Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (14 page)

But more interesting still were the people of Brannagh, the
knights, even the occasional farmer or villager come to see the sheriff on some
errand.  Once he left the main corridors of the keep, he saw only
servants—maids, valets, pages and cooks, all setting about the day’s business
of running the household.

Invaders were so different from the Dhanani; they wore
clothes even in their homes to hide their bodies when just the set of their
shoulders left their souls so bare he was embarrassed to watch them.  The big
men tended to lumber along clumsily with their heads bowed down, their eyes
turned away; some others who had a tight, pinched look about them thrust out
their chests and strutted by, intent on some errand or other.  But the ones he
found most interesting were those who held their shoulders small and close,
those guilty of some undiscovered mischief, ready to be caught, ready to
grovel.  Bears, cocks and mice.  He smiled.  And he, the Dhanani wolf among
them.

He trotted quickly up the steps from the audience wing to
the private upper corridors.  Countless candelabrum on sideboards lit his way,
but his body grew heavy and lethargic in the dim light, ready to go back to
sleep, and he felt the tightness in his chest again, the feeling of
suffocating.  He looked around him, desperate for air, and he saw a large open
window at the end of the corridor.  Just seeing that window made him feel better;
a few quick breaths, and he would be fine.

But ahead of him, he heard one of the doors opening. 
Instinctively, he ducked under one of the sideboards just as Sedrik let himself
out of a bedchamber.  While the door was opened, only for a second, Chul caught
a glimpse of what lay beyond it, and he forgot about the window.  He had to go
inside that room, if only to look, if only to let his eyes lay claim to that
secret space.

Once Sedrik was gone, he crossed the hallway and pushed the
door in.  It was not locked.  A fire burned in the fireplace to fill the
chamber with warmth, and the bedclothes were already turned down, with a white
rose of mourning set upon the outermost pillow.  A forbidding wardrobe of rare
velmon wood stood against the wall opposite the bed, with a large northern
bear’s fur spread on the floor.  Two huge tapestries hung on the other walls,
ornate intricate things full of tiny men at war, and a great cloth screen stood
drawn away from the window where the sunlight poured in.

But Chul’s eyes fell on something more personal, something
of gold. Articles of power.

He picked up the heavy gold hairbrush and ran his finger
over the Brannagh coat of arms, the same that was on the back of the companion
mirror.  His fingers trembled on the gold.  The handle was cold at first, but
it was taking heat from his own hand, from his own excitement.  With it, he had
power, if nowhere else but in his own mind.  He would know, no matter what the
sheriff did to him later, no matter how he cursed him or beat him or even
killed him, that he had won this time.

The boy deserves to die.

He clutched the brush in his hand.  He would know—

His mother must have whored herself to a Bremondine.

—no matter how his father punished him—

No son of mine is he.

—and nothing could take that away!  He jerked at his leather
tunic to loosen it, to stow the brush in it—

Welcome.

He paused and stared down at the brush. A few of the
sheriff’s hairs wound through the boar bristles, purest silver against the
gold, and it felt uncomfortably warm in his hand.  He remembered the sheriff’s
grip on his forearm in the warrior’s greeting, the power of the man’s gaze.

Surely Aidan had told Lord Daerwin what Chul was, and yet
he’d greeted him as an equal and welcomed him into his home.  He’d put the boy
to bed in a chamber nearly the equal of his own, sent his own valet to serve
him.  And Lady Renda…

Father and I are agreed.  We should be pleased to keep you as
our guest tonight at Brannagh.

Guest.  No prayer guarded the sheriff’s chambers, and no knights
prowled the halls behind the boy to watch him.  Yet Chul could no more steal
from this place than he could fly, and his sudden certainty of it made him
dizzy.  He could steal from his own tribe, from Aidan, even from Chief Bakti,
but he could not take this Invader’s hairbrush.

The boy’s no good.

The gold brush clattered to the floor, and Chul staggered
back against the wardrobe.  His face felt flushed, feverish, and his hands
trembled.  He had to get some air.

“Just where do you suppose you’d be selling those?”

He froze.  The voice came ghostlike from the shadows between
the open door and the wardrobe.  He was caught!  Without thinking, he grabbed
up the brush and the mirror and dove for the door, for the hallway, but too
late.  By the time he reached it, the door was already slammed shut.

