Reign of the eagle, p.80
Reign of the Eagle, page 80
His first impulse was to tell this woman to mind her own damned business. His second impulse was to tell her it hadn’t been his idea to go to Briddobad, and that if he’d had his own way, he would still be back in Formacaster with his Zekustian lover. But that was neither politic nor fair. He had agreed to go see Elwyn, and since he had taken on that mission, he had a duty to see it through.
Rada had a point, and he knew it. He had known it yesterday, when he first spotted Will, and he had known it the whole time Clara was visiting. A man who was serious about winning a girl’s heart didn’t run around like a stag in the rut.
He gave her his most sincere look and said, “I promise you I’m going to try to change. I won’t be like this if I marry her.”
She looked far less than satisfied. “We shall see, Lord Andras. We shall see.” Bending down, she picked up his trousers between her thumb and forefinger. After holding them at arm’s length, she tossed them on the bed like she was disposing of a dead carcass. “Now get dressed, please. I’m waiting for confirmation from my colleagues that the way through the forest is safe, but we will need food and other supplies when we leave.”
“Safe?” He shook his head. “Most of the fighting is over, or haven’t you heard?”
“Most, but not all. You were last here in the company of an army, my lord. You’ll find it’s an entirely different matter to ride through the forest in ones and twos.”
He couldn’t help snorting with laughter. “No offense, but clearly you made it through.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I realize this may be difficult for Myrcians like you to understand, but just because I’m not built like a draft horse doesn’t mean I can’t take care of myself.”
“Fair enough,” he said, with a nod of respect. “So when do you think we’ll be leaving?”
“I can’t say.” She frowned thoughtfully. “It might be a day. It might be a week. But we have to be ready the moment I get the word to proceed.”
“And what do I do in the meantime?”
“Whatever you like.” Then she corrected herself. “No, you may do whatever I like. And I would like you to stay out of trouble, please. Try not to do anything to call too much attention to yourself. Like reenacting the last days of Paradelphia in here, for instance.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
As she headed for the door, she said over her shoulder, “I hope you do a good deal better than that.”
Chapter 9
For more than a week, Donella had been forced to endure looks of disgust from her mother whenever she entered a room, derisive snorts at any word she said, and dismissive comments about her face, her figure, and her mode of dress. Donella tried not to let it bother her. She had the comfort of knowing she hadn’t disgraced herself, either in the eyes of Earstien or in the eyes of Andras. Someday, when he came back from Pinburg, she could try again, in her own way this time, and she wouldn’t have to feel ashamed of anything she had done that night at the Crown and Shield Inn.
Then on Sunday afternoon after church, her mother burst into her room. The queen’s face was fixed in a scowl, but for once, Donella didn’t seem to be the target of her displeasure. “Did you say you heard Andras Byrne was going to Pinburg?” she asked.
“Y-yes, Mother,” stammered Donella, looking up from her latest story—a continuation of the torrid saga of Sir Donald and Lady Andrea.
“H’m...well, I’ve just heard from your brother’s staff officers, and they haven’t seen Andras anywhere around.”
Maybe she was going to be the target of today’s tirade after all. No doubt this was somehow her fault. “Sorry. That’s what I heard. I promise I didn’t make it up.”
“Oh, I know you didn’t,” said her mother, with a wave of her hand. “I had Therese Halifax go visit Flora Byrne, since that old bitch won’t talk to me anymore, and do you know what Flora said? She said Andras has ‘gone to the country for his health.’ Can you think of anything stupider?”
“Well, he came back from the war, Mother. Maybe he’s got some injury that—”
“Nonsense. He’s no more injured than you or I.” The queen smacked her fist in her palm. “I knew it, Donella. The Byrnes are up to something. I can tell. I’m going to ask some of your father’s agents to find out where Andras went.”
