The Fell Sword (42 page)

Her eyes opened.

Ser Richard’s eyes fluttered again. He released a breath that he might have been holding for a very long time. ‘I’ll never doubt God again,’ he said dreamily.

Sister Amicia laughed. It wasn’t a strong laugh but it was a good one, and she sat heavily on the trestle bench.

Now that the crisis was past, Helewise and her daughter looked at each other. They both smiled.

The stench was truly awful.

‘Everyone wash,’ said Helewise. ‘What in the name of heaven is it?’

Ser John shook his head. ‘Giant shit,’ he said. ‘Pardon my Gallish, but that’s what it is.’

The hall was full and so was the yard, and everyone was awake. And everything happened at once – girls got pails of water from the well, fires were lit in the kitchen and the hall fireplace and even in Helewise’s solar, and every kettle they possessed was pressed into service heating water. Ben Scold, the best of the new men, started cleaning the horses, and the surviving archer joined him. Young Jamie began collecting the reeking armour – Lord Wimarc’s was the worst – and by then Phillippa had some boiling water for him. He looked at her and smiled.

‘Did you kill one?’ Phillippa asked.

Just for a moment, he thought of lying to her – she was so pretty. But he shrugged and looked at the ground. ‘I was sent with the horses,’ he said. ‘I didn’t strike a blow.’

She smiled at him. ‘Your time will come,’ she said, and he fell instantly in love with her.

Everyone bathed. The knights had soap, of all things, and the women had made some more; the women bathed in the hall and the men in the kitchen, and Helewise started a fashion by wearing her kirtle without a shift under it, because there was still dirty work to do.

Ser Richard attempted to rise and was pressed back into a bed by Amicia. ‘Good knight, the power of my healing, even with God’s help, is greatly aided by careful rest and a great deal of sleep.’

He looked at her with worship. ‘Beautiful sister, why? I feel better than I have in a long time.’

She smiled and smoothed his hair. ‘Shall I tell you? When I heal – when any good healer heals – we knit the tissues just as much as we need to bring them together, and no more. The power used is greater than any other kind of casting.’ She smiled hesitantly, and then shook her head. ‘Think of the power you would use to cut a man’s hand off with a sword. The power to put it back on is many times greater. So we fix what we can, but then we must let God and nature do the rest over time.’ She shook her head. ‘And nature’s healing gives a greater hope of success.’ she said. ‘And, when it comes to healing, I really need more training.’

Ser Richard gazed adoringly at her and said, ‘I’m sure you need no further training.’

Amicia had some experience being a healer – and a woman – and knew when it was time to fluff the pillow and be all business.

Lord Wimarc was moved into Helewise’s solar. The smell of giant began to recede, although it continued to catch at the back of people’s throats for days. Helewise broached a keg of cider, and everyone had a little – there wasn’t that much of it – and Old Gwynn produced a leather flagon of wine that they all drank greedily, and Mag Hasting brought out fresh bread.

Eventually, the excitement faded. Helewise made sure that her daughter went to bed with her friend Jen and not with either of the squires – she didn’t really think her daughter would, but she had to check – and then scrubbed the hall table one more time and helped Old Gwynn wipe down the kitchen where the men had slopped wash water. Amicia had passed out in the hall settle, and Helewise threw a heavy wool blanket over her. She stood in the middle of her hall, and listened to the silence. Gwynn smiled toothlessly and went laboriously up the stairs to the rooftrees, where she had a little garret.

Helewise stood there indecisively for just long enough to realise that there was someone there with her, and then his hands were around her waist.

‘I think you should dress this way all the time,’ he breathed in her ear.

‘John Crayford, if I catch one whiff of giant on you—’ she muttered. When he tried to kiss her, she ducked her head and slipped through his arms, but she caught his hand and pulled him into the yard. ‘Where’s your squire?’ she asked.

‘In the gatehouse,’ he breathed in her ear. ‘I kept the barn for myself.’

She put her arms around his neck. ‘Was it bad?’ she asked.

‘Better now,’ he said. He lifted her and carried her into the barn.

Father Arnaud sat in the hall and sipped from a cup of wine. His hands were shaking.

Sister Amicia came and sat by him. ‘Can I help?’

