“Alviss, yes,” Tessel concluded at last. “Simply wandering about. Given the situation, I assumed honor would demand a blade present. I could think of none better, for either of us.”
Liesa accepted this with the barest dip of the head. “You are welcome, ser, though you do come with a most unusual train.”
“Sadly they simply cannot do without me,” Tessel said with a little more teeth. Then, more earnestly: “You have my pledge as a gentleman that while they are here, they shall be on the very best of behaviors, though I would formally request quarter for my captains.” He kept his eyes trained on Liesa, but there was something in his motions, and his tone, that told Rurik they were not all meant for her.
“This is acceptable. And I should so hope. But I meant these vagabonds here.”
Tessel barked a laugh, and some of the rigid formality fled from his mantle. “Surely so did I, lady.”
She gestured across the table. “Please sit, ser, and tell us what it is that sees you to our door—and my dear brother returned to us. And you as well, Alviss. Sit. For a man your size, you have ever eaten as a bird; there is surely one’s fill left here somewhere.”
“You are kind, lady,” Alviss answered for them both.
After they had sat, and dinner resumed, there was some small talk as both masters of the table struggled to take something of the other. Tessel prodded at word of Witold, the forest, and even delicately Cullick, while offering condolences for what had been wrought on their family by him. The Bastard tactfully evaded the looming topic of Ivon—no doubt word had already reached him of his traitor’s short stay.
Yet Liesa brushed off all notion of Witold either and played the woe-struck lady to its fullest—though a lady still, hounding dates of departure, and numbers, as well as the scope of Tessel’s intent, all the while reminding him that the Matair name remained master in this place.
Yet there was something she wasn’t saying. Something Tessel’s placating smile seemed to know, and Rurik could only guess. He did not like being at a disadvantage.
“Frankly I must say it surprises me that Witold would be so gracious as to allow you to remain,” Tessel cooed at last, folding his hands in gratitude over his empty plate.
“Should he not?” Alviss piped up, before Liesa had the chance. “Matair land. Matair home.” His sharp gaze flicked to Rurik with a stiff nod. “Fought and bled for. Right-earned.”
Liesa blushed appropriately, looking down before casting demure glances back at Tessel. “Alviss is right. He was one of those to fight and bleed for it, after all. And Witold—he is an old friend. The oldest, perhaps.”
“To defy Imperial edict? He surely must be.”
This drew Rurik rigid. “What?” Liesa sat stunned beside him—how could she have known how blunt the Bastard could be? He looked to her, his face pleading, but it was Tessel that continued.
“The Empire is not kind to ones it deems traitors. Hence my condolences—”
“They are no traitor,” Alviss growled.
“No, no. Nor I. I never said they were. I said ones ‘the Empire’ deems traitors, old fellow. Your people, too, must be very loyal to have allowed you back in after all that. Though I note few soldiers to your banner—”
“What is your point?” Liesa bit crisply back. A sympathetic glance for Rurik was all she could spare. It promised answers—but when, he could not say.
“Dear lady, I think it time we come to the heart of the manner. You have noted my trains outside. They need not be seen as some raging war band, but as liberators.” He dipped his head in a show of grace. “We would liberate you and yours from bondage.”
“Bondage?” Her voice raised a note, then stilled. Delicate hands shook against the table before disappearing into her lap. In practiced grace, emotion fled her. Liesa smiled. “I know not what you think, Ser Tessel. But I assure you these lands—”
“Are not staked by other banners in the woods? My scouts tell me Insley men, among others, flee them in lands you supposedly hold. Might I be so bold as to ask what they do there?”
“They are Witold’s creatures,” she murmured.
“Of course. My apologies. And the rest of your family? Where are they? I have met two of the Matair lads. I should surely like to see how the third turned out.”
Liesa’s smile became the thinnest veneer—a viper’s curve. “I think you know.”