“Well, speak up, then.”  A striking young Bremondine woman
stepped between him and the closed door and crossed her arms over her chest. 
She was dressed in a riding tunic, and she wore her long brown hair loose like
a man, but he doubted anyone would mistake her for one.  He saw at once that he
stood nearly a head taller than she and half again as broad.  And he relaxed.

She snatched the brush and mirror from his hands.  He
grabbed to take them back, but he could not get his hands on them.  Instead, he
tried to grab her, tried to grapple with her and throw her against the door,
but she was fast, so very fast, and in the close space, his size worked against
him.  He hurled his whole weight at her.  And found himself falling through
empty space to the floor.  Then her boot was on his throat.  It was not until
he was on his back that he noticed the dirk sheathed in her leggings beneath
her tunic.  The two daggers at her hips.  The battered sword.  The dart belt. 
He felt a bit dizzy.

“Look here,” she said calmly as if nothing had happened. 
She flipped the mirror around to show him the back.  “Do you think this idle
decoration?”  She laughed.  “Look about you, boy; it’s the sheriff’s own
bedchamber you rob, and this, the sheriff’s own mark, the Brannagh coat of
arms, on the back.  And look at this!  You’d take his brush with the very
silver of his hairs still in it?”  She took her foot away and dropped the
mirror and hairbrush on the sheriff’s dressing table in disgust.  “Try to sell
these anywhere in Syon, you’d be clapped in a cell afore the night fell, and no
mistake.”

Sell them?  He blinked up at her.  Why would he want to sell
them?

She offered him a hand and helped him up, not noticing the
wide eyed stare he gave to the long nail on her little finger.  Then she opened
the door to lead him back to the hallway.  “You’d make a better market on the
candelabrum in the hall.  Gold, they are, not a one marked, not a one to be
missed, so long as you’ve an eye to hide the space you make.”  She winked at
him.  “Think on it.”

“You’re like me,” the boy breathed in shaky Bremondine. 
“You’re—” He pursed his lips, searching for the word.  “You...take things.”

“Aye, once upon a time,” she grinned, still speaking
Syonese.  “Like you and worse, I’d wager.”  Then she looked up and offered her
hand to him.  “They call me Gikka of Graymonde.  Gikka to you, lad.”

Chul stared at her a moment before he took her hand.

Steal?  From Gikka?  I think not.

At last he understood Aidan’s quiet laughter, and he laughed
himself.

Gikka smiled a bit uncertainly.  “Strikes you funny, does
it?”  She shook her head and looked him over with a wry grin.  “I take you to
be the Dhanani lad, aye?”

He bowed.  “Chul Ka-Dree.”

She bowed her head.  “Aidan’s asked me to take you on at
Graymonde Hall.”  She smiled.  “Teach you what I know, so please you.  But
we’ve a ride ahead, and I’m of a mind to take you round the back way.  It’s a
bit longer, but no sense giving the miners any call for wickedness.”  She
clapped her hand around his shoulder and led him up the hallway.

He glanced at the candelabrum as they passed.

Her hand tightened around him.  “I said they’d not be
missed.”  When she saw understanding in his eyes, she loosened her grip.  “I
said nothing about me letting you take one.  Steal from your friends,” she
added softly, “and soon you got no friends.  It’s a matter of honor; Renda
taught me that.”

“I have no friends,” Chul brooded, crossing his arms over
his chest. “And I have no honor; my father taught me that.”

Gikka grasped his chin roughly and shoved him back against
the wall, and he steeled himself for a good cuff.  “Your father,” she sneered,
scrutinizing the purpled swellings on his face.  “The very same as left you
this lovely bunch of plums, here, that father?  Oh, a sure man of honor, that.”

“I deserved it,” he answered, eyes growing wide with
fear—but not fear of her.  It was fear of something within himself.  “My father
was a great hunter.  A great warrior.” Chul shut his eyes then and sank against
the wall, feeling the welling blackness in his spirit again.  It was too dark,
too terrible.  He could not face it. Instead, he fought it the only way he
could, the way he had fought it for fifteen years.  He turned it against
himself.  “I was bad.  He deserved a better son than me.”

“Told you so himself, did he?”

She did not understand.  How could she?  Chul beat his fist
against the floor.  “He deserved—”

“Bah, he deserved a pox, is what he deserved, and no
mistake.”  She scowled.  “Bloody villain.”

