TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate (55 page)

'Orders
.'
insisted the guardsman, laconic, while Jieret lay pinned, sweat streaked, and panting amid the rucked wads of his bedding. 'We're to keep him alive, no matter how cross-grained.'

'Well, my master can treat him, and bleed for the privilege!' The offended assistant snatched up his satchel and stamped off, trailed by the exasperated yell from the guard as he stormed on his way through the tent flap.

'Better yet, send back the lads who doctor the oxen. They'll have the muscle to hold the brute down. We'll clean up the mess once your tincture takes hold. If you want, you can smash out his damnable teeth once he's meek as a babe and knocked senseless.'

Footfalls went and came again, this time in heavyset force. Rammed flat by strong hands, Jieret smelled mud-splashed boot leather and the mustier fust of fabric stained pungent with iodine.

'This time, we'll use poppy
.'
the healer announced, surly for the disruption keeping him from his rounds. 'Triple the dose. Leave his teeth in his mouth. The drug won't be kindly. Dharkaron Avenger will send yon clan devil his torment in the form of harrowing nightmares.'

'Light avert!' gasped the guard, no benediction spoken for Jieret's sake, but a reflexive protest to cancel a heretical oath that invoked the ancient powers.

Incensed by that faith in Lysaer's false cause, as well as the grinding ignominy of a life fallen prey to Alliance usage, Earl Jieret strained in redoubled effort. As his pack of armed keepers swayed off-balance, he burst a knot, tore chafed skin, and jerked one of the ties off his wrist. The victory won him no satisfaction. His blind strike at the guard was curtailed by mailed fists, Then the heavies who bullied the ox teams arrived, and he was knocked breathless and spread-eagled.

'You loutish fools, you've reopened his shoulder!' the healer carped from the sidelines. A knife blade was jammed between Jieret's closed teeth, his jaws pried apart to a chipped grate of enamel. Someone wearing spiked gauntlets crammed a paste ball of poppy through his lips, then clamped his mouth shut by main force. Whether he swallowed or not never mattered. The wound that remained at the root of his tongue flooded the remedy into his bloodstream.

Pain faded first. The rambunctious talk of the enemies crowding his pallet subsided into a spray of meaningless noise.

Under the bandages wrapping his eyes, Jieret wept for the loss. He could do nothing,
nothing at all,
but tremble in assaulted nutrage. The drugged juice whirled him dizzy, then pitched his awareness down and down, into the ink darkness of Sithaer's nethermost pit.

After that, nothing touched him: not the fresh round of cautery
t
o staunch his torn shoulder, or the hands which turned his head,
pu
t a knife to his nape, and hacked off the russet length of his
cl
an braid. By then, he traversed a landscape of dream, cast beyond reach of physical pain, and whirled outside of bodily
a
wareness.

The raven came. She folded jet wings, all the colors of night,
a
nd stood on his chest like a sentinel.

'Help me,' Jieret begged. 'Let me not die enslaved.'

The bird regarded him, first with the left eye, then swiveled her head in fixed gaze with the unwinking right. As though she lested his plea for sincerity, she wasted an interval, preening.

Shackled in darkness, Jieret screamed for release. 'Let me not break the blood bond I hold with Prince Arithon. On his life, my oath of service to the realm stands or falls. He is my sons' and
d
aughter's irreplaceable stake in the future.'

The raven flapped her wings once and cawed, sharp and shrill with impatience.

'By my Name,' Jieret begged. The cry of his spirit swelled and east rolling thunder across the cavernous vault of his dream. 'Let
th
e Fellowship Sorcerers rise to meet Rathain's need. I grant free permission. Let them to do as need dictates. For the heritage of my forebears, I will bear the cost and the sacrifice.'

For one instant, the raven regarded him again, a chipped jet
fig
ure of limitless majesty. Then she dipped her head in salute, bent, and hammered her beak straight down into Jieret's chest.

The blow punched through skin and muscle and bone, and pierced the core of his beating heart. He felt no pain. When the
rav
en withdrew the black awl of her bill, there came no fountain
of
blood; no trauma of outraged sensation. Fear dissolved. Enveloped in a moment of childlike wonder, Jieret was consumed by
a
t
ranscendent peace that blazed into a paean of welcome.

