“Is there any way we could go back to inhaling the Dashini dust?” Brasti asked. “Because while that involved being scared out of my wits and mumbling like a madman while pissing and shitting myself, I swear this is worse.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked. When no sound came from my mouth I realized it was morning and I was hallucinating from the paralysis again. How long will it be this time? I wondered.
Despite my eyes being closed, I could see a large room in front of me, the bare stone flags a stark contrast to the purple and silver hangings on the walls. It was hazy, of course, as hallucinations always are. Yet it still felt as if I were there, with two dozen Greatcoats, men and women I hadn’t seen in years, sitting on the floor next to Kest and Brasti. We were back in Castle Aramor, training in one form of combat we’d never expected to study.
Salima, the troubadour the King had hired to teach us to sing, struck an angry chord on her guitar. I swear it gave me a pain in the back of my head whenever she did that.
“If you open your mouth again and I do not hear music coming from it,” she said, her voice dark and rich, “I will play such a song that will drive you to run off a cliff to your doom.”
Brasti looked troubled for a moment, then grinned and opened his mouth and in a sing-song voice said, “If you keep making me sing, I’ll run off the cliff without any further prompting.”
Salima started plucking single strings on the guitar, fast and furious notes that never seemed to find a melody. Each one sounded ever so slightly off-key, though I’d heard her retuning only moments before. The notes got faster and faster, and as they did, my mind struggled more and more to make sense of them. But it couldn’t, and what began as a mild annoyance soon turned to a fearsome anxiety that threatened to overcome me. It suddenly occurred to me that the old stories of the Bardatti being able to drive a man mad with their songs might be true. Through the haze of pain and uncertainty I began, very slowly, to try to unsheathe my sword.
“Saints, are we under attack?” The King’s voice shattered the spell instantly—or at least his arrival in the room got Salima to stop playing. “Troubadour? Are we engaging in experimental melodies this evening?”
She smiled up at him from where she sat cross-legged on the floor. Bardatti never appeared to be too concerned about offending the nobility. “Merely chastising them, your Majesty. These ‘Greatcoats’ of yours have very little discipline.”
The King agreed, apparently. “A problem I have yet to rectify. And yet I find your solution equally painful to me, and I can assure you, I have no issues with my own level of discipline.”
“Your Majesty,” Brasti said, standing up, “will you not put a stop to this? I can’t imagine I’m going to sing my way out of a duel, nor will my voice ever make a Duke accept a verdict he doesn’t like.”
“It’s not for the Dukes, Brasti, and it’s not for you, either.”
“Then forgive me, Sire, but I’m lost as to the point. It’s not like I’m going to launch a career singing for farmers and blacksmiths in inns and taverns, is it? So why are you making us all do this?”
The King didn’t answer. He had a habit of making us do things without giving us the reason. His argument was that a lesson you had to be told seldom stuck as much as one you had figured out on your own. The King always did have an overly ambitious impression of our skills as students.
“It’s the melodies, isn’t it?” Kest asked. His eyes had a faraway look, as though he were trying to do sums in his head. “We need people in the towns and villages to remember the verdicts we issue, but most of them can’t read and none of them will remember our words.”
“But everyone remembers a good bar song. Right, Brasti?”
Brasti grinned. “I know a good many, your Majesty. Have I ever told you the one about the maiden who woke up to find diamonds in her—”
“Shut up, Brasti,” I said.
“‘The Maiden’s Diamonds’,” Salima said. “The melody is called ‘The Traveler’s Third Reel’. It’s the same as is used for ‘Coppers & Ale’ and for ‘The Old Man’s Bite’.”
I thought about that for a moment. I’d heard “The Old Man’s Bite” a time or two, and “Coppers & Ale” was sung in half the taverns in Tristia. “You’re right,” I said. “I’d never noticed that.”
“And do you remember the words to those songs?” the King asked.
I nodded, and so did everyone else.
“Good,” King Paelis said. “Then you’ll learn ‘The Traveler’s Third Reel’. And the first and second and fourth, and however many others we need. Then you’ll learn to set your verdicts to them. That way—”
“That way every farmer and blacksmith will remember the verdicts we issue,” I said. “They’ll remember them long after we leave. Hells, they’ll probably end up singing them whenever they get drunk.”
