Steeled Page 6

  “Why what?” demanded Irae, putting her hands on her hips.

  “It was the night of your coronation, and those men in the pub were slandering your name,” the diminutive kitchen maid fired back, mimicking her queen. “Of all the times and seasons, indeed. We only fought them because of what they said.”

  Irae took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I want to encourage the freedom of speech —”

  “It was slander, Your Majesty,” said Berren. “Any of your guards, in the direct employ of the throne, would have done the same.”

  “Be that as it may, I cannot have my friends — my closest and most trusted friends,” she clarified, sending another glare at Lully, “drunkenly attacking my citizens and starting brawls. That is no kind of precedent to set. You, Berren, have been honored along with the rest, and the public knows that you have been of great value to me. No one could doubt your loyalty and your sincerity. Just your judgment. And you, Lully.” She folded her arms again and shook her head. “I can’t even begin to imagine what you were thinking. I don’t know what you were doing out of the castle wandering around last night, to begin with!”

  Lully maintained her silence and kept her eyes on the ground. Irae waited a moment, then heaved a sigh that sounded like a concession.

  “You will have to make amends,” she said. “The crown orders that you make restitution to the public-house, in that you have broken a number of pieces of furniture, and further orders that you be fined for causing a disturbance. You are lucky that I don’t need to give you even more time in prison, just to make an example of you. But there are others who have created messes, some of them more pressing than yours, and so you will reap the benefits of your own bad deeds being outweighed by others.” She waved a hand at the royal treasurer, who waited with a few other men in charge on chairs ranged along the wall near the throne, which had been empty all day long. Irae was a pacer. “See to it, will you, Geffred?”

  “My lady,” said Berren slowly, casting a sideways glance at Lully, “with all the respect due to your position, I don’t believe that it is wise to let slander such as we heard go without at least investigation, if not punishment. It is a dangerous attitude to allow to foment among the people.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” said Irae. “If you will, please speak with Sir Merundi about the problem, and detail to him what you have heard. He watches my back in these and other matters, while I attempt,” she emphasized with yet another glare at Lully, albeit a softer one this time, “to establish and maintain healthy, respectful ties with my citizens.”

  “Very well, Your Majesty,” murmured Berren, casting his eyes low as well. He touched Lully’s elbow, and she made an awkward, automatic sort of curtsey to Irae, before turning away without meeting her gaze again. The sheep farmer followed her to the door and out of it, while Geffred the treasurer hurried after them both, sticking his quill pen behind his ear.

  “And me?” said Thorn, spreading his hands. “What about me?”

  Irae paused and looked at him.

  “Does your face hurt? It looks as though something heavy landed on it.”

  He rubbed at it, gingerly. “A bit,” he said, “though I’m more worried about my head, which aches something fierce.”

  She gave him a faint, fond smile.

  “What punishment awaits me? I may as well get it over with. I haven’t any money to be fined, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  “You,” she said, “have other things to be concerned with. You’ve spoken with Batrek Felcin?”

  “I — I have.”

  “Good. I expected no less. I have news for you.”

  Thorn sagged a little.

  “Nothing good ever comes out of ‘I have news for you.’”

  “You might disagree once you hear what it is. Lully was meant to tell you, but as I understand from her intoxicated ranting last night, she has been so caught up with being wooed by Berren and starting drunken bar fights that she has completely forgotten. When she went to the village of your birth, she found out a few facts about your history which, I understand, you had wanted to keep as silent as possible.”

  Thorn kept his hands loose at his sides and put his eyes on the ground. Almost dispassionately, he observed that his heart rate had sped up at the very mention of the village where he had been born.

  Irae stepped close to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Any such hopes are misplaced,” she assured him. “You are not forgotten there, but there will soon be one who has the best of reasons to remember you fondly.”

  Thorn lifted his head, shaking his dark hair out of his eyes and meeting her gaze. In his chest, his heart surged and boomed.

  “Elseth,” said Queen Irae, and nodded to him. “The baker’s daughter. It is almost her time now, to wake up and see —” She laughed a little, obviously unsure as to what, exactly, would be seen by the baker’s daughter. “See whatever there is to be seen, I suppose.”

  “Whether she will live,” breathed Thorn, though as it was difficult to force breath into his lungs, it was more difficult still to speak.

  “Yes,” said Irae, and she dropped her hand from Thorn’s shoulder and looked away from him. Turning to one side, she began to pace. “Yes, that is of course the main concern. Her health, her general condition, how much of her memory of the past seven years she retains — and most importantly of all, if she comes back to herself as she was, before she was Forged.”

  “Before I Forged her, you mean,” said Thorn, through lips that were nerveless and numb.

  “Yes,” said Irae. “And so, you must travel back to your village, and be there when she awakens.”

  Thorn twitched so violently that he actually fell back a half step. With both hands, he reached up to tug at the ends of his hair.

  “N-no, wait,” he said, “no, wait.”

  “Thorn —”

  “You can’t — I understand that you want to — maybe you think this is kind to me, Jelen, but I can’t do that.”

  She stepped in front of him again and lifted her hands, not touching him, but soothing him from afar. Her voice, too, was low and soothing.

