The Tale of Oriel (51 page)

ONLY TINTAGE REMAINED TO BE
done with.

“What think you?” Griff asked Wardel, who thought hanging, and “What think you?” he asked Verilan, who thought hanging. “Let us do it now, and then bury him, and then sleep before we return to Yaegar's city,” Griff said.

“You dare not!” Tintage cried, when his sentence was told him. “You cannot! You will not!” he maintained.

A soldier made the halter, tied the death knot. Tintage was sat upon his horse. The rope was thrown over the high limb of a tree. The soldiers gathered. They wanted to be ribald, but Griff silenced them. “This is a man's death,” he said, and they were quiet.

When the booted feet had ceased their twitching, and Tintage had been cut down—his tears still damp on his face and the smell of death about him, his own death and the deaths he'd given that morning—Griff understood truly that Oriel would never again be more than a memory.

When they had taken the body in a boat across the river, to bury Tintage in the uncleared forests there, beyond the Kingdom's land, Griff understood that he must always be Earl Sutherland.

When they had risen from a short sleep and set off for Yaegar's city, the prisoners to follow under guard, their own wounded to follow as they could, Griff rode at the head of the column. He led the men back along the forest path, in a night that seemed not as dark as the night before. They emerged from the trees once again in silvery predawn light. The voices from the city walls rose up to greet the victorious army, and the Earl who rode at its head. Griff understood then that with Oriel dead and himself Earl, he could once again approach Beryl and ask for marriage.

A
S THEY RODE OUT OF
the woods, the sun lifted itself up over the trees behind them, and looked across the field to the city walls. Under the sun's glance, the piled stones glowed, and a veil of light lay gently along the ground, gilding the autumn grasses, shining on the people who waited to hear the news from the Falcon's Wing. Beryl stepped forward, washed in the golden glow.

Griff barely heard the cheers and the sound of trumpets that greeted his return. He didn't notice the gate being raised, to let the city rush out, bringing food and drink, bringing welcome.

“I am glad to see you well,” Beryl greeted him. “I am glad to see you safe returned.” Sunlight shone in her hair, and he couldn't gather his thoughts when she looked at him so gladly.

“There is need of a healer at the Inn; will you go?” Griff asked her. “I would name your uncle Innkeeper—for his fears were correct and none live there. I would ask him to keep the Falcon's Wing for me,” he said, then wondered, “Would that please him? Is Merlis within the city?” he asked. “For there is news she must hear. When is the baby due, Beryl?”

She had tried to answer each question but he had given her no time. Now, when he needed to hear her answer so that he could frame his next request, she hesitated. Then she told him, “Midwinter, if all goes well. There is no reason to think all will not go well, so it is not long now. It's Oriel's child,” she said, and a smile lifted the corners of her mouth.

Griff felt his own mouth lift in response. “Beryl, I asked you once before and you refused me, but I ask you again: If you will be my wife. I won't have your answer now,” he said. “Oriel's child is heir to the Earldom,” he told her. “You can't deny me that, you can't deny Oriel that. I am the Earl for my life, but my heir is this child and I will declare it. I must be wed,” Griff said.

“Yes, I know.”

“There needs to be more than one heir, for the hazards of life, and if you were to wed me I would ask for children. More than that I wouldn't ask of you—and if you won't have me I will wed elsewhere. It is only that you are the one I wish for, as wife. But my wishes need not move yours.”

“Yes, I know that,” she said. Her hands rested on her belly.

“For it was Oriel to whom you gave your heart.”

Again she smiled.

“Just as it is you to whom I have given mine.”

“Aye, but Griff,” she said, speaking in the same tender tone with which she had refused his first proposal of marriage, “and the child might be a girl.”

“Still Oriel's heir,” he insisted.

“It's a lord's sons must inherit.”

“Under the law, that isn't clear. I've read the law, Beryl, and—it's custom that names the sons, not law. Custom is harder to change than law, but be it girl or be it boy, it is within the law that Oriel's child can be named heir to the Earldom. So this baby must be raised in the ancient castle of the Earls Sutherland, and thus—unless you leave it in my care—”

Her face told him she wouldn't leave it.

“—you also will live in the castle, and I would have you live there as my lady and my wife. No, don't answer me quickly this time.” Griff was certain that if she answered quickly she would refuse him, and he judged that she would be wise to accept him.

But he would not require it of her. He wouldn't force her, even if he could.

“I'm of a mind to appoint your uncle the Innkeeper of the Falcon's Wing. Did I tell you that? Then Merlis—for Tintage is hanged. Merlis can go to the holding your uncle lived in, with whatever servants she requires, until such time as she wishes to do elsewise with her life, or in perpetuity.”

“Is there anything more you ask of me, other than to be your wife?” Beryl inquired. “And not to answer you aye or nay right now? And to accept that this child I carry must be your heir?”

Nothing, Griff thought to answer, but then he thought that was a false answer. And then he thought of how much he was asking of her, twice out of the three. He could find nothing to say.

An officer approached, and Griff needed to deal with his soldiery and where they might be quartered. Another officer waited behind the first to present Yaegar's compliments and inquire what his fate might be. Griff dealt with the two, detailing Wardel to find quarters for the troops, sending word to Yaegar that he must wait until the Earl pleased to find time for him, and he turned back to Beryl with a clearer mind.

“He said you were the best man he knew,” Beryl told him then.

