by Mark Smylie
As they rode in through the wide-open gates, they could see horses, wagons, and coaches packed into its yards and sheds and stables. Drums and the muted roar of voices raised in song and argument came from the great hall. Dozens of drunken revelers were stumbling about through the rain, mixing with twice as many leather-clad stable hands and porters. All of them ignored the newcomers.
“King of Heaven, I think it looks even shoddier than the last time I was here,” mumbled Arduin. He and Stjepan peered through the rain at some of the stable hands lounging, unconcerned, under dry awnings. They all looked more or less the same, but Stjepan finally focused in on one of them who seemed a bit older than his companions.
“Oi, you there! Woat!” barked Stjepan.
The stable hand peered over his shoulder and waved his hand. “Oi, whatcha want?” he cried.
“Is the King’s Hall taken?” Stjepan asked loudly.
“No, it’s free tonight!” the young man shouted back, suddenly a bit more interested. He started walking toward them, pulling his hood up over his head as he stepped out into the rain. He had long straggly black hair, and a patchy growth along his chin and mouth, as well as the curled lip and the surly, shifty, slightly crossed set to the eyes that seemed the mark of the Woat clan. He wore a jacket of patched, undyed leather under his hood and short chaperon cape, torn hose, and mismatched short ankle boots, and had a sheathed dagger tucked into his belt.
“We’ll take it, then!” Stjepan said. “Private baths for two ladies in the King’s Hall, oat bags and stabling for the horses, and food and drink now and in the morning for our whole party.”
“Kitchens are still going, the baths are still hot, and the pussy’s still warm, too,” the Woat grinned.
“That part’s to every man’s individual discretion,” Stjepan said with a sour grimace. “So tell your girls to ask for coin up front, Captain, it’s not going on the general tab.”
“Right, your call,” the Woat said with a nod, and whistled. A half dozen of his brothers and cousins sprang into action, dashing out into the rain to help the dismounting knights lead their horses toward a set of stables right by the King’s Hall, while a few ran off to deliver news and instructions to other parts of the compound. The coach was directed to swing in front of the King’s Hall, and Gilgwyr and Leigh clambered off the rumble seats in the back as the knights and squires formed a cordon for the Lady and her handmaiden into the building. A few of the younger Woats looked on in not-so-idle curiosity until a long hard stare from Sir Helgi Vogelwain made them slink away, laughing into the rain and the night like a pack of wild dogs.
And wild dogs they were, for the Woat clan was marked by notoriety and infamy. Their line traced to the Wyvern King of the Manon Mole, from some bastard child of his that fled the hills and his father’s cruel reign to find refuge in the hold of Davers and discovered some skill at procreation. For centuries the now-sprawling clan of murderers and thieves had been tied to every crime imaginable in the central hills between Newgate and Westmark, and despite the strenuous efforts of kings and earls and sheriffs and their god-fearing neighbors to stamp them out, the clan had not only survived but prospered and eventually settled into the role of innkeepers along the West King’s Road. Many argued that the Inn was little more than a civilized form of highway robbery, given the prices they sometimes charged, and despite the thin veneer of respectability the establishment granted to the clan, rumor still associated them with every dastardly deed and foul doing within twenty miles of Dagger Vale.
“Stay armed the whole time you’re here, though inside the Inn it’s not the Woats you have to be worried about,” Stjepan said under his breath to Erim as they pulled saddles and bags off their steeds. “And we’ll arrange a private bath for you, if you want,” he added. She nodded absently as she scanned the yards and the great hall from the dry refuge of the stables.
“It’s after midnight. Is it normally so busy?” asked Erim, finding that she was warming to the place. “I’d expect this in Therapoli, but not out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“This isn’t really busy for Woat’s, I’d guess it’s just the first traders of spring hitting the roads,” said Stjepan. “Just wait a couple of months until there are thousands of travelers on the roads to and from the Tournament of Flowers, and this place will be packed to the rafters and the late and unlucky will be camping outside the walls. They slaughter an entire herd of cattle during that month just to feed everyone coming through,” he added with a hint of disapproval.
