by Jack Conner
Horns blared.
“There!” someone shouted, Giorn thought it might be Raugst. “There it goes!”
Then, unmistakably, the Baron: “After it!”
Giorn saw the movement. Instinctively, he spurred his horse and lit out after the fox. The hounds, newly trained, ran ahead in pursuit. The fleeting red shape of their quarry darted into the undergrowth.
Hot blood coursed through Giorn. This was living. Beside and behind him came the others, his father and brother, the many nobles and courtiers. It was the annual Baron’s Hunt, where Lord Harin Wesrain and the elites of Fiarth gathered at the Wesrain country manor for sport and companionship. It was a much more relaxed atmosphere than the Royal Hunt that King Ulea put on every year, and it was a welcome distraction from the constant Borchstog attacks to the south.
Giorn readied his bow, his hands steady even atop his stallion. Branches and leaves whipped at his face, but he dodged them easily. He kept his eyes on that darting red shape. All his senses strained to their limits. The fox would not escape him. It was the center of his world.
The baying of the hounds, the thunder of the hooves behind him—all behind him now; he was in the lead—faded from his awareness. All he could see was that speck of red and the greenery it was vanishing into. The forest sprawled in all directions, green and lush, awakening after the bitter winter.
There! The fox flashed to the side, under an overturned log, through thick bushes. The hounds, momentarily stymied, sniffed the ground, searching.
Giorn ducked his head, evading a branch, and guided his horse around the bushes. All he saw was green. No! He couldn’t lose it.
The little bobbing red shape flashed through two great cypresses. Giorn charged after. He leaned backward in his saddle as his stallion ran down a muddy slope, splashed through a small stream, then hunched forward as he pressed up the opposite bank.
The fox was dead ahead. And now, here, in this one spot, no trees impeded Giorn’s aim. He raised his bow, nocked his arrow, let fly—
The shaft took the fox through the heart. Giorn reined his horse in, dismounted and stood over the body, exaltation coursing through him. He lifted his head and whooped in the joy of the hunt.
The hounds arrived, baying in low tones. They seemed dismayed to see the fox already dead, and Giorn had to laugh. They recovered and began howling, alerting the other hunters that the quarry had been found and cornered. Giorn had yet to teach them how to sound out the call of the kill. That would come soon, though. He loved training the dogs, being with them. It had come as a great blow to him when his previous group had been slain by the boar, and he was glad to have new dogs. He patted them and howled with them.
A rider approached, a noble Giorn knew well. Lord Efram Hadris looked grim and gaunt atop his horse.
“Don’t look so bleak,” Giorn told him. “There are still more foxes to be had. Though, I fear, there is only one first.” He pulled his face into an expression of mock woe. “But there’s always next year.”
Giorn’s light-heartedness seemed to disorient Lord Hadris, who shook his head as if to clear it. “No, my lord, you don’t – ” He took a breath, seemed to steel himself. “Your father has been shot.”
“What?” Giorn straightened. “What did you say?”
“An arrow—from behind.”
Giorn stepped forward. The movement seemed to frighten Efram. “Does he live, man?”
“For the nonce, my lord. Come.”
Giorn quit the hounds and the dead fox without a thought. He swung astride his stallion and followed Efram through the forest to the scene of the violence. Many servants and courtiers were buzzing around a sun-drenched knoll, where the jutting limestone prevented a profusion of trees. There on a patch of lime-green grass the Baron was laid on his side, while a healer tended to him. The black-shafted arrow still stuck from his lower back, and blood trickled down from the wound.
Giorn dismounted and joined Meril in kneeling beside the Baron. Harin looked pale and drawn. His face was sweaty, his eyes glazed.
“He’s lost a great deal of blood,” the healer said.
“How?” Giorn said. “How could this have happened?”
“Yfrin,” Meril said. “Duke Yfrin!”
“I don’t understand. Yfrin took ill this morning and couldn’t come on the hunt. He’s still back at his tent ...”
Meril shook his head slowly. His jaw was clenched, his eyes narrow and hateful. Giorn would have laid a hand on his shoulder but he saw that Meril would only shake it off.
