The Sword-Edged blonde elm-1

by Alex Bledsoe

  But solemnizing the relationship was on indefinite hold. “It wouldn’t really be fair to marry her while I was in such a dangerous job, would it?”

  “I ain’t the guy to ask.”

  “Never been married?”

  “Nope.” He was just trying to be friendly, I reminded myself. “Never was lucky enough to find a girl like your Rachel.”

  “She’s a jewel, all right. Whenever I have doubts about my job, I remember that I’m doing all I can to keep her and her family safe. That’s all the encouragement I need.”

  We stopped in Mahaleela for the night. The town was pretty much the same as I remembered it-one long central road with an inexplicable right angle in the middle of it. The Serpent’s Toe Tavern and Inn was the best accommodation in town, and the desk clerk certainly fawned enough over Anders when the boy flashed his money bag. We sent our horses to the stable, dropped our saddle bags in the room and went downstairs to eat.

  Perched on the main road like it was, the Serpent’s Toe catered to a more varied clientele than the regular taverns. Single adult travelers and wealthy families both stopped there, and it dealt with this dichotomy by dichotomizing itself. The main room, where you could get dinner and warm yourself by the fire, was designed to be acceptable to prudish parents: the barmaids wore necklines to their chins, the ale served with dinner was frighteningly watered down, and there were even wet nurses available if the parents didn’t bring their own. Off to one side was the true tavern where you could ogle the girls’ cleavage and arrange for an evening’s companionship while you drank yourself idiotic on the real stuff. It was an interesting approach to attracting customers, but judging from the crowd in the dining room, it worked.

  One family, a Mishicot livestock trader with two wives and a half-dozen kids, occupied a corner table. The kids, as Mishicotian children tended to be, were regimented little mechanicals who lifted their spoons in unison under the watchful eye of their mothers. This kind of iron-fisted parenting was necessary when you might have twenty kids in a household. The younger of the wives, a shapely blonde with dark circles under her eyes, nursed a fussy infant and stared blankly into space. Each time the baby made a particularly loud noise, the other wife, dark-haired and portly, would shoot the blonde a disapproving look. Through all this the head of the household ate ravenously, ignoring everything around him. He was tall and handsome, and scanned the other women in the room with the same rapacious gaze so many Mishicotian merchants possessed. In Mishicot a man measured success by wives and children, and he was clearly on his way up the ladder.

  Our waitress, far too young for me but just about right for Anders, brought us drinks and bread. The menu was scrawled in chalk on a board on one wall. As we studied the fare, I caught the voices of two tradesmen at the table behind me.

  “… worst domestic scandal we’ve ever had.”

  “It’s not a scandal, it’s just the inevitable result of dealing with women.”

  “You’re too cynical. My wife isn’t so bad. Certainly not a child-killer.”

  “Well, you know the government’s not telling us everything. I hear that she’s a moon priestess; I bet it was all part of some spell.”

  “To do what? She married the king of Arentia, she’s the most powerful woman in the country now. What more did she need?” His voice dropped. “I bet there’s another man involved, and the king found out it wasn’t his child. This is just his way of saving face.”

  “I just know that I don’t believe they’re being straight with us.”

  “This king isn’t like that. He doesn’t hide in his castle behind guards and soldiers, he’s never had a scandal, and he’s never been caught in a public lie.”

  “Maybe he’s just better at hiding it than his father was.”

  That tied in with the message Anders had given me, and I began to understand its urgency. After we ate, I excused myself and went into the tavern for a nightcap. I couldn’t imagine sleeping in Arentia while sober.

  The tavern was half the size of the dining hall, lit with a few oil lamps and the smoldering fireplace. But the nearest waitress wore a blouse so low-cut the brown circles around her nipples poked above the hem, and the slit up her thigh went nearly to her waist. She tossed her hair as she turned and gave me the kind of professional smile that promised many pleasant surprises, if my money pouch was heavy enough. Then she looked me up and down the way a butcher might appraise a steer.

