The Last Light of the Sun (24 page)

“Jad of the Thunder!” he exclaimed. His father’s oath. Not an invocation anyone but Erlings new to the sun god were likely to use.

Gareth snorted but didn’t look up from his manuscript. Kendra did, at least, glance at where Hakon was looking, briefly raised both eyebrows, and turned calmly back to her whatever-it-was-going-to-be.

“What?” Athelbert said, evidently awake but not moving, or shifting the hat that covered his eyes.

“Judit,” said Kendra. “She’s angry.”

Athelbert chuckled. “Aha! I know she is.”

“You’re in trouble,” Kendra murmured, placidly plaiting.

“Oh, probably,” said her older brother, comfortably sprawled in deep grass.

Hakon, wide-eyed, cleared his throat. The approaching figure, moving with grim purpose through the summer meadow, was quite close now. In fact…

“She, ah, has a sword,” he ventured, since no one else seemed to be saying it.

Gareth did glance up at that, and then grinned with anticipation as his older sister came towards them. Kendra merely shrugged. On the other hand, Prince Athelbert, son of Aeldred, heir to the throne, heard Hakon’s words, and moved.

Extremely swiftly, in point of fact.

As a consequence, the point of the equally swift sword, which would
probably
have plunged into the earth between his spread legs a little below his groin, stabbed into grass and soil just behind his desperately rolling form.

Hakon closed his eyes for an excruciating moment. An involuntary, protective hand went below his own waist. Couldn’t help it. He looked again, saw that Gareth had done the very same thing, and was wincing now, biting his lip. No longer amused.

It wasn’t entirely certain the blade, thrust by someone moving fast on uneven ground, would have missed impaling the older prince in an appalling location.

Athelbert rolled two or three more times, and scrambled to his feet, white as a spirit, cap gone, eyes agape.

“Are you
crazed?”
he screamed.

His sister regarded him, breathing hard, her auburn hair seeming afire in the sunlight, entirely free of any decent restraint.

Restraint was not the word for her at all. She looked murderous.

Judit jerked the sword free of the earth, levelled it, stepped forward. Hakon thought it wisest to scramble aside. Athelbert withdrew rather farther than that.

“Judit … ” he began.

She stopped, held up an imperious hand.

A silence in the meadow. Gareth had set down his reading, Kendra her grass-plaiting.

Their red-headed sister said, controlling her breathing with an effort, “I sat up with father, beside Osbert, for part of last night.”

“I know,” said Athelbert quickly. “It was a devout, devoted—”

“He is well now. He wishes to see Hakon Ingemarson today.”

“The god be thanked for mercy,” Athelbert said piously, still very white.

Hakon saw Judit glance at him. Ducked his head in an awkward half-bow. Said nothing. He didn’t trust his voice.

“I went,” said the older daughter of Aeldred the king and his royal wife, Elswith, “back to my own chambers in the middle of the night.” She paused. Hakon heard the birds, over by the woods. “It was dark,” Judit added. Her self-control, Hakon judged, was precarious.

Among other things, the sword was quivering in her hand.

Athelbert backed up another small step. Had probably seen the same thing.

“My women were asleep,” his sister said. “I did not wake them.” She glanced to one side, regarded Athelbert’s bright red cap lying in the grass. Went over to it. Pierced it with the sword, used her free hand to tear the cap raggedly in two along the blade, dropped it back into the grass. A butterfly flitted down, alighted on one fragment, flew away.

“I undressed and went to bed,” Judit went on. She paused. Levelled the blade at her brother again. “Jad rot your eyes and heart, Athelbert, there was a dead man’s skull in my bed, with the mud still on it!”

“And a rose!” her brother added hastily, backing up again. “He had a rose! In his mouth!”

“I did not,” Judit snarled through gritted teeth, “observe that detail until after I had screamed and awakened all three of my women and a guard outside!”

“Most skulls,” said Gareth thoughtfully, from where he sat, “belong to dead people. You didn’t actually have to say that it was a—”

He stopped, swallowed, as his sister’s lethal, greeneyed gaze fell upon him. “Do not even
think
of being amusing. Were you,” she asked, in a voice suddenly so quiet it was frightening, “in any possible way, little brother, a part of this?”

“He wasn’t!” said Athelbert quickly, before Gareth could reply. And then made the mistake of essaying a placating smile and gesture.

