The Path to Power

by Karen Miller

  Looking down, Benedikt poked a finger into the damp earth. “Wish I knew which bastards it was killed my da. If I knew I’d go and find ’em. And I’d kill ’em stone dead.”

  His brother hardly ever talked about his murdered father ’cause, he said, it made Molly sad to speak of him. And Iddo didn’t like it. He elbowed Benedikt’s ribs again, but kindly this time.

  “When I’m duke we’ll find them. And then ye can kill them any way ye please.”

  “Iss?” Benedikt wiped his snotty face on his sleeve. “Good, then.”

  An eerie silence had settled over the blood-soaked woodland, broken only by the harsh croaks of ravens as they gathered in the trees. One flapped down to curl its talons in a dead man’s bloody hair. Another landed on a still chest and poked its sharp, questing beak into an open wound.

  “T’aint no more to see,” said Benedikt. “And could be there’ll be Humbert or Balfre or someone come looking for their men. We ought to—”

  Struck by a thought, Liam took hold of his brother’s shoulder. “Not yet. You were right. We need our own swords.”

  A moment, then Benedikt saw what he meant. His mouth dropped open. “Willem. Be ye cracked in the nod? Ye can’t—”

  He grinned. “Iss, I can.”

  “No–wait–Willem—”

  Fumbling to his feet, he darted from the top of the creek bank into the spindly woodland where all those men lay dead. The ravens flapped away, croaking hoarsely, their beady red eyes resentful.

  This close the stench of death was overpowering. Shite and piss and blood and opened guts spoiling the sweeter woodland scents. Gagging, he nearly tripped himself trying not to soak his shoes in scarlet pools. Dead mouths gaped. Dead eyes stared. Dead fingers loosely grasped the hilts of fallen swords. He made himself look at them. He’d have to do this to men himself one day.

  “Willem, come on! Let’s go!”

  Benedikt was right again. They couldn’t stay here any longer. He snatched up the two nearest swords and put a fallen dagger in each dead man’s empty hand. Surely it would look as though they’d lost their long blades somewhere else in Bell Wood. Heart pounding, he turned back to his brother–and stopped on a startled gasp. Both swords slipped through his fingers.

  One of the men wasn’t dead.

  Living eyes blinked slowly. Living nostrils flared. Living lips, blood-crusted, moved as he tried to speak. There was a wound in his throat. Blood on his shoulder. Blood on his leg. A sword-cut through his leather jack, showing broken ribs beneath. The blood there was frothy. Chances were the man would die. Only…

  Liam looked down at him, sweat stinging. The man wore a Harcian badge. That was good. A duke shouldn’t kill his own men. He felt his belly heave, thought he could taste blood. Felt like someone else, not himself, as he bent to pick up one of the stolen swords.

  I have to. He’s seen my face.

  The blade pushed easily through the wound in the man’s throat. He felt its point strike bone and pushed harder. Harder again. Felt bone break. A single moan. A spurt of blood. The man’s flaring nostrils stilled.

  “Willem!” Benedikt called from the top of the creek bank. “Willem, we got to go!”

  The heavy swords were hard to run with. Staggered back to his brother, he took one look at Benedikt and gave him a hard shove with his shoulder. “You right with them rabbits and ducks?”

  His brother nodded, still greenish. “If we be found with them swords it won’t be a whipping in the cellar, Willem.”

  “Don’t be a feggit. We’ll hide ’em.”

  “Willem—” Benedikt chewed at his lip. “It looked like–with one of them swords–that man, did ye—”

  “I did.”

  Benedikt swiped his hand over his mouth. “Did he see ye?”

  “Iss.”

  “Was it awful?”

  “Iss.” But not as awful as he’d feared.

  “D’ye feel sick?”

  “No. I’m wholesome,” he said, filled with relief. He’d half thought Benedikt might turn from him–and what he’d do without his brother he surely didn’t know. “Now let’s get on back to the Whistle, afore Molly sends that feggit Iddo looking for us. We can find somewhere to hide the swords on the way.”

  Hands on her hips, Molly looked at the game laid out before her on the kitchen table. Eight rabbits. Six duck. Four silver-scaled darts. Beyond the leather curtain a babble of voices in the public room, and Iddo laughing. A rare sound these days. It warmed her fretting heart to hear it. A good thing the Pig Whistle was near to half full. Better that Iddo be caught up out there serving ale and gathering gossip than in here tossing sharp questions at her boys.

