She bit her lip, her face going red as her voice dropped lower. “Well, we wound up talking alone, didn’t we? He was on foot in the woods, and I was just gathering mushrooms, half for sport as much as anything, there weren’t many of them about. And he was just taking a walk in the woods, and it was a nice spot, and we both having nothing really to do, we wound up just talking. And then—” She swallowed, took a breath, and went on.
“And then, we wound up standing rather close and all, by Chance, and we’d just been laughing over some joke or another, and then we were finished laughing, and it was quiet, and we were standing there looking at each other, with the speckled sunlight shining down through the trees, and I didn’t know what to say, but I felt all nervous and shaky. Then he started to say something, reached out and brushed his fingers along my cheek... then he was leaning in and kissing me.”
She was silent a moment, staring blankly into the distance, her once-more trembling fingers held against her cheek. “That’s all it was, that day. A few kisses. But he started seeking me out, after that, and it got to be more and more.” She shook her head. “I didn’t mean for anything to come of it,” she said, voice muffled as she pressed the cloth over her face, clearly trying not to cry any harder.
“Hush, there,” Wren soothed. “It’s not your fault.”
“Isn’t it?” Dania sniffed. “Half or so, anyway. It was hardly all him.”
Wren’s brow furrowed. “Wa—wasn’t it?”
“Well, I hardly discouraged him. I won’t say I’d been fishing for a chance to get my hands on him, but once I had the opportunity, I didn’t exactly turn it down. I’ve admitted I’d already noticed what a fine figure he cut. And he was so swee—up until his father died, he was such a sweet boy, and funny. Seems losing his da and being the lord proper has half crushed his spirit. I don’t see him but frownin’, these days.”
Wren stared. “You mean he didn’t rape you?” she asked, startled into bluntness.
Dania’s eyes went wide. “No! Of course not. That’s not Ferlund at all. He was confident, most times—not the very first kiss, you should have his face when he pulled back, half-scared, even—but he never pushed past what I was game.”
“No?” Wren shook her head, suddenly lost. “If he’s so sweet, then why isn’t he doing right by you now?”
Dania gave a tiny shrug. “He said he’d sort it. He’s got a lot to deal with right now, and Cavernad isn’t the wealthiest holding. And his da only just died, and Lady Nanine, who he was going to marry—I can’t say I’m sorry that’s out, except that I know he was counting on that dowry and alliance. I don’t know how, but he did say he’d take care of me somehow, and not to worry about it. I… I think that’s part of why he’s scrambling for a marriage so quickly, even though he’d rather not. Though perhaps…” She looked up, eyes hopeful even as she dabbed their corners. “With the Nightbird’s coin, perhaps the whole situation will be helped, and he won’t have as much to worry about.”
“I don’t think—” Wren began. Her eye caught on the light blue vines and flowers coiling around the edges of the kerchief. “I don’t think that’s exactly what he has in mind. Give me that.” She snatched the cloth from the Dania’s fingers and began urgently to read.
“Ferlund of Cavernad.”
Standing wide-stanced on a rock as he stared down the ravine, Ferlund turned his head with a frown, displeased that he had not heard the speaker’s approach. When he saw the dark-cloaked figure in black-feathered mask, he turned his body slowly ‘round as his hand went none-too-slowly to his sword hilt.
“I am the lord of this land,” he said in a measured tone, but loudly, hoping to attract the attention of his distant guards—wishing, for once, that they were not so discreet and respectful of his privacy. “Do you require something?”
“I require little,” the man said, his mid-range voice gravelly. The figure moved forward.
Wishing he had the higher ground, Ferlund’s gaze flicked towards where his guards should be coming, just about ready to dismiss his dignity and call out for them.
“Your armsmen shan’t be coming,” the stranger said. “They’re currently indisposed.”
Ferlund’s heart lurched and dropped. “Exactly how indisposed?” he asked, keeping the wobble out of his voice as he drew his sword and held it ready.
“I can’t say, I’m sure,” the man said conversationally. “They both seem to have come down with a sudden case of concussion, took a lie-down.”
