by T. O. Munro
Jay said nothing as Hepdida got up and paced the flagstones of the stables. “I’m not a little girl,” the princess insisted, though for whose benefit she could not say.
He nodded at that, with a swallow.
“And I won’t be left behind, not this time.”
“That’s what she ordered.” His tone was reasonable, the condescension given by the boy essential to their task towards the princess denied leave to accompany them. “I was there. If you go you’d be disobeying her. Everybody knows her orders. No one’s going to let you into one of the boats.”
“That’s where you come in.” She watched him carefully as she spoke, gauging his reaction.
“Me?”
“I watched you in the council.” She held his gaze, willing him not to look away. Meet my eyes little boy; let’s make a contract. “You haven’t got much regard for authority.”
“I can’t say I saw much authority there, except for the queen that is.”
“You look like a boy who’s used to not doing what he’s told.” She circled carefully, closing in on her intention, wary of alarming the prey.
“You want me to help get you into one of the boats when we cross the Derrach.”
She hid her surprise at his perspicacity. “See not just an insolent face, but a clever boy too.”
“I told you, I’m not a boy.”
“I’m not staying here this time. I’m not being left behind. I’m sick of being locked out and treated like a child.”
“Not saying I’m doing it mind, but what’s in it for me if I help you?”
Hepdida frowned, she hadn’t bargained on that, haggling over a price for his support. “What do you mean? I’m sure I could find some gold if that’s what you’re after, though what in the name of the Goddess you’d spend it on I couldn’t say.”
The boy shrugged and looked away. “I’ve never kissed a princess,” he told the horse.
Hepdida laughed. She couldn’t help herself but she did. “Have you ever kissed anyone?”
He glared back at her, red faced. “Have you?”
A memory she had locked away surfaced in the middle of her laughter. A memory of a misshapen leering face, foul breath and a sharp knife. She battered the thought away, battened it down. “My question, not yours,” she said curtly.
***
The night was still and moonless. The muffled oars circled silently in the rowlocks, their blades slicing without a splash through the cold fast waters of the Derrach. Niarmit stared ahead. The blackness had been total, but within it there was now a faint white line of the snow covered river bank over to the left and ahead a misty blur where the dusting of snow on the leafless trees loomed as a grey mass. The helmsman had to strain less against the swift current as the boats slipped into the slower shallower waters of the shelving river bed and they closed on the occupied province of Morsalve.
This was the point from which Jay had slipped into the icy water over a week earlier. The trees, reaching to the water’s edge in a poorly watched section of the river bank, had hidden him from prying eyes. The other man, his companion, had never been found; most likely swept clean through the Silverwood and out into the Eastern Ocean.
The boy sat beside her in the prow of the boat. Behind them the rowers and the soldiers shared the thwarts. The other boats were out there too, dark shapes dimly perceived to left and right. Five boats, forty soldiers in each. It was hardly an army, and none of them horsemen. They had to travel light and fast and in secret, following wooded trails for most of the time. Tempting as it might be to have ridden for Colnham rather than walking, the logistics of securing forage for the mounts and managing a night time river crossing were against them. On the other hand, Johanssen’s lightly armoured but ferociously armed elite troops could move scarcely less swiftly through the forest than Tordsen and Pietrsen’s cavalry would have. Particularly since Niarmit and the company chaplains would be conjuring their provisions. Both food and drink could be secured with the grace of the Goddess, saving them the encumbrance of carrying full packs of three days’ supplies.
The cavalry should already have made their crossing with Torsden twenty leagues to the east; they would have been ferried across the Derrach on flat bottomed barges in broad daylight. No-one in Morsalve would long remain oblivious to the Northern Lord’s arrival south of the Derrach and hopefully the bait of the arrogant Northern Lord would draw the equally self-opinionated half-elf from her den.
If Jay spoke true about father Simeon’s resources, then adding Niarmit’s two hundred should make sufficient force to capture this fortress while adding Rugan’s army should then enable them to hold it against any opposition.
