. He marched off, grumbling. As Agnes and Scylla escorted Auric toward the space for an audience before their woodland stage, Agnes looked back at Kennah, still atop his mount, still scowling. “You’ll take care of our horses for us, won’t you, Kennah?” She smiled and gave him a wink. The big man’s face recoiled as though he had bitten into a wedge of lemon.
When Agnes saw what the Blessed of Pember were having for their supper—a rather uninspiring salted wheat porridge with biscuits better employed as siege ammunition—she offered the rest of the side of bacon from their supplies. It was no sacrifice. Lady Hannah’s kitchen staff had provisioned them as though they were a pampered party of six on a week-long journey. The fellow cooking up their repast, a young man with a bent back and bulging eyes, gave her a grin of few teeth and cut the meat into small bits. He fried them in a black skillet and poured the cooked contents, grease and all, into the fat cookpot of bubbling porridge.
Chalca shared the troupe’s recent history as they ate, describing their triumphs and travails from the past year. Before their time in Kilkirk and Aulkirk, they had performed around the isle of Kelby for nearly eight months, with one of their performances in the main city attended by the earl himself. But at last, audiences dwindled, and a decision was made to seek new patrons on the main isle.
“A certain someone pinching a magistrate’s purse helped make that decision,” muttered Baucus, sitting across the fire from Agnes and her companions. He had been sending deeply unappealing invitations to her across the flames, between hateful glares at Chalca and Scylla, who sat next to her. Scylla chucked her half-eaten biscuit at the man’s head. He barely dodged the missile but managed to spill the contents of his bowl onto his lap.
Chalca laughed, a musical thing. “There’re no spectators for your bile here, Baucus. Go into the woods. Perhaps a baby bird has fallen from its nest. Vent your rancor there.”
“Oh, don’t trouble the baby birds, please,” said Scylla. “But do leave.”
Baucus stood and wiped the gruel from his pants. His lips peeled back from his teeth, making them seem even bigger, too large for his mouth. He pointed a finger at Chalca, his face reddening, his voice the aural equivalent of a predator readying to pounce. “You two,” he hissed, “whore and bender both—once Kellian is shuffled offstage, I’ll see to it you get what’s coming.” He held his hateful stare for a moment longer, then retrieved his wooden bowl from the dirt and tossed it into the fire.
“Wasteful,” offered Chalca. “We have few extra bowls.”
“Tis a petty man who doth direct his wroth at stray dog or other innocent darkened by his approach,” said Scylla.
“Spoken by the chatelaine, in reference to the Crown Prince of Perriweg, act one, scene two of our current production,” explained Chalca, turning to Agnes. “She certainly does steal my lines, if not that magistrate’s purse.”
Baucus’s eyes went from Scylla to Chalca. He took a knife from the sleeve of his shirt and pointed the blade at him, his stare full of menace. “When I cut dick and balls from you, Chalca, you want I should cut a slit there for you as well?”
Kennah stood then, one hand on the hilt of his sword. “Put your blade away, wretch,” rumbled the big man, “or I’ll lop off the hand that wields it.”
Baucus looked at Kennah, disbelieving. His blade wavered for a moment, and doubt played at the corner of his eyes, but his courage rallied. “Don’t be so sure I wouldn’t gut you first, you bearded ape,” said the buck-toothed man. “You sweet on him, blackbeard? I saw him make eyes at you. Did he touch something deep? Something you keep hid from the world?”
“Keep talking, wretch,” Kennah answered, drawing his sword a quarter way out of its scabbard.
Agnes was getting ready to intervene when her father, propped up against a log to her right, spoke. “Young man, Kennah has tangled with far worse than you and stands here today unscathed. He’s faced down the dead and demons. How much trouble would your little apple peeler there give him, do you think? And if you did get the drop on him, do you suppose my daughter would stand by while you tried to nick her Syraeic brother? The two of them would hand you your entrails before your corpse hit the ground. Now put that toy away and stop being an ass.”
Scylla laughed, an indelicate but hearty thing. Chalca, however, had no amusement in his expression, his eyes locked now on Baucus. Was that a tear at the corner of his eye? Agnes was ready if the angry man across the fire chose to chance a fight. But at last Baucus stood down and walked off down the path from the direction she and her travelling companions had come, glowering.
It took several minutes for the ill will that floated in the air after the man’s departure to dissipate, but finally it did and Murnay set about telling some far-fetched folk tales from his native Marburand. Agnes enjoyed the man’s flair for dramatizing his stories, with great gestures and a distinctive voice for each character, but more than once her eyes drifted to the path Baucus had taken. She noticed Kennah’s did as well, once or twice, but otherwise he brooded, as though he had no ear for Murnay’s colorful tales.