Relief swept through the young lord. More than likely alive, then, though he couldn’t count on help from that quarter. He didn’t need help, he told himself sternly. He had a sword, the man had only—
Throwing his cloak back from his shoulders, the man revealed and drew a short sword with his right hand and a long knife with his left.
“What is the little that you require?” Ferlund asked coldly.
“A blood debt,” the man said, revealing little of his intentions but what was already clear. “But it is blood of low quality from a breed of small worth, so you must consider that I ask no great thing.”
Ferlund felt his face heat, and his sword trembled in his hand. He tried to divorce his body from his emotion, lest all his training fly from his head. He only partially succeeded. His brain began to swim in furious directions.
“What, then; did you not get enough of it the last time to fill your measure?” he asked. It was perhaps a shot in partial darkness, but as the prints of his father’s fatal fall lay behind him, and a man with blades unsheathed before him, it did not seem a baseless guess.
“Your father, Chance harry his soul, was not my business—or you might say he was nothing excepting my business. This is no business. This is pleasure. And justice; for justice is my pleasure.”
“The justice of a mad and greedy duke?” Ferlund gritted. “And what justice! High-minded words for a hired sword.”
The man was moving slowly towards him. “The duke? The Hag take Graeme! Chance take you all with a rotten roll. I stand as no hired sword. I am the Nightbird, and I am come that you might learn the only lesson your kind understand.”
“Nightbird?” Ferlund scoffed. “That then explains your poor temper and belligerence. Nocturnal creatures ought not to venture abroad under the sun.”
The Nightbird moved forward at the same deliberate pace, but Ferlund could see in the man’s eyes that he was pricked by the mockery. The already furious gaze had grown darker still. ‘Tis well, Ferlund thought. If I cannot help but be enraged, at least my foe is at an equal disadvantage. Would that the same could be said of the slope of the hill! He began sidling to the side, glad his feet had grown so especially familiar with the terrain of this spot.
“I am come on behalf of the lady Dania, and all as dear and poorly used,” the Nightbird said.
Startled, Ferlund frowned, studying the man’s face and body more carefully. One could not be sure, with the mask covering everything from the nosetip up, but he looked nothing like Dania’s father, or her uncle, or any other person in her life—and he hadn’t the voice of anyone Ferlund could remember hearing. With the squareness of his jaw, thick darkness of his brows, and the olive hue of his tanned skin, he was surely not Cavernad-born.
“What is it to you?” the lord asked, honestly bewildered.
The Nightbird’s eyes flared with pure madness over the sharp black beak. “It is to me what it is to no one else: something that cannot be ignored. Something that cannot be stood for. Something that cannot go unchallenged.”
“So I was a fool!” Ferlund cried. “So I failed to use my head, and now a girl is pregnant. What matter would be solved in my slaying?”
“The matter of you,” the Nightbird said, his voice at once purring with a housecat’s satisfaction and growling like a cat of the mountains. There was nothing birdlike about it.
“How can I care for her if I’m dead?” Ferlund snapped, now as irritated as he was fearful and enraged. “She stands to gain more by my staying
alive to be a benefactor! A classic ruffian; swords over sense.”
Swords over sense. It was a line of his father’s, and he fancied for a moment that he appeared like his father speaking it. Taller, more muscular, his voice enriched by the passing years; his dark blonde beard square around his mouth and his sword easy in his hand; his body loose and of one intent with the blade he’d spent so many more years learning the ways of.
In an instant, Ferlund’s trembling hand went still, and the fury died with a hiss like a pinched wick. His body unknotted itself, landing in the balance of tension and relaxation that his father had worn into any combat. A smile twitched at the corners of his lips, as inexorable as the old lord’s smile had been unconscious.
“Benefactor!” the Nightbird was scoffing, but Ferlund no longer cared what the man had to say. “Now you cry the role to save your life! A fox’s tongue will not help you against me.”
