Chapter 52

By the end of the first day, Angharad would have been willing to fight another gray mirror for the prize of never again having to ride a coach.

It was no reflection on the coachman, a grizzled old woman who knew the country roads like the back of her hand and drove to Chalcia – the town nearest to the Eirenos estate – at least twice a week. It was the roads themselves that were devil’s work, the quality having wildly dropped a mere two hours out of Tratheke and never daring another swing upwards from there. It was as if someone had built a trail entirely out potholes and loose stones, occasionally throwing in some rain damage just to keep the coachman sharp.

Angharad, damned by deception to remain inside the coach instead of sitting on the bench outside with the driver, spent the day being treated like the insides of a saltshaker.

They stopped for the night at an inn within a roadside village, for though a large Glare lantern hung at the front of the coach it was meant for use only if they were caught out in the dark. Angharad felt at once tired and restless, so she decided on stretching her legs through a small walk around the nameless village while Mistress Katina secured their rooms and meal.

She limped around for a quarter-hour, contemplating mud streets and a surfeit of cabbage fields. Was cabbage so profitable as to warrant entire fields being sown? She’d had no idea. By the time she returned a warm meal was ready and she sat with her coachman, making idle conversation over profoundly average cabbage soup.

Admittedly, she should have seen the latter coming.

Mistress Katina had done business with the Eirenos for decades, she learned, having been known to Lord Cleon’s father the Lord Artemon. While not overly familiar with the Eirenos themselves, she had from a distance seen Cleon grow from a child to a young man and seemed fond of him in an abstract sort of way. As one who had regularly passed through Chalcia during decades, she was also a font of gossip about the noble house.

“His mother, Lady Penelope, she was from a fine family out east and she liked horses,” Mistress Katina said, lowering her voice as if confiding. “The good lord Artemon bought a herd after they wed, said they’d breed and sell them, but the land’s poor for it and half the horses died of sick on the second winter. They say belts tightened at the Eirenos manor after that.”

Horse breeding could be a lucrative trade, Angharad knew – some noble houses in southern Malan made a fortune off supplying the royal army and izinduna with warhorses – but it was not something that could be attempted lightly or half-heartedly. Buying several breeding pairs would have been a heavy expense for a small noble house. The finances of her own House Tredegar would not have been able to bear such a burden even though Mother’s foreign ventures had made them wealthier than most their neighbors.

“Lord Cleon seems to have led the house to recovery,” Angharad tried.

He had been finely dressed on every occasion they met and not treated like a beggar lord by his fellows.

“He’s a steady one,” Mistress Katina approved. “After Lord Artemon passed, they say Lady Penelope fell deep into grief and her young one had to handle the servants and rents on his own. By the time the Lord Rector recognized him as Lord Eirenos he’d been doing the work for two years already.”

Titles were formally inherited at sixteen, here in Asphodel, which meant Cleon Eirenos had begun running his house at the tender age of four and ten. It was impressive of him, Angharad thought. No wonder he had attracted a spirit’s interest enough for a contract to be offered. Song and Maryam clearly believed this Odyssean to be sinister, but Angharad disagreed. It was a spirit as spirits had been since the Old Night, harsh and bloody and never to be trusted too closely.

The notion that some spirits were trustworthy was what Angharad took exception to.

Fed plenty gossip and soup best complimented as being of the appropriate temperature, Angharad retired for the night in the rented room. It was clean, if cramped, but exhausted as she was the Pereduri would have fallen asleep on stone. The innkeeper woke her an hour before daylight began, providing an offering freshly baked bread deplorably accompanied by further cabbage soup. Simmering overnight had not improved its taste or texture.

A surprise came when she was told that the mail rider come overnight had left a package for her, however, paid for by sender. She opened it and found that a certain ‘Lord Allazi’ was allegedly returning her hat to her. His lordship’s handwriting was remarkably similar to Song’s, which had her retiring to her room to put the hat away in her traveling chest while Mistress Katina finished feeding the horses. Door closed, Angharad discovered that inside the round-crowned, short-brimmed gray felt piece there was a discreet black lining with a folded paper tucked inside.

She teased it out, learning after opening that that Song believed the Eirenos might be in possession of ancient royal property that could shed light on the nature of the spirit contained in the empty layer. Angharad was requested to find out if such property was truly in Eirenos hands, and to obtain it if she could. Both requests were suborned to the necessity of maintaining her cover, which Song stressed was more important than any short-term gain. She was then bid to burn the paper as soon as feasible.

The noblewoman promptly fed it to her room lantern and joined Mistress Katina in the coach, keeping her thoughts off her face.

None of her assignments ran, strictly speaking, contrary to the duties of a guest. To find out if he had any knowledge of the shipyard entrance – however indirectly – and tease out any involvement with the cult of the Golden Ram were no breaches of guest right. Neither, arguably, would be inquiring after old family history and treasures. Yet it could not be denied that Angharad had been invited in good faith and would repay this with petty sneakery.

No, she reminded herself. Not so petty, save what she committed on her own behalf. To learn about the roots of a rampant spirit, to investigate the good name of one who might be a cultist, these were not unworthy things. They only felt so because Angharad was used to attending as a guest, not a watchwoman. For a noble guest to spy would have been dishonorable, but for a rook it was only her duty.

