His Own Good Sword (The Cymeriad #1) Page 11

  Muryn’s wife came out from the house, wiping her hands on the skirt of her wool tunic. The boy came behind her.

  “I’m looking for Muryn,” Tyren said to the woman.

  He saw the uncertainty in her eyes.

  “He’s in the stable, my lord,” she said.

  “I’m here, Lord Risto,” Muryn said.

  He was coming over from the stable. He came unhurriedly, calmly, his face blank.

  “What can I do for you, my lord?” he said, when he’d gotten close.

  “You’re occupied, Muryn?”

  “It’s nothing, my lord.”

  “We can talk, then.”

  Muryn studied him, briefly. Then he nodded. “Let me take the horse for you, Lord Risto, and we can talk.”

  He gave Risun’s reins to Muryn and waited while Muryn took the horse into the stable. The woman was still standing with the boys before the doorway. After a moment she hastened the boys gently away with her hands and said, “Come in, lord, and rest yourself from the ride.”

  He went after her into the house. He stopped just inside the doorway to let his eyes adjust to the dim light. There was a cook-fire burning on the hearth at the eastward end of the room, rye loaves rising on the hearth stones, and the smoke of the fire made his eyes sting a little. The room was bare save for a rough-hewn wooden trestle table at its center and some pots and jugs nestled against the smoke-blackened wall by the hearth. There was a ladder of pine boughs in the corner of the room, past the hearth, leading up to a garret overhead, where the sleeping-places must be. The whole place smelled warmly of the smoke and of earth, of rye bread and dried herbs.

  The woman had gone over to the hearth. “Have you eaten, lord?” she said.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “We had our meal just now, lord. Let me bring you something.”

  He didn’t protest further. He sat down on one of the benches alongside the table. Muryn came in behind him and sat down at the head of the table, to his right. The woman brought Tyren a rye loaf and hard cheese on an earthen dish, warm, bitter brown ale in a leather cup. He ate slowly. Muryn watched him and said nothing. There was silence between them but it wasn’t an unpleasant silence and Tyren found himself reluctant to break it.

  He said, finally, without taking his eyes away from the dish, “You heard of what happened, Muryn?”

  Muryn said, “We had word from the village that Lord Magryn is dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we heard you led a troop into the Outland, my lord, to meet the rebels in battle.”

  He said, “Yes.”

  “You had success, I take it?”

  “I had success.”

  Muryn said nothing.

  Tyren took the empty ale cup and turned it over and over in his hands, absently. He put it quickly back down when he realized his hands were still shaking. There was a tightness in his throat.

  “We took a prisoner yesterday,” he said. “A farmer, I think, by his look. Thirty years old, maybe a little more. He wore this.”

  He opened his wallet and took out the silver cloak pin and laid it down on the board so Muryn could see it. Muryn looked at it and said nothing.

  Tyren said, “You know the man?”

  Muryn said, after a pause, “I know him.”

  “Has he family, that you know?”

  Muryn looked up to his face, quickly. “Lord Risto—”

  “Has he family, Muryn?”

  There was silence a long moment. They looked at each other. Muryn’s eyes were cold, clear, steady.

  “I can tell you nothing, my lord,” he said.

  Tyren shook his head. “I want you to take word to his family that he’s dead. He took his own life, though you needn’t tell them that if you don’t see fit. But I want them to know he’s dead, there’s no more need to worry for him. You can give them my sworn word he wasn’t mistreated, that he died quickly. Do you understand me?”

  Muryn looked at him. Then he inclined his head just a little and nodded. “I understand you, Lord Risto,” he said.

  The dog was barking again. One of the boys ran in suddenly through the doorway. He spoke to Muryn in Cesino, the words coming out in short, ragged bursts between gulped breaths. “Mægo’s here. He’s hurt.”

  The woman had sat down at the hearth to string bundles of fennel flower. She lifted her head sharply, startled. Muryn made no move to get up right away. He looked at Tyren, his mouth tightening. Then he turned his face away without a word and stood and went out with the boy into the yard. The woman laid aside her work at once to follow him.

