Clee nodded, and reined around confidently to lead Pen onto the road north. They walked their mounts along side by side for a while, threading local traffic; farm carts going, at this hour, mostly home from the markets, animals being walked to their fates at city butchers.
“Were you taught horsemanship as a child?” Pen asked.
“Yes, we had all the usual castle sports. Castle Martenden was a good place to grow up. I wasn’t apprenticed to the Order till I turned fourteen, as directed in our father’s will.”
The usual age for such placements. “Had the old lord a large family?”
“Not very, to my benefit. Rusi and I were the only boys. Rusi’s elder sister is long married, and mine chose the Daughter’s Order, and now teaches at a Lady-school down the valley of the Linnet.”
“It sounds a reasonably happy family life, then.” Pen hoped Clee would hear the delicate inquiry in that; or, if he didn’t, so much the better.
Evidently he did, for his lips turned up, wryly. “Rusi’s lady mother always treated us children fairly. And Rusi is my elder by a decade. So even if his parents had died in the opposite order, and our father had married my mother, very unlikely considering her station and lack of dower, I still would not be the heir. Nor greatly suited to the task.”
“You aren’t jealous of Rusillin’s rank?”
Clee eyed him sidelong. “I’d have been a fool not to have thought of it, and a greater fool not to have thought better of it. Are you jealous of your brother Rolsch?”
“No,” Pen realized, never having considered it quite like that before. “Rolsch plagued me in many ways, when I was growing up, if not how Drovo did—he was enough older to be above such humor, I think, as well as not being naturally inclined to it. But I never wanted his place. Still don’t.”
“That’s fortunate, then.”
As the road grew less crowded farther from town, Clee led them first to a trot and then to an easy canter, and Pen followed, heartened to have found another commonality with the prickly dedicat. After about an hour’s ride in the late spring afternoon, the waters sparkling to their right and the hills rising to their left, they rounded a curve of the lake, and the gray bulk of Castle Martenden loomed up before them.
It perched on an islet only a dozen paces out from shore, its walls seeming to grow out of the rock that was its foundation. High and solid and forbidding, they followed the contours of the islet’s bounds. This had resulted in something other than foursquare, though four round towers with conical slate caps jutted up at its corners, with a fifth for luck over the drawbridge.
The village of Martenden straggled along the road, a mere farm hamlet, though the fields and vines climbing the slopes beyond looked fair enough. A smithy, an alehouse, a leather-worker’s, a carpenter’s shop, a small inn for travelers too soon benighted to push on to the city at the lake’s end. Clee followed his glance.
“Its earlier lords had more hopes of this place,” he observed, “but they were all siphoned away by the Temple and the city merchants.”
“Mm,” said Pen. “I expect the city exploits the river for its mills, as well. And it is the logical end-point of lake traffic.”
“There is that.”
Clee led them right up to the small arched bridge and drawbridge, clopping across and returning the salute of a soldier standing guard with easy familiarity. Door and portcullis were all blocked open on this peaceful day. Inside the court, paved with fitted flagstones, the place was not so bleak. Arched porticos with stone columns ran along two sides of the irregular space. Atop them two stories of wooden galleries overlooked this light well, suggesting that those living within did not actually have to grope about in darkness at all hours. As they dismounted and a groom hurried up to take charge of their horses, Lord Rusillin himself came out on a balcony, saw them, and waved. He made his way down an end staircase, boots scuffing in an alert man’s rhythm, to the courtyard.
“Ah, you have secured our guest,” said Rusillin amiably to his brother. “Any difficulties along the way?”
“None whatsoever,” Clee assured him.
Making the hand-over-heart salute, he went on to Pen, “Lord Penric. Welcome to Castle Martenden.”
“Thank you for your invitation, Lord Rusillin. I was most interested to see it.” Pen looked up past the galleries toward the battlements. “And from it.”
Rusillin smiled. “Our supper is almost ready. But we could certainly take you up to the sentry walk.”
The castle’s lord led back up the stairs he had descended, and from the third floor over to a short set of stone steps. Pen followed eagerly, Clee bringing up the rear. Then onto the walkway behind the high, crenellated outer wall. Pen leaned over to gaze up and down the lake, imagining being a sentry here, on the watch for enemies. Or, he supposed, merchants’ boats laden with rich cargo from north or south, but he had not heard Castle Martenden accused of lake piracy.
Ten miles distant to the south, he could just make out the walled city. The lake curved slightly here, narrowing, then its northern arm struck out an even longer distance to the smaller town that overlooked its headwaters, lacking a princess-archdivine to raise its status and its walls, but doing well as an embarkation point for trade. Beyond the curve, a pair of small green islands decorated the blue surface, home, he understood, mainly to goats, sheep, and a few reclusive religious mystics. The westering sun breathed a golden glow over it all.
“Beautiful,” Pen said, awed. “Has this place ever been besieged in your time, Lord Rusillin?”
“Not in mine,” Rusillin replied easily. “My father fought off an incursion of the Earl of Westria, in his day, but at the ridges and along the roads. His troops never reached here. Or Martensbridge, little though the town remembers.”
“Yet now you work for Westria?”
Rusillin’s lips stretched. “The earl palatine learned his lesson. Far better to have us with him than against.”
Jurald Court really was a farmhouse, compared to this, Pen conceded.
“What lies beneath?” Pen asked, turning back to look down into the paved courtyard, grown shadowed as the light angled.
“You’ll see the lower levels after supper,” Rusillin promised. “There is an interesting water gate off the main stores. Very useful for bringing goods in and out.”
“I suppose this place would never run short of water in a siege,” Pen mused. “Another advantage over a crag.”
“To be sure,” Rusillin agreed, and led the back to the stairs. He pointed out a few more militarily useful features along the way, sounding as house-proud as any goodwife. Were the goodwife enamored of serious mayhem.
They walked, boots sounding on the boards, along the third-floor gallery to what proved not a lordly dining hall but a small chamber. Two slit windows on the lake side, framing an unlit fireplace built into the stone wall, provided a faint illumination, and Pen blinked, tempted for a moment to call on Desdemona’s seeing-in-the-dark skill, but his eyes adjusted soon enough. Good wax candles, only one frugally lit, graced an age-darkened sideboard crowded with covered dishes. Clee went to share the flames around among the holders there and upon the round table set only for three. The lord meant to have the luxury of privacy tonight with his interesting guest, apparently. At his brother’s polite request, Clee took the role of server, cheerfully and without resentment. Smiling, he offered Pen the pewter basin to wash his hands first.
The repast was rich in meats and thankfully sparing of cheese: venison, slices of beef, racks of lamb, and a whole chicken were presented, which Rusillin carved with the speed and dexterity of a surgeon accomplishing an amputation. A stew of spiced root vegetables, any winter-stored tiredness masked by their buttery sauce, and a salat of fresh spring greens improved the variety still more. The wine was pale yellow, sweet, and from kin Martenden’s own land, Pen learned. The two brothers, Pen noticed, drank sparingly, so he tried to do the same, for all that each took turns topping up his glass.