“Well someone’s caught a bug,” Mark said pleasantly, nuzzling Harler’s back with the point of his sword.
“Who i’ the Devil art tha!” Donkle cried.
“My name is no job of yours; nor is the murder of your Queen.”
“Slay me these traitors!” Her Majesty commanded.
Softly Harler said, “I do not know your motives, pilgrim, but I wis tha’rt slow at reckoning. Three against one is long odds by any counting.” The other two guards drew their swords.
“Two to one,” Mark said tersely. “I’ll stick you the moment one of your pigs puts out a trotter.”
Harler nodded. “Marry, thy words have some merit,” he said. “Mayhap might we—”
He dropped suddenly to the ground and whirled, but Mark had been waiting for such a trick. He met Harler’s sword with a numbing parry, and stepping inside his guard, he kicked him in the stomach, hard. Already off balance, Harler tumbled backwards down the slope and fell heavily into the moat. He spluttered and shook his head, struggling to gain his feet.
Then he screamed as something jerked him under the water. Cherry blossoms heaved and roiled. Once, Harler’s face rolled above the surface, whooping for air. Some time later they saw one hand claw the moat, fingers splayed, straining for an endless moment at the sky.
The water closed over Harler, smoothed, became still.
It’s not real it’s just a nightmare shite it’s just a nightmare nowt more than that. Mark looked at the other two guards. “Care to try another throw?”
Donkle shuddered and shook his head.
“I don’t mean to gut you,” Mark said. “I’ve no quarrel wi’ you, but I need your boat and your silence. Now: drop your weapons.”
Donkle did so at once. Abandoned, his friend glanced at the moat, then laid his sword upon the ground.
By God you’re getting the knack of this, Shielder’s Mark. “Good. Now: up there.” Mark pointed with his sword to the base of the outer wall. Slowly the two liveried men walked up the greensward, Mark behind them. When they reached the wall, Mark drew his knife and used the butt to club the unnamed guard. He crumpled to the ground.
Donkle winced.
“These villains must be brought before my son!” the Queen cried. “This treason must be doused with blood, ere like fire it spreads, to turn our state into Inferno.”
“O shite,” Mark grunted. Should have gagged her first. “I don’t kill for any pleasure: especially not yours.”
Kill? Had he really killed a man? No! A dream, no more. A spell, some damn witchery. Mark’s hands were trembling as he laid out the sapped guard. An I’d hit him any harder, I’d maybe have two bodies to my score.
There’s more honour in Squirrels Saved than Men Killed, Shielder’s Mark.
Shite.
He looked uneasily at Donkle. “You see how it is—”
“Of course, of course! I wis tha can’st do no other,” Donkle said quickly. “Sorry to be such a bother!”
“I mean I can’t be dragging you both around after me.”
“Tha speaks sooth, i’ faith. Tha knows best thy business,” Donkle said. He looked down at his unconscious friend and grimaced. “We’ll wake in the morning, yes? That is, a wee throb in the noggin, sure, but mayhap no worse than if we’d drunk a bottle too many?” He looked anxiously at Mark.
“How should I know?” Mark snapped. “It’s not like I’ve practised, mate. Maybe I’ll crack your skull like an egg.”
“An it please God,” the Queen sniffed, retrieving her purse from the unconscious guard.
Mark gave her a dirty look. “Bloodthirsty awd bitch. Hey—Donkle: come here.” From his pack he fished out the line he meant to use for scaling the Tower. If it’s short, it’s short. An extra yard or two won’t make much difference. “Hands behind your back,” Mark said.
Donkle eagerly complied, face alight with gratitude as Mark trussed him up. “Great thanks, sir. This skull o’ mine thanks tha, my wife thanks tha, and three wee kiddies—”
“Open up,” Mark said, reaching for another apple.
“Me awd Mum thanks—Aaaaah: ulpgh!”
Mark examined his handiwork. “A nice pork you make, with an apple in your snout,” he chuckled. “But this way I don’t have to bash you.”
Well pleased, Mark arranged Donkle against the wall as carefully as he could, checked to make sure he was breathing well through his nose, and gave him a friendly pat on the head. Gamely, Donkle hummed a little tune.
