The Three Lands Omnibus Part 21

Knox stared at Carle as though contemplating an exotic plant. I said, "There's no law against killing the King. He can be murdered in a blood feud like anyone else. As a matter of fact, that's how King Rawdon's grandfather gained the throne: he killed the last king of the old royal line in a blood feud. Besides, the King doesn't have any more soldiers than are required to keep order in the capital."

"He didn't at the beginning of the year," Knox amended, "but this feud has flamed up beyond all previous ones. It's no longer a case of one person being killed, then another, then another. The King sends soldiers out to kill whole sections of villages. Then Blackwood does the same with the villages held by the new n.o.blemen; his kinsmen have formed an army just as large as the King's. The priests are ready to tear their robes to shreds. They don't know how to stop this."

"They should have stopped this with the first blood feud," Carle said grimly. "This is what will happen in a land where you resolve grievances by murder." And he exchanged another look with me.

The twenty-sixth day of August in the 941st year a.g.l.

Carle asked me last night to explain the difference between the old n.o.bility and the new n.o.bility. He has heard the terms many times before, of course, but he says that he learned most of what he knows about Koretia from other Emorians, and he now suspects that the Koretian perspective is very different.

"The old n.o.bility are just like the Emorian n.o.blemen," I said. "Each village and town is run by a baron, who is sometimes the head councilman as well-"

"And is the baron also a judge, as in Emorian villages?" asked Carle. "No, I'm not thinking; the Koretians don't have judges."

"The village or town priest is the judge; he interprets the G.o.ds' law. At any rate, the baron's t.i.tle is handed down to the nearest male heir. The King can persuade the priests to declare the baron G.o.d-cursed, but he can't keep the t.i.tle from being pa.s.sed on to the baron's heir."

"That's one of the limits on the Chara's power," said Carle. "He can help appoint his council lords, but he can't appoint the other n.o.blemen of the land."

"Yes, but in Koretia, where the King's power is already so weak, it has always meant that the King was just one n.o.bleman among many others. It's as though the land was one giant council, with the King as head councilman. Most Koretians like that arrangement, but when Rawdon's grandfather won the throne a that's King Boyce a he started gathering power for himself. He influenced the priests to make changes in the G.o.ds' law a Fenton told me that that's when some of the worst atrocities entered the G.o.ds' law a and he developed a way to appoint new n.o.blemen."

Carle was lying on his side, with one elbow propping him up as he gnawed on the end of a lamb bone. Near us, Quentin was securing Knox's chains to a rock for the night, and Levander was practicing his code-whistles.

"I'm not sure who to support in this story," said Carle. "A strong central government is what makes Emor great, but this Boyce sounds like a law-hating rascal. Tell me about his scheme with the new n.o.blemen."

"He only managed it because Koretia was growing a great deal during that time, sprouting new villages and towns. In the past, barons to new villages and towns were always second sons to the old barons. Since the barons were blood kin all the way back to the beginning, this meant that a single family ruled the land. But Boyce, who wasn't a n.o.bleman before he became king, began appointing his own kinsmen as the new barons. And he did so in such a way as to ensure that they were allowed little independence. Oh, some of the new barons went their own way despite that, but for the most part Boyce controlled what decisions his kinsmen made. So he had a great deal more power than the old kings, who allowed the old n.o.bility as much independence as a High Lord allows his councilmen."

"May the high doom fall upon them all," said Carle crossly, tossing the bone away to an awaiting carrion crow. "They all sound like villains or incompetents to me. So how does this result in a blood feud?"

"Why, because blood feuds are carried out between rival families, and now Koretia is divided between two families of n.o.blemen. Even the King's Council is divided that way, except for a few lesser free-men who were appointed to the council."

"Lesser free-men are occasionally appointed to the Emorian council as well," said Carle. "They have to be exceptionally well-qualified, though. Only n.o.blemen really have the time to devote all their lives to learning the law, and you can't expect anything less from men who direct a great empire. -But I'm still not sure I see where the rivalry lies between the old and new n.o.bility."

