The Blood King (49 page)

Soterius showed the village militias how to appear more numerous than they were. Mikhail taught them how to move silently and hide themselves.

From the villagers’ web of family ties came anoth-er unexpected boon. Soterius knew that Tris had given his blessing to the ghosts of the Scirranish to avenge themselves and their families. Tris had also lent his power to make those ghosts visible. As the spirits of the scirranish returned to the places of their slaughter they called to the ghosts of their ancestors, until the forests and passes of the north-lands were too dangerous for even the most intrepid of Jared’s troops.

Soterius heard tales of the encounters between the spirits and the Margolan army. If they resembled even a fraction of the truth, the murdered villagers had fully avenged them-selves. Even without Tris’s magic, Soterius was more aware of spirits around him than ever before, especially since he almost always rode by night to accompany Mikhail and avoid detection.

Vayash moru were more numerous than Soterius expected among the volunteers, until he heard the stories of how relentlessly Jared’s troops had perse-cuted the undead, hunting them to their day crypts and burning them in the sun while they were vul-nerable. Those vayash moru were kin to the villagers, and had remained part of the lives of their families and villages even after they had been brought across into the Dark Gift. And so the fear that Jared hoped to instill of the vayash moru became loathing for the usurper king who severed bonds of family and marriage that even death had not sundered.

Feeling the barely suppressed rage of the vil-lagers, the anger of the spirits, and the cold resolve of the vayash moru, Soterius felt like he was watching storm clouds brewing on the hori-zon. The storm’s center would be Shekerishet, and its fury would fall on the night of the Hawthorn Moon. Until then, he and Mikhail had a kingdom to lead into revolution.

Although Gabriel had given Soterius the names of Margolan nobles likely to aid the rebellion, those holdings were further south. So it was the villagers and farmers who offered shelter and hiding places, as well as provisions and safe passage. But now, just a few candlemarks from his father’s lands, Soterius felt the need to go home and see how his own fam-ily fared.

Soterius passed an inn but did not stop. It was unlikely that anyone would recognize him, Soterius thought wryly, dressed as he was in a worn leather riding cloak with a full beard and his hair grown long. He was more likely to be taken for a brigand than the captain of Bricen’s guard, but there was still no sense in tempting fate. He rode on, though a mug of ale and a few moments by the fireside would have warmed him.

Once he passed the inn, the road grew quiet. Soterius rode on high alert, wondering if he had been wrong about insisting on riding alone. But these were the roads he knew from his childhood, and he had never before felt in danger here. Now, in Jared’s Margolan, Soterius wondered if he had beer, reckless.

Again he wished for dusk to come, so that he would have Mikhail’s company.

Something felt wrong, very wrong. Soterius thought about going back to the inn, but decided that it would take longer to go back than to go forward. Besides, he argued with himself, Mikhail would be looking to meet him at Huntwood, the Soterius family manor. Chilled to the bone, Soterius decided to con-tinue forward.

The sleet fell harder, glazing the wet ground and covering the bare branches of the trees so that they looked spun from glass. Soterius came to a rise in the road and saw Huntwood in the distance, a dark shape against the horizon. Only then did he realize the source of his sense of foreboding. The road to the manor, usually well-traveled, lay covered with an unbroken skin of ice, marked neither by hoof prints nor wagon tracks. The fields to either side of the road, usually home to cattle, goats, and sheep, were empty. No lights flickered from the manor house windows, and no smoke rose from its chim-ney.

Soterius urged his horse on, as fast as he dared to go on the icy roads. Within a few moments, the turn to the manor house came into view, as dark and undisturbed as the road itself. Feeling a rising panic, Soterius galloped up the long approach, hearing his horse’s hoof beats pounding in the silence. He reached the great entrance and stopped, feeling his heart rise to his throat.

Huntwood was a ruined shell. The dim light of evening was visible through the upper floor win-dow casings, where the roof had been burned away. The manor’s windows had been shattered, their cas-ings blackened by fire. The front door was splintered. From the overgrowth of the bare shrub-bery, it appeared as if no one had tended the gardens for many months.

Soterius lightly tethered his horse to a hitching post and drew his sword, advancing toward the steps warily. In the distance an owl hooted, but there were no other sounds of life. Heart pounding, Soterius realized he was holding his breath as he approached the doorway, stepping over the broken pieces of what had been massive oaken doors.

