Phillippa was fascinated by the whole scene. Her mother was . . . odd. She’d tossed her hair like a young girl – it was down because she’d been working. And the old man was old but he had something about him, something difficult to define. Something that the boys in Lorica did not have.
‘I’ll fetch you a rag, John, but please stay. We’re all women here.’ Her mother’s voice sounded odd, too.
‘Helewise, don’t tell me I’ve stumbled on the castle of maidens. I’m not nearly young enough to enjoy it.’ The knight laughed.
Old Gwyn cackled. ‘Hardly a maiden here, old man,’ she said.
Phillippa was appalled to see the nun giggle. Nuns, in her experience, were strict, dour women who didn’t laugh. Especially not at jokes that involved sex, even in the most harmless way.
The nun finished her laugh and she and the knight met each other’s eyes. ‘I can handle myself on the road,’ she said.
‘By Saint George, you are the Bonne Soeur Sauvage!’ he said. ‘Sister Amicia?’
She curtsied. ‘The very same.’
He laughed. ‘Sweet wounds of the risen Christ, Helewise, you don’t need me here. This good sister has probably slain more boggles than all the knights west of the Albin.’ He smiled at the nun. ‘I have a package for you, back in the Donjon. I’ll send it on to you.’
‘A package?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Arrived a month ago, by messenger from the east. Sent from the Inn of Dorling.’
She flushed.
The knight went on, ‘At any rate, if you plan to ride my roads, I’d appreciate knowing what you find. The Wild is still out there – closer, I would say, than they were a year ago. These ladies are lucky to have you, ma soeur. They won’t need me!’
Phillippa wanted her dinner, so she and Jenny Rose swarmed down the ladder to the ground and they missed Mistress Helewise saying, very softly, ‘Some of us need you, ser knight.’
Ticondaga Castle on the Wall – The Earl of the Westwall and Ghause Muriens
She looked into her silver mirror for far too long.
And sighed.
Her blond hair remained as nearly white-gold as artifice and phantasm could make it, and it fell down her back to the rise of the swell in her buttocks. Her breasts were full and firm, the envy of women half her age.
What do I care? she thought. I am so much more than the sum of my breasts and the length of my legs. I am me!
But she cared deeply. She wanted to be all that she was and continue to beguile any man she wanted.
She picked up a fur-lined robe. The morning chill was rising, the fires weren’t lit, and a rash of goose-bumps was not going to enhance her beauty. Nor was a bad cough.
She pulled the robe around her and, on impulse, cupped her breasts with her hands, and heard the movement—
‘Not now, you fool!’ she hissed at her husband, the Earl, but he had the neck of her gown in his hand, lifted her effortlessly and threw her on the bed, pinned her to it with a strong hand and shrugged out of his own heavy robe.
‘I’m – Stop!’ she said, as his weight came atop her.
He put his mouth over hers.
She writhed under him. ‘You oaf! I’m rising! Can’t you knock?’
‘If you will preen that marvellous body of yours in front of an open door, you get what you deserve,’ he breathed into her ear.
His feet were cold – he never would wear slippers. But his insistence had its own charm – his strong hands had many skills – and when his knee went to part hers, she locked his arm and rolled him over like a wrestler, and sat on his chest – leaned back and caught his prick with her hand, and he groaned.
She flicked him with a practised nail and impaled herself, and his eyes widened to have their roles so quickly reversed. He took her breasts in his hands. ‘Happy birthday, you faithless bitch,’ he growled into her throat.
‘What did you get me, you great fool?’ she asked as he sought to throw her over and get atop her again. She caught an arm and kept him pinned, and threw her hair over his face so he couldn’t see. She was laughing – he was laughing, but he got one of his iron-hard arms across her back, ran it down and down, and she moaned—
—and then he was atop her, grinning like the beast he was. But he kept his hand under her, and raised her – with one hand – cradling her on his hand as they rutted so that all the muscles in her back were stretched. She locked her legs over the back of his knees and bit his shoulder as hard as she could, her teeth drawing blood. His nails bit into her back. She wriggled, clenched her knees on his sides, and moved her head – he leaned forward to fasten his mouth on her left breast—
They fell off the bed slowly, the bed-hangings holding their weight for three long heartbeats and then tearing – she caught the floor under her right foot and then she was atop him and his back was to the cold stone floor, his head was lifted to hers. He tasted the blood on her lips, and she tasted her own salt—
There was a moment when they merged with the Wild. She flooded him with potentia. His back arched so hard that she almost came off him.
