In the Eye of Heaven (54 page)

Gol had a knife at his belt.

In a scrabbling instant, Durand's fingers caught the weapon. Gol must have realized, but Durand was on the man's back and already ripping the blade free. The captain's hands locked in Durand's face and hair, but Durand drove the dagger's point upward, scrabbling over mail-shirt and collar. He could feel the man's nails screwing into his eye, then, finally, the dagger slipped from iron links and shot home, deep in the captain's throat.

Durand lay half-pinned in the road. It was as though someone had overturned a cauldron of blood. As the gore ebbed among the cobblestones, he heard the rooks laughing.

23.
Th
e
Broken Crown

T
he rooks spun and tumbled down the Lawerin Way, a cackling cloud of rags. Beyond the cart, the sounds of fighting were finished.

Numb, Durand stepped past the crippled ox—still gulping convulsive breaths—and shuffled to where he was sure to find a killing ground. He remembered crossbows and figures moving on the banks, too close and too many. Some—or all— would be dead.

But familiar faces glanced up.

Between the two ditches, knights and animals sprawled in clumps. Shield-bearers picked through the wreckage, clearing the road. In the midst of it all, a knot of men crouched round Lamoric's prone form. Durand could not see whether their lord lived or died.

Faces popped up to look at him: Heremund, Berchard, Agryn. Coensar's face was stern. Each man wore his own version of shock. Finally, he saw Deorwen. Bent very low, she looked up into his face as though she was looking at a dead man.

Abruptly, Lamoric craned his neck. A sword wound had split the sleeve over his shoulder.
"Hells,"
he breathed.
"What have they done to you ? "

Durand blinked. He went to brush at his cloak, and saw his hands—shaking and bloody as a butcher's. A sticky mask covered his face, and his cloak stuck and clung with the stuff.

"No no," he said. "I met the captain on the road. It's his, or most of it."

There was sick, gusty laughter.

"Gods, Durand, wash up. We'll all be sick," Lamoric managed.

Deorwen was raising a hand, shaking, to her face.

Through luck or the intervention of the Powers, Lamoric's company had lost only three horses and two men, though a few had taken crossbow bolts.

"We're lucky," said Coensar. "You don't walk out of a trap like this, let alone drive the bastards off. They hadn't the men for it, and I think we got more warning than they intended."

A commotion turned their heads.

Stalking through the wreckage came Waer the wrestler at the vanguard of half-a-dozen knights, including Lord Moryn himself. Durand and a few of the others stood up to intercept him as Lamoric shoved his helmet back on, grumbling an oath.

"Very pretty," said Waer. He set big fists on his hips.

"You should watch what you say," Ouen warned, but Waer only laughed.

"Very pretty indeed. We all get bottled up behind your lot, and then they're on us. What did you pay?"

Lamoric forced himself into the thick of the confrontation. "I lost men!"

Waer sneered. "Or did they threaten you? Was that it? You had another half league behind them than we did. Did they have you at the point of a sword, telling you to shut up and let us come on? Was that it? A coward's bargain?"

"Waer!" said Moryn.

"It's easy to call off your dog after he's bitten, isn't it, Milord?" said Lamoric. Durand could hear a hitch of pain in his voice. "Why don't you just say what you wish and have- done with it? This man and his temper are a bloody thin excuse."

Waer lunged forward, caught short by his friends even as his fingers hooked the air at Lamoric's throat.

"You are enough to make a man ill, Moryn," said Lamoric. "You needn't worry about us getting under your feet any longer. There is more than one way to Tern Gyre, and I won't be on the same road with you any longer. Coensar?"

Coensar nodded stiffly.

"And Guthred?" Lamoric said. The aging shield-bearer looked up from his work in the blood and torn flesh. "Get that lot ready to travel. We!ll find a sanctuary to take the dead. And get a party forward to butcher those oxen and heave them out of the road."

They left their
dead in a town called Lanes Hall and rode north down back roads as a ship tacks into the wind. Where the Lawerin Way would have been straight and clear, now they navigated a maze of hamlets, following Heremund the skald. The little man knew every well and standing stone in Errest, but mysterious strangers stalked the countryside, and black shapes flapped from felons swinging at every crossroad.

They chose to make for Port Stairs. The men judged that from its cliffside perch above the Broken Crown, the city was no more than twenty leagues across the bay from Tern Gyre.

Berchard swore that coasters and fishermen crossed the Crown every day.

Outriders questing ahead of the party reported lone horsemen and slinking strangers among the hedgerows, though none would stand when challenged. Once, they heard hoof-beats over a rise—a fleeing rider. Durand could feel eyes on them from every side. He shot a glance at Deorwen and kept his hand near his blade.

Out ahead, Badan and two of Guthred's shield-bearers were hunting for a refuge.

"You can feel the buggers, closer and closer," muttered Ouen. "A hand's closing about us. We'll wind up missing Lord Moryn's party yet."

"Mind what you say," cautioned Berchard. The Sons of Atthi did not name a doom they hoped to avoid.

"I've never seen an outlaw band who'd attack so many swords," said Ouen. "It's madness, or it's not finished."

Abruptly, Agryn spoke. "I'd be happier if we had shelter."

They were losing the light of Heaven.

Coensar stood high in his stirrup irons, twisting to look out over the gloomy fields. 'There!"

Badan and his shield-bearers appeared from the gloom ahead, their horses puffing clouds.

"What news?" demanded Coensar.

