Saga of Menyoral: The Service (23 page)

“At least, until Vandis made Junior,” Ev
an said happily, twisting to look back at them. He slowed to match the three of them, and Wally fell in next to Dingus. “He’d just make motion after motion until enough people agreed with him to pass it. Didn’t usually take long, either, what with his being right a good bit of the time.”

“Don’t you mean ‘loud enough to make myself heard’?”

“No, I mean ‘right,’” Evan said. “And if you’re wrong, at least you keep us moving.”

Knights drifted around them, talking over the meeting or making plans for one last drink tonight or tomorrow.  “It’s been a good Moot,” Vandis said, changing the subject.

“Aye.” Evan lifted his face and took a deep breath of night air. “I wasn’t after thinking it would be, but it was. Let’s you and me scare up Santo and Pearly for a drink, what do you say? After all, it’s not as though these young ones want to be dangling after their old Masters all night.”

Kessa rolled her eyes. “I know when I’m not wanted. I’m gonna go find Skerne.”

“Say hello to Hjaldi if you see him,” Vandis told her as she left.

“C’mon, last party,” Wally said to Dingus. “You’d better show up for this’n.”

“I’ve showed up at all of ’em. Just didn’t stay that long,” Dingus told him. “Rather not play Spin-the-Dagger. Or watch.”

The
party games had always been Vandis’s least favorite part of being a Junior. “You guys still play that?”

“I don’t,” Wally and Dingus said at the same time. They grinned at each other as the crowd dwindled.

“Royals,” Evan said, and at that, an evil laugh escaped Vandis. The boys looked expectant, and Evan went on, “That was Vandis’s game.”

“Now ’tis Dingus’s,” Wally said, and jerked his head in the direction of the bonfire on the beach. “C’mon, I w
anna see you get all those last-years three sheets to again.” Dingus laughed and followed Wally across the cobbled square, lakeward.

“Don’t do anything we would’ve done!” Vandis called after. As they neared the edge of the square, Tony Scalietti scampered over to join them, and in a moment Santo came over to Vandis and Evan.

“We gonna have a drink?” Santo asked, and Vandis felt his face go devilish.

“Let’s play Royals.”

Whenever Dingus walked through the campground, more sites lay
empty, the firepits cold. He breathed easier every time; it’d been good, yeah it had, way better than he’d expected, but he itched to move again. One by one, his new friends left; Tony and Santo were the last, once Tony got a couple nights’ sleep. “Next year,” they all promised, “see you next year.” Dingus hoped so, though he’d sat through about an hour of his first Junior party, and then slipped away after a couple of drinks. The Juniors went at it a lot harder than the Squires, and they played the kind of slap-and-tickle, random-kissing, tell-your-secrets games that seemed calculated to make him uncomfortable. There was plenty of beer (which Squires weren’t supposed to have), and besides that, herb, which stank like a skunk and made everybody laugh and laugh at the stupidest shit. Dingus didn’t try any, even though Wallace said it was “bloody marvelous, I can see why Evan smokes it.” The upshot of all this was, nobody noticed when Dingus left, even during that very last party.

This morning was the end.
Dingus made his way back to Vandis’s spot, his hair damp from washing, across a deserted campground. One last woman struggled with her tent while a baby crawled nearby, tasting pine cones, and when Dingus passed, she called to him a little desperately in a lilting accent the same as Evan’s: “Lad, lad!”

Dingus wove around the trees, over to her. “You want me to take your tent down?”

“Catch that babe!” she cried, tangled in canvas and poles, as the baby crawled toward the burned-out firepit. Dingus suffered a moment’s agonized indecision, then lunged and snatched the baby around its chubby waist, just before it stuck its hand in the ash heap. It squalled almost as a cat would’ve as he lifted it up and held it out to the woman—at arm’s length.

“Oh, and do my hands look free just now?” she said. “Hold him, he won’t kill you!”

“Uh—” He gave in and drew the baby’s back against his chest, tucking his arm under its butt. At least it didn’t have a wet nappy. His hand covered its entire torso.

