Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (28 page)

Zinion’s head turned back toward the crypt, and he neighed
again, softly this time and with a note of anxiety.

“Aye, lad, we’re coming.”  Gikka pulled the rusty gate
closed behind her and set about warming the back of the wax seal with the
candle while Chul brushed away the little bits of rust that had crumbled from
the hinge.  Gikka would rather leave no sign for the miners that she had found
their cache.  Nothing, at least, on the outside of the crypt.

She matched the notched teeth of the lock to the relief on
the back of the seal and pressed it very gently into the lock, making sure not
to scrape any of the hard wax away in telltale curls.  A squinted eye showed
her, to her satisfaction, that the mark was not distorted before she warmed the
lock again to set the seal against it.  That done, she and Chul ran to the
horses, and just before she mounted, she looked far to the south along the road
to see several tiny pinpoints of lantern light dancing and bobbing along the
road.

Once more she looked back at her manor house, the only home
she had ever known, and once more she found herself inclined to stay and wait
for them to come.  Renda’s message had said that once the heat of their ire had
passed, only ten had had the will to follow Maddock and Botrain to Graymonde,
so she would face a round dozen at most.  She had her doubts that so many would
in fact reach Gikka’s gate after a three hours’ journey, that some of them
would surely have turned back.

Gikka was more than certain of besting so many tired
villagers on her own lands, especially with the boy’s help.  They could pick
them off one by one, for all of her, and it would be a goodly lesson for the
boy, besides.  But what of the twelve that would come to avenge them, and the
twelve after that, if so many remained?

No, she told herself as she swung up into Zinion’s saddle,
she would go, as Renda had said she should, to lose herself and the boy in the
Farras Maze until the farmers could be made to see reason or the sheriff could
find means of defending her from them with the law.  Were she alone, she might
be tempted to ride for Brannford on the east coast, to her old haunts by the
shipyards, but that would lead her past Brannagh or at the very least through
the sheriff’s lands.  Even if no one saw her, if no one recognized her, she
might well catch her death of plague and carry it into Brannford with her, and
once it reached the ports, no place in the world would be safe.

On the other hand, no plague had yet touched Farras as far
as anyone knew, though the city lay closer to Brannagh than B’radik’s temple,
and Farras would put her close enough to let her offer aid if the castle were
attacked, as Renda feared it might be.  Besides, Gikka had the boy with her,
and in Farras, this close to the Kharkara plains, one more Dhanani would not
raise a brow.  In Brannford they were much less common a sight; she’d have to
have some story for him there.  No, she had to agree with Renda.  For now, at
least, the Maze in Farras was her best choice.

Once the cardinal came, Renda’s writ had said, once the
plague was gone and the crops were safely stored away against their hunger, the
farmers would come to see the Sheriff of Brannagh as they had before, their
lord and protector, and his daughter, their guardian and hero of the Five
Hundred Years’ War.  Gikka would be a hero among them again when they were back
to themselves.

Gikka chuckled softly.  That was Renda, ever out to believe
the best of people, that the good in men was sometimes set askew by adversity,
to be set right again by grace.  But for Gikka’s part, she was certain the
reverse was true, that the farmers were set arights and at ease now;  they were
back to their distrustful, blameful selves again, back to the men they were
before this alien peace set them awry with false charity and tolerance for the
likes of her, war hero or no.  And if ever that charity returned, she would not
trust it again, having seen beneath its skirts.

She nudged Zinion out the southern gate to the road with
Chul behind her.  They could not hope to stay to the shadows, not with Chul’s
untrained and damnably luminous horse, but likewise, she could not lose the
horse’s speed to have the boy afoot, not if they were seen.  So they would do
what they must and stay to the road.  With any luck, they would pass the
crossroads and be well on the way to Farras before the villagers saw them, with
only the sealed city gates to slow them.

But Gikka never trusted to luck.

“Hold, there!” cried Maddock, and he galloped ahead to the
signpost where the roads crossed.  He took his sword from its sheath and slowed
his horse to walk toward the shadow beneath the clump of trees at the road’s
edge.  Trap, his mind shrieked in panicked tones, she lies in wait for you,
just ahead, and once you get close enough...

