Vandescardian meals were, at least among the nobility, a formal affair: Marta had changed into a filmy white dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a prom, while all twenty of their soldier-bodyguards had changed from their road leathers into silken robes and blousy pantaloons that Ian would have been more likely to wear to bed than to table.
But each to his own. If anybody noticed that Ian hadn’t dressed for lunch, no comment was made. Nor was any comment made about the way that a small corral outside the tavern had been cleared of horses so that Ian could plant Gungnir, point down, in the center of it, with a watching soldier, in leathers and livery, on each of its four sides.
As road food went, the meal wasn’t bad. Hell, as good restaurant cooking went, it was pretty good. The local specialty had sounded more like lox than anything else, but it turned out to be some white-fleshed fish that looked like a miniature flounder, and tasted richer and meatier than any fish Ian had ever had. The thick green sauce that went with it was served in little mussel shells, and was hot and pungent, with a delayed kick that cleared the sinuses and made the eyes water.
The talk was of politics, mainly. There seemed to be endless jockeying for position among the nobles who had seats at the Seat, so to speak, and who were collectively known as the Table. It was hard to keep them straight, as the majority of them were Tyrsons, and were referred to as such, always. Ian thought he’d figured out that there were three different Erik Tyr-sons—the margrave he had met, and two others, one called a count and another a count-wanting, until Marta explained that there actually were four at the Table.
Ivar del Hival held court down at the far end of the table, drinking seemingly endless glasses of wine while encouraging his soldier-audience to try to keep up with him. Ian couldn’t help feeling disgusted by their boozy laughter, but he tried to write that off as just a matter of his own prejudice against drunks.
“I have to wonder what you’re so angry about,” Marta said, leaning toward him. Her hair smelled of roses and lemon. She had chosen to sit on Ian’s right—or, more accurately, she had beckoned Ian to sit on her left, putting him at the left end of the bench.
“Nothing,” he said, with a sigh. “Nothing much.”
He fingered the silver clamp that held the corner of the tablecloth tightly to the table.
“Of course it’s nothing much,” she said. “You merely glared at your friend Ivar del Hival as though you wished him dead, then shook your head as though to reprove yourself for doing so.” Her smile mocked him, but the twinkle in her eyes took any sting out of it.
Remind me never to play poker with you, Ian thought. “It was nothing much.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. Were it anything serious, you would have called for him to take up a sword.”
Ian would have sworn that Ivar del Hival couldn’t have heard her low-pitched voice down at the other end of the table, but the big man had lurched to his feet, and beckoned to one of the soldiers, a blocky man with the sort of V-shaped physique that Ian associated with those idiot bodybuilders who spent hours on hours in the gym trying to make already bulky muscles bulge just a little bit more.
Practice swords were produced, and Ivar del Hival and his opponent squared off, saluted, and dropped into en garde.
It was fun to watch Ivar del Hival fence, particularly if you’d seen him in action before. As Ian had expected, he spent a few moments fiddling around in between teaching his opponent his beat-and-feint-to-the-open-line routine, then followed it up with a beat-feint-and-lunge that scored squarely in the middle of the chest. A better fencer would have ignored Ivar del Hival’s attempt to dominate the match and played his own game, but on the next point, the blockhead tried to turn Ivar del Hival’s act against him, and Ivar waited for the real attack, and then, moving faster than somebody would have credited him as capable of, took one step backward to parry, forcing the other’s blade down, out and up, then took a quick bouncy step forward, completing the touch.
Ian had to chuckle. Ivar del Hival had been learning foil fencing from Ian at the same time Ian had been learning swordfighting from Ivar. And for somebody who had had as much to drink as Ivar had, he was moving awfully well.
“He’s quite good,” Marta said, as Ivar tossed his sword to one of the waiting servants, then returned to the table, a thick arm thrown around his former opponent’s shoulder.
Ian nodded. “That he is.”
