Miles Cameron - The Fell Sword

‘The letter will wait,’ he growled, pushing her backwards.

‘Aren’t you too old for this sort of thing?’ she asked.

An hour later, they sat on heavy chairs in the castle’s Great Hall. She wore a heavy gown of blue wool as fine as velvet, spangled with gold stars embroidered by her ladies, and he wore the blue and yellow livery of the Muriens in Morean satin. They were of an age, and he had more grey than dark brown in his hair and beard. He looked like a rapacious eagle, and she looked like the eagle’s mate. Their eyes met often, and their hands touched constantly, two people who’d just made love and couldn’t quite let go.

Ticondaga was one of the great castles of Alba – the key to the Wall, the strongest rock against the Wild. Rising four hundred feet above the forest floor, commanding a bay on the lake with access to the Great River, Ticondaga was reckoned impregnable by Man and Wild alike. But the cold granite walls sixty feet high, the massive gatehouse, the three concentric rings of walls and the gargantuan donjon, the lower floor carved from the living rock of the mountain, while militarily magnificent, made the living uncomfortable most of the year and downright harsh in mid-winter. Late summer was merely cold in the morning. Everyone wore wool at Ticondaga.

The Great Hall seated the entire garrison for meals – sixty knights and four hundred soldiers and their wives, paramours, lemans, or whores. It was the Earl’s view that seeing his men eat three times a day kept them loyal, and thirty-five years in the saddle of the greatest and most dangerous demesne in Alba hadn’t changed his views. So breakfast was served to almost five hundred people – porridge, tea, scones and clotted cream and preserves and cider. When he had noble visitors, he’d serve fancier foods, but the Earl of the Westwall liked plain food in massive quantities, and he was famous as far away as Galle as a generous lord. His people ate well .

Once there had been six great castles on the Wall, and six lords in the north. Before that, they had been legates of a distant emperor. In the distant past, when the stones of the hall’s foundations were new, the Empress herself had sat in this hall.

Times had changed, and the Earl’s ancestors had sought dominion over the north, on both sides of the Wall. More, as the Wall mouldered it lost its value as either fortification or boundary. In the last hundred years, the Muriens had built their lordship at the expense of the Southern Huran across the river and the lordships to the east and west who were nominally allies and near relations.

The Earl himself had completed the job, vanquishing the Orleys in a series of pitched battles in the woods and a climactic siege of Saint Jean, once the mightiest fortress on the Wall. Young and full of vigour, sorcerously aided by his wife, the Earl had toppled the Orleys, taken Saint Jean and razed it; throwing the bodies of each and every Orley, their children, their women, and their servants into the blaze. It was a victory so total that the old King hadn’t bothered to declare him forfeit, and the young King was his wife’s brother and not inclined to make trouble. The old King had fought the great fight at Chevins with no help from the Muriens and died soon after, and the young King had never attempted to make his writ felt in the north.

For a while, there were the usual rumours that an Orley heir survived. Murien laughed at them in scorn and ploughed their monuments and their peasants alike under the rocky soil. As his sons grew to manhood, no one challenged his primacy as Lord of the North.

Lady Ghause stretched like a cat, showing a fine length of stocking that made her mate growl again. She ate her way through a small pile of scones and licked raspberry jam off the spoon with a curl of her tongue and then ran her eyes over him.

‘Stop it, witch! I’ve work to do.’ He laughed.

‘There was talk of a letter?’ she asked. ‘Work? The Cock of the North? You do no work.’

‘The Huran have a feud dividing their clans – they’re close to war. The Sossag grow stronger and the Huran weaker, and that’s my business. I’ve a rumour of Moreans among-’

Ghause took another scone. ‘The Moreans always have men among the Huran. It stands to reason – they share that part of the Wall.’

‘Woman, if you eat that many scones every morning you’ll have thighs like the pillars of this hall.’ He laughed at her appetite.

‘Churl, if you were as fit as I the scullery maids would more willingly jump into your bed,’ she said.

‘The way their swains jump into yours, bitch?’ the Earl spat.

‘I find that older trees have harder wood,’ she said, and he almost choked on his cider. He shook his head. ‘Why do I love you, you selfish, vain sorceress?’

She shrugged. ‘I think you like a challenge,’ she said, and motioned to her third son, Aneas, who waited below the dais for her orders. He was her favourite son – absolutely obedient, charming, a fine jouster, a decent bard.

‘Yes, Mother?’

‘It’s time we fostered this lanky by-blow,’ the Earl said. ‘By the virgin, he’s too old to wait on our table. Let’s send him to Towbray.’

‘You said all Towbray’s sons were lechers and sodomites,’ his wife said sweetly.

The Earl poured a dollop of Wild honey onto a piece of heavily buttered new bread and ate it messily, getting the honey on his beard and hands. She could smell the latent ops in the honey. ‘I did. That Michael – what a little hellion! Ran away! If my son did that-’ He shrugged. Paused.

Her lovely violet eyes narrowed. ‘Your son did do that, you fool,’ she said cattishly.

He frowned. ‘You tax me too hard, madam.’ He half rose. ‘Was he mine? Are any of them mine?’ he muttered.

She leaned back. Her eyes held his pinned. ‘The fourth one has a little of your look – and your piggish tastes.’ She shrugged.

He laughed again and slapped his thigh. ‘By God, madame.’

‘By the Enemy, you mean.’

‘I’ll have no part in all your blasphemy,’ he said. ‘Here’s the messenger, and the letter. It’s from Gavin.’

A message from her second son was reason for interest. She pulled her robe closed, leaving just enough flesh on display to keep the Earl – and every other man in the first three rows of tables – looking, and then she crooked a finger at the stranger, a handsome man, middle-aged, in a plain red jupon and high black boots.

‘What news of the southlands, messire?’ asked the Earl. He was interested to see his son had access to a royal messenger. The boy must be in high favour.

The man bowed. ‘I was fifteen days through the mountains, my lord Earl. Have you had word of the fighting in the south?’

The Earl nodded. ‘Ten days ago I had another messenger, but well ere that the Abbess sent me from Lissen Carrak. I know that a strong force of Sossag passed the Wall well to the west – beyond my patrols, I fear.’

‘Ser Gavin sent me from the Ings of the Dorring to tell you that news, and to tell you that the sorcerer Thorn was driven from the field at Lissen Carrak. Ser Gavin thinks he retreated to the north. Several of his friends – who have the fey – felt the same.’

‘Thorn?’ asked the Earl.

‘Shush, naming calls,’ said the lady, suddenly all business. ‘I’ll look for him later. He was once Richard Plangere. Back when we were billing and cooing.’

Her husband raised an eyebrow – they’d gone well beyond billing and cooing in their first fifteen minutes alone together, some twenty years before.

‘It’s an expression,’ she said.

The messenger looked as if he was trying to vanish into the flagstone floor.

‘How is my son?’ she asked.