The Widow and the King (44 page)

And when he spoke with the enemy? With Paigan Wulframson?

He sat, fingering the white stone his mother had given him. He did not think that the enemy had found him yet. He hoped it would not be here, hiding, with these people around him. When he met the enemy he wanted it to be because he had sought the Heron Man out face to face, as he had almost tried to do that afternoon.

Mother would say that even to want that much was dangerous. But he still wanted it.

He shivered. It was going to be colder, he realized, now that he had parted from his shirt. It would be some hours before he could wake Aun and take a rest himself. He picked up his new banner and drew it round his shoulders. Since he had sold his shirt for it, there was no reason why it could not be an extra blanket for him tonight. It was meant to bring him help, after all. It could start by helping him to keep warm.

The man and woman watched blank-eyed in the morning as he tied his banner to a long stick and slung it from his shoulder. They must have known what it meant. He wondered if they would tell their child, and if so, what they would say. He thought it more likely that they would argue among themselves again about whether it was better to have a lord than take their chances day by day with whoever might come to their door.

Aun looked darkly at the flag, but said nothing until
they had set off and left the hut behind them in its clearing. Then he reined his war-horse over to tower above Ambrose.

‘That is not my banner.’

Ambrose knew what he meant. If people saw a knight riding with a ragged boy who carried a standard, they would think that the standard was the knight's. And Aun must have hated Ambrose's father, like everyone else.

But he was not going to be stared down this time.

‘No. It's mine.’

He was expecting Aun to shout at him; instead, Aun seemed to take him seriously.

‘So. But in raising that standard you make two claims, not one,’ he said.

‘I'm telling people who I am.’

‘Who you are is the point; and more, who you could be. Your father was not just lord of this March. Nor was he the first of his house to be crowned King. People might wonder if he will be the last.’

King? It was a king who had done what had been done at Develin.

‘I am not going to be King.’

‘No? The land is still looking for one. No king who rules like Velis can be secure. If you do not wish to be King you will need to be sure that all men know it.’

‘I am not going to be King. I'm just tired of hiding. And if people are going to help me, they must know who I am.’

Ambrose knew that Aun did not agree, and was relieved when he did not answer. But at their midday halt Aun astonished him by unbuckling his own short sword in
its scabbard and fastening it to Ambrose's saddle. Then he drew it, and handed it hilt-first to Ambrose, who stared at the faded oak leaf cut upon its pommel.

‘I shall want this back in time,’ he said. ‘But it came from your mother's house, a long time ago. And of all my tools it is the most suited for you.’

There and then Aun made Ambrose stand before a mountain yew and cut at it with the sword, so that he could learn how to manage its weight and deliver the strokes that could break a mail-suit at the neck or cripple an armoured knee.

‘Should we not fight with each other?’ Ambrose asked as the iron swirled in his grip and dented the roots of the yew. It seemed much less heavy than it had last season, when he had lifted it with his half-starved arm from Aun's saddle.

‘Better to wait until you have learned how to use that thing,’ Aun answered.

‘I want us to fight each other.’

‘All right,’ said Aun after a few moments.

Aun put on his helmet and shield and unlaced from his saddle a short, cruel-looking mace. And fight they did. It was slower than the quick flash of staves with Chawlin, because the sword was still clumsy in Ambrose's grip, and because they both knew that even a training-hurt might be serious on this wilderness journey. But Ambrose was happy as he panted and staggered and hacked at Aun, and tried the tricks that Chawlin had taught him. He felt he was becoming more dangerous. He wanted to be dangerous, after running for so long.

When they had finished, he cut a small strip of black
off his banner and folded the last white stone into it. Then he tied it tightly to the sword, where the hilt and blade met. That way he could use it to guard himself from the creatures of his enemy, and then strike at them in a single movement. Chawlin had told him often that the trick was to move from guard to strike in the blink of an eye.

And now he had the Oak, and the Moon, in one. Perhaps that was the piece that was missing, he thought. Perhaps the shadow on the disc should be the leaf of his mother's house. He could make it so, when he had time.