“But you are better.” Her smile was vaguely challenging, as though she didn’t quite believe what she was saying.
“Is that so?” Ivar del Hival’s voice boomed down the length of the table. He was back on his feet. “I hear that you think you can still beat me, even on a glorious day like today.”
Ian shrugged. He did pretty well against Ivar, even when they sparred by epée or freestyle rules, which much more closely mimicked a real duel. It had taken some work—Ian had had to put aside a lot of his foil repertoire—but his slightly greater reach and his much greater speed gave him a natural advantage against Ivar del Hival’s greater strength. Yes, all things being equal, any advantage could be telling, but all things weren’t equal, and swordfighting wasn’t‘ arm wrestling.
“Could be,” he said, rising.
“Let’s see,” Ivar del Hival said, beckoning for the return of the practice swords.
Ian held up a finger. “Just give me a minute to stretch out.” Well, even though local practice didn’t include the protective equipment that Ian wouldn’t have considered stepping on a fencing strip without, Ian was still more worried about pulling a muscle or straining a tendon through lack of a proper warm-up than he was about a bruise from a practice sword tip.
Of course, he probably was in more danger of losing an eye, but…
“No,” Ivar del Hival said, placing himself so his back was to the people at the table. “Let’s just fence, shall we?”
One eye closed in a slow, deliberate wink.
Ian kept his face impassive as he squared off against Ivar del Hival. But he was disgusted with Ivar del Hival for setting this up, and with himself for playing along. He could do whatever he wanted; Ivar del Hival would be fencing to lose, not to win. This wasn’t a practice match; it was all about playing up Ian’s image, his reputation. Ivar del Hival probably hadn’t been drinking as much as he had seemed to, and had been simply planning this all along.
The right thing to do, the moral thing to do, would be to drop the practice sword and return to the table without a word.
Instead, Ian saluted, closed in, and responded to Ivar del Hival’s just-barely-telegraphed lunge with a circular parry that left Ivar’s practice sword tumbling end over end through the air, Ivar del Hival returning to the table shaking his head in feigned amazement at how easily he had been defeated, and Ian with a victory that tasted like ashes in his mouth.
A sliver of a moon hung high above the lake, a gentle if cold wind rippling its dark, satiny surface, rustling the leaves in the gnarled trees that stood at the edge of the campground like ancient giants, frozen on watch.
The Vandestish nobility treated themselves well, even when it came to camping out. This camping site by the side of a small lake had been improved over the generations to the point where flattened mounds rose a foot or so above the ground to be sure that the tents pitched on them would not be flooded in case of rain. Fire pits had been dug and lined with rock, and cords of wood waited, seasoning, serving for a time as a fence around the campground. One of the creeks that fed the lake had been diverted into a rock-lined channel that snaked through the campground, not only making it possible to catch fresh trout for dinner or scoop up some drinking or washing water, but tinkling and burbling so pleasantly that Ian suspected it had somehow been tuned.
And a marble bench had been erected, so that anybody camping here could sit and admire the night, listen to the creek, and inhale the woodsy smell of banked campfires, and watch a sliver of moon hang in the sky above the lake.
He had been hoping that M
arta might join him. He could hardly walk over to her tent and expect to brush past her guards, but it would have been nice to have her company. He could still smell her hair, almost.
Well, there would surely be time to themselves, somewhere between here and the Seat. Just not in a campground with both of her brothers and a troop of soldiers a few yards and fewer thicknesses of cloth away.
The trouble was, there was nobody to talk to. He wasn’t comfortable around Marta’s brothers—he felt guilty, still, about the way Ivar del Hival had set up Burs Erikson, and Aglovain Tyrson was an older brother who didn’t like the way his sister had taken to this stranger, possible Promised Warrior or not. Arnie had turned in, and Ivar del Hival was off swapping lies with some of his new friends.
