Besides, these days he found that no trial, though his drinking companions of old would find that hard to believe. Plenty of troopers sworn to other lords could tell lurid tales of sharing their festival liberty in the same gambling dens and brothels as the new Baron Halferan.
‘Well?’ he prompted Reven.
‘No, my lord.’
Corrain noted the swift blush rising from the boy’s collar. ‘Then what have they been asking?’
He hadn’t served in Halferan’s guard for more than twenty years without learning to recognise a junior trooper with something to hide.
Reven’s cheeks were burning as furiously as the sausage vendor’s brazier. ‘They say, my lord—’ he couldn’t bring himself to look at Corrain ‘—that you’re no longer fit to share any woman’s bed.’
‘Why not?’ Corrain was honestly puzzled.
‘They say, my lord, that the Archipelagans—’ Reven forced the words out in a rush ‘—that the Archipelagans geld their slaves.’
Corrain’s first instinct was to laugh. He curbed it. ‘They’re saying that I’ve left my stones on some Aldabreshin beach?’
Reven nodded. ‘Everyone knows that the warlords geld the house slaves who watch their wives.’
Corrain shook his head. ‘The corsairs would gain nothing by cutting a galley’s rowers. They’d lose half of them to blood loss or wound rot or just the shock of it.’
He could feel his groin tightening just at the revolting thought.
‘So try thinking with your brain not your shrivelling cock, Sergeant,’ he said curtly. ‘What does anyone have to gain by spreading this new rumour about me?’
Reven hesitated. ‘To make you a figure of fun?’
‘That’s doubtless part of it,’ Corrain agreed, ‘but what does it mean for Halferan? What’s to become of the barony if there’s no chance of me begetting an heir? That’s what they want people asking themselves,’ he concluded grimly.
‘My lord.’ Reven’s blush had been fading. Now he coloured more luridly than before, doubtless at the thought of Corrain sharing Lady Ilysh’s bed.
Corrain clapped a reassuring hand on the lad’s shoulder. ‘Well, if whoever’s behind this rumour has the stones to challenge my right to Halferan on these grounds, I can just drop my breeches and show all the lords of the parliament that I’ve still got both my berries attached to my twig.’
That won him a choked laugh from Reven.
‘Meantime, you can drop a few tantalizing hints when you’re drinking with Lord Erbale’s men this evening,’ Corrain said thoughtfully. ‘Just make sure you take their coin before you disappoint them with your certain knowledge of my intact manhood, my lonely bed notwithstanding, and my unshakeable devotion to Lady Ilysh.’
‘Yes, my lord.’ Reven ducked his head. ‘Would you like to see what I have bought her for a festival fairing?’
‘By all means.’ Corrain eyed the lad thoughtfully. Was he just trying to change the subject?
‘Look at this.’ Reven took a rag-wrapped lump from his pocket. Carefully unfolding the cloth, he revealed an ordinary pebble with one smoothly polished face.
‘See?’ Reven turned the shining stone so that Corrain could see it was patterned like a feather fern.
No, it was a feather fern, or at least, that’s what the hucksters who sold such stones insisted. Somehow in aeons past, the plant had been trapped in mud which had gradually turned to rock. Any wizard would swear to it, the peddlers assured their customers.
‘Do you think she’ll like it?’ Reven asked, suddenly uncertain.
Corrain was tempted to lie. He’d brought Reven on this trip for a good many reasons. Newly installed as sergeant, the lad needed to establish his authority over the troop without Kusint always at hand to prompt the men to toe Reven’s line. Added to that, Corrain wanted Kusint watching over the manor, in case someone like Baron Karpis was fool enough to try taking advantage of Zurenne while she and her children were left alone.
That wasn’t all. Over this past half-season, Corrain and Zurenne had agreed that Reven’s obvious devotion to Ilysh looked far too likely to slip into infatuation. One thoughtless midwinter kiss amid the license of the festival could prompt no end of complications.
‘I think she’ll like it well enough.’ He kept his approval muted. ‘Now, once you’re done drinking, you’re welcome to find some girl to share your pillow for the night. The cleanest whorehouses are by the Peorle Gate. Best to be sure you don’t take any unwelcome gifts back to some Halferan sweetheart.’