Then the raven spread dark wings a
nd flew. A rising, spiraling gid
diness arose, as the sucking wind of the void blew and
wh
istled through the hole her presence left behind. As though cine tangible mooring had been cut, Jieret felt a release. Caught like a sail in an updraft, his awareness launched upward and partnered the raven's free flight.

T
he cloth wall of the tent posed him no barrier. Objects were not solid by the dictates of mage-sight; recast as loomed energies, the canvas became as substanceless as cloud vapor. Creature of wild magic, the bird passed straight through, and the man, a spirit unmoored from his laboring flesh, followed its swooping lead skyward.

The hills of Daon Ramon unfolded below, clothed in velvet snow. Brush brake and briar seamed the gullies like black stitching, with the muddy sprawl of the Alliance encampment a marring rickle of trampled ground. The sky overhead was a rinsed, gentian blue, and the cries of the officers, strident. Laced through the joined fabric of winter landscape, under its lid of clear air, the purl of lane forces glimmered and waned, a sparkle of tinseled embroidery.

Then across that tableau, an inflamed streak of scarlet, where dogs with no voice had been leashed into couples by human handlers to track down unnatural prey.

Jieret's sight snagged on that thread of disharmony. The activity ignited the wish of his heart:
that he should know whose footsteps they hunted.
He beseeched assurance that the quarry hounded to flight was not the last Prince of Rathain.

A wingbeat ahead, the raven glanced back, the sunlight a sheen of metallic filigree on the edges of wind-riffled feathers. Creature of magic, the bird sounded the measure of the spirit she had drawn in tow, her eye an unwinking jet bead.

Then the black gaze swelled and swallowed all the world, hurling Jieret's altered vision headlong into his gift of prescient Sight. . .

* * *

The first enemy patrol had not found Braggen because he had holed up under the cobwebbed, black timbers of a posthouse mule shed that had twice been damaged by fire. The neglected thatch leaked. The rest of the structure stayed standing through shoddy repairs because the grandame of the head hostler was a simples woman who knew a few spells to bind wood. Since her mother before that had been clanborn, her grandson was known to the scouts who raided the Mathorn trade road. For gold or for payment in contraband spirits, the man would sometimes harbor their wounded, or provide a fresh horse to a man pressed under closing pursuit.

At lawful need, the mule shed was used for overflow stabling, as shelter for hot-tempered stallions, or for mares in fresh heat who kicked and squealed, damaging stall boards while teasing the insolent geldings.

For that reason, nobody troubled to question the hoof marks leading to and from the inn's gatehouse and the main stable.

By midafternoon, within the same hour as six couples of hounds, two appointed handlers, and Skannt's best headhunter tracker left the Etarran camp and streamed over the hills toward the trade road, Braggen was touched gently awake.

He opened his eyes. Patches of afternoon blue shone through the singed thatch, and under them, the tousled brown hair and inquiring, grimed face of the hostler's second-string groom.

'The remounts you asked for are saddled and ready,' the boy informed his illicit guest.

Braggen rolled and sat up, a gruff set to his lips for the twinging protest raised by his stiffened limbs. If the mere thought of straddling a horse felt like agony, he lacked time and resource to waste his breath in complaint. Expressionless, he brushed a stuck stem of timothy from his cropped bristle of beard. His blunt fingers had not lost their dexterity as he caught up the silk-wrapped sword he had slept on. A second glance reassured him: the bundled form of the prince still lay quiet beside him, packed safe as a goblet of Falgaire glass in a piled twist of straw bedding.

'Provisions?' he asked.

'Packed in the saddlebags, along with a flask of neat spirits.' The boy shot a strained glance over his shoulder. 'There were riders, this morning,' he admitted. 'They stopped for mulled wine and asked after a man who'd pinched clothes from a sunwheel officer.'

Clad in his own forest leathers, Braggen finished the thought with gruff bluntness. 'Nobody expected us, and so no one searched.'

But the next party who came making inquiry would not be as slack, or as trusting. If the posthouse was honest, the head hostler had a long nose for trouble. Friend to the gold the clans paid in exchange for his blind eye and his covert assistance, he likely sensed today's fugitives were not routine scouts on a raid to lift some town courier's state dispatches.

