Druid's Bane

by Phillip Henderson

  “Has anyone here seen the Lady de Brie or men of the palace guard?” James asked, trying not to sound as panicked as he felt.

  “No, sir,” a sergeant answered. “Not the lady, but two men of the palace guard were found dead inside Lord Kane’s residence.”

  “Lord Kane’s residence?”

  “Aye, sir, it’s ablaze now, but earlier some men managed to …”

  James didn’t hear the rest as he bolted down the street. Bastion and the soldier who had accompanied him from the palace were a few steps behind.

  The roar of fire and crackling of burning timbers could be heard plainly now above the urgent shouts of a sergeant and men coughing in the bucket brigade. Then the burning apartment emerged through the billowing white smoke. It was well alight, with flames leaping from upstairs and downstairs windows. Three knights, a nobleman attired in a thick night robe and several servants were standing beside a cart in conversation, upwind from the fire and smoke. Their faces and attire were smeared with soot and grime. Two bodies lay covered in the back of the rickety vehicle. James slipped through the line of soldiers and hurried over.

  “Gentlemen, I’m looking for the Lady de Brie. I fear she was here. Has the house been thoroughly searched?”

  That the king’s daughter might be somehow mixed up in this inferno ensured he had their immediate attention. “It has been, yes, at least as much as a search was possible,” Sir Taran said. James recognised the crossed lances on a shield enamelled onto his breastplate. The man was the champion of the lance in numerous knightly tournaments throughout Arkaelyon and abroad. A hero to many. “The kitchen, however, was well alight, as was a day room on the second storey. Every other room was searched.”

  The lord in the night robe said, “I did see ten men and lasses ride from the stable yard at the back of the house, just before the fire started. But the Lady de Brie was not among them. I’d know her face anywhere”

  “These ten riders, were they palace guards?” James asked.

  “Absolutely not.”

  Sir Taran spoke up. “Surlemian mercenaries we think, given the weapons we found inside. And the other descriptions we’ve been given, blond hair and flowing green and black robes. Oddly though, we found a dozen Arkaelyon crossbows and a good number of knight swords. We suspect them to be contraband.”

  So where had they gone? James was trying to think this through when Bastion said, “There were twenty men with her. If they didn’t leave the house, where are they?”

  “Was the cellar checked?” James asked. It was the only place large enough to hold twenty people that had not been checked. He found his answer in the looks his question provoked and it was an answer he would have preferred not to receive. A cold fear washed over him and he began to move towards the gate beside the burning apartment. It was the only other place they could be. “Where is it?”

  “There was no way we could check. The fire had taken hold.”

  “Where is it?”

  The nobleman said, “The same place for all these buildings; the entrance is through a trap door in the floor of a storage room off the kitchen. The pantry.”

  “You won’t be able to get at it,” one of the knights said, though like Sir Taran, the young lord was following all the same.

  “I want water brought to the rear, and a dozen men with spades and picks, and I want it now,” James bellowed.

  Sir Taran nodded and began to give orders. James ran to the back of the building, Bastion at his side. The fire was far more savage here. The back door had gone and an impenetrable wall of flame glowed inside. Ignoring the searing heat, James drew his sword and began to lever up the cobblestones beside the kitchen stairs. Bastion and the palace guardsman joined him; sweat already running down their faces.

  “Danielle! Danielle!” James shouted, hoping for a reply. But there was nothing but the roaring flames and crackling of burning timbers.

  Sir Taran and one of the younger knights arrived and drew their swords to help. But James directed them towards the stables. “Picks and spades, any thing we can use to dig, and a sledgehammer. Hurry!”

  Embers were raining down on them and the heat from the flames and smoke was becoming unbearable.

  “What do you want done with the water, sir?” Soldiers were beginning to arrive with buckets.

