Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (19 page)

“And pious,” muttered Gikka darkly.  “Let’s don’t forget
pious.”  She looked back to see that Chatka had just picked up a handful of
seeds and sniffed at them.  Not even a handful, just a few that she picked up here
and there among the others.  No more than might have come from a single apple. 
Instinctively, she began to look for possible escapes.  She stepped back out of
the torchlight and against Sir Waydon.  Then she twitched her hand toward Chul
before she slipped it beneath her cloak to rest on a dagger.  The boy moved at
once to the outer edge of the crowd.

“Hear me!” intoned Chatka once more, but this time her voice
held an edge of excitement, of danger, and the tensions in the crowd grew once
more.  “I see more!  A new vision comes to me!”  Her black eyes glittered over
the hooded crowd, searching, seeking.

“Hear me well!  Though the Dragon’s eyes and ears be open
just now, his senses fool him, and he cannot help but stumble.  The sun will
set, and ere it rises once more, your dearest down will blow in the mountain
winds, and four will again be five.”  She laughed, a short barking laugh so
common among the Verdura, so despised among the Bremondines.  “Red and blue,”
she laughed wickedly.  “Red on the Lioness’s breast and blue at her gates, but
not for you, not for any but those who need it not.”

Both Chatka and Gikka watched the farmers muttering between
themselves and the puzzled looks that showed from beneath their hoods.  The
witch had challenged them with a vision they could not decipher until it was
too late, if at all, and having so vexed them, she risked losing their faith in
her.  But this time, her words were not meant for them; they were meant for
Gikka to carry back to the sheriff, with her compliments.

Damerien’s eyes and ears were open, aye, or at least those
of the sheriff, but how could his senses fool him?  An he would stumble, sure
it was the Verdura’s own fault for it and no other.  Those words were the least
to vex her.  Dearest down, and blowing in mountain wind.  She shook her head. 
It meant nothing to her, nothing that made sense, at any rate.  But four will
again be five...  What was it Peg had said?

Four thousand years the Five are four
A fifth is found and binds the shores.

Gikka watched the old woman, watched her keen eye peering
from face to face, looking for the one who would see her message, looking to
see if she could spot Gikka.  The witch’d say naught more of meat-and-mead
tonight, not an she knowed she were watched.  Besides, like as not, the sheriff
would see through Chatka’s words like glass and draw answer for her from that.

“Shall I repeat it for you, or did you hear it well enough
already?”  The witch smiled pleasantly over the crowd, but her eye still
searched, still lingered on every cowl.

Gikka ground her teeth.  Were Renda here, she would stride
forward to stand a head taller than the Verdura to pit her own grace and
command against this witch’s wretched street tricks, and she would turn the
farmers away from Chatka in disgust.  Or the sheriff, standing a step below so
as not to loom over the woman, might speak softly and reasonably, plying her
words to dust before their eyes, counting upon the farmers’ own good sense to
show them the truth.

But no.  Only the assassin, the Bremondine, and one who was
none the witch’s better stood here, caught in the very act of spying on the
farmers, and she felt no particular eloquence of speech rising in her throat.

It was not until Gikka moved to walk away that the old
Verdura finally caught sight of her.

“Beware, Graymonde,” she called suddenly, and in the silence
that followed the mention of her name, Gikka turned slowly round to see all the
farmers and their families staring at her with open mouths and backing away
from her.  “Beware the wind and the word at your back.”

Outside the crowd, hidden in the shadow of the abandoned
bowyer’s shop, Chul stopped and stared at the old witch.  She had spoken the
ancient curse, not in Syonese for the benefit of the farmers, nor in Bremondine
that only Gikka might understand it, but in Dhanani.

“
A
way
with you,” came a man’s voice from inside a small house at the edge of the
field.

Renda glanced at Sir Teny, the lord of the fields behind
them.

“You see, my lady,” spoke the knight quietly and not without
embarrassment, “it is as I say.  He will not so much as speak with me.”

She cast a worried glance back over the hills toward
Brannagh.  Teny’s lands were some of the most remote of Brannagh’s fields.  If
Chatka’s sedition had reached this far, the situation was more dire than they’d
thought.

