the King’s heir, should be put off and shuffled about as though she were some troublesome trull whose swelling belly could be ignored. And then, worst of all, the Princess of Astarac had arrived with due state to be married to the father of Jemilla’s child. Or to the man everyone thought was the father, it made no odds—not now.
Things were slipping through her grasp with every passing day. This wedding must not happen. Her child must be recognized as the rightful heir. And if Abeleyn were as near death as everyone supposed, then surely it made sense to secure the succession. Couldn’t they see that? Or must they be made to see it?
She lay naked on the wide bed in her suite. The short day was almost over and the room was dark but for the blaze of a fire in the huge hearth that dominated one wall. At least they had quartered her in the palace. That was something. She regarded her body in the firelight, running her hands up and down it as a man might with a horse he meant to buy. The swelling was visible now, a bulge that marred the otherwise perfect symmetry of her shape. She frowned at it. Childbirth. Such a messy, painful affair. Even messier if one sought to avoid it. She remembered the blood and her own shrieking the night she rid herself of Richard Hawkwood’s first child. Nothing could be worse than that.
Her breasts were filling out. She cupped them, ran her slender fingers down her abdomen to where the hair sprang in ebony curls at her crotch. She stroked herself there absently, thinking. She thought of her body as an instrument, a tool to be utilized with the utmost efficiency. It was her key to a better life, this flesh and all that it contained.
She sprang up, pulled round her shoulders a robe of Nalbenic silk and padded barefoot to the door. A moment to gather herself, to rehearse her words, and then she yanked open the heavy portal in a rush.
“Quickly, quickly—you there!”
There were two guards, not one. She must have caught them as they were changing shifts. It made her hesitate, but only for the fraction of a second.
“There’s something in my room—a rat. You must come and look!”
The two soldiers were members of the Abrusio garrison, veterans of the battle to retake the city. They were rough, untutored swordsmen who had not been told why they were to guard the lady Jemilla’s door, only that her every move was to be reported direct to General Mercado. They hung back, and one said: “I’ll get your lady’s maidservant.”
“No, no, you fools. She can’t abide rats any more than I can. Get in there and kill it for me, for God’s sake. Are you men at all?”
Jemilla was beautifully unkempt, one shoulder gleaming pale as ivory above the robe she clutched together at her breasts. The two soldiers looked at one another, and one shrugged. They marched into her chambers.
Jemilla followed them, shutting the door behind her. The soldiers poked under the bed, along the wall hangings.
“I believe it’s gone, lady,” one of them said, and then said no more but simply stared. Jemilla had dropped her robe and was standing incandescently nude before them, touching herself, her body undulating like a willow in a breeze.
“It’s been so long,” she said. “Won’t you please help me?”
“Lady—” one of the men said hoarsely. He held out a hand as if to ward her off.
“Oh, please. Do this thing for me, just this once.” She approached them as they stood, thunderstruck. “Please, soldiers. Just this once. It’s been so long, and no one will ever know.”
The men’s eyes met for the briefest moment, and then they moved in on her like wolves on a lamb.
T HE men were drooping in the saddle when the lead riders of the screen came in sight of Staed. Corfe called a halt—it was by then the middle of the night—and after seeing to their mounts the tribesmen sank to the ground and slept without fires to warm them, pickets out every hundred yards around the bivouac.
Corfe, Marsch and Andruw stole up to the rising ground that hid them from their objective and took a look at the port itself in the starlit night. It was bitterly cold, and flakes of snow were running before the wind like feathers. The ground was frozen stiff as stone, which was all to the good. It would be better for the horses. Nothing worse than a cavalry charge bogged hock-deep in mud.
Staed was a largish port of some ten thousand people, one of the prosperous coastal settlements that the Fimbrians had founded centuries before in their drive to populate what was then a wilderness dominated by the Felimbric tribes. It had done well for itself. Corfe could see the massive breakwaters that protected the harbour and held in their arms over a score of vessels: galleys of the Kardian, probably hailing from one of the Sultanates, and some caravels, the seaworthy little ships that were the lifeblood of trade in the Levangore. Down by the harbour was the old fortress in which Duke Narfintyr had his headquarters no doubt, his ancestral seat. It was tall under the stars, a castle built before artillery. Nowadays walls were squat and thick to resist bombardment. But three hundred men would not fit in that keep, much less three thousand. Where had he them quartered?
They lay on the hard earth with the cold slowly sinking into them, the warmth of their bodies chilled by the metal armour they wore. The world was vast and starlit and bitter with winter. A few lights burned in Staed and in the keep which dominated it, but the rest of the sleeping earth seemed dark as a cave.
This country had been Corfe’s home once. He had been born in a farmer’s hut not two leagues from where he now lay. He had been a farmer’s son for fourteen years, before he followed the tercios north to Torunn to go for a soldier. It was the only profession allowed to the lowest class of commoners in Torunn, those tied to the land by the obligations to their feudal lords. For the poor, it was soldiering, or serfdom. An age ago it seemed, that last morning on the farm, a time back in the youth of the world. There was no familiarity in the dark hills, nothing for him here that he could recall. He remembered only his mother, small and patient, and his father, a broad, taciturn man who had worked harder than any human being he had ever known before or since, who had not stopped his only son from going for a soldier, though it would mean there would be no one around to look after him in his old age.
Old age. They were ten years dead, worn out by a lifetime of backbreaking labour. Dead in their fourth decade so that nobles like Narfintyr might hunt and drink fine wine and foment rebellion. That was the way the world worked. Ironic that the peasant’s son would come back with an army intent on destroying the noble. There was a sweetness in that which Corfe savoured.
It was Marsch who discovered the enemy camp, with his eagle sight. A scattering of fires to the south of the town, on a hillside. There was no shape or regularity to them. They might have been sparks fallen from the forge of some skyborne god. Corfe studied them, somewhat puzzled.
“No camp discipline. They’re spread over damn near half a mile. What are their officers thinking of?”
“There’s folk in the castle,” Andruw said quietly. “Lights and such. Do you think Narfintyr is in there, or out in the field with his men?”
“It’s a cold night,” Corfe said with a smile. “If you were one of the old nobility, where would you be? And if his senior officers are out of the cold with him, then that would explain the slackness of their men’s bivouac. But doesn’t he know that there’s an army approaching him? It’s criminally remiss of him to sleep separately from his command, even if he is a boneheaded nobleman.”
“We made sixty miles in the last eighteen hours,” Andruw reminded Corfe. “It could be we’ve stolen a march on them. Maybe they’re expecting Aras’s column and no more, and it’s still twenty-five leagues behind us, a week at their pace.”
Corfe considered it. The more he thought, the more he was sure that he had to move at once. Now. If he delayed the attack a day there was every chance his men would be discovered, and there went the advantage of surprise, which was vital when he faced the odds he did.
“We attack tonight,” he said.
Andruw groaned. “You can’t be serious. The men have had no sleep in two days. They’ve just completed a hellish forced march. For God’s sake, Corfe, they’re flesh and blood!”
“It’s to spare their flesh and blood that I want to hit the enemy tonight. They can sleep all they want once we’ve broken Narfintyr’s men.”
“The colonel is right,” Marsch said. “We have them where we want them. Such a thing may not happen again. It has to be tonight.”
