by T. O. Munro
“What about rest, your Majesty?” Giseanne said. “You must guard your own health, do not exert yourself beyond your strength.”
Niarmit gave a faint smile. “I have stared into the blazing maw of a dragon, Lady Giseanne. All other problems seem smaller scale by comparison.”
Giseanne frowned, dissatisfied by the answer, but any further response from either of them was cut short by a hail from beyond Sorenson’s austere chambers. The bishop’s rooms were in the outer wall of Karlbad fortress, the winding path to the gates snaked below his high window and it was through this narrow opening that Niarmit caught snatches of a bellowed conversation.
“Who goes there?”
“Master of Horse Pietrsen,” A northern voice replied and then, even as her heart quickened in anticipation of the sound, a familiar accent of Morwencairn shouted, “Seneschal Kimbolt.”
Niarmit barely registered the order to lower the drawbridge. She mumbled some expediency at the watchers through the gate and fled from the room. As she quick stepped her way down the stairway she tried to tuck a few recalcitrant strands of hair behind her ears. She smoothed down the front of another borrowed dress, wishing she had given more thought to its selection that morning. Was it fine enough? Or was it too fine?
The sudden doubt made her slow her pace, just as she came down the steps into the central hallway. She tried to calm her racing pulse. She was the queen going to greet her servant in chief in the courtyard of a great fortress, not some flighty girl running to meet her beau on a village green. She was not Hepdida.
She mustered some sense of majesty as the Nordsalve guard opened the door for her. The chill winter sun made her squint at first. They were there just sliding off the horses. The dark bearded Master of Horse saw her first and gave her a smile and a rakish bow. Kimbolt had his back to her, engaged in some unsatisfactory conversation with Margrave. The chancellor wobbled and waved in some dismay. Kimbolt jabbed and gestured with far greater insistence until Margrave slid away, all resistance to Kimbolt’s demands melting like fat in a frying pan.
Niarmit waited. She stopped herself from running, or even walking towards him. He should come to her. At last he turned and saw her. Did she imagine a lightening to the weary set of his shoulders? He crossed the courtyard quickly, while the stable hands led his and Pietrsen’s steeds away.
Her seneschal, her Kimbolt. He was smiling, though his face was a little grey. His chin was thick with an unsoldierly stubble and there were shadows beneath his eyes. His walk had the stiff unsteadiness of one unused to the solidity of the ground after rolling days spent in the saddle.
As he came near he knelt. She stretched out her arm and he pulled off a gauntlet in order to take her hand in his. His lips touched the back of her hand, a soft touch amidst the scratching of his bristles.
“Seneschal Kimbolt,” she said. “It has been an age since we heard from you, still less saw you.”
He frowned and looked across quickly at Pietrsen. “We sent word three days ago. Did the message not reach you, your Majesty?”
“It did.” With the slightest gesture she bid him stand. “But it has just felt like longer. I had thought to see more of you at my side, Seneschal.”
“I made a promise,” he said apologetically. “To Lady Isobel and I mean to keep it.”
“You have yet seen no sign of Torsden or the boy?”
He shrugged, “we have heard rumours that he has gone north again back to his great uncle’s county. Pietrsen, remembered that there is a former servant from Torsden’s household who serves in the Karlbad kitchens now. He reckoned the man may have information to give us the edge in tracking down this elusive kidnapper.”
“If you will forgive me your Majesty,” the Master of Horse interjected. “I will seek out this cook forthwith.”
Niarmit demurred with a nod. “Tell me, Kimbolt,” she began as Pietrsen hurried away. “What was your argument with Margrave?”
“He would not give me fresh horses as I asked, not at first, though he gave in with a little persuasion.”
“From where I stood it looked a swift surrender.”
“The man is so wet you could use him to dilute water, your Majesty.”
Niarmit’s imperfectly stifled laugh turned into a coughing splutter. Kimbolt gave her a look of concern. “Are you well, your Majesty?”
“Quite well,” she assured him, “and better than I have been. You must dine with me this evening.”