And then they were done.
‘Christ and his saints, bitch, you nigh broke my head,’ he said.
She licked his lips. ‘I own you,’ she said. ‘I rode you like a horse. A big warhorse.’
He smacked her naked arse hard enough to draw a cry. ‘I came to tell you there’s a letter,’ he said. ‘But there you were cupping your boobies with your hands and you looked good enough to eat.’ He passed a hand over his left shoulder and it came away bloody, and he laughed. ‘Jesus wept, it’s me who got ate. How to you do it, you witch? Yer as old as a crone, and I want no other.’
‘Fifty today,’ she said. She ran her hand over his shoulder and put a tiny working into it and it closed.
He stood and ran a hand up her leg from the bottom and she purred.
‘The letter will wait,’ he growled, pushing her backwards.
‘Aren’t you too old for this sort of thing?’ she asked.
An hour later, they sat on heavy chairs in the castle’s Great Hall. She wore a heavy gown of blue wool as fine as velvet, spangled with gold stars embroidered by her ladies, and he wore the blue and yellow livery of the Muriens in Morean satin. They were of an age, and he had more grey than dark brown in his hair and beard. He looked like a rapacious eagle, and she looked like the eagle’s mate. Their eyes met often, and their hands touched constantly, two people who’d just made love and couldn’t quite let go.
Ticondaga was one of the great castles of Alba – the key to the Wall, the strongest rock against the Wild. Rising four hundred feet above the forest floor, commanding a bay on the lake with access to the Great River, Ticondaga was reckoned impregnable by Man and Wild alike. But the cold granite walls sixty feet high, the massive gatehouse, the three concentric rings of walls and the gargantuan donjon, the lower floor carved from the living rock of the mountain, while militarily magnificent, made the living uncomfortable most of the year and downright harsh in mid-winter. Late summer was merely cold in the morning. Everyone wore wool at Ticondaga.
The Great Hall seated the entire garrison for meals – sixty knights and four hundred soldiers and their wives, paramours, lemans, or whores. It was the Earl’s view that seeing his men eat three times a day kept them loyal, and thirty-five years in the saddle of the greatest and most dangerous demesne in Alba hadn’t changed his views. So breakfast was served to almost five hundred people – porridge, tea, scones and clotted cream and preserves and cider. When he had noble visitors, he’d serve fancier foods, but the Earl of the Westwall liked plain food in massive quantities, and he was famous as far away as Galle as a generous lord. His people ate well.
Once there had been six great castles on the Wall, and six lords in the north. Before that, they had been legates of a distant emperor. In the distant past, when the stones of the hall’s foundations were new, the Empress herself had sat in this hall.
Times had changed, and the Earl’
s ancestors had sought dominion over the north, on both sides of the Wall. More, as the Wall mouldered it lost its value as either fortification or boundary. In the last hundred years, the Muriens had built their lordship at the expense of the Southern Huran across the river and the lordships to the east and west who were nominally allies and near relations.
The Earl himself had completed the job, vanquishing the Orleys in a series of pitched battles in the woods and a climactic siege of Saint Jean, once the mightiest fortress on the Wall. Young and full of vigour, sorcerously aided by his wife, the Earl had toppled the Orleys, taken Saint Jean and razed it; throwing the bodies of each and every Orley, their children, their women, and their servants into the blaze. It was a victory so total that the old King hadn’t bothered to declare him forfeit, and the young King was his wife’s brother and not inclined to make trouble. The old King had fought the great fight at Chevins with no help from the Muriens and died soon after, and the young King had never attempted to make his writ felt in the north.
