The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  “What is that?” Stephen whispered.

  Ehan stood a few feet away, whispering hastily with another monk, a gray-haired fellow Stephen had never seen before. The two briefly embraced, and the gray-hair hurried off.

  “Just come on,” Ehan said. “If it’s what we think it is, we don’t have time to spare. We’ve a few men waiting for us at the lower end of the valley, making sure nothing’s coming that way.”

  “What about the fratrex?”

  “Someone has to bait it to stay here for a while.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  His mind raced back to recall the whispered conversation between Ehan and the other man; he hadn’t been paying attention, but his ears ought to have heard it anyway.

  He had it now. “A woorm?” he gasped.

  Images crowded into his mind, all from tapestries, illustrations, children’s tales, and ancient legends. He stared up at the hillside.

  In the faint starlight he saw the motion of trees, a long, snaky line of them. How long was it? A hundred kingsyards?

  “The fratrex can’t stay and fight that,” Stephen said.

  “He won’t be alone,” Ehan said. “Someone has to delay it here, make it believe its prize is still in d’Ef.”

  “Its prize?”

  “What it’s after,” Ehan said, the exasperation becoming plain in his voice. “You.”

  “FIRE IS a wonderful thing,” Cazio said happily. He used his native tongue so he would understand himself. “A woman is a wonderful thing. A sword is a wonderful thing.”

  He reclined on a velvet couch next to the great hearth in the grand salon of Glenchest, one half of him baking and the other pleasantly warm and cushioned. If the fireplace was not lit, a man easily could walk in and stand up; that was how big it was, a giant slice of orange, a half-moon on the horizon, Austra’s smile inverted.

  He reached lazily for the bottle of wine the duchess had given him. It wasn’t wine, actually, but a bitter greenish tonic that had far more bite than the blood of Saint Pacho. He hadn’t liked it at first, but between it and the fire, he felt as if his body were made of fur, and his mind was pleasantly reflective.

  Esverinna Taurochi dachi Calavai. She’d been tall, as tall as Cazio, with limbs that seemed a bit long and awkward. Eyes like honey and hazelnut mixed together and long, long hair that sprouted almost black but paled to the color of her eyes toward the ends. He remembered that she always hunched just a little, as if ashamed of her regal height. In his arms, her length had felt luxurious, something he could stretch against infinitely.

  She was beautiful but unaware of her beauty. Passionate but innocent of her desires. They both had been thirteen; she was already promised to marry a far older man from Esquavin. He had thought to duel the man, he remembered, but Esverinna had stopped him with these words: You will never truly love me. He does not love me, but he might.

  Maio Dechiochi d’Avella had been a distant cousin of the Mediccio of Avella, the town of Cazio’s birth. Like most young men of means in that place, he studied fencing with Mestro Estenio. Cazio had quarreled with him about the result of a game of dice. Swords had been drawn. Cazio remembered how surprised he had been to see fear in Maio’s eyes. He himself had felt only exhilaration.

  The duel had consisted of exactly three passes: an unconvincing feint by Maio, becoming an attack in seft to Cazio’s thigh, and his parry of the attack and riposte in prismo, resulting in Maio’s mad scramble out of distance. Cazio had renewed the attack; Maio parried violently but did not riposte. Cazio repeated the attack, exactly the same as before; again Maio blocked without responding, apparently happy just to have stopped the thrust. Cazio quickly redoubled and hit him in the upper arm.

  He had been twelve, and Maio thirteen. It was the first time he had ever felt flesh give beneath his steel.

  Marisola Serechii da Ceresa. Fine obsidian hair, the face of a child, the heart of a wolf. She knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was to watch Cazio fight for her and then exhaust what remained of his energy in the silk sheets of her bed. She was a licker, a biter, a screamer, and she treated his body as if it were a rare treat she would never have enough of. She had stood hardly to his chest, but with three touches she could rob him off his will. She had been eighteen, and he had been sixteen. He often wondered if she was a witch and thought for certain she was when she dismissed him. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t love him, and years later one of his friends told him her father had threatened to hire assassins if she did not break with Cazio and marry the man he had chosen. Cazio never got to question her about it; she died in childbirth a year after her marriage.

