The Bear sotfk-4 Page 2

  "I don't think I have ever seen a man sit so still and quiet for so long," said a woman, interrupting his communion with the dancing flickers. The edge in that voice, not complimentary, drew him out of his introspection even more than the words themselves. He looked up to see the young mother who had questioned him sharply when he had first entered Hooplin Downs. The toddler stood now in the shadows behind her, which seemed to relieve some of her vulnerability, as was evident in her aggressive stance.

  "All the work is done," he answered.

  "And so is the meal you begged, uh, worked for," she added, her words dripping in sarcasm.

  His eyes narrowed. "I did what I could."

  The woman snorted. "A young man, very strong and quick, who can fight well… and here you sit, staring into the fire."

  That description of his fighting ability tipped her hand.

  "Your husband is off fighting in the war," Bransen said softly.

  She snorted again, helplessly, angrily, pitifully, and looked to the side. "My husband got stuck to the ground by a Palmaristown spear," she said, chewing every word with outrage. "He'd likely be there still if the animals hadn't dragged him away to fill their bellies. Too many to bury, you know."

  "I know."

  "And here you sit, because your work is done," she retorted. "Here you sit, all whole and breathing and eating the food of folk who don't have enough to give, while men and women fall to the spear and the sword and the axe."

  Bransen stared at her hard. She shifted and put her hands on her hips, returning his look without blinking. He wanted to tell her about Ancient Badden, how he had fought a more just war in the northland of Vanguard, how he and Jameston had saved a village from marauding rogue soldiers. He wanted to blurt it all out, to stand and stomp his feet, to scream about the futility of it all. But he couldn't.

  Her posture, her expression, the power forged by pain in her voice, denied him his indignation, even mocked his self-pity. He had his life and his wife, after all.

  "What side are you on, stranger?"

  "Doesn't matter." Bransen dared to stand up straight before her. "Both sides are wrong."

  He saw it coming but didn't try to stop it. She slapped him across the face.

  "My husband's dead," she said. "Dead! The man I love is gone."

  Bransen didn't say that he was sorry, but his expression surely conveyed that sentiment. Not that it mattered.

  "They are both wrong?" The woman gave a little helpless laugh. "You're saying there's no reason we eat mud and go to cold beds? That's your answer? That's the answer of the brave warrior who can dodge a pitchfork and snap its head from its handle with ease?"

  Bransen softened. "Do you wish that I had fought and saved your husband?" He was trying to send a note of appeasement and understanding, but the question sounded ridiculous even to his own ears. His face stung when she slapped him again.

  "I wish you had got stuck to the ground and not him!" She spun away from him, and only then did Bransen realize all the village folk had gathered again to hear the exchange. They looked on with horror, a few with embarrassment, perhaps, but Bransen noted that many heads were nodding in agreement with the woman.

  "It's all a matter of chance!" The woman stomped back and forth before the onlookers. "That's what it is, yes? A hundred men go out, and twenty die! A thousand men go out, and more die." She turned on him sharply. "But the more that go, the more that come home, don't they? A thousand targets to spread the bite of Yeslnik's spears mean that each has more of a chance to miss that bite. So why weren't you there?" She launched herself at him. "Why are you here instead of showing yourself as a target to the archers and the spearmen?"

  This time Bransen didn't let her strike him because he knew the situation could escalate quickly and dangerously for everyone. He caught her wrists, left and right as she punched, pinning them back to her sides. She began to wail openly, keening against the injustice of it all. He instinctively tried to pull her closer to comfort her, but she tore away, spinning about so forcefully and quickly that she lost her balance and tumbled to the dirt, where she half sat, half lay on one elbow, her other forearm slapped across her eyes.

  Bransen's instincts again told him to go to her, but he didn't dare. He looked up at the many faces staring at him, judging him. He held his hands out questioningly, starting to back away.

  A trio of women went to their fallen friend, one pausing just long enough to look up at Bransen and mutter, "Get ye gone from here." Her words sparked more calls. The woman's rant had touched a deep nerve here.

