The Lascar's Dagger (37 page)

Positioning herself at its neck and facing its rump, she slid her hand down the foreleg as she’d seen grooms do. Its ears went back and its hindquarters sidled away from her. From the way it flung up its head, she knew this was not going to be easy.

In the next quarter of an hour, she had acquired a squashed big toe and a bruised shoulder, but still had no idea what was wrong with the hoof. Exasperated, she decided to mount the dapple grey, leave the roan behind and find Saker first.

She’d no sooner made the decision than Prince Ryce appeared over the nearest rise, heading towards her.

When he’d started from Chervil that morning, Ryce knew he was likely to meet up with Sergeant Horntail and his men returning from the shrine after having dumped Saker the night before, so it was no surprise when he saw them coming from a distance. He pulled his cloak around him, put up the hood and tucked his neckerchief over the lower part of his face. The horse he rode was not one from his personal stable, and the only thing that might have given him away were the two fellhounds, and he’d taken the precaution of removing their collars of distinctive royal red leather. He just had to hope Horntail and his men couldn’t tell one hound from another.

They rode past at a trot, apparently oblivious to the fact that they’d just passed their prince.

He did not expect to meet other travellers on the track. With winter not far away, the first snows had already fallen on the high country and heavy mists were prevalent. The pass was a dangerous one to choose to travel to and from the coast.

A good place to leave a man you wanted to die of the cold.

How could Saker have done this? How could I have been so wrong about him?

Sometimes, remembering, he refused to believe it. Saker had been so helpful. His advice had always been good. The man hadn’t made his life miserable with criticism of his carousing and whoring, nor had he tried to drag him off to the chapel every day as other clerics had done from time to time.

Yet the witan’s own life had appeared beyond reproach.

Maybe Mathilda had misunderstood … Maybe Saker could explain what had happened. Maybe he should have asked the man, and interrogated Mathilda on the details.

Fobbing damn, why does life have to be so complicated?
Despairing, he wondered how he was ever going to manage once he was king. Decisions were always so
difficult.

From some distance away, he saw two horses tied to gorse bushes beside the trail, and a man with them. The fellow had dismounted and was attempting to look at the hoof of an unattractive roan. The horse, ears back, was shouldering him away and dancing sideways.

Ryce watched the battle of wills between horse and man as he approached, a conflict made worse by the appearance of his own two dogs to spook the roan further. As he was still hoping Saker would be dead by the time he reached the shrine, he was glad enough to stop.

“Can I help you?” he asked, giving the second horse a sidelong look. A dapple grey.
By the Oak, that’s odd. It looks like Saker’s
. It should now be the property of the Faith, surely.
Pickles ’n’ pox, it
is
Saker’s Greylegs.

Thoughts started roiling in his head. This was the man the guards at the walls of the city had told him about. He felt his ire rising, along with his confusion.
The
Prime
sent someone up here? Why? To kill Saker too? To rescue him?
Who was this scut, and what was all this about?

The man was now standing by the roan’s head, calming the animal as the hounds sniffed at its feet. Ryce summed him up with a glance: slightly built fellow, no rings or jewellery, well dressed, good-quality boots. A newly prosperous merchant, perhaps.

Calling his dogs back, he switched his gaze to the man’s face. For a moment he could make no sense of what he was seeing. The man was the double of Mathilda’s handmaiden, Celandine Marten. Her brother?

They stared at one another, wordlessly, for what seemed to be an age.

“I think perhaps you owe me an explanation,” he said at last, his anger growing, his voice gravel in his ears. “Who the devil are you?”

“Celandine Marten,” she replied, meeting his eyes without a scrap of discomfiture. “Who else?”

For a moment he was rendered speechless, appalled then embarrassed at seeing her without her skirts. Dressing as a man? Her hair tied at her neck like a lawyer’s clerk? Had she taken leave of her senses? And what the pox was she doing here? Still mounted on his horse, he waved a hand at her clothing. “I thought you must be her brother.
Your
brother. If you have one.” He was succeeding in sounding beef-witted, which riled him still further. “Have you no
shame
to dress like that? Not even a bawd from the midden fringe would be so – so disgustingly immodest!”