  St. Abulo Serechii da Ceresa, Marisola’s older brother, had spent time in the their hometown of Ceresa, studying writing and swordplay with his grand-uncle’s mestro. Aware of the relationship with his sister, St. Abulo had let drop a casually insulting remark regarding Cazio in the Tauro et Purca tavern, knowing it would get back to him. They had arranged to meet in the apple grove outside of town, each with a second and a crowd of admirers. St. Abulo was small, like his sister, but devastatingly quick, and he affected the somewhat antiquated tradition of using a mano nertro, a dagger for the left hand. The fight had ended when St. Abulo mistimed a counterthrust; he hit Cazio in the thigh, but Cazio skewered him in the ear. It was clear to both men that Cazio could as easily have stabbed him in the eye. St. Abulo conceded the point, but his second would not agree, and so he and Cazio’s second had taken up the duel. Before long, the bystanders took to one another, as well. Cazio and St. Abulo retired to watch the brawl, bind their wounds, and drink several bottles of wine.

  St. Abulo admitted that he wasn’t really much concerned with his sister’s virtue but that his father had put him up to it. He and Cazio shook hands and parted friends, which they remained until St. Abulo died of the wounds he received killing the man whose child had killed his sister.

  Naiva dazo trivo Abrinasso. The daughter of Duke Salalfo of Abrinia and a courtesan from distant Khorsu. Naiva had had her mother’s black almond eyes. She had tasted like almonds, too, and honey, and oranges. Her mother had fallen out of favor with the duke’s court when he died, but he had provided a triva for her near Avella. Cazio had met Naiva in the vineyards, squishing fallen grapes with her bare feet. She was sophisticated and jaded. She believed she had been exiled to the farthest reaches of the earth, and he’d always believed that with him she was settling for something less than she imagined. He remembered her thighs in the sunlight, hot to the touch, the sigh that was nearly a giggle. She had simply vanished one day without a word. There was a rumor that she had returned to Abrinia and become a courtesan like her mother.

  Larche Peicassa dachi Sallatotti. The first man who suggested in as many words that Naiva had been little more than a well-bred whore. Cazio had bound his blade and struck him through his left lung with such force that Caspator broke through his back. Larche was the first man Cazio had fully intended to kill. He had failed, but the man had been forever crippled by the fight, left to hobble on a crutch.

  Austra. Skin so pale that it was white even by firelight. Amber hair that tousled pleasingly, cheeks that flushed as pink as a dawn-lily. She was more fearful of twining fingers than of kissing, as if the touch of two hands was somehow an embrace much riskier to the heart.

  She had been clumsy, enthusiastic, fearful, and guilty. Happy but, as always, with an eye toward the end of happiness.

  Love was strange and terrible. Cazio had thought he could avoid it after Naiva. Courting was fun, sex a lot of fun indeed, and love—well, that was a pointless illusion.

  Maybe he still believed that, or part of him did. But if so, why did he want to twine his fingers with Austra’s until she believed him, until she relinquished her fear, skepticism, and self-doubt and understood that he actually did care for her?

  Acredo. Not really his name, of course; it just meant “sharp.” The first swordsman in so long, so very long, to really test his point.
>
  The duchess and some others were playing cards on the other side of the room, but he found that their voices had become like the piping of birds, melodic but incomprehensible. Thus, it took him a moment to realize that someone stood very near him and that the musical noises that were the loudest were intended for speech.

  He lifted his head and saw that it was Sir Neil. Cazio grinned and raised the bottle.

  “How is your foot?” Neil asked.

  “I can’t say it hurts at the moment,” Cazio replied happily.

  “I suppose not.”

  “The duchess told me not to, you see,” Cazio finished by way of explanation, then laughed for a few moments at his own joke.

  Oddly, Neil did not seem amused.

  “What is it?” Cazio asked.

  “I have the greatest regard for your bravery and swordsmanship,” Neil started.

