by Susan Murray
Marten sauntered out of cover, hand on the pommel of the sword he now carried openly, quietly asserting his role as leader of the mismatched band. No, he was no ordinary freemerchant. Weaver would be glad of a chance to ask a few questions of other freemerchants about his new employer – he imagined they’d have some colourful views.
“Have we met?” Marten’s voice was quiet, but assertive.
“No, no I don’t think so…” Drew hesitated.
“Saw you with Jervin, didn’t I? A few nights ago, at the White Ox?”
Drew nodded. “You may well have. I– I have news for Weaver.”
“Not a new recruit who missed us in Brigholm, then? Be quick, we’ve some distance to travel today.”
Drew glanced nervously over to where the freemerchant waited as he hurried to Weaver’s side. “I didn’t know what to do. Jervin loaned me the horse. I had to tell you…”
It was bad news. It could be nothing else. “Then tell me and get it over with.”
“It’s the Lady Alwenna. She’s in trouble. Terrible trouble. Last night…” Drew tailed off, a haunted expression crossing his face. He pressed his hands to his temples. “Goddess, I can hardly bear it…”
“What trouble? How could she–” They were to be married – when? Yesterday. The Lady Alwenna and her accursed cousin.
“That’s the worst, Weaver, I can’t tell. She’s trapped. In darkness. I don’t know what’s happened. But – it’s really bad. She’s terrified, in pain. And she’s calling for you.”
Weaver studied the lad’s harrowed expression. “How? How could you possibly know this?”
“She’s… in my mind. I can hear her, trapped in the darkness.” Drew’s voice shook. “I… I told you once how Gwydion planned to make me his heir? I have some of her gift, only the tiniest amount. But I know she’s in trouble. She needs your help, Weaver.”
Was the lad telling the truth? Weaver studied him. He’d never been able to lie to save himself. Whatever was happening, Drew believed Alwenna was in danger.
“How long? When did it start?”
“Yesterday afternoon.” Drew choked out the words. “I felt such a burst of rage… and then… at first I couldn’t tell what it was, but by nightfall I knew. And I set out to find you.”
“I can’t just drop everything and leave – I’ve signed to this company. I can’t help.”
Goddess, he might as well have kicked a puppy.
Drew gaped at him in disbelief. “But she’s calling for you.”
“So you say. If she’s in a dungeon at Highkell I won’t be able to get her out.” He’d sworn to protect her. Could he live with himself if he failed her again?
“But she’s not in a dungeon.” Drew’s eyes slid from side to side as he considered. “No, if she were, she’d not be so – she’s terrified. It’s dark, and she can’t move, I think, and – she needs your help.” If this was a trap for Weaver it couldn’t have been set more certainly.
Weaver turned to the freemerchant, who watched them with undisguised curiosity. Weaver suspected Marten would happily stick a knife in him simply to see his reaction – and probe his innards just to learn what manner of a creature he was. “The lad brings bad news from Highkell.”
“We have a contract, you and I. I hope you have not forgotten already.”
“I haven’t. Hear me out first.” Weaver led Marten further away from the group so they would not be overheard. “The news concerns your patron’s lady wife. She’s in danger. Would you have me ignore it, simply to bend my knee to my king a day or two sooner?”
The freemerchant tilted his head to one side, considering. “I think you mean to answer this summons, no matter what.”
“I swore to Tresilian that I would protect her. And when I believed him dead I swore the same to the lady herself. I can’t ignore her plea for help.”
“You would break your contract to answer it?” The freemerchant toyed with the cuff of his sleeve.
“If all is as you claim then I continue to serve my king as loyally as ever.”
Marten considered. “Then of course you must do what you may. Which is what, precisely?”
Weaver glanced at Drew. “She’s trapped, that’s all we know.”
“We?” The freemerchant turned his eyes to Drew, who blushed and shuffled his feet.
Weaver couldn’t spend time arguing with the freemerchant. Not now. “The lad has the sight.”
