by Morgan Smith
I was tired on the second day. We’d been up late, Iain, Feargal and I, the night before, and I overslept. By the time I arose, the two of them had gone out riding and Meryn proved elusive, seeming to shy away even more from any private speech with me.
When Feargal came back, he, too, seemed to be avoiding me. He spent a long time closeted alone with Lady Ilona, discussing business, I supposed, and then he was off again with Iain, back down into the town for more riotous carousing. I wasn’t excluded from it. Indeed, Iain had urged me to come along, but my head felt cloudy and I still had a headache, and I had opted for an early night.
And then I woke in the small hours, Meryn’s plaintive cries ringing in my ear.
An impossibility.
Her rooms lay on the opposite side of the keep from mine, with many a thick stone wall and long corridor between us, and I’d been so deep asleep, it was unlikely I could have heard what happened outside my own door, let alone soft sobs nearly a quarter mile away.
Some nameless terror filled me, though. I threw on my trews and shirt and ran blindly through the halls, across the long, open yard and up three flights of stairs, and to that place where nothing in my life would ever be the same again.
I saw what she’d felt compelled to do. I read the words she’d scrawled on a scrap of parchment. And every comfort I had garnered, every deed I’d done, every chance I had ever had in life dropped away like so much dust when the wind dies down.
I had failed her. The one true vow I’d made, the one person I had actually, wholly and unreservedly loved, and I had failed her so utterly that I had now only one purpose left in this world.
I didn’t heed Ilona’s words, did not hear them, would not, though I remembered, after, I could hear the sound of them and of so many other castle folk, weeping.
I was in a rage so cold, I could have torn down the walls of Gorsedd stone by stone with my bare hands and not have noticed I was doing it.
I listened to no one, I was storming along the hallways towards Feargal’s room, the one he always stayed in when he was here, and I meant to tear his heart out, or worse.
It was my cousin Iain who came to me, Iain who had dragged me forcibly away, onto a boat and up river back to Dungarrow. It was Iain’s voice I remembered, Iain who tried to reason with me, who begged me not to throw away everything we’d won, not to abandon Einon and the rule of law.
But I was a rock, I was stone, I was no living thing.
Feargal came into Dungarrow Castle two days later, to submit to judgment, to plead clemency of his duke, and I called the challenge. He had looked so dire, so shadowed and tormented, and so unlike his laughing self, but what did I care for that? He had accepted everything, and I did not see, could not let myself see, the sorrow and the bewilderment and the despair in every inch of him. He had stood out on the field, knowing I would kill him. It was in his eyes, and in mine. There could be nothing else. We both knew it.
And not even Einon’s simple request, that voice asking me to back down, just this once, to trust him, just a little, to wait for proper justice, to not do this thing - it could not stop me.
I barely heard him, there was so much murder in my heart. Some part of me knew this was another ending, that whatever life I had had before would be utterly and completely destroyed, but it didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter, not against the pain inside.
And I walked out and looked at the man I’d wedded and bedded, a man I’d laughed with and gambled with and drank with, a man I’d fought beside and trusted, had known for the best part of my life and called my friend, and I felt nothing, nothing at all but the emptiness of my loss, and I killed him in as painfully efficient a manner as I could.
Not even his last words could have moved me, then.
But they moved me now.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Arlais was already up and about when I woke, and she looked, if not cheerful, at least no longer in that state of complete nervous exhaustion, and she seemed determined to behave as if yesterday had never been.
I trailed behind her down to the hall, still trying to shake my head free of the dreams and memories. I filled a mug of ale and collected a couple of oatcakes and wandered out into the courtyard, still shut up inside my own head and preoccupied with my own confusion. I couldn’t even form intelligent questions, as far as I could tell, let alone begin looking for answers.
I nearly fell over Lannach, who was sitting in front of the doorway in very nearly the same place as I had been heading for.
He rose.
I tensed. I didn’t need another fight, not now, not when my mind was all on more crucial things.
“Lady Caoimhe.” he said. His voice was strained and stiff and it was as much a question as a greeting.
“Lady Caoimhe,” he repeated.
“Yes?”
“His Grace asked me, well, told me, really, that I must make amends.”
He was pale and shamefaced with it, and he’d lost that self-satisfied look of the practice ground bully entirely. It came to me now, how very young he was, and how he’d likely never been thwarted before, not in any real desires, until last night.
“There’s nothing,” I said, calmly, “that you need amend, for me. You lost a match, nothing more. There’s no shame in trying, nor in losing, either.”
“You could have killed me, though.”
“Well, yes. But to what purpose? Although,” I paused, thinking that teaching him to perhaps consider an action a little more before he committed to it might be no bad thing, “you could try coming up with better reasons to challenge someone. Rudeness doesn’t really make people think better of you.”
He blinked. Whatever he had thought I was going to say, that wasn’t it.
I smiled.
“I’ve called people out on much flimsier pretexts,” I said. “So I could never tell someone else not to do it. But it’s always best, too, beyond the excuses, to have an actual goal in mind. Did you really fancy moving to Dungarrow for the rest of your life, and killing only at someone else’s behest?”