"There isn't any reason behind the rivalry. It just flares up out of small arguments, like any other feud." I thought for a moment, pausing as I wiped my sword clean of a few drops of black blood that had lodged between the blade and the hilt. "Take Mountside and Cold Run, for example. They're close neighbors, and their families intermarry a lot, but they're still rivals, partly because of who their barons are. Cold Run's baron is Griffith a you remember; it was his brother that I nearly killed. His family is old n.o.bility; their line goes all the way back to the beginning of Koretia, as far as anyone knows. But Mountside is one of the villages that grew up during Boyce's reign, and so its barons have been new n.o.bility. That's why some people don't consider my father a real baron, and-"

"Consider who?"

I closed my mouth, but it was too late.

So then it all came out, about my n.o.ble blood, and I could tell immediately that my instinct to stay quiet about this matter had been the correct one.

"By all the laws, why in the name of the dead Charas did you not you tell me that you are a n.o.bleman?" Carle asked. He was sitting stiffly upright now; he looked at me as though I were the High Lord, and I was beginning to fear that he would stand and bow toward me.

I said uneasily, "Well, I wasn't, not until my brother died; he was my father's heir. And now I'm Emorian. I can't hold a Koretian n.o.bleman's t.i.tle when I've taken a loyalty oath to the Chara."

"That's true," Carle said. He relaxed and reached over casually to fling the bone at a further distance from us, since the gathering crows were beginning to become a nuisance.

I felt as though Carle had just whistled Danger Past, and that I was still trying to wrestle with the idea of there being danger at all. "Would it have made any difference if I were a n.o.bleman?" I asked in a low voice. "You know how it is in villages, Carle. One of your childhood playmates was your baron's son."

"That was when I was small," replied Carle, pulling open a flask of wine. "I don't believe in friendships between the ranks."

I made no reply. After a while, Carle paused from his sipping and said quietly, "I think I'd have made one exception to that rule, though." He offered to me his wine. I took it, feeling that the civil war that had threatened the two of us had been averted, not by my lack of a t.i.tle, but by Carle's final gesture.

The twenty-seventh day of August in the 941st year a.g.l.

Carle and I fell into a conversation earlier today with Quentin about the Koretian civil war. Quentin said that he'd been discussing it with Abiah a that's one of the Chara's spies who does missions to Koretia. Only a handful of high army officials and palace officials and their a.s.sistants know which Emorians are the Chara's spies, but the patrol has to be told as well, or we'd be stopping the spies every time they went through the mountains. Even the Chara's spies can't slip past us.

"Abiah says that the Chara can't decide which side to support as long as he remains ignorant of how the war started," Quentin said. "It wouldn't do any good to ask the King directly a the Chara would only receive one side of the story a so he has sent his spies out to discover the full story."

"It probably started with a dead chicken," I said with a half-smile.

Meanwhile, Carle has spent the past day slowly finding a way to handle my revelation yesterday and to bring us back into equal relations. He eventually found a solution, much to my relief.

"So you're kin to the King," he said as we walked over the final dip in the pa.s.s before the ridge that overlooks Koretia.

"Distant kin," I murmured, not wanting to dwell any more on my n.o.ble blood.

"We have that much in common, then. I'm kin to the Chara."

I looked over at Carle. His eyes were fixed on the rock-strewn path before us, but there was the suggestion of a smile to his expression.

"Carle son of Verne," I said slowly, "why did you not tell me that you are of n.o.ble blood?"

Carle laughed. "I suppose that we've both been keeping secrets. Actually, you're lucky that you weren't treated last winter to one of my father's long discourses on our family heritage. He's the reason why I don't talk much about my kinship to the Chara, though I'm incurably proud of the connection."

"How many cousins once removed is he to you?"

