The Fox (47 page)

“No,” Noddy said. “We didn’t see anybody.”

“King’s Runners are all dead in his chambers. Not all of them armed.” Cherry-Stripe grimaced.

Hawkeye said, “This floor and above are all the royal residence. Hadand will have all the public hallways and landings guarded.”

Cherry-Stripe remembered Hadand at their very first academy game, doing knife tricks against her brother Tanrid. And his last two years at the academy, how she’d commanded the siege games and won. He remembered some of the things Sponge had said about her. “Buck went off looking for Hadand—”

Buck Marlo-Vayir appeared right then, leaping down the stairs four at a time, and almost ran Hawkeye down before he fetched up against the rail. “No one up there, except women guarding the queen. Wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t answer questions. They drew their bows on me when I demanded to talk to Hadand,” he said, breathing hard. “So I ran. Stopped to take a squint through the big windows overlooking the garrison side. From the colors on the men I’d say the Algara-Vayirs are here, and they’re surrounding the garrison buildings. Women on the heights, all of them with bows drawn, aiming down inside. Would your father go to the garrison?”

Hawkeye shook his head slowly. “I think—I think he’d go to the throne room. We came there first, then straight up to the king’s rooms, after he argued your dad down, Buck. He’ll take the throne according to the old forms. In my mother’s name.”

Cherry-Stripe said, with conviction, “Then that’s where Hadand’s going to be, if she isn’t up here. She’s gonna turf him out.”

“Father’ll kill Hadand-Edli if she gets in his way,” Hawkeye whispered. “I’ve got to try to stop him.”

Above, reverberating off the stone walls, the castle bell began the deliberate, slow toll of lockdown, soon echoed by the city bells, faint and farther away.

The four looked up, then at one another. Hawkeye stooped, grabbed up his sword again, then began to run, using the servants’ stairs, the others now right behind him.

Hawkeye stayed in the lead, hesitating only once or twice. He always seemed to know where the women would be, and how to avoid them. None of the others knew—and he did not tell them—that his father had had their castle rebuilt on the same model as the royal residence wing for their mother when they first married. Hawkeye had grown up being told it was romantic gesture, but he knew now his father had built himself a king’s residence, and so he knew how it would be guarded.

Buck Marlo-Vayir muttered to his brother as they ducked down a narrow stair, “Did you see it the way I did? The king didn’t even have a weapon. The way he fell, it’s like he opened his arms to the blade.”

“It’s the blade for us all if Mad Gallop wins,” Cherry-Stripe retorted, skidding on a rug and stopping himself with both hands against a wall, then launching himself after his brother.

They rounded a corner and pounded down the flagstone hall in the guest wing where the Jarl families stayed during Convocation.

“If so, we’ll take as many of ’em with us as we can,” Buck promised.

They reached the service entrance to the great hall, which was opposite the throne room, the two separated by a huge arched passage. These two vast chambers each had enormous iron-studded doors that would have been barred and held against the onslaught of enemy invasion in the old days.

Now the doors stood undefended because the Harskialdna had only considered this area first priority on the Guard roster during Convocation; pending specific orders the sentries’ standing orders were to stay at the walls if the city bells tolled the lockdown.

So no one stopped them as they raced down the middle of the great hall, which was cold and empty, the massive tables still set out for the Jarls and their liege men, the dishes long since carried away. A trace of cabbage and rye aromas lingered in the frigid, motionless air.

Cama took the lead, but paused at the mighty doors at the other end. He and Buck shouldered them open and they ran across the passage between the great hall and the throne room. Those doors stood open.

They dashed in. There stood Hadand—flanked by two women—on the dais before the vacant throne, under the Montrei-Vayir banner. A cluster of men had gathered before the broad, shallow steps. Men with weapons drawn, some of the swords blood-smeared. Men, women, and swords were highlighted in the slanting shafts of sunlight from the clerestory windows along the walls to either side—they looked, at a glance, like one of the old tapestries.

“Stand
down,
” Hadand ordered in the voice of one who has already said it several times.

“I have no quarrel with you, girl. You must let me pass,” the Jarl of Yvana-Vayir stated, his voice, like hers, trembling from excitement, fear, determination.

