The Path of Flames (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 1) (5 page)

Something nudged his shoulder from behind. Asho wheeled and swung a sword he no longer held through Crook’s head. He stepped in and hugged his horse, and then pulled himself painfully up into the saddle. Around him men were running, some fleeing, some chasing. Victorious trumpet notes were floating through the darkness.

Turning Crook around, Asho dug his heels into his horse’s flanks. It was time to quit the field. He had to head home, had to return to Castle Kyferin and tell his Lady that she was now a widow, and he her only remaining knight.

CHAPTER THREE

Kethe slipped out the keep’s front door as quickly and lithely as she could. The trick with the massive old monster was to open it just shy of the spot where the iron hinges let out their terrible shriek, and then catch it as it closed but an inch from the jamb. If that was done just right, one could sneak out onto the keep stairs as sly as a ghost with nobody the wiser. The door shut with nary a sound, and Kethe straightened with a smile. It might take minutes before Hessa, her lady-in-waiting, noticed that she was gone. By then it would be far too late.

The keep was the highest point of the entire castle, mounted atop its own steep hill. From here Kethe could gaze out over the castle curtain wall to where the sleepy village of Emmond lay nestled hard by Greening Wood. She raised her chin and smoothed down her dove-gray kirtle. Two sentries were watching her from atop the twin drum towers that rose from the top of the barbican. She recognized one as Beartha by his wispy beard. He slouched against a crenellation and grinned at her, revealing his stained and mostly missing teeth.

Trying to exude as much disdain as possible, she began to descend the broad slate steps, raising her dress just enough that she wouldn’t trip and tumble head over heels down to the tower arch. Beartha would love that. If he called out to her, she swore to herself, she’d fetch an iron bar from the smithy and break his arm, but he stayed mercifully silent. The steps descended steeply to the arch that led into the barbican. Normally two more soldiers would guard this portal, but they were undermanned due to her father’s expedition. No matter. The fewer eyes that marked her passage, the better.

It was hard to maintain her anger at the guard when she was this excited. She almost broke into a run once she was inside, ignoring the countless murder holes and the slits in the ceiling through which three separate portcullises could be dropped. The barbican was a formidable line of defense, a squat building whose entire purpose was to kill those who sought to assault the keep. The wall torches cast flickering shadows, and she heard laughter from the soldiers on the far side of the passage wall. Playing cards, no doubt. She couldn’t blame them—Kyferin Castle hadn’t been attacked since before she was born.

She took the left turn in the corridor’s elbow and hurried back out into the sunlight. Below her spread the bailey itself, the vast yard enclosed within the curtain walls where the daily life of the castle played out for the servants, cooks, stable boys, farriers, smiths, Bythian slaves and everyone else that made the castle a vital and living entity. She loved the bailey; it pulsed with life, was filled with a tapestry of sounds and smells. Hessa always made a face when she was forced to descend from the keep to where the ‘commoners’ labored, but that was because she was a shallow prig who forgot that she was an Ennoian like the rest of them.

Kethe strode over the last drawbridge that connected the barbican to the stone ramp and fairly skipped down to the dirt floor.

It being late afternoon, half of the bailey was already in shadow, the great curtain wall rising up to cut into the sunlight, its base crowded with buildings that were built against it and around the open center. The cart of a bonded merchant was rolling in through the gatehouse, laden with fresh fish and no doubt come from the harbor city of Zoe through the Sun Portal in Ennoia. Trutwin the gardener and his three young helpers were standing by with wheelbarrows, waiting as the stable boys mucked out the stables, filling the air with the sickly sweet stench of manure. Four old Bythian men staggered past, their white hair slicked to their brows with sweat, bowed over under the piles of wood lashed to their backs and heading toward the massive woodpile stacked against the kitchen building’s wall. A young boy sprinted out of the bakery, hooting and juggling a hot cross bun, and Aythe chased him out the door before giving up and yelling after him. Kethe spun around the urchin as he almost collided with her, grinned, and then shrugged apologetically to the baker. Everywhere she looked people were busy: creating barrels, sharpening blades at the grinding stone, crossing from one doorway to the next. The bailey was the polar opposite of the tomb-like keep; here was life and action and excitement.

Slipping through the crowd, smiling as different folk nodded respectfully to her, Kethe made for the chapel. It was beautifully convenient that the entrance to the smith lay through the most respectful destination for the Lord’s daughter, a quirk of the castle’s construction that she adored, no matter how much the high priest objected. As a result, she’d garnered a reputation for devoutness that allayed her mother’s suspicions, and Simeon the priest was kind enough to not dispel any assumptions as to where Kethe spent her time.

She stepped through the door, then hurried along the chapel’s back wall, pausing as always to curtsy to the great silver triangle that stood on the far altar, illuminated by the requisite ten candles. It was a sign of her father’s wealth that the candles were fine beeswax and not tallow, each as thick and tall as her forearm and always lit. Still, she’d not come to ponder the mysteries of Ascension; with barely a guilty twinge she hurried to the smithy entrance and stepped through into the gloom.

When she was younger, entering the smithy had made her imagine she was passing through the Black Gate itself. The soft glow of the chapel candles would be replaced by the fitful illumination of the forge fires, the air acrid with smoke and the tang of scalded metal. Elon had seemed like an ogre, more massive than even an armored knight, and the hissing of quenched metal and the white and cherry-red glow of malleable steel had seemed to her to be instruments of torture. Now the smithy was her secret home, where she yearned to be when she wasn’t in the Greening Wood or riding Lady along the hills. She grinned as Tongs, Elon’s ebon firecat, flew up to land on her shoulders and curl about her neck just as Elon turned to regard her; she’d even managed to evade her younger brother Roddick, who thought it hilarious to race back to the keep and report her to their mother. She had at least a half hour before she was truly missed.

