4
They called him Leferic the Mouse. Leferic Weakshanks, Leferic Booklouse. The kindest of their names for him, the one he had taken as his own, was Leferic the Scholar.
It was not, among the war-loving Oakharne, a compliment.
Leferic thought about that as he leaned out the narrow window of his turret and watched the castle guards carry his brother’s coffin across the courtyard to the shrine in the south tower. The work took fewer men than he’d expected: two for his brother’s coffin, two for his wife’s, and only one for the small, ornate casket that represented his little nephew Wistan.
Of course, there were no bodies inside. That did tend to lighten the load.
Leferic expected that, eventually, a messenger would arrive with the cleaned bones of his kin. Lord Eduin Inguilar was not said to be a complete barbarian, and the dead were highborn, so in a month or two some passing merchant or dignitary heading south to Seawatch or east to Calantyr would likely be given the grisly gift to deposit in Bulls’ March on the way. It would not be one of Lord Inguilar’s own men who brought Galefrid’s bones home, unless Eduin did not intend to get the man back.
In the meantime there were ceremonies to be observed and platitudes to be mouthed, and since Leferic’s lord father had taken to his bed immediately after hearing of his elder son’s death, that burden now fell to him. Leferic the Mouse.
He knew his father’s men did not love him. They had much preferred his elder brother, who could ride with the ease of a centaur and best any two of them in a fight. Galefrid’s choice of a pious wife out of Seawatch had seemed a strange one to them—marriages here, as elsewhere in Oakharn, were about alliances between houses, not hearts—but she was rich and pretty and, most importantly, had borne him a strong son within a year of the wedding, so they were prepared to accept Galefrid’s foreign wife for his sake.
That Galefrid was a free-spending fool who threw money away like grain to chickens did not seem to trouble the liegemen of Bulls’ March. That he had no skill in diplomacy and no grasp of war was likewise of little concern. It was enough that Galefrid could drink with them all night in the great hall and then go hunting in the morning and still hit his mark; in the minds of their men, no more was required of a lord.
Leferic disagreed. That was why he’d had his brother killed.
He wondered, as he watched the coffins disappear into the dark chapel door, whether he should feel guilt over that. There was a little, for the wife and child, but even that was distant, as if he were expressing regret over the death of a stranger in a far-off land. Which was precisely what they were, now that he thought on it: people he barely knew who had died in another country. Not gasping before him, not at his own hand. He had given the order and that had been the end of it.
For his brother he felt nothing. Perhaps he was numb because of the newness of the tidings. Or perhaps there was simply nothing to feel.
An interesting puzzle. He would think on it later.
Leferic drew up his fur-lined mantle to ward off the late autumn chill and went down the stairs to the chapel, following the coffins’ path. The charcoal and ash of mourning colors made him look sallow, but then he always looked that way.
Guards and servants averted their faces as he went by. Leferic was mildly surprised to note that many of them had reddened eyes and wet noses. Had they loved his brother that much? Or were they simply afraid, now that the succession of a border hold had fallen to a younger son who loved books more than horses?
Another puzzle. An easier solution to this one, though.
He ducked his head as he entered the shrine and paused to let his eyes adjust to its gloom. Candles were an expensive indulgence, and the chapel’s would not be lit until it was time to send the dead to Celestia’s ever-golden lands. In the meantime, the only light that entered the shrine was the cloudy gray sunshine that filtered through the chapel’s stained-glass sunbursts.
The shrine was cold, dim, and deserted. Men did not like to be alone with the dead, even when the dead were present only in effigy.
Leferic bowed over his brother’s coffin, pretending to pray over the empty wood. He stayed there until his knees began to ache and his fingers had gone stiff with cold inside their fine kidskin gloves. The light through the windows darkened and brightened as clouds passed over the sun.
Just as he was beginning to give up hope that the meeting would be kept, a large man muffled in a gray mourning robe shuffled over to the coffin beside him. The robed man was a few inches shorter than Leferic, who was unusually tall for the Oakharne, but his shoulders were a full two handspans wider and his arms were thick as young trees. A scabbard clanked against a mailed thigh beneath the gray wool of his robe.
By bowing his head still lower and casting his eyes to the side, Leferic could get a glimpse into the hood of the man beside him. He saw a long grizzled jaw marred by a scar that cut a second pale cleft in his chin, and caught a gleam of amusement in a deep-set gray eye. He knew that scar, and he knew that look.
