Crown Duel

  “No use.” He shrugged. “If I were going to pitch into you, I ought to have done it last night, but it didn’t seem fair to do it on their turf. Come on, let’s go home.” He climbed onto his horse. I followed, and in silence once more we took to the road.

  oOo

  That night we stayed at an inn. We had good rooms, and an excellent meal, all paid for by Renselaeus beneficence. Bran’s mood stayed somber even through the fine music of some wandering minstrels who played for the common room, and he went early to bed.

  Enough of his mood lingered that, for the first time, I did not slip into the magical spell of music but listened with only part of my mind. The other part kept reviewing memories I would rather forget, and portions of conversations, until at last I gave up and went to my room. There I took out and puzzled my way through Debegri’s entire letter, which made me angry all over again. I spent a very restless night.

  Branaric woke me the next morning with an impatient knock. As soon as we’d bathed, dressed, and breakfasted, we were on the road, with new horses. Bad weather followed us; the wind chased coldly through the trees, and the air was heavy with the smell of impending rain. The edge of a storm caught us in the late afternoon, but we kept riding until sundown. It became apparent that Bran was looking for somewhere specific. We finally reached a small town and slowed until we rode into the courtyard of an inn on its market square.

  This was just as the rain hit in earnest.

  That night I lay in another clean bed, listening to the wind howl and a tree scratch at the window with twiggy fingers. It was a mournful, uncanny sound that disturbed my dreams.

  The storm passed west and south before dawn, leaving a cold, dripping world. Now we had reached the heavy forestland at the base of the mountains; by midday we would reach the lowest border of Tlanth.

  Even Bran seemed slightly more cheery at the prospect of getting home. We rose early and ate quickly, eager to get going.

  Until that morning most of the journey had been made in silence, our stops to eat and change horses—again, Renselaeus beneficence: all we had to do was mention their name, and the horses were instantly available—too brief for much converse. When we did stop, we were both too tired to talk. But that day the roads were too muddy for fast travel. Branaric asked for my story, so I gave him a detailed description of my adventures.

  I had reached the episode at the fountain with Debegri, and was grinning at the fluency and point of Bran’s curses, when we became aware of horses behind us.

  Traffic had been nonexistent all day, which we had expected. No traders had been permitted to go up into Tlanth for months. We were on the southernmost road into Tlanth, well away from Vesingrui, the fortress that the Renselaeus forces supposedly held, so we didn’t expect any military traffic, either.

  “Sounds like at least one riding,” I said, remembering the distinct sound of a riding. Danger prickled along my nerves, and I wished I had a weapon.

  “Something must have happened.” Bran sounded unconcerned. “They must need to tell us—”

  “An entire riding?”

  Bran shrugged. “Escort. Shevraeth sent it along to keep us safe. Knew you would refuse, so they’ve been behind us the whole way.”

  I was peering through the trees, anger and apprehension warring inside me. Annoyed as I was to be thus circumvented—and to have my reactions so accurately predicted—I realized I’d be well satisfied to find out that the approaching riders were indeed Renselaeus equerries.

  The Renselaeus colors would have stood out, but the green-and-brown of Galdran’s people blended into the forest; they were almost on us before we saw them, and Bran gasped, “It’s a trap!”

  “Halt!” The shout rang through the trees.

  Of course we bolted.

  “Halt, or we shoot,” came a second yell.

  “Bend down, bend—ah!”

  Bran’s body jerked, then he fell forward, an arrow in his back.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Our horses plunged up the trail.

  “Go on…Go!” Bran jerked a hand toward the mountains, then swayed in his saddle.

  Another arrow sang overhead.

  “I won’t leave you,” I snapped.

  “Go. Our people…Carry on the fight.”

  “Bran—”

  In answer he yanked the reins on his terrified horse, which lunged toward mine. Gritting his teeth, he leaned out and whipped the ends of his reins across the mare’s shoulder. “Go!”

