A King in Cobwebs Read online

  Durand couldn’t go on as he was, but neither could he run into the yard to play duke by daylight and avoid the Lost. He must find an escape. Deorwen had long dealt with her own plague of Lost souls. She dreamt of them, then helped them to peace with shoe leather and a few wise woman’s tricks. And, though he was loathe to throw himself on Deorwen’s mercy, she might be the one to bring him peace as well. He would find her now.

  Durand spread both hands in the air between himself and the townsmen. “Let me see what can be done,” he said, and he left them.

  * * *

  DEORWEN SAT ON a stool before Almora’s door.

  “Deorwen,” Durand began. The Lost filed in behind him: a procession of dead men. The things filled the staircase at his back. Still, something about Deorwen’s attitude stopped him. “Why do you sit here? In the passageway?”

  “Durand.” She stood, small and straight, gathering herself with a quick tug of her gown. “You might as well know. The fool girl has been locked in her chamber since her father left, and she won’t answer.”

  “She won’t answer you?” Durand could not imagine anyone holding a door against Deorwen.

  “Would I be waiting here otherwise? There are nothing but tears from inside. It’s not like her.”

  Durand heard a choked sob from beyond the girl’s door. Half-turning, Deorwen called: “It’s no good hiding in there!”

  The sobbing came sharper.

  “Girl!” said Deorwen to the closed door. She could not quite shout; the Painted Hall was not far away. “You’re too old to play such games. This door will open if you will it or not.”

  The girl shrieked.

  Durand put a hand over his face. The dead were all around; he would not be rid of them. And now the girl was playing up. With a sigh of resolution, he took hold of the door’s iron handle, turning the latch, hoping that a firm shove might get him inside.

  The door did not move, and the crying was redoubled.

  “You’ve no key?” he asked.

  “Once again, Durand, if I had a key, do you suppose that would I be still waiting on Her Ladyship?”

  Durand swallowed. “Let me see what I can do.” And, with a snarl of frustration, he threw his good shoulder into the door. The thing smacked wide. And Durand was staggering in the midst of Almora’s bedchamber. A maidservant cowered behind the bed, face streaming, but there was no sign of Almora. The girl was gone.

  Black wings left the window. “Haw, haw!” he heard.

  Durand remembered the missing serving men.

  “Deorwen, there are men missing since the duke departed.” His thoughts rabbited off with devil-plots—the maid, the runaways, the girl, and ransom or worse.

  Deorwen looked at the maid. “This witless child has not conspired with kidnappers.”

  The serving girl threw herself to her knees. “Oh, mistress, we meant no harm. Only Almora did so wish to get out of this old place.”

  “You find no excuse that satisfies me for even a moment, girl,” said Deorwen.

  Durand had no interest in the serving girl’s doom, whatever it might be. “When did Almora go?” he demanded, but the girl dissolved again into wild sobs.

  Deorwen intervened. “I have not seen Almora since the cavalcade left the gates, I am ashamed to confess.”

  “And I was fighting with patriarchs and burghers,” Durand said.

  “There was much to do. She will have kissed her father good-bye, I think, and darted back to the stables, bold as you like. All it would take is an old cloak if she chose her moment. Why should the warders keep anyone in? Acconel Castle is not a prison.”

  “Except for Her Ladyship, it seems,” said Durand. The Rooks scrabbled at the windowsill, more like pigeons than gallows birds, and much to Durand’s surprise, Deorwen stalked toward the window, flapping her arms and driving them off. “Dirty creatures.”

  There was a chuckle in Durand’s skull; the two Rooks, at least, were enjoying themselves. The Lost had slipped into the girl’s chamber now, aimlessly probing corners.

  Some noise from the doorway caused Durand to flinch around, too quickly for his stiff neck. Ailric had appeared in the wreckage. He seemed to be everywhere. Durand’s head pounded from his thick ear to the base of his skull.

  “All right, Ailric. The stables now. Find Almora’s palfrey. A gray. Sugar white. She would not leave the animal. And not a word to anyone—on your life, boy! If the girl is alone on the road, Leovere cannot learn of it.”

  Ailric nodded and vanished.

