The River King's Road

by Merciel, Liane

  “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” Bitharn bowed her head politely and began to turn away.

  “Wait,” he said. “You the woman travels with the Burnt Knight? Pretty girl in men’s clothes—don’t see too many of those.”

  Bitharn nodded. She would have liked to lie—no one asked that question unless they intended to ask for something else after—but she couldn’t make herself do it with Mirri standing right there.

  “I’ve got a boon to ask.” The man hesitated, crumpling the soft cloth of his hat in his hands. He seemed to shrink into himself, suddenly unsure. “My name’s Haeric. I’d have come to ask him personal, but … maybe you can take him my question, instead.”

  Mirri or no Mirri, Bitharn was not about to let herself be guilted into promising that. Kelland had too many demands on his time already. But she could be polite. “What is it?”

  “Mathas wasn’t a drinker. The baker. I mean—” He cut off, squeezing his eyes shut, and shook his head. Then he tried again, fumbling for words. “It doesn’t make a scrap of sense. I’ve worked for Mathas since he lost his leg, near ten years back. The man never had more than a mug of ale with his dinner. He didn’t like anything got in the way of his work, being as that was all the fates left to him. If he was going to drink himself stupid, he wouldn’t have done it during the night. That’s when he does the bread for the morning. Put that together with his girl from Langmyr goes missing not a week earlier, and my wagon’s gone this morning, and old Clover, too, and the whole thing smells worse than week-old fish. I’m worried I might be next. If you could just look into it, please—”

  “I will convey your concerns to Sir Kelland,” Bitharn said, coolly correct.

  Haeric took his cue from her formality. “Much obliged,” he muttered, dropping his eyes back to his battered hat as Bitharn left with the girl.

  At the third shop there were neither panicked ducks nor broken-necked bakers, and Mirri got her cream horn at last. Bitharn bought herself a honeyed roll studded with raisins and nuts, and the two of them ate in the shop’s small anteroom, warmed by the fires of the great ovens nearby. There was hot mint tea and spiced wine, slightly bitter from oversteeping, to drive away the chill from within as well as without.

  The baker refused to take their coins once she realized who Bitharn was. “It’s payment enough just to have you,” she said, and her tone brooked no argument. “We’re mindful of all the Burnt Knight does for us, and that with our own Blessed gone.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Bitharn said, though she would have preferred to pay. Even small gifts carried a weight of obligation, which her temple upbringing and long travels with Kelland left her unable to ignore. But again she felt that Mirri’s presence bound her to courtesy, so she did not insist.

  It was still early in the afternoon when they left the baker’s shop, Mirri clutching a braided stick of bread to share with her family at dinner. As they walked through the streets, the girl turned to Bitharn with the peculiar gravity of the very young.

  “I want to be a Sun Knight when I grow up,” she announced.

  “Do you?” Bitharn smiled. “Why is that?”

  “Because you can help people, and they give you things, and they’re always happy to see you.”

  “Not always, and it isn’t quite so easy. But that’s a worthy goal.”

  “How can I do it?”

  “You can’t, dearling.” Bitharn ruffled the girl’s short black hair, taken by an odd, nostalgic sadness. She’d had that same wish herself once. “You can keep a kind heart and a pure mind, and you can hope, but in the end the goddess chooses. We don’t. And perhaps it’s better that way.”

  “Why?” Mirri frowned. She wasn’t sucking her thumb anymore, Bitharn noticed; she’d taken to swinging her arms loose by her sides, the way Bitharn herself did, and kept the bread-stick easily in one hand.

  “Because the Bright Lady knows our hearts better than we do. She knows who has the strength to bear her gifts. It isn’t easy to be Called, and it’s harder still to live up to the oaths once you take them. Once you go out into the world … everyone expects things, everyone demands them, and many think they’re entitled without a word of thanks. People will try to use your name to justify themselves, or trick you into helping them to power, and sometimes you have to decide whether it does more good to let them or balk them.

