Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (15 page)

Suddenly, as if startled out of deepest thought by her
presence, he lifted his arm from round her shoulders and stood.  “Aye, but how,
is the question.”  With his hands clasped behind his back, he paced the floor. 
“I can think how to tell him his knights are dead, and even how they fell at
Renda’s hand, but ever I come to what brought Renda and Gikka against them,
ever I think to pen the words, ‘your knights sold my granddaughter to her
death,’” here his voice caught in his throat, and he turned to his wife with
pain in his eyes, “and the whole thing rings of anger and accusation.”

“And why not?”  Glynnis stood, drawing her shawl up about
her shoulders, and her eyes glistened in the firelight.  “Why not? Our son’s
child is murdered, Daerwin!  Murdered!  Wirthing’s men
did
kidnap her,
and Renda did take revenge on them.” 

“The Houses of Brannagh and Wirthing are allies, and I would
keep it so. But as to Lord Corin himself...”  He shook his head dubiously. 

She brushed away her tears and raised her chin.  “Corin
would be a fool to expect anything less than rage from your pen, given the
circumstances. He should count himself lucky that you do not declare war upon
him.  Would you hide your sorrow and your anger from one whom you’ve called
ally these many years?”

He shook his head.  “It is not so simple, Glynnis.”

“Is it not?”  She touched his arm and stared into his eyes. 
“Daerwin, Brannagh was wronged, not Wirthing, and you should not be the one
apologizing to him for what his knights have done!”  She crossed her arms.  “An
he would take offense enough at the truth to break your alliance, then it
stands broken already.”

“I would not apologize,” he answered harshly, “but I would
spare his honor, if I might.”

“That it harms his honor is none of your affair.  You would
but speak what you know.”  She sniffed.  “Besides, he should have seen the
resentment in his knights.  He should have known they would—”

“He did not know his knights’ feelings.” His voice was
almost wheedling, and he turned away.  “How could he?”

“You would have.”  Her eyes narrowed.

“Aye, I suppose.  And perhaps he did.  But Wirthing did not
do this thing.”  Daerwin rubbed his brow in frustration to find himself
defending the earl against her, especially when she spoke so true.  He closed
his eyes and regained his patience before he turned back to face her stubborn
stare.  “I would convey to him that I do
not
hold him responsible, but
without,” he gestured impatiently, “without apologizing, as you say.”  When she
nodded somewhat grudgingly, he continued.  “Yet upon the very insinuation—one
that cannot be helped, mark—I risk destroying a thousand year alliance.”  He
slapped his hand against the mantle.  “There is my difficulty.”

Glynnis sighed. “Well I remember Wirthing.  Word it how you
will, he will color it in the reading, regardless.”  She turned back to face
the fire with a shiver and straightened her shawl.  “Speak clear and true,
Daerwin; grant him but few words to twist.”

He came up behind her and touched her shoulders gently. 
“Aye, as few words as I can.”  Wrapping his arms about her waist then, he
pulled her back against him and sighed.  “I should go to him.”

“To Wirthing Castle?” she gasped and turned her head to look
at him.  “It’s a full tenday’s ride there and another back!  You should be gone
a full month or more!”

“Aye, but perhaps my best answer is to speak to him man to
man, and on his own ground.”  He shrugged.  “And thus be assured of no
misunderstanding.”

“This whilst we await a cardinal’s visit, and him to come at
your request?”  She frowned and looked back into the fire.  “You owe Wirthing
naught.  To take such pains for his sake were to call yourself the guilty one. 
And your daughter, as well, so do not think to send her, either.”

He breathed deeply. “Perhaps so,” he said at last. 

Glynnis lay her head back against his chest.  “You could
have Duke Trocu write him on your behalf.”

Daerwin drew breath to argue with her, more for form's sake
than anything since she anticipated exactly what he would say.

She turned to face him.  “Hear me, Daerwin.  He knows the
circumstance of Pegrine’s death; he would do this for you.”

