Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1)

by Jordan MacLean

  Her father looked up at her. “What did you say?”

  “I said, there must be a way for her to defend—”

  “Her name. Yes. There it is.” He turned to Renda. “Go speak with them at the gate, and in civil tones, or all is lost. Tell them that we must grant her opportunity to defend her name against these charges, as we would any accused. Tell them those words exactly, mark. The opportunity to defend her name.”

  Renda was baffled. Defend her name? “Aye, but what good—?”

  “Trust me.” He smiled shrewdly. “They must agree. If they would have any sympathy for their rebellion, they must follow all the forms. And naturally, they would be fools to expect any less for our loyal squire than the right to defend her name. In their agreement, they sow the seeds for their own defeat.” He templed his fingers. “It’s hidden well, but I shall find it. It changes the whole flavor of the charge and sets them at risk if she is not guilty.” By now he was muttering to himself, looking over the old parchments. “Imagine it. Gikka of Graymonde served, for once, by the arcana of Syonese law.” He looked up to see her still standing before him. “Go! Be quick!”

  But by the time she reached the gate, the disgruntled villagers had already gone back along the road toward their homes, having already decided that the sheriff would not agree to their demands. As an ominous reminder, they had left behind the litter bearing Chatka’s body. Given their purpose and determination when they had approached Brannagh’s gates, Renda did not have any sense of retirement about them. They were preparing. They were leaving only to gather their horses. They were preparing to attack.

  Seventeen

  Graymonde Hall

  “Well, well,” breathed Gikka, setting her candle down on the work table. She drew her shawl up about her shoulders and let the mews door close softly behind her. “If it ain’t Colaris, come bearing tidings!”

  The little hawk’s slender, black-edged wings hung down and away from his body, and he held his beak open to pant in spite of the cold night air spilling in from the open window behind him. She could tell that he had flown hard tonight, keeping low over the trees as was his wont during the war in spite of the darkness, and now he stood tapping his foot irritably, the one with the little scrollcase strapped to the ankle. His owlish eyes glared at her before he fluffed his feathers and gave the bellpull one more ill-mannered jerk.

  “A bit slighted, are we, to carry my lord’s messages about?” She laughed gently and took the rope from his beak just as he was about to pull it again. “Oh, no. I’ll thank you to leave the bell lie a bit.” She set down the small pan of water she had brought up with her and stroked his back once before she strapped the falconing glove on her arm. “Here you are, and mind you drink it slow.”

  While the bird sipped daintily at the water and cocked back his head to swallow, Gikka moved to the window and looked out into the night, over the shadowy grounds of Graymonde Hall and beyond the gate to the darkness of the road leading toward Brannagh. The sheriff had not sent his hawks out with messages since the war, when speed was of the essence. She looked back at the bird who was visibly more comfortable now. Something was surely amiss that they would risk sending out the sheriff’s prize harrier by night, even with the protections Nara must have set over him.

  Gikka shivered against the cold air and reached to pull the window closed, but Colaris squawked at her and flew to the sill, knocking his pan of water to the floor with a crash. The woman shook her head gravely. So he was to return by night, as well. Something was very wrong.

  “All right, then, up you come, lad,” she soothed and offered her arm to him. At once, Colaris stepped onto the glove and clutched the hard leather with the talons of one foot while he raised the other that she might take the tiny roll of parchment from its case. Even before she could open the scroll, the bird fluttered his wings impatiently. So they were expecting no reply, then. Gikka quickly fed him some small pieces of dried meat that she had brought up with her then closed the empty scrollcase at his ankle and sent him on his way, shutting the small window behind him.

  The seal on the scroll was set from a perfect miniature of the signet in the sheriff’s ring, a match to the seal she had cracked on the outside of the case. Even so, she doubted the message had come from him. She opened the little parchment and squinted at the tiny writing in the light of the candle she had brought up with her.