This got through. He looked me straight on and said, “Well, no. I didn’t really think - I mean, I’m the heir to Camlyn, I couldn’t just leave.”
“So, just for the glory, then? Believe me, with my past, all anyone wants to do is forget I ever existed. Killing me wouldn’t even garner you a begrudging thank-you.”
“You’re wrong,” he said, passionately. “You’re wrong. Everyone, they tell such stories of you, like the heroes the old bards sang of. They’ve been telling me about you for years. The deadliest fighter since Bronwyn, from the first day you picked up a sword.”
He wasn’t lying, I could see that. And somewhere inside me I could feel a curl of cynical amusement. The hero of a bard’s tale? The villain of the piece, more like.
“Well, that goes to show you something, does it not? Do I seem like a hero to you? You should not believe in travelers’ tales, Lannach. Nor in rumors, or in bard’s songs, either. I’m just lucky with a sword, that’s all.”
He shook his head. He was still young enough to want to believe, at least.
“Any road,” I said, and put out my hand, “We can call it quits, here, and start afresh, will that content you?”
Lannach nodded, and gripped my hand. His eyes looked clear and unshadowed, and he turned and went back into the hall without a backward glance, leaving me with a whole new question to distract myself with.
It had been in my mind that Lannach might have been the one who followed me out to the latrines, the night before. He’d be about the right size and build, and a man you’ve publicly shamed could be led into mischief against you without needing to have much explanation or prodding, even. But I couldn’t see him as a practiced dissembler, and nothing in him suggested even the slightest of secrets.
“You’ve mellowed some, you have.”
I turned. Cowell was leaning against the wall, half in shadow, and I wondered that I hadn’t noticed him till now.
“Ah, well,” I said. “He’s only a boy, really.”
“A thoughtless, useless lump of a boy, who won’t heed your words. He’ll just convince himself you won by some coward’s trick, and fall to someone with less restraint, in the end. Why didn’t you kill him?”
“I wasn’t in the mood,” I said, lightly.
He shrugged, and moved past me, away from the open doors, then stopped.
“You should watch your back, all the same,” he said, very softly. And then he did go, heading across the yard towards the stables.
I finished my oatcakes and the last swallow of ale, and decided on the one place I thought I might feel was solid earth beneath me. The one place that might still feel like home.
I’d spent the best parts of my life on the practice ground, after all, and at least there, I knew what the questions and the answers were likely to be.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rhwyn boasted very few of what Lord Uln had once disparagingly referred to as “northern comforts”, but they did have a bath house of sorts. It hadn’t been constructed with the idea that over fifty soldiers might need it at once, of course, and after two hours of beating up everyone I could talk or trick into match-ups, I could see I’d have to wait my turn a good long while. It was simply bad luck for me that by the time I got back from dumping my mail shirt and arming tunic off and collecting some cleaner things to wear, I wound up stuck next to Guerin in the lines.
I hadn’t seen Arlais since I’d left her in the hall that morning. She hadn’t been in our room when I’d gone to change before heading to the practice ground, nor was she there when I’d gone back after. I had been pushing both her and Lady Ilona’s very existences out of my mind, to be honest, because the truth was they had become the lynch-pins of the problems I was trying to avoid.
He started in on it immediately, though. When had I last seen Arlais? How had she been?
“Guerin,” I said, “I don’t know. I just told you. She seemed fine, and I haven’t seen her since we went into the hall for breakfast, and no, she wasn’t ailing.”
And what’s it to you, anyway? I wondered, again, if they were lovers.
His attitude, though, wasn’t very lover-like. He was worried, but not in a way that suggested the personal. It was almost as if, like me, he suspected her of some ulterior motive, and needed to keep track of her movements. Or, perhaps, that she had some knowledge that he wanted, and he was hoping to prise it out of her somehow.
He didn’t answer. He was looking down the line and suddenly, he straightened and said, in a low voice, “Look sharp, Caoimhe.”
I followed his gaze. Birais was just leaving the bath house, his hair still dripping wet. It was like him, I thought, absently, to wait his turn here along with his troops, when he could have easily pre-empted the first spot, or demanded a tub of hot water in his chamber. He was known for gestures like this, though, acting like one soldier among many, instead of standing on his privileges as king.
Well, and Einon did much the same thing, when he was in the field. It’s a good investment. The rank and file love it, and that makes them more willing to risk death for you.
The king hadn’t come near me on the practice ground, but I had noticed that he was watching me. I suspected that at least two of my fights had been because he had told those soldiers to offer me bouts. I wasn’t even particularly surprised. After Lannach’s claims about my overblown reputation, it seemed probable that Birais was mentally tallying what I was actually capable of with what he, too, might have heard.
But out past the king, across from the bath house, over where that unused cow-byre stood, where Delwen had had to house some of the extra soldiers crowding her home, there were two other people, deep in conversation. And really, they wouldn’t have been the two people I would have thought even knew each other, much less had anything at all in common.