  Tyren stood up and went after them, slowly, uneasiness knotting in his stomach.

  On the westward edge of the clearing, past the stable, the other boy had crouched down beside something stretched out in the grass in a dark heap—a man, Tyren saw after a moment, lying face-down, still as a stone. Blood stained the grass round him. The short sword sheathed across his back was Vareno steel but he was garbed in the plain, weather-worn green-and-brown cloth of the Cesino rebels.

  The boy had put an uncertain hand on his shoulder but Muryn got there and moved the boy away and knelt down and tore off the sword-belt and turned the man over onto his back.

  Tyren recognized the high-cheekboned face at once: the Cesino, his slave, the man he’d looked for among the dead yesterday, who’d taken the black colt in Rien so he might come home a free man. The ring was gone from round his throat, but it was him.

  He stood there stupidly, his heart tight, his mouth dry, while Muryn opened up the front of the Cesino’s blood-soaked tunic. There were old, soiled bandages beneath the tunic, sodden blackly with blood, and Muryn pulled them away so he could look at the wound: a sword thrust, wide as Tyren’s palm, that had gone deep, just below the rib-cage on the right-hand side. Fresh blood still ran from it in a thin trickle. The Cesino was unconscious, his eyes sunken, the eyelids dark, his face white as death—startlingly white against the wine-redness of the blood.

  For a moment Muryn just knelt there and looked down at it all, frozen, his own face whitening. Then he looked up to the woman, who stood with the boys a little way away, her right hand pressed in a white-knuckled fist against her mouth.

  “Help me, Ayne,” Muryn said.

  Tyren made up his mind all at once. He moved before the woman did. He went over and knelt on the other side of the body. Muryn looked up sharply and questioningly into his face and he met the look without a word, his teeth shut, not trusting himself to speak. Then he looked down to the Cesino and slid his right arm under the Cesino’s shoulders and lifted him, carefully. Muryn moved down to take the Cesino’s legs and they stood together and carried the body between them into the house.

  They took him over to the hearth and the woman spread out blankets for them to lay him on.

  “Bring me clean cloths and water,” Tyren said to her, over his shoulder.

  She obeyed him wordlessly, bringing him linen cloths and water in an earthen jug. He cleaned away the blood from the Cesino’s chest and belly, rinsed the wound, held a cloth against it to stanch the fresh bleeding. Then he looked up to Muryn.

  “Hold him while I bandage it,” he said.

  His hands were steady now as he worked. He hadn’t spent all that time in the soldiers’ hospitals at Vione for nothing. He owed Mureno for that.

  Muryn held the Cesino upright and Tyren took another of the cloths and tore it into long strips and wrapped up the wound tightly. He couldn’t help but stare a little, his mouth opening, when he saw the Cesino’s back—rows and rows of knotted scars furrowing the sun-browned skin from shoulders to waist, the ugly, pitted mark of a branding iron seared at the base of the Cesino’s neck. He closed his mouth and swallowed and went on with the bandaging. When he was done he nodded for Muryn to lay the Cesino back down.

  “More water,” he said. “He needs to drink. There’ll be infection otherwise.”

  Muryn brought him another water jug. He took it and wet a cloth and d
abbed the cloth over the Cesino’s face without wringing it out, letting the water run down over the skin.

  “Wake him,” he said to Muryn.

  Muryn knelt down again and said, “Mægo.”

  There was no response and they spent a little while doing that same thing over and over: wetting the Cesino’s face, saying his name aloud. Finally he gave a start, making a noise in his throat. He looked up to Tyren. His gray eyes were much too bright, the pupils dilated as with fever. He didn’t say anything, didn’t give any indication he recognized Tyren’s face. He lay without moving. Tyren leaned over him, slipped his right hand beneath the Cesino’s head to lift it up, held the rim of the jug to his lips, let the water run into his mouth, held his jaw and nose shut so he’d swallow. He did that until the jug was nearly empty and the Cesino was coughing a little, having swallowed wrong. Then he put the jug down and sat back on his heels.

  “He’ll need to drink often,” he said to Muryn. “You’ll have to make him drink even if it means waking him, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Muryn.