Albric Urdaring, once the swordmaster of Bulls’ March, was Leferic’s one real friend in the world. Neither his father nor his elder brother had much time to spare for him, so when Leferic was a boy he had been given over to Albric’s care to learn reading and swordcraft. Leferic had little talent in the practice yard, and Albric had still less in the library, but they’d muddled through. It was Albric who’d helped him master his first warhorse, who had taken him hawking and given the boy his own pheasants so that Leferic would not be shamed by returning empty-handed from the hunt. Over the years each had learned the measure of the other, and there was no man in Oakharn that Leferic trusted more.
There was an irony in that, he knew. Albric was not from Bulls’ March, and some of his father’s liegemen distrusted him because of it. Albric had been captain of the honor guard that accompanied the Lady Indoiya, Leferic’s late mother, when she came to Bulls’ March to marry Lord Ossaric. To honor her arrival, Lord Ossaric appointed her captain as swordmaster, but after Lady Indoiya’s death Albric was demoted to a mere household knight and the post was given back to a native-born Bulls’ March man. Leferic had been a child then, not yet ten, but the injustice of it still rankled him. If it galled Albric, however, he could not tell. The knight never mentioned it. All his life Albric had served loyally, uncomplaining; he accepted reward or demotion with equal calm, striving simply to honor his lords’ trust.
It was Albric whom he had sent to ensure his brother’s death.
“Dedicated of you to pray over an empty casket,” the hooded man said.
“I pray for success in all my endeavors,” Leferic replied.
“You should.”
“Why is that?” Leferic asked, keeping his tone light and his voice hushed even as a prickle of apprehension ran down his spine. It was over Albric’s objections that he had hired a Thornlady to aid the assassinations. Though Albric had been adamantly against involving one of the Maimed Witches of Ang’arta, Leferic believed magic was necessary to seal their success, and had quietly made the arrangements. Since then he’d often wondered if he would have been wiser to heed the swordmaster. “Did she—”
Albric shook his hooded head curtly. “She has been . . . efficient. If bloody-minded. But the work may not be done.”
“How?”
Albric made the sign of the sun, superstitiously: thumbs and forefingers circled opposite one another, fingers fanned out as rays. He lowered his voice until Leferic, standing a scant two steps away, could barely make out the words. “Some lived.”
The prickle of anxiety that Leferic felt grew into a cold wave of fear. For an instant he felt that the floor had dropped away under his feet. The ghostly taste of metal tingled on his tongue. He put out a hand to steady himself against his brother’s coffin, and was reassured by its solidity. “Who?”
“Some of the villagers. A runaway horse crashed into the gate, and some fled through the gap it made. One rider. He might have been one of Gal—one of the targeted men. Hard to say. I couldn’t tell who all the dead were, not after she was done, so I can’t say for a certainty who’s missing. But I thought I knew the face as he went by.” Albric paused. It was a tiny hesitation, hardly long enough to blink, but from him that heartbeat of silence spoke volumes. “And the child.”
Leferic closed his eyes. His hand tightened on the coffin’s lid, curling halfway into a fist and flattening out as if he could draw strength from the wood. “Where is he now?”
“We aren’t sure. We ran down most of the villagers who escaped. The child was not with them.”
“He must be found.” He had to be. Had to be. Leferic was not unduly worried about the other survivors; none of the killers, save Albric, could easily be traced back to him, and Albric had been masked behind a full helm that day. No one who had seen the massacre and survived would be able to put the deaths on him.
But if Wistan lived …
The troubadours’ songs were filled with orphaned princes who grew up in secret and returned to reclaim their birthrights from tyranny. The histories were littered with the bloody wreckage of those who had tried it in fact.
If Wistan lived, he became a direct threat to Leferic’s rule, even if no one ever learned the truth of his parents’ death. The child would be an obstacle to the succession, a rallying point for his brother’s loyalists, even a cause for civil war. Kingdoms had shattered over less. His father’s liegemen would accept Leferic as their rightful lord, if no other heir came forward, but he had no illusions about his popularity or how long their loyalty would last if an alternative appeared.
Albric’s jaw clenched under his hood. “I don’t know that I can find him.”
“But she can,” Leferic said.
“She can,” Albric agreed, grudgingly.
“Set up a meeting. Tomorrow night, after moonrise. We’ll have to renegotiate her services.”
HIS FATHER’S CHAIR, LEFERIC WAS DISCOVERING, was remarkably uncomfortable.
The throne of Bulls’ March was a great gnarled chair of red oak, stained dark and worn smooth by time. The troubadours claimed that the chair dated back to the day of Haelgric the Bold, first Lord of Bulls’ March, who’d won his lands and his title at the Second Battle of Seivern Ford. At that battle the King of Oakharn was driven back by Langmyrne armies and, trapped between his enemy and the river, would have died or been captured if not for the reinforcements that Haelgric led across the bridges of Tarne Crossing. Songs said that Haelgric’s last horse was shot beneath him as he fought to take the bridges, but he was so devoted to his duty that he seized a bull from a nearby farmer’s field and rode that beast to save his king. Haelgric’s stubbornness was greater than the bull’s: he forced it into the fray, winning the battle, his title and a legend.
