The Book of Battles

“I should have been a great queen, were I allowed to be one.”

-Edith Baldwin

  

ZAHEM

BORDER COUNTRY

“Arvad,” said the lanky farmer, “ask Mehta why she’s staring at her arm so much.”

The pretty housemaid stopped when the farmer said this and went back to sweeping.

“I’m not staring at anything,” she said, taking her broom across the old wood floor.

“I think,” said the farmer, “she’s looking at that old bracelet.

“I think that what she wants is for someone to go up to Nava and bring back some pretty things, ah, Arv?”

The young, red headed man smiled, and Mehta turned her broom around and pounded it.

“You can’t deny this house is getting something toward empty. We’re a dairy farm, but we can’t survive on the milk and cheese from three cows forever.”

The farmer clapped his hands, declaring, “That’s the Mehta I like to see.”

The girl with her curling reddish hair frowned at him, irritated by her master. Over them the green mountains that divided the Border from the Pass into Daumany spread themselves.

“It really is time you went to Nava,” she chided.

The farmer touched his chin. Arvad noticed the band that he always kept wrapped around his wrist.

“Do you?” he said with a funny smile, “think it’s time I go to Nava, Arvad?”

“Well, now I don’t know, Master. Only if you think you have to go to Nava.”

Mehta frowned sharply at the both of them and then the farmer smiled and said, “Well, all right. I guess I’ll go.”

“When?” Mehta said, trying to look cross.

“Maybe today. Um,” he pulled a face. “Definitely today. Which one of you wants to come with?”

“Oh, Mehta. She’ll get a kick out of the bazaars. You can put her up in a real hotel.”

Mehta blushed and said, “It wouldn’t be proper, me traveling about with a man.”

“There’s nothing proper about you,” said the farmer.

“Well, in that case,” Mehta said, forgetting her sweeping, “I’ll have to get a nice shawl. And a decent dress. To wear into the city of course. Oh, and then we’ve got to get the horses ready…”

“The horses are ready,” the Farmer said.

Mehta looked at him.

“We’ve got to get provisions.”

“Provisions are in the wagon.”

She scowled at him, and the more she wanted to smile, the more she scowled.

“You are a horrible person,” she told him, suddenly looking at the pile of dirt on the floor and making a noise. She marched across the kitchen to find the dust pan in the pantry.

The two men looked at each other, and then began to chuckle.

“Thank God for women,” said the Farmer. A house isn’t a house without a woman.”

 

“You need a woman,” Metha told him as they sat side by side in the open air carriage plodding toward the city. “And I don’t mean a scullery maid. I mean a real Mrs. Nelson to take charge of this house.”

Farmer Nelson chuckled and shook his head, “What would I do if I didn’t have you to tell me what to do?”

Mehta chose to ignore his irony and said, “Most probably starve and be dead by now. You and Arvad Lavran.”

She had been coming from up north, the borders, a few years back, when Metha had stumbled upon one raggedy, unkept farm with starving cows and the half starved Nelson. He wasn’t a farmer at all, then. Certainly there was a past to him, but it wasn’t her business what it was. He’d had a messy black beard from lack of care for himself, which she had immediately shaven. She’d decided to be the maid in this ragged house, and they had gone into the city then. That was where they met Arvad Lavrun and Flo. But Flo was gone now, married to Curly down the road. They had built this house up and Metha, scarcely fourteen, but full of piss and vinegar, had demanded that Nelson find new clothes. The only thing he would not let her do was remove the black cloth that was always tied about his left wrist and had hung rather strangely from the rest of his decent clothes. In time she convinced him to simply wear a black band. His past was hidden and so was his wrist. The rest of the black haired, blank faced Nelson, though, was tall, lanky, not so much pretty as somewhat handsome, and she loved her master in a rough, protective way. He was truly the Master. Provided he did what she told him to.

“A wife…” he murmured again.

“And not a wench,” she said. “I don’t mean a fill-up-the-bed for the night. Not unless she’s a slut who fills up the bed for a few nights in a row and knows how to care for a house. After all, I can’t care for you always.”

Nelson’s flat, unpretty face gave her a sudden, bright smile and he said, “Ah, Mehta, I thought you could, though. I thought you could take care of everything.”

  

AMBRIDGE 

After the service, Rufus King of the Daumans approached the Abbess of Saint Clew and, touching his fingertips together, gave a small bow.

“Holy Mother, one of your nuns said you wished to speak.”

Hilda, barely more than a girl, really, was sitting in one of the palace gardens, hands folded over her lap while she watched the fountain flow. Who was this strange woman, what was she, the daughter of a king, sister to kings and queens who ruled as such over a monastery, praying five times a day?

“I hate this city,” Hilda said. “I hate Ambridge. I will be candid. I despise your cousin the King and his wife.”

