The River King's Road

by Merciel, Liane

  “Of course you aren’t. You’re a robber. How many skulls have you crushed with this nice bit of oak? How many travelers have you rolled into the river with their throats slit and their purses emptied? Don’t answer. I don’t really care. What I do want to know is where you put their money.”

  “Fuck yourself.”

  Brys cut off his ear. It took some sawing to get through the gristly bits; what little edge was left on the knife seemed to have been blunted on Renshil’s throat. Nevertheless, after a few yanks, the ear came free. The man was bellowing like a stuck pig by then, so Brys slapped him with the bloody flat of the knife to shut him up.

  “Maybe it’s the other ear that works,” Brys suggested, shrugging. “Nothing seemed to be getting through that one. Of course, it could be that neither of your ears works, and further that you won’t tell me anything worth hearing, which would mean you don’t have any use for your tongue, either. But I don’t want to leap to conclusions, so let’s try this once more: Tell me where your money is.”

  This time the man told him. It was a fair amount of money; he’d been robbing travelers all autumn. When he was finished talking, Brys nodded thoughtfully, broke his neck, and went to collect the stash.

  He returned to the Broken Horn just as night’s shadows were lifting toward the grayness of dawn. The babies were sleeping, but Odosse was awake. She winced when he took off his trousers to examine the bruise on his leg. It was swelling and already livid, but it wouldn’t slow him much.

  “What in the Bright Lady’s name happened to you?” she demanded.

  “I got robbed.” There was water and soap so he washed the bruise and the cut Renshil had given him. The soap stung mercilessly, but the wound didn’t look too bad once he had all the blood off. The gambler’s thrust had skipped shallowly over his ribs; the most impressive thing about it would likely be the scar. When he was finished washing, Brys tore some strips of clean linen from the inn’s sheets, bound them around his ribs, and changed his clothes to sleep. The new boots were caked with mud, but they could wait for morning.

  “Should I be worried?”

  “You have better things to worry about than dead men.” Brys rummaged through the cloak he’d dropped by the doorway and pulled out a grubby pouch of stained leather. It held most of the footpad’s money; he’d taken out some of the silver for Merrygold, but the rest was still in there. He tossed the bag to her. It landed on the bed beside Odosse, clinking heavily.

  She opened it. Coins winked inside. Odosse pulled out a silver ring worked into a design of three serpents twined around one another. One of the snakes was missing its amethyst eyes, and the creases between their bodies were dark with dried blood. “What is this?”

  “You’d be surprised what you can get from robbers if you let them live long enough to tell you.” The night’s excitement was fading, and weariness was seeping in. Brys stretched out on the floor’s straw pallet and closed his eyes.

  “What should I do with it?”

  “Keep it. Spend it. Use it to get another room. I’ll probably have to kill a man tomorrow, and it’s likely to be an ugly death. Might be safest for you to take the children to another inn. I don’t expect the man to have friends, but if he does, they’ll be bad ones.”

  “Why? What are you going to do?” Fear sharpened her voice into something like anger. “If you’re going to put my son in danger, I want to know everything.”

  “Everything might take a while,” Brys said mildly. “I learned a little about Willowfield’s killers. They were soldiers out of Ang’arta, and they were paid in silver for what they did. One of them stayed behind in Tarne Crossing. Tomorrow I am going to find him, and then I will ask him some questions. If I don’t like his answers, I’m going to kill him.”

  He opened one eye, just a sliver, to look at Odosse. “Now, my guess is that this man isn’t one of their company, but a local who was hired to give them the lay of the land. But this is a guess. And if I’m wrong, things could get very messy once the knives come out. If that’s so, it would be best for you and the children to be somewhere on the other side of town, pretending you never met me.”

  “How will I know when it’s safe?”

  Brys grinned at her. “No sense worrying about that. It never is.”

  7

  There wasn’t much left of the servant by the time they found her again. Crows had taken her eyes. A fox or a tree-cat had worried off an arm. It was too dark to see much of the flies’ work, which was a small mercy. Albric hated what maggots did to a body.

