He glanced around and saw Corinna looking at him. She smiled and ducked her head a bit shyly.
“Should we prepare a handfasting?” Arrim said, half teasing, half in earnest. “She’s a pretty one, a good cook, give you good babies.”
Once he had thought about that with Lynn. She was the first woman he ever imagined he could settle down with. The gordath had other ideas though.
“I guess I should get my footing first, before I think about marrying,” Joe said evasively. Arrim snorted.
“Marrying, now? You’re a guardian, not one of the lords.” At Joe’s blank look, he said, “Marriage is for the Council, not us. We handfast—promise, before the grass god.”
“Yeah, I don’t know that I get the difference, Arrim, but no, I’m not planning that far ahead.”
One of Tal’s guards got up, and with an ostentatious look at the two guardians, he went over to Corinna, giving her a winning smile. She smiled back, blushed, and they had a conversation over the bread, with him swiping a loaf from the oven, tossing it to take the heat out of it, and her giving him a mock scolding.
“She’s trying to make you jealous, that one,” Arrim said, and Joe rolled his eyes. He’d had enough.
“Jesus, Arrim, give it a rest. You like her, you talk to her.”
Joe pushed past the guards more roughly than he had to and left the kitchen behind. Almost immediately the temperature plunged. Joe made his way through the stone fortress, automatically heading back to the outer walls. He was restless, the thought of the mountain overhead oppressing him. He paused on the top of the stairs that led up to the walkway on the wall. The air had turned thick with twilight, the barest of sunsets filtering through the shadows. He could hear the rush of the river like a distant wind. He turned south to go down the other set of stairs, his boots tapping softly on the ancient stone. He was the only person on the walls.
The walkway led around the rose tower, which jutted out from the mountain, its own winding stairs carved out of stone and patched with mortar. Climbing rosebushes trailed up along the wall. In the spring they were thick with small white wild roses. Lynn had been imprisoned in that tower.
Joe stopped along the gallery, leaning on the wall. It was his favorite place in the stronghold. Here a series of columns faced out toward the river, light and air entering in through the arched openings. The setting sun made the river sparkle until his eyes hurt. Across the river the Aeritan headlands rose above the banks and faded into the distance. He could see the barest line of a road, white against the dark hills, dipping and curving along the line of the terrain.
It was hard, missing Lynn. They had only had a few short months to get to know each other. Sometimes he dreamed about her apartment over the barn at Hunter’s Chase, its white curtains wafting in the breeze from the open windows while they made love in the evening after the day’s work was through. He told himself not to think about it, but it was no good. She was an ache that was ever-present. Only the gordath had more of a hold on him, and he knew that the gordath would use his yearning for Lynn as a wedge to pry itself open.
Can’t see her, can’t hold her, he thought. But he could still go visit an old friend.
Red Gold Bridge’s stables were in twilight except for a couple of glowing lanterns secured firmly by the main barn doors and the last remnants of the sun coming in through the high windows. A few grooms played a complicated game of cards and dice near the entrance, where the sun still lit up their table. They looked up.
“Guardian,” one said in greeting. They were used to him.
“Evening,” Joe said. He jerked his head at the big box stall on the side with the best light and the best air flow. “Just going to have a talk with Pride.”
“One of these days you’ll have to sit in with us,” another groom said, as he always did.
To be fleeced within an inch of his life, for sure. Joe knew he would be lucky to come out of a game with his boots, his belt, and his shirt.
“On payday,” Joe promised, as he always replied. They laughed and let him be.
Pride. They didn’t call him Dungiven here. The town the big Irish hunter had been named for didn’t exist in this world, so the stallion had been rechristened Pride. Dungiven had heard his voice, and the big horse turned around in his stall to greet him, his liquid eyes catching a bit of light. He snorted out, whuffing gently against Joe, his oaty breath warm and thick. The horse’s muzzle was dark, the black turning to gray and then almost white. His nostrils flared, and his ears pricked. Joe rubbed his big cheek, and the horse snorted again.