‘I don’t—’ Reven thrust his barely whiskered chin forward. ‘It’s my duty to serve you, my lord.’
‘As you wish.’ Well, he could hardly order the boy to go out and flip a lightskirt’s frills.
Noon’s five chimes sounded out across the town, every timepiece attuned to the great bell in the merchants’ exchange tower. Corrain reminded himself of the shorter days at this season so much further north than home. The barons would be summoned to their next debate by the sixth chime of the ten dividing the daylight. He had scant time to waste if he was to carry through his avowed intent to mark the turning of the year.
‘Come with me.’ He headed across the marketplace.
Reven’s stride nearly matched his own; For-Winter might have just passed but the lad had grown like a weed flourishing in Aft-Spring.
A black-gowned dancer trailing white ribbons from her hands wheeled into their path. As she pirouetted around them, drawing fleeting, silken designs in the sunlight, her smile invited them to spare some small coin in return for her festival entertainment.
Perhaps she had innocently noted Reven’s pewter and maroon livery matching Corrain’s cloak, marking them as noble and escort, one of them bound to carry a full purse.
Perhaps her calculating accomplice was coming up behind them. A slim knife could cut through a belt or even into a pocket to steal a purse unnoticed, especially if the girl were to stumble on these slick cobbles in her flimsy dancing slippers. Either the nobleman or his loyal trooper would surely dash gallantly forward to save the dark-haired beauty from a painful fall.
Perhaps mingling with barons and their plotting was making him too suspicious. All the same, Corrain twitched his cloak back to leave his sword hilt unencumbered.
‘Fair festival.’ He smiled at the dancer. ‘Reven, a few coppers for the fair maiden.’
As the boy obliged, the girl plucked the coins from the air amid a deft spiral of silk. The glint of tossed wealth prompted other entertainers to drift in their direction.
‘This way.’ Corrain disappointed them by cutting a straight route across the cobbles towards a narrow alley.
‘Where are we going?’ Reven made sure that his own cloak wouldn’t foil his blade if he needed to use it.
‘To fulfil an oath.’ Corrain felt for the new dagger sheathed on the opposite hip to his sword belt. He’d spent the last chime of the night before dawn honing the expensive steel with his whetstone. It would be sharp enough.
‘You should learn your way round these ginnels.’ He left the alley for a narrower path dividing the back yards of two long terraces. ‘Here and in Ferl, Trebin, Tresia and Adrulle. You must be able to find your way around any such town blindfold before the parliament returns.’
As they emerged on to a cobbled street, Corrain watched to see how long it took Reven to recognise their surroundings. Good. The first thing the boy looked for was a tavern. As soon as he found the Elm Tree, recognition gleamed in his eyes.
‘Where are we headed?’ Reven asked.
‘Talagrin’s shrine.’ Corrain crossed the broad thoroughfare and took another alleyway to reach a square of worn turf with a circular building in its centre.
The door stood half open to reveal the glow of candles within the windowless gloom. Hilts of broken daggers were nailed around the entrance and to the door itself, inside and out. Chipped enamel pommels, fraying wire bindings on hilts and fractured steel blades turned the portal into a sharp-toothed maw.
‘My lord?’ Reven was understandably bemused. The god of the hunt’s season was For-Autumn, with his rites celebrated at the turn from Aft-Summer.
‘Wait here.’ Corrain entered the shrine and closed the door behind him. Today the lad could learn that even a trusted sergeant didn’t know all a baron’s business.
He looked up at the god’s statue. Talagrin stared blindly ahead, his marble eyes blank. With Duryea so close to Caladhria’s border with Ensaimin, Corrain guessed at some Forest blood in this particular sculptor’s veins. The bow-wielding, pelt-draped effigy could have stepped out of the tales which Kusint told, of the god of wild places whom his mother’s folk worshipped as one of their own.
Corrain had been raised to call Talagrin the swordsman’s god. The little statue in Halferan’s manor shrine carried a sword and wore a chainmail hauberk in the same style as every baron and the men who rode behind him. That statue had been smashed along with the others when the corsairs had despoiled the shrine.
