The Widow and the King (43 page)

You have to find your way
, his mother had said.

He had tried. And what had happened?

It wasn't fair! He'd tried to do what he'd been told! And now he was left feeling ashamed – ashamed because he had tried to tell Wastelands not to kill his son.

He had not thought of Wastelands as a man who grieved. He had thought Wastelands looked at the world with a hard face and made his way through its misery as a fish swam in water – ruined farms, ruined houses; even,
perhaps, the loss of Develin, and the Widow whom he had called a friend. Ambrose had wondered how he could be so callous. Now he knew that Wastelands carried within him a rage and grief that was deeper than anything the man saw. That was what lay in the pit.

My mother thinks so.
What a thing to have said! He had said it because he had thought Wastelands would listen to her. But it had only made things worse.

What right do you think you have?

It was not right that a man should kill his son. That was true. And Wastelands knew it. He didn't want to do it – or why would he be weeping now? But he was still going to do it if he could.

It was not right. And yet what right did Ambrose have? In Develin they had said that men followed their feuds only because they could find no other way. Wastelands could not find another way; and Ambrose had not found it for him. There was a part of the man's soul that was locked, beyond reach.

The enemy had him.

They jogged on along the path by the stream. The countryside had hardly changed with their arrival on the southern fringes of the Kingdom. The valleys were wooded and steep-sided, and outcrops of rock broke the tree-cover on the ridges. They passed no dwellings, ruined or otherwise. After some miles the path left the streamside and began to climb an easy slope. Ambrose followed it. His thoughts had abandoned Wastelands. Now, angrily, they pursued the Prince Under the Sky.

He had barely glimpsed his enemy, in Develin, until the enemy had chosen to show himself at Develin's fall.

That fleeting, despising figure: how could Ambrose find him now?

He had already been too long about finding him. He wished that he had not been so afraid, back in Develin. He wished that he had looked harder. He should have used his hours to go walking through the courts and rooms looking for the Heron Man. Somewhere, behind some door, his enemy had waited. They should have met, at a time of Ambrose's choosing. And when they had spoken, their words should have been like the quick quarterstaffs to each other; and Ambrose would have answered like an equal.

He still would – if he could find him.

Where are you, Paigan, my enemy?

And so his mind escaped into a daydream of the house at Develin. He saw himself passing through the house, perhaps with a weapon in hand, searching for the frail man in a grey robe. Door after door opened before him, and all the rooms were empty. The corridors echoed to his feet, and the silence closed in behind him. He searched and he searched. And here at last was the door to the scholars' hall. And when he put his hand upon the iron ring he knew that the Heron Man was waiting for him beyond it: waiting before rows of empty benches to begin his lesson.

Ambrose blinked.

The mule had stopped. It had stopped because his hands had been pulling at its reins. They were at the top of a ridge, looking north into another valley, with the same fleece of trees that darkened in the shadows of drifting clouds.

Wastelands passed, high on Stefan's back. He said nothing to Ambrose. He headed on along the path that would lead down into the valley.

‘Wait,’ said Ambrose.

His companion either did not hear him or chose to ignore him again.

Ambrose cleared his throat, and found the man's name.

‘Aun,’ he called loudly.

The knight checked, and looked back.

‘Wait,’ Ambrose said again.

‘What's the matter?’

What was the matter? Ambrose was not sure. The feeling – the moment he had put his hand upon the door-ring in his dream – had been very strong.

‘Have you seen something?’ Aun asked him.

‘No.’

It was nothing you could see. There was nothing moving in the valley ahead of him. He had not heard anything either. And yet he had felt it clearly for a moment; like a trick of memory: an ugly, familiar, sick feeling, as if he had been about to walk back into a room where something dreadful had happened before. There had been a scent in the air as if the trees had begun to drip water from their leaves, in droplets that smelled of the edge of pools. Perhaps he could still feel it; perhaps he was just imagining it. But his mind showed him shapes that might be moving in the woods ahead of him – or that might come there, and look there, or that were walking among the brown rocks in a place that was near to this valley.