  “Hi, handsome,” she said. She held her tray with one hand and put the other on her hip, which emphasized her narrow waist. “Like a table?”

  “No, thanks, I’ll just sit at the bar.”

  “Your loss,” she said with a mischievous wink. For a moment I considered that it really might be. I felt too old, though, to need her kind of distraction.

  One thing I hadn’t expected was how weird it was to hear so many Arentian accents. My own had faded into a kind of neutral regional one, but I was slipping back into it with each word I spoke. Usually if I heard someone say “loss,” or “coin,” or any of those words that really emphasized the way Arentians talk, it would be a novelty. In Arentia, of course, everyone spoke that way, and it inexplicably made me nervous.

  I sat at the bar. It took my eyes a while to adjust to the dimness. I saw a half-dozen fellow patrons, four clustered around a single table, one at a table by himself and one at the far end of the bar. They were from all over: Suamico, Trego, Winneconne. The other guy at the bar had a tattoo on his arm marking him as a wizard from Colfax, even though he wore neither the robe of his calling nor the insignia ring. Either he was incognito and just not very good at it, or he’d broken their vow of chastity and been formally derobed. I suspected the latter, given the speed with which he put away the ale. Poor bastard, that’s what he gets for signing up with a group of men who decried sex as the world’s greatest evil. The moon priestesses, now, they had the right idea.

  The woman behind the counter, a tall, cool blonde with a scar along her jaw that somehow made her more attractive, served me without a smile. I downed it in one swallow, asked for a refill and prompted, “Pretty bad about the queen, ain’t it?”

  “Shit happens,” she said as she poured. She wasn’t going to make this easy.

  “I’ve been out of the country for a few years. What’s this Queen Rhiannon like?”

  “Blonde, blue-eyed, gorgeous,” she said, as if reciting the ingredients of a recipe. “Sings like a bird, dances like the wind. Can heal the sick, raise the dead, make the young men talk right out of their heads. Or so they say.”

  “She’s a healer?”

  She looked at me with disdain and blew a strand of hair from her face. “That’s exaggeration for effect. Sarcasm, I think they call it.”

  I raised my drink. “Here’s to ‘they.’ ” After I took a sip, I asked, “You believe she did it?”

  She leaned her hands on the bar and fixed me with her best no-nonsense stare. “I don’t care, mister. I thought King Philip was doing a bang-up job before she came along, and if she made him happy, I was happy. Now I just wish we still had a death penalty, because the bitch deserves to hang.”

  That pretty much ended the conversation. I finished my drink and went upstairs, where Anders was already asleep, fully dressed. His sword lay on the floor atop its scabbard, and a dagger handle peeked out from beneath his pillow. I took off my shirt and boots, washed my face in the basin, then dropped off asleep from trail exhaustion more than peace of mind. I dreamed of screams and fire.

  FIVE

  We reached the outskirts of Arentia City at noon the next day. Again, I don’t know what I expected-a storybook castle, the brightly colored child’s-eye view I remembered-but what I got was a city like any other, filled with people trying to get by and buzzing with the latest scandal.

  The city walls loomed at the end of the road, a great rectangle across the horizon. Legendary for their thickness and impregnability, they rose from the Eagle’s Plain (once known as the Vulture’s Plain, due to
the inconclusive battles fought there in ancient times) like artificial cliffs. The city’s population believed it could never be sacked because of them, and that sense of safety led many to forget how much bloodshed still existed in the world beyond those walls.

  Outside the walls a second city had grown up, peopled by the merchants and farmers selling their wares. This population was seasonal, but at its peak, as it would be in a couple of months, it rivaled the permanent citizenry of the city proper. With the first spring harvest out of the way and the second planting well into its season, this extended shantytown encircled the walls to a thickness of over a mile, and the straight roads split into little side paths, like a river’s delta, that wound through the wagons, buggies and semipermanent stalls of this alternate Arentia City.