  James looked up and wiped the sweat from his face. “In the doorway. Get it on the floor, as much as you can. His hope was to keep the floor from caving in for as long as possible. And with any luck some of the water would find its way through the gaps between the floorboards and cool any who might be trapped in the cellar below. Assuming there was anyone below and he wasn’t grasping at straws.

  “And on us,” Bastion said. Their clothes were beginning to smoulder.

  Water was tossed over them and now they steamed as they frantically worked to get the cobblestones up. When they’d cleared a space six feet square, James grabbed one of the spades Sir Taran had scavenged. Taran joined him, replacing an exhausted soldier beside the wall of the house. Bastion grabbed a spade too. The others used their swords to loosen the soil and their hands to scoop it out.

  They heaved, panted and coughed, working as quickly as they could. The brick wall below ground level was appearing with every spade full of dirt they removed.

  “A little more,” James said. His head was spinning with fatigue from the heat and his lungs and throat felt raw from the acrid smoke. And he knew he wasn’t alone. Bastion looked to be on the edge of collapse, but no one was ready to ease up if there was a chance Danielle and her retainer were inside the cellar.

  One last frantic effort was made to deepen the hole. Then James tossed his spade aside and asked for the sledgehammer. He was too exhausted to swing it, so he stepped back to let a burly sergeant do the work. Three solid blows were enough to open up fissures in the mortar and the fourth dislodged a brick creating a hole in the wall. Steam and smoke issued out of the darkness and it grew, as the hole got bigger with each new swing of the hammer. When it was large enough to climb through James called a halt. It was impossible see inside with the smoke and steam issuing out and the grim faces said it all, even if they were in there it was unlikely they were alive.

  James wrapped a cloth over his mouth and nose, a bucket of water was sloshed over him and he slipped through the gap in the wall. The heat was such it felt as if he has stepped inside a potter’s kiln and it was difficult to breathe even with a wet cloth tied around his head. A lantern was handed in.

  “Anything?” Bastion called into him.

  James was feeling his way along the wall. The light immediately snuffed out and he could see virtually nothing; the smoke was so thick. “Not yet.”

  A sickening creak travelled through the timbers above, and then an enormous crack brought a firestorm of embers and burning timbers and furniture cascading into the far end of the cellar as the trap doors gave way. Light streamed into the smoky interior and a wave of heat filled the chamber and momentary blinded him. When his vision cleared James found the floor littered with the bodies of palace guards. His blood ran cold. Most were concentrated by the wall on the other side of the hole he’d entered through and from what he could tell, they’d been trying desperately to dig their way out before the smoke and heat had become too much.

  “James, are you all right? Bastion was crawling in, his clothes dripping wet and smeared in soot and ash. Water was thrown through the hole behind him to try and make the heat more bearable.

  “Gods’ have mercy,” the undersecretary said, as he saw the carnage.

  “Get them out.” James had spotted a head of blond hair under the crush of bodies by the wall, and rushed across the cellar. He threw back a sodden riding coat and found Danielle. Her eyes were closed and her flushed face was smudged with dirt and ash. Refusing to think they were too late, James hauled her into his arms and carried her to the hole in the wall. To his relief he felt her stir against him. There was no time to give into his heaving emotions. He handed her o
ff into waiting arms and went back for the next body.

  The house was beginning to fall down around them with cascades of embers and more burning timbers groaning and creaking as they crashed in around them.

  James returned to the hole with the Lady Winters. Then Sir Mannering was hauled out. Bastion and several others were now helping too, but the fire was quickly consuming the cellar and with it the stench of burning flesh began to taint the air as the flames over took several inert soldiers closest to the collapsed doors.

  They got out eleven men before the rising temperature and another big collapse forced them to abandon the rescue and even then they only did so reluctantly.

  A coughing fit had taken James by the time he was hauled out of the hole, the smoke thick around him. When he tried to stand his knees buckled and several soldiers had to help him across the yard to where those who had been pulled from the cellar were laid out so soldiers of the city guard could checked for signs of life and help those who had survived. Danielle and the Lady Winters were nowhere to be seen.

