Widowmaker Read online

  It was a stupid war, and the sooner they realized it, the sooner they could set about putting an end to it. Whoever They were this month. And not that the hanen-vlethanek’n were calling it a war anyway. Oh no. That would be sure to offend someone, and there had been enough offence already.

  As if by common consent – or maybe even by Guild instructions, assuming they had bothered to re-establish that old structure – the Keepers of Years had employed every euphemism in their extensive vocabulary to describe what had been happening in Alba this past two years. Troubles; incidents; conflicting principles…

  Principles? Bayrd considered the word in disbelief.

  No matter the real reason behind it, when they came to write down what had just happened today, the Archives would be calling it nothing more disagreeable than ‘a frank and free exchange of opinions’.

  From what Bayrd could see, a couple of dozen members of the conversation hadn’t survived the experience of having their minds changed. His mouth quirked sourly at the sight of one corpse. Make that, having their minds smashed out and trampled into the landscape.

  “Light of Heaven, how the Pryteneks must be laughing,” said the Clan-Lord Talvalin savagely. It was probably just as well that Yarak-the-Second couldn’t report his sentiments back to the many who could have made use of them.

  This war had gone beyond support for or resistance against a female Overlord. It had become an excuse to vent all the spleen of the past score of years; all the spite, all the lost opportunities, all the jealousy against those who Had, nurtured like a sickly favourite child by those who Had Not.

  Even assassination had become a popular sideline to the main event. It indicated without question that there were those among the lower clans and line-families who found the killing of their enemies more satisfying than maintaining their own honour. When the lesser Families and Houses, those who held little of value except their generations of unblemished honour, were willing to throw all that away for a moment’s satisfaction, it said nothing good about the rest.

  Bayrd hissed an indrawn breath through his clenched teeth at the sound of approaching hoofbeats – noting warily that the ache under his ribs had already faded to a familiar crawl of heat as his Talent dealt with the injury whether he willed it or not – and dropped one armoured hand to his sword-hilt. The taiken’s long blade scraped as his fingers closed in the grip-and-twist of a partial draw that had become almost reflex in these past months. Isileth had ridden at his hip for more than a year now, without once being pulled up to the peaceful carrying position aslant his back. There was too little peace abroad in the land.

  Then he let the caught breath out again, slowly, trying to relax his tensed muscles and his twanging nerves at one and the same time. The snap as Isileth’s locking-collar was jammed back into its black scabbard was as loud as a breaking twig.

  “Father of Fires, man, but you’re jumpy today!” said Marc ar’Dru, reining his own horse to a standstill at more than the usual safe distance. As Companion and Bannerman to the Clan-Lord he knew Bayrd well enough, and in the recent troubled times he had come to know Bayrd’s sword a deal too well for comfort. The weapon was gaining itself a reputation, and not a wholesome one. Isileth was becoming known as an-gortaik’n, one of the swords with ‘hungry blades’ like those in the old stories, and for his own safety and continued good health Marc preferred to give it a respectfully wide berth.

  “I’ve good reason,” Bayrd snapped. He knew that there would be weeks of dreams when he would feel the cold draught of that axe-blade going by. “And you should know better than to come up behind me.”

  The broad, flared neck-guard of a kailin’s helmet meant that except when it was being worn normally, his blind side extended from forward of one shoulder to forward of the other. Pushed back, as Bayrd had done, the area of clear view to the front was as narrow as that of a draught-horse in blinkers. After the past skirmish, when neither side knew for certain whether the battle was properly over or if it had simply paused to adopt a new formation, Bayrd and Marc were both in the right, and equally both in the wrong.

  House ar’Dru, and especially Marc and his sister Mevn, had been Bayrd’s friends this long time past. It went beyond politics, beyond alliance, beyond even romantic attachment.

  After the death of his second wife Bayrd and Mevn had been lovers for a while, in a casual, mutually-comforting way, but it had never gone further. Bayrd ar’Talvlyn, as he had been then, had made representations and proposals to both Mevn and her father the Head of House, but neither had taken them as seriously as his long-winded speeches might have suggested.

  Bayrd and Marc’s friendship had begun as just two young men with a habit of getting amiably drunk in one another’s company. They had been brought together by the circumstances of military service – Bayrd a Captain-of-Ten, recently, suddenly widowed at the age of twenty-four, Marc one of that Ten, twenty-one and comfortably unfamiliar with any hurt more severe than a hangover.

  As time passed they had become not exactly the lovers that cheerfully scabrous bivouac gossip suggested, but as near to brothers as two unblood kailinin could be. They were also confidants, of career, of family, of what passed for private life in a mercenary barracks. What Bayrd knew of Marc was never told; and what Marc knew of Bayrd was told only to Mevn.

  The matter of his Talent for sorcery was something that remained a secret between the three of them until Eskra became a fourth, and it was supposed among the three that Eskra – though she appreciated the gesture – had never needed telling anyway. There was no fifth. No other social, and very few military secrets, could lay claim to being still secret after almost eight years.

