A Fatal Humor, page 4
“When have you seen Stasya use black magy?” demanded Pallavi.
“How could we see that which is always done in secret?” the priestess shot back. “And there is more to the story.” She looked around at the crowd, a faint smile on her lips. “It was sung by the poets of the Western Mountains how the disciples of the Cunning One perverted their natures, and practiced lustful, wicked acts upon each other, men with men, and women—”
At this, Pallavi burst out laughing. “Are you seriously suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”
“I dare you to deny it,” said the priestess.
“I’ll deny it all day, if you like,” Pallavi retorted. “I’ll deny it in ten languages. I can set my denials to music, if that would do the trick. I would never do anything of the sort, and even if I were going to, Stasya isn’t really my type.”
Stasya, who had led a more sheltered life than she sometimes liked to admit, wasn’t quite sure what the priestess and Pallavi were talking about, but she gathered that she was being accused of some kind of sexual sin. She considered telling the crowd that she had never been touched by a man. But it wasn’t quite true, and the logical part of her mind told her that this wasn’t an argument that could be won by getting into a fight about technicalities.
Instead, she decided to take what she hoped was the high road. “Do you not believe that we are angels of Earstien?” she asked the crowd. “Can you really believe that we are capable of such sin?”
“The Dark One himself was an angel, too, before his fall,” said the priestess. “As was Kovarni, the Cunning One, and all the other disciples of evil. As were many of the women who followed them.”
The faces in the crowd were now twisted and angry. These people had all cheered a few days earlier when Fyodor had called Stasya “the flower of all our hearts.” Now they were barely recognizable in their fury.
“You can’t be serious,” said Stasya. “You all know me.”
A furious muttering tore through the crowd, which became a grumbling, and then shouts and calls of “Drive them out!” and “Go away!”
Stasya raised her hands to call for silence, but no one paid any attention to her. Something small and fast flew by her head. And then something clattered away on the ground to her right. Pallavi grabbed her arm and started pulling her away. “Let’s go. Now.” Then Stasya realized what was happening; the surviving clansmen and women were bending over, searching for stones on the ground. A rock the size of a walnut stung the back of Stasya’s hand, and when she looked at the crowd, she saw the girl who had summoned them, wearing an evil, self-satisfied grin. Pallavi pulled on her arm again, and this time she did not resist. Pallavi sent a fireball over the heads of the villagers, and although that did not drive them off permanently, it bought the two women enough time to saddle their horses and leave.
“What will become of Vasily?” asked Stasya, as they spurred their horses to a fast trot down the river path.
“We will see him sooner or later, I’m sure,” answered Pallavi. “Either this century or the next.”
But as soon as they were out of sight of the angry mob, she sent off a bird to let him know they had left, and to warn him to avoid the former royal camp.
They lost the tent in their hasty retreat, but they were able to get away with all their clothes, which was to say all of Pallavi’s clothes, as Stasya still had none except what she had borrowed. There was a bag full of tins and bottles, which Pallavi was very careful of, and which Stasya guessed contained medicines and salves. There were a few books, a bag of dried meat, and some wine. And the two horses, as well.
All morning and late into the afternoon, Stasya fumed over what had happened. She couldn’t believe that her own people had driven her off like that. Every mile or so, she thought of something else that she ought to have said to them—either a clever argument that would have convinced them that she and Pallavi were not evil, or a devastatingly nasty reply that at least would have given her some personal satisfaction.
Her mother had been fond of saying, “A scolding won’t hang on your collar.” In other words, unfair criticism and slander were easily brushed aside. Stasya had never found that to be particularly true, though.
“They should not have treated us that way,” she said. “You are a guest, and Loshadnarod is my home.”
“No, my dear girl,” said Pallavi. “We are hillichmagnars. We have no home. Not even Diernemynster, really.”
They rode together in silence until the moon had risen, and then they stopped to have a quick bite of dried meat and to water the horses. “Where do we go now?” asked Stasya. It was only after she said it that she realized she had instinctively treated Pallavi as the leader.
