He nodded, unsmiling. "My thanks, princess. I know you meant it well."
She shot him a suspicious glance, then continued. "So when she did offer me a broth I took it without thought."
She made a face. "Fool! I remember nothing until I came back to sickness in the fens."
Blade looked ahead. The fens were ending and the dark arching forest, with caverns of shadows and dusky twilight, lay just ahead. A path led plainly from the fens into tall oaks and beeches and thick trunked yew wearing garlands of vine.
"Forget the Lady Alwyth," advised Blade. "Her fate will overtake her without our help. Neither she nor Lycanto can harm us here, but there may be other dangers. Know you anything of this country, Taleen? How far to the north lies Voth?"
She frowned. "I know little enough, never having traveled this way. What of that low fellow of yours? He has gotten us through the fens without mishap cannot he do likewise in the forest?"
Blade shook his head. "No. I asked. Sylvo is a fensman and also knows something of the sea, but he will be as lost in the forest as ourselves. Which," he added cheerfully to hearten her, "will not be so lost if we have the sun. I am woodsman enough for that."
"The Drus know of such things," said Taleen. She shot him a sidelong glance and he knew her thinking. As for himself, he had not thought recently of the sacrifice in the glade. Rather had his mind, when he let it range, been full of the strange and compelling, the passionate, dream of the woman called Drusilla. Drusilla! Dru? Odd he had not marked it before. But what matter it was all fantasy, a phantom play conjured in his unconscious mind.
"The Drus," Taleen went on, "can tell direction by stars, and how lichen grows on a tree, or by the set of the moon."
"Forget the Drus also," Blade said harshly. "They cannot harm us any more than can Alwyth. I am more interested in what Sylvo can find to put in that pot of his I am starving again."
Taleen smiled again and laughed. "I too. It seems we are always hungry, Blade! If that rapscallion of yours can find us food I may begin to forgive him his looks."
When they reached a suitable clearing Blade called a halt. Sylvo, after cutting some vines for snares, went in search of a hare or two for their dinner. They had twice seen deer since entering the forest, but the axe was no weapon for deer and Sylvo had only his knife.
Taleen gathered faggots and Blade struck a fire with flints, using an iron striker Sylvo had given him. As twilight thickened around the merry little blaze, and Taleen warmed her hands, Blade thought he heard a sound in the forest. Seizing the bronze axe he strode to the edge of the clearing and stood listening. It could have been anything a deer or some other animal, or merely Sylvo falling over a root. But it did not come again and Blade did not like the silence. No birds sang and the rustling of small creatures had ceased.
Taleen joined him, huddling close. "What is it, Blade? Your man does not return does it take so long to catch hares?"
He put a hand over her mouth, his lips to her ear. She had lost the odor of chypre now and smelled only of sweet girlish flesh.
"Stay here and keep quiet," said Blade. "I will go look for Sylvo."
"No! I will not stay in this place alone. I will come with you."
"Quietly, then, and not too close. If there is danger I must have room to swing my axe."
He had no chance to use the great axe. He and Taleen were not fifty yards into the trees, along a faint path, when the finely woven nets fell from above and enmeshed them. There was a sudden great shouting and men leaped from the trees and from bushes fringing the path.
Blade, his stalwart frame netted like any fish, could not free the axe for action. He heard Taleen scream once "Beata's men! We are taken!"
He butted and bellowed and made a rare fight of it while he could. He got his hands through the net and knocked heads together, swinging his massive fists like maces, sending half a dozen of his attackers sprawling. At the last, standing like one of the forest oaks, choking a man black-faced with either hand, Blade went down before a dozen men. He took three with him and kept pummeling them until a spear butt crashed down on his head.
At the very last, before the darkness, he heard a man scream a command: "Do not kill the big one! Queen Beata wants him alive."
Chapter Eight
Blade awoke in an oubliette. The slimy stone floor was covered with dank straw in which things crawled. A wick, guttering in a pannikin of fish oil, gave the only light. He was chained, hand and foot, to a ring bolt set into a wall. He itched intolerably and there was a great soreness at the back of his head. For a moment he lost control, slipped the habit of self-discipline built up over the years, and raged at the chains, tugging at them with fierce oaths and swinging and slamming them about.
"No use, master," said a voice from a dim corner. "We are well taken. The evil Queen Beata has us, and even the Lady Alwyth is merciful by comparison. I have been thinking hard, master, and my thought is that we are in a great deal of trouble!" There was a great rattling of chains as Sylvo shifted his malformed bones.
Blade, forcing calm on himself, squatted in the filthy straw. "What of the Princess Taleen?"
He could not see the man's shrug, but heard the chains rattle again.
"Safe enough, master. At least not yet harmed, as I saw. Beata holds her for ransom from Voth, as before I remember your telling of it and so we are back to the beginning. Or the lady is. What happens to us may be another matter and not one on which I like to think."
Blade quietly tested one of the chains, his huge sinews cracking with the effort. The chain held.
"Keep your heart up," said Blade. "I will somehow get us out of this." At the moment he could not have said how.
Sylvo's tone grew more cheerful. "So you will, master. I was forgetting that you are something of a wizard."
Blade, testing the chains again, scowled in the gloom. It was going to take a little more than wizardry to get them out of this. He began to question Sylvo; the basis of all effort, of all successful action, is knowledge.
"What is this place and how came we here?"
"A great castle called Craghead. On the Western Sea. As to coming here I walked, the Lady Taleen rode, and you were carried on a litter. You were well drugged to keep you sleeping, master, as Beata's men were in fear of you."
That accounted for his slight headache. He remembered the spear butt crashing down and fingered the wound on his head, swollen and sticky through the thick hair.
"They had nets in the trees," Blade mused. "I wonder how at just that place and time?"
"Ar, master. I wondered also. I was taken like a minnow and stifled without a cry. But I think I have it the Lady Alwyth must have sent word to Beata. They are in league, no doubt. King Lycanto would never have done it he and the Queen are enemies."
It was possible. Indeed it was probable. Lady Alwyth ran deep, was an intriguer by nature, and Blade had spurned her. Taleen was hated for her beauty, if nothing else, and Alwyth would have many tendrils to her web. She and Queen Beata may have been conspiring for years. Blade dismissed the thought. He must think of what would serve him now.
"Tell me of this Queen Beata, Sylvo. What manner of woman is she?"
Sylvo told him and Blade felt the prickles rise on his neck as he listened. Yet he doubted not a word. Such things were in this strange dimension he now inhabited. As real as life or death.
"And that is all I know," Sylvo concluded. "She is a bawd, if the stories can be believed, and likes women as well as men in bed. Children also it is said that she murders these afterwards so they cannot carry tales and I myself have seen her cruelty to those who serve her. Most of the men lack an ear, the left one, and many of her women have their left breast cut off. As we entered the castle I saw men hanging on iron hooks on the walls, and was told they were the guards who let the Lady Taleen escape. One was still wriggling, poor bastard."