I couldn't even get up the strength to question him.
Next he carefully rolled up a sleeve of my robe. My elbow was a bloody mess from its collision with the stone wall.
He studied it, studied me, said, “Take a drink,” and held the jar to my lips. “Now."
Bossy, bossy, but I did it, drank a gulp, stared at him wondering what was next.
He lifted my other arm, put it in front of my face, said, “Bite down on your sleeve. No, do not bite yourself, just the sleeve,” and he all but stuffed a wad of velvet sleeve into my mouth.
"Try not to scream,” he said. I wondered why and then he washed my elbow and I knew what he meant because, oh God, did I want to scream. Maybe it was the mead that burned, maybe just the cloth rubbing over the scrape.
That fun experience was over in a minute or two and then, damned if the guy didn't switch arms, stuff my other sleeve in my mouth and clean up the opposite elbow.
Huh. So whether or not they knew the names for bacteria, the barbarians did know about infection. I tried to keep my mind on all these puzzles. Better than decking him, which I would have enjoyed doing.
When he was satisfied with his first aid project, he pulled me into a hug, kissed my forehead and cheeks, smoothed my hair, did a whole lot of soft murmuring about how brave I was and kind of reminded me of my grandmother. I didn't bother to tell him that.
"Done torturing me?” I managed to ask.
"Hush up,” he said and he sounded angry but I somehow got the impression that he was angry with himself, not me.
He pushed me down until I was lying on the bench with my head pillowed on his thigh, reached the length of me to tuck the hem of my robe in around my feet, then leaned his back against the wall. He kept one hand on my shoulder and it might as well have been his sword.
Ah, not really, the sword had been heavy, sharp, threatening. The pressure of his hand was firm and somehow comforting.
"Get some sleep now,” he said.
"Are you going to sleep sitting up?” I asked.
"Yes."
With no hope at all of sleeping, I closed my eyes, listened to his soft breathing, tried to relax.
I woke hours later when the sky began to gray. I was alone on the bench, my head pillowed on something soft. When I sat up I heard myself moaning. Every surface of my body felt bruised. The scrapes on my arms burned. I spread open the rolled pillow and saw it was Tarvik's fur cloak.
He was wandering around in the cold winter morning with nothing more than a sleeveless tunic over his pants and boots.
Above the courtyard wall the open sky turned light, and there were faint drifts of smoke, probably from cook fires. The smell of roast meat lingered. There were no sounds other than those of any morning, building wind, something creaking somewhere, turning flocks of birds.
I peered through the narrow crack at the edge of the gate and saw an empty outer courtyard. The gate bolt was still in place on the inside.
Okay, time to head back the way we came, through empty rooms and down the lightless passageway until I saw the silhouetted form of Tarvik in an open doorway. I moved quietly up behind him.
Without turning his head, he reached back, curled his arm around me and held me pressed against his back. Over his shoulder I could see across an open grassy expanse that stretched from the castle to the edge of the hilltop, far enough away that the men standing there didn't notice us. We were within sight, but we were in shadow. Erlan's army seemed to be gathering, sorting themselves into a ragged order, tying on their packs.
Some were roping blankets to the few horses, others collected weapons and piled them into carts. All of them stumbled with exhaustion, their hands shaking as they lifted and secured supplies.
They looked like men who had not slept much, and as we watched I saw several rub their eyes and shake their heads.
Tarvik stepped back with me glued to him, and quietly closed the passage door. My eyes had adjusted to the light and now I could see nothing in the corridor. I felt him turn, lean toward me.
With his breath warm on my face, he said softly, “They are packing up and leaving."
"Are they? Why?"
"I don't know yet. Come on, let's look."
I pushed his cloak against him and he took it and put it on.
We moved methodically through the passageway, again going in and out of rooms, checking doorways, watching for moving shadows, listening for any sound at all from inside or outside. The castle seemed deserted. But each time we went into a walled courtyard, and the castle was edged with a maze of those empty little useless pockets that contained nothing more than a bench or firepit, we could hear voices from the outer grounds.
They spoke in low tones. Most of what we heard were instructions on how to carry or fasten something. It took them the better part of the morning.
When we reached the courtyard with the mead-filled jars, they still stood against the far wall. The spit above the firepit was empty, the ashes cold.
Two warriors were in the courtyard. My breath caught and I almost turned and fled. I felt Tarvik stiffen at my side.
They sat against a far wall, their eyes open and looking at us, their heads tilted and sagging toward their shoulders. I expected them to shout or jump up to chase us.
Tarvik grabbed his dagger from his belt. I put out a hand to stop him.
"You don't need that,” I whispered and walked over to them.
Neither moved. They breathed through open mouths. They stared from unseeing eyes. They looked the way Tarvik had looked after Alakar drugged him.
We hurried to the jars and peered into them. They were empty, the one into which I had dropped the powder as well as the other two.
After that, we stayed out of sight behind walls and doorways. Out on the open grass we saw several more men lying unconscious, ignored by the others.
"How long will they be like that?” Tarvik whispered.
"If it is the same potion you drank, a day or two,” I said, “maybe longer."