The King smiled. Sometimes he was a very clever man. When he noticed me staring he stopped smiling. “And then you will betray her, Falcio,” he said, and he turned and walked away from me.
“What? No!” I tried to rise from the floor but I couldn’t move. The sensation of paralysis brought me back to myself and to the hard ground on which I slept.
“Easy,” a voice said, and I felt a gentle pressure on my shoulder.
My eyes opened reluctantly and let in the morning light. Kest was watching me. “You’re awake now,” he said.
I tried to say something clever but couldn’t quite get the words out yet.
“The others are getting ready to leave,” Kest said. He rose and reached down a hand to help me up. “It was nearly an hour this time, Falcio.”
We traveled that day in silence. Even Brasti knew enough not to make me any more angry than I already was. If I failed to deliver what the Duke asked for, he would never support Aline. If I did, he might still break his oath, and either way the Greatcoats would once again be seen as traitors to the people of Tristia. You will betray her.
“We’ll be in Carefal soon,” Shuran said, pulling his horse up to mine.
I didn’t reply. I didn’t feel much like talking to the Knight-Commander of Aramor that day.
After a few awkward moments Shuran said, “Maybe another mile.”
“What happens when we arrive?” I said at last.
“We’ll meet a man named Tespet. He’s the Duke’s tax collector for this region. He and his clerk will brief us on the current state of affairs with the villagers.”
“Fine,” I said.
“You’re quiet today, Falcio.”
When it became clear he wasn’t going to leave me alone, I asked, “Did you know?”
“Know what?”
“The story that’s been going around about me and what happened in Rijou? And that Isault made this deal with me so that the Greatcoats would be seen to have broken faith with the common people.”
“Duke Isault consults me on many things, Falcio, but politics is seldom one of them.”
“And still, somehow I think you knew,” I said.
“Oh? Why would you say that?”
“The ‘entertainment’ you mentioned yesterday—did you have us stop at that inn just so I could hear the stories? Did you know what the troubadours have been saying about me?”
Shuran looked at me, his expression betraying nothing. “I’m a Knight, Falcio. I don’t have much time for stories and songs. They rarely serve my cause.” He flicked the reins and his horse pulled ahead.
Brasti stood up in his stirrups and peered ahead. He has the best distance vision of any of us—I suspect being an archer makes good eyesight something of a requirement. “The village is half a mile ahead of us.” He shaded his eyes from the sun with one hand. “And there’s something outside the village. Two things, actually.”
“What are they?”
“It looks like a pair of cages.”
“Cages? Can you see what’s inside them?”
He sat back down on his horse. “I can’t be sure, but if I had to guess, I’d say people.”
“Are they dead?” Shuran asked.
The two cages were made out of the trunks of saplings. Inside each one was a man, crouched on the ground.
I got off my horse and reached toward one of the bodies to feel for a pulse but stopped when I saw the chest move in and out. “No, just knocked out.” I turned to the big Knight. “If I find out your tax collector Tespet put these men here we’re going to have a very big problem.”
“He did not,” Shuran said.
“How can you be so sure?” Dariana asked, coming closer to see for herself.
He pointed to the man in the cage on the right. “That’s Tespet. The other is his clerk.”
I got a whiff of the man’s breath, then went and knelt down by the second cage. Both men were very drunk.
“Falcio,” Kest said, “company.”
As I rose I saw nearly forty men and women emerging from the trees lining the road. Some had bows; others carried rudely fashioned clubs. Some were holding swords, and I wondered how they had acquired proper steel weapons.
Sir Shuran’s men drew their swords and one of them called out, “On your knees.”
“On yours,” a woman’s voice replied.
“Everyone calm down,” I said, holding up a hand in a peaceable fashion. “We’re not here to cause trouble.”
The woman came closer. “You’ll cause us no trouble, travelers, if you turn back around and go the way you came.” She had short brown hair and a sturdy frame. She might have been forty, but then again, she could have been in her twenties; village life in Tristia was not easy. She pointed a sword at Shuran. “The Knights will stay as our hostages.”
“I don’t think that will be possible,” Shuran said. “I’m fairly sure my orders include not being captured.”
The woman ignored the Knight and looked more closely at me. “Are those Greatcoats you and your company are wearing?”
“Why do they always assume he’s in charge?” Brasti asked Kest.
“Shut up, Brasti,” Kest replied.