She shrugged, the gesture insolent in view of her knowledge of whom she was addressing. “If I’d tried to come all this way alone dressed as a woman, I would have been robbed at the very least. So easy for a man to be critical, isn’t it? You don’t have to think of your safety every moment you’re alone! You have your dogs and your sword and your strength and your position. What do I have?” Her glare was fierce. “And what about you, your highness? Have you no shame, sneaking around alone like this, in order to kill a man in cold blood? The man who used to be your spiritual adviser?”

“How
dare
you!”

“Oh, I dare. Easily, because I don’t think things could be much worse for me at the moment. We have much to discuss, you and I, Prince Ryce. But first, would you mind helping me find out what’s wrong with this horse’s hoof? No point in prolonging the suffering of an animal longer than necessary, is there?”

He gaped at her. The quiet handmaiden had turned into an impudent wench, speaking to him as if he was no more than a scullion in a taproom. He was having trouble believing what he was hearing. Had she taken leave of her senses?

“Well?” she asked. “Are you going to come down here and help fix this hoof?”

Raging with indignation, he dismounted, fumbling for his dagger.

When Saker woke in the morning, the sun was already in the sky. He couldn’t believe he’d actually slept. Real sleep, not just dozing. Hours must have passed while he slumbered, because he’d missed the dawn. He pushed himself out of his pile of leaves, astonished to find himself still alive and, as far as he could see, with no frostbite. Even his cheek wasn’t hurting. He touched it gingerly, to make sure it wasn’t frozen, and his probing fingers snagged on the roughness of the scarring. Frowning in confusion and disbelief, he tried to remember everything that had happened.

He’d suffered some sort of phantasmagoria, obviously. He remembered that much. When he concentrated, he could even remember what had been said to him by the people he’d imagined. None of it made much sense.

“Think about it later, you maltworm,” he muttered.
Right now I have to get out of here. I have to free myself somehow, and find somewhere safe and warm by nightfall, or I really will die.
The last meal he’d had, a generous one supplied by Horntail an hour or so before they’d reached the shrine, now seemed a lifetime ago. He was hungry, thirsty, dirty, cold and scared.

Everything he’d once been was indeed a lifetime ago…

He bent to take a look at his fetters.

They weren’t around his ankles. They were lying next to him, opened.

He stared. And stared. Nothing could make sense of that. Nothing, so he didn’t try.
Thank Va. Thank the unseen guardian. Think about it later.

He had to get away, quickly.

Stepping out on to the track, he rubbed his arms in a desperate and futile attempt to keep warm, and started to walk towards the east, away from Chervil. He’d hardly gone three or four steps before he realised there was someone standing in front of him, ten or twelve paces away, blocking the track. His heart pounded furiously in shock. She’d appeared out of the air, and he’d seen it happen. One moment she hadn’t been there; the next she was standing as solid as a statue on the path. Memories of his night came flooding back. This was the lady dressed in green. She was even more beautiful in reality, but her expression was stern. Wordlessly she raised her right arm and pointed back down the track towards Chervil.

He turned to look, but there was nothing to see that had not been there before. His shivering was shaking his whole body and he was no longer sure whether it was fear or cold.

“Who are you?” he asked, staring at her. “What do you want?”

She made no reply.

He continued to walk towards her. But when he was within five paces, he found he couldn’t move. His feet felt leaden, almost as though they were tied down. All the while she pointed back the way he had come.

“What do you want?” he asked again. “Tell me who you are.”

When she still didn’t reply, he tried to walk around her. He thought he’d succeeded, but once again she was there, in front of him, blocking the way. He whirled and looked behind, but there was no one standing where she’d been before.

He turned back to face her again. She was still pointing towards Chervil. Refusing to give up, he tried several times more to leave, but each time she was there in front of him, and if he approached too close, he couldn’t take the final steps, no matter how hard he tried.

