"Done then, lad. I'll meet you in the Col of the Blackroots tomorrow if it is the will of the Silent King. Tell your father I hope to see him then."
"I will do as you ask, Sir Kieren."
Kieren inclined his head. "I will carry your apologies to old Sir Osseric. You give mine to the Traveler if you meet him."
As he left
Sir Kieren, Durand threw Brag into a long gallop, storming past the fiddles of Gravenholm village to plunge deep into the misty forest once more. Finally, in a place as silent as a sanctuary, Brag jounced to a halt. The animal huffed at the thick air. Durand stroked the hunter's muscled neck, no horseman if he'd treat an animal this way.
Around him, mist steamed from the dark earth, thick as spirits. The Eye of Heaven had left him.
"Come on," Durand said, nudging Brag forward.
Ahead, the track meandered along the floor of a shallow and nameless valley. And, for the first time, Durand had a glimpse of how big a fool he'd been. The priests said that the Host Below swarmed every man's head, pulling and prodding. A tug of fear here and shame there. A night with
poor old Os
seric of Gravenholm would have done him no harm.
He looked into the dark woods; there were ruins under the leaves.
Since Durand could remember, they'd been telling
Osseric
story back in the Painted Hall of Acconel. The man's wife had died in childbirth: a love story ending with oaths and sorrow. But the pages and shield-bearers in the Painted Hall fixed their attention on the son: a boy who'd lived in Acconel just as they did, who'd slept in the very same straw. He was brave. He was strong. But when his greedy master boarded a ship for the Inner Seas, he had to follow. And the winds off the Harrow drove their merchantman onto the rocks where the bandy-legged fiends of that shore gnaw the bones of sailors.
Dreams of the wreck haunted Durand as a boy: corpses bobbing on bales of wool or following the ship down with the dragging weight of the tin heaped in its hold. Creeping fiends with iron fangs and skin smooth as sheep's gut among the dead. A thrill of fear went through him even now—an armed man, supposedly trained for battle.
But Osseric was a knight in the service of Durand's father. The lost son had been the only heir, and so in a realm where every stump was knotted with a hundred titles, Durand's father picked his second son's future from that shipwreck. With no heir waiting, all Durand must do, the priests said, was become a knight. And that had been Durand's duty for the last fourteen years: fourteen years of bruises among the page boys and shield-bearers in the Painted Hall of the Duke of Gireth in faraway Acconel.
Durand shook his head. He should have sat down at
Osseric
table and been civil to the man. Osseric deserved to know his heir. After Durand had been to the Col, he would come back and do what was right.
Just then, some motion among the clouds smothered the Gleaning Moon, dropping Creation into utter darkness.
"Hells," said Durand.
Brag stopped.
It was dark as blindness. Durand tried to recall the branches and the sopping leaves over the roots and ruins, but tapped a flood of childhood memories instead. He had played in these woods as a boy, and now remembered crabbed trees, a castle mound in a village of graves, a tumbledown shrine full of blank-faced icons. He remembered roots and ivy fumbling over stone. The realms of the Sons of Atthi were ancient, and most ancient of all was Errest the Old.
As the gray stone icons floated before his mind's eye and the cold stitched ice through his clothes, a breeze skittered through the high branches. He remembered Kieren's talk of the Traveler and the open doors.
"Not clever to dredge up dead men and drowned heirs alone in the dark," Durand muttered, setting his jaw. He was almost home, and there wasn't a twig or stone for leagues that didn't belong to his father. Muttering a charm against the Lost, he waited for a break in the clouds to let a little moonlight slip down. And, with the return of the light, it might have been any evening.
Then he heard a sound—
tock
—hollow and distant above the rattle of the wind. Thoughts of gates and latches and tombs returned, and the dark poured in.
Durand grunted, but urged Brag on.
Tock.
He turned in his seat. The footpath behind him was black. The sound seemed to issue from somewhere beyond the curl of track ahead. It had a slow rhythm. It might be a length of old chain swinging somewhere—a lost trap or halter. It had to be some such thing.
Durand set his mind to tallying the coin his father would need for the dubbing in Acconel. He didn't much like it. So much silver for this; so much silver for that. Sir Kieren wasn't about to let his shield-bearer kneel in the Acconel high sanctuary in sackcloth, no matter that it might be easier.
Tock.
Durand froze. .
The road might have been a black tunnel, a mineshaft. Heedless, Brag thumped forward. Durand reached for his blade, feeling as though he must move his hand with care.
Abruptly, the sound exploded under Brag's hooves:
tock-tock-tock.
It was the sound of iron shoes on stone. Durand threw his hood back and freed his blade. Cobblestones. It had been these cobblestones all along.
Right below him, the pale stones of the old Acconel road broke the skin of leaves. He likely traveled it a hundred times in childhood and had never heard. Now, every step scraped and clacked at the same note.
Brag must have noticed Durand's twitching; he had stopped dead. "Walk on," Durand whispered. And he heard the sound like a counterpoint beyond Brag's hooves: a staff's brass-shod heel, growing clearer, growing closer. What sort of man walked so blithely through the dark?
The trail opened, parting like curtains, and a huge tree spread black branches into the heavens. Now, Durand knew where he was. This was the Crossroads Elm, the hanging tree. Round the corner would be the open fields below the Col and no place for a man to hide. He could hear the staff still swinging just around that bend.
Tock. Tock....
Then there was nothing.
Silence chased the last report into the distance, skittering off like ripples on a millpond.
Durand jerked Brag to a halt, staring at the elm's old trunk. Not a whisper.
In his mind's eye, he saw the stranger stopped, waiting for him just around the tree.