  “I’ll bring medicine if I can. This kind of wound—I’m afraid there’ll be infection. I’m afraid it’s gone too long without treatment. A mercy the blade missed the liver or he’d have been dead a day ago.”

  Muryn said, in a quiet voice, “Is it a good chance he’ll live?”

  He knew the answer, of course. Most likely the wound was septic already. Most likely the Cesino would be dead before another day was out. But he didn’t say that aloud.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Muryn nodded. His eyes were troubled, distant.

  Tyren got up slowly to his feet. “I’d better go back,” he said. “They’ll miss me at the fort.”

  Muryn said, “Yes—of course.”

  They went out to the stable. Tyren shook his head wordlessly when Muryn made a move to do the saddling work. He saddled Risun himself and took him out into the yard. Curiosity was gnawing at him. Obvious, from the tightness in Muryn’s face, his voice, that he knew the Cesino well, had known him a while.

  He said to Muryn, as he mounted, “He’s close to you?”

  Muryn looked up to him. “Mægo?”

  “Yes.”

  Muryn said, “His father—his father was a good friend.”

  “Dead, I take it.”

  “Yes, dead.”

  Tyren said, “I swear to you I’ll do what I can for him, Muryn.”

  “I’m in your debt, Lord Risto,” Muryn said. “For this, and for the word you brought. I thank you.”

  That amused him for some reason, blackly.

  “The other wouldn’t be dead and this one wouldn’t be bleeding out on your hearth right now, if not for me. I don’t see you’re in my debt, Muryn.”

  Muryn made no reply to that. He gave no indication he’d heard. He put a hand on Risun’s dappled neck. “Answer something for me, now, lord,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “The same question you left unanswered on the road the other morning. What has a Risto to do to be sent to a place like Souvin?”

  He hesitated. Then he spoke a little sourly. “It needn’t have been a punishment. I might have come willingly. Maybe it was my sense of duty. Maybe it was that I wanted to win such a victory for the Empire. You haven’t considered that could be the explanation?”

  “I’ve considered it, yes.”

  “You think I’ve no sense of duty to the Empire?”

  “I think you’ve a very uncommon sense of duty, Lord Risto,” Muryn said.

  He looked down at Muryn in silence a long moment.

  “It was in Choiro,” he said, finally. “At the fort, Vione. Almost a year ago now. I was there for my training. There was a Cesino soldier in my column, from Rien. And one of my fellow officers was from Rien, too—one of the Marri. You know the name?”

  “I know the name,” said Muryn.

  “There’d been a grievance between them before, back home.” He hadn’t spoken of it since the examination. It was odd to speak of it now. The words didn’t come readily. His tongue stumbled over them, his voice unsteady. But it was clear and sharp and vivid in his mind, as it always was. “He was common-blood, the Cesino. His family were free laborers on the farmland the Marri hold outside the city. He had a sister. Marro had—forced her, had threatened punishment for all the family if they tried to make it known afterward, if they tried to seek justice for it. So nothing came of it, at first. The Cesino knew better than that, knew how useless it would have been. Marro had his name and his rank and his Vareno blood. And Marro made sure he knew it. Pushed him on and on, taunting him, humiliating him. Pushed a little too far, finally, and the Cesino forgot himself, drew a blade on him. Stupid to try it. He might have been executed for less. Marro wanted it done, of course. It—would have been done. They didn’t give him a trial. There are few enough in Choiro willing to run afoul of a Marro for the sake of a Cesino commoner.”

  “You prevented it,” said Muryn, quietly.

  “It was luck, mostly. Our commander had been a friend of my father’s. For the sake of that—for my sake—he was willing to see Marro was reprimanded. Only that: reprimanded, transferred to another column so there’d be little chance for further trouble. But Marro told me I’d pay for it. For the humiliation, maybe. He’s not used to not getting his way. And the Marri have influence enough in the capital—so I’m paying for it.”

  Muryn said, “I see.”

  Tyren said, dryly, “That explains things to your satisfaction?”

  “It explains things, yes.”

  Tyren gathered up Risun’s reins. “I’ll come tomorrow with medicine, if I can,” he said. “Keep a fresh dressing on the wound.”

