The Sword-Edged blonde elm-1

by Alex Bledsoe

  “Hm. I got a pretty good memory. Except when I drink.”

  I grinned. “Well, let’s get to work on your memory, then.”

  T ERRY VINT HAD inherited his family home from his father, and moved his already-considerable brood into it. I counted five children playing in the yard, and when Mrs. Vint came out the door, she held the newest future woodsman in her arms. For such a prolific breeder, Shana Vint was still very attractive in an earthy, sensual way that went well beyond physical appearance. I imagined that, had I married her, she’d have spent a lot of time knocked up, too.

  Terry introduced us, then he and I adjourned to chairs in the back yard beneath the shady trees. Shana brought us two tankards and a big bottle of wine, poured the first two drinks and then left. We could hear the children playing in the front yard, and the smell of dinner drifted from the kitchen.

  “So you came all the way back from wherever you were to help the king get his wife off the hook?” Terry asked.

  “He wants me to find out the truth,” I responded. I didn’t feel comfortable giving out more details than I had to.

  “I thought she was caught red-handed. Literally.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But sometimes things aren’t exactly what they seem to be.”

  He looked at me. “You’re being cagey with me, Eddie. And I guess that’s okay, we haven’t hung around each other in twenty years, we probably don’t have much in common anymore. Me, I got my home, my five sprouts and my wife, and no ambition to be anything else. I mean, I like Phil, and the queen was never anything but nice to me. But it’s hard for a parent to find a lot of sympathy for her. You got any kids, Eddie? Wife, family?”

  I shook my head.

  “She killed her own child. Pretty brutally, from what I hear. The king’s got to do the right thing by his people, or he’ll lose ’em. He’s only the king because everybody acts like he is.”

  Terry’s political insight, while accurate, didn’t help me much. I turned over the known facts in my head, looking for ways they might connect. So far, though, the threads eluded me.

  I threw out a wild card. “You ever heard of anyone named Epona Gray?”

  He thought it over, and his response seemed genuine. “Nope.”

  Something else nagged at me, another of those small off-kilter details, but this time I couldn’t catch hold of it. The wine unsurprisingly didn’t help, although I made sure I thoroughly explored that option before I left.

  I was a little wobbly by the time I excused myself from Terry’s hospitality. I had to hug each of his five mobile offspring in turn, while the baby settled for a simple kiss atop his fuzzy head. Terry’s wife was even more attractive once I got some alcohol in me, so I knew I’d picked the right moment to leave. As I rode away, Terry stood behind her nuzzling her neck, which made her smile. I wondered how soon she’d be pregnant again.

  The best view of the sunset anywhere in Arentia was from a certain part of the castle roof, where you could see for twenty miles in any direction. The roof was higher in other places, but in none of those could you also drink yourself stupid in peace. Phil and I had used the spot often as teenagers, and now we sat with our backs against a chimney, two empty bottles beside us, and a third destined to join them.

  Phil took a long drink then passed the bottle to me. “I can’t do it, Eddie,” he said. His eyes were heavy, but otherwise he betrayed no sign of the fact that he was almost, as they say in the provinces, too drunk to fish.

  “You gotta,” I repeated. We’d gone around this issue for nearly the entire three bottles, and I was at the end of my patience. “You’re only king because everybody acts like you are, you know.”

  He ignored my stolen wit. “Could you do it?”

  “I could if there was a good reason. Think about it, man. If you don’t let whoever did this think they’ve succeeded, then they’ll just try something else. This way, they’ll be off guard.”

  He looked at me seriously. “Ed, that’s my wife you’re talking about.”

  That made me mad, and yet again I almost told him about Epona Gray. Each time, though, Rhiannon’s words about love rang in my head, and somehow this made me keep it to myself. “Hey, y’know, you’re the goddamn king. You don’t want to take my advice, then I’ll just pack my stuff and go home.”

  “C’mon, Ed, I’m serious.”