The horns that crowned the back of the chair were supposedly from that first bull. The truth, Leferic suspected, was a good deal less thrilling. Certainly the throne was.
Curved horns marched down the sides of the chair’s back and jutted from the armrests, constantly snagging his sleeves. There was no cushion on the seat, so at the end of every audience Leferic was stiff-backed and sore-arsed. He was seriously considering the merits of stitching a hidden pillow into the backside of his ceremonial cloak. Carrying a pillow onto the chair would earn the ridicule of his liegemen, but the misery of going without was becoming too much to bear.
He wondered how his father had been able to sit on the gods-cursed chair for so long without complaining. Lord Ossaric never looked anything but stoic in his great hall. Perhaps he had passed the secret to Galefrid, but Leferic was the younger son and no one had ever thought to give him anything.
He was the ruler now, though. Comfortable or not, the throne of Bulls’ March was his to sit, for Lord Ossaric was indefinitely indisposed.
The last time anyone other than his own privy servants had seen the old lord was at the funeral pyre for Galefrid and his family. Leferic had been shocked to see how badly his father had aged. In the two days between the messenger’s arrival and the hastily arranged sunset ceremony, Lord Ossaric seemed to have endured twenty hard years. He had gone from a gray but strong old bear to a whispering husk of a man with a spirit drowned in sorrow. His father had lacked the voice to lead the prayers or the strength to lift his candle, so in the end it had been Leferic who asked the Bright Lady to guide the dead to her ever-golden lands, and Leferic who touched his candle to the pyre, igniting the stack of oiled herbs and sweetwood beneath the empty coffins.
That was three days ago. Since then Lord Ossaric had not emerged from his bedchamber, and the governance of Bulls’ March had fallen to his son.
To everyone’s surprise but his own, Leferic had proved quite adept at it. He had a natural head for figures and a keen ear for detail, which helped him sift truth from exaggeration when sitting as judge. He had plenty of opportunity to practice dealing justice in those first few days; Swordsday always brought an influx of strangers with weapons in one hand and ale horns in the other, and with them came a predictable flood of disputes. Thefts, tavern brawls, dice cheats, a mercenary who knifed one of his father’s soldiers in a fight over a whore … he heard all of it, and did what he thought was fair.
It did not, however, take the wisdom of Alyeta the Redeemer to pronounce guilt on a poacher caught bloody-handed as he cut arrows from his lord’s deer. Leferic had faced no real challenges, during his very short rule, until today.
Today he looked down on a murderer.
The man was stout and middle-aged, with a round ruddy face and a belly that strained at his belt. His wrists were not tied, and the castle guards did not force his forehead to the floor as they had the poacher’s before. He looked like someone’s stolid country uncle, not a killer of children.
But that, they said, was what he had done.
“Now comes before you Lusian the Fat of Littlewood, who stands accused of murder,” announced Heldric, gesith of Lord Ossaric’s liegemen and most experienced in the ways of court. In most cases Leferic had read subtle cues on the old warrior’s face and from him understood what was expected, but he could read nothing there now. Heldric’s expression betrayed nothing but grim determination, as if he faced an unknown enemy on a treacherous field and was waiting to see what his foe revealed first.
Seeing no help there, Leferic straightened his back against the uncomfortable chair and recited his part in the ritual proceeding. “Who stands to accuse this man?”
For a moment there was no answer. The gathered courtiers and armsmen exchanged puzzled or uneasy glances; no other criminal had been called without receiving an immediate accusation. Then the far doors groaned open. A gust of wind laid the torches low and sent the tattered battle-flags flapping on the bare stone walls. A man stepped in, and spoke.
“I do,” he said gruffly. His voice was heavy with the guttural accents of the north. There was a murmuring among the assembled liegemen, who parted to let the speaker through.
The man who strode forward was tall, easily a head taller than any other in attendance, and had the fair coloring of the White Seas. When he crossed from sunlight into the hall’s smoky shadows, the light did not seem to leave his hair. It stayed bright, almost white, in the gloom. A deep black mark—one of the northerners’ runes, Leferic guessed—was scarred on his right cheek. He wore a snowy bear’s hide as a cloak, its head intact in the barbarians’ fashion, and his glacial blue eyes were hard with contempt as he looked over the audience. Little of that contempt left him when his gaze fell onto Leferic. “I am Cadarn, called Death’s-Debtor. I accuse this man of murder, and I accuse your court of cowardice and deceit.”
