Time of Daughters II
Page 42
Leaf gave her old whoop of a laugh, then cut it short, wincing.
Neit put down her third biscuit. “Leaf?”
“Nothing, nothing.” Leaf waved a hand. “Just, sounds are somehow sharper, including inside my head, since I woke up out of that coma.”
“What did the healer say?”
“About that? I didn’t tell her about how sharp noises are. Sounds too much like complaining, and I did enough of that about whatever it was got shaken loose inside my eyes.”
“I take it they can’t fix it? Or might it heal on its own, like a broken bone?”
“She said they don’t have any way now. Not even in Sartor, though in the ancient days they could.”
Neit snorted her disbelief. “In the ancient days, if you believe all the songs, you could change yourself into a horse in the blink of an eye, and wish food out of the air as well as kill with a thought.”
Leaf gave a soundless laugh, then leaned forward. “Neit, about sounds. Would you do something for me?”
“Do what?” Neit said cautiously. She’d stopped to see Leaf, hopefully get a good meal, and let her horse do likewise before pushing on. She was happy with small errands, but anything that would keep her cooling her heels for days....
Leaf sat back. “It’s all right.”
Neit saw the frustration it didn’t occur to Leaf to hide, and she felt like a horse apple. “It’s just, I did want to get to the Riverbend at Tyavayir border by nightfall, but if there’s something important, I can always....”
“Not important,” Leaf said, her brow contracting as her gaze read over the ceiling. “That is, I don’t know.” She drank the last of her cup, then stood. “Tell you what. Let me show you my cottage. I’ll explain as we go.”
She led the way, her right hand out for orienting as she said, “The servants think it odd that I still sleep out there, and I let them think it’s because I got attached to the place because I woke up there. Because I don’t want to tell them their noise bothers my ears now. They make normal noise. I know that. But somehow everything is so sharp, like sound is when it gets so cold you can’t touch anything metal outside. Clear and windless nights, I can hear the farmers on the other side of the apple orchard beyond the south wall.”
Leaf kept her voice low as they walked along a side-corridor away from the main rooms, then cut toward the back of the castle, to the kitchen yard. They emerged into cold air, and splashed through rain puddles, past the hen coop, and then a bit farther—an area Neit had never seen before.
She had perforce played wargames for so long (always as an enemy, finally as enemy commander before she was able to escape them entirely into being a long runner) she couldn’t help but assess defenses. There was no back wall, she saw. Instead the east end of the castle was a long, solid stone ridge at roof height, with thick forest visible above, the trees budding with hints of green.
Tucked up against the stone was an old cottage, its tiled roof so mossy that at first glance the entire thing looked like part of the cliff. A few paces away a waterfall trickled into the stream that ran through the kitchen yard.
Leaf hummed softly under her breath, hands out. She stopped a pace or two before the door, then stepped up inside. Neit cast a glance around. Someone kept the stone floor swept. A bed sat under the window overlooking the waterfall, neatly made up. The space was small, but cozy.
“I can see why you like it here,” she said.
Leaf smiled. “The water mutes hard noises. But I can hear everything....” She turned toward the back wall, chiseled out of the ridge stone. “Up there. It’s been intermittent. At first I thought it was rain falling up on the hill, but no rain falling here. It happens—I’m sure you’ve ridden on dry road with rain falling a few paces away, or the reverse.”
“Many times. You usually get a rainbow.”
Leaf smiled in memory. “If Ghost were still here, I could tell him and he wouldn’t fuss at me, but he got called away the day after our wedding—”
“Nobody told me you two finally married!”
“Yup. He had to ride out almost as soon as he got here, as I said, so it wasn’t much of a celebration, but it did straighten out the chain of command here, Ghost being interim jarl, which makes me interim jarlan.”
“Did you at least get a good wedding night out of it?” Neit asked—then remembered that Leaf had never chased boys or girls when they were younger.