  “As well you should,” Cazio informed him.

  Neil paused, then nodded, more to himself than to Cazio, and continued. “My duty is to protect Anne,” he said. “Protect her from all things.”

  “Well, then, it should have been you fighting Acredo, eh, and not me. Is that it?”

  “It should have been me,” Neil agreed evenly, “but I had to confer with the duchess concerning what troops she has and what we can expect, and unfortunately I was not able to be in two places at once. Nor would it have been proper for me to have been in the room with her when she was attacked.”

  “No one was in the room with her,” Cazio said. “That’s how she came to nearly be killed. Maybe someone should be in the room with her, ‘proper’ or not.”

  “You weren’t with her?”

  “Of course not. Why do you think I was naked?”

  “My question exactly. You were lodged in a different part of the mansion.”

  “I was,” Cazio said. “But I was with Aus—” He stopped. “That’s really not your business.”

  “Austra?” Neil hissed, lowering his voice. “But she was the one supposed to be in the room with Anne.”

  Cazio pushed himself up on one arm and leveled his gaze at the knight. “What are you saying? That you would rather they had both died? Acredo killed the guards. If I hadn’t been nearby, how do you imagine it would have ended?”

  “I know,” Neil said, rubbing his forehead. “I didn’t intend to insult you, only to understand why…what happened.”

  “And now you know.”

  “Now I know.” The knight paused, and his face grew almost comically long. “Cazio, it is very difficult to protect someone you love. Do you understand that?”

  Cazio suddenly felt like taking a sword to the knight.

  “I know that very well,” he said evenly. He meant to say more, but something in Neil’s eyes told him he didn’t have to. So rather than pushing it further, he just said, “Join me for a drink.”

  Neill shook his head. “No. I have too much to do. But thank you.”

  He left Cazio to increasingly more colorful memories, imaginings, and, soon enough, dreams.

  When Neil left Cazio, he felt vaguely unclean. He had suspected from their first meeting that the Vitellian and Anne might have developed some sort of relationship; he remembered Anne’s reputation. Her mother had sent her away to a coven in Vitellia precisely because she had been caught in a delicate position with Roderick of Dunmrogh.

  Thus, it would be no surprise if, traveling together all this time, something had happened between the princess and the swordsman. Nor could Neil condemn Cazio for that; he himself had engaged in improper relations with a princess of the realm, and he was less well born than the Vitellian.

  But he’d had to ask, hadn’t he?

  Still, he didn’t like it, this role. It did not suit him to question grown men about their intentions, to worry about who was naked in bed with whom. These weren’t the things he wanted to be interested in. It made him feel old, like someone’s father. In fact, he and Cazio were about the same age, and Anne wasn’t much younger.

  He remembered Erren, the queen’s bodyguard, warning him not to love Muriele, saying that loving her would get her killed. Erren had been right, of course, but had misplaced the person. It had been Fastia he loved, Fastia who died.

  He suddenly missed Erren powerfully; he hadn’t known her well, and when they had spoken, it had been mostly her putting him in his place. But Anne needed someone like Erren, someone deadly, competent, and female. Someone who could protect her with a knife and with wise words.

  But Erren had died defending her queen, and there was no one to take her place.

  He looked in on Anne. The duchess had moved her to another room, and though Neil couldn’t remember the reasoning behind the change, he felt certain that it was to make her safer.

  He found Anne apparently asleep, and Austra was sitting with her. The girl looked as if she had been crying, and her cheeks flushed brilliantly when she saw him.

  Neil entered the bedchamber and walked as softly as he could to the far side of the room. Austra got up and followed him.

  “She is sleeping?”

  “Yes. The draft the duchess gave her seems to have worked.”

  “Good.”

  Austra bit her lip. “Sir Neil, I would talk with you for a moment, if I may. I have something I must confess. Will you listen to me?”

  “I’m not a sacritor, Lady Austra,” he said.

  “I know that, of course. You are our guardian. And I fear I abandoned my lady when she most needed me.”