Leferic held up a hand to quell the outrage that ran through the hall. He raised his voice to be heard over the grumblings of his liegemen. Heldric was watching him now, but the gesith’s expression had not softened. If anything, the old warrior seemed even more intent as he watched the young man on the throne. “Tell me, Cadarn Death’s-Debtor, why you do so accuse.”
“I was drinking in a tavern in Littlewood when this man came in. He had blood on his shirt and his axe-handle, and he was in a mood to brag. My friend Ulvrar asked what ferocious rabbits had he been fighting, and this man laughed”—Cadarn turned his head and spat into the rushes—“laughed that it had been no rabbits, but Langmyrne that he slew. We thought it strange that this woodchopper should have killed men and taken no wounds himself, so I asked what Langmyrne had he slain. He said that they were children and they were back in the woods.
“Ulvrar and I, we followed this man’s tracks to where he had been. Two children we found dead in the woods. The older had not yet seen two hands of summer. The younger was a girl. This man, he killed a girl-child and a boy who was a hand or more from being a man, and both unarmed. They were picking mushrooms, these children. We found their basket, and the mushrooms all covered in blood.
“When we came back to the village no one would help us take this man as a murderer. They tried to stop us. I had to kill one before the rest would let us take him, and for that killing I apologize to you Leferic-lord, but I will pay no bloodprice.”
At this the blond giant paused, and waited for Leferic to acknowledge his refusal with a nod before he went on. “We brought this man here to face justice. If I had not had a knife, or if my friends were not with me, no one would have come. The villagers did not want us to take him, and your men of the court lied when they said what hour I should come to bear witness. They said to come at dark, and here it is not yet noon, and this man stands before you. For this I accuse your court of lies and cowardice, Leferic-lord.”
“Have you anything else to say?” Leferic asked. When Cadarn shook his head, Leferic turned to the round-faced man who stood unbowed before his chair. “You, Lusian of Littlewood. You stand before this court accused of murder. What have you to say?”
The stout man blinked, seeming surprised to hear himself addressed. “Begging your pardon, lord?”
“What have you to say?” Leferic repeated, steel in his tone. “Defend yourself if you will. Claim innocence if you can. Otherwise all the court need consider is the word, and the honor, of the man who has named you guilty of a crime.”
“But I never did a crime.” Lusian sounded genuinely bewildered. He rubbed his hands together, more perplexed than nervous. “They killed your brother, milord. His wife, and his little boy. They owe us blood. This big fellow here, talking about how shamed I should be to kill a girl and a boy who ain’t had his first sweetdream—begging pardon for my coarseness, lord—well, their people killed a baby wasn’t out of his swaddling. Where’s their shame? Where’s someone hauling them off for justice? And anyhow they were on our side of the river, and like as not they were spying, so I don’t see how what I done was a crime at all.”
“The court does not agree.” Leferic raised his voice to be heard over the second wave of muttering that swept his hall, this time with a darker current of discontent. “I loved my brother dearly. I mourn every hour for his death. But the murder of children will not soften that tragedy. Killing will not undo killing. We have no proof that my brother died at Langmyrne hands. We are mindful that they lost a village of their own. Until we have something more than suspicion—until we know that Langmyr spilled Galefrid’s blood—we must believe that their children are only children, and innocent of this sin. This court holds you guilty of murder, Lusian of Littlewood. Make your peace with the gods. In the morning you go to the block.”
The noise in the great hall swelled to an uproar, and abruptly Leferic could stand it no longer. He stood and stalked off the dais, leaving the pennons on the walls fluttering in his wake. He had no clear idea where he was going, only that it should be somewhere quiet, away from his liegemen’s hatreds and Lusian’s sins and the weapons that hung over the great hall’s torches, marking decades of bloodshed with grim trophies. It was no surprise when his feet turned toward his tower library, following the same unerring instinct that brought pigeons to their dovecotes and silverbacks to their streams. Home.
He hadn’t visited the library since learning of Galefrid’s death, and he returned to find the room cold and gray. A damp lingered in the air. Leferic struck a spark to the logs laid in the hearth, tending the tiny flame with twigs and dried thistledown until it was strong enough to take.
Straightening, he looked over the shelves of books that lined his tower walls. They were his oldest friends. Apart from Albric, they were his only friends. Some were ancient relics, crumbling where they stood; they had survived generations of neglectful lords who let mice gnaw their bindings and dust dull their covers until Leferic could hardly read the titles they had once borne so proudly. Others were his personal acquisitions, imported at great expense from Calantyr and Mirhain and, in one or two prized instances, the scriptoriums of the Ardasi Empire.
