Tale of Elske (29 page)

WITH THE ARMY STRETCHED OUT
behind, they left the river. The King's Way ran north between low fences, through rough, brown fields. Dugald asked Elske about the Wolfers, telling her, “I've chased after one of the war bands, and raised my sword to its rear guard, and I have fought against those who buy the time for their fellows to escape. They don't fear death as we do.”

She agreed. “They fear only the Volkking, and the shame of cowardice.”

“And what do you fear, Elske?”

Elske considered, to give him the true answer. “I fear for the safety of Beriel.”

“Not for your own safety? Not for mine?”

Elske considered. “No,” she answered.

His shout of laughter caused the nearby soldiers to fall silent, so he spoke more quietly to tell her, “When we are at Hildebrand's city, there will be a council of war. I think, I would wish people to know you are Wolfer, so that we can hear your advice about our enemy. I give my pledge for your safety,” he promised.

The army traveled at some speed along the King's Way, passing solitary cottages, farmhouses with their outbuildings, inns and villages. Sometimes, people gathered to watch them pass, and all their faces seemed stilled by fear. They feared even to hope, Elske thought. The green shirts of the soldiers from the south at least earned a look of surprise, and a man might whisper into his neighbor's ear, or point out to a child Northgate's heir.

At the Ram's Head Inn, Elske slept under a roof, in her own chamber. She dined with Dugald, waited on by the redheaded innkeeper, Win's brother.

Their host could not speak four words without putting in “my Lord” or “my honored Lord.” His wife bustled in and out, as he apologized for the simple fare—“Had we known, my honored Lord, that you would dine with us, my Lord”—but dared to hope that the inn's wine, “made from the family vineyard, would please my noble Lord.” He offered clean napkins, his wife offered a chair to make Lord Dugald more comfortable, until finally Dugald tried to divert his hosts by saying, “I have news of your brother, if you would hear it.”

They stood with their hands folded in front of their aprons, to hear, and what they heard gave them unease. The innkeeper pulled ruminatively at his red beard, but his wife could not hold her tongue. “He ever did seek to serve that Princess,” she said, to her husband. “She magicked him that summer, over the hanging of your uncle, and you know how Win is. Stubborn-hearted.”

“He's ever been too quick to pity,” the host agreed, sadly.

Elske spoke up. “Win is loyal to his Queen.”

“Aye, and it'll be just that loyalty that will get him a traitor's death,” Win's brother said. “And if I know my brother, he'll say she's done him fair.”

“If that's what he gets, I'll be hanged beside him,” Dugald told them and their host asked uneasily, “What mean you, my Lord?”

Dugald answered plainly. “I mean that if a brother seizes the crown from his sister who is the firstborn, then
he
is the traitor, as are all who follow him.”

“Aye, and I know nothing of that,” the wife said. “But I know they're cowards who follow Guerric into the safety of Arborford, and leave their own people undefended.”

Her husband tried to shush her. “Here is Northgate's heir,” he pointed out, “and he brings soldiers from Sutherland to join his father's army, to protect us.”

“Aye, and there's no protection against these Wolfers,” she lamented. “They move secretly, and in packs, they never stand to fight. And it is the worse, now, for now they take revenge, too.” She turned to Dugald, “They eat the flesh of children!” she cried. “Women who fall into their hands go mad with pain, and shame, and fear, before they die. You must promise me, you'll slay me, Husband—I'll slay my daughters, I can do that—if those—”

“Hush,” he tried to soothe her frenzy. “I'll not keep you here if they come close.”

“You fool! They give no warning. Do you think the pigman would not have sent his daughter away? You saw the bodies, Husband. It's you who are the dreamer and fool, not Win. His enemy fights honestly—and speaks his language. Maybe he was the clever one, to leave you here without his arm at such a time—”

“She is afraid,” the host apologized. “My Lord, I ask you to remember that our children are young, and she is afraid for them. We'll leave you, my honored Lord, to your dinner.”

“Don't tell me there's nothing to fear!” his wife cried.

The host bowed to Lord Dugald, and bowed to Elske, too, as he drew his wife out of the long room, leaving them alone.

Dugald lifted his spoon and dipped it into his bowl of meat stew, but he didn't eat. Elske did not even lift her spoon.

“I need a map,” Dugald said, but not to her. “Hildebrand will have one.”

He took a bite then, chewed and swallowed. He drank a swallow of the wine. “I've let myself make a pleasure journey, and my people in danger.”

He drank of the wine again, and poured more from the pitcher into his goblet. Then he did raise his face, his eyes as mute as boulders, to ask Elske, “How could you be as you are and have lived among Wolfers?”

Elske shook her head. She could not answer his question.

“Tell me,” Lord Dugald insisted.

If he wished to insist, then Elske wished to make the attempt. “I was a girl,” she said, “and among the Volkaric—” but he interrupted her, “Who are these Volkaric?”

“Those whom you call Wolfers. Among the Volkaric,” she began again, and this time he did not interrupt her, “women are nothing, useless in battle, useless to win treasure. They remain near their houses—as do the women of Trastad, both the great Varinnes and their servants—to sew and scrub and cook, to care for children. Among the Volkaric, the best of a woman is to bear sons. I lived among the Volkaric as women everywhere live,” Elske told Dugald. “Except Beriel,” she said. Then she added, “All women except Beriel, who would be Queen.”

As she spoke, Dugald looked into her face, and looked still into her face. “How could they ask your death of you, being who you are?” he asked, but it was a protest, not a question. “And how could they ask you to know what your death was to be?”

“If it were kept a secret,” Elske explained, “there would have been no revenge on my grandmother. I was their revenge on her. Whenever anyone saw me, they remembered how my death would come and so our life was better when all knew what my death would be.”

