Irons in the Fire (26 page)

"Indeed." Tathrin said curtly. He didn't want the Mountain Man's sympathy.

"Evord's no fool," Sorgrad continued. "If Gren and I put this proposal to him, he'll have no end of questions. Is Master Gruit setting up all this commotion to make a little fortune for himself? Reniack's some firebrand son of a whore. Would you trust him? Either of the women in this coil could just be out to make trouble, curdled by love and revenge: Lady Derenna's intent on getting her husband out from under Duke Moncan of Sharlac's boot heel, while Failla was Duke Garnot of Carluse's doxy. Who's to say she left him, when it could just as easily have been him throwing her out on her pretty arse?"

"Don't talk like that about Failla," Tathrin snapped.

Sorgrad shrugged. "After travelling back to Vanam with the pair of you, I could tell Evord more about her than the rest of your friends. I can tell him I asked you all the awkward questions I could think of on that journey. That still wouldn't be enough. You know Aremil, you know Master Gruit. Lescar's your home. You're the one who needs to come and explain everything."

"So I'm coming," Tathrin growled. "Happy?"

"Happy enough." Sorgrad carefully guided the carriage horse through a narrow gap. "Though I suggest you mend your manners before you meet Evord. It's your case you'll be arguing, not mine. If he turns you down, we can find some other way to make a coin or two, me, Gren and Charoleia. You won't find a better hope of bringing peace to Lescar."

Tathrin bit back a pointless retort and sat in resentful silence. Assured with whip and reins, Sorgrad drove the gig towards the far slopes of the Pazarel and a district where once-fine houses were sliding into decay. He turned the horse between stone gateposts stained with rust from hinges holding desultory remnants of wood.

"Gruit does have his finger in a lot of pies." Gren was studying the derelict house ahead.

Tathrin looked warily at a man emerging from the depths of the overgrown garden before recognising him as Gruit's coachman. "Draig?"

"You don't want to be hefting all that around Solura." Sorgrad nodded at Tathrin's chest as he pulled two sturdy drawstring sacks out from under the seat. The pommels of short swords stuck out from both. "Take what you need. Draig will ferry the rest to Aremil for safe keeping." He looked at the coachman for a nod of confirmation.

Tathrin quickly stowed necessities in the same leather bag he'd carried on the road to Draximal. After a moment's thought, he added the finely made dagger that Sorgrad had retrieved for him. "All done."

Draig grunted an acknowledgement and drove the gig away. The wheels left dark lines on the crushed weeds and the scent of bruised tansy in the air.

"Gren!"

As Sorgrad called with some exasperation, Tathrin looked up to see that the younger Mountain Man was climbing up the cornice carved above the empty house's wide front door. He acknowledged his brother with a wave before coming down, the boards nailed across the window frames as good as any ladder to him.

"Empty." He brushed dust from his hands. "It's always worth making certain."

"What now?" Tathrin looked nervously at Sorgrad.

"This." Sorgrad reached for his left hand and Gren took his right.

Intense white light bleached Tathrin's view of the shabby garden to nothingness. Could magic blind him? Apprehension rising, he screwed his watering eyes tight shut. A faint aroma teased him. What was it? Recollection of his mother making sure the maids finished up the laundry came to him. He could smell the subtle scorching that hung around freshly ironed cloth. That made no sense.

Colour played across his inner vision, but not as it did after a long day's study, when he tried to ease his tired eyes with gentle fingertips. This wasn't shifting darkness laced with ruddy gold. Vivid coils of scarlet and blue threaded through creamy pallor.

Now a breeze was wrapping round him, warm and dry like the breath of summer noon. He realised he couldn't feel his feet. Or rather, he couldn't feel the ground beneath his feet. Or the weight of his leather bag on his shoulder. He still didn't dare open his eyes. Was this really a breeze he could feel? Or was he being blown through the air, tumbled like some helpless leaf?