  “There is more to this than you might expect, Thorn. Perhaps it may be kind, and perhaps it may not, but either way, I need to you to be there when she wakes so that you may tell me how it happens.”

  “Why?” he demanded, losing all tentativeness in the emotion of the moment. “Why must I be there for that? Why do you want to make me go back to the village I was run out of — twice! — to see the girl who may or may not die as soon as she wakes?”

  “Because you didn’t use the Anvil of the Soul to Forge my uncle,” said Irae, maintaining her soft, even voice. “And I am afraid that seven years may not be enough to undo the harm he has done to my kingdom. I need to know how he is likely to return to himself.”

  Thorn flung his arms in the air, nearly knocking himself over with the vehemence of it. Panic made his tongue run loose and illogical.

  “He is likely to come back to himself with a craving for grassroots and wool blankets,” he said. “He is likely to be just as hard-headed and traitorous as he was when he was a human, before he became a farm animal with idiosyncratic eating habits. What does it matter, Irae, how he comes back?”

  “I need to be prepared, Thorn.”

  “Just because she comes back a certain way, does not mean that the rule applies to everyone who is Forged,” he objected. She nodded at him, serenely.

  “I do understand. And I do sympathize. But you must be there when she wakes, and you must be my informant, my educator, my researcher. Take Ruben with you, if you like,” she offered. “I’m sure he would be delighted to be able to gather more research for his book on the Forged.”

  “Ruben has left already,” said Thorn. “After you snubbed him last night, he departed for parts unknown.”

  “Oh.” She wilted slightly. “I’m sorry to hear that. I truly didn’t mean to hurt his feelings.”

  �
��Yes, well, you did,” said Thorn eagerly, pleased to have the conversation turn to other topics. “If I were you — not that I’m telling you what to do — I would have him brought back and make him the royal bard here in the castle. Well, no, I probably wouldn’t go that far,” he amended, thinking of the little he had heard of Ruben’s performance the evening before. “But I would at least try to lessen the sting a little.”

  “Yes, that is very good advice, and I appreciate that you are so keen to look out for the feelings of your friends — but you can’t avoid the subject that easily. You shall take Berren with you. He’s likely to want to get back to his sheep farm, anyway. Take Berren by all means, but you must go.”

  He spread his arms, hands empty.

  “Please,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “You must do this.”

  “I can’t.”

  “It is an order,” she said simply. “You will go. And that is all.” She turned away from him again and nodded to another of the men who awaited the queen’s pleasure. “See that he is equipped for the journey, and that Berren is instructed as to what is expected.”

  Thorn removed his arm from the grasp of the other man, who seemed to be quite eager to please, and turned once more to plead with Irae.

  “Please, Jelen,” he said. “Please — don’t ask me to do this.”

  She was facing the throne and would not look at him.

  “I thank you for your service to the crown, Thorn,” she said. “You may leave the goat here, if you like.”

  “She wants me to leave,” Thorn told the man who conducted him outside the throne room and to his own chambers, there to be prodded inside for the gradual orchestration of his traveling affairs. The man only nodded at him, more or less sympathetically, and began to roll the pack Thorn kept in the corner, as a memorial to the journey he had taken. Thorn had scarcely expected to be called upon to need it again.

  Though, what was he expecting? He considered the facts morosely. He was in no greater standing than Lully or Graic; less, if it came to that, for his history with the queen was only recent and he had no real title in the castle. No one even knew what it was he had done; with the story being spread that the former king had exiled himself, there was no room for Thorn in the legend. He wasn’t sure how that was going to contribute, in the end, to the Forged having less of a stigma attached to them, but he had chosen not to think about it.

  Now, though, it rather jumped out at him. After all, if Lully, who had known the Queen for a great deal longer and been close friends with her, had no position beyond her usual one of serving maid, what use could Irae have for a Forged who could not even be acknowledged as such? No wonder he was being packed off like a third cousin.

  “She wants me to leave,” he told the horse which he was given, an hour later. He could still hardly believe it. “I help her to get back her throne, regain the kingdom and take back what was hers by birthright. And she tells me to slip off and go home.” He shook his head, touching gently at the edges of the horse’s ears. “Not even home. Just where I’m from. That isn’t even the same thing, not when you’ve been run out of town more than once. It’s bad enough when it happens when you’re a child, but when it happens multiple times —”

  “Believe me, I am not entirely pleased with how this is turning out, either,” grumbled Berren from beside him. “Do you reckon that she isn’t in favor of my attentions to Lully? Suppose she had her heart set on her marrying that strange bard, Ruben.” He shook his head and gave a mirthless chuckle. “The very idea of it is ludicrous, of course.”

  “She wants me to leave,” whispered Thorn to himself. “I can scarcely fathom it.”

  “You’d best get to fathoming,” advised Berren. “We’re nearly to Victory’s Blight as it is, and I’d hate to think that you’ll reach your home village tomorrow without ever believing that you’ve been headed there in the first place. I have a certain reputation to uphold. I can’t be carting imbeciles around with me willy-nilly.”

  “Which path shall we take?”

