by David Keck
Coensar dropped from his saddle in front of him.
Nearby, a group of men huddled around Abravanal’s sprawled form. The steward bent. “We are too late,” he said.
“No,” said Durand. Smearing soot from his eyes, he scrambled to the man’s side and looked down into the old man’s face while the pale mill building roared like a three-storey bonfire close enough to roast them. Knights and villagers appeared. As quick as thinking, Almora was there, her shaking hands seeking life in her father.
The duke began to cough. He lived. And there was Almora, and Deorwen. All alive.
“The sanctuary?” Durand murmured toward Coensar.
“No,” was all Coensar said.
Durand nodded his hanging head.
8
The Trial of the High Passes
That evening, they camped upon a stony pasture as the day’s thin heat vanished into the Heavens. By nightfall, the victims of the raid had been laid to rest in the gravel that passed for soil at Broklambe. Durand was black with the soot of hauling dead men from the sanctuary’s embers. There had been a priest and some twenty villagers. In a wide and somber circle of firelight, the duke’s men shared their food and fires.
Durand hunched atop a wall of rubble beyond the firelit circle, a black unmoving thing beyond the light. His people were not safe. He would not have his sight dazzled by the fires, and he would not have another man die on his account that night. Monks moved in and out of the old duke’s tent. He watched and knew the old man was not well. He saw Deorwen gather Almora in, moving from villager to villager with ladles of something boiled from the duke’s provisions.
All of this was retribution for Penseval. Durand thought back on Euric at the feast. If the man had been handled less roughly, would his kinsmen have gone riding for Penseval? Now Broklambe had burned. And the little sanctuary: Would they have broken through if Durand hadn’t called for Coensar? If he hadn’t let Abravanal’s guard go haring off? If he hadn’t locked them all in a burning building? Not far off, Ailric waited. It was as Durand tried to see the youth’s mind in his blank gaze that he felt something move nearby.
A breath of air stirred at his neck.
And there they were in the gloom all around: Sir Euric with his swaddled skull; a bondman in a blue tunic, all the way from the River Glass; a madman with his head staved in above his searching eyes. One after another, they were making their bewildered way across the turned earth and rutted track of the village. Over by the stream, more were gathered. Trapped, for the moment, at the riverbank. But there were others now: armored men with skin like bubbling cheese brought the faint scent of seared meat. And, from their gravel beds rose black specters by the dozen. They milled, as if on the verge of speaking with one another. The moon-faced giant crouched at the stream’s edge. It looked up from its own round reflection.
Durand made the Creator’s sign. “Go, by the Host of Heaven,” he muttered, and they flickered back, quick as minnows in a black pond, though he could still feel them watching from the crumbling darkness among the furlongs. Soon they would return. His words were a puff of breath on a stubborn flame.
Ailric watched him.
* * *
HE WOKE TO singing.
Mist steamed from the cold stones and tussocks of Broklambe. Durand lay on one frozen shoulder, stuck to the ground. Even with the dead all around him, he had slept. And, somewhere, the monks were singing the Dawn Thanksgiving in their hollow, modal harmonies under the mountains.
He blinked stiffly through the mist, peering over ruined cottages. Their timbers jutted like dead men’s knees on some battlefield. The company was, for the most part, still abed in their hastily pitched gaggle of pavilions. A few shield-bearers moved through the chill half-light. Durand heard coughing.
Wincing, he spotted a stocky shape on the move. Someone was trudging briskly toward him, wrapped tight in a cloak. It was Ailric.
There was a flinch, very little like a smile. “I thought I’d see what I could make out about the raid.”
“Well, what did you see?” Durand asked.
“The ground is bad for it. Stony. But they had a squad of foragers, looks like, who looted what they could from the village.”
“Did they?”
“And there were more, I think, than we met at the mill. Some fraction of their number was driving stock on the way out.” He pointed up the far valley wall, where the three bladelike peaks towered, blue and ghostly, into the vault of Heaven. “I found tracks of oxen. Pigs.” He shrugged. “Meat on the hoof rather than on their backs. There’re still some of these shabby mountain beasts wandering out there, though. They must not have been serious about reprovisioning—or they were in a hurry.”
