Widowmaker Read online

  That would have mattered little enough had any of his sons achieved eskorrethen, the legal age of majority, and little too if the passing-on of power had been formally observed before witnesses in the old way, from father to senior child of whatever gender. The ancient law was why some youths, not necessarily always the senior by age, had the title of Chosen: to avoid unnecessary confusion when their linefather went into the dark.

  Albanak, perhaps because he was kept too busy pacifying his unruly country and controlling his unruly subjects, had omitted to Choose one of his sons, or the daughter who was already showing herself as much a man as any of them – though some wags were claiming the reverse, that the sons were more women than their sister.

  Perhaps, said some cynical voices, it was no accident, but a part of some devious scheme simmering gently at the back of his subtle mind. And now the fire of life which warmed it had gone out. Albanak had passed with shocking speed from a rainstorm drenching during a hunt, to a shivering fever and at last to an inflammation which flooded his lungs. He had drowned in his bed, as surely if he had been sunk in the waters of the deepest ocean.

  The first and most natural suspicion was of sorcery. The elusive Lord Gelert had lost both lands and title to the Albans, and in his time he had been a notorious user of the uglier forms of the Art Magic.

  However, Eskra Talvalin insisted that neither Gelert nor sorcery were involved. She was believed, eventually, even though the belief came reluctantly. Clan Talvalin had already gained much from the dead Overlord – its land, its fortress, its right to exist – but not even Gerin ar’Diskan could prove they stood to make profit from defending an enemy with proof of his innocence. And there was an air about the Lady Eskra, beyond even her known abilities as wizard and sorcerer, that made calling her a liar something no wise man would dare to do.

  Albanak had died of a disease. It was as simple as that. But he had picked a damned awkward time to do it.

  Yraine his daughter was as tall as most men, lean, fair-haired, and even though her angular features formed a handsome enough configuration, she was no delicate beauty. Nor was she the sort of fragile blossom to be picked to ornament another man’s home; unless Yraine approved the match herself. By the number of discarded lovers she left in her wake, that approval was hard to gain.

  Worst of all, she was claiming the full rank of Overlord of the Albans, and she was doing so in the old way: by name and by fame, by birth, by blood and by acclaim. Lying behind that was the last clause, the one she had not chosen to invoke. If worst came to worst, she had enough supporters to attempt a claim by conquest, as her father had taken the Land itself.

  Yraine and her followers had reason enough to assume the rank would fall to her by default. Albanak, Landmaster, was not just the name of the Overlord, but the title as well. Passed down through the generations, its bearers gave up their own names, their own individuality, in favour of the power and prestige conferred by the word. And like so many other words in the language that were a title of sorts – words like warrior and lord, wizard and priest – it wasn’t specific to gender.

  That was the fine point of grammar on which a turbulent people had impaled themselves.

  The Albans had never, in living memory or in the written memories of the Books of Years – though for one reason or another, the study of those had been cursory indeed – had a female Landmaster. That was of no account to the younger, more progressive Albans. This Land, theirs for only eight years, was a new Land, their Land. New customs and breaking away from the old, hidebound ways of the past could scarcely harm it.

  So they said.

  The older traditionalists claimed that this proved nothing but hope of profiting from the inexperienced rule of a new Overlord. Those harsh, inflexible old men displayed an astonishing lack of diplomatic skill by stating out loud what they truly thought, when any sensible person would have kept such opinions to themselves.

  They said, loudly and often, that the powerful, arrogant lords and warriors who surrounded her would lead a mere woman in her decisions. Since her brother and rival Erhal was only seventeen, three years short of eskorrethen and thus incapable of legal decisions for those three years, it wasn’t an argument with much weight.

  Next they said that, never having endured war, she wouldn’t know how to conduct one, and would thus be forced to fall back on the self-serving advice of those same supporters. Erhal was no better in that respect either.

