On Tollswitch Hill Stories from the Averraine Cycle

by Morgan Smith

  Roisean stood a little apart, brushing away the dust on her gown, and Galen was bending over him, with a concerned look, and he saw that one of the stones, the pale one, had toppled a little sideways.

  “Are you all right, my lord?” Galen sounded frantic. His eyes were wild and questioning, and he did not look at all like a man who had the slightest comprehension of what had transpired. Well, neither did Kenzie, not really, and already, in his mind, the whole thing was slipping away, fading around the edges, and he couldn’t quite remember, now, what it was he had wanted to say.

  So, instead, he sat up, muttering that he was fine, really. When he looked at Roisean, he blushed, and wondered why he felt so awkward. She was just an ordinary woman, after all, and not particularly pretty.

  But when he stood up, he looked over to the stone circle, and he saw the three drops of blood, still wet and gleaming, and when he looked at Roisean again, she just nodded a little, and he shivered, even though the morning sunlight was so warm, but he could not think why.

  Indeed, his strongest memory of Toll, forever after, was that they’d killed and roasted a suckling pig, to celebrate the end of the terrors they’d been through. It was the best meal he’d had in weeks.

  ***

  In later years, when he had cause to visit the Holy Isle because his wife had a niece who was studying there, he was granted a brief audience with the Reverend Mother, who was as worn and as old as he was, but with the clearest green eyes, and they smiled at each other and talked of ordinary things.

  ####

  The Dead of Midnight

  By Morgan Smith

  Copyright 2015 Morgan Smith

  Traveling Light Publications

  The Dead of Midnight

  We marched into Gosset in pretty fine style, considering that we weren’t, and hadn’t ever been, devotees of close-order drill.

  Mind you, we’d had a week at the fortress at Glaice to rest up, mend our kit and suck down some decent ale before a pleasant day of strolling cheerfully along old, familiar terrain to our new posting, and no one objected when Tighe reined in, organized us back into tidier lines and pointed out that first impressions might, this time, actually count.

  We kind of agreed. When you’ve been a unit that supposedly needed to be “rehabilitated”, when you know full well that most people will still stubbornly believe in the old reputation of a garrison known for its overall disgracefulness, you occasionally have the urge to prove them wrong. We might claim we knew our own worth, and screw the world and their uninformed opinions, but deep down, well, we wanted a little respect. We’d been through hell and back, and lived to tell the tale, and some of the best-trained troops in Keraine were unable to say the same.

  They were building a new granary off a little ways west of the green – you could see the black, scarred earth where the old one had burned down last summer – but apart from this, it was well-kept and peaceful-looking. Just what Commander Olwen had promised us, when she announced the transfer: easy duties in pleasant surroundings to give us a bit of time to train back up, and a kind of reward for past services.

  For Tighe’s sake, then, we made an effort to look efficient and disciplined, marching fairly decently along with only a surreptitious inventory of the two taverns, and fetching up at the keep’s gates, still more or less in two lines.

  There was a guard on the gate who took the packet of orders without any sideways glances, and another who ushered us into the open courtyard inside, and then the captain was summoned into the hall, leaving us to water his horse and our two pack-ponies.

  The soldiers here were glad to see us, of course, since our arrival meant that their own transfer would be imminent. Just why they were eager to leave seemed obvious, I guess. Gosset isn’t a prestigious posting. There were some bandits preying on merchants along the North Road that they had to keep in check, they said, but not much else. They didn’t know where they’d be going next, but they didn’t seem to care.

  We looked at each other, trying not to be obvious. We used to think like that. Now we thought a little boredom wouldn’t come amiss. Soldiers only think they want excitement till they get it.

  ***

  The local lord was kind of nervous, like. That was Tighe’s take on it, anyway. The rest of us didn’t meet him in the flesh, so to speak, until a few days later. We’d seen him from a distance, of course, a lanky man with a shock of dark hair, but we were busy settling in, going out on a few desultory patrols just to get used to the terrain, not to mention visiting both taverns and passing judgment on them. The Three Geese was merely passable as far as the ale went, but got high marks for accepting our rowdiness with cheerful grins, while the Toad on the Green had better beer but seemed a bit sedate for common soldiers.

