Soulvine 03 A Bright and Terrible Sword (28 page)

What would the Brotherhood, and Soulvine Moor, do to us if they recaptured us? The rescue was for the old man, but we would be rich prizes as well. Roger
Kilbourne, who had killed their centre of power, his mad half-sister. Rawley Kilbourne, a leader of the
hisafs
fighting the Brotherhood.

My father put his ear next to mine, so that even Maggie could not hear. I felt something hard and cold put into my good hand.

‘If it comes to that, kill Maggie first, as cleanly as you can, and then yourself. Do it, Roger. They have vowed to torture her while you are forced to watch. I will do Charlotte and Rawnie.’ And he was gone, crawling from beneath the wagon and vaulting onto the box above.

My mind reeled. Torture Maggie and Charlotte and Rawnie while we were forced to watch … I had not imagined that much cruelty and revenge. The dagger felt twisting and poisonous in my hand, as if it were something alive. I thought,
I cannot do it
.

Nor could I bear the alternative. So I lay there, frozen, and watched the battle, concentrating everything in me on what was happening out there, to avoid what was happening within me.

I cannot do it
.

I must
.

I cannot
.

Maggie said something and although I was aware of her voice buzzing in my ear, the words were meaningless. I may even have pushed her slightly away. Nor did I look for Jee. I concentrated on the battle as if I were fighting in it.

And so I saw when it happened.

More of Lord Robert’s men had fallen. One, an arrow in his back, had tipped forward and lay half in, half out of the mire, which was slowly sucking him down. Some of the Soulviners, too, had fallen, but nowhere near enough. Hidden by the tor with its boulders, they had the advantage of position, despite their lack of armour.
Lord Robert turned to shout an order to the rearguard, and I saw the despair on his handsome face.

Then, all at once, the enemy
guns
ceased.

The enemy arrows did not fly.

And an image appeared in my mind, so hard and clear and shocking that I may have called out. Or not – I don’t know. I do know that Maggie cried out as did, somewhere behind me, Jee.

The first Soulviner tumbled from behind the top of the tor.

Her body seemed to fall slowly, bouncing off rocks in a tumble that must have broken bones, except that she was already dead. Another warrior, a young man, followed her down. Two more slumped from behind a boulder. They were immediately fired upon by Lord Robert’s men, but there was no need. They, too, were dead.

Even Lord Robert’s disciplined soldiers fell utterly silent, looking at each other in wild fear.

The Soulvine warriors cried out and began to scramble away from their hiding places. Lord Robert’s soldiers rushed to attack – then paused, utterly bewildered. One by one the enemy fell to the rocky ground, tumbling off the tor, thudding into the gorse, falling to the very edge of the mire. All cries ceased.

Silence stretched for an entire minute. Two, three. The image left my mind as abruptly as it had appeared. But I knew what was out there, and that in just a moment the first of them would appear. They waited for me. Or possibly for Jee.

Both of us raced up to the dumbfounded Lord Robert, me puffing with the exertion, Jee’s face tense as lute strings. ‘Ye maun not kill them!’ Jee shouted, at the same time that I gave my one and only order to a Lord Commander of The Queendom: ‘Hold your fire!’

‘Upon who?’ Lord Robert blurted, just as the first of
the web women staggered from behind the closest boulder, fell to her knees, and fainted.

‘They were snakes,’ I said, inadequately. Lord Robert looked at me as if I were crazed.

Again the vanished image burned in my mind, as clear as when it had come to me a moment ago. A small snake, grey as the rocks it slithered among, small enough to glide unnoticed to an ankle above a leather boot, to a wrist resting on a rock, to a neck backed up against a cliff face. To strike from a crack in the rock, from beneath a clump of gorse or bracken, from behind a pile of rubble slid off the tor. A small grey snake with a thin white line down its back, its little fangs filled with lethal and instantaneous poison. A dozen small snakes, that only yesterday had been guised as the women’s own soul-sharers, patiently moving unseen beside Lord Robert’s army, waiting for the necessary moment. And when it came, all the web women became snakes, slithered between and among the rocks and gorse, and struck. Again and again.

The soldiers panicked, but so good was Lord Robert’s discipline that none fired upon the girls that now appeared, strewn around the moor like so many cut flowers. Most of them gasped for breath, pale as summer clouds, and I saw that one had already died.

