The sudden sounds of a slamming door and a horse’s whinny, just as I reached the corner of the brewhouse, flattened my back against the stone wall of the deserted alley. No question the evening’s events had set me on edge. Heart galloping, I peered around the corner. A small muddy yard fronted a well-built three-story house with a steep-pitched roof and many fine windows. Soft light from the upper windows and a single torch in a door bracket illumined three saddled horses tethered by the stoop.
A man in a brick-colored cloak darted down the steps and wrestled a leather satchel onto one of the saddles, buckling straps to hold it. But the horse sidestepped nervously, the fellow’s arms were too short, and the satchel slid back onto his shoulders, dragging off his red hood. Fine boned and fair, he was younger than I’d guessed from his height. A tight braid bound his thick bronze-colored hair.
Blundering into strangers’ urgent business violated my usual practice, so I did not step out to help. In moments, Brother Gildas appeared on the stoop, holding open the heavy door for two other men. These two descended the steps slowly, one supporting the other. The more robust of the pair, a big, hawk-faced man with a narrow beard and meaty shoulders, barked an order at the squire—for the red-cloaked youth was surely Squire Corin from the kitchen. The house must be Gillarine’s guest quarters, these strangers the abbey’s noble benefactors.
The squire yanked his strap tight and hurried around to help the others lift the weaker man into the saddle. The gaunt, dark-haired fellow, racked with coughing as he gripped the pommel, was none but the gentlemanly secretary Gram. The hawk-faced man’s cloak fell back as he shoved his charge into the saddle. The sleeves of a hauberk gleamed from under his holly-green surcoat, and his jewel-hilted great-sword sparkled in the torchlight. A warrior, then, as well as a lord—Gram’s “excitable” employer.
Horrid weather to ride out. The faint drizzle had become an insistent shower, pattering on the brewhouse roof and dribbling from the gutters and downspouts. To get back to my dry bed in the infirmary, I had either to return through the cloisters or cross this courtyard, inviting Brother Gildas’s perceptive examination. If they would all just go…
Relieved, I watched as Brother Gildas gave the squire a hand up to his mount and retreated to the sheltered stoop. The warrior swung his bulky body into the saddle, exposing a device on his surcoat.
I uttered a malediction—under my breath, so I thought, but the lord’s head jerked up and twisted in my direction. Snatching my head out of sight, I slammed my back to the wall. Water sluiced down my neck. My skin felt as if swarming with midges.
Once, when I was eleven or twelve and lay in my bed bleeding from an encounter with my father’s leather strap, my elder sister, Thalassa, had chosen to break her longstanding habit and be civil. She told me of obscuré spells—certain patterns created in the mind and infused with magic that could cause one to be overlooked. In my usual way I had spat at her, called her a vyrsté—a pureblood whose parents had not paid enough attention to breeding lines—and ignored her.
Not for the first time, I regretted that choice. Embroidered in silver thread on the lord’s holly-green linen was a howling wolf with a lily under its paw—the device of Evanore and its sovereign duc, Osriel the Bastard.
Lords of the night! Afflicted with a sudden case of the shivers and a raging desire to hide, I hobbled back down the alley and around a corner of the brewhouse, doing my best to keep my stick and my booted feet quiet. Behind me, a man issued a sharp command. In moments, the three horsemen rode right past me.
“Teneamus!” Brother Gildas’s call followed them through the alley.
One of the three called an answer, softly enough no one but his companions and I could possibly hear. “Teneamus!”
Once the riders had vanished into the rainy gloom, I exhaled and took out as fast as I could down the alley. Though the torch was extinguished, lamps yet shone from within the guesthouse, but I saw no sign of Brother Gildas. As I hobbled across the yard and down the cart track that led through the lay brothers’ workyard, inside my sleeves I splayed the three middle fingers of my left hand, and inside my head I recited three saints’ names three times each. Whyever would a man of Prince Osriel’s party be welcome at a Karish abbey?
Chilled to the marrow, I stripped to the skin before diving gratefully into my bed. By the time Brother Robierre and Brother Anselm returned from supper, bringing me leek soup and hot bread, I had managed to stop shivering. As the two men changed my dressings and fussed about their evening duties, I put my mind to an escape plan should I need to abandon the abbey in a hurry. I would winter in a cave before crossing paths with King Eodward’s crippled bastard.
I ought to have had some sympathy with the youngest of Eodward’s progeny or at least with his pureblood mother. Though not strictly a recondeur—she had not actually run away—Lirene de Armine-Visori had defied her family and the Registry’s breeding laws by mating outside the pureblood families, an unforgivable offense, no matter that her lover was a king. Lirene had died when the boy was quite young, and stories named the halfbreed Osriel, raised out of the public eye, twisted in both mind and body.
Veterans who had served in Prince Perryn’s ill-fated campaign to wrest Evanore’s gold mines from his bastard half brother displayed wicked burn scars from Osriel’s mage-fire arrows and told of comrades snatched in the night and returned without balls, tongues, or hands. They described plagues of nightmares that afflicted their encampments, and men and women found wandering the tangled forests naked and mindless, their privy parts blistered from forced breeding with gatzi—creatures from the netherworld, pledged to Magrog’s service. And they swore that on every battlefield near Evanore, what dead were left to lie through the night were missing their eyes on the next morning. Which seemed not such a dreadful thing in itself compared to being dead, save that most Navrons believed a man’s soul resided in his eyes. Without a soul, a man was left with no hope of an afterlife, for the Ferryman had naught to carry.
It’s a soldier’s wont to top the next man’s tale. For years, I took no more stock in the stories of Prince Osriel’s evils than in legends of angelic visitations or of the Danae whose dancing supposedly nurtured fields and forests. Gods knew battle left enough mutilated bodies for every demonic purpose. The pox from unclean whores was a scourge that could flay a man’s loins, and drinking raw spirits squeezed from agueroot could scour a mind to blankness for a week. Yet over the summer, as Prince Bayard’s march across Ardra drove us toward Evanore, one comrade and then another swore me to find him should he fall in battle, and to pierce his heart before nightfall to ensure he was well and truly dead before Osriel the Bastard came for him. Such stern belief cannot but wear upon a man’s mind and take on the likeness of truth.
When the lay brother Anselm had hurried off to bed and the choir monk Robierre to the church for another bout of praying, I prowled through the infirmary stores. Using scraps of twine and linen from Brother Robierre’s baskets, I wrapped up small amounts of his powders and herbs—anything he had in plenty that I might sell or need. I discovered an herb knife with a nicked blade shoved to the back of a shelf, and I took that, too, bundling it with the medicines in a rag and stuffing the bundle under my palliasse with the bits of cheese and bread I’d saved from every meal.
As I worked, a lesser puzzle nagged at me. Pureblood families flaunted their unbroken descent from the decadent Aurellians by speaking Aurellian and Navron interchangeably. It was a useless skill that only they and hidebound scholars set store by now Aurellia was reduced from a great empire to a walled city a thousand quellae distant. But such childhood training penetrates very deep. Even after twelve years away from pureblood society, I could not have said in which language I articulated my thoughts. Therefore, I could wonder at the Aurellian farewell that Brother Gildas had exchanged with the Evanori lord. Teneamus—we preserve.