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

  Looking forward to the challenges the morning would bring, I slept better than I had all year.

  48

  Matron Dia Esar

  Lady Emery

  Umera and I laughed all the way back to her shop. Lilly, the most precocious of Urnedi’s children, had decided during the morning meal that she could run the full length of one of the hall’s long tables without knocking anything over. She had gotten close, but near her goal she stepped on the edge of Urs’ bowl. This sent his ham upon the top of his head and her into a stumble that ended with her face-first in a big bowl of blackberry jam. Urs stood, arms flailing, but seeing Lilly’s cry from the sudden shock of jam in her eyes, he moved to assist her instead. Halfway into a second great sob, the girl got a taste of the jam and smiled. The morning’s discussion of the carriagemaker’s visit transformed into the theatrics of a grumpy man and grinning girl cleaning food from hair and face.

  It was so good to laugh.

  “I bet you one of the boys put her up to it,” Umera suggested as she led me inside.

  “They did disappear, didn’t they?”

  The town was closer, happier during those hot summer days, though the work was just as hard. The morning and evening meals were much-needed spots of calm and distraction and a place to complain or discuss the town’s business. Sahin had been right. The castle’s staff needed a voice in that crowd. They were still far too accommodating. I guarded their time and got rather good at coaching them to say no. The only troubled talk during those days was of supplies that could not be found on our side of the mountain and Kuren’s timbermen along the east coast who were causing ever-greater trouble for the villagers. Leger’s trip would satisfy the first in part, but no one had any good ideas for how to take care of our trouble with Trace. Until the threat of further sanctions was gone, we could do little.

  Umera’s shop was sparse but coming along well, better than some, despite the disadvantage of not having all she needed for her craft in the forest beyond. Very little of the fabric she had come with remained, and Leger’s return would not do much for her. It would turn her into a maker of uniforms. The dress forms beneath her emptying shelves were bare—not that you could tell any of this by looking at her. She was, if anything, permanently cheerful.

  She moved behind the thin counter that separated the front of the store from her workspace and the stairs up to her apartment. On the table sat a small basketful of garments waiting to be mended. The wife of one of the carpenters had dropped them off the previous evening, and I had promised to help her with them.

  We sat on upturned buckets to have a look at the garments. I was about to ask Umera if she had heard anything more about when the carpenters might finish some chairs when I saw that none of the clothes had been cleaned. They were covered in sawdust and smelled of pig fat and tree sap.

  “What does she do with herself all day,” I asked, “if she can’t even be bothered to wash her husband’s clothes?”

  “Or mend them,” Umera agreed and tossed a tunica ruefully back into a basket. “She didn’t help with any of the festival preparations, either.”

  “Whose clothes are these?” I asked, not sure whom she could mean.

  “My neighbor. Merit.”

  “In the shop just next door? I didn’t know he was married.”

  “Sure, you remember her. She showed up for the fittings, happily took the dress, and then didn’t even come to the festival.”

  “I don’t recall her at all. Does she dine in the hall?”

  “No. She didn’t leave her husband’s tent more than three or four times while his shop was being built and has shut herself in since. Rudest woman I have ever come across—from Bessradi apparently.”

  “Bessradi?”

  “Yes, her father built grand ships for Kuren’s fleets, the way she tells it. She’s a bit batty if you ask me. Acts as if she were a noblewoman on holiday—as if the name her father left her means anything. And I don’t care what Erom says about how great it is that the carriagemaker is joining us. If he and his men come with manners as bad as hers, I think we would be better off without them.”

  “They will have good enough manners, having worked for the Yentif. It’s their lack of humility I worry about. The last thing we need is fifty lordly men from the Kaaryon ordering us around.”

  “Could they be worse than this man’s wife?” she asked, holding up the tattered affair that was the carpenter’s tunica.

  “Well, it hasn’t happened yet, but if anyone were to get truly out of order, I am certain Barok would send them south.”