The Heron Man was close; the Heron Man, or something that came from him.

‘They're hunting us,’ he said.

The man he had called Aun looked at him, and then at the trees again. Plainly he could see nothing.

‘Have they found us?’ he asked at length.

‘No. Maybe they've gone, but …’

‘But?’

Ambrose thought. Go on?

(Open the door? The door to the scholars' hall?)

Yes, he wanted to. He wanted to meet the Heron Man again. He wanted to hear him, speak with him, and
prove
to him that …

But not yet, surely. This was no daydream. Now that the moment was real, he felt the old fears slithering into his mind. He fought them. He knew he must not be so afraid. And yet at the same time he thought: Not yet. Not without more help.

His throat was sticky.

‘Is there another way?’ he asked.

‘We could go back to the streamside and follow that. I think there was a footpath on the other bank. We could rejoin the road further on.’

Still Ambrose looked at the valley ahead of them. A minute ago Aun must still have been nursing their quarrel. Now he was ready to turn aside at Ambrose's word; because he was an ally in another man's war.

‘Let's do that,’ he said.

‘Very well.’

They backed off the ridge and Ambrose felt better at once. He felt better still under the cover of trees.

The going along the stream was slow. The branches were low and they had to lead their mounts. They made only a few more miles that afternoon. Then, in a clearing
by the bank, they came upon a hut. They saw the roof was whole, and that smoke rose from the chimney. Ambrose dismounted first, and Aun let him. The door was closed fast, and so were the shutters. But Ambrose guessed that there must be people inside, and called and banged hard upon the boards. At length a shutter opened.

‘Lodging for the night?’ he said brightly to the scared faces that peered out at him. It was a woman and her young daughter. They must have heard the riders coming and have been hoping that these two strangers would pass and leave them alone; but the woman unbolted the door and showed them where they might tether their mounts.

‘Have you coin to pay them?’ Ambrose muttered to Aun as they unharnessed the horses.

Aun's brow lifted in surprise.

‘I have. Although they will give us food and bed for nothing.’

‘Why should they?’

‘It is the custom. Also they may fear that we would cut their throats.’

Ambrose felt his face harden.

‘Better to pay them, while we can.’

Aun grunted, but said only: ‘We should take watches through the night, still.’

Ambrose nodded. After feeling the enemy that afternoon he would certainly watch. If the Heron Man came to him, he did not want to be sleeping.

The hut was a single room with an earth floor strewn with belongings. The air within it was dark and smoky from the fire. The woman's husband arrived with fish that he had trapped in a pool. He was surly and suspicious, but
did not argue when his wife took his catch for their evening meal. While the pan began to sizzle on the hearth, Ambrose asked them questions about the March. They answered shortly. They had no lord or manor knight nearby. There was another family, half a day's walk further down the stream, but travellers were very few. They had heard of the Fifteen, and feared them, but had never seen them in their valley. They shrugged when Ambrose told them of the happenings in the wider Kingdom. Such things might have been taking place upon the moon.

The child, who could only have been six years old, watched them through the smoke and never said a word. Perhaps she had never seen armoured knights before.

Knight, he corrected himself. Aun was a knight. He wasn't. He did not know what he was.

‘What was the old lord like?’ Ambrose asked suddenly. ‘The last lord of Tarceny, before the stewards?’ He felt Aun glance sharply at him.

‘Fair, as I heard,’ said the man.

‘More than fair, sir,’ said his wife. ‘There was good law then, and no brigands in the March either.’

‘Better no law than a lord's law,’ said the man.

‘That's not so,’ said his wife. ‘When each time there's a horseman on our stream I think they'll put a rope round your neck – for me and the goat and a bucket of grain?’

‘That's foolish,’ said the man, and they both fell silent again in front of their knightly lodgers.

Ambrose asked no more questions. He watched the fish blacken over the tiny flames and let his thoughts turn as slowly inside his head.

