by D Mickleson
Triston watched in wonder as Bullistrode’s apple-red countenance softened into a soft smile, as though he was enjoying a pleasant reminiscence. “Remember?” he asked again with a chuckle, looking up at Letchen. “How we snuck up and spied on Her Grace from behind those bushes while she swam? Ahhhh, what a sight, what a sight! Such a shame that she can’t ever marry, eh? Do you really think she could be a virgin at her age?”
Giving his horror-struck friend a hearty slap on the back, he turned, then jumped a little as his eyes met the Seer’s furious stare, as though he’d forgotten she was there.
As the bizarre scene unfolded before him, Triston felt his anger draining. That he nearly brought his sword-hilt down in a potentially deadly blow on the head of a man who was clearly insane was beginning to irritate his conscience.
Then, as though the idea came to him from the heavens on the tail-end of a bolt of lightning, the answer hit him, the explanation for everything, and he kicked himself inwardly for not seeing it sooner. One glance at Alden’s gloating face confirmed everything. He didn’t need to see revenge dancing in Alden’s eyes to tell him what he already knew.
“What is the meaning of this, Sergeant?” asked the Seer, her eyes blazing, her voice laden with ice so that a shudder ran down Triston’s spine. He began to fear for Bullistrode’s safety as the man attempted to splutter an answer, the tears returning once more.
“Your Gr, ah, no, Your Grace, please. I didn’t mean that. I know you’re a virgin. Leastways, I don’t know—er, how could I know? Please stop looking at me like that ma’am, please.”
The Seer took several deliberate steps toward the man, who had begun to weep in earnest now. Tall for a woman, she now seemed to tower over him, radiating an anger so intense those nearby felt it as an actual heat. The forest itself was quiet and the air tingled with electricity.
Triston stepped forward. “Your Grace, he’s not—” But with an uplifted hand she silenced him, his tongue seeming to cling to the roof of his mouth seemingly of its own will. Watching in alarm, Triston noticed for the first time a ring on her uplifted hand glowing as though newly cast in a smith’s forge.
“Ah, uh, now, Your Grace, you don’t need to do that. Not the ring, I don’t think—not necessary.”
“Not necessary?” she repeated, some of the melody of her voice returning. “Perhaps. We’ll see. But first, you will explain the meaning of this.”
“I don’t, I’m not sure, Your Grace.” Still frozen by the Seer’s will, or so it seemed, Triston was aware that the wretched sergeant was regaining his composure at last. He had always found that danger has an amazing ability to focus the mind.
“You will explain yourself or I will be most displeased.”
“But Your Grace, I don’t know what’s come over me. The wine maybe. I don’t—”
“I will not be mocked, Sergeant. You have been in my service long enough to know that.”
The sergeant appeared to consider for a moment, blinking around at everyone fearfully, then lowering his head to his hands and pulling at his hair. After a long silence in which all could feel the Seer’s wrath building to the breaking point, he nodded to himself, as though deciding on a course of action.
He looked up and began to speak, hesitantly at first, but with growing confidence and deliberate purpose. “Yes, Your Grace, long enough to see many things. And as long as I am in your service, those things will remain with me. I will be your most faithful servant. But if you should make an enemy of me, well, there are many, including your cousin the Duke, who might be very interested to hear about some of what I’ve got to tell.”
He had said the wrong thing.
Bullistrode, seeing the fury that rose up in the Seer’s face at those last words, seemed to know it, too late. His look of defiance melted to fear, but his strangled plea did him no good. Triston watched, horror—and the Seer’s will—rooting him to the ground, as Bullistrode fell from his seat and began to thrash like a netted fish. The collar and neck tie of his cape had tightened horribly, so that the skin bulged weirdly above and below like a belt tied too tight around a fat man’s belly. He raised shaking hands to his neck, clawing futilely at the cape, then pointlessly at his own skin while his face turned blue. After a minute his last twitches ceased, and the chirping of birds and soft swish of the wind through the trees seemed to mock him with their perfect normality.