Afterwards they watched the troupe rehearse their production. Chalca brought them a bottle of cheap wine, which she and Kennah shared. Her father, who hadn’t touched alcohol in years, abstained. After only a second tumbler, the bearded man was already showing signs of inebriation. He poured himself a sloppy third. As Baucus, who had returned from his angry sojourn, played out a scene with Scylla as though nothing before had occurred, Kennah leaned over to Agnes and whispered in her ear.
“Peregrine,” he started, tripping a bit on the second r. “You—you know I never…made a go at you, out of respect.”
“What?”
“Tried to steal a kiss. You’re a lovely girl—I jus’…well, respect you, as a Syraeic sist’r.”
“Lalu’s tits, Kennah,” she whispered back, glancing at her father to see if he overheard their exchange. “Why on earth do you say this to me now?”
“Well, you unnerstan’ I like women, not like that buck-toothed bastard said.”
“Kennah, how can a man as big as you be drunk after two fucking glasses of wine? And why should I or anyone but the one you’re sticking it in care what you do with your dick?”
“O’ course, o’ course, I apologize,” he slurred, then took another swallow f
rom the cup.
It was getting late. Agnes excused herself and her father, who was nodding off during the performance anyway; it was a grim affair that Agnes always thought was overly bloody and cynical—such sour-souled stuff was popular in the capital these days. However well the actors dramatized the story, it gave her no pleasure. She helped her father change his bandages, noting some early signs of infection that worried her as she gently wrapped clean linen strips around the wounds. She dosed him with the apothecary’s painkiller, a bit more than she had seen her father take himself, then helped him get settled on his bedroll. She laid hers next to his, beneath a tree in sight of the actors’ tents. As she and her father lay there, staring above at stars peeking through the canopy of leaves above them, she told Auric of what Kennah had said. Her father chuckled, which she found irritating.
“Some men fear that other men will judge them weak, less than what they should be,” he said.
“Great gods and small, why?” Agnes asked. “I’ve never feared any woman would think less of me because I don’t wear a dress. My blood doesn’t boil when those I rebuff accuse me of preferring women. Why should it bother him?”
“You were raised by your mother, darling, and she was apportioned helpings of Belu’s wisdom and Lalu’s compassion afforded few. She was an innkeeper’s daughter, remember. She learned from a young age that we needn’t all be alike, in appearance, dress, or custom, or who we love. Of course, when your livelihood depends on every sort sleeping beneath your roof, silly prejudices are a hindrance. She instilled those virtues in you. And bless her for it. Others are still held hostage to the world’s opinion.”
“So, were you like that once?”
“Like Kennah? Not so much. I just wanted the stink of the tannery off me and an opportunity to prove my worth. The League gave me that. Your mother and your Aunt Lenda and you and Tomas gave me that. No. I learned that most every man or woman seeks nothing more than their own contentment, doing the best they can to navigate themselves through life’s mystery. I’ve fallen short of the man I want to be myself, many times, and I’ve tried to atone when I can. But I’ve never worried much about the man others thought I should be.”
Soon her father was snoring. She laughed at the ease with which he had fallen asleep and was glad that, like her mother, she herself didn’t snore. Agnes lay awake for a while longer, listening to the sounds of the theater troupe rehearsing in the distance, thinking on her father’s words until she drifted off.
Perhaps it was the wine she had the night before, but Agnes missed the dawn that next morning, a rare thing. She didn’t know how much later she would have slept had the shouting from a nearby tent not woken her. A man’s shouts, and a woman’s. The tent’s flap was flung aside, and Scylla emerged, round breasts bouncing as she strode out, pulling a white shift over her head to cover them.
“You must have dropped it somewhere, Kennah. I did not take it!”
Kennah emerged behind her, hairy-chested and shirtless, hopping on one foot as he tugged up his trousers. “Tolwe curse your lying tongue, woman,” he growled. “You lifted the goddamned thing from me while I slept!”
“That would have been a feat! You fell into a slumber atop me, you great beast! How is it I stole your coin?”
Agnes’s father rode up on Glutton at that moment. He must have been off on one of his early morning rides. “What’s this, now?”
Kennah folded his arms over his chest, a gesture that looked so much like that of a guilty novice found out by his preceptor Agnes might have laughed. “This woman has stolen my purse, Sir Auric. We…shared a tent last night, and while I slept, she took it from my belongings.”
“I deny it!” cried Scylla, head held high, looking like a wild-haired heroine on the stage.
Chalca arrived on the scene, foundation applied to his face, but none of the more artful touches yet accomplished, his long, dark hair hanging loose on his shoulders. “What’s the noise about, friends?”
“I’m afraid Kennah claims your opposite stole his coin purse, Chalca,” said Agnes, feeling a pain in her shoulders from how she had slept the night before.
Chalca looked at Scylla. She had crossed her own arms over her bosom, her head tilted back, looking down her nose as if appalled by the accusation. “Scylla…” he said. It was a gentle challenge.
“Should I take on the habit, Father?” she answered, arching the small of her back. “Consign myself to a nunnery? For thy accusing eyes fill my virgin breast with shame.”