Mindful of the grooms’ presence, he didn’t say aloud what he was thinking. I miss her, too. He didn’t know horses the way Lynn did, but he sometimes thought that Dungiven looked over his shoulder first before looking at him, as if expecting Lynn to be right there beside him.
Dungiven snorted again, and his ears cocked forward, just as the grooms exploded out of their seats. Joe turned as Mrs. Hunt came in.
She acknowledged the grooms and their startled cries of “My lady!” with a graceful nod, but she came straight over to Joe and Dungiven.
Joe tried to keep his expression neutral. If she were here, Lord Tharp wouldn’t be far behind, and he didn’t want to have to deal with the man and his jealousy. Hearing them fight or watching as they punished each other with icy silences was bad enough. She never should of come back. He wondered why she did. She could have just pointed him and Arrim in the right direction, after all. Likely it had been out of guilt for opening up the gordath all those years ago and causing a war over her disappearance. He and Arrim had talked about it and decided that they better keep her away from the woods in case she had a change of heart and started things up all over again.
She stopped a few feet away from him. He didn’t know if she had come here to talk or just to take in the horse, like him, so he waited for her to make the first move.
“Joe,” she said in her even voice.
“Ma’am,” he said courteously.
She didn’t say anything for a while. He studied her, her face lost in the dim light. She came up on Dungiven’s off side and laid her hand against the stallion’s neck. The horse’s skin quivered, but he stayed still, one ear tilted back—not flattened, as when a horse is angry, but attentive.
“You come here often,” she said. It was a statement, but it was so close to a come-on he almost laughed. She couldn’t have known that. Or maybe, since she had lived seven years in New York, she knew exactly what it meant.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I just like to keep an eye on him.” Dungiven was one of them, after all. He didn’t say that to Mrs. Hunt though. He didn’t think she would like being lumped together with the barn handyman and a horse.
She gave a small laugh, and he could sense the grooms’ shock. “He reminds me of home as well.”
Busted, he thought. She knew exactly why he came to the stables, and it wasn’t just to check on the big horse. But her words bespoke a dangerous homesickness. Aware of the grooms’ interest, Joe tried to be tactful. He kept his voice low.
“Ma’am, best you don’t think of New York as home.”
She looked at him over the horse’s mane. “Perhaps,” she said, and he knew that would be the most he would get. She gave the horse a final pat and turned to face Joe head-on, her expression lost in the darkness of night.
“I should go. Eyvig will wonder where I am, and I know you are not comfortable with me here.”
He was about to protest, even though she had the right of it, when she forestalled him.
“Sometimes, I just need someone to call me Mrs. Hunt. Or ma’am.”
He heard the smile in her voice, overlaid with the faintest of tears, so he gave her what she needed.
“Good night, Mrs. Hunt.”
“Good night, Joe.”
He watched her go, the grooms so shocked at the familiarity of their conversation that their card game was forgotten. Joe sighed. Their meeting would be all over the stronghold
in no time; the only thing that ran faster than the river in Red Gold Bridge was gossip. God only knew how Lord Tharp would take it. Well, he and Arrim would be out in the woods soon enough, and Tharp would just have to stew.
Joe woke in his small cell, groggy and disoriented, with only the faintest memory of a dream to disturb him. He lay shivering with the blankets kicked half off, the rest a tangle, and tried to figure things out. It was pitch-black, the small fire on the hearth having gone out while he slept, and the darkness pressed down on him. His vision played tricks on him, making him think he could see sparks and flickers of light, so he closed his eyes. The cold stronghold air rushed over his bare chest, chilling him.
What woke me? He couldn’t remember his dream except for a sense of foreboding. He sat up, untangling himself from the twisted blankets, and groped for his candle and rough matches. He scratched the match on the wall, and the light flared, the acrid smell of sulfur making his eyes water. He lit the candle and set it into the sconce on the side of the bed. The darkness retreated sullenly as his eyes adjusted.
