Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (26 page)

“Oh, no, lad.  We did not make you whole just so you could
suffer your way through the plague band back to your death.  Arnard assures me
that you are cured,” spoke the sheriff, “though not completely healed of the
wounds.”  He squeezed the young knight’s shoulder gently, his hand trembling
with his excitement at the young knight’s healing.  “An they would cure your
fellows, the last of your healing must come later.  But for now,” the knight
smiled down at him gratefully, tenderly, as if Matow were his own son brought
back from death, “you live, which is miracle enough for one day.”

T
he
last sharp rays of the sun winked down below the horizon, and they began their
slow, grateful trek back toward the castle.  As always, the wagons went first
with the men and women of Brannagh following behind.  No one passing them on
the path would think them knights, not now.  Their tunics were filthy and torn,
already worn through and faded with their short time in the fields.  Their
skins had darkened under the Gatherer’s Sun, and their hair had lightened until
they looked just like the farmers who peeked out at them from shuttered
windows.

The squires and pages no longer followed formally behind the
knights, instead walking just where they fell, with some of the younger boys
being carried upon the knights’ backs.  These ragged men and women were the
last of the brave fighting force that had defeated Kadak.

Occasionally, a word or a quiet laugh would drift back to
where the sheriff and his daughter walked in exhausted silence behind them, but
most often the knights said nothing or spoke their prayers as they walked,
grateful for one more day of life, grateful tonight for the sheriff’s quiet
news of the five cured.  They were forbidden to speak of the cures outside the
castle, lest the villagers overhear, but even so, their steps moved with just a
bit more energy tonight, and the wagons were just a bit more full.

But as they approached the castle, one of Renda’s knights
slowed her pace and looked behind her toward the village.  Patrise was her
name, and her mother was part-Bremondine.  When Lord Daerwin and his daughter
stopped beside the young woman, her eyes were wide with fear.  “Hear it, do
you?”

At her frightened words, the sheriff and Renda looked back
over the fields behind them. They saw nothing, but a moment later, they could
hear a distant sound, and a moment after that, the noise was enough to bring
the sentries out of the gatehouse at the castle.  It was distant taunting, the
sound an army might make by night toward its foes’ camp on a neighboring
hillside before the next morning’s battle.  Except that this noise was coming
closer.  Only then did they see the moving forms of a great mob of farmers
coming through the fields behind them.  It looked to them to be all the farmers
remaining in the sheriff’s lands.

They must have heard.

“Quickly,” shouted the sheriff to the knights ahead of him. 
“Get within the castle walls.”

Daerwin was the last across the bridge that spanned the dry
moat, and once across, he signaled to the sentries to draw it up.

A quarter-mile’s distance from the gate, in a stream of
spotty firelight along the road, came the farmers and villagers, shouting angrily. 
Most were dressed thickly in quilting and leather as they had been during the
war, and some carried butcher knives, others pitchforks and scythes.  They
carried something else as well, an injured man on a litter, a plague victim,
perhaps a captured knight.

Behind the main body of the villagers, several more carried
a battering ram they had cut, and seeing it, the sheriff called at once for the
horses.

“Oil, my lord?” called the sentries from above the gate.

The ram was not large since they had but a score or two of
men to carry it besides those who ran afoot, and likely it could not bring down
the gates before they either lost interest or were turned away by sword.  He
hoped it would not come to that.  “No,” he shouted back to them.  “Not yet.  I
hope they but posture.”

By the time the knights were mounted and armed, the
villagers had set down their battering ram as a bridge, and most had crossed
the dry moat to the gate.

“Halt,” cried a sentry from the gatehouse, and she and two
knights beside her brought their bows to bear upon the leading villagers
drawing up below them.  “What business have you?”

“There he is!” shouted one of the farmers, ignoring the
sentries.  “The sheriff!”

“And his daughter, she’s the one we want.”  At that, the
small crowd of men surged against the gate.

The sentries drew their bowstrings tight, but Daerwin
signaled them to wait.  “How dare you,” he thundered at the mob’s leaders from
horseback, and they recoiled in spite of themselves.  “How dare you approach my
castle thus armed and ill humored!”  He rode toward the gate, careful to keep
himself and his horse out of the reach of their weapons.  “Speak, one of you!”

The villagers looked at each other, but no one spoke.