"Erlan must think they're sick."
"And is leaving them behind to die."
Tarvik sighed. “They won't die, Stargazer. You know they won't. I didn't."
I don't know why I was upset. The whole purpose of drugging the mead was to convince Erlan that the castle was infected with plague. That's what I had told him to make him want to leave and it appeared to be what was happening.
For some reason, I'd assumed he would take his drugged warriors with him.
"What will we do with them?” I asked.
Tarvik shrugged. “As soon as the army leaves, we'll have to find all of those left behind and tie them up."
"You can't keep men tied up forever."
"When my blacksmith returns, we will chain their ankles."
"Like slaves?"
"That's what they will be. Quite a haul of slaves you made with that powder,” he agreed.
"I don't want to enslave anyone,” I protested.
"The alternative is to kill them, but if I do, you will be angry with me."
As happened too often when I talked to Tarvik, he was making my head hurt. I didn't like what he planned but I had no better suggestions. So I didn't bother arguing.
We waited in the castle, out of sight, until midday when we saw Erlan mount his horse. A guard walked beside him holding a banner on a pole. At some word from Erlan, the guard handed him the pole.
Erlan held the banner high above his head with the pole gripped in both hands and waved it in an arc several times. Then he handed it back to his guard. The long shabby procession began its slow winding journey down the path and across the valley.
Tarvik caught my hand. We moved quietly through the dusky halls, stopped at each corner, strained to listen. Strips of daylight cut through the empty rooms, as pale as ghosts and as spooky. I saw light and shadow shapes move in the edges of my vision, but when I turned my head there was no one there.
Sure there's ghosts, Gran always said so, but I'd never seen an
y. I hadn't believed in them, not before. But here, in this castle with its generations of warriors, believing in ghosts was a lot easier. The courtyards we crossed were full of unearthly light that seemed to shift as we passed. I was numb with cold by the time we reached the front gate. Tarvik grasped my icy hand with his warm fingers. Felt good. We saw and heard no one.
We climbed to the wall top. While I waited on the last stair, Tarvik, who was as sure-footed as a mountain goat, walked on the ledge.
To the west, a low black cloud of smoke dimmed the fading sunlight while the hillside turned dark behind the occasional flicker of a dying fire. Here the wind brushed my hair from my face and curled my robe around me. I felt warmer now that I was free of the passageway, felt like myself again standing beneath the familiar sky. I rubbed my arms and stamped my feet and concentrated on getting my blood circulating. I could see Tarvik moving against the gray sky as he circled the castle guard walk.
When he returned, he said, “They travel east and south, far beyond our hills."
East and south. Away from the mountains, away from Lor and Nance and the fires that I had told Erlan were funeral pyres. And, more importantly, away from the valley where Tarvik's people hid.
"We have won.” We grinned at each other.
In the dying daylight we stood at the edge of the thicket's shadow and watched Erlan's army move slowly toward his homeland. So fear had done the trick and Erlan had been fooled by me, by Nance, and better still, by a drug mixed by his own wife.
We returned to the western wall to build a fire to warm ourselves and to signal Nance and Lor to return. The sparks shot red and gold into the sky, a celebration, and I moved as close to them as I could. He said, “You're shivering, girl. Here, put this on."
He started to pull off his fur cloak.
"Keep it or you'll be the one who gets sick."
"It's big enough for both of us,” he said.
He stood behind me and wrapped his cloak around me and held me tightly so that I could feel his heat against my back, his chin on my shoulder. I felt too warm and safe to protest.
"How are your elbows?"
"Better,” I said, then added, “Thank you."
While we waited for a sign from Lor and Nance, he asked, “In your land, do you live in a castle?"
"No. I live in a house."
"What is a house?” It was his tell-me-a-story voice and I knew he wanted to hear about anything that would take his mind off thoughts about his father and war and traitors, and perhaps he also wanted to forget, for a while, the responsibilities he would have to face tomorrow.
So I described my house.
"It's small, but the rooms all open onto a deck facing the back garden. Sometimes on warm nights I sleep outside on the deck and I can watch the stars."
"I have never seen a place like that. Tell me about it."
Tell him about my house? Tarvik didn't know anything about houses. He knew stone castles and wood huts, but not houses.
My parents, if tested, would have flunked role-modeling. They wandered off, first one, then the other, daddy moving in with his longtime girlfriend who then tossed him out, mommy following a traveling somebody to the east coast. Who knows how many address changes they both collected. What it added up to was little Claire living with first one cranky aunt and then another. Not that they meant to be cranky, my aunts, they tried to do the mommy thing, but my mother's two sisters were both broke and underemployed and overextended and picked men who ran up debts before running out. Daddy's sister was a good egg married to a bad egg. So the three aunties took turns, a month here, six months there, for me.
I was twelve when my maternal gran was diagnosed with so many illnesses she had more prescription bottles in her kitchen cabinets than she had food. She was in a wheelchair within the year and needed someone to live with her, so my aunts grabbed that as a solution. Not a bad one, really, because it moved me into a house where I had a permanent room of my own and didn't have to keep changing schools. And Gran knew bits and pieces of magic. She could do that thing of opening her hand and lighting up a room. A couple of times the trick scared off a prowler. And she could call things to her, very small things like popped buttons and dropped hairpins. That skill only seems unimportant to someone who is not in a wheelchair.