“Indeed?” Marten studied Drew more closely. “You have freemerchant blood?”
“Aye, I do. On my mother’s side… and… my true father.”
“Then we are well met, young brother.” Marten made the gesture of greeting and, after a moment of hesitation, Drew responded in kind. “Outcasts together. We will speak more of this later, I hope.” He smiled, before turning his attention back to Weaver. “You will rescue the lady and bring her to safety. How many men do you require?”
A good question. What did they face? “Let me take Blaine and Curtis. We are used to working together.”
The freemerchant nodded, his face giving away nothing. “Very well. When you return, follow this road east for a further six miles and you’ll come to an inn at a crossroads. Ask for me there by name and they will give you directions. And think on, Weaver. If you attempt to cross me now I will see you regret it.”
“I’ve never broken a contract yet.”
The freemerchant studied him. “I don’t doubt it. But have a care, nonetheless.” He returned to his horse and took a bag of coin from his saddlebag and tossed it to Weaver. “You may need this to ensure the lady’s wellbeing. I shall expect you to account for every coin when you rejoin us.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY
The girl settled her porcelain-faced doll on the carriage seat. “How much further? It’s nearly dark.” She started swinging her legs back and forth.
“Not far.” Her mother glanced at the man dozing beside her, his arms folded, legs stretched across the floor to the opposite seat. “Don’t wake your father.” She tucked the folds of her travelling cloak closer about herself.
Alwenna sighed, then spoke in a stage whisper. “Will there be–?” With a crunch the carriage pitched sideways. Outside the coachman shouted and horses’ hooves scrambled as the vehicle lurched, flinging the girl against her mother. The floor tilted, creaking as the horses struggled outside against the weight. Then with a crack of snapping wood the body of the coach lurched sideways and it rolled over, flinging its occupants against wall then roof then wall, over and over. Soil and stones cascaded down the bank in its wake, clattering against the roof of the upturned vehicle. A great weight pressed down on Alwenna. Woollen fabric smothered her face and she clawed it free, fighting to breathe.
Alwenna woke to stillness. The crumbling, falling nightmare had ended. The same old nightmare, yet still so vivid, so real. The imagined weight of her father’s broken body pressed down on her legs. She could almost taste the loosened earth, the grit in her mouth, the dust caking her lips. Her eyes stung with grit when she opened them and tears streamed unbidden.
Dust? Grit?
She raised her hand to rub her eyelids, but something hampered the movement. She jerked her arm reflexively and freed it. Her action set something in motion with a tiny skirling hush that stilled after a moment or two. What? It sounded like pebbles. Or sand. The smell of mouldering plaster rose up around her. She blinked, looking for the chink between her bed curtains where moonlight or firelight always shone, but the night was too dark. Disorientated, she tried to push herself up into a sitting position, only to find one foot was pinned by tangled bedcovers. Impatiently she tugged it and pain ripped through her ankle. She yelped out loud and subsided. More cautiously she explored the darkness with her free hand. She was covered not by woollen blankets, but by a blanket of grit and small stones, crumbled plaster and mortar. This was not her old nightmare. Not now. It had propelled her into a new, waking one.
She could feel a jumble of stone to one side. When she reach
ed up – at least she believed it was up – her fingertips found a slanting rib of smoother stone. Her fingers dislodged a fall of mortar which cascaded onto her face, stinging her eyes anew. She pushed her hand against the stone rib. It did not move at all. She probed around the uppermost side of it and her finger pricked on a sharp, cold edge and came away sticky with blood. Glass.
Window glass.
The twisting, shaking floor. The collapsing masonry, the terrible rumbling slide as the dust cloud engulfed them. She had scrambled to the doorway by the window and now she must have been pinned beneath it. The keep of Highkell had swallowed her whole.
Her limbs began to tremble and she tried more desperately to free her foot from the weight that crushed against it. It wouldn’t move. She couldn’t even feel any pain in it now. She thrashed wildly, trying to tug it out by throwing all her body weight against it. Something shifted, then bit deeper into her ankle and she screamed aloud, until the pain overwhelmed her and she slid into darkness.