"There really are men on these roads, Coen," Badan said, eyeing the hills and hedges. "Luring us into some hard corner or waiting for a chance, I can't say. Quick to ride and slow to answer, anyway. But we've found a place. The plowman we rousted called it 'Attorfall.' Big enough to get inside and bolt the door."

"Let us hurry," commanded Lamoric.

Durand judged it
a miracle that Badan had found the place at all.

In the dusk, a deep curve of shadow swallowed the village entirely. Badan and his shield-bearers pointed at what seemed a lonely, oak-scabbed hump of hill, and no one believed them. Then they saw it. The whole village—two dozen barns and cottages—huddled where the hill's old flank had slumped into the road. Shingles, thatch, and walls were green with moss and black with damp. A dog barked.

"Hells, Badan," said Berchard, "there's a wellborn man living in this warren?"

"Some vassal knight of Hellebore's," Badan answered.

"Heaven help him."

Ouen winced. "Aye. Look there. A stone house."

"It's green as old pork," was Berchard's dubious answer.

Now, the dog was yowling.

"Let us get inside," prompted Agryn.

They rode on into the cramped alleys of the village and under the staring eyes of long-haired cattle. Durand watched Deorwen and Bertana moving through the damp as faces peered from between the green boards of their shutters.

All of the men went armed.

Berchard pointed at an ox. "I can actually see mold growing on this one. They're more than half vegetable, these brutes. I—"

"—Keep your eyes open, all of you, and your mouths shut," directed Coensar. "No more surprises."

At the next corner, a stooped manservant met them. This was no knight-at-arms.

"Sir," said Lamoric. "I am Lamoric of Gireth and these are my retainers and traveling companions. We have encountered trouble on the road and crave the hospitality of your master. There are womenfolk among us."

The servant regarded them wordlessly, slack and gray as a mushroom.

"We mean no harm," said Lamoric.

Another moment of silence passed. Durand heard leather straps creak around him—belts and gauntlets. No one wanted to turn back into the shadows on the road.

Without a word, the servant turned, and the company followed him through a crowd of sheds and coops and into the gloomy entry stair of the greenish manor house.

Durand kept an eye on arrow slits and upper windows, and kept his fist on his blade.

Stepping through an open door, the whole party crowded into the stair—a place damper than tombs—and a door rattled open above them. Durand followed the others shuffling into a cavernous darkness, conscious of keeping himself between Deorwen and the unknown.

But they found only the lank servant bowing in the gloom. "Sir Warin of Attorfall," he announced.

And no host answered.

The room was dark as a pool and nothing twitched. A dog was growling. Two dogs. Badan was already grumbling when a vague shape finally shifted in the murk.

Lamoric cleared his throat. "Sir Warin? I am Lord Lamoric, second son of Abravanal, Duke of Gireth. These are my retainers and traveling companions."

Durand thought he made out the long shape of a table.

"You come armed into my hall," grunted a voice.

"We met trouble on the road." He lifted his hand, triggering a booming bark from one of the dogs. "We mean no harm."

Eerily, flames appeared in the dark silence, bobbing in the empty air. They could have been candles borne by Lost souls. The lamps clunked down on the tabletop with a whiff of fish oil.

"Dinner and a roof?" said the reluctant shape that must be Warin.

"Aye," said Lamoric. "For a night. My men and I are bound to Port Stairs on my father's business." It was a simple lie.

Warin grunted again, and the manservant ushered the men silently to his. master's table where smoky lamplight gave the party a better look at their host: a sour old man, his thin hair bristled over the pale bladder of his face. He sat between two simperingly uneasy women, each like toadstools. Flustered, they were almost too late to usher Deorwen and Lady Bertana to sit by them.

As the men settled uneasily upon the benches, new servants appeared from the dark, thudding trenchers down and leaving the party with flat loaves and a wheel of what looked like yellow wax. Men like Badan and Ouen made faces, though Lamoric held his pleasant smile and picked up a bit of bread.

From the strain in his neck, he might as well have tried to bite an old woolen stocking.

In the candlelight, Durand could make out two monstrous mastiffs, bone-gray and looking as big as steers.

"You've a lot of men with you," their host grunted. "I have, and I'm sure we're grateful for whatever you can spare. Have you had many guests of late?" "No. No guests. It's lean times."

The servants returned, setting down tumblers and slopping out beer. One of the simpering mushrooms pulled at her lord's sleeve.

'These two are my daughters," Warin said, an introduction that provoked nodding bows from the pair.

In silence then, the men took their second bites of coarse bread or scrabbled at what they hoped was cheese.

Durand shifted on the bench, and his hand touched something on the seat: a pair of men's gloves. Well made, but too new for Warin, and he had never seen them before.

"So, Sir Warin," Lamoric ventured. "You will have seen the signs in the Heavens?"

"I've seen. Turned the milk sour in half my kine."

As the man scratched his wattles, his servant slipped in at Durand's elbow. The gloves were gone when Durand looked.

"And there are men on the roads. Messengers, maybe. Spies. I wondered if you might have heard something."

"There's always strangers on the road. More when times are uncertain. If you're asking after the king and his kin," Warin said, "we've heard naught, though I wouldn't be surprised with tax on tax and fines and levies. And now this great loan. No one much liked the story of Carlomund riding out with those two elder boys of his and coming back with a busted neck."

"Sir Warin," Lamoric warned.

"No one's ever much liked King Ragnal."