Champion of the Rose - Kobo Ebook (6 page)

A fortunate thing, given the weight of her remaining
saddlebag. She'd packed them both with
care, trying to anticipate all eventualities, and left the more disposable
concealed in the short passage between The Lost Prince's cellar and its
icehouse. The single bag had still
become an aching burden, and she would be entirely glad to stop.

"Why is it safe for us to travel this way?" she
asked, shifting the bag to her opposite shoulder.

"Running water, Champion." Nina's tone indicated she found the Rathen
Champion sadly ignorant. "We got to
leave it now, but
nothing'll
come close here. The bushes are spiny, so keep low. There's boards either side."

There wasn't enough light for Soren to see what Nina was
leading her into, but with the child's guidance she found wide, rough boards
which seemed to have been shoved beneath a stand of extremely thorny
bushes. They formed a low, uninviting
passage away from the streambed. Nina
was already scuttling ahead, but Soren hesitated. She wasn't particularly afraid of the dark,
and so long as she went slowly the bushes weren't a major issue. Yet for the first time it had occurred to her
to wonder if Nina was who she'd claimed to be. Trapped in a thorny tube, she would be at the mercy of someone who
wished the Rathen Champion ill.

A bit late for cold feet. Besides, the use of the secret stair in their escape wasn't likely if
Nina was only pretending to be the innkeepers' child. Feeling a little scared was natural, but it
was no good letting nerves overcome common sense.

A few jabs to the spine later, Soren found herself facing a
tall, dark figure who patted Nina's shoulder before saying: "Welcome,
Champion. I'm
Riese
Meddescalf
."

"Soren Armitage," Soren replied. "Thank you for sending for me."

"Didn't see what else I could do,"
Riese
Meddescalf
replied,
bluntly. "I don't relish spending the
rest of my life skulking about an abandoned temple."

"Is that what this place is?" Soren could only make out the shape of a wall
ahead, and the faintest crack of light.

"One of the
Selunic
retreats
as was." The innkeeper moved back
toward that line of light. "Best
crowd close, Champion. Don't want to
keep the door open long."

As Soren moved forward, the woman tapped on the door. Immediately, the light within dimmed to
nearly nothing, and then they were moving forward into a single, dilapidated
room. A guttering lantern revealed a
woman who was Nina's image, and a girl perhaps five years Nina's elder –
younger than Soren had expected. She was
darker than her heart-sister, more like her blood-mother, who proved to be tall
and statuesque, with near-black hair and hazel eyes.

Soren lowered her bag to the floor and immediately looked
around for the heir.

"I suppose introductions are the first order of the
day,"
Riese
Meddescalf
said. "You know Nina, of course,
and this is Lucia, my eldest."

"Champion." The girl, Lucia, bobbed briefly, then busied herself turning the lantern
back up.

"My wife,
Jesmy
," said
Riese
.
Jesmy
nodded, reserved and unforthcoming, and Soren tried
to smile at her, but almost all her attention was taken up by the bundle the
woman was lifting from a nest of blankets. Her stomach was a tight knot. At
last.

"About time you were feeding her anyway, Lucia,"
Jesmy
Meddescalf
said
prosaically. She surveyed the baby
cradled in her arms, then stepped forward so that Soren could view the new
Queen of Darest.

Sleepily, the child blinked. She had dark blue eyes and long lashes, but only a thin fuzz of black
hair. Pink lips parted in a minute yawn
and she shifted in her grandmother's arms. Her skin was the flawless cream of the very young. Beautiful.

And not Rathen. Not
remotely. Soren knew it as she knew the
sun would rise in the morning. There was
no response within her, nothing like the force which had brought her to Tor
Darest for her annunciation, or had spoken the name 'Teraman' at the touch of a
rose. There wasn't even the same intense
awareness which had made her look at the man at the inn. This was just a pretty baby.

Idiot. Thousand times
fool. She'd gone looking for a child
purely on assumption. Why should a
Rathen appearing out of nowhere be newborn, after all? A fully-fledged Rathen made just as much
sense as a baby fathered by a ghost. And
what had she met with, when she'd arrived at Teraman? What had the Rose told her?

