He may have saved Duncan’s life, but if he missed another wedding dance with Alyss, his own wouldn’t be worth living.
6
THE GROUP ASSEMBLED IN BARON ARALD’S OFFICE LOOKED UP AS Halt entered the room.
“So, did our Genovesan friend tell you anything?” Duncan asked.
Halt had been assigned the task of interrogating the surviving assassin. Will, for all his experience and prowess in battle, was still somewhat hampered in such matters by his young face and relatively ingenuous looks. Halt’s face, on the other hand, was anything but young and definitely not ingenuous. Halt had the ability to make a threat and appear as if he had every intention of carrying it through.
Possibly because he usually did.
He nodded now in answer to the King’s question. “Not at first. Genovesans are notoriously closemouthed and they’re not afraid of death threats. He fully expects to be executed. He accepted that risk when he took the job.”
“So how did you persuade him to talk?” Erak asked.
“Genovesans aren’t afraid to die. But they are afraid of the sort of suffering their own weapons can cause,” Halt told him. He nodded to Horace, sitting on the edge of the Baron’s desk, close to Cassandra. “I took a leaf out of your book, Horace. I threatened to infect him with one of his own poisoned arrows. He went a little green about the gills when I told him that the only man in Araluen who could produce an antidote lived eight days away in the north. Then he seemed quite willing to talk.”
“He really believed you’d do it?” Cassandra asked, and Halt turned to her.
“I have a very honest face,” he said with great dignity.
“Of course you do,” Cassandra replied.
Before Halt could continue, Will interposed a question that had been bothering him. “I’ve been wondering,” he said, “why did they wait till the bridal dance? After all, I noticed the gallery when I was standing at the front of the dais, making my speech. That means the front of the dais could be seen from the gallery. So they could have chosen to shoot when the King was making his speech.”
“Two reasons,” Halt told him, with a faint smile. “The target was exposed for a much longer period during the dance. And the target wasn’t the King. It was Cassandra.”
That caused a definite stir in the people listening to him. Duncan was the first to recover.
“Cassandra? Cassandra was the target? Who wanted her killed?”
“Apparently, a man named Iqbal,” Halt said. He looked at Selethen, who was frowning at the name.
“Iqbal?” he said. “He’s Yusal’s brother.” He turned to the rest of the group. Some of them weren’t familiar with the name. “Yusal was the Tualaghi chief who organized Erak’s kidnapping some years ago,” he explained. “But Iqbal is being held prisoner in the mountain village of Maashava. He was one of the men sentenced to hard labor there.”
Halt shook his head. “Apparently not anymore. It seems Iqbal made his escape from Maashava some months ago. The Maashavites haven’t got around to telling you about it yet.”
Selethen’s brow darkened and he muttered a soft curse. “That’s typical of them!” he said bitterly.“They’re so blasted insular up there in their mountains! They’ve always distrusted the central government. I suppose they were trying to find a way to make themselves look blameless for letting him escape.”
“Of course,” Halt replied, “they may have sent word by now. You have been out of the country for several weeks.” He looked at Cassandra. “This Iqbal fellow is quite angry with you, Cassandra,” he said. “After all, you did foil all their plans and reduce his brother to a drooling wreck. He wanted revenge. He hired the Genovesans to kill you. And he suggested that they should use Arridi crossbows when they did it. The plan was to leave one behind.”
“Which would have caused a lot of distrust between our two countries,” Selethen said thoughtfully.
“Just so,” Halt agreed. “I gather that our friend Iqbal would enjoy seeing bad blood between Araluen and Arrida. It would distract you from the task of hunting him down. And on top of that, killing Cassandra would leave Duncan with no heir to the throne. That could well destabilize the succession, and the country.”
“And the plan would have worked if Will hadn’t been so alert,” Horace said. He looked at his friend gratefully. “How many times have I said ‘thank you’ since we’ve known each other?”
