Tung.
The bolt punched through the ancient bronze without slowing and hammered into the man’s shoulder, twisting him around. Tiphaine d’Ath passed him with a sway of her torso, running with the liquid fluency of a leopard and ignoring the scrap-metal succession of blows from mace and war hammer that rang out behind as Armand and Rodard followed and finished the man in passing. Lioncel fumbled at the cocking lever of his crossbow as he dashed behind her; there was something dreamlike about it, his frantic speed not keeping up with her strides.
The dappled light of the balcony flashed into his vision like a tableau. A figure with a face dripping blood and boiling water and broken bones jutting through a servant’s livery stood before the hearth, leaning forward as if straining at an invisible barrier with a curved knife in his hand. Juniper Mackenzie and his own mother were between the man and the Queen Mother and the child, their hands upraised in an odd hieratic gesture; they and their opponent were in total silence, utter immobility, but he could feel immense forces straining against each other, as if the air between them rippled somehow without anything really visible at all.
The Grand Constable threw her shield aside and took the sword in the two-handed grip and spun like a wheel, the blade a silver blur. There was a heavy chunk-crack sound, and the assassin’s head leapt free. Juniper and his mother staggered and collapsed together clutching at each other, as if they had been pushing on a door that suddenly opened. The headless man fell . . . which was a relief, because some corner of Lioncel’s mind hadn’t been sure he would.
Signe Havel was fighting another broken man, one who slapped the strokes of her backsword aside with the flats of his hands. She screamed—as much frustration in the sound as rage—and lunged.
And the blade went through the man’s ribs and grated home in bone, a killing stroke in any sane fight. He lunged for her, grinning, his left hand reaching for her neck even as he laughed and coughed out bits of lung. She dove backward in a tuck-and-roll, just barely avoiding the slash of the curved knife in his right by sensibly not wasting time trying to pull the sword free. Huon Liu darted in, his own blade in the two-hand grip and flashing down.
“Huon!” Lioncel shouted at his friend.
The older boy’s face was set. His light sword thudded down at the junction of neck and shoulder; then he spun away, clutching at his stomach with an oooff as the dead man’s knife cut. Light mesh-mail showed through the rent cloth of his jacket, and then blood welled over his hands. Lioncel breathed out and forced calm on himself, and fired. The bolt transfixed the assassin at the pelvis, and he could hear the point crunch into bone, but the man—if he was one—just pivoted for a moment under the horse-kick impact, then lurched forward again.
The moment was enough. Tiphaine and Rodard and Armand were all on him at once, and blood spattered into the air behind a wall of armored shoulders and weapons rising and falling and harsh meaty sounds.
Lioncel shuddered, as if he’d been dropped into cold water when he was fevered. Or had suddenly woken from a very bad dream. A glance showed him his mother and sisters were all right, though Heuradys was frozen in shock and Yolande was sobbing; Lady Juniper had to help Delia de Stafford up before she clutched them to her. The Queen Mother was emerging from the hearth with her granddaughter, who was waving pink fists and making a wuh-wuh-wuh sound, less frightened than offended at not being in the center of the universe, which was where babies thought they belonged.
Sandra Arminger looked . . . alarmingly determined.
The High Queen was kneeling beside Huon, laying aside a long sword that looked a bit big for her, after a similar quick check. The blade and her right arm and side were heavily spattered.
“Where did you get that?” Tiphaine d’Ath said, as she knelt on the boy’s other side, ripping the clothing aside. Then: “Rodard, Armand, get this cluster . . . fracas . . . under control. See that the staircase up is secured. And we need a medic.”
“Two of the Guard knights leapt after the assassins,” Mathilda said. “Neither of them survived, much less arrived in shape to fight, but one of them lived long enough to give me this. A good thing, because there were three of the assassins. I got one, but . . .”
“They operate in threes, yes.” She looked up. “Brave of him.”
Lioncel did too, and shuddered; the men had deserved that accolade, even from so exacting a source. He wasn’t particularly afraid of heights, but the thought of deliberately hurling yourself off that drop, in armor, on the off-chance you’d survive long enough to be useful. . . .
