“WE didn’t think we dared wait another day,” Rys said to Philippa.
They sat on the beach in the cold morning, Philippa wrapped in a blanket, Sunny nearby. Philippa cast Rys a weary look. “Sunny couldn’t have waited another day, my lord, so you were right.” She shuddered, remembering. “It’s hard to comprehend such evil,” she said. “And I’m having difficulty believing I’m free of it—that it’s over, and Sunny unhurt.”
“It’s a great relief to me, as well.”
“But how did you—I looked around at those men, and those dogs, and I couldn’t see how you were going to pull it off.”
“Classic flanking maneuver. And of course, we had the matchlocks. They aren’t very accurate, but they make a terrifying noise and a lot of smoke. Confusion, and surprise…there was risk to you, of course. You broke free at the perfect moment.”
The Baron nodded to his cook, who came around the campfire to pour more of his excellent coffee into Philippa’s cup. Before she drank it, she looked over her shoulder to where Sunny stood, now warmly blanketed and brushed, with a bucket of fresh water before her. In an hour or two, when Philippa could be sure Sunny had had enough to drink, she could give her some of the grain Rys had ordered brought from the ship. She would rest her all day, and tomorrow, they could fly home. Tomorrow, Sunny would be strong enough, and the sky bade fair to be clear and cold.
Philippa turned her gaze up beyond the beach. Smoke still roiled from the Aesk compound. Rys’s soldiers were “mopping up,” the Baron had told her. The firing of the matchlocks had ceased when the soldiers poured down into the compound. They were archers, Philippa knew, and swordsmen, and their attack was lethal. There had been screams among the Aesks throughout the night, wails and shouting. Now, a weighted silence filled the little valley.
As Francis had led her and Sunny, with Peter close by, in a circle far from the battle, down to the safety of the beach, Philippa had seen the bodies already piled up at one end of the compound, and had averted her eyes. It was hard to feel sympathy for the Aesks, after what they had done to Rosellen, and what they had threatened to do to Sunny, but she had no stomach for killing. The thatched roofs had burned with alacrity, and she could only hope that the people—especially the children, whose screaming haunted her—had gotten out of the longhouses before the flaming thatches collapsed.
And Lissie was still there, somewhere.
The peace and order here on the beach was shocking, by contrast, in its civility. There had been a substantial breakfast, prepared over an open fire. Rys’s cook had produced scrambled eggs, some kind of pan bread, rich with soda and butter, and thick rashers of bacon. Young Peter ate until Philippa feared he would burst, grinning at everyone, showing his missing tooth, giving voluble thanks that there was no fish being served. She herself, despite her worry over the still-missing Lissie, ate heartily after two days of nothing but greasy fish soup. When the cook tried to persuade her to eat more bread, she protested. “I must fly tomorrow,” she said with a little laugh. “You will make me as fat as that gull over there, if you persist.”
He bowed and took her plate and linen napkin. The sun was fully up now, and the black sand and boulders glittered. Philippa even had a chair to sit in. It was more of a stool, really, canvas and wood, but it was set up before a well-laid table with a sheet of framed canvas as a windbreak. It was hard to believe that only a short distance away a battle was being concluded. People had died, could still be dying, but the cook appeared unperturbed by the circumstance.
Baron Rys, on the other hand, looked somber, sitting a little apart, head bent to speak with one of his captains. Francis paced the black sand and stared up at the smoke swirling into the sunshine with a hard expression Philippa had never thought to see on his gentle features. She left Peter devouring the last of the pan bread and went to join him.
He looked up at her approach. “Winter Sunset will be all right, I think,” he said.
“She’s fine,” Philippa said. “Tomorrow she’ll be able to fly.”
“And you?”
“I’m well enough, none the worse for the last two days. Though I am in desperate need of a bath,” she added, with a little laugh.
He didn’t smile. “I was frantic for you,” he said. “This should never have happened. We should have gone after them the moment they attacked the village.”
“You’ve done all you could, Francis.”
He shook his head. “Not yet. There’s still a child missing.”
A breeze from the sea gusted around them. Philippa wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the chill through her tabard. Francis frowned. “Where’s your coat?”
“Some barbarian has it,” Philippa said. “It’s probably burned to ash by now.”
Francis shrugged out of his own cloak, a finely made piece of black wool with a worked-silver clasp at the throat. “Here, Philippa. Please.”
