by Tad Williams
Miriamele turned to Cadrach for explanation, but the monk was absorbed in a goblet of the count’s wine, which he had apparently decided was safe.
“What does…‘Avi Stetto’…mean?” she finally asked.
“It’s Perdruinese for ‘I have a knife.’ ” Streáwe shook his head fondly. “He does know how to use his toys, though, that one does…”
“How did you know about us, sir?” Cadrach asked, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
“And what are you going to do to us?” Miriamele demanded.
“As to the first,” Streáwe said, “as I told you, the weak must have their ways. My Perdruin is not a country whose might makes others tremble, so we must instead have very good spies. Every port in Osten Ard is an open market of knowledge, and all of the best brokers belong to me. I knew you had left Naglimund before you reached the River Greenwade; I have had people taking note of your progress ever since.” He picked a reddish fruit out of a bowl on the table top and began peeling it with trembling fingers. “As to the second,” he said, “well, that is a pretty question.”
He was struggling with the fruit’s tough rind. Miriamele, feeling a sudden and unexpected sympathy for the old count, reached out and gently took it from him.
“Let me do it,” she said.
Streáwe raised an eyebrow, surprised. “Thank you, my dear. Very kind. So, then, the question of what I should do with you. Well, now, I must admit that when I first got word of your…temporarily detached state…it occurred to me that there might be more than a few who would pay for word of your whereabouts. Then, later, when it became clear you would be changing ship here in Ansis Pellipé, I realized that those who would find value in mere tidings might be willing to pay even more for an actual princess. Your father or uncle, for instance.”
Furious, Miriamele dropped the fruit into the bowl, half-peeled. “You would sell me to my enemies!?”
“Now, now, my dear,” the count said soothingly, “whoever said anything about that? And who are you calling an enemy, in any case? Your father the king? Your fond uncle Josua? We are not talking of handing you over to Nascadu slave-merchants for a few coppers. Besides,” he hastily added, “that alternative is now closed in any case.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I am not going to sell you to anyone,” Streáwe said. “Please, do not worry about that.”
Miriamele picked up the fruit again. Now her hand was trembling.
“What is going to happen to us?”
“Perhaps the count will be forced to go locking us up in his deep, dark wine cellars, for our own protection,” Cadrach said, gazing with fondness at the near-empty decanter. He seemed utterly and splendid drunk. “Ah, now wouldn’t that be a terrible fate!”
She turned away from him in disgust. “So?” she asked Streáwe. The old man took the slippery fruit from her hand and bit it carefully -
“Tell me one thing,” he said. “Do you go to Nabban?”
Miriamele hesitated, wrestling with her thoughts. “Yes,” she answered at last. “Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“And why should I tell you? You have not harmed us, but you have not yet proved yourself a friend, either.”
Streáwe stared at her. A smile slowly spread across the lower part of his face. His eyes, red-rimmed, retained their hard edge. “Ah, I like a young woman who knows what she knows,” he said. “Osten Ard is full to brim with sentiment and imprecise understanding—it is not sin, you know, but foolish sentiment that sets the angels to moaning in despair. But you, Miriamele, even when you were a small child you had the look of someone who would do something in this world.” He pulled the decanter away from Cadrach and refilled his own goblet. The monk looked after it comically, like a dog whose bone had been stolen.
“I said no one would sell you,” Count Streáwe said at last. “Well, that is not quite true—no, do not glare so, mistress! Wait until you have heard all I have to say. I have a…friend, I suppose you would say, although we are not personally close. He is a religious man, but he moves in other circles as well—the best kind of friend I could ask for, since his knowledge is wide and his influence great. The only problem is, he is a man of rather irritating moral rectitude. Still, he has given help to Perdruin and to me many times, and—to put it simply—I owe him more than a few favors.
“Now, I am not the only one who knew of your departure from Naglimund. This man, also, the religious fellow, had it through his own private sources…”
“He, too?” Miriamele demanded. She turned to Cadrach in anger. “What, did you send out a crier to trumpet the news?!”
