Prince of Outcasts (11 page)

The gearing hummed as the train swayed and clicked onto the siding by the Athana station. There was a brief metal-on-metal screech of brakes as they stopped, a feeling of surging forward and a falling whine as the treadmills sank back to horizontal. Karl strung his longbow and set the other Mackenzies doing likewise, which was an interesting operation for those sitting down. Heuradys joined him at the door as he twitched back the cover on his quiver, sliding her longsword into the frog-sling at her belt and working her hands to full suppleness with a set of brief exercises
that were so automatic she probably wasn't consciously aware of what she was doing.

They opened the door and hopped down together and spread out to either side, and the rest of the party followed. This part of the rail platform was unwalled, a concrete pavement covered with bricks set in a herringbone pattern and a tiled roof supported on wooden posts. Órlaith rose and stretched before she buckled on the Sword of the Lady and came out last, save for Macmac at her heels. She'd been accustomed to bodyguards all her life. Though it was disturbing to know that so many people—whether ones you knew and liked or ones you knew only as faces, you passed them braced to attention in front of walls or doors—were ready to throw their bodies between you and a blade to stop that hypothetical enemy. The more so now that she'd seen real battle and some
had
died in her place.

A man she recognized as one of Baroness d'Ath's light horse commanders waited outside, in half-armor and with his well-trained mount standing motionless behind him over the dropped reins. He had the golden spurs on his heels, a wagon and a few saddled horses standing by, and ten mounted troopers behind him in open-face sallets and short-sleeved mail shirts riveted inside their jerkins, quivers on their backs and four-foot horn-and-sinew bows in the boiled-leather cases before their right knees. Their shoulders had badges in the same black-gold-and-silver arms as he wore on his breastplate, the sigil of House Ath,
sable, a delta or over a V argent
. There was a group of locals in the background gaping and slowing down and stopping in the middle of shifting stacked pallets of boxed Mason jars onto a cart as they recognized her.

Obviously the news of who was visiting hadn't leaked, which was good.

They doffed their hats and fell to one knee anyway when they saw who got off the train and the soldiers saluted fist-to-breast, since she was well-known by sight here. She absently made the gesture—hand out at waist height, then turned palm upward and fingers curled slightly—that
meant
you may rise
. She found it all slightly absurd, but custom was king of all.

The knight was a grizzled dark man tanned and windburned to leather with a patch over his left eye, a short stub middle finger on the left hand, and thinning bowl-cut black hair shot with silver like his clipped beard and mustache. She noticed that two of his command were around his age and scarred too, and the rest in their teens and disconcertingly fresh-faced. Including a pair of youngish but tough-looking girls who were shooting glances of adolescent admiration at either Heuradys, herself, or both, or both of them and Suzie and Morfind and some of the Mackenzies too. For women to take up the trade of arms was less uncommon on the d'Ath domains than elsewhere in the Protectorate.

He noticed her noticing the makeup of the horse-archers.

“My lord Diomede has most of the regular garrison and the vassals doing their annual forty days over at Castle Campscapell for the post-harvest maneuvers, Your Highness,” he said. “These are what's left.”

He took a knee for a moment and inclined his head. She extended her right hand for the kiss of homage.

“Rise, Sir Savaric,” Órlaith said, when he'd made it.

Then he bowed to his liege's daughter with the leg-forward gesture that involved touching his right-hand fingers to his brow and then sweeping them outward with the bend so that it nearly touched the ground. Faramir and Morfind got a salute and small stiff bow, which did duty for Suzie as well. He nodded casually to Sir Droyn as one equal to another, which made the very-recently-knighted nobleman fight down a grin of pure pleasure. The younger man was the son of a Count and hence much better-born than a landless retainer, but knighthood had its own hierarchies and brotherhoods and he'd just been welcomed into a select company.

“God give you good afternoon, Lady Heuradys,” Savaric said. “My lord your brother and his good Lady Ysabeau send their love, and Ygraine and Gussalin and Ismay and young Morgause as well.”

“Morgause said that?” Heuradys said. “I knew the little beast was precocious, but . . .”

“Well, she said, ‘Wanna see Auntie Herry!'”

