no more votes in so falconburg chapters 1-12 won by a squeak.
Chapter 1
The big man with pale blond hair
shivered.
“Are you sure it’s safe? That he won’t find out?” He whispered,
running his tongue over his dry lips.
His companion gave him a look of
scorn.
“Of course he won’t find out. He’ll be dead.”
“But what if he remembers ….”
“He will be mindless. Your puppet. You have the ritual materials?”
“Yes, Lord Clovis.”
“No names! Come then, we must
blend his fingernail clippings with the bone of a relative and your blood as
his master, along with my own ingredients, and place the two near-identical
smooth stones in the potion. You have
the river stones? One for his heart and
one as a control?”
“Yes my lord.”
“Good. It would work better with his flesh and bone,
but I recognise that this is difficult for an underling to obtain, so the bones
of his ancestors from the churchyard will have to do.”
The blond looked shifty but
nodded.
The cloaked Lord Clovis made a
careful brewing, scorning to explain to his tool what he was doing. Finally he laid the two stones into the
liquid and chanted. When he brought them
out, they had a silvery sheen.
“And now to his chamber before he
awakes, and a poniard in the heart,” he gloated, “And I will be able to see how
well it works before I try it on that old fool Engilbert.”
The blond shivered. If anything
went wrong, this was treason.
He hastened to the castellan’s
chamber, his companion following.
Peter Haldane awoke in a hurry,
confronted by his illegitimate son, the captain of his guard. Before he could register that he was
betrayed, however, the slender poniard had slipped through his skin, between
his ribs and into his heart. He died
surprised.
“Good. Now open his chest and put in the replacement
heart,” said Clovis.
This was something which was
almost the undoing of Kort, Peter Haldane’s son. He was a brutal enough man normally, but this
was his patron and father, even if he was surviving too long, and had failed to
make a will in favour of a bastard son while he had a living, legitimate
daughter. A daughter married to the
warlord, Gyrfalon, who would not accept his wife’s inheritance being
usurped. Better to keep the ailing
Haldane in the semblance of life and enjoy the benefits of being castellan de
facto. He gulped, and cut, and blenched
at the blood.
“I’m wondering whether to cause
death by exsanguination would be a better course of action,” murmured Clovis. “The blood might just putrify quicker if left
in the body; a dry body might last longer before the smell is apparent.”
“Now you tell me,” said Kort,
angrily, thrusting in the stone and sewing up the body, fighting on the desire
to gag as he did so.
“You knew this was an experiment
when you agreed to take part in it,” said Clovis. “You can always have him will his lands to
you now.”
“True,” said Kort. “If Gyrfalon
will accept that.”
“Place it in the hands of the
ecclesiastical court; that will hang it about for years,” shrugged Clovis.
“If Gyrfalon doesn’t decide to
make sure it goes to my next of kin by gutting me,” said Kort.
“He has to catch you; and it’s a
strong castle. I’ll leave you a scroll which you can use to raise all the dead
in the churchyard if need be.”
“That would help. What do I do now?”
“You have put in the new heart and
sewn up the hole. Rather badly, but
never mind. Now put your hand on the
other stone and command him to get up.”
Kort swallowed hard, trying to
keep his stomach contents where they belonged.
Dead men were supposed to stay dead.
Everything in his being screamed at him that this was wrong, and that he
should never have listened to the necromancer.
Too late. One more swallow and he
laid his hand on the stone and thought at the corpse to get up.
It got up.
“Tell him to open his eyes,
moron,” said Clovis. Kort made a face and did so. It was horrible, seeing the staring, unseeing
eyes of his former parent. He started to retch.
“Control yourself!” snapped the
necromancer. Kort swallowed on the thin,
bitter taste of vomit. “Now get him to
speak.”
Kort thought of a trite phrase
like ‘good morning.’
Peter Haldane’s corpse bleated,
loudly.
The necromancer’s staff threw Kort
to the other side of the room.
“What did you do, you
incompetent?” screeched Clovis.
“Did you fail to obtain bones from the churchyard and settled for those from
the midden?”
“I … I was afraid of the dead,”
Kort did vomit then, ashamed as he did of the sharp, acrid taste of his own
fear, remembered and present.