“I am going to Leornian,” said the Sahasran woman. “I am going to see what the duke wants with hillichmagnars.”
“But you and Vasily both said you didn’t want to go there,” Stasya pointed out. “Why don’t we go find Vasily?”
“And be chased out of another camp? No thank you. These people are going mad with superstition. I only thought Leornian was a bad choice when it looked like we had better ones. Now it looks like Leornian may be our best option. We might as well go hear the duke out. What can it hurt? At the very least, we will get some fresh food and a good night’s rest in a real bed.” Pallavi beamed. “So how about it? Will you come with me?”
Stasya looked around at the rolling fields of high grass, waving and flowing in the night breeze. She wasn’t even sure where Chief Yakov’s camp was. And even if she found it, Pallavi was right; the Loshadnarodskis were becoming dangerously paranoid. Vasily could look after himself, but Stasya hardly knew anything about how to fight. If she were caught somewhere alone, what could she do? No, better to stick with Pallavi. Even if the woman was annoying, she knew how to shoot fireballs, and that made her the sort of woman who was good to have on your side.
Off to the west, the stars began to disappear, bit by bit, and soon there were flashes of lightning. Yet another big summer storm was blowing in. It would probably be on top of them by midnight, and Stasya couldn’t stand the thought of spending yet another stormy night alone on the high plains.
“Very well,” said Stasya. “I will go with you at least as far as Leornian.”
Chapter 6
“Should I send another bird? Maybe a whole flock of starlings. I like the idea of the Freagast shoveling herself out from under that mess.” The boy’s dark, angular eyebrows twitched, and his lips curled slightly at the corners. He rarely laughed openly at his own jokes.
Caedmon laughed, even though he immediately wished he had not. The boy—hardly a boy anymore, actually—was just four years from the end of his decades-long apprenticeship, and yet he had never really learned humility. He hadn’t needed to. He had always been the best at everything he had ever tried, at least as far as magy and Wiga were concerned. Caedmon had no idea how well the young hillichmagnar danced, or whether he might prove skilled at embroidery if given the chance. But he wouldn’t have put it past him. One thing that Caedmon had learned in more than eighty years as the boy’s teacher was that Ellard Koehler could do more or less anything he liked. This only stood to reason, as he was the most powerful hillichmagnar born in thirteen hundred years.
It was fortunate, then, that Ellard was neither boastful nor a bully. Earstien be praised, the boy seemed to understand the tremendous responsibility that came with his tremendous power. Caedmon had known a great many very powerful people in his life, both hillichmagnars and normal humans, and it was remarkable how few of them had a proper sense of duty. One very famous king in particular had been wont to get drunk and sulk whenever anyone reminded him that he had obligations beyond his own pleasure and self-aggrandizement.
Luckily, the Koehler boy was nothing like that. He knew he had a great destiny; he spoke of it often, in fact. True, he had his faults, and Caedmon as his teacher knew those faults better than anyone. But he was genuinely good at heart, which was very rare indeed among the great and powerful.
Caedmon had taught a number of other hillichmagnars. He technically had another, younger student at the moment—a promising young man named Ranulf, who had desperately wanted to come along on this journey. But Ranulf was not even a decade into his training, and he would be in more than capable hands with Earnwine and Astrid. And in any case, though Caedmon would never have admitted it out loud, it was good to be back with Ellard again—just the two of them.
Ellard finished setting up their tent at the edge of the field and then, with a spell of effortless elegance, called down a circling hawk to sit on his arm. “What do you think?” he asked, stroking the predator’s long, cruel talons. “Shall we send this fellow to let Astrid know that we are going to have beans and bacon for dinner tonight? She did say she wanted regular updates.”
“Now, now,” said Caedmon, stifling a chuckle, “you really ought not make fun of the Freagast.”
At this, Ellard finally laughed. It was a careless sort of laugh, free of malice, but also free from polite restraint. Startled, the hawk launched itself back into the air. “Caedmon,” said the boy, brushing the feathers from his tunic, “you can’t tell me you approve of the way Diernemynster is handling this business with the duke.”