He hesitated, conscious of the men behind him, watching
him.  He could turn back; in faith, he had seen no more than a darkness against
darkness, and it might well have been his own fancy.  Sure it was nothing more.

But a horse shuffled its hooves up ahead, and he heard a
sharp whispered curse, in the voice of a woman.  Or a youth, he allowed
grudgingly.  Either way, someone was there, and he was already engaged to
investigate.  He could feel the eyes at his back, worried, wanting his courage
and leadership.  His exhausted mount stepped closer, and suddenly he could make
out the white flank of a horse.

What luck, he grinned, kicking his horse up, if indeed he
had caught Gikka in guilty flight from her own hall, and what then of the
sheriff’s refusal to see her as the murderer?  Outside the safety of her manor,
he assured himself, and away from the protections of Lady Renda, she was no
more fearsome than any other lousy Bremondine bitch, and he well  how to deal
with her.

He heard the hooves of the horse skitter over the rocks, as
if to race away toward Farras.  “Hold, I said, or by damn, you’ll ride less’n a
mile ere we cut you down.”

At his words, the nervy white horse drew up to a fitful
stop.  Behind it, somewhere in the darkness of the shadows, Maddock was certain
he heard another set of hooves.  He squinted, but he saw nothing.

“Why do you stop me?” came a young man’s voice, full of
challenge, and Maddock rode closer to see that indeed another horse was drawn
up beside the first, dark and shadowy, but a horse all the same, and bearing a
rider.  Two riders, but who would ride with her? His mouth felt dry suddenly. 
Only one would ride with her, one away in the north, in the Hodrache Range. 
One he had hoped never to face in battle.

“Our fight is with the Bremondine,” he growled, but his
voice was shaking.  “You other, ride away unharmed.”

But as he feared they might, both horses stood their ground.

“Who’s a bloody Bremondine?”  This voice came from the one
in the shadows, a gruff adolescent voice in the accent of Farras and still a
bit unused to its new depth, so it seemed to him.  This voice, too, crackled in
challenge, but with a thinly disguised arrogance and even bitterness about it
as well.

Maddock stared at the two shadowy forms in confusion.  Dith
the Merciless was young, but Maddock had heard the mage’s voice once or twice
during the war, enough to know that he was no milk-fed boy.  Yet now he had
heard both riders’ voices, and neither sounded the least of Dith or of Gikka. 
Then again, voices could be disguised, especially by one as cunning as Gikka. 
He held his lantern up to study their faces.

The one who rode the dark horse wore his brown hair back in
a womanish sort of tail over the lowered hood of his cloak and glared at
Maddock with black rebellious eyes, far too dark and far too young to be the
mage Dith.  His thick brows met in the arch above his nose, and he had a
scattering of pimply scars over his babyish cheeks.  The first of his beard had
come in along his chin, and he had a pitiful little mustache over the
disdainful curl of his lips.  Though dark of hair and eye, the boy’s skin
looked flaccid and pale in the glare of the lantern and his build was far too
stocky for Maddock to take him for Bremondine.  With rough, smudgy features
like his, there was no mistaking this one for a lass, and sure not for one as
handsome as Gikka of Graymonde.  This could not be she, much as he might want
it so.  Reluctantly, he turned his attention to the one on the white horse.

That one sat hood up, and Maddock took the hood down with a
violent, triumphant jerk, his dirk held ready to cut a Bremondine throat.  But
then he could only stare in surprise.  This boy was dark, at least part
Dhanani, smooth-skinned with his black hair in long thin braids down about his
shoulders.  Without a word, Maddock swiped rudely at Chul’s face and looked at
his fingers.  No, no maquille, no mud.  The coloring was his own.

Maddock ignored the outrage in the boy’s eyes and turned his
horse away.  “Away with you, lads,” he grumbled in dismissal, not even
bothering to look back at them.  “See you’re well away ere the fighting
starts.”

“Fighting?”

