The Warden, page 14
Maurenia laughed. “Discretion is all well and good, but do you really think these folk might revolt openly?”
“I think that the magic of the coins could drive them to it. And I suspect that putting all the coins together into one place in front of people who’ve already been worked at by the enchantment laid upon them could be disastrous.”
“Then how is it you want to carry them all by yourself?”
“I don’t want to. I want to toss them all into a fire and then bury the result six feet beneath my best wards inscribed on silver bands. But I need to get to the bottom of what’s enchanted them, how, and probably who. And no one else in the vicinity of Lone Pine is more qualified to resist the effects than I am.”
“The Dobruszes carried in chests full of them and seemed none the worse for wear.”
“Did they touch the actual gold, or just the chests? It’s possible they may be naturally resistant, but unless there’s something I don’t know about them, neither has passed the test and earned a stripe from the College of Enchantment at the Lyceum, which still leaves them behind me in qualifications.”
Maurenia had no chance to answer for Aelis was already knocking at another door. This interaction went much like the first, with Aelis’s commands smoother and more certain and the business concluded quickly. They lapsed into silence as they moved from house to house, with Maurenia drifting away from the little light each doorway shed.
Two hours passed, with Onoma’s black moon a tiny sliver high above them. Clouds shrouded the other moons in darkness but Aelis had enough light to see and a bulging pouch of gold coin that dangled heavily on her belt. She passed her fingertips lightly over the rough hide of the pouch and felt the tingle of the magic within. She stopped in her tracks, frowning.
“Where did you say you found these, Maurenia?”
“Rather unremarkable ruin. An old fort. The kind that were hastily thrown together all over Ystain when the orc emigration started. Made of barely worked rocks and wood and never really used, except to turn into a strongpoint for the bands to rally around after they’d taken them.”
“And there were just the two chests, naught else?”
Maurenia shrugged. “Might’ve been some broken tools, weapons. Nothing of consequence that I can recall.”
A long walk to the next house gave Aelis time to ponder the problem. “None of this makes any sense,” she said. “This gold is freshly minted; orcs would not have done that, and certainly not with Old Ystain marks. Gold doesn’t hold onto magic very long. These coins can’t have been sitting in some hoard, cursed and enchanted, just waiting for someone to trip over them, since the time a warband overran some Ystainen fort. There’s something I’m missing.”
“If you’ve only read about orcs, then you aren’t acquainted with the reality,” Maurenia said. Aelis hadn’t time to interrogate that statement, for they’d come to Otto and Elmo’s ramshackle cottage. While the fences were all in good enough repair to keep the sheep in, the thatch was spotty at best, the door hung crookedly, and holes pocked the thin hides nailed over the windows. The stone walls wanted the attention of a mason if they were meant to stand for another year.
Aelis hesitated in front of the door, afraid a loud knock would send it tumbling out of the frame, then rapped her knuckles against it as sharply as she dared.
They waited so long in front of the darkened house that Aelis thought of turning away, when the door swung open without warning.
Had she not been able to see by the light of the black moon, the axe handle Elmo swung might have struck the crown of her head.
As it was, instinct and training had her flinging a ward up with her left hand, while her right drew her sword. The axe handle crashed into the ward once, twice, with real menace in the swings. Behind her, she heard steel clear leather as Maurenia armed herself. She could step back and draw the half-elf into what certainly looked like a fight; that much was clear. There was help to be had.
She gritted her teeth against accepting it and stepped forward, swinging the pommel of her sword into Elmo’s midsection. She didn’t put the full force she could have into the blow, but she drove the steel of the pommel straight into the cluster of nerves above his navel. He wore only a thin, stained nightshirt that offered no protection from her blow, pulled though it was.
Elmo immediately doubled over, retching on the dirt floor of the cottage, with Otto running forward from the second room—there were only two—sputtering.