Save, of course, for one part: the dishonor she had brought with her, the liar’s deal taken. It was tempting to tell herself that looking into Eirenos knowledge of the shipyard would also aid the Thirteenth’s investigation, but it would have been half a lie. Even if there had been no use at all for the test she would have asked. Was it dishonor, to pursue a private task while undertaking oathsworn service? Some scholars of honor would say so, that to dilute service was to destroy it, but Angharad was not so sure.

If getting her answers did not war with the higher duty…

The coach shook her out of her thoughts, quite literally, as it hit a pothole and Mistress Katina cursed most uncouthly. Angharad groaned, stretching out her aching back and resisted the urge to lean forward and bury her face into her bag. It would crease her only traveling dress and it would be a tedious chore to straighten it out when they stopped for the night. How long had it been since they left the town, a few hours? Let it be at least that, the day was stretching on most intolerably.

When the coach kept on inching forward at a crawl after that bump Angharad swallowed a second groan, for that seemed to her the herald of a wheel in need of changing – or, ancestors forbid, a whole axle – but the coachman did not stop outright. Frowning, Angharad reached for her traveling bag and prudently grabbed her pistol and a hunting knife borrowed from the Black House armory. The former was already loaded, and with it in hand she drew back the carriage drapes and peeked out.

Ahead of them were hilly woodlands with the dirt road slithering through a dip in the heights, tall fig trees casting shade on white bindweed flowers. Just before the road went into the hills, though, was a crashed carriage – it must have had at least four horses, by the looks of the harness, though there was no trace of them. Two wheels had come off, snapped, and it lay tipped over on the ground with a wall caved in and merchandise spilling out. Barrels and crates, bundles of cloth with glinting contents.

Two men in hunting coats stood by the wreck, one rummaging through a crate while the other kept watch. And at the latter’s feet Angharad saw a corpse – not that of a man but a beast, a thick-furred lupine felled by a hunting spear still lodged in its side.

“Mistress Katina?” Angharad quietly called out. “Why do you hesitate?”

The old woman leaned past the edge of her bench, her grimacing face cast in shadow from the lit lantern at the front of the carriage. Lit for the forest crossing, Angharad idly guessed.

“We’re still too close to Tratheke, my lady,” she said. “These are the Lord Rector’s woods, which means these are no hunters.”

“Poachers,” Angharad immediately grasped.

A plague on any noblewoman’s forests. Llanw Hall had been thin on trees, and thus such troubles, but she had sat at her mother’s table while some of their highborn neighbors complained of such lawbreaking on their own lands. And while Angharad was not sure of the punishment for poaching on Asphodel, even less so when poaching in royal land, it was sure to be unpleasant. These men might well see them as witnesses to silence.

“Is there another way to Chalcia?” she asked.

“Not without risking the gullies, which is treacherous traveling,” the coachman said. “It is too late, besides. They’ve seen us.”

Mistress Katina spoke true, for the poacher who had been keeping watch now walked away from his confederate and towards them, down the dirt road. He had in hand a musket loosely held – no, not a musket but a fowler. Slender, of smaller bore, but quicker on the shot as was needed to clip a bird’s wings.

“Ho there, on the road,” the dark-haired man called out. “Who goes here?”

“We may have to pay them off, my lady,” Mistress Katina murmured. “Let me do the talking.”

Reluctantly, Angharad nodded and withdrew. She mostly closed the drape, leaving herself just wide enough an opening to be able to see through and aim.

“Katina of Teon’s Hill,” the coachman called back. “I am headed for Chalcia, down the road, with a guest but no goods. I want no trouble.”

The man laughed.

“Neither do we, good woman,” he replied. “We were only passing through when we saw the fallen carriage and came to look for survivors. All hands lost, it seems.”

“That lupine your work, then?”

“It was,” the poacher agreed. “Waiting there, though there was no corpse to feed on and hardly any traces of blood. A passing strange accident, this.”

“No business of ours,” Mistress Katina said. “We are headed north and have no time for distractions.”

“Then by all means,” the poacher said, “be on your way.”

Through the slice of room she had left, Angharad saw the other poacher had abandoned his inspection and ripped his spear out of the lemure’s corpse. Precaution or preparation? Her fingers tightened around the pistol. Keeping it at the ready, she leaned to the side and blindly began digging under the bench. There the saber Uncle Osian had gifted her lay hidden. She set it over her traveling bag, in easy reach, as the coach began to advance again.

Five feet, ten, twenty – the poacher kept pace with them on the side of the road, the dark-haired man with poor teeth smiling all the while. It was the movement from the other one that told Angharad everything she needed to know. The second poacher, with his spear and knife, moved to get in the way of the horses with his spear at the ready. Horses, unless trained otherwise, did not charge into spears. Mistress Katina’s aging plodders did not strike Angharad as having been raised such.

The coachman had a musket of her own, and Angharad heard it getting cocked, but then the smiling poacher was flanking her with his fowler. Smaller bore or not, that gun would kill.