“They’d just lit the fires when we rolled up.”
Ailric nodded.
Durand squinted at the trail of the village beasts and the peaks beyond. “And those mountains?”
“The Sisters, they are called. They mark the pass,” said Ailric. “I’ve seen it. We’re a league or less from the foot. We will find a waterfall where the three peaks meet: the Tresses. A thready thing. Ice. You climb switchbacks and come to the ruins of a gate or wall in a stand of pines. Sir Euric rode to Fellwood a few years ago. We traveled that way. Over the pass, through to the commandery of the Solantines beyond, and down into the forest.”
The Solantine knights hardly seemed like real men to Durand. Half deathless, never sleeping. Monks and soldiers both. And the stark commandery in Pennons Gate must be the loneliest place in Creation.
“What did your man want in Fellwood?”
“He hoped to start something of his own in the Marches.”
“A younger son,” said Durand. Euric had never been meant to inherit Swanskin Down. This was something Durand understood. He had left his own brother in the Col to wait on their father.
“It is a wild place,” Ailric said. “There are things in the trees.”
Durand raised an eyebrow.
“Truly. The Fellwood Marches are not Errest the Old.”
“No matter what our king says?”
“They have carved it from the deep wastes of Fellwood and men go missing. Villages.”
“But a man needs no title to reign there. How long were you and Sir Euric in Fellwood?”
“Not long, Sir Durand. The moons of one summer were enough. We met the Solantines again in their commandery before the leaves fell.”
“My father’s gift, again?”
Ailric did not quite smile.
Together, the two men packed Durand’s few possessions and set about waiting.
* * *
THEY WATCHED ABRAVANAL’S pavilion all morning. The man did not emerge. The knights and men of the column were unnaturally still.
Villagers drove strays from the thin shoots of corn in the hardscrabble fields and worked to clear the ruins in that valley below the mountains. Animals brayed and shrieked. Houses crashed. Shield-bearers beat and scrubbed the soot from the knights’ gear. Almora went to her father’s pavilion, and she did not come out. Monks moved in and out. By noontide, the tents were struck, rolled, and stowed in saddlebags. Every horse was saddled. But the duke’s great pavilion stood, until every other tent was gone. And Durand fell from wondering about the next move of the raiders to wondering what would happen if the duke never emerged. Without him, would they march to Fellwood? Could they oppose Leovere? The duke choked and strangled. The king would hold the duke’s lands and make a ward of Almora, at least until the unmarried Almora came of age. Gireth would be turned on its head. This was why dead Euric had spoken out, of course: the girl must be married off, or the doom of every soul in Gireth would rest in the hands of a bankrupt king who had never come within fifty leagues of Acconel.
Durand watched the pavilion and winced at the sound of coughing.
Coensar and other ranking knights came and went from the duke’s tent, their faces grave. Then, sometime after the monks sang Noontide Lauds, the old man tottered out of the tent
hung between a valet and a footman.
At a surly thrust of the old man’s chin, Coensar bullied the company into motion. The villagers of Broklambe cheered as the column rode out, following the trampled trail of the stolen beasts up the vast peaks. Many of the knights scattered silver pennies over the crowd.
Only a league above the village, the icy wind brought them the smell of burnt flesh and the slaughterhouse reek of voided bowels. In the midst of a trampled plateau was the charred crater of a substantial fire. The fatty racks of half-picked carcasses lay scattered, hooves jutting into the damp air. A league was no distance at all for a fast horse. They had slept this close to death all night.
Almora huddled on the back of her palfrey under a white fur cloak and blankets. She looked at the black scar in the grass. “I met him once, on a rare journey beyond the walls of Acconel—Leovere,” said Almora. “We met hunting. He was dashing, or he seemed so, and had kind words for a hen kestrel of mine. He smiled, and I was fool enough to blush, I remember. He seemed so very serious—and then the smile. My father was not pleased.”
Coensar scowled as he surveyed the abandoned camp. The place was something of a crossroads. Tracks scurried off into the heather and juniper like little gullies. Ailric probed two of these lesser ways, but the matted grass and stony earth told him little. The raiders could have gone anywhere.
