The Fox (45 page)

They studied him now. He was tall and strong and all five remembered those stories about his winning a battle against overwhelmingly superior numbers of Idayagans when he was barely out of the academy.

“Now,” said one, with a sideways glance, and they charged.

Even charging they waited for one another to be the first to strike and so the Sierlaef ripped his knife across the lead man’s throat and on the backswing opened the belly of a second one.

The remaining three shouted and lunged at him. Two, each now determined to be the first to strike, fouled one another’s blades. Aldren-Sierlaef backed up, hoping to get to the doorway so they couldn’t come at him from the side.

The last man wheeled and blocked the door as the other two found their footing and attacked more efficiently.

And so, though the heir fought hard, he took more wounds than he gave. He managed to strike one himself and shove another into his companion’s downswung blade, but by then he was dizzy from blood loss. The first assailant dropped hard, kicking senselessly. The second folded to the floor in a faint. The Sierlaef slashed the man’s throat to finish him, then stumbled back through the doorway to his bedchamber. The last man, who had stood in the outer door to block it, now charged after him and arrived before the Sierlaef, who was breathing harshly, faint with pain and rapid blood loss, could get the door closed. The man whipped his cavalry sword in a vicious uppercut and buried the point in the king’s son’s heart.

The noises the Sierlaef made, the way he fell to his knees onto the carpet and then half rose again, groping with his knife, thoroughly unnerved the man. He did not see the promise of reward so much as the flogging post if he were caught here, and so he flung down the sword and ran.

The Sierlaef lay on the crimson carpet his grandmother had given him, where when he was small he’d loved to work his toes after a long bath. It was soft under his cheek, and so he lay there, his gaze on that cavalry sword gleaming dully so far away. Aware of only pain and thirst, of anger, because he knew why they had come. The king had a right! But slowly the world began to diminish, all meaning narrowing to that sword. If he could just reach it—

Ah. His hand touched steel, and he gripped it until all pain, anger, and question washed away in the coolness of night.

Kialen watched the man with the blood-stained blue-and-yellow tunic run by, looking neither to the right nor the left. Terror kept her there in the welcoming shadows, where comforting voices whispered from far away.

If she waited, still and quiet, maybe they would sing.

Hadand had sent Tesar the shortest way to the arms mistress; they met outside the queen’s rooms. “Fighting,” Hadand said, breathing fast. “Why doesn’t my aunt order the city bells to lockdown?”

The arms mistress said, “Not invaders. Yvana-Vayir, Marlo-Vayir. And one of our own scouts just arrived with the word that Choraed Elgaer is coming.”

Was this screaming and fighting related to the news about Barend that her mother’s Runner had brought from Choraed Elgaer? No time to find out—these warriors were
here
. In the castle itself. Hadand pressed her knuckles into her eyes. The women trained for generations for these moments. “My place is to guard the queen. Until we get orders from either Ndara-Harandviar or the king, you defend yourselves only if attacked. Otherwise, remind them that to draw weapons in the king’s house is to be forsworn.”

“If they fight?” the arms mistress asked, her emotions betrayed only by the sharpening of her voice.

“Since these are Marlovans, try to disarm and disable, not to kill, unless they try to kill you. Then strike swiftly. Take no commands from any one of them, no matter what rank.”

The arms mistress agreed, gripping her knife handle.

“Go now to secure all the public halls. Don’t let any Marlo-Vayir or Yvana-Vayir men cut any building off.” And to her own women, “Guard the hall outside the queen’s chamber—bows as well as knives. Let no one in. Let no one
near
.” Back to the arms mistress, “And you’d better send a girl to ring the bells for city lockdown. My aunt can always countermand, but having the city quiet seems a good idea.”

Everyone agreed—the city knew that lockdown meant
Get behind your doors and lock them
. Anyone out could, and would, be struck down without question.

The arms mistress loped off, issuing orders to the women who had assembled in stairs and archways, waiting in silence.