  This was one advantage of peacetime that the more belligerent kingdoms envied: a strong economy based on agriculture and manufacturing, not preparation for, and recovery from, war. It took Arentia a while to achieve this, but it became a sort of economic beacon to show other kingdoms that conquest was not the only way to grow riches. Arentia could certainly defend itself-ask the queen of Shawano, especially any of the few survivors of the Battle of Frog’s Lip-but had learned over time that economic security trumped the military one. A lot of this came about because of the courage of Queen Gabrielle, mother of the great King Dominic and grandmother of the man I was being brought to see.

  My thoughts returned to the present as we entered the great mass of merchants. Vendors yelled and waved as we passed, holding up goods and hawking services. Anders, at least, looked like he had money to spend, and that made him a prime target. He politely refused each and every offer without once losing his temper over the constant supplication, something I know I couldn’t have done. The people who did approach me got only an angry glare in response; few of them were Arentian, and their goods were either substandard or sublegal.

  Traffic was heavy, and my stolen horse reacted to the crowds by growing more and more anxious. By the time we got to the big gate that allowed passage through the wall, she was almost too skittish to control. “Country horse,” Anders observed disdainfully.

  “I didn’t exactly have time to comparison shop,” I said. Truthfully, my horsemanship had always been pretty bad, a source of embarrassment to my father and amusement to everyone else. That’s why I didn’t own one of the vile creatures.

  Inside the walls the socio-economic levels went up dramatically. People who could afford to live in the city could also afford the best of everything, and this was where they found it. The shops and dealers inside the walls sold overpriced jewelry, furs, tanned hides and elaborately dyed cloth. Merchants dressed like courtesans, and courtesans dressed in whatever ridiculous fashion was current. Noblemen and their entourages wandered among the goodies, and fancy buggies carried them to and from whatever they did between shopping trips. Anders blended in with this crowd; I did not. They probably thought I was his newly indentured servant, being brought in for a flea bath and etiquette training.

  I sensed an uncomfortable undercurrent to a lot of the conversations, and noticed more soldiers than usual posted on the corners and striding the parapet at the top of the walls. Given what Anders’s message said, this made sense. A captain of the bowmen walked past and yanked down a broadsheet tacked to the stone wall around a public well; I couldn’t read the message, but the illustration showed a woman with an excess of red lipstick around her mouth, like blood. The glimpse I got of the words implied a mocking, hateful tone.

  We continued down the main thoroughfare toward the palace itself. The grand stairs that led up to the main hall were now gated off and guarded by lancers in dress uniforms. The gates were new; in my time, those steps were public areas where people with grudges against the government, religious axes to grind or the simple need to be the center of attention could draw crowds of sympathetic or mocking listeners. To block them off this way spoke of a serious crisis that had rattled the palace’s sense of safety. It also, if I recalled my civics tutoring, violated one of the articles of the King’s Charter signed by Arentia’s original monarch, Hyde the Grand.

  We passed the gates, turned the corner by the Grand Stone set by King Hyde when the original palace was built, and proceeded down the Avenue of Wolves. I couldn’t quite recall the folklore that provided the street’s name, but it had something to do with King Hyde clearing the forest that once grew here of those nuisances. Now it was a row of houses and mansions crammed together on the street opposite the palace, occupied by noblemen and those appointed by the king to special tasks. Each house had an underground entrance to the palace, and the king could easily summon his advisors any time of day or night. Guards stood by the doors of each house as well.

  “Was there a coup attempt?” I asked softly as we rode beneath the carefully groomed trees.

  “Rumors,” Anders said with equal discretion. “No action taken, just handbills posted, a few protests and so on. This is just a visible precaution to make any impulsive types think twice.”

  “So you only get the well-organized revolution?”

  He chuckled.

  We turned down an alley at the back of the palace. I knew it led to the kitchens, where garbage and other refuse was removed by the wagonload daily and new supplies were delivered. There was a new iron gate here as well, guarded by two big men in uniform. There was no visible evidence of why this gate had been installed, and the soldiers themselves didn’t appear too concerned with their job. That, at least, I knew to be a trick: only the toughest guys watched the palace’s back door. You’d stand a better chance of storming the throne room itself.

