Red Gold Bridge
Page 4
“Why would he come here?” She felt another jolt when she remembered the way he looked at her through the windows of her mom’s car. When he had her beaten in the center of camp, he kept his eyes on her the whole time. She felt an overflowing of rage and despair, of hatred and helplessness, once again. I will kill him, she thought. I have to kill him. But she couldn’t; he was a general, a warrior. She couldn’t hold her own against him. She glanced at Colar. He’d fight for me, she thought, and in the next moment she thought, No. Because he would lose, too. He was a warrior, but he was also a kid.
And what am I, a princess who needs a champion? If Marthen were here, she needed to deal with him herself.
“He came because of you,” Colar said practically. For a second his face went hard, and he looked like his father, Lord Terrick.
“I don’t want him.”
Colar laughed a little. He swiveled in the computer chair. “The first thing we need to do,” he said, “is find out if it was really him.”
“How do we do that?”
He grinned. “We scout.”
When Kate met Colar last year, he had been a scout in the general’s army. From his look of anticipation, it seemed like one of the things he might be homesick for. Lacrosse and basketball were okay, but Colar was so much older than the rest of the kids their age. So was she, for that matter. It got hard to sit in class last spring after everything that had happened in camp.
They both looked up at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Her dad knocked and poked his head in. “Kate, we need to talk. Cole, can you excuse us, please?”
“Yes, sir,” Colar said automatically, getting up, and Kate caught her dad’s pained expression. No matter how often he had invited Colar to call him David, he wouldn’t. He called his own dad sir. He was hardly going to be so familiar with her dad. Even if the Mosslands had become his parents now, or foster parents at least.
Except, if she had seen General Marthen, then somehow he had gotten through. And if he went through, then Colar could go home again. I could go back, too, she dared to think, and for a moment she almost forgot to breathe. Did she want that? Could she want that?
When Colar left, her dad took his spot at the desk. “Your mom told me what you thought you saw,” he said finally.
“I saw him,” Kate said. The lump in her throat made the words hard to get out. “You have to believe me.”
“Kate . . .” He sighed, raked his hands through his hair. “Kate, we can barely believe what happened to you last winter. Now this? Look, it’s time to move on. You can’t keep going back to this—this story.”
“What, you think I’m making it up out of some sick need? My back, Dad! You saw my back! You saw what happened, what he ordered them to do to me!”
“Kate, calm down. Look, it’s not that simple. Even if he is here, how do we go to the police about him? No one will believe it, and that means no one will take it seriously.”
“You mean no one will take you seriously,” she said, bitterness in her voice. A part of her knew that it was to their credit her parents had taken in Colar. They’d had to call in a lot of favors and lie to a lot of people about where he came from to make it happen. After all, he was a boy from nowhere, with no record of his past, of his parents, of even ever being in “the system.” It took a lot for her parents to make a new life for him, a legitimate life.
They never once said a word about what that meant for her mother’s career trajectory as an influential prosecutor or her father’s plans to be named CEO of a Fortune 500 company. One whisper about the son fostered under strange circumstances, and it could all be over for them.
She knew all this, and it still hurt that they wouldn’t believe her about what happened last year.
“So what you’re saying,” she began through her tears, “is that because no one else will believe us, you won’t believe me.”
“Kate, I do—your mom and I, we do believe you. But you have to understand how far-fetched this all is. And you said that thing was closed, that no one else could come through. And now—this general is here? How are we supposed to take this?” He drew a breath. “Your mother and I have decided. We should have done this sooner, but better late than never.”
They’re sending Colar away. She stared with dawning horror at her father.
“We think you need to see a therapist.”
Colar of Terrick, heir to the House of Terrick in Aeritan, but now just Cole Mossland, went downstairs to the kitchen. Something smelled good, and he was reminded of the kitchens back home. The cooks labored all day for the people of Terrick, the householders and the lords, visiting villagers, and wandering peddlers, men-at-arms looking for work, farmers, crafters, others. The kitchen at Terrick was never quiet and never dull. As a kid and even just before he went to war with his father, he liked to sit in the kitchen and hear the wanderers’ tales, especially in the winter when the land was shut down by sleet and ice.
