The Given Sacrifice (7 page)

“Well, yes, my lady. Put that way, House Arminger have been extremely generous already.”

“So even if you didn’t know me personally, can you imagine me
not
being loyal to the Crown?”

“Ah . . . put that way, no, my lady. It’s sort of proverbial, in fact.”

They call you the Lady Regent’s Stiletto, actually. Or just Lady Death. Which is a
pun on d’Ath, but they mean it.

“And apart from the fact that I
want
to be loyal, there’s the additional fact that I’m disliked by the Church, and hated
by a lot of lay nobles whose relatives I’ve killed. I’ve been generously rewarded
with land and office, and I . . . and your parents . . . need the Crown’s ongoing
protection. Why give me more?”

“Well . . . it’s good lordship to reward service with an open hand,” Lioncel said,
beginning to sweat slightly. “It’s not supposed to be a
bribe
, after all. It’s
recognition
, it bestows honor, not just revenues.”

“True, and with Matilda . . . and Rudi . . . good lordship means a lot. They like
me personally too, oddly enough, and more understandably they like Delia . . . your
lady mother.”

“Ah . . .” Greatly daring, Lioncel cleared his throat. “My lady? Do
you
like the High King?”

He’d seen them working together, but his liege wasn’t a demonstrative person. He was
fairly sure that she regarded the High Queen as something like a younger sister, but
he couldn’t tell with Rudi Mackenzie. The ice-gray eyes considered him, and there
was a very slight nod of approval.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “And as you may have learned by now, I’m not given to easy
likings.”

He nodded. A couple of hours would be enough to learn
that
, much less a lifetime. It took him an instant more to realize that Tiphaine was making
a dry joke.

As if I were a grown man,
he thought with a mixture of pride and, oddly, a faint sadness.

“More importantly, we . . . respect each other. While he was living up here part-time—”

That had been part of the peace settlement after the Protector’s War; the Mackenzie
heir had come north, and Mathilda Arminger had spent time every year in Dun Juniper.

“—I helped teach him the sword, among other things. You’d be too young to recall most
of that, and mainly it was at court, not Ath.”

Lioncel nodded; he had vague memories of visits, no more. Tiphaine’s face went a little
distant, as if looking into time.

“He’s really extremely good. Mathilda always tried her hardest and she’s better than
average. But Rudi . . . he’s a natural, and he soaked up technique like a dry sponge
does water. The only man I ever sparred with as fast as I was. A bit faster, now;
he’s at his peak and I’m a little past mine. And even experts usually can’t strike
full force without losing either speed or precision. I can, but so can Rudi . . .
and he’s
extremely
strong.”

Another pause, and Lioncel nodded soberly. He’d had glimpses of the High King fighting
with his own hands during the tag end of the great battle, the savage scrimmage around
Martin Thurston’s banner, and it had been . . .

Frightening
, he decided. Even on that field of wholesale butchery, even if you’d been raised
among swordmasters.
Like some pagan God of war come to life.

“Most men remember grudges; Rudi never forgets anyone who does him a good turn,” Tiphaine
went on. “And he always returns loyalty. That was obvious even when I first met him,
when he was younger than Diomede is now.”

Her eyes met his. “You’ll start out with his favor, for my sake and your parents’,
but to keep it, you’ll have to
earn
it. Never forget that.”

“I won’t, my lady,” Lioncel said seriously.

“Good. Because when he has to be, the High King is . . . well, you’ve heard the saying:
Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent?
He won’t spare himself in the kingdom’s service, and he won’t spare
you
, either. Which brings us back to the grant. What’s the
realpolitik
reason? Remember that that usually coincides with good lordship, if you’re thinking
long-term. The higher your rank, the more careful you have to be about decisions,
because the easier it is to break things.”

He resisted an impulse to adjust the collar of his jerkin, suddenly grown a little
tight.

“Ah . . . well, that grant, it’s just idle land right now, not settled manors. No
annual revenues, no knights or sergeants owing service. The Crown will get the Royal
mesne tithes without having to pay anything upfront if
we
develop and settle it, full tithes since we’re tenants-in-chief. And we’ll have to
see to the roads and rails and patrols at our own expense, too, which means more trade
and the dues on that. What did they say in the old days . . . all gain, no pain?”

