The Highwayman matched his stare and saw that it was a vacant thing. Bransen turned away with a laugh. He heard the man mumble something, then felt the rush of air as the warrior just fell facedown to the dirt. The man with the sword was up across the way, lurching over to grab across his chest at his burned shoulder. His eyes went wide when Bransen stared at him, and with a yelp, he turned and ran off.
The silver flash of a reflection caught Bransen's attention, and he looked to the side to see the knife he had kicked high into the trees now lying on the ground. He slipped his toe under it and flipped it into his waiting hand, retracting with a single, fluid motion. He sent the knife out end over end, burying its blade into the back of the fleeing man's thigh. With a grunt of agony the man grabbed at it and bent over, swerving unevenly, half falling, half throwing himself into a bush.
Bransen surveyed his work. The woman with the knife moaned softly and almost breathlessly as she tried to suck in enough air to keep herself alive. The man he had hit with the right hook lay facedown, exactly as he had fallen. The woman in the bedroll, though, had pulled herself up to one elbow and had kicked her covers mostly aside.
The Highwayman surprised her when he grabbed her hard by the hair and tugged her head back viciously. Her eyes widened when she saw Bransen's right hand cocked back behind his ear, fingers stiffened for a killing blow upon her exposed throat.
She stared up at the masked face and knew her doom.
"My baby girl," she mouthed silently, for she knew that her life was surely at its end. Her expression reflected that hopelessness, and her whole body just relaxed in the resignation of ultimate despair.
Bransen Garibond saw it and recognized it, and it shamed him profoundly.
He wanted to be callous enough to drive his fingers into her throat and claim his first gold piece. Only then, behind the emotional fence of absolute ambivalence, could he truly be free of his agony and grief. He let go of her hair and stumbled backward, gagging.
"Damn you, King Yeslnik!" he swore, and he spun away, tripped to his knees. He gagged as he caught himself on all fours and threw up. "Damn you, Laird Ethelbert," he coughed and gasped between puking.
"Damn all of you!" he shouted into the night when he stood straight once more. He threw his head back, his arms out wide to the side, and screamed as loudly as he could manage with all the strength of his emotional agony reflected in every note.
He hated them, all of them, for what they had done to his father and his mother and to Garibond Womack. But mostly, Bransen hated them for what they had done to him, here and now, for the insanity of this absurd war that had brought him out here in the unfitting guise of a murderer.
They had made the Highwayman an assassin, an uncaring, unfeeling tool of murder, and nothing more.
"Damn you," Bransen said to the woman in the bedroll, who was sitting up now and staring at him incredulously.
"Damn them all," he said to her.
She shook her head, her mouth hanging open.
Soon after, Bransen Garibond stumbled through the forest feeling more like the unbalanced Stork than the cocksure and powerful Highwayman. In his hand he clenched a gemstone, a soul stone that he had used to minimize the wounds of all five of his "victims."
He hadn't earned his five pieces of gold; he hadn't taken them prisoner, even (for he feared that Bannagran would likely have executed them); he hadn't even robbed them!
But had he done any good, truly, by following his conscience? Wouldn't they just be out there when Bannagran closed in on Ethelbert, ready to join in the fight and die anyway, or to kill some men of Pryd or Delaval, perhaps?
The questions were way beyond him. Sensibility was way beyond him. He was stumbling more profoundly then, walking with an awkward and clumsy gait, falling more than once. At first he thought it was just his confusion, but as he continued on, ever more slowly, it began to dawn on him that something was very wrong here.
His line of ki-chi-kree was not holding. He felt it shivering and splintering. He took a deep breath and stood as straight as he could, and tried to walk.
He was the Stork.
The image of the woman, her head pulled back, her lament for a child she would never again see, haunted him and closed in on him, even as the words of Reandu's protest echoed in his mind.
His personal journey down Jameston Sequin's first road had led Bransen to the edge of a dark and deep hole, and the Stork realized to his horror that he had fallen in.
ELEVEN
The Restless Dame
"Aye, lady, o lady!" came the shouts across the waters, echoing up the stones to the back wall of St. Mere Abelle.