He smiled at her. ‘You are the famous Soeur Sauvage?’ He rose and bowed. ‘No one told me you were so pretty,’ he added.

‘Are you sure you’re a priest?’ she asked. But she grinned, and he had to grin back.

He drank more wine. ‘I’m good at killing monsters,’ he said. ‘Pardon me,
ma soeur.
I am suffering a crisis of faith.’ He turned his head. ‘Why on earth did I just tell you that?’

She shrugged. ‘People tell me things like that all the time. I suppose I’m easy to talk to – being pretty, and all.’ She sat opposite him, seized a dirty cup and poured wine into it. ‘I’m in a perpetual crisis of faith myself, though, so I’m of no help to you.’

He sat back. ‘Mayhap I could argue that if you have many crises of faith, you must also resolve them often, and thus you are my fittest guide.’ He looked away.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

‘I couldn’t heal. I haven’t been able to because—’ He paused and looked away.

They sat silently for a bit, because he was crying, and she knew better than to interrupt. After a little while, she said a prayer and then handed him her plain white handkerchief.

He dried his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t want to be a sop. I am simply so tired of failure.’

She watched him, waiting, listening.

But he surprised her by turning with a wry smile. ‘And you,
ma soeur
? Why your crises of faith?’

She shrugged. She had little interest in discussion or confession; she knew her sin, and talking about it would only make her feel more vulnerable.

On the other hand, he’d confided in her.

‘I’m in love,’ she said. Even saying the word gave her a jolt, like touching a sacred relic.

His smile sharpened. ‘Ah – love,’ he said. He drank off his wine, and his hands shook.

She couldn’t tell whether that was bitterness or not. ‘Has anyone asked if you killed the giants?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes. Both dead. Two of God’s creatures, as innocent as babes, and we killed them.’ He raised his eyes.

They were empty and hard for a moment. And then they softened, and he wrinkled his mouth – a particular tick. ‘Bah, I am too talkative. Lift my vow of silence and I ramble on and on.’

She got up and stretched. ‘You don’t seem especially talkative to me, ser priest. But I think I’m too tired to drink any more.’

‘Who is it?’ he asked. ‘Who do you love?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not important. He’s not around, so I cannot err.’ She was quite proud of how light her voice sounded.

‘I fell in love with a lady.’ Father Arnaud raised his eyes. ‘I ruined her life. I was proud and vain, and our love was a gift from God. Even now, I’m not sure that I repent it.’ He swirled the wine in his cup. ‘Isn’t it interesting that God can cut me off from the power to heal, but my strong right arm can continue killing? Despite my sin?’

She sat down with a thump. ‘So far, it sounds like you are more interested in being a romantic hero in a troubadour song than in being a good man. Despite which I promise you, ser priest, that the only thing that stands between you and healing is yourself.’

They sat for a moment, glaring at each other.

He shook his head, wrinkling his mouth again. ‘Sometimes our situations resemble the best troubadour songs. That’s why we love them, is it not? And yet – and yet, I feel a pang of something at your words, and you anger me, and that is good. I have considered that my limitations on casting must come from within me, like some kind of amnesia. But there is nothing there.’

She reached out a hand. ‘Let me look,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘No – pardon me,
ma soeur
, but you are too puissant for me. I will go and do my duty, and perhaps God and I will come to be friends again.’ He got up. ‘The worst of love is the change in habit – you know that? Years of celibacy, and now all that is overturned. I see you as a woman, not a sister. I see women all around me.’

‘Not altogether a curse,’ she said. ‘Might it not be better if some of our order lived and worshipped with yours?’

He laughed. ‘It would certainly alter our convents,’ he said.

She crossed her arms. ‘I’m cold. Good night to you, Father.’

He watched her climb the stairs, and then he poured himself a cup of wine, and later he prayed his beads and cried.

The next day, when the wounded men were stable and the dead man was buried, the priest took his leave.

Crayford embraced him. ‘You are a fine man of arms, Father,’ he said. ‘I wish you were staying. Where are you headed?’

Father Arnaud was booted and spurred and had a warm cloak over his arm. He bowed to the Lady of Middlehill. ‘Thanks for your hospitality, my lady,’ he said.

She curtsied. ‘May I ask your blessing, Father?’ she asked.