  Even though Marc’s ripped, stained crest-coat still bore the light and dark blues of the ar’Dru House colours, there was a new, broad stripe of white edging the pigments. It gave indication, to all who could read the blazoning, that Marc ar’Dru was the honoured Bannerman of clan Talvalin, Companion to its lord and entitled to this version of a high clan’s colours. He was the holder of many more confidences, gleaned from the high-clan lords who visited Dunrath, and none of those were kept any safer by the requirements of honour than those guarded by friendship.

  They watched another group of kailinin as the men dismounted and hobbled their horses near the ring of stones.

  There was nothing unusual about it. There were many such stones in the lands of the Debatable Marches, single standing stones, or avenues, or great circles of grey sarsens such as this, surrounding the collapsed remnants of a burial mound.

  In ancient times the Albans had raised such mounds themselves, over the graves of dead chieftains, and that was all they were, gravestones. Nothing more ominous than that. All the same, it was plain that none of the warriors even thought of using one of the taller stones as a hitching-post, or of letting any of the animals graze on the lush green grass that covered the low mound within the circle. There was no indication of fear, or wariness, or even of respect.

  They just didn’t.

  All were low-clan, merely House or Family, but all had one thing in common. They moved with the awkwardness that comes of weariness and stiff muscles, and they pulled off their helmets in search of air just as eagerly as their clan-lord had done.

  “It’s over,” said Marc.

  “For now.”

  “Very pragmatic.” Marc glowered at him from within the shadow cast by his own helmet’s peak. “What now, lord?” There was very little respect evident in the honorific. “Some sort of wise saying like, after a victory, look to your armour?”

  “This wasn’t a victory.”

  “It wasn’t a defeat either.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Argh!” Ar’Dru threw up his arms in despair, knowing only too well that he wasn’t going to get any more sense out of his clan-lord when Bayrd was in this sort of mood. And the biggest annoyance was that neither he nor anyone else – with the possible exception of Eskra and Mevn – could tell when Bayrd was being serious or not
.

  This time he wasn’t. At least, not as serious. Though Bayrd was serious enough, it was for a reason other than the usual.

  There had been too many men cut down in this encounter for anyone to treat it lightly, but at the same time it hadn’t been anything to do with the conflict between the two would-be Overlords and their supporters. This had been plain, simple armed robbery, a beast-reaving in the good old-fashioned Prytenek style. Before the Albans came, stealing livestock had been both sport and profit along the Elthan-Prytenon border marches, a pastime as common as a fall of rain. It had taken only a few years, and the recent breakdown in what passed for law and order, before the Albans had adopted it themselves.

  This one had followed the usual pattern. A couple of score mounted kailinin had been on their way from one place to another, and had decided to take advantage of the troubled times to help themselves to some of the famed Talvalin horses. Had they been satisfied with only the horses, they might have been far away before the theft was even noticed.

  They were not.

  By the time a hot trod – a lawful armed pursuit led by the lord and his household retainers – caught up with them, they had also pillaged several of the domain’s outlying steadings and run off thirty head of cattle. That sacking of the farms was their undoing.

  If the raid was a traditional border means of increasing one’s possessions at the expense of someone else, then this was an equally accepted means of getting those possessions back. The proper Alban for it was yrel-gol’wan, ‘riding with fire’, recalling the old Elthanek tradition that the riders carried torches to announce their presence, rather than entering another lord’s lands in secret. But typically, the Albans living in Elthan had taken to the pungent Elthanek vernacular with the same unseemly enthusiasm as they had embraced cattle-raiding.

  Organizing a hot trod into a neighbouring domain was recognized as not being a counter-raid, since that was governed by entirely different protocols. Furthermore it allowed only an attempt to recover the original stolen property.

  But it permitted the use of whatever force was deemed necessary to achieve that recovery and an appropriate punishment.

  Following a trod also legalized the injured party’s right to deal with the guilty as he or she saw fit – and the thieves all knew it – so that force was often excessive. Today, even though the fighting was done, it would have to be excessive indeed. There was a new and unpleasant twist to the raid that Bayrd hadn’t encountered before.

  The beasts and plunder were safely enough recovered, but nothing would restore the lives of the family of five yeomen farmers, killed in the course of the looting. They had been burned alive when the thatched roof of their farmhouse was set alight because they were slow in coming out. And then, because they hadn’t come out willingly, the raiders had prevented them from coming out at all…

  The deliberation of that killing had been ruthless, yet strangely not ruthless enough, otherwise no-one would have known that the fire was anything other than an accident. However, they had left one of the farm labourers alive to bear witness against them. It might still have been accidental, though Bayrd was inclined to doubt it. The man who survived was Alban, but all those who had been roasted in the flaming ruins had been Elthanek tenant farmers.

  And that, more than any other reason, was why they had died.

  As Bayrd walked his mare slowly towards where the prisoners were being rounded up, he suspected that there would be some among them who wouldn’t even regard what they had done as murder. The dead were of the Old People. Old maybe, but otherwise turlekh’n, unblood, and not real people at all.

  He knew for certain that there were honourable men among his own followers who thought the same. Warriors who would cut their own tongues with a knife sooner than speak insult to a lady were still men who, while they wouldn’t see much to be proud of in the killing of conquered peasants, couldn’t see anything especially monstrous about it either.