Now: the Queen. For a moment, something tingled in Mark’s brain. Something about her was familiar…
…But if he had seen her face before, it was across the moat, on the other side of dream, where he could not find it. Here the past went back no farther than the water’s edge, and dawn might as well be the end of the world, so distant was the future.
He had to do something with Her Majesty now. “Two pigs safe in poke,” he said, holding up another span of rope.
She gasped in outrage. “You cannot mean to—Hast tha no respect for the sacred person of a Queen? For duty, or for thine own honour?”
“‘Honour buys no bread,’ we say at home.”
The Queen looked at him with infinite contempt. “Aye, an’ it were clear tha never gentle wast, when tha kicked thy foe. Churlish were it; only baseborn duel thus.”
“We weren’t duelling, we were fighting,” Mark snapped. “I saved your life, damn your eyes. Doesn’t that count a brass button to a Queen?”
Slowly she nodded. “Aye…Aye: for thy timely rescue, much thanks.”
“Why did they want to kill you?”
The Queen sighed. “Of late my son has roosted oft in yonder Tower; but never hath he suffered me to enter there. My heart’s-dread evil whispers. Arts there are, as black as yonder moat, as fell as graves, to which a colt might turn, a-chafing at his master’s bit. He has for many moons been smithing on a darkling thing, a dagger all acreep with dread, of iron cold as the Devil’s heart.”
Mark nodded, feeling a quick burst of triumph. Now we’re getting somewhere. A dagger, then, lies at bottom of this enchanted Keep, a dagger the son means to use upon his father.
He felt quick, shrewd, planful. “We both need this boat, if we want to flee this place. But—afore I go, there’s summat I must do within,” Mark said, trying to speak as the Queen did. “Marry, an I choose not to bind or beat tha, will you give your word not to call out the guards or take the boat yourself and leave me behind?”
Slowly the Queen nodded. “Aye.”
“How can I trust you?”
The Queen stared at Mark with contempt. “A Lady am I, and a Queen, boy. My word must truer be than gold or blood or colour-glass.”
“Oh. Right.” Art tha not cloddish, i’ sooth?’ “Look, is there someplace we can hide the boat, in case someone else wanders by here?”
“Beneath yon Tower a tangle is, of rushes and of sallows. There might I with the coracle crouch,” the Queen said, with a strange, rueful smile, “—and tarry for my prideful champion.” She bent to grasp the boat’s prow, then stopped, drew herself up to her full height, and held out a fair hand encrusted with rings. “Arina’s Regina’s Testibon’s Royal Lerelil.”
Awkwardly Mark bowed. The hand he kissed was smooth as milk and smelled of rosewater. “Shielder’s Mark,” he said. “Honoured.”
“Tha’rt supposed to say, ‘Thy thrall,’ but tha dost not know, I wis.” And with that Queen Lerelil began walking along the edge of the greensward, pulling the little rowboat beside her.
Mark stood a moment and watched her go. Will she wait? A noble’s promise to a common man is about as good as an oath sworn to a cow, he thought sourly. Still, surely she won’t betray the jack who just saved her skin!
Anyway, he wasn’t going to club anyone else on the head. And looking at the Tower, he didn’t think he had much rope to spare for tying up stray royalty.
He started off toward the Tower, stooping to pat Donkle as he passed. He walked in the shadow
of the walls, even though he’d seen no sentries.
Now that was odd. No one on the walls. No lights lit in the Tower either. No voices eddying from the great hall, no lovers strolling through the cherry orchards, no horses whinnying from the stables. The Queen and her guards were the only people he had seen.
No soul had lived in the Ghostwood for fifty generations. But here, tonight, a Queen ruled, a son plotted, guards schemed in this nightmare country he remembered from his childhood, where trees hissed secrets to the dark wind and witches lay in wait for little boys.
Somehow the Keep was snared in grandfather days, before the Time of Troubles when the magic stopped. Each step into the Forest was a step through the years from the present into the past.
The Tower loomed above him as he reached its base.
But if tonight was a night long ago—the “one black night at the heart of hell,” Husk had called it—why was the Red Keep dead? Why weren’t rushlights burning in the windows, voices calling the watch, booted feet hurrying across the courtyards inside? Why only silence and a stink of dead flowers?
