Honor Among Thieves (3 page)
A
t dawn—as promised—Croy returned, looking a little tousled after riding in the woods all night. He was all blond hair and muscles and stupid grins, but Malden did his best not to hate the man. After all, Croy had already lost the game for Cythera’s heart—he just didn’t know it yet.
The three of them returned to the abandoned hill fort where they’d left their horses and their prisoner. Balint the dwarf looked angry enough to spit blood, but they’d kept her bound and gagged so she couldn’t get into mischief. They threw her over the back of Croy’s saddle and headed out, toward Helstrow. Balint was the last errand they had to run before they could finally head back to Ness.
Riding west toward the king’s fortress proved far less tedious than the voyage east had been. Back then they’d had to ford the river Strow at one of its wilder bends, but now they could approach the fortress directly. The sun had not even reached its apex by the time they saw Helstrow’s towers rising above the rolling hills.
Malden was thrilled by the prospect of returning to civilization, but just outside the gates Croy called a stop. The riders stood their horses in the road so they could watch a field full of archers lift bows all at once and take aim.
Bowstrings twanged and a hundred arrows lifted into the sky, the thin shafts spinning and tumbling. Some clattered together in midair, others flew true and arced downward to slam into a pile of rusted armor on the far edge of the field. Their wicked points cut through the old iron as easily as through parchment and lodged in the earth below.
Watching from a safe distance atop his horse, Malden jerked back in surprise.
“What are they doing?” he asked.
“Practicing, I think,” Sir Croy replied, bringing his rounsey up level with Malden’s jennet. “There was a time when every male peasant in the kingdom was expected to know how to draw a bow and hit a target at one hundred yards. The law required them to practice for an hour every day, to keep their arms strong and their eyes true.”
The line of peasants—villein farmers, Malden judged, by their russet tunics and the close-fitting cowls they wore—each nocked another arrow and drew back on their strings. A serjeant in leather jack and a kettle helmet shouted an order, and once more the bowmen let fly.
Most of the arrows landed well short of the target. One, knocked off course in midair, came directly for Malden. He flinched, but its momentum was already spent and it landed twenty yards from his horse’s feet. The jennet didn’t even look up.
Cythera shielded her eyes with one hand and looked at the pile of armor. Only a handful of arrows had reached the target. “They’re . . . not very good.”
Croy shrugged. “The law requiring them to practice every day was repealed a long time ago. Before these men were born, in fact. Most of them have probably never seen a bow before. And no archer hits the mark on his first try.”
“Why did they stop the practice?” Cythera asked.
“No reason to keep it up. In the early days, Skrae was always at war with one enemy or another—first the elves, then with upstarts who would seize the crown. Skrae always prevailed. The Northern Kingdoms were beaten into submission, turned against each other until they only fought amongst themselves. The barbarians were forced back across the mountains, sealed behind the two mountain passes. Now there are no enemies left to fight. Skrae hasn’t gone to war in a hundred years. There’s been no more than a border skirmish in the last ten,” Croy explained. “The king’s grandfather saw no need to keep a cadre of trained bowmen around. The peasantry were better used by spending that extra hour a day in the fields, feeding a growing populace.”
Malden frowned. All that was probably true, but he could guess another reason. He’d seen what the longbows did to the armor when they actually struck home. No knight in shiny coat of plate would ever really be safe with such weapons arrayed against him, not if the aim of the archer was skillful. He imagined the king had been more afraid of an insurrection of highly trained peasants than a foreign invader.
So why was the practice being resumed? This wasn’t some bit of makework to keep idle peasants from getting into trouble—the training was in deadly earnest. When they’d shot a dozen arrows each, the hundred men standing on the field were replaced by a fresh hundred, with more waiting to take their turn. Clearly every villein in the environs of Helstrow was to be given a chance to learn this skill.
Something was up.
As the three riders headed up the perfectly straight road toward the fortress of the king, they passed through the village where the prospective bowmen had their houses. The three on horseback drew more than the usual stares. Women leaned out of the doors of cottages, distaffs and kitchen knives still in their hands, to get a good look at the riders. A reeve carrying the white wooden baton of his station leaned on the signpost of a tavern and watched them with wide eyes. Children dashed out of the street as they approached.
These people were afraid, Malden saw. Afraid someone was going to come along at any moment and take away the pittance they had, the tiny scrap of safety and wealth they’d managed to accumulate. Even the village blacksmith closed the shutters of his shop as they drew near, though the heat inside his forge made the autumn air shimmer.
What had them so scared?