  “It’ll be done, Lord Risto.”

  “Tyren,” Tyren said.

  Muryn smiled. “Tyren, then,” he said.

  * * *

  He rode back to the fort and gave Risun to a stable-boy who came running and went to his office, as if nothing had happened, to write the letters he’d meant to write that morning. When he’d finished he picked out a rider to carry the letters and the battle report down to Rien. Then, because he knew he couldn’t put it off any longer, he found Verio and rode with him down to the hall of the Magryni to meet the new lord.

  Magryn’s oldest son met them in the ivy-choked yard with a tight, nervous bow. He was young, fifteen or sixteen at most, slight and pale and soft-eyed like a deer. Uncertain how to handle his new authority—hadn’t been ready for this, Tyren thought. The lady Magryn was with him. She was a striking, cold, haughty woman, clad, in Vareno fashion, in a stola of fine black silk for her mourning, dark hair piled elaborately on her head under a thin veil, silver bracelets circling her slender white arms, rings glinting on her fingers and in the lobes of her ears. The young Magryn seemed almost afraid of her, letting her make the formal greeting and pour the wine when they sat down at the table in the darkened hall, not speaking a word, keeping his eyes down, twisting the great seal ring on the forefinger of his right hand absently, as if its unaccustomed weight irritated him.

  Tyren said to him, out of duty, “I’m sorry for the loss of your father, Lord Magryn.”

  The young Magryn said nothing, gave no indication he’d heard, other than a slight lifting of his chin, but the woman said, “I want justice done on the bastard who did it, Lord Risto.”

  “I’m doing what I can, Lady Magryn,” Tyren said.

  She spat her words. “It was Sarre’s son. He told us he was the son of Rylan Sarre. I thought your people had dealt with that, Commander Risto. They told my husband they’d dealt with it, ten years ago.”

  There was silence a moment.

  “Impossible,” said Verio, stupidly.

  “He killed my husband in his own hall, my lord,” Lady Magryn said.

  “And left you and your children alive and unharmed?” said Tyren.

  The young Magryn glanced up to his mother very briefly. Lady Magryn’s heavily painted eyelids
flickered a little. She looked away. Her voice, when she spoke again, was subdued.

  “Yes, he left us alive,” she said.

  “I expect there was some condition for it.”

  A flush started in Lady Magryn’s cheeks, beneath the paint. She said nothing.

  “You,” Tyren said to the young Magryn.

  The young Magryn didn’t look at him. He’d looked back down to the ring on his finger, was still turning it slowly over and over again, though Tyren could tell, from the remoteness in his gray eyes, he wasn’t really paying it any mind.

  He spoke in a low, toneless voice. “It was justice. He and his mother were left alive when they executed Rylan Sarre. So it was justice to leave us alive. That was his reason.”

  “The ill-bred cur,” Lady Magryn said. The flush had spread all across her face and throat now. “To stand there and speak of justice with the blood of the lord of Souvin still on his hands. Justice would have him hanging from a gibbet same as his father.”

  Tyren said, “He might be dead already. The rebels lost a good number of men in the Outland yesterday, Lady Magryn.”

  “Maybe,” Lady Magryn said. Her lips were pressed tight; she wasn’t convinced. “But if not—if he’s still alive, Commander Risto, and if your people find him, I want him brought here, brought to me, to be dealt with according to Cesino law. He’ll pay for the murder of his lord after I have his tongue out for his insolence.”

  “If I find him,” Tyren said, “it’ll be my decision as to how best to deal with him.”

  Afterward he and Verio rode back across the water channel and over the common to the fort. He was lost in his thoughts and he started a little when Verio spoke.

  Verio said, “I wonder if it really could be Rylan Sarre’s son.”

  “You said the woman and the boy were sold in Rien when Sarre was executed,” Tyren said.

  “That’s what I heard, sir.”

  “It’s possible he might have escaped or been set free. It’s been ten years. Anything can happen in ten years.”

  “If it was Sarre’s son, sir,” Verio said, “and if the word spreads—we may well have open uprising on our hands.”