  They weren't interested in his truth. All that mattered to them was the injustice that a young, obviously capable man was sitting here, seemingly untouched by the devastating reality that had visited upon all their homes.

  Bransen took another step back from the outraged woman and held his hands up again, a helpless and ultimately sad look upon his face as he walked away.

  When he was back in the empty forest, wandering the dark trails, Bransen's memory of his encounter in the village only reinforced his growing belief that he did not belong here… and perhaps not anywhere. He thought of Cadayle, the one warm spot in his bleak existence, and of their unborn child. Was he damning them both to a life of misery by his mere presence? Should he, after all, go the way of the younger Jameston Sequin, the way of the recluse, and not the way of the Jameston who had made the fateful and errant decision to come back into the wider civilized world?

  What kind of husband would drag Cadayle and their babe into such an existence?

  That question nearly drove Bransen to his knees. The implications were too harsh for him to even entertain their possibility.

  Where would he fit in? How would he ever fit in?

  And most important of all, why would he want to?

  TWO

  The Inevitable Spiral

  Prince Milwellis burst into the barn with a roar of defiance. Flames ate at one wall, but the mob battling within hardly seemed to notice, so desperate was their struggle.

  The young, red-haired warrior prince rushed at one nearby fight, where a Palmaristown man lay bloody on the floor and two others tried desperately to keep up the with the furious movements of the red-capped dwarves darting all about them. One soldier scored a hit with his sword, a solid stab, but the dwarf shrugged it off and returned with a smash of his spiked club that shattered the man's knee. Only Milwellis's intervention prevented a second and more devastating powrie strike as the soldier tumbled in agony.

  The prince struck with his sword, a devastating slash across the powrie's chest that sent the dwarf stumbling back… but just a step. The ferocious little beast came on again with a snarl and a howl and a most wicked grin. Milwellis fell back, not willing to trade blows with the powrie. As he retreated he shoved his remaining comrade toward the dwarf.

  That man, too, stabbed the dwarf hard, a strike that would have felled most opponents. In response the soldier got the club right between the eyes, a spike stabbing into his brain. His legs dropped from under him. As he fell he twisted the dwarf's club awkwardly, tying up the creature.

  Milwellis stepped in. This time his clean strike at the powrie's neck finally finished the vicious little thing.

  Milwellis jumped back and looked for the next opportunity. Beside him, the man with the crushed knee pleaded for help.

  "Silence, fool!" Milwellis hissed, kicking the wretch to silence. "Crawl out of here!"

  The fires reached across the ceiling, the barn surely lost. Milwellis and his men knew it and worked toward the door, but the remaining powries-the prince was shocked to see that there were only three others-fought on as if they hardly cared. Another Palmaristown man was pulled down and slaughtered and then another, though the last desperate swing of his sword managed to take one powrie with him.

  Milwellis pushed his way through the door, tripping over the man with the shattered knee. The barn roof fell in behind them, sending sparks and embers flying into the night sky. Milwellis regained hi
s footing and brushed the dirt from his clothes, storming about, cursing every step. "Only four?" he yelled in outrage. "Only four?"

  For he had lost nearly a score of fighters in that barn, killed five to one by powries.

  "Easy, my son," Laird Panlamaris begged a few moments later, the old man riding over at the sound of Milwellis's bellowing.

  "Four, Father!" said Milwellis. "Four wretched powries held that barn for half the night and killed a score of my finest warriors."

  "These are formidable foes," Laird Panlamaris agreed. "A bitter lesson I learned decades ago upon the sea."

  "They are the curse of Honce," said another who rode up, a giant of a man, wearing the brown robes of the Order of Abelle. "Do not forget who loosed the evil upon us."

  Prince Milwellis eyed Father De Guilbe squarely and nodded, his face locked in a hateful grimace.

  "Dame Gwydre did this," De Guilbe said. "Dame Gwydre and Father Artolivan, the heretic who claims to rule the church."

  "They will pay with their blood," vowed Milwellis.

  "Not to doubt," agreed the Laird of Palmaristown, whose once-great city now lay before him in near ruin, the devious work of barely a hundred powries. "When Palmaristown is secured once more, the scourge of red caps driven into the Masur Delaval and drowned like the rats they are, I will sweep Gwydre's Vanguard into ruin."