Of course, they might just have been surprised to see Balint roped and secured atop Croy’s palfrey. It wasn’t every day you saw a dwarf trussed up like a bird in a roasting pan.
Balint would draw stares in any human village. Dwarves were a rare enough sight outside the big cities, and female dwarves almost unheard of—most of their women remained in the north, in the dwarven kingdom, while their men traveled south into Skrae to make their fortunes. This one stood out on her own merits, too. Balint was accounted a great beauty among her people, but then dwarves had a different notion of loveliness than humans. Balint stood just under four feet tall and was as skinny as a starveling dog. Her hair stuck out from her head in thick braids that looked like the spikes of a morningstar. Her eyebrows met above her nose in a thick tangle of coarse dark hairs, and there was a sparser growth of hair on her upper lip. Her eyes were squeezed down to dark beads, the lids pressed tight. As a nocturnal creature, she found the sun unbearable.
Even if she’d been more pleasing to the eye, she still would have drawn attention by how she was bound. Once dwarves and humans had been vicious enemies, but a treaty between their two kingdoms changed that long ago. Now by law no human could touch a dwarf in an offensive manner—not unless the human wanted to be tortured to death. The dwarves had proved too useful as allies to risk the peace between them and humankind. They were too valuable to the king, as they were the only ones who knew the secret of making good steel for weapons and armor and a thousand other uses. That a dwarf should be tied up and brought to justice like a common criminal was unthinkable.
Yet Balint was a criminal, and a particularly vile one. The same treaty that ended the war between dwarves and humans included another law, one that said no dwarf was allowed to use a weapon inside the borders of Skrae. Not even in self-defense, not even one they’d made with their own hands. Balint had broken that law without compunction or remorse. Sir Croy had been quite adamant that she be brought to Helstrow and made to account for her crimes. In all likelihood she would be banished from Skrae—and maybe even exiled by her own people. Where she would go at that point was not to be guessed.
Malden liked it not, even though he was the first person Balint had assaulted. She’d struck him across the face with a wrench with clear intent to kill him, and he wanted revenge badly enough. Yet he was a thief by trade, a flouter of the law himself. He lived by a certain code of dishonesty, and the first rule in that code was that you didn’t betray another criminal to the authorities, ever, under any circumstances.
She had turned him into a snitch. And for that he would never forgive her. What if word of it got out? His reputation would be dashed on the rocks of gossip.
He tried not to think about it. Ahead of them lay the first gate of the fortress, a massive affair of stone and iron that towered over every house in the village. Guards in studded leather cloaks stood there blocking the way with halberds. High above, amidst the battlements of the gate house, a pot of boiling oil was prepared to spill down hot death on anyone who attacked the guards. A dozen loopholes in the gatehouse wall hid crossbowmen ready to pick off any who even dared approach.
“I had expected a friendlier reception,” Croy called out, as the guards refused to stand aside to let him pass. “Though of course I’m not flying my colors today. Perhaps you don’t recognize me. I have been gone for a long time. I,” he said, placing one leather-gauntleted hand on his breast, “am Sir Croy, a knight of the realm. With me are Cythera, daughter of Coruth the witch, and Malden, a—well—a—”
“His squire,” Malden announced, patting the sword tied to his saddle. He couldn’t very well announce himself as Malden the Thief here, not and expect to pass the gate. More than once Croy had offered him the position of squire, and though Malden could imagine few things he’d less rather do for a living—collecting dead bodies for mass graves, perhaps—it was a simple enough ruse.
“Yes. He’s my squire,” Croy said, and it barely sounded at all like a lie coming out of the knight’s mouth.
“Bit old for it, ain’t ’e?” one of the guards asked, studying Malden with a yellow eye. But the guards weren’t there to challenge subjects of Skrae. They were waiting for something else. “That dwarf ye got,” the guard went on. “Is she—”
“An oathbreaker. I’ve come to present her for the king’s justice.”
There was a great deal of murmuring and surprise at that, but the guards stood back and the portcullis was raised. The three of them—plus one disgruntled dwarf—passed through without further incident.
O
n a map, the fortress of Helstrow would have resembled an egg cracked open and let to spread across the top of a table. Its center, its yolk, was the inner bailey—the center of all power in Skrae. Inside a stout wall lay the homes and offices of all the court, as well as the keep and the king’s palace. The buildings there stood tall and crammed close together, some so near that a man could reach out of a window and shake his neighbor’s hand. The white of the egg—the outer bailey, which had its own wall—sprawled in all directions. The houses and workshops and churches there weren’t as tall or as densely packed, yet twenty times as many people lived there, commoners for the most part, all the servants and tradesmen and merchants who fed and clothed and tended to the highborn folk of the court. Malden tried to imagine the place in his head, to secure his first look at it so he could start to assemble a mental map of the place.
