He stared at her in shock. “The Spider?” What sort of betrayal was this?
“No, not Zdenek. He can’t know about the deaths yet, not unless he has one of his hirelings spying on us.”
“Hirelings?”
“His Speaker flunkies. I’m on loan to Zdenek, as a sort of mutual favor, but we don’t want to get mixed up in anything as messy as priest killings.”
“Who’s ‘we’ in this situation?”
She shook her head and dipped the last piece of crust in oil. Sybilla had said that Justina was in, or had been to, somewhere she had called Elysium.
He asked, “Did you spy on the parley also?”
She nodded.
“Is it honorable to use talent at a parley?”
“Of course not. That Alojz scares me. He doesn’t look old enough to have his talent under control. Mind you,” she conceded, munching bread, “he slipped a neat stroke by you when he tweaked the bishop. That was deft.”
“I wasn’t fast enough! How far can you twist a man’s mind?”
“Well, there’s a limit. If you try to make a man believe he’s a horse, you’ll drive him crazy. Tweaking only works properly if it’s used to make people change their minds when they already want to. If he wants to be brave, you could tweak him into thinking he was brave, at least for a day or two. Your Bishop Ugne would much rather believe he was deceived by an apparition than that he saw what he really saw. So young Alojz nudged him the way he secretly wanted to go.”
“Is that within the rules?”
“Not the Saints’ rules, but it gets done often enough. I’d say that if you meddle with a man’s free will, then God may lay all his future sins on your shoulders, not his. But yon Alojz boy would contend that he was striving to uphold the first commandment, concealing a public display of talent-which he was-and that excuses a lot. None of us want the workadays all upturned and shrieking about Satanism, and a sending is less threatening than a materialization. From what you tell me, that display that Havel and Vilhelmas put on in Gallant last night was shocking by any standard. I wish I knew why they did it.”
This was the sort of teaching he needed, and it confirmed much of what he had been thinking. She was stretching her orders to drop hints, and he mustn’t appear ungrateful. Yet questions whirled in his mind like midges. He forced himself to keep both his eating and his conversation slow and casual.
“Can you tell me what Havel really wants? Whose side he’s on?”
“His own, I’d ween. You’re sure you saw him with Wends at Long Valley last night?”
Wulf helped himself to more of the fish soup. “Absolutely certain.”
Justina shrugged and nibbled a dainty piece of cheese as if she were just eating to keep him company. “That I don’t understand. He’s definitely in the know. You said he had three Speakers, all related to him?”
“Vilhelmas was a distant cousin, the moronic Leonas is his son, and he presented Alojz as a nephew. His family seems to breed even more of them than mine does.”
“They breed more workadays, too. You think he had one of them murder the old count and his son?”
“Yes. I thought it was Vilhelmas, but it could have been Leonas.”
“Doesn’t matter now. Then he tried to take over the defense against the Wends, so he could claim the earldom as Castle Gallant’s savior? I can eat that. But it doesn’t explain what he was doing consorting with the Wends.”
“If they really were Wends,” Wulf said glumly. “I don’t know a Wend from a wood dove. Perhaps the whole war is a Havel invention, and he has men at both gates? Duke Wartislaw may not even know what’s being done in his name.”
“Huh?” Justina was surprised. “By Our Lady, you’re as sly as a fox, Squire Magnus! But how many men attacked the north gate this morning?”
“I was too busy to make an exact count. More than a thousand. And I think I saw that many camped down at High Meadows. Enough tents, anyway.”
“You think the bombard may be real enough, but still be back in Pomerania? I suppose it’s possible.” She sighed. Her age seemed to vary all the time, from motherly to ancient and back again. “But if Vranov’s really feinting at both gates, I don’t know how he can possibly hope to keep his treachery secret for very long. Faith, if there’s no real Wends peering over the hills at you, then I’m sure you can handle Havel Vranov and his family Speakers. When he got rid of the old count, he did not expect to run into you and your pack of brothers.”
Wulf ate in silence for a moment, relishing a sense of achievement and the old woman’s praise. He had certainly done his part. Withou k pae="-1"›Wult him Anton might have been tweaked into inviting the Pelrelmians in, or the Wends might have taken the north barbican and thrown open the gates. Terrified refugees fleeing south would have run into Havel Vranov and been slaughtered. Wulfgang Magnus had done well.
And if the “Wend” attack was a fake staged by the Hound of the Hills, then the war was over. Duke Wartislaw might absorb this morning’s losses, but a mere count certainly could not. His troops would melt away after such a mauling.
So now what? “Build on success,” Father had always said. Otto said so too.
“We’d better assume the Dragon exists until we are sure it doesn’t,” Wulf decided. “When I’ve finished this excellent meal, it might be time for me to go and look for it.”
He had not seen her truly startled before. “Gramercy! Now? In daylight?”
“Better in daylight while everyone’s busy than at night when it’s quiet and they have guards posted and I can walk into trees.”
She chuckled uneasily. “Sooth, you’re the soldier, young squire, not me. You’ll just look, though? Don’t meddle. They’ll have Speakers, and a halo shows up as bright by day as in the gloam.”
Somehow the thought of what he was planning had dispatched the rest of his appetite. Abandoning the idea of a third helping, he moved the bowl away from him. Without touching it.
“I can lift that,” he said. “Could I lift the bombard? Roll it over the cliff?”
“No. You’d outblaze the sun, and very likely damage yourself, but nothing else would happen. And you shouldn’t be talking about it, if you think that Alojz Zauber is in league with the Wends.”
Hellfire! “I forgot that. Well, I’ll need to wear something…” He shivered as he realized where he would have to look for suitable clothes. “I’ll come back here to change, if that’s all right?”
This time he wasn’t going to ask Anton’s permission. Anton was in the solar with Vlad and Otto. Radim, the secretary, and old seneschal Jurbarkas had been allowed to sit in the other two chairs. Dali Notivova was standing by the window. They were all listening to Vlad, who was spouting a seemingly endless list of things that had to be done, with occasional prompts from Otto. Radim was frantically writing notes. So the military end of things was being attended to.
“I’ll help you.” Sybilla slunk in seductively from nowhere.
“What do you want?” Wulf demanded.
“Well, I’ll help you change if you want k if›
“Can you ride?”
She tossed her head. “Of course. I’m a Speaker. You think a dumb brute could throw me off?”
“She rides,” Justina said, frowning.
“Then come and be welcome,” Wulf said. He didn’t care what happened to the little flibbertigibbet. Only Madlenka mattered.
She was leaning over a blood-soaked table, steadying a wounded man, her hands caked in dried blood. The patient was little more than a boy, but he had taken a longbow arrow in the upper part of his chest. Descending steeply, it had probably lodged against his shoulder blade, for otherwise it would either have gone right through him or she would have tried to push it through. The burly young surgeon had cut off the excess arrow and was inserting a set of tongs, like two pointed spoons on a pivot, hoping to grip the arrowhead and crush the barbs so he could pull it out. The patient, thanks be to God, was unconscious. If his lung had been damaged or was about to be, he would probably never wake up.