  Someone should have burned her. It was only decent. It was only wise, where bloodmagic was concerned; the old traditions of oil and flame had developed during a time when dark things walked in the night and men knew what had to be done to stop them. But centuries had passed since the Pale Maiden’s faithful practiced their arts openly in Ithelas, and people in the west had forgotten that there was ever more to the burning of bodies than light and sweet incense to honor Celestia.

  The servant’s corpse lay in the stables where Albric had left it the first time he’d ridden through Willowfield, his horse’s hooves wet with blood. He’d pulled the woman out to the late afternoon light, made sure she was dead, and moved on. There were so many corpses to count.

  Now the body was rotted, stinking, most of the flesh on its face missing and the rest wrinkled like a soft brown apple, but it was still identifiable by the tatters of its dress and the arrow rattling in its ribs, and it was unchanged in any way that would put off the Thornlady kneeling in the straw beside it.

  Albric stayed on his horse and stayed on the road. He saw no need to get any closer to Thornlady Severine’s work.

  He disliked her intensely. He hadn’t particularly liked the mercenaries from Ang’arta, either, though they had done most of the killing in Willowfield and thus had been necessary to his lord’s plans. But that was a different kind of dislike. The Baozites were crude men, and cruel, but they were human. They diced and drank by the fire, they complained about cold nights on the road, and they suffered the shits after eating bad meals. He understood them.

  He did not understand Thornlady Severine. He hoped he never would. There was something profoundly broken about a mind like hers, something both more and less than human. Whether that was a result of the training she had endured in the Tower of Thorns, or a trait of those who sought out such training, Albric did not know and did not want to know.

  He hated that Leferic was relying on the woman. He would sooner have dangled over Spearbridge Chasm on a rotted rope than put his trust in a Thorn … but Leferic had decided otherwise, and it was Albric’s duty to obey.

  Ordinarily that was no burden. Albric had neither brothers nor sons, and over the years had come to regard Leferic as a little of both; but the bond between them ran deeper than that. It was, in its purest form, the bond between a knight and his lord.

  Albric knew war. He knew how to defend a line of foot against mounted attackers, how to lay sieges and withstand them, how to train a farmboy into a passable semblance of a soldier. In the past and present of the smoldering war along the banks of the Seivern River, these skills were common and necessary.

  In the future, they might not be. That was Leferic’s dream, and although Albric could not grasp the full ramifications of what his lord hoped to do, he understood that he played a crucial role in bringing it to pass.

  For while Albric knew war, Leferic knew rule. The scope and depth of his lord’s curiosity amazed him. It had since Leferic was a boy of five, reading the works of Inaglione and de Halle while Albric could barely piece together what the covers said. Lord Ossaric had ordered him to make a man of his younger son, as the Oakharne reckoned such things, and even though Albric had failed to make even a middling warrior of the boy, he’d learned that there might be other measures of manhood. Intellect, cunning, patience. Leferic had all those qualities. He would be a ruler such as Bulls’ March had never seen.

  He should have been the elder son. Sir Gal
efrid was not an evil man, but he was a weak-headed one, shortsighted and undisciplined and easily led. He liked hunting and hawking better than the cold practicalities of rule. In that he was his father’s son, and perhaps his mother’s, too, to Lord Ossaric’s delight and the realm’s misfortune.

  Albric had never met the Lady Nerissa, Galefrid’s mother and Lord Ossaric’s first wife. A winter chill carried her to the pyre long before Albric came to Bulls’ March. He knew, however, that Lord Ossaric had loved her and mourned her deeply. Although the lord had wed again for the sake of prudence and politics, he never found it in himself to love his second wife.

  It was over twenty years ago that Lady Indoiya had come to Bulls’ March. Albric was a young knight then, fuzzy-cheeked and more than half in love with his tiny, fragile lady. She had the pale coloring of the north, with eyelashes so light and long that she seemed to watch the world from behind a veil of snow. High-voiced, fine-boned, Lady Indoiya was delicate as a creature made of glass. Albric had adored her.

