The Bloody Quarrel (The Complete Edition) (47 page)

“Wait here. I have scribes preparing the treaty documents now. I shall have refreshments sent to you and we shall exchange treaties and then, if all is agreed, we will bring you your family,” he said.

Kemal almost staggered from the weight of relief that dropped into his chest. But he would rather burn in the pits of Zorva before showing any of that to Fallon. “I am pleased you have seen sense. Both our peoples will be grateful for this day. Let it be so,” he said.

He watched Fallon walk away and turned his back before he closed his eyes and offered up a small prayer. Aroaril willing, everything would work out now. It was not the same as taking back that fateful night when Fallon had broken him but it was a first step.

*

“Have we got the scribes? Get the treaty drawn up, then get drinks and food for the signing, as well as supplies for their trip home,” Fallon announced as he walked back down the gangplank.

Bridgit broke away from Brendan and hurried to his side. “What are you saying? Does this mean you have agreed to give his family back?”

Fallon sighed. “It was either have a treaty now or he would walk away and return in spring to burn Gaelland. I looked into his eyes when he gave in before and agreed to bring you back. But there was no give in his eyes this time. You were both right and wrong. He was prepared to let his family die in exchange for his revenge. The revenge meant more to him than they did.”

Her shoulders sagged for a moment, then her eyes blazed. “It is not too late,” she said. “We can—”

“Bridge, it is done,” he interrupted. “The die is cast and we must hope that Feray can bring him to his senses. She could be our best weapon against a Kottermani attack. Staying here just means there
will
be an attack, one we cannot hold back. We have no choice but to trust he will uphold the treaty we will sign.”

“I hope you do not regret this moment,” she warned.

He let out a bark of humorless laughter. “You are not the only one,” he said. “But at least it gives our people a chance. And I need you to support me. If we are to make it through this, then we need to work together.”

“As long as you listen to me, there will be no problems,” she assured him.

Kemal watched the harbor of Berry slip past on either side before nodding to Gokmen. “I shall be going below to my cabin. Sail to our meeting point and tell me when we reach it,” he ordered.

“Your will, high one,” Gokmen bowed.

Kemal walked past his men without a backward glance. They had watched him sign the new treaty and drink a glass of wine with Fallon without emotion. He was also proud he had welcomed his family back without any fuss. The men had been told his family had stayed behind in Gaelland as proof the new land was safe. He did not know how many believed it, nor did he care. Their lives were forfeit if they even whispered of it. But now there were no cursed Gaelish watching, so he hurried below.

He flung open the door and Asil and Orhan flung themselves into his arms. He fell to his knees and held them close, kissing them both on the head and feeling them sob into his shoulders.

“You are safe now. Nobody will ever hurt you again,” he promised. He held them tight. Finally they stopped crying and he stopped needing just to smell their hair and feel them in his arms and he stood, releasing them gently.

“Go and wash and change,” he told them. “There are fresh clothes for you – you no longer need to wear those Gaelish items.”

Accustomed to obeying him, the boys began to move off, then rushed back and hugged him again. He patted their backs until Asil took Orhan’s hand, leading him to their adjoining cabin space.

Kemal watched them go and then turned to see Feray standing at the window. Wordlessly he strode across and held her.

“I died a little each night without you,” she said softly.

“I am sorry. It was my fault you were taken and put into Fallon’s hands,” he said, drawing back a little from her. “Did he treat you with respect?”

“He did. He showed he is not the monster of that night when he hurt us. And he also saved the boys and me when the mad King Aidan took us and wanted to offer our hearts to Zorva. He risked his life for us. He, alone and barely armed, took on a King, a Prince, a Fearpriest and a whole roomful of Zorva-worshippers to save us. His son, Kerrin, even became friends with Asil and Orhan. When we return, I am sure they would like to—”

“That will not happen,” Kemal said harshly.

“What do you mean? I thought we had a new treaty with the Gaelish?”