“These are Greatcoats,” I said.
The woman grimaced. “Then you’ll be staying too. We don’t take kindly to those who steal greatcoats.”
Valiana took an imprudent step closer to the woman. “You’ll not take from us what is ours by right,” she said. “What makes you think we’re not Greatcoats?”
An old man awkwardly holding a longbow, his arms shaking on the bent string, making me worry he’d end up killing one of us for no better reason than that his arm got tired, said, “Whoever heard of a Greatcoat mucking about with Knights?”
Brasti looked at me as if this somehow proved his point.
“My name is Falcio,” I said to the woman, “First Cantor of the King’s Greatcoats. These are Kest, Brasti, Dari, and Valiana. The Knights with us are—”
The woman’s laughter cut me off. She turned to her men. “Look, boys, Duke Isault decided to put on a show for us. He’s sent actors to put on a play. ‘The Hero of Rijou and the Slayer of Saint Caveil’!”
“Oh, aye,” one of the men said, waving a pitchfork in the air. “Falsio himself, here to liberate us! Come on, Vera, quit playing around. Let’s kill them and be done with it.”
“Wait,” Brasti said, “what about me?”
“What about you?” Vera asked.
“I’m Brasti Goodbow. Haven’t you heard of me?”
“’fraid not.”
“Don’t worry though,” the man with the pitchfork said, “we’ll kill you just as if you were famous, too.”
Sir Shuran put a hand on the pommel of his warsword. “I think you’ll find us difficult to murder.”
“There’s more of us than there are of you,” Pitchfork said. He motioned around at the other villagers. Few among them looked like warriors; they were simply farmers and merchants. A young girl with a knife in her hand brandished it defiantly, and for an instant I mistook her for Aline. Saints, don’t let me start hallucinating while I’m awake.
A few of Shuran’s Knights laughed aloud and Vera looked at them through narrowed eyes. “Giggle all you want, Sir Knights, but some of us have heard enough of your laughter to fill a lifetime.” She nodded to one of her men on the other side and then the two of them pulled on ropes I now saw were looped around the branches of two trees lining the sides of the path and a set of crudely fashioned spears held together with more sapling trunks rose up from the ground. At the same time, twenty more villagers appeared behind the others, all carrying a bow or a sling or a sword or even just handfuls of rocks.
I looked at Kest, who shook his head. I agreed; there wasn’t an easy way around this. All the time we were trying to navigate around the spears to reach our opponents, the villagers could pepper us with arrows and rocks.
“What’s the matter, Sir Knights? Not laughing now?”
“You’re making a mistake,” I said.
“Really? Because it seems to me that capturing the men sent to kill us and holding them hostage could hardly be a mistake.”
“If we’d come to kill you,” Sir Shuran said, “we would have brought thirty Knights and you’d all be dead by now. I am Sir Shuran, Knight-Commander of Aramor. Duke Isault sent us to settle your dispute in good faith.”
The villagers looked wary. A lifetime spent trying to survive under the weight of the nobility and their greed hardly made for a great deal of trust.
Vera turned to me. “You say you’re a Greatcoat. Prove it.”
“How would you like me to do that?”
“Tell me the Seventh Law of Property.”
I was about to answer but Valiana was ahead of me. “There is no Seventh Law of Property.”
Vera tried in vain to stare Valiana down, and watching them, I realized that the two weren’t as far apart in age as I’d thought. What differentiated them was that Valiana had spent her eighteen years living in security and luxury and Vera hadn’t.
“Fine. What’s the Sixth Law then?”
She didn’t hesitate. “‘The taxing of a thing can never be more than a quarter of the yield it creates’.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that she could quote the King’s Laws from memory. It made sense—after all, she’d spent most of her life training to be Queen. No doubt she’d learned all the laws of Tristia, even those the Dukes would never have allowed her to enforce.
Vera eyed Valiana suspiciously. “Anyone who can read The Book of the King’s Laws could know that.”
Valiana frowned. She really could look like the epitome of the arrogant noblewoman when she set her mind to it. “Then why did you bother asking?”
“If you hadn’t known the answer I might have saved myself some time,” she said.
I looked out at the villagers who’d come ready to fight. I doubted even one of them knew the King’s Laws of Property, or any other laws for that matter. “Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked,” I said. “Do you even know why the King wrote the Sixth Law of Property?”