  Lord Ossaric had not. He was never cruel to her, but neither was he kind; he did his duty by her and otherwise ignored her. When Lady Indoiya died trying to give him a daughter, Lord Ossaric grieved publicly at her pyre and was done. He had two sons; it was enough. He did not marry again, and he paid little heed to the son given him by his second wife.

  Albric, who had never stopped loving his pale lady or forgiven Lord Ossaric’s neglect, took the boy under his own wing.

  He had never presumed to treat Leferic as a son. Never. It would have overstepped his station. But over the years, as he saw the man that Lady Indoiya’s child grew into, he could not help but feel some glimmer of pride.

  No, Leferic would never be a warrior. But he could be a lord. So when Leferic had come to Albric with a plan for Galefrid’s removal, the knight had swallowed his misgivings and agreed to help. Loyalty and love dictated that he do no less.

  Albric had swallowed his misgivings about the Thornlady, too, though he had nearly choked on those. But duty, in the end, won out. A knight’s first duty was to his lord, and Albric’s true loyalty had always been to Lady Indoiya and her son, never to Lord Ossaric. His second was to ensure the peace and safety of his realm. Removing Galefrid had been part of that duty. Thornlady Severine, however little he liked her, was merely another.

  Still, being alone in a dead village with her set Albric’s teeth on edge. He wanted this assignment done. Were it for anyone other than Leferic, he would never have agreed to it at all.

  She was chanting over the body. Against his will Albric found himself listening. The syllables blended and blurred together, slipping past his understanding, but the sound of the words stirred a deep fear in his soul. It was older than human speech, that fear; it was the fear of darkness and silence stretching beyond the small safety of a fire, of terrible hungers that lurked in the night. Her chant spoke of blood and binding, and spell-crafted chains that could give shape to shades and hold them past death.

  The Thornlady raised her whole hand and pricked her forefinger on the bones of the maimed one. Two crimson droplets welled up from the wounds, and she smeared them over the leathery lips and bare teeth of the servant’s skull.

  A hiss escaped through the dead teeth, so softly Albric could scarcely hear the sound. It went on longer than any mortal lungs could sustain, and the Thornlady wove her chant around it, alternately coaxing and commanding. Chill white mist gathered over the half-fleshed skull, luminous and eerie as the ghost-fogs that rose from the Greymire’s marshes at dawn. The mist coalesced into a shadowy likeness of the woman whose corpse lay under the Thornlady’s hands, and Severine’s chant ended, for her spell was complete.

  Albric knew, without looking, that the Thornlady’s eyes were filled with the same white mist that limned the spirit she had called. He had seen her work this magic before; he had no desire to watch it again. Flicking the reins lightly against his mare’s neck, he guided his horse back down the road.

  Behind him, he heard the shade scream.

  The Thornlady returned to the road some time later. Straw and windblown leaves clung to the soft black cloth of her robes; there might have been scraps of dry dead skin as well. He tried not to look too closely. Thornlady Severine was unsettling enough in herself.

  She might have been a beautiful woman once. The hint of it was still there, in the slim lines of her figure and the grace with which she moved. But everything else about her was as if she had taken a knife and set to work eradicating even the memory of beauty from her form.

  Her silver hair was shaved on both sides of her scalp, leaving a long, flowing crest that ran down the center of her head like a horse’s mane. Arcane runes were scarred white on the shaved skin, covering her bare scalp in strange patterns. Some said the Thornlady had cut those markings with her own hand. Albric believed it.

  Severine’s left eye was gone. A sparkling ice-blue crystal, framed by a spiderweb of pale scars, glimmered in its puckered hole. The last two fingers of her right hand were gone as well—or, at least, the flesh of them was gone. The bones had been cleaned and sharpened and fixed back into place, the joints sealed together with bright silver.

  They said that Thornlady Severine had done exceptionally well in her training, and that she stood high in the Spider’s favor. Albric wondered what was left of those who did poorly.

  None of these thoughts showed on his face. A lifetime of castle service had made him very good at keeping his opinions to himself.

  “Well?” he asked as she remounted her thin gray mare.

