Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (5 page)

Lady Delia was beautiful in a lushly feminine way, and much admired
as a leader of fashion; Huon had seen her a few times at Court or social events, and felt the same awed goggle-eyed lust as any boy his age. Baron de Stafford was ruggedly handsome, a noted champion in the lists, victor in two duels, and a respected leader in the field. Lady d’Ath was known as
Lady Death
; she’d been the Regent’s hatchetwoman for years before she became a commander, and she was victor in more than a
dozen
duels, about which rumor told equally credible and really, truly hideous details. Not many people liked her and a fair number hated her bitterly, but he’d never heard an Associate nobleman refer to her with anything but wary respect shading into outright fear.

She certainly scares
me, he thought.
Of course, if things had gone a little differently, the Regent might have sent her to kill the rest of House Liu; I’m pretty sure she was the one who…executed…Mom.

He grimaced slightly at the thought. His mother hadn’t really been herself that last year or two before things fell apart; it had been like living with a stranger who just
looked
like the mother he remembered. A dangerous and utterly unpredictable stranger. According to rumor, again, she’d been
possessed
, a thing of evil. He could believe it—though he very much didn’t want to—and a lot of his nightly prayers were for her soul. He couldn’t even really resent the way the Regent had dealt with her.

On second thought, with the Spider of the Silver Tower behind them, it’s no wonder nobody makes trouble for d’Ath and de Stafford, even if they’re not scared of ending up in a dueling circle. Which I would be. But the Regent’s mind scares me even more than Lady Death’s sword, now that I’ve seen Lady Regent Sandra Arminger in action at close range.

“Were you with the Grand Constable at Walla Walla?” Huon asked Lioncel, a little enviously.

D’Ath had commanded the Montivalan vanguard there, the army screening the gathering of the High King’s host and turning to snap and slash at the eastern invaders as they advanced. The war-camp was full of the news of their deeds, and the way the High King had led a charge to rescue them when they were surrounded by the Prophet’s cavalry just before they reached safety a few days ago. Huon had been part of that, but you didn’t see much even if you were involved; it was all a whirling
confusion, not the neat lines and duel-like blow-by-blow encounters of which the troubadours sang.

“Yes,” Lioncel said; his face was sober as he replied, as if he were suddenly looking somewhere quite different. “My lord my father was too. It was…there were so
many
of them, the enemy, even when they split up to try and trap us. If we’d made
one
big mistake, none of us would have gotten away. It was…like dancing backward while someone really big tried to hit you with a war hammer, but my lady d’Ath never let them get a grip on us. And we hurt them, hurt them badly.”

Then he smiled. “At first the regiments from the Yakima League didn’t like serving under the Grand Constable.”

“I suppose the Free Cities remember the old wars,” Huon said. “My father fought there, when we took the Tri-Cities; I’m too young to remember it.”

“Mine too. And do they
ever
remember the old wars! Not the way we Associates do, either. But by the end, they were cheering her whenever she rode by. And the enemy got a lot more cautious, even with their numbers. I grew up with her, but that was the first time I knew, really knew, why so many people are so frightened of her.”

Huon nodded respectfully; they both served warriors of note and of famous deeds, even if they were women.

And running the Grand Constable’s messages or carrying her spare lances must have been pretty dangerous too. He’s younger than me, but he’s already well-blooded.

He glanced through the door of the tent; Lady d’Ath was speaking, referring to a notebook in her left hand and tracing something on the map. Just to add to the puzzle, she looked a lot like Lioncel, enough to have actually been his mother herself; blond and regular-featured and tall. Not ladylike or feminine, but not really mannish, either—very female and very, very dangerous, like a she-tiger.

“You’re Baron Odard’s younger brother, aren’t you?” Lioncel asked. “The late baron, of course. We’ve all heard about his deeds and how well he died.”

Huon nodded. Lioncel was looking at
him
a little oddly, too, because the Barony of Gervais wasn’t exactly normal either. House Liu had produced
his elder brother, Odard, who had been one of the Companions of the Quest with the High King and Queen, all the way east to Nantucket. He hadn’t come back.