  “Where is she?’ James asked when he’d recovered enough to speak. The hacking cough had him teetering on the edge of consciousness. He was offered water from a bucket and he drank greedily.

  “Your charge and the other woman were taken in there, sir.” James glanced in the direction the soldier nodded. It looked like the back door to the kitchen of an adjacent tenement that shared the stabling yard.

  “You all right?” It was Bastion; his amicable grin was white against his soot-covered face. He was lying on his back, his chest heaving.

  James nodded and got to his feet, helping the undersecretary up next to him and together they crossed the readying yard. Stepping through the doorway they found a weary and battered Sir Mannering instructing Sir Taran to issue orders for the arrest of Lord Orson—Lord Kane’s liegeman—and any Surlemians in his company. The charge was murder and attempted murder of a member of the royal family, and if the Surlemian lord resisted, they should not hesitate to kill him. Mannering was being helped out of his armour and looked visibly shaken by the ordeal but revived.

  There were also brisk instructions to search Orson for a scroll. James suspected he was referring to the document the Lady Winter’s had spoken of and which had started this foolish errand in the first place. The nobleman who owned the house looked gravely ill, likely as much from the ordeal he’d witnessed as the nature of this business. His servants, their faces grim and not a word passing between them, were hurrying about bringing food and drink to the table.

  The Lady Winters was sitting alone in a chair by the window staring out at the burning building across the yard. Like everyone else who had been involved her clothes were smeared with soot and she was struggling to come to grips with how close death had come. She shook her head when a servant offered her a bowl of water and a cloth to wipe her face but accepted a mug of wine.

  James stepped aside to let Sir Taran pass, before the nobleman noticed them and welcomed them into his house and offered drink and sustenance. The poor man’s hands were shaking as if he had the palsy. Like the Lady Winters, James declined the hospitality.

  “If I might see my lady?” Nothing else mattered more than that right now. He had to know she was safe.

  “Of course. Mary, if you would show this gentleman to the room our highness is using.”

  A uniformed maid led James down a timber panelled hallway and then knocked at one of the solid oak doors. After a moment’s delay James was given entrance to a fine bedroom. He found Danielle standing in the middle of the chamber holding her shirttails up, while the lady of the house finished wrapping a bandage around her middle. She had the same harrowed look as the Lady Winters and when she looked up and saw him, silent tears filled her eyes and streaked down her soot stained cheeks. James waited until Lady Binsfield had finished with the bandage. Then he gave her a polite smile as she left them alone.

  “I am so sorry,” Danielle said.

  The misery in her face brought tears to James’ eyes as he crossed the room in three strides and pulled her into a crushing embrace. Just to have her close, to feel her warm and alive against him, the need was over powering.

  “I love you,” he said, his face buried against her neck. The image of her inside the burning cellar flared in his mind and almost broke him.

  Danielle clutched at him remorselessly and sobbed. “James, I am so sorry. I shouldn’t have done what I did. You have every reason to be furious with me.”

  “Hush. I’m not furious with you.” Oddly he wasn’t. How could he be?

  He eased her back and pushed the hair from her face, trying to reassure her. “It’s going to be all right.”

  She shook her head, her eyes pleading. “What have I done? Oh Gods, what have I done. I shouldn’t have come here. I deceived you, broke my promise to my father, and men have been killed because of it. I’ve made orphans and widows this morning and for no good reason. I don’t deserve to be a protector.”

  Aching inside, James held her again and gently shushed her. “Don’t say that. The blame falls on more shoulders than yours, and shoulders that are stronger and should know better.” That included him and he suspected there’d be a reckoning on that account. When she had calmed down some, James said, “How can we salvage this? Surely, with this Lord Orson trying to murder you …”

  Danielle shook her head against his chest, reluctant to let him go. The feeling was mutual. “My brother can’t be held accountable for his liegeman’s actions.” The disappointment in her voice was as telling as the knowledge was troubling.