We got along fine. She tried to teach me her tricks but I lacked that particular bit of magic. I did learn to take care of myself, help her, and stay out of the troll's way. We did okay until Gran died the year I turned eighteen. I still miss her.
As her daughters never came to call or help out in any way, and because she had long since decided they were a lost cause, she left them each some cash and she left me the house.
That could have caused a battle except the aunts didn't like the house and they needed the cash and the lawyer pointed out that the Will was legal, plus property in Mudflat was hard to sell, especially with a troll in the basement.
So that's how I ended up with a little two-bedroom house, all on one floor, about a thousand feet square. Upstairs is a small attic. Downstairs is a basement apartment and the rent from it takes care of utilities and taxes. The renter works nights, sleeps days, so our paths don't cross much, but when I am out, the grass gets mowed, hinges oiled, leaky plumbing repaired.
Should I tell Tarvik about the troll? Or would that require another long story to define troll? What the hell, he needed something else to think about than his uncle.
"There's a troll in the basement,” I said and he laughed because of course he thought I was joking.
"Do all the people in your village have houses and gardens?"
I nodded. “Or apartments. I don't actually live in a village. I live in a large city."
"And do people live with their families and share meals and do you tell stories in the evenings?"
I started to laugh, because it seemed like such an odd question, but then I thought about the castle with its endless cold and empty rooms, and guards standing in the hallways. He had no idea how anyone else lived, beyond knowing peasants lived in crowded huts and the rulers lived in lonely castles.
And so I told him a bit about Mudflat. That's what he wanted, something to picture in his mind.
"We go to our jobs during the day,” I said, and told him about a few of my friends.
Okay, I did not mention the Decko brothers, who were not friends, and not Roman, who was a sleaze. There were a couple of fun people at the bank, where I presumed I was no longer employed, and quite a few friends at the Mudflat Center House, a neighborhood center, which was solid Mudflat and peopled with assistants and counselors, all types who thought of forgiveness as a virtue and so I would be taken back like the prodigal daughter whenever I returned. If? No, not going there, not tonight.
"And then at the end of the day we sometimes hang out together."
"Hang out?"
"Watch TV, call out for pizza."
Skip trolls, it took the rest of the evening to explain about pizza and lights and heat and running water and I don't think he believed a word of it. He thought I was making up a story. As he liked anything that sounded like a story, he listened carefully and asked for explanations and descriptions, then repeated words like Seattle and Mudflat and freeway.
The fire flamed hot enough to shoot sparks and I felt much warmer. I unwound his arms from around me and stepped free of his cloak. We leaned back against the wall and watched the distant hills for an answering fire from Nance and Lor.
He kept one arm around my shoulders, holding me against his side, keeping me comfortably warm, and I gave up trying to explain electricity and switched to sports. He asked endless questions about soccer. He was as puzzled as Nance had been by the idea that the point of a game was to kick a ball past the opposing team without harming anyone.
"But wouldn't it be quicker to knock them all down and run over them?” he asked.
"That would be a battle, not a game,” I said.
"A battle is a sort of game,” he said.
> "If people get injured, that isn't much fun,” I said.
"Sure it is,” he said, and then he laughed at me. “All right, someday you'll have to teach me this game so I can find out what makes it fun."
For that one night, Tarvik and I were friends sharing a victory, trying to use happier memories to close out the horror of reality.
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Chapter 20
Winter in the Olympics. All I knew about the mountains was that in winter they were snow-topped and postcard pretty from a distance.
Was this strange land above or below the winter snow line, I wondered. Maybe if I was a hiker or skier I would know how to figure that one. Wasn't. Didn't. I didn't think I had climbed that far and guessed that I was still well within the mild climate of the peninsula, but who knew? The climate in this countray was somewhat different from the typical Northwest, about the same temperatures but less rain and a lot more sun. Maybe if some sort of gods wanted to hide a place and planned to visit occasionally, they would want it sunny.
Or maybe it was those elves living upstairs, maybe they improved the weather.
Kovat's damn world was neither past nor future. I knew for certain I hadn't time-traveled because the night sky was correct for the present time. But this country was not visible to the outside world and therefore it had to be controlled by magic. Okay, I grew up in Mudflat, so I accepted that when it comes to magic, non-magic rules don't apply.
Days shortened, the sun dropped lower in the sky, shadows lengthened, and the city returned to its winter pattern. Household fires moved indoors. Thin twists of smoke rose from the hole in each roof. Light snow drifted nightly across the hills, glittered in the sunrise and melted to brown mud by midday. There was more sun, yes, but the temperature range was about the same as Seattle. People were faceless shapes above scurrying rag-wrapped feet, covered in tattered shawls from headtop to ankles.
Like the snow, the warriors of Kovat's army drifted back, a few returning each day, exhausted, hungry, ill. Some wore armor beneath their torn capes, others returned dressed only in blankets and animal skins.
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