by Daniel Ford
Everyone in the shade of the trees suddenly and collectively drew breath. Allystaire felt intensely the pull of Garth’s words and could picture, for a moment, the battle they could summon. He saw Wind’s Jaw keep with a new flag snapping above it in the mountain air: gold sunburst on a brilliant blue field.
“Of the major liege lords, at least two would rise for you,” Garth said urgently, fueling the fantasy. “Highgate would be yours. Coldbourne, of course. The Horned Towers would stand with Gilrayan, but at least a dozen of the lesser knights would rise for you. Skoval. Curtes. Mauntell. Downys.
The soldiers and the levies know you as the best captain they ever had, to say nothing of the warbands. You think they’ve forgotten?”
Skoval nodded approvingly; Miles cleared his throat and added, “I’d step aside and give you Coldbourne back, m’lord. I’d be your man.”
“No man knows better than you where and how to fight in the high country,” Skoval put in, and Allystaire was momentarily silent and still, though stunned into noting, That might be the most sensible—mayhap the only sensible—remark I have ever heard him utter.
The thought came to him again; he knew every approach to Wind’s Jaw, and every angle the defenders inside it could and couldn’t use, how to bring the engines up and where to aim them. Men would rise; he saw that now, an army at his back marching up the eastern trails with the rising sun at their backs and the pennant he imagined, brilliant blue and bright burnished gold, flapping above them.
“Take Oyrwyn, and Harlach would be ours in two years. You conquered nearly half the place as it is. Then we can turn to Delondeur,” Garth murmured.
Allystaire turned his eyes from the grass, from the visions he conjured in it, toward the light of the morning filtering through the leaves. He smiled faintly as the words of the Goddess filled his head once more.
He saw the banner he imagined in tatters, flapping above a gutted castle. Bodies strewn everywhere. Ravens flying unchecked among the carnage.
Garth rose halfway to his feet, a hopeful smile breaking out on his face.
Suddenly, Allystaire laughed. He crossed the grass toward Garth and reached down as if to take the man’s hand. The pale knight smiled more widely and started to stand, when Allystaire cuffed him sharply on the back of the head.
“Raise your hand with thoughts of winning glory or riches and battle will turn against you,” Allystaire said, his voice quiet, his face still slightly dreamlike, as if still seeing a vision. “That is what She told me, Garth. Part of it.” He shook his head, bringing his eyes back into focus and his harsh, rough features into sharp awareness once more.
“Glory, titles, men flocking to my banner? I wasted too much of my life seeking that, Garth. Wasted,” he repeated, putting scornful emphasis into the words. “I am barred from them now. No. You will not entice me with this. I do not know if I have a home, or ever will again. Yet I know it is not in Oyrwyn, at Coldbourne, or at Wind’s Jaw.”
Startled, sprawling back to the grass, Garth looked up in shock and pushed himself to his knees. “Who is this she you speak of?” He tossed a glance over his shoulder toward Idgen Marte. “Her?”
Idgen Marte and Renard burst out in laughter, hers a shade too husky to be musical, his rolling and harsh, like rocks crashing against each other.
“No, Garth. The She I speak of…we have been calling Her the Mother.”
“Your mother’s dead, Allystaire. My father helped you carry her casket from Coldbourne Hall to your family’s tomb.”
“I did not say my mother. I said the Mother, Garth. Open your ears if you will not your eyes.” Allystaire squatted down in front of the paler man and fixed him with a dark blue stare. “Garth. Think over the battle yesterday, if battle we can even call it. I broke your leg—your armored leg—with a kick from a riding boot. How does it feel now?”
Garth swallowed hard, and, perhaps unconsciously, edged away from Allystaire, blinking a few times. “Itches.”
“Itches the way a wound does for a few days after it is well and truly mended, aye?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Garth nodded.
“How do you think I did that?”
“Sorcery of some kind.”
Allystaire shook his head, smiling ruefully, the way one might when trying to explain something to a child determined not to learn. “It is not sorcery. It is a Gift of the Mother. The power of a Goddess in my hands.”
Garth looked away, his fair skin flushed. “You’ve finally cracked. I always knew you would. What exactly do you fancy yourself to be?”
Allystaire only stared at him.
“He is a paladin, you tit. A holy knight. A hammer in the hand of an angry Goddess.” Idgen Marte’s voice rang out impatiently and she strode forward till she was standing above the blonde knight, her face taut with bottled rage, long white scars livid against her dark skin in a way that Allystaire had never seen.
“I’ve witnessed him perform more miracles in the last week than any song cycle attributes to Arentenius and his Argent Blade, and you’ve been on the receiving end of three. He snapped your leg like a child would a twig, then he compelled the truth of you, and then he healed you. If you cannot acknowledge the truth of that, then you aren’t just a freezin’ idiot, you’re a liar and a coward. And if you doubt his word again I will give you your sword back and we’ll find out just how well you can dance on a leg that should still be broken.” Her hand strayed dangerously to the hilt of her sword.