Kemal produced his sealed copy of the treaty, ripped the wax open, tore the parchment into pieces, then threw it into the sea. He turned back to her. “There is no treaty. There never could be a treaty with one like him.”

“But I do not understand,” Feray said. “You agreed, gave your word. And Fallon is the leader of the Gaelish, we need to deal with him—”

“I will never deal with that bastard!” Kemal spat. “I have spent the last moon dreaming of my revenge on him for what he did. Every night I relive that night when he threatened Orhan and made me do his bidding. Every fiber of my spirit cries out for vengeance. I have to humiliate him to restore my pride. That will always be between us and I must wipe out that stain.”

She reached out and grabbed his hand. “There is no stain,” she insisted. “You did what you had to, to protect your family. He was driven to it by the need to get his family back.”

He snatched his hand back. “I never thought you would defend him, after he held a knife to our son’s face!”

Feray reached out again, this time with both hands. “He fought for us, faced down real monsters disguised as men. I have to respect that and I have talked with him, seen he is a man not unlike you—”

“He is nothing like me!” Kemal snarled, outraged at the thought. “And saving you means nothing. If it were not for him, you would never have been at risk.”

She hung on to his hand. He was tempted to pull away but it had been so long since they had been together.

“What will you do?” she asked.

He let a smile creep across his face at the thought. It had taken a steady nerve and a quick tongue but he had finally turned the tables on Fallon. “I have seven other ships. They will meet us a day away from here. Then we shall return at night and take our revenge. I shall have a force of more than two thousand men. More than enough to strike at Berry and take the city. Without King Aidan, the country is ripe for the picking. I can secure Gaelland and return to Adana with Fallon and his family in chains to drag before my father and take a leisurely revenge.”

She pulled her hands away from his. “So you sat there and lied to them? Signed a treaty you intended to break?”

He stared at her in surprise. He had expected her to be delighted with his cleverness and applauding his acting skills. “I did what I had to, to free you!”

“I told them you could be trusted,” she said, her voice almost a wail.

“Good! Anything that helped fool that bastard. When next we see him, he will be in chains and groveling at my feet. And then the dreams will stop and I shall be a true man again,” he said, the thought of it filling him with a delicious joy.

Next moment she was in his arms again and he kissed her lightly. This was more like it!

“My love, do not do this,” she pleaded. “You do not need to prove your manhood and you lost nothing by agreeing to Fallon that night. You saved us and now we are all together again.”

Her hand slipped down his body, just as it did in his dreams every night. But he did not react to it. He did not want to hear he had no need of proving his manhood. He wanted her to see him for a true man. He stepped back.

“My love, Fallon is a better ruler to deal with than the mad King Aidan and his Zorva-worshipping son. Think of what is best for the Empire—”

“This is best for me, which is best for the Empire,” he said. “There will be no ruler in Gaelland but me and then, when the Gaelish are cowed, one of my brothers can take over so I am free to sit on the Elephant Throne. Now, no more about it. We shall wash and dress and eat together. We must make up for the time we have lost.”

She opened her mouth again but he placed his finger across her lips. He could see in her eyes that she wanted to keep arguing but his mind was clear. Fallon must pay for his crimes. Give him a couple of days to relax and then the trap would snap around him and the dreams would stop, replaced by Fallon on his knees, weeping and pleading helplessly for the lives of his family.

Duchess Dina watched the cheering crowds from her window, sourly, seeing the joy of families reunited. She should be at the head of the parade. She should be receiving the cheers. Without her, this would never have happened. But that bastard Fallon had been unable to see what she had done to help him. Ungrateful wretch. It wasn’t as if she had ever set out to harm anyone. She was just trying to make the best of a bad world.

She had thought she would enjoy being the Duchess of Lunster, although that enjoyment swiftly palled. Rather than spend most of his time in Berry, her husband Kinnard stopped that life and instead stayed in Lunster, which was a foul pit, denying her the adulation and luxury she deserved as his wife.

