Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (18 page)

There was silence in the throne room while Torsden glanced along the line of counsellors before him. He nodded slowly.  “So, your Majesty, just so I may be clear on this.”

Niarmit graced him with an open palm, urging the Northern Lord to speak his mind.

“My task in this is to be a decoy, a diversion.  I prance around at the eastern crossing of the Derrach and by action and deed convince the witch that I am about to invade.  She sets off after me, giving you the chance to sneak across far to the west and head down to this new built fortress you are keen to capture.”

“That is it.”

He winced.  “I was never much one for the mummers’ play your Majesty.  I found no entertainment in stories, in people pretending, I am not sure I like to be cast as the lead player in some charade on the river bank.”

“It has to be you, Torsden,” Pietrsen insisted.  “You are a victim of your own reputation.  Hearing that you are at the eastern fort, gathering an army, making a camp south of the river, the witch will see what she expects to see.  The foremost general of Nordsalve at the head of an invasion she must repel. It is sure to draw her out.”

“It is that which will give us our opening to slip in and seize her castle.”  Niarmit added her own voice to the Master of Horse’s argument.

“Well, glad as I am to still be the foremost general of Nordsalve, it hurts my pride and offends my dignity to be made a charlatan.”

“But it might save your miserable life,” Isobel spat.

Torsden bowed low.  “I will obey of course.  But permit the foremost general of Nordsalve to ask a question if you will, Your Majesty.”

“Of course.”

“Once this fortress is captured by this raiding party of yours, how will you hold it?  Will you not need me to bring whatever force I can to assist you in the endeavour?”

Niarmit and Kimbolt exchanged glances. The seneschal gave a brief shake of his head, the queen shrugged, Torsden waited patiently.  Then even as a look of alarm shot across Kimbolt’s face, Niarmit turned to answer the Northern Lord.  “We have sent word to Medyrsalve.  The diversion we are asking of you will not only allow us to head south, but Rugan can head west.  He should arrive in time to relieve us at the fort, long before Quintala has realised what is happening and turned back.  That is provided you play your part and play it well.”

Torsden pursed his lips and frowned in thought.  “I will obey, and I will play this part you cast me in the only way I know how, that is for real, your Majesty.”

“Goddess save us from another method actor,” Pietrsen mumbled.

“Remove the Lord Torsden’s chains.” Niarmit gestured the jailer forward.  The man approached searching through a jangle of keys on a ring.

“No need!” The sharp command from the Northern Lord made the jailer step back.  They watched in awe as Torsden brought his manacled hands crossed at the wrists infront of his chest.  He hooked the iron cuffs together inserting the hasp on one into the lock on the other, and then raised his elbows levering the lock open.  His biceps bulged, he grimaced red faced with the effort, the council looked on.  And then there was a sharp crack and the lock split.  The useless chains clattered to the floor while Torsden gave his wrists the briefest of celebratory rubs before bowing low, arms by his side.  “I am your obedient subject, your Majesty.”

In the excited chatter that followed Torsden’s departure, Niarmit beckoned Kimbolt close.  “How did you beat him?” she hissed.

“I must have had the Goddess’s favour,” he said.  “A lot of it.”

“She must have some great destiny in mind for you.”

“I thought there was another lady had designs on my body,” Kimbolt’s whisper was too soft for anyone else to have heard, but Niarmit still felt herself flush red and it was not entirely with embarrassment.

“Your name’s Jay isn’t it?” Hepdida probed the sulky boy infront of her.

“If you know it, why ask?”

“It’s an odd name.”

“And you’re an odd kind of princess, but you don’t see me making any comment on it,” he stopped himself.  “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“I didn’t expect to be a princess, it just sort of happened to me.”  She watched him steadily while he fussed with the horse.

“Well the queen thinks you’re a princess,” he said at length.  “So I guess that’s all that counts.”

“Niarmit thinks too much sometimes.”

“How so?” 

The horse side stepped within its stall and shook its head searching the air for some hint of more oats.

“She’s always trying to protect me, to keep me away from any hint of danger.”

Jay said nothing as Hepdida got up and paced the flagstones of the stables.  “I’m not a little girl,” the princess insisted, though for whose benefit she could not say.

He nodded at that, with a swallow.

“And I won’t be left behind, not this time.”

“That’s what she ordered.” His tone was reasonable, the condescension given by the boy essential to their task towards the princess denied leave to accompany them.  “I was there. If you go you’d be disobeying her.  Everybody knows her orders.  No one’s going to let you into one of the boats.”