After their meal he made a trade with the woman. He
gave her his scholar's shirt in exchange for a thin, black blanket and a rag of pale cloth. Then he begged from her the use of a needle and thread. He settled himself by the fire. Gradually the household went to bed around him, sleeping in huddles against the walls. He took his time over what he was doing. He did not want Aun to ask him about it until he was done. Let him suppose that it was an excuse to the household to be awake, and watching.

Aun went to sleep at once. The man and the woman lay still and made so little noise for so long that Ambrose was sure they were awake, distrustful of the strangers under their roof. He was sorry, because he did not want them to be afraid. But he knew that nothing he said would help them. His fingers worked slowly in the firelight, cutting the black cloth roughly into a broad rectangle with a knife that Aun had given him at the start of their journey. Then he took the pale rag and laboriously, cut by cut, ripped two rough circles from it, each as wide across as his spread hand. From each circle he cut a piece away, about the size of two of his thumbs together. At last he fumbled in the firelight for the needle and thread.

Stitching, especially for ornament or show, was not man's work. But Ambrose had learned enough to mend clothes and blankets in his mountain home, where even his child's hands were a help to his mother, busy with a hundred household tasks. And a scholar's life at Develin had been punctuated by the need to darn or mend his few things with whatever he could beg or borrow. It would have been better if he had had more light to see by. But these threads would not have to strain against muscle or stand the drag of skin, day in, day out. All they needed to
do was to hold one piece of cloth to another, for show.

Gradually, carefully, he stitched one of his two circles into the centre of his black cloth, working obstinately on as the firelight dimmed and his eyes ached, and going over and over his stitches at the end to make sure that the line would hold. Then he found and placed two more logs on the fire, not for warmth but for light to finish his job.

Aun was asleep. The man and the woman were asleep. Across the room the girl had raised her head, and was looking at him with eyes that flung back the firelight. The last time he had seen eyes gleam like that had been when the monsters crowded upon him at Ferroux. Now it was a child's face, small and calm, watching the world as if it were a puzzle that she would one day understand.

He said nothing to her, but fumbled for his needle and thread again. It was not there. He had lost it in the dimness. He sighed, and began to feel around for it, spreading his hand flat on the earthy floor of the hut.

‘It's by your foot.’

‘What?’

‘It's by your foot,’ the child whispered again.

He found it and grunted his thanks.

She went on watching him as he slowly stitched the second disc onto the reverse side of the black cloth. He would look up now and again and she was still awake, lying propped on one arm among her blankets with her head raised to follow what he was doing.

It came to him that her home, although only one room and built of wood, was not so very different from the house in the mountains where he had lived with his mother, sharing all the chores as far as he was able to. It was far more
like it than the busy world of Develin where each task had its own man, and learning itself was considered a task. He wondered what this child saw as she watched him crouched by the fire, and remembered how only a few months ago he had sat in the court at home watching a strange knight, who had travelled in so many places and seen so many things. That man had become the Wolf – one of the enemy. Why should this child suppose Ambrose to be a friend?

He held up his cloth in both hands. It was now a small banneret, with the white disc stitched into the centre of either face. He would need to find a long pole or stick tomorrow to tie the corners to.

‘There's a piece missing,’ whispered the child with firelight in her eyes.

He turned it in his hands and looked at the broken shapes of the discs on either side of his banner.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There's supposed to be.’

‘Why?’

‘It's the moon. You are looking at the moon on a dark night. But there's something between you and it, so you can't see all of it. That's what that black bit means. I don't know what it is, yet, but I'll think about it. You should go to sleep now.’

She must have wanted to know more than that. But she laid her head down obediently. In the shadow of her blankets he could no longer see if her eyes were open. She did not speak again.

He wondered, for a moment, if this was another angel. Then he thought no, it was not. Or, she had as much of the Angels in her as there was in any human. He did not
know her name – or the names of her parents either. He must remember about names. He could never speak with people properly if he did not use their names.