“Aye, he would,” breathed the sheriff.  He let his arms fall
to his sides and turned away from her. “But he has no place in this.”

“No place!”  She glared at his back.  “Vilmar is her great—”

“Trocu,” he said heavily, turning to meet her gaze with his
own, “is but her cousin, and removed by one generation, at that.”

In truth, the duke mourned Pegrine deeply, and for reasons
even Daerwin was not certain he understood completely.  Trocu had always been
fond of the little girl, and she of him; he had always asked after her in his
letters to Daerwin and sent her trinkets and gewgaws to brighten her days. 
Several times since she had learned to read, he had written her directly, much
to her glee, sending her official messages sealed and addressed most formally
to Lady Pegrine of Brannagh.

Yet in spite of his grief, he had not come to her funeral,
nor had he in any official way acknowledged her death.  More ominous still,
since she had died, his letters had become more and more vague and preoccupied,
as if he were troubled by far more than the murder of his dear little cousin. 
Yet he would speak not a word of his concerns, not even to Daerwin.

His wife blew her exasperation out in a breath and crossed
her arms.  “All right, then, but Trocu is your nephew.  If not for Pegrine’s
sake, then for yours—”

Daerwin shook his head firmly.  “He dares show no excess of
favor to Brannagh, not now.”  His lips thinned.  “The other houses grew jealous
enough after Renda ended the war, aye?  It’s too awkward a position for him to
involve himself, much as he might be willing.”  He shook his head.  “I cannot
ask it of him, not now.”

“But is it excess of favor for him to broach this issue with
Wirthing?”  She wrung her hands.  “The House of Brannagh is in mourning; you
cannot be expected to...”

“Were Trocu to write the earl on my behalf, his message
worded however it please you,” he said with a shake of his head, “the main of the
offense, the accusation itself, would remain, made the worse because I were too
much the coward to speak it myself.  Not to mention that now the accusation
would be in the duke’s ear as well as at his pen, a thing not lost on
Wirthing.”

“Were it up to me,” she mused, “I should send Gikka.”

“Gikka, indeed.  The very picture of diplomacy, she.”

“Diplomacy be damned, within twice a tenday, you would find
yourself installed as the new Earl of Wirthing, and I doubt a soul on all Syon
would blame you a jot.”

“But Glynnis…”

“Oh, I know, I know.  He is an ally, with all the baggage
that brings along with it.  So barring that, we’ve come full circle,” she said
with a sympathetic smile and put her arms round his waist.  “And it remains but
for you to pen your answer,” she said decisively.

“Aye, and pray he takes as little offense as I offer.”  He
sighed.  “How is it that the correct thing is ever the most difficult?” he
chuckled sadly.

Her smile brightened and she kissed his shoulder.  “The bad
choices must have something to recommend them.”

He made as if to answer, but she lay her finger over his
lips.  “Hush, my lord Husband.  Any more talk of Wirthing, and I shall be
heartburned the whole night.”

“But I would—”

“Enough.” She kissed his lips lightly, gently, “Enough,”
then again until he pulled her close.

“What are you about, missus?” he grumbled rakishly, letting
himself be led along toward her bed.

“Surely, my lord, you’re not planning to run right down and
pen your letter now,” she murmured, releasing him from her embrace.  Her shawl
slipped away from her shoulders.  “Are you?”

S
ir
Saramore leaned over his saddle and surveyed the quiet field beyond the fence,
stroking his graying mustache.  “Looks like we missed the worst of it.”

“Aye, so it does,” breathed Renda.  She squinted through the
morning glare over the field ahead of her and drew her sword.  “Keep your wits,
just the same.  We’ve yet to see who won.”

Black smoke boiled up in thick, black clouds from the
windows of both the manse and the rectory, and by her estimate, a hundred
white-robed bodies covered the grasses of B’radik’s temple grounds like an
early snow.

They had not waited.