If other heroes had been here before, how came the boat to be on the other side of the moat?
The moon had fallen farther eastward now, singed to a flake of ash by the approaching sun. The sky was finally beginning to pale.
Something hard gouged his foot. Squatting down, he found the grass littered with chips of granite. Must have fallen from the wall. He picked up a flat piece and slung it sidearm out into the water, listening for skips. It hit only once, and then was swallowed in blossoms.
Chink!
A ringing sound, steel on stone. Mark yelped as a piece of rock smacked into the ground beside him. He stared at it in the dim grey light, and felt his heart freeze.
A flat chip of granite, identical to the one he had just thrown into the mere, had fallen exactly where the first one had lain. Exactly. Not a single new blade of grass was bent.
A spasm of pure fear rippled through Mark’s body, made the skin crawl on his back like water ruffled by the wind.
Chink!
Mark leaned against the red stones, sick with fear. Steady lad. Work it through.
What if they had gone across, Harler and his henchmen with Queen Lerelil between them? Of course. They went across, and stabbed her, and left her body for the crows.
But summat threw all that off. What? You, of course! Just like when you chucked that stone into the moat and it got replaced. So when you took the boat, it cut against the grain of what happened that night long ago. The boat had to be on the other side, because that’s where Harler left it that night.
Here it’s always today, the day Queen Lerelil dies. That’s why Husk said not to linger: after a day passes inside this moat, it will be today again. Stay an hour too long, and you’ll be trapped in that last day of the Red Keep’s life, a living ghost.
Mark swore softly to himself, shuddering. O God, there’s probably heroes here who never died at all, but stayed too long and were limed by the Red Keep’s spell, doomed to relive one day for all eternity.
Shite. But the whole day was not happening again: not at all. Only when something was disturbed was it put right.
Chink!
Looking up Mark saw the shadow of a man on the Tower wall.
The shadow bent a leg, straightened it, climbed another few inches, swung back a careful arm:
Chink!
Spikes!
Some bastard stole your idea! He’s scaling the Tower wall. Goat’s-piss and sheep-shite! All his work gone for nothing. Mark watched helplessly as the climber moved surely up the stone face. He had been beaten. “No bloody luck,” he swore. Tonight of all nights, some pig’s-pizzle hero beat you to…
Hawd on. Think. Tonight of all nights…“There isn’t any other night! Anyone who dares the Ghostwood always gets to the Keep ‘tonight.’”
Well, whoever was scaling the Tower clearly had the jump on him. Mark pulled a piece of cheese from his pack and settled himself on the grass, watching the climber.
So this might be a hero from a hundred years ago. Brought back by…by me chucking that stone, I guess.
If the climber had come here at some time in the past, clearly he had failed to break the enchantment and been caught in the Red Keep’s spell. If so, Mark stood to learn something by watching him.
The climber was almost at the top now. If he got the dagger and broke the spell, Mark would have to do without a barony. But he had rescued Queen Lerelil. That had been a neat piece of work: his first really story-worthy deed.
He decided again that he needed a name for his sword. Violent? Blood-drinker? Too…brutal. Thief?
Thief. That was a fit name for a sword of his. Nothing pretentious, nothing overblown: but a steel thief who robbed wrong-doers of their weapons, or their lives.
The climber had reached the topmost window. For a long moment he hung there, as if angling to reach inside. Then he stopped, jerked and hung suspended, feet scrabbling against the stone for a dreadful moment before tumbling back and out, screaming as he dropped through the night. He landed with a sickening crash only yards away.
Mark’s heart hammered in his chest. He stared, horrified, at the crumpled figure on the grass before him. He thought of the spikes now lying in his pack, and cold sweat crawled along his limbs.
A low, mournful melody whispered from the shadows by the dead man’s body, a song like the wind passing over a bed of reeds, lonely as November.
It called to Mark, that song: called to places left empty when his father went away, hollows never filled. It sang to Mark of a thousand days alone before the dawn, driving to make himself faster, stronger, better, so that one day he could show them all, he could say Look! And they would know they had been wrong, everyone who had mocked him, scorned him.
