Vile

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by Keith Crawford


  Lena cracked another walnut in her fist.

  “That was around the time Anton won a place at Engineering school,” she said.

  “Just after his 12th birthday,” Arbalest said. “Busy year.”

  Arbalest gave up on the knot. The water had swollen it tight as a nut. He would have to cut it free.

  “Anton will outgrow this nonsense with the Garns,” Lena said. “He’s hardly the first Vile to sire a bastard. It does no real harm, in the long run.”

  “Are you mocking me or my father?”

  “Octavian Vile wasn’t your father. Not in a way that matters to anyone important.”

  “I suppose Dalard was more father to me than anyone else. And now I’m twenty years older than he was when he died, starting over again while his baby brother Théo runs the capital.”

  “You aren’t starting again. You have good kids. Maybe not everything we wanted, but good enough to be useful. We just have to do things a little differently.”

  “I won’t live that long,” Arbalest said.

  Could they see it at all? The web, its sticky strands tying them all together and holding them all apart? The delicate structure that was their only defence against the West?

  “You aren’t dying, Wat. I won’t let you.”

  She always used his given name when he complained too much. It was a private needle, I know who you really are, a reminder against pretentions great and small. He was just conjuring a caustic rejoinder when the gate horn sounded and the portcullis began its hissing, clanking rise. It put Arbalest’s teeth on edge. Lena set her bowl to one side, stood, smoothed her grey dress and walked the few paces out to the centre of the courtyard. Arbalest stayed, fiddling with the hoist.

  Four riders came through the gate. First Elianor Paine, the tiny, arrogant girl Théophile had sent to pester him. At her shoulder was Nathaniel, unharmed, of course, but frowning, his jaw clenched, and following when he should be leading. Sergeant Rees came third, a weathered stone waiting for the wind to wear him down. In his hand he held a rope that trailed back to the last horse. There sat Derec Garn, bloody bruises on his face and his arms tied behind his back. Good, thought Arbalest. At least they’ve got something right.

  “Your honour,” Lena said. “I see your mission was successful.”

  “We have everything but my rifle, which I expect will be returned shortly,” Elianor said, hopping down from the mountain horse with considerably more ease than the day before. “Senator Vile, might we have your permission to store the prisoner?”

  Lena looked back at Arbalest. He nodded; then something in the corner of his vision caught his attention and he stopped listening to the conversation. Too many variables, too many factors, too many things to go wrong. You could never tell when a child might become worthwhile, or worthless.

  Arbalest realised he was bored.

  “Very well, very well,” he called, interrupting somebody in the middle of saying something unimportant. “Sergeant, lock Mr Garn in the cells. We’ll hang him in the morning.”

  “My lord!” He watched Elianor stop herself, take a small breath, and start again. “Senator Vile, I have not decided—”

  “If you wish to execute him before the morning, that is your prerogative,” Arbalest interrupted. “But he insulted my guest and assaulted an officer of the law. The Garn boy dies.”

  Chapter 30

  Haf sat in front of her bedroom mirror in Nana Haf’s and tried to block out the sound of her daughter crying. Perhaps Olwen should have worked with the other girls, got her crying done early. But Gwyion would never have stood for it. He couldn’t even bring himself to call the hostel a brothel. Soft-hearted, that man. Haf applied the cream along her cheek. Being Madam of a whorehouse gave you plenty of experience in disguising bruises.

  The brothel would have horrified her own mother, except that bitch was long dead and better off for it. Haf hadn’t run away from the respectable future of a farmer’s wife just to spite her family. She hadn’t married a moonshine smuggler just for the look on her mother’s face the day she’d told her she was pregnant. But those things had helped. And Haf would have died before marrying fat cousin Tannyr. She clipped her hair back from her face, leaving visible the swelling her makeup could not hide, then, without saying a word, left Olwen sitting on the bed and walked downstairs to the saloon.

