Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (3 page)

How terrifying this nun had been to her, this harmless old
governess of the House of Brannagh.  Renda and her brother had spent night
after night cowering under the furs of their nursery beds when Nara would come
glowing at the door and leave them with terrors.

Unlike Renda, Roquandor had learned to put down that fear
with insolence, even open hostility, and not a day had passed that he and Nara
did not have words.  But a wonderful teacher Nara had been for them both, and
years later, when Roquandor’s bride, Merina, had died in childbed, the young
knight, in his grief, had taken his newborn daughter and placed her into the
arms of his old nursemaid.  Nothing more had remained to be said.  The pain
between them had fallen away, forgotten.

In the four years since Roquandor’s death, Nara had taken
her charge very seriously, raising his daughter with a firm hand and, no doubt,
giving the little girl terrors by night.  Pegrine, meanwhile, had grown into a
feisty seven-year-old with her father’s love for mischief who held her
governess in healthy disdain and hid from her at every opportunity.

“Your pardon, my lady, Mistress Gikka,” the nun hissed,
dipping her head in a quick bow.  She was obviously distraught, and she wrung
her arthritic hands miserably, peering from the doorway to the shelves and
under the tables.  “But have you seen Pegrine?”

Renda stared at her a moment, then chuckled.  “How now,
Nara, has the child lost you again?”  But her smile was sympathetic.  This was
not a rare occurrence at Brannagh.  “You will not find her here.  If she is not
with the sheriff or my mother, look in the gallery above the great hall.”

Nara was already shaking her head.  “Nay, madam, I have
already searched there, and neither did I find her with her grandparents.”

Renda’s smile wavered.  “Have you searched the wine cellars
and the practice hall?”

The old woman nodded.

“The stable loft?  The old garrison?”  asked Gikka.  Renda
caught her worried glance.  “The tunnel from out the old chapel?” 

“Leading to the crypt?  The stone is yet sealed down.”

“She might she have returned to the nursery,” offered Renda.

“I have searched there thrice, madam.  Likewise the
kitchens, the armory, the smithy, the new chapel and the old.”  She shuffled
forward, fingering the stiff collar of her habit.  “Some knights of yours I
sent to search the castle and grounds,” wheezed Nara painfully, “even Master
Roquandor’s hideaway in the oak beyond the old moat.  When they failed, my last
hope was that she might have found her way to you here.”

“Last hope?”  Renda glanced out the window.  The sun was
less than an hour from setting.  She counseled herself to calm.  “How long has
she been missing, Nara?”

“I cannot say how long, truly,” the nun answered, visibly
upset.  “She rose early from her nap and played for a time in the nursery
whilst I attended other duties.  When I looked in on her a while later, she was
gone.”

Renda rose and looked out into the corridor to find one of
the maids.  “Find His Lordship,” she told the girl, “and gather to the audience
chamber everyone of able body, at once.  The sheriff’s granddaughter has gone
missing, and we lose our light.”

Gikka breathed in sharply.  “What game was it, Nara?”

The nun looked up, not understanding.  “Game, Mistress
Gikka?”

“She played in the nursery, you say.” Gikka peered into her
eyes.  “What game was she at that might lead her out?  A game of pretend?”

They could see the effort in Nara’s face as she tried to
remember.  “No, no, I think not. I recall that she was chasing her ball about
within the chamber.  But the ball remains; she did not take it.”  Nara
sniffed.  “This hiding of hers, Mistress, ‘tis but sport; Roquandor, Renda,
even my lord Sheriff himself as a boy at Damerien—all the children hid from
Nara, as does Pegrine now.”  She crossed her arms defensively.  “But I see it
as a phase, aye, and of no harm.  The children were never in danger, even out
of my sight, and if ever I had trouble finding them, I would call upon B’radik
to show me where they hid.”

Renda looked back from the doorway.  “And now?”

“I have tried, madam!”  Nara cried, suddenly losing her
composure. “But I call upon B’radik, and I see only darkness.  To my terror, I
know not whether the darkness is my answer or whether my goddess abandons me!”

Gikka touched the old woman’s shoulder.  “Not to worry,” she
breathed, glancing out the library window.  “Peg’s about, somewhere.”

But at Nara’s answer, Renda had swept from the library in a
whirl of urgent commands, and presently Gikka followed her, leaving the old
woman alone in her fears to weep.