He should have just felt a little bit lonely, maybe. But why did he feel like such an asshole? The whole point of this had been to get Hosea well, and Ian didn’t doubt for a moment that Harbard was as good as his word on that point. And if stopping a war was the price to be paid for that, that wasn’t exactly a big moral problem. It wasn’t like Ian had been asked to start a war. So a few hundred or thousand or hundred thousand innocents who would otherwise have died in battle or as a consequence of it would now likely lead longer lives.
Was this a bad thing? No.
Arnie had a theory that it was going too well, but Ian didn’t buy that, not really. Things going well didn’t bother Ian, or he couldn’t have settled in to Hardwood so well.
A brush fence had been thrown up around the spot at the edge of the campground where Ian had secured Gungnir, and a guard posted, so he didn’t have to worry about that.
But he still felt like shit.
Ivar del Hival plopped himself down on the bench next to him.
“Art thou greatly wroth?” he asked.
“Eh?”
“It’s from your Bible, Ian. God to Jonah.”
“You’ve read the Bible.”
Ivar shrugged. “I’ve been around. You read a little of this, a little of that. Learn a language or three.” He patted at his ample belly. “Back when I was younger and had less of this to haul around, His Warmth used to send me on some errands, here and there.” He shook his head and sighed. “Getting too old for this, perhaps, but some of the old skills, the old talents, they stick with you.”
“Like faking a disarm.”
Ivar del Hival chuckled. “You have a strange faith, Ian. I have heard you claim that this fencing thing was merely a shovel, simply a way to make a living after your father kicked you out.”
“Well, it was.” Ian had taken it up mainly as yet another regular activity that kept him out of the house, and by the time Benjamin Silverstein had made it clear that he despised this activity just as much as he despised everything else his useless son did, Ian had been hooked. At first, of course, he had expected to become Errol Flynn overnight, but it hadn’t taken more than a dozen lessons for him to learn that that wasn’t what fencing was all about. There was something beautiful and elegant about fencing, about foil fencing in particular, that suited him.
But then, when he found himself standing outside what no longer was his home, a duffel bag in one hand, his gear bag in his other, a bruise on his left cheekbone matching the one on the knuckles of his right hand, he had had in his pocket $87.50 and the key D’Arnot had given him to what almost everybody else called the fencing studio, but which D’Arnot insisted was a salle d’armes. He slept in the supply room that night, his duffel bag for a pillow, and had woken that morning looking at his gear bag, realizing it contained his only salvation. Ian had had no living relatives—and certainly no close friends—it was hard to make friends when you didn’t dare bring them home and were too ashamed to ever explain why.
But he could tutor beginning fencers, and that and odd jobs here and there could keep him fed, and get him through the last couple of months of high school, and put him through college.
If he was good enough.
And he was good enough. He had to be.
But in doing that, in making sure he dominated the fencing strips, in being certain that he could regularly defeat any of D’Arnot’s other students, in carrying himself with the sureness verging on arrogance that made others willing to spend money for his time and tutoring, the joy had gone out of it. A foil was a tool, that was all.
He patted the hilt of Giantkiller. Until the moment that he had faced the fire giant, with nothing but a blade tempered in the blood of an Old One in his hand, knowing that what it would take would be him, Ian Silverstein—not D’Arnot, not Torrie Thorsen, not anybody else—to save them all, and that he had to do it as a foil fencer, because nothing else would serve, until then the joy had gone out of it.
That had brought it back, until today.
Ivar del Hival was watching him. “Then why do you look like you’ve bitten into a steak and found half a maggot? Is there something we need to talk about?”
“Nah. It’s just me being silly, and glum.” Ian shook his head. “It’s nothing much, I guess, not really. I’ve just been a bit… spoiled lately. Give me a night to sleep it off and I’ll be back to my usual cheery self.”
Ivar del Hival clapped a hard hand to his shoulder. “Then go to bed, go to sleep, and let me ruin a whole new day for you tomorrow.”
