Ghost in the Yew: Volume One of the Vesteal Series Read online

  “What?” he greeted from his spot at the center of a monstrous table as I entered the large dining hall. The grease from the mutton he chewed dripped from his chin to the wide napkin jammed into his collar. He was surrounded by his relatives, judging by their thick fingers and curly black hair. The man at the end of the long table was the only one who did not fit the description. He was a general if I was any judge, and his only obvious flaw was the family he’d married into.

  I bowed to the room and replied, “I have the accounting and documents you require.”

  “An alsman delivery boy. I like that.” He chomped, pointed the documents to a spot free of food, and waved his hand at me. “Get out.”

  “Yes, Lord Arilas,” I said with a low bow. I smiled all the way back to the inn.

  “It went well?” Gern asked.

  “He was a quarrelsome pig but didn’t ask a single question about the accounting. He didn’t even look at it. He just saved us a half day.”

  “Why didn’t he?” Gern asked while the men got back into the wagon and he started us down the road.

  “I don’t know. Either he is greedy and doesn’t care or trusts us.”

  “There could be another reason,” he suggested uncertainly. “Maybe he cannot read and did not want you to know.”

  “Clever thought. You might be right. What made you think of it?”

  “I just learned to read myself,” he whispered, blushing.

  “Knowledge well worth the expense of embarrassment, Lieutenant. And your study of the manuals was work well done, however badly you may have read before.”

  His face flushed brighter. “I only learned this past winter. Fana read me the manuals and taught me letters. Remembering her voice is very easy.”

  I nodded and wondered if Sahin or Barok knew. I let the subject lay, and Gern turned the topic.

  “You grew up in Bessradi?”

  “I did. One of its many orphans pressed into municipal service. I grew up cleaning Hemari boots and swords. I’ve spent my whole life in one barracks or another—lied about my age to join.”

  “You grew up a slave? How old were you?”

  “Not sure. I have no memory of my parents or the winter that killed them. I found a tinsmith who thought he knew my mother, but that was the closest I ever got to learning how old I was. Most said I looked eighteen or nineteen, but I was a lot nearer fifteen when I finished my fifty days.”

  “You will like being an alsman more, I think,” he said solemnly, “once it’s the only thing you’re doing, that is.”

  “For Barok, yes. You will not like my counterparts at Bessradi. They are as ruthless as Parsatayn, every one of them.”

  “Are you going to try and find out who was behind Kuren’s sanction?” he asked, lowering his voice again.

  “No. Mice should never go looking for owls.”

  “I think that Yentif arilas from Urmand is behind it—taking revenge for the death of his daughter.”

  “Him or Prince Yarik, for the same reason, which is why we need to keep our visit as short as possible.”

  “Sahin told us all about those two. It is a shame that Barok wasn’t able to get them in trouble for Yarik’s marriage. I’ve been wondering, though, why does Lord Vall care so much? Would Yarik really have been in that much trouble?”

  “Yes. He has hanged two of his sons for it already and would hang thousands more to prevent even one of them from fathering an heir.”

  “I do not understand it. Why would he not want just as many grandsons as sons?”

  “It is very simple, actually. By Bayen’s law, to be Exaltier a man must have sons of his own. By keeping the princes childless, he protects himself from them, and by having so many sons, he is protected from the other royal families.”

  “Other royal families?”

  “Yes, there are many, all descendents of the Zovi—the prophets who crossed the tundra centuries ago. Any noble family that can trace its line back to them is said to be royal. Rule has passed amongst them several times. The Pormes are one of those.”

  “Will Vall ever allow his sons to marry?”

  “Eventually. The older he gets, the more worried the Yentif become that they will lose their rule to another royal house,” I told the boy, and he looked confused. I explained, “If Vall were to die without a grandson, none of his sons could take the throne. The Yentif’s rule would be said to have failed, and the Council of Lords would elect another family to replace them.”

  “Would the Yentif so willingly step aside?”