Most were bound in leather, dyed red or green and adorned with thin-beaten gold leaf. A few were made of stranger materials: thin-cut vehrwood, dark as bitter tea; pressed and woven leaves that still held a whisper of Nebaioth’s sunny fragrance; one covered in what the merchant had sworn was dragonhide, although Leferic suspected that the scales really came from one of the great golden crocodiles of the Bilewater.
The books held the collected wisdom of the world. Musings from scholars whose bones were long dust, though their thoughts lived on in the pages; histories from lands no longer to be found on any map outside their own covers; secrets of great religions and smaller, ferociously secretive cults. Leferic owned nearly three hundred books. He knew, without false pride, that a better library was not to be found closer than Craghail. It was his life’s glory. Yet there was nothing in any of them to help him now.
In all his library there was nothing to guide a usurper who’d murdered his brother and nephew for the throne. Not that it hadn’t been done—the histories were full of that bloody tale, retold across the ages in a dozen lands, a hundred castles—but it hadn’t been admitted. Not by anyone who kept his throne. Only the failures were recorded, properly condemned, and he had already committed those lessons to heart before taking the first step of his plan.
At that moment he missed Albric sorely. The laconic swordmaster would have listened patiently to Leferic’s doubts and helped him reason his way through the tangle to the right solution. Without him, Leferic was lost.
He did not want war. He knew that to a certainty.
War was a sickness in the border holds. From time to time it flared and the fever took all Oakharn and Langmyr, bringing great armies to clash against the river and stain its waters red. But lords further from the Seivern’s banks had the luxury of being able to pull back when their armies were exhausted. They didn’t have to fight on their own fields; they didn’t have to watch their peasants’ homes burn in enemy raids or their granaries empty into the locust mouths of visiting hordes. They could go home, and when they did, they could leave the violence behind.
They’d leave Bulls’ March with it, burned and trampled and festering with a thousand new wounds. They’d done it time and again, down a long road of years back to Uvarric’s Folly.
That was the root of the hatred. It had flowered in a hundred different branches since then, each one bearing noxious fruit, but all the enmity between Oakharn and Langmyr came back to Uvarric’s Folly. Power, and the lust for power. The same greed Leferic had … but Uvarric had never committed so grievous a sin as fratricide for his, and had paid a far higher price than Leferic meant to suffer.
Over a century ago, redspider plague swept through the Sunfallen Kingdoms, decimating its people. Noble and peasant alike fell to the disease, their deaths written in broken veins webbed red across their skin. Some said it was a scourge of the gods, sent down to punish sinners, but few really believed that. Redspider killed without distinction between young and old, innocent and murderer.
It had no respect for high birth, either. In a single season, the plague wiped out one of the largest and richest noble families in Langmyr. House Tallaine was second only to the High King’s line for wealth and power; the Tallaine had married into the palace so many times that their own blood was half-royal. Yet the disease carried them away just the same. Not a single heir was spared.
Two cousins were left with claims on Stonegate Castle, the ancestral home of the Tallaine. One, a ward of the High King in Craghail, was scarcely more than a child. The other was Uvarric Penarring, a powerful Oakharne lord whose claim came through his Langmyrne wife, a daughter of the Tallaine cadet line. Though two hundred leagues and the Seivern River stood between Uvarric and his wife’s inheritance, he was determined to have what he considered rightfully his.
Uvarric’s claim was much the stronger of the two, not only by law but by force. The Oakharne lord was a close friend of his king’s, was rich in steel and horses, and commanded a considerable army. The rival claimant to the Tallaine lands was a child with no knights of his own. The plague had hit Langmyr harder than Oakharn, too, leaving that kingdom as a whole weaker. It was clear to everyone which way the matter had to be settled, and the High King of Langmyr saw that plainly. He accepted Uvarric’s claim. But not without conditions.
The people of Langmyr, the High King explained, did not want a foreigner as their lord. They knew and loved his wife well, but they did not know this Oakharne lord. If Uvarric was to rule in Stonegate, he would have to live there with his family and his retinue. Once he agreed to that, and swore oaths of fealty to Craghail, the keys to the castle would be his.
Uvarric agreed. He swore the oaths, kissed the High King’s sword, and took up residence in his new castle. A few hundred armsmen came with him, but most of his knights and lords stayed in their own lands. Some of Uvarric’s liegemen wedded Langmyrne wives from lesser families to seal their houses, and some took Langmyrne children as hostage wards, but after their lord was properly ensconced in Stonegate, they went home. Uvarric’s two eldest sons went with them, taking their father’s old lands to rule.