Savaric's rather stark single brown eye went gentle for a moment. Then he went on briskly:

“They bid you visit the keep of my lord your father at Campscapell if your duty to your liege permits, since my lord Sir Diomede intends to keep the winter season at Barony Ath in the west with his lady mother and the Baroness. There's word of a muster and he wants to be at hand if . . . when . . .”

“When,” Heuradys said flatly to his raised and questioning eyebrow.

“
When
the
ban
of the Association is called to arms.”

Órlaith nodded to herself, mentally noting that she
would
see that Heuradys got time to visit.

She enjoys her nieces so!

It had been a while since Ysabeau's difficult last pregnancy, after a close-set series; there would probably be no more.

So Ygraine's the heir of Ath in her generation, and she idolizes Herry and wants to follow in her footsteps to knighthood, too, and her parents sound as if they're reluctantly willing. I can have her attached to my household when this thing with Mother is cleared up, that'll mean her seeing the Kingdom beyond the Protectorate too.

Associate pages were expected to put up with a certain amount of hazing and hardship as part of their training; getting them out of their own privileged family settings and on their own among their peers while still young was part of the reason for the system, as well as forging bonds between families. A page was a very lowly form of life in a noble household, in practice if not theory subordinate to most of the commoner servants and run off their feet between drill, classes and duties. The baboon-troop jostling and bullyragging among the pack of pages in a castle could be quite a bit worse for a girl, though.

Easier to keep a close eye on her in a small menie, which mine will be until I come of Crown age, and Herry will be there to help. Maybe she could be Herry's squire in a few years, or mine if we get on and she shapes well. I'd like to do her family a favor.

She swung into the saddle of the waiting courser with a half-skip and a vault; it was good to be on a horse again after the ordeal of sitting still for a day and night, and feel the lively interaction between rider and mount as the great muscles moved between her knees. The rest of her party did likewise, except for the Mackenzies who slung the gear into the waiting wagon and trotted along on foot. Children who'd been playing in the slightly scruffy soccer field and baseball diamond and tournament track that separated the train station from the village stopped to stare, many running back home as fast as they could accompanied by barking mutts and yelling shrilly themselves.

Athana Manor was bigger and more complex than most, since it was the heart of a barony and provided specialist services for the other settlements on Harfang. In fact, by now it was trembling on the verge of being a town. That was marked by the fact that a second church was under construction behind a maze of scaffolding, and confirmed by the multiple workshops of smiths and carpenters and wheelwrights and leatherworkers and more, and the fact that there were actual full-time stores rather than traveling peddlers on market-days. It was also neater, more uniform and more efficiently laid out than many, because it had been purpose-built on vacant land to a set plan by experts starting well after the Change, rather than cobbled together by fumbling amateurs in a desperate emergency from whatever was to hand and then improved later catch-as-catch-can.

I'm more at home in the dúthchas among Mackenzies, at seventh and last, but this is a good place,
Órlaith thought.

A roadway of compacted crushed rock ran from the sheds and stables of the railway station through the village proper on its way to the manor house, lined with copper beeches now casting a welcome shade beneath their reddish-purple leaves on this hot dry summer's day. The whitewashed, tile-roofed, rammed-earth cottages of the peasants and craftsmen were on dusty-brown tree-lined lanes, each steading in its rectangular toft with sheds and gardens and chicken-coops at the rear and flowers or perhaps a trellised rose or honeysuckle in front.

Folk in coarse homespun were busy about the day, the ceaseless chores and working on things like roofs and fences and general tidying-up after the shattering all-hands labor of the Harvest. Most just bobbed their heads, but Boudicca jumped in cat-quick to rescue one basket of eggs dropped when a towhead girl barely old enough for the double tunics, headscarf and wooden clogs of womanhood suddenly recognized the Crown Princess. The air was full of the scents of pickling and canning and bottling and smoking and drying foodstuffs to be packed away in cellars and sheds for the cold season, as well as the inevitable smells of horse and woodsmoke.