“Stay your hand,” Allystaire said, quietly but firmly. He straightened up and placed his hand lightly on her arm, and he felt the smile of the Mother in his mind and words he had thought when he had first met Idgen Marte, an old lifetime ago: I like this one. He knew, of a certainty now, that those words had not been his thought, or at least not his alone, on that night in the tavern. The Mother had reached out to her as surely as to him. “We will speak after this. Alone,” he said, and gave her the gentlest push against her arm, indicating that she should step back.
She stepped back, dropped her hands, and took deep breaths, nodding. Allystaire saw her turn her face toward the morning sun, and he smiled before turning back to Garth.
“Tell me how things stand, truly, back…” He paused, stopped himself from saying home, and said, “back in Oyrwyn. Tell me no lies, and I may let you head back with the corpses and a warning.”
Swallowing once, Garth suddenly blurted, “I married her, Allystaire.”
Allystaire blinked in shock as he stepped away. “What?”
“Before the news of your flight had spread, before the Writs were published. We found a priestess of Fortune and had her say the words in front of three witnesses.” He swallowed hard, and pressed on. “I know you weren’t there to grant leave, but it seemed prudent.”
Allystaire absorbed this slowly, then nodded. “Audreyn’s life was always her own; her pledge was her own to give.” He paused, found the other man’s pale eyes, held them a moment. “For whatever it matters now, Garth, I would always have said yes.”
Garth nodded, and for a moment an old bond seemed to kindle between them, the easy, unspoken companionship of men who’d faced danger together, knew it, and saw no need to cheapen it with words.
It quickly passed as Garth cleared his throat and went on.
“The Young Baron is as bad as ever. Maybe worse. I keep waiting for his father’s blood to show true, and then he raises up blades-at-hire and thieves if they say what he wants to hear.” He jerked his chin toward Miles, who grimaced and fidgeted uncomfortably on the grass.
“’Ey! I’m as much a knight as any of you. Granted title by Baron Oyrwyn hisself,” Miles protested. “I earned it fair.”
“Did you?” Allystaire tilted his head toward Miles, and let the rope he’d been knotting dangle from his hands as a noose. “Under the Old Baron, being a knight meant more than wearing a suit of steel
and knowing how to swing a sword, Sir Miles. It meant being educated. Can you name all of the fourteen original baronies, Sir Miles?”
The man chewed at his lips in the midst of his dark black beard, eyes darting side to side. Allystaire chuckled and went on.
“Are you lettered, Sir Miles? Can you read and write your own dispatches and ciphers if commanding men in the field? Did you spend your months with the Old Baron’s dwarf chirurgeon, learning the ways to treat a wound, how to end a man’s life painlessly, where the blood flows strongest in the body?” Allystaire waved a hand to forestall any answer. “Sorry, that last is a trick, for old Michar is dead a half score years and more. A shame, though. His training, his knowledge, the medicine he alone knew, saved more Oyrwyn lives than all the steel and stone in Wind’s Jaw. Saved mine, more than once.”
Allystaire cinched the noose a little more tightly and looked closely at the man.
“Do you know the history of the barony you serve, Sir Miles? Or your fief? Coldbourne Moor has been the seat of no fewer than six different families. And that is just as far back as Oyrwyn’s archives reach. Could be many more.”
Miles shook his head, his eyes flitting from the noose to Allystaire’s face and back again.
Allystaire nodded slowly, his manner that of a scholar imparting a lesson to a dim charge. “It has been seen as something of a cursed fief. No family holds it long; often it is granted to a successful retainer or a landless knight who does sterling service to the baron. Often it has been simply a second holding for a family of greater means. My grandfather was awarded Coldbourne Hall for his service at the start of the Succession Strife. He was not much more than a soldier, but apparently a damned good one, for it earned him not only knighthood, but land and title. I do not know where he came from, but my father suspected that he had begun life as a laborer, perhaps even on the bogs of Coldbourne itself.”
Casually, Allystaire draped the rope over one shoulder and squatted painfully to one knee, in order to look Miles eye to eye, meanwhile continuing the lecture.
“My father broke the ‘curse’, as it were, by actually living long enough as Lord of Coldbourne Hall to have children. Heirs. Three generations of the same family. Had not been done for well past five-score years by then.”
“Now. Miles, Lord of Coldbourne Hall and the Moors; do you have a family? Children?”
Miles swallowed hard, his eyes wide and rolling in his head. “I…I had a son, m’lord. Bastard son. Down in Londray. Or I did. Been a few years.”
Allystaire nodded faintly. “How old?”
With a shrug, he replied, “Half a score years by now?”
“Gram—the lad whose life you threatened yesterday—is roughly that age. A defenseless child with no part in any squabble between the Young Baron and me. Casamir ordered you to kill him. Would you have done?”
“Would I have done…m’lord?” Miles swallowed again, edging back. He did not get very far before Allystaire clamped a hand on his shoulder, holding him still.
“You put a knife to the boy’s ribs, Lord Coldbourne. You used a child as a hostage, threatened his life, to get me to surrender in a ploy to curry favor with a baron in whose service you have been for perhaps a fortnight, who thinks so little of you he has not bothered to give you the proper arms upon your shield. Now answer my question, Miles.” Allystaire’s voice was a calm even rumble, but as he leant closer, it evoked the deadly whisper of steel.