  My mount panicked, and leaped forward. My neck snapped back. I clutched to the horse’s mane with all my strength. The last glimpse I had of Bran was of his blanched face and his anxious eyes watching me as he and his mount vanished.

  And then I was on my own.

  For a time the mare raced straight up the trail while the only thought I could hold in my mind was, A trap? A trap? And then the image, seen endlessly, of Bran being shot.

  Then a memory: The elegant Renselaeus dining room, and the marquis’s refined drawl: My people are taking and holding the Vesingrui fortress on your border. For now they are wearing the green uniform…

  A trap. Cold fury washed through me. They have betrayed us.

  I recovered enough presence of mind to recognize that I was in my home territory at last, and I could leave the trail anytime. The horse had recovered from the panic and was trotting. So I recaptured the reins, leading the horse across the side of the mountain toward the thickest, oldest part of the local forest. It didn’t take me long to lose the pursuit, and then I turned my tired mare north, permitting her to slow as I thought everything through.

  It made perfect sense, after all. Bran and I were certainly an inconvenience, especially since we’d refused to ally. Guilt tweaked at me—if it hadn’t been for my resistance, we’d both be alive and well in Renselaeus. And in their hands, I told myself. If they could cold-bloodedly plan this kind of treachery, wasn’t this sort of end waiting for us anyway?

  And now Bran is dead. Branaric, my fun-loving, trusting brother, the one who pleaded with me to give them a fair chance. Who wanted to be their friend.

  All my emotions narrowed to one arrow of intent: revenge.

  oOo

  It was nightfall, under a heavy storm, when I reached Erkan-Astiar, home to my father’s side of the family for over five hundred years. I didn’t even go to the castle, which appeared dark and cold. I went straight to the smithy, and there found Julen and Calaub sitting down to steep and porridge.

  Within a short time all our leaders were crowded together in their tiny kitchen. Celebration at my appearance was short-lived, for as soon as I had them together I told them what had happened, withholding no detail.

  Anger—grief—fear—questions—disbelief: These were the reactions from our people. Some expressed a variety of these reactions, as questions and amplifications went back and forth.

  Finally, there in the old smithy under a howling wind, I formally set everyone free of the oath they’d sworn to Bran and me. “We can’t win, not now,” I said, with tears burning my eyes. “But those who want to take a few of them with us when we go down, come with me.”

  Devan gripped his club, glowering up at the ceiling. “We goin’ against Vesingrui?”

  I nodded, wiping my eyes on the sleeve of my tunic, wet as it was. “Supposedly they took it to watch for Debegri’s warriors, but I expect they’re there to keep us divided from the rest of the kingdom. An all-out attack on that fortress will achieve something.”

  It was mostly the young—all Branaric’s particular friends, and mine—who stepped forward. I said to them, “We’ll leave as soon as you can get every weapon you can lay hold of. Choose only the experienced, surefooted mounts, for we’ll travel all night and attack at dawn.”

  Khesot sat across from me at the table, silent, smoking his pipe. When everyone had left, some to get their weapons and others to go home, he squinted at me over the drifting silver smoke and said, “You ought to be certain you are right.”

/>   “I am.”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “You don’t believe me?” I demanded.

  “I believe every word you have said, my lady,” he murmured, his quiet tone a gentle reproof. “But there remain enough questions to make me feel that there might yet be another explanation.”

  “What else could there be? They were the only ones who knew where we were—and who.”

  He pursed his lips. “I swore I would stay with you until the end, whether victory or defeat, and so I will. But this seems a foolhardy death you lead our folk to. Let me propose this. I will come with you—and I expect others will follow, if I go—if you grant me one thing, an initial scouting party.”

  Instinct fought against common sense. My wish was to ride with steel in either hand to death and destruction, as quickly as possible. Nothing, ever, could extinguish the terrible pain in my heart, except annihilation. But I had been raised to think of others, and so I forced myself to agree, though with no real grace.

  He rose, bowed, and went out. I knelt there on Julen’s soggy cushion, staring at my own hands wrapped around the squat mug I’d known since I was small. My hands looked like a stranger’s, taut and white knuckled.