The next time she woke she could hear voices. Many voices. Some sobbed, some shouted, some cried out for help, some whimpered. In the blackness she could not even tell if they were next to her, somewhere just beyond reach of her fingertips, or if they were only imagined. Too many voices. She couldn’t make out the words. They collided with one another in her mind, ran up against the barricades surrounding her and trickled away in the darkness before she could make any sense of them. But she finally understood. At some point in time, every one of them was, had been or would be real. And she had no way of knowing which were echoes of things past, which were things yet to happen and which belonged here and now. She was a revenant pinned there between the layers of darkness, suspended between past and future yet denied the present in this nightmare made real. Her head ached and her eyes stung, whether she held them open or closed. The dust on her face was encrusted by her tears, dragging her skin tight across her cheekbones. She was going to die there, parched with thirst, weak and hungry. Inside her womb the baby kicked. They were both going to die there.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
First there was darkness. And within it, pain, clamouring in his chest. A deep dragging sensation threatened to tear him apart. Then, where he could have sworn there had been nothing, was a tingling rush as air drew into his lungs. The uneven rise and fall of his chest settled into some kind of rhythm, and he heard the flow of air, the pulsing of blood through his veins. And it was familiar. Achingly familiar.
Sounds where there had been none.
And his chest rose and fell, rose and fell. So familiar… and yet…
The awareness crept up on him almost imperceptibly: he was alive. His pulse quickened, and the rush of blood through his veins threatened to deafen him. There was something, at the edge of his consciousness, something he ought to know…
Renewed pain seared through his chest, but it burned out almost immediately, settling to a dull, dragging ache. And there were other sensations now: coolness as an unseen hand mopped his forehead, warmth as hands moved over his ribcage, dispersing the pain, and the rise and fall, rise and fall, became less laboured, until he didn’t need to think about it at all – it simply was.
And then he became aware of sounds around him: the swish of fabric as someone moved nearby; a faint grinding sound some way away – a pestle and mortar; further still, birdsong; the susurrus of leaves stirred by a light breeze. More and more sounds. His fingers twitched. And now he sensed there was light but his eyelids weighed too heavy to lift and he gave up the struggle to open them.
He couldn’t say how many days passed in this way. Sometimes when he woke it was dark, and he caught the rank smell of tallow, recognised it and understood this was not what he was used to. Other times there was light beyond his closed eyelids. But every time, as soon as he stirred, even so much as a fingertip, something damp and cool was pressed to his lips and as he quenched his thirst he slid away from consciousness once more as a deeper weariness overcame him. Until the day came when he woke more fully and realised he was in the place where he had woken the day before, and the day before that, and all those times in between.
Footsteps approached and he recognised the sweet, cloying scent of the thirst-quenching stuff he had grown used to. He parted his lips, ready to take the scant moisture. Then the footsteps halted. Fabric swished close by and a hand pressed for a few moments upon his forehead.
A soft voice spoke. “You have returned to us, at last, my lord. May the Goddess be praised for her mercy. Let us give thanks.” The voice was soft, husky. A woman’s, he realised. Still something eluded him, something he thought he should know. With a supreme effort he opened his eyes but the light was overwhelming and he had to squeeze his lids shut again.
The woman murmured words he didn’t recognise: soothing, rhythmic words. He let them carry him along, drifting on the current of pleasant sensations. He felt the lightest of motions over his chest, followed by a rush of less warm air, and realised his garments were being unfastened. The hands began to massage his upper body, kneading his chest and ribs. He relished the sensation, his chest rising and falling in time to the rhythm of the massage. Then the hands moved lower still and his body responded, hardening as she worked her fingers over him. The hands left him for a moment and he heard fabric, lifting, settling.