“Several saw him do it.” Meril’s gaze stayed on their father. “Father had ridden up here to view his friends enjoying the hunt, when the Duke crept up behind him, bow in hand, and shot him. Several riders were in the area and saw him do it. They chased him, but he fled over the drop-off—” (Meril gestured to a modest cliff on the other side of the knoll) “—where his horse waited. He fled back to camp, where we found him in his tent, still pretending at illness.”
For a moment, Giorn grew faint, and the world twisted about him. Sounds and smells receded, then flooded back with shocking intensity. With effort, he concentrated on his father. The Baron looked to be in intense pain as the royal healer attempted to remove the arrow. Giorn moved forward and took his father’s hand. Lord Wesrain gripped his with surprising firmness, which cheered Giorn. His father suddenly seemed more alert, looking Giorn in the eye.
“It will be all right, Father,” Giorn said.
The Baron gasped, trying to speak, but could not. He shuddered and grew paler.
“Why?” Meril whispered. “Why would the Duke do it? He and Father’ve been friends all their lives ...”
“Why does anyone do anything?” came a new voice. Giorn turned to regard Raugst, wearing the finery of his new position as commander of the Castle’s defensive forces. He had taken to the post well.
“That is no sort of answer,” Giorn said. His father squeezed his hand even tighter. Both hands were sweaty. Giorn noticed the Baron’s hand growing colder, even under the warm sun. It was shaking.
“Then let us torture the truth out of him,” Raugst said.
“Yes,” Meril said. “We must know why he did it.”
Giorn frowned. If his father died, he would become the new baron. He would not commence his rule by torturing a duke and a friend
“Leave Yfrin to me,” he said.
At last the healer was able to remove the arrow from Lord Wesrain’s back and sew up the wound, but the Baron had lost a great deal of blood, suffered much damage to his organs, and the risk of mortification was high. The healer pronounced it too traumatic to move him, but he had more than enough comforts here at the camp—fine wines and linens, his favorite concubine brought from the country manor to sponge his forehead. Yet even this would not be enough, the healer, Masan, confided to Giorn in Giorn’s tent late one night after a bout of fever had gripped Harin Wesrain for several hours. Iarine the concubine had laid the Baron’s head in her lap, stroked his hair and sang to him, but he hadn’t even seemed to notice.
“I don’t think he has much longer,” Masan said to Giorn, his wide face bleak and drawn. “There’s not much more I can do for him.”
Giorn stared at the man for a moment, then nodded curtly. “You’ve done the best you could.”
“It may not be enough.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve sent for Lady Niara. It’s possible she can aid us. And she should be here soon, Omkar willing; I sent for her immediately after the attack.”
The healer bowed, accepting this, that his own skills might be inadequate. He seemed about to say something, but hesitated. “Is it true she’s part ... other?”
Giorn felt his throat tighten. “Why do you think I would know?”
The healer swallowed nervously. “No reason, my lord.”
Giorn forced himself to soften. “No. Tell me. No harm will come to you. You should know me well enough to know that.”
“Thank you, my lord. It’s you I fear for
. And her. You two play a dangerous game.”
Giorn felt fear grow in him, and anger. He tried to suppress it, but even so he saw Masan start to take half a step backward.
The healer immediately added in a shaky voice, “But maybe the gossips have the wrong of it. They usually do ...” He laughed nervously.
For some reason, Masan’s nervousness banished Giorn’s anger. Masan meant no harm, that was plain. Still, the thought that his affair with Niara was known to some terrified Giorn. He remembered the fate of the last man caught sleeping with a high priestess, and he shuddered. Nevertheless, he clapped Masan on the arm, startling the healer. “You worry too much about things that don’t concern you,” Giorn said, not unkindly. “I’ll look after my own skin. You look after Father’s.”
“I’ll do what I can, my lord. If I may ask, how goes the interrogation of Lord Yfrin?”
Giorn sobered. Now he saw why the healer was acting so nervously. All knew that Giorn had been overseeing the questioning of the Duke, and all feared he was implementing the harshest measures. Any man who could be so brutal was surely capable of anything. The truth was somewhat different, but Giorn would not go into such detail with Masan.