Donella shuddered. Her father’s best secret agents were, as a rule, men of astonishing cruelty and cunning. Torture and murder were all in a day’s work to them. If Andras wasn’t going back to the army or going to the country “for his health,” if this was part of a treasonous plot by his family, then he was in terrible, terrible danger.
Where had he gone, exactly? And how could she send him a warning about her father’s assassins? Her first idea was to ask his sister Lauren. But what if Lauren had been forbidden to tell? Or what if Andras and the duchess hadn’t trusted her with the secret, which was entirely likely? And even if Donella found out where he was from Lauren, there was no guarantee Lauren would be able to send him a message in time. Conspirators didn’t usually keep permanent addresses, after all.
No, if she was going to warn him, she was going to have to do it herself. She spent an hour or so pacing her room after her mother left, before she thought of some of her own adventure stories, and she realized there was only one logical course of action. It was nothing more than what any heroine worth her salt would do under these circumstances.
First she got a key from the chamberlain, went into her brother’s apartment, and borrowed a few of his older clothes. Next, she spent an hour altering them to fit her, and then, after packing them up in her saddle bags, she left them on her bed and went down the hall to her mother’s rooms, putting on her most guileless expression.
“Mother, I was thinking I might like to spend some time in the country, too. Maybe at Ellysby.” This was one of her mother’s family’s estates far to the south in Severnshire.
Her mother looked up from her writing desk, where she seemed to be drafting some sort of coded message. “Ellysby? Why on earth do you want to go there now?”
“I thought it would be a change of pace,” Donella said. “And I did mention it to you last week.” She smiled. “You said it would be alright if I went.” This was a blatant lie, but she was counting on the fact that her mother rarely paid much attention to anything she said.
“Did I? I suppose I did. Yes, now I remember.” The queen yawned and turned back to her letter. “Well, enjoy yourself. Try to fuck a stable boy or two. It would do you a world of good, darling; it really would.”
That was one bit of advice Donella had no intention of following, but before she left, she got out the Sahasran sex manual and put it in her bags. She didn’t quite know why she did this, except that it made her giggle, and it seemed like the sort of thing a carefree young knight might have in his possession.
She wrote a quick note for Janice, her lady’s maid, giving her a month off to go see her own family. Janice was a good girl and deserved a break, anyway. Then Donella bound her chest, put on her brother’s old clothes, and after a quick check in the mirror to assure herself that she looked like a boy, she headed to the stables. By mid-afternoon, she was on the road heading east, toward Pinburg. Not south, toward Severn and Ellysby. She had no idea where Andras was going, but her one clue was that he had taken the Pinburg road. So that was the road she took, too.
Following him turned out to be disturbingly easy, though. At each inn and tavern along the way, she introduced herself as “Sir Donald Graham” and said she was trying to catch up to her old brother-in-arms, Lord Andras Byrne. And sure enough, the innkeepers and barmaids were always pleased to point her in the right direction.
“He’s really not making any effort to hide himself, is he?” she thought.
And yet, even this disquieting note, and her worries for his family, couldn’t dampen her newfound enthusiasm for the open road. This was the first time in her life she had ever traveled entirely by herself, a lone rider on a single horse. Her brother traveled like that all the time, and her father, too. At least back before he had become the king, anyway. Men got to do things like that, and no one told them it was improper or scandalous. This was the kind of freedom the heroes in her stories always had, and it wasn’t until this moment that she realized how badly she had wanted to try it for herself.
As she approached the outskirts of the mighty Bridweld Forest, the innkeepers along the way started warning her against bandits and rebels. They advised her to stay for a day or two until some other travelers came along, so she wouldn’t be such an easy target. But she laughed at their concerns. Her brother had defeated the bandits. Everyone said so. And anyway, Sir Donald Graham wasn’t the sort of young man to run from a fight. She had a sword and a bow, and she was a pretty good shot, at least by the standards of the girls in her Atherton class.