Hadand glanced back but saw no sign of Kialen, and hoped she was safe in the hidden chamber.
I should have brought her,
Hadand thought, but then she shook her head and opened the door, smoothing down her gown. Kialen’s mind was slowly drifting to a place none of them knew, far from the real world. Any violence she witnessed might shred the last few threads of her hold on sanity. And what if these attackers came to kill the queen?

On Hadand’s entrance, Queen Wisthia felt some of her terror ease, only to be replaced by a rush of anger. She too had heard the war horns, the shouts, the running feet. “What is it?” she demanded.

“I do not know. But with your permission I will find out. My women are on guard—”

Wisthia rose to her feet, a tall, elegant woman who even after nearly thirty years of marriage to a Marlovan still moved, dressed, and especially thought like an Adrani. “Don’t leave!” she commanded. Her own women stared, shocked and frightened. “Don’t leave me alone with these barbarians. I always knew they would turn on one another like wolves in the wild. Worse, because wolves do not train their young with steel.”

The low, venomous voice went on and on, releasing decades of pent-up emotion. The Adrani women who had followed their mistress into her long exile forced themselves to sit silently, stitching with exquisite care the butterflies on sashes, the new fashion from home, each stitch counted out in heartbeats, as if order could be restored by will alone.

Hadand sat motionless, trying not to hear the trembling voice whispering invective against her people, as she wondered where Ndara was—and the king.

Taumad and Inda lifted the oars, rode a wave, then back-watered the boat to the newly-repaired dock. They shipped their oars.

Captain Ramis had been right about Lindeth offering anything they needed by way of repairs, either free or at bargain prices, once they heard the news. Not that they’d believed Inda’s people. Several boats had sailed with them for protection, southern traders known in Lindeth Harbor, and it was to them that the Lindeth people had listened.

Inda had seen during the very first exchange that their gratitude for the defeat of the pirates was tempered by fear. The harbormaster himself had visited each of the fleet of traders that had followed Inda north. Some had lowered boats, just to boom them up again after the harbormaster’s gig rowed away.

When at last the harbormaster was brought to
Death,
the harbor folk’s upturned faces were pale but determined as the harbormaster stated that Elgar send one person ashore—not himself—to negotiate. He could only come ashore to pay just before his departure and none of his crew was permitted ashore at any time.

“We’ve had too much destruction here,” the old harbormaster said, his gaze shifting uneasily from Fox to Inda. “Don’t want more, so we’re not telling anyone who you are, and we won’t let those traders that came in on your stern come ashore until you’re gone.”

Inda wondered who he thought would attack and then realized with a sick sense the harbormaster was afraid of the Marlovans that Inda had glimpsed on patrol through his glass.

Inda did not want to tell them why he himself felt obliged to avoid the Marlovans, so he just agreed.

He’d sent Dasta to negotiate, as he’d been raised by beekeepers a little farther down the coast. Dasta—wearing a sashed sailor’s smock and deck trousers, his sun-browned features unremarkable, his manner slow and easy except on the deck of an enemy—seemed the least piratical of the crew.

When Dasta returned, leading a fleet of supply boats and carpenters, he had reported, “When we’re done loading you’ll deal with the guild mistress. They are all afraid of you.”

“I gathered that.”

“As for news, no one knows anything of interest to us. They don’t communicate with the Marlovans except if they have to. The pirate attacks have kept them fairly isolated. They were full of questions about the Brotherhood’s defeat.”

Inda’s mind returned to the present when the boat bumped up against the floating dock. He and Tau tied the boat up, then looked at one of the barnacle-stippled pilings to check the flow of the tide, mentally gauging how long they could stay ashore.

Tau climbed up the seaweed-wrapped stairs to the pier. Inda stamped on the new planks of wood to get the feel of land under his feet again; he tried to envision the old harbor and the Pims’ hiring table, but too much had changed.

Home. He was on Iascan soil again, though briefly. And not under his name, so he was not strictly breaking Captain Sindan’s orders, but oh, the familiar smells, even in winter, cast him right back again to that terrible summer day when they first arrived here . . .

Inda had been silent too long. A glance showed Tau that Inda’s gaze had already gone distant. So Tau led the way up the dock toward the jumble of small houses patched together with wood and stone, their rows of windows, some dark and fire-marked, jagged teeth of glass still thrusting up or down, others alive with a dim golden glow.