Durand wouldn't sit there shaking. With a snarl, he spurred Brag on. The clatter of the hunter's hooves battered back the silence. With a wild surge, they swung round the great elm and into the open fields of the Col. Vast mountains reared into view. The empty road swung high to the old town between the peaks—and there wasn't a soul for half a league. Neither was there a ditch or a shock of hay to hide in between Durand's sword and the mountains. The stranger had vanished. Durand gave Brag the spurs.
2. Homecoming
B
rag got him home. In the dark, Durand's birthplace resembled a madman's stronghold. The ancients had fixed the fortress in a cleft between two peaks; it guarded a pass, now little used. Crowded in that stronghold would be all the family and friends Durand had left behind in his long exile in Acconel.
Below the stronghold, the village was warm with hearth fires and filled with quiet ta
lk from its open windows. Durand
marveled at how small the village seemed after years away, and found himself touching the slate walls and hanging eaves. Almost before he realized, he had reached the wall of his father's stronghold.
Sucking in a deep breath, Durand nudged Brag under the gates and into an inner courtyard that stood empty as a drum.
Durand could hear voices up in the castle rooms: a hundred people gabbling. Firelight glowed down from every open window.
"Home," he said, rolling the word like a pebble on his tongue. .
He led Brag across the courtyard and into the acrid warmth of the stables. Over the doors was the Col's coat of arms: the head and rack of three stags, two over one below. Durand took a few moments to scrub some of the water from Brag's hide while the hunter thrust his chin in the air. Durand grinned up at the brute, then, with a gentle slap, set off for the feasting hall.'
In no time, he stood with his hand on the latch as voices throbbed beyond it, unnerved at coming upon a feast from outside and hearing laughter not shared. For a moment, he was like some lost soul blown in from the trees.
Durand turned the handle, and warm air poured around his wrist.
For an instant, no one noticed him.
He had a glimpse of Baron Hroc's liegemen sprawled in the smoky hall of his childhood. Wives sat in circles. Faces shone with grease. Some he knew; some sent his mind searching. A pair of tired serving men were levering one of the tables from its sawhorse trestles, while dogs prowled the reeds to the tune of a skald's mandora.
Then Durand stepped inside.
The skald's fingers stumbled, and everyone in the hall looked up.
"Durand." A black-haired man with an expression of astonishment had spoken. While the face was strange, Durand knew the voice. This was Hathcyn, his brother. The whole of the high table turned, and Durand's mother—strangely small and suddenly ancient—rose to her feet.
"Durand,"
she gasped. And there was hardly room for her smile in the white frame of her wimple.
The swirl of
hands and smiles and toasts and questions kept the noontide feast alive late into Traveler's Night. The fifth hour found Durand staggering through the chill dark of his father's keep in search of the privy. He was swimming with wine and bursting with beef and crane and swan. He breathed a boozy plume of frost into the air, hardly able to stop smiling. These were his people. This was where he was meant to be.
Somewhere ahead they had hidden the upstairs privy—he was sure.
His palm scrabbled over a corner, then he fumbled into the darkness of a room: the privy, he hoped. A breath of pennyroyal and something rank told him he had guessed right. His scabbard clattered. The branding-iron cold of the stone was enough to make him regret an evening of warmth by the hearth fires, almost.
When he had finished, he pitched the washrag and a shot of water down the hole and left the little room.
Conversation swirled up the empty passage. Now that the feast's second life was nearly spent, the servants were back to dismantling the trestle tables.
Durand braced himself between the walls, yawning deep and thinking that all the forest omens had come to nothing.
A ribbon of light glinted in the darkness of the hall. As Durand leaned closer, it became an arrow loop crowded with the humped rooftops of the village between the mountains. Beyond the huddled flock of houses, he could see murky hints of the trees and the spot where the old elm would be.
Durand tore his gaze from the narrow window and descended to the hall, where he found Hathcyn weaving through the maze of limbs and tables, carrying a pair of cups. Though slighter than his younger brother, Hathcyn and Durand shared the same face: black mop, dark brows, blue eyes, square jaw—though Hathcyn's had been carved by a finer chisel.
"Here," he said, thrusting a cup toward Durand. "It's hot." Across the hall, the skald croaked out the end of a ballad.
Durand sipped hot sweetness from his cup.
"I was wondering where you'd got to," Hathcyn said. He looked round at the pallets and drowsy knights and their wives. "Girart and Lamis, you remember them? Sergeants? Sons of one of Dad's stewards? They were throwing daggers for clipped pennies. Every blade right in Mother's woodwork. She nearly spitted the pair of them." He winced. " 'Spat' the pair of them? Whichever, she nearly got Lamis.
"Now," he continued. "We ought to find you somewhere to sleep away from—"
"—I'm fine here with the others. Used to it."
"I suppose a straw pallet looks good after the roots and stones you've been bedding down on the last few days."
'The roof'll
make a change," Durand allowed, grinning.
A pair of yawning serving boys were struggling to lift a heavy table from its trestles. Durand jerked his chin toward it, and, in a moment, the two baron's sons had plucked the thing from the boys' hands.
"All right you two, where should we take it?" Durand asked.
After a moment, one got up the courage to point down the hall toward the cellar door. "You two get the legs," Durand suggested. "We'll see who gets there first." The two boys nodded and were off, scurrying faster than if Durand had barked an order.
"Mother was pleased to see your face," said Hathcyn as they shuffled the heavy table down the hall. "God. It was a great surprise to have you walk in." Hathcyn stopped a moment, puffing. Blowing hair out of his eyes, he glanced past an unperturbed Durand. "If it isn't the woman herself."