  After she had read the message for the third time, after she had set it aflame with her candle and set it to burn on the stone workbench, even after the last ash had been taken up by a draft and dashed against the doorway to dust, she sat in the empty silence and watched the candle wax melt and drip down until at last the flame puddled and drowned.

  “Just a wee owl,” growled Maddock squinting up into the moonlit sky. They had slowed their horses to listen, having only glimpsed the bird as it crossed the small patch of sky above the trees. In any case, it flew against their way, not with it. “Ride on.”

  “An owl,” muttered one of the men behind him as he kicked up his horse, “but no owl flies so high or so fast.” When Maddock continued to ride away without making answer, the man nudged his horse forward to catch up.

  “A hawk, then,” Maddock snapped back, “but it ain’t no bloody flying wolf.”

  The men fell silent now, marching their horses through the thinner woods at the southern boot heel edge of the Bremondine forestlands. Soon the trees would thin away to the west, and they would continue along the woodland border northwestward toward the outermost foothills of the Fraugham mountain range and the mines, and from there back to the main road and straight on to Graymonde Hall. Another two hours at this rate; two hours of fearful shadows that turned his men’s anger to fear and dulled their resolve against Chatka’s murderer. But for the time saved cutting through the woods, he might have been better served to keep to the main roads and avoid all the dangers, real and imagined, of the Bremondine forests.

  Never mind the Bremondines themselves, the lowlifes, ever at picking pockets in the cities or working schemes against simple farmers. That was all they were suited to, robbing and thieving and whoring and murdering, passing off the rotten wood of their forests to them as was too poor to afford proper Brannford wood. Maddock sneered. Never seen a Bremondine as worked an honest forge or tilled an honest field, no, nor sold a stick of hale timber—damnable thieves and beggars, the lot of them, and on these hidden forest roads where the sheriff’s knights never came, they were shameless cutthroats and brigands, robbing any as came along.

  But Maddock was sure his men hadn’t spent a moment’s thought between them on the Bremondines, not them. Oh, no. Their brains were muddled in the legends and stories, ever seeking out the glimpse of the beautiful siren women or golden coinworms on the ground. Or their damnable flying wolves—great bats, these, with wings the span of a man’s arms, whose look alone would steal a guilty man’s soul right through his eyes. Maddock snorted audibly. He’d heard all the same stories himself over the years, but truth to tell, he’d traveled these woods his whole life, trapping and hunting, and he’d never yet seen anything more dangerous than a wild boar. Nothing except those damned Bremondines.

  The villagers would never take his word, not when their eyes peered to and fro through the shadows making up wights and wyverns to menace them. He looked back over them, no longer seeing vengeance and determination but seeing only fatigue and fear. It was one thing to glory in the plan to attack Graymonde Hall and destroy the sheriff’s assassin, especially with the women looking on and waving their kerchiefs to your courage. It was quite another in the quiet and wicked dark of the forests to think of facing down Gikka of Graymonde on her own lands, in her own manor, after riding a hard three hours by night. Before long, they would be wanting to turn back.

  “A hawk, did you say?” Botrain kicked his horse up to ride beside Maddock. “But hawks don’t fly by night.”

  Maddock turned a glare on him. “Of course they do,” he muttered. “Else you’d not h
ave seen one, would you?”

  “This is a house of the dead,” whispered Chul. He set his back into a corner of the sunken doorway where he crouched beside Gikka and peered fearfully at the top of the crumbling marble stairs that ascended to the ground level just above his head. He was certain that the small square of dark sky above him was shrinking.

  Desecrator. Mohoro eats trespassers.

  The ground was closing over his head to swallow him up. He could already feel the tightness in his chest where Mohoro of the Underground stole away his breath.

  “Aye, that it is. The old Graymonde crypt.” Gikka glanced at him while she held the candle flame against the iron of the lock to soften the wax seal. “If you’d rather, you can mind the horses. I’ll be but a moment.”

  Weak at the knees, boy?