*          *          *

By the time the last of the twilight faded to darkness, all
those of the household, servants and resident knights, had returned to the
castle at least once for a fresh lantern. Some had taken out braces of the
sheriff’s hunting hounds, but none had found the slightest trace of the missing
child.  They searched on foot through the farm fields to avoid trampling the
little girl or the season’s crops under hoof, and the hunt was slow and
exhausting.  The shouts of “Pegrine” that sounded through the fields and the
casting whines of the hounds circling for the trail grew ever more hoarse and
hopeless.

The nearest farmers had come out at sunset, alarmed to see
noblemen and their servants walking through their fields on the eve of
harvest.  Some had joined the search, patrolling the roads and outlying fields
and knocking at farmhouse doors to see if the child might have found her own
way to shelter.  But they found nothing, and within a few hours, they had gone
home to their beds that they might arise early for the next morning’s harvest. 
Not long after that, the rest of the villagers had retired to their homes and
taverns as well, leaving only those of Castle Brannagh afield.

The men and women who combed the lands did not meet each
other’s eye as they passed, and many returned to the castle for oil well after
their lanterns had burned down, not wanting to report to the sheriff that they
had still found nothing.  With every sickening moment that passed while they
searched, they grew more certain that the child was not to be found, at least
not here.  But still they continued.  If they failed to find her by sunrise,
they would not find her at all.  The night animals rarely left a scrap.

Having finished searching the castle itself once more, Renda
and Gikka had taken two other knights, horses and a pack of hounds to the north
to search the hilly meadowlands just above the cliff wall that edged the
Bremondine forests.

Beyond the scatter of wildflowers that filled the low strip
of meadowland beyond the moat, the land leading to the cliff wall was overgrown
with thorny brambles, uninviting and certainly too rugged for the child to have
gone that way alone.  But since no one farmed it, they could search it quickly
on horseback.  Then, having caught the cliff to the north, they would continue
their sweep west from there through the Fraugham foothills as far as the city
of Farras, if need be.

After hearing yet another negative report, the sheriff
rubbed his eyes, weary from the pain and hope that battled in his heart.  Pain
at every moment that passed that might be the last in which they might have
found her alive, hope that the delay meant she was still moving ahead of them,
still breathing, still alive.

Behind him, his wife, Lady Glynnis, touched his shoulder for
only a moment before she turned back to help the kitchen maids tap a new barrel
of rendered oil to refill the empty lanterns.  He marveled at the returning
strength and calm in his wife.  She had spent most of her adult life tending
the affairs of Brannagh in her husband’s absence, withstanding one long siege
and several small skirmishes with only a handful of knights and servants.  Even
her son’s death had not destroyed her.  She had kept herself going by rising to
her duties every morning and falling to bed in exhaustion each night.  But at
the war’s end, despite her joy at having her husband and daughter home again,
that spirit and vigor had slowly left her until she spent her days roaming
listlessly from one gallery to another.  Only such a crisis as this could have
brought her back, the sheriff .  He only hoped she would be rewarded with
Pegrine’s safe return.

One of the grooms from the stable was waiting to make his
report and refill his lantern.  With a courageous smile, Lord Daerwin listened
while the man mumbled through his apology, even while his heart broke with
every sad report.  He took the empty lantern, gave the groom a fresh one and a
joint of cold chicken from the baskets the maids had brought from the kitchens
and sent him on his way, as he had done so many times.  Then he allowed his own
gaze to travel west again, wishing he had gone with Renda. 

“Lord Daerwin!”  One of Renda’s knights ran to him through
the gathered servants and sank to one knee.  Her hasty braid of thick dark
blonde hair was coming loose about the neck of her jerkin, and her face was
flushed.  She had found something, but Pegrine was not with her.

“Dame Jadin,” spoke the sheriff over his pounding heart. 
“Have you found her?  Speak.”

The young woman shook her head.  “No, my lord.  My
apologies.  But I have found the bodies of two men not three miles away, to the
east.”  At his bidding, she stood and pointed toward a slight rise near the
river.  “Slain, my lord Sheriff.  Stabbed to the heart, to my reckoning some
two days past.  It was a mighty battle.”

“Men of station?  Farmers?”  He frowned.  “Who might they
be?”  And what connection might these dead men have with Pegrine, he wondered. 
No, he cautioned himself.  It might not have anything to do with Pegrine at
all.  Assuming the two were related might make him miss something crucial. 
Still, he could not help but think this was no good omen.  “Well?”