The sheriff glowered over them.  “Come, you would storm my
castle, but you have not the nerve among you to speak a word in mine ear? 
Maddock?  Botrain?  What is this about?”

“What is this about?  You know right well what this is
about.”  A large man at the front of the crown, the one the sheriff had
addressed as Maddock and apparently the leader of this insurrection, glared up
at the knights and raised his fist.  “She saw this, Brannagh.  She saw that you
would do this, and she warned us.”  The gathered men drew strength from his
words and shouted angrily to support him.

The sheriff shook his head.  “Chatka.”

“Aye, Chatka,” spat the villager.  “Who else?”

“The Verdura fortune teller.”  The sheriff eased a gentle
tone of amusement into his voice and crossed his arms over his chest,
projecting power and control, but more importantly, calm and reason.  He still
believed his farmers could be made to see through the old witch’s tricks. 
“Tell me, what has your Chatka seen now?”  The sheriff squinted beyond the
lighted torches at the gate.  “Is she with you?  Bring her here, let her
speak.”

To his surprise, the crowd snarled and lunged toward the
gate like a giant wolf. His horse, Revien, stamped his foot and neighed sharply
in challenge.

Then Maddock motioned for the villagers carrying the litter
to bring it forward and set in front of the gate.  They drew back the cloth to
show Chatka’s dead body. The tiny blood vessels of her cheeks and nose had
burst, leaving dark blotches on her pale sunken face, her lips black, but her
expression was nothing if not peaceful. The sheriff could imagine a hint of
triumph there.

He glanced at Renda, but she looked as baffled as he felt. 
He had assumed, as she had, that they might have heard that five knights and
not five villagers had been cured of the plague.  But this was something else
again.

His mind raced.  Daerwin looked down over the body. 
“Boticlan, or I miss my guess,” he muttered, looking away thoughtfully.   He
had seen men die by boticlan before, the pale skin with the tell-tale
blotching, the black lips.  Boticlan was quick and painless, a favorite among
suicides, but it did not allow for a change of heart.  As quickly as the poison
worked, even if Chatka had kept anoboticlan in her house, even if the vial had
stood open in her hand, she could not have taken it before she fell
unconscious.

His brow furrowed against the odor rising from her corpse. 
Odor?  Was it his imagination, or did she smell of the plague?  He shook his
head.  Everything smelled of it now.  He could not be sure.

“You killed her, Brannagh,” shouted the large man, “just as
she said you would.”

“She killed herself.”  His eyes narrowed.  “Had I killed
her, Maddock, she would have died upon my sword, not by some craven poison,”
answered the sheriff, and he looked into all their angry eyes.  Some of them,
some precious few of them, seemed unsure now.  They might be turned to his
side.  “You must know I have been all night in the hospice—”

“Easing the suffering of them as deserves to die,” sneered
another man, the one called Botrain, and instantly those who stood uncertain
were firmly against the sheriff again.  “Think us fools, do you?  We know right
well you’d not bloody your own hands, m’lord.”  The scorn in the man’s voice
was obvious.

His daughter, she’s the one we want. 

Poison.

Gikka.

A brilliant move.  Chatka could not be seen to die of
plague, not after her insistence that it only struck those who angered the
gods.  Not when she could ease her own passing and frame Gikka for her murder
all in one stroke.  But he could not reason with an angry crowd.

“Maddock,” he called then, turning to the large man who had
spoken to him first.  “Upon my sword, I know nothing of this.  Since you’ve not
thought to bring your liege lords with you,” he spoke over their shouts, “I
will let Maddock into the castle, unarmed and alone, to speak with me and come
to some accord.  Agreed?”

The crowd grumbled angrily, more upset, it seemed to the
sheriff, that they might solve the problem without bloodshed and looting than
they were over Chatka’s death.  But after only a moment’s consideration, they
agreed.  Maddock handed off his weapons, then bade the rest back away across
the moat before the sheriff opened the gate and let him through.  A few of the
angrier villagers ran for the gate, but the knights had it secured again before
they reached it.  They could only rattle the iron bars in frustration while
they watched their appointed representative disappear into the castle.

Maddock was the trapper and tanner who kept shop in Belen. 
While his lands held little value of themselves, he had free run of the
forestlands nearby which kept him well fed.  Renda had had no dealings with him
directly, but she had heard of him through the knights and farmers that he was
a man who traded honorably and could be made to see reason more readily than
some, and certainly more readily than Botrain, whose
nom de guerre
had
been the Rabid.  If her father could make any of them see reason, it would be
Maddock.

