The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (39 page)

Thorn turned his body, the stones protesting as his unconscious hermetical working powered the stone into shape after shape, a smooth transition in many dimensions. “And you, De La Marche?” he asked. “Are you now a knight?”

De La Marche had begun life as a sailor, and risen to command. He was a merchant, a ship-owner, and a trusted servant of his king. But not a knight.

The merchant-adventurer looked away.

“De La Marche has declined the honour of knighthood at my hand. He holds himself unworthy,” Ser Hartmut said. Ser Hartmut’s feelings were naked for a second, and Thorn could see the man’s rage.

Even Thorn, at the apogee of his power and very close indeed to his goal, felt something closely akin to relief to see that Ser Hartmut was human enough to be enraged. And that De La Marche’s refusal had hurt him.

Thorn would have expected De La Marche’s refusal to cost the man everything—his life, reputation, honour, family. Ser Hartmut did not seem like the type to take a small revenge. But this sort of petty interaction was beneath Thorn now. He understood the great Powers better every day. As they evolved and developed, they lacked the time—or the
potentia
—to delve into petty matters. Great power required intense absorption. It left little time for revenge.

Petty revenge, anyway.

“Tell me when we will march,” Ser Hartmut said again.

“In two days, we will have the whole of our strength,” Thorn said. “Perhaps the Sossag will send their hundreds, or perhaps they will not. Either way, two days or perhaps three will see the last of our human soldiers. But I have other allies and other slaves—aye, and other avenues of attack.”

“And other enemies,” Ser Hartmut said.

Thorn swivelled back to face the Black Knight. “Other enemies?” he asked.

“The bears,” Ser Hartmut said. “I am told by Ser Kevin that the bears will stand against you.”

Thorn would have shrugged. “We will have twenty thousand boglins,” he said. “And ten thousand men. And hundreds of other creatures.” His black stone eyes swept over them. “We will crush the bears if they are foolish enough to fall under our claws. Otherwise, we will ignore them and take their vassalage later.”

“You avoid the question,” Ser Hartmut said.

Eventually, I will have to dispose of you. You, and Orley and the rest. All so greedy. Perhaps I should make De La Marche my ally.

“In two days, we will march. We will collect our allies from the north as we move—they will catch us up.” Thorn nodded. “I will cover us in a cloud of unknowing, and we will move as close to Ticondaga as my powers will allow.”

“And when will we strike?” Ser Hartmut insisted. “We’re one day from Easter.”

De La Marche spoke for the first time. “The ice isn’t off the lakes yet, and the woods are still full of snow.” He did not look fully at Thorn. “None of our men wish to march in this.” His voice all but begged. “Let the men celebrate Easter in peace.”

Ser Hartmut laughed. “I did not learn to win wars by doing what is easy.”

“Men will die in those woods,” De La Marche said.

Ser Hartmut shrugged. “None of them are any consequence to you or me or Master Thorn,” he said.

“We don’t have enough
raquettes
for all the sailors and the men-at-arms,” De La Marche said.

Ser Hartmut nodded. “Only the scouts will need them,” he said.

De La Marche looked at Thorn for a fraction of a heartbeat. “Our wizard will melt us a road?”

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “No,” he said. “Our Huran captives—those ones who will not submit—will walk ahead of us.” He waved one iron-clad hand. “They will tramp the snow flat. And cut the trees and make a road, all the way down the western shore of the lake.”

De La Marche took in a great breath. “And where will they camp?” he asked. “With our men?”

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “Camp? They will work until they die.
And then we will send more ahead of us.” He waved his hand. “They are not Christians. Not subjects of my King. They’re not even really people. Let them die.”

De La Marche sighed. “You will walk three thousand women and children to death to build a road for your army?” he asked.

Ser Hartmut nodded. “They defied me,” he said. “Now they will pay. This is absolutely within the Rule of War.”

De La Marche looked back and forth between Ser Hartmut and Thorn. “Of the two of you, I doubt that I can tell which is the worse,” he said. “I will go and walk the snow with the poor savages you send to their deaths. I cannot live and watch you do this to them.”

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “Do not, please, be a sentimental fool.”

“I am a man,” De La Marche said. His tone said what his words did not.