At her father’s request, she had ridden out at first light
with Teny to try to stir his farmers’ loyalty, or if not, perhaps their shame. 
It was his hope to defeat Chatka’s manipulations with what Renda grudgingly
allowed were their own.

She’d met with some success.  The mere sight of their
smiling young war hero in full armor and mantle at their door had been enough
to send Kode and his family back into the fields.  Mogen had taken a bit more
convincing, but in the end, he’d relented as well, offering his most abject
apologies for heeding a Verdura witch’s word over that of the Sheriff of
Brannagh.

But Jero would not so much as open his door.

She knocked at the knotty wooden door again and batted away
a bit of stale straw that fell from the roof thatching.  On the ground at her
feet she saw where more had fallen.  The man’s roof would not last through the
winter storms without fresh straw––straw still holding up the grain in his
fields.

“Jero,” she called pleasantly, “Lady Renda.”  When no answer
came, she knocked once more.  “I would speak with you a while.”

They heard slow steps within, and the door opened a few
inches to let free a great breath of stale air as of turned cheese or badly
soured milk.  But both Sir Teny and Renda held their expressions against the
odor.  Through the crack in the door, Renda could see Jero’s one good eye
peering out at them as it might at a stranger, or worse.  The eye was distant
and bleary, and the skin sagging beneath it was stained dark with fatigue.  The
man’s clothes hung rumpled about his thin frame, gray with dust and ash.

“Jero,” exclaimed Teny.  He ventured a smile and stepped
toward the door, expecting it to open to him.  When it did not, he stared into
the single eye beyond the door.  “Come, don’t you know me?”

“Aye, my lord, well enow.”  The man blinked coldly and
buttressed his shoulder against the door.  Then he turned his distrustful gaze
upon Renda.  “What business has Her Ladyship with me this day?”

Renda smiled diplomatically.  “Jero,” she said quietly,
though her voice held the same tones of command she had used afield.  “Well I
remember your faithful service to the House of Brannagh during the war.”

The man positively cringed at her words as if afraid someone
might overhear.  “Lost my only son in your bloody war, I’ll thank you to
recall.  An my lord Teny’d not set us neath your banner, Lady, he’d be here
now.”

Your bloody war, he’d said.  As if she herself had started
it five hundred years ago.

Sure you’d not have it all back.

“You forget yourself!” Sir Teny barked at him.  “Had you not
followed the banner of Brannagh, the whole of Syon would yet be under Kadak’s
dominion, as it was for half a thousand years.  You’d do well to remember that
it was Lady Renda as saved us all.” 

Renda shook her head.  “Sir Teny, please—”

But the knight spoke over Renda’s protest, shaking his fist
at Jero.  “Do not stand in the shade of your peaceful house to begrudge the
sacrifices we all made!”

“I lost my boy,” Jero menaced.  “What sacrifices made you,
boy?  Did you even wet your blade?”

“Gentlemen.”  Renda kept her body between them.  “Your loss
is bitter, Jero, but you know that the sheriff, my father, likewise lost his
only son in battle.  My brother, Roquandor.”  At these words, the man’s
shoulder sagged against his door.  She lowered her voice, and at her glance,
Teny moved back.  “Besides, the memory of your son’s death does not keep you
from your fields today.”

“Nah,” answered Jero quietly.  He looked up into her eyes
and drew a slow breath.  “I reckon not,” he murmured, “but…”

“We’ve no more than a month ere the first frost comes.”  Sir
Teny’s voice skirled harshly over the quiet that followed, over the beginning
of Jero’s answer.  “No more than a month, and all your grain still stands
afield while you whine and mewl and—”

“Aye, and so it will,” returned the farmer angrily.  He
turned back to face Renda, and she saw that his expression had closed against
her again.  “We’ll none of this house come out to gather, not in service to
Teny, not in service to Brannagh, not in service to no one.”

“Why not?  What is it breaks your loyalty to Brannagh?” she
asked calmly, her eyes leveled at his.  For a moment, a single moment, he
looked like he might answer.

“Yes, indeed, why not?” demanded Sir Teny.  “Traitor.  You
set a fine example to the rest of the farmers, Jero.”

