by J. V. Jones
Raina was hurt.
And she, Effie Sevrance, could have stopped it.
Her lore had known. It had wanted to tell her. It had tried to tell her. It had pushed and pushed, but she’d refused to listen.
Scrambling free of the bushes, she brushed snow and ice from her oilskin, hood, and skirt. She didn’t know if she was still crying; her cheeks were too numb to feel tears.
She could have stopped Mace Blackhail from hurting Raina. She could have taken the lore in her fist and held it until she saw the bad thing. It had happened like that with Da . . .
A deep shiver worked its way up her spine. Suddenly anxious to be away, back inside the small enclosed space of her cell, she ran along the ridge and down the slope.
She didn’t know how long it took her to get back to Raina—a quarter, perhaps; no longer—but by the time she reached the clearing Raina had become herself. Her hair was newly smoothed, her skirt free of ice, and her oilskin fastened tightly all the way down to her knees. She smiled briefly as Effie approached.
“I was just about to come looking for you. It’s time we were home. Come on. I’ll put you on Mercy’s back.” Her voice was level with just a slight strain to it. Her eyes were dead.
Effie didn’t speak. A lump had come to her throat.
NINE
The Dhooneseat
Vaylo Bludd spat at his dog. He would have preferred to spit at his second son, but he didn’t. The dog, a hunter and wolf mix with a neck as wide as a door, bared its teeth and snarled at his master. Other dogs leashed behind it made low growling noises in the backs of their throats. The wad of black curd spat by Vaylo Bludd landed on the first dog’s foreleg, and the dog chewed at its own fur and skin to get it off. Vaylo didn’t smile, but he was pleased. That one definitely owed more to the wolf.
“So, son,” he said, still looking at the dog, “what would you have me do next, seems you ill like the plans made by your father?”
Vaylo Bludd’s second son, Pengo Bludd, grunted. He was standing too close to the fire, and his already red face now glowed like something baked in an oven. His spiked hammer trailed on the floor behind him like a dog on a leash. “We must attack Blackhail while the win is still upon us. If we sit on our arses now, we miss our chance to take the clanholds in a single strike.”
Sitting back on the great stone Dhooneseat that formed the center of the mightiest and best fortified roundhouse in the clanholds, Vaylo Bludd considered spitting again. With no black curd in his mouth, he worked up a dose of saliva by jabbing his tongue against his teeth. Stone Gods! But his teeth ached! One of these days he was going to find a man to pull them out. Find a man, then kill him.
Vaylo Bludd swallowed the spit. He took a moment to look at his second son. Pengo Bludd had not shaved back his hairline in days, and a bristling band of hair framed his face. The longer hair at the back, with its braids and twists, was similarly ill tended. Bits of goosedown and hay were caught in the matted strands. Vaylo Bludd made a hard sound in his throat. Legitimate offspring were born to complacency and arrogance. You wouldn’t see such sloth on a bastard!
“Son,” he said, his voice as low as a dog growl, “I have lorded this clan for thirty-five years—a good five of that before you were born. Now I daresay you’d think it boastful of me to point out just how far Bludd has come under my lording, but I say I don’t care. I am clan chief. Me, the Dog Lord. Not you, lord of nothing but what I choose to give you.”
Pengo’s eyes narrowed. The hand that held his leather hammer loop cracked as it curled to a fist. “We have Dhoone. We can have Blackhail as well. The Hailsmen—”
Vaylo Bludd kicked out at the wolf dog, making it jump back and yowl. “The Hailsmen will be expecting us to attack. They’ll have that roundhouse of theirs sealed as tight as a virgin’s arse the minute we break their bounds. Hailsmen aren’t fools. They won’t be found slacking like Dhoones.”
“But—”
“Enough!” The Dog Lord stood. All the dogs leashed to the rat hooks skittered back. “What advantages we had here will not be easily got again. They come with a price, as such things do. And it will be for me to say when and if we use such means again. We have Dhoone. Make use of it. Go, take Drybone and as many of those useless brothers of yours as you can muster afore noon, and ride out to the Gnash border and secure it. All the Dhoonesmen that rode away are likely there, and if an attack is going to come, then it will more than likely start at Gnash.” Vaylo smiled, showing black aching teeth. “While you’re out there mayhap you can claim what land you see fit for your steading. I heard it said once that a chief should always house his sons on his borders.”