“Cullick is a divisive creature. I know him well. Your brother has been good enough to tell me much of the man. A pity he uses the true religion to enhance his own image.” Tessel’s face pinched into a scowl. “A despicable thing. And among his other crimes—something that shall be dealt with, I assure you.”
“You are…” She swallowed, looked to Rurik’s stunned face. “…too kind. During your stay, I hope you will accept Verdan’s kindness at its—”
“My lady. Let us not dance around this anymore.”
A grim gaze nailed Liesa to her chair. Meanwhile, with a butcher’s ease, Tessel folded his knife against his plate and eased his hands against his belly. Rurik rested his on the table, waiting. His eyes strayed to the door and back. If Tessel were going to summon his people, he would have done it already. Nothing could have set him more ill-at-ease than Tessel’s gentle manner, though. Given how Liesa’s foot rocked, he supposed it had infected her as well.
“Verdan is yours. You know it and I know it. I would only make it official—but I am a lord, as any other. I need shows of faith. I would bleed to the last for you and yours, if you would but sign an oath of allegiance.”
Alviss snorted, watching the man crossly. Tessel, seemingly amused by the less-than-noble gesture, met it with a smirk, asking, “Something wrong, Kuric?” The Matairs’ one-time master-at-arms met him boldly at that. “Yes,” he said, “contract. Like any sellsword. What goes unsaid—if you lose, a traitor two-fold.”
An insult to Tessel’s honor. Men died for less in the courts. “I will not lose. Think you so little of me, Kuric? You are, after all, a sellsword yourself.” Tessel waved a dismissive hand and shifted back to the young nobles. “It is standard, as you know. A lord needs shows of faith from his vassals, and in turn they are as his children. As my army is so. I will not neglect you.”
It was a challenge for Rurik to resist leaping the table at the man. As it was, he tapped a carving knife against his leg, pondering the chances he could make it. “How good of you to care of our bodily health, Tessel. You are ever so kind.”
The general’s gaze twisted with slight confusion. “Bodily and spiritual, Rurik. As an emperor should.”
“Spiritual?” Liesa gasped.
“Of course. Too long has this nation spent its time unnecessarily yoked to the burden of Mother Church. My father saw that and sought to change it. I would continue his example—and it is the young voices, the eager nobles like yourself, that shall help me to save this country so. Tell me: what are your thoughts on the Divine Will?”
“Assal is…” Liesa hesitated, glancing between her guests, face scrunched, as if trying to parse out what the Bastard wanted to hear. “Assal is everything. The Emperor masters through him. The rest, we can but…” An eyebrow arched and she leaned forward pointedly. “…listen?”
Tessel laughed aloud, a sharp, biting thing. “It is one thing to have the divine rule—it is another to hold it. Divine Will is nothing without stout hearts and sturdy steel behind it. And men—divine or no—bleed. If they shirk their covenant with men, they falter and fall the same as any other.
“And after, men will say, well clearly he did not have the divine favor, for if it were so, how could he have lost? Fickle. It’s all so fickle. I have my faith, but I put it first and foremost in steel. It is the truest religion any man might know.” Tessel leaned forward as well, clasping his hands together in a show of unity with his own words. “Assal watches, but men are his tools. His greatest and most terrible works. Faith rests on our own shoulders.”
“Great pains smother their young.”
> Tessel turned once more to the Kuric, sitting calm as a willow. “What is that?”
Alviss looked him dead in the eye, any hint of mirth gone from him. “Proverb. My people’s. Means: in great pain, those small are forgotten.”
“And this relates…?”
“If your war is this, it is war against self. Gives life illusion of being…a hollow march, its ends naught but tragedy.”
“Hollow?” The word tightened in the Bastard’s own throat, and Rurik could bear out the slightest hint of red to his cheeks.
“Religion, if it exists—it is man’s. Not men’s. To force is to paint it false.”
Liesa sighed, rising to talk over them. Before blood spilled across her table. “And if I were to say I am already of the Farrens, ser?”