  “No. They would not and did not when Vall’s father was killed.”

  “That was the war you fought in.”

  “Yes,” I replied, though I was unhappy to remember it. “When Vall claimed the throne, the other royal families refused to recognize him. Heneur, Eril, and Aderan declared war. Vall did not have any children but several of his wives were expecting. It was an untested distinction at the time, and he had just enough support from the Council to survive until his first son was born. It was a bloody, bloody year. The decade that followed was ... long. Vall owes his throne to the Hemari.”

  “No wonder Bendent hasn’t sent someone around to put a blade in Barok.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, unless I misunderstand things, Yarik and Bendent would have swung from Vall’s rope if Barok had been able to pass along evidence that Yarik had married Bendent’s daughter. They must still fear the same. Why else wouldn’t a father ride out himself to see Barok dead for his involvement in his daughter’s murder?”

  “I think you forget what would have happened if Barok had not outsmarted Kuren. But that’s enough talk. Bessradi loves locking men away for whispering.”

  Gern took a slow look around and put his eyes on a man whose old brown mare was taking her time passing our wagon on the road. “We’ll be quick and quiet as mice then.”

  I could not have agreed more, and we kept our talk to simpler things the rest of the trip south. The lads noticed that the fields of winter wheat, for instance, were in terrible shape. They were very right. I had not seen such short, bald fields in all my years. I began to worry at the price we would have to pay for seed, but not too much. We were in Zoviya, after all. There was nothing for it, and if nothing else, it would be a good reason why I could not return with the wedding bracelet the prince wanted.

  We reached the city of Alsonvale late in the evening seven days later. Barok was right that supplies would be cheaper south of Almidi. But for grain and horses, Alsonvale was the place to go—not Bessradi. The city was set in the middle of the wide band of wheat that stretched from the capital all the way west to the provinces of Aderan and Heneur and the headwaters of the capital’s mighty river. Two of the five Hemari divisions garrisoned there because of this, and where there are Hemari, there are horses. We rode in without event, and the inn we found was quiet.

  Early the next morning we split up. Erom and the craftsmen made for the market, and the lads and I set out for the largest horse ranch in the city. It was admirable how little they gawked at the city as we marched. In uniforms and overcoats of blue, instead of green, they would have been the very image of freshly-minted Hemari.

  We made one quick stop at a moneylender’s on our way up. I was surprised how happy the man was to trade the Chaukai’s crude silver bars for shiny new gold coins—grinning almost. Something to ponder later.

  The show stable at the front end of the ranch was enormous—a dozen head of forty different breeds were inside, with buyers as varied and numerous. Gern and the boys didn’t make it ten paces inside before they stopped and began to stare. But in their defense, I’d done the same the first time I’d made a similar walk. The horses in the number one and two paddocks on each side of the well-swept brick aisle were the same breed as Dia’s horse—the Akal-Tak. The boys couldn’t afford a single stallion, mare, or gelding, but you couldn’t stop them from dreaming. What we had come for was what I had seen on the way up, the stout Fell ponies tha
t grazed far below the show stable. Their place in the stable was much farther down, somewhere amongst the working breeds. I had seen them in action a number of times—calm, iron-muscled, and sure-footed. They were what were needed for trips over the mountain. The size of the herd was strange, though. I had never seen so many in one place before. I took another look at them through a window and wondered at the reason. Their size caught my attention as well, even at that distance. They were large for ponies, perhaps third again the normal size.

  I turned around to see a horse trader introduce himself to Gern. None less than the owner of the ranch, I heard with some alarm, and started back toward them. But before I could cross or the trader could say another word, Gern pointed at the Akal-Taks and asked, “How much for a brigade worth of mares?”

  I set my eyes upon the young man and scratched at my brow. We were not in a place built for joking. The trader, though, looked from my heavy case to Gern’s gold-threaded collar and back to me. He stepped close and took hold of my arm.

  “We speak somewhere else, yes?”

  “Out in the open is as good a place as any for what we came for.”