So far, so good
, he thought.
I miss Odard. He was a good guy and a good brother when he remembered me at all, but a knight has to expect to die by the sword—and he died like a hero from a
chanson.
He brought honor to our House and he saved Yseult and me. Without him, when Mother was arrested for treason…

The problem was that their mother hadn’t just been arrested and executed for treason; she had been
guilty
as the proverbial Dragon of Sin itself, in league with the Church Universal and Triumphant, and so had his uncle Sir Guelf been. They’d both died for it, and nearly taken House Liu down with them; he and his sister had spent a lot of time under arrest and parole, not to mention constant suspicion. It hadn’t been any fun at all.

That’s over by now, thank God and His Mother, but I’m still feeling…prickly…over it.

The High King and the Queen had been generous to a fault since they got back from the Quest. He was a royal squire now, a post a lot of young noblemen would kill for, and Yseult was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen; she’d been promised a dowry of manors from the Crown demesne, and it had been made known the High King and Queen would stand godparents to any children either had, a priceless
cadeau
. All that made them a lot less of a pair of lepers socially. It still hadn’t stopped suspicious glances out of the corners of eyes.

He wondered if anything would, except the passage of more time than he liked to think about.

“Huon!”

The High Queen’s voice snapped him out of his reverie. He left his tethered horse and strode briskly into the tent, sweeping off his brimless squire’s flowerpot hat and bowing before standing to attention.

“Your Majesty,” he said.

Mathilda Arminger had been a kindly mistress to him in the month of his service, but she was all business in the field. Which was just what you wanted, of course. Nobody who’d met her was going to tease him about being a woman’s squire.

“You’re going here,” she said, tucking a lock of her dark-brown hair back into place with one finger, then tracing a path on the map.

He watched closely as she tapped four points in the high country north of the town and Crown castle of Goldendale.

“There are posts here…here…here and here.”

He memorized the locations; map-reading and knowing terrain were skills a nobleman had to master. She handed him four envelopes with the Crown seal.

“You’re to take these messages to the commanders at each; they’re just signal and scout detachments. Take any reply — written or verbal, they won’t be urgent or they would have used their heliographs.”

“Your Majesty?”

That was Tiphaine d’Ath, in her cool inflectionless voice. “Sending him alone is
almost
completely safe. Remember what we have Ogier nosing around up that way for.”

The High Queen smiled, her strong, slightly irregular face lighting for a second. She was in her mid-twenties, a decade and a half younger than d’Ath, but tired enough by the labors of the last few days that you could see what she’d look like in middle-age when the freshness of youth was gone. Indomitable, like weathered rock.

“Good point, my lady Grand Constable,” she said with a nod. “Which is not the same as
absolutely completely
safe.”

D’Ath raised her voice in turn: “Lioncel!”

The blond youngster seemed to appear magically. “My lady?”

“Her Majesty’s squire is carrying dispatches to the posts north of the city. Accompany him, under his orders. Both of you keep a sharp lookout. If you see any sign of enemy activity, get out immediately and report it to Castle Goldendale. It’s not likely, but the unlikely happens sometimes.”

“Yes, my lady!”

Huon inclined his head. “When and where shall we rejoin, Your Majesty?”

Mathilda looked at her watch.

“Nine fifteen. We’re moving out to Castle Maryhill down on the Columbia
in a couple of hours, once we get this cleared up. Rejoin there by no later than sundown, we’ll be moving east at dawn.”

“And you have a new sister,” d’Ath said to Lioncel, handing over a parcel and a sealed note on lavender-colored paper. “Her name is Yolande. Your lady mother sent this for you with the courier.”

“Thank you, my lady! That’s wonderful news!”

Huon suppressed a pang of envy;
his
mother probably wouldn’t have sent the parcel. Even before she turned strange. Certainly not just before or after an accouchement.

So much for unnatural mothers,
he thought a little sourly, seeing Lioncel’s unaffected delight.

Both the squires bent their knee and turned about smartly. Both were smiling as they left; a day spent dashing about was a
lot
more exciting than standing and watching the grass grow. And they had all day to do it in, plenty of time. He suspected it was partly a test of his land-navigation skills, too; he hadn’t been given a map.