“I speak not to save my life,” Ferlund said, voice calm and nearly warm. “But by words you may yet save your own. Tell me truly who I may thank for the death of my father, and I will let you go unharmed. Beside that, your words are wasted. Are you here to perform for me—the mask suggests it—or to cross blades, carrion fowl?”
With a cry of rage not unlike a prey bird’s shriek, the man in the feathered mask sprang forward. Ferlund’s sword flashed up to meet the strike, and so the performance began.
They ran like a matched pair, the girls’ strides long and strong, the one used to bolting through crowds and around street corners, the other to loping through the fields they crossed now. The basket and bag of coins lay forgotten in the garden, but the embroidered handkerchief was tight-balled in Wren’s sweaty fist, the light flowering-vine embroidery in its corners speaking eloquently to comprehending eyes.
Commission: One lord of mid-sized fiefdom, dead. Cost: none, paid. Change: five silver suns or equivalent, paid. And the last corner, not the traditional sign of their establishment of assassins, but in small stitches, a tiny, spread-winged bird.
At last they neared the main gate of Cavernad’s castle and keep. “Where’s—Ferlund?” Dania gasped to the guard who raised his eyebrows at them as they staggered to a stop.
“He’s gone out.”
“Where to?” Wren asked.
“Always the same place. Your lord is in danger—a man—” Dania began, but she didn’t finish her sentence before she was turning and beginning to run again.
“What danger?” the man-at-arms asked. Wren shook her head, turning and sprinting to catch up. “He has guards with him!” the man called after them, but after a pause, she heard him calling to a guard inside to watch the gate for him, and his footfalls began pounding behind them, falling further behind them but still quick in spite of the weight of his own heavy muscle and armor, the bow on his back and the sword at his hip; doubtless spurred by his own spike of adrenaline and fear.
Even as her lungs and legs cried for oxygen, Wren ran as fast as before; she did not know what her Nightbird might attempt in his hot-blooded lust for justice. He has guards with him. Would Joreth be so senseless as to take three-or-more-on-one odds? Remembering the sight of him on the floor of his room, bloodied and blued, she pushed herself faster still. She ran to call him off, not now just for the life of Dania’s beloved nobleman, but for the life of her poor fool vigilante.
Their path grew quickly rocky and rough, cliffish, and Wren remembered, suddenly, the first time she had paused outside Joreth’s door, and the words she’d heard exchanged therein. How was it done? Tripwires? They had been speaking of the death of this young man’s father—sending him toppling, horse and all, over the edge of one of these very cliffs, probably.
And then she could hear the ring of metal on metal, and then they were bolting past the slumped bodies of two men in Cavernad’s livery, and then they were topping a rise and running down a slope towards two figures dueling on the edge of a ravine.
“Ferlund!” Dania screamed, or it would have been a scream, Wren supposed, if she’d had any breath left from running. She herself did not bother with the pointless cry, but ran onwards towards the fight—the figure in black backing the young blonde man downwards toward the cliff, the young noble trying to move laterally rather than back, but having lost enough ground that he was almost at the true edge—drawing her knife as she went, but not knowing what she would do when she got there, seeing that she wanted both men alive.
“Joreth—” she gasped, suddenly realizing that perhaps a crying-out was her best answer after all. “Joreth!” She stumbled to a halt, holding out her hands. “It wasn’t what you think! He’s a good man! Or good enough.”
“The best!” Dania pleaded, having run up beside her. “Leave him be, Nightbird—I love him, leave him be!”
With a clattering clang, Joreth struck such a blow to the opposing blade’s hilt that it sprang from Ferlund’s hands and over the edge of the cliff, tumbling till it stuck between rocks. The lord let out a half-cry as his bones doubtless resounded with the strike, then stood still, face pale but proud, as Joreth held the sword’s point at his throat.
A beat of silence followed, Dania crying silently with her hands locked over her mouth.
“Joreth. Nightbird,” Wren said in a low voice, coaxing. “Let it go. He did no wrong.”