No one moved. All eyes were fixed on the Seer as she stared with loathing at the broken man at her feet, her heaving breath growing steadily calmer. Then soft crying from Alessia broke the silence. She turned from the group and disappeared into the carriage, as though hoping to shut out what she’d seen.
The Seer faced Letchen, who stared back at her like a bird facing a serpent. An unmistakable tinkle of fluid running down his armored legs met their ears. Triston stepped forward once more.
“No.” He was startled to hear the command in his own voice, startled and terrified. The Seer turned, considering him. For a moment, as the anger smoldered in her eyes, he thought she would strike him, but then her shoulders slumped and with a last, fierce look at the dead Guardian, she turned to follow her lady.
But as she passed the place where Bullistrode had sat, she paused, as though struck by a sudden thought. Her back was turned to them, but they watched as she slowly ran one finger around the rim of his wine goblet, then lifted the finger to her tongue. Behind him, Triston felt Alden grow very tense.
The moment passed. Without turning, she continued on, stepping lightly into the carriage.
“Come,” they heard from within. “We still have far to go.”
SEVEN
THE CROW ROAD
Anomalies began to appear—a grove of carnivorous willows, a laughing mountain, poor souls whose flesh rotted off while they yet lived. And I asked myself: what have I done?
—Sir Athant the Wise, Chronicle, 227
“She knows.”
“You don’t know that.”
Triston leaned over in his saddle and whispered furiously in Alden’s ear. “Just chuck it all into the forest. Now.”
“Chuck into the—Trist! These are Hellcaps. Don’t you think the Seer would be a tad bit suspicious if an almighty explosion blasted away half the hillside?”
“OK, don’t chuck it, but get rid of it. Ald, if she finds that stuff, she might kill you.”
“And if I don’t pay the dogfaces back, they definitely will.”
Triston swore under his breath. “I told you not get involved in—”
“I damn well know I shouldn’t have gambled with the thieving Meridians!” Alden shouted, forgetting their traveling companions.
“Would you shut up!” Triston glanced anxiously at the golden carriage a hundred paces ahead. They had fallen back as far as they dared so their hushed conversation wouldn’t be overheard, but he would not have been surprised to learn the Seer was listening to their every word by some devious art. Not after what he witnessed yesterday.
“Look,” he said a moment later, watching the backs of the three remaining Guardians who now rode ahead of the carriage. When none showed any sign they heard Alden’s outburst, he continued. “You didn’t see how she looked at you this morning. I’m telling you, she knows.”
Triston had been helping Dornan harness the carriage when he happened to glance up just as the Seer emerged from her palatial silk tent. His first instinct was to avert his gaze, but he was struck by her sudden expression of severe dislike as she looked at something behind him. Following her line of site, he was alarmed but not surprised to see Alden by the horses, packing his and Triston’s gear for that day’s ride. Her dagger glare still gave him the shivers, not least because the last time he’d seen it she was staring down at the dying Bullistrode.
“It’ll be fine. You’ll see. Even if she has me searched, they won’t find a thing.” When Triston looked doubtful, Alden gave a wink. “By evening we’ll have Her Grace safely tucked away in that Fane of hers. Then you and me can hit the town,
pockets a-jingle with silver waiting to be spent.”
“A-jingle? Is that even a word?”
Alden pursed his lips. “Kara uses it.”
“Ah. Say no more.”
They rode on in silence. The sun had already passed the noon when they reached a high pass in the Catspines between two craggy heights. Triston, who alone among the company had never taken the Crow Road to Luskoll, drew breath sharply at the sight before him.
From the pass the land fell away in an abrupt drop, forming a sheer wall of rock which descended, like the unnaturally smooth sides of a quarry, straight down to the valley floor two thousand feet below.
Gripping his reins with sudden vertigo, Triston looked past the ledge onto a mantel of mist clinging to the cliff-side and saw against the billowing whiteness swarms of black specks like insects. In uniform flight, they darted here and there by the thousands. But here was no strange breed of gnat which had learned the art of synchronized swarming.