  After a more business-like patrol, this time well into the hills, we came back to find Lord Daric standing in our barracks, looking around.

  It isn’t done. It just isn’t. A troop has little enough to call their own, and even great lords bow to the convention that says they should ask for permission before they cross that threshold. Daric wasn’t even a great lord. He was just the minor vassal who paid for his holding by hosting the Queen’s troopers while we made sure that travelers heading north went their way unmolested.

  But we said nothing. We didn’t know how long our stay here might be. There was no point making trouble right at the start, and we reckoned that Tighe could drop a word in his lordship’s ear about not wandering into our barracks, if this wasn’t some kind of one-off emergency visit.

  “Oh – er – sorry and all that,” he said to no one in particular. “I was just making sure everything was, ummm, you know, comfortable. Got everything you need?”

  He was edgy. All the while he spoke, he was glancing into the corners of the room, his eyes skittering around like a startled foal, and he couldn’t seem to keep his hands quite still. They fluttered nervously at his sides, then swept up to brush away at the side of his face, then back down to twitch a little at his sides again.

  “We’re fine, sir,” Tighe said. He hadn’t been captain very long, and the habit of deferring to others still lingered a bit. It was no bad thing, said Ari, our troop second. Being polite to the gentry might save you trouble later on, when you needed to put your foot down. A surprise attack, as it were.

  Lord Daric nodded. His eyes made one more sweep around the shadowy edges of the barrack-room and then he nodded again, not to anyone in particular, and then he just sort of wandered out, as if he had forgotten us entirely.

  “Addled,” Ari muttered, but under his breath. “Why us? Couldn’t we get stuck in with a sane one for once?”

  Tighe shook his head. “He’s grieving, so I hear. The younger brother, he says Daric’s wife died, all sudden like, not a moon’s turn past, poor woman, and the lord’s still in shock.”

  Ari scratched his head. “That’s odd. No one down the village mentioned a word.”

  “Well, it’s old news to them. Likely it isn’t on their minds, what with the spring planting and all.”

  “Yes, but…” Ari’s voice trailed away.

  “No business of ours, is it?” Tighe was firm. He had a lot on his mind, I guess, still trying to make himself think like a captain. We were cheering for him to make good. We’d lost our last captain to promotion, and while we were pleased for her, the last thing we had wanted was some fresh-faced, inexperienced young lordling taking us over and trying to make us parade-ground quality. Tighe might not have been well-born or even trained to command, but he was someone we knew, someone who had been through the worst with us, someone we could count on.

  At table that night, I found myself watching Lord Daric out of the corner of my eye. Tighe might think his oddness was down to grief. I wasn’t so sure. I remembered how my father had been, when my mother’s last pregnancy took her. I remembered how he’d been when my old granddad had gone, too. Something, somehow, just didn’t ring true.

  He was still distracted. When the meat ca
me, he looked down at his plate as if he could not think what it was that was in front of him, and then he looked up, staring fixedly into the rafters.

  His brother, Saidear, was beside him, whispering at his ear, and drawing Daric’s attention back to the thin slices of chicken, and urging him to sip at the mug of ale. Even when Daric was seemingly recalled to the present, Saidear looked worried and watchful, and hardly took his eyes from Daric.

  I wondered why I hadn’t noticed all this before. I’d taken six evening meals in this hall, and it seemed I had barely even looked at the man whose keep this was. That was why, I thought wryly, I was destined to remain a simple squad leader at best. This was why I would never make troop second, let alone captain. Tighe and Ari – they might not always say much, but they watched for things. They kept their minds on soldiering, and me? Well, I was willing to put my mind to it, but only if I was told to. Bridget nic Faille, family pariah and disgraced Queen’s soldier, was not what commanders are made of.

