The Trouble with Peace
Page 44
She flinched as Antaup spurred his horse up from behind in a shower of mud.
“No sign of Rikke?” snapped Leo.
“No sign!”
“What the hell’s happened to her?”
“If her boats were caught in weather like this she could be anywhere.”
“At the bottom of the sea, maybe,” grunted Jin, peering up grimly at the streaming skies.
“If this rain gets any heavier,” growled Savine, trying to unstick her clammy dress from her shoulders under the weight of her waterlogged cloak, “the bottom of the sea will come to us.”
They picked their way around the boggy margins of a vast puddle in the road. One could have described it as a lake without fear of contradiction, men squatting on an upended cart at one side like shipwrecked mariners, all manner of gear floating on the rain-pricked water while others waded past, weapons over their heads, or tried to force their way through the hedges to either side.
“This way!” They were led past a miserable huddle of men under a tarp and out across a darkened field. It felt good for a moment to move faster than a crawl, even if Savine had no idea where they were moving to. Then she saw flickering lights up ahead, dark shapes moving in the twilight.
“Riders!” hissed Antaup, ripping his spear from its case. Panic rippled through the knot of officers. Steel scraped as swords were drawn, shields unslung. Savine’s horse was barged by another and she only just clung on to the saddle, wrenching her arm. She stared, heart in her mouth, one hand gripping the reins like death, the other wrapped protectively around her belly.
“Who goes there?” Jin roared into the night, standing in his stirrups with his great mace ready.
“Lord Isher!” came a strangled shout. “And you?”
There was a collective gasp as men sagged in their saddles. “It’s the Young Lion!” called Leo, reassuring laughter in his voice. “No need to piss yourselves!”
“So you say,” grunted Savine, squirming in her saddle.
“Thank the Fates!” Riders came smiling into the flickering light cast by the torches of Leo’s guards. “We thought you might be the king’s men.”
“Likewise.” Leo grinned hugely as he leaned from his saddle to clasp Isher’s hand.
The sight of their ally gave Savine far less comfort than she might have hoped. He had none of the self-assurance he radiated while stirring trouble in the Open Council, or discussing how they would divide the spoils in Ostenhorm. He looked gaunt and jumpy, his uniform a poor fit under his soaked oilskin, his white hair rain-flattened to a dirty grey but for one absurd tweak which stuck up like a peacock’s crest.
“Barezin is somewhere behind.” Isher waved into the darkness in a way that strongly implied he had no idea where. “I’ve had messages from some of the others.”
“Bloody roads are a bloody shambles,” snapped a lord with an extravagant breastplate. Savine didn’t recognise him and no one seemed in the mood for introductions, least of all her.
“Lady Wetterlant’s with us,” said Isher, eyes narrowed against a sudden gust, “but her troops are strung out along five miles of boggy track and their supplies five miles behind that! Have the Northmen landed?”
“Most of ’em,” called Jin. “Stour’s somewhere to the east but half his boats drifted. In this weather, who knows where they’ll wash up?”
“Bloody beaches are a bloody shambles, too,” grunted Antaup.
“Is Heugen with you?” asked Leo.
Isher’s unhappy horse kept trying to turn around. Savine sympathised. He bad-temperedly jerked it back. “You haven’t heard from him?”
“No, but we can’t wait. We have to push on, whatever the weather. We can’t give Orso any time to gather his forces!”
They clattered through the gate of a low farmhouse, mean wooden buildings around a yard of rain-hammered mud, wind thrashing at the trees. A dog ran wild, barking at the horses, and a soldier hissed curses as he kicked it away. Savine peeled herself from the saddle and Jin helped her down. A family watched from under the dripping eaves of a barn, presumably the unfortunate owners of the place, as dozens of soldiers, wagons and one heavily pregnant woman crowded into their churned-up farmyard. Probably Savine should have felt sorry for them, but her pity was soluble in heavy rain, apparently, and what she had left she needed for herself.