  We both smiled at that before Umera asked, “How is he these days?”

  “The prince? How do you mean?”

  “We don’t see him as much in the town as we used to. What is he doing up at the keep?”

  “Planning for the future of the province. There is a great deal that needs to be done.”

  “With that scribe of his?”

  I was certain she was joking, but her smile was gone. “Well, you’re in no mood to mince words it would seem.”

  She shrugged meekly. “I would want you to tell me if they were doing similar to me.”

  “They?”

  “The town. They move as if they mean to replace you with her.”

  “Not at all,” I lied and hid my surprise behind a small shrug. “It is as I planned it.”

  “Planned ... what?”

  “Barok will take more than one wife, Umera. I picked Fana to be the second some time ago.”

  “She knows?”

  “Certainly.”

  She didn’t look like she believed me, though, and sat up a bit straighter before she asked, “You’re not thinking of me as a third, are you?”

  “Well, no. Sorry, I had not thought that far ahead. Is it your hope?”

  “No. Not in the least. Is this what Bessradi expects of its women?”

  “As Bayen wills it,” a new voice startled us both, and we turned to see a woman at the counter I did not recognize—Merit’s wife, apparently. I did not like that she had snuck in nor that she was so casually listening in on our conversation. She was an average-looking woman with a wide chin, tightly-bound black hair, and narrow blue eyes. She wore a long well-fitting dress of dark gray and a wide and flowing white stole that wrapped around her shoulders and descended between her arms to hide her figure. Both garments were in excellent care.

  It was all but a uniform. Bessradi had many like her. I could only stare.

  “Bayen watch over us all,” she admonished with a shake of her head. “If I did not know better, I would worry that you are so forgetful of his teachings that you are deaf to his voice.”

  “What?” I managed to say, still too startled by her sudden menace.

  “No, no, that’s okay. Don’t mind what you do not understand, dears. It is only Bayen’s truest servants, after all, who will rise to join him in paradise.”

  I knew then why I had not seen her before. The season was a special time for women like her. “You had a pleasant spring?”

  “Indeed. The penance of the sermod was very refreshing, though with all of these trees in the way, it was impossible to cast my love to Bayen upon the four ordinals. It required that I pray twice as long, of course, but as you can see, he has rewarded me,” she grinned and briefly lifted away her stole enough to expose a rounding belly. “Twins for sure as early as they are showing, Bayen be praised.”

  I was suddenly sick. Figuring out a way to separate Barok and Fana, I could handle. This woman was something else entirely. One of Bayen’s sermod—his loyal women.

  “Do you have the clothes cleaned and mended yet?” she asked suddenly.

  “Neither,” Umera replied darkly. “This is not a laundry, Emery.”

  Her smile narrowed. “That is Lady Emery to you, and that best be the last time you speak to me that way, lawless widow. Bayen’s bright eye is already upon you.”

  Umera looked stricken and went very quiet.

  “You could
not clean them yourself?” I asked weakly, stupidly.

  “Bayen will provide,” she stated and turned. At the door she said, “See that they’re done by tomorrow, and maybe I will not include mention of you in my letter to the prelature.”

  Grinning, she left.

  Umera started to cry.

  49

  Captain Leger Mertone

  The 7th of Summer, 1195

  Gern’s good mood helped my own as our road put the capital at last before us. The young lieutenant had rightly thought his silver would bring home no more than twenty quality animals. Our good fortune would instead see us return with more than they could have purchased with a decade’s-worth of their collective wages. Gern and I agreed on the drayage rate he would charge Barok, and the lad even made jokes about extending Barok credit until he could afford to pay.

  It was difficult, though, to say how many of the ponies belonged to Barok, how many to Gern and Company, and how many more they could borrow from the prince. We thought we had it figured out a half dozen times, but with the last stretch of road before us, we decided to set it aside until Barok was at the table—it was his gold we had been playing with after all.

