The Traitor's Heir (58 page)

Eamon met his enemy's gaze squarely. There was no doubting that he stood in the Easter's power, but he was not afraid. The tall man tugged his reins into his hands.

“Harry us no further, Hand.” The words were harsh, strangely mixed with the eastern accent. Eamon did not answer.

The Easter turned his horse and galloped back to the injured convoy. The other riders followed him. None of them looked back. The last of the Gauntlet reached the treeline.

Eamon felt terrible relief and shame. He did not know what had moved the Easter to spare them, but it did not matter; his heart beat wretchedly. He laid one hand over it to ease the pain.

“By the throne!” Anderas rasped, half-laughing, gasping with pain and fear unworked. “You have a certain style, Lord Goodman – a very particular style – and not a little luck.”

Eamon helped Anderas hobble back to the treeline. The calls of the dying and jeers of the victorious washed over him. They staggered under the cover of the eaves. The battle of Pinewood was over.

The fallback location was a large glade, thickly wooded on all sides but with a narrow approach from the south by which the horses could be walked to it.

Bloodied men filled the once tranquil space. Eamon looked at them in dismay. A brief count had shown that half were dead. Another two dozen were missing or unaccounted for. They had lost three of the Hands, one knight, and over seventy ordinary soldiers and Gauntlet officers. Only a score of the sixty men from Greypass had survived; they stared vacantly at the surrounding carnage.

Eamon held a quick meeting with his officers and the remaining Hands. As they gathered tales from the various parts of the deployment they grew grave. The whole convoy had been littered with hidden war wagons. Many men had been lost in the initial volleys and dozens more had been killed while seeking shelter between the vehicles that should have been so easy to capture. The few vehicles that they had managed to take had been lost in the retreat. They did not know how many losses the enemy had taken, but it was reckoned to be a smaller portion of a much larger force.

Only one thing was certain: the Master's men had been defeated.

Eamon ordered their return to Dunthruik; there was nothing to be gained in sending anyone to the local divisions. His order was received with stony silence.

“Look on the bright side,” Anderas told him that evening. Eamon had sought the captain out among the wounded treated throughout the afternoon by the surgeons. The arrow had been removed and the wound cleaned, but when Eamon had asked what the man's chances were the surgeons had answered him with pale looks.

“There's a bright side?” Eamon didn't see it. Nine more had died during the day from their injuries and the air was punctuated by moans of the wounded. He shuddered. Benighted with defeat, he would have to lead the survivors back to Dunthruik. The thought of Cathair terrified him.

And the Master? What would be said of him to the Master? It was beyond utterance.

“We were vastly outnumbered, and surprised,” Anderas grimaced. “It was not our fault. We'll do well to take back so many survivors.”

“Will Lord Ashway see it in that light?”

Anderas laughed grimly. “No! Will Lord Cathair?”

“No.”

Anderas laid a trembling hand on Eamon's arm. “They weren't here, Lord Goodman.”

“But I was. It should have been easy, Anderas!”

“It isn't always easy, Lord Goodman.”

But it should have been. When Eamon lay down to sleep that night, hissing bolts, beating hooves, and dying men haunted him.

The following days' return journey to Dunthruik by the survivors of Pinewood was made in silence. They followed the same road that the convoy had taken. Eamon sent groups of sentries ahead to watch for an Easter rearguard that might yet do them harm. The precaution only added to their slow pace, but revealed that at least part of the convoy had gone south only a short distance from Pinewood; the rest had gone on.

Stops to tend to the wounded were frequent. More men died as they went and Eamon had them laid by the roadside. It was too cold to dig.

The overwhelming sense of shame grew daily. Eamon knew of no way to assuage it – perhaps there was none. At least it unified them. They consoled themselves with the knowledge – or hope – that what had happened had not been their fault. Still they feared their return to the city. Despite the danger posed by the Easters and wayfarers, some of the militia slipped from the ranks, deserting the company during the dark hours.

When the column made camp during those nights Eamon often sought Anderas. His wound was turning ugly, but the surgeons said that amputation would certainly kill him. Anderas bravely denied that anything was wrong. Eamon wondered if there was any hope for the captain at all.