  “Would your Hemari pride be offended if I told you no good business is done in the open?”

  “I am not Hemari.”

  The man stepped even closer. I was just about done with him doing it.

  “Sir, please,” he whispered. “You are a thirty-year man if ever I have seen one. If you are here wearing such horrible disguises, the Hemari are heading west after all. And if you buy from me in the open, word of the purchase will precede you. Now please, sir, follow me before I lose my business with the garrison and you your commission.”

  I did not understand what the man could possibly mean, and he tugged me along before I could find either questions or a protest sufficient to stop him. Gern and the lads followed, and we were seated in a private bureau with paneled walls and padded sedans.

  The horseman went through the motions of offering us wine and refreshments. The lads, true to the Hemari code, did what they should when in the presence of a superior officer—they did nothing. They did not speak and did not respond to his joke about girls from Trace. I was quite proud of their discipline. The trader did not miss it, either. He chuckled and sat across from me.

  “Your first brigade command, colonel?”

  “You have us mistaken. We are not Hemari, and I am not a colonel.”

  “Colonel, please. You came here to buy horses, yes? Enough to outfit a new brigade or two that will ride west before Aderan and Heneur start burning each other’s crops? I am sure you noticed the men from Aderan two paddocks down and the men from Heneur just three down from them. Both groups heard your man’s hasty words, so the moment you make a bid on 2,000 Akal, both sides are going to rush home and start burning and pillaging as fast as they can. The very thing you are being sent to prevent and the reason for those uniforms, yes?”

  I had to respect the man’s insight, wrong though he was. The Hemari, as with the prohibition against provincial troops entering the Kaaryon in numbers, could not ride beyond the borders of the Kaaryon in force without a formal declaration of war. But that did not stop Vall from mustering private forces not bound by that law. He had not done it in a decade, but the popular wisdom was that the wheat that grows in Heneur and Aderan feeds too many for it to be left to chance in a new squabble between them. And here we were, men who seemed very Hemari in never before seen uniforms.

  “Horseman, please. We are not Hemari, and we are not riding west.”

  The man started twice to say something, a gesticulation wasted with each, before he sat back down. “No. I would still bet my ranch that you are a thirty-year man. Who have you hired out to? I would have heard if you were from Aderan. I have not even heard rumors of someone else buying so many. Please tell me you are not from Trace.”

  “No, not Trace, Aderan, or Heneur. What are you trying so hard to sell us, horsemen?”

  He leaned in close again. “You noticed the Fell ponies, yes?”

  “Would have been hard not to. What did you do, buy every fit pony from Kuet to Khrim and breed them for size, hoping to sell them to one side or another? Neither could afford them, could they?”

  The man cleared his throat.

  “Do not tell me you were going to try to convince a Hemari colonel to buy ponies instead of Akal-Tak. I must say I admire the line you found—preserving the secrecy of a mission—but, horseman, you must know that the only way you would ever get a Hemari to ride a working breed was if he was half-dead or stone drunk. I don’t care how much bigger you were able to breed them.”

  “Tell me where you are from,” he said flatly, a bit of an accent creeping into his speech.

  “We are from Enhedu. I am alsman to Prince Barok—here to buy packhorses and wheat seed. I regret that you were misled by our appearance and the lieutenant’s bad joke. Please accept my apologies for it.”

  “How many can your prince afford?” he asked abruptly.

  “What is your game, trader? Why are you trying to sell us those ponies?”

  The man leaned forward and asked, “Did ya serve en Heneur?”

  His thick-tongued accent answered all of my questions. The man was from Heneur, and it was a certainty that not one other person in Alsonvale knew it. He had put the ponies together to sell to the men of his homeland—a breed built for Heneur’s mountains, a hundred times cheaper than the Akal-Tak, and enough perhaps to make the difference in this newest conflict with Aderan.

  I answered his questions reluctantly. “Yes. I served in Heneur during the Pqrista Rebellion.”

  “Where ’bouts?”