“Sorry, folk, sorry, Elmo doesn’t know what he’s doin’ when he’s woke like this,” the elder brother said, immediately snatching up an iron and stirring the coals in their sad little hearth, which threw little light and less heat into the room. By the time he’d gotten a stinking, smoking lamp lit with a piece of straw, Aelis was bending over Elmo’s supine form, having kicked his axe handle away. Maurenia had melted into the shadows just outside the door.
When Otto saw who knelt over Elmo’s form, her hands checking his breathing, the beat of his heart at his neck, and his eyes, he went pale and sputtered unintelligibly for a few seconds.
“I’m sorry, Warden, I’m sorry,” he finally stammered. “Elmo’s impossible to manage sometimes, but he means no harm, just … still thinks he’s in the war, sometimes. Nights, he just loses himself. I won’t keep blades in the house but he finds weapons all the same.”
“It’s all right, Otto. No one is hurt, except, I’m afraid, your brother.” His pulse was fine, if quick, and his breathing was slowly returning to normal, but his eyes were rolling in his head and his hands were clenched, his arms gripping their opposite across his chest. “You say this happens often?”
Meekly, Otto nodded. “In a bad week it could happen near every night.”
Aelis cast her eyes around the two mean rooms, barely furnished with one rickety table and three wobbling stools, with simple shelves and pegs holding the meager clothing and tools they owned, and struggled to keep a frown away. “Where’s Phillipa?”
Otto cleared his throat and rubbed his foot against the dirt floor. “When it looks like Elmo’s going to have one of his moments, I try t’find somewhere else for her to sleep. Sometimes Rus’ll take her in exchange for a bit of work on his patch. Tonight, Emilie took her. She’s always happy to go.”
“I see.” Elmo had by now uncurled himself and sat up. Aelis could see his face grow red. He snatched up his axe handle and stiffly walked out the front door, heedless of the fact that he was barely dressed.
Aelis couldn’t have been sure, but she would’ve bet whatever silver she’d have left tomorrow that Elmo didn’t see Maurenia as he passed within five feet of her.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed your rest, and his, Otto,” Aelis said. “But I need to ask if you transacted any business with the Dobrusz company today.”
“The dwarf? Aye. Agreed to do some work on their wagon and to provide some fodder for their horses for the journey.”
“Did he pay in gold?”
“Elmo brought gold home, so I assume he did.”
Aelis turned her face away from the guttering light of the lamp. “I’m afraid I have to buy that gold from you. Willing to pay you three pieces of good silver per gold coin. I’ll attest to the equivalence in value.”
“Nothin’ good comes of gold in the house,” Otto said, with a half sigh, half laugh. “Our mother used to say that. Never knew what she meant. I’ll go fetch the coin box.” With a slight hitch in his walk, Otto stumped off to the second room, a ragged blanket that fluttered behind him serving as a door.
Maurenia ghosted into the doorway as soon as Otto disappeared. “Your man ran off into the woods muttering to himself,” she whispered. “Should I follow him?”
Aelis gave a quick nod and Maurenia disappeared into the shadows again as Otto came walking out, rubbing the two gold pieces together in his hand. His steps slowed and he stared at them.
Aelis hurried to his side and swept the coins away from him. He looked up, startled, but calmed as she pressed six pieces of silver into his hand. She took a quick gauge of how much silver remained in her purse and weighed it against the ramshackle conditions of the cottage, and quickly plucked a seventh piece and pressed it into Otto’s big, callused hand.
“Is this all of it? This is very important, Otto.”
“You think we have so much gold in our box I’d lose track of it, Warden? Elmo handles our coin, mostly, but this is all that was there.”
Aelis nodded. “Elmo been like this since the war?” she asked quietly as she dropped the gold into her other pouch as quickly as she could.
“Aye,” Otto said. “Comes on him over the course of the day. Just see him change. He keeps lookin’ at the horizon. Won’t crest a hill. Reaches to his side for a weapon’s not there. Good days, he’d not hurt a fly. Bad?” The big man rolled his shoulders.
“Thinks he’s still there sometimes? Especially at night?”
Otto nodded; Aelis could read the sorrow peeking out from behind the cracks in his detached facade. “Worst is times he wakes up with a scream,” the farmer murmured.