“Silence!” Joreth roared. Dropping his offhand weapon, he pulled the bird mask off his face, revealing a contortion of livid loathing. Wren took a step back, eyes going wide at the hideous shape of it. “Done no wrong?” He threw the mask to the earth. “He is wrong. Everything about him is wrong! His blood is a plague with only one cure. We were cured of the father, let us now be cured of the so—”
A black-fletched arrow punched through Joreth’s ribs, and he stumbled to the side, his foot catching on a rock, and then he was gone from the ravine’s edge.
Ferlund’s head spun in overdrive as he strove to cover all the basics—trying to stop the little brown-haired girl as she began scrambling down after the shot-and-fallen man, seeing that, physically, at least, she knew what she was doing and dismissing it as he turned to holding Dania as she cried against him, murmuring that it was alright, being not a little confused as she sobbed “Nightbird, oh Nightbird” into his shoulder, guiding them back up the hill so he could get her away from the edge, fervently thank his armsman over and again for impeccable timing, and checking on his fallen guards—all while shaking and weak from the shock of his first encounter with actual mortal combat.
He’d hoped he didn’t look and sound as faint as he felt, but when his rescuing guardsman asked him kindly if he’d perhaps like to sit down and offered a drink from his water flagon, Ferlund gave up on trying to comport himself with dignity and accepted the offer, slumping against a tree trunk. Never mind keeping up appearances; he focused on making his brain work properly again.
From Dania’s breathless story, interspersed with sobs, the young lord gradually figured out who in all Chance’s graces his failed assassin was, and why he seemed to so hate Cavernad.
“But why would he kill my father?” he asked, as the other young girl—the Wren of Dania’s story, he assumed—walked slowly back into view at the top of the hill. He shook his head, wondering if his brain was perhaps still not working properly. “I see now where the misunderstanding lay, and why he would wish my blood, but… why Father? Father never did anything wrong. Father never even did anything that looked wrong.”
“That wasn’t him,” Wren interrupted, her voice sounding as ashen as he felt. “Not personally. That was just a paid job, and he assigned it out. That wasn’t the Nightbird. That had nothing to do with the Nightbird.”
Ferlund sprang up straight. “But who ordered it?”
Wren blinked at him. “I can’t… I’m not allowed to say.”
Every other man is your foe, until you have forced friendship upon him. With all delicacy and all appearance of decency, you must be ruthless in the making of friends.
“I understand. You can’t s
ay too much. He was your employer, then, this Nightbird?”
She stared blankly at him, nodded.
“Business loyalties to whoever takes over from him, then?”
“What.” It didn’t even sound like a question, so much as listless lostness made sound.
“Someone will take over the business, and you can’t betray them. And the Nightbird wouldn’t want you betraying the duke like that.”
She shook her head. “He didn’t like any of our customers. They were all nobility.”
“He wouldn’t mind, then?” Ferlund pressed. “He might even be for it—you giving me proof by your word that the duke ordered the assassinations of my father and the lady Nanine? Because if I had that proof, besides justice for the duke, I would use any recompense I received to look after Dania.” He tightened his arm around the young woman’s waist, turning to kiss her forehead. Or enough of it, at least. Surely some of it could go into Cavernad’s general disaster-readiness funds.
He fixed his attention back on Wren, then, watching the wavering in her face, holding his breath and hoping. Now was not the moment to push any further, he could feel; let her consider and see which way the wind blew.
She turned and stared off towards the ravine, a look on her face that he felt familiar with—grief with “What would Father do?” written all over it. Who was the Nightbird to her? It could have been her father, for all he knew. No, she’d called him by his name, he remembered that now.
“It was the duke,” she said at last, sending a thrill through him. “I don’t know why, but I know it was him. With your da and Nanine both. I heard the stories, saw the receipts.” She began twisting a dirty kerchief in her hands. “I can’t testify, though, or I’ll lose my job. But I figure you’re owed at least knowing.”
Ferlund pressed his lips together a moment, thinking. “Would you work for me?”
She blinked. “As what?”
“First, as a witness. At the least, you’d get part of whatever the duke is forced to give us.”
Cry of the Nightbird Page 7