Fortress of Mist (9 page)

He paused and studied them. Each returned his look with a smile.

Smiles?

“You enjoy this?” Thomas asked.

They nodded. “We know these weapons well,” one said. “Such a demonstration will set men on their ears.”

Thomas grinned in relief. “Then I propose this. We will request that the targets be moved back until the first of you says no farther. Thus, none of you will fear the range.”

More smile and nods.

Thomas then turned and shouted down the field. “More distance!”

He noted with satisfaction the renewed murmuring from the crowd. The men at the targets stopped ten steps back and began to position them in place.

“Farther!” Thomas commanded.

Louder murmurs. The best archers in an army of thousands had already shot at maximum range!

“Farther!” Thomas shouted when the men with targets paused. Five steps, ten steps, twenty steps. Finally, one of the archers whispered the range was enough. By then, the targets were nearly a quarter of the distance farther than they had been set originally.

The crowd knew such range was impossible. Expectant silence replaced disbelieving murmurs.

Thomas made no person wait.

He dropped his hand, and within seconds a flurry of arrows hissed toward the leather shields.

Few spectators were able to turn their heads quickly enough to follow the arrows.

Eleven arrows thudded solidly home. One arrow drove through the shield completely, spraying stripped feathers in all directions. The final two arrows overshot the targets and landed twenty yards farther down.

Thomas wanted to jump with joy and amazement, as many in the crowd did. To shoot arrows so much farther and so much faster, with so much more power than had ever been witnessed, was almost like magic.

Instead, he turned calmly to his archers and raised his voice to be heard. He smiled. “Survey the crowd and remember this for your grandchildren. It’s not often in a lifetime so few are able to set so many on their ears.”

C
lothed in the dirty and coarse fabric of a peasant woman, Isabelle held a long, slender stick that she had used to herd geese toward a wide patch of grass on a hillside.

All of the geese on the grass below her could have been slaughtered before the march started, but then the meat would have begun to spoil. Instead, although it took much more work than loading plucked and gutted carcasses on a wagon, the army fed itself by taking along livestock of all sorts, including these geese.

The peasant woman who normally tended to the geese had somewhat unexpectedly sickened before the march—it had been unexpected for her, but not for Isabelle. The dosage of a potion she’d added to the woman’s food during the preparations for the march had done its job.

While Isabelle was able to stay close enough to Thomas without drawing attention to herself, she wished she was away from the filthy geese and the constant squawking and honking and the greasy piles of green that she had given up trying to avoid as she walked. But those she served had given her no choice.

She sat on a hillside with a jar of jam and some black bread, ready to eat, when the army’s cook ambled over to report after the afternoon meal had been given.

“No, ’twas nothing unusual at all,” the cook said. “Except, of course, for the lord of Magnus’s archery contest.”

“You’re telling me that he did nothing after his lunch except host an archery contest?” Isabelle asked the cook. “You gave him the stew?”

“All of it. He went up on a hillside alone as he often does. When he returned, the bowl was empty.”

Isabelle frowned. In Magnus, she’d been given instructions. After the discovery of the slain white bulls, ensure that Thomas is seen going temporarily insane. A potion had been carefully mixed with the right combination of herbs and medicinal roots that would give Thomas a far deeper set of hallucinations than on the evening she had visited his bedchamber.

“Does he suspect you?” Isabelle asked the cook.

“He’s eaten everything I served him,” he said. “At least when I’m watching. I can’t speak for his time on the hillside.”

How could Thomas know what had been planned against him? What would those who gave her orders say when they learned she had failed? Isabelle had no one with whom to discuss her questions.

It was supposed to be simple. The white bulls would begin rumors among the peasants and the rest of the army camp. Once that was followed by a bout of insanity by Thomas, he would appear cursed, and his leadership would be destroyed. Then he’d be forced to pledge loyalty to those of the symbol in order to keep Magnus.

Instead, Thomas had only strengthened his reputation by the apparent showmanship of the archery contest. The cook went on to describe the magical display put on by Thomas’s archers, but Isabelle wasn’t fooled. She, too, had been taught how an inner circle of knowledge could be used to appear as magic.

But where had Thomas learned how to make weaponry so much more powerful than anything in England? It was obvious that Thomas held knowledge that the Druids needed to possess. They needed him to
pledge his loyalty to them—not only for their gain, but to keep it out of the hands of the enemy. In the bedchamber, her first attempt had failed; she expected something like the slain bulls would be done soon to put more pressure on Thomas, but she was not close enough to those who made the plans to know what it was.

“Where’s my silver?” the cook asked. “I’ve done all that you wanted from me. I want double what you promised. Whatever you wanted me to put into his food didn’t affect him. If you don’t pay, I’ll report to Thomas that you asked me to poison him and refused.”

“You think I carry it with me?” she said. “So that thieves such as you can take it all? Tonight I’ll bring it, the same way I delivered the potion to you yesterday.”

“You have until tonight then. I’m warning you.”

“Choose your goose and be done with it,” Isabelle said. She took a piece of bread and tilted the jam jar so that it oozed onto the bread, aware of the cook’s hungry eyes. There was a reason his belly was the most obvious part of his body. “I’ll see you tonight.”

“Remember. Double the silver.” He made no move toward the geese, and his eyes remained locked on the bread and jam in her hand.

