“Ask me on the morrow,” Rathe said, and Loro nodded again.
They walked back through the gates, Loro half-carrying Rathe. All the while, the fat man turned from victory to prattling about plans for seducing any number of the Maidens of the Lyre.
Rathe laughed at all the right places, but all he wanted was to get Nesaea out of the catacombs, and find somewhere to sleep.
Chapter 30
A steady rain fell from a leaden sky hung low over Valdar. Save that no watchmen stood in the turrets, the village looked much the same as the first time Rathe had gazed on its weathered wooden palisade.
“You think any of Sanouk’s men are in there?” Loro asked.
Rathe shrugged. “If so, then Erryn must have captured them, and is now sharpening an axe for their necks.”
Half a turn of the glass gone, the young woman, accompanied by a handful of Hilan men and the wagon driver Breyon-who turned out to be her distant cousin-had passed unmolested through the rickety gates. The sound of clucking chickens and a shutter banging against a windowsill were the only sounds from within Valdar. All had remained too quiet to think anyone with ill-intent waited behind the palisade.
Quiet or not, if Erryn did not show herself soon, Rathe meant to ride in, despite her insistence that she be allowed to deal with Mitros, and anyone else she found who had played a part in making her people suffer. “This fight is mine more than yours,” she had told him. “If any remain when I am finished, you can have them.”
Ringing the village wall, a number of the Maidens of the Lyre stood ready for battle atop their shiplike wagons. The rest aimed wheeled ballistae or mangonels much the same, Rathe suspected, as they had against Hilan. It astounded him that the Maidens had gone to such elaborate extents to rescue their leader, even using one of their own to bewitch Sanouk. Without the young woman Milia, who had garnered the lord’s affections and earned a place in his bed, the gates of Hilan might never have opened to her sisters.
Rathe caught Lady Nesaea’s eye. She smiled coyly, a striking figure, again the goddess of silver and snow he had seen on that distant night against the plainsmen. Like a true general, she cast her gaze back over her warriors, ensuring they were arrayed and ready. Nesaea had not spoken of her time behind that infernal barrier below Sanouk’s keep, but more than once she had screamed herself awake, then lay shuddering against him until sleep once more stole over her.
Thinking of sharing her bed furrowed his brow. She was a fine, strong woman, to be sure, but he suspected that his life-the uncertainty that awaited him-was not for such as her. He would have to broach that topic at some point, but a few more days delay would not hurt anything.
“I don’t think anyone from Hilan is here,” Loro stated, scratching himself, then taking a swallow from a wineskin. He wore as many scabs and bruises as Rathe, earned by fighting his way through the forest back to Hilan along with Erryn, Breyon, and the other prisoners taken from Valdar.
“They wanted to go to Valdar,” Loro had explained, “but I told them Hilan was the riper plum-and the first that should fall, if they had any hope of taking back their homes. It took little enough to convince Erryn that I needed to pull you out of the fire.”
Afterward, Loro had come across the Maidens of the Lyre, and learned of their plan to attack Hilan in order to rescue Nesaea. He promptly aligned himself with the woman Nesaea had freed after being taken captive. Fira was her name, a beautiful if stern woman who had since taken Loro into her wagon, and into her bed.
From what Rathe gathered, during the confusion of the plainsman attack north of Onareth, Treon had ordered Fira, Nesaea, and Carnala taken captive. No one knew if Sanouk had commanded Treon to specifically target the Maidens of the Lyre, or if their capture had merely been coincidental. By design or not, it had proven to be a grave error, for the full fury of the Maidens of the Lyre had fallen upon Sanouk and his fortress.
“Sanouk’s men may not be here,” Rathe said to Loro, “but do not forget their tracks. If they are not here now, they were at some point.”
On the dawn after the battle at Hilan, once Nesaea and the others who served as Sanouk’s sacrifices had been tended, along with those wounded during the battle, Rathe had trailed Sanouk’s devoted soldiers far enough to know that they had made for Valdar. It had been in his mind to pursue straight away, but there had not been enough able-bodied soldiers to form even a small company. Moreover, his own strength had been so limited that tracking Sanouk’s men a few miles had left him feverish and weak. Faced with that, and knowing that Mitros and his bandits were entrenched at Valdar, Rathe had reluctantly decided that attacking the village would have been a fool’s errand.
Near on a week had passed before he had enough hale soldiers and Maidens of the Lyre to set out. Another week had been squandered traveling the unforgiving mountain road to Valdar. His instinct, though he loathed to accept it, was that after coming to Valdar, Sanouk’s men had refitted and turned south for Onareth and the lord’s brother, King Nabar. As such, Rathe knew he must soon get as far from the Kingdom of Cerrikoth as possible. King Nabar’s affections for his brother might have been weak, but not so weak as to allow what would doubtless be spoken of as Sanouk’s murder.
Rathe sighed heavily, finally accepting what he had avoided thinking on over the last few days. “I accept your advice.”
Loro cocked a scabbed eyebrow at him, then poured more wine down his throat. “What advice is that, brother?”
“That we live the life of bandits, mercenaries, and gods know what else, in order to earn coin enough to feed ourselves.”
“I will miss Fira,” Loro said without batting an eye. “Truth be told, she’s a bit vulgar for my tastes.” His eyes went wide, oblivious to the irony. “Some of the things she does would make a slattern blush! By all the gods she-”
Rathe cut him off with a raised hand and a chuckle. Before he could tell Loro to keep such things to himself, Erryn strode through the gates, her motley retinue trialing behind with hard grins. In one hand, fingers curled around a few thin strands of hair, she bore Mitros’s head. Where the rest of him was, Rathe could only wonder.
“His days of raping and torturing are over,” Erryn announced when she drew closer, holding up the grisly trophy.
“What of the others?” Rathe asked.
Erryn flung the head away and watched it bounce across the muddy grass. “Lord Sanouk’s men were here. They took Mitros’s men, but left him behind. Many of my people had been locked in the mines, forgotten. The rest are like to be in the forests, or fled altogether. Mitros we found lying in his own squalor, drunk and insensible.”
“You know your people cannot remain here,” Rathe advised. He had told the same to the villagers of Hilan. Whether or not King Nabar sought to avenge his brother’s death, word of rebellion would enrage the king and the nobles of his court. Highborn of no land would tolerate rebellion.
Erryn scanned the decrepit palisade, and then the crags rising into the sodden mists beyond. “The greatest part of Onareth’s wealth yet lies within the mines. With so much gold, we can build a fortress and an army to resist anything Nabar dares to throw against us.”
“So you would make yourself a queen?” Rathe asked in jest.
Erryn’s lips spread in a mischievous smile. “Stranger things have happened. Perhaps naming myself Queen of the North is not so strange after all.”
Breyon shouted, “Queen Erryn!” The cry was quickly taken up by the soldiers at her back, and the Maidens of the Lyre.
“I could use a wise general,” Erryn said after the raucous chanting faded. “A man of war and honor … a man who was once the king’s champion, and who could treat with potential enemies and allies alike. Such a man as that,” she added, her cheeks reddening, “could, perhaps, rise higher … even become a king.”