Once they were through the gate, into the outer bailey, any thought of orienting himself was forgotten. The three riders and the dwarf were funneled into a narrow street that curled away ahead of them into a marketplace of countless stalls and small shops. Half-timbered houses loomed over it all, their upper stories leaning out over the streets to shadow the ground level. Malden was thrust immediately into a chaos of color and life, wholly unlike the placid farm country they’d traveled in for so long. His senses were assaulted and for a while all he could do was stare and try to get his bearings.
Smoke from braziers and open fires sent gray tendrils seeking through the crowded, close streets. The horses picked their way through ordure and startled a covey of pigs, which went scurrying down a dark alley. Malden wheeled his jennet to the side as a merchant in a russet jerkin went chasing after the pigs with a stick. He nearly knocked over a noble lady, fat and scrubbed pink, as she was carried past in a litter, a pomander of lilies held close under her nose. Malden could barely hear himself think. Everywhere there were the cries of barkers and hawkers, beckoning those with a little coin toward stalls where could be purchased roast meats, fresh apples, fine fabrics, measures of barley or flour or ink or parchment or wine.
“Ah,” he said, sighing deeply. “Civilization! It’s good to be back.”
Cythera laughed. “You didn’t enjoy your time out in the countryside? All the fresh air? The green hills and the quiet of the forest?”
“You mean the endless rain and the constant itching from insect bites?” Malden asked. “You ask if I enjoyed sleeping on the cold ground with a rock for my pillow, or perhaps eating meat cooked on an open fire—burned on one side, half raw still on the other? No, a place like this is where I belong.”
It was true. He had spent his entire life until recently in the Free City of Ness, a hundred miles west of here. He’d grown up in twisting cobbled alleys like these. He knew the rhythms of city life, knew where he stood in a crowd. His recent adventures in the wilderness had left him saddle sore and weary. To be back in a city—any city—was a great relief. It would not be long before they left again, and headed back into the farmlands, but he planned on enjoying this brief respite in a place that felt familiar.
The riders made their way carefully through the crowd, headed deep into the maze of streets. The going was slow and they had to stop and wait many times as traffic surged across their path. At one point Croy’s horse pulled up short and Malden’s jennet obediently fell into line. Malden wasn’t ready for the stop and he crashed forward across his horse’s neck. He had only just recently learned to ride, and was far from proficient at it yet. He saw why Croy had halted, though, and was glad the jennet was wiser than he. A procession of lepers was winding its way through the street ahead. They were covered head to toe with cloth, as the law demanded, and carried wooden clappers that they flapped before them in a mournful rhythm. Croy tossed a gold royal to their leader, who caught it with unthinking ease and hid it away instantly. The hand that had emerged from the leper’s robe had only three fingers, and Malden was glad he could not see the rest of the man.
When the lepers were past, Croy got them started again, but they didn’t go much farther. He took them down a lane that curled up toward the wall of the inner bailey and ended in the wide, muddy yard of an inn. There, a stable boy took their horses and welcomed them with honeyed words.
As Malden slid down off the jennet’s back, he groaned for his aching muscles and his bowed legs. He’d never gotten used to riding and was glad to be on his own feet again, even if he felt decidedly unsteady. The whole world still seemed to rock with the swaying gait of the jennet.
All the same, he was surprised by their destination. He had not expected them to spend the night in Helstrow. He would welcome a night in a real bed stuffed with straw, true, but he was more interested in getting to Ness as quickly as possible. He and Cythera would never be alone together again until they were back home, after all. “An inn?” he asked. “Must we spend the night here? I thought we had only to turn Balint over to the local constable and then be on our way again.”
Croy leaned backward, stretching the muscles of his back. “We need to make sure she receives justice from the king’s own chief magistrate. It may be many days before we can gain audience with him.”
“Days? How many days?” Malden demanded. “Two? Three? As many as a sennight?”
Cythera reached over and brushed road dust off his shoulders. She gave him a knowing look. “Are you in such a hurry to return to Ness? What’s there, waiting for you?”
Malden said nothing, and kept his face carefully still. She was teasing him—after all, she knew exactly why he longed to be back in Ness, where all secrets could be revealed. Yet he had another good reason to return home as quickly as possible. He could not help but reach up to the front of his jerkin and touch a piece of parchment folded carefully and held next to his heart. The others did not need to know what was written there, or the betrayal it tokened. The message on the parchment must remain his alone, for now.