"I bid you go back into the chapel," Brother Giavno said to Dame Gwydre when she arrived on the wall, stoically and stubbornly staring out to sea past the wreckage of the blockade boat to the solitary Palmaristown warship in sight between the high cliffs that sheltered the chapel's docks.
Behind Gwydre, Father Premujon reached for her arm as if to give motion to Giavno's reasonable request.
But Dame Gwydre pulled away.
"I need to hear this," she said.
"Yer Pireth Vanguard's burned, lady!" a sailor on the ship called out. "We sacked her good, we did. Now we've yer women, and fine they be, lady! Come and join with us, and if ye're half the ride of yer peasants, then welcome ye'll be!"
"Is it confirmed?" Gwydre asked tersely.
"Lady?" asked a flustered Brother Giavno.
"Pireth Vanguard," the dame replied. "Has it been sacked?"
Giavno closed his eyes and mumbled a quick prayer to St. Abelle. "Aye," he said. "We know not the extent, but one of the brothers sent his spirit across the gulf and saw that Pireth Vanguard has, indeed, been hit hard."
"And their claim of stealing women?"
Giavno shook his head and held his hands up helplessly. "I know not."
"Could it be true?" Gwydre asked, turning to her friend Premujon. The father had no answer, but his sour expression spoke volumes.
"Send forth more brothers in spirit form, across the gulf, the length of Vanguard's coast," Gwydre demanded.
"We are taxing them greatly," warned Premujon. "This is no easy task-few brothers can so energize the soul stone for such a journey, and fewer still can do so repeatedly."
"I will know the fate of Vanguard," the woman replied in no uncertain terms.
"It is a difficult task," Brother Giavno intervened. "And dangerous."
"I know the risks. But I will know of my home," Dame Gwydre said flatly. She turned back to stare at the distant sails, and when more taunting rolled in with the waves, the lady moved to the ladder and away from the wall.
"It is a difficult time," Father Premujon said to the obviously shaken Brother Giavno. He didn't have to finish his thought, for he knew that everyone at St. Mere Abelle shared it: As difficult as the current situation might be, it was only going to get worse.
Much worse.
Almost on cue, the whole of the courtyard shook as a boulder thrown by one of Laird Panlamaris's catapults slammed into the wall across the way. The opening salvo of a barrage, they knew, and so the brothers followed Gwydre down from the wall and into the strongly fortified chapel structure to ride out the latest rain in an unending storm. Dawson McKeege tore off a piece of smoke-dried fish and chomped it hard, then spat it out onto the deck, muttering with rage. For he, too, heard the echoes of the taunts being hurled from the decks of the Palmaristown warships, aimed at his beloved Dame Gwydre.
"We should put out from our shore running and put the dogs to the water," one sailor remarked, walking past the captain.
"I'll kill 'em four at a time for ye, Captain," another called.
Dawson munched another bite of the chewy fish, grumbling with every movement. How helpless he felt! Lady Dreamer had run fast from Ethelbert dos Entel, sweeping past the few fishing boats still sailing along the Mantis Arm and catching the strong Mirianic breezes on their turn into the Gulf of Corona. It hadn't taken them long to r
ecognize the coming problems, however, for the gulf waters were thick with warships, Palmaristown and Delaval City's fleet. Lady Dreamer had a short keel, though, and so the coastal shallows served as their sanctuary from the much larger warships, both because they could keep out of reach of the deeper-riding ships in many areas and because the shore provided them with some measure of camouflage. Still Lady Dreamer only unfurled her sails under the cover of night, for if she was sighted, she would be shadowed by an increasing fleet of hostile ships and would be boxed in against the shore with nowhere to flee.
They weren't many miles from the cove and St. Mere Abelle's docks now as the crow might fly, but Dawson knew that the treacherous waters and uneven reefs meant more than a day of hard sailing to get in, and he knew, too, that they'd never make it without fighting through at least two warships, each of them twice Lady Dreamer's size. They couldn't get home by sea. It would take at least two days of sailing to find a proper place to debark for a hike to the chapel, and even then, what obstacles, what ranks of enemy soldiers, might they find?