A small crowd of Woat serving girls and porters ran past them to prepare the King’s Hall and the baths. “The privies and a bath, I think, in that order; and then it’s off to see what there is to see,” said Stjepan, and Erim nodded in agreement.
Annwyn stood in the dark, listening to the rain on the rooftop and the murmur of quiet voices from down the hall, silently watching Malia sleep. For days, she had been trapped either in the back of the coach when they were on the road, or in her pavilion when they were in camp. Arduin had allowed her to walk and stretch her legs once in a while, or to relieve herself should the necessities of her body demand it, but she had been under constant guard and discreet observation when she was outside. When she wasn’t drifting in and out of consciousness or sleep, that is, as the events of the last weeks, the constant travel, and the enchantment that appeared to be upon her left her exhausted and at times delirious, sometimes forgetting who or where she was.
In some ways, she supposed, very little had changed in her life except for the opportunity to travel once again, as she had spent the last ten years . . . perhaps longer, perhaps even all of her life, if she thought about it . . . under constant guard and supervision. Her father, her brothers, her household; they were as much her jailers as anything else, keeping her locked away in a prison. They might have tried to line that prison with flowers and velvet and silk and finery, but sweet smells and fine textiles could not cover the stench of her own rot and decay and the walls that surrounded and kept her. And so she had slowly removed all of the gilded refinements from her life and her chambers until only the stark truth remained: that she was a prisoner, in black mourning clothes staring at blank walls. They all were. Her father; her brothers; Arduin, in particular, the golden boy heir to the family title now staring at a life without a future; Harvald, the brightest and smartest and most obscenely cruel of them, but born the youngest, and therefore of such limited prospects in society even from the start.
And now Harvald was dead. She had to remind herself of that. We burned his body and he is now ash in the wind and water. Am I not now freed from what was once Harvald?
But something had changed. She could feel it inside her, the presence of what for lack of a better word she simply thought of as the map like a living thing. She wondered if that was what it felt like to be pregnant; a rite of passage for most women that she had resigned herself to never experiencing. Except rather than just being concentrated in her belly, she could feel the tingle and pressure of the enchantment almost everywhere, playing over and under her skin, in her arms and shoulders, coiling about her heart and lungs, tightening around her spine. She could hear the map like a voice in her head, whispering to her in incomprehensible words, as though it were the wisp of a thought in search of form, poised forever on the tip of her tongue.
She had thought of telling Malia what she was feeling, what was happening to her, but could not figure out how to put it into words without scaring or even simply confusing her most loyal handmaiden and companion. They had prepared for bed almost wordlessly, helping each other bathe in the Aurian style and then inspecting her skin for new signs and images, but nothing new was moving upon her body yet. As she watched Malia sleep, she felt an overwhelming surge of gratitude that someone so steadfast was in her life: the sister she had never had.
She slid her black dress back on over her shift, and drew a dark cloak tightly about her before pulling the hood over her head. As quietly as she could, she opened the do
or to their room, and eyed the antechamber beyond; finding it empty, she slipped out the door and slowly closed it behind her. Through the door on her right she knew she would find the larger main hall that they had entered in through, and undoubtedly several of her brother’s knights and squires talking softly as they drifted off; or perhaps they were already asleep, exhausted from their long journey. The door opposite was another private room, to be held by her brother when he was done with his late-night meal. But it was the small door on her left that held her interest.
She opened it, and peered through. It appeared to be a short servant’s hall, with a small cloakroom or garderobe on one side, and a barred door at the other. She slipped to that door, lifted the bar, and stepped outside onto a small covered porch.
Annwyn stood for a while listening to the patter of the rain, and feeling the light wind on her face. She couldn’t remember the last time she had stood outdoors alone, except perhaps a few stolen moments in the courtyards of her father’s houses and holds.