  Anders stopped and dismounted. One guard stepped forward, and the other discreetly put his hand on his scabbard. “State your business,” the first one said.

  “King’s orders,” Anders said, and held out his right fist. He wore a signet ring, and popped it open to reveal the second insignia, the one that showed his true rank.

  “Huh,” the first man said, then looked up at me. “And you, fuzzy?”

  I nodded at Anders. “I’m with him.”

  The man started to say something, then stopped and stared at me as if I’d grown another nose. Then he turned to Anders. “Is that-?”

  “Yeah,” Anders said quickly, and snapped his ring closed. “And we don’t want to keep the king waiting.”

  “No, of course not,” the guard said. He gestured to the other man, who produced a key and unlocked the gate. I dismounted and followed Anders.

  The first guard preceded us through, and unlocked a nondescript wooden door set into the palace’s foundation. It looked like a servant’s entrance, and the ground outside it was stained after years of chamber pots, leftovers and worn-out linens being stacked for collection. He pushed it open, and we stepped inside.

  “What about our horses?” I asked.

  “They’ll be attended to, sir,” the guard said. He sounded nervous now. “Well fed, brushed down and put away dry. And, hey-sorry about that ‘fuzzy’ crack. No harm done, right?” He closed the door behind us before I could answer, and I heard the key turn the lock again.

  Anders was clearly on familiar ground, because even though we were in total darkness, he began humming. I said, “What the hell was that all about?”

  “They knew who I’d been sent to fetch. People still talk about you here.”

  “They do,” I repeated. My stomach fell into a pit and I was suddenly queasy. “What do they say?”

  A spark flared in the darkness, and then a torch burst to life. Anders held it at arm’s length while the harsh residue burned away. “They talk about that day at the lake, when you fought all those guys,” Anders said as he waited for the flame to settle. “Whenever someone’s facing odds like that, they call it ‘getting LaCrossed.’ ”

  “I can think of a few better words for it.” Failure came to mind. “We’re not allowed to use the front door?”

  “People watch the front. The king wants your visit to be, a
h… discreet.”

  We were at one end of a long passage. We walked down the tunnel to another door and Anders, still humming, tapped the stones in the wall, looking for the false one. I reached past him and pushed the correct one, which slid in to reveal a key in a small depression. The castle had dozens of these secret passages-every castle did-and it made me smile to think that I probably knew them better than Anders. After all, I’d grown up around them.

  The passage beyond was lit with widely spaced torches, so that we had to pass through deep pools of darkness between them. I knew that in some of these shadows, soldiers could hide in invisible notches in the wall, a security precaution to defend against enemy infiltrators. Heavy iron gates could also drop at a moment’s notice, trapping intruders between them. Ordinarily, though, these spots would be unmanned, because Arentia had been at peace with its neighbors for over forty years, since the reign of the previous king. Now, given all the precautions outside, would these niches be occupied by soldiers ready to defend the palace from attack? I thought about reaching into one just to see, but figured that was needlessly provocative. If I got run through before I even talked to the king, I’d never find out the truth.

  The tunnel dead-ended at yet another door. Anders knocked, and a slot opened. Hard eyes peered at us. Anders held up his identification ring again, and after a moment the slot closed, and the bolt inside slid back. Anders snuffed his torch in a bucket beside the door and gestured for me to precede him.

  We entered a small antechamber with a desk and two chairs. When the door shut behind us, it became almost invisible in the wall’s stonework. Another much more modern door was directly opposite the one we’d just used. A soldier, a major according to his uniform, sat behind the desk and looked up at us. When he saw Anders, he jumped to his feet and saluted. The man who’d opened the door stood at stiff attention beside it.

  “As you were,” Anders said calmly. “Has the king been informed that we’ve arrived?”