Then he had to get on his high horse and defy his cousin the King, declaring he would not have any part of Aidan’s plan to use Zorva to defeat the Kottermanis. What choice did she have? When your King tells you to silence someone or you will die too, naturally you make the choice to survive. The fact he promised the county would stay hers and dangled the possibility of marriage had almost nothing to do with it. It was a shame that guardsman she had prepared botched the job and sent the ship in to Baltimore rather than into the cliffs, but that was hardly her fault, now was it?

Yes, she had helped the Kottermanis take her people but that was inescapable. It was part of Aidan’s plan and, once she had helped him by killing her husband, there was no refusing him. But she had not liked doing it and had tried to help Prince Cavan. Aidan was a madman and she would have happily seen Cavan take the throne – especially if she could be sitting beside him when he did so. But the Prince had not grasped the possibility and, when the King had talked about making her his Queen, what could she do but to help him with that? It wasn’t her fault that men fell over themselves to fall for her.

Of course the mad bastard had then let Meinster drip honeyed words of poison into his ears, so he agreed to marry the Earl’s daughter instead. That meant all deals were off and she could help Fallon, as she always wanted to do. That had worked well, for a time, until the fool of a guardsman blabbed his mouth off and Fallon was too stupid to grasp what she had done for him and turned on her.

She glared out of the window. It was not her fault! The men around her were the dimwits who had tricked her and forced her to do what she must to survive. She had never intended to hurt anybody, just to make her way in this wicked man’s world. And then they looked down their nose at her and accused her of treachery! Well, if that was how they insisted on seeing things, then she must look elsewhere for advancement. And where else was there to go but to Prince Swane?

“Duchess?”

The man’s deep voice disturbed her contemplation but she turned from the window with a smile. Munro was pretending to be an expert dressmaker at the moment but his real job was being head of the King’s informers. The former chamberlain, Regan, had had quite the network spread throughout Berry, keeping an eye and an ear on what people were doing and saying. She had found all the details in the King’s papers and taken over the running of the network. Yes, maybe she should have said something to Fallon about it, but he would not have grasped how important such a network could be. He might have even demanded it be destroyed. And, given the way things had turned out, she had been right to keep it from him.

Once Fallon had betrayed her and stuck her in this gilded prison, she had been able to get word out for Munro so at least she knew all that was going on in the city – even if she could do nothing much with that information.

“What is the latest news from Prince Swane?” she asked.

“He is locked in Meinster, as much a prisoner there as you are here, your grace,” Munro replied. “He does not have the ships to sail to Berry, nor can he cross the mountain passes at this time of year, especially without a base on this side. Without any of the nobles here to help him, he is stuck in the country’s east. So our message has intrigued him. He wants to know more.”

“Was there any mention of my previously helping Fallon? Did he indicate I will have a place high in his favor if we can regain his kingdom?”

“Duchess, that I cannot say. I learned long ago not to try to predict the mood of the nobility,” Munro said simply.

Dina chewed her lip. She was confident she could do much to bring down Fallon, but it was only worth risking if she knew Swane would reward her. An exchange of scrolls was not enough reassurance. She needed to look Swane in the eye.

“I need to get out of here,” she said abruptly. “I know things about the Guild of Wizards that their ruling council would not want made public. They will have to help me. With magical help, I can make sure Swane gets over the mountains. And then the nobles around here will open their warehouses to the prince, if I speak to them first and remind them of the promises they made to Aidan, promises I found in his papers. Finally, with your help, we can open a gate into Berry for Swane’s men. Yet I need to speak to these people myself, both to convince them and to make sure Swane knows it is me he has to thank for returning him to his throne.”

“But your grace, we have discussed this before. There are too many guards on this house. I have some men who can sink a knife into a back but no one trained for this,” Munro said carefully.

“We need a distraction. Something to summon most of the men away from here. Perhaps a fire.”

“Your grace, we would need more than a distraction. We would need something big to happen to take away the attention of so many guards,” Munro warned.

“Something will occur to me,” she said confidently. “Get the men ready and have them nearby. I will get out of this and I will make Fallon rue the day he ever turned on me.”