It stopped squalling and started to bounce alarmingly, making clutching motions toward the woman and saying, “Ma-ma-ma!”

“Stay with Dingus half a moment, laddie mine,” she said to it, wrestling her way free of the canvas. “That’ll be Dominic the Second there,” she added to Dingus. “And I’m Missus Donnelly—Lady Sionnan to you.”

“I’m—well, I guess you know.” Dominic the Second squirmed and tilted his head to look up. Huge, blue-gray eyes gazed out of the baby’s face, and Dingus gazed back. That warm, soft feeling melted inside his chest, even faster than it had when he
’d met Kessa: his heart going to breakfast mush. Dominic the Second didn’t know anything about Muscoda,
dilihi
, or dirty sons of bitches like Arkady. He didn’t know anything but Ma, hugs, and milk, and his look was full of nothing but good.

The baby cackled, showing a few tiny teeth, and reached up to grab Dingus’s chin with a d
irty, soft hand. In a flash so sudden, so fierce the knowledge was pain, Dingus knew what he wanted, and wanted it more than anything in the world. He grinned, and the baby tried to bounce up high enough to get his nose, squealing with delight. Dingus tickled the pale skin on the fat little belly—people tickled babies, he’d seen that a hundred times at least. Dominic the Second kicked his little legs and gave a real, full-throated laugh, and it did for Dingus completely. If he had one of his own, would it be as red-headed as he was?
Have to get a wife, first,
he thought,
or somebody who wants to be with me at least.
It’d be so good, he just knew it, in a cabin in the quiet depths of the forest maybe, him and a family of his own.

“All right, lad, I’ve done with that,” said Lady Sionnan, reaching out. “I’ll take him back, and give you my thanks.”

“No problem.” Reluctantly, Dingus handed off the baby.

“And have a good year,” she said. He realized he’d been standing there kind of a long time, looking at Dominic the Second, and he blushed.

“You, too,” he said, and headed back to the camp. His stuff was already packed, but Vandis would probably want him to help Kessa with hers. Before he went into the woods, though, he saw something on the ground. Leaning over, he saw it was a weasel, all twisted around, swell-bellied, with bloody foam oozing from its mouth. About five feet away, there was half a chewed pastry: strawberry, it looked to be.

Vandis’s favorite. Dingus went cold, then hot. He barged through the trees to the camp with his heart thudding away, yelling, “Vandis!”

“What?” Vandis kicked dirt over the firepit. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

He pressed a hand to his chest. “Tell me you didn’t eat any of that strawberry bear claw.”

“Nah, I couldn’t. Too full. Kessa didn’t want it either. Guess I should’ve saved it for you; sorry, I didn’t even think of that.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Someone gave it to me. They do that sometimes, if they don’t want to take it all the way home.”

“You better come look at this.”

Vandis turned to Kessa. “Keep working on that bedroll.”

“Yes, Vandis,” she said, while Dingus dragged Vandis out
to where he’d found the weasel.

Va
ndis stared at the little carcass in the scatter of pine needles where it had thrashed out its life. Slow, real slow, he lifted a hand and pressed it to his gut, and real slow, he looked up at Dingus, his mouth hanging wide.

“Somebody tried to kill you,” Dingus said. “If you got any more food from people, maybe you want to throw it out.”

Vandis blinked. His mouth snapped shut. “Up to the fair. Booth eighty-six, looking for a blond girl, mole just the left of her mouth. Run.” He leapt into the air and zipped in the direction of the valley mouth. Dingus bolted to the fairground. Up here it was just as deserted, but he found a privy mucker and got directions to booth eighty-six.

It was empty. Dingus went behind anyway, looking for—anything, he wasn’t sure what. On the ground inside, he found an oddly-shaped oilcloth bag, sewn shut and filled with some kind of liquid. He
shook it, frowning, but didn’t dare open it; it might be the poison. He laid it on the front counter of the booth and searched around a little more.