Even before he reached out, he could sense it. The gordath was open.
“Shit,” Joe swore under his breath. A sorry-ass excuse for a guardian he was. It should have been the first thing he thought of. He reached out tentatively. It wasn’t like the last winter, when he first encountered a full-on gordath that had been out of control for months. Back then, the power was like a roaring turbine, overwhelming, dangerous, malevolent. This felt urgent but distant.
His gear sat at the foot of the bed. Joe put his feet on the floor and cursed again at the cold. He searched for his socks, found them, and put them on, then his jeans and shirt. It was too cold to stay naked, and he wasn’t about to cower under the covers until morning. As he drew on his boots, he tried to shake the last remnants of sleep from his head. He grabbed the candle, holding it carefully so as not to drip wax down onto his fingers, and pushed open his door, just as Arrim stood about to open it, dressed and ready to go with his own candle, his pack slung over his shoulder.
“Good,” the other man said, with no other preamble. He jerked his head. “Let’s go, Guardian.”
Joe grabbed his pack, glad he had kept it ready. He followed Arrim, their flickering candlelight throwing crazy shadows on the wall, glistening where the walls were damp. He wasn’t sure whether to be pissed off or worried. A little of both, he thought. He didn’t know what time it was, but if he wasn’t going to get a full night’s sleep after two weeks of deadheading through the woods, he was going to have to have a come-to-Jesus talk with whoever was messing around with the gordath.
And if it were Mrs. Hunt, he was going to be seriously pissed.
The tall, narrow house stood in a clearing in Gordath Wood between three tall trees, its rough stone weathered by time. It looked ancient, as if it were older than the forest itself. Narrow, vertical slits scarred the old stone. Its slate roof was broken. Where leaves had fallen and decayed, creating soil, a garden of moss and other plants grew among the slate. The house looked like a tor, a jagged mountain upthrust from the forest floor. The gordath, the portal between the worlds, was centered on this house. Joe knew that it lived in two places, at the end of a run-down lane in hunt country in upstate New York, and here, in Aeritan. Once the guardians lived here, Arrim had told him, but they had abandoned the house to live in Red Gold Bridge between patrols. He didn’t say why, but Joe figured that it was because the guardians felt the same thing he felt every time he was near the place. The power of the gordath was most on edge here, most alive, most conducive to opening. It was dangerous to be too close to it, even if your job was to keep it closed.
The clearing was quiet, dark. It was high summer in Aeritan, but the forest stayed cool.
“What do you think?” he asked Arrim, keeping his voice low.
Arrim gestured toward the door. “Make sure no one’s here. I want to take a look around the clearing.”
Joe pushed open the heavy wooden door, putting his shoulder behind it as the door stuck. The wood scraped across the threshold with a dull squeak. The bottom floor was a bare room, and the cold from the stone floor seeped into his old boots. A fireplace hulked at one corner, debris collecting on the hearth.
There were a few remaining cartons that had once held shells for the guns that Bahard had run from New York to Aeritan, but the boxes were empty, and the cardboard had gotten clammy and fallen apart. The guns themselves—well, no one knew what had happened to them. The Aeritan Council had confiscated what they could at the end of last year’s war, but Joe knew how that went. Plenty of guns to go around. At least there was a shortage of ammunition, and he doubted that Aeritan had the technology to make more. The smiths and metalwrights were good, but there was only so much they could do, and making modern ammo was beyond their capabilities. Nothing to stop a little reverse engineering, though, he thought. An enterprising Aeritan engineer could probably figure out how to make a decent facsimile of a modern gun if they took one apart.
The air inside was cold, and the house felt abandoned. Joe headed up the narrow stairs. Cold light spilled in on the landing, more debris in the corners and beneath the windows. At the top, he pushed open a door to one room. Empty.
The gathering emptiness in the house pressed down on him, and the gordath throbbed along with his heartbeat. It lived, he thought. Maybe it wasn’t like a human, or even an animal, but it lived.