He approached Huon himself. The Grand Constable gave him a slight approving nod, and he found that flushed a lot of the shakiness out of him; she held out her sword, and he started to clean it and check the edge for nicks. The High Queen was tending to the wound in his comrade’s stomach, a long shallow slash from around the left hipbone slanting up to the navel, ignoring the blood with the matter-of-fact competence of long experience. One of the songs the troubadours had made about the Quest was how the nine companions had dressed each other’s wounds in the wilderness. Then she frowned.
“Wait a minute, this wound isn’t deep enough to . . . he’s in shock!”
He was; his pale-olive skin was gray, and the pupils in his eyes had shrunk to pinpricks. The breath rattled in his throat.
The medics Tiphaine had called for arrived; they didn’t have far to come, since there were several clinics in the Silver Tower. One went to where Signe Havel lay clutching at her ribs and wheezing amid two countesses wielding smelling-salts and flasks of brandy, and the other to Huon. She was in the habit of the Sisters of Mercy, with a gold cross on the black leather of her doctor’s satchel.
“He’s dying,” she said flatly after a moment’s skilled investigation. “He shouldn’t be, it’s a superficial cut, but he is.”
No, Lioncel thought helplessly, inconsequentially, his hands freezing in the middle of their familiar task. Huon can’t die . . . we were supposed to go hawking tomorrow. . . .
“No!” Mathilda Arminger said; but there was no helplessness in her voice.
Then, very softly, with her eyes shut and her hands on the injured squire:
“Mary pierced with sorrows, Queen of Angels, you said that I should be as a mother to this land. This boy is flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone, wounded because he put his body between a child and evil. I ask . . . whatever grace is given me, let it pass to him.”
Nothing dramatic happened, except that a pink flush returned to Huon’s face; he sighed, began breathing more easily, and seemed to slide into a deep sleep. The Sister gave the High Queen a single sharp glance, and then began to swab and sew at what was now a perfectly ordinary mildly serious injury. Lioncel fought down a gasp.
Mathilda’s eyes opened. “No need to make much of this,” she said quietly, looking deliberately at the three of them in turn. “As the good Sister said, it’s not a life-threatening wound.”
Not now, Lioncel thought, and fought an impulse to fall to his knees in awe, or at least to cross himself.
He wasn’t entirely surprised; he’d seen the Sword of the Lady, after all . . . and there was something beyond the human in an anointed monarch, everyone knew that from the stories.
In theory. It’s a lot more alarming in practice. But I know keep your mouth shut about this from someone of high rank when I hear it, even if it’s . . . tactfully put.
He and his liege stood, bowed deeply to Mathilda, and backed away. Lioncel met the Grand Constable’s unreadable gray gaze and nodded very slightly: I understand. She almost-smiled in approval before she turned away. He was almost shaking with relief himself, now that there was time to appreciate just how bad the situation had been, but that helped to steady him.
Signe Havel was swearing mildly as the other medic—a layman—probed at her ribs and pronounced that several were probably cracked, but only slightly.
“I could have told you that without your sticking fingers into it,” she snarled. “Do you thin
k it’s the first time I’ve had a sprung rib?”
He heard Virginia Thurston speaking in a similar tone to someone else, her Powder River accent much thicker than usual: “I’m pregnant, not sick, y’ durned fool, and I didn’t get hit. Leave me be and tend to them as needs it!”
Things were getting set to order; more of the d’Ath menie had shown up, and some of the Lord Chancellor’s men, and attendants of the Countesses, who were giving crisp quiet directions of their own.
“Scrub down the blood from the assassins and then burn the rags and the instruments,” Tiphaine d’Ath said. “Then wash yourselves and burn your clothes. Burn Her Majesty’s dress once she’s out of it. No, don’t touch those knives with your bare hands, you idiot! Take them to Lord Chancellor Father Ignatius, in a box, he knows how to deal with them. The assassin’s bodies will have to be burned. Prepare a pyre outside the castle walls . . . a big one. With no people downwind.”
