Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (14 page)

“Forgive me your reverence, but have you seen my cousin?”

Sorenson turned from the altar to face the princess.  He was clad in thickly embroidered vestments, his hands worrying at the borrowed crescent symbol about his neck.  “Your cousin?” he mumbled.

“The queen.”  Hepdida reigned in her exasperation as she stepped into the chapel.  “I had thought to find her here, she seems to have been spending more time at prayer.”

“Oh yes, your Highness,” the bishop agreed warmly.  “She was here until perhaps half an hour ago worshiping at the altar, as I have been. Though in my case I might blame the length of supplication on the flawed communion of this…” He waved the crescent in her direction.  “This imperfect vessel of faith.  It was not fashioned for me you see.  These past weeks I feel the Grace of The Goddess as though I were listening to voices underwater.  It is most frustrating.”

“I am sure the queen will let you reclaim your own symbol, your reverence,” Hepdida lied with the practised artifice of a teenage girl managing a parent. “Perhaps if you knew where she was I could go and put that suggestion to her.”

“You could?” Sorenson beamed. 

“Yes.” Hepdida waited a moment before firmly repeating, “If I knew where she was?  Your reverence?”

He frowned gazing over her shoulder into his memory.  “She said something about fresh air, I have noticed how she likes to walk the battlements when she is not here.  Particularly the gatehouse.”

“Thank you,” Hepdida reached for the chapel door, cursing that it had taken the bishop to tell her something she should have worked out for herself.

“You won’t forget, your Highness.” 

She did little to hide the petulance in her stare.  “Forget what, your reverence.”

He held up the borrowed crescent.  “You were going to speak…”

“Yes, yes of course,” she gushed.  “I’ll do it right away.”

The castle corridors, like the whole expanse of Nordsalve itself, were cold and wide.  Hepdida swept along them determined to have it out with her cousin.  She was not a child and would not be treated like one.  Too many secrets kept from her, the big matters of state and the little matters too.  The letter that Niarmit would not share, which she had destroyed, or concealed beyond the reach of Hepdida’s imaginative scouring of hiding places.  The questions, she re-played them in her mind.

“Have you see Kimbolt fight?”

Hepdida did not like her cousin’s interest in Kimbolt.  She could not say why.  She felt no claim on the man herself, nor suzerainty in the queen’s choice of friendships. Just a desire to keep the two separate in her mind and in her life.  They did not belong together.

“Yes of course, they were always practicing their sword play at Sturmcairn.”

There hadn’t been much else to do in the remote border fortress, nor for that matter had there been much entertainment for a fifteen year old girl, beyond watching the soldiers working up a sweat in the practice yard.

“I watched Kimbolt fight Thren once.”
She’d volunteered the fact unthinking, as the memory awakened in her mind, but she had been jolted at the alacrity with which her cousin had leapt on the information.

“Did he win?” 

She’d laughed at Niarmit’s question, the absurdity of it.

“No, of course not.  No-one beat Thren.”

“Someone did,”
Niarmit had concluded glumly. 
“He’s dead now.”

And that had been the end of the conversation, the closest she had got to probing either the big or the little secrets that lay between her and her cousin.

The frustration carried her up a short spiral to the battlement walkway, where a vicious wind whipped at her cloak.  The fur trimmed hood flapped with the gusts that swept around the edges of the old square watch towers.

She heard the scream at the same instant as she saw Niarmit.  The queen was standing thirty yards away, hands resting on the embrasure between two merlons, staring out over the frozen landscape of Nordsalve.  The relentless wind had flung back the hood of the queen’s cape and she let her red hair stream heedless in its wake.

It was Niarmit who had screamed, some short syllable of anguish, cut off like a door shutting on a torture chamber.  The sound brought the princess to a dead halt.  Her cousin spun away from the battlements and charged past Hepdida; it would have been directly at her, had the princess not stepped quickly to the side.  The queen’s face was a mask of fury which froze the blood more cleanly than the icy wind.   

Hepdida stood still watching Niarmit fly down the stairwell, cloak billowing behind her. She thought it wise to let her cousin have a good head start in the hope that she might outrun her own formidable anger.

There was a sound from beyond the wall, a horse neighed, a chain rattled.  Hepdida hurried to the battlements to see for herself what had enraged the queen.  A column of cavalry was following the trail to the gate, clad in the blue and gold colours of Nordsalve.  There was the black bearded Pietrsen at the head of the column, but he was riding in the shadow of a giant of a man beside him.  His horse was in the same huge proportions as its rider.  Next to it the Master of Horse and his destrier looked like a harbour skiff bumping along the side of some ocean going cog in the harbour of Oostport.  Along the rest of the line of cavalry there was no sign of Kimbolt.