“That’s where you come in.”  She watched him carefully as she spoke, gauging his reaction.

“Me?”

“I watched you in the council.”  She held his gaze, willing him not to look away. 
Meet my eyes little boy; let’s make a contract.
“You haven’t got much regard for authority.”

“I can’t say I saw much authority there, except for the queen that is.”

“You look like a boy who’s used to not doing what he’s told.”  She circled carefully, closing in on her intention, wary of alarming the prey.

“You want me to help get you into one of the boats when we cross the Derrach.”

She hid her surprise at his perspicacity. “See not just an insolent face, but a clever boy too.”

“I told you, I’m not a boy.”

“I’m not staying here this time.  I’m not being left behind.  I’m sick of being locked out and treated like a child.”

“Not saying I’m doing it mind, but what’s in it for me if I help you?”

Hepdida frowned, she hadn’t bargained on that, haggling over a price for his support. “What do you mean?  I’m sure I could find some gold if that’s what you’re after, though what in the name of the Goddess you’d spend it on I couldn’t say.”  

The boy shrugged and looked away.  “I’ve never kissed a princess,” he told the horse.

Hepdida laughed.  She couldn’t help herself but she did.  “Have you ever kissed anyone?”

He glared back at her, red faced. “Have you?”

A memory she had locked away surfaced in the middle of her laughter.  A memory of a misshapen leering face, foul breath and a sharp knife. She battered the thought away, battened it down.  “My question, not yours,” she said curtly.

The night was still and moonless.  The muffled oars circled silently in the rowlocks, their blades slicing without a splash through the cold fast waters of the Derrach.  Niarmit stared ahead.  The blackness had been total, but within it there was now a faint white line of the snow covered river bank over to the left and ahead a misty blur where the dusting of snow on the leafless trees loomed as a grey mass.  The helmsman had to strain less against the swift current as the boats slipped into the slower shallower waters of the shelving river bed and they closed on the occupied province of Morsalve. 

This was the point from which Jay had slipped into the icy water over a week earlier.  The trees, reaching to the water’s edge in a poorly watched section of the river bank, had hidden him from prying eyes.  The other man, his companion, had never been found; most likely swept clean through the Silverwood and out into the Eastern Ocean. 

The boy sat beside her in the prow of the boat.  Behind them the rowers and the soldiers shared the thwarts.  The other boats were out there too, dark shapes dimly perceived to left and right.  Five boats, forty soldiers in each.  It was hardly an army, and none of them horsemen.  They had to travel light and fast and in secret, following wooded trails for most of the time.  Tempting as it might be to have ridden for Colnham rather than walking, the logistics of securing forage for the mounts and managing a night time river crossing were against them.  On the other hand, Johanssen’s lightly armoured but ferociously armed elite troops could move scarcely less swiftly through the forest than Tordsen and Pietrsen’s cavalry would have.  Particularly since Niarmit and the company chaplains would be conjuring their provisions. Both food and drink could be secured with the grace of the Goddess, saving them the encumbrance of carrying full packs of three days’ supplies.

The cavalry should already have made their crossing with Torsden twenty leagues to the east; they would have been ferried across the Derrach on flat bottomed barges in broad daylight.  No-one in Morsalve would long remain oblivious to the Northern Lord’s arrival south of the Derrach and hopefully the bait of the arrogant Northern Lord would draw the equally self-opinionated half-elf from her den. 

If Jay spoke true about father Simeon’s resources, then adding Niarmit’s two hundred should make sufficient force to capture this fortress while adding Rugan’s army should then enable them to hold it against any opposition.

She glanced across at the boy.  Little more than a dim shape in the darkness even though he was only a few inches away from her.  His face was a pale glimmer between the smears of dirt that they had all applied to any light or reflective surface.  Could he be trusted? Well, if this was a trap it was one of her own making.  Jay had not asked her to cross the river and march on Colnham, he could not have planned to lure her into danger. 

But there had been a certain furtiveness to the boy, a shifty unease that had him always looking over his shoulder, or glancing up sharply whenever she came near.  Perhaps it was just his manner.  The little she had gleaned of his past suggested he had suffered and suffering could make a child petulant and suspicious.  Goddess knows, Hepdida had shown her that often enough.