‘You need no blessing beyond the presence of Sister Amicia,’ he said. But he held out his hand and blessed her, and her daughter, and all the manor.

‘Where are you headed, Father?’ asked Ser John.

‘Over the mountains to Morea,’ the priest replied. ‘I’m off to be the chaplain to the Red Knight.’ He said it lightly enough, but Ser John’s brow darkened and the nun put her hand to her throat. The ring on her finger seemed to flash in the autumn sun. ‘I gather he needs a chaplain. Perhaps I’ll even reform him,’ he said.

Ser John shook his head. ‘You won’t. For an upstart sprig of nobility, he’s a fine fighter. Nor any worse than any other sellsword. But he stripped me of my best men-at-arms in the late spring, and now he gets you as well. Despite which, send him my regards.’

Sister Amicia coughed. ‘And mine, Father.’

‘You know him, I gather,’ said the priest. He vaulted onto his horse.

She nodded. ‘I do,’ she said.

When the priest was gone, Sister Amicia thought,
There goes a man who thinks me a pious hypocrite. And who is too intelligent for his own good. They’ll get along famously.
She sighed, clamped down on her regrets, and got on with her work.

Chapter Nine

Ticondaga Castle – Ghause Muriens

G
hause spent more time on research than she had done since she was very young, reading her mother’s books and her grandmother’s grimoire again and again. Even as the days grew colder and wetter, and her husband’s sword punished the Outwallers harder and tried to enforce his notions of peace among the Huran, she read and read, and then began one of the most complicated castings she’d ever designed.

The work began with an elaborate array of diagramata written in silver lead on the slate floor of her work chamber, high above the stone flags of the castle courtyard. The working was so dense that it required a kind of application that she normally forbore. She hated both research and diagramata, preferring to make up for each with simple power – power that she had had from birth.

But this was not a matter for power. This was a matter for subtlety.

Her intent was to discover how the King’s new bedmate had snapped the curse. The kind of work required – an investigative charm that would penetrate time – was so far from her usual style that she feared even to assay it, and twice she summoned daemons to question them about how they would manipulate the
aether
in such a way.

It was dull, detailed work and summoning daemons was far more exciting even if it was cold – working sky clad in an autumnal castle had its own risks.

One of those risks was that her focus on the task might blind her to other truths. She placed a sigil on Plangere, mostly meant to remind her to watch him more carefully if he moved too quickly.

She placed a sigil on her distant son Gavin – and did so three times in as many days – and saw her working dispelled each day.

‘Gabriel,’ she said aloud, but she didn’t press the matter.

On her fourth day, her husband summoned her by means of her son Aneas, who knocked and coughed repeatedly, being a polite young man who knew perfectly well what his sorceress mother might be doing on the far side of a closed oak door. She put on an ermine-lined gown and threw a light casting over the floor to protect – and cover – her scrawls, and opened the door.

‘Yes?’ she said, leaning on the door frame.

Aneas bowed. ‘Pater needs you,’ he said. ‘There’s an Imperial officer come.’

She nodded and slipped her feet into bright red leather slippers. Behind her, a dull grey moth flitted across a sunbeam and landed inside the hanging silver lamp of Morean make that dangled from a heavy iron chain in the middle of the room.

The moth caught her eye and she raised a hand and killed it with a thread of green light. Its death created a rainbow spectrum of swirling motes, like dust.

‘Oh, Richard!’ she said with delight. ‘I didn’t know you cared.’ She smiled.

The Castle of N’gara – Bill Redmede

Redmede woke to find Bess curled around him, her head in the crook of his shoulder, and he remembered their coupling of the night before.

She awoke as she felt him move. Her eyes popped open, and she sat up.

‘Damn me,’ she said. She was naked under the blankets, and she suddenly shivered, pulled her shirt out of the chaos and pulled it brusquely over her head. ‘Got to piss,’ she murmured, and walked away, pulling her hose up as she went.

Redmede began to roll the blankets, fighting a barrage of conflicting thoughts. The air was damp and promised rain. His people needed to get under cover before winter came, whatever else the Wild might have in store.

Why on earth had he bedded Bess?

He got the blankets rolled tightly, and found the ties so hastily discarded the night before and tied them tight. He passed the leather strap through the bundle.