  Suspiciously docile, Benedikt and Willem stood shoulder to shoulder and said nothing.

  She poked her finger into the rabbits and then the ducks. Pursed her lips. “These be fine conies, boys. Goodly meat on their bones. And the ducks? Plump as pigeons. Fine eating, they’ll make. The darts, too. Good fish for smoking.”

  Willem’s lips twitched. Benedikt beamed. “Iss, Ma. That be what we thought.”

  “Iss. Fine eating,” she mused, then slapped the flat of her hand to the table. Even Willem jumped. “And now ye can tell me where ’twas ye took ’em! For ye never took ’em in the home wood, that much I know fer sure!”

  “Molly—”

  She shook her finger in Willem’s scarred face. “Not a word from ye, Willem. I be asking Benedikt on this.”

  ’Cause Benedikt, her sweet boy, had a face she could read. But Willem? Willem baffled her. His amber eyes hid too many thoughts. If only she could ’prentice him somewhere. She’d sleep better at night.

  “Benedikt?” She gave him her best stare. “Where’d ye take ’em?”

  Her son glanced at Willem. The swift look knifed her. And when Willem twitched his lips again, saying tell her, loud as a shout? That twisted the knife till she wanted to cry out in pain.

  Benedikt shuffled his feet. Dried mud flaked from his leather shoes to dirty her clean kitchen floor. “Bell Wood, Ma. We took ’em in Bell Wood.”

  Bell Wood? She thought of the danger, and shivered. To take such a risk! She could slap them. She should slap them. But then she thought of the home wood, bare as a starveling’s pantry. Looked again at the silver fish and the fat rabbits and the plump ducks, and felt a dreadful relief.

  “No one saw ye?”

  “No, Ma!” said Benedikt. “Not a soul, Ma!”

  “’Tain’t no one in Bell Wood, Molly,” Willem added. “But there be a mort of game.”

  “And goats!” Benedikt was bouncing on his toes, gig-a-hoop. “Ma, we saw goats, run wild in the wood ’cause of the black-lung. We could—”

  “No, ye couldn’t,” she snapped. “Kill a goat with a slingshot? Not even Count Balfre could do that.”

  “Then we could catch some. Herd ’em back for ye, Ma. Goat’s milk and goat’s meat and—”

  “And explain ’em how, ye little feggit? No goats today, a herd of goats tomorrow? Ye d’know how folk be chancy just now. There’d be someone whispering of it a half-day later and faugh!” She clapped her hands. “Men-at-arms on the doorstep demanding to see the note of sale. No goats, Benedikt. Put the thought from yer mind.”

  Willem was watching her closely. “No goats, Molly. But rabbit and fish and duck you’ll nod at?”

  Folding her arms, she brooded at the table. Rabbit and duck she could vouch for. Rabbit and duck and fish she could smoke, so the flesh’d keep in the cool cellar. She looked up.

  “What do men-at-arms care for rabbit and duck?”

  “And fish,” said Benedikt. “There be a mort of fish in Wiggim Creek and Silver Pond.”

  There were two creeks running through the home wood. Fish could be explained. She rapped her knuckles on the table.

  “Rabbits and duck and fish, and that be all. No more than once a tenday, boys. And not a word to Iddo.”

  Benedikt’s eyes popped owlish. “Ma?”

  “Iddo frets himself
overmuch. And he do have a face as a blind man could read. So ye’ll not breathe a word to him.”

  “What if he asks?” said Willem. “Iddo b’aint a man you can tell none of your nevermind.”

  There’d been other whippings since that bad day in the cellar, but only a stripe or three at a time. She’d made sure of that. Even so, she watched Willem walk wide around Iddo. Not frightened. But wary. The boy had no trust. Just as Iddo didn’t trust him. Some days she thought it was like living in a tinder box. And ’cause that was her fault she worked hard to keep the peace. It had changed things ’tween her and Iddo, but there weren’t a thing she could do about it.

  “Iddo’s mine to deal with,” she said firmly. “If he asks, ye come to me. Now, ye can take them ducks and rabbits and fish and do what needs to be done with ’em.”

  The boys grinned at each other, then snatched up the game they’d killed and rough-and-tumbled their way outside to skin and pluck and gut.

  “Molly!” Iddo called, elbowing the kitchen’s leather curtain aside. “Three bowls of stew here!”