  Gwyion had straightened things up, of course. Even now he was unlocking the bar as if they would still open that night. Perhaps they would. She had heard the comments, the “great woman behind the great man” stuff meant as a compliment, but really an insult to them both. Because here he was, her man, who never gave up. She wanted to take his hand and lead him out the back of the whorehouse, take him along the river, past Garn’s farm to where they had first met, then on out of the mountains to wherever it was the rivers went when they were free. Gwyion always carried on. Gwyion never gave up.

  The three mercenaries sat at the same table where Nathaniel Vile had given them such a beating. Gwyion came from behind the bar with four goblets and a bottle of wine, and Haf stood behind him as he took the empty seat at the table. He placed a goblet before each of the men in turn, the last before himself. Gwyion had an unusual approach to failure. He’d caught the mercenaries riding away, bruised and ashamed, then ushered them back, fed them, and insisted they stay the night. Now, here they sat, a decent breakfast inside them, eyeballing their host. Haf had seen men beaten in fights. She knew their pride hurt more than their bruises. Gwyion took the red wine and poured it, generously, into each cup.

  “How soon can the rest of your company get here from Durançon?”

  The mercenaries looked at one another.

  “There’ll be a lot more fighting before this is over. Tannyr Brek will make sure of it,” Gwyion said. “I need you to say if you’re quitting.”

  The lead mercenary, a young, scarred Lieutenant called Massen, shook his head. The others followed suit.

  “Good,” Gwyion said, and raised his cup. They drank together. Haf noticed that her husband only allowed the wine to touch his lips, then lowered his goblet as if he had quenched a great thirst. “How long before the rest of the company can get here?”

  “A day there, a day back,” Lieutenant Massen said.

  “Do you need weapons?”

  “We were supposed to protect you.” Massen wouldn’t meet Haf’s eye. “We can bring our own weapons.”

  “The Captain won’t like it,” another mercenary said. “We’ve lost too many soldiers since we came up north. Weird stuff in the mountains. Girardino gone missing—not to mention the others.”

  “We can bring our own weapons,” Massen repeated, harder, angrier.

  Maybe if I hadn’t covered the bruise, they would have offered a discount, Haf thought. Through the window she could see Fyrsil, the sandy-haired foreman, organising the last of the groups of men from the mine. Even all these years after the revolutions, few women chose to be miners. Haf had explained to Gwyion that opening the brothel just brought supply to demand, and, because she knew her husband well, that they could take better care of the girls in a brothel than leaving them turning tricks in the street. He had tried “you’re not old enough to be a Nana,” a feeble effort and by then empirically untrue. He knew she was right. It was always better to be in control. And she wanted her name on the door, to chase away her mother’s ghost.

  “What are you thinking?” Gwyion asked her.

  Haf had been wool-gathering. The mercenaries were on their way out. Maybe she was getting old, after all.

  “Derec,” she said. “How do we get Derec back?”

  Before Gwyion could answer, Fyrsil came to the door, knocking three times on the frame and wiping his boots three times on the matt. Gwyion waved him in.

  “We’re ready to go,” Fyrsil said.

  “You won’t find anything,” Haf said.

  “They might,” Gwyion said. “It’s worth trying.”

  “Tannyr has the rifle. It’s the only logica
l answer.”

  “There are a thousand other things it could be. It could have dropped from the cart on the way.”

  “No. Tannyr sent one of his boys and stole it from right under your noses.”

  Fyrsil opened his mouth wide, an invitation to any passing fly. “I saw Uwen at the mine yesterday. Didn’t think it mattered.”

  “You didn’t think it mattered?” Haf spat each word like a dart. “Who did he talk to?”

  “No,” Gwyion said. “I’m not staging a witch-hunt. Go with the rest of the miners, Fyrsil. Tell them what happened and what it has cost us. Then make sure they get back here in groups when they’re ready to eat. Or if they find the rifle.”

  Fyrsil nodded and left as quickly as he could.

  “Sit,” Gwyion said to Haf.

  “I don’t want to sit.”

