“You can’t be in earnest,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Gobhann?”
“Aye,” she said, pulling his cloak more closely around her and lifting her chin. “I have business there that cannot be delayed.”
“The only business you should have, my lad, is taking up your place again behind your mother’s skirts. Now, why don’t you let me turn you around and set you on the right path?”
He reached for her, but she backed away.
“I don’t need aid.”
“I didn’t say you needed aid, I said you needed sense,” he said, reaching for her arm and taking hold of it. “Let’s go—”
“Look out behind you! There in the woods!”
He released her and turned around, drawing his sword as he did so. He braced himself, ready for anything, but fearing he would see there the man he had seen earlier that morning.
But he saw nothing.
His horse chortled, a particularly equine sort of snorting laugh that grated on Rùnach’s nerves. He took a deep breath and looked at Iteach.
“Are you trying to help?”
The damned horse only lifted an eyebrow and snorted again. Rùnach rolled his eyes, reached for his temper, and strode off across the muddy spring ground toward a place he was quite sure wouldn’t improve matters any. Whatever other failings his erstwhile companion might have had, the inability to sprint was not one of them. Whether she would make it to the gates before he did, however, was yet to be determined.
He dashed after her and contemplated what he’d seen in her face. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought there was desperation in her look. Perhaps that had less to do with determination than it did with a desire to find somewhere warm to sit and have something decent to drink. Obviously the task that lay next in front of him was to tell her that she would find neither inside Weger’s formidable gates.
At least his legs worked as they always had, which aided him in getting himself quickly to the gates before his companion. He knocked politely, then put himself in front of her when she tried to elbow her way past him. He shot her a warning look.
“Go home.”
“I must speak to Weger,” she said firmly.
He couldn’t imagine why. Obviously she had absolutely no idea what she was in for. Indeed, he couldn’t bring to mind a single reason why a woman would want to go inside those gates and subject herself to what he suspected would be months of absolute hell.
He wished—absently, lest he think about it overmuch and grieve—that his sister Mhorghain hadn’t chosen it as her habitation for so long, which led him to feeling that if he could save another wench the horrors of the work inside, he should.
“He wouldn’t be interested in anything you had to say,” Rùnach said.
She tried to elbow him out of the way. “I am a lad, just as any other. Why would he let you in and not me?”
“I have a sword?”
She opened her mouth, then shut it abruptly. Rùnach left her thinking on that and pushed her aside to put himself between her and the gate. It opened without haste, which he had expected. He steeled himself for the first test, grateful that in that, at least, he had been prepared by his sister and her husband as to what to expect—
Though it would have helped, he supposed, if he’d had a sword to hand.
His sword, as it happened, had been filched from his side with remarkable swiftness. He watched, Iteach’s nose on his shoulder, as a woman who had no business even looking at Gobhann faced the gatekeeper and brandished that pilfered sword.
The gatekeeper rested his sword against his shoulder and scratched his cheek absently with his other hand.
“Well,” he said, finally.
Rùnach couldn’t have agreed more. The lad—er, woman, rather—holding his sword with both hands and struggling to keep it aloft might have done a fair amount of damage with it if she lost control and had it nick some poor fool as it fell toward the ground. But use it for its intended purpose?
Not anytime soon.
“Which way to the lord of Gobhann?” she said, her voice quavering dangerously.
The gatekeeper blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“I must talk to Scrymgeour Weger today.”
The gatekeeper, who was reputedly named Odo, looked at her as if he couldn’t quite understand what he was hearing. “Today?”
“Before midnight, at least,” she said.
Odo frowned. “I think you might be better served if you were to turn around and retreat back out the gate.”
She put her shoulders back and fixed a look of determination on her face, a look she turned and favored Rùnach with very briefly. “I will go forward. If either of you stands in my way, you’ll pay a very steep price.”
Rùnach looked at Odo. Odo only shrugged, then gestured toward the stairs. The woman glanced at those stairs—empty ones, thankfully—then looked back at the gatekeeper.
“Thank you. I’ll speak highly of your good sense to your master.”
“Well, thank you, ah—”
“No need to exchange names,” she said. “I just need an hour to speak to your master, then I will be on my way.”
Odo frowned but didn’t stop her as she walked unsteadily past him. Rùnach watched her reach the stairs, then looked at Odo.
“Master Odo,” he said, inclining his head.
Odo lifted his finger and flicked it backward, indicating that Rùnach should remove the hood of his cloak. Rùnach supposed there was no point in delaying the inevitable flinching he would have as his reward. Why Miach of Neroche couldn’t have attended to his face while he’d been about that bit of repair work at Seanagarra, Rùnach couldn’t have said. Then again Rùnach hadn’t asked. He had wanted hands that worked, which he had gotten, for the most part. Anything else had seemed just too frivolous. He suppressed the urge to take a deep breath, then reached up and lifted the hood back off his head.
