Page 83

The duchess was not at home when Juste went looking for her later that afternoon.

A visibly curious Lady Verr said she had gone to the harbor, though if it weren’t for the hovering forms of Leonin and Davi, he would never have found her.

She was not at the harbor, but above it, hidden in the encircling roots of an old chestnut tree on the hill by the barracks.

From there she could see all the activity of the docks without being observed, seated in the grass with her chin on her knees.

“My lady.”

Juste dismounted, smacked his horse on the nose when it tried to bite him, and left it to crop the yellowing grass.

Leonin met his gaze with his usual expressionless nod, but Davi still looked as if someone had strangled his pet kitten.

“I hope I am not disturbing you.”

“No, it’s all right.”

Her voice was subdued, but steady, and though he could see signs of recent and prolonged weeping in her face, she was much more composed than he had expected.

There was a fragile steel in this girl.

It was easy to overlook with her soft exterior, but it all but confirmed his suspicions about her past.

Steel was only forged in a crucible.

“I did not think I would find you here,”

he said, gesturing Leonin and Davi back with a wave of his hand.

“Are you busy, Your Grace?”

“No.

I promised Sir Edemir I would look at the harbor,”

she said, nodding toward the busy docks and warehouses below.

“There are always at least two ferries waiting to be unloaded by this time of the day.”

“I see.”

Juste had heard about the problem.

Master Gibel would have been tearing his hair out over it, if he’d had any.

“What have you discovered?”

“I don’t know yet.

It might be a problem with one of the warehouses,”

she said, without much interest.

“The one on the end. ”

“Why do you say that?”

“The porters take a longer time in it.

Maybe.

I don’t know.”

It was too close a reminder of her other work, and her mouth shut.

She knew why Juste had come looking for her.

For a moment, he hesitated, wondering how to approach the subject, and then shrugged.

Neither of them enjoyed small talk.

“Your handwriting could use improvement, my lady,”

he said bluntly, sitting down beside her.

“Though I didn’t think anything of it.

I do remember stopping here and there to decipher a word, but it’s nothing worse than I’ve seen from Miche or Bram.

They’re probably pickier in the Tower.

But it says nothing at all about your scholarship. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

She was holding her head high, but her hands were clenched tightly together in her lap.

“And it is likely that some of the forms are lacking,”

he went on, considering.

“Particularly in your mapping.

There are a variety of methods for such work, and Edemir and I did not teach them to you; we didn’t know you needed them.

But we—no.

I am pleased with what you did. You surpassed my expectations. I found no fault in your method or your conclusions. And it exceeds much of the scholarship of the Tower in one significant area. Can you guess what it is?”

“No.”

“Utility,”

he said, with an edge.

“The Tower produces a great deal of work that is perfect in its form and utterly useless for any practical purpose.

Do you think Edemir would have his secretaries continuing your work to flatter you?”

“No,”

she admitted.

She knew Edemir far too well to believe he would squander his secretaries’ time when there was so much other work to be done.

“Do you think His Grace took fifty men to the Spur because he’s besotted with you?”

“No,”

she repeated, with a startled noise that was almost a laugh.

Her ears turned red.

“Then if you cannot believe in yourself, then believe in us, who believe in you,”

he said firmly.

“We’ve been planning that expedition to the mountains for three months, and we overturned all those plans because we thought you were right.

His Grace is gambling his life on it.

Perhaps he is risking all our lives, next year.

Your work isn’t just thorough, logical, and admirable. It is useful.”

For a while, they sat together quietly, watching the bustle of the harbor below, and Juste found himself watching the men entering the furthest warehouse, squinting to make out the details of their hair and clothing.

He couldn’t see well enough to be sure, but he thought he counted forty seconds for one man and nearly a minute for another before they reappeared at the doors.

It did seem a long time to walk through a building.

“Thank you,”

Ophele said finally.

“I—I did feel terrible.

When I heard him say that.”

“They will apologize,”

Juste promised.

“I don’t want it.

I don’t want to see them.”

Her lips quivered and she pressed them together.

“I mean, I don’t want their apology if they don’t mean it.

If they’re just saying it because I’m a duchess.”

He understood why she would feel that way, but he could not agree.

“They will apologize because they were wrong, but even if they were right, they will apologize anyway, out of respect for your rank.”

“Why?”

she wanted to know.

“Why should they respect me? I haven’t done anything to deserve to be a duchess.”

This was why Juste enjoyed talking to her.

She questioned premises.

“There are many types of authority,”

he said, leaning back against the tree.

“One of which is inherited.

Your father’s divine blood, for example, is an inherited authority.