As he so often did, Ellard seemed to have guessed Caedmon’s innermost thoughts. Deep down, Caedmon was quite annoyed that Astrid had not jumped at the chance to reestablish ties to the Myrcian government. True, the message had not been from the new king, but there was a new Duke of Leornian, too, and that was a title that had always commanded respect at court. But Astrid had refused to contemplate an official delegation to Leornian. “When we have had a full apology from the king, then we will consider helping them again,” she had said.
The message from the duke had come to Diernemynster a few weeks earlier, carried by a traveling Chayan hillichmagnar who had passed through Rawdon and seen the notice posted to the door of the cathedral there. The duke requested that hillichmagnars come to Leornian and render aid to the city and its people in this time of pestilence and judgment, “as the blessed angels of Earstien have done so many times before.”
There was no apology, of course, though Caedmon didn’t really expect one. In the first place, the king had been the offending party, not the duke, and the king who had caused the offense had been cold in his grave for well over a century now. But Caedmon thought he could see, between the few scant lines of the message, a desire to heal the painful breach that had persisted through the reigns of eight kings. Or nine, rather, counting the new one, who would hopefully be the last to bar the hillichmagnars of Diernemynster from his court.
Astrid, who was the Freagast, or leader, of Diernemynster, had been less sanguine for the chances of reconciliation. “They have never repented of anything they did,” she fumed, nearly as angry now as she had been when the breach was new and raw.
Caedmon, who had suffered from the breach more than anyone, insisted that she put it to a vote. So she had called the Magything—an assembly of every hillichmagnar at Diernemynster who had completed his or her training. Caedmon had spoken with great passion and at considerable length about the sacred bond that had once existed between hillichmagnars and the royal family. To his disgust, however, the vote had gone heavily against him. Afterward, perhaps because she felt sorry that he had embarrassed himself, Astrid took Caedmon aside and told him that if he wanted to go see the duke, purely in a personal capacity, she would not stop him.
Of course he had decided to take Ellard, too. The boy was practically finished with his training, anyway. Leaving him behind to spar in the Wiga training room and write reports in the library would have been an insult. This was not their first trip together outside Diernemynster, either. With the exception of a few, regrettable incidents (which Caedmon never spoke of anymore, lest he hurt the boy’s feelings), Ellard had acquitted himself magnificently in the outside world. Caedmon relied on his advice and trusted his instincts.
Ellard was a particularly good judge of character, for example. Much better than Caedmon, truth be told, in spite of the fact that Caedmon was nine centuries older. That kind of instinctual sense of when people were telling the truth, or when people were lying, was often more valuable than mere experience. If Caedmon could have chosen any hillichmagnar at Diernemynster for his traveling companion, he would still have chosen Ellard. That was how highly he thought of the boy.
They were now five days out from Diernemynster, riding south through the rolling fields of Newshire. Right down the road from where they were camping, there was a sizeable market town called Brawley, but now, with the plague raging from one end of the kingdom to another, it was safer to avoid inns. Caedmon had always loathed sleeping in a tent. Even when he was much younger, during the glorious days of the Myrcian War of Independence, for example, he had found that it was almost impossible to sleep. Now it was excruciating. Every morning, he found that his back was stiff and sore, and his joints had seized up. Not to mention what it did to his digestion. But he tried to keep his moaning and complaining to himself. He didn’t want Ellard to get the idea that his teacher was too old for this sort of thing.
By great good luck, they had found a campsite that was relatively flat, with no rocks or shallow roots that would poke into one’s back all night long. The site was in the corner of what had once been a farmer’s field. It had been allowed to go fallow, however, and judging by a young poplar tree nearby, which was nearly two feet tall, no one had plowed the field in more than a year. Ever since the plague had started, in other words. There was no need to guess what had become of the farmer who had once worked this land. Many of the farmhouses they had seen were derelict and empty, and every little country church they had passed had a wide pit in the graveyard.