“Good,” said Judit. “I need only kill you.”

Kendra held up her grass plaiting. “Tie him up with this, first?” she murmured.

“Be careful, sister,” Judit said. “Why did you not awaken when I screamed?”

“I’m used to it?” Kendra said mildly.

Gareth snorted. Unwisely. Tried, urgently, to turn it into a cough. Judit took a step towards both of them.

“I’m a … deep sleeper?” Kendra amended hastily. “And perhaps your courage is such that what seemed a piercing scream to you was really only—”

“I tore my throat raw,” her sister said flatly. “It was the middle of the Jad-cursed night. I was exhausted. I lay down upon a cold, hard, muddy skull in my bed. I believe,” she added, “the teeth bit me.”

Hearing that last, ruminative observation, Hakon suddenly found himself in extreme difficulty. He looked over at Gareth and took comfort in what he saw: the thrashing desperation of the younger prince’s suppressed
hilarity. Gareth was weeping with the effort of trying not to howl. Hakon found that he was no longer able to stay upright. He sank to his knees. His shoulders were shaking. He felt his nose beginning to run. Whimpering sounds came from his mouth.

“Oh, my,
look
at those two,” said Kendra in a pitying voice. “All right, this is what we will do. Judit, put down the sword.” She was displaying, Hakon thought, what was, under the circumstances, an otherworldy composure. “Athelbert, stay exactly where you are. Close your eyes, hands at your sides. That was a craven, despicable, unworthy,
extremely
amusing thing to do and you must pay a price or Judit will make life intolerable for all of us and I don’t feel like suffering for you. Judit, go and hit him as hard as you can, but not with the sword.”

“You are judge here, little sister?” Judit said icily.

“Someone has to be. Gareth and Hakon are peeing in their hose,” Kendra said. “Father would be displeased if you killed his heir and you’d probably regret it afterwards. A little.”

Hakon wiped at his nose. These things did
not
happen back home. Gareth was flat on his back, making strangled noises.
“Teeth!”
Hakon thought he heard him moan.

Judit looked at him, then at Kendra, and finally over at Athelbert. After a long moment, she nodded her head, once.

“Do it, fool,” Kendra said promptly to her older brother.

Athelbert swallowed again. “She needs to drop the sword first,” he said, cautiously. He still looked ready to flee.

“She will. Judit?”

Judit dropped the sword. There remained an entirely forbidding bleakness to her narrowed gaze. She pushed windblown hair back from her face. Her tunic was green,
belted with leather above the riding trousers she liked to wear. She looked, Hakon thought suddenly, like Nikar the Huntress, swordbride of Thünir, whom, of course, his family no longer worshipped at all, having come from bloody sacrifices to the … less violent faith of Jad.

Athelbert took a breath, managed an almost indifferent shrug. He closed his eyes and spread his legs, braced to absorb a blow. Gareth managed to lever himself into a sitting position to watch. He wiped at his eyes with the back of one hand. Kendra had an odd look to her ordinarily calm, fair features.

Judit, who would one day be saluted the length of the isle and across the seas as the Lady of Rheden, be honoured through generations for courage, and mourned in poets’ laments long after the alignments and borders of the world had changed and changed again, walked across the sunlit morning grass, not breaking stride, and kicked her brother with a booted foot, hard (very hard) up between the legs where the sword had almost gone.

Athelbert made a clogged, whistling sound and crumpled to the ground, clutching at himself.

Judit gazed down at him for only a brief moment. Then she turned. Her eyes met Hakon’s. She smiled at him, regal, gracious and at ease in a summer-bright meadow. “Did you four drink
all
the wine?” she asked, sweetly. “I have a sudden thirst, for some reason.”

It was while Hakon was kneeling, hastily filling a cup for her, splashing the wine, that they saw the Cyngael come walking up from the south, on the other side of the stream.

Four men and a dog. They stopped, looking towards the royal party on the grass. Athelbert was lying very still, eyes squeezed shut, breathing thinly, both hands between his legs. Looking across the river at the dog, Hakon suddenly shivered as if chilled. He set down Judit’s cup, without handing it to her, and stood up.

When your hair rose like this, the old tale was that a goose was walking over the ground where your bones would lie. He looked over at Kendra (he was always doing that) and saw that she was standing very still, gazing across the river, a curious expression on her face. Hakon wondered if she, too, was sensing a strangeness about the animal, if this awareness might even be something the two of them shared.