'Don't worry. We'll be deep into the foothills as soon as may be.' Braggen accepted an offering of tough bread and sausage from the boy. He chewed with tense economy, caught Arithon up, and arose from the straw, his Grace draped like a meal sack over his shoulder. The readied horses stood in the mule shed, two of them grain-fed post mounts, shod with steel caulks for sure purchase on ice, and three others, slope-shouldered mountain ponies with tough legs and feather-clad hooves.

The head hostler hauled up the billets and tightened the last girth. At Braggen's approach, he looked around, a man with a face like cracked shoe leather, and knuckles rouged as cherry wood knobs from the persistent cold. 'Your man looks dead,' he observed, clipped to exasperation as he strode to Braggen's side. Tight buckles and stiff harness were his stock-in-trade. His chapped fingers made swift work of strapping the Prince of Rathain astride the restive mare chosen to bear him.

Under the crusted dressing, and the wisps of blood-clotted gray hair, the subject under discussion never moved. His breaths came shallow and too widely spaced.

Braggen said, emphatic, 'If you're caught under questioning, then assuredly, he's dead. Or best still, he hasn't ever been here.' To the hostler's startled glare, he shrugged without sympathy. 'That's why you get soft taking risk pay.' Braggen took the reins of the unmarked bay gelding, adjusting the stirrups for his stout length of leg. The metal irons, with wise foresight, had been muffled with flannel. One less detail of two that might slow him; he broached the other forthwith. 'The liver chestnut mare with the crooked blaze I brought in, did you mask her?'

'Used walnut dye. Won't anybody see that marking at all till she sheds to her summer coat.' The hostler watched Braggen mount, a critical crook to his mouth as he satisfied himself that his fastest gelding would be carrying a man who could ride. Inspection complete, he passed over the laden horse's lead rein. 'The ponies aren't stupid, either,' he resumed, his brown eyes seamed with reproach. 'Should follow your lead without a restraint, as long as their bellies stay full. Let them get hungry, they'll find their way back here, no matter if they're tied or not.'

But Braggen was too shrewd to be hooked into pointless talk. He would not be raiding couriers, or harrying the road, but bound at a hagridden clip straight upcountry. Above the Mathorn foothills, blooded mounts would be useless, and a tied pony became staked kill for the wolves. Draped against the bay's neck to clear the low-slung rafters, he gathered his reins, prodded with light heels, and wheeled his responsive horse toward the shut doors of the shed. 'When you're ready.'

'You were the one who insisted on leaving before sundown.' The bay snapped its head as though the rein had been jerked
.'
and the hostler sourly relented. 'Our morning string is let out to pasture this hour anyway. Serving girls are eating,
and the Narms
coach isn't in. You get seen leaving now, it's sheer rotten luck.'

Braggen slapped his fist to his belt knife, his beard split in snarling agreement. 'For eighteen royals, gold, we leave during daylight, and luck has no part of the bargain.'

Surly now, his rough cheeks leached white, the hostler set the boy to peering through a knothole. Given the signal the yard was still empty, he slipped the bar in one motion. The doors swung open on soundless, oiled hinges.

His square features frown lined, and his pinched shoulders huddled into his hay-sprinkled jacket, the hostler saw Braggen through, then closed and bolted the crossbuck doors behind him.

'He'll breach the pasture fence,' he informed his shivering horseboy. 'When he does, we aren't going to notice until sometime past sunrise tomorrow.'

Together, the pair watched the taciturn clansman spur away, masked almost at once by the striped fall of sunlight through the straight trunks of the aspens. Hard on the bay's heels, the string of ponies flattened furry ears, forced to a brisk trot up the steep trail to the meadow.

The old hostler shook his head, touched by a foreboding that clenched sour knots in his belly. 'That man's not from Halwythwood. Sure as foals suckle milk, if he's of northern lineage, he knows something dangerous we don't.'

The horseboy stopped pressing nervous patterns in the snow with his boot toe. 'The risk pay is serious? You think we're going
t
o be questioned?'

The hostler pursed his lips. 'Sure hope not. But I suggest you take a nap in the hayloft, just in case. Don't stop drinking the beer I send up till you're knocked puking flat and stunned witless.'

'Sithaer's blazing furies, man!' The boy rolled his eyes. 'Last
t
ime we did this, I had to chase strays with a tongue like mulched straw and a headache!'

'You'll have much worse,' the hostler promised, his foreboding pressed beyond avarice to open regret. 'I'll cut the switch myself and warm your arse to match, if hell breaks loose after that fugitive!'