Will shrugged, embarrassed by the sudden attention of everyone in the room. “Friends don’t have to thank each other,” he said. But Cassandra rose and moved toward him.
“We don’t have to,” she said, “but we want to.” She placed both hands on his shoulders and leaned toward him, then paused and smiled at Alyss.
“With your permission, of course?”
Alyss smiled.“Of course,” she said, as the Princess kissed Will on both cheeks. She reflected that there had been a time when she would have torn Cassandra’s hair out by the roots for such an action. We’ve come a long way, she thought.
Duncan rose and approached Will, reaching out to shake his hand. “My gratitude as well, Will. I have only one daughter and I’m rather fond of having her around. Particularly now that she has Horace to keep her in order.”
Cassandra responded with a most unroyal poking out of her tongue. Duncan chose to ignore it.
“I wonder,” he continued, “if there will ever come a time when I don’t have to thank my Rangers for their service to me and my family.”
“I doubt it, My Lord,” Halt said, and there was a murmur of laughter in the room. They could laugh now, Halt thought, but if Will hadn’t been so alert, the atmosphere in the room would be vastly different. He caught the eye of his young protégé and mouthed the words Well done. He saw Will’s face flush with pleasure. Two unspoken words of praise from Halt meant more to Will than any amount of gratitude from the King.
“Rest assured, Your Majesty, that Iqbal won’t be enjoying his freedom for too much longer,” Selethen said. “As soon as I’m back in Arrida, I’ll make it a priority to hunt him down.”
“I’d appreciate that, Selethen,” Duncan told him. “I might even send a Ranger or two along to help you find him. I can’t say I like the idea of someone trying to kill my daughter and getting away with it.”
The two men exchanged a long glance. Then Selethen nodded. Watching them, it occurred to Cassandra that she wouldn’t care to be in Iqbal’s shoes over the next few months.
The meeting broke up soon after and they all headed back to their quarters. As they approached the stairway, Alyss took Will’s hand and led him into an unoccupied office to one side. He smiled at her, uncertain what she had in mind.
“Alyss . . . ,” he began, but she inclined her head in warning and laid a forefinger on his lips to silence him.
“This makes two weddings where our dance has been interrupted,” she said. “At Halt’s you had to go racing off, and at this one, you nearly didn’t make it back in time.”
She paused to let the message sink in, then finished:
“You’d better be there at ours.”
THE HIBERNIAN
Author’s note: I’m often asked who was Halt’s mentor, and how and where he served his apprenticeship. This story provides the answer to those questions. It’s set in the time shortly after Halt’s departure from his family home at Dun Kilty, in Hibernia.
1
CROWLEY RODE WITH A HEAVY HEART, IGNORING THE BRIGHT sunshine and the singing of birds in the trees. It was a beautiful summer day in Gorlan Fief, but the young Ranger had no eyes for the rich sweep of green fields and wildflowers that surrounded him.
His horse seemed to sense his malaise. He clopped heavily, head drooping, moving with increasing lethargy as he felt no urge from his rider to maintain the pace at which they had started.
For as long as he could remember, Crowley had harbored one aim in life: to become a King’s Ranger. It was the pinnacle of achievement as far as he was concerned. As a young teenager, he
could see no better way to serve his King and country, no more honorable career for an adventurous and loyal citizen.
Others might, and did, strive to become knights and warriors. But Crowley had always believed that the Ranger Corps was the real center of power and influence in the Kingdom—the place where an ambitious, intelligent and, above all, skilled young man could really make his mark and play an important part in the path of history.
His mentor, Pritchard, had reinforced that dedicated sense of purpose throughout Crowley’s training. As the young boy had developed his ability in tracking, unseen movement and archery, Pritchard had been at pains to remind him of the real reason why he should perfect such skills.
“We don’t do it for ourselves. We don’t do it for the glory. We train and we practice against the day when the King and the people of Araluen have need of these skills. As Rangers, it’s our duty to be able to provide them.”