She gave a sigh of exasperation and stood. “It’s this that you’re wanting too?”

She extended the bread, and he snatched it from her, eating it as he walked the short distance to the geese. He finished the jam and bread before reaching the geese. He took the sack off his shoulder and poured the handful of grain from the bottom of the sack onto the ground, then waited for a silly and greedy goose to push its way toward it. As the goose dropped its head, the cook slipped the sack over it and then pulled the sack upward. The evening meal kicked from inside the sack but was helpless to prevent its fate.

Wasn’t that how it went? Isabelle thought. Get silly and greedy, and danger will strike.

As the cook strolled down the hillside, she put away the jam untouched.

She’d never had any intention of eating it—not with the powders that had been mixed into it.

No. The jam had been meant for someone silly and greedy. Someone now helpless to prevent his fate as he walked away with a goose in a sack slung over his shoulder.

S
he was the oldest woman he could find during a hurried search of the other campsites as the last of dusk quickly settled.

Even in the lowered light, Thomas saw the grease that caked deep wrinkles on her hands and fingers. One of the cooks, no doubt. Part of the army that serves an army.

She sat leaning her back against a stone that jutted from the flattened grass. Her shabby gray cloak did not have a hood, and her hair had thinned enough so that her scalp shone, stretched shiny and tight, in the firelight. A grotesque contrast to the skin that hung in wattles from her cheeks and jaw.

“Ho! Ho!” she cackled as Thomas stopped in front of her. “Have all the young women spurned your company? Tsk. Tsk. And such a handsome devil you are.”

She took a gulp from a leather bag. “Come closer, dearie. Share my wine!”

Thomas moved closer, but shook his head. She smelled of many days squatting in front of a cook fire and of many weeks unbathed.

She pulled the wine back and gulped again. Then cocked her head. “You’d be Thomas of Magnus. The young warrior. I remember from the archery contest.” Another gulp. “I’ll not rise to bow. At my age, there is little I fear. Certainly not the displeasure of an earl.” She finished her sentence with a coughing wheeze.

Instinct had told Thomas that the older among them would know the tales he needed, the tales he did not hear the night before.

So he asked. “Druids. Would you fear Druids?”

The old crone clutched her wine bag, then took a slower swallow and gazed thoughtfully at Thomas. From deep within her face, black eyes glittered traces of the nearby campfire.

“Druids? That is a name to be spoken only with great care. Where would someone so young get a name so ancient and so forgotten?”

“The burning of two white bulls,” Thomas guessed. He was still working on instinct, and the old man in the cave had not connected Druids with those sights. “A symbol that inspires terror.”

“Nay, lad. That’s not how you conjured the dreaded name. A host of others in this army have seen the same. Not once have I heard the name of those evil sorcerers cross any lips.”

Evil sorcerers!

“So,” she continued, “it is not from their rituals you offer that name, although none have guessed so true. Confess, boy. How is it you know what none others perceive?”

He was right, he thought. Druids were behind the symbol. That meant Druids were behind the conspiracy to take Magnus. What might this old, old woman know of their tales?

Thomas did not flinch at her stare.
Keep her speaking
, he commanded himself. He tried to bluff. “Perhaps one merely has knowledge of their usual activities.”

The crone revealed her gums in a wide smile. “But of course! You’re from Magnus.”

Thomas froze and every nerve ending tingled. Magnus. Druids. As if it were natural that there was a connection between the two.

“What,” he asked through a tightened jaw, “would such imply?”

“Hah! You do know less than you pretend!” The crone patted the ground beside her. “Come. Sit. Listen to what my own grandmother once told me.”

Slowly, Thomas moved beside her. A bony hand clutched his knee.

“There have been over a hundred winters since she was a young girl,” the old crone said of her grandmother. “When she told me these tales, she had become as old then as I am now. Generations have come and died since her youth then and my old age now. In that time, common knowledge of those ancient sorcerers has disappeared. Even in my grandmother’s youth, she told me, Druids were rarely spoken of. And now …” The crone shrugged. “Yet you come now with questions.” The bony hand squeezed his leg and she asked abruptly. “Do you seek their black magic?”

“It is the furthest thing from my desires.”

“I hear truth in your words, boy. Let me, then, continue.”

Thomas waited. So close to answers, it did not matter how badly she smelled. His heart thudded, and for a moment, he wondered if she heard.

Then she began again. Her breath washed over Thomas, hot and oddly sweet from wine. “
Druid
means ‘Finder of the Oak Tree.’ It is where they gather, deep in the forests, to begin their rituals. I was told that their circle of high priests and sorcery began long ago in the mists of time, on the isle of the Celts. They study philosophy, astronomy, and the lore of the gods.”

Astronomy! The old man in the cave had known enough astronomy to predict the eclipse of the sun!

Thomas stood and paced, then realized her voice had stopped.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Please, please continue.”

“They also offer human sacrifices for the sick or for those in danger
of death in battle.” The crone crossed herself and after that, swallowed more wine. “I remember the fear in my grandmother’s eyes as she told me. And the legends still persist. Whispers among the very old. It is said that when the Romans overran our island—before the time of the Saxons and before the time of the Viking raiders—they forced the Druids to accept Christianity. But that was merely appearance. Through the hundreds of years, the circle of high priests held on to their knowledge of the ways of evil. Once openly powerful, now they remain hidden.”