“Not a word passed my lips, m’lady,” the monk said slurringly. Did she fancy that he was not as drunk as he pretended to be?
“Please, Princess.” Streáwe raised a shaking hand. “As I said, this friend is an influential man. Even those around him do not guess the breadth of his influence. His network of information, although smaller than mine, is of a depth and scope that often makes me shake my head in amazement.
“What I have been saying, though, is this. When my friend sent word to me—we each have a little flock of trained birds who carry our letters back and forth—he told me about you. This was a thing I already knew. He. however, did not know of my plans for you—those plans I spoke of earlier.”
“Selling me, you mean.”
Streáwe coughed apologetically. For a moment it became a real cough. When he had regained his breath, he continued. “And, as I have said, I owe this man several favors. So when he asked me to prevent you going on to Nabban, I really had no choice…”
“He asked you what?” Miriamele could not believe her ears- Would she never escape the meddling and interference of others?
“He does not want you to go to Nabban. It is not the right time.”
“Not the right time? Who is this ‘he,’ and what right…?”
“He? He is a good man—one of the few of whom the term can be used. I do not have much respect for the type, myself. The ‘right,’ he says, is the saving of your life. Or at least your freedom.”
The princess felt her hair sticking to her forehead. The room was warm and humid, and the baffling, irritating old man across the table was smiling again, happy as a child who has learned a new trick.
“You are going to keep me here?” she said slowly. “You are going to imprison me and so protect my freedom?”
Count Streáwe reached a hand to his side and tugged at a dark rope that hung nearly invisible before a rumpled wall hanging. Somewhere in the building above a bell tolled faintly. “I am afraid that is true, my dear,” he said. “I must hold you until my friend sends to say otherwise. A debt is a debt and a favor must be repaid.” There was a sound of booted feet on the doorstep outside. “It truly is to your advantage. Princess, although you may not know it yet.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Miriamele snarled. “How could you? Don’t you know that there is a war brewing? That I am carrying important news to Duke Leobardis?” She had to reach the duke, to convince him to join with Josua. Otherwise, her father would destroy Naglimund and his madness would never cease.
The count cackled. “Ah, but my child, horses travel so much more slowly than do birds—even birds who carry the weight of heavy tidings. You see, Leobardis and his army left for the north nearly a month ago. If you had not passed so swiftly, skulkingly, and secretively through the towns of Hernystir, had you but spoken with a few people, you would have known.”
As Miriamele slumped in her chair, dumbstruck, the count rapped his knuckles loudly on the table. The door swung open and Lenti and his two henchmen, still wearing their costumes, came into the room. Lenti had taken off his Death mask; his sullen eyes peered out of a face that was pinker, but not a great deal livelier, than the one he had doffed.
“Make them comfortable, Lenti,” Streáwe said. “Then, lock the door behind you and come back to help me into my litter.”
As the nodding Cadrac
h was rousted from his chair, Miriamele turned on the count. “How could you do this?” she sputtered. “I had always remembered you fondly—you and your treacherous garden!”
“Ah, the garden,” Streáwe said. “Yes, you would like to see that again. wouldn’t you? Don’t be angry, Princess. We will talk more—I have much to tell you. I am charmed to see you again. To think that pale, shy Hylissa should have birthed such a fierce child!”
As Lenti and the others hustled them out into the rain, Miriamele caught a last glimpse of Streáwe. The count was staring at the gate, his white-haired head nodding slowly up and down.
They brought her to a tall house full of dusty hangings and ancient, creaking chairs. Streáwe’s castle, perched on a spur of Sta Mirore, was empty but for a handful of silent servants and a few nervous-looking messengers who crept in and out like stoats through a fence hole.
Miriamele had her own room. It might have been pretty once, long, long ago. Now the faded tapestries showed only dim ghosts of people and places, and the straw of her mattress was so old and brittle and dry that it whispered in her ears all night.
She dressed every morning with the help of a heavy-faced woman who smiled tightly and spoke very little. Cadrach was being kept somewhere else, so she had no one to talk with during the long days and little to do except read an old Book of the Aedon whose illuminations had faded until the cavorting animals were mere outlines, as though carved in crystal.