*

Fallon held Bridgit close.

“I should have been there. I should have listened to you when you warned me,” he said softly.

An exhausted Kerrin had been finally put to bed, still protesting he was fine, and now had Caley snoring away with him in one room. Fallon had felt bound to offer the dog back to Dermot, her original owner, but Caley listened carefully and then stayed with Fallon. Dermot agreed it was the dog’s choice.

Finally, Fallon and Bridgit began to tell each other what had been happening for the past moon.

He listened in horror to her tale, although the horror soon turned to pride at what she had done. “I always said you would surprise yourself with the strength you have inside.”

“I would have been happier not to have to find it,” she said wryly.

He grimaced at the deaths of Sean and Seamus, although a little regretful he couldn’t try something similar on them himself, and shuddered as she told him of the escape and the fight to make it back across the sea, how they had nearly starved and then run into Kemal.

“You did something to him when you took his family, and he cannot forgive you,” she finished.

Fallon was not listening to that, still overcome with the thought of all she had been through, how she had held the people together.

“Your father was right. I should have just sailed for Kotterman and tried to get you all back, so you did not go through that,” he sighed.

“You probably would have died,” she said flatly. “It would have been a slaughter and, even if you got most of us out, they would have chased us and sunk us all.”

“But still—”

“I am back now, and safe. It has all worked out.”

“But so much could have gone wrong! And you did it all while pregnant!”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Not all of it. I did not realize at first.”

“But—”

“Will you stop saying ‘but’! I am here, you are here, we are safe and alive. We should give thanks to Aroaril for that.”

He hugged her closer still. “This baby will be a symbol,” he said. “It shows that our lives have changed and our luck with it. After all we have been through, surely we deserve this child.”

“I thought we deserved all of them,” Bridgit whispered.

“You know what I mean.”

“When the child is born, then I can relax. Not before,” she said. “Then I might believe that it is recompense for all we have been through.”

“I will protect you. You, Kerrin and the new baby,” he swore.

“Don’t make promises you may not be able to keep. We might have to protect you,” she said, poking him in the chest. “What have you been doing while I was away?”

Fallon hesitated. He had made so many bad decisions, what would she think of him? Then he began anyway. Talking about it with her might lift some of the guilt he had carried.

*

Bridgit too listened with a mixture of horror and sympathy as Fallon’s tale grew: the escape from Lunster, saving Cavan, fighting the spawn of Zorva, being unable to help Kerrin, Fearpriests, killing Cavan, becoming a hero to the city and then killing Aidan.

“Now you are back with me, everything will be fine. We have Berry and the west and south now and in the spring we shall take the rest of the country. We can make Cavan’s dream of a better Gaelland come true. With you by my side, what is to stop us?”

She stroked his cheek. “It may not be that easy,” she warned. “Swane will not sit back and let us take his kingdom. And then there are the Kottermanis …”

He stroked her face fondly. “In the daylight we have lookouts scouring the horizon. And at night we have the boom placed across the harbor each night, fishing boats tied together to make a barrier with men patrolling it. If Kemal tries to play us false, he will get a horrible surprise. I have trained the men to fight Kottermanis in the streets and we’ll drive them into the sea and capture him and his family. The only Kottermanis left are a couple of merchants and we are keeping an eye on them.”

She sighed. “I hope you are right. But I still feel uneasy about him.”

“That is only to be expected, after what you went through. But you are safe now and I swear to Aroaril that I shall never let anything happen to you again.”

She shivered a little at that.

“What would I do without you?” he asked.

“Well, Aroaril only knows, because you managed to get yourself into quite the pickle here,” she said with a smile, trying to forget his earlier promise.

“I missed you so much. Like my heart had been cut out.”

She kissed him then. “Enough talking,” she said. “We can talk more later.”

“There are so many more things—” he began, but she reached down.

He grabbed her hand. “But what about the baby?” he asked hoarsely.

“After all it has been through so far, I don’t think this will worry it,” she said.