"How old is Helena?" she asked, her tone not quite
hiding suddenly discovered doubts.

"Three weeks tomorrow," said Lucia, then looked
down and away, betraying awareness of the why behind the question. The girl knew perfectly well that there was
nothing Rathen about her child.

As her daughter became the picture of guilt,
Riese
Meddescalf
made a noise
full of understanding, anger, and disbelief. "It was that smooth-talking lieutenant, wasn't it?" she said,
sounding rather more relieved than anything else. "Sun, Moon and Sky, Lucia, do you have
any idea what you've done?!"

"
I've
done?!" the girl retorted, with sudden fire. "What have I done except what dozens
have done before me? Forgotten the herbs
or the moon's quarter and found no-one to stand by me except a story about a
ghost? I didn't suddenly announce that
the Rathens had come back. I didn't
bring Jutlanders and Cyans and half the garrison to camp at the inn!"

"You could have told us, you silly chit!"
Jesmy
said. "Why insist on the excuse after all this?"

"You never–!"

Disturbed by the raised voices, Helena coughed, then started
to wail. Argument forgotten, there was a
rush to soothe her. A babe's cry in the
forest would be a beacon to any who searched.

Soren looked around the makeshift home the
Meddescalfs
had made out of this retreat of Selune's
worshippers. Solid but neglected, with
only a few sticks of furniture and nothing resembling comforts. The shutters were plastered with mud and
leaves to stop light escaping, and a curtain, currently hooked to one side, had
been tacked above the doorway. There was
no arlune, no icons of Selune visible, but perhaps the retreat's dedication to
the Moon afforded it some protection. The thornbushes outside certainly did.

Safe, in other words. But not forever. Eventually the
garrison, or someone else, would find them.

"Mama-la?" Nina walked slowly forward. "Mama-la, does this mean we can go home?"

Riese
Meddescalf
looked at her heart-daughter with a mix of pain and regret, while
Jesmy
briefly stared at the ceiling, then turned back to
Soren. "Champion?"

As if she might know the answer, could do anything to fix
this mess. Soren wished she could
reassure them, say that it would be all right. "There's few who'd believe the truth," she said instead. "Not when there is an heir, and that
heir is in Teraman. If I went back there
now and announced that Helena was no Rathen, they'd only search the
harder."

Nina's face crumpled, and she would have headed for the door
if her blood-mother hadn't caught at her shoulder.

"That's it then?"
Riese
Meddescalf
asked. "There's no way back?" Her face was stark and sombre, facing down the prospect of abandoning
her home and livelihood to escape those who would kidnap her granddaughter. Simply because Lucia had sought the refuge of
a lie everyone had taken for granted until the blooming of the Rathen
Rose. Soren immediately decided she
couldn't let that happen.

All she had to do was think of some way to stop it.

-
oOo
-

Breathing in the dark.

Soren froze halfway along the fence between forest edge and
icehouse. One of her hands protectively
touched the babe-sling suspended against her midriff, and she almost laughed at
the sheer futility of the gesture.

Over in the pitch-black shadows cast by the icehouse, the
person who waited let out his breath – a soft, disparaging
tuh
!
which Soren shouldn't be able to hear – in response to a movement the lurker
shouldn't be able to see. The man from
the inn. No need to see his face. The prickle down her spine was enough, the
curling twitch of power saying here, yes, look. Look at this, your future, your central concern, your problem. Your King.

It was no use blaming herself for not understanding; the
important thing was that she'd found her Rathen. With Teraman full of people who seemed
determined to interfere, the best thing to do was get him far away as quickly
as possible. Of course, unlike Helena,
he was liable to offer an opinion about what happened next.

Glad she'd left Nina at the forest's edge, Soren started
slowly forward, her stomach clenching tighter with every step. The subtle alteration in his breathing when
she moved told her that he truly could see her, despite the moon-cast
shadows. He must have watched her leave,
and known that all she'd be able to do was come back.

"Your Highness?" she whispered experimentally,
stopping bare feet from the person whose breathing she could hear so
perfectly. Her eyes gave her only a
suggestion of a shape, a black form leaning against the small building's wall. Her pulse was falling over itself, her chest
all mashed with nerves, excitement and a peculiar kind of dread. If she reached out, she would be able to
touch him. Rathen.