“I think,” Rufus said, “as far as Queen Edith is concerned, that disdain is mutual.”

“And do you think she feels it less for you?” Hilda’s eyes met Rufus’s now.

“Do you think she planned for your to be heir to her husband?”

“Holy One—” Rufus began.

Hilda interrupted, “Please!”

“Why have you called me?”

“I did not call you in secret as some bishops would,” Hilda said. “Everyone knows I have called you and if they have imagination they know why? I called to ask you whose side are you on?”

“Side?”

“Do you need me to define the word, or do you not know what a side is?”

“Abbess—”

“You know full well I am on the side of King Osric and Queen Myrne. I am a Wulfstan as well, through my mother Queen Emmeline. I have no desire to see Edmund ruling the three kingdoms after he killed off all Wulfstan competitors, including his brothers and nephews, and with the Baldwins’ help at that.”

“This is speculation, Mother, and—”

“And I certainly do not wish to see you, a Dauman, ruling over the Three Kingdoms. Hale will never accept you, and I will never encourage Inglad to, so you should take that vision out of your mind, the vision I know is there.”

“You speak boldly.”

“I do,” Hilda said. “There will be a war. There already is a war in the North, and you have joined yourself to it, but if you do not stop you will have me to contend with as well as my sister Imogen and her husband King Idris. And when two of us are there, what of Anson—“”

“No one knows were Prince Anson is.”

“He went west, to learn magecraft at the hand of Ohean, to learn from his kin on the Rootless Isle, and he is Lord of Ondres. Essail is at your back door, as is Westrial and Senach—”

“Is small.”

“Senach is strong,” Hilda said. “Have a care that the war which rolls on in the North does not come to engulf all of Ossar, and have a care that, in the end, you are not on the wrong side of it.”

Hilda rose, and as she did, she threaded the shining black prayer beads through her long fingers.

“Your brother the Abbot of Fonteroy is already on my side. You know this. Your reign is young and your throne unsteady. Have a care, Lord.”

The Abbess of Clew bowed and turning, with a swish of her black robes, she was gone.

SUNDERLAND

 “Oh, everyone knows it,” Cody said, stretching out like a cat and, Teryn noted, even seeming to purr a little as their bodies linked together. “It’s whispered about as far as Ambrdige from what I hear.”

“Yes,” Teryn said, sticking his fingers in Cody’s dark hair, “but a whisper is not the same thing as the truth.”

“She killed him,” Cody lay on his side. “Eva, her right hand, is my cousin, and she told me.”

“Eva is the blond girl.”

“Yes. She’s not really a lady in waiting. Queen Morgellyn doesn’t have one. She was just her servant, since she was a little girl, and Morgellyn trusts her for everything.”

“And in turn Eva trusts you?”

In the way Teryn said you was the certainty that Cody was the last person one would entrust such an important secret to.

“Well, she’s my cousin. My father raised her. When people were wondering, I asked her.”

“And she said, Yes, Cody, the Queen killed her husband.”

“You can’t say such things,” Cody put a finger to his lips.

Every time Cody came to his room, he did the same thing Teryn had learned from Isobel. He checked around windows and mirrors, floors, strange places in the walls for where there might be spies, or gazing holes. Anyone with adequate magic could simply nullify those with a charm and some wards, but Teryn, alas, was no mage, and neither was Cody.

Cody, who would have known where to look for any spy now reported, “Eva only said that whatever I guessed at was probably true, and that I knew the truth because I’d seen the Queen’s apothecary.”

“Apothecary?”

“She had a whole… laboratory full of herbs, all sorts of herbs, but mostly poisons. That’s why she doesn’t have kids anymore.”

“Direweed.”

“Right. And ampedostale.”

“What’s that for?”

“For men. For everyone really. It prevents diseases… You know. The kind that happen in bed.”

Teryn raised an eyebrow. “I could have used that. Did you use some before coming to me?”

Cody blushed, turning away, and Teryn caught himself admiring his slim white back, his small buttocks, his tucked in thighs.

“I didn’t think about it,” he said. “Should I have?”

And then before Teryn could answer, Cody said, “The other night, the first time I came to you I took staystrong.”

“I have heard of that.”

“It eases nerves, makes everything stand at attention.”

Cody was talking more to the pillow than Teryn, his back still turned.

Yes, this was seduction. Yes, a boy this loose tongued and this close to the Queen could tell him many things, but he was feeling an affection for him, and by the third time they had gone to bed together, Cody was responding to Teryn’s desire and Teryn began to respond to his so that they were creating something new in that bed, and as Teryn placed his hand on Cody’s shoulder he wanted to create it again.

“What if you stayed the night?” he said to Cody.

Cody turned around, still looking a little nervous, but he smiled, his brown hair falling in his elfin face.

“That’s a good idea,” he said.