“Afraid of the dead? You idiot, the dead cannot harm you. Not unless I’ve had anything to do with
them,” sneered Clovis. “Well, you will have to make the best of it,
and make sure you tell people some witch has cursed him. He can write notes. He can write?”
“He … yes, well enough,” said
Kort. He got up from the crumpled
position he had been thrown into. “But
it worked.”
Clovis sighed.
“After a fashion,” he said. “I must be going before anyone gets up. Let me know how it progresses.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Kort,
repressing the urge to cross himself. He
had gone too far for that comfort now.
“Floris,” said
Gyrfalon, “I was thinking that when winter starts setting in, it might not be a
bad idea to visit your father’s court.”
“Won’t the
barbarians attack in winter?” the young prince asked.
“No, they have
enough trouble surviving. Much more snow
where they come from than we have,” said Gyrfalon. “So as he is an old man, it would be prudent
to go and see him while he is still alive.
He will want to know what you have been doing, as my page, and he did
express an interest, however badly couched, in meeting me, as well.” He smiled grimly, recalling the
arrogantly-worded letter, written by a scribe, summoning him like a naughty boy
to the capital. Cardinal Alessandro
Cordo had sorted that out very quickly, but King Engilbert never knew how close
he had come to having his summons answered by an invasion.
“Besides, with
the signalling towers in place, and working properly now, there will be plenty
of warning to withdraw all the village and their animals and food within the
walls,” said Falk. “And I presume you
did not mean to take all the church knights from their chapterhouse?”
“No, though I
shall expect Sir Lyall to work with whomsoever I leave as castellan,” said
Gyrfalon. “I should think that Foregrim
will be happier to run the castle, even with attacks, than to make a ride at
military pace?”
Foregrim
shuddered.
“I grow too old
for military pace, my lord,” he said. “I
would rather face a barbarian horde.”
“Good; and
young Lyall is in the habit of doing as you suggest anyway,” said Gyrfalon,
sitting back in satisfaction.
“And what of your wife, my love?” asked Annis. “Not to
mention your son,” she indicated the baby she carried in a sling at her hip,
currently sleeping off his last meal.
“Did you want
to stay, then? No, I thought not,” as Annis shook her pale head.”And our
adopted sister? Pauline? You are not due
for some months. Will you come?”
“I will,” said
Pauline. “I want gold wire to sew up the insides of our people when they are sore
wounded, as it seems to work, especially as we have determined that what Annis
does with her healing is magical, to enhance my skill. I can ride military pace; I never heard that
being pregnant stopped Annis from doing so.”
“I wouldn’t
dare ask her not too,” grinned Gyrfalon. “We are lucky to have you both as
healers.”
“And lucky to
have strong stomachs to put up with tales of healing over breakfast,” laughed
Falk, grinning at his brother.
“Oh, the
children soon stiffen our stomachs,” Annis smiled on Floris, Lukat, and
Wilgarth, her husband’s pages, and on her half-sister Sylvia. Sylvia was more
occupied with a mug of milk and a bowl of porridge than on the conversation.
“I am promoted
from being one of the children?”
Sylvia’s sister, Jehanne asked.
“You are well
on the way to being a warrior,” said Annis, and Jehanne glowed with pleasure.
The elf who
called himself Hrafyn was travelling on his own business. He had been to see his people, but as always
the stay had been brief. Elves kept
themselves to themselves these days, and private and standoffish as most humans
would have considered Hrafyn, he found himself stifled with the same
conversations, same music and same opinions, day in, day out. He had fallen in with a human companion once,
and had found some humans to be stimulating.
He preferred to watch them from a distance, as a child watches a
disturbed ants’ nest, but watching them amused him.
He rarely gave
much attention to the efforts of individuals, but this individual had caught
Hrafyn’s interest.
The low,
autumnal sun flickered golden speckles through the trees in a small clearing,
and danced on the silver-gilt hair of a youth, slender as a wand, slender
almost as an elf. She was using a
longbow to shoot at a target, and it was quite plain that she had never been
taught properly.
It annoyed
Hrafyn.
The bow and its
art were his passion.
The girl gave a
sigh of frustration.
“I am doing
something wrong,” she said to herself.
She was not expecting an answer when Hrafyn said, simply, “Yes.”