  “No, no, I’m fine. I’ll stay with you.” Chul scratched nervously at the threadbare woolen breeches he wore and looked away from the shrinking patch of night sky into the darkness beyond the rusty mausoleum gate, his brain blistering with fear that he might see his father’s rotting face floating in the flickering shadows. First the stone bedchamber, now this… “But why do we disturb the dead? I thought you said...” His voice cracked, and he fell silent, ashamed at the sound of fear in his voice.

  “Aye, we will away, and soon enough, but I’ve business below first.” Gikka gently pried up the soft edges of the seal with the long sides of her fingernails, careful not to distort the mark, an ornate G raised within a flattened square. Then she warmed the iron of the lock again and pried a bit more of the wax up, a knife blade’s width at a time, so it seemed to Chul. And again. Once the seal was peeled free of the lock, she flattened it across Chul’s hand to cool. “Take care you don’t muck it up, aye? I’ll need it again to close the gates.”

  The boy stared at the wax seal, shutting out all the darkness and the closeness of the soil and stone rising around him. But then he moved the seal into the candlelight and looked at it carefully. He shook his head at the black lines that ran through the red wax. “This wax is burned, see the streaks? You’d best use fresh.” When she only smiled, he looked up at her. “Why do you want to use this one again?” Then he sat back in amazement. “This is not your seal, is it?”

  “The seal is mine, sure enough,” she said, oiling her key before she slipped it into the lock, “or it were, once upon a time. Right up until the miners took the damned signet and made themselves a cast of it. For now, it serves me best to let them think their counterfeit fools me. And best to have this same seal back in place, old burn marks and all, when I go.”

  “The miners?” He found the thought of men who spent most of their lives underground both terrifying and fascinating, but try as he might, he had never caught a glimpse of one; somehow, he was always away on one of Gikka’s errands whenever they came up to Graymonde Hall.

  “Aye, the lowlifes.” She turned the key in the lock and pushed open the gate. “There we are.” She picked up the cloth sack she had brought with her and started down the stairs.

  Chul felt sick. Another flight of stairs descended below them, deeper into the darkness, into the guts of the underground.

  Chul glanced back at the square of moonlight high above him before he swallowed his fear and self-loathing and followed Gikka into the crypt. He carried the strange wax seal ahead of him as a sort of talisman against the spirits and demons of the underground, an absurd token, some small excuse for his presence in this sacred place. As he walked, he mouthed prayers to Nekraba, the goddess of the dead, and Her consort, the pale giant Mohoro, to forgive his intrusion.

  But in spite of his fear and his prayers, he saw no demons here, nor any other fearful monsters of the depths. The crypt was empty; he could feel it. The spirits of the dead had deserted this place centuries ago, just as Aidan said they abandoned their barrows in the Kharkara plains once their bodies turned to ash. No terrors seeped from the walls, no ghostly voices railed against him here. Except for the broken catafalques and a single stone casket near the back wall, nothing remained of the ancients of Graymonde, not even their names.

  The crypt itself was another matter. The granite floor and walls were buckled and cracked and looked like they were poised to fall in over him, and telltale bits of soil stood at the open cracks, ready to burst through the walls to cover them and their trespass. Yet Gikka moved beneath the broken stones of the walls without a second thought. Chul blinked his eyes and looked again. He even made bold enough to touch the stones gently. These broken slabs of granite had been standing thus for hundreds of years. A third glance and he supposed he might even be able to climb them, though he reeled with vertigo.

  He had to walk carefully over the uneven floor to keep from dropping the wax seal. These breaks, like those in the walls, were not new, he saw, nor were the strange scorched areas that occasionally appeared in the light of Gikka’s candle, and he found himself wondering just what had made those of Graymonde abandon their family mausoleum so long ago.

  He was about to ask Gikka, but she had already moved toward the single remaining casket. Just as Chul’s worst fears told him she might, she set down the sack and began to pry up the lid. To his surprise, the lid was no more than a thin sheet of stone, not the true lid for that sarcophagus at all, and Gikka lifted it easily. While she set it down against the wall of the crypt, he steeled himself—

  Guess who’ll be there looking up at you, boy.