She accepted it. As he wrapped it around her shoulders, enveloping her in a circle of warmth, all the sweeter after the reeking blankets of the Aesks, he said, “You have blood on your neck, Philippa. Are you hurt?”
“It was only a scratch.”
He didn’t answer. A muscle jumped at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes strayed again to the smoke above the beach. He put his hand on the hilt of his smallsword. “I’m going back there,” he said in an undertone.
Philippa said hastily, “No—Francis, no. Let Rys’s soldiers do what needs to be done.”
“I can’t. My whole life has been one of privilege. We are effete, we lords of Oc.”
“Francis, you’ve never been effete.”
“I’ve never done anything real,” he said, shaking his head. “And I’ll never again be content to think of myself that way.”
“Francis, don’t talk nonsense! You arranged all of this! None of it would have been possible without your diplomacy—that young boy would still be a captive, and the Aesks—”
“They still have one of my citizens.”
Philippa was so struck by his phrasing that for a moment she could think of nothing to say. What a fine duke he could make, however reluctant! He could restore integrity to Oc, leadership to the Palace. When he strode away from her, his boots sinking deep into the fine black sand, she watched his tall, lean figure with a regretful admiration.
She turned about, half-expecting Baron Rys to dissuade him. But she found Esmond Rys gazing after Francis, nodding slightly. Approvingly.
FRANCIS paused in his climb through the scattered black boulders to look back at the camp on the beach. He was so relieved by seeing Philippa seated there, the winged horse blanketed, tethered, and safe, that his blood seemed to run warmer in his veins, his breath move easier in his lungs. Why did William not feel these things? How could it be that William did not feel the compulsion he, Francis, felt, at knowing one of Oc’s citizens was still held captive?
It may be that the girl Lissie was past saving, but he could not go back across the Strait until he knew. He, it seemed, was the only Fleckham left to answer to his people.
He drew a deep breath, spun about, and marched up toward the compound.
Francis saw, as he approached the smoldering longhouses, that the row of bodies had lengthened. Some corpses lay in quite staggering pools of blood, and one of them, at least, had died at his hand. There were children among the dead, and Francis supposed such tragedies had been unavoidable. He tried to remember the deaths that had sparked this mission, the dead fishermen and the stable-girl Rosellen, but the stillness of the corpses sickened him. His only consolation was that none of them wore Klee uniforms. Or a flyer’s habit.
The fighting seemed to be at an end. He paced through the center of the compound, smoke billowing about his ankles. Someone, huddled in the ruins of one of the longhouses, was sobbing endlessly. Francis turned. An Aesk woman squatted in the ashes with something in her arms, something small. Francis looked away, not wanting to know for whom she grieved.
Rys’s men had herded the survivors of the battle to the far end of the compound, where a couple of buildings still stood, more or less intact. One was a sort of hut, with the same walls of sod and thatched roof as the longhouses. The other was a covered pen, and here he found several enormous dogs that whined and cowered against the far wall, as far as their tethers would reach. A center pole still held them fast. If the fire had reached this enclosure, these dogs, great creatures with huge teeth and restrained by the heavy spiked collars, would have died where they were. As it was, Francis could see that the fire and noise and smoke terrified them. He supposed they could smell the blood on the air. He could smell it himself.
One of the soldiers turned at his approach and pointed to a sagging hut next to the dogs’ pen. “That’s where they kept the horsemistress,” he said shortly.
Francis stared at it, aghast. It was little more than a cave, dark and stinking and cold. He turned back to the soldier. “Are these all the people left? Surely there were more.”
The soldier nodded toward the Aesks huddling together, with Klee soldiers surrounding them. Francis looked at them more closely, and frowned. “They’re all women and children.”
A captain heard his question and threaded his way through his men to stand beside Francis. “The men fled,” he said. “Those that weren’t killed in the initial incursion.”
Francis eyed the clutch of people, thinking he had never seen such misery. They were short, square people. The women wore cloth dresses beneath layers of animal skins that were matted and greasy-looking. Their hair looked no better than the furs. “They left them,” he said. “Ran off and abandoned their families.”
The captain shrugged. “Barbarians.”
“Barbarians, perhaps,” Francis mused, “but they are people.”
The captain fixed him with a level gaze. “They kill children, my lord.”