  “Really? You think you might have stopped the killer? Do you have resources that I don’t know about?”

  “I have a knife.”

  “The assassin killed two men who had swords. I can’t imagine that you would have fared better than they.”

  “Yet I might have tried.”

  “Fortunately, that was not tested. I wasn’t here, either, Austra. We are all very fortunate that Cazio happened by.”

  Austra hesitated. “He did not just…happen…by.”

  “Doubtless the saints guided him,” Neil said, gently. “That is all I need to know.”

  A small tear began in the corner of Austra’s eye. “It is too much,” she said. “It is all too much.”

  Neil thought she would collapse into weeping, but instead the girl dried her eyes with her sleeve.

  “But it can’t be, can it?” she said. “I shall be with her, sir knight, from here on, I assure you. I will not be distracted. Nor will I sleep when she sleeps. If the only thing I can do is to scream once before I die, at least I will not die thinking myself an utter failure.”

  Neil smiled. “That’s a fierce thing to say.”

  “I am not fierce,” Austra said. “I am not much of anything, really—just a maidservant. I have no gentle birth, no parents, nothing to recommend me but her affection. I have forgotten myself and my station. I will not do it again.”

  Neil put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t speak with shame of your birth,” he said. “My mother and father were steadholders, nothing more. There is no gentle blood in me, either, but I was born to good people, honorable people. No one can ask for better than that. And no one, no matter their birth, can ask for anything better than a loyal friend who loves them. You are fierce; I can see it in you. And you are a person of note, Austra. Hard wind and rain can wear down even a stone, and you have been in storm after storm. Yet here you are, still with us, worn but still ready to fight for what you love.

  “Do not barter yourself away for nothing. The only shame comes in surrendering to despair. That’s something I know all too well.”

  Austra smiled faintly. She had begun to cry again, but her face was steady. “I believe you do, Sir Neil,” she said. “Thank you for your kind words.”

  He squeezed her shoulder and let his hand drop. He felt older again.

  “I’ll be outside the door,” he said. “If you call, I’ll be here.”

  “Thank you, Sir Neil.”

  “And you, milady. And despite your vow, I urge
you to sleep now. I will not, I promise you.”

  Anne woke from a dream so incomprehensible as to be terrifying. She lay gasping, staring at the ceiling, trying to assure herself that the Black Marys she could not remember were the best kind.

  As the nightbale faded, she gathered her surroundings. She was in the room she and her sisters had called “the cave” because it had no windows. It was also rather large and oddly shaped. She had never stayed in the room before, but they all had played in it when she was very young, pretending it was the lair of a Scaos where they might discover treasure, though only at great peril, of course.

  Aunt Elyoner had moved her here, presumably, because she would be safer from another attempt at murder. She assumed that meant that there were no hidden passages to let her death in.

  Austra lay back on a nearby couch, head turned up, mouth open, her scratchy almost snore a comfortingly normal sound. A few candles burned here and there, and a very low flame burned in the hearth.

  Anne wondered for the first time why the room had so many couches and beds. Upon further reflection, she decided she did not really want to know what entertainment Elyoner would plan in a room with no windows.

  “How do you feel, plum?” a faint voice asked.

  Anne jumped slightly, turned her head, and sat up. She regarded Elyoner, who sat on a stool studying some cards that lay on a small table.

  “My arm hurts,” Anne said. It did; it throbbed in time with her heartbeat beneath the tight bandages.

  “I’ll have Elcien examine you in a little while. He assures me that when it heals, you will scarcely know it happened. Not like that nasty place on your leg. How did you get that?”

  “An arrow,” Anne replied. “In Dunmrogh.”

  “You’ve had quite the adventure, haven’t you?”

  Anne coughed a weak laugh. “Enough to know that there’s no such thing as adventure.”

  Elyoner smiled her mysterious little smile and dealt herself another card. “Of course there is, dove. Just as there is such a thing as a poem, an epic, a tragedy. It’s just that it doesn’t exist in real life. In real life we have terror, and problems, and sex. It’s when it gets told as a story that it becomes adventure.”