It was hard, but Tessel managed to pull his sneer back from the Kuric and to settle hands and hearts and eyes to the matter at hand. Jurti. It was the way of things. “Then I should say you would have no troubles signing letters to this end.”
“And the people? As Alviss says, not everyone stands the same. You cannot expect that everyone here—” Rurik intervened.
“The people follow their lord’s example. If you declare it, so shall they follow. But if some Orthodox fools wish to cling to old superstitions…” Tessel shrugged. “The faithful will deal with them as they may.”
“Meaning?”
“What do you think I mean? It is not a thing for polite discussion.” Tessel’s eyes hardened and locked on his former counsel. “I shall expect you to enforce these things, of course.”
“Excuse me?”
“Who better than a native son? I have no doubt you can keep all of these in line.” With that, the Bastard pushed back from the table and came to his feet. Alviss stood with him, though Tessel saw not the threat in it. He smiled at the man and tipped his head. “Good baiting words with you, goodman Kuric.” His eyes alighted, losing the harshness to their fire, and they adjusted to Liesa, settling on her hand with kindness as he bent to take it up. She offered it wordlessly, letting his lips grace the cool flesh. “A pleasure, lady. My attendants shall be along in due time with the necessary papers. You should make arrangement, such that your goodly townsfolk will be there to witness the signing. Rurik,” he said lastly, as he made to depart.
But Rurik did not rise. Tessel was halfway to the door before he noticed, but it halted him rigid as bones. “Rurik?” he repeated.
“I shall remain for now, ser. My sister—we have scarcely had enough time to catch up on…on everything.”
Tessel’s lips parted to speak, then fell tightly shut again. He looked to Liesa and she only nodded, saying, “It would be a kindness, ser. We have lost so much time.” Even a man as cold as Tessel had to have been moved by the sincerity in the wetness of her tone. He shook his head in regretful assent and promised someone would be by on the hour with the papers, as well as to collect his men. Goodbyes exchanged and the Bastard slipped back out the door through which he had come, taking most—but not all—his guards with him.
As soon as he had gone, Rurik rounded on his sister. “Anelie? Isaak? They are—they are still in Cullick’s hands?” She nodded sullenly, and sank as one defeated into her chair. It felt as if the water had drained from Rurik’s own throat. “I…Assal. Liesa, you have to go.”
“Excuse me?” She shot up sharply. “I will do no such thing. You think he scares me?”
He took her hands in his. “There comes to be few and fewer of us, Liesa. If he doesn’t scare you, he rightly should. I have seen what he and his will do if he does not have his way—sometimes, even if he does. There is honor there, it’s true, but also anger. Great anger. And the anger will win out. You would be but a pawn to him, as I have been. You need to go.”
Kasimir had, for all his faults, sought one thing above all else: for his children to have it better than he had. But for Rurik, the point had come and gone, and he had made it clear—at some point it was not better at all. He had failed his father and his name. Months had brought him to this moment, years, even—perhaps all the years of his life. As he stared his sister’s stubbornness down, however, he saw a chance to go beyond his nature.
So many lives had been broken by his childishness. By his inability to grasp at what it meant to be human. He would let no more of his family blood be shed for the flaws of his own nature. Even if that was the last—the only—thing that he could do.
“And leave our people to rot?” Liesa snapped.
“They shall suffer either way! At least this way, he cannot make you his martyr, and these—this way they will make their own choices. They—I will take you, Liesa. Away from here. But we must all go. Tonight.”
She ran a hand along her face, smothering her annoyance before it flicked back on her brother. “Is that right? Can you not come to this house and stay more than a single day, brother? Not once?”
He ignored that. Could not deal with it at the moment. Instead, he rounded on Alviss, whose surprise was plain across his own bearded face. “We will remain for now, Alviss. They will expect this. But you—you need to get the others. We must all go. I’ll not leave anyone to bleed, and by the Maker, Tessel will find someone to bleed if we do not.”
“And the Gorjes?”