Everything has a cost, Roger Kilbourne – when will you learn that?

‘
Snakes?
’ Lord Robert said. His men stood with raised weapons,
gun
or sword or knife or bow, looking wildly around for something else to shoot, their faces twisted with terror and uncomprehending anger. ‘I
said
hold your fire!’

Two women climbed down from the tor, unaffected by their return to human form. One was Nell.

Lord Robert scowled at Nell, whom he knew only as Charlotte’s serving woman. She strode up to him, fearless, and said, ‘Well done, Lord Robert. Where is Rawley?’

He was there then, beside me, Rawnie racing to keep up with him. Nell said to my father, ‘You are an idiot.’

He said coldly, ‘We thank you for your assistance. Now you may go.’

Rawnie said loudly, ‘But Papa, what
happened
?’

Nell said, ‘Do not do this thing, Rawley. We will stop you, if we must.’

My father said, ‘You cannot.’

Rawnie said, ‘Stop
what
? Roger, what happened?’

Jee grabbed Rawnie and pulled her aside. She struggled but I heard him hiss, ‘Stop! Have ye no sense? Come away!’

Lord Robert said, ‘I will have an explanation, and I will have it immediately. Roger?’

Everyone looked at me, and in the eyes of my father and of the two women I read warning:
Say little. This is not Lord Robert’s war
.

But it was. Children had been stolen from The Queendom, their lives extinguished to feed the immortality so ruthlessly sought by Soulvine Moor. It was Lord Robert who had rescued Rawley from Galtryf, and the men of his command who lay dead on the ground around us and in the foul mire. Lord Robert had a right to know what had occurred here. Curse this eternal secrecy among those who should be allies!

Or was I merely eager to defy my father?

I repeated, ‘They were snakes, Lord Robert. All these girls and women. They are … are women of the soul arts, which I think that Queen Caroline may have mentioned to you. They can guise themselves as animals, and these women you see became small poisonous snakes
that all at once, upon a signal, struck at the Soulviners as you fought this morning.’

He gaped at me. I saw the word form on his lips:
Witches
. I saw the word die, perhaps too inadequate to be uttered aloud. I saw his mind seize on the one thing he could, as a soldier, understand.

He said, ‘I neither heard nor saw any signal!’

It had been the image in my mind, that hard and clear image of a snake. And I knew it had come to all of them at the same moment, thus coordinating the attack, through the only means possible for such complex communication. The image had come to each of the web women, and to me, through the conduit: my infant son.

But I could not tell Lord Robert that. Not only had I strained his belief too far already, I would do nothing to alert anyone else to the existence of Maggie’s and my child. All at once I became aware of her by my side, clutching my good arm.

I said, ‘I am not privy to the methods of the women of the soul arts.’

Lord Robert said harshly, ‘Nor are you in your full wits, Roger, a thing I have always suspected. You talk nonsense!’ He glared at me, then turned to my father. ‘What happened here?’

‘I have no idea,’ Rawley said.

‘You, woman – where did you come from? You and these other maids?’

Nell gazed at him and said nothing.

There is a limit to what a man can accept. Lord Robert had been ‘witched’ from the banks of the River Thymar to Galtryf, far out on Soulvine Moor. He had been forced to accept me, the erstwhile queen’s fool, in the body of a moor cur, and then had seen me returned to my own form, nearly dying in the effort. He knew about
hisafs
crossing from the land of the living to the Country of
the Dead. He had seen reports of the tranced children, perhaps even seen some of the babes for himself. But he could go no further. The web women and their guising arts were new territory for him, and he could not make himself enter it. So do some animals stake out their hunting or mating grounds, and then never go beyond them. I saw the moment that Lord Robert rejected Nell, Rawley, me as completely as if we did not stand before him under the fast-rising summer sun.

He pointed southwest. ‘My men and I are returning to The Queendom. You and your troupe of half-wit actors may do as you choose. We travel at your pace no longer. I have duties to my sovereign, Her Grace Queen Stephanie, and I will return to her to perform those duties.’ And to his men, ‘Bury the dead. We march for home within the hour.’

Lord Robert strode off, and his men, after exchanging stupefied looks, sprang to follow his orders. I could feel their relief, like a ripple of wind in tall grass.