  “Even if she has simply chased after her fool of a father, she’s defenseless,” said Durand. “Abravanal’s heir alone, and Leovere hungry for any chance to force the old man’s hand!”

  “She is not safe.”

  “No, she’s not safe!”

  He would fill the roads with horsemen. He would send word to every baron in Gireth. And then everyone would know. The moment he spoke, his words would reach the Red Hall of bloody Leovere by a hundred roads. Durand thought of his oath to protect the girl. He thought of the promises he had made to watch Gireth as Kieren set out for Ferangore. He had sworn to protect Acconel. The duchy had been put in his hands.

  But there was only one thing for it.

  “I’ll call Sir Kieren back. He’s gone hours, only. And this girl.” The tears. The wild eyes. The secret might have been plastered on her forehead. “Get her out of sight, by Heaven. And someone will have to do something about this bloody door.”

  Durand nodded to Deorwen. “We’ll get her back.”

  * * *

  AILRIC HAD THE door rehung before a soul had noticed, and still he managed to scout the stables: The girl’s gray was not in the stalls. And, without a word from Durand, the youth had found Shriker; Brand, Durand’s hunter; and a rouncy.

  “They said the stallion was yours,” Ailric explained.

  Durand looked over big Shriker. “Aye, he is.” The brute was treacherous with strangers; Ailric was lucky not to have been bitten purple. “And the dun rouncy too.” The lad had everything ready. “I trust you gave them a story?”

  “Aye, yes.” He nodded. “I’m the new man, and maybe I’m eager to put my stamp on things. I found fault with the shoeing, the stalls, and the condition of their coats. I’m marching them straight to fresh stables in the city. The groom’s boy has cause to expect a beating,” Ailric explained.

  “So he won’t be wondering where we’re going,” said Durand with a shake of his head.

  “I wouldn’t think so. The boy seemed quite rattled, Sir Durand.”

  “That’ll do, then. Now, we must hope the girl’s on her father’s trail. They’ll be no finding her if she’s done ought else.”

  Ailric seemed watchful.

  “Hells,” said Durand, “I’ve a mind to turn the city upside-down and send a hundred men haring into the countryside after her, but she’d make a fine hostage for any man of Yrlac. A whisper in the wrong quarter could kill her.”

  He took Ailric by the shoulder, giving him a hard look. “Ailric of the Col, much depends on this secret. You must be my man in this.”

  “I am, Sir Durand. We must get the girl. Every moment that passes is too many.”

  “Good,” said Durand. He let the boy go.

  With that, they were on their way. The Eye of Heaven blazed low, making black canyons of the streets. He led Ailric through the dark city and slipped by the gatekeepers at the Harper’s Gate only moments before curfew bell.

  * * *

  JUST BEYOND THE big stone barrel vault and the iron-bound gates, they nearly trampled Deorwen. She’d known what Durand intended.

  The men in the gates pushed the big valves shut and dropped the bars.

  Toads shrilled from the Mere.

  Deorwen’s eyes were as steady as stone.

  * * *

  DURAND SET AS quick a pace as Brand, his thickset blood-bay hunter, could manage in the mud; the brute was as coarse-boned as a plowman’s ox, but tireless and laudably cool. The road followed
the valley of the Banderol. A kingfisher flashed blue over the ripples, vanishing into the creaking of the frogs and the boom of a bittern somewhere off among the reeds. It was an eerie evening beyond the wet clop of the horse’s hooves.

  From the far bank, Yrlac glowered. Plowman’s houses and sanctuary towers stood out there in the damp gloom and, in unshuttered windows, fires glowed. Durand rubbed a knot in his bad shoulder and imagined Leovere’s men peering out from one of the hovels on that far bank. A single unlucky glance from any of those windows might have sent Leovere’s men splashing over the river for Almora.

  Just then, a strange, half-human voice called across the reed beds, causing Durand to squint again at the valley walls.

  “It’s lambing time,” Deorwen supplied.

  “Hells,” said Durand. “What a sound.” Pure anguish.

  “Those’ll be lost lambs, I shouldn’t wonder,” she added.

  “Lost lambs…” repeated Durand.

  “It can’t be more than a few hours since she rode out. And she’ll keep to the road. I should have broken that door myself. Who knows where she’s got to?”