Every moment they were goaded by wheel tracks frozen in the muddy road – their quarry had passed that way before them. It made the road an agent of their shame.

It was the third morning following the battle. The road had run steadily west and a little south, towards the River. Eamon knew that a couple more days would see them to Dunthruik. Anderas's worsening plight was a distraction from the awful welcome that awaited him at the Blind Gate.

Eamon was riding a little way back from the front of the marching lines that morning, trying to encourage the remaining wounded, gathered in carts and buried under all the cloaks that could be spared. They had been moving for perhaps two hours when the lines came to a halt. At first Eamon assumed it signified an unsteady part of the road that would need to be negotiated with care, but the delay persisted. He spurred his horse on to the front of the lines.

They had come to a small hamlet. A couple of Hands and a Gauntlet officer were examining the road.

“What is it, gentlemen?”

“It was here,” snarled one of the Hands – Lord Febian. His fingers pointed in a wild, clawing gesture at the ground. There were traces of grain and wagon marks. “The rest of the bloody convoy was here. It off-loaded supplies and went north off the road.”

“If it no longer goes before us then we may reduce our vanguard sentries,” Eamon answered, trying to keep his voice measured. He was deeply surprised to see that the tracks went north – he had thought that the wayfarers' strength was in the south – but didn't have time to consider the matter. The Hand's tone was feral and men were breaking rank to find out what was happening.

“It stopped here,” Febian continued, then shrieked, “and these people helped them!” Angry assent rumbled through the ranks like thunder.

Things threatened to rupture. Eamon glanced anxiously at the village – there were people there. Some had come to look at the soldiers and many now froze in the streets, afraid – rightly so – that any movement on their part might trigger violence. Eamon's men wanted vengeance for what had been done to them. They wanted to take it there. Eamon could not allow it.

He dismounted and stepped close to the Hand. “Don't incite a massacre, Lord Febian,” he hissed. “There has been enough blood. There will be no more, do you understand?”

“Yes, Lord Goodman,” Febian growled.

“Whose blood has it been?” roared another Hand, jabbing at Eamon with an accusing finger. “Ours! And they shed it. They helped the bastards who killed our men and destroyed our pride. They will go on to strike at the Master. Shall it be said that we saw the Master's enemies and did not strike them? It is our duty!”

Eamon could have killed him where he stood.

“I said no more blood!”

But the Hand's words had grown to a howl; they were joined by the bitter squall of the company's fury. It was too late.

Some of the villagers ran; it triggered an enormous cry as scores of vengeful men broke ranks and poured into the dirty streets. Aghast, Eamon tried desperately to stop them as swords, knives, and daggers flew to their hands. Fingers became talons that carved flesh with the speed of steel.

The incensed mass streamed into the village. The screaming started.

Eamon hurled himself back into the saddle. The square was a mass of moving flesh, some of it already dead, and the soldiers a crimson wave. Men and women tried to flee and were stopped, some beaten to the ground and others dragged away from the square to be tortured.

Eamon yelled and shouted, cried and commanded, but in their rabid frenzy none would hear him. He shook and balked and raged and stared in horror; the violence that he saw was not perpetrated against the King, but against absent soldiers. He wept. It was a glut of madness that he could not stop.

The camp was quiet that night. Eamon sat once more at Anderas's bedside, his bed little more than a stiff bundle of cloaks on the hard ground. He had brought the captain something to drink. Anderas struggled to take a sip, growing weaker by the day. It was too much for Eamon to bear.

There had been rape and murder, hangings, men impaled, and children disembowelled before their parents. Houses had been burned, their contents hurled onto the streets and hacked with manic blows. Blood had been poured into the well along with dozens of small bodies. He did not know how many had escaped, or been left, wounded and alive, to suffer.

“You couldn't have stopped it,” Anderas murmured. Eamon shuddered. “Forgive me for saying so, Lord Goodman, but you were a fool to try. They could have turned on you, too.”

Eamon could not answer him.