The smell of smoke and charred wood still lin-gered. Little remained of the manor’s furnishings. What had not been destroyed by fire appeared to have been slashed or hacked to bits. Icy rain fell from the gaping hole in the ceiling.

Leaves swirled around Soterius’s boots in the ravaged front hall-way.

Numbly, he made his way through the ruin of the familiar manor, but found neither life nor any sign of recent habitation. He slipped from the back entrance into the terraced yards of which his moth-er had once been so proud.

The gardens with their carefully tended hedge mazes and roses had been ridden down, and parts of them had burned.

Soterius found it difficult to breathe. He looked down over the sloping yard, toward the barns that were now charred timbers, and toward the fields that appeared to have been torched instead of har-vested. Gone, all of it gone, he thought in shock. All gone—

- He heard a crunch of ice behind him, and then a cry. Soterius could not see his attacker, but the man had to be at least double his bulk and a good bit taller; he easily crushed Soterius to the ice-covered ground and pinned him with his knee.

He grabbed for Soterius’s sword hand and slammed Soterius’s knuckles against the ground until he could pry the sword away and throw it well out of reach.

“There’s nothing left to take, thief,” a man’s voice rasped near Soterius’s ear.

“Your kind has taken it all. Give me one reason I shouldn’t slit your whore-spawned throat!”

Soterius felt the blade of a knife press against his skin. He struggled in his shock to place the voice.

“I’m not a thief!” Soterius said. “I’m Lord Soterius’s son.”

He heard a rush of air and a strangled cry from his attacker, who was suddenly lifted from off his back. Soterius scrambled to turn over and saw Mikhail, holding a burly man aloft with one hand so that the man’s feet dangled a few inches off the ground.

“You!” the man gasped. “I should slit your throat! It’s because of you they’re dead—they’re all dead!”

Shaken, Soterius regained his feet. Mikhail returned the attacker to the ground but did not remove his hand from the assailant’s neck. Although the man was unkempt and an unruly growth of beard altered his appearance, Soterius recognized his brother-in-law, Danne. Danne’s words gave him no doubt as to the fate of his sister, Tae.

“Danne, what happened?”

“Soldiers came just after the Haunts. When your father met them at the door, they ran him through. Your mother, your brothers, the children, Tae—the soldiers chased them down, through the house, into the fields and killed them.

Even the servants. All but Anyon, who hid in the well. I was gone to market with Coalan. When we came back, the fires were still smoking. Everything was gone.”

Soterius staggered, and fell more than sat on the remnant of the garden wall.

“Anyon said that as your father lay dying, the sol-diers told him that you were a traitor, that you had helped to kill King Bricen and then fled like a cow-ard.”

Soterius closed his eyes for a moment, unable to speak. It was Mikhail who broke the silence. “Is that what you still believe?” the uayash mom asked. He released Danne’s throat, but stood between Danne and Soterius, blocking the big man’s way.

Danne glared at Soterius; his shoulders sagged as the fight left him. “At first, we knew nothing else. But it made no sense, none at all. Ban had no rea-son to kill the king, and no profit from it.” Danne’s pain was clear in his eyes.

“I’ve known Ban since we were boys. I feared he might die for the king, but betray him—never.” He took a heaving breath that shook his large form. “Since then, since Jared took the throne, we heard rumors… that Prince Martris survived, that he was spirited out of the palace, that his friends had got-ten him to safety. I wanted to believe that. I wanted to believe you saved the prince, and that he might return. But seeing you, here, alive—you didn’t see how they died, Ban. You didn’t have to bury them. You didn’t have to bury them.” He covered his face with his hands.

“Tris and I saw Jared stab Bricen,” Soterius said tonelessly. “We had climbed down the outside wall, trying to break into Arontala’s workshop. We saw the king die. We found Serae—and Kait—dead by the sword. It was all Carroway and I could do to get Tris out of there alive. Harrtuck joined us, and we headed east.” The full moon cast blue shadows across the ice-covered landscape. He was so chilled by the cold and so numb from grief that the words seemed to belong to someone else. “That’s why I’m here. To help Tris take back the throne. To bring Jared to account. To destroy Arontala.”

“Can he do it?” Danne asked. “He’s no older than you are.”

“He’s a Summoner, Danne. Bava K’aa’s mage heir. He’s got the backing of three kings and the Blood Council. He’ll take the throne—or die trying.” He stopped, feeling his throat close again. “I wish father could have known the truth.”