  Finally, with a breathless air of slight desperation, they pointed out that each month she would become, as they knew only too well from living with their own wives and consorts at such times, moody, irritable, unreasonable and impossible to deal with.

  “Which simply means, dear lords and gentlemen,” Eskra Talvalin had said loudly during that last acrimonious council meeting, “that such an Overlord will be a great improvement on a man.”

  She had given them that thin half-smile which always conveyed much more than words. “Because I’ve heard nothing to prove that any of you need the excuse of a bloody weekend to be unreasonable for the whole bloody month…!”

  Some were amused by what she said, some agreed, some disagreed – and some took such violent exception to being instructed by a woman who was not just a wizard but a foreign one besides, that they went stamping out of the council chamber with their minds already set. Not so much about who they would support, as who they wouldn’t.

  Anyone favoured by the Talvalins…

  It was an odd situation. For all their protests one way or the other, none of the old-established high clans became involved in the actual fighting. They were, Bayrd suspected, keeping their noses clean so that however events might turn out, they could claim to have been right all along. It was the little people who were doing the dying.

  As usual.

  Bayrd had remained at a distance from all but the verbal wrangling for as long as he was able. Since Clan Talvalin owed its very existence to the late Overlord Albanak, it felt improper, almost dishonourable, to take sides with one of his children against the other.

  He had told the High Council in Cerdor that he would abide by whatever final decision they achieved, and warned his retainers that if their Houses and line-families became involved, they would do so without the Talvalin banner. The tightrope act had worked.

  For not quite two months.

  He sighed. A soft sound, it was loud enough to produce an echo behind him. Bayrd half-turned, then smiled slightly as a pair of cool blue eyes regarded him thoughtfully from the bed. “The war?” said Eskra. “Or is it something else entirely?”

  “Both. Neither…” He shrugged, dismissing the question. “I was thinking.”

  “You—” she began to say, teasing, then shut her teeth on the rest at the expression which flicked across her husband’s face.

  “Think too much. Yes. Thank you.”

  Addressed to anyone else, that response would have been a snarl of anger, and even to Eskra it had an irritable edge which Bayrd couldn’t completely suppress. Everybody said that about him, and had been saying it so many times for so long that it had become a private joke – a very, very private joke – between himself and friends and family. But it could still strike a raw edge.

  Especially since thinking was all he had done since the news came down from Cerdor five weeks ago. He, and the whole of clan Talvalin, would have to jump one way or the other, and soon. The old maxims said so. Things like The enemy of my enemy is my friend…

  And more significantly, Those not with me are against me.

  The trick was in judging which way to jump, and for Clan Talvalin, either way was a leap in the dark. Gerin ar’Diskan wasn’t the only enemy Bayrd had made on his way up. Marriage to a wizard had alienated many potential supporters, and marriage to an Elthanek wizard had only served to deepen the rift. But if he – they – came out on the right side when all this was over, then his ‘mistakes’ would be forgotten, or at least set in the balance against his new advantages and found to have
lost their value.

  While if they chose the wrong side…

  Eskra sat up in the big bed, pulling the sheets and the fur coverlet high around her shoulders against the chill seeping from the mass of worked stone that was Dunrath-hold. With her free hand she ruffled her feather-cropped dark red hair into some sort of order and gave him the same sort of kestrel’s stare that had clenched his guts seven years ago. It did the same today; part invitation, part speculation, all consideration. A gaze that could drill through rock and read the secrets written at its heart.

  “And you,” she said. “Which way will you jump?”

  Wizard or not, sorcerer or not, Eskra never claimed to have the power of reading thoughts. She had spoken truth in so much else that Bayrd had never pressed her on the matter. But every now and then she would ask a question or expect a reply that was so close to what was in his mind that he couldn’t help but wonder.

  “Jump?”

  “You’re stalling, loved. Who’ll you support? The Old Order or the New? Are you going to back Yraine ar’Albanak? Or side with… With the others.” For decency’s sake she didn’t say ‘Gerin ar’Diskan’, even though he and his clan were most stringently against the prospect of a woman Overlord, and among those most likely to benefit from the manipulation of young Erhal. “It’s a decision that has to be made. One way or the other. Unless you think the clan can survive enemies on both side of the rift?”