His face grew greyer. “I cannot your Majesty. We are here only for as long as it takes to change horses and for Pietrsen to interrogate Torsden’s former servant. An hour at most. The rest of the company are waiting down in the village.”
“An hour.” Her voice cracked with the disappointment. “I have barely seen you in a fortnight. Sorenson and Johanssen worthy though they are, are not the most exhilarating of company.”
“I made a promise, your Majesty.”
There was a cry from behind them. “My boy, where is he?”
They both turned to face Lady Isobel. Though she had not ridden as far as Kimbolt, nor fretted over matters of state like Niarmit, Prince Yannuck’s mother looked less rested and more ragged than either of them. Her petite frame was thinner still, so each stray gust of wind threatened to lift her clear of the cobbled courtyard. “Did you find him, where is he?” Her expression was so distraught it might almost have tempted them into a lie, just to relieve the misery for a moment.
“We have not found him, not yet, my lady,” Kimbolt said gently. “But we will. I have made a promise and I mean to keep it. We ride out again within the hour.”
“Find him,” was Isobel’s only response.
Kimbolt gave Niarmit an apologetic smile. “Dinner will have to wait, your Majesty. Perhaps when I next return?”
“It is not for subjects to decide when and where to accept a queen’s invitation,” she said with a haughtiness she hated herself for. She hated Isobel for losing her son, she hated Kimbolt’s infernal honour for binding him to this digression of a quest, she hated him for making her hate and she hated herself for hating.
The day was ruined.
***
The wizard was terrified; Jay liked that. The whole endeavour had proven surprisingly easy. This was the first diversification of strategy for the little band. There had been a dearth of lone orcs for a week or more. The creatures had either grown wise, or been given clearer orders, for they seldom wondered abroad in groups of fewer than three. It had caused a hiatus in the supply of headless, and occasionally gutless, orcs.
Jay liked to think it was he who had suggested they graduate to headless wizards, thinking to come one step closer to his ultimate goal of Maelgrum the Dark Lord. However, if he had been the one to first voice the idea, it was a thought which had clearly already been on Father Simeon’s mind.
The wizards had been easy to spot, having appropriated the best houses in town. The group had marked this sorcerer returning with leaden steps from the hill where the half breed witch devoted her best efforts and most of her attention. It had been a relatively early hour, night having only just gripped the occupied town in its dark embrace, but the wizard had been sleeping soundly when Travis and Jay broke their way in. He had barely woken when they carried him out through the window, rendering the gag and the bindings almost superfluous.
Now the shivering wizard occupied the prison cellar beneath the barn, its dirt floor black with the stains of dried orc blood. He was not that old, thirty at the most. Jay had assumed wizards were always old, that they were born old. In the school history books human wizards had always been depicted as white bearded old men their faces twisted with the evil of their unlawful craft. This fellow had dark hair and pale skin, covered in a sheen of sweat despite the cold winter air. His nervous expression and pained whimpers may have had something to do with the fact that his hands had been nailed to the top of the barrel. Jay had enjoyed that, driving a pair of six inch nails through the back of each hand to pin the man’s sp
ell casting into immobility.
“I’m not an orc,” the prisoner said. “I’m human like you, my name is ….”
“Shut up,” Travis shouted. “Your name doesn’t matter.”
“Edrick,” the wizard mumbled. “My mother’s family were from round here. They had a farm.”
“Aye, I’m sure they did.” Simeon’s nod brought a brief flare of hope to the wizard’s face. “You should have stuck with the plough too, rather than dabbling in the dark arts, getting yourself exiled and then coming back with these invading scum.”
“Please, I’m not like that. There were lots of us did magic, we weren’t all turned to evil. I didn’t even know how we were all linked up. I only ever saw a couple of others.”
“You’re a filthy wizard,” Travis spat at him. “You’ve been murdering and thieving your way across Morsalve, you and your scum orc friends. Goddess only knows what dark sacrifices your foul kind have been carrying out up that hill. You, the half-breed witch, the orcs, you’re all one with Maelgrum.”