From the rear porch she could see the shape and shadows of stacks of barrels and crates, hay bales, and wagons. Large braziers and lanterns hanging suspended from chains lit several nearby buildings in the compound, including what she took to be the bathhouse and another hall of some sort, both of which seemed to be alight with some signs of activity. She saw the doors to the bathhouse open and Gilgwyr stepped out, calling out something to someone still inside. She froze in the darkness of the rear porch, momentarily afraid that Gilgwyr might head toward her. But instead he slipped a tricorn hat onto his head and started out into the rain in the general direction of the great hall. She slowly stepped down off the porch so that she could follow his progress as he nonchalantly crossed the yards toward his destination. A large side door in the main building swung open, a block of orange-red light in the night with his silhouette within it, accompanied by a sudden rush of noise and music, and then the door was shut and the sound became muted again.
She stared at the great hall for a long time, uncertain of her next course. She knew what she wanted to do, she wanted to follow Gilgwyr inside; though why was perhaps a bit less clear, and she was also sure that some risk accompanied this desire. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, but eventually she began whispering to herself quietly. She gathered up her courage and hurried across the yards toward the great hall before she could change her mind.
In the back of a nearby wagon, Leigh sat unmoving, as still as a statue, his elbow propped on a crate and his top two fingers resting on his forehead above his eye. From beneath his hood and through narrowed eyelids he watched her cross the yard and then enter the great hall.
He smiled, and in his mind’s eye he imagined her seated upon a fire-blackened throne of brass set over a jumbled field of polished bone, with a spiked crown made of brass upon her brow, and he thought to himself that she made quite a vision.
Upon entering the great hall of Woat’s Roadside Inn, Annwyn came to a full and stunned stop as though the sights and sounds of the room were a physical wall that she had just run into. The main hall was a great timbered vault, and from the rafters hung soot-stained banners from every corner of the Middle Kingdoms, gifts left behind by previous travelers to mark their stay. The plastered stone walls at each end of the hall held a great fireplace, each so large several men could walk into it standing upright, and the walls themselves were festooned with antlers and horns from a dozen different kinds of beast, a veritable history of slaughter. Arcaded aisles ran along the sides of the main hall, disappearing into distant chambers at each end, and galleries ran above them. Two sets of long tables ran end-to-end the length of the hall, and around them sat or milled a sprawling, drunken crowd of travelers, traders, tinkers, robbers, thieves, brigands, landless knights, sell-swords, and slumming country lordlings. They clustered in the galleries and aisles of the hall, fell out of their chairs, mock-wrestled each other, fought for real until someone broke them up. They were watched over and served by scantily clad women and burly, leather-clad thugs, all of them at first glance seemingly related. A bawdy song was being roared at the top of a hundred lungs, and a loud, discordant drumming and piping was coming from somewhere, perhaps the gallery right above her. Naked dark-haired, pale-skinned women shimmied and shook on the tabletops, strutting and preening the length of the room for the crowds that caroused beneath them. Annwyn could smell roasting meat, unwashed bodies and vomit, and the sharp tang of freshly spilled beer.
She reeled, momentarily and completely disoriented.
There was almost nothing in her experience to remotely prepare her for a place such as this, not even the easy, joyous revelry of the Athairi camp. The Athairi were, despite their hedonism and loose morals, a refined, graceful, and courteous people; but the rough men and women that filled the hall at Woat’s Inn were the kind that every part of her social world was designed to keep as far away from her as possible. Most of her time was spent within her own family and household, and outside the walls of her father’s houses and estates, her encounters were generally with other members of the ruling class of the Middle Kingdoms and its High Court. The tradesmen and crafters, farmers and laborers that supplied her household and made its functioning possible only ever met her under the auspices of her authority, as a full Lady of a landed Aurian family with a baron’s title before their name; and most of them were well versed in the behavior expected of them in an encounter with their social betters. But here the social niceties of the courtly culture of the Middle Kingdoms was replaced by the more mercenary give-and-take of want and fulfillment, supply and demand, a need and a price.
And she’d never seen anything quite like it.