“Sir Teny.”  Renda sighed in exasperation and shut her
eyes.  She should have followed her first instincts and come alone, or perhaps
with Gikka, and her father’s diplomacy be damned.  When had diplomacy solved
ought in her life that a sword could not solve better?  Gikka might have been
driven to kill Jero for his stubbornness or Teny for his abject stupidity had
they enraged her sufficiently, but at least she would not have further widened
the breach while they lived.

“Jero, enough of this nonsense.”  Sir Teny drew himself up. 
“Return to your fields forthwith.”  When the farmer only glared at him, Sir
Teny huffed petulantly.  “Come,” spoke the knight, “would you have me turn you
off your land?  Where would you go?  Hard upon the Feast of Bilkar, no less? 
How is it that you, whose family has farmed this same land through war and
famine and plague, would now, in time of peace,” he laughed at the absurdity,
“leave your own winter’s food to rot afield?”

Jero’s hard gaze turned reluctantly toward Renda before it
failed utterly.  “Because she says it angers the gods, and I’ll not be—” 

“She being Chatka, the Verdura witch woman.”  Sir Teny shook
his head with contempt and turned away.

“—heaping more sins upon my head just now!”

Teny strode away in disgust with his hands on his hips.  “I
should hang a sign at my borders, ‘Empty heads for hire.’”

She waved Teny to silence.  “Is it sin,” asked Renda
quietly, calmly, even though her heart was beating a panicked call to retreat,
“to harvest Brannagh grains?”  She saw Jero’s gaze waver and she stepped
closer.  “What sin, Jero, to serve a protector house of B’radik?”  Renda
softened her voice.  “But tell me, what sin?”

For a moment, the farmer looked uncertain.  His eye traveled
over her mantle, over the brilliant Brannagh surcoat, over the shining chain
coif that covered her auburn hair, and Renda saw in his eyes the beginnings of
a familiar spark of pride, the same fiery honor and courage which had carried
her men—which had carried Jero himself—through the breach into Kadak’s
stronghold.

She smiled encouragingly.

Jero breathed deeply to speak.

Suddenly, from behind him came the sound of a woman coughing
sharply, like the barking of a dog, and at once the odor redoubled at the door.

The smell, the cough.

No.

Any house of sickness carries such smells, she told
herself.  It was just the closeness of the air within, that they would not
subject the patient to draughts.  No more than that.  And a cough, she reminded
herself, could mark any of a thousand ills easily cured even without the
priests.  Easily cured, her mind repeated feverishly.

It is a sound you cannot mistake, like the barking of a dog.

“What is that wretched stink?” groaned Sir Teny, stepping
back with his glove over his face.  “Is your dog qualmed at the stomach?”

Jero looked back over his shoulder into the darkness of the
house, and when at last his gaze came round once more to meet his lord’s, Renda
was shocked to see that the valor and strength she had seen in the man’s eyes
only moments before had turned to utter terror.  “My lord, my lady, stay me not
from my prayers, I beg of you!  She’s worse by each minute I talk to you. 
Please, for pity, let me get to my prayers!” 

In amazement, the two knights stepped back and watched the
door close.

“Prayers.  Prayers when he should be gathering his crops.  I
should hang him,” muttered Sir Teny once they had mounted their horses.  “An
example to the rest of them.”

“Fool,” spat Renda, nudging Alandro away from Jero’s door. 
“Have you no eyes? That man is a hostage in his own home.”  But at Teny’s blank
expression, she merely turned and rode back toward the roadway, considering the
horror of what she had seen.  The plague had spread beyond the temple grounds,
beyond the neighboring farms.  She looked back at the little farmhouse where
Jero would pray and pray for his wife until the plague took them both, and
beyond to the next farm and the next.

Sir Teny kicked up his mount to join her.  “Well, perhaps if
we were to hang the old witch instead...”

*          *          *

“Ah, Lord Daerwin, come in.”  Chatka stepped away from her
door and bowed graciously to let him in.  His nose was assailed with the smells
of a thousand flowers that were nowhere to be seen—a cloying, clutching odor
that fairly burned in his nostrils.  He wondered if he did not prefer the smell
of his own stables.