And when Uvarric was alone in his castle, and felt safe enough to drop his guard, the Langmyrne killed him as he slept. They speared his younger children to their beds and hacked his grandchildren to pieces so cruelly that the nursery walls ran red. Even the children’s lapdogs died.
Lady Penarring survived, only to be given “refuge” in a lonely tower of the High King’s castle where she could look down on the world but never touch it, nor be touched by it, again. Within a few years, grief and solitude did for her what the knives had for her husband, and she joined him on the pyres.
No one knew exactly who committed the murders. Most rumors put the blame on Lord Asoril Veltaine, who had close ties to the rival child-heir, but there was never any proof. What was swiftly proven, and what set the two kingdoms afire, was that the killers had the support of the Langmyrne throne.
The High King wasted scarcely a day before installing the child claimant on Stonegate’s throne and investing him with the Tallaine lands, with Lord Veltaine as guardian during his minority. Uvarric’s sons swore vengeance, most of the Langmyrne hostages died terribly, and the Oakharne gathered their swords to avenge the treachery in Stonegate. On the other side of the Seivern, the Langmyrne waited to meet them.
That first war raged for a decade. The Oakharne swiftly seized Seivern Ford and both sides of Tarne Crossing, then poured their armies through those two points to cut a bloody swath across Langmyr. They took a dozen castles and burned a hundred towns, and in every battle the two sides traded atrocities, each uglier than the last.
In places the Oakharne held their conquests for months, even years: time enough to try strengthening a weak hold by marriage, or to birth a few children and call them heirs. But it never lasted. Step by step, inexorably, they were beaten back to the Seivern, leaving a wake of broken hopes and broken bodies. And for a hundred years since, the cycle of grievances had ground on.
Old grudges, old claims, old wounds that never healed before the next raid ripped them raw … the repercussions of Uvarric’s Folly never ended. Its ripples never died out before someone threw a new stone to make more. Hundreds had died for Widows’ Castle alone. That was a worthless endeavor if ever there was one, but Leferic’s own brother had been too blind to see it.
Hardly anyone remembered the castle’s true name. Its fields were long reclaimed by pines and brambles. Its keep was nothing but a pile of rocks crowned by a drafty, bat-infested tower. Its only link to Oakharn was that one of the daughters of Breakwall had married a Langmyrne lord there, fifty years back during a rare lull of peace, and ruled the castle in her own name for a few years after her husband died. Then one of the husband’s brothers held a mockery of a trial, convicted her of treason, and executed her to take the castle himself. A few bards had written songs about it. One, a politically minded playwright from Seawatch, had made it a popular tragedy. That was all. Yet not a decade went by without some fool lordling trying to retake Widows’ Castle, and there was never any lack of men willing to join up and die for no better reason than that their fathers had died there too.
Galefrid had wanted to take Widows’ Castle. His brother had been that foolish. They had a claim through some uncle of Lord Ossaric’s, and occasionally their father had mumbled about the castle when he was in his cups, but he’d never mentioned the precise nature of their claim or, more importantly, how anyone from Bulls’ March was supposed to take and hold the castle without an army sufficient to lay siege across the Seivern. Yet Galefrid dreamed of glory, and Widows’ Castle sang that siren promise, so he wanted it.
Even his visit to Thistlestone—the visit that was supposed to open a new door to peace—was meant as a subterfuge. Galefrid thought it would give him the chance to scout Lord Inguilar’s defenses, perhaps plan an attack later on. He couldn’t imagine any real peace, only a pretense that he could play for advantage in war. It was Leferic who’d spread most of the rumors that his brother was visiting Lord Inguilar to seek Langmyr’s friendship; he’d hoped his lies might sow the seeds of truth. Galefrid, however, hadn’t had any interest in seeing Thistlestone until he got it in his head that he could use the journey as a scouting trip. He was completely, willfully blind to any other possibility.
That was what Uvarric’s Folly had done to them. It buried the future under a history of hate. It was madness and stupidity and Leferic wanted no part of it.
It was, he assumed, what had driven Lusian the Fat to murder those children.
He had known, of course, that there was some risk of hotheads shedding blood over Galefrid’s death. When Leferic designed the plan, that had seemed an acceptable loss. If Galefrid died in a hunting accident or fell off the parapets and broke his neck, someone might get suspicious. Where would those suspicions fall, if not on the younger son who stood to inherit upon his brother’s demise?