“I could not tell, sire; they were stripped of all clothing
and possession.”

“By the gods...”  He did not want to take anyone away from
the search, but neither could he leave the bodies to rot, especially so near
the river.  He raised his hand to gather some of the nearby servants to see to
them.

Suddenly, he stopped.  He stood, motioning everyone standing
nearby to silence, and he listened again.  The low tone sounded again, followed
by a higher note and a slight drop in the pitch as it faded, and it made the
skin of his scalp crawl though it brought a cheer from the fields. 

It was the sound of a hunting horn, and it came from the
west.

T
o
Renda’s relief, the horn’s last notes were Gikka’s signature.  The call was
genuine, and at that sound, a thousand worries were allayed at once.  Pegrine,
praise to B’radik, Gikka had found her!

The sound had risen from a low thicket at the base of the
second ridge, no more than a few hundred yards south, and the knight’s heart
pounded, anxious to get to the child at once.  But before she rode down, she
looked back toward the castle.  From her vantage point at the top of a rocky
hill she could see tiny specks of lantern light flowing evenly toward the castle. 
Moving over the hillside below her, the lanterns of the two knights she had led
this way milled about but moved mostly eastward, no doubt gathering and
leashing the hounds on the way back to the castle and to bed.  She fancied she
could see relief in the way the two lanterns swung back and forth and she
smiled.

At Renda’s nudge, her horse stepped surefootedly down the
incline and over a narrow fall of rock, then sped at full gallop along the
broad ledge leading downward toward the thicket.  She pushed the questions from
her mind, not allowing herself to wonder how a seven-years child could have
crossed the same craggy hills alone and on foot that had taken her hours on
horseback.  Then again, perhaps Pegrine had not stopped to search every grove
and thicket as she passed.  Besides, Gikka’s horn had to mean that any danger
was past.  Renda clung to that thought and drove out all others as she urged
Alandro faster over the firm, flat ground.

Before long, she caught sight of Gikka’s cloak over the
bough of a scrubby tree.  That cloak was a gift from Duke Trocu, heir to Duke
Brada, woven half of parti-shaded Bremondine silk and half of something else,
something arcane, so that when she wore it, she was smartly camouflaged against
her surroundings, whatever they might be.  But at a price.  The cloak drew its
power from her.  Dormant and draped as it was over a dead tree limb, Renda saw
it easily.

The knight took up the cloak as she passed and tossed it
across her saddle as she rode.  She followed a trail of hoofprints as far as
they led, but it was not until she had reined in Alandro and come down from the
saddle that she made out Gikka’s horse, Zinion, standing silent and nearly
invisible against the darkness and foliage, as still as if he were carved of
wood.  The hoofprints had stopped several yards short of where he stood, and
had Renda not known he was there, she would not have seen him at all.

“Under silence, are you?” she soothed quietly, leading her
own horse to stand beside him, but Zinion was a well-trained Brannagh
Horse-at-Arms.  He would sooner die than break the command of silence, even
enough to risk the eyeshine from a glance at Renda’s familiar face.  The knight
patted the horse’s flank affectionately as she passed, wondering why Gikka had
hidden him.  Silence demanded an extraordinary measure of discipline—he could
not graze, snort, empty his bladder or bowel, nor shuffle his aching hooves in
the dust—surely more than was called for now that they had found Pegrine.  But
then Gikka seldom did anything without reason.

Renda commanded Alandro to silence as well and moved
cautiously between the trees toward a larger clearing just ahead where a single
lantern—Gikka’s lantern—sat strangely tilted on the ground, as if it had been
dropped.  The flame flickered bravely to the uphill side, but it foundered and
gasped in the welling oil.

Moving tree limbs aside, Renda drew a cheerful breath to
call to Pegrine, but right away her smile faded.  From the glade ahead, from
just beyond the lantern, she felt cold, dark, a sense of disorder, something
badly out of place.  She had not felt that sort of unnatural chill on her spine
since her battle against Kadak.  No, it was impossible.  Kadak was vanquished;
she had killed the creature, watched terror fill those strange yellow eyes
right as the life leaked out of them at last.  Kadak was dead, there could be
no doubt.  Duke Brada himself had assured them of it before he died of his
wounds.  This could not be Kadak.  This darkness was too deep, too cold, even
for him.  This was something else, something at once much more ancient and
powerful than Kadak and yet somehow asleep, or...she could not be sure, and for
the first time since the war’s end, she felt real fear.  She sent up a silent
prayer to B’radik and rested one hand lightly on the hilt of her sword as she
moved, listening to the sounds of the forest as Gikka had taught her.