From the moment she was brought to Streáwe’s house, Miriamele schemed, dreaming of ways she might get free, but for all its air of stuffy disuse, the count’s decaying palace was harder to escape than the Hayholt’s deepest, dankest cells. The front hallway door of the wing in which she was housed was kept firmly locked. The rooms along the passageway were similarly barred. The woman who dressed her and the other servants were brought in and out by a broad-boned and serious-looking warder. Of all the potential routes of escape, only the door at the other end of the long hallway was ever left open. Beyond this door lay Streáwe’s walled garden, and that was where Miriamele spent most of her days.
The garden was smaller than she remembered, but that was not surprising: she had been very young when she had seen it last. It seemed older, too, as if the bright flowers and greenery had grown a bit weary.
Banks of red and yellow roses lined the garden, but they were being gradually supplanted by exuberantly snaking vines whose beautiful bell-shaped flowers shone the color of blood, and whose cloying scent mingled with a myriad of other sweet, sad odors. Columbine clung to the walls and door-frames, its spurred blossoms dotting the twilight like softly-glowing stars. Here and there streaks of even wilder colors flashed among the tree branches and flowering shrubs—the tails of shrill-voiced, onyx-eyed birds from the Southern Islands.
The top of the high-walled garden was open to the sky. Her first morning in the garden Miriamele tried to climb the wall, but quickly discovered that the stone was too smooth for fingerholds, the vines too flimsy to offer support. As if to remind her of the proximity of freedom, tiny hill birds frequently spiraled down through this sky-window, hop-ping from branch to branch until something startled them and they leaped away into the air once more. Occasionally a gull, swept far in from the sea, flapped down to pace and preen before the more colorful denizens of the garden, keeping an urchin’s eye open all the while for scraps from Miriamele’s meals. But even with the unfenced sky churning with clouds just a short distance away, the brilliantly-plumed island birds stayed where they were, squawking resentfully in the green shadows.
Some evenings Streáwe joined her in the garden, carried in by sullen Lenti and propped in a high-backed chair, the count’s useless, withered legs covered with a figured lap robe. Unhappy in her captivity, Miriamele deliberately made little response when he tried to amuse her with funny stories or sailors’ gossip and rumors from the port. Still, she found she could not truly hate the old man, either.
As the futility of trying to escape became clear to her, and as the passing days wore away the edge of her bitterness, she came to find an unexpected comfort in sitting in the garden while late afternoon turned to evening. At the end of each day, as the sky overhead turned slowly from blue to pewter to black and the candles burned down in their sconces, Miriamele mended garments she had torn on her journey south. While the nightbirds sang their first hesitant notes, she drank calamint tea and pretended not to listen to the old count’s stories. When the sun had gone down, she put on her riding cloak. It had been an uncommonly cold Yuven-month, and even in the sheltered garden the nights were brisk.
When Miriamele had been prisoned for nearly a week in Streáwe’s castle, he came to her sadly and told her of the death of her uncle Duke Leobardis in combat before the walls of Naglimund. The duke’s eldest son Benigaris—a cousin that she had never much cared for—had returned to rule Nabban from the throne of the Sancellan Mahistrevis. With help, Miriamele presumed, from his mother Nessalanta, another relative who had never been one of Miriamele’s favorites. The news upset her: Leobardis had been a kind man. Also, his death meant Nabban had quit the field, leaving Josua without allies.
Three days later, as the evening of the first day of Tiyagar-month came on, Streáwe poured her a bowl of tea with his own trembling hand and told her that Naglimund had fallen. Rumor said there had been great slaughter, that few had survived. He held her awkwardly in his dry-stick arms as she sobbed.
The light was waning. The patches of sky that showed through the dark embroidery of leaves were the unwholesome blue of bruised flesh.
Deornoth stumbled on an unseen root and Sangfugol and Isorn crashed to the ground beside him, Isorn losing his grip on the harper’s arm as he fell. Sangfugol rolled to a halt and lay groaning. The bandage around his calf, strips of thin cloth from one of the ladies’ underskirts, reddened with fresh blood.
