The Monster War: A Tale of the Kings' Blades (5 page)

T
HE MORNING AGED AND THE DAY GREW HOTter. Wart asked directions from two shepherds, one more toll keeper, and the drivers of three other wagons, always receiving the same answer. Emerald was astonished to discover that she was enjoying herself. Having never wandered this far from Oakendown since she’d first entered its gates, she had forgotten how interesting the world was.

“What about you?” Wart asked. “Why are you not going to Newhurst by coach?”

That was none of his business, but if she lied to him, he would be entitled to lie to her. She wasn’t very good at lying anyway. “Someone used some nasty sorcery right in the heart of Oakendown. I detected it and wouldn’t lie about it, so they threw me out.”

“Oh, that’s tough! What sort of sorcery?”

The inquisitors of the Dark Chamber claimed they could detect any spoken lie. Although they did not brag of it, most White Sisters could do the same, smelling the taint of death on the falsehood. Emerald had enough of the knack to know that Wart had faked his reaction. Sadly she concluded that he was not what he said he was. He was playing Mother Superior’s evil games.

“Nasty. I was attacked by a spider bigger than you. I don’t honestly know if it was meant to kill me or just frighten me. It certainly did that. No one else will admit it existed at all. I was outvoted.”

“Not fair! What do you do now?”

“Find a rich husband.”

“Truly?” He had not expected that. He looked at her doubtfully. “Mightn’t that be even tougher? Not finding, I mean—I’m sure you won’t have to look very long. I mean, finding a husband you want.”

“Very likely.”

“No parents, brothers?”

“My mother’s still alive, but she hasn’t got two copper mites to clink together.” Either Emerald needed to hear her problem set out in words or else young Wart was just skilled at asking questions, but she found herself telling him all about her father’s illness and the enchanters of Gentleholme Sanctuary. “They said they could cure him, but the pain grew worse and worse. Soon he was screaming all the time unless he got a fresh enchantment every day.”

Wart’s lip curled in horror. “They made his sickness worse?”

“Don’t know. Some diseases act that way, so perhaps not. We certainly couldn’t prove anything. But they did keep putting their price up.”

“This is why the King is trying to suppress the elementaries!” he said indignantly. “His new Court of Conjury is turning up all sorts of horrible cases like that. They have some good sorcerers helping them, and some White Sisters, too. And the Old Blades, of course. You must’ve heard of Sir Snake, who used to be Deputy Commander of the Royal Guard? He’s their leader…. Officially they’re called the Commissioners of the Court of Conjury—but they’re all knights in the Order, so everyone calls them the Old Blades—and they go in and investigate the elementaries. But often the sorcerers fight back with monsters and fireballs and terrible things. They’re doing a wonderful job, and—” His baby face colored again. “I’m raving, aren’t I?” he muttered. “But you have heard about the White Sisters who help? They’re not called the Old Sisters, but…Well, you must know.”

“I’ve heard of them.” Emerald had volunteered to join them, but so had a hundred others, so she had been turned down. “Some of them have died, also.”

“I didn’t know that!”

“Why should you?” she asked quietly.

He gulped awkwardly. “Well, I’m interested.” After a moment he sneaked a look at her and evidently decided he had failed to convince. “I met Sir Snake once. You should tell him about this Gentleholme gang.”

“I can’t prove they made my father’s sickness worse. They did put their price up and up until they had taken all our money. When he died there was nothing left.” Not even Peachyard, the estate her mother’s family had owned for generations.

“Or they let him die when there was nothing left to take?” That was a surprisingly cynical remark. At times Wart sounded much older than he looked. She sensed an unexpected element in his makeup—a faint trumpet note in the far distance, a whiff of familiar scent on the wind. It might be the fading trace of some old magic, perhaps a healing, but somehow she thought it went deeper than that.

“You may be right,” she said.

Her brothers had gone off to war and died together in their first campaign. The White Sisters offered almost the only respectable profession open to a woman and would pay even a novice a stipend if she had real promise and the money was needed—as it was in her case. Her mother could no longer see well enough to sew. She could do washing and cleaning, but the rich folk who employed servants had no use for elderly women with twisted hands. She had been living on Emerald’s wages. Now it was rich husband or nothing. Trouble was, most rich suitors were old, ugly, crabby….