“Might be you’ll get me, but I’ll bring one of you along onto the Sculler’s boat,” Mistress Katina harshly said. “And then who will help the survivor carry the loot? Let’s settle this with coin, boys, parts ways bloodless.”

“There’s no need for blood,” the smiler agreed. “My oath to Oduromai King, you will leave with horses and coach and traveler.”

The other one laughed, as if there was some sort of private jest.

“We’ll only take everything else,” the first poacher continued. “Don’t make this ugly, old-timer.”

Angharad breathed out, closed her eyes.

(Angharad Tredegar grabbed her saber and pushed open the door on the smiling man’s side, jolting him in surprise. The pistol shoot took him in the head, pulping red, as the coachman leveled her musket and unloaded in the other’s belly. He fell screaming. A shot from the edge of the woods, the hill to the left, and a furious red-haired woman charged out with a smoking fowler as the coachman slumped dead on the bench and the horses went wild.)

“It will be an evil eye on all of us, if you push this,” Mistress Katina insisted, “it’ll only-”

Angharad grabbed her saber, tucked it under her arm and pushed open the door on the smiling man’s side.

He hesitated just a moment too long, knowing about the coachman’s gun but not yet having seen hers, so the shot took him just to the side of the nose at it had in the glimpse. He dropped, but before Mistress Katina could drop the other Angharad raised her voice.

“Woods, to the left,” she curtly ordered.

The old woman cursed and fired, a scream resounding in the distance, and Angharad barely spared a look for the red-haired woman running deeper into the woods while the last poacher – gone white-faced and wide-eyed – leveled his spear at them. Angharad tossed her pistol onto the coach bench, taking her saber and sliding it out of the sheath.

The poacher knew he was good as dead if Mistress Katina got in another shot, so he rushed towards the old woman before she could reload. That made him predictable, and predictable was half the walk to the graveyard.

It should have been child’s play to reap him, would have been if Angharad were not just as much of a wreck as the toppled carriage. So instead of darting in past his guard and cutting down the back of his knee, Angharad’s own leg gave under her as she hurried and she stumbled with a groan.

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She tossed her scabbard at the poacher’s face instead, just as he got past the panicking horses, and though it only clipped the side of his head he had to bring back his spear to protect himself – which let Mistress Katina leap off the bench before he blindly stabbed at where she had just been. The poacher snarled out a curse, panic rising as he looked around. Angharad had to push herself up with her saber to remain standing. She saw the choice being weighed behind his eyes: use the cripple as a shield or chase after the nimble older woman.

He picked the cripple.

Angharad had fought skilled spearmen before. In spars, and twice with death on the line: Tupoc, in the visions, then the hollow warband and Amrinder on the field. Warriors trained and tempered, some first-rate in their skills. The poacher was no such thing, just a scared man with a hunting spear, and because of that in the first breath of the exchange he came a hair’s breadth away from killing her.

She flicked to the side, feinting, and would have caught his arm when he moved to parry. Only instead he shouted and smashed the shaft blindly in her direction. She tripped backward trying to catch the haft with her guard, getting knocked on her ass, and he kicked her in the chest. Angharad groaned, limbs already trembling, but she had kept her saber in hand – she hacked at the side of his leg and cut deep, the poacher pulling back with a shout.

She feinted up at his face, the point near enough he panicked and slapped at it with his spear, and that was enough. When his arm extended to the right she rose onto her knees, delicately pressing the tip of her blade between two ribs as he stepped into the blow and it slid deep in him. The poacher let out a ragged gasp and fell to his knees while she ripped out the blade, eerily mirroring her. Angharad leaned on the coach to get back to her feet and kicked his wrist when he tried to reach for his hunting knife. It went flying on the dirt, soundless. Panting, sweat-soaked and her saber held more like a crutch than a blade, she forced herself to put the steel to his throat.

“Wait,” the man gurgled, holding his gut wound. “Wait. We weren’t going to hurt you, we were just paid to-”

“Paid,” she repeated, disbelieving. “By whom?”

“I didn’t see,” the poacher said, looking pale as he clutched at his wound. “Someone’s servant. Iris said she saw blue and green sown on the pouch, but we never got a name.”

“And what,” Angharad coldly said, “what were you paid to do?”

The man swallowed.

“To wait here,” he said, “for a coach. With the old-timer and some Malani girl in it. We were just to take everything but your smallclothes and let you go.”

Angharad blinked. What manner of plot was this? Nonsense.

“And the broken carriage?” she pressed.

“It was like that when we got here,” the man insisted. “We were looking through when the lupine came, to take the guns.”

The guns? No, that hardly mattered. She could look herself.

“The servant who paid you,” she said. “What did they look like?”

“He wore a hood,” the poacher said. “Please, we weren’t going to hurt you-”

“Ha!”

Mistress Katina, having gone around the coach, stepped out with a loaded musket.

“Well done, my lady,” she said. “Not hurt us, my boot. You can tell it to the magistrate.”

Angharad shot her an odd look. Magistrate? The man was a poacher, a highwayman and he’d bared steel on a woman of noble blood.

“Whatever for?” she asked.