The Barrow (39 page)

Arduin sat high in his saddle, the visor of his sallet up, looking back across the expanse of the city visible from the road. Sir Helgi waited by his side, guzzling water from a leather bottle. Street lanterns and fire-lit windows twinkled across the city skyline, reflected off the sides of the highest and best-lit buildings. He could see the lights of the high spires of the High King's Hall and the Great Temple of the Divine King on their distant rise; normally it would have been a stirring sight, but he felt nothing, just a hollow ache in his belly. He could see a bright fire of some sort in the High Quarter; he vaguely wondered if the mob had put the city house of his father to the torch. The alarm bells of the temples and the Watch still rang faintly and furiously; he'd gotten so used to them that they barely registered in his thoughts. Behind him the rest of the caravan had started to make its way down the road to Pierham, ten miles they'd have to cover as fast and as carefully as possible in the dark.

Stjepan, Erim, and Gilgwyr rode up, with a man that Arduin didn't recognize at first jogging by their side, until he remembered seeing him briefly in the rear courtyard of the house as they prepared to flee, and then two other men in dark leathers and partially masked faces riding horses. He sighed.
I'm not even going to ask
, he thought wearily.

The group came to a halt around Arduin and Helgi, milling their horses about. Erim turned her horse and, like Arduin, stared back at the city skyline. She started to laugh lightly to herself, the relief and exhaustion palpable in her bones, and finally she let out a wild
whoop
. Gilgwyr, out of breath, his face sweaty and pale, looked over at her, at first askance, and then, as she stared at him and laughed and laughed, he started to laugh as well.

Stjepan dismounted and walked over to Jonas, his arms casually outstretched. The two men embraced, saying quiet words to each other, and then Stjepan was swinging back up onto his horse. “My Lords. May the Fates smile upon you 'til next we meet!” cried out Jonas with a wave, as he started to walk backwards toward the gate.

Erim could barely stop laughing to get the words out. “We crossed three-quarters of the fucking city, and
the City Watch held the gates open for us on the way out!
” she gasped out. “Who the fuck
are
you guys?” Coogan and Cynyr chuckled under their scarves, and Gilgwyr started laughing so hard he almost pissed himself.

Good question, that
, thought Arduin.

“Why, we're the Lords of Book and Street, my dear Erim, at your service,” shouted out Jonas with a shit-eating grin and a short bow. “Hasn't anyone told you that yet?” And with that, he turned and started walking briskly back to the waiting gates.

“By the gods, I've always hated that name,” Gilgwyr barely managed to get out. Tears were rolling down his face. “I've forgotten which one of us fucking came up with it . . .”

“Fionne,” Coogan and Cynyr said together with exasperated shrugs. “May the gods keep him,” Coogan added. And with that their horses leapt into motion, surging down the road after the caravan. Erim and Gilgwyr turned to follow, as did Sir Helgi, and soon it was just Arduin and Stjepan sitting mounted and looking back at Therapoli Magni, capital of the Middle Kingdoms.

Stjepan looked out over the city toward the High King's Hall, sweeping his gaze down across rooftops and towers, to the black of the bay and the bobbing lights of the ships of thirty different cities near and far. He looked up at the cloudless night sky, saw the waning Spring Moon and the Star Child dancing the last of her days before the coming of the Serpent. He closed his eyes and listened to the wind, to the ringing of distant bells, to what sounded like someone weeping alone in the dark. He sniffed the air, smelt fire and ash, the sharpness of honest clean steel and the lather of horse sweat, and an undercurrent of desperate and abject fear. His gaze fluttered open and grew hard and grim, and he turned his horse away from the city.

“So,” said Arduin, looking at Stjepan carefully. “Any reward, you say? I mean, I know, it's
Gladringer
. . . but can any sword really be so valuable?”

Stjepan returned his gaze for a moment, measuring him.

“It's fucking priceless,” Stjepan said. He gave a sharp whistle, and Cúlain-mal sprang forward and onto the road.

Arduin looked bitterly, wistfully back at the city and the fires in the distance, and then he wheeled Ironbound and put his horse to spurs.

The road to Pierham was decently maintained, being part of the royal lands around the capital city, but the New Moon was almost upon them and the night sky did not provide much light. The torches and lanterns helped, but with two coaches and two wagons piled high with people and provisions the going was slower than they might have hoped, and so Coogan, Cynyr, and Stjepan picked up their pace and rode on ahead to begin making arrangements for the crossing of the river. By the time the Dawn Maiden rose, the main caravan was finally arriving—tired, frightened, and sleep-deprived—in the town of Pierham on the north shore of the Estuary of the Abenbrae. There was a low wall and towers and what seemed to be a keep at one end of the town, but the guards at the town gate greeted them cheerfully and the keep did not appear to be particularly active; Erim guessed its lord, whoever that was, was absent with most of his household.
Our luck is holding
, she thought.