  “There’s never enough magic to soothe all the world’s ills, and choosing who to help and who to leave … it’s a heavy weight to bear, knowing you had the power to help someone but didn’t, or couldn’t, because you judged someone else needed your magic more. And the hardest part, I think, is remembering how to keep a good heart when you see the ugliest parts of people’s souls every day. If they were kinder to each other, and more responsible themselves, much of our work wouldn’t be necessary—but they aren’t, and you have to help them anyway. How do you keep a heart generous enough to cure without condemning?”

  “You help the good people and stop the bad ones, that’s how,” Mirri said matter-of-factly.

  “You do,” Bitharn agreed. “But most people aren’t Sun Knights or reavers out of Ang’arta. Most people are a little of both. Even Sir Cadifar sinned out of jealousy, and even the Winter Queen loved her sons. What do you do then?”

  Mirri squinted at her toes, thinking, and kicked a loose cobblestone. A pigeon startled away. “I don’t want to be a Sun Knight anymore. I want to be like you.”

  “Ah. Well,” Bitharn said, trying not to smile, “that’s a little easier.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon outside the town walls, playing at archery with a scrap of canvas strung up between the ditch-stakes. She didn’t want to take the child out of the walls’ sight, but they couldn’t very well shoot arrows inside. Bitharn got a boy’s bow from one of the gate guards, who gave her an odd look but acquiesced once she explained her position. Being the Burnt Knight’s companion was good for some things, once in a while.

  She expected Mirri to get bored after a few rounds, but to her surprise the girl took to the lessons with a fierce determination, aiming each arrow as if the target were her worst enemy’s heart. The child had an instinct for the correct stance and hand placements, and by the end of the afternoon she was hardly missing the canvas target at all. Bitharn had picked a big one and set it close, but she was still impressed.

  They were picking up the arrows from the last round when Mirri suddenly straightened and waved Bitharn over.

  “Look.” The girl pointed to the muddy ditch.

  It took Bitharn a moment to see what she meant. The ditch was shallow and foul-smelling; while most of the town’s night soil was carted out to fertilize the fields to the east, whatever the dirt-carriers missed was thrown over the walls into the ditch. There was nothing remarkable in that, and at first Bitharn couldn’t see why Mirri had called her.

  Then she saw the footsteps in the mud. There were two sets leading out from a postern gate: a pair of heavy boots that had pressed deep into the soft soil, hard enough to leave clear imprints of the nails in their soles, and a single boot, slightly smaller, matched with the circular pocks of a peg leg. The prints were parallel to one another and each set occasionally trampled over the other, so they had to have been walking side by side at the same time. Two Boots got heavier where Peg Leg got lighter, but the reverse was never true; that meant Two Boots was supporting—and, judging by the grooves left by the wooden leg in places, sometimes dragging—the other person.

  “Mathas had a wooden leg,” Mirri whispered. “Are those wooden leg prints?”

  “I think they are.” Bitharn followed the trail as far as she could, but the ground quickly hardened away from the ditch, and the prints became too muddled for easy following. She could not see where, or if, they returned. She would have liked to circle around the walls and see where Peg Leg came back—Mathas had been found dead inside the walls, so at some point he had to have returned—but sunset was drawing near. The western horizon was red with the
promise of it, and she had to bring the girl home.

  Reluctantly Bitharn went back to where Mirri waited. She pointed to the tracks, beckoning the child near. “What do those tell you?”

  Mirri looked at the prints and shrugged. “I don’t know. That Mathas was here?”

  “And recently.” Bitharn stooped to show her, tracing a fingertip along the edge of the tracks. “Here, see how clear the marks are by the water? Right up here, a handspan from the edge. You can see a dent for every nail in his boots. It’s colder at night than it is now; I’ll bet this mud is half ice until highsun. If you walked this way by night, or early in the morning before it thawed, your prints would look like this. If you came this way now, when it’s warmer, there’d be nothing left but blobs. Soft mud sticks to your feet; it leaves sucking holes, not detailed prints like these.”

  “So he was here in the night?”

  “Last night, if I’m not mistaken, or very early this morning. The mud hasn’t filled in yet. Tracks don’t stay clear long in ground this soft.”

  “There was someone else with him,” Mirri said. “More tracks.”