Now he sat grudgingly and accepted a cup of hot tea in the
sheriff’s audience chambers.

Lord Daerwin gestured for the servants to leave, and Renda
closed the doors behind them before she took her seat.

“Maddock,” the sheriff began, “I need you to tell me what
happened.”

“She spoke to us as she always does, but a bit quieter last
night, like she were worried or upset.”  Maddock’s tone was calm and wary, and
occasionally, Renda saw him finger a thin leather thong that hung into his
shirt from around his neck, no doubt holding up some medallion or sachet of
herbs or other.  “She said she saw her death.  It would come from poison at
Gikka’s hand and by sunset, and that we could see the proof of it an we but
come to her house today.  And sure enough, as she said, there we found her,
dead.”

“At Gikka’s hand.”  Renda sat forward.  “Surely not.  Chatka
never speaks so clearly.”

Maddock laughed darkly and drank his tea.  “True, Chatka
never speaks so clear.  But what difference does it make?  Her meaning is plain
enough.”

“Indulge me,” Lord Daerwin said with a diplomatic smile. 
“What were her exact words, do you recall?”

The man frowned, staring into his cup.  “Think so.  Repeated
it to myself over and over, the better to remember it later.  She said, ‘To
quell the overspilt dark comes the sweet and silent hand, trusted ‘gainst our
better thought, to claw and steal away the fire.’”  He frowned.  “I thought
sunset was in there somewhere, as well, but that’s the main of it.  Mayhap
sunrise.”

“Sweet and silent hand, overspilt dark.”  Renda laughed. 
More of the witch’s poetry, as she’d suspected.  “Why, that could mean anything
at all.”

The sheriff rubbed his eyes wearily. “Maddock, I tolerated
Chatka’s rubbish because I had the idea that you and Botrain and the rest were
wise enough to see through her street tricks.”  He looked up at the tanner, his
flint and steel eyes showing just a touch of disappointment.  “Was I wrong?”

“What is this?”  Maddock looked up at them both, and his
eyes were full of betrayal.  His gaze settled on Renda.  “Her words are clear
enough to me, and her sight was true!  Chatka’s visions scattered dirt upon
your blessèd family honor, so you sent your filthy squire assassin to make it
look—”

Renda felt her blood surge at the accusation. 
“Preposterous.”

“—like she done it herself!”

Such a challenge to Gikka’s honor and her own could not
stand unanswered.  She stood with her hand on the hilt of her sword.  “I will
gladly defend Gikka of Graymonde’s name and my own against your charges,
Maddock.  Choose your ground.”

“Hold,” Daerwin said sharply.  “Maddock, surely a man of
your intelligence can see,” he began, “that what Chatka said means nothing at
all, taken alone.”

“Aye,” Maddock nodded.  “Save she is dead.”

“Aye, she is dead,” the sheriff agreed.

“Given that, it all comes sharp and bright, doesn’t it?”

“Ah, but she did not say that Gikka would kill her,” the
sheriff added, “and I must say, from what I know of Gikka’s methods, it strikes
me that boticlan is not her way.”

“Boticlan, what boticlan?  None but you calls it so,
m’lord.  Us common men, we’s not as learned in poisons and such, I reckon.” 
The tanner stood angrily.  “But we’ve no need to be.  Chatka lies poisoned,
just as she foreseed, and she all but named her killer, the assassin Gikka.”

“Gikka has served this house and the duke himself with honor
and loyalty. She is an acclaimed war hero,” snarled Renda, “and I will hear no
slanders against her!”

“You’ll not hear them, missus, but they be so, just the
same.”

“Peace, both of you,” said the sheriff.  “Maddock, did you
mount no watch, that someone might see who came and who went?”

“See?”  The villager laughed incredulously.  “See Gikka of
Graymonde?  You must be joking.  Aye, we did watch, but we seen no one.”

“There, you see?  You have no proof.” Renda crossed her
arms.

Maddock glared at her.  “Is all the more to her guilt.  We’d
have seen if it was anyone else.”

“Anyone but Chatka herself!”  Renda sighed in exasperation. 
“This is hopeless!”

The sheriff waved Renda to patience and smiled at Maddock
again—the picture of reason.  “Indulge me once more, good Maddock.  How is it
you hear Gikka’s name in Chatka’s words?”