Niarmit was pleased to have parted with her cousin on good terms.  The crown princess had been content to merely wave her off from the battlements of Karlbad.  There had been no suggestion of following her to the garrison fort where Johanssen’s elite force was being gathered, still less to the shallow cove where the boats had been assembled ready and waiting.  

At a click of the helmsman’s tongue, the rowers shipped their oars and the boat glided into the silt of the wooded bank.  In a trice the soldiers were stepping out into the shallow water and wading into the treeline. To either side there were faint splashes as the other boatloads disembarked, soldiers hurrying low to the ground in case a flurry of orcish arrows might erupt from the blackness ahead. 

Jay led them in a silent scurry through the wood until they came to a clearing some four hundred yards in. Here the boy stopped, hands patting at his jacket and breeches.

“What is it?” Kimbolt hissed.

“Wait here,” the boy said.  “I’ve got to go back to the boats.”

“Why?” Niarmit demanded.  “The boats will be gone, we told them not to wait, not once we were safely ashore.”

“I left the map, I must have dropped it in the boat.”

“Map? I didn’t think you needed a Goddess damned map.” Kimbolt’s exasperation shone through.  “We have to keep moving.  I thought you knew the way.”

“Most of it, not all.  I won’t be a moment.”   Jay took a few steps back towards the river.

“The boats will be gone. You fool.”

“Go with him Kimbolt.”

“I’ll be quicker on my own, quicker and quieter, just wait here.”  He turned and ran, lithe and swift between the trees.  Kimbolt hurried after him but tripped over a root and came crashing down.

Johanssen’s grey bearded face emerged from the gloom, his bald head smeared with dirt to dim the reflectivity of his bare scalp.  “What is going on, your Majesty?”

Niarmit stared into the gloom whence Jay had disappeared.  “It seems our guide has forgotten something important,” she said with a deep frown of foreboding.

It was dark and cold in the forest, but not as wet or cramped as it had been curled up under a tarpaulin beneath the helmsman’s seat. Hepdida clutched the knapsack against her chest and stumbled a few yards deeper into the wood.  Up until this point the plan had gone well.  The borrowed clothes, her hair quickly chopped into a boyish cut, the frantic ride from Karlbad direct to the cove where the boats were while Niarmit gathered her troop of specialist infantry.

The boatman had been expecting her, he’d been paid enough certainly.  Jay had warned that it wouldn’t be cheap. The gems prised from the broach that Giseanne had given Hepdida would have paid for far more co-operation and comfort than a sodden passage in bilgewater had afforded her.   Still it probably cost extra to avoid the obvious questions, why was a young boy returning to occupied Morsalve?  How did he have such money to pay for a passage? And why travel with this secret and sensitive mission?  Yes, it could easily have cost the whole broach to stifle those obvious questions, so maybe it had not been such a hard bargain after all.

Until this point that was.  The boat had been supposed to wait, to wait until Jay came back for her.  And it hadn’t.  There had been a muttering from the rowers.  Some complaint that the other boats had already gone, what were they waiting for?  And then the helmsman had hauled her out with a cheerful “off you go my lad,” and she’d been pushed numb limbed into the water.  The oarsmen, who knew their chief well, had asked no questions.  Maybe their indifference had already been bought and paid for, but Hepdida was alone and staggering through a cold dark wood.

She clutched the knapsack a little tighter, reflecting that at least she wasn’t entirely helpless.  And then something caught her foot and she fell with a squeak and a thump.  “Oh, shit!” she grumbled.

“Mind your language,” a voice commanded and a hand was on her elbow hauling her up.

“Where the fuck have you been?” she snapped.  “You were supposed to come back for me.”

“Why did you leave the boat, you fool?” Jay hissed in reply.

“They pushed me out. I had no choice.”

“Well, I found you, though to be honest anyone could have found you crashing through the trees like that.”  He bent to lift the knapsack.

“Don’t!” she called, louder than she should have.  He stopped mid-reach startled by her vehemence.  “Don’t touch my things,” she said, a little quieter but with no less insistence.  “Seriously, don’t.”

He raised his hands, palms downwards, waving down her distress with a pacifying gesture.  “All right, no problem. I’ll let the princess carry her own baggage.”

“Thanks,” she said, bending to retrieve the sack.  She had just grasped its strap when another hand seized her free arm.  It wasn’t Jay, for the newcomer had seized the boy with his other hand.

“What is going on here?” Kimbolt demanded.