She glanced across at the boy. Little more than a dim shape in the darkness even though he was only a few inches away from her. His face was a pale glimmer between the smears of dirt that they had all applied to any light or reflective surface. Could he be trusted? Well, if this was a trap it was one of her own making. Jay had not asked her to cross the river and march on Colnham, he could not have planned to lure her into danger.
But there had been a certain furtiveness to the boy, a shifty unease that had him always looking over his shoulder, or glancing up sharply whenever she came near. Perhaps it was just his manner. The little she had gleaned of his past suggested he had suffered and suffering could make a child petulant and suspicious. Goddess knows, Hepdida had shown her that often enough.
Niarmit was pleased to have parted with her cousin on good terms. The crown princess had been content to merely wave her off from the battlements of Karlbad. There had been no suggestion of following her to the garrison fort where Johanssen’s elite force was being gathered, still less to the shallow cove where the boats had been assembled ready and waiting.
At a click of the helmsman’s tongue, the rowers shipped their oars and the boat glided into the silt of the wooded bank. In a trice the soldiers were stepping out into the shallow water and wading into the treeline. To either side there were faint splashes as the other boatloads disembarked, soldiers hurrying low to the ground in case a flurry of orcish arrows might erupt from the blackness ahead.
Jay led them in a silent scurry through the wood until they came to a clearing some four hundred yards in. Here the boy stopped, hands patting at his jacket and breeches.
“What is it?” Kimbolt hissed.
“Wait here,” the boy said. “I’ve got to go back to the boats.”
“Why?” Niarmit demanded. “The boats will be gone, we told them not to wait, not once we were safely ashore.”
“I left the map, I must have dropped it in the boat.”
“Map? I didn’t think you needed a Goddess damned map.” Kimbolt’s exasperation shone through. “We have to keep moving. I thought you knew the way.”
“Most of it, not all. I won’t be a moment.” Jay took a few steps back towards the river.
“The boats will be gone. You fool.”
“Go with him Kimbolt.”
“I’ll be quicker on my own, quicker and quieter, just wait here.” He turned and ran, lithe and swift between the trees. Kimbolt hurried after him but tripped over a root and came crashing down.
Johanssen’s grey bearded face emerged from the gloom, his bald head smeared with dirt to dim the reflectivity of his bare scalp. “What is going on, your Majesty?”
Niarmit stared into the gloom whence Jay had disappeared. “It seems our guide has forgotten something important,” she said with a deep frown of foreboding.
***
It was dark and cold in the forest, but not as wet or cramped as it had been curled up under a tarpaulin beneath the helmsman’s seat. Hepdida clutched the knapsack against her chest and stumbled a few yards deeper into the wood. Up until this point the plan had gone well. The borrowed clothes, her hair quickly chopped into a boyish cut, the frantic ride from Karlbad direct to the cove where the boats were while Niarmit gathered her troop of specialist infantry.
The boatman had been expecting h
er, he’d been paid enough certainly. Jay had warned that it wouldn’t be cheap. The gems prised from the broach that Giseanne had given Hepdida would have paid for far more co-operation and comfort than a sodden passage in bilgewater had afforded her. Still it probably cost extra to avoid the obvious questions, why was a young boy returning to occupied Morsalve? How did he have such money to pay for a passage? And why travel with this secret and sensitive mission? Yes, it could easily have cost the whole broach to stifle those obvious questions, so maybe it had not been such a hard bargain after all.
Until this point that was. The boat had been supposed to wait, to wait until Jay came back for her. And it hadn’t. There had been a muttering from the rowers. Some complaint that the other boats had already gone, what were they waiting for? And then the helmsman had hauled her out with a cheerful “off you go my lad,” and she’d been pushed numb limbed into the water. The oarsmen, who knew their chief well, had asked no questions. Maybe their indifference had already been bought and paid for, but Hepdida was alone and staggering through a cold dark wood.