"It's actually a fairly close relationship. My father is the Chara's cousin and is a member of the royal family as defined by the Law of Succession. The Chara's uncle, the second son of the Chara Purvis, was my grandfather Carle, for whom I'm named."

"Is that where your father got his wealth?" I asked.

Carle shook his head. "That came from my mother's side of the family. My father was Carle's fourth son; he grew up in the Chara's palace and could have stayed on as a palace guest once he came of age since he was part of the royal family. But he had sense enough to see that his children would fall outside the line of succession and would not be ent.i.tled to live a n.o.bleman's life in the palace, once they came of age. So rather than let his future children struggle with the problem a I give my father credit for his foresight in this matter a he married the only offspring of a rich orchard farmer, so that he would have an inheritance to leave us." There was a pause in the conversation as we both thought of the inheritance that was no longer Carle's. Then Carle said, "No, as far as I'm aware, my father's sole inheritance from the royal family is a brooch-"

He stopped, having realized that I was no longer listening. We had reached the top of the ridge, and before us spread, like the dark green waters of an ocean, the Sea of Koretia: the forest of trees that spreads from the black border mountains down to the capital city, broken only by towns and villages and occasional patches of farmland.

After a while, I became aware that Carle's arm had made its way around my shoulders. "Do you miss it?" he asked quietly.

"I'd miss Emor a good deal more if I had to leave it," I replied.

"But it's still your native land," Carle said simply. Then he added briskly, "We'd better catch up. The others are nearly to the border, and the lieutenant may need our help if the Koretian border guards decide to capture us."

I laughed, turning my eyes away from the landscape to the path before us. "That won't happen. The lieutenant could cross the border, singing at the top of his lungs, and the Koretian guards wouldn't notice."

The twenty-eighth day of August in the 941st year a.g.l.

"And they say that we Emorians are obsessed with rank," Carle remarked with disgust this evening, as we returned to the Koretian border guards' hut.

The hut was empty. Unlike the mountain patrol, the Koretian border guard doesn't sleep near its work-ground. The subcaptain of the night guard, and the bottom-ranked soldiers who a.s.sist him, live in houses in Blackpa.s.s, as do the day guards: a lieutenant and his bottom-ranked soldiers. We had been introduced to all of them when we arrived yesterday, then had spent the remainder of the daytime sleeping in the hut, which was furnished with pallets for the wounded, as well as chests where the guards kept their uniforms when off-duty, exchanging them for their civilian clothes when they came on duty.

No guards or breachers have been wounded recently, so Carle and I had the hut to ourselves as we spoke together this evening. Except that we ought not to have been here at all. We ought to have been alongside Quentin as he held discussions with the subcaptain at the Koretians' guard-point.

"Maybe the subcaptain just didn't want us to distract him from his duty," I suggested.

"Then why call for a meeting while he was on-duty?" Carle pointed out as he paced restlessly back and forth in the tiny hut, as though he were a mountain cat trapped in a cage. "He said at the start that he wanted us to see his guardsmen at work. Most cursedly useless exercise I've ever undertaken. Our own patrol is polite to any man it stops, and it never lets a man past the border unless he has proper business crossing the border. The Koretian guards, on the other hand, are foul-mouthed toward every man they stop, yet they allow endless numbers of border-breachers past them-"

"Yes, I know," I said mildly. "And the subcaptain knows too, now that you've told him. Has it occurred to you that this might be why Quentin sent us back to the hut? Because the subcaptain was on the point of duelling you?"

Carle stopped his pacing suddenly. "Was he?"

"Carle, don't you even know the signals for a duel?"

"How could I? Most of what I know about Koretia, I learned from Fenton, and what he knew, he learned from books. I don't suppose that any Emorian who was challenged to a duel lived long enough to write about the experience." Carle flashed me a smile, his ill humor vanished. "Well, yes, I admit I did notice that the subcaptain went a bit red in the face when I told him how many breachers reach our patrol from the south, as opposed to the breachers that arrive from the north. He seems to think that we don't know about the ones coming from the north that have slipped past us. Do you suppose that's true?" A genuine note of concern touched Carle's voice.