Why had he never bedded her before?

He took a long pull from his water bottle and went to piss himself, and wondered where the irk had got to.

He turned and all but ran back into the middle of the camp – except that it wasn’t really a camp, but a huddle of survivors gathered around one big fire. A few men were up and armed, but most were merely gathered tight together.

Redmede started giving orders, and three more fires were started, wood was collected, blankets were rolled. Men saw to their weapons, such as they were. After the fight the day before, they were shockingly low on arrows.

Nat Tyler spat. ‘We’re about done, Bill,’ he said, conversationally.

Bill scratched at the beard he’d grown. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We need food and a strong place.’

‘
I can provide both, yesss. For an ally
.’ The irk was suddenly right there
.
Mounted on a great stag with golden horns and golden hooves, it towered over them.

Redmede fell back a step. ‘You—’

‘
My people came and fetched me, man. But I do not forget a ssservicsse. Never. Come feassst in my hallsss. It isss a true invitaissshun.
’

Redmede tried to remember anything he’d heard about the fey folk and their ways, but it all fled his mind when he looked into the irk’s ancient eyes. So he turned to Tyler.

Tyler whistled soundlessly. ‘Free to come and go again, Fairy Knight?’

‘
Yesss. My word upon it, mansss.
’

Redmede looked at Tyler. ‘A lifetime of war has taught me never to trust anything more powerful than I am.’

Bess pushed forward and gave the irk a surprisingly good curtsey. ‘Tapio!’ she said. Her delight was evident.

Indeed, in the grey light of an autumn dawn, the irk looked like a hero of legend. He wore an elegant red surcoat, a belt of links of worked gold like wild roses, each petal enamelled, the centres of jewels. He had flowers – real ones – like a chaplet in his hair, and his enormous blue eyes filled his angelic face. Only the tips of his fangs and his ears and overlong fingers gave away his inhuman origin.

‘The fairy knight has offered us refuge,’ Tyler said to Bess as she rose from her curtsey.

‘We should take it then,’ she said. ‘My lord – will you succour our wounded men?’

‘
It would be my dearessst pleasssure, lady
.’ The irk bowed. It was riding a giant stag without a saddle or a bridle, and had a lance and a bow in extravagant sheaths hanging behind it across the animal’s withers.

Bess smiled.

‘Bill thinks it might be a trap,’ Tyler commented.

Redmede shrugged. ‘I don’t trust lords of any kind,’ he said.

‘
You ssshould lisssten to your lady-love
,’ sang the irk. ‘
Often it isss the female who hass the greater wisssdom. My love isss often all that keepsss me from folly.
’

Bess and Bill looked at each other and said ‘Lady-love?’ aloud in the same moment. Bess blushed. Redmede coughed. Tyler flushed and spat.

Bess grabbed at Bill’s arm. ‘You have no choice,’ she whispered fiercely.

Redmede pursed his lips, then bowed – as if doing so hurt him – to the irk lord. ‘My— My lord, if you will give us leave when we wish it, and succour our wounded, I would be—’ He took in a deep breath. ‘I would be in your debt.’

The irk’s mount took two silent steps towards them. ‘
Fear isss the beginning of wisssdom, in the Wild
,’ he said. ‘
You would haf done better to sssave your dissstrussst for Thorn.
’

Redmede nodded. ‘Aye,’ he admitted.

A day later, he felt as if he’d lived in the irk’s castle for half his life, and some of his brother’s stories – and other tales mothers told children – were well explained.

The irk’s hold was not like a castle of men.

A great finger of land curled out into the body of a huge lake, and all along the finger of stone and earth, huge trees stood like cathedral spires among pillars of rock that appeared at first to be natural. Along the forest floor, hundreds of wigwams stood like oversized bundles of brush gathered by a giant and dropped almost at random. The huts seemed crude from a distance – mere stacks of twigs – but they were cunningly woven with grass mats hanging inside the walls of brush that, on close examination, were grown a-purpose, so that each hut was a single plant, or bush, or tree. The innermost layer was made of heavy rugs of carefully felted wool from the great sheep that wandered free in the woods. Every cabin had a stone hearth – most of them sat on living rock. A few had chimneys like human buildings, and others had only a smoke hole. There were sheep and goats everywhere, and the forest floor of the whole peninsula alternated pine needles and cropped grass. Every building had a carefully wrought door matched to the shape of the structure – all were organic, and none perfectly straight. Indeed, in the whole of the hold, there was not a single line that was entirely straight.