  There was a quiet step. “I saved this for you.” Oria’s pretty face was somber as she held out my short sword.

  I took it, and turned it over in my hands. “Are you coming with me?”

  She flicked a glance over her shoulder. “Mama said I can do what I want. There are a lot of us whose families are arguing it out right now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said tightly, though I wasn’t. Go…our people…carry on the fight…When I closed my eyes, I saw Bran’s pale, pain-grim face. I shook my head, resolving not to close my eyes again.

  Oria dropped down on the cushion beside me. “I’d rather die tonight than live with—your brother gone, and us under Debegri’s rule.” She smiled sadly, her brown eyes shiny with unshed tears. “Why is it the songs all end with the good people winning, but in life they don’t?”

  “They don’t make songs when the good lose,” I muttered. “They make more war chants against the bad. So there won’t be any songs for us.” Just laughter—

  Your brother has agreed to a truce. Shevraeth’s smooth voice, and Galdran’s harsh laughter, echoed with cruel antiphony through my aching skull. I got to my feet. “It’s time to go.”

  oOo

  Soon we were riding through the chill, wet night air, me in a borrowed hat probably older than I was. Despite the hiss of rain in the trees, we could hear the weird high singing of the Hill Folk’s harps, a different sound than any I’d heard yet. The sound seemed to thrum in my bones, and the horses were all skittish.

  But we rode steadily, knowing the way despite the minimal light that the moon provided through the rain clouds. Taking little-known paths straight down the mountain, we reached the ridge directly above the fortress well before dawn. There we dismounted, hidden in the ancient trees. The mounts were led away, and the rest of us gathered behind the stones at the edge of the rough cliffs.

  Khesot came forward. “We’ll go now.”

  He and his four chosen scouts slipped down through the soggy brush toward the fortress, which was merely a dark bulk below us. The only clear light was on the bridge over the Whitestream, sputtering red torches that cast light on the four sentries walking back and forth.

  My eyes stayed on those four half-discernible figures as I wormed my way slowly downhill and took up a position between some rocks, my sword gripped in my hand. A distant portion of my mind was aware of my shivering body; the rain trickling down my scalp into my tunic, which was already heavy with moisture; the tiny noises of the others moving into position around our end of the bridge; and the sound of the rumbling, rushing water below, which drowned the high keening of the Hill Folk harps on the peaks.

  A faint movement distracted me as Oria elbow-crawled up to my side. Her profile was outlined by the light from those faraway torches as she looked down on the castle below.

  “I’m sorry, Oria,” I breathed.

  She did not turn her head. “For what?”

  “All our plans when we were growing up. All the fine things we’d have had after we won. Making you a duchess—”

  She grunted softly. “That was no more than dream-weaving. I don’t want to be a duchess. Never did. Well, after my fourteenth year, I didn’t. That was you, wanting it for me.”

  For the first time a flicker of emotion broke briefly through the aching numbness around my heart. “But when we talked…”

  She rested her chin on her tightly folded fists, staring down at the castle. I could see tiny reflections of the ruddy torches in her eyes, so steady and unblinking was her gaze. “The only way for me to be a noble is to become a scribe or a herald and work my way up through the government service ranks, and I don’t want to write others’ things, or to take records, and I don’t want to get mixed up with governments—with the kind of people who want to rule over others. Seems like the wrong people get killed, the nice ones. I want…” She sighed and stopped.

  “Tell me,” I said. “We can dream-weave once more.”

  “I want to run a house. You can control that—make life comfortable, and pleasant, and beautiful. My dream was always that, or partly that…”

  Once again she stopped, and this time the gleam of the torches in her eyes was liquid. A quick motion with her finger, a lowering of her long lashes, and the gleam was gone.

  “Go on,” I said.

  She dropped her head down. “You never saw it, Mel. You’re what Mama calls a summer flower, a late bloomer.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She breathed a laugh. “I know. Well, it’s all nothing now, so why not admit what a henwit I’ve been? There’s another way to be an aristo, and that’s marriage. I never cared about status so much as I did about the idea of marriage. With a specific person.”