I laughed. "If it is, then the Koretian border guard would hardly know. Any breacher skilled enough to slip past the patrol could certainly slip past the Koretians."

"You seem very sure of that." Carle frowned.

"I could be the Jackal G.o.d, howling at the top of my lungs, and the Koretian guards wouldn't think to stop me."

I had spoken lightly, but Carle's frown deepened, and I realized that he was still worried that the activities of the man calling himself the Jackal would spill over the border. The bottom-ranked Koretian soldiers, exchanging harmless gossip with us over their meal, had told us that the Jackal was vigorously gathering followers to himself throughout the borderland.

"The Chara's spies will learn the truth about the Jackal," I a.s.sured Carle.

"I wish I could be sure of that." His brows low over his eyes, Carle turned and rested his arms upon the broad window-ledge. The time was an hour past dusk; an early evening breeze brought the smell of fresh-scythed hay from one of the fields in a farm just over the border. Beyond that, everything was hidden by the rustling leaves of the forest.

"Frustrating to be so close," Carle said, his eye on something besides the forest. Coming up next to him, I saw that he was watching a group of figures at the border ahead of us: our lieutenant and the Koretian guards. Levander was nowhere in sight; when we had first arrived at the border, the guards there had been in heated debate with a group of the King's men, over whether the guards or the King's men had the right to take charge of the breacher who was being returned to Koretia. Levander, mistaking the cause of the quarrel, had volunteered to go with the King's men to their captain, in order to a.s.sure the captain that Knox had been well treated while in Emorian custody.

I hoped that the King's captain would have enough sense to wait until Levander had left before slitting Knox's throat.

Now, as I watched, Quentin suddenly raised his head and said something to the subcaptain. The subcaptain shrugged off his remark. A moment later, I raised my head too. Carle, his hand shifting to his sword-hilt, said, "I wonder whether we should stop him."

"Them." I kept my voice quiet, listening with half an ear to the soft sound of pebbles rattling down the mountainside nearby. "There are two of them... . It's not really our business, is it? They're travelling so loudly that our patrol is sure to notice and stop them when they reach that far. And the guards here-"

"Ignored Quentin's warning that their border was being breached." Carle snorted as he let go of his sword. "I'm beginning to see why so many breachers reach us from the south. The arrogance of Koretians- Sorry."

I smiled at him. "For offending my kin?"

He grinned then. "You really don't think of yourself as Koretian any more, do you?"

I shrugged. "I'm Koretian in blood. I don't deny that. A man can't help where he's born, but I've made my choice about where to pledge my loyalty. Still ..." I leaned out the window, smelling what I had not smelled for a full year: the scent of blackroot trees, their boughs heavy with nuts ready to harvest. "It's a shame I'll never be able to visit it again."

"Why not ask permission to cross the border?" Carle suggested.

Now it was my turn to snort. "Carle, haven't you been paying attention to how the Koretian border guard works? Any man of Koretian blood who crosses the border has to give his name and lineage. The name Adrian is common enough to excite no notice, but how am I going to explain why I, the son of the Baron of Mountside, am working as a border patrol guard? And for all I know, one of those guards has taken a blood vow against the King's kin. They're all Blackwood's men, you know."

"Are they?" Carle looked at me with curiosity. "So Blackwood controls the border between Koretia and Emor? I wonder whether the Chara knows that. If Blackwood is at war with the King-"

"-he could prevent the King's men from pa.s.sing through. Yes, I know; it's been tried in previous feuds involving the King and the Baron of Blackpa.s.s, when Blackwood's father and grandfather were alive. But it doesn't work. The King merely sends his men up north by way of Daxis." I waved my hand to the west, where, many miles away, lies the land west and southwest of Koretia. "Anyway," I added, "the guards here are so poorly trained that a horde of the King's men could breach the border, and the guard would never notice."

