Steven Argent nodded. ‘Of course, my lord,’ he said.
With the patrol sitting motionless in the middle of the road, it occurred to Kethol that he would have objected to Lady Mondegreen accompanying them, if he’d thought anybody would have listened to him.
But she and her two maids were due in Mondegreen, to minister to the ailing baron and accompany him back to LaMut for the Baronial Council–or, at least, she was due to stay out of noble beds in LaMut for the time being–and Baron Morray had insisted that the patrol might as well swing north to guard her on her way home. Which made sense, perhaps. A company of cavalry was due within a day or two from Mondegreen, and this way they could be pressed into service around the city itself, relieving the Earl’s troops.
The trouble with what Pirojil called ‘a creeping mission’ was just that: it crept, and grew, and crept and grew, until it was increasingly unmanageable.
What had at first been a routine patrol which was to swing north and west and then back to LaMut had become an escort for those bound both for Mondegreen, as well as those to be escorted back from both Mondegreen and Morray. Sandwiched between the front and the back of the column were easily two dozen civilians: Father Finty and the young boy that he called his altar boy but whom Pirojil suspected to be his catamite; three of those rare tame Tsurani–former slaves who surrendered meekly after their masters were killed–who had been hired as tenant farmers in some Mondegreen franklins’ holdings; Lady Mondegreen and her claque of ugly maids. An assortment of servants, porters, and lackeys rounded out the company.
Not that Kethol would have minded the lady’s company, under other circumstances: she was companionable and more than a little pleasant on the eye. Some women seemed to bloom in their late teens and early twenties, but were clearly past their prime, jowls and breasts already beginning to sag, hair going limp, by their thirtieth year. Not so for Lady Mondegreen. Except for one white streak that only added character to her long, coal-black hair, she could have passed for her late teens. Perhaps that had something to do with her childlessness, or her relationship to the conDoin family–they tended to age well.
Those who didn’t die in battle, that is.
Her face was heart-shaped, with a strong if pointed chin that would have seemed almost masculine if it weren’t for the full, ripe lips above. And even in her riding outfit, with layers of clothes underneath the short jacket, her breasts seemed perky enough to make the palms of his hands itch. Long, aristocratic fingers, nails bitten short in a lower-class touch that Kethol found utterly charming, gripped the reins with practised ease, while her slim thighs, encased in tight leather riding breeches, gripped her saddle tightly when her huge red mare pranced nervously while they waited. Ladies usually rode in a coach for long journeys, and she likely would have preferred that, but the most direct route from LaMut to Mondegreen went through some rough country, and she had taken to horseback with good grace, riding like a man, astride her mare rather than sidesaddle.
Behind her, on what appeared to be a matched pair of remarkably spavined and mottled geldings, her two maids huddled nervously into their cloaks, clinging tightly to the cantle, clutching their reins without actually communicating to the horses. They seemed content to follow along behind the mounts in front, which Kethol decided was probably the reason the Horsemaster had picked out these two hayburners for this journey. Occasionally, those behind would have to flick the rumps of the two geldings, moving them along when they stopped to crop at the side of the road. Perhaps, thought Kethol, they might even have some sense of how to ride by the time they reached Mondegreen.
It was hard for Kethol to tell Elga from Olga–was Elga the one with the slight moustache and large potbelly, or the heavy moustache and slight potbelly? He thought it important to correctly identify which was which. Women as poorly favoured as those two needed any consideration available; somebody who partnered with Pirojil should understand that, and Kethol did.