She swallowed her dread and reined Alandro in just outside
the temple gate, careful to keep her hood low about her face even in the
Gathering sun.

At her signal, her hand-picked knights drew themselves up
behind her.  Like her, they were all armored only in silk-muffled chain beneath
their hooded woolen cloaks and riding unmarked mounts in unmarked tack. 
Deception, she frowned to herself, a bizarre bedfellow for the goddess of
truth.  But Arnard had been quite specific in this.  If they were known to come
from Brannagh, retribution would be swift and severe.  He’d had no need to say
by whom.

The rest of the knights followed her through the gate toward
the temple, guiding their horses between the scattered broken bodies. 

To Renda’s eyes, the temple still blazed white with tens of
centuries of B’radik’s goodwill, but beneath it, the grounds were a fading
tangle of wispy black tendrils and flickering white spatters of power from the
battle.  Her knights watched the priests’ faces, their eyes, their hands, for
the slightest movement, a gesture or a prayer.  But there was nothing, not even
the faintest glow of power.

Sir Anton quietly closed the medicine pouch on his saddle
and freed his sword.

Arnard’s message had been most urgent.  After Cilder’s
death, he’d said, those loyal to the other god had redoubled their zeal as if
they felt some new urgency.  They were recruiting B’radik’s priests to them
with torture and threats of death, and he feared they had come to outnumber
those loyal to B’radik.

His plan had been simple.  Renda would slip a handful of
knights into the rectory to join with his remaining priests, and together, they
would surprise the others and either bring them back to B’radik’s grace or kill
them.  He was adamant that they needed to act quickly, so she had come to his
aid at once, but it seemed she had not been fast enough.

Renda quickened her pace toward the temple.  They would find
their answer there, one way or the other.

Ahead, the temple’s side door opened and a single priest
stumbled out, bloodied and exhausted.  He leaned heavily against the temple
wall, gasping and squinting in the bright sunlight.  When he saw the horsemen
riding toward him, he shouted to them and raised his hand.

Instantly Anton and Jadin had ridden between him and Renda,
swords leveled.

“Arnard,” she murmured gratefully, “praise B’radik.”  She
sheathed her sword and dismounted at his approach, signaling her knights to
stand down.   “When I saw all the dead, I feared the worst.”

He bowed.  “I greet you all,” he said quietly, looking at
each of them, “in the name of B’radik, and sow your…your hearts with truth and
light.”

“We came as soon as we could.  But it seems we are too
late.”  His hands were so cold, and they shook when she took them in hers.

“I know.”

She looked into his weary eyes, but she saw there neither
triumph nor defeat.  How stood the day?  Had they won or no?

“Come,” he said, “I’ve something to show you.”  He led Renda
toward the door.  But then he stopped with a glance toward the rest of the
knights who were dismounting to follow.  “They’d be best served to remain out
here.”

Saramore’s brows came together like storm clouds, and the
anger in his eyes drove Arnard back a step.  “If you think we will send her
ladyship in there alone, Priest…”

“For their lives.  Please, my lady.”  Arnard looked around
at the knights desperately.  “We’ve not the strength to protect so many.”

Protect?  From what?  She looked around her at the dead
priests.  Wasn’t the battle over?  What could threaten a Knight of Brannagh
that would not answer to more Knights of Brannagh?  But the terror in Arnard’s
eyes was genuine.  “It’s all right, Saramore.”  She nodded toward the others.

The knight scowled at the priest, then bowed his head to
her.  “Understood.”  He turned to the rest of the knights and gestured toward
the field of dead.  “Come, let us see to them.”

Renda followed Arnard through the door and stood a moment,
letting her eyes adjust to the darkness of the antechamber.  Thick smoke filled
the air, smoke and some other odor she could not place.  Somewhere above was
the chamber where she had killed Cilder.  She wondered if it was yet sealed shut
or if somehow Cilder’s evil had survived and escaped.