  Gern guided the wagon across the wide river and past a leering granite colossus that guarded the bridge. I was never a fan of Lord Vall’s statues.

  The wide streets of the capital were as I remembered them: uneven, smelly, and crowded with all kinds and qualities of people, none polite enough to return a hello or make way. Gern learned this sharply when he greeted a man who had decided to block the road with his wagon. I had to hold the lieutenant in his seat after the man told Gern what he could do with our oxen. The man was a Chancellery officer, a bailiff—his empty wagon a large cage built to hold men.

  “How can I let him disrespect me like that?” Gern hissed. “Tell him you are an alsman and let’s be clear of this fool.”

  “You could be a Hemari captain and he would treat you the same. Quiet now. We are mice, remember?”

  He did not understand until the bailiff’s press gangs emerged from an alley. The coordinated sweep had grabbed up a dozen beggars. They wept and wailed and cried for release. One of the bailiffs bludgeoned the first man to the ground. The rest fell silent. The bailiffs jammed the unfortunate souls into the wagon, and it started down the street.

  “What kind of place is this,” Gern hissed, “where men will stand by while their fellows are caged?”

  I flung my gaze around. No one had heard him. “My friend, I am very sorry I did not prepare you better for this trip. Those men are bailiffs and they work for the chancellor. He has an army of them and they have the power to arrest any man for any crime, real or imagined. There is no opposing them. Hold your tongue and remember what we do here. No one on these streets will help us if the wrong someone was to hear your words.”

  He threw the reins at me. He looked a little sick. I was a bit green myself. I had been in Enhedu long enough to forget Zoviya’s love for slaves and its quiet disregard. I hurried us along, hoping still to arrive at our first stop in time.

  The way there took us north along the east bank of the river, past my old garrison, and along the outer curtain wall of the palace. The road was a clean featureless sheet, high walls on our right and the bank of river on our left.

  At the end of that uninviting road was a place I had wanted to visit most of my life, but when our road-weary wagon rumbled up toward the terraced, granite entrance of the headquarters of my new profession, I balked. The chancellery building rivaled the Deyalu in size and Tanayon Cathedral in severity, but unlike the cathedral’s sharp angles and tall spires, the chancellery was a thick-pillared square that stood as a forecastle to the fortress that housed the treasury. We could not see much of its high walls from the road or the single bridge that spanned the calm waters surrounding it. As I understood it, even an alsman needed special permission to cross the treasury bridge. What it took to gain access to its vaults, I could not guess.

  We rumbled to a halt at the bottom of a wide, stone stairway crowded with alsmen, each dressed regally from head to foot. At the top of the stairs, steely-eyed Hemari stood before each smooth pillar with shields upon their arms and in uniforms fit for parade review. Black-garbed functionaries of all manner scurried about and across the road to a single ornate gate in the palace’s outer wall. A wide underground passage also connected the chancellery to the palace, but it was only used in bad weather. All of Bessradi’s tunnels smelled of dead rats and piss. None of the chancellor’s bailiffs or their wagons stunk up the place, either. The business of prosecuting Zoviya’s law was the lesser of the chancellor’s responsibilities. Control of the royal treasury was his true power, and it was the alsmen who held the purse strings.

  I’d had the good sense to bring my vest from the festival but was beginning to question my judgment. Even with it on, I fit in about as well as a toothless gravedigger at a palace ball. No man of the Chancellery wore a soldier’s boot or a prince’s sword.

  The Hemari did not miss me either, and a troop of them descended to surround the wagon. Their lieutenant demanded my name and purpose.

  “Leger Mertone,” I stated and handed him my credentials.

  The gathered alsmen and functionaries fell silent and stared while the Hemari passed around the document. They seemed unimpressed until the lieutenant read that I had once been a Hemari captain and put it together with my name. I had hoped it wouldn’t happen.

  “The Leger Mertone?”