Tiphaine almost smiled, which startled him a little. She went on:

“Good points, but those are basically reasons to grant the land to
someone
, eventually, not necessarily to me and Rigobert right now. Speaking of whom, my lord
your father is getting an identical tract next to this”—she flicked a finger at the
parchment—“which means we’ll be neighbors out there, too. On the same terms, just
the names and map changed. So?”

“And because it’s important to be
seen
to reward good service? That’s a big part of a lord’s repute and good name, and that’s
part of what makes people eager to take service with you and do their best, and ready
to stick with you if things go badly.”

“Another point. I actually am grateful, too . . . not least because this means I can
reward some of
my
landless followers.”

She visibly took pity on him.

“Lady Sandra used to grill me like this, and she did it to Matti, too. The less obvious
part is about
your
generation of House Ath and House Stafford.”

Lioncel blinked a little, startled. Then he nodded slowly. It made sense that the
Crown would start thinking about him . . . though it was a bit . . .

Nerve-wracking. Exciting, though, too. Someday not too long from now
I’ll
be someone who does important things.

Tiphaine spoke, echoing his thoughts closely enough to startle:

“Rigobert and I will be out of the picture in a few decades, but you’ll be in your
prime when Crown Princess Órlaith is as old as you are now, and Diomede not long after.
This means the Crown thinks you and your brother will likely be assets for
her
. Plus . . . take a look at the tenures those manors are held under.”

He reread the document, frowning in concentration; this
did
involve questions of feudal law.

“Ummm. Parts of it . . . three manors out of twenty . . . are held in free and common
socage, not just by knight-service and tallages like the rest.”

That was unusual and meant they could be alienated, unlike ordinary land held in fief
by a tenant-in-chief, which descended undivided by primogeniture whether held in demesne
or subinfeudated. It didn’t escheat to the Crown in default of natural heirs, either.

A light dawned. “Those parts in socage are an inheritance for Heuradys and Yolande!”
he said delightedly.

His young sisters were a bit more than two and less than a year old respectively.
When he had thought of it at all he’d expected that they’d be dowered by charges on
the revenues of the baronies of Forest Grove and Ath, sunk in government bonds or
town properties or the like.

Actual manors in their own names would improve their prospects considerably, whether
they wanted to marry, go into the Church, or make some other choice. Right now the
“manors” were each just big chunks of rolling bunchgrass, but his sisters were very
young.

Wait a minute, if my lord my father got a grant like this, a hell of a lot goes to
me
, too,
he thought for the first time.

Which meant raising him as well as Diomede into the top rank of tenant-in-chief barons;
there were Counts with less, though not many. That was a distant enough prospect to
seem pretty theoretical, but it was agreeable enough too.

“Right,” Tiphaine said. “And—”

She stopped, cocking her head as if to listen. “That’s odd . . . did you hear that
owl? Sounded like a big Harfang.”

Lioncel looked at her blankly; he knew all the birds of prey well, from hawking and
hunting.

“Owl, my lady? It’s the middle of the afternoon!”

It was, and a bright one in early summer; the sunlight was a thick glowing bar across
the table, patterned where the Gothic stone tracery of the window cut it, and even
the corners of the room showed a bit of glitter on the metallic threads of the tapestries.

“That does make an owl unlikely, eh?” Tiphaine said. “And you’ve got youngster’s ears.”

He’d rarely seen her indecisive. For a moment her face went utterly still, and she
touched her right hand to the base of her throat; she wore an owl pendant there lately,
he remembered.

Then her eyes opened and she looked upward, crossing her arms and tapping her fingers
thoughtfully.

“So, logically . . .” she murmured. Then, oddly: “Thanks!”

The next floor was the Lady Regent’s . . . no, now the Queen Mother’s . . . chambers;
some sort of do was on for this afternoon, ostensibly a tea party, with the High Queen
and his own mother and a clutch of countesses settling privately what would be supposedly
debated
publicly later. Tiphaine didn’t raise her voice—she rarely did—but there was a crispness
to it when she spoke.