“You’re pressing your luck, don’t you think?” Elon’s voice was a rumble more akin to boulders shifting in the depths of the earth than any normal person’s voice. Now that she was older he no longer seemed like an ogre; he was a friend, or at the very least an accomplice. His black hair thinning, his beard cropped short, the smith’s features were ruddy from a life spent bent over scorching heat. As always, he was wearing only a sleeveless tunic and his heavy leather apron. Kethe wagered that Elon could arm-wrestle any of the Black Wolves into submission without much effort—not that a knight would ever deign to contest with a peasant.

“Yes, well, I’m almost done.” Kethe grinned and plucked Tongs from her shoulders, dropped him in his favorite spot by the furnace, and hurried to the back of the smithy. “Besides. Have you seen my needlework? Atrocious. Even my mother can’t find the words to compliment it.”

“Be that as it may,” said Elon, watching her as she rummaged under a pile of empty hemp sacks. “You were nearly caught yesterday, and the day before that I came close to lying to Berthold when he came asking after you. What’s going on? Is there some crisis you haven’t told me about?”

“Yes,” said Kethe, almost to herself. She grasped her treasure and pulled it out, then held it up to examine it in the light of the forge. It glimmered beautifully, like fish scales or a dream of silver under the moon. It was a hauberk, made slowly over the past year, each ring, each rivet, each and every piece tailored to her own body. “I need this finished. For me. Not for anybody else. For me.”

She walked over to a trestle table and laid the hauberk down. Two more lines of rings were all that remained to be done before she would declare it complete. Then she’d edge it with leather—or perhaps calfskin, but that might not prove as durable—and then, finally, she’d be able to take it out to Greening Wood.

Elon set down his tongs and hammer and stepped up beside her. He rubbed his jaw. “It’s not bad, I suppose.”

“Not bad?” She wheeled on him. “It’s better than anything
you’ve
ever made, what with those big sausage fingers of yours.” She cut off at the sight of his grin. “I mean, yes. Not bad, I suppose.”

Elon picked it up. “I still think you’ve meshed these rings too tightly together. Fine work, fit for jewelry, but you need flexibility as well.”

Kethe bit her lower lip. “Maybe.”

The smith set the hauberk back down. “Though it’s all academic, isn’t it? Like one of Magister Audsley’s theories about the Age of Wonders.” His words were soft as he regarded her, his eyes gleaming under his heavy brows. “Do you truly expect to wear this in battle, Kethe?”

She stepped over to his scrap pile and took up two heavy bars, one in each hand. A year ago they’d been too heavy for her to lift. Staring fixedly at the stone wall, she raised both bars till her arms were level with the floor. Within moments her shoulders began to burn with the effort.

“Yes,” she said. The bars began to tremble. “You heard Esson, that bard who came through with Lord Gysel six months ago.” It was hard to speak smoothly when she wanted to clench her stomach and lock her breath in her throat. “Women can be knights. There’s a female order far to the south, the Order of the Ax.” Her hands were starting to dip, and she forced herself to not lean back so as to compensate. “And Lady Otheria was a knight.”

“Lady Otheria,” said Elon, stepping up to where she stood, “may not have even existed.” He stood in silence for another minute until her arms began to tremble wildly, and only then did he take the weights from her.

Kethe let out a sharp breath as she dropped her arms, then shook them out and rubbed her shoulders. “Even if she didn’t, the idea of her is enough.” This was a familiar argument, one that Elon had indulged her in many times over the past year, but something had changed. Perhaps it was the near-completion of the chainmail.

He dropped the bars into the scrap pile and then turned back to his anvil, rubbing the back of his head. “I’m just a simple smith. It’s my own limitation, not understanding why a pretty young noble lady like yourself would want to get into vicious battles with full-grown men.”

Kethe blew a strand of her auburn hair out of her face. “That’s all right. When they’re singing songs about me, then maybe you’ll understand.”

He laughed. “Songs? My, the young lady has some real ambition. Though it points her in a terrible direction. I know all too well what the weapons I craft can do to flesh and bone.”

Kethe assumed an innocent expression. “As my mother says, women make, men break. I’m simply creating a hauberk, Elon.”

“Oh? You plan to run into battle with no weapons, then?”

“Well, maybe a sword. If a man tries to break what I’ve created, do I not have the right to defend myself?”

Elon crossed his arms over his chest and rocked back on his heels. “I’d like to meet the knight who would strike a lady. I’d stave in his helmet with my hammer.”

Kethe grinned. “If I didn’t do him in first. And what would
you
be doing out on a battlefield?”

The smith scowled. “Chasing after you, no doubt, and still arguing till the last moment against your folly. Now. Are you going to finish those links? I’ve set the wire out for you over there.”

Her mother, Lady Iskra Kyferin, had lectured her on the value of mindless tasks such as needlework. Letting your hands work allowed your mind to drift, she said, and it was during these moments of reverie that insights and ideas would come. Kethe put on her apron, pulled out the wooden stool and sat at the work station, then pulled the length of thick wire over and grabbed her rod. Tongs padded over and twined himself between her boots, his black feathered wings bumping against the undersides of her thighs. She began to wrap the wire around and around the rod, doing so with slow and methodical care. Some women enjoyed distracting themselves with needlework. She loved creating chainmail. Once the wire was completely wrapped, she’d snip circles from its coiled form, and then these she’d interweave with the unfinished hem of her hauberk and weld them shut. Quiet work. Delicate, repetitive work that allowed her to dream, to let slip her mind from the smoky confines of the smithy and out to wonder on her hopes and aspirations.