Left him.
Dream-slow he stepped toward the fallen body. At its side, a flash of fallen moonlight and a whisper-song, thin steel sliding from a leather sheath.
“Sweetness!” Mark breathed. The most storied of the great weapons, its steelsong lost forever when Stargad the Shrewd challenged the Ghostwood and did not return.
But tonight Mark was back in grandfather days, and Sweetness sang for him.
Desire kindled in Mark. Here was a treasure to wrest from the perilous wood! He stooped to unbuckle the half-sheathed sword from its dead master’s side, averting his eyes from Stargad’s face.
A pale hand crawled from beneath Stargad’s cloak and settled on the pommel of his sword.
Mark leapt back with a yell of fright. Slowly the shadow before him gathered itself to all fours, then knelt, then finally stood.
“You! You’re alive!” Mark breathed.
Stiffly Stargad threw back his hood, showing a face horribly crushed by his fall. “No,” he sighed. “I am the dead.”
“Shite, shite, shite!” Fear jumped and crackled through Mark. He whipped out his sword: it trembled like a dowsing rod in his shaking hand.
“I am the dead,” Stargad repeated. He was a tall man and spare; his face, before his fall, had been long and gaunt. One eye jutted from its socket; the other gazed at Mark with cool sorrow. “And though it gives my heart no joy to say it, you too must die.”
“I mean to die well,” Mark said. “I was thinking of taking another two score years to get ready.” Fine words, fine words. Tell your shaking swordhand to be so brave. “What happened up there? What was waiting for you?”
A spasm of pain passed over Stargad’s shattered face. “The brooding Tower have I climbed too many times. Inside one waits who has a soul as cold and hard as iron. Each time he slays me with his touch, and I see my Death within his eyes. Now like all the others I have returned to guard the Keep.”
Sweetness whispered its terrible song. “As I climb, I always on my fifteenth step glance down upon the Great Hall’s shingled roof. Thrice now have I seen Four-fingered Fhilip creep across the slates, and once the larcenous Silverhand, paused before a lamplit window. To his che
ek he raised his hand; I knew him by the silver bracer proud round his wrist. I think he wept.”
Stargad gazed at Mark with his one good eye. “Can you guess why we return, Warm One?”
Mark shook his head.
“Because it is our duty. Stay the dagger must, or else the heart will bleed! The heart will bleed…We were wrong, thrice-curst fools to try to break the spell that chains the black wind within these walls. The tines of sharp ambition spurred us forth on this mad quest to wake the dark. As you are spurred.”
Stargad, prince of a line already old in grandfather days, bowed sombrely to Shielder’s Mark. “My greetings to your honoured father; sorrow to your dam. Prepare to die.”
And then Sweetness leapt out with a cry like larksong at first light and cut Mark’s sword cleanly in two, so the top half flew clattering against the wall of the Keep.
Mark flung the haft at Stargad and bolted. Fast as fear his legs carried him, racing back to the door Queen Lerelil had come through. He ran within and slammed it behind him, then stood, chest heaving, listening for Stargad’s footsteps.
Shite. Shite! His muscles were screaming to run, fight, anything, but he forced himself to stillness.
No sound of pursuit. Wine and ribbons and all pretty girls defend me! Sweet, sweet air of life.
He felt a warmth spill down his chest. He’d been cut. It was only a scratch, but he stood halfway to fainting, trembling like a first-day foal.
Hell.
Still no sound. Maybe Stargad can only prowl the ground he walked when first he came; never got inside, so he can’t come in now.
A duchy at least, Mark swore to himself. O God, that bulging eye, that flat, dead voice. The King owes me at least a duchy.
Faintness shivered through him, as if he hadn’t eaten in two days. So much for Thief. “Better stick to saving squirrels,” he murmured.
Another chance at honour gone.
Men had dueled, stories said, for the privilege of falling before Stargad’s blade. But you’re not here for honour lad, nor glory either; just to fetch the dagger and break the spell. Fighting dead heroes is none of your business, he told himself, gasping against the door, ears straining for any sound of Stargad’s approach. Running away was just good sense.