His voice had
her starting, and reaching for a dagger as she turned towards the sound. She relaxed slightly at the slender,
leather-clad figure of the elf, hardly taller than herself. She noted the bow
that he carried, and that he raised it with the casual grace of one so much an
expert that he hardly had to think. Almost before she could realise it, let
alone react, he had three arrows in the air. The first thing that she
consciously noticed was three brief thuds, the sight of three arrows growing
out of bullseye of the target, though he was further from it than she was.
“That’s how you
do it,” said Hrafyn.
“Not much help
to me when you are so good that you move faster than I can see, Master Archer,”
said the girl. “Do you look for an apprentice?
I’m not afraid of hard work.”
He regarded
her.
“I do not
generally work with others.” His voice
was slow, every word weighed and considered. “But I will not leave a young girl
helpless. I will start you on the path
of learning.”
“Thank you,”
she said. “My name is Idonea.”
“Hrafyn.”
“Thank you,
Master Hrafyn.”
“Just Hrafyn.”
Hrafyn was an
elf of few words; he took her bow, and placed it in her hand, showing her how
to push the bow away from her when she had the arrow nocked. Once Idonea had been shown the proper
technique, the improvement was dramatic.
“Why?” asked
Hrafyn.
“Why do I want
to learn? You might call my reasons
whimsical.”
He shrugged;
she might expand on that, or not, as she chose.
“It’s a complex
story,” she said. “My mother was a maid
to a great lady, Lady Emblem. Lady
Emblem married, by arrangement of her parents, one Peter Haldane. It so happened that my mother, Edgyth, was
also the half-sister to Lady Emblem, and when Lady Emblem was ill after her
daughter was born, Haldane used my mother.
He threw her out when she conceived me.
The Lady Annis is about two years older than I am, and word is that she
is married happily to a strong marcher lord.
I thought to join her, but I will not be a maidservant. I hoped to bring useful skills as a warrior
to a northern march castle.”
“I have heard
the name of Lady Annis, daughter of Peter Haldane,” said Hrafyn. “Do you know the name of her husband?”
Idonea
shrugged.
“Gyrfalon the
Dark,” she said. “Some speak ill of
him. But it is said by the peasants of
Haldane’s demesne that Lady Annis is good and kind. She would scarce choose, as rumour says she
chose, a man who does not use her well.
Though by all accounts about My Lord Gyrfalon is that he has ever been
less hated by his underlings than our shared father.”
“I … have stood
against Gyrfalon,” said Hrafyn. “I, too,
am following rumour. The rumour that a
friend of mine, Gyrfalon’s brother, has reconciled with him. Our paths lie together.”
Idonea
brightened.
“Will you have
time to continue to teach me if we travel together? I will, in exchange, readily undertake all
camp chores.”
“You have a
good eye. It would be a shame not to
teach you more. I do not need you to act
as a servant. I camp with little fuss.
You humans need so many things. I do not.
I will teach you to camp like an elf.
Have you eaten?”
“You are an
elf? I … I saw the ears but did not like
to ask. I thought all the elves were
dead.”
“No. We … have ways of hiding at need. One day I do not doubt we will disappear,
unless we learn to change. Change … is
frightening. You have not answered me.”
“I … I think it
would be a shame if you disappeared. No,
I have not eaten. I have a bag of meal with me to thicken a stew, and can
recognise some edible herbs and roots. I
hoped to get good enough to hunt one day.”
“You may yet
learn enough,” said Hrafyn. “Determination gets further than pure talent. You
will have to learn the sword from Falk. It has never interested me as much.”
“Tell me about
elves, please!” Idonea was eager.
Hrafyn
hesitated, then shrugged.
“It does not
matter; nobody will find an elf who does not want to be found,” he said. “Elves
are some of the oldest beings. We had magic before anyone; and our magical
skills are valued. We live in forests by
preference. At need, we can merge with a
tree. We build by making trees grow as
we want them to, living architecture. We
value learning and beauty, and music.
There is learning and music and beauty in the firing of the bow. One must become the bow to be a true
archer. There is no arrow, only the
firing. Thus we approach those skills in
which we excel. For me, there is no path
through the woods, only the passing. For
my brother Lwysgain, who is a bard, there is no harp, only the music flowing
from his body.”
Idonea nodded.
“I think I
understand,” she said. “I will find that helpful when learning.”
“Yes,” said
Hrafyn.