At first he was afraid, then furious, then resigned. He returned to the oak to think. Seated on the pile of leaves, his back to the tree, his shivering stopped. He didn’t feel warm, but at least he wasn’t in danger of freezing. In some mystical way, the oak was warming him. Carefully, he thought back over all that had happened, or what he thought had happened, the night before. He’d heard and seen scenes from his past, either imagined or remembered. And then the lady had come to bargain with him, and to give him advice. The bargain, if he interpreted it correctly, was that she would save him now, if he gave his future life to her cause. Her advice had been to look to the twins of Lowmeer. And her cause? That depended on who she was, of course.

She’d said he must have the answer inside him.
She’s not a person, or even a ghost of a person. She’s the unseen guardian of this oak. Only she’s not really unseen, is she? Or is it just me that’s giving her a form and face? She can’t really speak to me. All she can do is take something from my mind and fashion it into a truth I can recognise.

The answer was there, clear in his head.
I thought I saw a goddess, but in truth she is nature, our land, our landscape, our living world, speaking to me.
It was all one. People, the land, the sea, Va. All one, and that was the only truth that mattered, because what mattered was to care for it all. To protect it. That was Va’s desire – or creation’s desire. Or just what was
right
.

With bemusement, he remembered that he had recognised that truth the night before. He’d agreed to her bargain. He’d already given his life away.

He chuckled ruefully and said, “All right, lady, you win. I’ll walk back towards Chervil, to whatever my fate might be. I put my future, my destiny in the hands of guardian witchery. Or Va. Or whatever. I am yours, now and always.”

He could think of plenty of worse fates, after all.

For a moment he glimpsed her again, shimmering in the wan sunlight at the edge of the tree canopy. Her smile was both sad and content. He thought he saw her lips move, but there was no sound.

Somewhere inside his head, though, he knew the truth she’d uttered the night before. If he – or someone else – didn’t succeed, all that was most precious in the world would wither and die. And he didn’t have the slightest idea why.

He started to walk towards Chervil, but away from the shelter of the oak he began to shiver. And so he ran, ignoring the pain of his bare feet on the rough path. Anything to keep warm.

When Prince Ryce came towards her, knife in hand, dogs at his side, Sorrel paled and skipped around to the other side of the horse, from where she eyed the blade with caution. “Why the knife, your highness?” she asked.

Prince Ryce felt himself colour up. He was supposed to kill her. “Your horse may have picked up one of the stones from the track, or need his foot cleaned,” he said, more gruffly than he intended. “If my groom was here, we’d have the proper implement for the job. As it is, this is all I have.” He added in freezing tones, just to show that he didn’t appreciate her suspecting he was about to hurt her, “Now, if you wouldn’t mind holding the horse’s head and stroking its neck to keep it calm…”

His inner voice was more stripped of niceties.
You
are
going to have to kill her, you know that. You’re just playing games.
Something inside his chest squeezed hard, paining him.

She did as he asked, once more the meek servant, at least for the moment. He still had trouble even beginning to understand how – or why – she had reached this spot, and how she had got hold of Saker’s horse. He found it hard to believe her presence had anything to do with Prime Fox. No, she’d come on her own, to do … what? Save Saker? The dapple grey made sense if that was the reason. But why would she want to do that? Why help the man who’d ravished her mistress? And this was the second time she’d helped the wretch of a witan too, damn her eyes…

The hoof problem was caused by a small stone, which didn’t seem to have done any long-term damage. He told her as much after he’d extracted it, and ended by saying, “Now you mount up and head back down to Chervil. Wait for me at the inn.”

He had to kill her right here.
When she turns her back
…

He’d never have a better opportunity. Yet he hesitated.
Va above, how can I murder someone who never did me any harm? That’s not the kind of prince I want to be
.

He knew what his father would say: now that she’d guessed what he was going to do to Saker, her death was even more imperative. Maybe he could slide his sword into her back if she turned around. Maybe he could take her two horses and leave her here, out on the heath, to die of cold. It would be easier that way.

Or so much easier to ask one of his guards to do it back in Chervil. But how long could you trust a guard to keep his mouth shut? A lifetime? Or just until he had a reason to talk?