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That was the good thing about being an independent: you could be a bit choosy, if you weren’t too choosy. Kethol wouldn’t much care what a sergeant’s personal habits were – he could prefer that his bedmates be large-breasted blonde women, or slender brown-haired boys, or flaming goats, for all Kethol cared – but you stood enough chance of getting killed as it was without having to rely on somebody who made it easy for the enemy.
The distant sound of Durine’s snoring came to his ears, a regular snorp-bleep, snorp-bleep that announced that the big man was resting for the night. Good. Kethol didn’t know why Durine didn’t do that when they were out in the open, when something as innocent as snoring could tell somebody where you were, but he didn’t much care.
The trick was to not close your eyes on watch. Not ever; not for a moment.
Once, as a young man, he had decided to rest his eyes for just a moment on watch, and the next thing he knew, the sun was shining in his eyes in bright reproval. That he had got away with it, that nobody had known of his shame, then or ever, made it worse than if the sergeant had found him asleep and kicked him bloody.
The problem was –
He jerked upright in the chair. He’d heard something.
Damn! There were groans coming from Baron Morray’s room.
‘Pirojil! Durine!’ he shouted, but Kethol didn’t wait for them; he kicked through the door, careless of any damage to the jamb, and rushed in, sword in hand.
The room was dark, lit only by a flickering fire in the hearth up against the wall.
Two bodies were struggling on the massive bed up against the far wall. The simple thing to do would have been to stick a sword-point into the writhing mass, but –
‘Stop.’ Baron Morray, his torso bathed in sweat, was sitting up in his bed. His fingers clawed for the knife on the bedstand, but he had Kethol transfixed with a glare.
Durine and Pirojil were close behind Kethol; he more than saw them, knowing that Durine would move to his right, while Pirojil would guard him on his left.
But not from this.
A pair of eyes peeked out from under the blankets, accompanied by giggling.
‘I’d ask what the meaning of this is,’ the Baron said, ‘but it’s all far too clear, I’m afraid.’ He ignored the giggling, and the way that his bed companion’s struggles to hide herself under the blanket momentarily revealed a flash of a particularly shapely rump.
The Baron patted her on it and snorted. ‘I don’t see much point in hiding, young Kate,’ he said.
She shrugged, and let the blankets drop below her shoulders, brazenly revealing the high young breasts that were every bit as firm as Kethol had imagined they would be.
Just as Kethol had suspected – too late it seemed – it was the serving maid who had delivered the food to the three of them. Easy for a young wench to turn up her nose at a trio of soldiers when she had what no doubt were more rewarding arrangements already made.
Beyond and to the right of the bed, a wooden panel in the inlaid wall had been swung wide open, revealing a dark passage behind it, through which the Baron’s bedmate had apparently arrived.
‘I apologize,’ Kethol said, ‘but –’
‘Get out,’ the Baron said. ‘Just get out of this room. Now.’
It was a bad time to argue with him, but since the Baron wasn’t raising his voice, and probably didn’t want to raise a ruction now, maybe it wasn’t the worst time.
‘No.’ Pirojil’s voice was quiet, but insistent. ‘No, my lord. Not until the door to the hidden passageway is secured.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s no concern of ours who comes and goes into your rooms with your permission, but it’s every concern of ours that nobody can gain access to your rooms without getting by us.’
Durine had taken a lantern down from the wall and was examining a piece of wainscoting on the far wall. ‘There’s another one here,’ he said, grumbling.
And you didn’t see it before? Kethol didn’t ask. It was the sort of thing that they should have thought through, but this sort of bodyguarding was a new thing to the three of them, and they were bound to make mistakes, and Kethol didn’t much like it. He knew enough to act as though the walls had ears, but the walls having doors that could swing open and shut more often than a whore’s crib?
Bloody hell!
‘Well, what do you propose to do?’
There was nothing vaguely unusual or remotely dangerous about a baron inviting a serving girl into his bed, but it was clearly not the sort of thing that Morray would want bruited about, particularly not around Lady Mondegreen.
Kethol walked to the open panel to the hidden passageway and closed it. There was some trick bit of lockwork hidden in the bric-a-brac, but he didn’t trust it, so he slid a dressing chair in front of it, and balanced a clean chamberpot on top of the chair, leaning it against the panelling.