The low-ceilinged front parlour of the house swarmed with men in mismatched uniforms, all gabbling at once, the windows misty with their breath. Antaup had dragged a table into the middle of the room and upended a case of damp maps onto it, rooting through them with the expression of a man trying to solve a riddle in a language he did not speak.
“Damn it!” Leo held one up to the inadequate lamplight, set flickering as someone shoved the door wide and wind whipped through the room. “Can we get a decent light in here? Is this map accurate?”
“None of them are bloody accurate—”
“Do we know where the king’s forces are?” grumbled Lord Mustred, rain dripping from his bedraggled eyebrows.
“I heard two days’ march away.”
“What? We were told he was fleeing south!”
Savine winced. In business, few things went entirely to plan. In war, plans and reality barely noticed each other in passing. Panicked guesswork was the best one could hope for. The sheer scale of it. Thousands of men. Tons of supplies. Oceans of misinformation hiding infinitesimal grains of truth. Savine was used to taking charge, but how could anyone take charge of this? Especially someone who could scarcely control her own bladder.
Not for the first time, Savine wished Jurand was with them. He was the only one of Leo’s friends who could really organise, who had an eye for the details, who thought less about what he wanted to do and more about what had to be done. The man was like a wagon’s axle. You paid little mind to it when it was there, but take it away and things plunged rapidly off the road.
The door banged open and another cold draught swept in. A man shook water from a fur-trimmed cloak, huffing and blowing. An old white-haired Northman, with gold on his mail and rain in his beard and broken veins on his bulbous nose.
He looked about, realising all the soldiers had stopped their business to look at him, and nervously cleared his throat. “Nice evening for it.”
“Hardbread!” said Leo, grabbing the old warrior by the hand and giving it a shake fit to tear his arm off. “At last! Where’s Rikke?”
“Still in Uffrith.”
“What?”
“Well, she was when I left. She should’ve left herself by now. Be here soon, I guess. There was a storm. Boats couldn’t leave the harbour. Good thing it didn’t come an hour later or we might’ve all drowned.”
Leo had lurched from the heights of relief to the depths of disappointment without taking a breath. “How many men did you bring?”
“For now, just the ones rowed me here. ’Bout thirty?”
“Thirty?” A shocked mutter ran around the room. An officer from Angland and one of the noblemen’s retainers had begun shouting at one another. A punch was thrown, they wrestled, barged the table, bellowing insults. Jin grabbed them around their necks and bundled the pair of them out into the night. The clamour and the panic and the wild eyes reminded Savine too much of Valbeck. She felt that horribly familiar sour taste, the gorge rising in her throat, her heart thudding and her head spinning as she backed into the shadows, wondering if among all these half-glimpsed faces she could see the men who had chased her through the streets—
“Are you all right?” asked Zuri, taking her gently by the elbow.
“Never mind Rikke,” Savine forced through her gritted teeth. “Just find me a fucking bucket.”
“This way,” said Zuri, slipping through the madness to a side door.
Savine shuffled after her, one hand pressed into her back and the other under her swollen belly, into a little kitchen on the side of the building with a time-blackened fireplace and a smell of bad cooking. She pushed the door shut and leaned back on it, tried to i
gnore the mad babble of raised voices from beyond, fix on the rattling of the ill-fitting window, the steady drip-drip of water from a leak.
Zuri stood with hands on hips, looking down at a pair of empty milking pails, yoke still attached and propped on top.
“More than adequate,” said Savine, waddling over.
After much fumbling, she finally wriggled her drawers past her knees and with Zuri half-holding her up managed to squat over one of the pails, skirts gathered around her hips and the cold metal brushing her arse. When she heard the metallic spattering, she almost cried with relief. She shuddered at the last trickle, tried to bend down to fish up her drawers between two fingers, but could not quite reach.
“Hell,” she gasped, legs trembling with the effort. In the end, she had to stand before she fell, let Zuri drag her rain-sodden skirts out of the way and pull them up for her.
