“Enough,” he snapped. Rather than still his uncle’s criticism, it only seemed to draw a knowing smile. Sighing, determined, Leopold shook his head. “I need to know if your grandson can be trusted.”
“Hans? Why? Do you intend to lock him up here as well?”
“Answer the question, old man.”
“I suppose…if you’ve something he wants. And you keep him from the wine. But I’d send Mauritz, if I were you. They’ve grown more in common with age. No scruples, you know. None at all.” The man coughed a few times into his hand, then looked pointedly at Leopold’s lap. “How are yours holding up? Any new heirs to throw into this tangled web?”
Leopold could feel the blush burn up through his cheeks as his fists clenched his robes.
His uncle shrugged. “Well, you’re not your father. But that’s good for the children—I understand they don’t live long around you.”
Leopold rose—or lurched, more like—with the intent to be a specter of rage, but the hobbling numbness of his leg made that an impossibility. He bobbed, as a child at a game of apples, and made himself less a specter than a clown. Portir had the decency not to laugh, but he could see the pity in the old man’s eyes. Pity! That only curdled his stomach more.
Outside, the bells rang with the changing of the guard. With every squad of palace guardsmen now moved at least a third as many mercenaries, that his eyes might extend to every corner. They might have laughed at him, all of them, but they knew not the truth. Appearances deceived. His wife had told him that, long ago, and he had registered it, on the dimmest edge of perception—but now he took it to heart.
All these others were so much air. He would teach them the dominance of the new high family. If he had to wheel a hundred souls a day to do it.
“Where was this side of yourself in council?” Leopold spat.
“Death has a way of helping us find ourselves.”
“You’re not dead yet.”
“As good as. If an axe does not do it, time surely shall.”
This gave Leopold pause, but he chose not to look back. “Do you hunger? I will have the Constable bring you something to eat.”
The response came so soft, he all but took it for wind: “I fear that is what kills me.”
Purpled lips. Sallow skin. He thought on this a moment, thought of all the people that might have made that true, and decided to summon his own cooks to the Tower. To hell with how it looked to the rest. The only man that lived forever was the one that trusted no one.
“Trust not Mauritz, Leo. I know you bear me no love—but mark it true. It’s not the snakes you can see which you must watch for.”
Leo. Its sound left a strange hollow in his heart as he left. It was something to the texture of it, the history—a memento of childhood, when mothers and fathers and uncles all seemed gentler, more human in their bearing. Before Ravonno, and the true path.
Trust no one. But use everyone. He did not consider himself a wise man, but he liked to think he was the wisest at that priestly court. Mauritz, the Patriarch, Cullick—they all had their own games, but he would teach them all. He would use what they gave and twist it on them. In the end, they would either despise him or they would be dead, but the madness would be done.
His children would live. Then he could sleep.
The Constable took his orders, the guardsmen drew close, and he decided to summon his other uncle for a meeting. There was an arrangement they needed to come to, Mauritz and he, if they were to turn this war.
And at night, he lay down alone in the naked dark, and he despaired. For what he would do. For what he had become. For all the little shards of his faith that had burned in the fires of one broken spirit’s malevolent gaze.
Chapter 5
Rurik dreamed of fire. In its waving stalks, he saw the faces of those he loved. His mother. Father. Liesa. Anelie. Alviss.
Essa.
Pain rekindled its embers as his eyes crossed their faces—as the blank distance settled onto her ashen, not-quite-human face. Eyes like the forest, like the great earth mother Herself, stared off into the blankness and threw him away as an unsettled horse. All swirled into smoke that bucked at his throat. Soot permeated the vision. Leant it taste. Something tickled his face and brought back the bluish haze of the moon, Havreth. Brought new faces all at once.
He wriggled his fingers and tried to touch the wounded places, but nothing moved. Not his hands. Not his feet. He moaned, rasped—realized it was more feeling than hearing. Sound trickled in through one side, was nothing but a ringing in the other. He rolled his jaw and tried to shake the other ear back to reality, but it seemed stubbornly fixed upon his dreams.