“The Crow Road,” Triston said aloud.
The specks were far below them, but still soaring at a great height, a dark-winged multitude haunting the cliff-face a thousand feet above the plain.
Beyond the clinging cloud skirt a vast patchwork in shades of green stretched before him, untamed forests and pasturelands fading into orderly orchards and fields of corn. Through the farmlands a river flowed down from the northeast, a blue ribbon flecked with gold under the early afternoon sun. On the far bank rose up a stone city. High-walled, adorned with battlements and towers of silver, the Holy City of Luskoll cast a proud eye over the flourishing countryside.
“Isn’t she a beaut?” said Alden in reverential tones, reining his charger in beside Triston. “And teeming with anything and everything a man could desire. Look at her lying there, just waiting to be taken.”
Triston smirked. “Come on. The others are out of sight.”
To their left the Crow Road plunged down the cliff-face, carving a narrow ledge between a wall of rock on one side and a knife-edge drop on the other. While the path was just wide enough for a carriage, Triston was uneasy. He was quietly pleased when his borrowed horse cleaved as close to the rock wall as it could without smashing him against it. When Alden passed him at a trot, showing no concern whatever for the deadly drop, Triston scowled and urged his horse to go ever-so-slightly faster.
The road descended in a seemingly endless series of switchbacks, bending back on itself sharply at each turn. The Seer’s coachman took his time at these, edging around each bend with caution and sometimes hopping down to check the position of the outward wheels. During these pauses, Triston could not help looking out over the immense drop. More and more, he felt like he’d wandered into a strange dream world from which he might wake at any moment. The heights above seemed to grow ever higher as they descended, while the valley below remained just as distant as ever. He began to imagine himself an insect with sticky-padded feet descending the stone stairs of some giant king.
The monotony was broken when they breached the black-feathered colony. Regiments numbering in the tens of thousands huddled along their way so thickly that every crag and crevice was draped in a twitching, fluttering shadow. The road was paved in a reeking blanket of feathers, twigs and droppings.
The crows were oddly silent, mostly content to watch the travelers pass with beady, night-filled eyes. But now and then one would break out in a grating call, and then all the others joined in, filling their vertical world with the discordant cries of fifty thousand croaking voices before suddenly falling quiet. Why they gathered here in such numbers and what they lived on, Triston had no guess. But he disliked their presence. Each time this cacophony erupted, his horse shuddered beneath him, and he began to fear it would bolt.
At the same time, awe grew in him, surpassing his disquiet, at the workmanship and immense labor it must have taken to create such a way. “Who built this road?” he asked Alden an hour later when they’d finally left behind the last feathered watcher.
Alden looked at him in surprise. “The empire, of course. Meridians build all the great roads and bridges.”
“But why here? Why go to the trouble to carve a road to Wyrmskull?”
“It’s just what they do, Trist. Hells, how do you think they win every war? How do you think they conquered the world? They can always bring superior force where it’s needed because their troops can get around faster and easier than their enemies. Empire-building. It’s all about engineers and taxes, not swords and soldiers.”
The sable-clad legionnaires stood at attention in two lines of fifty on either side of the paved courtyard, their faces forward, backs straight and mailed-chests puffed out. The Seer had ordered her driver to proceed under the arching gate and straight into the fort, ignoring the startled looks of the gatekeepers as they passed. At the site of her golden carriage, a runner disappeared into the inner keep, and in no more than two minutes Fort Ironwood’s commander himself was deferentially greeting Her Grace while his men looked on in an impressive display of martial pomp.
As the Seer and the commander greeted one another, Triston looked over the Meridian line. He caught many a dark glance directed at Alden, some even daring to break their training by turning their heads in his direction, regarding him with grim smiles that promised future pain. For his part, Alden smiled back, locking eyes with those who openly glared while pointedly resting a hand on his sword hilt.