“It is time for us to thank the Goddess.” She straddled him. Warm flesh pressed against his own and he felt the heat in his loins grow. He opened his eyes again then, just long enough to see she was every bit as beautiful as he had imagined, with long, fair hair and firm, rounded breasts. He yearned to explore her with his own hands, yet when he tried to lift them they might as well have been made of granite.
“Save your strength,” she murmured, leaning forward to kiss him. He closed his eyes again as she teased at his mouth with her tongue and her breasts brushed against his chest. Rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and– She lowered herself onto him and began to move, slowly at first but each sway of her hips more certain than the one before, until he released himself inside her.
“Your first act on waking is for the Goddess. May she bless your offering with new life.” She spoke unevenly, her voice taking a moment to recover its earlier lyrical quality. “Now she will walk at your side always, and favour you above all men.” She lifted herself off him then. A blink of his eyes showed him her firm, neat waist, vanishing beneath a shapeless robe.
He would have struggled to sit up at that point, to call her back to him, but the sweet-tasting sponge was applied to his lips again and he slid away into a deep sleep, vaguely aware he still had not recalled the thing that was so important.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Weaver wasn’t prepared for the scale of devastation that greeted them at Highkell. They’d halted their horses in the cover of trees on the ridge opposite the citadel. Or rather, what remained of it. It was as if a giant’s fist had punched a hole through the cliff on which the citadel stood. The cliff beneath the breach was soused with water seeping from myriad cracks. Below stretched a scar of freshly exposed rock. Soil stripped from the slope had been swept down to the bottom of the gorge and come to rest in a jumble of uprooted trees and fallen masonry. Above the breach…
Weaver swore.
Above the breach the whole of the King’s Tower had gone, taking with it one wall of the great throne room which now stood open to the elements. The curtain wall gaped either side, revealing a great gash in the ground cut away by the collapse of the tower. A section of soil still topped by turf curled out over the drop – all that remained of the washing green. The curtain wall to the town side of the citadel leaned drunkenly out from the cliff top. Further up the gorge, the main city gate opened out onto a sheer drop, the bridge carried away in another landslide, along with several hundred yards of the approach road on their side of the gorge. Highkell was effectively cut off from the south.
Despite Drew’s insistence something was badly wrong, Weaver had never quite believed it. Now he struggled to co
mprehend the scale of destruction. “Where in the name of the Goddess do we begin?”
Curtis shook his head. “No one could survive in that.”
“She’s here. I know it.” Drew studied the rubble below them, intent on something none of the rest of them could detect. “There.” He pointed down the gorge, some distance below the point where the tower had stood. “We need to get down there.” He sounded sure.
Weaver studied the citadel. Labourers moved among the wreckage, clearing fallen masonry and shoring up damaged walls with timbers, but there was no evidence of archers or other guard patrols. For the time being the only way down from Highkell would be by rope, or a circuitous route over the steep ground from the west gate. There seemed every chance they might search the rubble without interference.
“Weaver, how do we get down there?” Drew was insistent.
“We’ll need to go further downstream, to where the bank hasn’t washed away. There’ll be sheep trods we can follow. We’ll leave the horses up here, out of sight among the trees.”
Drew nodded. “Then let’s not waste time.”
Once they’d reached the mounds of rubble, their task looked impossible. The debris shifted underfoot, however carefully they tried to pick their way through it. Drew, lighter than the others, took the lead. “She’s here, I tell you.” Drew clambered up the precarious pile of rubble, teetering over loose blocks of masonry, searching for something only he could sense. Then he doubled back and crouched down, setting one hand against a huge stone lintel which jutted from the rubble. “Here. This is it.” He beckoned urgently to Weaver, and he and his comrades clambered up the fallen masonry to his side.
“She’s here. She’s alive, Weaver. I’m sure of it.”
The lad believed it. Weaver daren’t. But he began clearing the fallen stone aside, and they worked to uncover the lintel. It formed the top of an ornate window, and was still attached to one jamb. A few panes of leaded glass still hung from one mullion. The big window from the throne room? She might well have been there.