  “Hero of Opti Pass?” another asked before I could speak. He pointed suddenly at the medal upon my chest. “Ahh, now that’s a proper thing. An alsman wearing a thirty star. It’s about time.”

  “Yeah,” another grinned and slapped me on the back. “Makes sense now. It’d take a thirty-year man to straighten out that demon prince.”

  “Wearing a bit of Yentif steel, too,” another said with a slow whistle. “Wait until the garrison hears about this. What a sight. What a sight.”

  The guardsmen’s flagging discipline vanished after that, and they became a glad-handing mob. Even their lieutenant shook my hand before he returned my case and ordered his men back to their posts. I wished I could disappear. The bluecoats thought all was right with the world seeing one of their own made an alsman, but all through the show, the gathered men of the Chancellery stared.

  I began to worry I had arrived too late for my target’s daily walk across to the palace, but a commotion at the top of the stairs drew in the alsmen like flies.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” a clear voice rang out in their midst. The crowd parted, bowed low, and scurried after the man, all the while begging his attention for their urgent requests. Chancellor Helet Parsatayn was tall and meticulously groomed, his stature and rank as stark as the silver-brocaded white silk robes beneath his gold-brocaded black dalmatic.

  I stepped into his path. “Alsman Leger Mertone,” I greeted him with a deep bow, “here to deliver my summer report.”

  His genial expression vanished, and his even pace faltered. He glared daggers at the man standing nearest him—perhaps for failing to know of my arrival so he could have used the tunnel entrance. The crowd noticed all of this, stepped back a pace, and became startlingly quiet.

  His return was hardly even a tightening of the stomach. “There was no need for you to appear in person,” he sang so softly it was almost a yawn and continued around me at his previous pace. “Your prince is in jail for failure to satisfy sanction, yes?”

  “No, actually. The matter was resolved to Kuren’s satisfaction.”

  The chancellor’s pace faltered again, but he said no more. The looks of shock and alarm on the faces of those around him were far more telling. Barok had been marked down as disposed of.

  I decided to press our advantage.

  “Surely you were told of the purchase of wheat and horses Prince Barok made in Alsonvale?”

  Parsatayn stumbled down the last few steps, tearing the hem of his robe in the process. I mar
ched down toward him, forcing the smaller men to part for me or suffer a collision. Their eyes followed my sword.

  Parsatayn turned a slow circle and demanded, “With what coin?”

  “I cannot speak to that as the note was signed in confidence with the Arilas of Enhedu, and, therefore, no business of mine. I come only to deliver my report in person and to petition for an increase in Prince Barok’s stipend.”

  “An increase?” he hissed, scarlet with rage. “Guards, throw this man in the river.”

  I had expected a hostile reaction, but his sudden venom confused me. I turned to look up the stairs. The Hemari, though, had not moved, their gaze set forward as if nothing at all had happened. The chancellor glared death up at their lieutenant, but the young man would not be cowed. Only Vall and his sons had any authority over the Hemari, and it was no small mistake for Parsatayn to think otherwise.

  He glared back at me, instead, spit blasting from his mouth as he yelled, “By what right do you come here, dreaming to petition for anything?”

  What a simpleton I was. It was Parsatayn himself who meant to be rid of Barok—be rid of the man who threatened to take back Enhedu’s vote on the Council of Lords, a vote that belonged to the Chancellery by proxy. I had not considered this fact nor Barok’s political position within the Kaaryon once all season. This made it official—as alsmen go, I stunk. Alas, too late to retreat or apologize. Eh, I was never very good at either anyway. I took a step toward him, instead. “Chancellor, I must also tell you my report requires military amendment.”

  “What?” he sputtered, backing away, and looking down at my Yentif sword for the first time. “It is the madness of treason for a prince to raise his own army. Do you come to declare Barok’s rebellion?”

  “Dear Parsatayn, you forget again, perhaps, that Barok is an arilas. The armies of Enhedu are his to command. He asked I come to declare their number and swear their allegiance to the Exaltier.”