  “He tried to murder you in an attempt to keep you quiet about this document, which you have clearly seen, if Sir Mannering is to be believed.”

  “It won’t matter. Unless I have proof, any accusation I make in the General Council will fall on deaf ears. The best that can be done is that we take Orson alive and he confesses and even then it’s far from a sure thing.”

  James had been mulling over an idea. “The Lady Winters will likely have some ideas, I’m sure.”

  Danielle shook her head and looked up at him. “No, she can’t help us any more than she already has. And I’ll thank you to keep your voice down. I don’t want it known who she is.”

  James let Danielle go and went to the door.

  “James,” Danielle grabbed his arm, her look demanding an explanation of what it was that he intended.

  “We have to at least try. And there can be no harm in asking, surely?”

  Danielle let his hand go, but not happily.

  Opening the door, James called over a servant who was waiting a short way up the hallway. “Could you please tell Lady Katherine that her princess wishes to speak to her immediately?”

  The woman curtseyed and hurried off.

  After a short delay the Lady Winters filed into the room. James closed the door. “Madam, we need your help.” The woman frowned suspiciously and looked to Danielle, but James pushed on anyway. “As far as you are aware, is there any other way to bring Lord Kane’s bill down in the house this morning?”

  “My employer in this matter told me only what I have told you,” she said coolly.

  “I’m not talking about your employer in this matter, as much as your master. I’m sure that as an animal in his service you could tell us a great deal more if you wished?”

  “Why should I help you?” the woman said angrily, “If your lady had listened to me, and taken this matter to the Lord Protector as I said she should, that document would be in his hands by now.”

  “You have a nerve,” James flared angrily. “You said nothing of Surlemian mercenaries waiting to ambush our lady.”

  “James, enough,” Danielle said wearily. “Even if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Truth is, I shouldn’t have prevented Sir Mannering from shooting Lord Orson. This is my fault, all of it, not hers. Now, please, could you leave us alone for a moment?”

  James hesitated, but Danielle gave him a reassuring look that said she had e
verything in hand. After what he’d just heard, he seriously doubted as much, but retreated to the hall to wait out of courtesy, and because he was plain out of ideas of his own.

  Bastion came down the hall, looking troubled. “Everything alright?”

  “I don’t know. Dee’s up to something.”

  “Should she be in there alone with … you know who?”

  “I don’t think we have a choice, unfortunately. If we’re going to salvage anything from this morning’s folly, it’s up to how persuasive Dee can be with Winters.”

  Time ticked by and they stood there listening to the muffled voices inside, becoming ever more anxious. They both knew what was riding on this conversation.

  When Danielle finally emerged, she looked like an anxious doe that had just escaped a skilled hunter. “There is a way, but it’s more bluff than truth and there’s a catch.” She looked at James, “Winters and I have to go and get something. And we have to go alone.”

  James smiled sardonically at that. Of course she had to go alone. But what choice did they have

  .

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Danielle rode as quickly as she dared through the busy streets of the city. After a brief trip into the back lanes of the south-eastern quarter, and a briefer wait in an alley while the Lady Winters slipped into her rooms through a side door to get a small black shipping diary, Danielle was riding for the palace. She crossed a small bridge and turned onto Maryo Glen, a thoroughfare that led to the city’s Southern Promenade. As arranged, James, Bastion and Sir Mannering, along with the good Sergeant and several men of her original retainer who felt up to it, were waiting on horse back at the end of the thoroughfare. They were covered in soot and sweat and extremely glum of face, and those in the street were giving them a wide birth for their mood was such it was clear they would tolerate no trouble or curiosity.

  Danielle rode up and reined in, her hood pulled up so no one in the street would recognise her

  “All go well, then?” James asked sourly. She knew he had only agreed to this begrudgingly.