A seam of light and soft whinnies brought him into clarity of moment. Ground stirred beneath him, as though he floated, but the ache in his rear attested that he did no such thing. Intuitively he understood that he rode atop a horse.
Both tilted in the dark, but something caught him, held him. His hands moved at last, though not easily. Deep bruising gripped him everywhere and the tight fingers on his gut did not ease the feeling.
“Easy, easy,” the fingers’ master told him. The voice was too familiar to be comforting, as the sounds of ghosts so often were.
He shook. Turned. Even that subtle motion stirred nausea, and his head spun with vertigo of the deepest influenza. The face did not help. Ivon tugged him closer, but his brother’s eyes were iron.
Horses gathered around them, making a small herd. Other figures, their helmets and faces caressed by the blue light of the night sky, bent against the trail like wolves to the hunt. Rowan was strapped across one. Essa another. Still further back, walking beside the horses, was a man with hands bound. Ash claimed his face, but this one, too, he knew. Had watched its rage stalk over him and mean to strike him down.
Rurik pulled back with a shout as every sense in his body demanded he flee from Isaak. It disturbed the horse. Yet Ivon’s grip did not break—it gripped him harder and held him still.
“Are you through?” his brother asked. A sob caught in his throat as Ivon’s hand wrapped around his own—a hand, he saw now, that had sloughed off a good deal of skin. “We have a long way to go and little time for madness. And I’ll abide no kinslayers in my camp.”
Only when he had calmed enough to nod did his brother release him. Rurik’s head spun but he kept himself upright, clinging to the horse no longer out of fear, but of necessity. Heat blisters, he saw, covered the hand in which he had held his gun.
Gun. Explosion. His mind ran swiftly over what had happened, drew it all back into the present terror. So much shouting. The terrible whine of a dying dog. Rowan falling. Isaak advancing, blades in hand, nothing but a terrible emptiness captivating him.
“Why, brother?”
The words had never gained an answer. Instead, he recalled the raising of his gun and the pulling of the trigger. Then: nothing but fire. Drakkon’s fire, consuming all it touched.
By midnight—or so he guessed by the position of the moons—they pulled him down into a wooded valley. He no longer knew what direction they moved. Here, there was nothing but detritus and muck, moss and bugs. They swarmed and feasted on men and horses alike, but something in the stillness told Rurik they would be safe here. If there still was such a notion.
Ivon and the other riders did not bother with a camp, but they made a fire of dry twigs and set their prisoners, collectively, about it. Not gently, either. When this was done, Ivon stepped among them with a soldier’s frankness.
“I have many questions. But as you are young and filled with youth’s foolishness, I will put them all to the simplest: what, in all the hells, did we happen upon back there?”
Rurik could hear him above the ringing, but barely. He craned the left side of his head toward his brother, that it all might sink in. Essa and Rowan exchanged scowls, but said nothing. Likewise Isaac, seated blistering and somber across from them.
“Well?” Ivon asked brusquely.
If only I knew,
I might earnestly answer. Instead, Rurik scoffed. “Like a tree fairie, our featherweighted, posie prancing backbiter—”
Ivon promptly slapped him upside the head. “That is your brother, whatever else he may be.”
Biting back his own natural—albeit childish—reaction, Rurik forced himself toward the gracelessness of fact.
“My brother tried to kill me, not so long after a friend had tried the same—following, I might add, your own delightful effort to cannonade my corpse from the battlefield of our heartland. As I recall—”
Ivon rounded on Essa instead, demanding, “Did he do that to Alviss?”
But her only answer came in the form of daggers glared. Good girl, Rurik thought with some form of satisfaction. Petty, though it might be. In her stead, however, her cousin answered.
“Ser, Alviss died in defense of the ones you now would bind. Yet for all the blood I owe your brother over yonder, I must confess it was not him, but name that particular curse upon a house of Gorjes. A house, I might add, we should very much like to lock and set aflame.”
Ivon’s eyes darkened into a squinting distaste. “Witold’s sellswords?”