The servants gulped and paled and set to following her instructions with exaggerated care, and she went on to her household knights:
“Armand, get this troop of armored . . . people . . . out of the Queen Mother’s chambers, get up there with enough men and see to disarming the Guard detachment. Obviously most of them weren’t in on this but some of the ones who were may still be alive. Rodard, immediate message to Sir Tancred via the heliograph net and courier that he’s to have the High King comb the ranks of the Guard in the field.”
“Separate cells, preliminary interrogation, kid gloves, my lady?” Armand asked, clarifying.
“Right. Get going. Rodard, once that dispatch is off, go brief Conrad, he’ll be having kittens. The last thing we need is him wheeling his chair through this mess waving his cane and roaring.”
“Yes, my lady.”
She made a small exhaling sound as the knights departed briskly, glanced around to see if there was something else time-critical that needed doing immediately, and decided there wasn’t. The Queen Mother gave her an inclination of the head and mouthed: well done, which straightened Lioncel’s spine even further.
I was right, my liege is a strong right arm of the Crown! he thought proudly. And so will I be, one day!
He remembered to sling his crossbow, and tossed the cleaning-cloth and the glove he’d been wearing onto a growing pile of to-be-burned with gingerly care before he followed her and slid her sword efficiently back into the scabbard. She’d headed straight for his mother, who was holding Heuradys and Yolande and sitting on a bench. When she saw Tiphaine d’Ath approaching and Lioncel obviously unharmed beside her something seemed to go out of her, a stiff tension in her very bones.
“Good job, sweetie,” Tiphaine said quietly.
“You too, darling,” Delia said, then shuddered. “May I have hysterics now?”
“You earned them.”
His mother handed the infants to the nanny, hugged Lioncel hard enough to wind him through the mail shirt, then threw herself into the Grand Constable’s arms, sobbing.
CHAPTER NINE
Siege lines before Boise
(formerly southern Idaho)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
June 25th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
“Hello, love,” Rudi Mackenzie said. “I’m back from the fields, ready to sit by the hearth and talk over the day’s doings while you stir the stewpot.”
Mathilda laughed and waved without taking her eye from the focusing piece of a telescope whose tripod stood on the rosewood of the room’s main table. One wall of the tent had been rolled up, which gave her a view as far as the City of Boise itself.
The great striped canvas pavilion had started out life as one of Sandra Arminger’s, of the type she used for tours and presiding at the tournaments that were such an important part of Association life.
And for intimidating the bedamned out of fractious noblemen, Rudi thought, handing his shield to Mathilda’s squire Huon Liu de Gervais with a smile and a nod.
Huon was still moving carefully, but fit enough for light work, and had insisted on coming with the High Queen with an exquisitely deferential stubbornness. It was hard to say no to a lad who’d thrown himself without hesitation between a walking dead man with a cursed knife and your daughter . . . and who was visibly determined to do the same again should the need arise.
Mathilda had taken Huon and his sister Yseult under wardship and into the Royal Household for their brother Odard’s sake, and despite their mother’s proved treason. That had turned out to be a very good idea.
I never entirely trusted Odard, for all that we’d fought and hunted and sung songs and drunk wine together for years, Rudi thought. He was one of those men whose inwardness is always a secret, full of unexpected things like a forest at night. Until at the last . . . now, did I do him an injustice earlier, or did he grow on the Quest into the man he was when he died? For that man I miss, and badly.
The Baron of Gervais had gone with them not quite all the way to Nantucket, and fell on the shores of the Atlantic like a knight from an old song, with a broken sword in his hand, a circle of dead foemen around him and a jest on his bloodied lips. Mathilda had promised the dying man that she’d look after his family, but his younger siblings had since more than justified the grace of her favor by their own deeds.
And Matti has squires old enough to fight as men-at-arms; it’s not as if the boy will be overburdened.