Already ideas raced through his mind—set aside his son’s recent marriage to that detestable young snake Dannor Tya-Vayir—Hawkeye marries Hadand, mortars the Yvana-Vayir kingship with the former heir’s betrothed, daughter of a prince—

Hadand was struggling to comprehend what had happened and to think ahead, but this man was not giving her time to think. So her reasoning had narrowed to a single fact: he must not be permitted to sit on the throne.

Neither wanted to see the other dead. And so they held to the old forms, she standing on the dais before the throne, he below the steps on the stone floor, facing her, his feet in the place where the Jarls had stood to make their vows before the throne ever since Marlovans first captured this castle. “The king is dead, as is his brother,” he said, raising his voice.
Be strong! Kings are strong!
He set his boot upon the first step. “Who committed treachery against the kingdom, against your own family.” Another step. “The Sierlaef, at his uncle’s orders, had your brother murdered!” He took the final step then, and stood on the dais looking down at Hadand, who did not move away from the throne; her women glided forward to flank her, their arms, like Hadand’s, in the sleeves of their robes.

The Jarl of Yvana-Vayir ignored them. He raised his sword. “I now claim the throne in the name of my son, who is half Montrei-Vayir. And I warn you for the last time, stand aside!”

Hadand braced against the sickening sense in the pit of her stomach at the proximity of violence when there was no violence in her mind. She bit her numb lips, her face blotchy from the cold, from emotion, but her brown eyes were steady. “There is an heir. Evred-Varlaef.”

The Jarl was not listening; he’d shifted his gaze to his sword, and the blood there. In his dreams, the Jarl had raised his sword just so, but Tlennen had surrendered to him as he stood there triumphant, surrounded by loyal men who cheered, who drummed. What happened was the king’s unwavering gaze as he faced that killing sword—the flinch of pain as the steel juddered into living flesh—

The Jarl gripped the sword to steady himself. The king was dead.
I will be king, then my son. All I need to do is get this girl out of my way. If she will not obey me, she is no use. She’s better off dead.

“. . . Evred Varlaef.” He realized she’d spoken.

And the Jarl of Yvana-Vayir laughed, a triumphant little laugh that caused Hawkeye to gasp. Hadand’s chin jerked up; she saw Hawkeye’s face, the sudden and shocking realization there, and her mouth thinned.

“Father, don’t!” Hawkeye yelled.

Furious with his son, the Jarl brought the sword down at the girl.

“Evred,” Hadand whispered, and forced her watery knees to stiffen.

As the Jarl’s bloody sword came down toward her in a killing strike, her body obeyed with all the strength and speed of years of determined drill.

Steel scraped on steel, warding the Jarl’s sword mid-arc; the smooth deflection took him by surprise. He staggered, his balance off, and a jab of anger tightened his grip. He snapped the sword back, lunging straight at her, but Hadand-Edli had become a whirl of robes impossible to hit.

She deflected the Jarl’s blade again, twirled within his defensive space, and in the same circular motion sliced one knife lightly across his throat, too lightly to kill. Then she buried the second knife up to the hilt in the shoulder joint on his right side, all between one heartbeat and the next. His sword clattered on stone. He brought his hand up to the spurting wound and fell to his knees.

His men started forward. The two women stepped silently between them and Hadand, their blades out, angled along their forearms, sharp and gleaming and steady.

Hadand cried, “Stand down in the name of Evred Montrei-Vayir!” just as Hawkeye shouted to the Yvana-Vayir men, sword out, “Hold!”

Then he stepped forward to where his father knelt, groaning and wheezing over and over, “Kill them. Kill them, boy. You. Be.
King
. . .”

Noise at the back of the room brought them all around. A riding of men in green coats ran through the double doors and fanned out, weapons raised: Algara-Vayirs.

Behind them appeared four Marlo-Vayir liege men and the Jarl. “Barracks is under guard,” Hasta said to his son, wheezing slightly after having run, his bad hip aching.

Buck motioned the four liege men to surround Hawkeye and his father.

“Coward,” Mad Gallop glared up at his son. “Coward.”