Despite the dire warnings, she got through the forest just fine, and felt enormously proud of herself for doing so. On Thursday afternoon, only four days after she had left Formacaster, she rode through the big wooden gatehouse into Pinburg, and she immediately set about searching the inns and taverns for Andras.
She heard no news of him at all at the first three places she tried. Her fourth stop very nearly ended in disaster when she stepped into the common room and saw her brother, Broderick, standing only ten feet away, laughing and drinking with his staff officers. Fortunately, none of them saw her, and she managed to sneak out a side door through the kitchen.
The fifth inn was a nasty, grimy old place called the Cedar Bough, down by the river, where everything smelled like fish and tanneries. She didn’t think it looked like Andras’s sort of establishment at all, but no sooner had she walked into the stables, than she heard his voice at the far end. She couldn’t make out any words, but she knew the tone and phrasing as well as she knew her own. She started toward him, feet silent in the deep straw between the stalls. Then she stopped short when she heard another voice. A man’s voice.
Obviously, she knew she shouldn’t eavesdrop, but she assumed this was some part of the Byrne family conspiracy, and she longed to know exactly what was going on. So she crept closer, dodging from shadow to shadow under the thick oak beams.
“I’m sorry, but I’m going to be leaving soon,” said Andras, his voice firm, but not unkindly.
“Just one more time before you go?” said the other fellow in a plaintive tone.
“No. I’m trying to resist temptation now.”
“Try anything once, I suppose. Maybe a kiss?”
Donella pulled up short. Had she heard that right? What was going on here? She took another silent step and looked around the last pillar to see Andras and the other fellow, standing close together. Andras had his back to her, but she knew his hair, and the way he stood, and the slope of his big shoulders, and the shape of his hands. But he was running those hands through the other man’s hair now, and pulling him in close...for a kiss.
She bit a knuckle to stop herself from letting out a shriek of surprise, and then she backed away into the shadows, desperate to get out of there. Desperate to be anywhere else in the world. She made it out to the alleyway and had to lean against the wall there for minute. Her chest was pounding, and her eyes were burning, and she didn’t know whether she was going to faint or be sick.
Andras liked men. How had she never seen that before? She could see it now, obviously, and she thought back to the sarcastic inflection Tillie at the Crown and Shield had used when mentioning Andras’s “friend.” And the golden-haired head in his lap, the one Donella had seen through the keyhole? Now that she thought about it, that was the same color as the hair of his Zekustian friend, Sir Geert. Oh, Earstien. The two of them had been lovers!
She smacked herself on the forehead over and over, cringing at her own stupidity. He was supposed to be one of her best friends. Why was this such a surprise, then?
Well, obviously because she had imagined he might love her the way she loved him. “I am so dumb,” she thought, wiping her eyes. “I am such an idiot, and I’m a terrible friend.”
There was no point in staying here, no point in even bothering to speak to Andras. She could have written him a note, but why? This wasn’t part of some grand conspiracy. This was a romantic rendezvous. She had heard him tell his lover that he was leaving soon. So he would be headed back to Formacaster now, and her mother would realize there was no threat from the Byrnes at all. The only trouble was that Donella wasn’t sure she could ever look him in the eye again. Maybe she would go south to Severnshire for a while, after all.
She got her horse and headed out of town, not even sure where she was going. That was a problem for tomorrow, or maybe the day after that. For now, she just wanted to be on the road again, away from pain and humiliation, off in the dark forest, where no one would see her crying.
She cried for miles as the sun went down, and she passed through the silent woods stifling her own sobs, not out of fear that someone would hear them, but from shame at her own weakness and stupidity. She cried until her eyes were dry and burning, and her throat was hoarse, and all she could do was stare blankly ahead at the gloom, hardly seeing anything.
And so it was some minutes before she became aware that there were figures moving in the woods around her. She looked up, as if coming out of a daze, as half a dozen hooded men stepped out on the road, pointing arrows at her. Startled into action, she turned her horse, but there were archers in the trees, too, and yet more on the road behind her. Oh, Earstien, these were bandits!