She clutched the knapsack a little tighter, reflecting that at least she wasn’t entirely helpless. And then something caught her foot and she fell with a squeak and a thump. “Oh, shit!” she grumbled.
“Mind your language,” a voice commanded and a hand was on her elbow hauling her up.
“Where the fuck have you been?” she snapped. “You were supposed to come back for me.”
“Why did you leave the boat, you fool?” Jay hissed in reply.
“They pushed me out. I had no choice.”
“Well, I found you, though to be honest anyone could have found you crashing through the trees like that.” He bent to lift the knapsack.
“Don’t!” she called, louder than she should have. He stopped mid-reach startled by her vehemence. “Don’t touch my things,” she said, a little quieter but with no less insistence. “Seriously, don’t.”
He raised his hands, palms downwards, waving down her distress with a pacifying gesture. “All right, no problem. I’ll let the princess carry her own baggage.”
“Thanks,” she said, bending to retrieve the sack. She had just grasped its strap when another hand seized her free arm. It wasn’t Jay, for the newcomer had seized the boy with his other hand.
“What is going on here?” Kimbolt demanded.
***
The troops were ready to move out. It was just their missing guide and the seneschal that they were waiting on. Niarmit fretted, trying not to let her anxiety show. Quintala had deceived her so utterly that she felt sure she could never trust again; the boy had seemed genuine, and the excursion she had committed herself to was not his plan. But why run? She reached for the chains around her neck on which hung the golden crescent symbol and the royal ankh. She twisted the fine links around her fingers.
There was a shout from the guard posted at the northern edge of the clearing. Figures emerging from the treeline, the tall shape of Kimbolt, with two smaller figures held each by one arm, bringing them forward for Niarmit’s scrutiny. They didn’t seem to be struggling from anything more than discomfort beneath the seneschal’s hold, but still Kimbolt would not let them go. The boy on the left was Jay, pale skin showing through the dirt streaks on his face. The other shuffled face down, a bag slung over one shoulder.
“Master Jay has brought a friend,” Kimbolt announced grimly as the little party reached the queen.
Niarmit scowled. Kimbolt placed a heavy emphasis on the word friend, which she did not like. A hint of a deeper mystery beneath the obvious puzzle. It was too dark to read his features and too dangerous a place for riddles.
She seized the unknown boy by the hair and pushed his head back to look him in the eye. “Who are you? … you!” The exclamation raced the question out of her mouth as Hepdida looked back with a glare which was three parts defiance one part fear.
Hepdida said nothing, Niarmit cried in suppressed fury, “take her back to the boats, right now.”
“I tried,” Kimbolt said. “The boats are all gone, long gone.”
“She’ll have to stay here.” Niarmit made a snap decision. “We’ll leave an escort, ten, no fifteen should do it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Niarmit,” Hepdida replied fear giving way to the smug satisfaction of one who has seen parental fury take them beyond the edge of reasonable thought. “You can’t spare the men and I’d be no safer camped here than I would travelling with you.”
“You are my heir, you crass idiot,” Niarmit seized the girl by the shoulders and shook her. “I need to know you’re safe.” She dragged the ankh from about her neck, waving the pink gem at its head in the girl’s face. “I need to know that this thing isn’t going to suddenly flare into heat and light because you’ve gone and got your stupid little hide killed. You have to be safe. If something happens to me, you are the queen.”
Hepdida’s lip was trembling but her voice was firm. “And what use would I be then? Always kept closeted out of danger, out of council, secrets hidden from me but no-one else.” Her eyes darted to the left where Kimbolt stood a dark shadow in the night. “I’d be a fucking awful queen because I know practically nothing. You let me know nothing. If anything happens to you, then it had better happen to me too, then at least Giseanne could take up the crown. You’ve always trusted her more than you trust me, hell you trust Rugan more than me.”
“Niarmit.” Kimbolt’s voice was soft, urgently pleading. “This is getting us nowhere. What’s done is done. Now is not the time to pick over the hows and the whys of it. The little fool is right. We can’t send her back and we can’t leave her here. She has to come with us.”