  ***

  It was Ari, of course, who got us the dirty details. This is what troop seconds are for, I reckon; besides keeping the rest of us in line, they do that scut-work and gossip-mongering a captain can’t be seen to do.

  So Ari went down to the Three Geese and flirted outrageously with the tavernkeep’s aging wife and then offered to share with the pair of them a flagon of some honey wine they had from a beekeeper up Ys Tearch way. Once they’d made some inroads into that, while faking an intimate knowledge of past local events he did not actually have, he enticed them into giving him far more than just the bare basics.

  It had all begun innocently, if tragically, enough.

  She’d been much younger than Lord Daric, and very pretty, although it wasn’t really a love-match for either of them. She was the youngest daughter of a widowed northern merchant who depended on traders coming up the main road to survive long enough to fill his warehouses, and having an alliance with the man who made that possible had seemed a useful thing.

  The marriage had, at least on the surface, been a happy enough affair. Caronwyn hadn’t been much good at running the household, but she sewed fine seams and had a sunny, easily contented nature, although she had struck the villagers as a trifle odd, in that she had been partial to running about the woods barefoot in the early mornings, and she had been rather bizarrely squeamish about eating meat, especially if it was even the least bit bloody. Still, she seemed kind and goodhearted and willing to try, at least at first.

  After the first year, though, she began to change somewhat. The folk said at first that this was natural, that she was leaving her girlhood ways behind, that the cares of the keep that she tried hard to fulfill were wearing her down. She was less lighthearted, at any rate, and she seemed to avoid company of any sort save that of her husband.

  Then she got pregnant, and it all got very much worse.

  It takes some women that way. The ordinary tiredness and the new-mother sickness hits them hard, and they get fractious or prone to ill fancies and bad dreams, and it seemed that for Caronwyn, it was doubly hard, because her swollen ankles and growing belly ended her dawn-lit rambling.

  Saidear, who had trained at the Holy Isle at Braide, prescribed healing draughts and herbal tonics, but the symptoms didn’t abate. She seemed painfully thin, and all her youthful sparkle died away, till she became only a faded shadow of the girl she’d been. The servants reported that she wept, silently and often, and seemed not to care about anything, not even the life she carried, and that she spent most of her days alone, locked up in her room.

  It’s a tale grown stale with the telling – every old biddy by the fire has a version to scare the younger women into frightened respect.

  Except this time it was a little different, because of the manner of Caronwyn’s death, and then, of course, the hauntings.

  ***

  “You aren’t serious,” I said.

  “I’m telling you what they say,” Ari was a bit grumpy about it. I didn’t blame him. “The lord’s seen them. Her, I mean. And that’s why he’s so spooked.”

  The end was bloody. Caronwyn had seemed to be rallying, she’d started coming down to hall for the evening meal again, although she still only picked at her food.

  On the third night, she’d sang a little for them. Whatever ailed her, it hadn’t affected her voice, and when she’d finished the “Lament of Cadeyrn” there wasn’t a dry eye in the hall. She’d gone up to bed, then, and her maid had clearly heard the bar drop, locking out the world.

  In the morning, they just thought she was sleeping late. She’d done so a time or two before. But noontide came and went, and not a sound was heard. No answer came from the gentle knocks, nor from later, heavier poundings. Finally, Daric had ordered the door broken down.

  Even leaving aside days of gossipy exaggerations, Ari said, the facts were clear. The alewife at the Three Geese had been one of the women summoned to the keep to help wash and shroud the corpse; she’d seen the wounds, and Ari said he didn’t doubt her description completely – she was still a little sick at the memory. Caronwyn had had several frenzied stabs to the body and her throat had been slashed. The sheer amount of blood had been horrifying.

  Murder. That was the first and most logical thought.

  Except the door had been locked all night.

  Lord Daric had knocked, and then tried it, wanting to kiss her good night, when he’d come up some little time later. His brother had been with him, and they hadn’t heard a sound from within. She must have already been asleep, they thought…or dead, even then.