A woman bearing a tray of wooden mugs filled with ale almost knocked her over, and that shook Annwyn out of her shocked reverie. She drew her cloak and hood tightly about her, so that her face was completely in shadow, and pressed herself tightly to a wooden arcade column, trying to make herself as small as possible. Thankfully the crowds near her were so besotted with wine and ale and the proximity of naked women that she went entirely unnoticed, a dark shape blended into a dark shape. And so, left to her own devices, she slowly got her bearings, and her shock began to turn into something like curiosity.
She had found the dancing of the Athairi women she’d seen a few short days ago to be sensual, and erotic, with a core of grace and beauty even as it invited the viewer to unchaste thoughts and acts. The dancing here was cruder, more animal, more primal, almost ugly, as though the art had been stripped away to reveal the dance at its most salacious core. It was certainly less practiced; some of the women moved quite clumsily, as though inhibited by drink or weight or age. As she looked more closely, she thought the women here looked tired and worn-down, even the ones that at first glance had seemed like they might be beautiful, which admittedly was not many; most of the women here were clearly Woatlings, with the same curled, sneering lips and slightly cross-eyed look as the men-folk from the clan. Unlike the Athairi dancers, who had moved according to an inner fire and heat, swept up in a passion for music and rhythm and sex, most of the women in this hall seemed duller fare, with faces that were either too hard or too soft, and eyes that were either predatory or simply vacant, as though their very spirits were being drained away.
But the drunken and desperate men here didn’t seem to care very much, as far as she could tell. They happily tossed coins onto the tabletops under the feet of the dancing women, or into the air to fall haphazardly wherever they might land. Occasionally a dancer would reward a man that threw enough coins by taking him by the hand and leading him off somewhere behind the antlered walls, as his companions cheered his presumably good fortune.
As she surveyed the room and calmed her mind and racing heart, she came to realize that Gilgwyr was nowhere to be seen, unless he was in some dark corner hidden away somewhere. Slowly and carefully she wended her way through the crowds of men in the side aisles of the hall and, upon finding an ornamented staircase at the rear of one of
those aisles, went up to the upper galleries looking out over the raucous hall. She passed men drunk and sober, gamblers playing at dice and ignoring the nudity hovering nearby, traders arguing over the fair price of a dozen Highlands half-bred chargers, partisans arguing over whether Prince Hektor should step aside as next in line to the Erid crown in favor of his younger and more dashing brother Prince Colin, and thieves plotting to rob a wealthy jeweler traveling next week from Newgate to Westmark, but she did not see Gilgwyr amongst any of them.
Annwyn frowned, looking down upon the main hall from the relative safety of one of the upper galleries, taking her time to scan the men milling amongst the two rows of long tables below. She looked long enough to be convinced that Gilgwyr was not there. Confusion was about to set in on her when she spied a naked dancer stumbling out of the back areas behind the stone wall at the far end of the hall, where the dancers were taking their trysts, and she realized it was the one place she hadn’t looked.
She worked her way back downstairs and down one of the long aisles, then slipped into the back of the great hall. The chamber beyond was darker than the main hall and built into a warren of stalls. She could hear moans from men and women, gasps and shouts, from somewhere a kind of rhythmic slapping, and her heart started racing and her throat suddenly went dry. The stalls had no doors, and as she wandered light-headed down the tight passageway that wound its way through them, she glimpsed men and women in varying degrees of undress and in different poses. A heady mix of fear and a strange, inchoate desire welled up within her; she tried not to look, tried not to stare, tried to only see the faces of the men, to find the familiar face of her quarry amongst them, but it didn’t always work. She gasped and stared into a stall as a Woatling pulled her mouth off an erect penis, a strand of saliva still connecting her tongue to the bulging tip, the act barely registering in her mind before she was hurrying on. She blushed and faltered at the sight of a man’s pale, fat, hairy buttocks quivering and shaking as he thrust and thrust into a woman lying beneath him, her dainty but dirty feet waving in the air above his back. Annwyn felt flush, her body overheated, as though she might faint at any moment.