The Knight of the Red Beard-The Cycle of Oak, Yew, Ash and Rowan 5

by Andre Norton

  “My lord King and brother.” He bowed low.

  Gaurin returned the gesture in the proper degree. “Your Grace.” He smiled.

  Einaar turned to Ashen. “My lady Queen and sister.”

  She held out her left hand to him and he took it gently, kissing her fingers through the glove she wore.

  How frail they both looked, Einaar thought. Royance moved forward, his step youthful, his cheeks showing color.

  “Greetings, my lord Earl,” Einaar said.

  “And to you as well,” Royance returned. “How long must we play these Court games?”

  At that, Einaar smiled broadly. Royance, despite the difference in their ages, had always been a kindred spirit both to him and to Gaurin. “No longer, sir!” Then he gathered the Lady Mjaurita in his arms and bussed her right heartily on the mouth.

  “My lord husband!” Elibit exclaimed. “Whatever will Earl Royance be thinking!”

  “That my lady finds favor in more eyes than mine,” Royance said, amused. He retrieved a laughing Mjaurita from Einaar’s embrace.

  “Fie, my lord Duke! Your wife got not nearly as warm a welcome as I,” Mjaurita said teasingly, glancing at Elibit.

  “Just wait until we are in private,” Einaar told her.

  Elibit blushed. She had never become fully accustomed to the teasing that went on among some of them in the inner circle of kindred and near-kinship. “We must compose ourselves, my lords and ladies,” she said, “for our guests are arriving.”

  The Court, including Gaurin’s gentlemen and Ashen’s ladies, moved out from the vestibule onto the big landing at the top of the stone stairway leading from the ward to the Great Hall of the castle just as Ysa reached the foot of the stairs.

  “Greeting, my lady Duchess!” Gaurin said. “We make you right welcome to the Castle of Fire and Ice.”

  “Thank you, Gaurin NordornKing. Have Royance and Mjaurita married yet?”

  “We were waiting for you,” Royance said genially, putting his arm around Mjaurita’s waist.

  “Elin, welcome home, my dear daughter. Come inside, all of you, please,” Ashen said. “You must be wearied by your journey. We have food for all, and warmed wine with snowberry juice.”

  “Thank you, Ashen. It grows cold early this year. Mjaurita, greetings. As lovely as ever. Royance is a lucky man, even if he is more tardy than any other woman would tolerate. Where are my grandsons?” Ysa asked as she climbed the stairs to the landing.

  “I am here, Granddam Ysa,” Bjaudin NordornPrince said, stepping out of the crowd. He bowed low. “Alas, I think Mikkel is off hunting, unaware that you were to arrive today. My apologies for him.”

  “Oh, no apologies necessary—”

  At that moment, Rohan emerged from the Hall. “I am here, Granddam Ysa!” he cried. “Sorry I was late.”

  With a flourish, he produced an emerald-green silk rose out of nowhere and presented it to her. The crimson stone on his new thumb ring glowed in the noontime light. It didn’t escape Ysa’s notice.

  “You’ve come up in the world, with your fancy jewels,” she commented. “I didn’t think you the type for rubies.”

  “It’s a fire-stone. My dear foster mother and father, Ashen NordornQueen and Gaurin NordornKing, were kind enough to provide me with a replacement for the badge of the Sea-Rover Chieftain. My grandfather’s went with him to a watery grave.”

  “Oh,” Ysa said, scarcely chastened. “Yes. Well, greetings, Rohan. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “You wouldn’t have, except that I delayed my departure for the purposes of seeing my Lord Royance wed, and greeting you again. One week hence, I return to New Vold on Spume Maiden.”

  “So soon! But the gowns, the flowers—”

  “All arranged for, Madame Mother,” Ashen said. “You are to rest and enjoy the festivities without a care.”

  “Then why send for me? I have no duties.”

  “Ah, I meant only that the hard work was done. But believe me, there are many final details of protocol that will be perfect only with your expert touch!”

  “Hmph,” replied Ysa, scarcely mollified. “Where am I to stay?”

  “Your old apartments have been cleaned and warmed. Everything is much as you left it,” Ashen said.

  “When I was asked to leave by you, if I remember well,” Ysa retorted. “Well, no matter. I’m back now.”