  “Which way would you…” His words trailed off into a thin smile and he made the little gesture of ‘avert’ with his right hand, as though turning aside some thoughtless ill-speaking. “Na. An-tleir’n na. A hundred times no. The choice is mine. The weight of lordship, eh?”

  “It’s a heavy burden. Her father laid it on you – and turned a friend against you with the gift.”

  Bayrd sat down heavily on the bed and took Eskra’s hand between both of his own. “You help, and don’t help, all with the same words.”

  “I’m still an-hlensyarl to your people.” She spoke the Droselan word without any of the venom that an Alban might have used, but Bayrd could still hear the hurt behind it. “That makes me outlander. Outclan. Unblood. My views count for little. But it means I can look at matters from all sides. There are no old loyalties to colour the way I see them. And Bayrd…”

  “’Skra-ain?”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  Bayrd stared at his two clenched fists, white-knuckled with their own pressure, as if seeing them for the first time; and then at Eskra’s fingertips squeezed between them, wine-red with compressed blood. His face flushed equally dark with shame and let go at once.

  Eskra shook her hand to restore the feeling, and there was something about the casual flutter of fingers that suggest she was shaking aside any blame he might have borne. “We might have had five children by now. I could bring no more than three of them to birth. Only two still live.” Neither of them sons to bear your name, he heard her think as clear as words, and winced inwardly. “Give them a chance to grow in a land where there’s something close to peace. Make your choice.”

  “And if it should be the wrong choice?”

  “Then they die. We all die. Bayrd-ain, my loved, if this goes the wrong way, your people won’t leave any enemy children alive. They’d only grow up and ride as landless eijin warriors until they get a chance to take revenge. But if you’ve made the right choice…” She gave him a small shrug and an encouraging smile. “Whatever. Just decide. Then hold to that decision as if it was your next breath.”

  “It might well be.”

  “But it will be yours.”

  Bayrd Talvalin stared at his wife for a long time, then turned his face away and gazed instead at the calm green submarine light that filtered through the windows of the fortress. It was shot with gold now, the glow of the newly-risen sun breaking through the rainclouds. Bayrd, who had never thought of himself as a religious man, said a brief prayer to the Father of Fires and the Light of Heaven as that gold warmed the chilly bronze of deep water and turned it instead to the shade of leaves on a midsummer day. And he made his choice.

  This was Alba; not the old Land, but the new. And for better or for worse, nothing would be the same again.

  * * * *

  The man he had just killed had barely slithered to the ground when the crescent blade of a battleaxe whipped past Bayrd Talvalin’s face. It came close enough that he heard the heavy whoosh as it clove the air, and the wind of its passage was clammy on his cheek.

  He blocked the back-swing with a clanging parry that sent the thump of impact clear up his arm to the shoulder. Even though most of the blow’s power was lost in a screech of metal and a shower of sparks, it still left Isileth’s long blade vibrating like a tuning-fork.

  Bayrd’s return cut sent him leaning far out of the saddle, but its force was wasted. Isileth’s blade cut nothing except air and the echo of a war-cry. The other man was already far out of reach, riding hard – like all the others – more in an attempt to evade the lawful pursuit that had caught up with them, than risk closing for combat.

  Bayrd swore, swayed, regained his balance with a muscle-wrenching effort, then slammed the taiken back into its scabbard and wrenched Yarak’s head around. As the grey Ferhana mare accelerated in pursuit, he tugged his shortbow from its case, nocked, drew and loosed an arrow at the retreating back. It struck home with a smack that Bayrd could hear plainly, driving under the heavy curved shoulder-plate of the other kailin’s armour.