“Will they come again?” Almora asked.
“These men rode ahead of us this far. Now, it seems they’ve had their laugh and slithered into the rocks. They took a chance, and very clever they were. But they never had men enough to face us. These mountain tracks might lead anywhere. Highshields. Down to the Col. Back to Leovere in Yrlac.”
He paused a moment. “Still,” he said, “we will be wary.”
The old man was hacking into a knotted fist.
Through the afternoon, the company climbed the face of the Blackroots. The air was cool and the track beneath them was as stony as a streambed. No one for a league could fail to hear the clatter of their hooves in that hard emptiness. The three limestone peaks called the Sisters towered above them like the frozen hands of a Power. Everywhere, vast boulders crowded the trail. Durand rode with his shield on his shoulder.
Perhaps two hours before dusk, Abravanal simply dropped from his saddle. Tons of horseflesh and cartloads of baggage were still rumbling forward as the old man’s boneless form hit the road. Coensar jumped down. Durand joined him. Coensar was turning the duke over even as teamsters shouted. The stricken man’s gray head lay upon the stones. Durand looked up. As quickly as they could, the column was reining in their horses. Soon, Deorwen and Almora joined them.
“He is very hot,” said Deorwen.
Durand set the back of one broad hand against the old man’s cheek. It felt like the skin of wax at the mouth of a just-cooling candle: slack and hot. The old man began to cough, gulping for air between brittle spams.
“The monks have done nothing for him,” Durand said. “He’s fevered now. As, I’ll wager, he was this morning.” Abravanal should never have been moved and there wouldn’t be a village ahead until the Fellwood. He turned on Coensar. “Why did you let him ride?”
It was Almora who spoke: “If you seek to blame anyone, Sir Durand, you ought to accuse my father. He would not ride in a cart like an invalid. He did not want the others to see him that way.”
“No,” said Durand. He shouldn’t have been without his guard yesterday. Durand should not have let Raimer take a single rider. “None of it should have happened.” Penseval. The raid. The deadly refuge of the burning mill.
“We must get him to shelter,” said Coensar. “It is too narrow on this mountain for the company to camp. We will have to send parties down. There may be another village somewhere.”
Durand looked at the sheer peaks, at the implacable vastness of the range.
A cough erupted from the duke’s body that seemed ready to tear the old man to pieces. Shelter, if they found it, would not be enough. At their shuffling pace, Abravanal would die before he reached help.
“No,” said Durand. “We’ve let a sick man bounce around on the back of a mare for half a day. We’re lucky the fall hasn’t killed him. We do not have time to waste camping among these stones. We might reach the knights up in Pennons Gate.” They would have leechcraft to match any in the Atthias.
“You’d ask me to drag the man the length of the pass. He’ll be dead, and we’ll still be days away,” Coensar said. The others looked on.
Durand waved toward the baggage train. “We cut loose these rolling storehouses, we’ll reach the Solantine commandery before dusk tomorrow.”
“If we travel through the night.…” Coensar’s eyes glinted like the honed points of awls, calculating.
“Ailric has seen the pass,” said Durand.
The shield-bearer returned Durand’s fierce look with something tense, considering. “Sir Coensar, I traveled to Fellwood only three years ago, accompanying Sir Euric. The journey required four days, but we were not pressing.”
“There is nothing below us,” said Durand. “If we climb, we reach help tomorrow at dusk. We have remounts.”
Ailric nodded fractionally. “It is possible,” he allowed.
Coensar stood. “We’ll need a cart for His Grace. And not an oxcart.”
“I have just the thing,” said Durand, rising. Leaving the others behind in bewilderment, he stalked down the column and found the stooped tinker and his cart still with them. Durand stepped round the cart’s big wheels and set his boot on the rung under the thing’s back gate. Pots clattered.
“What’re you doing there?” demanded the tinker.
There was room enough for a man to lie down, or there would be, so Durand cleared the bed, flinging pots and kettles out the back. He took hold of a narrow grindstone and made to throw it.
“Hey there! Stop!” said the tinker.