Dizziness crept up on him. First it was unease, like he'd felt for the first day or so aboard the sailed barge he'd travelled down the river on. The sensation worsened and he swallowed apprehensively. Now he was recalling the day when he and some friends had stolen a bottle of white brandy from his father's cellar. He hadn't drunk himself to puking but the world had swirled around, his hands clumsy, his feet numb. Which way was up? As he wondered, he felt violently nauseous. For the first time that morning he was grateful for his empty stomach.

Then his feet found the ground with a thump that ran right up his spine to jar his neck.

"Welcome to Solura," Gren said without enthusiasm.

Chapter Sixteen

Tathrin

Castle Breven Demesne, in the Kingdom of Solura,

7
^th
of For-Summer

As the magical glare dissolved, he felt the two Mountain Men release his hands. Tathrin cautiously opened his eyes. Purplish smudges blurred his vision and he had the beginnings of a sickening headache. It was like the time he'd spent too long in the harvest sunshine without a hat. He blinked as he clutched at his travelling bag, its bulk some reassurance, but things didn't improve much.

"Solurans don't like wizards." Sorgrad looked meaningfully at Tathrin as he pulled a sword-belt out of his own baggage. "At least, not ones like me who refuse to be apprenticed to a mage who's already sworn his life away in obedience to an elder wizard's circle. That's how they work magic hereabouts."

"So keep your mouth shut about whatever you think he can do." Gren buckled his own weapons on.

"In general, keep your mouth shut," Sorgrad advised.

Tathrin nodded mutely as he looked around.

This was very different from the countryside where he'd grown up, and it wasn't like any of the places he'd seen travelling between Lescar and Vanam. Wherever he'd been between the White Mountains and the Southern Sea, he was used to broad sweeps of land with long vistas reaching to the horizon. Where there was high ground, like the fells to the north of Carluse, the ground rose steadily towards it, the hills visible from a good distance.

Here the land was rumpled with hillocks and gullies like the blanket on an unmade bed. There was no neat delineation between field and forest, no regular pattern of villagers' strip-fields and common grazing. Haphazard stands of scrubby woodland were separated by stretches of cropped grass. Here and there, erratic stone walls enclosed small patches of land. Tathrin couldn't see crops being protected or any stock confined. Apart from the walls, the whole landscape looked untouched by man and beast.

He swallowed, his throat unaccountably dry. "What do we do now?"

Gren handed him a leather-bound water bottle. "Evord's the lord of Castle Breven."

"A castle?" Tathrin didn't know whether to be impressed or overawed. It was some recommendation if this mercenary captain had earned enough coin to retire in such style. On the other hand, how was he supposed to coax the man out of peace and comfort to take up arms again?

"I don't suppose it would impress a Lescari duke, but it's never fallen to an enemy." Quenching his own thirst from a silver flask, Sorgrad was already walking towards a scar running across the turf.

The Lescari wouldn't dignify this with the title of track, Tathrin thought, never mind call it a road. Though it wasn't too long before he saw that there must be people living somewhere around here. Once they left the dell, handfuls of coarse-coated black cattle picked their way through rough pasture. Several already had calves trotting at their heels and the rest looked ripe for giving birth.

Without anyone to tend them? Who milked them? Tathrin looked around. A land as wild as this must surely have wolves? He didn't fear attack, not in daylight, but what losses must the cattle suffer? This Captain-General Evord was no herdsman, however fine a mercenary he might be.

He still couldn't see anything like tillage for crops. The only sign of anyone taking a spade to the land was some way further on. The road, such as it was, continued on a narrow embankment across a stretch of rank bog. Tathrin tried to make sense of black lumps stacked beside a moist hole dug into the sod. "What's that?"

"Peat." Gren looked at it incuriously. "For fires."

How could anyone burn earth? Tathrin wondered. Wizardry? He didn't ask.

A little further on, the road took them around a rocky outcrop scarred with stonecutting.

"Castle Breven." Sorgrad paused. "Evord's ancestral home."

Gren chuckled. "You can see why he went looking for a more comfortable life."