“I’m not a little fool.”
“No, you’re a Goddess-sworn big one,” Niarmit’s rebuke swiftly punctured the princess’s adolescent pride. “And some poor bastard is going to have to risk his back keeping an eye on yours.”
“I’ll watch out for her.”
At Jay’s unwise interruption, Niarmit swung round to glare at the boy from Colnham. Her gaze switched back and forth a couple of times between the princess and the boy, before she exclaimed, “you’ll do no such thing. You, boy, you’re walking in the van with me. And you,” she jabbed a finger at Hepdida. “You are in the centre with the seneschal and you move more than five feet from his side and I’ll tie you together with a bloody rope.”
The queen’s crushing rage completed the deflation of Hepdida’s defiance. The tremble to the princess’s lip was more pronounced, the whites of her eyes glistening brighter with welling tears. She shifted the knapsack on her back, “I brought you…”
“Shut it! The only word I want to hear from you is sorry, and I won’t be calm enough to hear it for another three days at least. Now get out of my sight.” She swung away shaking her head to try and free it of the raging demons of doubt that assailed her.
***
Another gust whipped around the tower. It slammed into Haselrig’s back with enough force to oblige him to step closer to the wooden rail.
“The view is magnificent is it not?” At his side Quintala spread her arms wide letting cloak and silver hair fly in the grasping wind. “And this is just from half way up.”
Haselrig gripped the rail and tried to look out rather than down. The ledge which girdled the midpoint in the tower’s height was only just wide enough for two to stand abreast and he would not trust the timber balustrade to withstand more than a slight knock before collapsing.
“From the top of the tower you could see all the way to the Palacintas or to Morwencairn.” Quintala’s gushing self- congratulation did little to ease the ex-priest’s vertigo. He was just grateful that the obstruction of wooden bracing which quite filled the narrower core of the upper tower had dissuaded Quintala from trying to climb all the way to the pinnacle of her monumental folly.
“What was it you wanted to see me about?” Haselrig kept his eyes on the distant horizon, swallowing back the thought of what height he must be at to s
ee so far.
She clapped him on the shoulder; he staggered against the rail which gave a far from re-assuring tremble. “Can’t two old friends share a moment to chew over the past and savour the future?”
“I have my work, Quintala.” He longed to return to the safety of his ground floor hutch.
“Your work, yes.” She frowned. “How goes it, staring all day at two old swords you can’t even handle?”
“I have my methods, Quintala.”
She didn’t probe his obdurate response. He was grateful for that as she swept down another train of thought. “And you have an assistant. I am sure the lovely Lilith is keeping you busy in that little hutch.”
“Lilith has been of value yes,” Haselrig answered with slow deliberation.
“And obedient?”
“She has done everything I have asked of her.”
Quintala gave a coarse laugh too heavy for the wind to whip away. “I hope you have been asking her to do plenty.”
Haselrig wanted to make some rebuttal, to deny the ugly allusion in Quintala’s words, but he knew that was not what the half-elf wanted to hear. “She misses her former companion.”
“Good,” Quintala spat. “Why else do you think I gave you Rondol’s favourite concubine for your personal slave?”
“I think Rondol hates me quite enough already.”
She shook her head. “No, Haselrig. Not nearly enough. Not until he is consumed by a blaze of hate he daren’t express, eaten up from within, rotten with loathing. And then, when his skin cracks and he dares to raise a hand to me or to you, then I will destroy him.”
Haselrig frowned. “Why do you despise him so? I know he has tormented me, but apart from his arrogance and idiocy I do not see what he has done to earn your hatred.”
Quintala turned to him with a laugh and a smile and patted him on the cheek. “I hate everybody, Haselrig. Even you. Rondol is just too convenient a rod through which to distil and conduct my contempt for humanity and elfinity.”
“You didn’t always have such hatred in you.”