Somebody might still be able to get into the room, but not without making a lot of noise.
Durine had rigged a similar improvised alarm on the other hidden panel, while Pirojil leaned back against the door, his arms crossed in front of him.
‘You’ve done what’s needed. Now get out,’ the Baron said. ‘I can assure you that there will be some discussion of this in the morning.’
Kethol wasn’t at all sure about that. He hoped the Baron would just let the matter drop, but he followed Pirojil’s lead, and bowed his way out of the room.
Durine just shook his head.
Morning broke with Baron Morray off to the east wing of the keep to visit with the ailing Baron Mondegreen and Pirojil, along with Durine and Kethol, barred from the Mondegreen Keep’s private quarters.
Which was about to be expected. Tom Garnett might have made it clear that Morray wasn’t to take a dump without one of the three of them watching to see if some assassin would leap up out of the garderobe and spear his noble arse, but the Captain wasn’t in charge in Mondegreen, and their warrant signed by the Earl of LaMut wasn’t quite that specific; waving it in front of the face of Mondegreen’s guard captain would do nothing more than cause a breeze.
Besides, most of the time, the law is what the most senior noble present says it is, and commoners were used to that.
So the three of them grabbed a skimpy breakfast of bread, onion and sausage in the barracks, and huddled in their cloaks against the cold as they headed across the outer courtyard to where the lackeys and stablemen were trying to prepare the Baron’s carriage, despite the constant interference from the ragged bunch of castle boys in their endless games of tag and kick-the-ball.
It was far too cold for anybody sensible to be running around outdoors if they didn’t have to. As they ran about, the young boys’ breath puffed visibly in the cold air, and one or another would occasionally slip on an icy spot on the courtyard that hadn’t been properly sanded over.
But perhaps the exercise kept them warm, and besides, it was at least something different from their daily chores.
‘Sixthday,’ one of the stablemen explained, as he beckoned at Pirojil to hold onto the reins while he fastened one of the big white geldings into its place in front of the carriage, then beckoned to his assistant to bring out another.
Pirojil didn’t mind helping, although he couldn’t help the way his eyes wandered to the large window in the east wing, across the courtyard, where he assumed that Baron Morray was explaining to Baron Mondegreen, over their own late breakfast, about how three ill-mannered freebooters had interfered with his sleep.
‘Sixthday?’
‘In the old days, they’d have only Sixthday afternoon to waste their time frolicking about like a bunch of ninnies, but things have got sloppy during the war, and the good Baron’s been … occupied with other matters,’ he said. ‘What was the Sixthday afternoon seems to begin earlier every Sixthday morning.’
Other matters. Like dying of some wasting disease that neither clerics nor wizards could touch, apparently – although that was none of Pirojil’s concern.
The lackey fastened a loop to a fitting, and pulled it into place with a loud grunt. ‘A few more blows with a cudgel,’ he said, ‘would do the stableboys a lot more good than additional time to run about like a bunch of squirrels, if you ask me, but the Horsemaster seems to be far more interested in old Cedric’s opinion of which animals are ready for the knacker than he is in my thoughts about which of the boys would learn better with more than a few clouts and a little less time to do whatever they take it in their heads to do.’
Pirojil wasn’t terribly interested in the problems of the stable-man, or in the beating up of young boys, but it didn’t hurt to listen politely, at least for a while.
It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do at the moment, unfortunately.
They should already have left. If Pirojil had been running things, the return trip to LaMut would have left the castle during what they called the ‘wolf’s tail’ down in the Vale – the grey light well before dawn, which hid all colours if not shapes.
On the other hand, the delay had given their betters a good enough opportunity to get their poles greased, apparently, and got Kethol and the other two a good two-thirds of a night’s sleep. Not bad, all things considered, he thought, yawning against the back of his hand. He wondered if there might be a mug full of hot tea in the battered iron pot simmering on the stove in the barracks, and whether it would be tannic enough actually to fry his tongue; of a certainty, it would be hot enough to warm his belly.
Kethol and Durine had set their weapons down under the care of a claque of the castle girls who were busy chatting among themselves while pretending to ignore their young male counterparts.
The two mercenaries had actually joined in the boys’ game.
There were times when Pirojil was more than vaguely suspicious that the two of them had been dropped on their heads as children.
