A Mankind Witch (20 page)

The monk came running. Erik snagged a spear from one of the Norse guards who had come trotting up. "There is something inside that pelt. Be ready. It's probably not human."

Uriel took the cross from around his neck, and held it before him.

Erik flipped aside the bearskin with the spear.

It was apparent that the weapons at the ready wouldn't be needed.

The naked man lying there, with Erik's Algonquin war hatchet imbedded in his neck, was no threat to anyone any more.

"
Björnhednar!
" hissed someone.

Manfred stepped over the corpse. "Get your hatchet back and let's get after them," he said grimly.

"Wait," commanded Vortenbras. "My sister is bound to have set traps up there. That is her nature. I will send my men to see if they have fled the royal hall." He pointed with his bloody sword to two of them. "Go. See if they have fled." He looked at his fallen hearthman. Shook his head. "I apologize. It appears that we had the traitoress in our midst all the time." He sighed. "My thankless half-sister. We knew she was a
seid
-witch. We just didn't realize—did not even begin to guess—how far into evil magic she must have gone. She was the first on the scene when the arm-ring was stolen, you know."

"I'm only getting about half of this," said Manfred. "What's he say, Erik?"

Erik translated. And looking across saw that the queen had slumped against the wall. "Is your mother injured? I think you'd better call her women."

Vortenbras nodded. He prodded one of his men. "See to it. The queen is uninjured, thanks be to the gods. I was between her and them all the time. But they only seemed interested in Signy and escape." He rested his sword tip on the ground. "Between the two of us, Ritter, I think it is the shock. She always treated Signy as if she were her real daughter. She had just, finally, organized a suitable marriage for her." He sighed again. "Bad blood. It was always said that Signy's mother was of
Svartalfar
blood. Evil will come out of such mixtures."

The two of Vortenbras's hearthmen who had gone to see if the bear-men had fled came back at a dog trot. "They've gone north, my king," panted one. "Toward the mountains," said the other, gesturing.

Vortenbras took a deep breath. "Get this place in order, Gutheric. You, Hans. Get all my hearthmen together with their war gear. We've a witch to catch and kill." He turned back to the knights. "My thanks. You will excuse me? I must go with my mother. She will need some comfort before I go," he said in broken Frankish to Manfred.

Manfred nodded. "Can we join you? I have thirty good horsemen to place at your disposal."

Vortenbras turned to Erik. "I have not the Frankish to say this. But what if the prince is hurt? The Emperor would be angry, yes? I don't think it wise."

Erik translated. "I'd agree with him, Manfred."

"You would. But Charles Fredrik wouldn't. We'll leave the nuns and a guard of three. The rest of us, including Ottar and Uriel, will ride," said Manfred.

Vortenbras obviously got most of that, bowed and turned to follow the women who were helping the dowager queen.

"Manfred," said Erik, with calmness he didn't feel. "Let them chase their own."

Manfred took a deep breath, and said with the stubbornness Erik had come to know well, and to realize was inflexible, "No. There's more to this than just theft, Erik. This smells as much as that affair in Venice did. You saw those bear tracks when we were attacked on our first night. This is aimed in some way at the Empire."

"I must agree with the prince," said the grim-faced Uriel. "You know that Sister Mary is a witch-smeller."

Erik hadn't. She was far less threatening-looking than Sister Mercy.

Uriel continued. "She says that there were at least three powerful practitioners of the arts here. Three or possibly four. She is sure that some of them at least were women."

"And?"

"Only one left the hall. Unless the bears were practitioners . . . but I think not. They were probably mere tools. Bespelled humans. In other words, Erik, Prince Manfred is probably as safe out of here, as in here."

Erik took a deep breath. "Very well then, Brother." He wished, later, that he'd used the argument of "snow." It might have borne more weight. "But first I want to catch up with one of the thralls. I think he might be able to help us."

"A thrall's not going anywhere, friend Erik. Those bears are," said Juzef Szpak. "We need to get to our horses."

"Well, I'll try in the stables," said Erik. "But I think we'll find that this thrall's run, too. He's neck deep in all this stuff, somehow."