Odo studied him for a moment or two, then leaned over and had a quiet word with one of the pair of lads who waited at his heels. The lad scampered off and up the stairs, bypassing the woman carrying Rùnach’s blade. Rùnach watched for a moment, then looked at Odo.
“She’s absconded with my sword.”
“That one’s trouble,” Odo agreed, then he blinked. “Did you say—”
“I meant he has absconded with my blade,” Rùnach said hastily. No sense in subjecting the gel to unnecessary attentions she was obviously trying to avoid.
Odo pursed his lips. “Then ’tis a good thing I’ve seen that he gets upstairs without incident.” He considered Rùnach for a moment or two. “You remind me of someone.”
“Do I?”
“Your sister, I imagine.” Odo drew his sword and handed it to Rùnach. “We’ll see if you make as good a showing as she did on her first day. Give that back later, if you’re alive to do so.”
Rùnach accepted the blade. “Thank you.”
“Well,” Odo said with a small smile, “you might not say the same a handful of hours from now, but then again, perhaps you might. That’s a mighty set of scars you bear.”
“They help me remember what not to become.”
“I daresay.” He looked over Rùnach’s shoulder. “I’ll see to your mount.”
“He would likely appreciate that.”
Odo waved him on. Rùnach would have thanked him yet again—he had decent manners, even in trying circumstances—but he suddenly found that whilst his companion had been waved through the gauntlet, he most definitely wasn’t going to be enjoying that same concession. The bellow of a war cry approximately two handsbreadths from his ear almost left him leaping out of his skin.
He turned and lifted his sword, hoping his attempt at reaching the uppermost courtyard wouldn’t end right there.
Four
Aisling made her way up the stairs, finding it very difficult indeed to keep her filched sword upright. Thank heavens she had no intention of becoming a mercenary. Better that she consider something that did
n’t require doing anyone in with a blade or being startled by the unexpected. She almost went sprawling thanks to a young lad slipping by her and racing up the stairs. Perhaps he was going to tell Weger he had guests.
She didn’t want to think too hard about how that set her heart to racing.
She climbed many long flights of steps, some broken in half by passageways that led to places she didn’t want to investigate, some briefly bursting out into courtyards only to wind back into darkened stairwells. She decided then that when she started her own life, she would begin a regimen of healthful trots about whatever village she settled on. She was wheezing already, and she was sure she had only climbed four or five flights of stairs.
But she climbed on because she had only until midnight to do what needed to be done to save not only her country but her own sorry neck. She would have had more leeway, of course, if it hadn’t been for the inclement weather that had turned a three-day voyage on that rickety ship into almost six. Admittedly, she could have perhaps calculated amiss—
Nay, that wasn’t possible. She had counted the days as if her life had depended on it, which it did. The third se’nnight ended at the stroke of midnight that night. Her task was set out before her and the time appointed mercilessly.
That she had managed to get past the gate was heartening. Perhaps it would be easier than she thought to simply continue on until she could go no further, at which point she could only assume that she would come face-to-face with either Weger himself or one of his aides. She would ask for a private audience, state her business, then be on her way. Perhaps Fate would smile on her and she would find a mercenary desperate enough to travel to Taigh Hall with only the promise of a princely sum as inducement.
She paused at the top of the sixth flight and looked over her shoulder. To her surprise, the man who had so generously paid her passage, then subsequently and rather inadvertently loaned her his sword, was fighting his way up the stairs behind her. Perhaps he had borrowed a blade from someone else. She considered telling him that assaulting Weger’s men at every turn wasn’t going to win him any affection from the lord of the keep, but perhaps it was better to keep her mouth shut. Obviously he had business in the keep just as she did, so perhaps it was better to carry on and leave him to his own affairs. She raised her eyebrows briefly at the things the man and his sparring partner were snarling at each other, added learn curses out in general circulation to her list of things to see to when she was free, then turned back to the stairs in front of her.
It was as she climbed that seventh staircase that things began to occur to her, most likely because she realized that there were men waiting in the shadows, men with drawn swords, men who watched her but did not approach. Perhaps it wasn’t so much that the man behind her had been sparring with men she hadn’t noticed, but that those men had formed a gauntlet he’d had to fight his way through. If that were the case, why hadn’t she been favored with the same?
Perhaps that was yet to come.
She reached the top of the staircase and walked out into a courtyard full of statues, realizing only then that she was chilled to the bone—and very uneasy. She had skill enough for sniffing out the dangers lurking in the hierarchy of a weaving guild, but here she was completely out of her depth. It had occurred to her that she would need to talk quickly to convince Scrymgeour Weger to give her aid, but she hadn’t considered that she might be putting her own life at risk as she did so.
She looked around her carefully. The middle of the courtyard itself was empty, surrounded by low, wholly inadequate walls, and full of fog. And then she saw that what she’d thought were statues obscured by the fog were actually more grim-faced men who stepped closer and formed a large circle around her, all watching her with glittering eyes. She hardly had the chance to even attempt to raise her sword before she went sprawling thanks to someone having pushed her from behind. She managed to hold on to her sword, but she supposed that was just dumb luck. She crawled to her feet and realized it had been her morning’s companion who had nudged her rather ungently out of his way.