  And so she was, Einaar thought wryly. Further, he had no doubt that she would stay as long as she pleased—or until she was asked again to leave.

  “I wish to examine the completed castle,” Royance told Gaurin the next morning at breakfast in the small room off the Great Hall, close to the fire. The room had served many purposes since the castle’s construction; now it functioned as a private dining room, easy to warm. “The women are busy with whatever it is that occupies them, and I’m always interested in this kind of architecture. The inner barbican is a late addition. And that tower by the Water Gate—that’s even newer, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Gaurin said, setting aside his bowl of bread scraps soaked in flat ale, the customary breakfast of Nordorners. “We could not build a guardian castle to that gate, such as exists in Rendel wherein the Lord High Marshal resides, but we constructed a residence for our own Lord High Marshal in the great barbican.”

  “Very wise,” Royance commented.

  “I will ask my brother to act as your guide. A would-be invader would have a hard time coming at us from Cyornas Fjord, and an even worse time trying a land assault. It would disturb and annoy our Lord High Marshal and I know I would hate to go against Svarteper when he is angry.”

  Royance laughed out loud. “As would I. It is an impressive fortification. Your engineer must know his business.”

  “Indeed he does,” Einaar said. “Come, sir, and I will gladly show you whatever you desire to see.”

  Cyornas Castle—the Castle of Fire and Ice—was a formidable structure indeed, looming high and proud on the north cliff-face of the fjord. No danger of invasion from the southern face, for it was taken up with a great ice-river that frequently dropped massive floes of ice, making navigation dangerous. Out in Cyornas Fjord, no good anchorage had ever been found, so ships moored to permanent buoys positioned where the ice would be unlikely to be a hazard. A loading wharf was now under construction, attached to the land.

  Almost rectangular in shape, the castle boasted great towers at each corner, with lesser towers punctuating the curtain walls and a new open gorge tower in the middle of the east wall. It was built of pale buff native stone whitewashed to rival snow so that the eyes of potential enemies might be dazzled. At certain times of the year, it loomed as cold, forbidding, and formidable as the ice-river across the fjord.

  The Cyornasberg Barbican Gatehouse, a late addition, was almost as strong as the Water Gatehouse, boasting two portcullises and double walls with arrow slits affording a wide angle of fire. If an enemy could make it through the town—a difficult proposition, as the town walls were thick and also well provided with defensive towers—he would face a daunting challenge at the barbican. Then he would have to fight hard to gain the gate to the castle itself. The Lord High Marshal’s banner, a silver devil-tree on a black ground, flew from a staff atop the highest tower. A second banner, a white snow-fox on a deep blue ground, proclaimed that Admiral-General Tordenskjold was in residence in his apartment in the barbican.

  The castle had proven barely adequate to house all the permanent residents, outgrown even before it was finished, and so a veritable village of outbuildings had sprung up, like weeds, between the castle and the town wall, crowding even the fixed bridge between the barbican and the castle gate against which a sturdy drawbridge could be raised. Here were smithies and stables, reserve barracks and mews, fullers, tailors, bakers, shoemakers, all hoping for patronage from the castle itself as well as the town residents, and all seldom disappointed. The spinners’ and weavers’ guild was important enough to rate its own defense tower and a wall with its
own gate, in a corner where town walls met castle curtain. Income from the spun and woven snow-thistle silk created a substantial part of Nordorn wealth.

  Cyornasberg had grown to become a very respectable city, the primary defense against wild northern tribes—Fridians, untamed Aslaugors, stubbornly independent Nordorners, even the fabled, warlike Wykenig wanderers, said to be moving steadily southward.

  “I have already delivered this message to Gaurin and Ashen, and will tell you in turn,” Royance said. “King Peres and Queen Hegrin are very much in the debt of the Nordorners, standing as they do as a bulwark between Rendel and their enemies. Kinship is kinship, but such alliances have broken in the past.”

  “Not these. Let us hope that Rendel remains ever in peace, due to our efforts,” Einaar replied. “Are Their Majesties well?”

  “Thriving. Queen Hegrin just presented us with another prince—Arnaldr.”

  “That makes—how many?”

  “Four. Boroth the Younger, the heir; Prince Nollan; Princess Gizela, and now the new one. I fear, among all those boys, Gizela may be a bit spoiled.”