The raised tent wall let in light—though the setting sun was behind them—and mildly warm air, along with some dust and the usual livery-stable-outhouse-and-sweat smells of an army camp, heavily seasoned with cook fire. They’d stripped out most of the comforts from the big tent to cut the weight for the transport train’s sake, but the sheer space was useful since the High Kingdom’s government had to be dragged around with it, as well as Montival’s military headquarters.
That meant a lot of meetings and a fair number of clerks, cartographers, typewriters, adding machines, reference books and knock-down filing cabinets. And a lot of the original folding furniture was perfectly practical, light and strong and compact even if given to parquetry and mother-of-pearl inlay. The chair he chose did nothing more than creak a little at his armored weight; he was spending most of his days in harness, to help keep fit and to set a good example. Fortunately it wasn’t really hot yet; if you had to fight, this sort of seventy-degree weather was the best for it. The main drawback of a suit of plate wasn’t the weight, it was heat exhaustion.
Huon helpfully fished another crock of mild cider out of a bucket and placed it not far from Rudi’s hand after he poured him a glass. The High King didn’t have any squires himself, as yet. He’d been knighted by Association ritual before the Quest, but that had taken him away soon after and since his return he’d been too busy. And he had spent enough time in the Protectorate in his youth to take the obligations involved seriously; he wouldn’t take a squire’s oath if he didn’t have time to fulfill them. The king hung the Sword over the back of his chair himself; he didn’t like anyone else to touch it anyway except Mathilda . . . and generally speaking others liked touching it even less themselves.
“I know Órlaith will be safer with mother at Dun Juniper than anywhere else on the green breast of Earth,” Rudi said to his queen.
He was continuing a conversation they’d been having for some time. Even he could hear that there was a little fretfulness in his tone, not to mention downright fear. Edain’s dog Garbh stopped her vigorous scratching and nibbling at recalcitrant parts of her shaggy fur to come over and put her gruesome head in his lap by way of comfort, rolling her eyes up at him and looking as meltingly sympathetic as a hundred and forty pounds of scarred gray-muzzled man-killing wolf-mastiff mixture could.
High Kings shouldn’t be fretful, he told himself, ruffling the great beast’s ears; the dog had walked all the way to Nantucket and back with them, and knew him well. On the other hand, I’m a father too—and someone just tried to kill my child. I can’t even dec
lare war on those responsible, because I’m already fighting them. But possibly I can bash someone tonight with my own hands, the which will be an immense comfort.
“She’d be just as safe at Mt. Angel,” Mathilda said, sighing and sitting back from the telescope.
That had been her first choice, and it was indeed a mighty fortress in more senses of the word than one. They both knew she referred to the safety gained from what might be called sanctity more than physical protection; the threat to their daughter wasn’t from armies, or even ordinary knife-men. He met her eyes for a moment and she shrugged ruefully.
“Agreed. But . . . well, I would say my mother is better at looking after children,” he said. “Didn’t she raise both of us?”
“That’s a point. No insult to the good monks of your order, Father Ignatius,” Mathilda went on hastily.
The warrior-monk, and now Chancellor of the High Kingdom, looked up from his folding desk in one corner of the chamber for an instant and nodded, solemn but with a twinkle in his slanted dark eyes. He was a man of middle height, slim but broad-shouldered and with a swordsman’s wrists, who looked graceful even sitting on a camp stool and dressed in the rather voluminous black Benedictine habit.
“None taken, my daughter,” he said, carefully signing a document and blotting the ink before peeling the paper off one of a little stack of wax disks, applying it to the paper and stamping it with his seal. “The Shield of St. Benedict is not primarily a nursery order. When the Crown Princess is a little older, my brotherhood will be delighted to assist with her education at our university. I hope to delay my senile decline until then.”
They all chuckled. Ignatius was a few years older than them, though a Changeling for all practical purposes, and he had a natural dignity that wasn’t all incompatible with his dryly ironic sense of humor. Beneath her amusement Rudi could feel the underlying anguish in Mathilda at deciding to leave their daughter in the care of others. Even an other as beloved and competent as Juniper Mackenzie. It was the spiritual equivalent of a constant low-level toothache, stoically endured.
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