Even Thorn felt a tiny pinprick of anger in reponse. “We act on a stage so vast that you cannot perceive it,” Thorn said. “Already my forces are south of Albinkirk, pinning our foes in place. A few Outwallers more or less—”

De La Marche nodded. “I thank God I do not
perceive
what you can,” he said. He turned rudely and walked away.

Ser Hartmut turned to his squire. “Take him. Beat him unconscious and have him bound. Do not let his sailors see you do it.” His squire walked away into the snow, and Ser Hartmut turned to Thorn. “He has become a fool. But if I allow this idiot martyrdom, his sailors will be wasted. They will not fight well, and they are my best troops, in a siege.”

Thorn was weary of the whole matter and all the petty inversions that went with human interaction. “Two days,” he said.

Ser Hartmut nodded. “Two days.”

Ser John Crayford awoke in a strange place. It took him a long moment to identify where he was. The ceiling was white, and had a spider web of cracks around a marvellous old beam that had been carved in whorls like a hundred intertwined dragon’s tails. His eye followed the whorls and the cracks.

There were two narrow windows with archery shutters—thick oak shutters that let in very little light. Each was pierced with a cross, so that either a longbow or a crossbow could be used on attackers.

As he looked at the windows, he knew where he was. Close by his right arm lay Helewise, naked. She was not asleep.

“Did I snore?” he asked.

She laughed. “Only when you were asleep,” she answered.

“You were going to send me away when we finished.” Ser John smiled.

She smiled back. “I’m an old woman,” she said. “And yet I’m not sure that I am finished, even yet.” She leaned over and threw a leg over his, and they kissed—the warmth, the foul to fair kiss of morning, a night shared.

Instantly aroused, Ser John laughed in his throat. “And last night you put out the candle,” he said.

“Not every man is full aroused by sagging breasts and widening thighs,” she whispered.

“Why are women so cruel to themselves?” he asked.

“Why, we learn it all from our lovers,” she said. But she took the strength of his arousal as compliment enough.

They played the music again, as they had played the night before, although Ser John was more conscious of the noise the bed frame made this time—so conscious that he began to flag, and then to move softly. But he suited her so well that at last she made a sound somewhere between the contentment of a cat and the cough of a leopard—a surprising, unladylike sound.

And then she laughed.

“Imagine, a prisoner of the pleasures of lust at my age!” she said.

“Will you confess it to the little nun?” he asked.

“Would that embarrass you, bold knight?” she asked in return. She put a hand on his chest—and pushed. “Do you think any woman in this house doubts where you spent the night? There’s no hiding anything in a house of twenty women.”

Ser John looked abashed. “I thought—”

Helewise rose. She threw back a shutter. “Wilst marry me, Ser John?” she asked.

Ser John, looking at her in the stream of sunlight, thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful. “I would be most pleased to marry you, lass,” he said.

“And all your other wives?” Helewise asked. Under the banter, he could hear a more sober note.

“Nay—I have no other lovers,” he said. “Mayhap ten years gone, there was a head on my pillow some nights.”

“Ten years?” she asked. She had a robe on now. “No wonder you find me beautiful.”

She stepped out from behind her screen. “I mean it, John. I’m no light o’ love and I have a daughter who’ll know by evensong what her mother did this night. Plight your troth—or don’t come into my bed again.” She flung her hair and gave him an odd look. “My daughter is flirting with your Red Knight’s youngest brother—you know that? If I play the fool with you…”

Ser John sat up. He shook his head. “I might say that I didn’t push you here, my lady.”

“Nor you did. I am a lustful mortal, as God made me.” Helewise stretched. “But I’ll not make a slut of my daughter through misjudgment.”

Ser John rose, naked and more grey than brown, and kissed her. “Hush, lady. I don’t need threats or admonitions.” Naked, he knelt at her feet. “I beg you to marry me and be my love.”

She smiled. “Oh, John.” She bent to kiss him. Her robe fell open to the last button and her earthy smell hit him.

“Mercy,” he said. “I’m an old man. I might die.”

“The old plough runs the deepest furrow,” she whispered.

“You made that up,” he growled back.