“If you can detect sorcery,” Wart protested, “why can’t you get a job doing what White Sisters do? Protecting warehouses from thieves and so on?”

“We don’t—I mean
they
don’t protect anything. All they can do is warn. Who’s going to take my word for what I can do? They’d assume I was in league with a gang of thieves.” She smiled at him. “That’s enough about me. Let’s hear your story.” He didn’t look old enough to have one.

“Me? I’m a wandering minstrel. Hold this.” Thrusting the reins into her hands, he squirmed around to rummage in the cargo. Saxon accepted the change of command without argument, although he twisted his ears nervously when Wart’s legs waved in the air. In a few minutes he turned right side up again, clutching a contraption longer than himself.

“Is that a chitarrone?” she exclaimed.

“Almost—an archlute. Very similar. Its mother was a lute and its father an unscrupulous harp.”

That described it well. It had the usual catgut strings and a lute’s sound box in the normal half-pear shape, in this case beautifully inlaid with brass and mother-of-pearl rosettes. But instead of stopping at the keys, the neck continued for another three feet or more and ended in another set of keys that tuned a second course of strings—metal ones, running the whole length of the instrument.

Leaving Emerald to steer Saxon—who was quite capable of looking after himself—Wart went to work to tune the monster. That would have been a hard enough task on level ground. On a small and bouncing bench, it proved impossible, because the keys for the bass courses were out of his reach. But he tuned up the standard lute portion well enough and soon his fingers were dancing on it, plucking out torrents of melody. He played a few pieces, sometimes singing, sometimes not.

“Wonderful!” Emerald said when he paused to adjust the keys again. “You are as good as any minstrel!”

“Better than most.”

“You could earn a living with that skill!”

He shook his head pityingly. “There are more worthy ways a man can earn a living. Any requests?”

She told him to play whatever he wanted.

He stopped at a ford to let the horse drink and eat from a nose bag. From one of the bundles in the wagon he produced two meat pies and a flagon of small beer to share with his passenger. He played his archlute again, doing much better on steady ground, but she noticed he was making little use of the extra strings, and when he did the result was not always tuneful. It was a very beautifully crafted instrument, worth more than he would earn in years.

As their journey resumed, Emerald tried again. “What do you do the rest of the time, when you’re not wrestling that lute or following Saxon around?”

He shrugged vaguely. “Odd jobs.”

That was a very terse answer from an air person. Sterner measures were called for.

“Who cuts your hair?”

That alarmed him. “What?”

“All the stable boys I ever met looked like pitchforks in hay season. Your clothes are dirty enough and you remembered not to wash your face this morning, but those fingernails? You don’t stink and scratch. A skilled barber cut your hair. You don’t talk like a hayseed. You’re interested in things a hayseed would not be—Sir Snake, for example.”

He flushed yet again, this time obviously furious. His anger was directed at himself, though, not her. “I wait on table sometimes. Vincent’s very particular about things like fingernails.”

He was lying. She just shook her head.

“And I overhear the gentlefolk talking about things like the Old Blades.”

“Go tell an owl, boy! You said earlier that you’d met Snake, one of the King’s most trusted officers. And ‘Vincent’?—you’re on first-name terms with a man who runs a county?”

“That has nothing to do with…with you.”

“Tell me anyway. All of it.”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” Wart said, sounding as if he were trying to talk and keep his teeth clenched at the same time.

“Try me. We have several days to kill.”

He sighed. “I ran away from home when I was ten. I had to. My stepfather drank all the time and beat me. He was going to kill me or cripple me. My name was Wat in those days, Wat Hedgebury. I teamed up with a wandering minstrel. He showed me how to strum a lute. Owain was his name, kindest old man you’d ever hope to meet. I sang a bit and passed the hat for him; I learned to do a little juggling and tumbling and carried his bedroll on the road, so I wasn’t just charity for him. One day we were performing in Firnesse Castle, which isn’t very far from here, and he had a stroke. He died the next day. Baron Grimshank had no use for a minstrel’s apprentice—I was ordered to try another county, and soon. On the other hand, he did fancy Owain’s lute, which was a good one. Owain had told me I could have it, but no one listened when I said so.” Wart grinned ruefully. “I became more than a little cheeky, I’m afraid.”