“No, no,” Edrick shook his head in desperation. “It’s not like that. I’m not like that. It’s just building work. I don’t like Quintala any more than you do. You should hear what we wizards call her behind her back…”
“You still follow the witch’s orders.”
“It’s just building, forming stone from sand and rock, making her infernal fortress. She wants it done by spring and she abuses us like slaves, just because our spells can fashion the thing far faster than a thousand men. The exhaustion is total, it leaves us fit for nothing but sleep. She is driving the wizards into the ground. I loathe her.”
Simeon shrugged. “You’re a criminal wizard returned from exile. We can’t exactly send you back into exile, so we’re going to have to find a simpler punishment.”
“I’m not an orc,” Edrick wept. “Don’t send her my head.”
“No,” Simeon shook his sadly. “We’re sending her your fingers.”
That was Jay’s cue. The hatchet swung before Edrick had even registered it. The wizard’s left little finger had already hit the dirt floor before he summoned enough realisation to unleash a bellow of pain. Jay cheerfully swung the hatchet again as a string of invective flew from the wizard’s mouth. Foul threats mingling with the dread language of magic. However his trapped and diminished hands were unable to twist openings in the fabric of space through which thaumatic energy could flow. His spells like his curses, were mere empty words to punctuate the screams as Jay’s hatchet struck.
And when it was done, ten bleeding stumps in a puddle of red on the barrel top, the wizard spat through gritted teeth. “You’ll die, you’ll all die for this. You can’t stop them. Not the half-breed or the master.” He panted against the pain, his threats screamed out as some catharsis for the agony in his hands. “The Master is All-seeing, the Master is All-knowing, the Master is all Powerful.”
“Bugger me, but the bastard’s got his faith back,” Travis exclaimed.
“The prospect of imminent death can do that to a man,” Simeon said.
“I’ve killed hundreds,” Edrick gasped, all pretence at human fellowship gone. “I burned scores of peasants at Proginnot. They ran down the hill like torches. If that fucking witch hadn’t made me form stone all day I’d have burned you into pillars of ash before you got within ten feet of me. You’re going to die, but your families will die first, infront of you horribly.”
Jay picked up an index finger from the floor and waved it at the wizard. “That’s already happened you bastard. We’ve got no families. Why do you think you’re here? You and the filth you serve have got no threats left for us.”
“Finish it, Robard.”
At Travis’s urging, the youth stepped up behind the raging wizard and dragged his knife across the man’s neck. He let Edrick’s head fall open throated onto the barrel. A puddle of red spread out and overflowed down the staves.
Simeon frowned. “Maybe we should go have a look at this fortress the witch is building.”
***
Kimbolt shivered. He hoped it was just the cold. At his side Pietrsen was uncharacteristically quiet. Kimbolt looked around, drawing in a deep calming breath of frozen air as he tried to slow his racing heart. It was just him and the Master of Horse, as had been agreed. A quarter of a mile down the track behind them lay their little camp, a company of cavalry bivouacked across the pass. Smoke from the campfires rose lazily into the crisp morning air. A dozen pots were warming oatmeal breakfasts to fill soldiers’ bellies.
Pietrsen had eaten before they set out. He’d offered some to Kimbolt too, but the seneschal’s appetite had abandoned him. The squads of horsemen gathered around their breakfast fires, filling their mess tins and then finding vantage points from which to observe, with a professional curiosity, the travails of Kimbolt and their commander.
A lone rider swung himself into the saddle at the southern edge of their encampment. Kimbolt could just make out the bulge of a knapsack on his back. The cavalryman looked up towards the seneschal and the Master of Horse. He raised his arm in a salute. Kimbolt waved back but, before he could be sure he’d been seen, the rider spurred his mount and galloped away down the narrow valley, riding hard, riding fast.
Kimbolt breathed out slowly. It was gone, for better or worse it was on its way. He found the irrevocability reassuring. The die was cast, he could not now recall the man or the missive. That half at least of the day’s business was done.