"Man in the water!" came a shout, and sailors began running to the starboard rail, pointing anxiously.
Dawson looked all about in confusion, for no other boats were to be seen. Had one of his men fallen overboard in these calm seas? He understood when he arrived at the rail, but his eyes went even wider in surprise. The description "man in the water" didn't really fit, he decided, for this one was more on top of the water-in fact, running on top of the water.
"Crazy monk," one sailor remarked.
"Brother Pinower!' another said excitedly, for Pinower was known to the crew of Lady Dreamer.
Huffing and puffing, the monk reached the side of the Vanguard flagship. "Might I trouble you for a rope?" he asked between gasps. Makes me glad we got no women," Gnurgle the powrie captain said to the first officer of his barrelboat as they, too, listened to the wicked taunting of the Palmaristown crew. "All them longlegs're ever thinkin' about."
The first mate spat in his open palm and winked lewdly at the captain.
"Ye wantin' to sink the dogs?" he asked.
Gnurgle scanned the waters, noting three other warships within an easy sail of the one whose crew was doing all the shouting. He had only three other barrelboats in his shiver, and these enemies weren't the smaller warships so common along the outer shore.
"Nah, Shiknickel and his boys are waiting for us in the river," he decided. "If we find any o' these sailing alone, we'll put her to the waves and put her boys to the blade, but we're not going against this many afore we've met up with the rest o' the boys."
The first mate spat in the water at that, obviously unhappy, but he kept his grumbling to a minimum. "I'll get us moving, then," he said as he moved back to the hold and the ranks of powries at the pedals. "Sooner we get to the river, the sooner we get to spill some blood. Me beret's going dull."
"Aye, get us moving but keep us wide," Gnurgle ordered, for he knew his bloodthirsty second-in-command well enough to understand that an "accidental" encounter wasn't out of the question here.
Gnurgle really didn't want to engage these particular warships, whose decks were full of archers. Normally he wouldn't have cared much about the odds, but Shiknickel's call had been full of optimism that there would be plentiful bloodletting along those riverbanks.
Patience would make his beret shine all the more. It took all of Dawson's willpower to keep from screaming several times, particularly when he and Brother Pinower crossed near to jagged rocks with a heavy surf threatening to wash them in hard. Dawson held to Pinower's hand with all his strength, thoroughly uncomfortable with this magical water walking, for that hand-to-hand connection extended the magical powers of the malachite from Pinower to him. If he let go, the cold, dark waters would take him.
By the time the two finally got into the cove near St. Mere Abelle's docks, a predawn glow had brightened the eastern sky, and by the time they got onto the docks themselves, the morning light shone brilliantly.
But no more brilliantly to Dawson than the image of Dame Gwydre and of Callen Duwornay, when he met up with them soon after. He rushed to his lady and kissed her hand, then swept over to Callen and crushed her in a great hug and a passionate kiss that went on so long it had Dame Gwydre giggling and Callen's daughter, Cadayle, blushing.
"I told ye I'd be back for ye," Dawson said when at last they broke the kiss, though neither showed any hint of easing up on the hug.
"I never doubted you," Callen replied.
"You delivered my emissaries?" Dame Gwydre asked, and, finally, the couple shifted side by side.
"Aye, they're with Ethelbert, and it seems we've an alliance," said Dawson.
Dame Gwydre breathed a sigh of relief, as did everyone in the room, including Brother Giavno and Father Premujon.
Dawson noted Cadayle staring at him hopefully, but the daunting question came not from her, but from Callen, standing at his side. "Any news of Bransen, then?"
Dawson tried to appear calm, but his sinking expression spoke volumes to all around before he finally stammered out, "We didn't see him, no, but Cormack and Milkeila will find out where he is, don't ye doubt."
Many exchanged concerned looks at the hesitancy in Dawson's response, and all of those gazes eventually settled on Cadayle.