All of them, save a very few, were full of irks, who lived in an indolent comfort that Bill envied. They seemed to tend the sheep and goats as a hobby rather than as work, and parties went out to gather rice or Wild honey to hunt or dance – he saw them come or go, and the products of their labour appeared – a bucket of honey, a dead doe, a basket of kale.

He was watching through a window. His spire of rock was like a keep – he assumed the wind-cut spire had occurred naturally, but the inside was as hollow as a log full of termites and just as packed – simply with irks. The tunnels ran in every direction, up and down and at odd angles, and the warren challenged his sense of direction just to find the jakes, which, thankfully, the Wild creatures seemed to need just as much as he did.

But he knew his way to the Great Hall, and it was there that his sense of time was most ruthlessly challenged, because there was always a feast laid – irks came and went, ate, played their faery harps with a magnificent ferocity that was utterly at variance to what he’d imagined irk music would be, and walked away. They came and went very quickly, and they spoke quickly, and his host sat in a chair of what appeared to be solid gold and laughed, applauded, spoke to this one and that one and never seemed to tire. Or leave his hall.

Nor did his consort, a female irk with a face shaped like a heraldic heart, eyes as big and bright as silver crowns and hair so red that Redmede thought it must have been dyed. She wore a green kirtle with hanging sleeves dagged like oak leaves, and she had by turns the air of a child and of an abbess.

It was his third visit to the hall – he couldn’t stop himself, and returned continually – when she turned and saw him, and her eyes widened, if that was possible. She sang an impossibly pure note, a high ‘c’, and her consort turned to her.

They sang together like a troubadour and his joglar for as long as it might take a man to say a pater noster, if he had been so inclined, and she smiled at Redmede, showing a mouth full of tiny, pointed teeth.

‘
Welcome, beautiful stranger
,’ she sang.

Liviapolis – Morgan Mortirmir

After the sabbath, Mortirmir returned to his classes at the Academy in a city that was rapidly returning to normal – so rapidly that the siege, the battle and the capture of the Emperor all began to seem like a dream.

Some things were not a dream.

One of the four religious sisters in his medical class on Monday curtsied, and let just a corner of her veil fall away. ‘My cousin tells me you helped save the princess,’ she breathed. ‘I had no idea – you are so young.’

He could only see her mouth, which was a fine, perfectly normal mouth. He instantly mocked himself for imagining that the four nuns were great beauties who had to hide their faces away.

‘Are you a Comnena?’ he asked.

She tittered. ‘Yes,’ she said.

It was hardly the stuff of romance, but she didn’t call him ‘the Plague’ even once during a half-day dissection of a pauper’s arm.

In the evening, he went back to his rooms over his inn. He had twice the space that Derkensun had, and a fine hearth with its own external chimney – which was the Morean fashion. He read Galeanius for an hour and found he’d learned very little. He decided to write a poem about the Comnena girl, and found that he had nothing to say. So, instead, he read a little poetry in Gallish – all the best courtly poetry was Gallish – and found that his mind was wandering.

Summer was far advanced, but hardly over. The light was still lingering, there was no need to light his fire, and he was bored and lonely and the last three days had opened a remarkable vista of new life.

He buckled on his sword and walked out into the evening. He saw the farm carts rolling in for the Tuesday market, and he waited while a herd of sheep was driven into the butcher’s market, and he sat at the edge of the Great Square near the palace and played chess with a stranger – a Moor from Ifriqu’ya who beat him after a long game. They shared a cup of tea in companionable silence and the Moor went off to his bed and Mortirmir went back to his. Nothing exciting had happened. He fell asleep wondering if the peak of his existence had been reached at age fifteen and a half.

The next morning he arose feeling adventurous, and he walked to the palace – where he had the password – and attended matins in the first light with the soldiers in the Outer Court. Giorgos Comnenos grinned at him and slapped his back. ‘Good of you to join us, barbarian, but if you hang around here, I’ll put you in uniform.’