  “So am I!” I was drunk enough to take his resistance as an affront to my professionalism. “You asked for my help, you know. I didn’t come bustin’ in here sayin’, ‘Oh, Phil, you must listen to me!’ I can go back to my old job and be quite happy.” I started to get to my feet.

  “Whoa, man, sit down,” Phil said. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back hard against the chimney. “I didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just… how do I sentence my wife to prison when I know she didn’t do anything?”

  I met his eyes as well as I could. “I wouldn’t say she hasn’t done anything. I don’t think she’s been honest with us, for one thing. But I’ll bet my left nut she didn’t kill your son.”

  He took another drink. In a small voice I’d never heard from him before, he said, “I miss him.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

  “Losing Janet was tough,” he continued. “And you’d think it would somehow, I don’t know, prepare me for losing P.D. But it didn’t.”

  I took a long drink from the bottle.

  “You ever think about her?” he asked me. “What she’d be like now?”

  “Nope,” I lied.

  “Think you would’ve married her?”

  “Nope,” I lied again.

  “Mom and Dad never blamed you, you know. Never. Neither did your dad.”

  I stared at him. “You talked to my dad about it?”

  “After you ran off, I felt bad for him. I used to visit him while he was sick before he died. He wanted me to tell you, if I ever saw you again, that he regretted all that stuff he said.”

  “That a fact.” You failed to protect the goddamn princess of the goddamn country, he’d roared. If you’d died too, then maybe we’d have some dignity left, but you couldn’t even do that right. “Well, he always tended to speak before he thought.”

  “Something I noticed you don’t ever do.” He took another drink. “What do you really think happened, Eddie? To my wife, to my son? Please, man.” The pleading was so honest it damn near broke my heart. I never expected to hear Phil beg anyone, let alone me, for anything.

  “I think,” I said carefully, “that your wife knows more than she’s telling, and that someone from her past, from before you met her, is out to get her. I don’t know why they picked now, and I don’t know why they chose this particular way.” I took another drink. “And that’s why she has to go to jail. I have to do some poking around outside Arentia, and that may take a while. I need all the cover I can get. The best cover is to let whoever did this think they got away with it.”

  “But I can’t even tell Ree.”

  “ Especially not Ree.”

  “She’ll think I hate her.”

  “And so will everybody else, which is the important part. She has to believe it, or no one else will.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “As long as it takes me to find the answers, or at least find better questions to ask.” My sympathy got the better of me. “I’ll go as fast as I can, Phil. I promise.”

  We stopped talking then, but kept drinking. Eventually we staggered downstairs, gave each other drunken hugs and stumbled off to our respective rooms. Mine kept spinning whenever I lay down, so I paced for a long time, trying to burn off enough buzz to get to sleep.

  I snuck back out and made my wobbly way to the royal portrait gallery, where paintings of the Arentian rulers and their families had hung for generations. I wanted one look, just for a moment, to see if my memory had embellished itself or if she’d really been as beautiful as I recalled.

  The gallery was dark, of course, since it was the middle
of the night, but the moonlight shone through the huge windows and illuminated the paintings on the opposite wall. I’d entered on the far end, where the legendary founder of Arentia, King Hyde, began the progression. I quickly moved down to the most recent paintings.

  And there she was. Dark hair cut shorter than was fashionable at the time, framing a face that was still a little too round to be striking. And yet she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Never mind that she was a child when this was painted, barely two months before her death; I’d been a child, too. Both of us sixteen, full of the certainty of our own immortality. And the moonlight in the painted eyes seemed an especially cruel reflection of the trust I’d once seen in them, a trust I failed in the most horrendous possible way.

  Hell, Janet, I wanted to say. I did the best I could. I’d do it all so much better now.

  The painting was too high on the wall for me to touch. I stared at it for a long time, marveling at how accurately the artist had captured her smile, the cocky tilt to her head, the way she’d lean her weight onto her right hip as if readying for a scrap. We should’ve had a lifetime of scraps; but we never even had time for one.