“Peace, no,” spoke a weak voice from the woods beside her. 
The slender form stepped a bit unsteadily from the shadows, and Renda felt a
strong hand with a single long nail take her elbow and draw her back.

“Gikka,” she whispered, stumbling in her squire’s grasp. 
“What in the name of—”

Gikka was not bleeding visibly, but her eyes were swollen
and red, and Renda could feel her hand shaking.  Thoughts of poison, of a
dagger stuck in Gikka’s back came into Renda’s mind. 

Renda reached out to grab an arm as the Bremondine woman
sank to her knees.  “Gikka?  How now?”

But Gikka shook her head stubbornly.  “Let me tend to this.”
Renda could smell the acid odor of vomit on her breath, and the knight’s brow
furrowed in confusion and worry.   Gikka clutched her arm and said, “Don’t see
it, Renda.”

“Speak sense.  I heard your horn, Gikka.  Where is
Pegrine?”  Renda pulled her elbow free and stood staring at the squire. Don’t
see it, Renda.  Don’t see what?  She could not help the shout of panic that
crept into her voice.  “Where is she?”

“Renda—”

But the knight stepped closer to the glade.  She would not
be stopped.  “Come, did you find her, or no?”

At this, Gikka collapsed to her knees, defeated.  She nodded
weakly and gestured toward the clearing, unable to meet Renda’s gaze.  “No
sight is it for your eyes, please...”

Renda’s pulse pounded in her temples, and she stifled the
slow scream that rose in her throat.

Don’t see it, Renda. 

The lantern Gikka had left in the clearing was nearly out,
and Renda could see nothing in the dim circle of wavering light.

No sight is it for your eyes. 

She stilled her dread and drew her sword. No moon shone
tonight, leaving only thick darkness beyond the edge of her lantern light. 
Soft black soil clutched at her boot heels, and new young trees bent
reluctantly against the flat of her sword, seemingly unwilling to let her pass.

Don’t see it, Renda.

She could see something ahead, something deathly still at
the center of the clearing, at the center of the icy blackness.  The shape was
so odd, the outline so vague against the darkness of the forest that her eye
could not bring it into focus. It was so still.  So very still.  It could not
be Pegrine.  Please, let it not be Pegrine.  With more courage than she had
ever called upon in her life, she stepped forward again and brought her own
lantern up.

The sound she made was less a word than a scream of agony
ripped from her soul.

Lifeless eyes stared out at Renda from just ahead—dark,
terrified eyes clouded nearly to white and turned somehow wrong, somehow upside
down in the darkness where the child’s head had fallen back against the rude
tree stump. Her black ringlets hung in limp plugs of sweat and blood around her
eyes, around her frozen expression of agony and fear, in that last moment when
she knew that no one could save her now, not even her Auntie Renda.

Her pale white hands and feet had been spread wide and
pinioned to the stump with a single rope.  Her blood swamped the ground below
the alderwood stump and clung to the bark in sticky clotted streamers below
what was left of her body.  So much blood...

Renda planted the blade of her sword in the soil and sank to
the ground beside it.   No words came, just a guttural rending shriek of rage
and loss that filled the glade and echoed through the foothills beyond.  Her
empty stomach convulsed, and she gagged wretchedly on the ground before the
strange altar.

Gikka knelt beside Renda and said nothing, letting the sobs
of anger and shock drain out of the knight.  Soon, Renda would be ready to find
Pegrine’s killer, but not now.  Not while the shock of her niece’s torture and
death still bled from her eyes.  Meanwhile, their quarry moved farther and
farther away, and the trail cooled.  Time was their enemy.

The thicket surrounding the clearing had been silent when
she approached it, so quiet in fact that she had been inclined to ride past. 
But the nesting birds and the tiny scurrying creatures of the night, even the
crickets had made no sound at Zinion’s approach.  They seemed too frightened
even to call warnings to each other.  That curious silence had been enough to
pique her curiosity and lead her into the glade.