“No, Your Grace, we’ve sent out no extra patrols. As you can see most of my men are either here in the fort or at-arms in the training field yonder.” The commander pointed over the Seer’s shoulder.
Ignoring the gesture, she smiled warmly. “All seems well here, Commander Civitas,” came her enchanting voice. Those who had been furtively watching Alden looked her way, their eyes drawn to the source of her sweet music. “Then you’re have no unusual orders of any kind? Not a hint of anything untoward underfoot?”
“No, Your Grace. Not a hint,” said Civitas, frowning. “I did receive orders by special courier to patrol west to Northgate two days hence with plans to embark. Just a standard troop movement, I believe. Where-to from there I haven’t been told. But all’s quiet at present.”
“I see. You’ll take the Giant’s Pass, then?”
“That’s right, Your Grace. What, may inquire, is the reason for your flattering interest in our movements?”
“Trouble away north, Commander. But nothing that need concern you here.” She gestured with palms up as though to say all was well. “Everything is as I expected. Good day, Commander.” She held out her ringed-hand, and the commander took it with a kiss, passing off his surprise at the speedy dismissal with a well-practiced mask of decorum.
The coachman pulled the bejeweled handle of her carriage door as she approached, but instead of climbing in she turned to face the commander. “A favor, Civitas, if you please.”
“What does Her Grace wish from her servant?” he said evenly, though Triston thought he caught a wary note in the man’s voice.
“That boy there, the dark-skinned one, I wish him held in one of your cells.” Everyone looked at Alden, whose face blanched at her words.
“Indeed?” said the commander, a perplexed tone showing through his cool professionalism. “And . . . held on what charges, ma’am?”
The Seer eyed Alden coolly for a moment, then turned back to the commander. “For offending and discomfiting my personage,” she answered in a stern voice. Climbing gracefully into her carriage, she spoke through an open window. “And have him searched for contraband,” she ordered, with a wink at Alden. “Just in case.”
“It will be done, my lady,” the commander said with a bow.
“But I’ve done nothing!” Alden shouted, striding up to the Seer and jabbing a finger in her face. “I was sent to protect you. That’s all I’m guilty of, protecting you! Here, search me now.” Two legionnaires came up at the commander’s signal and grabbed his arms with looks on their faces as though Yule had come early. “Search me no
w!” he yelled, struggling fiercely but to no avail. “You lying wench—”
He stopped suddenly as the Seer reached out and slapped him with surprising strength. “How dare you,” she said with cold fury. Then, leaning in so that only those nearby heard, whispered, “I’d take a good, hard look at some of these older men, you half-Meridian bastard, before they throw you in chains. You never know. One of them might be the man who knocked up your whore mother.”
Alden’s face flushed from beet red to ghostly pale in the span of a heartbeat. Wrenching free his right arm, he drew his sword with a flash of steel and pointed the tip between her widening eyes.
Triston didn’t hesitate. Grabbing Alden’s sword arm with both of his, he held on with all his might, even as his friend tried to execute the vengeful thrust. Their eyes met, Alden’s look of shocked betrayal like a dagger in Triston’s heart. Then his friend slumped over as the commander’s sword hilt came down with a sickening thump on his head.
A buzzing filled Triston’s ears, his limbs suddenly heavy and his fingertips tingling. He didn’t hear the commander wishing the Seer a fine afternoon, didn’t see the salute of the honor guard. He could only watch as his friend’s limp body was dragged over the flagged courtyard with all the dignity of a sack of potatoes. Alden’s booted feet disappeared into the fort, but still Triston stared, helpless to do anything.
But what could he do? Draw his own sword and take on the entire legion? A small voice told him that Alden would have done that for him. Alden would have fought for him, but what had he done? Sided with the enemy, that’s what.
Guilt began to weigh on him like a millstone. Alden would never leave here alive, not when half the soldiers were after his blood. And when they searched him and inevitably found the Hellcaps, what then? The commander himself might order Alden’s death in that case, saving the soldiers the trouble.