My father said, ‘They will find it difficult to bury the dead in peat.’

Nell faced him. ‘You must not kill him, Rawley. You must not even think of it.’

My father snapped, ‘I have thanked you for your assistance. You may go.’ He turned his back and walked away.

Nell started after him. I caught her arm, afraid that she might turn back into a snake and slay him right then and there. ‘Wait, Nell! Let me try first!’

She glared at me, but nodded.

I ran to catch up with my father. ‘I would talk with you for a moment!’

‘What is it, Roger?’ He did not slow. I caught his sleeve and yanked him to a stop.

‘Rawnie says we journey to Hygryll. Why?’

‘That is not your concern.’

‘I say that it is.’

He looked at me then, truly looked at me. His face, so like my own, took on an expression so intricate and layered that it was like the riddle boxes I had seen at court: box within box within box, all connected by delicate wooden levers without which the whole would come apart. On my father’s face I saw – or thought I saw, for I too was part of the boxes and levers – a profound sorrow housed by guilt housed by a ruthless determination to accomplish his own ends by his own means. And all of it coloured by something in his eyes that did not look quite sane.

More shaken than I wished to show, I repeated, ‘Why are we taking this old man to Hygryll?’

He did not answer, striding off alone in the direction of the tor. Behind me, I felt Nell’s eyes watch him go.

24

Lord Robert left us two wagons, one containing Harbinger, but it did us little good since he left no horses. When he found it impossible to bury his dead soldiers in the springy peat the remainder of his army piled their dead, wrapped in blankets, into the other two wagons and had all four horses draw them. The ponies carried their supplies. We watched Lord Robert march his men away, towards The Queendom.

Jee went with them. ‘I maun return to my lady,’ he said to me.

‘I know you must,’ I said.

Maggie reached out a hand to grasp Jee, thought better of it, let her hand drop. She said, ‘Thank you, Jee. I can never thank you enough.’

‘When ye be home, send a courier to me,’ Jee said, in the strangest mixture of his old loyalties and his new court life that I had heard yet. Maggie smiled, nodded, and kissed him.

Rawnie barrelled up. ‘Jee, do you march with Lord Robert?’

‘I do. Good day to ye.’

‘Good riddance,’ Rawnie sniffed, and flounced off. She had never liked Jee upstaging her, just as once she had disliked me for the same reason.

Maggie and I rested in the sun, on the south side of the tor. On the other side, in the shade and hidden by the rock, lay the web women who had become snakes. Two had died; I don’t know what Nell and her companions
had done with their bodies. The others seemed to be recovering quickly. Maggie had organized food and water for them. Charlotte had taken Rawnie to hunt for grouse eggs not far off. I did not know where my father was.

Not that there were many places to go. The desolate moor stretched away in all directions, rising land to the south and undulating scrub everywhere else. The scrub was dotted with grey boulders, rocky tors, and the deeper green of bog pools and mires. Nothing moved under the morning sun except the retreating army.

Jee pointed south. ‘Ye be no more than a day’s walk to the border of The Queendom. If that be where Rawley wants to take ye.’

It wasn’t, but I would burden Jee with no further knowledge. ‘Thank you. Good-bye, Jee.’

‘I maun go to my lady, or I would stay to aid ye.’

‘I know you must. Keep well, Jee. We will meet again.’

He ran across the moor, expertly keeping to the hummocks and other higher ground, following Lord Robert’s army. I watched until he, and they, were out of sight.

Maggie put her hand in mine. ‘Nell still will not tell me where Tom is!’

‘Better that you not know,’ I said.

‘How can you say that, Roger?’ But the words lacked conviction. The attack by Soulvine warriors had badly shaken her. Maggie was meant for small, efficient, bustling worlds that she could control: a kitchen. An inn. A cook house. A farm. In these larger affairs her courage never failed her, but her assurance did. And she had just seen what the web women could do. They were better protection for our child than were his stranded parents or ruthless grandfather.

Which raised a question in my mind: Did Rawley even know Maggie and I had a son? I didn’t think so. Nell certainly would not have told him.

As I sat on the moor trying to decide what we should do next, Nell ran full-tilt from the other side of the tor towards the tented wagon. When I saw her face, I knew immediately where my father was. ‘Stay here!’ I said to Maggie, who called after me but, for once, did not follow.