Once the door was safely closed behind them, she lowered her
hood.  “We left as soon as we received your message.”  She gestured toward the
field outside.  “Why did you not wait for us?  Did you think the House of
Brannagh would abandon you?”

“Nay, not so.”  He rubbed his temples.   “At least, I prayed
you would not.”

“Yet now you bid me leave my knights outside like so many
mudfooted hounds!”

“Please, my lady, hear me out.”  He brushed a thick spatter
of blood from his cheek, apparently not his own.  “We were forced to act sooner
than we had hoped.  As I said in my message, they’d come to outnumber us, but
certain events…”  He looked away from her. “To our disgrace, we were forced to
skulk about like so many outlaws, cutting throats and so forth.  It was
unspeakable.”

Renda said nothing.  She understood Arnard’s shame, but she
could not feel it herself.  She had seen, done and ordered far worse than that
in service to B’radik.  And Rjeinar, she admitted, feeling a guilty heat in her
face.

Then again, these were priests, not soldiers, and in their
sheltered lives, even during the war, they rarely came face to face with the
conflict between sheer, brutal pragmatism of survival and the idealized
philosophies of their faith.  Battle, even battle on behalf of B’radik, was
necessarily a bloody, unapologetic business.  They could not have defeated
Kadak with words.  They could not have defeated Cilder with pious sentiment. 
This was the difference between a priest’s oath to serve B’radik and hers.

“We dared not invoke the goddess’s intervention in such a
dark enterprise,” Arnard continued, “not even by way of enhancing our energies
against the others with powders and unguents.  Yet they were free to bring
their god’s power against us, such as it was.”

What Arnard did not say, could not say, was that B’radik
might not have been able to help even if they had asked.  She remembered the
sluggish feel of the priests’ healing in her wrist the night Pegrine died.

He stretched his neck wearily.  “As it fell, it was a near
thing.  And if they’d destroyed us,” he said, “they could not have known I’d
sent for you.  So you see, it was my hope, in that case, that you and your
knights would…”

“We would have avenged this, to B’radik’s greater glory,”
she smiled bravely, “All the better that we’ve no need.” 

He raised a brow.  “My lady, that remains to be seen.” 
Arnard touched the tips of his fingers together and bowed his head.  “Our
victory here may well prove our undoing.” 

Undoing?  But as she drew breath to ask what he meant, he
raised a hand to silence her.  He cocked his head as if listening to a distant
sound.  “Yes, I believe it is safe now, but we have little time.”  He gestured
for her to follow him and moved along the corridor that led out of the temple’s
main sanctuary toward the hospice.

“Apart from myself,” he called back to her, “we’ve but four
priests left of any season, ten younger priests, some eight novices and six
postulants.”  He paused, waiting for her.  “But nine and twenty all told.”

She could not believe it.  The rectory had been built to
house between three and four hundred priests.  “And how many of the enemy
remain?”

Arnard laughed bitterly.  “Just one.”  Then he opened the
door.

The hospice was no more than a single open chamber that
filled the whole of a structure the size of the Brannagh stables.  Most of the
hospice windows were cracked or broken out completely in the fighting, and
under these, a single rank of thinly curtained beds lined the walls.  The rest
of the beds had no curtains and lay head to foot to create quite a maze through
the center of the floor.  Curiously, between the beds lay countless burlap
sacks filled with straw which she supposed to be left over from the war, along
with the blue and white striped hospital tents, neatly folded in several
stacks.  She wondered as she passed them why the priests had not stored all
this away.  Left out, they made a perfect breeding ground for vermin. 

For now, the beds looked empty save four against the far
back wall, and she saw at once that Arnard was leading her toward them.

The smell of smoke was completely gone in the hospice,
chased out through the open windows, but what replaced it was worse than the
smell of honest death and decay, and it grew stronger near the beds.  Was he
bringing her to see the bodies of the dead?  But she’d seen the dead already,
outdoors.  This was something else, something worse.  Something against which a
Knight of Brannagh would need their protection. 