  Einaar laughed. “And why not. Our own Princess Elin is a bit spoiled as well. There is no harm to it, when they are young.”

  “And yet the young have a way of growing older,” Royance observed. “Was that the dinner bell?”

  “It was. We should be returning to the Hall.”

  “This afternoon my lady wishes to take a drive with me out into the countryside while late autumn still holds and the snows have not yet begun. She would rather go to Åskar to inspect the new fortified manor house I have built for her,” Royance said, “but that would take several days. I daresay she has become weary of the wedding preparations as much as I. If it were not for friends and relatives, we would steal into the Fane and let Esander the Good say the words over us in private and have done with it.”

  A sudden suspicion, coupled with the expression on Royance’s face and the tone of his voice, dawned on Einaar. “If I didn’t know better, I would think you had already visited the Fane, and Esander. But of course you haven’t—have you?”

  To his delight, Earl Royance blushed to the roots of his hair. “My lady Mjaurita is a good and virtuous woman. She would not—Well, she insisted that we, um, regularize our relationship some years back. Now, we are just making it all public for propriety’s sake, and because she is weary of keeping up a long outgrown pretense.”

  Einaar laughed aloud. “That is wonderful, sir! And you kept your secret all this time.”

  “Ysa would never forgive us, if she knew,” Royance said.

  “Then if only for that, be easy, my lord Earl; I will not betray you.”

  “We need to move now if we’re going to leave on GorGull,” Tjórvi told Mikkel. “Fritji is even more tired of all the fuss about the wedding than the rest of us are. He plans to leave with the dawn tide. Wind in the sails and waves favoring.” He indicated a bundle tucked under his arm. “Have you got your goods?”

  “In my room. Come and see.”

  The boys went out into the corridor of the castle wing that had been assigned to the Sea-Rovers. As they passed by the door in the room just beside Tjórvi’s, they could hear soft voices, male and female, and an occasional giggle coming from within. Mikkel raised his eyebrows, a question directed at Tjórvi.

  “Oh, that’s just Obern with one of the castle maids,” Tjórvi said dismissively. “I told you he’d be easy to get around. He should have brought Hallfríðr Snolladóttir with him. She’d keep him attending to his business.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “His wife. Her great-grandmother was Great-Grandda Snolli’s sister, or half-sister or something. From what I’ve heard about him, Hallfríðr inherited his disposition. Obern would be unwise to provoke her, even this far away.”

  Mikkel smothered a laugh. “It sounds like fun, to live in New Vold. A lot more fun than stuck off here in Cyornas Castle.”

  “You wouldn’t think it so much fun if you actually were there.”

  “If I were far enough away from Yngvar, it would. He’s a regular little prissy-pants. Here we are.” Mikkel pushed open the door to his apartment and the boys entered. He closed it carefully behind them. “I’ve got my trunk in the bedroom.”

  “Trunk!” Tjórvi echoed disbelievingly. “What kind of pleasure cruise d’you think you’re going on?”

  “Just a few things,” Mikkel protested.

  Tjórvi brushed past him and opened the offending article—a very small trunk, Mikkel thought—and began tossing the contents onto the floor.

  “You won’t need these,” he said, indicating snow-thistle silk hosen, “or this.” An embroidered coat—Mikkel’s second-best—followed the rejected hosen. “Haven’t you got any rough clothes, like you’d work in? Or do you ever work?”

  Stung, Mikkel retorted hotly, “Of course I work! There’s real work clothes down in the bottom of the trunk. You just didn’t look hard enough!”

  “Well, these are still too fancy but more like it.” Tjórvi held up a pair of trews made of coarse snow-thistle fabric. They were the sort of warm, long-lasting garments the common people favored, only somewhat nicer. “D’you have shirts, too?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, then, that’s not so bad. But you’ll have to leave these other fine things behind. And no trunk.”

  “But—”

  “Look you. How d’you think you’re going to manage to lug something like this onto the GorGull and not be seen? You’ll have Yngvar on us in no time flat and he’s just the sort to tattle. Tie everything up in a bundle like mine, and we’ll manage to get us a sea chest later on.”

  “Very well. What about a blanket? Can I take a blanket?”