Their tent was no more than five yards from the hedgerow and the road. This was an important highway, and in normal times, there would have been a steady traffic back and forth, even at night, of post riders, carriages, and peddlers’ carts. They would have been hard pressed to sleep with all the noise. But now, an eerie calm prevailed on the road. It might have been a cow path, for all the traffic they had seen over the past few days.
Caedmon mentioned this to Ellard, and the boy looked up from tending their cooking fire. “I have always wondered,” he mused, “what it must have been like for the first hillichmagnars when they came to these lands.”
“It will be a while before the land looks quite like that again,” said Caedmon. “There was once a huge forest here—”
“The Northarad Wood,” said Ellard.
“Yes, indeed,” nodded Caedmon. So few hillichmagnars, even ones five or ten times Ellard’s age, really cared about stories of ancient history, but Ellard had always been very interested.
A lot of people had forgotten about the old days. Whenever Caedmon had to travel out in the world now, he was continually surprised to find how ignorant ordinary people were of hillichmagnars. Most people, at least the ones who went to church, knew a few of the more important and more popular stories, like Uleflecht and the Lake, or Finster’s battle with Koarthak. But even well-educated people often didn’t realize that there had been a time, not even two centuries earlier, when hillichmagnars had lived and worked alongside ordinary people. How had everyone forgotten?
Caedmon, like Astrid and everyone else at Diernemynster, had never imagined that the breach would be so complete, or that it would last so long that hillichmagnars would become creatures of myth. And yet the Duke of Leornian had summoned them. That suggested that he, at least, had a proper sense of the role that hillichmagnars could play in the world.
Once again, Ellard put too much spice in the stew that evening. Caedmon didn’t know where the boy got the idea of putting all those strange Sahasran spices in everything. They weren’t good for his stomach, but he hated to discourage Ellard from doing something he clearly enjoyed, so he always pretended to like what Ellard prepared.
When they had eaten their fill and washed up the pots and pans in a nearby stream, Caedmon asked Ellard if he knew anything about the Duke of Leornian. It was frequently worthwhile to find out what the boy knew on any given subject. He was often curiously well-informed, and had a particular interest in court gossip.
“I know his grace is a man of action,” said Ellard. “He led the Dryhten House polo team to their first championship since I was a student at Atherton. That has to count for something.”
Caedmon knew he was being ironic. When Ellard had been at Atherton, he had hated team sports. It was odd, since Ellard was very strong and fast and physically coordinated. But he never seemed to like playing on a team. Perhaps that was a character flaw, but Caedmon knew from experience how frustrating it could be to have to depend on less talented people. So he couldn’t blame Ellard.
“I was wondering if you knew anything about his grace’s intellectual achievements,” asked Caedmon.
One corner of Ellard’s mouth curled up a quarter inch. “Given that the duke is a Dryhten, and that he was in Dryhten House, and given that he played polo and Atherton Football, I would guess that his grace might know how to lace his own trousers after going to the privy.”
“I think you may be surprised,” said Caedmon. And so he told Ellard what he knew of the duke.
Rodgar Dryhten, 36th Duke of Leornian, was not nearly the blockhead that Ellard thought his name and heritage suggested. Caedmon kept up a correspondence with several professors at Atherton, even when he was not teaching there, and so he had heard the duke had been a better-than-average student. Then, when he had finished at Atherton, the duke had gone to the Empire and had served on the staff of the Proconsul of Presidium. That was exactly the sort of cushy appointment that the rich and powerful of Myrcia often arranged for their sons, but rather than drinking himself stupid and begetting bastards with foreign mistresses, in the time-honored Myrcian way, Rodgar seemed to have learned something useful while he was in the Empire. He had returned to Myrcia, taken a commission in an engineering regiment, and had gone to work building roads and improving sewers all over the kingdom. Then, a year ago, the plague had carried off his father, and Rodgar had been obliged to go back to Leornian and take up the considerable duties of running some of the largest and richest estates in Myrcia.