“Congratulations,” Huon said. “Sisters can be fun; Yseult and I get along really well.”

“Thanks, but she’s older than you, isn’t she?”

“Two years,” Huon said. “It was Odard, then Yseult, then me. Then my father was killed in the Protector’s War, so I was the last, that’s why it’s such a small family.”

“You’re the youngest, but I’m the oldest in ours. Little Heuradys is still toddling and drooling, and when they’re babies they’re about as interesting as a lump of dough and not nearly as cute as puppies. Plus a puppy doesn’t take years to housebreak, as Lady d’Ath says. I’m happy for my lady my mother, though; she always wanted two sons and two daughters. A matched set, she called it.”

“Don’t worry now, they’ll both be old enough for you to be worrying about their suitors in no time!”

They unhitched their fast coursers from the picket line, vaulted into the saddle and cantered off northward, turning west along a rutted lane bordered with London plane trees to avoid the city wall, riding off onto
the verge now and then to dodge the odd cart or wagon and once sweeping off their hats and bowing in the saddle as a lady went by on her palfrey, with maids and guards in attendance. She nodded back at them and smiled regally, teeth white against her brown face.

Lioncel had stuffed the package in a saddlebag after sniffing hopefully at it.

“My lady my mother is always sending me stuff,” he said. “Little things, but it’s usually stuff I really
need
as well as being cool.”

He slit the note open with his dagger, a thin-bladed misericorde, and read it. Huon caught a slight waft of scent, some cool floral fragrance, maybe verbena.

“Oh good, thanks be to the Virgin. The accouchement went easily—
like a watermelon seed
, she says, and they’re both doing well. Lady Valentine Renfrew was there at Montinore with her—the Countess of Odell—they’re old friends. And the Renfrew daughters were there, all three; they’re nice girls. It must have been a lot of comfort to Mom. And them. It’s hard on women, waiting, when there’s war.”

“Bearing children is like battle,” Huon said, which was a cliché but had the advantage of being true. “You’re lucky to have three brothers and sisters.”

The smile ended as Lioncel read the end of the note, and Huon could see a flush spread up to the other boy’s ears, along with an audible grinding of teeth.

“Oh, sweet Saints,
Dolores sends her regards!
” he muttered angrily under his breath, and started to crumple the letter before he smoothed it out and tucked it into a pocket in his trews.

“Ah…who’s Dolores?” Huon asked.

They were thoroughly alone. The only sounds were the creak of saddle leather, the dull hollow clop of hooves on dirt, and the wind in the trees. Yellow-brown leaves fell around them, and a flight of starlings went by. Through town would be the most direct route, but impossibly crowded and slow. The witches-hat tops of the town’s towers and the taller ones of the castle on its northern fringe edged by, with the green slopes of the low mountains behind. You could see the peaks of Adams
and Ranier from here, and sometimes the cone of Mt. Hood southward and west.

Lioncel’s face had relaxed a little. “A girl,” he said ruefully. “A really pretty girl. Friendly, too.”

Well, at least it
is
a girl,
Huon thought. “Your leman?” he said.

Lioncel was distinctly young to have a recognized lady-love and he wasn’t wearing a favor-ribbon on his arm, either, just a plain mail shirt and surcoat.

“Ah…no,” he replied, and his mouth quirked, apparently halfway between humor and embarrassment. “She’s a servant girl at Montinore manor house. Part-time, boon-work, you know. Her father’s a blacksmith, and her mother’s a midwife.”

Huon nodded; he did. All peasant families on a manor owed labor-service as part of the rent for their holdings. Usually the skilled upper house-servants were full-time retainers who moved with the nobles they served from manor to castle to court, but the routine scrubbing, potato-peeling and fetch-and-carry was done by young women from the nearest estate village, fulfilling part of their kin’s obligations. It wasn’t as hard as working in the demesne fields and there were other advantages.

But Lioncel was rather too young to have an acknowledged mistress, either. Even if his parents were
very
indulgent.

“And…well, Mom…my lady mother…caught us in a linen closet,” Lioncel went on doggedly.

“Ouch,” Huon said sympathetically, trying to imagine
his
mother’s reaction…even when she’d been herself. “Trouble?”