The woman who greeted him was tall and handsome in spite of
her age, as he might have expected of a Verdura, even one as long away from the
northern Bremondine forests and the old communes as she must have been.  Kadak
had razed the last of the Verdura sorcerers’ compounds when his grandfather was
duke.

Chatka was as Gikka had described her, dark of hair and eye
with olive skin.  Oddly, her hands were lined and spotted, much more so than he
might have expected, and she walked slowly over the clean stones of her floor,
doubtless to paint herself helpless before him.  Even so, the sheriff found in
her gaze something that reminded him of his hawks when they spied rabbits
below.

“I wondered when the good Sheriff of Brannagh might pay me a
visit.”  She turned to lead him into her sitting room.  “Himself.”

He ignored her pointed remark and followed her further into
the house.  “Madam Chatka,” he said, bowing his head slightly.  “I trust you
know why I’ve come.”

“And armed, no less,” she said, casting a sideways glance at
his sword.  “Do I know why you’ve come?  Oh, full well.”  She smiled wryly. 
Without rising from the seat she had taken, she looked up at him.  “Sit, and I
will fetch some tea.”

But he did not sit, nor did he remove his cloak.   He would
not let himself be bound by hospitality, nor would he risk being poisoned by
her.

“No, madam,” he replied.  “Sure I thank you, but I will not
be staying long.”  He raised his chin slightly.  “I have come to ask why you
would keep the farmers from the fields.”

“Ah,” she said with amusement.  “So we come right to it,
then.”

The sheriff said nothing, merely waiting for her to reply.

“You are direct, Daerwin of Brannagh.  I must say, I find
that interesting.”  She smiled and relaxed rather sinuously across the chaise. 
“Very interesting, very...”  Her eyes met his, fiery and willing, trying to
provoke a base animal response in him.  She seemed at once much younger, and
the age spots on her arms had vanished.  “Very intriguing.”

He crossed his arms and glared at her.  Seduction.  If she
could prove that he was as prone to weaknesses of the flesh as any man, she
would have power over him.  The ploy was weak, as if she had not really
expected it to work.  But the insult was cast.  He looked away with disdain,
casting his own insult.  “Just answer my question.”

She sneered.  “You’ve not heard your spy’s report, then?”

“I know what was said.”

“Do you?”  She laughed.  “Do you indeed?”

His lips thinned.  “I would know why you choose to attack
Damerien and Brannagh.”

“Ah, attack, is it?” she laughed then, and she was once
again the old witch woman, no more the Verdura seductress.  “I merely speak
what I see in my mind, Lord Daerwin.  Nothing more.”  She glanced away from
him.  “That it undermines or,” she smiled, “
attacks
your households, as
you put it, well, you cannot blame me for that.”

Her coyness was irritating.  “What exactly did you see?  And
none of your poesies.  I would hear a plain report of it.”

“I do not recall
exactly
,” she said, pursing her
lips.  “I speak to them night upon night, and I vary it a bit to keep their
interest.”  She laughed.  “Showmanship, Brannagh.  You see, it’s showmanship
you lack.”

“It’s honor you lack, madam, to manipulate these people
thus, and to their deaths of starvation, no less.”

Chatka shrugged and looked away.  “They will not starve. 
The gods will provide.”

“The gods—!”  His steel and flint eyes blazed.  “The gods
are not our servants.  Their gifts are blessings, not debts to be paid upon
demand. 
We
will provide whilst we can, we lords of Syon, but we’ve not
enough stored away between us to feed everyone until the next harvest,
especially not an we use any to seed come the Feast of Didian.  They will
starve, Chatka, if not this year, next, and it will be upon your head.”

But she laughed again, a cruel, ugly laugh that raised the
hair on the back of his neck.  “You are a fool, Brannagh.  You know full well
that I speak the truth.  You know they will not starve.  And you know why.”

His eyes narrowed, questioning.

“Yes,” she laughed again.  “The plague strikes them even
now.”

“You spoke of the Houses of Brannagh and Damerien locking
our gates against them and turning away, of down in mountain winds and of four
becoming five.  Nonsense, all.”