“But lately,” Rowan confessed. “More likes the Bastard’s hounds now, for they hound us well. But might I add, this aside—and his less than eloquent mannerisms to that end—your brother does, otherwise, have the right of things.”
This was enough to give their interrogator pause, but not for long. With a curt gesture from him, some other shadow at their backs sliced the bonds that still held Essa and Rowan firm. The shadow whispered something in Essa’s ear that drew her rigid, and though Rurik strained to hear it, his hearing proved in no condition to do so. All he could make out was a feminine tint to the voice, and this retreated swiftly enough with the shadow, back into the dark.
As the others rubbed their wrists, Ivon stepped around them and toward the other. Isaak, however, betrayed no semblance of acknowledgement. He did not meet their brother’s gaze, nor attempt any showing of regret—any emotion at all, for that matter. He merely sat heavy upon his knees, head bent as if for the executioner’s axe. Coupled with the soot still burned into his face, a demon was born of that silence, and it shook Rurik as not even looming daggers had.
“You are many things, Isaak, but never should I have thought to name kinslayer among them,” Ivon spat.
The foiled hunter did not stir.
“Were it not for Rurik’s perpetual spot of misfortune—” or luck, Rurik surmised, depending on how one looked at it, “—he should be dead, and you would surely be as well. For as I told him upon his waking: I will abide no kinslayer in my camp, brother or no.”
Rurik, emboldened by this, called out his own addition: “You might have killed me in the manor, or smothered me in the crib; I confess strangling a babe in the nursery should have surely been as easy as taking me for a target now.”
Ivon silenced him with a snarl. “Be quiet, child, until spoken to.”
So too did Rowan turn to him, though his rebuke was softer. “It may feel manly, but I assure you such taunts do us little good. There is more here than we see—”
“Tell that to my hand! Or its ashes, for all that remains.”
Yet the swordsman, as ever, would not be goaded. “There is more here than we see, Rurik. Leave it to the ones with the steel to see its end. For now: how do you stand?”
He probed the wounds in his sides, found they hadn’t reopened. From what he could tell, his joints worked and nothing seemed broken. Something crusted against his cheek, however. A touch there brought him near to weeping. Blood flecked away from his fingers. It was no wonder his head rang so.
He shook his head, and Rowan frowned, but nodded all the same in grudged acceptance. Essa watched him from the corner of his eyes, but when Rurik turned toward her, she looked away. Turned her dagger looks upon their would-be killer.
In that time, Isaak had rolled back his shoulders and lifted his attentions at last to their elder brother. Remorselessly, though, as any statue.
A lesser man might have spat.
“If you will abide no kinslayer in your camp, by what threat might you bind me?”
“Your riddles have ever made you feel powerful, Isaak, but I assure you I have no time for them,” Ivon said. “What should turn you on your own brother?”
The look Isaak turned on Rurik then was so casually callous as to seem methodically homicidal. “You would name that brother?”
Despite his own pains, Rurik started to rise. It was not a matter of pride—he had begun to think little of it, in truth—but a matter of disbelief. Assal knew he had committed many wrongs in his life. Drawn many to anger. But none of it entitled a brother, certainly, to this level of vehemence. Once, he had named Ivon cold. But this…
What he would have done after rising was an answer forever beyond him. As soon as his muscles flexed to the endeavor, another’s hand forced him squat. It was followed by the warmth of lips close to his ear.
“Sit quiet, lord. You’ve a knack for worsenin’.”
It was the same voice that had whispered to Essa, only now he knew its master. Roswitte. His father’s huntswoman.
Exasperation might have spun him, but her fingers dug into his shoulder until he all but howled. Across from him, he could make out Rowan’s shaking head.
Though Rurik had missed the continued exchange between his brothers, he saw—and heard—the backhand that sent Isaak sprawling. Their elder brother hovered over him, knuckles bunched for another blow.
“Get up.”
Isaak lay very still. “You blame Anelie for mother. I blame him for father. Do not be hypocritical, brother.”