"So you're not completely oblivious," said the man
who was to be King. The words were
terse, exasperated, with an underlying note of the anger she'd been shown when
she first saw him. "What possessed
you to fetch back that nursling?"

Soren touched the sling again, tracing the curve of the head
and the soft, cushiony body. Since she
was certain he could see her, she simply grasped the doll around the neck and
drew it from the sling.

"A straightforward sort of diversion," she told
him, glad her voice didn't betray the knocking in her chest. This wasn't the moment to analyse why being
close to this Rathen stranger made her so apprehensive. "If someone spots me riding toward The
Deeping with a babe in a sling, they won't keep scouring the Tongue for the
Meddescalfs
. And
they'll have no reason to watch the road between here and Tor Darest."

He paused before replying, and his tone was a touch less scornful
when he did. "Riding? The stables are guarded."

"It's difficult," Soren agreed, rather hoping he'd
produce a better plan. The horse was one
of the many holes in her own. "But
so would escaping on foot be, after being spotted."

"True." The
admission was grudging, as if he wanted to be angry, to find fault with
her. "Wait here," he added,
and thrust a heavy leather object into her hands. Her other saddlebag. Before Soren could object, he strode away
toward the inn, not bothering to keep out of the light cast by the crescent of
moon.

Biting her lip, Soren silently cursed the man to whom she
was supposed to devote her life. There
was nothing she could do but sit and hope that he didn't get himself
captured. This Rathen, whoever he was
and however he had suddenly appeared in Teraman, did not seem a tractable
sort. Shepherding a baby definitely
would have been easier.

Thoughtfully, she replaced the doll in its sling. The unease which had gripped her lessened
with his departure, leaving her another thing to worry about. Why this impression of not-quite-threat? For all he was a mage, she hadn't expected to
feel scared of the Rathen she was supposed to protect. Or whatever it was she was feeling. Imminence.

Her intense awareness of his breathing had dropped away, so
she closed her eyes, trying to recapture it, trying to focus. The wind played on her skin, and skirled
noisily through the trees. A distant
something rattled, and she heard a woman's voice speaking soft and low. But nothing out of the ordinary.

Then, muffled but unmistakable, the sound of a horse. Disbelieving, Soren stood up as her Rathen
rounded the corner of the icehouse, Vixen in tow. He'd even saddled her. And in no more time than if he'd been
collecting his own horse, without any difficulties about guards at all.

Rathens were mages. It was a point she'd do well to remember.

"Give me time to get to the eastern edge of the
clearing, then ride out. I'll wait in
the forest on the right side of the road." Without another word, he dropped the reins and walked off.

Soren decided not to be exasperated. The man was going to be King, after all. An efficient sort of King, if this was any
example. Obnoxious arrogance was
something she'd just have to learn to ignore.

Sighing, she turned her attention to Vixen, who reached
forward a questing nose. "Hello to
you, too," she said, catching up the dangling reins. "Miss me?"

Vixen snorted wetly onto Soren's neck, then abandoned her
investigation to sample a grassy tussock.

Duly dismissed, Soren loosed the saddle so she could strap
the saddlebags in their rightful place, then played with Vixen's mane until her
Rathen could have walked twice as far as he'd specified. She still didn't have the least idea who he
was, or how he came to be alive so long after the death of the last
Rathen. At least he seemed to have
quickly grasped the importance of this diversion. An infant Rathen could have one day denied
Aristide Couerveur the Regency. A fully
grown Rathen need only have his Champion proclaim him beneath the Rathen Rose
to take the throne.

Soren doubted Arista Couerveur would be pleased.

Chapter Six

As she turned onto the road to the eastern edge of the
clearing, an astonished shout told Soren she'd been spotted. Urging Vixen into a canter, she searched
among the sharp-edged shadows for the source of the cry and found a pair of
swear-swords directly ahead. Two men,
who stared at the pale sling made so visible by the moonlight. Despite knowing she carried only a doll,
Soren still felt an urge to shield her midriff protectively. And to apologise for her deception.