  "Do not forget Chapel Abelle, I beg," said De Guilbe. "If I am to take my rightful place as leader of the Order of Abelle, loyal to King Yeslnik and you, Laird Panlamaris, then I must be properly seated at the chapel that has come to be the center of power for my order. No replacement chapel, however grand, will suffice."

  "Not even if King Yeslnik builds you the grandest one of all in Delaval City with a congregation numbering in the thousands?" the laird asked.

  Father De Guilbe couldn't contain his grin about that intriguing possibility, though he quickly dismissed it. "Only if the rot at Chapel Abelle is cleansed," he declared. "A grander chapel would, indeed, be a step forward for the church, but only if the disease that has rotted its core, Chapel Abelle, is cleared from the land. Else that rot will continually spread, and the lies of Artolivan and his cohorts will undermine any of my efforts to bring the flock more in line to the edicts of King Yeslnik and the lairds who rule Honce. We cannot ignore Chapel Abelle!"

  "And yet, friend, we would not again throw our men at those walls and against the gemstone barrage of a hundred brothers," Milwellis reminded him no. He looked to his father, whose face was locked in a grimace, his teeth grinding.

  "Look at your city nearly burned to the ground!" De Guilbe shot back.

  "We will trap them in their hole and take all the land about them," Prince Milwellis promised. "We'll keep them in and keep them silenced."

  "We will bombard them until they fall upon their own knives out of madness and despair," Laird Panlamaris added, growling out every word. "From the field and from the sea! We will fill their walls with thrown stones."

  Both De Guilbe and Milwellis thought the remark to be mostly bluster. To truly sack Chapel Abelle would require a vast army and armada at a price untenable to King Yeslnik's designs, particularly now that vicious powries had entered the fight on the side of their enemies. Certainly the wizened and seasoned Laird Panlamaris understood the truth of his words.

  Prince Milwellis stared at his father and saw no hint of doubt in his steeled gaze.

  "Come along," Laird Panlamaris told all around him, his voice still thick with simmering rage. "We've more powrie rats to catch." The rocking of the ship across the currents and waves of the great river seemed much more acute belowdecks. Yeslnik expected that he would find his wife with her head out of their private chamber's porthole, "feeding the fish," as Captain Juront of his flagship (newly named Grand Dame Olym in honor of his wife) often called it.

  He was pleasantly surprised to find that Olym was not at the window and didn't seem to be heading there anytime soon. Dressed in fine and revealing lace, her smile only adding to the obvious invitation, the Queen of Honce leaped upon her husband as he entered, wrapping his slight frame in her ample arms. Smothering him with passionate kisses, Olym reached over to shut tight the cabin door.

  "There are powrie boats in the river," Yeslnik managed to say between kisses.

  "We will destroy them," Olym rattled back in a single breath as she drove him back with a ferocious kiss and pushed him onto the bed.

  "We will make Palmaristown in the morning," Yeslnik went on. "The city is in great disrepair. Hundreds were murdered by the dwarves."

  "You will destroy them," Olym said without the slightest hesitation or reservation. She sat up and straddled him, pulling aside the folds of her garments. "You are the King of Honce. You are Yeslnik the Terrible, and all will tremble before you!"

  She began clawing at his shirt, trying to undress him and herself furiously as the moment of passion swept her away.

  "Yeslnik the Terrible," the foppish young king whispered to himself during the frenzy. He liked that. And he liked more the wild passion that had come over his wife of late! He had slunk back to Delaval from the far west, from the gates of the city of his greatest foe, Laird Ethelbert, in near despair, the promises of a swift victory slipping away. Emotionally flailing about, unsure of his next move or even of any point of any possible next move, Yeslnik had found strength in the least expected place: the arms of a wife who had cooled to him greatly over the last couple of years and, indeed, who had taken an obvious fancy to the rogue known as the Highwayman, the very same dog Yeslnik blamed for the murder of his uncle, King Delaval.