“Not wise?”

“Very foolish. His lordship did not take kindly to being called a thief to his face. He had a henchman called Thrusk, a great hairy brute, big as a bull. They called him the Marshal, but he was just the thug who did the dirty work, grinding the faces of the poor and downtreading peasants. Grimshank told Thrusk to see me off. Thrusk’s idea of a fond farewell involved a horsewhip. That left me really mad.” Watching her out of the corner of his eye, he added, “So I decided to get my lute back, and that night I broke in.”

“You broke into a
castle
?”

“Knew you wouldn’t believe me!”

But she did. He had lied earlier and was telling the truth now. Perhaps he was testing her ability to tell the difference. “I didn’t say I didn’t. I’ll decide whether I believe you when I’ve heard the rest.”

That pleased him. He smirked as he said, “It gets stranger. Firnesse Castle sits on the lip of a cliff—not a very high cliff, but high enough and steep enough that they don’t bother to post guards on that side. There’s no beach, just rocks. Even Baelish raiders could never land a boat there, but at low tide it’s no great feat to scramble around the base of the cliff. Climbing up by moonlight was a little trickier.” He was bragging, not understanding that it was his dominant element, air, that made him good at climbing.

“Nobody could scale the walls. I didn’t have to. Whoever built the castle had put all the latrines on that side—overhanging the drop, upside-down chimneys. It was chilly when the sea wind blew, but the sea did all the shoveling. I was small enough to wriggle up one of the shafts.”

“Yucch!”

He scowled at her. “Ever been really hungry? Really,
really
hungry? So hungry you can hardly walk? I had. That lute was
mine
and I needed it to earn a living. I spent
hours
creeping around the Baron’s castle hunting for it, terrified I would fall over something or rouse the dogs. When I eventually did locate it, I was too late. The tide had come in and the shore was white with breakers, real killer surf. I hid in a closet until the portcullis was raised at dawn, but they caught me trying to sneak out.”

“With the lute, of course?”

“Of course.”

And she had thought she was stubborn! “You were ten?”

“Oh, no. Twelve, almost thirteen.”

“You were lucky you weren’t hanged.”

“I very nearly was,” Wart said glumly. “Grimshank claimed to be a lord of the high justice and kept a gallows outside his gate to prove it. King Ambrose might argue about his right to use it, but Ambrose wasn’t there. After breakfast the Baron held one of the briefest trials ever seen in Chivial and told Thrusk to take me out and string me up….”

For a few moments the wagon rattled on. Even Saxon twisted his ears around, waiting for the rest of the story.

“I wonder if that slime pit is still alive?” Wart muttered, and Emerald heard again that inexplicable wrong note, that faint trumpet.

“Baron Grimshank?”

“No, Thrusk. Grimshank was within his rights—or almost within them. The law says to hang criminals over the age of ten. But Thrusk had other ideas. He spoke up to say I was too young to be hanged. ‘Your lordship should show mercy on a penniless orphan,’ he said. ‘Why not just send the poor lad back where he came from?’ And Grimshank laughed and told him to go ahead. That—” Wart thought better of whatever word he’d been about to use. “That
cur
! He was jeering and chortling as he marched me off to the latrines. He was going to shove me down a shaft, he explained—
with
my hands tied and
with
the tide in and breakers all over the rocks. Headfirst, he said.”

He looked at Emerald to see if she was going to accuse him of lying. She wasn’t. Even without her Oakendown training, she would probably have believed him. The story was all too horribly credible. Noblemen in remote areas could do pretty much as they pleased, answering to no one, and a baron who’d been insulted and made to look foolish by a friendless juvenile vagabond could easily react with the sort of brutality Wart was describing.

“Maybe one day I’ll find Thrusk and settle a score or two.”

“How did you escape?”

“Just luck, no credit to me. When we got to the latrines, Sir Vincent intervened. He was a guest in the castle, so he shouldn’t have meddled. He had no authority at all, except he was a Blade. His beard was gray and there were a dozen of them to one of him, but he didn’t even draw his sword. Didn’t need to. He told them he and his servant were leaving now and I was going with them—and so was the lute. And that’s what happened. That’s what it means to be a Blade.”