  I fell asleep fully dressed, and dreamed the worst dream ever, of Janet screaming for me to save her while the men who’d killed her laughed at me. I hadn’t had that dream in years, and hoped the wine would dull my head enough to avoid it now. I awoke in tears, but luckily no one was there to see it.

  ELEVEN

  I left Arentia before dawn, two days after my interview with Queen Rhiannon. I slipped out of the castle with the morning garbage detail, and waited at the dump outside town for an hour to make sure no one had followed me. My adversary, whoever he was, clearly had his fingers on a lot of spider webs. I wanted to make sure mine didn’t quiver.

  A day’s ride on my stolen horse brought me almost to the Arentian border, where I made camp. That night I stared up at the stars and imagined a wide-eyed horse tumbling out of the sky, its hooves pumping madly as it plummeted toward the ground. I looked over at my stolid, arrogant horse, tied to a low tree branch. The absurdity of the idea made me smile.

  If you wanted to say anything was possible, it was conceivable that Rhiannon had fallen from the sky in the shape of a horse and then transformed into a beautiful woman. And I guess it was also conceivable that the fall could’ve knocked her memories from her head. But none of that explained how a horse got up in the sky in the first place. Or why Queen Rhiannon was the spitting image of Epona Gray, the Queen of Horses.

  Hell, I chastised myself, don’t be catty about it. Queen Rhiannon is Epona Gray.

  Epona Gray, and Cathy Dumont, and Stan Carnahan and the mysterious Andrew Reese. I hadn’t thought of those names in over ten years. It was from a time in my life when I made foolish alliances far too quickly, and often found myself stuck with obligations I couldn’t fulfill. I’d learned a lot since then.

  They say too much introspection is as bad for you as too much drink. The folks who say this spend a lot of time introspecting, so I guess they’d know. Forced introspection can be even worse, because no one is ever compelled to contemplate the good things in their past. You look to history to avoid the same mistakes, not repeat the same joys. That’s why defeats are clearer than victories, funerals more vivid than weddings.

  I hated my past. Yet in it was my only clue to the disappearance of Phil’s son. The resemblance between Rhiannon and Epona Gray was too striking to be mere coincidence. But how had a woman who’d been dying when last I saw her traveled all this way, in both time and distance, to emerge as the sun-infused beauty I met in that tower?

  The trail to Epona Gray stretched back thirteen years, almost as far as the one to Phil and Janet. I seldom thought about that time in my life, but now I had to retrace not just my footsteps but my memories and feelings. Something, some miscellaneous detail, had to provide the connection. And if I knew why Epona had become Rhiannon-never mind how — I might know why someone hated her.

  So by day I headed toward Cazenovia, eventually crossed the bridge at Poy Sippi, and traveled through the dense forests to the hidden place that, long ago, had sheltered Epona Gray. And each night, I gave my thoughts renewed access to those days as well, hoping that some vital clue might shake loose from the memories. The past washed over me like the flood that hit Neceda, leaving behind the debris of pain, failure and death.

  That first night on the trail, my thoughts returned to the other time I’d skulked out of Arentia, after Janet’s death. I’d been sixteen, and sure of absolutely nothing except that I never wanted to see anyone I knew ever again-not my parents, not my friends, especially not Phil. As soon as my injuries had healed enough for me to travel, I caught a ride with a flannel merchant heading for the border, and spent the next three months drunk off my ass, fighting and whoring my way as far as my money took me. I wasn’t trying to burn Janet’s memory from my mind, or seeking death so I could be with her. I was creating a new Eddie LaCrosse, one who’d never been rich or brave or happy. Eddie version two was mean, selfish and took no shit from anyone.

  Finally, several months into my transformation, I awoke in some strange girl’s bed, broke and bruised and monumentally hung over. When the girl started screaming for her money, I smacked her, and knew I’d achieved what I wanted. I’d reached a point where no one else existed for me, where my own brutality was simply the way I operated. I was a bully and a jackass, and people better stay out of my way.