For a while, there were the usual rumours that an Orley heir survived. Murien laughed at them in scorn and ploughed their monuments and their peasants alike under the rocky soil. As his sons grew to manhood, no one challenged his primacy as Lord of the North.
Lady Ghause stretched like a cat, showing a fine length of stocking that made her mate growl again. She ate her way through a small pile of scones and licked raspberry jam off the spoon with a curl of her tongue and then ran her eyes over him.
‘Stop it, witch! I’ve work to do.’ He laughed.
‘There was talk of a letter?’ she asked. ‘Work? The Cock of the North? You do no work.’
‘The Huran have a feud dividing their clans – they’re close to war. The Sossag grow stronger and the Huran weaker, and that’s my business. I’ve a rumour of Moreans among—’
Ghause took another scone. ‘The Moreans always have men among the Huran. It stands to reason – they share that part of the Wall.’
‘Woman, if you eat that many scones every morning you’ll have thighs like the pillars of this hall.’ He laughed at her appetite.
‘Churl, if you were as fit as I the scullery maids would more willingly jump into your bed,’ she said.
‘The way their swains jump into yours, bitch?’ the Earl spat.
‘I find that older trees have harder wood,’ she said, and he almost choked on his cider. He shook his head. ‘Why do I love you, you selfish, vain sorceress?’
She shrugged. ‘I think you like a challenge,’ she said, and motioned to her third son, Aneas, who waited below the dais for her orders. He was her favourite son – absolutely obedient, charming, a fine jouster, a decent bard.
‘Yes, Mother?’
‘It’s time we fostered this lanky by-blow,’ the Earl said. ‘By the virgin, he’s too old to wait on our table. Let’s send him to Towbray.’
‘You said all Towbray’s sons were lechers and sodomites,’ his wife said sweetly.
The Earl poured a dollop of Wild honey onto a piece of heavily buttered new bread and ate it messily, getting the honey on his beard and hands. She could smell the latent ops in the honey. ‘I did. That Michael – what a little hellion! Ran away! If my son did that—’ He shrugged. Paused.
Her lovely violet eyes narrowed. ‘Your son did do that, you fool,’ she said cattishly.
He frowned. ‘You tax me too hard, madam.’ He half rose. ‘Was he mine? Are any of them mine?’ he muttered.
She leaned back. Her eyes held his pinned. ‘The fourth one has a little of your look – and your piggish tastes.’ She shrugged.
He laughed again and slapped his thigh. ‘By God, madame.’
‘By the Enemy, you mean.’
‘I’ll have no part in all your blasphemy,’ he said. ‘Here’s the messenger, and the letter. It’s from Gavin.’
A message from her second son was reason for interest. She pulled her robe closed, leaving just enough flesh on display to keep the Earl – and every other man in the first three rows of tables – looking, and then she crooked a finger at the stranger, a handsome man, middle-aged, in a plain red jupon and high black boots.
‘What news of the southlands, messire?’ asked the Earl. He was interested to see his son had access to a royal messenger. The boy must be in high favour.
The man bowed. ‘I was fifteen days through the mountains, my lord Earl. Have you had word of the fighting in the south?’
The Earl nodded. ‘Ten days ago I had another messenger, but well ere that the Abbess sent me from Lissen Carrak. I know that a strong force of Sossag passed the Wall well to the west – beyond my patrols, I fear.’
‘Ser Gavin sent me from the Ings of the Dorring to tell you that news, and to tell you that the sorcerer Thorn was driven from the field at Lissen Carrak. Ser Gavin thinks he retreated to the north. Several of his friends – who have the fey – felt the same.’
‘Thorn?’ asked the Earl.
‘Shush, naming calls,’ said the lady, suddenly all business. ‘I’ll look for him later. He was once Richard Plangere. Back when we were billing and cooing.’
Her husband raised an eyebrow – they’d gone well beyond billing and cooing in their first fifteen minutes alone together, some twenty years before.
‘It’s an expression,’ she said.
The messenger looked as if he was trying to vanish into the flagstone floor.
‘How is my son?’ she asked.