They mounted again. The path, a thread of stones and beaten earth, unravelled towards the heart of Tarceny. The stick of his makeshift banner bounced lightly at his shoulder as his mule moved forward. He could hear Aun's great horse, old Stefan, picking up the pace. The skies were clouded, but broken with blue and with gleams of sun.

He laughed, and rode north; and his ragged banner flew behind him.

Terrible things happened, and then wonderful things happened.

Not long ago Sophia would have called the dress that Chawlin bought for her terrible, because it was rough and stained and badly stitched. She had never worn anything like it before. But once it was on, she could look down at herself and imagine that she was some miller's daughter, living a completely different life. The truth of who she had been was hidden, like the pearls and the silk. It was locked away inside her secret self, until the time when she would choose to remember Develin, and how it had ended. Now she could be alive.

And never in her life had she felt so alive. Every day they travelled to a place she had not seen before. They drifted downriver in the punt, stopping at villages to join companies of pilgrims and pedlars for a meal or a night's rest. She liked the dirty lodging houses, and she liked them all the more for being crowded with fish-wives and journey men and clerks and tricksters and the hundred other sorts that still moved upon the river and roads. She woke with flea-bites, and scratched them, and laughed. Even when her hands got sore from her turns at the puntpole she liked it, for Chawlin stroked her fingers and dressed the blisters, and she laughed again when he scolded her for not taking care. And one afternoon they rounded a bend in the river, and there before her was a broad estuary running out to the great lake of Derewater, that stretched the length of the western side of the Kingdom. She had never seen so much water all in one place before: a great, flat plain of wavelets, sparkling in the sun and so far across that the opposite shore was lost in haze.

‘We should have a story to get us across the lake,’ Chawlin said. ‘I think we should be a brother and sister from Tuscolo, and our father can be a merchant who wants us to try to find some of his old trading partners in the March … What's the matter?’

Sophia had started to laugh again.

‘Who do you think will believe us?’ she said.

‘About trading with the March? It used to be …’

‘No. That we're brother and sister!’

They both laughed, then. And Sophia laughed so much that she got the hiccups, and Chawlin put his arm
around her shoulders and kissed her, because he said it was a good cure for hiccups, and …

And
this
was love. When they lay together – under a bush or on a narrow pallet in a crowded boarding house, it didn't matter. All the meaning in the world found itself in the press of his body upon hers. And her head was pillowed upon his arm and his breath blew like a warm wind in her ear, and she knew that whatever else the world had done to her
he
was going to be there again and again and as much as she wanted, and she wanted him for ever.

‘You save me,’ she said, wrapping him in her arms.

‘We were lucky, that's all.’

‘No, I mean you save me now. Every day.’

He laughed softly at her. But it was true. Whatever she had done, he was the answer. For all her misery and failure and betrayals at Develin he was the answer, because he loved her.

So they played, for each other and for the world, that they were man and wife; although, as Chawlin said, few wives that he had seen went about finding their husbands little gifts of flowers, or brought him water that he had not asked for, unless they were still in the very first days of their marriage. And he had heard none – Sophia – that called their man ‘husband’, in the way that she so wished to do.

She loved him. She loved him so much. She had never had feelings like these before.

And he smiled, and teased her hair and let his breath linger on her skin. But he also spent much time thinking to himself, chin upon hand or with his fingers over his eyes, and he would not say what he was thinking.

On the estuary they came to a small town, which even in these days saw numbers of pilgrims making their way down to the holy city of Jent. There Chawlin went up and down the waterside looking for a boat. Sophia stayed with the punt, waiting and talking with travellers and fishermen, trying this gambit and then that, until at last someone she had given up on an hour before came back unexpectedly to say that he would buy the punt at the lowest price that Chawlin had said they should sell it for. Then she bought some food and a little wine (for which she guessed she was over-charged) and found Chawlin at the last jetty before the lake, stowing sacks in an open boat that he had acquired. It seemed very small, for a journey on such a huge water, but Chawlin said it would be good enough if the weather held. They paid the quay-guard to watch the boat and she persuaded Chawlin to come onto the hillside above the town, to sip the wine while they watched the sun set.