Aelis wanted to set her hand on his shoulder, reassure him somehow, but Bardun Jacques’s voice came back to her once again.
You’re not their friend, you’re not their confidant, you’re not their barman, and you certainly aren’t their gods-damned lover, the old Warden had said, wheeling stiffly in front of the lecture hall. You’re their Warden. You’re among them, not of them. The day may come where you have to judge them, carry out a sentence. Harder to do that clearheaded to people you’ve supped with, drunk with, laughed with. For some of you it’ll be impossible.
“The next time you think he might be having a moment,” Aelis said, “send for me. There might be something I can do for him.”
“You mean … reach into ’is mind? With a spell?”
Aelis tried not to frown and nearly succeeded, but she took comfort that Otto couldn’t see in tonight’s dark nearly as well as her. “That’s precisely what I mean, Otto. It could calm him, help him get past these moments.”
Otto took a deep breath. “If I can tell the next time it’s comin’, I will,” he said. Then, trying to hide it behind one big swollen-knuckled hand, he yawned.
“We’ll let you get back to your sleep,” Aelis said. “We’ve got more houses to visit this night.”
“Would you check in on Emilie and Pips?” he asked sleepily. “I don’t think Elmo’d go there, but…”
“I will,” Aelis said as she headed out and shut the door behind her, forestalling further conversation. Emilie’s house was not on her list, a fact she was reminded of as Maurenia slipped out of the uneven shadows of the house.
“Don’t recall hearing the name Emilie come up,” she murmured.
“It didn’t, but he asked.”
“And are you to do everything they ask of you, or what is most important to protect them?”
“When the two go together, I can do both. We don’t know what direction Elmo hared off in.”
“He went haring across the open field to the north at a skirmisher’s trot. Stand of trees beyond there. Be my guess that was where he was headed.”
“Skirmisher’s trot?”
“You didn’t fight in the war, did you?”
“I was fourteen when it ended,” Aelis said, sourly. “How would I have done?”
Maurenia tsked. “So young, then. Younger than I would have guessed.”
“This is not answering the question.”
“A skirmisher’s trot is two running steps followed by a shorter, slower one. Conserves energy to travel a long distance at a high speed and still be ready to fight when you get there.”
“I’d thought Elmo was a scout.”
“Scout, skirmisher, it all depends on the army, the officer, the day.”
“So that’s what you did, then?”
“Briefly,” Maurenia said. “But I had too good a head for geometry and too many good ideas to waste in the infantry, or so I eventually convinced them. Spent most of my time as an engineer, cobbling siege equipment together.”
“I thought orcs didn’t build fortifications.”
“Didn’t stop them from inhabiting what they’d already rolled over when they saw it was to their benefit.”
Their feet crunched on the small rocks and dry grass as they wound their way farther from the village center, to Emilie’s house. Of a similar size and construction to Elmo and Otto’s, it looked like a more reputable and well-heeled sibling. It had square corners, whole walls, doors that fit their frames, shutters over the windows, and a chimney that didn’t seem to be in danger of filling the house with smoke. Aelis imagined Pips’s uncles’ cottage looked like this twenty years ago.
As she raised her hand to the door, it swung open as if on its own. Maurenia was at least as surprised as Aelis, as knives appeared in her hands, and she’d no time to melt into the darkness beside the door as she’d done at every other house. There were no lights on inside, which didn’t hinder the Warden or the half-elf much, and apparently not the occupant either. Aelis saw a woman taller than Maurenia and as broad as many a man, with blond hair cut near to the scalp on the sides and gathered into a warrior’s queue along the back of her neck, holding a long, antler-handled knife in one hand. She didn’t wear a typical nightshirt, but instead woolen leggings that were wound around her legs with leather thongs and a dark blue shirt that reached halfway to her knees.
“Strangers come to my door past the turn of the night with steel in their hands means no good, I am sure,” she said slowly. “What is it you want, Warden?”