Leaf’s “Eh,” made it plain she still felt the same. “Ghost offered, everything proper, but you know me. Besides, Manther is riding with him, and he’s still...you can hear the grief in his voice. I told them to take the big bed, and I came out here. Much quieter, with all those men whooping it up with the spiced wine.... Oh, that doesn’t matter. You’re in a hurry, but this noise. It’s sporadic, see, these rustling sounds I thought might be rain. But too steady, so I thought of animals, but what animals go in numbers? And I said recurrent, right? Two days ago, morning then night, and this morning again, I heard a branch snap and it woke me up.”
Neit wondered how much of that ‘sharp noise’ was left from the horror of the attack, but she wasn’t going to bring that up if Leaf didn’t. So she just said, “You’re talking about up on the ridge somewhere? You want me to go up there and take a quick poke around?”
“Would you?” Leaf’s anxious expression eased. “I don’t want Lnand worrying at me anymore than she does, and I got up too late to ask Captain Venad. They were heading to the river for some exercise with the Tyavayir Riders today.”
Neit hadn’t done rock climbing since she was a girl running with Floss, her brother, up into the hills at Nevree to play. At least the weather wasn’t hot, she thought as she walked out and eyed the mossy stones alongside the waterfall.
A few were loose, and she was wearing her heavy riding boots for warmth. Not great for climbing. So she took her time, scrambling only when she neared the top.
Instead of an easy walk she found herself confronted by a thick tangle of willow and cottonwood uniting to battle an army of aspen shoots, and winding among them all, fierce berry shrubs of at least three varieties—all thorny.
She thought longingly of the metal armor warriors were reputed to wear someplace overseas as she toiled a difficult ten paces without being able to see much ahead. Then she placed her foot on a muddy something and nearly tumbled into a totally hidden shrub-choked crevasse, carved by the stream that fed the waterfall.
She caught herself against a low willow branch before taking a nasty tumble, looked around, cursed under her breath, then swung herself upward into the willow.
Three broad branches up and suddenly the navigation became easier. She clambered her way along the branches woven together, willow, ash, oak, oak again as she moved away from the running water.
It was only after she had worked her way from tree to tree to tree, then paused to orient herself that she discovered she had cleared what amounted to a hedgerow along the cliff, some twenty or thirty paces deep. If you didn’t know that Halivayir Castle lay directly to her right—west—you wouldn’t catch a glimpse of it.
She lowered herself hand over hand and dropped to the moist ground. Then she froze, aware of anomalies in the confusion of growing things in the dappled sunlight.
The area was still. Too still. No birds or small animals. Ahead—eastward—the pale wood of broken small branches here and there. She edged along a mighty root, reluctant to make prints, though she had no reason beyond instinct as yet. As she passed the mossy remains of a gnarled oak that had probably fallen in her grandmother’s time, she saw a trail winding among the trees, the mud churned up with footprints. Many footprints. Fresh ones—as fresh as morning, at least made since the previous day’s rain.
Rider patrol? But Riders rode. She joined the multitude of prints, her own lost among them as she looked for the expected perimeter trail. But there was no sign of any such thing winding back toward the Halivayir castle. Neit followed the trail for a ways, noting it bending gradually eastward, away from t
he castle, which was still completely invisible. When she came to another, wider stream, she followed the western turn downstream, stooping often.
She had to crouch down to ease through the brambles and berry bushes, until she came out in a rocky area south of the castle walls, barely visible through the twisted branches of a very old apple orchard.
It was marked off by a bramble hedgerow. Sighing, she paced alongside it until it gave onto someone’s farmland.
Crossing field and stream, she found the road at last, then ran up it until she reached the front gates. Here, she surprised the gate sentries as she walked through, muddy to the knees, her robe torn in several places. She peered up, question on the tip of her tongue, then decided to talk to Leaf first.