‘He does nobly!’ said the messenger. ‘He won much renown in the battle. He was wounded in the great battle on the fells, and then again fighting boggles beneath the castle.’
‘Ah? And how was he wounded?’ she asked mildly.
‘He took a great wound, but the Magister Harmodius—’
‘The faker. Posturer. Yes?’ the lady’s eyes seemed to glow.
‘Lord Harmodius healed him – although there were, er, complications.’ The messenger held out a scroll tube.
‘Old charlatan. And how fares my dear friend the Abbess of Lissen?’ she asked. She leaned forward and her gown fell open a little.
The messenger licked his lips and raised his eyes to hers. ‘She died. In the fighting.’
‘Sophia is dead?’ Ghause asked. She leaned back, and looked at the ceiling, thirty feet above her. ‘Well, well. That is news.’
The Earl took the scroll. He opened it, read a few words, and slammed the bone scroll tube into the arm of his throne so hard it smashed. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he swore. ‘Gabriel is alive.’
Ghause froze. All the colour left her face, and her hand flew to her throat. ‘What?’ she asked.
He picked up the scroll. His face was as red as beet.
Pater and Mater,
I must start by saying that Gabriel is alive, and I am with him.
If you have heard of the mercenary captain they call ‘The Red Knight’, well, that is Gabriel. He won the fight men now call ‘The Fells’, and he held Lissen Carrak against the devil himself. I was there.
I have left the court. It is not for me – or perhaps I liked it too well. And I have plighted my troth to the Lady Mary – yes, Pater, that’s Count Gareth’s daughter. I have joined Gabriel. Our company – we have a goodly company, more than one hundred lances—
The Earl looked up. ‘Gabriel? My lackwit minstrel son is leading a company of lances? What sorcery is this? That ponce couldn’t have led a company of maids to pick flowers.’
He met her icy stare. ‘You always were a fool,’ she said.
—into Morea, to aid the Emperor in his warres. I have entrusted this messenger with certain news concerning the great Enemy we vanquished at Lissen, because we are sore affeard that said Magister Traitor may attempt to recoup his fortunes north of the wall.
Gabriel has entrusted me with certain informationes which I now believe, but I will hold my peace until I have heard from Mater and from you as to how we came to be a family divided so deep. For the nonce, I ride by my brother, and we have good cheer together – better
cheer, I think, than ever we had as children.
‘What has Gabriel told him?’ Ghause asked the air. But she could see it in her mind’s eye – Gabriel, alive, had faced a power of the Wild and defeated him.
A wild joy roared in her breast like a fire just catching hold in twigs and birch bark and carefully split kindling. Gabriel – her Gabriel, her living revenge on the world of men – was alive. No matter that he no doubt hated her. She smiled.
Men quailed to see it.
Later, in the privacy of her own tower, she worked a small phantasm. She had known Richard Plangere well. She found him easily, cast a working to trace him if he moved, and noted that he was less than three hundred leagues away – and that he was orders of magnitude more powerful than he’d been when she had last deceived him.
She flexed her fingers. ‘Oh, so am I, lover,’ she said, delighted. Everything delighted her, because Gabriel was alive.
She wanted a look at this Lady Mary. She hadn’t seen the girl since she was eleven or twelve – when she’d been gawky, hipless, and no kind of a wife for Gavin, who was moody and difficult and given to rages. Not her favourite son, although the easiest to manipulate.
This working was complex, because rumour said that the King’s new whore of a wife was a sorceress, and Ghause had no intention of being caught snooping; she spent the day laying her snares, reading from grimoires with her tongue clenched between her teeth, and writing in silver on her floor.
She heard the Earl’s cavalcade return, but she was almost done and she wasn’t going to stop for him. She lit a faery light, and then another, and heard their little voices scream in the aether. She hated faeries and their soulless leeching on the world of men, and it pleased her to use their little bodies for light.
By the light of their agony, she finished her structure. She reached into her maze – an aethereal palace of brambles and apple trees and roses turned a little bad – and summoned the rich green power that smelled of loam and rain and semen, and pushed that power through her structures, and saw.