  Even a jackass needs a job, though, and what better one than signing up for someone else’s army? My dad had insisted I learn to handle a knife and sword, and it turned out I had a real knack for it. Since I didn’t care which side won, I had no problem hacking down anyone designated as my “enemy,” and so I spent five years bouncing around various small countries, once rising to the rank of major. I drank too much, killed people for all the wrong reasons and generally behaved like most of the career soldiers I knew. I saw things so brutal they would give a lesser man, or any man with a conscience, nightmares for life. It was a liberating experience.

  Once again, though, the change came when I awoke one morning with a girl. Only this time she was dead, and so was everyone else in the whorehouse, including my entire unit.

  It remains the spookiest dawn of my life. A noise awoke me, but I never found out what it was. I winced at the sun through the window. The girl’s body had stiffened during the night, and I had to struggle to get free of her cold, clutching arms. A single sword thrust went through her back and emerged between her breasts, bisecting her heart. Blood soaked the mattress beneath us. Her expression was one of slack-jawed surprise, although her eyes were closed. When I threw her aside in momentary panic, I dislodged two dozen flies already claiming the body.

  My head thundered from drink, and I quickly checked myself for injury. Not a fresh mark showed among the old pink scars. Had the murderer been after only the girl? And had I been so drunk that someone could come into the room and stab her without waking me?

  I got dressed, and found my money was still in my pockets; robbery hadn’t been the motive. I searched each room on the second floor and found the same thing-a soldier and a whore, both dead from a single sword thrust. Nothing seemed to be taken from them, either.

  The bar downstairs was empty. I helped myself to enough drink to dull my headache, then went into the street. Our horses, tied to the post the night before, were gone. The manure piles told me they’d been away for over six hours. The rest of the tiny crossroads town was deserted, although I found no other bodies, or any indication when the native population left. It was as if they’d just vanished.

  I didn’t make a really thorough search because the whole thing was too damn eerie. I got out of there as fast as my wobbly legs would carry me. At first my wine-addled brain convinced me I was marked for death, that who or whatever had slaughtered everyone else would realize it had missed me and follow me to the ends of the earth. Later, after I’d thrown up a lot and choked down some h
alf-cooked rabbit, I realized I’d just been incredibly, almost mythologically, lucky.

  To this day I don’t know for certain who killed them all, or why. We were fighting in a disputed territory with lots of guerrilla units as well as regular troops on the prowl, none of whom were above ambushing us while we were drunk or asleep. Later I heard a faction loyal to the local king may have killed everyone and burned the town; I must have accidentally slipped out while they were off readying their torches. Either way, that day loaded with real death marked the symbolic demise of Eddie the Mercenary. Although I wasn’t a religious guy, I couldn’t shake the notion I’d been spared for a reason, and once I’d sobered up enough to think straight, I decided I’d be an idiot not to honor my luck.

  I spent two aimless years doing odd jobs for meals and learning various quirky trades. I was still young, and didn’t really look like a soldier, although I still had my sword and sundry other hidden weapons. I also still despised horses, so I traveled everywhere on foot. It kept me lean and alert.

  And so it was that one day thirteen years ago I strolled along the empty road between Antigo and Cazenovia, minding my own business, when I heard the distinctive clatter of swords in combat.

  I instantly slipped off the road and into the thick forest. A woman’s voice snarled, “Goddammit!” accompanied by three quick clangs. I followed the sound to its source.

  Three men, rough-clad ambush robbers by the look of them, surrounded a fourth figure. The bad guys had huge battered swords and wielded them with casual, vicious skill. They stood around their quarry in a practiced pattern that kept one of them always out of their victim’s field of vision.

  In the center of this triangle stood a slender, red-haired girl, as tall as me but with that willowy quality so many country girls possess. She had short hair and was dressed like a man, which actually made her look more feminine. But this was certainly no helpless maiden.

  As I watched, one of the men grabbed for her jacket. She spun, and something smaller than their weapons flashed in each of her hands. They were too big to be knives and not wide enough to be swords, but they clearly did the job. The man howled and jumped back as the girl blocked not only his awkward sword thrust but the straight-to-the-mark jab of another man now directly behind her.