  With mutton still hard to come by, and pot hens twice the price they used to be, most days she made barley, dried pea and carrot stew. It broke her heart, but times were as they were.

  “Front table,” said Iddo, jerking his chin towards the far end of the public room. “Bascot be in from Clemen.”

  Bascot? ’Twas a while since she’d seen him. She took the tray of steaming bowls down to the table by the door, where Bascot, his brother Tapster and his scrawny nephew Philbert huddled over their tankards of ale.

  “Sers,” she greeted them, with her best innkeeper smile. “A fine thing t’see ye under m’roof agin. How d’the cloth trade be treating ye? And what be the news from Clemen?”

  Bascot, whose sober brown wool tunic belied the richness of the fabrics he traded, exchanged gloomy glances with his brother and nephew.

  “Sad news, Mistress Molly,” he said, accepting his bowl of stew with a nod. “For there be a fresh round of ducal courts travelling throughout the duchy, levying taxes and fines on folk already light in their purses from the last time His Grace foisted up the fees.”

  “Not that Clemen’s lords do be feeling the pinch,” Tapster added, and wiped at the ale foam plumping his lip. “The duke’s council and the rest, high on the hog they’re living. Aye, and their men-at-arms too. Only the second decent harvest we’ve had in six years, Mistress Molly, and the poor folk of Clemen with their rib-bones like the spars of a wrecked ship. Does His Grace take pity and think of the hungry before his coffers?” He thumped a fist to the bench. “He does not. The harvest be taxed thrice over. You’ll find folk the length and breadth of the duchy, weeping for a crust. But not Roric. Bastard or not, he’s that bastard Harald’s true blood and no mistake. Berold’s blood, it’s turned to water. His blood’s been pissed away.”

  “Easy, Father, easy,” young Philbert murmured, glancing around the chatter-filled public room. “Who’s to say what ears are flapping?”

  Molly bent lower. “Don’t ye fret, now. I can name every man in here and not a one of ’em belongs to Lord Humbert or his man Egann.” She straightened. “And I be right sorry to hear of yer troubles. Babbies starving for a crust of bread? T’aint right. Do I misremember, or don’t the dukes of Clemen buy in grain from Cassinia?”

  Bascot splashed his emptied spoon into his stew. “If them goblins had grain to sell, aye, we’d be buying. But ain’t word reached the Marches, Mistress Moll? Drought’s got Cassinia by the parched throat again, it has.”

  “And the grain ships from Danetto?” Tapster snorted. “Pirates got them.”

  Yes, she’d heard that a few weeks ago, from a passing Pruges merchant. “There do be grain grown in Sassanine, b’aint that right?”

  “Aye,” said Tapster. “Only Aimery of Harcia wooed them Sassanine goblins with fine horseflesh. They do have a treaty or some such now, horses for grain. No grain to any folk else. Leastwise not in Clemen.”

  “Thanks to Duke Roric,” Bascot added. “He taxed the Harcian horse-merchants so hard last summer they threw up their hands and now they stay home.”

  So that explained why she’d not lately seen hide nor hair of her regular Harcian horse-coping guests. Was Roric of Clemen a doltard, to be kicking such holes in his suffering duchy’s coffers?

  “There’s them as saw it coming,” Tapster muttered. “Not two month ago, I heard a soothsayer give warning in Gramply Ford. Blood on the moon for a week, he said. A foretell of calamity. And not a hand of days after—”

  Bascot was shaking his head. “You don’t want to pay any mind to that. Omens and foretells and suchlike. Blood on the moon. Blood in his eye from sour ale, that be—”

  “Not a hand of days after,” Tapster said, slapping the bench, “we got word of the ducal courts starting agin. And what have we seen since but innocent folk bleeding coin from their purses?” He looked up. “You do know there be signs and portents in the world, for them with eyes open to see, don’t you, Mistress Moll?”

  The first rule of innkeeping was never argue with a customer. Besides, didn’t she burn her little offerings to the spirits and keep about the place the charms Izusa made for her, just in case?

  “Well,” she said, being careful, “I can’t say as I’ve ever laid eyes on a foretell, or been shown an omen, or fallen foul of a soothsayer. But—” She smiled at Tapster. “I can show ye plenty of folk in these parts who have. The old ways b’aint so popular as they were, what with them exarchites traipsing all over, but folk don’t altogether forget what they was raised to believe. They just… nudge it aside.”