  Tjórvi swore. Obviously, he had forgotten to pack a blanket.

  “That’s all right,” Mikkel said. “There are lots of blankets made out of snow-thistle silk. Light as anything and they fold down really small. I’ll get you some, too.”

  Under the other boy’s guidance, Mikkel picked out two changes of clothing, a pair of stout shoes, and three pairs of stockings. He rolled all of these things up into one of the shirts. As if by accident, he allowed the amulet he had borrowed from Mother’s jewel box, bearing her Ash emblem, to slip outside his shirt and noted Tjórvi’s raised eyebrow with delight. No need to mention that he had not gotten permission to borrow it first.

  When they were finished with his packing, his bundle looked much like Tjórvi’s.

  “There now. We’ll make our appearance in the Hall for dinner, and then slip away separately and into our special place in GorGull for the night,” Tjórvi said. “When we wake up we’ll be well out to sea.”

  Mikkel smiled. At odd moments, particularly when the crew were busy with their duties, the boys had clambered aboard GorGull, one among many vessels now crowded in the fjord. The ships flew many banners—Yuland, Rendel, Aslaugor, Fridian, and more.

  They raced from forecastle to aftercastle, ducked around the single mast, laughing and shouting. Ostensibly they were just youngsters playing, but they had systematically created a snug berth for themselves in a larder well belowdecks, on the starboard side near the bow. They had shifted barrels of flour and grain until they had created a wall of sorts behind which—they hoped—they would be well-nigh invisible.

  “There will be lots of coming and going on the portside. The larder opposite ours holds barrels of salt pork and cheese and other spoilables,” Tjórvi told Mikkel. “Or, it will, once Fritji arranges for them to be brought on board. No sense starting out with stale provisions. The kegs with the spirits are over on that side, too.”

  Mikkel secretly looked forward to tasting spirits for the first time, but Tjórvi wouldn’t allow any tapping of the kegs, not now when they could easily be caught. Mikkel reasoned that his turn would come sooner or later. For a long time he had wondered what spirits tasted like.

  That evening, once dinner was over and the dancing begun, first Tjórvi and th
en Mikkel would steal out through the Water Gate, down the stairs set against the cliff face, and thence into a small boat they had hidden under the wharf. To Mikkel’s relief, Yngvar was nowhere to be seen. But, as he was making his way across the castle ward, Talkin appeared out of the shadows and moved to tag along at Mikkel’s heels.

  “No,” Mikkel told the warkat. “You can’t go with me this time. A Sea-Rover ship is no place for you.”

  Undeterred, Talkin padded along beside him, through the Water Gate and down the stairs. He had to be physically shoved away from the little boat as the boys climbed in.

  “Go find Weyse and play with her,” Mikkel ordered. “Please.”

  “You sound like that beast can understand you,” Tjórvi said, a little scornfully.

  “He can. Or he could if he wanted to,” Mikkel said. “Look, Talkin, I’d take you if I could. But I can’t. So go back to the castle now. We’ll go hunting when I get back.”

  Talkin was almost pure white now with the coming winter. Mikkel put the furry head between his hands and kissed the warkat on his forehead. “Good-bye for a while.”

  The boys, under Tjórvi’s direction, turned the little boat toward the GorGull and began rowing, very quietly, the oarlocks muffled with rags. Because this was their last night in safe port for some time to come, Captain Fritji had given the crew leave. If there was anybody left aboard, they were apt to be fast asleep. It was the perfect opportunity for Tjórvi and Mikkel to smuggle themselves aboard.

  As they pulled farther and farther away from the wharf, Mikkel could see Talkin, not returning to the castle as instructed. The young warkat had sat down, ears pricked forward. He watched and watched until Mikkel had climbed the rope ladder and disappeared from view.

  Three

  Elin prepared with special care for the evening’s banquet, officially welcoming Granddam Ysa’s arrival. Lady Kandice had to do her hair three times before she was satisfied. Lady Hanna searched through every chest and brought out gown after gown until Elin found one that suited her—a rose-pink snow-thistle satin with matching coat, hosen, and slippers, the very picture of innocence. When the ladies had finished with her, she presented herself for Ysa’s inspection and approval. She was, as Granddam said, growing up. And a grown-up Princess of the Nordorners was marriageable.