Here the kitchen was empty more often than not. The Mossland family usually lived on takeout. Colar liked Indian, himself. Its spices and scents were the most like home.
Tonight Mrs. Mossland was cooking. Kate told him her mom used to cook all the time, that she loved it and could putter in the kitchen all day, stirring, chopping, tasting. It was her rest and her joy, just as his own mother loved to work the wool from their sheep into thread and then cloth, dying, weaving, shaping. She had special songs for each part of the work that she said worked the blessing of the grass god’s daughter into every fiber. He didn’t think Mrs. Mossland sang to work blessings into her food.
Mrs. Mossland looked up at his approach. She and Kate had the same fine, straight hair and the same nose and mouth, but Kate’s eyes were her father’s, as was the cast of her face.
Mrs. Mossland’s face was flushed from the heat of the pots. Steam rose from a bubbling pot of pasta, and in a gleaming skillet she was sautéing shrimp in butter, garlic, and wine. His mouth watered.
“Oh, hi, Cole,” she said. She made an apologetic face. “Is David still upstairs with Kate?”
Colar nodded. “Can I help?” he asked. He hadn’t known till he came here that he liked to cook. Back home his only role in the kitchen had been to run in, steal dinner, and run out with his brothers and sister, the cooks shouting at their backs.
“Sure. Do you want to put together a salad?” She nodded at the butcher block table where all the ingredients waited, freshly washed.
The knives were dull again. No one in the family seemed to know how to keep them sharp except for Colar. He got out the sharpener and set to work, the dull scraping the only sound between them. Mrs. Mossland seemed almost lost in thought, but he could tell what was on her mind the way she kept glancing at the kitchen door.
The silence didn’t bother him. He honed the knives and thought about what Kate had discovered. The general had come through, looking for her, most likely. His cheeks heated as he remembered what the scouts had talked about, how the general had taken Kate to bed. He himself had seen her coming from the general’s tent late at night. And the general had her flogged when he found out she and Colar had kissed. My fault, he thought, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her, and it was all mixed up with some idea of stealing her from the general.
Instead, it had gotten her so badly beaten that she would bear the scars for life, even with the skin grafts the doctors here had performed.
“Cole?” Mrs. Mossland said, and he startled. He loosened his grip on the knife. The knife was sharp. He set to chopping bell peppers.
So he could go back. The question was, did he want to? There was no place for the son of the lord of Terrick in this country, to be sure, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a place for Cole Mossland, age seventeen, foster son of the House of Mossland.
School, for one. Going to school was a foreign experience. He had never been with so many people his own age, all in one place. And what they learned! He could read and write in Aeritan, but the math he was learning now was far
beyond anything he ever could have been taught, even in Brythern, the seat of learning. As for science, he couldn’t ask half the questions he longed to, because most of the time they were so elementary they were about things everyone else here already knew. But he devoured the books, once his brain reset from going through the portal and he could learn to read again. There were so many marvels here that he had thought of them as magic when he first encountered them. But it wasn’t magic. It was technology, and it could be used by anyone, developed by anyone, and the basic principles were taught in his books.
Could he leave this behind? He dressed the salad and put the bowl on the table. The shrimp scampi waited, steaming in a bowl of hot pasta, and Mrs. Mossland pulled bread from the oven. The table was set; there were even small glasses of wine for Colar and Kate.
“Ah, there you are,” Mrs. Mossland said with false brightness as Kate and her father came in. Both were subdued. Kate looked as if she had been crying. “I thought we were going to have to send out a scouting party.”
Kate and Colar exchanged glances as they slid into their seats. The chatter continued, light and inconsequential, throughout dinner, but Colar’s thoughts were far away, to a life he had thought closed to him.
