Men quailed to see it.
Later, in the privacy of her own tower, she worked a small phantasm. She had known Richard Plangere well. She found him easily, cast a working to trace him if he moved, and noted that he was less than three hundred leagues away – and that he was orders of magnitude more powerful than he’d been when she had last deceived him.
She flexed her fingers. ‘Oh, so am I, lover,’ she said, delighted. Everything delighted her, because Gabriel was alive.
She wanted a look at this Lady Mary. She hadn’t seen the girl since she was eleven or twelve – when she’d been gawky, hipless, and no kind of a wife for Gavin, who was moody and difficult and given to rages. Not her favourite son, although the easiest to manipulate.
This working was complex, because rumour said that the King’s new whore of a wife was a sorceress, and Ghause had no intention of being caught snooping; she spent the day laying her snares, reading from grimoires with her tongue clenched between her teeth, and writing in silver on her floor.
She heard the Earl’s cavalcade return, but she was almost done and she wasn’t going to stop for him. She lit a faery light, and then another, and heard their little voices scream in the aether. She hated faeries and their soulless leeching on the world of men, and it pleased her to use their little bodies for light.
By the light of their agony, she finished her structure. She reached into her maze – an aethereal palace of brambles and apple trees and roses turned a little bad – and summoned the rich green power that smelled of loam and rain and semen, and pushed that power through her structures, and saw.
She was really very pretty – beautiful hair, fine teeth, and a good figure. Best of all, she had developed good hips for child bearing, and she was reading. A woman who could read was a find indeed.
Ghause watched her in the aethereal for as long as a priest might say mass, studying her movements and her composure. She even watched Lady Mary take a breviary cross from her girdle and say a prayer. Her lips shaped the sounds of ‘Gavin’ and Ghause heard them and smiled.
The Earl shouted for her in the hall and someone banged on her door, and she felt another presence, and suddenly she saw the King’s trull.
Lady Mary rose and put her breviary on a side table. ‘Lady?’ she asked.
The Queen passed into the room, and into Ghause’s ops-powered sight. Her beauty cut Ghause like a sharp knife to the soul. And she-
– was-
– pregnant.
Ghause slammed out of her spell and screamed.
Sixty Leagues West of Lissen Carrak – Bill Redmede
The wilderness west of Lissen Carrak was a nightmare.
Every day that the Jack of Jacks, Bill Redmede, led his exhausted and demoralised men further west, they looked at him with that mixture of trust and bewilderment that he knew would inexorably lead to the collapse of belief, and then of discipline. And he was sure – as sure as he was that the aristocrats were an evil burden on the shoulders of men – that no sanctuary lay to the east.
Every night he lay and replayed the ambush; what should have been the Day. The Day when the King and his cronies fell, when the yeomen of Alba reclaimed their freedom, and the lords fell choking on their own blood. He thought of every error he had made, every deal he had brokered. And how they’d all gone wrong.
Mostly, he lay freezing in his cloak and thought of Thorn. He’d given up his blanket to Nat Tyler, who had a fever and the runs and was worse off. They’d carried Tyler for days until he declared he could walk – but he walked in silence, and when they made camp he’d lie down and sleep. Redmede missed his council.
The worst of it was that more than a month had passed since the defeat, and he didn’t really have a goal. He had heard that the Wild had a mighty lord, far to the west; an old and powerful irk who had a fortress and a set of villages where some Outwallers lived free. It was a rumour he’d gleaned when he recruited some serfs in the Brogat; he wondered now if it was just a cloud cuckoo land, a promise as false as the heaven preached by priests. A month’s travel, scrounging food and killing any animal big enough to make a meal-
The immediate problem was food. It might have amused him, that his very success in saving Jacks from the wreck of defeat now meant that there were too many of them to hunt deer in the woods. His people had consumed the last of their supplies when they left their canoes at the last navigable stretch of the Cohocton, and began walking west. They followed a narrow ribbon of trail beaten into the earth by generations of Outwallers and Wild creatures – it was like a deer trail, but twelve inches wide and formed of hard beaten earth that didn’t show a footprint or even the mark of a dew claw or a hoof.
And there was no game for hundreds of yards to either side of the trail. The only sign in the woods was boglin sign. Thousands of them – perhaps more – had survived Thorn’s defeat, and when the sorcerer abandoned his forces he’d released thousands of the small but deadly creatures from his will. They, too, were on the trail, headed west. Headed home.
That was a frightening thought.
But this trail led somewhere. That much Redmede knew.
The woods themselves seemed more threatening then he remembered. The silence was oppressive – even the number of insects seemed reduced by the magnitude of the Wild’s rout. It was a silent summer. And Bill Redmede had never travelled this far west.
A day’s travel west of the Ings of the Cohocton, they found an irk village burned flat. Casual inspection showed that the inhabitants had probably done the work themselves – there were no corpses, and nothing had been left. Just the remnants of twenty-four cabins in a great circle, all burned, and the stockade around it, closely woven with raspberry canes and other prickers, black, but still thorny.
One of his men had cried to see it. ‘They’re ahead of us!’ he said. ‘Sweet Jesus, Jack, the knights are-’
Redmede wanted to smack him. But instead, he leaned on his bow and shook his head. ‘Use your noggin, young Peter. How would they get here? Eh? Irks did this themselves.’ He ordered men to prod the cabin foundations for grain pits, and they found ten – all empty. But they were desperate enough to pick the kernels of dried corn out of the earthen pits, one at a time, and then young Fitzwilliam found a buried pot – a great earthenware container that held twenty pounds of grain. Another hour of digging found another.
Forty pounds of corn among two hundred men was a mere handful per man, but Bill sent three of his best, all veteran foresters, north across the stream, and they returned while the corn was being roasted on fires. They had a pair of deer.
The next morning, as if a miracle, a troop of turkeys walked boldly across the cleared fields to the south – twenty fat birds, bold as brass. In the process of killing them, the Jacks realised that the corn in the fields was ripe. The fields furthest from the woods’ edge had already been picked clean – clearly the irks had harvested what they could before they burned their village – but the corn under the forest eaves was fresh, full-kernelled, and mature. Albans grew grains – oats, barley, and wheat – irks and Outwallers grew the native corn, and while the taste was unfamiliar and curiously sweet Bill knew salvation when he saw it. Twenty turkeys and four hundred ears of corn provided a second feast, and with time to think and food in his belly he decided they should rest another day and sent more hunters north and south to look for deer.
The men he sent north didn’t return. He waited three days for them, and mourned the loss of his best scout, an old man everyone called Grey Cal. Cal was too good to get lost and too old to take foolish chances. But the Wild was the Wild.