In the sudden darkness Cair had seen the fur-clad monsters seize Signy. Unlike the rest of these superstitious Norse bastards Cair had worked out what they were. By the time the knights got to the dais he was not far behind. He'd got himself close enough to see the one they'd killed. A man in a bear skin—as he'd suspected. And at this point, discretion had kicked in. He was certainly the only thrall still left in the feasting hall. And sooner or later someone was going to notice. Someone might even point out that he was Signy's thrall.

He ducked his head and scurried out, collecting no worse than a casual clout from one of the guards. Once in the kitchen he kept moving. His chess-player's mind had identified several possible moves. At least two of them involved his life becoming rapidly shorter. He was in the stables before anyone else—and up into the princess's hidey-hole before anyone else got there. Even the thralls had sneaked across to the main halls, if not to watch, at least to glean snippets of news from those lucky enough to do so.

He'd organized himself an improvement on the mere ceiling hideout. For years, the stables had just been rethatched on top of the old thatch. The thatch was very thick, and the underlayer was more than a little brittle and rotten. He'd burrowed into the far corner. A dog would have found him rapidly. But getting a dog—except a small, agile terrier—to walk on the poles would be difficult. Besides, he thought it was most likely that they'd go after Signy first. And he wasn't planning to be here if they came back. He'd burrowed in feetfirst, with an old scrap of bark to hide his face if need be, so that he was well able to listen to the stable noises and the excited gossip among the thralls below as they came in. Besides, he could breathe. He'd probably have sneezed himself into betrayal facing the other way. Now he had time to listen, and to think.

The story was already growing like weeds on the dung heap: vigorously, and somewhat misshapenly. Cair was surprised to find that it was growing, at least in the stables, in a somewhat bizarre direction. "It's those black-clad foreigners. Like Odin's ravens." Among the thralls Odin was not popular. Thor and Freya had adoration. Odin—the nobles' god—fear and respect. "Come to stir up trouble among us," the thrall continued to a chorus of assenting grunts.

He was a little more taken aback to discover that it wasn't any deep love for Princess Signy that inspired them to believe it all a foreign plot, but her clumsiness. "She'd spot a hair out of place on a horse halfway across the stable, but she falls over her own feet," said Henri. "What kind of witch is that? Now if they'd told us it was Cair . . ."

"Where is he?" asked someone

"I dunno. He comes and goes about just as he pleases. He was in the stable when they called her."

The sound of boots and loud voices interrupted the thralls. Vortenbras's hearthmen, yelling for horses to be saddled.

And barely minutes later someone looking for him. "I'm trying to find the thrall with black hair." The person spoke Norse, but with an outlander accent.

"We haven't seen him, master," said Thjalfi fearfully. "Not since before . . ."

"I told you he'd run, Juzef," said the outlander, in Frankish.

"Not far, unless he took a horse. Ask them."

"You ask them," the first voice sounded amused. "The language the Götar speak is close enough."

Henri replied without waiting. After all, he was a Frank. "No, master. He didn't steal a horse. He's good slave, master. Very loyal to our mistress."

"Where has he got to, then?" asked the first outlander.

"I think he has gone to try to help the mistress."

"Alone and on foot? He's a crazy fool then," said the second.

"Yes, master. Mad. But he is a magician, too."

There was a snort. "Well, we'll overtake him then, unless he's grown magical wings and flown after them. You can question him then, Erik. Come on. Otherwise Prince Manfred will have left without us, next thing we know."

He listened to the sound of spurred mail-boots walking away. "Better make sure you've got a spare cloak and some boots you can walk in, in your saddlebag, Erik. The prince, too. I think we'll have snow before nightfall, by the looks of that sky."

"I always carry them."

Lying warm in the thatch, Cair wished them all the misery in the world. Outside, horns sounded. Dogs were barking. And Cair at last faced up to thinking about the subject he'd been avoiding.

He was quite sure that she wasn't the thief. He couldn't bring himself to believe that she could have murdered two guards, or even got someone else to do that. Which left him with two questions, the first relatively unimportant: why had the Servants of the Holy Trinity, perhaps working with some of the locals, done this? Politics? Was Signy a pawn in some evil game of the Holy Roman Emperor? But it was the second question that really troubled him: what was he, Cair Aidin, going to do about it?