  He let that pass. “I wonder what they’re thinking in Acconel,” said Durand. “No duke, no steward, no champion, no Almora, no Lady Deorwen. That will give them a shock.”

  “If we can catch her in the next hour or two, we’ll be able to stare them down come the morrow. Otherwise, well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.…”

  “She’ll put her head down. We’ll catch her and be back by dawn,” said Durand.

  “If we find her, it must be sooner than that. You forget the night, Durand Col.”

  “The night? Ascension? There is nothing ominous about the days after.”

  “You are thinking only of Heaven’s Eye. But we are in the province of the moons out here. The Sowing Moon has passed, and the Farrow Moon will not rise tonight. Through all the Atthias, every village has folk standing watch. There will be no moon, and the Banished will be free with Heaven’s Queen gone.”

  “It is Calends,” Durand breathed. The girl gone, and this the night for hags and worse to creep from their dens. “Of all nights.”

  “We’ve an hour before Last Twilight. We’ll find her, or we will hope she’s found shelter—and find shelter ourselves.”

  They rode on as the heavens darkened. Durand found himself watching the shape of every stray plowman on the misty Yrlaci side. He’d been so intent on the far bank that he started when a Rook croaked from the branches of a crooked blackthorn closer at hand.

  “I wonder if it’s all connected, brother,” said a scrabbling whisper in Durand’s skull.

  “What, exactly, is connected to what, brother?” The blackthorn rustled as the Rooks teetered among its naked spines.

  “Leovere and this girl and the fire in the high sanctuary and King Ragnal issuing mad commandments that bully men into the trees.”

  “There is no way of knowing, I am sure.”

  “And there are strange things abroad this night.”

  “A disquiet is upon the land.”

  Durand was about to spur Brand at the Rooks’ thorn when Ailric called out from the rear. “Sir Durand!” And, as the chuckling Rooks flapped and tumbled upriver, the young man’s blade hissed from its scabbard. “Up the river,” he said. “Among those trees.”

  The track curved toward a riverbank copse of willows. Maybe there was a crossroads. After a moment’s scrutiny of the trees, Durand began to pick out mute figures among the branches.

  There were, perhaps, a dozen silent men between the trunks. Beggars or bandits, they must be. “I’ll flush them,” Durand murmured, “and we’ll be on our way.”

  The Rooks had circled round to settle in the high, bare branches.

  Durand had unshipped his flail and prepared to set his spurs when a west wind breathed across the Banderol and set the willows dancing.

  Suddenly, another hundred watchful human forms were clear among the dancing branches, suddenly obvious in their huddled stillness not more twenty paces from Brand’s twitching nostrils. The Rooks laughed their reedy “Haw! Haw!” from the branches.

  Durand set a hand on Brand’s neck. “Easy.”

  Faces turned, hollow-cheeked below wide, mad eyes; there would be no scattering a hundred such men.

  “What is this?” whispered Deorwen.

  Durand shook out his flail’s chain, eyeing the crowd. “Outcasts. Madmen. There’s nothing odd about a beggar or two beyond the city walls.”

  “‘A beggar or two.’ I’d imagined you could count, Durand,” said Deorwen.

  But Durand was making different calculations. The roadbed where they’d stopped was a heavy clay muck. No good. The verges were fatally steep. A trench. And there was nothing but mud on the hillsides.

  Durand and his party could only back away, hoping to find another road.

  But the beggars had not been still. As Durand eyed the ground, the creatures slunk for better vantage points, shifting only inches. Among them numbered men and women both, smeared with mud and some naked to the patches of hair between their legs. “Host of Heaven,” he said. It was too cold.

  A few of the mob were dead already, hanging low and crook-necked from the branches where the living stood. An idle corner of Durand’s mind wondered whether the beggars had gathered to strip the rags from the swinging corpses—or to do worse. The end of winter was a hungry season.

  “I did not know that things had come to such a pass in the countryside,” murmured Deorwen. “We have been sheltered in the city.”

  “What are they wearing on their heads?” wondered Ailric. It looked as though every man and woman wore a raven’s nest of sticks.