She flopped back exhausted onto a stool with a flapping of muddy cloth, shoulders against the damp plaster, boots stretched out wide in front of her.
“So much for leading an army. I can hardly get my drawers up without help.”
“A good thing for your reputation as a general that I am here,” said Zuri. “Rabik and Haroon should be along soon with dry clothes and dinner.”
Savine shut her eyes, tears of gratitude prickling the lids. “What the hell would I do without your family? I’ve no idea how you can stay so calm.”
“I was not always a lady’s companion. I have seen my share of storms.” Zuri frowned off into the corner of the room, as though bad memories lurked there. “They pass, in time.”
“If the lightning doesn’t find you out,” muttered Savine, giving Zuri’s hand a squeeze.
The door rattled at a thudding knock, and she gritted her teeth and worked her way into a slightly more presentable position, bladder aching again already. “Yes?”
The door wobbled open and someone dipped his head under the low lintel.
“Broad!” The name almost came as a gasp of relief. Here was a man she had seen deal with a crisis. A rock to cling to in a storm.
“Lady Savine.” He frowned down at her, eye-lenses dotted with beads of rain and an ugly scab on one side of his head. “Are you all right—”
“I should not have ridden and it should not have rained. Tell me you have some good news!”
He did not look like a man with good news, it had to be said. Even in Valbeck, during the uprising, even when things got bad, he had always seemed hopeful, at least. Now he looked grim. Brows wrinkled, fists clenched. For a moment, the sight of him, scabbed head nearly brushing the low ceiling, gave Savine the slightest twinge of fear. An echo of the terror when she first saw his great silhouette on the barricade in Valbeck.
“The Breakers’ll join us,” he said, after a pause. “And the Burners. They’ve been armed, like you told me. Aiming for uprisings all across the Union on the last day of summer.”
“They should already be underway,” murmured Zuri.
“That could make all the difference.” Savine closed her eyes and breathed a long sigh. “If they can pin down the King’s Own, stop reinforcements arriving, we might not need to fight at all.” She hoped, she prayed, they did not need to fight at all. “Who did you deal with? Risinau?”
“No.” Broad took off his lenses to wipe them on a corner of his shirt. Savine got the feeling it was definitely bad news this time. “Judge.”
“The woman who hanged all those people in Valbeck?”
Broad winced, mouth open, as though wondering how much to say. In the end, all he said was, “That’s her.”
Savine felt another surge of panic, slipped the box out of her sleeve and into her trembling hand, snapped it open. Water had got inside, the pearl dust made useless paste. “Damn it!” she snarled, flinging it against the wall. Right away she felt foolish. “Sorry. Not very graceful.”
“These aren’t very graceful times.”
“Can this woman Judge be trusted?”
“I’d sooner trust a scorpion,” said Broad, hooking his lenses around his ears again.
“We’ll just have to hope for the best.” Savine gave a little gasp as her baby shifted, put a calming hand on her stomach. “Is war always like this?”
“It’s when the enemy arrives things really turn to shit, begging your pardon.”
“Let’s hope they never arrive, then,” said Savine.
“Hope can’t hurt.” But Broad gave the strong impression that he did not think it would help much, either.
“Could you tell His Grace what you’ve told me?”
“Aye. If I can get a word in.”
Savine waved Zuri over. “I fear I need my bucket again.”
Liar, Liar
“Lord Governor Brock’s headquarters?” asked Vick, sitting easy in her saddle but with an expression that said she’d no time for nonsense.
The corporal barely looked up from his sizzling pan, just waved her on. One of the soldiers gave her a weak smile, then went back to scraping mud from a boot. None of them challenged her as she nudged her horse past, but that was no surprise.
She’d always been the best liar she knew.
From as early as she could remember, little Victarine dan Teufel, doted-upon youngest daughter of the Master of the Mints, had known she didn’t feel things quite the way other people did. Or at least that her feelings never made it to her face. What a solemn little child. How cold you are! Say something, Victarine, I have no notion what you are thinking.