  “If you’re going to shout at me, I’d prefer you sat.”

  “I’m not going to shout at you.”

  Gwyion was the only man who had ever made Haf cry. It had been on the day Derec was born, sitting there holding the baby and smiling like someone had cracked him on the head and made him stupid. She touched the back of her hand to the space beneath her eye. It stung.

  “I should have killed Tannyr Brek years ago.”

  “We should have run away to sea,” Gwyion said. “You would have made an excellent pirate captain.”

  “And you the cabin boy?”

  “Ship’s cook.”

  “You can’t cook.”

  “I could have learned.”

  Haf snorted and crossed her arms.

  “Is Lord Vile behind this?” she said. “Does he control the Black Dog?”

  “I don’t think so. And this is too subtle for Tannyr.”

  “Tannyr would still be better dead. Vile as well.”

  “Don’t talk about killing people, Haf. I don’t like it.”

  “That’s why I would do it instead of you.”

  He took her hand.

  “You beat Tannyr years ago. Time and commerce will finish him. His sons are reasonable men.”

  He pulled her gently down until she sat on his lap. She reached over and drank the wine from his goblet.

  “You’ll talk to Anton?” she said.

  “And I’ll plead our case to Lord Vile. He has a duty to investigate. I’ll talk to Lena, I’ll talk to Nathaniel, hell, I’ll talk to Persephone and all the guards if that’s what it takes, although Ty still thinks she caught crabs off our girls.”

  “Talking won’t be enough.”

  “Then I’ll do more than talk,” Gwyion said. “Anton will come up with something.”

  But Haf knew the limits of her husband. She put down his goblet and stood.

  “I want to talk to Tannyr.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Tell Anton you’ll accept the Magistrate’s ruling. Make it look convincing.”

  “What do you mean, make it look convincing?”

  “Take Fyrsil and a couple of your best men. Not enough to be suspicious, just enough for what’s coming. Go to the Manor to plead before Lord Vile. Then wait for me there.”

  “What are you going to do, Haf?”

  She cupped his cheek with her hand.

  “What I have to do. Just be ready to get our son back.”

  Chapter 31

  The chill got in under skin and into bones, under eyelids and into their dreams, so that no matter how tired they got, they couldn’t stay asleep. Anton curled up in the dark and waited, praying that the rudimentary snow shelter was enough to keep the things that hunted them at bay, trying to find a way to lie close but not too close to Persephone. She moved, uncomfortable, pretending to be asleep, pushing herself against him, and when he pulled away, another breath of the warmth between them escaped into the ice.

  She had grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the Kindred. The Kindred had stopped, paralyzed by the mysterious howling that had interrupted the battle, staring up the mountain as if it had forgotten Persephone and Anton. They had run together, wading through the snow, her greater strength keeping them upright as they clambered to firmer ground. With every heavy step, he wondered how close the Kindred was, and why it hadn’t struck them down. Then he heard one of the horses being killed, an awful shriek from far too close, and stopped thinking about anything more than pulling one leg in front of the other.

  Suddenly, the land had fallen away into a perilously steep slope. Persephone did not hesitate. She threw Anton ahead of her, and the two of them tumbled down the mountainside, hands and feet and knees and velocity kicking up clouds of snow as they fell away from their pursuers. At the bottom of the hill, she pulled him back to his feet, checked his unfocused eyes, and dragged him off again along the winding road before he understood they were no longer falling.

  “Stop,” he had said, when he could force out the words with his burning lungs.

  “We have to keep going.”

  “We have to build a shelter before it gets dark. The cold will kill us just as dead as the Kindred.”

  They found a hollow, where the snow had mounted in the lee of a large rock. Persephone cut the snow with her sword and Anton dug out the tunnel on his hands and knees. Finally, exhausted, they had sealed the shelter and huddled together, snatched brief moments of sleep, and waited for first light to be sure they had survived.

  “I hope the horses are nearby.” Persephone said.