“It was ill done,” Dugald said plainly. He asked her then, “So you would have no secrets?”

“My Lord?”

“It is a simple question, a simple policy: Do you believe secrets should be kept, and that the people should be kept in ignorance?”

Elske considered what secrets she had known, and kept, and which she had spoken of, before she said, “I believe that there are some secrets dangerous to their possessors, should they be known.” She was thinking of the secret of the black powder, which she held unbeknownst to any other, not even Var Jerrol, who had assumed she could not comprehend what she had heard; for otherwise—this she knew—he would have had her killed. “And surely those who do not know secrets can live most easily, in this world. For the day, at least.”

“For the day,” he echoed, doubtfully.

“It is not a simple question,” she told him.

“You've heard of the black powder,” he told her.

Elske didn't wonder how he knew that of her. She just answered him truthfully. “Yes.”

“A deeply kept secret, and no man knows where it comes from so that he may get it for his own use, even against Wolfers,” Lord Dugald said.

Elske corrected him. “Men know where it comes from, and where to buy it, and even how to make it. I learned how to make it,” she told him, trusting him, “from a man who revealed the ingredients and their proportions before he died. He gave up his secret so that he would live, but he died because he no longer possessed it. This was among the merchants of Trastad.”

Lord Dugald looked into her face again. “Is this a secret that should be kept?”

“I think, no,” she answered.

“But the people,” he said, and waved his hand in the direction of the door through which the host and his wife had withdrawn. “If the people are so afraid of Wolfers—who are only men after all—how much will they be crazed by fear of the black powder, which is a hundred times more heartless than any Wolfer, and is moreover magic?”

“It is not magic,” Elske told him. “Any man might make it.”

“Can we? Have we the time?” Lord Dugald asked, and when she shook her head he smiled ruefully. “Well, it's too dangerous a weapon to take lightly up, as if it were no more than a pretty dagger. And the Wolfers do not stand as still as city walls, so it could not serve against them. Yet I would like to be so strongly weaponed.”

“Beriel also wishes to have it,” Elske said. “Ask of me what help you need, for the Wolfers must not come killing here. In Beriel's Kingdom. In Northgate's lands.”

“Can they be stopped?” he asked. He answered his own question, “How can I know unless I make the attempt? Are you willing to die in this cause, Elske?”

“Yes.”

“Because it is Beriel's cause,” he said. “Well, so am I, although I cannot be so willing for
you
to die. On some Wolfer blade or at the end of a traitor's rope, we may all die in Beriel's cause.”

Elske had never seen a man hanged, but she saw in her mind Dugald so dangling, dead, and her heart twisted in her chest.

“Elske?” he asked, watching her face. “What is it? Did you not know the dangers you faced?”

“I knew my danger,” she said, “but—”

“As Beriel knows hers, I promise you. It is in Beriel's cause, and that is a good one,” he reassured her. “Few understand this of her, but I have known her from a child and seen how she masks her true heart. I know that if one of her people bleeds, Beriel bleeds. If fire scorches the land, Beriel has the scar. Can you ride through the night, Elske?”

“Yes,” she said, and he was not surprised at her answer.

T
HE LORDS AND THEIR CAPTAINS
gathered together in Hildebrand's great hall, where the long table had a map unrolled onto it. The Lords were seated in high-backed chairs, and their captains stood behind them. Lord Dugald had Elske seated beside him.

A fire burned in the great fireplace, taking the chill off the air, and the stone walls of the hall were hung with woven carpets. Through the unshuttered windows a mild blue sky shone over the low roofs of Hildebrand's city. The army waited beyond the city walls for the decisions being debated now, in this hall, and Elske would have felt more at ease among the soldiers.

Lord Hildebrand was an aging man, his thin hair silvery, his cheeks sunken; he coughed, and drank wine to soothe his throat, and kept his eye on Dugald, to learn the younger man's thoughts. Hildebrand's heir, a square-jawed man of middle years, sat the length of the table from his father, and kept his eyes on the map as if only his vigilance kept it flat on the table. One of Dugald's brothers, Thorold, had been sent by the Earl, and with him came four other Lords, all younger sons, all bringing troops in response to Northgate's appeal.

The map showed the whole Kingdom, and the men discussed how they might defend it. Troops were kept in plenty to guard the cities, but there was no protection for the villages, nor for the isolated holdings, all easy prey. The map showed these habitations and villages, as well as the cities. Northgate's demesne spread between the river to the east and the foothills to the west; mountains bordered the northern parts and thick forests guarded the south. Lakes were plentiful among the wooded foothills. The map did not mark the cities of the south, Celindon and Selby, nor the northern city of Trastad. Pericol was only a phrase: HOUSES HERE. It was as if in all the world, there was only this Kingdom.

White pebbles marked the places where the Wolfers had struck at the end of the last summer, and these were all gathered in the southern and western parts of Northgate's lands. For each homestead or village looted, burned, destroyed, there was a white pebble on the map. There was no marking for the lives lost. The men studied the map to see where a fortress might be built, to be garrisoned to patrol and guard the western and southern borders; or wouldn't a line of walled castles make a stronger defense?

Looking at the map, Elske could guess that the Wolfers had entered the Kingdom from the south, although she didn't know how they had found their way to its borders, whether they had been led by some trader who hoped by the favor to gain his life, or if some Wolfer bands, lost and wandering homewards, had stumbled into this unknown land. She guessed that there had been at least three Wolfer bands entering together and then, when they saw what lay before them, separating, each to pursue its own chances. They would have joined up again where they had parted, to return together to the Volkking.