Once Corrain had done what he intended today, he was done with all the gods, however they were carved. He no longer believed in any of them. Why should he, when they had so completely failed him and his fellow guardsmen when the corsairs had enslaved them and murdered their lord?
‘I swore an oath,’ Corrain drew the dagger from his belt, ‘that I would see Hosh brought safely home. That I would see Halferan saved from those accursed raiders. That I would do it all myself without any god’s aid, for my dead lord’s sake.’
Turning his head, he drew the long braid of his uncut hair free from his cloak’s collar. Pulling it hard and taut, he severed it with a swift stroke of the razor-sharp dagger.
‘So much for my ambitions. I was a fool to meddle with magic. But Hosh is home and the barony is safe—’
About to throw the fraying braid at the statue’s feet, Corrain halted. ‘Maybe I should give this to Drianon. How does it feel for a warrior god to be outdone by a goddess armed with a broom? She’s done more to save Halferan than you.’
He remembered the night when he had cut Ilysh’s ribbon-bedecked wedding plait, to lay it before the divine guardian of hearth and home, yielding to Zurenne’s desperate plea for the fiction of legal protection for her children.
So much for his oath to save his dead lord’s family by cutting down their enemies with his mighty sword. Who was he to mock even this lifeless statue of an imaginary god? Who was he to boast of his heroism?
Corrain had sworn to avenge his dead lord but Hosh had slain Lord Halferan’s murderer. Alone, unarmed, suffering from unhealed wounds, the boy had survived in the corsair lair after Corrain and Kusint had escaped. More incredible still, he had escaped the slaughter when that cursed Mandarkin mage had held the whole island in magical thrall.
Corrain dropped the severed hair to the earthen floor and drove the dagger deep into the wooden pillar closest to hand. Now he turned his attention to his manacled wrist. Plenty of the parliament’s barons had sneaked covert glances at the slave iron he still wore, trailing its short length of broken chain. He’d wager that none of them had noticed that the manacle’s iron ring was now secured with a discreet twist of wire.
No one, Corrain included, could possibly have imagined how long it would take him to pick that cursed Archipelagan lock. At least he’d had plenty of time, sitting alone at night in his truckle bed set up in the baronial tower’s muniment room. When the time came to give Ilysh’s hand to a worthy suitor, plenty of Halferan servants would be able to swear that the two of them had never shared a bedchamber. Meantime, no one would be able to sneak up the tower’s stairs without Corrain knowing.
‘Have this as well and much good it may do you.’
Corrain dropped the unlocked manacle beside his discarded hair. Let that baffle the shrine’s priest or whoever else might find it. Perhaps someone would recognise it for the low-born Lord Halferan’s slave-iron and go running to some other baron.
Good luck to them and he hoped that they would ask for its weight in silver before handing the cursed thing over. Who ever bought it would get no joy of their purchase. He wouldn’t answer any of their questions. This was between Corrain and his dead lord.
Now his honour was satisfied. He had made good on his oath to lay these tokens before Talagrin when Hosh and Halferan were safe and he’d done so far from home, to avoid sullying the manor’s shrine at this turn of a new year with these reminders of past sorrows and tribulation. Now it was time to make a fresh start without gods or wizards or any such fetters.
Corrain turned his back on the god and opened the shrine’s door.
‘Cap—’ Reven’s eyes widened to see Corrain’s hair cut short above his cloak collar. His gaze dropped instantly to fasten on the older man’s wrist, the scars where the manacle had galled him now plain for all to see. ‘My lord?’
Corrain wasn’t about to answer his sergeant’s questions either. The only person with any right to ask him what he had done was Hosh, though Corrain still shrank from the prospect of explaining his follies and failures to the inexplicably trusting youth. One day, perhaps. Many years from now.
‘Do you think that the Elm Tree will serve us a decent mug of ale and a bowl of stew before the parliament begins its debate?’
‘Perhaps, my lord,’ Reven said uncertainly.
Corrain left the shrine door ajar as they had found it and headed towards the jovial noises of the street. It wasn’t only his head and his hand which felt lighter, relieved of those burdens of his oath and his servitude.