He turned away from the camp and clapped Pietrsen on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do this thing.” And at last he looked north to the great timbered steading, cradled by the enfolding arms of the mountains at the head of the valley.
The Master of Horse swallowed hard and nodded with a nervousness Kimbolt thought quite unjustified in the circumstances. Pietrsen was just the second. Together they walked another hundred yards towards the steading’s entrance. The fortified manor house had a gate that would have credited many a castle. It swung open now and two men walked out. Well the description certainly matched one of them; the other towered so tall that genealogists might have looked for ogre blood somewhere in his recent lineage.
Pietrsen was not short, but this man stood a full head taller than the Master of Horse. He walked with unhurried ease towards the rendezvous, but his second had to half-run to match the natural pace of his lord’s giant strides.
“That,” Pietrsen murmured, “is Lord Torsden.”
“He’s tall.” Kimbolt’s numbed mind found that the obvious was sometimes the only thing to say.
Torsden, like Kimbolt, wore full armour. The shield was painted blue with a gold stallion rampant upon it, a slightly larger copy of the one Pietrsen carried.
“It doesn’t look like he’s accepted his dismissal from your post, Master of the Horse,” Kimbolt said.
“He’s an arrogant bastard,” Pietrsen muttered,
The arrogant bastard drew a bastard sword from his belt. It was a blade that most men would have wielded two handed, but Torsden swung it in one giant paw, his wrist flexing effortlessly to snap the weapon to left or right.
“Remember, Pietrsen, whatever happens, everything is carried out as we agreed.” Suddenly Kimbolt needed the reassurance, the promise.
“His strength is as mighty as his ego,” the Master of Horse mumbled on.
“Pietrsen, your promise, your word of honour whatever happens.”
“You have it, Seneschal.” Kimbolt’s second blew out a soft whistling breath. “You’re a braver man than I, Kimbolt. I just want you to know…”
“Save it,” Kimbolt spat. He wasn’t interested in good-byes, at least not from him. “You know what they say about big musclebound men, Pietrsen? Big means slow.”
There was a flutter of movement. A thrush darted from the wall of the steading, either disturbed by the creak of the gate closing or drawn to the noise and smells of cooking in the cavalry camp. It flew low, swooping across the ground. Torsden’s sword flashed, a tin
y spray of red and two halves of the bird fell to the snowy ground.
“Shit, that was fast,” Pietrsen said.
***
It was not the finest set of rooms in the fortress of Karlbad but it had a separate antechamber as a sitting room, and the bed chamber was comfortable if a little draughty. It served Niarmit’s purpose well enough, and the queen had no mind to turf the distraught Lady Isobel out of the grand hall and the suite of connecting rooms. Niarmit could in all comfort, govern Nordsalve from a broom store and would, if doing so would allow the widowed Lady of the North some small easement against the ache of her missing son.
They sat, the pair of cousins, either side of a simple table. The meal was rudimentary. The depths of winter and the remoteness of Nordsalve did not allow for much beyond salted meat, bread and a few stewed vegetables. However, Niarmit thought it important that she and Hepdida should pass some time together, free of the distractions of state and castle.
“How are you finding it?” she asked her cousin. “Our sojourn in the North.”
Hepdida chewed morosely on a hunk of bread before replying. “Cold. Cold and dull.”
Niarmit winced. Her cousin, she reminded herself, was not quite six months from being a besotted servant girl whose greatest challenge had been manufacturing chance meetings with the object of her obsession. For all their shared blood and suffering, the crown princess had just as much in common with Maia, the flighty consort of Lord Tybert, as she did with Niarmit.
“You have changed the colour again, I see.” Niarmit stabbed at small talk; the paler central streak to Hepdida’s coal black hair was now a deep plum hue.
The princess looked up with sharp suspicion. “Maia showed me how. I can do it myself now.” She watched Niarmit through narrowed eyes.
“It suits you,” The queen insisted. “Very striking.”