  “Marriage,” I repeated, and then a blindingly new idea struck me. “You mean—Branaric?”

  She shrugged. “I gave it up three summers ago, when I realized that our living like sisters all our lives meant he saw me as one.”

  “Oh, Ria.” Pain squeezed my heart. “How I wish our lives had gone differently! If Bran were alive—”

  “It still wouldn’t have happened,” she murmured. “And I’ve already made my peace with it. That’s an old dream. I’m here now because Debegri will do his best to kill our new dreams.” She nudged me with her elbow. “Truth is, I rather liked being heart-free last summer, except you didn’t notice that, either—you’ve never tried flirting, much less twoing. You just dance the dances to be dancing, you don’t watch the boys watch you when we dance. You don’t watch them dance.” She chuckled softly. “You don’t even peek at the boys’ side at the bathhouse to see them come and go.”

  I began to comprehend how much I had neglected to notice.

  My cold lips stretched into a smile. “The boys never looked at me, anyway. Not when they had you to look at.”

  “Some of that is who you are,” she responded. “They never forgot that. But the rest is that you never cared when they did look at you.”

  And now it’s too late. But I didn’t say that. Instead, I turned my eyes to those four figures in their steady pacing and let my mind drift to old memories, summer memories. How much of life had I missed while dedicating myself to Papa’s war?

  After an uncountable interval a voice whispered on my other side, “It’s taking a long time.” It was Jusar, our trained warrior. “Worries me.”

  With a jolt, I remembered Khesot and his party. Back to the war, and my losses. I steeled myself: no more dream drifting. “We’ll watch the sentries. See if anyone comes out from the castle with a message for them,” I whispered back. “That would mean trouble. Otherwise, as soon as we have light enough, we attack. Khesot or no.”

  He nodded. In the faint light from those torches below, I saw him swallow, then compress his lips, as though for
ming a resolve.

  I returned to my vigil. The darkness seemed to endure forever, outside of me, inside. Now I wanted only to move, to run, to strike against a pair of watchful gray eyes and extinguish the light of laughter I saw there. And then be swallowed whole by the darkness, forever…

  “Dawn.”

  I had dropped into another, darker reverie without knowing; Oria’s soft voice broke it. I lifted my head. Faint bluish light barely distinguished one tree from another. It touched the fortress, giving the flat bulk the dimension of depth, of height; and as I watched, the massive stones of the walls took on texture. From the peaks there was silence.

  Now that action was nigh, I felt a strange calm settle over me, blanketing me from emotion, from thought, even. Instinct would guide me. It remained only to give the signal, and emerge from our cover, and attack.

  I gripped my sword tighter and rose to my knees, bracing myself. Once I raised my arm, there would be no turning back.

  A deep graunching noise, the protest of old metal, came from the fortress, and I froze, waiting. My heart racketed in my chest as I peered down through the early-morning gloom.

  Slowly the big gates opened. Red-gold fire glow from inside silhouetted a number of figures who moved out toward the bridge, where the strengthening light picked out the drawn swords, the spears, the dark cloaks, and the helmed heads of the Renselaeus warriors. They were wearing their own colors, and battle gear. No liveries, no pretense of being mere servants. In the center of their formation were Khesot and the four others—unarmed.

  There were no shouts, no trumpets, nothing but the ringing of iron-shod boots on the stones of the bridge, and the clank of ready weaponry.

  Could we rescue them? I could not see Khesot’s face, but in the utter stillness with which they stood, I read hopelessness.

  I readied myself once again—

  Then from the center of their forces stepped a single equerry, with a white scarf tied to a pole. He started up the path that we meant to descend. As he walked the light strengthened, now illuminating details. Still with that weird detachment I studied his curly hair, the freckles on his face, his small nose. We could cut him down in moments, I thought, and then winced the thought away. We were not Galdran. I waited.