Tilda turned to the horses, and undid the last buckle holding Dugan’s saddle bags. He stood and she heaved the bags at him harder than was necessary, but he caught them easily and draped them familiarly over one shoulder. He held the bound bank notes in one hand and ran a thumb hard with calluses over the edge, counting.
“There is enough here for one ticket to Vod’Adia,” he said, almost but not quite like he was not even talking to Tilda. “And for a license to enter the city, besides. Still with five or ten gold left over. Probably ought to buy a helmet if I‘m going in there…”
“I do not want you to come with me,” Tilda said slowly, enunciating every word so there was no lack of clarity though she knew she was saying them for herself as much as for Dugan.
“I am not talking about you anymore,” Dugan said, holding his money in one open hand to feel the weight of it. Tilda had noticed at an early age that cash always felt heavier than just the paper and ink of which it was made.
“You will do what you want, or what you feel you must,” Dugan said. “As for me…it looks as though I am a man without a country now. A soldier without an army.” He met Tilda’s eyes, and winked. “Seems like Vod’Adia is the place to be for a man like that, in this season.”
He stuffed the notes into a trouser pocket.
“Today is Eighth of Ninth. Blackstone is due to Open in three weeks and I imagine it takes most of that to raft there. If you want your shot at John, I would suggest you take the next boat out. I’ll see you on it, most likely. Otherwise, fare thee well, my Island girl.”
With that Dugan stood to attention and struck his chest with a balled fist, in the manner of a legionnaire’s salute. He turned on his heel and marched for the gap in the front of the tree-like tower. Some of the bullywugs in the branches were still croaking, and Dugan snapped “Ribbit!” as he passed beneath them. They fell into a sulky silence.
Tilda watched Dugan step into the bound-log tower and heard him boom a hearty “Good evening, Gentlemen. Hobgoblins.” She turned away to the horses and snatched their reins free of the hitching post. She stood there in the street for a moment with the tired horses looking at her. The counterman from the store was leaning in his doorway, smoking a pipe and watching her with no particular expression on his face.
Tilda spoke one word under her breath, a Miilarkian expletive generally not put down in the more decent sorts of writing. She turned and jerked on the horses’ reins, leading them toward the docks beyond the tower.
Chapter Eighteen
Duke Cyril II, lord of the city and province of Chengdea, had a headache. It had been with him off-and-on for months, ever since word had come up the river that the Ayzant forces had broken out of the Larbonne waterfront and set siege to the remaining Daulic defenders in the old citadel.
Sometimes if the Duke slept well the headache would be gone in the morning. But it would ooze back into his skull over the course of the long days spent in his throne room. The room had changed now to the point that it was in no condition to receive visitors nor to host any banquet or ceremony. The twin thrones of mahogany inlaid with silver and upholstered with silk still sat on their dais, though Cyril hardly ever sat in his and his wife’s had been empty for twelve years now apart from the jeweled circlet sitting untouched on the pillow, which the Duchess’s staff still dusted and fluffed every day.
The throne room was vast and church-like with stone columns running down a central aisle and wide windows of stained glass high in the tall walls, facing due east and west to dapple the parquet floor with pink light at dawn and somber purple in the evenings. Beneath the windows the paneled walls were covered with adornments, primarily the Chengdean banners of a gold flower on a green field. The blossoms were a species of lotus with four curving petals native to the banks of the Black River, and thus commonly called the Black Lotus despite being a deep yellow bordering on orange. The ancient Ettacean name for the flower was the chengde, and it had given this place a name nearly fourteen centuries ago.
Between the banners, murals and torch brackets were dozens of decorations of a classic Daulic type; embossed shields mounted over crossed swords. The shields displayed the heraldry of prominent provincial nobles with the family names etched in flowing script on fired clay tablets mounted beneath them. The tablets and even a few of the names such as Gaehei, Vracchi, and Chirobbi hearkened back to ancient times when Chengdea was the twelfth and last province of the Ettacean Empire. A mixture of modified Ettasi names and old Leutian families such as Dolmonum, Towsan, and Orbachauer had become part of this land’s history during the long centuries when Chengdea had survived as an independent successor-state to the fallen empire, ruled by Dukes who still modeled their authority on the defunct Imperial writ.
Most of the shields and the family names were newer and purely Daulic, for the Nan River Kingdom had held sway here for some three-hundred years since its knights had poured into the Duchy to battle the unholy monstrosities that had scuttled out of Vod’Adia and the Wilds at the Second Opening. The Duchy was saved but at the price of independence, for the knights had not gone home after the last wight was hewn asunder, the last shadowy wraith banished. As the shields told, the descendents of men who had been but squires and knights in the Dead War were barons and earls of Daulic Chengdea to this day.
There were two shields above the thrones, that above the circlet in the empty chair was the ancient sigil of the Halvalons of eastern Daul. Cyril’s wife had detested her family banner for while from a distance it just looked like a white dove flanked by two sets of three wheat sheaves, once you got close you could see that the dove was holding an eyeball in its beak, hanging by a red nerve. Duchess Jasmine Halvalon Perforce had been a women of refinement whose sense of decorum did not embrace severed body parts on banners, and especially not on tableware.
The last shield, mounted above the ducal throne, was such a simple design as to have been an afterthought, consisting only of a diagonal gold band on a green background. The design, and Cyril’s family name of Perforce, had only been in existence since the ongoing Ayzant war began with the catastrophic battle of the Icheroon. There on an insignificant stream in the bad borderlands between the Kingdom of Daul and Ayzantium the cream of Daulic chivalry had ridden their heavy horses downhill into sucking marshes that must have looked dry from above. They had been butchered by Zantish peasants with scythes and threshing flails. A line of Dukes who had ruled Chengdea for a century was ended there, as were many much older Daulic families. In the chaos that followed thrones and fiefdoms across the provinces changed hands until seized by someone strong enough to hold onto them. In Chengdea the last man standing had been a minor knight whose lineage dated from Daul’s occupation of the Winding River lands, across the Girdings in Orstaf. Sir Cyril Balabushevych had been crowned Duke Cyril I in this very throne room, with a horse saber in one hand and the dead Duke’s widow in the other. The new Duke had lost the old Kantan mouthful in favor of Perforce, which was both Daulic and indicative of the manner in which his line had come to power.
The younger Cyril had been there as well, barely more than a boy at the time. He had held a blunderbuss on the sweating Jobian priest who conducted the dual wedding ceremony and coronation. As he now remembered it, Cyril had also had a splitting headache on that day.
Within five years the boy had gone from the bastard son of a minor knight who’d had to rent horses for jousts to being crowned himself as Duke Cyril II of Chengdea, for his father’s reign was short. It had ended with a drunken fall down five flights of circular tower stairs. The man who had killed something like fourteen or fifteen rival claimants for the Ducal throne in single combat had met his end after tripping over a cat.
To the equal surprise of Cyril II and the Chengdeanese, the young man had proven up to the task of ruling the Duchy, even as the war with Ayzantium slashed bleeding hunks out of the Kingdom’s southern, coastal flank. Chengdea met all royal demands for manpower and supply from the new King of Daul, Hughes III, who had also come to the throne as a youngster after the old king’s death on the Icheroon. Perhaps because of their likeness in age the young King seemed to trust his young Duke from the beginning, and the two had begun and maintained a warm correspondence between Chengdea and the royal capital of Bouree, or else with Hughes’s headquarters in the field. For Cyril the richest reward of the relationship had been his introduction at the King’s behest to Jasmine Halvalon, the beautiful golden-haired daughter of a powerful but under-titled baronial family in the east.