A pair of young ruffians, no more than half Durine’s size, actually tried to tackle the big man, and he fell to the ground, releasing the leather ragbag with what probably looked to the others like an honestly-come-by slip.
Pirojil took a quick glance beyond the carriage into the stables. He reckoned it would be at least another hour before the Mondegreen detachment was ready to ride, and who knew how long they would be waiting for the nobility to –
‘You are Kethol?’ A soldier in Mondegreen livery had come up behind him without his noticing. Pirojil stopped himself from reaching for his sword. That was Pirojil’s fault, and he tried not to let his irritation at himself show on his face. He was getting old.
‘No. I’m Pirojil. Kethol’s the one under that wriggling pile of boys over there.’
‘The Baron will see him now. Will you pull him out of the pile, or shall I?’
‘Baron Mondegreen?’
‘Yes, Baron Mondegreen.’ The soldier frowned in disgust. ‘And in these walls, who else would the Baron be? Now, are you going to get him?’
‘I’d better do it.’ There were some risks involved in interrupting Kethol when he was distracted. The Mut would probably just grab Kethol by the collar or the foot, and the touch of a hand stronger than a boy’s might set Kethol off.
‘Then be quick about it.’ The soldier spun on the ball of his foot and set off toward the keep.
Pirojil shook his head as he walked toward where Kethol was rolling around on the ground.
Lady Mondegreen was attending her husband as he lay propped up with pillows on the massive, brass-railed bed. She smiled a greeting to Kethol, and beckoned him toward the chair next to the bed.
Kethol stood and waited. He hadn’t been told to sit, after all, and you could never tell when some noble would decide that you were being presumptuous.
The room smelled like old death, or maybe it was just the Baron himself. Mondegreen had, so legend had it, been a big and physically powerful man in his youth, but the wasting disease had turned him into a shrivelled relic of what he had been. Before Kethol lay a barely-living object trying not to pant with the exertion of sitting up.
‘Please – remove your cloak,’ the Baron said, ‘or I fear you’ll find yourself sweating furiously.’ His voice was weak, but he was forcing himself not to pause for breath until he completed each sentence. Death would claim Baron Mondegreen sooner rather than later, and it would come as more of a blessing than a curse, but he would not go down without fighting it.
Kethol removed his cloak, and after looking around, folded it over the back of a chair.
Even without his thick cloak, the room was too hot. Castles were famous for being draughty, but somebody seemed to have taken great care in the mortaring of the cracks in these walls, and the huge, floor-to-ceiling tapestries blocked any flow of air that remained.
The hearth, on the opposite side of the chamber to the bed, held a fire with a nice glow to it, and it warmed the room enough that Kethol couldn’t understand how the Baron could stand being under his thick pile of blankets.
‘Please sit by me, Sergeant Kethol,’ the Baron said, indicating the chair beside the bed. ‘I trust that you have breakfasted?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ Kethol said, seating himself. It happened to be true, but the smell in the room would have taken away his appetite, anyway.
‘I understand that I have you and your two companions to thank for my wife’s safe arrival here,’ the Baron said. ‘I thought that it was only right that I thank you in person.’
Kethol didn’t quite know what to say. Lady Mondegreen seemed nice, was pretty, and was far more pleasant with the hired warriors than she had any need to be, but if he’d had to watch her spitted on a Tsurani sword while he protected Morray from a scratch, he would have done just that, and would have let it bother him later.
‘You’re welcome, of course, my lord,’ he finally said. ‘But I don’t think we actually did very much.’ That, at least, was true.
The Baron smiled knowingly. Kethol didn’t like the way the old eyes watched him. It reminded him too much of the eyes he’d seen in a mottled mirror.
‘Yes,’ the Baron said, ‘and a thousand tons of thanks will buy you a pint of ale, as long as it comes with a bent green copper, eh?’
‘Well, yes.’ Kethol nodded. ‘But the thanks are welcome, nonetheless, my lord.’
‘Yes. I’m sure that they are, Sergeant Kethol.’ Baron Mondegreen broke into a fit of coughing, and stifled it only with an effort, then turned to his wife. ‘My dear, would you be so very kind as to get me a half cup of that wonderful tea that Menicia has been brewing? I’d have the servant do it, but you always seem to add just the right amount of sugar.’
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