Setting aside the various questions that occurred to her—how did Emilie know they were coming, how could she see and identify them in the dark, to name two—Aelis said, “We’ve recently come from Elmo and Otto’s place.” She hesitated briefly. “They wanted us to check on Pips.”
“You mean Otto wanted you to check on Phillipa while Elmo runs wild and howls his rage at a moon he cannot see and plays at being a wounded man. Very well,” Emilie said, slipping the knife into a sheath at her back. Without a weapon in hand, she stood oddly, her right shoulder cocked upward, her elbow slightly bent. “Phillipa is asleep and well and her uncle would not come near this place even were he able to cope with what he has seen and what he knows. I do not intend to wake her up, nor to invite you in. Good night, Warden.”
The door shut and was bolted with a severe-sounding finality. Aelis had one hand half lifted and her mouth open to speak.
“That,” Maurenia said, sounding shaken for the first time Aelis could remember, “was odd.”
“One gods-damned mystery at a time,” Aelis said aloud, even while adding it to the list she needed to ask Rus, and other friendly locals, about: My missing book. Her. The bear. Was the bear a mystery, or just a bear? Something else. Something I’m forgetting. She worried at her bottom lip with her teeth.
She was going to need time alone in her tower with pen and ink to sort these thoughts and questions out and decide how to approach, but for the moment there seemed nothing more to do but collect the coins and move on.
“Come on then,” Aelis said. “We’ve a couple more hours of walking. Time to head even farther out of the village.”
* * *
Onoma’s moon had nearly set, the encroaching sun lightening the sky to gray by the time Maurenia and Aelis were taking their last weary steps to the doors of the inn. Too tired to talk, or to do much more than put one foot before the other, they trudged into an empty common room.
And to a clatter and shouts on the second floor, thumps on the ceiling over their heads, and voices raised in anger.
Maurenia beat her to the stairs, Aelis comforting herself with the thought that the half-elf’s stride was simply so much longer that she couldn’t compete; she’d reacted just as fast and gained the landing only the shortest moment later.
A door just to their left was open and the sounds of fighting emerged from within. Aelis heard dwarfish cursing—Andresh, she was sure—and a deep voice she suspected was Timmuk’s yelling, “For fuck’s sake, Darent, get his legs!”
They looked to each other, filled their hands with steel, and ran in side by side. Maurenia tried to slip in first, but Aelis slipped her shoulder under the half-elf’s arm and nudged her out of the way with a hip-check.
And the fact that she was able to bring a ward up in time to deflect the clay pitcher that was thrown at them, sending it crashing into dozens of pieces on the floor, proved the wisdom of her decision.
In the far corner of the room, Luth stood, making use of what furniture the room had to keep Darent, Andresh, and Timmuk at bay. The basin the pitcher matched was already shattered and the washstand they’d been kept on had been broken into so much kindling, two long spear-like pieces of which Luth was jabbing at Darent and Andresh as they feinted toward him. The bed already looked ruined, with one of its posts broken and the blankets nowhere to be seen.
Luth’s expression was madness personified, beyond even his burned rictus. He was wearing only drawers, and Aelis saw that whatever had given him the burn on his face had indeed burned that entire side of his body, starting at his neck and moving down his shoulder, leaving his entire arm twisted with livid white scar tissue—except for two patches that glistened a raw, wet red that Aelis couldn’t look at without feeling queasy.
Luth was holding the others off easily, and it wasn’t hard to tell why; he was armed and ready to do violence, and they weren’t. Darent seemed the closest, one hand drifting to a long knife at his belt. Andresh came forward and tried to seize one of the broken lengths of wood as Luth swung it at him. He managed it, but the second clouted him hard enough to send him reeling away. What was more, Luth’s position between the bed and the wall made it hard for most of them to approach him.
Maurenia looked to a cringing Timmuk for orders or ideas.
Full of confidence, Aelis just went for the same Enchantment that had laid him low days before.
When she released it, wand extended gracefully from one hand, she expected him to slump to the floor, his erstwhile weapons clattering harmlessly to the ground.