Because of it, you became the wife of Remin, Duke of Andelin, and so his authority is conferred to you as well.

You are owed respect on the grounds of your birth and your marriage. But if authority is not continuously maintained, and asserted when challenged, then it will pass away.”

“And their insult to me challenges that authority,”

she said, her eyebrows drawing together as if she did not much like the thought.

“It’s like a game no one asked if I wanted to play.”

“You were born into that game, as we all are.

Some of us with better positions than others,”

he added, thinking of his own privileged birth, and the events that had ripped all rank and authority away from him.

“And if you are born to it, then you must rise to it.

You earned a little authority on your own, did you not? Your work on the devils gave you authority on that subject among us, but now the scholars have challenged it.

Is scholarly authority something you want? Will it be useful to you? And will you seek it on our utilitarian terms, or the terms of the Tower?”

“I…maybe neither,”

she said, looking thoughtful.

“I do want to be useful, and I hoped it would help, but…I did it because I was curious.

I just wanted to know where the devils came from.”

“Please continue to be curious,”

Juste said approvingly.

“But all the same, you must maintain your authority as His Grace’s wife, as well as the authority you inherited as a daughter of the House of Agnephus.

Insist upon it, in all its trappings.

Do it for His Grace, even if you do not like it for yourself.

There are many who will try to degrade you to diminish him. Don’t let them.”

They had already discussed this, obliquely.

She knew what he meant.

“Hallows aren’t just trappings of power,”

she said, casting an unhappy glance toward Leonin and Davi, who had moved a polite distance up the hill.

“I don’t want them to follow me around just because it makes me look important.

Or because famous people had hallows.”

“They were people who needed protection,”

Juste replied.

Those were the passages he had marked for her in the book she had borrowed: the stories of past hallows, and the soul-sworn they had defended.

“As you need protection.

Hallows are protectors sworn not just to the devotion of their bodies, but of their spirit.

That is the difference between a guardsman and a hallow.”

“I don’t want anyone’s spirit,” she said.

“That may be,”

he acknowledged.

Remin might be reluctant to push her on this issue, but Juste was not.

“But your position is a difficult one for many reasons.

You are a weapon that might be wielded against Remin, who has many powerful enemies.

You are a princess who is not loved by the Emperor, your father. Your illegitimacy makes you a complication for the Court of Nobles, especially since your father was forced to acknowledge you, so you might marry Remin instead of your sister. Do you realize that some might think that that places you on equal footing with the Crown Princess? And you are the elder sister? It is too dangerous for you to be without hallows, yet with them, you pose an additional problem for the Temple. There are too many areas where your position is ambiguous. You must thoroughly understand what you are, my lady— ”

“I know what I am,”

she interrupted, and he was surprised to see her small face was closed, her eyes averted as she rose.

“Please excuse me, Sir Justenin.

I am tired.”

“Of course, my lady,”

Juste replied, rising to follow.

What was this? “I beg your pardon, Your Grace, if I have overstepped—”

“It’s fine.

Thank you.”

There was that steel, holding her together as they went up the hill, her head held high.

At the manor, Juste apologized again and bid her goodnight, eyeing her with well-concealed curiosity.

He understood people, in a mechanical sense.

Stimulus and response.

Juste was very good at figuring out which buttons to push to elicit the desired behavior.

But he had yet to discover all the levers that moved the Duchess of Andelin.

Out of respect for Remin, he resisted the urge to pry.

But Juste admitted that it was equal parts puzzle and promise that drove him out of his cottage late that night.

Yvain and Dol maintained their watch outside the manor just as they had done outside the cottage, and he nodded to them as he slipped inside the front door, careful to let them see that he went no farther than the entryway.

In the empty, echoing vault of the first floor, he stood and waited, listening.

Whatever she said to his face, there was something that was putting those shadows under Ophele’s eyes.

And he suspected it was not only Remin’s absence, or the callous disregard of scholars.

Just as there had been last night and the night before, there was the sound of feet pacing endlessly back and forth above him, restless in the dark.

* * *

Crassege was a wreckage built on top of a ruin.

Long before the arrival of Ospret Far-Eyes, the hillforts of the Andelin Valley had been the last defense of his people against whatever native horrors troubled them, lost to time and distance.

Even Remin could not name them, and likely never would, for the lore of the Andelin had formed no part of his childhood in the faraway East, and the destruction of the Andelin’s cities and centers of learning meant that its own people could not name their ancient terrors.

But Remin always felt it, when he visited the ancient places of the Andelin: the weight of its long and lonely history, and the layers of foreign magic strung upon it like cobwebs .