As Hepdida watched open mouthed, the giant looked up and saw her.  His head was bare exposing a thatch of thick blond hair that stretched to his shoulders and a beard which, though shorter than a dwarf’s, was braided with a symmetry that would have done Pardig-ap-Lupus proud.  The man grinned, a flash of teeth as white as the snow on the distant peaks.

Hepdida stepped away from the battlement, swept back by a wave of the man’s confidence, and hurried after her cousin.

The horsemen and the cousins followed parallel paths on either side of the castle’s curtain wall as they converged on the gatehouse.  Fast though she ran, Hepdida did not catch sight of Niarmit again until they were in the outer bailey and the newcomers were making their way under the gate.  The blond giant alone had to bow his head slightly to pass beneath the stonework.

Niarmit had stopped in the middle of the frozen courtyard, beckoning one of the guardsmen to her side.  Hepdida heard her demand. “Give me your sword, now!”

The soldier hurried to comply but his haste was not enough for the queen who grabbed the hilt in her own hands and pulled the blade from its sheaf just as the giant and Pietresen drew level with her.

“Your Majesty, may I present the Lord Torsden.”  The Master of Horse made an unctuous introduction.

Niarmit’s welcome to Lord Torsden was uncompromising. “Get off that horse. I don’t care what my idiot seneschal promised you, your fucking head comes off right here, right now.”

Torsden merely smiled at the vitriolic greeting. “I’d love to oblige your Majesty, but circumstances prevent me.”

Niarmit caught sight of Hepdida for the first time. “On second thoughts, Hepdida, get the Helm,” she cried.  “We’ll make the smug bastard wear it.”  She spun back towards Torsden, the blade shaking in her hand as she shouted, “now are you going to get off that horse or am I going to pull you down and hack you to pieces in the dirt?”

The white heat of the queen’s fury was unlike anything Hepdida had seen before.  She tried to keep her own voice calm. “Niarmit, you’re scaring me.”

“Where’s Yannuck, where’s my boy.” Isobel came running from the shadow of the inner bailey.  “What have you done with my boy?”

“For the last time, get off the fucking horse!” Niarmit screamed. “Or I will cut you off it one fucking limb at a time.”

Torsden’s grin grew broader and he held up his hands with a rattle.  There was a chain on them running in a tight loop around the horn of his saddle.  As he shook his feet, Hepdida saw that they too were manacled to the stirrups.  “I’d love to oblige, your Majesty, but as you see, it is not quite as easy as just getting off the
fucking
horse.”

“My boy,” Lady Isobel mouthed at Hepdida’s side, looking beyond the cavalrymen to the still open gate.  “My boy!  My boy!”

There was a clatter of hooves in the archway, two new riders came charging into the courtyard.  In the lead a small boy on a white horse, behind him a soldier on a roan mare.

“Yannuck, my boy!”  Isobel ran towards the young rider, who brought his steed to an elegant stop beside her.

“Mama,” he cried.

“Kimbolt!” Hepdida exclaimed as the second rider hove into view, approaching the reunion of mother and son with a hesitant discretion.

“That idiot seneschal of yours is quite quick with his sword, your Majesty,” Torsden observed, though Niarmit did not seem to be listening.

“My horse threw a shoe,” Yannuck was saying as he dismounted into his mother’s arms, trying to simultaneously enjoy and shrug off her embrace.

“Took ages for the smith to get the forge warm,” Kimbolt was explaining. His voice sounded strange. As he slipped off his horse Hepdida saw that he had a swollen split lip and an ugly yellow bruise around his right eye which had all but closed.  “I thought we’d catch back up, before they got here.”

Words tailed off into silence.  Mother and son clutched at each other oblivious to the rest of the world.  Kimbolt stood stiff and awkward staring past Hepdida at the queen.  Niarmit was frozen to the spot, lips parted, eyes wide, the sword still in her hand but gripped tight enough to squeeze the blood from her fingers.

“Well which is it to be,” Torsden said.  “Head off? head on?  I haven’t got all day?”

The spell was broken, Niarmit gave a slow half shake of her head then turned away, flinging the sword aside. Hasty steps took her from the open courtyard and its guards and visitors.  One hand was at her face, the other reached out infront of her as she stumbled through the privacy of a dark doorway.  The guard had to step smartly to one side to avoid her crashing into him.  And then she was gone.

Kimbolt looked after her a moment, then at Hepdida and finally Isobel.  The Lady of the North cradled her son’s head against a shoulder as she looked at the seneschal’s expression of utter painful bemusement.

“Go after her you fool,” she said.