Three
The high windows of the house at Trieve, some paned with wavering glass, glinted in the rising sun. The fields at the foot of the terraced steps were wreathed in early morning mist, a soft gray just tinged with the palest yellow. Crae’s breath smoked, even though it was high summer. Trieve was a mountain holding, and the air kept its chill. He wrapped his half cloak around himself, slung his crossbow and bolts over his back, a sword hanging in the scabbard at his belt, and headed for the barn. The old building hulked in the dawn light. It was older than the house itself and had once served as the house for Trieve’s lords, when they had been holders themselves. Now it loomed in the mist, an ancient structure of stone and timber.
He pushed open the great door and was enveloped in the smell of the byre: horses, cows, manure, hay. Crae sneezed.
“Good morning, my lord,” said one of his men.
“ ’Morning to you,” Crae said. The cows lowed, their bags heavy with milk, and the men chivvied them outside to the milking barn on the lower terrace. The cows went willingly; they needed the relief. Crae watched them go and then pushed open the half door to his horse’s box.
“So there boy,” he said. The gelding nickered at him. He was one of Stavin’s horses, actually. Hero. Stavin’s daughter Tevani had named him. The big chestnut horse, his coat and mane a red brown, was tall and sturdy, tall enough for Crae, who stood a head taller than his friend had.
Not a day went by that Crae didn’t think of Stavin and his death on a snowy road on the outskirts of Red Gold Bridge, or his friendship, or the fact that everything he now called his own once belonged to Stavin.
Hero was well-groomed already. The grooms had brushed him and picked out his feet. Crae lifted them anyway out of old habit. When he was captain at Red Gold Bridge, a year and another life ago, he was only Captain Crae, and if he didn’t take care of his own mount, no one else would.
He tacked the horse up himself. Hero fought the bit sulkily, tossing his head, then settled down, and Crae led him out. He knew that the horse enjoyed his early morning rides as much as Crae did, who liked to scout the lands surrounding the house as he used to patrol around Red Gold Bridge. He cleared the barn and mounted up, just as a little voice called out to him.
“Lord Crae!” Tevani came running up, slowing as she had been taught before she got too close to the horse’s hooves. She waited, hands on her hips, at four years old looking like her mother and father both. She wore thick leggings under her thick skirt, a half-buttoned shirt over all, which still had butter and crumbs from her breakfast on it. Her face, too, it looked like. And her hair . . . Crae winced. Jessamy, her mother, was likely looking for her at this minute, ready with a wet cloth, a hairbrush, and a scolding. “I want to go, too!”
He leaned down to talk to her. “You’re covered with butter, Tevani. Lady Jessamy will want you to go back to the house and get cleaned.”
Tevani smeared herself more in trying to wipe up her breakfast. “Lord Crae, please take me with you. Please? Mama is only busy with Jori, and Calyne tells me I must be a good girl, and it’s easier to be good when I’m riding. And Snowflake is too small,” she added, referring to her pony and preempting his suggestion.
If he took her up he would only incur Jessamy’s wrath all the more—not that it was hard to do. But she looked so forlorn, and he had always been too easy with her. I must be sterner, he thought, but it never seemed to be the right time. Stavin had always spoiled her rotten, too.
“All right,” Crae said. “But only for a little, and then you must go into the house. Agreed?”
She hopped up and down. “Yes! You are the best lord of Trieve after my father!”
She couldn’t have seen him wince. He dismounted, picked her up, and swung her into the saddle. He mounted again behind her. She immediately took the reins, her hands at the proper angles. Hero snorted and threw up his head but obeyed when Crae added pressure behind the girth.
“Can we gallop?” she said as they went down the terraced slope, Hero half sitting before jumping down each level. Tevani rode it well for someone whose legs were so short she couldn’t really straddle the saddle. She was a good little rider though. Born to it, fearless, with an instinctive sureness in her that horses responded to. Not sure where that came from, Crae thought. Stavin didn’t have the attentiveness, and Jessamy was an indifferent horsewoman.