  “There was.” Bitharn stood up, wiping her hands on her breeches. “But that’s a mystery for another day. We need to get that bow back to the guards, and your mother’s likely waiting for you.”

  “Will she be well?” Mirri asked wistfully.

  Bitharn hesitated. There was so much hope in the girl’s eyes, and surely it would be harmless to give her the promise … but she had seen too much go wrong, with too little cause, to answer with anything more than the truth. “If the Bright Lady answers our prayers, she will be.”

  Mirri nodded, and they went home.

  CELESTIA HAD INDEED HEARD KELLAND’S CALL. Mirri’s mother was standing on her own two legs when they returned at the end of sundown prayers; the right was unsteady from lack of use, but she walked to the door to welcome them, and she kept her balance when Mirri bowled into her skirts for a hug.

  “Thank you,” the woman said, her eyes shining with tears. She held her daughter close; her hand trembled on Mirri’s back. “Thank you for letting me work again.”

  “It is Celestia who deserves your thanks,” Kelland said, emerging from the candlelit room behind her. “We do no more than channel her blessings, and for us that is only duty.” His face was shadowed by weariness and his voice was rough with it, but he stood straight as a tourney herald and his white cloak was spotless as ever.

  “I’m grateful all the same. Won’t you stay for dinner?”

  Bitharn saw Kelland hesitate, and answered quickly in his stead. “It’s generous of you to offer, and I wish that we could, but we’re needed elsewhere. Please, rest well.”

  “We could have stayed,” Kelland murmured as they left.

  She shrugged and took his elbow, hooking her arm around his and leaning into his side. As they stepped into the street they could have been any young couple strolling through a winter evening. So she told herself, closing her thoughts to his medallion and her bow and everything else that made them who they were, not who she wished they could be.

  Just for a moment, Bitharn thought, she could be allowed to forget that. Just until they got back to their inn. “I wanted to enjoy the walk. Alone, with you. We don’t get much time to ourselves here.”

  Guards wearing the black bull on red walked the wooden walls above them, lighting torches that sent up thin trails of smoke and burned almost invisibly against the setting sun. Night would fall before they finished setting their ring of fire around Tarne Crossing; but for now the world, too, was between phases, and its transitory beauty brought an ache to Bitharn’s heart. The golden hour had faded, but some of its warmth still glowed along westward walls and high-peaked roofs, while on fences and bare twigs the silver lace of frost glimmered before the dusk.

  Kelland drew her closer as they walked. The contact, shoulder to shoulder, warmed her. “What did you do today? I noticed you took the girl.”

  “I didn’t think she needed to see her mother like that.”

  “You said children make you nervous.”

  “It wasn’t so bad.” Bitharn told him about their misadventures in search of a cream horn, Mirri’s swiftly quenched desire to become a Sun Knight, and their archery practice outside the town walls. She was hardly listening to her own words; the story was far less important than the feel of him by her side and the rare moment of closeness in the privacy that twilight allowed. The soft clicking of the shells in his hair was sweeter than music to her ears. “She has a good hand and a good eye, and I think she’s a natural tracker.”

  “Give her a stubborn streak wider than the Seivern and a complete unwillingness to play fair, and she’ll be well on her way to achieving her goal.” Kelland gave her a slight, fond smile, barely visible in the dusk.

  Bitharn didn’t know what came over her. Seized by impulse, she leaned up on her toes and kissed him right on that smile, shocked at her own daring but not—once the amazement subsided—not sorry at all. Kelland startled like a splashed cat, but she still had her arm twined around his and she wouldn’t let go. She could feel his heartbeat thundering through his sun-marked tabard. Her own seemed to be going even faster. She had to remember to breathe, and was suddenly and deeply grateful that nightfall hid her flush.

  “You were right,” she heard herself say smugly, if a trifle quickly, turning to continue down the street as if nothing had happened. “I don’t play fair at all.”

  “You don’t,” Kelland agreed, hurrying to catch up.