And, in an instant, the gangling man had landed among his wares.
All down the line, the grand carts were cut loose. After a few shocked protests, every horse fit to ride wore a saddle. Bags were torn apart. Every man at arms would ride with the duke and few were the serving men who would stay behind. Thus, a greater treasure than was scattered to the plowmen of ruined Broklambe was abandoned on the roadside stones.
Almora and Deorwen climbed into the tinker’s cart with the duke. The girl looked very young beside her father; too young to watch him die.
“I’ll get him to Pennons Gate. You have my oath,” Durand said, and took the reins.
* * *
THEY SCRAMBLED UP the face of the mountains, clattering along sheer switchbacks in the angled light. Durand was now driving two mules, harnessed nose to tail for the narrow track. Below, the hills tumbled away, forests gobbled up the light, and the Banderol and far more distant Silvermere flashed like bullion spilling from the Creator’s mold. Soon, Durand lost sight of the Sisters among the high walls above them. A cataract of icy water tumbled down the sheer face.
“I see the falls,” said Durand. In the cart, Creation had become impossibly small. The old man’s jagged breathing caught at every motion, while the cart shook with each jerk of the mules’ bony backsides like a hut on an elephant’s back. Every stone in the road had it heeling over.
“Good,” said Deorwen rocking in the bed of the cart, “but, Durand, he cannot stand these ruts.”
“Next we’d have to carry him in a litter. It would add a day or more.”
“Then do your best.” Durand saw her glance at Almora. “But speed may do no good if this shaking continues.”
There was little point in rushing them all to Abravanal’s funeral. Deorwen mopped Abravanal’s brow, balancing at his side as the cart pitched and heeled. Finally, she crept forward and settled on the bench beside Durand.
“Where are these raiders now?” she said, looking up at the cliffs.
“There is a chance that they’re up ahead. That could be. But, if I were them, I’d have ridden to Penseval for or
ders. They haven’t the men to fight us, and they will never lay another trap like Broklambe. That was the devil’s masterstroke. It would be hard to match.”
She leaned near, but had her eyes on the mountains. “So, if they’ve any sense, they’ve gone home?”
“Aye,” said Durand. “But I don’t know.”
She cursed and settled back at Abravanal’s side.
* * *
IN AN HOUR, the spray of the Tresses misted the shadowed air. They mounted a final corner and reached the scrub of twisted pines in the shadow of the knife-sharp Sisters. Durand saw fear in the wild glances of his fellow travelers as they climbed into that crabbed glen. The skalds told tales of the vast and frigid hearts of these mountains, where thoughts dread and fickle scraped through caverns of stone. Banished spirits haunted the uncharted labyrinths of the heights. Only grudgingly would the Blackroots suffer a mortal to pass. Blocks of frost-white marble lay heaped and scattered over the ground, each with some ancient sigil deeply incised in its face. The clatter of hooves and wheels swelled in the gelid twilight.
“It is there,” said Ailric, pointing into the deepest shadows where the bald track led into a narrow defile. A man could almost hear the hate creaking through the hearts of the peaks.
Durand twitched the reins, urging the tinker’s stolid mules onward.
The shield-bearer cut close to the cart.
“We’re not the first to reach this place,” Ailric said. “There have been horses.”
Deorwen came climbing forward. The cart wobbled like a basket.
“What is he saying?” she asked.
“Pennons Gate is a pass,” Durand said. “People will ride here from time to time.” Though it was newly opened and likely half-choked with snow.
The boy nodded. “Some prints are like those at Broklambe: a big animal with a barred shoe. One with round nails. Others.”
“They’re in the pass?” asked Deorwen.
Durand spat a curse, not at her. “This is what he’s saying, Lady Deorwen.” With his free hand, he rubbed his face. Morcar and his thugs knew where Abravanal must go. There was only Pennons Gate. The road would not fork. Abravanal’s knights had the numbers, but Morcar could choose whatever ground he liked. It shouldn’t be enough, but Morcar was a cold-blooded creature. The only thing that might upset whatever scheme he’d worked up was the speed of Abravanal’s party. Morcar had no reason to expect a headlong dash.