"Where he could earn some solid coin," Sorgrad agreed.

A small lake shimmered at the far end of the shallow valley. Sharp-edged against the bright water, a tall, narrow tower stood defiant. A stone wall protected lesser buildings clustered around it, their tidy thatched roofs and smoking chimneys just visible. Tathrin had only seen Carluse Castle, but he'd heard tales of Sharlac Castle and Draximal, too. A Lescari duke wouldn't think this was fit for a hunting lodge.

"You don't see villages here, not like in Lescar." Sorgrad was striding onwards. "There are steadings scattered across the land. When there's trouble, everyone comes running for their lord's protection."

"How far does his writ run?" While the tower was solid, it wasn't very big. Tathrin counted four tiers of windows beneath the steeply pitched slate roof.

"As far as his reputation in times of strife." Gren chuckled. "So for Evord, that's pretty much all the way to the Solfall River and the border with the wildlands."

"He exaggerates." Sorgrad spared his brother a glance. "We're a good long way from the wildlands here. Thirty days' hard march, maybe more."

"Anyone between here and there would be happy to swear fealty to Evord," Gren protested.

"He won't let them." Sorgrad glanced at Tathrin this time. "I told you, he has no such ambitions. He won't want to conquer Lescar and hold it for himself."

Tathrin frowned. "Where's the gate?" The wall presented an unbroken barrier on this side.

"Facing the lake." Gren was walking alongside Tathrin. "Some of the small castles right by the border, they don't have any gates at all. Everyone goes in and out by ladder."

Tathrin suspected he was being teased. "Even the horses?"

"They're stabled outside in compounds tucked away in defensible places," Gren allowed. "But when they need to get wagons into the castle precinct, they just take down a section of wall and then build it back up again." He sounded perfectly serious. "Misaen blind me if I lie."

Sorgrad smiled at Tathrin's scepticism. "That way the wild men can't launch a strike on a permanent gate."

"Wild men?" Tathrin realised Vanam's obligatory lectures on Tormalin history had told him almost nothing about Solura.

"You know all those tales your grandmother told you about shadow-blue men stepping through rainbows from the Otherworld, armed with flints struck from moonbeams, lying in wait for lost travellers and naughty boys?"

"Yes," Tathrin said slowly.

Gren's smile broadened. "The Eldritch Kin would run screaming from the beast men who roam the wildlands across the Solfall."

If that was so, Tathrin found it all the more remarkable that cattle were left wandering the landscape.

A pair of riders appeared, coming from the castle. Tathrin guessed there were sentries in the slim turrets rising from the encircling wall.

As soon as the horsemen came within hailing distance, Sorgrad cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, "We're here to see the captain-general."

Raising a hand in acknowledgement, the riders wheeled away to carry this news back.

As the three of them walked around the outer wall, Tathrin heard the clash of blades within and the solid drumming of hooves amid the general bustle. When they reached the gate, he saw nothing akin to a village but rather an armed camp that wouldn't have disgraced a Lescari duke's standing guard. Over to one side a farrier was shoeing horses, the smithies flanking him echoing with the strike of sword-makers' hammers. In front of lean-to sheds lining the wall, men sat making chain mail, taking advantage of the sunlight.

In the open space, youths about Tathrin's own age practised sword-strokes against imaginary foes in repetitious drills. Older men circled in wary two and threes, broadswords ready to test each other to the edge of injury. Quarterstaffs clashed and pole-arms were swung with lethal grace.

The sentry said something Tathrin couldn't understand and Sorgrad answered in the same language.

"Don't they speak Tormalin here?" Tathrin quietly asked Gren.

"Why should they?" He looked puzzled. "This is Solura."

As they were allowed through the arched entrance, hooves pounded on the hard-packed earth. Tathrin saw a mounted warrior run a lance right through a figure made from sacking and straw. Its canvas head was a snarling mask of teeth and glaring eyes, sewn with rank strips of animal fur for hair and beard. At least, Tathrin hoped it was animal fur.