  They decided she must have gone mad, and done it herself. There wasn’t any other explanation, the alewife said, conveniently overlooking the fact that there had been no knife, nor any other weapon found that could have been used to make those cuts.

  And there it might have rested, if little Nyx, the farrier’s son, hadn’t seen the lady, walking across the green at dawn, like she so often had, one full seven-day after they’d laid her body in the cold winter ground. The lord had been like a wild man when he heard it, hauling poor Nyx into his hall and questioning him, and it had become apparent that the boy wasn’t the only one who’d seen Caronwyn’s sad shade. Daric couldn’t hide his own guilty knowledge – he saw her everywhere, seemingly.

  “Mother of All,” Colm said. He’d been in the middle of sewing a new lacing onto his boot when Ari had started the tale, and halfway through, he’d just stopped, dropping the leather onto the floor, and listening open-mouthed and disbelieving. We’d all been like that. It was quite the story. “So we’re to be haunted now?”

  “Don’t be daft,” Tighe said. “This is just country yobboes, making their lives more exciting.”

  “Well, but you saw the lord,” said Ari. “There’s something here – he’s all to pieces. He thinks he sees his dead wife larking about the keep – I believe that part of it, anyway.”

  I thought that was the least interesting feature of this, and I said so.

  “The point is, how did she die? It seems to me that everyone’s worrying about the ghost because it stops them from thinking about the rest of it.”

  “Maybe,” said Tighe. “But how is that our affair? We’re here to keep the roads safe, not go chasing after dead pregnant ladies who like to stroll about in the dawn. She isn’t harming anyone, is she?”

  “No-o, I guess not. But if she didn’t kill herself, then there’s a murderer on the loose. You don’t think that concerns us?”

  “She must have done it herself,” Ari said. “She must have. We’re talking country folk here, Bridget. They wouldn’t know what was what in a month of feast-days, and I bet they didn’t look too hard for that knife. It could have rolled under the bed – it’s likely still there. The alewife says they locked her chamber door the day they buried her, and no one’s been in since, on Daric’s orders. The door was barred from inside that room from dusk till noon, so how could anyone have gotten in and killed her, and then gotten clean away with the bar still dr
opped?”

  I didn’t know. But it itched me. I could almost hear our old captain telling me in a firm voice that the dead don’t walk. I needed to believe that.

  ***

  Officially, according to Tighe, we didn’t know word one about any of this, and we were ordered to keep out traps shut and go about our business. If and when the lord asked for aid, then we’d see. Till then, we were here to patrol the roads and chase bandits.

  Over the next few days, though, it became apparent that Gosset’s placid, prosperous surface was only that: a surface. Underneath, the village was seething with worry and fear and spite.

  You know how country people can be. It doesn’t really matter how far apart or unrelated their mischances are: they link them up into a chain of misfortune and cry “Curses!” at the first opportunity. From Issing to Ys Tearch, they’re likely all the same.

  It hadn’t taken long before every possible bit of bad luck, from last year’s raids by the Camrhyssi to a hen gone broody, were laid at the ghost’s door. What with Daric’s increasingly strange manner, people began to wonder if the ghost was trying to tell someone something: something about Daric and her death, and the talk was turning ugly.

  He was now the pack-pony on which every evil could be laid. They weren’t saying it outright, but they thought him a dreading and an ill wind, and they wanted him gone. And judging by his current state of mind, I thought that Daric probably would have agreed with them.

  It was just after midnight, when my squad was coming off a guard-shift on the walls, that I saw her.

  She was just how I’d pictured her, standing in the little alley that ran between the bakehouse and a little walled garden. A girl, still, bloody and pale, balancing awkwardly against the weight of her belly, and she looked full at me, hands outstretched, and then she turned and pointed up at the keep.

  I gasped and then I stumbled, my heart pounding, but when I got my balance back, all I could see was Colm’s face, frowning at me, because my mis-step into his back had knocked him forward, too.