She found Leaf in the kitchen with her steward, discussing the shifting of ale barrels. Before the steward could react, Leaf’s head turned in Neit’s direction, and she exclaimed, “Neit! I was beginning to wonder if you’d been lost!”
“Just took a stroll,” Neit said with as much cheer as she could muster, though her mood was vile. “Hoping for early berries.”
A couple of kitchen servants laughed at that.
“Come see me out. I’d better ride, if I want to reach Riverbend by nightfall.”
Leaf readily assented, question in her face. Neit paced beside her until they reached the courtyard. Making sure they couldn’t be overheard, Neit lowered her voice to a whisper. “Do your people patrol up there in the woods?”
“Of course not,” Leaf said. “Even when we were small, we couldn’t get up there, not without the brambles shredding us, and for what? The kitchen staff is probably making all kinds of jokes about bellyaches and berries right now.”
“Well someone is patrolling. If it’s a patrol.”
Leaf’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that a whole lot of people have been moving down what looks like an old trail, which seems to bend eastward, away from Halivayir.” Neit scowled down at the stones. “Ghost and the rest of his company scored out the brigands, right?”
“Oh, yes. Last summer. They and Fath Riders and we even had some Riders all the way from Lindeth come help, though they didn’t find any lairs down this way. There aren’t any caves this far south. All those were up north, west of Lake Arrowhead. They cleared them all out, even the deserted ones.”
“And then they stopped patrolling, right?”
“I don’t know that they ever patrolled. It was a dedicated search,” Leaf said. “I was still recovering, but...why do you ask?”
Of course they don’t patrol because Marlovans think of mountains as barriers. “Never mind. Leaf, don’t say anything to anybody. If there’s something sneaky going on, then whoever it is counting on surprise. But they’re passing you by, and even if they can’t see it, they have to know Halivayir Castle is right there. My thought is this, you get your captain here to start the spring with battle-alert games.”
All the humor had drained from Leaf’s face, along with most of her color. “Yes,” she whispered.
Neit clapped her thin shoulder. “Remember, it might be nothing but a bunch of traders heading to market somewhere. Just because we never pay much attention to trees and woods doesn’t mean Iascans and the like don’t. I’m going to make a grass run to Ku Halir and report it. If they laugh at me, say it’s some training mission, or a bunch of the wood guild doing a sweep for winter branches that fell, or however they collect their wood, it won’t be the first time I’ve been laughed at. But I want someone to know.”
They reached the stable. Neit was on horseback and trotting out the gate shortly after, leaving Leaf listening to the hoofbeat rhythm shift to a canter as she made her way back inside, her mind churning.
While Neit rode, Quill and the Winter Company climbed.
Quill recognized his surroundings now. As if the labor to breathe fully were not enough, the equipoise of elements had altered, water found only in fallen snow, or icy vapors. Climbing at the rear of the line, he noticed when items began to be discarded by the wayside as men tried to lighten their packs, almost always after a nearly vertical climb forcing them to crawl from rock to rock. An extra pair of boots. Another. Clothing. And one day, a spear; that night, Jethren marched two of his men up the trail, and angry voices echoed down, one rising, “I can’t. I’m coughing up pink, and getting black things in my eyes.”
Someone else went back down and returned with the spear.
The day after that, they lost a man. Quill didn’t see it happen. He was bent forward, working on breathing as he climbed a very steep patch slick with runny mud when he heard a sudden scrabbling, a muffled voice, then a shriek that died away.
Quill, at the back, saw three of Jethren’s men glance around warily, then up front toward someone out of sight. It was a deliberate yet furtive scan. Did they think that man was pushed? His blood chilled.
Stick Tyavayir snapped hoarsely, “Keep moving!”
The wind began rising, a merciless onslaught of ice-needles. Quill was not the only one hugging the rocky wall to the left, and avoiding looking down the edge of the cliff. When the path at last opened onto a slope covered by a thin layer of fresh snow, he breathed somewhat easier.