"You didn't see him, but what word did you hear?" Callen asked, and when Dawson hesitated, she added, "You wouldn't be a smart one to start lying to me now."
The old sea dog rocked back on his heels. "We're worried for him, to be sure, but we heard no word, and, truth be told, we feared to ask too much. Ethelbert's bodyguard, a woman of Behr, is carryin' a sword much like Bransen's. Our guess is that them two met. She's just like him in that Jhesta Tu thing, so we're hoping he's out working for her."
"But you're fearing…?" Cadayle prompted.
"Not for knowing," said Dawson. "Cormack and Milkeila will learn the truth of him, if there's any truth to be known in Ethelbert's domain."
Cadayle started to inquire further, but Callen grabbed her arm and hushed her, nodding toward Dame Gwydre and Father Artolivan in a not-so-subtle reminder that there were other matters to discuss, however much they both feared for Bransen.
"So we have Ethelbert with us, and that is no small thing," Dame Gwydre stated. "But our scouts claim that Yeslnik marches once more to Ethelbert dos Entel, and he has us trapped in here by that wretched Panlamaris on the land and a great armada in the gulf."
"And they're hitting at Vanguard, so they're shouting," said Dawson.
"They are," Gwydre confirmed. "The brothers have ventured there in spirit form."
"And we're not for getting to our kin," Dawson remarked.
"Then what are we, here, to do?" asked Gwydre. "We cannot simply sit behind these walls and hope that the events of the world turn in our favor."
"Cormack will approach Bannagran of Pryd, as we proposed," Father Premujon reminded. "He is a fine emissary, and I believe that Master Reandu will support our proposition."
"Bannagran will more likely be swayed if we secure the former alliances of Ethelbert-the coastal holdings east of here," Dame Gwydre reasoned. "Let us bring them into our alliance. "Brave Brother Pinower has shown us that Milwellis's net isn't nearly as tight as he believes, after all. My ship awaits not far from here, I trust."
"Sitting quiet in a cove," Dawson confirmed.
"It is time for me to go out," Dame Gwydre decided, to more than a few fearful gasps. "Fear not, for I will not walk openly and will not walk alone."
"If all the brothers and all the former prisoners here at St. Mere Abelle were to accompany you, and Dawson's crew as well, it would not be enough," Premujon replied. "Lady, I beg, you are too important to take such a chance."
"I cannot simply sit here to the drumming of Panlamaris's catapults and the songs of sailors' taunts while the world is conquered around us."
"And if you go out and are caught, then there is no hope against Yeslnik," Premujon reminded. "None."
They all did. Brother Jurgyen yanked open the flimsy door and threw aside the heavy dark curtain, rushing to the side of screaming Brother Auchance, who lay curled on the floor. He couldn't quiet the poor young man, couldn't even uncurl him from the fetal position. He looked into the monk's eyes and saw nothing but a blank stare.
Auchance was looking far, far away.
Jurgyen had seen this before, and so he closed his eyes and hugged the brother close. The man had fallen into the body of another, probably someone a hundred miles away, and had become entwined in a battle of souls for that foreign body. There was no way for a spirit-walking brother to win in that situation, for even a temporary victory would mean possession, and possession could not endure (nor should it, since it was considered among the most immoral possibilities of gemstone magic).
The brother had been evicted. As the magic of the stone had faded, he'd found his way back to his own corporeal body, here in the one of the meditation rooms in St. Mere Abelle. But the experience had broken him, Jurgyen knew from bitter experience.
Other brothers arrived behind him. He backed out of the tiny closet and bade them to take poor, young Auchance to a bed in the rooms of healing. "Tie him down," he instructed, and they nodded, for they all knew that the monk would injure himself in his likely fits of thrashing.
Brother Jurgyen stormed away. Perhaps Auchance would recover, and perhaps he would die. There was nothing that Jurgyen or any of the brothers could do to help with this malady, and that helplessness only infuriated him as he made his way to Dame Gwydre's chambers. He knocked hard on the door and burst through it before the woman had even bade him to enter.
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