But if Galefrid died across the river, and by strange and terrifying sorcery rather than an arrow in the back, that did not look like assassination—certainly not any assassination a bookish younger brother might plot. It looked like an attack by Ang’arta. Who but the Spider could command the Thorns? Who but the Thorns could inflict such a slaughter? Bloodmist was their weapon. Thousands had seen its grisly work on Thelyand Ford, laying waste to the pride of the Sunfallen Kingdoms and bridging the river with corpses. No one wanted to make an enemy of the Iron Fortress.
Some might mutter that there was another hand in the ambush, but there had been mutterings about the Slaver Knight, too, and no one had gone to war over that. Lord Inguilar of Thistlestone was not one to call his knights to battle over a few lost peasants. Inguilar wanted peace badly enough to swallow his suspicions for it; he’d shown that five years ago, when they’d handed him the Slaver Knight and he’d asked for no other names. He’d reinforced it with his eagerness to let Galefrid visit him under a peace-banner. The man had little stomach for war.
Leferic, in turn, had predicted that he should be able to keep his own people from blaming the Langmyrne for the deaths. There might be a few isolated incidents, but the killing was so clearly a Thorn’s work that he didn’t think anyone would truly believe Langmyr was to blame. A few fools might claim otherwise, might even kill a Langmyrne peasant or two, but there would be no war over it. Anything less was a price he could pay.
Sitting on that chair, though, and listening to Cadarn make his accusations, Leferic had become uncomfortably aware that accepting a loss in the abstract was one thing. Having it thrown in his face was another. He’d sent fat Lusian to the headsman, but the guilt was his as much as the condemned man’s. More so, truly. Lusian had killed two children, but how many had died in Willowfield? Leferic had never even thought to ask.
What did that make him?
A ruler, he decided. The people of Willowfield were necessary sacrifices to cover his tracks and divert suspicion. If both sides suffered losses, neither would leap to accuse the other, and war could be averted. Their deaths, therefore, were not wasted. Many more might have died otherwise.
Lusian’s killings, on the other hand, were wasteful, and so he had been justly punished.
It was a neat bit of sophistry. It did nothing to soften the corrosive knot that sat in the pit of his stomach.
The truth, Leferic thought, was that he was not as cold-blooded as he wanted to be. Needed to be. The truth was that he was wracked with guilt over the needless deaths and desperately afraid of what he had set in motion. What had been elegant and tidy in the controlled abstraction of his plans had to unfold in the living chaos of the world, where the smallest mistake could cause catastrophe. It terrified him, and the fact of his fear frightened him anew. Now more than ever, he needed to be flawlessly calculated.
The murder of those two children, left unpunished, could have been the spark that set the Seivern on fire. He’d stamped it out, but there would be others. His fate rested on how he dealt with them.
Too soft, and the Langmyrne would be outraged. The massacre of Willowfield put them very near the edge; Leferic was loath to test them any further. Lord Inguilar had turned a blind eye to the Slaver Knight’s conspirators, true, but his patience had to have limits. He wasn’t eager for war, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be forced into it. At some point—and Leferic feared he was very near that point, if not already past it—Eduin Inguilar would have to answer with fire and sword.
Too harsh, and his own knights would rebel against him. If that happened, it would hardly matter whether Albric found and removed his infant nephew. Dozens of landless knights and petty lordlings could claim some distant connection to the rulers of Bulls’ March, enough to take its throne if Leferic proved unfit. They wouldn’t need Galefrid’s boy as a figurehead.
What Leferic needed was time. Time, calm, and swords he could trust.
With that thought in mind, he sent a servant to find Heldric.
By the time the old gesith climbed up the tower stairs, other servants had brought platters of cheese, smoked meat, and black bread. The food tasted like dust, and the autumn ale that went with it might as well have been water, but Leferic made himself eat while gazing through the windows at the castle courtyard. He’d need his strength.
At Heldric’s knock, he turned. “Come. There’s food if you’re hungry, ale if you’re thirsty.”
“Thank you, but I have no need.” The gesith stroked the snow-flecked gray of his beard. “That was a brave thing you did. I hope the fates see fit to reward you.”
Leferic gave him a sardonic, disbelieving smile as he stepped back from the windowsill and returned to his favorite armchair. He left his half-eaten plate behind, but took his ale mug with him. “Was it?”
“Your lord father would not have done it. Nor would your brother. I pray that you were in the right, my lord.”
“I am not my father, or my brother. That man was a murderer. He deserves the block.”
“He was a murderer,” Heldric agreed. “But the victims were Langmyrne, and though we may not have proof, as you say, that the Langmyrne killed your brother, still most of your people believe it. Some will say you betrayed your brother’s honor and are unfit to sit your father’s chair. They will not like your decision today.”