‘Easy, girl, easy,’ Tom Garnett murmured to his big black mare. Kethol never understood why somebody would want an animal that edgy–‘high-spirited’, to use the accepted term–when perfectly decent, placid mounts were available. It seemed foolish. And Garnett’s mare appeared to be as hot-blooded as any horse Kethol had seen; the Captain had picked her for beauty and speed, he assumed, which was as stupid a choice as a mounted soldier could ever make. Now, a trained warhorse, that he could easily understand. He had seen more than one such trample infantry underfoot in battle, and while they were fractious, they were worth the effort; it gave the rider an extra weapon–four, if you counted each hoof separately, five if the horse was a biter. But a horse that was just plain nervous made no sense to Kethol under any circumstance. Well, at least the Captain had the good sense not to pick an uncut stallion as his mount, unlike that idiot they had served under in Bas-Tyra. That would be the last thing that anybody ever needed–a stallion going crazy because one of the maids was in her monthlies or a mare was in heat.
Tom Garnett had not liked the look of the stand of elms that guarded the far side of the clearing, and had sent a trio of horsemen ahead to scout for a possible ambush. The Tsurani were expected to be behind their lines for the winter, at least some twenty miles to the west of here, but Kethol had seen more than one corpse with a surprised expression on its face because things hadn’t turned out quite as had been expected.
The scouts were a sensible precaution. The Tsurani were no match in forestcraft for the likes of the Natalese Rangers or for Kethol himself, granted, but they were learning quickly. Too quickly.
That was the trouble with making war on people without eliminating them to the last man: you killed the weak, stupid, and unlucky, leaving the strong, smart, and fortunate to face later on. If it was up to Kethol, the war would end with the Tsurani pursued to whatever vile pit they’d emerged from, and slaughtered right down to the last infant–despite the obviously preposterous stories about how many of them there were on Kelewan–but, at least for now, that issue wasn’t even on the table.
All told, it was more than a good argument for Kethol, Pirojil and Durine getting their pay and getting themselves out of here, just as soon as this council of barons was over, and the ice had cleared in the south.
Warm winds and soft hands…
Soon, perhaps. Although…He sniffed the air. He couldn’t have said how he knew, but there was a storm coming. Not soon, not right away. The sky to the west was clear and blue-grey, only the puffiest and most distant of clouds scudding across its surface. But there was a storm coming, and of that Kethol was sure.
Kethol glanced over to where Baron Morray waited, motionless, on his equally motionless mottled bay gelding. He was a big man, who would’ve seemed more pretty than handsome, if it wasn’t for a certain calculated ruggedness in his plain-cut great-coat and the utilitarian dragonhide grip of the great sword that hung from his saddle in counterpoint to the short rapier that hung from his hip. His features were just too regular, too even, his clean-shaven face too smooth, his movements too fine and precise, when he moved at all.
His look at Kethol was filled with disdain.
‘As you can see, there was no reason for you to fear,’ he said, his voice pitched low enough to carry only as far as Lady Mondegreen and Captain Tom Garnett.
Kethol didn’t rise to the bait. What the Baron thought of him as he sat still while LaMutian regulars rode forward to scout was of no concern to him. He could more feel than hear Durine stirring behind him, while Pirojil’s face held that studiously neutral expression that spoke volumes about his opinion of people who criticized professional men in their work.
Tom Garnett came to their rescue, his nervous horse taking a few prancing steps that Garnett managed with just the bare twitch of his fingers on the reins, and a tightening of his knees against the saddle. ‘I’m afraid, I’m sorry to say, Baron Morray, that you misunderstand Kethol’s reluctance to ride ahead.’
‘Oh?’
Kethol shook his head minutely
. Tom Garnett, too, eh?
As usual, it was for some reason incorrectly understood by people who really didn’t know the three of them that he, Kethol, was the leader of the three. Durine was too large and too quiet, and Pirojil was grotesquely ugly; for some reason, that tended to make people think that Kethol was somehow in charge of the other two.
‘I was with the Swordmaster when he assigned the three of them to protect you, Baron Morray,’ Tom Garnett went on. ‘I don’t remember him telling them that they were in your service.’
Unspoken was the fact that the Swordmaster hadn’t put Tom Garnett’s company under Baron Morray’s command, either; a distinction that seemed to escape Baron Morray more than occasionally.