They clattered through a stone-paved central square with its church in the Italo-Gothic style still bedecked with sheaves from the Harvest mass, tavern sporting a creaking low-relief sign carved and colored to show a drunken owl lying on its back with a mug in one claw, and shops and worksteads and the long weaving-shed that doubled as town hall and site for dances.

The houses grew larger and the gardens broader and brighter as you went south towards the lord's dwelling, until there were some quite substantial ones built around courtyards for the married gentry staff like Sir Savaric who didn't live in, and a square of barracks set by itself with stables and corrals.

The manor-house proper sat on its own gentle south-facing slope some distance away and a bit higher for the view. They entered through a fretted metal gate; there was a whitewashed wall topped with wrought-iron work and lined with cedars that enclosed lawns and terraced gardens, banks of flowers and clipped shrubberies and scattered trees and a swimming pool behind hedges and windbreaks. A small herd of ornamental white-spotted fallow deer stood in a clump and stared in horror at the Mackenzie greathounds, who in turn covertly looked back as they padded along at heel and let their tongues lap at their noses in interest. A peacock glared with offended aggression, gave its raucous cry and then stalked off past a row of espaliered fruit-trees. Gardeners stood and bowed as they
clattered through the gates, busy getting ready for the cold season after the Harvest rush.

The E-shaped Great House was rammed earth too, the more expensive variety with five parts in a hundred of cement mixed in, three stories covered in a warm cream stucco with just a hint of reddish gold, picked out by colored tile arches over the doors and windows. The drive that led to the main entryway curled around a burbling fountain surrounded by elongated leaping bronze greyhounds. A five-story square tower at one corner had an open top floor to accommodate the heliograph, and also had tracks for mounting a nine-pounder usually kept disassembled in the basement.

The whole rather Iberian-Gothic composition was so charming that you took a minute to realize that there was a dry moat disguised by a ha-ha, and the fact that all the exterior windows were too narrow for a man to climb through, and could be slammed closed in moments by loopholed steel shutters just as strong and fireproof as the yard-thick walls. It wasn't a castle, but it was definitely defensible against anything short of a formal attack with artillery and siege gear.

A fortyish man in a black-and-white tabard holding a white staff of office stood at the front doors, which were high blond oak over a steel core and studded with octagonal bosses of black lacquered iron. He made a knee to Órlaith and bowed deeply to Heuradys as they dismounted and handed off their reins to the grooms, with the heads of the various staff divisions doing the same in the background.

“Your Highness. My lady Heuradys,” he said, with a slightly strained smile.

He contemplated a somewhat out-of-favor Princess who nonetheless was heir to the throne, accompanied by more than a dozen rowdy young warriors, mostly pagans from beyond the Association lands with God-knew-what uncouth customs and unreasonable expectations. All this just when he'd expected months of having the place to himself while he put everything in painstaking order.

“Sir Droyn. My . . . ah . . . honored guests of the house.”

Heuradys grinned. “Don't worry, Goodman Paein,” she said. “This is the last disruption for a while, I promise.”

“Shining pearl within the crimson sky

Guide me in the coming night—

Perfect seed within a humble husk

Ground my feet in soil so I may rise—

Patient leaf within the endless pool

Calm me when the torrent falls—

Gentle wind within the slanting grass

Bear me ever on until I rest!”

Órlaith lowered her arms and slid the sheathed Sword of the Lady she'd laid across her palms back to her swordbelt's frog-sling; since her father died she'd taken up his habit of holding it so when she made the Farewell to the setting Sun. Then she turned from the balcony and stepped back into the suite, looking around the bedchamber's expanse of smooth pale tile.

The floor was a geometry of cream squares edged with green vines, and the French doors she'd just used opened onto balconies with their decorative wrought-iron balustrades overlooking the fountain, walkways and gardens in the courtyard below. She sighed happily at the comforting familiarity. This was the suite the Royal family usually got on visits. Like many modern manor houses, it was made up with interior inner-facing windows and glass doors for the light excluded by solid exterior walls. There was a big fireplace with a carved stone surround of owls and vines, swept and garnished with dried wildflowers for summer, but discreet bronze grill vents showed a central heating system, and the frosted globes of the gaslights glowed brightly now that the sun was on the horizon westward.