“Do not attempt to lie. You will find that you cannot.” His hand tightened on the man’s shoulder and then clasped the back of his neck, fingers digging roughly into the flesh and the bone beneath. “Would you have killed the lad?”
Miles’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, then, finally, he croaked, “Yes.”
“Why?”
“What d’I care, he lives or dies?”
“You have killed children before? Women? And would do so again?”
Once again his mouth opened and closed and no sound came out. The man clamped his mouth shut, closed his eyes, shaking with the force of the effort. He threw all his weight against Allystaire’s hand and fell back upon the ground, pale, trembling, sweating.
Allystaire stepped back, his eyes dark with fury. Miles blubbered on the ground, eyes still tightly shut. “Warlock. Sorcerer. Forced me…forced me t’say I…it’s a lie!” The man sat up and started to push to his feet as if to run.
Allystaire casually backhanded Miles across the mouth, sending him sprawling back onto the grass. “I cannot force you to say something that is not true.” He pressed his lips into a flat line and said, “Garth. Skoval. Help Sir Miles of Coldbourne Moor to his feet.”
The other two prisoners stood with the abrupt attentiveness of men used to obeying. They bent to seize Miles with their still bound hands and managed to force him to sit up, if not stand. Allystaire stepped in front of him and began to settle the noose over his neck. “This will go poorly for you if you insist on staying on the ground, Sir Miles,” he murmured, with grave formality. “You would have committed a murder, and you are a murderer, many times over I suspect. Yesterday, a knight in armor on horseback—you used the weapons of your station to threaten a child and terrify poor folk. You are not the first man to do that. You will not be the last. But today, you will hang for it.”
Garth and Skoval both paled, and the paler knight licked his lips and spoke. “Allystaire, you’ve no legal—”
Allystaire turned his hard and pitiless blue eyes on his brother-in-law. “I did not ask your legal opinion, Lord Garth of Highgate.”
“I cannot allow—”
“Who speaks next, hangs next,” Allystaire roared. “You will not try to tell me that this man deserves less than death for his crimes yesterday, or the many that lie behind it.”
“You won’t hang me, Allystaire,” Garth said. “And he may deserve it, but he is knighted by a baron’s hand. He cannot be hanged like a common bandit.”
“He is the commonest of bandits,” Allystaire spat back. “One with a title, and the wealth and arms that position brings.” He cinched the noose tightly around Miles’s neck, and tucked his hands under the man’s arms, dragging him up to his feet. “Stand up and die like a man.”
Desperately, tears streaming down his cheeks, Miles sobbed, “Ransom, m’lord! The baron will—”
“Do you think I would trade justice for links? No.” Allystaire turned back to Skoval and Garth. “Get your shoulders under him. Lift him up. You remember how.” Flicking his glance back to Miles, he added, “It will be quick. I promise you that.”
He took the end of the rope that coiled around his arm, loosed it, and threw as much as he could over the nearest, stoutest tree branch that stood the right height—just under twice his own length—above the ground. He pulled the slack through, then braced it by wrapping it around his back and tying a quick sliding knot with the end, setting his feet into the ground and digging in. “Renard, Idgen Marte.”
Renard set down his spear, and both of them came over to assist him in holding the rope taut. “Do you wish a prayer, Sir Miles? Do you wish to discuss disposition of your remains? Or to speak some final words?”
“Freeze you and your whore Goddess, you freezing warlock,” Miles shrieked, struggling against the grip of Skoval and Garth, uselessly.
With a slight, cold shrug, Allystaire said, “In the next life, Sir Miles, should you meet the Mother, I should recommend not calling her that.” Then, without any further warning, he tensed his shoulders, yelled, “DROP!” to Skoval and Garth, and dug in his heels.
Skoval and Garth both fell to their knees, each seizing one of the man’s trouser legs, and pulling hard. Miles, still screaming curses, went silent after a crack so sharp it startled birds from the nearby trees. The rope dug into Allystaire’s shoulders and back, a thin line of fire, and Idgen Marte and Renard braced him as the dead weight tried to pull him forward, hi
s feet digging into the ground. He hauled back on the rope, silently counting in his head till he reached a score. When he did, he slowly stepped forward, lowering the rope until Miles’s body hit the ground, lifeless and still, neck unnaturally bent.
The two surviving knights of Oyrwyn scrambled back to their feet in shock, faces blanched. “Fortune freeze me, Allystaire, I thought you were trying to scare us,” Garth said, trembling a bit.
Allystaire fixed a hard stare on them. He unlooped the rope from around his shoulder and began unknotting it, staring evenly, not blinking. “He wanted killing. If you cannot see that, you are not quite the man I thought you were.”
Garth swallowed and turned his eyes away.
Skoval cleared his throat. “Allystaire, you always were a hard one. This isn’t the first man you’ve hanged. Cold, it isn’t the first man we’ve helped you hang. He was different, though, he was a—”
“He was a what? A lord? A brother of battle? A knight?” Allystaire spat these words while he finished unknotting the rope, throwing it aside in disgust. “He was a murderer, and would have been again. Did you not hear his own words? Did you not see what he did?”