  Even though the man reeled forward in his saddle, he straightened up an instant later, glanced back, then ducked lower and plied his quirt and the tails of his reins with all the frantic energy of terror. He was still within bowshot but pulling clear when another arrow came whirring after him. This time the shaft struck against the crown of the man’s helmet and went wavering away at an angle, no more damage in its wake than ringing ears. A minute later he had topped the low hill to the north and vanished from sight.

  At the crest of the ridge, Bayrd leaned back in his saddle and tried to get his breath back even while he wasted it on cursing the stupidities of warriors who insisted on fighting in the heat of high summer. Warriors like himself, who had ridden out without the heavy Greatbow that would have skewered his quarry like a roasting-joint…

  And most of all, warriors who insisted on fighting at all, instead of sitting down with as many jugs of wine as it required, and talking out their differences.

  No matter that such behaviour was unAlban and not the action of kailinin-eir at all. It would at least silence the laughter of the Elthaneks and Pryteneks and Cernuans, who sniggered behind their hands to see their conquerors slaughtering each other over what had they saw as no more than a trivial difference of opinion.

  His heart was pounding, there was a taste of blood in his mouth, and underneath the scales and mail and leather of his battle harness he was soaked with sweat, soaked to the point of squelching. No amount of wishful thinking would leave him as comfortable as a long bath and an even longer drink of something that didn’t taste of the leather canteen hanging from his saddle.

  “Firecursed small chance of that,” he muttered venomously, and found himself suddenly grinning at the way Yarak raised her sagging head and twitched her ears at him. Those were the first words he had spoken in half-an-hour of frantic and bloody activity that hadn’t been either war-shouts, oaths or simple incoherent yelling. For all he knew, the grey mare disapproved of blasphemous language – but it was far more likely that she was anticipating some sort of treat.

  Light of Heaven witness she deserved it, because she was panting as hard as he was, and under the lamellar barding of her own armour, the mare was streaked and lathered. She was the second of his mounts to carry the name, and for all that this one was somewhat bigger, half-bred Andarran and Ferhana, there was still enough of her dam’s blood that the original Yarak’s line seemed undiluted. Certainly this Yarak was just as intelligent, just as nimble, just as wilful when she could get away with it – an
d when she had to be, just as vicious.

  “Stupid day for a fight anyway,” Bayrd grumbled, trying to remember if there was an apple or a lump of sap-sugar tucked into his saddlebags. He kicked both feet free of the stirrup-irons and let them dangle, leaned forward to slide from his saddle, then winced, clapped one hand to his ribs and thought better of it.

  Not just yet. Get your breath back properly before you try

  He hoped that the sudden jab of pain was nothing more than a bruise or a stitch in his side, rather than something more serious. Though Bayrd’s armour had taken several hits during the quick, swirling exchange, none of them had penetrated the mail or lamellar scales and, until now, he had thought the padding and the combat leathers beneath had muted their impact.

  But there had been that kailin in a green-and-white painted helmet, the one who had been using a mace instead of a taiken longsword. Isileth’s sweeping stroke had sheared the man’s skull off just above the eyebrows, helmet and all, but the hard-swung mace in his dead hand had kept on coming – and maces didn’t need to penetrate armour to do damage. That was their whole purpose.

  He knew it well enough, from painfully personal experience. His collarbone had been cracked by one, half a year ago, right through the harness, and though it had healed fast enough – with only a little help from the sorcery he was growing wary of using too much, for fear of relying on it for his life on the day his Talent failed – it still ached occasionally.

  He continued to breathe shallowly, carefully, as he unbuckled his helmet and pushed it to the back of his head. The metal war-mask dangled clanking against his chest as he unpicked the laces of his mail coif, leather thongs that no matter how carefully he tied them always contracted into tiny, impossible knots within minutes of his breaking a sweat. And he had certainly broken a sweat today. Knowing better than to wipe his face with mailed gauntlets, he could only snuffle dismally as freed moisture ran down the bridge of his nose and dripped from its tip.

  Stupid day? Stupid battle? No.