  “Smargnoid, beneath Opti,” I said low, the words sounding foreign after so many years. He stared. Opti Pass was where Heneur’s royal family had lost its war with Lord Vall.

  “You were Hurdu?” he asked darkly.

  “No, horseman. I was not amongst the Hurdu when Wilgmuth fell. I commanded the Hemari.”

  “You are Leger Mertone,” he said flatly, and I feared he would strike me. He stood, instead, straightened his clothes, and offered his hand. I did not understand him. It was the reaction I was used to from Hemari veterans and Yentif loyalists.

  After a very long moment, I rose and shook the man’s hand. “You have me at an advantage, sir.”

  He did not at first let go. “Your humility is astonishing, Leger Mertone. It is known that you tried to stand in the way of the Hurdu that day. Many thousands escaped the massacre because of you.”

  Gern and the boys stared at me.

  “So you’re trying to sell your ponies to Heneur,” I said quickly, desperate to set the topic of my history aside, “but the men from Aderan made a bid on the herd that Heneur cannot match?”

  The man hung his head low. “That’s correct. Heneur can’t afford even a few companies’ worth. Between the heavy sanction the Council of Lords laid on our arilas last fall and all of Aderan’s meddling, Heneur has nothing but debts, iron we are better off not selling to our neighbors, and the harvest. I’ve been setting aside Aderan’s bid for five days now, but have run out of ways to delay them. I will have to recognize their bid tomorrow or risk losing my master’s status with Alsonvale’s consortium. I can only prevent the sale to Aderan if someone makes a good offer on all 4,800 head.”

  “Why not just pull up stakes and move every horse you have to Heneur?”

  “You know better than that, Alsman. Backing out of my garrison contracts would cost me everything. I would leave penniless.”

  “What is their bid?”

  “1,300 weights of gold for 2,000 ponies—sixty-five standards per head.”

  “Horseman, I am sorry. At that price, we could buy no more than the fifteen we came for. For us to be able to make such a bid, you would have to find a moneylender willing to extend us a very bad note.”

  “Do you have the prince’s seal with you?”

  “Be careful, horseman. You ask a desperate question. Prince Barok could n
ot repay the note.”

  “His stipend must be so much more than the amount. I know he was banished, but he is also an arilas now. Fools ridicule your prince, but anytime you put the words Yentif and arilas in the same sentence, you best look around to see who is listening. The prince could borrow thousands of weights of gold—on the quiet, too, if you know what I mean.”

  “His stipend is not what you think.”

  “With gold brocade on his officer’s collar? Who do you think you are fooling, alsman?”

  “I wish beyond all else that it were otherwise. If ever there was a place that could make noble use of such fine ponies, Enhedu is it. But Prince Barok cannot afford them.”

  “Sirs,” Gern interrupted, “I have an idea for it, if you would permit me.”

  The horseman blinked at Gern and asked with surprise, “Are all the men of Enhedu so polite?”

  “They are. Speak your mind, Lieutenant.”

  “It seems to me that if we are considering borrowing so much in the prince’s name, we should also return with the means by which he could make good the debt. Instead of borrowing enough for just the horses, make it enough to load four sixty-weights of wheat seed onto each. Enhedu’s farmers have no debts and would each take on a portion of this one gladly.”

  It was Gern’s turn to be stared it.

  “Lieutenant, you are speaking for a thousand families without their leave. The debt you would bring back for them is a hundred times greater than what they have agreed to. Are you sure the villagers would so willingly take on this burden?”

  “Yes, sir, I am. If they will take one sack of wheat for fields they would plow by hand, they will take twenty and the horses to do the work.”

  I asked the slowly smiling horseman, “What price on the whole herd would top Aderan?”

  “Serm has already outstripped his credit. He is at his limit with the bid he made. If you bid 3,000 even for all 4,800 head, Harod could not match it.”

  “What price is that ... sixty standards a head?” I asked skeptically. “At that price, sir, we would be robbing you.”