“Reinforce the gates and start making torches,”

he ordered as the wagons trundled behind him, winding their way through the perfect spiral of stone walls to the barrow and keep at the center of the fortress.

“At least we left ourselves something to work with,”

replied Tounot, sitting up high on his horse and raking his fingers through his sweaty hair.

It was the torment of his life that his hair was too curly to be neatly confined in a ponytail.

“Do you want everyone in the barrow or the keep?”

Remin squinted at the sun.

“Let’s take a look at both,”

he said, kicking over a stone with his boot.

The other side was glossy black, a shard of the mirror tower that had once dominated the skyline of these hills, a looming obelisk made of oily black stone.

It made his skin crawl.

Fortunately, they had not destroyed Crassege as thoroughly as they had destroyed Ellingen.

The Vallethi forces had already been departing when Remin arrived, their sack of several nearby villages complete, so he had only needed to knock down a few walls to take the fortress, then turned his trebuchets on the obelisk to pound it to pieces.

Once, there had been dozens of these towers dotting the Andelin landscape, monuments of atrocity, but Remin had made it his policy to destroy every one he encountered.

The mirror tower of Crassage was smashed just above its base, jutting from the center of the old keep like a broken tooth.

Long grasses and shrubs obscured much of it, but as he and Tounot clambered into the center of the keep, Remin could still see the Vallethi spell-work carved into the stone, and the handprints sunk deep into its surface, as if that hard black stone had been made of wax.

Those were the hands of Valleth’s victims, some of them scarcely two inches wide.

Babies, sacrificed to feed the Lord of Tales.

“I think the walls are sheer enough to slow stranglers down,”

said Tounot, clambering around the perimeter of the keep wall and testing the stones with a solid kick.

“But those barrow gates are beyond repair.

I say we put the horses and supplies down there, wall it up with stone, and defend the entrance from above.”

“Do it,”

Remin said, after a brief visual survey of the narrowing walls of the inner spiral of the fortress, and the large broken stones on its outer edges.

“Get some horses to start dragging those stones in and throw up some break walls while we’re at it.

If we can slow the devils down on the way in, it’ll be easier to pick them off when they reach this courtyard.”

The walls of the keep dropped twenty feet straight down to the barrow entrance and looked directly onto that open space: a killing ground if there ever was one.

The only unknown was the purring devil.

They had as much chance of fighting it from the keep as from the barrow, but Remin knew most of his men would sooner face a hundred purring devils than spend the night with the remains of a Vallethi mirror tower.

The stranglers were already cackling when Remin and Jinmin lowered the last stone into place over the barrow doors.

There were a few slivers open to give the fellows within some air, and a very unhappy Auber would spend the night with the horses and twenty other men, a large enough force that they had a chance of surviving the journey back to Tresingale if something went wrong.

The rest of the men were with Remin in the keep, armed with bows, throwing spears, and piles of loose rocks.

And absolutely no reason to use them.

It was true that they were almost twenty miles from the forest’s edge; it would take time for the devils to catch up to them.

And how far could devils sense humans? How far could they hear? Did they track scent, like hounds? Did they hear each other racketing when they found a new victim? Once again, Remin thought of Ophele’s treatise, wishing there had been time to discuss it among his men, to compare their own experience.

They had been preoccupied with Valleth throughout the war, with little time to spare for what seemed to be tricky, troublesome animals.

“We ought to let some of the fellows sleep while we can,”

said Tounot, stepping into the torchlight.

Like Remin, he wore his full armor, with the crags of his home in Irenvale engraved on his breastplate in silver and verdigris.

“We just had a strangler on the other side, but Galliard put it down.”

“I’m tempted to build a bonfire and see if we can’t attract a few more,”

Remin muttered, glaring into the dark.

He had chosen to leave the forest and the purring devil, but his stomach was in knots at the thought that it might have worked.

“What? ”

“Nothing,”

Remin replied, shrugging his shoulders as if he could physically shake away his guilt and regret.

There was no point in inflicting it on anyone else.

“I guess this has always been a barren bit of country.”

“Not always,”

Tounot replied.

He had a fascination with history in general and the bloody history of the Andelin in particular, and often had to be pried away from investigating ruins, no matter how hazardous.

“There was a city called Carenton about fifty miles that way, famed for their groves of ironheart oaks.

Livrach was a mining town at the entrance of the Aven Bede, and they had plantations of sugar maples to feed their forges.

But when Valleth came, it wasn’t enough to feed them and their cities to the Lord of Tales. Valleth fed him their work. All the things they made, the things they tended, generations of nurturing and care. It was a mighty sacrifice. There were six great burnings in the 750s, when Valleth’s fires raged out of control.”