Pengo Bludd snarled. Tugging on his hammer loop, he raised his hammer from the floor and weighed its limewood handle across his chest. The spiked hammer head bristled like a basket of knives. Eyes the same color as his father’s burned coldly like the blue inner tongue of flames. Without a word he turned on his heel, his braids and twists swinging out from his skull as he moved.
When he reached the chamber door, Vaylo stopped him with one word. “Son.”
“What?” Pengo did not turn around.
“Send the bairns to me afore you leave.”
Pengo Bludd snapped his head, then continued his journey from the door. He slammed it with all his might behind him.
The Dog Lord took a long breath when he was gone. The dogs, all five of them including the wolf dog, were quiet. After a moment Vaylo bent on one knee and beckoned them as near as their various leashes would allow. He tousled them and slapped their bellies and tested their speed by grabbing their tails. They snarled and snapped and nipped him, wetting his hands and wrists with their frothy saliva. They were good dogs, all of them.
Unlike most hunters and sled dogs, whose fangs were filed to stop them chewing through leashes and ruining pelts by tearing at game, Vaylo’s own dogs still had fangs of full length and sharpness. They could rip out a man’s throat on his say. None of them had names. Vaylo had long ago stopped keeping track of all the names of those around him. A man with seven sons who all had wives and in-laws and children of their own soon gave up keeping tally on what people were called. What they were was the only thing that counted.
Feeling separate pangs of pain in each of his remaining seventeen teeth, the Dog Lord stood. Bones in his knees cracked as they dealt with his weight. The Dhooneseat, carved from a single slab of bluestone as tall as a horse, beckoned him back. Vaylo moved away from it, picking a plain oakwood stool close to the hearth. He was too old for stone thrones and too wary of growing used to them. A bastard learned early that he always had to be ready to give up his place.
Glancing toward the door that his second son had slammed moments earlier, Vaylo frowned. That was the problem with all of his sons: None of them knew what it was to give up their place to another. They knew only the politics of take.
Behind his back, Vaylo could hear the dogs scrapping among themselves. He heard the wolf dog’s low distinctive growl, and he knew without turning to look that the dog was being attacked by the others because of the favor its master had showed it. Vaylo made no move to interfere. Such was the way of life.
So, he thought, stretching out his legs before the fire as he looked around the room, this is the great Dhoone roundhouse. Men calling themselves kings had lived here once. Now there were only chiefs.
A smile spread across Vaylo’s face as he remembered the last time he was here. He had not been invited that time either. Thirty-six years ago it was now, in the dead of night while Airy Dhoone, the clan chief at the time, and his sixty best men were away. Vaylo slapped his thigh. That bloody guidestone had been murder to move! Old Ockish Bull had ended up with a hernia as big as a fist! And of the other four dozen clansmen who had helped pull it free from the guidehouse, only two were able to move the next day, and none could mount their horses for a week.
Vaylo chuckled. The whole operation had been without a doubt the most misguided, ill-planned, fool-stupid thing fifty
grown men had ever conspired to do. They never did get the guidestone farther than Blue Dhoone Lake. It was still there today, at the bottom of the copper-tinted lake, resting amid the silt and the sandstone, sunk within three hundred paces of the Dhoonehouse itself.
None but the fifty knew that, of course. When they returned to the Bludd roundhouse twenty days later, all swore blind that the collection of rocks they arrived with, pulled by a team of mules in a war cart, was none other than the broken-down guidestone itself. Not some quarry-purchased rubble and a bucket of ground glass. And it had made such an excellent outhouse . . .
Vaylo Bludd leaned forward on his stool. Those were the days! Jaw was all that counted. Jaw had taken him, a bastard son with only half a name and enemies for brothers, to the chiefship he held today. Take, he had. But it wasn’t an assuming, born-to-expect-it kind of take. It was take hard learned and hard won. He hadn’t gone to his father for a handout. Gullit Bludd had said but a handful of words to his bastard son from the moment he’d acknowledged him as his own. And a good half of them were curses.
