This? This was unseemly. It was beneath the dignity of the Head of House, to say nothing of that of the ruler of the Greenweald.
After a few moments of no answer, she pushed on the doors, but they didn’t budge. Then she banged on them harder and stepped away, tilting her head back at the windows and balconies spaced along the trunk.
“Jamshir!” She was breaking protocol by not adding his title. Good.
Still no answer.
“Jamshir!” She tried again, raising her voice louder.
She was seriously considering calling for rope to tie the doors to a couple of horses and pull them open when she heard the noise of a bar falling to the floor inside the tree. A moment later and the doors cracked, allowing two figures to slip through.
One of them was very large. Tall, even for one of the Folk, he was also wide and well-muscled. Shireen recognized him from the tent in front of her own compound. General Bragnold. Like his men, his uniform was disheveled and unkempt. His eyes were on her but appeared to be unfocused.
The other man was no less than Jamshir himself, who was apparently wearing a nightshirt, his bony knees poking out from underneath it. His hair had grown long and greasy, and his beard ratty. Even from several feet away, Shireen could smell the sour odor of a body that hadn’t washed in several days.
“Who are you to come banging on my door?” he hissed.
“You know who I am, Jamshir,” Shireen said.
“LORD Jamshir! It’s LORD Jamshir!” Spittle flew from his lips and his eyes bulged.
Now Shireen knew what the snort of laughter from the guard at the gate had been about.
“If you are worthy of the title, I’ll use it,” she said calmly. “But when you attack a member of my House, you lose that respect.”
“Your House? Where is that Solomon? The one that you would see supplant me?”
Was he acting? Surely, he knew that Solomon was away, which was why he dared to move against them.
“Don’t play games with me, Jamshir. What have you done with Samuel? Is he still alive? And where is that Soul Gaunt?”
She already saw that she wasn’t getting through to him. His eyes widened and his breathing increased.
“I told you it’s Lord Jamshir,” he growled. He drew himself up and puffed his chest out. “General. Teach her respect.”
General Bragnold surged forward, drawing his sword. Shireen heard her own soldiers draw their weapons and motioned for them to hold. She didn’t bother drawing hers.
The General was huge and had a reputation as a fierce and capable fighter. But she saw the way he was moving. He was awkward, his movements not smooth or practiced.
She stepped to the side as he neared, and he stumbled past her. Putting out a foot, she grabbed his arm, spun him in a circle and tripped him. It was a move that a child at play could have countered, but Bragnold went down with a crash.
Before he could recover, Shireen reached down and yanked the sword from his grip. He hardly offered any resistance at all. She tossed it down the steps to land in the dirt near her troops. Bragnold lay at her feet, unmoving.
“Hah, there, now let that be a lesson to you!”
Shireen turned back to Jamshir in surprise. The ruler of the Greenweald was chuckling, a thin line of drool hanging from his bottom lip.
“Now you know. It’s Lord Jamshir. Always Lord Jamshir.”
The man was utterly mad. More than he had been when he attacked Towering Oaks and brought the Soul Gaunts. His mind was gone and reality had no bearing on him.
She was beginning to doubt that he was capable of being responsible for anything.
Maybe if she gave him what he was demanding he could focus enough to answer. “Did the Secret House do it, Lord Jamshir?”
“The Secret House? Oh, not so secret anymore, are they? No, everyone knows of Subtle Hemlock now. But I have others. Others who will do what I want. Others who will obey Lord Jamshir.”
Shireen doubted that. From the condition of the compound, Jamshir had been driven mad and then abandoned. But that other House, this Subtle Hemlock, was devious. They could very well be playing a whole new game.
“Lord Jamshir,” she tried. “I came here once before, with your old friends Lords Jediah and Florian. Do you remember?”
“I remember. I remember Jediah stealing my father from me….” He trailed off, muttering to himself.
“I was enamored by the greatness of your House,” Shireen continued. “And ever since, I’ve been dying to see it again, and telling everyone how wonderful it was. Would it be possible to see more of it?”
In truth, she was going inside whether it was with Jamshir or over him. Maybe he wasn’t responsible for what happened to Samuel, but she didn’t know that. She wouldn’t leave until she searched the place top to bottom for signs of him.
If she could do that without using force, all the better.
None of this was going the way she’d expected it to. She never thought of forcing her way into the tree when she rode here. But if that was what she needed to do, she would.
“You wish to see? It’s not as nice as it…” Jamshir appeared confused for a moment, looking about the compound. Then, he shook his head.
“Yes, of course. It’s only right for a ruler to be magnanimous to his subjects. Bragnold, show our guests inside.”
The General hadn’t moved since Shireen tripped him. Now he lumbered to his feet and shuffled to the double doors, thrusting them open and standing aside.
Jamshir offered his arm to Shireen. Swallowing her disgust she took it, and motioned behind her for the rest of