And he did, running across the courtyard with uneven steps, favouring his right leg quite noticeably.

Hepdida bit her lip as she watched him go.  At her side Isobel walked her son towards the inner keep in the blissful silence of those who know they have all the time in the world to share each other’s stories.

Even the cavalryman and the prisoner seemed unwilling to disturb the silent stillness in the air.  Torsden looked across at Pietrsen, pointed at his own head, and simply mouthed a question “on? off?”

Kimbolt’s leg hurt but it was the stiffness rather than the pain which slowed him down.  He would have walked barefoot across hot coals without a second thought, but no force of will could flex his swollen knee into more rapid motion than an old man’s stagger. 

The door was closed when he got there. The guard beside it wore the confused expression of a minion who had seen more than he thought he should.  Kimbolt knocked on the oak, with more trepidation than he had approached the duel with Torsden.  “Your Majesty?”  There was a noise, but not an answer. 

Kimbolt looked at the guard who gave a shrug of ignorance.  Whatever the queen may have meant by retiring to her room in such haste she had given no orders to him.

“It’s me, Seneschal Kimbolt, your Majesty,” he announced himself, before pushing the door ajar.

She was sitting in a chair half turned away from him, head bowed, face in her hands.  Her shoulders shook with violent emotion.  He shut the door firmly behind him as watery sobs wracked her frame, air gulped through a veil of grief.

“My Queen?” He began stepping slowly across the room. “Your Majesty? Niarmit?” He stretched out his hand, finger tips reaching for her shoulder.

Her hand seized his, reaching behind her, squeezing his fingers in a painful grip, though she still would not turn to face him. “I thought you were dead,” she gasped at the wall.  “You let me think you were dead!”

“I’m sorry.” He berated himself for never doing anything right.  “I didn’t…”

“I’ve buried two lovers already, with my own hands.  Piled rocks over their corpses. I’ll not do that again.”  Still she addressed her words to the stonework infront of her, so she did not see the glimmer of a smile that her words wrought on his face. Buried in her grief was an admission that she cared for him and while his conscience battered him for his lack of consideration, his heart tapped out a double beat of joy.

He came round and knelt before her, taking her hands in his and looking up through the veil of auburn hair at the tear strewn face behind. She blinked bleary eyed at him.  He smiled. She hit him, a round house buffet around the head, hard enough to daze.

“I have never been so angry! It was so stupid. If you wanted to kill yourself why not do it properly and jump off the fucking gatehouse?”

“It was something I had to do.” For once there was no apology in his tone.

“Something you had to do?” she parroted the phrase.  “You wanted the Goddess’s judgment? You demanded her verdict! Threw yourself on her mercy in a trial by combat.  She doesn’t like being quizzed by the self-obsessed, Kimbolt.  She could have easily let your arrogance destroy you for the impertinence of asking the question.”  She gripped his hands more tightly and stared at his face with red rimmed eyes.  “You had survived, why couldn’t you just accept that as proof of her forgiveness and favour?”

“There is a price to survival, Niarmit.” He said stiffly.  “It is a debt that is not easily forgotten or discharged.”  He frowned.  “You did get my letter didn’t you?  I thought I had made my reasons…”

“Yes,” she interrupted.  “I got your letter and I read it again and again, and it still didn’t make any bloody sense.”

“I had hoped I’d made my feelings clear, your Majesty,” he said grimly formal as he pushed himself upright.  “Evidently not.” 

She gave him a puzzled look as he lowered over her. He gave a bow and then spun on his heel, but his wounded knee rebelled, buckling with a painful snap that drew an involuntary cry from his unguarded lips.  He would have fallen if she had not caught him, rising from the chair and catching his arm and elbow with surprising strength.  There was a grip of iron within her wiry frame.

“You’re hurt,” she said, seeing his bruises for the first time.  She reached out towards the swelling around his eye; despite the pain it awakened, he still welcomed the light touch of her finger tips against his skin.

“You should see the other man.”

“I did.” She said bluntly. “There’s not a mark on him.”

“I had to lull him into a false sense of security.”

“How? By hitting his sword with your face?”

He smiled and shrugged. She swept her hair out of her face and wiped the back of her hand across tear reddened eyes.  “Who am I to talk,” she muttered.  “I’m hardly a more presentable prospect.“

And then they were laughing and crying, and crying and laughing and kissing.  Yes, kissing.  She broke apart, “your lip, he split your lip. It looks painful.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” he lied, impatient again for the feel of her mouth on his and she returned his urgency in kind.  And they were fumbling with the unfamiliar fastenings of each other’s clothing, as they stumbled their way towards the bedchamber.