Later, dressed and armed, he met his escort—knights and squires of far-off Jarsay—in the yard. The younger women of the manor all seemed busy with laundry—busy in a way that required their presence in the yard. He smiled beneficently as one does when all is right with the world, and he noticed with some amusement that many of the younger men in armour would not meet his eye.

His squire, Jamie the Hoek, had his great horse saddled and everything prepared just the way he liked it. From a gawky adolescent who knew little or arms and nothing of horses, Jamie had grown into a tall man of gentle manners who was welcome wherever he went—and was the best squire a knight could ever want. He was quiet, he worked very hard, and he had learned every skill of management, maintenance, repair and replacement that a squire might ever need to know. He could sew. He could even do a little embroidery. He could take the dent out of a helmet.

He could kill a boglin while covering his master’s side.

He bowed. “Ser Captain, we understand congratulations are in order.”

Ser John bowed back. “Gentles, you have the right of it. Lady Helewise and I will be wed at midsummer.”

Now all the young men met his eye, and his hand was shaken, and he thought,
What a nice lot of boys these are. We were a rougher crowd in my day.
He’d taken a few days to warm to Ser Aneas—a cold young man—but the boy’s infatuation for Heloise’s daughter Philippa was—charming.

The youngest Muriens received a stirrup cup from his lady love.

“I think it’s horrible,” she said. “My mother—at her age!”

Aneas Muriens had a different kind of mother. “I think it—splendid,” he said.

Philippa gazed at him a moment. “You do?” she asked.

They looked at each other so long that other knights chuckled, and Ser John had to clear his throat.

Long before the sun reached the apex of her travels across the sky, Ser John led his company out of the restored gates of the manor and past the new stone barn that the master masons were just completing. It had been warm enough for foundations to be dug, and new stone barns were rising across the whole of the area west and south of Albinkirk to replace the wooden barns burned the year before.

They rode north through the countryside, passed over two streams in roaring full spate by means of careful scouting and a willingness to get very wet. A dozen huntsmen—all professionals—rode well ahead, and they paused to look at every track on the road, or rather, the mud slide that passed at this time of year as a road.

Early afternoon. Birds sang, and the spring flowers were in full bloom, and Ser John, who had in truth missed a great deal of sleep the night before, began to feel its lack. He turned to say something about a nap to Jamie, when he saw one of the huntsmen coming along the verge of the road where the ground was harder. The man had his rouncy moving at a trot—when the ground was hard, he cantered.

Ser John had faced the Wild on too many patrols. “Gauntlets and helmets!” he called. “Lace up!”

Most of the southerners had learned to ride with their steel gauntlets on their hands, but very few men liked to ride about wearing their helmets.

The squires and pages handed out lances—fifteen-foot spears tipped in hard steel.

“Let’s go!” Ser John said, fatigue temporarily forgotten. He led the column along the edge of the road, single file—an invitation to ambush except that he’d seen his own scouts work the apple orchard on the other side of the lane’s wall.

He met the huntsman at the corner of the old wall.

“Boglins,” the huntsman panted.

“Where away?” Ser John asked. “In broad daylight?”

The huntsman shrugged. “Saw ’em mysel’,” he said. “Away over past the Granges.”

Ser John looked under his hand.

“Big band—fifty or more. Running flat out—you know, so their wing-cases stand up.”

“On me!” Ser John roared. He turned in the saddle and caught Lord Wimarc. “Take the squires and sweep the hillside,” he said. “All the way down to the creek past the Grange. You know the ground?”

Lord Wimarc nodded. Since the death of his knight, he had withdrawn on himself, and his eyes were sunken and he had dark smudges under his eyes, but he was alert enough. “Aye, Captain,” he said.

“If you catch them, dismount and hold them. Don’t let them get at your horses.” Ser John waved to the other squires. “Jamie, stay with me. The rest of you—follow Lord Wimarc.”

As he turned his horse on the muddy ground, the scent of new grass and mud gave him a flash of Helewise, above him, her breast…

He flushed and focused on the reality of a warm day and a tired horse.

Off to his left he saw Lord Wimarc stand in his stirrups. The man’s lance tip moved.

There was something on the hillside.

An explosion, like lightning—a ball of lightning…

Then the crack of a distant whip and one of the squires and his horse were a butcher’s nightmare in an ugly instant.