A big man with a black beard stepped closer to her, a sword in his hand. “Now who might you be, young fellow?” he asked, grinning.
“Sir...Sir Donald Graham,” gasped Donella. Her voice, ragged from weeping, managed to come out in a rough approximation of masculinity. “Knight of...um, knight of Severnshire.”
“Well, then, Sir Donald,” said the bearded fellow. “I’ll have to ask you to climb down from there. You can come enjoy our hospitality, and then we can discuss how much money your family might be willing to part with in order to see you again.”
Chapter 10
Going without sex for a few days wasn’t as bad as Andras had feared it might be. Obviously he went without sex now and again, like anyone did. But it was pretty unusual for him to turn it down when it was blatantly and openly available. It made him feel virtuous, and to celebrate, he had a glass of whiskey with breakfast, much to Rada’s annoyance.
They were eating in a tiny private parlor upstairs in the Cedar Bough Inn, and she had spread a map of the whole Bridweld Forest on the table. He tried to set his drink on it, and she smacked his hand until he took it away.
“Now there are rebel groups still holding out here, here, and here,” she said, pointing at seemingly random spots in the middle of nowhere. “And of course the border smugglers at the River Bewerian. But I’ve gotten the assurance of my superiors that none of them will try to stop us.”
He nodded at the map for a moment, sipping his drink, until the deeper significance of her words hit him. “Wait a minute. What do you mean, you have the assurance of your superiors? Who are your superiors, and how exactly do they know what the bandits on this side of the border are doing?”
“Oh...well, you see...um. Look here, Lord Andras, I work for a special bureau of the Sahasran government, and we...well, there are certain arrangements in place that—”
“Ah, ha!” he cried, slapping his knee. “I knew it! You people are supplying the bandits, aren’t you? Your government is supporting the Sigor rebels! We always suspected, but we could never find proof.”
She leaned forward. “And you never will. Not to mention, has it occurred to you that you’re on the Sigors’ side now?”
“Well, yes, fine. Fair point,” he said with a shrug. “But it’s still interesting to know, all the same.”
Shaking her head, she slumped back in her booth. “Honestly, you’d better keep that to yourself. Now, the next item on my agenda: your clothes.”
He looked down at his slashed doublet of blue velvet with gold embroidery. “What about them? I just bought this thing.”
“Yes, and it will be lovely for when you see Princess Elwyn. For now, however, you should get something a little more sedate. Something that doesn’t present such a perfect target. The bandits are really only loyal to themselves, and we don’t want to give them too much temptation.”
“Fine, whatever. Very well, then.”
A few minutes later, they parted at the side door of the inn, and he headed off through the streets with his cloak pulled low over his face, the way she had told him to. He walked down the hill, past rickety tinkers’ shops and sagging old cabins that tried pathetically to look like stone townhouses. And as he walked, he pondered the mystery of Lady Rada.
She was really quite attractive. Her looks weren’t classically beautiful by Myrcian standards—her cheeks a little too rounded, her eyes set a little too close together. But somehow it all worked for her, and when she smiled, there was something so pure and hopeful in her look, something almost religious. Not that she smiled often. And that was the real mystery. She couldn’t have been much older than him, and yet, there was clearly anger boiling away below the surface. Some deep, bitter wound still festered and threatened to make her lash out at any time with sharp, poisonous fury.
As he pondered, his feet seemed to take charge of their own accord, and he turned this way and that through the Overcourse District and down toward the River Kelwinn, where the best shops were located. If his head had been a bit clearer, he might not have gone that way, but he was full of whiskey and he simply went where he always had gone when he was in Pinburg and needed new clothes.
Before he knew it, he was at the big blue door of Yates and Parminder, the finest tailors in the city. And as he stepped inside, without even thinking, he pushed his hood back and turned to look at the long racks of gorgeous new laces and cottons and silk brocades and wool tartans.