Ian’s tent was like the nobles’: A-framed, pegged down at all four corners, supported at both fore and aft of the peak by guy ropes that looped over one of the several cables that crisscrossed the campground a dozen feet above his head—they ran between trees on the edge of the campground. It meant that he didn’t have to sleep around a tent pole, and he didn’t have to worry about tripping over ground-planted tent guys in the dark.
Inside, his gear had been neatly stacked in a back corner of the tent, and sleeping blankets laid out on top of a canvas groundcloth that had been waterproofed with wax.
He quickly stripped and slid under the blankets, unsurprised to find that his bed was already warm. The nobles did well by themselves in this, too; vestri servants had dug up little divots of grass, and placed hot stones from the fireplace inches beneath the surface before replacing the divots.
The social pyramid here came to too sharp a point for Ian’s comfort. But it did mean that he would sleep warm.
Ian was never sure if he’d been sleeping, or if she simply slipped into his tent while he was yawning.
But it was her. Even if her outline hadn’t been framed in the door of the tent as she dropped the blanket she had wrapped around her, the sliver of moon high in the sky behind her, Ian would have known it was Marta. She smelled of flowers and sunshine, with just a trace of musk.
God, she was lovely in the moonlight.
She turned, and tied the door of the tent shut.
“I thought,” she whispered, “you were going to stay up talking to that loud friend of yours all night.”
“But—” But what? But her brothers? But her guards?
But what? If it was something that she thought she couldn’t handle, she wouldn’t be here.
“Shh. I slipped out the back of my tent, and even if somebody saw me, they wouldn’t have seen me.” She knelt down beside him, then slipped under the blankets. “Still, we must be quiet. Should I make too much noise, Ian, you may silence me as you wish.”
And then she was in his arms. Her skin was cold from the night, but only for moments.
When he woke in the golden light of dawn, she was gone.
He didn’t think even for a moment that it had been a dream. A dream wouldn’t have left a bite mark on the palm of his left hand and on his right earlobe, or scratches on his back.
But he wasn’t quite alone. A flower, that on cloudy days would have been called a Stay-Abed, lay, all red and gold and glorious, on the blankets beside him.
Chapter Fifteen
Storna’s Stele
Market day in the village of Storna’s Stele was a medley of sights and sounds and, particularly, smells. And tastes.
At the entry to the
market a side of something that looked too large to be a cow roasted slowly over an open fire pit. The sweaty proprietor, a magnificently fat man, naked from the waist up, reached out with his tools—a carving knife and a two-tined fork, each tied to the end of what looked to Torrie like four-foot-long chopsticks—and sliced off sizzling hunks, conveying each with a practiced flick to the rough-hewn surface of the serving table. The fat proprietor’s assistant—wife? sister? partner?—a lathe-thin woman in a dingy gray dress, quickly sprinkled each slice of meat with a practiced pinch of seasonings from a wooden bowl, then wrapped it along with a few strips of green and red vegetable in what looked like an overlarge pancake, then rolled the whole thing between her palms before exchanging it for a small copper coin from the next person in line, occasionally dipping her fingers into the pockets of her apron to produce change.
Torrie had quenched his thirst at the spring just outside the town gate, but it had been a long time since breakfast at Harbard’s Landing. “I could use a quick bite,” he said.
Dad nodded. “Wait here.” After a quick, appraising look at the crowd, Dad walked slowly to the front of the line—the crowd parted around him like he was Moses at the Red Sea—and held up three fingers, accepting three of the sandwiches in exchange for a coin from his pouch. He returned to where Torrie stood trying not to gape openmouthed, and handed one of the rolls to Maggie before giving one to Torrie.
They walked on, past a stall where dozens of plump chickens of some unfamiliar breed waited in their wooden cages, while a bald man in a badly bloodstained runic, his head sunburned and peeling, stroked a sharpening rod up and down an oversized cleaver.
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