“Let them threaten. Let them howl. They knew where we went before, but now—this is our home. We know it best. And Essa…Essa will know it better than any. Let her be your guide. But find somewhere to hole up. I—I think it best we travel separate. It is me he will seek. The rest of you can slip away.”
“And leave me with the hunted man?” Liesa squawked. “Oh, lovely. Chivalrous, brother.”
Chivalry, he longed to tell her, was dead. It had died with the last of the knights, buried in the ashes of a distant plain, where the gunpowder crackled and the golden earth drew sundered by the fury. He was no knight. He was just a man—and he would do what he could, as he could. He was beginning to see that was all anyone could do.
Alviss, without a word, went from the table and left them to it. Then the siblings turned to one another and Rurik tried not to flinch from the tears that awaited him.
Father. Give us strength.
* *
Stars formed shimmering novas through the canopies of leaves by the time the Company made good its flight.
By then, the night patrols had made their rounds about town, and all but the most dedicated watchmen and wastrels had given way to sleep’s inevitable call. Chigenda, whose regular late night wanders placed him beyond additional suspicion, was the one to make certain of this. At his silent word, the others made good their escape, foregoing their tents, lest wary eyes noted too quickly their abrupt departure. With only what they could carry, they hastened to the northern edges of the camp and slipped away into the trees.
Only two stops delayed them: to collect a baker from his home of thatch and wood, and to bid a friend farewell. This last was Essa’s decision, for it led her to Starlet and the stables. A long moment guided her hand against the trusted pony’s side—then she loosed her reins and bid her ride, which Starlet did only with the greatest reluctance, taking to the south, and away.
Let them follow her. Let them howl and curse and scorn their chase until all that remains to them is a riderless horse, free at last, as nature intended. Yet let no one ask me how it feels.
Fortunately, they all had such sense of mind.
After Chigenda guided them outside the boundaries of men it became Essa’s place to lead. She took them on a hard slog, shying away from either the merchants’ road or logging trails for hard earth and thick brush. The rockier the better. So, too, in careful leagues, did they drift toward the rumble of the white water Jurree, praying its roar would cover any excess noise their progression might leak. If luck were on their side, they would not have to cast themselves into the river’s depths. Spring it may have been, but the ice still flowed heavy down the river, and its deep waters bit as chill as the harshest wind.
Best not to be seen.
Essa herself was as a ghost among such places. It had been years since she had known the trees, but her feet remembered, and they beckoned her on as old friends. She knew, too, that Alviss and Chigenda could be as deer—swift-footed and sure, with a concerted alertness toward any sense of excess. Voren and Rowan on the other hand floundered hopeless as fish on dry land.
The going was rightly slow. Purposely so. When they were far enough to render voice a softer threat, though, Essa called a halt—by way of rounding on departure’s instigating figure. “Where is Rurik?” It was the question she had wanted to ask since Alviss first stalked back from the Matairs’ manor with his orders.
It had been time. There could be no other. No point to question it then.
Alviss, caught between her fury and the blackness of the trees, found no reason to lie. “He is not coming.”
“Not coming? What do you mean? This idiocy was his idea.”
A harsh shooshing took them both as Rowan swept into the line of fire. Pine needles and stray twigs had insinuated themselves in the flopped remnants of his plumed cap, making his shrill words almost comical, but the tone ended that. “Is this really the time?”
Essa’s eyes lit on him. “If they should find us so quick, I should welcome death to be rid the shame.”
The Kuric’s own were a pointed blankness. “He remains. As we should not.”
“He sacrifices himself?” There was a certain rising note within the baker’s tone—hope? “A noble end, at least.”
“Noble? Always dis say,” came the rasp of the Zuti’s harsh voice. He had circled once as the others spoke, scanning the trees. Reassured, he strode back with all the glamour of a creeping snake. “Is strong. Yes. But fool. Self is…” Alviss shook his head, and the Zuti let it go. “Is.”
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