“Oh, the poor man,” Vorzheva said, limping forward. She squatted, spreading out the skirt of her tattered dress, then took Sangfugol’s hand. The harper’s eyes were fixed in an agonized stare on the tree limbs overhead.
“My lord, we must stop,” Deornoth said. “It is growing too dark to see.” Josua turned slowly. The prince’s thin hair was disarranged, his face distracted. “We should walk until full dark, Deornoth. Every moment of remaining light is precious.”
Deornoth swallowed. It made him feel almost ill to contradict his liege lord. “We must make a secure place for the night, my prince. It will be hard to do that after dark. And the wounded are even more at risk if we continue to travel.”
Josua looked down at Sangfugol, his expression distant. Deornoth did not like the change he was seeing in his prince. Josua had always been quiet, and many thought him strange, but still he had been a decisive leader—even in the last terrible weeks before Naglimund fell. Now he appeared unwilling to do anything, in small matters as well as large.
“Very well,” the prince said at last. “If you think so, Deornoth.”
“I beg pardon, but might we not move just a little farther up this…this defile?” Father Strangyeard asked. “It is only another few steps, and it seems safer than making camp in the bottom of a gulley—doesn’t it?” He looked expectantly at Josua, but the prince only grunted. After a moment, the archivist turned to Deornoth. “Do you think?”
Deornoth looked around at the ragged party, at the white, frightened eyes in the dirt-streaked faces. “That is a good idea. Father,” he said. “We shall do that.”
They made a tiny fire in a hastily-dug pit surrounded with stones, more for light than anything else. Heat would have been most welcome—with nightfall, the forest air was turning bitterly cold—but they could not risk so much of a display. There was nothing to eat, in any case. Their pace had been far too hurried for any hunting.
Together, Father Strangyeard and Duchess Gutrun were cleaning Sangfugol’s wound and rewinding the bandage. The white and black-feathered arrow, which had knocked the harper down late yesterday afternoon, seemed to have struck th
e bone. Despite the care taken with its removal, not all the arrowhead had come out. When Sangfugol could talk, he complained that the feeling in his leg was nearly gone; at the moment, he was in shallow, uneasy sleep. Vorzheva stood nearby, looking on sorrowfully. She had been pointedly shunning Josua, who did not seem much bothered.
Deornoth silently cursed his thin cloak. If I had only known we would be tramping the open woods, he lamented, I would have brought my fur-hooded riding cloak. He smiled grimly at his own thoughts and suddenly laughed aloud, a short bark of amusement that caught the attention of Einskaldir, squatting nearby.
“What’s funny?” the Rimmersman asked, frowning as he worked his hand-axe up and down a small whetstone. He held it up, testing the blade with his callused thumb, then laid it back against the stone once more.
“Nothing, really. I was just thinking about how stupid we’ve been—how unprepared.”
“Waste of time, crying,” Einskaldir growled, his eyes never leaving the blade as he lifted it to the red firelight- “Fight and live, fight and die, God waits for all.”
“It’s not that.” Deornoth stopped for a moment and considered. What had begun as an idle thought had grown into something more; suddenly, he was afraid to lose his grip on it. “We have been pushed and pulled,” he said slowly, “driven and drawn. We have been chased for three days since we escaped Naglimund, with barely a moment free from fear.”
“What is to fear?” Einskaldir said gruffly, tugging at his dark beard. “If they catch us, they will kill us. There are worse things than to die.”
“But that’s just it!” Deornoth said. His heart was pounding. “That’s just the point!” He leaned over, realizing that he had raised his voice almost to a shout. Einskaldir had stopped scraping his axe-blade to stare. “That is what I wonder,” Deornoth said more quietly. “Why haven’t they killed us?” Einskaldir looked at him, then grunted. “They tried.”
“No.” Deornoth was suddenly sure. “The diggers…the Bukken as your people call them…they tried. The Norns haven’t.”