Chawlin sat in silence, looking at the gold light glaring upon the water and licking the under-bellies of the clouds with fire. She leaned against him, murmuring little thoughts now and again, but he answered only shortly and took mouthfuls from the flask. When he handed it to her she tasted it and decided that it was sourer than any wine she had known in Develin. But that was not the point. The point was that they had the freedom to drink it together, here, and not worry about who saw them or what might be thought of what they were doing.

And maybe – maybe they would stay out here together, if the night were warm enough, and love one another under the stars; and lie in each other's arms, and talk softly
with the feel of skin against skin: the grass their pillow and all the world their bed.

‘So we leave the Kingdom tomorrow,’ she said.

‘The March is still part of the Kingdom. But yes, it will be beyond Velis's reach.’

‘How long before we can come to Hayley?’

‘A week, yet.’

‘Is it so far? I can see the mountains, I think.’

Beyond the lake the horizon was black, and a little higher than it should be, as if the sun were falling into a low bank of thick cloud.

‘Yes. But Hayley is further north.’ He gestured with the bottle, looked at it, and took another sip. ‘The fastest way would be to sail straight up to the head of the lake before landing. But I'm no great sailor. So we'll take the shortest way across. I should be able to do that in a day. Then we'll follow the shore, at least as far as the harbour at Aclete. There are not many people there now, but it is the only place of any size over there.’

She put her arm around him and kept her head on his shoulder. He was speaking fairly, but under his words she sensed a mood that had not been there before.

‘Is there something wrong?’ she asked.

‘It's – well, yes there is. I've had a shock, anyway. I met someone by the water. Or rather he – he came up to me.’

The way he said
came up
made it sound as though there had been something very unpleasant about the way this stranger had appeared.

‘Who was it?’

‘You don't know him. He's – he's no friend, anyway.
He wanted me to do something I'd no intention of doing. Then he threatened us. He knows who you are, you see.’

Sophia thought it must be someone who knew what had happened at Develin – who had seen them arrive and had recognized her. Plenty of travellers had passed through her home, when it had been her home. She supposed they were lucky to have gone unnoticed for as long as they had.

‘What did he want you to do?’

He shook his head. ‘I'd rather not talk about it.’

‘We'll be safe over the water, though,’ she said stoutly. And it would be another reason not to return to town tonight. They would have to hope that the bundles aboard the boat would be safe.

Chawlin grunted. He did not seem as confident as she thought he should be. He sat with his chin on his hand, like a man who had lost his way.

‘Luke is over there,’ he said suddenly.

Sophia sat up. ‘He's alive?’

‘Yes.’

Chawlin must have seen him in the cup, she thought.

‘Are we going to meet him?’

‘I'm thinking about it.’

Sophia thought about it, too. Something heavy stirred deep inside her, like a great beast shifting in its sleep. It was guilt.

‘I want to talk to him, if we can.’

Chawlin shook his head. ‘It's too far. It's out of our way.’

‘Where is he then?’

‘I don't know. I've tried the cup, but for some reason it is difficult to see him.’

Difficult?

At Develin, when people had told her something was difficult, what they had really meant was that they did not want to do it. She thought she could understand why Chawlin did not want to turn aside from their journey to go hunting through the wild lands. But he would if he knew it was important to her.

‘Please, Chawlin.’

Chawlin sighed. He did not ask her what she wanted to say to the boy.

Sophia did not know what she wanted to say, either. But if Luke – no, Ambrose – was alive, then she had to speak with him. She could not speak to her mother, or Hestie, or any of the others whose lives she had helped to squander. She could tell Chawlin what she felt, but Chawlin did not stand for the dead. He was who he was, thoughtful, loving, capable – all those things. He was himself, and what he meant to her.