  Even as Olym began to almost savagely ride him, Yeslnik recalled that the chasm between him and his wife had widened after Yeslnik's embarrassment on the road in Pryd a year before. His coach had been assailed by powries, and only the Highwayman's intervention had saved the day. Of course, the rogue had then humiliated Yeslnik and stolen from him!

  Olym had turned from Yeslnik then and toward the knave! Yeslnik had been blaming the Highwayman for his conjugal troubles, but now, finally, pinned beneath his nearly frantic wife, he understood the truth. Power and danger drove this woman's hungry loins. She wanted-nay, demanded-a man who would crush the skull of an enemy under his boot with hardly a thought, a man who carried a sword more often than not bloodied with his enemy's entrails.

  Lady Olym wanted a king, not a peasant! And this wild creature riding him to levels of pleasure and passion he had never thought possible deserved nothing less.

  He was Yeslnik, King of Honce, and woe to those fools who did not drop to bended knee before him! He was Yeslnik the Terrible. Look upon him and be afraid.

  Every time the people of Palmaristown believed they had rid themselves of the scourge that had crawled from the Masur Delaval in that awful night now called The Dark of Long Murder, another group of powrie dwarves reared its ugly head. And no matter the odds, those dwarves fought with their typical fury. The ratio Prince Milwellis had seen in the barn held pretty closely with each incident: Nearly forty powries had been killed or captured by the end of the second day, but the Palmaristown garrison had also lost more than two hundred warriors.

  Back in his castle, which had mostly survived the fires, Laird Panlamaris took every report of powrie incidents with a heavy and resigned grunt, followed immediately by a slam of his large fist upon the armrest of his oaken throne. He waved away the newest crier who had come in to relate that a single powrie had killed eleven people in the market district before they had tied him down.

  Panlamaris sank back wearily in his seat and muttered curses at Dame Gwydre under his breath, not wanting the guards in the room, their morale already low, to hear him.

  His son, though, was not nearly as diplomatic. "Why are you not more outraged, Father?" Prince Milwellis rushed forward to stand before the throne. "How can you hear of these murders and not scream and thrash?"

  Panlamaris's old eyes narrowed at his impetuous son. "To what end? We have shallow graves filled with hundreds of
Palmaristown bodies. There will be more, many more, before this is settled."

  "Eleven more now," Milwellis spat.

  "You hold your sarcastic tongue," Panlamaris growled. He let his glower sweep the room, stealing any widening grins before they could begin. "I will not be mocked by anyone, least of all my son."

  Milwellis looked about to argue, but he bit it back and bowed low in deference.

  Panlamaris eyed him with amusement now. "You think me not outraged enough, my son?"

  Milwellis could contain himself no longer, beating his chest with one fist. "I would go to Market Square and choke the powrie dead with my own hands," he replied through clenched teeth.

  "A rather easy death for a powrie, then." Panlamaris gave a hateful little chuckle. "Perhaps I am more angry than you."

  Milwellis and all the others in the room looked at the old laird curiously.

  "How many powries have we in our dungeons now?" Panlamaris asked.

  "Twenty-seven, my laird," one of the guards answered. "Twenty-eight if this latest survives the mob at Market Square."

  "The rat'll live," another said. "Hard to kill the damned things."

  "Prepare twenty-eight stakes," Panlamaris announced. "Tall stakes."

  Prince Milwellis was about to learn much from his father in ways he had never expected. I've spent many a day killing these little rat-dogs," Panlamaris explained later as the stakes were prepared to his specifications in the city square. "Not too sharp," was the order, for a sharp stake would cause such overwhelming trauma as to reduce the duration of the suffering.

  "Never thought we'd have to fight them again," said Harcourt, hands on his old hips as he watched the construction. Panlamaris's trusted general had been in the east serving as advisor to Milwellis. "Never wanted to."

  "We'll chase them off like we did on Durbury's Rock," Panlamaris promised. He turned to Milwellis, who, though listening, stood staring past the two old warriors toward the spectacle in the square before him. The first powrie prisoner had been dragged from the dungeon and stripped of his ratty clothing. Bound hands and ankles to four horses, the dwarf was naked and laid out spread-eagled in the square.