  Especially when it didn’t seem to be helping ’em no more.

  Tapster poked his brother with a sharp finger. “There, Bascot, y’see?”

  “Feh,” Bascot grumbled. “I still say that old soothsayer were ale-blind. But I can’t deny we’re seeing some right tricksome times.”

  Molly rested a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “And if ye are, ’tis no wonder ye be gloomy.”

  “Gloomy? Mistress Molly, we be grim. The ducal courts, they don’t just levy taxes and fines. Roric’s men-at-arms be marching off folk heard raising their voices against the duke and his council.”

  “You can stare, but it’s true,” said young Philbert, woeful. “Ten silver ducats our trading warrant cost us. Last time we sold into Harcia, Mistress Molly, our papers cost us four. With Clemen’s roads unchancy, we thought this venture to join with another clothier and his man. But Master Fenwick protested at paying twice double for his papers. He and his man were marched off, and that was the end of them.”

  Molly nearly dropped her wooden tray. “D’ye tell me they be dead?”

  “Who can say?” said Bascot, shrugging. “We left Fenwick wailing. Didn’t dare speak up for him, I’m sorry to say.”

  “And I be sorry to hear it,” she said. “I knew Clemen had its troubles, but not so bad as this.”

  “Tell her about the slavers,” said Philbert. “D’you know about them, Mistress Molly?”

  “I be sorry to say I do. Folk plucked from their beds, I hear, up and down the length of the duchy. Been going on a goodly while. D’ye say Duke Roric b’aint nipped it?”

  Philbert glowered. “He tries, but he can’t. All he can do is foist taxes. What use is a duke as can’t keep his people safe?”

  “My, my. And here’s me only ever hearing good things about Clemen’s duke.”

  “Times change,” Tapster said sourly. “And men do change with them. Remember that, Mistress Moll.”

  “Indeed I will, Master Tapster,” she said. “’Tis good advice. Now I’ll leave ye to—”

  The public room’s door banged open and Lord Waymon strode in. At his heels, a pack of Harcian men-at-arms, no better than snarling dogs. She didn’t recognise a one of them. So many new Harcian men-at-arms in the Marches, it seemed every other week she saw a face she’d never met before. Prickled by the sudden silence, Molly turned back to the bar, where I
ddo stood staring. But the boys weren’t with him, thank the faeries. They must still be outside plucking and gutting what they’d killed. And praise the faeries, let ’em stay out. She never wanted Lord Waymon to once notice her boys.

  “Mistress Molly!”

  She looked round. Bobbed a curtsy, tray and all. “My lord.”

  “I come on Count Balfre’s business,” Waymon said, his cold stare sweeping round the room. His hunter-green velvet doublet was sewn with topaz. Gold dangled from his ear. “And what I say is for every man under this roof to hear. Earlier this morning Clemen did, without lawful leave or provocation, attempt to extort coin from some innocent Harcian merchants. When these merchants rightly refused to pay, Clemen did meet them with violence. I have six slain men-at-arms even now being carried out of Bell Wood.” His head whipped round. “Mistress Molly? What d’you know of this?”

  Fear was a cockroach, scrabbling in her throat. “Nothing, my lord.”

  His cruel eyes slitted. “No? You seem somewhat struck.”

  “I am, my lord,” she said, forcing her gaze to hold his. “I be right shammeried, my lord, to hear such a dreadful thing.”

  “Really? With the Pig Whistle so used to bloodshed?”

  “Not for some years, my lord,” she said, fighting to keep her voice no more than politely reproachful. “We be peaceful here, as ye d’know.”

  After a terrible long time, he shifted his stare. “You men. I don’t know you.”

  Master Bascot frowned at his brother and his nephew, then stood. “I am Bascot, my lord. A cloth-trader of Clemen.”

  Waymon’s thin lip curled. “Thinking to trade your rags in the Harcian Marches? And in Harcia?”

  “Thinking to trade, my lord, with all proper papers.”

  “Not today. Harcia has had its fill of Clemen today. You may present yourselves to Count Balfre five days hence. He will decide then if you can trade in Harcia, or not.”

  Bascot looked with some alarm at his brother. “Five days, my lord? You’d have us tarry here idle five days? But—”

  Waymon’s hand found his sword-hilt. “Man, you and your friends can tarry or you can fuck each other for all I care. What you won’t do is set foot on Harcian soil before Count Balfre allows it. Not without offering forfeit of your lives.”