Pritchard was gone now, of course. He had been driven out of the Kingdom on a trumped-up charge of treason three years prior—shortly after he had presented Crowley with his silver oakleaf, the symbol of a graduate Ranger. Crowley had been assigned to a small, remote fief on the northwest coast and word had reached him of Pritchard’s fate months after his mentor had been forced to flee. Rumor had it that he had gone across the western sea to Hibernia.
Crowley found himself isolated in more ways than one. Hogarth Fief was remote and difficult to reach, and news of what was happening in the country as a whole was intermittent at best. But he felt emotionally isolated as well. The Ranger Corps as he knew it, and as Pritchard had known it, had been subverted and weakened until it had become little more than a dissolute social club for sons of noble families—usually those too lazy or without the skill to become knights or warriors. Whereas once Rangers had selected apprentices to join the Corps, and submitted them to five years’ rigorous training, these days, a new Ranger simply had to buy a commission to be granted the silver oakleaf.
Many of the older Rangers had quit in disgust. Some of the more vocal, like Pritchard, were forced to leave the Kingdom. Although the Corps had a theoretical strength of fifty members, training and appointment of new Rangers under the old system had fallen off in recent years. There had barely been thirty properly trained Rangers when Crowley received his appointment. He estimated that there might be ten or twelve of these still serving, but they were scattered in remote parts of the Kingdom.
The key to the problem was King Oswald. He had been a good king in his younger days, energetic and fair-minded. But now he was old and weak and his mind was going. He had accepted a group of ambitious barons as his ruling council. Initially, they were appointed to take care of the day-to-day matters of ruling the Kingdom and to relieve him of the repetitive, annoying minutiae that came across his desk every day. But as time went on, they encroached more and more into the important decisions, until Oswald was little more than a rubber stamp to their rulings.
Prince Duncan might have prevented this by taking over as Regent in the King’s place. But the council, led by a charismatic and scheming baron named Morgarath, had undermined his position with his father. Oswald became convinced that his son was unready to rule. His council told him that the Prince was too impulsive and too inexperienced for the job. Believing them, Oswald had posted his son to a fief in the far northeast of the Kingdom. There, isolated from the seat of power in Castle Araluen, and without any organized support, Duncan languished, frustrated and ineffectual, unable to resist the changes that were being imposed on what would be his Kingdom.
All in all, thought Crowley, it wasn’t the life he had imagined himself leading. He leaned forward and patted Cropper’s neck.
“Still, it could be worse,” he said, trying to raise his own spirits. Cropper’s ears pricked up and his head rose as he heard the more positive note in his master’s voice—a note that had been missing for some days now.
Good to see you’re feeling better.
“Well, no sense in moping,” Crowley said, forcing the dark thoughts aside.
Taken you three days to figure that out, has it?
“Give credit where it’s due. I may have been moping for three days, but I’m over it now.”
You say.
In spite of his recent gloom, Crowley found himself smiling. He wondered if he’d ever get the last word with his horse.
Probably not.
“I didn’t say that out loud!” he said, a little surprised. Cropper shook his mane.
You don’t have to.
They crested a rise and Crowley could see a building beside the road, a few hundred meters ahead. It was small, but larger than the general run of farmhouses in the area. And there was a signboard swinging from a beam in front of the porticoed doorway.
“That’s what we need!” he said brightly. “An inn. And it’s just about lunchtime.”
I just hope there are apples.
“You always hope there are apples.”
As they rode closer, a slight frown returned to Crowley’s forehead. He could hear raised voices from the inn, and loud laughter. Usually, that sort of sound indicated that someone had taken too much liquor. And these days, with no firm hand ruling the Kingdom, drunkenness was all too often accompanied by meaningless violence. Unconsciously, he loosened the big saxe knife in its scabbard.