Knocking.
The Dog Lord looked to the door. He had been too long alone and his mind had got thinking, and that was never what a Bluddsman was about.
“Enter.”
Expecting his second son’s children, who had arrived from the Bluddhouse that morning, Vaylo had his gaze focused halfway down the door when it opened. A man’s waist met his eyes. Seeing the long white robe and smooth, almost womanish hands, the Dog Lord let out a hard sigh. If you dealt with the devil, his helpers always arrived soon enough.
“Sarga Veys. When did you get here?”
A tall man with a sallow complexion and womanish eyes entered the room. Although dressed in the plain white robe of a cleric, Sarga Veys was no man of God. “In my own small way, Lord Bludd, I have been here all along.”
Vaylo hated the man’s high voice and the overly fine shape of his lips. He hated being called Lord Bludd too. He was nothing but the Dog Lord, and both he and his enemies knew it. Suddenly angry, he cried, “Close the door behind you, man!”
Sarga Veys was quick to do his bidding, moving in the loose-jointed way of a man possessing little physical strength. The dogs growled behind his back. Sarga Veys didn’t like the dogs, and when he was finished with the door, he moved as far away from them as possible. When he spoke, a tremor that may have been fear, yet Vaylo Bludd suspected was anger, showed itself in his voice. “I see you’re making yourself at home, Lord Bludd. The Dhooneseat quite suits you.”
A small nod on Sarga Veys’ part led the Dog Lord’s gaze to the foot of the Dhooneseat, where a thin strip of leather lay on the stone. Vaylo’s eyes narrowed. Such a tiny thing, a bit of leather fallen from his braids, yet the devil’s helper had picked up on it straightaway. Not for the first time, Vaylo reminded himself to be cautious of this man.
“So,” he said, hands patting his belt for his pouch of black curd. “You’ve been within the clanholds all along. Tell me, did you stay in the safe refuge of a stovehouse? Or did your master want you closer for the show?”
“I don’t think,” Sarga Veys said, color rising to his cheeks, “that where I stay is any business of yours.”
The dogs found much to dislike in Sarga Veys’ tone of voice. Snarling and snapping, they tested their leashes in his direction. The wolf dog began worrying at its tether.
Sarga Veys’ mouth shrank. His violet eyes darkened.
“Dogs!” called Vaylo Bludd. “Quiet!”
The dogs became silent immediately, dropping their heads and tails and slumping down onto the cut stone floor.
The Dog Lord watched Sarga Veys closely. Wondered, for a brief moment, if he hadn’t seen the man’s throat working along with his violet eyes. That was another thing to remember about devil’s helpers: No matter how weak they looked they were seldom defense-less. Sarga Veys was a magic user, Vaylo was sure of it.
“Did you ride here alone, or with a sept?”
“I head a sept as always.”
Head? Vaylo doubted that. Protected by one, more like it. Seven fully trained, fighting-fit swordsmen would hardly allow a man like Sarga Veys to lead them. Hard campaigners couldn’t stand his type.
“I shall be riding south to meet my master after I’ve left here.” Sarga Veys seemed more at ease now the dogs were quiet. He took a moment to smooth back his fine hair. “I shall tell him, of course, of your great success. Assure him that everything went smoothly, and report that you are well on your way to becoming Lord of the Clans.” Sarga Veys smiled, showing small, white, but ever so slightly inward-slanting teeth. “My master will be pleased. He has done his part. Now it’s up to you to do—”
Vaylo Bludd spat out the wad of black curd he’d been chewing, silencing Sarga Veys as effectively as his dogs. “Your master wasn’t the one who planned the raid and took the risks. He didn’t cut through the darkness and smoke not knowing what each new step would bring him. His blade wasn’t bloodied. His sons weren’t risked. His balls weren’t froze with the waiting.”
“Thanks to my master,” Sarga Veys said, his voice dropping a tone lower, “your blades weren’t as bloodied as they might have been.”
Crack!
The Dog Lord smashed his foot down on the hearth stool, breaking its carved legs like sticks. Across the hearthwell, the dogs shrank back against the wall. Sarga Veys flinched. A muscle in his throat quivered.