You might have called the wolfhound beside the youngest of the four men a dark grey, if you’d wanted to. Or you could have said it was black, trees behind it, sun briefly in cloud, the birds momentarily silenced by that.

CEINION OF LLYWERTH SQUINTED,
looking east into sunlight. Then a cloud passed before the sun and he saw Aeldred’s older daughter recognize him first and, smiling with swift, vivid pleasure, come quickly towards them across the grass. He made his way through the stream, which was cool, waist-deep here, that she might not have to enter the water herself. He knew Judit; she would have waded in. On the riverbank, she came up to him and knelt.

With genuine happiness he made the sign of the disk over her red hair and offered no comment at all on its unbound disarray. Judit, he had told her father the last time he’d been here, ought to have been a Cyngael woman, so fiercely did she shine.

“She doesn’t shine,” Aeldred had murmured wryly. “She burns.”

Looking beyond her, he saw the younger sister and brother, and what appeared to be an Erling, and belatedly noted the crumpled figure of Aeldred’s heir in the grass. He blinked. “Child, what happened here?” he asked. “Athelbert … ?”

His companions had crossed the stream now, behind him. Judit looked up, still kneeling, her face all calm
serenity. “We were at play. He took a fall. I am certain he will be all right, my lord. Eventually.” She smiled.

Even as she was speaking, Alun ab Owyn, the dog at his heels, walked over towards Aeldred’s other children, before Ceinion had had a chance to introduce them formally. The high cleric knew a brief but unmistakable moment of apprehension.

Owyn’s son, brought east on impulse and instinct, had not been an easy companion on the journey to the Anglcyn lands. There was no reason to believe he would become one now that they’d arrived. A blow had fallen on him earlier this year, almost as brutal as the one that had killed his brother. He had been direly wounded within, riding home to tell his father and mother that their first-born son and heir had been slain and was buried in Arberthi soil, then drifting through a summer of blank, aimless days. There had been no healing for Owyn’s son. Not yet.

He had agreed, reluctantly and under pressure from his father, to be an escort to the Anglcyn court for the high cleric on the path between the sea and the dense forest that lay between the Cyngael and the Anglcyn lands.

Ceinion, watching him surreptitiously as they went, grieved for the living son almost as much as for the dead. Surviving could be a weight that crushed the soul. He knew something about that, thought about it every time he visited a grave overlooking the sea, at home.

KENDRA WATCHED
the young Cyngael come over to them, the grey hound beside him. She knew she ought to go to the cleric, as Judit had, receive his blessing, extend her own glad greetings.

She found that she could not move, didn’t understand, at all. A sense of … very great strangeness.

The Cyngael reached them. She caught her breath. “Jad give you greeting,” she said.

He went right past her. Not even glancing her way: straight brown hair to his shoulders, brown eyes. Her own age, she guessed. Not a tall man, trimly made, a sword at his side.

He knelt beside Athelbert, who lay motionless, curled up like a child, hands still clutching between his legs. She was near enough, just, to hear her older brother murmur, eyes closed, “Help me, Cyngael. A small jest. Tell Judit I’m dead. Hakon will help you.”

The Cyngael was still for a moment, then he stood. Looking down at the heir to the Anglcyn throne, he said, contemptuously, “You have the wrong playmate. I find nothing amusing about telling someone their brother is dead, and would lie in torment eternally before I let an Erling …
help
me … with anything. You may choose to eat and drink with them, Anglcyn, but some of us remember blood-eaglings. Tell me, where’s your grandfather buried, son of Aeldred?”

Kendra put a hand to her mouth, her heart thudding. Across the meadow, in morning light, Judit was standing with Ceinion of Llywerth, out of earshot. They might have been figures in a holy book, illuminated by clerics with loving care and piety. Part of a different picture, a different text, not this one.

This one, where they were, was not holy. The lash of the Cyngael’s words was somehow the worse for the music in his voice. Athelbert, who was, in fact, considerably more than simply a jester, opened his eyes and looked up.

Hakon had gone red, as he was inclined to do when distressed. “I think you insult both Prince Athelbert and myself, and in great ignorance,” he said, impressively enough. “Will you retract, or need I chastise you in Jad’s holy name?” He laid a hand on his sword hilt.