  “She gave the baby to a man named Brys Tarnell. A knight in Sir Galefrid’s service.”

  “He isn’t a knight.” Albric snorted. “He’s a jumped-up mercenary who happened to win my lord’s melee last year. I know the man. He might have been given spurs and a medallion, but he’s no knight.”

  Severine shrugged, lifting her hood over her head so that the black cloth shrouded much of her strangeness. The blue crystal of her left eye still shone in the shadow of that hood. “Be that as it may. He took the child and left her to die.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Is he a loyal man? Where would he take the child?”

  “He’s loyal to himself and whoever’s paying him—and the second man’s dead. He’d go wherever he thought he could get the most profit.”

  “Where would that be?”

  Albric pondered the question. “Bulls’ March, I’d think. Baby’s only worth as much as his rank, so pick a place where that matters. No reason to stay in Langmyr. Far as he knows, they’re the killers. Why bring them the baby to finish the slaughter? Likely to get paid with profuse thanks and a knife in the ribs. Could go to Seawatch, to his mother’s kin … but that’s a long way to take a baby, and winter’s near upon us. Bulls’ March is closer and safer. I’d head there.”

  “Unless you suspected treachery,” Severine said softly.

  “Aye. Unless that. But there’s no reason he should.”

  “A man who wins a lord’s melee is likely to be a careful one,” she murmured. “But it is as good a guess as we have. What road would you take to get there?”

  “The one we’re on. Straight to Tarne Crossing and south to Bulls’ March. But he didn’t go straight, or he’d have gotten there before we left.”

  “Do you believe he would have gone anywhere else?”

  “No.”

  “Then we will begin there, and perhaps find where he diverged.” She touched the mare’s ribs with her heels, and the gray started down the road.

  Albric followed, a little ways behind. “You’re a little exotic for Tarne Crossing, m’lady.”

  The hooded head turned. He caught the flash of a smile over her shoulder, and the hint of laughter in her voice. It chilled his blood.

  “Not for long,” Severine said.

  AS AUTUMN FADED INTO WINTER, TRAVELERS became as scarce as green leaves along the River Kings’ Road. Few dared to walk the glimmering paths, and those that did travel
ed in groups. Too many rumors had spread about what happened in Willowfield; even the most isolated villagers knew there was something darker and deadlier than the usual bandits in the woods. No one ventured near the blood-soaked site if they could avoid it, and if they could not, they went with wary eyes and ready bows.

  It took a full two days for Albric to find a party suitable to the Thornlady’s needs. She had been very specific about what she wanted, and did not seem to mind the delay. Albric, on the other hand, resented every hour that was not spent pursuing the infant who threatened his lord’s rule. But he couldn’t hope to find Wistan without the Thornlady’s help—not without losing more time than he was wasting on this whim—so he did as she asked.

  Finally he managed to track down a small company of pilgrims going north. They had the look of devout but ordinary commonfolk, probably making their one great vensolles to the Sun Garden in Craghail or the Tomb of the Redeemer in Mirhain. Even their solaros wore simple brown clothes while traveling; the man was identifiable only by the bands of yellow on his sleeves and a sun sign that, although it appeared to be made of true gold as custom required, was by far the smallest Albric had seen on a priest.

  The pilgrims were not completely blind to the realities of the road. They carried sturdy sticks and knives, and three competent-looking armsmen rode with them. Albric spent the better part of an afternoon shadowing the party in the hopes of assessing the armsmen’s skill, but nothing happened to give him that opportunity. The men carried their weapons comfortably, kept one of their number ahead of the pilgrims and another at the rear, and bore no lord’s emblem on their plain leather armor. Albric guessed that they were freeswords, good enough to impress travelers in need of protection but not good enough to have earned a place with a bigger company or a lord’s keep for the winter.

  Severine did not seem terribly concerned about either the pilgrims’ staves or their escort. Once she heard that he had found a party that numbered more than five and included a woman, she lost interest in the details. All she wanted was for Albric to show her to them. He took her through the forest, fighting down his misgivings as autumn’s golden hour passed and sunset stained the sky red through the trees’ rattling branches.