“Try any of your foul magics upon me,” Vaylo roared, “and as the dogs are my witness you will not leave this roundhouse alive.”
Hearing their name spoken, the dogs thrashed their muzzles and snarled, spraying the surrounding stone with drops of urine.
Unable to take a farther step back as his heels were already pushing against the door, Sarga Veys pinched in his lips. “Yes. I see now why they call you the Dog Lord.”
Vaylo nodded. “That’s me.” With the side of his foot, he shoved away the broken stool.
“Well, Lord of Dogs, or whatever else you choose to call yourself, you took my master’s help quick enough when it suited you. I don’t believe your anger caused you to break any stools then. Yet now you stand here at the very hearth he helped you win, issuing physical threats to his envoy in the manner of some common stovehouse brawler.” Sarga Veys stepped forward. “Well let me tell you—”
Vaylo cut him short with a fierce shake of his head. “Tell me what you came to say. Then be gone. Your voice grates on my dogs. If your master has brought a message, speak it. If he has named a price, then name it.” As he spoke, Vaylo watched Sarga Veys’ face. It wasn’t right that a man have violet eyes.
Sarga Veys made a small shrugging motion. He brought his facial features under control, yet it took him a long moment to do so. When he spoke there was still a residue of anger in his voice. “Very well. I bring you no message from my master. When the deal was struck he asked for nothing in return, and continues to do so now. As he said at the time, he wishes only to see the clanholds under a single firm leadership, and he believes that you are the man to do it. I cannot say when and if he will offer his help again. He is a man with many claims upon his time and resources. I do know, however, that he will be watching your progress with interest. I should imagine he would be quite upset if after all the trouble he has taken, you find the Dhooneseat as comfortable as a padded cot and decide to bed down upon it. There are many clanholds yet to be taken.”
The Dog Lord sucked on his aching teeth. Glancing around the old Dhoone chief’s chamber with its huge blue sandstone hearth, its comfortable animal-hide rugs and wall coverings, and its smoky isinglass windows, he thought hard upon Sarga Veys’ words. They weren’t truthful, Vaylo was sure of that, yet there was truth in them.
“I have plans of my own for Blackhail and the rest,” he said. “And will move upon them in my own good time. I must secure the Dhoonehold first.”
A quick smile flitted across Sarga Veys’ face. “But of course. My master places great store in your judgment.”
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Frowning, the Dog Lord crossed toward the door. He had the satisfaction of seeing Sarga Veys shrink away from him, but the pleasure was only fleeting. He really didn’t like the man at all. Veys was dangerous. He had a temper better suited to a man with the muscle to use it.
“You’ll be on your way now,” Vaylo said, reaching for the door. “Be sure to tell your master that the message you came expressly not to deliver was heard well and good.”
Sarga Veys inclined his head. As he did so, Vaylo realized that the skin on the man’s face wasn’t as smooth and hairless as he had first thought, just razored with an expert hand.
“I shall tell my master you find the Dhooneseat to your liking,” Veys said. “And that you have—how should I put it?—long-term plans to take the Hailhold as well.”
Vaylo Bludd came close to hitting Veys then. His face flushed and his fist curled and the bones in his jaw and neck cracked all at once. Smashing the heel of his hand down upon the door handle, he fractured the oak lintel beneath. “Leave!” he cried. “Take your sly half-truths and your mincing Halfman ways and get your bony, well-shaved arse off my land.”
Sarga Veys’ violet eyes darkened to the color of midnight. His face twisted and hardened. “You,” he said, his voice rising as he lost control of it, “should watch that dog-muzzle mouth of yours. You’re not talking to one of your animal-skinned clansmen now. I came here as a visitor and envoy, and at very least should receive due respect.” Veys stepped over the threshold and then turned to face Vaylo Bludd one last time. “I wouldn’t get too comfortable on the Dhooneseat if I were you, Dog Lord. One day you just might turn around and find it gone.”
With that Sarga Veys clutched at the sides of his robe, lifting the fabric clear of his ankles, and stalked away.
The Dog Lord watched him go. After a length of time he let out a heavy breath and closed the door. The last thing to remember about devil’s helpers was that they were often more trouble than the devil himself.