“Perhaps on your tour of duty in the north you never saw similar,” Anderas added weakly, “but it is not uncommon – especially when our enemy is as hidden as this Serpent is. Defeat – shame, and the death of brothers in arms – puts a kind of madness into men's blood. But right senses return. Many of these men will not sleep soundly for a long time.”

What good was broken sleep? “It will not atone for what they did,” Eamon snapped.

“It won't,” Anderas agreed. “You should rest, Lord Goodman.” His breathing sounded sickly and shallow.

“Yes,” Eamon murmured, but he did not move.

They remained silent for a long time. Anderas fell asleep. Eamon saw him shuddering beneath the cloaks as the chill moon rose. The camp was quiet.

Anderas was going to die. The surgeons had informed him that the wound was past their skill. It was rumoured that the Easters used arrows with poisoned tips but the surgeons believed that the wound had turned with infection. Anderas fought it bravely, but was doomed to meet with as much success as the battle in which he had garnered the hurt.

Eamon watched the captain's pale, sweating face, sorrow and anger grinding hard in his heart. He would not have lost the battle if he had been a wayfarer. He could have saved the village if he had been a King's man. If he had ever been the First Knight he could save Anderas, even now. But the throned's mark was on him. He had never been – and could never become – the man whom Hughan had believed him to be. He saw that now. The battle was lost, the village was slaughtered, and Anderas would die.

He laid his hand on the captain's brow. It was clammy beneath his touch. Would Anderas last the night? Choking back a sob, he brushed his hair aside. Why should Anderas die for what he had not had the courage to be?

He closed his eyes. He pleaded with the blue light, the King's grace, begging it to overlook his oaths and transgressions, imploring it to come and save a man whose life surely deserved saving. Was it not but little to ask?

You are not a Serpent's man. Cease your unseemly pleading. No grace will come to you, son of Eben. You serve me.

The voice worked cruelly in his mind and his hope fell, crushed. No grace would come. Anderas would die.

He tore his hand away and rose. He could not stay there.

They had camped by the roadside again that night, among a small cluster of hills that offered shelter from the wind. The hillside was dotted with campfires; he heard their distinctive crackling. He did not know – and barely cared – where his feet took him. None noted him, a shadow among shadows at the edge of the firelight. He swept on into the hills until the noise of the camp was far behind him. He walked until his feet began to climb and he was scaling the hillside, his lungs burning with effort. He gasped in the cold air.

Suddenly he stopped. The rocky hillside lay all before him. But there was something different about the half-lit shadows. Part of him remembered the feeling of so long ago, when Ma Mendel had first led him to the Hidden Hall. As he gazed hard at the windswept grass he felt a similar sensation.

Scarcely daring to breathe, he walked forward until he stood between two of the stones. He was staring directly into the hillside. He smelled the cool earth. He reached out with one hand, and stepped forward.

He opened his eyes to the inside of a hall. It was rounded and worked with grey stone. Dull paintings, faded with age, marked the walls. Dust lay thick on the floor and burnt-out torches were bracketed to cracked wall-stones. Behind him he saw out onto the moonlit hillside and down to the field of campfires.

The hall was deserted. It gazed out over the stony hillside, an unseeing guardian that watched the road to Dunthruik.

Why had he come in? Perhaps he had hoped that the place would be filled with wayfarers who, seeing his black cloak, would have fallen upon him and killed him before they realized who he was – or wasn't. He remembered the face of the Easter who had spared him and the eyes of those from the desecrated village who, with their screams, had begged him to spare them. He thought of Anderas, pale and shivering under borrowed cloaks while death choked him…

The moon cast a long arc of light over the hall wall. He looked up. His eyes stung – was he weeping?

There was a shape cut into the stone. Blinking hard, he made out the blade of a sword. It was matched by a star whose light, made real by the moon, hallowed both the carved blade and the house whose emblem it was.

With sudden fury Eamon slammed clenched fists against the wall. Clods of dirt fell from it. He let go of his voice. An anguished, enraged howl, which he had held inside himself since the battle, erupted from his lungs, reverberating in his throat. He roared. Sobbing hard, he sank down to his knees in front of the stone. Watched only by the moonlight he called on the name of the King in despair – and no answer came to him.