Which was not surprising. Nobility tended to be punctilious about such things around other nobility, but less so around commoners, no matter what their military rank. That was one thing Kethol liked about working in the Western Realm of the Kingdom; while soldiers everywhere understood that nobility was no substitute for judgment and experience, out here you found the armies refreshingly free of ambitious office-seekers. Had Tom Garnett been back in the Eastern Realm, angling for a squire’s rank or marriage to a minor noble’s daughter, he’d have been kissing Morray’s backside and asking politely which cheek he preferred smooched first.
The forest loomed ahead, all grey and stark. It would be spring, soon, bringing green life back to the woods. That was the nice thing about the woods: you could count on a forest to regenerate itself, both from the ravages of winter and those of invaders.
People were different.
Tom Garnett signalled for the column to proceed, and Kethol kicked his horse into a quick canter that put him ahead of Baron Morray, while Durine and Pirojil took up their places beside the Baron.
After years of working together, he could almost read the minds of his companions without the need for any word being spoken between them. Kethol would take the lead, not because he was any more expendable than the other two–any more than he was the leader of the three–but because he had been raised in forested land, and his early years had tuned his senses to the smells and sounds and the silences of the forest in a way that could only be learned from birth.
Off in the distance, a woodpecker hammered away, almost loud enough to hurt his ears. Apparently the clopping of horses’ hooves on the hard, frozen ground wasn’t threatening enough to cause the bird to go silent.
Raising his hand for attention, Kethol gave out a forester’s shout, and the hammering desisted for a moment, only to take up again. Good. The bird was sufficiently wild to go silent in the presence of men, but sufficiently used to men to resume his work quickly; and that helped to verify that they were still alone in the forest.
He smiled as he rode. You could develop quite a legendary ability for being able to hear things in the woods if only you let the woodland creatures help you.
A cold wind picked up from the west, bringing a chill and a distant scent of woodsmoke, probably from some nearby franklin’s croft. Birch mixed with the tang of pine, if Kethol was any judge of woodsmoke, which he was.
Morray kept up a steady stream of complaints about his franklins, which Kethol listened to with only half an ear, and then only because the Baron griped better than most grizzled cavalry sergeants.
By edict of the Earl, and probably the Duke himself, the borders of a franklin’s croft were inviolable by the barons–who were always looking to increase their own holdings, and settle bondsmen on any vacant land–but the actual house itself was, in law and in practice, the property of the Baron, and while franklins were forbidden from expanding their wattle-and-daub buildings, the barons were required to make necessary repairs to ‘their’ property.
If you believed Baron Morray’s complaints, not only had Tsurani troops put the red flower to every thatched roof in his barony last autumn, forcing the Baron now to spend sizeable sums for the hire of carpenters, daubers, and thatchers, but the mud and straw of LaMut invariably crumbled if a harsh thought was sent in its direction.
Arrangements would have to be made with Baron Mondegreen, the earldom’s Hereditary Bursar, for some loans of Crown money, no doubt, and Baron Mondegreen was as famous for being stingy with Crown money as he was for his own personal generosity, and it was likely that there was some other conflict between the two, given that Morray was serving as the Earl’s wartime Bursar, if only because he was more mobile and healthy than Mondegreen was. His position would enable–and require–Morray to pay soldiers, fealty-bound or mercenary, as well as provisioning troops and suchlike; it would not permit him to dip into the Crown purse for repairs to his own barony.
For Morray to be tupping the Baron’s wife while trying to get him to authorize a loan was probably not the wisest of ways to proceed, but Kethol had long since decided that wisdom and nobility seemed to go together only by coincidence.
The farming road they were using to make their way through the North Woods wound down into a draw, and then up and out through a shallow saddle between two low hills. The Earl’s Road cut across the top of the hills, but it wasn’t the fastest way to Morray, or from there to Mondegreen.
Lady Mondegreen left her maids behind as she rode up beside him. He nodded a greeting, and idly touched a hand to his forehead.