So she had taught herself to fake it. Sat cross-legged in front of her mother’s little mirror, rehearsing shy smiles and hurt frowns, squeezing out the tears, practising until she could blush on demand. Such an expressive daughter. How animated she is! Her feelings are written on her face, poor thing.
Then one day she broke a treasured vase, and blamed her brother, and maintained a perfect air of baffled innocence while he turned red and angry. Her mother punished him for her crime, and made him apologise to her for lying into the bargain, and gave her a slice of fruit tart as a reward. So little Victarine learned early what the truth is worth. Good lying isn’t so much about what you say as how you say it. Amazing how far you can get if you stick to a straight line and look like you’ve got every reason to be there.
So Vick crossed muddy fields choked with rebels and ruined tents, not skulking on the margins, but trotting through the midst of the slimy chaos, eyes ahead. She tutted in disgust as two soldiers argued over a canteen. She hissed impatiently at a crowd trying to shift a mired wagon. She ordered a whole queue of bedraggled men outside a slumping soup-tent to get out of her way and made them grumpily shuffle aside.
She’d always been the best liar she knew. But like anyone who wants to truly master a skill, young Victarine dan Teufel had built on natural talent with painstaking practice.
She’d made herself a student of behaviour. Noted giveaway twitches of the eyes, telltale movements of the hands, observed them in others, suppressed them in herself. She’d practised on the servants, then on her family, then on the powerful men her father met with. She’d learned to keep always as close as she could to the truth. To shape her lies to her audience like a key to a lock. To shape herself. Not only to tell them what they wanted to hear, but to be who they wanted to hear it from.
She would be dealing with nobility today, so she became nobility, shoulders confidently back, chin proudly raised. She was Victarine, with the big “dan” in her name and disinterested scorn for anyone without it. She’d pinned her hair up. A plain dealer, hiding nothing. On reflection, she pulled a few strands free for a softening touch. Simple clothes, but not cheap. She’d decided a skirt was pushing it, but she’d opened one more button of her shirt than usual, rolled the sleeves once to show her wrists. Unguarded. Even a little vulnerable. Finally, she’d made Tallow flick her with road muck. She had been riding hard on a vital mission, after all.
“Who goes there?” snapped a sergeant, pointing a polearm and a belligerent expression.
“My name is Victarine dan Teufel.” In the smooth, clear noblewoman’s accent her mother used to have. “I need to speak to Lord Governor Brock.”
He frowned up, looking for something to distrust, but she gave him nothing.
“You could be a spy,” he said, grudgingly.
“I am a spy.”
He stared at her, caught off guard.
“On your side.” She leaned down, glancing left and right, using an urgent whisper, as if she’d picked him and only him to trust with a secret. “And I have a message from Lord Marshal Brint that could change everything.”
Important news, for the important man. He puffed himself up, turned frowning to the busy yard. “Clear a path there! This woman needs to see the Lord Governor!”
She’d always been the best liar she knew. Then the Practicals dragged her from her bed in the night, and her family was sent to the camps in Angland. Young Victarine dan Teufel had buried her fancy name in a shallow grave and become just Vick, and lying had gone from a game to a means of survival. In the years she’d spent in that freezing hell, as her family died one by one, she’d only told the whole truth once, and that was the day she got out. She’d hammered her face into a vizor of blank indifference that no shock, no pain, no terror could dent.
Which proved to be a very good thing as she was shown into Leo dan Brock’s borrowed dining room. From what she’d heard, he was one of those vain men of action who can’t wait to believe what they want to. But he wasn’t eating breakfast alone. Standing nearby, big hands clasped, looking mightily surprised to see her wander in out of the muddy morning, was her old comrade from the Breakers, Gunnar Broad. Worse yet, sitting on the other side of the table was the heavily pregnant daughter of Vick’s previous employer, Savine dan Brock.