Another burst of raucous laughter greeted him as he swung down from the saddle and led Cropper into the fenced-off yard beside the inn. There were feed bins and water troughs set along the fence at intervals. He found a full feed bin and left Cropper before it, filling a bucket with fresh water from a pump and pouring it into the water trough. He glanced around. There were four other horses in the yard. Three of them were long-legged cavalry mounts and their saddle cloths and tack were military pattern. The fourth was a nondescript gray, tethered a little apart from the others. All four of them turned their heads curiously to view the newcomer, then, seeing nothing to hold their interest, they returned to the feed bins in front of them, their jaws moving in that strange rolling, grinding motion that horses use. Crowley made a hand signal to Cropper.
“Wait here.”
What about my apple?
Sighing, Crowley reached into his jacket packet and produced an apple, holding it out on his flattened palm for the horse. Cropper took it gently and crunched happily, his eyes closing as the juices spurted inside his mouth. Crowley loosened the saddle girth a few notches and turned toward the inn.
After the bright sunshine outside, it took his eyes some time to adjust to the dimness inside. But as he opened the door and entered, a loud male voice stopped in midsentence and, for a moment, silence hung over the room.
“And what do we have here?” the male voice began again. Now that Crowley’s eyes had adjusted, he could see it belonged to a beefy soldier lounging against the bar. He wore a surcoat and mail shirt and was armed with a sword and a heavy-bladed dagger.
He had two companions, similarly dressed and equipped. One sat at a long bench by a table close to the bar. He was turned around away from the table, facing the bar. The other was sitting on the table itself, his feet perched on the bench. Behind the bar, Crowley saw the innkeeper, a smallish man in his fifties, and a young serving girl who looked to be around twenty. Both of them cast nervous glances at the three soldiers.
As the speaker turned slightly to face Crowley, the Ranger made out the blazon on his surcoat—a sword with a lightning bolt for a blade. They were members of Morgarath’s Gorlan garrison, he thought.
He glanced around the room. There was one other occupant. A man sat at the rear of the room, dressed in a dark green cloak. His hair and beard were black and he was spooning food from a bowl on the table in front of him, seemingly ignoring the other customers.
“I said, what do we have here?” the man at the bar repeated. There was an unpleasant edge in his voice now. As Crowley moved closer, he could see that the man was flushed and his heavy-jowled face was damp with perspiration. Too much to drin
k, he thought. The man’s two companions chuckled quietly as he pushed himself up from the bar and stood straight, glaring at Crowley. There was an air of expectation about them. Crowley stopped about two meters away from him. The man was taller than Crowley, and heavily built. He was carrying a lot of fat, Crowley thought.
He spoke evenly in return, allowing no sense of the wariness he felt to enter his voice.
“Name of Crowley,” he said. “King’s Ranger to Hogarth Fief.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sensed a movement at the back of the room. The solitary diner had raised his head at the words King’s Ranger.
The heavily built soldier reacted to it as well. His eyes widened in mock admiration. “A King’s Ranger!” he said. “Oooooooooooh my! How very impressive!”
More laughter from his friends. He turned his head and grinned at them, then turned back to Crowley, resuming the expression of fake admiration.
“So tell me, King’s Ranger, what are you doing here in Gorlan Fief? Don’t you have important things to do at Ranger headquarters—like getting drunk and gambling?”
Crowley ignored the jibe, reflecting sadly that it was a fairly accurate picture of how the newer members of the Ranger Corps spent their time. The other soldiers laughed again. Their laughter was becoming louder, he noticed.
“I’ve been at Castle Araluen for an assembly,” he said, maintaining a pleasant tone. “Now I’m heading back to my home fief. Just passing through Gorlan.”
“And we’re honored to have you with us,” the soldier said with heavy sarcasm. “Perhaps we could buy you a drink?”
Crowley smiled. “I’ll just have coffee,” he said, but the soldier shook his head vehemently.
“Coffee’s no drink for such an honored guest. After all, you’re a . . . King’s Ranger.” He managed to make the words sound like an epithet. “I insist that we buy you a glass of wine. Or a brandy. Or a drink worthy of such an exalted person as yourself.”