They found Stjepan awaiting them down on one of the docks, alongside two river captains and their spritsail-rigged
hoys
, large shallow-draught coasters designed to maneuver the estuary and river of the Abenbrae and the coastal tides that swept in from the Bay of Guirant. Erim scowled a bit on seeing the vessels; they would barely be considered sea-worthy, and shouldn't be sailed out of sight of land, but she conceded that plenty of their type plied the port of her home city and they'd certainly do the job. Her bones aching, she dismounted gingerly and stood on the dock, sniffing the air and scanning across the estuary mouth toward the port city of Abenton, which anchored the southern side of the river as it opened into the Bay.

The Abenbrae was perhaps the greatest river in the Middle Kingdoms, almost three hundred and fifty miles in length, though almost half of that was in the Highlands of Daradja, where it started as a trickle from the base of the Dess Urharat, one of the great peaks of the Harath Éduins. It collected the cold waters of most of the Daradjan plateau, and brought them down out of the mountains into the lowlands, where the river served as the boundary between the Plain of Stones and the Plain of Horns. Once out of the mountains the river was a mile or two wide until it expanded to almost five miles wide in the Estuary (which was, in fact, a slight misnomer, as the actual tidal estuary pushed up the river all the way to the city of Collwyn; but the name “Estuary” itself was only used for the lowest part of the river where it fed into the Bay of Guirant). The river had once been the easternmost boundary of the great Erid Wold, the wood of An-Athair, before the coming of the Aurians.

A half dozen rival clans of merchant shippers and traders, all of them mixed Danian and Athairi in lineage, controlled the river traffic up and down the Abenbrae and its offshoots; the river folk called themselves Abenbrayers. The Danias to the west also had their Volbrayers and Eridbrayers, clannish river folk who plied their great rivers and who were of similar mixed roots; but the principal rivers to the east in Auria, the Dusabrae and the Fasabrae, were seemingly bereft of the modern descendants of their ancient river populations. Two families dominated the town docks in Pierham: the Lyrians, the largest of the Abenbrayer clans and tenants of the Baroness of Abenton; and the Herlas, a smaller clan that called Pierham itself their home. The two captains that Stjepan had found were from the Herla family, though Erim wasn't sure if he'd picked them because of some kind of local river politics, or just because they happened to have the two largest vessels in port at the moment.

The two river captains certainly looked to be related. They both had the same sunbaked skin, bald spots in the midst of their dark hair, thick black mustaches, and the lean, muscular physiques of men who worked for a living; but the senior of the two looked to have been putting on some weight in his later years. When he spoke, there was the hint of a slow drawl and an accent that Erim found familiar. “It's thirty miles of water 'tween here and Vesslos. The wind'n'll be in our favor, the fortuneteller promised me that this morn. So if'n we time the tide right, we can sail right up the Vessbrae to the city, if'n you want,” said Master Wynram, the captain of the grandiosely named
River King's Crown
. “It'll mean we have to sail soon, though, to catch the tide pushing in. Otherwise'n you'll have to hire on a tow team at Badford to haul us up the last leg, or'n we could head to the bridge-docks at Tauria,
or'n
just wait another half day for the high tides to come again if'n you really want Vesslos. No matter'n to me,” he concluded with a shrug.

“We'll have to sell the wagons; it will take too long to load them, and would require at least a third riverboat anyway,” counseled Stjepan. “The captain here can purchase them from us on behalf of the Herlas.”

“Aye, that'n I can,” said Wynram with a nod.

“We can buy new wagons in Vesslos, my Lord,” said Master Tomas. “But they might not have a coach suitable for your sister. Perhaps the markets at Abenton might have more choices . . .”

“Abenton's too close,” said Stjepan, nodding out across the waters of the Estuary to where the city of Abenton was visible on the far away opposite bank.

“Agreed. We must to Vesslos, and the sooner we're on the ground there and moving again the better, so sell the wagons and we'll just make do with what we can find once we're there,” Arduin said wearily, waving his hand. He was exhausted and barely able to stand on his two feet without swaying slightly, and the prospect of having to take the river was making him queasy, though he'd done it before. “King of Heaven, get us on the boats and off our feet before we all keel over from lack of sleep.”

And so the captains nodded and the docks came alive with the cries of rivermen and stevedores as they started to load the horses and their provisions, such as the household had managed to secure in the final panic-strewn minutes at the city house of Araswell, up broad ramps and onto the decks or into the holds of both hoys. The men around them didn't seem particularly nonplussed by an entire armed household suddenly appearing on their docks, and Erim supposed they'd probably seen stranger things; but then that could also be why Stjepan had chosen the Herlas. Some of the household were having to be convinced to get into the
hoys
; she realized that the more superstitious amongst them had never set foot on a boat before, even one of the riverboats. She spotted a cluster of handmaidens and a couple of Arduin's knights escorting a cloaked and hooded figure, presumably Annwyn, onto the
River King's Crown
, and then was surprised to see Leigh already standing on the deck of the ship, peering about as though he wasn't sure where he was. She shook her head with a slight shiver.
Creepy, creeping, creeped
, she thought to herself.