At the cold amusement in the arrogant boy’s voice, Maddock
shuddered.  Then he turned back to see the boy glaring at him coldly, and in
that gaze he felt a murderous wrath.  Such a glare as he might expect from the
Bremondine if she knew what they were about.  He blinked his eyes, and once
again, he saw only two sullen adolescent boys whose horses shuffled impatiently
by the roadside.  In any case, they bore no swords; they were harmless enough. 
“Away, by the gods, or you’ll come to harm.”

Then Maddock rode back to where the men stood waiting to
storm Graymonde Hall.  When he turned to glare back at them, when he looked as
if he might come toward them again, they very carefully and deliberately turned
their horses out of the shadows and walked them down the road toward Farras.

He watched the boys ride out of his sight, the dark horse
disappearing against the night and then the white one. Odd that he had seen the
dark horse as the better animal when now it danced and bucked almost angrily,
much more than the white one.  No horse for Gikka of Graymonde, either of
those; the filthy Bremondine thief’s horse was as well trained as the sheriff’s
own while the knights’ farmers had to ride beasts no better than mules.  But
not for long.  He would ride the assassin’s mount back to the village himself,
and right past the gates of Castle Brannagh.  And once there?  He laughed
grimly and led his men up the northern road toward the hall.  Once there, he
would ride against the sheriff and take Castle Brannagh for his own.

Gikka watched Chul bare his teeth when the lantern light
left him, watched him raise his hunting knife to throw into the man’s back, but
she touched his arm.  Wait, her signal said.  She saw the frustration in the
boy’s eyes.  But if she let him have his satisfaction against Maddock, they
would never escape with their lives.  Her eyes met his.  He would obey her, if
just this once.

She tapped her two long nails on the saddle.  Patience.

By the time the villagers had ridden through the gates to dismount
outside the manor house, Gikka and Chul had stopped just below a hilltop to
watch.  Chul had led his horse to stand and graze above a thick stand of trees
where its white coat would not be seen before he joined Gikka and Zinion a few
yards away to see where the villagers had just broken through the doors of the
manor house.

The shouts of vengeance when they rode through the Graymonde
gate did not carry this far from the hall, not over the little brook or the
thick grasses and low trees of the foothills below.  Neither did the death
screams of her livestock in the barn nor the breaking and splintering of each
of her few belongings that remained within.

“We could have killed them,” he offered quietly.  When she
made no answer, he looked up at her.  “We still can.”

“Nay, lad,” she sighed at last, peeling away the strips of
false beard and brow, the thin mustache.  “We cannot.”  Her eyes narrowed to
see the men drag her sheep and pigs out into the green to slaughter them.  “We
cannot.”

“Honor again?” he asked quietly, but Gikka could hear the
mocking undertone in his voice.  “Is this what your precious honor buys you?”

“You’d not understand,” she breathed, taking the thick wads
of silk from her cheeks and using them to wipe the pallid gritty maquille from her
face.  “And even if you might, I’ve not the will to try you.  Yes, honor it is,
that I let them take what’s mine and leave them to live for a time while it
serves.  Honor, that I’d not be killing off the sheriff’s men just now when the
plague takes more than its share.  But honor it is, too, lad, that I’ll not be
leaving this account unsettled.”  She glanced at him, then loosed her hair from
the thong that bound it.  “Them as owe will pay, and no mistake.”

Chul nodded and they watched the villagers’ lanterns and
torches move past the windows of the manor house for a time, past the window
that had been his own chamber.  A few moments later, he looked up at her a bit
uncertainly.  “If that, that mage, the one you told me about, if he were
here...”

But Gikka closed her eyes and raised her fingers just
slightly from the saddle in a gesture of such pain and weariness that Chul fell
to silence and turned his gaze back across the valley toward the hall.

Below them, the villagers had come together in the central square
before the manor house, some from the house itself, another from the empty
stables, some from the barn, a few from the mews, and even one from the mine
road.  Not one had come from the crypt.

The large one, the man who had spoken to them, came from the
house carrying something—a weapon, it seemed, and suddenly, the villagers
renewed their search.  Having spoken only a word or two between themselves,
they moved now to search the grounds again, careful to sweep their weapons
through the shadows before they moved, but when they came together again at the
center square, they were even more frustrated.  Their anger was obvious.  By
now, they had figured out that she had known they were coming.  They would know
she had escaped them.