‘I want to thank you for escorting me,’ she said. Her voice was surprisingly low and pleasantly melodic, like a baritone wind-flute.
‘You are, of course, welcome, my lady,’ Kethol said.
And never mind that it was none of his idea, and he would have been perfectly comfortable leaving her to wait for the next company of Mondegreen cavalry to be cycled back to the barony. The larger the party, the better, sure–but that was only when you were counting fighting men, not when you added on baggage like noble women, no matter how pleasing to the eye they might be.
‘There’s something…frightening about a late-winter forest,’ she said. ‘When you look at the branches out of the corner of your eye, they sometimes look like skeletal fingers, reaching out for you. Add a few black robes, and you might think you had the Dark Brotherhood on every side.’
She rode almost knee-to-knee with him, letting the others lag behind.
‘I guess that is so.’ Kethol nodded. ‘But I’ve always liked the forest. All forests.’
‘Even when it looks so bare and desolate?’ she asked, lightly.
‘Looks can be deceiving, Lady.’ His knife came to his hand without him having to have thought about drawing it; Kethol reached up and cut a twig from an overhanging branch. A blunt thumbnail cut through a grey bud on the twig, revealing the green hidden inside. ‘No matter how dead it looks, there’s always life hidden here,’ he said.
Ahead, ashy corpses of burned trees told of where a raging fire had scarred the forest. Kethol remembered that specific fire, which had been started by fleeing Tsurani troops, and his jaw clenched at the memory.
‘The winter trees are merely…sleeping,’ he said. ‘But, in fewer days than you care to think, if you’ll probe with your fingers or a stick at the base of that burned oak, you’ll see sprouts reaching out to the sky.’
‘I see.’
‘You will.’ He smiled. ‘Ten years from now, you won’t be able to tell that there was a Tsurani bastard who lit a fire here like a dog puking over food he can’t steal in order to prevent somebody else from eating it.’
He gestured with his twig at the top of the hill that rose up beside them. ‘And right over there, maybe twenty or thirty years from now, there will be a nice little stand of oaks–short ones, granted, but real trees, and not merely saplings–drawing their sustenance from the ground below.’
She laughed, the sound of distant silver bells. Kethol normally didn’t like being laughed at, but her laughter was in no way insulting.
‘Why, Kethol,’ she said, as though more in shock than surprise, ‘one would think you were a poetic philosopher, not a soldier. Oaks, you say? Why oaks, rather than elms or pines or beeches? And how coul
d you know that they’ll grow there, and not somewhere else?’
‘I could–’ No. He caught himself, and forced a shrug. ‘I guess there is no way that I really could know,’ he said. ‘But I believe it will happen. Tell you what, Lady: come back in twenty years and think kindly of me if you find a stand of oaks here.’
‘I just might do that, Kethol,’ she said. ‘In fact, you may have my promise on it, and if you’re still serving the Earl, I’ll bet my silver real against your one copper that it will be elms or pines or something other than a stand of oaks, if you’d care to wager.’
He smiled. ‘Well, I doubt that I’ll still be in LaMut even come spring, but if I’m in the earldom twenty years from this day, I’ll knock on your castle gate, and ask to collect that bet.’
‘Or pay it.’ She raised an eyebrow, and smiled. ‘Unless you’d flee the earldom to avoid losing a copper?’
‘No, I wouldn’t do that, Lady.’
There was no point in mentioning that it was a safe bet, as the top of the hill was where he and Pirojil and Durine had buried the Tsurani Force Leader who had ordered the fire lit, scattering dozens of acorns over his bare chest before they had filled in the hole. The Tsurani’s eyes had gone wide as they started to shovel in the earth. But gagged with a leather thong that held his acorn-filled mouth half-open, he hadn’t said much beyond a few grunts, and hamstrung as he was at elbows, ankles, and thighs, he wasn’t going anywhere. They had not packed down the earth very hard after they buried him; he probably had at least a few minutes to think over the wisdom of having burned down that which he could not conquer.