  Berren cast him a surprised glance.

  “The Northern road. Victory’s Blight to Ainsea’s Delight, as the saying goes. Passing Lovesick on the way; should reach there by tomorrow evening if all goes well. It’s too bad we didn’t get an earlier start this morning, but not much to be done about that, as the Queen was so dead set on making us see the error of our ways.”

  “Northern road,” muttered Thorn. “I haven’t gone back to — I haven’t gone back since I left, you see.”

  “Ah.” Berren nodded. “Yes. I quite understand. Well, I should have been back before now, you know. My sheep are probably wondering what’s kept me. Losing sleep over it, I shouldn’t be surprised. They’ll have to stay up and count themselves at night to drift off.” He smiled to himself.

  “I doubt it,” said Thorn. “Do you think we’ll pass by any bands of rogues?”

  Berren sputtered at him. “What? Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “Because I have a message for them.”

  “Don’t speak such things out loud, boy! Do you want to curse us?”

  “I’m cursed already,” said Thorn gloomily. “What does one more or less matter?”

  “What sort of message could you possibly have for the likes of them, anyway?”

  “Well, it’s an interesting story,” Thorn began, tugging at his hair. “But I’ve changed my mind, and I’m not going to tell you. Nothing against you personally, of course, it’s just that I neither know you nor like you and even when I do know and like people I still have trouble trusting them to the point of telling them stories, especially interesting ones.”

  Berren looked at him for a moment, then threw his head back and guffawed.

  “At least you’re honest!”

  “Er — of course I am,” said Thorn untruthfully.

  “Then I’ll be honest in return. I hope nothing more than to have an uneventful trip to Lovesick, tend to my sheep, and get back to Balfour town as soon as ere I can. I would be sorely disappointed if I was forced to fight off a band of rogues just to satisfy your quest to deliver a message, no matter how interesting the story is.”

  “To get back to Balfour town,” said Thorn. “Because of Lully? It doesn’t matter much to me, I’m asking only because I want to know.”

  Berren sobered at the question.

  “Truth be told, no, that isn’t my only reason. I’m not settled in my mind over what happened last night. I’m not loyal to a fault, by any means, and I can understand why some might have doubts over how Queen Irae managed to come by her throne, without knowing the true and full of it. But still, the words that were said smacked of treason, and there needs more doing about it than claiming freedom of speech.”

  “Did you speak to Sir Merundi about it?”

  “That I did. I told him exactly what I heard last night, along with a few things I’ve picked up over the last few weeks that you probably have not been privy to. All is not well here in Balfour.”

  “All is not well anywhere,” muttered Thorn, squinting at the hazy sky. “Life is uniformly terrible.”

  Berren ignored him. “I don’t know what that Merundi fellow is up to, but if he’s the Queen’s chief advisor, he’s falling down on the job. There’s more than one group that are spreading all sorts of lies about how our Irae was able to take back her throne — and only a few of them pin it to what it actually was and include the involvement of the Forged. Those are worrisome enough, even though they have some of it true, simply for what else they’re including. There are rumors that the Queen is gathering Forged, pulling from secrets kept long and well in villages here and there throughout the entirety of Ainsea. The ideas of what she might be wanting them for vary, but they are all uniformly destructive.”

  “Gathering Forged,” repeated Thorn. “Like they say used to be done in the old days.”

  “Aye,” agreed Berren, nudging his horse a little to the right so he didn’t drift off the
path. “The bad old days.”

  “I’ve never met another Forged,” murmured Thorn. “I only have heard of them, now and then, and nothing too specific. Nothing to really believe in. Why, I think — I think I may be the only one.” He hadn’t ever realized it till just then, but as soon as the words left his mouth he realized the truth of them. He did believe that he might very well be the only Forged in all of Ainsea; in all of the world. True, there were the reports and studies of the alchemists in the desert, but those were hearsay only; even the supposition that Thorn’s abilities had been passed down from his mother’s family line was only just that — a supposition.

  The feeling of loneliness was not unfamiliar, but he had kept it at bay for the last few months, by dint of keeping busy and surrounded by people. As it settled back into its place for a stay, like a cat curling up on a cushion, he poked at it gingerly to see if it still hurt.

  It did.

  Berren had no time for this, however.

  “Like as not, you just haven’t looked hard enough,” he said. “Regardless of what they’re claiming, only a few of us know the truth. But they do say that lies can run quicker than streambeds in winter.”

  “Do they?” said Thorn politely. “I’ve never heard that before.”

  Berren cast him another sideways glance and shook his head.

  “Jest all you like, my friend, but if your queen doesn’t look and act sharp, she may find that the throne is harder to keep hold of than she thought. And considering she’s lost it once already, that’s saying something.”

  Around them, the thickets that surrounded the area of Victory’s Blight were beginning to rollick past; behind them, the castle loomed behind its walls and gates. Ahead of them, far in the distance and waiting in tomorrow, the town of Thorn’s birth, and Berren’s too — and Elseth, silent, waiting.

  Thorn bit his lip.

  “She’ll be fine without me,” he said. “Without us. We have a job to do.”