“Perhaps he does,” Danne said. “They say the dead are watching.” He looked toward the old kitchen house, and Soterius saw a thin wisp of smoke rising from its chimney. “Come on. Anyon and Coalan have a fire started. I’m sorry what I said—about slitting your throat. I swear to you on Tae’s grave, I’ll cause you no harm.”

“Accepted. But first,” Soterius said, “first, show me where they’re buried. Please.”

Danne hesitated, and then nodded. “All right. Follow me.”

Soterius and Mikhail followed Danne down through the ruins of the garden, toward a stand of tall trees near the broken fence line. Under the mas-sive oak trees was a large cairn. Soterius gave a strangled cry and fell to his knees, weeping.

“We did the best we could, the three of us,” Danne recounted quietly. “Those that didn’t die in the fire we bathed and shrouded and brought out here. We wrapped the others, what we found of them, and then we raised a cairn because the ground was too cold to dig. There was no one but ourselves to send them to the Lady, but we gave them our blessing.” In the moonlight, Danne looked tired and old, though he was only a few years Soterius’s senior. “By the Whore, no man should have to do that. Many’s the night I wish I’d gone with them.”

“I’m so sorry,” Soteiius said.

“I don’t mind the cold, but perhaps we should take shelter or you may have your wish,” Mikhail said gently. Soterius struggled to his feet, following silently as Danne led the way back to the kitchen house.

Inside were a man in his third decade and a boy who looked about five years younger than Soterius. They looked up as Danne entered. Soterius recog-nized the man as Anyon, his father’s grounds keeper, and Danne’s son, Coalan. Anyon moved with a limp that was new, and Soterius saw a deep scar slashed across his cheek. Coalan’s light brown hair and hazel eyes looked so like his mother that it almost made Soterius weep for his lost sister. Coalan regarded the two newcomers with suspi-cion, his eyes glinting with loss and fear.

This time, it was Danne who told Anyon and Coalan of Soterius’s tale. Soterius saw questions in the eyes of the two men, but to his great relief, nei-ther seemed inclined to doubt the story.

The kitchen house was filled with the remnants of what could be salvaged from the manor, bits of charred furniture, cookware, a few books that still smelled of smoke, and lanterns. Pieces of heavy tap-estries covered the windows, keeping any passers-by from seeing the light within.

“We’ve made do off the land,” Anyon said, set-ting a piece of roasted venison and some leeks in front of Soterius, along with a wineskin. Mikhail raised a hand to forestall a similar offer. “Deer and game from the forest, some fish from the stream, and what was left in the fields that didn’t burn. Some of the stores in the cellars weren’t ruined, so we’ve had wine and dried fruit and cheese.

Enough to get by.”

“What will you do, now that it’s almost planting season?” Soterius asked.

Danne met his eyes. “I guess that’s up to the lord of the manor.” Soterius’s eyes widened as he took Danne’s meaning. With his father and older broth-ers dead, the title and lands now fell to him. It was a windfall as undesired as it was unexpected.

“There isn’t a future, until Martris Drayke holds the throne,” Soterius said.

“Maybe after that, I can think about it. But I’m oath-bound to raise rebel-lion against Jared. That has to come before anything else.”

Danne stroked his beard thoughtfully, listening as Soterius told them of the rebels he and Mikhail had trained and the deserters they recruited. “You can’t house your soldiers here,” Danne said when Soterius finished. “Margolan troops come by every so often—maybe to see if you’ve returned.”

“I have a suggestion of a place that might be ideal for a base camp, if you dare,”

Mikhail said. He gratefully accepted a tankard of deer’s blood, which Anyon had drained from the carcass hanging at the back of the kitchen. “The Carroway manor house, Glynnmoor, is barely a candlemark’s ride from here. It’s near the main roads south, which we will need to secure as we head toward Shekerishet.”

“The plague house? Are you mad?” Coalan exclaimed.

Mikhail held up a hand. “The ill humours that caused the plague have long since gone. Mortal squatters and vagrants have taken refuge there over the years with no ill effects. Some of my kind, out of friendship with Lord Carroway, chased off the squatters and cleaned out the manor, burning the bodies and their intimate goods that might have carried plague. While it’s not as it once was, it’s habitable and in much better shape than Huntwood. And as you say, even those living near-by stay clear. So we may be spared the interest of passing soldiers.”