“Not downhill, Tev. Maybe at the bottom.”
“Here?” she asked at the next level.
“The bottom, Tev. When we reach the road.”
She giggled at each of Hero’s little jumps, and Crae decided that the company wasn’t so bad after all. She chattered happily, and he listened with half an ear, as the fog burned off and the sun rose behind them, making their shadows impossibly long.
When they reached the road, Crae took the reins and pulled up Hero to let the horse rest. It was hard riding the terrace. Downhill required concentration and balance. Uphill was even worse, not just because of the incline but because each level was at just the right height and length to keep most horses from taking a comfortable stride, especially one carrying an armed rider.
It was an effective defense.
After a bit he let Tevani have the reins again, and they began walking along the road, Hero’s hooves clopping pleasantly along the hard-packed dirt. A tumbledown stone wall, holding back uncultivated scrub and second growth, followed roughly along the road as it wound around the foot of the hill, meeting a rougher road that undulated through the scrub, lost in the sunrise and the fog. He knew that road. More than half a year ago he had ridden it with Lynna. It led to the plains, and beyond that Red Gold Bridge, and beyond that, Gordath Wood. And beyond that, he thought, to somewhere else, where she now lived and he could not go.
Hero snorted and shied. Crae thought he heard a crack or a rustle, and old habits leaped to the fore. Even as Tevani giggled at the sudden movement, he reached behind himself for the crossbow, cursing his ill luck for bringing her. She hampered him—she could be in danger—he could not load a crossbow with her in front of him.
All of this he thought in a flash as he caught Hero behind the girth with his heel and faced the sound.
Just a stray sheep, he thought, even as a head peeked over the tumbledown stone wall, and then another. Not crows. Not crows.
They were crows. Holdless, ragged men, they had been plaguing the countryside for months after the war set off by Red Gold Bridge.
Crae could not ride fast enough up the terraces without being swarmed by crows. He would have to hold them off so that Tevani could escape.
Crae swung over Hero’s haunches, crossbow up, knowing that he was doomed. He drew his sword with his other hand and spared a glance for the girl, her small face white and frightened now. S
he had the reins. Her little legs were in perfect position.
“Ride, Tevani!” he roared. He smacked Hero on the hindquarters, and the horse squealed and bolted, Tevani’s scream as high-pitched. She stayed on, though, as Hero carried them both away from danger.
As the crows boiled over the wall at him, he could think of only one thing: if they didn’t kill him, Jessamy surely would.
There were six crows. Crae dropped his useless crossbow but took two of the bolts from the quiver, holding them point out, the sword in the other hand. The crows carried staffs and mauls. He took in all the information he could, backing up to the terrace to keep any from getting behind him.
They came on, grinning, the odds in their favor. They were all ragged and skinny, their teeth brown and broken. Lordless men, he thought. Lawless men. A murder of crows.
Two broke ahead and attacked, swinging their makeshift weapons, no less deadly for all that, and nearly taking one another out before they reached Crae. He grinned, too. That was the problem with mobs: they could be as dangerous to one another as they could to their prey.
He ducked a swinging maul, the momentum taking the man around with it, and brought up the crossbow bolt. It caught the man in the back, and he screamed. Crae took the other man with his sword through his belly, coming in under the staff. It smacked down on his arm, but by then he had already skewered the crow, and the blow lacked force. Crae kicked the man off his sword and back at his fellows.
The rest came on, but by then he had killed or maimed the two.
They gave wordless cries of rage and fear. Crae roared back. A staff caught him a ringing blow, and light crashed in his head. He stumbled backward, knocked off his feet. He lost his sword and cursed himself for giving them another weapon, a good weapon.
He struggled up, only to be knocked down again. His right arm was useless, and a maul crashed down on his shin. Forest god, help me . . .
No. There was no forest god here.