  THE NEXT DAY HE WANTED TO see Mathas’ body. Bitharn thought that was a waste of time, but between the peculiar tracks in the ditch and the fact that the missing baker’s girl was Langmyrne, Kelland argued that it was worth a look. Since a dead man was less likely to ask them for favors than anyone else they might see, Bitharn let him talk her into it, but she wasn’t expecting much. She had other concerns on her mind.

  In the clear light of morning she regretted the kiss. No, not the kiss; Bitharn couldn’t make herself feel sorry for that. What she did regret was lying to him that night outside Willowfield.

  She did, in fact, want him to break his oaths. One of them, at least. She wanted it very badly indeed.

  He never would. Bitharn was certain of that. Not only would Kelland keep his oaths until his dying day, he would never admit to temptation. Not to himself, not to her, maybe not even to his goddess. But she was equally certain that he wanted it as badly as she did. It was in his wary glances, the forced casualness of his conversation, the way he kept a careful distance from her after last night’s kiss, as if the slightest touch of her skin might burn him. He wanted desperately—as she did—and both of them were duty-bound to say nothing and do nothing that might inflame that desire.

  Under those circumstances, spending the morning in the company of a corpse didn’t seem like such a terrible idea.

  Mathas’ body was laid in a corpse-cellar beneath the town chapel, as was common custom for those with the means to afford a decent funeral but not a private service. He would be burned at sunset in a day or two, whenever Tarne Crossing had enough dead to justify a pyre or the insults of putrefaction became too great to bear. Until then his mortal remains waited in the cellar, where the coolness of stone and air kept decay to a minimum.

  A shroud of fine white linen, embroidered with Celestia’s sunburst in gold, covered Mathas’ body on its stone bier. Similar shrouds masked the other two corpses in the cellar. Local superstition held that it was bad luck to look upon the faces of the dead, and while Celestia’s dedicated were supposed to banish the shadows of misbelief from the minds of the people, they usually let such harmless customs stand. Real heresies caused them enough trouble.

  Kelland glanced at Bitharn, who nodded almost imperceptibly. She felt strangely apprehensive at the thought of unveiling the corpse, though she didn’t know why. It seemed that the knight shared something of that feeling, for he swept off the shroud with a single swift motion, as if it wo
uld have been too awful to do it slowly.

  But there was nothing terrible about the corpse. The body was bloated, the eyes sunken, and the face pallid behind a bristle of stark black beard, but both Kelland and Bitharn had seen far too many dead men to be disconcerted by that. There were no wounds, no signs of struggle, nothing at all to justify that odd prickle of fear.

  Bitharn came closer to examine the body. Nothing unusual, but …

  “There’s mud on his boot,” she observed, touching the caked toe, “and on his peg.” The dry mud crumbled easily under her fingers. It had to have been wet when he was walking; otherwise it would have cracked and fallen away. Even then, he couldn’t have walked far without shaking it off.

  “Where did his friend say he was found?”

  “Outside a tavern in town.”

  “There isn’t mud this deep anywhere inside the walls.”

  “But we know he went outside,” Bitharn said. “He walked through the ditch, came back, and died before the mud had time to dry or get knocked from his boots. What I can’t fathom is why a man drunk enough to trip and break his neck goes outside the walls on the same night he dies. Why? What’s out there to make him do that?”

  “If that is what happened.” Kelland shook his head doubtfully. He drew out the golden sunburst that he wore around his neck—his knight’s medallion, marked with the symbol of his faith rather than the emblem of a mortal lord. Clasping the sunburst in his right hand, he began a sonorous prayer, calling upon the Bright Lady to grant her Light of Truth.

  White light surrounded him in a nimbus, flickered, and failed. Bitharn bit back a surprised oath. She had never seen Kelland falter in a prayer since the earliest days of his training. The Blessed simply did not fail, unless …

  … unless they were badly beset by doubt, and on the verge of breaking their oaths.

  She looked at him, eyes wide, but Kelland’s face revealed nothing. He started the prayer again, reciting the syllables with calm determination, and this time when the white light blossomed it filled the corpse-cellar with its radiance. It was so bright that it hurt her eyes; those shadows that were not obliterated were thrown back to the far corners.