In the Red Lord's Reach Read online

  The portcullis had slammed down.

  But we have the winches, Alaric thought, and then he saw that at the top of the wall, where the thick cable should have passed over a last wheel before attaching to the portcullis, there was no cable. It lay instead on the flagstones, where men surged back and forth across it in their struggles. Someone had cloven it in two.

  Perhaps a hundred nomads were trapped inside the castle, and though four hundred others still howled beyond the walls, there was little they could do to help.

  Alaric glanced at Simir again and felt the heart shrink inside his breast. He felt sick and dizzy, and every instinct screamed at him to get away. Then he scanned the courtyard one last time and willed himself…

  … to the portcullis.

  Four men had been crushed by its fall; he appeared standing on their bodies, and he caught at the massive iron grate with his good hand to keep from slipping. Men were fighting on the other side—the Red Lord's soldiers with their backs to him, hard-pressed by the nomads. As he stood there, one man was hacked through, and the blade glanced off one of the iron crossbars after cleaving his body.

  Alaric embraced the portcullis with his whole body, pressing himself to it, feeling its cold strength, its immobility, through his clothing and against his naked cheek. He embraced it and called up all his own strength, and he willed himself to move.

  He felt himself falling in darkness—no, not falling, but being pulled, and he thrust the weight of metal away from him, or thrust himself from it, he was not sure which. He fell anyway, and slammed his injured arm on something hard, and cried out with the sudden rush of pain. Then he lay still and began to sob, the helpless tears flooding from him, half physical hurt, half the anguish of his heart. The portcullis was beneath him, a hard bed on the grassy mountainside. The night was dark, and the shouts from the Red Lord's castle were the merest breath on the summer wind.

  Alaric lay limp on the cold metal, weeping and alone.

  ****

  IT WAS MORNING when he limped across the drawbridge. The portcullis was still down, what was left of it—broken bars on either side, leaving room for five men abreast to pass through. A dozen nomads were guarding the opening with the Red Lord's pikes. They greeted him wearily, but he said nothing to them, only walked on.

  The courtyard was a charnel house, corpses everywhere, blood everywhere. The flies had begun to gather already: they buzzed round Alaric's face, but he didn't bother to brush them away. Two men came out of the keep as he entered; they carried another corpse between them. He didn't look to see if it was Gilo, or perhaps the Red Lord, or even someone who had ridden beside him across the snowy plain. He walked on.

  Simir and some others—band chiefs and influential men—stood talking where the Red Lord's chair had been. They saw the minstrel when he was ten paces into the room.

  "Alaric!" Simir cried, striding toward him. "We've been looking for you half the night! You're hurt!"

  Alaric cradled his right arm with his left, as if it were a baby. Swathed in cloth—in his own cloak, retrieved from the dungeon—it made a large bundle. "My arm is wrenched. The rest are just bruises."

  Simir circled the minstrel's shoulder with his own big arm. "Come into the kitchen. Have something to eat, and we can look at it."

  In the kitchen, tables and stools had been pushed aside to make room for the nomad wounded. These lay on straw pallets on the floor, covered with blankets or cloaks, or with tapestries ripped down from the walls, and they were tended by nearly as many of their uninjured fellows. At the great hearth, the Red Lord's cooks bent over half a dozen simmering caldrons and ladled the Red Lord's food onto trenchers for his conquerors. The old woman who served Alaric was dull-eyed, her movement slow and stiff. He wondered if she had seen the carnage in the yard. He wondered if perhaps her own son was there, or her grandson.

  Simir unwrapped Alaric's arm, and several chunks of ice fell free of the swaddling cloth.

  "Where did you get ice at this time of year… ?" he began, and then he nodded. "Of course."

  The arm was swollen from knuckles to elbow, and the hand and wrist were beginning to discolor. Simir probed the joint gently, then moved the fingers and the wrist itself, as Alaric grimaced. "A bad sprain," he said at last, wrapping it up with the ice again and fashioning a sling from a fragment of drapery, "You won't be playing the lute for a time. But perhaps we can make it a short one—we've found the Red Lord's private store of wine, and steeping in the bottom of each barrel, a bag of dried leaves which smell of the valley's Elixir plants. It won't be one of Kata's potions, but it's better than none at all. A better remedy for this, I venture, than it ever was for an aching heart."