  More figures rose from the reeds and ferns below the trees. Others appeared by a low roadside wall—too many, too near. Durand could see the ivory pegs of their teeth.

  “How will Almora have got through?” asked Deorwen.

  “Who knows when these creatures came to this place?” said Durand. “We must worry about ourselves for now. We’ll give them their privacy. Back, and we’ll find another way.” He stole a tighter grip on the reins even as the figures in the trees heaved deep breaths, snarling prayers and obscenities.

  It was suddenly clear to Durand that the bird’s-nest garlands were crowns. Willow. Bleeding hawthorn in ragged flower.

  “Ailric…” Durand warned.

  And the entire throng rushed.

  In a giddy instant, Durand knew there could be no escape, not for all of them. Deorwen could have only one hope. He saw it all, and understood.

  “Ride!” Durand shouted. Deorwen must not argue. Durand spurred his poor hunter at the crowd, and the levelheaded cob jolted forward like a warhorse. Durand and the boy would buy Deorwen a moment to break free. Brand wallowed into the devils while Durand swung his flail, kicking and cursing at each bounding shape that surged past him. But it was like battling the sea. A fist got Durand’s belt. A bearded man swarmed up, grappling for Durand’s flail. Poor Brand kicked and wheeled, panicked now. And the wild bearded face scrabbled close by Durand’s ear, the thorny crown in his eyes.

  “Traitor!” the man hissed. A dozen other hands tore Durand from the saddle, and Durand hit the clay, twisting under waves of fists and feet—an engulfing violence, swallowing him under thorn-crowned, twisted faces.

  Deorwen must be free.

  It was his last thought, the last impulse of his heart.

  Then one powerful blow smacked his chin into the muck, and he was lost to Creation.

  5

  A Keeper of the Dead

  Durand came to his senses in the belly of a trench or ravine, his face half-frozen to the muck. Alive.

  A canopy of willows shut out the Heavens where some trace of the twilight still remained over the ditch. He half-remembered the beggars hauling him on their shoulders. Now, it looked as though they’d discarded him.

  He must learn what had happened to Deorwen and the girl.

  As he prepared to move, a st
range hiss reached his ears. A few paces away, a hill of huddled stones bulged from the dark. The muddy stones might have been a nest of serpents—but louder. Then one of the huddled boulders twitched—an arm slid past a pallid knee—and Durand understood that he lay three feet from a hundred round backs, all packed as tight as corpses in a grave.

  They spoke.

  “The Queen,” said a hundred crowned madmen. “She watches. Forever peering from the tail of my eye. And well she might, for my every breath thwarts her ambition. Her ambition for her child. For herself! But I will not die easily. I will not climb down.” A hundred voices popped with venomous spittle; hands clutching at shoulders in vain spasms of self-comfort. “I could manage her—and handily, if it were not for this plague of whispers. But I cannot think for whispers. Who would have a crown at such a price?”

  Durand marveled. Was this some cabal of traitors?

  “My people?” said the voices. “They starve. They sicken. They throw their gripes at my feet. But do I command the rains? Do I call fishes to their nets? Am I wet-nurse to their beasts? Why must they plague me?”

  Durand began to understand. In Errest the Old, the king was bound to his people. Life to life. Pain to pain. It was priestcraft of the eldest sort that knotted the king’s life into the soul of the kingdom. For three days, every king must lie under the high sanctuary in Eldinor. Three days under stone. Three days there among the tombs of his forbearers. Durand had seen the place as he fled with Lamoric through the tunnels under Eldinor.

  It seemed that this could only be some strange echo of the king’s mind.

  A mind tortured.

  But Durand could not picture the fearsome king of Errest the Old nattering like these mad things. Not Ragnal with his warrior’s sword and his robes as jeweled as the Book of Moons.

  But it did no good to wonder—not there in the bottom of a pit where he could do nothing. He must get free; he must find Deorwen. Almora was lost and abroad on the Eve of Calends.

  The hint of twilight remaining between the branches told him that the beggars had not taken him far—there had been no time for it—and so the ravine had to be some flaw in the valley of the Banderol. It should lead to the river and back to the Wrothsilver Road. And so Durand resolved to put madness and omens from his mind and creep downhill.