hurry to get toother matters. But friends, now…”
“Keep your hands on the buckles, ‘Friend’ Brace,” Alusair said warningly, turning to let the firelight fall on her side so that he could see what he was undoing. He gently laid aside the plates that covered her torso and gestured to her to sit. She obeyed.
“As I was saying,” Brace continued in dignified tones, “friends have the only hands suitable for the removal of chafing armor… and the rubbing of tired feet.”
“Ahhh,” Alusair moaned, lying back and closing her eyes in genuine ecstasy. “I’ve made the correct choice! I should have surmised you were as good with your hands as you were with your blade. It’s good to have a championship foot rub, particularly when the realm is in dire peril.” An errant thought crossed her mind as she spoke, and she stiffened involuntarily.
“Princess?” he asked anxiously.
She waved a dismissive hand. “No… I just remembered something, that’s all…”
“A secret, or something to share?” he asked, and she shook her head absently.
“A secret,” was all she said, but the thought was blazing through her brain over and over again. She knew she was right. In all her life, she’d never heard her father say, “the realm is in dire peril,” but it had always been one of Vangerdahast’s favorite phrases. She frowned and thought of the message plate. Why would the old wizard be impersonating her father?
What was Vangerdahast up to now?
Chapter 8: Massacre
Year of Distant Thunder (16 DR)
Ondeth and the others picked their way carefully through the smoking remains of the Bleth farmstead. The eldest Obarskyr’s face was like stone, and he said nothing as he stared around at the devastation. Not a single building had been spared… and not a single creature was alive.
The farm was only a mile from Suzail, a small glade that Mondar Bleth had cleared to twice its original size. Three main buildings, one with a stone foundation, had stood here, and in this place Mondar had reared a prodigious supply of goats. Now those buildings were smoking husks, and the riven corpses of the goats lay strewn around the camp, along with the human bodies.
Ten men and women had been slain here for no good reason. Mondar himself had been found at the entrance to the farmhouse, his battered body supported by a tripod of thin ivory pikes tipped with gold. Elven weapons. Their bloody points had stood up out of his chest and belly, holding his huge, bearlike body clear of the ground. Mondar’s eyes were open and accusing.
Faerlthann came up to his father with Mondar’s sword, a huge, heavy-hafted blade that had always hung at the large man’s side. Mondar had never been shy about drawing that sword to make a point. The blade was sticky and dark with drying blood. Though there were no elven bodies among the dead, it seemed Mondar had held out well against his attackers.
The eyes of the older and younger Obarskyrs met, and Ondeth saw accusation in his son’s eyes. Two of the Bleths had survived this slaughter by being in Suzail at the time. Minda, Mondar’s sister, had been a guest for dinner the previous night and had brought Arphoind, Bleth’s youngest son, a strapling of all of eight winters, with her.
The visiting Bleths had come for dinner and stayed the night, Arphoind in the loft and Minda… well, Minda was in Ondeth’s quarters. No one should have known of their tryst, and the Bleths would have left with the morning sun, the rest of Suzail none the wiser. But in the dawn there was smoke rising from the northwest, and panic in the household, and not a few eyes noted that the raven-tressed beauty of the Bleths had emerged from Ondeth’s private room.
They had left Minda and her nephew behind when they went to investigate, which was just as well. Ondeth did not want the woman to see her brother pinioned like a goose held over a fire. And the elves who did this might still be nearby.
Upon seeing the devastation, Ondeth’s first thought had been, “What will I tell Minda?” Yet looking into his own son’s eyes, he was faced with another question: What do I tell Faerlthann? His son was among those who’d noted Minda’s emergence in the morning. His face was pale with anger-not anger for elves, but rather for Ondeth Obarskyr, who had betrayed his mother’s memory
As they’d hastened out of Suzail, Faerlthann had said but one thing, a short, barely heard whisper as they pulled their swords from the wall and gathered their light suits of armor. “How could you do it? How could you do that to Mother?” But then he had turned to join the others and there was no time to talk.
Ondeth should have spoken out, and spoken out then. It had been four years since Suzara had left them, tired of the wolves and the mosquitoes and, most of all, the endless work. He should have replied that Mother had already done unto him. Nor had this tryst been the first time, only the first time they’d been caught at it. If Minda had not been at Suzail, she would be dead, here among the flies, and young Arphoind, Faerlthann’s friend, as well.
Ondeth should have said something then, but there’d been no time. And now his son looked at him over the bloody edge of Mondar’s blade, and his eyes were as accusing as Mondar’s own.
Perhaps later they would talk, father and son. Perhaps later he could explain, but now they had to cut down Bleth’s body and give him and the others a decent cremation. The Silver brothers were already gathering the dead into a pile, goats on the bottom and humans on the top. Another column of smoke, thick and oily, would rise here this day.
Ondeth looked at Bleth’s suspended form, pitched slightly forward, as if taking flight. Mondar’s jaw hung loose, as if he were passing on some drunken secret to those below. Yet there was no secret to be found here, only a warning from a people who had for the past decade been Ondeth’s allies.
“Why now?” asked Ondeth. Faerlthann started at the dreadful quiet in his father’s voice. “After all these years, why did the elves attack now?”
The center of the settlers’ universe was Suzail, and the center of the Suzail was Ondeth’s manor
The town, named after Ondeth Obarskyr’s now departed wife, had slowly crept its way up the low hillside behind the original glade. The lumbering had been carefully supervised by Baerauble Elf-friend, with the felled trees being used immediately for housing. Most of the original homesteads had been given over to farming, the buildings Ondeth and Villiam had erected now home to tools and coops and shearing floors. Newly arriving families moved upward, inside the sprawling wooden wall that embraced the entire hill. Its height was claimed by the Obarskyrs by right of first arrival, and none argued with that. Three hundred and fifty or so folk called Suzail home, a muster that could live in a single block of a packed city in Chondath or Impiltur, or even in the mercantile outposts of nearby Sembia.
Yet they were prospering. A dock had been built four seasons ago, allowing ships safe moorings along the rocky coast. Previously waterborne visitors had to make landfall at Marsember, then trek along the coast to Suzara’s City, Suzail. Merchants were now bypassing the swampy town in favor of the Obarskyr settlement. Baerauble’s contacts with the elves made it possible for the port to ship out elven cloth, nuts, and beast hides, receiving in return tools, weapons, and various fine mongery from the human cities on more southerly shores of the Sea of Fallen Stars.
Ondeth’s manor looked out over the city. Despite its two floors, it was a low, solid rampart of rough-cut stone and gray slate shingles, set partially into the hillside behind. Its stone foundation had been the first in Suzail, and envy of it had spurred the other families to build likewise.
Ondeth had talked of raising some towers at the ends of his home, but had been too busy to commit time enough to do so. When he built the manor, most of it was a single great hall, and here most of the populace of Suzail was wont to gather in the early evenings around the great fire pit in the center of the chamber. The families would come to cook their evening meals, gossip, and trade tales, lies, and legends. With the rising popularity of Suzail, even an occasional bard or minstrel would join those at the fireside, to swap sweet tales in exchange for a roof to sleep under.
And from a great chair close to the fire, Ondeth Obarskyr was the center of his own universe. He, too, had grown in the past decade, the heaviness of advancing years settling firmly around his waist. And though there were