"Yes," said Carle in a reflective voice, "they are poorly trained, aren't they?"

For a moment, the only sound was of a moth, fluttering through the window and circling our lamp. Then I said, "We couldn't. It would be a crime."

"We're not Koretian," Carle pointed out. "We're not subject to the G.o.ds' law."

"Yes, but- Carle, the lieutenant sent us back to this hut to stay. We can't just leave here without permission."

"Who's speaking of leaving? We'll be back in a short time. And Quentin wants us to gather information regarding the Koretian border guard, doesn't he? That's what he told us before we arrived here. How better to gather information than to try to slip past the Koretian border guard?"

For a moment, my heart thumped; then I sobered, saying, "The lieutenant will hear us breaching the border."

"Will he?" Carle's smile quirked as he waved his hand toward the border.

I looked, and then I stared. Quentin was gone; so was the subcaptain. The only men left were the bottom-ranked soldiers, who looked very bored.

Carle laughed at my expression. "It's the custom for the subcaptain of the Koretian border patrol to treat visiting guards to an hours-long dinner on their first night here. If the lieutenant hadn't sent us back, we'd be having dinner with him and the subcaptain now, at a small inn that's only a spear's throw from the border, and no doubt we'd spend the night at the inn. As it is ..."

"You know," I said, beginning to smile, "I'm sure that the subcaptain's failure to invite us was simply an oversight. That being the case, he certainly wouldn't mind if we dined ourselves."

"At a Koretian place of dining," Carle suggested.

"Of course. And since we are, as the subcaptain recently reminded us, below the rank of lieutenancy and therefore ill-qualified to take part in high-level discussions-"

"-then we really must not disturb the subcaptain and the lieutenant at their high-ranking discussion," Carle concluded. "We need to find a place to eat on our own."

"Over the border."

"Over the border, in Koretia. Purely to fulfill the subcaptain's promise of hospitality, of course."

We grinned at each other. Far away, to the south, I could hear the sound of the Koretian border-breachers, making their blithe way toward the border mountain patrol. For a brief moment, I pitied them.

We delayed only long enough to find disguises for ourselves.

"Make yourself free of anything you want here," the subcaptain had said in an expansive manner when we first arrived at the hut, before the subcaptain had learned of Carle's skill in asking pointed, uncomfortable questions about the Koretian border guard's techniques. Now we made good the subcaptain's promise by rummaging through the chests where the civilian clothes of the on-duty guards were kept. After a few minutes of trying on this and that, Carle and I managed to find Koretian tunics that fit us. We could do nothing about our boots, but Emorian-style boots are not uncommon in the Koretian borderland, and it was easy enough to set our swords aside in favor of the Koretian daggers we found in the chests. Without bothering to discuss the matter, we kept our thigh-pockets strapped underneath our tunics, hiding our thigh-daggers.

Then we breached the border. It was no harder than convincing my mother to forgive my cousin Emlyn after he placed goldfish in her fresh vat of lime juice.

Half of an hour later, we were strolling along a woody path, chatting about how I had conceived a desire for Daxion nuts on my previous birthday. The path we had chosen leads to Blackpa.s.s, which lies only a mile from the border. The moon was up, laying a snail-silver trail for us through the dark leaves. I kept a careful watch on the bushes we pa.s.sed, but if any bandits were lurking there, Carle and I evidently looked too young to be holding any wealth upon us, for we arrived at the town gates unmolested.

These were just being closed for the night, and all visitors were being carefully questioned, but we managed to slip past the guards by hiding amidst a group of young men who were returning from an evening of country revelry. Carle made a manful effort to pretend that he had visited this town dozens of times, though he kept glancing at the moat surrounding the town wall, as we walked over the bridge to the gate.

"Fire barrier," I explained when we had travelled beyond the town guards, who all bore black-and-forest-green badges, showing they were Blackwood's men. "The King is particularly skilled in fire feuds."