  Anton took a breath, then kissed the back of her head. It made his lips tingle.

  “I think the horses are dead,” he said.

  They clawed their way out of the shelter. By the time they were done, the fingers of his gloves had frozen together. Ice showered from their shoulders as they got stiffly to their feet. Snow and rock, tree and sky. There was no sign of another living thing for miles, all the way down to where the cooking fires of Shadowgate Castle plumed faint trails into a terribly bright morning sky.

  “Is it still following us?” Persephone said.

  “The Black Dog? Or the Kindred?”

  He didn’t like the thought that something other than the Black Dog might have made that awful howl.

  “Both,” Persephone said. “Either.”

  “If we were followed, we would have been found during the night. With any luck they killed each other.” He knocked his head with the palm of his hand. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  Persephone took a few steps forward and looked up the mountain, towards the watchtower, the monastery, and Demon’s Pass.

  “Anton. I’m not sure I could have beaten the Kindred.”

  He almost said, ‘I hope we don’t ever get a chance to find out’, but that was the last thing she wanted to hear.

  “How did father fight an army of those things?” Persephone said.

  “Well, it probably helped that he had his own army with him.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t know they were like that.”

  “Maybe that was a particularly nasty one.” He put his hand on her arm. “It surprised you, you were fighting in the snow, and you had to protect your stupid brother. Half of all fights are circumstance. The rest are luck.”

  “Stop saying you’re stupid and stop saying it’s luck. You are the next Lord of Shadowgate, and I’m supposed to be your…your knight.”

  “Why do you care? Why don’t you want to be Lord of Shadowgate yourself?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “It will happen whether I want it or not.” He knocked the last of the snow off his boots and followed her out from the cover of the hollow. It had stopped snowing. “Did you recognise the Kindred, before it changed?”

  “Southern marks, like the dragon helm in the cave. You want to tell me about these mercenaries you’ve hired?”

  “The mercenaries are for security. You can’t keep a mine open if you can’t protect the miner’s wives. Father doesn’t need to know about this.”

  Persephone grunted. “I don’t like leaving Mabyn and the others on the moun
tain.”

  “We can’t do anything for them.”

  “I don’t want to hear more things we can’t do, Anton!”

  Anton banged his hands on his arms. Cascades of loose snow went to meet their comrades on the ground. It hurt to walk.

  “We can go back to Shadowgate and warn them,” he said. “We’ll come back with more people; maybe give that Magistrate something proper to worry about.”

  Persephone strapped the sheath of her great sword into place and looked along the length of the blade, checking it for damage. Anton watched her closely, but Persephone didn’t seem injured. Would she still tell him if she were hurt?

  “Are you alright?” He said.

  She laughed, a sudden laugh out of nowhere that widened with her big blue eyes, then with long strides came and hugged him so hard she lifted him off his feet.

  “I can see the road from here,” she said in his ear.

  He grinned. “Do we head straight, or take the detour to warn Hodri?”

  “Hodri can go to hell,” Persephone said. “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 32

  Tannyr was at the kitchen table in the farmhouse, a spread of paperwork arranged as a bulwark about him. The family was outside his door. Iwans and Tafals, Keenans and Breks, cousins and uncles and grandnieces and nephews running between the feet of the adults. They had been setting out chairs and tables since sunrise, but there were not nearly enough spaces for everyone to sit. Glance out of the window and he would see them, chattering and bickering, hallooing and cursing, all waiting for him to come and tell them what to do next.

  “Da, we found him,” Dale said from the doorway.

  Tannyr should have been completing memoranda to send to the castle, replying to letters from people who could write no better than he, composing orders for supplies from Durançon—doing all sorts of things Ifanna reminded him were the Mayor’s responsibility. Instead, he pushed the papers to one side and rubbed his finger at the stain on the table. Dale’s blood from last night had run into the scratches and scrapes left by cutlery and plates, along feint grooves left by children learning to write, across generations of disorder and strife and mess and family.

 

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