He thought he could perceive an extra edge this time, a malevolent intention. It wanted to be open, and it knew Joe was its enemy.
Joe opened the next door and looked around. Something compelled him, and he stepped over to the narrow window, leaning on the rough sill to get a better view. The ground was very far below. To his eyes, everything looked ordinary. There was the clearing, and the door in the ground to the root cellar—he could just make out the iron ring half submerged in fallen leaves that pulled the door up and open. The trees shot straight up into the overcast sky.
He frowned into the distance, between the trees. For a second something flickered, and he thought he could see . . .
Then it was gone, and he couldn’t tell if he had really seen telephone wires or if it had just been his eyes trying to make familiar sense of tree branches. He knew better than to look again. To distract himself and break the gordath’s hold, he turned away from the window. In the corner of the room stood a cask hidden by shadows and covered with debris that had blown in from the weather over the past seasons. It wasn’t that big; it stood about knee-high on four ornately carved legs. Joe went over and brushed off the leaves and dirt composting on it. It looked like a lady’s jewelry box, even had a pretty little clasp on it. He tried to lift the lid, but it stuck. The lock was mostly decorative, though, and no match for his knife. He gouged at the lock and snapped it free. The lid creaked open.
Joe stared down at the stacks of American currency neatly arrayed inside the chest.
“ Joe! ”
Arrim’s voice rose faintly from the clearing, startling Joe. He came back to himself and hesitated. The money’s worthless here, he told himself. Only good for starting a fire, or maybe stuffing inside a lumpy straw mattress. So why he wanted to grab it and stow it in his pack was beyond him.
He went over to the window. Arrim looked up at him. “Find anything?” he called out.
“Nothing,” Joe shouted back. “Nobody’s been here in months.”
At least, not since Mark Ballard hid his payment for running guns between New York and Aeritan on the Aeritan side of the gordath. It was better than a bank and easier than laundering money. No one who would know what it was worth would ever find it, and it was safe until Mark needed it. Until now.
And I can’t take it. Carry that money around long enough, and he would go crazy. Carry that money, and it would take no effort at all for the gordath to open, unlocked by greed, desire, and homesickness. He should burn it, but he knew he wouldn’t. Instead, he lowered the lid to the little chest and left it behind.
&nb
sp; He came down the stairs again to find Arrim kneeling in the clearing. The guardian swept his hand over the dirt and twigs as if he were looking for something. Joe watched him, puzzled. The master guardian could be closemouthed with his secrets. Joe could ask him what he was looking for, and all he might get was a vague, “I don’t know,” or “What do you think?” It was maddening, and it forced Joe to rely on his own intuition, which, he suspected, was the point.
Arrim stood. “All right,” he said. “Ready?”
Joe nodded. He closed his eyes, gathering his strength.
“Don’t get lost in the woods,” the forestholders said. “You never know where you will end up.” The gordath reached out and gathered in solitary travelers before they knew they had been taken. That’s what had happened to Lynn last year when she rode Dungiven home through the Wood by herself. Probably didn’t even know what had happened to her, Joe thought. Not till she came to Red Gold Bridge, and probably not even then . . . He mentally shook himself and refocused. As if it knew it was being thwarted, the gordath hummed harder, but that could have just been because Joe was concentrating now. He could feel Arrim gathering his own strength, and their breathing synchronized. He and Arrim and the gordath all breathed together the same, until he lost track of just which one he was.
When he first closed the gordath back in the winter, he knew instinctively what to do. The gordath had been out of control, but in a way, that made it easier—brute force answered with brute force. He and Arrim had joined forces, and the gordath backed down, folded in on itself, and closed up. This time it was like trying to hold water in his cupped hands. He couldn’t get a handle on it. The more he tried to grab hold and force it to stay still, the less control he had. Sweat ran down his face and soaked his shirt.
Red Gold Bridge Page 2