Hasta grimaced at him, took in Hadand at the throne, and looked away; Hawkeye faced Cama and the Marlo-Vayir brothers, offering his sword, hilt out, his expression bleak. “Listen. Whatever happens to me, one of you had better ride north, make sure your Runners got there, Noddy. If Evred is alive, he’s the only one who can hold the kingdom now.”

“I’ll see if my horse is still saddled,” Noddy replied, relieved to have a clear duty—and even more relieved to get away from the tears in Hawkeye’s eyes, the pain and embarrassment in his friends’ faces, the angry ravings of the fallen Jarl. “Looks like it’s back on the road for me.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

JAREND-Adaluin, come to seek justice, found himself standing next to his daughter in command of the royal castle.

Elsewhere in the castle his men and the Marlo-Vayir and Yvana-Vayir armsmen, kept apart by the expertise of armed women, all stood about eyeing one another uncertainly. This lasted until Hadand asked Cama Tya-Vayir to go through the castle ordering any guards not on duty to report to the barracks, in the name of the king. She did not say which king. By then Jarend-Adaluin—listening to the disjointed exclamations from those around him as he stood at his daughter’s side—had figured out most of what had happened, and he ordered his own men to escort the Yvana-Vayirs under drawn steel to the garrison prison.

Tradition and common sense guided Hadand and her father in their dazed attempt to restore order. First one by one and then in an ever increasing flood they issued orders. Tesar stood by Hadand’s other side, blades out, and the Adaluin’s gray-haired old Runner took up position behind him, sword in hand.

And so, riding back at the gallop from Lindeth Harbor to Ala Larkadhe, Evred Montrei-Vayir went, unknowing, from being Evred-Varlaef to Evred-Sierlaef.

About the time he arrived at the white tower, his father stood unresisting before the steel of Yvana-Vayir’s ambition, and his son became Evred-Harvaldar.

In Ala Larkadhe, the Guard was out, weapons at the ready. Visitors had been summarily ejected. Evred dismounted at a run and dashed inside, forgetting that he wore a coat of unmarked blue.

His people looked at him in amazement. Much later he discovered that people thought he’d escaped the assassins by cleverness. At the time, he listened to the jumbled words shouted at him from all sides: Yvana-Vayir men always passed through before—said they had a verbal message, Jarl to prince—fight—Sindan defending the archive door—assassins all dead—

Sindan lying in his bunk dying, repeating Evred’s name over and over.

Evred dashed through the barracks to Sindan’s private chamber off the officers’ duty room, which he rated as King’s Runner Captain. Evred had seen death often enough during the past two years to recognize it in the blue lips, the unfocused eyes, even if he hadn’t seen the great crimson stain across Sindan’s shirt as he lay there on the narrow bed.

"Ev... red...”

Evred flung himself down at the side of the bed. “Uncle Sindan. Try not to speak.”

But the one good hand groped for his, and paper pressed into his fingers. The sharp-sweet scent of blood clogged Evred’s constricted throat. “Necklet,” Sindan whispered, in Sartoran.

Necklet? Had he gotten the word wrong?

Sindan’s fingers moved to his chest, feeling restlessly, then slipped to his side; the effort had defeated lifelong and patient strength of will at last. Evred, staring down in misery and question, saw the glint of gold at Sindan’s neck. He reached down, feeling with gentle fingers. There was a long chain. Up came a locket smeared with red.

Aware from just beyond the reach of the physical world that he had discharged his last duty, Jened Sindan gave a sigh and died.

Evred straightened up, the bloodstained gold loose in his fingers. “I have to send a message to my father,” he stated in a flat voice, and walked upstairs, motioning for Nightingale to flank him.

No one followed or spoke. Most of the Guard were too busy searching out other assassins, and finding nothing but cold shadows and curious and speculative looks from the locals here with their demands and complaints.

Evred ran to his rooms, but before he sought pen and paper, he remembered the paper in his hand and opened it up. It, too, was blood-smeared and gritty from being crushed. He could barely make out his own name. After close examination directly next to a lamp he realized two things: that the other word was “protect” and that it was not just smeared with blood, but written in it.

He dropped it onto the table. “Where did this come from?” No answer, of course. He looked up at Nightingale Toraca, who stood in the doorway facing outward, knife in hand. “Summon Tlen. He’s going to have to take command here. I have to go home,” he said. “Now.”