Arlais was moving away from the man, and disappearing around the corner of the cow-byre wall now. Cowell watched her go, then turned back towards the bath house line-up. He could see me clearly, he could see me watching him, but he seemed uncaring, leaning stolidly against the wattle and daub walls with his arms folded, going nowhere.
“That,” said Guerin, “isn’t a good sign.”
It shocked me, a little, that his train of thought ran so close to my own. But he seemed to be making a fairly big assumption about where I stood in this, I thought. For all he knew, I could be as much a part of this mystery as Arlais and Cowell seemed to be. Or was this just more misdirection? One enormous feint before the sword fell from a new angle?
I didn’t want to believe it, though I couldn’t have, had anyone asked, given a clear reason why. I simply didn’t want to believe that Guerin was a part of some underhanded deal with magic and mysteries because it was idiotic and ludicrous, or so I told myself.
He might be mischievous in his habit of putting you on the spot in a political discussion, he might trip you up on your own internal contradictions with an innocent-sounding question, he might even force an avoidable quarrel by those needle-sharp comments thrown lazily out just to amuse himself, but Orleigh dealt in open certainties, in steel-bright honour and in the here-and-now, not in shadowy realms and smiling treacheries.
I suppose, mainly, that it occurred to me that my fears were taking over, and that this way led only to madness.
“Well,” I said, after a bit, “at least you know Arlais is all right.”
The bath house was overcrowded, and out of courtesy, people were trying to be quick about things. I lost track of Guerin in the steam and the bodies, and wound up beside the hot water sluice with one of the soldiers who’d kept my wine cup full the other night. He introduced me to a couple of his friends, got someone to make some room in the main tub for me, and loaned me a leather thong to re-tie my braid when the one I’d been using decided to break.
That book, I thought. It’s something in that book.
It seemed to me, based on what little I’d picked up from living at Gorsedd and from snippets of talk with Nesta, and with Meryn, too, that it was likely I would not be able to read anything in it. There were secret scripts, apparently, protected writings in ancient tongues, and special sigils that might alter those meanings still further beyond that. Nesta had been struggling to memorize the simpler ones when I’d first gotten to Gorsedd, and I’d been relieved that the Lady hadn’t ever seemed to consider that sort of learning for me.
I wouldn’t know till I looked at it, though.
Cowell was still watching the bath house. I sketched a little salute as I went by, and he ignored it. It seemed possible his watchfulness was for someone else. Guerin? I turned over the possibility, but there seemed no conceivable reason anyone should want to spy on him, and in any case, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen that little exchange with Arlais or that Cowell was skulking around or hiding in dark corners. Guerin, I decided, could take care of himself.
Our room was empty. I left the door open just enough that I might be able to hear someone in the corridor, got out one of my long knives and went to the window.
Inside the crack, I could just still see the top of the thing. It was only seconds before I’d levered it up just enough to grab the corner of it with two fingers and wheedle it further up and out. Somewhere out by the stairs, I heard voices, and I stuffed the thing into my shirt, grabbed my spare tunic and pulled it on.
I needed to be somewhere quiet and not where anyone would expect to see me. Somewhere no one could come up on me unawares. And luckily, because my on-sufferance status in Rhwyn Vale had occasionally offered me chances at slightly dangerous odd jobs that no one else wanted to do, I knew just the place.
Rhwyn might be small, but it wasn’t radically different from any other place I’d lived, really. Still, the manor had been reworked and added to over the years, and at one point, one of the original stone outbuildings of the manor house had disintegrated enough that part of it had been pulled down and rebuilt to connect with the main keep
.
It had probably been done in a hurry, and not very well, and last year, when the adjoining hallway had developed some serious leaks, I had been the obvious choice to go up with Gair and help him do a patchwork mending job. Not that I was at all versed in carpentry, stonework or roof tiling, of course, but Owain had felt that it was sufficiently risky a job that Gair might need someone to hand him tools and make sure he didn’t slip and fall to his death. Owain was good like that. Most lords wouldn’t have given the danger to a local tenant farmer a second thought.
Mostly, I’d tried to not be an additional distraction, and just sat around watching Gair work. But we’d had to access the roof through the makeshift loft space above the rafters, and I’d noticed, the very first day, that the builders hadn’t closed everything off up there.
At the end where the loft abutted the main wall, there was the remnant of an old window, a small black well of darkness that led, when I’d later investigated out of simple curiosity and boredom, to the higher ceiling beams of a little store-room that Lady Delwen used as a linens cupboard. No one else seemed to have noticed the gap, which didn’t surprise me. People don’t often look past their own noses, and rarer still do they look up.
The whole place was quiet enough, just now. Everyone who could be spared for it was busy in the kitchens, trying to come up with yet another meal that was plentiful enough for the number of people now in residence and still suitable for a king. Anyone else was either in the yard or on their own errands. It was about the safest time I might ever have.
I closed the door of the cupboard softly behind me, and used one of the middle shelves as a foothold, swinging noiselessly up onto a roof beam and from there crawling through the dusty, cobwebby opening and on into the loft.
I lit the stubby candle-end I’d brought, pulled out the book, and began to flip through the pages.