  "I don't want the Red Lord's wine."

  "I think Kata would want you to drink it."

  Alaric looked away from him and shook his head. "What Kata would want no longer matters. I won't be seeing her again."

  Simir gripped his good shoulder suddenly. "Why do you say that? Has something happened to her while we've been gone?"

  "No. Not to her; to me."

  "To you… ?"

  Alaric turned his face to Simir's. The high chief was exhausted, that he could see. And there was a cut on his cheek, a line of beaded clots and a faint smear of red. But it wasn't a bad cut. "I'm not staying, Simir," said the minstrel. "I'm going back to the south."

  Simir's grip loosened; then, stiffly, he rubbed Alaric's shoulder. "You're tired, my son. You need rest. We all do."

  Alaric looked into the high chief's weary eyes and saw everything that the north had been to him. He saw Zavia and Kata, and Grem and Fowsh. He saw Gilo and Berown. And above all, he saw Simir himself, and those nights of song and laughter at his fire. "You've been very kind to me. I won't forget you."

  "Alaric, don't be foolish. This is the beginning of our new life. You can't leave now. Why, Kata wants to teach you all her lore, and Zavia—I wager she'll take you back. She's already tired of that other one, and you will be her hero, as you will be to all our people."

  "Will I?" As if that matters.

  "We took this castle because of you, you know that."

  He closed his eyes. "I didn't kill anyone last night. Not a single man. And yet all their deaths are on my head. Every one."

  "And through their deaths, we live." Simir's voice softened. "It's a hard world, my son. Only the strong and the clever survive. Surely you've learned that in your wanderings." He hesitated. "It is something a high chief must never forget, for his people's sake."

  Alaric looked into his face again, then. "That's what you would have me be, isn't it? The high chief after you."

  Simir smiled a little. "You'd make a fine one."

  "Simir, you don't know me."

  "Oh, I think I do, my son."

  "No. You know what you wish me to be. But what I am inside"—he tapped his chest with his good hand—"you don't know that. If you did, you'd understand why I must go." He gripped Simir's arm. "I have loved you all, Simir, never doubt that. Especially you."

  Simir's smile faded slowly as his red-rimmed eyes searched Alaric's. "You're all that I have left, Alaric," he said softly. He caught Alaric's good wrist in his big hand.

  The minstrel gave him look for look. "I'm sorry," he answered, as gently as he could.

  "Stay at least till your arm heals."

  Alaric shook his head.

  Simir's mouth tightened for a moment, then worked once, twice, as if he were about to say something but stopped himself. At last he did say, "What shall I tell the others?"

  "That the minstrel has traveled on, as minstrels do."

  "And Kata? She had such high hopes for you."

  "I think… Kata knows already."

  Simir looked at his swaddled arm. "Where will you go, Alaric? How will you earn your meat? You can't play…"

  "There are people who will remember my songs and give their hospitality for that memory's sake. I'll manage." He took a step back from the high chief, slowly shedding his touch. "Fare
well, Simir."

  "What, now, this very moment? But you're far too tired to travel, surely."

  "Not in my way."

  Simir's mouth curved, but the expression was joyless, nothing like a smile this time. "You're very stubborn, minstrel," he whispered. "It's a northern trait, gift of the Pole Star. Perhaps it means the Pole Star will look after you, even in the south. You are one of us, after all. You always will be."

  Alaric felt the sadness deepen inside him. "No," he said softly. "I never was. But thank you for thinking it. Father."

  A heartbeat later, he was on the mountainside where he had left his lute, and then he was in the southern forest, in a bower he had used in former times. Feeling drained of life, he lay down upon the thick cushion of last year's leaves, the lute held fast in the crook of his good arm. But sleep was slow in coming, because his injured arm throbbed, and because the future seemed so bleak. The southern sun was warm, and it helped him to rest; but in his heart, Alaric felt the winter of exile closing about him again.