“Act three, scene five of The King of Calamities, moments before the shocking suicide,” said Chalca. He sighed and approached her. With a liquid movement he took hold of Scylla’s wrist and lifted it, then reached into her shift, between her breasts, and pulled out a leather draw purse. Agnes’s mouth dropped open, wondering how the woman could have secreted it there, as she had seen the pair of them bare and bouncing only a few moments before.
Chalca turned to Kennah, who seemed even angrier now with his accusation confirmed. Scylla looked ready to weep, though Agnes wasn’t certain if this was an actress’s skill rather than genuine emotion. Chalca held up a hand, the other holding the leather pouch at his side. “Sir Kennah, can you forgive this child of Pember for her transgression? If for no other reason than the two of you shared a night of intimacy?”
“Sir Auric is an anointed knight,” he said stiffly. “I am not.”
“Nonetheless, can you find it in your heart to forget this?”
Chalca was standing in front of Kennah now, only an inch or two shorter than the big man, though otherwise the two could not have been more dissimilar: Kennah, muscled, hirsute, scars on his flesh, the very image of the gruff soldier; Chalca, graceful, poised, a paragon of Pember, god of prophecy and the arts. Kennah seemed suddenly uncomfortable out of his shirt, shifting his feet, but nodded curtly.
“Then let me return this,” said Chalca, and he took the purse and sunk it deep in Kennah’s trouser pocket, along with the hand that held it. With both of his hands, Kennah shoved Chalca back with brutal force, sending him crashing to the ground.
“I said not to place your hands on my person, you bloody bender!” barked Kennah. Agnes was over to him in a flash, pushing him back with a palm.
“Pack your goddamned bags, brother.” Her voice was icy, and to her surprise, Kennah sank back, as though her words were those of the First Lictor herself. Her father had gotten down from Glutton and helped Chalca stand. Scylla dusted him off while Auric made quiet apologies for Kennah’s violence.
Making a sign against the evil eye, Scylla glared at Kennah. “Baucus isn’t the only one who directs his fury where it doesn’t belong,” she said to the big man as Agnes backed him towards their mounts and belongings. And in that moment, the look of hurt that bloomed on Kennah’s face drained Agnes’s anger.
The three of them were ready to go in a short while and soon were riding out of the camp of the Blessed. Agnes waved to Chalca and Scylla, who stood at the roadside, again with their juggling pins. Scylla, her thick hair up in ribbons again, waved a pin back at her in farewell. Chalca nodded and smiled a small smile.
It was four hours later, the three of them traveling in silence, when she saw Kennah begin searching his person. He felt at one trouser pocket, then the other, then pawed more frantically at other places for the item he sought. His shouted curse launched a dozen birds from their perches in a nearby tree.
“My purse! Fucking bastard must have palmed it!”
And in unison, Agnes and Auric laughed. Kennah, teeth gritted, said not another word for the rest of their journey.
8
Citadel
They found the walls of Boudun hung with solemn black banners when they finally reached the city at mid-morning the next day. Someone of importance was dead. The crowds at the Mouth were thick, among them at least four aristocratic retinues, with grand wagons and ornate mounted honor gu
ards, suited in baroque, impractical armor and carrying ceremonial swords. Kennah assessed them with a barely restrained sneer. “The two of us could cut down the lot of them in ten minutes,” he said to Agnes, shaking his head.
Agnes nodded in agreement, but her focus was on her father. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, though the morning was fair, and a light wind stirred through the impatient throng. “Papa,” she said, touching his clammy cheek, “you’re feverish.”
“Aye,” he answered, swaying a bit in the saddle. “These burns fester worse. I need to get to a priest.”
Agnes made a decision, leading her mount forward through the crowd, several of whom protested with loud curses. “Kennah!” she shouted back. “Mind my father!” The bearded man put a steadying hand on Auric’s good shoulder and waved her on with the other.
A thin man with a great nose that looked like the head of an axe was clerk at the center gate. He wore an exaggerated frown on his pockmarked face as he scratched with a quill in the battered codex held by a diminutive man in ragged clothing. This doesn’t look promising, she thought. Agnes forced her mount past a few others waiting at the center gate, who objected to her rudeness with varying levels of their own. The barking expletive of a peddler whose cart she banged against drew the attention of the thin man, whose frown grew even more severe.
“Good morning, citizen,” she began, displaying her broadest smile. “I have a man with an infected wound whom we must get to the Blue Cathedral immediately. I wonder if you would let us enter quickly for the purpose. Belu would bless you for it.”
“Would she now? Perhaps you’d like me to close the other gates and summon an escort from the palace as well?” The man’s voice was high-pitched and reedy. It suited his features. He waved his quill-wielding hand in a dismissal and returned his attention to the book. “Get back in line with the rest, girl, or I’ll have my guard clap your ass in irons and throw you in the queen’s dungeons for a fortnight.”