Inda, blinded by the stream of images and emotions of the past, did not see the transformed harbor, much less individuals in the present, but Tau—on the watch for the king’s gray-coated warriors—measured each pair of eyes he encountered, then moved on when he saw no threat. There was no threat, for example, in the steady hazel gaze watching them from the shadow of one of the archways. Tau glanced at the red-haired young man long enough to note and then dismiss the plain coat of Runner blue; then they were past.

That hazel gaze belonged to Evred, who’d recognized Inda instantly, though in that broad-shouldered young man in the loose-sleeved heavy linen shirt and long brown rough-woven winter vest there remained little of the eleven-year-old boy he knew. Inda had not grown very tall, but he was at least as broad through the chest as Evred, his face scarred, his hands big, his walk a rolling stride that set his long brown queue swinging, his golden hoops dancing at his ears, rubies winking with bloodred light. But the expression of those wide-set brown eyes was the same guileless inward gaze of the eleven-year-old boy, and Evred hesitated; in the space of a single breath the world fractured into starbursts that whirled and spun and then locked together into a new pattern that left Inda limned in invisible white fire.

He shook away the reaction, meeting the wary gaze of the tall, golden-haired young man at Inda’s side. Evred half-raised a hand, then he too was overwhelmed by memory: Tanrid’s dying voice,
Find Inda,
and his own promise,
I will
.

In that moment Inda and Tau turned the makeshift corner at the newly built Sailor’s Rope Inn, its freshly painted sign swinging above the door, and followed the lane between the half-repaired houses that they’d been told would lead to the guild mistress.

So when Evred dropped his hand and said, “Inda?” there were only incurious Idayagans to hear; traffic moved along on the high street beyond the stone archway but Inda and his companion had vanished.

Furious with himself for being a fool, Evred dashed up the street toward the harbormaster’s, for of course they would go there.

The vagaries of wind, weather, roads, and horses had thus brought Yvana-Vayir’s four assassins to Ala Larkadhe on the very day that their lord attacked the royal city, though neither party could have foreseen such timing.

And so, while the assassins were dismounting below the weird white tower, far south in the royal city Tlennen-Harvaldar emerged from his rooms to the sound of shouting and the clash of swords. He thought:
Pirates attacking the castle? No, for those are Marlovan horns . . .

He ran to his son’s rooms. Shock stopped his breath in his throat when he saw the bloodstains and shattered furnishings. On the floor lay four blood-covered bodies. Little lights sparkled across Tlennen’s vision when he recognized the yellow-blue livery on the dead.

He stepped around them to the bedroom beyond and there his son lay sprawled on the crimson rug on the floor, fingers gripping a fallen cavalry sword.

Three swift steps and he knelt by his son, whose face was peaceful in death as it never had been in life. Tlennen touched the long lashes resting on Aldren’s lean cheeks, the brow almost smoothed of the faint creases of frustration that had shadowed his son’s efforts to communicate all his days, and anguish ripped through him. For an excruciating time he could not breathe. Tears of horror, of anger, most of all of the bitterest regret welled up through years and years of anxious waiting, and watching, and standing aside because custom demanded it, exigencies of kingship required it, and his brother’s platitudes and talk of duty made it easier to postpone another struggling conversation in which he and Aldren shared so very little.

Shared so little beyond flesh and blood.
Heart of my heart, and now you lie dead, and it is forever too late to
make amends
. Sobs shook Aldren’s father, tears burned down his face, dripping, unheeded, onto his son’s brow. He rocked back and forth, the world narrowed to anguish, until faint sounds roused him.

Yvana-Vayir. The old ambition.

“Evred.” He whispered the name, urgency breaking the paralysis of sorrow. He rose to his feet while scanning around him, but of course there would be no pen or paper in Aldren’s rooms.

There was always paper in his own pockets.

He picked up the blood-smeared sword and slashed his own arm, using his own welling blood and the nail of his forefinger to scratch out the words “Protect Evred.”