“Tell Sir Armand and Sir Rodard to turn out the
menie
, everyone on hand right now. Then arm me, half armor, no more.”

Putting on a suit of plate complete took about fifteen minutes with expert help, and
couldn’t be done alone at all.

“
Move
, boy!”

He did. Nobody stopped him to ask for explanations, just started doing what was needed.
And by the time he dashed back with the flexible plate cuirass of lames in his arms
and the other equipment slung around him Tiphaine had already tossed her houppelande
aside and hung her sword belt over the back of the chair. The steel would be a little
loose without the padded arming doublet beneath, but he latched it quickly and stood
by to hand her the articulated steel gauntlets, sallet helm and the four-foot knight’s
shield shaped like an elongated teardrop with its arms of sable, a Delta Or upon a
V Argent.

“What are we going to do, my lady?” he asked, proud that his voice was steady.

“Head straight in, yelling alarm and murder,” she said absently.

“That will . . . look strange, my lady.”

She shrugged to settle the harness, and put both hands up on the sallet’s low dome
to press the broad-tailed flared helmet with her palms so that its circuit of internal
pads were snug in exactly the right place before she buckled the chin-cup. The visor
was down. Without a bevoir attached to the breastplate her mouth and chin showed beneath,
and the long narrow blankness of the vision slit in the smooth curve gave a look of
merciless detachment and power to her glance.

The armor the
menie
of Ath wore wasn’t black like the harness of the Protector’s Guard, because that
color sucked up heat in the sun and sometimes stood out against a background. It wasn’t
white—bare and brightly polished—like that of many baronial fighting-tails, either,
because that was even more conspicuous.

Instead it was a pale neutral gray like her eyes, the finish very slightly roughened
so that it wouldn’t glint, though in fact you rarely tried to hide in plate. Lady
Death was meticulous about details.

Mom is that way too,
Lioncel realized suddenly.
Only she does it about other things.

“It’ll look very strange, my lady,” he added, and didn’t go on to say:
Charging into the Queen Mother’s quarters with drawn sword and armed men at your back.

“Lioncel, have you heard the saying that you can do wonders if you don’t care about
who gets the credit?”

“Yes, my lady. My lord my father is fond of that one.”

She smiled, a chill stark expression. “Well, you can do even more if you don’t give
a damn how crazy it makes you look.”

As she spoke he went down on one knee and buckled the sword belt around her waist
while she pulled on her gauntlets; that took three extra holes on the belt in armor,
and he tucked the tongue neatly beneath. Then she drew the sword, a yard of tapering
watermarked cross-hilted steel. That slid the honed edge within an inch of his ear,
but it didn’t occur to him to flinch. Tiphaine d’Ath’s sword went exactly where she
wanted it to go, neither more nor less. He’d seen her flick flies out of the air,
neatly bisected with a twitch of the wrist, something he
still
couldn’t do in practice.

With the curved top of her shield she knocked the visor of her sallet up. His own
vision disappeared for an instant as he pulled his light mail shirt over his head;
when he settled the familiar weight and belted on his own sword the two household
knights were there.

“Lioncel, get your helmet on,” she said. “And stay behind the shields when we move.”

“What’s up, my lady?” Rodard said as he strode briskly in, blinking at the naked sword,
his brother Armand at his heels. “I have six men-at-arms including us—”

All knights were men-at-arms, full-armored and capable of fighting as lancers on horseback
among their other skills. Not all men-at-arms were knights, though most hoped to be
some day.

“—and as many more of spearmen and crossbowmen. I could recall men from other duties
or rustle up some more from the Lord Chancellor’s household—”

The Georges brothers had been given the accolade last year; Rodard had been wounded
at the Horse Heaven Hills and was just back on full service. Both young household
knights were armored cap-a-pie with their shields slung point-down across their backs;
they’d been on duty. Usually there weren’t more men than that up here in the Silver
Tower; most of the
menie
of Ath was still at the front, or at work on half a dozen assignments.