  —and stepped over the broken floor to look into the open grave.

  “Aye,” whispered Gikka with a grin. She knelt beside the casket and picked up a handful of the rough gems that lay inside. “They’ve been busy, my thieving miners have.” She turned to him. “Come, find a spot to set down that wax. Do as I do; we’ve no time to waste.”

  Once the villagers had ridden free of the forest, Maddock led them to join the road that led north. Almost as soon as the trees were behind them, they stopped their trembling whispers of flying wolves and avenging dragons and silently rejoined the task ahead of them with their courage refreshed in the openness of the land ahead. Only occasionally did bunches of trees sidle up to the road, and even so, they were low enough that on the whole, the men felt they could see from one side of the foothill valley to the other.

  By day or in the early evening hours when fires burned and candles lit the windows, they might have been able to see the manor house from here, but this late, the road was dark all the way into the mountains, even through the little Hadrian mining town that lay along this road. Even so, they followed the road with determination, sure now of their way.

  Zinion neighed and nipped irritably at Chul’s horse, the one the boy had taken from the tavern’s hitching post on his first journey to Brannagh. Both animals stood at the gate in bare tack over worn saddle blankets, the one nearly invisible against the shadowy darkness with his eye to the road and his ears well forward to listen, the other showy and white and grazing stupidly against the fence. They carried nothing that would betray them as belonging to Graymonde Hall. Their saddlebags held food and extra clothing against the cold, Chul’s few belongings, but little else. They would need their speed.

  Zinion’s head turned back toward the crypt, and he neighed again, softly this time and with a note of anxiety.

  “Aye, lad, we’re coming.” Gikka pulled the rusty gate closed behind her and set about warming the back of the wax seal with the candle while Chul brushed away the little bits of rust that had crumbled from the hinge. Gikka would rather leave no sign for the miners that she had found their cache. Nothing, at least, on the outside of the crypt.

  She matched the notched teeth of the lock to the relief on the back of the seal and pressed it very gently into the lock, making sure not to scrape any of the hard wax away in telltale curls. A squinted eye showed her, to her satisfaction, that the mark was not distorted before she warmed the lock again to set the seal against it. That done, she and Chul ran to the horses, and just before she mounted, she looked far to the south along the ro
ad to see several tiny pinpoints of lantern light dancing and bobbing along the road.

  Once more she looked back at her manor house, the only home she had ever known, and once more she found herself inclined to stay and wait for them to come. Renda’s message had said that once the heat of their ire had passed, only ten had had the will to follow Maddock and Botrain to Graymonde, so she would face a round dozen at most. She had her doubts that so many would in fact reach Gikka’s gate after a three hours’ journey, that some of them would surely have turned back.

  Gikka was more than certain of besting so many tired villagers on her own lands, especially with the boy’s help. They could pick them off one by one, for all of her, and it would be a goodly lesson for the boy, besides. But what of the twelve that would come to avenge them, and the twelve after that, if so many remained?

  No, she told herself as she swung up into Zinion’s saddle, she would go, as Renda had said she should, to lose herself and the boy in the Farras Maze until the farmers could be made to see reason or the sheriff could find means of defending her from them with the law. Were she alone, she might be tempted to ride for Brannford on the east coast, to her old haunts by the shipyards, but that would lead her past Brannagh or at the very least through the sheriff’s lands. Even if no one saw her, if no one recognized her, she might well catch her death of plague and carry it into Brannford with her, and once it reached the ports, no place in the world would be safe.

  On the other hand, no plague had yet touched Farras as far as anyone knew, though the city lay closer to Brannagh than B’radik’s temple, and Farras would put her close enough to let her offer aid if the castle were attacked, as Renda feared it might be. Besides, Gikka had the boy with her, and in Farras, this close to the Kharkara plains, one more Dhanani would not raise a brow. In Brannford they were much less common a sight; she’d have to have some story for him there. No, she had to agree with Renda. For now, at least, the Maze in Farras was her best choice.