Leferic looked at him hard, wondering if there was a threat hidden in those words. Heldric’s favorite nephew had been caught and killed on the other side of the river when Leferic was young. He had been a child then, and not privy to the details, but he remembered that Heldric’s nephew was hanged, and that the insult cut deep.
Beheading was the usual method of execution. It was still a condemned man’s fate, and therefore ignominious, but at least it was a death by the blade. There was no honor in hanging. Common criminals died that way: wretches who had forfeited their right to die like men. Even Lusian the Fat, killer of children, was granted a death on the block.
Some inkling of Leferic’s thoughts must have showed on his face, for Heldric turned away slightly and stroked his beard again. The firelight caught the shadows in his craggy cheeks and gilded the white in his beard. “Edoric was about your age. Seventeen. Seventeen, and certain he would be the one to restore the Sunjewel to our house.” He rubbed his knees as if soothing an old ache. “Instead he died. But you know that.”
“Only how,” Leferic said. “Not why.”
“The ‘why’ was a wild fancy,” Heldric said with a bare, bitter trace of a smile. “Family legend claims that long ago, when we were still House Edorrin, one of my ancestors rescued a prince of Khartoli from bandits while he was on pilgrimage. In gratitude he gave us the Sunjewel: a golden brooch set with a gem big as a quail’s egg and fiery as the Bright Lady’s heart. Supposedly it was enchanted so that no one could lie to its wearer, but without that it would still have been priceless. It was the one great treasure of our House.
“We kept the Sunjewel after we lost our title and our lands following Rhodric’s Disgrace, but in the end we lost that too. My grandfather was captured by the Langmyrne during the Fall of Widows’ Castle. His son, my uncle, carried the Sunjewel to the castle as ransom … but Lord Veltaine murdered them both and kept the stone. Later he had it taken from the brooch and set into the coronet of House Veltaine, and his grandsons wear it still.
“That is the grievance that cost my nephew’s life. They caught him trying to sneak into Veltaine Castle dressed as a serving boy, convicted him of thievery, and hanged him. I had not thought he was so foolish.” Heldric shook his head slowly. He glanced back at Leferic. “He would have done better to think the way you do. Forget the old legends, the old grudges. Forget what we’ve lost. Look to today. They murdered your brother and nephew, yet you had the forbearance to do justice by their slain children. I cannot say that I would have shown your patience, my lord, but I can admire it in another.”
“Thank you,” Leferic said, because he did not know what else to say. He set the gesith’s words aside to consider later. “But I summoned you to discuss another matter. The northerner in the great hall today. Cadarn, the one who brought Lusian to us. What do you know of him?”
“Little enough, my lord. He travels with perhaps ten of his fellows. All skar skraeli from the White Seas, all claiming to be exiles. Mercenaries, I believe. They were in Isencras for the Swordsday competitions, where I am told they placed highly in the melees, and were traveling east to seek employment in Thelyand when they were diverted by the … misfortune in Littlewood.”
“Thelyand’s battle is already lost,” Leferic said, “and King Merovas impoverished. The ironlords make hard enemies. Cadarn’s men might do better to spend the winter here. Find out where they are staying. If not in the castle town, arrange lodgings for them there. The Rose and Bull should suit. See if they make any trouble in the inn, whether they drink too much or fight with the patrons. If they are reasonably sober, and all like the man who came before me today, offer them posts in my guard. One season at good rates. Tell them that if they do not like my rule at the end of the winter, they are free to go; but I was impressed by Cadarn’s honor today, and I should like to have such courageous men at my side.”
Heldric cocked his head to the side, looking thoughtful. “Wisely played, my lord.”
“One can never have too many good swords at hand,” Leferic said, shrugging with feigned nonchalance. He doubted Heldric was fooled. Both of them knew it was not a routine matter of supplementing the castle guards.
If Leferic misjudged, and his liegemen began plotting treachery in earnest, he would need force to quell them. He dared not trust any of the armsmen in Bulls’ March that far. They’d been Galefrid’s men, not his. Outsiders, on the other hand, would have no ties that might compromise their loyalty to him, and a man who prized honor enough to personally drag a killer from Littlewood to Bulls’ March for justice was as trustworthy as anyone else Leferic could imagine.
“Of course,” Heldric agreed smoothly. “Was there anything else?”
“No. Thank you.”
After the gesith had gone, Leferic sat alone in his library, rereading Inaglione’s Thirteen Graces for the thousandth time. A shrill wind rattled at the panes. He scarcely heard it, so deeply absorbed was he in the writings of that shrewd old courtier.
At last his lantern guttered low. Leferic rubbed his eyes, startled at the blackness in his windows. Night had fallen while he wasn’t watching. Morning waited, and with it the promise of another day in the uncomfortable chair.