Chul looked up at her in shock.  “No!” he shouted.  “He was
a warrior, a Dhanani warrior.”

“He were a villain!” she spat.  “Challenge the chief to see
his own son dead, a villain sure!”

“But I stole!  I deserved to die!” Chul sobbed, desperate to
wall away his horror of his own heart.  The feelings were too terrifying, too
evil to let spill out.  He could not hate his father.  He shook his head and
put his hands over his ears.  “No!”

“You’re a child.  You deserve none of it.”  Gikka stopped
mid-breath and crouched beside him.  She gently took his hands from his ears
and held them.  “Hear me, for I say it but once,” she spoke gently.  “Men there
are in the world, not just your father but other men, too, and all cried out
great and noble even, but what has no honor in their souls.  Men what says of
one thing but knows right well they mean another.  Men what ache to see their
brothers fall in harm’s way and set the path for them.  Men what steals from
them as gives them freely, aye?”  He nodded hesitantly, feeling the pain and
darkness fade, and she went on.  “Villains, these are,” she said, “and I’ll not
be training you to villainy.  You’ve too good a soul for that.”  Then she stood
and offered him her hand.  “Of me, lad, you’ll have your honor or you’ll have
your death, and no mistake.”

Honor or death.  His lip curled in a sneer. He stared at
Gikka’s tiny hand, at the little finger’s long nail pointing at his eyes, and
his palm moved lightly over the hilt of his knife.  Gikka’s meaning was clear,
and she would act on his decision now, in the space of a breath.  He steeled
himself, ready to cross his arms in defiance.  He was already dead to the
tribe, an outcast.  Just this morning, he’d been ready to do it himself, to
throw himself off the ledge, so what difference did it make to him?  Besides,
what sort of honor could she teach him, Invader honor?

Renda of Brannagh is fully as valiant a warrior as our own
chief.

Suddenly, his sneer was gone.  Lady Renda was an Invader. 
But no one, not Aidan, not Chief Bakti, not even his own father would question
the honor of such a one, Invader or not.  Outcast or not.  Gikka would teach
him that kind of honor, something that, as Vaccar’s idiot son, he would never
have gotten from the tribe.  He would have as many chances for death as he made
for himself, but a chance at true honor was a rare thing.

Slowly, his hand rose to clasp hers.

*          *          *

“I see no simple solution, my love,” sighed Glynnis when
Daerwin told her of Wirthing’s letter.  It was well after Gikka’s departure
with her new apprentice, hours since dinner, and the knights and servants had
retired to their apartments.  The sheriff and his wife sat alone beside the
fire in her chambers, she wrapped in her shawl and curled up against his
shoulder, he staring thoughtfully into the fire. 

Below in his audience chambers, the same parchments sat
blank upon his desk, the same pens lay clean beside capped vials of ink as when
he had left them.  He had stared at them the whole day and the better part of
the evening besides, and still he could find no answer.  None that would not
threaten the Wirthing alliance.

“You cannot simply say nothing,” she observed at last,
“since he is bound to hear of the whole business eventually, and from sources
less reputable than yourself.”  She shrugged.  “In any event, to give no answer
when he pleads so would be less than honorable.”  She was right.  She had a way
of seeing to the heart of things when his decades of training in strategy and
diplomacy often obscured them with complication.

“Neither can you write the essential truth, that they
departed without taking their proper leave of you.”  She shifted against him. 
“For the same reason.”

He kissed her coppery hair thoughtfully and frowned. 
“Something in his tone makes me wonder what he might already know of it.”

“In which case he may think to catch you in some
unintentional deceit.” 

“Were we at war,” he said darkly, “I might agree, but we are
allies...”  His words were meant to defeat her argument, but his tone was
uncertain.

“Ever the distrustful warrior battles the patient diplomat,
seeing only the motives of war in a time of peace.  Ah, my love,” she smiled
wistfully.  “Remember when a sword and a firm hand answered all?  How is it
that now we fret away the whole day and lose the night’s sleep over the lay of
a few words on a page?”  She nestled her head against his shoulder again and
sighed.  “Your first instincts are true, Daerwin.  The whole and proper truth
is your best reply to him.”  When he made no answer, she nudged him with her
elbow.  “And right well you know it.”