“Get up,” Ivon repeated, agitation hunching his shoulders.
“Because of him, we are no longer a house. We have no land. No title.”
“I have laid the same at his feet. But I saw beyond. He is a catalyst, to be sure, but an unwilling one—you know, as well if not better than I, that Cullick is to blame. And you make light of all our suffering to ignore that fact.”
From between Ivon’s legs, Isaak all but smiled at Rurik. A haunted, wretched thing that promised naught but ill. Only under the force of that stare did Roswitte’s grip on Rurik’s shoulder finally slacken.
“Steady now,” she whispered.
A breath heaved through the fallen man like a whistle through the branches of a stricken oak. Then these words: “I strike what devils I can, and mark the rest for later.”
Rowan groaned. “Well that’s comforting.”
Ivon grunted. “I cannot begrudge you, brother. Not truly.”
“Might I?” Rurik interjected.
Ignoring him, Ivon continued. “Any one of us should be named fools, were we to think that duty alone might hold us above a dagger to our child’s throat.” He bent to Isaak’s height, squatting with his hands on his knees, guileless. Isaak drew still as a tomb. “But likewise, I should doubt any of us might look that child in the eye again, were we to do what you design to.”
And Isaak, still very still, did not bear this in silence. A breath, scarcely shuddered, heaved up through his madman’s gait, and he did not look a single one of them in the eye as he said, from seemingly far away, “Then let that be the difference between brothers.” And he said no more, no matter how his elder goaded him.
Eventually, Ivon gave up on that avenue and addressed the rest. “Ensil, has there been any further sign?” he hallooed over their heads.
From the shadows: “No, lord. There is nothing, and if it follows, it is soft-foot indeed.”
Another grunt, before Ivon cocked a sidelong glance at the Company. “It’s the Zuti, isn’t it? The mud man’s still with you?”
To their credit, all three shrugged as if to give the same reply: that of having pleasantly no idea what he meant.
“Why stand up for him? You in particular, girl; I well know you’ve no love for the man. And it’s not like we’ll kill him.”
Essa sniggered. “Oh, Ivon
. It’s not love. It’s simply—if it were Chigenda, there wouldn’t be no tracks.”
He stiffened, looked as if he’d caught a whiff of someone’s soured fish, and seemed to consider that point. Then he dismissed it out of hand, ordering Roswitte into the woods with two men of her choice, to continue to search. “No man,” he declared, “knows the forest better.” With that praise, she called in turn to her selections, bowed low, and returned to the trees without the slightest hesitation. They left their steeds behind.
Ivon looked to Rurik as though he had something more to say, but a bellow from the Ensil he had beckoned before drew him off before he could act. In so doing, the Company was left mostly—barring two rather broad-shouldered men-at-arms—to its own devices. Rurik took the opportunity to scoot the small distance between himself and his companions.
“What happened?” he asked, as soon as he was close.
“You blew yourself up,” Essa offered at a deadpan.
Rurik clicked his tongue, rolled his eyes to her cousin. “Chigenda? Alviss…?”
“They buried Alviss,” Rowan murmured. “Kindly. We actually haven’t gone too far.”
“Obviously Chigenda’s still gone. These idiots saw some tracks and think they’ll run him down.” Essa snorted. “If that one couldn’t drag him out, these certainly won’t. Personally, I think it’s either more Gorjes, or someone trailing them. I…I don’t think Chigenda’s coming back.” That admission, he noted, seemed to leave her hollower than he should have expected.
Nonetheless this was overshadowed by the greater pall of failure. He shrank from it, as he had too often in the past. Shrank so far and so small as to become little more than another speck of ash on the wind, because he had not yet had the time to come to terms with a death that meant every bit as much to him as the loss of a limb. For Alviss was surely that. To call him friend did not do him justice. To call him protector encompassed nothing. The man had seen more of him than his father in his days at home. Had never once abandoned him on the road. He understood more deeply the wiles and insecurities of his soul than the most knowledgeable brother.
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