“So that the Dukes wouldn’t be able to deprive us of what we earn through our labors.”
“That’s part of it,” I acknowledged.
“That’s the only part that matters.”
“Not to a monarch,” Valiana said. “If the Duke overtaxes your land here, it creates shortages of supplies of food, lumber, and other resources for you to trade, and that then causes shortages in other goods, and eventually the whole system falls apart. The reason for the law is to prevent an economic collapse.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Vera asked.
“So that you know that the King wanted you to pay your damned taxes,” I said.
Vera snorted. “You’re funny. When you’re dead I’ll mount your head on a spike and perhaps it’ll help me laugh when I’ve had a hard day working the fields.”
“He’s not that funny when he’s dying,” Brasti said. “He gets quite preachy.”
I heard the sound of an arrow flying and felt the air shiver near my left cheek as it passed and landed in a tree just behind me. The old man’s arm had finally given out. Before I could react, one of Shuran’s men had brought his blade up and taken a step forward. “The penalty for attacking one of the Duke’s envoys is death, old man.”
“Stop!” I yelled, pulling my left rapier from its sheath.
“The Trattari betray us!” one of the other Knights said, and shifted position, ready to attack me.
A moment later ten Knights were facing the five of us, two of the Knights holding suddenly loaded crossbows, while we were stuck between the sharpened logs the villagers had set all around us.
“I know the odds, damn it. Put down your swords,” I said to the Knights. “This isn’t why we came here, Shuran.”
The Knight-Commander hadn’t drawn his weapon. “I agree. That’s why I need you, your men, and these villagers to put down their weapons. I can’t have people drawing on the Duke’s own Knights.”
Vera sneered. “The incentive for killing all of us is considerably higher if we’re not holding weapons.”
“Put down your weapons,” Shuran repeated, “or I’ll have no choice but to order my men to fight.”
“You give that order,” I said, “and I’ll order Brasti to kill you first.”
The old man who had started all this leaned heavily on his bow, apparently unconcerned. “Now, see, this is more what you expect with Knights and Greatcoats.”
One of the villagers started spinning a sling.
“Brasti, keep an eye on that man. Vera, keep your people in check.”
“Falcio?” Brasti said.
“I’m busy.”
“It’s just that it would be helpful to me if you could let me know who I’m supposed to kill right now.”
“I’m still trying to work that out.”
A crashing sound came from the woods, nearly setting off the battle right then and there. A thin, awkward-looking young man emerged, out of breath and carrying a rapier in his hand. Few men other than me carry rapiers. I had met this one before.
“Cairn?” I asked incredulously.
Guileless brown eyes beneath a mop of brown hair met mine. “Falcio?” He ran up to me and dropped to his knees. “First Cantor! I can’t believe it’s you! Here in Carefal! Did you come to find me?”
“Get up,” I said. The last time I’d seen Cairn was in Rijou, where he’d proven to be almost as eager to be a Greatcoat as he was unsuited to the role. I could tell things hadn’t changed since then.
“I merely—”
“First of all, you’re not a Greatcoat, so you don’t owe me any fealty, and second, Greatcoats don’t bow to anyone.”
Brasti leaned forward and whispered as loudly as he could, “Except Dukes, as it turns out, when we want our lips to more comfortably reach their asses.”
“Shut up, Brasti.”
“Cairn, is this true?” Vera asked. “Is this man really who he says he is?”
Cairn stood up. “I don’t know who he says he is, but I know him to be Falcio val Mond, First Cantor of the Greatcoats.” The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold coin. “He gave me this. I was one of his twelve jurors when he called an end to the Ganath Kalila. This is the Hero of Rijou—the man who inspired our rebellion!”
I winced. Cairn’s voice was all pride mixed with religious fervor and to me at least, he sounded like a halfwit who’d just discovered a Saint’s face in his cottage cheese. But looking around at the villagers I saw their expressions change, just a little, and understood just how badly they wanted to believe that there were heroes out there coming to save them. For the first time in a long while it looked like they were even willing to believe those heroes might be Greatcoats.
Vera stepped forward until she was less than a foot away and looked into my face as if she were inspecting a coin to see if it had been forged. “Well then, ‘Hero of Rijou’,” she said, “have you come to save us, or to betray us?”