“Yes. I do remember.” Francis approached the group of Aesks, noting that none shrank away from him. Several of the women gave him fierce looks as they pushed their children behind them. One or two boys, on the verge of manhood, thrust their chests out and did their best to look brave, though their dirty faces were haggard with fear and shock. Francis circled them, trying not to let his own dismay show. He had no heart for this. He was sure he would have made a terrible soldier.
“Don’t get too close, my lord,” the captain said at his shoulder.
Francis looked back in surprise. He hadn’t known the man was following him. “Surely there’s no danger now,” Francis said.
“There is always danger,” the captain answered.
“I need to find the girl from Onmarin,” Francis said.
“You may need to look among the dead,” the captain said. “This lot all look alike to me.”
Francis’s belly clenched at the thought of telling the grieving mother that she had lost another daughter. He glanced back at the far end of the compound, where the dead lay cold and still, then he surveyed the disheveled survivors. He would look here first. He had to try.
They looked back at him as he walked around them, their eyes slitted and wary. A child whimpered in the little group, and was quickly shushed. Some of them sat on the hard ground, others knelt or stood. All faced outward, reminding Francis of a hunt he had once been on, when a herd of deer gathered in a protective circle. And there was, he thought uncharitably, something animal about these people. They were dirty, and they smelled bad, but it was more than that. The veneer of society had never touched these creatures, never softened their edges, disguised their drives, or cushioned them from the basic necessities of survival. These people lived as close to the land as it was possible to do, and the land that was theirs had not been kind to them.
Suppose, Francis thought, with jarring irrelevance, suppose we were to help them, rather than hunt them? Suppose we employed our ships to send them goods, grain or cloth or tools—
He stopped, and gestured to two women standing shoulder to shoulder in front of him. One was a crone, grizzled and tiny. The other was younger, but hideously scarred, one half of her face ruined, the other flat-featured and stoic. “Stand aside,” he ordered, his confused emotions making his voice harsh. “Who is that behind you?”
The women stared at him, and for a moment, he thought they would not move. He put his hand on the hilt of his smallsword and pulled it from its scabbard. The soldier behind him moved closer.
Slowly, the old woman moved, a half step to her left. The scarred one didn’t budge, except to put one hand inside her furs.
There was no mistaking the girl from Onmarin, now that Francis could see her. Though she was shockingly dirty, her pale hair and pinched features set her apart from the Aesks. She knelt on the ground, held there by the scarred woman, who kept one grimy hand clamped on the back of her thin neck. As the old woman moved aside, Lissie’s eyes lifted to Francis’s face. Tears streaked her pitifully bruised cheeks, and she began to sob.
“Lissie?” he asked, stepping forward. “Lissie of Onmarin?”
She put out her hand. Giddy with relief at having found her, he bent to help her stand. The Klee captain said, “Have a care, my lord.”
Lissie’s eyes rolled to her right, stretching wide with alarm.
Francis didn’t see the scarred woman’s knife, but he felt it. It was not pain, not exactly. It seemed to burn, and yet to freeze at the same time, as if were a blade of ice. It cut through his wool shirt, sliced his skin, and drove in through his flesh until it struck bone.
Distantly, he heard the captain’s shout, but he could not turn, impaled as he was. He still faced the girl from Onmarin, the thin, shaking child. The last color drained from her face as she opened her mouth to scream. He tried to lift his own weapon, to defend her, and himself, but his arm was nerveless. He managed only to pull it out of its scabbard, and then he dropped it.
The Klee captain seized him from behind with both hands, and the girl from Onmarin, suddenly shrieking, leaped to her feet, and reached with both hands for Francis’s smallsword.
The world blurred before Francis’s eyes, and a wave of cold swept his body. He hoped, rather faintly, that he was not dying. He watched, with wonderment and a sort of detachment, as the slip of a girl, the child of Oc, seized the hilt of his smallsword and thrust the blade at the Aesk woman who had stabbed him.
Francis felt as if he were falling head over heels into a gulf of darkness. He flailed with his hands, trying to grasp at something to stop himself, but he found nothing. He couldn’t tell up from down, left from right. He couldn’t breathe, and the darkness was rising to his waist, to his chest, to his neck. When it closed over his head, all sound faded from his ears, and he sighed, giving in. How foolish he had been, when success had been within his grasp! William would be triumphant. He had failed after all.