“As I said, you worry about Father. I’ll worry about the rest.”
Masan nodded reluctantly. “There is one other matter, if I can ask another moment of your time.” He took a breath. “It’s probably not my duty to bring it up—I was waiting for Lord Meril to address it with you, but, as he hasn’t, and there is no other, so—”
“Yes?” But inside Giorn already knew what he would say.
Masan swallowed. “Succession. You are the Heir. Perhaps now’s the time for you to step forward—”
Suddenly furious, Giorn gripped Masan by the front of his tunic and hauled him close so that Giorn’s teeth were just inches from the healer’s face. “We’re practically standing over him now! Your patient in the very next tent! How can you say this to me?”
Masan licked his lips but evidently could find no voice to speak. At last, Giorn, abashed at his outburst, set the healer down and half turned away.
“Forgive me,” he said. “But I cannot do what you ask. I cannot give up on Father. Neither should you. You’re his healer. Away with you.”
Masan nodded wordlessly and left.
Giorn found a bottle of wine among his things and tilted its contents into his mouth. It was red and tart, and he grimaced. He drank some more, straight from the bottle, then twisted the cork back on.
“Time to visit Yfrin.”
It was dark outside, the stars half hidden by amorphous clouds. A few braziers flickered in the wind, their coals burning white-hot, and Giorn worried about sparks spreading from tent to tent. He would have to get somebody to watch that. Gathering his green cloak about himself for warmth, he cut through the camp, though his steps were a bit uneven. Everywhere men saluted him or bowed. One or two approached him to give progress reports and seek orders, and he dealt with them one by one, though he was impatient to reach the Duke. Giorn recognized the importance of maintaining discipline—principally his own. He could drink and wallow in private, but no one must ever see. He was careful to appear sober.
The great limbs of the Tree of Kings stretched overhead, their feathery green leaves filtering the moonlight. The massive cypress loomed at the edge of camp, high and proud, majestic. Legend said it was over eight hundred years old. It had already been huge six hundred years ago when King Erryl Wesrain had met under it with King Haled Raegar. Two kings had met beneath it, but only one had walked away.
Giorn neared the tent where Duke Yfrin was being kept. Two guards stood before its closed flap and two more on either side faced the tent. The primary pair bowed to Giorn and let him pass. Giorn entered, shoving the tent flaps before him. Within it was darker than outside but comparatively warm; at least there was no wind. Giorn blinked, adjusting to the dimness, then made out the Duke, a huddled shape in soiled clothes chained hand and foot, his ankle chain connected via a short length to a stake set deep in the earth.
The Duke whimpered but rose to a sitting position. He was just a shadow in the darkness. “Have you come to finish it?” he said.
Giorn squatted beside him so that he wouldn’t be looming over the man. “No.” He sighed. So far Yfrin had given him nothing. He had not even admitted to the crime, despite the accounts of several witnesses. “But I’m thinking that perhaps it’s time to question you more ... thoroughly.”
The Duke whimpered again, and Giorn clenched his jaw. He hated having to do this, to be this man, though there was nothing for it. But he also despised the Duke for his lack of fortitude. Giorn had not tortured him, at least not physically. He had alternately starved him, let him thirst, plied him with alcohol, interrupted his sleep, administered hallucinogenic toxins (which had produced the screaming that gained Giorn his notoriety), and more, and still Duke Yfrin would not talk. And yet he had no trouble complaining about his treatment!
“Please don’t,” he said. “Have mercy!”
Giorn, against his better judgment, sat down next to him. The ground was cold and its moisture seeped through his breeches.
“Tell me,” Giorn said, “why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I torture you? You shot my father.”
The Duke shrank back. “I—I—I didn’t!”
“You lie!”
“No! I would never! You know me, Giorn. You know me.”