Connar stopped them at the other end of the slope, where long ago water had hollowed out an overhang marked with layers of ancient sediment. The sky overhead had begun to cloud up with dark gray towering clouds, greenish light glowing at the defined edges: thunder imminent.
They set firesticks at either end, but the wind blew the flames sideways and so they put them out to conserve the magic in the firesticks, which they had been using heavily. No one actually spoke, but there was a shared sense of dread of losing the magic entirely before their climb was finished.
As they passed chunks of travel bread to gnaw on, Quill was aware of some kind of argument going on among Jethren’s men. Over the spears? There were sharp looks sent at the teenaged runner with the red hair, and Quill thought he heard someone mutter in coastal Iascan, “It wasn’t Moonbeam. You pushed him, you little soul-sucker.”
“I didn’t!”
“Get away from me.”
Quill didn’t know any of them. They kept to themselves, so he avoided them when he could. He pulled on the Fox coat, which he’d only been wearing at night to sleep in, pressed his back into the stone, drawing his knees up to his chest, and watched the others through the thin space between his woolen hat and the two scarves he’d wrapped around his neck and lower face.
The red-haired youth’s sullen voice cracked as he argued, until Jethren shot a look his way, and tipped his head toward his scar-faced first runner. “You need some time with Moonbeam?”
“Sorry. Sorry,” the redhead muttered.
Quill turned his attention away, tucked his hands in around his gear bag, which was pressed between his thighs and his stomach, and laid his forehead on his knees.
He slept fitfully, waking to a startled, “Shit! He’s dead!”
Quill looked up, his neck sending a pang down his spine; the redhaired youth sat at the extreme edge of the shallow overhang, where the wind had hit the hardest. He was very still: frozen to death.
Connar walked over, held his fingers to the boy’s nose, then said tightly to Jethren, “That’s two of yours.” He walked out, clearly displeased.
Voices carried on the frigid air, a whisper, “Was it Moonbeam?”
“Naw. There wasn’t a mark on him. You know Moonbeam always cuts them up.”
Moonbeam sat on the other side of the overhang, a faint skritching sound rising as he methodically honed another knife, this one long, with a thin, wicked blade, his gaze a light, flat stare. At a gesture from Jethren, one of his other personal runners cut slices of half-frozen travel bread, which were passed out to be gnawed with grim determination.
When this brief, bleak breakfast ended, Jethren motioned his entire company out into the snow. The wind had stilled, revealing that aching blue sky, so pure, so merciless.
His load was divided out. As they began to shoulder their burdens, Quill walked a little ways away, to where the snow was fresh with no footprints, and bent to stuff snow into both his flasks.
“What are you doing?”
Quill turned his head to see Stick Tyavayir standing warily nearby.
“Filling these with snow. Streams are going to be much rarer up here. I found that the headaches weren’t as bad if I kept drinking, so I fill these with snow, then put them here.” He opened his coat to indicate the side pocket at either hip. “The snow melts. Every time I drink, I try to refill it.”
Stick walked away, shouting to his men, who obediently began to fill their flasks. Ghost’s company did as well; Jethren’s all looked toward him for orders. When he saw Connar bend down and pick up a handful of powdery white, he jerked his chin down, and his men began to stuff their flasks with snow.
They resettled their packs and started out.
Quill waited, then rounded the rock toward the curve that of the slope, halting suddenly when he came face to face with Connar, who stood waiting.
For?
Quill recollected that they were not men sharing a dangerous journey, but commander and runner, and brought his fist to his chest.
Nothing was visible of Connar’s face except his eyes, the same blue as that overhead as he spoke, “Do you recognize this terrain?”
Quill looked out past Connar to a mighty slope stretching away westward. “I know where we are right now. But the upper slope can get confusing, especially if there’s a storm. Also, streams are much rarer up here.”
“Then you guide us.” Connar handed Quill his much-folded map, then walked to the rear of the company. Quill silently paced past the line of scarved and hatted faces that had halted to watch.