  He could hear the responses in his head already. Call them what you will: arguments, justifications, reasons, but not really excuses. Excuses were an attempt to explain guilt, and if guilt wasn’t felt…

  So the thatch caught fire. No, lord, not by accident. Yes, lord, all right, so it was deliberate. Yes, someone did set a torch to it. What difference does that make, lord? It would have burned either way. What of it…?

  If they didn’t know the answer to that question by now, it was time they learned. If they could learn. And if it was his task to teach them that lesson, then it would have to be hard to forget.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Marc ar’Dru. Bayrd blinked, and stared at his Bannerman. From the look of him Marc didn’t much like the expression that had settled over Bayrd’s face, and he could guess why. It would have gone shuttered, cold, secretive.

  Even after hours of practice in front of the best mirror money could buy, that was the best Bayrd had ever managed in his attempt to match the control of old Lord Gyras. The Clan-Lord ar’Dakkur could become as unreadable as a blank sheet of paper, without indications of thought, or emotion, or anything else. It was a consummate skill for a politician.

  Though he had long envied ar’Dakkur’s ability, Bayrd had conceded at last that he was no politician. The best he could do was make it difficult for anyone trying to second-guess the trend of his thoughts; and today he hadn’t been doing very well. What he had been thinking was grim enough that even Lord Gyras might have trouble hiding it.

  “Making An Example,” he answered finally, giving the three words their full capital-lettered value, but still managing to pronounce them as if they left a sourness on his tongue. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and surveyed the gaggle of captives as they were herded alongside the ring of stones. It was odd. They should have looked more disreputable. Less neat, less decently clad and armed and armoured. More like bandits and less like…

  Like his own men.

  “Find out a few things for me,” he said, his voice quite calm, its tone suggesting nothing more than curiosity. “How many were in the original party, how many did we kill, and how many got away.”

  Marc didn’t move off at once. He looked from Bayrd to the prisoners and then back again; and his gaze dropped to the ominous black steel hilt of the taiken Isileth. “What happens to the rest?” The question rang flat, because he knew the answer already and it was confirmed in silence by a movement of Bayrd’s mouth. It wasn’t so much a smile, even a small, bleak, humourless one. Just a bloodless compression of the lips. Marc swallowed. This was a mood he had never seen before. “All of them?”

  “I told you. I have to make an example.” Bayrd’s voice was quiet, grim, edged with the forced severity of a man trying to convince himself that what he was about to do was right. With warriors like these – and that included his own people – it was right. The knowledge didn’t make it taste any better in his mouth the second time around. “Now go find out what I asked.”

  Marc looked him slowly up and down, then saluted without another word and rode away, heeling his own horse from a walk to a canter as if eager to be gone.

  2

  Widowmaker

  As Bayrd came closer, it was very obvious that even though Marc had said nothing out of place, word of his intentions had flown around the gathered kailinin of his household. He reined in, leaning on the pommel of his saddle, and watched them for a moment.

  Some were watching him in turn, with a near-insolent directness unusual when an Alban retainer met the gaze of his clan-lord. A few eyed their normally-affable lord with a surprise that bordered on shock, but others seemed quietly approving that he should have decided at long last to make his presence felt along the border country.

  There was just so much a man could stand, before he weighed his lord’s dignified restraint in the balance against his personal reputation as a warrior and found that reputation wanting.

  This past season had seen too many anonymous incursions across the frontiers of the T
alvalin domain. Not one of them until now had been successfully followed by trod either hot or cold, never mind brought to battle and captives taken. It was the bad fortune of these prisoners that they would bear the weight of justice for all the others before them who got clean away.

  And then too, there was the matter of the burned farmers.

  Bayrd cynically diluted a grim smile. Those farmers were a legitimate reason for what he was going to do; but for a good half of his men, any other reason would have been equally acceptable.

  It was as he had suspected. A few were sympathetic to the men and women who had been killed, but none of them felt anything deeper than insulted honour against those who had done the murders. None of them ruled these people – and that rule was responsible not merely for their taxes but for their welfare – so none of them felt any real anger.

  Bayrd Talvalin was angry; and that was after hours of hard riding, and after a good deal of his rage had been washed away in the fright and sweat and fury of a vicious little combat. But when he had slipped from Yarak’s back outside the smoking ruins of that cottage, and gone inside to where the charred, shrivelled bodies lay smouldering in the ruins of their home, he had been willing to set loose not merely feud but a full scale clan-war on the men responsible.

  That dangerous passion had cooled somewhat, because the risks of revenge disguised as justice running out of control were all too obvious with the present mood in Alba. There was an old saying – there was always an old saying – it’s so easy to set the grass ablaze, and so hard to put it out. He had no desire to be scorched without good reason, and this reason, though good, wasn’t good enough.

  It had been as if he had never seen a corpse before. But maybe he hadn’t; not in this sense, anyway. Bayrd had been Clan-Lord Talvalin for almost seven years now. He had seen men die, and he had killed a number of them himself. But this had been the first time he had failed people who looked to him for their protection. The failure hurt. It shamed him. And it took away his honour.