The silence had told her something else, as well.  She had
frightened no one away, nor had she heard the sounds of horse or man in the
surrounding hills.  The killing had been done hours ago, most likely well
before sunset, and the killer or killers were already well away.  The best she
could hope to find, then, would be some fragments of a trail.  She hoped it
would be enough.

She squeezed Renda’s shoulder once, then rose, picking up
the lantern to look around the clearing.  She would look over the glade again,
this time with the calculating eye of an assassin, of one used to dealing death
and concealing it. 

She picked up handfuls of the soil here and there and looked
along the borders of the glade for broken branches. Almost immediately, she
found two marks that might have been partial footprints near the edge of the
clearing.  With her finger, she completed the outlines of the two prints and
sat back on her haunches, staring at them. 

The steps had been very heavy, as of an armored man, with
the familiar crenelations of a knight’s salleret.  The two prints were not just
alike, though they were both left feet.  Different weights, different stances.

Knights, she thought bitterly, a brace of treasonous
knights.  But to what end, she wondered, brushing the dust from her leggings as
she stood.  To what end, killing the sheriff’s granddaughter?

She frowned at the peculiar growth of the ancient trees
lining the glade, the way they bunched and crowded at the edges of the clearing
like the duke’s vassals at tournament, crushed together in no comfort and each
straining to see, aye, but not one to cross the cordon.  No cordon hung in this
clearing, at least none that she could see, but the boundaries were keen and
even, she saw, and likely lined up along the stars as well. This glade was
witched, that much was sure, and the way Peg had died spoke of ritual
sacrifice.

Gikka pushed aside some bits of dried mud with her nail and
frowned. Nights spent huddled for warmth in one Brannford temple or another had
educated her in the ways of most of the gods—Bremondine, Syonese, even
Hadrian.  This glade, this ritual, matched nothing she had ever seen.

Had it been blood alone, it would have made little enough
sense.  Human blood would desecrate the altars of most gods.  And the
rest—Rjeinar the Hadrian god of vengeance, Cuvien the Torturess, and a few
others—held to strict observances, none of which had been kept here.  Blood was
a high price, and an innocent’s blood, the highest of all.  A price none of the
gods took lightly on account of the uncomfortable lot of power it bought of
them.  To say nothing of the kind of folk as would pay for that power.

But they, whoever they were, had not taken just her blood. 
Pegrine had been cleaned like an elk, her insides taken away.  That made no
sense at all.

The killers had taken the blade with them, too; no doubt it
was a special ritual weapon and of dear price.  One they might use again.  Even
so, she might have expected them to set it down once, if only for a moment that
she could see the size or shape of it.  They had not.  Likewise she found no
indentations for any bowls to catch Peg’s blood or her organs.

She pushed through the tree limbs beyond where she had found
the knights’ footprints and proved to herself that her instincts were correct. 
As she expected, she saw no tracks, no broken limbs on the trees.  Not even the
spoor of the knights’ horses, assuming, and she thought the assumption fair,
that they had ridden here from Brannagh.  All she had were two partial left
bootprints, and these with no motion to them.  Most likely, her knights had
stood here for a time, waiting, and then they had gone.  But where?  She rocked
back on her heels, considering.

“Sweet B’radik,” whispered Renda finally, her eyes wide, her
lips trembling.  She stood, her face a stone mask of horror, and moved toward
the terrible altar, raising her sword to cut the rope and free her niece’s
body.

“Renda, stay back,” barked Gikka, “please.”  The squire’s
face was drawn and pale, and the light of the swinging lantern cast strange shadows
over her features.  “Please.  Let me be sure they’ve not...”  She gestured
toward the child’s body.  “That she—that her body’s not set as bait and trap.”

She watched the dull realization dawn in Renda’s eyes.  They
had both seen the wounded and dead, especially children, set with wicked
powders and elixirs, to explode in flame or a cloud of poison when they were
touched. 

After only a moment, Renda nodded, gesturing for Gikka to do
as she thought best.  Then she walked away, leaving Gikka to her work. 

Much later, Gikka found Renda standing beside Alandro, numb
and staring through the trees with her eyes like shining amber against the
black shadows.  Renda had split the vein of a sacred verinara leaf and
consecrated her sword before Rjeinar.  A dangerous oath for a knight sworn to
B’radik.

Without a word, Gikka also picked a perfect verinara leaf
and split the vein with her own sword.  But then she picked another, crushed it
and ran the length of her blade through the poisonous juice.  She did the same
with her daggers.