This was true, and it was why Giorn had spared Yfrin thus far. The Duke had been a lifelong friend of his father’s, and Giorn had grown up often traveling to the Duke’s castle to the north and enjoying fragments of the easy life there, away from the Oslog border. Yfrin had been a plump and happy man, and a good lord for his subjects, and his bloodline was connected with Giorn’s in many places throughout history. Giorn had always thought of him as something of an uncle and had actually called him Uncle growing up.
The wind ruffled the canvas tent, making it flap noisily. Yfrin jumped and cried out. Giorn was so distracted by his musings that he hardly noticed. He scraped some cold dirt up in his hands, clumped it, feeling its moisture, its richness, then let it drift through his fingers.
“How?” he said at last. “How could it not be you? You were seen.”
For a long moment the Duke said nothing. He just crouched there, huddling in the dark, his head directed at Giorn. “I don’t know,” he said, and there was weariness, but also earnestness, in his voice. “I took ill that day. Shouldn’t have been drinking so early in the morning.”
Idly, for had heard this story many times before, Giorn said, “It’s not like you to drink so early. And before a hunt! You could have fallen off your horse.”
“Would that I had!”
Giorn allowed himself a smile at that. Yes, indeed. “Then why drink?” He had yet to probe the issue.
He saw the Duke shrug in the darkness. “Why does anyone? I was having a chat, he was tilting a flask, and I thought, Why not?”
Giorn frowned. “He?”
“What? Oh, yes. That young fellow Raugst and I. I wanted a talk with little Fria’s new husband. I haven’t gotten to know him well—at all, really—and here I am the next thing to an uncle to Fri. I remember sitting her on my knee when she was a little one. She used to chase rabbits in my garden. So did you, for that matter.” His voice had grown wistful.
“I remember. Those were simpler times.”
“Indeed they were. Good ones, though.”
Giorn scratched some dirt off his pants. “Raugst, eh?” This was new.
“Yes. I didn’t mention it before?”
“No. No, you didn’t.”
“Well, no matter. Please, don’t get him in trouble for my old body’s failings. Of course, that’s assuming you believed me in the first place.”
“Who says I don’t? Perhaps that’s why I haven’t tortured you yet.”
“Do you still think that you should?”
“I ... haven’t decided. I’ll think on it tonigh
t. At any rate, it’s been a long day, and I’m in no mood to hear an old friend scream.” And should I become Baron, this is only the first of many hard decisions I’ll have to make. He did not relish it. “Good night.” As he rose to his feet, his head swam and he had to lean against the tent pole to steady himself.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine.” Hard decisions go easier with a dulled mind. Giorn started to go, then turned back. “Tell me, Uncle, was it you that asked Raugst for a sip or was it the other way around?”
The Duke scratched his chin. “It was me that wanted a sip. Yes, yes, I’m almost certain.”
“That’s what I thought. ‘night.” Giorn turned.
“No! Wait!”
“Yes?”
“It was Raugst! Yes, I remember now. We were talking, and he was drinking, and I thought that it was odd for him to be drinking so early, but then, he’s a southerner, a frontiersman, and who knows with that lot?, and we were having a chat, about hunting stag I think, and I was eyeing his flask, and he asked me if I wanted a sip, and I started to say, No, it’s too early, but then I thought, Well, why not? I’m an old man and should get my pleasures where I can. Who knows how long I’ll have left? Not long, I’ll wager,” he added ruefully.
“And how long was it after this that you began to feel sick?”
“Oh, I don’t know, perhaps half an hour. But why are you so interested? It’s just the failings of an old man’s body. Trust me, if they were interesting, I would fill a book with them.” He laughed to himself.
“Likely nothing. You rest up. And ... I’ll see if I can’t get a blanket and some pillows for you.”
Giorn shivered as soon as he left the tent, but it was not because of the biting cold wind that took just that moment to gust up from the dreaded South and flap his cloak about him. It was the thought of Raugst, the mysterious woodsman, and his equally mysterious flask of spirits.
But no, Giorn thought as he made his way through the camp, beneath the creaking branches of the Tree of Kings, and finally back to his tent, it wasn’t possible. Whoever had shot Father had looked like Duke Yfrin, and Raugst was a foot taller and many pounds heavier. It was simply not feasible.