What troubled him most about this was that he already in his heart of hearts knew the answer. It made no kind of sense. He should take this heaven-sent opportunity to make for the coast. With all the fuss of chasing Signy, they'd never get to pursuing a runaway thrall on a good horse, until he'd got himself onto a boat.

He knew, though, that he'd be behaving like the crazy fool that the outlander Juzef had said he was. But he wouldn't be alone, or on foot. He had every intention of stealing at least a pair of good horses.

The trail had been easy enough to follow, but the bears had not made following easy for the riders. They'd crossed the river, forcing the riders to go upstream to where it could be forded and then to ride back until they could pick up the trail again. Then they'd gone into some old woodland, uncut and full of snags and dead briars. A bear could go where a horse would struggle. It was apparent that these bears retained human intellect if not shape.

Vortenbras cursed, "Witch-slut. She always was my father's favorite. She couldn't accept that she wouldn't rule. This kind of thing is typical of her. Typical. Vindictive bitch, she made everybody's lives around her a misery. I should have guessed it was her. And after the way my mother always treated her like a daughter."

Erik made a suitably sympathetic noise. What did you say to a man whose sister had just turned into a witch, a thief, and a murderer?

After nearly an hour's hard ride, the going eased. Erik wondered about that, until he saw that the bears, or shape-changing men, had simply taken the shortest route to somewhere where horses would be nearly as useful as an extra nose—in a room full of skunks. They'd ridden into the end of a dead-end valley. A drystone-walled garth and a hut stood at the head of the valley, and beyond it a steep rocky path headed into a ravine between two granite sheetrock slabs. To add to the cheerfulness of the scene, occasional snowflakes drifted down.

The hearthmen reined in, except for the huntsman, who was busy whipping the dogs in. Men started dismounting with a steady grumble. The huntsman, having completed his circuit of the dogs, came back up to the knights. He pointed at the trail. "Too steep. Much rocks to climb. No take horses," he said in broken Frankish.

"Hell's teeth!" said Manfred looking at the slope. "Not up there in armor."

Erik nodded. That would kill a man, as surely as an arrow through the heart. "Dismount them, Szpak. We'll need to strip to breastplates. I hope they'll wait for us."

The stable thralls left for the midday meal. Cair slipped down from his hidey-hole. Hopefully things would still be in too much flux to have his absence noted. Or, if it was noted, to have anything done about it.

He would have to lead the horses, at least until he was well into the woods. A thrall leading horses would excite no comment. A thrall riding . . . well. A different matter. He had a good hooded cloak and pair of breeches and some boots that might pass for a poor freeman's gear. A knife, too. They'd kill him for that, if they caught him. The biggest problem was that the horses would look like stabled, pampered things, too good for a poor man to own, and his olive skin would betray him, too. So he'd have to try to keep his distance from other people.

He'd decided that a saddle would be worth the attention it might generate while he led the horses and was just busy putting it on when someone cleared their throat behind him. He whirled . . . to face the last person he had expected to see in the stables.

Queen Albruna.

She looked, Cair thought, like a ghost. A shadow of her normal rosy-cheeked blond self. She was alone—also unusual. But she stood between him and his objective. And if he was caught they'd kill him anyway.

Her words robbed him of his resolve. "You will be going to my daughter. I need your help."

Cair stood still. Wary.

She wrung her hands. "Vortenbras and his men will kill her. She makes me very angry sometimes, but she is still my daughter. I cannot let her be killed."

Cair hoped that his suspicion didn't show. Or at least the fact that he was going to brain her with a barrel stave any minute didn't show. "And so?" he asked warily.

"One of my men has just come back. They've cornered them behind Svartdal." Cair knew where that was. He'd been up there with the other thralls to load hay for the stables. It wasn't even a league away. "There is a steep pass up behind it, that leads out onto the vidda. My man saw bear tracks around a cave near a
bautarstein
close to the top. The hunt has gone past the cave but they will find it."