Grief was a stone he had swallowed, and his words struggled past it. “When I first—when I was a boy, and we lived on the island, and there was no hope,” Griff told her. “When I first saw him, he was a child, but even then . . .” the nameless boy, barefooted on the beach, afraid of the sixth Damall but determined not to give way to fear, his head held high and his shoulders, under rags, held back and brave. “Oriel's child will have the Earldom,” Griff said, and somehow that completed the thought.

Beryl watched his face out of her blue eyes.

“There is healing needful, at the Falcon's Wing,” Griff said. “The burying has all been done, and the burnings, but some of my soldiers were too badly wounded to travel. There is a soldier named Reid, waiting for you, to look at his arm, and his hand. But when those things are done, I ask you to come back to the castle, and give me your answer, and await the birth.”

“What if I were to run away?” she asked.

He hadn't thought of that. The possibility hadn't ever occurred to him, and yet he knew how large the world was, and how easily a woman and her child might be lost to sight in it. He could understand why Beryl might prefer to try her own fortune, with the child. He thought, however, that she would send him word so that he might know of it and look out for another wife; he thought she would deal fairly with him. So he must deal fairly with her.

But he didn't know what answer to make her.

“What if that were my choice?” she insisted.

“You will make your own choices,” Griff said, and didn't speak of how empty life was, when Oriel was gone and Beryl also. “I only ask you to take care of what needs care at the Falcon's Wing, and then to come to the castle.”

“He said,” she said again, “you were the best man he knew, and I didn't deny it.”

AFTER BERYL HAD GONE, IN
company with the people of the village and their Major, who was now also Innkeeper of the Falcon's Wing, followed by the horse that carried the lady Merlis into the south, Griff turned his mind to Yaegar and his three living sons.

He couldn't think, short of hanging, how to answer Yaegar's perfidy. Yaegar had failed in his fealty—not to Griff, but to the Earl, and through the Earl—whoever might hold that title—to the King.

Yet Yaegar was a lord, and many of his people were loyal to the man, however much they decried his actions in this event. His sons had followed their father in failure of fealty.

Griff called Verilan and Wardel to him, and they discussed the matter over bread and ale and cheese, standing before a table that had been brought out from the city to set before them. They were all three tired, and longing for sleep; but they all agreed that the matter of Yaegar, who waited among his sons under the walls of the city, must be determined.

“Lock him in your dungeons,” Wardel suggested.

“The sons would try to rescue him,” Verilan pointed out.

“As they should,” Griff said. “I wouldn't have any man live out his years in dungeons.”

“Then they must all four be hanged,” Verilan concluded. “Let's get it over with quickly.”

“Were they traitors, then?”

“Not precisely,” Wardel said.

“You walk too fine a line,” Verilan answered. “They gave Tintage the support of weapons, food, safe passage. They aided a traitor proven. They wished him success, and Tintage's success was the same as Lord Griff's downfall. How can you argue that they aren't traitors, who wished to bring down your lord?”

“Do we hang men for what is in their minds?” Griff asked. “There would be many to hang, I think. More than we have ropes for, think you? And who would remain to be the hangman?”

Verilan's dark eyebrows gathered together in irritation; and then, unwillingly, he smiled, and then he laughed in a short swordstroke of laughter. “Yes, my lord, you have the right of it. I have had such thoughts in my mind, such desires in my heart.”

“And you do not deserve hanging,” Griff said. One decision was now made, and he spoke it. “You deserve, I think, the work of restoring order to this part of the Earldom. Yaegar's moiety is yours, whatever Yaegar's fortunes may be.”

Verilan looked quickly at Wardel.

“Wardel will be my Captain, in a brother's place,” Griff said. “I would ask this of you, Wardel.”

Wardel, his eyes shining with the honor of it, assented.

“So, now, to Yaegar and his sons,” Griff said.

“I can keep all four in my dungeons,” Verilan offered.

“Wouldn't it be dangerous to let them remain in what were their own lands?” Griff asked.

“Must they be judged together?” Wardel asked.

“Ah.” Griff welcomed a new way to see the problem. “No,” Griff said, and asked Verilan, “Do you think?”

Verilan agreed. There would be one judgment on the father and another on the sons. After a long argument, during which at one time or another each of the three became so frustrated that he suggested hanging all four traitors, just to have the quarrel between the three of them settled, a decision was reached. Yaegar, under guard led by Wardel, would be sent to the King, and house arrest in the King's city would be the sentence on him, the expenses of his imprisonment to be borne by the Earl's coffers. The three sons would be sent into the north, one to Lord Hildebrand, one to Earl Northgate, one to Lord Arbor, again in Wardel's company, to serve those lords in a country to which they had no claim by birth and where they had no hope of sympathetic followers.

Wardel and his soldiers would then ride back at speed, to be of service to Verilan should he need it and thence back to the Earl's city. Griff and the remaining soldiers would return now to Sutherland's city, where he must be Earl and rule. Verilan would keep a company of his own men with him, until he could be sure of the loyalty of Yaegar's house and people.

“Yours is the most perilous situation now,” Griff said to Verilan even as he thought that the peril would be welcome to the young fighter. “Remember, the Falcon's Wing I keep in my own disposal, under my own man, if you need a place of safety.”

Verilan wished to deny the possibility, but couldn't, although he could think it unlikely. “I hope not to need to accept your hospitality,” he said.

“As I hope also, and feel I have good reason to,” Griff said. But there was no certainty, as he knew. There was only a good plan, and luck, and the intention to deal justly; that was all he could bring to any occasion.

Griff had much work to do, and much to learn, and these would fill the days until he could know how Beryl would answer him. He rode out of Verilan's city two days later, without allowing himself to turn and see where the river flowed away, into the forest, southward to the Falcon's Wing.