His voice darkened as he spoke, evoking the devastation of that burning over these barren hills, lost now to stone and moss.

“Perhaps we will make this place a stronghold again,”

Remin mused, looking down at the spiral of the fortress walls.

“If we sent a force in winter to repair the walls, and stocked the barrow with a year’s supply—”

“Edemir would ask whether that really ought to be our highest priority,”

said Tounot, amused.

“Trying to give me some ruins to study?”

“Well, there has to be some way you can be useful,”

Remin replied, giving him a friendly shove, and laughed as Tounot punched him in his armored side.

They had been trading insults and shoves since they were five years old.

“I’ll remember that next time you need someone to manage the gate passes,”

Tounot retorted, grinning.

“Crassege’s not going anywhere.

We can come back in ’29 as easily as ’28.”

The thought of such permanence was obscurely comforting.

They packed up the next morning after a surprisingly restful night, and though Remin wanted to tell himself it was because they had evaded the purring devil, he couldn’t shake the thought that it had gone in search of an easier target.

It made him all the more determined to reach the Spur.

It was getting colder.

They were deep into the Berlawes now, with the terrain rising higher every day, and the snowcap above them was drawing near.

Four days from Crassege, the weather turned bad, with a squall of sleet and snow that soaked them to the skin, followed by a blustery night that left even the horses short-tempered and miserable.

“Stars, let me be wet or let me be cold, but not both at the same time,”

said Auber the next morning, his teeth chattering as he peeled off his soaking tunic.

Their shelter on a rocky outcrop had kept the devils off them, but not the weather.

The march ground on.

Cold hands, sore feet, and stultifying boredom as the peaks loomed steadily nearer.

It had been two years since Remin last saw this place: Mount Virel, Faelon, the twin spires of Mount Orval and Mount Elun.

There were three Vallethi fortresses within a few days’ march, or what remained of them; Remin had broken them beyond repair, with the intent that he would come back later to assert his borders.

Valleth was in no position to challenge him.

Frankly, the devils were trouble enough for both of them.

It was good that they had left the forest behind.

It gave Remin time to improvise and test their defenses in this more open country, where the steep, rocky slopes only supported occasional stands of pine.

The early windstorm had made for a dangerous trip through the forest, but an easier one through the mountains; there were not enough devils here to threaten them.

Yet.

Remin had no doubt that would soon follow.

By day, he scoured the horizon, seeking the campsites that he wanted.

He had seen a dozen likely places last time he had been in this part of the mountains, but there was one in particular, a high bluff with narrow sides, and stands of pine to feed the torches and support a palisade…

“There it is,”

he said, four days from Crassege.

His breath puffed white with the words, and a light snow was falling.

It took a full day to fortify the camp to his satisfaction.

Really, it couldn’t be fortified against the purring devil; any creature big enough to shake a hundred-foot tree was big enough to knock over a palisade.

But Remin lined the inner walls with the box wagons, providing a platform to archers and spearmen, and mounted spike frames facing outward to deter stranglers.

At the base of the palisade, he and Jinmin dug a trench and shored it up with stones, to keep ghouls from digging under the wall .

And on that thought, he went to Lancer, washing and grooming the horse until his black coat gleamed, picking out the white scars that marred his haunches and barrel chest.

Remin had never been terribly affectionate with his horse, but there was a sympathy between them; Lancer rumbled low as Remin latched his armor into place, testing the buckles and cinches with hard jerks of his fingers.

“Guard,”

Remin ordered quietly, lifting a hand to stroke the horse’s nose.

Lancer bit his palm, his ferocious black eyes gleaming.

The next morning, they broke open the last box wagon.

Heavy cloaks.

Layers of woolen clothing.

Spiked, fur-lined boots that laced tight to their feet, suitable for treacherous terrain and bitter temperatures.

Every man had a belt equipped with coils of ropes, icepicks, and the materials to start a fire.

Every other man carried a roll of extra torches.

Remin handed out rations, personally inspected every man’s armor and kit, and made all of them run up and down the hill beside the camp to make sure no gear went flying.

In his own skin, he felt a familiar jitter of nerves and excitement, that the moment was upon him at last.

He had planned and planned, and now it was time to execute.

When they marched away that morning, he left five men behind to defend their camp and horses.

Three were Huber’s scouts, trained to survive in rough country on only the barest supplies.

The other two were sharp-eyed as eagles and knew how to read the Empire’s smoke signs, which Remin would use as a last extremity to signal what he had found.

He had no doubt that he would find something.