A few minutes later, Vandis touched down in front of the booth, jogging to a stop. “Anything?”

Dingus pointed at the bag. “Just that.”

Vandis snorted. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. If I didn’t feel so stupid right now, I’d be laughing.”

“Why? What is it?”

“It’s a falsie.” At Dingus’s confused frown, Vandis said, “A fake breast. Actors use them when they portray women.”

“I
touched
it!”

“Ha!” Vandis let out a belly laugh. “Thank you for that. You make me feel better that I’m never going to find this guy. Hell, it could’ve been a woman—just in disguise.”

“What about whoever rented the booth? Wouldn’t they have to leave their name?”

“Sure, but how likely do you think it is that they used their
actual name?”

“Oh.”

“Exactly,” Vandis said, picking up the falsie and flapping it around. 

“Could you please not do that?”

He laughed again and tossed it aside. Then he seemed to fold in on himself. “Dingus…”

“Who wants you dead bad enough to wear those?”

“Order of Aurelius,” he said. “At least, I hope so. Otherwise, I’d be looking for it from two angles.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open.”

Vandis nodded. All of a sudden he looked every minute of fifty. “Please do.”

“Y
ou better be careful,” Dingus said. “Don’t take any more gifts or whatever. You shouldn’t—”

“I know.”

When they got back into camp, Dingus insisted on going through his Master’s pack, plus his own and Kessa’s. He tossed everything edible into the nearest latrine and buried it. He made Vandis promise not to eat anything Kessa or Dingus hadn’t cooked for him. He wiped down every last blade with a wet cloth, and when Vandis called him paranoid, he just scowled.

Let them try. They wouldn’t get Vandis, not while he drew breath.

Midnight.

The stars glanced through wispy, shifting curtains of cloud. An old man stood in a fallow field with a sandstone fort rising behind him. The night wind whipped around his ankles and tugged at his white robes. The long grass bowed and rippled before it.

The old man stared at the stone in front of him, a great gray stone that, though it had lain untouched for nearly half a century, still gleamed in the faint moonlight like the surface of the stillest water. He longed to run his hand over it and feel the runes etched there, to run his finger through the crack, but to touch the Stone was death, and Lech Valitchka was far from ready to die.

A nacreous tear dangled from the bottom of the crack, suspended, growing. For long minutes, he watched it shiver there. The bottom rounded, oh, so slowly, and the top stretched until it was no thicker than a thread.

It fell into a bald patch in the grass at the stone’s base. The earth drank the thick fluid until only a wet, softly glittering patch was left behind.

“I can’t do it,” Lech said, hushed, as if in the presence of something huge and holy.

Fell whispering rushed through the grass. It might have been the sound of the wind, but it might have been speech, if one were to bend an ear close enough.

“Ah…” The softest of exhalations fr
om Lech’s lips. His eyes fell shut and white light burned through the darkness behind his lids. He saw.

When he opened his eyes, the etched inscription on the stone had subtly changed, not enough to notice unless one strained sight; but Lech did not. He turned and strode back toward the fort, passing the guards along the way. Their shifts were carefully structured so that no one guard saw him come twice.

He had letters to write.

To be continued in
Saga of Menyoral #3: Oath Bound

Coming Soon

This book would not be what it is without my husband’s unflagging understanding and love. I thank him for everything.

This book would not be what it is without the many wonderful friends I have made since first unleashing Dingus onto the world. I thank them for their since
re support, affection, and love of my fiction-babies.

This book would not be what it is without my beta-readers, who can look upon this work with smug satisfaction, knowing that I would be lost without them.

This book would not be what it is without the editor, John Hart, who delivers ruthlessness with grace and charm. I thank him for helping me to make it beautiful.

This book would not be what it is without the cover artist, Jo
el Lagerwall, who made an image so lovely I could not but raise my expectations of the prose that would go behind it.

Special thanks to M.L. John, for her wonderful support, and to PK Thunder, for
his expert advice on snakes and reptiles.