He was also keeping her behind him, putting himself between her and the man who had stepped forward and engaged him. She would have thanked him for that, but she imagined he wouldn’t be particularly interested in anything she had to say at present. He was too busy keeping himself alive. He shrugged out of his pack at one point, then flung it away from him before he was decapitated by his foe.
The battle didn’t go on for very long before her companion’s sword was slapped out of his hand. It went sliding across the wet stone, past her. She followed its journey and saw the toe of a boot pin it against the stone. Aisling looked up the leg, up, and still up a bit more, until she saw a face that sent a cold, heart-stilling terror through her.
Scrymgeour Weger.
It could have been no one else.
“I heard,” he drawled, “that a warrior of uncommon ferocity was making his way up my steps, so I came to see who it was. Which one of you two feeble women was mistaken for someone with sword skill?”
Aisling found herself again pulled behind the scarred man, which she didn’t object to as it gave her time to decide how best to be about her business.
She looked around herself. She was still surrounded by very fierce-looking men who were watching her as if they could have as easily killed her as looked at her. Worse still was the giant of a man standing there with his arms folded over his chest, who would likely grasp her by the front of her tunic and fling her over his parapet. She could only assume what lay beyond those walls was the sea. She could hear the roar of it—or perhaps that was the wailing of those whom Weger had sentenced to death and were still awaiting it.
It was perhaps foolhardy to think there could be honor in such a place, but all she could do was hope for it. Though it was tempting to simply stand where she was and hide, she knew she had to do what she’d come to do. Her life hung in the balance.
She stepped forward, in front of her companion.
“It was me,” she managed. “I am the warrior.”
“You?” Weger said with a look that reduced her to the quivering coward she was. “You were the one sending my best men off to lick their wounded pride and not this strapping lad behind you?”
Aisling lifted her chin. She supposed that was less to manufacture a show of courage than it was to keep her teeth from chattering. “He did me a good turn on a ship recently. I had to repay him.”
“Not by doing aught with a sword,” Weger said with a snort. “I have a better idea. Why don’t you take the part best suited for you, which would be to act as his servant for the next fortnight?”
She blinked. “But I wasn’t planning on being here a fortnight. I only need to speak to you—”
He waved away her words. “Not now. I’m busy.”
“But—”
“I am busy,” he said, cutting her off curtly.
Aisling wanted to blurt out that she had until midnight only to talk to him, but he didn’t seem amenable to any further conversation.
Weger pointed at her, then used his pointer finger in the most minimal way possible to indicate that she should move.
Aisling hadn’t planned on moving, but she moved just the same thanks to the hands that came to rest on her shoulders and set her out of the way. She went, then pulled her cloak closer around her—his cloak, rather, the man who was now standing in front of her—and was grateful for someone to hide behind. She leaned slightly to the left so she could see Weger’s face, which was as malleable as granite. He simply stared at her companion for several very long minutes in absolute silence. Then he pursed his lips.
“Well.”
The man in front of her didn’t move. It occurred to her as she stood there that he was the perfect size for her to hide behind. A swordsman, obviously, judging by his muscular build, which was well revealed by the tunic pasted to his shoulders and arms. He was trembling badly, but she couldn’t blame him for it. If she’d been fighting her way
up those perilous, slippery stairs, she might have been trembling as well.
“Your name?” Weger barked.
“Rùnach,” the man said. “My lord.”
Weger’s expression didn’t lighten. “Who’s the quivering puss behind you?”
“A lad I encountered on my journeys.”
Aisling looked around the man—Rùnach, if that was what he was called—and nodded. “He paid for my passage on the ship after I’d been robbed. Very decent of him.”
“Then as I said, you’ll be very decent and be his squire whilst you’re both here, given that you have absolutely no skill and he has two hands that don’t work.”
Aisling felt her mouth fall open. “But—”
“Paul,” Weger called, “take these two and show them to the buttery.”
A man stepped forward. “But, my lord,” he protested, “I have already a lad with no skill under my charge—”
“And now you have another,” Weger said, looking at him mildly, “plus his servant. Does this trouble you?”
Paul looked as if he was torn between marching himself over to the parapet and flinging himself off or speaking his mind. Apparently he decided on the latter. He let out a slow breath. “It seems to me, Master Weger, that my skill might be, ah, better used—”
“How I say it should be used,” Weger interrupted. “And I say your mighty skill, my good Paul, should be used to see this man and his servant fed. I’ll send instructions later on where they are to be housed. Find the lad water as well to wash the blood off his face.”
Paul opened his mouth, considered, then shut it. Aisling understood completely. She’d seen the look Weger had sent him and found herself rather relieved that her interaction with both the keep and the keep’s lord would be limited to sneaking in a simple question before midnight.
Paul scowled at her, then looked at the man who had named himself Rùnach.
“Come, then. And bring that thing there along with you.”