The air swirled with the aromas of rotting flowers and stale
perfumes, spices to cover the odor of death, but under all these, the burning
smells of urine, sickly excrement and vomit, living odors that only deepened
the stench of corruption in the air.  She breathed deeply, chasing her fear to
its familiar prison at the deepest level of her soul and steeled herself
against whatever she might see, just as she had in the glade.  Then she
approached the beds.

Two of the patients were farmers.  They had served under her
banner during the war, and since then, she had seen them come to the castle
occasionally with their lord to speak with her father.  She smiled bravely,
comfortingly over them, just as she had over the wounded in battle.  “Draben,”
she said quietly.  “Quenton.”  They were so very pale.  “How fare you, good
gentlemen?”

While both were apparently conscious, neither man answered
her nor acknowledged her presence, and she turned quizzically to Arnard, but he
only directed her attention to the next bed.  There lay one of her father’s
veteran knights, Sir Ralton, the lord of these two farmers, and to her shock,
she saw that half the flesh of his face was gone, burned and blackened.  The
rest looked mealy and sandy, ready to fall away.  He writhed with the pain, but
when he moved, more of his flesh burned away from him, sloughing away as ash
and dust to his bed where one of the postulants calmly swept it into a little
pan and carried it away.  At a glance from Renda, Arnard waved his hand over
the man, and the knight fell into unconsciousness.

Then Arnard pulled aside the curtain of the last bed, where
more ash than man remained.

Renda drew a sharp breath and turned away.  “Arnard,
please.  I would have some answers.”

“Aye,” he whispered, taking her arm, “but not here.  All my
priests are at prayer to keep your presence secret and to protect you from
this,” he gestured toward the four beds.  “This plague.”

“Plague!”  She gasped.  “Surely you cannot call it so.  It
is ghastly, but four ill men—”

“—do not a plague make?”  Arnard drew her back between the
beds and stacked straw sacks, back into the corridor where he closed the door
behind him.  “How think you that I have lost so many of my priests, Lady?”  He
paced away from her, rubbing his forehead.  “The first fell ill yesterday with
an odd cough, stiff joints, fever.  He was an old priest, not so powerful but
true to B’radik to his last breath.  What with his age, we thought little of
it.  But by the time he died, two more had fallen ill, younger men, and then
another two, then four, all faithful to B’radik.  Don’t you see?  It came from
the others!  They were killing us by ones and twos.”

Her mind raced.  The priests outside.  How many had she
seen, as many as a hundred?  She had assumed all the rest were yet within.  But
Arnard had said there were only nine and twenty left.  So many had fallen, and
so quickly.  Perhaps plague was not too strong a word after all.

“Now you see why we could not wait to strike.”

She hated the desperation in her voice.  “But you’ve
defeated them, now.  Surely this…plague will abate.”

Arnard shook his head.  “The last of the false priests fell
soon after dawn, but instead of weakening, somehow the disease seemed to
redouble its strength.  At that time, I still had three score and some.”  He
paced away from her.  “Nine of my priests began the strange coughing almost at
once—it is a sound you cannot mistake, like the barking of a dog—and two more
since.”  He gestured back toward the door.  “That one in the last bed, he is
the last to fall ill, and he will be dead within the clock, more’s the mercy. 
The knight by sunset tonight, and the two farmers by sunset tomorrow or dawn
the next day.  As for the rest of us…so far, we have not caught it, but I
cannot believe our luck will hold.”

“The patients do not see me.”  Renda hugged herself and
paced across the corridor, looking back anxiously toward the hospice door. 
“Does this plague steal their minds as well?”

Arnard shook his head.  “That is our doing, and with what is
left of our strength.  You see, we know so little of this plague.  We could not
risk letting the other god know you were here, not even through their eyes.” 
He looked away.  “Their senses will return all too soon, I’m afraid.”